They say charity begins at home. Families and communities should care for their own, before other families and communities. We all tend to do that, both individually and as a community.
From cans on shop counters collecting coins for sick children in hospitals in Miami, to excessively generous medical coverage for Civil Servants and their families, Caymanians in particular are extraordinarily well cared for.
Nobody goes hungry in Cayman for more than a day. Schoolchildren receive free hot breakfasts and lunches, if their parents can’t afford to feed them, or can’t be bothered. Nobody goes homeless, even when their homes are destroyed. Then, the destroyed homes are repaired or replaced free of charge.
Families are not as diligent as they once were, in looking after their poor; but that’s a worldwide phenomenon. Sometimes, individuals who have done well from Cayman’s boom turn their backs on their less fortunate relatives, and let charities pick up the slack.
Because Cayman is a rich little place, what we regard as life’s necessities are luxuries in other places. We tend to overlook just how lucky we are, and how unlucky much of the rest of the world is. Collectively, we don’t like to see pictures of extreme poverty, and don’t want to hear about it or even know about it. We are much more comfortable with charity that begins and ends at home.
Most of Cayman’s businesses have annual budgets for donations, and many of us individuals have too. But all the budgets are overwhelmingly in favour of domestic charities, with very little set aside for anywhere beyond our shores. Foreigners in dire poverty? Huh. Let them eat mud-cakes!
The poorest of our Caribbean neighbours do eat mud-cakes, actually. Mud-cakes don’t keep children alive, but they do keep them from feeling hunger. Many children in Haiti starve to death with full stomachs, while we collect money for our local athletes to play games overseas, and for school trips up north, and for local church-building, etc.
It’s natural to favour local charities, and we shouldn’t despise it. It’s a basic tribal instinct, and we are all captives of our instincts. Caymanians support Caymanian charities; Britons support British charities. That’s how the world works. Rich Haitians support Haitian charities, up to a point.
It would be a noble thing, if we as a community were to cut back our donations to local charities and divert as much as we can to needier folk overseas. But it’s not going to happen, and it’s not realistic to expect that it will. It’s not realistic to expect that we will increase our personal charity budgets, either.
However, what we could do is withhold some of our donations from some of the less essential local “good causes”, and support some of the more serious good causes outside Cayman.
We could go a bit lighter on school trips to Disneyworld and a bit heavier on clothes and medicines for Jamaica and Haiti. A bit lighter on Christmas presents for mildly deprived local children and a bit heavier on food for desperately poor foreign children who have nothing to eat but mud.
The Haitians aren’t going anywhere; they won’t suddenly stop starving, after two hundred years of it. By next Christmas they will still be in trouble even without another earthquake or hurricane. But they are our Caribbean brothers, and we are supposed to be our brothers’ keepers.
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Going green
Here in Cayman, a few years ago, our supermarkets imposed a five-cents charge on plastic bags. The advertised purpose was to help save the world from plastic. Some of the cynics amongst us raised our eyebrows at the explanation – but, what can you do?
Cutting down on plastic bags is good for our souls, I guess. Self-denial of that kind is a tribute to the virtues of simpler times. It’s like after local hurricanes, when we all do without electricity and town water & sewage for a while. Forgoing our beloved plastic shopping bags doesn’t make heroes of us, but it won’t do us any harm. Indeed, logic demands that the supermarkets not stop with the shopping bags.
I bought a memory-stick for my computer last week. It was the size of my little finger, and came in a tough plastic package as big as a book. That package used more plastic than 200 shopping bags, and the plastic would stop a bullet. If the Police budget doesn’t run to Kevlar vests for everybody, they could keep a few of those plastic packages in stock to shove under their shirts when things get rough.
In fact, rather than sell us the bags for five cents apiece, why don’t the supermarkets simply divert shipments of new bags directly to Haiti, our poorest neighbour? Earth Day gimmicks aren’t a top priority in Haiti. Most of the victims of the last earthquake are still living in gutters and dying in pain. Plastic shopping bags are all that most Haitians have to keep them dry from the rain above and the filthy drains they sleep beside.
Plastic bags are all they have to keep their food safe, when they have food. When the only food they have is mud cakes, plastic shopping bags help to keep clean mud separated from mud mixed with faeces. We would be doing them a big favour by sending them all the bags we don’t use.
Anyway, we in Cayman are too few in number to make any noticeable difference to the world’s consumption of plastic. If our bag-usage is typical of our region, there must be ten billion bags a year doing the rounds throughout the Caribbean region. Why bother?
News reports tell of a gigantic floating pile of plastic and other rubbish in the ocean up between Japan and Canada, labelled The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Nobody knows for certain how big it is, but its area may well be thousands of times the area of Grand Cayman and its volume, billions of times the volume of the town dump we call “Mount Trashmore”.
Even Mount Trashmore is too big for us to do anything about. At least, it’s too big for our public sector to do anything about. There are enough engineers and other experts among Cayman’s retirees to fix it – if they could fend off the dead hand of state bureaucracy, which they can’t!
For the moment, we must settle for dealing with just the plastic shopping bags – a drop in the ocean, so to speak. Is it a futile gesture? Of course; but sometimes the world needs a futile gesture.
We are told that plastic shopping bags never disintegrate. Scientists (well, “scientists”...) tell us that they take somewhere between 400 and 1000 years to degrade. Hmph. I don’t know how anybody could know that. If you throw plastic bags on a fire they shrivel right up. Even left out in the sun they disintegrate in a lot fewer than 400-to-1000 years. Keep it real, people! That’s how “man-made global warming” scientists screwed up their act, by mixing lies with truths.
The thick plastic that can fend off bullets, though – that might last 400 years, with care. It might be a positive thing if we sent it to the Haitians. It could be that long before they become rich enough to classify it as a nuisance.
Cutting down on plastic bags is good for our souls, I guess. Self-denial of that kind is a tribute to the virtues of simpler times. It’s like after local hurricanes, when we all do without electricity and town water & sewage for a while. Forgoing our beloved plastic shopping bags doesn’t make heroes of us, but it won’t do us any harm. Indeed, logic demands that the supermarkets not stop with the shopping bags.
I bought a memory-stick for my computer last week. It was the size of my little finger, and came in a tough plastic package as big as a book. That package used more plastic than 200 shopping bags, and the plastic would stop a bullet. If the Police budget doesn’t run to Kevlar vests for everybody, they could keep a few of those plastic packages in stock to shove under their shirts when things get rough.
In fact, rather than sell us the bags for five cents apiece, why don’t the supermarkets simply divert shipments of new bags directly to Haiti, our poorest neighbour? Earth Day gimmicks aren’t a top priority in Haiti. Most of the victims of the last earthquake are still living in gutters and dying in pain. Plastic shopping bags are all that most Haitians have to keep them dry from the rain above and the filthy drains they sleep beside.
Plastic bags are all they have to keep their food safe, when they have food. When the only food they have is mud cakes, plastic shopping bags help to keep clean mud separated from mud mixed with faeces. We would be doing them a big favour by sending them all the bags we don’t use.
Anyway, we in Cayman are too few in number to make any noticeable difference to the world’s consumption of plastic. If our bag-usage is typical of our region, there must be ten billion bags a year doing the rounds throughout the Caribbean region. Why bother?
News reports tell of a gigantic floating pile of plastic and other rubbish in the ocean up between Japan and Canada, labelled The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Nobody knows for certain how big it is, but its area may well be thousands of times the area of Grand Cayman and its volume, billions of times the volume of the town dump we call “Mount Trashmore”.
Even Mount Trashmore is too big for us to do anything about. At least, it’s too big for our public sector to do anything about. There are enough engineers and other experts among Cayman’s retirees to fix it – if they could fend off the dead hand of state bureaucracy, which they can’t!
For the moment, we must settle for dealing with just the plastic shopping bags – a drop in the ocean, so to speak. Is it a futile gesture? Of course; but sometimes the world needs a futile gesture.
We are told that plastic shopping bags never disintegrate. Scientists (well, “scientists”...) tell us that they take somewhere between 400 and 1000 years to degrade. Hmph. I don’t know how anybody could know that. If you throw plastic bags on a fire they shrivel right up. Even left out in the sun they disintegrate in a lot fewer than 400-to-1000 years. Keep it real, people! That’s how “man-made global warming” scientists screwed up their act, by mixing lies with truths.
The thick plastic that can fend off bullets, though – that might last 400 years, with care. It might be a positive thing if we sent it to the Haitians. It could be that long before they become rich enough to classify it as a nuisance.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
More trouble in Paradise
Government’s financial mess has us all worried, who care what happens to Cayman. Certainly there are many, many more worried long-term immigrants than there used to be. Whenever two or three of us are gathered together, the mood is sombre. Collectively, we aren’t feeling as comfortable as we used to do about the economic future.
Of course I can’t speak for the whole community of veteran expats, or for the current community of tax-haven expats; but it’s no secret that there is a general loss of confidence in the ability of our local rulers to fix the mess. The FCO probably has the ability, but does it have the will? Its attention tends to wander, where its colonies’ internal affairs are concerned.
The loss of confidence among long-term expats may soon reach critical mass. The endemic xenophobia of a large portion of the ethnic Caymanian community is a large factor. It is oppressive, and there are no signs of its abatement. Despite some reformist mumbling in the six months since the last general election, nothing has changed. Political interference with the private sector’s independence will continue as far ahead as we can see. So will the anti-expat sentiment that drives our Islands’ immigration policy.
Let’s be honest about it. Public-sector employment will not be reduced: its heavy hand will not be lifted. State-owned enterprises will not be sold to private investors; state-operated services will not be outsourced. Corruption will not be curtailed; cronyism and nepotism will not be suppressed. The Public Debt will not be paid down to any significant degree; unfunded government pensions and medical expenses will stay unfunded. The rollover policy will come and go according to the whim of the moment.
Last month, there was a bit of a kerfuffle in Bermuda, when a local independent Commission on “Spending And Government Efficiency” (SAGE) reported its findings. Huh. They must lead sheltered lives up in Bermuda, for the findings wouldn’t have surprised anybody in Cayman. It’s an interesting read, though. Google SAGE Report Bermuda for the Report and its Executive Summary.
The FCO may well decide on a similar Commission for Cayman – although ours would NOT be truly independent. ALL our existing Commissions are overseen by a shrewdly appointed “safe pair of hands”. Our politicians and senior Civil Servants are highly skilled in the suppression of independent opinions. My own experiences on our Human Rights Committee and Vision-2008 exercise can testify to that. Actually, a perusal of SAGE Bermuda’s Executive Summary shows many similarities with Vision-2008, whose reports and recommendations have been gathering dust since January 1999.
If a SAGE Cayman Commission were to be appointed, its first job should be to substitute Cayman for Bermuda throughout the entire Bermuda report. Nine tenths of the work would thereby be done. For the remaining tenth, it could simply dust off all the relevant Vision-2008 Reports and Minutes and slot them in where appropriate.
(The Minutes recorded what was agreed and what not, at least on the two committees I composed the Minutes for. The final Reports were subjected to skulduggery, and did not always reflect what had been agreed in the Meetings.)
Sigh. I wonder whether the FCO clerks would be prepared for all the shenanigans that would lie in wait for them. Almost certainly, not. The existing waste-of-space Commissions – on Corruption, Human Rights, and Standards in Public Life – have bamboozled our colonial masters successfully; small chance that a fourth one would be any different.
Of course I can’t speak for the whole community of veteran expats, or for the current community of tax-haven expats; but it’s no secret that there is a general loss of confidence in the ability of our local rulers to fix the mess. The FCO probably has the ability, but does it have the will? Its attention tends to wander, where its colonies’ internal affairs are concerned.
The loss of confidence among long-term expats may soon reach critical mass. The endemic xenophobia of a large portion of the ethnic Caymanian community is a large factor. It is oppressive, and there are no signs of its abatement. Despite some reformist mumbling in the six months since the last general election, nothing has changed. Political interference with the private sector’s independence will continue as far ahead as we can see. So will the anti-expat sentiment that drives our Islands’ immigration policy.
Let’s be honest about it. Public-sector employment will not be reduced: its heavy hand will not be lifted. State-owned enterprises will not be sold to private investors; state-operated services will not be outsourced. Corruption will not be curtailed; cronyism and nepotism will not be suppressed. The Public Debt will not be paid down to any significant degree; unfunded government pensions and medical expenses will stay unfunded. The rollover policy will come and go according to the whim of the moment.
Last month, there was a bit of a kerfuffle in Bermuda, when a local independent Commission on “Spending And Government Efficiency” (SAGE) reported its findings. Huh. They must lead sheltered lives up in Bermuda, for the findings wouldn’t have surprised anybody in Cayman. It’s an interesting read, though. Google SAGE Report Bermuda for the Report and its Executive Summary.
The FCO may well decide on a similar Commission for Cayman – although ours would NOT be truly independent. ALL our existing Commissions are overseen by a shrewdly appointed “safe pair of hands”. Our politicians and senior Civil Servants are highly skilled in the suppression of independent opinions. My own experiences on our Human Rights Committee and Vision-2008 exercise can testify to that. Actually, a perusal of SAGE Bermuda’s Executive Summary shows many similarities with Vision-2008, whose reports and recommendations have been gathering dust since January 1999.
If a SAGE Cayman Commission were to be appointed, its first job should be to substitute Cayman for Bermuda throughout the entire Bermuda report. Nine tenths of the work would thereby be done. For the remaining tenth, it could simply dust off all the relevant Vision-2008 Reports and Minutes and slot them in where appropriate.
(The Minutes recorded what was agreed and what not, at least on the two committees I composed the Minutes for. The final Reports were subjected to skulduggery, and did not always reflect what had been agreed in the Meetings.)
Sigh. I wonder whether the FCO clerks would be prepared for all the shenanigans that would lie in wait for them. Almost certainly, not. The existing waste-of-space Commissions – on Corruption, Human Rights, and Standards in Public Life – have bamboozled our colonial masters successfully; small chance that a fourth one would be any different.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Holding hands in a movie show...
Early next month it will be 47 years since we married in Toronto, our mothers checking in by phone from Australia. The longevity has been a triumph of stubbornness, as much as anything. We were both brought up to honour our word, and that included marriage-vows.
Our child (1975) added an extra dimension to the marriage – an amendment to the contract, if you like. Even when both contracting parties positively like the prospect of such an amendment, the reality can be a nasty shock. As I blogged last September [A young man’s car], “Where two had been company, three was a crowd”.
We were children of the 1950s, when divorce was not readily granted by the state or condoned by one’s family and community. Simple incompatibility was insufficient grounds to break a sworn contract. Marriage was for life. Battered wives were not excused, unless their small children were also battered – and even child-abuse didn’t warrant a divorce in the eyes of pious Christians.
In the crowd I hung around with before I left on my travels, promiscuity was rare. A Frank Sinatra song captured the innocence of the era:
London in The Swinging Sixties opened my eyes to a whole new world. Wow. My (our) son’s generation inherited that world, and built on it. It would have been a factor in their collective decision to defer marriage beyond what used to be the standard age – and sometimes indefinitely.
When he and I had “The Talk”, it was about marriage, not about sex. He was probably rattling his pots and pans plenty in his late teens, and here in the West Indies the advice of peers carries far more weight than that of parents.
Today, I fret about my granddaughters, who are just beginning to discover boys. Fortunately or not, they live in pretty much the same blithe innocence as Linda and I did at their ages. Their home and school are at some physical remove from urban pressure, and their peers are (generally) equally innocent. Will they think that holding hands in a movie show is a big deal, or will they want to join the trail a bit further along? When neither Mum nor Dad has ever bothered with marriage, will the girls be equally wary of long-term commitment? Very likely.
Do they wish their parents had stayed together? Possibly not, you know. After all, there is more variety in their lives when there are two parental homes. In a spirit of objective enquiry they once asked Ross why he had so many ladies in his life. (They used the Norwegian word that translates as “ladies”, not the word for “women”!) More recently, they marvelled – to me, in English – at how many official and unofficial grandparents they had, who loved them. They showed no regret or wistfulness, just a wholehearted contentment with the way things were. They were counting their blessings.
Linda and I spend four weeks each year in their company – two there and two here – and would like to spend more. However, more time with us might cause scheduling difficulties during school vacations. All the Norskies would not easily give up any of their share of the pie.
Our child (1975) added an extra dimension to the marriage – an amendment to the contract, if you like. Even when both contracting parties positively like the prospect of such an amendment, the reality can be a nasty shock. As I blogged last September [A young man’s car], “Where two had been company, three was a crowd”.
We were children of the 1950s, when divorce was not readily granted by the state or condoned by one’s family and community. Simple incompatibility was insufficient grounds to break a sworn contract. Marriage was for life. Battered wives were not excused, unless their small children were also battered – and even child-abuse didn’t warrant a divorce in the eyes of pious Christians.
In the crowd I hung around with before I left on my travels, promiscuity was rare. A Frank Sinatra song captured the innocence of the era:
Holding hands in a movie show, when all the lights are low,
May not be new.
But I like it – how about you?
London in The Swinging Sixties opened my eyes to a whole new world. Wow. My (our) son’s generation inherited that world, and built on it. It would have been a factor in their collective decision to defer marriage beyond what used to be the standard age – and sometimes indefinitely.
When he and I had “The Talk”, it was about marriage, not about sex. He was probably rattling his pots and pans plenty in his late teens, and here in the West Indies the advice of peers carries far more weight than that of parents.
Today, I fret about my granddaughters, who are just beginning to discover boys. Fortunately or not, they live in pretty much the same blithe innocence as Linda and I did at their ages. Their home and school are at some physical remove from urban pressure, and their peers are (generally) equally innocent. Will they think that holding hands in a movie show is a big deal, or will they want to join the trail a bit further along? When neither Mum nor Dad has ever bothered with marriage, will the girls be equally wary of long-term commitment? Very likely.
Do they wish their parents had stayed together? Possibly not, you know. After all, there is more variety in their lives when there are two parental homes. In a spirit of objective enquiry they once asked Ross why he had so many ladies in his life. (They used the Norwegian word that translates as “ladies”, not the word for “women”!) More recently, they marvelled – to me, in English – at how many official and unofficial grandparents they had, who loved them. They showed no regret or wistfulness, just a wholehearted contentment with the way things were. They were counting their blessings.
Linda and I spend four weeks each year in their company – two there and two here – and would like to spend more. However, more time with us might cause scheduling difficulties during school vacations. All the Norskies would not easily give up any of their share of the pie.
Thursday, November 28, 2013
The Turning Point
Mark Twain identified the turning point of his life as his infection with measles at age twelve. That was precocious of him. Mine occurred at age 26 in the US Consulate in London at ten o’clock one morning. I expect most people’s personal turning-points occur more in young adulthood than in childhood.
Fearful of a local measles epidemic, Samuel’s mother confined him to the house pro tem. Impatient with delaying what he reckoned to be the inevitable, he sought out an infected friend and crawled into his bed. When the epidemic had run its course – with the boys luckily still alive – Sam’s furious mother gave up on his schooling and apprenticed him to a printer of books.
Captivated by stories of the Amazon River, he ran away on a Mississippi river-boat headed for the international port of New Orleans. With no money, he stayed on the river, became a pilot, then a writer of occasional stories, then a literary legend. It all began with the measles.
I had never thought to identify my own turning point, until I read about Mark Twain’s the other day. It was always taken for granted in our house that I would travel overseas. There was never a realistic likelihood that I wouldn’t. My boss in Toowoomba had invested a lot of hope that I would abandon the ambition and become a partner in his accountancy firm. At age 22, I was made manager of his branch-office in Brisbane, and he wasn’t happy to lose me. It might have been a turning point if I’d stayed, but I didn’t and it wasn’t.
My adventures overseas were all merely incidents along the path of my manifest destiny. Linda was a large part of that destiny – as it transpired – but meeting her [Zorba the Greek, blogged in January 2012] wasn’t a turning-point either. The day before that meeting, a Yugoslavia peasant woman had caused me to miss a vital signpost [A back road to Bulgaria, March 2012] and end up in Greece by mistake. Missing the signpost was certainly the key turning point in my domestic circumstances, but it didn’t result in a deviation from The Master Plan.
That Plan called for the replenishment of my finances while auditing in the USA, then (if nothing exciting distracted me) heading home to Australia and probably the eventual partnership that awaited me. If something exciting did distract me there, I would go with the flow and wherever the wind blew. I might well have married, and sired American children. I would surely have wangled a transfer to somewhere warm, like Florida. All I needed to do was fill in the US Immigration form in London, and wait my turn.
But, as I explained in Almost American in February 2012, the waiting line in the Consulate was a long one, and to fill in time I went round the corner to the Canadian Consulate, where they interviewed me immediately. I never went back to the other place. Linda met me off the plane in Toronto a month later.
The New York office of Touche Ross & Co would never have sent any of its auditors on secondment to its correspondent office in The Bahamas, a British colony offshore from Florida. Even if it had done, the trust company in Nassau would never have given them access to its clients’ records. Nor would the trust company have hired an American auditor. US auditors were reckoned to be vulnerable to blackmail by the IRS. They still are, actually.
The Nassau trust company introduced us to the world of offshore tax-havens. We earned more money than we knew what to do with. Retirement was the obvious thing to do. And when that didn’t work out, we turned to another tax-haven – Vila in the New Hebrides, later Vanuatu. And when the next retirement didn’t work out, we turned to Cayman. It’s been a good life.
The wages-summary Touche Toronto gave me for the 1966 tax year said: Salary $8000, less Tax $1200 = Net $6800. I remember thinking, $1200! That’s 15%! Outrageous! I’ll never pay Income Tax again, if I can help it! That vow marked a turning point, too, in a way.
Fearful of a local measles epidemic, Samuel’s mother confined him to the house pro tem. Impatient with delaying what he reckoned to be the inevitable, he sought out an infected friend and crawled into his bed. When the epidemic had run its course – with the boys luckily still alive – Sam’s furious mother gave up on his schooling and apprenticed him to a printer of books.
Captivated by stories of the Amazon River, he ran away on a Mississippi river-boat headed for the international port of New Orleans. With no money, he stayed on the river, became a pilot, then a writer of occasional stories, then a literary legend. It all began with the measles.
I had never thought to identify my own turning point, until I read about Mark Twain’s the other day. It was always taken for granted in our house that I would travel overseas. There was never a realistic likelihood that I wouldn’t. My boss in Toowoomba had invested a lot of hope that I would abandon the ambition and become a partner in his accountancy firm. At age 22, I was made manager of his branch-office in Brisbane, and he wasn’t happy to lose me. It might have been a turning point if I’d stayed, but I didn’t and it wasn’t.
My adventures overseas were all merely incidents along the path of my manifest destiny. Linda was a large part of that destiny – as it transpired – but meeting her [Zorba the Greek, blogged in January 2012] wasn’t a turning-point either. The day before that meeting, a Yugoslavia peasant woman had caused me to miss a vital signpost [A back road to Bulgaria, March 2012] and end up in Greece by mistake. Missing the signpost was certainly the key turning point in my domestic circumstances, but it didn’t result in a deviation from The Master Plan.
That Plan called for the replenishment of my finances while auditing in the USA, then (if nothing exciting distracted me) heading home to Australia and probably the eventual partnership that awaited me. If something exciting did distract me there, I would go with the flow and wherever the wind blew. I might well have married, and sired American children. I would surely have wangled a transfer to somewhere warm, like Florida. All I needed to do was fill in the US Immigration form in London, and wait my turn.
But, as I explained in Almost American in February 2012, the waiting line in the Consulate was a long one, and to fill in time I went round the corner to the Canadian Consulate, where they interviewed me immediately. I never went back to the other place. Linda met me off the plane in Toronto a month later.
The New York office of Touche Ross & Co would never have sent any of its auditors on secondment to its correspondent office in The Bahamas, a British colony offshore from Florida. Even if it had done, the trust company in Nassau would never have given them access to its clients’ records. Nor would the trust company have hired an American auditor. US auditors were reckoned to be vulnerable to blackmail by the IRS. They still are, actually.
The Nassau trust company introduced us to the world of offshore tax-havens. We earned more money than we knew what to do with. Retirement was the obvious thing to do. And when that didn’t work out, we turned to another tax-haven – Vila in the New Hebrides, later Vanuatu. And when the next retirement didn’t work out, we turned to Cayman. It’s been a good life.
The wages-summary Touche Toronto gave me for the 1966 tax year said: Salary $8000, less Tax $1200 = Net $6800. I remember thinking, $1200! That’s 15%! Outrageous! I’ll never pay Income Tax again, if I can help it! That vow marked a turning point, too, in a way.
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Shame and scandal in the family
Doing some family-history research online, my niece in Australia discovered that one of our ancestors was murdered with an axe while lying drunk one night on his front lawn. He was a wife-beater, and one of his sons probably did him in. There was no trial, but the inquest made for some fun reading. The authorities may not have tried too hard to find the culprit.
Linda was shocked – shocked! – to hear the news. Her family-tree has nothing that can compete with such a scandal. She had a distant aunt of five generations ago who was a freelance prostitute down by the London docks, but pfft! Who hasn’t? Not in the same bracket as a murdered wife-beater, is it?
All families have skeletons in the closet. We today have no reason to be ashamed of them, or proud of ancestral heroes. We had nothing to do with what they did, any more than vice-versa. Bad stories are sometimes disappointing, sometimes amusing; but unless they’re personal to us, what do they matter? (I’ve never understood why people boast about important ancestors. Why brag about your family’s having come down in the world?)
Some of my family’s skeletons involved religion. When my Catholic great-uncle was discovered to have sired a child by his secretary, his wife and siblings were upset less by the illegitimacy than by the fact that the secretary was a Protestant. In Toowoomba, in those days, a “mixed marriage” meant one between Roman Catholics and Protestants.
My father’s hometown was a hotbed of mutual suspicion and contempt. The Protestant spouse in a mixed marriage came under heavy pressure to surrender the children to the mercies of The Church. My mother refused to knuckle under, which brought her a lot of ill-will from the other side. A visiting bishop referred to her “that woman”, and prayed for the souls of her lost children.
Much of the ill-will was tribal; the local Catholics were all of Irish descent, and the Irish-English chasm was as wide as eight hundred years of British invasions and occupation had made it. In 1981 the RC priest in my ancestral village in Tipperary was indignant. “Ours have always been tolerant parishes”, he said. “Protestants would have helped your ancestors build the parish church we’re sitting in.” I told my mother later, but she looked doubtful.
Here in Cayman, Caymanians have never had much of a problem with mixed-religion unions, whether blessed by a church service or not. There must have been plenty of problems with mixed-race unions, in the aftermath of plantation-slavery, but the public record is silent on the matter. Nothing seems to have been recorded of domestic unions during and after slavery. Surely, it’s high time to break the taboo. What’s the point of hiding old truths in the broom-cupboards with the skeletons?
During slavery, almost all black-white unions would have involved rape by slave-owners. That’s an uncomfortable fact that we just have to live with. Sex between superiors and inferiors is usually categorised as rape because genuinely free consent can’t be presumed. Today in Cayman it sometimes happens between male employers and their female migrant domestics whose indentures they own. That’s a taboo subject, too.
Homosexual rape has always happened between male guards and inmates in prisons and asylums, and among inmates. It would certainly have occurred between European sailors and African men on the prison-ships crossing the Atlantic. And among the African captives themselves? Very likely. The latter is yet another taboo subject, throughout the Caribbean. But a prison is a prison, after all.
Linda was shocked – shocked! – to hear the news. Her family-tree has nothing that can compete with such a scandal. She had a distant aunt of five generations ago who was a freelance prostitute down by the London docks, but pfft! Who hasn’t? Not in the same bracket as a murdered wife-beater, is it?
All families have skeletons in the closet. We today have no reason to be ashamed of them, or proud of ancestral heroes. We had nothing to do with what they did, any more than vice-versa. Bad stories are sometimes disappointing, sometimes amusing; but unless they’re personal to us, what do they matter? (I’ve never understood why people boast about important ancestors. Why brag about your family’s having come down in the world?)
Some of my family’s skeletons involved religion. When my Catholic great-uncle was discovered to have sired a child by his secretary, his wife and siblings were upset less by the illegitimacy than by the fact that the secretary was a Protestant. In Toowoomba, in those days, a “mixed marriage” meant one between Roman Catholics and Protestants.
My father’s hometown was a hotbed of mutual suspicion and contempt. The Protestant spouse in a mixed marriage came under heavy pressure to surrender the children to the mercies of The Church. My mother refused to knuckle under, which brought her a lot of ill-will from the other side. A visiting bishop referred to her “that woman”, and prayed for the souls of her lost children.
Much of the ill-will was tribal; the local Catholics were all of Irish descent, and the Irish-English chasm was as wide as eight hundred years of British invasions and occupation had made it. In 1981 the RC priest in my ancestral village in Tipperary was indignant. “Ours have always been tolerant parishes”, he said. “Protestants would have helped your ancestors build the parish church we’re sitting in.” I told my mother later, but she looked doubtful.
Here in Cayman, Caymanians have never had much of a problem with mixed-religion unions, whether blessed by a church service or not. There must have been plenty of problems with mixed-race unions, in the aftermath of plantation-slavery, but the public record is silent on the matter. Nothing seems to have been recorded of domestic unions during and after slavery. Surely, it’s high time to break the taboo. What’s the point of hiding old truths in the broom-cupboards with the skeletons?
During slavery, almost all black-white unions would have involved rape by slave-owners. That’s an uncomfortable fact that we just have to live with. Sex between superiors and inferiors is usually categorised as rape because genuinely free consent can’t be presumed. Today in Cayman it sometimes happens between male employers and their female migrant domestics whose indentures they own. That’s a taboo subject, too.
Homosexual rape has always happened between male guards and inmates in prisons and asylums, and among inmates. It would certainly have occurred between European sailors and African men on the prison-ships crossing the Atlantic. And among the African captives themselves? Very likely. The latter is yet another taboo subject, throughout the Caribbean. But a prison is a prison, after all.
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Children without books
[As with so many of my blog-posts, this one is of general application, not just to Cayman.]
Cayman’s government schools are failing most of their pupils. The Education Establishment and the local media concentrate their attention on the minority of academically bright pupils, while ignoring the majority of academically dull ones. High-school graduations are a topic of scorn. (“Academically dull” is NOT the same as “stupid”, by the way.) My February post Protection versus Education explained the origin of this system.
There are various reasons why some children are disadvantaged. Being raised in homes by parents who disrespect the virtues of discipline and learning is one; being distracted by shiftless siblings or companions is another. But most of the blame rests on homes without books.
Homes without books rarely produce children who can read comfortably or write grammatically. Even in this Internet Age, books are an essential base for learning. You can buy a book for ten or twenty cents at a yard sale, leave it behind somewhere, and replace it for the same price at the next yard sale.
Cayman’s charity “op” shops are replete with books. The Humane Society’s are relatively expensive, but the NCVO and Red Cross don’t have many books priced higher than fifty cents. The George Town Library occasionally flogs hard-cover books for 25 cents. I have shelves full of tatty old books on history and geography that I value highly.
A home without books is no proper place for a child, and it reflects poorly on our local rulers in the Civil Service and Legislative Assembly that such homes exist in Cayman. Considering the tens of billions of dollars raised by our government over recent decades, there should be no Caymanian child forced by circumstances to live without books. How could our representatives get their priorities so wrong, in such a tiny community?
While politicians and Civil Servants “earn” their wages and pensions by shuffling papers, our private-sector leaders concern themselves with newspaper photographs of large cheques for college scholarships. Each photo buys an extra Work Permit or two, so it’s a good investment; but there’s no investment of thought and care. Cayman doesn’t need more college graduates, as much as it needs a local labour force that is literate.
Local business organisations fall short of what they should be doing. After all, their members are forced by law to hire semi-illiterate high-school graduates and to educate them on the job. Yet the Chamber of Commerce, Cayman Finance, the Tourism Association and the rest all pursue their agendas without focussing on the prospect of a permanently alienated and illiterate underclass. For half the price of a photo-op scholarship, every bookless child in Cayman could be helped towards a productive future.
Fancy-shmancy schools don’t fix literacy, and aren’t necessary to education at any level. Rather, they are monuments to vanity, and provide no help for academic under-achievers. Before our government’s coffers became awash with money from the tax-haven, the children of the Islands were taught at home by their mothers or casual tutors. That wasn’t such a bad thing.
My brother and I were taught at home on the farm by our mother, until a one-room shack was knocked up by the local men out of slab-timber. The State Education Department 250 miles away provided moral support and a 17-year-old teacher straight from training-college.
The school opened with thirteen pupils, aged from four to eight. The room measured eighteen feet by twelve; it had one door and two window-spaces with board-shutters. No air-con, no fans. Older Caymanians will relate to that – and to the slates and those slate-pencil things that had to be sharpened on the nearest rock. No school dinners, no cold drinks, no flushing toilets, no fans. Did I mention there were no fans? No fans. We dripped sweat onto our books, just like we did at home.
Cayman’s government schools are failing most of their pupils. The Education Establishment and the local media concentrate their attention on the minority of academically bright pupils, while ignoring the majority of academically dull ones. High-school graduations are a topic of scorn. (“Academically dull” is NOT the same as “stupid”, by the way.) My February post Protection versus Education explained the origin of this system.
There are various reasons why some children are disadvantaged. Being raised in homes by parents who disrespect the virtues of discipline and learning is one; being distracted by shiftless siblings or companions is another. But most of the blame rests on homes without books.
Homes without books rarely produce children who can read comfortably or write grammatically. Even in this Internet Age, books are an essential base for learning. You can buy a book for ten or twenty cents at a yard sale, leave it behind somewhere, and replace it for the same price at the next yard sale.
Cayman’s charity “op” shops are replete with books. The Humane Society’s are relatively expensive, but the NCVO and Red Cross don’t have many books priced higher than fifty cents. The George Town Library occasionally flogs hard-cover books for 25 cents. I have shelves full of tatty old books on history and geography that I value highly.
A home without books is no proper place for a child, and it reflects poorly on our local rulers in the Civil Service and Legislative Assembly that such homes exist in Cayman. Considering the tens of billions of dollars raised by our government over recent decades, there should be no Caymanian child forced by circumstances to live without books. How could our representatives get their priorities so wrong, in such a tiny community?
While politicians and Civil Servants “earn” their wages and pensions by shuffling papers, our private-sector leaders concern themselves with newspaper photographs of large cheques for college scholarships. Each photo buys an extra Work Permit or two, so it’s a good investment; but there’s no investment of thought and care. Cayman doesn’t need more college graduates, as much as it needs a local labour force that is literate.
Local business organisations fall short of what they should be doing. After all, their members are forced by law to hire semi-illiterate high-school graduates and to educate them on the job. Yet the Chamber of Commerce, Cayman Finance, the Tourism Association and the rest all pursue their agendas without focussing on the prospect of a permanently alienated and illiterate underclass. For half the price of a photo-op scholarship, every bookless child in Cayman could be helped towards a productive future.
Fancy-shmancy schools don’t fix literacy, and aren’t necessary to education at any level. Rather, they are monuments to vanity, and provide no help for academic under-achievers. Before our government’s coffers became awash with money from the tax-haven, the children of the Islands were taught at home by their mothers or casual tutors. That wasn’t such a bad thing.
My brother and I were taught at home on the farm by our mother, until a one-room shack was knocked up by the local men out of slab-timber. The State Education Department 250 miles away provided moral support and a 17-year-old teacher straight from training-college.
The school opened with thirteen pupils, aged from four to eight. The room measured eighteen feet by twelve; it had one door and two window-spaces with board-shutters. No air-con, no fans. Older Caymanians will relate to that – and to the slates and those slate-pencil things that had to be sharpened on the nearest rock. No school dinners, no cold drinks, no flushing toilets, no fans. Did I mention there were no fans? No fans. We dripped sweat onto our books, just like we did at home.
Thursday, November 14, 2013
A weekend in Cuba
It took a weekend in Havana a couple of years ago to remind me that my travelling days are over. It wasn’t as much fun as that sort of thing used to be. The last time I had visited a “new” country was 1989, and the country was Grenada, where the natives speak a wonderfully melodic variety of English. In the parts of Havana where we visited, half of the natives spoke even less English than we did Spanish, for goodness sake.
We met a young chap whose father had been born in Jamaica, moved to the Isle of Pines, sired a son in New York, and now lived back in Cuba. He (the son) was one of only two Cubans we met who had ever heard of the Cayman Islands, a hundred miles to the south. The other was a retired maths teacher who was selling off his collection of books and minor heirlooms from a stall in one of the Plazas in the Old City every weekend.
The teacher’s pension was ten US dollars a month plus (I think) free accommodation and rationed utilities. There are no frills to life in Cuba, thanks partly to the power of the civil service (which owns or licences all economic activity) and partly to the American blockade of the past fifty years. Everybody with some service or goods of value to tourists does relatively well; the government makes concessions to them.
We were there in the off-season, but tourists were thronging the streets and squares of the Old City. They were mostly Latinos: our sightseeing bus was packed with a tour-group of Colombians. We heard English spoken by only two couples the whole weekend – one from England, the other from Canada. No English-speaking West Indians at all.
For US$30 a night, we rented a room in a run-down private apartment on the edge of the Old City – now a beautifully renovated tourist trap. Little putt-putts were cheap, and young men on tricycles seemed glad of $3 to pedal us home through the dark streets at night. The town was as safe as houses – somewhat safer, actually, considering the state of the poorer dwellings.
Our room looked down on the roof of a block of flats where four dogs, uncounted chickens and an old man lived all together in a nest of lumber that vaguely resembled a shed. Did he sell the eggs and fatten the dogs for their meat? Who knows? It was a bizarre example of urban poverty – though not unique in our region. I’ve seen a lot worse in Haiti and Jamaica.
Many people, when they think of Cuba, think of the longtime US military occupation of Guantanamo Bay and the torture camp there that gives the Island a bad name. The unelected government of independent Cuba no doubt has its own torture camps, though it does have the grace to be embarrassed about their existence. Cuban nationals in ramshackle boats wash up in Cayman from time to time; but no refugees from the American camp ever do. Independent Cuba may, arguably, be the less oppressive place.
The mainstream US media organs all reflect the fact that the US’s rulers classify the Republic of Cuba as an enemy. In fact, Cuba is a long way from the Big Bad Communist North-Korean Hell that most Americans are ignorant enough to believe it is. (These days, of course, Big Brother is as much of a presence in the US itself as in most of its enemies! As the preacher said, “To every thing there is a season...”)
The people of Havana seem to be a delightfully cheerful bunch, on the whole. The Latino temperament is amazingly resilient. Just about everyone works for the government, and their pleasure in what they do – and the loose discipline – is probably the same as any governments’ employees’ is. In Cayman, too, government provides a regular wage to its Civil Servants, plus the opportunity to make some private money on the side. Havana is a very Caribbean town, as well as a very Latin one.
We met a young chap whose father had been born in Jamaica, moved to the Isle of Pines, sired a son in New York, and now lived back in Cuba. He (the son) was one of only two Cubans we met who had ever heard of the Cayman Islands, a hundred miles to the south. The other was a retired maths teacher who was selling off his collection of books and minor heirlooms from a stall in one of the Plazas in the Old City every weekend.
The teacher’s pension was ten US dollars a month plus (I think) free accommodation and rationed utilities. There are no frills to life in Cuba, thanks partly to the power of the civil service (which owns or licences all economic activity) and partly to the American blockade of the past fifty years. Everybody with some service or goods of value to tourists does relatively well; the government makes concessions to them.
We were there in the off-season, but tourists were thronging the streets and squares of the Old City. They were mostly Latinos: our sightseeing bus was packed with a tour-group of Colombians. We heard English spoken by only two couples the whole weekend – one from England, the other from Canada. No English-speaking West Indians at all.
For US$30 a night, we rented a room in a run-down private apartment on the edge of the Old City – now a beautifully renovated tourist trap. Little putt-putts were cheap, and young men on tricycles seemed glad of $3 to pedal us home through the dark streets at night. The town was as safe as houses – somewhat safer, actually, considering the state of the poorer dwellings.
Our room looked down on the roof of a block of flats where four dogs, uncounted chickens and an old man lived all together in a nest of lumber that vaguely resembled a shed. Did he sell the eggs and fatten the dogs for their meat? Who knows? It was a bizarre example of urban poverty – though not unique in our region. I’ve seen a lot worse in Haiti and Jamaica.
Many people, when they think of Cuba, think of the longtime US military occupation of Guantanamo Bay and the torture camp there that gives the Island a bad name. The unelected government of independent Cuba no doubt has its own torture camps, though it does have the grace to be embarrassed about their existence. Cuban nationals in ramshackle boats wash up in Cayman from time to time; but no refugees from the American camp ever do. Independent Cuba may, arguably, be the less oppressive place.
The mainstream US media organs all reflect the fact that the US’s rulers classify the Republic of Cuba as an enemy. In fact, Cuba is a long way from the Big Bad Communist North-Korean Hell that most Americans are ignorant enough to believe it is. (These days, of course, Big Brother is as much of a presence in the US itself as in most of its enemies! As the preacher said, “To every thing there is a season...”)
The people of Havana seem to be a delightfully cheerful bunch, on the whole. The Latino temperament is amazingly resilient. Just about everyone works for the government, and their pleasure in what they do – and the loose discipline – is probably the same as any governments’ employees’ is. In Cayman, too, government provides a regular wage to its Civil Servants, plus the opportunity to make some private money on the side. Havana is a very Caribbean town, as well as a very Latin one.
Less than human (torture)
Communities in the Western World are cracking down on sex-offenders. These days, their names go down in an official Register – for life, sometimes. If convicted of a sex-crime against children, they must not live near a school or (sometimes) even be near a school. The Police must keep track of where they live. In some US states their names and home addresses must be open to public enquiry. Recidivism is rife among sex-offenders, apparently. They just can’t (most of them) hold themselves back from indulging their weaknesses.
I wonder if the same self-indulgence occurs among those who make careers of torture and mutilation. US and NATO drone-pilots, for instance, and prison guards at Guantanamo and other torture-camps – do they suffer withdrawals symptoms when they are back home in civilian life?
Do the pilots miss the thrill of taking close-up videos of body-parts of all ages and sexes being splattered around village streets? I’ve read some pretty gruesome descriptions of such mutilations – both of the original targets and their families and of the rescuers caught by the “double-tap” follow-up rockets.
Do the torturers miss the thrill of physically restraining their victims, and of hearing the cries of pain and anguish? Surely they must. For psychopaths – and we can take it for granted that torturers are psychopaths – the adrenalin rush must be like a powerful drug. Every day, a new fix. Just like for addicted sex-offenders.
What do they all do when their tours of duty end? Some sign on as security contractors to Armies and their corporate sponsors; some join domestic Police Forces (which would explain the growing brutality of those) or become Prison Officers. But most of them just take up ordinary jobs and keep their heads down, like their Japanese and German exemplars did after World War II.
Isn’t it in the public interest to know where they work and live? What a shock it would be, to discover one of them behind you in the supermarket line, muttering with impatience, or sitting at the next table in a restaurant. These are people whose lives have for years been focussed on committing horrific acts of extreme violence against civilians. Their minds are filled with a thousand images of bleeding meat and screaming children – bleeding and screaming that they themselves have been responsible for.
Being psychopaths, they must hunger for fresh images. They can’t look at a stranger – especially an unarmed and helpless one – without assessing the stranger’s capacity for agony. “Hmmm. I don’t have official status any more, but I have a sharp knife and a basement. I wonder if I would feel the same rush as I used to do. Well, there’s only one way to find out...”
Why are people like that allowed to prowl the streets? They are infinitely more dangerous than most sex-offenders.
When a professional torturer greets a friend or acquaintance, he shakes hands with the same hand that he twisted a victim’s throat or gut or balls with, following an eager wait for the doctor to revive a body for another session. (In the armies, all the torturers are professionals; they’re all well paid, with generous pensions and medical benefits.)
A blog-post of mine last April (The war against women) speculated that the only safe perpetrators and witnesses of atrocities were those whose memories keep them awake at nights. Those who sleep soundly are the psychopaths, who aren’t capable of remorse. They are less than human, which is what makes them such excellent mutilators of minds and bodies.
I wonder if the same self-indulgence occurs among those who make careers of torture and mutilation. US and NATO drone-pilots, for instance, and prison guards at Guantanamo and other torture-camps – do they suffer withdrawals symptoms when they are back home in civilian life?
Do the pilots miss the thrill of taking close-up videos of body-parts of all ages and sexes being splattered around village streets? I’ve read some pretty gruesome descriptions of such mutilations – both of the original targets and their families and of the rescuers caught by the “double-tap” follow-up rockets.
Do the torturers miss the thrill of physically restraining their victims, and of hearing the cries of pain and anguish? Surely they must. For psychopaths – and we can take it for granted that torturers are psychopaths – the adrenalin rush must be like a powerful drug. Every day, a new fix. Just like for addicted sex-offenders.
What do they all do when their tours of duty end? Some sign on as security contractors to Armies and their corporate sponsors; some join domestic Police Forces (which would explain the growing brutality of those) or become Prison Officers. But most of them just take up ordinary jobs and keep their heads down, like their Japanese and German exemplars did after World War II.
Isn’t it in the public interest to know where they work and live? What a shock it would be, to discover one of them behind you in the supermarket line, muttering with impatience, or sitting at the next table in a restaurant. These are people whose lives have for years been focussed on committing horrific acts of extreme violence against civilians. Their minds are filled with a thousand images of bleeding meat and screaming children – bleeding and screaming that they themselves have been responsible for.
Being psychopaths, they must hunger for fresh images. They can’t look at a stranger – especially an unarmed and helpless one – without assessing the stranger’s capacity for agony. “Hmmm. I don’t have official status any more, but I have a sharp knife and a basement. I wonder if I would feel the same rush as I used to do. Well, there’s only one way to find out...”
Why are people like that allowed to prowl the streets? They are infinitely more dangerous than most sex-offenders.
When a professional torturer greets a friend or acquaintance, he shakes hands with the same hand that he twisted a victim’s throat or gut or balls with, following an eager wait for the doctor to revive a body for another session. (In the armies, all the torturers are professionals; they’re all well paid, with generous pensions and medical benefits.)
A blog-post of mine last April (The war against women) speculated that the only safe perpetrators and witnesses of atrocities were those whose memories keep them awake at nights. Those who sleep soundly are the psychopaths, who aren’t capable of remorse. They are less than human, which is what makes them such excellent mutilators of minds and bodies.
Free Labour vs Slave Labour
Here we are, late in the year 2013, and our local rulers still won’t accept that Cayman’s forty-year experiment with affirmative action and indentured migrant labour has failed. Sigh. How much more evidence do they need? Why are they such slow learners?
Cayman has three thousand registered unemployed men and women – in a community that employs 20,000 migrants, mostly unskilled. Despite all the pressure brought to bear on them by the authorities, private-sector employers continually refuse to hire individuals who can’t be fired for incompetence. Our government does hire incompetents, because one of its major duties is to be the employer of last resort. In fact, our three thousand unemployed are unemployable: even government won’t hire them.
But not all of them are unemployed. Some have unrecorded jobs in illegal occupations such as burglary, drug-dealing, pimping and prostitution. A few make a reasonable living by begging from strangers in the street or outside supermarkets. Some receive free meals, beds and occasional cash allowances from parents or other relatives; in effect, they live off their inheritances. None starve to death, and (to the best of my knowledge) none are actually homeless.
Further fiddling with the Immigration Law and regulations will not help a single one of them. Not one. So before our politicians toss any more xenophobic accusations around like confetti, they ought to stop pretending that permanent protectionism is the answer to the problem.
All intelligent people know that the answer to the problem is to abolish the indentured-labour system that all too often resembles bond-slavery. Only migrant labour is bound by indentures; only Caymanian labour is free to switch employers at whim. And free labour can never compete fairly with slave labour of any kind.
Our public servants are in thrall to Caymanian householders and other employers of unskilled labour. Most government bureaucrats run private businesses at taxpayers’ expense, and benefit mightily from the cheap migrant workers. Immigration Officers are famous for importing foreign slaves-in-all-but-name and selling their services. Again: free Caymanian workers can’t compete.
Unfortunately, there is zero chance that our politicians will acknowledge the truth. So the indentured servitude of the past forty years will be with us for another forty. What a prospect! Somebody once defined insanity as doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time. Yet that is what the politicians are doing. Well, they can fiddle with the protectionist legislation till the cows come home: the result will be the same. The insanity looks set to continue forever.
What humbug, to embrace the concept of human rights, while endorsing indentured servitude. If our local politicians – and the FCO clerks to whom they report – were honest in the matter, they would abandon the legal exploitation of migrants, and would accept the full blame for our local unemployment. To be clear: the blame is NOT the private-sector businesses: it is our rulers’ defiance of a basic law of economics. Let’s say it once more: free labour cannot compete with slavery.
Three years ago I posted on this blog an article called Everybody’s Cheating, commenting on how employers got around the law and how governments manipulated it. In February of this year (2013) I posted Protection versus Education, explaining the origin of the current indentures system, when the unskilled Caymanians of forty years ago were set up for exploitation by an alliance of the local elite of the day and the FCO clerks of the day.
They were tricked into giving up an educated future for the mirage of protection from competition by foreigners. Thus, the entitlement culture was born.
Cayman has three thousand registered unemployed men and women – in a community that employs 20,000 migrants, mostly unskilled. Despite all the pressure brought to bear on them by the authorities, private-sector employers continually refuse to hire individuals who can’t be fired for incompetence. Our government does hire incompetents, because one of its major duties is to be the employer of last resort. In fact, our three thousand unemployed are unemployable: even government won’t hire them.
But not all of them are unemployed. Some have unrecorded jobs in illegal occupations such as burglary, drug-dealing, pimping and prostitution. A few make a reasonable living by begging from strangers in the street or outside supermarkets. Some receive free meals, beds and occasional cash allowances from parents or other relatives; in effect, they live off their inheritances. None starve to death, and (to the best of my knowledge) none are actually homeless.
Further fiddling with the Immigration Law and regulations will not help a single one of them. Not one. So before our politicians toss any more xenophobic accusations around like confetti, they ought to stop pretending that permanent protectionism is the answer to the problem.
All intelligent people know that the answer to the problem is to abolish the indentured-labour system that all too often resembles bond-slavery. Only migrant labour is bound by indentures; only Caymanian labour is free to switch employers at whim. And free labour can never compete fairly with slave labour of any kind.
Our public servants are in thrall to Caymanian householders and other employers of unskilled labour. Most government bureaucrats run private businesses at taxpayers’ expense, and benefit mightily from the cheap migrant workers. Immigration Officers are famous for importing foreign slaves-in-all-but-name and selling their services. Again: free Caymanian workers can’t compete.
Unfortunately, there is zero chance that our politicians will acknowledge the truth. So the indentured servitude of the past forty years will be with us for another forty. What a prospect! Somebody once defined insanity as doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time. Yet that is what the politicians are doing. Well, they can fiddle with the protectionist legislation till the cows come home: the result will be the same. The insanity looks set to continue forever.
What humbug, to embrace the concept of human rights, while endorsing indentured servitude. If our local politicians – and the FCO clerks to whom they report – were honest in the matter, they would abandon the legal exploitation of migrants, and would accept the full blame for our local unemployment. To be clear: the blame is NOT the private-sector businesses: it is our rulers’ defiance of a basic law of economics. Let’s say it once more: free labour cannot compete with slavery.
Three years ago I posted on this blog an article called Everybody’s Cheating, commenting on how employers got around the law and how governments manipulated it. In February of this year (2013) I posted Protection versus Education, explaining the origin of the current indentures system, when the unskilled Caymanians of forty years ago were set up for exploitation by an alliance of the local elite of the day and the FCO clerks of the day.
They were tricked into giving up an educated future for the mirage of protection from competition by foreigners. Thus, the entitlement culture was born.
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