Rick Lowe
I think I can refer to Dr. Rollins as an acquaintance. He used to visit Nassau Institute events where we would exchange thoughts/ideas.
But as we pointed out in this post… politics makes it appear that people hold a double standard, as with Mr. Obama deciding to send troops off to "war" for example. He said his predecessor was in contravention of the US Constitution when he took similar action.
We also have reports of a recently elected Republican in the US receiving farm subsides and when pressed would not offer to give his subsidy up. Saying something like, farm subsidies need to be rationalised. Go figure!
Now let's look a little closer to home, where we have a political figure stating that foreign investment is both good and bad.
According to a story in The Nassau Guardian on April 1, 2011 by Chester Robards, recently nominated PLP candidate Dr. Andre Rollins chastised the current government for not attracting foreign investors to The Bahamas.
He was quoted as saying; "We need to cause businesses to come here that are outside of the scope of our current economic model."
While he is correct that The Bahamas needs foreign direct investment he does not appear to have indicated what those foreign businesses are that should be asked to come in and invest.
But what's the double standard then?
Well Dr. Rollins' party just came off a heated campaign against allowing a foreign company into the country to buy BTC the government monopoly phone company and now he says we need foreign investment?
I sometimes wonder how we say these things with a straight face. And to our College of The Bahamas students no less.
I must paraphrase Mencken yet again for a little respite from this:
I dislike double standards and the compromise politics forces on values, common sense, common honesty. It seems this makes me forever ineligible for public office.
Oh, you might find this article on Politics as the Art of Confined Comprises interesting.
These people have no values, what I mean by that is that they have no real philosophies that govern their world-view or governance ideas. One minute they can be something and another against it, it just all depends on if they are the government or if they are trying to be the govt(opposition). Nobody in the PLP has no real problem with foreigners buying BTC or with Chinese working in the Bahamas, its just that they are the opposition and they know its good politics to oppose such, using national arguments, this is evident in the reality coming out that a PLP senator is the lawyer for the Chinese State Construction Company, no doubt raking in thousands in legal fees, so much for being opposed to foreigners working in the country. Watch what people do, not what to say… Truth be told if the PLP was the govt. and privatizing BTC to C&W, and the FNM was the opposition, you would probably have some of the same FNM’s making the arguments that the PLP’s are making now, and viceversa. Such is Bahamian politics, the really sad thing is that individuals in both parties no better, but know they can trick large segments of the uneducated Bahamian populace.