Independently Ignorant!!!

Not everyone will recognize that stupid and ignorant are two different concepts. Someone who is stupid is just not very bright whereas ignorant means you just don’t know. In the world of politics stupidity is more forgivable than ignorance. I mean we can all call the names of some pretty stupid Senators, but all you need to win an election is to be smarter than a few thousand people who would vote for you. You don’t even need to be brighter than average.

The people who win elections study the process and work with their own circle of friends. Sometimes the circle of friends is the ICM party, sometimes it’s the Democratic Party. Very rarely it’s the Republicans. It seems that the voters are looking to chose those people who will work together. One year they have faith that the Democrats will work together and so elect a majority of Democrats. For one election in 1990, they believed the Republicans would work together and elected four out of seven Republican Senators.A few years back a “Crucian Coalition” formed which was a fairly radical Native rights group. They worked together during the whole election and while they got trounced by the Democrats, as a group they did better than the Republicans who didn’t work together at all.

There is a certain amount of logic in that security in groups is greater than the Lone Ranger getting shot at all the time and by being part of a group there are seven fewer people shooting at you.

Where or not the above explanation is entirely true, the historic record shows that no first term senator has won an election running as an independent since Chucky Hansen in 1986.

Seems that we have a lot of Lone Rangers running around who are independently ignorant of the Virgin Islands election process and history. Maybe this year one will get lucky and get elected.

I personally doubt it.

DeJongh Democrats Vrs. Diageo Democrats

Good Morning, St. Croix!!

It’s kind of hard to tell where dirty campaign tricks end and truth begins during an election. There were rumors and lists circulating that the Governor had backed a full slate of Senatorial Candidates to go against the Crucian Senators who had questioned the Diageo Deal. Candidates went so far as to wear name tags identifying themselves as DeJongh Democrats and there was a core group of Government house employees who attended the rallies for those apparently anointed by the Governor.

The incumbent who are all savvy politicians weren’t afraid of the newcomers and some went so far as to circulate the lists and tell people to vote against the Governors Candidates as payback for an inept first two years. (St. Croix is really suffering economically.)

Officially, the Governor stayed out of the primary for reasons of “plausible deniability” and it was a darn good thing. Careful analysis of the result shows that the governors endorsement might have been worth a maximum 200 votes above what the candidate would have done on their own. Since he only tried to split the Democratic party in St. Croix, it left a sour taste in the mouths of many loyal Democrats and they pledge to remember his disruption of the Party in two years when he runs for reelection.

Well like any good politician, he lied and denied any involvement three times before the Newspapers went to press. The official version is that the voters of St. Croix never rejected his hand picked candidates because he was never involved at all. All these fine young candidates that ran with the Governor’s support ended up as very lonely losers as the voters of St. Croix rejected them in mass.

There was no Diageo Dirge!

Good Morning St. Croix!!

If you listen to all the white folks on talk radio, you would have thought the incumbent Senators were in trouble. To hear their rantings, voting against the Diageo Bill was tantamount to Treason against the people of the Virgin Islands and all of the incumbents should lose in the Democratic Primary. The Governor, who apparently listened to these rantings and was harboring resentment against the five Crucian Senators who challanged him, supported his own team so we had so called Diageo Democrats running against the DeJongh Democrats.

Now in the end, there was absolutely no impact from the Diageo Vote and only one incumbent lost. The real question is why there was little impact on St. Croix and is their a reason why eight St. Thomas Senators voted for the bill and five of Seven St. Croix Senators voted against it. For people to stay in office they have to vote with their constituency in a logical matter so it’s time to look at risks and rewards.

Now a 200 million dollar addition to the treasury is a lot of money and will have a huge impact. Since two-thirds of all government workers are located on St. Thomas and all the highest priced professional positions are on that island, about three quarters of all Wages paid by the government go to St. Thomas Residents. Now not only is there a direct benefit from using these revenues to increase the wages of all government workers, but it means three quarters of all retroactive and pensions will be paid on that island.

Now St. Croix has more land and a fair number of industrial workers so half of all taxes are generated on that island and half of all Government Bills are paid on that island. Since this was a $250 million Dollar Project, half of the Debt is $125 million.

Any of the eight St. Thomas Senators would be a fool to vote against receiving a 150 million dollar a year benefit to voters for an investment of $125 million.

Now on the other hand, the Crucian Senators would only be able to deliver about $50 million a year for a very risky investment of $125 million. Not only is their the cash risk, there is environment risk and also the gift of 70 acres of prime land. Perhaps the biggest risk comes from giving away $90 million a year to a foreign company which can be used to promote foreign rum in direct competition to Puerto Rico. If anything goes wrong it could hurt Cruzan rum which has been run by locals who have earned a living and supported the government for 75 years. The safest route is to protect you own and vote against Diageo.

The two Crucian Senators that just didn’t fit were of course Jimmi Webber and Norman Jn. Baptiste. Lord knows what possessed Webber to vote for the bill. It’s not like the 7% white voters in St. Croix really matter in an election.

Now Jn. Baptiste is a lot easier to understand. He has voted for any project involving jobs wether it’s one or 100. While this project is for only 30 jobs, he was promised a 34 million dollar boondogle to build a silly little fish pond. Of course the St. Thomas Senators took the vote and reniged on the $34 million.

Oh well, that’s just politics VI style.

Hurricane Omar – Give Jack his Jacket.

Good Morning, St. Croix!!!

Most locals know that give Jack his Jacket means give credit where it is due and when it comes to Hurricane Omar, no one deserves more credit than Governor John DeJongh and his team at VITEMA (Virgin Islands Emergency Management Agency.) While Omar really wasn’t much of a storm, it was expected to be a very wet Category 3. Fortunately, it took a right hand turn veered East and missed the Islands.  Yeah, there was a lot of wind damage because the winds came from the wrong direction, but if it had been a direct hit, the winds and water would have come from every direction and their would have been much more damage.

So why give the Governor any credit at all?  Because almost every decision was timely and correct.  By the time the Wednesday call for curfew was being enforced, the rain and flooding was already severe, some parts of the island had lost power and it was dark.  That night, there were robocalls to every house on the island with a message from Governor DeJongh assuring everybody that he was working hard and praying for everybody and that everything would be all right.  Amazingly, many of our people never recognized the automated phone calls but thought that they were actually getting a personal message from the Governor.  According to my wife it was a well worded soothing message.

The curfews on the two days after the storm were well thought out allowing time for the citizens to do what they had to (including Friday night partying) while allowing road crews time to work on empty, curfew protected roads.

While it wasn’t much of a storm, there have been much worse efforts by prior administrations for even bigger non events.

The biggest failure for the whole event was WAPA which had some serious internal problems and failed to keep the public informed.  Lack of generating capacity led to a slow repowering of the island.  Instead of clearly explaining what had happened and why, the WAPA spokes person and their Customer service line was down for a couple of days so their was just no information.  Moreover, the restoration of power appeared random. Hotels were down for days, while residents received power.  There was no priority for the restoration of power to businesses so workers lost wages and will have no way to pay for the electricity they received at home.

Prior administrations had made restoration of power to hotels and other businesses a priority so that workers would have money to pay for the added expenses caused by the storm.

But then WAPA is not a direct government entity so the Governor is not responsible for their chaotic actions.

Give Jack his Jacket, the Governor did a wonderful job and he should pray for a storm two years from now to assure his reelection in the face of a collapsing economy.

Dump police Commissioner McCall

You have to admire a person who is willing to put his future career on the line by telling the world that his boss should be fired. On Pg. 25 of the Daily News (7/16/08), Police Lt. Joseph Gumbs makes an emotional plea that Commissioner James H. McCall has provided no effective leadership and should be fired for being absent from his Job for extended periods. This should really come as no surprise. As Deputy Commissioner McCall, he fraternized with the employees he was supposed to be leading and they bungled a lot of investigations which carried to the National Press. Who can forget the Post Office Killings of the tourists who were visiting for a wedding at the start of his command. The police ignored solid evidence and just beat a confession out of a crackhead or two. This was later recanted and the crime not solved. At the end of his watch was the little boy in bra and pantyhose who was killed and they tried to frame the step father while ignoring all other leads.

After he left the position as Deputy Commissioner and returned to ATF, they gave him the exulted and somewhat ceremonial position of Liaison to the United Way Fund for ATF. Now with a horrible record like that known well in advance of his appointment, it’s almost impossible to conceive why he was the Governors choice for Top Cop. Thus, it was not surprising that at the start of his new job, the investigation of the murder of the tourist on St. John was bungled and made national press. This is just more of the same bad police work that had occurred under his previous command.

It’s no surprise that McCall proved to be just as incompetent the second time around. The surprise is he is so bad that St. Thomas Cops would break rank and publicly bitch about his incompetence. All it took was the killing of a retired policeman who had the bad luck to walk in on a robbery in progress.

Times Really Tough, me son!

There’s a lot of reasons not to shop at Cost-U-Less, It’s not well lit, it’s not well organized, there are no baggers or for that matter bags. The selection varies from week to week and it could hardly be called a well stocked full service grocery store. Besides who really needs a 10 pound box of Cheerios or Rice Crispies or the whole leg of a cow. Obviously, I never go there unless I’m stocking the pantry for hurricane season. You never want to shop after a hurricane where the least fortunate among us who had their house destroyed are trying to buy food with very little money because all the banks are closed. – but thats a different story.

On the other hand there is price. I mean Plaza prices are rising daily. The butter I bought at $3.99 a month ago is now $5.69 and the salsa at $2.99 is now $3.69. I could go on item for item for the rest of this blog but trust me everything is inflated. So off I trek to Cost-U-Less to get my “bargains”.

Now the concept of bargain is relative as my two recycled cardboard boxes of groceries plus two bags of charcoal came to over $180. Alright I’ll concede that $50 was wine but still, I could lift each box and carry it to the house without feeling old. But that’s not all!!

In the middle of this shopping trip I noticed something I never expected to see in my life – Arab woman shopping at Cost-U-Less. seems that in the old days, Sunday or Thursday morning was the shopping day for Arab Women. These are slow days because of church and the day before payday respectively. The reason they shopped during these slow times is that the owners of Plaza would open a register just for their women and give them a discount. Now our Muslim community is quite devote and every Saturday, the men attend Mosque, pray, socialize and talk business while their women stay home care for the children and cook.

Seems their is now a new Saturday custom for the women. They are sneaking out to Cost-U-Less to do their shopping because they need to save a dollar or because plaza prices are way too high.

Just imagine that Arab women shopping at Cost-U-Less on a Saturday!

Times Really Tough, me son!

Gary S. Becker & Diageo Winners and Loosers

It really didn’t take a Noble Prize to predict the out come of the Diageo Vote. Most political prognosticators in the islands got it correct and predicted the outcome well in advance. The acceptance was unanimous on St. Thomas and 5 to 2 against for St Croix Senators although most guessed it would be 4 to 3 against.

Now very few St. Thomaians and as a matter of fact Crucians understand why it happened this way but almost all St. Thomas Senators think their Crucian Counterparts were nuts whereas as the Crucian Electorate with the exception of affluent White people believe their representatives did the right thing. Every single Senator wanted a deal with Diageo and the St. Thomains focused on the rewards and voted for it while the Crucian Senators focused almost exclusively on the risks and voted against it.

Gary S. Becker won a Nobel Prize for developing the concept that people are rational, their economic decisions make sense and as a group they make the best economic decisions even when they can’t explain why. So how would Professor Becker explain the two different groups reaching different conclusions based on the same set of data?

Well the answer is almost intuitive when you understand the island dynamics and belief sets. First, it has been a historic fact verified by a random survey done years ago for the St. Croix Chamber that two thirds of all Government Wages go to St. Thomians. This is because they have more employees, they have a higher consumer price index and partially because all employees are in close proximity to the seat of power and know the decision makers who can grant a raise.

Regardless of why, if 2/3 of all wages are paid on St. Thomas than 2/3 of all pension benefits will be paid to St. Thomains. Thus paying off the GERS pension fund should be a St. Thomas problem. Even if the money were used to stabilize energy prices, St. Croix has the refinery. Thus, if Gasoline prices were stabilized a $3 a gallon, St. Thomians would get $2 per gallon bebefit and Crucians $1. The belief is held that whatever good is done from $100 million a year, St. Thomas will get steak and Crucians will eat “dumb bread.”

Meanwhile the risk is assumed equally by all Virgin Islanders. So While Crucians assume half the risk if the project fails, they will only get one third or less of any benefits if it succeeds.

Now it doesn’t take a Noble Prize winner to understand that both groups were rational and reflecting the belief sets of their constituencies.

Why Did Diageo Pass??

It’s really elemental “me son”!

More people believe in magic than believe in the cold hard facts of the contracts critics.

I just read an interesting blog. Evidently, there has been some academic interest surrounding the whole lottery craze. So a couple of papers did a survey and discovered that 20% of Americans consider the lottery a rational and practical way to get rich. Moreover a majority believe that the only way they will ever solve their financial problems is to win a lottery.

20%!! That’s a lot of people ladies and gentlmen. The population of the USA is about 300,000,000. So that means 60,000,000 people believe that lottery is a more practical way to get wealthy than working a 9-5 job and another 130,000,000 believe that while they may never win the lottery, it’s the only way to solve their financial problems.

Our legislature is really just ordinary people serving their islands.  Why should their thought processes be any different and who am I to want people to change?

Diageo – A Cynical Perspective

Something like the following conversation played out all across St. Croix yesterday and demonstrates a a totally different yet logical, honest and very desperate perspective. The Diageo Deal supporters accepts that Kenny Mapp and Bert Brian can both read, are intelligent enough to understand what they read and are not lying. Moreover, they accept that the Governor, Adam Christian and Nathan Simmons are totally lying about the contract and their point is “Who is stupid enough to care? The deal brings in $100 million a year and is the only source of funds in sight to solve our economic problems.

Ok, but what about them invoking a Force Majeure after a hurricane and earning a bigger profit than they are actually entitled to at the expense of the suffering people? His answer was simply who really cares, “It’s only a couple of million, they have already collected the money and their corporate public relations group would be so embarrassed they would donate more than that back to hurricane recovery just to keep their good image.”

OK, but what about the molasses subsidy being used to make rum for foreign sales at the expense of the territory with no benefit. His answer was simplistic; “As long as Captain Morgan is selling in America, they would never do that because they make more money from the Rum Rebates than the do from selling rum.

OK, but wat about the size of the Marketing subsidy? The answer, Of course it’s too much. They never spent more than $20 million on media for Captain Morgan in a year and even if the brought Virgin Islands bulk rum and created a new rum, it’s still too much money so the only logical solution is to allow them to spend it on their other Caribbean brands and the contract says they can do it.

Doesn’t it bother you that all Government Officials are lying about the content of the contract, slandering those that oppose it and deceiving the people of the Virgin Islands? – No thats politics and business – everybody always lies.

Won’t this piss off Puerto Rico? The answer: “Diageo will only piss off Puerto Rico if they are a total success and we are getting over $100 million a year so who cares. Congress doest care about Puerto Rico or us and are not likely to get involved with a pissing contest between the two islands even if Diageo is using Rum Rebates to promote Myers and screwing Bacardi, Ronrico and Don Q.”

The point is this is $100 million a year and we need it so it’s worth a few risks.

Diageo Molasses Follow-up is more fatal

Ethical Business is probably an oxymoron but I’m not sure that anyone can be as cynical as our mistrusting Crucians whether born here or not. Seems the molasses subsidy had a logical beginning. Give our rum factory a competitive edge and subsidize their rum production. When it’s shipped to America, we get more rum rebates. The little bit of rum sold elsewhere didn’t matter and besides the cap on the subsidy could be lowered to reflect the gallons of molasses used and the gallons which was the foundation for the rum rebates.

Now Diageo changed this simplistic view or should have. In theory there contract superceeds all existing laws including limits on the total gallons and regardless of price. Now its a well know fact that Brazil is using rum based alcohol as a gasoline substitute and up to 10% can be included in gasoline without damaging the quality.

It’s conceivable that the Virgin Islands subsidy would allow Diageo to make rum for a variable cost as low as 50 cents per gallon which could be sold to Great Britain as rum, be refined as a fuel additive and subsidized by the people of the Virgin Islands to help stabilize the energy market of much larger and richer Great Britain.

While this might never happen, as I reread the contract it is probably legal – but then big business would never be that Machiavellian.

RIGHT!!