History – Page 4 – Go Lean…Caribbean

Tag: History

More Storms: Rinse and Repeat – Encore

Posted on September 3, 2019 in Government, Strategy

I have friends …

… that live in North America and Europe. They always ask about visiting the many beautiful islands of the Caribbean. I strongly urge them to come on down and “be our guest“; to consume our hospitality, enjoy our culture, food, spirits, cigars, festivals, fishing, resorts and cruises.

But, I caution them: Do not come between August 15 and September 15; this is the peak of our mean season! This is when we Rinse and Repeat.

This has often been the case over the years – see Table 1 below – and this is true this year as well. The Bahamas just endured Category 5 Hurricane Dorian and now … there are other storms on the radar screen, in the vicinity. See photo here:

Rinse and Repeat is more than just a shampoo instruction, it is what we endure in the Caribbean region every year during Hurricane Season. Lastly, it is also the title of a previous blog-commentary from August 30, 2017.

Table 1 – Highest Number of named storm occurrences by month
Month
Month	Storms	Season
January	1	1938, 1951, 1978, 2016
February	1	1952†
March	1	1908†
April	1	1992, 2003, 2017
May	2	1887, 2012
June	3	1886, 1936, 1968
July	5	2005
August	8	2004, 2012
September	8	2002, 2010
October	8	1950
November	3	2005
December	2	1887, 2003
Based on data from: U.S. NOAA Coastal Service Center – Historical Hurricane Tracks Tool
† – Highest number for month by virtue of being only known season to see a storm form

Again, imagine 8 named storms in the same month; that is truly Rinse and Repeat. This is our reality. It is only apropos to Encore that previous blog-commentary here-now:

———–

Go Lean Commentary – Disaster Preparation: ‘Rinse and Repeat’

The reality of Caribbean life: we must contend with natural disasters, not of our making, “again and again”. The situation can be described as “Rinse and Repeat“.

Climate Change is not of our making, but it is our problem. Truth be told, it is not just our problem alone; the whole planet is affected. Right now this moment, the Greater Metropolitan area of Houston, Texas USA is suffering “pangs of distress”; see the VIDEO in the Appendix below.

It is what it is!

Some communities have done a better job than others in preparing for the unavoidable:

“Some communities”? “Better job“? That is not us … in the Caribbean!

As related in a previous Go Lean commentary, our Caribbean region has failed … in our managing this Agent-of-Change:

… we do not have the luxury of “sticking our head in the sand” and pretending that these problems will simply go away. The region has been devastated with this dysfunction and mis-management. Some 70% of Caribbean college-educated citizens have already fled their homelands in an undisputed brain drain. It’s time now to manage change differently than the Caribbean has done as of late. It’s time now to “Go Lean”.

The book Go Lean…Caribbean – available to download for free – serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), for the elevation of Caribbean society – for all member-states. This CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives for us to do a better job:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs. This includes an efficient Emergency Management apparatus to ensure business continuity.
Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies. We can “move” member-state governments simply through funding, rankings and ratings.

The book stresses that reforming and transforming the Caribbean societal engines must be a regional pursuit. This was an early motivation for the roadmap, as pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 12 – 13):

i. Whereas the earth’s climate has undeniably changed resulting in more severe tropical weather storms, it is necessary to prepare to insure the safety and security of life, property and systems of commerce in our geographical region. As nature recognizes no borders in the target of its destruction, we also must set aside border considerations in the preparation and response to these weather challenges.

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

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt new community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines of Caribbean society, for better preparation for natural disasters. Consider the Chapter excerpts and headlines here from this sample on Page 184 entitled:

10 Ways to Improve for Natural Disasters

1	Emergence of the Caribbean Union Lean-in for the Caribbean Single Market & Economy initiative as the Caribbean Union Trade Federation. This allows for the unification of the 30 member-states into one market, thereby spreading the risk and premium base across a market of 42 million people. The Caribbean member-states have Hurricane Katrina styled disasters (relatively speaking) every year.
2	Caribbean Emergency Management Agency – Federal Disaster Declarations Modeled after FEMA in the US, this agency will be charged with the preparation, response and reconstruction for the regions for the eventual manifestations of hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, flooding and other declared disasters, natural and man-made like medical epidemic, drought, pollution, oil spills, terrorism, etc.
3	Support Services for First Responders Training, licensing and standards for Emergency Managers, Paramedics, Firefighters, Search and Rescue resources. For major disasters, some of these resources will come from international origins; they will need the support services (language translation, guides, maps, etc.) and coordination to maximize their results.
4	Animal Partner Training and Development Maintain plantations for the training, development and boarding of “search & rescue” dogs, cadavers dogs and other service animals (horses, mules, pigs, etc.) so that there will be local resources within the region. (We cannot always depend on international responses in light of other regions experiencing their own disasters). These animals need not be owned by any one member-state, they can be on loan from CU resources.
5	Siren Warnings & Notifications The CU will install tornado-style alarms/sirens in all major municipalities. In addition, the CU will implement tsunami warning messaging (emails/text) in coastal areas & seismic meters throughout the region in the affected “fault-line” areas.
6	Airlift & Sealift Authorizations The CU Emergency Management Agency can license, regulate and authorize (air & sea) vessels and vehicles for emergency deployment in a disaster zone, before during and after the disastrous event.
7	JUA-style Insurance Fund The fiduciary management of premiums and claims to allow the immediate response for reconstruction after disasters. These financial services, sidecars traded in markets can be direct or indirect as in reinsurance or insurer-of-last-resort.
8	Economic Crime Enforcement During and After Disasters The CU will police, investigate and prosecute price gouging, insurance red lining and other economic crimes of both the “white collar” and “blue collar” variety. Once a CU-member-state declares a Disaster Emergency, new rules (quasi-Marshall Law) goes into effect. The CU will review and prosecute the actions of civilians and institutions alike.
9	Disaster Declaration Loans Once there’s a Federal Disaster Declaration, the CU will make funds available for low-interest loans for communities to fund reconstructions. With tourism as a major “cash crop” the goal will be to restore the locality as a tourist destination as soon as possible, as even the perception of prolonged disaster damage can affect future bookings and travel plans.
10	Building Codes and Standards Through peer review, the CU will regionalize the standards of building codes to assuage the threat of hurricanes and earthquakes, ensuring a higher survivability rate in the Caribbean islands. Due to economic pressures, when buildings and homes cannot be retrofitted, they will be rated for evacuation during hurricane warnings, or earthquake after-shocks.

The Caribbean must foster a better disaster preparation and response apparatus. We must do it now! Lives are at stake.

Just look at our American neighbors – they are suffering right now in the Greater Metropolitan area of Houston, Texas.

While Climate Change is the underlying Agent-of-Change, it is outside of our control. This does not imply that there is no remediation for Climate Change; there is. In fact …

Fix ‘Climate Change’ – Yes, We Can

We do not have the resources (time, talent and treasuries) to fix Climate Change for the planet ourselves, but we can fix it in our Caribbean region. This is a “Lesson in History” that our community has learned … from back in 1863:

There is an important lesson to learn in considering the history of the American Civil War. The war was fought over the issue of slavery. This was an ugly institution for those condemned as slaves. In the United States, that ugly disposition extended beyond the slaves themselves to the entire Black race. Though individuals could be set free, laws in the country could push them back into slavery without any due process. This was the case with the “Fugitive Slave Act of 1850″. Any Black person could be detained as a runaway slave and returned to any alleged Slave Master in the South; no matter any proof or the truth, or lack there-of. In many jurisdictions, a Black man could not even testify against white people. (This was the basis for the autobiographical book – by Solomon Northup – and movie “12 Years A Slave”).

To be Black in the America of those days, one “could not win, could not break-even and could not get out of the game”. There was no neutral destination in America. The optimal option was the only option, to work towards the end of slavery.

For this reason many Blacks joined the war effort, at great sacrifice to themselves and their community. This was a matter of principle! There is an important lesson for the Caribbean from this history^[1] :

The 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was an infantry regiment that saw extensive service in the Union Army during the American Civil War. The regiment was one of the first official African-American units in the United States during the Civil War.

Remediating and mitigating Climate Change will be a battle. We need our own “Voluntary Infantry“ in this fight.

“We have a dog in this fight” – English language slang.

In the Caribbean, we must confederate and implement the institutions to work to remediate and mitigate Climate Change. We must “join in this fight”; we must Go Green and we must Go Blue. We have to be prepared for natural disasters – they will come … assuredly every season, some Caribbean destination will be impacted. We must be prepared to:

Rinse and Repeat.

If we are ready, to quickly respond, offer relief and rebuild – so as to guarantee the business continuity – we would then do a better job in our quest to make our homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

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

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

———–

Appendix VIDEO – Historic flooding inundates Texas, hampering rescue efforts – https://youtu.be/Da-VS39gdfQ

PBS NewsHour
Published on Aug 27, 2017 – Houston’s mayor on Sunday urged his constituents in the nation’s fourth-largest city to stay off roadways as the state of Texas continues to contend with unprecedented flooding from Hurricane Harvey, now classified as a tropical storm. Officials said rising waters would reach catastrophic proportions, with more than 2,500 emergency calls made overnight in Houston alone. Hari Sreenivasan has more.

Category: People & Blogs
License: Standard YouTube License

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Disaster, Green Energy, History, Model, Power

Disaster Relief: Helping, Not Hurting – Encore

Posted on September 2, 2019 in Government, Implementation

It’s happened again …

… a Climate-Change-infused hurricane has devastated the Commonwealth of the Bahamas; every year there seems to be one Caribbean country after another who suffers this fate; think Barbuda, Puerto Rico, etc.. In this case, it is the deadly Category 5 Hurricane Dorian.

Now it is time for the response:

Rescue
Relief
Recovery
Rebuilding

The appeal has gone out for aid … and supplies…

… but the truth of the matter, the best way to help is to just write a check or submit a credit card. The call for supplies can be interpreted in “oh so many wrong ways”. This theme was thoroughly detailed in a previous blog-commentary from April 26, 2016 in support of Haiti’s 2010 Earthquake Relief; it is only appropriate to Encore that submission now because …

… the Bahamas needs all the help it can get; see the previous entry here-now:

————–
Go Lean Commentary – The Logistics of Disaster Relief

It is during the worst of times that we see the best in people.

This statement needs to be coupled with the age old proverb: “The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions“…

… especially when it comes to disaster relief.

In previous blog-commentaries promoting the book Go Lean…Caribbean, it was established that “bad things happen to good people”; (i.e. ‘Crap Happens’ – So What Now?, Managing a ‘Clear and Present Danger’). Yes, disasters are a reality for modern life. The Go Lean book posits that with the emergence of Climate Change that natural disasters are more common place.

In addition there are earthquakes …

… these natural phenomena may not be associated with Climate Change, but alas, they too are more common and more destructive nowadays. (People with a Christian religious leanings assert that “an increase of earthquakes is a tell-tale sign that we are living in what the Bible calls the “Last Days” – Matthew 24: 7).

The motives of the Go Lean book, and accompanying blogs is not to proselytize, but rather to prepare the Caribbean region for “bad actors”, natural or man-made. The book was written in response to the aftermath and deficient regional response following the great earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010. Many Non-Government Organizations (NGO) embarked on campaigns to shoulder a response, a relief and rebuilding of Haiti. Many people hold the view that those efforts did a lot of harm, along with some good.

In a previous blog-commentary, it was reported how the fundraising campaign by one group, the American Red Cross, raised almost US$500 million and yet only a “piddling” was spent on the victims and communities themselves.

Now we learn too that many good-intentioned people donated tons of relief supplies that many times turned out to be “more harm than help”. See the story here in this news VIDEO; (and/or the Narration Transcript/photos in the Appendix below):

VIDEO – When disaster relief brings anything but relief – http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/disaster-relief-donations-that-dont-bring-relief

Posted April 24, 2016 – Many of the well-meaning articles Americans donate in times of disaster turn out to be of no use to those in need. Sometimes, they even get in the way. That’s a message relief organizations very much want “us” to heed. This story is reported by Scott Simon, [on loan from] NPR. (VIDEO plays best in Internet Explorer).

This commentary asserts that more is needed in the Caribbean to facilitate good disaster relief, in particular a technocratic administration. This consideration is the focus of the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies of the Go Lean…Caribbean book. The declaration is that the Caribbean itself must be agile, lean, and optimized in providing its own solutions for disaster recovery. The alternative, from past experiences like in this foregoing VIDEO, is that others taking the lead for our solution seem to fall short in some way … almost every time!

The Caribbean must now stand up and be counted!

The Go Lean book declares (Page 115) that the “Caribbean should not be perennial beggars, [even though] we do need capital/money to get started”, we need technocratic executions even more.

What is a technocracy?

This is the quest of the Go Lean movement. The movement calls for a treaty to form a technocratic confederation of all the 30 member-states in the Caribbean region. This will form a Single Market of 42 million. The consolidation and integration allows for economies-of-scale and leverage that would not be possible otherwise. “Many hands make a big job … small”. But it is not just size that will define the Caribbean technocracy but quality, efficiency and optimization as well.

According to the Go Lean book (Page 64), the …

“… term technocracy was originally used to designate the application of the scientific method to solving social and economic problems, in counter distinction to the traditional political or philosophic approaches. The CU must start as a technocratic confederation – a Trade Federation – rather than evolving to this eventuality due to some failed-state status or insolvency.”

The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) to provide better stewardship for the Caribbean homeland. The foregoing VIDEO describes the efforts of non-governmental organizations (NGO) in shepherding disaster reliefs. These NGO’s are stakeholders in this Caribbean elevation roadmap. Even though many of the 30 member-states are independent nations, the premise of the Go Lean book is that there must be a resolve for interdependence among the governmental and non-governmental entities. This all relates to governance, the need for this new technocratic stewardship of regional Caribbean society. The need for this resolve was pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 11 & 14) with these acknowledgements and statements:

i.    Whereas the earth’s climate has undeniably changed resulting in more severe tropical weather storms, it is necessary to prepare to insure the safety and security of life, property and systems of commerce in our geographical region. As nature recognizes no borders in the target of its destruction, we also must set aside border considerations in the preparation and response to these weather challenges.

ii.    Whereas the natural formation of the landmass for our lands constitutes some extreme seismic activity, it is our responsibility and ours alone to provide, protect and promote our society to coexist, prepare and recover from the realities of nature’s occurrences.

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.

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 [other] communities.

This is the quest of CU/Go Lean roadmap: to provide new guards for a more competent Caribbean administration … by governmental organizations and non-governmental organizations. (NGO would also be promoted, audited and overseen by CU administrators). The Caribbean must do better!

Our quest must start “in the calm”, before any storm (or earthquake). We must elevate the societal engines the Caribbean region through economic, security and governance empowerments. In general, the CU will employ better strategies, tactics and implementations to impact its prime directives; identified with the following 3 statements:

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

Former US President George W. Bush shares this advocacy!

He narrated this VIDEO here describing the efficiencies of the American logistics company, UPS, in delivering disaster relief:

VIDEO – Report Logistics and Haiti: Points of Light and President Bush – https://youtu.be/8-gmh1QyWTU

Uploaded on Mar 30, 2011 – [In 2009], Transportation Manager Chip Chappelle volunteered to help The UPS Foundation coordinate an ocean shipment of emergency tents from Indiana to Honduras. Since then, he has managed the logistics of humanitarian aid from every corner of the world to help the victims of floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes and cyclones.

The Go Lean book stresses our own community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies necessary for the Caribbean to deliver, to provide the proactive and reactive public safety/security provisions in the region. See sample list here:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Security Principles – Whistleblower Protection	Page 23
Community Ethos – Security Principles – Intelligence Gathering	Page 23
Community Ethos – Security Principles – “Crap” Happens	Page 23
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Return on Investments	Page 24
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Cooperatives	Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Turn-Arounds	Page 33
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing – Emergency Response	Page 35
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
Strategy – Mission – Prepare for the eventuality of natural disasters	Page 45
Strategy – Agents of Change – Climate Change	Page 57
Tactical – Ways to Foster a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Growing the Economy – Post WW II European Marshall Plan/Recovery Model	Page 68
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers – CU Federal Government versus Member-State Governance	Page 71
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers – Homeland Security – Emergency Management	Page 76
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers – State Department – Liaison/Oversight for NGO’s	Page 80
Implementation – Assemble All Regionally-focus Organizations of All Caribbean Communities	Page 96
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Ways to Foster International Aid	Page 115
Planning – 10 Big Ideas – Homeland Security Pact	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices – Governance and the Social Contract	Page 134
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Housing – Hurricane Risk Reinsurance Fund	Page 161
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance	Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security	Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Improve for Natural Disasters	Page 184
Advocacy – Ways to Develop a Pre-Fab Housing Industry – One solution ideal for Haiti	Page 207
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti	Page 238

The Go Lean roadmap seeks to empower and elevate Caribbean societal engines to be better prepared for the eventual natural disasters. The good intentions of Americans, as depicted in the foregoing VIDEO, is encouraging … but good intentions alone is not enough. We need good management! We need a technocracy! While it is out-of-scope for this roadmap to impact America, we can – and must – exercise good management in our Caribbean region. So what do we want from Americans in our time of need? See VIDEO here:

VIDEO – Donate Responsibly – https://youtu.be/14h9_9sopRA

Published on Nov 2, 2012 – A series of PSAs released by the Ad Council explain why cash is the best way to help. The campaign was launched on November 5, 2012 by the Ad Council and supported by the coalition — which includes CIDI, the U.S. Agency for International Development, InterAction, the UPS Foundation and National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster.

The Go Lean book calls on the Caribbean region to be more technocratic: collectively self-reliant, both proactively and reactively. Because of Climate Change or the Last Days, natural disasters (i.e. hurricanes and earthquakes) will occur again and again. Considering that our American neighbors may Pave our Road to Hell with Good Intentions, we need to prepare the right strategies, tactics and implementations ourselves, to make our region a better homeland to live, work and play. 🙂

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

——————

Appendix Transcript – When disaster relief brings anything but relief

When Nature grows savage and angry, Americans get generous and kind. That’s admirable. It might also be a problem.

“Generally after a disaster, people with loving intentions donate things that cannot be used in a disaster response, and in fact may actually be harmful,” said Juanita Rilling, director of the Center for International Disaster Information in Washington, D.C. “And they have no idea that they’re doing it.”

Rilling has spent more than a decade trying to tell well-meaning people to think before they give.

In 1998 Hurricane Mitch struck Honduras. More than 11,000 people died. More than a million and a half were left homeless.

And Rilling got a wake-up call: “Got a call from one of our logistics experts who said that a plane full of supplies could not land, because there was clothing on the runway. It’s in boxes and bales. It takes up yards of space. It can’t be moved.’ ‘Whose clothing is it?’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t know whose it is, but there’s a high-heeled shoe, just one, and a bale of winter coats.’ And I thought, winter coats? It’s summer in Honduras.”

Humanitarian workers call the crush of useless, often incomprehensible contributions “the second disaster.”

In 2004, following the Indian Ocean tsunami, a beach in Indonesia was piled with used clothing.

There was no time for disaster workers to sort and clean old clothes. So the contributions just sat and rotted.

“This very quickly went toxic and had to be destroyed,” said Rilling. “And local officials poured gasoline on it and set it on fire. And then it was out to sea.”

“So, rather than clothing somebody, it went up in flames?” asked Simon.

“Correct. The thinking is that these people have lost everything, so they must NEED everything. So people SEND everything. You know, any donation is crazy if it’s not needed. People have donated prom gowns and wigs and tiger costumes and pumpkins, and frostbite cream to Rwanda, and used teabags, ’cause you can always get another cup of tea.”

You may not think that sending bottles of water to devastated people seems crazy. But Rilling points out, “This water, it’s about 100,000 liters, will provide drinking water for 40,000 people for one day. This amount of water to send from the United States, say, to West Africa — and people did this — costs about $300,000. But relief organizations with portable water purification units can produce the same amount, a 100,000 liters of water, for about $300.”

And then there were warm-hearted American women who wanted to send their breast milk to nursing mothers in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

“It sounds wonderful, but in the midst of a crisis it’s actually one of the most challenging things,” said Rebecca Gustafson, a humanitarian aid expert who has worked on the ground after many disasters.

“Breast milk doesn’t stay fresh for very long. And the challenge is, what happens if you do give it to an infant who then gets sick?”

December 2012, Newtown, Connecticut: A gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Almost instantaneously, stuff start arriving.

Chris Kelsey, who worked for Newtown at the time, said they had to get a warehouse to hold all the teddy bears.

Simon asked, “Was there a need for teddy bears?”

“I think it was a nice gesture,” Kelsey replied. “There was a need to do something for the kids. There was a need to make people feel better. I think the wave of stuff we got was a little overwhelming in the end.”

And how many teddy bear came to Newtown? “I think it was about 67,000,” Kelsey said. “Wasn’t limited to teddy bears. There was also thousands of boxes of school supplies, and thousands of boxes of toys, bicycles, sleds, clothes.”

Newtown had been struck by mass murder, not a tsunami. As Kelsey said, “I think a lot of the stuff that came into the warehouse was more for the people that sent it, than it was for the people in Newtown. At least, that’s the way it felt at the end.”

Every child in Newtown got a few bears. The rest had to be sent away, along with the bikes and blankets.

There are times when giving things works. More than 650,000 homes were destroyed or damaged in Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Thousands of people lost everything.

Tammy Shapiro is one of the organizers of Occupy Sandy, which grew out of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“We were able to respond in a way that the big, bureaucratic agencies can’t,” Shapiro said.

When the hurricane struck, they had a network of activists, connected and waiting.

“Very quickly, we just stopped taking clothes,” Shapiro said. Instead, they created a “relief supply wedding registry.”

“We put the items that we needed donated on that registry,” said Shapiro. “And then people who wanted to donate could buy the items that were needed. I mean, a lot of what we had on the wedding registry was diapers. They needed flashlights.”

Simon asked, “How transportable is your experience here, following Hurricane Sandy?”

“For me, the network is key. Who has the knowledge? Where are spaces that goods can live if there’s a disaster? Who’s really well-connected on their blocks?”

Juanita Rilling’s album of disaster images shows shot after shot of good intentions just spoiling in warehouses, or rotting on the landscape.

“It is heartbreaking,” Rilling said. “It’s heartbreaking for the donor, it’s heartbreaking for the relief organizations, and it’s heartbreaking for survivors. This is why cash donations are so much more effective. They buy exactly what people need, when they need it.

“And cash donations enable relief organizations to purchase supplies locally, which ensures that they’re fresh and familiar to survivors, purchased in just the right quantities, and delivered quickly. And those local purchases support the local merchants, which strengthens the local economy for the long run.”

Disaster response worker Rebecca Gustafson says that most people want to donate something that is theirs: “Money sometimes doesn’t feel personal enough for people. They don’t feel enough of their heart and soul is in that donation, that check that they would send.

“The reality is, it’s one of the most compassionate things that people can do.”

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Bahamas, Disaster, History, Model, Security

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400 Years of Slavery – Sequel: Greatest Story Never Told

Posted on August 31, 2019 in Ethos, Social

Go Lean Commentary

We just completed a special series of blog-commentaries for the month of August 2019, commemorating and commiserating the “400 Years of African Slavery” on the American mainland. Yes, slavery started in America in August 1619, and we are now at a pivotal anniversary; but this is not an occasion to be proud. This was NOT America’s finest moment.

For the New World – discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492 – African Slavery was not exclusive to the United States of America (then British North America). No, there was a race to the bottom and every European power wanted to get in on it:

British – North America (today’s USA & Canada), Central America (today’s Belize), South America (today’s Guyana) and many Caribbean islands
Denmark-Norway – today’s US Virgin Islands
Dutch/Netherlands – Caribbean islands,
Sweden – Caribbean Island of St. Bartholomew
French – North America (think: Louisiana Purchase)
Portugal – Brazil
Spanish – Latin America

They all explored and settled colonies in the New World, instituting slavery in its wake.

Wait, wait?! No Germany, Italy or Belgium? These nations also engaged the race to exploit Africa and African people, but limited their involvement to the continent, rather than the New World. (The 1885 Berlin Conference gathered all these European powers to “divvy up” the continent for their own self-interest).

In between the initial New World exploration and the Berlin Conference, the Enlightenment Movement – “Age of Enlightenment” between 1650 to 1700 – took hold. It brought a new definition of Freedom, Egalitarianism and Liberalism. The orthodoxy of enslaving indigenous people (in the Americas or in Africa) came to be viewed as barbaric and uncivilized – thanks to a lot of Women in the Abolition Movement. By the 1770’s, there was momentum in the British Parliament to disenfranchise Slavery and the Slave Trade.

This history set the stage for the Greatest Story Never Told …

The 13 original colonies that rebelled and Declared their Independence from Great Britain, were not inclined to abandon slavery – not just yet. The official tagline of the Revolutionary War or America’s War for Independence (1776) was “a conflict of the American Patriots versus the British Loyalists”. But in actuality, the War could have been considered a Slavery Rebellion-in-Reverse; a revolt to maintain the orthodoxy of slavery.

Through out the New World, Slave Rebellions abounded – see Appendix below. But the enslaved African people were always a minority in America, while in the Caribbean territories, they were the majority population, on average 4:1, but in some cases, 7-to-1 … Africans versus European. This reality, and the accompanying injustice of slavery, was a “powder keg waiting to explode”. No one group had a greater incentive to fight than the slaves themselves. Many such slaves – 20,000 actually; see VIDEO below – joined in formal conflicts during the American Revolutionary War, fighting on the side of the British. See the full story here:

Title: The Ex-Slaves Who Fought with the British
Subtitle: While the patriots battled for freedom from Great Britain, upwards of 20,000 runaway slaves declared their own personal independence and fought on the side of the British.
By: Christopher Klein

When American colonists took up arms in a battle for independence starting in 1775, that fight for freedom excluded an entire race of people—African-Americans. On November 12, 1775, General George Washington decreed in his orders that “neither negroes, boys unable to bear arms, nor old men” could enlist in the Continental Army.

Two days after the patriots’ military leader banned African-Americans from joining his ranks, however, black soldiers proved their mettle at the Battle of Kemp’s Landing along the Virginia coast. They captured an enemy commanding officer and proved pivotal in securing the victory—for the British.

After the battle, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia who had been forced to flee the capital of Williamsburg and form a government in exile aboard the warship HMS Fowey, ordered the British standard raised before making a startling announcement. For the first time in public he formally read a proclamation that he had issued the previous week granting freedom to the slaves of rebels who escaped to British custody.

Dunmore’s Proclamation was “more an announcement of military strategy than a pronouncement of abolitionist principles,” according to author Gary B. Nash in “The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America.” The document not only provided the British with an immediate source of manpower, it weakened Virginia’s patriots by depriving them of their main source of labor.

Much like Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, however, Dunmore’s Proclamation was limited in scope. Careful not to alienate Britain’s white Loyalist allies, the measure applied only to slaves whose masters were in rebellion against the Crown. The British regularly returned slaves who fled from Loyalist masters.

Dunmore’s Proclamation inspired thousands of slaves to risk their lives in search of freedom. They swam, dog-paddled and rowed to Dunmore’s floating government-in-exile on Chesapeake Bay in order to find protection with the British forces. “By mid-1776, what had been a small stream of escaping slaves now turned into a torrent,” wrote Nash. “Over the next seven years, enslaved Africans mounted the greatest slave rebellion in American history.”

Among those slaves making a break for freedom were eight belonging to Peyton Randolph, speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and several belonging to patriot orator Patrick Henry who apparently took his famous words—“Give me liberty, or give me death!”—to heart and fled to British custody. Another runaway who found sanctuary with Dunmore was Harry Washington, who escaped from Mount Vernon while his famous master led the Continental Army.

Dunmore placed these “Black Loyalists” in the newly formed Ethiopian Regiment and had the words “Liberty to Slaves” embroidered on their uniform sashes. Since the idea of escaped slaves armed with guns stirred terror even among white Loyalists, Dunmore placated the slaveholders by primarily using the runaways as laborers building forts, bridges and trenches and engaging in trades such as shoemaking, blacksmithing and carpentry. Women worked as nurses, cooks and seamstresses.

As manpower issues grew more dire as the war progressed, however, the British army became more amenable to arming runaway slaves and sending them into battle. General Henry Clinton organized an all-black regiment, the “Black Pioneers.” Among the hundreds of runaway slaves in its ranks was Harry Washington, who rose to the rank of corporal and participated in the siege of Charleston.

On June 30, 1779, Clinton expanded on Dunmore’s actions and issued the Philipsburg Proclamation, which promised protection and freedom to all slaves in the colonies who escaped from their patriot masters. Blacks captured fighting for the enemy, however, would be sold into bondage.

According to Maya Jasanoff in her book “Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World,” approximately 20,000 black slaves joined the British during the American Revolution. In contrast, historians estimate that only about 5,000 black men served in the Continental Army.

As the American Revolution came to close with the British defeat at Yorktown in 1781, white Loyalists and thousands of their slaves evacuated Savannah and Charleston and resettled in Florida and on plantations in the Bahamas, Jamaica and other British territories throughout the Caribbean. The subsequent peace negotiations called for all slaves who escaped behind British lines before November 30, 1782, to be freed with restitution given to their owners. In order to determine which African-Americans were eligible for freedom and which weren’t, the British verified the names, ages and dates of escape for every runaway slave in their custody and recorded the information in what was called the “Book of Negroes.”

With their certificates of freedom in hand, 3,000 black men, women and children joined the Loyalist exodus from New York to Nova Scotia in 1783. There the Black Loyalists found freedom, but little else. After years of economic hardship and denial of the land and provisions they had been promised, nearly half of the Black Loyalists abandoned the Canadian province. Approximately 400 sailed to London, while in 1792 more than 1,200 brought their stories full circle and returned to Africa in a new settlement in [Freetown,] Sierra Leone. Among the newly relocated was the former slave of the newly elected president of the United States — Harry Washington — who returned to the land of his birth.

Source: Posted August 22, 2018; retrieved August 29, 2019 from: https://www.history.com/news/the-ex-slaves-who-fought-with-the-british

—————

VIDEO – History Stories – Slavery – https://www.history.com/news/the-ex-slaves-who-fought-with-the-british

The Greatest Story Never Told led to the origins of the City of Freetown, Sierra Leone in Africa. This tale features the full circle of those stakeholders, the Black Loyalists: enslaved in America; fought for the Royal Army; sought refuge in Canada, London and then repatriated to Africa.

Wow!

Among the nameless masses of 20,000 people, was the 1 named-hero: Harry Washington, the ex-slave of the First American President George Washington. See his story here:

Harry Washington (c. 1740–1800) was known as a slave of Virginia planter George Washington, later the first President of the United States. He served as a Black Loyalist in the American Revolutionary War and was granted his freedom by the British and evacuated to Nova Scotia. In 1792 he joined nearly 1200 freedmen for resettlement in Sierra Leone, where they set up a colony of free people of color.

Harry had been born in Gambia and sold into slavery as a war captive. He was purchased by George Washington, who had plantations in Virginia. During the American Revolutionary War, Harry Washington escaped from slavery in Virginia and served as a corporal in the Black Pioneers attached to a British artillery unit. After the war he was among Black Loyalists resettled by the British in Nova Scotia, where they were granted land. There Washington married Jenny, another freed American slave.

In 1792 the couple were among more than 1,000 freedmen chosen to migrate to Sierra Leone, West Africa, where the British had established a new colony of people of African descent.
…
Source: Retrieved August 29, 2019 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Washington

“This” is the personification of the Greatest Story Never Told!

This is a sequel, a supplemental blog-commentary to the recently completed 5-part series from the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean for August 2019. This series was composed to remember, reflect and reconcile the 400 Years of Slavery history in the American experience – 1619 until … today. The full series of these blogs-commentaries this month were cataloged as follows:

400 Years of Slavery: America, Not the first
400 Years of Slavery: International Day of Remembrance
400 Years of Slavery: Emancipation Day – Hardly ‘Free At Last’
400 Years of Slavery: Where is home?
400 Years of Slavery: Cop-on-Black Shootings in America’s DNA

This theme, discrediting the Moral High Ground in the history of American Patriotism, has been previously analyzed in numerous Go Lean commentaries; see a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12380	‘4th of July’ and Slavery – Should ‘We’ Be Celebrating?
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=11870	America’s First Official Victims: Indian Termination Policy
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=11048	The Missing Model of Hammurabi: No one is Managing the ‘Strong versus the Weak’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4971	A Lesson in History – Truth & Consequence of Royal Charters: Slavery

The Greatest Story Never Told is not very flattening of the United States of America. Nor does it extol honor on the British hierarchy – in the Peace Treaty to end the Revolutionary War, the British returned many runaway slaves to their previous masters. No, the heroes are the slaves who bravely fought for their chance of freedom for themselves and their children. The actuality of racial oppression, suppression and repression of being a Black Man in America was tragic. The biggest learned-lesson was:

Do not count on the White Man to bring you salvation.

This thought was embedded in the Go Lean book (Page 21), with this quotation:

The African Diaspora experience in the New World is one of “future” gratification, as the generations that sought freedom from slavery knew that their children, not them, would be the beneficiaries of that liberty. This ethos continued with subsequent generations expecting that their “children” would be more successful in the future than the parents may have been.

Reflecting on the history of 400 Years of Slavery in America, reminds us that we must do the heavy-lifting ourselves to reform and transform our society. We cannot count on the Americans nor the British, or any Europeans for that matter, to save us. We must save ourselves!

How?

This is the purpose of the Go Lean roadmap; it features the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies for us to make the Caribbean member-states a better place to live, work and play … on our own. We urge every Caribbean stakeholder to lean-in to this roadmap. Yes we can! 🙂

About the Book
The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), for the elevation of Caribbean society – for all member-states. This CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

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

Who We Are
The movement behind the Go Lean book – a non-partisan, apolitical, religiously-neutral Community Development Foundation chartered for the purpose of empowering and re-booting economic engines – stresses that reforming and transforming the Caribbean societal engines must be a regional pursuit. This was an early motivation for the roadmap, as pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 12 – 13):

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

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

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

————–

Appendix – Revolts of the Caribbean Islands
Vincent Brown, a professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard, has made a study of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In 2013, Brown teamed up with Axis Maps to create an interactive map of Jamaican slave uprisings in the 18th century called, “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761, A Cartographic Narrative.”^[14] Brown’s efforts have shown that the slave insurrection in Jamaica in 1760-61 was a carefully planned affair and not a spontaneous, chaotic eruption, as was often argued (due in large part to the lack of written records produced by the insurgents).^[15]

Later, in 1795, several slave rebellions broke out across the Caribbean, influenced by the Haitian Revolution:

In Jamaica, the descendants of Africans who fought and escaped from slavery and established free communities in the mountainous interior of Jamaica (Maroons), fought to preserve their freedom from British colonialists, in what came to be known as the Second Maroon War.
In Dominica there was the Colihault Uprising.
In Saint Lucia there was the Bush War.
In the Saint Vincent islands the Second Carib War broke out.
In Grenada there was the Fedon Rebellion.^[16]
Curaçao had a slave revolt in 1795, led by Tula.
In Venezuela, José Leonardo Chirino’s Insurrection occurred in 1795.
In Barbados, a slave revolt occurred in 1816, led by Bussa.
In Guyana there was the Demerara Rebellion of 1795.^[17]
In the British Virgin Islands, minor slave revolts occurred in 1790, 1823 and 1830.
In the Danish West Indies an 1848 slave revolt led to emancipation of all slaves in the Danish West Indies.
In Puerto Rico in 1821, Marcos Xiorro planned and conspired to lead a slave revolt against the sugar plantation owners and the Spanish Colonial government. Even though the conspiracy was unsuccessful, Xiorro achieved legendary status among the slaves and is part of Puerto Rico’s folklore.^[18]

Source: Retrieved August 29, 2019 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demerara_rebellion_of_1823

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400 Years of Slavery – Cop-on-Black Shootings in America’s DNA – Encore

Posted on August 30, 2019 in Ethos, Social

Slavery was clearly an oppression, suppression and repression of the African race on American soil. This was true in the Year 1619 … and unfortunately; there is still some truth to this assessment in 2019, 400 years later. See this case-in-point:

Title: What New Research Says About Race and Police Shootings
By: Brentin Mock

In the U.S., African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people. For black women, the rate is 1.4 times more likely.

That’s according to a new study conducted by Frank Edwards, of Rutgers University’s School of Criminal Justice, Hedwig Lee, of Washington University in St. Louis’s Department of Sociology, and Michael Esposito, of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. The researchers used verified data on police killings from 2013 to 2018 compiled by the website Fatal Encounters, created by Nevada-based journalist D. Brian Burghart. Under their models, they found that roughly 1-in-1,000 black boys and men will be killed by police in their lifetime. For white boys and men, the rate is 39 out of 100,000.

In fact, people of color in general were found more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts. …

Source: Posted August 6, 2019; retrieved August 29, 2019 from: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/police-officer-shootings-gun-violence-racial-bias-crime-data/595528/

This is the final submission in this series of blog-commentaries from the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean for August 2019. This final entry, 5-of-5 in this series, focuses on the lingering effects of racial oppression-suppression-repression of the African race in America. Clearly, the American scales of justice are not balanced. This acknowledgement aligns and complements the entire series as it was composed to remember, reflect and reconcile the history of 400 Years of Slavery in the American experience – 1619 until … today. The full series of these blogs-commentaries this month is cataloged as follows:

400 Years of Slavery: America, Not the first
400 Years of Slavery: International Day of Remembrance
400 Years of Slavery: Emancipation Day – Hardly ‘Free At Last’
400 Years of Slavery: Where is home?
400 Years of Slavery: Cop-on-Black Shootings in America’s DNA

Assuredly, there is no slavery in America today; yet there is still some racial oppression-suppression-and-repression, especially evident in the dynamic of Cop-on-Black Shootings. This sober subject matter had been thoroughly dissected in a previous Go Lean commentary from April 9, 2018.

It is only apropos to Encore that previous blog-commentary here-now:

———————-

Go Lean Commentary – Nature or Nurture: Cop-on-Black Shootings – Embedded in America’s DNA

It happens so often, it rarely gets attention anymore; Police-on-Black shootings that is!

It seems to be a constant feature of American life. See the latest high profile one – Stephon Clark – in the Appendix below.

What’s worse, when it happens, the White people in America, just yawns. Sad, but true!

Is this phenomenon the Nature of the United States of America, or is it Nurture?

The answer is complicated; the answer is both!

This commentary continues the 4-part series on Nature or Nurture for community ethos. This entry is 2 of 4 in this series from the movement behind the book Go Lean … Caribbean in consideration of root causes of some societal defects – specific examples in the US and UK – and how to overcome them. The other commentaries in the series are cataloged as follows:

Nature or Nurture: Black Marchers see gun violence differently
Nature or Nurture: Cop-on-Black Shootings – Embedded in America’s DNA; Whites Yawn
Nature or Nurture: UK City of Bristol still paying off Slavery Debt
Nature or Nurture: Nurturing comes from women; “they” impacted the Abolition of Slavery

In the first submission to this series, the history of Psychology was introduced, which quoted:

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

All of these commentaries relate to “why” the New World – including the US and the Caribbean – has the societal defects that are so prominent – and so illogical – and “how” the stewards for a new Caribbean can assuage these defects and the resultant failing dispositions among Caribbean society. Though the traits may be consistent in the hemisphere, our efforts to reform and transform is limited to the Caribbean.

The subject of Police-On-Black shootings is a familiar theme for this commentary, from the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean – available to download for free. The book asserts that there is a consistent lack of respect for those in America fitting a “Poor Black” attribute. In fact these prior blog-commentaries doubled-down on this assertion:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13081	America’s Race Relations – Spot-on for Protest
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8202	Lessons Learned from American Dysfunctional Minority Relations
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8200	Climate of Hate for American Minorities
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7221	Street naming for Martin Luther King unveils the real America
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5527	American Defects: Racism – Is It Over?
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4863	Video of Police Shooting: Worth a Million Words
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=546	Book Review – ‘The Divide’ – Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=341	Hypocritical US slams Caribbean human rights practices

Say it ain’t so … it is a dangerous proposition to be Black in America. In fact one Caribbean member-states – The Bahamas, a majority Black population – had urged their young men traveling to the US to exercise extreme caution when dealing with police authorities. This advice is Spot-on!

The Nature of the US is that Black people – especially men and boys – have always had to contend with an unjust society in terms of justice and the security apparatus. Since the subject of Nature assumes that racism is predisposed in a society’s DNA, despite the fact that formal slavery ended 150 years ago, it is no surprise that Blacks in America have seen a continuous suppression, repression and oppression of any justice requirements.

After all, this is the population that suffered so much of the indignity of lynching.

Yes, we are going there …

Despite the fact that African slaves were taken to all New World territories, the country with this acute practice was only the United States of America. Surely, this had a lingering effect on the culture and society. This effect was not only on the victims, but on society in general, and the law enforcement establishment.

Imagine people gathering in their Sunday Best Clothes to watch the lynching (murder) of a Black man with no trial or due process. Imagine the effect that would instill on that community? Would that forge concern and consideration for the targeted population?

Now imagine that drama repeated again and again … 4733 times.

According to a previous Go Lean commentary, 4,733 people were documented as being lynched. That’s a huge number. To think there would be no impact on the Nature of a society is inconceivable. This theme was also conveyed in the TV news magazine 60 Minutes. See the full story here:

VIDEO – Inside the memorial to victims of lynching – https://www.cbsnews.com/video/inside-the-memorial-to-victims-of-lynching/

Posted April 8, 2018 – Oprah Winfrey reports on the Alabama memorial dedicated to thousands of African-American men, women and children lynched over a 70-year period following the Civil War.

Surely this country – the America of Old – would have been no place for Caribbean people to seek refuge. The Nuturing of American society continued to develop a nonchalance to injustice for the Black people of the US. This is where the Nature has been supplanted by the Nurture. This is why stories like Stephon Clark continue to emerge and why White America “continue to yawn”. Surely this society – modern America – is no place for Black-and-Brown Caribbean people to seek refuge.

Yet, the region – all 30 member-states – continue to suffer from an abominable brain drain rate in which so many Caribbean citizens have emigrated to the US, and other countries. (One reported has rated the brain drain rate of 70 percent).

The book Go Lean…Caribbean asserts that it is easier for the Black-and-Brown populations in the Caribbean to prosper where planted in the Caribbean, rather than emigrating to foreign countries, like the United States. If only we can reform and transform our own society so as to dissuade our people from leaving to seek refuge in the US. This is the quest of the Go Lean book, to serve as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The book presents 370 pages of instructions for how to reform and transform our Caribbean member-states. It stresses the key community ethos that needs to be adopted, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies necessary to optimize the societal engines in a community.

The CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives for optimizing our societal engines:

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

As related in this blog series on Nature or Nurture, the Caribbean has the same Nature as our American counterparts, but not the same Nurture. Our majority Black-and-Brown populations have forged different societies than the baseline US. And we are not wanting to be like America …

… we want to be better.

This is not just a dream; this is a roadmap that is conceivable, believable and achievable. Yes, we can … reform and transform our society. We can make our homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

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

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

————

Appendix – Shooting of Stephon Clark

Stephon Clark was shot and killed on the evening of March 18, 2018, by two officers of the Sacramento Police Department in Sacramento, California, United States. The officers were looking for a suspect who was breaking windows in the Meadowview neighborhood, and confronted Clark, an unarmed 22-year-old African-American man whom they found in the yard of his grandmother’s house, where he resided. Clark ran from the police in an encounter that was filmed by police video cameras. The officers stated that they shot Clark, firing 20 rounds, believing that he had pointed a gun at them. After the shooting, police reported that he was carrying only a cell phone. According to an independent autopsy, Clark was shot eight times including six times in the back.

The shooting caused large protests in Sacramento, and Clark’s family members have rejected the initial police description of the events leading to Clark’s death. The Sacramento Police Department placed the officers on paid administrative leave and opened a use of force investigation. Police have stated they are confident that Clark was the person responsible for breaking windows in the area prior to the encounter.

…

Shooting

The Sacramento Police Department stated that on Sunday, March 18 at 9:18 p.m., two officers were responding to a call that someone was breaking car windows.^[3] In a media release after the shooting, police stated that they had been looking for a suspect hiding in a backyard. They said the suspect was a thin black man, 6 feet 1 inch (185 cm) in height, wearing darkly colored pants and a black hooded sweatshirt.^[3] A sheriff’s helicopter spotted a man at 9:25 p.m. in a nearby backyard and told officers on the ground that he had shattered a window using a tool bar, run to the front of that house, and then looked in an adjacent car.^[3]

Officers on the ground entered the front yard of Clark’s grandmother’s home, and saw Clark next to the home.^[10][3] Vance Chandler, the Sacramento Police Department spokesman, said that Clark was the same man who had been breaking windows, and was tracked by police in helicopters.^[3] Chandler said that when Clark was confronted and ordered to stop and show his hands, Clark fled to the back of the property.^[3]

Police body camera footage from both of the officers who shot Clark recorded the incident, though the footage is dark and shaky.^[10][11] In the videos, officers spot Clark in his grandmother’s driveway and shout “Hey, show me your hands. Stop. Stop.”^[10] The video shows that the officers chased Clark into the backyard and an officer yells, “Show me your hands! Gun!” About three seconds elapse and then the officer yells, “Show me your hands! Gun, gun, gun”, before shooting Clark.^[10][11]

According to the police, before being shot Clark turned and held an object that he “extended in front of him” while he moved towards the officers.^[3] The officers said they believed that Clark was pointing a gun at them.^[6] The police stated that the officers feared for their safety, and at 9:26 p.m., fired 20 rounds, hitting Clark multiple times.^[6][3] According to an independent autopsy, Clark was shot eight times, including six times in the back.^[1] The report found that one of the bullets to strike Clark from the front was likely fired while he was already on the ground.^[1]

Body-cam footage shows that after shooting him, the officers continued to yell at him as one shined a flashlight at him and they kept their guns aimed at him. One officer stated in one of the body-cam videos, “He had something in hands, looked like a gun from our perspective.” Three minutes after the shooting, a female officer called to him and said “We need to know if you’re OK. We need to get you medics, so we can’t go over and get you help until we know you don’t have a weapon.”^[12] They waited five minutes after shooting Clark before approaching and then handcuffing him.^[13] Clark was found to have a white iPhone, and was unarmed.^[6][4] Clark’s girlfriend later said the phone belonged to her.^[14]

After more officers arrived, one officer said “Hey, mute”, and audio recording from the body camera was turned off.^[10]

The Police Department stated on March 19, one day after the shooting, that Clark had been seen with a “tool bar”. On the evening of that day, police revised their statement to say that Clark was carrying a cell phone, and not a tool bar, when he was shot.^[3] Police added that Clark might have used either a concrete block or an aluminum gutter railing to break a sliding glass door at the house next door to where he was shot, and that they believed Clark had broken windows from at least three vehicles in the area.^[3]

…

Responses

Elected officials and political activists

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, initially said he would not second-guess decisions made by officers on the ground. After a backlash, he said the videos of Clark’s shooting made him feel “really sick” and that the shooting was “wrong” but declined to comment whether the officers should be charged.^[30] House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi stated that Clark “should be alive today”.^[31] [Civil Rights Activist] Reverend Al Sharpton stated that he was alarmed by the story, which he said had not received enough media attention.^[32]

On March 26, White House spokesman Raj Shah stated that he was unaware of any comments from President Donald Trump regarding the incident.^[31] Two days later, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stated that Trump is “very supportive of law enforcement” and that the incident was a “local matter” that should be dealt with by the local authorities.^[33]

Clark family

Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who represents the Clark family, stated that the autopsy finding was inconsistent with the official narrative that Clark was charging toward the police officers when they fired.^[1] Clark’s family expressed skepticism of the police version of events. Clark’s brother, Stevante Clark, said of police statements: “They said he had a gun. Then they said he had a crowbar. Then they said he had a toolbar … If you lie to me once, I know you’ll lie to me again.”^[10] Clark’s aunt Saquoia Durham said that police gave Clark no time to respond to their commands before shooting him.^[34] According to Crump the officers did not identify themselves as police when they encountered Clark.^[22] The police have stated that the officers who confronted Clark were wearing their uniforms at that time.^[35]

Policing experts

University of South Carolina criminology professor Geoffrey Alpert stated that it might be hard for officers to justify their conclusion that Clark was armed, since they had been told he was carrying a toolbar.^[36] Peter Moskos, assistant professor of Law and Police Science at John Jay College, said that the officers appeared to think they had been fired upon following the shooting.^[37] Alpert, Clark’s family, and protesters questioned officers’ decisions to mute their microphones.^[10][38] Police Chief Daniel Hahn said he was unable to explain the muting. Cedric Alexander, former police chief in Rochester, New York, and former president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, said that the muting did not appear to violate any policy, but looks bad. He also stated that it is not unusual for police to mute their body cams and that attorneys advise the police to mute conversations to prevent recording any comments that could be used in administrative or criminal proceedings. Many body cams are made with a mute button on them.^[38]

Source: Wikipedia; retrieved April 9, 2018 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Stephon_Clark

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400 Years of Slavery – Where is ‘Home’?

Posted on August 29, 2019 in Ethos, Social

Go Lean Commentary

“Go back to Africa”

According to the Urban Dictionary, this phrase is just simply an insult:

Phrase used when a black person is living in a white country; i.e. Here is England, here is not your land! Go back to Africa!
An insult used against blacks living in a non-African country.
What people forget when they use it, however, is that in order to “go back” to somewhere, you have to have been born in that place. Most likely, the black who you tried to insult was born in a Western country, and no Western country is located in the continent of Africa.

All in all, this insult is cruel, unkind and unwelcoming. But, for 1 minute, let’s look at this whole issue from an American perspective – African-American more specifically – see how/if/when an American Black person can truly … go “home” to Africa.

One man’s trash is another’s treasure.

The African country of Ghana is rolling out the Welcome Mat for African-Americans. They know that the ancestors of many of these African-Americans may have actually come through the doors of African Slave Trading posts located in today’s Ghana; see the details on Elmira Castle below.

This Welcome Mat is presented by the highest elected official in that land – the President. See the full story here:

Title: 2019: Year of return for African Diaspora
Subtitle: Ghana rolls out the red carpet to encourage resettlement in the motherland
By: Benjamin Tetteh

In the heart of Accra, Ghana’s capital, just a few meters from the United States embassy, lie the tombs of W. E. B. Du Bois, a great African-American civil rights leader, and his wife, Shirley. The founder of the US-based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People moved to Accra in 1961, settling in the city’s serene residential area of Labone and living there until his death in August 1963.

Mr. Du Bois’s journey to Ghana may have signaled the emergence of a profound desire among Africans in the diaspora to retrace their roots and return to the continent. Ghana was a major hub for the transatlantic slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

In Washington, D.C., in September 2018, Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo declared and formally launched the “Year of Return, Ghana 2019” for Africans in the Diaspora, giving fresh impetus to the quest to unite Africans on the continent with their brothers and sisters in the diaspora.

At that event, President Akufo-Addo said, “We know of the extraordinary achievements and contributions they [Africans in the diaspora] made to the lives of the Americans, and it is important that this symbolic year—400 years later—we commemorate their existence and their sacrifices.”

US Congress members Gwen Moore of Wisconsin and Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, diplomats and leading figures from the African-American community, attended the event. Representative Jackson Lee linked the Ghanaian government’s initiative with the passage in Congress in 2017 of the 400 Years of African-American History Commission Act. Provisions in the act include the setting up of a history commission to carry out and provide funding for activities marking the 400th anniversary of the “arrival of Africans in the English colonies at Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619.”

Since independence in 1957, successive Ghanaian leaders have initiated policies to attract Africans abroad back to Ghana.

In his maiden independence address, then–Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah sought to frame Africa’s liberation around the concept of Africans all over the world coming back to Africa.

“Nkrumah saw the American Negro as the vanguard of the African people,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard, who first traveled to Ghana when he was 20 and fresh out of Harvard, afire with Nkrumah’s spirit. “He wanted to be able to utilize the services and skills of African-Americans as Ghana made the transition from colonialism to independence.”

Ghana’s parliament passed a Citizenship Act in 2000 to make provision for dual citizenship, meaning that people of Ghanaian origin who have acquired citizenships abroad can take up Ghanaian citizenship if they so desire.

That same year the country enacted the Immigration Act, which provides for a “Right of Abode” for any “Person of African descent in the Diaspora” to travel to and from the country “without hindrance.”

The Joseph Project
In 2007, in its 50th year of independence, the government initiated the Joseph Project to commemorate 200 years since the abolition of slavery and to encourage Africans abroad to return.

Similar to Israel’s policy of reaching out to Jews across Europe and beyond following the Holocaust, the Joseph Project is named for the Biblical Joseph who was sold into slavery in Egypt but would later reunite with his family and rule Egypt.

The African-American community is excited about President Akufo-Addo’s latest initiative. In social media posts, many expressed interest in visiting Africa for the first time. Among them is Amber Walker, a media practitioner who says that 2019 is the time to visit her ancestral home.

“It is definitely comforting because that kind of red carpet has not been rolled out by our oppressors in the Western world,” she added.

In making the announcement President Akufo-Addo said: Together on both sides of the Atlantic, we’ll work to make sure that never again will we allow a handful of people with superior technology to walk into Africa, seize their people and sell them into slavery. That must be our resolution, that never again, never again!”

But Ms. Walker took issue with Mr. Akufo-Addo for appearing to downplay the actions of some Africans in the slave trade. “In the president’s [Akufo-Addo’s] statement, he sounds like the entire blame is placed on white people coming in with weapons and taking black people away, but that’s not necessarily the history. So I think that needs to be acknowledged,” she said.

She suggested a form of reconciliation such as took place in post-apartheid South Africa—a truth and reconciliation process that will satisfy the millions of Africans whose forefathers were sold into slavery.

In 2013 the United Nations declared 2015–2024 the International Decade for People of African Descent to “promote respect, protection and fulfilment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms of people of African descent.”

The theme for the ten-year celebration is “People of African descent: recognition, justice and development.”

The “Year of Return, Ghana 2019” will coincide with the biennial Pan African Historical Theatre Festival (Panafest), which is held in Cape Coast, home of Cape Coast Castle and neighbouring Elmina Castle—two notable edifices recognized by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) as World Heritage Sites of the slave era.

[See VIDEO of Elmira Castle here:]

Source: Posted Africa Renewal: December 2018 – March 2019; retrieved August 27, 2019 from: https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/december-2018-march-2019/2019-year-return-african-diaspora

———–

VIDEO – Elmina Castle shows horrors of slave trade – https://youtu.be/xWupcOOPUOE

Newsy
Published on Feb 8, 2017 – The horror stories from inside this Ghanaian slave castle easily rival the cruelty of the Middle Passage and life on an American plantation.
Learn more about this story at www.newsy.com/66923/
Find more videos like this at www.newsy.com
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Category: News & Politics

The truth of the matter, Black people are not all “homogenous” – the same. Many of them have ancestral homes that are actually outside of Africa. For many, that home is the Caribbean – accordingly, some studies project 10 to 25 million American residents may actually have Caribbean heritage. (Slave ships stopped in the Caribbean on the way to North America). The same as the President of Ghana has sent out the invitation, Caribbean stakeholders are making the same pledge; notice this featured in a previous commentary by the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean:

We Want you back
“We tend to think economic growth comes from working harder and smarter, but economists attribute up to a third of it [growth] to more people joining the workforce each year than leaving it. The result is more producing, earning and spending.”

Many Caribbean natives love their homeland, but live abroad in the Diaspora – estimated at 10 to 25 million. Over the past decades, they had moved away looking for better opportunities or safe haven. The stakeholders of the Caribbean now need to declare to these people: I Want You Back!

Unlike the harsh treatment encountered in America – racism still proliferates – the Caribbean and African countries are more natural in their invitation. This may be due to the fact that 29 of the 30 Caribbean member-states feature a majority population of Black-and-Brown people. While our communities are not perfect, this commentary has repeatedly asserted that it is easier to reform and transform these member-states than to try and change America, with all its societal defects.

This is a logical conclusion, considering that it has been a history of 400 Years of Slavery in this American homeland and Black people are still not welcome; still being urged to:

Go back to Africa!

This is the focus of this series of blog-commentaries from the movement behind the Go Lean book for August 2019. This entry is 4-of-5 in this series; it is composed to remember, reflect and reconcile the history of 400 Years of Slavery in the American experience – 1619 until … today. The full series of these blogs-commentaries this month is cataloged as follows:

400 Years of Slavery: America, Not the first
400 Years of Slavery: International Day of Remembrance
400 Years of Slavery: Emancipation Day – Hardly ‘Free At Last’
400 Years of Slavery: Where is home?
400 Years of Slavery: Cop-on-Black Shootings in America’s DNA

The invitation to repatriate to the Caribbean has been detailed in previous Go Lean commentaries; see a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=15126	‘Time to Go’ – Caribbean member-states must have ‘population increases’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14746	Calls for Repatriation Strategy
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13604	Caribbean to the Diaspora: ‘I Want You Back’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10654	Stay Home! Immigration Realities in the US
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9219	‘Time to Go’ – Logic of Senior Emigration
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7151	The Caribbean is Looking for Heroes … ‘to Return’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4222	Message to Caribbean Retirees – “Come in from the cold”

There are many lessons for stakeholders of Caribbean society to learn in considering the history of 400 Years of Slavery in America. Despite the reality of the racial oppression, suppression and repression, many Caribbean people still emigrated there, to partake in the American experience. This depicts the sad reality of Caribbean life – the “frying pan was better than the fire”. As a result, many lessons-learned have been derived from these historic details:

Caribbean Life was too hard for slaveholders and plantation-owners without slave labor. Once the abolition occurred, there was a first round of White Flight. Then once de-colonization took effect, more White Flight was experienced. So the European Imperial presence in the Caribbean has been supplanted with majority Black-and-Brown people in residence (29 of 30 member-states) and holding positions of power.
The economics of mercantilism continued in the Caribbean, despite the dissolution of the colonial system. This meant, no manufacturing footprint in the regional markets; raw materials were exported to come back as finished goods. The end result: all Caribbean member-states boast only a service economy with consumption dynamics only.
The Caribbean is arguably the greatest address on the planet, geography-wise. But the societal engines – economics, security & governance – are defective and inadequate for the majority of the population. As a result, the abandonment rate is very high, averaging 70 percent of tertiary-educated citizens in the independent member-states; plus 50 percent for the general population for the dependent territories (Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Netherland Antilles, French Islands, etc.). So we Lose our Best and have to nation-build with the Rest. 🙁
Many American frontier cities – i.e. Miami – were built with the blood, sweat and tears of Caribbean people. These Black-and-Brown people will not leave – and they should not have to – despite how many outcries from racist and narrow-minded White People to “Go back to Africa”.
Retirement life may be the best opportunity for the Caribbean to entice their Diaspora to return “home”. Home is NOT Africa. This is the reality of repatriation – if you have never lived there – it was never really home. For this reason, while we want to see prosperity in the African Motherland, we – the Caribbean – really do not need to compete with that continent.

Going back to Africa is not a new declaration for America towards Black people. First there was a voluntary movement in the late-1800’s. See the encyclopedia details here:

The Back-to-Africa movement, in the nineteenth century called the colonization movement, encouraged Americans of African ancestry to return to Africa — not to their original homelands, which in most cases were unknown, but to the continent. In general the movement was an overwhelming failure; very few Blacks wanted to move to Africa, and the small number that did — some under duress — initially faced brutal conditions. As the failure became known in the United States in the 1820s, it spawned the abolitionist movement. In the twentieth century Marcus Garvey, Rastafarians, and some other African Americans espoused the concept, but few actually left the United States.

Source: Retrieved August 27, 2019 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-to-Africa_movement

Reflecting on the History of 400 Years of Slavery in America, reminds us that this American mainland is not really our homeland. Though we helped to build this country to make America great; see Appendix VIDEO below, it was not intended for greatness for the Black-and-Brown populations- we can only ever be immigrants; we will never be considered among the settlers. It is our assertion that the Caribbean Diaspora can be more successful at home in the Caribbean. We can more easily elevate our standing in society and our standard of living.

Yes, we can!

This is the purpose of the Go Lean movement. We urge every Caribbean stakeholder to lean-in to our roadmap to bring change to this Caribbean region. Yes, we can make our Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

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

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

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

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

—————

Appendix VIDEO – “We Built This Country. Do Not Tell Us To Go Back Where We Came From.” – https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4814023/we-built-country-back-from

Posted August 24, 2019 – Virginia Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax at 400-Year Commemoration of 1619 Landing of Enslaved Africans in English North America.

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400 Years of Slavery – Emancipation Day: Hardly ‘Free At Last’

Posted on August 27, 2019 in Ethos, Social

Go Lean Commentary

“Free At Last, Free At Last; Thank God Almighty, We Are Free At Last”
– Dr. Martin Luther King; “I Have a Dream” Speech; March on Washington, 1963

Considering that the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863, it would have been expected that those powerful words from Dr. King may have been a reality long before 1963.

Regrettably, No!

This was the point of Dr. King’s theme:

…
Five score years ago, a great American [President Abraham Lincoln], in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. …

See the Appendix VIDEO below of the actual speech in 1963.

America was forged on the blatant hypocrisy of a legal premise that “All men are created equal”, and yet the African-American population was never treated equally, fairly or justly. In fact, by some analysis, America is still not equal-fair-just for African-Americans. In fact, just naming a street after Martin Luther King creates friction in American communities even today, 56 years after that iconic speech.

How about other communities (nations in the New World)? Did they emancipate their slaves sooner or later? See the full list here of all the territories in the Caribbean region including the mainland coastal lands rimming the Caribbean Sea:

Chronology of the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean

First abolition Final abolition of slavery Date of independence

Haiti 1793 1804

Dominican Republic 1801 1822 1844

Costa Rica 1824 1821

El Salvador 1824 1821

Guatemala 1824 1821

Honduras 1824 1821

Mexico 1829 1810

British West Indies
Anguilla
Antigua and Barbuda
Bahamas
Barbados
Belize
Cayman Islands
Dominica
Grenada
Guyana
Virgin Islands
Jamaica
Montserrat
Turks and Caicos Islands
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
St. Vincent and Grenadines
Trinidad and Tobago 1833-1838
1833-1834
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1838
1833-1834
1833-1838 1981
1973
1966
19811978
1974
196619621983
1979
1979
1962

Nicaragua 1838 1821

Danish Virgin Islands
Saint John
Saint Thomas
Saint Croix 1846-1848
1846-1848
1846-1848

Swedish Antilles
Saint Barthelemy 1847

French Antilles
Guaealoupe
Guiana
Martinique
Saint Martín (French zone) 1794 1848
1848
1848
1848

Colombia 1814 1851 1810

Panama 1851 1903

Venezuela 1816 1854 1811

Netherlands Antilles
Aruba
Curacao
Bonaire
Saba
Saint Eustatius
Suriname
St. Martin (Netherlands zone) 1863
1863
1863
1863
1863
1863
1863 1975

United States 1863-1865 1776

Puerto Rico 1873

Cuba 1880-1886 1898

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

———–

In summary, the dates of Final abolition of slavery in the New World territories started in 1801 and ended in 1886. (The difference between the First year and the Final year reflect the attempts of Empire stakeholders to re-introduce slavery – this is best exemplified by the experience in Haiti). The above chart reflect one issue, the abolition of slavery; what about full Civil Rights for these former enslaved populations? That’s another discussion of historic timelines.

(See the previous blog-commentary here from the movement behind the book Go Lean … Caribbean that details the American Civil Rights journey)

This is the focus of this series of blog-commentaries from the movement behind the Go Lean book for August 2019. This is the season to remember, reflect and reconcile the 400 Years of Slavery History in the American experience – 1619 until … today. It is also the time to review the Emancipation practices in the hemisphere and ascertain when the “Free At Last” declaration was sounded in the region – if it was ever sounded at all. The full series of these blogs-commentaries this month is cataloged as follows:

400 Years of Slavery: America, Not the first
400 Years of Slavery: International Day of Remembrance
400 Years of Slavery: Emancipation Day – Hardly ‘Free At Last’
400 Years of Slavery: Where is home?
400 Years of Slavery: Cop-on-Black Shootings in America’s DNA

Perhaps, “emancipation” is just a hollow word. It seems as if the people – African descended people there of – were never really free nor equal in American society. Finally in 2008, with the election of Barack Obama – the first African-American president, could the manifestation of freedom and equality “for all” finally be realized?

Not quite!

There are many examples of racial oppression, suppression and repression in the US. These experiences may be indicative that something deeper than equality is at stake; there is a Bad Community Ethos – fundamental character or spirit of a culture; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society – tied to religious mis-information.

Yes, this commentary went there! This theme – reconciling the bad track record of the Moral Leaders: the Church – have been exhaustingly studied in many previous Go Lean commentaries; see a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16944	Bad Messaging – Rejecting Black Women ‘As Is’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16534	European Reckoning – Christianity’s Indictment
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16512	On Martin Luther King’s 90th Birthday – America is still ‘Dreaming’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16477	Transforming Hindus versus Women – What it means for the Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16172	A Lesson in History: Rev Jim Jones and Jonestown, Guyana
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=15580	Caribbean Unity? Religion’s Role: False Friend
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10216	Waging a Successful War on Religious-based Orthodoxy
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9766	Rwanda’s Catholic bishops apologize for genocide
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5695	Repenting, Forgiving and Reconciling the Past

There are many lessons for stakeholders of Caribbean society to learn in considering the history of 400 Years of Slavery in America. Considering that formal emancipation did not complete until the end of the 19^th Century, we have a lot of derived lessons that we can further benefit from by considering these historic details:

The abolition of slavery was a long journey everywhere; slave-owners never wanted to give up their property – they wanted to continue to benefit from their previous investments. They were forced to give up the practice by a superior authority – The “State”. This parallel’s the actuality of bullying … everywhere, everytime.
Underlying to slavery was the false precept of Natural Law. Adherents believed that they were somehow created better than other classes of people – think White Supremacy. While this is blatantly false, many people still hold on to these false precepts – religion and faith is involved. When religious dogma is involved, the appeal to logic rings hollow.
Admitting when you are wrong – don’t hold your breath – helps reconciliation. It is a human tendency to excuse, rationalize previous wrong courses of action of a people or society. Thusly, racism and anti-Semitism lingers to our day.
Religious institution did good! The Abolition and Civil Rights movements were energized by zealous religious groups; i.e. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was a Baptist Minister.
Religious institutions did bad! The teachings that Christian conversions – for Amerindians and imported slaves – were necessary for their Godly salvation was flawed, anti-Christian (Apostate) and imperiled society in the New World.

While we empathize, we are not America – Yippee!!!

… for our 30 Caribbean member-states, 29 of them feature a majority population of Black-and-Brown people. While this majority does not always equal political or economic power, universal suffrage (one man/woman, one vote) has been transformational in correcting social ills. Universal suffrage equals universal respect, so this should always be at the start of change in society. This teaches us that societal stewards should work to ensure voting rights and protections of the balloting process.

Reflecting on the 400 History of Slavery in America, reminds us that this bad institution affected the economic, security and governing engines of society. So too did emancipation! Changing the societal engines in any community requires brains (Art & Science) and brawn. So the study of Best Practices and the applications of Lessons Learned should always be prioritized for community leaders. This is the purpose of the Go Lean movement. We urge every Caribbean stakeholder to lean-in to our roadmap to bring change to this Caribbean region.

Free At Last? Hardly!

But, we can make our Caribbean homeland Free At Last and even a better place to live, work and play. Let’s get busy! 🙂

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

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

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

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

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

————–

Appendix VIDEO – I Have a Dream speech by Martin Luther King .Jr HD (subtitled) (Remastered) – https://youtu.be/vP4iY1TtS3s

RARE FACTS
Published on Nov 7, 2017 – I Have a Dream” is a public speech that was delivered by American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, in which he called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States. Delivered to over 250,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the speech was a defining moment of the civil rights movement and among the most iconic speeches in American history.

Under the applicable copyright laws, the speech will remain under copyright in the United States until 70 years after King’s death, through 2038.

Edited by: Binod Pandey
Caption author (Spanish): ALEJANDRA GONZALEZ
Caption author (Spanish (Latin America)): Adrian Roldan
Category: Nonprofits & Activism

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400 Years of Slavery – International Day of Rememberance – Encore

Posted on August 23, 2019 in Ethos, Social

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

Reconciliation and remembrance are the motives of this series of blog-commentaries from the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean. With a documented start date in America of August 23, 1619, today marks 400 years exactly. This August 2019 series focuses on this 400 Year History of Slavery – past, present and future. This is entry 2-of-5 for this series; the full catalog is listed as follows:

400 Years of Slavery: America, Not the first
400 Years of Slavery: International Day of Remembrance
400 Years of Slavery: Emancipation Day – Hardly ‘Free At Last’
400 Years of Slavery: Where is home?
400 Years of Slavery: Cop-on-Black Shootings in America’s DNA

In this series, reference is made to the fact that many American institutions have still not reconciled this ugly history – the assumption of White supremacy still persists. While African-Americans are a minority ethnic group in their country, 29 out of the 30 Caribbean member-states have majority Black populations – descendants of slaves. So there is is opportunity for a different – better – societal interaction. Or so we hope…

The subject of the August 23 International Day of Remembrance of Slavery and the Slave Trade has been detailed in previous blog-commentaries from August 23, 2017 and August 23, 2016. Underlying, was the historic events of the successful Slave Rebellion in Haiti in 1791. It is apropos to Encore that original 2016 entry – there are lots of lessons for today and the 400-year Look Back.

See that previous blog-commentary here-now:

——————————

Go Lean Commentary – A Lesson in History – Haiti 1804

There are important lessons to learn from history. This commentary considers one particular lesson: the repercussions and consequences from Slavery and the Slave Trade.

Today – August 23 – is the official commemoration of the Slave Trade, as declared by UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization). It measures the date that the 1791 Slave Rebellion in Haiti commenced.

“All of humanity is part of this story, in its transgressions and good deeds” – Irina Bokova, UNESCO Director-General

This is a very important lesson that we glean from this history, no matter our race or homeland. Let’s consider this lesson from the perspective of the Caribbean and for the benefit of Caribbean elevation.

In jurisprudence, there is the concept of felony murder.

… if a perpetrator robs a liquor store and the clerk has a heart-attack and dies, that perpetrator, once caught is tried for felony murder. The definition is the consequence of death in the act of committing a felony. What’s ironic is this charge would also apply if its a co-perpetrator that dies of the heart-attack rather than a victim-clerk.

This justice standard also applies with family discipline. If/when a child is being naughty and accordingly a sibling is unintentionally hurt, the naughty behavior will almost always be punished for the injury, because it was linked to the bad behavior.

A lesson learned from family discipline; and a lesson learned from criminal law. All of these scenarios present consequences to bad, abusive behavior. This sets the stage for better understanding of this important lesson from the international history of the year 1804. After 200 years of the Slave Trade, repercussions and consequences were bound to strike. This happened in the Caribbean country of Haiti. The following catastrophic events transpired in the decade leading up to 1804:

- - - 1791 Slave Rebellion – See Appendix A below – A direct spinoff from the French Revolution’s demand for equality
    - Leadership of Louverture – As Governor-General, Toussaint Louverture sought to return Haiti to France without Slavery.
    - Resistance to Slavery – The French planned and attempted to re-instate Slavery
    - Free Republic – The first Black State in the New World
    - 1804 Massacre of the French – See Appendix B below – An illogical solution that killing Whites would prevent future enslavement.

Make no mistake, the Massacre of 1804 – where 3,000 to 5,000 White men, women and children were killed – was a direct consequence of Slavery and the Slave Trade.

See VIDEO here of a comprehensive TED story:

VIDEO – The Atlantic Slave Trade: What too few textbooks told you – https://youtu.be/3NXC4Q_4JVg

Published on Dec 22, 2014 – Slavery has occurred in many forms throughout the world, but the Atlantic slave trade — which forcibly brought more than 10 million Africans to the Americas — stands out for both its global scale and its lasting legacy. Anthony Hazard discusses the historical, economic and personal impact of this massive historical injustice.
Lesson by Anthony Hazard, animation by NEIGHBOR.
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-atlanti…

Category – Education

License – Standard YouTube License

The review of the historic events is more than just an academic discussion, the book Go Lean…Caribbean aspires to economic principles that dictate that “consequences of choices lie in the future”. The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). Haiti – the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere – is one of the 30 member-states for this Caribbean confederacy.

The people of the Caribbean need to understand the cause of this country’s decline and dysfunction; and by extension, the cause of dysfunction for the rest of the Caribbean. It is tied to the events of 1804. How will this lesson help us today?

- - - Reality of the Legacy – The new Black State of Haiti was censored, sanctioned and scorned upon by all European powers (White people). According to a previous blog-commentary, to finally be recognized, France required the new country of Haiti to offset the income that would be lost by French settlers and slave owners; they demanded compensation amounting to 150 million gold francs. After a new deal was struck in 1838, Haiti agreed to pay France 90 million gold francs (the equivalent of €17 billion today). It was not until 1952 that Haiti made the final payment on what became known as its “Independence Debt”. Many analysts posit that the compensation Haiti paid to France throughout the 19th century “strangled development” and hindered the “evolution of the country”. The CU/Go Lean book assessed the near-Failed-State status of Haiti – “it is what it is”; Haiti is as bad as advertised – and then strategized solutions to reboot the economic-security-governing engines of this Republic.
    - Security assurances must be enabled to complement economics objectives – Slavery was introduced to the New World as an economic empowerment strategy, though it was flawed in its premise of oppressing the human rights of a whole class of humans. The only way to succeed for the centuries that it survived was with a strong military backing – fear of immediate death and destruction. The CU/Go Lean premise is that economics engines and security apparatus must work hand-in-hand. This is weaved throughout the roadmap.
    - Minority Equalization – The lessons of slavery is that race divides societies; and when there is this division, there is always the tendency for one group to put themselves above other groups. Many times the divisions are for majority population groups versus minorities. If the planners of the new Caribbean want to apply lessons from Slavery’s history, we must allow for justice institutions to consider the realities of minorities. The CU security pact must defend against regional threats, including domestic terrorism. This includes gangs and their junior counterparts, bullies. The CU plans for community messaging in the campaign for anti-bullying and mitigations.
    - Reconciliation of issues are not optional, more conflict will emerge otherwise – The issues that caused division in Haiti where not dealt with between 1791 and 1803. A “Great Day of Reckoning” could not be avoided. The Natural Law instinct was to avenge for past atrocities – “an eye for an eye”. The CU/Go Lean roadmap accepts that an “eye for an eye” justice stance would result in a lot of “blindness”; so instead of revenge, the strategy is justice by means of Truth & Reconciliation Commissions – a lesson learned from South Africa – to deal with a lot of the latent issues from the last Caribbean century (i.e. Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, etc).

The purpose of the Go Lean roadmap is to turn-around the downward trends in the Caribbean today, to reverse course and elevate Caribbean society. The CU, applying lessons from best-practices, has 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 to support these engines.

The Go Lean book details a series of assessments, community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to empower all the factions in the Caribbean region:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – “Crap” Happens	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 Improve Sharing	Page 35
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness	Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Integrate region for Economics & Security	Page 45
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization	Page 57
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Department of Homeland Security	Page 75
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Department of Justice	Page 77
Implementation – Assemble Existing Super-national Institutions	Page 96
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Foreign Policy Initiatives at Start-up	Page 102
Implementation – Security Initiatives at Start-up	Page 103
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Implementation – Ways to Promote Independence	Page 120
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices	Page 134
Planning – Lessons from the US Constitution	Page 145
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 Foster Cooperatives	Page 176
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice	Page 177
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security	Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Mitigate Terrorism	Page 181
Advocacy – Ways to Protect Human Rights	Page 220
Advocacy – Battles in the War on Poverty	Page 222
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti	Page 238

Why bother with all this dark talk about Slavery and the Slave Trade?

UNESCO has provided a clear answer for this question with this declarative statement:

Ignorance or concealment of major historical events constitutes an obstacle to mutual understanding, reconciliation and cooperation among peoples. UNESCO has thus decided to break the silence surrounding the Slave Trade and Slavery that have concerned all continents and caused the great upheavals that have shaped our modern societies.

The subject of Slavery and the Slave Trade relates to economic, security and governing functioning in a society. The repercussions and consequences of 1804 lingers down to this day. There have been a number of blog-commentaries by the Go Lean promoters that have developed related topics. See a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8724	Remembering African Nationalist Marcus Garvey: Still Relevant Today
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7682	Frederick Douglass – Pioneer & Role Model for Single Cause: Abolition
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7221	Street naming for Martin Luther King reveals continued racial animosity
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5695	Repenting, Forgiving and Reconciling the Past Bad Deeds
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5123	A Lesson in History – Royal Charters: Zimbabwe -vs- South Africa
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4971	A Lesson in History – Royal Charters: Truth & Consequence
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=451	CariCom position on Slavery/Colonization Reparations

This commentary purports that there have been watershed events in history since the emergence of the slave economy. They include:

1804 – Haiti’s Massacre of White Slave Advocates
1861 – US Civil War – A Demonstration of the Resolve of the “Pro” and “Anti” Slavery Camps
1914 – World War I: “Line in the Sand”
1948 – United Nations Declaration of Human Rights

No doubt the Massacre of 1804 was a crisis. It was not wasted; it was used in a good way to escalate the abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. It was also used in a bad way to justify further oppression of the African Diaspora in the New World.

A pivotal year.

Let’s learn from this year of 1804; and from the repercussions and consequences from that year. In many ways, the world has not moved! Racism and the suppression of the African race lingers … even today … in Europe and in the Americas.

Our goal is to reform and transform the Caribbean, not Europe or America. We hereby urge everyone in the Caribbean – people, institutions and governments – to lean-in to this Go Lean roadmap. It is time now to move. We must get the Caribbean region to a new destination, one where opportunity meets preparation. This is the destination where the Caribbean is a better homeland to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

—————

Appendix A Title: International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition 2016

— Message from Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO —

In the night of 22 to 23 August 1791, men and women, torn from Africa and sold into slavery, revolted against the slave system to obtain freedom and independence for Haiti, gained in 1804. The uprising was a turning point in human history, greatly impacting the establishment of universal human rights, for which we are all indebted.

The courage of these men and women has created obligations for us. UNESCO is marking International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition to pay tribute to all those who fought for freedom, and, in their name, to continue teaching about their story and the values therein. The success of this rebellion, led by the slaves themselves, is a deep source of inspiration today for the fight against all forms of servitude, racism, prejudice, racial discrimination and social injustice that are a legacy of slavery.

The history of the slave trade and slavery created a storm of rage, cruelty and bitterness that has not yet abated. It is also a story of courage, freedom and pride in newfound freedom. All of humanity is part of this story, in its transgressions and good deeds. It would be a mistake and a crime to cover it up and forget. Through its project The Slave Route, UNESCO intends to find in this collective memory the strength to build a better world and to show the historical and moral connections that unite different peoples.

In this same frame of mind, the United Nations proclaimed the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024). UNESCO is contributing to it through its educational, cultural and scientific programmes so as to promote the contribution of people of African descent to building modern societies and ensuring dignity and equality for all human beings, without distinction.
Source: Retrieved August 23, 2016 from: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/events/prizes-and-celebrations/celebrations/international-days/slave-trade-and-its-abolition/

—————

Appendix B Title: 1804 Haiti Massacre

The 1804 Haiti Massacre was a massacre carried out against the remaining white population of native Frenchmen and French Creoles (or Franco-Haitians) in Haiti by Haitian soldiers by the order of Jean-Jacques Dessalines who had decreed that all those suspected of conspiring in the acts of the expelled army should be put to death.^[1] Throughout the nineteenth century, these events were well known in the United States where they were referred to as “the horrors of St. Domingo” and particularly polarized Southern public opinion on the question of the abolition of slavery.^[2][3]

The massacre, which took place in the entire territory of Haiti, was carried out from early February 1804 until 22 April 1804, and resulted in the deaths of between 3,000 and 5,000 people of all ages and genders.^[4]

Squads of soldiers moved from house to house, torturing and killing entire families.^[5] Even whites who had been friendly and sympathetic to the black population were imprisoned and later killed.^[6] A second wave of massacres targeted white women and children.^[6]

Writers Dirk Moses and Dan Stone wrote that it served as a form of revenge by an oppressed group that exacted out against those who had previously dominated them.^[7]

Aftermath
By the end of April 1804, some 3,000 to 5,000 people had been killed^[23] and the white Haitians were practically eradicated. Only three categories of white people, except foreigners, were selected as exceptions and spared: the Polish soldiers who deserted from the French army; the little group of German colonists invited to Nord-Ouest (North-West), Haiti before the revolution; and a group of medical doctors and professionals.^[14] Reportedly, also people with connections to officers in the Haitian army were spared, as well as the women who agreed to marry non-white men.^[23]

Dessalines did not try to hide the massacre from the world. In an official proclamation of 8 April 1804, he stated, “We have given these true cannibals war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage. Yes, I have saved my country, I have avenged America”.^[14] He referred to the massacre as an act of national authority. Dessalines regarded the elimination of the white Haitians an act of political necessity, as they were regarded as a threat to the peace between the black and the colored. It was also regarded as a necessary act of vengeance.^[23]

Dessalines was eager to assure that Haiti was not a threat to other nations and that it sought to establish friendly relations also to nations where slavery was still allowed.^[26]Dessalines’ secretary Boisrond-Tonnerre stated, “For our declaration of independence, we should have the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen!”^[27]

In the 1805 constitution, all citizens were defined as “black”,^[28] and white men were banned from owning land.^[23][29]

The 1804 massacre had a long-lasting effect on the view of the Haitian Revolution and helped to create a legacy of racial hostility in Haitian society.^[28]

At the time of the civil war, a major reason for southern whites, most of whom did not own slaves, to support slave-owners (and ultimately fight for the Confederacy) was fear of a genocide similar to the Haitian Massacre of 1804. This was explicitly referred to in Confederate discourse and propaganda.^[30][31]

The torture and massacre of whites in Haiti, normally known at the time as “the horrors of St. Domingo“, was a constant and prominent theme in the discourse of southern political leaders and had influenced American public opinion since the events took place.
Source: Retrieved August 22, 2016 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre

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400 Years of Slavery – Lessons Learned from America’s Start

Posted on August 23, 2019 in Ethos, Social

Go Lean Commentary

That’s America for you; they think they are the only one that has had this problem – slavery that it.

Today, is a Red Letter Day in the History of the American Experience; it is believed that on this day – August 23, 1619 – the first African slaves touched down on the American mainland – see Appendices A & B below. This is an important milestone to commemorate and commiserate, as the eco-system of slavery dictated every “ying-and-yang” of the American experience, from 1619 until … today.

(Don’t get it twisted – the reason for the American Revolution in 1776 was so that the 13 Colonies could maintain autonomy of the slavery eco-system, rather than submitting to the ever-increasing liberalism of the British Parliament).

Why should we bother to look back at this history?

The 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean answers this question. It looks at that hard-wrought history and declares that lessons can be learned today that will allow us to reform and transform our society tomorrow. The book states at Page 26:

Ways to Impact the Future – If Not Now, Then …
History is a Great Teacher. The African Diaspora experience in the New World is one of “future” gratification. The generations that sought freedom from slavery knew that their children, not them, would be the beneficiaries of liberty. The ethos or guiding beliefs is that “children should be more successful in the future than the parents maybe here and now”.

So America wants to take note of this day – August 23 – and remember, reconcile (and maybe even repent for) the stain of this bad history of this country’s record.

If so, have at it!

But let’s start with the truth! August 23, 1619 was not the start of slavery in the Americas. No, the practice had started earlier in the New World, including these same Caribbean islands. Consider the VIDEO in Appendix C below plus these documented examples here:

Slavery in the America’s – An Early Timeline

New Spain – In order to establish itself as an American empire, Spain had to fight against the relatively powerful civilizations of the New World. The Spanish conquest of the indigenous peoples in the Americas included using the Natives as forced labour. The Spanish colonies were the first Europeans to use African slaves in the New World on islands such as Cuba and Hispaniola.^[156]

Hispaniola – The first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola [(today’s Haiti & Dominican Republic)] in 1501.^[157]

Brazil – During the Atlantic slave trade era, Brazil imported more African slaves than any other country. Nearly 5 million slaves were brought from Africa to Brazil during the period from 1501 to 1866.^[174] … Slave labor was the driving force behind the growth of the sugar economy in Brazil, and sugar was the primary export of the colony from 1600 to 1650.

Jamaica – The Caribbean island of Jamaica was colonized by the Taino tribes prior to the arrival of Columbus in 1494. The Spanish enslaved many of the Taino; some escaped, but most died from European diseases and overwork. [The Spaniards treated the Tainos so harshly that in about fifty years all of them were dead. They had numbered fully sixty thousand. The Spaniards got slaves from Africa to take their place.] ^[190]

Mexico – In 1519, Hernán Cortés brought the first modern slave to the area.^[194] In the mid-16th century, the second viceroy to Mexico, Luis de Velasco, prohibited slavery of the Aztecs. A labor shortage resulted as the Aztecs were either killed or died due to disease. This led to the African slaves being imported, as they were not susceptible to smallpox.

Puerto Rico – When Ponce de León and the Spaniards arrived on the island of Borikén (Puerto Rico), they Taíno tribes on the island, forcing them to work in the gold mines and in the construction of forts. Many Taíno died, particularly due to smallpox, of which they had no immunity. Other Taínos committed suicide or left the island after the failed Taíno revolt of 1511.^[195] The Spanish colonists, fearing the loss of their labor force, complained the courts that they needed manpower to work in the mines, build forts, and work sugar cane plantations. As an alternative, Las Casas suggested the importation and use of African slaves. In 1517, the Spanish Crown permitted its subjects to import twelve slaves each, thereby beginning the slave trade on the colonies.^[196]
Source: Retrieved August 22, 2019 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery#Modern_history

The foundation of slavery was embedded deep in the societal engines of the New World.

Can’t we all just get along … now?

Slavery was an ugly institution. No victim deserved such treatment; no perpetrator’s can be justified, rationalized or excused. Today, due to the analysis of the acts and events of slavery, we have the definition and classification of Human Rights violations. There is no normalizing this villainy; and this is an apropos and contemporary discussion as slavery is not just ancient history:

Saudi Arabia didn’t abolish slavery until 1962.^[118]

But indeed we can still “get along“! But only after reconciliation, and that reconciliation must come with the desire to set things straight and correct the wrongs. In fact reconciliation is the motive of this August 2019 series of blog-commentaries from the movement behind the Go Lean book. Our focus is on all the dimensions of this 400 Year History of Slavery; the past, present and future. The full series is cataloged as follows:

400 Years of Slavery: America, Not the first
400 Years of Slavery: International Day of Remembrance
400 Years of Slavery: Emancipation Day – Hardly ‘Free At Last’
400 Years of Slavery: Where is home?
400 Years of Slavery: Cop-on-Black Shootings in America’s DNA

In this series, reference is made to the need for a comprehensive roadmap for elevating the societal engines of the 30 Caribbean member-states. We are not trying to reform or transform America – that is outside our scope. But we want to learn from the American experience. Truth be told, there are many American institutions that have still not reconciled their ugly history; no reconciliation; no reform. The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the implementation for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). We want to do better here. Considering that 29 out of the 30 Caribbean states are majority Black – descendants of slaves – we must do better.

We can succeed too; we can be Better than America.

This theme – learning from the history of Bad Race Relations – have been exhaustingly studied in many previous Go Lean commentaries; see a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16944	Women Empowerment – Accepting Black Women ‘As Is’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16926	Learning from Canada’s Viola Desmond: One Woman Made A Difference
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16512	On Martin Luther King’s 90th Birthday – America is still ‘Dreaming’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=15123	Blacks get longer sentences from ‘Republican’ Judges
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=15121	Racist History of Loitering
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=15093	1948 “Windrush” Drama – Migration to the UK fraught with Racial Discord
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9626	The Black Vote – Continues to be Marginalized
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9214	Black Relations in America Today – Spot-on for Protest
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2297	History’s Lessons on Contrasting Strategies – Booker T versus Du Bois

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson was on a committee within the Continental Congress of the 13 British Colonies; he was appointed to write the Declaration of Independence. He penned:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

As this Declaration went back to England, the home country laughed and scoffed at the blatant hypocrisy of these words, as America was believed to be holding (a little less than) 694,200 African-descended-people in the bonds of slavery at that time – out of a full population of 3,893,635. In England, there was a movement towards liberalism and libertarianism at this time. One of the respondents to the US Declaration of Independence was the philosopher and statesman Jeremy Bentham.

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was a British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer. He is regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. Bentham became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated individual and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalizing of homosexual acts. He called for the abolition of slavery, the abolition of the death penalty, the abolition of physical punishment, including that of children, and animal rights. Though strongly in favor of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural laws/natural rights [as flawed moral basis for slavery and oppression of women and minorities], calling them “nonsense upon stilts”. – Go Lean book Page 37.

Jeremy Bentham advocated for the Greater Good as the preferred community ethos; this is ‘the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong”. So he urged America to be better and do better towards its slave population. They did not! After winning the war for Independence against Britain, the new United States of America doubled-down in the practice and pursuit of slavery, especially in the southern States:

1790 Census Slave Population: 694,200 | Total Population: 3,893,635 | 17.8% | Slavery in 100% of Country

1860 Census Slave Population: 3,950,200 | Total Population: 31,443,321 | 12.6% | Slavery in only 25% of Country

So there are many lessons for the Caribbean to learn in considering the history of 400 Years of Slavery in America. We can take these lessons to heart in our region and be a better society as a result:

Where as, there was a Slave Trade then, we have human trafficking today. Have we learned to protect the Weak in our society from being abused by the Strong?
Where as, there was White Supremacy then – a byproduct of Natural Law, have we now corrected that defect in society and promulgate policies that project that All Men Are Created Equal?
Where as, the Slave Trade was urged-on as an economic solution for cheap labor, do we now ensure that all labor is conducted with dignity and due consideration for all stakeholders?

A consideration of 400 Years of Slavery in America does not have to be dead history, it energizes our current society to ensure liberty, fairness and egalitarianism. These are great ideals to pursue. America needs to do better in this pursuit; and so does the Caribbean.

Slavery affected economic, security and governing engines of Caribbean society. These same 3 societal engines are in focus to reboot so as to elevate the member-states today. So slavery is more than just academic; it is our foundation. We must not ignore it, nor forget; we must recognize the pain, sacrifice and purchase-price our ancestors paid for us to occupy these lands. As the old Calypso song says:

“Oh island in the sun, willed to me by my father’s hand“.

Let’s remember and reconcile. 🙂

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

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

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

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

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 … . On the other hand, the Federation must also implement the good examples learned from developments … like … the old American West and tenants of the US Constitution.

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

————–

Appendix A – History of Slavery in Virginia

Slavery in Virginia dates to 1619,^[1] soon after the founding of Virginia as an English colony by the London Virginia Company. The company established a headright system to encourage colonists to transport indentured servants to the colony for labor; they received a certain amount of land for people whose passage they paid to Virginia.^[2]

Africans first appeared in Virginia in 1619, brought by English privateers from a Spanish slave ship they had intercepted. …
Source: Retrieved August 22, 2019 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

————–

Appendix B – Virginia’s First Africans
Contributed by Martha McCartney
Virginia’s first Africans arrived at Point Comfort, on the James River, late in August 1619. There, “20. and odd Negroes” from the English ship White Lion were sold in exchange for food and some were transported to Jamestown, where they were sold again, likely into slavery. Historians have long believed these Africans to have come to Virginia from the Caribbean, but Spanish records suggest they had been captured in a Spanish-controlled area of West Central Africa. They probably were Kimbundu-speaking people, and many of them may have had at least some knowledge of Catholicism. While aboard the São João Bautista bound for Mexico, they were stolen by the White Lion and another English ship, the Treasurer. Once in Virginia, they were dispersed throughout the colony. …
Source: “Virginia’s First Africans”. www.encyclopediavirginia.org. Retrieved 2015-11-04.

————–

Appendix C VIDEO – ! Slave Ship… International Slavery Remembrance Day August 23,2018 – https://youtu.be/aCM4RoV5MSI

International Slavery Remembrance Day
Published on Apr 18, 2018 – An estimated 15 million Africans were transported to the Americas between 1540 and 1850. To maximize their profits slave merchants carried as many slaves as was physically possible on their ships. By the 17th century slaves could be purchased in Africa for about $25 and sold in the Americas for about $150. After the slave-trade was declared illegal, prices went much higher. Even with a death-rate of 50 per cent, merchants could expect to make tremendous profits from the trade. The journey from Africa to the West Indies or North America Usually took about two months. One study shows that the slave ship provided an average of about seven square feet per slave.

Category: People & Blogs
Music in this Video: Listen ad-free with YouTube Premium
Song: Slave Ship
Artist: Mighty Diamond
Album: Dancehall Attack & Fat Eyes Dee-Lite
Licensed to YouTube by: IODA, The Orchard Music (on behalf of Fat Eyes Productions); Downtown Music Publishing, Sony ATV Publishing, and 2 Music Rights Societies

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Born After Woodstock – Lessons for the Caribbean

Posted on August 15, 2019 in Ethos, Industries, Social

Go Lean Commentary

50 years ago today, in 1969, the legendary Woodstock Music Festival took place in White Lake, New York, USA.

Wow! This event was so impactful that we were all Born After Woodstock. This was bigger than just music!

Woodstock was one of the enduring events of the 20^th century.^[37] For those born before the year 1969, theirs was a “Rebirth”.

Woodstock 1969 was also the end of “Reign of American Orthodoxy”; the counter-culture emerged there upon.

Strong opinion?!

Well, this is not just our viewpoint alone. Many others express similar views; see here the Wikipedia summary here:

… Thirty-two acts performed outdoors despite sporadic rain.^[6] It has become widely regarded as a pivotal moment in popular music history, as well as the definitive nexus for the larger counterculture generation.^[7][8]

The event’s significance was reinforced by a 1970 Academy Award–winning documentary film, an accompanying soundtrack album, and a Joni Mitchell–written song that became a major hit for both Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Matthews Southern Comfort.

Starting in 1979, music events bearing the Woodstock name have been planned for major anniversaries including the tenth, twentieth, twenty-fifth, thirtieth, fortieth, and fiftieth. In 2004, Rolling Stone listed it as number 19 of the 50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll.^[9] In 2017, the festival site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.^[10]

Having 32 acts and artists at a “concert” is a major undertaking; plus half-a-million attendees exacerbated the event. The fame and infamy of many of those artists – cause and effect of Woodstock – still lingers today. See the historic line-up here:

Friday – August 15	Saturday – August 16	Sunday – August 17
Richie Havens	Quill	Joe Cocker
Sweetwater	Country Joe McDonald	Country Joe and the Fish
Bert Sommer	Santana	Ten Years After
Tim Hardin	John Sebastian	The Band
Ravi Shankar	Keef Hartley Band	Johnny Winter
Melanie	The Incredible String Band	Blood, Sweat & Tears
Arlo Guthrie	Canned Heat	Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Joan Baez	Mountain	Paul Butterfield Blues Band
	Grateful Dead	Sha Na Na
	Creedence Clearwater Revival	Jimi Hendrix
	Janis Joplin
	Sly and the Family Stone
	The Who
	Jefferson Airplane

That’s a lot of artists, and a lot of music:

36 hours
432 songs

Undeniably, the Music World was re-born after Woodstock; and the Counter-Culture was cemented too. Different attitudes and values were definitely forged during this period – some changes for good; some for bad – that resulted in the abandonment of the “bad orthodoxy” that had impeded American progress. In a previous blog-commentary, the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean summarized how racial segregation, questioning the rationale for war, gender rights, sexual toleration, and recreational drug use evolved from the “fringe” to the mainstream during this time. This quotation reflects that summary:

… we are now able to better embrace the historicity of the “counter-culture” of the 1960’s. This is our most recent example of a subculture whose values and norms of behavior differed substantially from those of mainstream society. …

[This] relates “how” the stewards for a new Caribbean can shepherd societal change in this region. We accept that with the Counter-Culture, young people can reject conventional social norms. This can be good when the “mainstream” culture reflects cultural standards that are defective. The counter-culturists of the 1960’s – think Hippies – rejected the norms of their parents – from the 1950’s and before.

Yes, looking back on the 50 years since Woodstock is looking at more than just music – this festival can be labeled the soundtrack of the “Hippies” and Counter-Culture – it looks at the mechanics of how change is forged in society.

Music is a great impetus …

… this was related in a different previous blog-commentary from December 30, 2014:

… “music” can be used to forge change. The Go Lean book declares that before any real change takes root in the Caribbean that we must reach the heart, that there must be an adoption of new community ethos – the national spirit that drives the character and identity of its people. We must therefore use effective and efficient drivers to touch the heart and forge this change. How? Here’s one suggestion:

Music fills your heart, well that’s a real fine place to start

Oh, my music makes you dance and gives you spirit to take a chance

And I wrote some rock ‘n roll so you can move

The Need for Change is the driving motivation of the movement and book Go Lean … Caribbean. This is the biggest lesson for the Caribbean to learn from the historicity of Woodstock. The Caribbean status quo is unsustainable; it is broken. We must reform and transform our society if we are to have any hope of a future.

In that previous blog-commentary about the Counter-Culture, it was concluded that:

The ‘Hippies’ stood in the track of an oncoming locomotive … and stopped the train!

The counter-culture brought change, some good (ie: desegregation & anti-war protest) and some bad (ie: un-kept grooming & liberal drug use)! So the ‘Hippies’ are only to be emulated as a model for forging change, not necessarily what they change. …

We are not asking the Caribbean to be “Hippies”, just learn from the “Hippies” and reject the status quo and orthodoxy of the broken Caribbean eco-system.

While we need to look forward towards the future, we also need to look backwards and learn from the lessons of the past – Woodstock 1969 is one such lesson. Like the “Hippies”, we must also reject the “bad orthodoxies” in our communities; see how this theme has been conveyed in this sample of previous blog-commentaries:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=17919	Bad Rules of Hospitality – Strangers Over Neighbors
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=17464	Bad Ethos Retarding ‘New Commerce’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16408	Bad Ethos on Home Violence
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10532	Learning from Stereotypes – Good and Bad
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10216	Waging a Successful War on Orthodoxy
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5542	Economic Principle: Bad Ethos of Rent-Seeking

We can also use music in the future out-workings for changes in our society. Plus, we can use festivals and mega-events. These too are lessons learned for us in the Caribbean. These themes have also been conveyed in these previous blog-commentaries; see a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12304	Caribbean Festival of the Arts – Past, Present and Future
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=11905	Want Better Event Security? ’Must Love Dogs’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=11574	Bad Week for Bahamas Events – Missing out of Opportunities
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10910	Lessons Learned from “Jazz in the Gardens” (Miami)
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9712	Forging Change: Panem et Circenses (Food & Festivals)
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3568	Forging Change: Music Moves People

So were you born after Woodstock?

Most assuredly! We have all had new beginnings since the monumental tremors (shakings) of this event 50 years ago. Now let’s keep on shaking up the status quo in the Caribbean and challenging the orthodoxy; we must reform and transform.

And let’s have fun too! The Woodstock 1969 event was fun … for the nearly half-a-million people who attended; and despite the obvious potential for disaster, riot, looting, and catastrophe, the attendees spent the three days with music and peace on their minds. (See the related VIDEO in the Appendix below). The usual profit motive was thrown out and only the music was left.

Organizers felt they had [only two options] … to complete the fencing and ticket booths, without which the promoters would lose any profit or go into debt, or [complete the] building of the stage, without which the promoters feared they would have a disappointed and disgruntled audience. When the audience began arriving by the tens of thousands … the Wednesday before the weekend, the decision was made for them. Those without tickets simply walked through gaps in the fences, and the organizers were forced to make the event free of charge. Though the festival left its promoters nearly bankrupt, their ownership of the film and recording rights more than compensated for the losses after the release of the hit documentary film Woodstock in March 1970.^[11]

Woodstock 1969 was not a Caribbean event; but it does pose lessons for us in the Caribbean. Let’s pay attention. 🙂

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

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

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

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

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

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

—————

Appendix VIDEO – By The Numbers: Woodstock 1969 – https://www.cbsnews.com/video/by-the-numbers-woodstock-1969/

Posted August 4, 2019 – “Sunday Morning” takes account of one of the most heralded events of the 1960s: the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair, where 400,000 showed up for “three days of peace and music.” Jane Pauley reports.

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What Went Wrong? ‘7 to 1’ – Quantifying Caribbean ‘Less Than’

Posted on July 22, 2019 in Ethos, Social

Go Lean Commentary

When building a house, one starts with the foundation. It is important to have a good solid foundation.

²⁴“Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. ²⁵Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won’t collapse because it is built on bedrock. ²⁶But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn’t obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. ²⁷When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash.” – The Bible – Matthew 7:24-27 – New Living Translation

Don’t get it twisted! Caribbean society did not have a good solid foundation at the start; it was built on the premise of Slavery! That’s a flawed moral foundation. That was then … as the years, decades and centuries past, the societal defects only exacerbated. See this quotation:

One by one, at least six European powers [(British, Danish, Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish)] entered the fray and wrestled with each over the riches to be obtained from the region under colonization. Caribbean islands were exchanged as part of peace negotiations after European wars, and sometimes captured outright by those countries that could muster the naval power so far from their shores. The source of this wealth was the fruits of the labor of enslaved Africans. Commercial and military intervention on the African coast ensured a supply of captive laborers for the plantations. The slave trade represented the largest capital investment in the world, meaning that the slaves themselves were valuable commodities, and was promoted and patronized by the royal families and leading merchants and politicians of Europe.

Africans were enslaved and taken to the Americas, agricultural commodities were transported, often in the same slaving vessels, from the Americas to Europe, and trade goods were shipped from Europe to Africa for more slaves—the so-called “Triangular Trade.” More than nine million enslaved Africans reached the New World, … about 40 percent going to the Caribbean. Jamaica received nearly twice as many slaves as were imported into the United States; Barbados and Martinique, tiny islands where plantation slavery was established very early, each received roughly the amount received by the whole United States. While these figures cannot take into account the many millions who died en route, they do provide an idea of the intensity of Caribbean slavery. Caribbean slaves were notoriously malnourished, overworked, and susceptible to disease. They died in droves. It was cheaper for planters to simply import new slaves than to maintain their existing labor forces, and women were not encouraged to bear children until it appeared the slave trade would end. …
Source: Yelvington, Kevin A. (2000). ” Caribbean Crucible: History, Culture, and Globalization”. Retrieved July 22, 2019 from: http://www.socialstudies.org/sites/default/files/publications/se/6402/640201.html

The islands and coastal lands that constitute today’s Caribbean were not intended to be paradisiacal destinations for Black-and-Brown people. No, in the original intent, these people had only one purpose: provide [cheap] labor … and that’s it.

So ‘What Went Wrong‘ in the historic development of the Caribbean? Answer: There is a lot of “red on our ledger”.

It was generally accepted that the ratio of African slaves to Europeans were ‘7-to-1’. That was the balance in Caribbean society. All those 7 Africans – freed men and slaves – were balanced or counter-weighed with 1 European. See these historic details:

During the 17th and 18th centuries, European colonialism in the Caribbean became increasingly reliant on plantation slavery, so that, by the end of the 18th century, on many islands, enslaved (and free) Afro-Caribbeans far outnumbered their European rulers.^[3] – Source: Wikipedia

Saint Domingue (Haiti’s/Dominican Republic) example – In 1789, the population was composed as follows:^[14][15][16]

· 40,000 Grand-blancs (literally “Great whites” in French) and Petit-blancs (“Little whites”)

· 28,000 Sang-melés (French for: “Mixed blood”) or free people of color.

· 452,000 slaves

Jamaica‘s example – In 1787, there were only 12,737 whites out of a total population of 209,617.^[6]

Suriname – Long inhabited by various indigenous people before being invaded and contested by European powers from the 16th century, eventually coming under Dutch rule in the late 17th century. As the chief sugar colony during the Dutch colonial period, it was primarily a plantation economy dependent on African slaves and, following the abolition of slavery in 1863, indentured servants from Asia. Suriname was ruled by the Dutch-chartered company Society of Suriname between 1683 and 1795. … As a legacy of colonization, the people of Suriname are among the most diverse in the world, spanning a multitude of ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups, [with only 1% featuring an European heritage]. – Source: Wikipedia

(In addition, see the Appendix VIDEO depicting “how the Caribbean became the most Racially Diverse Region in the World”).

Another way of looking at the ‘7-to-1’ ratio is with this narrative from an European perspective: “it takes 7 of you people to equal to one of us”. While this was never the official codification in any Caribbean country, this was the anecdotal experience. (‘Less Than‘ was the official codification in the US for the African population: Three-Fifths – slaves would be counted when determining a state’s total population for legislative representation and taxing purposes). This was especially evident after abolition & emancipation of slavery, when the journey began: the slow march toward de-colonization, majority rule and independence.

This is What Went Wrong with Caribbean society; the people that would form the vast majority of the population – the former slaves and indentured-servants – was considered ‘Less Than‘, yet suddenly thrust into national leadership.

This commentary, 3-of-6 in the July series from the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean continues the theme “What Went Wrong?” in the history of nation-building for Caribbean society. Like other New World territories, every Caribbean member-state was structured for plantation economies. That means the ethos of Caribbean communities was embedded with a lot of societal defects – Crony-capitalism, White supremacy, propensity for flight (slaves and masters). In fact, in all Caribbean communities, the European population declined after emancipation, and even more left when the Caribbean states obtained independence from their colonial status to European empires. The “writing was on the wall”. The full catalog of all the entries in this blog-series is listed as follows:

What Went Wrong? Asking ‘Why’ is Important
What Went Wrong? ‘We’ never had our war!
What Went Wrong? ‘7 to 1’ – Caribbean ‘Less Than’
What Went Wrong? ‘Be our Guest’ – The Rules of Hospitality
What Went Wrong? Failing the Lessons from Infrastructure 101
What Went Wrong? Losing the Best; Nation-building with the Rest

The proliferation of bad community ethos in Caribbean member-states have been detailed in many previous Go Lean blog-commentaries. See a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=17464	Bad Ethos Retarding ‘New Commerce’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16645	Bad Partners – Cruise Lines Interactions
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16534	European Reckoning – Christianity’s Indictment and Bad Ethos
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16408	Bad Ethos on Home Violence
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10532	The Propensity of Bad Stereotypes
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5542	Economic Principle: Bad Ethos of Rent-Seeking
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3582	For Canadian Banks: Caribbean is a ‘Bad Bet’

Caribbean ‘Less Than‘ is an important consideration for the Go Lean movement. This is why it is important to examine the full length-and-breath of the societal defects in our communities.

All Caribbean people are created equal … despite the flawed moral foundation of our history!

We are not ‘Less Than‘; yet when our people leave, abandon their homeland, they are treated ‘Less Than‘ in the foreign abodes – noticeably true in the US and Canada – they re-settle as their new homes. What’s more, for the English-speaking Caribbean citizens that emigrated to the United Kingdom, their experiences have also been documented as Less Than in that country. Lastly, similar anecdotes have emerged from France (Paris) and the Netherlands.

Now that we know “What Went Wrong“, we can now remediate and mitigate the shortcomings. Yes, we can! This is not easy – heavy-lifting actually – but it is conceivable, believable and achievable to reform and transform our societies.

The movement behind the Go Lean…Caribbean book, hereby urges all Caribbean stakeholders to lean-in to this roadmap. Embedded here-in are the strategies, tactics and implementations to make the homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

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

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

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

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

—————-

Appendix VIDEO – Here’s how the Caribbean became the most Racially Diverse Region in the World – https://youtu.be/fAZBLzWCUbU

Masaman
Published on May 1, 2017 – This is how the Caribbean became the most racially diverse region on the planet, after having it’s ancestry and genetics permanently altered through European colonialism and migration.

In this video, I’m going to give the rundown for several Caribbean countries such as Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, along with many others. We will look at the demographic history, and just what spawned the drastic fluctuations in the racial makeup of the region.

We’re also going to touch on many of the surrounding areas such as Central America, the Gullah coast, as well as the Guianas of South America.

Please let me know your thoughts on my analysis, especially if you live in, or have ancestry from the region. Videos over the latter regions will be released soon. Thanks for watching!

Category: Comedy

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	First abolition	Final abolition of slavery	Date of independence
Haiti		1793	1804
Dominican Republic	1801	1822	1844
Costa Rica		1824	1821
El Salvador		1824	1821
Guatemala		1824	1821
Honduras		1824	1821
Mexico		1829	1810
British West Indies Anguilla Antigua and Barbuda Bahamas Barbados Belize Cayman Islands Dominica Grenada Guyana Virgin Islands Jamaica Montserrat Turks and Caicos Islands Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia St. Vincent and Grenadines Trinidad and Tobago		1833-1838 1833-1834 1833-1838 1833-1838 1833-1838 1833-1838 1833-1838 1833-1838 1833-1838 1833-1838 1833-1838 1833-1838 1833-1838 1833-1838 1833-1838 1833-1834 1833-1838	1981 1973 1966 19811978 1974 196619621983 1979 1979 1962
Nicaragua		1838	1821
Danish Virgin Islands Saint John Saint Thomas Saint Croix		1846-1848 1846-1848 1846-1848
Swedish Antilles Saint Barthelemy		1847
French Antilles Guaealoupe Guiana Martinique Saint Martín (French zone)	1794	1848 1848 1848 1848
Colombia	1814	1851	1810
Panama		1851	1903
Venezuela	1816	1854	1811
Netherlands Antilles Aruba Curacao Bonaire Saba Saint Eustatius Suriname St. Martin (Netherlands zone)		1863 1863 1863 1863 1863 1863 1863	1975
United States		1863-1865	1776
Puerto Rico		1873
Cuba		1880-1886	1898