By Mabel Doge Luhan
What’s that?
A Saipan newspaper article with a brain?
Shockingly, the Marianas Variety’s October 14th article “Retirees want a Settlement Fund trustee from NMI” includes ACTUAL ANALYSIS AND THOUGHT. Yes, in the Marianas Variety!
It’s only two sentences that suggest the presence of brain waves (I still run SETI@Home on my Amstrad): one sentence pointing out that the “information” the retirees supposedly lack is available online, and another sentence pointing out that the bonus the retirees seek is above what the court granted them. But that’s two sentences more thought and analysis than the Variety usually puts into its articles. Maybe it’s just because the retirees’ demands are among Zaldy’s favorite bugaboos, right up there with prosecutors, liberals, and education.
And I hate to say that Zaldy is exactly right about the retirees. But he is. The retirees’ demand for a trustee “from here” is a bald-faced attempt to get someone they can strongarm and blackguard to cater to their whims.
Which is funny in itself, because the amount of money in the settlement fund is fixed — all you can do by getting a different trustee is change how the money is divvied up. No matter how much they threaten and intimidate the trustee, the pot of money won’t grow. It can just be distributed faster, which is what they most likely want.
But Joyce Tang is not the right person for the job, according to those wise retirees. She is not only from Guam, but even worse, doesn’t have relatives who can be recruited to cajole her into whatever those retirees want doing. And what they want is most likely another lump-sum payout, just like what happened before — when the prices of pickups as well as pick-me-ups skyrocketed, and quite a few of our retirees seriously damaged their cardiac health. That lump-sum payout lasted them two weeks at most, and now, of course, our retirees want another one. Moth, flame: hello!
And of course the retirees want to be “prioritized” in the government budget. Which sounds great. But as Zaldy says in every one of his editorials, you can’t “prioritize” everything. You can only prioritize something at the expense of something else. So what are we going to cut in order to give the retirees a 33% bonus on top of what they’re legally entitled to? (Yes, 25% of the original pie-in-the-sky pension amount is equal to 33% of the reduced amount in the settlement.)
And why of all people should the retirees get a 33% bonus, when we could do a lot more for the community by funding public goods instead of a pension bonus? Why can’t We The People give ourselves a bonus? Oh, right, because every retiree is a voter. I forgot.
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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.
