Curiouser and Curiouser
A Drama Scripted for Public Consumption
Twenty-four hours after demoting Cabinet Minister Darryl Smith to the level of Junior Minister under his own new portfolio as Housing Minister, Prime Minister Rowley dismissed Smith from his new post.
By media release, the PM sought to explain his sudden change of heart claiming that “new information came to the attention of the Prime Minister” “during” ”a meeting between the Prime Minister, the Minister of Planning and Development, the Honourable Camille Robinson-Regis and Mr Smith”.
This record shortest Ministerial appointment sparked a wildfire of speculation among various active political figures and organisations, social media enthusiasts and the population generally and a flood of responses from PNM party and Government officials.
The PM’s release also announced that “The meeting (PM, Planning Minister and Smith) also resulted in the appointment of a committee to thoroughly review the circumstances surrounding the dismissal and payment of compensation to Ms Carrie-Ann Moreau at the Ministry of Sport and Youth Affairs”.
The investigating committee was also named and stated that it is “…expected to report in two weeks”.
Finally, the release stated that the PM “anticipated that all parties involved in any non-disclosure arrangement in this matter will lift such impediment so as to allow the fullest examination of the facts for the benefit of the public”.
Every point in this release competes for the label of ‘most curious’. Let us examine them:
The April 10 meeting

• On April 5, the PM said he only knew about the compromised dismissal Trade Dispute the day before (April 4)
• The PM only met with Smith 5 days later and after moving him (Smith) as junior Minister to himself (PM) in another Ministry. Why?
• What was “new information” that came up at the meeting when Robinson-Regis had already investigated the matter, at the PM’s request?
• Was the new investigation committee only decided at the meeting or before that?

The Investigation Committee

• The PM’s release gives the mandate as reviewing ‘the circumstances” re “the dismissal and payment of compensation” to the dismissed worker. Why are the dismissal and compromise of the Trade Dispute being investigated by the PM after the fact?
• The AG is a named party in the Dispute and the PM’s Junior Minister is also the Junior Minister in the AG’s office, is the PM suggesting they settled the Dispute without even informing him? (sounds like the PM’s narrative on the OAS vote issue).
• If this investigating committee was decided out of the April 10 meeting, when were the members contacted and agreed to serve?
• If the “payment of compensation” is a subject of the investigation, is the role of the AG in the compromise of the Trade Dispute also to be included?

Erasing the Non-disclosure agreement

• The PM’s release ends “It is anticipated anticipated that all parties involved in any non-disclosure arrangement in this matter will lift such impediment…”.
• Who is anticipating what the aggrieved worker and her union will reverse course and ‘lift’ that agreement?
• On what basis is the PM expecting the worker and her union to do so?

All of this is a tale of the cart coming after the horse. Investigation after the case is already settled. The PM receiving decisive information after the case is already settled and after investigation report from a PM-appointed Minister.
There is much that is not told in the narrative of the PM’s release. There is more in this mortar than the pestle.  
All this against the backdrop of the PM’s failure to apply the principle of Ministerial individual responsibility to Smith and 3 other Ministers in the matters he addressed at the post-Cabinet media conference on April 5.
This script was authored as a smoke-and-mirrors plot, not for clarification and certainly not as an example of “what good governance is all about” as Robinson-Regis would have us believe.
The chorus who were trumpeting the virtues of Smith a week earlier and trying to convince us that the dismissal of Ms. Carrie-Ann Moreau had NOTHING to do with her complaints of sexual harassment are suddenly, magically now championing “a national policy on Sexual Harassment in the Workplace”. Just so?!
Once again, the body politic is taken for granted and a drama is acted out for our consumption while the real issues in the particular case are obfuscated and other front-burner issues of failed governance are also obscured by the curtain lowered to keep attention where the politicians-in-power wish to direct.
Just as there was a loud outcry on the transfer of the Sports Minister, the thinking Trinbagonians must be vigilant to ensure that this does not become another episode of sanitizing like the Seabridge fiasco, the OAS vote, the enrichment of another Minister and the mounting examples of a self-serving rule of the ‘sovereign’ PM and his Cabinet.
 
Clyde Weatherhead
A Citizen Fighting for
Democratic Renewal
Of our Society
11 April 2018

Note: Check my post of 9 April on the PM's post-Cabinet positions - Ministerial Non-Responsibility
​ - Click Here

Cambridge-Analytica Scandal:
                  Use of Consumer Market Techniques in Elections
For many years, using various methods, advertising and marketing agencies operating in the world of consumer markets devised means for driving consumer spending in the direction of particular retail giants to ensure maximum profits for their clients.
Various means were used to collect information on individual consumers and their spending and personal habits to develop psychological profiles to be used to influence their spending habits and choice of particular products.
These techniques in Commercial Advertising were merged into the process of Data-mining, Profiling and Micro-targeting consumers by accessing personal information of online activity in this era of the global use of the internet.
These techniques which shape tastes and preferences for particular commodities or particular brands of commodities are labelled as “Advertising” and are considered legitimate in the world of consumerism.
The SCL-CA-AIQ Web developed the same processes - Data-mining, Profiling and Micro-targeting – for use with the objective of Manipulating Voting preferences in Elections.
The capture and use of personal information for political purposes without the knowledge of the voter that this was the use to which their information was to be put or the outright capture of such information without the citizens content is illegal in almost all countries.
SCL-Cambridge Analytica – By any Means Possible
The SCL-CA-AIQ inter-locking corporate group is now being investigated because its most ambitious data-mining activity in the US and British elections and referendum processes (Brexit), the illegal capture of data from up to 87 million Facebook users for political purposes.
The exposure of this activity and even more sinister schemes by the SCL Group came from Christopher Wyle, a champion of data-mining and micro-targeting techniques in elections.
Some of the revelations of the more salacious means used or proposed by SCL-CA to influence elections included corruptly offering campaign money to candidates in exchange for land or organizing a disinformation campaign to prevent opposition voting in an African country as far back as 2007.
In the Caribbean alone, SCL-CA is alleged to been involved in:

• using video recordings of such corrupt deals during elections to discredit one candidate in St. Kitts and Nevis in 2010,
• running a smear campaign on Google to help defeat a referendum in St. Vincent and the Grenadines in 2009,
• providing services in the re-election campaign of an incumbent in exchange for a promise of a $1.9M contract for a public health campaign if successful. Their horse lost.
• Setting up a data microtargeting propramme for a party in Trinidad and Tobago in 2013 to be disguised as contract to set up a Government national security database.

SCL brochures also claimed that they were involved in one campaign in Trinidad and Tobago in 2010 and claims to have carried out a graffiti campaign to allow a candidate to claim to be ‘listening to a ‘united youth’”.
That SCL-CA-AIQ group is accused of not only illegal capture of personal information, but of using any means possible to manipulate voters in elections in favour of their political party clients.
Who is Cambridge Analytica
At the top of this post is a diagram showing the group.
Christopher Wylie is reported to have promoted the use of micro-targeting since age 17 while working for the Liberal Democratic Party in Canada. He is reported to be a co-founder of Cambridge Analytica in Britain and helped create AggregateIQ in Canada and founder of Eunoia Technologies - a data-analytics company which worked for a Parliamentary Office, the Liberal Research Bureau.
Wylie and CA linked with a Cambridge University academic to develop the Facebook app named “thisisyourdigitallife” which was the tool used to get Facebook user to give their personal information for what users were told they were participating in a personality quiz.
After playing such a leading role in promoting and developing the tools of this election manipulation industry, Wylie said he now views what they were doing as a “grossly unethical experiment” and “….not only are you playing with the psychology of a nation, you are playing with the psychology of an entire nation in the context of a democratic process."
What Will All the Investigations Lead To?
Having turned whistleblower, Wylie exposed so much of the illegal and unethical activity of this SCL-CA-AIQ group which has become an extreme form of the use of the regulated and legal methods of advertising to promote consumerism to manipulate voters ‘choices in elections worldwide.
Several investigations in the British, US and Canadian Parliaments are already underway.
Here in Trinidad and Tobago, Government has announced a Parliamentary investigation via a Joint Select Committee.
What will be the outcome of all these investigations?
On the one hand the SCL-CA-AIQ group and some of their political clients may be labeled ‘bad elements’ in the electoral process.
Here, the PNM is hoping to criminalise the UNC although the laws may not permit it.
The UNC is hoping to complete its destruction of the UNC.
These are narrow self-serving aims of parties that do not represent the people.
On the other, the use of the data-mining/profiling/micro-targeting process accepted as legitimate in the commercial world may now be institutionalized and legitimized in the electoral and political processes by establishing laws and regulations to establish these manipulative methods as part of the ‘new normal’ of political campaigning in electoral processes which do not offer electors a ‘real choice’ – a ‘choiceless’ democracy as one party in TT labeled it.
A recent local Facebook post, a TT citizen suggested that there was nothing wrong or illegal in the SCL-CA-AIQ activity in electoral manipulation. “It is simply advertising”, he posted.
In other words, we should accept the consumer advertising and psychological manipulation as a legitimate method in the electoral process.
This is the most dangerous thinking which we, the people; we, the electors must not and cannot accept. This whole issue must be looked at from our interest.
What we need, as citizens, the majority of the body politic must demand is the renewal of the political process in a way that makes it possible that we can actually elect Representatives and Government which serve the interest of us, the majority instead of the minority which is what elections produce now.
At the end of every election, Governments which serve the interests of the wealthiest and most powerful private oligarchy. So, since 1981 elections in Trinidad and Tobago have been occasions to Vote Out Governments which the majority come to see do NOT represent their interests.
Transforming the electoral and political processes to serve the interest of the majority of society and no longer the minority is what Democratic Renewal must create and guarantee.
To give the manipulation of the body politic legitimacy as an outcome of this ‘Cambridge Analytica scandal’ by legalizing and putting rules in place to facilitate the methods of data-mining/profiling/micro-targeting to achieve electoral outcomes that are against the interest of the majority must be opposed strongly.
 
Clyde Weatherhead
A Citizen Fighting
For Democratic Renewal
of Our Society
9 April 2018
 
 
 

                                    Ministerial Non-Responsibility
Last Thursday, PM Rowley took centre stage at Government’s post-Cabinet to address several issues falling under the portfolios of several Ministers of his Cabinet.
What we, the people, were presented with were:

• A very detailed reporting on reports submitted to the PM from several public officers in the Ministry of Foreign and CARICOM affairs
• The personal observations of the PM as to the state of Tobago in light of the collapse of the seabridge
• A proposition that a Court matter alleging improper acquisition of property, both real ($1M US condominium) and personal (withdrawals of several hundred million US from a person’s bank account) was nothing but a “personal matter” with which the PM did not overly concern himself
• A settlement, including an unusual non-disclosure clause, of a harsh and oppressive dismissal trade dispute connected to claims of sexual harassment by the terminated worker by a Ministry using $150,000.00 of public funds of which the PM was only “recently aware” and to look into.

Apart from pointing fingers at senior public officers in the first case (which has led even a former Foreign Affairs Minister to join the chorus calling for their ‘heads to roll’), the PM’s purported accounting to the nation amounted disappointingly to very little else.
The characterization of questionable property acquisition by a Cabinet Minister or alternatively property of almost $1.5M US value legally obtained and accountable to the Integrity Commission – the enrichment of a Government Minister as a ‘personal matter’ by a Prime Minister is disturbing.
Even if that property were acquired legally it is still a ‘gift’ and there are Parliamentary Rules regarding Gifts to Parliamentarians in the Code of Ethics. Such enrichment is no personal matter.
The PM’s off-the-course assessment of hotel occupancy at the Magdalena Grand as a major basis for statement that ‘things are not so bad in Tobago’ was immediately challenged by the Tobago Hotel Association who cited figures from all classes of hotels and guest housing pointing out that average occupancy was almost 40% than the Magdalena’s as report by the PM.
Ministerial Responsibility Dismissed
Much more important and indeed very much more troubling than the PM’s deficient statistical methods in assessing occupancy rates, is the fact that in speaking on matters which have generated serious public concern regarding 4 Ministries, the PM managed in one session to almost magically dispense with the Constitutional principle of Ministerial Responsibility.
The doctrine of Ministerial responsibility is a Constitutional principle of the Westminster parliamentary system. We are routinely that ours is a Westminster Parliamentary system.
There are 2 aspects to Ministerial Responsibility – collective and individual responsibility to Parliament and the body politic.
Collective responsibility establishes that all Ministers are bound by decisions of the Cabinet and all Minister stand or fall TOGETHER with the Government.
Individual responsibility prescribes that Ministers are personally responsible to Parliament and the people, for their Ministries. Under this principle, a Minister is responsible for the actions or inactions of him/herself as Minister and the departments and agencies within and under that Ministry.
Mistakes or wrongdoing of all civil servants within the Ministry or the agencies under that portfolio are the political responsibility of the Minister.
In such a situation, the Minister must:

• Take action to correct the situation
• Apologise or even resign from their Cabinet position, depending on the severity of the error or wrongdoing.

The Minister takes political but not personal responsibility for the errors of those within the Ministry, other than himself.
Applying this principle in the case of the OAS embarrassment, which was so serious that the PM decided to investigate it himself, let’s see what we were told:

• The Minister, a former Ambassador to the very OAS (the PM reminded us) was quoted by the PM as reporting that he ‘did not know’ that the Dominica waiver was on the agenda of this regular meeting of that body.
  • Is the Foreign and CARICOM Affairs Minster is not aware of the schedule of major meetings of an international body and did not seek to acquaint himself with it in advance of the meeting?
• The PS and Deputy PS dealt with the matter and gave directions to the TT delegation without discussing same with the Minister.
  • They failed to carry out the standard practice in such cases and for their misdeeds they face possible disciplinary action for misconduct.

According to the principle of individual responsibility, the Minister is personally liable for his failure to be able to give policy direction to his civil servants because he simply did not apparently seek to make himself aware of the agenda of this important meeting.
According to the principle, the Minister is politically liable for the errors of his staff.
But, in this case, the principle was not applied by the PM.
The PM’s proposal to have a former ambassador review the matter does not change the facts plainly reported to him and from which reports he quoted generously at the post-Cabinet conference last Thursday.
Individual Responsibility of this Minister was converted into Ministerial Non-responsibility even in the face of his own admission of omission.
Once again, in this case and in others like the seabridge disaster under the portfolio of another Minister who was even excluded from a Cabinet committee which usurped the procurement role of the Port Authority, there is a demonstration of what has been politely referred to as a Governance deficit in some circles.
The editorial of a daily newspaper more abruptly declaring – ‘Moses Can’t Be Absolved’.
For a party which constantly reminds us of its record as the longest serving in Government, it is indeed strange that a Constitutional principle of our Governance system is so easily dis-applied in relation to its Ministers.
Yet again the quality (or lack thereof) of Governance in our nation is exposed.
 
Clyde Weatherhead
A Citizen Fighting for
Democratic Renewal
Of Our Society
9 April 2018