Forging partnership is important

The Issue: The planned joint committee (policy-makers and business community) is most vital at this juncture.

Our View: A good partnership between the two sectors is most essential in planning the future of the NMI.

In recent years, the private sector is basically left out in the cold to fend for itself. Policy-makers then hardly consider the only revenue generating sector a true partner in the collective planning of the future of these islands. They basically ignored the role of the business sector at a critical juncture in our developmental history.

On its own initiative, the private sector took its case to Washington to protect the very investments of these islands from permanent meltdown and ruination. While it worked the committee rooms of the US Congress to discourage approval of the proposed federal takeover, i.e., immigration and minimum wage, it found out that
Washington Representative Juan N. Babauta was working at the other end of Capitol Hill questioning exclusion of the NMI under the proposed minimum wage measure.

Perhaps Mr. Babauta simply has no inkling of the ruinous effects of a federally mandated wage in the NMI against a fragile island economy. It is the usual wrongful prescription issued to an economic hemophiliac or convenient politically correct solution against an economy struggling to stay solvent. He basically panders to the
very agenda being championed by our detractors: Economic annihilation as the surest ticket to bankrupting the local government.

Don’t we deserve protecting our economic freedoms too? Is this too complicated an issue for Mr. Babauta’s nimble mind?

It’s good though that there’s the formation of a joint committee between policy-makers headed by Representative Norman Palacios and Saipan Chamber of Commerce President Lynn Knight. Such a joint effort would not have been necessary had Mr. Babauta been trumpeting the true sentiments of the people of these islands among members of the US Congress. Move on with your joint committee for it is the one sure way to impress national policy-makers that Mr. Babauta and detractors have been strange bed fellows. For $1.6 million in taxpayers’ money, annually?

It’s a good move where the true sentiments of our people can be conveyed to national policy-makers in the US Congress. After all, the Washington Office has failed us–public and private sectors–in the true representation of our sentiment against a federal takeover. Perhaps he’s never learned the very essence of self-government so guaranteed under the Covenant Agreement. How sad the wind Mr. Babauta’s sails are torn. Si Yuus Maase`!