Bahama Pundit

Slipping Towards the Abyss - Addressing the Three Categories of Social Breakdown

by Larry Smith

The nation slipped a little further towards the abyss recently as young people began rioting in the streets for no particular reason, leading to the knifing of one boy on Paradise Island and the shooting of another on a public holiday.

Gangs of Junior high schoolers also engaged in a rock-throwing, after-school melee on a busy Palmdale street, attacking police who tried to stop them. And this follows fights, riots and murders in the schools themselves.

One thing is clear - this is not crime. It is impending social breakdown. And you don't have to be a social scientist to figure out what will happen when these youngsters get a bit older.

"It's a terrible feeling," one of Tough Call's correspondents cried. "But for the first time I believe that if we have not gone beyond the point of no return, we are very close. It seems that everyone is despairing."

The Bahamian Attitude Towards the EPA

by Craig Butler

Here we go again, and this time I want the general public to note there is no fanfare, no outcry, no negative full-page ads, no town meetings and no uproar.

What am I talking about? Of course, I speak about the latest advance in trade policy - namely, the Economic Partnership Agreement that the government is going to sign with the European Union.

During the debate on joining the Caribbean Single Market and Economy I was a lone warrior in favour. It was my contention that as the world was moving towards economic blocs; and as the Bahamas was going to sign on to the World Trade Organization; joining the CSME would have allowed us to become a major player in the Caribbean bloc.

I was harshly criticized for my support but I felt then, and still do today, that our participation was vital to the success of the CSME. And the other member states were willing to accept reservations and delays in terms of our membership. By getting in on the ground floor we would have been in a better position to guide the course of the bloc.

The Way Forward for the Progressive Liberal Party

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com

The then governing Progressive Liberal Party entered the last general election with the theme “No Turning Back”. Yet they fought the last campaign, seemingly more obsessed with its -- and the country’s -- past and less focused on modernizing their vision and capacity to govern.

Had the party been more forward looking, it may have been in the second year of a second term. A few weeks ago, when the country observed the first anniversary of the 2007 General Election, most of the analysis focused on the performance of the governing Free National Movement.

But May 2 may also serve as a critical -- though, perhaps painful -- anniversary for the opposition PLP. Last year the party claimed a record they would have preferred to have avoided. They became the first government in an independent Bahamas to forfeit power after a single term.

Agriculture in the Bahamas - the Fairy Tale

by Larry Smith

Lately, there's been a rash of calls for Bahamians to turn to large-scale farming to address skyrocketing fuel and food prices.

A developer named Tony Joudi made several attempts to get the government to back his cock-eyed scheme to grow corn on hundreds of thousands of acres throughout the country.

He was asking us to clear our remaining forests so we could make ethanol to run our expensive sport utility vehicles on our over-congested roads.

More recently, strange noises have been made about growing rice in our brackish mangrove wetlands by none other than the Minister of Agriculture himself (who should know better).

And according to Edison Key, a one-time citrus farmer from Abaco who is now chairman of the Bahamas Agricultural and Industrial Corporation, "we are trying to fast forward the agricultural sector - we just need to get serious."

Thankfully, we have yet to hear calls for Bahamian pothole farmers to plant wheat fields to help lower the price of imported flour.

Parliamentary Hearings on Crime Should be Broadcast on TV

by Craig Butler

Bahamians have many expectations that have been formulated due to our proximity to the United States as well as our British heritage.

The present government came to power a little over a year ago and promised to deliver many reforms. To be fair, during the campaign trail we told that their agenda was one that would take more than a five-year term would allow. That being said what has been achieved to date is appalling.

The major issue in the run up to the election was the national crime epidemic. The present government on a daily basis complained about the lack of focus and vision displayed by the then PLP government as it related to this vexing issue.

Time for Some Good News

by Simon
•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com

Like the mercurial nature of the weather, you never know how well or unevenly ZNS News’ The Bahamas Tonight will flow.

Technical glitches, poor field report lighting, uncreative graphics, grammatical and other errors are, like the nightly weather, a regular feature of the evening news.

This isn’t just any news programme; The Bahamas Tonight should be the flagship of the news division. And ZNS’ News Division -- as the oldest broadcast news service in the country -- should be the gold standard.

Bahamian Water Resources, the Environment & Ways the World Could End

by Larry Smith

"A can of soda costs more than 50 gallons of fresh water." -- Godfrey Sherman, general manager of the Water & Sewerage Corporation

James Altucher is an investor who writes books with titles like Super Cash. And for all you alarmists out there, his latest project is about ways the world could end.

"I was thinking about this during dinner with a risk manager of a multi-billion dollar fund of funds," Altucher explained recently in the Financial Times. "All this guy does all day is worry. Pandemic this, dollar collapse that, terrorism, nuclear accident, etc etc. Imagine getting paid to worry?"

With that goal in mind, Altucher worked up a list of 30 scenarios on how the world can end. The options range from an asteroid strike to a financial collapse to a flu pandemic to running out of clean water. But that last scenario, he says, is the only one that is "very likely" to happen within the next 30 years.

The Balancing of Power

by Simon
•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com

Crow-barring a well-known quote out of its original context is akin to isolating a verse from a famous poem. You may get some of the flavour, but not the full taste, of what the author fully intended.

Think of prooftexting, which drains Biblical texts of their originality and vitality, by severing them from their historical and literary contexts. There are also misquoted texts.

Money is not the root of all evil, according to Timothy 6:10. Rather, “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

It’s telling that the qualifying verb, love, has often been discarded in this moralism regarding the relationship between man/woman and moolah.

Are we in for a Macroeconomic Adjustment?

by Larry Smith

Renowned Bahamas-based financial expert Sir John Templeton once said that the four most dangerous words in investing are: "This time is different."

He was referring to the tendency to predict gloom and doom - often an irresistible urge for pundits.

But with the world economy about to shift gears in some fundamental ways, it is fair to ask (along with analyst James Ledbetter), "are we going to be wearing barrels for clothes and burning Ikea furniture to heat our homes, in a rerun of the Great Depression?"

Of course, we don't need to heat our homes, but air conditioning is just as important. And at the moment our lives depend almost entirely on imports - of everything from clothing to fuel to food. So perhaps we should take a closer look at what may be in store for us down the road.

The Fires Next Time

by Simon

•Simon is a young Bahamian with things on his mind who wishes to remain anonymous. His column 'Front Porch' is published every Tuesday in the Nassau Guardian. He can be reached at frontporchguardian@gmail.com

Some of the broadcast news coverage of the recent fires at New Providence’s main dump has been sensational. One network reporter breathlessly signed off from the dump with the melodramatic assertion that he was reporting from Ground Zero.

The term 'Ground Zero' was coined after the initial testing, followed by the subsequent detonation of atomic bombs in Japan during World War II. It referred to the ground directly under the exploding nuclear weapons.

Between August 6, 1945 and September 11, 2001, the term gained currency, and was often drafted to describe the epicentre of a natural or human-made disaster of extraordinary proportions.

Post-9/11, it became synonymous with the site where a pair of airplanes struck the Twin Towers of The World Trade Center in New York City.

We can forgive the hyperbole of labeling the site of these dump fires, Ground Zero. Less excusable, is the failure of much of the team coverage, to sift through the embers and unearth still smoldering and broader story-lines.