If not the crook or mook, then who?
Dear Editor,
Reading Devant Maharaj’s response to Ronald Harford that Ronald was somehow making light of a dire situation by accepting our situation where lesser evil voting makes a mockery of real democratic choice when he said choose the crook over the mook (he didn’t say which was which), but Devant is guilty of this himself.
Now that it suits his purposes to agitate to remove the leader who plucked him from race based activism and gave him a political career, he and others have never properly explained why.
That she can’t win?
No one in her position could without mobilizing the non voters of the corridor that ONR nicknamed the third force.
Panday couldn’t.
He failed more times than anyone in our history but neither Devant nor Vasant agitated for his removal.
In fact, Vasant remained a Panday loyalist even after Panday lost to Kamla, and Kamla took him anyway.
Dookeran mobilized the third force and got almost two hundred thousand votes, but it cost him the grassroots Indian vote for being a ‘knife and fork Indian’ a label put on him like a dagger to his political heart by Panday himself, who burnt the ULF, NAR and UNC down so he could rule the ashes. Ask Ramesh, Ralph, Trevor, Raffique, Gillian, Winston and others. Ask ANR Robinson what it was like with him behind closed doors.
Like the PNM, identity politics is the heart of the UNC, and it is why they are stuck behind the Caroni bridge, and no, no Parray or Vasant or any other coming from within the belly of that beast is changing that.
But let’s pretend for a moment that changing the leader could accomplish that, how are the voters to know if any of the choices jockeying for the position are themselves, crooks, mooks, both, or worse?
ALL are guilty of riding the same train they are damning now when it suited them.
ALL have made the same lesser evil justifications that Harford suggests to try and sway voters.
NONE have attempted to create something new, away from the crookedness of the contract mafia controlled race based voting.
I’ve asked them all in the past, if you do like Panday and sleep with the devil that is the political investor class to get into office, what will you do when the bill becomes due?
Panday and Manning went to their graves with the identities of the parasitic oligarchy and Mr. Big as secrets.
We live in a country so corrupt from the top down, we just learnt that a convicted criminal was able to purchase a Presidential pardon from behind bars.
The Scott Drug Report was stopped because of the power of some of the persons named, and some who, while not named, were beneficiaries of that status quo.
Senior attorney Robin Montano tells the story to whoever would listen who he believes murdered his cousin and burnt his body.
Gene Miles, Dana Seetahal and Selwyn Richardson remain public names that we should be ashamed to know, of persons who paid the ultimate price fighting corruption in this land.
So I ask Devant, don’t pussyfoot, put the names of your candidates on the table.
Let the public examine who might have benefitted from state contractors renovating their million dollar properties or funneling funds into their campaigns and pockets.
Show us the virtuous options that you would supplant who are neither mook nor crook.
Ronald Harford’s words are damning and should shame us all. To me it now rests alongside David Rudder’s “how we vote is not how we party.”
Our politics is sinister, it is vile, it is racist, it is corrupt and rotten to the core.
And we the voters, by our choices and our failure to properly choose, are responsible.
So your choices remain a mook and a crook. Make a choice and make your peace.
Or do like Devant and migrate.
Phillip Edward Alexander Q.b.E.
Political Leader
Progressive Empowerment Party