Co-sign. Agree totally.

>Please do not denigrate our labour force to that extent ........... thats a cop-out

Last year, I asked all of the tellers in the bank if they knew what compound interest was. Most said that it was interest on your money. They were unaware of the fact that it was interest upon interest from the previous cycle. Not a single one could tell me correctly what 1.5% interest was on a $1000 on an annual basis and what the resultant amount would be. That is how bad the workforce is, and the people that I asked were the smarter ones in the workforce.

I got transferred out of the country with my financial institution, and it was my saving grace. I am glad that I took the job instead of staying. My salary was bumped up to near double, I was put on more training courses, and I now travel in a more professional atmosphere. The biggest thing that I find, is that the slackness is all gone. The cable guy comes when called. My internet was installed and working the same day. I pay all of my bills online. Food in the stores is plentiful and inexpensive.

If a Bahamian gets a chance to get transferred out the country, I would say "Take the job!". Your horizons will be expanded, your career will be enhanced and your quality of life will improve significantly. Life is no longer a Shirley Street drudge.

All of this is highly entertaining. And the majority of these comments validate Fweddie's personal opinion of Bahamians in general.

There is an easier and cheaper way to fix the problem, but the enlightenment necessary to see the solution is in short supply.

Bran is not even in the same league as the Right Honourable Hubert Alexander Ingraham. Once the history of the Bahamas is written by objective, non-biased historians, he will be seen as the most upright, honourable Prime Minister that the Bahamas has had to date.

Lead, plastics, neuro-toxicity is a cause of crime? This article is full of blather. It is no wonder why psychiatrists are the least effective members of the medical profession. If I am having a heart attack, a physician can aid me. If I am having a breakdown, a psychiatrist will ruminate about me hating my mother to the gathering crowd.

This series just became a waste of ink and bandwidth. The reasons for crime are well known. We have it at every level in the Bahamas. For crying out loud, we elevated the wife of a drug-running corrupt criminal leader of the independence kleptocracy to the post of governor general. It is in our culture to tief, steal, kill and lie about it, because there are no societal controls from the top down. We are a nation of hypocrites. A cabinet leader is too afraid to come out of the closet, while promulgating hatred against the poorest of the poor of our black brethren. We are like the Arabs who cannot come together to advance our common cause.

We don't want to be enlightened. We do not want to be economically liberated. It is too much like hard work. Almost every Bahamian alive has had the optimism, patriotism, and ability to achieve and gain something materially and intellectually significant in Bahamian society beaten out them. Therefore we would rather take the easy road and be hypocrites rather than take our leaders to task for their criminality, lies and ineffectual laziness. I will take my ham and turkey in exchange for my vote, and you Mr. PLP can do whatever you want to this poor country and its treasury. It is just like the army captain announcing to the recruits that the beatings will stop when the morale improves.

Crime is the result of all of this. Once we grow a thicker skin of enlightenment, cast off the ignorance and admit the shortcomings of our dysfunctional society, and do something to ameliorate it, crime will go down. Until then, unless there is some sort of economic deus ex machina, we will continue the slide to anarchy.

@Sickened Co-sign your statement. Something is fishy.

Hey, they spent a whole $12.99 for that website. That's what was left over after everyone got their grubby hands on the $9 million. You can find out that this is true by clicking on the "Powered by web base store". It is so Mickey Mouse, automatically playing the music when you go to the site.

They should change the design immediately.

Excerpt from Nick Cohen in The Independent ~ UK newspaper

To show that connections between criminality and joblessness have existed for decades, David Dickinson, an economist for Public Policy Research looked at who actually commits crimes. A 1972 study of 18-year-olds in London showed that the offending rate was three times higher for the unemployed. Research by the Northumbrian police between 1975 and 1980 showed that about one-third of all offenders were unemployed men. In 1993, the National Association of Probation Officers surveyed 1,331 convicted offenders and found that 79 per cent were living on means- tested benefits.

Moving from the small to the large scale, he then looked at young men, the group most likely to be involved in crime and showed that their rate of offending was closely correlated to rises and falls in the unemployment rate. The fit could be tightly measured: every time the jobless figures went up by 1 per cent, there was a 0.4 per cent rise in burglaries.

This is not a particularly radical idea. A report from within the Home Office itself, which was leaked last April, concluded that all the evidence from Britain and abroad showed that the "single most effective form of intervention was the provision of employment to offenders".