What are you young professionals waiting for?

I met six young professionals this week and three others in the last few weeks and probably can meet 20 more this week if I really go looking for them. I see how they carry themselves, their self-assurance, and their easy countenance around others. Nine are NMDs with at least one Chamorro parent, two are of Filipino descent, and all are U.S. citizens. Only three are registered to vote. The youngest is 22, the oldest 33. All have been to a mainland university and all have a bachelor’s or master’s degree in such diverse fields as business management, marine biology, liberal arts, accounting, literature, IT, and education. But not one of you knows any of the others. One of you needs to take a leading role in setting up and monitoring a young persons’ club or association for all the hundreds, maybe thousands of others like you. Get the word out. Alone, the CNMI hydra will swallow you up, one by one, and you will end up doing nothing productive, like all before you. United, you just might make enough noise to make the fossils that run this place listen to your new, fresh, exciting solutions to our myriad of challenges. You know the answers are on YouTube; they don’t.

Governor, please come clean

Gov. Eloy Inos, you couldn’t talk for four minutes without contradicting yourself. In the fifth paragraph of your State of the Commonwealth speech, you state, “When I assumed the Office of the Governor, people were questioning government integrity, doubting its honesty and criticizing its lack of transparency.” Duh, one of your first acts as governor was to slip a badly and hastily written “midnight hour” casino bill on us, which violates all three of these tenets.

Inos was the director or supervisor of all of the former Trust Territory finances from 1971 to 1987. From 1987 to 1994 he was the director of Finance for the CNMI. From 1994 to 2006 he was employed in various positions in the private sector, most in positions where he worked directly with CNMI governors and department heads. From 2006 to 2009 he was secretary of Finance, again, for the CNMI. For him to say he didn’t know what the financial situation of the CNMI government, CUC, CHC, and the pension fund was is ridiculous. He has been working with TT and CNMI governments and government budgets for over 40 years and we accountants know how to read figures after a while. Generally accepted accounting practices dictate we notify directors, stockholders, owners, the IRS if necessary, the FBI if warranted, and anyone else that might need to know when we find problems, and not nearly as big as the ones that the CNMI had when Mr. Inos was the boss. It may be bad politics to let the general public know how bad things were but he wasn’t in politics when these problems came up and he had a responsibility to the public that he hid, or at the very least didn’t report, which resulted in the same outcome. Now as governor he apparently is still practicing secret deals and trying to keep the public in the dark, just as he did when he was director of Finance. This guy does not deserve your trust anymore. Anyone that votes for this man must like the dark, shady side of politics.

Gary DuBrall
Chalan Piao, Saipan