Dealing with the Warner issue...

"Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are. Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived." 

— Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince)

The same things that some people like about Austin Jack Warner are the same things that they ought to be concerned about. The same quality that helped him wrench control of the UNC out of Basdeo Panday's cold, half-dead hands is the same one he is using to foist his sidekick Anil Roberts on the Congress of the People as Leader, and the same one again that has his son parked in the PNM and for the same purposes, unfettered political control.

The stakes in this game appear to be consolidation of power at the highest level, and if he were to achieve it then that will be it. In this game of 'loot and run' started under Williams there was always going to be a 'winner,' and because we have no shortage of greedy men and women at the highest rungs of our society willing to sell us all down the river for their cut it is not as difficult a plot to achieve as you might think; if his alleged prowess and practices in FIFA are anything to go by, this man know which wheel to grease to get what he wants and we need to be concerned to the point of action.

Now I don't know if Patrick Manning is too foolish or too selfish to see, but his current efforts at self aggrandizement is tearing the PNM apart and weakening the only check and balance the constitution provides against this sort of thing. For better or worse Dr. Rowley is the Leader of the Opposition at this time and he does not need his limited power undermined from within his own ranks. As an important first step the PNM needs to eject young Warner from their ranks while his father is Chairman of the UNC so as to send a strong message that the Party will not be compromised  and that what is being done in the public glare is also being done in private.

We need to sound a warning and take steps to prevent this from occurring; Laboring under the illusion that someone will come along and save us were this to occur is foolish because there is no one who can. We're it; it is up to us to see past these plans and abort them while they're still in the womb.

If this all sounds very Machiavellian it is because it is; one just has to join the dots and arrive at one's own conclusion. It is instructive to note that throughout history most men who achieved Dictator or absolute ruler status did not arrive there with a big noise but with the silent acquiescence of the very people charged with preventing such occurrences in the first place.

Put in the words of the master instructor himself:

"as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure" 

— Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince)