Editorial

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.

Having just brokered a fragile political deal in Zimbabwe, South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki has issued a warning that the International Criminal Court’s decision to prosecute President Omar Bashir for war crimes “will not help to resolve the challenges that we are facing in the Sudan.”

We wrote of last week as being an ominous one for the countries of the Caribbean Community.

Twice in five months, the Federative Republic of Brazil dispatched high-level national security delegations to Guyana and other regional states. 

It is exceedingly taxing to reconcile how a government that constantly plays up its environmental credential can preside over a capital city for 16 years without decisively dealing with the festering and hazardous garbage dump along Mandela Avenue.

Last week Bolivia expelled the US Ambassador; Venezuela followed suit; the United States responded in kind; the Honduras government refused to accredit the new American Ambassador to Tegucigalpa; the Americans issued flight advisories to their citizens travelling to Venezuela; Miraflores ordered the US to reduce flights by American airlines to Venezuela; President Chávez unveiled yet another coup plot against him allegedly originating with the military and backed by Washington; the US Treasury declared it had frozen the assets of three Venezuelans – two intelligence chiefs and the former Minister of Justice Ramón Rodríguez Chacín – because they had “armed, abetted and funded the Farc…”; and President Chávez’s name was called in a Miami court where testimony was given that he had sent agents to Florida to try and buy the silence of the businessman involved in the ‘suitcase scandal’ case.