Ronald Thwaites | Falling dollar and rising challenges

The breakfast downtown which cost $250 at the beginning of the year, now costs $350. The lunch which went for $350 is now $450. The price of cabbage, the staple with rice and plenty of gravy or ketchup for Sunday dinner, recently rose steeply.

People can’t throw up light wires or bridge the water main any more because the utility companies are getting ‘rhygin’ and people are very shame when they get caught and you have to beg space in your ‘facety’ neighbour’s fridge or worse, ask them to allow your children to use their toilet.

We don’t even reach to the pickney book list yet. It’s longer and more dear than ever. Rent? ‘Faget’ it!

That is the reality of most of the people I deal with on a regular basis. All this while the minimum wage remains where it was, despite all the big promises and continued chants of ‘prassperty’ – and a wholesale on East Queen Street has been pricing their goods at $160 to US$1 for some weeks now.

Give thanks that the remittances have been holding up through June as Auntie Roachie shared a little of Mr Trump’s stimulus money and the dollars change out good. But we hear that that soon done. And what then?

Yes, Dr Nigel Clarke, you are the money-man who says that recovery needs continuity, and you speak nicely. We have no choice but to listen to you. After the election money which is flowing now, runs out, how are we going to manage on September 4?

After all, whoever has cash is buying up the foreign dollars because the best investment in town now is to buy at 150 and hold on for a few months, or even weeks, and expect to sell at 160 or 170. Wicked, you think? No. Perfectly legal. “Plenty of ‘dem’ who have plane, Porsche and villa do it regular”. Better returns than weed or scamming – and no police or soldier.

STRATEGY TO RESHAPE ECONOMY

Really, I admired Minister Clarke’s honesty this past week. Although campaigning to keep his work, I hear him acknowledge that unemployment is going up and debt-to-GDP ratios will deteriorate. He truthfully recognises the inevitability of the same “bitter medicine” which sunk his leader in 2011.

What we are still waiting to hear is the strategy to radically reshape the economy in the shortest possible time so that the cabbage and cooked food prices will become more affordable. And maybe even the utility tariffs, too. Talk about that and how we are going to stop the out-of-control dollar are the only meaningful issues on the campaign trail.

Are you hearing it? When will the land reform start? When can we fill ‘miles of Black Star (air)liners’ with the Jamaican yams, which are so short on the Toronto market that prices, in good, good foreign exchange, have doubled? That’s just one example.

And will it be this week when there is established a direct window at the Bank of Jamaica for bona fide manufacturers and exporters to get foreign exchange without having to pay the usurious spreads of the financial sector?

When will we start to save much of the misdirected national security budget by multiplying the resources to Project HOPE, which is transforming idle youth into productive citizens?

If you are not telling us the concrete plans to tackle these and other desperately urgent issues, your plea for “continuity” is empty, and even if entertained, would only take hungry people back to the same uneasy position we were in before March. For your party, that seems to be good enough.

Sensible voters will choose otherwise. Many will abstain. Others will ‘kin teet’ and take what you have to give them because “no better no deh”. You should see the truckloads of scarce benefits spilling out of the constituency office near me.

WHERE DO PEOPLE GO

After all the big talk about recovery strategies by the high-ups last Friday, what are the prospects that better must come? At what address, phone number and email contact can a small farmer, manufacturer or service provider go – now, not next month, to get credit needed to produce? We are already tripping over the places to go to finance a car at six per cent for 10 years.

I am especially sorry for the tourism workers. The ones with bank loans on vehicles or houses particularly, now that the moratorium soon done and the We Care subsidy soon run out. Instead of all the false hopes, shouldn’t we be engaging in the difficult conversation which starts with the realisation that tourists won’t be coming for a while, given what is going on in the USA? Look what happened to the Playa hotels last week!

Is Mr Andrew Holness sure that the Business Process Outsourcing industry can absorb plenty of the retrenched tourism workers? If so, when and how many? Where to apply? We need back-to-school money now.

Last week I treated with the distress in the sugar cane and bauxite industries. The bottom line is, the nation is enduring an expensive election campaign (bet you we will never know who funds what) full of ‘ray-ray’, but far removed from the deepening economic and social crisis that is upon us.

So what are we to expect if the current Government is voted back to power?

Ronald Thwaites is member of parliament for Kingston Central. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.