Let there be light

Uncle Ben flipped Aggreko’s switch and e-juice flowed through our island’s lines uninterrupted for at least 24 hours. Presumably, smiles of satisfaction abounded in some administrative sectors though I do not think anyone was foolish enough to think that we had arrived at the culminating solution to a lingering complex problem. Nor was the euphoria to last. Within the next 24 hours, an outage would strike once more, and the stories about CUC’s myriad contradictions—from benign neglect to conspiracies to destroy the institution in order to position interested parties at a competitive advantage to take over—flourished once more.

Our Commonwealth Utilities Corporation has been everyone’s favorite whipping boy, and for good reason. It has a knack for being annoyingly indifferent to its unhelpful, and sometimes, downright criminal practices. Or, it appears like it had been set-up as an emergency response to a perceived public need once, only to be turned into a huge bucket that anyone with any knowledge on how to milk a corporate cow just merrily lined up and helped one’s self along its vulnerable leaky spots. Island opportunism reigned unrestrained and unhappily, well coached by local and imported scam artists.

Five years ago, I brought my CUC bill to their Dandan office. My Chinese significant other then had set up the account when we rented an apartment unit at As Lito. Lo, and behold, our month’s consumption of power was astronomical, to the tune of 46,000+ of Uncle Sam’s dollars.

I walked into the cashier’s office and though I hardly looked like your normal Han, sometimes folks from Hainan, Guangdong and Fujian do have an admixture of Indo-Malay strain in their bloodstream, so the finance officer did not bat an eye over my bill and the amount in it, nor did she wonder about the ethnic congruence between the customer in front of her and the name in the bill. Playing along, I explained that the garment industry was not doing too well and that I might not be able to pay for my electrical consumption for a while.

I suggested that I leave my credit card particulars so that CUC could automatically bill the account but that I would request for a second meter reading and make sure that my next bill would be accurate since the bill was for a residence that would take more than 29 years to consume the amount of power we were being charged.

Needless to say, it took more than six months to straighten out the record, which meant that CUC’s books had a $46,000+ collectible in its assets’ column that really was not there. Too bad, my ex and I did not have enough foresight to have taken the good credit rating the amount afforded us and applied for a CDA loan!

CUC’s corporate structure, or the absence of any reasonably accountable one, is hardly an isolated case. The culture of unbridled looking-after-my-business-interest-sans-active-regulatory-supervision ethos reminiscent of the Wild, Wild West seemed to have accompanied CUC at the creation. Was it not only a year or so ago when someone was hauled to court for unauthorized connection to CUC’s power source? Was it not a common practice before to have a legitimate metered connection to one line and nine others delivered through a jumper that bypassed proper measurements? Wasn’t this a charge leveled against one of our law officers who allegedly looked the other way, or at worst, connived to “steal” power while counsel to a manufacturing concern?

I can recall connecting to Cable TV eight years ago, and in my naiveté, allowed neighbors to bring their splitters and connected themselves to my line, only to find out shortly thereafter that the practice was illegal and that the company had patrols to catch those who still continued what was allegedly a common practice from the inception of the service across the island. And being of Philippine descent, I was privy to conversations on where the expertise and experience came from that provided the technical know-how in the elaborate practice milking public utilities.

We are a community of concerned and caring people, who do not hesitate to assist a neighbor needing help, and we have taken strangers into our midst allowing even some of them to join our family lineage and genealogy. As I am oft to tell my sixth graders, they are relatively good kids with bad habits! So are we, by my experience. The culture of exclusion, which admittedly retains and has acquired resurgent strength locally, and now, nationally with the GOP making a strategic, and evidently popular turn to the dissatisfied and often disenfranchised Religious Right, is nevertheless, on the wane, and the instinct of inclusion is manifesting itself not only here but also abroad.

Consider the burst of the real estate bubble that many economists predicted as a cyclical occurrence and was about to explode. Well, it has. Not only has the residential mortgage fiasco shaken the foundations of this nation’s Wall Street, but also by the nature of the beast, it has caused a hailstorm across the stock markets of the world. Bailout as a national strategy by Uncle Sam is no longer enough; a plan to deal with the global economy is no longer a matter of goodwill but of survival. The World Bank, the International Monetary Board, the Asian Development Bank, and all other regional development instrumentalities will now have to gear up to a new reality of hard-headed cooperation and authentic collaboration beyond the good-old-boy network of Wharton school-educated executives who have cornered the perks and privileges of being the official bean counters for global assets.

To be sure. the boundaries of greed by the privileged guardians of trade and commerce, and the weak-kneed default of public regulatory bodies, along with the culture of avarice ingrained in every aspiring business school entrant in our prestigious universities, and the uninformed compliant involvement if not mercenary connivance of labor to manipulative management, is not only true at the global and national level, but prevalent at the local level as well.

That is why the high symbolism of the Wednesday rally at the Gualo Rai fishermen’s wharf of those who donned black clothes while lighting a candle, was not so much a protest over our prevailing situation as it was an affirmation that it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. It was a loud though soundless scream to our public officials that there is nothing testicularly demeaning about asking our fellow citizens in the federal government to extend assistance in a time of emergent need.

It should also come as a wake-up call to our local decision-making process facilitators that the issue at hand, in the long term, involves the basic protection, conservation and preservation of our natural capital as the basis of our economy, and in that context, opportunism over the visitors’ industries Yen, Won, and Yuan, and the Guam military budget (this is actually coerced Yen from put-upon but hardly complaining Nippon colleagues!) cannot be viewed as simply making a quick buck while the bank account lasts. The ecological reality must now be a measure to determine local policies and to educate residents of civic responsibility and citizens’ rights. If we can invest corporations with a personal identity with accompanying rights, perhaps, it is time to draw up the list of the planet’s rights so that we treat Mother Nature as a personality rather than just a compliant pit for our mining extractions, regardless of how debase we exploit her generous offerings.

The shortsighted objections, and the evidently self-serving opposition of interested parties, over the proposal to declare the Marianas Marine Historic Monument is astounding. As many have already declared, this proposal is a no-brainer. That issues of sovereignty and local autonomy would now suddenly confuse and baffle the rhetoric of such agencies as the Coastal Resource Management and the Department of Natural Resources reflects the insidious effect of partisan and archaic imperial/colonial politics in public affairs. I wonder how many people worried about proprietary rights and procedures when the nation declared the Grand Canyon as a protected national heritage?

Let there be light! Indeed. Plato’s allegory of the cave that explained his claim that humankind only sees appearances and hears echoes remains pertinent to our continuing dependence on illusions and spins. A turn to radical honesty and authentic accountability is not a novel suggestion. Following through with it would be. Particularly in the Marianas!

Our community is small enough that a Cantonization of political discourse is a technical possibility towards real participatory democracy. Civil discourse and the art of association could very well accompany our beach barbecues, R360 dining experiences, family gatherings and colleagial gatherings. If Uncle Ben can help switch on that process by practicing openness and forthrightness within his government’s administrative and legislative ranks, then the force of darkness will not prevail.

Meanwhile, we shall light the candle. Let the darkness curse its own self.