Submitted by Pachamama
As another election looms it may be good look at the relationship of the elites to intersectionality and their usage of rat lines.
Intersectionality is a popular term deployed by social scientists generally and activists, more particularly, to measure the degree of connectedness between the systems around us.
The master narrative being that everything in the natural world is connected to everything else. Therefore the political can never be properly understood unless within a universal context. So, in order to properly understand the political is it also necessary to make sense of the economic, social, technological, environmental and legal circumstances.
Rat lines have long been employed to ferry defeated political, military and other elites to relative safety. There are many examples of this. The present regime in the USA has used rat lines to transport their terrorists fighting the Syrian government to protected zones.
The Russian government has deployed the rat line to transfer a former Ukraine president to a city well known for this type of individual, with all his looted property, of course.
In Barbados there are well established rat lines – some obvious, others less so.
Former Prime Minister David Thompson okayed Elizabeth Thompson’s, no familial relationship we presume, employment within the United Nations soon after her defeat in the 2008 elections. For us this is an interesting rat line. For Elizabeth was maybe the most reviled political figure in modern politics. It certainly did not help that she was unquestionably female operating in a ‘man’s world’. This may have implications for Mia Mottley in her quest to become the first recognizable ‘female’ seeking to be prime minister. We hardly think that the Thompsons could have engineered such a rat line without Mottley’s blessings.
The interplay between rat lines and intersectionality are not always that obvious and seldom restricted to the political elites alone.
The first birthday of OSA after the 2008 general elections defeat demonstrated both intersectionality and rat lines at work. The Williams boys – Cow Williams and Bizzy Williams were well-known ‘associates’ of OSA and were expected to be at that party. But COW and Bizzy were now with David, for interests of course. OSA could do nothing more for them. So as many times as OSA’s main henchman called, and up to and past midnight, the Williams boys felt he could be duly ignored.
So rat lines are not constructed for political scoundrels alone. They are well used by economic rats as well.
That is at the upper end. But there are other rats building their own lines of escape, most times more ‘modestly’.
Politicians who serve two terms or more can expect pensions and other benefits regardless of the level of mal-administration they were a part of, regardless of the crimes of the regime. Indeed, a member of opposition or a government backbencher could be in parliament for decades and do nothing more than occasionally talk some foolishness and thereafter demand a statutory pension. There is general agreement between and amongst both parties that these entitlements should never be adversely interfered with.
Even if they gave us a Speaker of the House of Assembly who is a known crook and that the lawyer-politician, a class from which most parliamentarians derive, has a well established, a standard rat line, to evade justice.
Well, they are other want-to-be rats who generally know too little about too much, neither understand intersectionality nor rat lines, but are satisfied to present a righteous pretense of having something to contribute, they all say!
Maybe the economist or politician will never learn how to subtract.
Maybe the world’s premiere social scientists are wrong.
Maybe the rats-in-line are better able to navigate intersectionality than activists, but we doubt it, ‘bigly’.
Australian Palestinian supporters are calling for people to stop using online payments provider PayPal because it does not offer services in the West Bank and Gaza. iStock
Pro-Israel group The World Values Network took out this full-page ad in the Washington Post attacking New Zealand and Lorde. Twitter/RabbiShmuley
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