More bashing headed our way

The US Department of Interior’s OIA’s hell bent agenda to permanently cripple the local garment industry here was never inclusionary. In other words, it really doesn’t matter to them that their vicious agenda would kill a major source of revenue and jobs on this island.

Allen Stayman and cabal, in concert with the labor union and a law firm from Manhattan are hell bent to scare buyers and retailers from our local garment industry in hopes that we sink permanently into insolvency and instant poverty. This endless and mindless agenda of permanent destruction of a fragile island economy continues with OIA’s Stayman seemingly oblivious to the current economic crisis that has resulted in the plummet of revenue generation, therefore, major economic contraction. In medical parlance, he’s decided to proceed with major surgery on a hemophiliac patient. A hemophiliac is one who bleeds profusely even from small cuts. Imagine this patient going under the knife. He’d be dead in no time from bleeding. The NMI is the patient!

I often wonder whether OIA understands the consequence of its insidious takeover plan of the NMI. With economic conditions being at its lowest, hope our lordly OIA boss understands that this is no time for another Department of Interior Insular Experiment. You’re dealing with the fate and livelihood of people, not birds that you and cabal have seen fit to guard and protect their droppings from contamination.

The domino effect of the planned lawsuit OIA has seen fit to push goes beyond just hurting buyers and retailers, but jobs upon which more than 3,000 employees support their families. Perhaps OIA has a back-up plan to institute unemployment checks for all who will be displaced by such half-cocked takeover agenda. I haven’t heard that such a plan has been proposed for budgetary consideration by the US Congress.

I strongly beg our friends in the US Congress to probe the activities of OIA and all the expenditure it has incurred using hard earned US mainland taxpayers money to turn its operations from partnership to adversarial lobbyist against the NMI. This has gone too far and nobody deserves to be thrown into instant bankruptcy and abject poverty just to accommodate a plan that never ever took into account the collective voice of the indigenous people of these islands. This has been and continues to be the major divisive element in the current relationship–threats and sanction–in the imposition of half-cocked federal policies that caters to other interest hardly mindful of our role and fate in the exercise of self-government.

Amidst the closure of over 1,080 businesses over the last year, I quiz why OIA has been awfully mute in making an offer to assist the NMI muddle through this crisis until it can regain its once thriving economic posture. I can only surmise what I used to read and hear about long time ago: suffocate their (islanders’) economic means and livelihood and their hearts and minds will follow. This is wrong since it would have forced the indigenous people to turn government into their holy grail for all their needs. Wasn’t it Stayman’s predecessors who constantly preach self-reliance as the battle cry insular areas over the last 37 years?

The evil geniuses at OIA must come to their senses that with over a thousand businesses closed here (and more are likely to follow suit), recovery is a very slow process that will take longer than what most of us wish to see in good tidings. If OIA hasn’t been a part of our collective efforts at problem solving and relishes dancing the rainy day dance of an adolescent critic, then it better start learning that scare tactics, threats and bully pulpit via the constant bashing of the NMI is far from our idea of bringing its perceived abuses to rest. Finally, for as long as there are human beings treading this planet earth, we will continue to see the emergence of labor problems. Their emergence, however, doesn’t grant you or any other group the right to bring our livelihood down to abject poverty.