A response to Perry Conner’s queries

Retaining current immigration/labor status: No disputing the issue on immigration, but taking a proactive approach to halting an annihilative law would grant any administration the opportunity to maintain current and future investments for these isles. Furthermore, the insular areas are given $4 million annually to split among themselves based on needs. Can we really secure much from this meager amount when it must be shared among five entities?

The lawsuit, if perchance we retain some appreciable success, would force the federal government to keep its commitment under the Covenant Agreement to provide for a “progressively higher standard of living”. The impending federal labor law would do the exact opposite—total economic paralysis—following a 40-60 percent contraction. I see that you failed to research the history of this fundamental provision of the Agreement. Therefore, you so perfectly fit your own assertion of “braggadocio.”

The CNMI is a territory: Again, you fail to thoroughly research the history and case laws behind the Agreement and what makes it unique. The CNMI is the only sovereign entity that negotiated its political relationship with the federal government. No other state or territory was ever given this opportunity. Therefore, your conventional definition and categorization of the NMI as a territory is without foundation. It makes reviewing the history of each provision of the Agreement mandatory!

Yours is a shortsighted, if not shallow, view, but I still welcome healthy discussion including misperceptions and misconceptions on matters pertaining to the rights of the indigenous people here for greater degree of self-government. Regrettably, though, I could also sense a strange energy of the usual white male superiority in the views of you have conveyed. But I have also grown some very thick skin for those who have been infected by the Micronesian Bug.

Finally, the law (any law) is a set of tools for bringing about progress and change for the better. It is not a sacrosanct set of principles, but is one of the means by which society transforms itself, defines itself and evolves. The impending tsunami-like economic contraction emanating from the new federal labor law is but regressive! And all we have seen over the last two years are the veiled intent of evil geniuses to compromise the right of the indigenous people to greater degree of self-government. This is followed by subsequent rhetoric to defend, i.e., U.S. GAO’s inadequacies, though it’s obvious that it was scurrying to provide for what I call varnished legitimacy in its own sea of inadequacies!