AmbergrisCaye.com Home Forums About Belize Nation U.S. General: Belize is important to U.S. security

Being belizean and living all your life in the usa ?

then you do not see a difference ? or do you choose to not see a difference ?
humor me.

Here's one for ya' to run with:

George Price: "Tourism is whoreism"

What would make him state such a thing?

SIN

makes sense to me, however i find it hard to believe he would of used those words

"run with"? where...to the toilet with severe cramps?

No JP, been here a long time. Not the point anyway.

Short...see what I mean...just like watching Point/counterpoint...

All we would have had to do was Bomb the crap out of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Syria, and a few other places with...

Playboy and Maxim magazines.
Jenna Jameson videos.
Hot pizza and cold beer.
Pamela Anderson posters.
Pork ribs.
Jessica Simpson videos.
Rum and Cokes.
a few hundred Corvettes.

Osama would have come out of his cave and the rest of the gang would surrender faster than a Frenchman!!
:p

Mandel, Jay R. Persistent Underdevelopment; Change and Economic Modernization in the West Indies. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1996. 190 pp.

Mandle presents a convincing picture of economic conditions and prospects in the West Indies in a compact treatise. It may also qualify as an economic history of the region in brief. The West Indies are defined as the Englishspeaking Caribbean, including Guyana.

The theoretical underpinnings of Mandle's work may create some perplexity in the reader's mind. The analytic framework, we are told in the preface, is rooted in Marx and Simon Kuznets. But it is not Marx the revolutionary socialist, or even "the young Marx," that either Kuznets or Mandle relies on, but rather Marx the capitalist, the one who appreciates the model of modernization based on private, that is bourgeois, industrial enterprise: "capitalism compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production" (p. 4), wrote Marx in the Manifesto. At the same time Mandle dismisses the "neoMarxists," especially those who assume that there is a necessary cause and effect relationship between underdevelopment in the periphery and the development of the metropolis.

What readers may recognize as a Marxist approach is the reliance on history. Six of the nine chapters deal with the past. Two of these deal with the colonial period and the plantation system, when there was a clear relationship between underdevelopment in the West Indies and industrialization in England. The way Eric Williams describes it in his History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (albeit not everyone would agree) is that the relationship between colony and mother country remained detrimental to the colony, not so much because of any intent to maximize exploitation, but rather because of racism and a muddle-headed colonial administration.

Mandle reminds the reader that the United States supplanted Great Britain as the dominant economic power in the region, but the political consequences of this shift are hardly mentioned. In his chapter on the failure of the socialist road to modernization (Chapter 6), Mandle discusses Guyana, which "allied itself with revolutionary forces and thus risked antagonizing the major conservative power in the region, the United States" (p. 114). As for the Grenada Revolution, it "came to an end", states the author succinctly (p. 112), this time without bothering to remind the reader that the final blow came not from the Coard faction's coup against Maurice Bishop, but from the United States Marines. Experiments in the introduction of socialist economics failed in the English-speaking Caribbean, we are told, as they seemed to have failed in Cuba. The reader still does not know, however, whether socialism is inherently utopian, or whether its failure in the region is due to the presence or proximity of the United States.

If the socialist experiment failed, so did "industrialization by invitation" (Chapters 4 and 8). It failed because of the small size of the island economies concerned and the failure to federalize upon decolonization. It failed particularly because of the lack of a competent, well-trained workforce, whether at the managerial or at the technical levels. It failed even where attempts were made to relate industrialization to available resources or to the island-country's natural endowments, as in the case of the Point Lisas project in Trinidad, which was predicated upon the availability of inexpensive oil and gas. It might be noted, however, that the author's obituary of the Point Lisas project may have been premature. Indeed, one shortcoming of this publication is that, although published in 1996, the statistics and analysis, with one exception, do not extend beyond 1991.

In other words, the prospects are not good for the West Indies. Yet Mandle sees a glimmer of hope in the Caribbean diaspora. Admittedly, the diaspora drains brainpower from the West Indies, since it is the better trained and more enterprising West Indians who are most likely to leave for Canada, Great Britain and especially the United States. But, Mandle argues, these persons have not severed all ties with their homeland. They create a demand for West Indian products in the "North". Moreover, it might be possible to persuade them to spend longer stints of time upon their visits "home" and contribute their skills, their technological know-how, to promote the process of modernization.

This may sound a bit far-fetched, but the fact is that the migration of populations has been insufficiently analyzed as a factor in North-South relations. Xenophobia and the redoubled vigilance of border-patrols notwithstanding, people of the South are streaming northward, beginning with those who live in contiguous areas: North Africans to France; Turks and the people of the Balkans to Germany; Mexicans, Central Americans and West Indians to the United States. These populations are not necessarily the best educated (the West Indians may be the exception); but, in any case, they become more or less integrated while maintaining links to their respective homelands. In certain ways it is imperialism in reverse, which may some day result in a narrowing of the gap between the "developing" and the developed worlds.

Mario D. Fenyo (NOT SIN)