Sunshine and beaches are not the current wants of tourists. Tourists want the experiential tourism package. They want culture, things to do, fine restaurants, big experiences that they cannot get at home.

The sun, sand, sea paradigm is dead. The lower class tourists from Canada stay at all-inclusives in Cuba or Dominican Republic -- and that is mainly to escape the winter and cold. Those tourists purely for sun in the winter are price shoppers, and the Bahamas is one of the highest price destinations (due to unionization, high energy cost, etc).

The upper middle class tourists look for experience. They like the "Swim with the Dolphins" stuff, but even that is getting old. Most of my Canadian colleagues who are upper middle class, now vacation at a place that is not even on the sea. They are all headed to Mexico to San Miguel de Allende. The climate is warm, it is safe, there is huge amount of culture, shopping at low prices, gourmet restaurants, music, movies, theater, and the population welcomes the snow birds.

The people with money in my client circles, go to the Maldives, Mauritius, or the old standby - Monte Carlo or the south of France.

The reason why One & Only Ocean Club closed for renos, is that they do not offer what the people with money want any more.

Galanis has a negative history. He was fired as Managing Director from Ernst & Young, and the company (E & Y) had to pay $3 million dollars to make this lawsuit http://www.offshorealert.com/galanis-cl… go away. It was an almost $10 million dollar fraud case.

Potcake don't care anymore. He knows that he is on the way out, and not in anyone's circle, so he will criticise in spite of the veiled threats of Brad. Insiders already know that if Christie is forced out (and he is not even sure himself if he can stand the pressure bearing down on him to step down in 2017) -- anyway Christie has anointed his successor and that is Obie Wilchcombe. The webshop money that controls the party has already anointed Obie as well. So Potcake can rant and rave all that he wants, and no one is paying attention to him.

The interesting aspect is whether or not the rump of the party will go against Christie and go with their horse - Brave Davis. Christie has a whole cadre of stalwarts with votes.

And therein lies the problem. The idea behind ameliorating the ills of the Bahamas, is not to make a select few rich, but to elevate firstly, the lowest of the low, and then make us all capable of a dignified standard of living and a way of life.

The Bahamian saviour worked his miracles and made the blind deaf, and crippled blind, and the smart were instantly made deaf and dumb. And most were made just plain intellectually challenged. And the Bahamian saviour called this his paradise, because it suited him fine and enriched his coffers.

Nay, what we need is a selfless individual who will not get rich by leading this country. The greatest step to remediation of this tortured land, is to fix the economy. Get rid of the fixed, useless Bahamian dollar and dollarize the economy. Throw out the dinousaurs like Fred Mitchell, and give residency and business licences to any foreigner who wants to brave our idiotic government. Open the society. Tear down the shutters and boards around the government and let the people have freedom of information. Empower all technologically, and jail all of those who have stolen even a penny from the public purse. Or banish them to work in the salt flats of Inagua.

No one needs to get nailed to a cross, or thrown from a horse by bolt of lightening. We just need a real patriot in the highest office. However, such a platform would guarantee that he will never be elected. So those who can, will pack their georgie bundles, and wait for the next plane off the limestone rock. The rest will suffer and suffer grievously.

Not laughing. Legislation or no, when push comes to shove, Bahamians WILL BE locked out one way or another. The beaches may have access, but if access is stopped at Paradise Island, like a gated community, then access doesn't matter, if you can't get on PI.

Had a client who lives on PI (in the same complex that the head of ScotiaBank used to live) that had his tyres for his sports car stolen even though they were behind a high wall, and chained to a post. He was pushing for the properties owners to "create a barrier" at the bridge so that people with no business on PI could not get in.

As is, we no longer own the hilltops or the beaches. We have no means of "achieving the American Dream". We have a bunch of thugs adopting the Fiddy Cent ethos of "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" by the gun. We are marginalised as citizens, and no shouts in the face of the Prime Minister -- "we have had enough!". And the PM is in London telling folks we want more of this FDI crap that locks us out of patrimony.

Paradise Island will be first. The night watchmen and gatekeepers will not be at the beaches. They will take their stand at the toll gates at the base of the bridge. Do you notice the increased police presence at Marina Village on a Friday night?

If the crime situation deteriorates, I'm willing to bet that access to Paradise Island will be only for Bahamians who work there or have business there. That's what you get when Foreign Direct Investment is the sole engine of the economy. You have to sell the best bits off, and are lost to the natives forever.

Can anyone else see that the path that the Bahamas is on, is totally unsustainable and headed for collapse?

I can see why Crisco Butt thinks this way. In my conversations with Bahamian patriots who really do want to fix the country, the big elephant in the room is the huge cadre of functionally illiterate, poorly skilled, poorly socialised, young school leavers entering the job market. On top of that, a goodly percentage of the young women are starting to make babies. We have about 20,000 unemployed and a huge economic structural problem of an economy that cannot absorb any more unskilled workers.

So when one looks around and sees the 8,000+ employees at Atlantis, one can begin to think that a couple more Atlantises would solve the problem. The trouble is that we have already saturated the market with rooms, airlift, attractions, etc, and building more will not bring more people. We have had our run of sun, sea and sand, and the world has moved on. We used to be the Tiffany's of vacations, and now we are the WalMart. It's just the way it is.

So how does one gainfully employ people who are largely unemployable? This is the nub of the problem. Other countries typically do it in manufacturing (line workers), resources (miners, treecutters) and service jobs (janitors, fast food, maids) but we have saturated the services sector as well. We cannot run manufacturing because of high cost and unreliable energy. We cannot transition to a knowledge-based economy because of the poorly educated workforce. We cannot expand financial services because of the global trends of transparency and the G20 attack on tax havens. Quite frankly there is only one painful answer.

We must bite the bullet, write off the present unemployed, and concentrate on education to make the school leavers more fitted and suitable to join the higher paid, skilled jobs. And then we must re-build the infrastructure to support the companies that will employ these people, and we must revamp the civil service and laws to create a facile ease-of-business protocols. This is a lot of work, and doesn't exactly guarantee results. So Crisco Butt and company cling to the last hope of cookie-cutter Altantises all over in the islands in the hope that some of it works.

What this insidiously partisan character, rightly and ubiquitously called "The Snake" doesn't realise, is that the Bahamas has already lost. The reputational damage is severe if one peruses social media, and the viral video by the rogue Disney ex-employees has gotten more traction than a positive multi-million dollar advertising campaign. Our online reputation is just as good as the domestic reputation that the Snake owns in the Bahamas.

The really sad part is that one cannot live reasonably on that sort of money. Something has to be done to rescue the unskilled working class, which is the majority of the population.