Plenty Water

“Because if marketing in Mainland China would lead to more business for the hotels, why don’t the hotels do it themselves? After all, the hotels would receive ALL of the after-tax profit of those supposed additional tourists. The CNMI government would receive only a sliver of that after-tax profit, called taxes. So the hotels, a privately owned, for-profit business, should be eager to spend money to make money. Somehow they’re not spending this money. And yet the CNMI government, which stands to gain only a few percent of these hotel profits or revenues, is supposed to be spending this money?”

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By Mabel Doge Luhan, Kandit News & Views

My former minions at the newsroom I ran in Montreux couldn’t believe “Plenty Water” was a real headline from a real newspaper. They thought I, or the newspaper at hand, was engaging in a bit of April Fool’s waggery! Oh no. This was an actual headline, from an actual newspaper, that purports to be written in English.

At least Emmanuel Erediano is now internationally famous. The dot-matrix printout of his headline from my IBM PROPRINTER III now adorns quite a few newsrooms, right alongside that classic Marianas Variety headline of days past, “Medicaid Babies Explode.”

The links are

https://www.mvariety.com/news/local/plenty-water/article_5b000f27-01b8-48b6-8e2e-9133d360a867.html

and

https://www.mvariety.com/news/local/medicaid-babies-explode/article_b6c824c3-1319-576f-9aa9-331cd7d404be.html if you don’t believe me.

Even the Variety’s section heading, “Letter to the Editor,” screams illiteracy. “Student First,” anyone? And “Senior Citizen On Board.”

But what’s inside their rag of a newspaper is even worse!

Consider, for example, the latest press release from HANMI, printed without comment in the April 3rd Marianas Variety.

Don’t even worry about the elementary-school-level arithmetic error in the very first paragraph. (87% of 43.81% is not 38.18%, and why are we using two decimal places of precision here anyway?)

Don’t even worry about the comparison not even being a real comparison, because the denominator changed when the Hyatt closed down. The proper method, for anyone who paid attention in middle school, would have been of rooms sold year-to-year, which yields a result of a 27% (and not 13%) decrease in rooms sold in February 2025 vs 2024.

Worry, instead, about why we are supposed to read, and care about, the business problems of a private business association (WHICH IS NOT AT ALL A PRICE-FIXING CARTEL, BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE ILLEGAL, JUST LIKE COCKFIGHTING AND BRIBERY). Why do they keep whining to us, the public?

Oh, the next paragraph tells us why: this private business association is demanding the cash-strapped CNMI government to do its marketing! It even has the bolabola to tell the CNMI government where it demands to have its government-paid ad campaigns run: Mainland China, of course.

Which suggests an interesting business logic.

Because if marketing in Mainland China would lead to more business for the hotels, why don’t the hotels do it themselves? After all, the hotels would receive ALL of the after-tax profit of those supposed additional tourists. The CNMI government would receive only a sliver of that after-tax profit, called taxes. So the hotels, a privately owned, for-profit business, should be eager to spend money to make money. Somehow they’re not spending this money. And yet the CNMI government, which stands to gain only a few percent of these hotel profits or revenues, is supposed to be spending this money?

Why? I mean, yes, I know the real answer is because of the free buffets and free rooms for visiting relatives. But let’s pretend none of that ever happens (BECAUSE LIKE COCKFIGHTING, IT WOULD BE ILLEGAL). And let’s consider the pure business logic — why should the CNMI government pay up for this marketing, when the hotels won’t pay up themselves?

Can you imagine a business deciding that it’s not worth to spend its own money on marketing, but trying to convince the government that it’s worth it for the government to spend our public money on that marketing?

All goes by without comment from the supposed tax-hating, fiscally conservative Marianas Variety. [It’s as if t]hey just open wide and print whatever HANMI tells them to print.

Including that “We have a great product to offer visitors.” Right. More like ‘We want Chinese visitors because they’d need a visa to go anywhere else, and their money-laundering operations benefit some of our businesses.’

Not that any visitors are coming over anyway. Anyone with their head not spelunking their own sphincter (so not the Marianas Variety) knows that foreign tourists have stopped traveling to the US since the coronation of Elon Moscow and Donald Dump. It’s in every legitimate newspaper in the US and abroad. Of course, despite being critically important to the CNMI, that’s not covered in the Variety. They are still trying to figure out how connecting flights work[, it seems].

Speaking of leisure travel, at least MVA gallivanted to Australia again! They hadn’t gone down under in several months, after all! Vacationing in Perth is what it takes to get tourists pouring in to the CNMI, and that there’s absolutely no way to remind airlines that we exist without in-person meetings — and we needed to send a full four people there, because we just have so much money these days!

Plenty water, indeed.