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
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
CARIBBEAN UNITY URGED TO STOP IMF
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.
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.
Friday, February 5, 2010
'ARE YOU LISTENING' LOVE SONG FOR HAITI - KIRK FRANKLIN & FRIENDS
Please enjoy song. This is awesome!
A SHAMEFUL DECISION TO REFUSE HAITIAN PATIENTS
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
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
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
PUPPETS OF THE IMF
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
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
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