The Patron Saint Of Cricket World Cup – Charles Ponzi
My fellow citizens,
Barbados Free Press does not have much that is new to say about the train wreck that was Cricket World Cup 2007, for the simple reason that we have been pounding home our warnings of rape, pillage and financial disaster for about a year now.
This very morning, just as we and others predicted, the world’s media is full of stories covering every embarrassing misstep, and every outrageous abuse of those poor citizens whose politicians were stupid enough and/or crooked enough to buy into one of the largest ponzi schemes ever seen in the Caribbean.
The absurdity of the final game, the boos from the crowd and the pathetic invisibility of the Prime Minister and the others who drove the disastrous agenda was a fitting end to the tournament.
We Citizens Will Continue To Pay The Price Of Politicians’ Folly
The rainy insipid finale of Saturday’s game did not end the financial and public relations damage that will be our burden for the next twenty years or more. We will continue paying in so many ways for the politicians who used Cricket World Cup as their excuse for an orgy of public spending on things that didn’t matter.
Half a billion dollars and more to host a cricket party – while our children’s teeth rot for lack of a school-based dental hygiene programme.
Owen Arther and company widened a few roads while people died at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for want of a working heart monitor. We were told that the new flyovers were crucial to traffic management during Cricket World Cup for the hundreds of thousands of visitors who would descend upon Barbados – so we left our only library closed and rotting.
We spent millions to paint old chattel houses to fool the world, but built no new public housing. Now we have newly-painted rotting old chattel houses. We blew $50,000 dollars A MINUTE for the closing ceremony while our abandoned elderly citizens still haul water in pails.
The government allowed BMW to import autos for CWC bigwigs and forgave all duties – while criminal gangs stop tourist cars in the north and demand tribute to pass their gang territory. And our best and brightest police officers are abandoning Barbados because the government doesn’t consider them important enough to pay a living wage.
A body is found here and another found there and the police don’t respond for two hours because they are stretched to the limit. There was a time only a few years ago when you could walk anywhere on this island at night. Not anymore.
But by God we had cricket!
Moving Barbados Forward
Our politicians have never instituted the accountability checks and balances into the system because such laws would prevent them from corruptly taking money from the public purse.
Our Prime Minister can get caught red-handed depositing a $750,000 “campaign donation” cheque into his PERSONAL bank account – and nothing is done because this corrupt thief and his gang never instituted conflict of interest and integrity legislation.
Nor will they institute integrity legislation. Never.
The leader of the opposition who should have been pounding away at corruption issues for 13 years instead makes a “fatted calf” speech to his band – promising that when elected the DLP will take their turn to feed at the piggy trough of corruption.
These are the two leaders of Barbados. Both corrupt and both unbound by any rules of integrity.
What can one person do? Plenty!
A few weeks ago, some folks called Barbados Forward sent us a manifesto demanding various changes to our laws and asked that the government and the opposition band together to introduce these changes BEFORE the next election.
This Barbados Forward manifesto is far from perfect, but it is what we have now. Your local politician needs to receive a copy and be given an opportunity to sign it as is – or else lose your support.
As our corrupt system now stands, each newly elected government can feast at the piggy trough of corruption without fear.
We have to break this cycle. We have to call out these corrupt leaches for what they are – both government and opposition politicians and their supporters.
We have to demand that the system be changed BEFORE the next election. And we have to start making life difficult for those criminals who refuse to implement integrity legislation.
Read Barbados Forward. Let’s talk for a few days, and then let us take back our country.
