The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

In the United States, the production and repetition of empty political slogans (“Yes we Can”, “Make America Great Again”, etc.) have come to mask not only the widening gap between lofty professed ideals and persistently depressing outcomes, but also the minuscule distinction between the parties themselves on virtually any matter of substance.

In reality, both parties promote endless wars abroad; both support a Wall Street-led economic agenda that delivers Dickensian levels of inequality; and both resist the delivery of truly universal healthcare to the American people, while spending trillions of dollars on a useless war machine that enriches defence corporations and the politicians who support them.

With such entrenched realities blocking genuine progress, it is little wonder that US politics has turned unashamedly to showbiz-style image manipulation to engage the electorate. Hence Trump, a twice divorced womanizer and casino mogul sells himself as the champion of blue collar evangelicals, while Kamala Harris, who imprisoned poor black mothers in California for the truancy of their children and used the state’s (minority-laden) penal system as a source of free labour, is hailed as a liberal ‘inspiration’ on the sole basis of her colour and gender, rather than her policies.

Thankfully, in The Bahamas, there are still real (rather than just representational) distinctions between the two parties – although the better of the two (the Progressive Liberal Party) – has yet to learn that it will get nowhere by permitting those distinctions to be blurred.

The PLP must recognize that adopting policy positions of the Free National Movement is not only bad for The Bahamas (because they are atrocious policies), but is bad politics too, because they simply enrich the FNM’s support base. For example, no amount of deferring to the Chamber of Commerce or employers’ lobby groups on issues like minimum wages or the (decades overdue) introduction of income tax on the wealthy will make the membership of these groups vote PLP.

Rather, it will merely confirm a perceived bipartisan endorsement of the regressive economic policies that have disfigured our country for a generation. This in turn alienates the PLP’s own support base – the poor and working classes who bear the brunt of these bad policies.

In this regard, it was truly excruciating to witness Mr. Christie’s doomed attempts to reconcile the private insurance lobby to his National Health Insurance plan. He gained no political capital whatsoever by conceding to these hardened vested interests, but allowed the process to be watered down and endlessly protracted until the vested interests’ own party got elected and scrapped it, prolonging our sufferance of a barbaric health system dominated by greedy profiteers (who will of course continue to fund the FNM).

The only input the PLP needed on NHI was that of the wider public (who support it overwhelmingly, in its most robust form). The next step was to quickly construct a single-payer, publicly funded universal healthcare system – the only kind that works anywhere on earth. Had Christie done that a decade earlier, the vested interests in private insurance would simply not have had the money to fund a regressive backlash, as they did in 2017 – especially if they were paying income tax on their corporate profits, as they would anywhere else on earth.

If the PLP is serious about rescuing the country from this dismal crew, it must unashamedly embrace positions that meaningfully differentiate it from the failed policies of the FNM.

Leave discredited trickle-down economics to the FNM and its puppet-masters; stop pretending that the pursuit of ever-more foreign investment is some panacea – in fact, admit that too much foreign investment without strong, balancing policies of Bahamianisation is actually a bad thing, which leads to a fire-sale of our country and a weakened domestic economy to boot (look at BTC).

Most importantly, on important issues like wages, taxes and healthcare, consult not with narrow vested interests, but rather with the wider Bahamian public.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

January 21, 2021