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ONE CARIBBEAN today (OCT) is a communications machine designed to increase knowledge, enhance understanding and empower civil society to be the author of its own fate.

24/02/2022

Good morning. Russia attacks Ukraine.
Russia has no moral authority. The West has no moral authority.
May God Almighty have mercy.
The time to start farming has arrived.

Faces of Cancer getting ready to receive the Independence Day torch
21/02/2022

Faces of Cancer getting ready to receive the Independence Day torch

14/02/2022

Saint Lucia has recorded the first pediatric COVID-19 death. A three year old female child with
serious underlying medical conditions from Babonneau was admitted at the Respiratory
Hospital on January 27, 2022 and passed away on February 8, 2022. The Ministry of Health
expresses sincere condolences to the family affected at this time.

Government pressing Vendors for Rent! The vendors at the Castries vendor’s arcade and the craft market are being asked t...
12/02/2022

Government pressing Vendors for Rent!

The vendors at the Castries vendor’s arcade and the craft market are being asked to make bread out of stone. As we remain in pandemic economic conditions, public authorities in the City of Castries have demanded payment from vendors who are in rent arrears. This, in spite of the fact that fewer visitors are travelling to Saint Lucia than in times past. The vendors, many of whom are unvaccinated, are also disadvantaged by the fact that tourists are discouraged from patronizing their stalls for fear of contagion.

One Caribbean says that government must give vendors a rent waiver for the period of the pandemic, and as conditions continue to bite, the city authority should use a soft touch. The priority must be for vendors to take home something rather than nothing at all. Rent should wait, and if they say that rent can’t wait, well there will be no choice.

If government wants to see money moving in the vending sector once again, it must reason logically about the vaccine. If the tourists are vaccinated, what is the risk? And if the vaccinated can transmit covid-19 then what’s the big deal about the bubble!

The bubble is a fiction!

Admittedly, in the final analysis the decision will be made at cruise ship headquarters. But the government of Saint Lucia must demonstrate that it is doing something to increase access to opportunities for vendors so that they will be able to meet their obligations including rent.

In the meantime, the vendors need to recognize their strengths and know that they are important in a city as unsightly as Castries. We say, vendors need to bite the bullet, and on the next occasion when a large number of visitors is expected (if ever), vendors need to leave the arcade and craft market bone dry!

Then government will know that it takes two hands to clap!

In the meantime, it's best that all vendors disregard the chatter at Thursday afternoon’s meeting with the City.

Allan Chastanet’s Apologies Allan Chastanet’s apologies are not really apologies at all; at least not to our satisfactio...
09/02/2022

Allan Chastanet’s Apologies

Allan Chastanet’s apologies are not really apologies at all; at least not to our satisfaction. Take for example, his purported attempt to apologize for saying that colonialism had a conscience. This was anything but an apology. It was equivocal and seemed to reinforce his view that it did in fact have a conscience.

Allan Chastanet should know that colonialism was a long standing and sustained evil that imposed death and slavery upon the African peoples including some of his ancestors, annihilated the native civilizations of what is now known as the Americas, and brought out the worse in the European.

In his most recent conversation on the issue with Andre Paul and Stanley Lucien on Radio 100 FM, he explained that as bad as colonialism was, it had a conscience. In his incomprehensible and incoherent mumbling on the subject, Chastanet said something to the effect that colonialism was not as bad as economics or had more of a conscience than economics. The senseless chatter was a base and illogical insult within an ‘apology’.

Effectively, on national radio, and TV, recorded and posted for posterity on the World Wide Web, the opposition leader demonstrated to the world that throughout his days as Minister of finance for Saint Lucia, he never discovered that economics is in fact a science. It is no wonder that Chastanet ran the Saint Lucia economy like an art, eccentrically crafted according to his fancy.

What’s interesting is that although Chastanet apologized in his own way for making the “colonialism had a conscience,” statement, we still have a problem.

The words were insulting and insensitive but what of the thoughts? Yes! A predisposition to favour colonialism and everything that came with it must have influenced Chastanet to make the statement in the first place. The problem therefore resides in his mind.

We got the sense that our former Prime Minister was apologizing because of the public backlash that followed from him making the statement that colonialism had a conscience, rather than because he realized that he was dead wrong.

Chastanet has not convinced us that in the disquiet of his overly counterproductive mind he believes that colonialism was an unfeeling system of sustained evil that indicts the European for some of the worse atrocities in history.

The big question for us then is: if Allan Chastanet was a privileged three quarter or so breed on the slave plantation in the 1800s, would he carry news from the house to the field or would he carry news from the field to the house. Or worse yet, would he carry news in both directions?

This is no frivolity.

Believe it or not, in 2022, this is the deciding question on which many aspects of our view of Allan Chastanet depend.

We suspect that we know the answer.

09/02/2022

The Relationship between Poverty and Crime!

Is yet another killing on our small island even headline news anymore, when the growing rate of violence in Saint Lucia seems exponential? There was a time when ten murders per year would stir shock on the island. With over 70 killings last year, these days are long gone.

Over the years we have observed a palpable cultural change. Up to 1980s Saint Lucians were a friendly and welcoming people; the crime rate was very low and; although the drug trade was growing, it was slow, and illegal weapons did not proliferate our streets.

The turn for the worse came in the 1990s and coincided with political change and significant economic decline.

Now many Saint Lucian’s are a vex people, raging at the slightest irritation. The family as an institution has crumbled into a thousand pieces; household poverty levels have become acute; the police force has evolved into a corrupt institution with some of its officers spinning apartheid style investigations, designed to avoid prosecution of select persons who are supported by money or privilege.

The judicial system is merciless to the poor. It starts at the point of arrest where poor suspects often cannot afford to pay attorneys for representation. They are regularly lured into making inculpatory statements to the police in the presence of Justices of the Peace who cannot advise because they have no significant knowledge of the law.

The problem gets worse at the court where bail is unavailable to the poor since they have no money or assets to meet its terms. The strategic disadvantage of being unrepresented becomes stark when defendants stand before juries while court proceedings affecting their fate, fly over their heads.

The struggle is real. Poverty is no joke and in a sense, to be poor is a crime!

Poverty breeds dysfunction, hopelessness and often unfortunately, a sense of worthlessness.

Should we expect the dejected to place no value on their lives, but to respect ours? We wish. This would be an unnatural reaction.

If someone doesn’t care whether he or she lives or dies, we should not expect that person to care about whether we live or die either.

The answer to our problem of crime lies in the happiest countries in the world. This may sound far-fetched but it’s not. We won’t exactly be able to follow their revenue generation model but there is much we can learn from them. This includes economy, equality and equity in government, democratic sanctity and the development of state institutions for the upliftment of man.

If we are to learn, we must learn from the best.

Our people are not happy. That’s the bottom line. Pain and grief are hidden behind almost every drunken or stoned out smile; children endure through sexual and other abuses in order to cushion the effects of poverty; government assistance to the poor is a pittance, provided not as of right but likened to the charity of a benevolent administration; people with disabilities must learn the art of begging (a lifetime indignity); healthcare within the public system is less than a six for a nine; a large percentage of our youth remains unemployed for years after leaving school; businesses struggle in an economic climate uninspired by investment or effective government stimulus and support.

The problems that affect people in this country are a mile long.

With very limited natural resources, Saint Lucia will never be rich but we are convinced that a different approach to macroeconomic management and governance will improve our financial standing and the plight of our people.

A survey in 2021 found that people from Finland where the per capita income is higher than the OECD average, are the happiest people in the world. It is no wonder that with a population of 5,553,139 people, recorded offences against life amounted to only 17 in 2020.

Although these statistics are merely anecdotal, they are safely reflective of the fact that crime levels are high when people are unhappy and; that poverty breeds unhappiness and dysfunction.

Let’s break this cycle in Saint Lucia instead of replaying the empty threatening rhetoric that “we will bring the strong arm of the law upon the criminals”.

The criminals don’t care about the strong arm of the law. The law itself, is often a criminal as well!

Here’s a hard fact: the rich need to be less rich and the poor need to be less poor in Saint Lucia in order to fulfill the spirit of good and to massage the conscience of the dejected.

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