News coming out of Jamaica indicates an (IMF) International Monetary Fund deal could be coming as early as the end of this month.
To the Governing Administration this is good news, it potentially means that the Government will be able to pay its bills from monetary draw-downs of cash, made available by the fund.
Public sector workers will be guaranteed their salaries, the country will be able to pay for oil and take care of other monetary obligations. This all sound great, of course it sounds great, when you are coming from zero, the number one is a big improvement. What’s scary is that Administration officials and a large part of the population sees money from the IMF as a good thing, in fact the Administration is celebrating being able to secure this loan as a kind of achievement for the Government.
The Government sets the bar of success that low.
I caution my country-men however, to avail themselves to the catastrophic consequences of getting high on borrowed supplies. To do that we need to examine how we got to a place where merely securing a loan is celebrated as a major political accomplishment.
♦We , meaning Jamaica, borrowed a lot, from any and everyone who would loan us money.
♦ We, meaning politicians, wasted and stole those monies.
♦ We , meaning both political parties, kept borrowing more, to fill budgetary shortfalls from declining income and the crash of entire economic sectors.
♦ The more we, meaning Jamaica, borrowed the more interest those loans accrued, which required us to borrow more, because we had larger budget gaps to fill , coupled with declining income.
♦ This set us, meaning Jamaica, on a dangerous course of borrowing more, which means we are required to pay even more of the country’s earnings, servicing those interest payments.
♦ The result is that the country has less and less with each loan it secures, because the interest payments on those loans becomes more and more, leaving the Government with less and less money to actually run the country.
♦ While the country is doing this, be reminded that those principal loans are still intact , because we are merely servicing the interest payments, It is a dangerous game of Russian roulette, which is an existential threat to Jamaica’s national security and sovereignty.
♦ The Administration is happy to get the money , why not? It needs new bullet-proof high-end sports utility vehicles for its members to ride around in, at tax-payers expense and money to give to political operatives to secure votes, what’s not to love?
The problem with this cotton-candy approach to a hungry stomach, is that the ultimate consequence to our country is economic collapse and economic slavery of generations of Jamaicans yet unborn. Those loans are outstanding , they will have to be repaid, we are literally mortgaging our children’s future to those lenders. Already all of our national treasures have been sold to the Chinese, the Spaniards and God knows who else.
Jamaicans are literally becoming foreigners in their own country, our country is no better than a tin-pan dictatorship, run by a warlord. In fact our country has long been carved up into geographical enclaves ruled by local chieftains (dons) from different political parties and more recently, criminal gangs.
While this volcanic brew is smoldering, the new bourgeois’ (the never si cum si ) who live above Cross Roads continue to delude themselves, basking in what they perceive as the grandeur of the present situation, and their sense of importance in it all. Their influence and importance shape policy, they own the present state of affairs, most if not all of them has dual citizenship, or possesses American or Canadian Visas. What about the rest of the people? The very strategies they berate and demonize are the strategies which are employed in the countries which are safe havens for them ‚when things gets hot in Jamaica.
Americans , Canadians, and the Brits, simply do not allow criminals or criminal-supporting lobby, to tell them how to secure their countries. America the poster-child of democracy, is not shy about administering the death penalty to certain class of felons, after they have exhausted their appeals, in many states.
Does the death penalty guarantee that people will stop committing crimes ? Absolutely not. That was never the idea. What it does guarantee is, that one felon put to death will never be able to kill anyone else. And so it goes to others not deterred by capital punishment, when they kill society puts them to death, until others are deterred or society runs out of murderers, whichever comes first.