Ocean of promise vs. policy

As US Citizens in the fringe, we listen with pride to promises made by President Clinton about wealth that translate into jobs creation. He boasts of a robust US economy and how his program of “welfare to work” has worked successfully across the country.

Equally troubling too is the fact that we’ve found a deep ocean of inconsistency in what he promises and the subsequent policies that emerge following towering pitches that America can take pride of its healthy economy that has given the jobless the opportunity to wean themselves from the federal roll.

Yet this pleasant message is equally discordant and troubling. At least, this is true in the case of the NMI. His accomplishments trumpet hope for those of us outside mainstream America whose economy have been leveled by the Asian crisis. But this hope instantly melts into meaningless confidence building for we know the deep blue ocean that exist between what he promises and the contrarian policies that seek to sink us further into the abyss of exclusion, discrimination and forced destitution.

Perhaps the intent of this purposeful exclusion and accompanying bashing is to force the NMI to succumb to the whims of an adversarial lead federal agency. It’ll be doomsday to accede to the adolescent views of Interior’s Office of Insular Affairs given its sterling record of failure of more than 37 years. We ably built an economy even without the participation of Interior since the inception of our constitutional government in 1978. Now, our supposed partner has turned into a complete enemy who wants nothing else but the grand opportunity to ruin all that we’ve worked for over the last 20 years.

This agenda by a lead federal agency highlights the ocean between what the president promises and contrarian policies that compromise the very substance of the Clinton Administration pronouncements of wealth and jobs creation. This is the sad aspect in our relationship with the federal government that we had to endure. It is crystal clear that the president’s promises versus policies that come out of his administration are far from being an instrument of wealth and jobs creation for the NMI. In fact, his policies have become instruments of permanent destruction of a fragile island economy.

We believe that these inconsistencies are designed by clever spin-masters to force the NMI into succuming to Interior’s agenda to sink the NMI permanently even without commissioning a study that lays out how its (Interior’s) grand scheme would impact negatively upon our livelihood. And so in the ocean between presidential promises and policies, perhaps someday soon we too would hear the bells of freedom ringing loudly “from sea to shining sea”.