Star evil genius against the NMI

A journalist by the name of Ms. Mindy Belz of WORLD International (On the Web) recently wrote how Interior’s Allen Stayman padded his case against the NMI in what I call “reverse human rights abuse”. Please read on:

“Reports of forced abortion and religious persecution in a US island commonwealth played on the sympathies of religious conservatives in Washington. But a closer examination suggested a different conclusion: that the charges were trumped up for political advantage-greater federal control over a local governed island and decreased economic competition for unions. Furthermore, taxpayer dollars may have been spent preparing and promoting areport that could be a sophisticated, unlawful lobbying operation.”

“Along with its veracity, the conduct of the department’s (Interior) investigation is also under fire. Interior’s director of Insular Affairs, Allen Stayman, hired a private investigator to conduct the probe, under a $100,000 contract with the government. The department’s investigating team says it conducted 400 interviews in the Northern Marianas…as the basis of the report.

“During the Senate hearings (March of `98), however, department officials said they were not prepared to turn over the report to the Senate Committee, even though a draft version was shown to The Washington Post and ABC News. Justice Department and Customs Service officials, which have jurisdictions over such investigations, asked that the outside report not be presented because they considered it unverifiable.

Governor Pete P. Tenorio told the Senate panel: “We believe that Interior has lost sight of its role under the covenant. The covenant did not contemplate a federal relationship that dictates the internal affairs of the commonwealth”.

Senator Rod Grams took Stayman to task charging that “investigators may have even violated federal laws (Hatch Act) in the course of their inquiry.” The law prohibits federal employees “from engaging in specific political activity”.

“When a government employee willfully thumbs his nose at the Congress by hiring an ‘investigator’ whose sole purpose is to find evidence that will buy off Republicans”, Senator Grams wrote to Inspector General Wilma Lewis, “that is when I think you, in your role as an independent Inspector General must act”. He cited Stayman in particular for using US mainland taxpayers’ dollar to hire a private investigator and taking the findings to the press before they were presented to Congress.

Two issues are clearly confirmed in this article: 1). A trumped-up case to compromise self-government. 2). Decreased economic competition for unions. Regrettably, this Interior evil genius with a huge loose gun has successfully wronged the people of these islands with unrelenting negative bashing of the NMI as “slave country”. He’s gone the extra mile to indict the NMI on baseless religious persecution of its guest workers.

It is now apparent that Stayman has used Interior to promote the interest of US textile unions over the interest of this group of US Citizens to which it has the fiduciary responsibility to assist “attain a progressively higher standard of living”. But its actions in terms of policy have been the exact opposite. Stayman doesn’t even have any idea nor definition of the “standard of living” for these isles to scaffold a fragile island economy. His only interest is to please the textile labor unions by finding every avenue available to permanent sink the NMI. So much for the so-called “American Dream”.