Capitalizing the B when referring to Black people might not seem like a big deal. However, when editors at The New York Times, USA Today, and the Columbia Journalism Review all make a big deal of their change in style, it’s certainly worthy of comment. Here is how the Times announced and rationalized its (belated)… Read more.
Caricom
For Independence Sake, Caribbean, Abolish Privy Council!
The migration crisis is only the latest issue threatening to blow the European Union asunder. From “Brexit” to “Grexit,” respective countries are chipping away the categorical imperatives of integration by reasserting the political imperatives of sovereignty. In fact, more and more Europeans are longing for the days when the EU functioned primarily as a trading… Read more.
British PM Rejects CARICOM Demands for Reparations for Slavery … and Rightly So
For years, CARICOM leaders have been demanding billions in reparations from the British government for slavery. For just as long, I’ve been trying to disabuse them of their legally, politically and morally unsustainable demands. I tried in such commentaries as “The Fatally Flawed Demands for Reparations for Slavery,” February 16, 2007, and “CARICOM Demands for… Read more.
French Forgiving Haitians like Germans Forgiving Jews
The media are lauding President Francois Hollande for announcing that France will finally right one of history’s greatest wrongs by forgiving what remains of Haiti’s “independence debt.” In an address at the opening of the memorial and cultural centre in Guadeloupe on Sunday, Hollande said Haiti’s debt of US$81.2 million will be cancelled… Haiti, which became the world’s… Read more.
CARICOM Demand for Reparations Smacks of Extortion
It speaks volumes that Europeans are ascribing no blame for this Lampedusa tragedy to the African governments that have failed their people so abysmally. This failure, after all, is the only reason why so many Africans, utterly bereft of hope at home, are fleeing to Europe in desperate pursuit of peace, prosperity, and happiness. But… Read more.
CARICOM and Its Groundhog-Day Meetings
I read with a mixture of dismay and bemusement about the goings-on in Haiti this week at the Twenty-Fourth Inter-Sessional Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government. This Conference is the de facto central government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and is responsible for setting its policies. Perhaps you’ve read reports on discussions the… Read more.
TCI looking to CARICOM (et.al.) to repeal VAT?!
For a number of reasons I have been loath in recent years to comment on political developments in my mother country of the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI). I am doing so today only in response to an inordinate number of urgent entreaties for me comment on the fight between our local leaders and British… Read more.
CARICOM’s ironic, if not misguided, call to lift the embargo against Cuba
At an extraordinary summit in Cuba this week, leaders of all countries in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) called on President-elect Barack Obama to lift America’s nearly 50-year embargo against their host country. As we gather today in Cuba, the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America is still in place…… Read more.