On Wednesday morning on KREM’s Wake Up Belize’s morning show, Belize City Mayor Darrell Bradley made it pretty clear that he is a neoliberal thinker, in the sense that he theoretically believes in small government and the private sector as the engine of growth.

The dispute over the last several weeks involving the Mayor’s attempt to terminate the City Council’s security workers and privatize CitCo’s security was already giving Belizeans an idea of the Mayor’s philosophical direction. He was moving to cut jobs and save money and increase efficiency in classic neoliberalism. Neoliberalism: let the human chips fall where they may.

The Mayor’s BTL Park has been an early smash hit because he has succeeded in giving Belizeans a slice of “foreign.” We had seen at Battlefield Park that Mayor Bradley is really big on cosmetics, and does not concern himself with such human losers as those Belizeans who had thronged the downtown area for the decades since the coming of independence brought social confusion and chaos to Belize City.

It is for sure that Belize City had reached the pits in its downtown commercial areas, and that Belize money had been fleeing to and flooding Chetumal for decades and decades because of what the Chetumal municipal authorities have created there. While Belize City’s human flotsam and jetsam were on display on our main streets for all the world to see, Chetumal had created a lie: Chetumal authorities had “disappeared” all their poor people. Where spending your money is concerned, Chet is all good, a totally consumer-friendly experience.

Somewhat tangentially, we must remark here that the only attraction in Belize City which had begun to move some Chetumal money into Belize’s old capital was semi-pro basketball at the original Civic in 1992. The management of Kremandala Raiders essentially gave away the inaugural semi-pro championship by voting for Fred Garcia and Kirk Smith to play for Penta Lakers on their return from Navarro State in the second half of the season. Commissioner Gus Perera had ruled that the decision on whether Smith and Garcia could play would be left up to the four playoff teams – Raiders, Lakers, Santino’s Hotpoints, and Crown Stadium. Hotpoints and Stadium, quite logically, voted for the playing rosters to remain the same, for Smith and Garcia to be inactive. Raiders, looking into the future of the sport as an industry, voted with Penta Lakers for Shabba and Fred to play. The rest is history, but no one ever mentions the sacrifice the Raiders made in 1992.

To return to the specific subject, there is a contradiction involved in the Mayor’s park initiatives, because the upgrades are being done with municipal government taxes and bonds. These, especially BTL Park and Memorial Park, should have been private sector initiatives, with support from the municipal government, not municipal government initiatives with private sector opportunism. The burning question now is how come Belize’s vaunted private sector never made any strong move to compete with Chetumal and keep Belizean dollars at home? One reason is that cutthroat party politics in Belize is so vicious that the domestic private sector is afraid of serious investment. It should be noted that in the United States, when it comes to massive investments like sports stadiums and entertainment auditoriums, municipal and state governments support and cooperate because of the economic benefits for the cities and states. In Belize, there is little nationalism or vision.

In addition, Belize’s private sector is old-fashioned and safety first: import commission, buy and sell. The only business industry adventurer we produced in the second half of the twentieth century was Barry Bowen, and different Belize governments had to be intervene several times to rescue his projects. No one can dispute the fact that Sir Barry was more nationalistic in vision than anyone else in Belize’s private sector, but the fact of the matter is that, to repeat, various Belize governments had to bail him out.

So then, all over the world we have seen neoliberalism exposed as a fraud, in that neoliberalism makes rich people get richer, poor people end up suffering more, and governments get into deficit because they reduce their tax revenues to encourage rich people to invest, and all the rich people do is bank their increased profits. To make it worse in the case of Belize, our rich Belizeans bank their money abroad.

The Mayor created a beautiful BTL Park. The Mayor is spending money like crazy. But if his neoliberal philosophy had been as wonderful as he thinks it is, it is not the City Council which would have been taking chances with these investments: it is the vaunted private sector which should be in risk territory, the risk being the ingredient necessary to justify their large profits.

In Belize, capitalism is too often cartel capitalism, not free market capitalism. Prices are rigged by inside industry collusion in several important areas of the economy. And in Belize, our new CitCo neoliberalism has the municipal government throwing in the investment capital and a small group of favored people in the private sector becoming the beneficiaries.

Neoliberalism makes the externals look beautiful, and citizens feel an early rush of excitement. But neoliberalism does not have a heart. Neoliberalism does not have a space for the desgraciados. The problem in Belize is that the desgraciados are the majority. But neoliberalism has no balm for desgraciados. Neoliberalism turns its head and pretends that it just doesn’t see. Always with neoliberalism, it is a favored few and desgraciados many. Reality will not go away. The nature of highs is that one returns to earth. All we can do is hope for the best. We sincerely do so hope.