RACIST MARINA SQUATTERS BLEEDING SLU - Does SLASPA Know & Will They Stop Them?

WHO ARE THE RACIST MARINA SQUATTERS & IS SLASPA PROTECTING THEM

 

 

Dear Christopher Alexander,

Racist people are squatting in a St Lucian marina, making endless money, without paying a dime in the fees that everyone else has to pay.

They have been doing it for years. And getting away with it. How does a company that has made money in tourism for years escape paying their fees to SLASPA?

A funny thing happened on the way to researching the promising yachting sector of St Lucia. It came to my attention that there is, in St Lucia, a ghetto marina. Imagine that.

A  place where a business that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe over a million in revenue a year is allowed to squat FOR FREE.

FOR YEARS.

 

Hmm. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

And to make it worse, the owners seem to be downright racist. It has been witnessed and reported enough times over that these people routinely call their staff ‘Nigger’ and not in a friendly, thuggish Tupac kind of a way.

To be clear, when they say ‘Nigger’ it sounds like what, in academic and technical circles, called “Some Massa Shit.”

Ironically, on the other side of this ghetto, another St Lucian of the lighter skinned persuasion is running a totally legit group of businesses, struggling to pay rents and fees and licenses on facilities that could use some investment from you.

So, like, it’s not to say, all light-skinned, straight-haired Lucians are racist. Just these motherfuckers, in this instant, at this moment.

I’m hope that as the person who wears the pants on government’s maritime affairs, this revelation will come as a shock to you and that you will curse yourself for not detecting this dangerous anomaly before. It would be very, very hard to take if one could confirm that you knew about this before and were the kind of son of a bitch to go along with it for whatever reason.

In the wake of the REEL IRIE case and the HIA upgrade scandals, I’m sure you appreciate how hot the scene is for SLASPA right now.

In fact, SLASPA is competing with Tourist Board for the number one spot when it comes to unaccounted waste and corruption.

When coupled with the overt racism of the upper middle class squatters in question, it looks like SLASPA is facilitating the classist, oppressing post-colonialism that robs average St Lucians of their opportunities in business, in career, in education, in sports.

Is it?

Are you going to get defensive like Lorne Theophilus and order a gag on your staff to protect the rich squatters?

Or are you going to honestly look into how much money these people owe SLASPA for the use of facilities that the People of St Lucia have entrusted to SLASPA’s care?

Some people predict that you will do nothing to address the matter of these squatters who owe endless money to the Government and People of St Lucia, in this, the Mother of All Guava Seasons.

I reserve my opinion and depend upon your actions in come Monday morning.

In the meantime, I await your call or email.

Because, you know, there is an outside chance that you really don’t know who I’m talking about. After all, when was the last time anybody at SLASPA knew anything that they could report honestly to the media.

 

FREDO'S LAST SHOT TO BE THE HERO: Castries Central MP Could Blow The Lid on Lab-Flam Corruption

THE NEW AND IMPROVED RICHARD FREDERICK

Where?

I didn’t see it. Did you?

What I saw the entire political class fall in stature to the point where they were no better than Richard Frederick. In fact, Richard Frederick has one up on them.

One of the most important rules of war is that you shouldn’t fuck a man who has nothing left to lose.

Another important rule is that you shouldn’t wound a dangerous beast if you mean to survive. You should kill him. One time.

The wounded beast..

"Do I look dead to you?"

 

The failure of Kenny Anthony and Allen Chastanet to effectively address the threat of Richard Frederick, their procrastination, delay, indecision, weakness in the face of internal dissent, all of these have led us to this point.

The point where everyone in the international community and the local populace can see clearly that Richard Frederick is no worse than any of the politicians who have successfully painted him as a drug dealer, a wheeler dealer and the most dangerous kind of politician.

They’re all the most dangerous kind of politician.

But Richard Frederick has one on them.

He’s more dangerous. He plays hard ball. While they are weak hearts who don’t know how to kick the dog when it’s down, Richard Frederick is a risk taker, who has correctly bet that neither Labour or Flambeau has the guts to do what it takes to get rid of him.

Richard Frederick with some retarded children

 

And here’s the upshot.

Richard Frederick, of all people, now has the most legitimate shot at coming out as the real hero, the real goddam revolutionary, in all this.

He is expertly armed in information that lesser men in the same position neglected to arm themselves with.He has maintained cells of personal loyalists in the planning ministry, in the justice ministry, the attorney general’s office and of course, the police force. He had always had cells and contacts in Customs and Immigration, although those are not so useful given the heightened state of international surveillance of St Lucia.

Who really runs planning? Richard Frederick or the current minister (who just happens to be Richard Frederick's former partner and Richard Frederick's child's pawen)

 

He is not averse to collecting background information on his rivals and using it against them.

He’s a real Macchiavellian. The kind of Christian pope who will stab you in the back and take all your shit, just because the time is right.

Now that he has had enough time to use his Lucian al Qaeda to gather all the information he could need to attack his enemies, now they want to throw him out of the party. Now, they want to figure out how to beat him in an election so that he loses his diplomatic passport.

But it’s too late for that. Because the smart money says that there is more than one person in the Lower House of Parliament who has dealt in the traffick of cocaine. There is more than one person there whose accounts and lists of assets are full of ill-gotten gains. It doesn’t even matter which political party you’re talking about.

These men are corrupt.

"Drug money, it's gonna buy you what you want

Fish scale, I'll buy you what you want

Thousand bill, I'll buy you what you want

A hundred square, I'll buy you what you want..."

 

And Richard Frederick, perhaps more than anyone else, knows how corrupt they are. They don’t want to fight with him. They want to dance with him.

But if he has the guts to expose them for what he knows they are…

If Richard Frederick starts dropping bombs of truth that no one else in parliament would tell…

Tell me, wouldn’t you consider him a hero in the making, too?

Of course, I wouldn’t bet money that Richard Frederick is going to drop any real hard science on his enemies in Flambeau and Labour. I’m betting that he’s dancing with them, too. They’re negotiating the new balance of power, now that it seems a credible third political force has come about for the first time since George Odlum had abs.

Richard Frederick could change the entire game by exposing every single one of the dirtiest players in parliament. But the problem is that Richard Frederick is not one of us, yet.

He’s still one of them.

I wonder if he’ll ever learn.

THE GHOST OF OLLIE GOBAT: One Murder That Won't Just Go Away

COPS ENGAGE IN 'TRAINING' ON OLLIE GOBAT KIDNAP SITE

 

 

Ollie Gobat, entrepreneur, baller, national athlete

and somebody's son...

 

Something is happening.

Usually, when some gruesome or international homicide happens here, there is a flurry of news activity. Then, the flurry ends and the case goes nowhere. That's how it is in the small islands. Police forces were not built to solve crimes in the Caribbean. Historically, the only function of the police force is to keep the local slave population in check.

Apart from that, whatever.

But months after the frenzy over the kidnapping and murder of Ollie Gobat, something is happening.

They thought they finished Ollie Gobat when they burnt him to death in his vehicle. But they thought wrong. Ollie Gobat isn't going away.

On August 18, a bunch of people who looked like local and British cops visited the site of the kidnapping of Ollie on the strip of road approaching the Landings.

"You taking a stroll?" they asked, as I approached them.

"Nope," I replied. "I'm looking for Ollie Gobat's killer. You?"

"Training exercise," they lied. "Yep. Just a little training. Nothing to do with nothing at all."

"And then you wonder why no one trusts a word that cops say..." I pretended to mutter.

"I think you should move on," a handsome local pit bull growled, restrained only by the presence of the foreign masters of crime solving.

Pretending to investigate

Bal fini, once the cameras are off...

"I think," I said, daring him to be an asshole local cop while the British were watching, "that you should be more polite when you speak to people."

The men and women with British accents in the group kind of huddled together under the tree where Ollie Gobat was stopped on the way to or from the Landings, after leaving the golf club. Most of the men sported tattooes that looked kind military - you know, swords made of fire and proud serpents, scrolls with writing or whatever. The women, thankfully, did not seem to be so adorned. Science cops, maybe. Consultants? I'd ask the Royal St Lucia Police Force, but then, they'd just lie to me, like they do about everything of any significance whatsoever.

There was a vehicle parked around where Ollie Gobat's vehicle was seen to be parked by someone who knew him. There was a transit van parked behind a bush on the track just east of where Ollie's vehicle would have been parked.

One vehicle was parked under the tree where Ollie was flagged down. Other vehicles were parked on the west side of the scene. I figure they had nothing to do with anything, just transport. But I could be wrong.

One senior, more sensible local cop tried to diffuse me.

"It's just a training exercise," he repeated.

"Oh come on, that's a lie," I pushed on. "If you tell me, 'Yo Jason, this thing is at a sensitive stage. Just chill and stay close to me for a few weeks or months and you'll get your story,' I would be cool. But when you lie, I have no choice but to not trust you and to mess with your whole game."

This is Ollie's vehicle

It is also the state of the investigation of his murder

Somehow, all the servants of the world have forgotten that they are the servants. Somehow, they think they are the boss and that they can withhold information from us and then abuse us when we press for the truth.

They decided that they had done enough 'training' for the day and got in their vehicles and drove away.

But it was enough for now.

It was enough to know that this Ollie Gobat case hasn't gone away. Will not go away. The local cops can't just continue to pretend that this was some crime of passion.

Something much more wicked and thoughtful happened here. And the presence of those local and British cowboys on the site where Ollie Gobat was kidnapped confirms several things for us.

This was planned.

It involved several people.

It goes further than anyone in the Royal Crapaud Police Force wants to know. It goes far enough that local cops are afraid to truly investigate this.

Any real investigation of Ollie Gobat's murder is going to be driven from outside St Lucia.

There is currently a real ongoing investigation of Ollie Gobat's murder.

It will probably result in yet another indictment of St Lucian cops, who have done absolutely nothing to really investigate. Crapaud. They are not incompetent. They are cowardly. Those of them who are not completely corrupt.

As I watched the sniffers drive away, I could help but wonder how many of the local cops were in the real killers' pockets. The force is so infected that during the extra-judicial killings a special cell of officers managed to assassinate quite a few people before international justice put some spokes in their wheels.

Justice in St Lucia. Ha. That's like reversing forwards.

Historically, we have never had justice in St Lucia.

But someone wants justice for Ollie Gobat. And whoever it is, they are well connected enough to get British officers to the site of Ollie Gobat's kidnapping to actually investigate what the hell really happened there.

As for the training, I don't think the local cops were really paying attention. There's a certain look on a man's face when he's learning something and I didn't see that look on any one of their faces. They weren't learning. They were resisting the need to aggressively investigate things that do not want to be investigated.

Change doesn't suit them.

They're fine being khaki clad colonial keepers of the peace who spend more hours oppressing their own people than, um, what did you call it....solving crime.

But that's ok.

This time, someone else will figure it out.

They just better hope that none of them are part of the cover up.

"It's just a lover's quarrel with some aviation fuel thrown in..." WRONG!

WRONG!WRONG!WRONG!

ALWAYS FUCKING WRONG!!!

NO MORE LEAKS!!! LORNE GAGS TOURIST BOARD STAFF TO PROTECT SECRETS AND PREVENT HONEST AUDIT

　

Is Lorne shielding the corruption at Tourist Board? He sure did a good job shielding Donovan Lorde...

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH:

THE LONE RANGER VS TOURIST BOARD:

WHOSE SIDE IS LORNE ON

 

The staff at the St Lucia Tourist Board has been gagged.

The workers have been ordered by no less than tourism minister to keep their damned mouths shut about anything to do with the unaudited shenanigans that are taking place on his watch.

And it's all because of the FLOGG.

Ha! Sweet. Talk about validation.

One would have hoped that Lorne Theophilus would see that his political career is at stake. One would have hoped that he would come down hard on the side of the honest, but lonely people who think Tourist Board needs to come clean about its happy-go-lucky spending habits.

Too bad.

Well, at least now we know where Lorne Theophilus stands.

Last Friday, Tourist Board staff was called to a meeting. They were anxious. What was it about? Staff cuts? Salaries? Restructuring? Was it the magical disappearance of the Donovan Lorde case, where a Tourist Board employee represented by Lorne was alleged to have made a $300,000 bobol?

What was so important that Tourist Board head honchos and the tourism minister, Lorne Theophilus, himself, wanted to speak with the staff personally?

It was The FLOGG and the pinez in Tourist Board who are feeding it.

Earlier that week, it was reported on St Lucia's most notorious blog that one honest board member was fighting an uphill battle to get an honest audit done of what some people consider St Lucia's most corrupt nest of vipers.

The FLOGG dared the tourism minister to show which side he was on. He did.

Poor Lorne Theophilus came down on the wrong side of history. What he told the Tourist Board staff meeting last Friday could be the beginning of the end for him.

"No more leaks," he ordered the staff. "No more propaganda." Apparently, the search to find the source of the FLOGG's information led the minister to the staff. There has been no indicator showing any contact between the FLOGG and any Tourist Board director or manager. So it must be the staff. Right?

Lol.

Ironically, Louis Lewis practically admitted to being unwitting source that the FLOGG uses when he noted that the story used a photograph that was only on his WhatsApp profile.

Unfortunately, he is neither willing or able to find out which one of his personal contacts I am. As I sat, practically in the room in the room with them, listening live as they gagged their staff, I could only smfh.

Meanwhile, despite all indicators that The Lone Ranger who is trying to bring some honesty to Tourist Board has said nothing to the FLOGG and has no idea where our information is coming from, Lorne Theophilus, Louis Lewis and friends, still suspect him of ratting them out.

 

THE LONE RANGER AND TONTO

It's unfactual (thanks for the word, Louis Lewis) to say that there is one lone board member fighting for accountability at Tourist Board.

There are at least two.

Ray and Nobby are an unlikely pair. One is a doctor and the other one is the current king of all service drivers. One is a book boy and the other is all street knowledge. Which one is the Ranger and which one is the dangerous quiet Indian is hard to tell. But the one thing they have in common is that you can't easily pull the wool over their eyes.

When Ray first started to grumble about Louis Lewis' and Tracy Warner-Arnold's bullshit management reports to the board, they tried to force him out. It would have worked, too, except that they bit off more than they could chew.

They tried to get rid of Nobby at the same time.

That guy was just always a pain in the ass to them.

When Lorne brought the idea of sacking the The Lone Ranger, he found out something he didn't know before. Ray has some connection with Prime Minister Kenny Anthony. He's his sister's husband's father's nenen's child. Or something.

Still, Kenny might have thrown Ray under the bus. I mean, Ray is Lorne's cousin and Lorne was the one who was proposing to sacrifice him. It was close. The money wasn't on Ray's side. Ray was going down.

Except...

Nobby also has a personal connection with the Prime Minister. In fact, some think that Nobby is actually the Prime Minister's personal plant in the Tourist Board. Kenny's personal set of eyes and ears. Why that is so, no one can clearly say.
Kenny rebuffed Lorne's attempts to replace Ray and Nobby. Or rather, Nobby and Ray. Reports are that Kenny actually cursed Lorne out constitutionally. I'm really sorry I wasn't in that room. I would love to have reported that verbatim.

Somehow, though, I don't think Jadia Jn.Pierre will be providing me with that transcript.

Who knows if the Prime Minister even knew about last Friday's meeting to gag Tourist Board? Or whether he ordered/sanctioned it? You never know with these people.

Now that Tourist Board staff has been effectively gagged, Lorne and Louis can now get back to business as usual. The other conspirators are already making complots to quiety get rid of Nobby and Ray, again. This thing is getting radioactive and if Nobby and Ray get any traction, now that it's in the public, then the shit could really hit the fan at Tourist Board.

This could be big.

It could go back 20 years.

Too bad you can't shred credit card records.

And to make things worse, Martinique Consul General Shazi Chalon and local yachting consultant Cuthbert Didier just hosted a two island each bash that put the jazz festival to shame. In one weekend, they made more than$5 million rain directly into Lucian pockets, by spending approximately zero public dollars.

Kinda makes jazz look like a joke. Like a scam, really.

Meanwhile, as far as we know, The Lone Ranger and Tonto are still fighting their lonely, losing battle. They are under pressure, because they are the ones who have to take the most heat for the stuff the FLOGG reports. The only thing they have to their advantage right now is their honest confusion. Even they don't know where I'm getting this information from. And everyone can see that.

That doesn't stop them from being under surveillance, however. From the beginning, I was sure that if I contacted Nobby and Ray, they would be blamed, wholesale, for everything I wrote. Right now, I have no doubt that if I contacted either one of them, Lorne and Louis would know within the hour. It's just the excuse the bastards need to get rid of the two last honest men in their company.

Thankfully, they are not the source of this story.

There's another Lone Ranger out there.

Someone with a box of documents and a jump drive.

After that, there will be others. People are already brave enough to talk to their friends. How long before the gagged staff of Tourist Board is brave enough to put together their own box of documents and jump drive?

How long do Lorne and Louis think they can shut people up?

Hi-ho, Silver, you bastards.

There is no containing this.

Audit or no audit, this one is going to blow.

ALLEN CHASTANET IS AN ASS -WHAT RICHARD'S EXPULSION SAYS ABOUT TI CHAS LEADERSHIP

PROCRASTINATION, INDECISION, WEAKNESS PLAGUE FLAMBEAU'S TOP DOGS

Short story:

Allen is an ass. He had to expel Richard last year at this time. Instead, he attacked Stephenson King, fracturing his party further than it already was.

Allen is an ass. At this stage in the game, it's too late to be fracturing Flambeau to expel Richard Frederick. He should, like the FLOGG, be changing tact and attacking Kenny Anthony for either lying about Richard Frederick, or not exposing him, as promised.

Allen Chastanet is an ass. He hasn't even figured out where and how he will win a seat, but he is attacking people in his party who have proven they don't even need Flambeau to win.

Lucky for Allen Chastanet, Kenny Anthony is also an ass. Any right-thinking strategist would have called the election and destroy Flambeau already. In the aftermath of that election, they would be so decimated that the expulsion of Richard Frederick would be a non-story.

If Kenny Anthony was smart, he wouldn't wait for the dust to settle from this Flambeau civil war. He wouldn't wait for things to get worse. He would just call an election and destroy them while they were destroying each other.

But as we said before, Kenny Anthony is an ass. Or was that, Allen Chastanet? Can't remember. What's the difference?

WHY THE HELL AM I WRITING ABOUT THIS SHIT?

"I can't wait to see your take on Richard Frederick's expulsion from Flambeau..."

The person who said it doesn't even talk to me.

But I guess this stupid blog must be having an effect for my enemies to be egging me on against their enemies.

From the moment I realized The FLOGG might be more than the joke it started out as, I stopped following the regular news. That stuff is misleading. It's the facts after being filtered through lying political, social and business leaders, filtered through duplicitous, exploitative public relations people and finally, through a bunch of untrained reporters who mostly fall in the category of 'those who know not but think they know.'

One the issue of Richard Frederick, the regular news has be blind, misleading and in some cases (especially in the case of Caribbean News Now) has been just plain corrupt. Reporters, apparently, are as much for sale as voters.

And media managers? They're all a bunch of hostages, selling political and commercial lies in order to keep their licenses and get some advertising dollars.

So while I wouldn't normally report something that has already been reported in the regular news, I guess, this time, I have a responsibility to say something, to clear some of this smoke that's circulating now.

Not to mention that I want to say the words, "Allen Chastanet is an ass" as many times as I credibly can.

I think I might be able to establish this as a fact.

Also, if 10,000 of Frederick's and Labour's supporters hit this article, every time anyone in the world googles Allen Chastanet, the first thing they will see is: ALLEN CHASTANET IS AN ASS.

I'm sure that Fully Blessed Angel and Jadia JnPierre understand exactly what their roles are in this and I thank them in advance.

THE PROCRASTINATOR-IN-CHIEF

If Kenny Anthony is the Hesitator-In-Chief and Jason Sifflet is the Castigator-in-Chief, then Allen Chastanet surely is the Procrastinator-in-Chief.

The simple conclusion here is that Allen Chastanet takes too long to arrive at an inevitable conclusion.

Everything that's happening now had to be done last year. And doing it now might prove to be Allen's last fatal mistake. If Kenny wakes up from his egocentric daze and just listens to good sense for a moment, he will call elections sometime this year. If he does that, he will catch Flambeau in the middle a civil war. I don't have to lay out the conclusion for you.

Regardless of whether you are on Frederick's side or not, there is no getting around the conclusion that if Flambeau does not shake this guy, they have no friends.

No friends in Taiwan, no friends in the Republican Party, no friends in the Tory Party, no friends whatsoever. Basically, they will have no money except what Richard Frederick gives them. And Richard Frederick just doesn't have as much money as he used to.

So:

When Allen Chastanet won the leadership of Flambeau last year, he had to do two things. First, he had to expel Frederick from Flambeau as violently as he possibly could, in order to impress everyone in the world with how antithetical he was to everything Frederick stood for. Second, he had to keep Stephenson King, close, close, close. Steven had to kept as Opposition Leader, no matter what the cost. Allen had to find himself falling asleep and waking up at King's house. King had to be separated from Frederick in order to rescue the soul of the party.

But Allen Chastanet is not just a procrastinator.

He is an ass.

And so, after spending months procrastinating over Frederick's inevitable expulsion, he did the one thing he should never have done. He stripped Stephenson King of the office of leader of the opposition. He didn't think it through. If he did, he would see that there is no better person in the parliamentary opposition right now who is better suited to this post.

The result was that within days of the announcement, Stephenson King's staff were claiming victimization because the new LOO, Gail Rigobert, dismissed Steve's staff without making accommodation for them. She just threw these good Flambeaus to the wind. Facepalm. Self-slap. I wonder if Gail can kick herself in the balls, cos she deserves it.

The story dragged on and on, until it got to the point where there was no point in getting rid of Frederick until after the next election. At this point, when Labour is scrambling, the opposition needs to consolidate, not fracture and fragment. Allen would still need to sabotage Frederick at every step, but he'd need to do it stealthily, so that Labour could never take advantage of his party's division.

Kinda like the way Kenny and Alva HATE each other, but have the discipline to keep that shit indoors. Left to Kenny, Alva will never be PM. And left to Alva, Kenny would be relegated to the dustbins of history. But Flambeaus don't know that. So they can't use it.

Isn't it funny how the tables have turned?

When I first started working in Lucian journalism, Flambeaus were the ones who never leaked and Labours  were the ones in constant disarray.

And now, Kenny Anthony is one step closer to his secret dream of being the new John Compton.

Well, at least, the version of John Compton who kept winning elections after his usefulness had run out.

Say one thing for John Compton though. He had no patience for his political rivals. If John Compton was in Kenny Anthony's place, both Richard Frederick and Allen Chastanet would be a thing of the past.

Of course, when John Compton was in Kenny Anthony's place, he retired, he didn't he? But then again, John Compton wasn't going up against an ass like Allen Chastanet.

TOURISM'S APARTHEID AGENDA - ARE HOTELS INHERENTLY RACIST?

AND IS ALLEN CHASTANET WILL HELP THEM ACHIEVE THEIR MISSION

You call that a Queen's Chain?

Shit. That's not even a Lady in Waiting's Chain.

 

What on earth would Boo Hinkson steal from a hotel?

What would Mae Wayne steal? Why would hotel security, on a small island, where everyone knows everyone, subject people who had no need to steal to searches?

I’m trying to avoid the conclusion that hotel tourism in St Lucia is inherently racist. Tourism is necessary. And fun. I mean, who in their right mind does not want to make millions by cooking for, partying with and cleaning up after people with disposable income?

And hang out with drunk women who are definitely leaving next week. Tourism is a great idea for anyone who has excess beach, relatively good weather and peace.

Click. Take a pic.

Cos you can't trust your politicians not to sell it.

(The bastards would probably blame it on Boz if they could.)

 

But…

The evidence is increasingly against me. More and more, the evidence points to the single conclusion that all right-thinking, modern, multi-racial St Lucians want to avoid.

It’s racist. From the north to the south of the island, hotel tourism is implementing apartheid policies. Not just against black people. Against St Lucians in general. Unless, you have one of those special passes and general recognition amongst the plantation owners, Lucians are not welcome in Rhodesia.

I mean, amongst hotel managers and owners on the hotel complex. What did I say? I didn’t compare hotel tourism with the Belgian Congo, did I?  Because that would be unfair.

Me dat say it.

Tell them, Jacquot say tourism is Belgian Congo.

In their MDC!

 

But Rhodesia, yes. South Africa, yes. Hotel tourism is building a new apartheid. And no matter which party rules St Lucia, the local chieftains co-operate. They collaborate. They even instigate the implementation of tourism apartheid.

It’s not just Allen Chastanet who will sell St Lucia until there is nothing left to sell. Allen Chastanet wasn’t the one who told Discovery Bay to pay construction workers EC$100 when the contractors were ready and willing to pay U$100.  Who did that?

That’s another story. Let’s give this person time to 'fess up or stew, while we deal with something bigger.

Hey kid! WTF? This is a private beach!

 

 

Allen Chastanet is just the most honest about the nature of the beast. In his own words, “If St Lucians want to prevent the selling of the beach, they have to make that decision for themselves.” Which means they can’t count on him to protect the beaches from sale, if he becomes prime minister. He’ll sell the beaches. He tried once. He’ll try again.

"Beat it! Beat it! The hotel owns the beach, so beat it!"

 

At least Allen Chastanet is honest. “Food security is bullshit,” he told me, boldfaced, in our first and last interview, just before he used Richard Frederick to wipe the floor with Stephenson King, in Flambeau’s last leadership contest.

Which means, fishermen and farmers can expect to get totally screwed over, if he ever becomes prime minister, or even tourism minister, again.

Not that Labour is any different. More than one beach in St Lucia has been ‘sold’ and now belongs to the hotel rather than to the nation and people of St Lucia, because of the deliberate foolishness of the St Lucia Labour Party. They let these hotels end up owning the beach. They pretended to fight.

Labour is just full of ass when it comes to tourism.

They have Ray and Nobby fighting all alone for Tourist Board's soul. And none of them are stepping in.

 

At least Allen Chastanet is honest.  He’ll sell all of us to the 21^st century Gold Coast traders. But then, he’s not any different from Lorne or Menissa or Pip. They all sold us, piece by piece. Allen is just foolish enough to announce your sale to you in the national media as though it was a good thing and you should be grateful.

He’s just the messiah who, it was foretold, would return St Lucia to the hands of the people who owned it in the first place. You know, the pirates, the slave owners, the colonists and the sea merchants. Whatever version of them exists in the 21^st century.

The Amerindians? They didn’t own shit. They just lived here. Died. Whatever. They were savages. They didn’t even know how to own.

Which brings us closer to the core of the problem. You can almost smell it. It looks like a hotel operator. But it’s not. It’s a hotel investor. Apparently, those are two completely different things.

WHO WANTS LESS BEACH?

WTF, DUDES?

Hotel investors are a funny thing. The people who build hotels probably have no interest in running it. They’re looking to sell it. Flip it. The new owners are probably real hotel operators. They’re looking to cut corners. There are all kinds of permutations and configurations of these two categories. They are called worthless conmen, middlers who talk a lot and do very little. It’s not the best situation in which to do business. But…

That’s the way things are all over.

But somehow, in the Caribbean, there’s an even more insidious character to hotel tourism that you can’t really find on Miami Beach. I wonder if it happen in other places in the world.

First of all, in Miami, more beach is good beach. Nobody builds on the beach. In fact, they import sand by the ton in order to turn non-beach areas into beach.

Miami Beach. Notice how much bigger the Queen's Chain is.

And they don't even have a Queen's Chain.

They're just using common sense.

 

 

 

Not so in the small islands. Investors will build in the water if you let them. Somehow, every hotel investor who ever built a hotel in St Lucia was intent on murdering the beach and would have succeeded if he wasn’t held back to save the political career of some corrupt nigger or coolie. They still manage to rape the beach and to prevent its recovery, which I guess, must suffice, until Kenny lets Allen win the next election.

Instead of preserving more beach, they build right up as close the water as they can. This is not to maximize profits for high impact tourism investors. This is to crowd the beach with tourists so that locals are dissuaded from being in ‘visitor areas’.

Basically, it’s psychological warfare.

Hotels vs locals, for the prize possession of the islands, the sunshiny beach.

It is the most visibly obvious evidence of hotel tourism sinister secret agenda. But it is by no means the only evidence.

A SHORT LIST OF TOURISM’S APARTHEID CRIMES

They’re constantly making ‘public access’ more uncomfortable and invisible.

They’re constantly trying to violate the Queen’s Chain and constantly taking every opportunity to own the beach. Why? To keep you out, you stinky little Lucian mongrel.

Staycation guests and workers confess that the Staycation vacation is not on the same level with the foreign visitor vacation. Why? To keep you out AND take your money at the same time, you damned fool. You could have stayed at a nice local guest house in Gros Islet or Canaries. But you want to live like the Joneses.

Go on with your bad self. Give them your money to export. Act as if Balenbouche and Fond Dou don't exist. Couyon!

Sunrise in Gros Islet.

Poor jab. You missed it.

You stayed at  big hotel.

 

Security searches have an increasingly racist pattern. Locals who are not guests are constantly under suspicion. From Boo Hinkson to Mae Wayne, Lucians are subjected to illegal searches, searches that not even police are empowered to carry out. You can make matters even worse by being black.

(As for the politicians, they’re on the hotels’ guest list. Which is not to say that they’re in the hotel’s  pockets. Case in point: When it was pointed out to Allen Chastanet that every single security search carried out by hotel security is illegal, he replied, “Maybe they shouldn’t do it in the front. Maybe they should do the searches round the back.” Current tourism minister Lorne Theophilus ain’t much better. It’s cool with him, too. It was cool with every single tourism minister going back to Romanus Lansiquot. Philip J Pierre. Menissa Rambally. Chastanet. Theophilus. It doesn’t bother them in the least that hotel security are a law unto themselves, conducting searches so illegal that not even local police would make the mistakes they do. And yet, they do them with impunity.)

Workers are also subjected to unconstitutional searches and work under constant suspicion.

So are local guests.

But the evidence from world tourism is that foreign visitor tourists are the single biggest source of theft and leakage. By the time you check that you have been robbed, they’re gone. Yet, there is little evidence that security ever turns on the non-Lucians guests of the hotels. Having gotten the signal that they are not under suspicion, the foreigners continue to pilfer everything from bathroom supplies to small furnishings and appliances, while Lucians, workers and Staycationers get the blame.

As though it’s not enough to place false blame, they are also on a never ending quest to take the bread out of Lucian’s mouths. The hoteliers are also constantly limiting the ability of small independent entrepreneurs in craft and services to get at the tourism dollar. They are monopolizing the beach and every opportunity to make money on the beach. They harass craftsmen, claiming harassment, instead of co-operating to help the people make a buck on the beach that was theirs before the hotel was a twinkle in a real estate conman’s eye.

They are successfully squeezing the life out of St Lucian farmers, whilst at the same time being able to claim that they are making stronger linkages in the agriculture sector. At the biggest hotel chain, farmers are forced to wait three months to get paid. THREE MONTHS. If time is money the farmers are basically selling to Sandals at a loss. Sandals gets all the interest from the farmers money and then pays them four times a year. When farmers have problems resupplying themselves and improving their yield and quality, the hotels go and cry to Allen Chastanet and his ilk about the need to be able to import with impunity.

It’s a brilliant strategy.

It’s like conquering the Congo, using treaties, instead of rifles. You still end up with your own country inside another person’s country and your country is totally private property. And their country is a mess, begging to suck at your teat.

Brilliant.

RACIST AGAINST ANIMALS?

TOURISM’S EXTINCTION AGENDA

 

 

 

It is also a wonder that hotel tourism of the small islands makes itself the enemy of endemic species and archeology. In this day and age, why would anyone kill a rare species to build a hotel? You’d make way more money on the hotel by saving the species. Duh….

One would think that if a hotel investor acquired some land in Fregate Island or at Jalousie and discovered rare species like the Thrasher, the Iguana and the Fer de Lance lived there, they would be overjoyed to protect and exploit these valuable resources. One would think that if, in digging, they found Amerindian and Negmarron artifacts, that they would see this as an opportunity to maximize the cultural profit.

One would think we’d have to fight the hotels to own the Thrashers and the artifacts on the hotel site.

But no.

We have to fight them to keep the rare animals and the history alive.

At Jalousie, they dumped thousands of tons of artifacts. They destroyed St Lucian history, forever entrenching in everyone’s mind the notion that tourism and local archeology are sworn enemies.

At Fregate Island, Le Paradis put the small population of rare and indigenous species under so much pressure that the Fer de Lance were running as far as Canaries and Anse la Raye for shelter.  And you know when a snake goes to Anse la Raye for shelter, boy, things must be really bad, because Anse la Raye is to snakes what Israel is to Palestinians. It’s the most hostile territory that ever once belonged to them.

 

If tourism is illegally searching Lucians, even the foreign-born, light skinned and upper class Mae Wayne, if it is exploiting workers with wages that are cited by the US State Department as a human rights abuse and if it is callously killing the indigenous species and natural beauty of the island….

 

If tourism is against the people and the beauty of the island…

Who is it for? Who is really profiting from this?

Remember the slogan “You are the U in tourism”?

 “U get this. U get that. U get off the beach. U, you’re fired for the summer.”

I don’t want to be the U anymore.

I want to be the I.

After all, we are on an Island. And it is mine. It belongs to I and I. Not you.

 

THE SABOTAGE OF ST LUCIAN TOURISM

It's ironic.

Allen Chastanet is the owner or something at the best damned hotel in St Lucia, barre none. Coco Palm captures the spirit, the culture, the look and the historicity of St Lucia, without subscribing to any of the clichés that other hoteliers fall for.

It’s a like a multi-story plantation house with a pool instead of a pond. The staff there are mostly happy. For real. You can’t get these people to say anything bad about Allen Chastanet, not because he’s a great manager, but because he is such a cool guy. No one who associates Allen with the slave-owner class that Kenny Anthony comes from works for him. He’s nothing like that.

Not in person. Not when you work for him personally.

But change the scale of the economic action and Allen Chastanet will be the first to rip the bread out of Lucians mouths.

Ask Gillan Ajodha how Ti Chas ripped the bread out of his mouth. Out of all our mouths. He practically kidnapped an investor friend of Gillan’s and brought him on a joyride around the island, trying to make a commission on selling the guy a different property.

The result: Cas en Bas still has one hotel and a golf club.

Chastanet will rip the bread out of Lucians mouths.

Ask the staff and contractors of REEL IRIE. This was a boat charter company that never quite made a profit but paid every single one of its bills on time. Finishing a job for REEL IRIE was the best guarantee anyone in St Lucia ever had that they would receive cash in the next 24 hours.

But Chastanet threw REEL IRIE under the bus when SLASPA’s most corrupt decided that they wouldn’t give the company a license, in order to protect some of their friends in Ganter’s Bay.

The result: Less local investment. Less employment for local drivers, cleaners,  , laundry, rum shops, street side barbecues, far flung bakeries, all of which were art of REEL IRIE’s attractions. We sure could use those opportunities now.

A REEL IRIE children's party.

Where's big tourism's children's party?

 

But as we said before he’s not the only one.

When Labour came back into office in 2011, they gave REEL IRIE and other local friendly businesses the same treatment as Chastanet did.

Last year, Lorne let the St Lucia Tourist Board rebuff a French media company’s offer to shoot the entire Jazz Fest for free and then air it for free, all year round in their European markets.

No one in Flambeau or Labour stood up for the boatman  Joe, when a big hotel and a big charter boat operator named Chastanet made a complot that would rob Joe of his entire small business. If not for an international social media campaign, he’d be somebody’s underpaid employee today.

Louis Lewis went on vacation during the performance of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Company of Shakespeare in The Rainforest, throwing endless untold opportunities for locals to the wind. No one at SLTB saw fit to visit the cast and crew of the production even once, much less lobby them for more opportunities for St Lucia.

They still want to do bigger business with St Lucia, but no one in Tourist Board would know that, because they didn’t give a shit. The Royal Shakespeare Theater Company is interested in St Lucia. Tourist Board is interested in first class flights to America and Brazil.

Meanwhile, Lorne Theophilus’ stewardship has allowed the apartheid to continue in security, in entrepreneurship and opportunity, the same way Chastanet’s did.

All tourism ministers approve huge budgets for which Tourist Board shows no accountability, while letting small entrepreneurs who really make the St Lucian tourism dollar to fend for themselves.

And then, when VAT hits, nobody gets a break, except the slave owners. I mean, hoteliers. Same fucking thing.

The farmers, the small property owners, the grocers and restaurants and other small service providers who can make a tourism dollar? Fuck them.

The irony is that St Lucia’s tourism plant has working models of success at every scale, from Somewhere Special in Gros Islet to Fond Dou in Soufriere to Coco Palm in Rodney Bay. And none of them are anything like the big hotels that tourism ministers want us to believe we should bend over for.

Maybe that’s the problem.

Maybe the St Lucian side of tourism needs to make its government kiss more ass. Maybe the St Lucian investor and service sector need to threaten the government more. Maybe we’re being too soft on them.

Or maybe they’re selling us out to people who hate us, at worst, and don’t respect us, at best, and we should really think about what life would be like without them.

Because when you’re persona non grata in your own damned country, surely, you can do better than that.

Allen Chastanet: Farting in your face since 1965