January 2017 – Go Lean…Caribbean

Month: January 2017

California Secession? W.T.H.!!

Posted on January 31, 2017 in Government, Locations, Social

Go Lean Commentary

What the Hell!?!? Are they for real?!

This is the disgust. The rule of the majority is not absolute. That would be Fascist! Pure majority rule declares that “we can win any vote, so we can do whatever we want”.

The contrast is a Constitutional Democracy. This is where constitutional protections (rights, privileges, entitlements, etc.) are guaranteed, despite majority or minority status. This is the governmental attribute of the United States and many countries in the Caribbean. So what is a minority to do if they are persecuted by the majority in the US?

Lawsuits – for court orders to enforce rights

Lobbying Legislatures – to enact statures that reflect constitutional rights

Protests – to demand rights

… and …

Secession

Secession? What the Hell (WTH)!?

That is a different option.

So is this real? Unfortunately, yes. See the full news article here:

Title: Backers of California Seceding From the U.S. Get a Go-Ahead
Sub-title: Group, energized by Donald Trump’s election, can start collecting signatures, but a ‘Calexit’ would require amending the nation’s Constitution

Demonstrators protest against President Donald Trump’s crackdown on ‘sanctuary cities’ outside the City Hall in Los Angeles on Jan. 25. Photo: Ringo Chiu/Zuma Press

By Alejandro Lazo

Jan. 28, 2017 12:58 p.m. ET

SAN FRANCISCO—California secession dreamers can begin collecting signatures to place a nationhood proposal on the November 2018 ballot, after language for the measure was approved this week by the state’s attorney general.

The notion of a “Calexit”—a highly improbable idea that would require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution—gained popularity on social media following President Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in November, mostly as a humorous expression of opposition to the new president, whose policies are at odds with the liberal state.

The measure would strike a line from the state Constitution describing California as “an inseparable part of the United States of America” and set up an election, on March 5, 2019, asking the question, “Should California become a free, sovereign and independent country?”

Proponents of the measure, a group called “Yes California“, have until July 25 to gather 585,407 signatures for the measure. Even if they manage that feat, which is usually accomplished by hiring an army of signature-gatherers, the effort faces larger hurdles.

A number of states have had individual secession movements in recent years, including Texas and Hawaii, but the Supreme Court has ruled the U.S. Constitution doesn’t have a process for states to exit from the union.

But that history hasn’t dissuaded some Californians from toying with the notion. The “Yes California” effort began in 2014 and the idea was discussed more widely on social media under the hashtag #Calexit following November’s election. The state voted overwhelmingly for Democrat Hillary Clinton against Mr. Trump.

“This idea was born a couple of years ago—it hasn’t been a response to Donald Trump, though we have found new support as a result of his election,” said “Yes California” cofounder Louis Marinelli, in a telephone interview from Yekaterinburg, Russia, where he lives and works teaching English as a second language. “We are really excited about the idea that this is starting to catch on.”

Mr. Marinelli was once a social conservative and activist with the anti-gay marriage group National Organization for Marriage, but said he had a change of heart, turning liberal. Mr. Marinelli said he voted for Mr. Trump in November because he felt a Trump victory would galvanize voters in the state and advance the cause for California independence.

Supporters such as Mr. Marinelli talk up the state’s large economy and independent political culture. The state has already set itself up as an adversary to Mr. Trump. State leaders have vowed to defend California’s policies on immigration, climate change and health care, often citing California’s powerful economy and status as the nation’s most populous state.

California had a gross domestic product of $2.5 trillion in 2015, which would make it the world’s sixth-largest economy if it were its own country, according to figures released last year by the California Department of Finance’s Economic Research Unit. Studies have found that California receives less in federal funding than it sends to the federal government in tax revenue, mostly because of its sizable population of high-income earners.

Even if Californians were to vote for independence, the effort would face enormous obstacles. Congress would have to approve a constitutional amendment, which requires a two-thirds vote by each chamber of Congress, or a vote by two-thirds of the states to call a constitutional convention, and then ratification by three-quarters of the states.

An analysis of the measure by California’s independent legislative analyst also found that the fiscal impact of the measure could be large. “Assuming that California actually became an independent nation, the state and its local governments would experience major, but unknown, budgetary impacts,” according to the analysis.

A separate California group that began in 2015 is seeking to register enough voters under the “California National Party” so that it can begin running candidates in local races who are supportive of a withdrawal. That group hopes to build support for secession over time, through elected leaders, and it isn’t supporting the ballot measure.

But leaders of both secession movements say their efforts are serious, and not simply a political statement. “It is a lot likelier than people think,” said Jay Rooney, a spokesman for the National party. “It’s certainly as likely as Donald Trump becoming president.”

Write to Alejandro Lazo at alejandro.lazo@wsj.com
Source: Wall Street Journal January 28, 2017 from: http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/backers-of-california-seceding-from-the-u-s-get-a-go-ahead-1485626281

See the related story here:

Trump’s Threat to Take Federal Funding Away From Sanctuary Cities May Have Started Fight He Can’t Win
Posted January 27, 2017, By CNN WIRE
Source: http://ktla.com/2017/01/27/trumps-threat-to-take-federal-funding-away-from-sanctuary-cities-may-have-started-fight-he-cant-win/

Secession as a dissent strategy has not been deployed successfully since 1861, when the dissension over slavery was so polarizing that there was no hope for peaceful reconciliation.

The most significant and notable events related to secession of states, and the initiation of the American Civil War occurred between November 6, 1860 and April 15, 1861. On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln wins the 1860 presidential election to become the 16th President on a platform that includes the prohibition of slavery in new states and territories.^[233] Lincoln won all of the electoral votes in all of the free states (except in New Jersey where he won 4 votes and Stephen A. Douglas won 3). By the time Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, 7 southern states had already seceded and the President of the Confederate States of America was already inaugurated. – Sourced from Wikipedia.

Can secession be used again to protest the mandates of the majority – California -vs- the full United States. If this is earnestly pursued in California, it will definitely get the attention of the rest of the country and also the world. (If constituted a separate country, California would be the 6th largest economy in the world – by GDP, just ahead of France).

All in all, it is apparent that the 45th President, Donald Trump, has to preside over a divided nation. The 16th President did not want a division in his day, so he bargained, cajoled and proposed compromises to his opposition. Trump may have to ‘take a page out of that book’ from Lincoln.

This is perhaps what California is hoping for with the secession talk-action! See the VIDEO here debating the viability of this CalExit move:

VIDEO – Can California Actually Secede From The U.S.? – https://youtu.be/gBWbfudLwtE

Published on Nov 18, 2016 – With the election of Donald Trump, calls for California to secede have grown strong. So how realistic is a Calexit?

Learn More:
CNN: What history says about ‘Calexit’
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/11/opinion…

Yes California: The 2019 #Calexit Independence Referendum
http://www.yescalifornia.org/

New York Times: California Today: Secessionist Groups Seize the Moment
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/us/…

This is an American drama … worth watching in the next days, weeks, months and years. But reforming or transforming California or America is out of scope for the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean; our focus is the Caribbean only.

The Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), a technocratic federal government to administer and optimize the economic, security, and governing engines of the 30 Caribbean member-states. In fact the prime directives of the roadmap is identified with the following 3 statements:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The book asserts that many of the Caribbean member-states are dysfunctional and as a result many citizens have fled their homelands – this is a secession of sorts. Consider Puerto Rico, the island’s population as of 2010 was 3,725,789, while the Diaspora population across the US totaled 4,623,716. That an entire nation in absentia.

In general, the Caribbean population is 42 million, with a large Diaspora (estimated up to 25 million); many who have pledged not to return (for permanent residency) until their homeland breaks from the legacy of ineffectual governing systems, failing economic engines and inadequate security provisions.

These failing member-states is the focus of the Go Lean book, but there is mention of one city, Freeport/Lucaya, the 2nd City in the Bahamas. This town is the epitome of a dysfunctional community . They can benefit from a parallel secession strategy as that of California in the foregoing. This was the recommendation to Freeport in a previous blog-commentary, to consider a public referendum to weigh different secession options from the national government in Nassau. Freeport needs more autonomy for any chance of success.

The Go Lean recommendation is the secession option of incorporating a municipal city – with an autonomous parliament – and then become a Self-Governing Entity (SGE) of the CU.

By petitioning for autonomy, California in the US and Freeport in the Bahamas gets more audience for its grievances.

This is how a minority group can get a bigger-better addressing of issues in a country, “leave”, threaten to leave or negotiate to avert leaving. Sometimes, leaving involves secession.

This was also the experience for Scotland in the United Kingdom, as related in a previous blog-commentary.

There are a lot of lessons – from the worldwide struggle – to reform and transform communities. The underlying spirit behind a secession movement should be to make life better for a minority group who do not have the votes to effect change through the election process. This is one way to “appoint new guards” for governance. This was specified in the opening Declaration of Interdependence at the outset of the Go Lean book (Page 12):

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

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 avoid the pitfalls of [failing] communities … On the other hand, the Federation must also implement the good examples learned from [successful] developments/communities …

Thank you for the lesson California … and Scotland.

The Go Lean roadmap posits that the challenges in the US may yield a lot more lessons for our Caribbean region. We will be watching. We will “observe and report” on their strengths and weaknesses. Then apply the models effectively here at home. This is the quest of the Go Lean roadmap: to make our Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

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Freeport, History, Model, Power

Waging a Successful War on ‘Terrorism’

Posted on January 30, 2017 in Ethos, Government, Implementation

Go Lean Commentary

“The first casualty when war comes is truth” – US Senator Hiram Warren Johnson (1918).

In the United States, the War on ‘Terrorism’ was declared after the World Trade Center Attacks in September 2001. The war is still waging … some 16 years later. This is the third Commander-in-Chief (President) to lead the American effort; (George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump). Now, the lines are starting to blur in terms of who are the enemies and who are the allies.

During the first week of the new Trump administration, the new President issued an Executive Order – fulfilling a campaign promise – banning all immigrants from certain Muslim-majority countries. This is purportedly in conjunction with the ongoing War on ‘Terror’. The problem is that the cited countries have not been the source of the terrorist activities that have attacked the US. The targeting seem arbitrary. We must consider the truth; see the news article and photo/map of this story here:

Title: These Countries with Business Links to Trump Aren’t Part of His Immigration Ban
By: Joseph Hincks

A little over a year ago, then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” until the country’s leadership could “figure out what is going on.”

Along the campaign trail, he modified this blanket ban to a suspension of “immigration from terror-prone regions, where vetting cannot safely occur,” which he promised to enact during his first 100 days in office.

And now, a week into Trump’s presidency, he has tried to make good on that promise—or, at least, partly so. A draft proposal of an executive order obtained by Bloomberg News reportedly shows that Trump is poised to suspend all entry to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries.

Notably missing from the blacklist, however, are several Muslim-majority countries where Trump has business dealings, according to Bloomberg.

The news organization has put together a map of the proposed suspensions, with the Muslim-majority countries where Trump has business interests—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan—rendered in yellow.

While Muslim-majority countries such as Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and others are not included on the list, the omission of Turkey and Egypt may be argued as being seen at odds with Trump’s definition. Both Turkey and Egypt endured high-profile terror attacks in 2016.

The President has positions in two companies that may be related to business in Egypt, and has previously praised the country’s autocratic leader, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. In Turkey, Trump has a licensing deal to use his name on two luxury towers in Istanbul.

Source: Fortune Magazine Online Site; posted January 27, 2017; retrieved January 29, 2017 from: http://fortune.com/2017/01/27/donald-trump-muslim-immigration-ban-conflict/

Such a bold move – based on mis-truths – elicits response, feedback and uproar from opposition and pundits alike. In one such salvo on Saturday January 28th, a Security Analyst (with TV News Network MSNBC), Malcolm Nance, identified that terrorists are sourced in many countries around the world, not just the banned 7 and including places like the Caribbean.

Wait, what?!?! Such a scandalous accusation!

This brings to mind a previous blog-commentary by the promoters of the book Go Lean … Caribbean, describing the reality of the terrorism-threat in the Caribbean:

ISIS reaches the Caribbean Region

The Caribbean member-states are all atwitter about such associations. The region’s governments asserts that they are partners in the ‘War on Terror’ and not accessories to any Bad Actors. Consider the formal response from the Bahamas in the Appendix A below.

But truth be told, the US – and other advanced democracy countries – are very alarmed with their Caribbean partners; we have so many societal defects that exacerbate the global attempts to mitigate terrorism. Consider this list of security-based societal defects:

1. Indiscriminant Citizenship By Investment Program – see the CBS 60 Minutes story about Passports for Sale even to Terror Suspects featured in this previous blog. Can terrorists hide their identity with a passport from a Caribbean member-state? Can we do better going forward?

2. US PATRIOT Act – Managing ‘the Need and the Greed’ with this law. The measure allowed US authorities to have purview on foreign bank accounts in cooperative countries. This is where the Caribbean member-states were given the opportunity to demonstrate that they were willing to mitigate terrorism. Cooperation with these measures – see Appendix B below – jeopardized the Offshore Banking industry in the region. Can terrorists use our “banking in the shadows” to facilitate their malice? The historicity of the Offshore Banking Regulatory changes were detailed in the Go Lean book (Pages 321 – 326). Consider this sample from Page 321:

“In 2001 the development of standards in the fight against terrorism financing was added to the mission of the FATF [(Financial Action Task Force … on Money Laundering)]. In October 2001 the FATF issued the Eight Special Recommendations to deal with the issue of terrorism financing. The continued evolution of money laundering techniques led the FATF to revise the FATF standards comprehensively in June 2003. In October 2004 the FATF published a Ninth Special Recommendations, further strengthening the agreed international standards for combating money laundering and terrorism financing”.

3. Aversion to Digital Dragnets – The cutting edge technologies to capture meta-data or actual cell phone contents have been frowned on in the Caribbean; in a 2011 WikiLeaks dissemination, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the Bahamas cooperates with US official and records all cell phone calls. This disclosure was assailed as an Abuse of Power. But we must admit, this is an abuse of American power on the Caribbean homeland. Issues abound that need to be addressed and settled. The societal defect is that we are expecting others (the US in this case) to take the lead for our own security. Can we better prepare our own security apparatus for our own security needs? See VIDEO here relating the Privacy Concerns of dragnets.
VIDEO – USA Today: Digital Dragnet – Police Scoop Up Cell Phone Data – https://www.occupycorporatism.com/digital-dragnet-dhs-police-stingray-trackers/

Posted December 9, 2013 – Systems like the “Stingray” allow law enforcement entities to “tap into cellphone data in real time . . . capturing information about thousands of cellphone users at a time, whether they are targets of an investigation or not”.

4. Monitoring for threats (Weapons of Mass Destruction) – like Nuclear weapons. In the Caribbean, the “Sum of our Greatest Fear” is a terrorist detonating a dirty (nuclear) bomb in an unsecured island community. This is not just something we can complain about, no, we must prepare. There is an international accord that affords a solution, through the US. This is addressed in the discussion of the NEST program (Nuclear Emergency Support Team) in Appendix C below. We can facilitate our own arrangement, with US cooperation. We can mount sensors and monitoring equipment; we can grant access and enable the NEST inspectors in our domain.

How we receive, perceive and retrieve security mitigations indicates the impact of our societal defects. Without firing one shot, the Caribbean is able to help or hurt the War Against ‘Terrorism’ with our societal defects. This is commentary 4 of 4 from the movement behind the Go Lean book on the subject of Caribbean societal defects. So how do we move our communities from the deficient-defective status quo to our targeted destination: “a better (safer) place to live, work and play”? By waging war on our defects. All of these commentaries detail that effort, for the following defects:

These commentaries draw reference to the Go Lean book, as it details the quest to reform and transform the Caribbean; it features a how-to guide and roadmap for elevating the region’s societal engines for (1.) economics, (2.) security and (3.) governance. Strategies, tactics and implementations for the War Against Terrorism have relevance for all these three spheres of society.

The book Go Lean … Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) to elevate the region’s societal engines of economics, security and governance. With a brand name like Trade Federation, obviously the primary focus is on economics, but the book asserts (Page 23) that peace, security and public safety must be tantamount to economic prosperity; that bad things will happen to good people and so the community needs to be prepared to contend with the risks that can imperil the homeland. The Go Lean book therefore serves as a roadmap for full Caribbean integration, with the motivation for Greater Good. In all, the Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy and create new jobs.
Establishment of a homeland security apparatus to ensure public safety and to protect the resultant economic engines of the Caribbean region.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The priority on homeland security was pronounced early in the Go Lean book with the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Page 12) that claims:

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

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

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

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, including … forms of terrorism, 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 Caribbean appointing these “new guards” will include many strategies, tactics and implementations considered “best-practices” in the War Against Terror.

The CU would be established by the sovereign powers of the 30 Caribbean member-states to empower the region with economic, security and governing tools and techniques. This includes a Security / Defense Pact (Armed Forces) with a fully-empowered Naval Force and Expeditionary Marine (ground) Forces. The Security Pact is about action, not attitude; but the right societal attitude (weeding out societal defects) is important, critical even.

Societal defects are destructive and self-defeating for the interior of our communities. But in the case of security gaps, far-away communities can be imperiled as well. The War on Terrorism is fought by many stakeholders on many different ‘battlefields’. Consider airport screening; once every passenger has been screened for weapons and explosives, the plane is considered “sanitized” and can then enter any airspace with a presumed label of “safe-and-secured”. Poor security executions in the Caribbean can therefore impact the public safety of far-away places. So our defects can result in bad cause-and-effect for other (innocent) people.

This is the attitude – community ethos – that we must adopt, that our battles in the War Against Terror can help/hurt the rest of the world. “Community Ethos” is defined here as:

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

The Go Lean book details the series of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to wage a successful ‘War on Terrorism’; this includes proactive and reactive public safety/security measures in the Caribbean region:

Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Privacy –vs- Public Protection	Page 23
Community Ethos – Intelligence Gathering	Page 23
Community Ethos – Whistleblower Protection	Page 23
Community Ethos – “Crap” Happens	Page 23
Community Ethos – Cooperatives	Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations	Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing	Page 35
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness	Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Confederating a non-sovereign permanent union	Page 45
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Coast Guard & Naval Authorities	Page 75
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Ground Militia Forces	Page 75
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Emergency Management Agency	Page 76
Tactical – Separation of Powers – CariPol: Marshals & Investigations	Page 75
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Start-up Foreign Policy Initiatives	Page 102
Implementation – Start-up Security Initiatives	Page 103
Implementation – Ways to Foster International Aid	Page 115
Planning – 10 Big Ideas – #3: Consolidated Homeland Security Pact	Page 130
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices – Escalation Role	Page 134
Planning – Lessons from the American West – Needed Law & Order	Page 142
Planning – Lessons from Egypt – Law & Order for Tourism	Page 143
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy – Quick Disaster Recovery	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance	Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice – Policing/Supporting the Police	Page 177
Advocacy – Ways to Reduce Crime – Regional Security Intelligence	Page 178
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security	Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Mitigate Terrorism	Page 181
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Intelligence Gathering & Analysis	Page 182
Advocacy – Reforms for Banking Regulations – Offshore Banking Reforms	Page 199
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Wall Street – Downplay Lawless Impressions	Page 200
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Main Street	Page 201
Advocacy – Ways to Protect Human Rights – Watchful World	Page 220
Appendix ZD – Offshore Tax & Financial Services Industry Developments	Page 321
Appendix ZE – Offshore Tax & Financial Services Industry – Bahamas Example	Page 322

Other subjects related to security and governing empowerments for the region’s defense have been blogged in other Go Lean…Caribbean commentaries, as sampled here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9974	Lessons Learned from Pearl Harbor
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9072	Securing the Homeland – On the Ground
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9070	Securing the Homeland – From the Seas
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9068	Securing the Homeland – From the Air
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7119	Security Role Model for the Caribbean: African Standby Force
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6720	A Lesson in History – During the Civil War: Fighting for Our Own Cause
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6103	Sum of All Fears – ‘On Guard’ Against Deadly Threats
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5183	A Lesson in History – Cinco De Mayo and Mexico’s Security Lapses
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5002	Managing a ‘Clear and Present Danger’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4809	Americans arrest 2 would-be terrorists – a Clear and Present Danger
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4360	Dreading the ‘Caribbean Basin Security Initiative’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3881	Intelligence Agencies to Up Cyber Security Cooperation
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1965	America’s Navy – 100 Percent – Model for Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1554	Status of Forces Agreement = Security Pact
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1076	Trinidad Muslims travel to Venezuela for Jihadist training
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=809	Muslim officials condemn abductions of Nigerian girls
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=535	Remembering and learning from Boston
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=273	10 Things We Want from the US – #4: Pax Americana

An effort to provide better security solutions in the Caribbean should be welcomed here.

The new Caribbean must foster good security habits … and ‘War against Bad Ones’ – societal defects. This is how to secure our homeland: monitor for threats, gather intelligence, investigate incidences, police communities, arm a defense apparatus and prepare for the worst.

This level of response is new … for our region; we normally sit back and let someone else do the heavy-lifting for security. But it is time now to grow up and secure our own communities and our economic engines.

All Caribbean stakeholders are therefore urged to lean-in to this roadmap, to this conceivable, believable and achievable plan to make the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

———–

Appendix A – Statement By The Bahamas Ministry of Foreign Affairs

On Reported ‘Terrorism Threat From The Bahamas’

28 January 2017

For Immediate Release

Today on MSNBC Cable News, on a show hosted by Joy-Ann Reid, a guest Malcolm Nance, a reported expert in security and terrorism, made the following statement:

” We [ the United States] have not banned terrorists from Brazil. ISIS has dozens of members from Brazil or Trinidad or The Bahamas who have more terrorists members than any of those other countries.”

In today’s atmosphere, the video clip is being spread around at a clipped pace.

Upon hearing the report, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Fred Mitchell spoke with the Prime Minister, the National Security Minister, the Head of SIB in the Royal Bahamas Police Force. all of whom are responsible for the country’s national security and they have no knowledge of any such terrorists or group of terrorists or any individual terrorist that is related to ISIS or any other terrorist organization in The Bahamas.

In speaking with ZNS TV news this evening, the Minister said the report is rubbish.

He indicated that the U S Mission in the United States has been asked to reach out to US counterparts, to MSNBC and the Mr. Nance himself to find out what the source of the allegation is. The Mission has been asked to ask for a retraction forthwith.

Source: Retrieved January 29, 2017 from: http://www.thebahamasweekly.com/publish/bis-news-updates/Bahamas_Gov_t_responds_to_MSNBC_regarding_reported_terrorism_threat_from_The_Bahamas52287.shtml

———–

Appendix B – USA Patriot Act

The USA PATRIOT Act is an Act of Congress that was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001.^[1] With its ten-letter abbreviation (USA PATRIOT) expanded, the full title is “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001”.^[2]

On May 26, 2011, President Barack Obama signed the PATRIOT Sunsets Extension Act of 2011, a four-year extension of three key provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act:^[3] roving wiretaps, searches of business records, and conducting surveillance of “lone wolves”—individuals suspected of terrorist-related activities not linked to terrorist groups.^[4]

Following a lack of Congressional approval, parts of the Patriot Act expired on June 1, 2015.^[5] With the passage of the USA Freedom Act on June 2, 2015, the expired parts were restored and renewed through 2019.^[6] However, Section 215 of the law was amended to stop the National Security Agency (NSA) from continuing its mass phone data collection program.^[6] Instead, phone companies will retain the data and the NSA can obtain information about targeted individuals with permission from a federal court.^[6]

From broad concern felt among Americans from both the September 11 attacks and the 2001 anthrax attacks, Congress rushed to pass legislation to strengthen security controls.

…

Acts amended

Electronic Communications Privacy Act
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act
Money Laundering Control Act
Bank Secrecy Act
Right to Financial Privacy Act
Fair Credit Reporting Act
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952
Victims of Crime Act of 1984
Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act

…

Title III: Anti-money-laundering to prevent terrorism

Title III of the Act, titled “International Money Laundering Abatement and Financial Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001,” is intended to facilitate the prevention, detection and prosecution of international money laundering and the financing of terrorism. It primarily amends portions of the Money Laundering Control Act of 1986 (MLCA) and the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 (BSA). It was divided into three subtitles, with the first dealing primarily with strengthening banking rules against money laundering, especially on the international stage. The second attempts to improve communication between law enforcement agencies and financial institutions, as well as expanding record keeping and reporting requirements. The third subtitle deals with currency smuggling and counterfeiting, including quadrupling the maximum penalty for counterfeiting foreign currency.

…

Restrictions were placed on accounts and foreign banks. It prohibited shell banks that are not an affiliate of a bank that has a physical presence in the U.S. or that are not subject to supervision by a banking authority in a non-U.S. country. It also prohibits or restricts the use of certain accounts held at financial institutions.^[47] Financial institutions must now undertake steps to identify the owners of any privately owned bank outside the U.S. who have a correspondent account with them, along with the interests of each of the owners in the bank. It is expected that additional scrutiny will be applied by the U.S. institution to such banks to make sure they are not engaging in money laundering. Banks must identify all the nominal and beneficial owners of any private bank account opened and maintained in the U.S. by non-U.S. citizens. There is also an expectation that they must undertake enhanced scrutiny of the account if it is owned by, or is being maintained on behalf of, any senior political figure where there is reasonable suspicion of corruption.^[48]Any deposits made from within the U.S. into foreign banks are now deemed to have been deposited into any interbank account the foreign bank may have in the U.S. Thus any restraining order, seizure warrant or arrest warrant may be made against the funds in the interbank account held at a U.S. financial institution, up to the amount deposited in the account at the foreign bank.^[49]

Source: Retrieved January 29, 2017 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

———–

Appendix C – Nuclear Emergency Support Team

The Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) (formerly known as the Nuclear Emergency Search Team) is a team of scientists, technicians, and engineers operating under the United States Department of Energy‘s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Their task is to be “prepared to respond immediately to any type of radiological accident or incident anywhere in the world”.^[1]

History

Concerns over scenarios involving nuclear accidents or incidents on American soil are not recent. As early as the 1960s, officials were concerned that a nuclear weapon might be smuggled into the country, or that an airplane carrying a nuclear weapon might crash and contaminate surrounding areas.^[2] In late 1974, President Gerald Ford was warned that the FBI received a communication from an extortionist wanting $200,000 (equivalent to $971,000 in 2016) after claiming that a nuclear weapon had been placed somewhere in Boston. A team of experts rushed in from the United States Atomic Energy Commission but their radiation detection gear arrived at a different airport. Federal officials then rented a fleet of vans to carry concealed radiation detectors around the city but forgot to bring the tools they needed to install the equipment. The incident was later found to be a hoax. However, the government’s response made clear the need for an agency capable of effectively responding to such threats in the future. Later that year, President Ford created the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST), which under the Atomic Energy Act is tasked with investigating the “illegal use of nuclear materials within the United States, including terrorist threats involving the use of special nuclear materials”.^[1]

One of its first responses was in Spokane, Washington on November 23, 1976. An unknown group called the “Days of Omega” had mailed an extortion threat claiming they would explode radioactive containers of water all over the city unless paid $500,000 (equivalent to $2,104,000 in 2016). Presumably, the radioactive containers had been stolen from the Hanford Site, less than 150 miles (240 km) to the southwest. Immediately, NEST flew in a support aircraft from Las Vegas and began searching for non-natural radiation, but found nothing. No one ever responded, despite the elaborate instructions given, or made any attempt to claim the (fake) money, which was kept under surveillance. Within days, the incident was deemed a hoax, though the case was never solved. To avoid panic, the public was not notified until a few years later.^[3][4]

Today

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, NEST has the ability to deploy as many as 600 people to the scene of a radiological incident, though deployments do not usually exceed 45 people.^[5] NEST has a variety of equipment (weighing up to 150 tons) and has the support of a small fleet of aircraft which includes four helicopters and three airplanes, all outfitted with detection equipment.

When an airborne response to an incident is underway, the Federal Aviation Administration grants NEST flights a higher control priority within the United States National Airspace System, designated with the callsign “FLYNET”.

Since 1975, NEST has been warned of 125 nuclear terror threats and has responded to 30. All have been false alarms.

Source: Retrieved January 29, 2017 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Emergency_Support_Team

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Waging a Successful War on Rent

Posted on January 28, 2017 in Ethos, Government, Implementation

Go Lean Commentary

‘Rent’ is a 4-letter word …

… in the field of Economics.

This is not referring to the positive action of paying for the monthly expense for a house or an apartment, but rather the bad practice of extracting uncompensated value from others without making any contribution – getting something for nothing.

With such a simple definition, the assumption would be that ‘rent’ is unwelcomed and marginalized in society. And yet, for the Caribbean, this bad practice proliferates.

“Say it ain’t so…”

Unfortunately, there is plenty “rent-seeking” in the Caribbean. If we want to reform and transform our society – we do – there is a need to “Wage War” against this bad practice of rent-seeking.

The movement behind the book Go Lean … Caribbean describes rent-seeking as a societal defect … in the Caribbean, and most other societies. It is destructive and self-defeating. In a previous blog-commentary, this defective practice was fully dissected, detailed and dismissed as behavior we want to weed out of Caribbean society.

How?

First we start by recognizing that there is a problem:

“There is rent-seeking in our communities”.

Now we can arm ourselves for battle in this War Against Rent. This is an important first step in reforming and transforming our regional society. This is commentary 3 of 4 from the movement behind the Go Lean book on the subject of Caribbean societal defects. So how do we move our communities from the deficient-defective status quo to our targeted destination: “a better place to live, work and play”? By waging war on our defects. All of these commentaries detail that effort, for the following defects:

These commentaries draw reference to the Go Lean book, as it details the quest to transform the Caribbean; it features a how-to guide and roadmap for elevating the region’s societal engines for economics, security and governance. Rent-seeking can, and have, penetrated all these three spheres of society.

In the previous commentary on ‘Stupidity’, it was established that when stupid policies-practices persist in a society, it is usually because “someone is profiting” in the shadows. Rent-seeking on the other hand, tends to be “out in the open”, i.e. guaranteed gratuities at a restaurant/bar. Both stupidity and rent-seeking are therefore tied to Crony-Capitalism: the abuse of public funds for private gain.

Consider these details of rent-seeking in the economics, security and governing societal engines:

Economics
Gratuity .	18 percent guaranteed
Sharing Economy	AirBnB and Uber examples
Security
Bribery/Graff .	An obvious crime …
Traffic Cameras	Electronic surveillance used to auto-generate traffic tickets
Governance
Citizenship For Sale	$100,000 fees for … doing nothing – See VIDEO in the Appendix.
Disclosures .	‘Follow the money‘; many politicians enter public service with modest incomes, but become wealthy while in office, despite only moderate government paychecks.
Fuel Taxes .	Dissuade Green Alternatives and e-Cars. “Invention, the Mother of Necessity” is discouraged because the government wants it’s guaranteed revenues.

The movement behind the Go Lean book seeks to reform and transform the economic engines of the Caribbean by being technocratic in applying best practices from the field of Economics. Rent-seeking is distinguished in economic theory from profit-seeking, in which entities seek to extract value by engaging in mutually beneficial transactions.^[6] Profit-seeking in this sense is the creation of wealth, while rent-seeking is the use of social institutions such as the power of government to redistribute wealth among different groups without creating new wealth.^[7] For the Caribbean elevation quest, we see the defects; we see the destructive rent-seeking practices; and we now know how to supplant them. This intent is declared at the outset of the book with this Declaration of Interdependence (Page 10) for the region to work in unison to remediate the broken systems of commerce:

Preamble: 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. Despite this past, we thrust our energies only to the future, in adapting the best practices and successes of the societies of these previous imperial masters and recognizing the positive spirit of their intent and vow to learn from their past accomplishments and mistakes so as to optimize the opportunities for our own citizenry to create a more perfect bond of union.

So how exactly do we supplant rent-seeking practices in the Caribbean? Foster best practices for economics and governance.

There is an implied Social Contract in every expression of governance everywhere, where “citizens surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority of the State in exchange for protection of remaining rights” (Page 170). In modern societies, there is a role for governments and a role for commercial entities. This was the assertion of the father of modern economists, Adam Smith, that the “division of functions” between governments and commerce should be carefully regulated to keep free enterprise operating “freely”; governments should limit their deliveries in commerce. The Go Lean book relates this (Page 67) as follows:

Adam Smith, the 18th century Scottish political economics pioneer, is best known for his classic work: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations. This book is considered the first modern work of economics, and he is thusly cited as the “father of modern economics”, even today, and among the most influential thinkers in the field of economics. Through reflection over the economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the [Wealth of Nations] book touches upon broad topics as the division of labor, productivity and free markets.

Smith attacked most forms of government interference in the economic process, including tariffs, arguing that these create inefficiency and high prices in the long run. It is believed that this theory, laissez-faire economic philosophy, influenced government legislation in later years.

Smith advocated a government that was active in sectors other than the economy. He advocated public education for poor adults, a judiciary, and a standing army—institutional systems not directly profitable for private industries.

So according to a scholar in economics from 240 years ago, the cause of Caribbean rent-seeking is governmental interference and the solution is a governmental “pull back”.

This is how to wage war against ‘rent’.

Look back at the foregoing list of Caribbean rent-seeking activities; and consider here how we can mitigate:

How much tips/gratuity should waiters/waitresses receive when they serve tables? The experience is that they always receive more that government-mandated 18% when the service is good. The incentive to provide good service is lost when the gratuity is guaranteed by government policy.
In other markets, the “Sharing Economy” has spurred the economy in creative ways: 1. AirBnB has created opportunities for festivals to absorb bigger crowds than hotel capacity; 2. the presence of Uber has forced taxicabs to become more efficient with smartphone apps and have created prospects for any restaurant to now offer delivery.
Fuel tax dependency in the Caribbean keeps electricity costs high; the average is US$0.35/kWh, one of the highest in the world. Green Energy alternatives have been avoided, even discouraged, despite an abundance of sun and wind resources; with these mitigations, the cost for electricity can be lowered to US$0.088/kWh.
Traffic Light Cameras will be a new deployment in the region. When these are implemented, they must be regulated at the government level. The government should never be the service provider but rather the escalation authority. It would be rent-seeking to just sit back and collect traffic fines … uncontested. Everything at a traffic light is not always “black-and-white or red-and-green”; there are scenarios with breakdowns and pedestrians that must be accounted with allowances.
Passports For Sale – This is indefensible; to tarnish the Caribbean Image for “30 Pieces of Silver”, sorry, make that $100,000. See VIDEO in the Appendix below.

The Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The CU is designed to be a technocratic intergovernmental entity that shepherds the Caribbean region. The goal is to reboot and optimize the region’s economic, security and governing engines. Optimization would entail weeding out any rent-seeking practice.

As previously detailed:

“Rent-seeking can prove costly to economic growth; high rent-seeking activity makes more rent-seeking attractive because of the natural and growing returns that one sees as a result of rent-seeking. Thus organizations value rent-seeking over productivity. In this case there are very high levels of rent-seeking with very low levels of output. Rent-seeking may grow at the cost of economic growth because rent-seeking by the state can easily hurt innovation. Ultimately, public rent-seeking hurts the economy the most because innovation drives economic growth.”^[19]

“Government agents may initiate rent-seeking – such agents soliciting bribes or other favors from the individuals or firms that stand to gain from having special economic privileges, which opens up the possibility of exploitation of the consumer.^[20] It has been shown that rent-seeking by a bureaucracy can push up the cost of production of public goods.^[21] It has also been shown that rent-seeking by tax officials may cause loss in revenue to the public [treasury].”^[8]

The Go Lean/CU roadmap employs some counter-tactics; consider the “Separation-of-Powers between CU federal agencies and Caribbean member-state governments”; so the limitations of national laws in a member-state would not override the CU. The CU‘s technocratic practices would directly apply to the installation of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) and Self-Governing Entities (SGE); these operate in controlled bordered territories like campuses, industrial parks, research labs and industrial plants. Lastly, there is the power of “peer pressure” to reform the member-states. When progress is made by one Caribbean state, this would incline the others to follow suit. In total, the Go Lean/CU roadmap will employ strategies, tactics and implementations to impact its prime directives; identified with the following 3 statements:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety assurances and protect the region’s economic engines.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The Go Lean roadmap seeks to “Wage War against Rent” by optimizing the entire Caribbean economic eco-system with the adoption of best practices for commerce and governance. This vision is defined early in the book (Page 12) in the following pronouncements in the Declaration of Interdependence:

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

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

In order to make the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play the people of the region must change their attitudes about elements of their society – elements that are in place and elements missing. This is referred to as “Community Ethos”, defined as:

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

Rent-seeking is one of the negative community ethos – societal defects – that must be weeded out of the Caribbean. This ethos stems from an attitude of entitlement; to get something … for almost nothing. The Caribbean was colonized originally with this type of community ethos; a previous blog/commentary related this:

Most of the property and indigenous wealth of the Caribbean region is concentrated amongst the rich, powerful and yet small elite; an oligarchy. Many times these families received their property, corporate rights and/or monopolies by Royal Charter from the European monarchs of ancient times. These charters thus lingered in legacy from one generation to another … until …

The Go Lean book presents a roadmap on how to optimize the economic engines without continuing rent-seeking practices. The book stresses key community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies necessary to transform and turn-around the eco-systems of Caribbean society. These points are detailed in the book as follows:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – Return on Investments	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Confederate all 30 member-states/ 4 languages into a Single Market	Page 45
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers – CU Federal Government versus Member-State Governance	Page 71
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change – Award exploratory rights in exclusive territories	Page 101
Implementation – Start-up Benefits from the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)	Page 104
Planning – 10 Big Ideas – #3: Proactive Anti-crime Measures	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Improve Trade	Page 128
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy – Protect Property Rights	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance	Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Main Street	Page 201

In considering this economic history, the CU/Go Lean roadmap distinguishes rent-seeking from profit-seeking:

Profit is Good!
Rent is Bad!

The new Caribbean must foster good economic habits … and abandon bad ones. This is how to grow the economy: create jobs; create businesses; retain people; foster new opportunities, learn from past mistakes and accomplishments.

This is new …

All Caribbean stakeholders are urged to lean-in to this roadmap/plan for change … and empowerment. This plan is conceivable, believable and achievable. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

———–

Appendix VIDEO – CBS 60 Minutes: Passports For Sale – http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/passports-for-sale/

Posted January 1, 2017 – Steve Kroft reports on how cash-starved countries [in the Caribbean] offer citizenship for a price, creating ways to ease travel for foreigners, including those running from the law.

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Waging a Successful War on Stupidity

Posted on January 27, 2017 in Ethos, Implementation

Go Lean Commentary

“Stupid is as stupid does…”

Nobody likes to be called stupid!

It has a “stinging” feel to its indictment. It is different than being called “crazy” as insanity may be linked to a physical disability from brain chemistry. No, “stupid” is different. Stupid says that the person is perfectly sane and intentionally chooses an action that they know to yield an undesirable result – “… stupid does …”.

A person knowing they have a balance of $6.00 in their checking account, but newly writing a check for $7, knowing that their bank may charge them a $35 fee and the check recipient may charge another fee ($20 – $50 range). That one $7 transaction may cost up to $75 in fees.

Surely this is stupid! Yet this happens in society again … and again. In fact there is a whole industry based on this reality in the United States: Check Cashing / Pay-Day Loans. This entire industry has been weighed and measured and found to be “wanting” or stupid.

So, knowing that there is some degree of intentionality associated with this question, why do people do the “stupid” things that they do?

Answer: It’s complicated!

Perhaps there’s more to “stupid” than what meets the eye. See/hear the AUDIO Podcast here of a related interview based on a new book:

AUDIO Podcast – What Is Driving The ‘Unbanking Of America’? – http://www.npr.org/2017/01/10/509126878/what-is-driving-the-unbanking-of-america

Published on January 10, 2017 – Author Lisa Servon says a growing number of Americans are giving up on traditional banks and relying instead on alternatives, including prepaid debit cards, check-cashing centers and payday lenders.
“… increasing numbers of working Americans are using those services and turning their backs on traditional banking because banks don’t meet their needs and whack them with fees and charges they aren’t expecting. In 2011, she notes, Americans paid $38 billion just in overdraft fees.”

There is no doubt that there is “stupidity” in society and there is a need to “Wage War” against it. We first need to understand the roots and origins; many times the “rhyme and reason” why stupid policies-practices persist, is because “someone is profiting”. So stupidity may be tied to Crony-Capitalism: the abuse of public funds for private gain.

The movement behind the book Go Lean … Caribbean describes this stupidity as a societal defect … in America … and the Caribbean. This previous blog-commentary has identified “Crony-Capitalism” as a serious societal defect in the US. The goal is for the Caribbean to do better!

How?

First we start by recognizing that there is a problem: “there is stupidity in our society”. Now we can arm ourselves for battle in this ‘War Against Stupidity’. This is an important first step in reforming and transforming our regional society. This is commentary 2 of 4 from the movement behind the Go Lean book on the subject of Caribbean societal defects. So how do we move our communities from the deficient-defective status quo to our targeted destination: “a better place to live, work and play”? By waging war on our defects. All of these commentaries detail that effort, for the following defects:

These commentaries draw reference to the Go Lean book, as it details the quest to transform the Caribbean; it features a how-to guide and roadmap for elevating the region’s societal engines for economics, security and governance. Stupidity can be found in all these three spheres of society. Consider these details:

Economics

The Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The CU is designed to be a technocratic – opposite of stupid – intergovernmental entity that shepherds the Caribbean region. The goal is to reboot and optimize the region’s economic, security and governing engines. We have some stupidity that we need to weed out. Our economy currently serve as a parasite of other – more mature – economies, consider the US, Canada and Western Europe. We must not be parasites, we should be protégés. These role model countries have their own stupidity to weed out, consider the recent adventures with NINJA loans.

In a recent blog-commentary, the problem of these NINJA loans were fully dissected. Imagine giving a $100,000 mortgage to someone with No Income, No Job and no Assets. How about $200,000, or $300,000 or worse $400,000 to $600,000? The problem was that bad during the bad old days of the Great Recession of 2008. Many of the heightened financial controls – common sense mandates – that we implemented during the aftermath of the crisis, are now at risk of being dismantled with the new Donald Trump administration in the US.

This is stupidity; this is not the role model, we want to emulate in the Caribbean. But we, in the Caribbean, have our own stupid economic policies to contend with; consider this sample list:

Mono-industrial economy – After 50 years, it is still Tourism or bust!
Tourism stewardship by politicians, not E-Commerce Gurus, though most travel is booked online.
Excessive Resort Fees and Airport Taxes sending tourists to cruise ships. as opposed to more lucrative stay-overs.
Doubling-down on the failing business model of Casino Gambling, in the Caribbean, while it fails elsewhere.
One City: Only expensive Premium Gasoline available in the entire City – still after many years after a temporary crisis.
Oil refinery supply-and-demand imbalance – availability per capita is so much worse in the Caribbean. Why?
Green Energy avoidance despite abundance of sun and wind – costs for electricity can be lowered from US$0.35/kWh to US$0.088/kWh.
Unrealistic High Cost of Cancer Drugs – Despite Cuba’s cheaper deliveries.
Caribbean currency standard based on US dollar – so we get punished for America’s mistakes
Spending $Billions to mask Black Hair – yet this population claims to be “Strong and Proud”.
Failing to Save – ignoring the positive Time Value of Money

Security

Stupidity can be found in other areas of society as well; take “crime and punishment” for example. Comedians (and other entertainers) often amuse us with stories about “Stupid Criminals” who commit atrocious acts, many times caught on camera. In fact, a proliferation of security and traffic cameras has proven to be a great investigation tool. See this phenomena portrayed in these sample VIDEOs:

VIDEO 1 – 10 Stupid Criminals You Won’t Believe – https://youtu.be/YOivkJxx2_0

Published on Nov 2, 2016 – Top 10 dumbest criminals in the world
Subscribe to our channel: http://goo.gl/9CwQhg
———–
VIDEO 2 – GEICO Commercial – Objection: Great Answer – https://youtu.be/zj_RHi1klRU

Published on Dec 4, 2016 – The savings you get from switching to GEICO make it a great answer for car insurance. But that leads some people to think that GEICO is a great answer to other tough questions. Watch this defendant use GEICO to defend his innocence. *** PARODY ***

For the Caribbean to wage a successful war against stupidity, communities should make “Stupid Criminals” videos available to the media for full dissemination; these can be a great crime deterrence.

But videos from where? Consider:

Governance

There is a lot of stupidity in the governing arena.

Consider the US, the most advanced democracy on the planet. The assumption is “one man one vote” and yet in the 2016 general election, one candidate for President had 3 million more votes than the other opponent, and yet lost. By some measures, the Electoral College is considered “stupid”.

In the Caribbean, we have a lot of stupid rules and stupid iterations in our governance; consider this sample list:

US Territories (Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands) are between a “rock and a hard place” – they have no vote in Washington; this guarantees that their voice (non-voting congressmen) will not be heard.
Depending on the US for Caribbean Security
Depending “Too Much” on Foreign Investors
Stupid policies selling Citizenship
Education – students leave their Caribbean homes to study (college) and most assuredly, many do not return … for permanent residency. The resultant brain drain is near 70 percent rate.
For-profit Educational Institutions: Plenty of Profit; Little Education
Textbook Pricing – All Stupid; all Price-gouging
Deficient Property Tax practices – not even trying to collect badly needed tax revenues.
Relying on Customs Duties (as “rent”) for government income, while technology is shifting to 3D printing.
Ignoring obvious remedies for “Too Hot” summers.

——–

The movement behind the Go Lean book wants to help reform and transform the Caribbean. We see the defects; we see the stupidity. We know how to overcome the stupidity. There is an implied Social Contract in every expression of governance everywhere. Technocratic efficiency is embedded in the implied CU Social Contract. The Go Lean book defines (Page 170) the Social Contract as follows:

“Citizens surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority of the State in exchange for protection of remaining natural and legal rights”.

The CU Social Contract, as specified in the Go Lean book, specifies that governments should serve the people as efficiently as possible. So then, how can we employ more efficiencies?

The Go Lean/CU roadmap seeks to deploy the technocratic efficiency by embracing the latest project management methodologies and best practices. In fact, the roadmap calls for the establishment of a Project Management Office in every Cabinet Office for the CU Trade Federation.

Further, the Go Lean/CU roadmap employs a tactic of a “Separation-of-Powers between CU federal agencies and Caribbean member-state governments”; so the limitations of national laws in a member-state does not have to override the CU. The CU constitution would apply to the installation of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) and Self-Governing Entities (SGE) that operate in controlled bordered territories like campuses, industrial parks, research labs and industrial plants. Lastly, there is the power of “peer pressure” where progress by one CU member-state would incline others to follow suit. In total, the Go Lean/CU roadmap will employ strategies, tactics and implementations to impact its prime directives; identified with the following 3 statements:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety assurances and protect the region’s economic engines.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The Go Lean roadmap seeks to “Wage War against Stupidity” by optimizing the entire Caribbean economic/security/governance eco-system with the adoption of best practices. This vision is defined early in the book (Page 12) in the following pronouncements in the Declaration of Interdependence:

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

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

The Go Lean book posits that inefficient Caribbean communities can be reformed and transformed if they adopt the community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies as depicted in the Go Lean book; consider this sample:

Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – People Respond to Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Turn-Around	Page 33
Strategy – Mission – Foster Local Economic Engines to Diversify the Economy	Page 45
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Self-Governing Entities	Page 80
Implementation – Steps to Implement Self-Governing Entities	Page 105
Implementation – Ways to Deliver – Case Study on Project Management Offices (PMO)	Page 109
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Advocacy – Ways to Measure Progress – Case Study on Six Sigma Methodology	Page 147
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Communications	Page 186
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Urban Living	Page 234
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Rural Living	Page 235

The Caribbean can succeed in our efforts to improve our regional efficiencies. Consider this sample of previous blog-commentaries that delve into aspects of transformation in the Caribbean region:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10043	Integration Plan for Greater Caribbean Prosperity
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9595	Vision and Values for a ‘New’ Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7989	Transformations: Money Matters – ‘Getting over’ with ‘free money’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7646	Going from ‘Good to Great’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7628	‘A Change Is Gonna Come’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6993	Forging Change: ‘Something to Lose’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3915	‘Change the way you see the world; you change the world you see’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1596	Transforming to where we can “Prosper where Planted”
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=623	‘Only at the precipice, do they change’

The vision for a new Caribbean is one that has successfully ‘waged the war on stupidity’. This is easier said than done, but we have seen it (and done it) in other societies with measurable success, and we are ready, willing and able to succeed here at home.

Deploying a technocracy is how the Go Lean/CU roadmap wages a successful war on stupidity. Technocratic executions include the “arts and sciences” of project management and Quality Assurance (QA) deliveries. As related in the Go Lean book (Page 147):

… one QA methodology – Six Sigma follows a methodology, aimed at improving existing business processes – uses a set of quality management methods, including statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization (Champions, Black Belts, Green Belts, Orange Belts, etc.) who are experts in these very complex methods. With Six Sigma the maturity of a delivery process can be described by a sigma rating indicating its yield or the percentage of defect-free deliveries it creates. A six sigma process is one in which 99.9999998% of products manufactured/services delivered are statistically expected to be free of defects (3.4 defects per million).

This is heavy-lifting, but ‘Yes, we can … do better‘.

We can work towards making our region a better homeland to live, work and play. We urge everyone in the Caribbean to lean-in to this roadmap for change and optimization. We do not have to do as stupid does. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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Waging a Successful War on Orthodoxy

Posted on January 25, 2017 in Ethos, Implementation

Go Lean Commentary

What is the formula for having/being a great society?

There is no doubt the societal engines of economics, security and governance must be optimized. But history has proven that these don’t just happen; there must be a concerted effort by stakeholders in society to make their community great. Yes, it takes “blood, sweat and tears”, but we find that there must be something else first, the right community attitude. The book Go Lean … Caribbean describes this attitude as community ethos …

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

There are good ethos and bad ethos (defects). The Caribbean member-states are not known as great societies, despite having the greatest “address on the planet” in terms of terrain, fauna/flora, hospitality, festivities, food, rum and cigars. This is because our community attitudes or ethos … suck!

We all know people that are beautiful on the outside, but ugly on the inside. See a sample in this VIDEO clip here from a recent movie.

VIDEO – Shallow Hal (1/5) Movie CLIP – Dancing With the Nasties (2001) – https://youtu.be/K4j25DUQLgE

Published on Sep 8, 2015 – Movie: Shallow Hal, a feature about “Inner Beauty”/”Inner Ugly”. See more movie clips: http://j.mp/1POlWqm
Following the advice of his dying father, Hal dates only women who are physically beautiful. One day, however, he runs into self-help guru Tony Robbins, who hypnotizes him into recognizing only the inner beauty of women. Hal thereafter meets Rosemary, a grossly obese woman whom only he can see as a vision of loveliness. But will their relationship survive when Hal’s equally shallow friend undoes the hypnosis? Written by “Anonymous”

The Caribbean has “outer beauty” and “inner ugly”. See Photos here:

Identifying the Caribbean ugly – societal defects – is an important step in reforming and transforming the regional society. There are a number of defects to consider; this is commentary 1 of 4 from the movement behind the Go Lean book on the subject of Caribbean defects. So how do we move our region from the deficient-defective status quo to our targeted destination: the undisputed “greatest address on the planet”? By waging war on our defects. All of these commentaries detail that effort, for the following defects:

What is ‘Orthodoxy’ and why is it important to “War” against it?

The simple definition is: a belief or a way of thinking that is accepted as true or correct. The more formal definition is defined as follows:

or·tho·dox·y
(noun)

1. authorized or generally accepted theory, doctrine, or practice.

synonyms: doctrine, belief, conviction, creed, dogma, credo, theory, tenet, teaching
“Christian orthodoxies”

2. the whole community of Orthodox Jews or Orthodox Christians.

In everyday-speak, “do what you have always done; get what you always got”.

Is orthodoxy a force for good in modern society … in the Caribbean? Despite the above definitions relating to religion and doctrine, the unfortunate observation is:

“No, orthodoxy is not a force for moral good”.

The reference to Caribbean orthodoxy is not limited to religion; there are other defects as well; for example, there is the whole case study of colonialism:

Colonialism refers to the establishment of a colony in one territory by a political power from another territory; [particularly from Europe], and the subsequent maintenance, expansion, and exploitation of that colony. The term is also used to describe a set of unequal relationships between the European colonial power (British, Denmark, Dutch, French, Portugal and Spain) and the colony and often between the colonists and the indigenous peoples. The European colonies in the Caribbean also featured the practice of slavery of an imported African population.

The European colonial period was the era from the 16th century to the mid-20th century when several European powers established colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. At first the countries followed a policy of mercantilism, designed to strengthen the home economy at the expense of rivals, so the colonies were usually allowed to trade only with the mother country. By the mid-19th century, however, many empires gave up mercantilism and trade restrictions and introduced the principle of free trade, with few restrictions or tariffs.

The book Go Lean…Caribbean details (Page 307) a lot of the history of the European colonial movement in the Caribbean. Some territories changed hands from one European power to another (again and again); consider the island of Trinidad got their independence from the British, but the Spanish name of “Trinidad” (English equivalent of Trinity), extols the Spanish legacy. (The US Virgin Islands have a city named Christiansted, reflecting its Danish legacy). In fact, the 30 different member-states in Caribbean region feature 5 different European colonial legacies and 4 different languages. (18 Caribbean member-states are part of the British Commonwealth).

The Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The CU is designed to be a technocratic intergovernmental entity that sheds the orthodoxy of European colonialism. The goal is to reboot and optimize the region’s economic, security and governing engines.

How much of this European orthodoxy remain?

Plenty…

… this despite the fact that many of the former European powers have discontinued much of their orthodox practices. Consider these following examples in the Caribbean region:

Patriarchy – Men “must” lead … at the peril of women; assigning more status and privileges to men; this effectuates repression of women and girls.
Homosexual Persecution – Regulating the private affairs against homosexuality – i.e. British Buggery – has now been defined as a human rights violation.
Domestic violence toleration
Racial Prejudice & Dissension – The justification of African Slave Trade in the New World was religious expansionism.
School uniforms for youth classification; girls must wear skits or dresses
Nurses in clinics/hospitals must wear formal dresses and stockings
Lawyers/Judges must wear wigs
Supreme Court (highest) authority remaining in Europe
Upper Chamber of Legislature a body of entitlement only
Titles – Right Honorable, Lord, Your Eminence…
Mercantilism – all trade must go through colonial masters; services (i.e. postal mail) and telecommunications continue this routing.
Carnival festivities banned for Sundays

The results of this orthodoxy on our society is dire and desperate: we are near Failed-State status!

Too much?!?! Too radical an assessment? Think again, we have such a high societal abandonment rate that it is plausible to assign any descriptor synonymous with “failing”.

A mission of the Go Lean/CU roadmap is to mitigate Failed-State indices, and reverse the propensity for “human flight”. The book accepts the premise that many people flee the Caribbean region in search of refuge from the region’s strict orthodoxy. The book explains that there are two reasons why people flee their beloved homelands: “Push” and “Pull” factors. These factors highlight reasons that people want to flee “home” and seek “refuge” in foreign countries. “Refuge” is an appropriate word; because of societal defects, or orthodoxy; many from the Caribbean must leave as refugees – think LGBT, Disability, Domestic-abuse, Medically-challenged – for their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. On the other hand, the lure of a more prosperous life in foreign countries, (US, Canada and Europe) drive the “pull” side of the equation; these ones “pulled” are to be considered economic refugees.

What alternative is there to orthodoxy?

Secularism!

This commentary is NOT an attack on Christianity. A Christian character is preferred for the individual; but a “Christian nation”, not so much. This harmonizes with the Bible’s decree itself. Jesus Christ said:

“My kingdom is no part of the world”. – John 18:36

To answer the earlier question: why is it important to “Wage War” against orthodoxy? Religious orthodoxy is responsible for a lot of harm in the world, and in the Caribbean. The Go Lean movement (book and blogs) have identified the foregoing defects, many bad values, attitudes and community ethos. The Caribbean region needs to desist and make amends of these practices. We need to pursue an alternative ethos, the Greater Good. The book defines this (Page 37) as follows:

“It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong”. – Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

The Go Lean book (Page 20) and movement advocates the community ethos of the Greater Good for all of the Caribbean. The movement wants to help reform and transform the Caribbean. We see the defects; we recognize that status quo, including the root causes and orthodoxy of many of our influences; we perceive the harmful effects. Still, we do not want to ban religion; we simply want a clear “Separation of Church and State”, because we have so many churches and so many States in the Caribbean. We must not favor one over another.

A “Separation of Church and State” is the standard in the advanced democracies; this is now embedded in the implied Social Contract. The Go Lean book defines (Page 170) the Social Contract as follows:

“Citizens surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority of the State in exchange for protection of remaining natural and legal rights”.

According to the foregoing orthodoxy list, this Social Contract is not the norm in the Caribbean. The Caribbean Social Contract should specify that governments must protect their citizens; that human rights are assumed and that there is a religious neutrality.

The Go Lean/CU roadmap employs a tactic of a “Separation-of-Powers between CU federal agencies and Caribbean member-state governments”; so the limitations of national laws in a member-state does not have to override the CU. The CU constitution would apply to the installations of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) and Self-Governing Entities (SGE) that operate in controlled bordered territories like campuses, industrial parks, research labs and industrial plants. There is also the power of “peer pressure”; one Caribbean state making positive progress, inclines the others to follow suit.

This CU/Go Lean mission is to elevate society for Caribbean people in the Caribbean. There is the need to monitor the enforcement of human rights and stand “on guard” against movements towards Failed-State status. The Go Lean roadmap calls for the CU to assume that role. Using cutting edge delivery of best practices, the CU will employ strategies, tactics and implementations to impact its prime directives; identified with the following 3 statements:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety assurances and protect the region’s economic engines.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The Go Lean roadmap seeks to optimize the entire Caribbean economic/security/governance eco-system. This vision is defined early in the book (Page 12) in the following pronouncements in the Declaration of Interdependence:

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

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

The Go Lean book posits that failing Caribbean communities can be rescued, that if “we do what we have always done, we get what we have always got”. Therefore Caribbean communities must adopt different community ethos, plus the executions of key strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to bring about change, empowerment and turn-around . The following is a sample from the Go Lean book:

Community Ethos – Economic Principle – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principle – Voluntary Trade Creates Wealth	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – People Respond to Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship	Page 28
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Turn-Around	Page 33
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations	Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness	Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Mission – Foster Local Economic Engines to Diversify the Economy	Page 45
Strategy – Mission – Keep the next generation at home; Repatriate Diaspora	Page 46
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Tactics to Forge an $800 Billion Economy – High Multiplier Industries	Page 70
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Meteorological and Geological Service	Page 79
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Self-Governing Entities	Page 80
Implementation – Start-up Benefits from the EEZ	Page 104
Implementation – Steps to Implement Self-Governing Entities	Page 105
Planning – Big Ideas – Virtual “Turnpike” Operations to Ensure Continued Relevance	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Planning – Ways to Improve Image	Page 133
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices	Page 134
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice	Page 177
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Communications	Page 186
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Hollywood – Convey Messaging	Page 203
Advocacy – Ways to Preserve Caribbean Heritage	Page 218
Appendix – Failed State Indicators & Definitions	Page 271

The Caribbean can succeed in our efforts to improve our community ethos. Consider this sample of previous blog-commentaries that delve into aspects of forging change in the Caribbean community ethos:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10043	Integration Plan for Greater Caribbean Prosperity
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9595	Vision and Values for a ‘New’ Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9428	Forging Change: Herd Mentality
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8186	Respect for Minorities: ‘All for One’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7646	Going from ‘Good to Great’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7628	‘A Change Is Gonna Come’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7056	‘Necessity is the Mother of Invention’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5695	Repenting, Forgiving and Reconciling the Past
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3915	‘Change the way you see the world; you change the world you see’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3780	Forging an Ethos of ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=623	‘Only at the precipice, do they change’

The vision for a new Caribbean is one that has successfully ‘waged the war on orthodoxy’. This means a religiously neutral society that respects and protects the human rights for all stakeholders. This is easy to say, hard to do, but we have seen it successfully deployed in other societies, as in the same European communities that once colonized our Caribbean region. We need to follow their lead … again. We need to adjust our community ethos to reflect 2017, not 1867.

Yes, we can … do this heavy-lifting. We can work towards making our region a better homeland to live, work and play. We urge everyone in the Caribbean to lean-in to this roadmap for change and optimization. We do not have to “always do what we have always done”. We can do … and be better. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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Farewell to Obama and to ‘Wet Foot/Dry Foot’

Posted on January 20, 2017 in Ethos, Government, Locations

Go Lean Commentary

This is a Red Letter Day in the affairs of the United States of America: it is the inauguration of the 45th President, Donald J. Trump. Out with the old, in with the new. The old, Barack Obama, bid farewell to the American Halls of Power; but he bid farewell too, to one of the most egregious immigration policies in the history of civilization: ‘Wet Foot / Dry Foot’ policy for Cuban migrants.

Good riddance to a bad policy!

Many people have died trying to flee Cuba, (Haiti too); see the “Bad Old Days” in Appendix B VIDEO.

Obama disbanded this executive policy – instituted by the 42nd President Bill Clinton – as one of his final acts, before his term ended. Yippee, Mr. Obama. This ‘Wet Foot / Dry Foot’ was indefensible. It portrayed the impression that the American homeland was the panacea of Caribbean (and/or Cuban) ills, and if one was lucky enough to put their ‘Dry Foot’ down on American soil, they were blessed; if their ‘Wet Foot’ never touched American soil, then they’d be cursed to a substandard Caribbean existence. Plus, with the Cuban exclusivity, this policy put a wedge among Caribbean people in general: Yes to Cubans; no to Haitians, Dominicans, Jamaican or any other regional citizens.

Now, all of the Caribbean can be treated the same and as one, by the American legal-governmental institutions.

We are the same!

We could be one!

Caribbean leaders must do the heavy-lifting to reform and transform the Caribbean member-states to fix our eco-systems, to make our homeland a better place to live, win and play. This is the purpose of the book Go Lean…Caribbean, to serve as a roadmap for elevating Caribbean society, for all 30 member-states (Cuba et al). The book does not ignore the subject of immigration and refugees. In fact the roadmap provides perhaps the ultimate resolution to this perplexing problem, that of a regional entity providing a regional solution.

We must give Caribbean citizens every reason to want to stay, rather than the status quo, where they are willing to risk life-and-limb (for themselves and their children) to get out and get to the US. This is the sad-and-bad reality that is depicted in this news article here:

Title: Cubans amass at Mexico-Texas border after ‘wet foot/dry foot’ change
By: Rick Jervis, USA TODAY Daily Newspaper

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — Joel Gonzalez was midway across the narrow pedestrian bridge connecting the U.S. and Mexico at this border crossing when U.S. border guards waved him back to Mexico.

A U.S. policy that for decades awarded Cubans like Gonzalez, 31, automatic amnesty was repealed the day before. His dream of a new life in America instantly vanished.

“You feel this weight in your chest,” he said, recalling that day last week. “You have these ideas about the future, all these thoughts in your head. To get so close and have your dream of freedom taken from you is very hard.”

Gonzalez and dozens of other Cubans have been amassing at this crossing since the Obama administration ended the so-called “wet foot/dry foot” policy on Jan. 12. The rule, created by President Clinton in 1995, allowed most Cubans who touched U.S. soil to stay in the country, while those intercepted at sea were returned to Cuba. Those who remained in the U.S. for one year were allowed to apply for legal permanent residence.

Cuban officials have long denounced the rule, saying it incentivizes Cubans to leave the communist island. Other critics say while the policy was put in place to help Cubans fleeing political persecution, many instead used it for economic betterment in recent years.

The new policy forces Cubans to apply for visas in their home country or face deportation if they enter illegally, just like migrants from other countries. About 20,000 U.S. visas are awarded in Cuba each year.

Despite the shift, Cubans continue to arrive at this border crossing, just across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas. Around 120 Cubans are now in this Mexican border town, according to local estimates, staying at churches or in migrant centers. Many, like Gonzalez, say they won’t leave.

“In Cuba, if you think differently from the system, you’re marked,” said Gonzalez, a systems engineer. “You don’t get jobs, you don’t get opportunity. If you’re against the system, there’s no way to survive.”

The repeal of wet foot/dry foot is the latest in a series of efforts by President Obama, beginning in late 2014, to end five decades of isolation with Cuba. President-elect Donald Trump, however, has said he may renegotiate the accords.

Sensing a change was imminent as relations warmed between Washington and Havana, thousands of Cubans rushed to enter the U.S. last year. Overall, 56,406 Cubans entered the U.S. via ports of entry in fiscal year 2016, more than double the number who arrived in 2014, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

The change in U.S. policy will likely improve relations between the two countries and could force Cuban officials to focus on improving conditions, rather than simply allowing the disaffected to flee, said Ted Piccone, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies Cuba.

“The safety valve – of exporting unhappy Cubans who could cause trouble – just got smaller,” he said.

Some Cubans at Nuevo Laredo said they hoped Trump would reverse the repeal. But that may be wishful thinking, Piccone said, given Trump’s tough stance on illegal immigration.

Some arriving here now left the island months ago, well before the policy change. Each morning, they gather at the intersection of Avenida 15 de Julio and Avenida Vincente Guerrero, within sight of the U.S., sharing the latest news and debating the next move.

Idania Laurencio Fernandez, 44, left Cuba in mid-October for the small South American country of Guyana. From there, she traveled to Brazil, trekked through jungles, sailed up the Amazon River, traveled across nine countries in Central and South America and spent 12 days in an immigration detention center in Tapachula, Mexico, before being able to leave for Nuevo Laredo.

She arrived Jan. 13, the day after the policy was repealed. She said she planned to stay until something changes, fearing repercussions if she returned to Cuba. “We can’t go back,” Fernandez said. “I’m persona non grata in Cuba.”

Fernandez said she hopes her predicament sheds light on what she described as a worsening situation on the island, where the average worker earns $20 a month and dissension isn’t tolerated. “Obama doesn’t understand,” she said. “He let himself be fooled. The Cubans in Cuba know the reality.”

As a worker in the service industry in Varadero, one of Cuba’s most popular tourist beach destinations, Manuel Reyes, 37, said he was earning a decent living. But the island’s lack of basic rights and stagnant economic growth was suffocating, he said. He was denied visas to the U.S. and Canada and tried leaving Cuba three times on homemade rafts but was forced back each time due to mechanical failures.

Finally gaining a Mexico visa, he flew to Monterrey on Jan. 12 and arrived at the Nuevo Laredo border crossing early the next morning. Dreams of joining friends in Miami or Las Vegas came to an abrupt end when he learned of the changed policy.

Like most others gathered here, Reyes said he’s not leaving. He sleeps at a local church and prays each day for a reversal in U.S. policy.

“We’re going to stay firm. We have a lot of faith,” he said. “And there are many more Cubans coming.”

Related stories:

Obama ends ‘wet foot, dry foot’ policy for Cubans

Cuban-Americans at odds over ‘wet foot, dry foot’ repeal

In final days, Obama administration signs law enforcement pact with Cuba

On 2nd anniversary, Cubans race to sign U.S. contracts to secure opening

Source: Posted Jan. 19, 2017; retrieved Jan 20, 2017 from: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/01/19/cubans-texas-border-wet-foot-dry-foot/96770142/

One person can disrupt the lives of so many people … in the Caribbean.

The ‘Wet Foot / Dry Foot’ policy was initiated by Presidential Executive Order – by Clinton.

The ‘Wet Foot / Dry Foot’ policy was canceled by Presidential Executive Order – by Obama.

So the new president – Donald Trump – can readily re-institute a ‘Wet Foot / Dry Foot’ policy again.

Please, Mr. President Trump, do not do it!

We do not need to send the wrong message to people in the Caribbean that it is OK to take to the High Seas and endanger their lives, or their children lives. We also do not need to incite Smugglers and Human Traffickers – see Appendix A VIDEO – to entice Caribbean citizens to flee their homeland. The cancellation of the ‘Wet Foot / Dry Foot’ policy takes away the incentive, inducement and rationale for migrating in the first place.

Why do people want to leave their Caribbean homes?

Two factors: “Push” and “Pull”. These factors highlight reasons that people want to flee “home” and seek “refuge” in foreign countries. “Refuge” is an appropriate word; because of societal defects, many from the Caribbean must leave as refugees – think LGBT, Disability, Domestic-abuse, Medically-challenged – for their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. In addition, the lure of a more prosperous life in the US (and other destinations) drive the “pull” side of the equation, making most people emigrating economic refugees.

A key problem with this ‘Wet Foot / Dry Foot’ migration policy is that it echoes a bad and wrong message, that some Caribbean people are “Less Than“, and the rest of the people are worth even less than that.

The book Go Lean … Caribbean posits that the region should be “mad as hell and refuse” to accept the continuation of any image defying immigration policy. As a people, we must not tolerate just any standards; we must stand for something more and better. We must fight for change … with revolutionary fervor.

Another dire consequence of the ‘Wet Foot / Dry Foot’ policy is that it hardened the attitudes of other Caribbean countries in the middle of migrant source countries (like Cuba and Haiti) and their American destination. The Bahamas, in particular in the Caribbean, had been “in the way” and have thusly developed harsh attitudes and treatment of Cuban and Haitian refugees. This country have changed their constitution to tighten their immigration policy to end the automatic birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants; this is the provision:

The Bahamas no longer automatically grants citizenship to people born in its homeland, as was the case for all citizens born before Independence in 1973. There are now special provisos that applies when one parent is or is not a Bahamian citizen; many of these provisos are gender-biased.

Other countries that have been in the way” include Mexico and Guyana.

The Caribbean member-states are badly in need of remediation, to lower the “push and pull” factors that drive so many to risk their ‘life and limb’, and those of their children, to take flight to where “Wet Foot / Dry Foot” would matter. How can we reform and transform? While this is easier said than done, the Go Lean book and blogs posit that the effort is less to cure the Caribbean homeland than to thrive as an alien in a foreign land. So this is the quest of the Go Lean roadmap, to make the Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work and play for its 42 million residents across the 30 member-states. The Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), which would apply best-practices for community empowerment. This roadmap has these 3 prime directives, proclaimed as follows:

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.

How exactly can the CU impact Cuba and Haiti, the most troubled countries in the region and the primary sources of migrants? The book relates the strategy that was successful in the history of post-war Europe, the Marshall Plan. The Go Lean book details the Caribbean Marshall Plan (roadmap) for Cuba and Haiti, and other failing Caribbean communities.

The related subjects of rebooting European and Caribbean societal engines have been frequently blogged on by the Go Lean promoters, as sampled here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9813	Fidel Castro Is Dead; Now What for Cuba?
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9487	10 Things We Want from Europe and 10 Things We Do Not Want
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6563	Lessons from Iceland – Model of Recovery
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5733	Better than America? Yes, We Can!
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3473	Haiti’s Caracol Industrial Park – a preview of a Self-Governing Entity
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3455	Restoration of Diplomatic Relations with Cuba – Need for Re-boot Now
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3090	Introduction to Europe – All Grown Up
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2907	Local Miami Haitian leaders protest Bahamian ‘Bad’ immigration policy
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2809	A Lesson in History: Economics of East Germany
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2330	‘Raul Castro reforms not enough’, Cuba’s bishops say
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1531	A Lesson in History: 100 Years Ago Today – World War I
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1433	Caribbean 70% brain drain to foreign shores
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1014	All is not well in the sunny Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=599	Ailing Puerto Rico open to radical economic fixes
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=273	10 Things We Want from the US and 10 Things We Do Not Want

The Go Lean book details a series of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to optimize the “push/pull” factors that send Caribbean citizens to the High Seas to flee their homeland:

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 Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 172
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 236
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the Dominican Republic	Page 237
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti	Page 238
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Jamaica	Page 239
Appendix – Puerto Rico Migrations to New York	Page 303

All of the Caribbean needs to deal with our domestic issues … now! We do not need the good fortune of putting ‘Dry Foot’ on US soil. We need to just work to fix our home. This is the purpose of the Go Lean book, to show how … to minimize the push-pull factors leading to societal abandonment.

The Go Lean/CU roadmap has proposed the solutions: assembling of many regional organization and institutions to engage reboot strategies, tactics and implementations.

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean to learn the lessons from other societies. The Go Lean book posits that the Caribbean is in a serious crisis, but asserts that this crisis would be a terrible thing to waste. The people and governing institutions of Cuba, Haiti and the entire Caribbean region are hereby urged to lean-in for the empowerments described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean. The Caribbean should be the greatest address on the planet. People should be dying to get in, not dying to get out. It is time to reboot and turn-around our fortunes.

Let’s do this … right, just us, with no American interference – no ‘Wet Foot/Dry Foot’ – just Caribbean solutions.

Farewell Obama and farewell to ‘Wet Foot/Dry Foot’. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

—————

Appendix A VIDEO – U.S. Upgrades Cuba’s Ranking on Human Trafficking List – https://youtu.be/JPkuw4ak9eM

Published on Jul 28, 2015 – The U.S. State Department government upgraded Cuba’s ranking in its Human Trafficking list. According to Washington, Cuba has made significant progress in combatting sex and human trafficking and now stands at midlevel in the annual list. teleSUR http://multimedia.telesurtv.net/v/us-…

Category: News & Politics
License: Standard YouTube License

—————

Appendix B VIDEO – Bad Old Days: Cuban Human Trafficking – https://youtu.be/CTwMouJKL38

Published on Oct 23, 2013 – Latest news across Belize; source: http://edition.channel5belize.com/

Category: News & Politics
License: Standard YouTube License

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Cuba, Foreign Policy, Transform

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Day of Reckoning for NINJA Loans

Posted on January 19, 2017 in Economics, Government, Strategy

Go Lean Commentary

Be not deceived … whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. – King James Version – The Bible

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

No Income
No Job & Assets

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

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

Title: United Shore Agrees to $48M Settlement with DOJ
By: Jacob Passy

United Shore Financial Services, a Troy, Mich.-based lender, has agreed to pay $48 million to settle allegations that it violated the False Claims Act.

The Department of Justice alleged that USFS did not comply with certain origination, underwriting and quality control requirements while participating in the Federal Housing Administration’s direct endorsement lender program. Consequently, the Department of Housing and Urban Development insured hundreds of loans that UnitedShore approved that should not have been eligible for FHA coverage, subsequently taking losses due to claims on those loans.

“USFS acknowledged that it failed to comply with FHA underwriting and quality control requirements, resulting in improperly originated mortgages,” John Vaudreuil, a U.S. attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin said in a news release. “While USFS deserves credit for acknowledging and resolving its conduct, that conduct not only resulted in substantial losses of public funds, but also put Wisconsin homeowners at risk of losing their homes or ruining their credit.”

United Shore, which is both a retail lender and the parent of United Wholesale Mortgage, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In particular, the DOJ said that UnitedShore admitted to pressuring underwriters to approve FHA mortgages under a compensation plan that tied pay to the percentage of loans approved. United Shore also falsely certified that direct endorsement underwriters reviewed appraisal reports prior to mortgages being approved for FHA insurance; under the DEL program, the FHA does not review that lenders are complying with the agency’s requirements.

The DOJ also identified other issues with UnitedShore’s compliance practices. The lender allegedly did not provide senior management with “meaningful information” regarding quality control findings. Additionally, UnitedShore did not meet HUD’s self-reporting requirements, only self-reporting three loans to the department despite quality control reviews finding hundreds of FHA-insured loans that were materially deficient at issuance.

The alleged activities occurred between from 2006 through 2011. The DOJ also said that United Shore “made certain discretionary distributions to a shareholder in the company” after the federal government began investigating the company in January 2014.
Source: National Mortgage News – Industry Trade Journal; posted 12/28/2016; retrieved 01/18/2017 from: http://www.nationalmortgagenews.com/news/compliance-regulation/united-shore-agrees-to-48m-settlement-with-doj-1093769-1.html

This story aligns with the book Go Lean…Caribbean; it serves as a roadmap to introduce and implement the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) and Caribbean Central Bank (CCB) for better stewardship of the Caribbean banking eco-system, to ensure the economic failures of the past do not re-occur in the Caribbean. The book was inspired by the events of 2008, by people engaged in the mortgage-housing-investments industries. These ones engaged in the post-mortem analysis – dissection of the crisis – of all the bad community ethos, strategies, tactics and implementations leading up to 2008 and saw the need for this Day of Reckoning.

The goal of this roadmap is to apply the lessons-learned from 2008 in the stewardship of the economic engines in the Caribbean region. It turns out that we were affected by 2008 as well; we were devastated by the elasticity in the global markets.

Welcome to the Caribbean’s Day of Reckoning!

The Caribbean economy is a parasite of the US and so when the American market “catches a cold, we sneeze”. (This is referred to as “financial contagions”). We can – we must – do better and guide our own economy away from American dependence to a regional interdependence.

We are on the way…

With the proposal for the CARICOM Single Market & Economy (CSME), a more integrated region is expected to emerge with greater linkages among the member-states of the economic union. Issues of financial contagions will now have to be a constant concern for a regional sentinel. The Go Lean roadmap calls for the deployment of the Caribbean Central Bank as that sentinel, to proactively and reactively shepherd the financial institutional processes (wholesale and retail). We do not want to “get caught with our pants down” in our region. We do not want government loan guarantees for mortgagors that have NINJA qualifiers. (That money would be better placed in more substantial investments in Caribbean people and processes). The lesson from 2008 is to follow the money and discern those who profited from this bad behavior; see the VIDEO in the Appendix below.

Mortgages with a government-guarantee stamp of approval are readily sold in the secondary markets. Bad actors are able to glean quick profits from loan origination fees and then “wash their hands” of any inherent risk from deficient payment collection. (See the VIDEO in the Appendix below). This was the direct charge against United Shore Financial Services in the forgoing article: “[funding] hundreds of FHA-insured loans that were materially deficient at issuance”.

Bad actors … profiting from existing supplies of capital!?!?

This is so familiar! The Go Lean book details (Page 23):

… history teaches that with the emergence of new economic engines, “bad actors” will also emerge thereafter to exploit the opportunities, with good, bad and evil intent. A Bible verse declares: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” – Ecclesiastes 1:9 New International Version.

This roadmap for Caribbean integration declares that peace, security and public safety is tantamount to economic prosperity. This is why an advocacy for the Greater Good must be championed as a community ethos. A prime precept is that it is “better to know than to not know” – this implies that privacy is secondary to security. A secondary precept is that bad things will happen to good people and so the community needs to be prepared to contend with the risks that can imperil the homeland.

The prime directive of the Go Lean/CU/CCB roadmap is to optimize economic, security and governing engines to impact the Caribbean’s Greater Good, for all stakeholders: residents, visitors, bank depositors and mortgage-holders. This need was pronounced early in the Go Lean book, in the Declaration of Interdependence – (Page 13):

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

The foregoing news article shows the type of functions executed by technocratic financial regulators: monitoring risks, policing the industry stakeholders, and reckoning bad practices. The “bad actor” in the article – United Shore Financial Services – had their Day of Reckoning.

The related subjects of banking oversight and optimizing financial governance have been a frequent topic for blogging by the Go Lean promoters, as sampled here:

For Canadian Banks: Caribbean is a ‘Bad Bet’

Christmas presents (2015) for American Banks

Bad Actors profiting from a supply of capital in private education

Too Big To Fail – Caribbean Version

5 Steps of a Bubble – Learning to make a resilient economy

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce failing investment in FirstCaribbean Bank

Bitcoin needs regulatory framework to change ‘risky’ image

Open the Time Capsule: The Great Recession of 2008

What Usain Bolt can teach banks about financial risk

Barbados Central Bank records $3.7m loss in 2013

US Federal Reserve Releases Transcripts from 2008 Meetings

Dominica raises EC$20 million on regional securities market

Fractional Banking System – How to Create Money from Thin Air

Book Review: ‘Wrong – Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn…’

10 Things We Want from the US – # 2: American Capital

The Erosion of the Middle Class

All the Caribbean has experienced economic dysfunction due to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. In line with the foregoing news article, the Go Lean roadmap seeks to mitigate bad behavior from bad actors like United Shore Financial Services in our local region. The book details the many infrastructural enhancements/advocacies to the region’s financial eco-system; to facilitate efficient management of the economy, and policing of this important financial/banking industry-sector:

Ethos-Strategy-Tactics-Implementation-Advocacy	Page
Anecdote – Caribbean Single Market & Economy	15
Anecdote – Puerto Rico – “The Greece of the Caribbean”	18
Confederating Non-Sovereignty Inter-Governmental Entity	45
Facilitate Currency Union/Co-op of Caribbean Dollar	45
Fostering a Technocracy	64
Caribbean Central Bank	73
Deposit Insurance Regulations	73
Securities Regulatory Authority	74
Modeling the European Union / Central Bank	130
Lessons from 2008	136
Anecdote – Caribbean Currencies	149
Growing the Economy	151
Better Manage Foreign Exchange	154
Improve Credit Ratings	155
Improve Housing – Mortgage Standards Enforcement	161
Foster Cooperatives	176
Banking Reforms	199
Wall Street – Capital/Securities Market	200
Impact the Diaspora	219
Impact Retirement – Need for Savings	221
Help the Middle Class	223
Appendix – Credit Reporting and Ratings Good Governance	276

There is no doubt that there has been previous corruption of the American financial eco-system. They have “made themselves sick; given themselves colds”, and yet we, in the Caribbean, “have had to sneeze”. We hope that the new oversight methodology in the US is more effective for managing their stakeholders. But management of the US is out-of-scope for the movement behind the Go Lean book; our focus is limited strictly to the Caribbean economy. So now is the time for change to a new regulatory regime here in our region; now is the time for new stewards of the Caribbean economy, security and governing engines. It’s time for the CU/CCB. We must prove that we have learned from the bad American past. A lot is at stake: our financial security; our future.

We urge all stakeholders – residents, mortgage-holders, mortgage lenders, banks – to lean-in to this Go Lean roadmap to elevate Caribbean society. The destination is common and desired for all Caribbean men, women and children: a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

———

Appendix VIDEO – NINJA Loans: The Big Short – https://youtu.be/os1Etuv_gDE

Published on Apr 27, 2016 – Clip from Academy Award Winning Best Picture “The Big Short”.

Category: People & Blogs
License: Standard YouTube License

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2008, Banks, Model, Power

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ENCORE: Obama is the 3rd ‘Reconstruction’; Trump is the resulting ‘Redemption’

Posted on January 16, 2017 in Ethos, Social, Strategy

Reconstruction and Redemption?!?!

This deliberative analysis was carefully laid-out in this previous blog-commentary from June 15, 2016, where it presented the following periods of Reconstruction and Redemption for race relations in the United States of America:

First Reconstruction: 1865 – 1877
First Redemption: 1890 – 1968
Second Reconstruction: 1954 – 1972
Second Redemption: 1964 – 1994 (i.e. Covenant with America)

Now, with the drawing close (January 20, 2017) of the federal administration of the nation’s first Black President, Barack Obama, it seems logical to conclude that the surprising election of Donald Trump with a mandate to usurp many of the Obama Executive initiatives may be a Third Redemption (2017 – ) to the Obama years (2009 – 2017) being the Third Reconstruction. This is supported by the fact that during the Obama years, 1,030 elected seats (State & Federal Legislators plus governors) were lost to his opposition party.

See the full details of this developed thesis on the “2nd Redemption and 2nd Reconstruction” in the ENCORE below…

… and consider the consistent point of so many blog-commentaries from the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean, that America, with its lack of respect for minority rights, should not be the Land of Refuge for the Black-and-Black people of the Caribbean.

🙁

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Go Lean Commentary – Title: Respect for Minorities: Reconstruction then Redemption – A Lesson in History

This subject of “Respect for Minorities” is dominant in the news right now. This commentary is 3 of 3 in this series on lamentations for defective social values. The complete series is as follows:

Respect for Minorities: ‘All For One’
Respect for Minorities: Climate of Hate – ‘It Gets Worse Before It Gets Worse’
Respect for Minorities: Reconstruction then Redemption – A Lesson in History

There are these familiar proverbs:

1. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. – The Bible; Ecclesiastes 1: 9

2. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

There is a lot of history in the United States regarding “Respect for Minorities”; and the lessons from that history apply for the Caribbean. In this case, there is the history of the 2nd Reconstruction and 2nd Redemption that applies directly to Caribbean people living in the US. Life in the US for our Diaspora has been a familiar theme for the publishers of the book Go Lean…Caribbean; this theme has been exhausted in the book (Page 118 – Reasons to Repatriate to the Caribbean) and in countless blog/commentaries (see list below), within the quest to dissuade Caribbean people from emigrating to the US and to encourage many of the existing Diaspora to return to their homelands, to repatriate.

Why is this so important? The Go Lean movement (book and blogs) have been consistent: it is easier for the people of the Caribbean – a majority Black and Brown demographic – to prosper where planted in their homelands than to endure as alien residents in foreign countries. This commentary asserts the key ingredient for reforming and transforming societies with diverse demographics: “Respect for Minorities”. This commentary seeks to learn this lesson based on life (and history) in the US; though the principles here can easily apply to Canada and the many western European countries that receive our citizens. Consider this analogy:

Do you want to go a party – that you hear is a lot of fun – uninvited? What if you hear the host really wants you at the party, and then when you get there you discovered that they want you to serve and work and cater to the other preferred guests; you are just there as support staff?
Want to go home yet?

This is the experience for so many Caribbean Diaspora when they ‘come to America’. Just take a quick tour at so many tourist/travel facilities at America’s principal cities. So many of the “serving” staff are of Caribbean heritage. One would talk to taxi drivers, hotel maids, waiters and retail store clerks and you discover that these ones descend from the Caribbean.

You think: They came here for “this”? They are minorities among a majority that has little respect for them.

There is this above scenario, and then … there is “prosper where you’re planted”:

Just like a tree planted by the rivers of water
That bring forth fruit in due season
Source: The Bible – Psalms Chapter 1 verse 3 – King James Bible

This was the strong point made by one of the key figures in African-American history, Booker T Washington. He asserted that the African-American community must work to prosper in its own hometown, that they must seek reconciliation with their White neighbors and find a way to co-exist. This was a good plan for Black America, the minorities; but White America, the majority population didn’t always cooperate. The effort to reconcile was attempted before, immediately following the Civil War, during the period of Reconstruction; 1865 – 1877. This period of time actually featured some real progress in liberating and promoting the previous enslaved minority population – an enfranchisement of all freedmen. But then, at the end of the formal Reconstruction period, there was redemption…

… redemption: a return to American original values, that is “White supremacy” and the repression of the African-American race.

During this Redemption period: Jim Crow laws – segregation in public places – were implemented, as the follow details depict:

The end of Reconstruction … was followed by a period that White Southerners labeled Redemption, during which White-dominated state legislatures enacted Jim Crow laws and, beginning in 1890, disenfranchised most Blacks and many poor Whites through a combination of constitutional amendments and electoral laws. The White Democrat Southerners’ memory of Reconstruction played a major role in imposing the system of white supremacy and second-class citizenship for Blacks. – Sourced from Wikipedia.

That was then, 130 years ago; how about now? The notion of an Encore/”Second Take” seems unthinkable; and yet this is the historicity of events and experiences after this 2nd Reconstruction – the Civil Rights movement of the 20th Century: think Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Affirmative Action, Minority Set-Asides, etc.. See the encyclopedic reference here:

Reference Title: Second Reconstruction
Second Reconstruction is a term that refers to the American Civil Rights Movement. In many respects, the mass movement against segregation and discrimination that erupted following World War II, shared many similarities with the period of Reconstruction which followed the American Civil War. The period of Second Reconstruction featured active participation on the part of African-Americans to regain their rights that they had lost during the period of Redemption and Jim Crow segregation in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

During Second Reconstruction, African-Americans once again began holding various political offices, and reasserting and reclaiming their civil and political rights as American citizens. Unlike Reconstruction, however, most African-Americans abandoned the Republican Party for the Democratic Party. A noteworthy feature of Second Reconstruction was the political realignment that occurred in 1965, which transformed the nature and composition of both the Republican and Democratic Party’s, eroding the Democratic Solid South.

In the same way, however, that Reconstruction was followed by Redemption, some have also claimed that period following Second Reconstruction could be termed a Second Redemption characterized by more conservatism on the part of the federal government, and several Supreme Court decisions that weakened the scope of civil rights reforms, especially in the Northern States

The years between 1954-1972 have often been called the Second Reconstruction, since it has noteworthy similarities with the First Black Reconstruction (1865-1877), which began with the abolition of slavery by the enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment. Both periods saw African Americans making tremendous gains in the fields of politics and civil rights. Three major Supreme Court decisions (the Brown decision on school desegregation (1954), desegregation of public transportation (1956); bussing to achieve school desegregation (April 1971), two legislative enactments (the Civil Rights Act, 1964, and the Voting Rights Act, 1965) and the March on Washington, D.C. (April 28, 1963), many demonstrations and riots, resulted in major alterations in race relations. There was “change within change,” and America would never be the same.

While the Second Reconstruction destroyed the legal foundations of the segregationist system, it also highlighted the further and more difficult challenge of translating legal victories into real change. Moreover, the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., removed a key symbol and source of unity in the nonviolent freedom struggle. According to one activist, King was “the one man of our race that this country’s older generations, the militants, and the revolutionaries and the masses of black people would still listen to.” As the limitations of the Civil Rights movement became more apparent, growing numbers of young African Americans advocated Black Power as an alternative to nonviolent direct-action strategies. Partly because revolutionary black organizations like the Black Panther party (formed in 1966) emphasized the mass mobilization of poor and working-class blacks, armed struggle, and opposition to the Vietnam War, they came under the combined assault of federal, state, and local authorities. Under the weight of official and unofficial white resistance, the Black Power movement fragmented and gradually dissipated by the early 1970s.

Late Twentieth Century Developments. As the civil rights and Black Power movements weakened, white resistance to the gains of the Second Reconstruction intensified. Opposition to affirmative-action policies in employment and education were closely related to the deindustrialization of the nation’s economy. The loss of jobs to mechanization and low-wage overseas factories affected all industrial workers, black and white, but the persistence of overt and covert discriminatory employment practices rooted in white kin and friendship networks made black workers and their communities especially vulnerable to economic down swings. African-American unemployment rates persisted at well over the white rate, especially among young black males. At the same time, the beneficiaries of existing affirmative-action programs–the middle class and better-educated members of the black working class–experienced a degree of upward mobility and moved into outlying urban and suburban neighborhoods. They left working-class and poor blacks, disproportionately single women with children, concentrated in the central cities, where violence, drug addiction, and class-stratified social spaces intensified, causing acute tensions in day-to-day intraracial as well as interracial relations.

Perhaps even more than in the industrial era, the post- industrial age challenged African Americans to develop new strategies for coping with social change and the persistence of inequality. Some of their emerging responses built upon earlier struggles. Institution-building, marches, participation in electoral politics, and migration in search of better opportunities all continued to express black activism and resistance to social injustice. Yet, much had changed in the nation and in African American life, and such time-tested strategies took on different meanings in the 1980s and 1990s. Rising numbers of southern- born blacks returned to the South during the 1970s. After declining for more than a century, the proportion of blacks living in the South increased by 1980. Other African Americans rallied behind the Rainbow Coalition and supported the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s bid for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988. Still others endorsed Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March (MMM) in 1994. Calling the march a “day of atonement” for black men, leaders of the MMM encouraged black men to earn and reclaim a position of authority in their families and communities. Four years later, many black women responded to the MMM’s gender bias with their own Million Woman March, which emphasized the centrality of women in the ongoing black freedom struggle. Through these various actions and many more, African Americans continued to resist shifting forms of inequality and gave direction to their own lives as a new century began.

These same years saw the emergence of a new generation of African-American academics, musicians, performers, sports figures, and writers. Such diverse men and women as the scholars and public intellectuals Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, and Stephen L. Carter; basketball superstar Michael Jordan and track-and-field athlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee; film actors Eddie Murphy and Denzel Washington; jazz musicians Joshua Redman, Herbie Hancock, and Wynton and Bradford Marsalis; television celebrity Oprah Winfrey; and an array of novelists and writers including Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison enriched American life and gave voice to the black experience.

By the 1990s, the nation’s more than 30 million African Americans, representing about 12 percent of the total population, had transformed themselves from a predominantly rural people into an overwhelmingly urban people; from a southern regional group to a national population living in every part of the nation; and, perhaps most importantly, from a group confined to southern agriculture, domestic service, and general labor to a work force with representation in every sector of the nation’s economy.
Source: Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia – Retrieved May 26, 2016 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Reconstruction

——————

VIDEO 1 – Henry Louis Gates assesses the black community today – https://youtu.be/g8XcWodA47g

Uploaded on Oct 28, 2011 – www.twaintrip.com

——————

VIDEO 2 – Powell Comments On Gates Arrest, Admits Being Profiled “Many Times” – https://youtu.be/sVelDpz5ZT0

Uploaded on Jul 28, 2009 – Gen. Colin Powell talks about the Henry Louis Gates arrest with Larry King. He said the story “went viral” when President Obama commented on the story. Also, Powell thinks that America “isn’t quite post-racial” at this time. “These problems still exist in post-racial America.” However, he suggested that Gates should not have argued with the policeman arresting him. “You don’t argue with a police officer,” he says.

Powell also called the arresting cop, Sergeant James Crowley, “an outstanding police officer.”

Also, at 5:10, Powell admits he’s been profiled “many times” [even] as the National Security Advisor.

This conclusion of a 2nd Redemption is not so far-fetched!

Just consider the current campaign of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump: “Make America Great Again“. It bears to mind the question: “just when was America great before”? Answer: After the first Redemption.

It should be hard to justify migrating to this American climate/eco-system, rather than the quest to prosper where planted in the homeland. The societal defects in the Caribbean – that “pushes” many to flee – must be that acute!

The book Go Lean…Caribbean declares that the “Caribbean is in crisis”; but asserts that this crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU); an initiative to bring change, empowerment, to the Caribbean region; to make the region a better place to live, work and play. This Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The book describes the CU as a technocratic administration with 144 different missions to elevate the Caribbean homeland. This underlying goal is stated early in the book with this pronouncement in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Page 12):

xii. Whereas the legacy in recent times in individual states may be that of ineffectual governance with no redress to higher authority, the accedence of this Federation will ensure accountability and escalation of the human and civil rights of the people for good governance, justice assurances, due process and the rule of law…

Change has come to the Caribbean. The Go Lean book declares that for permanent change to take place, there must first be an adoption of new community ethos of the Greater Good; this term community ethos refers to the national spirit that drives the character and identity of its people. This Greater Good ethos, with genuine concern and respect for minority groups, is what was missing in previous American generations … and current Caribbean population. This point of “Respect for Minorities” is therefore our biggest lesson from this consideration in history – the foregoing encyclopedic reference.

The Go Lean roadmap was constructed with this and other community ethos in mind, plus the execution of strategies, tactics, implementation and advocacies to forge the identified permanent change in the region. The following is a sample of these specific details from the book:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification – Historic Motivation of Black America	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – People Choose	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – All Choices Involve Costs	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – People Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – The Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Security Principles – Anti-Bullying and Mitigation	Page 23
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Minority Equalization	Page 24
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Foster Genius	Page 27
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship	Page 28
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Intellectual Property	Page 29
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Research & Development	Page 30
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations	Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing	Page 35
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness	Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Anecdote – LCD versus an Entrepreneurial Ethos	Page 39
Strategy – Vision – Confederation of the 30 Caribbean Member-States into a Single Market	Page 45
Strategy – Mission – Celebrate the Music, Sports, Art, People and Culture of the Caribbean	Page 46
Tactical – Confederating a Permanent Union	Page 63
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers: Federal Administration versus Member-States Governance	Page 71
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Foreign Policy Initiatives at Start-up	Page 102
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Implementation – Reasons to Repatriate to the Caribbean	Page 118
Planning – 10 Big Ideas for the Caribbean Region	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Planning – Ways to Better Manage Image	Page 133
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance in the Caribbean Region	Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Mitigate Terrorism – Anti-Bullying Mitigations	Page 181
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Communications	Page 186
Advocacy – Ways Impact the Diaspora	Page 217
Advocacy – Ways to Preserve Caribbean Heritage	Page 218
Advocacy – Ways to Improve the Arts	Page 230
Advocacy – Ways to Promote Music	Page 231

Previous Go Lean blog/commentaries stressed issues relating to respect for minority rights and full societal inclusion. The following sample applies:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8099	Caribbean Image: ‘Less Than’?
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7221	Street naming for Martin Luther King unveils the real America
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7204	‘The Covenant with Black America’ – Ten Years Later
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6722	A Lesson in History – After the Civil War: Birthright Mandates
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6434	‘Good Hair’ and the Strong Black Woman
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5784	Buggery in Jamaica – ‘Say It Ain’t So’!
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5733	Better than America? Yes, We Can!
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5527	American Defects: Racism – Is It Over?
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5333	Racial Legacies: Cause and Effect
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4935	A Lesson in History – the ‘Grand Old Party’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2222	Sports Role Model – Playing For Pride … And More
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1918	Philadelphia Freedom – Some Restrictions Apply
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1896	The Crisis in Black Homeownership
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1596	Book Review: ‘Prosper Where You Are Planted’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1020	Lack of Respect in European Sports – A Lesson; A Role Model
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=789	America’s War on the Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=546	Book Review: ‘The Divide in American Injustice’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=341	Hypocritical US slams Caribbean human rights practices

The purpose of the Go Lean movement (book and blogs) is not to fix America; it is to fix the Caribbean. We want to learn important lessons from this advanced democracy who have endured a bitter history but has now emerged as the richest, strongest and most-prosperous nation in world history. The US is now a “frienemy” of the Caribbean. As we lose so many of our Caribbean citizens to life in the Diaspora in the US.

Some reports are that the Diaspora and their heirs amount to over 20 million American residents. America’s population and economy grows while our region is in crisis.

Our people leave our homelands due to “push and pull” reasons; “push” as in societal defects that cause many to seek refuge abroad, and “pull” in the presumption that American life is now optimized for the Black-and-Brown people. But a consideration of this commentary helps us to understand the “DNA” of American society, that while “Respect for Minorities” is improved, it is far from optimized.

The recommendation from this commentary and the Go Lean book in general is:

“stay home” in the Caribbean and work toward improving the Caribbean homeland.
And for those who have left, please consider repatriating home and bring us your “time, talent and treasuries”; help us reform and transform our society.

The US should not be considered the “panacea of Caribbean hopes and dreams”. With the adoption of the appropriate community ethos, strategies, tactics and implementations of the Go Lean roadmap, we can make all Caribbean member-states better places to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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Civil Rights, History, Model, Transform

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ENCORE: Looking Back at the Obama Years

Posted on January 12, 2017 in Government, Social

Just one more week and the Obama years will be over. (The new President – Donald J. Trump – will be inaugurated on January 20, 2017).

This is good …
This is bad …

Barack H. Obama has been transformational as the 44th President of the United States. He has truly impacted American society, but the Caribbean, not so much. This was the theme of the previous blog-commentary (from March 31, 2016) that detailed Obama’s bad consequences on the Caribbean. See here:

===================

Title: Obama – Bad For Caribbean Status Quo

Go Lean Commentary

Yes, Barack Obama was elected in 2008 as the first Black President of the United States, with his campaign of “Hope and Change”. While one would think that would be good for all Black (African-American) people in the US – and around the world – alas, that has not been the case. It is the conclusion of many commentators and analysts that Obama has not been able to do as much for his race as he would like, nor his race would like. (Obama himself has confessed this). Or that another White person may have been able to do more for the African American community.

This seems like a paradox!

Yet, it is what it is. The truth of the matter is that race still plays a huge decision-making factor in all things in America. This reality has curtailed Obama in any quest to do more for his people.

This is the assessment by noted commentator and analyst, Professor Michael Eric Dyson, in his new book “The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America“. Professor Dyson points out some actual events during the Obama presidency and concludes that a White President would have been more successfully championing certain race-related causes. (Think: the Black Lives Matter movement was ignited during the Obama presidency).

VIDEO – Michael Eric Dyson on Democracy Now – https://youtu.be/F7Uo06_NfCw

Published on Feb 3, 2016 – http://democracynow.org – As the 2016 presidential race heats up and the nation marks Black History Month, we turn to look back on President Obama’s legacy as the nation’s first African-American president. Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson has just published a new book titled The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America. From the protests in Ferguson to the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, to the controversy over the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Michael Eric Dyson explores how President Obama has changed how he talks about race over the past seven years.

Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on nearly 1,400 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch the live-stream 8-9AM ET: http://democracynow.org.

The summary is that White Privilege still dominates in America. See the review of this book in Appendix A below.

This conclusion aligns with the assertions of the book Go Lean…Caribbean, and many aligned blog submissions, that America is not the ideal society for Caribbean citizens to seek for refuge, that rather Caribbean people can exert less effort to reform and transform their homelands than trying to prosper in this foreign land. The conclusion is the priority should be on a local/regional quest to prosper where planted in the Caribbean. This is a mission of the Go Lean…Caribbean movement, to lower the push and pull factors that lead many in the Caribbean to flee their tropical homes. Highlighting and enunciating the truths of American “Race Reality” aligns with that mission. We must lower the “pull” factors!

It is this commentary’s conclusion that Obama has been a good president for American self-interest. (The economy has recovered and rebounded from the “bad old days” of the 2008 financial crisis).

It is also this commentary’s conclusion that Obama has been a bad president for the Caribbean status-quo! His administration has brought ” change” to many facets of Caribbean life – good, bad and ugly, as follows:

Consider the good: The American re-approachment to Cuba – under Obama – is presenting an end to the Cold War animosity of these regional neighbors – Cuba’s status quo is changing. A bad actor from this conflict, former Cuban President Fidel Castro, just penned his own commentary lamenting Obama’s salesmanship in his recent official visit to Cuba on March 15; see Appendix B.
Consider the bad:
- (A) The US has doubled-down on globalization, forcing countries with little manufacturing or agricultural production to consume even more and produce even less; a lose-lose proposition.
- (B) The primary industry in the Caribbean – tourism – has experienced change and decline as a direct result of heightened income inequality in the US, the region’s biggest source of touristic visitors; now more middle class can only afford cruise vacations as opposed to the more lucrative (for the region) stop-overs.
- (C) The secondary industry in the Caribbean – Offshore Banking – has come under fire from the US-led Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) to deter offshore banking growth; the industry, jobs and economic contributions have thusly receded.
Consider the ugly: Emigration of Caribbean citizens to the US has accelerated during this presidency, more so than any other time in American-Caribbean history. Published rates of societal abandonment among the college educated classes have reported an average of 70 percent in most member-states, with some countries (i.e. Guyana) tallying up to 89 percent.

The Caribbean status quo has changed. It is now time for a Caribbean version of “hope and change”.

This book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). This roadmap presents “hope and change” for empowering the Caribbean region’s societal engines: economic, security and governance. In fact, the following are the prime directives of the roadmap:

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.

A mission of the CU is to minimize the push and pull factors that lead so many Caribbean citizens to migrate to foreign lands – to America; and also to invite the Diaspora living there to repatriate home. The argument is that America is not the most welcoming for the Black and Brown populations of the Caribbean. Let’s work to prosper where planted at home.

Yes, there are societal defects in the Caribbean, as there are defects in America. But the defects in America are greater: institutional racism and Crony-Capitalism. Though it is heavy-lifting, it is easier to reform and transform the Caribbean.

The reference sources in the Appendices relate that the Obama effect is changing the status quo … in America … and the Caribbean.

This issue of reducing the societal abandonment rate and encouraging repatriation has been a consistent theme of Go Lean blogs entries; as sampled here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7628	‘A Change Is Gonna Come’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7204	‘The Covenant with Black America’ – Ten Years Later
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7151	The Caribbean is Looking for Heroes … ‘to Return’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7412	The Road to Restoring Cuba
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7151	The Caribbean is Looking for Heroes … ‘to Return’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6016	Hotter than July – Still ‘Third World’ – The Need for Cooling …
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5784	The Need for Human Rights/LGBT Reform in the Region
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4613	‘Luck of the Irish’ – Lessons from their Past, Present and Future
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4447	Probe of Ferguson, Missouri exposes Institutional Racism

All in all, the roadmap commences with the recognition that all the Caribbean is in crisis, with its high abandonment rate. These acknowledgements are pronounced in the Declaration of Interdependence (Page 13). The statements are included as follows:

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

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

The Go Lean roadmap lists the following details on the series of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies necessary to effectuate the “hope and change” in the Caribbean region to mitigate the continued risk of emigration and the brain drain. The list is as follows:

Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices	Page 21
Community Ethos – Job Multiplier	Page 22
Community Ethos – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Return on Investments	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship	Page 28
Strategic – Vision – Integrated Region in a Single Market	Page 45
Strategic – Vision – Agents of Change	Page 57
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Growing to $800 Billion Regional Economy	Page 67
Tactical – Separation of Powers	Page 71
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Implementation – Reasons to Repatriate	Page 118
Planning – Big Ideas for the Caribbean Region	Page 127
Planning – Lessons Learned from the US Constitution	Page 145
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 Impact the Diaspora	Page 217
Appendix – Source of 2.2 Million New Jobs	Page 257

The Go Lean roadmap allows for the Caribbean region to deliver success, to mitigate the risk of further push and pull. The world in general and the Caribbean in particular needs to know the truth of life in America for the Black and Brown populations. This heavy-lifting task is the mission of the CU technocracy.

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people and institutions, to lean-in for the “hope and change” that is the Caribbean Union Trade Federation. Yes, we can … make this region a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

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

————–

Appendix A

Book Review: ‘The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America’ By Michael Eric Dyson. 346 Pages. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $27. ISBN 978-0544387669
Review By: N. D. B. Connolly

What happens when the nation’s foremost voice on the race question is also its most confined and restrained? Michael Eric Dyson raises this question about President Obama in his latest book, “The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America.” The book inspires one to raise similar questions about Dyson himself. For, while hardly restrained, Dyson appears noticeably boxed in by the limitations placed on celebrity race commentators in the Age of Obama.

Readers will recognize Dyson’s practiced flair for language and metaphor as he makes an important and layered argument about American political culture and the narrowness of presidential speech. The book argues that Americans live under a black presidency — not so much because the president is black, but because Obama’s presidency remains bound by the rules and rituals of black respectability and white supremacy. Even the leader of the free world, we learn in Dyson’s book, conforms principally to white expectations. (Dyson maintained in the November issue of The New Republic that Hillary Clinton may well do more for black people than Obama did.) But Obama’s presidency is “black” in a more hopeful way, too, providing Americans with an opportunity to better realize the nation’s democratic ideals and promises. “Obama’s achievement gestures toward what the state had not allowed at the highest level before his emergence,” Dyson writes. “Equality of opportunity, fairness in democracy and justice in society.”

A certain optimism ebbs and flows in “The Black Presidency,” but only occasionally does it refer to white Americans’ beliefs about race. Far more often, Dyson hangs hope on Obama’s impromptu shows of racial solidarity. One such moment was the president’s remarks after the 2009 arrest of the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. (who was arrested trying to get into his own home). Another was Obama’s public identification with Trayvon Martin. Both acts may have been politically risky, but they also greatly heartened African- Americans. Hope builds, and by book’s end, readers find a chapter-long celebration of the president’s soaring invocations of “Amazing Grace” during last year’s memorial service for the slain parishioners of EmanuelA.M.E.Church. For Dyson, the eulogy at Emanuel seems to serve as a sign of grace that black America may still yet enjoy from the Obama White House.

Its cresting invocations of hope aside, the book ably maintains a sharp critical edge. Dyson uncovers a troubling consistency to the president’s race speech and shows that in spite of Obama’s reliance on black political networks and black votes during his meteoric rise, the president chose to follow a governing and rhetorical template largely hewed by his white predecessors. As both candidate and president, Obama’s speeches have tended to allay white guilt. They have scolded African-American masses for cultural pathology and implied that blacks were to blame for lingering white antipathy. Obama’s speeches have also often consigned the worst forms of racism and anti-black violence to the past or to the fringes of American political culture. One finds passive-voice constructions everywhere in Obama’s race talk, as black folk are found suffering under pressures and at the hands of parties that go largely unnamed. “Obama is forced to exaggerate black responsibility,” Dyson advances, “because he must always underplay white responsibility.”

Critically, Dyson contends that the president’s tepid anti-racism comes from political pragmatism rather than a set of deeper ideological concerns. “Obama is anti-ideological,” Dyson maintains, and that is “the very reason he was electable.”

That characterization, however, overlooks how liberal pragmatism functions as ideology. What’s more, it ignores the marginalization and violence that black and brown people often suffer — at home and abroad — whenever moderates resolve to “get things done.” If the Obama era proved anything about liberalism, it’s that there remains little room for an explicit policy approach to racial justice — even, or perhaps especially, under a black president. As Obama himself explains to Dyson: “I have to appropriate dollars for any program which has to go through ways and means committees, or appropriations committees, that are not dominated by folks who read Cornel West or listen to Michael Eric Dyson.”

Upon a careful reading of Dyson’s book, loss seems always to arrive on the heels of hope. As we might expect, the author explores Obama’s estrangement from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in 2008. He also attends to his own very public and more recent split from Cornel West. But even beyond these signal episodes, “The Black Presidency” is suffused with a bittersweet tone about relationships strained. President Obama seems to leave a host of people and political commitments at the White House door as he conforms to the racial demands of a historically white office. Even Dyson seems unaware of all the ways in which “The Black Presidency,” as a book, both explicates and illustrates how the Obama administration leaves black folk behind.

All but the last two of the book’s eight chapters begin with the author placing himself in close and often luxurious proximity to Obama. The repetition has the literary effect of a Facebook feed. Here is Michael at Oprah’s sumptuous California mansion during a 2007 fund-raiser, sharing a joke with Barack and Chris Rock. Here is Michael on the private plane and in the S.U.V., giving the candidate tips on how to use a “ ‘blacker’ rhetorical style” during his debate performances against a surging Hillary Clinton. Here he is in the V.I.P. section of the 50th-anniversary ceremony for the March on Washington and, yet again, at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Through these and similar moments, Dyson projects his status and, in ways less clear, his authority. Dyson knows Obama, the reader is assured, because he has kept his company. He has swapped playful taunts and bro-hugs with the president; he has been intimate, one might say, with history.

Moments like these have a secondary effect. They illuminate a tension cutting through and profoundly limiting “The Black Presidency” as a work of political commentary. Regardless of who Michael Eric Dyson may have been to Obama the candidate, Dyson now has barely any access to Obama the president. Time and circumstance have rendered Dyson, the man and the thinker, increasingly irrelevant to Obama’s presidency. He can be at the party, but not at the table.

Perhaps worse in relation to the book’s stated aim to be the first full measure of Obama and America’s race problem, Dyson, the author, has none but only the smallest role to play in assessing and narrating Obama’s legacy. When Bill Clinton decided to chronicle his own historic turn in the White House, he called on Taylor Branch and recorded with the historian some 150 hours of interviews over 79 separate sessions. Dyson, in 2015, gets far shabbier treatment. Chapter 5, “The Scold of Black Folk,” opens: “I was waiting outside the Oval Office to speak to President Obama. I had a tough time getting on his schedule.” In response to Dyson’s request for a presidential audience, the White House offered the author 10 whole minutes. By his own telling, Dyson “politely declined” and pressed Obama’s confidante, Valerie Jarrett, to remember his long history with and support of the president. “I eventually negotiated a 20-minute interview that turned into half an hour.” It appears to be the only interview Dyson conducted for the book.

In the end, “The Black Presidency” possesses a loaves-and-fishes quality. Drawing mostly on the news cycle, close readings of carefully crafted speeches and a handful of glittering encounters, Dyson has managed to do a lot with a little. The book might well be considered an interpretive miracle, one performed in fealty and hope for a future show of presidential grace, either from this president or, should she get elected, the next one.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/books/review/the-black-presidency-barack-obama-and-the-politics-of-race-in-america-by-michael-eric-dyson.html. Posted February 2, 2016; retrieved March 29, 2016.

————–

Appendix B

Title: Cuba’s Fidel Castro knocks sweet-talking Obama after ‘honey-coated’ visit
By: Marc Frank

Havana – Retired leader Fidel Castro accused U.S. President Barack Obama of sweet-talking the Cuban people during his visit to the island last week and ignoring the accomplishments of Communist rule, in an opinion piece carried by all state-run media on Monday.

Obama’s visit was aimed at consolidating a detente between the once intractable Cold War enemies and the U.S. president said in a speech to the Cuban people that it was time for both nations to put the past behind them and face the future “as friends and as neighbors and as family, together.”

“One assumes that every one of us ran the risk of a heart attack listening to these words,” Castro said in his column, dismissing Obama’s comments as “honey-coated” and reminding Cubans of the many U.S. efforts to overthrow and weaken the Communist government.

Castro, 89, laced his opinion piece with nationalist sentiment and, bristling at Obama’s offer to help Cuba, said the country was able to produce the food and material riches it needs with the efforts of its people.

“We don’t need the empire to give us anything,” he wrote.

Asked about Fidel Castro’s criticisms on Monday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the Obama administration was pleased with the reception the president received from the Cuban people and the conversations he had with Cuban officials.

“The fact that the former president felt compelled to respond so forcefully to the president’s visit, I think is an indication of the significant impact of President Obama’s visit to Cuba,” Earnest said.

After the visit, major obstacles remain to full normalization of ties between Cuba and the United States, with no major concessions offered by Cuba on rights and economic freedom.

“The president made clear time and time again both in private meetings with President Castro, but also in public when he delivered a speech to the Cuban people, that the U.S. commitment to human rights is rock solid and that’s not going to change,” Earnest said.

Fidel Castro took power in a 1959 revolution and led the country until 2006, when he fell ill and passed power to his brother Raul Castro. He now lives in relative seclusion but is occasionally heard from in opinion pieces or seen on television and in photos meeting with visiting dignitaries.

The iconic figure’s influence has waned in his retirement and the introduction of market-style reforms carried out by Raul Castro, but Fidel Castro still has a moral authority among many residents, especially older generations.

Obama did not meet with Fidel Castro during his three-day visit, nor mention him in any of his public appearances. It was the first visit of a sitting U.S. president for 88 years.

Fidel Castro blasted Obama for not referring in his speech to the extermination of native peoples in both the United States and Cuba, not recognizing Cuba’s gains in health and education, and not coming clean on what he might know about how South Africa obtained nuclear weapons before apartheid ended, presumably with the aid of the U.S. government.

“My modest suggestion is that he reflects (on the U.S. role in South Africa and Cuba’s in Angola) and not now try to elaborate theories about Cuban politics,” Castro said.

Castro also took aim at the tourism industry in Cuba, which has grown further since Obama’s rapprochement with Raul Castro in December 2014. He said it was dominated by large foreign corporations which took for granted billion-dollar profits.

(Reporting by Marc Frank; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu in Washington; Editing by Bill Rigby)

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2008, Book Review, Cuba, Diaspora, Transform

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Lessons Learned: Detroit demolishes thousands of structures

Posted on January 6, 2017 in Ethos, Government, Strategy

Go Lean Commentary

Lights, camera, action …

That expression is used to initiate a filming session on a movie set. It is symbolic of manifestation; “coming to a head” after a long series of planning steps.

“You have planned the work; now its time to work the plan”.

Engage!

This book Go Lean…Caribbean – published in November 2013 – analyzed the once-great-but-now-distressed City of Detroit (Michigan, USA); it embedded the lessons learned from Detroit in a page entitled:

10 Lessons Learned from Detroit (Page 140)

Afterwards, the book’s publishers went to Detroit (for almost 1 & 1/2 years) to “observe and report” on the turn-around and rebirth of the city. The motivation was that the Caribbean region could learn a lot from the strategies, tactics and implementations to mitigate this community’s “Failed-State/Failed-City” status. The recommendation of the book and countless blogs – 34 not including this submission – was always the same that Detroit can benefit by engaging in a demolition of so many of its blighted buildings. This is described as exercising the mastery of destruction arts and sciences – salvage, removal, recycle, redevelopment, rebirth, reboot and “right-sizing”.

Those pleas have been heard: Detroit has now commenced the recommended action of demolishing structures. See a full news article relating this here:

Title: Detroit demolishes thousands of structures; many more to go
By: Corey Williams

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DETROIT (AP) — Remnants of the roof and walls creaked, groaned and then crumpled to the ground Wednesday from what once was an industrial building that covered an entire city block, likely the last structure demolished this year under Detroit’s massive blight elimination program.

Blows from an excavator methodically destroyed a portion of what had been a 60,000-square-foot building on Cloverdale Avenue in a west side neighborhood of homes, auto repair shops and other light industrial buildings.

When leveled, the structure that a local resident said had once housed an industrial laundry or dry cleaners, will mark about 3,130 structures cleared in 2016 and about 10,700 — mostly houses — razed since 2014. The vast majority are owned by the city’s Land Bank Authority.

But the city has a long way to go. A blight task force in 2014 said 40,000 needed to be torn down and 38,000 others were falling apart in one of the nation’s poorest major cities that emerged in December 2014 from the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Many blocks have more abandoned houses and empty lots than lived-in homes, a result of the exodus of whites and much of the black middle class from the city. About 1.8 million people lived in Detroit in the 1950s. Fewer than 700,000 currently call Detroit home, according to the U.S. Census.

Mayor Mike Duggan has said the mass demolitions are necessary for Detroit to attract families to city neighborhoods and stop decades of population loss.

“I’m so excited about this,” said an almost gleeful Sandra Pickens as the excavator clawed at brick and wood.

Pickens is president of the Littlefield Community Association. The neighborhood group met over the summer with Duggan about the empty building and other concerns.

“This was an eyesore for us,” she told The Associated Press Wednesday. “I’ve seen people come and dump things here; come in at night and steal the beams. We shouldn’t have anything looking like this.”

Mike Douglas works in a muffler shop on Cloverdale. He remembers the neighborhood and small businesses in the area as “thriving” 20 or so years ago. He believes the building across the street has been empty a dozen or so years.

The area had “deteriorated to the point that we were having a tough time actually keeping our business here,” said Douglas, 55.

By removing dangerous buildings and empty houses, safety and quality of life in Detroit is improved, according to Fire Investigations Division Capt. Winston Farrow.

“It eliminates the opportunities for criminals to set fires in vacant houses,” Farrow said. “The problem was more just the sheer numbers of dwellings that we had.”

The average sale prices of over 100 houses sold in the city also has increased over the past three years, according to the Land Bank.

The problems haven’t been resolved completely, “but it’s much better,” said Linda Smith, a blight task force co-chair and executive director of a nonprofit that builds homes in Detroit and provides resources to city residents.

“Maintaining and securing all of the homes that need some work done to them is the next step,” Smith said.

Not everyone is as optimistic.

“You can tear down a house on one block and go back several months later and where houses were occupied (they) are now abandoned and need to be demolished,” said Sheila Dapremont, owner of Detroit demolition company 3D Wrecking.

“It just seems like it never ends,” she said.

On average, it costs Detroit $12,616 to knock down a house. More than $128 million in federal funds over the past three years have helped pay for the work. Another $130 million was approved this year.

About $40 million in the city’s general fund has been set aside for demolitions.

Federal funding was temporarily halted earlier this year and resumed after an audit determined demolition costs above a federal cap of $25,000 per house were redistributed to 350 other properties to have those houses appear to meet the cap. Amounts over the cap should have been billed to the city. The city says controls have since been tightened.

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Detroit Demolition Tracker: http://www.detroitmi.gov/demolition

Despite these events being in Detroit and not the Caribbean, the foregoing can still impact the Greater Good for the Caribbean. It provides us an exact role model of what to do … and not do. Lessons learned …

The Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) to elevate Caribbean society. Detroit is not in scope for this effort, but as detailed in a previous blog-commentary, an examination of the details of Detroit can be productive for the Caribbean effort. The Go Lean roadmap therefore has these 3 prime directives:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion GDP and create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

Early in the Go Lean book, the point of lessons from Detroit was pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Page 14), with this opening statement:

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 avoid the pitfalls of communities like … Detroit…

As a “failed-city”, Detroit has suffered abandonment; first “white flight”, then eventually everyone else; (the population peak was 1,849,568 in 1950, but only 713,777 in 2010). The need for demolition is tied to the fact that many of the buildings from that population peak were still standing in the city, though now blighted.

According to the foregoing article, the city has more to do to right-size to an optimized city. The city’s disposition is still dire (brain drain, unemployment, urban blight and acute hopelessness); but there is hope for a better future. This is very familiar for Caribbean communities. This is why the study of Detroit is such an ideal model for the Caribbean.

Previous Go Lean blogs highlighted some specific lessons from Detroit and other nearby Michigan cities, as sampled in this detailed list here:

Detroit makes Community College free

An Ode to Detroit – Good Luck on Trade!

Beware of Vulture Capitalists

Detroit giving schools their ‘Worst Shot’

Flint, Michigan – A Cautionary Tale

Secrecy, corruption and conflicts in State governance

Before and After Photos of Detroit’s Transformation

Education & Economics: Welcoming Obama to Detroit

Ann Arbor: Model for ‘Start-up’ Cities

Big Salt: Short-term Benefit; Long-term Damage

NEXUS: Facilitating Detroit-Windsor Commerce

M-1 Rail: Alternative Motion in the Motor City

JP Morgan Chase $100 million Detroit investment

The foregoing news article (and VIDEO in the Appendix below) relates more to the art and science of destruction-recycling than it does to Detroit. This has also been a consistent theme for the Go Lean movement. Consider these previous blog-commentaries that advocated developing business models around destruction/recycling/turn-around:

A Lesson in ‘Garbage’

Where the Jobs Are – Entrepreneurism in Junk

Where the Jobs Are – One Scenario: Ship-breaking

‘Only at the precipice, do they change’

The CU/Go Lean effort is focused on forging change in the region; this does not start with the demolition process, rather it starts with attitudes and motivations to reject the status quo. This positive attitude is defined in the Go Lean book as the community ethos for “turn-around”. Here is a sample of the text relating to turn-around practice (Page 33):

… dispositions of abandoned buildings in the member-states still relate to CU missions, as in the protection of image (“psychological trauma” is inflicted daily on neighbors of abandoned structures) and the quest for beauty. While beauty, aesthetics and preservation may be paramount for communities, these should only be a concern after basic needs are satisfied – housing is a basic need. The economics of housing can be impacted with the over-supply of abandoned buildings, as it brings the value down for other properties, and sends out the false vision, like Detroit’s abandoned structures, that just a “little rehab” and their new manifestations will be readily available. Learning from Detroit, it is more beneficial to raze abandoned buildings and build anew turn-around, rather than considering restoration or preservation.

Accordingly, demolition of blighted buildings can reinvigorate a community. The building materials can be re-purposed. Bricks can simply be re-used; scrap metal can be recycled; the wood can grind down to chip/saw-dust; concrete can grind down to sand-fill; and on and on.

Imagine the jobs.
Image the restoration, the renewal, the refresh … in the community.
Even the newly-razed land-lots can be put into service as community gardens; or just left as vacant land-lots, therefore posing no risk or dangers to the community – see VIDEO below.

The book details other ethos to adopt, plus the executions of the following strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to impact the reboot and turn-around of Caribbean communities:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – People Respond to Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Job Multiplier	Page 22
Community Ethos – Light Up the Dark Places	Page 23
Community Ethos – “Crap” Happens	Page 23
Community Ethos – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Return on Investments (ROI)	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship	Page 28
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact a Turn-Around	Page 33
Community Ethos – Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Customers – Foreign Direct Investors	Page 48
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Modeling Post WW II Germany – Reboot with Marshall Plan	Page 68
Tactical – Modeling Post WW II Japan – Reboot with no Marshall Plan	Page 69
Separation of Powers – Public Works & Infrastructure	Page 82
Separation of Powers – Housing and Urban Authority	Page 83
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Ways to Re-boot Freeport – Sample Failed City	Page 112
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices	Page 132
Planning – Lessons Learned from 2008	Page 136
Planning – Lessons from Detroit	Page 140
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Local Government	Page 169
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Reboot Cuba	Page 226
Advocacy – Ways to Reboot Haiti	Page 238
Advocacy – Ways to Reboot Jamaica	Page 239

The foregoing news article aligns with the publishers of the Go Lean book for the purpose of empowering and rebooting economic engines. The roadmap calls for the heavy-lifting of working with individuals, families, communities and nation-states to turn-around and reboot the region’s future prospect. There is the need for this re-boot so as to make the Caribbean better.

The Caribbean is arguably the best address on the planet, but there is a lot missing; like Detroit we have blight and urban decay (with dangerous buildings). So the example from Detroit is a good model to reboot the societal engines in our region. There are benefits to demolition, but there is also the need for caution. Crony-Capitalism can easily seep in to exploit public funds for private gain. So there are security and governing concerns as well. See the photos here of the Detroit Demolition Tracker, attempting to provide transparency for better governance.

The Go Lean roadmap provides a complete plan to reboot Caribbean economic-security-governing engines. The region is hereby urged to lean-in to this roadmap, to make the homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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Appendix VIDEO – Watch Detroit Demolish 2 Houses in 2 Minutes – https://youtu.be/ML5l8GrJEe0

Published on Jul 6, 2016 – Watch the time lapse video of two demolitions in Detroit. For more information, visit detroitmi.gov/demolition.

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