By Raffique Shah
Sunday, March 15th 2009
Trinidad and Tobago News Blog
www.trinidadandtobagonews.com/blog
When she entered the political arena and accepted the Cabinet position of Minister of Finance, Karen Nunez-Tesheira must have been familiar with the adage, “In politics, perception is reality.” She would also have been aware that politics exposes office holders to intense scrutiny, and more than that, all politicians are presumed to be corrupt and liars unless or until they prove otherwise. In other words, politics is downright dirty business.
Continue reading Karen’s dilemma
The Picton Folk Performing Company is one of the most recognized cultural groups in Trinidad and Tobago. Coming out of Picton, Laventille, (or as some of the residents prefer to call the area ‘Love-Until’) this group consists of about twenty-three members, most of whom are young people.
AFTER you overcome the initial shock you feel angry, very angry. Then a feeling of sadness overwhelms you, followed by stark reality that the sports you so enjoy, the sportsmen and women who give you such pleasure, who are seen as symbols of sanity amidst a sea of madness, are being destroyed before your eyes. Those are but a few of the emotions that ran through my mind as I watched the carnage that erupted in Lahore last week.
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.
This article seeks to clear the air as to my obdurate professional assertion that there is a direct correlation between soca lyrics and moral decadence, public pornography cum simulation of sexual intercourse and sexual promiscuity in T&T.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) defines child labour as work that exceeds a minimum number of hours, depending on the age of a child and on the type of work. Such work is considered harmful to the child and should therefore be eliminated. There remains no official statistics on the magnitude of child labour in T&T. However, rapid assessment studies conducted by the International Labour Organisation, (ILO), in 2002, uncovered some alarming facts.
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.
The Food and Fuel Forum of Trinidad and Tobago offers, through the General Union of Guadeloupean Workers, UGTG, its deepest solidarity with the LKP, a grouping of forty seven peoples organisations, the workers and people of Guadeloupe as you pursue your general strike against the extreme exploitation that has been the lot of the masses of people in the French colonies in the Caribbean. We in Trinidad and Tobago also suffer the effects of the capitalist economic crisis and strongly empathise with the people of Guadeloupe.