Check your Rolex watch Gibson. Times are a-changing and there still might be a day when you see the inside of her Majesty's wonderful accommodations in Fox Hill.

The real issue is that the Bahamian contractors are owed a hundred million dollars. Crisco Butt says that they will be paid. It's been over a year now since the corrupt, kleptocratic PLP stole the project from Izmirlian, gave it to the Chinese, who are sitting on it, putting chopsticks up the butts of Bahamian contractors. Crisco Butt and his criminal allies in the PLP are simply lying about the contractors being paid -- or Baha Mar ever being finished. How long has the casino/hotel in Freeport been sitting empty? A couple of generations? The only thing that the towers are good for, is jumping off to commit suicide.

And Dionsio D’Aguilar is being castigated for just pointing out that the Chinese, brain-dead emperor has no clothes?

>They have to have the courage to make them fall in line.

Sigh ... for someone who has spent a year at the London School of Economics, Mr. Youri Aramin Kemp hasn't learned much. Businesses first responsibilities is to their shareholders. Sandals hasn't broken any labour laws. Were they indulging in a bit of union busting? Perhaps. Was the union busting deserved? Perhaps. Mr. Kemp and many PLPs (with the exception of Potcake Miller) doesn't understand the golden rule, that *he who has the gold, makes the rules.*

The unions have been a scourge on the first pillar of our economy. I've posted this before, but using UNWTO numbers, look at the average cost of a Bahamian holiday compared to others.

It would be okay if there was value for money, but sadly there is not:

http://tribune242.com/users/photos/2016…

D’Aguilar is a graduate of the famed business school at Cornell University and he talks sense. He also puts him money where his mouth is and invests in various businesses. The Bahamas needs a lot more like him.

Sad. RIP.

I have absolutely no doubt that there was some union-busting going on. Unequivocally. Without a doubt. Was it justified? Who knows. There were signs that the Nassau operation wasn't meeting their KPI's (Key Performance Indicators). There were street whispers that profitability had taken a downturn.

Unfortunately, both for unions and for the company, the workers are mere pawns. And they are the ones that have a real life outside a balance sheet with kids to feed, cars to keep up, mortgages to pay. I understand that, and it is heartbreaking to me, how we as Bahamians were not given a chance to pursue the dream of financial democracy and independence. Our independence was supposed to guarantee that. Instead, the old UBP Stafford Sands economic model was continued, because quite frankly, our first independence government didn't have a clue about anything. Look at what Loftus Roker did to education.

It's the poor and common people who always suffer. But unions today are not the answer. There has not been a single case that I can recall where unions have mitigated an economic disaster for the common folk. Look at Tiger's employees from City Markets -- my aunt used to cook there for their lunch food. If you audited the unions, would you find a large strike fund? No. What will you find? Bloated salaries for Obie and his henchman.

Nobody, including the unions and government gives jack sh*t for the ordinary Bahamian. Their NIB old age pension fund is unfunded by over a billion dollars due to government spending. The economy is monolithic with no upward mobility. The poor people. Education and exit are the only ways for a vast majority of Bahamians to live a decent, financially fulfilled life like the vast number of North American inhabitants. There are no Bahamian patriots, just the Trumpian kind who lie and sing hosannas of the PLP criminals.

Sandals doesn't need the Bahamas. Using UNWTO figures, here is a breakdown of how much more expensive it is for tourists to vacation in the Bahamas:

http://tribune242.com/users/photos/2016…

We have some of the most expensive holiday costs in North America.

As for currency differences, that doesn't matter at all. Par value means nothing. Look at Canada -- member of G7 ( was G8, Russia is banned), G20, one of the strongest economies in the world, best standard of living in North America, and their dollar today was at 78 cents US. It really doesn't matter what the currency is pegged at, it all comes out in the wash.

A large or small currency peg doesn't hurt tourist companies who sell vacations in hard currency. The tourists pay in US or Cdn dollars. It only hurts the locals who must buy stuff with local currency trading at pennies to the dollar of hard currencies.

Some of my colleagues think (and I agree) that the Bahamian dollar will eventually be devalued at least once or twice in the next 5-10 year, eventually coming to rest at around 50 - 65 cents US. Econometric analysis shows that the "real" value of the Bahamian dollar is about 35 cents US, and there is a strong case to ditch the Bahamian dollar and dollarize the economy. Bahamians will be better off for it.

There are many unfinished projects in Africa as well.

The unfinished project syndrome is used in two ways by the Chinese:

(1) In China itself, they built huge unused cities, malls, theaters, infrastructure to keep the internal economy heated up. People were employed in every aspect from raw materials to manufacturing to construction to feed these projects. They needed to keep the hot fires of their economy burning and the fuel was creating unnecessary infrastructure. The Chinese still expect to grow their GDP by an unheard of 6% in these times, and to do it, they have to do all sorts of wacky things like building empty cities.

(2) In foreign countries, it is a huge advantage to hold the ownership of mega projects as an economic and political lever. For example, suppose that they promised to build an airport in Lusaka. They start building it. The Angolan government gets biggity and doesn't vote with them in the UN or other political moves, so they stop the project. The country needs the airport. Now the unfinished project is a carrot and stick. Do as we say or we won't finish the project. The host government doesn't have the money or the will to do it, so they live with the Chinese intransigence.

And as for the figures mentioned above, when you take into account the remediation work necessary, and factor in all of the economic hits associated with the time factors in remediation, the damage to the economy is more in the neighbourhood of $3.026 billion dollars and it grows every day that the project is idle.

I'm not a fan of Potcake, but I think that he has it right this time. The trucks were the last straw. And the funny part was that they weren't road-legal! How smart are you to drive a truck and park it on the carriageway and not have a proper licence, insurance or documentation. Who are these mental midgets?

Agree on news-reporting secretaries. Then again, in this country, it pays not to 'vestigate too deep. You keep ending up at the same place, and it een healthy.

You are making the assumption that companies care about their human capital. Sorry my dear, it is just a balance sheet entry. The only companies that care about their humans, are those with skilled, productive monkeys who's knowledge activities contribute greatly to the bottom line.

But in the service industry with near illiterate employees who tief the terlit paper, tote da food, do a full day's work in three days, and have a sense of entitlement greater than their worth to the organisation, you really can't expect the employer to act any differently, since there are three or four eager beavers out there for everyone that gets declared redundant.

Unions make the same mistake as communism and socialism -- something that I think that you are very familiar with. Communism pre-supposes that workers are units that do empirical measures of work, and that one worker is the same as another. In the socialist's eyes, what makes a worker more valuable is their seniority, and so they maintain scrupulous seniority lists. The study of working heuristics also shows that low-level employees who have been at their jobs for long periods of time, are actually less productive than new employees. The only exception to this, are some customer-facing employees. (Thinking of the old long-time doorman at Breezes for example.)

That would work well if there were upward mobility, but there ain't. The bosses are foreign. The owners are foreign, and the natives (as you call them -- I think that it is pejorative) don't have the schooling, the mental machinery or the wherewithal to advance up the ladder. Black Moses could have fixed that, but he was too busy transshipping nose candy to the US out of Norman's Cay.

So there een no jobs to go to. Thank you Crisco Butt for your wonderful Baha Mar efforts.

The problems are many, and at this stage are unfixable. Pity. There was enough here at one point, for an intelligent, non-criminal leader to create a society where everyone could have a guaranteed annual income, but those opportunities have been cashed and hidden offshore in Panama by sub-human PLP scum who sold this country to the cartels and sowed the seeds of what we are seeing today.