By Stephen Kangal
Democrats must celebrate and document for posterity this defining and watershed moment in the victorious enactment of people’s power by our Chatham folk. The script of the politics of post-Chatham T&T has been rewritten by the simple, rural, ordinary God-fearing people of Chatham. Their message to us is that State arrogance, insensitivity and unilateralism have no place in the new people centred political order that they have now ushered in. No government can now afford to underestimate the will and determination of the salt of the earth to defend and conserve the integrity of their living spaces as well as their inalienable right to be consulted and heard in democratic T&T.
Continue reading A Watershed Moment of People’s Power
A woman who was earlier spotted talking to officers attached to the Anti-Kidnapping Squad (AKS), who were enquiring about a person believed to be linked to the kidnapping of Xtra Foods Supermarket CEO, Vindra Naipaul-Coolman, was later gunned down in front of her house. The woman’s killing was one of two murders recorded yesterday — the second day in the new year. Both victims were gunned down.
During the heyday of European colonialism when the colonized were denied adult suffrage, the European colonizer arrogantly and automatically assumed that he knew what was best for the colonized. The European colonizer also assumed that it was his Divine Right to assign all policy decisions of governance unto himself. This represented the parental and condescending nature of Euro-colonialism.
I e-mailed a Nigerian friend the article from the New York Times this morning, with a brief comment, “O God, Again?” 
Forget those never-fulfilled New Year resolutions as the not-so-magical midnight hour approaches tonight. Let’s be realistic: we hardly ever adhere to our wishes because we simply do not have the will, the discipline to break bad habits or to adopt new, supposedly good ones. I can visualise it even as I write on Friday. Sloshed-to-bollocks, as the Brits would say, wealthy men and women with those gaudy, comical (and conical) hats, whistles and champagne glasses competing for space in their mouths, shouting in drunken stupor: Happy New Year!
As the year 2006 draws to a close, some people have made a lot of money in Trinidad and Tobago, and some have become distinctly poorer as the cost of living soars to the sky. Money is flowing in the land, it seems, but it is not circulating. The flow is in one direction, from the pockets of wage earners to the pockets and bank accounts of “businessmen”. Many businessmen seem to give nothing back.