We print what people tell us, MV 21

By Jeffrey C. Turbitt

There is an old saying in journalism that notes, "We don't print the truth, we print what people tell us." Nowhere was that on greater display than in the local media over the last few weeks.

Last week a story in the Saipan Tribune offered the headline: "Wage hikes harmful to NMI." The rest of the story followed that line completely, noting that a "U.S. Labor report said that raising the local minimum wage to the federal level would have adverse impacts on employment and lead to additional population declines in the Commonwealth."

Quoting press releases and writing one source stories with cherry picked report quotes from a local administration hell bent on keeping its poorest citizens poor is easy. Taking the time to read the actual report to get the full story and canvassing the community to get a broad range of opinion is harder.

What was completely omitted from the news was this caveat from the actual report about the recently enacted wage hike: "The Department’s research was limited by two significant factors: 1. Short Time Frame. The reporting time-frame specified in the legislation – no later than 8 months from the date of enactment (May 25, 2007) – did not provide sufficient time to observe actual effects of the minimum wage increases. The period following the initial increase was too short for significant observable effects to materialize. Adjustments of employment arrangements and of patterns of living standards typically do not occur instantaneously following a change in a key economic parameter. Immediate changes may be too small in scale to observe, and it may require the passage of many months before cumulative effects become large enough to observe."

Translated into simpler English, this statement above is code from academics to other academics that means the report does not have any reliable data, is speculation, has no merit, but it was requested by their bosses so they have to come up with something -- and please don't slam our lame research in any academic journals because we need to get a professorship somewhere when Bush leaves office next January.

This same story states, "Increasing the CNMI wage to $7.25 an hour, the report said, is comparable to raising the U.S. minimum wage to $16.50 an hour. No further explanation is given, notably this part from the report: "The scheduled increase in the minimum wage to $7.25 (by 2015) will likely affect at least 75 percent of wage and salary workers in the CNMI. By comparison, in order to directly affect 75 percent of U.S. hourly workers, the minimum wage would need to be raised to $16.50, the 75th percentile mark for wage and salary workers who are paid hourly rates."

All that means is most everyone here in the private sector makes meager wages. To affect 75 percent of the the U.S. population, the minimum wage would have to go to $16.50 because people in the mainland make so much more than us now. We're also talking about 2015. That statistic is hardly an argument against the increased minimum wage, but it sure looked like it.

Economics is hardly an exact science, so without data, these Bush Administration folks followed the usual Right Wing party line, which is to support anything that aids big business to the detriment of the working poor. Remember, this is an administration that kept its surgeon general from giving his honest opinion on stem cell research, tried to muzzle its top climatologist from speaking out on global warming and amplified sketchy intelligence in a State of the Union address to create an atmosphere for war. I'm sure the message came across to the economists who wrote this report to follow traditional Right Wing economic dogma about wages. Blogger Ken Phillips provides an excellent, detailed critique of the report at http://www.sosaipan.blogspot.com/.

The lack of the complete story wasn't the only lousy reporting by this reporter, Agnes Donato, who did a much better job than this paper's reporter on the federalization rally a few weeks ago. Continuing the one source, press release format in a separate story, she quoted the governor's public information officer Charles P. Reyes, Jr. as saying: “Just about everybody is in agreement that the Commonwealth cannot sustain additional increases to the minimum wage. We will do everything in our power to communicate this message to the U.S. Congress." Nowhere in the story was another viewpoint presented.

Really. Just about everybody. The local people not in the government bureaucracy making $3.55 are satisfied with those wages and don't want a raise? Where was Taotao Tano Greg Cruz's voice, a voice we hear daily and even discussing things like dentistry and medicine, who I presumed was the person who spoke up for the average working local?

Not once in five years of reading papers and discussing these types of issues with students and their parents did I hear anyone oppose a higher minimum wage. I can't recall hearing anyone not in the government leadership or the business community oppose a higher minimum wage. Some in the business community even acknowledge the shame of our wages. In fact, I would say most everyone not in the government leadership or business ownership community supports the higher minimum wage. Any reporter who walks around Kobler, San Antonio, Dandan or elsewhere would find out pretty quickly that it isn't so unanimous, but those folks don't write many press releases.

Real journalism is hard. It requires research and work. Writing one source stories from a press release from an administration that didn't win the most votes in Saipan while barely getting elected at all and whose party was massacred in the last election is easy and not very good.

Jeffrey C. Turbitt is the language arts department chairman at Saipan Southern High School, as well as an avid scuba diver and traveler. He offers more thoughts in his blog Hypercritical Thoughts at: www.turbittj.blogspot.com/ He welcomes feedback, tips and story ideas at turbittj@yahoo.com. His column appears regularly on Wednesdays.

I just don't get it

Let's say you were one of those people who think contract workers are taking our jobs and that the indigenous people are the people of the land and they should be given preference and you'd just rather have things as they were back in the day. Lots of people think that way I'm sure.

What evidence has there ever been that the local government won't continue to flood the labor force and the island with workers from economically deprived countries? Who brought them here in the first place? Who is trying to make damn sure you, the person not in the bureaucracy, won't make more than $3.55, and fought tooth and nail to keep it at $3.05 for years? What is it about a local government that can't maintain a diesel engine power plant that makes you want them in control of anything?

If you are a business owner, all that makes sense. It's probably nice to hire accountants and engineers for $4.00 or less. If you are the average local working person, local control makes so little sense for you as to be absurd -- the bureaucracy has to shrink. The CNMI budget is down more than 25 percent in two years -- $60 million dollars less than the Babauta days and it's going lower. It gets estimated even lower every quarter. People will have to get private sector jobs and the local government simply isn't on your side. It wants you to make $3.55, and it wanted you at $3.05. Repeat, the upgraded immigration status for the foreigners thing is dead. Start using your heads and look at who is really on your side. It sure isn't the local government doing its best to see you don't get a .50 cent raise.

I'm sick of even having to write this, but it gets blasted in the news each day and the stance people take against their own interest is so ridiculous I want to scream.

Let them eat cake

I love this message. The commonwealth can't handle poor people making a little more money. It's even worse journalism because it only gets the perspective of rich government bureaucrats bought and paid for by business interests. Those annoying poor people don't have much of a spokesman, so it's "unanimous" that a .50 cent increase is a bad idea and the commonwealth can't handle it. Go walk around Kobler, San Antonio and Dandan Agnes Donato and see if it's unanimous there instead of the lazy way and just reporting this administration's viewpoint from some email they sent you -- an administration that barely got elected two years ago and whose party just got massacred in the last election.

Is it really so much better to have the highest food, gas and medicine prices in America on the lowest wages in America? Here is one thing this government can't sustain: $500,000 to the Rota Mayor to dole out to friends for this casino when the commissioner of education is saying they don't have the money to open schools next August or make payroll past June. Let's see if Taotao Tano Greg Cruz blasts this one. My bet is no.

As to the part of population declines, good. This place doesn't have the infrastructure (load shedding anyone) to handle the population it has, and God forbid we lose some of those $3.55 per hour jobs. Don't run off with all those Mcjobs, please. The $16.50 thing I suppose is some kind of nonsense about percentage increase. Yes, because our minimum wage was so scandalously low before and for so long. Essentials like food, power, medicine and gas aren't cheaper here -- they're more. If anything, our minimum wage should be higher than the mainland to account for that fact. “I think any major stakeholder in the wage issue will agree that the next increase should not be implemented, " the Governor's Press Secretary Charles P. Reyes, Jr. said. Again, go ask the broke parents of my students from Dandan, Kobler and San Antonio. They're not major stakeholders, so I guess they don't matter, but I don't think it is quite so unanimous among the working or non-working poor.

'Suspend further wage hikes'

Armed with the federally prepared wage hike impact report, the Fitial administration vows to lobby intensely against the next scheduled increase in the local minimum wage.

“Just about everybody is in agreement that the Commonwealth cannot sustain additional increases to the minimum wage. We will do everything in our power to communicate this message to the U.S. Congress,” press secretary Charles P. Reyes Jr. said yesterday.

In its report submitted to Congress last Friday, the U.S. Department of Labor said that raising the local minimum wage to the federal level would have adverse impacts on employment and lead to additional population declines in the Commonwealth. Increasing the CNMI wage to $7.25 an hour, the report said, is comparable to raising the U.S. minimum wage to $16.50 an hour

We're still at $3.05 through creative accounting

After all the crying over the minimum wage increase and all the lobbyists and public relations firms hired to keep wages low, all paid for on the public tit, I found out from Cynthia through her contract worker friends that some, and probably most I intend to find out, of our local businesses merely cut off food allowances and raised the rents on the rat holes that go for contract workers barracks so that it's all a wash. Others just cut back hours. Contract workers are still, and apparently will perpetually be, in that $3.05 quicksand. It's this kind of thing that causes books like this to be written, websites like this to be a top Google search on Saipan, and blogs like this to keep being updated.

Bruce Almighty and a proposal on Boni's Prize

Bruce Bateman amplified the rhetoric telling the CNMI masses about Dengre, the premiere CNMI critic. Bruce was openly campaigning for votes for Worst Person in the World. Tell us your entire platform, Bruce. The cyber equivalant of a lawn sign won't get my vote. Will you be kicking puppies, telling small children, or Brad, there is no Santa Clause, banning betelnut at Porky's, displaying the non health benefits of Spam or processed noodles? I'm going to follow you around and throw out the tough questions like Sam Donaldson would do to Reagan.

Bruce questioned why some of us link to Dengre. First, I linked to Bruce and his Right Wing sidekicks before that site died, so agreement isn't necessary. I linked to Sarah Miel, the Ann Coulter of Saipan, crusading to keep immigrant workers poor, and urging everyone to fight the evil efforts of liberals to pay immigrant workers, and locals, more than the U.S. minimum wage from 1980. What evil lurks in the mind of those trying to assist the poor. That site basically died as well. She might have the best crusade since the Middle Ages.

Dengre might be a little extreme in his statements, but his essential argument, that our system here stinks, is spot on. His blog isn't a full blown, across the board indictment of everyone and everything here, like Saipan sucks. Dengre thinks the CNMI government sucks, and its economic model, too. He's right.
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Poor Boni feels a bit slighted by her lack of a prize for her triumphant victory. I propose all the male bloggers adept at swimming take Boni to World Resort for a swimming lesson and day of general waterpark revelry. Any day next week is good for me. I'll cover Boni's entrance, but I'll urge other sponsors to cover the rest of her crew, most definitely including Tony Senior since I don't want him getting the wrong impression and using his military training on any of us. I can get a Splash Card for a $10 admission. Sponsors anyone for crew, Angelo. Brad can deliver Yum burgers to Boni.
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Normally a minimum wage increase is viewed as a popular thing to support the poorest workers, and is something that is applauded. That would especially seem to be the case when the CNMI wage is equal to the Federal minimum wage from 1980, almost 30 years ago. Sure enough, this administration feels no concern about everyone not in the bureaucracy since they are so unhappy these people are getting their first raise in more than 10 years. It is obvious and expected they don't give a bleep about Filipinos and Chinese et al, but there are a lot of their own people in the $3.05 hole as well. These tend to be the less educated and less likely to speak up or vote, so they are completely blown off. Harry Blalock talked about how our government officials lambasted David Cohen on the Interior Secretary's visit for not doing enough to keep the poor, poor. Good job on seeing reality and not giving in Mr. Cohen. You seem pretty human for a reasonably high ranking Republican.

On Article XII, the Chamber and Tina Sablan

Ricky Delgado in his recent letter mentioned the absurdity of Article XII, the law that limits who can own land here, and noted land prices in Hawaii are through the roof and how Saipan would benefit from fee simple real estate. I just read Frank say on Angelo's blog, there's "nothing wrong" with it, which I know is the prevailing view here on that issue. People think they'll get a free house, free land, free sounds good, so keep it. If I didn't have land, and was indigenous, I'd probably like it. If I owned land already, I wouldn't. As someone who generally believes in economic freedom and treating adults as adults, not children who can't handle their own economic affairs, I think it has to go.

There is something very wrong with Article XII. I've heard from multiple good sources that the few local families with money are buying all the land up now on the cheap from the economically desperate. I'll make the prediction that they'll use their political influence to end Article XII and they just created their own personal money machine. It makes good business sense to do this. I'd buy land now, too. It makes sense to buy things when they're cheap. The problem is land is cheap because of Article XII and the lousy economy, so it is practically being given away. Wall Street couldn't create a scheme as good as this one since Wall Street hasn't created a law that upends the first principle of economics: Supply and Demand.

If a business could only legally sell M&M's to people 6'4'' and above with nine toes, would they sell more M&M's? Would there be demand to drive the price up? Do you think the land owners, once they get as much land as they can on the cheap in this cataclysmically poor economy with 46 percent plus in poverty, will leave all that free money just sitting out there uncollected? Do you think these people won't have the influence to change this stupid law? Post Article XII, which will happen, are they going to say to the average Sablan, Villagomez or Babauta, you're Chamorro, I'll give it to you for a discount from the market rate. Haven't the garment factories proven over the last twenty years that it isn't that hard to buy off this government to do the bidding of the few connected people versus the interests of the majority, who live in poverty according to the legal definition. The last count in the U.S. census was 46 percent in 2000, and you can bet the rent that number hasn't gotten better. Someone has to wake up here.

When Article XII ends, the price of land will go up a lot overnight. One of the reasons the U.S. economy hasn't imploded from war, massive budget and trade deficits, income disparities and a Neanderthal in office, is the fact that homes have increased in value dramatically over the last few years, which is now cooling off. People have borrowed against that value via home equity loans to go out and buy ipods, dinners, vacations and whatever else they want, an invaluable economic tool that is non-existent here. Spending money moves an economy, and to spend money you need to have money. How do we get it: Wages (often lousy here), borrowing (virtually impossible and if so, expensive) and spending less on other necessities like gas and power (through the roof here, especially in the last few years).

This lack of a credit market is perhaps the primary reason our economy stinks. A twenty nine percent loan from Tony Soprano, I mean Wells Fargo or the neighborhood loan shark doesn't lead to much borrowing and much spending and much economic activity. But people hold on to those dreams of a free house, so let's just keep Article XII, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it severely limits the value of land, not to mention the racism that discriminates against those even born here. It is a blatant violation to the 14th Amendment and its equal protection clause. I'm not enough of a CNMI constitutional scholar to know how they get away with that. Plus valuable members of the community might actually stay here, where they have a home, instead of leaving as frequently as they do. Dr. Sawer and Dr. George, the two top surgeons at the hospital, just flew the coop. That is an enormous loss for this island. I don't know how many good teachers I've seen leave in the past couple years. They might stay if they had a home here. On top of that, people treat things they own a lot better than things they rent. People care more about their hometown, not their "apartment town." Remember your last rental car?

It would be amazing if something as prone to screw ups as the federal government actually fixes the three things most messed up here: wages, immigration and Article XII. They've finally started to fix one.
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I've heard and talked to some Chamber members about the wage issue, and I don't think they'll meet and come up with this position, at least I hope, but here is what their president said. Granted there is the caveat, "who spoke as an individual business."

Following this argument, Guerrero said he doubts the increase in the paychecks
of minimum wage earners will be significant enough to spur economic
activity.“Those who will get a raise will continue to save their money for
more important things. They will still be cautious about spending. Besides,
with the increased cost of doing business, prices will go up everywhere
definitely,” he said.

First the prices retailers charge are scandalous. The wages they've been paying are equally scandalous. The implications of those wages are the demoralization of most people in the CNMI and a bloated, unsustainable bureaucracy. The price of most everything has gone up in the last eleven years, especially gas and power, are you telling me businesses can't adjust to paying .50 cents more after a government paid lobbyist earned millions in government money for this free ride all this time. Plus your telling me it destroys businesses, but won't help workers. Cmon.

“The wage increase is good for the employees, but bad for the employers. The
timing, everything is against us. Fifty cents at 80 hours is $40. Not many
businesses will be able to sustain this additional cost. You can expect layoffs,
reduction in work hours to take place,” said Guerrero, who spoke as an
individual business.

People will still buy food and tires and fix their cars and so on and so forth. I'm sure someone can make it work and pay a meager $3.55.
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A quick thought on Tina Sablan. I loved her letter, and agreed with most all of it, and supported it publicly on multiple occasions. She is not, however, the only, or even the leading voice of protest on this island, as many letter writers would make people believe. Some people have been doing it a lot longer, a lot more regularly and before it was so trendy. I've also heard that she has not exactly played nice with Beautify CNMI.