The state owned national carrier Air Jamaica has been getting a lot of attention as the country grapples with what to do with the perennial loss making carrier during testing financial times. Since it began operating in 1968, it has experienced its share of expansion and contraction and only once recorded an operating profit in [...]
David Comissiong, president of the People’s Empowerment Party (of Barbados) argues that the island and other Caribbean countries are becoming puppets of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and marginalising their vulnerable populations.
Where has it gone wrong for Bruce Golding and Barack Obama? Why have both men, who campaigned on platforms of ‘change’, faltered so badly in running their respective affairs of state? In September of 2007, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) for the first time since 1972, won a general election without Eddie Seaga as its [...]
“If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own. For if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.” – Angela Davis Jamaica has done what was believed to be sacrosanct some months ago, defaulted on our sovereign debt with the most [...]
Televangelist Pat Robertson’s demented claim that Haiti’s disastrous earthquake was the result of a pact the Haitian slaves signed with the devil to win their freedom has probably gained more converts to atheism and agnosticism than have the efforts of Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest of the ”new atheists” vanguard together. In the midst of intense grieving for a [...]
Many writers have excused Jamaica’s poor economic performance by blaming or ascribing it to the global melt down. While I will admit that that occurrence affected visitor arrivals, Jamaica’s economic woes were set in motion long ago. Let me hive off one little piece of our unreadiness. We built the mercantile trade of the Maritime [...]
The sugar plantation was undoubtedly the dominant economic and social phenomena of colonial Jamaica and the Jamaican society that emerged out of slavery was very much a reflection of the sugar plantation. In such a society there is a small but dominant upper class and large but subservient lower class. In colonial times colour and [...]
It was surprising to many how Jamaicans responded to the tax measures announced by the Government in the April supplementary budget. Even the Government had expected some amount of street protest over the gas tax. The Jamaican people have demonstrated that they understand the effects of the global recession and are appreciative of the difficulties [...]
In the days that race towards us we should endeavour to teach ancestral words of wisdom. We shall need teachers to accomplish this task. But who shall teach our teachers? I seem to recall a time less than forty years ago when the village still raised the child, when any adult could reprimand for an [...]
There is an island of rolling hills and blue-green mountains, nourished by swirling rivers that empty into a yawning sea. Those burnt-faced, olive-skinned people who were its first inhabitants, in homage to its resplendent vistas, bestowed on it the name, ‘Xaymaca’ – “Land of Springs”. After their demise at European hands, came those of my [...]