The tyranny of the economic

Ned Arriola, when he was still a deputy at Public Health, was at a planning symposium I attended and the conference panel quickly deteriorated into a discussion on budgets and available grants. We were supposed to confer on what we needed to address in the health field, but before we got to articulate a vision of our community’s physical well-being and the abiding contradictions in implementing the vision, we bogged down on the availability or scarcity of grants, and the oppressive demands of funding compliance.

Being the new kid in town, I squeaked my humble mousiness and inquired if we could, perhaps, reverse the process of our deliberations. Wouldn’t we engage in broad, free-wheeling, comprehensive visioning first? Could we check our intuition and our experience on where the contradictions are were we to pursue the vision? Would we not want to create practical proposals to address the concrete challenges that impede or bar anyone from realizing the vision rather than just resigning to the perennial excuse of “lack of funding”? Then, we can design strategies and tactics that would implement the proposals and confront the contradictions, concretizing any mission statement of the vision.

Mr. Arriola was candid enough to admit that, yes, the stated process in all the agencies begins with the brainstorming of vision elements, and the issue of budgets and finances is dealt with at the level of implementaries, of strategies and tactics. But it was convenient to short-cut the process, Ned added, by focusing on the available grants from funding agencies, and tailoring the service delivery provisions at the local level to the requirements of the funding source.

It was thus a déjà vu when I attended the pre-summit forum for the private sector before the full-blown two-day Economic Summit in response to the stimulus package passed by Congress in support of local level economic recovery. The group was quickly herded into three groups to consider the feasibility of promoting aquaculture, establishing call centers, and identifying alternative industries for the Commonwealth.

The chief facilitator conceded that the government wants to utilize the funding from the stimulus package on improving infrastructure that would attract investments. This is consistent with the Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy’s intent. Of course, this just begs the question: What investments would attract investors? That was what the private sector antennae was to declare but, of course, being a quadrant of D.C., the Commonwealth’s dependence on the sneezes inside the beltway pretty much determine the hiccups of our economic planners.

The current “bread and butter” of the Commonwealth economy is the visitor industry. The Economic Restoration Summit added aquaculture (with its off-shore, nearshore, and on-shore technologies developed elsewhere), agriculture (food production particularly for the military and the tourism sector), call centers (to serve English-speaking markets) and alternative industries (e.g., English language learning for the captive Chinese-Korean-Japanese markets). “Restoration,” of course, is a misnomer since the garment industry is the only thing that may be restored, happily an unlikely occurrence.

What we need is an authentic economic development plan that is not pro-forma response to funding agencies’ requirements but a real reflection of local people’s perceived needs, expressed sentiments, and felt intuitions. Saipan is but a 5-by-12-mile island with less than 70,000 people, yet we have no mechanism to activate a broad-based participatory conversation on how we may map out our continuing existence and survival. Focus groups gathering for conversations this year, desirable in their flexibility and composition, are nevertheless, highly politicized and are thereby suspect of partisan political agenda.

That we are a predominantly “republican” population is also evident. By this, we mean that in the decision-making process, we elect representatives to do the policy-making for us, and we expect them to design programs and implement projects for our general well-being. The economy in our rhetoric is outside the purview of governance, ideally left to the undulation of supply and demand.

We aped the republican form of governance from Uncle Sam that created the system when it took three months to get from the West Coast to the Potomac. The image of a free market economy is our favorite illusion. There is no such thing; the invisible hand has always been that of the businesses influencing legislative mandates.

Direct democracy has always been a possibility for the Marianas, if not the whole of Micronesia, but since we inherited patronage politics from elsewhere, and being elected to an office had been considered a “high honor and privilege,” the bloated pyramidal structure of governance fitted our social and cultural requirements. That has changed. The elected office is no longer privileged status but public service, accountable to democratic standards. Prosecution of a Lt. Governor is not the persecution of a public servant; it is the public’s exercise in holding one accountable to public standards!

We often read pundits write about how our economy has been grossly if not corruptibly mismanaged. Perhaps, our moralism, or ideology blinds rational assessment. Our economy has been very well managed, thank you; in fact, it has been too well-managed. It served the interest of the investors! The value pursued was on return on investment. The economy, and this still holds true if the recent Economic Summit were to be used as an indicator, is out to serve the interest of the investors, hoping that the multiplier or trickle-down effect would benefit cheap labor. Since collection of revenue is waived, nothing accrues to the general public except from the expenditure of labor in the production line.

The tyranny of the economic is the preeminence of Wall Street (accumulated capital in support of consumerism) over the realities of the Sabalu market. Food production in agriculture for local consumption is the only responsible industry worth pursuing, otherwise, we depend on the value of the politicized homestead, and adhere to the religion of food stamps, for our sanity and survival. That taotao tano and taotao tasi does not a local economy make!