Bungling blue-note policy

WAYNE KUBLALSINGH

IT IS NO crime to save my money in a shoebox. No crime to save it inside my mattress, in my ceiling, in the woodwork under my kitchen floor. I may choose to do so for a number of good reasons. It is no crime to keep my money growing cold and mouldy in a used car seat that I use to sun out in my back porch. No crime at all.

First, I may find it convenient. I may be aged. I may not have people to escort me to the bank. I may find it handy to have cash available to commit to unfortunate circumstances. I just want my cash near me to avoid the head and body ache of traffic, tellers and other people toting me around.

Second, I may be displeased with the low interest rates that the banks are currently affording. It is not worth my time traipsing up and down to the bank.

Third, I may find that I do not agree with the banking system. For each dollar I put into the bank, the bank could use it as the official reserve for lending out nine. It is called fractional reserve banking. I may have a strategic or philosophical disagreement with this system: making money from digital or invisible money, which some call usury.

Fourth, culturally, this is the way I do business. Small loan systems. Sou-sou. Alternative banking. Systems laid down for thousands of years, which I, in this cosmopolitan society, of many types of businesses, commerce, banking and saving practices, subscribe to.

Finally, I may feel safe with my money next to me. It makes me feel safe. I may distrust banks, period. I like my money sleeping next to my head when I go to sleep. This makes me feel safe and sound; I sleep better.

So it is no crime to keep my cash at home, one dollar, ten, or five hundred thousand. No crime at all.

So why are the government officials and others criminalising me, jeering and jesting at me? Treating me as if I were a common criminal? As if I used some foul means to earn my cash? And why do I have to tote my load of cash to the bank, wait in long lines, for hours, like a refugee at meal stations? And have to prove that the money is mine? And if I cannot, you will take it from me?

How vile? For my own money?

It is not a sin to practise small business. Trade and commerce, practised at a micro or mini level, and savings are not a crime. Why am I being made to look like a common criminal? Do you want me to take my money to the bankers, like serfs and peasants of old taking their bags of corn to the master millers to grind, to amass in wagonloads, and make a profit on my head? Which they then use to keep me in thraldom?

This is another way of transferring money from the individual citizen to the established money elites. Money is anti-gravitational. The net movement is always upwards. Shall I not keep some to keep the small economies in which I participate warm, energised and running?

The bulk of commercial, trade and business activity in TT occur at the invisible micro level. Such trade, practised by market vendors, fishermen, farmers, itinerant merchandisers, the self-employed, for example, is good, not bad.

Now, you are telling me that this is a plot to catch criminals. Well bugger off, sirs.

First, I am not a criminal. Why do I have to suffer these indignities? For working hard and saving? If you want to catch the criminals, do good police work. If you are serious, capture the two big fishes, who trade in US dollars, not local hundred-dollar bills; it is called money-laundering.

Criminals place money in legit business offices, shops, banks; or invest in real property, using cash. Catch them. Don’t put me through, in my old age, or as a righteous citizen-business practitioner, in such distress. Such confusion. Such kerfuffle and pressure.

I don’t think this is a criminal-catching measure. If it is, it is poor strategy. A combobulation. Too much confusion, at this time, Christmas, New Year, at the height of a busy shopping season. The enormity of the measure requires a lengthier deadline, and adequate time for citizens and banks alike to prepare.

This backhanded way of “catching criminals” is foolishness; you are putting the people through pressure because of your dismal failure to find, charge, sentence and, if found guilty, jail big criminals.

This idea of criminal catching is just a rationalisation; an explanation after the fact, a practice that the government ministers and the Prime Minister are expert at, to justify poor policy. This measure constitutes an abuse of the people.

This Government has found many ways – like the mothballing of the Petrotrin refinery, like flooding, like traffic dystopia – of roundly abusing the people, then coming with shining linguistic treats to justify and obfuscate their sadism. Sadism is the practice of abusing people, deceiving them, stressing them, then jeering, chuckling, smirking with replete pleasure.