Aranza’s last ditch effort: fruitless

The Issue: With 14 months to go before Gov. George W. Bush takes over the White House, Clinton’s faithful cronies give it their last ditch efforts to push their agenda.

Our View: It’s a lame duck administration whose agenda will never go past the 106th Congress and not when the most powerful house member never trusted Clinton.

It isn’t surprising that OIA helmsman Ferdinand Aranza tries with futility to rebuild a bridge his predecessor decided to burn to ashes before moving to the State Department. Aranza is left with just that–a charred bridge–and quizzes how does he go about rebuilding a gutted sense of trust and confidence. Well, there’s nothing up that alley and it’ll take forever to reconnect with a people whose image have been destroyed and ruined by OIA.

Interesting that Mr. Aranza has such short memory when, in recent years, the NMI sought for OIA’s impact study on the arbitrary imposition of immigration and minimum wage to which his agency was awfully silent. It goes without saying that OIA never commissioned such a study much less answer our queries for fear that facts and figures would prove our conclusions correct from the outset. But then what can anybody reasonably expect from an agency that has demonstrated greater ineptitude and inefficiency second only to the US Immigration and Naturalization Services.

Aranza wants to focus on training and economic issues. We hope it’s training far removed from a recent program OIA sponsored to teach women in the FSM how to scale fish. It’s a sterling case or epitome of irrelevancy! Economics? Perhaps OIA has better economic substitute than what’s already here–tourism and apparel manufacturing. And we’re sure too that OIA knows that the last major form of investment that descended on these isles some 16 years ago was the much maligned apparel industry that proved very sturdy in tax contributions. And it is OIA who took the lead to shut down this local industry permanently.

After about two weeks, all these would essentially turn into water under the bridge. By then, it’s time to scribble a resolution of condolences to Aranza and other staunch detractors of the NMI for a half-cocked job. We would have won both the battle and the war for the issue is purely economics, no more, no less. And if Mr.
Aranza has any future plans dealing with these isles, he should learn the ABCs of how not to speak from both sides of his mouth. We know how to deal with adversaries who represent a highly suspect and lame duck administration all piled into one messy cow pie. Si Yuus Maase`!