Category: Social

Juneteenth 2021 – Now it’s real – Encore

Posted on June 19, 2021 in Locations, Social

Hooray for progress!

President Biden signed a Bill on Thursday June 17, 2021 to make “Juneteenth” an official Federal holiday; it will be the Law of the Land …

… effective immediately.

We were anticipating this … last year! We planned for it and advocated for the immediate adoption of the Juneteenth tradition to be recognized, accepted and celebrated by all Americans. See here, how relevant this is for the State of California – normally, a non-Slave State in history:

VIDEO – How California history fits into Juneteenth celebrations – https://youtu.be/ae3jZi6hO7M

Sacramento Bee
Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration marking the end of slavery in the United States. It was originally celebrated June 19, 1865. Here’s what to know about the event, and where California fits in.

More from The Sacramento Bee:

So, it is only apropos to Encore our blog-commentary from last year (2020). See that post here/now:

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Go Lean Commentary – Happy Juneteenth

Happy Juneteenth!

It’s an American thing, yet you in the Caribbean will still understand, resonate and empathize with this sentiment. This is true, based on the historicity that “Happy Juneteenth” is actually Happy Emancipation Day.

Despite the different legal history, all of the New World have the same social demographic history: same previous reality of an enslaved population of African people.

Most of these New World countries and territories endured abolition of their slavery institutions and have some form of an Emancipation Day to commemorate the “Sea Change”. These dates were identified in a previous commentary  from the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean. See this excerpt here:

Chronology of the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean Basin

First abolition Final abolition of slavery Date of independence
Haiti 1793 1804
Dominican Republic  1801 1822 1844
Costa Rica 1824 1821
El Salvador 1824 1821
Guatemala 1824 1821
Honduras 1824 1821
Mexico 1829 1810
British West Indies
Anguilla
Antigua and Barbuda
Bahamas
Barbados
Belize
Cayman Islands
Dominica
Grenada
Guyana
Virgin Islands
Jamaica
Montserrat
Turks and Caicos Islands
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
St. Vincent and Grenadines
Trinidad and Tobago		 1833-1838
1833-1834
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1834
1833-1838		 1981
1973
1966
1978
1974
1962
1979
1979
1962
Nicaragua 1838 1821
Danish Virgin Islands
Saint John
Saint Thomas
Saint Croix		 1846-1848
1846-1848
1846-1848
Swedish Antilles
Saint Barthelemy		 1847
French Antilles
Guaealoupe
Guiana
Martinique
Saint Martín (French zone)		 1794 1848
1848
1848
1848
Colombia 1814 1851 1810
Panama 1851 1903
Venezuela 1816 1854 1811
Netherlands Antilles
Aruba
Curacao
Bonaire
Saba
Saint Eustatius
Suriname
St. Martin (Netherlands zone)		 1863
1863
1863
1863
1863
1863
1863		 1975
United States 1863-1865 1776
Puerto Rico 1873
Cuba 1880-1886 1898

Source: Retrieved August 28, 2019 from: http://atlas-caraibe.certic.unicaen.fr/en/page-117.html

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Let’s dive deeper in the American experience. So what date actually signified the abolition of slavery in the US? In a different previous commentary, these key dates were presented:

The cruel, inhumane institution of slavery finally ended in the United States … on which date?

This was not meant to be a multiple choice! But rather, these answers demonstrate the continuous flow of racist oppression that had befallen the African-American experience, despite these identifiable dates ending the practices and legacy of America’s Original Sin.

Doubling-down on the Juneteenth details, let’s consider this encyclopedic reference:

Juneteenth (a portmanteau of June and nineteenth;[2] also known as Freedom Day,[3] Jubilee Day,[4] and Liberation Day[5]) is an unofficial American holiday and an official Texas state holiday, celebrated annually on the 19th of June in the United States to commemorate Union army general Gordon Granger announcing federal orders in the city of Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, proclaiming that all slaves in Texas were now free.[6] Although the Emancipation Proclamation had formally freed them almost two and a half years earlier and the American Civil War had largely ended with the defeat of the Confederate States in April, Texas was the most remote of the slave states, with a low presence of Union troops, so enforcement of the proclamation had been slow and inconsistent.[6]

A common misconception is that this day marks the end of slavery in the United States. Although this day marks the emancipation of all slaves in the Confederacy, the institution of slavery was still legal and existed in the Union border states after June 19, 1865.[7][8] Slavery in the United States did not officially end until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States on December 6, 1865, which abolished slavery entirely in all of the U.S. states and territories.[9]

Celebrations date to 1866, at first involving church-centered community gatherings in Texas. It spread across the South and became more commercialized in the 1920s and 1930s, often centering on a food festival. During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, it was eclipsed by the struggle for postwar civil rights, but grew in popularity again in the 1970s with a focus on African American freedom and arts.[10] By the 21st century, Juneteenth was celebrated in most major cities across the United States. Activists are campaigning for the United States Congress to recognize Juneteenth as a national holiday. Juneteenth is recognized as a state holiday or special day of observance in 49 of the 50 U.S. states.

Modern observance is primarily in local celebrations. Traditions include public readings of the Emancipation Proclamation, singing traditional songs such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing“, and reading of works by noted African-American writers such as Ralph Ellison and Maya Angelou. Celebrations include rodeos, street fairs, cookouts, family reunions, park parties, historical reenactments, and Miss Juneteenth contests. The Mascogos, descendants of Black Seminoles, of Coahuila, Mexico, also celebrate Juneteenth. – Wikipedia, retrieved June 19, 2020.

There is the need to reflect and remember the bad history of slavery and its abolition in the Americas.  There is also the need for a few other action verbs, all starting with  the letter “R”. Consider:

  • Reconcile
  • Repent

There is a lot of work to be done, in the US, throughout the Caribbean Basin, the New World and the whole world for that matter. Racial disharmony has been the world’s most troubling condition since the end of the Middle Ages. This was the consideration in many previous Encore productions. See these excerpts here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18421 Title: Refuse to Lose – Introducing Formal Reconciliations

The practice of U.S. cities eschewing Columbus Day – because of the bad history associated with the Spanish Explorer’s atrocities – to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day began in 1992”. [This is a form of] an informal reconciliation; it is time to pursue a formal reconciliation. (We have Indigenous People and oppressed people in the Caribbean too).
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18096 Title: 400 Years of Slavery – Emancipation Day: Hardly ‘Free At Last’

America was forged on the blatant hypocrisy of a legal premise that “All men are created equal”, and yet the African-American population was never treated equally, fairly or justly. In fact, by some analysis, America is still not equal-fair-just for African-Americans. In fact, just naming a street after Martin Luther King creates friction in American communities even today, 56 years after that iconic speech.
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18093 Title: 400 Years of Slavery – International Day of Rememberance

There is the need to reconcile the UGLY history of Slavery and the Slave Trade.

Reconciliation and remembrance are the motives of this series of blog-commentaries …. With a documented start date in America of August 23, 1619, today [(August 23, 2019)] marks 400 years exactly. [So] this August 2019 series focuses on this 400 Year History of Slavery – past, present and future.
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6022 Title: Music Role Model ‘Ya Tafari’ – Happy Emancipation Day

All of these [Bristish Commenwealth] countries memorialize the abolition of slavery in the British Empire on August 1, 1834 with a National Holiday on the First Monday of August. (This holiday is commonly referred to as August Monday). The focus of this commemoration is not slavery, but rather a celebration of Caribbean culture – accentuating the positive.

For those in the Caribbean Diaspora (US, Canada and the United Kingdom), the holiday does not go un-recognized … nor uncelebrated.
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5695 Title: Repenting, Forgiving and Reconciling the Past
How does a community repent, forgive and reconcile from such a bad legacy? Easier said than done!For starters, do not proceed as if the events never happened. This is the lesson now being learned in modern day Spain …There is a need to reconcile a lot of bad episodes in Caribbean history.
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4971 Title: A Lesson in History – Royal Charters: Truth & Consequence

An earlier Papal Bull that sealed the fate and would prejudice the African Diaspora for 500 years. The African Slave Trade and institution of “Slavery” was legally predicated on a Papal Bull from Pope Innocent VIII (Giovanni Battista Cybo) in 1491; just months before Christopher Columbus’s historic first voyage.
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2222 Title: Sports Role Model – Playing For Pride … And More

The calendar of Black America includes several specific holidays. Juneteenth, celebrated every June 19, honors the day the Union Army liberated slaves in Texas following the end of the Civil War. Kwanzaa, beginning on Dec. 26, is a seven-day festival of African heritage. On Dec. 31, which is called watch night, churches hold worship services to commemorate the way their forebears had stayed up all night awaiting the issuance of the ­Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.

We need the New World territories to do a better job of reconciling their bad racial history. This is the issue for America, yes, and for the Caribbean homeland too.

Should America make Juneteenth a National Holiday? See VIDEO here.

VIDEO – Juneteenth recognized by more states, companies as a holiday – https://abcn.ws/2YgZrXO

Posted June 19, 2020 – In the wake of the nationwide outcry over the killing of George Floyd, bipartisan calls have amplified to name Juneteenth — June 19, which commemorates the end of slavery — a federal holiday.

A group of Senate Democrats announced Friday that they would introduce the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, legislation to designate the day, and if passed, would make Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Day was recognized in 1983.

While this is an American issue and outside our scope of the advocacy for Caribbean reformation, we do recommend such a focus for America to finally become a more just and equal society.

Will a Juneteenth commemoration accomplish that? Maybe not, but it’s a good move in the right direction. This country have had to contend with many atrocities to Black-and-Brown people. Just recently there have been a proliferation of protests and civil unrests due to an exhaustion of recent blatant incidences.

If advocates and activists are able to succeed with efforts for formal Juneteenth commemorations, then we recommend that they make festivities about more than just slavery. Rather it should be a celebration of African-American culture – as we attempt to do with our Caribbean Emancipation Celebrations, as related here-in.

But no doubt, all people need to remember, reflect, reconcile and repent for the bad racial history. And while our Caribbean activists may not be able to facilitate these action-verbs in the US, we can-must facilitate them here in the Caribbean.

We hereby urge all Caribbean stakeholders to lean-in to this Go Lean roadmap and to this advocacy to celebrate Juneteenth. 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 & 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!

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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 11 – 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.

xii. Whereas the legacy in recent times in individual states may be that of ineffectual governance with no redress to higher authority, the accedence of this Federation will ensure accountability and escalation of the human and civil rights of the people for good governance, justice assurances, due process and the rule of law. As such, any threats of a “failed state” status for any member state must enact emergency measures on behalf of the Federation to protect the human, civil and property rights of the citizens, residents, allies, trading partners, and visitors of the affected member state and the Federation as a whole.

xiii. Whereas the legacy of dissensions in many member-states (for example: Haiti and Cuba) will require a concerted effort to integrate the exile community’s repatriation, the Federation must arrange for Reconciliation Commissions to satiate a demand for justice.

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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St Patrick’s Day 2021 – Does It Really Matter? – ENCORE

Posted on March 17, 2021 in Ethos, Locations, Social, Strategy

Does St. Patrick’s Day matter to us here in the Caribbean?

Yes, it does!
Or … Yes it should!

You see, despite the fact this is a cultural and religious celebration – held every 17th day of March – commemorating the foremost patron saint of Ireland, Saint Patrick’s Day recognition is really a recognition of Irish people.

This is a BIG Deal …

… not just to acknowledge the 6.5 million people on that island, but rather to acknowledge the 80 million people worldwide that herald some form of Irish heritage.

So to Ireland and Irish people the world over, we hereby declare:

We see you!

This was the declaration of a previous blog-commentary from the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean … Caribbean. (We even have our own “Ireland of the Antilles”, a moniker for the Eastern Caribbean island of Montserrat). It is only apropos to Encore that previous submission from March 17, 2015 here-now:

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Go Lean Commentary – The ‘Luck of the Irish’ – Past, Present and Future

Today (March 17) is Saint Patrick’s Day. Why do people wear green?

It’s a move of solidarity for Irish people and culture.

This is a big deal considering the real history.

This subject also has relevance for the Caribbean as Saint Patrick’s Day is a public holiday in the British Caribbean Territory of Montserrat, in addition to the Republic of Ireland,[10] Northern Ireland,[11] and the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. While not a holiday elsewhere, this day is venerated by the Irish Diaspora around the world, especially in Great Britain, Canada, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. See a tribute here from an American job site:

Title: Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
Southfield, Michigan – We hope you are showing your Irish spirit by wearing green!

Here are 5 fun facts about St. Patrick’s Day:

CU Blog - The Luck of the Irish - Past, Present and Future - Photo 2

1. Of course with St. Patrick’s Day comes the massive appearance of shamrocks. Shamrocks have definitely become a central symbol for this day. In the olden days in Ireland, the shamrock was seen as sacred. The four leaves of the clover represent faith, love, hope, and of course, luck.

2. Good luck finding a four-leaf clover. The odds of finding a four-leafer on your first try are 1 in 10,000.

3. St. Patrick’s Day was traditionally a dry holiday. Irish law between 1903 and 1970 made St. Patrick’s Day a religious holiday for the entire country, which meant pubs were closed for the day. Today, St. Patrick’s Day is arguably one of the largest drinking holidays with an estimated $245 million spent on beer for March 17.

4. Green or Blue? Though green is a very popular color on St. Patrick’s Day, the original color that was very popular and often related back to St. Patrick was not green, but blue. In Irish folklore, green is known as being worn by immortals, and often signified new life and crop growth.

5. The Irish flag. The flag representing Ireland is green, white and orange. The green symbolizes the people of the south, and orange, the people of the north. White represents the peace that brings them together as a nation.

CU Blog - The Luck of the Irish - Past, Present and Future - Photo 5

Source: Credit Acceptance Internal Staff Intranet site; retrieved March 17, 2015.

This subject also provides a case study for the Caribbean, as the Irish Diaspora is one of the most pronounced in the world. This is the model of what we, in the Caribbean, do not want to become.

According to information retrieved from Wikipedia, since 1700 between 9 and 10 million people born in Ireland have emigrated, including those that went to Great Britain. This is more than the population of Ireland at its historical peak in the 1830s of 8.5 million. From 1830 to 1914, almost 5 million went to the United States alone.

After 1840, emigration from Ireland became a massive, relentless, and efficiently managed national enterprise.[1] In 1890 40% of Irish-born people were living abroad. By the 21st century, an estimated 80 million people worldwide claimed some Irish descent; which includes more than 36 million Americans who claim Irish as their primary ethnicity. [2]

CU Blog - The Luck of the Irish - Past, Present and Future - Photo 1

The city of Chicago, Illinois dyes the river green in tribute for St. Patrick’s Day

CU Blog - The Luck of the Irish - Past, Present and Future - Photo 4

The White House in full St. Patrick Day tribute mode

CU Blog - The Luck of the Irish - Past, Present and Future - Photo 3

London; on the Thames River

The Diaspora, broadly interpreted, contains all those known to have Irish ancestors, i.e., over 100 million people, which is more than fifteen times the population of the island of Ireland, which was about 6.4 million in 2011.

In July 2014, the Irish Government appointed Jimmy Deenihan as Minister of State for the Diaspora.[3]

Why this history?

In 1801 Ireland acceded to the United Kingdom (UK).

The Irish Parliament, charged with the heavy burden of directing Ireland’s destiny, was abolished in 1801 in the wake of the Republican United Irishmen Rebellion and Ireland became an integral part of a new United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland under the Act of Union. Without the power to direct their own affairs, the island found itself victimized by fate and bad fortune.

The Great Famine of Ireland during the 1840s saw a significant number of people flee from the island to all over the world. Between 1841 and 1851 as a result of death and mass emigration (mainly to Great Britain and North America) Ireland’s population fell by over 2 million. In the western province of Connacht alone, the population fell by almost 30%.

The Go Lean … Caribbean book relates that this is also the current disposition of so many of the Caribbean Diaspora; (10 million abroad compared to 42 million in the region). These ones love their country and culture, but live abroad; they want conditions to be different (better) in their homelands to consider any repatriation. The book details where in Puerto Rico, their on-island population in 2010 was 3,725,789, but Puerto Ricans living abroad in the US mainland was 4,623,716; (Page 303).

In a previous blog/commentary, a review of a book highlighted some strong lessons from Ireland’s past that are illustrative for the Caribbean’s future. The book is by Professor Richard S. Grossman entitled: Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them. The following excerpt is extracted from the book review by the London School of Economics:

As an example, we can take a closer look at the chapter on the Irish Famine, (1 of the 9 lessons), which took place from 1845-1852. Grossman not only describes what happened, but puts it into the perspective of  other famines, starting from the BCE period. In terms of absolute numbers, the Great Hunger in Ireland was not the worst famine recorded but it did tragically lead to the death of twelve per cent of Irish population, forcing many others to emigrate. The author details how the potato – which originated in the Americas – arrived to a fertile Ireland, and that the poorest third of the Irish population consumed up to twelve pounds of potatoes per day (per capita). Only after this introduction the economic policy is mentioned. Grossman compares the responses of two Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom to the famine: Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell. Russell was so committed to the limited government intervention that he refused to buy food for the starving masses in order not to disturb the free formation of prices in the market. Similarly, he refused to increase the scale of public works that would give jobs to Irish workers so as not to disturb the free labour market. The paradox is that when the Great Famine occurred, Ireland was not a poor country. The Famine would not have been so ‘great’ if it were not for the free market ideology followed by the policymakers at that time. As it turns out, leaving things to the invisible hand of market is not always an optimal solution.

The Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), a technocratic federal government to administer and optimize the economic/security/governing engines of the 30 member Caribbean states. The quest is to provide a better direct stewardship, applying lessons-learned from case studies like Ireland in the 1800’s.

Ireland has fared better since those dire days of the potato famine, but still its people, the Diaspora, endured a lot of misery, resistance and discrimination in their foreign homes. As reported in this previous commentary, the usual path for new immigrants is one of eventual celebration, but only after a “long train of abuses”: rejection, anger, protest, bargaining, toleration and eventual acceptance. Wearing green today – or any other March 17th’s – is a statement of acceptance and celebration of the Irish; as a proud heritage for what they have endured and accomplished.

The island of Ireland today is comprised of 2 countries: the independent Republic of Ireland and the territory of Northern Ireland, a member-state in the United Kingdom, with England, Wales and Scotland; (last year Scotland conducted a referendum in consideration of seceding from the UK; the referendum failed).

The Republic of Ireland ranks among the wealthiest countries in the world in terms of GDP per capita.[11] After joining the European Union, Ireland enacted a series of liberal economic policies that resulted in rapid economic growth. The country achieved considerable prosperity from 1995 to 2007, during which it became known as the Celtic Tiger. This was halted by an unprecedented financial crisis that began in 2008, in conjunction with the concurrent global economic crash.[12][13] Today, the primary source of tourism to Ireland – a primary economic driver – is from their Diaspora; see VIDEO in the Appendix below.

There are a lot of lessons in this issue for the Caribbean. Ireland did need better societal engines, economic-security-governance; this was accomplished with their assimilation into the EU. If only that option was available in the past.

This is the exact option being proposed now by the Go Lean roadmap, to emulate and model the successes of the European Union with the establishment of the Caribbean Union. It was not independence that brought success to Ireland, but rather interdependence with their neighboring countries “in the same boat”. This is the underlying theme behind the Go Lean movement, to “appoint new guards” to make the Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work and play. This Declaration of Interdependence is pronounced at the outset of the Go Lean book (Pages 11 & 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.

xix. Whereas our legacy in recent times is one of societal abandonment, it is imperative that incentives and encouragement be put in place to first dissuade the human flight, and then entice and welcome the return of our Diaspora back to our shores. This repatriation should be effected with the appropriate guards so as not to imperil the lives and securities of the repatriated citizens or the communities they inhabit. The right of repatriation is to be extended to any natural born citizens despite any previous naturalization to foreign sovereignties.

xx. Whereas the results of our decades of migration created a vibrant Diaspora in foreign lands, the Federation must organize interactions with this population into structured markets. Thus allowing foreign consumption of domestic products, services and media, which is a positive trade impact. These economic activities must not be exploited by others’ profiteering but rather harnessed by Federation resources for efficient repatriations.

xxv. Whereas the legacy of international democracies had been imperiled due to a global financial crisis, the structure of the Federation must allow for financial stability and assurance of the Federation’s institutions. To mandate the economic vibrancy of the region, monetary and fiscal controls and policies must be incorporated as proactive and reactive measures. These measures must address threats against the financial integrity of the Federation and of the member-states.

The Go Lean movement declares solidarity with the culture and the people of Ireland.

We too have endured a lot of misery in our foreign abodes. We would rather prosper where we were planted at home in our homeland, but due to economic, security and governing dysfunctions have had to emigrate.

The Go Lean book details a roadmap with turn-by-turn directions for transforming our homeland. The following is a sample of the community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to impact the Caribbean region for this turnaround:

Community Ethos – Economic Principle – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principle – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future Page 21
Community Ethos – Job Multiplier Page 22
Community Ethos – Lean Operations Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Confederating a Non-Sovereign Union Page 45
Strategy – Mission – Keep the next generation at home Page 46
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy Page 64
Tactical – Tactics to Forge an $800 Billion Economy Page 67
Tactical – Separation of Powers Page 71
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change Page 101
Implementation – Ways to Deliver Page 109
Implementation – Reasons to Repatriate to the Caribbean Page 118
Implementation – Ways to Promote Independence – Interdependence Page 120
Planning – 10 Big Ideas – A Single Market in the G-20 Page 127
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better Page 131
Planning – Ways to Better Manage Image – Not as Unwanted Aliens Page 133
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Enhance Tourism Page 190
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the Diaspora Page 217
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the British Territories Page 245

The Go Lean book posits (Page 3) that the Caribbean islands are among the greatest addresses in the world. But instead of the world “beating a path” to these doors, the people of the Caribbean have “beat down their doors” to get out; despite the absence of any famine, or war for that matter. This abandonment must stop … now!

May we learned from the history of Ireland in our quest to make our homeland a better place to live, work and play. And may we have the luck of the Irish, as conveyed in this Classic Irish Blessing:

May you always have…
Walls for the winds
A roof for the rain
Tea beside the fire
Laughter to cheer you
Those you love near you
And all your heart might desire.

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

——–

Appendix- VIDEO: Happy St Patrick’s Day from Discover Ireland – https://youtu.be/J680_aKF5zc

Uploaded on Mar 8, 2011 – This short film is an ode to Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day (which means we used a little bit of poetic licence!). Hope you all enjoy it. Happy St Patrick’s day!
http://www.discoverireland.com/

 

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“Black British” Reality Exposed – Encore

Posted on March 9, 2021 in Ethos, Locations, Social

This has gotten heated…

Q: How dare Black People accuse British institutions of being racists. You can’t be serious?!?
A: Are you serious?! Just walk in our shoes!

This is a fitting summary of the global dialogue the last few days – after the bombshell March 7, 2021 interview on American TV with Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle. Yes, they went there and named, blamed and shamed Buckingham Palace of blatant racist thoughts, feelings, words and actions. See this portrayed in this short exchange here – this Twitter excerpt:

VIDEO – Good Morning Britain’s Piers Morgan vs Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamim –  https://twitter.com/GMB/status/1368831131764858881

————-

So Black people in Britain are NOT valued as equal citizens?!?! MMMmmmm?!?!

This assertion seems so familiar!

We had previously discussed the actuality of the Caribbean Diaspora who had fled to Great Britain. These ones had learned the harsh lessons that the “welcome mat” that were extended to their immigration did not include respect, hospitality, warmth nor love.  🙁

It is only apropos to Encore that April 21, 2017 commentary again here-now:

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Go Lean Commentary – ‘Black British’ and ‘Less Than’

Truth be told, a Black person speaking with a British accent gets more respect than a Black person speaking with a Caribbean slang or a ‘Hip-hop’ /‘Jive’ dialect.

cu-blog-10-things-we-from-the-uk-photo-1It is what it is! Notice this portrayal in the Appendix VIDEO where many Afro-Caribbean citizens in Britain, seem to self-identify more as British than their Caribbean heritage;  (POINT 5).

Does this mean that the Black British person is better off on the world stage? Sadly no! The actuality of Blackness still means “Less Than“.

The problem is not the Blackness, but rather Whiteness, the proliferation of White Supremacy … throughout the world.

This is the assertion of the movement behind the book Go Lean … Caribbean, in consideration of reasons why the Diaspora should repatriate back to the Caribbean homeland and why the Caribbean youth should not even depart their homelands in the first place. This thesis was presented in a 9-part series, with these submissions:

  1. Time to Go: Spot-on for Protest
  2. Time to Go: No Respect for our Hair
  3. Time to Go: Logic of Senior Immigration
  4. Time to Go: Marginalizing Our Vote
  5. Time to Go: American Vices; Don’t Follow
  6. Time to Go: Public Schools for Black-and-Brown
  7. Stay Home! Remembering ‘High Noon’ and the Propensity for Bad American Societal Defects
  8. Stay Home! Immigration Realities in the US
  9. Stay Home! Outreach to the Diaspora – Doubling-down on Failure

All of these prior commentaries related to the disposition of the Caribbean Diaspora in the United States; now we take a look at England, Britain or the United Kingdom. There is a difference … supposedly.

“Britain has done a great job as painting itself as the humanitarian, with the US being the torturer. But that shit ain’t true.” – Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The purpose of this commentary – considering these source materials below – is to relate the following 5 strong points of contention; (these labels are shown throughout this commentary where applicable):

  • POINT 1 – The world is not fair, equal or just; and if you are of the Black-and-Brown races, the injustice is even more pronounced.
  • POINT 2 – Charity begins at home! There is a need to reform and transform society wherever you are. No one else will reform your homeland; you must!
  • POINT 3 – Leaving home, hurts home.
  • POINT 4 – The children of the Diaspora identify more with their current home, than their parent’s ancestral home.
  • POINT 5 – When the children do not want to identify with your land of heritage, it is Time to Go, to take them back home.

See this interview here relating Black British reality, with VICE News (UK Desk), the provocative media outlet that exposes the harsh realities of daily life in the Third World and the “First World”; (find more on VICE in Appendix A):

Title: We Spoke to the Activist Behind #BlackLivesMatter About Racism in Britain and America
By: Michael Segalov

… Patrisse Cullors is co-founder of Black Lives Matter — the movement and oft-trending hashtag. Based in LA ([Los Angeles]), she’s been on the front line at uprisings across the US in response to a wave of high-profile deaths of black people in police custody.

CU Blog - Black British and 'Less Than' - Photo 1

[While] on a speaking tour of the UK and Ireland, heading to communities, universities, and holding meetings in Parliament. VICE caught up with Patrisse on the train from Brighton to London in the midst of a hectic schedule. VICE chatted [with her] about how she’s spreading the Black Lives Matter movement across the globe, what’s happening in the States at the moment, and why that’s relevant to the UK.

VICE: Tell us about the origins of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Patrisse Cullors: After George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin, back in July 2013, myself and two friends came up with the hashtag. My friend Alicia had written a love letter to folks, saying, “Our Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.”

I put a hashtag in front—within days people were using it across the world. We’re talking about all black lives; we weren’t just talking about black men dying in the hands of the police. We’re talking about black women, black trans people, black queer people. We want to show that under the current system of white supremacy, anti-blackness has major consequences. Inside the US, and around the world, anti-black racism has global consequences. Black Lives Matter is a call to action—it’s a mantra, a testimony.

How did you end up at the heart of it?
I’ve been organizing since I was 16. I came out as queer, and was kicked out of home. Along with a bunch of other young queer women of color, we raised each other. We also dealt with poverty, being black and brown in the USA, and trying to figure out how to live our daily lives. My brother was incarcerated in LA county jails at 19, and he was almost killed by the sheriffs. They beat him. They tortured him and brutalized him. This was my awakening, seeing how far the state will go, and how they treat our families.

Most disturbing was the lack of support and absolute neglect that my brother and my family faced after he was brutalized. Part of my upbringing was a feeling of rage, but I also knew I could do something about it. With my mentors, and a civil rights organization, I learned my craft over 11 years. I focused on the school-to-prison pipeline [where young people go straight from school into the juvenile criminal justice system], environmental justice, and police violence.
…
You’ve been in the UK for a week, how has it been, and how does the situation here relate to the USA?

In theory the UK has a significant amount of structures to allow for accountability, of law enforcement in particular. That’s the theory. But in the US we don’t really have these structures to allow for accountability. There aren’t really independent investigators; its just very rare for prosecutions for law enforcement. And so, being here, I’ve realized, there are some systems in place that might actually be good for the US. It just seems those systems don’t work.

Then there are the similarities, the ways in which black people are treated—it’s outright racism. From Christopher Alder being brutalized on tape, hearing the officers calling him racist slurs, to the G4S guards who killed Jimmy Mubenga with racist texts on their phones. You have that same hatred, these white supremacist ideologies coming out of both of our countries. And here too, justice is not being served. We have Mike Brown, no justice. We have Eric Garner, no justice. Here we see the same: Mark Duggan, Sean Rigg. The list is vast.

Is this stuff talked about in the States, like how in the UK we’re aware over here about what’s going on in Ferguson?
Here’s the thing, black people in the US don’t know what’s happening here in the UK. I’m well read, well educated, and coming here and learning these stories I’m like, “Why don’t I know about this? Why haven’t we heard?” The US is very insular. The UK has an image of being better, a humane society in which there isn’t the same level of racism. But now I have a very different perspective that I’m going to take home and talk about. Britain has done a great job as painting itself as the humanitarian, with the US being the torturer. But that shit ain’t true.

Here in the UK there’ve been solidarity actions. People shut down the streets in London and Westfield shopping center too. What’s the impact of these things for people on the ground? Do you notice?
Yes, it was noticed. We’ve seen all the work folks are doing on the ground. From here, where you guys shut down Westfield, to Spain and Brazil. In Israel, African refugees are using the Black Lives Matter mantra to talk about law enforcement violence by the Israeli police. We see it, and we’re in awe. We wanted and needed it to go global.

Where is this going? What happens next?
There are 23 Black Lives Matter chapters right now, in the US, Canada, and Ghana. We need to uplift the local struggles across the country, as well as pushing for greater accountability for law enforcement.

We want legislation that will see divestment from law enforcement and investing in poor communities. We want to build a national project linking families who have been impacted by state violence, with a national database that looks at individual law enforcement officers and agencies. We also want to look at how to develop a system of independent investigation. We want to figure out a victim’s bill of rights, to counter the police bill of rights. Until then, we’re gonna shut shit down.
Source: VICE (UK) News; Posted February 2 2015; retrieved April 20, 2017 from: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/patrisse-cullors-interview-michael-segalov-188?utm_source=vicetwitterus

See related VIDEO’s here on Britain’s Black History; (POINT 1 and POINT 4):

For Caribbean people, the world thinks of us as “Less Than”, whether we are in the Caribbean or in the Diaspora in the UK, Europe or North America. We take the “Less Than” brand with us wherever we go. This is a crisis! The movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean seeks to use this crisis, to elevate the Caribbean brand …. globally.

Why is the Caribbean brand perceived as “Less Than”?

Yes, first there is the reality check of being Black-and-Brown in a White world. But also due to our own mis-management of our homeland. It is the greatest address on the planet, and yet our people beat down the doors to get out. Already we have lost 70 percent of our professional classes. So we send this subtle message to the world that “we would foul up the ground wherever we stand”; (POINT 1).

We – the Caribbean region as a collective – must do better; be better! We can reboot, reform and transform from this bad history and bad image; (POINT 2). How?

While easier said than done, this is the comprehensive action plan of the Go Lean book. The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The CU is designed to optimize Caribbean society in the homeland – though there are many benefits to the Diaspora as well – through economic, security and governing optimizations. Therefore the Go Lean roadmap has 3 prime directives:

  • Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
  • Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the economic engines.
  • Improve Caribbean governance – including empowerments for image promotion – to support these engines.

Reforming or transforming the UK, Britain or England is not within scope of the Go Lean/CU effort, notwithstanding the impact on our Diaspora there. But the subject of “Image” is inseparable from any discussion of elevating the Caribbean brand. So this commentary is on image, the facts and fiction of being a minority in a majority world or being an immigrant to a foreign country. This applies to any consideration of the Caribbean Diaspora in the British Isles, where their numbers have been reported between 4 and 5 percent of the population;  (POINT 4). Consider these encyclopedic details:

British African Caribbean (or Afro-Caribbean) people are residents of the United Kingdom who are of West Indian background and whose ancestors were primarily natives or indigenous to Africa. As immigration to the United Kingdom from Africa increased in the 1990s, the term has sometimes been used to include UK residents solely of African origin, or as a term to define all Black British residents, though the phrase “African and Caribbean” has more often been used to cover such a broader grouping. The most common and traditional use of the term African-Caribbean community is in reference to groups of residents’ continuing aspects of Caribbean culture, customs and traditions in the United Kingdom.

CU Blog - Black British and 'Less Than' - Photo 2A majority of the African-Caribbean population in the UK is of Jamaican origin; other notable representation is from Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Barbados, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Lucia, Dominica, Montserrat, Anguilla, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Guyana (which although located on the South American mainland is culturally similar to the Caribbean and was historically considered to be part of the British West Indies), and Belize.

African-Caribbean people are present throughout the United Kingdom with by far the largest concentrations in London and Birmingham.[1]  Significant communities also exist in other population centres, notably Manchester, Bradford, Nottingham, Coventry, Luton, Slough, Leicester, Bristol, Gloucester, Leeds, Huddersfield, Sheffield, Liverpool and Cardiff. In these cities, the community is traditionally associated with a particular area, such as Brixton, Harlesden, Stonebridge, Dalston, Lewisham, Tottenham, Peckham in London, West Bowling and Heaton in Bradford, Chapeltown in Leeds,[2] St. Pauls in Bristol,[3] or Handsworth and Aston in Birmingham or Moss Side in Manchester. According to the 2011 census, the largest number of African-Caribbean people are found in Croydon, south London.
Source: Retrieved April 20, 2017 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_African-Caribbean_people

There are a number of insights to glean looking at the demographics of the Afro-Caribbean population in the UK. (See Appendix B below). All in all, the Afro-Caribbean populations in the UK prefer to identify themselves more as British than as Caribbean;  (POINT 4).

See this portrayal in the Appendix VIDEO below.

Despite the 60 years of futility, our Caribbean people continue to leave, abandoning our homeland; (POINT 3). This is bad; bad for the people and bad for the homeland. Our people “jump from the frying pan to the fire”:

  • Distress continues …
  • Oppression persists …
  • Image: “Less Than”!

This commentary asserts that it is easier for the Black-and-Brown populations in the Caribbean to prosper where planted in the Caribbean, rather than emigrating to foreign countries, like the UK. The reasons for the emigration in the first place have been identified as “push and pull”. “Push” refers to the societal defects in the Caribbean that drive people to move away (POINT 2); and “pull” factors refer to the impressions and perceptions that life abroad, as in England, is better. More details apply regarding these elusive “pull” factors:

  • The UK is NOT the #1 destination for the English-speaking Caribbean Diaspora, not anymore; that distinction is now towards the US. Today’s trending is for more and more new immigration to the US as opposed to the UK; Canada is Number 2.
  • While the “pull” factor had been compelling in the past, the decision-making of Caribbean emigrants – looking to flee – now needs a reality check! (POINT 1)
  • “Pull” is further exacerbated by the “push” factors; all of these  continue to imperil Caribbean life; we push our citizens out. Then the resultant effect is a brain drain and even more endangerment to our society: less skilled workers; less entrepreneurs; less law-abiding citizens; less capable public servants – we lose our best and leave the communities with the rest. This creates even more of a crisis; (POINT 2).

The Go Lean roadmap posits that the entire Caribbean is in crisis now (POINT 3); so many of our citizens have fled for refuge in the UK and other countries, but the refuge is a mirage. The “grass is not necessarily greener on the other side”. Life in the UK is not optimized for Caribbean people. It is easier to fix the Caribbean than to fix the British eco-system. For our Diaspora there: it is Time to Go! For our populations in the Caribbean, looking to depart: Stay! Our people can more easily prosper where planted in the Caribbean … with the identified mitigations and remediation here-in.

The Go Lean book posits that Caribbean stakeholders made many flawed decisions in the past, both individually and community-wise;  (POINT 2). But now, the Go Lean/CU roadmap is new (and improved). This is a vision of the CU as a confederation of the 30 member-states of the Caribbean to do the heavy-lifting of championing better nation-building policies,  to reboot the region’s economic-security-governing engines. For one, there is the structure of a separation-of-powers between CU agencies and the individual member-states. So there are “two pies”, so citizens get to benefit from both their member-states’ efforts and that of the CU Trade Federation.

The Go Lean roadmap provides turn-by-turn directions on how to reform the society as a whole. This roadmap admits that because the Caribbean is in crisis, this “crisis would be a terrible thing to waste”. As a planning tool, the roadmap commences with a Declaration of Interdependence, pronouncing the approach of regional integration (Page 10 – 14) as a viable solution to elevate the regional engines:

Preamble: And while our rights to exercise good governance and promote a more perfect society are the natural assumptions among the powers of the earth, no one other than ourselves can be held accountable for our failure to succeed if we do not try to promote the opportunities that a democratic society fosters.
As the history of our region and the oppression, suppression and repression of its indigenous people is duly documented, there is no one alive who can be held accountable for the prior actions, and so we must put aside the shackles of systems of repression to instead formulate efficient and effective systems to steer our own destiny.

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.

xii. Whereas the legacy in recent times in individual states may be that of ineffectual governance with no redress to higher authority, the accedence of this Federation will ensure accountability and escalation of the human and civil rights of the people for good governance, justice assurances, due process and the rule of law. As such, any threats of a “failed state” status for any member state must enact emergency measures on behalf of the Federation to protect the human, civil and property rights of the citizens, residents, allies, trading partners, and visitors of the affected member state and the Federation as a whole.

xix. Whereas our legacy in recent times is one of societal abandonment, it is imperative that incentives and encouragement be put in place to first dissuade the human flight, and then entice and welcome the return of our Diaspora back to our shores …

xx. Whereas the results of our decades of migration created a vibrant Diaspora in foreign lands, the Federation must organize interactions with this population into structured markets. Thus allowing foreign consumption of domestic products, services and media, which is a positive trade impact. These economic activities must not be exploited by others’ profiteering but rather harnessed by Federation resources for efficient repatriations.

The Go Lean book details the community ethos to adopt, plus the executions of the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to impact the eco-systems in the Caribbean region.

The book provides these recommendations in regards to the dynamics of Diaspora living:

  • Encourage the Caribbean Diaspora to repatriate back to their ancestral homeland – (10 Reasons to Repatriate to the Caribbean – Page 118).
  • Dissuade the high emigration rates of Caribbean citizens to foreign stories – (10 Ways to Make the Caribbean Better – Page 131).

These subjects (Repatriation and Diaspora) have been frequently commented on in other Go Lean blogs  (POINT 4); as sampled here with these entries:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=11244 ‘To Live and Die in L.A.’ or London …
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9485 10 Things We Don’t Want from the UK
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8099 Caribbean Image: ‘Less Than’?
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7151 The Caribbean is Looking for Heroes … ‘to Return’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1683 British public sector workers strike over ‘poverty pay’

The book also relates the significance of image/brand management, as with this advocacy: “10 Ways to Better Manage Image” (Page 133):

The Bottom Line on Martin, Malcolm, Mandela, Muhammad and Marley
The majority of the Caribbean population descends from an African ancestry – a legacy of slavery from previous centuries. Despite the differences in nationality, culture and language, the image of the African Diaspora is all linked hand-in-hand. And thus, when Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Ali and Bob Marley impacted the world with their contributions, the reverberations were felt globally, not just in their homelands. It is hard for one segment of the black world to advance when other segments have a negative global image. This is exemplified with the election of Barack Obama as US President; his election was viewed as an ascent for the entire Black race.

Overall, we must elevate the Caribbean brand. There are active movements now to accentuate the  image/brand; consider:

Proclaim ‘International Caribbean Day’

The African Renaissance Monument

Declared “Best in the World”

Accentuate Caribbean Image Tied to the Dreadlocks Hairstyles

Underlying to the Go Lean/CU prime directive of elevating the economics, security and governing engines of the Caribbean, is the desire to make the Caribbean homeland better, to reform and transform our society. If we can do this, we will dissuade the high emigration rate for our young people. But saying that it is “Time to Go“, must mean that we are ready to receive our Caribbean Diaspora from London and other British cities. Are we?

We are not! But this Go Lean roadmap gets us started. This is the intent of the book Go Lean … Caribbean.

The Go Lean/CU roadmap asserts that Britain should not be presented as the panacea for Caribbean ills – we must reform and transform our own society. While Britain or the UK does some things well, that country does not always act justly towards Black-and-Brown people of Caribbean descent;  (POINT 5). We must do this ourselves (POINT 2); our region needs the empowerments here-in (jobs, economic growth and brand/image enhancement).

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people and governing institutions, to lean-in for the empowerments described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean. This is the roadmap to elevate the Caribbean; to make our homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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

———–

Appendix A – Vice News

Vice News (stylized as VICE News) is Vice Media, Inc.‘s current affairs channel, producing daily documentary essays and video through its website and YouTube channel. It promotes itself on its coverage of “under-reported stories”.[1] Vice News was created in December 2013 and is based in New York City, though it has bureaus worldwide.

Background
In December 2013, Vice Media expanded its international news division into an independent division dedicated to news exclusively and created Vice News. Vice Media put $50 million into its news division, setting up 34 bureaus worldwide and drawing praise for its in-depth coverage of international news.[2] Vice News has primarily targeted a younger audience comprised predominantly of millennials, the same audience to which its parent company appeals.[3]

History
Before Vice News was founded, Vice published news documentaries and news reports from around the world through its YouTube channel alongside other programs. Vice had reported on events such as crime in Venezuela, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, protests in Turkey, the North Korean regime, and the Syrian Civil War through their own YouTube channel and website. After the creation of Vice News as a separate division, its reporting greatly increased with worldwide coverage starting immediately with videos published on YouTube and articles on its website daily.[5]
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_News

———–

Appendix B – British Afro-Caribbean Demographics

Based on a variety of official sources and extrapolating from figures for England alone, the estimates for the number of people in Britain born in the West Indies grew from 15,000 in 1951, to 172,000 in 1961 and 304,000 in 1971, and then fell slightly to 295,000 in 1981. The estimates for the population of ethnic West Indian in 1981 were between 500,000 and 550,000.[26]

In the UK Census of 2001, 565,876 people classified themselves in the category ‘Black Caribbean’, amounting to around 1 percent of the total population.[38] Of the “minority ethnic” population, which amounted to 7.9 percent of the total UK population, Black Caribbean people accounted for 12.2 percent.[38] In addition, 14.6 percent of the minority ethnic population (equivalent to 1.2 per cent of the total population) identified as mixed race, of whom around one third stated that they were of mixed Black Caribbean and White descent.[38]

In the latest, the 2011 Census of England and Wales, 594,825 individuals specified their ethnicity as “Caribbean” under the “Black/African/Caribbean/Black British” heading, and 426,715 as “White and Black Caribbean” under the “Mixed/multiple ethnic group” heading.[35] In Scotland, 3,430 people classified themselves as “Caribbean, Caribbean Scottish or Caribbean British” and 730 as “Other Caribbean or Black” under the broader “Caribbean or Black” heading.[36] In Northern Ireland, 372 people specified their ethnicity as “Caribbean”.[37] The published results for the “Mixed” category are not broken down into sub-categories for Scotland and Northern Ireland as they are for England and Wales.[36][37] The greatest concentration of Black Caribbean people is found in London, where 344,597 residents classified themselves as Black Caribbean in the 2011 Census, accounting for 4.2 per cent of the city’s population.[35]

The UK Census records respondents’ countries of birth and the 2001 Census recorded 146,401 people born in Jamaica, 21,601 from Barbados, 21,283 from Trinidad and Tobago, 20,872 from Guyana, 9,783 from Grenada, 8,265 from Saint Lucia, 7,983 from Montserrat, 7,091 from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, 6,739 from Dominica, 6,519 from Saint Kitts and Nevis, 3,891 from Antigua and Barbuda and 498 from Anguilla.[39]

Detailed country-of-birth data from the 2011 Census is published separately for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In England and Wales, 160,095 residents reported their country of birth as Jamaica, 22,872 Trinidad and Tobago, 18,672 Barbados, 9,274 Grenada, 9,096 St Lucia, 7,390 St Vincent and the Grenadines, 7,270 Montserrat, 6,359 Dominica, 5,629 St Kitts and Nevis, 3,697 Antigua and Barbuda, 2,355 Cuba, 1,812 The Bahamas and 1,303 Dominican Republic. 8,301 people reported being born elsewhere in the Caribbean, bringing the total Caribbean-born population of England and Wales to 264,125. Of this number, 262,092 were resident in England and 2,033 in Wales.[40] In Scotland, 2,054 Caribbean-born residents were recorded,[41] and in Northern Ireland 314.[42]Guyana is categorised as part of South America in the Census results, which show that 21,417 residents of England and Wales, 350 of Scotland and 56 of Northern Ireland were born in Guyana. Belize is categorised as part of Central America. 1,252 people born in Belize were recorded living in England and Wales, 79 in Scotland and 22 in Northern Ireland.[41][42][40]
Source: Retrieved April 20, 2017 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_African-Caribbean_people#Demography

———–

Appendix VIDEO – Do you call yourself Black British? – https://youtu.be/i3dgzdsAZug

Published on Oct 21, 2016

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Women’s Day – Today and Everyday – Helping Them Change the World – Encore

Posted on March 8, 2021 in Ethos, Social, Strategy


Today – March 8 – is International Women’s Day.

Today, the International community – i.e. the United Nations – and societal stewards have set aside this day to recognize the fine contributions that women make to society.

This is completely unnecessary! When is International Men’s Day?!

Women have been contributing to society from the beginning, ancient times and modern ones. Yet, the formal Orthodoxy in the world – religion and politics – many times ignore the role of women.

The problem there is with the Orthodoxy, not the women. Women has been forging change, fighting against Bad Orthodoxy for a good while now. To that we say:

Go Girl Go!

We need the women in our society – the current ones and more – to keep on fighting against the many facets of Bad Orthodoxy; they have succeeded in the past … and we need them to succeed again.

This assertion seems so familiar!

We had previously discussed the actuality of Women fighting for change in a previous blog-commentary from April 14, 2018. It is only apropos to Encore that commentary again here-now:

————

Go Lean Commentary – Nature or Nurture: Women Have Nurtured Change

Here is valuable advice to young people … hoping to partner with a soul-mate:

Take time to know him/her … give it a full cycle of seasons: Summer and Winter.

There is the person’s Nature and also their Nurture-ing that must be taken to account:

Nature – Genetics determine behavior; personality traits and abilities are in “nature”

Nurture – Environment, upbringing and life experiences determine behavior. Humans are “nurtured” to behave in certain ways.

So prospective marriage mates need to ascertain the Nature and Nurture of a potential partner.

If the potential mate does not measure up, my advice: do not bond, take your leave. Just do so BEFORE the wedding rehearsal – i.e. Runaway Brides – do not abandon all the stakeholders high-and-dry (“at the altar”), after they may have invested in catering, banquet halls, clothes, travel, etc.. Such a failure would just be pathetic!

This advice applies to individuals, yes, but not so much for communities, or societies. For the group dynamic, we simply have no choice; we must work to transform the attitudes, traits and practices in a community. The book Go Lean…Caribbean identified this subject as “community ethos”, with this definition:

… the fundamental character or spirit of a culture; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society; dominant assumptions of a people or period. – Page 20

If/When the community ethos is unbecoming for a society, citizens do not bond; they abandon! This is so pathetic, as the community too may have invested hugely in the individuals – think education, scholarships and student loans. The community is “left at the altar“.

But change is possible! Communities have forged change and been transformed .. in the past, in the present and I guarantee future communities will also forge change.

How is this possible? How to Nurture change despite “bad” Nature? Let’s consider a sample-example from the history of the UK; this is actually the history of the Caribbean as well, as it features the Abolition of Slavery in the British Empire in the year 1833 – the date that the measure passed the British Parliament.

There were a lot of advocates and activists that led the fight against … first the Slave Trade and then eventually the institution of Slavery itself; think William Wilberforce and Charles Spurgeon who argued for the abolition of slavery and advocated for women to have rights equal to that of men. Slavery and Women’s Rights became locked-in-step – see Appendix VIDEO. So a lot of the Nurturing for the abolition advocacy came from women of the British Empire. See this portrayed in the article here:

Title: Ending Slavery

For much of the 18th century few European or American people questioned slavery. Gradually on both sides of the Atlantic a few enlightened individuals, some of them Quakers, began to oppose it.

From the 1760s activists in London challenged the morality and legality of the slave trade. They included former slaves, like Olaudah Equiano and the abolitionist campaigners Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce.

Women who opposed slavery took the lead in boycotts of slave-grown produce, particularly sugar. Slavery abolitionists used badges and iconic images to publicise their views, like the sugar bowl above made by Wedgewood. Enormous petitions opposing the slave trade were delivered to the House of Commons.

Women Against Slavery

It is only relatively recently that historians have explored the activities of women abolitionists. When looking at local provincial sources, autobiographies, historical objects and sites it becomes clear that women played a significant and, at times, pivotal role in the campaign to abolish slavery.

These women came from a range of backgrounds. The tactics they used – boycotting slave-produced sugar and other goods, organising mass petitions and addressing public meetings – proved highly effective.

Hannah Moore

Hannah Moore (from 1745 to 1833) was an educator, writer and social reformer. Born in Bristol, she was strongly opposed to slavery throughout her life. She encouraged women to join the anti-slavery movement.

In 1787 she met John Newton and members of the Clapham Sect, including William Wilberforce with whom she formed a strong and lasting friendship. Moore was an active member of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the African Slave Trade. Her writings reflected her opposition to slavery and “Slavery, a Poem” which she published in 1788 is regarded as one of the most important slavery poems of the period.

Ill health prevented Moore from taking an active role in the 1807 campaign to end the slave trade but she continued to write to Wilberforce and other campaigners.

She lived just long enough to see the act abolishing slavery passed. She died in September 1833 and is buried with her sisters in the south-east corner of All Saints’ Churchyard, Station Road, Wrington, Bristol, BS40.

Mary Prince

Mary Prince (from 1788 to around 1833) was the first black woman to publish her account of being an enslaved woman. She was born in Bermuda in 1788 and endured a life of violence and abuse through a succession of slave-owners.

Her owners, the Woods, brought Mary to England. To escape their cruelty she ran away to the Moravian Church in London’s Hatton Gardens. Members of the Anti-Slavery Society took up her case and they encouraged her to write her life story.

Published in 1831 as “The History of Mary Prince”, this extraordinary story describing ill treatment and survival was a rallying cry for emancipation. The book provoked two libel actions and had three editions in its year of publication.

In 2007 Camden Council and the Nubian Jak Community Trust placed a plaque near to the site where she lived at Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (from 1806 to 1861) is commemorated with two plaques in Marylebone, London. A brown Society of Arts plaque is at the site of her former home at 50 Wimpole Street, London W1G 8SQ. There is a bronze plaque at 99, Gloucester Road, London W1U 6JG.

Barrett Browning’s father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett (from 1785 to 1857), inherited 10,000 acres of sugar plantations in Jamaica, with an annual income of £50,000. Her maternal grandfather John Graham-Clarke (from 1736 to 1818) was a Newcastle merchant who owned sugar plantations, trading ships and many more businesses associated with slavery. At his death his assets were equivalent to around £20 million today.

Barrett Browning was aware of the source of her family’s wealth:

  • I belong to a family of West Indian slave-owners and if I believe in curses, I should be afraid. – Letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to John Ruskin in 1855.

In 1849 she published an anti-slavery poem “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”. It portrayed a slave woman cursing her oppressor after she had been whipped, raped and impregnated.

Elizabeth Jesser Reid

A social reformer and philanthropist, Elizabeth Jesser Reid (from 1789 to 1866) is best known for founding Bedford College for Women in London in 1849. The College is now part of Royal Holloway, University of London.

Jesser Reid was also an anti-slavery activist and she attended the Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840 and was a member of the Garrisonian London Emancipation Committee. A green plaque has been placed at her former home, 48 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DR to commemorate Reid and the first site of the college.

While living at 48 Bedford Square, Reid entertained Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1853. She also shared her house with the African American abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond whilst she studied at the College between 1859 and 1861.

Sarah Parker Remond

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Sarah Parker Remond (from 1826 to 1894) came from a family that was deeply involved in the abolitionist campaign in the United States. Her brother Charles Lenox Remond was the first black lecturer in the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Parker Remond was such an impressive speaker and fund-raiser for the abolitionist movement that she was invited to take the anti-slavery message to Britain. Soon after arriving here in 1859 she embarked upon a nationwide lecture tour. In 1866 she left London to study medicine in Italy. She practised as a doctor in Florence, where she settled.

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Related Posts

Listen to our podcasts about women’s involvement in the abolition movement:

Source: Retrieved April 13, 2018 from: https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/the-slave-trade-and-abolition/sites-of-memory/ending-slavery/

Women applied pressure to all aspects of society – the engines of economics, security and governance – for the end of the Slave Trade; then they continued the pressure for the Abolition of Slavery itself. The Nurturing worked! It was not immediate, but eventual and evolutionary:

  • They impacted the economic cycles – boycotts & embargos. See the notes on the Anti-Saccharrittes in Appendix A.
  • They compelled the Security engines – The Royal Navy was engaged to enforce the ban on the Slave Trade after 1807. (Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans.[5]) See Appendix B below.
  • They engaged the related governance by entreating the political supporters, every year, to introduce and re-introduce the Abolition Bill.

Though the abolition of Slavery went against the Nature of the New World, these women and their Nurturing did not stop.  They persisted! This commentary concludes the 4-part series on Nature or Nurture for community ethos. This entry is 4 of 4 in this series from the movement behind the book Go Lean … Caribbean in consideration of the Nurturing by the mothers (women) of England who finally forge change in the British Empire.. The other commentaries in the series are cataloged as follows:

  1. Nature or Nurture: Black Marchers see gun violence differently
  2. Nature or Nurture: Cop-on-Black Shootings – Embedded in America’s DNA; Whites Yawn
  3. Nature or Nurture: UK City of Bristol still paying off Slavery Debt
  4. Nature or Nurture: Nurturing came from women to impact Abolition of Slavery

In the first submission to this series, the history of the Psychological battle between Nature and Nurture was introduced, which quoted:

One of the oldest arguments in the history of psychology is the Nature vs Nurture debate. Each of these sides have good points that it’s really hard to decide whether a person’s development is predisposed in his DNA, or a majority of it is influenced by this life experiences and his environment. – https://explorable.com/nature-vs-nurture-debate

All of these commentaries relate to “how” the stewards – including empowered women – for a new Caribbean can assuage societal defects despite the default Nature. Here-in, this example from England is a great role model for the Caribbean region. We too, need our women!

How about the Caribbean today? What bad Nature can women help to Nurture out of Caribbean society?

There are many!

The Lord giveth the word: The women that publish the tidings are a great host. – Psalms 68:11 American Standard Version

Our region is riddled with societal defects. In fact, the subject of societal defects is a familiar theme for this commentary, from the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean. The book asserts that the British colonial masters for the Caribbean – 18 of the 30 member-states share this legacy – did not endow this region with the organizational dynamics (attitudes or structures) that would lead to societal success. The former slave populations became the majority in all these lands; when majority rule was compelled on the New World – post-World War II restructuring – the people were not ready. Looking at the dispositions in the region today, these are nearing Failed-State status – it is that bad!

The theme of Failing States has been detailed in previous blog-commentaries by the movement behind the Go Lean book. Consider this sample previous blogs:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13749 Failure to Launch – Governance: Assembling the Region’s Organizations
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13746 Failure to Launch – Security: Caribbean Basin Security Dreams
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13744 Failure to Launch – Economics: The Quest for a ‘Single Currency’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13391 After Maria, Puerto Rico Failed-State: Destruction and Defection
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12996 After Irma, Many Caribbean Failed-States: Destruction and Defection
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12098 Inaction: A Recipe for ‘Failed-State’ Status
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10657 Outreach to the Diaspora – Doubling-down on Failure
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2547 Miami’s Success versus Caribbean Failure

There is the need for the Caribbean member-states to reform and transform. We have some bad community ethos; we need “all hands on deck” to mitigate and remediate them. The book Go Lean…Caribbean – available to download for free – 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 30 member-states. This CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives for effecting change in our society:

  • 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 same as the British Empire needed a “large host” of women to Nurture societal values, priorities, practices and laws to supplant the bad Nature of the British Slave economy, a “large host” of women will be needed to forge change in the British Caribbean and the full Caribbean – American, Dutch, French and Spanish legacies. This subject too, has been a consistent theme from the movement behind the Go Lean book. Consider this sample from these previous blog-commentaries:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14541 One Woman Made a Difference – Role Model: Viola Desmond
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14482 International Women’s Day – Protecting Rural Women
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13063 Getting Gender Equity without a ‘Battle of the Sexes’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12035 Lean-in for ‘Wonder Woman Day’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10124 The ‘Hidden Figures’ of Women Building-up Society – Art Imitating Life
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8306 Women Get Ready for New “Lean-In” Campaign
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6937 Women in Politics – Yes, They Can!
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6836 Role Model – #FatGirlsCan
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5648 One Woman – Taylor Swift – Changing Streaming Music Industry
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3490 One Woman Entrepreneur Rallied and Change Her Whole Community

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to Nurture a better Caribbean society. It details the new community ethos that needs to be adopted so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines of Caribbean society – economics, security and governance. We want the women to help empower Caribbean society and so we want to empower women. In fact, the book (Page 226) details the bad community ethos that permeated the “Imperial” world during the times of Caribbean colonization. The advocacy entitled 10 Ways to Empower Women presented this encyclopedic reference on the Natural Law philosophy as follows:

The Bottom Line on Natural Law and Women’s Rights

17th century natural law philosophers in Britain and America, such as Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, developed the theory of natural rights in reference to ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and the Christian theologist Aquinas. Like the ancient philosophers, 17th century natural law philosophers defended slavery and an inferior status of women in law.

Relying on ancient Greek philosophers, natural law philosophers argued that natural rights where not derived from god, but were “universal, self-evident, and intuitive”, a law that could be found in nature. They believed that natural rights were self-evident to “civilized man” who lives “in the highest form of society”. Natural rights derived from human nature, a concept first established by the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Citium in Concerning Human Nature.

Zenon argued that each rational and civilized male Greek citizen had a “divine spark” or “soul” within him that existed independent of the body. Zeno founded the Stoic philosophy and the idea of a human nature was adopted by other Greek philosophers, and later natural law philosophers and western humanists. Aristotle developed the widely adopted idea of rationality, arguing that man was a “rational animal” and as such a natural power of reason.

Concepts of human nature in ancient Greece depended on gender, ethnic, and other qualifications and 17th century natural law philosophers came to regard women along with children, slaves and non-whites, as neither “rational” nor “civilized”. Natural law philosophers claimed the inferior status of women was “common sense” and a matter of “nature”. They believed that women could not be treated as equal due to their “inner nature”. The views of 17th century natural law philosophers were opposed in the 18th and 19th century by Evangelical natural theology philosophers such as William Wilberforce and Charles Spurgeon, who argued for the abolition of slavery and advocated for women to have rights equal to that of men. Modern natural law theorists, and advocates of natural rights, claimed that all people have a human nature, regardless of gender, ethnicity or other qualifications; therefore all people have natural rights.

These thoughts on Natural Law and Women’s Rights persist to this day, despite how archaic they may seem.

This flawed Natural Law philosophy accounts for the Nature of the Caribbean – this was inherited from the Imperial Europe (1600’s) – and never fully uprooted. This was the heavy-lifting that the foregoing women helped to Nurture out of Europe, and what we need continued help for today’s women to uproot.

In addition to the ethos discussion, the book presents the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute change in the Caribbean region. This is how to Nurture a bad community (ethos) into a good community (ethos).

Yes, we can elevate our societal engines. We can do more than just study impactful women from the past, we can foster our own brand of impactful women. We need them!

We need all hands on deck to make our Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

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

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

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Appendix A – Anti-Saccharrittes … in England

…
In 1791, … the abolitionist William Fox published his anti-sugar pamphlet, which called for a boycott of sugar grown by slaves working in inhuman conditions in the British-governed West Indies. “In every pound of sugar used, we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh,” wrote Fox. So powerful was his appeal that close to 400,000 Britons gave up sugar.

The sugar boycott squarely affected that most beloved of English rituals: afternoon tea. As The Salt [Magazine] has reported, sugar was an integral reason why tea became an engrained habit of the British in the 1700s. But with the sugar boycott, offering or not offering sugar with tea became a highly political act.

Soon, grocers stopped selling West Indies sugar and began to sell “East Indies sugar” from India. Those who bought this sugar were careful to broadcast their virtue by serving it in bowls imprinted with the words “not made by slave labor,” in much the same way that coffee today is advertised as fair-trade, or eggs as free-range.

…

Source: Posted August 4, 2015; retrieved April 14, 2018 from: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/08/04/429363868/how-percy-shelley-stirred-his-politics-into-his-tea-cup

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Appendix B – Rare ‘slave freeing’ photos on show

A set of rare photographs showing African slaves being freed by the Royal Navy have gone on show for the first time. They are part of an exhibition marking the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade.

A set of rare photographs showing African slaves being freed by the Royal Navy have gone on show for the first time.
Published April 28, 2007.
The photographs, on display at the Royal Naval Museum, Portsmouth, Hants, show a sailor removing the manacle from a newly-freed slave as well as the ship’s marines escorting captured slavers.

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East African slaves aboard the HMS Daphne, a British Royal Navy vessel involved in anti-slave trade activities in the Indian Ocean,

Samuel Chidwick, 74, has donated the photographs taken by his father Able Seaman Joseph Chidwick, born in 1881, on board HMS Sphinx off the East African coast in about 1907.

The photographs, on display at the Royal Naval Museum, Portsmouth, Hants, show a sailor removing the manacle from a newly-freed slave as well as the ship’s marines escorting captured slavers.

Mr Chidwick, of Dover, Kent, said: “The pictures were taken by my father who was serving aboard HMS Sphinx while on armed patrol off the Zanzibar and Mozambique coast.

“They caught quite a few slavers and those particular slaves that are in the pictures happened while he was on watch. “That night a dhow sailed by and the slaves were all chained together. He raised the alarm and they got them on to the ship and got the chains knocked off them.

“They then questioned them and sent a party of marines ashore to try to track the slave traders down.

“They caught two of them and I believe they were of Arabic origin.

“My father thought the slave trade was a despicable thing that was going on, the slaves were treated very badly so when they got the slavers they didn’t give them a very nice time.”

Jacquie Shaw, spokeswoman for the Royal Naval Museum, said: “The museum and the Royal Navy are delighted to announce the donation of a nationally important collection of unique photographs taken by Able Seaman Joseph John Chidwick during his service on the Persian Gulf Station where the crew of HMS Sphinx were engaged in subduing the slave trade.

“The collection comprises a fascinating and important snapshot of life on anti-slavery duties off the coast of Africa.”

The exhibition, ‘Chasing Freedom -The Royal Navy and the suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, is being held until January next year to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.

The House of Commons passed a bill in 1805 making it unlawful for any British subject to capture and transport slaves but the measure was blocked by the House of Lords and did not come into force until March 25, 1807.

Mrs Shaw said that since the exhibition opened, members of the public had brought forward several historically-important items. She said: “As well as these amazing images, members of the public have brought many other unheard stories of the Royal Navy and the trade in enslaved Africans to the museum’s attention including the original ship’s log of the famed HMS Black Joke of the West Coast of Africa Station.”

Source: Posted 29 Apr 2007; retrieved April 14, 2018 from: http://metro.co.uk/2007/04/29/rare-slave-freeing-photos-on-show-331626/

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Appendix C VIDEO – Abolition to Suffrage – https://youtu.be/WbLVp27cqZ8

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Zero Sum: Book Review of “The Sum of Us” – Racism is a factor in “Us vs Them”

Posted on February 25, 2021 in Economics, Ethos, Planning, Social

Go Lean Commentary

White America had it all wrong!

Racism was not a privilege, it cost them more than they had bargained for. In fact, pursuing a racist agenda deprived them of privileges that they were entitled to.

Imagine, denying yourself of a swimming pool on a hot day because by opening the pool, Black people would get to swim too.

This was bad … and yet, if lessons are not learned that same expensive consequence will be repeated again and again.

This is the lessons we glean from the new book by Heather McGhee, that the Zero Sum experience is expensive when Non-Zero Sum is so much cheaper, easier and … just.

The movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean … Caribbean proclaims that people in the Caribbean – mostly Black and Brown – can benefit by consuming Heather McGhee’s book and the resultant lessons. The actual title-subtitle is as follows:

“The Sum of Us”: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.

The book is about America, but we can apply these lessons in the Caribbean too.

See the full Book Review here:

Book Title: The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together – By: Heather McGhee

Review by: Jennifer Szalai

Hinton Rowan Helper was an unreserved bigot from North Carolina who wrote hateful, racist tracts during Reconstruction. He was also, in the years leading up to the Civil War, a determined abolitionist.

His 1857 book, “The Impending Crisis of the South,” argued that chattel slavery had deformed the Southern economy and impoverished the region. Members of the plantation class refused to invest in education, in enterprise, in the community at large, because they didn’t have to. Helper’s concern wasn’t the enslaved Black people brutalized by what he called the “lords of the lash”; he was worried about the white laborers in the South, relegated by the slave economy and its ruling oligarchs to a “cesspool of ignorance and degradation.”

Helper and his argument come up early on in Heather McGhee’s illuminating and hopeful new book, “The Sum of Us” — though McGhee, a descendant of enslaved people, is very much concerned with the situation of Black Americans, making clear that the primary victims of racism are the people of color who are subjected to it. But “The Sum of Us” is predicated on the idea that little will change until white people realize what racism has cost them too.

The material legacy of slavery can be felt to this day, McGhee says, in depressed wages and scarce access to health care in the former Confederacy. But it’s a blight that’s no longer relegated to the region. “To a large degree,” she writes, “the story of the hollowing out of the American working class is a story of the Southern economy, with its deep legacy of exploitative labor and divide-and-conquer tactics, going national.”

As the pandemic has laid bare, the United States is a rich country that also happens to be one of the stingiest when it comes to the welfare of its own people. McGhee, who spent years working on economic policy for Demos, a liberal think tank, says it was the election of Donald Trump in 2016 by a majority of white voters that made her realize how most white voters weren’t “operating in their own rational economic self-interest.” Despite Trump’s populist noises, she writes, his agenda “promised to wreak economic, social and environmental havoc on them along with everyone else.”

At several points in McGhee’s book, I was reminded of the old saw about “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face,” though she prefers a less gruesome metaphor — the drained swimming pool. Grand public pools were sumptuous emblems of common leisure in the early decades of the 20th century, steadfastly supported by white Americans until they were told to integrate them. McGhee visited the site of one such pool in Montgomery, Ala., drained and cemented over since 1959 so that nobody, white or Black, could ever enjoy it again.

It’s a self-defeating form of exclusion, a determination not to share resources even if the ultimate result is that everyone suffers. McGhee writes about health care, voting rights and the environment; she persuasively argues that white Americans have been steeped in the notion of “zero sum” — that any gains by another group must come at white people’s expense. She talks to scholars who have found that white respondents believed that anti-white bias was more prevalent than anti-Black bias, even though by any factual measure this isn’t true. This cramped mentality is another legacy of slavery, McGhee says, which really was zero sum — extractive and exploitative, like the settler colonialism that enabled it. She writes that zero-sum thinking “has always optimally benefited only the few while limiting the potential of the rest of us, and therefore the whole.”

Recent books like Jonathan Metzl’s “Dying of Whiteness” have explained how racial animus ends up harming those who cling to a chimera of privilege. While reading McGhee I was also reminded of Thomas Frank’s argument in “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” (2004), about how the Republican Party had figured out a way to push through an unpopular economic agenda by stowing it inside a Trojan horse of social conservatism and cultural grievance.

But there are major differences between their books. Frank derides the idea that racism has anything to do with what he’s writing about. Not to mention that McGhee isn’t a stinging polemicist; she cajoles instead of ridicules. She appeals to concrete self-interest in order to show how our fortunes are tied up with the fortunes of others. “We suffer because our society was raised deficient in social solidarity,” she writes, explaining that this idea is “true to my optimistic nature.” She is compassionate but also cleareyed, refusing to downplay the horrors of racism, even if her own book suggests that the white readers she’s trying to reach can be easily triggered into seeking the safe space of white identity politics. Color blindness, she says, is just another form of denial.

One of the phenomena that emerges from McGhee’s account is that the zero-sum mentality tends to get questioned only in times of actual scarcity — when people are so desperate that they realize how much they need one another. She gives the example of the Fight for $15 movement: Already earning poverty-level wages, fast-food workers began to ask what they had to lose by organizing.

Against “zero-sum” she proposes “win-win” — without fully addressing how the ideal of win-win has been deployed for cynical ends. McGhee discusses how the subprime mortgage crisis was fueled by racism, but it was also inflated by promises of a constantly expanding housing market and rising prices. Once the credit dried up, win-win reverted to zero-sum, with the drowned (underwater homeowners) losing out to the saved (well-connected bankers).

“We live under the same sky,” McGhee writes. There is a striking clarity to this book; there is also a depth of kindness in it that all but the most churlish readers will find moving. She explains in exacting detail how racism causes white people to suffer. Still, I couldn’t help thinking back to the abolitionist Helper, who knew full well how slavery caused white people to suffer, but remained an unrepentant racist to the end.

Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter: @jenszalai.

Source: New York Times – posted February 23, 2021; retrieved February 25, 2021 from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/books/review-sum-of-us-heather-mcghee.html

America has some reconciliations to do.

Their Good Old Days weren’t all so good …

Racism is embedded in the country’s DNA …

Institutional Racism is institutional … and weaved into many facets of the American eco-system …

For the Caribbean, the urging is to be On Guard while emulating and role-modeling America as the regional hegemony. Their preponderance for “Us versus Them” continues to proliferate.

This problem in America – racism as a factor in “Us vs Them” – continues as a defective Community Ethos – the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of society. Despite the passage of time, the bad Community Ethos persists. This is why, for the Caribbean to learn from the American experience,  we must start with reforming and transforming Community Ethos before the consideration for any strategy, tactic or implementation in the economic, security or governing engines in Caribbean society.

“Us vs Them” …

… is the continuation of the February 2021 Teaching Series for the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean. (Every month, we present a series relevant to Caribbean life, culture and economics). For this month, we are looking at the subject of Zero Sum Thinking and lamenting how “Us vs Them” thinking permeates so much of the Caribbean mindset. It is NOT true for us to win, someone else must lose. Not rather, it is possible for “Win-Win”. This is Non-Zero Sum cooperation, collaboration, collusion, collectivity and community. This is the fifth entry, 5-of-6, on this Teaching Series. Consider, how this seamlessly fits in with the full catalog for this month:

  1. Zero Sum: Lesson 101 – No more “Gold Standard”
  2. Zero Sum: Realities of Globalism – “Non-Zero Sum” for the whole world
  3. Zero Sum: ICT as a tool, the “Great Equalizer”
  4. Zero Sum: Regional Tourism should not be a competition – Encore
  5. Zero Sum: Book Review – Racism is a factor; “Us vs Them”
  6. Zero Sum: How to fix “Inequality” – Raise the tide, all boats are elevated

We started this series on Zero Sum by looking at economic principles, establishing  that since we are no longer on a “Gold Standard”, any view of “haves versus have-nots” should no longer be an issue. We, the full 30 Caribbean member-states, can now all win, gain and grow. There should be no “Us vs Them” strategizing. This is a great lesson we can learn from this American experience; (do not be misled, the blatant racial segregation in the Jim Crow South was also practiced in other New World countries, including many Caribbean destinations; in fact, Colorism persists even in this day).

The book Go Lean … Caribbean posits that America’s history (and present) has been plagued with institutional racism (and another defect Crony-Capitalism). This should not the role model for the Caribbean to emulate. Rather, the book advocates for a Non-Zero Sum climate, with no “Us vs Them” racially. No, the roadmap calls for reforming and transforming Caribbean society to be the just, equitable homeland that we all seek. The book stressed that to accomplish this goal, there are some key community ethos that the community must adapt, and then also some strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies that must be executed.

Yes, we can …

In addition to the Go Lean book, this commentary has addressed this subject matter – reforming racial inequities – on many occasions. Consider this sample of previous blog-commentaries:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18963 Happy Chinese New Year – Honoring Sino people worldwide
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=20203 Black Image – Pluralism is the Goal
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18749 Good Example of Diversity and a ‘Great Place to Work’: Mercedes-Benz
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16102 Celebrating Diwali – A Glimpse of our Pluralistic Democracy
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14558 A Role Model of Being the Change in Civil Rights – Linda Brown, RIP
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14413 Repairing the Breach: ‘Hurt People Hurt People’ – Lynching History
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7204 ‘The Covenant with Black America’ – Ten Years Later
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5733 Better than America? Yes, We Can!
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5527 American Defects: Racism – Is It Over?
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1909 Using Music to Change Americas Race Relations – Berry Gordy

Heather McGhee is the American Author that penned this book, The Sum of Us, on the economic impact of racism in America. She did not only journalized the problems, she strategized solutions as well; see this depicted in an interview in the VIDEO here:

VIDEO – Heather McGhee – “The Sum of Us” & The True Cost of Racism | The Daily Social Distancing Show – https://youtu.be/IZpse-90KTY

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
Published on Feb 18, 2021 – Heather McGhee talks about examining the economic impact of racism in America in her new book “The Sum of Us,” and underlines the importance of having honest conversations about past and present racism at a community level. #DailyShow #TrevorNoah #HeatherMcGhee

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Per Heather McGhee, the First Step in resolving society’s woes: Stop being racist; stop pitting “Us vs Them”; stop being Zero-Sum; try including everyone in the community in elevating the economic, social and governing engines.

Again, yes, we can … . While the American South languished during the Bad Old Days, other communities thrived, as they did better with universal community building. The South had a lot of work to do.

Consider this example from Sports: In 1947, the Owner of the Major League Baseball Team “The Brooklyn Dodgers”, Branch Rickey, was the first to hire a Black Man – Jackie Robinson – on a baseball team. What was his motivation? To win baseball games … and championships. He was successful with this goal with a World Series Championship in 1955 … and then some:

Jackie Robinson was named National League Rookie of the Year [in 1947, the year he broke the racial barrier]. In 1949 he was the league’s Most Valuable Player. Robinson led the Brooklyn Dodgers to six league championships and one World Series victory. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. – https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jackie-Robinson

White-Only teams henceforth sacrificed the ability to win by discriminating against minorities. Today, Major League Baseball (MLB) is dominated by the best athletes in the world; the only thing that matters is talent, with little regards to ethnicity; (now Whites are the minority).

The Caribbean also, has some work to do. We must look for “Win-Win” with people who may be different.

The Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for effecting change in the Caribbean; it introduces the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) as a vehicle to bring about desired change in the region’s economics, security and governing engines. We want to be a pluralistic democracy with opportunity, equal rights and justice for all. All persons in the Caribbean are hereby urged to lean-in for this Go Lean roadmap.

Now’s the time for these empowerments in the Caribbean! It is time to build our better society. The strategies, tactics and implementations proposed in the book Go Lean…Caribbean are conceivable, believable and achievable. Yes, we can … do this; we can make our 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 & 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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Zero Sum: Lesson 101 – No More “Gold Standard”

Posted on February 20, 2021 in Economics, Ethos, Government, Social

Go Lean Commentary

Whether you realize it or not, Zero Sum Thinking is a real concern … and a real problem … in the Caribbean.

The default psychology of Zero-Sum Thinking refers to the perception that a situation is like a zero-sum game, where one person’s gain is another’s loss; (see the full encyclopedic treatment in the Appendix below).

This complex topic relates heavily to the economic discussions of “Supply and Demand“; actually it magnifies more on the different dynamics of Supply. The actuality is not everybody has the same level of supply – this is true despite whatever resource is being considered. If everyone had an adequate supply – if there was no scarcity – then this standard would not apply:

Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the Rules. – Old Adage

Just the premise of this Old Adage assumes a limited amount of gold, a “finite pie” and the challenge to get a slice of it. The term Zero Sum infers the same size pie and the activity to just change the slicing; the total mass of the pie never increases or decreases.

The actuality of a finite pie aligns with a primary Economic Principle, 1st among the 6 principles established in the orthodoxy of Economic Principles. This concept was explained in full details in the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean. See the excerpt here from Page 21:

  1. People Choose: We always want more than we can get and productive resources (human, natural, capital) are always limited. Therefore, because of this major economic problem of scarcity, we usually choose the alternative that provides the most benefits with the least cost.
  2. All Choices Involve Costs.
  3. People Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways.
  4. Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices and Incentives.
  5. Voluntary Trade Creates Wealth.
  6. The Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future.

This Economic Principle (1-of-6) predates the Go Lean book; it is Classic Economics. See the encyclopedic definition here:

Scarcity as an economic concept “… refers to the basic fact of life that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources which the best technical knowledge is capable of using to produce only limited maximum amounts of each economic good … .”[1] If the conditions of scarcity didn’t exist and an “infinite amount of every good could be produced or human wants fully satisfied … there would be no economic goods, i.e. goods that are relatively scarce…”[1] Scarcity is the limited availability of a commodity, which may be in demand in the market or by the commons. Scarcity also includes an individual’s lack of resources to buy commodities.[2] The opposite of scarcity is abundance.

The above points on scarcity are true and valid, when the supply of the limited resource – like gold – actually affects our life. But the world has actually moved away from Zero Sum Thinking, as there is no longer a Gold Standard for economic measurements. See more here:

A gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold. The gold standard was widely used in the 19th and early part of the 20th century. Most nations abandoned the gold standard as the basis of their monetary systems at some point in the 20th century, although many still hold substantial gold reserves.[1][2] – Source: Wikipedia

Unfortunately, the Caribbean has not caught up with this advanced thinking. There is no longer any excuses; we must now assimilate this concept that modern society has transformed to a Non-Zero Sum world. The sooner we accept this actuality, the better.

Many Caribbean people still believe that America is the “greatest” country in the world only because they have the largest Gold Reserves. But alas, as reported above, the Gold Standard no longer applies. The World now operates on a “Fiat Currency” principle, and so we can all grow, advance and win without someone else having to decline, lose or fail.

Let’s examine this closer! Every month, the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean presents a Teaching Series to address issues germane to Caribbean society. For this month of February 2021, we are looking at the psychology and sociology of Zero Sum Thinking. It turns out that many of our societal defects are tied to this reality – (see the Appendix below). This first entry, 1-of-6, introduces the concept and then we drill deeper and climb higher.  The full catalog of this series is detailed as follows:

  1. Zero Sum: Lesson 101 – No more “Gold Standard”
  2. Zero Sum: Realities of Globalism – “Non-Zero Sum” for the whole world
  3. Zero Sum: ICT as a tool, the “Great Equalizer”
  4. Zero Sum: Regional Tourism should not be a competition – Encore
  5. Zero Sum: Book Review – Racism is a factor; “Us vs Them”
  6. Zero Sum: How to fix “Inequality” – Raise the tide, all boats are elevated

We start our discussion on Zero Sum by looking at the economic picture – the Gold Standard. This aligns with the assertions of the Go Lean book, that regional stewards can reform and transform Caribbean society by first rebooting the economy engines.

# 6 – Need People Too – Not All About Money, or is it?
The quality of life for the citizenry is very important, otherwise, people leave, and take their time, talents and treasuries elsewhere. Family, cultural pride is more important than economics, and yet when the economics are bad, people leave. This is evident by the large Caribbean Diaspora in foreign lands – where they re-assembled their culture and civic pride. – Go Lean book Page 26 – Title: “10 Ways to Impact the Future“

The regional stewards need to pay more than the usual attention to this consideration. What regional stewards?

There is no such stewardship and this is the first step the political Caribbean needs to do to reform and transform the regional homeland. So that same Page 26 Go Lean Advocacy calls for this #1 “Way to Impact the Future“:

# 1 – Lean-in for the Caribbean Single Market & Economy initiative: Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU)
This will allow for the unification of the region into a Single Market economy of 30 countries, 42 million people and a GDP of over $800 Billion (based on 2010 figures), thereby creating the world’s 29th largest economy. The CU will then forge multiple Agencies to foster technology growth and garner benefits from the economic “Catch-Up” principle. This should double the GDP after 5 years and help create the structures for the meaningful future that past visionaries had foreseen.

The European Union is the Model for the Caribbean Union

In addition to an integrated political stewardship – which must come first – the roadmap calls for an integrated economic stewardship. The Go Lean book (Page 32) introduces the Caribbean Central Bank (CCB) with this mandate:

CCB – Mixed Basket – Monetary Strength
An obscure Murphy’s Law states “when people claim that it’s the principle, and not the money, chances are, it’s the money”. There are more important things in life than money, but somehow all these things can be bought/sold … for money. The CU strategy is to consolidate monetary reserves for the region into one currency, the Caribbean Dollar, managed by the technocratic Caribbean Central Bank. The C$ will be based on a mixed-basket of foreign reserves (US dollars, Euros, British pounds & Yens). This strategy allows the CU to negotiate with sufficient economic strengths.

The Euro is the Model for the Caribbean Dollar

So if Gold is no longer the Reserve Standard, and we are not limited to Zero Sum Thinking, then nothing prevents us from growing and growing our economy – monetary reserves and Fiat valuations.

This concept was thoroughly explained in a previous blog-commentary from March 25, 2014 entitled:

How to Create Money from Thin Air
Something more amazing happens in our modern economic system, money is created out of “thin air” … . How is this possible? This is accomplished through the Commercial/Central Banking system.

First of all, banks are financial institutions that take in deposits from people and use their money to give out loans to others. The reason why banks provide this service [to the community] for free is because they earn a profit by letting people deposit their money. Banks charge higher interests rates on the money they lend out compared to the money deposited. All in all, banks are both borrowers and lenders. People trust banks to store their money. The deposits allow banks to lend out money with higher interest rates with the expectancy that the loans will be paid back.

Banks have something called a required reserve ratio, mandated by the Central Bank; (the “Fed” in the US). This is the ratio of reserves to total deposits that banks are supposed to keep as reserves. Banks also have the right to increase the reserve ratio. They lend out the remaining percentage. For example, the bank has a 10% reserve ratio meaning it reserves 10% of its total deposits. It will then lend out the remaining 90%. When a person deposits $100, the bank is able to lend out $90 and keeps $10 for reserves. The $10 does not count as money since it is used as a reserve and may not be used for lending. So far, the bank has $100 and $90 currency loaned out. This is a total of $190 created as opposed to $100 before. Currency held by the public is money.

Of course, the borrower doesn’t simply keep the $90 but he will spend it. For instance, he will spend his money for a pair of soccer cleats at the Nike store. Now the Nike store has $90 but it will then deposit it back into the bank. The cycle then repeats itself. If the bank has more borrowers, it will certainly make a profit. If it lends again, it will lend out $81 and keep $9 on reserves.

The way banks create money is a cycle and over time, the profit compounds on top of each other and the original $100 can be [extended] potentially [to as high as] $1,000.[a]

So the new $900, compared to the original $100, is created from “thin air”.

Surely, you see how this new fractional banking regime is better than the old Gold Standard. If the monetary regime had remained tied to “gold”, the only value that would have mattered would have been an original deposit of $100 in Gold, not the $1000 in Fiat Currency. Rather than a Zero Sum system where that $100 in Gold only changes hands between parties and still amounts to $100, we now have a Non-Zero Sum regime, in which the focus and emphasis is on $1000, not only the $1000 – we now have a much Bigger Pie.

In this series, a reference is made to the need for a comprehensive roadmap for elevating the societal engines of the 30 Caribbean member-states for the Greater Good. We need to ensure that institutional stewardship is in place to manage this new economic regime. The world is already doing this with Non-Zero Sum Thinking. It is time we catch up.

Zero Sum Thinking is actually a bad Community Ethos – the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of society – while Non-Zero Sum Thinking reflects a new Community Ethos.

The dread of Zero Sum

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt the new Community Ethos we need for progress, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, protect, reform and transform the economic engines of Caribbean society. There is a lot of consideration in the book for establishing the CCB and the Single Currency (Caribbean Dollar or C$) in the region.  Plus, there have been a number of previous blog-commentaries by the Go Lean movement that have highlighted the ecosystem of monetary, central banking and currency best practices. See a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=19452 Big Hairy Audacious Goal: Regional Currency – ‘In God We Trust’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16530 China seeks to de-Americanize the world’s economy
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16210 In Defense of Trade – The Real Threat of Currency Assassins
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14248 Leading with Money Matters – Almighty Dollar
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13744 Failure to Launch – Economics: The Quest for a ‘Single Currency’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13365 Case Study from West Africa: Single Currency for 8 Diverse Countries
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10513 Case Study from India: Transforming Money Countrywide
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8381 Case Study on Central Banking for Puerto Rico
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7140 Case Study from Azerbaijan – Setting its currency to Free Float
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6800 Case Study from Venezuela: Suing Black Market currency website
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3858 Case Study from ECB: Unveiling 1 trillion Euro stimulus program
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3814 Case Study from Switzerland: Unpegging the franc
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=360 Case Study on Central Banks: Creating Money from ‘Thin Air’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=833 Case Study from the Euro: One Currency, Diverse Economies

This consideration is bigger than just a discussion on the “Gold Standard” and regional currencies. As related in Appendix below, there are psychological and sociological limitations associated with Zero and Non-Zero Sum Thinking:

  • Labor Negotiations – Winners does not have to mean losers.
  • Immigration – New Arrivals does not mean “less for the status quo”.
  • Academic Grading – On the curve?
  • Jury Deliberation – Evidence has point to more than one conclusion
  • Job Skills Competence – Jack of all trades, master of …
  • Inter-personal relations – Love more than one person (i.e. best friends)
  • International Trade – Trade Deficits do not mean losses

See this portrayal in this VIDEO Book Review:

VIDEO – Thomas Sowell – Zero-Sum Thinking – https://youtu.be/5dbrzo5-sdE

Posted June 1, 2017 – Excerpt from Thomas Sowell “Basic Economics A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy 2nd Edition”: http://amzn.to/2quYW9l​

Subscribe to The War on Mind and Body: https://goo.gl/mGMe2a​

– Video Upload powered by https://www.TunesToTube.com

In summary, it is inexcusable that the Caribbean has failed to adapt to this new monetary, economic, sociological and psychological growth that is associated with Non-Zero Sum Thinking.

Let move forward now!

We hereby urge all Caribbean stakeholders – stewards and subjects – to lean-in to this comprehensive Go Lean roadmap to elevate Caribbean society. This is the work we must do to make our 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 & 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.

—————–

Appendix – Title: Zero-Sum Thinking

Zero-Sum Thinking perceives situations as zero-sum games, where one person’s gain would be another’s loss.[1][2][3] The term is derived from game theory. However, unlike the game theory concept, zero-sum thinking refers to a psychological construct—a person’s subjective interpretation of a situation. Zero-sum thinking is captured by the saying “your gain is my loss” (or conversely, “your loss is my gain”). Rozycka-Tran et al. (2015) defined zero-sum thinking as:

A general belief system about the antagonistic nature of social relations, shared by people in a society or culture and based on the implicit assumption that a finite amount of goods exists in the world, in which one person’s winning makes others the losers, and vice versa … a relatively permanent and general conviction that social relations are like a zero-sum game. People who share this conviction believe that success, especially economic success, is possible only at the expense of other people’s failures.[1]

Zero-sum bias is a cognitive bias towards zero-sum thinking; it is people’s tendency to intuitively judge that a situation is zero-sum, even when this is not the case.[4] This bias promotes zero-sum fallacies, false beliefs that situations are zero-sum. Such fallacies can cause other false judgements and poor decisions.[5][6] In economics, “zero-sum fallacy” generally refers to the fixed-pie fallacy.

Examples
There are many examples of zero-sum thinking, some of them fallacious.

  1. When jurors assume that any evidence compatible with more than one theory offers no support for any theory, even if the evidence is incompatible with some possibilities or the theories are not mutually exclusive.[5]
  2. When students in a classroom think they are being graded on a curve when in fact they are being graded based on predetermined standards.[4]
  3. In a negotiation when one negotiator thinks that they can only gain at the expense of the other party (i.e., that mutual gain is not possible).[7]
  4. In the context of social group competition, the belief that more resources for one group (e.g., immigrants) means less for others (e.g., non-immigrants).[8]
  5. In the context of romantic relationships, the idea that loving more than one person at a time means loving each one less.[9]
  6. Jack of all trades, master of none: the idea that having more skills means having less aptitude (also known as compensatory reasoning).[10]
  7. In copyright infringement debate, the idea that every unauthorized duplication is a lost sale.[11][12][13]
  8. When politicians argue that international trade must mean that one party is “winning” and another is “losing” when transfer of goods and services at mutually-agreeable prices is in general mutually beneficial, or that a trade deficit represents “losing” money to another country.
  9. Group membership is sometimes treated as zero-sum, such that stronger membership in one group is seen as weaker membership in another.[14]

Causes
There is no evidence which suggests that zero-sum thinking is an enduring feature of human psychology. Game-theoretic situations rarely apply to instances of individual behaviour. This is demonstrated by the ordinary response to the prisoner’s dilemma.

Zero-sum thinking is the result of both proximate and ultimate causes.

Ultimate causes
In terms of ultimate causation, zero-sum thinking might be a legacy of human evolution. Specifically, it might be understood to be a psychological adaptation that facilitated successful resource competition in the environment of ancestral humans where resources like mates, status, and food were perpetually scarce.[4][15][3] For example, Rubin suggests that the pace of technological growth was so slow during the period in which modern humans evolved that no individual would have observed any growth during their lifetime: “Each person would live and die in a world of constant technology and income. Thus, there was no incentive to evolve a mechanism for understanding or planning for growth” (p. 162).[3] Rubin also points to instances where the understanding of laypeople and economists about economic situations diverge, such as the lump-of-labor fallacy.[3] From this perspective, zero-sum thinking might be understood as the default way that humans think about resource allocations, which must be unlearned by, for example, an education in basic economics.

Proximate causes
Zero-sum thinking can also be understood in terms of proximate causation, which refers to the developmental history of individuals within their own lifetime. The proximate causes of zero-sum thinking include the experiences that individuals have with resource allocations, as well as their beliefs about specific situations, or their beliefs about the world in general.

Resource-scarce environments
One of the proximate causes of zero-sum thinking is the experiences that individuals have with scarce resources or zero-sum interactions in their developmental environment.[16] In 1965, George M. Foster argued that members of “peasant” societies have an “Image of Limited Good,” which he argued was learned through by experiences in a society that was essentially zero-sum.

“The model of cognitive orientation that seems to me best to account for peasant behavior is the “Image of Limited Good.” By “Image of Limited Good” I mean that broad areas of peasant behavior are patterned in such fashion as to suggest that peasants view their social, economic, and natural universes—their total environment—as one in which all of the desired things in life such as land, wealth, health, friendship and love, manliness and honor, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity and are always in short supply, as far as the peasant is concerned. Not only do these and all other “good things” exist in finite and limited quantities, but in addition there is no way directly within peasant power to increase the available quantities … When the peasant views his economic world as one in which Limited Good prevails, and he can progress only at the expense of another, he is usually very near the truth.” (pps. 67-68)[16]

More recently, Rozycka-Tran et al. (2015) conducted a cross-cultural study that compared the responses of individuals in 37 nations to a scale of zero-sum beliefs. This scale asked individuals to report their agreement with statements that measured zero-sum thinking. For example, one item on the scale stated that “Successes of some people are usually failures of others”. Rozycka-Tran et al. found that individuals in countries with lower Gross Domestic Product showed stronger zero-sum beliefs on average, suggesting that “the belief in zero-sum game seems to arise in countries with lower income, where resources are scarce” (p. 539).[1] Similarly, Rozycka-Tran et al. found that individuals with lower socioeconomic status displayed stronger zero-sum beliefs.

Resource scarcity beliefs
Related to experiences with resource-scarce environments is the belief that a resource is scarce or finite. For example, the lump of labour fallacy refers to the belief that in the economy there is a fixed amount of work to be done, and thus the allocation of jobs is zero-sum.[17] Although the belief that a resource is scarce might develop through experiences with resource scarcity, this is not necessarily the case. For example, individuals might come to believe that wealth is finite because it is a claim that has been repeated by politicians or journalists.[18]

Resource entitlement beliefs
Another proximate cause of zero-sum thinking is the belief that one (or one’s group) is entitled to a certain share of a resource.[19][9] An extreme case is the belief that one is entitled to all of a resource that exists, implying that any gains by another is one’s own loss. Less extreme is the belief that one (or one’s group) is superior and therefore entitled to more than others. For example, perceptions of zero-sum group competition have been associated with the Dominance sub-scale of the social dominance orientation personality trait, which itself has been characterized as a zero-sum worldview (“a view of human existence as zero-sum,” p. 999).[20] Individuals who practice monogamy have also been found to think about love in consensually nonmonogamous relationships as zero-sum, and it was suggested that this might be because they believe that individuals in romantic relationships have an entitlement to their partner’s love.[9]

Effects
When individuals think that a situation is zero-sum, they will be more likely to act competitively (or less cooperatively) towards others, because they will see others as a competitive threat. For example, when students think that they are being graded on a curve—a grading scheme that makes the allocation of grades zero-sum—they will be less likely to provide assistance to a peer who is proximate in status to themselves, because that peer’s gain could be their own loss.[2]

When individuals perceive that there is a zero-sum competition in society for resources like jobs, they will be less likely to hold pro-immigration attitudes (because immigrants would deplete the resource).[8] Zero-sum thinking may also lead to certain social prejudices. When individuals hold zero-sum beliefs about love in romantic relationships, they are more prejudiced against consensual nonmonogamists (presumably because the perception of zero-sumness makes consensual nonmonogamy seem inadequate or unfair).[9]

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Black History – Pandemic-wise: A Lesson from the Ancestors

Posted on February 17, 2021 in Ethos, Industries, Social

Go Lean Commentary

The Ancestors are speaking to us, telling us to remember them, remember their sacrifices and achievements, and then to follow their models on mitigating communicable diseases.

Listen carefully!

Listen, especially now during Black History Month 2021, in the middle of a global pandemic, to the lessons from previous generations, or forefathers and foremothers.

Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching. – The Bible; Proverbs 1:8 New International Version

There is no way to justify Slavery and the Slave Trade! It was an abominable stain on European society and the Church; see the Appendix VIDEO below.

But we cannot change that Bad History. Like all things historic, all we can do is study it, learn from it and change the present-future to optimize our lives and society based on those lessons. This aligns with the Old Adage:

Those who do not learn from history are forced to repeat it.

So now, we must listen to the lessons from our Ancestors in dealing with a modern day crisis – COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic. Our Ancestors told us, and the whole world how to mitigate, minimize and manage this and all epidemics. See this Lesson in History in the story here:

Title: How an Enslaved African Man in Boston Helped Save Generations from Smallpox
Sub-title: In the early 1700s, Onesimus shared a revolutionary way to prevent smallpox.
By: Erin Blakemore

The news was terrifying to colonists in Massachusetts: Smallpox had made it to Boston and was spreading rapidly. The first victims, passengers on a ship from the Caribbean, were shut up in a house identified only by a red flag that read “God have mercy on this house.” Meanwhile, hundreds of residents of the bustling colonial town had started to flee for their lives, terrified of what might happen if they exposed themselves to the frequently deadly disease.

They had reason to fear. The virus was extremely contagious, spreading like wildfire in large epidemics. Smallpox patients experienced fever, fatigue and a crusty rash that could leave disfiguring scars. In up to 30 percent of cases, it killed.

But the smallpox epidemic of 1721 was different than any that came before it. As sickness swept through the city, killing hundreds in a time before modern medical treatment or a robust understanding of infectious disease, an enslaved man known only as Onesimus suggested a potential way to keep people from getting sick. Intrigued by Onesimus’ idea, a brave doctor and an outspoken minister undertook a bold experiment to try to stop smallpox in its tracks.

Smallpox was one of the era’s deadliest afflictions. “Few diseases at this time were as universal or fatal,” notes historian Susan Pryor. The colonists saw its effects not just among their own countrymen, but among the Native Americans to whom they introduced the disease. Smallpox destroyed Native communities that, with no immunity, were unable to fight off the virus.

Smallpox also entered the colonies on slave ships, transmitted by enslaved people who, in packed and unsanitary quarters, passed the disease along to one another and, eventually, to colonists at their destinations. One of those destinations was Massachusetts, which was a center of the early slave trade. The first enslaved people had arrived in Massachusetts in 1638, and by 1700, about 1,000 enslaved people lived in the colony, most in Boston.

In 1706, an enslaved West African man was purchased for the prominent Puritan minister Cotton Mather by his congregation. Mather gave him the name Onesimus, after an enslaved man in the Bible whose name meant “useful.” Mather, who had been a powerful figure in the Salem Witch Trials, believed that owners of enslaved people had a duty to convert enslaved people to Christianity and educate them. But like other white men of his era, he also looked down on what he called the “Devilish rites” of Africans and worried that enslaved people might openly rebel.

Mather didn’t trust Onesimus: He wrote about having to watch him carefully due to what he thought was “thievish” behavior, and recorded in his diary that he was “wicked” and “useless.” But in 1716, Onesimus told him something he did believe: That he knew how to prevent smallpox.

Onesimus, who “is a pretty intelligent fellow,” Mather wrote, told him he had had smallpox—and then hadn’t. Onesimus said that he “had undergone an operation, which had given him something of the smallpox and would forever preserve him from it…and whoever had the courage to use it was forever free of the fear of contagion.”

The operation Onesimus referred to consisted of rubbing pus from an infected person into an open wound on the arm. Once the infected material was introduced into the body, the person who underwent the procedure was inoculated against smallpox. It wasn’t a vaccination, which involves exposure to a less dangerous virus to provoke immunity. But it did activate the recipient’s immune response and protected against the disease most of the time.

Mather was fascinated. He verified Onesimus’ story with that of other enslaved people, and learned that the practice had been used in Turkey and China. He became an evangelist for inoculation—also known as variolation—and spread the word throughout Massachusetts and elsewhere in the hopes it would help prevent smallpox.

But Mather hadn’t bargained on how unpopular the idea would be. The same prejudices that caused him to distrust his servant made other white colonists reluctant to undergo a medical procedure developed by or for Black people. Mather “was vilified,” historian Ted Widmer told WGBH. “A local newspaper, called The New England Courant, ridiculed him. An explosive device was thrown through his windows with an angry note. There was an ugly racial element to the anger.” Religion also contributed: Other preachers argued that it was against God’s will to expose his creatures to dangerous diseases.

But in 1721, Mather and Zabdiel Boylston, the only physician in Boston who supported the technique, got their chance to test the power of inoculation. That year, a smallpox epidemic spread from a ship to the population of Boston, sickening about half of the city’s residents. Boylston sprang into action, inoculating his son and his enslaved workers against the disease. Then, he began inoculating other Bostonians. Of the 242 people he inoculated, only six died—one in 40, as opposed to one in seven deaths among the population of Boston who didn’t undergo the procedure.

The smallpox epidemic wiped out 844 people in Boston, over 14 percent of the population. But it had yielded hope for future epidemics. It also helped set the stage for vaccination. In 1796, Edward Jenner developed an effective vaccine that used cowpox to provoke smallpox immunity. It worked. Eventually, smallpox vaccination became mandatory in Massachusetts.

Did Onesimus live to see the success of the technique he introduced to Mather? It isn’t clear. Nothing is known of his later life other than that he partially purchased his freedom. To do so, writes historian Steven J. Niven, he gave Mather money to purchase another enslaved person. What is clear is that the knowledge he passed on saved hundreds of lives—and led to the eventual eradication of smallpox.

In 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox entirely eradicated due to the spread of immunization worldwide. It remains the only infectious disease to have been entirely wiped out.

Source: History Channel; posted Feb 3, 2021; retrieved Feb 13, 2021 from: https://www.history.com/news/smallpox-vaccine-onesimus-slave-cotton-mather

What is the take-away?

Get inoculated or vaccinated. The human body and immune system has a way of learning, in advance, how to counteract viruses. The Ancestors conveyed this lesson to the waiting world that there is a way to build up our personal defenses by introducing a virus in a controlled manner.

This is a Big Deal now, as many descendants of those same slaves – in the Americas and the Caribbean – refuse to consider the option of vaccinations for COVID-19. See this excerpt from a previous blog-commentary from August 29, 2020:

Title: Pandemic Playbook – COVID Vaccine: To Be or Not To Be

The world is enduring the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic crisis; it is wreaking havoc on the world’s economic engines – $250 Billion a day in losses – and Public Health deliveries. The only hope is a vaccine, of which there are a number of them in development (Phase I – Test Tubes, Phase II – Lab Mice, Phase III – Human Trials). Around $10bn is being spent on finding a vaccine for this Coronavirus.

Will you consume or ingest the eventual vaccine?

Will you allow your children to ingest? What percentage of people in the community will refuse to ingest?

What if consumption is a prerequisite for work, school, church, travel, etc.?
…
But don’t get it twisted! The Caribbean member-states boast a Service industrial economy – tourism. To participate in this industry space will require compliance. Tourists – by air for resort-based stay-overs or cruise line passengers – will not want to expose themselves to possible infections.

Lastly, individuals can simply chose to exit societal functioning – a self-imposed quarantine; think: Leper Colony. These ones will have to take a seat – with a view – and watch life pass them by.

Is this what you want for yourself, your family and your community? If you chose NO VACCINE, you have that right. But your children may choose differently. Especially those children that you invested so selflessly to get advanced education – college graduates. Already, this population have a higher than normal abandonment rate in the region.

The Caribbean region is in an epidemiological crisis. What are we to do?

We hereby urge all to listen to the Ancestors: Take the vaccine.

A lot of blood, sweat and tears have spilled to get us to this point; do not disregard those sacrifices.

Learning lessons from our Ancestors in Black History is always the motive every February of every year in the US and other countries. The movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Commentary have consistently participated in this quest to educate Caribbean communities on the merits of Black History. In fact, this commentary is our 326th submissions on a theme related to Black History and/or the African experience in the New World.

Consider this sample list from previous blog-commentaries:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16685 Ready for February – Black History Month
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=20237 Black Image – Slavery in History: Lessons from the Bible
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18152 A Lesson from America’s Slavery History – Greatest Story Never Told
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18093 400 Years of Slavery – International Day of Remembrance
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=17917 What Went Wrong? ‘7 to 1’ – Quantifying Caribbean ‘Less Than’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8724 Remembering Marcus Garvey: Still Relevant Today
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4971 Authorizing Slavery – Royal Charters: Truth & Consequence
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2297 A Lesson in History: Booker T versus Du Bois

Learning lessons from the past, from Black History, would mean acting in harmony with those lessons. While we may not be able to fix the historic past, surely we should apply the wisdom from the Ancestors and fix the present and ensure a brighter future.

The Go Lean movement is here to do more than just pique our collective conscience; we are here to act! The purpose of the Go Lean book is to usher in a Caribbean regional administrations to cooperate, collaborate and coordinate technocratic Homeland Security solutions for all 30 Caribbean member-states – the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) – despite their historical legacies or governmental hierarchy.

See this synopsis here, as related in a previous Go Lean commentary from March 24, 2015:

Title: A Lesson in History – SARS in Hong Kong
The CU is not designed to just be in some advisory role when it comes to pandemic crises, but rather to possess the authority to act as a Security Apparatus for the region’s Greater Good. This is the mandate as pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Page 11) related to climate change, but it applies equally to pandemics, to …

  • “protect the entire region 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 … challenges”.

Legally, each Caribbean member-state would ratify a Status of Forces Agreement that would authorize this role for the CU agencies (Emergency Management and Disease Control & Management) to serve as a proxy and deputy of the Public Health administrations for each member-state. This would thusly empower these CU agencies to quarantine and detain citizens with probable cause of an infectious disease. The transparency, accountability and chain-of-command would be intact with the appropriate checks-and-balances of the CU’s legislative and judicial oversight. This is a lesson learned from Hong Kong 2003 with China’s belligerence.

As concluded in that previous August 29, 2020 blog-commentary, we urge all Caribbean stakeholders – governments, citizens, doctors and patients – to participate in the global quest to eradicate this [COVID-19] pandemic. This is the roadmap for making the Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work, heal and play. [The slave named Onesimus did this with Smallpox in 1721]; Jonas Salk did it with Polio … eventually; we can too. So our vision, this quest is conceivable, believable and achievable.

Let’s do our part and learn these important lessons from our Ancestors. 🙂

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 & 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 11 – 13):

ix. Whereas the realities of healthcare and an aging population cannot be ignored and cannot be afforded without some advanced mitigation, the Federation must arrange for health plans to consolidate premiums of both healthy and sickly people across the wider base of the entire Caribbean population. The mitigation should extend further to disease management …

x. Whereas we are surrounded and allied to nations of larger proportions in land mass, populations, and treasuries, elements in their societies may have ill-intent in their pursuits, at the expense of the safety and security of our citizens. We must therefore appoint “new guards” to ensure our public safety and threats against our society, both domestic and foreign. …

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.

xii. Whereas the legacy in recent times in individual states may be that of ineffectual governance with no redress to higher authority, the accedence of this Federation will ensure accountability and escalation of human and civil rights of the people for good governance, justice assurances, due process and the rule of law. As such, any threats of a “failed state” status for any member state must enact emergency measures on behalf of the Federation to protect the human, civil and property rights of the citizens, residents, allies, trading partners, and visitors of the affected member state and the Federation as a whole.

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 accidence 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.

———————–

Appendix VIDEO: Life Aboard a Slave Ship | History – https://youtu.be/PmQvofAiZGA


HISTORY
Published on Feb 7, 2019 – From approximately 1525 to 1866, 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Middle Passage to serve as slaves in the New World. Life aboard slave ships was agonizing and dangerous; nearly 2 million slaves would perish on their journey across the Atlantic.

#HistoryChannel​
Read More: http://po.st/slave_ship​

Check out exclusive HISTORY content:

Website – http://www.history.com​
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Twitter – https://twitter.com/history​

HISTORY®, now reaching more than 98 million homes, is the leading destination for award-winning original series and specials that connect viewers with history in an informative, immersive, and entertaining manner across all platforms. The network’s all-original programming slate features a roster of hit series, epic miniseries, and scripted event programming. Visit us at http://www.HISTORY.com​ for more info.

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Happy Lunar New Year … Again – Encore

Posted on February 12, 2021 in Ethos, Planning, Social

It’s Happy New Year … again, in China … and other Asian countries.

See this “Feature Article”:

Title: Lunar New Year’s Traditions and Superstitions, Explained
Sub-title: The holiday’s about luck, health, and reuniting with family.
By Samantha Vincenty

When people talk about the “holiday season” in the U.S., they typically refer to that period between Thanksgiving dinner and New Year’s Day. But shortly after that, another massive holiday brings friends and family together in several Asian countries, with concurrent parties that carry on the traditions stateside. The Lunar New Year, most commonly associated with the Chinese New Year or Spring Festival, typically falls sometime between January 21 and February 20 annually. Lunar New Year 2021 is on February 12, and in terms of the Chinese zodiac animal, it’s the Year of the Ox.

“Google Doodle” for February 12, 2021

It’s called the Lunar New Year because it marks the first new moon of the lunisolar calendars traditional to many east Asian countries including China, South Korea, and Vietnam, which are regulated by the cycles of the moon and sun. As the New York Times explains, “A solar year—the time it takes Earth to orbit the sun—lasts around 365 days, while a lunar year, or 12 full cycles of the Moon, is roughly 354 days.” As with the Jewish lunisolar calendar, “a month is still defined by the moon, but an extra month is added periodically to stay close to the solar year.” This is why the new year falls on a different day within that month-long window each year.

In China, the 15-day celebration kicks off on New Year’s Eve with a family feast called a reunion dinner full of traditional Lunar New Year foods, and typically ends with the Lantern Festival. “It’s really a time for new beginnings, and family gathering,” says Nancy Yao Maasbach, president of New York City’s Museum of Chinese in America. Three overarching themes, she says, are “fortune, happiness, and health.”

Here’s what to know about Lunar New Year traditions, and what more than 1.5 billion people do to celebrate it.
…
Source: Posted and retrieved Feb 12, 2021 from: https://www.oprahmag.com/life/a34892893/what-is-lunar-new-year-festival/

Why should we commemorate or even pay attention to this Sinophone culture? For one reason, as explained in the foregoing article: 1.5 Billion people.

Size matters…

This is so familiar for the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean; as we published a previous blog-commentary on the same topic last year, just as the Coronavirus Pandemic was blowing up round the worlds – it was hard to celebrate anything “Chinese” then. It is only apropos that we Encore that commentary again now, as we measure this milestone in the annals of Caribbean life.

The Wuhan, China-bred Coronavirus is still wreaking havoc on the world stage. But China has done better in managing this crisis.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste …

… China has not wasted this crisis. As the world’s economy has receded, China’s had expanded. Wow!

We need more of the Chinese actuality in our Caribbean actuality. We need to invite, retain and return China’s time, talent and treasuries. See how that previous blog-commentary presented that thesis last year; consume this commentary here/now:

—————-

Go Lean Commentary – Happy Chinese New Year

Happy New Year …

No, not the January 1st thing, but rather the January 25th thing – the Chinese New Year.

This is a Big Deal in China and among the Chinese Diaspora – Sinophone – throughout the world. There is great importance to this observation. See this VIDEO and encyclopedic reference here:

VIDEO – Everything you need to know about the Chinese New Year – https://youtu.be/3I-R5S3czyw

TRT World
Posted January 24, 2020 – Here’s everything you need to know about the Chinese New Year – how it’s celebrated, it’s history, and what the animals represent.

#Chinese New Year #Spring Festival #metalrat

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Visit our website: http://trt.world

————————————

Title: Chinese New Year
Chinese New Year[a], also referred to as Lunar New Year, is the Chinese festival that celebrates the beginning of a new year on the traditional Chinese calendar. The festival is usually referred to as the Spring Festival in mainland China,[b] and is one of several Lunar New Years in Asia. Observances traditionally take place from the evening preceding the first day of the year to the Lantern Festival, held on the 15th day of the year. The first day of Chinese New Year begins on the new moon that appears between 21 January and 20 February.[2] In 2020, the first day of the Chinese New Year will be on Saturday, 25 January, initiating the Year of the Rat.

Chinese New Year is a major holiday in China, and has strongly influenced Lunar new year celebrations of China’s neighbouring cultures, including the Korean New Year (seol), the Tết of Vietnam, and the Losar of Tibet.[3] It is also celebrated worldwide in regions and countries with significant Overseas Chinese or Sinophone populations, including Singapore,[4]Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar,[5]Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines,[6] and Mauritius,[7] as well as many in North America and Europe.[8][9][10]

Chinese New Year is associated with several myths and customs. The festival was traditionally a time to honour deities as well as ancestors.[11] Within China, regional customs and traditions concerning the celebration of the New Year vary widely,[12] and the evening preceding Chinese New Year’s Day is frequently regarded as an occasion for Chinese families to gather for the annual reunion dinner. It is also traditional for every family to thoroughly clean their house, in order to sweep away any ill-fortune and to make way for incoming good luck. Another custom is the decoration of windows and doors with red paper-cuts and couplets. Popular themes among these paper-cuts and couplets include that of good fortune or happiness, wealth, and longevity. Other activities include lighting firecrackers and giving money in red paper envelopes. For the northern regions of China, dumplings are featured prominently in meals celebrating the festival. It often serves as the first meal of the year either at midnight or as breakfast of the first day.
…
Festivities
New Year’s Eve
The biggest event of any Chinese New Year’s Eve is the annual reunion dinner. Dishes consisting of special meats are served at the tables, as a main course for the dinner and offering for the New Year. This meal is comparable to Thanksgiving dinner in the U.S. and remotely similar to Christmas dinner in other countries with a high percentage of Christians.

In northern China, it is customary to make jiaozi, or dumplings, after dinner to eat around midnight. Dumplings symbolize wealth because their shape resembles a Chinese sycee. In contrast, in the South, it is customary to make a glutinous new year cake (niangao) and send pieces of it as gifts to relatives and friends in the coming days. Niángāo [Pinyin] literally means “new year cake” with a homophonous meaning of “increasingly prosperous year in year out”.[44]

After dinner, some families go to local temples hours before the new year begins to pray for a prosperous new year by lighting the first incense of the year; however in modern practice, many households hold parties and even hold a countdown to the new year. Traditionally, firecrackers were lit to scare away evil spirits with the household doors sealed, not to be reopened until the new morning in a ritual called “opening the door of fortune” (开财门; 開財門; kāicáimén).[45]

Beginning in 1982, the CCTV New Year’s Gala is broadcast in China four hours before the start of the New Year and lasts until the succeeding early morning. Watching it has gradually become a tradition in China. A tradition of going to bed late on New Year’s Eve, or even keeping awake the whole night and morning, known as shousui (守岁), is still practised as it is thought to add on to one’s parents’ longevity.

First day
The first day is for the welcoming of the deities of the heavens and earth, officially beginning at midnight. It is a traditional practice to light fireworks, burn bamboo sticks and firecrackers and to make as much of a din as possible to chase off the evil spirits as encapsulated by nian of which the term Guo Nian was derived. Many Buddhists abstain from meat consumption on the first day because it is believed to ensure longevity for them. Some consider lighting fires and using knives to be bad luck on New Year’s Day, so all food to be consumed is cooked the days before. On this day, it is considered bad luck to use the broom, as good fortune is not to be “swept away” symbolically.

Most importantly, the first day of Chinese New Year is a time to honor one’s elders and families visit the oldest and most senior members of their extended families, usually their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.

For Buddhists, the first day is also the designated holy day of MaitreyaBodhisattva (better known as the more familiar Budai Luohan), the Buddha-to-be. People also abstain from killing animals.

Some families may invite a lion dance troupe as a symbolic ritual to usher in the Chinese New Year as well as to evict bad spirits from the premises. Members of the family who are married also give red envelopes containing cash known as lai see (Cantonese dialect) or angpow (Hokkien, Chaozhou, and Fujian dialects), or hongbao (Mandarin), a form of blessings and to suppress the aging and challenges associated with the coming year, to junior members of the family, mostly children and teenagers. Business managers also give bonuses through red packets to employees for good luck, smooth-sailing, good health and wealth.

While fireworks and firecrackers are traditionally very popular, some regions have banned them due to concerns over fire hazards. For this reason, various city governments (e.g., Kowloon, Beijing, Shanghai for a number of years) issued bans over fireworks and firecrackers in certain precincts of the city. As a substitute, large-scale fireworks display have been launched by governments in such city-states as Hong Kong and Singapore. However, it is a tradition that the indigenous peoples of the walled villages of New Territories, Hong Kong are permitted to light firecrackers and launch fireworks in a limited scale.

Source: Retrieved January 25, 2020 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_New_Year

What’s the Big Deal? Well, for starters, this relates to the 1.4 Billion people in China. That’s a market size that is bigger than North America and the European Union … combined. Consider the encyclopedic details in the Appendix below.

You see it, right? You do see why this is important; 1.5 Billion people (out of 7.7 Billion) in a world where Size Matters (as related in this previous blog-commentary from August 26, 2016):

For Hollywood – a metonym for the film-television-video industry – any access to large markets is a win-win.

Enter China…

… this country has 1.3 billion people. That’s a lot of “eye-balls”. This country, considering its history, used to be closed to western commerce and movie distributions. Now, its open … and advancing. Those 1.3 billion pairs of eye-balls are presenting a lot of opportunities and now starting to wield power.

For the Caribbean, this is a necessary discussion for the planners and stewards of a new Caribbean; this requires a consideration of the economic engines for our communities. This is the assertion of the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean – that size matters when it comes to marketing your “Export Products & Services”. For us in the Caribbean, our primary export is tourism – we sell travel experiences to consumers around the world. – we must consider the 20-percent of the population that features Sinophone culture.

We must curry their favor!

So Happy New Year to our Sinophone friends and family.

Yes, we have Sinophone family members in the Caribbean. In a previous blog-commentary, it was detailed how Chinese immigrants were “recruited” to come and impact the Caribbean eco-system. Consider this excerpt:

10 Things We Want from China and 10 Things We Do Not Want
Like it or not, the Caribbean is in competition with the rest of the world – and we are losing! …

Now we must consider other countries … that compete with us and are doing MUCH BETTER jobs of contending in this competitive environment. We must consider China and India:

China … went from “zero to hero”, emerging as an economic Super Power in short order. We can look, listen and learn from the Chinese eco-system; their mainland (the Peoples Republic of China), the special territories of Hong Kong and Taiwan (the Republic of China). We can lend-a-hand in reforming and transforming our own Caribbean region – as China has had to do – and we can eventually lead a reboot and turn-around of Caribbean society; again as China has done. …

While Caribbean people are not fleeing their homeland to relocate to China. there is a Diaspora issue associated with Caribbean-China relations: Indentured Servitude. At the end of the era of Caribbean slavery (1830’s to 1840’s), the plantation system required a replacement labor source; many Chinese nationals were thusly “recruited” as Indentured Servants to the region – British, French and Spanish lands – see here:

  • There were two main waves of Chinese migration to the Caribbean region. The first wave of Chinese consisted of indentured labourers who were brought to the Caribbean predominantly Trinidad, British Guiana and Cuba, to work on sugar plantations during the post-Emancipation period. The second wave was comprised of free voluntary migrants, consisting of either small groups (usually relatives) to British Guiana, Jamaica and Trinidad from the 1890’s to the 1940’s. In fact the most modern Caribbean Chinese are descended from this second group. – Caribbean-Atlas.com

Derivatives of the 18,000-plus Chinese immigrants are still here in the Caribbean today. These descendants have grown in numbers and power (economic and political) in the region. They are part of the fabric of our society. They are home in the Caribbean; and we are at home with them

So we need to embrace the Sinophone world, here and abroad – we must “curry their favor”. The liberal view is to value what they value and honor what they honor, while the conservative view is to NOT disrespect this people-culture and allow them to co-exist, survive and thrive. Doing so extends hospitality to these people and incentivizes them to trade with us – come visit as tourists – and impact our economic prospects.

This is the same thing we said about India and the Indophone Diaspora, in a previous blog-commentary from October 2017:

Making a ‘Pluralistic Democracy’ – Respecting Diwali
A “Pluralistic Democracy” … means a society where the many different ethnic groups (and religions) have respect, equal rights, equal privileges and equal protections under the law; where there are no superior rights to any majority and no special deprivations to any minority. The expectation is for anyone person to be treated like everyone else. …

We fail so miserably in respecting non-standard traditions. The truth of the matter is that while religious toleration appears to be high in the Caribbean, this is really only true of European-styled Christian faiths. Other non-White religious traditions (let’s consider Hindu) are often ignored or even ridiculed in open Caribbean society, despite the large number of adherents. Of the 30 member-states to comprise the Caribbean Single Market, 3 of them have a large Indian-Hindu ethnicity. As a result, in these communities, though lowly promoted, one of the biggest annual celebrations for those communities is Diwali or Divali

… While Diwali is a religious celebration, many aspects of this culture spills-over to general society; see the detailed plans of a previous year (2009) in Appendix A below. This celebration, in many ways, is similar to Christmas spilling-over to non-Christian people in Christian countries. So the festivities carry a heavy civic-cultural “feel” as opposed to religious Hindu adherence. Plus, these values here are positive community ethos that any stewards in any society would want to promote: “the victory of light over darkness, good over evil, knowledge over ignorance, and hope over despair”.

What about the argument that this Chinese (and Indian) toleration – like celebrating the Chinese New Year – is not Christian?

Don’t get it twisted!

Christmas – the western equivalent to the Chinese New Year tradition – is not Christian either, consider – Four reasons Christmas is not Christian:

    1. Dec. 25 is the wrong day, and it’s celebrated for the wrong god. Dec. 25 is associated with many pagan birth myths—not Christ’s birth.
    2. Most Christmas traditions come from pagan religions, not the Bible.
    3. There is no Santa Claus. Parents shouldn’t lie to their children.
    4. Christians should keep the holy days that Jesus kept, not holidays that originated in paganism.

. Source:  January 25, 2020 from: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/god/blog/four-reasons-christmas-is-not-christian/

The movement behind the Go Lean book have always advocated this community ethos:

Live and let live.

Plus, we need to embrace China right now. They are one of the few groups of Direct Foreign Investors that have been showing interest in the Caribbean communities. We need all the help we can get to reform and transform our society. The heavy-lifting gets a little easier with a little help from our friends. Consider these previous blog-commentaries related to China’s investments in our region:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18301 After Hurricane Dorian, Rebuilding Partners: China Versus America
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16192 In Defense of Trade – China Realities
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8799 History of China Trade: Too Big to Ignore
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8813 Why China will soon be Hollywood’s largest market
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8815 China’s Organ Transplantation: Facts and Fiction
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8817 Chinese Mobile Games Apps: The new Playground
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8819 South China Seas: Exclusive Economic Zones??
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8823 China’s WeChat: Model for Caribbean Social Media
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6231 China’s Caribbean Playbook: America’s Script

What about the argument that China is a Communist state and advocates for communism?

We have addressed this issue before – June 20, 2019:

‘Free Market’ Versus … China – Two Systems at Play
China is on the verge of overtaking the US as the Number 1 Single Market economy in the world…

  • Wait, isn’t China a communist state?
  • Hasn’t communism failed to deliver on its promises to elevate societies that abide by its principles?

Yes, and yes …

But China demonstrates that there is a difference between principles and practices. China abides by communist principles, but their practice is more aligned with Free Market concepts, especially with their doubling-down in trade, World Trade.

Do we truly consider Hong Kong as a communist state? Far from it; yet it is China; it is part of the “One country, two systems” practice.

All in all, we have nothing to fear from China – not their culture, religion, politics nor their military power. We should simply embrace them for trade in a give-and-take relationship. We must export to China as well; we need Chinese tourism.

We have to make changes, on our end, to make this Chinese tourism viable. We have to work harder to “live and let live”:

“Make happy those who are near, and those who are far will come”.

- Photo 2

This is the charter of the Go Lean roadmap; we urge all stakeholders to lean-in to the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to elevate our society. This is worth all the effort for us to do. This is how we 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 & 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. 

—————

Appendix  – Reference: Sinophone

Chinese-speaking world or Sinophone or sinophone is a neologism that fundamentally means “Chinese-speaking”, typically referring to a person who speaks at least one variety of Chinese. Academic writers use Sinophone “Chinese-speaking regions” in two ambiguous meanings: either specifically “Chinese-speaking areas where it is a minority language, excluding China and Taiwan” or generally “Chinese-speaking areas, including where it is an official language”. Many authors use the collocation Sinophone world to mean the regions of Chinese diaspora outside of Greater China, and some for the entire Chinese-speaking world. Mandarin Chinese is the most commonly spoken language today, with over one billion people, approximately 20% of the world population, speaking it. …

Statistics (for populations outside of China and Taiwan)

Region Speakers Percentage Year Reference
 Anguilla 7 0.06% 2001 [1]
 Australia 877,654 3.8% 2016 [1][note 1]
 Austria 9,960 0.1% 2001 [1]
 Belize 2,600 0.8% 2010 [1]
 Cambodia 6,530 0.05% 2008 [1]
 Canada 1,290,095 3.7% 2016 [1]
 Cyprus 1,218 0.1% 2011 [1]
 Falkland Islands 1 0.03% 2006 [1]
 Finland 12,407 0.23% 2018 [1]
 Hong Kong 6,264,700 88.9% 2016 [1][note 2]
 Lithuania 64 0.002% 2011 [1]
 Macao 411,482 97.0% 2001 [1]
 Marshall Islands 79 0.2% 1999 [1]
 Mauritius 2,258 0.2% 2011 [1]
 Nepal 242 0.0009% 2011 [1]
 Northern Mariana Islands 14,862 23.4% 2000 [1]
 Palau 331 1.8% 2005 [1]
 Philippines 6,032 0.4% 2000 [1]
 Romania 2,039 0.01% 2011 [1]
 Russia 70,722 0.05% 2010 [1]
 Singapore 1,791,216 57.7% 2010 [1][note 3]
 South Africa 8,533 0.02% 1996 [1]
 Thailand 111,866 0.2% 2010 [1]
 Timor Leste 511 0.07% 2004 [1]
 United Kingdom 162,698 0.3% 2011 [1]
 United States 3,268,546 1.0% 2017 [2]

Source: Retrieved January 25, 2020 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinophone

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In demographics, the world population is the total number of humans currently living, and was estimated to have reached 7.7 billion people as of April 2019.[2]

Source: Retrieved January 25, 2020 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

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One Person Can Make a Difference – ENCORE

Posted on February 11, 2021 in Ethos, Social, Strategy

SuperBowl LV … on February 7, 2021 … Wow!!!

It was a fun watch. Check out these encyclopedic details:

  • The Game – The championship for the 2020 NFL season. The National Football Conference (NFC) champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the American Football Conference (AFC) champion Kansas City Chiefs, 31–9. The game took place at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida, the home stadium of the Buccaneers, marking the first time that a team played a Super Bowl in its home stadium.[7][8] Due to COVID-19 protocols limiting the stadium’s seating capacity to 25,000 fans, it was the least-attended Super Bowl.[9]
  • The Halftime Show – This was headlined by The Weeknd.[5][116][117] The show featured a number of the Weeknd’s hit songs, including “Can’t Feel My Face“, “Earned It“, and “Blinding Lights“, among others.[120]It was reported that the Weeknd spent US$7 million of his own money on the show, which featured men dressed in all black with red jackets and bandages on their face as backup dancers.[120]
  • The Commercials – The estimated cost of a 30-second commercial at Super Bowl LV remained steady with 2020, with [American TV Network] CBS reportedly charging around $5.5 million. The economic impact of COVID-19 prompted some brands to skip the game, including Avocados from Mexico, Budweiser (who donated the airtime it purchased to the Ad Council for public service announcements regarding COVID-19 vaccination; Budweiser parent company Anheuser-Busch would still air ads for its other brands during the game, with a total purchase in line with that of Super Bowl LIV),[92] Coca-Cola, Hyundai, and Pepsi (focusing more on its halftime show sponsorship).[93][94]
    This is a familiar topic for the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean in that we have exhausted the consideration of lessons-learned for the Caribbean ecosystem from SuperBowl commercials.

There is one more take-away:

The lesson-learned of the impact of One Person.

The SuperBowl winning team, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, had a losing record of 7 – 9 last year. But now, they were able to go from Zero to Hero. How?

One person made a difference: Quarterback Tom Brady.

[This is] his first season away from the New England Patriots; [bringing the winning culture with him]; he was the oldest player in this Super Bowl at 43. He extended his player records for Super Bowl appearances at 10 and wins at seven. He was named Super Bowl MVP for a record fifth time and was the first to receive the award with multiple franchises.[15][16][17] He became the oldest player to receive the honor and win a Super Bowl as the starting quarterback, breaking additional personal records.

It was all because of Tom Brady that this team went from Zero to Hero. This one player made a difference to this game, his team-franchise and the home-town-region. What he brought to the team was more than just a good strategy, more importantly, a good culture (discipline, attitude, respect, commitment to hard-work and a refusal to lose). We truly believe that culture eats strategy for breakfast.

This is familiar. We had published a previous blog-commentary on the same topic on February 6, 2017. It is only apropos that we Encore that commentary again now, as it was a profile in courage for the same player Tom Brady and his previous team. We need more of this culture in the Caribbean; we need to recognize that One Person Can Make a Difference and be prepared to allow that person or those persons to “ply their trade” in the region. We need to invite them here, retain the ones – differences makers – we have and petition to return those ones that have emigrated. We need their impact here in the homeland.

See that previous Encore here/now:

————————-

Go Lean Commentary – ‘Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast’

Congratulations to the New England Patriots of the National Football League. They won SuperBowl LI on Sunday February 5, 2017 – beating the Atlanta Falcons 34 to 28 in a dramatic comeback – in which they overcame a 28 to 3 deficit.

[Congratulations to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the National Football League. They won SuperBowl LV on Sunday February 7, 2021 – beating the Kansas City Chiefs 31 to 9 in a dramatic fashion.]

Their victory proved the validity of the business axiom:

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

CU Blog - 'Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast' - Photo 2This phrase was articulated by distinguished management consultant Peter Drucker and made famous by Mark Fields, a former President of Ford Motor Corporation. This corporate best-practice – good for nation-building as well – is that this axiom is more than just theory, it is an absolute reality! Any company, or community for that matter, disconnecting the two (culture and strategy) are putting their success at risk.

This expression made a leapfrog to NFL football in 2014 when the Head Coach of another team, Philadelphia Eagles, referred to the concept in a passing comment. See the full origin story in this link:

How ‘Culture Beats Scheme’ Became Eagles’ Motto

The New England Patriots SuperBowl win is proof-positive of the culture-first ethos. Talent abounds in the league; all 32 teams have the same opportunities and yet, none can boast the Patriots’ history of success. Why? This team has focused heavy on its culture … and has the success to show for it:

The Patriots have appeared in the Super Bowl nine times in franchise history, the most of any team, seven of them since the arrival of head coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady in 2000. The Patriots have since become one of the most successful teams in NFL history, winning 14 AFC East titles in 16 seasons since 2001, without a losing season in that period. The franchise has since set numerous notable records, including most wins in a ten-year period (126, in 2003–2012), an undefeated 16-game regular season in 2007, the longest winning streak consisting of regular season and playoff games in NFL history (a 21-game streak from October 2003 to October 2004), and the most consecutive division titles won by a team in NFL history (won eight straight division titles from 2009 to 2016). The team owns the record for most Super Bowls reached (seven) and won (five) by a head coach-quarterback tandem, as well as being the first tandem to win the Super Bowl 13 years after the first. – Source: Wikipedia.
CU Blog - Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast - Photo 1

The purpose of this commentary is the focus on culture. This definition of culture refers to community ethos; this is defined in the book Go Lean … Caribbean as …

… the fundamental character or spirit of a culture [group or community], the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society; the dominant assumptions of a people or period.

Culture allows “you” to overcome obstacles; endure the heavy-lifting of a turn-around; invest in future success based on promising talents; stay the course of a roadmap, rather than “giving up” and fleeing for the appearance of greener pastures elsewhere. Culture dictates devoting “blood, sweat and tears” to a community cause, to give a full measure of devotion. We can learn so much by examining organizations and communities of great accomplishments. The New England Patriots is one such model. See VIDEO here describing the culture of the New England Patriots:

VIDEO – Chris Long of New England Patriots on Team, Winning, Unselfish Culture – https://youtu.be/ne-YkmXMN4M

Published on Jan 3, 2017 – Chris Long discusses the New England Patriot’s TEAM Culture, Winning Attitude, & Unselfishness on the NFL Network’s Game Day Prime with former NFL Head Coach Steve Mariucci on 1/1/17.

The Go Lean book relates that there are good ethos and bad ethos – the good ethos can be considered “culture” while the bad ethos may be deemed “defects”. The Caribbean member-states are not known as great societies, despite having the greatest “address on the planet” in terms of terrain, fauna/flora, hospitality, festivities, food, rum and cigars; this is due to our deficient community ethos, our organizational culture. There are role models for us to consider:

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” is a famous quotation attributed to the late business management guru Peter Drucker, and I can’t think of a better example that proves this than Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s acquisition of National Car Rental and Alamo.
…
They have been recognized numerous times for their customer service by J.D. Power. Business Week recognized them as one of the top 25 customer service brands in the world. In addition to running a wildly successful business, they obviously know how to take care of their customers, which means their customers want to come back.

All that is impressive, but not nearly as impressive as how they proved these top customer service awards weren’t a fluke. All of the awards and accolades they continue to receive don’t happen by accident. They aren’t just lucky. Everything Enterprise does is very purposeful. It is their culture. – Forbes Magazine Columnist Shep Hyken’s Profile Story.

One mission of the Go Lean book is to foster good community ethos – good culture – for the Caribbean region. We have great talent in our region and yet still we do not win; our people “take their talents to South Beach / South New York / South Toronto / South London, etc.”. What is missing here? Culture.

The Caribbean has a lot of people who have excelled on the world stage in their chosen professions, only because they fled their Caribbean homes seeking better opportunities abroad. Consider:

The Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) to elevate Caribbean society and culture. The CU has 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 protect the resultant economic engines.
  • Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

From the outset of the book, in the opening Declaration of Interdependence, the Go Lean roadmap posits that a target for the CU’s empowerments should be the Caribbean youth. This is the best way to foster a new culture, focus on the next generation. Then the remainder of society will assimilate … the new values within a short time. See the focus on youth in the opening pages of the book (Page 3), with this sample quotation:

Our youth, the next generation, may not be inspired to participate in the future workings of their country; they may measure success only by their exodus from their Caribbean homeland.

Thusly, the Go Lean/CU roadmap dictates how to reach, engage, and solicit the youth market to foster the new required attitudes. These other pronouncements in the opening Declaration of Interdependence, bear a direct reference to this quest for changing culture; consider these on Pages 11 & 13:

xix. Whereas our legacy in recent times is one of societal abandonment, it is imperative that incentives and encouragement be put in place to first dissuade the human flight, and then entice and welcome the return of our Diaspora back to our shores…

xxi.  Whereas the preparation of our labor force can foster opportunities and dictate economic progress for current and future generations, the Federation must ensure that educational and job training opportunities are fully optimized for all residents of all member-states, with no partiality towards any gender or ethnic group. The Federation must recognize and facilitate excellence in many different fields of endeavor, including sciences, languages, arts, music and sports. This responsibility should be executed without incurring the risks of further human flight, as has been the past history.

The book provides some turn-by-turn instructions for soliciting the different generation groups (Baby Boomers, Generation X and the current Millennials) who are at the frontline of the current Caribbean battles, that of societal abandonment, of which the region is sorely losing; (see this portrayed in a previous blog-commentary). The Go Lean book asserts new community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementation and advocacies. The following list from the book applies:

Community Ethos – Economic Principle – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principle – Voluntary Trade Creates Wealth Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives Page 21
Community Ethos – People Respond to Incentives Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future Page 21
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship Page 28
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Turn-Around Page 33
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good Page 37
Community Ethos – Lean Operations Page 24
Community Ethos – Cooperatives Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future Page 26
Community Ethos – Impact the Greater Good Page 37
Strategy – Strategy – Keep Young People At Home in the Region Page 51
Strategy – Agents of Change – Technology Page 57
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization Page 57
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Postal Union Page 78
Anecdote – Turning Around the CARICOM governance Page 92
Anecdote – “Lean” in Government Page 93
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change Page 101
Implementation – Ways to Deliver Page 109
Implementation – Ways to Impact Social Media Page 111
Implementation – Reasons to Repatriate Page 118
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Events Page 191
Advocacy – Ways to Promote Fairgrounds Page 192
Advocacy – Ways to Foster e-Commerce Page 198
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the Diaspora Page 217
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Youth Page 227
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Sports Page 229
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Urban Living – Sports Leagues Page 234

The Go Lean book is a great guidebook for developing agile institutions – a recipe for the CU technocracy.

The Caribbean can succeed in our efforts to improve our community ethos. Consider this sample of previous blog-commentaries that delve into aspects of forging a better “culture” in Caribbean communities:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10220 Waging a Successful War on the BAD ethos of Rent-seeking
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10218 Waging a Successful War on the BAD ethos of Stupidity
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10216 Waging a Successful War on the BAD ethos of Orthodoxy
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9595 Vision and Values for a ‘New’ Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9428 Forging Change: Herd Mentality
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8186 Respect for Minorities: ‘All for One’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7646 Going from ‘Good to Great’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7628 ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5695 Repenting, Forgiving and Reconciling the Past
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3915 ‘Change the way you see the world; you change the world you see’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3780 Forging an Ethos of ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=623 ‘Only at the precipice, do they change’

The vision for a new Caribbean is one that has a culture that could “eat strategy – scheme or talent – for breakfast”.

While the focus of this commentary is on culture, a lot can be said for the Sports eco-system as well. The Go Lean/CU roadmap is NOT a sports promotion plan but it does present the important role for sports in the vision to make the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play. As an expression of this vision, the Go Lean book states (Page 81):

“… a mission of the CU is to forge industries and economic drivers around the individual and group activities of sports and culture”.

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people and governing institutions, to lean-in for the empowerments described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean. The benefits are too alluring: dawn of a new economy and new opportunities to preserve Caribbean culture for future generations. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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“From the back of the Bus to the White House” – No need to Imagine – Encore

Posted on January 20, 2021 in Ethos, Government, Social

We all know the history …

… yet it should still be vocalized; it should be shouted from the rooftops and from the steeples. There is a dramatic change in the administration of America today.

Congratulations Kamala Harris!

We applaud you … here and now … as we applauded you in the recent past. In fact, we had published a blog-commentary on March 7, 2019 shortly after Ms. Harris commenced her campaign for President of the United States (POTUS). Now today, she is the Vice-President.

    1. One step away…
    2. One heartbeat away …

Now is an appropriate time to Encore that previous blog-commentary; see it here-now:

——————–

Go Lean Commentary – Women Empowerment – Kamala Harris: From Caribbean Legacy to the White House?

Who is the most powerful person in the world?

No doubt, the President of the United States. But this is not just an American drama, as the holder of that office is often considered the “Leader of the Free World“.

Free World?!

Q: Are there other worlds? A: Sure, countries like North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen and others, may not consider the American Hegemony. But, most ironic, all those countries are considered Failed-States. So in summary, the President of the US is considered the Leader of all functioning societies on the planet – including our Caribbean member-states.

There is a chance, that a person of Caribbean heritage – an empowering woman: California Senator Kamala Harris – could assume that office. See the introductory news story / VIDEO here:

VIDEO – Who Is Kamala Harris? | 2020 Presidential Candidate | NYT News – https://youtu.be/cO_CZCebc5U

The New York Times
Published on Jan 21, 2019 – Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, is joining the race for the White House. Ms. Harris becomes the fourth woman currently serving in Congress to announce her presidential ambitions.
Read the story here: https://nyti.ms/2FSqIHD Subscribe: http://bit.ly/U8Ys7n
More from The New York Times Video: http://nytimes.com/video

———-

Whether it’s reporting on conflicts abroad and political divisions at home, or covering the latest style trends and scientific developments, New York Times video journalists provide a revealing and unforgettable view of the world. It’s all the news that’s fit to watch.

So can she go from Caribbean Legacy to the White House? That would be shocking and empowering, considering that “Jamaican” comes with certain stereotypes. See a related news article here, detailing the affinity and conflict “she” has with her Jamaican father/heritage:

Title: Donald Harris slams his daughter Senator Kamala Harris for fraudulently stereotyping Jamaicans and accuses her of playing Identity Politics
By: Jamaican Global

Professor Donald Harris Kamala Harris’ Jamaican father, has vigorously dissociated himself from statements made on the New York Breakfast Club radio show earlier this week attributing her support for smoking marijuana to her Jamaican heritage. Professor Harris has issued a statement to jamaicaglobalonline.com in which he declares:

    “My dear departed grandmothers(whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents , must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics. Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”

This is the line – “Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?” – that has been repeated over by virtually every news media since Kamala Harris gave that response to the interviewer on New York’s Breakfast Club radio show when asked if she smoked marijuana.

Jamaica’s venerable Gleaner newspaper headlined:

    US Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris wants Marijuana Legalized, cites Jamaican roots.

While the locally based online news source Loop reported:

    Kamala Harris cites Jamaican roots in support of ganja legislation.

The Georgia based Macon Telegraph  was less subtle. Its report screamed:

    Kamala Harris supports legal pot. “Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?”

The 2020 presidential hopeful with a Jamaican heritage said she not only smoked but added “I inhale”. Perhaps said jokingly at first in the spirit of the interview, she proceeded to suggest that her Jamaican father’s side of the family would be disappointed in her if she did not support the legalization of marijuana. And that IS a serious statement. Now Harris’ father has come out vigorously dissociating himself from his daughter’s statement.

And well he might. V.G. McGee in a op ed piece published on January 12 in Urbanislandz writes “ Back in 2014 while running for re-election for California attorney general, she wasn’t in support of legalizing recreational use of the plant , but it is good that she has evolved on the issue and we can thank her Jamaican relatives for influencing her changing opinion.” So, the perception created by Ms. Harris’ statement is real and has caused some unease amongst Jamaicans at home and in the diaspora and now, it seems, her father and his Jamaican family. For some, it is more than mere unease; one Jamaican commenting on social media expressed the concern that “soon my job will be singling me out to drug test me since I am from Jamaica. What a stereotype”. Her concern is not unfounded given the experience of Jamaicans travelling to US ports having sniffer dogs around them in customs halls.

The Indian/Jamaican Marijuana connection: Did Kamala Harris deliberately and unfairly stereotype Jamaica as a nation of pot smokers? 

An ironic twist in Ms. Harris’ associating marijuana smoking with her Jamaican heritage that seems to have escaped her as well as media watchers is the fact that it is also very much a part of her Indian heritage that she is so proud of claiming. Is she aware that it was India that bequeathed a marijuana culture to Jamaica? In her authoritative Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage (2003) Oliver Senior writes:

    ‘The practice of cultivating, smoking and otherwise consuming the herb (marijuana) is believed to have been popularized by Indian indentured immigrants who began to arrive from 1845. The local name ‘ganja’ is Indian. The concept of ganja as a holy herb is a Hindu one; it is widely used to enhance the religious experience in parts of India (despite government prohibition).

This seeming lack of knowledge about the connection between her Indian and Jamaican heritage provides additional ammunition for some Jamaicans who are of the view that Ms. Harris tends to downplay her Jamaican heritage when it suits her, crediting her Tamil Indian mother with the most significant influence on her life and outlook and rarely talks about her father’s influence. Her father Donald, hardly ever gets credit except when mentioned alongside her mother, but rarely as an individual. Even when asked by her host in the now famous ‘marijuana interview’ about her motivation to enter the presidential race, Ms. Harris referenced ONLY her mother whom she said, raised her and her sister Maya with many beliefs and rules – one being never to sit and complain about something, but to do something about it. Yet, anyone who has read ‘Reflections of a Jamaican Father’ Donald Harris’ heart-warming account of how he raised his two daughters, will immediately realize that there is another side to the Kamala Harris story. In that article Donald Harris writes:

    “As a child growing up in Jamaica, I often heard it said by my parents and family friends ‘member whe you come fram’ (remember from where you came). To this day I continue to retain the deep social awareness and strong sense of identity which that grassroots Jamaican philosophy fed in me. As a father, I naturally sought to develop the same sensibility in my two daughters.”

Continuing, Harris says:

    “My message to them was that the sky is the limit on what one can achieve with effort and determination and that in the process, it is important not to lose sight of those who get left behind by social neglect or abuse and lack of access to resources or ‘privilege’.

If Kamala Harris inherits some of ‘that deep social awareness’ and heeds the advice of her Jamaican father, she will make an excellent President of the United States of America.

Source: Posted February 15, 2019; retrieved March 7, 2018 from: https://www.jamaicaglobalonline.com/donald-harris-slams-his-daughter-senator-kamala-harris-for-fraudulently-stereotyping-jamaicans-and-accusing-her-of-playing-identity-politics/

How realistic is the notion of a Kamala Harris presidency?

History is on her side!

“Last time we knocked on the door  – this time, we are going to kick the son-of-a-bitch in!”

In the last presidential election (2016) Democratic Candidate Hillary Clinton knocked-on-the-door and won the popular vote, but lost out in the Electoral College. (Today, investigations are concluding on the possibility that the eventual winner, Donald J. Trump, may have benefited from illegal campaign funding activities and collusion with the foreign government of Russia – he may have cheated). So yes, a woman can win the office.

Based on the “Blue Wave” of the 2018 General Election (Mid-terms) results, there is reason to believe that the 2020 race will have a Democratic Party winner, rather than the Republican incumbent. Plus, ex-President Barack Obama proved that a “Black” person can win the office.

Will this combination propel Kamala Harris to the Office of the Presidency?

There is still a long journey to go, with a lot of obstacles to overcome and challenges to meet. But many women have overcame obstacles and met challenges to obtain their goals to impact society. In fact, this is the very theme this month of this series of commentaries from the movement behind the book Go Lean … Caribbean. This is part 3 of 6 for Women History Month; this series addresses how one woman can make a difference in society; and how society can make a difference for women; this is because qualities like courage, problem-solving, determination and a zeal for justice flourishes with some women … as it does with some men.

Other commentaries in this series include these entries:

  1. Women History Month 2019: Thoughts, Feelings, Speech and Actions
  2. Women History Month 2019: Viola Desmond – The Rosa Parks of Canada
  3. Women History Month 2019: Kamala Harris – Caribbean Legacy to the White House?
  4. Women History Month 2019: Captain Marvel – We need “Sheroes”
  5. Women History Month 2019: Ellevest CEO: Sallie Krawcheck
  6. Women History Month 2019: Accepting Black Women As Is

For Kamala Harris to win the presidency, she will have to “win over” America; but first she must “win over” the Democratic Party; even before that, she must “win over” the Black community. Some people think that will be her biggest challenge; see a related news article/opinion-editorial here:

Title: Kamala Harris Can’t Count on the Black Vote in 2020
Opinion by: Luther Campbell

Kamala Harris will have trouble persuading black voters to make her president in 2020. First, the U.S. senator from California must explain why Donald Trump has a better prison-reform record than she had as the Golden State’s attorney general. Then she’ll have to overcome the perception she’ll do anything to climb to the top.

On the street, many blue-collar African-Americans, especially men, have already made up their minds not to vote for her. Between 2004 and 2016, when Harris worked as San Francisco’s district attorney and state attorney general, she supported legislation that sent kids who skipped school to jail. And she opposed federal supervision of California’s prisons after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling declared the overcrowded facilities inflicted cruel and unusual punishment on inmates.

When she appealed a court order to implement new parole programs, Harris cited the need to use prisoners as slave labor to fight wildfires and pick up highway trash.

Though black voters want politicians who’ll put away thugs and killers terrorizing the neighborhood, they don’t support those who deny defendants rehabilitation and send them to prison for crimes they didn’t commit to line private prison companies’ pockets.

Harris rose to prominence in California after an affair with married, but separated, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who recently wrote a column that mentioned their relationship. Brown said he influenced Harris’ career by appointing her to two state commissions when he was California Assembly speaker. He also helped her in her first race for San Francisco district attorney.

When Harris, whose mother is from India and father is from Jamaica, decided it was time to take her talents to Washington, D.C., she married Douglas Emhoff, a rich white lawyer. For better or worse, black men don’t want to vote for a black woman who married a white man or was the mistress of a powerful black man.

Like everyone else, black voters want help from one of their own. The Bushes made sure their people got oil money. Bill Clinton let the telecommunications industry gobble up small radio and TV stations. And Donald Trump is looking out for his developer buddies through a tax cut and opportunity zones that gentrify minority neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Harris has let black people know they can’t count on her.

Source: Posted February 5, 2019; retrieved March 7, 2019 from: https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/kamala-harris-cant-count-on-the-black-vote-to-win-in-2020-11068985

(This foregoing writer is not endorsed by this commentary; his editorial seems misogynistic).

Women in Politics? To the highest office in the land? This theme aligns with previous Go Lean commentaries asserting that ” Yes, they can!”; see a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14718 ‘At the Table’ or ‘On the Menu’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13063 Gender Equity without a ‘Battle of the Sexes’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12035 Fact & Fiction: Lean-in for ‘Wonder Woman Day’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8306 Women Get Ready for New Lean-In Campaign
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6937 Women in Politics – Yes, They Can!
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6836 #FatGirlsCan – Women do not have to be a ‘Ten’ to have impact

For those of us in the Caribbean, we have No Vote and No Voice in this 2020 presidential race. But we can observe-and-report. We can apply the proven “5-L” methodology: Look, Listen and Learn how to overcome orthodoxies to finally get the best person elected for the job, despite any race or gender.

We can also Lend-a-hand! (Many people of Caribbean heritage live in the US – many can vote). In fact, we – Jamaicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans – were target demographics in the 2016 race.

Lastly, there is the opportunity to Lead – especially to define good leadership; recognizing attributes and personal qualities are bigger and of more importance than race and/or gender. We need to apply these lessons and leadership development in the Caribbean member-states.

So “Yes, we can” … learn from this American drama and learn to 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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