Nice try Mr. Aranza

The Issue: Offer of economic plans by Interior’s OIA chief’s a bit too late.

Our View: Good last ditch effort from a lame duck Clinton administration.

It’s ironic that Interior’s OIA helmsman is making a winter month junket tour of insular areas pitching economic plans that are far removed from the economic reality in the NMI. The deathly pitch is still intact–a federal takeover of the NMI–an old refrain that island leaders find still view as unpalatable.

From the outset, the now lame duck Clinton administration has done nothing to listen to the voice of governance in this part of the world. It still views the position of special interest groups (US Textile Labor Unions) with greater importance than our livelihood. He boasts of the economic “good times”, including hypocritical rhetoric that he doesn’t want to see anybody “left behind”. President Clinton didn’t leave us behind. He bought the pitch to impose economic annihilation under the guise of reform.

Your legacy, Mr. President, insofar as this group of US Citizens are concerned, will forever remain an ugly chapter in our developmental history. How regrettable the hope you have instilled in our hearts at the peak of the Asian Crisis only to watch it reduced to despair for your words ring hollow versus centrist positions on economic and other issues aimed at ALL US Citizens. You never allowed us to assimilate into the greater American Community. Need we beg for it when in fact we are an integral part of a great country?

The economic plans being waved in front of our beaten faces are plans that should have included our input for we know best the peculiar realities of resource-poor island economies. Therefore, the plans are at best suspect, irrelevant, at worse, a waste. Enough is enough of the empty rhetoric about ascertaining that the economic “good times doesn’t leave anybody behind”. In our case, if we may reiterate, it’s total neglect and brow-beaten to death by a hideous agenda by the US Textile Labor Unions so grandly dubbed reform.

Our detractors need to go back to the drawing boards to revisit and learn the consequence of their planned reform we know contains nothing but strands of political muscles being flexed in favor of special interests in California, capital of garment manufacturing in the West Coast. Is it justice to pander to the whims of special interests often making the wrong reference to this group of US Citizens as foreigners by the constant use of the phrase “American Jobs?” What about wealth and job creation for US Citizens in this remote Pacific Island? Si Yuus Maase`!