Chester Cooper, Deputy Leader of the Opposition PLP says his party's interest in contracts awarded to companies held by Brent Symonette's children in a blind trust is not about race, "… it… is about privilege and class and special interest."
I find it curious that they are not questioning the bid process or whether or not the companies that won the bids are capable. It's all about a man's privilege and class and special interest. A man that by all accounts was not involved in the bid process at all. Sad.
The contract causing most of the political blowback is one awarded to Bahamas Hot Mix for the airport runway. Turns out Mr. Symonette's children's trust owns "nine percent or ten percent" of this company according to one press report.
I support their desire for the "fair awarding of contracts" if that means the best people for the job get it, but somehow I doubt that's what they mean.
This is all so reminiscent of Atlas Shrugged and John Galt's speech in particular…
“They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself . . . . They are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.”
But instead of encouraging Bahamians to emulate that which is good, they destroy goodwill of everyone for the sake of their own envy and hatred of the good.
More from Rand:
"Today, we live in the Age of Envy.
“Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.
"Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves. . . . That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.
"This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree. . . . Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one’s own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable…"
By the way, I'm all in favour of revoking the contracts if there is something illegal about the process.
I am not in favour of one privleged politician encouraging hatred and envy of another privileged politician though.
