Don’t touch our money

I’ve worked here on Saipan for 25 years. My wife and children were all born here. I have recently retired and will depend on my life’s work and investments in the CNMI’s Retirement Fund to help me live out my last tri-semester of life in dignity. To my understanding of this present administration’s fiscal plans, it wants the Retirement Fund to write off $124 million of delinquent payments, and then borrow $40 million to invest money in a mismanaged and money-losing venture called the CUC.

That kind of thinking staggers the mind and stretches the imagination to the borders of insanity. But, if anyone with the least bit of common sense thinks that I write with a flare to exaggerate or highlight the negative, take these kind plans to any reputable money lending institute and offer them the same business transaction! And, if there are banks and money lending institutes out there with financial death wishes, publicize their identity, so that all entities and people of mean spirit can infect, invade, and grind those institutes into bankruptcy. But don’t touch our money.

If by some unimaginable act of incompetence, our representatives in the Retirement Fund, by under-the-table deals or by any means possible, allow even a shadow of a thought of such policies to gain foothold and eventually lead to the bankruptcy of the Retirement Fund, people like me would have to go to Retirement Option Plan B.

So, for the benefit of people like me who don’t want to be forced into Retirement Plan B, our competent leaders who have our best interest at heart will cease to respond to this threat defensively. Our competent leaders who have our best interest at heart will take the initiative and file a lawsuit to force the CNMI government to honor its obligation, negotiate a payment plan, cease to entertain any such present or future loans, and let us live out our lives with the security and dignity we have worked so hard to obtain.

Retirement Plan B? There are two Retirement Fund buildings in the CNMI. One of the buildings is on Capital Hill. And, if our present and any future members of the Retirement Fund board of directors do their jobs aggressively with the retirees’ best interest at heart, we won’t need to seek out our social livelihood from Building 2 and Plan B.

Building 2 and Retirement Plan B is in Susupe and located near MTC. If you force this Grey Panther into the streets, homeless, and broke, I’m going to have to do something to force this community to incarcerate me. If I can’t afford housing, power, water, clothing, and the means to buy myself three meals a day, after a life of investments, made in good faith to Plan A of the Retirement Fund, so I could care for myself in old age, I’ll arrange it so this community, by whatever funds available, will care for me while I’m in jail, in retirement building 2 under Plan B.

James W. Feger
via e-mail