Being presumptuous about apparel industry

I find it interesting how people at the grassroots level have asked a relevant query: Have our leaders found an industry substitute in the event the apparel industry deploys elsewhere? I really couldn’t answer the question in forthright fashion in that former Governor Froilan C. Tenorio was the last proactive titular head who fought the issue tooth and nail. Most others thought they did while, well, swimming in the warm sea of mañana.

This legitimate query brings into focus whether in fact the apparel industry would leave in the next five years. Friends, this could only happen when federalization of immigration successfully makes it through the last chamber of the US Congress. This isn’t likely and not for as long as friends like Congressmen Tom DeLay, Dick
Armey and Don Young who understand economics and our rights to fend for ourselves are in the US House of Representatives.

Here at home, the presumptuous notion of the apparel industry leaving over the next five years had its genesis in people who don’t have their facts together or presume that there’s a relationship between this industry and events that are unfolding in the World Trade Organization (when in fact they are referring to the General Tariffs and Trade Agreement), among others. This viewpoint definitely lack rock solid reasoning based on factual information and so out comes shallow and hollow excuses for the sake of making it to the pages of newspapers or evening news.

I say that these people not only must learn how to “Shut Up”, but “Wake Up” too. If you can’t present a fully supported position based on pertinent and thoroughly researched set of facts, cancel your shallow piece or keep your trap shut. This issue is too involved to brave a juvenile explanation. You’re not adding clarity of understanding but fueling ramblings on an already confused issue. For instance, have alleged experts really understand the workings of GATT and WTO and its relationship with the factual comparative advantages of the apparel industry here?

While most of prophet of doom toy with their glowing sense of presumptuousness, interesting that reality escapes them entirely in queries they too must answer responsibly such as: Where would you place indigenous US Citizens (some 3,000 employees directly or indirectly employed by the industry) when the largest export industry leaves the island? And if you still wish to brave the forte of ignoramus, then the next best query you too must answer is: How many of the would-be-displaced indigenous US Citizen employees in both sectors can be accommodated in your company? We need wealth and jobs creation, not ramblings, yeah?

The departure of any and all industries here would be fueled by the federalization of immigration and other policies now in the hands of the local government. In the absence of such forced federal statutory mandate, the future of any and all industries here would be dictated by market forces. Currently, the NMI has the comparative advantage over every non-state possession because we have ably employed the very tool of development imbedded in local control over immigration and minimum wage.

Dr. Webster defines presumption as: “The overstepping of limits of propriety….” This arbitrary viewpoint has recently become the new fad in dealing with the media. No sir, get your facts straight and the fact that your errant perception of the role of the WTO makes you sound professorial on an issue you really have no inkling of isn’t a reason to brave stupidity. It only opens the opportunity to create the “fourth” person on the three types of people: Those who make things happen, those who watch what happen, those that didn’t know what happen, and, well, those who wanted things to happen. Woe!