Go Lean…Caribbean

Go Lean Commentary

Live your life in such a way that the entire planet doesn’t dance in the street when you lose your job. 

The General Election for the President of the United States (POTUS) is now over. Yippee!! People, all over the world were dancing in the streets to celebrate … Donald Trump’s defeat, more so than Joe Biden’s victory.

So many people had been anxious that Donald Trump would be re-elected and continue his “reign of terror” for another 4 years. But now that the election results are in; it is official that its “Hasta La Vista Mr. Trump”. See this reported in this excerpt from USA Today the daily newspaper:

Opinion: People are pouring out in the streets, cheering Biden, Harris and democracy
… the last four years have been total chaos, as President Trump and his divisive rhetoric and politics have exposed deep divisions that exist in our country. As the vote counts continue to roll in, several things are becoming clear. First, more people than ever voted in this historical election. Totals continue to rise, but as of now almost 75 million people have cast ballots for Biden, while 70 million people voted for the sitting President. Second, Biden has gotten more votes than any another presidential candidate, including Barack Obama in 2008. While that margin is close, Biden is entering the White House with a clear mandate. Still, as vote totals indicate, we’re a deeply divided country, and that will not go away anytime soon.

Source: https://ftw.usatoday.com/2020/11/biden-harris-democracy-cheering-in-the-streets retrieved November 7, 2020.

This was the plan for the last year. 12 months ago, there were 28 candidates vying for the nomination for POTUS for the Democratic Party. That number whittled down to just a precious few; then the pandemic happened and the Trump dysfunction manifested as being mortally dangerous – see Appendix VIDEO – 230,000 Americans and rising – have since died due to mis-management of the pandemic. The remaining candidates all “stepped aside” to allow a Unity Candidate, Joe Biden, to more easily defeat Trump.

Mission Accomplished:

Hasta La Vista Mr. Trump.

Every month, the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean presents a Teaching Series on issues germane to Caribbean life and culture. For this past month, October 2020, the theme of the Teaching Series was on the influence and input that the Caribbean Diaspora have with their voices and votes in the American General Election.

The full catalog of that 5-part Decision 2020 Teaching Series were as follows:

1. Decision 2020: Puerto Rico claps back at Trump
2. Decision 2020: Haiti’s Agenda 2016 ==> 2020 – Trump never cared
3. Decision 2020: Latino Gender Gap – More Toxic Masculinity
4. Decision 2020: More Immigration or Less
5. Decision 2020: What’s Next for Cuba & Venezuela
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6. Decision 2020: Hasta La Vista Mr. Trump

This recent election was November 3, 2020; now we are able to analyze and evaluate the results; we are also able to …

Celebrate! 

As related many times previously, Donald Trump was Bad for the Caribbean; see this chronological sample of excerpts from previous commentaries:

Trump’s Vision of the Caribbean: Yawn – March 17, 2017
The new American President, Donald Trump, has announced, proclaimed and repeated that he is “for America First”. Yet the rest of the world seems to be surprised when he promotes policies that ignores, disregards and denigrates foreign people and countries. …

1: Cuts to fighting drug trafficking …
2: [Cuts to] the Inter-American Foundation …
3: [Cuts to] the U.S. Trade and Development Agency …
4: The Overseas Private Investment Corporation … its budget of $83 million has been swiped away.
5: The Global Climate Change Initiative … has been wiped away.
6: [Cuts of US $70 million to] the Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund. …
7: [50 percent] Cuts To The State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs.

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2017 Review – Mr. Trump shows the ‘Wrong Way’ – December 21, 2017
While this year 2017 has been a cliffhanger, it has … the new President – Donald Trump – proved the “perfect example of what NOT to do” to elevate society – economics, security and governing engines. Yet, this is the country that so many Caribbean people have fled to. We can learn a lot from America’s accomplishments, and even more from their failures. [See 17 blatant and egregious Trump actions].

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The Spoken and Unspoken on Haiti – January 16, 2018
Donald J. Trump – called Haiti a “shit-hole” country while negotiating the details for an immigration reform bill with his political opponents. …
For people to say something like the above about a Caribbean country shows that truly, they have no regard for that country. Take away their words and study their actions (i.e. policies) and we see a consistent trend – spoken or unspoken – that there is really no regard for Haiti – and other Caribbean member-states.

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2019: A ‘Year of Living Dangerously’ – December 31, 2019
From a Caribbean perspective, this year was truly eventful, a “year of living dangerously”; remember all of these bad episodes (10 listed from the most recent to the oldest):
#1 Trump Experiment Implodes – Concluded Impeachment impacts Caribbean member-states

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Good Leadership: Example – “Leader of the Free World”? – May 30, 2020
Donald Trump is not to be credited as the “Leader of the Free World”. He has not provided a good example of Good Leadership. He is not ready, willing nor able. This is not our opinion alone; [but that of the whole world].

It is good to see the sunsetting of this Trump administration, policies and hopefully influence:

Hasta La Vista Mr. Trump. Goodbye. Good Luck. And Good Riddance!

The foregoing USA Today quoted article stated this factoid of America and Americans: “as vote totals indicate, we’re a deeply divided country”. This is a troubling fact! In our opinion, the toxicity, chaos and dysfunctions of Donald Trump and his administration is so egregious that all “Men of Goodwill” should have been anxious to rid themselves of this “circus”, and yet the opposite happened – even more people voted for Trump this time than in 2016:

2016 – For Trump: 63 million. Against Trump: 66 million
2020 – For Trump: 71 million. Against Trump: 75 million .

(In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College with a 304 / 227 margin).

America is far from being a perfect society. Even less perfect for Caribbean stakeholders. Societal defects abound …

Despite all the above evidences, many more American still voted for Donald Trump. Even Latinos (Cubans, Nicaraguans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans and Venezuelans); even more so distressing, so many more Caribbean Hispanics doubled down and voted for Trump. See that story here:

Title: Trump saw gains among Florida Puerto Ricans. They say Democrats ‘don’t hear us’
Less than a month before Election Day, Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez stood in front of a mural in Miami commemorating the victims of Hurricane Maria and recalled the pleas of a man he met in the Puerto Rican city of Ponce after the 2017 storm devastated the island of over 3 million.

“Mr. President,” repeated Perez, “Boricuas son Americanos.”

Maria, which struck as a Category 4 monster of a hurricane, led to widely held expectations that it would reshape Florida’s political destiny by fueling a mass exodus, mostly to Central Florida, of hundreds of thousands of left-leaning Puerto Ricans disgusted with President Donald Trump’s response to the storm — an effort symbolized by Trump tossing paper towels to stranded victims of the storm.

Perez’s recollection — a storm victim reminding him that “Puerto Ricans are Americans” — was part of Democrats’ outreach in Wynwood, a part of Miami once considered a Boricua enclave. But the effort proved to be too late for many Puerto Ricans. Instead of gaining support among Puerto Ricans, Democrats lost ground. Four years after winning Florida by 113,000 votes, Trump won it again on Nov. 3 by triple that amount.

Much of the Florida focus in the wake of the election has been on Trump’s stunning improvement with Hispanic voters in Miami-Dade County. But according to a Miami Herald analysis of Hispanic-majority voting precincts in Orange and Osceola counties, two Central Florida counties with the largest Puerto Rican communities in the state, Trump also made unexpected gains in a community where he is broadly disliked.

And in one of the few Hispanic electorates in Florida where messages against socialism are not particularly effective, Trump’s gains raise questions about Democrats’ ability to connect with voters believed crucial to their chances of winning statewide elections in the future.

“The paper towel throwing and the hurricane were not the lens through which Puerto Ricans were looking at the election,” said Latino-focused research firm Equis Research co-founder Carlos Odio, noting the potential consequences for Democrats if they can’t connect with a community expected to help the party compete in the nation’s biggest battleground state. “Going forward, it opens up a lot of questions of what the Democratic coalition is going to look like.”

While President-elect Joe Biden largely won high support among Florida Puerto Ricans, reaching up to an estimated 68%, according to an exit poll by Edison Research, Trump improved his numbers in a community that Democrats have largely seen as crucial to win the state of Florida. Trump received as much as 39% of votes in some heavily Hispanic Orange County precincts, according to the Herald’s analysis. Overall, according to Odio’s own estimates, Trump received about 32% support from Puerto Ricans in Central Florida, about an 11-point gain since 2016.

Trump’s numbers even surpassed the number of Puerto Ricans who in Florida’s 2018 U.S. Senate race supported Republican Rick Scott. Odio said Scott received about 29% of the Puerto Rican vote after visiting the island seven times after Maria, ahead of his election. In that election, those numbers were enough to help Scott edge a win over former U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson in a razor-thin election that went to a recount.

The lack of Democratic gains in this growing electorate of independent voters underscored the theory of some Florida Puerto Ricans that Democrats had reached a ceiling with their anti-Trump message and failed to appeal to Puerto Ricans who were more worried about how to pay their bills and losing small businesses as a result of the pandemic.

See the rest of the article here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/election/article247106087.html retrieved November 12, 2020.

Yes, Donald Trump needed to be repudiated by America, and yet on November 3rd, 5 million more people than in 2016 voted for him. That is not a repudiation, that is a concurrence!

Maybe the problem is not the player; maybe the problem is the game!

The United States of America is not home for Caribbean people; especially evident with the many Black-and-Brown emigrants suffering injustices. Rather than emigrating, what is needed is nation-building. Rather than fixing America, Caribbean people need to reform and transform all of the Caribbean homeland. This has been the theme of our advocacy before Donald Trump, and now will continue after him. See how this theme – fixing home to dissuade emigration and encouraging repatriation – has been detailed in so many previous Go Lean commentaries; consider this sample list here:

The Go Lean movement posits that America will always pursue the American best interest. This may not always be – and rarely is – the Caribbean’s best interest. So we must do the heavy-lifting ourselves for our own society and not look to the American hegemony to do it for us. Those 4 years of Trump-ism taught us that America is for Americans. We must do our work, for our own interest.

It is what it is, but let’s not get it twisted. America is the only remaining Super Power; they are the “800-pound gorilla” in the Western Hemisphere. So, good, bad or indifferent, their Chief Executive continues to be the “Leader of the Free World”.

This is why people were dancing in the streets with the “firing” of the malevolent Trump.

The take-way from this 5-part October Teaching Series – and now this 6th entry – is that elections have consequences. We need to do more than just wish and pray. We need to advocate and vocalize our agenda in the American mainland and also in the Caribbean homeland. The heavy-lifting to reform and transform our society must be engaged.

Let’s get busy.. this Go Lean roadmap provides turn-by-turn directions on how to reform and transform our society. All stakeholders are urged to lean-in to this viable roadmap. This is the Way Forward. This is how we can make our Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work and play.  🙂

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):

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.

xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

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

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Appendix VIDEO – Trump vs the Mailman | Cartoon Rap Battle – https://youtu.be/vw-1E2vcXBQ

Rhyme Combinator
subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/user/pantless… #stories

LYRICS:
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TRUMP Sorry we’re gonna need that
MAILMAN Wait, our ELECTION’S gonna need these. Up to half of Americans are voting by mail
TRUMP Not my fault.
MAILMAN It kind of is.
TRUMP It was China!!
MAILMAN but look how fast they recuperated Now we need vote by mail to fix a problem you created: this pandemic – and mail in voting is saving lives
TRUMP All the real patriots will wait in line Less boxes, less fraud, that’s why I planned the removals
MAILMAN You’re pushing the envelope Donnie, that doesn’t get my stamp of approval You know you can’t win so you made us your scapegoat
TRUMP No – I hate’ fraud – no fake news, no fake votes
MAILMAN Thru depression and world wars, always deliver was the policy Even in a pandemic we’ll stand committed to democracy
TRUMP But someone could die and vote two times after/
MAILMAN You wanna defund mailmen – I thought blue lives matter?
TRUMP I only want to count the good votes!
MAILMAN we do too! But you don’t get to choose the voters, the voters choose you! you cheated on taxes, your wife, your SAT’s are in question But let’s get this straight – you cant cheat the election For 150 years we’ve been picking up the votes So when you lose, I’ll be there to deliver the results Speaking of…
TRUMP Positive?
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CREDITS
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Created by: Rhyme Combinator, 6 Point Harness, Loogaroo
Executive Producer: Reid Hoffman
Producers: Beau Lewis, Ian Alas
Director: Beau Lewis
Vocal Directors: Illmac, Frak Writers: Illmac, Frak, Pass
Music: Will Randolph V, Chase Moore
Mix/master: Nafets
Animation: 6 Point Harness, Loogaroo
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CAST
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Donald Trump: Jonathan Kite
Mailman: Pass