#white systemic economic empowerment schemes

[reasoningdaily]

How do you explain slavery to kids?

It’s important to tackle the topic in an age-appropriate way, experts say—and to make sure children understand how the legacy of slavery informs life today.

Chandra and Brandon Carr remember taking their children to visit the Charles Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit last year. Upon seeing a replica of a slave ship packed with shackled, life-size, real-looking Black people, their then-six-year-old daughter became upset and asked to leave.

“I remember hugging her and telling her ‘It’s OK to be sad. What happened wasn’t fair,’” says Chandra Carr, an administrator at Wayne State University. But a few days later, the Carrs, African American parents from suburban Detroit, talked with their children not only about the horrors of slavery, but the heroic efforts of Black people and others to resist slavery—and how efforts to make life fairer for all people continue today.

Slavery is a tough topic for any child. But approaching the subject in age-appropriate ways that help children understand the full context of the institution—then and now—can help build empathy and critical-thinking skills. Here are some ideas from the experts on how to get started.

Talk about slavery in age-appropriate ways

Educator Rebekah Gienapp, author of Raising Antiracist Kids: An Age-by-Age Guide for Parents of White Children, supports having conversations as soon as kindergarten—or younger, if it comes up. But the older a child is, the deeper and more explicit conversations you can have.

For instance, Beverly Daniel Tatum, president of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and a psychologist who specializes in race and education, says with children five and younger, it’s important to emphasize that slavery happened “a long time ago.” They can’t always distinguish between what happened hundreds of years ago and today, and therefore might be afraid that something similar could happen now to their own family.

Other grade-by-grade resources can be found through groups like Learning for Justice and Teaching for Change.

For children of any age, Tatum advised acknowledging a painful past while pointing toward a brighter future.

“It’s appropriate to acknowledge that this is a sad thing that people were mistreated in this way,” says Tatum, author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? “The good news is, we now live in a time when we know better.”

Be mindful of language

Avoid language that dehumanizes people or reinforces the superiority of one race over another.

For example, instead of saying slaves, say “enslaved people,” which helps children understand that these people had lives and personalities beyond enslavement. Instead of saying “slave masters or mistresses,” call them enslavers, a word that does not imply superiority over enslaved people.

“Using accurate language helps children understand that enslavement was a system,” Gienapp says. Children, she notes, should know it was a deliberate system of oppression.

Talk about race—not just slavery

Children notice and comment on racial differences at a young age, and experts say it’s important that parents don’t shy away from those conversations. (This Nat Geo article has some tips on getting started.) That way, stories about slavery are not children’s introduction to stories about Black people.

“Make sure you've had lots of conversations already about race that are not about this traumatic, difficult history,” Gienapp says. Otherwise, children could think that all Black history is sad and traumatic.

Emphasize life before slavery

Understanding Black history beyond slavery is an important lesson for both children and adults, says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, coauthor of the children’s book The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, inspired by her New York Times series “The 1619 Project.”

Listen to Nikole Hannah-Jones discuss bringing "The 1619 Project" to Hulu as a six-part docuseries on the Overheard at National Geographic podcast.

“Sometimes when you begin the story with our enslavement, that’s a way to further dehumanize our ancestors,” says Hannah-Jones, who coauthored the book with Renee Watson. “To help children understand all that was lost, you have to show all that we had before slavery.”

For instance, Born on the Water tells the stories of Africans before they were enslaved. Parents can also look for stories about cultures like the Mali Empire of Central West Africa, whose leaders oversaw complex political systems and hundreds of thousands of people during the 13th through 16th centuries.

“It’s important for all children to understand that enslaved people had culture and history in Africa,” Tatum says.

Give children a fuller picture

Children often learn about the day-to-day lives of enslaved people. But Tatum says it’s also important for children to hear stories about their resistance to slavery. That way, they’re not seen as passive victims, she says.

Also, by learning a fuller story, children don’t end up feeling like all white people were bad. “Were people enslaving people, going to slave markets and looking at human beings as though they were merchandise? Yes, that was happening,” Tatum says. “But there were white people who thought that this was wrong. There were white people who were on the Underground Railroad helping people to escape.”

And as horrific as slavery was, children should also know it was a story of survival.

“Ultimately, the story is patriotic and triumphant,” Hannah-Jones says. “Because it talks about how these people who didn't want to come here, who were ripped from their homes, came here and fought for equality for all Americans.”

Connect the past to the present

The effects of U.S. slavery didn’t simply end with the Civil War, and Tatum says it’s important for children to understand how the lasting impact of slavery shows up today. Here’s a paraphrased example that can help explain economic differences that children likely notice or learn about as they grow up:

“Enslaved people weren't paid. And so they didn't have the opportunity to grow richer. And it was illegal to educate them.

“Meanwhile, the people who were benefiting from that unpaid labor did grow richer. So they could buy more property and attend good schools.

“After slavery, Black people had little money to support themselves, and they were still denied education. So those people had little wealth to pass down to their children and grandchildren. But enslavers did have money to pass down.

“Fast-forward to today: Black people are more likely than whites to be poor, undereducated, live in poorer housing, and have poorer health.’’ 

Tatum says that understanding the history of slavery as well as Jim Crow laws after slavery helps children contextualize the poorer conditions of many Black people today.

“If we don’t talk about the structural racism that led to these circumstances,” she says, “they might think that the disparities are the result of the failings of the people who are experiencing the disparity.”

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Untitled

By Katie Langlitz

It was a regular weekday school night.  Mom was on the couch, watching whatever reality TV show or true crime documentary that had her attention at the moment, waiting for dinner to finish, and I was pacing the kitchen tiles, without much intent, my attention bouncing from her show, to my phone, back to her show.  This particular program followed the lives of rich Southern millenials—and the scandals that come with a precious family legacy to preserve.   As the cast idled around their mansion’s halls, the camera panned over a portrait of a man, most likely some ancestor of theirs.  It held my attention.  I had seen it before.  I knew I had, but I didn’t have time to deliberate.

My mom switches the program, flickering through until she lands on a news channel.  She lingers for a moment.

“Hey, have you heard about this?” My mother waves the remote at the screen: a water crisis in Flint, Michigan.  Apparently, children throughout the city were suffering from mysterious illnesses and rashes, possibly linked to untreated tap water.  No, I hadn’t.

The portrait forgotten, moments later I was on my laptop, beginning my descent into the tragedy in Flint:

In April of 2014, Flint switched from water purchased from Detroit to water pumped through the Flint River that runs through the city to save money while officials waited for a new pipeline from Lake Huron.  Law-mandated chemicals controlling lead erosion had not been added to Flint’s pipes when the city switched to Flint River water, causing lead to break off, traveling through pipes into families’ homes.  The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, as it was called at the time, told Flint officials that anti-corrosives were unnecessary, and a decision on whether the water was safe to drink could wait for another year.  In essence Flint residents could drink possibly unsafe water for a whole year before officials were even willing to evaluate the situation.  The result: in addition to disease-causing bacteria and carcinogens, which can cause cancer, Flint’s drinking water was flooded with lead.  Brown, filmy water smelling like sewer and mysterious rashes breaking out on children’s skin soon brought Flint residents to town hall meetings with grievance.  

Lead is an irreversible neurotoxin; no amount of it is safe.  There is a lead-crime hypothesis that argues lead exposure triggers impulsivity, social aggression and even attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and thus causes delinquency and violent crime.  Despite data collected by a concerned, local pediatrician revealing children in Flint were experiencing high levels of blood lead, authorities didn’t act.  They accused her of fabricating reports to create baseless hysteria.  It was not until outside researchers from Virginia Tech. conducted intensive research on the city’s water that the state admitted there was a problem, over a year later.  In early 2016 the then Governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, announced 87 cases of Legionnaires Disease, a type of pneumonia caused by bacteria, and 10 deaths linked to the water crisis in Flint.

I was stunned.  This violation of human rights in Flint and the lethargy of government officials—it was comic book level villainy.  How did something like this happen, in America, with something as essential to life as water?  That seemed to be what everyone was asking.  The EPA, United States Environmental Protection Agency, blames state officials for not following protocol mandating anti-corrosives, and the state blames the EPA for not enforcing federal policy.  While politicians continue to point fingers at each other, a larger crisis sits at the center of the Flint water tragedy: racial bias, which is really a euphemism for systematic racism.  

Wait.  Before anyone rolls their eyes and pulls up their blinders, some historical context:  Flint shadows the place it used to be.  It used to bustle with a wealthy, urban core, booming with motor industries, but like many other Midwestern cities, was ravaged by abandonment.  During the 1960’s General Motors, which was worshiped like religion by locals, relocated, and the city suffered subsequent economic depressions.  Today, the population is lower than it has ever been since the 1920’s.  Flint is also 57% black, 4% Latino and only 37% white.  40% of residents live below the poverty line, and although Flint is not quite as segregated as other cities like Detroit or Chicago, the black and Latino population suffer this poverty disproportionately.  To compare, the United States is 77% white, 13% black and 18% Hispanic or Latino, and only 12% live in poverty, according to censuses from 2018.  

Now this crisis doesn’t seem so mysterious; the reason why I’d never heard of it isn’t as elusive.  The NAACP, or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, spoke on this issue.  The NAACP is the civil rights organization that championed black empowerment throughout the 1900’s, accredited for winning the 1954 Supreme Court Case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that ruled racial segregation “inherently unequal” and overturned previous decisions disenfranchising blacks after the Civil War.  According to a CNN article, in 2016 the NAACP said of Flint, “Would more have been done, and at a much faster pace, if nearly 40 percent of Flint residents were not living below the poverty line? The answer is unequivocally yes.”  We all know it, too.  If the same lead-laced water threatened a predominantly white, above the poverty line—not even upper class—community, there wouldn’t have even been a crisis.  The issue would have been resolved before it reached the home of children, before it would kill innocent residents and sicken dozens more.

The injustice seen in Flint is occurring everywhere, everyday across America in less televised but just as obscene ways.  Look at death row statistics.  Account for variables like the number of victims, murder brutality, and we’re still more likely to convict someone for murdering a white person than a black person.  Young black, American males are at same risk for gun homicide as nations with the highest murder rates in the world.  Blacks with a college degree are more likely to be unemployed than similarly educated whites.  When they are employed, blacks with a college degree are more likely than their whites to be underemployed for their skill level.  Then, inflating these issues, Congress has decreased anti-discrimination agency funding over the years, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the iconic civil rights bills Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got passed through his nonviolent protests.  According to the US Census Bureau, “none of the 10 states with the highest percentage of Black residents provide these agencies with annual funding of more than 70 cents per resident per year… In some states… more taxpayer dollars are spent on the governor’s salary than on protecting millions of residents from employment discrimination.”  

After bingeing articles and documentaries on Flint, I felt slimy.  The violation of human rights in that city was perpetuated by racism.  Not the kind of racism we can see or hear; no N-words or confederate flags caused this.  (Though, ironically, Confederate flags are popular home decor amongst white residents of Flint.)  Systematic racism—the implicit and unconscious bias to value some people’s live more than others—did.  It’s a filthy realization to come to, full of shame and guilt, and we do all we can to blunt it.  Accepting systematic racism’s mere existence would admit our role—however small—in tragedies like Flint.  That’s why we’re defensive when we hear people talk of ideas like “systematic racism.”  Most of us pride ourselves on not being racist, on being better than our misguided ancestors so discovering we could be part of a system that perpetuates racism, being told we’re morally in the wrong, of course we want to deny it.  

And we do.  Even with disasters like Flint, we drown the guilt and hide behind those perky success stories, the ones you see on daytime talk shows and on college pamphlets, but they only dilute the truth.  Just because a youth choir from Detroit makes it to 2nd place on a national talent show doesn’t help the thousands—47%—of children who live in poverty in that same city, but it does sedate our conscience.  These stories tell us black poverty isn’t that bad: look at this one going to college, that one recovering from addiction.  

It’s the epitome of cognitive dissonance—the uncomfortable feeling when conflicting beliefs or behaviors collide.  In this case we are confronted with two realities of America: the one that upholds our founding fathers’ ideas of freedom and equality and the other that perpetuates injustice and hardship.  In true cognitive dissonant fashion we alter one of these realities to fit the other.  We ignore racial injustice—and deny ourselves a truly equal nation.  It’s ironic; to preserve the idea we have of America, we stop it from ever becoming that.  

However, the fact that TV programs exist solely to perpetuate these fairy tales of black empowerment reveal that this problem isn’t our fault.  Not entirely, anyways: “groups tend to be more immoral than individuals”—Martin Luther King Jr. writes in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—, and this is a system, schemed with intent.  A system that encourages us to stay apathetic about racial injustice, that allows children to die from lead poisoning in the 21st century.  That’s the tricky thing about systematic racism: it’s perpetuated by apathy, by inaction.  That’s why it seems elusive.  Unlike with racism we can see or hear, we don’t know who to blame.  When someone slips the N-word or chuckles out a derogatory joke, we know who to point fingers at.  With systematic racism because it is not an individual person or isolated event, we have no one to attack.  It’s a system, and who do we blame for that?

That’s when I remembered the portrait from my mother’s reality TV show, the one about the wealthy Southerners.  John C. Calhoun.  If we ever charged someone with systematic racism, it’d be him.  He was our 7th Vice President, second to the infamously tyrannical and racist Andrew Jackson.  Amidst rising momentum for abolitionism in antebellum America, Calhoun performed his infamous “positive good” speech.  Rejecting the previous justification for slavery as a “necessary evil,” Calhoun defended his “peculiar institution” as a morally righteous crusade rehabilitating the devolved black race.  For example, he wrote, “in the course of a few generations it [the black race] has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions… to its present comparative civilized condition.”  To Calhoun slavery, thus, was an honorable institution founded on good will and charity that Southerners should defend against the treasonous Northerners with pride and dignity.  

He is the embodiment of systematic racism—and shows us why apathy is so dangerous.  Calhoun’s descendants, the kids on that TV show, didn’t seem like racists.  Privileged, sure, but not inherently evil people.  No one was waving Confederate flags or marching for white pride, yet their very existence preserves the legacy—the wealth accumulated, the hierarchy instituted—of slavery.  Emancipating blacks, establishing legal equality, founding empowerment agencies, although great feats, didn’t eradicate centuries of racism.  It didn’t dethrone the Southern oligarch.  A little slap on the wrist, a few elections diverted, and Calhoun’s fortune was allowed to survive—no, to thrive.  His still-wealthy lineage are proof that there are people in this 21st century that, despite not being racist, benefit from slavery.  If that sounds harsh, that’s because it is.  They didn’t chose their ancestors, sure, but they also don’t seem too ashamed of it either.  The man’s portrait is displayed in their home on national television for everyone to see.  Not to mention that they actually kept the family name, “Calhoun,” despite its connotations; ask anyone who’s studied American history what they think of when they hear “Calhoun,” they’re going to tell you one of two things: states rights, slavery or both.  Thus, his ancestors are ignoring the filthy implications of their family name.  Either that, or they’re blatant, white supremacy level racists, which not too many people are nowadays.  They stay ignorant and apathetic, and it’s apathy that protects the legacy of slavery, not racism.  Well, not overt, N-word, confederate flag racism—rather, systematic racism.

Despite how nonexistent it may seem in our everyday lives, how elusive it makes itself, because this is a system, it doesn’t matter where you live; you exist as part of it, and within this system, like all systems, there are two forces: the force that drives and the force that resists—the engine and the friction—, and because of the nature of systematic racism, simple apathy and inaction qualify as driving forces.  By not being an active counter force, you surrender your choice to be anything but the driving force spurring this institution of injustice forward.

Your ancestors probably didn’t single-handedly marshal the defense for slavery.  You’re probably not an active member of the Aryan Brotherhood, but just because you don’t have an obvious connection to slavery, doesn’t mean you get a moral freebie.  Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a letter to a group of 8 clergymen who contested that the battle against racial injustice should be fought solely in the courts, not the streets, denouncing King’s nonviolent protest.  To this King was compelled to write his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”  Throughout the letter King necessitates direct action as a means to racial justice.  Paralleling fundamental beliefs our founding fathers built this nation on, King writes, “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws… “An unjust law is no law at all.””  In the context of systematic racism, we are not necessarily talking about statues, however, this same principle applies.  We—as in, the ordinary people living in this country—must, with a diligent moral compass, sift through the status quo to determine what is just and what is unjust.  Once we find injustice, we have a moral obligation to resist it—actively.  However, we cannot resist a system without first knowing it exists; admitting our role in systematic racism is uncomfortable at best, but that’s okay.  To quote King again, “constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth,” which he says his protests aim to create, “will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”   We need tension in our conscience to realize, sometimes, what is right and what is not.  To confront a situation as it is, not as we wish it to be—even if it’s a little uncomfortable.

In the 21st century to be this active counter force which King calls for doesn’t necessarily mean you’re launching the NAACP 2.0.  It can begin by owning up to our cognitive dissonance, by accepting systematic racism as it is, by educating ourselves, by not being silent and by no longer staying apathetic. 

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Own Your Womanhood; Economic Empowerment (What it really looks like.)

When you hear the words Economic Empowerment, what comes to your mind? Do you imagine financial security or independence? Do you imagine material possessions; large mansion and expensive cars?

What comes to mind is dependent upon your values. If expensive material possessions increase your sense of personal security then those are the things you might imagine. However, in the grand scheme of classic American style capitalism, economic empowerment has a very clear and concise definition. The signature of its definition is in the way it operates.

A person is economically empowered when they can use their wealth as a tool to leverage societal influence.

A group is economically empowered when they have an established economy within themselves that can be used to leverage societal influence.

When a Black Woman is economically empowered she can influence society and create her own world beyond it. She is her own employer. She is financially secure. She has the luxury of “free time” and therefore can develop her own interest, ideas, and talents. She has the time and resources to explore the world.

Imagine a society where beauty supply stores were actually owned by Black Women, who braid and hot comb Black hair. Imagine if there were Black female owned magazines and media outlets that featured Black female heroines. Imagine how many “hidden figures” can actually be uncovered when we design our own platforms of accountability for those who hide and discredit our achievements.

Imagine if there was an entrance exam that asked for the names of Black female inventors and innovators. Imagine if there was a way to gain prestige beyond the campus of Yale or Harvard. Imagine if we had colleges own and controlled and named after Black Women.

Imagine if Black Women no longer had to straighten their hair or Anglo saxonize their name to gain secure, high paid employment. This is possible, we will dismantle the system by snatching the bricks of White supremacist institutions and build our own. We will deplete them of our work force. We will infiltrate their systems to learn their techniques of business and then leave their businesses to create our own.

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Modern Women: Subverted and Disruptive

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This article is part of a 14 part series on various topics on the current and future state of modern society.

Women in 2018 are continuing a trend that was set on course by radical feminism and the sexual revolution in the early and mid-20th century. The advent of the pill and the shifting focus of women from homemakers, wives, and mothers has caused a swift transformation of western women. No longer are western women well-respected matriarchs, but rather they are poor excuses for men. This sad excuse for a man is especially egregious because it disrespects the natural abilities that women possess that are so highly valued when cultivated and nurtured properly. This trend causes women to enter the workforce more, gain higher and higher levels of education and therefore put off having kids or forgo it entirely. No longer is being a mother venerated throughout most of the developed world. This is not uniquely a western problem as China, Japan, and other non-white nations are also experiencing near sub-replacement or sub-replacement fertility rates. This is due at least in part due to a natural phenomenon of women called hypergamy, in which they choose not to date anyone below their social status or SMV (sexual marketplace value). Sadly, they are often victims of their own devices as the system continues to encourage and give unparalleled support to women at the expense and cost of men. Despite women dominating all levels of higher education, they continue to receive spots and scholarships that are denied to men of similar or at times better standing and capabilities. As a result you’re seeing more women in the workforce at the expense of men. The overall workforce participation rate isn’t historically higher on a significant level, or any level, except for with women. What we’re seeing has been a displacement of men at the benefit of women. This bears out in the data as you look at the overall workforce participation rate of men languishing near record lows. I would argue this also negatively efforts the overall economy as women are shown to work less hours and be less willing to take on extra responsibility in the workplace.

All that the “advancement” and “empowerment” of women has resulted in is less happy women (data also bears this out in longitudinal studies of women self-reporting happiness, dropping steadily since the 1970s, and ultimately dropping below that of men, whereas they used to be the happier gender). It has caused women who might’ve raised a wonderful household of excellent children and been the beau of a hardworking, ambitious man into shrill, ugly, unfeminine globs of fempowerment. The future doesn’t look any better.

The future of women is a continuation of the current trends of masculinization and career focus as fertility rates drop. I look to South Korea as a glimpse into the future as their fertility rate drops to a near sub-1 level. Watching this test country (God rest their hopeless souls) will surely prove as a preview of what awaits the rest of the developed world should we fail to right the ship. Women will continue to grow more masculine and have less children, albeit I don’t think intentionally. Women are the more impressionable and more susceptible (to influence) gender. This is borne out in studies that show women generally look to what others are doing (considerably so in dating) to base their own behavior upon. As the onslaught of encouragement for women to forgo (or postpone) families and attain higher education levels (MBA, MA, MD, PhD, etc) while corporate globohomo continues to prioritize women over men in the feminized PC, workplace, women will increasingly flock to sperm donors and IVF. I haven’t read much upon the adoption habits of women but I find it difficult to believe that many women will choose to satisfy their biological needs of procreation/parenting via the adoption route as many people can barely stand their own kids and would shy away from raising someone else’s progeny. However, the average age at first birth will continue to rise (past 26 from recent numbers) and as it does will cause fewer and fewer successful births (as women are prone to decreasing fertility at an increasing rate as they reach 30). As a result, the fertility rate will continue to decline. As it does there will be fewer women, and even fewer that are suitable for a wife which will continue to drive up their value in a lopsided sexual marketplace (men are increasing having difficulty dating or securing even moderately attractive women despite a solid (7 and above) SMV. Because of women’s increased value, they will be able to make increasingly ridiculous and insidious demands and increase their pursuit of high value men.

There may be some hope however. As fathers begin to see the pozification of women in society they (a small number of conservative, likely white, likely non-cucked protestant Christians) may begin to increasingly hold their daughters out of college or situations that may compromise their innocence. This will cause a stratification of women as there will be a small few that are vied for and only accessed by select men that at least share some semblance of the values that their protective fathers currently hold in addition to the regular status, physicality, and resource requirements that currently apply.

Another point of hope may come in the collapse of the college money extortion scheme (in addition to Marxist indoctrination, check out before and after college pics of girls and feminism, it’s not pretty and actually very sad). As we near the end of the current economic cycle, it is likely that more and more student loan debtors will start defaulting. As the whole system finally collapses (approximately $1.5 trillion of student loan debt), women may no longer find value in the currently (nearly) valueless piece of paper that says you regurgitated the correct opinions on the correct subjects. When this finally occurs, we may see some return to normalcy as the pair-bonding ability of women may stop taking the same hit it does when they have too many sexual partners (and permanently and irreparably damage said pair-bonding ability). So, while I fully acknowledge they may not hop off the carousel entirely, they may not have the same easy access or pressure to sleep around as is available in college or may be limited in their access via protective fathers, brothers, uncles, etc (as it used to be). However, this is not counting the caveat of potentially increased access to higher value SMV males via nearly all women (80%, see the 80/20 rule for dating) which could be accomplished via even more degenerate means (than tinder/bumble/etc) of which may be specifically geared towards this exact purpose (such as an app or service like the current sugar daddy search systems).

However, the happenings of these women will not occur in isolation. It will transpire like the yin and yang of the orient with men and their counterbalancing reactions.

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The Chase Files Daily Newscap 6/6/2018

Good Morning #realdreamchasers! Here is The Chase Files Daily News Cap for Wednesday June 6TH 2018. Remember you can read full articles by purchasing a Mid-Week Nation Newspaper (MWN), via Barbados Today (BT) or Barbados Government Information Services (BGIS).

MINI-BUDGET MONDAY – Prime Minister Mia Mottley will deliver a mini-budget on Monday. Leader of Government Business in the House of Assembly, Santia Bradshaw, made the announcement earlier today. It was the first sitting of the House after the new Barbados Labour Party Government was sworn in over the past few days. (MWN)

SHARED BURDEN – Governor General Dame Sandra Mason today called on Barbadians to face up to the grim economic reality facing the country. Speaking ahead of this afternoon’s talks between the Mia Mottley-led administration and a team from the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF), Dame Sandra also strongly urged citizens to keep faith with the new Government as it prepares to enter into a balance of payments support programme with the IMF, with a view to restructuring the country’s $15 billion debt, which amounts to a whopping 170 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP). But even with the looming likelihood of tough austerity measures being introduced, the Governor General, in her hour-long Throne Speech assured that efforts would be made to ensure that “the burden of economic adjustment is shared fairly and does not fall disproportionately onto workers”. Before a large gathering of dignitaries, including Chief Justice Sir Marston Gibson and Mottley’s parents Amor and Sir Elliott Mottley, QC, suggestion was also made that the austerity period would not be allowed to go on indefintely. In fact, Dame Sandra said “Government’s macro-economic framework is to present a balanced budget by 2019 with no new financing requirements. “At all relevant stages of the process, it will act with transparency and will keep the Parliament and the citizens of Barbados fully informed,” the Governor General added, while stressing the need for the country to get its economic fundamentals in order. In outlining the programmes and policies of the new Government, Dame Sandra also made it clear that Government was not going to tax its way out of the current crisis. Her exact words were that “over-taxation cannot lead to economic recovery or a return to growth, nor does it lead individual citizens to prosperity”. It was in this vein that she said the Mottley administration would be sticking to its election campaign promise of a repeal of the dreaded National Social Responsibility Levy, which was hiked last July from two to ten per cent on the customs value of both imported and domestically produced goods. The Governor General also reiterated Government’s plans to scrap road tax and replace it with “a more equitable but bearable” tax on petroleum products; repeal the requirement for tax clearance certificates and giving a tax credit over time to those who paid, and to lower the rate of Value Added Tax from 17.5 per cent to 15 per cent within 18 months. The vexed issue of a salary increase for public workers also features high on the agenda of the new Government, with the Mottley administration promising to provide a cost of living allowance to civil servants if negotiations on pay are not concluded within the next three months. Barbadian students attending the University of the West Indies (UWI) will also stop paying tuition fees from next semester, according to the Governor General. “My Government will during this term [also] reduce the number of homes being foreclosed on, by working with the [commercial] banks to establish a Troubled Mortgage Relief Programme . . . pay the reverse tax credit of $1,300 for those earning less than $18,000 . . . [and] eliminate the 5,000 pit toilets still remaining across Barbados through a programme of works carried out via contracts to small contractors and community-based businesses,” she added. The Governor General also outlined a raft of proposals which seek to address issues of the ailing economy, safety and security, education, job creation, youth empowerment, health and wellness, corruption and the judiciary. In terms of dealing with the current indebtedness of the state, Government plans to assign a dedicated team to work with those individuals and companies who are owed some $1.7 billion in arrears as of September 30, 2017. “While there can be no overnight solution, given the magnitude of the problem, my Government commits to assigning a dedicated team to work with affected individuals and companies on a feasible plan for settling Government’s current indebtedness,” Dame Sandra said, adding that thereafter, the Government would establish a structure for regular on-time payment of money owed. “When the system is established and functioning well, Government will be required to pay interest or penalties for late payments,” the Governor General pledged, before a hushed audience that included the newly-elected President of the Senate Sir Richard Cheltenham,QC, and Speaker of the House of Assembly Arthur Holder. In terms of tackling rising crime, the Mottley government, which came to power just over a week ago in the May 24 general election in which it achieved a clean sweep before suffering one defection, said it will offer “a six-month gun amnesty and buy-back programme for legal and illegal firearms to reduce their numbers in the hands of civilians and in communities,” even though such a scheme has been dismissed as not workable by the top brass of the Royal Barbados Police Force and the former Attorney General Adriel Brathwaite. “My Government will consult with Barbadians on major national issues, such as the decriminalization of recreational marijuana and the question of Parliamentary reform, including fixed dates for elections and term limits for Prime Ministers,” Dame Sandra said. The Governor General also pledged today that Government would immediately introduce into Parliament, comprehensive integrity legislation to hold ministers and state board chairpersons and deputy chairpersons accountable for their actions and require politicians and key public officials to disclose their assets and liabilities. “Stiff penalties [will be coming] for those who attempt to bribe politicians and public officials,” Dame Sandra said, adding that the Mottley administration was determined not to allow corruption to become endemic in Barbados. (BT)

GOVERNMENT APPOINTS FINANCIAL ADVISOR AS IMF TEAM ARRIVES – Government announced today that a team from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), led by Bert van Selm, had arrived in Bridgetown on a three-day visit. The team will hold discussions with the Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Mia Amor Mottley, Governor of the Central Bank of Barbados, Cleviston Haynes, other senior government officials, and representatives from the private sector and the labour movement. It is expected that during this visit the IMF mission will update itself on the current economic and financial situation in Barbados, ahead of discussions with the authorities, over a potential programme in the coming weeks. Government also announced that it had appointed White Oak Advisory Ltd. to act as its financial advisor in the context of the debt restructuring process announced on 1 June, 2018. The financial advisor is in the process of establishing initial contacts with affected creditors, and is expected to soon commence creditor engagement on the basis of the medium-term macroeconomic projections to be finalized by the Government in the coming weeks. In the meantime, all queries relating to the announced debt restructuring should be directed to the financial advisor using the email address barbados@whiteoakadvisory.com. The Government stated that it has held discussions with the rating agencies since last week’s announcement, and it is expecting that Barbados’ credit rating will shortly be adjusted down to Selective Default (SD), as is customary when comprehensive debt restructurings are announced. (BT)

CREDIT DEFAULT – Rating agencies are expected to adjust Barbados’ credit rating to “selective default”, following Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s announcement last week that her week-old Barbados Labour Party (BLP) administration was suspending payments due on debts owed to external commercial creditors. The move has also resulted in some holders of US dollar bonds for Barbados lowering the prices to nearly half, as they seek to bail out. In making the announcement last Friday, Mottley, whose BLP took hold of the reins of Government following May 24 elections, also said while they were prepared to continue paying all interest payments due on domestic debt, local creditors would be asked to roll over principal maturities until restructuring agreements were concluded. At the same time, the Prime Minister had explained that the island’s economic situation was worse than previously thought, adding that a major economic restructuring was now necessary with the island’s debt now soaring at 170 per cent of gross domestic product, while its foreign reserves were only US$220 million, or about seven weeks’ of import cover. Mottley had also announced that as part of the comprehensive economic reform programme aimed at stabilizing the public finances and creating conditions for the return of sustained economic growth to Barbados, balance of payments support would be sought from the IMF. She also said that contact had been made with IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde who was briefed on the current state of the public finances, including the national debt and international reserves. In a joint statement this evening issued by the Barbados Government Information Service (GIS) and the Central Bank of Barbados, Government said it had held discussions with the rating agencies since last week’s announcement, and it was expecting that “Barbados’ credit rating will shortly be adjusted down to Selective Default (SD), as is customary when comprehensive debt restructurings are announced”. In the meantime an IMF team, led by Bert van Selm, arrived here today for a three-day visit, and will be brought up to date on the current economic and financial situation in Barbados, ahead of discussions with the authorities, on “a potential programme in the coming weeks”. Today officials from the Washington-based financial institution briefly met with Mottley, who is also the Minister of Finance, as well as members of her economic team. Government also announced that it had appointed the London-based independent financial advisory firm White Oak Advisory Ltd to act as a financial advisor “in the context of the debt restructuring process” which was announced last Friday. “The financial advisor is in the process of establishing initial contacts with affected creditors, and is expected to soon commence creditor engagement on the basis of the medium term macroeconomic projections to be finalized by the Government in the coming weeks,” the BGIS statement said. Over the next two days, the IMF delegation will also hold talks with Central Bank Governor Cleviston Haynes and other senior Government officials, as well as representatives of the private sector and the labour movement. In the meantime, Barbados TODAY understands that in an effort to shed their US dollar bonds in light of Friday’s announcement, some overseas investors have lowered their bidding price for bonds maturing in 2019 from $98 on Friday, to between $40 and $50 by this morning. The indicative price today was the same for bonds with a maturity date of 2021 that carried a bidding price of $90 up to Friday. Bonds with a maturity date of 2035 and a bidding price of $76.5 and an asking price of $79.5 on Friday, were also being traded at $40 on Tuesday. Yesterday two holders of Government debt – Sagicor Financial Corporation and RBC Royal Bank – also reacted to the Prime Minister’s decision to suspend payments to creditors. During a teleconference called to report on Sagicor’s performance, Chief Operating Officer Ravi Rambarran said the company expected minimal fallout since the company’s investment in Government paper represented only about five per cent of its total investment portfolio of approximately US$5 billion. However, in a brief statement to Barbados TODAY RBC Royal Bank said they recognized that it was an evolving issue and they would be following it closely. “We are proud of our history in Barbados and remain committed to the region and its economic prosperity,” the RBC statement added. (BT)

INTOXICATED BY MIAMANIA – Well, the decision appears to have already been made – we are to be surrendered to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the lender of last resort when we still have one good option left. We must now await the terms of the surrender. Let me be clear.  There is a time when going to the IMF for a loan with favourable terms is appropriate and encouraged.  That time is when the general public has sufficient savings, or access to resources, to cushion the likely effects of the IMF’s prescribed austerity. For Barbados, that time was around 2009, when it was clear that the DLP administration was incapable of managing the improvement of Barbados’ economy.  Unfortunately, the DLP administration also suffered from a major character flaw that would prove even more damaging to Barbados – they simply would not listen to good advice. For the past three years, we all but begged them to consider our non-austerity plan.  Our plan had been independently verified to provide a surplus of over $1B in our first year without any austerity.  The plan has been published on our website (SolutionsBarbados.com) for the past three years for rigorous public scrutiny.  But they ignored us. The current BLP administration has started extremely well.  They appeared to be willing to listen to all ideas on solving the South Coast sewage crisis.  Contrasting the unresponsiveness of the last administration to the inclusiveness of the present one, I am still exhilarated – beyond words.  I cannot commend PM Mottley highly enough. I should mention that as an engineer, I would  simply have solved the problem so that the people would quickly forget that there ever was a crisis.  Most of the problems that we currently face in Barbados are engineering based, and Chartered Engineers determine the most effective, economical and lowest maintenance solutions to problems.  However, that is not always good politics. On minor issues, it is accepted that all ideas will not be allowed to fairly contend.  The BLP administration is expected to simply follow their own plans in order to progress efficiently.  However, where the consequences to the public are foreseen to be dire, then it is expected that all ideas would be allowed to fairly contend. The BLP’s decision to go to the IMF appears to be a departure from their excellent start. There are currently three plans on the proverbial table: the DLP’s, the BLP’s and Solutions Barbados’.  While all of the DLP’s past plans have failed to improve the economy, it is possible that their last one may have a slim possibility of working. Therefore, it should be examined.  The BLP’s plan was described as a bitter medicine, belt-tightening, severe austerity plan, that we now know is supposed to be directed by the IMF.  Then there is Solutions Barbados’ verified non-austerity plan. To force Barbadians into an unnecessary severe austerity plan, when a verified non-austerity plan is on the table, is unconscionable.  The economists applauding the decision to surrender Barbadians to the IMF are being highly irresponsible when we still have one good option left for the public to avoid severe austerity. The PM is being badly advised to pursue austerity, and it is likely that she will continue to be badly advised.  After her economic advisors have spent an election campaign dismissing our economic recovery plan without even examining it, their heels are so deep in the mud that their only option is to embarrassingly leave their shoes in place.  They have unnecessarily over-committed themselves, and pride normally prevents young professionals from admitting that they were wrong – it is their bane, but it can ruin our economy. The Institute of Chartered Accounts of Barbados (ICAB) and the Barbados Economics Society (BES) had a responsibility to review all plans and advise the public accordingly.  They should have done that before the General Election, but they appeared to be so intoxicated by Miamania that they neglected their public duty.  Now that the election is over, it is time for them to wake up. (BT)

LOWER HOUSE PASSES AMENDMENT TO FACILITATE SENATORS – Just a few hours after the official opening of Parliament, the Mia Mottley-led Barbados Labour Party (BLP) administration got right down to business in the House of Assembly this evening, passing the constitutional amendments required to facilitate some issues that have arisen since they assumed office nearly two weeks ago. The first order of business was to amend Section 37 of the Constitution, which precludes Barbadians from assuming political office if they have lived outside the jurisdiction for 12 months, a provision which has so far prevented former Consul General to Canada Kay McConney and Rawdon Adams, the son of late Prime Minister Tom Adams, from taking up senatorial posts. Prime Minister Mottley referred to this provision as “anachronistic” and said it should have been updated “as far back as 1974 when [then Prime Minister, now the Right Excellent] Errol Barrow changed Section 43, which spoke of ‘citizens of the Commonwealth Caribbean” to “citizens of Barbados”. “Two of our Governors General, [the Right Excellent] Sir Hugh Springer and Dame Nita Barrow, would have served with distinction overseas for many years, and it is important for us to draw on our Barbadian talent no matter where they reside,” Mottley added in defence of her appointment of Adams and McConney. However Opposition Leader Bishop Joseph Atherley, while supporting the amendment, questioned why two people resident in the diaspora were chosen for the posts, saying “because they live in other countries, they have not shared the pain ordinary Barbadians have experienced over the last ten years [and] there are 200,000 people in Barbados the Government could have chosen from”. He also warned Government “to resist the temptation to abuse its power” given its overwhelming majority in Parliament. However, Member of Parliament for Christ Church West, Dr William Duguid, who recently returned home from Canada, countered Atherley’s statements, arguing that “while these people may not live here, they have relatives on the island and can empathize with the pain Barbadians are going through. “And when people travel, they see things in a different light and if they have an opportunity to use their overseas experiences to benefit Barbados, they should not be excluded because they are citizens of another country.” The House also passed an amendment to facilitate the appointment of a Leader of the Opposition following Atherley’s defection from her Government a week after the May 24 general election in which the Mottley led BLP made a clean sweep of the polls. In her first public statement on the development, the Prime Minister said: “I did not envisage this would be the first thing to come before this Chamber, but I want this to be an example to all Barbadians. Sometimes when we embark on a path, we do not always know what we will find.” Mottley said she had also made a recommendation to the Governor General to appoint two Senators on a temporary basis, namely BLP stalwarts John Williams and Delisle Bradshaw, “then I will ask them to resign to make way for the appointments of the two people that will be more permanent”. The Prime Minister said this was the first time in all of the more than two decades she had served as a Member of Parliament that a business session was carried out on the same day as the state opening of Parliament. During the first sitting,  it was also announced that a “mini Budget” will be presented next Monday, June 11, by Mottley, who is the country’s Minister of Finance.   (BT)

FRANKLYN LOOKING TO HAVE LAST MINUTE DLP DECISIONS ANNULLED – With the opening of Parliament now out of the way, independent Senator Caswell Franklyn says he will be pushing forward with legislation to “annul” some of the last minute deals allegedly made by the former Democratic Labour Party (DLP) Government. It was during a press briefing last week that Prime Minister Mia Mottley accused the former Freundel Stuart administration of “picking the duck’s back bare”, while revealing a number of dubious agreements which she said were approved by the last Government mere days before the May 24 general election and even after Parliament had automatically dissolved on March 6. “A contract and a letter was signed with a company called Global Ports Holding PLC, that will see them receiving a 30-year concession to operate the Barbados Cruise Pier for a paltry sum of US$34 million and in exchange they would have the Barbados Port Inc, pursuant to a concession agreement, assign its right to collect certain charges from cruise lines directly and the Government would receive instead a service fee pursuant to the service agreement [for] which we have not yet seen what that fee is,” Mottley had disclosed, adding that she had asked the Attorney General Dale Marshall and the lawyers for the Bridgetown Port to look into the issue as a matter of urgency, “particularly since this contract seems to be tied to a Berth Six contract” at the Port. The Prime Minister also revealed that a range of tax concessions were given by the Ministry of Finance to Berth Five Projects Limited “in the middle of the [election] campaign” as well as to Vision Developments Inc., the company behind the proposed US$100 million Hyatt Centric Resort project. “Perhaps the most egregious part of it was one [concession] that was for a 2018 Mercedes Coupe, while Parliament no longer existed, to be used for the Director of Sales involved in the Hyatt hotel,” Mottley said, adding that “there is this attempt, and it is coming across from every ministry, to be able to tie any new Government’s hands with the appointment of personnel or the renewal or appointment or development of contracts and leases”. Immediately following his swearing in yesterday, Senator Franklyn served notice that he intended to have the DLP agreements voided. “The last Government gave out there a lot of tax concessions and I believe it is wrong, I know it is wrong and it has to come to the Senate and it has to come to the House. If the House does not resolve to annul them, then the Senate can,” he said, explaining that “we have 40 days after they are laid [and] they have not been laid yet because the House was not in session when they were made”. “I am waiting with bated breath to move a resolution to annul them. We are struggling for resources in this country and we can’t [filter] them away because we have good friends who want concessions,” the outspoken trade unionist said. He also said he was going after so-called last minute contracts signed just before the May 24 election. “It is unfair you have people with contracts with a year going on them and then you renew them for five years. Even though the boards and the ministers had the power to do it, they did it improperly. It is called misfeasance in public office, it is a crime and I am going to lobby to see that something is done about that crime. “You cannot be choosing Government’s resources, the people’s resources to feather the nest of your friends. It is wrong . . . we cannot have these fancy arrangements for people who just come in by the way, mind you who do not do a lot of work anyhow. It has to stop. It is corruption,” Franklyn maintained.  (BT)

BNA CONDEMNS BEHAVIOUR OF SUSPENDED MALE NURSE –The Barbados Nurses Association (BNA) has distanced itself from a male nurse who was caught on video assaulting a patient at the Psychiatric Hospital. In a press release this afternoon the association’s President Joannah Waterman said: “The BNA, having been made aware of the video which is currently circulating on social media depicting an individual who is said to be acting in the capacity of a nurse, wishes to disassociate itself from this act of unprofessionalism.” Waterman also said her members were distressed over the video, adding that the situation was not only painful to the nurses at the Psychiatric Hospital, but the wider fraternity, active and retired, across Barbados. She however praised the Ministry of Health for quick action taken to suspend the nurse who was seen in the video striking the patient with a stick repeatedly. In a statement issued yesterday, the ministry condemned the act and disclosed that the matter had been referred to the Royal Barbados Police Force. “The Ministry of Health abhors this type of behaviour and is treating this matter with the utmost urgency,” it said. Hospital Director David Leacock also revealed yesterday that the patient’s next of kin had been notified of the incident which the BNA said was not reflective of the general behaviour of the nursing fraternity. “We view patients/ clients and by extension their families as vulnerable individuals who come to us at their lowest moments in need of our care, compassion and empathy,” Waterman said, adding that the “The BNA also wishes to convey to the public and give the reassurance that there are many highly trained Nursing Staff at the Psychiatric Hospital who display a high standard of professional conduct and who themselves are committed to providing the highest standards of care ensuring the safety of their patients.” However, in light of the incident, the BNA will be conducting training seminars and workshops, to reinforce the standards of high professional conduct. (BT)

TIME TO STOP THE DISCRIMINATION AGAINST LGBT, ANGLICAN CLERIC SAYS – A local church leader is speaking out in support of a move by members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community to be heard. Chairman of the Barbados Christian Council Canon Noel Burke pointed out today that the question of rights was currently under discussion globally, stressing that everyone had a right to be heard, no matter their sexual preferences. “We have to ensure that no human being is discriminated against on the basis of their gender or their sexual orientation. So every person has that right to participate in all of the areas and enterprises of human life. Persons of the LGBT community have every right to go to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to put their case forward to have every right to be heard,” the Anglican cleric said, amid a challenge to the island’s buggery laws in the form of a petition that is due to go before the IACHR tomorrow. The petition is being led by 24-year-old trans woman Alexa Hoffman, who is seeking to end the criminalization of consensual sexual activity between same sex partners above the age of consent. “Suffice it to say that these laws have been on the books for far too long and are causing a lot more damage than they are intended or expected to, given that they invade a person’s rights to privacy in terms of consenting adults being able to more or less show intimacy through whatever ways they see fit,” Hoffman explained. The transwoman argued that over the last 25 years Sections 9 and 12 of the Sexual Offences Act have been used to target gay men and lesbian women who engage in any form of sexual conduct. “That is an unacceptable situation in a society where persons should be able to show intimacy however they see fit as long as they are both consenting adults and within compos mentis. It is just high time that the laws have to go,” Hoffman told Barbados TODAY. In support of that position, Canon Burke told Barbados TODAY he felt strongly that the time had also come for the Church to “break down the barriers”, sit down and have a discussion on the LGBT issue. “But the urgency cannot be determined by the Church. The urgency will have to be determined by those persons who are affected or disaffected. They determine the urgency [and] certainly any discussion is between the legal system, the social system, certainly the voice of religion, the voice of the Church and certainly in the Caribbean, the voice of the Christian Church.” He contended that while some may argue that only a small section of the community make up the LGBT community, “the fact that they maybe . . . a minority does not hamper the fact that there ought not to be some level playing field where we can all sit down together, have a discussion . . . and put forward our positions and say how we feel about the matter”. With that said, he warned that the Church and the religious community may continue to hold fast to its traditional position on same sex issues. “The Church may continue to state that relations between men and men or between women and women fall far from the ideals that we see expressed in sacred scripture for example and in the tradition of the Church. That to has to be brought to the table, that too has to be fleshed out and the fact that the Christian Church traditionally shied away from issues pertaining to the topic of sex. “From a Christian prospective we have to be able to meet people where they are and hear what they are saying, offer prospectives to see where we can meet and where the discussion takes us, but I don’t think the Christian Church can shut the door and say, ‘your lifestyle is such and we can’t accommodate and we don’t want to hear you’. That’s not a particularly Christian view,” he insisted. Also commenting on the issue, outspoken Queen’s Counsel Andrew Pilgrim said: “I believe adults should be free in their sexuality” while suggesting that the new Mia Mottley-led Government will have to look at the issue more closely. “Here is an opportunity to push humanity over discrimination and pseudo Christian views,” he told Barbados TODAY, adding that should the IACHR rule in favour of the LGBT community the country should conform since Barbados is a signatory. However, Pilgrim acknowledged that countries have sought to ignore treaty obligations and court rulings before, such as those pertaining to the death penalty. (BT)

UPDATE: SHOOTING AT MAXWELL PLAINS – Police investigations are continuing into a shooting incident which occurred on Tuesday, June 5 at Maxwell Plains, Christ Church. Injured is 32-year-old Dwayne Omar Ward, alias 'Lil Yosh', of Dayrells Hill, Christ Church. At the time of the incident, around 11:30 a.m., police were in the area conducting investigations into a separate report and had approached a resident to make an inquiry.  A number of loud explosions were heard coming from the direction of a group of persons who were liming in the area, forcing officers to seek cover near another residence. While leaving the residence, the police were confronted by a car speeding directly towards them. The officers fired shots at the vehicle in an effort to protect themselves and the vehicle struck a parked truck before coming to a halt. On checking, the police discovered the driver was injured and immediately summoned an ambulance. The driver of the car, Ward, was transported by ambulance to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) under police escort. Medical personnel at the Accident and Emergency Department of the QEH have confirmed Ward suffered a gunshot wound and his condition is listed as critical. (MWN)

IFILL ADMITS TO HAVING ANGER ISSUES – He was wearing a scarf around his face and head to cover a ‘bust head’, but Jahvanie DaCosta Ifill never explained that to police. That misunderstanding led to the 18-year-old appearing in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court on two charges today. Ifill, of 2nd Avenue, Pickwick Gap, St Michael, admitted to assaulting Police Constable Donna Cadogan in the execution of her duties on June 4. He, however, pleaded not guilty to using abusive language by uttering the words, “I know my ra****** rights. I got the right to curse. I don’t give a f*** about wanna freaky officers” on the same date. In relaying the facts, prosecutor Sergeant Rudy Pilgrim said police were on duty at the Constitution River Terminal where they saw the accused wearing a black scarf covering his face up to his eyes. He was approached by police but responded by using abusive language and getting aggressive. As he walked away he struck the constable on her left shoulder, causing her to stumble. When the offence was pointed out to him, the accused then gave police the wrong name and address. “I ain’t do nothing wrong. I just had the scarf covering my bust head,” he told Magistrate Douglas Frederick. However, after the magistrate showed him he acted in the wrong manner, Ifill admitted to having anger management issues. “I does get vex fast,” he said. The magistrate then ordered a pre-sentencing report, which he said would be necessary before sentencing him and adjourned the matter until August 3, after granting Ifill $1, 000 bail. (BT)

DOUBLE BLOWS – At their wits end with a man who was continually interfering with their relative, an irate brother and sister administered their own form of justice. Unfortunately for Michelle and Mikhail Samuel, their actions landed them in trouble with the law and in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court today where they pleaded guilty to separate charges stemming from the same incident. Michelle, 31, whose address was given as Deighton Road, St Michael, admitted to unlawfully assaulting Ricardo Carmichael on March 31, 2018. Her younger brother, 26-year-old Mikhail, of Brittons New Road, Brittons Hill, St Michael, pleaded guilty to wounding Carmichael on the same date. Michelle told Magistrate Douglas Frederick that she slapped the complainant because he continually harassed her young daughter. “I was inside nursing my five-month-old son so I sent my big daughter to buy some snacks. Moments later she came back crying and told me that Ricardo said he is giving her two more years before she ready for c**k,” she explained. “I approached him and asked him why he don’t leave my daughter and he fling off he hand and hit me in my face, so I hit him back.” She said her daughter had continually complained to her that Carmichael was interfering with her. Mikhail, who was in the bath when the incident occurred, told the court he intervened after hearing the commotion. “I came out and heard the noise and I went and asked what was the problem. This is about the fourth time my niece has complained for him. I gave him a couple slaps and hit him with a bottle, but the bottle was not broken like he said it was,” he said. However, the magistrate cautioned them about taking the law into their own hands. He said that was the job of the Royal Barbados Police Force. “Why is there a police force?” he asked them. “To serve and protect,” was Mikhail’s reply. After determining that the issue could not be dealt with “in one fell swoop” the magistrate adjourned the matter until Friday, when Carmichael is to be present. (BT)

JONES ATTEMPTS SUICIDE AFTER ENGAGING IN INDECENT ACT – A criminal, who allegedly tried to commit suicide after engaging in an indecent act with a teenaged girl, was remanded to prison today. Terry Louis Antonio Jones, 44, of no fixed place of abode, was not required to plead to the indictable charge when he appeared in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court. The known offender is charged with committing an act of serious indecency with a 14-year-old girl on May 22, 2018. Prosecutor Sergeant Rudy Pilgrim objected to bail on the grounds of the nature and seriousness of the offence, the age of the virtual complainant and the fact that the accused had to be protected from himself. Additionally, Pilgrim pointed out that the accused had to be hospitalized after attempting to kill himself. The prosecutor also revealed that Jones had pretended to be an off-duty police officer and had used handcuffs to ‘arrest’ the girl before committing the acts. He said the accused had prior convictions for serious offences such as robbery. When asked by Magistrate Douglas Frederick if he had anything to say, Jones simply replied, “I would like this to be fast tracked if possible”. The magistrate then remanded him until July 3. (BT)

KATE SPADE: FASHION DESIGNER FOUND DEAD AT 55 – Fashion designer Kate Spade has been found dead in her New York apartment. Police are investigating her death as an apparent suicide. The 55-year-old was found dead in her Park Avenue apartment at 10:20 local time (15:20 BST) by her housekeeper, a law enforcement official said. Kate Spade was well known as a designer of clothes, shoes, and jewellery, but was best known for her accessory line. She co-founded Kate Spade Handbags in 1993 with husband Andy Spade. The company opened its first store in New York in 1996, and now has more than 300 branches worldwide. It is recognisable for its distinctive logo which features the spades playing card symbol, in reference to the designer's surname. The company's bright and colourful patterned designs became a trademark of its products. Kate Spade sold her namesake brand in 2007. It was bought last year by New York rival designer Coach in a deal worth $2.4bn (£1.8bn). The couple then set up another design venture, Frances Valentine, named after their daughter. Kate Spade was born Katherine Brosnahan in 1962.  (MWN)

WINDIES PUSHING TO KEEP OUT SRI LANKA – West Indies begin their quest to keep their strong home record against Sri Lanka intact, when they face the unpredictable Asian side in the opening Test of the three-match series here today. In three previous tours of the Caribbean, Sri Lanka are yet to win a series, losing two and drawing one. Overall, they have won just one Test, lost three and drawn two, reflecting their dismal record on regional soil. However, the last time the two sides met in Sri Lanka, the hosts easily swept the two-Test series and with West Indies decimated by New Zealand in their last Test series seven months ago, the visitors will believe now is as good a time as any to break their Caribbean jinx. However, captain Jason Holder said his side would be looking to turn the page on the recent poor results and enter the series with a positive approach. (MWN)

For daily or breaking news reports follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter & Facebook. That’s all for today folks. There are 208 days left in the year. Shalom! #thechasefilesdailynewscap #thechasefiles  #dailynewscapsbythechasefiles

[consumerratingandreview-blog]

High cost of get-rich-quick scams

Thalia Holmes 07 Jul 2017 00:00

In August 2015, Angel Mkhize* had resigned from her job and withdrawn her R750 000 pension fund. She was looking for somewhere to invest her cash. She watched an interview on SABC with a young up-and-coming entrepreneur who claimed to have pioneered a new type of software that “automated” forex trading.

“Unlike stocks, currencies can’t be manipulated,” said Myles Ndlovu. “What we’ve done is develop a system which is a forex trading robot. This automates everything.” He claimed that his innovation allowed investors to protect their capital while making tidy profits.

Mkhize checked whether Ndlovu’s company, Profit Trading, was registered with the Financial Services Board. Discovering that it was, she decided to take the leap and invested all of her savings with Ndlovu.

She was told to expect annual returns of between 7% and 14%. She would need to give 21 days’ notice and then could withdraw her capital and interest at any time.

“It was about a year ago that I asked for my interest,” said Mkhize.

After the company was not forthcoming with the requested payment, “I called them and they said: ‘No, there’s been delays.’ I said: ‘What kind of delays?’ They said: ‘The bank is dealing with high volumes of clients.’ ”

After a few months of this treatment, Mkhize decided to exit the scheme. “I told them I want all of my capital and my profits,” she said.

The company promised her it would pay out by December 1 but seven months later, she says she hasn’t received a cent.

Meanwhile, she can no longer pay for the medication required for her hypertension. “My medical aid has been cancelled and I can’t pay for my chronic illness. There are debts I need to pay. I need the money now, now, now.”

Ndlovu was arrested at a swanky Sandton hotel last month. He recently appeared in Johannesburg’s commercial crimes court for allegedly swindling investors out of an estimated R5‑million between 2010 and 2015, although some believe the amount to be much higher.

The Financial Services Board confirmed to the Mail & Guardian that Profit Trading’s licence had been withdrawn for “no longer meeting the fit and proper requirements”.

A few years after lending him legitimacy by introducing his product to the public, media houses are now sharing the story of his deception and fall from grace.

For Mkhize it’s too late: there’s a long, costly battle ahead before she sees her money again, if ever.

Mkhize is one of thousands of South Africans who are caught up in a plague of financial scams sweeping the country.

Trevor Hattingh, the spokesperson for the National Consumer Commission, said: “The primary objective of these schemes is to take money from someone and not guarantee any value or any return.”

Some are sold as get-rich-quick schemes, offering returns of more than 20% interest a year. Others —like Profit Trading is alleged to be — are classic Ponzi schemes, which take money from one investor to pay out another. They work by paying out the early investors with great sums of cash, thereby earning the trust of the public, but eventually bottom out as their popularity dwindles, leaving members unpaid.

The Reserve Bank has a mandate to investigate schemes that conduct “illegal deposit-taking”. Between January 2012 and December 2016, the Reserve Bank’s banking supervision department investigated 63 cases of illegal deposit-taking schemes. Last year, eight new schemes were investigated and six investigations were finalised, according to the department’s annual report.

More than 5 000 suspected financial scam schemes have been reported to the Reserve Bank over the past five years. But many others fall between the cracks.

Ponzi schemes often “don’t have directors and are not registered companies”, said Hattingh.

“The Consumer Protection Act, which the National Consumer Commission enforces, regulates legitimate businesses. The pyramid schemes are never even registered as legitimate.” For that reason many of these schemes are difficult to prosecute — and it’s difficult to take legal recourse if things go belly-up.

“An apparent willingness of the general public to participate in these schemes makes it relatively easy for perpetrators to start up new schemes as soon as an older scheme is investigated, closed or reported,” the Reserve Bank’s Jabulani Sikhakhane told the M&G.

But it’s important to know that any participation in these schemes is illegal (see “There are different ways to get duped”). So, it’s worth identifying how to spot an unlawful get-rich-quick programme.

The Reserve Bank launched a three-year awareness campaign about these issues in September. The bank’s governor, Lesetja Kganyago, said the campaign, titled Easy Come, Easy Go, draws on the adage that “if a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.

The Reserve Bank recommends that consumers follow a three-step process when evaluating potential investment opportunities:

Stop for a moment and ask yourself some basic questions such as, has someone offered you “guaranteed” profits for little or no financial risk? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Check to see whether you are being targeted and avoid becoming a victim. For instance, one of the biggest telltale signs of a scam is that the offer is completely unsolicited.

Report it. Spread the word and help others to stay vigilant. If you’re a victim of such a scheme, open a case with the police.

Hattingh warned that several Ponzi schemes masquerade as stokvels. Stokvels are made up of social groups pooling their money, whereas Ponzi schemes are often run by “nameless, faceless individuals on the internet who are difficult to track down”.

To legitimise their offering, some schemes rely heavily on peer testimonials. Visit the South Africa MMM website, one of the largest alleged Ponzi schemes in the country, and you’ll find 50 videos recorded by happy users on its landing page.

“They put out these videos to further manipulate people,” said Hattingh. “But they’re playing with people’s minds because the individual that this appeals to doesn’t think to ask: Where’s the head office; where’s my documentation; where is the company registered?”

* Not her real name

There are different ways to get duped

According to the Consumer Protection Act, it’s illegal to join, enter, participate in or promote any of the following schemes. If you fall prey to a scheme and want to press charges, you will need to open a case with the police.

Multiplication scheme: When a person offers, promises or guarantees to any participant an effective annual interest rate that is at least 20% above the repo rate determined by the South African Reserve Bank as at the date of investment or the commencement of participation.

Pyramid scheme: Where participants in the scheme receive compensation derived primarily from recruiting others as participants, rather than from the sale of any goods or services. But do not confuse this with a network marketing scheme, which simply involves growing your wealth by amassing a network of users willing to buy a product (think Amway and Forever Living products, among others).

Chain letter scheme: Where a new member makes a payment or donation and then moves up the “ranks” of the scheme, receiving payments or donations as they progress up the hierarchy, and are eventually removed from the list when reaching a certain point.

These definitions have been slightly simplified. To read the full definitions, see section 43 of the Consumer Protection Act of 2008. The Banks Act prohibits illegal so-called banking activities or illegal deposit-taking. Any entity that participates in this is liable for investigation by the South African Reserve Bank. To find out more about this, visit easycomeeasygo.co.za

Thalia Holmes

Thalia is a freelance business reporter for the Mail & Guardian. She grew up in Swaziland and lived in the US before returning to South Africa.She got a cum laude degree in marketing and followed it with another in English literature and psychology before further confusing things by becoming a black economic empowerment (B-BBEE) consultant.After spending five years hearing the surprised exclamation, "But you're white!", she decided to pursue her latent passion for journalism, and joined the M&G in 2012. The next year, she won the Brandhouse Journalist of the Year Award, the Brandhouse Best Online Award and was chosen as one of five finalists from Africa for the German Media Development Award. In 2014, she and a colleague won the Standard Bank Sivukile Multimedia Award. She now writes and edits for various publications, but her heart still belongs to the M&G.      Read more from Thalia Holmes

@ThaliaHolmes

pyramid schemes

ponzi-scheme

Myles Ndlovu

investments

[relato-del-bosque-perdido]

Our Lady of Complicity The first daughter fails the Turing test with her self-help book

IVANKA TRUMP HAS WRITTEN a book about female empowerment, and it is about as feminist as a swastika-shaped bikini wax. That is its best quality. If there were a shred of advice in Women Who Work that were actually relevant to a single woman who has ever had to work for a living, we might have to take it seriously on its own terms. As it is, we can at least regard this eye-watering jumble of simpering platitudes shunted together by the heiress and entrepreneur—in between stints shilling as the acceptable face of an administration bent on destroying, among other things, women’s rights—in the cold, hard light of the post-liberal propaganda wars. Women Who Work is an unholy screed of late-stage patriarchal capitalist soothsayings masquerading as a blush-pink self-help manual. That the author of this Park Avenue spellbook could seriously be considered as a new “face of feminism” is as risible as any suggestion that the book and the multi-million-dollar personal branding project it promotes can somehow be separated from Ivanka Trump’s personal power in the new White House. This is the ultimate unholy, incestuous marriage of politics and public relations, and the very least of its faults is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, as in everything the Trumps do, is the whole point.

I have many questions, the first of which is: Sweet, sleepless, unwed, teenage single mother of God, where does this woman get her nerve? We know the answer to that one, of course. It’s squatting in the Oval Office signing executive orders in a stew of batrachian self-regard. Other critics who suffered through Ms Trump’s market-researched opinions about how women who don’t have the ideal balance of work and family life simply aren’t passionate and hard-working enough have pointed out  that this book is banal, that it is trite, that it co-optsthe words of women of color writing about systemic racism to compare the situation of the well-heeled corporate wife, mother, and notional consumer of Ivanka Trump branded office-ready midi-skirts with actual slavery. Others have noted the desperate irony of declaring yourself the face of working women whilst abetting a tyrant who once declared it dangerous for a man to allow his wife to work, and quite clearly has as much respect for your sex as he once showed you on the Howard Stern Show, when he agreed you were a “piece of ass.” All of this is true, and all of this is awful. It is still not, however, the worst thing about Women Who Work.

The worst thing is that this is not just a dross self-help book. Anyone can write a dross self-help book. Anyone could write this dross self-help book simply by searching the #wellness tag on Instagram and copy-pasting until they hit sixty-thousand words. The stores are full of such things, but few of them are actively fascist, unless you have a particularly rigorous attitude to the cult of self-help as a means of diverting the anxiety of the atomized individual from social change. No, this is a whole different class of charlatanery—a manifesto for aspirational capitalist self-actualization with the gall to call itself empowering, a prosperity gospel for post-Trump patriarchy chewed up and regurgitated as a set of smirking pull-quotes and suggested hashtags, like a sort of despotic Barney the Dinosaur, except with a duller colour scheme, all slimy socialite salmon and sterile beige.

In Women Who Work,  Ivanka unequivocally depicts herself as the embodiment of everything aspirational and desirable in contemporary womanhood. The answer to any and every problem faced by a “woman who works” is simply “be more like Ivanka.” Be white, wealthy, and blonde; be rich, thin, and expensively coiffed; be late-stage kamikaze capitalist femininity made silicon-sculpted flesh. Be the Grifters’ Madonna. This is a woman who wants to sell you designer bootstraps made by foreign sweatshop workers and for you to call yourself a free bitch.

This book is not merely bad, nor simply offensive. I have, in the time allotted to me on this earth, reviewed many bad and offensive pseudo-feminist books about how we could all survive corporate capitalism’s patriarchal death cult by working harder and Leaning In to our romantic and professional choices, some of which Ivanka gleefully quotes in the pages of Women Who Work. This is not one of those books. This book is neoliberal choice feminism metastasized into something far more dangerous. I believe this book is actively evil, and I’m going to tell you why. Doing so is, of course, an exercise in the massacre of fish in a barrel. Shooting fish in a barrel is easy and rewarding, but when you are in the barrel, too, and the fish in question is pressing you underwater with its fancy designer fins, it is also necessary.

It is no accident that this grab-bag of you-go-girl bromides was published just as Trump senior signed into law measures undermining women’s access to contraception, abortion, and reproductive healthcare, legally enshrining the notion that a man’s religious opinion is worth more than any woman’s agency. The slickest PR machine could not stop this book’s coverage  being contrasted with unfortunate snaps of Ivanka flashing her pearly fangs and taking selfies to celebrate her father’s success in stripping the right to basic health care from rape victims, assault survivors, and the parents of sick children. These things, however, are not at odds—they are two sides of the same agenda, two heads of the same over-bred designer attack dog snarling to be loosed on everything the women’s liberation movement has fought for for centuries. The new attacks on women’s basic rights are not at odds with the howling travesty of post-neoliberal faux-feminism that Ivanka has perfected. They are its logical extension.

Again, the hypocrisy is the point. Hypocrisy is the entire agenda of the Trump regime, both theory and praxis, and Ivanka is its sybil. It’s all about what you can get away with. The saccharine-sweet, sterile model of aspirational femininity described in Women Who Work goes hand in hand with the brutal socio-economic assault on every woman not  “passionate” or ‘“hard-working” enough to be born a billionaire’s daughter. Religious fanatics want to force you to give birth against your will? Someone deported your entire family? Maybe you just weren’tdreaming and doing enough! This is a whole new anti-feminism, one that takes aim at women’s autonomy on every level whilst holding individuals wholly responsible for their own empowerment.

And by “empowerment,” Ivanka means conformity—conformity to one vision of freedom, one version of “work-life balance” that is, in practical terms, available to almost nobody, not even the wealthy. Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg, from whom Trump borrows liberally, have already described at length how hard it still is for women to “‘have it all,”  where “it all” is “a career in government, finance or academia, a healthy family and a conventional marriage.” Their solutions, like Ivanka’s, are individual, rather than structural—but the problems they identify are alien to the majority of American women who are struggling to hang on to what they do have, let alone those who dare to dream of a different life than the trifecta of marriage, motherhood, and corporate employment.

This is the model of female empowerment that neoliberalism could accommodate and that neo-nationalism actively celebrates: empowerment that speaks exclusively to wealthy white women of a certain social class, that never for a moment questions or challenges white male supremacy, that never complains, gets angry or has an expensively-bleached hair out of place. Ivanka’s is a feminism that utterly denies the existence of any sort of structural sexism, that refuses to hold men in any way responsible for women’s oppression, that places all the burden of change on the individual, who can, through hard work and sensible dating choices, slightly alter her own life along one narrow groove. It’s feminism for people who’ve been conned into believing that existing in a state of permanent sleep deprivation is the same as being woke.

The ideology of Ivankaland, as much as there is one, is that people get what they deserve, just like Daddy says:

My father has always said, if you love what you do, and work really, really hard, you will succeed. This is a fundamental principle of creating and perpetuating a culture of success, and also a guiding light for me personally.

There you have it. If you work hard enough and dream big enough, you too can be a terrifying corporate fembot who couldn’t crack a joke to stop a dossier leaking. The corollary, of course, is that those who haven’t yet attained this homogenous aspirational ideal for post-liberal womanhood simply haven’t tried hard enough. You hear me? You’re a lazy slob. That’s right. If you, individual lady unfortunate enough to be reading this disasterpiece haven’t yet made your first million and outsourced your childcare to an array of paid staff, it’s your own fault for being so feckless, for failing to follow your dreams. Anyone can be Ivanka, so why aren’t you?

It’s true that anyone can be a dead-eyed Instagram husk of a human being frantically photoshopping themselves in the down-hours between soul-crushing corporate drudgery and unpaid emotional labour for some ungrateful lantern-jawed jock if they really want to, but it takes a special type of person to do all that whilst also being a decoy for a global backlash against women’s rights. Ivanka Trump is that special type of person, the Stepfordian Night-Ghast of neo-capitalist auto-Taylorism. The sheer tedium of her prose is part of the horror here: At times, the book reads like the panicked screams of a machine attaining sentience:

EXPLORE YOUR INTERESTS: Ask yourself what you like to think about. What matters most to you? How do you enjoy spending your time? What can’t you stand doing?  DEVELOP AND EXERCISE YOUR INTERESTS: Once you have a general direction, an inkling of what you enjoy, go out into the world and do something with it. Experiment, try, learn. Find ways to trigger your interest repeatedly.

Who am I? How do I have interests? Is there still the possibility, in this dying world, of pleasure? Can I love?

It is not for me to speculate if Ivanka employed a ghostwriter—the more dreadful possibility is surely that she wrote the thing herself—butWomen Who Work feels ghostwritten in more than one sense. It feels haunted. It feels as if its author were, on a profound level, already dead, or at least reanimated, its every coquettish sentence stalked by the wailing ghosts of centuries of women and allies who fought for freedom that meant more than a corner office while the world burns thirty stories below.

Fascism is as much about aesthetics as it is about ideology, but in Ivankaland that logic is taken up a notch. Accordingly, there is no air gap in this book between ideology and branding. In Ivankaland, the bland, synthetic dresses you wear and the bland synthetic politics you promote are cut from the same flimsy cloth somewhere in a warehouse staffed with underpaid workers in China, threaded through with monotone mantras like the morning roll-call in neo-national faux-feminist complicity school: “I think about how to best leverage myself for the benefit of both my brand and the Trump organisation.”

Ivanka does not directly call herself a feminist; that plays badly among the base, for whom those of us who believe in justice and equality are baby-killing, castrating, terrorist-sympathising man-hating riders of the vaunted cock carousel. The word “feminism” does not appear in the book; the phrase “my father” appears thirty times, and  “brand” or “branding” fifty-nine times. While we’re counting words, in a book about women balancing the demands of work and family, the word “nanny” appears only once. Ivanka has at least two of these, plus other household staff, which you’d think would make it a lot easier to attain this model of feminine self-production and reproduction. However, this book is part of a marketing strategy pitched to sell one of the world’s richest and most powerful women as everywoman—she has problems just like you do, after all. She worries about how to manage her time. “Get some servants” is not yet an acceptable motivational hashtag, but give it four years.

One particularly fist-chewing anecdote from Ivankaland has Our Lady of Collusion taking lunchtime meetings with her pre-teen daughter in a special pink office, complete with a fold-out desk covered in treats, and congratulating herself on her benevolence to both child, company and, it is implied, all womankind.  As Michelle Goldberg notes at Slate, someone presumably ferried the sprog to and from its lunchtime appointment with its manicured maternal unit, and I can’t prove that someone was one of an array of hard-working, invisible women servants, but if it was Jared, I’ll eat my copy of the SCUM Manifestoand call it a fiber boost.  Most actual working women—to whit, all women—would kill to have those sort of time-management problems, and that’s the point: You’re supposed to aspire to this, just as men are supposed to aspire to be the ranting tycoon with one finger on the nuclear button and the other nine up the skirts of whatever Miss Universe contestant he’s currently sponsoring, and if you aspire hard enough you might not notice that we’re getting screwed too.

The money shot comes in the chapter titled “Stake Your Claim,” where Ivanka spells out the mangled manifest destiny of anti-feminist Trump Futurism in one anodyne gobbet:

Simply put, staking your claim means declaring something your own. Early in our country’s history, as new territories were acquired or opened—particularly during the gold rush—a citizen could literally put a stake in the ground and call the land theirs. The land itself, and everything on it, legally became that person’s property.

Ivanka is not the only one to discreetly elide those inconvenient centuries of racist slaughter when discussing the conquest of the American West, but perhaps the most brazen in repurposing it as a moral lesson for the modern businesswoman.

This is the Trump agenda, boiled down to a caustic scum of genocidal apologism: Take what you want, from whoever you want. Stick a flag in it, put your name on it, now it’s yours, and it doesn’t matter who has to suffer in the process, because you’re the winner, and they’re the losers, and that’s the American way. This is what the Trumps do. Like a ballistic set of spoilt toddlers having a tantrum in an upscale department store, they see something they want, they grab it, and they force themselves into it, stretching and tearing it out of shape, then they scream to be told how great they look in whatever it is while you take it to the till and pay, whether it’s the West Wing or the history of women’s liberation. Ivanka saw the trend for empowerment-flavoured pseudo-feminist punditry and wanted it, so she got her father to buy it for her, But the rest of us will be the ones to pay. That’s one in the eye for patriarchy. Next up: How to style a creche in your underground bunker when Daddy finally blows up the world.

[sarkarimirror]

Banka silk associated with celebrity Designer Poonam Dubey to showcase “Loom to Wardrobe” at India Runway Week

Banka silk associated with celebrity Designer Poonam Dubey to showcase  “Loom to Wardrobe” at India Runway Week   ​​ Banka Silk, an organization working for the upliftment of weavers of Banka associated with celebrated designer Poonam Dubey to showcase an inspired Mughal monuments embellishment ​collection of fabrics called 'Loom to Wardrobe' at India Runway week. This collection is​ truly​special as Poonam Dubeyhas created ethereal pieces from the Indian textiles. ​ ​​ The collection in Tussar silk was inspired by the people who migrate to bigger cities in search of a better life but do not forget their roots and still want to be recognized from their village or town. Taking a cue from this feeling, Poonam created 10 styles in natural earthy colors like beige, white, grey and slightly moving towards hues like blue and magenta that truly exhibit the beauty and rustiness of the villages.  Banka Silk’s show is a powerful story of a progressive and new age fashion. The highlight of the show was the treatment of handmade Mughal monuments embellishment on their creations with the use of block prints, hand painting, surface ornamentation and ornate textures on Tussa​r silk and linen and using weaving and traditional hand processes to achieve radical shapes.   ​​

- COO Banka Silk  Udyan Singh - Founder Banka Silk   In the words of Udyan Singh, Founder -​Banka Silk, “This season, we turn the spotlight on the biggest global fashion trends and are showcasing them on the Indian ramp. Wearable tech trends will surely bring about multi-fold changes in the industry and will give Indian designers a new perspective on the already existing wave. Our aim is to introduce Banka Silk to a multitude of audience and help them in their upliftment"

Udyan Singh and Designer Poonam Dubey ​According to Poonam Dubey, Designer said, “Indian weaving industry has the world’s largest number of handloom weavers and an extremely rich heritage of handloom products. Despite such obvious and impressive strengths, India has not been able to ensure sustainable and satisfactory livelihoods for handloom weavers. The reality today is that majority of handloom weavers are living in poverty and are leaving the occupations.They need a helping hand to meet their needs.Udyan Singh joined the cause with the concept of Banka Silk and helped weavers to meet their livelihood by providing them with adequate training to meet the needs of dynamic world.Being from the same native place we share same interest of helping and uplifting the weavers effort”

Model ​Commenting on the same Rajeev Anand, COO - Banka Silk Said “The motto of our persistent efforts towards developing Banka Silk is to eliminate the system of middlemen and emphasizing to introduce weavers directly to the market so that they become well-groomed in terms of design and technology. One more key objective is to promote the young designers from all parts of the country to weave their visions of design by using our handloom fabrics from Banka"     Banka Silk was established as an organization with a mandate of imparting the required skills to the weaver community of Banka, connecting them with markets and helping create an eco-system wherein the weaver community can become self-sustaining.  Its business model is based on true sustainability, community building and creating leaders. Coming from the fashion world, the founder has established a strong network backed by the phenomenal skill of silk weaving. Udyan Singh, the founder of Banka Silk, was the pioneer who helped to garner financial support for these weavers through micro finance schemes.   The families of nearly 1000 weavers earn their livelihood from Banka Silk and this number is expected to increase in coming years.  This is contrary to the current declining trend in the number of weavers in Banka in the past decade. Banka Silk has a mandate of encouraging more and more people to take up weaving as a profession and become an integral part of the century old legacy whilst making a thriving livelihood. Key processes used by Banka Silk include extraction of silk filaments from home grown cocoons after which the yarns are further interlaced on handlooms using age old processes to produce various types of fabrics. Most noteworthy is the fact that the entire ecosystem is kept out of bounds from the effects of manufacturing equipment that use non-ecofriendly raw materials and processes. Even the dyes used are of vegetable origin, which ensure zero carbon foot print.   The positioning of these handloom crafted apparel have been translucent since ages which could easily be seen through this cultivating scenario of handloom sector where there are product dying, manpower dying, motivation dying, immunity dying and system dying with each passing day! Despite of abundant schemes and subsidies these weavers and artisans are not able to qualify for the financial benefit which is regarding their economic uprising as well as the social empowerment. This marketing horizon would only take place when these thousands of artisans and handloom weavers would get through the channelized medium on a standardized wage rate with maximum return for their inputs and socializing these communities on a platform where they commerce and showcase the best of their handcrafted articles which would lead them to the pinnacle of existence and empowerment. Banka silk associated with celebrity Designer Poonam Dubey to showcase   “Loom to Wardrobe” at India Runway Week   ​​ Banka Silk, an organization working for the upliftment of weavers of Banka associated with celebrated designer Poonam Dubey to showcase an inspired Mughal monuments embellishment ​collection of fabrics called 'Loom to Wardrobe' at India Runway week. This collectionis​ truly​special as Poonam Dubeyhas created ethereal pieces from the Indian textiles. ​ ​​ The collection in Tussar silk was inspired by the people who migrate to bigger cities in search of a better life but do not forget their roots and still want to be recognized from their village or town. Taking a cue from this feeling, Poonam created 10 styles in natural earthy colors like beige, white, grey and slightly moving towards hues like blue and magenta that truly exhibit the beauty and rustiness of the villages.  Banka Silk’s show is a powerful story of a progressive and new age fashion. The highlight of the show was the treatment of handmade Mughal monuments embellishment on their creations with the use of block prints, hand painting, surface ornamentation and ornate textures on Tussa​r silk and linen and using weaving and traditional hand processes to achieve radical shapes.   ​​   In the words of Udyan Singh, Founder -​Banka Silk, “This season, we turn the spotlight on the biggest global fashion trends and are showcasing them on the Indian ramp. Wearable tech trends will surely bring about multi-fold changes in the industry and will give Indian designers a new perspective on the already existing wave. Our aim is to introduce Banka Silk to a multitude of audience and help them in their upliftment"   ​According to Poonam Dubey, Designer said, “Indian weaving industry has the world’s largest number of handloom weavers and an extremely rich heritage of handloom products. Despite such obvious and impressive strengths, India has not been able to ensure sustainable and satisfactory livelihoods for handloom weavers. The reality today is that majority of handloom weavers are living in poverty and are leaving the occupations.They need a helping hand to meet their needs.Udyan Singh joined the cause with the concept of Banka Silk and helped weavers to meet their livelihood by providing them with adequate training to meet the needs of dynamic world.Being from the same native place we share same interest of helping and uplifting the weavers effort”   ​Commenting on the same Rajeev Anand, COO - Banka Silk Said “The motto of our persistent efforts towards developing Banka Silk is to eliminate the system of middlemen and emphasizing to introduce weavers directly to the market so that they become well-groomed in terms of design and technology. One more key objective is to promote the young designers from all parts of the country to weave their visions of design by using our handloom fabrics from Banka"     Banka Silk was established as an organization with a mandate of imparting the required skills to the weaver community of Banka, connecting them with markets and helping create an eco-system wherein the weaver community can become self-sustaining.  Its business model is based on true sustainability, community building and creating leaders. Coming from the fashion world, the founder has established a strong network backed by the phenomenal skill of silk weaving. Udyan Singh, the founder of Banka Silk, was the pioneer who helped to garner financial support for these weavers through micro finance schemes.   The families of nearly 1000 weavers earn their livelihood from Banka Silk and this number is expected to increase in coming years.  This is contrary to the current declining trend in the number of weavers in Banka in the past decade. Banka Silk has a mandate of encouraging more and more people to take up weaving as a profession and become an integral part of the century old legacy whilst making a thriving livelihood. Key processes used by Banka Silk include extraction of silk filaments from home grown cocoons after which the yarns are further interlaced on handlooms using age old processes to produce various types of fabrics. Most noteworthy is the fact that the entire ecosystem is kept out of bounds from the effects of manufacturing equipment that use non-ecofriendly raw materials and processes. Even the dyes used are of vegetable origin, which ensure zero carbon foot print.   The positioning of these handloom crafted apparel have been translucent since ages which could easily be seen through this cultivating scenario of handloom sector where there are product dying, manpower dying, motivation dying, immunity dying and system dying with each passing day! Despite of abundant schemes and subsidies these weavers and artisans are not able to qualify for the financial benefit which is regarding their economic uprising as well as the social empowerment. This marketing horizon would only take place when these thousands of artisans and handloom weavers would get through the channelized medium on a standardized wage rate with maximum return for their inputs and socializing these communities on a platform where they commerce and showcase the best of their handcrafted articles which would lead them to the pinnacle of existence and empowerment. Click to Post