“[MVA provides] a way for well-connected people to team up with well-connected businesses to fleece the public.” – Mabel Doge Luhan
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By Mabel Doge Luhan for Mabel’s Table, Kandit News & Views
Abolish MVA.
When I say this, the usual response is, “They’re doing the best they can, in a difficult situation.”
That might be true. But it’s no reason to keep them around.
We could hire a troupe of nude Panamanian jugglers for the governor’s office. I’m sure they’d be great jugglers, and do the best they can. But we don’t need them and can’t afford them, even if they’d bring what Governor Palacios sorely lacks: BALLS.
So we shouldn’t hire them. Even if they do the best they can. And so it is with the Cannabis Commission, the Zoning Commission, and at least a quarter of the CNMI government.
And so it is with MVA. There’s no law or regulation or other reason that we need to have them around. And “doing the best they can” is not enough of a justification.
Tourism in the CNMI is dying. And we’re spending millions of dollars for MVA to give us monthly updates on how far it’s fallen. Millions of dollars that are sorely needed just about everywhere else in our islands, even if by people not as well-connected as the MVA vacation club.
Thanks to the Musk-Trump-Putin presidency, no foreign tourists want to visit the US. Look it up. Foreign leisure travel, and even business travel, to the US dove off a cliff after January 2025. Rightly or wrongly, even people with valid US visas don’t want to end up shackled on a plane to El Salvador. (Not to mention all the dollars the US is losing that we normally earn on foreigners coming for education and medical care.) Those are facts, from real people in the tourism business, not from the online geniuses whose keyboards (and brains) only have the letters T, D, and S.
February tourism to the CNMI fell 27% from 2024 to 2025. To get back to (already abysmal) 2024 levels, we’d need an increase not of 27%, but of 37% (reversal asymmetry). Yet according to MVA’s own statements, things will get worse before they get better, and there are “challenges.” And basically we shouldn’t expect any payoffs from the money we’re spending on MVA now.
So why are we spending those millions? Why?
MVA promises that by the end of the year, they’re going to be “branding” — and until then, we’re supposed to spend a few hundred thousand dollars a month on them so they can “prepare to brand?” “Branding” requires a one-hour Zoom meeting with a legitimate ad agency (at least they finally hired one, after years of me haranguing them and untold millions spent on cronies and scams). It doesn’t require a year of preparation (H) and millions of dollars in salaries and travel.
MVA vacationed in Australia again, and we paid the bill. At least they no longer claim that we should expect Australian tourists. Though they do claim they’ll get us “new markets” — and if the countries next door don’t want to visit us, then why would people from the other side of the world who have a wealth of better, cheaper destinations want to visit us?
Oh, right. The most comforting and politically viable answer: Because of our culture. Sure. Because no other place in the world has culture, right? And when people plan their vacations, what they most care about is culture — not clean beaches, good food, and cheap taxis. Culture. Must be why all our visitors are always eagerly studying Chamorro language and Carolinian navigation.
We have culture. Or as the Marianas Variety would say, “plenty culture.” But our visitor[ arrival numbers] don’t explode. In fact, their numbers have been collapsing. And MVA admits it can’t do anything about it. Yet we keep throwing money down the sinkhole.
Wake the heck up. The millions we’re spending on MVA could pay for cops, schools, medical referrals, or even beach bathrooms. Instead of salaries for four “accountants,” two “statisticians,” and untold office-fuls of “liaisons,” “specialists,” and “special assistants” scrolling Instagram in their government-paid air conditioning.
But then, this is the same administration that refuses to disband absolutely ridiculous “commissions” and “boards,” remove regulations that serve only to create shakedown opportunities, and let go of entirely political hires. No matter what kind of austerity we’re supposedly under.
It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the same administration absolutely refuses to acknowledge that the problems with our tourism are a bad product (for the same reasons for decades now), collapse of Chinese outbound tourism (for Chinese economic and political reasons), and collapse of US inbound tourism (US self-inflicted).
The solution to our lack of tourists is not giving MVA more money or more “global branding.” The solution is not begging for exemptions from caps on direct flights from China that nobody wants to run anyway. The problem is our islands, the Chinese Communist Party, and Donald Trump. Only two of which we can do anything about. But of course we won’t.
Rather than looking seriously at our tourism product, and being honest about the extent to which the Trump presidency is destroying the American (including CNMI) economy, it’s a lot easier paying MVA for another year, so they can tell us yet another season of comforting lies. Culture.
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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.
