Senator Subhas Ramkhelawan's telling assertion first, in the FIU debate in Parliament, and now printed in a daily news paper, that "there is no doubt...that there is an extensive amount of money laundering...when you see an economy going down and property prices staying up," tells something of the national character which accepts wrongs such as these without batting an eyelid. With 000's being replaced by decimals in the price of housing, from 500,000 to 1.5m on the average, which has its correlation in banks paying you pennies for your deposit while charging you exorbitant mortgage fees. You wonder at how such evil can be allowed to prevail when in the US, dollar for dollar, a 10,000 sq ft lot can be obtained for $10,000 in Florida, and a home for less than $175,000, the latter all the more possible because of fore closures resulting from the US downturn.
This is a horrendous crime against lawful citizens who must now see their hard-earned savings turned to nought because of their inability to compete with the ill-gotten gains of others which is no different from the robber helping himself to your hard-earned money or the car that you would have worked all your life to buy or the crop of cucumbers that you would have depended on to purchase books for you children. And if this is not bad enough we as a people are slowly coming to accept this kind of lawlessness as a way of life, for six murders overnight is no longer a problem and a 2 by 4 house for two million equally so. If a country begins to accept that the normal channels of social and economic mobility no longer apply and in its stead crime pays, then to talk of independence is truly a sham, and we have become slaves to our own appetite and greed, bereft of all moral compunction which is the corner stone of civilized living. If no one has been prosecuted for this criminal act of money-laundering against the people, what does that say of law-enforcement in this country? Would the FIU be the beginning?
Dr Errol Benjam
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