On the hustings – which some of us can be forgiven for seeing as “hustlings”!! – puffery becomes the norm!! One newly-launched party led by a fella sanctioned by the US Treasury’s OFAC – like Mad Maduro next door!! – insists he’s gonna win the elections, hands down!! Seems he’s taking his party’s name acronym – WIN – literally!! All of the Opposition parties are racing to throw out the most zeroes behind $ they’ll be doling out “when” they win. And let’s not even talk about beating Roosevelt’s “chicken in every pot” promise – here it’s a “house lot and a $1M annual cash payment for every person over eighteen”!!
So when your Eyewitness heard our energetic AG – a veritable “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”! – announce that come Sept 1st his party – the PPP – will be “breaking the back of racial voting”, he was sure some might see it as just matching the Opposition’s braggadocio!! “So how does your Eyewitness see the claim?” Is that the question that popped into your head just now, Dear Reader?? Well, not to say the PPP ain’t prone to inflating particulars to their rivers of red across the country – elections aren’t called “the silly season” for nothing! But as your Eyewitness has been stressing, after five years of running the country we’re in a better position to judge whether their promises are being pulled from that place where the sun don’t shine. In other words, just like the Opposition!!
We all know that from the time Burnham broke away from the PPP – because he demanded to be “leader or nothing” and lost! – our voting’s been dominated by racial sentiments rather than parties’ programs – which may even be in our interests! So voting in national elections became identical to voting in parliament – the Speaker already knows how the MPs will vote and doesn’t even lift his head when he announces “the ayes have it”!! And so in our dear Mudland, elections were dubbed “racial censuses’ because once you knew the racial composition of our country, where you knew which group was the majority, you jus’ KNEW who’d win!!
But after the elections of 2011, 2015 and 2020, everything changed!! The PPP won the Executive in 2011 – but had a minority in Parliament; they lost in 2015 after the APNU and AFC hitched up as a coalition; then returned to office in 2020 on a one-seat majority!! What happened?? The national racial census had changed – that’s what!! If folks just voted by their racial origins, no one party could win no mo’ – since no ethnic group was a majority!!
So returning in 2020 – the PPP overcame their diffidence in mentioning race in their mobilisation – and spending from oil revenues!!
And voila!! Broke the back of racial voting!!
…T&T’s diffidence
T&T’s PNM used to play a “hold me; loose me” game when to came to Mad Maduro and his actions against us. Maybe it was the Dragon Gas Field that was shared with Venezuela and they were hoping would save them after their oil ran out – and poverty and crime to ran in. Be as it may, new TT PM Kamla – universally known by her first name – has come out to give unequivocal support both against Mad Maduro’s annexation grab of our Essequibo and the US action to take on the Drug Mafia the madman runs from Miraflores Palace!
This, of course, is contraposed to the simpering sycophancy of St Vincent’s Ralph Gonzalves who slavishly sucked up to Mad Maduro to denounce the US “unprovoked attack on Venezuela”! Now, no one denies that the US will always act to further their interests – which may go beyond he destruction of the Drug Cartels facilitated by Mad Maduro.
So Ralph ain’t concerned about drugs in St Vincent??
…kneecaps??
In the US, the Mafia’s notorious for loan sharking with humongous interests – “the Vig”! But even more notorious for their collection method – baseball bats condignly applied to kneecaps!!
Here, our local Mafioso’s collector got bitch-slapped silly by the borrower!!
