WHEN you need a good laugh, check out government plans, political news or campaign pledges from the past. Many of them are like apocalyptic predictions with a happy ending: “after much suffering and cataclysm, the forces of good will permanently triumph over the forces of evil.”
The beauty of these predictions is that they’re never “wrong.” For true believers, they’re just off by a few years — maybe decades, centuries, a millennium or two.
In the realm of governance and politics, there’s not a lot of things that are new. The rhetoric and the ideas behind most policy proposals are as old as the Garden of Eden. Come to think of it, politics should be the world’s oldest profession. “When you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.” That could be the first campaign pledge in recorded human history.
Here’s another ancient but still widespread belief: that other people — not us, of course — are too ignorant, too immoral, too weak-willed, etc, to know what’s good for them so they must be led (dragged by the ear if need be) by enlightened, intelligent and virtuous leaders (like us).
For thousands and thousands of years, humanity has been trying to solve, more or less, the same problems of governance and politics, with practically the same old solutions that many of us today believe are new. Not a lot of us are eager to find out the actual results of the previous solutions.
“This is about the most important election ever to be held.”
“We must all join together and improve our economy.”
Those statements were made by election candidates in the NMI…half a century ago.
And here’s what some of the voters back then had to say about their elected officials:
“Don’t you ever stop and think just what the hell our Congressmen are doing for us? … Oh yes, our Congressmen tell us that they introduce bills to remedy [problems]. But the Administration, they tell us, will not cooperate with them and other officials and especially Congressmen from the other districts….”
“Employees in any field of work should be guided by the principles of integrity, honesty and fairness. A problem develops when public employees do not practice these principles consistently. Friends or relatives receive special treatment and the ‘nobodies’ receive harsh ‘justice.’ The public these employees are supposed to serve soon lose confidence in such employees and in the work they are doing.”
Happily, elections and selective amnesia go hand in hand.
oOo
Speaking of government plans, the then-Marianas Visitors Bureau came up with a 179-page “tourism master plan” 32 years ago. (MVB became MVA through legislation so that the then-newly elected governor wouldn’t have to fire the then-MVB chief who was an appointee of the previous governor. When MVB became MVA the MVB chief’s job ceased to exist. Political problem solved. A recent example of this political wizardry is the law that turned NMTI into NMTECH. Guess what happened to the NMTI chief’s job position.)
Anyway. MVB’s 1990 master plan was a 10-year plan. At the time, five-year plans — popularized by jolly good ol’ Uncle Joe Stalin — were already passé.
According to the MVB plan — excuse me — master plan, its goal was “to provide the CNMI government with an overall course of action to guide the development of tourism in accordance with economic, sociocultural, physical/environmental and administrative goals and objectives.”
Excellent.
And what was the state of the local economy in 1990?
“The CNMI economy has grown rapidly since 1984, based primarily on a vigorous tourism industry catering mainly to the Japanese market…. [A] strong yen vis-à-vis the dollar and Japanese government policies promoting overseas travel have resulted in a booming industry and rapid growth of direct and indirect tourism-related businesses such as tour operations, restaurants, retail outlets and firms offering sports/leisure activities.” Moreover, “garment manufacturing and the receipt of U.S. government financial assistance have contributed significantly to the Commonwealth’s economic growth.”
Then and now, however, “Government is a significant component of the CNMI economy and the largest single employer in the Northern Marianas.”
A rapidly growing economy needed more workers, the master plan stated, hence there was a sharp increase in the number of nonresident workers. But not to worry. “The CNMI government has taken steps to reduce the number of nonresident workers in the total labor force through legislation.”
Right on.
“Looking to the future,” the master plan stated, “the probability of continued growth of the [tourism] industry is high….” The master plan came up with two possibilities. Under Growth Scenario A, estimated visitor arrivals to the CNMI in the year 2000 would total 1,235,430. Under the more optimistic Growth Scenario B, there would be over 2.9 million tourists visiting the CNMI in the year 2000.
Actual total arrivals in the year 2000:
529,000.
(P.S. Arrivals would drop to 342,000 in 2011, but would reach 653,000 in 2017 before plummeting to 487,000 in 2019 [post-Yutu]. Covid-19 drastically brought down the numbers to 88,000 in 2020 and 12,000 in 2021.)
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