By Mabel Doge Luhan for Mabel’s Table, Kandit News & Views
Oh my, Kim (and not Kardashian) wants four hundred million dollars! Sure sounds like a lot of money when we don’t have it. Was it a mere ten years ago when the Marianas Variety was talking about IPI’s imaginary seven billion buckaroos as if it was just pocket change? And wasn’t it a mere three years since BOOST was handing out six-figure checks to anyone who could demonstrate basic proficiency in fellatio? Why, they even gave away almost a million dollars to a literal foreign intelligence officer. And how much is the previous administration accused of stealing — maybe also a few hundred million?
It felt better when we were on the having end of that money instead of the begging end, didn’t it?
And now, after receiving electoral congratulations and vows of support from you, the world’s richest man has teamed up with the world’s orangest psychopath and a bunch of literal nazis — to cut all government spending that doesn’t personally benefit them. Everything. From the Department of Education (Elon’s fourteen anchor babies can get private tutors, just as he did as a child) to the Department of Agriculture (you know that’s where your SNAP comes from, right?) to the Department of Defense (which might just be subsumed into Минобороны России).
Every MAGA community supported the cuts, until they realized they were included. Their lifeblood was Elon’s excess. Oh noes! It’s an age-old scenario, isn’t it? As I presciently wrote exactly one year ago ( https://kanditnews.com/so-
It’s a lot like our very own Arnold and Kim being completely obliviously the only brown people in a room (metaphorically, or even literally, as in that recent photo) of virulent white racists — and then wondering why when the rations run out and the carving knives come out, all eyes are on them. Why, who could’ve ever imagined!
So in this age of Elon & Co cutting everything, hilariously, KKH has “been writing letters to every federal agency, requesting them ‘to spare the CNMI from any cuts.’”
Wow, letters! That’s powerful!
When Elon & Co come storming through shutting down entire agencies, someone in that building is going to hold up a letter (would love to see the knee-slapper grammar and usage errors in said letter) from some brown woman (or “female,” as the incels have it) in some far-off territory — and they’ll say “Oh, never mind! We cut everything in every state in the US, but yeah, we’re going to spare some far-off island we’ve never heard of full of brown people who can’t even vote.”
Right.
It gets better though! Kim doesn’t just want us spared from the cuts. She wants $400MM+ extra free cash federal money-money for us. Because reasons.
KKH has a law degree and presumably some access to basic newspapers. Did she not know what platform she was running on with the GOP? Which is cutting off funding for everything that doesn’t personally benefit Trump and Musk? Is she incapable of reading the room? Or is this just her attempt to be able to say “Well, I did ask!”
She even asks for “expanded labor access,” i.e. allowing undocumented people to be the backbone of our workforce, as they’ve been ever since — did she not read the GOP platform? Ok, let’s rephrase: did she not watch some TikToks summarizing the GOP platform?
At least she’s on board with some of the GOP’s even worse ideas: “[T]he CNMI has urged Congress to amend birthright citizenship in the Covenant,” according to Kim’s Twitter post as quoted in the Variety.
Really now. “The CNMI” has “urged” Congress for this? You are a liar, Kim. Because that is a lie. Certainly you and some of your friends may have “urged” (funny how you can’t just order people around in the big world) Congress to amend the Covenant and the Constitution to better suit your and your paymasters’ political and financial goals. But don’t call yourself “the CNMI.” You are not us.
More broadly, Kim’s vilification of “birth tourism” makes no sense. Or would make no sense if she were interested in the CNMI and our people, government, and economy. It might make sense given whatever the molasses her actual goals are. Birth tourism might be our only real, profitable industry, or at least used to be. Those “birth tourists” were dropping large amounts of cash at our hospital, our pharmacies, our grocery stores, and our apartment buildings. Why are we against this, remind me again?
And then she descends into the monomania that might make us all question her mental health: the absolute obsession with nonstop flights from China. Seriously, can you imagine a congressperson, plus a newspaper editor, who are so completely obsessed with such a trivial nothingball of an issue? Oh sure, I know: it’s what “has been ordered” up above. I get it. But that doesn’t mean that we have to approve of it.
Repeat after me: the lack of tourists to the CNMI is not because of a lack of nonstop flights. Tourists take many connecting flights. Just ask your employee Chris Concepcion about all the time he’s spent loitering around airports!
For actually bringing in tourists, how about instead of changing the Covenant and the Constitution, we, you know, break the hotel and taxi cartels, put bathrooms at beaches, stop shakedowns of food vendors, and set up a simple tourist information booth in Garapan (that’s actually staffed, with people who actually speak Chinese and Korean)? How about we enforce the federal law against cockfighting? You know, do what every other first-world country does to bring in tourism? Well, Chris Concepcion is working for you now, so you have a ton of tourism expertise in-house! (OUTBOUND OF COURSE.)
And none of those initiatives hold a profit motive for the political or business elite, so none of them will be pursued or promoted by KKH and her ilk — but they’re what would bring actual tourists here. Not meaningless nonstop flights. Not “seats,” as MVA claimed for decades.
Kim, in case you haven’t read a newspaper in the past five years: Chinese people aren’t traveling abroad anymore. And although nonstop flights from China are about the limit of your intellectual capacity to understand this situation, it’s really a lot more complicated than that — and it has nothing to do with those nonstop flights, actually. You’re chasing those old highs from the IPI days, I know. Look: those days aren’t coming back. You’ll still be chasing your tail and those fat IPI retainers decades from now if we don’t stop you. Even Si Rafet is no longer hanging out with Chinese “investors” — shouldn’t you take his lead?
The funniest line in KKH’s letter shows that she knows as much about the State Department as Orville knows about cunnilingus: “I am urging [Secretary of State Marco Rubio] to work with embassies in Japan, Australia, the Philippines, etc., to help us expand our tourism market.” Wait, what?! US embassies in those countries (“Etc”?! She couldn’t name any more countries?) are supposed to expand tourism to the CNMI? Has Kim ever, like, been to an embassy? Maybe seen one from afar? Maybe in our prime tourism markets of The Republic of South Korea and Czechoslovakia? Kim is not very well-informed, but this is getting ridiculous even for her.
But no more ridiculous than an island of poor brown people dependent on foreign labor and foreign tourism cheering on a political party, and its candidates, who are hellbent on destroying poor brown people, foreign labor, and foreign tourism. Putting us back where they imagine we belong — which is certainly not “their” America. Except when they say “We,” Kim thinks that includes her. In Finu Chamorro terms, she thinks it’s “ta,” when it’s actually “in.”
Malcolm X, besides being great in the sack (A LADY NEVER TELLS, BUT I DO!), saw KKH coming:
“The house Negro, when the master said ‘we,’ he said ‘we.’ ‘Our house caught on fire.’ And you’ll find that same Negro today. Still saying ‘we.’”
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Mabel Doge Luhan is a woman of loose morals. She resides in Kagman V, where she pursues her passions of crocheting, beatboxing, and falconry.
