Memories can be short. That’s how we end up electing liars and idiots whose lies and idiocy fall behind the veil of time. It’s how we trumpet sweeping tariffs, forgetting that the last time they happened, so did World War II. And it’s probably how we forgot that in February of 2012, the Hotel Association of the Northern Mariana Islands stumped with full force for a casino that they claimed would turn around the economic fortunes of the CNMI.
Journalists 13 years ago probably should have asked those HANMI officers who talked up the big casino game who they meant when they said “CNMI.” Because, fortunes did come for the people who pushed for that casino. According to ledgers leaked to Kandit and which we published in 2020, the politically connected made out big, including some peddlers of so-called journalism. But for everyone else? Well, if you live in the CNMI, you know what the truth is.
You’re living it every day.
That casino was nothing for the everyday folk that HANMI said it would be.
Even the Saipan Chamber of Commerce – that current dust off of a sell out to the CCP – warned a decade ago that casino gambling was a bad idea for tourism, new industry, and economic sustainability.
But there was HANMI, chugging along the gambling train with their choo choo about their expertise in business, gambling away the future of the CNMI.
And, well whaddaya know? HANMI is still around. Still pushing for all things China in a country clearly preparing defenses on the threat of war with the CCP. Still parading their big business credentials. Still bullying their way to relevancy despite decades of getting it wrong to the detriment of the CNMI.
Who actually believes that any of this has been expensive for HANMI? Their corporate members aren’t lining up for food stamps, worrying whether CUC will cut off their electricity at home, or facing down the economic barrel of austerity the way public employees have been forced to deal with life.
While the average CNMI resident received a pittance of pandemic-era federal funding in the form of stimulus checks, some of the wealthiest HANMI members got corporate welfare checks in the millions. It was supposed to be for tourism recovery.
Where the hell are the tourists?
And now HANMI wants you to believe that it isn’t their fault. That their failure to turn those millions in corporate welfare into plane loads of tourists from Japan, Korea, and yes, even China, is somehow the fault of the American government and the Palacios commitment to end the CNMI’s tragic and nearly treasonous relationship with the CCP. That the answer to the economic woes of the Commonwealth is found in that same well that has over and over led to the destruction of the CNMI economy.
That it isn’t America and its military who should be trusted, but China. That’s what HANMI wants you to believe. It is laughable to anyone whose memory isn’t so short.
There is one constant in the boom and bust trajectory of the CNMI economy, and it is HANMI.
Here’s our final and most relevant point on this subject: Why are we taking business advice from businessmen who are failing and begging for bailout?
Wake up. They’re trying to take the CNMI for a ride. Again.
