From phantom wealth to real wealth

Our experience with protest as a methodology for change relies on someone other that one’s self to correct the protested situation. In the case of the Marpi poles, the AG and the guv are just their intransigent ornery best! Tina Sablan et al appear helpless to do anything about it unless they take the subversive route and either stealthily construct alternative power and water source, or destroy all the CUC-constructed pole, splash them with syrup, and blame their collapse on termites. Adversarial confrontation before a judge is, at best, a delaying tactic, and worst, a further ruffling of entrenched feathers that defensively feels it is under assault.

Besides, it does not deal with the fundamental but unarticulated issue of what the community intends in “developing” Marpi, particularly its public domains.

I begin this reflection on this tone because we are unable to figure out how a world already lucid about the casino-like operation of our financial markets seems unable and unwilling to do anything about it; to shift focus on people as subjects rather than as manipulated objects in the stratified scale of $-denominated wallets.

We do not protest markets and the capitalist free enterprise system. In fact, markets have functioned in the past as a systematic platform for legitimate trade and exchange mechanism of goods and services. It is when services become dominated by the financial market that the role of capital formation takes a back seat to making money on the speculative movement of finances itself.

The free market system envisioned by Adam Smith has no resemblance to the free enterprise promoted by Wall St. characterized by Korten as a bunch of buccaneers and privateers (legalized pirates) whose operation “created an Alice in Wonderland phantom-wealth world in which prospective financial claims and the expectations that go with them exceed the value of all the world’s real wealth by orders of magnitude.” Smith’s image was more of an unfettered Sabalu market that allows producers and consumers the creativity to conduct human transactions.

Rather brutal in his conclusion that “we can no longer acquiesce to a system of rule by those engaged in the pursuit of phantom wealth far beyond any conceivable need,” Korten adds that the system cannot be fixed and it is time to bring economics back to Main St. where the tangible market can serve genuine needs and deal with actual wealth.

Tony Pellegrino’s push on the Trade Institute to address labor market needs from local human resource, and his new venture of flying agricultural products where it might make some profit would be steps in the right direction of getting Main St. to handle its own economic requirements. An interdependent global village, as IMF-World Bank has long ago conceded, requires government not to see themselves as competitors in a limited market but rather as collaborators in focusing on the qualitative sustenance and survival of humanity and the planet.

A United Nations University study reveals that the richest 2 percent of the world’s people now own 51 percent of all the world’s assets. The poorest 50 percent own only 1 percent. This is not a matter of the “poor will always be with us.” It is a deliberate effort of the captains of financial markets, at least, in the United States, to “modernize” the economy by deregulating the financial markets and making finance the dominant sector, ensuring the triumph of the haves over the have-nots in a class war reminiscent of the rise of socialist sentiments around the world when oligarchs could whimsically decide fate and destiny of the multitude with the stroke of their bank pens.

So, what can the economics of Sabalu do?

Obviously, attaining self-sufficiency in locally grown and produced food, including local seafood catch, would be high on the priority. There is no reason to be dependent on the food chain originating from the poultry farms of the eastern seaboard, or to meat packers and grain silos in the Midwest. Nor of fruits, nuts and fresh produce of the Far East, Southeast Asia, California, and Central America.

Next would be self-reliance that feeds on open-ended participation in communal, political and educational processes. For the last 10 years, I had not seen one event in the CNMI facilitated to rely on local experience—even on relevant issues of health, education, and welfare; “expertise” imported from Hawaii and lands beyond were called upon. I mean, for heaven’s sake, why do we need a university in Mississippi to tell us about the nature of our autistic children’s syndrome, and how to deal with them? Parents are already doing that. Why don’t we ask them?

Most important, of course, is self-confidence, the acceptance of our acceptance just by virtue of being born into the human race, without having to prove status and integrity through achievement, or worst, the level of deposited amounts in bank accounts. Our dejado starting point stems from an inherited story of a couple that munched on a forbidden fruit, rather than the story of our miraculous conception, unique and unrepeatable!

Strengthening local human resource enables Main St. to transform Wall St. into simply another thoroughfare in NYC.

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[I] Vergara is a regular contributor to the [/I]Saipan Tribune’[I]s Opinion Section[/I]