Editorial

What do Wilton Sinclair, Tricia Ann D’Aguiar, Fredericka Latrice Coats, Melissa Cox, Tanasha Fleming and Raphael Armstrong have in common?

All the signs presently are that the two main political parties in Trinidad & Tobago, the ruling People’s Partnership (PP) and the Peoples National Movement (PNM) have set their wheels in motion for the next general election in the country, now due at the latest, in May 2015.

It requires no great knowledge of the manufacturing sector to recognize that – in the main – manufacturing has traditionally been a considerable underperformer in the Guyana economy.

President Ramotar’s brief announcement on Saturday that General Elections will be called sometime next year underlined in stark terms that he and his government are completely out of touch with their responsibilities and have failed to apprehend the need for stable governance of the country.

When those in power suffer from power disease, then the confidantes and employees who surround them will often exhibit arrogance themselves, as if the conceit of their superiors has radiated outwards to touch them too with the scourge of what perhaps should be called power association disease.

In 1965, in front of a capacity crowd at the Cambridge Union, the novelist James Baldwin and the eminent American Conservative William F Buckley debated the motion that “The American Dream is at the Expense of the American Negro.”

To the disappointment of many in Colombia, the archive of its most famous literary son, the Nobel laureate, Gabriel García Márquez, has been acquired by the University of Texas at Austin.

As the end of the year approaches, we expect that the government ministries and agencies are preparing to hold their annual self-aggrandizement exercises during which they will trot out for the invited media all of their ‘successes’ over the past 12 months.

In October of this year the New York Times, hardly known for extreme political radicalism, went on a virtual campaign calling for the resumption of normal relations with Cuba.

It was interesting to learn about the Ministry of Education’s recent Drug Prevention Education Training forum through a news report in last Friday’s edition of this paper which stated, among other things, that the forum targeted “teachers and welfare officers from Georgetown.”

There are many questions which arise from the detention of Mr Kem Khamraj Lall in Puerto Rico over the discovery of US$620,000 on the private jet on which he was a passenger.

One is left to wonder who it is that is writing the press releases in Freedom House.

The unrest emanating from Ferguson, Missouri following a grand jury’s decision to forgo indictments of the police officer who shot Michael Brown is the latest expression of a chronic and deep-seated anger at institutional racism in American life, particularly within the criminal justice system.

Online regional news agency Caribbean News Now posted an interesting item on November 26.

On Monday some 40 Bourda Market stallholders marched down to City Hall furious over the fact that the market was not scheduled to open that day and they had not been informed in advance.

To use a broad generalization, it is ironic that Russia, known as the Soviet Union between the two twentieth-century World Wars, the latter of which morphed into a Cold War, should today seem once again to be a source of intense Western concern.

Last Thursday’s deluge and the attendant filth and chaos which it visited on the capital are nothing unusual.

At a press conference on November 14, following a question by a reporter, President Ramotar denied that he had ever spoken to businesswoman Mrs Bhena Lall about tax evasion charges that had been brought against her and her husband, the proprietor of Kaieteur News, Mr Glenn Lall.

After $500 million spent, a small army of ordinary citizens mobilized to manually clean drains, and excavators pressed into service to dredge the main canals, Georgetown experienced the worst flooding it has seen since 2005.

For Latin America and the Caribbean, President Obama’s proposed changes to US immigration policies are a mixed bag of common sense reforms of outmoded legislation, and a likely source of unwelcome security challenges.