I say dey have no plan, now BC saying it too.....well BC boy welcome to the club you is a PNM too!!!....and btw stop nit picking.....
Firetrucking jokers!!!!
Colour Us Firetrucked
BC PiresThere might be debate as to when exactly the People’s Partnership shuffled off its mortal COP and became the Pretend Partnership, a UNC government in everything but name, but the most rabid UNC supporter would probably concede that, on Tuesday, the UNC stopped pretending to be even the UNC, and simply became the PNM; and not even the “new” PNM but the same-old, same-old PNM, the same shameless, corrupt outfit that, under different guises, has been milking the Treasury since independence; so colour them the New Old PNM and get on with the pappyshow. Of government. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, with even more pomp and ceremony than her immediate predecessor, who was content to fete them at the Crowne Plaza, spent a small fortune to receive Mr Manning’s “community leaders” at the Hilton; and formally promised to hand over bags of cash to people who put on the right colour jersey. The UNC/New-Old PNM’s “new” anti-crime endeavour could properly be called “a scheme” but cannot legitimately be called a “make-work” one; so call it “a make-as-eef-work scheme,” colour the whole programme “the New Cepep-URP” and go down the road.
To perdition. The New Cepep-URP launched on Tuesday was called, I think, “Colour Me American Penitentiary Overalls” and was apparently aimed at the people who, after 50 years of largely uninterrupted PNM (mal-)administrations, have been left with a stark choice between making-as-eef they’re working or making a jail. Newspaper accounts of the event—hosted, ostensibly, by the Housing Development Corporation, but really a Kamla thing—report a large, orange-clad crowd spilling from the lobby onto staircases at the Hilton, all man Jack jostling to sign on with the HDC/ UNC/New-Old PNM “Colour Me Orange” “anti-crime” programme, whose only distinction from Cepep-URP are (1) beneficiaries get a two-weeks instead of a ten-days; and (2) you have to have an orange jersey, not a red one, to collect state money for nothing. If, at the start of the event, you had any doubt about “Colour Me Orange” being anything but the URP with a fresh coat of paint, it was dispelled at the end, when fights broke out and at least one car was damaged as stones flew faster than promises from an election platform. (Please note: I strongly support social safety nets. Without a hand-up from the State, large sectors of our Caribbean populations would be trapped in poverty forever; it’s just that people on the dole should not be fooled into thinking that they’re working, because it annihilates the work ethic; which, sadly, we know all too well in Trinidad, after 40 years of handouts disguised as make-work.)
A couple of UNC “bloggers”—really group e-mail round-robin participants—were honest (and naive enough) to be horrified by the UNC so patently (and so shamefully quickly) doing exactly what they hounded the PNM out of office for doing, but you suspect they’re the usual maverick suspects, the one or two people with a greater commitment to country than party or wallet. Most party people are happy to see them leave: it’s one share more for them when the spoils are divvied up. So there may have been one or two people deeply hurt by what they see as the UNC’s betrayal of the country (by the open cooption of plain Patrick Manning tactics) but they should have known better. In the same way that Carnival has been reduced to a parade of empty-headed winer girls in bikinis, beads and feathers, Parliament has been reduced to a con- glomeration of conmen sweating in ill-fitting suits. No one comes to government with any plan because no one goes to the electorate with one; and the electorate itself votes either on the basis of race or on the need to do something, anything, that might arrest the free-fall.
If there had been any doubt that the UNC/Old People’s Partnership/New-Old PNM had no clue, they removed it boldly when they adopted that worst idea the PNM ever had: the mega-farm. If my father had been alive, it might well have killed him to see the peasant agriculture he had given his whole life to promote being transformed from the best mechanism for creating wealth and transforming farmers into citizens into one more form of minimum wage McJob. Any idea at all about agricultural development—such as giving squatting farmers tenure, or refusing to compensate them for losses due to flooding—would have been better than the most crazy one Mr Manning lifted from the Cubans (where, in any case, mega-farms work completely differently, since private property barely exists there); but the UNC/ New-Old PNM cannot discern that they should invest in privately owned small farms because there is no agricultural policy.
And there is no crime policy or plan, because there is no plan at all, just a series of increasingly desperate and more obviously vai-ki-vai voops. Declare a state of emergency, shuffle the curfew hours, walk down the wicket and colour all the sufferers with your jerseys. And, when you find yourself doing exactly what the people who were destroying the place were doing, do exactly what they would do: shoot the messenger and turn up the music. If you find yourself in a jam, turn it into a wine-and-jam. And try to spot the difference between UNC, PNM and obliteration of the nation.
http://www.guardian.co.tt/columnist/2011/11/18/colour-us-firetrucked