People's Empowerment Party

BAJAN ENTERTAINERS - "ARISE!"

2011-02-14T19:10:00.001-04:00

The ‘Peoples Empowerment Party’ (PEP) is extremely concerned about the manner in which the powers-that-be in Barbados continue to disrespect and stifle the growth of our performing artistes!

Can you imagine that in the year 2011 some hotels in Barbados are still offering Barbadian entertainers the paltry and insulting sum of $150.00 for a night’s performance? Can you imagine that some entertainers are still being required to make do with a toilet as their changing room?

It is not surprising therefore that a number of Barbados’ leading veteran entertainers, such as Richard Stoute and Anthony "Gabby" Carter, have long since given up on the Barbadian hotel sector as a source of employment and income.

And what, other that utter disrespect, could be the reason for Barbadian radio stations to give the barest minimum of air-play to the recordings of outstanding, international quality Barbadian artistes? Just last year, veteran Barbadian songstress, Toni Norville, released a brilliant gospel album entitled "Reign" but sadly, one does not need more than the figngers of one hand to count the number of times this album has featured on local radio! And the same thing can be said for Arturo Toppin, with his majestic "Inside Out" album, and indeed for many other Barbadian artistes.

Every year in Barbados there is a lot of talk about what our local performing artistes need to do in order to make it on to the international scene. Every conceivable person, including sundry Ministers of government, take it upon themselves to lecture our entertainers as to what they must and must not do if they are to make it. But what is always conveniently overlooked is that the starting place must be the provision of a strong local support base for our artistes. Our performers must be able to satisfactorily commence their professional careers in Barbados and the Caribbean, before taking the next upward step to the international scene!

In the Caribbean island of Cuba, the biggest tourism attractions are the Cabaret shows at the Tropicana and the Hotel Nacional. Indeed, the Hotel Nacional stages no less than two fully sold out Cabaret shows a day, thereby providing employment for literally dozens of singers, musicians, dancers, marketing and administrative personnel, make-up artists, and stage, sound and lighting technicians! In other words the tourism industry of Cuba provides the basis of a professional career for the artistes of Cuba.

Well, in Barbados, we possess more than fifty 3, 4 and 5 star hotels that should be providing good paying, career starting jobs for hundreds of local singers, dancers, musicians, poets, comedians, writers and technicians. Tragically, this does not happen, and will never happen, if is left solely up the initiative of the hoteliers!

Indeed, Government must intervene! The State must take the initiative to establish a national union or association of certified professional performers and technicians; to establish minimum wage rates and working conditions for entertainers in the hotel sector; and to use all of the available instruments of government incentives to persuade or cajole hotels to factor local entertainment into their programmes and budgets in a significant manner.

And similar governmental action is required with the radio and television stations of Barbados! How can we reasonably expect Barbadian artistes to continue to invest their time and resources in creating products, when they can’t get airplay even in their home territory? Clearly, the time has come for the State to legislate and regulate!

We also need to turn our attention to the regional scene, and do what is necessary to establish a regional "circuit" for our performing artistes - and not just for our calypsonians and reggae performers! Just like the USA, we too must have a well established Caribbean touring circuit, stretching from Suriname in the south to Bermuda in the north. Of course, this will call for inter-governmental cooperation, and a mechanism to subsidize transportation expenses for certified artistes.

The PEP is willing to work with the entertainers and artistes of Barbados to bring these ideas to fruition.
　

A Black Barbadian Profile in Courage

2011-02-08T18:53:00.002-04:00

In celebration of Black History Month, we would like to share with the Barbadian people a truly outstanding example of Black courage and heroism drawn from the annals of Barbadian history.

It was the year 1675, and the oppressive British slave colony of Barbados was celebrating its 50th year of existence. Indeed, by 1675, the island of Barbados had developed into the prized "jewel" in the British "crown" of colonial territories, and boasted a white population of 23,000 persons, and an enslaved black population of some 33,000 souls.

Furthermore, by 1675, the white slave-masters of Barbados had worked out a comprehensive system for keeping the enslaved Blacks or Africans in check and under control. According to the English writer, Francis Ligon, who published his "A True & Exact History of Barbadoes" in 1657, the slaveocracy’s method consisted of the following three components:-
(1) the Blacks were rigorously prevented from coming into contact with any weapons whatsoever, while, of course, the Whites were well armed with muskets and other firearms;

(2) the Blacks were kept in a state of shock and awe by the fearsomeness, power and brutality of the slavery regime; and

(3) the enslaved Blacks were drawn from various regions of Africa, and as a result spoke different languages and therefore experienced difficulty in communicating with each other.
It was in this milieu that a network of enslaved Blacks or Africans, residing on several plantations across Barbados, spent three years meticulously hatching a plot to over-power and destroy the white slave-master class, and to take over control of the island.

This momentous event in the history of Barbados was recorded in a 1676 United Kingdom publication entitled "Great Newes from the Barbadoes, or A True and Faithful Account of the Grand Conspiracy of the Negroes....". The author recorded that the African-Barbadians had chosen "an ancient Gold Coast Negro" called Cuffy to be crowned the new king of Barbados, and had designed an insurrection that was to commence with setting fire to the fields of sugar cane, and culminate in a general slaughter of the slave-masters.

Unfortunately for the network of revolutionaries, a female domestic slave by the name of Anna (alias Fortuna) overheard one of the rebels trying to persuade a reluctant teenager to join the plot. Anna spoke with the young slave, discovered that the uprising was due in two weeks’ time, and persuaded the youth to go with her to inform her slave-master, Judge Gyles Hall.

Judge Hall, in turn, went in haste to the Governor, Sir Jonathan Atkins, and he immediately mobilised his corps of military guards to arrest the known conspirators. Governor Atkins also declared Martial Law, and within days more than one hundred African-Barbadian suspects had been arrested and subjected to a barbaric process of interrogation, torture, trial and execution.

Seventeen of the Black suspects were immediately found guilty and sentenced to death, with six being burnt alive and eleven beheaded and dragged through the streets of Speightstown.

It was against this background of utter horror and barbarity that the shining, imperishable heroism of an African-Barbadian revolutionary hero known simply as "Tony" emerged!

Tony, described by his captors as "a sturdy rogue, a Jew’s Negro", was in the presence of another condemned rebel who was being prepared for death by burning. The "Provost Marshall" or superintendent of security was in attendance, and he proceeded to urge this unfortunate man to confess and to name others before he died. The obviously terrorised black man responded by calling for water - a sign that he was prepared to speak and to divulge information.

Thereupon, Tony immediately spoke up and admonished him as follows:- "Thou Fool, are there not enough of our Countrymen killed already? Art thou minded to kill them all? This rebuke caused the condemned man to remain silent! And, in obvious resentment, one of the white spectators shouted to Tony - "Tony, Sirrah, we shall see you fry bravely by and by!

Tony’s response to this threat of the most horrible death imaginable was to declare proudly and defiantly: - "If you Roast me today, you cannot roast me tomorrow!" - and to bid the execution to proceed.

Tony was burnt to death - one of forty-two heroes who were executed for having the audacity to claim their freedom and dignity. Five others committed suicide in jail, while seventy were either deported or sent back to their so-called "owners" after a savage flogging.

Tony’s example, and his immortal cry of courage and defiance - "If you roast me today, you cannot roast me tomorrow!" - should be remembered, honoured and cherished by every generation of Barbadians! What magnificent and exemplary courage, dignity, brotherhood and solidarity!

Indeed, our generation of Barbadians, would do well to look back to that fateful year of 1675, and to adopt as our second national motto, a ringing cry with which to confront our enemies - "If you roast me today, you cannot roast me tomorrow!".

We wish to implore the Barbadians of this generation to be ever conscious of their great heritage, and to carry themselves with such dignity, courage and self-respect, that they show themselves to be worthy sons and daughters of our magnificent and beloved "Tony".

Egypt Today, Barbados Tomorrow

2011-02-02T17:25:00.001-04:00

The crisis in Egypt that has caused millions of Egyptians - led by the educated youth - to engage in nine days of mass demonstrations, was ‘made ’ in the United States of America (USA) and Europe, and is coming to us right here in Barbados and the Caribbean!

The best way to conceptualize the situation in Egypt is to refer back to the labour rebellion that rocked the English-speaking Caribbean in the 1930's . In Barbados, for example , the masses of people found themselves contending with an oppressive, autocratic planter/merchant oligarchy that was reinforced and propped up by the power of imperialist "Great Britain" . And the critical spark was applied to this tinder box of social conditions when the international capitalist system plunged into a profound depression which inflicted the additional penalties of unemployment, scarcity, hunger and hopelessness on the already suffering people.

The result was an explosion of pent up revolutionary anger and energy that shook the very foundation of the quasi-feudal colonial order - not only in Barbados , but throughout the region.

Well, the Egyptian people are facing an almost identical scenario! For thirty long years they have suffered under the oppressive, autocratic rule of an oligarchy led by Hosni Mubarak, and propped up and financed by the imperialistic USA with billions of dollars in so-called "aid" every year.

But this alone does not explain the hundred of thousands out on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria! The other critical contributing factor is the fundamental breakdown in the system of international capitalism that has manifested itself since the 2007.

The reality is that the "vampires" of finance capitalism in the USA and Western Europe engaged in such an excessive , prolonged and parasitical plundering of the resources of the world that by 2007 it had become clear that they had caused fundamental damage to the world economic system.

Compelling evidence of their greed and parasitism is reflected in the fact that they created a quantity of largely fictitious financial derivatives that is equivalent to ten times the "Gross Domestic Product" of all the countries of the world combined ! And , particularly since 2007 , they have been forcing national governments to save and bail out these fraudulent financial instruments at the expense of the welfare of their own people.

Egypt has not been spared the ravages of this international capitalist crisis, and the Egyptian people have been rocked by steeply rising levels of youth unemployment and a hyper-inflationary increase in food prices . Indeed , the price of simple bread in Egypt has increased by 10 per cent each month since last year, motivating the demonstrators to coin the slogan -"Bread ,Freedom, Dignity".

The young educated Egyptians who are driving these demonstrations are acting out of frustration and anxiety about their future ! They are seeing signs of a civilizational collapse all around them and are deeply concerned about their rapidly diminishing future prospects. It is not simply about Mubarak - it is much deeper and wider than any one leader, no matter how powerful or autocratic he might be!

The truth is that an economic and political system is dying , and if nations and leaders do not recognise this reality and take concrete steps to distance themselves from the effects of the death throes , they will be dragged down as well!
The Barbados and Caribbean governments need to wake up! If they simply continue to do what they are doing now their young people will soon come to sense that their future prospects are diminishing rapidly, and they too will eventually take matters into their own hands - in the streets of Bridgetown and every other Caribbean capital!

Professor James Smalls Interview pt. 2 of 3

2011-02-02T13:52:00.000-04:00

IMPLICATIONS OF THE JOHN BEALE EXPOSE

2011-01-26T19:23:00.002-04:00

The Nation Newspaper of 20th January 2011 featured an interview with Mr John Beale, the former President and Chief Executive Officer of RBTT Bank (Barbados) Ltd and Barbados’ current Ambassador in Washington D.C, in which he described the process through which banks in Barbados impose bank fees and other charges on their Barbadian customers.

Mr Beale’s reported words were as follows:-
"For example, every year a bank would sit down with their directors and their managers and they may say: ‘We made $1 million last year, we must make $1.1 million this year, where is it coming from?’ The guy may say the loans are not as many as we had in the past, and then somebody comes up with the bright idea - ‘let’s make some extra fees’, they go straight to bottom line, there is no cost to it. Someone may ask ‘how can we do that?’ The answer would be ‘Let’s tack on a $5 fee here or something and across the board that would give us another $200,000".
The Barbadian people should read this statement over and over again, and let it sink into their consciousness! Many of us suspected that our banks were unreasonably and exploitatively imposing bank fees and charges on us, and now we have express confirmation from a man who functioned at the highest level of the banking fraternity!

This is Capitalism at its very worst! This is a business system based on the principle of plundering the enterprise and its customers or constituents for the sole purpose of delivering ever increasing "profits" to people whose only connection to the enterprise is that they hold pieces of paper (shares) that entitle them to be considered a part owner of the enterprise.

Now, if Barbados had a properly functioning democratic Parliamentary system, Mr Beale’s statement would have elicited howls of outrage from our members of Parliament, and the setting up of a Parliamentary committee to investigate the banks, and to develop appropriate measures to protect the Barbadian public.

Needless-to-say, there will be no such response from the ineffectual ‘political eunuchs’ of the two political parties that are popularly known as "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Bum".

The Peoples Empowerment Party, on the other hand, publicly addressed this issue last year as a component of the PEP’s programme to tackle the recession. The exact quote from our party document entitled ‘Time To Make A Move!’ is as follows:-
"One of our strategies must be to save our people from the suffocating effect of burdensome debt and oppressively high interest rates.

At the present time, many thousands of working class and middle class Barbadians find themselves in a debt trap - ensnared by high and oppressive levels of bank debt, mortgage debt, automobile based finance company debt, and credit card debt. Generally speaking, the interest charged on credit in Barbados is way too high. For example, Barbadians routinely pay an astronomical 22 per cent per annum on their credit card debt!

It is clear therefore that our Government needs to come to the rescue of the Barbadian people by ensuring that the Minister of Finance, a public official elected by the people and therefore accountable to the people, has the power to intervene and to determine maximum limits on interest rates charged by banks and other financial institutions, across the board.

There is also scope for the Minister of Finance and/or the Central Bank of Barbados to engage with the banking sector in working out a national ‘Code of Conduct’ that will guide the behaviour and actions of banks in relation to their imposition of interest and other user charges on Barbadians during this period of national response to the intensifying recession.

The bottom-line is that effective measures must be taken to extricate Barbadians from the crushing mounds of personal and household debt that so many of them are now struggling under. And this must be seen as a national priority".
What a comical people we Barbadians are. We refuse visionaries and patriots admission to our House of Assembly, but open the doors wide for the bogus queens, kings and jacks of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle dum!

PEP DENOUNCES NEGATIVE POLITICS IN ST JOHN BY-ELECTION

2011-01-12T14:20:00.002-04:00

We have said it before and we will say it again - the two major Barbadian political parties that began their existences in the 1930's and 50's as institutions for the liberation of oppressed Barbadians are now in danger of becoming instruments for the degradation of our people!

The ‘Peoples Empowerment Party’ first made this observation in the aftermath of the 2008 General Election as we reflected on the crude manner in which both parties had sought to buy votes and to reduce Barbadians, particularly our youth, to insensible beings who only respond to the stimuli of entertainment and material bribes.

Now the St John By-Election is proving that these two political parties are also in the process of degrading their own members, inclusive of their leaders.

Take the case of former Prime Minister Owen Arthur! If there was one sphere in which Mr Arthur had distinguished himself during his fourteen years as Prime Minister, it was in the arena of Caribbean integration - all over the region, Caribbean people came to respect Mr Arthur as, perhaps, the leading integrationist of his generation.

What a disgraceful spectacle it is therefore to witness Owen Arthur attacking Mrs Mara Thompson on the basis of her St Lucian birth! How low and politically degraded has Mr Arthur sunk with his xenophobic appeals to Barbadians to reject Mrs Thompson because she was born and raised in a sister Caribbean territory!

The PEP’s simple and blunt message to Mr Arthur and the BLP is:- "Stop it! Stop it, before you completely destroy your reputation and do irreparable damage to the Caribbean integration movement!"

Our party is also not impressed with Prime Minister Freundel Stuart’s persistent personal attacks on Mr Arthur! Unfortunately, Mr Stuart seems to have bought into the notion that our national politics centres around a little personal ‘beauty contest’ between himself and Owen Arthur. Since coming to office, Mr Stuart has wasted time with too many speeches about who "shines like a lighthouse"; who hates themselves; who is the loneliest man and the list goes on, when what is required is nothing less than the establishment, by deeds and words, of a new, widely shared, sense of mission for our nation.

The times are too critical for an opportunity to set the nation on a new path to be wasted in that manner! The PEP is alerting Mr Stuart that if he does not act quickly to distinguish himself from the politically decadent, highly mythologised David Thompson brand of leadership, he will be drawn in and become complicit in the process of national degradation that is already in train.

Our party is also deeply concerned about the disservice that both the DLP and BLP are doing to the good people of St John. Contrary to what is being suggested by their platform effusions, the people of St John are not a backward, simple-minded, helpless group who require a nanny (female or male) to look after them!

Some 23 years ago PEP President, David Comissiong, wrote a Nation Newspaper column in which he acknowledged the vibrancy and worth of the youth of St John and noted that "these young people have made it unmistakeably clear that they are ready, willing and able to play a fully active role in every conceivable area of our national life.......... they are also imbued with a strong sense of national identity.......... these rural youth are not the type whose greatest ambition is to catch the earliest 747 aeroplane to New York City".

That was the calibre of the young people that the late David Thompson "inherited" in 1987. What did he do to unleash and facilitate those pent up abilities?

Are Mara and Hudson capable of doing any better? What message do they have for the youth of St John and Barbados? What role do they see for themselves in helping Barbados to find a way out of the ideological, economic, spiritual and cultural quagmire that our country finds itself in?

These are the types of questions they must be required to answer!

CRIME AND THE UNDER-DEVELOPMENT OF BARBADOS

2011-01-05T11:31:00.003-04:00

No less than five young Barbadians were brutally murdered in the twelve day holiday period between the 22nd of December 2010 and the 2nd of January 2011 – supposedly a period of peace and goodwill.

The horror started three days before Christmas when young Roderick Jones and Christopher Charles literally stabbed each other to death, and continued with a 17 year old Barbadian teenager opening fire on a ZR van full of passengers and ending the life of Sheldon Taylor with a bullet.

We then proceeded to usher in our new year with the slaying of 29 year old Anderson Brathwaite in Cane Hill, St. George, and with the equally senseless and brutal shooting death of young Adrian Nervais at Sargeant’s Village, Christ Church.

Barbadians need to ponder long and hard on the significance of these cold, ugly and undeniable social facts!

The reality is that if the murder rate continues at such a pace for a whole year, we would rack up no less than 152 murders per annum. And this would be a per capita murder rate far in excess of Trinidad’s 500 per annum or Jamaica’s 1000 per annum!

These murders, coming in the wake of the horrific “Campus Trendz” mass homicide of September 3rd, 2010, in which the lives of six young Barbadian women were extinguished, should clearly tell us that something is fundamentally wrong in our country.

But if something is fundamentally wrong in our nation, why are we not hearing the voices of our official leaders – our Prime Minister, our Attorney-General, the leader of the Opposition, the Bishop of the Anglican Church, the head of the Christian Council, the chairman of our Private Sector Association and Congress of Trade Unions – addressing the sources and causes of the social disease and rallying Barbadians to mount a collective national response?

How is it that political parties and their functionaries can tell us that the major issue in the upcoming St .John By-Election will be the matter of the unfinished St. John Polyclinic, when Barbadian youth are murdering each other at an alarming rate? Does Hudson Griffith or Mara Thompson have anything at all to say on the issue of fratricidal violence and murder among the youth of Barbados?

Barbadians need to take their heads out of the sand and recognize that our nation has started to exhibit all of the social maladies associated with a society shaped by the value system and cultural imperatives of United States of America-based liberal Capitalism.

The self-centredness, the psychological alienation, the lack of human empathy, the breakdown of a sense of community, the contempt for persons who are considered to be weak or social failures, the seeming addiction to mindless entertainment, the consumerist life-style, the enjoyment of entertainment based on violence and sensation, the dissipation of belief in a spiritual dimension and in transcendental spiritual values, are all embedded in the social, cultural, business and governance structures that Barbados’ private and public sector establishment have either actively promoted or acquiesced in over the past quarter century.

We note that Mr. Darwin Dottin, our Commissioner of Police, has stated that the Police will be responding to the crime situation with a combination of “tough measures” and an intervention by the Ministry of Family.

We would just like to warn Commissioner Dottin that to date the Ministry of Family has not distinguished itself by demonstrating that it has any deep understanding of the predicament our society is in.

We would also like to remind him that for several years now our Peoples Empowerment Party (PEP) has been urging him to have the Royal Barbados Police Force stage a “National Consultation On Crime” through which the Police would seek to “ground” with our people in their communities, and to establish a greater rapport between grass-roots communities and the Police Force. We are confident that this approach will achieve much more success than the so-called “tough measures” that are being contemplated.

The bottom-line is that Barbados is facing a deeply rooted problem that goes to the very foundations of our society and nation. If it is to be solved, it will call for enlightened and informed leadership on the part of individuals and organizations that genuinely care about this country and its people.

The PEP is ready, willing and able to play its part in finding and implementing relevant solutions.

CHRISTMAS, COMISSIONG AND THE CHILDREN

2010-12-30T11:37:00.000-04:00

This Christmas Column is dedicated to the memory of the late Rev. Vivian Comissiong, a veteran Minister of the Methodist Church of the Caribbean and the Americas, and a great son of our Caribbean Civilization.

Rev. Comissiong’s concept of God was that of the Heavenly Father - a Father of perfect goodness and love towards His earthly children. It is not surprising therefore that the "babe of Bethlehem" held a special place in his heart, and that he loved children - all children - and especially enjoyed the celebration of Christmas, which he regarded as the "Festival of the Child":-

"Tomorrow we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Christ, who admonished the world to - "suffer the little children to come unto me, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs." And yet, Christmas can be the cruelest time of year for many, many children!

The celebration of Christmas has come to be characterised by an excessive concentration on the commercial marketing of toys and other ‘goodies’, and the insistence that the commemoration of the birth of Jesus is centred around the giving and receiving of presents. And as a result, many of the children of the poor are devastated at Christmas time, as they witness a seemingly never-ending parade of toys and ‘goodies’ on their television screens and in the windows of department stores - toys and ‘goodies’ that are really for other children, and that they can only admire and wish for from afar.

Some of us have seen this scenario played out time and time again at Christmas - the little single parent child whose home is so wracked by poverty that ‘mummy’ simply cannot afford to buy the beautiful things in the store window.

And so, as we celebrate Christmas tomorrow, we should spare a thought for the poor children of our nation. Indeed there is no better time to seriously reflect on the welfare and well-being of our children, since Christmas - properly understood - is really the festival of the child. This is the perfect time therefore for us to give some thought to the duty that we owe to all the children of our nation, and more especially to the children of the poor!

The Peoples Empowerment Party (PEP), has always had a clear understanding that a set of duties is owed by society to the children of Barbados. These duties may be conceptualised as essential ‘foods’ for the bodies, intellects and souls of the nation’s children, and include the duty of respect; the duty to give our children a sense of a community and a culture that belongs to them; the duty to bestow upon them a significant role in society and a sense of accomplishment and importance; and the duty to convey to them a sense of the location of their lives in the scheme of eternity and a positive belief in the future.

Of course, the duty of respect implies and encompasses the duty to provide for the physical and material welfare of all of the children of our nation. All Barbadian children - regardless of the material wealth or social standing of their parents - must be properly fed, clothed, housed, educated and cared for medically - and our Government must ensure that this duty is fulfilled!

Let us all celebrate and mark this Christmas Festival with a collective resolution to orient our society towards the children and their future!"

PARTNERSHIPS FOR PROGRESS

2010-12-15T12:34:00.000-04:00

At the very core of the plan to save our country from recession must be a strategy to re-energise production in Barbados’ agriculture, construction, manufacturing, tourism and international business sectors.

We have to start with the enterprises that currently exist in these crucial sectors of our economy, and bring to bear state sponsored initiatives that will lift them to higher levels of performance and cause them to multiply.

Firstly, there must be efforts by the governmental administration to establish a close and intimate ‘partnership’ between Government and these sectors - a ‘partnership’ in planning; a ‘partnership’ designed to literally invent comparative advantage for enterprises in these sectors by extending to them a wide range of incentives, priveleges, assistance and institutional support; and a ‘partnership’ in ensuring that the jointly constructed plans are carried out and actualized.

Secondly, there must be a governmental programme to make long term credit available at extremely low interest rates for productive investment in these sectors. Essentially, farmers, hoteliers and manufacturers must be able to secure loans for productive investment in their enterprises at nominal interest rates of 1 or 2 per cent per annum!

And when we speak about a ‘partnership’ we are contemplating a relationship that is much more profound than the ‘Social Partnership’ or than the Manufacturers Association meeting with the Minister of Finance and presenting him with a wish list two or three weeks before the annual Budget presentation!

Rather, we are talking about a process of intimate and institutionalized planning, in which the two parties routinely sit down together and work out in detail an expansionary and developmental strategy for each sector, undergirded by the deliberate and conscious use of the formidable power of the State.

In manufacturing, for example, we visualize a range of enhanced possibilities for Barbadian manufacturers in such fields as garments, furniture, metal fabrication, food and beverages, office equipment, scientific and medical instruments, solar technology, pharmaceuticals and plastic goods, provided the state plays a leading role in encouraging, directing and supporting the relevant initiatives!

Outlines of the prospects in agriculture, tourism and construction, may be found in the PEP’s 2008 election manifesto, and they all hinge upon a process of joint planning and the articulation of state support and power.

We now turn our attention to a possible source of financial resources to be used by the Government in providing long term credit at nominal interest rates.

The most obvious source is Venezuela’s "Petro Caribe Energy Cooperation Agreement’. If Barbados was to participate in and to purchase its petroleum supplies under this arrangement, we could convert almost one-half of our annual petroleum expenditures into a 25 year loan at a nominal interest rate of 1 per cent per annum. Our Government would therefore be in a position to utilize this deferred expenditure by using the freed up funds to make sound long term loans to local farmers, manufacturers and hoteliers at a similarly low interest rate.

Once the loans made by Government are sound loans which will be repaid to the Treasury over a period of years, there will be no danger of a national accumulation of debt!

Furthermore, overarching the ‘Petro Caribe’ agreement is the hemisphere-wide project known as the ‘Bolivarian Alternative For Latin America & the Caribbean’ (ALBA) with its emphasis on developmental cooperation and funding. Surely, Barbados needs to be a member of ALBA, and to utilize ALBA based resources to benefit our farmers, manufacturers and hoteliers.

PEP’S RESPONSE TO THE BUDGET

2010-12-05T19:59:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, the Democratic Labour Party administration and their new Minister of Finance forgot that Barbados is a society and not merely an economy!

More particularly, they forgot that poor people are human beings too, and are subject to the same material needs and aspirations as the upper middle class and wealthy of our society.

Furthermore, they forgot that the dominant organising principle of modern civilization is "democracy", with its emphasis on engineering a gradual equalisation in economic enjoyments across social class lines.

We are convinced that they ‘forgot’ all of these fundamental principles because how else can one rationalize a Budget that makes virtually no effort to require the wealthy and comfortable members of society to bear the burden of fiscal adjustment, but instead places the burden squarely on the backs of the large mass of working-class Barbadians.

There are tens of thousands of poor, working-class Barbadians who are barely surviving on wages of less than $300.00 per week and minimum pensions of less than $160.00 per week. And yet, Mr Sinckler and his colleagues now expect them to bear the additional burden of a 2.5 per cent increase in VAT, a one-third increase in bus fares, and an increase in gasoline prices that will bring in its wake an additional across-the-board inflation in local consumer prices.

In the DLP’s new vision of Barbados they apparently see no difficulty in asking a Barbadian earning $160.00 per week and a Barbadian earning $1,600.00 per week to bear the same additional financial burdens!

Indeed, not even advanced age seems to make a difference any more, for they have now decided that impoverished old age pensioners suffering from chronic and other diseases will henceforth be required to pay substantial sums of money for their medication. Either that, or they will have to find the taxi fare, bus fare, time, strength and effort to make their way to one of the few and far between government dispensaries to get their on going medication. Surely, Mr Sinckler must know that this will prove to be extremely difficult if not impossible for many poor, elderly Barbadians who now find it difficult enough to make their way to the private neighbourhood pharmacy!　

The fundamental point that the Peoples Empowerment Party wishes to make is that if additional tax revenue had to be raised, then the first place to go for such revenue should have been the wealthy and comfortable sectors of the society.

Some three weeks ago we issued a Press Release in which we advised as follows:-

"The sectors that must be asked to bear the increased tax burden must be the wealthy and the big corporate sector.

Indeed, what we would simply need to do is to roll back a portion of the tax cuts that former Prime Minister Owen Arthur gave to the wealthy and to the corporate sector during his 14 year reign.

We refer to Mr Arthur’s 1995 "Group Tax Relief" which permitted tax losses incurred by a company that was a member of a group of companies to be set off against the taxable income of other members of the group. We also refer to the reduction of Corporation Tax from 40 per cent to 25 per cent, the reduction of income tax on the wealthy from 25 per cent to 20 per cent, the 35 to 60 per cent reduction of income tax on personnel employed in International Business companies, and to the removal or reduction of taxes on yachts, marinas and luxury cars.

The wealthy individuals and corporations that benefitted from these "Owen Arthur tax cuts" must now be called upon to give back some of this wealth, in the national interest!"

This would have been the correct place to start. Unfortunately, it does not seem that Mr Sinckler even gave any thought to this option.

The late Errol Barrow and the old DLP understood the concept of "progressive taxation" under which the wealthy is required to bear the brunt of the burden, and the concept of "regressive taxation" under which the poor masses bear the brunt. Sadly, it seems that Mr Sinckler and the current DLP have forgotten the concept of "progressive taxation".

　

　

　

SAVING BARBADOS FROM RECESSION (PART 5)

2010-12-05T19:56:00.002-04:00

At the very core of the plan to save our country from recession must be a strategy to re-energise production in Barbados’ agriculture, construction, manufacturing and tourism sectors!

It goes without saying that we have to be realistic and practical, and that we must therefore start with the enterprises and production capacity that currently exist in these four crucial sectors of our economy, and bring to bear state sponsored initiatives that will lift them to higher levels of performance and cause them to multiply.

The state sponsored initiatives that we have in mind fit into two broad categories.

The first category would consist of efforts by the governmental administration to establish a close and intimate ‘partnership’ between Government and these four sectors - a ‘partnership’ in planning; a ‘partnership’ designed to literally invent comparative advantage for enterprises in these four sectors by extending to them a wide range of incentives, priveleges, assistance and institutional support; and a ‘partnership’ in ensuring that the plans jointly constructed by Government and the representatives of these sectors are carried out and actualized.

The second category would consist of a governmental programme to make available long term credit at extremely low interest rates for productive investment in agriculture, manufacturing, tourism and construction. Essentially, we are talking about farmers, hoteliers and manufacturers being able to secure loans for productive investment in their enterprises at nominal interest rates of 1 or 2 per cent per annum!
When we speak about a ‘partnership’ between Government and these four sectors of the economy we are contemplating a relationship that is much more profound and intimate than the Social Partnership or than the manufacturers association or the Chamber of Commerce meeting with the Minister of Finance and presenting him with a wish list two or three weeks before the annual Budget presentation!

Rather, we are talking about a process of intimate and institutionalized planning, in which the two parties routinely sit down together and work out in detail an expansionary and developmental strategy for each sector, undergirded by the deliberate and conscious use of the formidable power of the State.

In the Peoples Empowerment Party’s 2008 general election manifesto we provided brief sketches of the developmental prospects that exist in these four productive sectors of our economy. In manufacturing, for example, we visualized a range of possibilities for Barbadian manufacturers in such fields as garments, furniture, metal fabrication, food and beverages, office equipment, scientific and medical instruments, solar technology, pharmaceuticals and plastic goods, provided the state played a leading role in encouraging, directing and supporting the relevant initiatives.

Limitations of space would not permit us to provide similar outlines of the prospects in agriculture, tourism and construction, but these details may be found in the PEP's 2008 election manifesto, and they all hinge upon a process of joint planning and the articulation of state support and power.

We now turn our attention to a possible source of financial resources to be used by the Government in providing long term credit at nominal interest rates.

The most obvious source is Venezuela’s ‘Petro Caribe Energy Cooperation Agreement’. If Barbados was to participate in and to purchase its petroleum supplies under this arrangement, we could convert almost one-half of our annual petroleum expenditures into a 25 year loan at a nominal interest rate of 1 per cent per annum. Our Government would therefore be in a position to utilize this deferred expenditure by using the freed up funds to make sound long term loans to local farmers, manufacturers and hoteliers at a similarly low interest rate.

Once the loans made by Government are sound loans which will be repaid to the Treasury over a period of years, there will be no danger of a national accumulation of debt!

This helpful Venezuelan offer has been available to us since 2005 and we have failed to take it up. If it is that we do not intend to shift our petroleum purchases from Trinidad & Tobago, then we should at least be pressing Trinidad & Tobago to extend similarly attractive credit arrangements to us!

With such planning and credit provision mechanisms in place, Barbados would be in a position to forge ahead with such new developmental initiatives as:-
(1) Substantial investment in collectively owned national agro-processing facilities designed to exploit the commercial and export potential of our locally produced ground provisions, fruit, vegetables and fish;

(2) A new thrust in "Cultural Tourism’, centred on properly developed locally owned hotels and guest houses that radiate the unique culture and hospitality of Barbados and Barbadians;

(3) A major investment in the retooling of our manufacturing sector, and the provision of critical international market research services for export oriented enterprises.

(4) A major ‘national’ lower income housing construction and urban renewal programme that pulls together and synergizes inputs from the Ministry of Housing, National Housing Corporation, National Insurance Scheme, the Credit Unions, Churches, Mutual Funds, Insurance companies, the trade unions and building contractors.

(5) The facilitation of the overseas expansion of Barbadian companies that possess the potential to spread their wings beyond the confines of our island nation.
　
　

SAVING BARBADOS FROM RECESSION (PART 4)

2010-12-05T19:53:00.001-04:00

Our "Rescue Plan" to save Barbados from recession began with proposals for absolutely essential measures to re-establish the soundness of the finances of our Government and to restore the purchasing power of the Barbadian people.

But even while this foundation of financial reforms is being put in place, our Government must bestir itself and come to the assistance of citizens who are facing unemployment or are otherwise in poverty and distress!

To begin with, our Government must commit itself to preserving and maintaining all of our nation’s existing welfare services and programmes! And of course, this is no mere academic matter. Our new Minister of Finance will shortly be delivering his first Budget presentation, and we are therefore publicly calling on him not to touch Government’s existing welfare programmes! If cuts are to be made to the national budget, let them be made elsewhere!

We Barbadians must insist on Barbados being a ‘civilized’ society. And in a civilized society, when economic conditions become difficult, the poor and destitute are not abandoned! In fact, it is precisely in such difficult times that Government must show its true worth as the principal defender of the ‘general welfare’ of the people.

The services and programmes that we consider to be absolutely sacrosanct are as follows - the Welfare Department, National Assistance Board, National Disabilities Unit, Barbados Council for the Disabled, the Child Care Board, Poverty Alleviation Bureau, National Drug Service, the Geriatric and District Hospitals, National HIV/AIDS Commission, Children’s Development Centre and the School Meals Department. All together, these agencies and programmes comprise approximately $180 million out of Government’s total estimated expenditure of $3.6 Billion for fiscal year 2009 - 10, an extremely modest proportion indeed.

But preserving the funding of these essential welfare services is not all that is demanded of Mr Sinckler and the current Democratic Labour Party administration. They must also go on to establish a public works programme that will come to the rescue of the rising number of unemployed Barbadians!

The specific public works programme that we have in mind is an environmental programme directed towards dealing with such pressing environmental issues as flooding and soil and beach erosion. We envisage a number of labour intensive projects devoted to creating new drainage infrastructure, re-establishing critical suck wells and protective vegetation cover, as well as a variety of beach and reef protection measures. And needless-to-say the persons to be employed in this public works programme would be drawn primarily from the ranks of the currently unemployed.

But where, you may ask, is the funding to come from? Well, we believe that the Barbados Government can access international grant funding for such an environmental protection project under the broad international "global warming and climate change agenda".

Left to us, we would bring together the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Environment & Drainage and put them to work on accessing international funding for Barbados from such entities as the ‘Global Environmental Fund’ established under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Control.

Of course, the argument to be made is that as a low lying small island Caribbean state vulnerable to the effects of global warming and climate change, Barbados needs to proactively strengthen its environmental defences.

But, of course, not only will we be addressing a genuine environmental problem, we will also be combating unemployment and alleviating human distress, as part of a comprehensive strategy to save Barbados from recession.
　

SAVING BARBADOS FROM RECESSION (PART 3)

2010-12-05T19:45:00.001-04:00

The "Rescue Plan" to save Barbados from recession and to lift the stagnant economy out of the doldrums begins with the re-establishment of the soundness of the finances of our Government. But once we have taken those measures we must then move with haste to deal with that part of the problem that concerns the finances and credit of the tens of thousands of ordinary citizens!

The mission that we must set out to accomplish is to restore the purchasing power and the confidence of the masses of our people, so that they can once again engage in commercial activity and socially useful consumer spending at a level that will set the internal machinery of our economy humming.

One of our strategies must be to save our people from the suffocating effect of burdensome debt and oppressively high interest rates. And a second strategy must be to clear away the encumbrances that are inhibiting socially useful spending.

At the present time, many thousands of working class and middle class Barbadians find themselves in a debt trap - ensnared by high and oppressive levels of bank debt, mortgage debt, automobile based finance company debt, and credit card debt.

Generally speaking, the interest charged on credit in Barbados is way too high. For example, Barbadians routinely pay an astronomical 22 per cent per annum on their credit card debt!

We are convinced that a significant proportion of the drying up of discretionary consumer spending by the Barbadian people is tied to the level of indebtedness that they currently find themselves in, and the high interest rates that they are forced to bear.

It is clear therefore that our Government needs to come to the rescue of the Barbadian people by ensuring that the Minister of Finance, a public official elected by the people and therefore accountable to the people, has the power to intervene and to determine maximum limits on interest rates charged by banks and other financial institutions, across the board. Clearly, this is not a matter that can be left up to so-called "market forces"! And in any event, in Barbados, "market forces" usually amounts to three or four large entities coming together to agree things among themselves.

Our Government also needs to exert itself to do more - much more - to save Barbadian consumers from an unnaturally high cost of living inflicted upon them by an oligopolistic elite merchant class that has a 300 year old record of price gouging.

The present governmental administration has made many vain promises on this matter. Surely, the time has now come for serious action based on a combination of price controls and direct governmental involvement in the importation of some strategically important consumer items. We must act now to increase the power of the currency in the hand of the consumer by reducing the overall level of prices!

Government must also act now to come to come to the assistance of micro businesses in the working-class sector of the economy - corner shops, mini-marts, seamstresses, wayside vendors, and the list goes on.

Many of these small working-class entrepreneurs have experienced a significant decline in sales. Of course, there are many reasons for this, but a major reason that is overlooked is that tens of thousands of Barbadians have diverted their discretionary spending away from these working-class businesses towards Lotto tickets, other forms of gambling and cell phones! Literally millions of dollars that would otherwise have been spent with the community corner shop, are now ploughed into gambling and cell phones by working-class Barbadians, on a weekly basis.

We therefore say - moderate cell phone use and impose an outright ban on gambling in Barbados, and permit this discretionary consumer spending to revert back to more socially useful purposes!

We also recommend that financial resources be freed up by adopting Muhammad Nassar’s often repeated proposal that Government off set the delay that small business persons routinely experience in receiving payment of State funds owed to them, by issuing Government backed guarantee certificates that the small businessman can take to the bank and exchange for cash or use as security for credit.

SAVING BARBADOS FROM RECESSION (PART 2)

2010-12-05T19:43:00.001-04:00

The foundation upon which any national effort to lift Barbados out of recession must be built iS the re-establishment of the soundness of the finances and credit of our Government!

Make no mistake about it, the institution known as "Government" has to take the lead in addressing the recession and bringing the nation out of the economic doldrums. Simply put, our government has to lead, and the private sector and the people will follow!

However, if Government is to be able to provide such leadership, Government must begin by re-structuring and strengthening its own finances and credit, because without that no real leadership is possible.

A Government whose finances are in disarray will simply not be in a position to go on to tackle the other aspects of the rescue plan such as restoring the purchasing power of the Barbadian people, securing welfare services, providing employment in essential public works projects, and re-energising the major productive sectors of the economy.

The fundamental problem we are facing with Government’s finances is that for several years now our government has not been living within its income. And this fact, along with the recent decline in Government’s tax intake caused by the recession, has created a $500 million annual structural deficit in Government’s finances.

Over the past year or so, concrete evidence of a cancerous structural deficit in Barbados’ traditional Government budget has emerged. Indeed, compelling evidence of a structural 10 per cent decline in our Government’s annual tax intake has manifested itself, in tandem with a naturally increasing expenditure bill.

The immediate task therefore must be to bring our Government’s annual regular or recurrent expenditures within the limits of Government’s annual income. And this must be done even in a situation where Government, in dealing with a recessionary situation, may actually need to be borrowing and spending many millions of dollars to energize economic growth and development in the country.

So what we are proposing is the seeming paradoxical situation of Government rigorously tailoring its regular or recurrent expenditure to fit within its annual income, while at the same time borrowing and spending in an effort to energize and build the economy.

Of course, the key to this is that the great majority of this emergency money or capital resources that is borrowed and spent must be paid out by Government in the form of sound loans which will be repaid to the Treasury over a period of years. In addition, if any such borrowed funds don’t fit the criteria of "sound loans" then Government must ensure that they are covered by new taxes that will take care of repayment of the interest and the periodic instalments!

Now to the most critical issue - how can the Barbados Government go about closing a $500 million gap between its annual recurrent expenditure and its annual income?

Well, the most painless place to start would be with a rationalization of existing Government departments, projects and programmes, with a view to cutting down duplication, inefficiencies and non-essential spending. An effort also has to be made to restructure the management of the statutory corporations, with a view to making them more efficient and less costly to finance.

But when all efforts at rationalization and restructuring are exhausted, it may still become necessary to increase Government’s tax intake. And if this becomes necessary, the sectors that must be asked to bear the increased tax burden must be the wealthy and the big corporate sector!

Indeed, what we would simply need to do is to roll back a portion of the tax cuts that former Prime Minister Owen Arthur gave to the wealthy and to the corporate sector during his 14 year reign.

We refer to Mr Arthur’s 1995 "Group Tax Relief" which permitted tax losses incurred by a company that was a member of a group of companies to be set off against the taxable income of other members of the group. We also refer to the reduction of Corporation Tax from 40 per cent to 25 per cent, the reduction of income tax on the wealthy from 25 per cent to 20 per cent, the 35 to 60 per cent reduction of income tax on personnel employed in International Business companies, and to the removal or reduction of taxes on yachts, marinas and luxury cars.

The wealthy individuals and corporations that benefitted from these "Owen Arthur tax cuts", must now be called upon to give back some of this wealth, in the national interest!
　

Saving Barbados From Recession (Part 1)

2010-12-05T19:39:00.002-04:00

No representative of the Peoples Empowerment Party(PEP) has ever been invited to attend, much less participate, in any of the Government or Private Sector sponsored economic ‘powwows’ that have been periodically held in Barbados!

It is as if the people charged with piloting the economic affairs of our country only want to hear from people who share and subscribe to their own ideas. It would appear that they fear having their ideas challenged by persons or organizations outside of their little incestuous in-group.

Now-a-days, these self-proclaimed economic gurus are fond of declaring that no-one could have predicted or anticipated the international economic recession that has so affected Barbados. But this is simply not true! There was at least one Barbadian thinker who went on the public record as long ago as the year 2001, and predicted, with precision, the calamitous economic events that unfolded in 2007. And that ‘thinker’ was the current president of the PEP, Mr. David Comissiong.

In his May 2001 Facing Reality column in the Nation Newspaper, Mr.Comissiong wrote as follows, under the headline – ‘A Word to the Wise”:-

“The world has become enmeshed in a global monetary and financial quagmire, the tentacles of which reach into Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, and indeed as far as the allegedly all-powerful New York Stock Exchange …One result of this unfortunate trend is that it is now estimated that the sum total value of purely financial instruments known as ‘derivatives’ in the world today is over US$140 trillion - a figure far in excess of the total real Gross National Products of all the nations of the world combined.

In other words, the financial tycoons of the world have built a global financial bubble that will eventually explode violently … And the bubble will burst – there can be no doubt about that. Indeed, you can only escape reality for so long.

When the financial bubble explodes and deep recession hits the North American and European tourist and financial service markets that Barbados depends so heavily upon, what will become of us? … The global crisis is coming to us here in Barbados. Let us ensure that we are prepared to face it.”

Mr. David Comissiong wrote those prophetic words in May 2001, and publicly repeated his warnings several times thereafter! But Barbados’ supposed economic gurus probably never heard - they would have been too busy indulging in their usual facile in-group intellectual self-congratulations.

Well, with an intransigent economic recession threatening to suffocate our Barbadian economy, our Party now proposes to lay out a practical, people-centred blue print for ‘Saving Barbados from Recession”.

The PEP’s blue print for ‘Saving Barbados from Recession” will be based on a foundation of policies and measures to:-

(i) Re-establish the soundness of the finances and credit of the Barbados Government;

(ii) Restore the purchasing power of the masses of Barbadian people;

(iii) Secure and shore up welfare services and programmes that prevent or alleviate human distress;

(iv) Provide employment through essential environmental public works programmes;

(v) Re-energise production in Barbados’ Agriculture, Construction, Manufacturing and Tourism sectors; and

(vi) Engineer a new social contract based on a greater degree of equality and sharing of resources in Barbados.

Stay tuned for a series of submissions from the PEP on this critical issue over the coming weeks!

OH BARBADOS!

2010-12-05T19:35:00.002-04:00

Oh Barbados! This is our season of affliction and lamentation! In the words of our national poet, Kamau Brathwaite:-

"Ev’ry day you see the sun

Rise, the sun

Set; God sen’ ev’ry month

A new moon. Dry season

Follow wet season again

An’ the green crop follow the rain

An’ then suddenly so

Widdout rhyme

Widdout reason

You crops start to die

You can’t even see the sun in the sky;

An’ suddenly so, without rhyme,

Without reason, all you hope gone

Ev’rything look like it comin’ out wrong.

Why is that? What it mean?"

What does it mean when the conventional wisdom of all the supposedly great economic gurus is proven to be mere folly, and the world plunges into a recession that grabs a still dependent Barbados by its throat?

Why is it that young men born and bred in Barbados can show themselves capable of wantonly and callously causing the deaths of six of their young Barbadian sisters?

What does it mean when naked greed, ambition and arrogance can so dominate our social life that not even a venerable 70 year old political party is spared the ravaging and demoralizing effects of a blind pursuit of narrow self-interest?

But most of all, why did our 48 year old Prime Minister, in the full bloom of his maturity and intellectual powers, have to die - so sudden, so young, without rhyme, without reason!

Truly, this is the dark time - a period in which it seems that we will be tested as a nation and profound questions will be posed to us.　

But in the midst of the darkness there are several points of light, evidence of something good and strong within the national character!

We see, for example, a young widow and her three beautiful daughters bearing their loss and the tremendous crush of national scrutiny with exemplary dignity and grace.

We witness self-less citizens joining together to memorialise our nation's six newest martyrs, and pledging themselves to wok for Barbados in such a way that what happened on September 3rd will never happen again.

We witness self-less citizens joining together to memorialize our nation’s six
We see an acting Prime Minister negotiating the succession process in a throughly democratic manner, with transparency and constitutional rectitude. Surely, congratulations are in order for new Prime Minister Freundel Stuart for giving Barbadians, including Sir Lloyd Sandiford, a lesson in democracy and constitutional correctness!

We see a people mourning for their fallen leader with fortitude, dignity, graciousness and profound genunineness of human feeling! Truly, it seems that adversity brings out the best in the Barbadian spirit!

And so, in keeping with this imperishable spirit, we in the Peoples Empowerment Party (PEP) pledge to our fellow citizens that in the midst of darkness the PEP will always be found searching for the points of light.

We believe in Barbados and in the Barbadian people, and are imbued with the confidence that Barbados and its fellow Caribbean nations possess all the resources requied to solve their problems and to establish a civilization that will amaze the world.

Again, Kamau Brathwaite speaks for us:-

"let my children

rise

in the path

of the morning

up and go forth

on the road

of the morning

run through the fields

in the sun

of the morning,

see the rainbow

of Heaven:

God’s curved

mourning

calling."

THE BARBADOS TRAGEDY

2010-12-05T19:33:00.001-04:00

Virtually every where one looks in Barbados these days, one sees deeply flawed national leaders and institutions sinking - almost inexorably - into tragedy! It is almost as if a "tragic flaw" has become lodged in the bosom of the national body politic.

In January 2006, the then opposition Member of Parliament, David Thompson, executed a most cynical and opportunistic political manoeuver, and displaced his long time colleague, Clyde Mascoll, from the leadership of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP). Having basically used Mascoll’s leadership to get the DLP through a difficult period, Thompson decided that he wanted the beckoning political glory, and did what was necessary to unseat his friend and take back the reins of power.

Well, Thompson got what he wanted - the leadership of the D.L.P and ultimately the leadership of the entire country - but, almost like the unfolding of a Greek tragedy, he has not been able to enjoy the winning of his long sought after prize.

Now, in October 2010, another opposition Member of Parliament has done a similar thing to his long time colleague and political side-kick! After having used Mia Mottley to get the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) through the difficult first years of a stint in opposition, Owen Arthur now senses that political glory is in the offing, and had decided that such glory must fall to him and be used to rebuild his image in the historical annals of Barbados.

Mr Arthur has seemingly gotten what he wanted, but will it all turn to ashes in his opportunistic hands? Time will tell!

But the sense of tragedy also extends to institutions and entire social classes as well. Take the case of the wealthy, traditional, white, big business elite of Barbadian society. Clearly, they have realized that recession-mired Barbados is on the verge of a major economic and fiscal adjustment, and they are now making their moves behind the scenes to ensure that the adjustment does not touch them, but is borne instead by the working and lower middle classes. And, of course, a critical part of this scheme involves getting their agents into positions of leadership in the two major political parties!

The tragedy in all this is that after 44 years of ‘Independence’, the white Barbadian sector of the population still see themselves as a separate minority group with one foot out and one foot in the nation building process, determined to hold on tight to their traditional position of economic domination, ambivalent towards the new emerging national culture, and forever seeking opportunities to extract wealth from the society.

This is a tragic, unhealthy situation that should have been rectified years ago! There is no reason why - with enlightened national leadership - the white community could not be led to reorient themselves; to establish a meaningful relationship with the masses of black Barbadians; and to adopt a constructive nationalist role in the building of a new economy.

The large black working and lower middle classes also face the tragedy of political parties that are getting ready to sell them out! Listen carefully to the noises coming out of the DLP, and you will see that they are readying themselves to decimate the National Drug Service and the system of free tertiary education.

The BLP, for their part, are pushing notions of privatisation - even of the airport and seaport - and can see no further than a servile "off shore" economy based on tax avoidance and evasion.

The major losers in all of this are the working and lower middle class people of Barbados, who, unfortunately, can see no further than the DLP / BLP circus show. And this is the ultimate "Barbados Tragedy"!

THERE IS AN OPEN CONSPIRACY IN BARBADOS!

2010-12-05T19:31:00.001-04:00

Whenever there is a serious crisis in a country, and a major economic adjustment is required, the central issue that comes to the fore is--'Which class or grouping of the population will be made to bear the brunt of the cost or burden of the adjustment?"

Well, Barbados is at the stage where we are on the verge of making fundamental decisions about a major economic and fiscal adjustment for the country, and all the signs are there that a massive right wing, big business, elitist conspiracy is underway to ensure that the working class and lower middle class sectors of Barbados bear the brunt of the adjustment!

If we want to understand how such a conspiracy works in Barbados, then we have to go back to the last serious crisis that the country faced--- the crisis of 1990 to 1992.

At that time--- in March 1990 to be precise--- under the coordination of Mr. Peter Boos, the Barbados Chamber of Commerce and Industry joined forces with the accounting firm of Ernst & Young, in a so-called National Resource Mobilisation Conference, to develop a plan to steer Barbados along a big business, private sector oriented path of economic adjustment.

Those Barbadians who were fortunate enough to get their hands on a copy of the "Post Conference" document discovered that the agreed upon modus operandi was as follows:-

* "Massive public education programme to explain the benefits of market forces....and that the country is living beyond its means"
* "Establish a task force to construct a private sector agenda"
* "Prepare and publish alternative Estimates"
* "Encourage opposition parties to present pro-business Bills in the House"
* "Establish a "Call In" programme"
* "Reduce scope of welfare services including health"
* "Eliminate free tertiary education"
* "Reduce scope of government regulation"
* "Targets for privatisation should include both profitable and unprofitable enterprises and be extended to central government services....including...CBC, IDC factories, revenue collection, Port Authority..."

Those of us who have been following recent developments in Barbados closely would have noted the outlines of a very similar agenda in the following events :-
1. The recent establishment of the Peter Boos led "Barbados Entrepreneurship Foundation" ;

2. The recent effort made by the Chairman of government's Council of Economic Advisors to float the idea that Barbados can no longer afford free secondary and tertiary education;

3. Sir Courtney Blackman's highly publicised prescription of a public sector wage freeze, and his violent rejection of price controls on the private sector;

4. The termination of Marilyn Rice- Bowen, who, as Chairperson of the National Housing Corporation, publicly complained about the Minister steering virtually all major contracts to one or two big, elite,construction companies;

5. The recent enhanced power of right wing elements within the Democratic Labour Party, leading to the installation of the pliable Chris Sinckler in the Ministry of Finance, and efforts to subvert the position and strength of the ideologically strong Freundel Stuart;and

6. The recent similar efforts within the Barbados Labour Party aimed at ressurecting the political fortunes of Owen Arthur--- a veritable front man for big, elite, business interests--- at the expense of the more intrinsically nationalist Mia Mottley.

What is taking shape here is a major push by the traditional local big business elite and their foreign allies to impose an adjustment on Barbados that will leave them virtually unscathed, but that--- similar to 1991--- will see the masses of working class people hit with terrible blows of wage stagnation, lay offs, and welfare and social service cuts.

It is now becoming more and more clear that the real political divide in Barbados is not between the various political parties, but between persons and organisations that line up on opposite sides of a central ideological divide.

The Peoples Empowerment Party (PEP) stands on the side of the Social Democratic consensus that has been at the heart of whatever social progress Barbados has made over the years, with ambitions to shift that Consensus further to the left, in a gradual and organic manner.

There is no need for a harsh right wing response to the crisis in Barbados! There are many alternative Social Democracy and Democratic Socialist solutions that will preserve principles of fairness, justice and human dignity!

BARBADOS AND THE "CUBAN FIVE"

2010-12-05T19:24:00.001-04:00

The "Cuban Five" are five patriotic Cuban men - Gerardo Nordelo, Ramon Salazar, Rene Sehweret, Fernando Llort and Antonio Rodriguez - who are currently locked away in a number of prisons in the United States of America, serving sentences ranging from 15 years to life in prison, imposed upon them by the Federal court of Miami in the state of Florida, USA for the alleged crime of espionage against the U.S.A and other associated alleged offences.

Over the past twelve years these five men have been treated by the judicial authorities of the U.S.A as if they are the most vile criminals, and yet, in the Republic of Cuba itself, and in numerous countries all around the world, these men are regarded as heroes and have been the subject of a multiplicity of campaigns and petitions demanding their release.

When one examines the backgrounds of the "Cuban Five", one discovers that they are all married family men between the ages of 45 years and 54 years, and that their occupations range from engineer, to pilot, to writer, cartoonist and economist. In addition, prior to their arrests and convictions by the U.S. criminal justice system they enjoyed shining and unblemished reputations.

The American establishment claim that they are guilty of some substantial crime, but at the same time , all around the world, tens of thousands of fair minded and justice loving persons, including no less than ten Nobel Prize winners have formed themselves into committees and are demanding the release of the "Cuban Five".

Indeed, right here in Barbados there is a small "Cuban Five Defence Committee" under the chairmanship of Mr Eddie Douglas! Furthermore, our very own "Clement Payne Movement" has also done some considerable work on bringing the plight of the Cuban Five to the attention of the legal fraternity of Barbados and in petitioning the government of the USA to release these unjustly convicted and imprisoned fighters against US based terrorist attacks on the Republic of Cuba.

And this is as it should be! In fact, Barbados should be playing an even greater role in the international campaign to free the Cuban Five, because, in a very real sense, the journey of these five Cuban patriots to their imprisonment in the USA began right here in Barbados, almost 25 years ago!

It was on the 6th day of October 1976 that, within minutes of a Cuban civilian airliner taking off from Seawell Airport in Barbados, a bomb planted in the cabin of the aircraft exploded, causing the Cubana airplane to plunge into the waters of the Caribbean sea, in close proximity to the west coast of Barbados. Every single one of the 73 Cubans, Guyanese and North Koreans on board perished in this precedent setting act of terrorism!

One week later - on 14th October 1976 - the government of Barbados appointed a Commission of Enquiry under the chairmanship of High Court judge, Denys Williams, to investigate the causes and circumstances of this tragic event.

In its report issued some four months later, the Commission noted that substantial evidence existed to identify Ricardo Lozano and Freddie Lugo--- two passengers who had joined the Cubana flight in Trinidad and who had disembarked when the plane landed at Seawell Airport in Barbados--- as the two functionaries who had been responsible for placing the bomb on the Cubana plane. And significantly, in his evidence before the Commission, the representative of the Cuban government, Senior Martinez, explained that the Cuban government’s own investigation had determined that Lozano and Lugo were subordinates of the anti-Cuban CIA supported terrorist organisations known as CORU and ICICA and run by arch-terrorists Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles respectively.

Needless-to-say, the Cubana mass murder in Barbados shocked the entire Cuban nation and brought about a national realization that the campaign of terrorism that had been launched in 1960 against the Cuban Revolution by the Cuban-American mafia and their United States backers had now reached a new level of barbarity, and that bolder measures would have to be taken in the future to foil the U S based terrorists.

Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carilles were never brought to justice for their high crimes against the Cuban nation, and in fact continued to be given comfort, succor and support in the USA by the plethora of Cuban-American counter- revolutionary organisations stationed in the city of Miami.

Indeed, Carilles and Bosch became so emboldened by their US based support that in the mid 1990's Bosch embarked upon a new conspiracy to assassinate Fidel Castro, and Carilles masterminded a terrorist campaign to blow up hotels in Cuba. And so, operating out of Miami, counter-revolutionary terrorists found their way into Cuba and set off explosions at no less than six Cuban hotels in the year 1997!

In fact, so brazen and arrogant had the counter-revolutionary forces become that the Miami Herald newspaper actually openly reported that Carilles was at the heart of these bombing operations, while Carilles himself, in a 1998 New York Times interview, publicly admitted to having organized the bombing campaign.

It was this intensification of terrorist attack on Cuba that led five Cuban patriots to station themselves in Miami in order to infiltrate the various terrorist organisations, and to collect advance intelligence that could be used to forestall pending attacks on their homeland.

Indeed, so open and well-meaning were the Cuban authorities, that in June 1998 Cuba’s Ministry of Home Affairs provided the FBI with dossiers of information on the acts of violence being planned in Miami, together with audio and video tapes which explicitly identified the malefactors. Ironically,

it was this honest and constructive overture that the American authorities pounced upon and used as a springboard to launch arrests against– not the Miami based terrorists – but against the five Cuban patriots who had helped to ferret out the information.

And so, on 12th. September 1998 the "Cuban Five" were arrested in Miami, subjected to a biased and deeply flawed political trial, and sentenced to unjust and inordinately long prison terms.

We all have a duty to help to get them released, and the best way we can do so is by raising our voices in condemnation of this egregious injustice, and by lobbying our government and fellow citizens to get involved in the international campaign to free the Cuban Five. Please feel free to contact the Peoples Empowerment Party for further information.

A FUNDAMENTAL BREAKDOWN!

2010-12-05T19:21:00.001-04:00

They are not criminal deportees from North America! Neither are they migrants from some other Caribbean country! In fact, they are not foreigners at all. No! They are born and bred Barbadians, and when you look at their photographs in the newspaper, they look no different from tens of thousands of other Barbadian young men.

When they were born - in 1979 and 1981 - the supposedly great contemporary European philosophers were proclaiming that the projects that we Barbadians had embarked upon back in the 1930's, of seeking to establish a nation of our own, and pursuing the ideal of a society characterised by justice and righteousness, were no longer valid.

They told us that those projects were part of the "Modern" phase of mankind’s development, and that human history had advanced beyond the "Modern" era into so-called "Post Modernity".

Furthermore, they described the Post Modern society as one in which the old human quest for truth, for universal and eternal values, and the construction of collective forms of existence that transcend narrow, individualistic desires and wants had become irrelevant.

And from the U.S.A. came the voice of the historian and former State Department functionary, Francis Fukhuama, assuring us that history itself had come to an end, and that there was no form of human existence to be sought for beyond the Western liberal capitalist society, festooned with its narrow individualism, hyper-active materialism and crass commercialism.

If we Barbadians wish to comprehend why we are producing young men and women who are so atomised, alienated, lacking in empathy and so devoid of any sense of a connection between themselves and their fellow citizens that they are capable of committing callous fire bombings and public open-air executions, then we need to acquire an understanding of the extremely powerful political, cultural, psychological and economic forces that have reshaped the great centres of international capitalism in North America and Western Europe, and that are sedulously undermining our intrinsically weak neo-colonial society.

Take some time to reflect on the vast number of Barbadian politicians, business gurus, and sundry social leaders who mindlessly prate on about the alleged wonders and benefits of Post Modern society, Post Industrial economy, Globalisation, neo-Liberalism, the Information Age, the services economy and other Western capitalist nostrums of the past quarter century.

Back in the late 1960's and early 70's, if you asked typical Barbadian secondary school students what life was all about in Barbados, and where they were heading with their individual lives, they would give you sensible and coherent answers rooted in the collective national mission of independence and the construction of a new independent nation, and in the still vibrant effort to establish a multi-territory Caribbean nation and civilization.

Ask the same questions to the Barbadian students of today and they cannot give you a meaningful answer! But it is not their fault! The current generation of official Barbadian adult leaders has failed to establish and set before our people any meaningful collective or national mission that is rooted in our own history and culture.

These "mis-leaders", having facilely jumped on the Western capitalist bandwagon of globalising Post Modern society, have permitted a socio-cultural vacuum to develop, and this vacuum is now gradually being filled with all of the diseased new cultural, political and economic secretions of the great centres of Northern capitalism.

It is not a simple question of reintroducing hanging, corporal punishment or Sunday school! The very fundamentals of our society have to be dealt with!

LET US FIGHT FOR BARBADOS - NOW!

2010-12-05T19:16:00.002-04:00

It was not the absence of a fire escape, nor the lack of adequate street lighting that killed Nikita Belgrave, Pearl Cornelius, Kellisha Olliverre, Shana Griffith, Kelly Ann Welch and Tiffany Harding! No! These six young and beautiful black Barbadian women were killed by the conscious, pre-meditated and deliberate actions of two young black men!

The robbery of a store in the heart of Bridgetown is not an on-the-spur-of-the moment, haphazard event. Rather, it is a pre-meditated, planned enterprise. And so, when those two young black men exploded that incendiary device and set the Campus Trenz store alight, they had to know that there were young women in the store who might suffer severe injury or death - but they just did not care! Clearly, they had no sense of there being any connection between themselves and these young daughters of our nation - they had no empathy, no human feeling! They were totally self centred and self consumed, and the fate of these innocent young women who had caused them no offense meant nothing to them!

And what is particularly troubling is the fact that last Friday’s horrific event is by no means a one-off or isolated happening. Indeed, for some time now we have been witnessing a number of brutal and callous murders carried out by persons who are manifestly alienated, atomized, self-consumed, and lacking in human empathy and feeling. The recent casual execution of a young Pinelands basketball player is a case in point, as well as the February 2010 gunning down of Fabian Antonio Greaves at an open air street party in Waterhall Land.

So, this is where we have now reached in Barbados! We now live in a country in which a growing number of our fellow residents are demonstrating that they are capable of coldly, callously and remorselessly destroying human life.

The questions that we all need to ask ourselves are - "What does this mean?...." "What does this say about out nation?"

Barbados is such a small and intimate country that we should be existing and functioning like a family - a humane and well ordered family in which we share our collective resources, look out for each other, set individual and family goals, and take pride in assisting each other to attain such goals. How could we have fallen so far from this ideal? Why have we degenerated to such a stage that we are now producing people who are so alienated from their fellow citizens, and so bereft of a collective national or family interest that they are capable of such barbarity?

And most importantly - "Who or what is to blame?"

Should any blame be ascribed to the politicians
and political parties that crudely and crassly buy votes in elections, and that set out to systematically reduce our people to insensible, materialistic beings who only respond to the bribery of money and entertainments?

Should any blame be ascribed to the various pastors and priests
who dilute the spirituality of the nation with their morally bankrupt, money based "Prosperity Gospel", or with their sterile status-quo and establishment oriented Christianity? And what about businessmen and women who see our Barbadian youth as merely a captive commercial market to be exploited and plundered and act in accordance with that vulgar conception?

And how about the educators
who are content to maintain an educational system that herds thousands of low academic achievers into schools that are so lacking in the facilities, resources and spirit required to respond to the special needs of these children, that the eventual production of hundreds, if not thousands, of alienated, hopeless and angry young men and women is virtually guaranteed?

And why have all of us
allowed the continued existence of a social structure marred by deep pockets of poverty and deprivation amidst a vista of comfort and plenty, and a capitalism based culture in which the American dominated media inculcates negative values of selfishness, individualism, lack of compassion and contempt for those who are considered to be different or unsuccessful?

Clearly, a major national effort is required to retrieve the situation - a major effort in which highly motivated and committed citizens come together to target and to reform a number of social sectors and institutions, including our Barbadian family life, our neighbourhoods and communities, our national political behaviour and policies, our Barbadian business system and culture, our educational system, the national mass media and the internet and video game culture, and our churches and religious sector.

The time for Barbadians to wake up, bestir themselves and make a monumental effort to save their nation has come!

A NEW MANAGEMENT MODEL FOR Q.E.H AND OTHER STATUTORY CORPORATIONS

2010-12-05T19:12:00.002-04:00

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) is currently in the news for all the wrong reasons, and all of the controversy seems to centre around the "Board’ of the QEH!

The National Union of Public Workers, is accusing the ‘Board’ of flouting established industrial relations practises by appointing politically sent "johnnies come lately" over the heads of temporary workers who have served the QEH for as long as 10 years, while the Barbados Association of Medical Practitioners is also accusing the "Board’ of having breached the contracts of medical doctors employed at the QEH by failing to first advertise internally at the QEH for candidates for prestigious consultancies at the Hospital.

In both instances, it is the relatively anonymous and somewhat mysterious ‘Board’ of the QEH that is being identified as the source of the unions’ displeasure. The question therefore arises - just who or what is this ‘Board’ of the QEH?

As many Barbadians would be aware in 2001 the previous Barbados Labour Party administration transformed the QEH into a statutory corporation with the passage of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Act, and placed our sole national hospital under the management of a 13 person "Queen Elizabeth Hospital Board".

After a 2008 amendment, the Act now stipulates that the Board shall consist of eleven persons appointed by the Minister of Health, along with two ex-officio members in the form of the Chief Medical Officer and the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health. The Act also expressly stipulates that "members of staff of the Hospital shall not be appointed as members of the Board".

And so, the current, Democratic Labour Party (DLP) appointed Board of the QEH consists of a little known Anglican priest - Rev. Guy Hewitt - who is Chairman of the Board; attorney-at-law and former D.L.P candidate - Francis De Peiza - the Deputy Chairman; and a number of ordinary Board members - Cardinal Fenty, Lisa Niles, Natasha Small, Junior Allsopp, Lawrence Clarke and Dr Irvine Brancker.

Now, the QEH is the single largest institution in the whole of Barbados, employing some 2,500 workers, carrying out some of the most technical and complicated medical procedures imaginable, and commanding an annual budget of some $157 million. The QEH is therefore an extremely large and complex organisation. And such an organisation cannot be adequately managed by a group of part time Directors who are not intimately involved with the complicated workings and procedures of the Hospital on a daily basis!

In order to make proper informed management decisions about the QEH, the decision makers must be possessed of the specialized knowledge on which the Hospital operates, and must be intimately involved with the everyday exchange of information within the Hospital. And clearly, a group of Directors operating part time and meeting for a few hours once a month will not be equipped with the intimate knowledge and insight required to make complicated decisions about the QEH! After all, running a large and complicated modern hospital requires serious knowledge and attention!

The Peoples Empowerment Party (PEP) therefore has grave reservations about the capacity of Messers Hewitt, De Peiza and the others to effectively manage the QEH! Clearly, the persons with the required knowledge and hands-on experience to make informed management decisions about the QEH are Chief Executive Officer, Dr Dexter James, and his team of senior medical, engineering and administrative full time staff. And they must therefore be permitted to manage their institution free of inappropriate intrusion by relative "outsiders" who are not sufficiently integrated in the running of the institution to possess the knowledge required for complicated decision-making.

This is not to say that there is not a role for a government appointed "supervisory" Board to play in the overall administration of the hospital. But the correct role of such a government appointed body should be the more restrictive but very important one of ensuring that the technocratic management structure seriously pursues the fundamental objectives set by Government for the Hospital, and that they adhere to the operative rules and principles, and operate with integrity and accountability to the people and Government of Barbados. And of course, the Board should also have the power to discipline where there are clear breaches of the rules.

If this is to be the role for the
Government appointed Board, then persons should "NOT" be appointed to such boards on the basis of partisan political party affiliation! Rather such Boards should be composed of outstanding and publicly known citizens, possessed of impeccable and publicly recognised reputations for integrity and high professional competence.

We, the citizens of Barbados, should know and have confidence in the people who are placed in a supervisory role over major public institutions that we are underwriting with our precious tax dollars! And we cannot, in all honesty, say that the current Board of the QEH, as a whole, fits this criteria of public recognition of reputation and merit! In fact, we in the PEP could easily think of 100 publicly recognised outstanding citizens who are much better qualified to lead a properly focussed QEH Board than Messers Hewitt and De Peiza.

The PEP is therefore hereby making a call for a revolutionary restructuring of the management structures of all the major statutory corporations. Let the professional full time officers manage with a large degree of independence. And let state appointed supervisory Boards be appointed on the basis of undoubted public reputation, rather than on the basis of partisan political connections!

WE ARE BEING MISLED!

2010-12-05T19:08:00.001-04:00

Barbados is in dire straits, and the Government of Barbados is doing a serious disservice to the people of Barbados by encouraging an overly optimistic and indeed, false, belief that our economic difficulties are temporary in nature and easily manageable!

The current Government is guilty of pushing the patently false notion that there will be an international economic revival by the latter part of 2010, and that this development will automatically lift the Barbadian economy and return us to a state of normalcy.

This is mere foolish wishful thinking, and to the extent that it provides the Government with an excuse for doing little or nothing, and lulls our citizens into a false sense of security, it is also treacherous.

The simple fact of the matter is that there will be no substantive international economic recovery by the latter part of 2010, or indeed for several years to come! Indeed only foolish "pollyannas" are being taken in by the overly optimistic, reassuring blandishments of Western central bankers. And only economic neophytes are misreading the temporary upward bump in economic data produced by the pumping of trillions of newly printed dollars into the North American and European banking systems, as evidence of a substantive recovery.

The harsh truth is that too much damage has been done to the real economy and financial structures of the Western capitalist countries for there to be any short term recovery. The United States industrial sector, for example, cannot recover over-night from the virtual shutting down of the US automobile industry. Furthermore, at the heart of the still lingering crisis is the continuing overhang of staggering losses in the Western financial sector estimated at more than US $4 Trillion.

In spite of what the facile central bankers predict, the reality is that rising household and corporate debt in North America and Europe will cause further declines in asset values and losses to financial institutions. In addition, these countries now have to grapple with the necessity of reducing their record Governmental budget deficits, in a generalised context of sinking tax revenues.

All of this constitutes a recipe for economic contraction and deflation, and already influential institutions of the Anglo-American establishment such as the ‘Royal Institute of International Affairs’ are beginning to acknowledge this and are warning about the very real possibility of a "lost decade".

We already have concrete evidence in Barbados that the international recession has produced a cancerous structural defect in Barbados’ traditional Governmental budget. Compelling evidence of a structural 10 per cent decline in the Government’s annual tax intake has manifested itself, in tandem with a naturally increasing expenditure bill.

All of this spells danger for Barbados, and particularly for the fairly impressive ‘welfare state’ that we have managed to build for ourselves over the past 50 years.

How, in the prevailing circumstances, will a sleeping "know nothing / do nothing" Government preserve Barbados’ free education system and our almost ‘first world’ national drug service? How will they rebuild and re-tool our Queen Elizabeth Hospital? How will they tackle the problems of water and energy and find jobs for the 5000 young people leaving secondary school in July?

Do they have any concrete ideas for expanding the economy in new directions and spheres of activity? Are there any new social forces that they propose to mobilize within the national society?

What is the plan? What is the mission? Where is the national call to arms? Sadly, there is none. And there will not be any until we rid ourselves of the foolish fiction that some ‘big brother’ of the North will soon lift us up and return us to the good old days.

DISPATCHING DR HILAIRE’S LONG HOP!

2010-06-20T00:33:00.001-04:00

Dr Ernest Hilaire, chief executive officer of the West Indies Cricket Board, has publicly confirmed that the members of the West Indies Cricket team possess less formal education than the members of any other Test team. Why should anybody take offense at this statement? Indeed, what Dr Hilaire is doing, albeit unwittingly, is paying tribute to one of the great strengths of West Indies cricket!

The truth of the matter is that cricket is almost exclusively the game of the social elite in every single Test playing country, with the admirable exception of the West Indies! In England, the original home of cricket, football is the game of the working-class, rugby is the game of middle class, and cricket is the game of the upper-class elite. In such former British colonies as India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the highly intellectual game of cricket is the preserve of the wealthy, leisure class. And in South Africa, cricket is the game not just of the elite, but of the still narrower "white" elite.

It is only in the West Indies that the masses of working class people have been able to take hold of the game of cricket and throughly democratise it. As a result, the West Indies Cricket team, since at least the 1950's, has tended to be dominated by young working-class men, who, in spite of their undoubted mental sharpness, were less likely to have access to tertiary level education than their wealthy, elite counterparts in England, New Zealand, India and Pakistan.

Cricket is one of the most intellectual of games, and requires of its practitioners a capacity for sustained deep, sophisticated thought and calculation. And from the early 1960's right through to the 1990's, the elementary and secondary school educated black and Indian working-class young men of the West Indies demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were the intellectual superiors of the wealthy, university trained cricketers of all of the other Test playing nations.

If therefore we ever come to a stage in which the West Indies Cricket team is dominated by university graduates, let such a development not be a function of social elitism, but rather, the ineluctable consequence of having established a socialist society in which all the sons and daughters of the working-class are guaranteed access to tertiary education.

Dr Hilaire also made the very noteworthy disclosure that almost half of the cricketers on the West Indies under 19 team could barely read or write!

But what seems to have escaped Dr Hilaire is the very obvious fact that these illiterate young men would have competed against and bested thousands of highly literate and well educated young cricketers in order to make it onto the West Indies under 19 team! Furthermore, these semi-literate West Indian youth cricketers recently competed against the cream of the youth cricketing world and acquitted themselves extremely well. It is clear therefore that these illiterate young cricketers possess substantial innate mental and intellectual capacities, and are therefore not incapable of being taught to read and write!

The question we should therefore be asking ourselves is - why do we remain so content with a deeply flawed educational system that is persistently failing tens of thousands of innately talented working-class boys and girls?

The culprits in all of this are not the young cricketers - not even the underachieving ones who currently play for the senior West Indies Test team. Rather, the real culprits are to be found in a self-centred, decrepit, visionless leadership class, that populates virtually every institution of "official society" in the Caribbean, inclusive of the West Indies Cricket Board.

'Bloc Against Crime'

2010-06-20T00:32:00.001-04:00

Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean are in danger of being destroyed by crime! We have therefore developed the ‘Bloc Against Crime’ - a collective plan that has a role in it for all major institutions of society. And we now present components of it for your consideration.
The function of the family
is vital! As the Ashanti proverb says, ‘the ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people’. For the community to heal it’s ‘wounds, the families of the nation must get involved to end the violence. Our children need to see role models all around them who can inspire them to become successful citizens with strong Christian and other positive values. And this must begin in the home and family
Civil participation is the foundation of democracy. The culture of civic participation must therefore be restored to the level of vibrancy that was evident in Barbados in the 1960's if we are to be successful in our efforts to stop the increasing violence in our homes, schools, workplaces and communities. Civic education is needed to prepare people, especially the youth, to carry out their duty as citizens and to help them to understand the importance of political participation. Civic education also helps the youth to understand that electing a government is not about creating ‘election beggars’, but rather , is about participating in the political process and understanding why one is choosing to vote for a particular person.
Professional sportsmen and women
also have a role to play. Not only do they have access to the people at the top levels of society, but they are also looked up to by the youth of our nation. These persons are therefore in an extremely powerful position to make a positive impact on the youth of the nation, and to steer them away from violence and crime.
The business and corporate community
should also have a strong interest in improving the quality of life for every one in the society. Business leaders in our communities have a responsibility to impact the violence by providing and creating economic opportunities that will improve the conditions of those who are badly disadvantaged. The business sector has the responsibility to set goals that include the development, implementation and maintenance of community-based businesses, as well as employment initiatives that will deliver a decent "liveable wage" to their employees.
In living up to its responsibility to the community, the business sector should seriously consider coming together to establish a "Community Supermarket" that will provide the poorest segment of our community with the basic necessities, at the lowest possible prices. This will create employment and also relieve some of the social pressure that is currently leading to violence and crime.
The recognition of the value of spiritual development within each human being is essential to the building of relationships that can ultimately reduce crime and violence, by increasing self respect and respect for and tolerance of others. Practicing spiritual disciplines can help people, especially youth, to understand the meaning of the suffering and frustrations of others, thereby enabling them to better control and channel anger.
Education is the foundation for financial success, the expansion of one’s mind and ability and the making of responsible citizens. When one looks at the history of our people, one can discern that lack of education has often led to the absence of hope, to wasted lives, violence, incarceration, and even death. The entire educational system, from pre-school to university, must be held accountable and made to promote a conducive environment for learning at the mass level.

Lesson from Jamaica

2010-06-03T13:26:00.002-04:00

Tennyson Joseph
Friday, May 28th 2010
THE Caribbean has watched in bewilderment as the Jamaica government slid into crisis over Prime Minister Bruce Golding’s involvement in efforts to block the extradition to the United States of an alleged gun and drug runner, Christopher ’Dudus’’ Coke.

Emerging first as a disagreement with the US on the ’legality’’ of the extradition of Coke, the situation has since descended into an all-out war between the security forces and the organised criminal gangs in Golding’s constituency determined to protect their ’don’’.

As this is being written, the reports are that six policemen have been shot, and two have died. The gravity of the situation cannot be understated, particularly since it has brought to the fore the deep links between the political directorate and the organised criminal elements of Jamaica.

The link between crime and politics has now been crudely exposed. The international dimension has only served to exacerbate the difficulties for Jamaica.

Before, however, the rest of the Caribbean begins to shrug the problem off as a Jamaican problem, we should all take careful note of similar trends in Caribbean politics.

We have not yet seen the emergence of ’garrison constituencies’’, but we have had too many examples of the criminalisation of the state for us to be comfortable.

On top of all this is evidence of organised gang activity, linked to a growing gun and drug trade, which have taken root in many urban constituencies across the Caribbean.

Indeed the Eastern Caribbean differs from Jamaica in degree, but not in kind.

Since the end of the ideologically-based politics of the 1970s to the mid-1980s, politics in the Caribbean has tended to be fought along lines largely revolving around the material comfort of voters, state handouts to citizens, and contracts for large and small public works.

The politics of money has replaced the politics of ideas, freedom, democracy, sovereignty and national self-determination. In this context, men of ideas, skill, talent, honesty and true ability count for very little.

A new genre of politician, whose skills set is no different from that of the petty thief and average con man has emerged. It is such persons whom voters now find attractive, and it is such men who they swear to defend to their death.

In this context vote buying and auctioning, particularly among the urban poor youth on the block, is now a common practice. Voting on principle has been replaced by voting for money.

A clear sign of the confusion of the impact of the new value system on the attitudes of Caribbean voters was revealed during the airing of CBC TV’s The Peoples’ Business last Sunday.

During that programme, several callers tended to interpret the ’Dudus’’ Coke affair as a sovereignty issue in which the internal affairs of the Caribbean needed to be defended against US interference.

However, whilst it is true that the history of the US subversion of Caribbean sovereignty remains a sensitive issue for many Caribbean people, it was interesting that many of the callers seemed to want to look past the allegations of criminality which led to the extradition request in the first place.

There have been several breaches of Caribbean sovereignty in the recent past by the US to which Caribbean leaders have responded only with silence or acquiescence.

In light of this, the energy and passion with which Golding sought to defend the rights of Coke, a wanted criminal with a deep power base in his constituency, reveals much of the new directions in Caribbean politics.

Given the pervasive nature of this new value system, it is clear that the Caribbean has travelled a long way down towards the Jamaica situation.

The region should remember, however, that politics is a one-way street. Once we go too far down the wrong way, it is extremely difficult to reverse course.

The Jamaica situation, bad as it is, now presents us with a chance to stop the rot.

It is a lesson that civil society will either embrace, or be damned by future generations for their failure to do so. History is paying studious attention.

- Tennyson Joseph is a lecturer in political science at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados.

A "BLOC" AGAINST CRIME

2010-06-03T13:13:00.001-04:00

Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean are in danger of being destroyed by crime! We have therefore developed the ‘Bloc Against Crime’ - a collective plan that has a role in it for all major institutions of society. And we now present components of it for your consideration.
The function of the family
is vital! As the Ashanti proverb says, ‘the ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people’. For the community to heal it’s ‘wounds, the families of the nation must get involved to end the violence. Our children need to see role models all around them who can inspire them to become successful citizens with strong Christian and other positive values. And this must begin in the home and family
Civil participation
is the foundation of democracy. The culture of civic participation must therefore be restored to the level of vibrancy that was evident in Barbados in the 1960's if we are to be successful in our efforts to stop the increasing violence in our homes, schools, workplaces and communities. Civic education is needed to prepare people, especially the youth, to carry out their duty as citizens and to help them to understand the importance of political participation. Civic education also helps the youth to understand that electing a government is not about creating ‘election beggars’, but rather , is about participating in the political process and understanding why one is choosing to vote for a particular person.
Professional sportsmen and women
also have a role to play. Not only do they have access to the people at the top levels of society, but they are also looked up to by the youth of our nation. These persons are therefore in an extremely powerful position to make a positive impact on the youth of the nation, and to steer them away from violence and crime.
The business and corporate community
should also have a strong interest in improving the quality of life for every one in the society. Business leaders in our communities have a responsibility to impact the violence by providing and creating economic opportunities that will improve the conditions of those who are badly disadvantaged. The business sector has the responsibility to set goals that include the development, implementation and maintenance of community-based businesses, as well as employment initiatives that will deliver a decent "liveable wage" to their employees.
In living up to its responsibility to the community, the business sector should seriously consider coming together to establish a "Community Supermarket" that will provide the poorest segment of our community with the basic necessities, at the lowest possible prices. This will create employment and also relieve some of the social pressure that is currently leading to violence and crime.
The recognition of the value of spiritual development within each human being is essential to the building of relationships that can ultimately reduce crime and violence, by increasing self respect and respect for and tolerance of others. Practicing spiritual disciplines can help people, especially youth, to understand the meaning of the suffering and frustrations of others, thereby enabling them to better control and channel anger.
Education
is the foundation for financial success, the expansion of one’s mind and ability and the making of responsible citizens. When one looks at the history of our people, one can discern that lack of education has often led to the absence of hope, to wasted lives, violence, incarceration, and even death. The entire educational system, from pre-school to university, must be held accountable and made to promote a conducive environment for learning at the mass level.
Additional components of the plan will be laid out in future columns.

NO MORE SHEDDING OF INNOCENT BLOOD!

2010-05-31T13:07:00.001-04:00

Far too much innocent blood is being spilled in the streets of Kingston, Jamaica! Totally blameless working-class women, children and men are being injured and killed as the two halves of a venal ‘criminal/political’ establishment battle each other over the Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke affair.
Prime Minister Bruce Golding and the Jamaican political establishment have no moral right to cause the spilling of the blood of the ordinary working-class residents of West Kingston in their violent search for their long time Jamaica Labour Party henchman - Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke!
The Jamaican political establishment must not be allowed to behave as though there is no connection between them and ‘Dudus’. After all, it is a well established fact that for several decades now both the Peoples National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) have been wrapped up with many of the so-called "Dons" of ‘garrison communities’ such as Dudus Coke.
Thus, if ‘Dudus’ is to be held to be guilty, the political establishment must share in that guilt as well! And therefore, a system with blood on its hands and guilt in its soul cannot arrogate to itself the right to spill or cause the spilling of innocent blood!
The only moral course for the current Jamaica government to take in this very tragic situation is to make a public declaration to the effect that ‘Dudus Coke’ has escaped the dragnet, and to temporarily call off the current military campaign to locate Dudus, thereby bringing hostilities and innocent deaths to a halt.
And once the social climate returns to some level or normalcy, the Jamaica political establishment, inclusive of both the JLP and the PNP, must publicly admit their collective guilt in taking Jamaica down a path of political and social decadence.
They must publicly admit their guilt and concede that as a result they have forfeited the moral authority to lead the country. Furthermore, as part of the process of repentance and rehabilitation, they should propose the establishment of an interim government of national unity to oversee the construction of a new and reformed political order in Jamaica that will feature a genuine empowerment and involvement of the mass of ordinary Jamaicans, and a severance of all links with organized crime.
This, in our opinion, would be the moral and peaceful way forward. We very much doubt however that the Jamaican political establishment possesses the moral rectitude or the sense of responsibility to take this difficult but very necessary path.
Our Party also wishes to make it clear that we do not consider that the political decadence that is so graphically on display in Kingston is something that is confined to Jamaica! On the contrary, we consider this to be a phenomenon that is present, to some degree, in every single CARICOM country.
Indeed, the terrible display of death and destruction in Jamaica is symbolic of a process of social and political decay and decline that has taken hold in every single CARICOM nation.
The Caribbean anti-colonial leaders of the 1940's, 50's and 60's extricated our countries from the jaws of formal colonialism and established the initial basic foundations of independent national societies.
However, it was always clear that if our governments did not move on from there to deepen these very basic structures by genuinely empowering and involving the masses of people, and by setting our sights on the development of a collective, self-sustaining national economy, that a process of decay would set in and the initial good start of the founding fathers would be squandered.
And so said, so done! In Jamaica, the Seagas, P.J. Pattersons and Bruce Goldings have presided over the destruction of the initial good work of Bustamante and the Manleys, just as, in Trinidad, the Pandays and Mannings have presided over the squandering of the positive early start of Dr Eric Williams. And of course the list goes on and on, implicating every single CARICOM country, including our very own Barbados.
If ever there was a time for us to admit our mistakes and take fresh guard, that time is now!

Women Have Been Misled.

2010-05-31T12:45:00.000-04:00

The United States has been capable of misleading some of the best brains around the world with its propaganda machinery and foreign policy and this is actually what is now happening with the Woman’s movement.
The reality is the first woman’s rights organization was when Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton lead Seneca Falls New York Women’s Rights Convention July 19 – 20 / 1848.
Feminism revived as a culture and political movement (Friedans Feminine Mystique 1963)
The National Organization for Women founded in 1966 and a movement for homosexual rights emerged (Stonewall Riot in New York City 1969).
NOW objective was equal rights for women this was supported by millions of men across America.
However by a vote of 84 to 8 the senate approved a Constitutional Amendment banning discrimination against women because of their sex and sent the measure to the States for ratification in 1972.
The Equal Rights Amendment was defeated after a ten year struggle for ratification in 1982.
Nevertheless NOW continued its struggle until it was used as a front to target women by luring them into a shopping extravaganza purchasing US products around the world. The reason to target women is women are greater in population, more fashion conscious and also larger consumers. This is capitalism at work using countries around the world as markets for US goods including Barbados.
So therefore the scam is to promote women and discredit men using the propaganda machinery in the most derogatory sense with lies and deception.
(For an example) Removing men from the family, also from jobs replacing them with women. Giving girls more grades in the schools than boys. Exaggerating the catch phrase Domestic Violence. This is to mislead women giving them a negative perception of men. This was all fabrication by the US State Department.
The above was to bamboozle women that there were getting ahead of men and Barbadian women have been mislead by this propaganda that keeps coming out of Washington.
However the next step was to excite women by bringing an influx of exciting female products into this country that have women’s heads spinning like a top, especially the fancy cars, and the introduction of credit cards at twenty percent interest.
All this glamour has triggered the shopping spree having women in the whirlpool of debt with all the profits leaving the country for the Banks in the USA and our Government is left picking up the crumbs that fell off the table.
I do hope that Barbadian women will get wise like American women reaching for the scissors and cut the credit card to ribbons and get back to family life.
Neville Roach

We Warned You About Dodds!

2010-05-16T03:43:00.001-04:00

The recent revelation by the Goveror of the Central Bank that Dodds Prison will cost the people of Barbados a total of $749 million, payable over a 25 year period, further convinces the ‘Peoples Empowerment Party’ (PEP) that Barbados is well on its way to a status of ‘debt slavery’, compliments of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) and the Barbados Labour Party (BLP)!

The BLP must be condemned for the shenanigans they perpetrated on the Barbadian people when, in 2005, they initially gave a price of "around $100 million" for Dodds, only to increase it to "$288 million" two years later, and then subjected Barbadians to having to wait a full two years after they left office before details of the full price were publicly revealed for the very first time!

Similarly, the ‘DLP’ must also be condemned for failing in their duties as a Parliamentary Opposition during the period of BLP rule, and for accepting the ridiculous contractual arrangements entered into for the construction of Dodds. It is noteworthy that the new DLP government paid the Dodds debt in 2008 and 2009 without once protesting or even bringing the matter to the attention of the Barbadian people. In fact, Barbadians should note that it was the Governor of the Central Bank who brought this matter to their attention and shared the relevant information with them - not the Minister of Finance or any other DLP policitican! Indeed, the DLP Minister of State, Senator Darcy Boyce, actually participated in accepting and approving the Dodds contract!

The clear conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that the DLP tacitly approved of and went along with what we now choose to call "The Dodds Fiasco". The PEP on the other hand, has been publicly protesting about this matter since 2006!

Indeed, in a Press Release dated 4th June 2007, our party stated at follows:-

"The PEP is demanding that Prime Minister Owen Arthur explain to the Barbadian people why the cost of the contract to construct the new prison at Dodds in St Philip has escalated from $100 million to $288 million................. The PEP is extremely concerned about this phenomenal increase in the contract price of the new prison........... Indeed, as early as 8th March 2006 our Party signalled our concerns about the prison contract to Attorney General Dale Marshall, when we wrote to him requesting that we be given copies of the construction plans for the new prison and be permitted to visit the construction site at Dodds, St Philip..........................

The PEP demands to know why a foreign firm was selected at a price of $288 million over a local consortium of firms, whose price was much lower at $120 million.............. The PEP denounces the practice that has been routinely engaged in by both the BLP and the DLP of awarding contracts at a particular figure, and then agreeing to phenomenal increases in the cost of such contracts..................................

The PEP also deplores the trend that has emerged of favoring foreign companies over their local competitors, even in circumstances where the local company is offering a lower and more reasonable price."

The recent revelations of the Governor of the Central Bank have confirmed the relevance and correctness of the concerns that we raised back in June 2007.

The real issue is that the narrow, incestuous two party system of governance is leading our country to ruin! And you, the citizens of Barbados need to bestir yourselves and join the PEP to engineer a broadening and a democratisation of the system, thereby facilitating greater accountability!

The Meaning of Hammie La

2010-05-16T03:27:00.002-04:00

Hamilton Lashley began his political career in the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) camp in the capacity as one of Delisle Bradshaw’s "right hand men". He then switched allegiance to the Democratic Labour Party (DLP), before switching back to the BLP, and last week made his most recent switch back again to the DLP!

But Lashley is far from being alone in this capacity to jump back and forth between the BLP and the DLP! There is, for example, the case of Clyde Mascoll, who jumped from being leader of the DLP one week, to being a minister in the BLP government by the following week. And there are several others, including Kerrie Symmonds and Wendell Callendar.

The question the Barbadian people should be asking themselves about all of this is:- "Why is it so easy for a politician to jump from the BLP into the DLP and vice versa?"

Well, the simple answer is that there is no real difference between the DLP and the BLP! Thus, "Hammie La" and Clyde Mascoll were not required to change one iota of their political philosophy or ideology as they moved between the BLP and the DLP! Indeed, Lashley and Mascoll can feel equally "at home" in both the BLP and the DLP!

And so, the real meaning of the Hammie La version of political musical chairs is that it really does not matter much whether a politician is in the BLP or the DLP, since there is no significant ideological or programmatic difference between these two parties - the only difference is one of personalities!

It is high time therefore that the Barbadian people stop fooling themselves. Clearly, the fate of Hammie La, or Clyde Mascoll for that matter, is a political triviality - part of the comedy that passes for politics in Barbados.

For sure, we in the Peoples Empowerment Party (PEP) found it extremely comical when Hammie La identified the policy of free bus rides for school-children and the establishment of constituency councils as key reasons for his opportunistic switch.

Hammie La could read the DLP’s General Election manifesto from cover to cover, and he will not find a single reference to "free bus rides for school-children". Indeed, if he wants to discover where this policy truly came from, he would have to consult page 20 of the Nation Newspaper of 10th January 2008, and the report on the PEP published therein under the headline - "PEP Offering Free Bus Rides And Medicines". The Nation reported PEP’s Bobby Clarke as follows:- "We (a PEP government) are going to take out (abolish) bus fares for children .... It should be free..... The Government doesn’t gain anything from the $1 schoolchildren pay".

Similarly, the proposal for the establishment of constituency councils first appeared in PEP’s widely distributed leaflet entitled - "Bajans, Take Back Your Government!" - almost two years before the DLP manifesto was published. The only difference is that we proposed that the Councils be elected by the people, and be given significant resources!

And these are not the only purloined policies! For example, Minister Sinckler continues to prattle on about the proposed establishment of a "Department of Elder Affairs". Once again, there is absolutely no mention of this in the DLP manifesto, while page 12 of PEP’s manifesto states as follows:- "We will establish a specialized government "Department of Elder Affairs", with a mandate to secure the welfare and well being of our Barbadian elders and to create national structures and initiatives for the expression and utilization of the collective wisdom of our elders".

'Alternative Lifestyles' in Focus

2010-04-26T20:17:00.001-04:00

Based on the comments that the Hon. Ronald Jones reportedly made to a gathering of young members of the Democratic Labour Party, our Minister of Education seems to believe that a fairly typical or traditional feature of girlhood in Barbados is a phase of development during which Barbadian girls engage in intimate sexual relations with other girls.

I do not subscribe to this point of view, and I would therefore like to publicly refute this, and to challenge the Minister to produce hard evidence to support his position. And if he cannot produce such evidence, he should publicly withdraw this very negative statement that has the potential to cast a pall over our female population.

The Minister also seems to have a very casual attitude towards the idea of Barbadian young people being exposed to so-called "alternative lifestyles" from international sources - life-styles based on male homosexual and female homosexual behaviour - and going through a phase of experimenting with such homosexual lifestyles until, according to him, "they find their basis of being." Surely, the idea of Barbadian boys and girls exploring and experimenting with homosexual lifestyles is not something to be taken lightly, and deserves a serious response from the Ministry of Education!

Barbadian and other Caribbean people do not have to simply sit back and imbibe all the cultural rubbish coming from North America and Europe. We too can produce "alternative life-styles" for our young people - alternative life-styles based on positive, powerful, self-affirming and culturally elevated values and practices that truly belong to us. But this calls for visionary and enlightened national leadership.

Please take note Mr Minister!

THE DODDS SCANDAL - "WE TOLD YOU SO - THREE YEARS AGO!"

2010-04-26T20:15:00.001-04:00

The recent revelation by the Governor of the Central Bank that Dodds Prison will cost the people of Barbados a total of $749 million, payable over a 25 year period, further convinces the ‘Peoples Empowerment Party’ that Barbados is well on its way to a status of ‘debt slavery’, compliments of a class of venal, spendthrift and irresponsible politicians who have taken control of both the Democratic Labour Party and the Barbados Labour Party over the past 25 years!
The Dodds issue is nothing short of a scandal, and both the Barbados Labour Party and the Democratic Labour Party must be indicted!
The Barbados Labour Party must be condemned for the shenanigans they perpetrated on the Barbadian people when, in 2005, they initially gave a price of "around $100 million" for Dodds, only to increase it to "$288 million" two years later, and then subjected Barbadians to having to wait a full two years after they left office before details of the full price were publicly revealed for the very first time!
Similarly, the ‘Democratic Labour Party’ must also be condemned for failing in their duties as a Parliamentary Opposition during the period of BLP rule, and for accepting and accommodating the scandalous contractual arrangements entered into for the construction of Dodds. Indeed, it is noteworthy that the new DLP government paid the Dodds debt in 2008 and 2009 without once protesting or even bringing the matter to the attention of the Barbadian people. In fact, Barbadians should take careful note of the fact that it was the Governor of the Central Bank who brought this matter to their attention and shared the relevant information with them - not the Minister of Finance or any other DLP policitican!

The clear conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that the DLP tacitly approved of and went along with what we now choose to call "The Dodds Scandal".
The PEP on the other hand, has been publicly protesting about this matter since 2006! Indeed, in a Press Release dated 4th June 2007, and issued to all the media houses of Barbados, inclusive of the CMC, our party stated at follows:-
"The Peoples Empowerment Party (PEP) is demanding that Prime Minister Owen Arthur explain to the Barbadian people why the cost of the contract to construct the new prison at Dodds in St Philip has escalated from $100 million to $288 million................. The PEP is extremely concerned about this phenomenal increase in the contract price of the new prison........... Indeed, as early as 8th March 2006 our Party signalled our concerns about the prison contract to Attorney General Dale Marshall, when we wrote to him requesting that we be given copies of the construction plans for the new prison and be permitted to visit the construction site at Dodds, St Philip..........................
The Pep demands to know why a foreign firm was selected at a price of $228 million over a local consortium of firms, whose price was much lower at $120 million.............. The PEP denounces the practice that has been routinely engaged in by both the Barbados Labour Party and the Democratic Labour Party of awarding contracts at a particular figure, and then agreeing to phenomenal increases in the cost of such contracts..................................
The PEP also deplores the trend that has emerged of favoring foreign companies over their local competitors, even in circumstances where the local company is offering a lower and more reasonable price."
The recent revelations of the Governor of the Central Bank have confirmed the relevance and correctness of the concerns that we raised back in June 2007.
Ideally, Barbadians should be calling upon their Government to institute a Commission of Inquiry into the Dodds scandal, but in the prevailing circumstances that would be tantamount to calling upon the pot to investigate the blackness of the kettle!
The real issue is that this narrow, incestuous two party system of governance is leading our country to ruin, and the citizens need to bestir themselves and engineer a broadening and a concomitant democratisation of the system, thereby facilitating greater accountability. Until that happens, the people of Barbados will continue to be taken for granted and taken for a ride by two political parties that think the same and exhibit the same callous and facile approach to the issue of accountability.

An Open Letter to Matthew Farley And Other School Principals

2010-04-26T20:09:00.002-04:00

Dear Brother Farley

Your column in the Sunday Sun newspaper entitled "Lessons For The PEP" caused our ‘Peoples Empowerment Party’ some concern, because you sought to portray our party as being hostile to the Principals of the secondary schools of Barbados.
Furthermore, you were so intent on publicly talking down to us and teaching us "a lesson" that you were guilty of obfuscating the simple and concrete proposal that we have put forward for reforming and improving the Barbados educational system.
Our proposal was made against the background of an educational system marred by a growing incidence of indiscipline and homosexuality, and characterised by pedagogical deficiencies that are reflected in the fact that some 50 per cent of our students leave secondary school without a single certificate to their name.
We have therefore called for an emergency rescue plan centred around the role of the school principal as the key leader responsible for ensuring the success of his or her school.
Conscious of the fact that we are in recessionary times and that resources are relatively scarce, we proposed that the rescue plan be implemented on an incremental basis, with no more than two secondary schools being tackled each year. At this pace, the entire public secondary school system would be over-hauled in one decade, with the more obviously failing schools being dealt with first.
We have encouraged the Ministry of Education to begin immediately by identifying the two worst performing secondary schools, based on criteria relating to academic success, student discipline and moral standards. (Of course, in measuring academic success one would have to factor in the academic proficiency of the students each school receives in the first form.)
The Principals of these two schools would then be invited to move with haste to draft a practical and comprehensive rescue plan for their schools, and to provide the Ministry of Education with a list of all the inputs and resources that they will need in order to commence the implementation of the rescue plans at the start of the new school year in September 2010.
We envisaged that these Principals would decide that they needed to reduce the size of their classes, and to increase the number of teachers on staff, so that students could receive more individual attention. We also envisaged the Principals requesting specialist remedial education teachers, additional guidance counsellors, and perhaps even the attachment of social workers and child psychologists to the schools.
The provision of these types of resources for two secondary schools is not beyond the capacity of the Barbados government even in this recessionary period!
In fact there are several ways in which these resources can be provided at minimal cost. For example, in order to accommodate smaller class sizes, new class rooms could be built during the long summer vacation, utilising relatively cheap pre-fabricated material or simple ply-wood. In addition, retired teachers can be placed on part time contracts and deployed in the targeted schools.
The Ministry of Education would therefore give the two school Principals all that they ask for, but would also inform them that they will be held accountable for the production of positive results, after a three year period.
If, after three years of the most complete cooperation and assistance on the part of the Ministry, a Principal is still not able to arrest the rot in his or her school, then that Principal should be relieved of his or her duty, and some-one else given the opportunity to accomplish the mission.
This proposal, dear Brother Farley, is not a "broadside" against or an attack on Principals! In fact, the PEP is fully cognisant of the very difficult task that our school administrators have on their hands, and that is why we are constantly searching for ways in which we can assist in the education and development of the young people of Barbados.

SAVE OUR YOUTH FROM HYPOCRISY IN HIGH PLACES!

2010-03-29T17:43:00.003-04:00

Two years ago, then Opposition Leader, David Thompson, along with then Prime Minister, Owen Arthur, and their two political parties, inundated Barbados with a flood of Jamaican dance hall and dub artistes! They did so in a calculated effort to pander to and to win the votes of our Barbadian young people in the 2008 General Elections.
Rather than seeking to encourage our youth to engage in serious thinking and discussion about the critical issues facing our nation during the General Election campaign, Messers Thompson and Arthur, and their two political parties, sought to distract and entertain our young people with imported dub singers from Jamaica! Indeed, in the days leading up to the January 2008 poll all we could hear about were DLP and BLP music based rallies for the young people of Barbados.
Just imagine, during the last General Elections, these two leaders and their two political parties, claimed that that they could not find the time or resources to arrange even one televised political debate, yet they had no difficulty finding time or resources to import numerous Jamaican and Trinidadian entertainers into Barbados for the titillation of our youth!
Now, two years later, Mr Thompson and other members of the political class are self-righteously getting up on their moralistic soap boxes and denouncing our youth for having made questionable Jamaican entertainers into their role models.
And in an exhibition of high class comedy these shallow national leaders permitted Mavado and Vybz Kartel to come to Barbados and performed during the period of time that these two artistes were involved in a violent feud and were releasing offensive, violence filled songs, but have chosen to ban them now that they have ended the feud and have allegedly committed themselves to promoting positive and peaceful messages!
How therefore can one quarrel with our young people when they contemptuously dismiss the adult leaders of our society as a bunch of hypocrites?
The Peoples Empowerment Party (PEP) is sick and tired of all of this exaggerated and constant denunciation of the young people of Barbados! If you listen to the mainstream political, religious and social leaders of Barbados, one would think that the young people of Barbados are the most degraded and delinquent creatures on the face of the earth, and the most inferior generation of Barbadians!
Yet, there is so such evidence around us of positive, disciplined, talented and well behaved young Barbadians. Indeed, this generation of young Barbadians is achieving at the international level in phenomenal ways that previous generations could not even dream about! In a world that is infinitely more complicated and stress filled than the world of the 1950's and 60's, we witness numerous Barbadian teenagers and young adults routinely managing daily schedules made up of a multiplicity of activities and developing into well rounded, multi-skilled citizens.
Of course there are also many young people who have fallen short of the mark, but let us be balanced in our criticism, and acknowledge that the good among our youth significantly outweighs the bad.
Let us also recognise that the world is in an era in which degraded forms of culture are being foisted on societies all over the world. And in the face of this enormous challenge, our Barbadian young people have done and continue to do remarkably well.
And let us also not fail to recognise the many ways in which the adult society has failed and continues to fail out youth. For example, Barbadian politicians who buy votes in elections and who set out to systematically reduce our young people to insensible, materialistic beings who only respond to the bribery of money and entertainment!
So too the case with Barbadian pastors and priests who dilute the spirituality of the nation with their morally bankrupt, money based "Prosperity Gospel", or with their sterile, establishment oriented Christianity. And businessmen and women who view our youth as merely a captive commercial market to be exploited and plundered, and act in accordance with that vulgar conception.
Please let us stop the hypocrisy and this exaggerated denunciation of our youth.

THE P S V TRAGEDY

2010-03-23T11:11:00.002-04:00

Mr Morris Lee, President of the ‘Association of Public Transport Operators’ (APTO) has declared that Barbados’ public service vehicle industry is in a state of "crisis", while Ms Judy Forde, Vice President of APTO is lamenting that the current governmental administration has shown no interest in even having a meeting to discuss the many critical issues facing the industry!
None of this surprises us in the ‘Peoples Empowerment Party’ (PEP)! The sad reality is that the established black political class of Barbados is dominated by persons who exhibit deeply rooted psychological deformities that have seemingly rendered them incapable of reaching out to and supporting and nurturing aspiring black Barbadian businesspeople.
The PEP states, without fear of contradiction, that no group of white, Indian or Syrian business people in Barbados would have any problem whatsoever in securing a meeting with Government to discuss their problems. But the vast majority of public service vehicle operators are native black Barbadians, and are therefore not so fortunate!
Our party invites Mr Lee, Ms Forde and the thousands of public service vehicle owners and operators to take careful note of the PEP’s policy on the public service vehicle industry, as expressed in our 2008 General Election Manifesto:-
"Rather than continuing to treat public service vehicle operators as renegades and criminals, we will work with them, and hold out the promise of bringing dignity, commercial success, professionalism and respectability to this largely black owned business sector. PSV drivers and conductors will be given special training and certification; their bus stands will be upgraded and transformed into places of dignity and comfort; and the punitive taxes and other impositions will be removed."
When the PEP published that policy in our Manifesto we were not engaging in facile electioneering; we were not making insincere promises for the purpose of attracting a few votes. On the contrary, we meant exactly what we said! Indeed, that policy is the natural product of a general philosophy of society and governance which we adhere to in the PEP!
As far as we are concerned, in a society that experienced 330 years of anti-black slavery and serfdom, and the associated use of the instruments of state power to restrict the development of blacks, a popularly elected, democratic government has a duty to use the power of government to secure the advancement and commercial success of legitimate aspiring small black entrepreneurs!
Historically, one of the few areas of the commercial life of Barbados that ‘blacks’ were able to take control of, was the sphere of public transportation. It should therefore have been clear to successive Barbados Labour Party (BLP) and Democratic Labour Party (DLP) governments that this was an ideal sector to target for development and upliftment.
Successive BLP and DLP administrations should have focussed on making the public transportation sector a towering and shining example of ‘black’ professionalism and business success!
They should have set about to "professionalize" the industry by putting in place compulsory state run training and certification programmes for the drivers and conductors of public service vehicles. On a daily basis, public service vehicle operators are responsible for the lives and well being of hundreds of human beings. These operators are therefore entrusted with extremely important and responsible functions, and should be trained appropriately. Furthermore, the professional certification they receive in Barbados should be of such a standard that it would be recognised and accepted internationally.
In addition, successive administrators should have virtually guaranteed the commercial success of these aspiring entrepreneurs by keeping taxes and duties to levels that are low enough to ensure commercial viability! Instead, our governments, have done the very opposite by punishing PSV owners with excessive taxes and duties!
Our political misleaders have taken a sector that had the potential to make an extremely positive and invaluable contribution to Barbadian society, and have turned it into an arena of decadence and outlawry. Truly, where there is no vision the people perish!

ADVICE FOR THE PRIME MINISTER

2010-03-16T11:25:00.002-04:00

One year ago, Prime Minister Thompson produced a Budget which, according to him, was based on the fundamental premise that the world would come out of recession in 2010, and that the Barbadian economy would once again be lifted by a growing international economy.
The Peoples Empowerment Party (PEP) responded almost immediately, and in our Nation Newspaper column of June 5, 2009 we stated as follows:-
"The PEP wishes to publicly let Mr Thompson know that he is living in a ‘fool’s paradise’! The harsh reality is that there will be no international recovery in the year 2010, or indeed for several years to come. The damage done to the international financial system and to structures of physical production all over the world is too massive for there to be any short term recovery. Thus, to base Barbados’ fiscal and developmental policies on the expectation that such a recovery will occur next year, is to be guilty of gross negligence in the management of our national affairs".
Well, we are now into the year 2010 and once again the PEP has been proven right! A couple weeks ago Mr Thompson’s Ministry of Finance issued a "Medium-Term Fiscal Strategy" report in which they were forced to admit that Government’s tax revenues had declined by a whopping 9.6 per cent during the first nine months of fiscal year 2009/10, producing a massive fiscal deficit of $480.9 million!
So, having based his fiscal policies on a false premise one year ago, Mr Thompson now finds himself in a serious crisis and is desperately thrashing around in search of a way out of the hole he has dug for himself.
We will have to wait on the Budget to hear precisely what new economic policies Mr Thompson is proposing, but one of the measures he has already taken is to bring three new Democratic Labour Party (DLP) journeymen into his Administration. Mr Thompson has now made history by putting together the largest conglomeration of Government ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries in the history of Barbados - up from 18 to a truly massive 21 in number!
But why does Mr Thompson need to burden the already hard pressed taxpayers of Barbados with the heavy load of salaries and "perks" for 21 Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries? The greatest and most productive DLP cabinet was Mr Errol Barrow’s cabinet of 1961 to 1966 - a cabinet of seven ministers. Mr Thompson now has three times that number!
But aside from the matter of quantity, the PEP is definitely not impressed with the quality of Mr Thompson’s Cabinet! With Barbados in one of its most desperate economic crises, how does it serve our country to pack the Administration with additional nondescript DLP foot soldiers?
Time and time again the PEP has warned that Barbados needs a genuine ‘politics of inclusion’ to steer us out of this crisis. We are convinced that our country does possess the intellectual resources required to meet the challenges that now confront us, but those resources reside, only to a limited degree, in the Democratic Labour Party! It is therefore imperative that we develop the political maturity and the sense of patriotism that will permit us to search for and pull together executive talent from outside the confines of our own narrow political tribe. This is a warning that Mr Thompson continues to ignore to his and Barbados’ peril!
The PEP also continues to advise that a new world economic order is going to emerge from the current crisis, and that the most appropriate long term strategy for Barbados is to assume the role of chief conceptualiser and architect of a Pan-Caribbean economy and system of production, inclusive of the large populations of the Caribbean Diaspora in North America and Europe.

The Caribbean nation and civilization is our future. It is, perhaps, the only acceptable future that is available to us. Once again, we advise Mr Thompson to take the first decisive steps now, on the journey to that future.

DAVID A. COMISSIONG

THE GREAT IMMIGRATION HOAX!

2010-03-10T12:59:00.000-04:00

In this era of recession, economic contraction and deflation, what the Barbados economy most desperately needs is a concrete and practical strategy for economic growth. And it is clear that the most likely arena in which Barbados can pursue such a growth strategy is in relation to the pan-Caribbean market and economy. Yet, this is precisely the time that the myopic Government of Barbados has chosen to turn its back on the Caribbean, to engage in an anti-CARICOM immigration policy, and to evict hundreds of hard working and productive workers and consumers from Barbados!
At present, the Immigration Department of Barbados is pursuing the most rigid and heartless policy against undocumented CARICOM migrants, and is routinely rejecting the applications of virtually all CARICOM migrants who have applied for Immigrant Status.
Just last year, the Prime Minister gave undocumented CARICOM migrants who came to Barbados after the 1st of January 1998, the assurance that if they filed applications for Immigrant Status that they would be treated fairly and every application would be judged on its individual merit.
Well, it is said that "a promise is a comfort to a fool” and our Immigration Department is in the process of turning the hundreds of CARICOM citizens who took the Prime Minister at his word into fools. The harsh reality is that the applications are not being judged on merit, and that the Immigration Department is simply rejecting the applications out of hand.
This is resulting in persons who have been living in Barbados for as long as eleven years, and who are gainfully employed and have children who were born in Barbados, being ordered to pack up their children and leave this country! How any of this is helping Barbados only God knows!
It seems as though the members of the present Administration have some-how gotten it into their heads that they can alleviate Barbados’ economic woes by expelling the so-called undocumented Caribbean "foreigners" among us. They seem to believe that the best way to solve the unemployment problem and to deal with the fiscal dilemma is to evict Caribbean "foreigners" who work in Barbados and access education, health care and housing.
Indeed, they seem to be so enamoured of this anti-CARICOM migrant strategy that they have even drawn up a "Green Paper" on Immigration Reform, in which they are proposing to alter the Barbados Constitution in order to deny citizenship to the children of certain categories of migrants who are born in Barbados, and to the spouses of native born Barbadians.
All of this constitutes a foolish and unintellectual approach to economic management, and a tragic repudiation of Barbados’ shining and unrivalled reputation as a leader in the Caribbean integration movement
Economic development is not a ‘zero sum game’ in which in order for one person to gain a job, another person must necessarily lose a job! Indeed, the typical scenario is that migrants enter the work force and help to grow the economy, to increase the ‘Gross Domestic Product’, and to play a catalytic role in the multiplication of job opportunities.
It is not surprising therefore that the period of the greatest influx of CARICOM migrants to Barbados was the period of Barbados’ most robust economic growth, and the era in which unemployment sunk to its lowest level in the history of Barbados.
It is not surprising either that with the continuing departure of hundreds of CARICOM migrants that a large number of Barbadian shops, small supermarkets, landlords and private schools are beginning to feel the pinch and have started to suffer from a significant loss of business.
Simply put, our anti-CARICOM migrant policy is causing a further contraction or deflation in the Barbados economy, at a time when what we desperately need are anti-deflation, pro-growth policies! Thus, the Government is going in the wrong direction, and is doing far more harm than good to the Barbadian economy and society
Our anti-CARICOM immigration policies are also going to make it much more difficult for Barbados to reach out to and engage with other Caribbean countries in a pro-growth regional economic strategy from which Barbados will derive the lion’s share of benefits.
As our government continues to paint Barbados into a small, isolated anti-CARICOM corner, the government of Trinidad & Tobago continues to reach out to its Eastern Caribbean neighbours, and to pursue a pro-Caribbean migrant strategy that may eventually lead to a lock in of the Eastern Caribbean economies with Trinidad & Tobago. Barbados could very well find itself on the outside looking in.

Truly, where there is no vision the people perish!

DAVID A. COMISSIONG

Chile and Haiti after the earthquakes

2010-03-05T13:57:00.004-04:00

Chile has again been hit by an earthquake of apocalyptic magnitude, like in the earthquakes of 1938, 1960 and 1985. With the precision of a Swiss watch, the centre and south of the country is hit every 25 years by a seismic movement that puts the country in a state of deep shock. The earthquake we saw on 27 February was one of the strongest recorded in history - 8.8 degrees on the Richter scale, 9 on the Mercalli scale.

The anguish of not knowing anything about our loved ones, of not being able to communicate with them, has followed the destruction, the isolation and death or disappearance of a great many people. Impotence is a shadow hanging over the heart. The death toll is now at about 700 - some are saying that they expect a final figure of about 2,000 when we eventually get the full picture of the devastation. Nothing is known yet about many in the affected provinces in the regions of Maule and Bío Bío. When people were still talking of about 300 killed, we learnt that the Constitución tsunami had swallowed up around 350 inhabitants, doubling the death toll. And we now know there were other places hit by tsunamis, though the extent of the damage is still unknown.

The consequences that this earthquake will have for the Chilean people are frightening. It is estimated that at present 2,000,0000 people have lost their homes and are literally on the streets. We're talking of more than 10% of the total population, which gives you an idea of the daunting task of reconstruction ahead.
more....http://www.anarkismo.net/article/15978

Cuba, the Corporate Media, and the Suicide of Orlando Zapata Tamayo

2010-03-05T13:47:00.005-04:00

On February 23, 2010, Cuban inmate Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after 83 days on hunger strike. He was 42. This is the first such incident since inmate Pedro Luis Boitel died in 1972 under similar conditions. The corporate media put the tragic incident on the front page and emphasized the plight of Cuban prisoners.1
Zapata's dramatic exit sparked a global uproar. The Cuban prisoner's case undeniably fosters sympathy and a sense of solidarity with this person who expressed his despair and malaise in prison carrying out his hunger strike to the ultimate consequence. The heartfelt emotion aroused by his case deserves respect. In contrast, the manipulation of Tamayo's death and of the grief of his family and friends by the corporate media for political purposes violates the basic principles of journalistic ethics.
Zapata, Political Prisoner or Common Convict?
Since 2004, Amnesty International (AI) has considered him among Cuba's 55 "prisoner of conscience." In addition, it has noted that Zapata's hunger strike was launched not only to protest his conditions of detention, but also to demand the impossible: a television, a personal kitchen, and a cell phone to call his family.2 Zapata was not exactly a model prisoner. According to Cuban authorities, he was guilty of several acts of violence during his incarceration, especially against the guards, leading to his conviction being increased to 25 years.3
Curiously AI has never mentioned the alleged political activities that landed Zapata in prison. The reason is relatively simple: Zapata never carried out any anti-government activities prior to incarceration. Instead, the organization recognizes that he was convicted in May 2004 and sentenced to three years of imprisonment for "disrespect," "public disorder," and "résistance."4 This sentence is relatively minor compared to the sentences, ranging up to 28 years, that were handed down to the 75 opposition figures convicted in March 2003 of "having received funds or materials from the U.S. government to carry out activities that the authorities consider subversive and damaging to Cuba," as recognized by AI, which is a serious crime in Cuba and any country in the world.5 Here AI cannot escape an obvious contradiction: on the one hand AI characterizes them as "prisoners of conscience" and on the other it admits they committed the serious crime of accepting "money or materials from the U.S. government."
Unlike the 75, the Cuban government has never accused Zapata of accepting funds from a foreign power and has always considered him a common convict. Zapata had a serious criminal record. Since June 1990, he had been arrested and convicted several times for "disturbing the peace, two counts of fraud, public exhibitionism, injury and possession of non-firearm weapons." In 2000, he fractured the skull of Leonardo Simon using a machete. His criminal record does not involve any political actions. It was only after his imprisonment that his mother, Reyna Luisa Tamayo, approached government opposition groups, and she has never been bothered by the authorities.6
Double Standards?
The United States and the European Union declared their consternation and demanded the "release of political prisoners." "We are deeply distressed by his death," said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who denounced the oppression of political prisoners in Cuba. Brussels followed suit and demanded the "unconditional release of all political prisoners." France's Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero announced that "following his situation closely, we called for his release along with the other detainees whose health seemed particularly worrying."7
Cuban President Raúl Castro "regretted" the death and responded to the uproar from Washington and Brussels by stating that "in half a century, we have not murdered anyone here, no one has been tortured, and there have been no extrajudicial executions. Well, here in Cuba there have been people tortured, but at the Guantanamo Naval Base," in reference to the torture center under U.S. administration. "They say they want to hold talks with us and we are ready to discuss with the U.S. government all issues they want. I repeated it three times in Parliament, all, all, all. We will not accept discussions unless both parties enjoy absolute equality. They can investigate or ask any questions in Cuba, but we have the right to ask about all the problems of the United States."8
During a visit to Cuba, Brazilian President Lula da Silva also declared his sympathy, but wished to highlight the double standards of the corporate media of Washington and Brussels recalling a sad reality: "I know about virtually all the hunger strikes that have taken place over the past 25 years in the world and many people have died on hunger strikes in many countries."9 The media ignored the vast majority of those tragic cases and absolutely none received the media coverage that has been afforded this Cuban inmate.
By comparison, in France between January 1, 2010 and February24, 2010, there were 22 suicides in prison, including a 16-year-old boy. In 2009 there were 122 suicides in French prisons and 115 in 2008. State Secretary of Justice Jean-Marie Bockel declared his impotence in these situations: "When someone decides to commit suicide and is determined to do, whether they are free or in prison, [. . .] there is nothing you can do about it." The families of those victims were not entitled to the same media treatment as Zapata, nor even an official public statement from the French government.10
We must put the Zapata's case into perspective by looking at two much more serious situations deliberately ignored by the corporate media that clearly illustrate the politicization and manipulation of this ordinary incident that would pass unnoticed in most countries, except Cuba.
Since the coup in Honduras took place and the military dictatorship was established on June 27, 2009, led first by Roberto Micheletti and then since January 28, 2010 by Porfirio Lobo, there have been more than a hundred murders and countless cases of disappearances, torture, and violence. The abuses occur daily, but are carefully omitted by the corporate media. Thus, when Claudia Larissa Brizuela, a member of a group opposed to the coup, the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), was murdered on February 24, 2010, just one day after the death of Zapata, there was not a single word about it in the corporate press.11
A similar case further illustrates the duplicity of the corporate media. In December 2009 in La Macarena, Colombia the largest mass grave in the history of Latin America was discovered with no fewer than 2,000 bodies. According to testimonies collected by British MEPs on the ground in La Macarena, these were the bodies of union and peasant leaders killed by the paramilitaries and the Colombian army's Special Forces. Jairo Ramirez, lawyer and secretary of the Standing Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Colombia, described the grisly scene: "What we saw was frightening. Countless corpses and hundreds of white wooden plaques inscribed with NN and with dates ranging from 2005 to the present. The army commander told us they were the bodies of guerrillas killed in combat, but the people of the region told us of the many community leaders, farmers, and community advocates who have disappeared without a trace." Despite the many testimonies and the presence of the MEPs, despite a visit by a Spanish parliamentary delegation to investigate, no corporate media has given even a little attention to this news.12
The suicide of Orlando Zapata Tamayo is a tragedy and his mother's pain must be respected. But there are unscrupulous people. The corporate media, Washington, and the European Union cares little about his death, just as they care little for the Hondurans and Colombians killed every day. Zapata is useful to them only in the media war against the Cuban government. When ideology is placed above objective information, truth and ethics are the first victims.

by Salim Lamrani

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/colinsedge.rss

2010-03-04T16:28:00.002-04:00

PUBLIC MUST RALLY AROUND POLICE AND JOURNALISTS

2010-03-04T16:18:00.003-04:00

Listening to Emmanuel Joseph on a program on the Peoples Business of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation has so bravely articulating some of the adverse conditions reporters have to encounter when pursuing a story, it was somewhat irritating.
Mr. Joseph continued without fear of contradiction, given an example of what can be seen as a blatant attempt by a privilege few to muzzle reporters in this country, it is unbelievable to me in this day and age that Barbados has come to this.
Just imagine professionals that are well trained to be allowed to serve the public under the banner of "free speech", are subject to "hand off" situations to protect a special interest group in our society.
However, Mr. Joseph also made mention of an incident when a police officer was hindered by being required to sign a book to enter one of the controversial gated communities, this humiliation must have impacted heavily on our officers, reporters, and skillful citizens that are providing two separate services that are important in any civilized society; There were treated like boy scouts.
Having said that, it is understood that the police and news media have some things in common, example: serving the public.
Therefore it is only logical for them to embrace each other like they recently have and are now busy working together to mend fences with a view to impact there relationship, which is a positive one.
The public which is demanding investigative journalism and also expecting a reduction in crime, must now accept its responsibility and rally around our police officers and reporters in concrete solidarity.
The above accusation must be taken seriously and the public will always be entitled to an explanation from the authorities.

Neville Roach

REJECT ANTI-WORKING CLASS ECONOMIC ADVICE

2010-03-01T14:44:00.004-04:00

PRESS RELEASE
Over the past two weeks, a concerted effort has been made by a number of ‘economic gurus’ - Dr David Estwick, Mr Owen Arthur, Professor Avinash Persaud and Mr Peter Boos - to foist their opinions on a Barbadian public that they seem to believe is relatively naive and bereft of a healthy sense of its own self interest.
We in the Peoples Empowerment Party (PEP) make this observation because all of the views expressed conformed to an elitist class and ideological perspective, and yet these "gurus" seemed to expect that they would be uncritically accepted by the mass of poor and working-class Barbadians.
Dr David Estwick
Our neophyte Minister of Economic Development has proposed that the best way to tackle Barbados’ economic predicament is to impose what was initially described as a ‘national wage freeze’, and later modified to a ‘public sector wage freeze’. But how does one justify treating a maid who is barely surviving on $300.00 a week, in the same manner as a Permanent-Secretary or a top executive who is earning $90,000.00 or $200,000.00 a year respectively? Surely, any proposal for wage restraint in Barbados must be tied to an effort to restructure and ameliorate the extreme disparity between wages at the top and bottom ends of the ladder!
Furthermore, how can one talk about freezing wages without also proposing a companion price restraint policy for the big businesses of Barbados and the state enterprises that charge fees for their services? And what about wealthy corporate shareholders and professionals such as doctors, engineers, accountants and lawyers - how can one expect lower level public servants to carry the burden of restraint, but exempt wealthy professionals? Dr Estwick needs to ‘wheel and come again!’.
Mr Owen Arthur
Our former Prime Minister’s fourteen year reign was defined by his unreserved acceptance of such elitist North American and European orchestrated concepts as liberalisation, free market, free trade, neo-liberalism and globalisation. Indeed, he spent his years in office preparing Barbados to enter a so-called ‘Free Trade Area of the Americas’; reducing Caribbean integration to a narrow preoccupation with concepts of free trade and free market; and embracing such ‘globalizing’ mechanisms as the ‘World Trade Orgainsation and the ‘Economic Partnership Agreement’.
Well, the global economic crisis has forcefully demonstrated the folly of these liberalisation and globalisation nostrums, and perceptive analysts have recognised that the old order is mortally wounded and that a new world system is emerging. And yet Owen Arthur is still lecturing about "Transforming The Economy in the Age of Liberalisation", and urging that Barbados’ economic policy should be based upon accommodating another round of liberalisation! It is time for Arthur to wake up and smell the coffee! His economic prescriptions are outdated and dangerous. Our future has to hinge around the development of a regional economy based on new regional industries, programmes of import substitution, and engagement with new non-traditional development partners.
Professor Avinash Persaud
After Cave Hill’s Dr Michael Howard had advised that Government should deal with the fiscal problem by reducing the number of Barbadian students at the University of the West Indies, Professor Persaud latched upon this and recommended that we should curtail funding of university education and instead focus on primary school education! What a load of backward thinking rubbish! But we are not surprised. This, after all, is the same Persaud who, in an article published in the Barbados Business Authority of 27th October 2008, approved of job cuts as a "sensible" way for local firms to deal with the international recession. Some-one should inform this self appointed "guru" that we will not permit him to lead us back onto the old plantation!
Mr Peter Boos
When the private sector guru, Peter Boos, was Chairman of our Cricket World Cup Organising Committee, he used to speak as though he was the de facto Prime Minister of Barabdos. He fed us a load of grandiose ‘hogwash’ about the supposed tremendous future benefits of the World Cup to Barbados, and encouraged us to invest hundreds of millions of dollars. Virtually none of Mr Boos’ promised benefits have materialized! However a number of his private sector peers walked away from the World Cup as millionaires, while the government and people were left holding the bag of debt. Mr Boos has never apologised to the people of Barbados - yet he has the effrontery to suggest that the main encumbrance to Barbados’ future progress is our public sector!
Conclusion
The PEP rejects the so-called ‘advice’ of all of these supposed gurus. None of them has properly analysed our predicament, and they are therefore offering fundamentally flawed recommendations. Furthermore, they are offering self-interested prescriptions that conform to their class positions or to their preconceived ideological biases.
What Barbados desperately needs is a group of people oriented professional economists who are grounded in the science of ‘physical economy’, and who understand the need of a developing country to invest in physical infrastructure and new industries, and to unleash the initiative, energy and ability of the masses of people.

DAVID A. COMISSIONG
President

In Defence of Rex and Cuba

2010-02-26T13:14:00.004-04:00

THE LETTER PUBLISHED in the February 15 DAILY NATION, under the headline To Rex Who Spoke Against Cuban Racism, should be a warning to public figures about the ease with which opportunistic propagandists can use a person's good name and reputation to promote ends that that person would never support.
The letter, which was signed by several domestic Cuban opponents of the Revolutionary Government of Cuba, portrays our Rex Nettleford as a man who dedicated his life and abilities to identifying and denouncing racism in contemporary Cuba, and to "highlighting the lot of those who are fighting for civil rights in Cuba".

This is a portrait of Rex Nettleford that virtually none of us in the Caribbean can recognise! Indeed, Rex Nettleford himself - were he still alive - would also not be able to recognise this portrait of himself. No doubt, the purpose of the letter is to use Nettleford's good name and reputation as a weapon against the government of Cuba, and to further ends that are dear to the signatories of the letter.

Readers of the letter are being led to believe that Rex Nettleford had devoted himself to identifying Cuba as a purveyor of acute forms of racism. Clearly, the deceased Nettleford is simply being used! After all, it is common knowledge that the early Castro-led regime took immediate steps to outlaw anti-black institutional racism in Cuba, and that the current leadership openly acknowledges the need to combat the remnants of "subjective" racism that still exists amongst some elements of the white Cuban population.

But, to some extent, perhaps Rex has to share some of the blame for this facile and reactionary exploitation of his name and reputation. You see, in November last year, Nettleford joined with three other Jamaican academics in addressing a letter to President Raul Castro of Cuba in support of one Dr Darsi Ferrer Ramirez - a domestic opponent of the Cuban government who had been arrested a few months earlier. It is clear from the Jamaicans' letter that they had been informed that Dr Ferrer was "participating in the organisation of a peaceful demonstration in defence of the human rights of Afro-Cubans when he was arrested," and that they had therefore issued their letter in good faith.

What needs to be noted, however, is that this letter was written within the context of a concerted international effort by certain opponents of the Cuban government to generate a number of such letters. Indeed, a very similar letter was penned by an equally eminent and well meaning group of African American public figures!

However, one of those African American luminaries - Makani Themba-Nixon - had the foresight to withdraw her signature, after realising that her good name and intentions were likely to be exploited in precisely the same way that Rex Nettleford's have been.

In respectfully requesting the withdrawal of her signature, Ms Themba-Nixon wrote as follows: "I just don't want any public statement that we sign to become fodder for attacking a nation and a revolution that has contributed so much to the world. . . Certainly, we should have thought this through more carefully when we signed on. . . Unfortunately, this effort is being used by enemies of all of us to attempt to undermine a government whose efforts have proven critical to the uplift of Black people, despite its shortcomings."

May we allow the great Rex Nettleford to be true to himself in death as he was true to himself in life. And may this great African-Caribbean intellectual and warrior rest in peace!

PEP COLUMN

2010-02-17T20:56:00.002-04:00

HARD EARS YUH WON’T HEAR!
All over the island, people are beseeching leaders of the Peoples Empowerment Party, to give advise to the current government on how to handle the economic crisis. Well, all we can say is that we have been offering advise for the past 9 years now, but no-one seems to be listening! The following is but a small sample of the many interventions the PEP and its leaders have made:-May 2001 - David Comissiong’s "Facing Reality" column in the Nation Newspaper:-
"The financial tycoons of this world have built a global financial bubble that will eventually explode violently. When the bubble explodes and deep recession hits the North American and European tourist and financial services markets that Barbados depends so heavily upon, what will become of us? The global crisis is coming to us here in Barbados. Let us ensure we are prepared to face it".
September 2007 - PEP Column
"Do the Barbados Labour Party and the Democratic Labour Party have any notion of the dangers facing Barbados, and the need for pro-active, defensive actions? It is as if these two visionless, useless organisations and their leaders exist in blissful ignorance of all that is going on around them in the international arena".
May 2008 - PEP Column
"How could these two political parties have gone through a whole general election campaign, glibly spending millions of dollars, making all sorts of extravagant promises to the Barbadian people, and never seriously grappling with the implications of the rapidly deteriorating international situation?"
January 2009 - PEP letter to David Thompson, Mia Mottley and other CARICOM leaders:-
"It is already bad now, and it is going to get worse, much worse! Indeed, if we do not respond pro-actively and appropriately, we can confidently expect years of mass unemployment, collapsing social programmes, massive balance of payment crises, spiraling crime rates, and general social disintegration ............... There are many ways in which we in the Caribbean can respond to the crisis. The menu of available options would include a ‘stimulus’ package based on the collective investment in new industries and structures of production; a new thrust in import substitution; a Caribbean food and housing programme based on the use of indigenous resources; an effort to collectively organise our nations under the banner of a ‘Caribbean Civilization;’ and the crafting of new relations with other regions of the world. But in order to be effective these ‘options’ must all be based on the solid foundation of a political consensus that involves both government and opposition parties".
September 2009 - PEP letter to David Thompson and other CARICOM leaders:-
"It is clear that the CARICOM countries need a collective project to deal with the international recession. Permit me to give but one example. Throughout the region existing public sector jobs and government welfare programmes are under threat as a result of the recession. If, therefore, the CARICOM states came together and established a collective "Social Security Stabilization Project" designed to defend and preserve the social welfare status of the people by maintaining the existing public sector jobs and social welfare benefits over the next 24 months, the CARICOM group of countries would be in a credible position to present such a project to the international community, and to request financial support and assistance from relevant nations and organisations. Such a collective regional project would be much more credible and likely to attract international support than individual territories requesting assistance".

Does Anybody Care?

2010-02-09T19:36:00.001-04:00

PRESS RELEASE

The back page of the Nation Newspaper of Monday 8th February 2010 reported the following horrific account of the murder of a young son of our nation:-

"A decision to stop at an open-air street party has left 28 year old Fabian Antonio Greaves dead...... The National Conservation Commission worker was killed about 2:40 a.m at Waterhall Land in St Michael after an altercation with another man led to his being gunned down by a group of men who walked up to him and opened fire. An eyewitness............ said Greaves went to the bar to buy drinks and got into an argument...... later, a group of men walked up and opened fire, and Greaves fell to the ground with at least six bullet wounds".

So, this is where we have reached in Barbados! We now live in a country in which a group of our fellow residents are capable of arming themselves with guns and coldly, callously and openly shooting a human being to death, simply because of a verbal altercation!

What does this mean? What does this say about our country? And why has there been no public expression of outrage, horror, shock, disappointment or even regret by our Church leaders, politicians, journalists, moderators and other sundry makers and shapers of public opinion? Other than the immediate family of the late Fabian Antonio Greaves, does anybody care? Is anybody even paying attention?

Barbados is such a small and intimate country that we should be existing and functioning like a family - a humane and well ordered family in which we share our collective resources, look out for each other, set individual and family goals, and take pride in assisting each other to attain such goals.

How could we have fallen so far from this ideal that we are now producing people who are so alienated from their fellow citizens, and so bereft of any conception of a collective national or family interest, that they are capable of such barbarity? And who or what is to blame?

Should any blame be ascribed to the politicians and political parties that crudely and crassly buy votes in elections, and that set out to systematically reduce our people to insensible, materialistic beings who only respond to the bribery of money and entertainments?

Should any blame be ascribed to the various pastors and priests who dilute the spirituality of the nation with their morally bankrupt, money based "Prosperity Gospel", or with their sterile status-quo and establishment oriented Christianity? And what about businessmen and women who see our Barbadian youth as merely a captive commercial market to be exploited and plundered and act in accordance with that vulgar conception?

And how about the educators who are content to maintain an educational system that herds thousands of low academic achievers into schools that are so lacking in the facilities, resources and spirit required to respond to the special needs of these children, that the eventual production of hundreds, if not thousands, of alienated, hopeless and angry young men and women is virtually guaranteed?

And why have all of us allowed the continued existence of a social structure marred by deep pockets of poverty and deprivation amidst a vista of comfort and plenty, and a capitalism based culture in which the American dominated media inculcates negative values of selfishness, individualism, lack of compassion and contempt for those who are considered to be different or unsuccessful?

Clearly, a major national effort is required to retrieve the situation. The Peoples Empowerment Party is ready to try. Are you?

DAVID A COMISSIONG
President

CARIBBEAN UNITY URGED TO STOP IMF

2010-02-07T19:56:00.004-04:00

Posted by Editor on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 in
Share News a Canadian ethnic newspaper.
Written by RON FANFAIR

David Commissiong spoke to scholars at a public lecture at the University of Toronto
on Friday 31st, 2010, on the Topic: "The Impact of the Economic Crisis on the Caribbean and the IMF and Reparations".

Like voracious vultures circling helpless prey, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the forces it represents are preparing to impose a severe austerity program on the Caribbean, many of whose citizens are already submerged in poverty, warns Pan Africanist, lawyer and Barbadian politician, David Commissiong.

To make matters worse, he said, Caribbean leaders have displayed an unwillingness to want to work together to form a political and economic union to attempt to alleviate the crisis.

The global financial meltdown has contributed to negative economic growth in many Caribbean countries whose economies are based on tourism and off-shore financial and business services.

The IMF recently agreed to lend Jamaica US$1.25 billion over 27 months while the governments of Antigua & Barbuda and St. Vincent & the Grenadines have approached the international lending agency for financial support.

Commissiong noted there was a TT$18.9 billion decline in government revenues in Trinidad & Tobago which has one of the strongest economies in the Caribbean, and tourism - Barbados' principal revenue earner - decreased by nine per cent last year.

He also said the Barbados government has been advised by the IMF, with whom they are in consultation, to raise the island's value added tax from 15 to 17 per cent, reduce the government wages bill which translates into public sector lay-offs and sell government assets.

"Austerity programs are designed to destroy all the mechanism structures for our people's development and upliftment and keep them enmeshed in poverty and underdevelopment," Commissiong said at a public lecture last Friday night at the University of Toronto. "If we in the Caribbean continue to be satisfied with economies based on tourism and off-shore financial and business services, we will remain forever vulnerable to those kinds of policies and we will not be in a position to resist them. If we wish to avoid that future, we have to come together in a collective."

The U of T Caribbean Studies Program and the Global Afrikan Congress (Canada) sponsored the lecture whose theme was "The Impact of the Economic Crisis on the Caribbean and the IMF and Reparations".

Acting on behalf of the People's Empowerment (PEP) party established four years ago, Commissiong said he wrote to Caribbean heads of government and opposition party leaders last year proposing a meeting to design and agree on an appropriate political and economic response to the global financial crisis that he sensed was going to have a devastating effect on the region.

He said Barbados' Prime Minister David Thompson and St. Vincent & the Grenadines opposition New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Arnhim Eustace were the only Caribbean political leaders who responded to the invitation.

"I did not get a serious response," said Commissiong, a former head of the Barbados government's Pan-African Affairs Commission. "The Caribbean, in my opinion, has been badly served by its political leadership, certainly over the last 30 years or so. We seem to have a political class with very limited vision...We are still extremely vulnerable and dependent economies and as long as we remain separate and individual small island states, that's going to be our fate.

"If we insist on this 'going alone' approach, we are going to be picked off one by one and all of us are going to fall into the IMF hands. It's only a matter of time...Political and economic union is the only alternative.

"If we came together in a political union with one central government, a national bank and a new common currency for the entire region that will be issued in the first instance in the form of virtually interest-free loans to territorial governments to be used not for white elephant projects and not to go into the pockets of politicians, but to be used exclusively for building new industries and new structures of production, things that will be impossible as a single territory become possible once we are now talking about a collection of territories and a political union."

Commissiong invited scholars and activists from Canada to attend the fifth Assembly of Caribbean Peoples in Barbados August 3-8. He said delegates are compelled to come up with solutions to address the problems facing the region.

'ARE YOU LISTENING' LOVE SONG FOR HAITI - KIRK FRANKLIN & FRIENDS

2010-02-05T13:57:00.007-04:00

Please enjoy song. This is awesome!

A SHAMEFUL DECISION TO REFUSE HAITIAN PATIENTS

2010-02-05T13:06:00.002-04:00

Press Release

The Peoples Empowerment Party(PEP) is appalled and dismayed that our Barbados government has turned down a request to accommodate and treat some of our injured Haitian brothers and sisters in Barbados.

Aside from Cuba, Barbados probably has the most comprehensive health care system in the Caribbean. Thus, if Barbados declares that it cannot spare the resources that would be needed to accommodate even one Haitian patient, then we are sending a message to virtually every Caribbean country that they too should close their doors and their hearts to Haiti’s wounded and disabled.

Clearly, no one would expect a country the size of Barbados to take in a large number of Haitian patients, but surely Barbados could make a positive gesture by accommodating even a handful of Haitian patients. By so doing, we would have fulfilled our duty, and would have sent a powerful message to bigger and more powerful countries. Haven’t Prime Minister Thompson and his Cabinet colleagues ever read or heard Jesus’ parable about the widow’s mite?

Our Government has done a disservice to us, the people of Barbados, and has brought shame to our nation.

David A. Comissiong

President

PUPPETS OF THE IMF

2010-02-03T13:34:00.003-04:00

PRESS RELEASE
When Barbados Minister of Economic Affairs, Dr David Estwick, got up at a constituency conference in the rural parish of St Philip last Sunday and declared that the government of Barbados must institute a national wage freeze and sell off state assets, it was Dr Estwick’s lips that were moving, but the voice we were hearing was really that of Dr Estwick’s master - the International Monetary Fund (IMF)!

It was around the middle of last year that the IMF held a "consultation" with the Government of Barbados, and instructed the Government that they were required to reduce Government’s wages bill; sell off state assets; reduce subsidies on such essential consumer items as natural gas; broaden the tax base and rake in more taxes from Barbadians; and raise the level of Value Added Tax from 15 percent to 17 percent. Half a year later, Dr Estwick has begun, puppet-like, to promulgate these backward, anti-developmental policies as though they are his own.

What the Barbadian people need to understand is that the international ruling elite and their organisations - inclusive of the IMF - have resolved to impose an anti-developmental austerity programme on the countries of the ‘Developing World’!

The IMF has therefore rolled out an ‘austerity’ agenda not only for Barbados, but also for Jamaica and a host of other developing countries around the world. The Jamaican government, for example, were instructed to impose a slew of punishing consumption taxes that were designed to push tens of thousands of already impoverished Jamaicans further into hunger and deprivation. At present, the Jamaica government is still agonizing over how they are going to implement their orders from the IMF.

Another example of the oligarchy’s austerity agenda for the Developing World was manifested at the recent Copenhagen Climate Summit. There, the international elite unveiled a sinister plot to strip developing countries of their sovereignty and to imprison them in a mandatory policy framework which would oblige them to eschew industrialization programmes and content themselves with primitive, low technology economies and lifestyles.

You see, the oligarchy is once again more than ever determined to reinforce an international order comprised of a small elite of developed ‘First World’ countries, and a mass of low technology, underdeveloped ‘Third World’ countries. Thus, the response to the international economic crisis that they have prescribed for the United States of America and Western Europe consists of anti-austerity, growth and consumption oriented polices, while the prescription for countries like Jamaica and Barbados are deflationary, austerity measures.

And so, a national wage freeze and a privatization programme is just the beginning of the IMF’s austerity assault on Barbados. Once those initial policies have been implemented, it will only be a matter of time before they go after such things as government subsides on cooking gas and public transportation; the free medication dispensed by Barbados’ National Drug Service; free secondary and University education; state run polyclinics, and the list goes on.

Dr Estwick and Barbados’ Democratic Labour Party government are going in the wrong direction when they seek to impose an IMF austerity programme on Barbados. However, the problem with Dr Estwick and his ministerial colleagues is that they do not possess the imagination, the intellectual resources or the self confidence to envisage and pursue an alternative path, and so they slavishly follow the dictates of the IMF.

Barbados, and all the other small island states of the Caribbean need to recognise and acknowledge that they possess limited human and intellectual resources, and that they therefore cannot afford a divisive form of politics that causes the marginalization and discarding of some one half of the country’s intellectual resources because of narrow partisan political considerations.

Barbados, like the other countries of the Caribbean, needs a genuine ‘politics of inclusion’ that will bring to the table intellectual resources that the governing administration does not possess. Barbados and the other Caribbean countries also need to look outwards towards a pan- Caribbean system of production, and thereby find the economic space and resources to implement anti-austerity, growth and consumption oriented policies.

David A. Comissiong

HAITI: MICROCOSM OF THE CRISIS OF DEVELOPMENT

2010-01-31T19:59:00.003-04:00

Yash Tandon
2010-01-28, Issue 467
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/61809
The 'failure of development' is to blame for the devastating effects of the recent earthquake in Haiti, writes Yash Tandon. Calling for democratic institutions accountable to the country's people to be put in place, Tandon argues that Haiti is ‘a microcosm of the disastrous outcome' of ‘development’ policies and the 'destructive effects of foreign interventionist policies’ in the affairs of the South.

Haiti is a tragedy for us all. It is a tragedy for you and me. It is a tragedy for Africa, for the poor countries of Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. An earthquake is a global phenomenon, it can happen anywhere. It can happen in the US, in Europe and in Japan. So why then is it so destructive in its effects in the countries of the South? It is because of the failure of development. Haiti is a microcosm of the disastrous outcome of the failed so-called ‘development’ policies of the last thirty years in the South, and the destructive effects of foreign interventionist policies in the affairs of the poor countries of the South – from Somalia to Bangladesh to Haiti.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected president, in his passionate book, The Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization gives a graphic account of what happens when local economies and local initiatives of a poor country like Haiti are subordinated to the will of global finance and corporate power masked by the ideologies of ‘free trade’ and ‘development aid’. ‘In a world oriented only toward profit, it may be difficult for us to hear God's voice among the din and the racket of the moneychangers who have filled the world's temples’, he writes.

He describes how he had to wrestle with his heart and mind to resist the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) that was being forced on him as a condition for donor aid. When he remained faithful to his heart and mind, he was forced out of power. The government that replaced him relented to the pressure of the donors and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)/World Bank (WB). In 2004 in what he described as his ‘kidnapping’ with the connivance of France and the US, he was forced into exile. He was unceremoniously transported first to Jamaica and then, eventually, to South Africa.

The so-called International Community (IC) of the North is organising a conference in Montreal, Canada, for Haiti. It will, for sure, fail to bring development to the people of Haiti for it will put Haiti back under the heel and control of the local power and economic elite which, in turn, is under the control of the very forces that have ruined Haiti’s economy; the IMF/WB imposition of SAPS and the ‘benevolent’ dictatorship of ‘donor aid’. This is behind the present tragedy of Haiti, and this is behind the tragedy of most of Africa, and the poorer nations of the South.

An ‘Alternative International Community’ (AIC) of the South – an ad hoc body that should be set up comprising of individuals and intergovernmental organisations of the South and welfare-oriented organisations of the United Nations such as the FAO and the WHO – should organise its own counter conference in a spirit of genuine solidarity for the people of Haiti. It should aim at putting power in the hands of the people themselves. The initiative can come from, for instance, the government of South Africa, the South Centre in Geneva, or a body of sympathetic non-governmental organisations from the South and the North – or by all of these working in cooperation, under an initiative taken by one of them.

The objectives of the conference should be:

- To identify from among the Haitian population those community organisations and ad hoc groups which may have emerged from the ruins and which are engaged in self-help activities of relief, care of the injured bodies and souls among the survivors, and the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the society and economy
- To help build the capacity of these groups to take charge of the relief assistance now being airlifted, shipped or sent via the Dominican Republic
- To help institutionalise these efforts into a government of the people by putting in place self-governing councils at local levels going up to the apex at the national and state level
- To expose the fake ‘solidarity’ of the Montreal initiative
- To demilitarise the occupation of Haiti that is currently under way by the US and US-led NATO forces
- To join and support Haiti peoples` demand for the return of Aristide, who still remains the beacon of hope for Haiti. He has the support of the poor. He has faith in his people's strength to oppose the domination of donors and the IMF/World Bank, and to put in place democratic institutions that are accountable to the people, and not to the false gods of ‘moneychangers who have filled the world's temples’.

This is a call to all those who are inspired by a humane spirit and who wish to assist our brothers and sisters (‘our families’) in Haiti, from a sense of genuine solidarity.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Yash Tandon is the former executive director of the South Centre.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

GOD IS GOOD ALL THE TIME

2010-01-31T15:31:00.001-04:00

The God that I - David Comissiong - worship is ‘good’ - all the time! He is a God of perfect goodness - the God that Jesus Christ described as "our Father who art in heaven". He is the perfect Father, immeasurably surpassing in goodness to his children my own father and every other earthly father.

I therefore have never accused the God that I know and worship of committing evil! I have never believed that our heavenly Father wilfully directs earthquakes, hurricanes, armies or slave traders to inflict death, disease, pain, starvation or slavery on innocent babies, children or even adults.

However, there are some people who seem to worship a peculiar kind of god. For example, there is a man in the United States by the name of Pat Robertson who, it appears, worships a god that would inflict death and suffering on totally innocent and blameless new born Haitian children, simply because some obscure Haitian is supposed to have allegedly made a so-called pact with a being called Satan some 230 years ago. Clearly, Pat Robertson’s god and my heavenly Father cannot be one and the same God!

There is also a woman by the name of Janice D. Gibbs who had a letter published in the Nation Newspaper of Monday 25th January 2009, and it appears that she worships a god that would impose punishment and evil consequences on my totally innocent and blameless children and grand children simply because I made a statement which she and her god deemed to be inappropriate. Again, it is clear to me that my God of perfect goodness and Ms Janice Gibbs’ god cannot be one and the same!

I would also like to take this opportunity to inform Janice Gibbs, Pat Robertson and all those who think like them, that if they are looking for the purveyors of evil in Haiti, that they are much more likely to find them among the Christianity - practising mulatto and black elite of Haitian society than among the Vodun-practising segment of the masses of poor black Haitians.

The elite sector of Haitian society is comprised of Roman Catholic Christians who speak French rather than Haitian Creole, and who look to France and Europe for their models and value systems rather than to Africa. For almost 200 years now, this elite - often in complicity with Europeans and North Americans - has exploited and oppressed the Vodun and Christianity practising, Creole speaking, Africa oriented masses of Haiti.

Indeed, on more than one occasion over the past 200 years the Christianity - practising Haitian elite has used the state power at their disposal to organise military-style, violence filled campaigns designed to stamp out the practise of Vodun in Haiti. In the name of religious purity these supposed Christians inflicted murder on thousands of Vodun practitioners. And of course they claimed to be doing so in the name of ‘their’ god!

DAVID A. COMISSIONG

Save Haiti From The Shock Doctrine

2010-01-21T13:11:00.002-04:00

The Peoples Empowerment Party (PEP) is appealing to the governments of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the African Union (AU), and the Bolivarian Alternative For Latin America (ALBA) to bestir themselves and make a collective effort to save Haiti from the evil consequences of the ‘Shock Doctrine’ and its associated plague of ‘Disaster Capitalism’!
The term ‘Shock Doctrine’ was coined by the award-winning Canadian author, Naomi Klein, and refers to the doctrine that was developed by the ultra-right wing American economist, Milton Friedman, to the effect that traumatic man made or natural disasters are to be used by conservative capitalist ideologues to impose radical right wing economic and social policies on the disaster struck and traumatised population.
Friedman understood that the extreme right wing capitalist agenda of wholesale privatisation, government deregulation, dismantlement of social programmes, the enthronement of private capital and capitalists, and the opening up of the economy to the full blast of foreign (North American) economic dominance would be resisted by ordinary people concerned about their own welfare, and could only be fully and permanently imposed if the population was in such a traumatised state that it was unable to resist.
Friedman initially experimented with this doctrine during the 1970's, in his capacity as economic advisor to General Pinochet’s tyrranical, authoritarian government, installed in Chile after a brutal coup. In more recent years, Friedman’s acolytes in the United States have sought to apply the doctrine in the context of the 911 terrorist attack on New York City, the American "shock and awe" military attack on Iraq, the tsunami in Sri Lanka and other parts of South East Asia, and the death and devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The modus operandi of the followers of the ‘Shock Doctrine’ is to wait in readines for the next disaster, and once it occurs, to act swiftly and decisively.
Well, a ‘Shock Doctrine’ type of disaster has now erupted in Haiti, and if the initial approach of the United States government to the relief effort is anything to go by, then we need to brace ourselves for an American capatalist ‘shock and awe’ approach to the reconstruction of Haiti.
Just last Tuesday night, Dr Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s medical correspondent, reported on CNN that doctors of several nationalities in Haiti were deprived of the medical supplies required to properly carry out their services and went on to explain that "the huge effort placed on security has supplanted the effort to get essential supplies to the hospitals and doctors in Haiti".
Furthermore, within hours of the earthquake in Haiti, countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and China were successfully sending food, water, medicine and civilian teams of doctors and other specialists to Haiti. On the other hand, the very first reaction of the United States government was to mobilise the US military and to send in thousands of marines and paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division.
And to the consternation of aid agencies all over the world, once the US military had taken control of Haiti’s air and sea ports, getting assistance seemingly became increasingly difficult. Indeed, such well respected aid organisations as ‘Medecins Sans Frontieres’ and the ‘International Red Cross’ were denied permission to fly their medical teams into the Port-au-Prince airport. These desperately needed medical specialists were forced to land in the Dominican Republic and waste many precious hours and lives as they made the long land journey into Haiti. In addition, even CARICOM’s Prime Ministerial mission was not permitted by the Americans to land in Haiti.
The PEP is very concerned about the ‘games’ that are being played and where they will all end up. Indeed, our concern has been intensified by the knowledge that President Obama has designated USAID as the lead agency in the response to the Hatian crisis, since USAID has a long track record of promoting American capitalist interests in Haiti at the expense of the workers and poor people of Haiti.
We are therefore calling on CARICOM, the AU and ALBA to recognise that they possess a deep kinship with and responsibility towards the people of Haiti and urge them to engage in a strong defence of the independence and sovereignty of Haiti.

Haiti's Classquake

2010-01-21T12:54:00.002-04:00

Haiti's Classquake

By: Jeb Sprague - HaitiAnalysis.com

Just five days prior to the 7.0 earthquake that shattered Port-au-Prince on January 12th, the Haitian government’s Council of Modernisation of Public Enterprises (CMEP) announced the planned 70% privatization of Teleco, Haiti’s public telephone company.

Today Port-au-Prince lies in ruins, with thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands dead, entire neighborhoods cut off, many buried alive. Towns across the southern peninsula, such as Léogâne, are said to be in total ruin with an untold number of victims. Haiti’s president, René Préval, and his administration remain largely inept, absent from Port-au-Prince and even the local radio.

At Pont Morin in the Bois Verna section of the capital, Teleco’s office building is badly damaged. One twitter poster in Port-au-Prince on Monday warned local residents to evacuate “After the latest evaluations of the building, they've noticed that the main poles of the structure are damaged.”

With masses of people unable to get critical emergency medical care, water and basic supplies, the lack of local state infrastructure and personnel is plainly apparent.

Instead of investing in social programs and government infrastructure that could have helped care for the people of Port-au-Prince, especially following such a natural disaster, Haiti’s government has long been pressured by the United States and International Financial Institutions to sell off its infrastructure, to shut down government sponsored soup kitchens, to lower tariffs that might benefit the rural economy.

The demographic trend in Haiti over the last few decade’s showcases the impact of capitalist globalization: the movement of rural folks to slums in Port-au-Prince, often perched in large clumps precariously on hillsides.

"Slums begin with bad geology,” writer and historian Mike Davis explains. In his book Planet of Slums, Davis describes the explosion of slum communities in today's era of global capitalism. Billions have no choice but to live in close proximity to environmental and geological disaster, Davis explains.

In mid-2007, Haitian journalist Wadner Pierre and I wrote a piece for IPS (Inter Press Service) that investigated the gutting of Haiti’s public telephone company. We interviewed public sector workers laid off in droves. The government’s plan was to reduce Teleco employees from 3,293 to less than one thousand. By 2010 Préval’s appointed heads of Teleco had terminated employment for two-thirds of the workers at the company. During his first term in office from 1996-2001, Préval had already sold off the government’s Minoterie flourmill and public cement company.

Préval now follows through with the Cadre de Coopération Intérimaire (CCI), a macro-economic adjustment program formulated by his unelected predecessor (the interim regime of Gerard Latortue), along with international donor institutions and local sub-grantee groups. Privatization has been one plank of neoliberalism in Haiti.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Haiti was pressured to lower tariffs on foreign rice, bringing down the few protections in place for its local economy. With a lack of opportunity in the countryside, migration to the nation’s capital intensified. Hundreds of thousands took up residence in poorly constructed shantytowns, many in hillside slums such as Carrefour.

Using the worn-out rhetoric of nationalism to draw attention away from the implementation of policies favorable to global capitalism, government functionaries in Haiti have worked closely with IFI, NGO and governmental advisors and experts from abroad. For those Haitian politicians unwilling to go along with these plans, the brute force of coup d’états, economic embargo and reoccurring civil society training missions from abroad have reinforced the “right way” to govern.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, the Haitian state evaporated. Police searched for their own loved-ones, as government ministries and UN bases lay in ruins, many top officials now dead under tons of fallen concrete.

Widely criticized for failing in the days following the quake to visit or speak out on the radio to the neighborhoods of the capital in turmoil, Préval and other aloof Haitian government leaders have been encamped at a police station on the cities edge meeting with foreign leaders and journalists. On Tuesday Préval went to Santo Domingo in the neighboring Dominican Republic to confer further with aid officials.

The Washington Post explained “The U.S. government views Préval, an agronomist by training, as a technocrat largely free of the sharp political ideologies that have divided Haiti for decades. But at a time when tragedy is forcing the country essentially to begin again, Préval's aversion to the public stage has left millions of Haitians wondering whether there is a government at all.”

Hundreds of journalists have streamed into Port-au-Prince, while the U.S. military has set up base-camp at the damaged national airport with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the ground. Giving priority to unloading heavy weaponry, U.S. forces have turned away a number of large planes carrying medical and rescue equipment, prompting protests from France, Venezuela and the Médecins sans frontières.

International media outlets show images of Haitians digging with pieces of concrete at collapsed buildings. But over the days the cries of loved ones buried below have slowly fallen silent.

Other media have begun to show images of poor people in the capital's downtown searching for food, calling them "looters", when in fact mass starvation is setting in. This occurs as shotgun-wielding security guards attempt to cordon off the rubble of some of the larger markets.

Given the past decades of forced austerity measures imposed upon Haiti, it has been nearly impossible for the country to build up a larger government, one with more capacity to deal with emergencies, to support social investment projects, soup kitchens, or even improved slum housing. The overthrown Aristide government, 2001-2004, though severely crippled by aid embargoes and elite-backed death squads and opposition groups, had refused privatization, instituted a national program of soup kitchens and literacy centers, and even constructed a few blocks of improved slum housing in the capital (as covered at the time in an article by the former government newspaper L’Union).

Those small but welcome measures are a thing of the past. The repression of attempts by the people to have a say through democratic means and the forced subjugation of the local economy to global capitalism parallels the assumption of power by elites disconnected from the people they govern. These are the technocratic elites that Sociologist William I. Robinson in his book A Theory of Global Capitalism refers to as “transnationalised fractions of local dominant groups in the South…sometimes termed a ‘modernizing bourgeoisie’, who have overseen sweeping processes of social and economic restructuring and integration into the global economy and society.” Out from the ashes, do not be surprised if the Haitian people refuse to accept this.

Geographer Kenneth Hewitt coined the term 'classquake' in examining the 1976 earthquake in Guatemala that cost the lives of 23,000 people, because of the accuracy with which it struck down the poor. The classquake in Haiti today is much worse, compounded by decades of capitalist globalization and U.S. intervention.

---

Jeb Sprague received a Project Censored Award in 2008 for an article he published with the Inter Press Service (IPS) from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Visit his university website: http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~jhsprague/

Haiti's Relief Fund

2010-01-20T14:05:00.004-04:00

Dear Brothers and Sisters

The Clement Payne Movement has established a HAITI RELIEF FUND at the Broad Street Branch of RBTT Bank.

The account number is 1-4717070.

All funds that we collect will be used to send emergency supplies to Haiti.

At this stage, we are focusing on medicines and related medical supplies.

Since we are members of the Assembly of Caribbean Peoples and the Caribbean Pan-African Network, we have associates in Haiti and also in the Dominican Republic to whom we can funnel the supplies.

The Dominican Republic is important because it is via or through the Dominican Republic that the first sets of supplies reached Haiti.

Please give generously.

DAVID A. COMISSIONG
President

Fifth Assembly of Caribbean Peoples Agenda

2010-01-20T14:01:00.002-04:00

Topic No. 1 - International Economic & Debt Crisis
How are the Third World debt crisis and the international financial and economic crises impacting on the Caribbean, and how should the Caribbean respond?

Topic No. 2 - Colonialism, Militarisation & the Blockade against Cuba
What are the components of a comprehensive strategy to achieve the total de-colonisation of the Caribbean and to defeat the ongoing efforts of the United States to militarise the Caribbean and to blockade Cuba?

Topic No. 3 - Agriculture, Agrarian Reform & Food Sovereignty
What does the Caribbean need to do in order to reform the rural sector, develop agriculture and achieve "food sovereignty"?

Topic No. 4 - Integration, Political Union & Governance
What would be the components of new and more appropriate people centred models of governance for Caribbean states, and how could the nations of the Caribbean utilise all of the available options and opportunities for integration and political union?

Topic No. 5 - Industrial Development, Trade & Transportation
How can the Caribbean so harness, organise, combine, process and exchange its own resources that new industries are developed and existing industries are taken to higher levels of output and productivity?

Topic No. 6 - Drugs, Crime, Cultural degeneration & Racism
What measures can the Caribbean take to address the socio-cultural defects of illegal drugs, crime, racism and moral and cultural degeneration that continue to blight so many Caribbean societies?

Topic No. 7 - The Environment
What practical programme of cooperation can Caribbean nations put in place to address such urgent environmental issues as global warming, climate change, and the destructiveness of hurricanes and volcanoes?

Topic No. 8 - Intra-Caribbean Migration
What would be the components of a new and more appropriate human rights centred model for the treatment of migrants within the Caribbean?

Topic No. 9 - Education
We must develop a comprehensive educational system which demands the use of the languages used in the Caribbean - English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Papiamento(u) and Portuguese.

Topic No. 10 – Health
Health security for all of our peoples.

Fifth Assembly of Caribbean Peoples

2010-01-20T13:51:00.002-04:00

Fifth Assembly Of Caribbean Peoples

CALL TO THE ASSEMBLY
(Barbados, August 3 - 8, 2010)
"CARIBBEAN PEOPLE, SEIZE THE TIME!"

Now that the fraudulence of the international oligarchy and its inhuman system of subordinating people and nations to the narrow interests of financiers and elites has become manifestly clear, the time has come for the Caribbean people to assert themselves and to boldly step forward and take firm control of the future agenda of our Caribbean region!

We, the ‘Regional Executive Committee’ of the Fifth Assembly of Caribbean Peoples are therefore issuing a CALL to the Caribbean’s social movements of farmers, workers, women, artistes, students, intellectuals and youth, and to the people centred political parties, trade unions, non-governmental organisations, cooperatives, credit unions and community based institutions of our region to SEIZE THE MOMENT and come together in a mighty PEOPLE’S ASSEMBLY dedicated to the singular purpose of clarifying and agreeing upon an immediate, concrete and practical programme of action for solving the many critical existential and developmental problems of the Caribbean people.

Against the background of four previous Assemblies of Caribbean Peoples -Trinidad (1994; Dominican Republic (2001); Haiti (2003); Cuba (2008) - in which considerable intellectual work was done in analysing the predicament and development challenges of the Caribbean, we now take great pride and pleasure in sending out an INVITATION to all authentic Caribbean organisations and to the patriotic sons and daughters of our region to attend and participate in the historic FIFTH ASSEMBLY OF CARIBBEAN PEOPLES, which will be held in the Island of BARBADOS between the 3rd and the 8th of August 2010.

The Fifth Assembly Of Caribbean Peoples will constitute a coming together of activists and popular organisations from across the Spanish, English, French and Dutch speaking regions of the Caribbean focussed on designing Caribbean solutions to such challenges as:-

the international financial, economic and debt crisis that is threatening to devastate the Caribbean;

the prevailing balkanisation, fragmentation and colonial domination in the Caribbean;

our persistent failure to harness the resources of the Caribbean for our own collective industrialisation and development;

the many severe environmental challenges that threaten the long term survival of the Caribbean and its people;

our lack of food security and the manifestly unsustainable food import burden that the region is bearing;

the terrible scourges of crime, illegal drugs and racial disharmony that bedevil several Caribbean countries;

the many cultural and political factors that continue to retard the development of our identity as a Caribbean people belonging to a
unique Caribbean Civilization.

The historic FIFTH ASSEMBLY OF CARIBBEAN PEOPLES will consciously and deliberately endeavour to include in our convocation specialists who have carried out relevant research into the targeted subject areas, as well as regional policy-makers who, now more than ever, need to sit down and reason with popular and grass-roots activists.

There will also be caucuses of what are perhaps the three most important segments of the population of the Caribbean - our women-folk, our youth and our farmers. Indeed, we, the Regional Executive Committee, have determined that the unique ideas and perspectives of these three critical, but often marginalized, segments of our population, must be accorded a place of pre-eminence in the several deeply considered solutions that will emerge from our Fifth Assembly.

The Caribbean people should rest assured that the Fifth Assembly of Caribbean Peoples has been consciously designed to produce solutions to the problems of the Caribbean! We, the Regional Executive Committee, are not interested in staging yet another academic conference that is full of long, learned academic papers, but short on concrete solutions and mechanisms for follow-up action. We assure you - the Caribbean people - that the constant watch words of this Assembly will be - "solutions, solutions, solutions"!

We now look forward to our gathering at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies in Barbados, from the 3rd to the 8th of August 2010, as we come together in powerful formation to SEIZE THE TIME.

For further bobbyclainformation please contact Robert ‘Bobby’ Clarke or David Comissiong at clementpaynechambers@gmail.com

My Navel String Buried Right Here

2010-01-12T18:57:00.000-04:00

"I am charged with landing improperly (in Barbados) and for giving a false statement relative to my place of birth........ I don’t know where the hell I was born, but I was told Barbados......."

Rt. Excellent Clement Payne (1937)

"The celebrated national poet of Guyana, Martin Carter, reminds us..... that we represent the expectations of five million human beings, and that what we achieve or betray concerns not only the living but those who are not yet born........ There is a fundamental theme on which I should like to think there can be no difference. And that is the absolute necessity to promote the solidarity and the sovereignty of this regional Caribbean family, and also the absolute obligation to discover those strategies and mechanisms which will ultimately lead to unity of action in all major areas of our economic, social and political life"

Rt. Excellent Errol Barrow (1986)

As the current Government of Barbados prepares itself to amend the Constitution in order to deny citizenship to the children of certain categories of Caribbean migrants who are born in Barbados, we have to seriously ask ourselves whether, just as the late Errol Barrow forewarned, we are not on the verge of betraying not only the existing 5 million people of our Caribbean Community, but also the countless generations that are "not yet born".

Last year, the Barbados Government issued a so-called "Green Paper" on a "Comprehensive Review of Immigration Policy and Proposals for Legislative Reform". And the most significant proposal contained in the Green Paper was the suggestion that the existing constitutional scheme of according citizenship to all children born in Barbados should be discontinued, and replaced with a system in which children born to undocumented migrants, to persons who are on work permits, or to persons who merely have permission to "reside and work" in Barbados, should not acquire Barbadian citizenship.

What makes this proposal all the more reprehensible is the widespread knowledge that it was motivated by a desire to specifically target the children of our Guyanese, Vincentian, St Lucian, Dominican and Jamaican brothers and sisters! As virtually all Barbadians know, and as has been confirmed by authoritative spokespersons of the government, the current Administration is not concerned about European, American, Chinese or Indian migration to Barbados: rather, their fundamental objective is to clamp down upon the migration to Barbados of our fellow Caribbean people.
The system of according citizenship to all babies born on Barbadian soil has been in place since the birth of our nation, and has served us well over the years. Why do we wish to change it now?

Why do we want to follow the path of some of the most racist and xenophobic countries in denying citizenship to certain categories of babies born on our soil? Why do we wish to give comfort and support to racists in the U.K and U.S.A who have urged their governments to adopt this type of policy against Barbadian and other Caribbean migrants to those countries?

Intelligent Barbadians need to ask themselves where this new policy is taking us, for the current Government seems to want to take us in the direction of a small, narrow, insular Barbadian nation, rather than towards the future of an expansive, multi-territory Caribbean economy and nation. Can we really envisage our children being satisfied to be confined indefinitely to a little 166 square mile nation and an economy of tourism and off-shore services? Is this really all that we aspire to?
And by the way, our national hero Clement Payne was born in Trinidad.

Marching Into 2010 With PEP

2010-01-12T18:47:00.000-04:00

EXACTLY ONE YEAR AGO, the People's Empowerment Party (PEP) issued a New Year's Message in which we warned Barbadian that 2009 was going to be a very difficult year and urged the powers-that-be to commence a serious campaign to diversify the Barbadian economy beyond the traditional pillars of tourism and so-called "offshore" financial and business services.

We advocated that Barbados should seriously set about to educate its citizens to the highest possible international standards; that Government should encourage and assist Barbadians to forge ahead into a multiplicity of high-skilled/high-creativity economic activities; and that our country should proactively undertake a central role in encouraging and crafting a pan-Caribbean system of production. We noted that at a time when economic structures were collapsing in North America and Europe, it behoved us in the Caribbean to look towards each other and to take control of our own destinies by producing for ourselves.

Our New Year's message also counselled the new Government not to spurn the hand of friendship that had been extended to us by our Latin American comrades, and urged that we "get on board" with Petro-Caribe and the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean (ALBA).

One of the most striking passages in last year's message exhorted as follows: "Let us take inspiration from the great athletes of Jamaica, who conquered the entire world in spectacular fashion at the Beijing Olympics. What made Jamaica's achievement at the 2008 Olympics so different from previous games is that instead of sending their athletes to the United States and Europe for training, the Jamaicans established their very own high-performance track and field academies, and used their native intelligence to produce athletes of the very highest international calibre. The lesson is therefore that we possess the ability - all we need is the self-belief and the will to forge ahead."

Well, needless to say, the powers-that-be totally ignored our New Year's advice and exhortations of one year ago. Instead of coming together in Caribbean unity to collectively face the international economic crisis, they did the opposite and instituted an immigration reform exercise that quickly took on negative and backward connotations, and resulted in the unfortunate scapegoating of Caribbean migrants living in Barbados.

The year 2009 therefore turned out to be a very disappointing one. And so, rather than being able to join with and support our Barbados Government in charting new and progressive paths, our party was forced to spend 2009 fighting rearguard battles to minimise the damage being done. However, the PEP remains undaunted and will be forging forward into 2010 with a visionary and progressive agenda.

On the domestic front, we intend to engage in a formidable battle on behalf of all the impoverished and marginalised sectors of our population. We will ensure the burdens of the recession do not fall disproportionately on the backs of the "poor and the powerless", and that principles of humanity and equity are applied to the sharing of resources.

On the regional front, we will be playing a leading role in the staging of an historic Assembly of Caribbean People in Barbados during August, and will be advocating progressive solutions to the Caribbean's problems and seeking to promote and fast-track the idea of a political union of the English-speaking Caribbean.

And on the global front, we intend to push for the establishment of a Pan-African Commonwealth of Nations, and the development of deep linkages and relationships between CARICOM on the one hand and the African Union and ALBA on the other.

Published: December 31, 2009

For The Children's Sake

2010-01-12T18:44:00.000-04:00

TOMORROW we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Christ, who admonished the world to "suffer the little children to come unto Me, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of Heaven belongs". And yet, Christmas can be the cruelest time of year for many, many children!

The celebration of Christmas has come to be characterised by an excessive concentration on the commercial marketing of toys and other "goodies", and the insistence that the commemoration of the birth of Jesus is centred around the giving and receiving of presents. And as a result, many of the children of the poor are devastated at Christmas time, as they witness a seemingly never-ending parade of toys and 'goodies' on their television screens and in the windows of department stores - toys and "goodies" that are really for other children, and that they can only admire and wish for from afar.

Some of us have seen this scenario played out time and again at Christmas - the little single parent child whose home is so wracked by poverty that "mummy" simply cannot afford to buy the beautiful things in the store window.

And so, as we celebrate Christmas tomorrow, we should spare a thought for the poor children of our nation. Indeed, there is no better time to seriously reflect on the welfare and well-being of our children, since Christmas, properly understood, is really the festival of the child. This is the perfect time therefore for us to give some thought to the duty that we owe to all the children of our nation, and more especially to the children of the poor.

The People's Empowerment Party (PEP) has always had a clear understanding that a set of duties is owed by society to the children of Barbados. These duties may be conceptualised as essential "foods" for the bodies, intellects and souls of the nation's children, and include the duty of respect; the duty to give our children a sense of a community and a culture that belongs to them; the duty to bestow upon them a significant role in society and a sense of accomplishment and importance; and the duty to convey to them a sense of the location of their lives in the scheme of eternity and a positive belief in the future.

Of course, the duty of respect implies and encompasses the duty to provide for the physical and material welfare of all of the children of our nation. All Barbadian children - regardless of the material wealth or social standing of their parents - must be properly fed, clothed, housed, educated and cared for medically!

Indeed, the PEP was so clear about this duty that in our manifesto we advocated the establishment of a "liveable wage" (rather than a "minimum wage") for Barbadian workers, and suggested that the ratio between the highest and lowest paid workers in Barbados should be much less pronounced and more equitable. In other words, poor Barbadians who are struggling to provide decent living conditions for their children must be given additional resources, even if this means requesting the wealthy to make do with less or to contribute more to the tax revenues.

We also proposed a massive low-income housing programme, fundamental educational reforms aimed at ensuring that the less academically gifted children are given more attention and educational resources, and an effort to ensure that our children and youth are permitted a presence and input in our major national institutions and activities.

Let us resolve to orient our society towards the children and their future!

Published: December 23, 2009

Message To The Migrants

2010-01-12T18:24:00.000-04:00

EARLIER THIS YEAR, undocumented CARICOM migrants residing in Barbados were sent into a state of panic when authorities started to routinely order the removal from Barbados of "illegals" who, in an effort to regularise their status, had voluntarily gone into the Immigration Department and filed applications for immigrant status.

Of course, these applicants for immigrant status were simply following a modus operandi that had developed under the previous Barbados Labour Party regime, of permitting undocumented CARICOM migrants who had resided in Barbados for five or more years to come forward and have their status regularised.

It came as a great shock therefore when, contrary to the past practice, instead of granting the applicants official permission to remain in Barbados while their applications were being processed, the authorities started to order them to leave the island.

The panic intensified in May when Prime Minister David Thompson announced that his Government would be offering an amnesty to undocumented CARICOM migrants - but only if such migrants had been residing in Barbados from before January 1, 1998.

This led to a feeling of doom and gloom in the CARICOM migrant community, for there was a perception that undocumented migrants who had come to Barbados after January 1, 1998, would be ordered to leave the island once they came to the attention of immigration authorities.

Thus, there was great apprehension and a reluctance to follow the Prime Minister's directive that all undocumented migrants should report to the Immigration Department between June 1 and December 1, 2009.

It was at this stage that leading members of the People's Empowerment Party (PEP) joined with other citizens and residents of Barbados to establish the Coalition For A Humane Amnesty.

The coalition immediately went into action and sought to catalyse a reconsideration of the policy, with a view to making modifications that would render the policy less threatening and disruptive to qulaified CARICOM migrants.

The coalition reached out to all of the relevant policymakers of Barbados, inclusive of Prime Minister Thompson, Minister Arnie Walters, the chief immigration officer, Permanent Secretary Greaves, all of the members of the House of Assembly and Senate, and the major civil society organisations of Barbados.

Out of this process, the following very important and helpful modifications emerged:

(1) Migrants who have resided in Barbados for at least five years prior to June 1, have been given a guarantee that they will not be required to leave Barbados when they lodge their applications for status at the Immigration Department.

(2) Such applicants will be permitted to remain in Barbados pending the processing of their application - and in the event their application is rejected and they exercise their right of appeal to the Immigration Review Committee, pending the determination of their appeal.

(3) Applicants who do not meet the criteria for the "amnesty" have no guarantee of being given status in Barbados, but at least they do have a guarantee that their application will be seriously considered on its individual merit.

Published: November 13, 2009

Time To Go Beyond CSME

2010-01-12T18:22:00.000-04:00

THE People's Empowerment Party (PEP) extends a warm welcome to all Heads of Government, civil society leaders and technocrats of our Caribbean Community (CARICOM) who are in Barbados attending this weekend's Convocation on the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME).

These regional leaders are expected to give careful consideration to the findings of an 'audit' which was recently carried out in all CARICOM states on the workings of the CSME. It is also anticipated that they will propose strategies for advancing the process of constructing a 'single economy'.

The PEP would like to urge these leaders to approach their task with a consciousness that the CARICOM region is in the grip of a major economic crisis that threatens to plunge all of our nations into poverty and disarray. It cannot therefore be business as usual!

In January of this year, the PEP wrote to all of the heads of government and the leaders of all of the governing and opposition political parties of CARICOM proposing the holding of a bi-partisan, CARICOM-wide political convocation geared towards developing a bi-partisan, collective, emergency programme of action to respond to the crisis. Unfortunately however, the only entities that bothered to respond to our appeal were the New Democratic Party of St Vincent and Prime Minister Thompson of Barbados.

Since then, the economic crisis has intensified, as manifested in Jamaica and Antigua heading to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Trinidad government experiencing a TT $18.9 billion drop in revenues, and Barbados being buffeted by a 12 per cent decline in the vital tourism industry. We can therefore safely predict that if CARICOM does not rise up to the challenge of developing a serious collective plan of action, that all of our nations will eventually end up in the hands of the IMF.

This realisation led the PEP to send a second letter to the regional government and opposition leaders in the month of September, reiterating our call for a convocation that includes heads of government, opposition leaders, presidents of the political parties, and representatives of organised labour and the Caribbean private sector.

This is now a time for bold, visionary, patriotic and creative action! This is a time for us to put aside egos and narrow political agendas, and to come together in defence of our region and its people.

The PEP urges the leaders of CARICOM to be brutally frank in dealing with our condition in the region. We keep coming together to talk about trade - but what are we actually producing? We must forge ahead with collective investments in new industries and structures of production. And these efforts will have to be led by our governments, albeit working in partnership with the private sector.

We must also strive for the collective security of our people. Throughout the region, existing public sector jobs and government welfare programmes are under threat. Let us therefore come together and fashion a collective 'CARICOM Social Security Stabilisation Project' aimed at preserving existing public sector jobs and welfare programmes over the next 24 months. And of course, where we fall short in resources, we would then be in a position to approach the international community for assistance with credibility and dignity.

Let us also bite the bullet and set a time frame for the establishment of a 'Union of Caribbean States' equipped with: a common citizenship, passport and currency; a union executive armed with a mandate to develop the entire territory of the union; a collective industrial development programme; and a time frame for phasing in full freedom of movement.

Published: October 9, 2009

Do More For Wynter Crawford

2010-01-12T18:20:00.000-04:00

APPROXIMATELY one year ago this PEP column expressed the following view:

"Wynter Algernon Crawford was arguably the greatest Barbadian of the 20th century. Yet, if you ask the average Barbadian student who Wynter Crawford was, you would almost invariably elicit a blank response.

"Crawford's monumental record of social and political activism impacted more significantly on Barbados than the work of any other social or political activist. And yet, there is no public institution named after Wynter Crawford; not even a roundabout!"

When therefore, we learnt that the present Government was proposing to establish some type of memorial to Wynter Crawford at the Six Roads roundabout, two executive officers of the PEP made their way to Six Roads to scrutinise what sort of physical work was being done on the roundabout. We were certain the Government had to be erecting either a statue or a bust of Crawford on the roundabout. Imagine our shock when we discovered that there was to be no statue or bust - merely the naming of the roundabout after Crawford.

Clearly, an historical figure of Crawford's stature deserves much more than the mere naming of a roundabout after him. As far as the PEP is concerned, Wynter Crawford should be declared a "national hero" and a statue should be erected in his honour.

Wynter Crawford's contribution to the public life of Barbados began in 1934. At a time when Grantley Adams was still a supporter of the 'conservatives' and a fierce opponent of Dr Charles Duncan O'Neal, Crawford launched his radical and progressive Barbados Observer newspaper.

The Observer played a crucial role in the fledgling 'worker's movement', by raising critical issues and giving a voice to the advocates of social and political reform. Of great significance was the role played by Crawford in recording the workers' rebellion of 1937, and ensuring that the plight of the 'martyrs' remained in the public consciousness.

Wynter Crawford was also virtually the founder of the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) in 1938. It was he who met with the visiting lawyer, Hope Stevens, and proposed the formation of a political organisation to unite the progressive forces of Barbados. Indeed, it was Crawford who set up the meeting in Bay Street at which the BLP was formed.

However, Crawford subsequently broke with Grantley Adams, and in 1944 established an even more radical and progressive political party - the West Indian National Congress Party. Indeed, throughout the second half of the 1940s, Crawford's Congress Party was responsible for developing the core agenda of the progressive movement - compulsory education, universal adult suffrage, free books and hot lunches for school children, a national health and unemployment scheme, disestablishment of the Anglican Church, the development of manufacturing industries, and labour migration schemes.

Although the Congress Party went into decline in the 1950s, Wynter Crawford occupied such a respected position on the political landscape that the young Errol Barrow and his infant Democratic Labour Party (DLP) naturally gravitated to Crawford for his advice and input.

Crawford ultimately assumed the position of Deputy Premier in the first DLP Government and undertook responsibility for establishing the National Insurance Scheme, and for putting in place the institutional infrastructure for the industrial development of Barbados and for developing the Farm Labour Programmes.

* The PEP Column represents the views of the People's Empowerment Party.

Published: August 28, 2009