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The winner-take-all, unaccountable politics in Guyana has always been vulnerable to those in power using their position to accumulate personal wealth. This weakness, according to the Guyana Human Rights Association on the occasion of Human Rights Day, when wedded to the most unregulated form of market economics, has led to a situation in which governing Guyana is akin to running a giant corporation, without the legal and accounting constraints that apply to business. The major challenge confronting the society is how to re-constitute the concept of public interest,Cheap NFL Jerseys Wholesale, public space and common ground as areas over which government is accountable to citizens.“The purpose of politics in this context has become to create an  alliance with private sector elements prepared to operate on the margins of the law, cooperate in deals to attract investment from questionable sources, create duty-free concessions, remove fiscal disincentives, accept extensive tax evasion, furnish  work permits to unskilled labour, permit importation of a wide range of defective, sub-standard consumer goods, including foodstuffs with  little or no control with respect to public health or safety standards.”According to the GHRA, the parallel with running the State as a private corporation is also reflected in the operations of the Office of the President. Salaries, as revealed by the Minister of Finance to Parliament, are massive even by legitimate private sector standards. Sources of finance dedicated to betterment of low income citizens, such as the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) and the New Building Society (NBS) have been manipulated by officials of the Office of the President as if they were subsidiaries.“Absorbing the Privatisation Unit into a private holding company, NICIL, under the chairmanship of the Minister of Finance, is the single clearest example of both running the State as a private corporation and the lack of accountability by government to electors. This unconstitutional manoeuvre allows the Government access to proceeds accumulated from the sale of public and State assets by the Privatization Unit, along with whatever other funds they choose to  accumulate there, in order to invest and speculate like a private company without effective Parliamentary oversight.”The local human rights body said that environmental protections are systematically over-ridden by the demands of private accumulation: uncontrolled exploitation of gold and bauxite is creating devastated habitats, sacrificing fresh waterways in Amerindian areas and fresh air in bauxite communities.  This negative effect, it noted, immediate profit for private investors and long term costs for Guyanese tax-payers is over-looked.  Not only are Guyanese denied the benefits of these natural resources themselves, but they are forced to assume a substantial part of the costs of production by others.  Every foreign investor, it should be borne in mind, is investing here, not  because it is cheaper to produce in Guyana, but because more of the costs of production can be off-loaded on to Guyanese in the form of lower wages, no taxes, hazardous working conditions and trashing the environment, than is the case in the investor’s country of origin.  The scale of illegal and unregulated mining and forestry products make a mockery of the notion that they are ‘national’ resources.“The developmental challenge facing Guyana is not rooted in a shortage of natural resources, nor access to land, we are not prone to natural disasters nor suffering unduly from economic recession. Yet our performance as a society finds us rooted near the bottom of all recent Caribbean social and economic indicators of progress and development and near the top of indicators for crime, insecurity, illegal migrants, drug trafficking and corruption. Our failure to implement a rights-based form of development in Guyana is rooted in the failure, over the past five decades, to create an accountable form of government. An unaccountable government during the first half of that period suppressed the rights of Guyanese citizens by bizarre political experiments and curtailed freedoms by misguided ideology. The second half of the period, described above has resulted in a division of   people into those  – not necessarily Guyanese  –  accumulating enormous wealth and the majority of citizens whose economic and social rights have been shredded by steady disintegration of public and welfare services: low-paying jobs stripped of trade union protection, deteriorating maternal and child services, appalling levels of violence against women, public health hazard levels of uncollected garbage, high levels of personal insecurity, homophobia, and stigma towards people living with HIV.”The GHRA stated that a parallel transformation, accompanying that from country to corporation, has seen Guyanese encouraged to see their salvation in what has been called “a consumerist idea of freedom”. The more we consume the more we consider ourselves “free”, rather than in securing vibrant respect for rights.“International Human Rights Day 2012 finds Guyana with a range of institutions which superficially suggest Guyana is a rights-conscious society. However, among the four rights commissions – children, indigenous, women, human rights – and even the Police Complaints Authority, none possess a single legal power to enforce rights. While weighted down with ‘functions’ they cannot enforce appearances before them, subpoena witnesses, or search or enter. Guyanese must not lose sight of the fundamental lack of accountability in the political system.  In other words, re-asserting citizenship involves re-constituting the distinction between public and private realms and rehabilitating accountability in political life.  The importance of International Human Rights Day  lies in  reminding us that human rights provide a pathway for securing human flourishing, as well as a guide for assessing how well we are progressing along that pathway.”