Born again unionist

Lost and found?

Amid all the clamour and noise of the budget cuts by the parliamentary dictatorship of APNU/ AFC, we’d wondered what happened to Patrick Yarde. With the opposition wielding its budget axe like berserk Vikings, and the government protesting that public servants would have to be let go it was not unreasonable to expect to hear the measured, drawling cadences of Patrick, was it? Hey! The fella gets a fat salary and plenty of perks from the union dues of public servants to live high off the hog, doesn’t he?

Well all has been explained in a letter he whipped off to the Stabber News recently. The man has found religion! In an extraordinary turn of events, Yarde, the fellow who stormed the Guyanese Bastille at the head of his troops in 1999, confessed that he only made sense of the budget battles after studying a release from the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Now our WI Catholics had been meeting right here during the budget fracas, but Yarde didn’t say whether he consulted them on the empyrean light shed by their U. S. confreres. Anyway after Yarde’s epiphany, he now advises us that it is all a ‘moral’ issue: the government should have applied ‘moral criteria’ to the budget. No. It’s not Hamilton Green going on his usual spiel on ‘moral upliftment” – the old fake has now been joined by Yarde.

But we’re more than a tad disappointed by Yarde – especially with his newfound moral bearings. Fact of the matter is that it shouldn’t have been “newfound”. What the heck was the standard Yarde’s been using to demand distributive justice for workers in the Public Service for decades? Machiavelli’s? We always suspected that but now we know.

But what bothers us about Yarde’s claimed new moral “insight” is he refused to apply it to the opposition’s budget cuts. What is going on? The opposition gets a free pass on morality as far as the budget is concerned? Even when they harm public servants? The opposition wasn’t ‘manoeuvring’? What does Yarde call the action to cut the government’s proposed subsidy to GPL for all Guyanese to enjoy and yet retain the subsidy for Linden only? We sadly conclude that Yarde is up to his old tricks: he came out of hibernation to counter Lincoln the Loud. Once a wanker, always a wanker.

Hold me/loose me

The path of true love, we have been assured, never ran smooth. But then we’ve also heard that all is fair in love and war. But when it comes to the relations between APNU and the AFC we wonder whether they’ll ever make up their minds if they’re engaged in love or war. Of course, there’s always the possibility that war might be the way to go when you’re taming a shrew. So who’s the shrew?

Right now it’s definitely Ramjattan. Wasn’t he the one who ran behind his suitor’s back to fink on APNU in Linden? Ratted that Granger was cutting deals with the big, bad PPP! Granger and his band of ex-soldiers had to eat a lot of humble pie after that. It was payback time! As the old folk’s say: Do fuh do na obeah, but (and as the young folks say) payback’s a bitch!

So why is Ramjattan so bent out of shape that he didn’t get to pick the replacement Commissioner for GECOM? Hey, Mr Hoyte knew what he was doing when gave the UF a squeeze on Robert Williams – Williams wasn’t exactly a stranger to the PNC! Can’t have it both ways, wanker!