Trinidad has some of the highest obesity rates in the world too. Since the various global financial crises, it has had several years with innordinately high murder rates.
This is just capitalism at work. The system amplifies the gap between the classes, breeds poverty, violent crime, creates smug politicians who blame "laziness" and "criminals", creates social divisions, suspicion, hate, grotesque homes sealed shut by burglar proofing, and leads to a slow genocide of the lower classes (not to mention 150 species extinct a day!), who are shunted into jails and slowly killed off until you have a nice and stable island, everyone peaceful and fat on foreign junk food, until trouble starts again and the whole damn cycle repeats itself.
No system which runs on debt based, interest issued currency, can ever combat poverty because there will always be more money owed than money present in the system, debt must always exponentially increase, and for every dollar out of debt you and I are, someone else is in corresponding debt. Trinidad, in the 1960/70s, had the only movement in the caribbean which challenged our current central bank system, and they killed off all those activists.
Trinidad is just a microcosm of how capitalism works: a stupid, myopic, self-regarding middle class, an isolated and absurdly rich priviledged class, an invisible foreign class to whom the money is sucked away too, and a stigmatized underclass who die.
Ask any West Indian economics professor how money is created - they cannot tell you. Ask any politician - they cannot tell you. The whole world is running on system that is inherently unsustainable, inherently unethical, and whose workings 99.9 percent of the world doesn't understand.
Trinidad is just the whole world under a magnifying glass. It's sick.
