Editorial

In one of the most egregious examples of asymmetrical warfare in modern times, the United States of America, the world’s most powerful state, invaded Grenada, one of the world’s weakest mini-states, almost exactly twenty-five years ago on Tuesday 25 October 1983.

As hard as the PPP/C government and its security apparatus have tried to pretend that drug trafficking and money laundering are being attacked frontally this fiction is being exposed week by week in the courts of New York.

Some of the problems of this society would be alleviated if those who sat in government spent more time discussing their plans with various interested groups before steamrolling ahead implementing decisions that the citizenry knows little or nothing about.

The deliberate placing of the substance melamine in baby formula and milk products, quite possibly, ranks right up there among the most reprehensible acts known to be committed against humans by humans.

Like Mr Christopher Ram in his letter of September 29, 2008, regarding Prime Minister Samuel Hinds’s letter of September 26, we were rather surprised by Mr Hinds’s repeated references to himself in the third person as “Prime Minister,” mostly without even the use of the definite article.

The political intrigue behind the scenes of  America’s latest financial crisis teems with the usual suspects.

Some months ago, the Managing Director of the Jamaica Banana Producers Group, the largest exporter of bananas from Jamaica to the United Kingdom, declared that if the periodic severe weather that Jamaica has been having over the years continued, the company would have to seriously consider stopping the cultivation, in that country, of bananas for export.

The Caribbean Community may have refused to send soldiers to support the current security operation in Haiti but it cannot refuse to be concerned about the plight of the ordinary people of that country.

When he dismissed the latest unflattering report of Transparency International (TI) on perceived corruption here, Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon employed one of the well-worn excuses of his administration by suggesting that those persons who might have been interviewed for the purposes of the survey might have had an anti-government stance.

There is nothing which illustrates better how politics has contaminated every human activity in the Co-operative Republic than Minister of Education Shaik Baksh’s response to the offer by the AFC to donate some materials to Santa Rosa Primary School.

As of yesterday the US Congress had not yet reached agreement on the proposed US$700 billion bailout of the US financial system; in fact, early yesterday morning it was reported that talks had stalled.

We should be grateful to BC Pires for drawing attention to what must surely rank as one of the most outstanding examples of bureaucratic verbiage ever inflicted on an unsuspecting Caribbean public.

While the US media diverts itself with the subplots of its increasingly operatic election, the gap between the pseudo-politics of lipstick on pigs, or sex education for children, and the very real politics of the impending collapse of the American economy could not be greater.

Events in Afghanistan and Pakistan continue to resonate in the world at large, and certainly in United States diplomacy.

In yet another attempt aimed at preventing trans-national crimes such as money-laundering, narcotics-trafficking, trafficking in persons, gun-running and violent crimes, Suriname’s Minister of Justice and Police Mr Chandrikapersad Santokhi and Guyana’s Minister of Home Affairs Mr Clement Rohee signed the ‘Nieuw-Nickerie Declaration’ last May.

By its very nature the offering of a hefty reward by the state for the capture of criminals is an admission of defeat.

While the structural flaws inherent in the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between Cariforum and the European Union are acknowledged, the matter of why it is only now when it is almost too late that this country is registering objections to the agreement is something about which questions can be legitimately asked.

In the recent extensive discussions on Guyana’s stand on the Cariforum/EU Economic Partnership Agreement and the subsequent refusal of the other heads of government at a special meeting in Barbados to accept Guyana’s position one factor has been overlooked.

There must be some irony in the fact that as we approach the celebration of Sir Shridath Ramphal’s 80th birthday and as we acknowledge his “considerable contribution to Caribbean and Commonwealth diplomacy,” as David Granger puts it in his probing review of Shridath Ramphal: The Commonwealth and the World.

Few recent corruption-related revelations  – and there have been quite a few in recent years –  have attracted  the same level of public attention as the alleged Customs/Fidelity fraud.