The seri­ous­ness of the mur­der may­hem in Jamaica is being aid­ed and abet­ted by the print and elec­tron­ic media, which is [not] report­ing in a ful­some way, the total­i­ty of the killings tak­ing place.
This medi­um has more than enough evi­dence that proves deci­sive­ly, that the num­ber of killings occur­ring dai­ly is not mak­ing it into the news­pa­pers, their online pub­li­ca­tions nor the elec­tron­ic media in Jamaica.
Whether or not there is a con­spir­a­cy of sorts to sup­press the num­ber of peo­ple being killed I can­not say.
Nevertheless, I find it curi­ous at best, that the Police cor­po­rate Communications Arm puts out bul­letins on the crimes being com­mit­ted, yet some mur­ders do not make it into the news­pa­pers or onto the Television screens, but fluff, non­sen­si­cal polit­i­cal pos­tur­ing, and gib­ber­ish does.

On any giv­en day the online ver­sion of the Gleaner looks like a for­eign pub­li­ca­tion. There are more sto­ries about Brexit and old gob­bly-gook sto­ries from abroad, mixed in with ques­tions to Bounty Killer than there are actu­al sto­ries on rel­e­vant events hap­pen­ing in Jamaica.
For its part, the Observer is some­what bet­ter, but just bare­ly.
The thick influ­ence of sto­ries from over­seas seems to mir­ror Jamaican’s lust for all things American, good or bad.
The idea that mur­ders and oth­er vio­lent crimes are treat­ed with such lack of angst, leaves open the idea that maybe, just maybe, the num­ber of killings being report­ed to the Police is not the full sto­ry of the mur­ders being com­mit­ted.
We already know that a lot of vio­lent felonies do not make it to the police, peo­ple are either too scared to report them to author­i­ties, or they take mat­ters into their own hands.
For that rea­son, there is enough space to argue that we are not get­ting the full sto­ry of vio­lent deaths in the coun­try.
Shockingly, Jamaica at this time has the dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion of being num­ber two with mur­ders on the glob­al stage. If we were to have a more accu­rate foren­sic account­ing of the num­ber of homi­cides being com­mit­ted, includ­ing vic­tims who do not die imme­di­ate­ly after being assault­ed, the coun­try’s plac­ing on that dubi­ous stage would most cer­tain­ly change for the worse.

It seems to me that there is a sys­temic move­ment afoot across the globe for lead­ers in posi­tions of pow­er to straight-for­ward­ly abdi­cate their oaths to pro­tect and defend the con­sti­tu­tions of their respec­tive states.
Greed and the desire to gain and hold onto pow­er has lit­er­al­ly [trumped] the duty to adhere to prin­ci­ples and to hon­or their oaths.
Whether It is the United States Senate abdi­ca­tion of its con­sti­tu­tion­al duty which most believe is immi­nent, or the seri­ous crim­i­nal charges lev­eled against Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, be it the Brexit débâ­cle or events in Venezuela and oth­er cap­i­tals, it seems that the sky is cer­tain­ly falling.

Jamaica, a tiny speck on the geo­graph­i­cal stage is cer­tain­ly expe­ri­enc­ing some of the same char­ac­ter­is­tics which are plagu­ing its larg­er con­tem­po­raries.
I am old enough to remem­ber changes on a glob­al scale, the falling of the Berlin Wall, the dis­man­tling of the Soviet Union, China’s rise to a glob­al pow­er pow­er­house. I believe we will see anoth­er shift after all this, which will set­tle the world into a new glob­al order.
Unfortunately for the cit­i­zens of this plan­et, it does not seem that it will be a glob­al order built on truth and hon­or, but an order in which the pow­er­ful takes full con­trol of all our lives.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

Every sin­gle mem­ber of the Republican cau­cus in the US Congress and every mem­ber of the Republican cau­cus in the United States Senate took an oath to defend the Constitution against all ene­mies for­eign and domes­tic.
Defense of the con­sti­tu­tion is so impor­tant that these pub­lic ser­vants are required to swear an oath to defend it even before tak­ing office.
These pub­lic offi­cers, most of whom call them­selves Christians, take the oath by swear­ing on a Bible.

Yet, like the unan­i­mous Republican response to the Trump impeach­ment in the house, Senate Republicans will treach­er­ous­ly abdi­cate their most sacred duty in defense of the con­sti­tu­tion, and give total feal­ty, to arguably the most cor­rupt and degen­er­ate President in American his­to­ry.
Suggesting that Donald Trump is arguably the most dan­ger­ous and degen­er­a­tive occu­pi­er of the white house says a lot, because, most of that lot have been hor­ri­ble characters.

The trag­ic irony is that, though Donald Trump and his white base would rather have a dic­ta­tor­ship than an open plu­ral­is­tic soci­ety, (accord­ing to polling), he will not be pres­i­dent for­ev­er.
Eventually, there will be a Democrat in the White House, Democrats will con­trol the Senate, maybe even the House and Senate while hold­ing the white house.
The Democrat in the White House could and may use what Donald Trump is allowed to get away with as a prece­dent for push­ing the enve­lope.
Republicans may think they will be in the major­i­ty for­ev­er, but the dam­age they are doing to the Republic is not just for Trump to get away with high crimes and mis­de­meanors, it is for all future pres­i­dents, Democrats, and Republicans.
Worse yet, the two par­ties are so far apart ide­o­log­i­cal­ly, there is next to no chance they will come togeth­er to leg­is­late and cod­i­fy into law, best prac­tices which stip­u­lates how a pres­i­dent shall behave.

Someone argued a few days ago these are old white men who are liv­ing in the now. They care noth­ing about what hap­pens when they are gone, they say.
I agree some­what, but I also believe they see Donald Trump as the best thing for white enti­tle­ment, white iden­ti­ty, white suprema­cy, and their fraud­u­lent white griev­ances.
The Republican base cer­tain­ly thinks so. That explains the absolute fear con­gres­sion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tives and sen­a­tors in the Republican Party have of open­ing their mouths to say any­thing which could remote­ly be con­strued to be in dis­agree­ment with Trump.

The TV talk­ing heads, and the pun­dits claim that Trump’s sup­port comes from peo­ple who are eco­nom­i­cal­ly anx­ious. They are bla­tant­ly lying to the pub­lic.
These peo­ple are always eco­nom­i­cal­ly anx­ious, when­ev­er the fac­to­ries in their mid­west­ern towns and sub­urbs close they blame every­one. Immigrants, Blacks, Muslims, for­eign­ers, and every­one in-between, become their ene­my of choice.
As long as Trump hates peo­ple they do not like, he is safe with them. That well of antipa­thy has always been there to be exploit­ed, it took a man as immoral, amoral and deeply cor­rupt as Donald Trump to exploit it.

This is the sec­ond of a two-part series, on the sub­ject of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s vis­it to Jamaica, for talks with Prime Minister Andrew Holness.
I intend to show in the sim­plest form pos­si­ble, that the American Secretary of State’s vis­it, though couched and wrapped in beau­ti­ful and flow­ery dress­ing, is noth­ing more than an attempt by the Trump admin­is­tra­tion in Washington DC to ensure that it keeps Jamaica in the fold, in the face of the mas­sive Chinese for­ay into the Caribbean and the devel­op­ing world.

Even as Pompeo was sup­pos­ed­ly engrossed in seri­ous bi-lat­er­al talks with lead­ers of the tiny island of 2.7 mil­lion peo­ple, large­ly of African ances­try, house man­agers were pre­sent­ing cred­i­ble and damn­ing evi­dence against Donald Trump, Pompeo’s boss, for high crimes and mis­de­meanors.
In nor­mal times the evi­dence against Trump would have been enough for the 45^th occu­pant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to be sent pack­ing.
These are no ordi­nary times, the very exis­tence of the American exper­i­ment is at stake. Regardless of the out­come, a new prece­dent will be set, and the United States will absolute­ly be worse off for it.

I have no doubt that the Jamaican Prime Minister rec­og­nizes that the coun­try can­not con­tin­ue under the cloak of mur­ders and vio­lent felonies com­mit­ted dai­ly across the coun­try.
And so I have no doubt that he believes in Pompeo’s [BS] charm offen­sive.
He may even be daz­zled by the pres­ence of the Secretary him­self, as some in the media believe that Jamaica should be hon­ored to have the sec­re­tary him­self, when a low­er-rung bureau­crat would be more than enough for Jamaica, right?

[We peas­ants out hey in di colony do not need any­one as impor­tant as Massa’s sec­re­tary, we [is] quite com­fort­able with any­one white].

Clearly, some in the opin­ion-mak­ing busi­ness still strug­gle with unshack­ling them­selves from the yoke of sub-human sta­tus.
It is for that rea­son that the Prime Minister said the fol­low­ing with gid­dy school­boy excite­ment;
“For our region­al engage­ment, the US-Caribbean 2020 Engagement Strategy also sets the course for fur­ther work to pro­mote pros­per­i­ty, ener­gy secu­ri­ty, health and well-being, peace and secu­ri­ty, and ongo­ing high-lev­el polit­i­cal engage­ment in the years ahead.”

In a press brief­ing after the talks end­ed Mike Pompeo said the fol­low­ing:
“Today in our meet­ing, the prime min­is­ter and I strength­ened our coun­try’s friend­ship and set the table for greater engage­ment.”

Does any­one seri­ous­ly believe that the bonds between Jamaica and the United States need strength­en­ing?
Whether it is pros­per­i­ty, ener­gy secu­ri­ty, health and well-being, peace and secu­ri­ty, or high-lev­el polit­i­cal engage­ment, the United States has had more than enough time to strength­en those areas over the last decades.
And so the ques­tion must be, “why now”?
What about the mass depor­ta­tions of peo­ple who com­mit­ted only minor infrac­tions, some who are even inno­cent?
What about the mass influx of ille­gal auto­mat­ic weapon­ry flood­ing Jamaica’s streets and alley­ways, is America help­ing to stop it?
What about infra­struc­tur­al devel­op­ment, why did the United States not offer Jamaica low-inter­est loans over the years?
Those infra­struc­ture devel­op­ment loans would have helped to make Jamaica a first-world nation as Israel is?
Jamaica is small­er than the state of Israel, so if America want­ed to help Jamaica, it would be rather easy to help Jamaica’s devel­op­ment over the years.
Those loans would have pro­vid­ed good jobs for Jamaicans, which in turn would lessen the need for Jamaicans to line up seek­ing a way into the United States.
Or, is tak­ing mon­ey from poor Jamaicans who line up expect­ing to get a vis­i­tors visa an eas­i­er way to extract from the poor what lit­tle they have? Even though the vast major­i­ty of those peo­ple will nev­er receive a visa to set foot in the United States?

There are rough­ly 39 mil­lion African-American peo­ple liv­ing in the United States. That num­ber is greater than the entire pop­u­la­tion of Canada, with its 37.59 mil­lion.
Black spend­ing pow­er is 1.3 tril­lion dol­lars annu­al­ly, accord­ing to [Neilsen].
Despite that numer­ic strength and eco­nom­ic spend­ing pow­er, the United States still treats its black cit­i­zens as sec­ond class cit­i­zens, and with­out the respect they deserve.
It behooves those gid­dy with excite­ment that [mas­sa] came down to the [colony] to grace the peas­antry with his pres­ence, and to offer plat­i­tudes, to cool off on drink­ing too much of the cool-aid.
As I wrote before Pompeo start­ed his talks with Holness, the sin­gu­lar rea­son he is in Jamaica is to whip Jamaica in line over China’s grow­ing influ­ence in the region.
Of course, this did not require much crit­i­cal think­ing. Last year the American Ambassador to Jamaica, some guy named Donald Tapia, had the gall to lec­ture the Island about accept­ing loans from China.
And then Pompeo made clear the real rea­son for his vis­it by admon­ish­ing the Island about accept­ing loans from China. The United States is itself heav­i­ly indebt­ed to China. If America is so heav­i­ly indebt­ed to China, why should Jamaica not have the right to exer­cise its dis­cre­tion on who it bor­rows from and under what con­di­tions?
Who gives Pompeo, and the United States the right to exer­cise pater­nal­is­tic author­i­ty over Jamaica? Is Jamaica unequal to the task of self-determination? 

I hate to say I told you so but .… actu­al­ly, I don’t, I told you so. If Jamaica is able to secure low-inter­est loans from China, America los­es out on its high-inter­est loans to Jamaica.
If Jamaica sees ben­e­fit in deal­ing with China, the Asian behe­moth becomes a lot more attrac­tive to the Island, as it does to oth­er Caribbean nations.
It is for that rea­son that the stance tak­en by Barbados & Trinidad & Tobago is so valiant.
I under­stand the utopi­an view Jamaicans at home have of the United States, who could blame them.
If we wish to speak the truth, most of us believed that American streets were paved with gold when we saw the beau­ti­ful pic­turesque images of the Manhattan sky­line.
In our minds, there were no pot­holes. Friends and I joked recent­ly, many believed there were no mos­qui­tos in America.

Despite the best men­tal images we had of what America was, before we first set foot on American soil, she remains every­thing but what we imag­ined.
No, the streets are not paved with gold, they are pot-holed infest­ed.
Sure the Manhattan night-time sky­line is pic­turesque, but the back­ground dark­ness masks the hunger, home­less­ness, and despair of tens of thou­sands, it is a beau­ti­ful wall­pa­per that cov­ers up the decay­ing walls, of pover­ty and racial exclu­sion.
For the hard-work­ing peo­ple of col­or rais­ing their boys in Manhattan and oth­er met­ro­pol­i­tan cen­ters across the coun­try is a dai­ly grind of nerves. Their fears are not that their boys will be mur­dered by their con­tem­po­raries so much, as it is that they will be mur­dered by the very peo­ple they pay to pro­tect them, the police.
Poor whites with no influ­ence are hard­ly any bet­ter off, pover­ty, eco­nom­ic anx­i­ety, and drug abuse are wreak­ing hav­oc all across the nation. When it affects blacks they are lazy crack addicts, this time the label is the opi­oid cri­sis.
If America refus­es to fix its own peo­ple, why in hell would it want to help black peo­ple in Jamaica?

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

It is not often that the Editorial pages of news­pa­pers get it right.
In fact, in most cas­es, Editorial boards are so out of the loop that their opin­ions evoke dis­be­lief and even ridicule.
The Editorial page of the Jamaica Observer for Tuesday, January 21^st decid­ed that it did not want to break that cycle.
In its head­line titled; ” Mr. Pompeo’s vis­it an oppor­tu­ni­ty for our region”, the pub­li­ca­tion trot­ted out old bul­let points on the sup­posed friend­ship bench­marks between the United States and Jamaica.
They are old­er than the wee­vil infest­ed American flour and corn­meal hand­outs, labeled, ‘in god we trust” from the 1960s.

The Editorial is in response to Barbados and now Trinidad & Tobago’s deci­sion, not to meet with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Kingston Jamaica.
Pompeo is slat­ed to begin a two-day meet­ing with Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness.
In its gush­ing endorse­ment of the vis­it, the Editorial argued; “instead of see­ing the vis­it as a threat to the notion of Caribbean uni­ty, we should grasp the oppor­tu­ni­ty for the region to fur­ther strength­en its rela­tion­ship with our long-stand­ing friend, the United States”.

Without giv­ing cre­dence to the salient rea­sons giv­en by Jamaica’s Caribbean neigh­bors for not attend­ing the meet­ing with Pompeo, the Editorial, in juve­nile fash­ion said; “we regard Mr. Pompeo’s deci­sion to come here as a fur­ther demon­stra­tion of his Government’s com­mit­ment to the long-stand­ing friend­ship between Kingston and Washington”.
The naïveté of the fore­gone is beyond laugh­able. What friend­ship?
” It’s a friend­ship that this news­pa­per val­ues high­ly, because we remem­ber when it was threat­ened by the adven­tur­ism of a left-lean­ing Administration in the 1970s, which not only plunged Jamaica into the Cold War, but ruined the econ­o­my, result­ing in a brain drain and the ero­sion of the mid­dle class”.
True, but there was no men­tion of the role the United States played in the process­es which brought Jamaica to finan­cial ruin in the ’70s.

“After all, giv­en the vol­ume of high-inten­si­ty geopo­lit­i­cal events now in train glob­al­ly, and the fact that the US is play­ing a sig­nif­i­cant role in many of these issues, Washington could eas­i­ly have assigned a junior in rank to Mr Pompeo to trav­el to Jamaica for these talks”.

Oh Lord, this lev­el of self-doubt and sec­ond class mind­set is extreme­ly dif­fi­cult to shake, but I thought that these peo­ple would have had a lit­tle more self-assured­ness.
In vir­tu­al­ly every so-called high-inten­si­ty geopo­lit­i­cal event across the Globe, there are American fin­ger­prints. Most are of American cre­ation.

“Some seem to expect that all mem­ber states of Caricom should be at the meet­ing. That is obvi­ous­ly unnec­es­sary, because if Caricom is act­ing like one, there should be no need for a room­ful of lead­ers”.

By that state­ment, the cocooned Editorial in one fell-swoop gave Prime Minister Andrew Holness carte-blanch to speak on behalf of all of CARICOM.
I have a feel­ing that mem­ber states of CARICOM may have some­thing to say about that.
Despite CARICOM, mem­ber states with­in the orga­ni­za­tion have very strong opin­ions on their indi­vid­ual auton­o­my. Students of his­to­ry know that it is for that very rea­son that the pro­posed “west indies fed­er­a­tion” remind­ed just that, a proposal.

“So, we wel­come Secretary Pompeo in the spir­it of friend­ship and hope that the talks will be fruit­ful. For cer­tain­ly, his coun­try has proved, over many decades, that it is a friend in times of need and that it val­ues the excel­lent rela­tion­ship between both our coun­tries”.

Several books can be writ­ten about the sup­posed relationship/​friend­ship between the United States and Jamaica. Fundamental to the top­ic, how­ev­er, would be the appro­pri­ate dis­pen­sa­tion of the myth, that the United States is a friend of any coun­try, much less Jamaica.
I would like to state the obvi­ous for the Observers Editorial board, nations have strate­gic inter­ests, not friendships.

It is dif­fi­cult to change the minds of some peo­ple with pre-formed opin­ions that the US is an unvar­nished friend to Jamaica. Any such belief is to ignore, or worse, dis­play a dan­ger­ous igno­rance of the dif­fer­ences between the two polit­i­cal par­ties in the United States.
To believe that the American for­eign pol­i­cy of the 1970s is sta­t­ic, and there­fore the same today as it was in the 70s, is just anoth­er exam­ple of that pro­found igno­rance and naiveté.
Mike Pompeo is of an admin­is­tra­tion that is vehe­ment­ly opposed to coun­tries with black and brown pop­u­la­tions.
Donald Trump, Pompeo’s boss, calls coun­tries like Jamaica, the Caribbean region and Africa *shit­hole coun­tries*.
He would kick every black and brown per­son out of the United States if he could do so.
In fact, he has con­sis­tent­ly asked his advi­sors, why is America let­ting black and brown peo­ple in? He has explic­it­ly stat­ed his pref­er­ence for immi­grants from Sweden. Sweden for Trump rep­re­sents white qual­i­fi­ca­tion.
It is impos­si­ble to make the argu­ment that Mike Pompeo, a pompous, arro­gant, and blovi­at­ing crud, is in Jamaica for Jamaica’s interest.

Let us dis­pense with the non­sense about friend­ships, as per the Observer; We expect, of course, that the unfor­tu­nate devel­op­ments in Venezuela, as well as China’s grow­ing influ­ence in this region, will come up for dis­cus­sion. (Said the Observer).
The United States is a friend to one coun­try in the word, and one coun­try only, and that coun­try is Israel.
Mike Pompeo is in Jamaica on a whip mis­sion. He is there to use Jamaica’s influ­ence in the region, to help the United States to counter China’s bur­geon­ing incur­sion in the region.
There is a legit­i­mate con­ver­sa­tion to be had about Communist China’s inten­tions across the globe.
History shows that America’s wars, includ­ing the war in Vietnam, was about cur­tail­ing what America saw as the scourge of Communism, the red men­ace.
Even as America fought those wars, con­sci­en­tious Americans were demon­strat­ing in cities across the US, on College cam­pus­es, in the streets, many were beat­en by police, many were mur­dered by nation­al guard troops, and in the American, gov­ern­ment the debate about com­mu­nism raged with Joseph Mcarthy-like fer­vor. This pit­ted Americans against Americans. 

Past is pro­logue, it is time that opin­ion-mak­ers do the research nec­es­sary before lead­ing the Jamaican peo­ple down rab­bit holes they have no busi­ness going into.
China’s influ­ence across the globe is a threat, but it will require will and com­mon sense to thwart that threat. China is not approach­ing the devel­op­ing world with bul­lets and bay­o­nets. China is dol­ing out dol­lars and do-good.
That approach is dif­fi­cult to stop. Mike Pompeo is in Jamaica to try to counter that influ­ence in America’s nation­al secu­ri­ty inter­est.
Not Jamaica’s.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

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As a prac­tic­ing Christian, I have always believed that the words of the Bible, parts of which have been assigned direct­ly to the supreme God, becomes man­i­fest in front of our eyes because of human doings, rather than any­thing mag­i­cal or mys­ti­cal.
Having giv­en this sub­ject much thought, and hav­ing observed the rapid cul­tur­al meta­mor­pho­sis from a sit­u­a­tion in which truth is at the very least an estab­lished base­line, to the pro­lif­er­a­tion and accep­tance of lies, I am moved to put my thoughts into words.

2 Thessalonians 2:1 – 3 New King James Version (NKJV)
Now, brethren, con­cern­ing the com­ing of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gath­er­ing togeth­er to Him, we ask you, ² not to be soon shak­en in mind or trou­bled, either by spir­it or by word or by let­ter, as if from us, as though the day of ^[a]Christ had come. ³ Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of ^[b]sin is revealed, the son of perdi­tion.

I nev­er sub­scribed to the the­o­ry that any sin­gle indi­vid­ual rep­re­sent­ed the fright­en­ing sys­tem of gov­ern­ment the Bible pre­dicts, (the sys­tem of the antichrist), will pre­cede the sec­ond com­ing of our Lord and Savior Yeshua the Christ. However, hav­ing read and assim­i­lat­ed the word of God as best I could, and hav­ing stud­ied keen­ly his­tor­i­cal and cur­rent events, I long con­clud­ed that the fright­en­ing sys­tem to come has lit­tle to do with any sin­gle indi­vid­ual.
So no,.…… I do not believe that Donald Trump is the Antichrist as white Christians believed President Barack Obama to be. Nevertheless, I believe that as a species we have woven our­selves so tight­ly into a cocoon of ungod­li­ness, that we would not know how to dis­en­tan­gle, even if we want­ed to. As a con­se­quence, the ful­fill­ment of the scrip­tures is guar­an­teed because of our own actions.

While Barack Obama was com­pet­ing for the pres­i­den­cy of the United States he under­went all kinds of attacks, many of which were not only unwar­rant­ed, but down­right racist, dirty, and stu­pid­ly con­spir­a­to­r­i­al.
He was accused of being a Muslim, as if being a Muslim was a con­sti­tu­tion­al block against attain­ing the US pres­i­den­cy.
It is not!
He was accused of being a Manchurian can­di­date, and after he won he was accused of being a Manchurian pres­i­dent intent on destroy­ing the Republic.
 A manchuri­an can­di­date is a per­son, espe­cial­ly a politi­cian, being used as a pup­pet by an ene­my pow­er. The term is com­mon­ly used to indi­cate dis­loy­al­ty or cor­rup­tion, whether inten­tion­al or unintentional.

Most of those scur­rilous the­o­ries came from FOX mis­in­for­ma­tion, and the bevy of right-wing nut jobs on talk radio which blared out rabid hatred dai­ly.
Those the­o­ries even­tu­al­ly got picked up by white Evangelical Christians and inevitably bled into the main­stream con­ver­sa­tion and became pseu­do-facts, alter­na­tive facts. The real­i­ty is that those alter­na­tive facts infil­trate the brain of peo­ple, not just those char­ac­ter­ized as the [deplorables], but by peo­ple who have advanced degrees, includ­ing black peo­ple with PhDs who ought to know bet­ter, have bought into the lies, and the deceit which has tak­en over the nation­al consciousness.

I was absolute­ly shocked that a Ph.D., who is also a black man, and a Pastor, told me that he would rather have Donald Trump remain in the pres­i­den­cy than vote for Pete Buttegeig because he is a homo­sex­u­al.
He won’t vote for Joe Biden because he is bor­ing, and he will not vote for either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren because they are Socialists/​Communists.
He based every state­ment he made on his Christian faith, not on his intel­lec­tu­al capabilities.

My Ph.D. lament­ed that his tax­es are being used to take care of peo­ple who ought to be work­ing. [Did I tell you that he is also a Pastor]?
I stood there in utter shock as he berat­ed the Democrats, point­ing to New York City’s Mayor Bill De Blasio who he argues wants to give away every­thing to peo­ple for free, peo­ple he believes ought to be work­ing.
Dumfounded, I stood there, mouth agape at what I was hear­ing, I was almost at a loss for words, some­thing that does­n’t hap­pen often.
I harkened back to Yeshua’s teach­ings, take care of the poor, take care of the orphan and the wid­owed, vis­it the incarcerated.

As small busi­ness and prop­er­ty own­ers, my wife and I pay what we believe are over and above what we should be pay­ing in tax­es.
Am I some­times mad that we get noth­ing back for all that is tak­en from us?
You bet!
But the way funds in the fed­er­al bud­get are allo­cat­ed should leave no one with the wrong idea about wel­fare.
Corporate wel­fare is the prob­lem, not the crumbs which are tossed to the poor­est Americans.
The thing that puz­zles me most is the way the poor­est peo­ple have been conned into mil­i­tat­ing for the inter­est of the rich over their own interests.

Exasperated I pulled up this page, turned my com­put­er screen around and showed him this pie-chart.
His first reac­tion was that it was exag­ger­at­ed, I asked him for proof, he gave up and went onto some­thing else.
I want­ed to be fair so I found PolitiFact’s piechart. Politifact is well respect­ed as a non-par­ti­san arbiter of polit­i­cal claims. 

Politifact argues its chart is more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the true fed­er­al spend­ing allo­ca­tions.
[“To get num­bers that approx­i­mate this, the pie chart(chart num­ber one), cher­ry-picks just dis­cre­tionary spend­ing. But that means the pie chart rep­re­sents only about one-third of fed­er­al spend­ing. Once you include the 60 per­cent of the bud­get that is manda­to­ry spend­ing, the mil­i­tary share plunges from 57 per­cent to 16 per­cent, and the cat­e­gories that include Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid col­lec­tive­ly account for a major­i­ty of fed­er­al spend­ing. Spending on food and agri­cul­ture is still small, but it does quadru­ple from 1 per­cent to 4 per­cent.]

That is PolitiFact’s assess­ment, I dis­agree, because Social Security is mon­ey paid to the gov­ern­ment by work­ing Americans, that mon­ey should be locked away to do what social secu­ri­ty was intend­ed to do and ought not to have been part of the nation­al bud­get year to year.
The fact that social secu­ri­ty com­mit­ments have to be hon­ored from the fed­er­al bud­get is exact­ly because those funds have been raid­ed to finance ille­gal wars over­seas.
So tech­ni­cal­ly, a more accu­rate pic­ture would be to add social secu­ri­ty’s 25.3% to the mil­i­tary’s 16.2% for a grand total of 41.5%. So we are back clos­er to the first pie chart’s num­ber of 57%. 

To be fair, I want­ed you, our read­ers, to have access to both charts so that you may make an informed deci­sion.
Given a sce­nario in which the actu­al truth is that fed­er­al spend­ing actu­al­ly lands some­where in the mid­dle of the two depic­tions, or worse, even falls where [Politifact] places the num­bers, how can we jus­ti­fy spend­ing that share of the pie on weapons of mass destruc­tion, instead of on poor Americans?
If we (a) set aside Donald Trump’s moun­tain of neg­a­tives which ought to have dis­qual­i­fied him from the pres­i­den­cy, (at least accord­ing to nor­mal eth­i­cal stan­dards), and (b) are able to set aside the idea that any­one call­ing them­selves Christians, (much less Africa-American and Christian) would accept Donald Trump, we are still left with the dis­pro­por­tion­ate allo­ca­tion of fed­er­al dol­lars to contemplate. 

How do we, who call our­selves Christians rec­on­cile that amount of resources going toward cor­po­rate inter­est, yet we com­plain about the mea­ger crumbs going toward help­ing the most vul­ner­a­ble?
Are we so social­ized into apa­thy and dis­dain toward the poor that we would rather con­tin­ue the trick­le-down the­o­ry which says if we give more to the rich some will fall from their tables so that the poor can eat the crumbs?
It seems that my Ph.D. friend and the Evangelical move­ment has done just that.

During his pres­i­den­cy, Barack Obama asked the peo­ple earn­ing half a mil­lion dol­lars or more annu­al­ly to pay a lit­tle more in tax­es.
Polls at the time showed that the major­i­ty of peo­ple in that income brack­et were quite fine with pay­ing a lit­tle more in tax­es so that oth­er social oblig­a­tions could be addressed.
Ironically, it was the poor­est peo­ple in the Southern and Midwestern States who came out with tiki-torch­es and pitch­forks, they called Obama all kinds of deroga­to­ry names, social­ist, com­mu­nist, and those were the good names.
The medi­an income in those states was about $35.000, yet they were out fight­ing the fight of mil­lion­aires and billionaires.

In a September 2019 arti­cle for [The Atlantic], Columnist Derek Thompson wrote, ” By the ear­ly 2000s, the share of Americans who said they didn’t asso­ciate with any estab­lished reli­gion (also known as “nones”) had dou­bled. By the 2010s, this grab bag of athe­ists, agnos­tics, and spir­i­tu­al dab­blers had tripled in size.
The stark real­i­ty is that few­er and few­er young peo­ple are sub­scrib­ing to their par­en­t’s reli­gious prac­tices.
Is this part of the falling away from the faith? I do not pre­tend to have those answers.
Daniel 12:4 (KJV) But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowl­edge shall be increased.
The pro­lif­er­a­tion of knowl­edge has nev­er been greater at any time in record­ed his­to­ry. The Internet and social media allow for the mass dis­sem­i­na­tion of infor­ma­tion across con­ti­nents in nano-sec­onds.
While this is hap­pen­ing, Pastors and Parishioners alike, are mak­ing a mock­ery of the word of God, the young peo­ple are watch­ing and many are say­ing “we want none of it”.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

One of my for­mer col­leagues made a rather impor­tant obser­va­tion on a social media plat­form today.
I must say that I found his obser­va­tions rather point­ed even though I can­not val­i­date the num­bers killed gen­der­wise.

He said;
“In Jamaica, in any giv­en year we will mur­der over a thou­sand of our cit­i­zens. Of those more than a thou­sand cit­i­zens„ prob­a­bly 1 % will be women. Of that 1%, maybe a huge per­cent­age of those weren’t direct­ly tar­get­ed. So do we believe that the prob­lem is ’ “vio­lence against women?” maybe we need to change our selec­tive out­rage. Our default set­tings are to kill those who offend us be it man woman boy girl or a dog that attacks us. That’s the prob­lem”.(RS)

He nailed it.
I have always won­dered where we would end up in our Jamaican soci­ety because we nev­er do any­thing with­out being extra, pre­ten­tious and over­do­ing it.
Sure, we need diver­si­ty of all kinds, but I hard­ly think that tip­ping a con­tain­er too far one way or the oth­er does any good to the con­tents of that container.

In February of last year, I wrote the above arti­cle in which I called out a female gov­ern­ment min­is­ter for ignor­ing data in order to push what I con­tend­ed was a fem­i­nist agen­da.
One of the things that I have observed in our soci­ety grow­ing up, was that in many cas­es a poor fam­i­ly would make the choice to edu­cate a girl sib­ling leav­ing the boy to fend for him­self. After all, a man can always fend for him­self so we have to ensure that the girl gets an edu­ca­tion.
I have always thought that way of think­ing was dan­ger­ous because we lived in a soci­ety in which the man was [still] expect­ed to take care of his family.

A man who did not take care of his chil­dren was less than a rabid dog, open to ridicule and deri­sion, and cor­rect­ly so. Nevertheless, if he was not edu­cat­ed the same way his sis­ter was, how can he be expect­ed to com­pete in the dog-eat-dog soci­ety in which only the fittest sur­vive?
When the UWI, the pre­em­i­nent insti­tu­tion of high­er learn­ing fresh­man class year over year, is up to 85% female, is there any won­der that the men are angry and feel­ing left behind?

In the arti­cle last year I includ­ed some basic facts to be con­sid­ered, I will incor­po­rate some of those facts here.

There are expo­nen­tial­ly more all-girls schools in Jamaica than boy schools. 
There are also myr­i­ad agen­cies ded­i­cat­ed to the sup­port and uplift­ment of girls and women.
(1) The Bureau of Women’s Affairs (gen­der affairs)Act as a cat­a­lyst to ensure that the Government address­es the prob­lems that con­front women, giv­en the impact of patri­archy and sex­ism. 
(2) Woman Incorporated (Crisis Centre) Offering cri­sis coun­sel­ing, refer­ral ser­vices, and a 24-hour hot­line. The issues addressed by Woman Inc. include rape, incest, domes­tic vio­lence, domes­tic cri­sis, and sex­u­al harass­ment. 
(3) Sistren Theatre Collective  Brings pres­sure to bear on soci­ety to change the neg­a­tive stereo­types of women.
(4) Women’s Centre Of Jamaica Foundation  Objective is to moti­vate young moth­ers to choose edu­ca­tion instead of con­tin­u­ous moth­er­hood. 
(5) Women’s Media Watch The orga­ni­za­tion works to improve the images of women in the media.
(6) Women’s Resource And Outreach Centre Provides a place for women and youth in the Lyndhurst and Greenwich com­mu­ni­ty to learn the route of self-empowerment. 

This list does not begin to scratch the sur­face but it gives clear and unequiv­o­cal exam­ples of the dis­par­i­ty in sup­port ser­vices and to whom they are ded­i­cat­ed.
I am yet to locate a bureau of men’s affairs. Not only are men in cri­sis not social­ized to be vul­ner­a­ble, they hard­ly have any place to go for help.

If you have been pay­ing atten­tion you would have noticed that from the class­rooms to the board­rooms across the coun­try, men have basi­cal­ly retreat­ed and in some cas­es have all but dis­ap­peared.
Who will the high­ly edu­cat­ed women enrolling in the UWI mar­ry? In fact, when the very man who was side­lined in order that his sis­ter could go to col­lege, decides to edu­cate a girl he falls in love with, and then she finds him une­d­u­cat­ed and there­fore unsuit­able for her, and he kills her, why are we in shock?

The sad truth is that there is a lot to ven­ti­late on this issue, an issue that needs psy­cho­log­i­cal atten­tion.
The men who dropped out of school, or were side­lined for their sis­ters, or decid­ed they did not want to both­er with the long process of edu­ca­tion, are the men being empow­ered by the gun. They are the men who find pow­er and ven­ti­la­tion in vio­lence, they see no oth­er way.
They are not about to give up that pow­er, those guns will have to be pried from their fin­gers, one way or another.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

I won­der what would have hap­pened if Jamaica’s elites had thrown their col­lec­tive weight behind our bud­ding democ­ra­cy in the ear­ly days. A Democracy that rose from the ash­es of colo­nial­ism and the chal­lenges of the 70’s which lit­er­al­ly ques­tioned the very idea of whether us Jamaicans could gov­ern our­selves.
Wonder where our coun­try would be if those who had loud impor­tant voic­es capa­ble of shap­ing opin­ions, used those pow­ers and perch­es to push and demand a soci­ety cen­tered around the con­cept of the rule of law?
After all, it is rather easy and con­ve­nient to blame every­one else for what we failed to do for our­selves. As Jamaicans, we have cer­tain­ly blamed the Americans and the CIA for our own stu­pid fail­ings even as we have blamed the Cubans who were sim­ply look­ing to broad­en its sphere of com­mu­nist influ­ence. What we did as Jamaicans were total­ly up to us and not any­one else.

Wonder where our coun­try would be if the news­pa­per edi­to­ri­als, radio gab­bers, and tele­vi­sion talk­ing heads used their medi­ums to edu­cate and chal­lenge our peo­ple to respect author­i­ty?
I guess we will nev­er know, and so I find it curi­ous that the very same enti­ties are all caught up in hand-wring­ing at the seri­ous­ness of the mur­der mad­ness grip­ping the Island.
Nobody seems to under­stand what to do or have any prac­ti­cal ideas on the way for­ward. In fact, if you looked at the Observer Editorial page you would walk away believ­ing those jok­ers were always con­cerned about the crim­i­nal behav­ior pat­terns of our peo­ple.
The trav­es­ty of this real­i­ty, is that they real­ly believe that there is some way of get­ting to the cos­mopoli­tan soci­ety they crave, with­out dirty­ing their hands.

The sense of empa­thy that is demon­strat­ed in the Observer’s Editorial page for police com­mis­sion­er Antony Anderson is astound­ing, to say the least. This led me to won­der, where was that sup­port over the years for the police? Where was that kind of under­stand­ing?
The Observer’s Editors are not only empa­thet­ic, but they were also falling over them­selves to cre­ate a nar­ra­tive that legit­imizes the very inac­tion of Anderson.
Speaking to the com­mis­sion­er’s fail­ure to chal­lenge Andrew Holness, the prime min­is­ter and Peter Phillips the oppo­si­tion leader, into col­lec­tive action on crime they had the fol­low­ing to say.

OBSERVER

He has used every oppor­tu­ni­ty he gets to artic­u­late and paint the big pic­ture on the fight against crime, includ­ing his lat­est inter­view car­ried in the Sunday edi­tion of this news­pa­per, in which he implores Jamaicans to fight this scourge togeth­er. And yet we could not help notic­ing the fact that, in what was his first major inter­view for the new year, our top crime-fight­er and guardian of the nation com­plete­ly avoid­ed any ref­er­ence to the role of our elect­ed politi­cians who should pro­vide lead­er­ship. Could it be that General Anderson him­self sees no prac­ti­cal use in call­ing on the Government and Opposition to pro­vide the lead­er­ship in mobi­liz­ing the coun­try to put par­ti­san­ship aside and unite against the crim­i­nals?

[Get the fuck out of here], are you kid­ding me? Not only has Antony Anderson failed as all oth­er com­mis­sion­ers of police have failed, (arguably not all because of their own incom­pe­tence, but because of the sys­tem set up for them to fail.
Nevertheless, no seg­ment of this media fra­ter­ni­ty showed any degree of empa­thy to pre­vi­ous com­mis­sion­ers of police who came up through the ranks. They cared even less about the hard-work­ing grunts who risked life and limb for the shit­ty beans they are paid for their trou­bles.
On the con­trary, the media was not only hos­tile, but has demon­stra­bly incit­ed vio­lence against police officers.

OBSERVER

General Anderson’s Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) has been con­sis­tent in its posi­tion on the impor­tance of part­ner­ships and pub­lic engage­ment, stress­ing that the over­all effort to remove dis­or­der and mobi­lize the groundswell of sup­port among our cit­i­zens for a safer Jamaica “requires con­tin­u­ous engage­ment with the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors, com­mu­ni­ty-based inter­ests, and our inter­na­tion­al partners”.

Blah, blah, blah what a load of crock?
Had pre­vi­ous com­mis­sion­ers not said and done the very same things for years?
Under Antony, Anderson, crime has basi­cal­ly con­tin­ued to climb year over year, with well over 1300 homi­cides for the year that just end­ed. Any oth­er com­mis­sion­er of police would have been berat­ed and clas­si­fied as a fail­ure.
The men and women under the Commissioner would be demeaned as incom­pe­tent une­d­u­cat­ed fools.
So what we are up against today is that the [bull-puckey]that this very group of peo­ple who told the nation that he rea­son crime was climb­ing was that the police force was made up of a bunch of illit­er­ate idiots.
Now that was­n’t a total lie, but what the force lacked in for­mal edu­ca­tion it cer­tain­ly made up for in ded­i­ca­tion from its officers. 

The elit­ist’s ele­ments in our coun­try clam­ored for a force filled with their cronies from the UWI and oth­er insti­tu­tions, they got them.
That is the rea­son Antony Anderson has received lat­i­tude that no one before him did.
They are now too ashamed to say that their efforts at social engi­neer­ing had failed, and failed mis­er­ably, so they pre­tend that it’s not even hap­pen­ing.
In the mean­time, the crime sit­u­a­tion con­tin­ues unabat­ed, and all Anderson and his enablers in the Editorial rooms have is hope and a whole lot of bull­shit.
Unfortunately for Jamaicans hope is not a strat­e­gy, nei­ther is bullshit.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

The rules are the rules, are the rules. When a can­di­date decides to run for pres­i­dent of the United States, he or she has to be mature enough to know that he or she will have to appeal to a wide cross-sec­tion of peo­ple, raise a lot of mon­ey, and run a near-flaw­less cam­paign, which if he or she is lucky will res­onate with peo­ple. As such, mes­sag­ing, like­abil­i­ty, elec­tabil­i­ty, becomes cru­cial to a can­di­date’s viability.

As far as the Democrats run­ning to unseat Donald Trump are con­cerned, they all knew the rules of the game when they decid­ed to enter the race.
It is for that rea­son that I shed no tears for Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, Wayne Messam, Corey Booker or any oth­er minor­i­ty can­di­date who drops out or will drop out of the race, then com­plain about the rules. You have noticed that I have not men­tioned Hawai’s, Tulsi Gabbard. I did not for the sim­ple rea­son that I do not believe she sees her­self as a minor­i­ty. Furthermore, I for one, do not see her as a legit­i­mate Democratic can­di­date for the presidency.

The Democratic par­ty which gets its votes large­ly from African Americans and coali­tions in large urban cen­ters still fol­lows the right-wing Republican par­ty in the way it selects its nom­i­nees for pres­i­dent.
I nev­er under­stood why the par­ty need­ed to cater to vot­ers in New Hampshire and Iowa, two states which hard­ly have any black or oth­er sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of minor­i­ty vot­ers?
It is for that rea­son, that by the time the New Hampshire and Iowa vot­ers have had their say in who they want to vote for, the issues impor­tant to minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ties, (the back­bone of the Democratic par­ty), are either watered down or does­n’t exist on the par­ty’s plat­form any longer.

Despite that, I do not believe that minor­i­ty can­di­dates should com­plain about not being on the debate stage because of the rules. They all agreed to the rules when they decid­ed to run. What they should be focused on is mak­ing sure that the par­ty’s pri­ma­ry vot­ing begins in states in which large minor­i­ty pop­u­la­tions reside.
This will not hap­pen in this elec­tion cycle, but the par­ty’s coali­tions should endeav­or to make sure that this prac­tice becomes a thing of the past. 

Julain Castro

A lot of issues came to the fore this cycle, many of the can­di­dates who ran on some of those issues are both white and male, many of them are already gone, they made no impact. It fol­lows there­fore that the con­tention of the minor­i­ty can­di­dates can­not in good faith be that race is the rea­son they are not on the debate stage or were forced to drop out of the race.
Joe Sestak ran on account­abil­i­ty. John Delaney ran on bi-par­ti­san­ship. John Hickenlooper ran on prag­ma­tism. For Jay Inslee, it was cli­mate change. Tim Ryan ran on being a blue-col­lar guy. Eric Swalwell ran on gun con­trol. Seth Moulton ran on his mil­i­tary ser­vice. Mike Gravel ran as an anti-war can­di­date. Michael Bennett ran on prag­ma­tism as well I sup­pose. For Steve Bullock cit­i­zens unit­ed was the issue and for Beto O’rourke, it was immi­gra­tion as well.
None of those issues res­onat­ed sin­gu­lar­ly with pri­ma­ry vot­ers enough, or gen­er­at­ed enough enthu­si­asm to keep those can­di­dates in the race. They all fold­ed their respec­tive campaigns.

That leaves us with what pun­dits and prog­nos­ti­ca­tors say is the sin­gle issue dri­ving Democratic vot­ers, (the need to find a can­di­date who they feel can defeat Donald Trump).
This is no ordi­nary cycle, despite his soar­ing rhetoric and mes­sage of hope and change, was he run­ning this cycle, Barack Obama’s pres­i­den­cy would like­ly not hap­pen.
The anger and deri­sion of the Trump pres­i­den­cy have had mil­lions of Americans almost lit­er­al­ly hold­ing their breaths in antic­i­pa­tion of the next pres­i­den­tial elec­tions when they will be able to exhale.
It is for that rea­son I believe those per­fect­ly good can­di­dates like Booker Harris, Castro and oth­ers got flushed out ear­ly. It is for that rea­son white male can­di­dates with less­er name recog­ni­tion did not make the cut either.

The can­di­dates still in the run­nings, Joe Biden, the for­mer vice-pres­i­dent, well known US Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the young and excit­ing Pete Buttigieg, US Senator Amy Klobuchar from the mid­west and the bil­lion­aires who can finance their own cam­paigns even if they are unable to make the stage, can hard­ly be said to be there because of their skin col­or, but are there because of name recog­ni­tion and their fat bank accounts. Amy Klobuchar a daugh­ter of the mid­west may still be a viable can­di­date even if she is not suc­cess­ful in the Iowa cau­cus­es less than a month away.
Democrats sent pack­ing this cycle, black, white, lati­no, or female, failed the ear­ly elec­tabil­i­ty test that’s it. Nothing about it is racial. 

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

Jamaicans are quite capa­ble of rid­ing and whistling at the same time, or as the Americans say, “walk and chew gum at the same time”.
We are not by any stretch a mono­lith. we are a diverse com­mu­ni­ty of peo­ple of African, Chinese, Caucasian, Indian, Arab, Lebanese, Jewish and a slew of oth­er peo­ple. Yet we are a peo­ple vehe­ment­ly Jamaican to our core, all of us.
It is for that rea­son that we can take pride in the strides our coun­try have made since 1962 when our coun­try was grant­ed Independence and giv­en auton­o­my over our own lives.
Our progress in areas of edu­ca­tion, cul­ture, sports, med­i­cine, research, agri­cul­ture, tourism, is remark­able.
As a small nation, we have every right to hold our head high. Even among our least edu­cat­ed peo­ple, street smarts are a valu­able and val­ued cur­ren­cy that makes every Jamaican, not just wit­ty, but decep­tive­ly intrigu­ing.
We are sec­ond to no one in mak­ing some­thing from very little.

Understanding those attrib­ut­es makes it a head-scratch­er that we are not con­nect­ing the dots on the trau­ma vio­lent crime is wreak­ing on the coun­try.
There are many Jamaicans, far too many if you ask me, who would rather that we focus sole­ly on the pos­i­tives. We should­n’t wash our dirty laun­dry in pub­lic they say.
Of course, those peo­ple for­got one lit­tle secret, there is some­thing called the inter­net, there are no secrets any­more.
Others say we should sim­ply focus on the good things. As if the bad things will just get frus­trat­ed and dis­ap­pear on their own.
Bad things hap­pen on their own, peo­ple have to work their buns off to make good things hap­pen, both indi­vid­u­al­ly and col­lec­tive­ly.
We must cham­pi­on the good and seek to improve on them but we must focus like a laser on the bad, oth­er­wise bad becomes worse and the worse will inex­orably make us the worst.

We have to find ways to agree that the things that are good are com­mend­able and that the things which are not so good are .……well they are not good, and we must find ways to fix them col­lec­tive­ly.
The year 2019 end­ed with over 1300 mur­ders, which rep­re­sent­ed an increase over the year 2018 which had reg­is­tered a decrease com­pared to the year 2017.
Essentially, even when there is a slight decrease in vio­lent deaths and assaults, because of an absence of work­able and sus­tain­able strate­gies crime lev­els become sole­ly a func­tion of the whims and fan­cy of the vio­lence producers.

The World Bank laid out how crime affects nations as fol­lows.

A high rate of vio­lent crime can have many adverse reper­cus­sions:
1 It has a neg­a­tive impact on the invest­ment cli­mate and can deter or delay both domes­tic and for­eign invest­ment, and hence growth.
2 It leads to a high­er cost of doing busi­ness, because of the need to employ dif­fer­ent forms of secu­ri­ty, and diverts invest­ment away from busi­ness expan­sion and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty improve­ment, and may lead to a less than opti­mal oper­at­ing strategy.

2. 2 It leads to busi­ness loss­es, aris­ing from loot­ing, arson, theft, extor­tion, and fraud.
3. 3 It leads to loss of out­put because of reduced hours of oper­a­tion (includ­ing avoid­ing night shifts) or loss of work­days aris­ing from out­breaks of vio­lence, and avoid­ance of some types of eco­nom­ic activity.
4. 4 It also reduces out­put because of the tem­po­rary (from injury) or per­ma­nent (from mur­der) exit of indi­vid­u­als from the labor force. In the lat­ter case, the loss is not just the cur­rent out­put, but the out­put in the remain­ing years of the individual’s work­ing life.
5. 5 It can also cause a per­ma­nent shut-down of firms or relo­ca­tion to less crime-prone coun­tries.
   It erodes the devel­op­ment of human cap­i­tal as well as social cap­i­tal and thus con­strains the poten­tial for growth. The crime sit­u­a­tion in Jamaica seems to be an impor­tant rea­son for migra­tion, since the fear of crime sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduces the qual­i­ty of life. Crime and vio­lence have also been blamed for slow­ing down the rate of return of migrants back to Jamaica. Also, crime forces oth­er­wise pro­duc­tive indi­vid­u­als to occa­sion­al­ly exit the labor force because of vio­lent injury to them­selves or close asso­ciates, or because of social unrest in the com­mu­ni­ty. Violence in some com­mu­ni­ties also caus­es schools to close peri­od­i­cal­ly. Moreover, home and com­mu­ni­ty insta­bil­i­ty is not con­ducive to learn­ing and edu­ca­tion­al objectives.

It diverts pub­lic resources exces­sive­ly away from pro­duc­tive uses that have a poten­tial­ly much high­er impact on social devel­op­ment and growth, to areas such as police, jus­tice, the med­ical sys­tem (for treat­ment of vio­lence-relat­ed injuries and trau­ma). For exam­ple, between ¹⁹⁸⁸⁄₈₉ and ²⁰⁰¹⁄₀₂, Jamaica’s bud­getary expen­di­ture for health, in nom­i­nal terms, grew 23 per­cent annu­al­ly, where­as the bud­get for nation­al secu­ri­ty and jus­tice grew by 62 per­cent. Since 1999, the bud­get for Justice and Correctional Services plus the Police has exceed­ed the bud­get allo­ca­tion for health (PIOJ, var­i­ous issues). For pri­vate cit­i­zens, it also diverts resources away from poten­tial­ly use­ful expen­di­tures like edu­ca­tion, to spend­ing on treat­ing injury and on pri­vate security.

Unless we devel­op tes­tic­u­lar for­ti­tude and stop pre­tend­ing that we can deal with this issue by the book, this prob­lem is sim­ply going to get worse.
This is not a prob­lem for America to solve, America can­not solve its own prob­lems.
It is not up to the British or Canadians to fix our crime prob­lem. We have this unique Jamaican propen­si­ty of ignor­ing dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals.
In fact, we not only ignore their crimes, but we also idol­ize and lion­ize the crim­i­nals until they become too large and pow­er­ful to be con­trolled local­ly.
Then we look for the Americans to come to bail us out, as if Jamaica is the fifty-first state of the United States.
In the mean­time, the harm they do to the coun­try is incal­cu­la­ble, not just in blood and trea­sure but to our pop­u­lar cul­ture.
An inter­state high­way with­out guardrails is real­ly not a prop­er­ly con­struct­ed high­way. A coun­try that refus­es to guard its estab­lished demo­c­ra­t­ic prin­ci­ples is a coun­try des­tined for failure.

Former Contractor General and now direc­tor of the Turks and Caicos Islands Integrity Commission Greg Christie, speak­ing at the Annual Archbishop Samuel Carter Lecture held Wednesday evening at Campion College, high­light­ed that Jamaica is now the num­ber two mur­der cap­i­tal of the world.
Let that sink in because some­one is going to argue that things are not so bad, even though the cumu­la­tive cost is out­lined above.
“Speaking of Jamaica, Christie said, “It’s now num­ber six in orga­nized crime out of 141 coun­tries, that’s not some­thing to be hap­py about”. “We can’t put that under the cov­ers”. It tells us some­thing about our soci­ety – a very mur­der­ous soci­ety.”
“There are two laws in our soci­ety. “One for the well-to-do – the rich, the con­nect­ed – and there is anoth­er law. The first one is sel­dom applied while the oth­er one is applied to every­body,” Christie said.

We are run­ning a fool’s errand when we pre­tend that our coun­try is on the path to some kind of eco­nom­ic mir­a­cle, despite this unchecked law­less­ness.
Yet one writer char­ac­ter­ized Greg Christie this way. “Christie’s, acid tongue and volu­mi­nous reports chafed the nerves of pub­lic offi­cials dur­ing his tenure in Jamaica”.
Speaking out is char­ac­ter­ized as acid-tongued.
The longer the author­i­ties wait to clamp down on this mon­ster the more entrenched it becomes, the more entrenched it becomes is the hard­er it is to eradicate.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

In 1914 the world was plunged into a glob­al con­flict, we have come to refer to that con­flict as world war one (ww1). That con­flict began after the assas­si­na­tion of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
According to History​.com, ten­sions had been brew­ing through­out Europe — espe­cial­ly in the trou­bled Balkan region of south­east Europe — for years before World War I actu­al­ly broke out. A num­ber of alliances involv­ing European pow­ers, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and oth­er par­ties had exist­ed for years, but polit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty in the Balkans (par­tic­u­lar­ly Bosnia, Serbia, and Herzegovina) threat­ened to destroy these agreements.

The spark that ignit­ed World War I was struck in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand—heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire — was shot to death along with his wife, Sophie, by the Serbian nation­al­ist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914. Princip and oth­er nation­al­ists were strug­gling to end Austro-Hungarian rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Thanks to new mil­i­tary tech­nolo­gies and the hor­rors of trench war­fare, World War I saw unprece­dent­ed lev­els of car­nage and destruc­tion. By the time the war was over and the Allied Powers claimed vic­to­ry, more than 16 mil­lion peo­ple — sol­diers and civil­ians alike — were dead.

World war one last­ed from 1914 until 1918, as stat­ed in History’s report­ing, by the time the con­flict end­ed over 16 mil­lion human beings were dead.
By 1939 the sec­ond world war had bro­ken out in Europe, a mere twen­ty-one years (21) lat­er. One would have thought that the death and destruc­tion of world war one would have served as a wake-up call to the European con­ti­nent, that they must set­tle their dif­fer­ences through dia­logue and con­ver­sa­tions, not so.

History​.com char­ac­ter­ized the rea­son for the sec­ond world war thus; The insta­bil­i­ty cre­at­ed in Europe by the First World War (1914−18) set the stage for anoth­er inter­na­tion­al con­flict – World War II – which broke out two decades lat­er and would prove even more dev­as­tat­ing. Rising to pow­er in an eco­nom­i­cal­ly and polit­i­cal­ly unsta­ble Germany, Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi Party) rearmed the nation and signed strate­gic treaties with Italy and Japan to fur­ther his ambi­tions of world domination. 

The truth of the mat­ter is that the rea­son for the break­out of world war two was far more com­pli­cat­ed than the fore­gone para­graph syn­op­sized.
Hitler felt that the Treaty of Versailles that brought World War I to an end, blamed Germany for the start of (WW1) and placed oner­ous con­di­tion­al­i­ties on the German peo­ple. Adolph Hitler promised that he would bring Germany out from under what he saw as an unfair treaty.
With the full back­ing of the German peo­ple behind him on the treaty issue, Hitler was able to devel­op his racial­ist mil­i­taris­tic goals for Germany.
The sec­ond world war end­ed in 1945, thank­ful­ly the Western pow­ers had defeat­ed the Nazi Axis of Germany, Italy„ and Japan.
Critical to the war effort in Eastern Europe was the effort of the Soviet Union against Hitler’s war machine.

In 1945, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of 50 coun­tries met in San Francisco at the United Nations Conference on International Organization to draw up the United Nations Charter. Those del­e­gates delib­er­at­ed on the basis of pro­pos­als worked out by the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States at Dumbarton Oaks, in the United States in August-October 1944.
The Charter was signed on 26 June 1945 by the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the 50 coun­tries. Poland, which was not rep­re­sent­ed at the Conference, signed it lat­er and became one of the orig­i­nal 51 Member States.
The United Nations offi­cial­ly came into exis­tence on 24 October 1945, when the Charter had been rat­i­fied by China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and by a major­i­ty of oth­er sig­na­to­ries. United Nations Day is cel­e­brat­ed on 24 October each year.

Since the incep­tion of the United Nations, in 1945 there have been many con­flicts, to include the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq wars and many oth­er con­flicts in which America’s actions are less overt, to include the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the Bosnian war and America’s excur­sions in places like Panama and Grenada.
Despite those con­flicts, the world has dodged major esca­la­tions com­pa­ra­ble to the two pre­vi­ous glob­al con­flicts of 1914 and 1939.
A full 75-years has passed since the last world war. The avoid­ance of a world­wide con­flict may have some­thing to do with the two com­pet­ing forces of the United States and the Former Soviet Union bal­anc­ing each oth­er out with their expan­sive nuclear arse­nals.
Since the end of the sec­ond world war, sev­er­al nations have also acquired for­mi­da­ble nuclear arse­nals which may have some deter­rent effect.

Those nations now include “Israel”, Great Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and of course the Russian Federation and the United States.
When the his­to­ry books are writ­ten on world his­to­ry let it be fac­tu­al­ly depict­ed, not by alter­na­tive facts, but by hard truths.
Let it be doc­u­ment­ed that President Barack Obama was able to bring the Islamic Republic to the table along with oth­er nations and ham­mer out an agree­ment.
By all accounts, Iran stuck to the terms of the agree­ment. The ene­mies of peace argue that it was not a [Treaty] and as such tear­ing up the deal was no big deal.

It is not the first time that we have been brought lied to, remem­ber the nar­ra­tive that Iraq had weapons of mass destruc­tion, and that Iraq was about to unleash them in a mush­room cloud over American cities?
That was the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for a total­ly unpro­voked war against a sov­er­eign Iraqui nation.
Hundreds of thou­sands of Iraquis were killed and for what? Not that there could be any legal or moral jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the ille­git­i­mate inva­sion of a sov­er­eign nation, the top­pling of its gov­ern­ment and the slaugh­ter of its people. 

WHAT WAS ACCOMPLISHED UNDER PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

The JPOA or Joint Plan of Action was a frame­work agree­ment that encour­aged the P5+1 to con­tin­ue to nego­ti­ate a com­pre­hen­sive deal on Iran’s nuclear pro­gram in exchange for nar­row and tem­po­rary sanc­tions relief. That frame­work deal helps pave the way to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, which is also com­mon­ly referred to as the “Iran Deal”.
The JPOA was entered into on November 24^th, 2013. It is a nar­row­ly-con­strued sanc­tions relief pro­gram designed to encour­age Iran to stay at the nego­ti­at­ing table. It is the only eli­gi­ble sanc­tions relief until Implementation Day.

The JPOA relaxed eco­nom­ic sanc­tions direct­ed at non‑U.S. per­sons when con­duct­ing busi­ness with Iran relat­ed to petro­chem­i­cal prod­ucts; the auto­mo­bile indus­try; Iran’s pur­chase and sale of gold and oth­er pre­cious met­als; and Iran’s export of crude oil to China, India, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and Taiwan. The United States also autho­rized U.S. per­sons to sup­ply Iran’s spare parts in sup­port of the safe oper­a­tion of Iran’s civ­il air­craft. Furthermore, the JPOA estab­lished a finan­cial chan­nel to facil­i­tate human­i­tar­i­an trade with Iran. This lim­it­ed relief was offered in exchange for Iran tem­porar­i­ly lim­it­ing its nuclear pro­gram while the par­ties negotiated.

There was no rea­son to walk away from the deal. The Iranians by all accounts were adher­ing to the rules of the JCPOA.
The prob­lem with the JCPOA is that it bore the sig­na­ture of Barack Obama the 44^th pres­i­dent of the United States.
And that was a prob­lem for the moral­ly bank­rupt nar­cis­sis­tic racist who suc­ceed­ed him.
He could not bear to leave in place a plan that no oth­er American pres­i­dent of the United States was able to secure.
So he tore up the deal claim­ing that he could get a bet­ter deal, the truth of the mat­ter is that he can­not even get Iran to the table to talk, because world lead­ers have zero respect for him.
And so now the cam­paign of lies and defama­tion has increased as the war­mon­gers build a case for war against anoth­er sov­er­eign nation.
Do not be fooled by the lies. 

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

With over 1300 homi­cides in 2019, mur­ders hap­pen­ing in Zones Of Special Operations and in spaces in which there are active States of Emergencies in place, there is no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the sta­tus quo.
Several indi­vid­u­als over­seas have offered their ser­vices to the Jamaican Government to help with solv­ing this mon­ster which is rob­bing the coun­try of its human and eco­nom­ic trea­sures and poten­tial. Unfortunately, to date, there has been silence from the admin­is­tra­tion in Jamaica House, despite the con­tin­ued ele­vat­ed lev­els of homi­cides and oth­er vio­lent felonies being com­mit­ted daily.

Not every per­son who claims to have exper­tise may offer up good or prac­ti­cal ideas on how to pro­ceed on this crit­i­cal mat­ter.
Nevertheless, even a bro­ken clock is right twice per day. On that basis alone, it is incom­pre­hen­si­ble that the admin­is­tra­tion would not jump at the oppor­tu­ni­ty to take advan­tage of the offers of help.
The Government could eas­i­ly form a blue-rib­bon pan­el to con­sid­er the sug­ges­tions. A blue-rib­bon pan­el that does not include any­one from the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the oth­er know-noth­ing, know-it-alls, whose ideas got us into this pick­le in the first place.

Failure to accept offers of help and seri­ous­ly con­sid­er the pro­pos­als put for­ward will con­firm what many peo­ple both local­ly and abroad already believe, that politi­cians are heav­i­ly invest­ed in the state of crim­i­nal­i­ty in the coun­try.
For our part, we have sug­gest­ed over the last decade that the nation needs com­pre­hen­sive reso­cial­iza­tion of our peo­ple. Since Government can­not leg­is­late moral val­ues in the home, it should begin by doing so in the schools.
For years I have called for a clos­er look at bring­ing young peo­ple not going to col­lege or trade schools under the tute­lage of some kind of pro­gram, run and super­vised by the Jamaica Defense Force. That pro­gram would not include tac­tics and or strate­gies that could be used against the coun­try if the indi­vid­ual choos­es to step out­side the laws.

Discipline and Civic duty and respon­si­bil­i­ty are crit­i­cal com­po­nents in nation-build­ing. None of these pro­pos­als have been act­ed on in a ful­some way, and as is cus­tom­ary the pro­pos­als are being regur­gi­tat­ed local­ly as if they are nov­el ideas.
In 2013, three years after the INDECOM act was passed and it came up for review, I wrote sev­er­al arti­cles beg­ging the then admin­is­tra­tion to change aspects of the law, to com­plete­ly repeal and replace it, or pay for inac­tion lat­er.
The law came up for review, as it has rea­son­ably been designed to after 3 years. At the time the Police, Military and even the Minister of National Security came out against the Act. 

Minister of National Security at the time Peter Bunting did not mince words in rela­tion to the Act. quote: This com­mis­sion is too pow­er­ful!
Nothing sub­stan­tive, if at all, was done by the par­lia­ment and the Act was allowed to remain.
The dam­age to the rule of law in the coun­try since then, will nev­er be known. Notwithstanding, it is clear that what emanat­ed from the last decade of the INDECOM Act, is that we have a police depart­ment that is com­plete­ly immo­bi­lized and unwill­ing to get involved in fight­ing crime, out of fear of being criminalized.

That is not to say that INDECOM is sole­ly to blame for the high lev­el of vio­lent crime in the coun­try. Far from it, nev­er­the­less, the last thing that the police need­ed was a [rabid dog] with a per­son­al agen­da, who is will­ing to coach and coerce wit­ness­es to lie in order to build crim­i­nal cas­es against police offi­cers sim­ply for doing their jobs.
On that score, INDECOM and Terrence Williams have become a sanc­tu­ary for the crim­i­nal gangs oper­at­ing on the Island, com­pa­ra­ble only to the polit­i­cal cov­er under which ’70s and 80’s gang­sters oper­at­ed with impunity.

Today, the sin­gle most astound­ing thing to me as a for­mer front line crime fight­er, is the igno­rance and bone-head­ed­ness of the present admin­is­tra­tion in its belief that vio­lent crime can be con­tained by a show of red seams and cam­ou­flage uni­forms.
High law enforce­ment vis­i­bil­i­ty is a deter­rent for some cat­e­gories of crimes and offens­es. Traffic offens­es sim­ple lar­ce­nies, etc
Vigilant police patrols are a deter­rent to break­ings, bur­glar­ies, rob­beries, and oth­er offens­es of that nature.
Great crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tors with the appro­pri­ate work­ing knowl­edge of crim­i­nals and their modus operan­di, who are unafraid to take them down one way or anoth­er, are the only deter­rent to gang­land activity.

That is the rea­son that despite the smoke-screens called ZOSO and the SOE’s there has been an increase in vio­lent crimes, and dan­ger­ous killers are not being held account­able nei­ther in the courts on any sig­nif­i­cant lev­el, or are they being neu­tral­ized by the police.
The Island’s polit­i­cal lead­er­ship, and the Prime Minister, in par­tic­u­lar, con­tin­ue to play pol­i­tics on this issue. In the mean­time, in the last decade alone, over 16,000 Jamaicans have lost their lives vio­lent­ly.
The laws are not near­ly tough enough. The police are not near­ly as effec­tive as they should be, because the real offi­cers who want to make a dif­fer­ence have no guar­an­teed path in this JCF, and are fear­ful of being criminalized.

In the mean­time, the aver­age joe on the street have no respect for the laws.
They are unper­turbed by the pres­ence of the police and are quite will­ing to drape offi­cers in their uni­forms and beat the hell out of them. (Ashes cold dawg sleep in de).
This is a new year, it requires new ideas, humil­i­ty, and intro­spec­tion. Clearly, the strate­gies employed in deal­ing with vio­lent crimes over the last three years are [not]working.
And so I beseech the Prime Minister to change course. “You have the pow­er and the office to lead on this sem­i­nal issue”.
“Mister Prime Minister, it is only great lead­ers who have the humil­i­ty to say I made a mis­take”. Violent crim­i­nals require a firm hand. A very firm hand.
Do not be delud­ed any longer into think­ing that flood­ing neigh­bor­hoods with the uni­formed bod­ies of poor­ly trained police offi­cers and sol­diers are the solu­tion to these killings.
They are not.
Too many inno­cent peo­ple have died because your admin­is­tra­tion and oth­ers before it refused to act deci­sive­ly against crim­i­nals. The ball is in your court, you do not want any more blood on your hands.
You are the leader of the coun­try.
Act now.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

Mike Beckles

There is much that can be said about crime in the Caribbean region and the way indi­vid­ual Island nations deal with it on their own.
One thing is cer­tain, is that no Caribbean coun­try has dealt as poor­ly with the issue of crime as Jamaica has.
Across the region, we have seen peo­ple take decid­ed stances, in some cas­es even more stri­dent than their respec­tive gov­ern­ments, has been against who they believe are vio­lence pro­duc­ers who will inex­orably degrade the qual­i­ty of their lives. This has sparked protests from our native Jamaica, and her nation­als, a clear sign that Jamaicans are hav­ing doors slammed shut in their faces even across the CARICOM region. 

A for­mer col­league retired Deputy Commissioner of Police Novelette Grant spoke elo­quent­ly on this issue in a social media post days ago, detail­ing in no uncer­tain terms how our polit­i­cal lead­ers have let Jamaica down as a mat­ter of polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy, and our coun­try­men and women pur­sue a path of destruc­tion while expect­ing good out­comes.
DCP grant wrote in ref­er­ence to a local pub­li­ca­tion’s head­line “mur­ders galore”, It is a dis­mal indict­ment on a fail­ing soci­ety that glo­ri­fies the wrong val­ues and idol­izes per­sons who pro­mote may­hem. Even more appalling is the igno­rance that pre­vents us from cause and effects out­comes, we do the same things day in day out and are sur­prised when we get a wors­en­ing of the same outcomes.

Needless to say, these pages have been ded­i­cat­ed since 2010 to argu­ing, and urg­ing my fel­low Jamaicans to change course from the path they are on.
The cen­tral theme as val­i­dat­ed by Grant is that we are yet to make the link between respect for the rule of law and safe­ty and secu­ri­ty.
The aver­age Jamaican would like to live to a ripe old age, even those who engage in tak­ing the lives of oth­ers, they too cry like lit­tle bitch­es when con­front­ed with cer­tain death.
Yet arguably, the aver­age Jamaican engages in prac­tices that lit­er­al­ly guar­an­tee that they will be vic­tim­ized by vio­lent crime.
Hiding crim­i­nals. Refusing to give infor­ma­tion to law enforce­ment in con­fi­dence. Actively shield­ing crim­i­nals. Benefitting and prof­it­ing from crim­i­nal con­duct. Demonizing and slan­der­ing law-enforce­ment for doing their jobs. Actively engag­ing in demon­stra­tions against police and pro­vid­ing false state­ments to adver­sar­i­al agen­cies opposed to the rule of law, are only a few of those prac­tices which are anti­thet­i­cal to a sta­ble demo­c­ra­t­ic nation.

Some of the fac­tors which plague Jamaica also plague oth­er Caribbean nations. Political inter­fer­ence. Lobbying from enti­ties like defense lawyers, so-called human rights groups and oth­er NGOs has pro­vid­ed suc­cor and sup­port to crim­i­nal gangs in ways they nev­er bar­gained for.
The year 2019 just con­clud­ed and even though we do not have the offi­cial crime sta­tis­tics from the police, it is safe to say that over 1300 Jamaicans have been mur­dered despite the imple­men­ta­tion of mul­ti­ple States Emergencies (SOE’s) & Zones Of Special Operations (ZOSO’s) across var­i­ous hotspots across the Island.
Clearly, the mea­sures in place are not work­ing. Clearly, a new approach is need­ed. The solu­tion to Jamaica’s crime epi­dem­ic is not to be found in any new crime plan, ZOSO, SOE or any oth­er stop-gap mea­sure.
In fact, it will not be found in the train­ing of more of the same cour­tesy corps cops who are being turned out onto the streets in num­bers but are unable to effect a sim­ple arrest with dis­patch and pro­fi­cien­cy.
A thou­sand zeroes are still worth noth­ing unless a sol­id pos­i­tive num­ber pre­cedes them, More poor­ly trained, poor­ly super­vised, poor­ly renu­mer­at­ed, poor­ly sup­port­ed police makes no dif­fer­ence.
During my ser­vice, I saw those dead­wood cops in name only. As one who engages in social com­men­tary years lat­er, I see the same dead­wood, many of whom served over three decades yet made not a damn dif­fer­ence beyond the salaries they col­lect­ed.
Most of them are the harsh­est crit­ics of those who prof­fer work­able ideas out­side their scope of understanding.

Across the Caribbean Sea in the twin Island Republic of Trinidad & Tobago mur­ders and acts of ter­ror­ism has long being a part of their infra­struc­ture as it has been ours.
Today Trinidad and Tobago have a Police Commissioner who exem­pli­fies what polic­ing and lead­er­ship of police ser­vices ought to look like.
Commissioner Gary Griffiths is a no-non­sense police com­mis­sion­er who is a cop’s cop.
He is unafraid of the spe­cial inter­est, crim­i­nal lawyers, ( term self-explana­to­ry). Those who make a name from demo­niz­ing cops, and oth­ers tasked with inves­ti­gat­ing cops

This year, this medi­um cel­e­brates a decade of com­mit­ment to the rule of law, through its unwa­ver­ing sup­port for the nation’s law enforce­ment agency.
As it’s founder, and a past mem­ber of the JCF, I have com­plet­ed count­less hours of research and writ­ings ded­i­cat­ed to the bet­ter­ment of our coun­try, through sup­port for the rule of law.
Throughout that time I have argued that the hier­ar­chy of the JCF has been the most cor­rupt incom­pe­tent bunch of peo­ple any­where in law enforce­ment.
Some of the adjec­tives I have used to describe them have been unsa­vory but well earned.
In recent times the new head of the Police Federation Sergeant Petra Rowe has shed the cloak of fear and tore into that same group label­ing them lazy, and opposed to the present com­mis­sion­er’s agen­da.
It is good to see new police lead­er­ship grow­ing balls and speak­ing out against this cor­rupt lot of incompetents.

This how­ev­er in no way absolves the imbe­cil­ic lead­er­ship of the two polit­i­cal par­ties. Neither has shown a ded­i­ca­tion to the secu­ri­ty and sol­ven­cy of Jamaica. Instead what they have engaged in are cheap polit­i­cal pos­tur­ing which has been dan­ger­ous­ly detri­men­tal to our coun­try, all because of the need to gain and main­tain polit­i­cal con­trol.
At least when Commissioner Griffiths speaks in Trinidad and Tobago those polit­i­cal imbe­ciles have the shame to remain silent.
In Jamaica, a police com­mis­sion­er is mere­ly a lap­dog for the crim­i­nal sup­port­ing morons who beat the desks in the par­lia­ment build­ing. As such from 103 Old Hope Road down, the JCF is noth­ing but a neutered mon­grel with no bark, and cer­tain­ly no bite.
If only we had police lead­ers in our coun­try will­ing to stand up for Jamaica, but of course, our soci­etal mon­grels would not even have the shame to sim­ply shut their stu­pid mouths.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

Have you ever won­dered why Democrats are always shak­ing in their boots about what Republicans think, how they will react to what they want to do?
Me too, and that is the rea­son the coun­try lags behind and could arguably be seen as regress­ing in some areas when com­pared to parts of Europe and Asia.
It is also the rea­son that the United States con­tin­ues to appear to be a cen­ter-right nation, despite the fact that there are more peo­ple who iden­ti­fy as Democrats than Republicans.

It is for that rea­son also that Republicans get what they want pol­i­cy-wise. They take out­landish posi­tions out­side what they would nor­mal­ly expect to get away with, but they get Democrats to cave in and give them a lighter ver­sion of the out­ra­geous posi­tion they put for­ward, result­ing in them get­ting what they want­ed in the first place.
Did Democrats want this log-jam which exist in immi­gra­tion? How about a wall on the south­ern bor­der, did Democrats want that? Did Democrats want a strained rela­tion­ship with Nato allies? How about kids kid­napped from their par­ents and locked in cages like ani­mals, did Democrats want that?

Republicans could­n’t care less about what Democrats think? The Republican par­ty long ceased to be a par­ty of rea­son, it purged from its ranks mod­er­ates who pre­vi­ous­ly joined Democrats on issues, and carved out a con­sen­sus on pol­i­cy posi­tions.
It is the Republican Party that decid­ed that bi-par­ti­san­ship was a dirty term. It was the likes of Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Louie Gohmert, and the new age Racist Xenophobes like Meadows of North Carolina, and the drunk Matt Gaetz from Florida who con­tin­ue to carve up the coun­try into enclaves of hate.
Naming them nowa­days is real­ly an aca­d­e­m­ic process, there is no day­light between the mem­bers of the Republican par­ty. It is a par­ty of igno­rant hate­ful Racists, period.

Republicans In Name Only, (RINO), is the pejo­ra­tive for any Republican who showed an incli­na­tion to rea­son or to work with Democrats.
Today, bi-par­ti­san­ship is a thing of the past, for Republicans, it’s either their way or no way.
Many ran for the exits rather than stay and fight for the par­ty. John Boehner, David Jolly, Paul Ryan, Jeff Flake, on and on, even the old Long Island hack Peter King has now decid­ed not to seek reelec­tion.
There is noth­ing brave or noble about these men who have decid­ed to walk away from the par­ty with­out defend­ing the hon­or of the par­ty, and by exten­sion the Constitution of the United States of America.
They are abdi­ca­tors of their oaths, cow­ards, who ran away, rather than stand up to Tyranny, Racism, Xenophobia„ and Sexism. 

This brings us to the rea­son the Republican par­ty has come to this. It cer­tain­ly has­n’t been the first time that the par­ty has been hijacked in mod­ern his­to­ry.
(a) It is a well-doc­u­ment­ed fact that after the sign­ing of the civ­il and vot­ing rights acts white men, who were tra­di­tion­al Democrats fled en-mass to the Republican par­ty. For them, the Democratic par­ty had betrayed them by giv­ing African-Americans dig­ni­ty and auton­o­my over their own lives. Their women also bailed on the Democratic par­ty as well. White women place all else sec­ond to their priv­i­leged white­ness. The right to own prop­er­ty, the right to have con­trol over their repro­duc­tive rights, are all sec­ondary, white­ness is the cen­tral pow­er priv­i­lege they value. 

So when Democrats ask why do white women vote against their own self-inter­est? The answer becomes, they are vot­ing their inter­est, it just isn’t what you think it should be.
(b) After Illinois, US Senator Barack Obama was ele­vat­ed to the Presidency of the United States, the T‑Party, (a sup­posed grass­roots move­ment) lit­er­al­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ized the Republican par­ty, it was­n’t for the bet­ter.
The T‑party move­ment was no grass­roots move­ment, but a dis­rup­tive move­ment fund­ed from the shad­ows by bil­lion­aire right-wing Libertarian broth­ers, Charles and David Koch, who also fund­ed oth­er shad­owy right-wing groups like Freedom Works, and more impor­tant­ly the pow­er­ful Americans for pros­per­i­ty.
The Koch broth­ers are major indus­tri­al­ists who vis­cer­al­ly oppose lib­er­al Obama’s poli­cies which would pro­tect the envi­ron­ment.
David Koch was recent­ly deceased.

Donald Trump forced impeach­ment onto the Democratic house and the American nation. He was not impeached because of things Democrats did. He was impeached because of the ille­gal and immoral acts he com­mit­ted.
Unfortunately, the media con­tin­ue to engage in hand-wring­ing about how this is going to play with Republicans. Who the hell cares about what Republicans think when the cor­rect thing to do is to stand up to a law­less chief exec­u­tive, and a par­ty which has marched lock­step with him?
Why is the con­ver­sa­tion viewed through the eyes of old white Republican peo­ple who are vast­ly out of step with the rest of the world on most issues of importance?

Oh, one more thing to my African-American peo­ple, you con­tin­ue to live in the dark­ness of apa­thy and dis­in­ter­est. You con­tin­ue to make the argu­ment that your vote does not count. That noth­ing changes. Why then do you believe old­er white peo­ple vote with such fer­vor?
Why did you think they stood in lines which snaked around city blocks in 2016, so they could vote for Donald Trump?
Why do you think that they have tried so very hard to stop you from vot­ing for as long as your ances­tors have sought the fran­chise?
Why do you think Republicans have tried to sup­press your vote cycle after cycle, and have com­mit­ted them­selves to do the same on steroids come 2020?

The idea that peo­ple can live in a coun­try and not care to engage in the sin­gle most impor­tant process which affects their lives is insane, to say the least.
Those who gov­ern, make deci­sions that affect every­thing in our lives, whether the police con­tin­ue to mur­der our chil­dren in cold blood, what we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, how much tax­es we pay. They deter­mine the qual­i­ty of our chil­dren’s schools, deter­mines war & peace, and every­thing in between.
That any­one would leave such seri­ous deci­sions for oth­ers to make is fright­en­ing.
Yes, it is quite okay to get mad at all the ills which plague us, but apa­thy towards the process is the least good option African-Americans have at their dis­pos­al.
In fact, con­tin­ued vig­i­lance and fideli­ty to the process is the best option we have, that is the rea­son so many have giv­en so much for so long, it is for that rea­son that so many paid the ulti­mate price.
Throwing away what they died for is not an option.

Emily Jacobs

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed 2020 Democratic pres­i­den­tial hope­ful Tulsi Gabbard for being the only House Democrat to vote “present” on impeach­ment arti­cles against President Trump and refus­ing to take a stand. “Today was very con­se­quen­tial, and to not take a stand one way or anoth­er, on a day of such great con­se­quence to this coun­try, I think is quite dif­fi­cult,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters after the his­toric vote Wednesday, adding, “We are sent here to lead.”

Rep. Gabbard (D‑Hawaii) did not speak on the House floor, while most oth­er mem­bers gave 30-sec­ond to one-minute speech­es to explain or jus­ti­fy their stances. During the sec­ond vote on charges of obstruc­tion of Congress, Gabbard was seen stand­ing against the back wall of the House cham­ber on the side where Republicans sit, accord­ing to Fox News. After the pres­i­den­tial con­tender stunned House Democrats and Republicans alike by refus­ing to opt for or against the two arti­cles, Gabbard released a state­ment explain­ing her deci­sion. “After doing my due dili­gence in review­ing the 658-page impeach­ment report, I came to the con­clu­sion that I could not in good con­science vote either yes or no,” the Hawaii Democrat said. 00:03 /​00:15

“I could not in good con­science vote against impeach­ment because I believe President Trump is guilty of wrong­do­ing. “I also could not in good con­science vote for impeach­ment because removal of a sit­ting President must not be the cul­mi­na­tion of a par­ti­san process, fueled by trib­al ani­mosi­ties that have so grave­ly divid­ed our coun­try,” Gabbard added.

Gabbard’s “present” votes were essen­tial­ly her way of abstain­ing from tak­ing a posi­tion on the issue, while still vot­ing on the mea­sures. She went on to say in her state­ment that she would intro­duce a res­o­lu­tion on the House floor cen­sur­ing Trump. Ocasio-Cortez didn’t buy her expla­na­tion. “Whenever we have a vote, we should vote ‘yes’ and we should vote ‘no,’” the New York Democrat said. “Voting ‘present’ is a very tough posi­tion to be in. To not take a stand in a moment that is so con­se­quen­tial, I think it’s quite dif­fi­cult.” Gabbard wasn’t the only House Democrat to take a posi­tion sep­a­rate from the par­ty line. Reps. Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey both vot­ed “no” on the arti­cles, while Jared Golden of Maine vot­ed “yes” on the abuse of pow­er arti­cle but “no” on the obstruc­tion of Congress arti­cle.
This arti­cle first appeared in the New York Post.

As the Yuletide sea­son approach­es the need to be safe becomes more para­mount.
In times like this in which peo­ple are spend­ing more cash and maybe receiv­ing a few extra dol­lars from over­seas oppor­tunis­tic thieves, rob­bers and mur­der­ers will be even more brazen.
Nowhere is the need to be vig­i­lant more urgent than in Jamaica, though crim­i­nals every­where look to these high activ­i­ty events to take advan­tage of law-abid­ing cit­i­zens.
As vio­lent crimes con­tin­ue to increase, regard­less of what politi­cians in pow­er say to the con­trary, it behooves every­one to be extra vig­i­lant.
As some­one who writes from a for­mer law enforce­ment back­ground, I try to be as objec­tive as I pos­si­bly can. Needless to say, peo­ple on both sides of the polit­i­cal divide will find ele­ments of my analy­sis objec­tion­able of course.
As long as the objec­tions and sub­se­quent ad hominem reac­tions do not suc­cess­ful­ly chal­lenge the facts of what I write, I’m okay with the attacks.

The present admin­is­tra­tion con­tin­ues to use the *sup­pressed *crime sta­tis­tics from the States of Public Emergencies and Zones of Special Operations,(where those num­bers con­tin­ue to be sup­pressed) to (a) make the argu­ments for their con­tin­u­a­tion and (b) point to the sup­pressed sta­tis­tics as proof of the mea­sures’ suc­cess.
Without ques­tion­ing the motives of the admin­is­tra­tion, it is safe to say that the mea­sures are not work­ing as a suc­cess­ful or sus­tain­able crime strat­e­gy, for two pri­ma­ry reasons.

(1) The com­bined strength of the JCF & the JDF is not near­ly enough to begin to make the strate­gies sus­tain­able. There are sim­ply not enough bod­ies to staff these mea­sures.
Some may have seen the images of a group of sol­diers all sleep­ing in the Zone, with their weapons there for the tak­ing, not to men­tion the poten­tial of being killed while they sleep.
If we are hon­est with our­selves and set aside our polit­i­cal bias­es for a sec­ond we must con­clude that this is not sustainable.

(2) The shock and awe of the impo­si­tion of a ZOSO or SOE, nat­u­ral­ly result in the reduc­tion of vio­lent crimes. After they have been in place for a few weeks the crim­i­nals quick­ly adapt and it is busi­ness as usu­al.
The admin­is­tra­tion uses the sup­pressed stats to make its case as I have said before, but across the board, vio­lent crime num­bers con­tin­ue to climb as the crime-pro­duc­ers migrate to oth­er localities.

On Friday PNP Senator Lambert Brown berat­ed the lead­er­ship of the secu­ri­ty forces as, quote: ” fail­ures in his book”. Brown made the com­ments before oppo­si­tion sen­a­tors vot­ed to extend states of emer­gency (SOE) in five parish­es and a St Andrew police divi­sion for anoth­er 30 days.
There is more than enough rea­son to sup­port [Brown’s asser­tions], just not com­ing from either Brown or his par­ty.
The PNP had more than enough time to set the coun­try on a coher­ent path of law and order in which the rule of law pro­tect­ed the Jamaican peo­ple.
Under Michael Manley, Percival Patterson and Portia Simpson Miller’s failed lead­er­ship the coun­try has become a ver­i­ta­ble killing field.
Instead of doing its duty to our coun­try, the PNP chose cheap pop­ulism as a means to cur­ry favor with Jamaica’s most intel­lec­tu­al­ly and finan­cial­ly vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple.
Outside of the repet­i­tive fail­ure com­ments, Lambert Brown offered no ideas and how he believed the lead­er­ship of the secu­ri­ty failed the coun­try, nei­ther did he offer up any ideas on what may be done differently.

As I said in an arti­cle yes­ter­day, the crim­i­nals in Jamaica have won.
Period!
“Evil per­sists where good men remain silent”. I am not sure about the [good men] part in this case, but the gen­er­al idea holds true. The absence of will and deter­mi­na­tion to erad­i­cate from its midst mur­der­ers, rapists and oth­er vio­lent offend­ers have set Jamaica on a col­li­sion course with a dark destiny.

The process­es in the day to day oper­a­tions of many dis­ci­plines are a bit much for many peo­ple. For that rea­son, only a small per­cent­age of peo­ple sign up for the mil­i­tary in the United States, for exam­ple, There the chance of actu­al­ly hav­ing to go to war is always height­ened, not many peo­ple want to kill or be killed.
Only 0.5 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion actu­al­ly vol­un­teer for mil­i­tary ser­vice.
I can­not stand the sight of dead bod­ies so I would be no good work­ing in a mor­tu­ary. Many peo­ple say they could nev­er be doc­tors or nurs­es and oth­ers could nev­er be police officers.

In fact, being a police offi­cer means that those who vol­un­teer have made a deci­sion that they are will­ing and ready to deal with the worst ele­ments in soci­ety.
Generally, those encoun­ters are not pret­ty events to wit­ness. Those encoun­ters usu­al­ly come with a pri­or warn­ing of “beware, vio­lent con­tent”.
The rea­son police encoun­ters with vio­lent crim­i­nals are not pret­ty events is rather sim­ple, peo­ple who make con­scious deci­sions to com­mit seri­ous vio­lent offens­es have decid­ed by default, that they will not con­form to soci­etal rules and norms.

It is for these rea­sons why the Legislative branch of Government must set the legal para­me­ters for the police to do its job, butt out, and allow the police to do what nei­ther doc­tors, leg­is­la­tors, nurs­es, talk­ing heads, nor arm­chair experts can do, enforce the laws.
Butt out already!
The prob­lem in our coun­try is that there are far too many peo­ple with too much time on their hands. They call in, to radio talk shows dai­ly, just so they can hear them­selves talk.
Juxtapose that with the self-styled sav­iors of human­i­ty who oper­ate in the media space, they take full advan­tage of the opin­ion­at­ed igno­rance, and encour­age the anti-police growth indus­try, and we have a per­fect storm, and the rea­son for the pop­u­lar cul­ture which exist in Jamaica today.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

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The con­ven­tion­al wis­dom which has char­ac­ter­ized the world­view of Andrew Holness and the opin­ion shapers in Jamaica, that stri­dent­ly and force­ful­ly enforc­ing the nation’s laws, is tan­ta­mount to abuse of rights, is far­ci­cal, and not anchored in real­i­ty.
That pre­sump­tion makes the ridicu­lous assump­tion that in order to have a coun­try of laws, where cit­i­zens can live in safe­ty is a bina­ry choice between hav­ing secu­ri­ty and los­ing all their rights, or hav­ing all their rights and hav­ing no secu­ri­ty.
This is the far­thest thing from the truth, as is evi­denced from Africa to Asia, from Europe to the Americas.
It is true that at times indi­vid­ual rights and con­ve­niences may be infringed in order for gov­ern­ment agents to restore secu­ri­ty and pub­lic order, but it is not the same as say­ing that police can­not do their jobs with­out abus­ing the rights of law-abid­ing citizens.

And so we must rec­on­cile what is behind the intran­si­gence and stub­born­ness on the part of author­i­ties to move deci­sive­ly against the mur­der­ers who are oper­at­ing with­out regard for con­se­quence.
It is easy to con­clude that it is *pol­i­tics*, hit pub­lish and close my com­put­er, but it is far more com­plex than that.
It was­n’t always so, there was a polit­i­cal par­ty that believed in the rule of law for sure. Revisionist his­to­ri­ans, par­tic­u­lar­ly those in the *intel­lec­tu­al ghet­to*, have not only con­vinced them­selves that strong gov­ern­ment action against ter­ror­is­tic insur­gency is a bad thing, but they have also man­aged to con­vince their alums, Andrew Holness includ­ed.
That is the rea­son mon­ey and mea cul­pa was giv­en to the Rastafarian com­mu­ni­ty for Carol Gardens.
It is the rea­son mon­ey and mea cul­pa was giv­en to the repub­lic of Tivoli after it attacked the Jamaican state and mur­dered civil­ians and agents of the state.
Agents of the state in both cas­es who gave their lives for the repro­bate nation received ridicule, chas­tise­ment, and had their rep­u­ta­tions dragged through the mud by the Island’s crim­i­nals who dou­ble as polit­i­cal leaders.

Those who both­er to pick up a his­to­ry book will find evi­dence that nei­ther Bustamante, nor Hugh Lawson Shearer believed in pussy­foot­ing with crim­i­nals.
It was the PNP that decid­ed to play polit­i­cal pop­ulism, by tak­ing advan­tage of the sophis­ti­ca­tion of the semi and illit­er­ate mass­es.
Cheap promis­es of man­na from heav­en and every­thing free includ­ing the free­dom to do as they please became the polit­i­cal cur­ren­cy of the People’s National Party. Free house, free elec­tric­i­ty, free water, free mon­ey for food and fun. What’s not to like?
How does an oppo­si­tion par­ty break­through that fan­tas­tic lie to teach the love of coun­try, hard work, obe­di­ence to our laws as the bet­ter way toward a pros­per­ous nation?
It could not and still can­not. In the 70s Manley’s man­na from heav­en and every­thing free, was dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed to his oth­er teach­ings of self-suf­fi­cien­cy. But no one both­ered to pay atten­tion.
After all, why would any­one care when they were busy mov­ing into the free hous­es peo­ple vacat­ed hav­ing fled demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ism?
Why would they care about tak­ing peo­ple’s prop­er­ty from them, they were told that the own­ers were bad cap­i­tal­ists?
Until of course the whole deck of cards came crash­ing down, as it most cer­tain­ly had to.
Out of that peri­od came the sta­bi­liz­ing peri­od of the Seaga admin­is­tra­tion in 1980.
By 1988 Michael Manley was back, he said he was sor­ry, but a leop­ard nev­er changes its spots. Of course, the gullible free­ness indoc­tri­nat­ed Lumpenproletariat was again ready for anoth­er round of slop­ping at the pub­lic trough.
An unprece­dent­ed 18 ¹⁄₂ unbro­ken years of any­thing goes regres­sive PNP Government was to fol­low. That peri­od has shaped and honed the nation’s pop­u­lar cul­ture, includ­ing the, take what you want by what­ev­er means nec­es­sary. Remember *any ting a any ting*!

It was a dif­fer­ent coun­try before 1972, Jamaica was the Caribbean then. People from oth­er Islands told for­eign­ers they were Jamaicans, unable to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the dif­fer­ent accents, every Caribbean nation­al became by default a Jamaican as far as for­eign­ers were con­cerned.
Today despite some good indi­ca­tors, Jamaica strug­gles to regain its for­mer pres­tige and pride of place. Her cit­i­zens are viewed with sus­pi­cion and as pari­ahs, even with­in the CARICOM region.
Bustamante, Sangster, Shearer, and Seaga are all gone, today the lead­er­ship of both polit­i­cal par­ties all comes from the same left­ist, ran­cid cesspool.
The PNP has always cap­i­tal­ized on the igno­rance of the mass­es, that was a giv­en. Adherence to the rule of law was nev­er on their agen­da. They paint­ed the police as aggres­sors to be hat­ed. They PNP pro­lif­er­at­ed zones of polit­i­cal exclu­sions which became ver­i­ta­ble no go for law enforce­ment. The JLP did the same.
Neither polit­i­cal par­ty saw any­thing wrong with the pro­lif­er­a­tion of focus groups oper­at­ing as human rights orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing some from out­side the coun­try.
To the two polit­i­cal par­ties any group/​s which would bring more pres­sure to law enforce­ment would free them up from been seen to be inter­fer­ing, what’s not to like?
Today, no leg­is­la­tion to do with crime and vio­lence can pass the leg­is­la­ture with­out it pass­es muster with for­eign groups oper­at­ing as human rights groups and their local affil­i­ates.
No oth­er nation allows this except Jamaica.

THIS OUGHT TO PUT IN CONTEXT EVERYTHING I’M WRITING TODAY

The *intel­lec­tu­al ghet­to* and the mis­guid­ed pur­vey­ors of filth and deca­dence declare [Jamaica has come a long way in human rights]
In one local pub­li­ca­tion one such pur­vey­or, Glenroy Murray, Associate direc­tor, pro­grams & advo­ca­cy Equality for All Foundation Jamaica Ltd, wrote;
“Jamaica is no stranger to human rights abus­es. Within our dis­tant past, there is the Coral Gardens mas­sacre, and in more recent times we remem­ber the secu­ri­ty forces’ oper­a­tion in Tivoli Gardens. Gender inequal­i­ty and sex­u­al vio­lence con­tin­ue to plague our women; homo­pho­bia and trans­pho­bia rep­re­sent bar­ri­ers to inclu­sion for les­bian, gay, bisex­u­al and trans­gen­der (LGBT) Jamaicans.”
http://​www​.jamaicaob​serv​er​.com/​e​d​i​t​o​r​i​a​l​/​j​a​m​a​i​c​a​-​h​a​s​-​c​o​m​e​-​a​-​f​a​r​-​w​a​y​-​i​n​-​p​r​o​t​e​c​t​i​n​g​-​h​u​m​a​n​-​r​i​g​h​t​s​_​1​8​1​954

(1)The state respond­ed in Coral Gardens to crim­i­nals who burned a gas sta­tion.
(2) The state respond­ed and annexed Tivoli Gardens after that repub­lic trea­so­nous­ly attacked the Jamaican state.
I will not attempt to relit­i­gate either event, the cause and con­se­quences are mat­ters of the his­tor­i­cal record for pos­ter­i­ty.
The cam­paign to bring Jamaica a coun­try deemed extreme­ly homo­pho­bic, into com­pli­ance with trend­ing west­ern stan­dards has always been behind the flood of focus groups which set up shop in JAMAICA. It was nev­er about the num­ber of dead poor black Jamaicans.
The aver­age Jamaican got duped but it has always been clear that whether it was the so-called human rights groups or INDECOM which Bruce Golding was forced to cre­ate, the focus was not about mur­dered Jamaicans.
Those who write about these human rights advances, includ­ing the one in the link above, have revealed them­selves for the world to see, yet the entire Lumpenproletariat has missed it.

The great­est right a human being has is the right to life. Without life, noth­ing else mat­ters. Dead peo­ple have no care.
Jamaica is on track to have anoth­er ban­ner year in homi­cides, no one who talks about human rights ever both­er to talk about the rights of the mur­dered inno­cents.
Their focus was nev­er about stop­ping the mur­der of black Jamaicans. The focus was always about bring­ing Jamaica into conformity(regardless of the cost) with the Homosexual agen­da.
Carolyn Gomes for­ay into the Island’s polic­ing mat­ters unrav­eled when the truth came out, no one took heed.
The Island’s lead­er­ship fell for it hook line and sinker, as they have on so many oth­er issues.
In the mean­time, the mur­ders con­tin­ue unchecked. The two polit­i­cal par­ties are still bound up by the pow­er of the inter­na­tion­al human rights lob­by, with no end in sight.
The ques­tion remains as I have asked repeat­ed­ly, ” what made you think that those who fund these groups cared about dead black Jamaicans”?
Have you heard a sin­gle so-called Human Rights Agency lament the car­nage?
Me nei­ther!

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

Michael Bloomberg’s lia­bil­i­ties as a polit­i­cal can­di­date are so glar­ing­ly obvi­ous that it’s easy to dis­miss his pres­i­den­tial bid as a van­i­ty project. He is utter­ly devoid of charis­ma, has no real organ­ic base in the Democratic Party, and is a viable can­di­date only because he’s filthy rich and is will­ing to inun­date the race by open­ing up his near­ly lim­it­less mon­ey pit.

This unpre­pos­sess­ing pro­file hasn’t stopped big name pun­dits like Tom Friedman and Bret Stephens, both appear­ing in the pages of in The New York Times, from extolling Bloomberg as a poten­tial sav­ior. Writing even before Bloomberg entered the race, Stephens argued that all the exist­ing Democratic can­di­dates were weak against Trump except for Bloomberg.

“But if trounc­ing Donald Trump is essen­tial to the preser­va­tion of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy, then it won’t do to cross fin­gers and hope he stum­bles,” Stephens averred. “A Bloomberg can­di­da­cy would be a gift to Democrats, the coun­try, and the world. Sneer at it at your per­il.” Heeding Stephens’s injunc­tion, I forced myself to momen­tar­i­ly stop sneer­ing at Bloomberg’s can­di­da­cy and try to empathize with his sup­port­ers. To go by Bloomberg’s words and those of advo­cates like Stephens, the case for Bloomberg goes some­thing like this: In an age of polar­iza­tion, Bloomberg could bring the nation togeth­er by being the voice of cen­trists who are being aban­doned by both the right and left. Bloomberg’s polit­i­cal pro­file of social lib­er­al­ism com­bined with eco­nom­ic con­ser­vatism would draw vot­ers who don’t like Donald Trump but find Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders too rad­i­cal. He’s more men­tal­ly agile than Joe Biden and less cal­low than Pete Buttigieg. Bloomberg could not only defeat Trump but also pull the United States away from the polar­iz­ing pop­ulism offered by the extreme left and the extreme right, polit­i­cal ten­den­cies that are desta­bi­liz­ing democ­ra­cy.
Read more here: https://​www​.then​ation​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​b​l​o​o​m​b​e​r​g​-​a​u​t​h​o​r​i​t​a​r​i​a​n​-​c​e​n​t​r​i​s​t​-​p​r​e​s​i​d​e​n​t​i​al/

THE INTERESTS OF WHITE LIBERALS AND BLACKS ARE NOT THE SAME. MICHAEL BLOOMBERG MAY BE RIGHT FOR WHITE LIBERALS, NOT FOR BLACK AMERICANS. 

Democrats should be wary of embrac­ing can­di­dates like Democrat turned Republican, turned Independent, now Democrat again Michael Bloomberg.
Sure there is an urgent desire to see the back of Donald Trump, that is a fore­gone con­clu­sion. Nevertheless, the likes of Michael Bloomberg is cer­tain­ly not what the coun­try needs at this cru­cial time, and is most cer­tain­ly not what the Africa-American com­mu­ni­ty needs.
Black Democratic vot­ers can ill afford to allow their dis­gust for Donald Trump to cloud their visions and allow for the crit­i­cal mis­take of nom­i­nat­ing a can­di­date, the likes of Michael Bloomberg.

The very fact that Michael Bloomberg was a Democrat, then changed to Republican, then changed to Independent and has now sup­pos­ed­ly changed back to being a Democrat is proof enough that he has no core con­vic­tion, but that he is an oppor­tunis­tic leech who will latch onto any­thing from which he can derive a ben­e­fit.
After Barack Obama ascend­ed to the Presidency, all and sundry on the Republican side thought they could also be pres­i­dent, (you know, if the black guy can become pres­i­dent, then it can’t be that hard right)?
Wrong.…. in my Trumpiest voice.
Well in a way they may have been right to some degree, we end­ed up with Donald Trump.
And now the shoe is on the oth­er foot, now Democrats, Socialists, Turncoats, and every bil­lion­aire run­ning believe that Trump is a goof­ball and a clown, so it can’t be too dif­fi­cult to beat him.
Wroooong!!!!!
As we have seen this cycle, many have lined up hop­ing to be the Democrat nom­i­nee, as Republicans and oth­er nut-jobs did in 2016. As in 2016, so too will they all leav­ing one. Let us hope for the sake of san­i­ty that the Democratic nom­i­nee will not be Michael Bloomberg.
The real per­ver­sion in my esti­ma­tion is not the plu­ral­i­ty of the can­di­dates who have lined up seek­ing the Democratic nom­i­na­tion. It is the fact that bil­lion­aire Michael Bloomberg believes that he can enter the race at his choos­ing and just dump mil­lions of dol­lars into adver­tis­ing and vot­ers will sim­ply bow down and anoint him the sav­ior of the Democratic par­ty, and the heir appar­ent to suc­ceed Donald Trump.
For the record, I have no prob­lem with peo­ple of means using their mon­ey to seek office. Tom Steyer did not just decide that he had a right to the nom­i­na­tion at the last moment. His has been a pro­tract­ed cam­paign, we can argue on the merits.

In an arti­cle, I wrote [in the link above] I talked about the affron­tery of Bloomberg attend­ing ser­vices at A R Bernard’s Christian Cultural Center(CCC), in Flatlands Brooklyn a few Sundays ago, and offer­ing up a nau­se­at­ing­ly trans­par­ent mea cul­pa to Bernard’s con­gre­ga­tion, but which was aimed at the wider black com­mu­ni­ty.
Bloomberg’s con­tin­u­a­tion of the Rudolph Guiliani stop and frisk pol­i­cy as Mayor of New York City, caused untold agony, pain, and suf­fer­ing to black and brown New York city res­i­dents, as a result of NYPD abuse of that process.
Michael Bloomberg sup­port­ed stop and frisk even after the NYPD had scaled back the pol­i­cy on its own, and even after he was long out of office.
Now that Michael Bloomberg wants to be pres­i­dent he is all of a sud­den sor­ry?
Bloomberg’s mea cul­pa on this issue, was one more iter­a­tion of his will­ing­ness to do and say any­thing as long as he can derive a ben­e­fit.
But my dis­gust was not sole­ly for Bloomberg on that Sunday morn­ing when he was allowed to take the stage at CCC, in fact, he was not the pri­ma­ry tar­get of my ire. The idea that any leader of a church, large or small, much less one which boasts a con­gre­ga­tion of forty thou­sand, would allow a Michael Bloomberg to deceive his flock, is a grave dis­ser­vice not just to the con­gre­ga­tion but ulti­mate­ly to the body of Christ. 

We are well aware that politi­cians will lit­er­al­ly say any­thing to get elect­ed. Nevertheless, African-American vot­ers have to be high­ly cog­nizant of the fact that the past is pro­logue when they decide to cast their vote for a can­di­date.
I have a tremen­dous degree of mis­trust for peo­ple who say they have evolved ‘on the issue of race for exam­ple’ I believe that every one of us was born with the abil­i­ty to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between wrong and right. We have that innate [built-in], which tells us whether or not the posi­tion we are tak­ing on any giv­en issue, is the cor­rect one. Christians call it the Holy Spirit, oth­ers call it a con­science.
Michael Bloomberg was unmoved by the cries of hun­dreds of thou­sands of black and brown peo­ple who felt the full brunt of [racial­ly tar­get­ed polic­ing] on his watch.
His sum­ma­ry dis­missal of the data, even after he left office, expos­es a cyn­i­cal bil­lion­aire tech­no­crat who will do what­ev­er serves his per­son­al ends.
How does he dif­fer from Donald Trump?

It is that cyn­i­cal dis­re­gard for respect and the human­i­ty of oth­ers which caused Michael Bloomberg to say the fol­low­ing about New Jersey junior US Senator who hap­pens to be African-American.

“Cory Booker endorsed me a num­ber of times, and I endorsed Cory Booker a num­ber of times,” Bloomberg said. “He’s very well-spo­ken. He’s got some good ideas. It would be bet­ter the more diverse any group is, but the pub­lic is out there pick­ing and choos­ing, and nar­row­ing down this field.”

There is a very good argu­ment to be made about Corey Booker as a legit­i­mate African-American can­di­date for pres­i­dent. That he who would endorse Michael Bloomberg, or would part­ner with the bul­ly­ing for­mer Republican Governor of his state, (Chris Christie), on some issue, cre­ates enough space to debate the pros and cons of his pro­gres­sive bona fides, or whether they even exist­ed before he decid­ed to run for the Democratic nom­i­na­tion.
But that is a ques­tion for debate between cen­trists and pro­gres­sive Democrats.
The fact that in 2019 a can­di­date for pres­i­dent would refer to an African-American, US Senator as, “very well-spo­ken”, much less a supreme­ly edu­cat­ed US Senator, demon­strates that on the crit­i­cal issues which affect black peo­ple, Michael Bloomberg is com­plete­ly dis­in­ter­est­ed.
(Corey Booker attend­ed Stanford University, where he received a BA in 1991 and then a mas­ter’s degree a year lat­er. He stud­ied abroad at the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, before attend­ing Yale Law School). [w]
Bloomberg grew up in Medford, Massachusetts and attend­ed Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Business School. [w]

Michael Bloomberg is being tout­ed at some lev­els on a dai­ly basis, par­tic­u­lar­ly by white lib­er­als on pub­lic radio in the New England area as the best hope for Democrats.
What is good for white lib­er­als in New England is not good for Black peo­ple suf­fer­ing under the yoke of police oppres­sion in America’s cities and towns.
Michael Bloomberg may have been good for white lib­er­als in New York City, but just ask the aver­age black and brown New Yorker, and they will tell you of a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent reality.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.