OWTU SPEAKS 2003-03-19
THE WAR BUTTON
In less than two (2) hours from now, the War Button might be pushed, activating and unleashing the worst forces of terror on a people whose leader has contemptuously dismissed, with enough good reasons and justification, a badjohn aggressor’s directive that he should flee his home and his country. However, brutish, evil and dictatorial Saddam might be, Bush has absolutely no moral authority to determine what essentially is a United Nations responsibility and prerogative. And indeed, it is self righteously impertinent of one deviant character to arrogate unto himself the authority to set what he thinks to be wholesome principles by which others must be guided and the unilateral self-determination of any disciplinary action to which another seeming miscreant character might be subjected for assumed violation of the superbadjohn’s tenets.
Many thousands of innocent Iraqis and no doubt American and British forces too will feel and succumb to the cold heat of a War that America wants to fix its economy and extend further its hegemonic control over more of the world’s people and their natural resources. The United States is not satisfied with being the world’s sole superpower. It must have the United Nations and all of us genuflect before it as the sole super and supreme power; - supreme as in highest authority, - as in ecclesiastical supremacy, as in God! And I am tempted to suggest another consideration which people like the Republican Bush are always guided by, but I repel the temptation as I remember two (2) mornings ago, no other than a Caribbean born ‘uncle tom’, inarticulate and seemingly unkempt, was defending the threatened was and demolition of Iraq.
This War, it is estimated will benefit the United States only – and only superficially so – for the time being. Israel will experience some collateral benefit too. The $B’s worth of contracts that have been awarded to war machinery manufacturers, the developers of information and specialist communication devices and the unleashing of the production and supply capacity of cheaper oil – all of them will address American economic concerns, to the so far not understood disadvantage of the rest of the world and the particular incalculable disadvantage of the rest of the world and the particular incalculable disadvantage of the developing countries of the Globalized World about which Joseph Stiglitz has had much to say.
Joseph Stiglitz is the Winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics 2001 and a former Chief Economist at the World Bank and former Chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors. We will share some of his views later on in subsequent editions of this programme but for the time being he attests that “Globalisation today is not working. It is not working for much of the environment. It is not working for the stability of the global economy”. But back to the more substantive issue. Tony Blair’s Britain will not benefit from any fracture in an European Economic Community behind which the Americas now lag organizationally. Mr. Blair is risking much through his blind following of Bush. But the worst causalities of Mr. Bush’s War apart from the Iraqis themselves will be the United Nations and future world economic and political stability.
In that regard then, one regrets that we did not mount some anti-war demonstrations here like others have done in Seattle, Washington, Spain, Sweden, Germany and elsewhere. We might be still smarting from the buss heads and cut tails at the hands of local politicians and police when we demonstrated against apartheid and racism back in 1986. But we might do it yet.
Stay Tuned. Have a good evening – I an Errol Mc Leod for the OWTU speaks.
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OWTU SPEAKS 2003-03-14
MATTERS ON THE GOVERNMENT'S CARDS
The matter of the Red House being transformed into a Museum, ‘has been on the cards for a long time’ – so said Messrs Manning and Valley yesterday. So what? On whose cards and in whose interest and to what objective purpose and benefit? I think that those are the questions. And it is most distressingly disappointing although not at all surprising that Mr. Manning is returning to his last excursions into the fantasies of frills, ceremony, superficial nonentities and frivolity – nothing really fundamental or profound.
There are other matters that have long been on the cards. But again, whose cards? I speak of matters such as the Occupational Safety and Health Bill which was being developed since 1972 and which, the last time that it was looked at in 2001, was the subject of scrutiny and comment before a Joint Select Committee of the House of Representatives.
I speak also of matters such as the foreshore redevelopment of King’s Wharf in San Fernando, matters that are more necessary and that address more and varied interests than the Prime Minister’s office being moved to the center of the city and amidst a museum into which the Red House would be transformed. The way that the important affairs of the country are being overmanaged and underled will suggest that among the Government’s important issues that are on the cards, could well be the conduct of Cabinet meetings at Emperor Valley Zoo given the asinine expressions, lack of knowledge and understanding and absence of good vision of some who now direct the system of Governance in T & T.
This government is saved by the fact only that its immediate predecessors in office are corrupt, uncivilized, unsociable and perhaps the most despicable of the Trinidad & Tobago character.
Have a good evening and peaceful weekend is to all– I an Errol Mc Leod for the OWTU speaks.
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OWTU SPEAKS 2003-03-10
LNG TRAIN 4 AND TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO
There are strong suggestions that the LNG Train 4 negotiations have been concluded but for a loose end here and a nod of the head there. It is rumored that a big announcement is imminent. What is likely to be in that for Trinidad and Tobago as compared perhaps with the humongous concessions that our lead negotiators are known to make from their third world plantation attitude of psychological mendicancy in their relationship with the representative overseers of the MNC BPTT and British Gas, themselves representatives of international Capital that is the agent provocateur behind an imminent war that the world does not want.
And we shall soon be summoned to the table again to concede more of the national patrimony as Trains 5 and 6 will become necessary. And as we speak BP Trinidad & Tobago in only now considering as approach to remedying the environmental degradation caused by willful negligence during Train 1 construction including the replacement of the Clifton Hill Sea Wall.
And all of these, in the interest of a made of globalization that will marginalize us – T&T and the Caribbean, and in the scope of a plan of growth and modernization to developed nation status by 2020 but without the soundest of those fundamentals that will ensure sustainable growth and development and that will move the country and the people forward. In other words, we will be hustled into 2020 without vision for and focus on T&T’s interests. When we can spend time searching futilely for justification to support a relocation of Parliament from the Red House, we are suggesting a propensity for the superficial and simple. One listens to the prime Minister’s comments on the issue and one hears the prevarication of unsoundness. All is not lost through! I am in receipt of the English translation of Dr. Fidel Castro’s remarks to the xiii Conference of Heads of States and Governments of the Non-Aligned Movement at Kuala Lumpur Malaysia – two weeks ago – February 25, 2003.
Fidel said:-“these are hard times we are living’. In recent months, we have more than once heard scary words and statements. In his speech to the West Point graduating cadets, on June 1st, 2002 the United States President Stated: “Our security will require transforming the military you lead, a military that must be ready to strike at a moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world”—That same day he proclaimed the doctrine of a pre-emptive strike, something that no one had ever done in the political history of the world. A few months later, while referring to the unnecessary and almost certain military action against Iraq, he said: “and if war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the United States Army”. That statement was not by the government of a small and week nation, but by the leader of the richest and mightiest military power that has ever existed, the same that possesses thousands of nuclear weapons – enough to obliterate the world population several times over – and other fearful conventional military systems and weapons of mass destruction. That is what we are:” Dark corners of the World.” That is the perception some have of the Third World nations – Never before had anyone offered a better definition; no one had such despise.
The former colonies of powers that divide the world among them and plundered it for centuries constitute today the group of underdeveloped countries. There is nothing like full independence, fair treatment on equal footing or national security for any of us; none is a permanent member, of the UN Security Council with a veto right; none has any possibility to be involved in the decisions of the International Financial Institutions; none can keep its best talents; none can protect itself from the flight of capital or the destruction of nature and the environment caused by the squandering, selfish and insatiable consumerism of the economically developed countries.
After the latest world carnage in the 1940’s, we were promised a world of peace, the reduction of the gap between the rich and the poor and the assistance of the highly developed to the less developed countries. It was all a huge lie. We were imposed an unsustainable and unbearable world order. The world is being driven to a dead end and within hardly 150 years, the oil and gas it took the planet 300 million years to accumulate will have been depleted. In just 100 years, the world population has grown from 1.5 billion to over 6 billion people that will have to fully depend on energy sources that are still to be researched and developed. Poverty continues its expansion while old and new diseases threaten whole nations with annihilation. The soils are eroded and lose fertility; the climate is changing; breathing air, drinking water and the seas are increasingly contaminated. Authority is snatched from the United Nations, its established procedures obstructed and the organization itself destroyed; development assistance is reduced; there are continuous demands that Third World countries pay a 2.5 trillion US dollar debt that cannot be paid under present circumstances while over one trillion US dollars are spent in ever more sophisticated and deadly weapons. Why is that? What is that for? A similar amount is spent on commercial publicity, sowing consumerist expectations that cannot be realized. For the first time the human species is running a real risk of extinction due to the insane behaviour of the very sane human beings, who are thus becoming the victims of such civilization.”
That was Dr. Fidel Castro, President of the Republic of Cuba. Most profound with 20/20 vision and foresight.
Have a good evening – I an Errol Mc Leod for the OWTU speaks.
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OWTU SPEAKS 2003-03-07
LNG EXPANSION AND TRINMAR
Energy Correspondent writing in last Wednesday’s Express Business Supplement seemed to have missed the point by a long shot. He was without his usual ‘on-spot-focus.’ Knowing him to be of generally sound and progressive intensions, I will pass over his slip-up as a mere instance of his enthusiasm taking him close to the realms of indiscretion.
The Trinmar workers and their Union and the residents and people of Point Fortin are not standing in the way of progress to that southern borough, if LNG expansion – on the basis that it has so far been done, can be considered progress – even for Trinidad and Tobago. And one suspects that it is precisely because LNG expansion – from Train 1 to 2 and 3 – did not address Trinidad and Tobago’s interests, that Prime Minister Manning suggested, some weeks ago, a tough stance by Government in the current Train 4 negotiations.
Energy Correspondent is not just missing something – he is pelting toe punch kicks at his own balls. To talk about the delays that the Trinmar work boats are already experiencing with respect to LNG Tanker traffic associated with Trains 1 and 2 and an exacerbation of that problem when Trains 3 and 4 come on stream and in the same breadth suggest that Trinmar’s base could be relocated ten miles away in La Brea to the north – is to expose total ignorance of the logistical issues to begin with. The fact of the matter is that Trinmar’s fields are South West of the LNG installations and the cannel through which the Tankers are ferried for receipt and then dispatch from LNG cargo loading berths. The Trinmar base is north of the channel so that the Trinmar work boats must cross the channel. To relocate the Trinmar off shore fields and with the channel still having to be crossed in the path of the LNG tankers.
But our focus has taken us beyond that. We are well ahead of Energy Correspondent when it comes to seeing beyond the tress for the field and the forest.
Contrary to the views expressed by – in this instance – a seemingly uninformed energy correspondent, the workers and management of Trinmar and their Union, the OWTU, are engaged in discussions and have agreed that the decision to remain or relocate Trinmar’s base will be undertaken after a full assessment of all the options and consideration of the best interests of the Trinmar operations, its stakeholders, employees, suppliers and the Point Fortin community. On this, the workers and the OWTU’s position is quite clear – the interest of the country, Point Fortin and its immediate environs and the workers must come before that of Atlantic LNG, BPTT, British Gas, Repsol and the rest.
The experience with LNG Trains 1,2, and 3 have certainly not helped to assure these.
Energy Correspondent had better not compromise those principles with which we have always associated him.
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OWTU SPEAKS 2003-03-05
THANKS TO THE WORKERS IN THE ESSENTIAL SERVICES
Welcome to the “OWTU SPEAKS” and now that the Merry Monarch has gone to rest for another year, welcome back to the real and pertinent issues.
It was a good and clean Carnival. Of course there were the odd incidences here and there as there would always be the over-enthusiastic few on the lunatic fringe, but generally the Carnival was Violence-free and reasonably sane. Commissioner Hilton Guy and his much maligned Police Officers rose to the occasion, and with the assistance of the Defense Force, provided the citizen and visitor with a sense of security, protection and service for which we feel gratitude appreciation must be expressed. Take a bow Commissioner Guy! A Job well done Sir!
It has also become necessary, in light of some unsavoury comments that have been made, that we recognize the many workers in the Essential Services Industries – Water, Electricity, Fire, Health, Oil & Gas and Heavy Manufacture for their dedication to the Social and key economic business of Trinidad and Tobago. These are the essential workers who dutifully were at their posts ensuring a safe and potable water treatment and distribution system; maintaining the reliable generation, transmission and distribution of industrial power and domestic electricity supplies; ensuring safety and fire protection; the beleaguered health care workers in an understaffed, ill-equipped system ensuring the dispensation of as best a health care as they can humanly deliver; Oil workers on Offshore Platforms and installations, drilling for new oil and gas and recovering old oil and gas from established reservoirs; Oil and Petrochemical workers in refineries at Pointe-a-Pierre and Point Lisas and Point Fortin transforming that oil and gas into products ready for market; those workers in the manufacture of construction materials - cement and block building – all of these workers, inadequately compensated and whose contributions are not essentially appreciated by the authorities – all of these workers were toiling as it was their duty, while the rest of us were wining, gyrating and jumping and generally having a damn good time. And nothing is wrong with that – perhaps. It has always been so and may well remain that way in the future.
It is crass and a little bit obscenely insensitive however, when those in the cloister of their privileged positions, and for whom we make and play the mass engage in uninformed blah-blah about increased productivity on Ash Wednesday. Imagine that – folks who themselves know nothing about hard work are working had to deny workers paid time-off for Carnival Days and other Public Holidays. What do they want again? Blood? How has important industries been affected by Carnival? What do our armchair theorists and bunglers in industry know about Productivity and work ethics coming from a background of mercantilism? And another suggests that the Carnival be shut down at 8.00p.m. He must be mad or he does not know of the response to the Colonial Governor who had said “NO MAS”. Or he might well be satisfied to be placed in Category Donkey. He is not without the sad face for it. We think that congratulations are also in order to all the Monarchs, Kings and Queens of Soca, Mas, Kaiso, Junior and Senior, Panorama Champs Exodus, Road March Champ Fay Anne Lyons and all of the highly productive contributors to a most successful Carnival 2003. And may we put the same spirit, zest commitment and superior levels of productivity and love for Trinidad and Tobago in other spheres of national activity.