Submitted by Pachamama
We must transform or perish,” Arthur warned yesterday in an address to the Barbados Association of Office Professionals at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre – Nation Newspaper
Today the corporate media has Owen Seymour Arthur mouthing the arguments that BU has made for several years about the pressing need for radical transformation in Barbados, as a cultural construct. But we think he means the economy alone. Any real cultural transformation, the type we have been calling for, must of necessity transcend the dubious arithmetic methods of the Keynesian, post world war two architecture, to which Owen Arthur is an avid devotee. He knows nothing else and this old dog cannot be thought any new tricks. He seems to have now awoken to the truism, which has been obvious to those of us who closely follow global events, that all of what we think of as Western ‘civilization’ is under threat – and may well collapse sooner that we think.
This is a man who whole-heartedly embraced the Washington Consensus Neo-liberal policies of his masters in American and European capitals for more than 30 years. This is a man who is known to have a close relationship with one of the most plutocratic ‘leaders’ in the West, Tony Blair. It was Blair who spearheaded an illegal war on Iraq to steal Iraqi oil. Arthur has no history of transforming anything, with the possible exception of his personal life. We well remember him shedding crocodile tears on the floor of Parliament in a public relations (PR) gambit to attract resources. That this kind of man would now want to present himself as an agent of transformation is an affront to all that is Barbados and more particular those of us who have been fashioning this argumentation for many years.
Arthur is no more than an imposter!
But is must be the responsibility of BU to call out this neophyte as a real and present danger to the development of a new form of people-centered or direct democracy for which BU is possibly the sole voice in Barbados. We must be very careful that this troglodyte does not succeed in compromising our search for a better way by which we organize our society. We must make sure that this ideological frame does not end up being the basis on which Owen Arthur again seeks to stage a soft coup in Barbados. We can be sure that if Arthur hinges himself to a populace rhetoric it will only be for electoral reasons because everything that he is anathema to the type of transformation we seek. After such an election it shall be business as usual and the historic moment for real transformation would have lost its innocence and its non-partisan nature.
Stand firm!
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