Interior’s OIA failed CNMI

Had the US Department of Interior’s Office of Insular Affairs (OIA) taken a proactive partnership role some eight years ago in the enforcement of pertinent federal laws, the soured relationship and probe for allged overt political activities could have been avoided altogether.

OIA, however, decided to shelve its fiduciary responsibility in law enforcement by donning the illegal role of policymaking. That triggered the beginning of a confused role backed by arrogance and blatant disrespect for an elected government in the CNMI. Since the onset of its agenda, we’ve asked for its set of plans to which we have received none.

It’s obvious why such total silence: it’s agenda requires the fine touch of real financial and economic experts. Nor is it surprising why the sudden shift in policy–it had to advocate half-cocked “reform”–to shield the real motive behind fronting for the US Textile Labor Unions.

The issue is purely economics. After years of being encouraged to use the Headnote 3-A provision under the covenant by former Interior undersecretaries, the apparel industry thrived beyond their wildest imaginings to a $1.2 billion sector. The US Textile Labor Unions found that Pacific’s Little David is way too successful and must find a way to trip him. Perhaps this attitude is founded on the notion that if our country has bombed every nation to submission during World War I and II, no one should even dare challenge her global dominance even in manufacturing.

It’s actually a case best depicted in the legend about industriousness vs. complacency between the a tiny ant and a grasshopper in preparation for the winter months. The grasshopper boasted in grand style during the height of summer that life is merry. He even harassed the ant not to work hard. The ant quietly carried heavy loads of bread crumbs and other scavenged items into his underground home. When winter came he had lots of food to carry him through the first break of Spring. The grasshopper had nothing to consume and so he died of hunger. How sad though that paradigms have changed where California, capital of garment manufacturing, missed the boat completely. They never saw the shift in manufacturing from industrialized to third world countries.

Thus, the all out agenda employing human rights as a tool to brow beat other countries. This movement never takes the fate of young children they eventually displaced. Were they ever around to help them from job losses which have enabled them in recent past to bring food to the family table? In other words, this group is long on rhetoric but awfully short on real alternatives for those they’ve displaced, especially young children in foreign countries.

It’s even comical how advocates of Marianas Ruination have used the phrase “American Jobs” blatantly trashing the more 3,000 direct and indirect jobs in the CNMI through which this group of US Citizens (situated outside mainstream America) must work to bring home the bacon. It’s a tale of how our detractors have blindly and purposely fanned the fire of racism as to conveniently forget that we too are US Citizens and, are, therefore, endowed the same political and economic freedoms that every American Community enjoys throughout the country.

Through its own negligence, OIA allowed for the emergence of a dysfunctional family. Guess what: they’re back finger pointing forgetting that they’ve grandly failed their legal roles by assuming policymaking solely the purview of the US Congress. And it has the audacity to speak from both sides of their mouths hoping (wrongly again) that we didn’t know what’s up their sleeves. Well, it’s another sterling agenda to depict its own ineptitude in dealing with island governments. Welcome to the Ethics Hall of Shame!