By Raffique Shah
Sunday, April 5th 2009
FOR those charged with securing the Summit delegates from rampaging protestors, as happened at last week’s G20 meeting in London, their bigger challenge is likely to be refereeing jousts among the delegates. Our people are not known for violent protests. In my youthful days I was involved in some of the biggest protest demonstrations that followed the Black Power eruption of 1970. Among them was the infamous “Bloody Tuesday” on March 18, 1975, which, by the time it was violently attacked by the police on Coffee Street, San Fernando, had grown in size to more than 5,000 people-and expanding by the minute. The violence, when it came, was on orders from Dennis Ramdwar, not from the demonstrators.
Continue reading We have come a long way, Barack
It seems that every expert testimony given so far to the Uff Commission of Inquiry has revealed mismanagement, technical incompetence and, perhaps, deep-rooted corruption.
There is clearly a link between the findings contained in the February 20 report presented by Gerry McCaffrey, construction expert hired by the Uff Commission of Inquiry that the structural steel work at the Brian Lara Stadium project “is effectively condemned” and the cancelling of his return flight to Trinidad on February 27 by the Office of the Prime Minister.
During the RIC hearings that subsequently resulted in the current electricity rate hike I made it abundantly clear that the net effect of the proposed unit rate increase from 15 cents to 35 cents per unit would result in a 45% hike in electricity bills. T&TEC and the RIC under Professor Dennis Pantin used every statistical trick in the book to deny and discredit this percentage increase.
FOR too many years we have haggled over what the minimum wage should be in this country: should we pay the poor buggers $9 an hour, or $10? That would amount to less than $2,000 a month, but it’s worth fighting over. For those trapped in this gloomy underworld-not so hidden, since we shop at groceries and stores where they labour every day-it could mean being able to afford an extra “doubles” for lunch, or buying their children the toys they so covet. As far as I am concerned, what we call a minimum wage is in fact starvation wage, a kind of semi-slavery endured only by those who have no other options, except perhaps to turn to crime.