Editorial


  • Working it

    By Staff | Saturday, October 11, 2008 | 0 Comments

    “Women do two-thirds of the world’s work for five percent of the income. But our work is unvalued and devalued, and we are unwaged and low-waged. We give birth to, raise and care for all the people of the world, ensuring the survival of every community... Read more »

  • No laughing matter

    By Staff | Friday, October 10, 2008 | 0 Comments

    Even as the US presidential and vice-presidential candidates manoeuvre to score points off each other on the campaign trail and in their so-called debates, the hosts of America’s comedic, late night shows are sparring with each other to come up with... Read more »

  • The Economy, Stupid

    By Staff | Thursday, October 9, 2008 | 1 Comment

    Wall Street’s sudden collapse and the prospect of a global recession have now overshadowed every other issue in this year’s US elections. With less than a month to go, it seems increasingly clear that – barring a remarkable “October surprise”... Read more »

  • The EPA and regional undercurrents

    By Staff | Wednesday, October 8, 2008 | 1 Comment

    Over the past months, particularly during the period in which CARICOM’s  negotiations for an Economic Partnership Agreement(EPA) have been coming to a conclusion, there have been two undercurrents running through regional relations which give pause... Read more »

  • The conquest of Grenada in 1983

    By Staff | Tuesday, October 7, 2008 | 6 Comments

    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... Read more »

  • What the US courts are exposing

    By Staff | Monday, October 6, 2008 | 7 Comments

    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. We have argued before in these... Read more »

  • The proposed Kingston hotel

    By Staff | Sunday, October 5, 2008 | 1 Comment

    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.... Read more »

  • Plastic food

    By Staff | Saturday, October 4, 2008 | 1 Comment

    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. Were it not for the deaths of four Chinese babies... Read more »

  • The third person

    By Staff | Friday, October 3, 2008 | 6 Comments

    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... Read more »

  • Neoliberal Corrections

    By Staff | Thursday, October 2, 2008 | 2 Comments

    The political intrigue behind the scenes of  America’s latest financial crisis teems with the usual suspects. As credit tightens and stocks yo-yo wildly, neoliberal fundamentalists in the Republican Party who cannot, for ideological reasons, come to... Read more »

  • More Caricom banana questions

    By Staff | Wednesday, October 1, 2008 | 0 Comments

    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... Read more »

  • Caricom’s Haitian human security headache

    By Staff | Tuesday, September 30, 2008 | 1 Comment

    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. Of a total population of about 14 million in the... Read more »

  • The Transparency International report

    By Staff | Monday, September 29, 2008 | 12 Comments

    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... Read more »

  • Toilet bowl politics

    By Staff | Sunday, September 28, 2008 | 8 Comments

    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.... Read more »

  • Slippery slope

    By Staff | Saturday, September 27, 2008 | 6 Comments

    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. Bad news for financial institutions some of which... Read more »

  • ‘The ideal Caribbean person’

    By Staff | Friday, September 26, 2008 | 18 Comments

    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. In his ‘Thank God It’s Friday’ (TGIF) column, in... Read more »

  • In praise of boring elections

    By Staff | Thursday, September 25, 2008 | 4 Comments

    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... Read more »

  • Slippery sands in ‘The Great Game’

    By Staff | Wednesday, September 24, 2008 | 1 Comment

    Events in Afghanistan and Pakistan continue to resonate in the world at large, and certainly in United States diplomacy. They continue to demonstrate how hard it is to arrange any reasonable stabilization of the area. In the pre-Cold War period the United... Read more »

  • The reward

    By Staff | Monday, September 22, 2008 | 3 Comments

    By its very nature the offering of a hefty reward by the state for the capture of criminals is an admission of defeat. It connotes an acceptance that on their own the security forces are unable to snare the serious criminals. It is also by implication... Read more »

  • EPA

    By Staff | Sunday, September 21, 2008 | 4 Comments

    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... Read more »

  • Marginalising diplomacy

    By Staff | Saturday, September 20, 2008 | 9 Comments

    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.... Read more »

  • The road to Brasilia

    By Staff | Friday, September 19, 2008 | 24 Comments

    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... Read more »

  • The Fidelity/ Customs report at last?

    By Staff | Friday, September 19, 2008 | 0 Comments

    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. This may well have to do with huge sums of money said to have... Read more »