Columnists

THE TRUTH of the matter is WE need real REFORMS, as all of the Boards and Commissions are OVERPAID for the work they do. This is a great opportunity to begin REFORMING (overhauling) our government but I do want to commend the effort to try and create some kind of “pay-scheme” for the Casino Commiss…

MY brother, Jim, and I were cruising through the Federated States of Micronesia in Adaline a few years back when I decided to stop in and see Bob, an old friend who ran a scuba shop.  I won’t mention the island in order to protect the innocent, but it should be enough to know that it was near Chuuk…

IN a recent National Review cover story, Mario Loyola, who is Puerto Rican, noted that the once-bustling neighborhood where his grandparents lived now “sits eerily abandoned, a common sight in Puerto Rico.” According to Loyola, “The island has lost more than 15 percent of its population since the s…

THERE is an inescapable fact affecting communities in the Pacific, and until now we have not spent much time talking about it.  Soon will come a time, however, when we have no choice but to face it.  The population is getting older. Around 70 years ago, the largest group of children ever born came …

WITHOUT ARPA funds, the CNMI is back to where it was in March 2020, when the tourism-based economy had to shut down because of global pandemic restrictions. In April of that year, the CNMI government, with the assistance of Graduate School USA, held a virtual Fiscal Response Summit. The participant…

WHEN still a boy, William Mariner left England in 1804 on the ship Port-au-Prince for a whaling expedition to the Pacific.  After two years on the high seas, the ship anchored at Lifuka, one of the islands of Tonga, to rest and refit.  By that time, the crew was as ragged as the sails. Possibly bec…

THE truth of the matter is WE are facing the biggest financial challenge since the creation of the Commonwealth.  The deficit is a paradigm created by Ralph & David, who is on the run, that must be broken if WE are to overcome this challenge that can only happen by “thinking-outside-the-box” (b…

TWENTY-EIGHT years ago, the two biggest news items on island were the “federal takeover” bill introduced in the U.S. Congress by the new Republican leadership; and (drum roll please) the medical referral deficit amounting to $14.5 million — worth $27.8 million today. The then-Department of Public H…

I HAVE been described as old-fashioned.  Honestly, I do not know what to make of that. In my experience, that can be a good thing or bad.  See what I mean. Growing up, when my father said my music was just noise, I said he was old-fashioned.  That was a strange thing for me to say because I listen …

JAPAN created a vibrant economy in the NMI and the rest of the Micronesian islands that were formerly under the German flag (the Marshalls, Palau, the present-day FSM). “At first,” says historian Francis X. Hezel, SJ, “the Japanese Imperial Treasury supplied almost the entire administrative costs f…