By Joe Q. Public for Kandit News & Views
Your leaders are failing you as usual!
Yes that is correct, once again the leaders of Guam are failing you over and over. The saddest is part is they simply do not care!
Let me explain a little. Please look back to the excitement of 2018 and the “ALL IN” movement of Lou & Josh. Remember how you felt after 16 long years of Republican governors and how exciting it was to welcome a new era into our political landscape?
I, too, was excited and even donated to a political group for the first time in my life. It felt exciting to see what was going to come. Fast forward six very, very long years later and what do we have? We have just another greedy, arrogant, condescending administration that could not care less about the needs of the people, and the effects their actions have on the people of Guam.
Seriously folks, before you judge me for what I am saying take a moment and look around you. Once you do that please tell yourself one single thing that is better today than it was six years ago, just one. Schools are falling apart, drug offenses sky rocketing, health care would be a joke only if it wasn’t so tragic, cost of living the highest it has ever been, consumer spending down, consumer confidence down, wages flat, jobs flat, new business openings flat, population fleeing Guam for greener pastures. But, hey, the governor has her pie-in-the-sky hospital underway, right? So all is good?
Notice I left out tourism above. This was on purpose, being this subject alone is the most dangerous of them all. Since the [1970s], tourism has been the life blood of the Guam economy, it is too important to call it the backbone because you can break your back and still live but without blood you can’t. This now circulating idea that Guam can survive without tourism is insane to me and should be to everyone who calls Guam home.
We live on an island, we have no domestic products made here, we ship no goods out, we manufacture nothing [that significantly offsets imports], we have no tech hubs, we have no natural resources to export. We have two things that drive our economy to the third thing. Military/federal government spending which is great right now for GRT purposes, tourism spending (this is hotel tax, GRT, local spending, shopping, tours, dining out, etc.); together these lead to local economic spending.
Without these two things working well Guam has no future, it is a simple truth we need to accept. Whether you be a fan of Trump or not it is a fact he is erratic and unpredictable and most likely does not know where Guam is let alone understand its strategic importance. Say Pete Hegseth wakes up tomorrow from his latest bender and decides that the build-up going on here is not in America’s best interest any longer and, boom, we are in a desperate situation. Do you really feel this is not a possibility? If you don’t it is time take the MAGA hat off and think for yourself a little!
Last week the governor of Hawaii announced a $6.5 million initiative for the island of Maui as they are still in recovery from the fires in Lehaina 18 months ago. However the interesting part was that it was a marketing initiative to combat the decline in tourists from Los Angeles and the surrounding areas that were effectedby the fires there last month and the reduction in tourism this would cause to Maui.
Get that: a governor of a US state/territory actually recognizing an issue and stepping in to do something about it. Yesterday GVB announced that after five long years since our governor closed our businesses, schools, beaches and malls and had the National Guard stopping us in our own streets to let us know COVID is dangerous, we have actually accomplished nothing.
Our tourism is at 42 percent of pre-pandemic levels and down 10 percent from last year, we have the slowest tourism recovery in the WORLD. We hear all kinds of excuses, like the weak Yen versus the Dollar, Japanese economic woes, Korean airline crashes and whatever BS they can throw at the wall. This is all nonsense and simply misdirection from the fact that our government is full of people who should not be in the positions they are in and our governor is simply incapable of caring about this enough to step up and do something about it.
Where is our governor while our most important economic driver continues to fall apart and dwindle away? When was the last time she made an appearance? Was it the infamous GVB meeting where she appointed her son to run the tourism recovery? Because I am sure he was the most qualified one for that job!! Where is the leadership we need and crave in a time of crisis?
As our governor prepares to take another $400 million of YOUR FEDERAL MONEY to build a hospital that fireman, EMTs, doctors, ambulance drivers and every other person who has testified says ‘do not build,’ she is absent and silent when the people of Guam need her the most.
Wake up people. You are being led down a path that will end horribly. We will be like Saipan a lot sooner than you think: full of shuttered hotels, restaurants, businesses and streets. We must focus our efforts on the tourism recovery and we desperately need the governor to pay attention to this.
But where is she? Where has she been? Does she even care that countless people have lost their livelihood, businesses, life savings, dreams, and futures because our government cannot wake up and see the big picture that we cannot survive here without tourism?
My feeling is that our elected leaders simply do not care about you or me, they care about getting reelected and that is it!!
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Joe Q. Public is a deeply affected and concerned citizen of Guam
