Jan 05
Also published in Stabroek News 2 January 2012
The generation of young Caribbean adults who did not live under colonialism, nor the dictatorships of Batista and Duvalier, must play a leading role in the re-thinking of our region and its identity. It must be a collective reflection on many levels: regionally, nationally,, locally, and across generations…
Thanks, Mickey.
This article was a lot more progressive than the previous two (Radical Solutions: If I Were a Young Man, A Policy Agenda for the New Jamaican Government) which I found (surprisingly) very conservative.
Norman takes up the point about the debt audit. What about the debt burden in general? How can there be solutions to anything, even conservative economic policies, without tackling the debt more radically?
The debt problem dominates and directs much that happens.
1. There is an ordering of priorities by the lenders, which serves the objective of re-payment of the debt, not primarily sustainability of the Caribbean economy. Yet the lenders too have an interest in not letting the economy totally collapse.
2. The harder the effort is made to satisfy the lenders, the deeper ( like quick sand) do the nations sink into debt.
3. Any truly nationalist movement that may raise its head within the Caribbean is likely to be faced with opposition from vested interests within the region, as much as from the predictable external oppositional forces. Both will ideologically embrace the status quo and its dependency systems – relying on and believing in the methodologies that sustain the dynamics of 1 and/or 2 above.
The question and the challenge is – how do we change those processes?