Go Lean…Caribbean

Go Lean Commentary

The Caribbean region has come to the aid of the Bahamas, in this their time of distress after the strong devastation of Category 5 Hurricane Dorian.

But some stakeholders in this region would rather tell this country: “I told you so …”.

They had been so proud and loud in rejecting the tenants of regionalism. Now they need help.

See the September 9, 2019 Facebook posting “I have no Sympathies for the Bahamas” by one commentator here; (Click to Enlarge or see the full text in Appendix C below).

Yes, the Bahamas rejected the Caribbean Single Market and Economy initiative – see Appendices A & B below – because they did not want the 42 million people in the region to just freely venture in-and-out of its borders for activities like “live, work and play”. A previous blog-commentary from July 10, 2018 reported:

According to the Bahamas Prime Minister’s [Hubert Minnis] issue with CSME is the Free Movement of People. The country would rather maintain its independence than to succumb to a new “free movement” regime whereby people can freely move from one Caribbean member-state to another for any activity: live, work or play. …

Now Hurricane Dorian happened and the country has been impacted; people have died (official toll at 51 as of today, but expected to rise into the hundreds); plus 60,000 people have been displaced. The country sent out an SOS and the most fervent response have come from those same scorned regional partners. Here are some examples:

Title: Guyana donating US$200,000 to hurricane-hit Bahamas
The Government of Guyana will be donating $41.6M (US$200,000) to The Bahamas to aid in relief following the battering by Hurricane Dorian.

This declaration was made last  evening, by the Minister of State, Dawn Hastings, during the ‘Rise Bahamas’ telethon programme, aired on the National Communications Network (NCN), according to the Department of Public Information (DPI). …
See the full story here, posted and retrieved September 16, 2019: https://www.stabroeknews.com/2019/09/16/news/guyana/guyana-donating-us200000-to-hurricane-hit-bahamas-hastings/

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Title: CDEMA Pushes On
By: Rachelle Agard
Dateline September 13, 2019 – The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) continues to play an integral role in assisting the islands of Grand Bahama and Abaco which were devastated by Category 5 Hurricane Dorian earlier this month.

“At the moment, between the government of The Bahamas, the international military and/ or Caribbean military, we have over 1 000 boots on the ground, a quarter of which is from Caribbean troops.
…

“We must also recognise that The Bahamas is close to the US mainland and will also have a relationship with the US and would have benefitted from US resources. We signed an MOU recently with the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Part of the MOU sees CDEMA benefitting from the Dutch military capabilities, so we requested their support and they have deployed a vessel with 700 military artisans which arrived on Wednesday to provide a good boost,” he said of the organisation which is made up of 18 governments. …

See the full story here, retrieved September 16, 2019: https://www.nationnews.com/nationnews/news/241773/cdema-pushes

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Title: Dominica to Assist Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian

The government of Dominica reported the actions taken to help the Bahamas and announced a contribution of US$100,000.

The government of Dominica announced a plan to help the Bahamian government and its people who were hit for three days by category 5 Hurricane Dorian on Sept. 1, seven people have been reported killed by the storm.

“From our experience with Hurricane Maria in 2017, we know that it will be a long and challenging road to recovery in the Bahamas. We encourage all Dominicans to continue to lift the Government and people of the Bahamas in their prayers and encourage the donor community to be proactive in responding to their needs,” said the country’s Prime Minister, Reginald Austrie. …

See the full store here, posted September 3, 2019; retrieved  September 16, 2019 from: https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Dominican-Republic-to-Assist-Bahamas-after-Hurricane-Dorian-20190903-0025.html

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VIDEO – Ship Set To Leave Bermuda With Aid For Bahamas, Sept 8 2019 – https://youtu.be/9jWTQAiudPg

bernewsdotcom
http://bernews.com | Bermuda | Minister Wayne Caines press conference on board the Royal Navy HMS Protector

Regionalism has it benefits, people come to your aid when you send out an SOS. There is “give” and there is “take”.

The summary of the Caribbean Single Market & Economy (CSME) effort is that an integrated regional economy brings leverage, so “many hands make big job small”. In that previous blog-commentary from July 10, 2018 it related the benefits of the confederation roadmap as described in the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean:

Righting a Wrong: The Bahamas Needs to Re-think CSME
The Go Lean roadmap is designed to elevate the Caribbean region, to be better destinations to live, work and play. The movement therefore fosters strategies, tactics and implementation to better foment the region …

The Go Lean book was published in November 2013, projecting verbiage like “the Caribbean is in Crisis; alas a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” (Page 8). According to many observations in the Go Lean blogs-commentaries – click here – the Northern Bahamas was in a dire crisis, in need of immediate remediation, even before Hurricane Dorian. The crisis is exacerbated now. The recommendation of the movement behind the Go Lean book is to confederate now!

The Go Lean roadmap calls for a technocratic administration to allow the Caribbean region to embrace the economic benefits of a Single Market and a regional Security Pact – with the needed Disaster Preparation and Response organizations. The points of effective, technocratic stewardship for a regional security apparatus have thusly been elaborated upon in many previous blog-commentaries. Consider this sample here:

What should be the advocacy priority of a technocratic regional government? Guaranteeing safety and security of our people before, during and after any natural disaster.

The Bahamas must do better than in the past; the Caribbean must do better than in the past. We all need to lean on each other. Remember the 2nd Stanza of the 1971 song “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers:

If there is a load you have to bear
That you can’t carry
I’m right up the road
I’ll share your load
If you just call me

This is how we can make the Bahamas and all of the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play, by working together with our regional stakeholders to rebuild, restore and recover. 🙂

About the Book
The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), for the elevation of Caribbean society – for all member-states. This CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives:

• Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs.
• Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
• Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt new community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines of Caribbean society.

Download the free e-Book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

Who We Are
The movement behind the Go Lean book – a non-partisan, apolitical, religiously-neutral Community Development Foundation chartered for the purpose of empowering and re-booting economic engines – stresses that reforming and transforming the Caribbean societal engines must be a regional pursuit. This was an early motivation for the roadmap, as pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 12 – 13):

i. Whereas the earth’s climate has undeniably changed resulting in more severe tropical weather storms, it is necessary to prepare to insure the safety and security of life, property and systems of commerce in our geographical region. As nature recognizes no borders in the target of its destruction, we also must set aside border considerations in the preparation and response to these weather challenges.

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

Sign the petition to lean-in for this roadmap for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation.

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Appendix A – Bahamas maintains stance against CSME

By: Royston James

The Bahamas will maintain its stance against joining the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), despite increased pressure from certain regional heads to expand the initiative.

The CSME seeks to create a single, enlarged economic space by removing certain restrictions, the result of which would allow the free movement of goods and services, people and capital and technology.

“In spite of what you may read in the newspaper, we have discussed CSME, [but] The Bahamas is not and will not be a part of CSME,” Prime Minister Dr. Hubert Minnis said upon returning from Jamaica on Saturday.

“The Bahamas will not allow the free movement of people within our boundaries. So we are not a part of CSME. That must be clear, so that you do not feel that [because of] what has transpired there that Caribbean nationals would be able to move into The Bahamas quite regularly.

“We have our rules, our laws, and they will continue to apply.”

Full implementation of the CSME was high on the agenda of the CARICOM meeting held last Thursday. At least three CARICOM heads called for a review of the program by its member states and for regional leaders to find the political will to see the program expanded and made more efficient.

Addressing CARICOM, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley opined that “psychological impediments and the closed mindsets in some quarters of officialdom” can be attributed to the slow progress of the CSME.

Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne and CARICOM Secretary General Irwin LaRocque also pushed for more to be achieved. CARICOM Chairman and Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness said at a press conference following the CARICOM meeting that a special meeting on CSME will be held in Trinidad and Tobago in November.

Under the first Christie administration, the CSME issue featured prominently in local debates with strong opposition to The Bahamas joining the initiative being expressed in many quarters. Debate died down only after the government at the time publicly announced that The Bahamas would not join any bloc that would lead to the free movement of people in the country.

Source: Posted July 9, 2018 retrieved July 10, 2018 from: https://thenassauguardian.com/2018/07/09/bahamas-maintains-stance-against-csme/

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Appendix B – No Caricom Without Referendum

By Sir Randol Fawkes – June 1993

I often wondered what The Caribbean Community’s Common Market (CARICOM) was up to. But now that I know, I wish to sound a warning to all true Bahamians to hold fast to the “Christian values and the Rules of Law” as enshrined in the Preamble to our Independence Constitution of July 10th, 1973, because some power-hungry politicians to the South are planning to invade our homeland and to steal our birthright away.

Simple enough? Dictatorship is always simple, monosyllabic and quick. Under a democracy we have a right to be properly briefed on CARICOM before being required to vote, “Yes” or “No” on whether the Bahamas should become a full Member State of the Caribbean Community’s CARICOM. The Rt. Hon. James F. Mitchell further expostulated, “One flag means we speak on the podium of the United Nations with one clear voice. One voice means one passport, one citizenship and all that flows from a single citizenship. Secondly, one Ministry of Finance is essential to provide the economic development which our people crave. This union will need to show results, and this authority which negotiates and secures financing must be responsible for the repayment of that finance.”

Make no mistake about it, These Caribbeans who will descend on Bahamian soil in July offering CARICOM as a panacea for all ills, intend to destroy our national flag: the Black, the Gold and the Aquamarine; silence our National Anthem, Lift Up Your Heads to the Rising Sun Bahama land, abolish Bahamian citizenship and our passports; eliminate Bahamian autonomy and thereafter superimpose upon us a leviathan dictatorship with a network of cells throughout the Caribbean – all done without first a people’s forum in which all voices – pro and con could be heard and ultimately expressed in a Constitutional Referendum.

…

Source: Retrieved July 10, 2018 from: http://www.sirrandolfawkes.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/No_Caricom_Without_Referendum1.216134242.pdf

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Appendix C – Mark Devonish: I HAVE NO SYMPATHIES FOR BAHAMAS

Let me say this from the outset. I sympathise with those who lost their lives in Hurricane Dorian. A life lost is a life wasted. Having said that I will now outline why I have no sympathies for Bahamas.

The CSME is a CARICOM trading blocks which promotes free movement of people in the Caribbean among other things. Countries signing up to CSME have to abide by their conditions.

Most countries did except Bahamas. They flatly and in a disparaging way stated that no CARICOM citizen will enter our island to live. In effect they though that they were too good for the rest of CARICOM citizens.

Enter the great equaliser, Dorian. Now the very CARICOM that they scorned, they are crying out for help. Seriously?

I can’t be a political leader. I do not forget and I don’t care about what is politically right. If I were a CARICOM leader, I would have told the Bahamians to go eat their fecal matter, drink their piss and die since I will not help them.

Some folks may not be happy with my position but that is my position which I’m entitled to. Bahamas pissed on the rest of the CARICOM citizens because they though they were great. How the mighty have fallen.

Source: Posted September 9 at 7:27 PM; retrieved September 16, 2019.