Who Will Save Bruce From The Bullies?

Funny how the Prime Minister can declare that the guvament will not be bullied. Hilarious when you look at recent interviews with him wherein he threatened to cut jobs if the guvament paid workers don’t stop demanding their contractually agreed on pay increase. Hell how he denied teachers their back pay with the lament; “We don’t have the money!”.

Congratulations on being flexible enough to repeal some of the stupid tax measures recently introduced, we know it hard, we know you need as much money as possible to get on with the business of the country.

However I would like to ask the guvament this: We don’t have any money you say, but you can find the money for not one or two labor day projects but three, how come?

Also, do you not think it looks very suspicious  that these projects are in constituencies where the members of parliament are facing challenges to their citizenship, and by extension their right to sit in parliament, will probably face a buy-election (like the well purchased one Vaz won), and are all JLP?

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You don’t have the money to pay teachers, police or civil servants, but to help protect your slim majority in parliament, you will find it to fund your pork barreled endeavours.

You will not be bullied!

No one in your circle of friends could ever survive on the pittance you pay the police, yet you demand they do.

You will not be bullied!

In the event of police “industrial action”, you have the military on stand-by. I suppose your intent is to have somebody safeguarding law and order, but it sounds more of a veiled threat to the police.

You will not be bullied!

You raise taxes, freeze wages, threaten to cut jobs (which you are still going to do) in order to get the underpaid people  to back down, to “tek wha dem get”.

You will not be bullied!

Meanwhile, rumblings in the Ministry of Mining and Energy are that James the Foul-Mouthed is busy cleaning house, kicking people out of their jobs to fill them with party loyalists.

He will not be bullied!

Traitor-to-the-trade-unions has declared war on gangs, declaring that “Gangs must be crushed!”.

We would love it if he indeed was not bullied, and that he does what he sets out to do, but since the bullies in the JCF won’t get their pay then it is difficult to see how much if any lasting effect your plans will have on crime in this country.

The guvament is going to ask these very underpaid men and women to risk their lives, even more than they currently do to fix the crime in society.

If I was a member of the constabulary I would quit.

$40,000 a month is not enough to face violent gangs, not enough to help my family, now, or if I die in the line of duty. Not enough to ensure my dedication to the job.

In fact, it is just the right amount at which the criminal element  may successfully bribe me.

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The criminals “bully” the country, the people who should be “bullying” the criminals are being “bullied” by Bruce, which makes us all buggered.

Perception

Ok, Bruce did his job. Good.

As the minister of defense he would have committed political suicide if he wasn’t as up front in the hijacking as he was, what with the budget due to be read in parliament.

So for leading from the front, good job.

Vaz on the other hand, in his capacity as information minister was very disappointing, sounding very much like the english-challenged lout i believe him to be. When asked questions about the matter his difficulty in getting the information across was embarrassing.

However, I am sure that many thought he did a good job, and that is up to them.

BUT!

Neither of these two men were anywhere in the ‘field of fire’, and at no time was in any danger. So to call them ‘Heroes’ is quite a stretch.

The Observer will do anything to prop up the guvament’s image especially when they delivering more and more hardship on people.

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Bruce spoke to the nation ahead of Audley budget speech, to calm nerves and reason with the people about the further hardships they face.

Good.

Some credit his talk to the nation as a reason why there were no riots, others in the media credits a Jamaican populace with being more politically mature.

Maybe.

The ever-increasing courseness of Jamaicans seemed to have let this opportunity slide.

Good for them.

However, the last time that a Jamaican guvament tried to impose a gas tax and the people rioted, afterwards there was whispers everywhere that the riots were instigated by the then opposition, to disrupt the guvament’s plans for the country.

How true that is depends on which side of the fence you fall. If you are a PNP supporter then it is absolutely true. If you are a JLP supporter then it’s all lies. If you are sensible smaddy, you wouldn’t put any underhanded dutty scheming past either of the two parties.

Of course another take would be that PNP supporters are less violent than JLP supporters.

But what I beleive the real reason  for the calm reaction to the budget is that we as a people have taken too many hits lately that we have been cowed into a near submissive mass.

We dread losing the little work we have because time hard so we wait on others to say something.

The high murder rate, has us keeping our heads down so as not to get it shot off. Besides we don’t want anybody to see we a protest , that may cost us our jobs or our lives or both.

We realize where acting up  may lead to no job, no money to pay bills or to eat food.

The guvaments of Jamaica are nearly successful in eroding our free will.

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As of this writing the guvament has yet to give the full details on the newly taxable items, maybe they using the weekend to give themselves and us some breathing room.

Or they still making it up.

Maybe they feel that spreading it out would ease the shock. It probably has, but one could start to get the feeling that they don’t know what they are doing  and are merely stretching things out to make it seem substantial.

The PSOJ is in love with Audley’s budget, how it’s fair and is necessary and good for this country. Maybe, but none of them has asked about the real impact it will have on the ever-growing ranks of the poor. Questions like:

What effect will the tax on gasolene have on the cost of food, which will also welcome new members into the group of products affected by GCT?

How will this affect the Jamaican worker whose pay has been frozen and therefore means that their spending power is significantly reduced.

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There are actually some who believe that teachers, in demanding their back-pay, are unreasonable in these hard economic times.

Let me tell you what is unreasonable, doing your work for an agreed amount, only to be shorted for a very long period of time, to now see taxation and cost of living flying up, to have been promised what is due to you, and now be told yuh can’t get it.

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Nex’ Time.

Hijack

I am sure people are going to lose their jobs for letting the gunman get on the plane, even after he was detected while still inside the terminal.

Armed security personnel were not usually in the terminal. This is an internationally accepted practice.

If this is indeed not the result of security personnel failing to carry out their duties then no one should lose their job.

But measures will clearly now have to be tightened up, maybe have armed security in the terminals. That is fine, because one would say why this wasn’t the case already, but you know that in order to save face or to make it seem as if they were doing something about it people are going to be fired.

Either Bruce  going to demand resignations or the operators of the airport will go about ‘punishing’ the ‘incompetent’ people for being ‘lackadaisical’ in their duty.

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Great to see the situation resolved with no one dying, can’t be said for the other people murdered over the weekend, in the same parish.

But, Jamaica’s rep gets another knife wound to its belly, sigh.

I can imagine now how the American news media will start producing reports on what is wrong with Jamaica, regurgitating the drug dealers from the eighties, that mad man from the train, and all the violence and murders happening now, twisting the above mentioned knife some more.

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Please could someone tell Bruce to give the Information portfolio back to Babsy? On CNN this morning, Daryl Vaz displayed his basic school level of competency with the English language. No, there are youngsters more capable of conveying information than that man was capable of.

Embarrassing.

Babsy has proven to be much more capable of imparting information than this heavy-tongued oafish-sounding man.

 

Hallelujah!

Will someone PLEASE tell Portia fi stop wid the religiosity?

This woman is incapable of making a reasoned argument without calling on the name of Jesus or his daddy, perhaps in some idiotic belief that it will lend authenticity to what she has to say.

But she isn’t the only one, Vaz, before and after the buy-election, various other ministers and MPs and even Bruce himself.

This is the business of the country, not religion. This is Parliament, not church.

Though I must admit, the zeal party supporters display approaches religious fervor. Hell, like all religious conflict in the world, they will even kill for it.

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Fine!

It’s a religion.

Sorry for wasting your time.

Praise be to God!

The Buy-Election Is Over

After a well purchased victory, Vaz will now go back to parliament and his post as minister.

Nothing changes.

Bruce shows his disdain for the constitution once again about griping that the PNP was trying to “Constitutionally overthrow the government”.

If the constitution says you ought not be the guvament then you should get your ass out of there.

Until the constitution is changed, and as long as you are of the mind to obey the laws of the land, then you should do as the constitution demands.

When in opposition these same people harangued the then Prime Minister, P.J. Patterson, when he remarked: “The law is not a shackle”.

The JLP let him have it.

Mutty let him have it.

All JLP supporters let him have it.

Openly mocking and deriding him for his words, totally missing the nuance of his meaning.

Now, the JLP are gleefully living by Patterson’s words, and sparing no vehemence for being called on it.

The Law Isn’t A Shackle

So the JLP got their way in the Dabdoub/Vaz affair.

Don’t let them fool you into thinking that it wasn’t for their benefit, this is exactly the outcome they were looking for, because the law was broken in their favour.

The constitution of Jamaica states that no one with allegiance to a foreign power may be eligible to run for or hold office. Vaz, therefore, was legally, not a candidate.

Disqualified!

Therefore since the JLP had no legitimate candidate to challenge Mr. Dabdoub then the seat should have gone to Mr. Dabdoub.

I wonder, with all the threats of a snap election if Dabdoub was awarded the seat as the constitution demanded, did the sure-to-occur political upheaval sway the judges opinion in the matter?

And also, were the JLP aware of the outcome of the ruling ahead of time, as their readiness to contest the by-election infers?

Wouldn’t be surprising, they have cronies everywhere.

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Shahine Robinson, St. Ann MP, is another person who will not allow her self to be shackled by the law.

Painting public government property in party colours is a no-no.

Simple.

Government property is for the people of Jamaica, and not any one party. As much as it was troubling to see the previous guvament put the names of their friends all over bridges and roads and squares, so too is it troubling to see MPs flouting the law and branding public property in the colors of their party. It is something they would not have stood for and therefore is something they themselves should not do.

But they have the power….

We Really Cannot Afford This Guvament!

It is amazing that with the hard economic times, the ever growing number of people losing their means of income and the bleak forecast by sensible people (not the fairy tale dreamers in guvament), that this guvament is still, more than a year and a half after the election, is spending money like it can’t done.

Nineteen ministries, with its nineteen ministers and all their entourage, inclusive of consultants and constituency workers, all the staff necessary to do the work required all the equipment and furniture necessary to outfit the offices, and since the guvament doesn’t own these properties they occupy, all the rent they have to pay. All this and they are still hiring more consultants, buying more furniture (in some cases from the US) and having expensive tastes in personal transportation, and that john crow Dwight Nelson is hinting at cutting the workforce of the civil service?

Why doesn’t the guvament rein in its spending look to cut the expenditure generated by themselves before looking to cut jobs?

JOBS JOBS AND MORE JOBS!

More jobs were cut with Air Jamaica’s ditching of some of its routes to the US, adding to the ever growing number of people who ‘obviously’ were not included in the JLP’s election promises.

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What is interesting to note is that no one has come forward with statistical figures depicting the number of people who have lost their jobs since this guvament took power. It would be interesting to know the figures, but with a looming by-election or general election, dependent on the Dabdoub/Vaz ruling, i guess Bruce and company would not want such information out there.

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Who knew that by 2009 we would all be caught in Bruce’s “rampin’ shop”?

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I felt like apologizing for that one, but i won’t.