One of my good friends said, in a reggae rhythm, don’t jump in the water if you can’t swim ...  Some one dear to me tells me that in her view, most Belizeans believe the current administration is doing the “right” things. She sums up her circular reasoning by saying that that’s why they voted for them.

I don’t think that this is a case of the current administration’s credibility out weighing Ms. Enriquez’ native cynicism because Khalilah, and by extension KREM’s WUB, are currently more allies than opponents of the state and her risk of being shot at are probably higher than her risk of being wrongfully imprisoned. Political opponents of the state don’t have that same reassurance, though, because for the past two months they have had to endure the political directorate generally, and the minister of police in particular, using the security apparatus to persecute them. Who feels it knows it, no?!

Chaos theory 101: If a butterfly in Brazil flaps its wings can it cause a typhoon in Taiwan? Wasn’t it just a few months ago that Iceland, the number one country on the 2006 UNDP Human Development Index, was being held up as the model for good governance and fiscal responsibility? According to the international press, Iceland is now the hot topic in the financial world for a different reason: it could become the “first national casualty” of the ongoing credit crunch that is the result of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Until last year Iceland’s economic track record was often described as “phenomenal” because of average annual growth rates of over 4% of GDP, and a per-capita gross national income that had surpassed the United States. Today analysts are more apt to describe the new Nordic Tiger as becoming “the Bear Stearns (remember them) of the North Atlantic” instead.

I like to think that Belize and a couple other Caribbean countries were the first casualties of what is now an international financial crisis caused by the massive subprime lending practices in the United States, because after all, that’s what securitization was all about - we securitized loans that were in effect subprime mortgages. In many ways we did not fully understand or appreciate the risks, but the moral of the story is that we were able to right our ship before we ended up on the reefs.

Iceland, despite having an economy at least 20 times that of Belize, had to extensively borrow its way to developmental prosperity, and therefore it is at the mercy of foreign investors’ fickle perspectives as determined by the credit ratings services. The credit crunch means they have to pay a lot more so as to be able to continue borrowing to pay their debt obligations ergo, their ratings drop, their risk factors go up, and so on, and so on. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Those who fail to prepare, are obviously prepared to fail ... The biggest impact of Dean Barrow’s endorsement of political victimization is the denuding of our ability, collectively, as a nation, to plan for the medium and long term and the simple fact that it increases our risk factors. In our increasingly “globalized” world, stability is really predictability “misnomered” as security. If we agree that decimating government at all levels in the pursuit of the objective of providing jobs for political supporters is the right thing to do, then let’s agree on shortening the terms of government.  We have already seen the massive instability and negative outlooks that this can cause, so why aren’t more people concerned? Am I the only person who believes that, at this point in time going forward, there are serious economic storms wreaking havoc on the world financial scene, and already their “bands” have stretched across the horizons and our borders to impact in the form of skyrocketing prices? I don’t have Bette Davis eyes but we all need to fasten our seat belts because we’re in for a rough ride.

Is this why I wonder, every time I pass the now stalled National Stadium project, if it is butterfly wings flapping I’m hearing?