Investments || Proud Jamaican 🇯🇲 Interests: Nature, Art, Culture, Diversity, History, Literature, Politics, Economy #WritingCommunity RETWEET NOT ENDORSEMENT
Joined November 2012
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My interest: Discovering where we're all coming from. Not to re-litigate the past nor tilt at today's windmills. Who are we truly, as fellow survivors on this planet? What markers of history guide us to meet today's challenges in making this world a joyful place to live in?
Deception and misleading narratives are the bedrock of PNP's entire strategy.
Upon this foundation, they weaponise the politics of distraction, grievance, and dependence to garner support, lock in loyalty, and command election-day votes.
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
Johnson Smith defends Cuba vote, rejects Patterson’s ‘betrayal’ claim jamaicaobserver.com/2026/11/…
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
Here is the arithmetic that the phrase "Global South" obscures:
Africa: 1.6 billion people.
Asia: 4.9 billion people.
Latin America and the Caribbean: 670 million people.
Together: roughly 7.2 billion people out of 8.3 billion on earth.
The "Global South" is not a minority asking to be included.
It is the majority that has been structured out of power.
The entire architecture of the post-war international order, the Security Council veto, the IMF voting weights, the WTO rules, the dollar as a reserve currency, was built to ensure that 7.2 billion people would not have proportional influence over the decisions that shape their lives.
That architecture is not natural law.
It is a set of choices made by the winners of a particular moment in history, encoded as permanent, and maintained by the threat of consequences for those who question it.
Questioning it is not radical.
It is arithmetic.
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
The sanctions on Iran have lasted decades.
Iran developed domestic production capacity it would never have built if it could have simply imported.
The sanctions on Russia accelerated the development of Russian alternatives to Western financial infrastructure.
The sanctions on North Korea isolated its economy for generations. They did not prevent the country from developing its own nuclear deterrent.
The sanctions on Cuba failed to produce regime change. Cuba nevertheless built one of the most extensive public healthcare systems in the world, alongside a domestic pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector.
There is a pattern here that Washington seems constitutionally incapable of learning:
Economic pressure forces adaptation.
Adaptation builds capacity.
Capacity reduces dependence.
Reduced dependence undermines the next round of pressure.
Every sanction regime that fails to produce submission produces, instead, a more self-sufficient adversary with less exposure to the next sanction.
The weaponization of the dollar is the most powerful sanction tool available.
It is also accelerating, faster than any other single factor, the construction of alternatives to the dollar.
The weapon is sharpening the shield.
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
Don't be fooled by intellect, status, or confidence. Many narcissists are little more than emotionally arrested adults masquerading as mature human beings. Strip away the title, the money, and the spotlight, and you're often left with a tantrum-throwing child demanding the world revolve around them. America appears to have elevated that archetype to an art form.
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
The response is due courtesy to a former Prime Minister and for the cause of correcting a false narrative. The current government has no obligation to be tethered to past foreign policy positions. Same with advocating for the CCJ. PJ’s time is up! New government, new thinking.
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
Linstead Hospital now offers paediatric care for children from the post-neonatal stage up to 12 years, bringing essential services closer to families and reducing travel to other hospitals.
#SERHA #LinsteadHospital #PaediatricCare @themohwgovjm
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
Foreign affairs minister, Senator Kamina Johnson Smith, has rejected criticism from former prime minister, PJ Patterson, about Jamaica’s abstention from a vote on a United Nations resolution condemning the United States embargo against Cuba.
READ MORE HERE: nationwideradiojm.com/johnso…
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
This:
She insisted that the Cuban people deserved more than an annual expression of solidarity that had failed to achieve its central objective, arguing that constructive international engagement was needed to bring meaningful improvements to their lives.
Foreign Affairs Minister Kamina Johnson Smith has defended Jamaica’s decision to abstain from a UN vote calling for an end to the US embargo against Cuba, rejecting former Prime Minister PJ Patterson’s description of the move as an “abominable betrayal”.
jamaicaobserver.com/2026/11/…
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
Can't wait 😁!!
READ: Mandeville to get steady water by Christmas
Mandeville, Manchester will get a more reliable water supply before Christmas, ending years of shortages in that town, Water, Environment and Climate Change Minister @matthewsamuda said on Thursday.
jamaica-gleaner.com/article/…
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
Marxist feminists (like Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa) argue that the "housewife" is the most exploited worker in capitalism bc her labor -cooking, cleaning, raising children, providing emotional stability - is the foundation of the economy, yet she isn’t paid.
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
American military spending is only possible because the dollar is the reserve currency.
This is not an opinion. It is arithmetic.
The United States runs persistent deficits that would be unsustainable for any other country.
It finances those deficits by issuing Treasury bonds.
Foreign central banks buy those bonds because they need dollar-denominated assets for their reserves.
They need dollar-denominated reserves because the dollar is the currency of global trade.
The circle is closed.
Military spending → deficit → Treasury bonds → foreign purchase → dollar demand → reserve currency status → military spending.
Break any link in that chain and the whole logic shifts.
This is why dedollarization is not just an economic story.
It is the foundational strategic threat to American military primacy.
Not Russian missiles. Not Chinese carriers.
Foreign central banks deciding to hold a more diversified reserve portfolio.
The most important battlefield of this century looks like a spreadsheet.
The side that understands this is already fighting.
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
Business process outsourcing workers and founders must pivot as artificial intelligence cuts the industry’s need for workers, Bank of Jamaica Governor Dr Brian Langrin said on Friday.
Read more: jamaica-gleaner.com/article/… #GLNRToday
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
Hurricane Melissa Relief: $1.7 BILLION accounted for in the reported breakdown!
$750M for roofs
$700M for modular housing bases
$100M for shelters
$150M for direct assistance.
550 homes restored! 🇯🇲 #JamaicaStrong
🩸@travismacmillan, I grieve over the murder of 4 young ones in Ochi.
Unimaginable horror now faced by families—especially the mothers—and their community.
And I've already started hurting for the loss of perhaps their only child American mothers may soon face in West Asia.
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
Plans are advancing to redevelop KPH into a modern healthcare facility through NaRRA. Bed capacity will increase from 484 to 720, expand clinical services and introduce modern medical equipment. Completion is projected within four years.
#KPH250 @themohwgovjm @christufton
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
Kemi, congratulations on leading a major British party as a Black Woman. It takes real talent to rise to where you are and deceit is what it takes to rise as a Black leader in a western Conservative Party.
It is a pity the climb did not leave room for a history book and since you chose to argue in the language of history, let us do the history. Let’s dissect your verbal diarrhea point by point.
Everyone participated." Slavery existed on every continent. So did war, and nobody calls a village feud the World War. The transatlantic trade ran for 366 years (1501 to 1866) and put about 12.5 million Africans on ships, of whom about 1.8 million died before they saw the Americas, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. It ran through joint-stock companies, chartered monopolies, Lloyd's underwriters and acts of Parliament. It was hereditary, because the law made the child of an enslaved mother property from birth. It was racial, because a whole continent was defined as chattel. No other system in history combined those features at that scale. Dissolving all of it into "people from every continent" is far worse than intellectual dishonesty.
Britain was a market leader, not a participant. British ships carried about 3.2 million Africans, second only to Portugal and Brazil. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave Britain the asiento, a thirty-year monopoly to supply 4,800 enslaved Africans a year to Spanish America. The Royal African Company, chartered in 1672 and headed by the Duke of York, later James II, branded its captives "DY". During Edward Colston's years in its leadership it shipped about 84,000 people, and roughly 19,000 died on the way.
You say British taxpayers should not answer for what happened before they were born. They did. In 1833 Britain borrowed £20 million to compensate slaveholders, and taxpayers serviced that loan until 2015, including the descendants of the enslaved. So the principle you invoke was not applied when the cheque went to slaveholders. It only appears when the cheque changes direction.
"Navel-gazing" is a curious charge from someone whose party spends more energy on the past (Empire nostalgia, culture war crusades) than most of those you accuse. Defend Britain if you must. But do not use your Nigerian name as the permission slip for arguments Nigerians know better than anyone.
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
Lodric Atkinson retweeted
Law enforcement officers assigned to the St Ann Traffic Department are investigating a three-vehicle collision that claimed the lives of three boys and a 17-year-old girl along Dacosta Drive, Ocho Rios, in the parish on Saturday, October 31.
The deceased are:
•17-year-old Shantana Leonard of Cardiff Hall, Runaway Bay, St Ann.
•16-year-old Kenneil Lyle of Mansfield Heights, Ocho Rios, St Ann.
•16-year-old Marcodine Maxwell, of Mansfield Heights, Ocho Rios, St Ann.
•15-year-old Rajani Abdul of Mansfield Heights, Ocho Rios, St Ann.
Reports from the St Ann’s Bay Police are that at about 2:30 a.m., two black C43 Mercedes-Benz motorcars were travelling in a westerly direction. It is reported that one of the vehicles attempted to overtake the other, causing it to veer into the path of a Toyota Vitz motorcar travelling in the opposite direction. Shantana drove the Toyota Vitz, with Kenneil, Marcodine, and Rajani as passengers.
The overtaking Mercedes-Benz allegedly collided with the left side of the Toyota Vitz, forcing it into the right lane, where it collided with the other Mercedes-Benz. It is reported that the drivers of both Mercedes-Benz vehicles removed the licence plates and fled the scene.
The police were alerted, and the occupants of the Toyota Vitz were assisted to the hospital, where all four succumbed to their injuries.
The police are appealing to anyone with information that can help identify the drivers of the Mercedes-Benz motorcars, or with any other information, to contact the St Ann’s Bay Police at 876-872-7523, the police emergency number 119, or the nearest police station.
