Express Editorial
March 14th 2009
Trinidad and Tobago News Blog
www.trinidadandtobagonews.com/blog
With the charges and countercharges and demands for resignation, we remind readers that the core of the matter is law and the rule of law. It is quite irrelevant that Ms Nunez-Tesheira may not see a conflict of interest in participating in a decision-making of the Government bailout of CLICO and CL Financial. Nor are the views of Prime Minister Manning and of Mr Duprey that there is no conflict of interest. Nor can we accept Minister Enill’s advice to consider the bigger picture.
With the obvious conflict, Minister Mariano Browne should properly have been point man, and the finance minister should have stood down from the relevant Cabinet discussions. Whatever individual parties may consider of their preferred definition of a conflict of interest, we remind all that there is the Integrity in Public Life Act 2000 which is the law of the land. And there is no ambiguity in the wording of the law and the normal processes to be followed.
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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.
It is patently clear to me that had not CL Financial magnate Lawrence Duprey made his pre-emptive approach to Government in mid-January to mobilize State injection of liquidity into his cash-strapped investment bank, CIB, CMMB and insurance giants CLICO and British American it would have been business as usual to date.
The handing over of prime Caroni lands to selected companies certainly raises cause for concern about the government’s agricultural policy and who benefits from it.
January 24, 2009
THERE was a time when the moment things turned sour in this country, those who could afford it would simply flee to the USA, Canada or Europe. That happened mainly among professionals who were educated here at taxpayers’ expense, entrepreneurs who rose from running one-door shops to the multi-million-dollar enterprises. The one aberration to this pattern occurred in the late 1980s, when thousands of ordinary people, mainly Indians, fled to Canada as refugees, claiming they were oppressed by an African-dominated state machinery.