Bahamas – Go Lean…Caribbean

Tag: Bahamas

Abaco, Bahamas – Losing the Battles on Two Fronts

Posted on September 19, 2020 in Ethos, Government, Locations, Strategy

Go Lean Commentary

At the beginning of World War II, it became obvious, very early, that Germany was going to lose. Why?

Because they had to fight battles … alone … on two fronts:

On the West, against the Allied Forces (Britain, French, Americans, etc.)
On the East, against the Communist-bloc, the Soviet Union (Russia, and 15 unified republics).

That was a strategic and tactical disadvantage for Nazi Germany! Time was to catch up with them eventually.

There is a parallel situation today in the Caribbean, in the Northern Bahamas community of Abaco in particular. They have battles on two fronts: A hurricane and a pandemic.

Climate Change – infused storms like Hurricane Dorian in September 2019
At 16:40 UTC on September 1, Dorian made landfall on Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas, with one-minute sustained winds of 185 mph (298 km/h), wind gusts over 220 mph (355 km/h), and a central barometric pressure of 910 millibars (27 inHg),^[26][27] as Dorian reached its peak intensity during landfall.^[28] Storm chaser Josh Morgerman observed a pressure of 913.4 mbar (26.97 inHg) in Marsh Harbour.^[29] Dorian’s forward speed decreased around this time, slowing to a westward crawl of 5 mph (8.0 km/h).^[28] At 02:00 UTC on September 2, Dorian made landfall on Grand Bahama near the same intensity, with the same sustained wind speed.^[30] Afterward, Dorian’s forward speed slowed to just 1 knot (1.2 mph; 1.9 km/h), as the Bermuda High that was steering the storm westward weakened. Later that day, the storm began to undergo an eyewall replacement cycle to the north of Grand Bahama; the Bermuda High to the northeast of Dorian also collapsed, causing Dorian to stall just north of Grand Bahama.^[31][32] Around the same time, the combination of the eyewall replacement cycle and upwelling of cold water caused Dorian to begin weakening, with Dorian dropping to Category 4 status at 15:00 UTC.^[33] Due to the absence of steering currents, Dorian stalled north of Grand Bahama for about a day.^[34][35] – Wikipedia
Pandemic – Coronavirus COVID-19
Consider the actuality of life in the Bahamas during this crisis as related in a previous blog-commentary; (this reporting describes the situation on the ground in the Bahamas as miserable):
- Jobs are affected – most private businesses, including tourist resorts, are closed or curtailed.
- Retail food prices increase because of higher inventory-carrying costs.
- Hospitals and public safety institutions are overwhelmed with COVID cases: testing, tracing, therapeutics and terminal patients.
- Government Shutdown – No administrative processing, at all; no passport processing, no business registrations, etc.

Abaco is failing miserably on both fronts. It is not wise to bet that they will win, overcome, survive or thrive. 🙁

These are not just our thoughts alone; see these 2 articles here depicting the acute crisis on the ground in Abaco:

Title # 1: Everything Is Not Okay in the Bahamas… Not by a Long Shot – Surfline
By: Matt Pruett
For those who don’t regularly deal with natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires or tornadoes, it’s easy to think of these violent events as one-offs, cosmic flukes, and after a year or so passes, old news. When in reality, the devastating effects from these catastrophes can last many, many years after the initial deathblow, and casualties continue to stack.

It’s been a little over a year since the prolonged and record-breaking Category 5 Hurricane Dorian blasted the Bahamas with 185mph maximum sustained winds — effectively become the most intense tropical cyclone to ever strike the islands, the costliest event in Bahamian history with $3.4 billion in damage, and the worst natural disaster in the country’s history — leaving at least 70,000 people homeless and 74 dead (although the exact death toll is unknown, as 245 people were still missing as of April 2020).

But there is compassion, especially from Floridian surfers who’ve been island-hopping this area for generations. And with compassion comes aid, and with aid comes relief, and with relief comes recovery. At least that’s what we hope.

“There are very few moments in life when we as individuals have the opportunity to do something larger than ourselves and help,” explains acclaimed filmmaker Wesley Dunham-Brown, who co-created the surfing documentary films Peel: The Peru Project and Chasing Dora before starting his own production company, Arora Entertainment. “I believe this is what we were ultimately put on this planet to do. When Hurricane Dorian decimated the Bahamas, and more specifically the area of Hope Town, it gave us the opportunity to do just that. Our small group of passionate filmmakers at Arora Entertainment went down to help these people, tell their incredible stories of loss, grief, love and compassion and share their unrelenting faith, will and perseverance to see the Bahamas rebuilt.”

Respected for their storytelling techniques, industry contacts, and ability to spread awareness, Brown and his directorial partner Bobby Pura were hired by Hope Town Rising — a grassroots initiative of the Community Assistance Foundation focused on supporting and rebuilding Elbow Cay — to focus their lenses on this devastated area in the way of a full-length documentary, “This is Hope Town.” The film shadows a close-knit community of Bahamians as they join together to work around-the-clock in terrible conditions to rebuild their lives, while recounting the damage, emotional toll and physical wreckage in heart-wrenching interviews. Brown and Pura immediately tapped longtime Bahamas traveler and professional surfer Cory Lopez to serve as ambassador for the mission.

“I spent a lot of time in the Bahamas over the years,” says Cory. “I started going there when I was a kid, and one year Andy [Irons] and I spent six weeks there. So I have a lot of great memories from the place. Looking at how big that storm was, I expected it to be bad. And of course I heard stories and saw pictures of how bad it ended up being. But once you get down there and actually see the severity of it, a year later… it’s catastrophic, man. It’s been such a slow process of removing debris off the island while getting supplies that are needed — and food — on to the island. And unfortunately with COVID-19, it’s just been a double-whammy for those people. At this rate it’ll take two to three years to rebuild, five years to bring this place back.”

“With disasters like this, it’s like a lot of people will donate right away, but then three months later there’s another disaster somewhere else in the world,” Cory adds. “So hopefully this film will bring another boost of money to the Bahamian people. And they were very grateful that we went down there to give them a voice and bring attention to the problems they’re facing.”

“This is not simply a documentarian journey, it’s a human journey,” Brown continues. “One that demonstrates to the world that we all possess the power to affect change, and a human responsibility to assist those in need wherever they may be. This is our time and opportunity to change things for the people of Hope Town, and to show the world what the people of the Abacos, and those who are doing everything in their power to help them, are truly made of.”

For more information, to watch the movie or to make a donation, visit Hope Town Rising.

Source: Posted September 12, 2020; retrieved September 19, 2020 from: https://www.surfline.com/surf-news/everything-not-okay-bahamas-not-long-shot/95982

————

VIDEO – This is Hope Town Trailer – Extended Cut (3:34) – https://youtu.be/CfqqaHzFO_A

————————-

Title # 2: Abaco in “precarious situation” with COVID, ongoing reconstruction — says MP
NASSAU, BAHAMAS — Central and South Abaco MP James Albury said because the construction industry represents a major hotspot for COVID-19, Abaco is in a “precarious situation” as reconstruction forges on.

Infections on the island continue to rise, albeit more slowly in recent weeks.“It’s something that is on everyone’s mind, including my own,” Albury told Eyewitness News.

“We’re in a very precarious situation and trying to handle that as well as handle reconstruction of course, is a double whammy that is really keeping us on the back foot. We’re pushing forward as much as possible, but there is always a danger there in terms of a resurgence.Abaco has the third-highest number of infections in The Bahamas with 104 infections as of yesterday, trailing Grand Bahama (607) and New Providence (2,186).

The island remains in recovery mode more than a year after deadly Hurricane Dorian decimated many of its once-thriving communities.

Amid the height of lockdown and curfew measures nationwide, exemptions were made for reconstruction of the island, a major undertaking, to continue.

The MP said while it is hoped a rapid increase is avoided, “realistically, if it does happen it will require a lot more effort on behalf of the health team”.

He said an increase in cases and exposures also challenges residents, many of whom remain in alternative housing and tents.

“Even quarantining is difficult for lack of available housing, so it is a big concern and it is certainly nothing to take lightly,” Albury said.

“It is certainly nothing that we can afford to sleep on.” Albury said while new infections per appear to have somewhat slowed “things can change tomorrow”.

“We’re at [over] 100 cases spread out through several areas — Moore’s Island, Sandy Point, and some of the cays as well — so we have a bit of a spread of cases, and we’re dealing with a disaster already within a disaster,” he said.“It’s a very challenging position for the health team on the ground, so I do give them kudos.

“I think they have been working very hard to make sure that testing and monitoring is going on.”

Asked about compliance with emergency protocols on the recovering island, Albury said: “There are always going to be people who try and skirt around the law or skirt around the laid out protocols, but it’s something that Abaconians are taking very seriously.

“…Those members of society who are not really complying of course are going to face the end of the law on that.

Of the total cases on Abaco, 25 were recorded in the last two weeks.

In the two weeks prior, 35 cases were recorded.

This means in the last month, Abaco has more than doubled its cases — from 44 on August 20 to 104 yesterday.

During the first wave, which spanned mid-March through the end of June, Abaco recorded zero cases.

Moore’s Island in the Abacos recorded its first few cases on July 23.

Two days later, a case was recorded on Great Guana Cay in the Abacos.

And on July 28, mainland Abaco recorded its first case.

Source: Posted EyeWitness News – September 18, 2020; retrieved September 19, 2020 from: https://ewnews.com/abaco-in-precarious-situation-with-covid-ongoing-reconstruction-says-mp

The Abaco chain of islands are a beautiful part of the Bahamas archipelago – the natural beauty flourishes. The Bahamas has been rocked by the pandemic but the country was in crisis even before COVID-19; this was due to structural deficiencies that were exacerbated by Agents of Change like Climate Change, globalization, technology and an Aging Diaspora. So the cupboards are now bare; this makes relief and refuge from these recent crises (COVID-19 and Dorian) untenable. Crisis within a crisis; failure on top of failure.

This theme – Bahamian Deficiencies – aligns with many previous commentaries; see a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=19327	‘Missing Solar’ – Inadequacies Exposed to the World
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18266	After Dorian, ‘Fool Me Twice’ on Flooding
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18038	Bahamas 2019 Self-Made Energy Crisis
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18011	Regulating Plastics in the Bahamas – So Little; So Late
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=17992	What Went Wrong? Losing the Best; Nation-building with the Rest
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=17118	White Paper: A Nation in Chaos
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16645	Economic Dysfunction: Bad Partners – Cruise Lines Interactions
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13856	Economic Dysfunction: Baha Mar – Doubling-down on Failure
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12911	Bahamian Diaspora: Not the ‘Panacea’

But we are here to explain, not just complain.

So the problems in Abaco are bigger than just COVID, bigger than just Dorian. The systematic defects are still present and still impacting the viability of this community for the future. There is the need to reboot the Abaco eco-system.

How?

The 2013 book Go Lean … Caribbean identified the root causes of Caribbean communities’ dysfunctions and presented viable solutions: strategies, tactics and implementations. But it cautioned that the remediation work is not easy; it takes heavy-lifting. The book decomposed the societal engines to these sub-categories: economics, security and governance. Then it proposed confederating the 30 member-states of the Caribbean region so as to better leverage the solutions across a wider base – 42 million people – as opposed to just the small populations of many of the Small Island Development States. This is true for sparsely populated Abaco – 10,000-ish population; before Dorian; well before some documented defection-abandonment. Abaco is just a skinny string in the fabric of the regional society.

This is the urging right now; we need more than a string; we need to make the “rope” of our society stronger and better. We must … confederate, collaborate, collude, consolidate and convene:

Many strains of strings in a rope make it stronger. – The Bible Ecclesiastes 4:12

The mono-industrial engine of tourism-alone must be retired. This community – Abaco – must diversify, whatever it takes.

So the certainty of Abaco’s failure, does not have to be so certain; it can be averted. Learning the lessons from ill-fated Nazi Germany, Abaco, the Bahamas and the entire Caribbean need a more structure alliance (allied nations) fighting along-side them for victory.

Yes, we can! Confederation – this is how … we can make our homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

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

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

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt new community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines of Caribbean society.

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

Who We Are
The movement behind the Go Lean book – a non-partisan, apolitical, religiously-neutral Community Development Foundation chartered for the purpose of empowering and re-booting economic engines – stresses that reforming and transforming the Caribbean societal engines must be a regional pursuit. This was an early motivation for the roadmap, as pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 11 – 13):

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

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

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

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

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

Share this post:

Bahamas, Disaster, Green Energy, Transform

Pandemic Playbook – Caribbean Inadequacies – Bahamas Example: ‘Too Little Too Late’

Posted on August 27, 2020 in Government, Locations, Planning, Strategy

Go Lean Commentary

My thimble runneth over! – Derisive Pun based on the Biblical expression “My cup runneth over”.

Considering the reality of the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic on our economic engines and Public Health deliveries, how do you answer:

Is your cup running over?

“My cup runneth over” is a quotation from the Hebrew Bible (Psalm 23:5) and means “I have more than enough for my needs”, though interpretations and usage vary. In desert cultures one is required by laws of hospitality to provide a drink to strangers. – Source: Wikipedia.

For many the answer can only be: My thimble runneth over!

(Check out this blog-site – http://mythimblerunnethover.blogspot.com/ – of a simple woman in Tennessee who feels that she is blessed just to have the simple things in life).

Consider the actuality of life in the Bahamas during this crisis; (this writer is a descendant of Freeport, Bahamas and observed-reported on the pandemic from Nassau):

Jobs are affected – most private businesses, including tourist resorts, are closed or curtailed.
Retail food prices increase because of higher inventory-carrying costs
Hospitals and public safety institutions are overwhelmed with COVID cases: testing, tracing, therapeutics and terminal patients.
Government Shutdown – No administrative processing, at all; no passport processing, no business registrations, etc.

This reporting describes the situation on the ground in the Bahamas as miserable. In fact, a Misery Index (inflation, unemployment and crime rate) would not do justice in depicting the despair in-country. Even Food Security is an issue; the government has had to implement a national feeding program. See a related story here, describing this program and the challenges:

Title: PM: Food assistance costs soar to $1 mil., more than 110k in need
By: Ava Turnquest
NASSAU, BAHAMAS — Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis yesterday revealed the government is supporting the National Food Distribution Task Force with $1 million per week to assist more than 110,000 people.

Now entering its 11th week, Minnis advised the task force will move to erestructure aid into three categories: most, moderately and least vulnerable; with assistance to be distributed weekly, bi-weekly, and once a month, respectively.

The prime minister said 27,705 households have registered for assistance, to date.

“Access to food is a basic human right,” Minnis said during his national address on Sunday.

“Around the world, and here at home, people who have been self-sufficient their entire lives are now struggling to feed themselves and their families.

“Ensuring that our people in need are being helped is one of our leading priorities. We are investing heavily in food assistance.”

He continued: “I understand the unique situation so many of you find yourselves in, never imagining that you would ever have to seek assistance to have enough to eat.

“It is important, at this point in the program, to emphasize that first and foremost the Task Force is implementing a needs-based program.

“We have set out to help those in our communities who are the most vulnerable.”

Minnis said he asked the task force to reach out to smaller grocery stores so that arrangements can be made for food vouchers to be purchased from stores throughout the country.

“We would like neighborhood “Mom and Pop Shops” to participate in, and benefit from, this exercise with us,” he said.

During his address, Minnis noted the budget allocation of $16 million dollars for food assistance.

“Your government is delivering on this commitment,” he said.

“We are now providing $1 million dollars per week to the National Food Distribution Task Force for food assistance, to ensure those who are truly in need of food are being helped.

“Our Food Task Force is making every effort to preserve safety and dignity.”

Minnis noted an interaction with an individual who registered for assistance but later advised they were no longer in need.

“We are so grateful to people like Mr. Knowles, who I am told registered for food assistance but recently wrote back to the Task Force saying, “I am well and God has provided me with more than enough, so I don’t need any further assistance. Please provide it to those in need”.”

“Mr. Knowles’ noble action enables the Task Force to stretch the budget and help those who really need it most.”

Minnis added: “We thank Mr. Knowles and others like him, who understand that even in these difficult times, there are those who are in deep, deep need while others are not struggling as much.”

Source: Posted August 20, 2020; retrieved August 27, 2020 from: https://ewnews.com/pm-food-assistance-costs-soar-to-1-mil-more-than-110k-in-need

The Bahamas has a population of 340,000 (circa 2010) and yet 110,000 are being fed by the government.

Sad! $1 million per week for 110,000 people means $10 each … per week. Wow, the thimble runneth over!

One cannot wait until it rains to get an umbrella.

There should have been some disaster planning for this pandemic in advance – this is called a Pandemic Playbook. The Bahamas, and the whole Caribbean region, was alerted 5 years ago to be prepared for such a possibility; see here:

Lesson Learned – Mitigating SARS in Hong Kong – March 24, 2015
The people, institutions and governance of the Caribbean need to pay more than the usual attention to the lessons of SARS in Hong Kong [(2003], not just from the medical perspective, but also from an economic viewpoint.

During the “heyday” of the SARS crisis, travel and transport to Hong Kong virtually came to a grinding halt! Hong Kong had previously enjoyed up to 14 million visitors annually; they were a gateway to the world. The SARS epidemic became a pandemic because of this status. Within weeks of the outbreak, SARS had spread from Hong Kong to infect individuals in 37 countries in early 2003.^[3]

Can we afford this disposition in any Caribbean community?

This commentary continues the Teaching Series for the month of August 2020 on the subject of Pandemic Playbooks – the need for them and the current deficiency there of in the Caribbean. This is entry 3-of-6 from the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean. The other commentaries in the series are cataloged as follows:

Pandemic Playbook: Worldwide Leadership – Plan ==> Actual
Pandemic Playbook: Caribbean Inadequacies – Missing the Bubble Opportunities
Pandemic Playbook: Bahamas Example – ‘Too Little; Too Late’
Pandemic Playbook: Only at the Precipice – ENCORE
Pandemic Playbook: To Be or Not To Be – COVID Vaccine
Pandemic Playbook: Success – Looks like New Zealand

Are we assigning blame to the Government of the Bahamas for being ill-prepared for the eventuality of this COVID-19 crisis?

Yes – Too Little; Too Late.

In fact, we assigned the same blame to all the member-states of the entire Caribbean. This is because governments have a certain expectation, responsibility and job description. This is referred in the Go Lean book – and in standard Good Governance – as the implied Social Contract; defined as follows:

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

No Food Security on an island or within a chain of islands?

Wait! Why not just Go Fish?

Nope! The government’s playbook forbids standard fishing solutions among the archipelago of island. See this source here:

THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE BAHAMAS
GENERAL PROTOCOLS FOR
BOATS, YACHTS, PRIVATE CRAFT, RECREATIONAL CRAFT, CRUISING IN, PLYING THE WATERS OF, OR SHELTERING IN THE BAHAMAS OR SEEKING TO DO SO
DURING THE COVID-19 SHUT-DOWN
14 April, 2020

…
All foreign boats shall remain in place. There shall be no boating, cruising, fishing, day trips or other movement of any kind.
Boats belonging to Bahamians or Bahamian residents whose boats have a regular berth or place in The Bahamas shall comply with the following restrictions:
- …
- On no account shall Bahamian boats travel from one island of The Bahamas to another …
- …
- In order to minimize interpersonal contact and to respect the lockdown and curfew requirements, Bahamian boats shall not engage in boating, cruising, day trips or other movement. However, Bahamian boats may engage in subsistence fishing and local fishing for sustenance only (no sports fishing) at allowable times only and with all possible precautions (including Pars. (10) to (13) hereof), and only with the boat departing from and returning to the same location.

So unless you own your own boat – rare in the community – no subsistence fishing (for personal consumption) is allowed.

How about the land? Can Bahamians feed themselves “of the land”, as in subsistence farming?

Nope! Despite our foregoing assertion that “one cannot wait until it rains to get an umbrella”, the Bahamas Ministry of Agriculture is doubling-down in its desire to encourage Backyard Farming and Community Gardens; only now. See the full story here:

Title: Michael Pintard – Agriculture Minister – Relaunches Backyard Farming Programme
By: DENISE MAYCOCK, Tribune Freeport Reporter
AGRICULTURE and Marine Resources Minister Michael Pintard relaunched the Backyard Farming Programme on Friday, distributing 1,500 backyard kits here on Grand Bahama.

This comes a day after the announcement of an extension of the lockdown for another two weeks to August 19, to control the spread of the coronavirus infections on Grand Bahama.

Additionally, Mr Pintard revealed plans to launch community gardens throughout the island, in partnership with the five GB MPs. Land will be identified and cleared in each of the five constituencies to grow community gardens.

Mr Pintard said these programme initiatives are part of the food security programme, which is important, especially due to the global coronavirus pandemic.

“Again, we are in a difficult period and we believe that the potential for disruption in the food supply is real, given COVID-19,…” he said.

According to Minister Pintard, of the 1,500 kits assembled at the Department of Agriculture in Freeport, 100 will be distributed to each of the five MPs, and the remainder to churches, NGOs, and others.

He believes that “the revitalized” backyard farming programme will not only help the country in terms of its expenditure on food imports, but will also benefit residents.

“We believe it will enhance our ability to save money on our food bill, but also assist a number of persons in growing their farming operation as well. This is going to be accompanied by two other programmes: the distribution of a variety of seeds also on the island as a separate part of our backyard and community farming programmes. We have many more seeds that supply a minimum of 1,000 households,” Mr Pintard said.

The minister was pleased that all five MPs have agreed to support and participate, including Minister of State for Disaster Preparedness Iram Lewis, MP for Central Grand Bahama, Pakesia Parker-Edgecombe of West Grand Bahama and Bimini, Deputy Prime Minister Peter Turnquest of East Grand Bahama, and Frederick McAlpine, MP for Pineridge.

“We don’t believe that MPs are the only conduits by which kits should be distributed, and we want to make sure we have 1,000 kits, plus 1,000 additional seed packages distributed, through partnership with churches, NGOs, and others,” he said.

In terms of the community gardens, Mr Pintard noted that they will be clearing properties for community gardening in every constituency, and will also be partnering with local government on that initiative.

MP Pakesia Parker Edgecombe said she is very appreciative for the kits, which will be distributed in her constituency. “It is important for us to promote food sustainability. I know with the crisis we are going through many are asking about food security. What Mr Pintard and his ministry have been able to do with this initiative and this programme, is to (encourage people) to grow your own food and not spend so much at the supermarket,” she said.

MP Iram Lewis said he has been a strong advocate for backyard farming. “I was happy when the Minister decided to partner with us to take backyard farming to the next level where we form cooperatives in the community by having community gardens. All MPs have identified an area in their constituencies for these community gardens.”

Mr Lewis said a major anchor garden has been identified on South Mall Drive where there will be a seedling nursery and a production area, and weekly Farmers’ Market.

“We really appreciate this gesture,” he said. We are happy it is officially launched and will go a long way, with respect to food security and putting healthy produce that we grow ourselves on our table,” he said.

Tutorial videos and workshop for persons interested in backyard and community gardening is available on the Ministry’s website. Anthony Hutcheson will also provide lectures and tips on how to plant and care for the garden.

Source: Posted Friday August 7, 2020; retrieved August 27, 2020 from: http://www.tribune242.com/news/2020/aug/07/michael-pintard-relaunches-backyard-farming-progra/

Yes, indeed! The assessment is conclusive: Too little; Too late!

In contrast, the full strategies, tactics and implementations for Food Security and Disaster Preparation had already been embedded in a roadmap for reforming and transforming the Caribbean; this is the purpose of the Go Lean book. This is a vision of a Pandemic Playbook. Rather than “waiting for it to rain and then go looking for an umbrella”, the Go Lean roadmap presents a plan for New Guards for Homeland Security and Public Safety on Day One / Step One of the ascension of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation.

See the vision for Caribbean Food Security plus Disaster Preparation (and Response) as presented in previous blog-commentaries; consider this sample:

Food Security

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=19725	Keep the Change: Being ‘Basic’ about Basic Needs
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18836	Food Security – Big Chicken 101
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18834	Food Security – A Lesson in History: Free Trade Agreements & Food
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18831	Food Security – Planning and Opportunities for the Cruise Line industry
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18828	Food Security – A Plan for Temperate Foods in the Tropics
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18817	Food Security – Bread Basket 101
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13184	Industrial Reboot – Frozen Foods 101

Disaster Preparation and Response

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=20052	Natural Disasters: The Price of Paradise
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=19568	Big Hairy Audacious Goal – Need ‘Big Brother’ for Pandemics
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18243	The Need after Disasters? Regionalism – ‘How you like me now?’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18182	Disaster Relief: Helping, Not Hurting
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=17500	Continuity of Business: Lessons on Recovery from System Failures
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=15996	Good Governance: Stepping Up in an Emergency
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=15886	Industrial Reboot – Planning for Disasters with Reinsurance
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8943	Zika’s Drug Breakthrough – End-Game of an Playbook
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7449	‘Crap Happens’ – So What Now?
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4720	Lesson Learned – Mitigating SARS in Hong Kong
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4308	911 – Emergency Response: System in Crisis
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2397	Lesson Learned – Monitoring and Mitigating Ebola
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1003	Painful and rapid spread of new virus – Chikungunya – in Caribbean

Here’s the major problem: the whole Caribbean – not just the Bahamas – is in competition with the rest of the world, whether we want to be or not. In fact, the original motivation of the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean was to execute a Regional Battle Plan to dissuade emigration – to lower the Push-Pull factors that lead to the Brain Drain.

We are losing that Battle.

Some countries – that we compete against – are stepping up and filling the “cups of sustenance” for their citizens and residents, while here in the Caribbean, we are falling short. This is evident in the Bahamas, as related in the foregoing, as they are only able to provide some basic food support for some citizens, as a rate of $10 per person per week. Yes, the competition is doing so much more; see here:

Canada is providing families $950 every 2 weeks for the duration of the pandemic, plus freezing rents & mortgages.
Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/24/fact-check-canadas-pandemic-relief-isnt-broad-claimed/5493166002/
The US provided a one-time $1,200 Stimulus Check to all their tax-payers – plus $500 per child.
The UK government’s emergency fiscal measures – including paying 80% of the salaries of furloughed workers, higher welfare spending, tax cuts and grants for small companies – will cost around 104 billion pounds. The government has also announced 330 billion pounds in state-guaranteed loans.
As of May 2020, the Euro Zone’s (which includes the Caribbean stakeholders of France and The Netherlands) total fiscal response to the epidemic is tallied at 3.2 trillion Euros. Of that total some 2.7 trillion Euros comes from national fiscal stimulus and government guarantees for companies to keep them in business. On top of that, 100 billion Euros of money jointly borrowed by the EU is to go to a scheme to subsidize wages so firms can cut working hours, not jobs.
Source: https://www.fm-magazine.com/news/2020/may/global-coronavirus-pandemic-relief-efforts-infographic.html

For us in the Caribbean in general, and in the Bahamas in particular, can you see the “Too Little; Too Late” dilemma? Do you see the “Push”? Do you see the “Pull”?

Brain Drain – Where the Brains Are – February 25, 2020
For us in the Caribbean, it is important for us to understand the full width-and-breadth of Brain Drains. Every month, the movement behind the Go Lean book present a Teaching Series on a subject germane to Caribbean life. For this February 2020, our focus is on the machinations that lead to Brain Drain. This is entry 1 of 5 for this series, which details that every community everywhere has people with brains – or those with genius qualifiers – it is just the opportunities that is missing in many communities. So there is the need to analyze the “Push and Pull“ factors that causes our genius-qualified-people to abandon this homeland and then identify the strategies, tactics and implementations that we must consider in order to abate this bad trend.

Firstly, the “Push and Pull” reasons are identified in the Go Lean book as follows:

“Push” refers to people who feel compelled to leave, to seek refuge in a foreign land. “Refuge” is an appropriate word; because of societal defects, many from the Caribbean must leave as refugees – think LGBT, Disability, Domestic-abuse, Medically-challenged– for their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

“Pull”, on the other hand refers to the lure of a more prosperous life abroad; many times our people are emigrating based on a mirage of “greener pastures”; but many times, the “better prospect” is elusive for the first generation.

The Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic is a real threat and crisis for our Caribbean region; we have no choice but to contend with it. Our competition, with the rest of the world is also real; we have to contend with that as well.

We need a better Pandemic Playbook; we need Good Governance. We need to do more! Individually, our member-states are crippled – we cannot fill a cup; only drip into a thimble. We must leverage the full region; we need a Single Market for the Caribbean now more than ever. See how the EU Single Market – our role model – is micro-managing the economic-fiscal fall-out in the Appendix VIDEO below.

This crisis would be a terrible thing to waste …

We urge all Caribbean stakeholders – governments, citizens, institutions, trading partners and Diaspora – to come together, to convene, collaborate and confederate to forge a better response to this global pandemic crisis. This is how we can make the homeland a better place to live, work and play. Our people have choices and options; they can, and have abandoned us and fled to more prosperous (resilient) lands abroad. Let’s wake up, fight back and compete for our people.

Despite the challenges, if we unify, we can compete – Yes, we can – it is conceivable, believable and achievable. 🙂

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

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

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 – 14):

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

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

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

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … 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.

xxxiii. Whereas lessons can be learned and applied from the study of the recent history of other societies, the Federation must formalize statutes and organizational dimensions to avoid the pitfalls of communities like … . On the other hand, the Federation must also implement the good examples learned from developments/communities like … .

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

—————–

APPENDIX VIDEO – COVID-19: EU’s plan to save the economy – https://youtu.be/KyRKU2DePO0

EURACTIV
Posted April 20, 2020 – The European Commission estimates the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak could be greater than the financial crisis in 2008.

In order to keep the economy running, the EU executive introduced flexibility for funds and national expenditure, member states approved a safety net of liquidity for countries, workers and companies involving the ESM, EIB, and Commission SURE, and EU leaders agreed on the need to work out a recovery plan for the block in the coming months.

EURACTIV looked into the details of the EU’s economic response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Share this post:

Bahamas, Disaster, Freeport, Transform

[Top]

‘Missing Solar’ – Inadequacies Exposed to the World – Encore

Posted on March 2, 2020 in Economics, Ethos, Government, Locations, Tactical

The Bahamas has inadequate infrastructure to contend with the realities of modern life. This is all too familiar to the people in the Bahamas.

This is also familiar to the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean. On August 15, 2019, this commentary scolded the stakeholders in the Bahamas for their inexcusable inefficiency and ineffectiveness with their infrastructure and Public Works. Now last night, the US-based media-television-network company CBS exposed these inadequacies for all the world to see in their titular news magazine show 60 Minutes.

Eat Crow Bahamas!

What’s more, the actuality of Hurricane Dorian came along and made the bad Bahamas energy delivery even worse. See the VIDEO here of the 60 Minutes report:

VIDEO – Bahamas installing solar power after storms – https://www.cbsnews.com/video/bahamas-hurricanes-power-grid-solar-60-minutes-2020-03-01/

60 Minutes
Posted March 1, 2020 – A tiny country in “Hurricane Alley” is trying to be an example to the world after Category 5 storms demolished parts of its electrical grid. Bill Whitaker reports on the Bahamas’ adoption of solar energy.
Click on PLAY Button to watch; expect commercial advertising before and during.

That report revealed that:

The Bahamian Government pays $400 million dollars on diesel fuel to keep its power plants operating and pass that cost on to the consumers.
“They pay 3 to 4 times the rate that people pay in the mainland US”.

In addition, in another Go Lean commentary, it was reported that the World Bank revealed that 61 percent of college-educated citizens of the Bahamas have fled this homeland for foreign destinations. Is there any surprise? This failure to deliver basic services in an efficient and effective manner is a contributing Push factor why people leave.

There is no mystery! Now the Bahamas is trying to “play catch-up” and deploy Solar Micro-Grids. Yippee!!

This is an appropriate time to Encore that previous blog-commentary from August 15, 2019 – during the ‘Dog Days of Summer‘; (remember this was 2 weeks before Category 5 Hurricane Dorian made landfall). Now that this is March 2020, there is the opportunity to look back with 20/20 Perfect Hindsight Vision at the issues raised by the 60 Minutes story – there are many. This entry is 1-of-3 in that “Look Back“. The other entries are cataloged as follows:

60 Minutes Story – Bahamas Self-Made Energy Crisis
60 Minutes Story – Go Green … finally
60 Minutes Story – Moral Authority to “Name, Blame & Shame” the Big Polluters

See the first Encore here-now:

———————

Go Lean Commentary – Nassau’s 2019 Self-Made Energy Crisis

It is seriously Hot-Hot-Hot out there …

So there is no intent here to be “cold and callous” … (callous = ‘feeling no emotion’).

But the Bahamas’s capital city – Nassau – is having an energy crisis right now:

The local power generation utility (Bahamas Power & Light or BPL) is not producing enough electricity to meet the needs of the community, so they have to load-share and force black-outs/brown-outs around the island to try and facilitate some delivery some time to all their customer base. They do not want to show favoritism to one group over another, so they are leveraging the load-sharing tactic on everybody. So now instead of some people being happy and some being angry, they have obtained universality …

… everybody is angry!

———-

VIDEO – B.P.L. Load Shedding Update – https://youtu.be/fW8JGGnlvzQ

ZNSNetwork
Published on May 15, 2019

Category: People & Blogs

Additionally, see this portrayal in this news article here (and the Appendix VIDEO below):

Title: BPL causing ‘chaos’
By: Jasper Ward, The Nassau Guardian Staff Reporter

Super Value food stores are taking a significant hit as a result of protracted power cuts, according to its owner Rupert Roberts.

Roberts said about six Super Value locations are impacted by outages daily and the company has spent around $100,000 recently on replacing equipment damaged by the outages.

He described the outages as “a nuisance” and said they create “chaos”.

“This BEC (Bahamas Electricity Corporation) crisis is more than a crisis, it’s chaos,” Roberts said at the Nassau Street store.

“It’s costing us $250,000 a year from burning up our equipment.”

He said, “I suppose our biggest concern is burning up equipment.

“…[We] burn up a $10,000 or $20,000 air conditioning [unit and] we’re always burning up compressors. We’re using up spares so fast and we’re doing emergency imports.

“Fortunately, we’re able to get them in within three or four days without flying them in. But I noticed on Saturday we had a diary case down because we’re waiting on the compressor that burned out. That’s the biggest problem.”

Roberts said it will cost about $10,000 to replace a compressor in the dairy case at the Nassau Street location. He said it is unlikely that case will be operational before Saturday.

Roberts said dairy sales were up 14 percent before the case was damaged.

Since it was damaged, sales have gone down 17 percent, he said.

Roberts said the company has twice the amount of equipment needed “because of the serious problem” of the outages.

Although the food store chain is facing challenges with the outages, Roberts said the company is “managing quite well”.

“We’ve been in this business over 50 years and we’ve had power problems for the last 50 years,” he said.

“So, we learned how to cope. We don’t run out of fuel. Years ago, when I first started in the industry, we had generators because of hurricanes but for the past 25 years we’ve had to have generators because of power outages.”

For nearly two months, communities on New Providence have experienced hours-long blackouts as part of Bahamas Power and Light’s (BPL) load shedding exercise.

Over the last few weeks, BPL has conducted nearly four-hour-long load shedding.

On Sunday, BPL Chief Executive Officer Whitney Heastie said he could not guarantee an end to load shedding exercises in the immediate future, describing BPL as being “on a cliff”.

Heastie said BPL needs 250 megawatts of generation in order to meet the summer demand.

However, it is currently running on 210 megawatts, including 105 megawatts of rental generation.

Heastie said the 40-megawatt shortfall has led to load shedding across New Providence.

Source: Posted by The Nassau Guardian daily newspaper on August 13, 2019; retrieved August 14, 2019 from: https://thenassauguardian.com/2019/08/13/bpl-causing-chaos/

The need to explain that our statement is not “cold and callous” is due to the fact that the appearance is that “we” are ‘kicking the people when they are down’ when we make this assertion:

This energy crisis for Nassau is Self-Made!!

Wait, what?!

This is a matter of infrastructure and Nassau has had an inadequate infrastructure for a while. In fact, since the 1970’s residents on this island of New Providence (NP) have been encouraged to buy bottled-water and not consume the ‘tap’ water.

All of this is evident of the lacking municipal infrastructure. In fact, this is reminiscent of the US City of Flint, Michigan. Their infrastructure has become defective and the people there has to resort to bottled water. In Flint, that problem has now persisted for 4 years. In Nassau, it has been 40 years. (See an excerpt of our 2016 blog-commentary on the Flint crisis in the Appendix below).

Yep, self-made!

This is a BIGGER issue than water or electricity; this is an issue of the Social Contract.

The 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean (Page 170) defines the Social Contract as the informal arrangement where citizens surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority of the State in exchange for protection of remaining natural and legal rights. This is why the State, in this case, the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, is allowed to operate monopolies for the water and power utilities. But any failures in these Social Contract deliveries causes repercussions and consequences. For example people leave and abandon their homeland. This relevance was detailed in a previous Go Lean commentary from July 28, 2015:

The issue of Caribbean citizens abandoning their homelands is one of the more dire threats to societal life in the region. Why do they do it?

“Push and Pull” reasons!

Push
Conditions at home drive Caribbean citizens to take flight and find refuge elsewhere. Many times these conditions are economic (jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities), security and governance related, but there are other reasons too; consider discriminations due to ethnic diversity or other lifestyle choices.

Lastly, there is the new threat of Climate Change. While this is a threat for the whole world, the Caribbean is on the frontline. Though there is some debate as to the causes of climate change, there is no question as to its outcome: temperatures are rising, droughts prevail, and most devastating, hurricanes are now more threatening. A Caribbean elevation plan must address the causes of climate change and most assuredly its consequences. …

Now, the anecdotal experience is that there is a need to mitigate excessive heat in the region for an even longer season. How do we mitigate excessive heat?

Air conditioning!

But this cure may at times be worse than the disease.

Air conditioning requires even greater energy consumption, (the Caribbean has among the highest energy costs in the Western Hemisphere); the Go Lean book posits that the average costs of energy can be decreased from an average of US$0.35/kWh to US$0.088/kWh in the course of the 5-year term of this roadmap; (Page 100).

In addition, the release of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s) in the air-conditioning process is a contributor of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The status quo needs remediation!

The Bahamas should have remediated these infrastructural problems years ago – the price is too high to allow it to linger. In addition to the societal abandonment threat; there are life-and-death issues associated with convalescing citizens needing continuous power supply – see photo here:

That’s the problem, now what is the solution?

In addition to the voluminous number of blog-commentaries on infrastructure – see this recent submission from July 26, 2019 – the Go Lean book presented strategies, tactics and implementations that must be pursued, not just for the Bahamas, but for the whole Caribbean region – all 30 member-states. In fact, the book presents one advocacy (Page 176) specifically focused on Public Works, entitled: “10 Ways to Impact Public Works“. These “10 Ways” include the following highlights, headlines and excerpts:

1	Lean-in for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The CU is chartered to unify the Caribbean region into one Single Market of 42 million people across 30 member-states, thereby re-engineering the economic engines in and on behalf of the region, including a currency & monetary union. This new eco-system allows for the design, funding and construction of Public Works and Infrastructural projects. The federal agency within the CU’s Department of the Interior has the scope for the Caribbean much like the Corps of Engineers has for the US. (Plus the CU will collaborate with the US Corps for projects related to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands). There are a number of inter-state projects that must be coordinated on the federal level. There will also be projects that are “Too Big for One State” that will be facilitated by the CU. In addition, all CU efforts must comply with the Art in Public Places mandate, so sculptures and statutes will be embedded in projects or the project itself can be a work of art (bridges, water towers, building architecture). For existing projects that fail due to financial shortfalls, the CU will accommodate dissolution or reorganization in the federal courts, bringing balance to the process to all stakeholders.
2	Union Atlantic Turnpike
3	Pipelines and PCP (Pneumatic Capsule Pipeline)
4	Regional Power Grid The CU will facilitate the installation of a regional power grid, and power sharing between member-states, with underwater and above-ground high-intensity wiring to alternate energy plants: wind/tidal turbines, solar panel & natural gas.
5	Self-Governing Entities (SGE)
6	Enterprise Zones
7	Empowerment Zones
8	Monopolies The UN grants the CU the monopoly rights for an Exclusive Economic Zone, so the focus must be on quality delivery. The CU plan is to liberalize management of monopolies, with tools like ratings/rankings against best practices. Plus technological accommodations for ICT allows for cross-competition from different modes (satellite, cable, phone).
9	Cooperatives The CU will task utility cooperatives with the delivery of some public utilities such as Air Chillers; Refrigerated Warehouses to its members. This strategy shares the cost of the “Works” installation across the full co-op membership.
10	Capital Markets A single market and currency union will allow for the emergence of viable capital markets for stocks and bonds (public and private), thereby creating the economic engine to fuel growth and development. This forges financial products for “pre” disaster project funding (drainage, levies, dykes, sea walls) and post disaster recovery (reinsurance sidecars).

The Go Lean book doubles-down on the concept of leveraging across a larger population base so that BIGGER infrastructure projects can be facilitated in the region – on land or in the waters – see Photo here. Imagine large arrays of solar panels, wind turbines, tidal generators, geo-thermal energy captured at the volcanic hot zones, and even Natural Gas as a cleaner-cheaper fossil fuel. These energy options are realistic and should be available to us now in the Caribbean, so they should be explored and deployed. This, a regional power grid, is the energy prime directive for this Go Lean movement.

This theme – exploiting alternative options for the economic, security and governing empowerments in the region – aligns with many previous Go Lean commentaries; see a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=17925	‘We’ have repeatedly failed the lessons from ‘Infrastructure 101’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=17280	Way Forward – For Energy: ‘Trade’ Winds
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13985	EU Assists Barbados in Renewable Energy Self-Sufficiency
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12994	The Science of ‘Power Restoration’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12466	12 Caribbean Member-states have ‘Volcanic Energy’ to Exploit
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10367	The Science of Sustenance – Green Batteries
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5155	Green Energy Solution: Tesla unveils super-battery to power homes
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4897	US Backs LNG Distribution for Caribbean Energy Solutions
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=915	Go ‘Green’ … Caribbean

Make no mistake, energy is a basic need!

The failure for a community to have continuous supply of energy is an energy crisis. (This means you Bahamas).

Enough already!

Now is the time for all Caribbean stakeholders to prepare for the empowerments of Green-Energy solutions. It is past-time for a regional power grid:

generation – Green options (solar, wind turbines, tidal, geo-thermal and natural gas)
distribution – Underwater cables to connect individual islands
consumption – efficient battery back-ups for home deployments.

These changes are coming … one way or another.

For you government revenue institutions who may be overly dependent of fuel taxes and surcharges – you are hereby put on notice:

Changes are afoot. We will succeed; we will make our Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work and play.

🙂

About the Book

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

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

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 – Another B.P.L. Blackout – https://youtu.be/fOT0gfvSchM

ZNSNetwork
Published on Jul 2, 2019

Category: People & Blogs

——————–

Appendix – Excerpts from previous Commentary: Flint, Michigan – A Cautionary Tale – January 19, 2016

[The City of] Flint serves as a “cautionary tale” for other communities near “Failed City/Failed State” status. From this perspective, this community may be a valuable asset to the rest of the world and especially to the Caribbean.

The publishers of the book Go Lean…Caribbean are here in Detroit to “observe and report” the turn-around and rebirth of the once-great-but-now-distressed City of Detroit and its metropolitan areas, including Flint. (Previous commentaries featured the positive role model of the City of Ann Arbor).

What happened here?

According to the Timeline in the Appendix, Flint, MI suffered this fate as a chain reaction to its Failed-State status. Outside stakeholders – Emergency Managers – came into the equation to execute a recovery plan with focus only on the Bottom-Line. The consideration for people – the Greater Good – came second, if at all. They switched water sources, unwisely!

The assertion of the Go Lean book is that the Caribbean region can benefit from lessons learned from Good, Bad and Ugly governance. The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The Go Lean book and related commentaries call on citizens of the Caribbean member-states to lean-in to the empowerments described in the roadmap for elevation. This will require a constant vigil to ensure the Greater Good as opposed to personal gains.

…

See VIDEO here of the story in the national media …

VIDEO – Citizens’ Anger Continues Over Toxic Water in Flint, Michigan – http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/citizens-anger-continues-toxic-water-flint-michigan-36348795 –

…

This tragic story – cautionary tale of Flint – is an analysis of failure in the societal engines of economics, security and governance. These 3 facets are presented in the book Go Lean … Caribbean as the three-fold cord for societal harmony; for any society anywhere. The Caribbean wants societal harmony; we must therefore work to optimize all these three engines. As exhibited by Flint, this is easier said than done. This heavy-lifting is described in the book as both an art and a science.

The focus in this commentary is a continuation in the study of the societal engine of governance; previously, there was a series on economics and one on security. This commentary though, focuses on the bad eventually of Social Contract failures. The Social Contract refers to the unspoken expectations between citizens and the State. In many cases, State laws limit ownership of all mineral rights to the State; so citizens will be dependent on State systems to supply water. In the case of Flint, the City’s Water and Sewage Department has a monopoly; this supply is the only option for residents!

The Go Lean book describes “bad actors” wreaking havoc on the peace and security of the community. The book relates though that “bad actors” are not always human; they include bad events like natural disasters and industrial spills. Plus, actual “bad actors” may have started out with altruistic motives, good intentions. This is why the book and accompanying blogs design the organization structures for the new Caribbean with checks-and-balances, mandating a collaborative process, because sometimes even a well-intentioned individual may not have all the insight, hindsight and foresight necessary to pursue the Greater Good. This the defect of the Michigan Emergency Manager structure; it assigns too much power to just one person, bypassing the benefits of a collaborative process. This is one reason why this review is important: power corrupts…everyone … everywhere.

…

We must do better, than Flint! (Flint must do better; too many lives are involved).

We know that “bad actors and bad incidences” will always occur, even in government institutions, so we must be “on guard” against abusive influences and encroachments to Failed-State status. The Go Lean roadmap calls for engagement and participation from everyone, the people (citizens), institutions and government officials alike. We encouraged all with benevolent motives to lean-in to this roadmap, to get involved to effect a turnaround for the Caribbean Failed-States.

Our Caribbean stakeholders deserve the best … from their leaders. 🙂

Share this post:

Bahamas, Disaster, Green Energy, Model, Power

[Top]

After Dorian, ‘Fool Me Twice’ on Flooding

Posted on September 18, 2019 in Government, Implementation, Strategy

Go Lean Commentary

A Caribbean island – the Northern Bahamas island of Grand Bahama – just got hit with a once in a lifetime Category 5 Hurricane Dorian. Once in a lifetime for a dog (average life span 12 – 15 years), but not for a human (average lifespan 70 – 80 years). No, this island was equally devastated by the following storms:

Hurricane Frances (August 2004) – Several feet of water flooded the international airport at Freeport.^[28] In the Bahamas, insurers and reinsurers estimated industry insured losses at about $300 million (2004 dollars).^[29]
Hurricane Jeanne (September 2004) – Because Hurricane Frances struck only about two weeks prior, numerous houses were still patched with plastic sheeting on their roofs, while other residents were still living with neighbors or relatives. Officials urged residents in low-lying homes to evacuate. Shelters were set up at the churches and schools on Abaco Islands, Eleuthera and Grand Bahama.
Hurricane Wilma (2005) – The hurricane produced hurricane-force winds^[38] and a powerful storm surge, flooding southwestern coastal areas of Grand Bahama and destroying hundreds of buildings. In western settlements on the island of Grand Bahama, graves were washed up with skeletal remains lying in the streets. Damage totaled about $100 million almost entirely on the western half of the island. The central portion of Grand Bahama, including in and around Freeport, reported minor to moderate damage, while the eastern end received little to no damage.^[39]

Get it?! Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!

Who’s fooling who?

The culprit here is Mother Nature, yes, but there are other stakeholders to blame; think:

Public Works / Infrastructure – Surely with such a preponderance to flood, storm water management and solutions must be put in place. Think: levies, dykes, sea walls, and parks as storm retention ponds; see VIDEO below.
Insurance Companies – Reports are that insurance carriers are reticent to cover flood casualty; see Appendix below.

So ‘Shame on Freeport’ for not remediating the threats of storm surge, in the 15 years since Hurricane Frances. This is NOT the product of learning from the “Cautionary Tales” of the many low-lying urban areas around the world; think New Orleans, Louisiana, USA or the European country of Holland (or The Netherlands).

Flood control is not a luxury for those communities, nor should it be for Grand Bahama Island; it must be embedded in the Way Forward for Freeport. According to a previous blog-commentary, “there is a thesis that flooding could be prevented”. The Dutch experience and their historicity in flood control provides lessons-learned for us; (see the Appendix VIDEO on the lessons from The Netherlands).

More than just low-lying communities are affected; every coastal community needs to be On Guard. See the mitigation plans here being pursued in some communities, with the adoption of spill-ways and retention ponds to handle storm surges:

VIDEO – Storm-resistant parks are helping cities defend themselves against flooding – https://www.cbsnews.com/news/storm-resistant-parks-that-are-helping-cities-defend-themselves-from-flooding-2019-09-17/

Posted September 17, 2019 – Flooding from storm surges and heavy rainfall can be one of the most devastating effects of storms — and scientists say Climate Change is making those storms worse. Often, engineers build barriers like sea walls and levees to protect coastal cities. But now, there’s a new, prettier approach: public parks that are also storm-resistant.

One of those parks, Hunter’s Point South Park, sits on the edge of New York’s East River. The park boasts rows of seasonal plants, winding paths, and breathtaking views. But that’s not all: the flower beds disguise a ditch and filtration system that captures water and slowly releases it back into the river; synthetic turf absorbs water, too.

“In a big, heavy storm, we almost have a half a million gallons of water being held here, detained, until the tide or the storm leaves, and then it goes right back to the river,” said Tom Balsley, who designed the park with Michael Manfredi and Marion Weiss.
…
See the full transcript of this episode in this Series, in the link here: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/storm-resistant-parks-that-are-helping-cities-defend-themselves-from-flooding-2019-09-17/

About This Series
In our “Eye on Earth” series, we’re looking ahead to a landmark United Nations Climate Action Summit next week. CBS News is the only broadcast network participating in the “Covering Climate Now” Project, in partnership with 250 other news outlets. We’re highlighting the health of our planet with our own original reporting.

Climate Change is now our reality. One storm after another will always be a threat for Caribbean communities – Rinse and Repeat is more than just a “Shampoo Instruction” here, its our daily weather report. We would be fools not to be prepared. So being On Guard was the motivation for the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean. It identified these 4 Agents of Change affecting the Caribbean region …

Climate Change
Technology
Globalization
Aging Diaspora

… and prioritized Climate Change as the paramount threat.

This theme – Better Water Management and Flood Mitigation in the wake of Climate Change – aligns with many previous Go Lean commentaries; see a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18228	After Dorian, The Science of Power Restoration
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13155	Industrial Reboot – Pipelines and other Public Works
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12856	Hurricane Flooding – ‘Who Knew?’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12724	Lessons from Colorado: Water Management Arts & Sciences
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7235	Flint, Michigan – A Cautionary Tale in Water Management
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1817	Caribbean grapples with intense new cycles of flooding & drought

The Go Lean book addressed the heavy-lighting that Caribbean communities need to do to strengthen their infrastructure for the realities of this new threatening world, where coastal flooding is a constant. There is the need to reboot our Public Works!

The book posits that a Caribbean region Public Works reboot may be too big for any one member-state alone; there is the need to consolidate and confederate a Single Market entity to successfully reform and transform our societal engines. That Single Market entity is the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). This is the actual title of one advocacy in the Go Lean book. Consider the specific plans, excerpts and headlines here from Page 175, entitled:

10 Ways to Impact Public Works

1	Lean-in for the Caribbean Single Market entity: Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) The CU is chartered to unify the Caribbean region into one single market of 42 million people across 30 member-states, thereby re-engineering the economic engines in and on behalf of the region, including a currency & monetary union. This new eco-system allows for the design, funding and construction of Public Works and Infrastructural projects. …There are a number of inter-state projects that must be coordinated on the federal level. There will also be projects that are “Too Big for One State” that will be facilitated by the CU. …
2	Union Atlantic Turnpike
3	Pipelines and PCP (Pneumatic Capsule Pipeline)
4	Regional Power Grid
5	Self-Governing Entities (SGE) The CU will promote and administer SGE’s throughout the region; these include industrial parks, hospitals, prisons, scientific labs, foreign military bases. SGE’s are only subject to CU laws, so they are self-regulated in terms of zoning and monopolies. Thus the SGE’s will yield many Public Works initiatives, spin-off jobs and economic activities.
6	Enterprise Zones
7	Empowerment Zones
8	Monopolies The UN grants the CU the monopoly rights for an Exclusive Economic Zone, so the focus must be on quality delivery. The CU plan is to liberalize management of monopolies, with tools like ratings/rankings against best practices. Plus technological accommodations for ICT allows for cross-competition from different modes (satellite, cable, phone).
9	Cooperatives
10	Capital Markets A Single Market and currency union will allow for the emergence of viable capital markets for stocks and bonds (public and private), thereby creating the economic engine to fuel growth and development. This forges financial products for “pre” disaster project funding (drainage, levies, dykes, sea walls) and post disaster recovery (reinsurance sidecars)

In summary, we do not want to be fools by NOT preparing for the next flood. It is coming! This should be a real concern for all Caribbean communities; this especially should be a priority for Freeport, Grand Bahama, Bahamas:

You have been hit with a 20 foot storm surge … twice! Now – no excuses – you must build levies, dykes, sea walls and storm-resistant parks as depicted in the foregoing VIDEO.

Insurance companies will be disinclined to write flood-casualty policies without such a mitigation – they are not fools. Their business model is all about identifying risks, mitigating and managing risk:

Hurricane Dorian is “definitely the biggest event” that we have encountered – See story in the Appendix below.
“Bahamian property and casualty insurers, which have relatively thin capital bases of their own compared to their developed country counterparts, buy huge quantities of reinsurance annually to help spread/minimize the risks they underwrite”. – Source.
“… we need to be aware of things like flooding, prepare accordingly and pay attention to it.” – Source.
‘Reinsurance‘ is a vital industrial strategy for the Caribbean Way Forward; see previous blog-commentary here.

So to Freeport, and the rest of the Caribbean, if you do NOT want to become a Ghost Town, you must engage these mitigations. This is how we can make our homeland a better place to live, work and play, by working together to reboot our infrastructure to ensure that after the inevitable storms, we can still rebuild, restore and recover. 🙂

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——————

Appendix – Title: $500m Dorian Payout ‘Biggest I Have Seen’
By NEIL HARTNELL, Tribune Business Editor
Insurers yesterday estimated that Hurricane Dorian claims payouts could “easily exceed” $500m, with one top executive revealing: “It’s definitely the biggest event I’ve ever seen.”

Tim Ingraham, Summit Insurance Company’s president, told Tribune Business that the industry wanted the damage assessment and claims process “to be moving a lot quicker” but had been frustrated by the difficulties associated with accessing the parts of Abaco hardest hit by the category five storm.

His counterpart at RoyalStar Assurance, Anton Saunders, added that the entire Bahamian property and casualty industry was “trying every possible solution” to get loss adjusters into Marsh Harbour and the surrounding Abaco cays so that the process of damages and claims assessment could begin in earnest more than a week after the battering from Dorian.

Pledging that claims will be “fairly paid” based on each individual insurance contract, Mr Saunders reassured Bahamian homeowners and businesses that RoyalStar and the other local underwriters would “stand by them through thick and thin”.

He also urged clients “not to be alarmed” by the release from AM Best, the international insurance credit rating agency, that placed four property and casualty insurers – Bahamas First, RoyalStar, Security and General Insurance and Summit – “under review” as a result of the likely nine-figure claims payouts that will result from the devastation inflicted by Dorian.
…
“There’s going to be a significant number of people uninsured or underinsured. In the past a large number of persons have been underinsured, but we can’t speak to this loss precisely because it’s very difficult to get into … ”
…
Mr Ingraham and Mr Saunders differed on whether Dorian’s payout will impact Bahamian property and casualty premium rates moving forward, with the former arguing it was likely to contribute to an increase and the latter deferring an answer until RoyalStar spoke to its reinsurers.

See the full story here, posted September 10, 2019 and retrieved September 18, 2019 from: http://www.tribune242.com/news/2019/sep/10/500m-dorian-payout-biggest-i-have-seen/

Related Story: Insurer’s Flood Claims Equal 30% Of Profits

——————

Appendix VIDEO – Sea change: How the Dutch confront the rise of the oceans – https://youtu.be/3J5ZoPFhSGM

Posted August 27, 2017 – Windmills are more than just a traditional part of the Dutch landscape; they have played a key role in the war the Dutch have been waging against the ocean for the past thousand years. Our Cover Story is reported by Martha Teichner. (This story was previously broadcast on May 21, 2017.)

Share this post:

Bahamas, Disaster, Freeport, Model

[Top]

After Dorian, Regionalism – ‘How you like me now?’

Posted on September 16, 2019 in Government, Industries, Strategy

Go Lean Commentary

The Caribbean region has come to the aid of the Bahamas, in this their time of distress after the strong devastation of Category 5 Hurricane Dorian.

But some stakeholders in this region would rather tell this country: “I told you so …”.

They had been so proud and loud in rejecting the tenants of regionalism. Now they need help.

See the September 9, 2019 Facebook posting “I have no Sympathies for the Bahamas” by one commentator here; (Click to Enlarge or see the full text in Appendix C below).

Yes, the Bahamas rejected the Caribbean Single Market and Economy initiative – see Appendices A & B below – because they did not want the 42 million people in the region to just freely venture in-and-out of its borders for activities like “live, work and play”. A previous blog-commentary from July 10, 2018 reported:

According to the Bahamas Prime Minister’s [Hubert Minnis] issue with CSME is the Free Movement of People. The country would rather maintain its independence than to succumb to a new “free movement” regime whereby people can freely move from one Caribbean member-state to another for any activity: live, work or play. …

Now Hurricane Dorian happened and the country has been impacted; people have died (official toll at 51 as of today, but expected to rise into the hundreds); plus 60,000 people have been displaced. The country sent out an SOS and the most fervent response have come from those same scorned regional partners. Here are some examples:

Title: Guyana donating US$200,000 to hurricane-hit Bahamas
The Government of Guyana will be donating $41.6M (US$200,000) to The Bahamas to aid in relief following the battering by Hurricane Dorian.

This declaration was made last evening, by the Minister of State, Dawn Hastings, during the ‘Rise Bahamas’ telethon programme, aired on the National Communications Network (NCN), according to the Department of Public Information (DPI). …
See the full story here, posted and retrieved September 16, 2019: https://www.stabroeknews.com/2019/09/16/news/guyana/guyana-donating-us200000-to-hurricane-hit-bahamas-hastings/

—————-

Title: CDEMA Pushes On
By: Rachelle Agard
Dateline September 13, 2019 – The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) continues to play an integral role in assisting the islands of Grand Bahama and Abaco which were devastated by Category 5 Hurricane Dorian earlier this month.

“At the moment, between the government of The Bahamas, the international military and/ or Caribbean military, we have over 1 000 boots on the ground, a quarter of which is from Caribbean troops.
…

“We must also recognise that The Bahamas is close to the US mainland and will also have a relationship with the US and would have benefitted from US resources. We signed an MOU recently with the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Part of the MOU sees CDEMA benefitting from the Dutch military capabilities, so we requested their support and they have deployed a vessel with 700 military artisans which arrived on Wednesday to provide a good boost,” he said of the organisation which is made up of 18 governments. …

See the full story here, retrieved September 16, 2019: https://www.nationnews.com/nationnews/news/241773/cdema-pushes

—————-

Title: Dominica to Assist Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian

The government of Dominica reported the actions taken to help the Bahamas and announced a contribution of US$100,000.

The government of Dominica announced a plan to help the Bahamian government and its people who were hit for three days by category 5 Hurricane Dorian on Sept. 1, seven people have been reported killed by the storm.

“From our experience with Hurricane Maria in 2017, we know that it will be a long and challenging road to recovery in the Bahamas. We encourage all Dominicans to continue to lift the Government and people of the Bahamas in their prayers and encourage the donor community to be proactive in responding to their needs,” said the country’s Prime Minister, Reginald Austrie. …

See the full store here, posted September 3, 2019; retrieved September 16, 2019 from: https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Dominican-Republic-to-Assist-Bahamas-after-Hurricane-Dorian-20190903-0025.html

—————
VIDEO – Ship Set To Leave Bermuda With Aid For Bahamas, Sept 8 2019 – https://youtu.be/9jWTQAiudPg

bernewsdotcom
http://bernews.com | Bermuda | Minister Wayne Caines press conference on board the Royal Navy HMS Protector

Regionalism has it benefits, people come to your aid when you send out an SOS. There is “give” and there is “take”.

The summary of the Caribbean Single Market & Economy (CSME) effort is that an integrated regional economy brings leverage, so “many hands make big job small”. In that previous blog-commentary from July 10, 2018 it related the benefits of the confederation roadmap as described in the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean:

Righting a Wrong: The Bahamas Needs to Re-think CSME
The Go Lean roadmap is designed to elevate the Caribbean region, to be better destinations to live, work and play. The movement therefore fosters strategies, tactics and implementation to better foment the region …

The Go Lean book was published in November 2013, projecting verbiage like “the Caribbean is in Crisis; alas a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” (Page 8). According to many observations in the Go Lean blogs-commentaries – click here – the Northern Bahamas was in a dire crisis, in need of immediate remediation, even before Hurricane Dorian. The crisis is exacerbated now. The recommendation of the movement behind the Go Lean book is to confederate now!

The Go Lean roadmap calls for a technocratic administration to allow the Caribbean region to embrace the economic benefits of a Single Market and a regional Security Pact – with the needed Disaster Preparation and Response organizations. The points of effective, technocratic stewardship for a regional security apparatus have thusly been elaborated upon in many previous blog-commentaries. Consider this sample here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=18182	Disaster Relief: Helping, Not Hurting
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=15996	Good Governance: Stepping Up in an Emergency
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13746	Failure to Launch – Security: Caribbean Basin Security Dreams
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12466	State of the Union: Unstable ‘Volcano States’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9455	Fix ‘Climate Change’ – Yes, We Can
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7449	‘Crap Happens’ – So What Now?
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6103	Sum of All Fears – ‘On Guard’ Against Deadly Threats
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5002	Managing a ‘Clear and Present Danger’

What should be the advocacy priority of a technocratic regional government? Guaranteeing safety and security of our people before, during and after any natural disaster.

The Bahamas must do better than in the past; the Caribbean must do better than in the past. We all need to lean on each other. Remember the 2nd Stanza of the 1971 song “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers:

If there is a load you have to bear
That you can’t carry
I’m right up the road
I’ll share your load
If you just call me

This is how we can make the Bahamas and all of the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play, by working together with our regional stakeholders to rebuild, restore and recover. 🙂

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

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

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

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

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

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

——————-

Appendix A – Bahamas maintains stance against CSME

By: Royston James

The Bahamas will maintain its stance against joining the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), despite increased pressure from certain regional heads to expand the initiative.

The CSME seeks to create a single, enlarged economic space by removing certain restrictions, the result of which would allow the free movement of goods and services, people and capital and technology.

“In spite of what you may read in the newspaper, we have discussed CSME, [but] The Bahamas is not and will not be a part of CSME,” Prime Minister Dr. Hubert Minnis said upon returning from Jamaica on Saturday.

“The Bahamas will not allow the free movement of people within our boundaries. So we are not a part of CSME. That must be clear, so that you do not feel that [because of] what has transpired there that Caribbean nationals would be able to move into The Bahamas quite regularly.

“We have our rules, our laws, and they will continue to apply.”

Full implementation of the CSME was high on the agenda of the CARICOM meeting held last Thursday. At least three CARICOM heads called for a review of the program by its member states and for regional leaders to find the political will to see the program expanded and made more efficient.

Addressing CARICOM, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley opined that “psychological impediments and the closed mindsets in some quarters of officialdom” can be attributed to the slow progress of the CSME.

Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne and CARICOM Secretary General Irwin LaRocque also pushed for more to be achieved. CARICOM Chairman and Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness said at a press conference following the CARICOM meeting that a special meeting on CSME will be held in Trinidad and Tobago in November.

Under the first Christie administration, the CSME issue featured prominently in local debates with strong opposition to The Bahamas joining the initiative being expressed in many quarters. Debate died down only after the government at the time publicly announced that The Bahamas would not join any bloc that would lead to the free movement of people in the country.

Source: Posted July 9, 2018 retrieved July 10, 2018 from: https://thenassauguardian.com/2018/07/09/bahamas-maintains-stance-against-csme/

——————-

Appendix B – No Caricom Without Referendum

By Sir Randol Fawkes – June 1993

I often wondered what The Caribbean Community’s Common Market (CARICOM) was up to. But now that I know, I wish to sound a warning to all true Bahamians to hold fast to the “Christian values and the Rules of Law” as enshrined in the Preamble to our Independence Constitution of July 10th, 1973, because some power-hungry politicians to the South are planning to invade our homeland and to steal our birthright away.

Simple enough? Dictatorship is always simple, monosyllabic and quick. Under a democracy we have a right to be properly briefed on CARICOM before being required to vote, “Yes” or “No” on whether the Bahamas should become a full Member State of the Caribbean Community’s CARICOM. The Rt. Hon. James F. Mitchell further expostulated, “One flag means we speak on the podium of the United Nations with one clear voice. One voice means one passport, one citizenship and all that flows from a single citizenship. Secondly, one Ministry of Finance is essential to provide the economic development which our people crave. This union will need to show results, and this authority which negotiates and secures financing must be responsible for the repayment of that finance.”

Make no mistake about it, These Caribbeans who will descend on Bahamian soil in July offering CARICOM as a panacea for all ills, intend to destroy our national flag: the Black, the Gold and the Aquamarine; silence our National Anthem, Lift Up Your Heads to the Rising Sun Bahama land, abolish Bahamian citizenship and our passports; eliminate Bahamian autonomy and thereafter superimpose upon us a leviathan dictatorship with a network of cells throughout the Caribbean – all done without first a people’s forum in which all voices – pro and con could be heard and ultimately expressed in a Constitutional Referendum.

…

Source: Retrieved July 10, 2018 from: http://www.sirrandolfawkes.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/No_Caricom_Without_Referendum1.216134242.pdf

——————-

Appendix C – Mark Devonish: I HAVE NO SYMPATHIES FOR BAHAMAS

Let me say this from the outset. I sympathise with those who lost their lives in Hurricane Dorian. A life lost is a life wasted. Having said that I will now outline why I have no sympathies for Bahamas.

The CSME is a CARICOM trading blocks which promotes free movement of people in the Caribbean among other things. Countries signing up to CSME have to abide by their conditions.

Most countries did except Bahamas. They flatly and in a disparaging way stated that no CARICOM citizen will enter our island to live. In effect they though that they were too good for the rest of CARICOM citizens.

Enter the great equaliser, Dorian. Now the very CARICOM that they scorned, they are crying out for help. Seriously?

I can’t be a political leader. I do not forget and I don’t care about what is politically right. If I were a CARICOM leader, I would have told the Bahamians to go eat their fecal matter, drink their piss and die since I will not help them.

Some folks may not be happy with my position but that is my position which I’m entitled to. Bahamas pissed on the rest of the CARICOM citizens because they though they were great. How the mighty have fallen.

Source: Posted September 9 at 7:27 PM; retrieved September 16, 2019.

Share this post:

Bahamas, CariCom, Disaster, Transform

[Top]

After Dorian, The Science of Power Restoration – Encore

Posted on September 8, 2019 in Government, Implementation, Industries

The Caribbean is in crisis now; our region has just been devastated by Hurricane _______; it has wreaked catastrophic havoc in certain destinations: __________.

The foregoing was an exact sentence composed in September 17, 2017 in a previous blog-commentary. We are able to repeat this phrase again and again and fill in the blanks with the name of the storm and locations. This is the reality of Caribbean tropical life, while arguably the greatest address in the world, the ever-present threat of hurricanes is our annual reality.

So the version of the foregoing sentence for September 2019 is as follows:

The Bahamas is in crisis now; our region has just been devastated by Hurricane Dorian; it has wreaked catastrophic havoc in certain destinations: the Bahama islands of Great Abaco and Grand Bahama.

The current situation on the ground is miserable. As always, there is an urgent need for infrastructure to be restored:

Power
Water
Telephone
Transportation

The recovery from this storm, as always, starts with the restoration of electrical power. There is an Art and a Science to this functionality. Let’s focus on the science; see the Encore of that previous blog-commentary

The science is the same since Hurricane Irma 2 years ago. See the Encore here-now:

—————

Go Lean Commentary – After Irma, The Science of Power Restoration

The problem with hurricanes – and there are many – is that it takes a long time for the storm preparation and response (relief, recovery and rebuilding). On average, the storm’s preparation takes 3 days; this includes provisioning, installing protective shutters, hoarding water and gasoline. The response on the other hand can take days, weeks, months and dread-to-say, years.

The most uncomfortable part of the storm response is undeniable waiting for electrical power to be restored.

In general, the good-bad-ugly scale of memories of previous storms tend to be tied to the length of time it took for power to be restored. The peak of the hurricane season is the very hot months of August/September; there is the need for air-conditioning.

The Caribbean is in crisis now; our region has just been devastated by Hurricane Irma; it has wreaked catastrophic havoc in certain destinations: Barbuda, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, Anguilla, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Florida. Consider the encyclopedic details in Appendix A below and these questions:

How long did/will it take for power to be restored now after Hurricane Irma?
How can we reform and transform our Caribbean communities to ensure the efficiency of ‘Power Restoration’?

There is an art and science to the subject of ‘Power Restoration’; actually mostly science. The ‘art’ applies to the efficient deliveries of the management of the restoration process. The science considerations are extensive, starting with the entire eco-system of energy deliveries. As related in a previous blog-commentary …

… no one doubts that the inventory of basic needs include “food, clothing and shelter”. But modernity has forced us to add another entry: “energy”. In fact, the availability and affordability of energy can impact the deliveries of these order basic needs.

… In our region, energy costs are among the highest in the world. The book Go Lean… Caribbean relates (Page 100) how the Caribbean has among the most expensive energy costs in the world, despite having abundant alternative energy natural resources (solar, wind, tidal, geo-thermal). The Caribbean eco-system focuses on imported petroleum to provide energy options and as a result retail electricity rates in the Caribbean average US$0.35/kWh, when instead it could be down to US$0.088/kWh. …

With such a 75% savings … there is definitely the need to adapt some of the scientific best practices for energy generation and consumption. In a previous blog-commentary, it was confessed that one of the reasons why people flee the Caribbean region, is the discomforts during the summer months … hot weather, and the lack of infrastructure to mitigate and remediate the discomfort, is identified as one of the reasons for the brain drain/societal abandonment.

One motivation of the movement behind the book Go Lean… Caribbean – available to download for free – is to facilitate a turn-around of economic, security and governing engines of the Caribbean region to do better with power generation, distribution and consumption. The Go Lean book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). This Go Lean roadmap has 3 prime directives:

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

This commentary continues the 4-part series – this is 3 of 4 – on the Aftermath of Hurricane Irma. There are a lot of mitigation and remediation efforts that can be done to lessen the impact of this and future storms. There are lessons that we must consider; there are reforms we must make; there are problems we must solve. The full list of the 4 entries of this series are detailed as follows:

Aftermath of Hurricane Irma – America Should Scrap the ‘Jones Act’
Aftermath of Hurricane Irma – Barbuda Becomes a ‘Ghost Town’
Aftermath of Hurricane Irma – The Science of Power Restoration
Aftermath of Hurricane Irma – Failed State Indicators: Destruction and Defection

Despite the manifested threats of Climate Change-fueled hurricanes, we want to make the Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work and play. This is going to take some heavy-lifting to accomplish, but we can be successful. Yes, we can. This quest is detailed early on in the Go Lean book’s Declaration of Interdependence, as follows (Page 11 – 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.

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

The Go Lean book asserts that Caribbean stakeholders must find a Way Forward; they must institute better systems, processes and utilities to deliver electrical power (energy) despite the reality of hurricanes. Though power will go off – electricity and water is a bad combination – ‘Power Restoration’ must be a priority. Therefore Caribbean communities must adopt different community ethos, plus execute key – and different – strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to reform and transform.

This Way Forward must therefore fulfill these 2 requirements:

Flood Management and Control

According to a previous blog-commentary: “there is a thesis that flooding could be prevented. Yes, indeed! This is the experience and historicity of the Dutch people, the European country of the Netherlands or Holland.”
Even in the low-lying American city of New Orleans, Louisiana there is the practice of pumping out excess water to mitigate and remediate flooding; see this depicted in the VIDEO in Appendix B below.
Implementation of a Caribbean Regional Power Grid

Power distribution is important for any mitigation-remediation plan. The problem with hurricane toppling trees and power lines is unavoidable – it is what it is – a better solution is to deliver electricity underground or underwater, as illustrated in the above photo. The Go Lean roadmap calls for an extensive smart Power Grid and a region-wide Utility Cooperative. This would allow for alternate power generation and electrical distribution. See sample of an underground/underwater “Power Cable” product depicted in the VIDEO in Appendix C below.

Many other communities have done a good job of optimizing their electrical utility grid. They execute strategies, tactics and implementations to mitigate the risk of power outages; then remediate any crises with technocratic deliveries to facilitate ‘Power Restoration’.

There will be heavy-lifting for our Caribbean region to have this disposition. The Go Lean roadmap details that heavy-lift, describing the community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to foster progress for Caribbean energy distribution, our own Regional Power Grid. The following list of entries in the Go Lean book highlights this theme:

Community Ethos – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Return on Investments	Page 24
Community Ethos – Cooperatives	Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Negotiations	Page 32
Anecdote – Pipeline Transport – Strategies, Tactics & Implementations	Page 43
Strategy – Harness the power of the sun/winds	Page 46
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 82
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Energy Commission	Page 82
Anecdote – “Lean” in Government – Energy Permits	Page 93
Implementation – Regional Grid as Economies-of-Scale benefit	Page 97
Anecdote – Caribbean Energy Grid Implementation	Page 100
Implementation – Start-up Benefits from the EEZ	Page 104
Implementation – Ways to Develop Pipeline Industry	Page 107
Implementation – Ways to Improve Energy Usage	Page 113
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Public Works	Page 175
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Cooperatives	Page 176
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Monopolies	Page 202
Appendix – Underwater High Intensity Power Lines	Page 282

The experience of enduring hurricanes is never pleasant. As such, we do not invite people to fly down from northern locations to pass storms with us. In fact, when there is a Hurricane Watch, the practice is to evacuate tourists and visitors. We evacuate our high-risk residents as well; (kidney dialysis patients, senior citizens, anyone that cannot endure the loss of electronic-based health instruments). This is a best-practice.

Why do we only evacuate just a limited group from the islands?

We assume that everyone else can endure.

Hah, lol …

But actually, with such high post-hurricane abandonment rates, as reported previously, it is obvious that everyone loses patience. So any improvement in the ‘Power Restoration’ experience would be a win-win; it would improve our communities’ endurance and make our Caribbean homeland better places 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 A – Hurricane Irma Devastation

In Barbuda, Hurricane Irma caused catastrophic damage on the island; it damaged or destroyed 95% of the island’s buildings and infrastructure, leaving Barbuda “barely habitable” according to Prime Minister Gaston Browne. Everyone on the island was evacuated to Antigua, leaving Barbuda uninhabited for the first time in modern history.^[3]
In St. Martin, on 6 and 7 September 2017 the island was hit by Hurricane Irma (Category 5 at landfall), which caused widespread and significant damage to buildings and infrastructure. A total of 11 deaths had been reported as of 8 September 2017.^[12][13] France’s Minister of the Interior, Gérard Collomb, said on 8 September 2017 that most of the schools were destroyed on the French half of the island. In addition to damage caused by high winds, there were reports of serious flood damage to businesses in the village of Marigot. Looting was also a serious problem. Both France and the Netherlands sent aid as well as additional police and emergency personnel to the island.^[14][15][16] The Washington Post reported that 95% of the structures on the French side and 75% of the structures on the Dutch side were damaged or destroyed.^[17][18] Some days after the storm had abated, a survey by the Dutch Red Cross estimated that nearly a third of the buildings in Sint Maarten had been destroyed and that over 90 percent of structures on the island had been damaged.^[19] Princess Juliana Airport was extensively damaged but reopened on a partial basis in two days to allow incoming relief flights and for flights that would take evacuees to other islands.^[20]
In Anguila, the eye of the storm pass over it on September 6. Many homes and schools were destroyed, and the island’s only hospital was badly damaged.^[163] The devastation was particularly severe in East End, where the winds uprooted scores of trees and power poles and demolished a number of houses. … One death was reported on the island.^[163] According to [sources], Anguilla’s economy could suffer at least $190 million in losses from the hurricane.^[129]
Puerto Rico avoided a direct hit by the Category 5 Hurricane Irma on September 8, 2017, but high winds caused a loss of electrical power to some one million residents. Almost 50% of hospitals were operating with power provided by generators.^[133]
Damage in the British Virgin Islands was extensive. Numerous buildings and roads were destroyed on the island of Tortola, which bore the brunt of the hurricane’s core.^[172] Irma’s effects in the U.S. Virgin Islands were most profound on Saint Thomas. Due to its normal reliance on electricity from Saint Thomas, the island [of St. John] was left without power.
In the Florida Keys, the hurricane caused major damage to buildings, trailer parks, boats, roads, the electricity supply, mobile phone coverage, internet access, sanitation, the water supply and the fuel supply. … As of 6:41 p.m. EDT on September 10 over 2.6 million homes in Florida were without power.^[232]

———–

Appendix B VIDEO – Here’s how the pumps in New Orleans move water out during heavy rainfall – https://youtu.be/hZvGVUZi9FU

Published on Mar 30, 2017 – WDSU News: Pumps Work During Thursday’s Flooding

———–

Appendix C VIDEO – ABB launches world´s most powerful extruded HVDC cable system –

Published on Aug 21, 2014

ABB Power Grids

525 kV voltage (previous highest installed 320 kV) sets world record more than doubling power flow to 2600 MW (from 1000 MW) and extending range to 1500 km for more cost effective, efficient and reliable underground and subsea transmission while keeping losses to below 5 percent. Major breakthrough for applications like underground HVDC transmission, sub-sea interconnections, offshore wind integration etc. More information: http://new.abb.com/systems/high-volta…

Category: Science & Technology
License: Standard YouTube License

Share this post:

Bahamas, Green Energy, Model, Transform

[Top]

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.”

Share this post:

Bahamas, Disaster, History, Model, Security

[Top]

Nassau’s 2019 Self-Made Energy Crisis

Posted on August 15, 2019 in Government, Tactical

Go Lean Commentary

It is seriously Hot-Hot-Hot out there …

So there is no intent here to be “cold and callous” … (callous = ‘feeling no emotion’).

But the Bahamas’s capital city – Nassau – is having an energy crisis right now:

The local power generation utility (Bahamas Power & Light or BPL) is not producing enough electricity to meet the needs of the community, so they have to load-share and force black-outs/brown-outs around the island to try and facilitate some delivery some time to all their customer base. They do not want to show favoritism to one group over another, so they are leveraging the load-sharing tactic on everybody. So now instead of some people being happy and some being angry, they have obtained universality …

… everybody is angry!

———-

VIDEO – B.P.L. Load Shedding Update – https://youtu.be/fW8JGGnlvzQ

ZNSNetwork
Published on May 15, 2019

Category: People & Blogs

Additionally, see this portrayal in this news article here (and the Appendix VIDEO below):

Title: BPL causing ‘chaos’
By: Jasper Ward, The Nassau Guardian Staff Reporter

Super Value food stores are taking a significant hit as a result of protracted power cuts, according to its owner Rupert Roberts.

Roberts said about six Super Value locations are impacted by outages daily and the company has spent around $100,000 recently on replacing equipment damaged by the outages.

He described the outages as “a nuisance” and said they create “chaos”.

“This BEC (Bahamas Electricity Corporation) crisis is more than a crisis, it’s chaos,” Roberts said at the Nassau Street store.

“It’s costing us $250,000 a year from burning up our equipment.”

He said, “I suppose our biggest concern is burning up equipment.

“…[We] burn up a $10,000 or $20,000 air conditioning [unit and] we’re always burning up compressors. We’re using up spares so fast and we’re doing emergency imports.

“Fortunately, we’re able to get them in within three or four days without flying them in. But I noticed on Saturday we had a diary case down because we’re waiting on the compressor that burned out. That’s the biggest problem.”

Roberts said it will cost about $10,000 to replace a compressor in the dairy case at the Nassau Street location. He said it is unlikely that case will be operational before Saturday.

Roberts said dairy sales were up 14 percent before the case was damaged.

Since it was damaged, sales have gone down 17 percent, he said.

Roberts said the company has twice the amount of equipment needed “because of the serious problem” of the outages.

Although the food store chain is facing challenges with the outages, Roberts said the company is “managing quite well”.

“We’ve been in this business over 50 years and we’ve had power problems for the last 50 years,” he said.

“So, we learned how to cope. We don’t run out of fuel. Years ago, when I first started in the industry, we had generators because of hurricanes but for the past 25 years we’ve had to have generators because of power outages.”

For nearly two months, communities on New Providence have experienced hours-long blackouts as part of Bahamas Power and Light’s (BPL) load shedding exercise.

Over the last few weeks, BPL has conducted nearly four-hour-long load shedding.

On Sunday, BPL Chief Executive Officer Whitney Heastie said he could not guarantee an end to load shedding exercises in the immediate future, describing BPL as being “on a cliff”.

Heastie said BPL needs 250 megawatts of generation in order to meet the summer demand.

However, it is currently running on 210 megawatts, including 105 megawatts of rental generation.

Heastie said the 40-megawatt shortfall has led to load shedding across New Providence.

Source: Posted by The Nassau Guardian daily newspaper on August 13, 2019; retrieved August 14, 2019 from: https://thenassauguardian.com/2019/08/13/bpl-causing-chaos/

This energy crisis for Nassau is Self-Made!!

Wait, what?!

Yep, self-made!

This is a BIGGER issue than water or electricity; this is an issue of the Social Contract.

The issue of Caribbean citizens abandoning their homelands is one of the more dire threats to societal life in the region. Why do they do it?

“Push and Pull” reasons!

Push
Conditions at home drive Caribbean citizens to take flight and find refuge elsewhere. Many times these conditions are economic (jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities), security and governance related, but there are other reasons too; consider discriminations due to ethnic diversity or other lifestyle choices.

Lastly, there is the new threat of Climate Change. While this is a threat for the whole world, the Caribbean is on the frontline. Though there is some debate as to the causes of climate change, there is no question as to its outcome: temperatures are rising, droughts prevail, and most devastating, hurricanes are now more threatening. A Caribbean elevation plan must address the causes of climate change and most assuredly its consequences. …

Now, the anecdotal experience is that there is a need to mitigate excessive heat in the region for an even longer season. How do we mitigate excessive heat?

Air conditioning!

But this cure may at times be worse than the disease.

Air conditioning requires even greater energy consumption, (the Caribbean has among the highest energy costs in the Western Hemisphere); the Go Lean book posits that the average costs of energy can be decreased from an average of US$0.35/kWh to US$0.088/kWh in the course of the 5-year term of this roadmap; (Page 100).

In addition, the release of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s) in the air-conditioning process is a contributor of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The status quo needs remediation!

That’s the problem, now what is the solution?

1	Lean-in for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The CU is chartered to unify the Caribbean region into one Single Market of 42 million people across 30 member-states, thereby re-engineering the economic engines in and on behalf of the region, including a currency & monetary union. This new eco-system allows for the design, funding and construction of Public Works and Infrastructural projects. The federal agency within the CU’s Department of the Interior has the scope for the Caribbean much like the Corps of Engineers has for the US. (Plus the CU will collaborate with the US Corps for projects related to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands). There are a number of inter-state projects that must be coordinated on the federal level. There will also be projects that are “Too Big for One State” that will be facilitated by the CU. In addition, all CU efforts must comply with the Art in Public Places mandate, so sculptures and statutes will be embedded in projects or the project itself can be a work of art (bridges, water towers, building architecture). For existing projects that fail due to financial shortfalls, the CU will accommodate dissolution or reorganization in the federal courts, bringing balance to the process to all stakeholders.
2	Union Atlantic Turnpike
3	Pipelines and PCP (Pneumatic Capsule Pipeline)
4	Regional Power Grid The CU will facilitate the installation of a regional power grid, and power sharing between member-states, with underwater and above-ground high-intensity wiring to alternate energy plants: wind/tidal turbines, solar panel & natural gas.
5	Self-Governing Entities (SGE)
6	Enterprise Zones
7	Empowerment Zones
8	Monopolies The UN grants the CU the monopoly rights for an Exclusive Economic Zone, so the focus must be on quality delivery. The CU plan is to liberalize management of monopolies, with tools like ratings/rankings against best practices. Plus technological accommodations for ICT allows for cross-competition from different modes (satellite, cable, phone).
9	Cooperatives The CU will task utility cooperatives with the delivery of some public utilities such as Air Chillers; Refrigerated Warehouses to its members. This strategy shares the cost of the “Works” installation across the full co-op membership.
10	Capital Markets A single market and currency union will allow for the emergence of viable capital markets for stocks and bonds (public and private), thereby creating the economic engine to fuel growth and development. This forges financial products for “pre” disaster project funding (drainage, levies, dykes, sea walls) and post disaster recovery (reinsurance sidecars).

This theme – exploiting alternative options for the economic, security and governing empowerments in the region – aligns with many previous Go Lean commentaries; see a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=17925	‘We’ have repeatedly failed the lessons from ‘Infrastructure 101’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=17280	Way Forward – For Energy: ‘Trade’ Winds
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13985	EU Assists Barbados in Renewable Energy Self-Sufficiency
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12994	The Science of ‘Power Restoration’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12466	12 Caribbean Member-states have ‘Volcanic Energy’ to Exploit
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=10367	The Science of Sustenance – Green Batteries
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5155	Green Energy Solution: Tesla unveils super-battery to power homes
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4897	US Backs LNG Distribution for Caribbean Energy Solutions
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=915	Go ‘Green’ … Caribbean

Make no mistake, energy is a basic need!

The failure for a community to have continuous supply of energy is an energy crisis. (This means you Bahamas).

Enough already!

Now is the time for all Caribbean stakeholders to prepare for the empowerments of Green-Energy solutions. It is past-time for a regional power grid:

generation – Green options (solar, wind turbines, tidal, geo-thermal and natural gas)
distribution – Underwater cables to connect individual islands
consumption – efficient battery back-ups for home deployments.

These changes are coming … one way or another.

For you government revenue institutions who may be overly dependent of fuel taxes and surcharges – you are hereby put on notice:

Changes are afoot. We will succeed; we will make our Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work and play.

🙂

About the Book

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 – Another B.P.L. Blackout – https://youtu.be/fOT0gfvSchM

ZNSNetwork
Published on Jul 2, 2019

Category: People & Blogs

——————–

Appendix – Excerpts from previous Commentary: Flint, Michigan – A Cautionary Tale – January 19, 2016

What happened here?

…

See VIDEO here of the story in the national media …

VIDEO – Citizens’ Anger Continues Over Toxic Water in Flint, Michigan – http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/citizens-anger-continues-toxic-water-flint-michigan-36348795 –

…

We must do better, than Flint! (Flint must do better; too many lives are involved).

Our Caribbean stakeholders deserve the best … from their leaders. 🙂

Share this post:

Bahamas, Disaster, Green Energy, Model, Power

[Top]

Regulating Plastics in the Bahamas – So Little; So Late – Encore

Posted on August 12, 2019 in Economics, Government, Strategy

Plastics have been identified as “unbecoming” for the Caribbean environment. One country after another is now starting to regulate them and maybe even ban them.

Considering the 500 year history of Caribbean society, plastics are new …

… the proliferation emerged in the last 100 years. But the acknowledgement is now universal that they are destructive for the planet’s landscape and seascape.

While plastics are dutiful, plentiful and cheap, they are strictly optional; there are many viable alternatives; think glass, paper, wood and ceramics.

Here again:

plastic bags ==> paper bags
plastic bottles ==> glass bottles
plastic straws ==> paper straws
plastic cups ==> ceramic cups
plastic stirrers ==> wood stirrers

Plastics may be cheaper than all of these alternatives! But economically, plastics costs more … in the end! This is due to the disposal costs; or worse still: the destruction to the environment.

Caribbean communities that depend on the trade of touristic services must not jeopardize the sand and sea of the region. Tropical beauty is a strong selling point. Same too for the Fisheries.

One country after another is starting to implement regulations to eliminate plastic shopping bags, food utensils, straws and Styrofoam. Last year, August 21, 2018, the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean related the efforts of the Caribbean country of Saint Lucia for their mitigation of plastics and Styrofoam. Now, we see that an additional country, the Bahamas, is also deploying their ban on plastics, starting in January 2020.

In fact, 40 other countries have already implemented such bans.

This is late for the Bahamas to only now be implementing this ban – they have always been vulnerable. In addition to their near-400,000 residents, they also hosts more than 3 million tourists annually (stay-overs and cruise passengers). But the location of the archipelago chain exposes it to unwanted marine debris (plastics) as a result of ocean currents and wave patterns – see the Gulfstream photo above.

The Bahamas is late! They should have been front-and-center with any mitigation efforts.

See this article here that describes the Bahamas plan for January 2020. Notice the emphasis on “plastic bags” and the little focus on other examples of single-use plastics. See the article here:

Title: Ferreira: Bahamas to join more than 40 countries that has banned plastic bags
By: Ginelle Longley

NASSAU, BAHAMAS – Minister of Environment and Housing, Romauld Ferreira, during his contribution to the 2019/2020 Budget debate on Tuesday night, said the Bahamas is expected to join more than 40 countries that have introduced a ban on plastic bags.

The government’s proposed ban on plastic bags is set to take effect in January 2020.

Ferreira said the Government will ensure that the move offers minimal disruption to businesses and their operation. He said his ministry will also inform and educate the public through a number of town hall meetings heading into 2020.

“The ministry’s education is also advancing the message of a healthier Bahamas through this initiative as the improper use of plastics is associated with various forms of environmental pollution and environmental degradation, which ultimately affects an individual’s health and well-being,” Ferreira said.

The proposed ban comes on the heels of several warnings issued by local environmental and climate experts who have stressed that non-biodegradable products such as plastic bags and Styrofoam have contributed to environmental issues.

Director of Energy and Environment with the Bahamas Chamber of Commerce, Debbie Deal, told Eyewitness News Online Wednesday that back in April 2018, the Ministry of Environment signed a Memorandum of Understanding with The Bahamas Chamber of Commerce, to ensure that businesses would be prepared for enforcement of the 2020 ban.

Deal said the implementation of the ban should not be an issue.

“VAT was [pushed] from 7.5 to 12 per cent and on July 1, 2019 it came into effect. We as a people were able to make that transition in a month’s time, so I personally think that a year and 9 months is sufficient to make that transition,” Deal said.

Meanwhile, Trevor Davis, the co-owner of Quality Home Center on Blue Hill Road said as his business prepares to replace plastic bags with reusable shopping bags, the move, while costly, will bring down the cost of bags for business owners as the new bags are reusable.

Source: Posted June 12, 2019; retrieved from: https://ewnews.com/ferreira-bahamas-to-join-more-than-40-countries-that-has-banned-plastic-bags

While we applaud the Bahamas for this tardy effort; it must be acknowledged that it is: so little; so late!

It is very apropos to Encore that previous blog-commentary from August 21, 2018. See that blog-commentary here-now:

——————–

Go Lean Commentary – Plastics and Styrofoam – A Mitigation Plan

So where do all the used plastics – and Styrofoam – go?

In a landfill …

… and may not degrade for a thousand years!

But for the ones that end up in the water (oceans and seas), they too do not degrade. They linger, pollute and disrupt eco-systems.

No one can just “stick their head in the sand”; this issue must be addressed, the crisis must be assuaged, the threat must be mitigated. See this crisis as depicted in this VIDEO here:

VIDEO – How Much Plastic is in the Ocean? – https://youtu.be/YFZS3Vh4lfI

It’s Okay To Be Smart

Published on Mar 28, 2017 – What can you do to make the oceans plastic-free?

Ocean plastic pollution is a massive environmental problem. Millions of tons of plastic waste enter the ocean every year, even plastic that goes in the trash can often ends up in the sea! This week we learn about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and look at the dangers ocean plastic poses to ocean animals. Plus, a few tips for you to reduce your own plastic use!

Sample Resources

Plastic Oceans Foundation: http://www.plasticoceans.org/

United Nations “Clean Seas” program: http://www.cleanseas.org/

Ocean plastic pollution resources from Monterey Bay Aquarium: https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/c…

Category: Education

Welcome to the Caribbean! We are 30 member-states in an all-coastal region – with many archipelagos (i.e. the Bahamas alone features over 700 islands). We have a lot of waterways and seascapes to contend with … and manage! So this global problem of plastics and Styrofoam is a local problem too.

Think global; act local!

What are we doing in our Caribbean region to mitigate the problem of plastics and Styrofoam? One member-state, St. Lucia, has proposed something; see the full news story here:

Title: Saint Lucia to ban Styrofoam and plastics

August 13th, 2018 – Saint Lucia plans to phase-out Styrofoam food service containers and plastics, both plates and cups, beginning December 1, 2018, with a total ban on their importation before the end of next year.

The announcement came in a statement from Minister of Education, Innovation, Gender Relations and Sustainable Development, Doctor Gale Rigobert.

Rigobert said the Government of Saint Lucia is cognizant of the negative impact on the environment and human health from food service containers made from Polystyrene and Expanded Polystyrene, also known as Styrofoam, along with Plastics.

However, she observed that the administration recognises that the healthier alternative to these products, such as biodegradable and compostable food service containers, are more costly.

” We are doing our very best to alleviate this issue,” the minister explained.

She disclosed that over the last few months, the Department of Sustainable Development, in partnership with other key agencies such as the Saint Lucia Solid Waste Management Authority, the Department of Finance, the Ministry of Commerce and the Customs and Excise Department, has been working towards the development of a strategy to eliminate single use plastics, polystyrene and expanded polystyrene from the Saint Lucia market.

“To date, we have completed fiscal analyses, conducted a survey of the key suppliers of these products and we have also identified suppliers of the biodegradable and compostable food service containers, all this to ensure that Saint Lucia creates the enabling environment to facilitate this process,” Rigobert stated.

She explained that in light of this, the Department of Sustainable Development will be taking a phased approach to facilitate a smooth transition for all stakeholders.

“The phase-out, along with a ban on the importation of Styrofoam food service containers, and plastics, both plates and cups, will commence December 1, 2018 with a total ban culminating by November 30, 2019:”

Rigovert revealed that in order to ensure adequate sensitisation, the Department of Sustainable Development will continue its campaign to educate the general public on the options they have available to them during this phase.

“With respect to plastic bottles, discussions are ongoing with major stakeholders to finalize legislation that would curb and control their use,” the minister noted.

“I encourage you to join the fight to reduce your dependency on single use plastics and Styrofoam by utilizing re-useable bottles, food containers, cutlery and shopping bags. Let us act responsibly in our everyday consumption and production,”Rigobert stated.
Source: St. Lucia Times – Daily Newspaper – Posted 08-13-2018; retrieved 08-21-2018: https://stluciatimes.com/2018/08/13/saint-lucia-to-ban-styrofoam-and-plastics/

This problem is bigger than just the Caribbean member-state of St Lucia. They did not start this fight; nor can they finish it. This is BIG Deal that is too big for any one member-state or the full Caribbean region alone. This will require a global effort, including some Caribbean mitigation!

But here in the Caribbean, we cannot expect others to do all the heavy-lifting and clean-up; we must do our share; clean-up our own environment. This has been a frequent theme by the movement behind the book Go Lean … Commentary – available for download now. In the book, and in previous Go Lean blog-commentaries, it was asserted that we – the Caribbean region – must do our share to “Go Green” so as to assuage our own contributions to global pollution and greenhouse gases; yes, we must keep our own neighborhoods clean and optimize our own industrial footprint, so that we may be less hypocritical – have moral authority – in calling for reform from the big polluting nations. This sample – as follows – depicts some previous blog-commentaries that relates this theme:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14832	Counter-culture: Manifesting Change – Environmentalism
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=14174	Canada: “Follow Me” for Model on Environmental Action
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12724	Lessons from Colorado: Water Management Arts & Sciences
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=12144	Book Review: ‘Sea Power’ – The Need for Good Oversight
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=9455	Fix ‘Climate Change’ and other Environmental Issues? Yes, We Can
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2465	Book Review: ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2276	Climate Change May Affect Food Supply Within a Decade
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1656	Blue is the New Green
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=915	Go ‘Green’ … Caribbean

From the foregoing news articles and these previous blog-commentaries, we see the compelling need for a concerted anti-pollution-Go Green effort in our region. We must “Reduce, Re-use, Recycle”. Who will stand-up and lead this charge?

“Here I am, send me” – The Bible; Isaiah 6:8

This is the charter of the Go Lean book. It serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The roadmap depicts how this federal government is designed to stand-up and lead the charge to assuage and mitigate the threats on Caribbean life. The book identifies a list of crises as Agents of Change that are crippling our way of life. We can add pollution to that list. As a Single Market, we need a regional sentinel to be on guard and to tackle these “plastics pollution” problems.

Why regional?

Because the national effort has been unsuccessful; in many cases, even unknown, unavailable and unfunded.

No, individual member-states will not be able to succeed in this effort; we need a regional effort; it is too big to tackle alone; so we must acknowledge our regional dependency or interdependence to have any chance of success. This vision is embedded in the opening Declaration of Interdependence, pronouncing as follows, (Pages 11, 12):

vi. Whereas the finite nature of the landmass of our lands limits the populations and markets of commerce, by extending the bonds of brotherhood to our geographic neighbors allows for extended opportunities and better execution of the kinetics of our economies through trade. This regional focus must foster and promote diverse economic stimuli.

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

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

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

The Go Lean book and previous blog-commentaries posit that the “whole is worth more than the sum of its parts”, that from this roadmap disparate Caribbean nations can speak with “one voice” … collectively as a Single Market and be heard. The international community – the big polluters – would therefore have more respect and accountability to our regional Caribbean entity, rather than the many (30) Small Island Development States. But while contributing to the problem ourselves, though on a smaller scale, we cannot just say to these big polluters:

“You break it, you fix it”.

No, we must unite and take our stand in this fight … to mitigate plastics and Styrofoam … and advocate for change!

As related in the Go Lean roadmap, the CU Trade Federation is designed to elevate Caribbean society, but not just against pollution, rather these other engines in the regional construct as well. The roadmap therefore has these 3 prime directives:

Optimize the economic engines of the Caribbean to elevate the regional economy to grow to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establish a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines over the seas & land.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

So the CU will serve as the regional administrator to optimize the economy, homeland security and governing engines for the Caribbean. These efforts are already important in the fight for Climate Change abatement; so the same can apply for the mitigation of polluting plastics and Styrofoam.

We can all do more!

Some hotel resorts in the Caribbean have already embraced the strategy of being early-adopters of plastics-Styrofoam bans. See a related article here from St Lucia:

Bay Gardens Resorts discontinues use of Expanded Polystyrene EPS (Styrofoam) products https://stluciatimes.com/2017/02/17/bay-gardens-resorts-discontinues-use-expanded-polystyrene-eps-styrofoam-products/

Change has come to the Caribbean region. This heavy-lifting is the quest of the CU/Go Lean roadmap; to make the Caribbean region more self-reliant collectively; to act more proactively and reactively for our own emergencies and natural disaster events; and to be more efficient in our governance.

If “plastics pollution” is not arrested, then even more devastating changes will come. So there is the need for our region to establish a regional Sentinel, a permanent union to provide efficient stewardship for our economic, security and governing engines.

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people and governing institutions, to lean-in to the efforts and empowerments to mitigate and abate “plastics pollution”. It is also time to lean-in to this roadmap described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean. Plastic pollution is a Big Deal. We have other Big Deals too, so as to reform and transform our society. We must make our waterways and homelands better places to live, work and play. 🙂

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

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

Share this post:

Bahamas, Disaster, Green Energy, Security, St Lucia, Transform

[Top]

What Went Wrong? Losing the Best; Nation-building with the Rest

Posted on July 29, 2019 in Ethos, Social, Strategy

“The one walking with the wise will become wise, but the one who has dealings with the stupid will fare badly”. – The Bible – Proverbs 13:20 NWT

There is no doubt that our Caribbean communities are suffering from a bad case of societal abandonment. Everyone in the Caribbean knows someone that has left. In fact, whenever there is a colleague we know from the hometown that is skilled and competent, we would expect them to leave and be disappointed if they have not; see this dramatized in the Appendix VIDEO; caution for Strong Language.

Search your heart, you know it to be true. That Valedictorian from High School, if he/she is still in the Caribbean, you are puzzled right?

This is our dilemma!

If/when all the best students leave, the remnant only reflect the rest – Less Than best students.

One Caribbean country – The Bahamas – has been faced with this reality. As their Brain Drain rate gets worse and worse, they are now measuring the academic performance of the remaining students, and the grade is bad:

‘D’ Average.

See the full news article here:

Title: Results Expose Failing Schools
By: Khrisna Russell, Deputy Chief Reporter
A DAY after Education Minister Jeff Lloyd said “something is wrong” with the country’s educational system, officials withheld an official subject letter grade breakdown for the Bahamas General Certificate of Secondary Education examination results, which also show that of 6,692 students who sat the national tests this year, only 521 or 7.8 per cent, scored a C or above in mathematics, English and a science subject.

This is about a nine per cent decrease compared to last year.

This lack of detailed BGCSE statistics raises questions over how students fared in individual test subjects and highlights challenges this country faces regarding the readiness of youth to adjust to life after high school where they are expected to transition into the work force or college.

However, sources within the Ministry of Education told The Tribune this year’s test scores did not depart greatly from the dismal grade trends seen in both 2015 and 2016.

On Wednesday Mr Lloyd told educators during an event in Grand Bahama that they could not continue to rest on their laurels while the national exam results remain at a D average.

“For the last 10 years or more, the BGCSE results have shown not (any) improvement; we started out with a D, we are still at a D – something is wrong,” the minister said during the Ministry of Education’s annual Teachers’ Enrichment Day. The event was held at the Jack Hayward High School gymnasium on Wednesday.

He continued: “There is no way to camouflage it; there is no way to excuse it; something is wrong and we must fix it.”

He went on to stress the only way the issue could be corrected was to go back to the beginning and start with preschoolers.

In 2015, core subjects of mathematics and English averaged an E and D+ respectively. In 2016, the ministry did not release letter grades per subject, but then Minister of Education Jerome Fitzgerald confirmed at the time that the grades were not much different from those of 2015.

Prior to 2015, subject letter grades were released with the official BGCSE and Bahamas Junior Certificate (BJC) exam tests scores. The following year, the ministry broke away from its traditional analysis, only giving a general overview and percentage calculations per letter grade. This year, the Ministry of Education also did not hold its usual press conference to officially release the results, this time opting to disseminate the details of the tests by email.

Results
“In 2017, a total of 521 candidates received at least a grade C or better in mathematics, English language and a science,” the press release accompanying the 2017 results noted. “This represents a decrease of 9.23 per cent when compared to 2016 which had a total of 574 candidates. There were 570 candidates in 2015; 588 in 2014 and 561 candidates in 2013.”

According to the new results, there were 2,141 As; 3,000 Bs; 7,065 Cs; 5,569 Ds; 3,496 Es; 1,936 Fs; 1,184 Gs and 710 Us for the BGCSE exams.

Regarding the number of students who sat these tests, there were 6,692, or a 3.95 per cent increase compared to the 6,438 test takers in 2016.

A further breakdown of the results showed in 2017, a total of 1,493 candidates obtained a minimum grade of D in at least five subjects. This represents an increase of 2.33 per cent from 2016, which had a total of 1,459 candidates.

There were also 1,534 candidates achieving this mark in 2015; 1,545 in 2014 and 1,626 in 2013.

In addition, a total of 880 candidates received at least grade C in five or more subjects in 2017 compared with 903 candidates in 2016.

This represents a decrease of 2.55 per cent. There were 961 candidates in 2015; 922 candidates in 2014 and 996 in 2013 in this category.

The Bahamas Junior Certificate (BJC) examination results were not much different when compared with the BGCSE test scores.

Of the 12,120 students who took the tests in 2017, only 1,326 or 10.94 per cent of candidates achieved at least a C in mathematics, English and a science.

“This represents a 14.67 per cent decrease when compared with 2016, which had a total of 1,554 candidates. There were 1,479 candidates in 2015; 1,651 candidates in 2014 and 1,302 candidates in 2013,” the Ministry of Education said in its press release.

The BJC results also show there were 3,831 As; 7,033 Bs; 9,395 Cs; 8,036 Ds; 6,036 Es; 4,508 Fs; 2,954 Gs and 2,565 Us.

“When compared with 2016, there is a percentage decrease noted at grades A, C, E and U and increases at B, D, F and G. It is interesting to note that this is the second consecutive year the percentage at U has decreased.

“Overall, the percentage of candidates achieving grades A – D decreased this year when compared with last year,” the Ministry of Education said.

Source: Posted August 31, 2017; retrieved July 29, 2019 from: http://www.tribune242.com/news/2017/sep/01/results-expose-failing-schools/

While this article is from 2017; an except of the full Ministry of Education Report (MOE) for the 2017-2018 Academic Year is also hereby attached in Appendix below. This commentary is hereby published during mid-summer 2019; so we only have analysis based on that 2018 report. See a related news article on the latest MOE Report from September 3, 2018:

Title: Exam Passes Down Again
By: Khrisna Russell, Deputy Chief Reporter
STUDENTS who took the Bahamas General Certificate of Secondary Education (BGCSE) examinations performed marginally worse this year [2018] in comparison with those who took the national tests in 2017.

See the full article here: Retrieved July 29, 2019 from: http://www.tribune242.com/news/2018/sep/04/exam-passes-down-again/

This has not always been the case. What Went Wrong?

Simple: This grade is an average!

In the past, there were better students in the Bahamian educational eco-system. If you total all of those test scores and divide by the count, you get the average. If you then take away all the higher earners and calculate the average again, the result is an even lower average score. Repeat this process again and again and the overall average lowers.

Welcome to the ‘D’ Grade Reality. This is indicative that the best-of-the-best have left, are leaving and unless something is done, will continue to leave.

(“An apple doesn’t fall far from a tree”; so most good students have children that are good students; most bad students rarely have children that are good students. This is Nature and Nurture).

This commentary completes the July series from the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean. This submission follow through on the theme “What Went Wrong?“, focuses on Caribbean defects and dysfunctions in every aspect of Caribbean life; many which have been addressed and remediated by other societies – think North America and Europe yes, but even Asian communities. So this creates the pressure of Push and Pull, in which our people leave to seek refuge in those places.

While this is entry 6-of-6, the full catalog were published 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

Though the foregoing news article cites the Bahamas, the experience of falling test scores have befallen all Caribbean communities. In this What Went Wrong series, we did not only detail the timelines of the faults and breaks, but also drew reference to the need for a comprehensive roadmap for reforming and transforming the Caribbean region – all member states, individually and collectively. So the solutions here-in are for the Bahamas and the rest of the region.

The problems of failing Caribbean education scores are too big for any one member-state alone, we would need the leverage of the whole Caribbean neighborhood – despite the language, race, colonial heritage or political structure – to forge the change and solutions.

Forge the change and solutions?
The Go Lean movement (book and previous blog-commentaries) asserts that technology, Internet Communications Technology (ICT) in fact – can be the great equalizer in education solutions so that smaller countries can compete with larger ones worldwide. Imagine, right on our islands, coastal shores, rural settlements, barrios and ghettos, our students can have the best-of-the best for instruction, knowledge base, tutorials and reference sources.

Yes, we can … correct What Went Wrong in our Caribbean education evolution with these different strategies, tactics and implementations. See how this theme was developed and presented in these previous blog-commentaries:

Title: Future Focused – Personal Development and the Internet – November 8, 2017

“I believe that children are the future; teach them well and let them lead the way”.

That is just a song; but this is life.

What is the hope for the Caribbean youth to be transformed in their development compared to past generations?

What transformations are transpiring in the region that shows willingness for the people and institutions to embrace the needed change?

In 2017, a focus on the future for young people must also consider “cyber reality” and/or the Internet. This consideration is embedded in the Go Lean roadmap. In fact, the book presents the good stewardship so that Internet & Communications Technologies (ICT) can be a great equalizing element for leveling the playing field in competition with the rest of the world. …

The Go Lean book presents the plan to deploy many e-Learning provisions so as to deliver on the ICT promise in educating our Caribbean youth. The book references the roles and responsibilities of e-Learning in many iterations; this shows the Future Focus of the Go Lean roadmap; …

The future – of electronic learning systems – is now! The technology is ready and the Caribbean youth is ready. We only need to deploy the delivery models to allow our students to matriculate online. See the profile of this American company that is currently available:

http://www.k12.com/

———–

Title: Future Focused – College, Caribbean Style – November 10, 2017

A huge step in making [distance learning] happen occurred with the development of the personal computer and the Internet. It took a while for modem technology to gain use in distance learning, but once it did, online educational platforms started popping up all over the place, first by connecting private computers directly, but later on the Internet. Add in the benefits of updated teleconferencing technologies, and it’s no wonder that six million postsecondary students take at least one fully online class every year.

Related:

100 Best Online Colleges

50 Best Online MBA Programs

25 Best Online Degrees

————

Title: Managing the ‘Strong versus the Weak’ – Lower Ed. – April 27, 2017
(Avoiding the bad American example)

We need more e-Learning options in our Caribbean homeland, for all education levels: K-12 and college. There are many successful models and best practices to adopt. We are in position to pick, choose and refuse products and services from all our foreign trading partners, including from the US. (We must assuredly avoid their societal defects).

One successful model is “iReady” [used by Miami-Dade Country School District].

The purpose of the Go Lean movement is not education, rather it is presenting a roadmap to reform and transform the societal engines (economics, security and governance) of the Caribbean. We must reboot to stop the Brain Drain. But education is important! Education is directly related to economics. See how this theme was developed in many previous Go Lean commentaries; see a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=16882	Exploring Medical School Opportunities … as Economic Engines
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=15543	Ross University Relocation Saga: There Goes Economy and Jobs
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=13952	Welcoming the Caribbean Intelligentsia: Educated Economists Role
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6269	Education & Economics: Welcome Mr. President
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4487	Role Model FAMU – No. 3 for Facilitating Economic Opportunity
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1433	Caribbean loses over 70 percent of tertiary educated to Brain Drain

All of the Caribbean feature societal defects and dysfunctions. A lot went wrong! Now that we have diagnosed that, we can better prescribe remedies.

We cannot go back in time and correct the Caribbean Bad Start – associated with slavery and colonialism – we can only go forward from here and weed out the bad community ethos; then adopt the good ones, plus strategies, tactics and implementations that we need to reboot society.

Yes, we can.

This is the assertion of the movement behind the Go Lean…Caribbean book and the resultant roadmap. So we urge all Caribbean stakeholders to lean-in to this roadmap to make our homeland a better place to live, work, learn 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.

————-

Reference: The Ministry of Education submits the results of the 2018 Bahamas Junior Certificate (BJC) and the Bahamas General Certificate of Secondary Education (BGCSE) examinations.

Excerpts:

… The national examinations are all graded on a seven (7) point scale, i.e., High-Up: A – Lowest of the low: G – all grades indicate a measure of positive achievement. Grade ‘A’ denotes the highest level of performance while grade ‘G’ denotes the lowest level. …

BGCSE Grade Outcome Statistics

Females continue to outperform males receiving higher percentages at A – C and lower percentages at E – U. Males outperformed females at D. It is interesting to note that females increased in percentage at grades A and B this year while males decreased in performance at A – C. It is unfortunate that males also increased in percentage at grades E – G. Positively, both males and females decreased in percentage at U.

See full report at this: https://www.bahamaslocal.com/files/BJC%20&%20BGCSE%202018%20Results.pdf posted August 2018; retrieved Bahamas Ministry of Education; July 29, 2019.

————-

Appendix VIDEO – Good Will Hunting | ‘The Best Part of My … (HD) – Ben Affleck, Matt Damon | MIRAMAX – https://youtu.be/Xv7eeMikM_w

Miramax

Published on Dec 15, 2015 – Chuckie (Ben Affleck) gives Will (Matt Damon) a friendly dose of reality.

In this scene: Will (Matt Damon), Chuckie (Ben Affleck)

About Good Will Hunting:

The most brilliant mind at America’s top university isn’t a student; he’s the kid who cleans the floors. Will Hunting is a headstrong, working-class genius who is failing the lessons of life. After one too many run-ins with the law, Will’s last chance is a psychology professor, who might be the only man who can reach him. Finally forced to deal with his past, Will discovers that the only one holding him back is himself.

Starring, in alphabetical order: Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck, Matt Damon, Minnie Driver, Cole Hauser, Stellan Skarsgård, Robin Williams

About Miramax:

Miramax is a global film and television studio best known for its highly acclaimed, original content.

Visit Miramax on our WEBSITE: https://www.miramax.com/ Good Will Hunting | ‘The Best Part of My Day’ (HD) – Ben Affleck, Matt Damon | MIRAMAX

http://www.youtube.com/Miramax

Category: Entertainment

Share this post:

Bahamas, College, Diaspora, Transform, Youth

[Top]