Payless paydays for PSS?

On Jan. 6, 2005, the above headline topped the Tribunes’ front page. This headline is becoming an everyday feature in our local newspapers. Vendors are not being paid. Contractors are not being paid. Funding is not being released—because there IS NO funding to release. Programs are being closed. Almost all hotels on Saipan are being or have been sold. MCC cannot meet its obligations and the list goes on and on EVERYDAY!

In the Variety, there appeared the following epitaph: “If people are starting to withdraw and not coming in, then there is something wrong with the system.” – Hiroyuki Saito.

Four major garment firms are on the block. Some 2,000 workers (and their salaries) will soon be leaving unless the AG continues its unrealistic and ridiculous policy of doling out TWAs to everyone. The others are set for a minimum 25 percent downturn. As usual Fermin Atalig’s math once again needs to go back to kindergarten. His “rosy” $20 million dollar increase will actually be a net million dollar LOSS! Do the math!

Yet every single investment opportunity that has stepped up to the CNMI and offered the possibility of SOME relief has been blown away by calculated programs of misinformation, politicization, trumped up melodramatic charges by some group claiming to want to protect some segment of society while truly only representing someone else’s private desires for power or property. I wish I had a dollar for every lie that has appeared in our newspapers regarding the fine people at Azmar and even the project itself!

Well, here is one fact you may want to consider: If Azmar had been allowed by MPLA in February 2004 to commence its affairs on Pagan, an estimated $2.2 million in business gross revenue taxes alone would have been collected to date. In order for the CNMI to survive economically, this government must stop politicizing every venture capital opportunity that comes along. Melodrama sells newspapers. It doesn’t put food on the table.

The abovementioned $2.2 million dollars is only a portion of the total amount that could have flowed into CNMI’s coffers during that period. It does not include the 7 percent royalty, the 2 percent lease rent, the 5 percent excise tax on imported business use materials, payroll taxes on employees nor all the expenditures made by employees with money earned from their employment by Azmar! The overall total could add up to nearly a million dollars a month! And what would it have cost the people of the CNMI? Not one red cent!

Documents that the MPLA chair says were not submitted actually were submitted. Everyone—even Pagan Watch—has been duped by the clandestine world of secrecy and skullduggery that has unfolded around this project. It eventually will be the fodder of public press!

There would be NO environmental damage to Pagan—only PLANNED and APPROVED development: housing, roads, harbor, airport, water supply, power supply, transportation, homesteading—and the list goes on. Mayor Taisacan has expressed his support for this on numerous occasions and well as most of our government leaders—but where is the action?

No mining experience? The team of consultants that will train the Azmar team for actual mineral recovery has more than 120 years of professional mining experience all over the world. We’re talking “Star Wars” state-of-the-art multi-million dollar equipment!

The people of the Marianas have never been offered a better deal. What many fail to understand is that pozzolan is not gold. The commercial world doesn’t “need” pozzolan. It takes top international businessmen steeped in the art of finance, law, sales, marketing, and distribution to help major corporations around the world recognize that they “want” pozzolan. That’s Azmar. That’s why they were such a vitally important link to the economic restructuring of the CNMI. MPLA, you blew it—and we are starving to death!

Dr. Thomas D. Arkle Jr.
San Jose, Tinian