By Raffique Shah
Sunday, January 11, 2009
IF ever the world needed an economic recession, this is the time. Maybe there is some superior entity that is both omniscient and omnipotent, that saw the excesses man was capable of, left to his devices. And just maybe, that entity decided to call halt to the madness that gripped mankind, from Iceland to Antarctica. Almost the entire world, except for the one billion living in poverty that we can pretend do not exist, engaged in wanton, wasteful consumerism. It was as if we were re-enacting the lavishness of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, or the Court of the Roman Empire in its halcyon days.
Continue reading Recession opens new opportunities
On 1st January 1959, a successful armed revolution took place in the Caribbean. This revolution destroyed Euro-Spanish-American colonial oppression in Cuba. It was led by Fidel Castro, Raul Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The Euro-Spanish-American dictatorship regime was led by Fulgencio Batista. 
The recent call by leaders of both the Congress of the People (COP) and UNC-A for a co-operative accommodation/dialogue with the ruling PNM government to tackle the thorny, intractable crime problem in TnT will always remain a classic exercise in futility.
PREDICTABLY, Time magazine named US President-elect Barack Obama as its “Individual of the Year, 2008”. Obama would undoubtedly emerge as “the Man” for publications and institutions that usually bestow such annual honours. In fact, for most people across the world, Obama is the Man of the Century, matters not that we are a mere eight tumultuous years into an era that is as unpredictable as Obama’s stature is predictable.
EVER since Barack Obama shot into the limelight and coined the campaign slogan “Yes, We Can!” politicians of all hues and persuasions across the world have adopted it to suit their own agendas. Upon becoming President-elect then putting together a same faces, different administrations White House team, Obama ignited a passion for what many see as “national consensus” politics. That, too, has caught on, especially among politicians in opposition, those whose only hope for sharing in the spoils of office lie in accommodation by the lucky ones who have power.
Many people agree that this country is in serious crisis. However, I find that many of these perspectives on the state of Trinidad and Tobago rarely touch on the roots of the issues, especially as they fail to recognize that many of the problems we face are built into the very fabric of Caribbean and Trinbagonian society. Thus, addressing these problems calls for a fundamental questioning of the origins and evolution of our society.