Planning – Go Lean…Caribbean

Category: Planning

‘Too Big To Fail’ – China’s Version

Posted on September 30, 2021 in Ethos, Industries, Planning

Go Lean Commentary

A New World Order is good!

A New World Order is bad!

Now with the global accountability, Bad Actors cannot hide; they are called into account quickly – they are named, blamed and shamed; (think of the 2014 Boko Haram kidnapping of young girls in Africa).

That is good!

But with global interactions, any one contagion in one part of the world can easily and quickly affect the rest of the world. This is true of viruses; epidemics become pandemics – think of the currency of COVID-19. In addition to infectious diseases, the same consequence can happen with economic contagions.

… spread of an economic crisis from one market or region to another and can occur at both a domestic or international level. Contagion can occur because many of the same goods and services, especially labor and capital goods, can be used across many different markets and because virtually all markets are connected through monetary and financial systems. – Investopedia

This was the reality with the 2008 Great Recession crisis, and the Sovereign Debt crisis a decade ago …

… and it may be happening again now with a “Too Big To Fail” crisis in China. See the full news story & VIDEO here:

News Article – Title: China: What is Evergrande and is it too big to fail?
Sub-title: Global financial markets have been on high alert as cash-strapped Chinese property giant Evergrande faces several key tests in the coming days.

The world’s most indebted real estate developer is set to hit a series of deadlines for bond interest payments, totalling tens of millions of dollars.

As the company struggles to meet those payments, it has started to repay some investors in its wealth management business with property.

What does Evergrande do?

Businessman Hui Ka Yan founded Evergrande, formerly known as the Hengda Group, in 1996 in Guangzhou, southern China.

Evergrande Real Estate currently owns more than 1,300 projects in more than 280 cities across China.

The broader Evergrande Group now encompasses far more than just real estate development.

Its businesses range from wealth management, making electric cars and food and drink manufacturing. It even owns one of country’s biggest football teams – Guangzhou FC.

Mr Hui was once Asia’s richest person and, despite seeing his wealth plummet in recent months, has a personal fortune of more than $10bn (£7.3bn), according to Forbes.

Why is Evergrande in trouble?

Evergrande expanded aggressively to become one of China’s biggest companies by borrowing more than $300bn.

Last year, Beijing brought in new rules to control the amount owed by big real estate developers.

The new measures led Evergrande to offer its properties at major discounts to ensure money was coming in to keep the business afloat.

Now, it is struggling to meet the interest payments on its debts.

This uncertainty has seen Evergrande’s share price tumble by around 80% this year. Its bonds have also been downgraded by global credit ratings agencies.

Why would it matter if Evergrande collapses?

There are several reasons why Evergrande’s problems are serious.

Firstly, many people bought property from Evergrande even before building work began. They have paid deposits and could potentially lose that money if it goes bust.

There are also the companies that do business with Evergrande. Firms including construction and design firms and materials suppliers are at risk of incurring major losses, which could force them into bankruptcy.

The third is the potential impact on China’s financial system.

“The financial fallout would be far reaching. Evergrande reportedly owes money to around 171 domestic banks and 121 other financial firms,” the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Mattie Bekink told the BBC.

If Evergrande defaults, banks and other lenders may be forced to lend less.

This could lead to what is known as a credit crunch, when companies struggle to borrow money at affordable rates.

A credit crunch would be very bad news for the world’s second largest economy, because companies that can’t borrow find it difficult to grow, and in some cases are unable to continue operating.

This may also unnerve foreign investors, who could see China as a less attractive place to put their money.

Is Evergrande ‘too big to fail’?

The very serious potential fallout of such a heavily-indebted company collapsing has led some analysts to suggest that Beijing may step in to rescue it.

The EIU’s Mattie Bekink thinks so: “Rather than risk disrupting supply chains and enraging homeowners, we think the government will probably find a way to ensure Evergrande’s core business survives.”

Others though are not sure.

In a post on China’s chat app and social media platform WeChat, the influential editor-in-chief of state-backed Global Times newspaper Hu Xijin said Evergrande should not rely on a government bailout and instead needs to save itself.

This also chimes with Beijing’s aim to rein in corporate debt, which means that such a high profile bailout could be seen as setting a bad example.

Reporting by Peter Hoskins and Katie Silver

Source: BBC Business News – Retrieved September 29, 2021 from: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58579833
Related VIDEO:

Posted September 28, 2021 – What China’s Evergrande crisis means for the world.

This key excerpt from this foregoing news article laments a credit crunch:

This could lead to what is known as a credit crunch, when companies struggle to borrow money at affordable rates.

A credit crunch would be very bad news for the world’s second largest economy, because companies that can’t borrow find it difficult to grow, and in some cases are unable to continue operating.

We saw the world’s largest economy, the USA, deal with “A Too Big to Fail” crisis. We also saw the European Union deal with their crisis. Now we get to see China – the #2 largest economy – deal with this issue.

What lessons do we learn?

How can we apply those lessons in the Caribbean?

As related previously, China subscribes to a more technocratic approach, rather than the Western model of yielding to the Crony-Capitalism influences for bail-outs; this was the conclusion of the foregoing news article:

… Beijing’s aim to rein in corporate debt, which means that such a high profile bailout could be seen as setting a bad example.

Consider our insights here; these 6 points extracted from previous blog-commentaries on Too Big To Fail contagions and a bad Debt culture:

1. Lessons Learned from 2008: Too Big to Fail –vs- Too Small to Thrive – September 18, 2018

“Too Big to Fail” was a Big Deal. This is more than just an academic discussion …. In 2008 the biggest impact of the global financial contagions was the dilution of net worth for the citizens of the affected countries: US, Canada and Western Europe. These economies are the primary source of Caribbean tourists; since tourism is the primary economic driver, this was a real problem for the pocketbooks of every individual and institution in the region.
…
The 2008 Great Recession / Financial Crisis exposed the trappings of the interconnected global economy. If we, in the Caribbean, are going to “play in this sandbox” – transact in this marketplace – then we must be prepared and On Guard, for the risks, threats and dangers.

2. Lessons Learned from 2008: Still Recovering – September 20, 2018

When policies are put in place that allow greedy people – bad actors – to continue unabated, bad things happen … to the bad actors and to society in general. This reality is something that stewards of every society must contend with. Every community is required to implement public safety provisions – at great expense. But the lesson is undisputed: whatever law enforcement costs, pales in comparison to lawlessness.

This actuality applies all the more so to economic crimes and misdeeds; this was definitely true with all the economic crimes leading up to the Great Recession of 2008 – lost of net worth estimated at $11 Trillion. And yet, the US is throwing out much of the wisdom gleaned after 2008. There is the trend now to undo a lot of the reforms that were implemented after the Financial Crisis – to de-fang the Dodd-Frank regulations. This is unwise! The regulations that were imposed are designed to mitigate the risk of subsequent economic meltdowns.

History does repeat itself. …

2008 was a giant mess for the US. We want to learn and apply lessons from their experiences. But truthfully, we have no power there. We have no vote and no voice to change them. We can only protect ourselves from their abusive activities; (the abuse to the American-self and the interconnected world). The bad trend of America stripping the new financial protections has begun – already after less than 10 years.

3. ‘Too Big To Fail’ – Caribbean Version – November 14, 2014

The Caribbean region has not been front-and-center to many financial crises in the past, compared to the 465 US bank failures between 2008 and 2012.^[a^] But over the past few decades, there have been some failures among local commercial banks and affiliated insurance companies where the institutions could not meet demands from depositors for withdrawal. Consider these examples from Jamaica and Trinidad …

With the advent of the CARICOM Single Market & Economy (CSME), a more integrated region is expected to lead to greater linkages among the member-states of this existing economic union.

4. Day of Reckoning for NINJA Loans – January 19, 2017

It is time for the Day of Reckoning for one of the players in the recent housing bubble and financial crisis, referred to as the Great Recession of 2008. Industry stakeholders had been “skimming of the public coffers for mortgage guarantees and giving unwise mortgages to people who had what was considered NINJA qualification:

No Income

No Job or Assets

Such activities in the retail mortgage industry, plus bad practices in the wholesale lending, credit ratings and mortgage-back securities industries had congealed to form a “perfect storm” for disaster in the financial markets (Wall Street, et al) in the US and around the world.

Many innocent people lost fortune and faith in the American eco-system. There had to be an accounting of the “sins and sinister plots”; there had to be a Day of Reckoning. That day came for one Michigan-based (Detroit area) company, United Shore Financial Services. See the full story here …

5. Lessons from Iceland – Model of Recovery – September 23, 2015

There are so many lessons the Caribbean region can learn from the island Republic of Iceland. …

During the bad days of the Great Recession – at the precipice of disaster – the country deviated from other troubled regions …

Iceland let its banks fail in 2008 because they proved too big to save.

How does it relate to the Caribbean? The Caribbean is at the precipice … now; many of the member-states are near Failed-State status, while others are still hoping to recover from the devastating Great Recession of 2008. Turn-around should not take this long – 7 years. Strategies, tactics and implementations of best-practices to effect a turn-around must be pursued now.

Iceland has now recovered, and complaining about a 2% unemployment rate. What did they do that was so radically different than other locations? For one, they changed course regarding economics, security and governing policies. An ultra-capitalist movement had taken hold of the country and business communities; they pursued an aggressive “boom-or-bust” strategy, that ultimately “busted”, rather than continue on that road, the country – all aspects of society – altered course and returned to a path of sound fundamentals.

They rebooted and turned-around! Iceland embraced all aspects of turn-around strategies, mandating bankruptcies and “wind-downs” so that the economy – and society in general – could start anew.

6. Beware of Vulture Capitalists – February 25, 2016

… just say “No” to debt!

Many bad things happen when people, institutions and countries depend on debt. A “slippery slope” can emerge … from dependence, to reliance, to requirement, to a “vital” status, to … debt slavery. Emancipation from debt slavery is not so easy, as many times its a voluntary slavery. The ransom to redeem from slavery is all about money, finance and/or economics. This is why the sage advice from a Subject Matter Expert in Economics is: The further one stays away from debt, the better!

It’s a lesson learned, as chronicled in the 2013 book Go Lean … Caribbean, from Detroit; not only does debt impact the past, but the future as well. Debt can be so bad that at times the providers … and collectors of debt may be derisively called “vultures” …

This dire disposition of debt is not exclusive nor limited to Detroit. This applies to many other communities, in North America, Europe (think Greece), Latin America and even in the Caribbean.

Some may conclude: “this Evergrande Debt Crisis is a Chinese problem for China to deal with alone”. Right?

Such people may think that this drama ”is none of our business”.

Alas, we have learned so much about economic contagions to know that this can affect us … quickly. Plus, in the last decades, China has emerged as a global giant in trade and also a regional player in the Caribbean for foreign investment and infrastructure-building. We are in too deep! See this portrayal in this excerpt from a previous blog-commentary:

China’s Caribbean Playbook: America’s Script – September 2, 2015

China has invested heavily in the Caribbean, as of recent; see [this] list here of selected announcements …

Just what is China’s motive, their end game?

Should we be leery or should we just embrace [the badly needed] help from whatever sources?

How much of this questioning is influenced by a pro-American yearning? Pro-Christian yearning? Fear of strangers? Racist under-valuing of non-White/European races?

There is the need for the Caribbean to take stock of its thoughts-feelings-actions and give all of these questions serious deliberation.

If this Golden Rule is true: “he who has the gold makes the rules”, then we will be held to account to stakeholders in China, as their many state-own companies are definitely “bringing gold” to the table. …

[China’s] This focus on trade is very familiar.

This is the same playbook of the United States of America in building the world’s largest Single Market economy. (Remember, with the Army Corp of Engineers, the US built the Panama Canal, but with more strings attached). China is simply following the same American script – minus the cronyism and militarism – of promoting trade of their products, services and capital.

Capital? Yes, many of the projects highlighted in the foregoing news articles are being financed by China’s state-owned banks and lending institutions. They are “putting their money, where their mouth is”.

The possibility of an economic contagion originating out of China should scare us.

(We are still dealing with the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, which originated out of China).

So let’s pay more than the usual attention … about the news and developments of this Evergrande Debt crisis. This is our business too. We must look, listen, learn, lend-a-hand and lead our own stewardship for economic contagions in our Caribbean region.

Everyone in the Caribbean are urged to lean-in to this consideration to glean the insights, strategies, tactics and implementations of China in managing this Evergrande crisis.

We are not being asked to change China; no, we are being asked to change “us”. It is heavy-lifting to remediate and mitigate threats and protect our society; but this is what it takes to lead: to reform and transform our society. Yes, we can make our regional homeland a better place to live, work and play.

Let’s get started; let’s stay alert; let’s protect our homeland … 🙂

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) and the accompanying Caribbean Central Bank (CCB), 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):

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. The Federation must employ the latest advances and best practices … to assuage continuous threats against public safety.

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.

xiv. 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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Why not share … ? – Encore

Posted on September 13, 2021 in Ethos, Planning

There is still flooding in certain parts of the US.

There is still drought in certain parts of the US.

These two regions are still not sharing. Why continue this problem … unabated?!

Perhaps it is denial …

This was the contention in a previous blog-commentary in June 27, 2014 where we highlighted the actuality of Climate Change and urged our American counterparts to get ready; invest in infrastructure to share water resources. Now, a popular Comedian/Pundit is making the same urging, though more comically.

See the Host here on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher as he lambasted this lack of sharing. See this embedded VIDEO here:

VIDEO – New Rule: America’s Pipe Dream – Real Time with Bill Maher – https://youtu.be/SAsExSNfNXQ

So why still no sharing?

Why are factions in this country (USA) continuing to deny the actuality of Climate Change? For one, the age-old standard may have a lot to do with the issue:

You break it; you buy it.

Acknowledging the problem comes with the responsibility to “do something” about it; to address it; fix it; mitigate it and prepare for it.

We raised these points in that previous June 27, 2014 blog-commentary; it is only apropos to Encore it again now.

—————————————

Go Lean Commentary – Floods in Minnesota, Drought in California – Why Not Share?

Millions across Minnesota are in the middle of a flooding disaster as a severe storm system moves over the central U.S.. See this VIDEO:

VIDEO – CBS News; posted June 23, 2014; retrieved June 27 from: http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/minnesota-communities-face-weeks-of-flooding/
Title: Minnesota communities face weeks of flooding

(VIDEO plays best in Internet Explorer).

At the same time, California continues to endure serious drought conditions. Many feel, though not supported by the facts, that this may be the worst drought in California history. See the aligning VIDEO here:

VIDEO – Win Rosenfeld, NBC News; posted June 2, 2014; retrieved June 27 from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx7vFqU8iGY
Title: California’s Drought History | Debunker

So on the one hand, part of the United States is experiencing too much water and in other parts of the country, too little water. This is Climate Change 101. If only, there would be some equalizing between “the feast and the famine” with water.

This was the point/comment of one viewer of the CBS News Video:

Why are we not building a WATER PIPELINE from these flood prone areas to the parched West and South?!?!? If we can afford an OIL pipeline all the way to the southern gulf, we can definitely build a desperately needed pipeline for water! – By: uberengineer – June 24, 2014

This comment was spot on! According to the book Go Lean … Caribbean, pipelines can be strategic, tactical and operationally efficient. They can mitigate challenges of Mother Nature, create jobs and grow the economy at the same time.

The Go Lean book identifies that there are “agents-of-change” that our world have to now contend with. Proactively managing the cause-and-effect of these agents can yield great benefits and alleviate much suffering. The agents-of-change for the Caribbean are identified as follows:

Technology
Aging Diaspora
Climate Change
Globalization

If the suggestion of above commentator Uber Engineer is to be seriously considered in the US, this would fall under the scope of the US federal government as two states California and Minnesota are involved – neither state has jurisdiction over the other. Plus, the many states in between (Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah and Nevada) where a pipeline would traverse would also have to be factored into the equation. Under US law this approach is called an Interstate Compact. Uber Engineer is right! This pipeline strategy is already being deployed for oil in the US with the TransCanada Keystone^[a] Pipeline project, running from southern Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico; (see route map in the photo).

The question is: who can contemplate such a solution for the Caribbean marketplace? The Go Lean book posits that Climate Change is wreaking havoc on Caribbean life as well and that Caribbean stakeholders must proactively consider the benefits of pipeline deployments in the region. This book purports that a new technology-enhanced industrial revolution is emerging, in which there is more efficiency gleaned from installing, monitoring and maintaining pipelines. Caribbean society must participate, not just spectate the developments in this revolution. This point is pronounced early in the book with this Declaration of Interdependence (Page 11 &14), with the opening and subsequent statements:

i.     Whereas the earth’s climate has undeniably changed resulting in more severe tropical weather storms, 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 weather challenges.

xxvi.       Whereas the Caribbean region must have new jobs to empower the engines of the economy and create the income sources for prosperity, and encourage the next generation to forge their dreams right at home, the Federation must therefore foster the development of new industries, like that of … pipelines …

xxvii.     Whereas the region has endured a spectator status during the Industrial Revolution, we cannot stand on the sidelines of this new economy, the Information Revolution. Rather, the Federation must embrace all the tenets of Internet Communications Technology (ICT) to serve as an equalizing element in competition with the rest of the world. The Federation must bridge the digital divide and promote the community ethos that research/development is valuable and must be promoted and incentivized for adoption.

This book Go Lean… Caribbean, serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) to elevate society of the 30 Caribbean member-states. This agency will assume jurisdiction for the Caribbean Sea, the 1,063,000 square-mile international waters under the guise of an Exclusive Economic Zone. This approach allows for cooperation and equalization between the feast-and-famine conditions in the region. This is a real solution to real problems! In fact the CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The Go Lean book details the economic principles and community ethos to adopt, plus the executions of strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to forge Research & Development with pipelines and industrial growth in Caribbean communities:

Economic Principles – People Choose because Resources are Limited	Page 21
Economic Principles – All Choices Involve Costs	Page 21
Economic Principles – People Respond to Incentives	Page 21
Economic Principles – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices	Page 21
Economic Principles – Voluntary Trade Creates Wealth	Page 21
Economic Principles – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Job Multiplier	Page 22
Community Ethos – “Crap” Happens	Page 23
Community Ethos – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Return on Investments (ROI)	Page 24
Community Ethos – Cooperatives	Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship	Page 28
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Research & Development	Page 30
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Negotiations	Page 32
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing	Page 35
Community Ethos – Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Anecdote – Pipeline Transport – Strategies, Tactics & Implementations	Page 43
Strategy – Vision – Confederating 30 Member-states in a Union	Page 45
Strategy – Agents of Change – Technology	Page 57
Strategy – Agents of Change – Aging Diaspora	Page 57
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization	Page 57
Strategy – Agents of Change – Climate Change	Page 57
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Growing Economy – New High Multiplier Industries	Page 68
Separation of Powers – Interstate Commerce Administration	Page 79
Separation of Powers – Interior Department – Exclusive Economic Zone	Page 82
Implementation – Assemble – Pipeline as a Focused Activity	Page 96
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Benefits from the Exclusive Economic Zone	Page 104
Implementation – Ways to Develop a Pipeline Industry	Page 107
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Planning – 10 Big Ideas – Pipeline Projects	Page 127
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract – Infrastructure	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Ways to Impact Public Works – Ideal for Pipelines	Page 175
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Cooperatives	Page 176
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage Natural Resources – Water Resources	Page 183
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Extractions – Pipeline Strategy Alignment	Page 195
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Emergency Management	Page 196
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Technology	Page 197
Advocacy – Ways to Ways to Improve Monopolies – Foster Cooperatives	Page 202
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Transportation – Pipeline Options	Page 205
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Rural Living – Minimize Irrigation Downsides	Page 235
Appendix – Interstate Compacts	Page 278
Appendix – Pipeline Maintenance Robots	Page 283
Appendix – North Dakota Example – Oil Drilling Economic-Societal Effects	Page 334

Historically, pipelines are cheaper than alternative modes of transport for liquid materials like oil, natural gas and water. Plus the cost of water in all aspects of modern society is no longer negligible. Just conduct an acid test at a friendly neighborhood Gas Station; while a gallon of gas may be high, the equivalent pricing for cool drinking water is within the same range.

Water is only free in our society when it is raining; for all other times, there are costs associated with storage and distribution.

Thusly, the economic principles of pipelines are sound.

Pipelines can be above ground, underground and/or underwater. (See Trans-Alaska Pipeline photo). There is a role for many schemes of pipeline deployments in the vision for the reboot of the Caribbean homeland. The roadmap Go Lean … Caribbean identifies pipelines as strategic, tactical and operationally mandatory for any chance at success in making the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play.

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

——–

Appendix – Referenced Source:

a. Keystone Pipeline (Retrieved June 27, 2014 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline):

The Keystone Pipeline System is an oil pipeline system in Canada and the United States. It runs from the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin in Alberta, Canada, to refineries in the United States in Steele City, Nebraska; Wood River and Patoka, Illinois; and the Gulf Coast of Texas. In addition to the synthetic crude oil (syncrude) and diluted bitumen (dilbit) from the oil sands of Canada, it also carries light crude oil from the Williston Basin (Bakken) region in Montana and North Dakota.

Three phases of the project are in operation, and the fourth is awaiting U.S. government approval. Upon completion, the Keystone Pipeline System would consist of the completed 2,151-mile (3,462 km) Keystone Pipeline (Phases I and II), Keystone Gulf Coast Expansion (Phase III), and the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline Project (Phase IV). Phase I, delivering oil from Hardisty, Alberta, to Steele City, Wood River, and Patoka, was completed in the summer of 2010. Phase II, the Keystone-Cushing extension, was completed in February 2011 with the pipeline from Steele City to storage and distribution facilities at Cushing, Oklahoma. These two phases have the capacity to deliver up to 590,000 barrels per day (94,000 m3/d) of oil into the Mid-West refineries. Phase III, the Gulf Coast Extension, which was opened in January 2014, has capacity up to 700,000 barrels per day (110,000 m3/d). The proposed Phase IV, would begin in Hardisty, Alberta, and extend to Steele City, essentially replacing the existing phase I pipeline.

The Keystone XL proposal faced criticism from environmentalists and some members of the United States Congress. In January 2012, President Barack Obama rejected the application amid protests about the pipeline’s impact on Nebraska’s environmentally sensitive Sand Hills region. TransCanada Corporation changed the original proposed route of Keystone XL to minimize “disturbance of land, water resources and special areas”; the new route was approved by Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman in January 2013. On April 18, 2014 the Obama administration announced that the review of the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline has been extended indefinitely, until at least after the November 4, 2014 mid-term United States elections.

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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.

HBCU’s – Historically Black Colleges & Universities – continue to strive among the African-American population for tertiary education.
Housing Discrimination continues unabated; Urban for Blacks; suburban for Whites; in fact, the term “Urban” is even now considered the new slang for “Black”; i.e. Urban Contemporary Music is Hip-Hop for Black people.

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:

Zero Sum: Lesson 101 – No more “Gold Standard”
Zero Sum: Realities of Globalism – “Non-Zero Sum” for the whole world
Zero Sum: ICT as a tool, the “Great Equalizer”
Zero Sum: Regional Tourism should not be a competition – Encore
Zero Sum: Book Review – Racism is a factor; “Us vs Them”
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.

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

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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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 Feb 2, 2021 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 1^st thing, but rather the January 25^th 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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Category: News & Politics

————————————

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 Maitreya Bodhisattva (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”.

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. 🙂

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.

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

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

———————

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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2020 Review: No Perfect Vision

Posted on December 28, 2020 in Economics, Ethos, Government, Planning, Social

Go Lean Commentary

The expression goes: “Hindsight is 2020 – Perfect Vision”.

The concept is simple: while looking forward is uncertain, looking back is perfect.

As this year 2020 comes to a close, we would like to acknowledge that this year did not unfold the way anyone expected or hoped. Our forecast was wrong. See this excerpt from a previous blog-commentary of June 7, 2019:

Blog # 900 – 2020: Where Vision is Perfected
Do “you” have 20/20 vision?

… Unfortunately, for the 30 member-states of the Caribbean, the answer is an undisputed “No”. We have the greatest address on the planet and yet our societal engines (economics, security and governance) are so dysfunctional that our people are “beating down the doors” to get out. In a recent blog-commentary [(June 4, 2019)] from the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean, this historic fact was enunciated:

“The Caribbean region has exported more of its people than any other region of the world since the abolition of slavery in 1834. While the largest Caribbean immigrant sources to the U.S. are Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Haiti, U.S. citizen migrants also come from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.”

The same as vision can be corrected with glasses and lenses, community vision or planning can also be perfected with reboots and turn-around activities. Our current vision is bad, we need correction. We cannot see (nor seem to care about) all of our citizens that are fleeing the homeland and looking for refuge elsewhere. Yes, we need to correct our vision; we need to get back to 20/20.

2020 is not just a reference to vision; it is also the next year on our calendar. This intersection allows us to use the actuality of 2020 to perfect our vision for Caribbean planning. …

The Go Lean movement, introducing the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), is bent on planning or presenting a new Vision for the year 2020. 2020 is a milestone in a lot of ways: new decade, new generation, even a new census (from an American perspective).

The “Perfected Vision” we had hoped for did not materialize. In fact the number 2020 has turned out to be one of the most unsavory numbers; think 13 or 666.

There are other numbers that are en vogue as well, think 330,000 and 5 million. That number 330,000 refers to the number of Americans dead as a result of the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. This is the number just for the US! While other countries have had losses, the American death toll best describes the absurdity of the devastation of this horrible year. (America being the last remaining Super Power).

There are people that question that death count. (The long train of denial is part of the story of 2020). The number of people denying the actualities of 2020 could be higher too, as the 45th President Donald Trump, despite obvious egregious speech and actions (policies) garnered even more votes than in 2016: 5 million more.

Imagine the depraved indifference. You just buried a loved one, limited to only 10 people at the graveside ceremony, and people question the validity of the death. This is the effects of a lie; lying tears down, not build up.

The actuality of “Lies and Lying” seems to be the theme of this 2020 year. The year opened with the biggest news headlines being related to the Impeachment Trial of President Donald Trump in the US Senate. Underlying to this case was the lies and deceitful behavior of the POTUS in dealing with the government leaders of the Eastern European country of Ukraine. Mr. Trump wanted the Ukrainian president to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of the expected Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, in the November 3, 2020 General Election.

That lie set the stage for the whole year; (Joe Biden was the eventual winner of the Decision 2020 and won with more than 7 million votes over Mr. Trump).

Next came the threat of the Wuhan-China birthed Coronavirus. Rather than facing the challenge head-on by containing it – as executed by other presidents with other epidemics, think SARS and Ebola – this was presented by President Trump as a hoax, so everyone lost their vigilance … until it was too late.

More threats and challenges emerged in which truth needed to be the leading weapon, but instead lies and denial was the dominant characteristic. See this theme as developed in this news article/editorial review here:

VIDEO – The biggest Pinocchios of 2020 – https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/the-biggest-pinocchios-of-2020-fact-checker/2020/12/18/93200b2e-24a6-4fbb-be9c-f00a72a72973_video.html

The Fact Checker tackles some of the most Pinocchio worthy claims of 2020. (The Washington Post)

—————

Title: The biggest Pinocchios of 2020

It’s time for our annual roundup of the biggest Pinocchios of the year.

Donald Trump

Ever since President Trump burst on the political scene in 2015, we have noted that we faced a challenge in not letting him dominate this list of the biggest falsehoods. The president is a serial exaggerator without parallel in U.S. politics. He not only consistently makes false claims, but also repeats them, in some cases hundreds of times, even though they have been proved wrong.

In 2019, Trump took seven of the 13 spots. He earned six spots in 2018 and 2017, five in 2016 and three in 2015. Even so, we cheated a bit because in some cases Trump’s false claims on a particular subject were so numerous and varied that we created all-around categories.

The explosion of false and misleading statements from Trump during his presidency is well documented in our database. We have struggled to keep up with his torrent of falsehoods during the final weeks of the campaign, when he barnstormed the country making 600 to 700 false or misleading claims a week. The next update will show he crossed the 25,000 mark by mid-October.

So in this remarkable year, we have given up trying to keep Trump to about half of the list. In 2020, Trump will earn seven of 10 spots, with three all-around categories — his false claims about the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. election and the violence that erupted after the death of George Floyd in police custody. President-elect Joe Biden earns two spots, while the last slot goes to a GOP hopeful in a Senate race.

Nevertheless, this may be Trump’s last appearance on this annual list. As of Jan. 21, we will set a high bar for fact-checking his statements. He will be a defeated ex-president, and we tend to focus on claims made by people in power. In other words, we hope to ignore him and concentrate on people who really matter in national policy debates.

In compiling this list, we mostly focused on claims that earned Four Pinocchios during the year. To keep it simple, in some cases, we have shortened or paraphrased the quotes in the headlines. To read the full column, click on the link embedded in the quote. The all-around categories have links within the summaries.

We generally do not list the Pinocchios of the Year in any particular order, but the collection of coronavirus and election claims are especially consequential. The president’s statements affected both the health of U.S. citizens and American democracy and will undoubtedly influence how historians assess his performance as president.

Coronavirus falsehoods
A global pandemic would be a challenge for any U.S. president. But through his constant lies about the crisis, Trump managed to consistently make the situation worse for the United States. He minimized the danger at first, dismissing the novel coronavirus as less serious than the seasonal flu and something that would go away on its own. He touted bogus cures and quick fixes. He oversold achievements, such as falsely claiming that he led the world in a China ban and that U.S. testing for the virus was on track. He blamed others, falsely saying, for instance, that President Barack Obama bungled the swine flu pandemic and left behind an “empty cupboard” of ventilators. He invented a fairy tale about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “dancing” in the streets of Chinatown and attacked Anthony S. Fauci, the renowned director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, with bogus complaints. He also repeatedly lowballed the death count, falsely claiming he saved millions of lives. He often wrongly said 85 percent of mask-wearers catch the virus — insisting it was true even after he was corrected. And this is only scratching the surface of his falsehoods.

Election lies
Throughout 2020, Trump seeded the ground for challenging the presidential election results with bogus claims of election fraud. More than 200 times, he warned about the alleged dangers of mail-in voting. (His own administration highlighted how his false claims on voting-by-mail were almost identical to the Russian propaganda being spread online to destabilize U.S. politics.) In his campaign rallies, Trump sprinkled his speeches with tall tales about election malfeasance. So when Biden decisively defeated him in the 2020 election, the president and his allies engaged in a scorched-earth effort to challenge the vote count in key swing states. His claims were repeatedly tossed out of court by judges and denied by election officials, but Trump has kept repeating the false claims, even after the electoral college affirmed Biden’s win. Trump still refuses to concede. These lies may have long-term consequences, undermining Americans’ faith that votes will be correctly counted.

Bogus violence claims
The killing of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis by police led to a national reckoning on race. But Trump saw the incident as a way to gain an electoral edge, so he repeatedly hyped claims about “professional anarchists, violent mobs, or, arsonists, looters, criminals, rider rioters, antifa and others.” antifa is a moniker, not a single group with a clear organizational structure or leader, and no cases could be found in which someone who self-identifies as antifa led violent acts at protests across the country. The White House tweeted (and later deleted) a 58-second video that employed out-of-context social clips to lob unproven accusations and create a misleading impression of what has happened during the Floyd protests. Trump himself tweeted an outrageous conspiracy theory about a Buffalo man injured by police. He also falsely claimed that Obama never tried to tackle the problem of police brutality during his presidency. And he repeatedly — and falsely — said that Biden supported efforts to defund police.

“No president has done more for Blacks since Lincoln”
Trump is not a modest man. More than 30 times, he declared he has done more for Black people than any other president — or, he might generously concede, since Abraham Lincoln. Historians scoffed at his claim, saying that Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, is clearly the recent president who had the most lasting impact on the lives of Black Americans. Many other presidents were also ranked higher than Trump.

“Joe Scarborough got away with murder”
Some dozen times, Trump insinuated that MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough might have murdered a congressional aide. This was an old claim, debunked by The Washington Post in 2017. But Trump often smears those who challenge him. He has a long-running feud with the “Morning Joe” husband-and-wife team of Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. Still, even after four years of Trump, it remains astounding to see the president make a thinly veiled murder accusation devoid of evidence.

“I will always protect people with preexisting conditions”
Trump understands little about health-care policy. But he does understand that the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with preexisting health conditions are highly popular. So in every speech, he includes this line, even though it is directly contradicted by the policies his administration has pursued, including asking the Supreme Court to strike down the entire ACA, thus ending the guarantee for patients with preexisting conditions. Few claims better illustrate the gap between Trump’s words and actions.

“Trump is the most pro-gay president in American history”
Technically Trump did not say this, but he retweeted a video — proclaiming “My great honor!!!” — that was narrated by Richard Grenell, a longtime spinmeister and booster of the president. The video makes the provocative claim that Trump — whose administration is often criticized by LGBTQ rights advocates as anti-gay — is actually the most “pro-gay” president in U.S. history. The core of the video is actually a lengthy attack on Biden as anti-LGBTQ. The video is a stew of misleading timelines, out-of-context quotes and claims easily debunked — which was typical of Trump campaign material.

Joe Biden

“I was arrested trying to see Nelson Mandela”
In one of the strangest tall tales, Biden three times asserted that he had the “great honor” of being arrested with the U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see Nelson Mandela “on Robbens Island.” Never mind that Soweto, a township near Johannesburg, is nearly 900 miles from Robben — not Robbens — Island, which is off the coast of Cape Town. No one knew what Biden was talking about, including Andrew Young, the former ambassador. Eventually Biden explained he was separated from Black colleagues at the airport. That’s not an arrest.

“Trump has a plan to deplete Social Security”
There cannot be an election without Democrats making bogus claims about an alleged GOP attack on Social Security. The Biden campaign followed this technique when it asserted that Trump had a “plan” to eliminate the payroll tax that funds Social Security. Trump certainly made confusing comments before he reiterated that any diversion for a payroll tax holiday would come out of general funds. But that did not stop Democrats from ginning up a letter from the chief actuary of Social Security to estimate the impact of a plan that did not exist — which the Biden campaign weaponized into attack ads and the candidate repeated on the campaign trail.

Other Parties

“I created a foundation 10 years ago that helped inner-city kids”
Bryant “Corky” Messner, a first-time candidate who unsuccessfully challenged Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), during his campaign touted an organization, the Messner Foundation, which he said selects low-income students every year to receive college scholarships. But tax records examined by The Fact Checker showed that in the first 10 years of the foundation’s existence, only one student received a scholarship from Messner’s foundation — and even more money was given to an elite private school that Messner’s sons were attending at the time. Yet for years Messner and the foundation have suggested that many students had been the recipients of funds.

Source: Posted December 18, 2020; retrieved December 20, 2020 from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/18/biggest-pinocchios-2020/

It has been a year filled with darkness; the only remedy is light, or enlightening knowledge. Even the Bible says:

You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. The Bible – John 8:32 New Living Translation

So truth is connected to freedom and freedom to truth. The President of the United States is considered the Leader of the Free World, but that title has been dubious for 2020, as so much of what has gone wrong this year has Mr. Trump’s fingerprints on it. Consider these, the major 2020 events of the year:

Natural Disaster rages on – We must abate Climate Change – Thanks for nothing Mr. Trump
Coronavirus – Facts and Fictions – Exposing hate and denials
Solar Energy reconciliation – Finally, but long past the right time to implement Green Energy solutions
Chef Jose Andres – bailing out America, too, by feeding the hungry
European Role Model, not so admirable – we must Grow Up ourselves and Be Better
Labor Realities in a Pandemic: Essential or Sacrificial – Not everyone suffers the same
Hamilton comes to Streaming; Streaming takes over the world
Remembering 100 Years of Voting for American Women – Lessons for us in the Caribbean
Naomi Osaka – Shining Example of Light
Banking on the Bank – The Inter-American Development Bank
Election Reality – Hasta La Vista Mr. Trump

In addition, the movement behind the Go Lean book always publishes a Teaching Series every month. The subject matters of those series have propelled the “Caribbean” discussion forward in terms of how to reform and transform our society. Consider these topics for the applicable months of 2020:

January	Forging Change – How? An Art & a Science – 4-part series
February	Brain Drain Actuality – The Good, Bad & the Ugly – 5-part series
March	Big Hairy Audacious Goal – Yes, we can – 7-part series
April	Keep the Change – Some Pandemic changes are good for transforming the world – 5-part series
May	Good Leadership – Essential for Progress – Here is how – 6-part series
June	Rise from the Ashes – COVID-19 is the last to devastate us; time to rebuild – 7-part series
July	Black Image and Black Lives Matter – This means the Caribbean too – 6-part series
August	Pandemic Playbook – Fail to plan; plan to fail – 7-part series
September	Toxic Environments – A compelling reason for the Exile “Push” – 7-part series
October	Decision 2020 – Impact of the Caribbean Diaspora – 5-part series
November	Decision 2020 – After the Vote Analysis – 5-part series
December	Long Train of Abuses – a 6-part series

We lost a lot during 2020 – see the “Review” in the Appendix VIDEO below. For the Caribbean, we lost people to death and to the Diaspora. So we have no choice; we must reform and transform. This is still the goal, this is the Way Forward.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

If this premise is true, then the needed changes for Caribbean survival should be forthcoming, as 2020 has been all crises all the time.

Let’s get busy …

… the end of the pandemic is in sight – with the release of vaccines – the emergency will subside, but we must not ignore the urgent-emergent need to protect our Caribbean future.

Yes, we can …

When is the time to act? Now! It is always now! Now is the time to reboot and turn-around the societal engines of economics, security and governance. People are listening now. They are ready, willing and able to Be the Change that our society needs. They are ready, willing and able to make the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

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.

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

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 VIDEO – “CBS This Morning” looks back on a historic year with a roundup of all the news that mattered in 2020 – https://youtu.be/0etgUEHz6zM

CBS This Morning
Posted December 21, 2020 – 2020 will be a year we’ll always remember, and one that has forever changed our country. The coronavirus claimed the lives of more than 300,000 Americans, businesses closed, and tens of millions of people filed for unemployment. We also elected a new president, and witnessed the growing demand to end racial injustice. “CBS This Morning” looks back at the pivotal moments and people that shaped this year.

Watch “CBS This Morning” HERE: http://bit.ly/1T88yAR

Download the CBS News app on iOS HERE: https://apple.co/1tRNnUy

Download the CBS News app on Android HERE: https://bit.ly/1IcphuX

Like “CBS This Morning” on Facebook HERE: http://on.fb.me/1LhtdvI

Follow “CBS This Morning” on Twitter HERE: http://bit.ly/1Xj5W3p

Follow “CBS This Morning” on Instagram HERE: http://bit.ly/1Q7NGnY

Get new episodes of shows you love across devices the next day, stream local news live, and watch full seasons of CBS fan favorites anytime, anywhere with CBS All Access. Try it free!

http://bit.ly/1OQA29B

Each weekday morning, “CBS This Morning” co-hosts Gayle King, Anthony Mason and Tony Dokoupil deliver two hours of original reporting, breaking news and top-level newsmaker interviews in an engaging and informative format that challenges the norm in network morning news programs. The broadcast has earned a prestigious Peabody Award, a Polk Award, four News & Documentary Emmys, three Daytime Emmys and the 2017 Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Newscast. The broadcast was also honored with an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award as part of CBS News division-wide coverage of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Check local listings for “CBS This Morning” broadcast times.

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Long Train of Abuses: Religious Character in Society – Human Rights

Posted on December 10, 2020 in Ethos, Locations, Planning, Social

Go Lean Commentary

This is a continuation of the monthly Teaching Series from the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean on the Long Train of Abuses that have molded our people and our society. We have a lot of defects that is obvious for all to see, within the region or from an external global view. After 525 years, our societal character is cemented; we have the greatest address on the planet and an abundance of hospitality, but we have many societal flaws that dominate.

People can see it and/or feel it without actually being here.

Did you know?

“Customers can hear a smile through the phone.” – Contact Center Experts

This is true because it is hard to fake sincerity; despite the senses, proof of a good/bad heart comes through. The actuality of a good/bad heart has been evident through out Caribbean history. The moral sense of right-wrong, good-bad and right-wrong for the Caribbean has been based on the Judeo-Christian standard. As related in the last blog-commentary in this series, the premise was established that Caribbean society was molded with a Christian expansion motivation; make that Christendom.

How do we know it is Christendom, instead of Christianity?

By the character fruitage of our society. That same Judeo-Christian standard, the Bible, clearly defines how to assess:

… love one another; just as I have loved you. By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love among yourselves.”— John 13:34, 35 NWT

We have failed, far too often, to show love to our neighbors.

Many times, we have even fostered a Climate of Hate, especially for people different from the majority of the population in power. Thusly, many people in our society have had to endure a Long Train of Abuses. This is what was related in a previous blog-commentary from June 14, 2016:

Climate of Hate
Our Caribbean society, far too often, promotes a “climate of hate”. Consider these three examples:

Haitian Immigrants– Many Caribbean countries express vitriol towards Haitian migrants.

LGBT– Still clinging to the archaic “Buggery” laws, many countries persecute gays in their society as degenerates.

Equality-seeking Women– Just last week, a referendum failed in the Bahamas 3 to 1.

The Caribbean member-states, collectively and individually, need to curb its “climate of hate” and to pay more than the usual attention to the lessons from …

This discussion is important because our failures to exhibit a Christian character – or any religious influence – has led to a lot of societal defects – Human Rights abuses – and eventual societal abandonment. See here, as related in a different previous commentary from July 2, 2015 entitled “Buggery in Jamaica – ‘Say It Ain’t So’!”:

… this defect – LGBT Intolerance – was listed among the blatant Human Rights abuses in the region.

This is an important consideration for the planners of Caribbean empowerment. The Caribbean, a region where unfortunately, we have NOT … tried to be as tolerant as may be required, expected and just plain moral.

We must do better!

The book Go Lean … Caribbean asserts that Caribbean society’s prosperity has been hindered with a high abandonment rate – reported at 70% for educated classes region-wide, but an even higher 85% in Jamaica [some countries]. The primary mission of the Go Lean book is to “battle” against the “push-and-pull” factors that draw so many of our Caribbean citizens away from their homelands to go to more progressive countries.

The Go Lean book campaigns to lower the “push” factors!

The purpose of the Go Lean book is to fix the Caribbean; to be better. The Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) to pursue the quest to elevate the Caribbean region through empowerments in economics, security and governance. It is the assertion that Caribbean citizens can stay home and effect change in their homelands more effectively than going to some foreign countries to find opportunities for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The book therefore asserts that the region can turn-around from failing assessments by applying best-practices, and forging new societal institutions to impact the Greater Good for all the Caribbean.

Rather than promote “peace and love” or even Human Rights, the Christian communities have exacerbated a Climate of Hate.

A Long Train of Abuses, ouch!

Research shows that the men most likely to abuse their wives are evangelical Christians who attend church sporadically. Church leaders in Australia say they abhor abuse of any kind. But advocates say the church is not just failing to sufficiently address domestic violence, it is both enabling and concealing it.

Remember the bad religious orthodoxy that was discussed in the last entry in this blog series; how these ‘hatreds’ were embedded in national edicts (Law-and-Order) over the centuries, decades and years: Slavery, Colonialism , Patriarchy / Gender Rights, White Supremacy, Buggery / LGBT Rights, Child Abuse.

This monthly Go Lean Teaching Series always presents issues that are germane to Caribbean life and culture and how to address them. For this month of December 2020, we are looking at the Long Train of Abuses that have pushed our people away from the homeland. This is entry 4-of-6; this one asserts that the embedded religiosity in Caribbean society has real world consequences, bad consequences. The toxicity and dysfunction in our society is among the Long Train of Abuses that we have had to endure. The full catalog of the series this month is as follows:

Long Train of Abuses: Enough Already – Colonialism Be Gone!
Long Train of Abuses: Overseas Masters – Cannot See Overseas
Long Train of Abuses: Religious Leadership in Government – Reconciling Trump
Long Train of Abuses: Religious Character in Society – Human Rights
Long Train of Abuses: Dutch Hypocrisy – Liberal Amsterdam vs Conservative Antilles
Long Train of Abuses: Puerto Rico – “Take the Heat” or “Get out of the Kitchen”

All the defects identified and qualified here are reflective of Human Rights abuses.

Human Rights deficiencies despite the Christian premise. Wow! This is because it is not Christianity at work in the Caribbean; it is Christendom. So we need greater protections than just a copy of the Bible in everyone’s “night stand”. We need to reboot and end this Long Train of Abuses, now!

How?

The Go Lean book, serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), an apolitical, religiously-neutral, economic-focused technocracy. The Go Lean book presents an action plan to better foster the Greater Good – “the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong” (Page 37). In addition, the book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt new community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics and implementations to execute so as to transform the Caribbean’s stance on Human Rights. In one specific advocacy (Page 220), there are action items for the heavy-lifting work that needs to be done. See here for summaries, excerpts and highlights from this Chapter entitled “10 Ways to Protect Human Rights“:

1	Lean-in for Caribbean Integration This regional re-boot will allow for the unification of the region into one market, thereby creating a single economy of 30 member-states, 42 million people and a GDP of over $800 Billion. The CU will assume the primary coordination for the region’s economy and the requisite security to protect the resultant economic engines. While the CU is an economic initiative, there is a mission to monitor/mitigate Fail State Indices, and Human Rights violations constitute a Failed State Indicator.
2	Watchful World A CU mission is to monitor the image of the Caribbean to the rest of the world. Not only will the world be watching the activities in the region, but the “story” being told will be directed to depict a positive behind-the-scenes view, that the region is the best place to live-work-play.
3	Caribbean [Persons] with Disabilities
4	Women & Youth The CU will allow for empowerment and protections of women & children, orphans & widows, in compliance with Judeo-Christian precepts, Human Rights requirements, & natural instincts. These efforts will include the special needs for young girls, adult women and senior women.
5	LGBT Toleration It is no longer acceptable to deny natural rights or Human Rights to those with alternate sexual orientation. In fact, qualifications for current EU grants depend on compliance of this requirement, (not granting rights for same-sex marriage), allowing this class to live free of discrimination, hazing, bullying and abuse. These rules are codified under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This provides a right to respect for one’s “private and family life, his home and his correspondence” ^[248]. The CU federal oversight is mandatory as these clauses clash with pro-Christian values.
6	Reconciliations
7	Future Focus
8	Justice Focus
9	Tourist Omnipresence
10	Long-Form Journalism

Human Rights versus Christian Character?

It seems like such a “joke” that this advocacy is even necessary – but the need is great. Where is the Christian love? What a reproach to God that such behavior have brought a Climate of Hate in the name of God. Actually, this apostasy is exactly what the Bible prophesied for these times – the Last Days. See here:

You will be chased out of the synagogues. And the time will come when people will kill you and think they are doing God a favor. – John 16:2 Contemporary English Version

The Long Train of Abuses is predictable, but not good.

Other societies have done better; they have done the heavy-lifting for everyone – majority and minority – to prosper where planted in their homeland. We can, and must do it too; or watch our citizens – and those that love them – flee to those better lands. These better lands has formulated Human Rights standards and conventions and expect all “Men/Women of Goodwill” to comply.

One such convention is CEDAW or the “Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women”. See the full details in Appendix A below. (Also see Appendix B VIDEO as it relates the subject of gender-based violence being endured in the Caribbean region and around the world during this COVID-19 pandemic). Notice that one of the few countries that have not ratified CEDAW is the “Holy See” or the Vatican.

Holy See
The jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome, known as the pope, which includes the apostolic episcopal see of the Diocese of Rome with universal ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the worldwide Catholic Church, as well as a sovereign entity of international law, governing the Vatican City. – Wikipedia

The Holy See being tolerant of a Long Train of Abuses is indicative of Christendom and not Christianity.

The Caribbean member-states must foster a better homeland that protects all of its residents and promotes prosperity, despite whatever the Churches are doing or not doing. What’s more, we must hold religious organizations accountable for their actions and violations of Human Rights standards and modern justice requirements.

This Go Lean movement has previously detailed many related issues and advocacies for Human Rights mandates in our region; consider this sample of previous blog-commentaries:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=20561	How to mitigate Human Rights Abuses? Build on ‘Diversity & Inclusion’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=20559	Toxic Environment – Homophobia: Hate not Fear
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=20557	Toxic Environment – It Infects Everything – Think “Cross” burnings
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=19002	Remembering Auschwitz – Still Relevant considering modern atrocities
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=15580	Caribbean Unity? Religion’s Role: False Friend
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14482	International Women’s Day – Protecting Rural Women
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=11224	‘Loose Lips Sink Ships’ – Fanatical Theologians Undermine Tourism
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10216	Waging a Successful War on Orthodoxy
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9766	Rwanda’s Catholic bishops apologize for genocide
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6718	A Lesson in History Before the Civil War: Compromising Human Rights
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5695	Repenting, Forgiving and Reconciling the Past
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4971	A Lesson in Church History – Royal Charters: Truth & Consequence
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=341	US slams Caribbean human rights practices

Human Rights, the concept and the practice has been fleeting here in the Caribbean, not just among the governmental leaders but the citizenry as well. Leaders have not protected Human Rights for all and the citizenry have not demanded it … among the majorities – vocal outcries may be limited to minority groups only.

Enough already! It is time to think of the Greater Good for all people not just the most populous; from one aspect or another, anyone and everyone may be considered a minority.

There needs to be a force for moral good for all, but that has not come from the religious influences in the region, so it must come from the State (or Federal Government) instead, despite a formal Separation of Church and State.

This is not just a Christian indictment. We saw the same issue in India with the Hindu population (also a Caribbean minority):

Transforming Hindus versus Women – What it means for us?
“Women of menstruating age were forbidden to pray at the temple until the [Indian] Supreme Court lifted the ban in September [2018]. The ban was informal for many years but became law in 1972.

Some devotees have filed a petition saying the court decision revoking the ban was an affront to the celibate deity Ayyappa. …”

The concept is simple for “States“, while they must allow for Freedom of Religion, they cannot allow religious intimidation of their citizens. No More!

This is an issue of Orthodoxy and it is not only a concern in India. Even here in the Caribbean we have to make progress. Clearly we understand the oppression, suppression and repression experienced in India prohibiting women to pray in the Temple, and so there is the acceptance that it is right for that State to act against continued abuse. There has always been a need for States to legislate morality in society over the years.

Based on the foregoing, Hindus suffer the same abuse record as Christianity and Islam towards women. Bad religious orthodoxies seem to always exist when matters of faith are involved, so the State must regulate the behavior of Churches to ensure no violation of basic Human Rights.

We must do better; we must pursue the Greater Good … always.

We hereby urge all stakeholders – the faithful and the faithless – to lean-in to this Way Forward – a formal separation of Church and State – for societal progress; this is the quest of the Go Lean roadmap. This is our plan to make our regional homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

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.

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

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. The Federation must employ the latest advances and best practices … to assuage continuous threats against public safety.

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.

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 A – Title: Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is an international treaty adopted in 1979 by the United Nations General Assembly. Described as an international bill of rights for women, it was instituted on 3 September 1981 and has been ratified by 189 states.^[1] Over fifty countries that have ratified the Convention have done so subject to certain declarations, reservations, and objections, including 38 countries who rejected the enforcement article 29, which addresses means of settlement for disputes concerning the interpretation or application of the Convention.^[2] Australia’s declaration noted the limitations on central government power resulting from its federal constitutional system. The United States and Palau have signed, but not ratified the treaty. The Holy See, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and Tonga are not signatories to CEDAW. …

See the full details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Elimination_of_All_Forms_of_Discrimination_Against_Women ; retrieved December 9, 2020.

—————–

Appendix B VIDEO – St. Lucia: #CaribbeanYouthAgainstCovid19 and #YouthAgainstCovid19 – Jasmyn Joseph – https://youtu.be/FsDU7P1o_RM

UNFPA Caribbean
Due to #COVID19, the health and safety of women and girls has been compromised. Women and girls are disproportionately impacted by this pandemic. In this last episode of the #youthagainstcovid19 campaign Jasmyn Joseph talks about the ways this pandemic has been affecting women and girls around the world and the actions we as a community can take to promote #genderequality during covid-19.

Share this video, so other youth can get informed and take action against gender inequality during covid19!

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Decision 2020 – The Winner: Cannabis

Posted on November 17, 2020 in Ethos, Government, Planning, Social

Go Lean Commentary

The 2020 US General Election is over – finally! And the winner is:

Cannabis

Voter approval for Marijuana decriminalization or legalization was on the ballot in a number of states. In almost every case: Cannabis (or Marijuana) won.

Ouch!

While this is not the case in most Caribbean countries, the fact that the giant United States of America has changed their views towards Cannabis – both legally and morally – will most definitely have an effect on us in our region. The American hegemony rules … in both trade and tourism. The enormity of the American impact can be visualized with this puzzle:

Where does an 800 Gorilla sit? Anywhere he wants.

There were a lot of BIG ISSUES in the Decision 2020 campaigns, but this one should not skip our attention, as the legalization of recreational marijuana can have major upheavals on society. In a previous blog-commentary – observing and reporting on the legalization of Cannabis in the US State of Michigan on December 1, 2019 – by the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean, a direct correlation was made to chaos in society; see this excerpt:

Marijuana in Detroit – Chaos on Chaos – December 17, 2019
It turns out that the Marijuana eco-system brings chaos. If the community is already chaotic, then that disposition is heightened, intensified and exacerbated.

This commentary is an analysis of the Decision 2020 issues. It is a continuation of the monthly Teaching Series from the Go Lean movement for November 2020. Every month, a Teaching Series addresses issues germane to Caribbean life and culture. This one is not about the presidential candidates for Decision 2020, but rather this “Hot Button” issue of Cannabis.

We have previously covered issues about the presidential race in 5 blog-commentaries for October 2020, plus three subsequent ones in November – this is the fourth. All of these entries are relevant for Decision 2020 as they relate to the impact of the Caribbean on America’s politics … and the impact (and lessons) of America’s politics on the Caribbean. See the full catalog of this multi-part, multi-month Decision 2020 Teaching Series here as follows:

Decision 2020: Puerto Rico claps back at Trump
Decision 2020: Haiti’s Agenda 2016 ==> 2020 – Trump never cared
Decision 2020: Latino Gender Gap – More Toxic Masculinity
Decision 2020: More Immigration or Less
Decision 2020: What’s Next for Cuba & Venezuela
——– After the Vote:
Decision 2020: Hasta La Vista Mr. Trump
Decision 2020: Voices From the ‘Peanut Gallery’
Decision 2020: It is what it is; ‘we are who we are’
Decision 2020: The Winner: Cannabis

The take-away from all of these considerations is that American politics and social engineering have a bearing on our Caribbean eco-system; their domestic policy affects moral issues like recreational drugs will impact our Foreign Policy, trade practices and touristic hospitality. We wish American Cannabis policy and Decision 2020, was just their business, but “No, we are affected; just like we are down wind from a pot-smoking crowd”; we will be affected. So this is our business too!

Welcome to heavy-lifting…

See how this Cannabis victory was portrayed in the news media production here:

Title: ‘A tipping point’: Psychedelics, Cannabis win big across the country on election night
Sub-title: “People are realizing it’s not just about getting high,” said Avis Bulbulyan, CEO of SIVA Enterprises. “This is a tipping point for drug policy absent any federal reform.”
By: Alicia Victoria Lozano

As the nation awaits a final result from the presidential election, a clear winner emerged Tuesday: drugs.

Measures to legalize cannabis and decriminalize other drugs won major victories this week as five states — Arizona, New Jersey, South Dakota, Montana and Mississippi — legalized some form of marijuana use and Oregon became the first state to make possession of small amounts of harder drugs, including cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine, violations not punishable by jail time.

Voters in Oregon and Washington, D.C., also approved measures to allow for the therapeutic use of psychedelic mushrooms, which are already being prescribed to help some terminally ill patients in Canada cope with pain and end-of-life anxiety.

“People are realizing it’s not just about getting high,” said Avis Bulbulyan, CEO of SIVA Enterprises, a cannabis business development and solutions firm based in Glendale, California, near Los Angeles. “This is a tipping point for drug policy absent any federal reform.”

On Tuesday, South Dakota became the first state whose voters approved both recreational and medical cannabis in the same election. Medicinal marijuana also was made legal in Mississippi. Meanwhile, New Jersey, Montana and Arizona all legalized recreational cannabis.

“Despite this public consensus, elected officials have far too often remained unresponsive to the legalization issue,” Erik Altieri, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, said in a statement.

NORML has lobbied for the end of marijuana prohibitions since it was founded in 1970.

“These results once again illustrate that support for legalization extends across geographic and demographic lines,” Altieri said. “The success of these initiatives proves definitively that marijuana legalization is not exclusively a ‘blue’ state issue, but an issue that is supported by a majority of all Americans — regardless of party politics.”

Just 10 years ago, recreational cannabis was illegal in all 50 states, but that started to change in 2012, when Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize marijuana for recreational use. At the time, California, which has one of the biggest and oldest marijuana markets in the country, allowed only medicinal use of cannabis.

A domino effect followed, with several more states venturing into the medicinal markets, including Pennsylvania in 2016 and New York in 2014. Now, 15 states, two territories and Washington, D.C., have legalized marijuana for recreational use, while 34 states and two territories allow medical marijuana.

“It’s fantastic to see this cannabis sweep,” said Stuart Titus, CEO of Medical Marijuana Inc., a hemp products company based in San Diego. “There is a tremendous momentum building. I think we’re right on the precipice of changing federal policy with so many states coming online.”

Despite the ballot initiatives, marijuana and other drugs remain illegal at the federal level. The Drug Enforcement Administration continues to classify cannabis as a Schedule 1 drug akin to LSD, heroin and ecstasy.

In New Jersey, some advocates for cannabis legalization worry that the state ballot measure remains too murky and would not tackle social justice concerns surrounding the so-called war on drugs.

The question posed to voters appears simple at first glance: “Do you approve amending the Constitution to legalize a controlled form of marijuana called ‘cannabis’?”

While the majority of voters said yes, the language would not necessarily decriminalize all adult-use cannabis. Instead, it would make only “a controlled form” of the plant legal, said Chris Goldstein, a regional organizer for NORML.

“New Jersey voters sent a message to the Legislature — they want prohibition to end,” he said. “They want people to stop getting arrested.”

The Legislature will now have to pass another measure to set up the new cannabis marketplace. Whether that will reduce marijuana arrests and convictions remains to be seen, Goldstein said.

Meanwhile, Arizona’s measure allows people convicted of certain cannabis crimes to seek expungement of their records. Arizona voters narrowly defeated a legal pot proposal in 2016.

Cannabis was not the only drug on the ballot.

In Oregon, voters approved Measure 110 to allow a person found in possession of small amounts of hard drugs to avoid jail time by paying a $100 fine or attending an addiction recovery center. The centers would be funded through tax revenue collected from the state’s legal cannabis program.

Separately, Oregon voters passed measures to decriminalize psychedelic drugs, as did voters in Washington, D.C.

In Washington, D.C., Initiative 81 will lower the enforcement priority for “entheogenic plants and fungi,” or psychedelic mushrooms and mescaline-containing cacti. The ballot measure would not legalize psychedelics in the nation’s capital.

Oregon, however, became the first state to legalize psilocybin, also called magic mushrooms.

Measure 109 calls for the manufacture and therapeutic use of psilocybin to treat patients with mental health disorders. Some research suggests that psilocybin, when ingested in small doses under supervised settings, can ease stress and induce feelings of happiness.

In one recent study, patients who were given a single dose of the psychedelic drug to ease depression and anxiety still felt its positive effects years later. The patients were given small amounts of psilocybin in 2016 to look at whether it could ease cancer-related anxiety and depression. Eighty percent of the patients said their symptoms faded.

“What is permanent is that I don’t have anxiety about cancer. Not only about my cancer returning, but how I viewed my reoccurrence when it did happen,” Dinah Bazer, who was diagnosed in March with a type of rare gastrointestinal cancer, said at the time.

Source: Posted November 4, 2020; retrieved November 20, 2020 from: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/tipping-point-psychedelics-cannabis-win-big-across-country-election-night-n1246469

———-

Title: MAP – See the States where Marijuana is legal
Sub-title: Nationwide, 15 states, two territories and Washington, D.C., have legalized marijuana for recreational use, while 34 states and two territories allow medical marijuana.
By: Jiachuan Wu and Daniella Silva

Voters in New Jersey, Arizona, Montana and South Dakota approved ballot measures Tuesday that would legalize recreational marijuana. Mississippi approved the use of medical marijuana for people with debilitating conditions.

Nationwide, 15 states, two territories and Washington, D.C., have legalized marijuana for recreational use, while 34 states and two more territories allow medical marijuana.

See which states allow marijuana for medical and/or recreational use.

Source: Posted and retrieved November 4, 2020 from: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/map-see-if-marijuana-legal-your-state-n938426?icid=related

Do you see the slippery slope? Not only Cannabis, but other psychedelic drugs as well? See Appendix VIDEO below.

This is a familiar theme – the emergence of medical-then-recreational marijuana in mainstream society – for the Go Lean movement; we have repeatedly blogged on this subject; consider this sample of previous submissions:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18737	Marijuana in Detroit – Chaos on Chaos
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14836	Counter-culture: Pushing for Change
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14480	Managing Mental Health in the Caribbean – Marijuana Use Intensity
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13882	Managing ‘Change’ in California
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12703	Lessons from Colorado: Legalized Marijuana – Heavy-lifting!
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1386	Marijuana in Jamaica – Puff Peace

As related previously, the ecosystem around Marijuana use is not purely an economic equation; it also addresses security concerns and Public Health issues:

There will be Winners and Losers.

Marijuana or Cannabis is a drug! Plain and simple! People will get addicted and society must deal with addiction as a Mental Health reality.

Overall, the position of the Go Lean movement is:

“We are not ready … for the chaos of recreational marijuana. We had better get ready now because this change is coming soon”.

The book Go Lean…Caribbean (Page 36), posits that the Mental Health eco-system in the region must get ready. We must reboot, empower and elevate our Mental Health facilitations. The chore of doing this is too big for any one Caribbean member-state alone. We need help!

The help we need in the Caribbean is not an American consideration. The candidates for Decision 2020 have no positions on the Caribbean Mental Health facilitations; this is on us … alone.

Mental Health affects everyone; everybody is involved. No one is spared from Mental Health challenges; consider these everyday Mental Health realities:

Bereavement
Post-Partum Depression (for new mothers)
Post Trauma Stress Disorder
Drug Abuse and Alcohol Counseling
Suicide Prevention

The Mental Health ecosystem must be optimized to address the needs of all the people all the time. This is part of the standard offering of local governance. This is the actuality of the Social Contract on the societal engines of economics, security and governance. This Social Contract means …

… where citizens surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority of the State in exchange for protection of remaining natural and legal rights.

Caribbean stewards – government and community leaders alike – have just a little time to get ready for more societal Chaos brought on by recreational marijuana; (and possibly other recreational drugs – see Appendix VIDEO).

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Of no, wait! that’s not an option either.

Change – good and bad – is coming!

If you can’t stand the heat … get out of the kitchen and allow cooks and kitchen stewards who can stand the heat.

This is the new reality. We must deliver on our societal deliverables.

Change brings Chaos.
Chaos brings change.

7 years ago, the Go Lean book was presented to the Caribbean region as a roadmap to get ready for unavoidable Agents of Change. The roadmap is ready.

We hereby urge all Caribbean stakeholders to lean-in to this roadmap to reform and transform the regional economic engines, security apparatus (including Public Health facilitations), and our regional governance. This is how we will make our Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work, heal and play. 🙂

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.

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

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, wellness, mental health, obesity and smoking cessation programs. The Federation must proactively anticipate the demand and supply of organ transplantation as developing countries are often exploited by richer neighbors for illicit organ trade.

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 VIDEO – California could decriminalize psychedelic drugs – https://youtu.be/cUqVH_IinwQ

ABC10
State [Senator] Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said he plans to introduce a bill decriminalizing possession of hallucinogenic mushrooms and other psychedelics.

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Toxic Environment – Ease of Doing Business

Posted on September 28, 2020 in Ethos, Government, Industries, Planning

Go Lean Commentary

Peace and Prosperity …

This is what we want – it is just that simple – to live harmoniously with our neighbors while we provide for ourselves and our loved-ones. But this is not so automatic! There must be empowerments and protections in the societal engines to allow citizens to obtain these goals. Failures in the delivery of these empowerments and protections will create chaos, dysfunctions, Toxic Environments and even:

Failed-States

If we do nothing, the end result is a Failed-State.

If we do the wrong things … Failed-State. This has been the focus of this current series on remediating Toxic Environments.

So societal stakeholders must be a part of the solution; they must help … for the sake of Peace and Prosperity.

When there is a lack of Peace and Prosperity, a Toxic Environment can easily emerge. Let’s focus now on Prosperity. That means there must be a solution for jobs (full-time and gigs), entrepreneurial and investment opportunities. This is the focus on this commentary, the means for prosperity. The same effort we put on promoting Peace must also be put on fostering Prosperity. Without the opportunity for citizens to live prosperously, the environment becomes Toxic.

We do not want Toxic Environments … anymore.

In fact, this has been the focus of this Teaching Series from the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean – which serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). This roadmap asserts that Caribbean economic, security (Public Safety) and governing stakeholders must all work hand-in-hand to remediate our Toxic Environments. Every month, the movement behind the Go Lean book presents these Teaching Series to address issues germane to Caribbean life and culture. For this month of September 2020, this is entry 5-of-6, we are looking at how to improve the homeland so that our citizens can prosper where they are planted; all citizens, not just some privileged few and definitely be On Guard for any discrimination against a persecuted minority.

As alluded here, a lack of opportunities for the masses, or limitation of opportunities to a privileged few only, or blatant discrimination to persecuted minorities trying to participate in the economic eco-system describe the Toxic Environment that we currently suffer here in the Caribbean. The end result of such Toxic Environment is inexcusable human flight due to these Push and Pull dynamics:

“Push” refers to people who feel compelled to leave, to seek refuge in a foreign land. “Refuge” is an appropriate word; because of societal defects, many from the Caribbean must leave as refugees – think LGBT, Disability, Domestic-abuse, Medically-challenged – for their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
“Pull”, on the other hand refers to the lure of a more prosperous life abroad; many times our people are emigrating for societies that have better expressions of the rights for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

Toxic Environments have a direct correlation to Push and Pull dynamics. We need to always monitor these factors and societal defects. This is the purpose of this month’s Teaching Series. Consider here, the full catalog of the series this month:

Toxic Environment: Ready for Football – Washington “Redskins”
Toxic Environment: Homophobia – The problem is the Hate, not the Fear
Toxic Environment: Opposite of Diversity & Inclusion
Toxic Environment: Lessons from Yugoslavia
Toxic Environment: Ease of Doing Business
Toxic Environment: Make the Caribbean Great (Anew)

The subject of prosperity versus Toxic Environment is a concern for the stewards of the new Caribbean – promoters of the CU Trade Federation, and also for the United Nations-backed financial institution, the World Bank. In fact, the World Bank produces an Annual Ranking of all participating countries for the assessment of the Ease of Doing Business. This ranking measures the success-failure of National Governments to facilitate the creation of new businesses and expansion by existing businesses.

Yes, it can be measured.

Some reporting Nation-States do it better than others.

The ones that fail, create a Toxic Environment for those trying to improve prosperity in their homeland. These failures and the Toxic Environments push good people to flee and leave for “greener pastures”.

See the summary of the 2020 Ease of Doing Business Report here; (notice, New Zealand is #1):

Title: World Bank – Ease of Doing Business Ranking
Overview
Doing Business 2020, a World Bank Group flagship publication, is the 17^th in a series of annual studies measuring the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. Doing Business presents quantitative indicators on business regulations and the protection of property rights that can be compared across 190 economies—from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe—and over time.

Doing Business covers 12 areas of business regulation. Ten of these areas—starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, and resolving insolvency—are included in the ease of doing business score and ease of doing business ranking. Doing Business also measures regulation on employing workers and contracting with the government, which are not included in the ease of doing business score and ranking.

By documenting changes in regulation in 12 areas of business activity in 190 economies, Doing Business analyzes regulation that encourages efficiency and supports freedom to do business. The data collected by Doing Business address three questions about government. First, when do governments change regulation with a view to developing their private sector? Second, what are the characteristics of reformist governments? Third, what are the effects of regulatory change on different aspects of economic or investment activity? Answering these questions adds to our knowledge of development.

Data in Doing Business 2020 are current as of May 1, 2019.

Main findings:

Doing Business captures 294 regulatory reforms implemented between May 2018 and May 2019. Worldwide, 115 economies made it easier to do business.

The economies with the most notable improvement in Doing Business 2020 are Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Togo, Bahrain, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, China, India and Nigeria. In 2018/19, these countries implemented one-fifth of all the reforms recorded worldwide.

Economies in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean continue to lag in terms of reforms. Only two Sub-Saharan African economies rank in the top 50 on the ease of doing business; no Latin American economies rank in this group.

Doing Business 2020 continues to show a steady convergence between developing and developed economies, especially in the area of business incorporation. Since 2003/04, 178 economies have implemented 722 reforms captured by the starting a business indicator set, either reducing or eliminating barriers to entry.

Those economies that score well on Doing Business tend to benefit from higher levels of entrepreneurial activity and lower levels of corruption.

While economic reasons are the main drivers of reform, the advancement of neighboring economies provides an additional impetus for regulatory change.

Twenty-six economies became less business-friendly, introducing 31 regulatory changes that stifle efficiency and quality of regulation.

Source: See the Full 149 Page Report retrieved September 26, 2020 from: https://www.doingbusiness.org/en/reports/global-reports/doing-business-2020

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Click on Photo to Enlarge

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VIDEO – Tracking the “Ease of Doing Business” Around the World – https://youtu.be/NvwOzxR2lf0

World Bank
Posted October 31, 2017 – To learn more: http://wrld.bg/29Na30genKg

It takes global entrepreneurs significantly less time to start businesses, obtain construction permits and transfer property, making many developing countries more competitive. The World Bank’s latest Doing Business report says worldwide unemployment could be eased if countries continue to cut red tape and promote business-friendly policies. #DoingBiz

Innovation comes from innovators. Every community have innovative people, but not all communities foster opportunities. Governments can streamline the business creation-expansion process with incubators and optimized regulations. Consider this Case Study of former US President Jimmy Carter’s policies that created the now hot micro-brewery industry in the United States:

In 1920, due to Prohibition, breweries across the United States were closed down or began making malt for other purposes. The Homebrewing of beer with an alcohol content higher than 0.5% remained illegal until 1978 when Congress passed a bill repealing Federal restrictions and excise taxes,^[8] and President Jimmy Carter signed the bill, H.R. 1337, into law.^[9] Within months of homebrewing’s full legalization, Charlie Papazian founded the Brewers Association and American Homebrewers Association. – Source: Homebrewing

In 1979, Carter deregulated the American beer industry by making it legal to sell malt, hops, and yeast to American home brewers for the first time since the effective 1920 beginning of Prohibition in the United States.^[156] This Carter deregulation led to an increase in home brewing over the 1980s and 1990s that by the 2000s had developed into a strong craft microbrew culture in the United States, with 6,266 micro breweries, brewpubs, and regional craft breweries in the United States by the end of 2017.^[157] – Source: Jimmy Carter

“Prosper where planted” – Yes, we can …

This idea and prospect of “prospering where planted” is important to the movement behind the Go Lean book. In fact, this subject was stressed in a previous Go Lean commentary; see this summary:

So how do we prosper where we’re planted? While this is a simple question (based on the Bible principle of Psalms 1:3), the answer is more complex. …

… the Go Lean roadmap uses cutting-edge delivery of best practices to employ strategies, tactics and implementations to impact its prime directives; identified with the following 3 statements:

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 protect the resultant economic engines.

Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The successful execution of these directives will allow Caribbean stakeholders to prosper, while remaining as residents in their homeland. The Go Lean book seeks to optimize the entire Caribbean economic/security/governance eco-system to reach this goal.

[There needs to be] a “Hustling” Attitude, [which the Go Lean book describes as an] Entrepreneurial Ethos (Page 28).

The Go Lean movement had previously presented more blog-commentaries on the subject of fostering prosperity. See a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=20371	Success Looks like New Zealand
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=19189	Brains are already here; now to bring in the opportunities
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=17358	There could be a “Marshall Plan” for Prosperity
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16000	Better Balance of Regulations or Laissez-faire creates Economic Growth
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10043	Integration Plan for Greater Caribbean Prosperity
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5034	Patents and IP Protections: The Guardians of Innovation

We have good ideas … that will create jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities. Imagine the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics/Medical (STEM) fields and all those innovative ideas. Under this Go Lean roadmap, there will now be new stewards in Caribbean society to foster Research & Development. Economic activities will flourish … not just for the STEM participants (High Tech), but many down-line positions as well: Low Tech and No Tech.

The Go Lean roadmap introduces other strategies as well, like Infrastructure projects, Exclusive Economic Zones, Self-Governing Entities and Public-Private Partnerships. These strategies will reboot the industrial landscape in the region.

2.2 million new jobs is conceivable, believable and achievable.

This is what we must do: Mitigate Toxic Environments and foster prosperous homelands.

Let’s do this – let’s make our homelands better places to live, work and play. 🙂

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.

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

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.

xiv. 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.

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.

xxvi. Whereas the Caribbean region must have new jobs to empower the engines of the economy and create the income sources for prosperity, and encourage the next generation to forge their dreams right at home, the Federation must therefore foster the development of new industries, like that of ship-building, automobile manufacturing, prefabricated housing, frozen foods, pipelines, call centers, and the prison industrial complex. In addition, the Federation must invigorate the enterprises related to existing industries like tourism, fisheries and lotteries – impacting the region with more jobs.

xxvii. Whereas the region has endured a spectator status during the Industrial Revolution, we cannot stand on the sidelines of this new economy, the Information Revolution. Rather, the Federation must embrace all the tenets of Internet Communications Technology (ICT) to serve as an equalizing element in competition with the rest of the world. The Federation must bridge the digital divide and promote the community ethos that research/development is valuable and must be promoted and incentivized for adoption.

xxviii. Whereas intellectual property can easily traverse national borders, the rights and privileges of intellectual property must be respected at home and abroad. The Federation must install protections to ensure that no abuse of these rights go with impunity, and to ensure that foreign authorities enforce the rights of the intellectual property registered in our region.

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

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Toxic Environment – Lessons from Yugoslavia

Posted on September 26, 2020 in Ethos, Planning, Social, Strategy

Go Lean Commentary

Welcome to Yugoslavia … one of the most classic Toxic Environments in the history of civilization.

Wait, what?!

That country does not exist anymore. (See the encyclopedic reference in the Appendix A below). The land is still there; the people are still there … mostly, but the culture and national identity is gone.

The only things that remain are lessons … for other communities – like us in the Caribbean – to learn the consequences of an unchecked, un-remediated Toxic Environment. We need to look, listen and learn the lessons. But first consider the historic references in the VIDEO here:

VIDEO – The Breakup of Yugoslavia – https://youtu.be/oiSgAiM0d8A

WonderWhy

Posted April 30, 2016 – Why did Yugoslavia split up? In this video, I attempt to look at the complex situation of the former Yugoslav republics and what led to their breakup.
Free audiobook and a 30-day free trial at: http://www.audible.com/wonderwhy
Thanks to Audible for sponsoring this video!

MUSIC Satiate Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

All images/footage used in this video are either public domain, CC or free use.

Fair use as this is a transformative work for educational proposes.

No doubt, the Balkan region was Toxic in the distant past and the recent past. This is the same region that ignited World War I, back in 1914. We had addressed this history before, in a previous Go Lean commentary; see highlights in Appendix B below.

What are the lessons that we glean from this history, then and now?

The one country of Yugoslavia was an integrated and consolidated federation that combined these 6 neighboring member-states in a Single Market:
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia
The 6 member-states were not homogenous; there were many differences in their populations, i.e Official languages: Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian and Slovene.
Religiosity do not contribute to peace; in fact, religious intolerance can lead to Civil War. Yugoslavia featured 3 major faiths: Western Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox and Islam.
Historical disputes and grievances do not just dissipate – they must be reconciled – or future generation will still contest the issue.
Minorities will always be persecuted by majorities in Toxic Environments.

The lessons from World War I cannot be ignored.

The lessons from the recent Yugoslavia conflicts cannot be ignored.

This discussion on Yugoslavia underpins a consideration of the Toxic Environment that we suffer here in the Caribbean. The 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean, serving as a roadmap for the introduction of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), asserts that Caribbean economic, security (Public Safety) and governing stakeholders must all work together to abate our Toxic Environment.

This commentary is a continuation on the Teaching Series related to Toxic Environments where we addressed the pseudo-phobias – irrational fear or hatred – and how these bring on the “fight or flight” psycho-drama in everyone’s response. In Yugoslavia, “fight” was frequently the selected option. Every month, the movement behind the Go Lean book presents a Teaching Series to address issues germane to Caribbean life and culture. For this month of September 2020, this is entry 3-of-6, we are looking at the history of persecuted minorities in this Eastern Europe country-culture – that is now extinct.

Consider here, the full catalog of the series this month:

Toxic Environment: Ready for Football – Washington “Redskins”
Toxic Environment: Homophobia – The problem is the Hate, not the Fear
Toxic Environment: Opposite of Diversity & Inclusion
Toxic Environment: Lessons from Yugoslavia
Toxic Environment: Ease of Doing Business
Toxic Environment: Make the Caribbean Great (Anew)

After 100 years, according to the foregoing VIDEO, the member-states that constituted Yugoslavia have now reconciled their Toxic Environments from the past – they gave up on integration. They gave up on diversity and just decided to continue as independent homogeneous nations – no leverage, no economies-of-scale, no “whole is more than the sum of its parts”. Sad!

The Go Lean roadmap urges the Caribbean region to confederate, asserting that we double-down on Diversity & Inclusion among the 30 different member-states. We need the inherent benefits; we need the leverage; we need the economies-of-scale; we need the “whole to be more than the sum of its parts”. Consider this list of previous blog-commentaries on the subject of confederation, when it worked and when it did not:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=20072	Rise from the Ashes – Political Revolutions: Calling ‘Balls & Strikes’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=19570	European Role Model: Not when ‘Push’ comes to ‘Shove’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=19494	BHAG – One Voice: Foreign Policy and Diplomatic Stance
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=19452	BHAG – Regional Currency – ‘In God We Trust’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3090	Introduction to Europe – All Grown Up
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=816	The Future of CariCom – A Technocratic Confederacy

Yugoslavia was a unified country across a large geographic area. They were among the most successful communities; they even hosted the Olympics – Sarajevo 1984. They could have been in the G20 and be one of the “best addresses on the planet”, if only they had learned “how to get along” with each other, despite ethnic differences.

We must do better …

We must consider Yugoslavia as a cautionary tale for us in the Caribbean. We want Diversity & Inclusion; we want every distinct group in our society to have a “seat at the table, with no one being on the menu”.

Different races, no problem.
Different languages, no problem.
Different religions, no problem.
Different colonial heritage, no problem.

Yes, we can …

Let’s work to remediate and mitigate our Toxic Environment. Let’s make our homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

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.

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

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. The Federation must employ the latest advances and best practices … to assuage continuous threats against public safety.

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.

xiv. 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.

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 A – Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia (literally. ‘South Slavic Land’) was a country in Southeast Europe and Central Europe for most of the 20th century. It came into existence after World War I in 1918^[B] under the name of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by the merger of the provisional State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (it was formed from territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire) with the Kingdom of Serbia, and constituted the first union of the South Slavic people as a sovereign state, following centuries in which the region had been part of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary. Peter I of Serbia was its first sovereign. The kingdom gained international recognition on 13 July 1922 at the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris.^[2] The official name of the state was changed to Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 3 October 1929.

Yugoslavia was invaded by the Axis powers on 6 April 1941. In 1943, a Democratic Federal Yugoslavia was proclaimed by the Partisan resistance. In 1944 King Peter II, then living in exile, recognised it as the legitimate government. The monarchy was subsequently abolished in November 1945. Yugoslavia was renamed the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946, when a communist government was established. It acquired the territories of Istria, Rijeka, and Zadar from Italy. Partisan leader Josip Broz Tito ruled the country as president until his death in 1980. In 1963, the country was renamed again, as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY).

The six constituent republics that made up the SFRY were the SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SR Croatia, SR Macedonia, SR Montenegro, SR Serbia, and SR Slovenia. Serbia contained two Socialist Autonomous Provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo, which after 1974 were largely equal to the other members of the federation.^[3][4] After an economic and political crisis in the 1980s and the rise of nationalism, Yugoslavia broke up along its republics’ borders, at first into five countries, leading to the Yugoslav Wars. From 1993 to 2017, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia tried political and military leaders from the former Yugoslavia for war crimes, genocide, and other crimes committed during those wars.

After the breakup, the republics of Montenegro and Serbia formed a reduced federative state, Serbia and Montenegro, known officially until 2003 as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). This state aspired to the status of sole legal successor to the SFRY, but those claims were opposed by the other former republics. Eventually, it accepted the opinion of the Badinter Arbitration Committee about shared succession^[5] and in 2003 its official name was changed to Serbia and Montenegro. This state dissolved when Montenegro and Serbia each became independent states in 2006, while Kosovo proclaimed its independence from Serbia in 2008.
…

Source: Retrieved September 24, 2020 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslavia

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Appendix B – Previous Blog from June 28, 2014

A Lesson in History – 100 Years Ago Today – World War I
On this date 100 years ago, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead in Sarajevo by Serbian assassins. The political objective of the assassination was to break off Austria-Hungary’s south-Slavic provinces so they could be combined into a Yugoslavia. The assassination led directly to the First World War when Austria-Hungary subsequently issued an ultimatum against Serbia, which was partially rejected. Austria-Hungary then declared war, marking the outbreak of the war.^[a]

Multilateral military alliances abounded in that day among the Great Powers: Austria-Hungary with Germany (Triple Alliance of 1882) and Serbia with Russia and France (Triple Entente of 1907) and Britain. When war ensued later in August 1914, these were the sides. Many other military treaties were triggered thereby engaging empires/countries like Ottoman-Turks, Portugal, Japan and Italy, (The United States joined in 1917 allied with Britain). The resulting conflict was dubbed the Great War until subsequently rebranded World War I.
…
The people of the Caribbean understand societal decline and dysfunction all too well.

What have we learned in the 100 years since the events of June 28, 1914? How will these lessons help us today?

Minority Equalization – Bullying and terrorism must be mitigated at the earliest possible opportunity – the foregoing photo depicts the oppression the minority Balkan communities perceived in the Austria-Hungarian Empire. As a minority group they felt bullied in their own country; their Slavic culture and language set them apart, and their religious adherence led to even more dissension (Austria-Hungary: Catholic/Lutheran; Serbia: Eastern Orthodox and Bosnia- Herzegovina: Muslim) There were terrorist activities for decades before in the quest for independence. In the past 100 years, this same modus operandi has been repeated in countless locales around the world. The CU security pact must defend against regional threats, including domestic terrorism. This includes gangs and their junior counterparts, bullies. The CU plans for community messaging in the campaign to mitigate bullying.

Reconciliation of issues are not optional, more conflict will emerge otherwise – The issues that wedged the people of the Balkans were not resolved in World War I. More dissensions continued leading to World War II, and continued during the Cold War while most of the Balkans were under Soviets control. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, civil war and ethnic cleansings proceeded in the Balkans. Their issues/differences had not been reconciled. A common practice after WW I & WW II was the prosecution of war crimes. But in South Africa an alternative justice approach was adopted, that of Truth & Reconciliation Commissions (TRC). These have become more successful as the emphasis is less on revenge and more on justice normalization. Many other countries have instituted similar TRC models. The CU plans for the TRC model for dealing with a lot of latent issues in the last Caribbean century (i.e. Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, etc).
Self-determination of local currencies – in planning for postwar reconstruction, U.S. representatives with their British counterparts studied what had been lacking between the two world wars: a system of international payments that would allow trade to be conducted without fear of sudden currency depreciation or wild fluctuations in exchange rates—ailments that had nearly paralyzed world capitalism during the Great Depression. There is a multiplier associated with the currency in the money supply. Therefore the communities of the Caribbean must embrace its own currency, the Caribbean Dollar (managed by a technocratic Caribbean Central Bank), thereby bringing local benefits from local multipliers.
Security assurances must be enabled to complement economics objectives – A lot of dissension has resulted when economic engines become imperiled due to security conflicts. The instability then causes more economic dysfunction, which results in even more security threats – a downward spiral. The CU/Go Lean posits that security apparatus must be aligned with all economic empowerments. This is weaved throughout the roadmap.
Negotiate as partners not competitors – The end of World War I immediately set-up ripe conditions for WW II, because of the harsh terms in the Peace Treaties. The CU maintains that, negotiation is an art and a science. More can be accomplished by treating a negotiating counterpart as a partner, rather than not an adversary. (See VIDEO below).
Cooperatives and sharing schemes lighten burdens among neighbors – The Balkan conflict of 1914 resulted in a World War because of cooperative treaties with aligning nations. Despite this bad outcome, the practice of cooperatives and sharing still has more upside than downside. The CU will employ cooperatives and sharing schemes for limited scopes within the prime directives of optimizing the economic, security and governing engines.
Promote opportunities for the Pursuit of Happiness – A lot of terrorist activities are executed by “suicide” agents (i.e. suicide bombers). The Go Lean roadmap posits the when the following three fundamentals are in place, the risks of suicide is minimal: 1. something to do, 2. someone to love, 3. something to hope for. These are the things a man (or woman) needs to be happy.
Consider the Greater Good – Complying with this principle would have prevented a lot of conflict in the past century. The philosophy is directly quoted as: “It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong”. The CU/Go Lean roadmap calls for a number of measures that strike directly at the Greater Good mandate: accountable justice institutions, economic empowerment for rich and poor, strategic education initiatives, proactive health/wellness, etc.institutions, economic empowerment for rich and poor, strategic education initiatives, proactive health/wellness, etc.

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‘Climate Change’ raging Worse for some compared to others

Posted on September 20, 2020 in Ethos, Industries, Planning, Social

Go Lean Commentary

We are all in this together! – popular fallacy for global problems

This is not true for Climate Change. Some communities are on the frontlines; some communities take all the beatings, while some other communities are unscathed.

Inequality rules the day!

This writer recently repatriated back to the Caribbean (Bahamas) in 2019 and have consistently endured power utility bills of US$900 to US$1,100 during the summer months. “Our A/C never goes off”.

Most residents in Caribbean communities cannot afford this actuality. This is not about enjoying; this is about enduring.

This has always been true in society: There are the Haves and the Have-Nots. But what is emerging in the Climate Change eco-system, is not just the individual inequalities, but rather the national inequalities. Some countries have suffered pangs of distress from Climate Change … some countries have-not.

Though we have experienced and expressed these distresses, this is not our thoughts alone …

No, the highly-regarded New York Times has recently published their own formal journalistic depiction of this assertion. See that story highlights here:

Title: A warming world
In the past 60 years, every decade has been hotter than the last, and 2020 is on track to be among the hottest years yet. But the burden of extreme heat is not shared equally — it’s significantly worse for people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

Extreme heat can exacerbate poor health, ravage crops and make it dangerous to work outside. And in many parts of the world, simple ways to alleviate those effects — like water, or electricity for fans and air-conditioners — are a luxury.

Somini Sengupta, The Times’s international climate reporter, and a team of photographers have a new story that documents how rising temperatures are affecting people across multiple continents.

Excerpts
The agony of extreme heat, though, is profoundly unequal.
This Is Inequity at the Boiling Point

It was a record 125 degrees Fahrenheit in Baghdad in July, and 100 degrees above the Arctic Circle this June. Australia shattered its summer heat records as wildfires, fueled by prolonged drought, turned the sky fever red.

For 150 years of industrialization, the combustion of coal, oil and gas has steadily released heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, driving up average global temperatures and setting heat records. Nearly everywhere around the world, heat waves are more frequent and longer lastingthan they were 70 years ago.

But a hotter planet does not hurt equally. If you’re poor and marginalized, you’re likely to be much more vulnerable to extreme heat. You might be unable to afford an air-conditioner, and you might not even have electricity when you need it. You may have no choice but to work outdoors under a sun so blistering that first your knees feel weak and then delirium sets in. Or the heat might bring a drought so punishing that, no matter how hard you work under the sun, your corn withers and your children turn to you in hunger.

It’s not like you can just pack up and leave. So you plant your corn higher up the mountain. You bathe several times a day if you can afford the water. You powder your baby to prevent heat rash. You sleep outdoors when the power goes out, slapping mosquitoes. You sit in front of a fan by yourself, cursed by the twin dangers of isolation and heat.

Extreme heat is not a future risk. It’s now. It endangers human health, food production and the fate of entire economies. And it’s worst for those at the bottom of the economic ladder in their societies. See what it’s like to live with one of the most dangerous and stealthiest hazards of the modern era. …

Heat waves are becoming more frequent in Athens. It’s toughest in the city’s treeless, concrete neighborhoods.

… Mr. Hotak was 16 when he left his home in the Sholgara district of Afghanistan, the only one among his 11 brothers and sisters to do so. After one failed attempt to enter Europe and two years in a refugee camp, he was granted asylum in Greece. That’s when he arrived on the rooftop refuge with a friend, in the crowded warrens of Kolonos, a working class Athens neighborhood where many migrants have settled.

The city has grown hotter by the decade. According to temperature records kept by the National Observatory of Athens, there were fewer than 20 hot days (with temperatures over 99 degrees Fahrenheit, or 37 Celsius) from 1897 until 1906. By the mid-1980s, there were still fewer than 50 hot days per decade. From 2007 to 2016, though, the number had risen to 120 hot days. …

In Athens, heat waves have increased fivefold over the last century. Diminished rains and longer dry seasons are destroying Guatemala’s farmlands, where Indigenous farmers could see crop yields fall sharply. In Nigeria, hotter nights make it easier for mosquitoes to breed, increasing the risk of mosquito-borne diseases. And in the United States, heat kills older people more than any other extreme weather event, including hurricanes.

We spoke with Somini about what she described as “one of the most profound inequities of the modern age.”

“I have seen over the last couple of years the impact of what is truly a global problem,” she said. “We know that high heat and humidity is a dangerous combination for health, agriculture and economies of whole regions — nearly everywhere around the world, heat waves are more frequent and longer lasting than they were 70 years ago.”

What do experts recommend to combat rising temperatures?

“Draw down the combustion of fossil fuels,” Somini said. “The world is capable of getting off coal in many instances, capable of vastly reducing the burning of oil and gas.”

But the world also has to adjust to the extreme heat we’re seeing already, she said. That includes making water, air-conditioners and fans more accessible, and planting trees to bring down temperatures in cities.

“It could also mean adjusting things you might not immediately think of, like labor laws so people don’t have to work for hours under the blistering sun, agricultural changes in farming methods or what is grown in what place to adapt to higher temperatures,” she said.

“In short, it requires doing everything pretty differently.”

In other climate news:

Government scientists updated their forecast for the remainder of the Atlantic hurricane season, predicting “one of the most active seasons on record.” Climate change appears to be making hurricanes more intense and destructive.

Source: posted August 6, 2020; retrieved September 14, 2020 from: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/06/climate/climate-change-inequality-heat.html

Go Lean Commentary continues …

What’s next for the Caribbean? While excessive heat and the need for air-conditioning is critical, the pang of distress that impacts us most severely is that of hurricanes. Remember Irma, Maria or Dorian …

Hurricanes are worse; more frequent and more powerful. In fact for 2020, the meteorological officials have ran out of names to assign for this year’s Atlantic Hurricane season. They are now assigning the Greek alphabet as hurricane names; think Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, etc.. Here is the actuality of the Alpha Storm here:

Subtropical Storm Alpha (2020)
… a very unusual subtropical cyclone that made landfall in Portugal, the first ever recorded occurrence for the country. The system was also the easternmost-forming Atlantic tropical cyclone on record in the basin, exceeding the previous record of Tropical Storm Christine in 1973.^[1] The twenty-fourth cyclone and twenty-second named storm of the extremely active and record-breaking 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, Alpha originated from a large non-tropical low that was first monitored by the National Hurricane Center on 15 September. Initially not anticipated to transition into a tropical cyclone, the low gradually tracked south-southeastward for several days with little development. By 18 September, the low began to separate from its frontal features and exhibited sufficient organization to be classified as a subtropical cyclone as it approached the Iberian Peninsula, becoming a subtropical storm later that day. Alpha made landfall just north of Lisbon, Portugal during the evening of 18 September, becoming the first recorded landfalling (sub)tropical cyclone in mainland Portugal.^[2] Alpha was also the third confirmed (sub)tropical cyclone landfall in mainland Europe, following a hurricane in Spain in 1842 and Hurricane Vince (as a tropical depression) in 2005. Alpha rapidly weakened and became a remnant low early on 19 September.

There is no denying, this is all relative! Imagine a necessary ingredient for managing snow removal in society: rock salt. If there was a shortage of rock salt, countries nearer to the Arctic and Antarctic poles would be more directly affected. It does not snow in the tropical regions, near the equator, so these would be disaffected.

Well, the opposite is occurring; there are shortages – like precipitation, cool breezes, shady trees – and dire consequences (drought, forest fires, storms, flooding, rising sea levels, etc.) being endured in the tropical regions and the communities closer to the poles are less affected. (Note: Melting glacial ice does have universal effects with rising sea levels; think Canada).

The dire consequences of Climate Change are not equally shared. This actuality has fostered the threat of Climate Refugees or Migrants – people leaving one part of the planet – think: deserts of the Middle East and North Africa – to seek refuge in lesser affected locales, like Western Europe and North America.

Ready or not, climate migration is now also acute here in the Caribbean. Societal abandonment had previously been identified as the most dire threat to Caribbean society. The 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean opens with this declaration:

There is something wrong in the Caribbean … instead of the world “beating a path” to these doors, the people of the Caribbean have “beat down their doors” to get out.

So first there was the brain drain (college educated population), but now we are noticing the rest of society also taking leave:

Overseas Territories – i.e. Puerto Rico, USVI, Aruba, St. Martin, Martinique, Bermuda, Caymans, etc. – have no hope of retaining young people.
- High School Graduation on Friday; flights to the colonizing Fatherland on Saturday.
Independent countries emigrate through legal (family sponsor-ships) and illegal means (trafficking).

As stated in the opening, we are not all in “this” together! There are the “Haves and the Have-Nots”. This is the new normal; we must adapt to this new reality; see the VIDEO portrayal in the Appendix below. This is a consistent theme in many previous Go Lean commentaries; see a sample here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=19347	Go Green … Caribbean … finally
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18182	Disaster Relief: Helping, Not Hurting
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12949	Grow Up Already! The Caribbean must manage Charities ourselves
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12068	Abating Climate Change – Ready to reboot, reform and transform
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10895	Not expecting the relief and refuge only from others – Readying Ourself
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9455	Fix Climate Change – Yes, We Can
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7103	COP21 – Caribbean lands acknowledges ‘Climate Change’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5462	American Red Cross raised $500 million for Haiti but kept most of it
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3432	OECS diplomat has dire warning for the Caribbean looking for hand-outs

Our choices are that simple: prepare for Climate Change or watch our people migrate away from the homeland to foreign shores where the dire effects are lessened. While all humans are created equal, all people do not get equal treatment from … Mother Nature. Some people get more hot and wet than other people, yet they may not be able to afford the physical relief.

Even air-conditioning may not be equally accessible to everyone – we need cooperative refrigeration.

There are strategies, tactics and implementations to abate Climate Change and relieve the dire consequences for people and property. We can … must endure this new normal. This is how and why we can make our homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

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.

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

i. Whereas the earth’s climate has undeniably changed resulting in more severe tropical weather storms, 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 weather challenges.

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 VIDEO – Refugees Are Fleeing Climate Change – https://youtu.be/nIlMHFwC1MM

The YEARS Project
Tens of millions of people could be displaced by climate change by the end of this century. Climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer explains why that matters, why he supports the right to migrate, and what governments need to do to prepare.
This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets that aims to strengthen coverage of the climate crisis.

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