People’s National Party Senator,Andre Haughton a young and upcom­ing star of that polit­i­cal par­ty has decid­ed that his con­tri­bu­tion to nation-build­ing will be to fur­ther erode stan­dards of decen­cy and deco­rum.
Haughton believes that penal­iz­ing dance­hall artistes for curs­ing dur­ing their per­for­mances is out­dat­ed and in some way vil­li­fy­ing words which oth­er coun­tries find unique and enter­tain­ing about Jamaica’s cul­ture.
Speaking to local media enteties the up and com­ing nation­al leader who has a [Dr]. beside his name insists, “There are a lot of peo­ple who these words don’t affect in a neg­a­tive or pos­i­tive way. If a man seh ‘b****cl**t eedi­at’ is not the b****cl**t doing the harm is the eedi­at, if a man seh ‘f*****g fool’, is the fool that have the impact. It’s words like cor­rup­tion and eedi­at that are the bad words.”

In mak­ing his argu­ment for the nor­mal­iz­ing of more course­ness in the soci­ety, the sen­a­tor point­ed to the July, Reggae Sumfest’s Dancehall Night which was halt­ed by police due to pro­fan­i­ty dur­ing the per­for­mance of dee­jay Javillani. In the past, hip hop artiste Nicki Minaj was fined at that show for using b**c**t on stage dur­ing her per­for­mance.
The term bad-word has been affixed to cer­tain ter­mi­nolo­gies with­in the Jamaican col­lo­qui­al ver­nac­u­lar for as long as our coun­try has exist­ed as an inde­pen­dent nation or longer.
These words are not part of any dic­tio­nary, but are words put togeth­er to dri­ve home a point when we Jamaicans want to express a range of emo­tions.
Over the years they have been used when we are hap­py, sad, angry, fraus­trat­ed, excit­ed or expe­ri­enc­ing any oth­er feel­ing with­in the range of emo­tions we may be expe­ri­enc­ing at any par­tic­u­lar time.
For exam­ple, the word [blood], is a part of the eng­lish lan­guage. So too is [cloth], pieced togeth­er [blood-cloth], or rather the col­lo­qui­al­ized ver­sion [blood­claat], is a nov­el­ty to for­eign­ers who like every­thing about our cul­ture.
In the United States, there are terms which are deemed not to be prop­er lan­guage, so too is it in Canada, England ‚as well as oth­er nations.
Though these terms are used loose­ly in the streets, as the so-called bad words are uesd unspar­ing­ly in Jamaica, yet stand­ing before a American judge, or deal­ing with the police would not be a good time to be ref­fer­ing to them as a [moth­er­fuck­er].
There is a rea­son cer­tain guard-rails are in place, which this young sen­a­tor would be wise to first be edu­cat­ed on, before he goes charg­ing for­ward like a bull in a chi­na shop.

There are strong points of views on this sub­ject from both sides.
Do these words real­ly harm any­one, I guess there is a strong argu­ment to be made that at face val­ue they don’t?
Nevertheless, there is the ques­tion of whether they do any­thing to advance deco­rum, par­tic­u­lar­ly in pub­lic spaces, the very place this sen­a­tor wants them to be freed up?
What’s more, it seems that these younger politi­cians are more inter­est­ed in [an any­thing-goes strat­e­gy] which would open Jamaica up as a place where one could feel free to go and do what­ev­er they please and once done, go back to their respec­tive coun­tries of law and order.
That Hedonistic approach is seen as a means toward attract­ing more vis­i­tors and inex­orably more for­eign mon­ey regard­less of the harm it does to our coun­try. This sen­a­tor seems a will­ing schill for the dance­hall indus­try, he says he and a team intend to go through the Town and Communities Act to decide the next move to get things in motion. He urges Jamaicans to embrace what is their prof­itable cul­ture.

The police have a duty to enforce the laws. Police offi­cers have to be dis­cre­tionary gauges with their ears primed for [trig­gers]. Those trig­gers, some­times deter­mine whether an event is about to go south pret­ty fast. If not addressed imme­di­ate­ly, those events may dete­ri­o­rate rapid­ly, result­ing in greater prob­lems for them­selves and the wider com­mu­ni­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly, in sit­u­a­tions in which large groups of peo­ple are gath­ered and alco­hol has been con­sumed.
At a time when crime and law­less­ness are at all time highs, it is regret­ful that these upstarts want to cre­ate more lever­age for more crime and law­less­ness rather than arrest­ing those neg­a­tive traits.

The idea that words are not bad is an infan­tile con­cept which this much vaunt­ed Doctor ought to be con­ver­sant of. True to form how­ev­er, he is demon­strat­ing that hav­ing knowl­edge in one area does not mean smart in anoth­er.
Freedom of speech is essen­tial. Nevertheless we must be cog­nizant that our free­dom to say what we feel has con­se­quence.
That is the rea­son we do not shout [bomb] on an air­plane or in a crowd­ed the­ater. That is the rea­son we do not go up to a cop and shout gun, that could get you killed.
In the United States traf­fic stops are used to stem the flow of ille­gal guns and drugs across states lines.
Through the use of traf­fic stops untold amounts of drugs and ille­gal guns are con­fis­cat­ed and sus­pects arrest­ed each year, count­less lives are saved as a result.
All because offi­cers stay vig­i­lant and observe traf­fic vio­la­tions.
The police should be able to use a strength­ened Town and com­mu­ni­ty act to tamp down cer­tain behav­iors, poten­tial­ly sav­ing lives in the process.
What they do not need is for some upstart seek­ing a hype to cre­ate more hav­oc in the society. 

Of all of the dif­fi­cul­ties fac­ing the nation, this is the issue this wun­derkind has come up with toward nation-build­ing.
It is near­ly impos­si­ble to get some of our peo­ple to think crit­i­cal­ly.
Does the use of these terms phys­i­cal­ly hurt any­one? The answer is no!
What are the ben­e­fits of leg­is­lat­ing fur­ther coarse­ness into a coun­try which is already unnec­es­sar­i­ly coarse? This does absolute­ly noth­ing to to enhance Jamaica’s image.
It is one more attempt to turn over the last bas­tions of decen­cy or nor­mal­cy to the ret­ro­grade hedo­nism many crave.
Here is a sit­u­a­tion in which law-enforce­ment cor­rect­ly end­ed a show because the laws were being breached and a moron­ic upstart decides he wants to change the laws to usurp the author­i­ty of the police.
If this is an indi­ca­tor of what the PNP has to offer, the nation will be in for a whole lot of hurt because the gov­ern­ing JLP is doing as much harm to our estab­lished norms as this upstart would.

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.

To the many Jamaicans who held out hope that there is the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a return to the san­i­ty, peace, and tran­quil­i­ty of the 60s and ear­ly 70s, it is time to move along.
For oth­ers like myself who came of age in the 80s, who lived through the rel­a­tive peace of that peri­od, it is time for us to move along also.
Sure, I under­stand the trau­ma and the sense of loss we feel at the idea that our beloved Jamaica of yes­ter­year is only now a fig­ment of our imag­i­na­tion.…. blurs of mem­o­ry, of a time when our inno­cence was bliss.

It was a time when every­one par­ent­ed every­one’s kids. Mostly every­one was poor, but it was no big deal, we were all basi­cal­ly the same.
Children played with­out fear of being kid­napped and mur­dered, in fact, they had no idea what that was. Young girls lived with­out fear of being raped. In that Jamaica, friends were actu­al friends, not gang asso­ciates.
There was no inter­net or cable tele­vi­sion to alert us to trap­pings of moder­ni­ty we did not need. There was no inter­net, no cable tele­vi­sion, and no smart­phones.
It was a sim­pler time, a time of less greed, less envy. Most of all, with the excep­tion of parts of Kingston, guns were some­thing we only read about.
And so as I snap­back from my nos­tal­gic stu­por, I remind myself, as I cau­tion you to, do not waste any more of your lives in despair, hop­ing for a time, which shall nev­er return.

We have to face the fact that the peo­ple who made Jamaica what it was then, are with us no more. It was nev­er about how nice the place was, that has nev­er been in ques­tion. Sure the water is blue and the sand is white, the land is fer­tile and the air is cool. Sure we took pride in what we did in school, and we some­times played the fool, now its time to wake up and wipe away the drool.
There is a new men­tal­i­ty, new lead­er­ship, new val­ues, or should I saw a lack there­of? Right is wrong and wrong is right.
It is now a coun­try in which drug lords are revered, cel­e­brat­ed and lion­ized.
Reggae artistes who are gun­run­ners and heads of crim­i­nal gangs are nor­mal­ized with nation­al hon­ors.
Our Jamaica is a coun­try which makes it legal for some­one to sim­ply build a house on any par­cel of land, remain there for a cer­tain peri­od of time and they are auto­mat­i­cal­ly the own­ers of that land.
Some believe that those who make the laws do not under­stand that allow­ing that to hap­pen, cre­ates untold prob­lems. But they miss the obvi­ous that they do under­stand.
They are well-thought-out mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tion poli­cies, by the crim­i­nals in the par­lia­ment, to repay their sup­port­ers for their votes.
A look around the Kingston Metropolitan area, as well as the city of Montego Bay, or any oth­er munic­i­pal­i­ty for that mat­ter, and the zinc and ply­board com­mu­ni­ties which have been allowed to devel­op is a tes­ta­ment to those real­i­ties.
The dimin­ished and now non-exis­tent sense of moral­i­ty and val­ues which once char­ac­ter­ized our coun­try, has been replaced with greed, envy, hatred, and las­civ­i­ous indul­gence.
Rather than lift up and cel­e­brate teach­ers, social work­ers, police offi­cers and oth­er pub­lic ser­vants who toil end­less­ly to make our coun­try bet­ter, the nation’s lead­ers con­spire to ele­vate the worst ele­ments from with­in, with the express intent of cap­i­tal­iz­ing from the cheap returns.
National hon­ors are ren­dered worth­less, squan­dered and dimin­ished, not worth the mate­r­i­al they are made from, by the qual­i­ty of the indi­vid­u­als on whom they are bestowed.
It sick­ens me to my stom­ach to see what Jamaica has come to. How the very peo­ple who have been the worst actors, those who should be the very epit­o­me of our scorn and deri­sion are cel­e­brat­ed and ele­vat­ed.
And still, we won­der why our youth see the gun as a means to pow­er, recog­ni­tion, respect, and fame.
From what we have seen in the Jamaica of today, the gun is a means to pow­er, recog­ni­tion, respect, and fame.
Our coun­try has sunken to a new low and for that, we should all hang our heads in shame. Instead, we con­tin­ue to lie to our­selves that Jamaica nice.

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.

If you ever took a moment to think about automa­tion, you must have won­dered how are the poor and une­d­u­cat­ed and unskilled going to live going for­ward?
In just a few years, all across America, a whole slew of jobs which pre­vi­ous­ly pro­vid­ed bread, (if no but­ter), to the poor­est, least edu­cat­ed and unskilled Americans have been wiped out by automa­tion.
This is in addi­tion to the fac­to­ry jobs which had ear­li­er dis­ap­peared and min­ing jobs which had also dwin­dled as a con­se­quence of out­sourc­ing and chang­ing envi­ron­men­tal atti­tudes.
Supermarket cashiers, toll col­lec­tors, Fewer bank-tellers, Librarians, sec­re­taries, typ­ists, exec­u­tive assis­tants, and so much more, those jobs have dis­ap­peared, or, are all but gone from the econ­o­my.
As the pop­u­la­tion increas­es and jobs which requires man­u­al labor becomes few­er, the sit­u­a­tion inex­orably becomes direr.

We are once again in an elec­tion cycle, and as can­di­dates jock­ey for posi­tion in front of the cam­eras, not a sin­gle Democrat save one, (Andrew Yang), a vir­tu­al unknown or the right-wing extrem­ist in the white house has broached the sub­ject of what do to about this inevitable train wreck.
This econ­o­my has been on an upward tear after President Barack Obama avert­ed a col­lapse in 2008. Experts of all kinds have pre­dict­ed that a down­turn is immi­nent.
In fact, the job-growth tra­jec­to­ry under the present occu­pant of the white house has been low­er than what obtained under President Obama’s lead­er­ship, despite the lies and pro­pa­gan­da to the con­trary.
This peri­od of job growth will not con­tin­ue for much longer accord­ing to many experts.
In 2018 the New York Post, a pub­li­ca­tion not known to be a bul­wark of left-wing ide­ol­o­gy, pre­dict­ed that the next crash will be worse than the great depres­sion. I hope they are wrong.
In May of 2018, (Mynorthwest) warned the next major reces­sion may be just around the cor­ner. A 2020 reces­sion is emerg­ing as the most like­ly time-frame, the pub­li­ca­tion warned. 

For the seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion, which has diver­si­fied port­fo­lios or have high pay­ing tech jobs, a poten­tial eco­nom­ic down­turn may not be as fright­en­ing, as it will be for the poor­er less edu­cat­ed in the soci­ety.
What that means in a nut­shell, is that African-Americans, Latinos and poor whites will imme­di­ate­ly be impact­ed.
As the say­ing goes, black peo­ple are always the last hired and the first fired. Make no mis­take about it, the next major eco­nom­ic down­turn will be dev­as­tat­ing to African-Americans, the most vul­ner­a­ble in soci­ety are always the hard­est hit.
As dev­as­tat­ing as the next recession/​depression will be, it will pale in com­par­i­son to what actu­al­ly awaits the African-American, Latino and yes the poor white communities.

MY SHOCKING PREDICTION

Since nei­ther polit­i­cal par­ty has seen fit to address the freight train bar­relling down the track, we are left to con­clude that they already have a strat­e­gy in place which does not require input from the mass­es, the seg­ment of the soci­ety which will inevitably be impact­ed the hard­est and quick­est.
Over the years there have been many con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about the inten­tion of the Federal Government as it relates to the American mass­es. Some peo­ple deemed (kooks and cra­zies) have already built bunkers and have stock­piled food, water, and oth­er neces­si­ties they believe will allow them to sur­vive what­ev­er they deduce will be forth­com­ing.
Some have argued that FEMA, the Federal agency which is tasked with dis­as­ter relief coör­di­na­tion, has a secret agen­da which will involve hun­dreds of thou­sands all herd­ed into camps on the instruc­tions of the gov­ern­ment.
Some have point­ed to the mil­i­ta­riza­tion of the thou­sands of police depart­ments across the coun­try and the decid­ed­ly more aggres­sive stance the police have tak­en, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the black com­mu­ni­ty.
Many have scoffed at these ideas and labeled those who believe that these things are pos­si­ble, [con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists].
To oth­ers, this is no laugh­ing mat­ter. What if, just what if, this is no laugh­ing mat­ter? What if the strat­e­gy is actu­al­ly to put mass incar­cer­a­tion on steroids?
After the Emancipation of Black peo­ple from the oppres­sion of slav­ery African-Americans were to expe­ri­ence a reign of gov­ern­men­tal ter­ror many argue was worse than slav­ery itself. If one can imag­ine the indig­ni­ty of servi­tude where one can be treat­ed any way or dis­posed of as chat­tel or prop­er­ty, the peri­od of recon­struc­tion was more hor­rif­ic for black peo­ple in America.
In October of 2016 writ­ing for the Huffington Post, Aristotle Jones wrote, Slavery was abol­ished in 1865 with the end of the Civil war and pass­ing of the 13^th amend­ment. The racial caste in the United States should have end­ed as well. However, the idea of race as a mark­er of val­ue con­tin­ued. After recon­struc­tion, the major­i­ty of whites dur­ing this time believed new­ly freed African Americans were too lazy to work, which surged leg­is­la­tors to pass the black codes. This was essen­tial­ly a sys­tem of white con­trol. These codes var­ied from state to state, but were root­ed from slav­ery, and they fore­shad­owed Jim Crow laws to come. For exam­ple, employ­ment was required for all freed­man; vio­la­tors faced vagrancy charges, they were not taught to read or write, and pub­lic facil­i­ties were seg­re­gat­ed. Within Reconstruction and Its Benefits, W.E.B. Du Bois says, “The codes spoke for them­selves… No opened mind­ed stu­dent can read them with­out being con­vinced they meant noth­ing more nor less than slav­ery.” Clearly, the black code’s inten­tions were to treat and see African-Americans as prop­er­ty, not per­sons. Furthermore, the black codes were intend­ed to secure a steady sup­ply of cheap labor, and con­tin­ued to assume the infe­ri­or­i­ty of the freed slaves.

Even with crime going down over­all across America the Government has con­tin­ued to build pris­ons.
According to the lat­est FBI report of Crime in the United States, the nation’s toll of seri­ous vio­lent and prop­er­ty offens­es dipped in 2017 over the pre­vi­ous year. As com­pared with 2016, the vio­lent crime rate per 100,000 pop­u­la­tion declined by .9 per­cent, includ­ing a 1.4 per­cent drop in homi­cide (which would have been a 1.8 per­cent reduc­tion were it not for the act of one indi­vid­ual last October in Las Vegas). Meanwhile, the decline in prop­er­ty crime was even more pro­nounced with a 3.6 per­cent low­er rate per 100,000 pop­u­la­tion. (USA TODAY)
According to the [Sentencing Project], The United States has the world’s largest pri­vate prison pop­u­la­tion. Of the 1.5 mil­lion peo­ple in state and fed­er­al pris­ons in 2016, 8.5 per­cent, or 128,063, were incar­cer­at­ed in pri­vate pris­ons.¹⁾Another 26,249 peo­ple ‑73 per­cent of all peo­ple in immi­gra­tion deten­tion- were con­fined in pri­vate­ly-run facil­i­ties on a dai­ly basis dur­ing the fis­cal year 2017.
And so it’s not like there has not been American prece­dent for lock­ing up black peo­ple as a strat­e­gy. The present sit­u­a­tion at the Southern bor­der of the United States and the gov­ern­men­t’s response to it may only be a test run.
Children and adults seek­ing asy­lum locked in cages and forced to live in their own feces have elicit­ed no out­rage from a huge chunk of the pop­u­la­tion.
For those peo­ple, no life mat­ters unless they are white lives. For the 35 – 40 mil­lion African-Americans liv­ing in America, a reck­on­ing is com­ing and it will not be good.
Unfortunately for poor whites, their sit­u­a­tion will hard­ly be any dif­fer­ent. As jobs become increas­ing­ly more dif­fi­cult to find, those on the low­er end of the eco­nom­ic spec­trum will be forced to resort to sur­vival tac­tics.
Simply put, crime will increase and mass incar­cer­a­tion will explode. That explains the silence on the con­se­quences of automation.

In a 2017 arti­cle for the (Intercept) Journalist, Alice Speri writes, “It is not uncom­mon for res­i­dents of America’s most heav­i­ly policed neigh­bor­hoods to describe their local cops as “an occu­py­ing force.” Judging by where many U.S. police forces get their train­ing, the descrip­tion seems apt. Thousands of American law enforce­ment offi­cers fre­quent­ly trav­el for train­ing to one of the few coun­tries where polic­ing and mil­i­tarism are even more deeply inter­twined than they are here: Israel.“
Read her arti­cle here: https://​thein​ter​cept​.com/​2​0​1​7​/​0​9​/​1​5​/​p​o​l​i​c​e​-​i​s​r​a​e​l​-​c​o​p​s​-​t​r​a​i​n​i​n​g​-​a​d​l​-​h​u​m​a​n​-​r​i​g​h​t​s​-​a​b​u​s​e​s​-​d​c​-​w​a​s​h​i​n​g​t​on/
It is not that both polit­i­cal par­ties are obliv­i­ous to these real­i­ties, they do know. The Republican par­ty which is the white suprema­cist par­ty and the par­ty of the rich and pow­er­ful have been build­ing jails to ware­house poor peo­ple of col­or. For them, it is par for the course. The increas­ing mil­i­ta­riza­tion of the thou­sands of police forces across the coun­try serves that end.
As for the Democrats, they can’t even decide on a strat­e­gy on which to con­test Donald Trump much less agree that their base, the most vul­ner­a­ble Americans are at great risk.
In the same way that Democrats man­aged to lose the so-called blue-col­lar union­ized work­ers to Donald Trump, so too will the par­ty lose its most loy­al base, African-Americans, only this time it will be for keeps.
Yang’s pro­pos­al is to pro­vide $1,000 per month ($12,000 a year) to each adult cit­i­zen. A core fea­ture of the Freedom Dividend is that indi­vid­u­als would need to choose between their cur­rent gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits and the Freedom Dividend. 
This is a con­cept which has start­ed to take root in west­ern Europe in response to the effects automa­tion and out­sourc­ing has had on their pop­u­la­tions.
It is safe to bet that this plan will not fly in America, a nation which did not use its tremen­dous wealth to uplift all its peo­ple.
Not even those to whom it owed a tremen­dous debt for their hun­dreds of years of forced servi­tude, or from those from whom they stole the land.

A Louisiana police offi­cer — who when he isn’t man­ning the streets — appar­ent­ly has time to post threat­en­ing mes­sages about elect­ed offi­cials on social media.
Officer Charlie Rispoli took time out of his day to write a Facebook post sug­gest­ing that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be shot; he also not­ed that the Democratic con­gress­woman from New York is a “vile idiot.”
“This vile idiot needs a round,” Rispoli wrote on social media and prob­a­bly fig­ured no one would read it because it was only on social media. In case any­one was won­der­ing what Rispoli meant by “a round,” the offi­cer kind­ly cleared that up as well, post­ing: “And I don’t mean the kind she used to serve,” NOLA​.com reports, in ref­er­ence to Ocasio-Cortez’s time as a bartender.

Rispoli has been a mem­ber of the Gretna, La., police force since 2005.“The department’s Police Chief Arthur Lawson told the local news site that the post was ‘dis­turb­ing’ and appeared to vio­late the department’s social media pol­i­cy,” Newsweek reports.
Lawson also not­ed that he didn’t think the post was an actu­al threat against the con­gress­woman, but he didn’t explain how it wasn’t, and he report­ed­ly claimed that he would deal with the sit­u­a­tion.
“Whether you agree or dis­agree with the mes­sage of these elect­ed offi­cials and how frus­trat­ed you may or may not get, this cer­tain­ly is not the type of thing that a pub­lic ser­vant should be post­ing,” Lawson said.

Newsweek notes that Rispoli’s sug­ges­tion that Ocasio-Cortez needs a round that wasn’t served in a bar — which, for those in the slow lane, means for her to be shot and the police chief doesn’t believe is an actu­al threat — was all linked to a fake news sto­ry from a web­site called Taters Gonna Tate titled: “Ocasio-Cortez On the Budget: ‘We Pay Soldiers Too Much.’”The sto­ry was clear­ly fake and Newsweek reports that the arti­cle had a “water­mark clear­ly stat­ing the con­tent is satire. Snopes​.com has also debunked the sto­ry, as ‘false.’” Of course they did, because Taters Gonna Tate is no Wall Street Journal. Rispoli report­ed­ly removed the post and took his entire Facebook page down after real­iz­ing that he’d not only made a huge ass of him­self but he’d threat­ened a con­gress­woman (well, his chief doesn’t believe he did, but I don’t know when or where offer­ing some­one a non-alco­hol-relat­ed “round” is a joke.)

From Newsweek:

Ocasio-Cortez and oth­er fresh­men pro­gres­sive Congresswomen, such as Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts have faced sig­nif­i­cant crit­i­cism and even death threats since tak­ing office ear­li­er this year. Last week, President Donald Trump repeat­ed­ly made racist remarks about the four con­gress­women, first writ­ing on Twitter that they should “go back” to the coun­tries “from which they came.” He added: “you can’t leave soon enough.”The pres­i­dent dou­bled down on the remarks even after Democrats and some Republicans slammed the attack as “racist” and “xeno­pho­bic.” All of the con­gress­women are women of col­or and three of the four were born in the U.S. as American cit­i­zens. Omar was born in Somalia and immi­grat­ed to the U.S. as a young girl. She became a nat­u­ral­ized U.S. cit­i­zen near­ly two decades ago in 2000. Many point­ed out that there is a long racist his­to­ry in the U.S. of peo­ple telling non-white Americans that they should return to their coun­tries of ori­gin, even if their fam­i­lies have been U.S. cit­i­zens for many generations.An inves­tiga­tive report by BuzzFeed pub­lished last month also found that many police offi­cers across the coun­try had post­ed to social media to endorse or encour­age vio­lence against women, crim­i­nal defend­ents and Muslims. The arti­cle by BuzzFeed report­ed on The Plain View Project, which was launched by Emily Baker-White and looked at the social media accounts of 2,900 cur­rent police offi­cers and 600 retired offi­cers rep­re­sent­ing eight depart­ments nationwide.

Update, 7/​22/​19, 6:23 p.m.: Rispoli has been fired by the Gretna Police Department, NOLA​.com reports. Another offi­cer who liked the Facebook post in which Rispoli sug­gest­ed that AOC need­ed “a round” was also fired. Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson announced the fir­ings at a press con­fer­ence ear­li­er today.

“This inci­dent, we feel, has been an embar­rass­ment to our depart­ment,” Lawson said, accord­ing to NOLA​.com. “These offi­cers have cer­tain­ly act­ed in a man­ner which was unpro­fes­sion­al, allud­ing to a vio­lent act be con­duct­ed against a sit­ting U.S. (con­gress­woman), a mem­ber of our gov­ern­ment (and) we are not going to tol­er­ate that.”
Story first appeared here: https://​www​.the​root​.com/​t​r​u​m​p​s​-​d​o​i​n​g​-​i​t​-​a​g​a​i​n​-​a​n​d​-​b​y​-​i​t​-​i​-​m​e​a​n​-​a​t​t​a​c​k​i​n​g​-​t​h​e​-​s​-​1​8​3​6​6​0​2​375

A POLITICAL MUST READ

When President Donald Trump tweet­ed a video of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D‑Minn.) spliced among images of the Twin Towers col­laps­ing, every­body knew the deal. Trump has one polit­i­cal play ― aggra­vat­ed racism ― and he had decid­ed to make Omar, a Somali refugee who came to the United States as a child, the pub­lic focal point of his hate. Trump is going to do hor­ri­ble racist stuff. It’s what he does. And while there are a lot of black and brown Democrats in Congress, Trump picked on Omar because Democratic lead­er­ship had spent much of the pre­vi­ous two months try­ing to fig­ure out the cor­rect way to dump on her. 

Omar had offend­ed Jewish mem­bers of the cau­cus with com­ments about Israel that were legit­i­mate­ly insen­si­tive, but not exact­ly a nation­al cri­sis. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D‑Calif.) sur­prised her cau­cus by telling them they would be vot­ing on a res­o­lu­tion that con­demned Omar by name, uproar ensued. Why were Democrats sin­gling out one of their own over some stray tweets when the pres­i­dent was putting brown chil­dren in cages, rant­i­ng about immi­grants from “shit­hole coun­tries” and stand­ing up for the “fine peo­ple” who marched with Nazis in Charlottesville? Was the man run­ning the exec­u­tive branch of the most pow­er­ful nation on earth the prob­lem, or a ran­dom House freshman?

Democrats even­tu­al­ly split the baby, vot­ing to con­demn anti-Semitism and Islamophobia (phew!) ― but Pelosi had exposed a weak spot. Seeing the cau­cus divid­ed over Omar, Trump attacked. She was del­uged with death threats, and Democrats didn’t know what to do. Somehow nei­ther Pelosi nor her cau­cus learned any­thing from this débâ­cle. They’re still com­plain­ing about Omar, and whin­ing to the press about how they don’t real­ly want to have to vote against the awful things the most pow­er­ful man on the plan­et does. Pelosi spent much of the past month paint­ing tar­gets on the backs of Omar and three oth­er fresh­man Democrats: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D‑Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D‑Mich.). She bad­mouthed them to New York Times colum­nist Maureen Dowd, and when they fired back, she held cau­cus meet­ing to denounce them again for tweet­ing their com­plaints. Two days lat­er, House lead­er­ship vio­lat­ed this new no-mean-tweet­ing rule to attack Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff from the offi­cial @HouseDemocrats Twitter feed. 

Trump, cor­rect­ly read­ing the room, pounced again. He attacked all four in a racist Twitter rant on Sunday, telling them to “go back to their coun­try.” When Pelosi final­ly got her mem­bers to vote for a res­o­lu­tion con­demn­ing the president’s remarks, a crop of House Democrats imme­di­ate­ly went to CNN’s Jake Tapper to com­plain under cov­er of anonymi­ty that they real­ly hat­ed hav­ing to vote about Trump and were still mad at the Squad.
Their com­plaints? They wish Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t described the prison camps at the bor­der where chil­dren are dying and refugees are being rit­u­al­ly humil­i­at­ed as “con­cen­tra­tion camps.” One Democrat com­plained that sin­gling out Trump for crit­i­cism was unfair when Democrats had failed to leg­isla­tive­ly con­demn Omar back in the spring. “We couldn’t even bring our­selves to have a res­o­lu­tion exclu­sive­ly con­demn­ing anti-Semitism uttered by one of those mem­bers,” this brave Democrat told Tapper, “but we leapt to their defense here.”

Once again, Trump got the mes­sage. Shortly after Tapper post­ed all of this stuff, Trump held a ral­ly in North Carolina where he assailed all four House mem­bers, inspir­ing a ter­ri­fy­ing chant of “Send her back!” refer­ring to Omar. Democrats aren’t going to agree on every­thing. No polit­i­cal par­ty ever does. They have ide­o­log­i­cal dis­putes, gen­er­a­tional divides, what­ev­er. But House Democrats haven’t been debat­ing. For months now, they’ve been direct­ing a fas­cist feed­ing fren­zy toward four women of col­or.
Read more here: https://​www​.huff​post​.com/​e​n​t​r​y​/​w​h​i​c​h​-​s​i​d​e​-​a​r​e​-​h​o​u​s​e​-​d​e​m​o​c​r​a​t​s​-​o​n​_​n​_​5​d​3​0​b​7​a​9​e​4​b​0​2​0​c​d​9​9​4​0​8​f28

In Biblical times there was a gen­er­al per­cep­tion that noth­ing good could come out of Nazareth. Nazareth was a small town some accounts, say that it had only about 150 res­i­dents.
Little is known of the rea­sons behind the neg­a­tive per­cep­tions of Nazareth. Nevertheless, archae­o­log­i­cal exca­va­tions have con­firmed that the city was only a small agri­cul­tur­al vil­lage dur­ing the Hellenistic and Roman peri­ods.
Jesus spent his boy­hood days in Nazareth, and so that ques­tion became moot. Yeshua/​Jesus was the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of good.

Donald Trump Junior has demon­strat­ed that it is gen­er­al­ly true that no good can come out of some­thing bad unless you are Yeshua how­ev­er. Stupid is real­ly is as stu­pid does.
Donald Trump the present occu­pant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and his wife Melania the genius, has been two of the ear­li­er per­pe­tra­tors of the racist birther lie against then-can­di­date Barack Obama.
But Junior, an apple no less an igno­ra­mus than the tree from which he fell, was also a part of that slim­ing.
Barack Obama is no longer the President, nei­ther is he run­ning for any­thing. So despite the hatred of him which still exist in the bit­ter hearts of this despi­ca­ble fam­i­ly, the ven­om seems now trans­ferrable to any oth­er can­di­date of col­or. Since California Senator Kamala Harris has been get­ting some press after her debate per­for­mance, she is now the new tar­get of this imbe­cil­ic clan.

After Senator Harris’ break­out per­for­mance dur­ing the Democratic debates in Miami, a right-wing hack tweet­ed claim­ing she had no right to rep­re­sent American blacks because her father grew up in Jamaica. Donal Trump Jnr boost­ed the tweet and received a Twitter back­lash which forced him to delete the tweet.
The idea it seems, was to dri­ve a wedge between African-Americans and Senator Harris’s can­di­da­cy.
The gen­er­al idea is that Kamala Harris whose father is Jamaican and her moth­er of Indian ances­try, is not fit nor black enough to rep­re­sent African-Americans.
There are just a cou­ple of prob­lems with that premise, Kamala Harris is not run­ning to be pres­i­dent of [African-America], I don’t even know where that coun­try is?
She is run­ning for the pres­i­den­cy of the United States of America.
Secondly, Kamala Harris’s dad was not a mem­ber of the white planter class in my native Jamaica.
Donald Harris, is a promi­nent eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor, but he is the off­spring of African peo­ple who were kid­napped and dropped off as slaves, just as oth­ers were dropped off in the United States. 

Trump Junior’s clear and unequiv­o­cal lack of intel­lect has borne out what I have always main­tained, Racism is a degen­er­a­tive dis­ease which comes from igno­rance.
There is no tan­gi­ble rea­son to believe that Donald Trump Junior would have emerged a smarter man than his father, but it seems that Junior has emerged as a kind of dum­bo which must be caus­ing even his own father to ques­tion his abil­i­ties.
Of course, the strat­e­gy to tweet and delete may very well be a strate­gic con­tin­u­a­tion of the mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign waged in 2016, which got us to where we are 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 also writes occa­sion­al­ly for the web­site Medium​.com.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

In response to President’ Carter’s in your face state­ment, that Donald Trump is an ille­git­i­mate President by virtue of Russian inter­fer­ence in the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, for­mer Arizona US Senator Jeff Flake had this to say.
“This is an awful thing for one American President to say about anoth­er.”
“We need to stop try­ing to dis­qual­i­fy each oth­er,” Flake wrote. “I could not sup­port President Trump large­ly because of his awful embrace of birtherism. President Carter call­ing President Trump ille­git­i­mate is not right either. We should be bet­ter than this.”

Speaking at the Carter cent in Virginia, for­mer President Carter said the fol­low­ing about the Trump Presidency.
“I think the inter­fer­ence … if ful­ly inves­ti­gat­ed would show that Trump actu­al­ly didn’t win the elec­tion in 2016.” 
“A full inves­ti­ga­tion “would show that Trump didn’t actu­al­ly win the elec­tion in 2016….He was put into office because the Russians inter­fered.” Does that mean he’s an ille­git­i­mate pres­i­dent? “Based on what I said, which I can’t retract.”

Jeff Flake, (the human pret­zel), pre­tend­ed to be dis­tressed with Donald Trump’s inhu­mane poli­cies, before vot­ing to imple­ment them dur­ing his tenure in the US Senate.
Flake is now a fel­low at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics.
Flake’s Senate career was rem­i­nis­cent of his last name. Inconsistent, flaky and wishy-washy. He left the Senate, hav­ing done him­self no favors by bad-mouthing Trump’s poli­cies, then vot­ing for them in the end.
Jeff Flake made ene­mies on both sides of the polit­i­cal divide by being a wishy-washy fence strad­dling Toadie.

As was to be expect­ed from Jeff Flake, he was tak­en aback by the sever­i­ty of the back­lash after his sil­ly Carter rebuke.
Flake has­tened to say he was not defend­ing Donald trump but was defend­ing the Presidency.
“We need to have respect for the process,” Flake told The Arizona Republic on Saturday. “I have a ton of respect for President Carter. I think he’s ten times the man in terms of being a good per­son than Donald Trump will ever be. But we need to stop try­ing to dis­qual­i­fy each oth­er in elec­tions and use the bal­lot box instead.”
The irony in Jeff Flakes response was vin­tage Jeff Flake weak-kneed strad­dling.
How could Flake argue that he is defend­ing the Presidency if he is unwill­ing to see that the best way to do so is to stand up with patri­ots like President Carter and speak the truth instead of hid­ing behind a veil of lies and pre­ten­tious BS?

In the world’s [“Oldest Democracy”], the can­di­date who received three mil­lion plus more votes than her oppo­nent, end­ed up los­ing that elec­tion.
Because that irra­tional­i­ty is an anom­aly in west­ern democ­ra­cies, it begs a clos­er look.
We should nev­er be dis­tract­ed from the fact that the US has built-in safe­guards, which are intend­ed to ensure the con­tin­u­a­tion of white rule regard­less of the dwin­dling num­ber of whites in soci­ety or the num­ber of whites ver­sus peo­ple of col­or in the coun­try.
North Dakota’s pop­u­la­tion was 760,077 on July 1, 2018. Republican
South Dakota is esti­mat­ed at 858,469. Republican.
Wyoming’s pop­u­la­tion in 2019 is esti­mat­ed at 572,381. Republican.
As of 2019, the esti­mat­ed pop­u­la­tion of Montana is 1.07 mil­lion. Largely Republican.
As of 2019, the pop­u­la­tion of Iowa is 3.17 mil­lion. Republican.
West Virginia’s pop­u­la­tion is esti­mat­ed at 1.79 mil­lion. Generally Republican.
The pop­u­la­tion of Nebraska in 2019 is now 1.94 mil­lion. Republican.
The 2019 esti­mate for Idaho’s pop­u­la­tion is 1.79 mil­lion. Republican.
Oklahoma has an esti­mat­ed pop­u­la­tion in 2019 of 3.95 mil­lion. Republican.

California’s pop­u­la­tion in 2019 is 39.75 mil­lion. DEMOCRAT.
Even though there are a cou­ple of states in the New England region with low pop­u­la­tions, the vast major­i­ty of the rur­al states which are Republican mono­liths all have two Republican Senators the same as California with rough­ly (40,000,000.00) peo­ple or New York anoth­er blue state with rough­ly (20,000,000.00 res­i­dents.
This means that rur­al, most­ly white homogo­nous states with small pop­u­la­tions get a dis­pro­por­tion­ate rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the US Senate, there­by can­cel­ing out the will of states with large diverse pop­u­la­tions which gets the same two US Senators. 

President Carter is a thinker who under­stands that it would be a near impos­si­bil­i­ty that much of a plu­ral­i­ty in the pop­u­lar vote across the coun­try would be nar­rowed down to Minnesota, Michigan, Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Trump won those states by less than two per­cent­age points accord­ing to the Washington Post.
Pennsylvania and Michigan had not vot­ed for a Republican pres­i­dent since vot­ing for George H.W. Bush in 1988. Wisconsin had not gone Republican since 1984.
How much of a stretch is it to fig­ure out that this was no win, but a clever well-tar­get­ed chang­ing of the votes just enough to toss the Presidency to Trump, with­out cre­at­ing too much of a stink which would raise eye­brows when that win is looked at in a par­al­lel prism with the raw votes.
As I opined at the time Robert Muller was appoint­ed Special Counsel to look at Russian inter­fer­ence into the American elec­tions, the arro­gance of those who tout American supe­ri­or­i­ty on all fronts would pre­vent a thor­ough inves­ti­ga­tion of the facts.
Even if a thor­ough inves­ti­ga­tion was allowed, the full and com­plete fact that a hos­tile for­eign adver­sary had installed a pup­pet in the American White House would nev­er be accept­ed, much less made avail­able to the public. 

One Twitter user shot back at Jeff Flake’s com­ments, “Jeff Flake, more upset at what a for­mer pres­i­dent says than what a cur­rent pres­i­dent does.”
There are far too much hypocrisy and arro­gance in this coun­try for them to admit that Donald Trump is the Manchurian pres­i­dent they had long feared.
He and Vladimir Putin are hav­ing a jol­ly old time laugh­ing and ham­ming it up at how they got away with it Scott free.

free.

• Former President Jimmy Carter called President Donald Trump an ille­git­i­mate pres­i­dent and said he only won his 2016 elec­tion because of state-spon­sored Russian inter­fer­ence to ben­e­fit him.
• Carter made the con­tro­ver­sial com­ments along­side his Vice President Walter Mondaleat a June 28 human rights forum host­ed in Leesburg, Virginia.
• “A full inves­ti­ga­tion would show that Trump did­n’t actu­al­ly win the elec­tion in 2016. He lost the elec­tion, and was put into office because of the Russians inter­fer­ing on his behalf,” Carter said.
• When the mod­er­a­tor fol­lowed up and asked if Carter believed Trump was an ille­git­i­mate pres­i­dent, Carter said, “based on what I just said which I can’t retract, yes.”
• Carter’s com­ments came after Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to laugh off Russia’s elec­tion inter­fer­ence when the two lead­ers met at the G20 sum­mit in Osaka, Japan.

Former President Jimmy Carter called President Donald Trump an ille­git­i­mate pres­i­dent and said he only won his 2016 elec­tion because of state-spon­sored Russian inter­fer­ence to ben­e­fit him.

Carter, who is 94 years old and served as America’s 39^th pres­i­dent from 1977 to 1981, made the con­tro­ver­sial com­ments along­side his Vice President Walter Mondale at a June 28 human rights forum host­ed in Leesburg, Virginia and mod­er­at­ed by pres­i­den­tial schol­ar Jon Meacham.

“There’s no doubt that the Russians did inter­fere in the elec­tion. I think the inter­fer­ence, although it’s not quan­ti­fied, a full inves­ti­ga­tion would show that Trump did­n’t actu­al­ly win the elec­tion in 2016. He lost the elec­tion, and was put into office because of the Russians inter­fer­ing on his behalf,” Carter said.
Read more here:
https://​www​.msn​.com/​e​n​-​u​s​/​n​e​w​s​/​p​o​l​i​t​i​c​s​/​j​i​m​m​y​-​c​a​r​t​e​r​-​s​a​i​d​-​t​h​a​t​-​t​r​u​m​p​-​i​s​-​a​n​-​i​l​l​e​g​i​t​i​m​a​t​e​-​p​r​e​s​i​d​e​n​t​-​b​e​c​a​u​s​e​-​r​u​s​s​i​a​n​-​i​n​t​e​r​f​e​r​e​n​c​e​-​g​o​t​-​h​i​m​-​e​l​e​c​t​e​d​/​a​r​-​A​A​D​z​qC6

In case you are won­der­ing how the Supreme Court under George Bush appointee Chief Justice John Roberts will be viewed in his­to­ry, the long list of 5 – 4 deci­sions along par­ti­san lines, has already defined the way the Right-wing court bear­ing his name will be remem­bered for­ev­er.
Along with Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and the stolen seat giv­en to Neil Gorsuch and the oth­er Trump appointee weepy Brett Kavanaugh, the court’s right-wing jus­tices have made no attempt to be dis­pas­sion­ate or fair in its rul­ings as a con­ser­v­a­tive majority.

The Roberts court has embarked on a steady path of 5 – 4 deci­sions favor­ing Conservative caus­es. It has left pre­cious lit­tle room for those who believe in the court as a last decider of fair­ness, to have con­tin­ued faith in this court.
In the lat­est Ruling on a deci­sion which should have been easy for any coun­ty court as a mat­ter of fair­ness, decen­cy and com­mon sense, the court in typ­i­cal 5 – 4 fash­ion, ruled on Thursday, June 27^th that par­ti­san ger­ry­man­der­ing was a polit­i­cal ques­tion beyond the reach of the fed­er­al court. (under the sig­na­ture of John Roberts)
There are no fair and man­age­able stan­dards for judges to eval­u­ate whether a ger­ry­man­der is con­sti­tu­tion­al, Roberts wrote in his major­i­ty opin­ion.
The deci­sion was in response to cas­es of con­gres­sion­al dis­tricts in North Carolina and Maryland.
According to the HuffingtonPost​.com, the court’s deci­sion ensures state law­mak­ers will have vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed license to choose the vot­ers who elect them. By pack­ing the oppos­ing party’s vot­ers into as few dis­tricts as pos­si­ble or spread­ing them out among many dis­tricts, law­mak­ers can make it next to impos­si­ble for the oth­er par­ty to win a major­i­ty of leg­isla­tive or con­gres­sion­al seats. 

In a 2012 Article titled; The Incredible Polarization and Politicization of the Supreme Court, the Atlantic’s David Paul Kuhn wrote, schol­ars con­sid­er these nar­row deci­sions the most polit­i­cal. Research indi­cates that 5‑to‑4 rul­ings are the most like­ly to be over­turned by lat­er Courts. They car­ry the same legal author­i­ty as more unan­i­mous opin­ions — but not the same moral author­i­ty. In this vein, the one branch of gov­ern­ment designed to be above par­ti­san­ship echoes the rise in hyper­par­ti­san­ship seen through­out Washington.
Justice Elena Kagan, in a dis­sent­ing opin­ion joined by the three oth­er lib­er­al-lean­ing jus­tices, wrote about the cor­ro­sive effect ger­ry­man­der­ing has on American democ­ra­cy. New tech­nol­o­gy, she said, would only make the prac­tice more extreme. “If left unchecked, ger­ry­man­ders like the ones here may irrepara­bly dam­age our sys­tem of gov­ern­ment,” she wrote. “Of all times to aban­don the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. 

From Citizens United which states that Corporation are peo­ple to evis­cer­at­ing the vot­ing rights act on the flim­sy excuse it is no longer need­ed, the Roberts court has demon­strat­ed that the faith cer­tain Americans had in the court to be dis­pas­sion­ate is mis­placed.
What we are wit­ness­ing is a com­plete makeover of America as we know it.
And not in a good way.
That will be the lega­cy of the Roberts court.

The American Government con­tin­ue to talk down to small­er less pow­er­ful nations, through its var­i­ous arms of gov­ern­ment as well as direct­ly from the horse’s mouth at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
At the same time coun­tries like Iran, North Korea, and oth­ers insist that respect is a two-way street.
That is essen­tial­ly true, respect is earned, it has noth­ing to do with one’s size, pow­er, or wealth, and it cer­tain­ly is not giv­en because a pow­er­ful coun­try engages in threats, brava­do, intim­i­da­tion or bellicosity.

In the process of speak­ing down and act­ing as a strict par­ent to way­ward kids, the US has devel­oped its own grad­ing and rat­ing sys­tem through which it chas­tis­es admon­ish­es and pun­ish­es less pow­er­ful nations for what it deems to be a lack of adher­ence to the ortho­doxy of the rules it cre­at­ed.
Usually, those infrac­tions are inju­ri­ous to no oth­er coun­try except the United States. In many cas­es, the injury is mere­ly a mat­ter of per­cep­tion.
I find this lord­ing over oth­er nations curi­ous, as the US allows no one to tell it what to do. Which brings us to the ques­tion of human traf­fick­ing and more sub­stan­tial­ly the ques­tion of human rights.
In a recent arti­cle pub­lished in the Jamaica Gleaner, the US Government chid­ed Jamaica for not being aggres­sive enough in pros­e­cut­ing offend­ers and pro­tect­ing vic­tims.
Read arti­cle here; http://​jamaica​-glean​er​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​l​e​a​d​-​s​t​o​r​i​e​s​/​2​0​1​9​0​6​2​5​/​n​o​t​-​t​o​u​g​h​-​e​n​o​u​g​h​-​u​s​-​r​a​p​s​-​j​a​m​a​i​c​a​-​l​i​m​p​-​a​c​t​i​o​n​-​h​u​m​a​n​-​t​r​a​f​f​i​c​k​ing .
My ques­tion for Jamaica is this, why not cre­ate and main­tain a grad­ing and rat­ing sys­tem which grades America’s efforts in stop­ping the flow of guns into Jamaica?
Since as far back as the ear­ly ’80s, Jamaica has gone over and beyond to erad­i­cate mar­i­jua­na and pre­vent it from get­ting into the United States.
As a young police offi­cer, this writer has done more than most cops to wage war on a weed that I nev­er smoked or had any­thing to do with, all because the Americans want­ed us to do so.
While we were active­ly erad­i­cat­ing mar­i­jua­na our poor coun­try was pay­ing exor­bi­tant (fines/​extortionist fees to the Americans) when Ganga was found on the nation­al air­line, the then [Air Jamaica].
In the same vein, thou­sands of Jamaicans have been incar­cer­at­ed and deport­ed, some inno­cent­ly, because of America’s hatred for mar­i­jua­na. America’s police depart­ments did not care who they hauled into their mar­i­jua­na drag­nets, inno­cent or guilty. If one was/​is black or brown it did/​does not mat­ter.
All this was going on while American states were active­ly engaged in the growth and sale of far more mar­i­jua­na than tiny Jamaica could ever hope to pro­duce.
Tens of thou­sands of Jamaican lives have been ruined while mar­i­jua­na is now being decrim­i­nal­ized across America.

America’s ten­den­cy to dic­tate to oth­ers on what they ought to do is cer­tain­ly not lost on this writer. Despite this ten­den­cy, America’s police depart­ments com­bined, kills thou­sands of peo­ple each year. Not just armed sus­pects, but unarmed peo­ple with whom they come in con­tact, who have com­mit­ted no crimes but who may have ques­tioned their assault on their per­sons.
These inno­cent vic­tims are gen­er­al­ly African-American and oth­er peo­ple of col­or.
Police body and dash­cam videos are always avail­able to slime poten­tial accused sus­pects but are with­held (“pend­ing the com­ple­tion of the inves­ti­ga­tions”), when racist and cor­rupt cops are accused of crimes against inno­cent cit­i­zens.
And so while we are on the ques­tion of peo­ple’s rights I will take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to reit­er­ate some­thing I stat­ed to a friend just today.
We are expe­ri­enc­ing a stub­born rise in the Islands vio­lent crime rate. I believe the lead­ers of our coun­try have squan­dered oppor­tu­ni­ty after oppor­tu­ni­ty to right the ship.
Nevertheless, because of their own crim­i­nal expo­sure, they have used smoke and mir­rors to cre­ate the impres­sion that mean­ing­ful work is being done to reme­di­ate the exis­ten­tial issue of vio­lent crime on the Island.
However, in real­i­ty, police and oth­er sta­tis­ti­cal data shows that the tra­jec­to­ry of vio­lent crimes and the bru­tal­i­ty and brazen­ness with which they are being car­ried out has been on a steady north­ward trajectory.

(1) I am opposed to (INDECOM), Terrence Williams and Hamish Campbell’s ZEALOTRY, PERSONAL AGENDAS AND EGOS. I am not opposed to police over­sight. Police can­not be left to police them­selves.
The JCF has the most over­sight of any police agency any­where, yet police cor­rup­tion is on the rise. It fol­lows, there­fore, that over­sight is not the issue, the approach is wrong. Just as the wrong-head­ed ZOSO’s and States of Emergencies can­not stop mur­ders, nei­ther can the pro­lif­er­a­tion of pres­sure groups on the JCF work to low­er crime.
I am opposed to INDECOM because it was born out of Jamaicans for Justice (JFJ), an anti-police agi­ta­tor, and crim­i­nal enhance­ment group.
(2) If the Government had fol­lowed our sug­ges­tion in 2010 when they cre­at­ed INDECOM. If they had put the M$355 per year it throws down the dark hole known as INDECOM, into the JCF, that B$3.2 Billion dol­lars would have brought the JCF to first world stan­dard.
It would have root­ed out cor­rup­tion, drove down crime through more effec­tive inves­ti­ga­tions and appre­hen­sion of crim­i­nal sus­pects.
(3) Additionally, had the Government decid­ed­ly shown the crim­i­nal rights fra­ter­ni­ty the door and backed the JCF leg­isla­tive­ly and through com­pen­sato­ry means, I would be writ­ing from Jamaica about the mas­sive infu­sion of real invest­ments which have flood­ed into our country. 

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. You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.

TALK OF SOCIAL JUSTICE IS NOT THE SAME AS DEMANDING CHANGE IN POLICING PRACTICES

In 2016 then FBI Director James Comey told a con­fer­ence of police chiefs, of white suprema­cist groups infil­trat­ing local and state law enforce­ment, indi­cat­ing it was a sig­nif­i­cant threat to nation­al secu­ri­ty.
Additionally, [PBS​.ORG] report­ed that as far back as 2006 in a bul­letin the FBI detailed the threat of white nation­al­ists and skin­heads infil­trat­ing police in order to dis­rupt inves­ti­ga­tions against fel­low mem­bers and recruit oth­er suprema­cists. The bul­letin was released dur­ing a peri­od of scan­dal for many law enforce­ment agen­cies through­out the coun­try, includ­ing a neo-Nazi gang formed by mem­bers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who harassed black and Latino com­mu­ni­ties. Similar inves­ti­ga­tions revealed offi­cers and entire agen­cies with hate group ties in Illinois, Ohio, and Texas.
(See link here); https://​www​.pbs​.org/​n​e​w​s​h​o​u​r​/​n​a​t​i​o​n​/​f​b​i​-​w​h​i​t​e​-​s​u​p​r​e​m​a​c​i​s​t​s​-​i​n​-​l​a​w​-​e​n​f​o​r​c​e​m​ent

To date, we know of no real mea­sure which has been imple­ment­ed to deal deci­sive­ly with this scourge. This phe­nom­e­non is not new because America’s police depart­ments have always been pop­u­lat­ed and plagued with racist cops. That is not to say that all cops are racists, far from it, but racist makes bad cops. When good cops remain silent or sup­port the ille­gal actions of bad cops they can no longer claim to be good cops, after they have vio­lat­ed their oaths to uphold the laws faith­ful­ly, and with­out favor.
At the same time, it is instruc­tive to remem­ber that it has been just around two decades or that we start­ed wit­ness­ing the numer­ous killings by police and the out­right in-your-face abuse and mur­der of unarmed Black and Brown peo­ple. These warn­ings by the FBI and the trou­bling occur­rences are not unrelated. 

In a Facebook post recent­ly, I opined that there are 23 or 24 can­di­dates run­ning for the Democrat nom­i­na­tion to replace the impos­tor in the white house. No one expects the present occu­pant or any­one in his régime to rec­og­nize the threat these ter­ror­ists oper­at­ing under the col­or of law pos­es, not just to peo­ple of col­or but ulti­mate­ly all peo­ple.
In fact, he has encour­aged police to use more vio­lence when mak­ing arrests.
However, the Democrats run­ning to replace Trump must know that there are close to forty mil­lion Black peo­ple in this coun­try which forms the basis for the exis­tence of the present Democrat par­ty.
Yet not a sin­gle one of those twen­ty-odd can­di­dates includ­ing the African-Americans have broached the sub­ject of white suprema­cists and skin­heads in America’s police depart­ments and the dan­ger they pose.
Even as they remain mute Philidelphia’s police depart­ment was forced to pull 72 offi­cers in one fell swoop from the streets because of their racist rants on social media.
Yet as far as we know not a sin­gle leg­isla­tive body has tak­en up this issue or has lift­ed a fin­ger to purge these dan­ger­ous mem­bers of the white suprema­cist belief before they do more dam­age than they have already done.
The dam­age they have done far exceeds the killings and the untold inci­dences of bla­tant unpro­voked attacks and assaults on the per­sons of peo­ple of col­or. They expo­nen­tial­ly and for­ev­er dam­age the con­cept of polic­ing as we knew it, and under­mines the very con­cept of the rule of law.

A Florida may­oral candidate’s racist tirade went viral after he told a group of activists to “go back to Africa” dur­ing a may­oral forum in2017.
According to local report­ing, Long-shot St. Petersburg may­oral can­di­date Paul Congemi made the com­ments while address­ing rival Jesse Nevel, a white sup­port­er of the social­ist Uhuru Movement, which seeks slav­ery repa­ra­tions for African-Americans.
“Mr. Nevel, you and your peo­ple, you talk about repa­ra­tions,” Congemi said, accord­ing to video of the out­burst. “The repa­ra­tions that you talk about, Mr. Nevel, your peo­ple already got your repa­ra­tions. Your repa­ra­tions came in the form of a man named Barack Obama.”

This dis­gust­ing piece of germ-infest­ed fecal mat­ter epit­o­mizes the fact that racism is a degen­er­a­cy of the mind. A sick and endem­ic lev­el of low self-esteem which caus­es the vic­tim to feel good about him­self only by debas­ing oth­ers.
It is a dis­ease which attacks the intel­lect, or should I say it is a dis­ease which finds fer­tile ground in non­in­tel­lec­tu­al brain-space. That space is usu­al­ly found in Caucasians, the last race to emerge into the light of civ­i­liza­tion.
Someone ought to give this imbe­cile a few class­es in real his­to­ry, not the (his-sto­ry )they have con­coct­ed and per­pet­u­at­ed over the last sev­er­al hun­dred years. One which once again is in and of itself a clear sign of their low self-esteem and lack of ele­vat­ed intel­lec­tu­al matu­ri­ty.
Lies, false state­ments, mis­in­for­ma­tion all intend­ed to feel good about them­selves, at the expense of oth­ers.
Their ascen­dan­cy into the light of civ­i­liza­tion has been the bane of human­i­ty. Their con­tri­bu­tion has been death, theft, mur­der, and war across the globe. They have tak­en sim­ple cre­ations like gun­pow­der cre­at­ed by the Chinese, and weaponized it into a weapon of mass destruc­tion.
They are the only ones to have used an atom bomb to kill mil­lions of brown peo­ple despite the fact that both the first and sec­ond world wars were start­ed by them, Caucasian Germans. 

Should I go on, or has this inbred been edu­cat­ed enough?
Oh, by the way when they came here our ances­tors were long here, three hun­dred years before they arrived.
We had trav­eled to India, Australia, and places they nev­er dreamed exist­ed. They thought the Earth was flat, these imbe­ciles believed they would fall off the edge of the earth if they ven­tured too far away from their European caves.
[Christopher Come-Rob-us] wrote about it in his jour­nal. He thought when he arrived in the Islands he had land­ed in India. The fool was lost, hence his nam­ing it the [west indies].
Nevertheless, their crim­i­nal intent was imme­di­ate­ly evi­dent, they decid­ed­ly laid claim to places they arrived at, where they were greet­ed and wel­comed with kind­ness.
Unfortunately, the hos­pi­tal­i­ty and gen­eros­i­ty of brown and Black peo­ple would be repaid with bar­barism, inhu­man­i­ty, decep­tion, and sav­agery. From the Caribbean Islands to the tip of South America all the way to the shores of Africa
the ances­tors of sav­ages like the one above, demon­strat­ed that they can­not be tamed and should nev­er be trust­ed.
They have hon­ored no hand of friend­ship, respect­ed no out­stretched hand of kind­ness. They have hon­ored no treaty or agree­ment to which they have attacked their John Hancock. 

There needs to be an edu­ca­tion cam­paign for these inbred low IQ for­mer cave dwellers. But before that hap­pens we as a peo­ple must first know who the hell we are. 

Have you ever stopped to think about the crass hypocrisy of those ser­pents who decry the police for what they call ‘extra-judi­cial killings”? While they sur­rep­ti­tious­ly remain death­ly silent about the “myr­i­ad killings in our coun­try”.
Not that we can allow our police to kill whomev­er they want, that is total­ly unac­cept­able, but our police should nev­er fear get­ting inves­ti­gat­ed and impris­oned for doing their job.
We expect and ask our police to go out and enforce our laws so that we can feel safe and secure in our homes and in pub­lic spaces. The truth of the mat­ter is that the mechan­ics of that are not always pret­ty or palat­able to digest, sim­ply put it is not pret­ty to watch some­times.
As a young CIB offi­cer, I went to Maddens funer­al home at the request of my Sub-offi­cer in charge of Crime, Detective Sergeant Wallace to observe a post-mortem exam­i­na­tion. I had done this sev­er­al times before as a young inves­ti­ga­tor.
This time the vic­tim was a young man who was stabbed in the neck area and had died. The killing hap­pened in the White Hall Avenue area of Kingston 8. The vic­tim had not bled much, so there was an expec­ta­tion that when his corpse was cut open there would be a sig­nif­i­cant amount of blood inside.
Even armed with that expec­ta­tion, I was total­ly unpre­pared for the ghast­ly sight of the semi-con­gealed blood which gushed out of that young man’s corpse when the porters opened it up.
A wave of nau­sea washed over me instant­ly and I dashed out of the build­ing and vom­it­ed up every­thing that was inside me.

Dealing with the dirt and grime of law-enforce­ment can be grue­some and unsa­vory, we send sol­diers to war and we expect them to win. In times past, los­ing meant being tak­en into slav­ery or killed, so every­thing rode on win­ning.
Corrections offi­cers have to be tough as nails, because it is their job to deal with indi­vid­u­als we do not want to be roam­ing around in our com­mu­ni­ties.
It is that same mind­set which must be attached to the process of law enforce­ment. Unfortunately for us, we remain stuck in the non­sen­si­cal belief that a per­son who has some med­ical train­ing is capa­ble of fly­ing air­planes. We believe that col­lege pro­fes­sors who are politi­cians will make great min­is­ters of finance. In oth­er words, hav­ing an under­grad­u­ate degree or even a grad­u­ate degree or two auto­mat­i­cal­ly qual­i­fies the degree hold­er to do any and every­thing.
That is the rea­son that Peter Bunting a Banker was made National Security Minister. The earthy and unpre­dictable Robert Montaque an agron­o­mist, was also giv­en the same job, and today we have a med­ical doc­tor in that office.
Using that same log­ic I sug­gest that when Chang is done at National secu­ri­ty he be giv­en the job to fly air­planes.
It is that stu­pid and regres­sive think­ing which has got­ten us into this mess, but most of all it is our propen­si­ty for talk­ing shit, when we have no idea what we are talk­ing about.

Sure, we have had bad police shoot­ings in our coun­try, as have every oth­er coun­try in which there is pover­ty, drugs, lack of oppor­tu­ni­ties and lots of guns and ammu­ni­tion. That is not to say we are okay with them, but we under­stand that they occur.
What is been done with the data on police-relat­ed shoot­ings is a duplic­i­tous con­fla­tion of the num­bers in order to advance a cer­tain point of view, to shape pol­i­cy and to empow­er and legit­imize out­siders who would inter­fere in our coun­try’s affairs. It is instruc­tive to con­sid­er that they do not put chains or restraints on their law enforce­ment offi­cials and they damn sure do not tol­er­ate vio­lence in their own soci­eties.
By virtue of them con­flat­ing every police-relat­ed shoot­ing into a bad shoot­ing, every police-relat­ed killing became an “extra-judi­cial killing.“
Remember my ini­tial point about peo­ple trained in one dis­ci­pline being viewed as know it all? Well then, you have Carolyn Gomez a baby doc­tor, Susan Goffe [a know-noth­ing loud­mouth], Horace Levy anoth­er loud­mouth who argued crim­i­nal gangs, were [corner-crews]sic, in order to dis­cred­it the police’s ver­sion of events.
Now, these tools could have cried in their soup all they want­ed with­out con­se­quence, if there was strong lead­er­ship in Jamaica House. But we did not, we had Bruce Golding a weak pow­er hun­gry tool who ran away from the labor par­ty to form the National Democratic Movement only to fail and run back to the Labor par­ty and Edward Seaga with his tail between his legs.
Yes, that same Bruce Golding who refused to extra­dite Christopher [Duddus] Coke to face jus­tice in the United States for his crimes.
Rather than look at the data and stand up for the police depart­ment which had been dec­i­mat­ed by the weak and feck­less fail­ure Percival Patterson, Golding gave over the coun­try to Carolyn Gomez and Jamaicans for Justice.

Rather than com­mence a pro­gram of repair­ing the ram­shackle police sta­tions, pro­vid­ing com­put­ers to the police so that crit­i­cal data can be uploaded in the fight against the Island’s equipped crim­i­nals , and rather than pay­ing the police bet­ter and pro­vid­ing them with more of the tools they need­ed, includ­ing leg­isla­tive tools, Bruce Golding was too busy defend­ing Duddus Coke.
Bruce Golding admit­ted to hir­ing Manatt, Phelps & Phillips to lob­by Washington for a favor­able out­come in the con­tentious ‘Dudus’ extra­di­tion dra­ma, accord­ing to the Observer.
Golding had pre­vi­ous­ly lied to the nation’s par­lia­ment in 2010 when ques­tioned by the Opposition’s Peter Phillips about the inci­dent.
In the end, Bruce Golding was forced to fess up to hir­ing the law firm, but even then he man­aged to couch his das­tard­ly actions by stat­ing that the pay­ment came from the JLP rather than the Government.
So for Bruce Golding, it was okay for the Jamaica Labor Party to pay a for­eign law firm to lob­by for a favor­able out­come for a gun run­ning drug lord, while the police had no tools to do their jobs.

Said Bruce Golding.….

“I SANCTIONED THE INITIATIVE, KNOWING THAT SUCH INTERVENTIONS HAVE IN THE PAST PROVEN TO BE OF CONSIDERABLE VALUE IN DEALING WITH ISSUES INVOLVING THE GOVERNMENTS OF BOTH COUNTRIES. I MADE IT CLEAR, HOWEVER, THAT THIS WAS AN INITIATIVE TO BE UNDERTAKEN BY THE PARTY, NOT BY OR ON BEHALF OF THE GOVERNMENT,” GOLDING SAID YESTERDAY.
“A PAYMENT OF US$49,892.62 WAS MADE TO MANATT, PHELPS & PHILLIPS ON SEPTEMBER 18TH 2009. THESE FUNDS WERE SOURCED FROM FINANCIAL CONTRIBUTORS TO THE PARTY. RUMORS AND SPECULATION CARRIED IN THE MEDIA THAT THESE FUNDS WERE PROVIDED BY CHRISTOPHER COKE ARE COMPLETELY FALSE AS THE PARTY IS FULLY AWARE OF THE SOURCE OF THESE FUNDS,” HE ADDED.
PRIME MINISTER GOLDING FURTHER INSISTED THAT THERE WAS “ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ILLEGALLY OR SURREPTITIOUS” ABOUT WHAT HAD BEEN DONE, ARGUING THAT THE ENGAGEMENT OF LOBBYISTS TO ACT ON BEHALF OF FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS, POLITICAL PARTIES OR CORPORATIONS IS A WELL-KNOWN PRACTICE IN THE UNITED STATES GOVERNED BY LAW. SOURCE: CARIBBEAN 360

Today, Bruce Golding’s cre­ation, INDECOM , has been proven a dis­mal fail­ure. The agency lies and influ­ences man­u­fac­tured wit­ness­es to give false affi­davits and to lie under oath in order to con­vict police offi­cers for crimes they did not com­mit, all to pad arrest and con­vic­tion num­bers. Those num­bers are not arrests of crim­i­nals, they are the false arrest of police offi­cers who go out to pro­tect the coun­try for the most part.
INDECOM has not earned it keeps, but it has sure­ly result­ed in an increase in vio­lent crimes as the Island’s mur­der­ers are no longer afraid of the police com­ing after them. Yet in 2018 the Jamaican tax­pay­ers coughed up in excess of $353.35 mil­lion Jamaican dol­lars to fund that mon­ey suck­ing dark hole..
The rest of the fund­ing comes from even dark­er cor­ners of the International com­mu­ni­ty, with inter­ests which do not line up with a pros­per­ous Jamaica.
As one of my friends wrote in response to one of our arti­cles recent­ly, well why not let him tell it?

Until the police are giv­en a state man­date to fight and push back crime we are beat­ing a dead horse here. A coun­try with 2.8million peo­ple should nev­er be so crime-prone with all the cul­tur­al and psy­cho­log­i­cal ameni­ties avail­able for just about every­body. With so much over­sight groups cre­at­ed to over­see such a small police force in fight­ing crime against some of the most vicious crim­i­nals on the plan­et is egregious,the mil­lions of dol­lars allot­ted to finance unessen­tial agen­cies like Indecom is a total waste of gov­ern­ment funds, instead such monies would be wis­er spent on health care, edu­ca­tion and equip­ping the secu­ri­ty forces bet­ter to deal with crime and vio­lence. It has been cost­ing the health care sys­tem in Jamaica an astro­nom­i­cal amount of mon­ey annu­al­ly just to deal with every­day trau­ma cas­es at hos­pi­tals across the coun­try just to treat peo­ple with gun­shot wounds derived from crim­i­nal shoot­ings which clear­ly under­scores my plea to cut fund­ing for Indecom dras­ti­cal­ly and real­lo­cate the mon­ey to the hos­pi­tals around the coun­try. The amount of wan­ton killings and shoot­ing of inno­cent Jamaicans far out­num­bers the num­ber of ques­tion­able shoot­ings alleged to have done by our secu­ri­ty forces,the time is now to repeal or aban­don the Indecom act and release the shack­les from our men and women in uni­form to go out and face the killing machine which is the crime mon­ster. Hamish Campbell needs to be sent pack­ing back to England where he belongs and to the coun­try which start­ed our social woes in the first place. As for big mouth Williams,he needs to go and set up shop for a law prac­tice which he went to school for and get paid from the crim­i­nals and gun­men which he is so obsessed with for him to defend them in courts of law in the coun­try and stop free­load­ing off a sys­tem which is strug­gling to finance it’s secu­ri­ty forces effi­cient­ly to fight crime in a crime-rid­den bas­tion in the Caribbean called Jamaica . (LS)

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police cor­po­ral, busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. He is also a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge.

We Jamaicans have always been known to be uncon­strained by rules, bound­aries or laws. We are wild and crazy peo­ple, who will push the bound­aries of accept­abil­i­ty, until the rope line flings us back­ward.
It is that kind of wild aban­don which makes us uncon­cerned about obey­ing laws and rules while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly demand­ing peace and tran­quil­i­ty with­in the same space in which we cre­at­ed the dis­qui­et and may­hem.
We demand that the police deal deci­sive­ly with the issue of crime while we protest when they arrest the crim­i­nals. We expect the trap­pings and com­forts of mod­ern first-world soci­eties, yet we are reluc­tant to deal with the incon­ve­niences which must pre­cede the lay­ing of the mod­ern infra­struc­ture we crave.

It seems to me that we are in a dilem­ma about what it takes to bring Jamaica to the stage we all want her to be because we are a microwave peo­ple who must have what we want now and with­out any delay. That is the quag­mire in which we find our­selves, as we seem­ing­ly are unaware of what it takes to build the kind of soci­ety we demand.
At the cen­ter of this quag­mire are some polit­i­cal lead­ers whom I must con­clude, knows what it takes to build our soci­ety the right way, but are more con­cerned with elec­tabil­i­ty than speak­ing the truth to their con­stituents.
I do under­stand that dilem­ma, we are an opin­ion­at­ed peo­ple who will not allow facts or ratio­nal rea­son­ing to get in the way of our emo­tions and pre­con­ceived per­cep­tions.
Then there are oth­ers I think, like the PNP’s Damion Crawford who is smart, intel­li­gent and is unafraid to tell it like it is.
That may explain why Crawford is find­ing it dif­fi­cult to acquire or hold on to a seat in the low­er cham­ber in Gordon House.
The major­i­ty of the peo­ple are still unpre­pared and unwill­ing to hear intel­li­gent truth so they hold onto mis­placed fan­tas­ti­cal myths.

The ques­tion I con­tin­ue to ask of the Jamaican peo­ple is this, ” how do we attain a soci­ety built on the rule of law, if the law­mak­ers are them­selves, crim­i­nals’?
How do we build a soci­ety where every­one is able to live out their lives in secu­ri­ty and peace if we are unwill­ing to sub­mit to the laws of the coun­try?
How do we com­pete in the world if we con­tin­ue to cre­ate a [pre­ten­tious sys­tem] which is soft on crim­i­nals, while we demand an end to crime?
The sim­ple answer is that we can­not. We have to make the hard choic­es that we do not want the lev­el of crim­i­nal­i­ty that present­ly exist in our coun­try and at the same time, we must be pre­pared to accept that remov­ing all of that garbage will not be pleas­ant to look at.
If we fail to make the hard choic­es we are mere­ly delay­ing the inevitable. Given enough time we will not have the abil­i­ty to turn back from this precipice we are head­ing toward. 

After the sec­ond world war, the Russians built out and expand­ed Communism all across Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and even in satel­lites as close to us as Cuba and across Latin America. Jamaica may have been saved the destruc­tive clutch­es of Communism by the late Edward Seaga, who pushed back against Michael Manley’s deter­mined flir­ta­tions with author­i­tar­i­an­ism and his desires to see Jamaica become a satel­lite of the then Soviet Union.
Today many Jamaicans are fix­at­ed with the notion of the CIA’s inter­fer­ence in our coun­try, but they are bliss­ful­ly unaware of what was about to beset our coun­try, had Michael Manley had his way in turn­ing Jamaica into a proxy of the Soviet Union.
Sure, the CIA’s inter­fered in our affairs, but the actions of the Americans were direct­ly attrib­ut­able to ensur­ing that the Soviet Union did not gain anoth­er foothold in their back­yard, they were already in Cuba and Nicaragua, etc..

Manley was deter­mined to teth­er our coun­try to a fail­ing 20^th-cen­tu­ry mil­i­tary pow­er. One which was oper­at­ing on an unsus­tain­able 19^th-cen­tu­ry eco­nom­ic mod­el.
States of the for­mer Soviet Union like Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania, etc, were bare­ly eking out a liv­ing through sub­sis­tence farm­ing, done large­ly through the use of horse and ox-drawn plows. Yet the pro­ceeds of their efforts had to go Russia, the cen­ter of the Empire to fund Russian mil­i­taris­tic exploits across the globe. In the end, the Soviet Empire crum­bled because it was a mam­moth iron beast with feet made out of clay.
The Soviet empire col­lapsed because it ran out of mon­ey, plain and sim­ple. Hungry, angry, broke and dis­il­lu­sioned many of the for­mer satel­lites of the Soviet Union hat­ed the Russians.
They them­selves want­ed out of the Soviet vice and could not wait to break away and align them­selves to the west as soon as the cracks became evi­dent in the com­mu­nist façade.

In the same way, the Soviet empire crum­bled because it could not sus­tain itself, Jamaica, an Island which begged to become a satel­lite of that sink­ing ship, can­not build a pros­per­ous soci­ety unless it faces up to the real­i­ty that the cor­rup­tion in the soci­ety is a major hin­drance to full growth and devel­op­ment let alone pros­per­i­ty.
Sure the present admin­is­tra­tion has made some pos­i­tive eco­nom­ic moves which have borne pos­i­tive results. The results of which are evi­dent in the growth indices. Nevertheless, those num­bers are nowhere near where they need to be for any­one to begin cel­e­brat­ing.
In a March 18^th, 2019, Editorial theDaily Gleaner said the following. 

Despite min­is­ter of finance Nigel Clarke’s valiant attempt at play­ing up the growth num­bers for last year dur­ing his Budget pre­sen­ta­tion, the real­i­ty is that the hope for an accel­er­a­tion of gross domes­tic prod­uct (GDP) growth in the Jamaican econ­o­my has not occurred. The much-her­ald­ed Growth Council does not appear like­ly to real­ize its ‘5 in 4’ growth tar­get. The last time the Jamaican econ­o­my grew any­where near to three per­cent per annum was over a decade ago. The Jamaican econ­o­my seems stub­born­ly locked into a low growth equi­lib­ri­um path, aver­ag­ing only about one per­cent per annum over the last 30 years. Over the same peri­od, the Chinese econ­o­my, for exam­ple, has had dou­ble-dig­it annu­al GDP growth rates, result­ing in the com­plete trans­for­ma­tion of the econ­o­my and soci­ety. For Jamaica to achieve the much sought-after trans­for­ma­tion, it must grow for a sus­tained peri­od at an annu­al rate of at least five per­cent per annum. Growth has elud­ed the coun­try, despite tremen­dous efforts at reforms. Much more needs to be done to achieve faster growth.
http://​jamaica​-glean​er​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​c​o​m​m​e​n​t​a​r​y​/​2​0​1​9​0​3​1​8​/​e​d​i​t​o​r​i​a​l​-​g​r​o​w​t​h​-​a​n​d​-​2​019 – 20-bud­get

(1) That [much more] entails, relax­ing the mas­sive bureau­crat­ic bur­den­some restric­tions which dis­cour­ages peo­ple from start­ing new busi­ness­es. As a result, they resort to the under­ground econ­o­my which is thriv­ing and grow­ing.
(2) Eliminating cor­rup­tion from pub­lic bod­ies engen­ders trust and gives poten­tial investors and entre­pre­neurs the con­fi­dence they need to invest, there­by expand­ing the for­mal econ­o­my.
(3) Most con­se­quen­tial, is the need to arrest the free­dom of the mur­der­ous gangs which have all but tak­en over the Island, and are oper­at­ing with near impuni­ty.
Without a doubt, the lethar­gic growth rate that has plagued the Island, is direct­ly attrib­ut­able to the fear investors, dias­po­ra- res­i­dents and oth­ers feel of being mur­dered.
The free­dom of crim­i­nals to sum­mar­i­ly mur­der whomev­er they will and get away with it, stems direct­ly from the lack of tes­tic­u­lar for­ti­tude com­ing from the lead­er­ship on what to do to the mur­der­ers.
Instead of ensur­ing that there is no safe haven for mur­der­ers in our coun­try, the Island’s polit­i­cal lead­ers have cre­at­ed and main­tained a false nar­ra­tive that stri­dent­ly and deci­sive­ly enforc­ing the nation’s laws is the same as abus­ing the rights of cit­i­zens.
This non­sense has giv­en immense cov­er to those who would engage in, har­bor, and sup­port crim­i­nal behav­ior.
And so like the Soviets the Jamaican peo­ple are being conned into a sense that pros­per­i­ty is just around the cor­ner. The pros­per­i­ty which they will nev­er see with the present con­di­tions even if they man­age to stay alive. 

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police cor­po­ral, busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. He is also a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge.

Jamaica’s mur­der sta­tis­tics are not get­ting bet­ter, in fact, they are get­ting worse. This year the Island is on track to record an even greater num­ber of mur­ders than it did last year.
In an attempt to fool the pub­lic, and cre­ate for the International com­mu­ni­ty, a sense that they are on top of the Island’s bur­geon­ing crime epi­dem­ic, the gov­ern­ment has embarked on a series of ini­tia­tives designed to pla­cate and con­fuse.
Chief among the admin­is­tra­tion’s smoke and mir­ror cha­rade is the (SOE) State Of Emergencies, and (ZOSO’s) Zones Of Special Operations, both of which includes the flood­ing of com­mu­ni­ties with the bod­ies of police and sol­diers, spot-checks and oth­er show of force band-aid approach­es, which are high­ly inef­fec­tu­al and sim­ply laugh­able as crime pre­ven­tion strate­gies in this day and age.

The Jamaican Prime Minister would rather hob­nob with for­eign lead­ers like Benjamin Netanyahu, of the apartheid state of Israel with­out acknowl­edg­ing that those lead­ers do not tol­er­ate the lev­els of crim­i­nal­i­ty that he tol­er­ates. Even though they may be total­ly cor­rupt shit-bags them­selves.
The Prime min­is­ter’s horse and pony show were in full dis­play at the police fed­er­a­tion’s retreat in Ocho Rios recent­ly. There he showed up and dis­re­spect­ed them, reeled off a laun­dry list of plat­i­tudes and promis­es, all while telling them that what he real­ly wants is for them to be nice to the blood-thirsty mur­der­ers who are wag­ing war on the Jamaican peo­ple.
For the record, if this for­mer cop was a mem­ber of that group, as soon as he start­ed with his bull­shit I would have got­ten up and walked out.
Wouldn’t it have been nice if every­one had got­ten up and walked out leav­ing him stand­ing there talk­ing to Chang, Fitz Jackson and Antony Anderson?
Or bet­ter yet, take a tact from what the NYPD offi­cers did to Mayor Deblasio, who was far less deserv­ing of the cops action’s than Holness is.
Yea, but we are talk­ing about Jamaican cops, they are too shit scared to stand up for them­selves, so every Tom Harry and every Dick dis­re­spects them.
Nothing like the NYPD offi­cers, who to a man, turned their backs on Mayor Deblasio when they thought he had dis­re­spect­ed them.

The dam­age being done to our coun­try’s secu­ri­ty infra­struc­ture by this admin­is­tra­tion will be incal­cu­la­ble. This is not to sug­gest that the People’s National Party is in any way more equipped to deal with the new crop of hard­core crim­i­nals who are now oper­at­ing in the Jamaican space.
On the one hand, the Prime min­is­ter and his (non-police, ‑police com­mis­sion­er Antony Anderson), (Horace Chang, the National Security Minister, who heads St James most intractable gar­ri­son) is pulling the wool over the nation’s col­lec­tive eyes, Delroy Chuck the so-called (Justice Minister) is work­ing assid­u­ous­ly to strength­en the hands of crim­i­nals, by try­ing to give them a new start after they have com­mit­ted mur­der.
Or worse to ensure that they do not face tri­al for their crimes.

Delroy Chuck has orches­trat­ed a slick scheme which takes full advan­tage of the coun­try’s inabil­i­ty to bring cas­es to a res­o­lu­tion in a [time­ly man­ner].
As far as the Chuck and Holness show goes, vio­lent crim­i­nals (includ­ing mur­der­ers), will have their cas­es tossed from court dock­ets if there is no res­o­lu­tion at the end of five years. As I have writ­ten exclu­sive­ly before, this in and of itself is an invi­ta­tion and an oppor­tu­ni­ty for high-priced influ­en­tial crim­i­nal defense lawyers to get cre­ative in bring­ing to a vir­tu­al stop, mur­der cas­es involv­ing well-con­nect­ed accused, with a view to hav­ing those cas­es tossed.
Every accused per­son charged with a crime does have a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to a speedy tri­al. Now, what con­sti­tutes a speedy tri­al is for the experts to decide.
Nevertheless what it should nev­er be, is a gate­way and or an excuse for cor­rupt politi­cians to pre­vent their cohorts from fac­ing jus­tice, or to san­i­tize their vio­lent mur­der­ous crim­i­nal records as this admin­is­tra­tion is try­ing to do as we speak.
The issues which are being recy­cled by the gov­ern­ment are knee-jerk pro­pos­als which are not well thought out by peo­ple in the know.
Under the lead­er­ship of Commissioner Carl Williams, the Government through the JCF embarked on what they called then, a get the guns cam­paign.
I was opposed to it then, and I specif­i­cal­ly stat­ed the fol­low­ing.
Essentially, this is just anoth­er Gun Amnesty which gen­er­al­ly does pre­cious lit­tle to reduce Crime but pro­vides a stream of income to those already immersed in crim­i­nal con­duct and more specif­i­cal­ly those engaged in the gun trade. Generally, Criminals do not give up their guns, they will turn over unused or unus­able old weapons to the police while hold­ing onto their stash of real weapons.
Probably more con­se­quen­tial, a gun amnesty opens up new oppor­tu­ni­ties for gun traders to source weapons ille­gal­ly then sim­ply sell them to the Police/​Government at a prof­it.
The new head of the Police Federation echoed this posi­tion on nation­al radio days ago. It is good to see that they are begin­ning to learn some­thing and push back against the insan­i­ty of the Government, even though he mealy-mouthed said he was not opposed to it.

Ask your­selves this ques­tion, what kind of gov­ern­ment refus­es to lay down the laws to crim­i­nals in defense of the peo­ple?
What is the fear of going after crim­i­nals, first with laws so puni­tive that every per­son with an ille­gal gun would bury it and nev­er look back at the spot where that gun is buried?
What it will take for the Jamaican peo­ple to wake up and smell the cof­fee is any­one’s guess. After all, we are not peo­ple par­tic­u­lar­ly well known for crit­i­cal think­ing. Political loy­al­ties are life­long, break­ing out of those con­fines are not some­thing we are known for.
The across the board assault on the way we effec­tu­ate the rule of law in Jamaica at the present time, does not lend itself to a reduc­tion in the crime sta­tis­tics.
Conversely, it will result in new lev­els of crim­i­nal­i­ty in Jamaica and even­tu­al­ly, across the region no one bar­gained for, as Jamaican crim­i­nals take their brand of mur­der and may­hem international.

It is not out of the ordi­nary for Jamaican crim­i­nals to cre­ate mam­moth empires and build them out inter­na­tion­al­ly, result­ing in tremen­dous grief to tens of thou­sands of inno­cent peo­ple spread out over large geo­graph­i­cal areas.
The Shower and Spangler’s poss­es were two of the more well known and infa­mous ones, but there has been a long litany of oth­er vio­lent Jamaican crim­i­nal gangs which were forced to leave Jamaica dur­ing the 80’s rule of now deceased for­mer Prime Minister Edward Seaga.
Faced with long prison sen­tences or cer­tain death those gang­sters emi­grat­ed to the United States Canada and Britain and changed the way law enforce­ment dealt with gangs, particular;y in the United States of America.
The “Showa Possee,” a mur­der­ous gang which had its roots in Tivoli Gardens is eas­i­ly the most renowned of those gangs.
To this day, law enforce­ment and media enti­ties in the United States believe that the gang derived its name from show­er­ing its adver­saries with bul­lets.
The truth of the mat­ter is that the Gang derived its name from its asso­ci­a­tion with the Jamaica Labor Party and it’s 80’s mantra “Showa”.
These groups, includ­ing the [Showa Posse] in par­tic­u­lar, were key­to the Authorities deci­sions to draft tough laws like the “Rico statute” in the United States, which linked oper­a­tives of those gangs into crim­i­nal enter­pris­es, and insti­tut­ed seri­ous puni­tive reme­dies for par­tic­i­pa­tion in such groups.
That was in the ’80s when those crim­i­nals ran away from Jamaica, this is 2019 and crim­i­nals are not run­ning away from Jamaica they are being dumped onto Jamaica through the process of depor­ta­tion from every coun­try in which Jamaicans live and break their laws.
Juxtapose that with the tech­no­log­i­cal advances of today, the smarts of today’s crim­i­nals the shack­les which have been placed on the police in Jamaica, and it is easy to see where this is headed.

For those in the dias­po­ra who wish­es to pull their heads from their polit­i­cal ass­es, as well as the Island’s tra­di­tion­al part­ners, it is impor­tant that what this admin­is­tra­tion is doing is not allowed to go with­out a response.
The entire process is cor­rupt to the core. How do we get to a place where a court agrees with a dou­ble mur­der­er that his con­sti­tu­tion­al rights are infringed by his being in jail for a few years with­out a trial?

Mervin Cameron and Christopher Wilson, were arrest­ed and charged with mur­der, con­spir­a­cy to com­mit mur­der, ille­gal pos­ses­sion of a firearm, and rob­bery for the 2012 mur­der of Barrington Davis, then deputy chief of secu­ri­ty at Jamaica Post, and his female friend, Patricia Lumont-Barnswell.
Cameron was award­ed dam­ages and request­ed a $30-mil­lion pay­out from the Government after he lan­guished in jail for near­ly six years while his case wound its way through the court sys­tem.
Yes, a Jamaican court agreed with a mur­der­er that being locked up as he awaits tri­al was a breach of his con­sti­tu­tion­al rights.
The court, in a land­mark two-to-one major­i­ty rul­ing hand­ed down last year, found that his con­sti­tu­tion­al right had been vio­lat­ed and award­ed him dam­age, but ordered pros­e­cu­tors to pro­ceed with his tri­al swift­ly.
Davis and Lumont-Barnswell were kid­napped from his home in St John’s Heights, St Catherine, in August 2012. Their decom­posed bod­ies were found with mul­ti­ple gun­shot wounds in a cane field in Innswood, also in St Catherine, accord­ing to local report­ing.
Of Friday, May 31^st the Home Circuit Court in down­town Kingston hand­ed down a unan­i­mous ver­dict of guilty in the case against Mervin Cameron and Christopher Wilson. 

This is what Jamaica has become, a top-to-bot­tom crim­i­nal enhance­ment enter­prise which pays lip ser­vice to the rule of law but behind the scenes is inher­ent­ly cor­rupt.
When the Prime Minister speaks with his forked tongue about police asso­ci­a­tions, he knows ful­ly well just how hyp­o­crit­i­cal and duplic­i­tous­ly he is as he makes those asser­tions.
Sure, some police offi­cers are cor­rupt, but an arm of gov­ern­ment being some­what cor­rupt is a func­tion of a com­plic­it gov­ern­ment.
What is hap­pen­ing to Jamaica is over much of the Jamaican pop­u­la­tion heads.
In the end, it is the ordi­nary man who ends up dead on the street cor­ners dai­ly. Their bul­let-rid­dled bod­ies grotesque­ly sprawled encased in their own dry­ing blood, or their heads chopped off.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police cor­po­ral, busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. He is also a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge.

What can we say about Karine Jean-Pierre, MoveOn’s chief pub­lic affairs offi­cer who jumped up imme­di­ate­ly to con­front the man who invad­ed the stage and grabbed the Microphone from Senator Kamala Harri’s hand?

While Senator Kamala Harris was speak­ing on a MoveOn pan­el, an audi­ence mem­ber came on stage and stole the micro­phone from the 2020 pres­i­den­tial can­di­date. Shortly after, the man was tak­en off the stage and the sen­a­tor rejoined the panel. 

The guy who took Kamala Harris’ mic, Aidan Cook, 24 of Oakland, said he’s try­ing to bring more atten­tion to the mass extinc­tion of ani­mals. He is not being charged with a crime, he said, adding that the MoveOn secu­ri­ty crew was “cool about it.” 

Anyone with a shred of decen­cy, hon­esty, and fair­ness must be offend­ed at Andrew Holness’s dis­gust­ing behav­ior as a guest of the Police at their retreat in Ocho Rios days ago.
Or bet­ter yet, maybe I should say that in anoth­er coun­try that kind of behav­ior would have been met with a sol­id wall of con­dem­na­tion and sig­nif­i­cant con­se­quences to boot.
Unfortunately, Jamaica is not that kind of coun­try, it is a coun­try with a polit­i­cal class which is large­ly a bunch of crim­i­nals, a cheer­lead­ing media which also hates the police, a pseu­do-intel­lec­tu­al class with its col­lec­tive head so far up its own pre­ten­tious ass to be of use to the coun­try, and an oth­er­wise vast­ly illit­er­ate masses.

To begin with, when you are an invit­ed guest in anoth­er man’s house you act mag­nan­i­mous­ly to your host. It does not mean that you nec­es­sar­i­ly agree with every­thing that that per­son ever did or say, but it means that for that brief moment that you are an invit­ed guest you show that man some damn respect. If you do not have it in you to have some class, stay away.
But what Andrew Holness did was even more class­less, because while he was dis­re­spect­ing the poor feck­less police rep­re­sen­ta­tives at their own retreat, two police offi­cers had just been shot a mere two days ear­li­er and nar­row­ly escaped death at the hands of the maraud­ing thugs Andrew Holness wants the police to be def­er­en­tial to.

And so even though Holness is with­in his rights to hate the Police, as a prod­uct of his unfor­tu­nate and blight­ed envi­ron­ment, it was high­ly inap­pro­pri­ate that he would con­tin­ue to berate and dis­re­spect the hard-work­ing men and women of the police depart­ment who fool­ish­ly invit­ed him to address them.
Sure some crim­i­nals have seeped into the police force, that is regret­table. Some have also seeped into the Parliament and into Jamaica House as well, and that is vast­ly more con­se­quen­tial.
I did not hear Holness berate Andrew Wheatley who was forced to resign over the Pertojam scan­dal. After all the Petrojam scan­dal has been a scan­dal of epic pro­por­tion which has cost the Jamaican peo­ple untold bil­lions of dol­lars in lost rev­enue.
I did not hear Holness berate Ruel Reid over his scan­dal, lav­ish spend­ing and report­ed­ly alleged cor­rupt prac­tices as Minister of Education.
I did not hear Holness Criticize Carl Samuda who was alleged­ly forced to repay the Jamaican peo­ple for the work­ers who were report­ed­ly work­ing on his farm on tax-pay­ers dime.
Should I go on or have I made my point about the ram­pant cor­rup­tion which has char­ac­ter­ized the Holness Administration?
Because we can go on and detail point by point the inci­dences of cor­rup­tion in this three-year Government.

The Prime Minister, as Minister of Defense, is well with­in his right to be crit­i­cal of police cor­rup­tion, as long as he is equal­ly adamant and vocif­er­ous­ness about cor­rup­tion across the board begin­ning with his own admin­is­tra­tion.
He is well allowed to lash out against Police asso­ci­a­tions with under­world fig­ures, as long as he also looks behind him and in front of his seat in Gordon House at the well-dressed crooks parad­ing as men of char­ac­ter.
What we have in this Prime Minister, is a man who is a prod­uct of and a mind­set which was derived from the past, steeped in igno­rance of what mod­ern day police ought to look like to pro­tect the peo­ple and the stub­born­ness and lack of humil­i­ty to acknowl­edge that he does­n’t know what he is talk­ing about.
In the end, Andrew Holness is a prod­uct of the gar­ri­son pol­i­tics our coun­try must eschew, he is a Socialist, schooled and edu­cat­ed in far left ide­o­log­i­cal think­ing parad­ing as a con­ser­v­a­tive Prime Minister.
He under­stands noth­ing about what the rule of law means fun­da­men­tal­ly to the well­be­ing and devel­op­ment of a peo­ple. His sub­se­quent fix­a­tion with abus­ing and demo­niz­ing the police are bound to cause more harm than it will end the unmit­i­gat­ed blood­shed in our country. 

And now it pains me to see that the Party of Bustamante and Hugh Lawson Shearer, has become the anti-police par­ty. It is no sur­prise that as Edward Seaga the last leader who believed in the rule of law (some­what), has passed, the Labor par­ty my grand­par­ents sup­port­ed, have become the par­ty of Bruce Golding and Andrew Holness, elit­ist frauds who hate the police.
Make no mis­take about it when Andrew Holness stood in front of del­e­gates of the Police Federation and the entire nation and talks about cre­at­ing a police force for good, he is say­ing that the police which exist­ed before was and have always been a force for evil.
That has been his argu­ment all along. His dis­re­spect and hatred of the police come direct­ly from a dark place with­in his inner sanc­tum, as the Member of Parliament of one of the most entrenched gar­risons on the Island.
The many police offi­cers who paid the ulti­mate price in ser­vice to their coun­try do not deserve a weak punk of a politi­cian spit­ting on their grave in dis­re­spect.
What has Andrew Holness sac­ri­ficed for Jamaica?
Absolutely noth­ing!

My squad-mate arrived for Police train­ing with his Bible. He was the most inno­cent, gra­cious and God-fear­ing guy imag­in­able. He always had a smile on his face.
After grad­u­a­tion Seiveright took that same con­ge­nial­i­ty, civil­i­ty, and Christianity to the streets. As a patrol­man sta­tioned at the Motorized Patrol, one night he approached a sus­pi­cious taxi-cab his dri­ver pulled over on the Ferry main road.
Courteous as always, Seiverright approached the cab with the same degree of naïveté’, which Andrew Holness, his min­is­ter of nation­al secu­ri­ty, and his [non-police] com­mis­sion­er have toward actu­al polic­ing.
Before Seiveright could greet the occu­pants of the cab, he was greet­ed with a bel­ly­ful of 9mm bul­lets, he had no bal­lis­tic vest.
At the time we had no bal­lis­tic vests. 

When I was shot in 88 bal­lis­tic vests was­n’t a con­sid­er­a­tion, we sim­ply did not have any.
Constable Seiveright was not a part of any force for evil, he was not an evil man. I was not a part of any force for evil, every day that I put on my uni­form and strapped on my util­i­ty belt, or but­toned up my shirt and laced up my shoes, as an inves­ti­ga­tor, I stepped out to help peo­ple, and make a safer coun­try for each and every law-abid­ing Jamaican.
The very idea of a tagline which now speaks about “a force for good,” is a dis­grace and a dis­re­spect­ful affront to the tens of thou­sands of offi­cers who gave of them­selves to their coun­try through­out the 151 years of the JCF ‘s his­to­ry. Despite the Yeomans sac­ri­fice the police has giv­en to nation build­ing the Jamaica Labor Party and this Prime Minister has demon­strat­ed that he has zero regards or respect for that ser­vice and sac­ri­fice.
Which brings me to think­ing about those offi­cers putting their lives on the line to pro­tect him.

This behav­ior is not about par­ty pol­i­tics. This is about an elit­ist Prime Minister, from a par­ty which has had prob­lems in the past with per­cep­tions of elit­ism.
But this tran­scends the elit­ism which nor­mal­ly char­ac­ter­izes the JLP and has kept the par­ty out of Jamaica house for almost two decades, because the aver­age man did not believe their goals and aspi­ra­tions were rep­re­sent­ed in the par­ty.
It is about a Politician who is bla­tant­ly igno­rant about a sub­ject and has, in an over­bear­ing way, inject­ed him­self into the mechan­ics of polic­ing and polic­ing poli­cies with­out the com­men­su­rate knowl­edge, or the sense to know that he does­n’t know what he does­n’t know.
In addi­tion to that, he fun­da­men­tal­ly believes that the police are so back­ward and stu­pid that despite their many years of expe­ri­ence and edu­ca­tion a suit­able com­mis­sion­er of police could not have come from the gazetted ranks of the force.
And to rem­e­dy that, he appoints a syco­phant who has zero law-enforce­ment expe­ri­ence to run a 12,000 man police force in one of the most volatile Islands in the Caribbean and one of the more crime-rid­den places on plan­et earth.
Not to men­tion the fact that this mil­i­tary General is the for­mer head of a 3’000 man defense force.
Now inso­far as that is con­cerned, I have no sym­pa­thy for the police brass. Many of them have been pret­ty much lap­dogs for the likes of Holness, crabs in a bar­rel, news car­ry­ing, pathet­ic excus­es for lead­ers, so they deserve the slap in the face. It is the hard-work­ing rank-and-file that I care about.

This requires no cliché, but make no mis­take about it, mess­ing with the Mobile Reserve and turn­ing the JCF into a cour­tesy corps instead of a force, com­pe­tent and able to deal with the chal­lenges and emerg­ing threats of the 21^st cen­tu­ry, will have sus­tained and sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges and con­se­quences for Jamaica.
INDECOM was the brain­child of Bruce Golding, Andrew Holness’ men­tor.
That has not worked so well for Jamaica, but there is far too much pre­tense and denial with­in the Jamaican intel­lec­tu­al space to walk that back. On this issue, the idea of an intel­lec­tu­al space is [oxy­moron­ic].
Sure the police aren’t shoot­ing the crim­i­nals as they are used to doing, so the crim­i­nals are shoot­ing more inno­cent peo­ple than they were used to doing.
But INDECOM, the Albatros, will be around the col­lec­tive necks of Jamaicans, and the killers will con­tin­ue to find solace in the fact that the police have no incen­tive to come after them.
In the mean­time, the gov­ern­ment will con­tin­ue to blow smoke up the nation’s ass, about the effec­tive­ness of INDECOM with­out ever men­tion­ing the fact that the end does not jus­ti­fy the means. Fewer bad guys are get­ting shot as more good guys are being mur­dered.
This is the twi­light zone that Jamaica has become.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police cor­po­ral, busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. He is also a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge.

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