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HERE are times when Bermudian public figures demonstrate such overdeveloped senses of egotism and inviolability you could imagine them leaving crime scenes in getaway cars sporting vanity plates. The shamelessness, the self-absorption, of the political and commercial elite now cuts through all of the old proscriptions against recklessly plundering Bermuda's environment as relentlessly as a chainsaw tearing through beefsides in an abattoir.

The community's needs are increasingly taking second place to the developer's profit margins. The quick buck so routinely supersedes the island's long-term interests these days that such behaviour almost goes unnoticed; and public service so routinely takes a back seat to self-interest it risks becoming the Bermudian norm ? a fool's-gold standard of civic and corporate behaviour.

Language is indeed degenerating in this new environment. Words camouflage actions, they no longer explain or, God forbid, rationalise them.

It's evident everywhere. Miserly $14 monthly pension boosts for the elderly are trumpeted as evidence of Government's social conscience while hyperinflationary Parliamentary wage increases are passed off as both unexceptional and fully warranted, as perverse an inversion of the value-for-money principle as any imaginable; the Premier talks of nation-building yet sanctions the sort of polarising tribalism that all but precludes one micro-nation ever emerging from the many peoples who make up Bermuda; and what's billed as a Government programme of "sustainable development" is actually anything but, the island's fragile eco-system experiencing the kind of pulverising wear that will ultimately make it unfit for the current generation let alone future ones.

Lies are now the devalued currency of the Bermudian public realm, a realm in which public figures are more likely to be mouthpieces for well-heeled overseas' interests rather than those of their constituents.

Tourism, for instance, is still discussed, straight-faced, as a potential second string to our economic bow.

But with the charming amenities that once made Bermuda such an appealing resort being systematically bulldozed, resuscitating the hospitality industry is as much an odds-against proposition as David Burch ever being garlanded by the National Association for Reconciliation.

Tourism is now simply a front for relentless condomania, a construction boom aimed at attracting long-term leases from the financial services industries rather than attracting deep-pocketed vacationers.

Ever since the Hotel Concessions Act essentially conceded Government had no further say in how resort properties could be redeveloped, Tourism has in fact been facilitating Bermuda's transformation into an off-shore company town, not arresting the trend.

The Inverurie, Glencoe, Castle Harbour, Newstead, Belmont and Palmetto Bay have all disappeared in recent years. The hundreds of hotel rooms lost at those locations have been replaced by outsized apartment developments that owe as much to their surroundings as a Spielberg-type alien mothership dropped into a delicate Winslow Homer landscape.

No one wants to lose their seats aboard the dual-purpose development gravy train that left the station when ground was broken for Tucker's Point. The Wyndham is now being condominiumised, Fairmont Southampton's ready to plough its golf course up to make way for a crush of townhouses and Coco Reef, its grace-and-favour lease already as outrageous example of croneyism as is imaginable (even for a Government that rarely hides its lies under a bushel), is to become the site of twin hulking high rises.

Perhaps worst of all in terms of both environmental impact and dubious aesthetics is the Ariel Sands redevelopment. Seemingly based around the notion that nothing succeeds like wretched excess, phalanxes of Bermudian tower blocks are beginning to march across the once inviolate ridgeline at that property, little better than Bermuda-roofed multi-storey parking garages for people.

Nominally, these are all mixed developments ? a combination of condominiums for sale and rent and "vacation villas" that will maintain the fiction these properties are still primarily in the tourism industry.

But the hotel rooms/villas will presumably be designed for dual-usage ? allowing them to be converted into condominiums if market forces dictate. Given these properties are being transformed beyond recognition into suburban housing tracts, it's difficult to see how any of these projects will flourish as hotels. When completed, the end results will resemble precisely the type of congested semi-urban environments the average overwrought North American wants to escape from, not vacation in. However, the average financial services employee is unlikely to be as discriminating.

Height and size restrictions and zoning regulations on new developments designated ? no matter how implausibly ? as tourism-oriented all seem to have been expunged from the rule book as far as resort redevelopment is concerned. Given Bermuda's extremely limited land area and the seemingly unlimited number of people our economic overlords hope to shoe-horn in here, it's probably a matter of "when" not "if" all remaining restrictions on land will become as very flexible as those once applied to hotels. The Planning Department might as well be abolished; Government could doubtless find other areas where its budget might better be squandered

The shift in economic emphasis to an almost complete dependence on the off-shore financial services sector is taking its toll on the human environment as well as our natural surroundings. As the tourism-based economy continues to diminish, so the number of Bermudians employed by Government in what amount to glorified make-work programmes continues to swell.

14 per cent of the Bermudian workforce is now on the Government payroll, a staggeringly high number for such a small island and one that is only likely to continue growing given so many locals have neither the backgrounds nor the qualifications to be easily assimilated into the financial services sector.

These are the people who continue to be priced out of a housing market that is increasingly geared towards non-Bermudians, these are the people who have turned affordable housing into an increasingly urgent political issue.

For many years their concerns were ignored. The attitude among Bermuda's political and economic powerbrokers seemed to be that if they took take care of the luxuries, the necessities would somehow take care of themselves. But that has not proved to be the case and housing now consistently tops the list of Bermudian political priorities.

After years of neglect and malfeasance, the Bermuda Housing Corporation is finally stirring itself into action. But one of its proposed solutions to the housing crisis amounts to building the poor, psychotic cousins to the high rises planned for Coco Reef.

It is being suggested that low-income Bermudians now be warehoused in multi-storey developments that will likely become the Bermudian answers to those infamous public housing projects that have failed so spectacularly in the US and Europe ? claustrophobic poverty traps that become incubators for dysfunctional behaviour, depression and crime.

Even when ground is broken for such projects with the best will in the world, they have repeatedly been demonstrated to fail if low-cost housing is not located among mixed-income developments ? allowing them to become extensions of the surrounding communities rather than towering islands of hopelessness entirely disconnected from their surroundings.

is already witnessing the emergence of gangs and brutal gang-related violence ? a situation that will only be further aggravated if this proposed solution to the housing crisis spawns a host of new social problems.

It is recognised that the overwhelming majority of those in Western societies who commit violent acts are drawn from the lowest strata of their communities. Marginalised from the social and economic mainstream, not so much under-appreciated as completely ignored by their more well-to-do compatriots and largely unskilled, these people not only resent their status as untouchables in the Bermudian caste system but are beginning to actively strike out against it ? violence becoming a perverted form of self-affirmation.

Housing such people together and marooning them from the rest of the community in Bermudian answers to, say, Chicago's Cabrini Green project will compound not contain the social problems now making themselves felt throughout the community.

Bermuda's Powers That Be need to start paying somewhat more attention to the community's interests rather than those of their corporate friends. Otherwise they might really need getaway vehicles to escape from the anti-social destructiveness that is already making its unwelcome presence felt.