Exploiting and profiting in an unbearable time

May 05, 2020 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,

The observations, experiences, and reports keep piling up and further confirming what went before. I detect again this mentality and culture of restrained chaos, of what is corrupting and strangling, of what is devastating and destroying us. Cumulatively, they are of the cultivated disorderliness that makes us still more dreadful at a bad time.
First, I take the local market places. Prices have gone up here, just as in the US, where even the well-established and well-regarded and well-supported name brand supermarkets have increased prices at least twofold for foodstuffs and other essentials. I go to order some things online from here and the electronic warehouses are either without or, when available the prices bring cursing; well, not quite, but definitely some hard teeth-grinding. I think I can understand the smaller shops and little guys hustling to make a quick dollar. But does it have to be so many dollars, so much of a triple-digit percentage increase?
As examples, prices for anything remotely pandemic related has gone through the roof, if found. Oranges, one of the recommended (especially now) Vitamin C fortifications, were $80 a head, then $100; now they are 3 for $700. Take them or leave them, with the same being the sharp, savaging story for lemons, now a healthy $600 a piece, at last check. Other items and other places have increased, but to the extent that the working man still can access and obtain. Those forts hold, but rather shakily. I got some stuff from the well-standing (Sterling, Farfan, and Mattai’s, among others) and the price levels are the same. I thank God for meaningful mercies; may there be more such places dedicated to serving, not gouging, fellow citizens.
As we struggle to cope amid coalesced and coalescing national disasters-some manmade, some still unraveling locally (elections) and overseas (virus origins), there are the continuing abuses from the law enforcing and their associates from the ranks of the law-violating. Three men are in the back seat of a private car proceeding at 16:30hrs from Parfait Harmonie, when the driver is pulled over and threatened with violating seating restrictions in place. I stand to be corrected on this, but my knowledge is that the seating arrangements and requirements apply to public transportation facilities only, such as minibuses and taxis.
I must wonder how that standard will be enforced when the norm is encountered. That is, of three in the backseat (parent and two small children) of privately operated SUV or car. I don’t think that that fast one will be pulled; at least, it will be attempted with those who look inhospitable to overtures for what follows. What followed was that the team of workers, led by the driver forked over the ‘leff sumting’ tribute that was the whole objective of this sordid affair. That was two thousand dollars handed over and pocketed, and it proceed and on to the next yielding victim.
Meanwhile, in broad daylight some bus drivers pay heed to the numerical limitations, while many do not and crowd their vehicles as normal. The dusk-to-dawn curfew imposed is ignored by many on the East Bank roadway, with a near unending stream of loaded minibuses and private passenger vehicles going back and forth without a care in the world. How is it that those numerous violators are not pulled over? Never seen?
I believe that either the private tolls have been paid by virtue of existing beneficial relationships, or through senior police linkages still in place. In aggregate, these are but a tight snapshot of the troubles that swamp this country and its law-abiding citizens. In so many respects, there are these chronic inversions of intentions, these ongoing negations of the observations and implementations that ought to occur, but are not and not by some negligible margin, but the opposite.
We are dealing with the viral while distracted by the political and sabotaged by environmental, with the latter two being, arguably, worse viruses in and of themselves. Whether the profiteering from unconscionable prices or the exploitation from the noncompliant, there is this draining of the spirit, of those who can least spare it, those who cannot afford it. It is about the worst excesses of the capitalistic at work, and the underpinnings of the freedoms and challenges of things democratic also. There are only rights and opportunities, there are no commensurate responsibilities, no individual and civic obligations.

Sincerely,
GHK Lall

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