Taran's blog

According to this article by the Political Editor (Ria Taitt) of the Trinidad Express, there will be no more public meetings of parliamentary committees. In the continuation of an era where government is being accused more and more of corruption and overspending, it seems counterintuitive that a government that wishes to stay in power would remove public hearings. From the article:

...Government intends to discontinue public hearings of parliamentary committees, Government sources stated yesterday. The biggest impact, from the public standpoint, would be the effect on the Public Accounts Enterprises Committee (PAEC) and the three Joint Select Committees (JSCs), which, over the past four years, have held their meetings in public.

Sources said Government desire to hold the meetings in camera is motivated by a determination to protect public officials from the "brutal treatment" which they (the Government) feel many of them have suffered at the hands of Committee members before the viewing public.

Some of these persons, such as EMBD (Estate Management and Business Development Company Limited) Chairman, Uthara Rao, and UDeCOTT Chairman, Calder Hart, were buffed. In fact, Rao complained bitterly at the last PAEC meeting in the 2002/2007 Parliament, that he was treated like a criminal whenever he appeared before the Wade Mark-chaired Committee.

So far, the PAEC, which is again chaired by Opposition Senator Mark, has so far held its meetings in private. Sources said "from the get-go, the view was expressed by a Government minister that the Government wanted to have the meetings in private"...

Thomas Friedman's article, 'Who Will Tell the People?', echoed through my subconscious since this past Sunday. It wasn't that what he wrote is true - I'm sure it is - but it is probably more true than what he wrote in context. It is the disconnect between representation and people that he has shown in the American context that floats the idea to sentience - as Richard Feynman would say, 'the same ideas keep coming back'. So it is with the reconnection of representation and people - the lifeblood of economies, democracy and legal entities that pay service, perhaps 50% of the lip, to people themselves. While marketers try to drag people kicking and screaming through speakers, televisions and computer monitors, so do the very people who would have us represented through them.

And from that tangent, there is much that could be said - that should be said - but probably won't be said by those with the rapt audience. It is that what needs to be said isn't being said, and not only in the United States - indeed, the economic strength of the United States has become cannibalistic, eating itself with seasonings of it's own growing (ibid):

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation — work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means — have given way to subprime values: “You can have the American dream — a house — with no money down and no payments for two years.”

The Trinidad and Tobago Postal Service, TTPost, has apparently stopped the protest which has kept many, including me, from getting mail. Of course, this has been very inconvenient for many people over the last 2-3 weeks; checking the mailbox has been annoying, to say the least. One would think that mail would be considered important enough that 2-3 weeks would not elapse before they started delivering again. In a way, TTPost has held the country hostage with it's demands - whatever they may have been, and however they have been met.

To me, mail is a vital service. It brings the books sent to me to review. It brings bills such as the phone bill in an almost timely manner, though the tardiness is usually the issue of TSTT who for some reason does not seem to think mailing bills before their due date is a good idea. I won't pretend to understand that.

So now, apparently, I can expect a deluge of mail that is 2-3 weeks old. This is what the TTPost communications manager, Simone Farmer, had to say:

...She expressed gratitude to the public on behalf of TTPost for their "patience and continued loyalty during this period"...

Well, thank you for thanking me for being forced to be patient. And loyalty? Do I have a choice? Of course I don't. Did those words come out of a Public Relations 101 manual? It would seem so.

The general secretary of the Trinidad and Tobago Postal Workers' Union (TTPWU), Reginald Crichlow, seemed more realistic and less thankful for our 'patience and loyalty' (ibid):

I was updating the Caribbean Blog List and surfing around to see what was being written here and there (I try to avoid the 'dear diary' weblogs) when I found a few interesting stories on the Trinidad and Tobago Media Watch site - interesting, but worth discussion since much room is left for that.

But guess what? There is no discussion at Media Watch. The comments are disabled for whatever reason, but I must note my amusement that someone who is willing to criticize the media is unable to have comments on their own site. The obvious issue, then, would be that I moderate comments on my site due to the high amount of spam comments KnowProSE.com gets hit with.

At least I allow people to comment. What is it that they say about glass houses? Something about... stones? Throwing?

People think that just because they are using weblog software that they have a weblog. Not so. If you don't have comments enabled, you are simply broadcasting and are a very simple evolution of a Microsoft Frontpage website. That isn't new media.

New media allows discussion. Stop driving in the dark with your headlights off, especially if you claim to be on the highway.

I regret that I didn't immediately write about my trip to Port of Spain where I attended my first Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago (MATT) meeting. Because it was also about World Press Freedom, it was an instant lure for me.

While the meeting didn't go as anticipated, I did get to listen to a bit of what was said between people, as in this conversation.

Most of us were late for whatever reason, but once a small group coagulated a lot of things were discussed that I found interesting. Everyone but myself, it seemed, was used to dealing with the brick and mortar institutions of media in Trinidad and Tobago. Because of that, the discussion centered around those issues. While out of my depth, I found it interesting to get to see an exposed underbelly of traditional media in Trinidad and Tobago. It seemed to me that the issues were rather normal for any bureaucracy, and that one of the thrusts of the MATT would have to be dealing with some of those issues. The topic of web media is difficult to ignore, perhaps more so with myself in the room, but it was not the focus. This appealed to me. Understanding the problems others have with their profession is always interesting to me - while it may not apply to me, ever, it is always good to get a feel for the ground when discussing things with others.

One of the things that irked me at the Trade Investment Convention (2008) was the lack of coffee I could find. Granted, I love coffee and am of the belief that I operate at a less than optimal level without it, so this is personal. And yet, lest we forget, the huge land mass to the West of Trinidad and Tobago constitutes Latin America. To the North, aside from the Spanish speaking islands, there is a country known as the United States (you may have heard of it). While not close, European Union visitors are also participants in a culture that Trinidad and Tobago business has yet to grasp in a meaningful way. It is a very simple thing to create given water and ground beans.

It is a thing called coffee.

Granted, at the convention I ended up doing shots of instant coffee from a machine (!) to appease my morning craving in the food court area. After buying those, I noticed a small sign to the right which mentioned French Press coffee available. When I had first walked in and registered, I was told that there was coffee on the first aisle (but no one was there). The Costa Ricans had coffee, I'm sure, but they seemed to be out when I hovered past with a tank low on caffeine.

Trinidad and Tobago, through entrepeneurship and making coffee something exclusive and overpriced, has coffee shops - carbon copies of Starbucks that is called 'Rituals', and they tend to have decent coffee. Not great coffee, mind you, but decent. But it is, at the least, coffee made fresh by hot water passing through ground beans (as opposed to passing hot water through ground beans).

I was more than a little surprised - pleasantly so - to see the Agricultural Development Bank when I stopped in at the Trade and Investment Convention today. I got enough information to compromise the airway of a small horse from them - as well as a tomato and green pepper plant. The discussions revolved around my own interests in starting in agriculture here in Trinidad and Tobago, and I suppose their interests were more along the lines of helping me figure out what I wanted to do so that maybe they could get around to giving me a loan. I'm trying to avoid loans, of course, but one never knows - so I got as much information as possible from them and will be following up at their South Branch on Cipero Street here in San Fernando, perhaps next week.

I mentioned my concerns about praedial larceny, and I got a few blank stares. It doesn't hurt to ask; it is a problem and one that might have had some form of insurance on it. Apparently this is not the case - but agriculture itself is a risky business, especially with acts of Man and Acts of God. If it were as simple as sticking things in the ground and reaping the rewards, everyone would be doing it and we wouldn't have so much trouble feeding our own species. I'm sure some enterprising insurance company has something on that...

When I saw that FastForward, Trinidad and Tobago's Ministry Of Public Administration & Information, was at the Trade Investment Convention 2008, I was of two minds to speak to them. On one hand, I know that from discussion with them in public meetings when they first started demonstrated their own introspection as an organization. And yet, I also know that they face a lot of resistance from their own side of the fence - government. In many ways, rewiring a bureaucracy to handle information and communication technology is a daunting task for all involved.

Still, it is difficult to hide my own disappointment in the lack of viewable progress on their site. They may be very busy, but most of that hardly leaks out to their own pages. And so, when I entered discussion with a few people there, I brought that up fairly gently and outside of the public eye - I tried not to be confrontational about it and I think it succeeded.