When Merely Securing A Loan Becomes A Major Accomplishment , You Know The Country Is In Trouble.

I find it instruc­tive that when Transparency International labels Jamaica 84% cor­rupt no one gets angry. When the Chicago Tribune bears out the stark fact that Jamaica’s debt bur­den is worse that of Greece no one gets angry. You know what ?We should all be angry, not at the mes­sen­gers who show these truths, we should be pissed at the peo­ple who got us there.

The same peo­ple who have been in elect­ed office(elected used liberally)have been in pol­i­tics since I was a child , they still hold polit­i­cal pow­er today, not because the peo­ple are stu­pid, but because they have bor­rowed tremen­dous sums of mon­ey from over­seas lenders,and have through the decades cre­at­ed zones of polit­i­cal exclusions.

What that means is that both polit­i­cal par­ties have cement­ed their pow­er in cer­tain geo­graph­i­cal areas of the coun­try, mak­ing it impos­si­ble for them to be vot­ed out of office. One par­ty has been expo­nen­tial­ly bet­ter at it than the oth­er, nation­al elec­tion results have borne this out .

It is called ger­ry­man­der­ing here in the US. It isn’t ille­gal but it’s immoral and dis­hon­est. What we end up with is over one tril­lion Dollars US dol­lar of debt, well over half of the coun­try’s gross domes­tic prod­uct is spent on debt ser­vic­ing. Meaning pay­ing on inter­est on these loans , not on the principal.

The down-side to doing this is that in order to fill bud­getary short­fall they have to bor­row more mon­ey to run the coun­try which sends the amount need­ed for inter­est pay­ments sky­rock­et­ing through the roof .

At that rate pret­ty soon the entire gross domes­tic prod­uct will be required and then some, to ser­vice inter­est pay­ments. And did I men­tion that the prin­ci­pal loans will still be there?

That will leave noth­ing to run the coun­try. That my dear friends is called eco­nom­ic col­lapse. As we have seen lenders like the IMF are very reluc­tant to board a sink­ing ship, this last time around they were very reluc­tant to free up any more loans to Jamaica.

When lender Agencies do free up loans , they come with mul­ti­ple strings attached. Those mea­sures fur­ther com­pli­cates the prob­lem by adding pain to an already over-bur­dened peo­ple and con­stricts the econ­o­my through lay­offs and spend­ing cuts.

When the econ­o­my gets small­er the gov­ern­ment rais­es tax­es to fill short-falls which in turn gives them a tem­po­rary quick-fix of cash but that is like cot­ton-can­dy it invari­ably leads to much less cash in the econ­o­my as peo­ple have less mon­ey to spend , there­by tight­en­ing the econ­o­my even fur­ther. The prob­lem is syn­ony­mous to a snow-ball careen­ing down-hill, get­ting big­ger with each rev­o­lu­tion, it will crash and when it does it will be cataclysmic.

The Jamaican peo­ple must stop berat­ing each oth­er while those they elect­ed to lead them build mam­moth man­sions as soon as they enter office and dri­ve around in import­ed lux­u­ry vehicles.

The time has come to hold their feet to the fire and demand to know where the mon­ey comes from to fur­nish the lifestyle they are liv­ing. We must stop giv­ing them a pass while Rome burns.