You never feed a growing government with more taxes under any circumstances. Since May 2017, and before Dorian, the Minnis-led FNM government has shown us time and time again that their idea of governing is more national debt, more taxes and more fees so that they can continue to grow the size of government. Minnis and Turnquest have done very little if anything to improve the ease of doing business for local businesses and thereby create more and better paying private sector jobs. They also have done absolutely nothing to reduce or even contain the size of our grossly over-bloated, very costly and non-productive civil work force. Dorian left many Bahamians without their jobs in the private sector, but did it leave a single civil servant on Grand Bahama or Abaco without their very cushy job in the public sector??!!

> .....the Bahamas National Recovery and Reconstruction Trust Fund {BNRRTF}, an “independent and non-political body to help fund home and building repairs”.

This new BNRRTF entity that Minnis keeps on harping about is going to be a most critical one for all Bahamian taxpayers to carefully pay attention to and monitor on an ongoing basis. Note how the name of this new entity does not even mention the name Dorian or the word 'hurricane'.

The word on the street is that the BNRRTF is expected to be used as a mega Robin Hood mechanism on steroids for the redistribution of huge amounts of wealth from the Peters to give to the Pauls.

It's laughable that the very deceitful Minnis has the audacity to say the BNRRTF "is an independent and non-political body" when it will be fully under the control of government appointees with the mandate that it do the government's bidding.

By the way, did anyone see a full page notice in each of our local newspapers in Creole announcing Minnis's claim that "there will be no illegals in the domes, full stop, no illegals”?
Apparently there was no such public notice, no doubt because our very deceitful Minnis is still talking with a forked tongue about his government's willingness to aggressively address the root cause of many of our country's most severe problems; i.e. the ongoing invasion of our country by overwhelming numbers of excessively procreating illegal Haitian aliens.

Certainly the human smugglers in North Haiti didn't get any such notice from Minnis; they are now heavily promoting Ville du Dôme in Central Abaco as the up and coming new Haitian community in the Bahamas.

> According to three sources familiar with the matter, he {Captain Samuel Evans} was the top choice of the Christie administration to succeed Roderick Bowe, who retired in 2015, as commodore of the Defence Force; however, the administration reluctantly chose Commodore Tellis Bethel instead because he had enormous backing from the US government.

This one sentence quoted immediately above is a very telling one. The U.S. government has collected intelligence information over the years on many of our defense force officers who have either engaged in activities they should not have engaged in or have been at the scene of questionable activities, including crimes, but did not come forward with information that they should have known. We've all heard stories about the subsequent disappearance of contaband turned over to the RBDF by U.S. DEA officials, among other alarming things.

In exchange for the U.S. government's assistance to (and close coordination with) the RBDF in fighting the smuggling of contaband and human trafficking through Bahamian waters, our government quite naturally allows the U.S. government the input they wish to have in more critical senior level appointments at the RBDF.

No matter how poorly Captain Evans may have been treated upon his forced retirement, it's ashame he elected to run to the press on a note of sour grapes rather than hold his head high after a 40-year career. But that's his prerogative.

Reports like the two below are all over the internet. The government of Haiti is in total disarray (all but collapsed) and neither our Minnis-led FNM government nor the Panamerican Health Organization (PHO) should be placing any great deal of reliance on that country's ability to prevent and/or quickly contain an outbreak of Ebola.

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-2903…

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-1231…

Have our defense force seamen received the necessary training, virus protection gear, equipment and supplies of medications that they would need to quickly identify and address/contain Haitians interdicted at sea who may be carriers of the Ebola virus? If not, the entire crew of an intercepting defense vessel could fall victim to a possible outbreak by the time the vessel returns to New Providence.

We should have a large defense force base with an appropriate medical facility located on one of our southern most islands where interdicted Haitians seeking to gain illegal entry to our country must first be taken for infectious disease screening before any further processing. This should also apply to U.S. Coast Guard interdictions/interceptions on behalf of the Bahamas government, i.e. all illegal aliens captured should go through the disease screening exercise at the southern defense force base/medical facility before being brought to New Providence for detention and deportation.

My use of the conditional pluperfect (past perfect) tense was clearly not meant for you. LMAO

The very thought of Lloyd as a policy maker on education matters is truly frightening !

Fully agree with you on the enforcement side of things.

Our corrupt politicians usually selectively enforce the laws only when they want to maliciously victimize someone who has called them out in a big way. Otherwise, it's pretty much a free for all no matter what they may have legislated as law. We have become the very definition of a society with many laws and much lawlessness.

Only a true fool would believe anything Warren Rolle has to say.

The big picture on Dorian-related insurance claims is in fact a relatively simple one.

The true value of the insured damages is astronomical - far above any amount BIA is willing to admit. In fact, quite a few of even the big name local insurers have been completely wiped out, i.e. made technically bankrupt, by the true value of the insured damages within their book of business.

Rather than reinsuring a conservative portion of their insured risks with other financially stronger insurers abroad, and thereby effectively sharing a good portion of their premiums received with those other insurers, many of our now technically bankrupt local insurers greedily kept the lion's share of the insured risks and related premiums received for themselves. These bankrupt local insurers can only now survive by not honouring and paying out the true value of the damages they have insured. In other words, their very survival is dependent on ruthlessly aggressive claims denial tactics where those among the insured who are least able to hire high priced lawyers to defend the validity and true value of their insured claims lose out big time. Aggrieved policyholders should not expect any help from insurance regulators who are for all intents in purposes 'owned' by the insurance industry.

Banks and other lending financial institutions like life insurance companies are big losers too as mortgage loan holders to the extent they have also financed insurance premium payments on the mortgaged property of borrowers who are no longer able to honour their loan obligations as a result of the impact of Dorian on their mortgaged property and/or jobs.

You can bet the banks and other lending financial institutions are not going to be similarly inclined to finance property purchases and associated insurance premiums going forward when they see the pitifully low amounts paid out by the now technically bankrupt local insurers in relation to the true value of the claims that were actually insured. This will of course only further exacerbate the serious over-liquidity situation within our banking system at this time.

As a most interesting aside:

Monteserrat is a British territory and in recognition of the volcano disaster, in 1998, the people of Montserrat were granted full residency rights in the United Kingdom, allowing them to migrate if they chose. British citizenship was granted in 2002.

Just think of the additional options we Bahamians may have had in response to global warming attended by the ever increasing threats of monster category 5+ hurricanes and rising sea levels. Had we been smart and remained Loyal British Subjects we likely would have had an alternative place to live when the Bahamas gets totally wiped out by mother nature's response to mankind's destruction of the global environment.

But alas, a very greedy and corrupt small group of politicians, led by Poodling, insisted we become an independent nation so that they could greatly enrich themselves and their select few friends and business cronies by selling the best of what the Bahamas has to offer to the highest foreign bidders (greasers) without a morsel of benefit for the vast majority of Bahamians. Yes indeed, we can only hope the souls of Poodling and his very corrupt greedy cronies all end up in the one place they all truly belong.

Excellent points made by the writer.

And these same government employees all use their overly generous allotment of annual sickdays whenever they want to a vacation. It's frankly criminal!