A Comment On BBC’s WEBSITE that they edited!!!

As it goes the BBC on the Caribbean had a question of readers, it was something to the effect of… what are your disappointments with the Caribbean / Caricom or your country in 2009 etc? My reply was editted to cut out OBAMA’s part and I think it is a deliberate effort to subvert opinions against Obama…

 

The regions institutions have opened up travel & work for grauates of tertiary institutions but much more needs to be done in terms of regional cooperation. We need a common media, a Uber national/ regional, newspaper, radio, television and unified and system access to Internet, a common portal, and uniform standards. The reality and necessity of a functional and economic union and market and strong fairer trade.

Tourism has proven how fickle it can be and is subject now to realities such as gas prices, travel security, economic recession, crime, and markets that wax and wane. Also the tourism industry itself has failed to endorse newer markets, niche markets, the European and Asian markets, failed to employ strategies like Eco-tourism,civic tourism, heritage tourism, medical and health/therapy tourism. The industry itself failed to diversify and re-invent itself into a more far reaching and sustainable model of business. We also relied so much on tourism while neglecting possible advance in the field and industry of technology and computers. We neglected to harness our intellectual capacity.

In terms of sports, as much as individuals excelled, governments and governing bodies failed to hone, foster and harness it. Regionally I personally wanted to see sports integrate and crossover and merge a little more! I would like to see even football reach to a level where there are inter-regional cups for categories like, D1 and D2 leagues etc.

I definitely believe the media has been used to dumb down the nations and given an undue fascination to celebrities lives and delved to far into the voyeuristic fetish of reality tv. Has no one heard of the Hawthorne's effect or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The fact of observation itself affects the thing observed... Sure art reflects life, yet it also impacts it... I do believe the musicians can do more to pass on information to the public and help to paint a different picture of the world and lend vision to the people, not that they should stop showing us the gritty reality but they should try to show us an alternate future than the one we are heading to... The society and the heads of it especially need to be honest about their shortcomings and the inequity in the social order. So maybe the artistes and icons have a different reality to muse on.

The most moving moment is waking up to the reality that a black president doesn't translate into a global black agenda, and has thus far not panned out well for the Caribbean, we have been neglected and slighted by the Obama administration, they have also seemingly perpetuated the illegal stance on Cuba, used the G20 to muscle us into some horrible tax contracts and continue to perpetuate the inequity in global trade, they take our preferential treatment whilst subsidizing their farmers and using GM and chemicals... OH the inequity and injustice... some revolutionary leader... he might have "seemingly" changed the color of the presidency, but his relations with the Caribbean seem colored by the history and biases of the US international relational stance  policies and edicts handed out by the CFR.

As Obama “Tax-ifies” the Caribbean and We Grovel to the IMF

 

By the end of last year, 195 countries had signed tax-information exchange agreements, prompted by increased scrutiny from the G-20, the head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Develop-ment's Tax Center announced Jan. 19. Among the countries to have 'substantially implemented' the anti-tax haven standards were Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina and Mexico.
Read more: http://www.poder360.com/article_detail.php?id_article=3541#ixzz0h9KpjdHb

 

Real income in the Caricom area is less today than it was 10 years ago; unemployment is higher in 2009 than it was in 1999; poverty has expanded in many countries; and many Caricom countries now experience debt levels of over 100 per cent of their GDP
~Ronald Sanders

The picture for international financial services is just as bleak. Having fought off the so-called 'Harmful Tax Competition Initiative' (HTCI) of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) -- the club of the rich countries -- in 2002, Caribbean governments allowed themselves to be threatened by the newly formed G20 countries in 2009 into signing up to 12 Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs) with OECD countries. New members of the G20 -- Brazil, China, India and South Africa -- who Caribbean countries might have expected to fight in their corner, simply endorsed the OECD agenda.

The cost of compliance with these agreements will place an unreasonable burden of cost on regulatory bodies and financial institutions in the Caribbean.

I hope Mr. Bruce Golding and Mr. Audley Shaw read that last sentence…

Rasta Church

TAKEN FROM: http://www.bbc.co.uk/caribbean/news/story/2010/03/100301_rastachurch.shtml

Rastafarian church has been seeking recognition for 14 years

A Rastafarian church in Jamaica is continuing its 14-year fight for legal recognition by the country's lawmakers.

The Church of Haile Selassie I the first submitted its petition for incorporation in October 1996.

But despite pleas by the church and its legal representatives, the organisation is yet to receive parliamentary approval.

At issue is the Church of Haile Selassie I's use of certain herbs in its religious sacraments, which it says has been misinterpreted by some as promoting the use of marijuana during worship.

Misconceptions

The Church's spokesman Abuna Foxe told BBC Caribbean that misconceptions about the use of herbs during workship have contributed to the delay in being granted legal status.

"For the average Jamaican a chalice is a ganja pipe, that's wrong. A chalice is a sensor that's used to burn frankincense and myrrh," Mr Foxe said.

He also said that at no time will his organisation ask parliament to legalise the use of 'herbs'.

The Church of Halie Selassie met with lawmakers last December where it stressed the use of the herb cassias, but not marijuana, in it's rituals.

Review

Their request has been reviewed by the parliament's joint select committee.

The Committee Chairman Senator Hyacinth Bennett told members there was a need to clarify the concept of the word 'herb'.

But Opposition Senator Mark Golding told BBC Caribbean the church had made it clear it did not use marijuana and too much emphasis was being put on the legislation that aimed to define the organisation's sacrament.

"The concern of some of the members of the committee is that they don't want, by passing the bill, to appear to be condoning the use of ganja," Mr Golding said.

"Every time the committee sits, the issue of whether they use herb or not, and what herb means in their liturgy has come up.

"But I think that after (the) sitting the members present were minded to accept that there's really no basis for the committee to use that as a basis for denying the church the desired recommendation that their petition be allowed."

If approved the Church of Haile Selassie I would have the legal rights to property ownership, open schools as well as tax benefits.

Independence, Self Reliance, Self Sustenance, Self Sufficiency!

I would advise my amigos in Kingston start adopting some principles… like using gray water… In this water crisis…

The New World Order is coming with pre-paid water for you in this coming age and dawning of Aquarius…

He who rules the pitcher rules the world…

“Behold, when ye are entered into the city, there shall a man meet you, bearing a pitcher of water; follow him into the house where he entereth in.”
Luke 22:10

RECOMMENDED DOCUMENTARIES:

• FLOW: For the Love Of Water
• Blue Gold

 

The Water Cycle…

 

 

Gray Water Cycle/System…

I plan reuse the rinse water from my laundry machine to water the native plants, many of them edible, in my yard.

 

 

 

Gray water, is all the wastewater from your home, excepting the toilet wastewater. The sink, shower, tub, dishwasher, and clothes washer are all gray-water sources. With a little filtering, this precious resource can be used on the landscape and returned to the water cycle without entering the public sewer first.

Gray-water "contaminants" vary and may range from food waste to soap residue to dead skin. These are mostly great nutrients for plants, especially when filtered through mulch, but persons will need to filter or eliminate the non-great ones. Soap and detergent ingredients one ought to avoid are; sodium, chlorine, and boron (which is, alas, a major ingredient in the handy cleanser Borax). These are either immediately harmful to plants or will become so over time, as they accumulate in the soil. Hence, one will need to avoid cleaning products that contain them, or install a diverter valve in the system so that when if you use any of these harmful products, the water will run into the sewer system, not into the yard.

 

Gray-water systems basically involve adjusting plumbing so that water travels through a filtration system and into your yard or a holding tank, instead of into the sewer pipe. The more drain contaminants, the more filtering that will be necessary, in the form of screens, plants, rocks, sand, mulch, and the like. A few sources recommend starting a gray-water project with the easiest drains: the bathroom sink and tub, with their skin, hair, and soap flotsam… then moving on to the more contaminated drain of the clothes washer (…think lint!), and finally to the kitchen-sink water, which will be filled with grease (…remember high-bacteria yield).

 

World Bank and those guys don’t about Jamaica

President Obama's chief economic heavyweight, Lawrence Summers, who, 18 years ago was vice-president of the World Bank.

In a memo to staff of the bank, Summers wrote: "'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons: "...the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that; ...under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City; ... The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high-income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate [sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under five mortality is 200 per thousand."

Some politicians in Europe are bending over backwards to put dirty industry profits before public interest.

The World Bank's Human Development Report for that year said global inequalities had increased in the 20th century to the point where they count as violations of human rights. The inequalities have increased "by orders of magnitude out of proportion to anything experienced before". The gap between the incomes of the richest and poorest countries was about three to one in 1820, 35 to one in 1950, 44 to one in 1973, and 72 to one in 1992. Today it is more like 150 to one.

Ten years ago, in 2000, Mr Bill Gates' wealth was estimated at over $100 billion, just slightly less than the wealth of 600 million people in the least developed countries.