…for Nov rumble
Well, it’s now official – this November, in the highly anticipated US Presidential elections, out of the blue corner will come “Sleepy” Joe Biden, and from the red corner will be Donald “Agent Orange” Trump!! Trump – who slapped the moniker “Sleepy Joe” on his opponent – however, has come out with a nickname for himself – “Honest Don”!! Yep!! This man who’s been convicted on 34 charges of falsifying records for years to show he was wealthier that he actually was – and was fined US$355 million for doing so!! Your Eyewitness will not go into the four CRIMINAL indictments he faces – ranging from conspiring to overthrowing the government to mishandling classified documents – since he MIGHT honestly think he’s right!!
In the meantime, Biden had his own accusations of mishandling secret documents thrown out by the Special Prosecutor – but fumed at the reason the latter offered. That he was an old man who forgot things!! With both candidates being over EIGHTY, your Eyewitness confidently predicts that memory lapses will play a big role, come November.
But the bigger question for your Eyewitness is: how the heck have the 300+ million American people decided that, out of all of them, these two doddering fogies are the best to lead them into a most treacherous period of their history? And that, of course, is the billion-dollar question, innit?? The answer is that all 300+million of them ain’t running for the presidency!! They devised a “representative system” with a two-step method of choosing those representatives. And it’s here that the winnowing out leads to the situation the Yanks find themselves in.
In step 1, each of the two major parties that have survived over the years – the Republicans and the Democrats – hold caucuses or primaries where registered members in most of the States vote for the candidates on the ballots. And that’s where story begins. Now, of course, all candidates gotta know what hot button issues to press; but ultimately, it also takes money!! Cause the candidates who’ll get to stage 2 have a chance of running the Government, which eventually controls how TRILLIONS of dollars of business – or boondoggles – are distributed!! Stage 2, of course, is the quadrennial Nov presidential election.
So, the process boils down to who can get the most campaign contributions to move from step 1 to step 2. Once in a blue moon, a relative outsider like Jimmy Carter from Arkansas can enter a fractured field and end up on top. But in general, the party mechanism winnows out outliers – for instance, like with Bernie Sanders .
So, what we’re seeing is the logical conclusion of that system: American has become a country for old men who know how to game the system!!
…for GTU round 2
After all the hope (and hoopla) following the judicial intervention that brought the striking GTU and the MoE together to hash out their differences face to face – it all fell apart, and we’re back to square one. The GTU stuck to its insistence that it wasn’t JUST the 6.5% unilaterally-imposed increase they were objecting to. They wanted a 25% salary increase going back to 2019 and 20% for each year from 2020 to 2023!!
So, if a trainee teacher were earning, say, $100,000/monthly in 2018, she’d be bumped to $125,000/monthly in 2019; $150,000 in 2020; $180,000 in 2021; $216,000 in 2022; and $259,200 in 2023!! Not bad, eh?? And they haven’t even started talking about 2024!! The Government countered that they were going forwards, never backwards – since the GTU had already accepted the raises up to 2022. And the GTU got up and walked out.
Its General Secretary/APNU MP has resumed her vitriolic outbursts against named Govt officials on social media. Doesn’t bode well!!
…to house Housing
A five-storey building to house the Ministry of Housing is being constructed for $741.5 million, while the adjoining four-storey GWI Building will cost $562 million. If you think it’s exorbitant, it would’ve built only 170 low-income houses!!
