February 2015 – Page 2 – Go Lean…Caribbean

Month: February 2015

The African Renaissance Monument

Posted on February 9, 2015 in Locations, Social

Go Lean Commentary

The commentaries of the Go Lean…Caribbean blogs have often addressed the Caribbean Diaspora. But for many people of Caribbean heritage, they are a member of a larger Diaspora, the African Diaspora. Every Caribbean member-state – except for the French Territory Saint Barthélemy and the new Indo-Guyanese immigrant reality – has a majority population of Black or African ethnicity. So most people of the region have been affected by events that took place in Western Africa during the Atlantic Slave Trade. Any symbolism or artistic expression commemorating this historic sacrifice of Africa to the Caribbean genome should be acknowledged, promoted and celebrated.

This prominent statue in Dakar, Senegal, the African Renaissance Monument, is the epitome of such a symbolism.

This monument should be a World Heritage Site.

This subject aligns with the book Go Lean…Caribbean which details a plan to promote World Heritage Sites (Page 248) in the Caribbean region. The book also asserts that there are good economic returns to be harnessed by communities investing in regional artists and the eco-systems surrounding the business of the arts.

This commentary continues that pattern, established in the book. The following encyclopedic details provides a role model for how the Caribbean can further develop this industry space:

Title: African Renaissance Monument – Source: Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia (Retrieved 02/08/2015 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Renaissance_Monument)

The African Renaissance Monument is a 49m tall bronze statue located on top of one of the twin hills known as Collines des Mamelles, outside of Dakar, Senegal. Built overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in the Ouakam suburb, the statue was designed by the Senegalese architect Pierre Goudiaby after an idea presented by president Abdoulaye Wade (in office from year 2000 to 2012) and built by Mansudae Overseas Projects, a company from North Korea.^[1] Site preparation on top of the 100-meter high hill began in 2006, and construction of the bronze statue began 3 April 2008.^[2] Originally scheduled for completion in December 2009, delays stretched into early 2010, and the formal dedication occurred on 4 April 2010, Senegal’s “National Day”, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the country’s independence from France.^[3] It is the tallest statue in Africa.

Construction

The monument is made of 3-centimetre thick metal sheets and depicts a family group emerging from a mountaintop: a full-length statue of a young woman, a man, and held aloft on the man’s raised left arm, a child resolutely pointing west towards the sea. Construction of the bronze statue group was carried out by the North Korean firm Mansudae Overseas Project Group of Companies.^[4]

The project was launched by then Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade who considered it part of Senegal’s prestige projects, aimed at providing monuments to herald a new era of African Renaissance.

Unveiling

On 3 April 2010, the African Renaissance Monument was unveiled in Dakar in front of 19 African heads of state, including President of Malawi and the African Union Bingu wa Mutharika, Jean Ping of the African Union Commission and the Presidents of Benin, Cape Verde, Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania and Zimbabwe, as well as representatives from North Korea, and Jesse Jackson and musician Akon, both from the United States.^[3][5] Everyone was given a tour.^[3][5]

President Wade said “It brings to life our common destiny. Africa has arrived in the 21st century standing tall and more ready than ever to take its destiny into its hands”.^[6] President Bingu said “This monument does not belong to Senegal. It belongs to the African people wherever we are”.^[7]

Criticism

Expense
Thousands of people protested against “all the failures of [President] Wade’s regime, the least of which is this horrible statue” on the city’s streets beforehand, with riot police deployed to maintain control.^[3] Deputy leader of the opposition Ndeye Fatou Toure described the monument as an “economic monster and a financial scandal in the context of the current [economic] crisis”.

The colossal statue has been criticized for its cost at US$ 27 million (£16.6m).^[1] The payment was made in kind, with 30 to 40 hectares of land that will be sponsored by a Senegalese businessman.^[8]

Style
Senegalese opposition leaders have also questioned the style of the project, labelling it “Stalinist“, while art critics have pointed out that the body shapes are cartoon-like, with only vaguely African facial features.^[1] It has also been suggested that the monument is a stark representation of the macho sexism of African authoritarian rulers.^[9] The statue’s design has been derided internationally because of false claims of its Senegalese origin, actually having been designed by a Romanian architect and built by a North Korean sculpting company famous for various projects and large statues throughout Africa since the 1970s.^[10] It was a poorly received piece by art critics around the world after its much-delayed unveiling in 2010, and has been compared by some to the infamous (and now-abandoned) Christopher Columbus statue project that was underway in Cataño, Puerto Rico in the late 1990s and early 2000s.^[11] Local Imams (Islamic Spiritual Leaders) argue that a statue depicting a human figure is idolatrous, and object to the perceived immodesty of the semi-nude male and female figures.^[12]

In December 2009, president Abdoulaye Wade apologised to Senegal’s Christian minority for comparing the statue to Jesus Christ.^[1]

Revenue
The project has also attracted controversy due to Wade’s claim to the intellectual property rights of the statue, and insisting that he is entitled to 35 percent of the profits raised.^[12] Opposition figures have sharply criticized Wade’s plan to claim intellectual property rights, insisting that the president cannot claim copyright over ideas conceived as a function of his public office.^[13][1]

Local artists
Ousmane Sow, a world-renowned Senegalese sculptor, also objected to the use of North Korean builders, saying it was anything but a symbol of African Renaissance and nothing to do with art.^[14]

The book Go Lean…Caribbean is a economic elevation roadmap for the Caribbean, not Africa. But there are many lessons for the Caribbean to glean from this African Renaissance Monument project: good, bad and ugly. Whereas, this monument project does not have the economic impact of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, it has potential.

This discussion of “art in the public domain” is not just academic. Community pride, jobs, and the growth of the regional economy is involved. This point aligns with the objectives of the Go Lean book, in that it serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). This effort will harness the individual genius abilities (micro) of artists so as to elevate the arts and the economic impact on their related communities (macros). To glean these economic benefits, the charter for the regional “art world” must be bigger than just sculpture; it must also include paintings, fashion, music, film and performing arts (dance & theater). The CU will employ strategies, tactics and implementations to impact its prime directives, defined 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 Go Lean book identified this vision early in the book (Page 13 & 14) in the following pronouncements in the Declaration of Interdependence:

Preamble: As the history of our region and the oppression, suppression and repression of its indigenous people is duly documented, there is no one alive who can be held accountable for the prior actions, and so we must put aside the shackles of systems of repression to instead formulate efficient and effective systems to steer our own destiny.
As the colonial history of our region was initiated to create economic expansion opportunities for our previous imperial masters, the structures of government instituted in their wake have not fostered the best systems for prosperity of the indigenous people.

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

xxxiii. Whereas the cultural arts and music of the region are germane to the quality of Caribbean life, and the international appreciation of Caribbean life, the Federation must implement the support systems to teach, encourage, incentivize, monetize and promote the related industries for arts and music in domestic and foreign markets. These endeavors will make the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play.

The foregoing African Renaissance Monument is on the Eastern side of the Atlantic; there is also a monument effort on the Western side of the Atlantic: the “Vicissitudes” and other features in the Moilinere Bay Underwater Sculpture Park in the waters off the Caribbean island of Grenada. The voyage across the Atlantic was referred to as the Middle Passage, a segment in the Slave Trade Triangle. Many victims, African captives designated to be sold in slavery, did not survive the Middle Passage. The Vicissitudes are in honor of the African Ancestors who were thrown overboard during the voyage; (retrieved from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molinere_Underwater_Sculpture_Park).

1. “Vicissitudes” – According to the primary professional Artist, British Sculptor Jason de Caires Taylor:

“Vicissitudes depicts a circle of figures, all linked through holding hands. These are life-size casts taken from a group of children of diverse ethnic background. Circular in structure … the work both withstands strong currents and replicates one of the primary geometric shapes, evoking ideas of unity and continuum. … The sculpture proposes growth, chance, and natural transformation. It shows how time and environment impact on and shape the physical body. Children by nature are adaptive to their surroundings. Their use within the work highlights the importance of creating a sustainable and well-managed environment, a space for future generations.”

2. Amateur Projects – Cast student faces in the side of a large underwater stone: Theophilus Albert Marryshow Community College

In March 2007, a project was initiated with Helen Hayward of T.A. Marryshow Community College (Grenada) to produce a series of works for the Molinere sculpture park. Workshops were planned with A-level Art and Design students; (senior exams – General Certificate of Education or GCE – from the University of London). Each student was required to produce a life cast of their face, to form an installation two meters deep around the shoreline of Molinere Bay.

The project aimed to encourage local artists to contribute further works to the site and provide a arena for communities to appreciate and highlight the marine processes evident in their local environment.

The students were taught a range of skills including life-casting, cement casting and sculpting. The final pieces were installed by Jason [de Caires Taylor] on 25th April 2007.

The following news article relates the coverage received at the project’s implementation:

Title: Underwater Sculpture Park off Grenada is stunning and unique
Sub-title: Jason de Caires Taylor is an internationally recognized sculptor with a difference.
(Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/3538787/Underwater-sculpture-park-off-Grenada-is-stunning-and-unique.html)

December 1, 2008 – Instead of bleak urban backdrops for his creations, [artist Jason de Caires Taylor] has crafted a stunning and unique underwater sculpture park in the shallow waters off the West Indies island of Grenada.

His desire to create striking and meaningful art forms and his love of the underwater world led him to explore the intricate relationships between art and the environment.

For Grenada, this has resulted in a series of beautiful marine seascapes that have formed a series of artificial reefs, drawing new life into areas which have been damaged by nature’s raw power and mans intervention.

Jason discusses his work in a video interview with Miranda Krestovnikoff, one of the UK faces of a new global web TV channel, The Underwater Channel.

Miranda, also a BBC One Show / Coast presenter, explores Jason’s motivations and shows footage of his installations demonstrating the beauty of the structures and the way they interact with their environment. In some zones, the shifting sands of the ocean floor can change the whole viewing experience from moment to moment.

The sculptures are sited in clear, shallow waters to allow easy access by divers, snorkellers and those in glass-bottomed boats. Jason is keen to engage local people, particularly children, in his work to build a direct relationship with and understanding of their own precious natural resource.

The physical nature of the underwater world is vastly different from that of dry land. Objects appear 25 per cent larger underwater, and as a consequence they also appear closer. Colours alter as light is absorbed and reflected at different rates, with the depth of the water affecting this further.

The large number of angles and perspectives from which the sculptures can be viewed increase the unique experience of encountering the works.

His first work, Grace Reef, was built in a bay where the coral growth and natural habitat had been decimated by Hurricane Ivan. It comprises 16 statues, each cast from a local Grenadian woman.

Located across an expansive underwater area the work draws marine life to a zone that has suffered substantial and sustained storm damage. The direction and strengths of currents mean that entire sections of the work become covered, hidden and lost. At other times figures emerge and are fully visible.

Another major work is Vicissitudes comprising the extraordinary visual impact of a circle of 26 life-size children of diverse ethnic background, all holding hands and facing outwards.

The cement finish and chemical composition of Vicissitudes actively promotes the colonisation of coral and marine life. This natural process echoes the changes experienced through growing up and shows how time and environment impact on and shape the physical body.

Children by nature are adaptive to their surroundings and their use within the work highlights the importance of creating a sustainable and well-managed environment, a space for future generations.

“This piece took six months to create and weighs about 15 tons” Jason tells Miranda. “Consequently I had to install it in sections and it attracted quite a lot of local attention as parts of it sat outside the front of my house!”.

Un-Still life is a beautiful depiction of the essence of growth and change in the marine environment which mirrors the composition of still life tableaux.

On a table is an arrangement of cement objects; a vase, bowl and fruit. In contrast to established ideas of stasis the work is constantly changing, remaining a work in progress as living coral builds layers onto its surface and marine creatures take up residence in its tiny nooks and crannies.

This colonization becomes a physical equivalent to the conventional development of drawing and painting.

Jason currently has 65 stunning installations in place. The majority of his work is in Grenada, but he also has additional projects in the UK and Europe. Contracts have been agreed for the first phase of a new underwater project in Mexico, placed within the National Marine Park of Cancun, Isla Mujeres and Nisuc. Jason works out of his studio in London.

VIDEO: Grenada Underwater Sculpture Park, Molinere Bay, Marine Protected Area, Grenada, West Indies – http://youtu.be/Zmy0o7Zk4wg

Published by Louis Kahn ^(c) on Apr 1, 2012 – Video shot while scuba diving in Grenada at the Underwater Sculpture
Park.

The African Renaissance Monument in Senegal should be a World Heritage Site.

The stunning and unique Underwater Sculpture Park in Grenada should be a World Heritage Site; and similar expressions should be duplicated throughout the Caribbean region.

Imagine eco-tourism tours, SCUBA divers, glass-bottom boats and sub-marines, to this site and other monuments erected in kind.

Previous Go Lean blog/commentaries related artistic endeavors in the region and how they have impacted the communities; consider this sample as follows:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3999	Sir Sidney Poitier – ‘Breaking New Ground’ in the Film Arts
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3641	‘We Built This City …’ on Music and Show-business
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3568	Forging Change: Music Moves People
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3292	Art Basel Miami – a Testament to the Spread of Art & Culture
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2726	Caribbean Role Model for the Arts/Fashion – Oscar De La Renta: RIP
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2415	How ‘The Lion King’ roared into history
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1909	Music Role Model Berry Gordy – No Town Like Motown
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1037	Humanities Advocate – Maya Angelou: RIP
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=866	Caribbean Music Man: Bob Marley – The legend lives on!

The Slave Trade and Middle Passage victimized millions of innocent people. The world must never forget the travesty and sacrifice of the African people. The Bible makes a related statement at Isaiah 56:5 (NET Bible): “I will set up within my temple and my walls a monument that will be better than sons and daughters. I will set up a permanent monument for them that will remain”.

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean to lean-in to the following community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies detailed in the book Go Lean … Caribbean to foster remembrances and memorials in the region:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification – African Diaspora Experience	Page 21
Community Ethos – People Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Return on Investments	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Foster Genius – High Art Intelligence	Page 27
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness	Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategic – Vision – Integrating Region in to a Single Market	Page 45
Strategic – Mission – Preserve Caribbean Ecology	Page 46
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Culture Administration	Page 81
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Fairgrounds Administration	Page 83
Implementation – Steps to Implement Self-Governing Entities (SGE’s)	Page 105
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Planning – 10 Big Ideas for the Caribbean Region	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Planning – Ways to Better Manage Caribbean Image	Page 133
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance	Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Libraries – Creative Exhibits & Archives	Page 187
Advocacy – Ways to Enhance Tourism – Eco-Tourism	Page 190
Advocacy – Ways to Promote Fairgrounds – Art Colonies as SGE’s	Page 192
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Public Works – Aesthetic & Practical	Page 175
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage Natural Resources – World Heritage Sites	Page 183
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the Diaspora	Page 217
Advocacy – Ways to Preserve Caribbean Heritage	Page 218
Advocacy – Ways to Improve the Arts	Page 230
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Urban Living – Access to the Arts and Culture	Page 234
Advocacy – Ways to Promote World-Heritage-Sites – Petition UNESCO for more…	Page 248
Appendix – Taos (New Mexico) Artist Colony	Page 291
Appendix – List of 21 World Heritage Sites in the Caribbean region	Page 330

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people and governing institutions, to lean-in for the empowerments described in the book Go Lean…Caribbean. This is a big deal for regional artists and art institutions. This book provides the turn-by-turn directions for how to monetize the arts and foster genius potential. By pursuing the strategies, tactics, and implementations of this roadmap, we do not only impact the artists; we also impact the whole world.

“Artists have a unique power to change minds and attitudes” – President Obama urging to the Grammy’s audience (musical artists) on February 8, 2015.

The Caribbean needs change…and empowerments (jobs, economic growth and brand/image enhancement); plus we need to always remember the great sacrifices of the others that came before us, and those that did not survive.

🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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Art, History, Image, Tourism, WHS

Daktronics – Keeping score on the world’s largest video displays

Posted on February 6, 2015 in Ethos, Industries

Go Lean Commentary

The book Go Lean…Caribbean asserts (Page 20) that elevating Caribbean society has to be a total commitment, involving “Head, Heart, Hands”, in full measure. Head refers to visions, roadmaps and strategies; heart refers to the community ethos, the motivation and spirit that drives the community; hands refer to the industrious energy to do the heavy-lifting to make progress.

The Go Lean book, and accompanying blog/commentaries, frequently focuses on the subject of models and lessons from companies and institutions that exemplify these above values.

One such company stemmed from humble beginnings, in a small town, with the motive to retain local talent in the local area; to give people the opportunity to prosper where they are planted. The firm is Daktronics, founded in 1968 by Drs. Aelred Kurtenbach and Duane Sander, professors of electrical engineering at South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD. The company began with the design and manufacture of electronic voting systems for state legislatures.

In 1971, Daktronics developed the patented Matside® wrestling scoreboard, the first product in the company’s growing and evolving line. Then in 1994, Daktronics continued growth allowed them to become a publicly traded company, offering shares under the symbol DAKT on the NASDAQ National Market Exchange.

Today, Daktronics has grown from a small company operating out of a garage to the world leader, offering the most complete product lineup in the display industry. The company’s vision is to be the world leader at informing and entertaining audiences through dynamic audio-visual communications systems. Their mission statement details a commitment to:

Deliver industry leading value to customers
Engage employees through challenging and rewarding opportunities
Develop strategic partnerships with suppliers
Leverage their strengths in product innovation, manufacturing, and service
Contribute to the betterment of their communities
Generate an attractive return for investors

The book Go Lean…Caribbean boasts a similar vision and mission for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), to impact the Caribbean region. The book describes initiatives from top-to-bottom in the Information Technology/ICT industry space, asserting that the region should not only consume, but should create, develop and produce as well. So Daktronics is a good role model for Caribbean initiatives. The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic CU. This CU roadmap is designed to elevate the economic, security and governing engines of Caribbean society; this vision is defined early in the book (Page 14) with these statements in the opening Declaration of Interdependence:

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.

xxxiii. Whereas lessons can be learned and applied from the study of the recent history of other societies, the Federation must formalize statutes and organizational dimensions to … implement the good examples learned from developments/communities like New York City, Germany, Japan, Canada, the old American West and tenants of the US Constitution.

Daktronics has found its niche, especially in the market of giant scoreboards at sports stadiums; consider their activities as highlighted in the following VIDEO; (or the written narrative below):

VIDEO: Daktronics Featured on CBS Sunday Morning – http://youtu.be/KY9SS2jMVUo –

Published on February 1, 2015 – How did a small Midwest company, Daktronics of Brookings-South Dakota, operating out of a garage end up as the leading provider of professional sports scoreboards? CBS News national correspondent Lee Cowan spent three days at company headquarters to find out.

These Go Lean blogs have previously detailed the economic and civic advantages of sports enterprises. Now we can consider how opportunities have been exploited in the attendant functions of sports, scoreboard systems (then spinning-off to Main Street):

The Daktronics difference is obvious from local high school scoreboards to “giant-esque” video systems in major league stadiums; from roadside LED signs to “Gee-Whiz” digital signage in iconic sites like Times Square (New York) and Piccadilly Circus (London) – see sample of non-sports installations in the Appendix below. There is a good chance one can see Daktronics products every day as their range of products make them the most experienced digital display manufacturer in the industry.

From the “comfy confines” of rural South Dakota, this electronics company (Dak + tronics) has shocked the world; proving that change can emerge from anywhere, even remote locales. This provides great inspiration for any island in the Caribbean! Daktronics’ contribution to the world is their focus on efficiency, quality and agility. This is what the Go Lean book refers to as “lean”.

The concept of “lean” is very prominent in the book (and movement), even adapting the title, Go Lean, for the quest for excellence in Caribbean economic empowerment and governing efforts. The label “lean” is indicative of this quest; the word is used as a noun, a verb and an adjective. This point is pronounced early in the book (Page 4) with these statements:

The CU will lean on, lean in, lean over backwards, and then lean towards…
The CU will embrace lean, agile, efficient organizational structures – more virtual, less physical, more systems, less payroll.

The Daktronics experience lends confidence to the viability of the revolutionary changes being proposed by the Go Lean roadmap, that we can succeed in transforming our society through innovative technology. Previous blogs/commentaries also exclaimed societal benefits from pursuits in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Consider this sample of previous blogs:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3974	Google and Mobile Phones – Here comes Change
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3915	Microsoft Holograms Transforming How We See the World
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3889	RBC EZPay and other Banking Automations – Ready for Change
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3490	How One STEM Entrepreneurial Start-up Can Rally a Whole Community
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3276	STEM/Medical Role Model Shaking Up the World of Cancer
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3187	Robots help Amazon tackle and dominate Cyber Monday
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2488	Role Model Jack Ma brings Alibaba to America
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2126	Where the Jobs Are – Computers Reshaping Global Job Market
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1743	Google and Novartis to develop ‘smart’ contact lens
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1698	STEM Jobs Are Filling Slowly
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1416	Amazon’s new FIRE Smartphone
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1277	The need for highway safety innovations – here comes Google
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=888	Book Review: ‘Citizenville – Take the Town Square Digital & Reinvent Govt’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=554	Cuban cancer medication registered in 28 countries
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=308	CARCIP Urges Greater Innovation

The Go Lean book posits that technology and ICT can level the playing field of competition and trade with the rest of the world. Surely this entire Daktronics commentary demonstrates the advantage of leading with technological innovations. We do not have to be in Silicon Valley to have an impact. Daktronics was foundered and remains based in a Midwest rural city (Brookings, SD) of only 22,000 people. Yes, an innovator can also be on a beach in the Caribbean homeland, with a great idea and support of his community.

The Go Lean book details a series of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to foster great contributions from Caribbean technology innovators. The list is as follows:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – People Respond to Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Job Multiplier	Page 22
Community Ethos – Governing Principle – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Governing Principle – Return on Investments	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship	Page 28
Community Ethos – Promote Intellectual Property	Page 29
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Research & Development	Page 30
Community Ethos – Ways to Bridge the Digital Divide	Page 31
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Mission – Exploit Globalization – Producers & Consumers	Page 46
Strategy – Agents of Change – Technology	Page 57
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization	Page 57
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Growing to $800 Billion GDP – East Asian Tigers Lesson	Page 69
Tactical – Separation of Powers	Page 71
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Implementation – Ways to Impact Social Media	Page 111
Planning – Big Ideas – Cyber Caribbean	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 136
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Education – STEM Promotion	Page 159
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Technology	Page 197
Advocacy – Ways to Foster e-Commerce	Page 198
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Main Street	Page 201
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Youth	Page 227
Appendix – CU Job Creations	Page 257
Appendix – Copyright Infringement – Protecting Intellectual Businesses	Page 351

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean to lean-in for the empowerments in the book Go Lean … Caribbean. This is a big deal for the region. The benefits are simply too alluring to not commit to this cause:

Optimization of the economic engines; growing the regional economy to $800 Billion & creating 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The region needs this delivery. Without the equalizing effects of technology/ICT, we will continue to be rendered inconsequential on the world scene. This was the motivation of Drs. Aelred Kurtenbach and Duane Sander, founders of Daktronics. We can channel their resolve and commitment to retain our young people to remain in their homeland. We can do for the Caribbean what they have done for rural South Dakota.

Now is the time to deliver the Caribbean as a better place to live, work and play… for today and for the future. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

———-

Appendix – Daktronics Sample Non-Sports Client Installations

———-
Appendix VIDEO Narrative:

Title: Keeping score on the world’s largest video displays
By: Lee Cowan, CBS News National Correspondent; Posted February 1, 2015 from:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/keeping-score-on-the-worlds-largest-video-displays/

Here on the plains of South Dakota, being a football fan can be a bit lonely. The closest NFL team is a four-hour drive from here.

And yet, the town of Brookings, South Dakota, has a big stake in tonight’s Super Bowl — because this is where the NFL goes up in lights.

The town is the home of a company called Daktronics, which, in the late 1990s, entered what’s become an arms race to build the biggest and most vivid video scoreboards in football … including one that will be used at tonight’s big game in Arizona.

If you’re surprised that something that big comes from such a small place, don’t worry — Daktronics CEO Reece Kurtenbach is pretty used to that. He says it’s one of the “mental hurdles” they’ve had to overcome: “We’re here in South Dakota, we have a high-tech company – ‘Where’s South Dakota?'” he laughed. “And you have to kind of position it on the map for some people, even in the U.S.!”

It all started back in 1968 on the campus of South Dakota State University with two friendly engineering professors.

Al Kurtenbach (Reece’s father) and fellow professor Duane Sander were looking for a way to help their students find local jobs.

“We were seeing our students leaving the state and thought we should try to do something to keep our students here,” said Sander.

They rented space in a tire repair shop just off Main Street in Brookings, and never really planned to leave.

“When you talk to startup companies, talk to venture capitalists, those kind of people, they always talk about the exit strategy — ‘What’s your exit strategy?'” said Al Kurtenbach. “And my exit strategy for the company was no exit!”

His first hire was a graduate student named Jim Morgan. He went on to become Daktronics’ CEO years later, but back in those days he didn’t even know what the company was supposed to make.

“Basically, we really didn’t have a product when we started,” said Morgan, “so every accomplishment you celebrated in those days!”

They finally put their engineering minds together to build a scoreboard for wrestling matches. It may look simple, but at the time it was revolutionary.

And they’ve never looked back since.

“If somebody was interested in having us build another scoreboard, we were willing to do that,” said Sander.

They were soon building scoreboards for high schools, colleges, you name it.

In 1980 Daktronics was even asked to ply their trade at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. It was a turning point for them, to have a worldwide audience for what they were building in Brookings. “Yeah, it was fairly good advertising!” laughed Sander.

Back then, they were timing world records. Today, they’re making them. Daktronics holds the distinction of building the largest video displays in sports, installed at the home of the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Each is bigger than the field the Jags plays on — 362 feet long, six stories high.

And with a price-tag to match. The scoreboards come in at nearly $9 million a piece.

To really appreciate their size, you’ve got to see them in person. There’s almost 22,000 square feet of screen. With Cowan’s face displayed, that makes Lee’s face big enough to be on Mount Rushmore. His eyeballs are about 11 feet across.

The NFL is counting on bigger being better, a way to entice fans off their comfy couches to buy tickets to see the spectacle in person.

“You have many great reasons to stay home,” said Larry Rosen, executive producer of the Jaguars’ big screen entertainment. “You have your 62-inch HD in your man cave or whatever. Those are great reasons to stay home. I need to provide you with a different kind of experience that you can only get in a venue.”

The resolution is four times better than what one could get at home. The screens are a constellation of millions of LEDs — about the size of a small thumb tack — spaced about a half an inch apart. Standing near them, it’s hard to actually picture a picture; all your eyes focus on are clusters of red, blue and green lights.

But back away . . . and those clusters miraculously blend together into a portrait in vivid detail.

The panels undergo brutal testing to make sure they can withstand the elements — everything from the steamy heat of Sun Life Stadium in Miami, to the pounding rain and snow of Chicago’s Soldier Field. Some are even submerged in water.

But perhaps the biggest test for Daktronics has been the students at SDSU, where Al Kurtenbach — long since retired as a professor — still rarely misses a Jackrabbits game (under HIS scoreboard, of course).

In the early ’80s, only 22 percent of Engineering graduates here actually found work near Brookings, S.D. Today, that number is closer to 62 percent. Many of Daktronics’ would-be employees now attend class in the university’s Daktronics Engineering Hall.

“I felt we always had to show them exciting work, demonstrate that there was exciting work right here in Brookings,” said Kurtenbach.

Daktronics, of course, isn’t the only manufacturer of stadium big screens. Mitsubishi turned heads years ago with a massive display at the home of the Dallas Cowboys.

But it’s Daktronics that has just been awarded the contract to build the biggest scoreboard to date. Called a “Halo Board,” it will ring the top of the new Atlanta Stadium. The only way for this screen to get any bigger is for the stadium itself to grow.

“How big can these displays get?” asked Cowan. “I mean, are we approaching sort of the biggest they’re gonna be?”

“I think it depends on how large the checkbook is,” said Kurtenbach. “That would certainly be a factor. If the checkbook is larger, we’ll sure try to build it!”

And we, undoubtedly, will watch.

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ICT, Jobs, Model, New Media, Play

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Detroit-area Judge to Decide if Kids Need Vaccines

Posted on February 5, 2015 in Government, Industries, Social

Go Lean Commentary

“What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive” – Novelist and Poet Sir Walter Scott.

The viral debate regarding some parents refusal to vaccinate their children is not one that can be simply reduced to bad parenting; there are some heavy issues surrounding this topic. This is not 1950, where there were only 3 vaccines; the number has now grown voluminously. Consider the US standards:

Vaccination of 14 diseases by two years of age…
U.S. children receive as many as 24 vaccine injections …

Then in the 1990’s, a new deterrent arose, the sudden rise in the cases of Autism among children; 1 in every 160.

No wonder a growing number of parents apply for exemptions from vaccinating their kids; (see Forbes Magazine article below). It almost seems logical.

Though there is no conclusive evidence that Autism may be linked to vaccinations, the occurrence rate is ungodly, 1 in 160. This alarming Autism rate seemed to exceed any risk of exposure to “wild” pathogens targeted by vaccinations – until the Disneyland outbreak recently. It was hard to ignore these numbers, thusly parents were trying to protect their children from the cure, not the disease, and refusing to vaccinate their children. Consider this story from Metropolitan Detroit:

VIDEO – Oakland County judge to decide if 4 kids need vaccines – http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/oakland-county-judge-to-decide-if-4-kids-need-vaccines/31099632

While this may appear to be an issue of Public Health policy, it can be argued that actually this is an issue of capitalism.

The vaccine, the medicine comes from Pharmaceutical companies. When new drugs are introduced and then compelled for the entire population, it is a boon for the drug company. This is the kinetics of capitalism at full hilt. The below encyclopedic reference (Appendix #1) help us to appreciate the background of the economic dynamics of this issue.

This consideration aligns with the book Go Lean…Caribbean; this book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). This empowerment effort represents a change for the region, calling on all 30 member-state governments in the region to confederate and provide their own solutions – together – in the areas of economics, security and governance. The book directly advocates for a Group Purchasing Organization to facilitate better pricing and delivery options for Public Health medications – the vaccines that must be administered. This issue therefore relates to all three areas (economics, security and governance). The CU/Go Lean roadmap defines these 3 prime directives as follows:

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

The purpose of this commentary is to draw reference to the different governing bodies regulating these policies around the world, or at least in countries within scope of a Caribbean focus. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the US, European Medicines Agency (EMA) in Europe and the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) hold sway over this issue.

Just what influence does the Pharmaceutical industry have in lobbying these agencies to steadily increase the vaccination requirements? This industry is pejoratively referred as Big Pharma. Why the negative reference?

More and more parents have not trusted Big Pharma’s assertions, motives and sponsored research into side-effects and repercussions of vaccinations. There is no doubt that this industry would have a profit motive to protect and deflect any criticism of their Public Health policies. The charges of Autism fit this mode. See Autism Reference in the Appendix #2 below.

Is there a conspiracy? While it would only be honorable to give Big Pharma the benefit of any doubt, odds like 1-in-160 is very hard to ignore. Besides, many sources, including this Go Lean book and accompanying blogs have reported on the “bad intent” in the American eco-system associated with crony-capitalism.

But vaccination is an honorable cause. Many of these “now” preventable diseases wreaked havoc on human society until the vaccines were developed and distributed. The sustainability of modern life has actually improved due to immunizations. This fact was re-affirmed with the recent Disneyland measles outbreak. See article here:

Title: Is The Disneyland Measles Outbreak A Turning Point In The Vaccine Wars?
By: Matthew Herper, Forbes Staff – February 4, 2015 Retrieved from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2015/02/04/the-disneyland-measles-outbreak-is-a-turning-point-in-the-vaccine-wars/

“In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her.”

Those words were written by Roald Dahl, the author of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory and James the Giant Peach, about his seven-year-old daughter who died in 1962. In 1986, when he wrote them in an entreaty to his fellow Britons to vaccinate their children so that his little girl would not have died in vain, Dahl followed up with a taunt that played on his readers’ sense of national pride. “In America,” he wrote, “where measles immunization is compulsory, measles like smallpox, has been virtually wiped out.”

I saw Dahl’s 621-word pamphlet shared dozens of times this weekend, on sites like Io9 and DailyKos and by friends on Facebook who are frustrated and upset that Dahl’s statement is no longer true – that America, which led the eradication of smallpox, has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. As a result of the growing number of parents who are applying for exemptions from vaccinating their kids, an outbreak that started in Disneyland in California has now spread. There have been 102 cases of measles reported in 14 states since January 1, more than in all of 2012.

What’s different now – and this is a reason for hope, even celebration – is that people are angry. This was clear Monday when Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor and likely Republican presidential candidate, when he told an MSNBC reporter that he vaccinates his own kids, but that “I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that the government has to decide.” The backlash was so fast and fierce that an hour-and-a-half later Christie’s office was walking the statement back, saying that “with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated.”

Turning Walt Disney’s Happiest Place on Earth into the measles kingdom flipped a switch in our collective brain. The thought that thousands of people could have been exposed to a virus that was declared eliminated in the U.S. a decade-and-a-half-ago is scary. And it drives home the reality that vaccines only fully protect us if almost everyone uses them.

Between CNN’s tale of an infant quarantined due to measles and NPR’s profile of a little boy named Rhett who’d battled leukemia and whose father was angrily campaigning to require schoolmates to be vaccinated, we remembered that even amazingly powerful vaccines aren’t perfect, and that people with measles can spread the disease for four days before symptoms occur, and that at least 5 out of 100 vaccinated people will still catch measles if exposed to it.

Up until now, politicians frequently at least gave lip service to the very small but very vocal group of parents who believe that vaccines are harmful and that they should be able to opt-out. California Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, did more than that in 2012, signing a law that loosened vaccine exemptions, allowing parents who claim a religious reason for not vaccinating to leave a doctor’s office without even mandatory counseling. The reaction was subdued.

Now a few Republicans, including Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and Wisconsin Representative Sean Duffy, are arguing that vaccines should be voluntary. The nine out of ten of American parents who vaccinate their children should let their elected officials know that this isn’t acceptable – that we want the rules about vaccine exemptions tightened. We don’t need draconian measures (I’ve seen arguments that parents who don’t vaccinate should be jailed or sued, which is impractical and harsh) just the same fair rules we’ve had for years. Want to send your kid to school? Make sure he gets his shots, or have a very, very, very good reason not to have.

Measles is still a small problem. Even if there are 1,000 cases this year, it remains so. The high vaccination rates through most of the country mean it will burn out. But we’re also likely to face 28,000 cases of whooping cough, another vaccine-preventable illness that has been on the rise not so much because of patients who don’t get vaccinated but also because the new vaccine adopted in the 1990s is less effective than the old one. And every year there are between 3,000 to 49,000 deaths due to influenza; even though the flu vaccine is one of the least effective we have, if everyone got it each year it would reduce that number.

In a Roald Dahl story, a big friendly giant could visit people who choose not to vaccinate and give them nightmares of measles encephalitis. But this is the real world. The way for people to keep vaccine rates up is to write their elected representatives, and to be very public about the benefits of vaccines. Mention in conversations the way that vaccines have changed the world. Or get your flu shot, and brag about it as if you just shaved a ten seconds off the time it takes you to run a mile. That’s the way to turn the anger that’s been produced by the news about Disneyland into a happier world for everyone.

The book Go Lean…Caribbean asserts that the Caribbean Public Health must be strenuously protected. Like Disneyland, the Caribbean economic engines are based on extending hospitality to visitors; so (preventable) infectious diseases undermine the attractiveness of the destination.

So all stakeholders need to employ best-practices. Citizens need to embrace immunizations and Pharmaceutical companies need to “play nice” and not excessively pile on the vaccination formulas. The region must do better; we must not allow the US, or Big Pharma, to take the lead for our own nation-building. In America, capitalistic interest tends to hijack policies intended for the Greater Good. This assessment is logical considering the realities of so many of these Big Corporate Bullies, as follows, where public policy is set to benefit private parties:

Big Oil	While lobbying for continuous tax subsidies, the industry have colluded to artificially keep prices high and garner rocket profits ($38+ Billion every quarter).
Big Box	Retail chains impoverish small merchants on Main Street with Antitrust-like tactics, thusly impacting community jobs.
Big Pharma	Chemo-therapy cost $20,000+/month; and the War against Cancer is imperiled due to industry profit insistence.
Big Tobacco	Cigarettes are not natural tobacco but rather latent with chemicals to spruce addiction.
Big Agra	Agribusiness concerns bully family farmers and crowd out the market; plus fight common sense food labeling efforts.
Big Data	Brokers for internet and demographic data clearly have no regards to privacy confines
Big Media	Hollywood insists on big tax breaks/subsidies for on-location shooting; cable companies conspire to keep rates high; textbook publishers practice price gouging.
Big Banks	Wall Street’s damage to housing and student loans in 2008 are incontrovertible.
Big Weather	Overblown hype of “Weather Forecasts” to dictate commercial transactions.

The Go Lean book, and accompanying blog commentaries, go even deeper and hypothesize that American economic models are not always suitable for long-term Caribbean benefits. The American wheels of commerce stages the Caribbean in a “parasite” role; imperiling regional industrialization even further. The US foreign policy for the Caribbean is to incentivize consumption of American products, and serve as a playground for their leisure.

The book and blogs assert that this disposition of a “parasite” is not the only choice. Other communities have demonstrated how to forge a protégé relationship with the US. Japan and South Korea, despite American pressure and having a small population-size, are examples of countries having trade surpluses for the US. They are protégés, not parasites, and thusly provide a role model for the Caribbean to emulate.

The broken Pharma eco-system in the US does not have to be modeled in the Caribbean. Parents should not have to demand exemptions from mandatory immunizations, nor should corporations be allowed to bully Public Health demands. Change has now come to the region. The Go Lean book posits that the governmental administrations must be open to full disclosure and accountability. Any encroachment into bullying should be easily detected and censured. Plus the ubiquity of the internet allows whistleblowers to expose “shady” practices to the general public; (WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden provide great examples).

The Go Lean roadmap provides turn-by-turn directions for forging change to reboot Caribbean societal engines. This roadmap is thusly viewed as more than just planning; this is pronounced early in the Declaration of Interdependence (Page 11 – 12):

viii. Whereas the population size is too small to foster good negotiations for products and commodities from international vendors, the Federation must allow the unification of the region as one purchasing agent, thereby garnering better terms and discounts.

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.

The Go Lean book purports that the Caribbean can – and must – do better. The vision of the CU is a confederation of the 30 member-states of the Caribbean doing the heavy-lifting of optimizing economic-security-governing engines. We can weld more power and influence collaborating and consolidating Public Health acquisitions. The Go Lean book details the policies and other community ethos to adopt, plus the executions of the following strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to elevate Caribbean society, and make it a better place to live, work, play and heal:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – People Choose	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Choices Involve Costs:	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – People Respond to Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Privacy versus Public Protection	Page 23
Community Ethos – Whistleblower Protection	Page 23
Community Ethos – Witness Security & Protection	Page 23
Community Ethos – Anti-Bullying and Mitigation	Page 23
Community Ethos – Intelligence Gathering	Page 23
Community Ethos – Lean Operations – Group Purchasing Organization	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations	Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing	Page 35
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Agents of Change – Technology	Page 57
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization	Page 57
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Emergency Management	Page 76
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Justice Department – Trade/Antitrust	Page 77
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Health Department – Disease Control	Page 86
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Health Department – Drug Administration	Page 86
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change – GPO Logistic Fees	Page 101
Implementation – Security Initiatives at Start-up – Big Data Analysis	Page 103
Implementation – Ways to Benefit from Globalization	Page 119
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices	Page 134
Planning – Lessons Learned from 2008	Page 136
Advocacy – Ways to Measure Progress	Page 147
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Healthcare – Public Health Extension	Page 156
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance	Page 169
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 171
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice – Truth & Reconciliation Commissions	Page 177
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security	Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Intelligence Gathering & Analysis	Page 182
Advocacy – Ways to Ways to Protect Human Rights	Page 220

The foregoing article/VIDEO relates to topics that are of serious concern, even for Caribbean communities. While the US is the world’s largest Single Market economy, we want to only model some of the American example. Instead we would rather foster a business climate to benefit the Greater Good, not just some special interest group.

There are many Go Lean blog commentaries that have echoed this point, addressing the subject of the Caribbean avoiding American crony-capitalism consequences. See sample here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3760	Concerns about ‘Citizenship By Investment Programs’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3397	A Christmas Present for the Banks from the Omnibus Bill
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3326	Detroit’s M-1 Rail – Finally avoiding Plutocratic Auto Industry Solutions
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2887	Caribbean must work together to address rum subsidies
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2522	The Cost of Cancer Drugs
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2465	Book Review: ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2435	Korea’s Model – A dream for Latin America and the Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2338	How Caribbean can Mitigate the Dreaded ‘Plutocracy’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2259	The Criminalization of American Business
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2183	A Textbook Case of Industry Price-gouging
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1309	5 Steps to a Bubble
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1256	Traditional 4-year Colleges – Terrible Investment for Region and Jobs
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1143	Health-care fraud in America; Criminals take $272 billion a year
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=798	Lessons Learned from the American Airlines merger
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=709	Student debt holds back many would-be home buyers
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=658	Indian Reservation Advocates Push for Junk-Food Tax
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=353	Book Review: ‘Wrong – Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn…’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=273	10 Things We *Don’t* Want from the US – American Self-Interest Policies

“Measles” is a serious, painful disease; death can result as well. This disease does not make an inviting call for our guests to visit the Caribbean destination for vacations and festivals. Not just the manifestation of measles but also any unsubstantiated rumors can curtail economic activity in the CU regional area.

What is the connection with vaccinations and Autism? Currently, a connection is not definitive; more research is needed. Autism must be monitored, tracked and catalogued. There is no cure; but the conditions can be managed as an chronic ailment…

The book Go Lean…Caribbean posits that many problems of the region are too big for any one member-state to solve alone; there is the need for the technocracy of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation. The purpose of this Go Lean/CU roadmap is to elevate the Caribbean homeland; and improve the lives for Caribbean citizens. We want our people to prosper where they are planted in the Caribbean.

The Go Lean roadmap calls for integration of the regional member-states drug acquisition and regulatory oversight. Further, the roadmap posits that to succeed as a society, the Caribbean region must not only consume, but also create, produce, and distribute intellectual property products (like medical innovations) to the rest of the world. We need our own Caribbean solutions.

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people and governing institutions, to lean-in for the changes/empowerments described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean.

🙂

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

———–

1. Appendix – Vaccination Schedule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_schedule)

(Click Photo to Enlarge)

A vaccination schedule is a series of vaccinations, including the timing of all doses, which may be either recommended or compulsory, depending on the country of residence.

A vaccine is an antigenic preparation used to produce active immunity to a disease, in order to prevent or reduce the effects of infection by any natural or “wild” pathogen.^[1] Many vaccines require multiple doses for maximum effectiveness, either to produce sufficient initial immune response or to boost response that fades over time. For example, tetanus vaccine boosters are often recommended every 10 years.^[2] Vaccine schedules are developed by governmental agencies or physicians groups to achieve maximum effectiveness using required and recommended vaccines for a locality while minimizing the number of health care system interactions. Over the past two decades, the recommended vaccination schedule has grown rapidly and become more complicated as many new vaccines have been developed.^[3]

Some vaccines are recommended only in certain areas (countries, subnational areas, or at-risk populations) where a disease is common. For instance, yellow fever vaccination is on the routine vaccine schedule of French Guiana, is recommended in certain regions of Brazil but in the United States is only given to travelers heading to countries with a history of the disease.^[4] In developing countries, vaccine recommendations also take into account the level of health care access, the cost of vaccines and issues with vaccine availability and storage. Sample vaccinations schedules discussed by the World Health Organization show a developed country using a schedule which extends over the first five years of a child’s life and uses vaccines which cost over $700 including administration costs while a developing country uses a schedule providing vaccines in the first 9 months of life and costing only $25.^[5] This difference is due to the lower cost of health care, the lower cost of many vaccines provided to developing nations, and that more expensive vaccines, often for less common diseases, are not utilized.

In 1900, the smallpox vaccine was the only one administered to children. By the early 1950s, children routinely received three vaccines, for protection against (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus and smallpox), and as many as five shots by two years of age.^[3] Since the mid-1980s, many vaccines have been added to the schedule. As of 2009[update], the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends vaccination against at least fourteen diseases. By two years of age, U.S. children receive as many as 24 vaccine injections, and might receive up to five shots during one visit to the doctor.^[3] The use of combination vaccine products means that, as of 2013[update], the United Kingdom’s immunization program consists of 10 injections by the age of two, rather than 25 if vaccination for each disease was given as a separate injection.^[6]

2. Appendix – Autism Causes (htt p://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism)

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction, verbal and non-verbal communication, and restricted and repetitive behavior. Parents usually notice signs in the first two years of their child’s life.^[2] The signs typically develop gradually, but some children with autism will reach their developmental milestones at a normal pace and then regress.^[3]

It has long been presumed that the cause of Autism is genetic. But now environmental factors that have been claimed to contribute to or exacerbate autism, or may be important in future research, include certain foods, air pollution, infectious diseases, solvents, diesel exhaust, PCBs, phthalates and phenols used in plastic products, pesticides, brominated flame retardants, alcohol, smoking, illicit drugs, and … vaccines ^[19].

Controversies surround many of these environmental causes;^[6] for example, medical stakeholders posit that the vaccine hypotheses are biologically implausible and have been disproven in scientific studies.

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Crony-Capitalism, Detroit, Health, Power, Security

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Media Fantasies versus Weather Realities

Posted on February 4, 2015 in Government, Tactical

Go Lean Commentary

Dateline Monday, February 2: It’s Groundhog Day again…and again…and again…*

The media swarms around this hibernating animal for prognosticating signs of what to expect for the rest of the winter weather season. This is a fantasy; an American media fantasy. On the other hand, there are many effective meteorological models that do an effective job of forecasting the weather, but many people think these are ignored in place of media hype; case in point: a Groundhog.

VIDEO – Punxsutawney Phil See His Shadow and Predicts 6 More Weeks of Winter – http://wapo.st/1BU7s23

A Groundhog?

Groundhogs, whistlepigs, woodchucks, all names for the same animal. Depending on where you live, you might have heard all three of these names; however, woodchuck is the scientifically accepted common name for the species, Marmota monax. As the first word suggests, the woodchuck is a marmot, a genus comprised of 15 species of medium-sized, ground-dwelling squirrels. Although woodchucks are generally solitary and live in lowland areas, most marmot species live in social groups in mountainous parts of Europe, Asia, and North America. (Source: http://blog.oup.com/2015/02/groundhog-day-urban-wildlife-institute/#sthash.c41AKDvb.dpuf)

The concept of weather forecasting requires hardware and software, not rodent animals. The Europeans have provided a good example for the Caribbean to model. Their hardware: satellites, are collaborative efforts to deploy, maintain and support, referred to as the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites or EUMETSAT; see Appendix below.

The software for weather forecasting is the application of science and technology to predict the state of the atmosphere for a given location. These forecasts are made by collecting quantitative data about the current state of the atmosphere at a given place and using scientific understanding of atmospheric processes to project how the atmosphere will change. The chaotic nature of the atmosphere, the massive computational power required to solve the equations that describe the atmosphere, error involved in measuring the initial conditions, and an incomplete understanding of atmospheric processes mean that forecasts become less accurate as the time range of the forecast increases. The use of ensembles and model consensus help narrow the error and pick the most likely outcome.

A major part of modern weather forecasting is the severe weather alerts and advisories which a governmental weather service may issue when severe or hazardous weather is expected. This is done to protect life and property.^[75] Some of the most commonly known severe weather advisories are the severe thunderstorm, tornado warnings, as well as the severe tornado watches. Other forms of these advisories include those for winter weather, high wind, flood, tropical hurricanes, and fog.^[76] Severe weather advisories and alerts are broadcasted through the media, including radio, using emergency systems as the Emergency Alert System which break into regular TV and radio programming.^[77]

Among the notable models for Caribbean consideration are:

American Model: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
European Model: European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMRWF).

The scope of the American Model is weather affecting the American mainland and aligned territories. The European Model, on the other hand, has a similar scope for Europe, but starts their focus earlier with weather patterns in the Americas and Caribbean. (The “Jet Stream” brings weather from West to East across the US and then continues across the Atlantic on to the European continent).

The American and European models assume different strategies. The American model runs a short, mid and long range forecast. The European model considers mid-range only, running out only 10 to 15 days into the future.

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines against “bad actors” and natural disasters.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, with a separation-of-powers between federal and state agencies.

The purpose of this commentary is to draw reference to the European Model, ECMWF, at a time when the American eco-system appears to be dysfunctional and filled with bad intent.

ECMRWF is renowned worldwide as providing the most accurate medium-range global weather forecasts to 15 days and seasonal forecasts to 12 months.^[2] Its products are provided to the European National Weather Services, as a complement to the national short-range and climatological activities. The National Meteorological Services of member-states use ECMWF’s products for their own national duties, in particular to give early warning of potentially damaging severe weather.

While many things the US do are good, there is also “bad intent” in the American eco-system, often associated with crony-capitalism. Many believe that media hype over weather forecasts spurs retail spending (surplus food, gasoline, generators, and firewood) to benefit the same companies that contract media purchases (advertising) with the media outlets. Consider the “blown out of proportion” sense in the following article:

About Juno: The how and why of a blown forecast http://www.mcall.com/news/breaking/mc-juno-snow-dud-lehigh-valley-20150127-story.html

January 27, 2015 – Those Lehigh Valley commuters dusting the powder off their windshields Tuesday morning undoubtedly cast their thoughts back a day and concluded something had gone amiss in all the weather laboratories.

Wasn’t it supposed to snow 14 inches? Or was it six? Or two to four? They said something about a European model…

Well, off to work.

The storm that might have been is now the storm that wasn’t and no one will mention it again, at least until the next big miss by the weather services.

“Mother nature humbled us,” the Eastern PA Weather Authority wrote in a mea culpa Facebook post after its final call of 9 to 14 inches fell roughly 9 to 14 inches short.

What happened? As always, forecasters looked at a variety of models — the European model, famed for its precise forecasting of Superstorm Sandy, and many domestic models — and made predictions based on the data.

Mitchell Gaines, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, N.J., said there are about 10 commonly used models that make use of weather observations gathered around the world from satellites, balloons, ground stations and ships.
…
“We blew the call, and everyone blew it,” the Eastern PA Weather Authority post said. “(A)mending or lowering your original call is not nailing it either. No one got this right, plain and simple.”

Not quite no one. Adam Joseph, a meteorologist at the ABC station in Philadelphia, had predicted an underwhelming storm for the Philadelphia^# region from early on, saying on Sunday it had “high bust potential.”
…
New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio spent a couple of days making pronouncements so foreboding that he was parodied as an end-times prophet by [humor magazine] The Onion.

But instead of three feet of snow and blizzard winds, the city got about 8 inches of snow in Central Park. “Snore-easter,” the Daily News called it.

“This is an imprecise science,” New York^# Governor Andrew Cuomo said at a news briefing early Tuesday when asked about the forecast. He noted that last November, a storm that officials had not expected to be severe dropped seven feet of snow on Buffalo, in the western part of the state.

In New Jersey^#, Governor Chris Christie said it was better to err on the side of caution: “I was being told as late as 9 o’clock (Monday) night that we were looking at 20-inch accumulations in parts of New Jersey,” he said. “We were acting based on what we were being told.”
…
There was, too, something of a New York-centric slant in the media coverage. The storm was declared a “dud” because it largely spared Manhattan. But it slammed New England as advertised, with wind gusts approaching hurricane strength and smothering snow.

VIDEO – MONSTER BLIZZARD OF 2015 | New York Snow Storm Juno Forecast was an EPIC FAIL – https://youtu.be/Je6zr_K966A

Published on Jan 28, 2015 – Jan. 27, 2015 will go down in the annals of history as the day New Jersey came to a standstill for a blizzard in another state. Blizzard warnings have been lifted in the Garden State, projected snow totals more than cut in half and forecasters have apologized for what they’re describing as “big forecast miss.” …

Conspiracy, anyone?

The book Go Lean…Caribbean asserts that the Caribbean region must not allow the US to take the lead for our own nation-building, that American Crony-Capitalistic interest tends to hijack policies intended for the Greater Good. This assessment is logical considering that despite the reality of the 2008 Great Recession and the Wall Street complexity, no one has gone to jail! This despite the blatant “lying, cheating and stealing”, the millions of victims and $11 Trillion in economic setbacks.

Be kind, rewind …

In the fall of 2012, Super Storm Sandy devastated the Northeast American coast despite warnings and accurate forecasts from the European Model.

US vs. European hurricane model: Which is better?
By: Tamara Lush; posted May 29, 2013; retrieved February 3, 2015 from:
http://news.yahoo.com/us-vs-european-hurricane-model-better-164750199.html

When forecasters from the National Weather Service track a hurricane, they use models from several different supercomputers located around the world to create their predictions.

Some of those models are more accurate than others. During Hurricane Sandy last October, for instance, the model from the EuropeanCenter for Medium-range Weather Forecasting in the United Kingdom predicted eight days before landfall that the large storm would hit the East Coast, while the American supercomputer model showed Sandy drifting out to sea.

The American model eventually predicted Sandy’s landfall four days before the storm hit — plenty of time for preparation — but revealed a potential weakness in the American computer compared to the European system. It left some meteorologists fuming.

“Let me be blunt: the state of operational U.S. numerical weather prediction is an embarrassment to the nation and it does not have to be this way,” wrote Cliff Maas, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.
…
Experts also say the quality of a nation’s computer capability [for modeling] is emblematic of its underlying commitment to research, science and innovation.

Many felt that “the powers that be” did not want to overly alarm American citizens and affect the turnout for the Presidential Elections days later.

The foregoing articles/VIDEOs look at the repetition of Weather Forecast Dysfunction in 2012 with Super Storm Sandy and again, just last week with Winter Storm Juno. Compare this to the over-blown media hype of a Groundhog in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania…for weather prognostication.

Something is wrong with this portrayal. This is American crony-capitalism all over again. Like the Groundhog Day movie, the same patterns are repeating again, and again …

The Caribbean must do better!

This issue on weather is not the first instance of a “Big Bad American Bully” in the business world. This is just another reflection of American Crony Capitalism – where public policy is set to benefit private parties. Consider this chart from a previous blog:

Big Oil	While lobbying for continuous tax subsidies, the industry have colluded to artificially keep prices high and garner rocket profits ($38+ Billion every quarter).
Big Box	Retail chains impoverish small merchants on Main Street with Antitrust-like tactics, thusly impacting community jobs.
Big Pharma	Chemo-therapy cost $20,000+/month; and the War against Cancer is imperiled due to industry profit insistence.
Big Tobacco	Cigarettes are not natural tobacco but rather latent with chemicals to spruce addiction.
Big Agra	Agribusiness concerns bully family farmers and crowd out the market; plus fight common sense food labeling efforts.
Big Data	Brokers for internet and demographic data clearly have no regards to privacy confines
Big Media	Hollywood insists on big tax breaks/ subsidies for on-location shooting; cable companies conspire to keep rates high; textbook publishers practice price gouging.
Big Banks	Wall Street’s damage to housing and student loans are incontrovertible.
	NEW ENTRY
Big Weather	Overblown hype of “Weather Forecasts” to dictate commercial transactions.

The Go Lean book, and accompanying blog commentaries, go even deeper and hypothesize that beyond weather alerts, the American economic models are dysfunctional for the Caribbean perspective. The American wheels of commerce portray the Caribbean in a “parasite” role; imperiling regional industrialization even further. The US foreign policy for the Caribbean is to incentivize consumption of American products and media, and to ensure that no other European powers exert undue influence in the region – Monroe Doctrine and Pax Americana (Page 180).

The disposition of a “parasite” is not the only choice, for despite American pressure, countries like Japan and South Korea, despite being small population-size, have trade surpluses with the US. They are protégés, not parasites, and thusly provide a model for the Caribbean to emulate.

This broken system in America does not have to be modeled in the Caribbean. Change has now come. The driver of this change is technology and globalization. The Go Lean book posits that the governmental administrations must be open to full disclosure and accountability. The ubiquity of the internet has allowed whistleblowers to expose “shady” practices to the general public; think WikiLeaks.

The Go Lean roadmap provides turn-by-turn directions on how to forge this change in the region for a reboot of these Caribbean societal systems, including justice institutions. This roadmap is thusly viewed as more than just a planning tool, pronouncing this point early in the Declaration of Interdependence (Page 13) with these statements:

xvi. Whereas security [(Emergency/Disaster Management)] 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.

The Go Lean book purports that the Caribbean can – and must – do better than our American counterparts. The vision of the CU is a confederation of the 30 member-states of the Caribbean to do the heavy-lifting of optimizing economic-security-governing engines. The book thusly details the policies and other community ethos to adopt, plus the executions of the following strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to protect Caribbean society with prudent weather forecasting:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Privacy versus Public Protection	Page 23
Community Ethos – Whistleblower Protection	Page 23
Community Ethos – Anti-Bullying and Mitigation	Page 23
Community Ethos – Intelligence Gathering	Page 23
Community Ethos – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Agents of Change – Technology	Page 57
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization	Page 57
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Emergency Management	Page 76
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Meteorological and Geological Services	Page 79
Implementation – Security Initiatives at Start-up	Page 103
Implementation – Ways to Benefit from Globalization	Page 119
Planning – Big Ideas – Integrating to a Single Market	Page 127
Planning – Lessons Learned from 2008	Page 136
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance	Page 169
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 171
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security	Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Intelligence Gathering & Analysis	Page 182
Advocacy – Ways to Improve for Natural Disasters	Page 184
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Emergency Management	Page 196

The foregoing article/VIDEO relates to topics that are of serious concern for Caribbean planners. While the US is the world’s largest Single Market economy, we want to only model some of the American example. We would rather foster a business climate to benefit the Greater Good, not just some special interest group.

The world is not fooled! “Tamarind, Sour Sap and Green Dilly, you musse think we silly” – Bahamian Folk Song

There are many Go Lean blog commentaries that have echoed this point, addressing the subject of the Caribbean avoiding American consequences. See sample here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3397	A Christmas Present for the Banks from the Omnibus Bill
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3326	Detroit’s M-1 Rail – Finally avoiding Plutocratic Auto Industry Solutions
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2887	Caribbean must work together to address rum subsidies
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2522	The Cost of Cancer Drugs
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2465	Book Review: ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2435	Korea’s Model – A dream for Latin America and the Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2338	How Caribbean can Mitigate the Dreaded ‘Plutocracy’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2259	The Criminalization of American Business
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2183	A Textbook Case of Industry Price-gouging
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1309	5 Steps to a Bubble
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1256	Traditional 4-year Colleges – Terrible Investment for Region and Jobs
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1143	Health-care fraud in America; Criminals take $272 billion a year
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=798	Lessons Learned from the American Airlines merger
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=789	America’s War on the Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=782	Open the Time Capsule: The Great Recession of 2008
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=709	Student debt holds back many would-be home buyers
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=658	Indian Reservation Advocates Push for Junk-Food Tax
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=623	Book Review: “The Divide – American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap”
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=353	Book Review: ‘Wrong – Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn…’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=273	10 Things We *Don’t* Want from the US – #1: American Self-Interest Policies

The book Go Lean…Caribbean posits that many problems of the region are too big for any one member-state to solve alone, that there is the need for the technocracy of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation. The purpose of this Go Lean/CU roadmap is to make the Caribbean homeland, a better place to live, work, learn and play. This effort is more than academic; this involves many practical mitigations and heavy-lifting. While this charter is not easy, it is worth all effort.

Climate change is a reality … for the Caribbean; (despite many in denial, especially in the US).

In the Caribbean we need accurate weather forecasting and alerts. We need the public to respect these alerts and not question some commercial-profit ulterior motive. We need the European Model more so than the American one.

The Go Lean roadmap calls for some integration of the regional member-states, a strategy of confederation with a tactic of separating powers between CU federal agencies and member-states’ governments. The roadmap calls for the regional integration of all meteorological and geological professional services. The separation-of-powers tactic also calls for assumption of Emergency Management Agencies for the member-states. There is the need for weather and disaster preparation/response under the same umbrella, with a direct line of reporting. The roadmap posits that to succeed as a society, the Caribbean region must not only consume, (in this case weather forecasts), but also create, produce, and distribute intellectual products and services (property) to the rest of the world. We need our own Caribbean weather/forecast models, algorithms, calculations and formulas!

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people and governing institutions, to lean-in for the changes and empowerments described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean.

🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

—————-

Appendix – EUMETSAT: European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites

EUMETSAT is an intergovernmental organization created through an international convention agreed by a current total of 30 European Member States: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. These States fund the EUMETSAT programs and are the principal users of the systems. The convention establishing EUMETSAT was opened for signature in 1983 and entered into force in 19 June 1986.

EUMETSAT’s primary objective is to establish, maintain and exploit European systems of operational meteorological satellites. EUMETSAT is responsible for the launch and operation of the satellites and for delivering satellite data to end-users as well as contributing to the operational monitoring of climate and the detection of global climate changes.

The activities of EUMETSAT contribute to a global meteorological satellite observing system coordinated with other space-faring nations.

Satellite observations are an essential input to numerical weather prediction systems and also assist the human forecaster in the diagnosis of potentially hazardous weather developments. Of growing importance is the capacity of weather satellites to gather long-term measurements from space in support of climate change studies.

EUMETSAT is not part of the European Union, but became a signatory to the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters in 2012, thus providing for the global charitable use of its space assets.^[1]Source Reference: 1. http://www.disasterscharter.org/c/document_library/get_file?p_l_id=23109&folderId=172718&name=DLFE-4704.pdf

—————-

Appendix – ^# Winter Storm Juno Overblown Preparations: http://youtu.be/ivK6jtWfX-U

Blizzard 2015 !!! Winter Storm Juno Forecast “Northeast Snowstorm Ramping Up ” !!! Amazing Video

Published on Jan 27, 2015 – More than 35 million people along the Philadelphia-to-Boston corridor rushed to get home and settle in Monday as a fearsome storm swirled in with the potential for hurricane-force winds and 1 to 3 feet of snow that could paralyze the Northeast for days.

—————-

Appendix – * Movie Reference: 1993 Movie Groundhog Day

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107048/?ref_=nv_sr_2

A weatherman finds himself living the same day over and over again.

Trailer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107048/?ref_=ext_shr_eml_vi#lb-vi1319829785

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Crony-Capitalism, Disaster, Model, Power, Security

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New York Times Maledictions on The Bahamas

Posted on February 2, 2015 in Government, Locations, Social

Go Lean Commentary

In this context, the word malediction simply means “bad” or “damning” words. It is not calling down a curse on a subject, but rather the reporting of an unbecoming characteristic. The Bahamas has done “bad” and the New York Times is telling the world.

But this is New York, not the Bahamas; why should this matter?

The New York Times is more than just the newspaper for the Tri-State metropolitan area surrounding New York City (35 million people); nicknamed for years as “The Gray Lady“, the New York Times is long regarded within the industry as a national “newspaper of record“.^[6] The paper’s print version remains the largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States. Its motto is “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, which appears in the upper left-hand corner of the front page.

If a student wants to do research on the 1892 American Recession for instance, (the paper has printed continuously since September 18, 1851), this one only has to retrieve the archives of the New York Times for that period.

Over its history, the New York Times has been awarded 114 different Pulitzer Prizes for Excellence in Journalism. Pulitzer Prizes have previously been awarded to journalists reporting on human trafficking and illegal migrations – See VIDEO below – it is an ignoble accomplishment to be put into this focus.

A front-page story, above the fold, about a small 320,000 populated nation in this paper is by all means an earth-shattering occurrence. Bahamas, you have done “bad” to garner this type of coverage, right in the middle of your #1 tourist market during the peak tourist season.

The article print date is Saturday January 31, only a few days after vicious Winter Storm Juno pelted the Northeast United States, (shutting down all of Manhattan), now to be followed by another (Artic Blast) storm currently lambasting the Mid-West (Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, etc.) but heading eastward towards NYC. Drawing attention to a tropical resort destination like the Bahamas in the middle of such uninviting winter weather should be a bonus of free publicity. But alas, the New York Times article is a malediction!

This is also “on the heel” of a demand to “boycott Bahamas tourism” by certain fractions in Miami, Florida.

The purpose of this commentary is more than just newspapers and maledictions, but rather the acknowledgement that perhaps, the boycott-cause is gaining traction. Anyone from this Caribbean country, as is the case of this writer, may be timid with the characterization of supporting a cruel, inhumane – though legal – regime in his homeland. The constitution in the Bahamas do not award citizenship to babies born in the Bahamas to non-national parents. This is the standard – jus solis – in the US and in Canada. This standard obviously shades the American newspaper’s view of the Bahamas domestic policies.

There are so many issues with this New York Times story that aligns with the book Go Lean…Caribbean. The book serves as a roadmap for elevating Caribbean society and the economic, security and governing engines. The roadmap introduces the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), asserting that the problems besetting the region are too big for any one Caribbean member-state to tackle alone. That rather, there is a need for a super-national solution. Considering the details of the following article, a number of countries have been struggling with this same issue: Bahamas, Turks & Caicos Island, Dominican Republic, etc. The actual New York Times story about Haitian immigrants is as follows:

Title 1: Immigration Rules in Bahamas Sweep Up Haitians
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/31/world/haitians-are-swept-up-as-bahamas-tightens-immigration-rules.html?mwrsm=Facebook&fb_ref=Default&_r=0
By: Frances Robles – January 30, 2015

NASSAU, Bahamas — Kenson Timothee was walking down the street when a uniformed officer asked him a question that sends Bahamians of Haitian descent like him into a panic these days: Do you have a passport?

Mr. Timothee, who was born in the Bahamas to illegal Haitian immigrants, wound up jailed in immigration detention for six weeks. He is one of hundreds of people swept up in a fiercely debated new immigration policy in the Bahamas requiring everyone to hold a passport, a rule that human rights groups say unfairly targets people of Haitian descent.

Mr. Timothee had proof that he was born in the Bahamas, but because he had trouble obtaining his absentee father’s birth certificate, his application for Bahamian citizenship was never completed.

“I showed them that I had applied for citizenship, but they said that wasn’t good enough; as far as they are concerned, you are not Bahamian, you are Haitian, and you need to get deported,” Mr. Timothee said. “I don’t know anything about Haiti.”

On Thursday, the Bahamian government announced that the new policy would go a step further: By next Fall, schools will be asked to ensure that every child has a student permit. The annual $125 permit and a passport with a residency stamp will be required even of children born in the Bahamas who do not hold Bahamian citizenship.

The tough new policy echoes similar stances around the region, where new citizenship policies and anti-immigration measures have overwhelmingly affected Haitians, who are fleeing the hemisphere’s poorest country and are the most likely group to migrate illegally in great numbers. The top court in the Dominican Republic ruled in 2013 that the children of illegal immigrants, even if they are born in the country, did not have the right to citizenship.

Facing an international backlash, the Dominican government came up with a plan to prevent tens of thousands of people from becoming stateless, but months later, few people had managed to complete the process. With few successes to tout, in October the Dominican government extended the application period for another three months.

In Turks and Caicos, a top immigration official vowed early in 2013 to hunt down and capture Haitians illegally in the country, promising to make their lives “unbearable.” The country had already changed its immigration policies in 2012, making it harder for children of immigrants to obtain residency. Last year, Turks and Caicos said it would deploy drones to stop Haitian migration.

In Brazil, politicians considered closing a border with Peru last year to stem the tide of Haitians, and last month, Canada announced that it would resume deporting Haitians.

Here in the Bahamas, Mr. Timothee’s arrest coincided with stepped-up immigration raids in predominantly Haitian shantytowns, where people who lacked passports or work permits were apprehended. When illegal immigrants ran from officers, the agents knocked down doors and took their children, and the photos of toddlers being carried away circulated widely on social media.

Since the policy took effect November 1, children born in the Bahamas have been deported with their parents, and others with Haitian-sounding names have been pulled from school classrooms, human rights observers said. The government acknowledges that even Bahamian citizens with French surnames are frequently arrested by mistake. In September alone, 241 Haitians were deported, according to government figures.

Though 85 percent of Bahamians support the new policy according to one poll, it has set off a round of international condemnation. A Florida legislator called for a tourism boycott of the Bahamas and organized a protest at the nation’s Miami consulate. Citing some of the more alarming cases, including that of a pregnant Haitian woman who gave birth on an immigration detention center floor aided only by other detainees, several international groups have asked the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to intervene.

Immigration officials in the Bahamas say their policies do not target any particular group, provide a better sense of who is living in their country, and could deter thousands of Haitian migrants from taking to the high seas each year in boats that often sink.

“We had situations where 100 people were showing up every day; that’s unsustainable,” said Frederick A. Mitchell, the Bahamian foreign minister. “That situation had spiraled out of control.”

Annette M. Martínez Orabona, director of the Caribbean Institute for Human Rights, said she recently visited the Bahamas to investigate the new policy, arguing that it fit into a broad context of immigration crackdowns in the region.

“It’s all guided by discriminatory practices toward persons of Haitian origin,” she said.

Children like Mr. Timothee’s 5-year-old daughter are in a particularly precarious legal situation, she said. If nationality is passed down by blood and Mr. Timothee has no citizenship, then what passport would his daughter get?

“The third generation is in a black hole,” Ms. Martínez said.

In the Bahamas, the Constitution says that people born there to parents who were not citizens have the right to apply for citizenship between their 18th and 19th birthdays. In a country where one in 10 Bahamians is of Haitian descent, many people never apply, and others face years of administrative delays, leaving an untold number of people in the country without documentation.

The new policy forces them to apply for a passport from their parents’ country of origin. Americans who have children in the Bahamas regularly get United States passports for them, and this is no different, Mr. Mitchell said.

“There’s nothing wrong with being Haitian,” Mr. Mitchell said.

But the people affected by the new policy are leery of obtaining citizenship from Haiti, a country most of them have never visited.

“It’s a trick,” said Fred R. Smith, a civil rights lawyer in the Bahamas who has become the policy’s most vocal critic. “Once you apply for a Haitian passport, you’re already a citizen of another country, and you no longer fit into a category where the Bahamas is under an obligation to give you citizenship. You are no longer stateless.”

He said the government had routinely descended on an area, apprehended a few hundred people, and “hauled off” anyone who could not produce papers on the spot. The majority of detainees are released when their relatives or employers come to the detention center with their paperwork.

Some people have been deported even though they were born in the Bahamas. People like Mr. Timothee, whose citizenship status is pending, wind up in limbo. Others, like Rose St. Fleur, have been sent home with an admonishment to carry their paperwork.

Ms. St. Fleur, a 29-year-old Bahamian citizen, said she had been picked up twice since October. She was 32 weeks pregnant when neighbors watched agents drag her down the street onto a bus, she and her neighbors said.

“When they asked me my name and I told them, they said, ‘That’s a foreign last name,’ ” Ms. St. Fleur said. “I told them, ‘Yes, but I am a Bahamian citizen.’ ” She said they replied, “You still have to come with us.”

Many people have not been able to obtain documents because the paperwork required, including certified copies of both parents’ birth certificates, is difficult to obtain. The Haitian government, itself crippled by political infighting and a halting recovery from the earthquake five years ago, has been unable to speedily produce records for the hundreds of thousands of people in the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas who are suddenly in need of decades-old birth records.

Because of delays in obtaining Haitian passports, thousands of Bahamians are now at risk of having no nationality at all.

“The person who may have a delay in getting papers is not stateless,” Dwight L. Beneby, the Bahamas’ assistant director of immigration. “It’s not that we’re trying to get rid of people or trying to get out of giving them citizenship. If you are here, let’s know who you are.”

Francois Guillaume II, who was Haiti’s minister of Haitians living abroad when the policy was announced, said the new policy came without warning.

“It’s troubling when we have cases of people who have never lived in Haiti and are sent to a country that is completely foreign to them,” said Mr. Guillaume, who lost his position in a recent ministerial shuffle. “It must be traumatizing for them.”

Most of the Bahamian-born deportees were children, but one was 18 years old, and it was unclear why she was not given the opportunity to seek legal residency, he said.

“I don’t think there is an anti-Haitian sentiment in the area; I believe there are countries experiencing social pressure and are trying to look for solutions,” Mr. Guillaume said. “Some solutions are rash. Sometimes they are politically motivated. Nonetheless, we hope the solutions respect international norms.”

Though the Bahamas immigration/nationality enforcement is “legal” per the country’s constitution, not everyone in the homeland approves of this policy. Note to the New York Times: “The round-up of Bahamian-born Haitians is not universally concurred in the country”. This is a policy of the current government administration. There are non-government organizations (NGOs) and elected opposition officials that are vocal in their disagreements of this enforcement. (This Go Lean commentary remains apolitical). See a news article (snippet) here in that vein:

Title 2: Call To Bring Immigration Legislation to Parliament –
(Retrieved 01/30/2015 from: http://www.tribune242.com/news/2015/jan/30/call-bring-immigration-legislation/)

ST ANNE’S MP Hubert Chipman yesterday renewed calls for legislation to be brought to Parliament to support the government’s new immigration policy.

Mr. Chipman, shadow minister for foreign affairs and immigration, said the only person who had a clear understanding of the policy was Immigration Minister Fred Mitchell, and questioned how the new policy has affected the department’s backlog of citizenship applications.

He said officials have put the “cart before the horse” by targeting migrant communities before modernizing infrastructure to process individuals.

These articles reflect the heavy-lifting burdens that the Caribbean member-states must address regarding nationality and immigration. Underlying to this issue among all the affected Caribbean member-states is the failing disposition of Haiti. The Go Lean…Caribbean book presents a Marshall Plan to re-boot Haiti. The consequence: a better Haiti to live, work and play. Only then will the citizens of Haiti, and the Caribbean as a whole, be less inclined to flee the homeland.

The Go Lean roadmap provides perhaps the ultimate resolution to this perplexing nationality processing problem, that of a regional entity, the CU, to streamline application processing. This would be an extension of the current CariCom passport process.

A key problem with this nationality issue is the current sensitivities of Jus soli (Latin: right of the soil) versus Jus sanguinis (Latin: right of blood). These points were detailed in a previous blog.

In the middle of the winter, the New York Times should be inciting its readers to flee the bitter cold and enjoy the hospitality of the Bahamas, Turks & Caicos and the Dominican Republic, yet instead the front page article is exposing the human rights shortcomings of these states’ nationality policies.

The Go Lean book and blogs addresses ways to better protect human rights. While this subject is not tried-and-true economics – the usual focus of this roadmap – there is a correlation of satisfactory human rights records and American trade. The roadmap seeks to elevate all the engines of Caribbean society for a better homeland for the 42 million residents and 80 million visitors, across the 30 member-states. The CU, applying best-practices for community empowerment and human rights, has the following 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 protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance, with consideration for minority equalization, to support these engines.

The Go Lean book details a series of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to optimize the region’s economic landscape:

Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Anti-Bullying and Mitigation	Page 23
Community Ethos – Minority Equalization	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations	Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Integrate region into a Single Market Economy	Page 45
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization	Page 57
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Department of Homeland Security	Page 75
Implementation – Ways to Foster International Aid	Page 115
Planning – 10 Big Ideas … in the Caribbean Region – Haiti & Cuba	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Ways to Model the EU – From Worst to First	Page 130
Planning – Reasons Why the CU Will Succeed – Germany Reconciliation Model	Page 132
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices – Cuba & Haiti on the List	Page 134
Planning – Lessons from East Germany – European post-war rebuilding	Page 139
Planning – Lessons from the US Constitution	Page 145
Planning – Lessons from Canada’s History	Page 146
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Empowering Immigration – Case Study of Indian Migrants	Page 174
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice	Page 178
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the Diaspora	Page 217
Advocacy – Ways to Protect Human Rights	Page 220
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Cuba	Page 237
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the Dominican Republic	Page 237
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti	Page 238

The message to the Caribbean leaders and planners is straight-forward: The US, New York Times and all American media, are watching and judging, based on their own standards. The goal of the Go Lean roadmap is to formulate the Caribbean region to be better American neighbors, a protégé status rather than the current parasite status. There is the need to re-focus on our populations in general – majority, minority, Black, White, French, English, etc.. Countries like the Bahamas, and Haiti for that matter, need “all hands on deck”, not less hands. Economic growth requires a growing population; (a previous report disclosed 70,000 Bahamians living illegally in the US).

We do not want to encourage migration nor facilitate it. Just the opposite, we simply want to encourage and facilitate citizens staying and contributing to their native homelands. We do not want to “fatten frogs for snake”, we want to elevate our own communities to be better places to live, work and play.

Now is the time for all the Caribbean to lean-in to this Go Lean roadmap for Caribbean economic, security and governance elevation. Now is the time for all of the Caribbean to learn the lessons from other communities, (think Apartheid in South Africa). It is guaranteed: once the human rights issues are resolved, your society/community will soar.

🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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APPENDIX – VIDEO: Pulitzer Prizes on Human Trafficking

Direct Link: http://www.nytimes.com/video/multimedia/100000002825879/reuters-journalist-jason-szep-celebrates-pulitzer-prize.html

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