quote:

Originally posted by Rahmah bin Jabr:

quote:

Originally posted by Mara:

quote:

Originally posted by baseman:

Have you ever pass thru any canecutter or fish monger ville? Manners, morality, decency is Greek.

For the tens of thousands of cane cutters & fish mongers who have for over a century eked an honest living, educate and instill in their off springs great moral and ethical values that have allowed them to occupy esteemed positions in practically every worthwhile human endeavor, the above statement has to be one of the most asinine - perhaps more so, coming from a supposedly educated coolie trying to curry-favor with those who think that all indians are scums.

Conjecture, an educated and emancipated Indian is my best friend. I like everyone and my Indo brothers and sisters most of all, but stay far from Katahars.

quote:

Originally posted by baseman:

quote:

Originally posted by Rahmah bin Jabr:

quote:

Originally posted by Mara:

quote:

Originally posted by baseman:

Have you ever pass thru any canecutter or fish monger ville? Manners, morality, decency is Greek.

For the tens of thousands of cane cutters & fish mongers who have for over a century eked an honest living, educate and instill in their off springs great moral and ethical values that have allowed them to occupy esteemed positions in practically every worthwhile human endeavor, the above statement has to be one of the most asinine - perhaps more so, coming from a supposedly educated coolie trying to curry-favor with those who think that all indians are scums.

Conjecture, an educated and emancipated Indian is my best friend . I like everyone and my Indo brothers and sisters most of all, but stay far from Katahars.

quote:

Originally posted by baseman:

quote:

Originally posted by Rahmah bin Jabr:

quote:

Originally posted by Mara:

quote:

Originally posted by baseman:

Have you ever pass thru any canecutter or fish monger ville? Manners, morality, decency is Greek.

For the tens of thousands of cane cutters & fish mongers who have for over a century eked an honest living, educate and instill in their off springs great moral and ethical values that have allowed them to occupy esteemed positions in practically every worthwhile human endeavor, the above statement has to be one of the most asinine - perhaps more so, coming from a supposedly educated coolie trying to curry-favor with those who think that all indians are scums.

Conjecture, an educated and emancipated Indian is my best friend. I like everyone and my Indo brothers and sisters most of all, but stay far from Katahars.

Makes me wonder how truly "educated and emancipated' the indian friend is if he / she would accept and tolerate this 'gem' "Have you ever pass thru any canecutter or fish monger ville? Manners, morality, decency is Greek" , from his enlightened, "educated & imancipated" friend. Personally I would rather be in the company of cane cutters, fish mongers & katahars than such self deprecating coolie. At least katahar & shrimp can be a delicious combination.

quote:

Originally posted by Rahmah bin Jabr:

quote:

Originally posted by baseman:

quote:

Originally posted by Rahmah bin Jabr:

quote:

Originally posted by Mara:
[QUOTE]Originally posted by baseman:

Have you ever pass thru any canecutter or fish monger ville? Manners, morality, decency is Greek.

For the tens of thousands of cane cutters & fish mongers who have for over a century eked an honest living, educate and instill in their off springs great moral and ethical values that have allowed them to occupy esteemed positions in practically every worthwhile human endeavor, the above statement has to be one of the most asinine - perhaps more so, coming from a supposedly educated coolie trying to curry-favor with those who think that all indians are scums.

another self deprecating coolie?

Conjecture, an educated and emancipated Indian is my best friend . I like everyone and my Indo brothers and sisters most of all, but stay far from Katahars.

So, where is the rest of the band?

Where are our tax dollars for education going?
By STABROEK STAFF | LETTERS | SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

Dear Editor,

Reading Stabroek News’ editorial titled “The state of our schools” (SN, September 13), I checked the 2011 budget where I found $24.3 billion Guyana dollars spent on education in 2011. That equals US$124 million. The PPP budgeted 6.37% of the 2011 budget for education. That placed Guyana at among the top 25 nations in the world in spending on education, higher than the USA. At roughly 190,000 school-age children in schools across Guyana, the PPP is spending approximately US$652.63 or $130,526 per schoolchild in 2011. By contrast, the USA spends 5.7% of its GDP on education at roughly $10,000 per student. However, each US student obtains roughly 21% of the US GDP per capita of $47,000 whereas each Guyanese student receives 26% of the GDP per capita.

Despite the Guyana government outspending the USA, every year when school opens, the saga of newly built schools falling apart, no running water, latrines for washrooms, dismal sanitation, poor maintenance, lack of teachers, no labs, no desks, cramped conditions and conditions greet the Guyanese people. A child died from falling into a school latrine. Yes, a school latrine. I know the PNC messed things up but after 19 years of staggering spending on education on a pool of students that has virtually stayed the same, where are our tax dollars for education really going? Where are they disappearing to? For they sure ain’t ending up in the proper education of our children.

The dropout rate in the ‘progress and development’ era of the PPP has been the highest ever in this country. As Stabroek News stated in its editorial, the Ministry of Education is quick to point to results. I have two questions for them. How many of those who achieved those results attended after-school lessons? How many of those who got those results attended private schools? With private schools popping up all over the country lessening the burden on the education ministry, we still have these problems greeting children on the very first day school reopens. The incompetents will say we feed schoolchildren and provide them with uniforms. That is a disgrace. It is a disgrace that people cannot afford to feed their own children in this country or buy them uniforms.

With all this PPP progress and development, more and more money is going towards feeding children whose parents are so crushed by poverty and killed by the 33% income tax and 16% VAT that they can’t feed their own children to send them off to get an education. No government should be proud of this sickening kind of dependency. It removes people’s right to feed their own children from the sweat of their labour. People should feed and clothe their own children, not some government taking everything in taxes and giving a contract to a lucky guy to give some milk and biscuits to our children. A man must be able to earn enough in a country to open up a box of cereal and a bottle of milk to feed his kids in the morning before kissing them goodbye as they leave for school. Those in Pradoville I and II do it every morning but they see nothing wrong in making our children dependent on the government for a little milk and some biscuits.

The PPP has no game plan for education. Its game plan is to build things by giving big hefty contracts to the lucky few. We get lots of new buildings. Sugar factories, wharves, roads, schools, bridges, etc. Nobody to run them properly. An arm and a leg to use them (see Berbice Bridge). They fall apart the next day. They are empty providing good homes for mice. They cost a fortune.

A happy handful is getting very rich in this country while harsh taxes are forcing many more into poverty. No wonder the cost of living is a nightmare. Our schools are no different. We might get another 100 brand spanking new schools next year. The condition of them and what happens in them is an entirely different matter for which the PPP really doesn’t care. You look at the new school from the outside and shut up is the philosophy.

Yours faithfully,
M Maxwell

Source

Guyanese should read the WikiLeaks cables
By STABROEK STAFF | LETTERS | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2011

Dear Editor,

The US Embassy cable of June 2007 is a humdinger, a big one. It is written by Chargé d‘Affaires Michael Thomas from the US Embassy. The cable claims Roger Luncheon called the US Chargé to the Office of the President on June 18, 2007. The Chargé claimed that he offered during the meeting to bring the DEA Country Attaché resident in Trinidad to Dr Luncheon’s office that very week, but that Dr Luncheon reportedly blurted out, “Whoa! I’m not going to talk to DEA!” The Chargé said he expressed confusion since Luncheon had only moments before asked for US cooperation. Luncheon then changed his position and accepted the offer.

Luncheon handed the US Chargé documents including a letter containing allegations that Senior Superinten-dant Steve Merai attempted to extort money from a drug-dealer. The principal point of the letter was a concern that Venezuelan-based Guyanese narco-trafficker Maxwell `Lunkie’ Melville was being aided to take control of Khan’s narco-trafficking empire. Now, this letter could have been written by anyone including one of the parties involved in the drug turf war and could be dismissed as speculative self-serving garbage. However, the fact that Dr Luncheon allegedly called the US Embassy official to his office to discuss this matter in person because he did not wish to discuss it over the phone signals that the letter posed a serious problem.

The embassy claims in its cable that Dr Luncheon stated that after the arrest of Roger Khan the second tier of drug traffickers was disorganized. Dr Luncheon allegedly suggested that ‘we,‘ which I suppose meant the Guyana Government and the US Government, should strike the drug traffickers now. Dr Luncheon then reputedly followed up that bang with a whimper when he allegedly said that while US cooperation with Suriname and Trinidad was strong, “Guyana’s constitutional and legal structures are inconvenient” for taking action against drug traffickers. Another case of total nonsense. The PPP since 1992 has controlled Parliament. It can pass any law it wants with its majority. It went to Parliament alone and passed the Freedom of Information Act. For President Jagdeo’s right-hand man to allegedly claim that the country’s legal and constitutional structures were a hindrance to destroying the scourge of narco-trafficking when his own PPP party owns the Parliament has to be one of the most extraordinary statements ever made. If the US cable was correct, this was another case of utter foolishness.

The US cable claims that in 2005 it offered to set up a vetted police unit to gather actionable intelligence but the Guyana government killed it. The cable claims that President Jagdeo allegedly told Ambassador Robinson that almost everyone knows who the major drug traffickers are in Guyana. Yet nothing was done to arrest, prosecute and target the assets of those individuals. If one knows allegedly who is committing crimes in a country and one has a mandate from the electorate to fight crime, why isn’t anything done to put those committing drug-trafficking crimes behind bars? The cable alleges that senior government officials socialise with notorious drug traffickers and the President participates in ribbon-cutting ceremonies opening businesses allegedly built with drug money. When I read this cable, the picture in this country of my birth and the place that I love with all my heart, became clearer. Clearer meaning more frightening. Every Guyanese should read those cables. The PPP will give them laptops with their tax money, but when they get them, they should go online and read the WikiLeaks cables. It will open their eyes to an entirely new world.

Yours faithfully,
M Maxwell

Source

$889M from sale of house lots in 2010 seriously exposes PPP’s boast on housing accomplishments
SEPTEMBER 22, 2011 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER LETTERS

Dear Editor,

The PPP spinners have always claimed and boasted that their party has done wonders with housing, distributing tens of thousands of house lots, opening schemes, etc. I’ve always said these spinners were delusional. Kaieteur News has vindicated me with numbers.

$889 million made from selling house lots and land for private schemes in 2010 tells the story. This so-called progress on housing claimed by the PPP for the past 19 years has always been nothing more than a major money-making scheme. The PPP takes the Guyanese people’s land, clears some bush from it, cuts a few narrow dirt roads and runs some water and some light poles and then sells it to the same Guyanese people for a fortune.

Guyana has 83,000 square miles (214,969 sq. km) of land. Land should be delivered way cheaper to the poor people looking for a better home. Instead, the PPP has concentrated on making as much money from selling people their own land. The Ministry of Housing made $1940 million in 2010 and spent $692 million for a massive profit of $1248 million. In 2009, it was $1180 million in income and spent $226 million for a massive profit of $954 million. The administration is obviously profiting from selling Guyanese people their own land.

The numbers clearly show that they are spending next to nothing on that land to prepare it properly before they sell it to Guyanese. No wonder we get housing schemes without running water, without electricity, mud dams for roads, no playgrounds, no schools, no medical centres and a palpable lack of community services. The PPP spent 19% and 36% of what it collected from the public. That is a shocking number. It is no wonder Diamond Housing Scheme has only one asphalt-covered dam that could barely fit two cars side by side as its only ingress and egress. It is no wonder we get schemes without basic amenities. People are being asked by government to pay millions for a small piece of land with no amenities and poor infrastructure.

When those private businessmen who get huge chunks of land for next to nothing turn around and charge poor people killer prices for small pieces of land, it is another expose of the truth about failure surrounding the PPP’s housing policy. Guyanese people are paying too much for land in a country with an abundance of land. The fact that the PPP is spending only about a third to develop the land they sell to Guyanese when they ‘give’ them house lots, tells us that the price of land is too high; tells us that this thing is a profit-making scheme being run on the backs of poor people already crippled by taxes and VAT.

There is no subsidising the cost of land to the people to whom it belongs. While the administration may distribute house lots, it is Guyanese like you and me who are paying an arm and a leg for those house lots. The PPP forgets to mention that there are really no free house lots in Guyana. You have to pay for that land, and given these numbers disclosed by Kaietuer News, you have to pay a lot for it. Land distribution should not be a profit-making scheme when people have to take on massive loans to build on those lands they have already paid too much for. Making money from selling the Guyanese people’s land back to them ends up taking that money from the Guyanese people and giving it to government in profits, all $1248 million of it in 2010.

When you give a government running a corrupt country $1248 million from mostly selling land to struggling people, who knows where it will end up.
The Guyanese people are the ones who have made housing a success. Not the PPP. For it is the Guyanese man or woman, desperate to make himself or herself better in spite of the slackness and failure of the society surrounding him or her, who takes that overpriced piece of swamp without amenities – that those selling it call a house lot – and struggles to build something from it.

While those who can afford it possibly get preferential rates for their land in areas like Pradoville and Pradoville 2, the poor, struggling Guyanese man has to overpay for his. He bears the burden of a mortgage, not the PPP. He faces the demands of the bank when he misses a payment, not the PPP which sold him the land at a ripoff price. It is he and only he who has to face the consequences of his action. If the administration distributes millions of house lots tomorrow, it does not change that it will make shocking profits on the backs of the struggling Guyanese who bought them.

Nor will it ever change that those who bought them have to lift the financial burden themselves in a country where 33% of their paycheques is lost to income taxes and 16% to VAT and another 5% to NIS payments and where cost of living is driving more and more people into poverty. When the PPP talks of making possible the dream of people owning their own homes, it does not talk about poor-paying jobs, stagnant incomes, high unemployment and rising cost of living causing many of those living this so-called dream to endure a nightmare to enjoy the roof over a house on an overpriced piece of land a callous government ripped them off with.

M. Maxwell

Source