It’s the Economy

At Issue: The proposed lifting of “capping” in the number of employees for the apparel industry under the new leadership’s reform plan.

Our View: It’s easily misunderstood, but the crux of the proposal is to allow investment friendly environment and stability.

Policy-makers are entrusted with public confidence to create wealth and jobs for their constituencies through the establishment of business industries here. It means each must be proactive in embracing the free enterprise system, a system that has allowed our mother country, the robust economy that fellow Americans enjoy today.

Under the free enterprise system, one doesn’t impose strangling policies such as capping in that it is wise to accommodate expansion in any and all industries. For instance, would policy-makers impose capping the tourism industry if economic recovery revives healthy activities as to warrant more hotels, golf courses, support businesses throughout the NMI? It is this very issue that policy-makers must not overlook in our collective efforts to revive revenue generation to a level as we know it.

The proposed labor and business reform act would allow garment factories here to hire new alien workers, but on the condition that they first train and hire at least 20 percent indigenous US Citizens in managerial or supervisory positions. This is in addition to the requirement of existing law requiring all businesses to hire at least 20 percent local workers in their companies. Unlike the existing 20 percent local worker requirement, the requirement for management and supervisory positions is without exemption.

The future of current and future investments rest solely on stability now on the laps of policy-makers. Each must understand and embrace the free enterprise system, a system that President Clinton trumpets in every corner of the country today. As such, policy-makers need not entertain, much less, accommodate the fear tactics so successfully leveled against the NMI by our detractors for we have as much right to defend our economic freedom as any other American community.

The juvenile architects of Marianas Economic Annihilation have apparently gotten the better part of some of our policy-makers’ judgment. Perhaps the greater question that the faint-hearted need to revisit is: Who do you represent in our legislative institution and would you have fulfilled your fiduciary duty by dancing to the whims of detractors who wanted you beaten psychologically as to be incapable of defending the economic freedom of the NMI?

Understandably, the successful brow-beating of the NMI by our detractors has planted a sense of fear from the paper tiger they have been waving in front your faces. But the issue is the NMI’s economic survival for ALL industries. Would you dare impose capping in any industry under the Free Trade Zone you recently approved? For once, let us mean what we say and say what we mean! Si Yuus Maase`!