Author: Jomo Thomas

Decision 2025: issues to watch With two weeks of campaigning left before the Nov. 27 general elections, several circulating issues may have a small but decisive impact on the outcome. Most voters have already decided how they will vote. The housing issue with the Gonsalves family, Eloise Gonsalves’ disastrous social media defence of her family’s luxurious lifestyle, the attempt to knock off the opposition leader and the ULP’s high spending are issues to watch. Lee Atwater, the conservative political consultant, said, “Facts are facts, but perception is reality.” Plain Talk endorses this view of life. Here’s why. Last August, an…

ULP desperation campaign In New York, the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won an emphatic victory with the significant support from organised labour, immigrants, working people and ordinary decent folks. He carried an inspiring message that the city belongs to everyone who lives in it, rather than the notion that the rich and powerful should have all the privileges while working people are pressed down by high taxes, unaffordable housing, a high cost of living, inadequate and expensive transportation and a lack of hope for the future. Contrast that with the dark and nasty scaremongering campaign being run by Gonsalves’ Unity…

Gonsalves lied about the size of Taiwan’s hook In a 2010 memoir, “A Mountain of Crumbs”, Elena Gorokhova wrote, “The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.” And so it is with a growing section of the Vincentians regarding statements made by government officials. At the 114th Taiwan National Day celebration in St. Vincent, Prime Minister Gonsalves declared that the size of Taiwan’s hook in our nation’s “gill” was a whopping EC$800 million. Had Gonsalves made that statement…

“Lord! With all that evidence? That’s a wicked verdict.” The death-by-misadventure verdict delivered last Wednesday amounts to the second killing of Cjae Weekes, the 17-year-old boy who was chased to his death by police officers in February 2022. The inquest confirmed my long-held view that in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Justice has two faces. The verdict, which means that the police officers who chased Cjae to his death bear no criminal responsibility, is a travesty of justice. The coroner’s inquest was not a search for facts, truth or justice. It was a trial of the actions of Cjae Weekes…

All engines go means that we are in a state of readiness. The elections are upon us. Both parties have announced their slate of candidates. The ULP is hosting Red Limes in various constituencies. The opposition NDP continues its busy electioneering with public meetings across the country. Unfortunately, we don’t know the hour. The country holds its collective breath as it awaits the decision of PM Gonsalves to prorogue the Parliament and announce the date for us to vote. The 2020 election was held on Nov. 5. Nomination day was Oct. 20, and PM Gonsalves used the Independence Day celebration (Oct.…

Pfizer Papers revealed a Smoking Gun ‘The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them,’ ~ Patrick Henry After the Covid Plandemic was declared in 2020, a massive fear campaign was developed to condition people to take the vaccine, which Pfizer said was created with the ‘speed of science.’ The Covid vaccine, which was rolled out in early 2021, was deemed safe and effective. Across the world, people, corralled by fear and force, were told that once they were vaccinated, they could neither contract nor transmit…

‘Give me one generation of young people and I will transform the world.’ — V.I. Lenin. I have long held to the view that my generation and the generation before us have been a dismal failure. To be sure, there have been sparks of political and intellectual genius, but, as a whole, the political leadership and the intellectual superstructure that undergirds it were not up to the task gifted to it to lead the post-independence, anti-colonial struggles. Some may say that so steeped was their colonial mindset and ideology that they betrayed the mission of national development and settled for…

The Donald Trump regime is preparing a false flag event as a pretext for an invasion of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The people and governments of the Caribbean must defend our countries’ sovereignty and not allow our land, sea and air space to be used as a launching pad for such unlawful and illegal misadventure. Two events in recent times point to the American attempt to pressure, strangle and eventually invade, overthrow and destroy the revolutionary experiment initiated by Hugo Chavez, the former president of Venezuela, who died in December 2012. The first occurred on Aug. 8, when US…

‘Blood thicker than water and politics makes the thickest mix of all.’ — local folklore A ULP candidate in the next general election told me that politics and sports should never be intermingled. I asked him if he was sure of his conviction, and he replied, “Without a shadow of a doubt.” I told him that if we take his views on sports and politics to their most logical conclusion, apartheid South Africa should not have been isolated to pressure the racist regime into submission. He said that it is different. I asked what about Attorney General Grenville Williams leading the…

Gonsalves’ Emancipation Cricket Festival ‘The higher monkey climbs, the more he exposes his naked ass.’ — African proverb Last Tuesday evening, Gonsalves and his clansmen launched their self-styled Emancipation Cricket Festival. The festival will run over four days. Gonsalves took exception to someone labelling his extravaganza a clown show. The description is apt. He might as well market his most recent high-wire event as “The Great Kishore Shallow High Fall”. It will fail. Citizens should ignore him so that the event flops. The theme of Gonsalves’ festival, which comes at a significant expense to Vincentian taxpayers, is “Legacy, Unity and Excellence”.…

(Guest column by Chris Hedges) This is the end. The final blood-soaked chapter of the genocide. It will be over soon. Weeks. At most. Two million people are camped out amongst the rubble or in the open air. Dozens are killed and wounded daily from Israeli shells, missiles, drones, bombs and bullets. They lack clean water, medicine and food. They have reached a point of collapse. Sick. Injured. Terrified. Humiliated. Abandoned. Destitute. Starving. Hopeless. In the last pages of this horror story, Israel is sadistically baiting starving Palestinians with promises of food, luring them to the narrow and congested nine-mile ribbon of land…

Vincentian scholarship on display “There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.” — Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The week that was may go down in the annals of Vincentian intellectual thought as the one that decisively took issues of national development away that the narrow corridors of political gamesmanship into the realm of profound reflections and debate, from the renk mouths of politicians to cerebral reflections of the best and brightest in St Vincent and the Grenadines. We must thank Dr. Jason Haynes, Luke Browne, Mikhail Charles and Guevara Leacock…