By Peter Polack

Peter Polack

The Grand Court of the Cayman Islands recently dismissed a poorly advised attempt to put taxes on the local telecoms. It will be another case where there is no oversight or peer review of the disastrous advice of their Attorney General or Solicitor General.

More of the same like the extinct Dodo bird.

Local telecoms of the Caribbean are unlike the electric utility monopoly dinosaurs that fend off competition at every turn as rates rise with stock prices, some on international stock markets.                                                                           

The greatest opportunity for a paradigm change in the regular monthly bills that oppress         voters of the Caribbean is being missed. The solar revolution can provide an alternative and parallel electricity supply that avoids oil prices, political meddling, mechanical breakdowns, hurricanes or social discord.         

The elephant in the room is that solar electricity gives Caribbean residents a chance at independence from monopolies overseen by incompetent regulators, independence from burdensome bills and independence from the vagaries of government politics as well as corporate greed.             

Imagine a perfect world where poor people do not steal electricity in the ghettos or bank tellers do not steal only $800, just enough to reconnect electricity to cool their newly born children in the prosperous Cayman Islands.

The ballot box is not the answer as recurring political appointees let the voters swelter in summer heat so the answer has to come from somewhere else among the multitude of suggestions.

If people are happy to continue with the status quo so be it.

If not, there has to be a wholesale cleaning with a new broom starting with the civil service, concrete, leadership  positions of various portfolios and a review of the systems that entrap people at the bottom of the scale in poverty as well as the prison of monthly utility debts.

To do otherwise is to endorse idiocy or declare acceptance of the now and forever.

You can hear the children weeping already.

Notes
https://www.matrixlaw.co.uk/news/cayman-tax-declared-unlawful/

Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer in the Cayman Islands for several decade. His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013), Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2019). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of Russian espionage activities with almost five hundred Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide 1940-88. His views in the above release are his own