Editorials—Details

Guest Editorial - What Our Leaders Really Want

07/15/2010

There has been a lot said about the operation of our local government and the misuse of funds, both federal and local. We now have even more experience with the realities of disasters. What we have also experienced is a peek inside of our systemic mismanagement culture that’s in place in our local government. Through this we can glimpse the direction that our leadership has been taking us, and it is not pretty!
 

Start with the economy. The economy is the start, middle, and end of a capitalist society. It’s the “engine” that drives everything. It’s not the government. For decades we’ve listened to our leaders in government give lip service to improving the economy, yet in reality it has been subtly strangling and stifling growth in the private sector. There is a constant undercurrent of corrupt practices going on in immigration, just ripe for investigation. This is important because consistent and transparent immigration policies that invite outside investment rather than exploitation are important in growing the economy and sustaining it.

We have finally received an undersea fiber optic cable, but what was this cable originally intended to improve? It was to advance the territory’s advantages to “high tech” industries, starting with a “premium call center.” What happened was indicative of how our administration actually feels about such things. After giving lip service to the benefits, so uninterested and reluctant to cooperate was our administration that it failed to supply the necessary information, lease agreements, and other crucial documentation in timely fashion to the company involved. Dealing with the slacking attitude and obfuscation presented by our government contributed to a split within the call center company, and its eventual incarnation in neighboring Samoa.

Then there is the matter of paying for that cable! An ASG retirement fund loan granted 9 million dollars to BlueSky’s investment with its parent company eLandia to land that cable. Sure it sounds like support for the private sector, but with whose money? Loans have to be paid back, and those that do not get paid back are theft. Where is the policy for contributing funds from the public sector to the private sector, and the regular schedule of return on investment and repayment? Is the answer similar to that which was given about the siren warning system?

Last years Pacific Arts Festival was considered a success. It too was to be a boost to the economy and a lure to gain interest in investment. It too had considerable ASG funding from a retirement fund loan. There were daily public announcements about contributions to the festival, yet where is the final expense report? Where are the specifics of where that money ultimately went? Sure the festival cleaned up the island, but what did it actually do for our economy after the festival? Did our contributors get a return on their investment or reimbursed for their expenses? That information is still missing. Our leaders had a blast with their VIP counterparts, but what is everybody else left with?

Spending money is no object when it comes to political investment, and our leaders have shown us this time and time again. When it comes to putting money into policies that improve the long term economy, they’ve consistently shown suspiciously less than ambitious attitudes. In fact something smells more fishy than the cannery!

Enter Jobs For Votes! You’ve heard of the “Cars For Clunkers” program, well our local political system has been running a “Jobs For Votes” program since the first elected governor in the seventies. It has become a completely expected part of campaigning, and once its implications are more thoroughly understood, what our leaders really want becomes much more plain to see.

In order to make the Jobs For Votes program work, several things must be addressed and maintained:

1 - There must be jobs that can be politically assigned. This of course implies the ASG.
2 - There must be government of such size to house a significant number of these jobs.
3 - There must be a repressed private sector to keep the value of ASG jobs high.
4 - There must be immigration bias to repress opposition vote counts.
5 - There must be minimum wage bias to insure maximum government size.

Number one is obvious. Support for candidates implies placement in director or other significant positions within departments. This also implies placement of family and extended family members in departments. The result is overstaffed, inefficient departments, often with those unqualified or under qualified for the positions they hold, including the Director position.

Number two again reiterates that the ASG remain bloated, overstaffed and inefficient.

Number three exists because if the private sector begins to attract a significant amount of voters to more attractive jobs outside ASG, the Jobs For Votes program loses effectiveness. It also loses effectiveness as private sector jobs can’t uniformly be assigned for political favor.

Number four holds that most “outsiders” be ineligible to vote; Koreans, Chinese, Filipino, and other non-US citizens. The low wages in the territory contribute to the bias, with US citizens opting for higher pay locations, while non-US citizens opt for the more valuable US dollar or chance to migrate to America. Immigration processes, some which maybe in practice corrupt, assures that significant numbers of votes that could be cast by private sector immigrants for the “wrong” candidates could not be cast.

Now we come to number five, and this is a perplexing and far reaching issue. American Samoa’s government has for many decades been taking advantage of its population’s poor status. Keeping people poor has numerous advantages to certain people that aren’t so obvious to the uninitiated. Being well below the poverty line for the US has given almost 100% access to grant moneys from the US, and has assured in many cases that “matching local funds” provisions requiring ASG to pay for 50% of something, get wavered. This is at least part of the reason that American Samoa has such high funding rates from the states for its tiny size! It is just such US funding usage that has come under questioning.

Why would our administration be so against the territory being brought in line with the US minimum wage? Well, as addressed above, keeping people poor has its advantages, and advantages especially for certain people. That they would wish to stop the wage increases instead of negotiate for proper cost of living provisions applicable for economic and private sector growth in the territory shows concern for something else very important to them.

The ASG is already operating at maximum local financial capacity, drawing from the retirement fund to extend itself. If the wages were to be raised a little too high, or especially the US standard, the ASG would itself have to participate, and DOWNSIZE and become more efficient, something that would significantly hurt the Jobs For Votes program.

It was and is never in our leaders agenda to DOWNSIZE government. In fact in nearly every case its just the opposite. Even as modern technology calls for less human intervention, more and more people get hired, and efficiency goes down, not up. That’s because we have Jobs For Votes, and that calls for big government and small private sector!

And now we get to perhaps the most tragic element in this whole matter: Our children are given among the lowest goals of achievement. Oh yes, we have the NFL and military, and we participate in those in the highest per capita capacity. Don’t let that fool you though. It still is not a lot of people! There are a huge bunch who won’t be in either, and what for them? Well our governor said that there is nothing wrong with working in fast food, and that one day someone might work their way up to managing a restaurant. That may be well and good, but restaurant manager is a pretty low goal to set in a technology laden world like ours. Our modern world calls for intelligence and knowledge, in other words, brain power. Samoan people have every bit as much advantage in this potential as anyone else on the planet! Still there is significant repression and resentment toward this going on at many levels. Be it Jobs For Votes or attempts to hold on to the old ways, it hurts the advancement of our children and of the Samoan people. Our children should be being told that they could in the future be designing the next computer, car, airliner, medical procedure, or own a large corporation, or even become the president of the US. None of this is too far fetched for any Samoan if she or he wishes to pursue it, so where is the encouragement, and plans and funding to accomplish it?

If the coming generation is so important, then why is there not significant funding that actually does something that really improves the quality of education empirically? Tons of money go into the local DOE, yet teachers still complain of lack of materials, inadequate supplies, low pay, bad environment, lack of support, and many other items that directly or indirectly affect quality of education, and with it the aspiration to continue to become educated.

It becomes all too clear that for all the words our political leaders have been offering, what they really have wanted all along has been to keep a perverted heritage alive that keeps a tiny upper class in power and affluent off the sweat of those living subsistence lives. The same leaders, some of whom are also church leaders, operate as self serving, often arrogant, morally corrupt people seemingly without conscience. They keep getting elected because they have successfully scammed what should be a personal democratic process with Jobs For Votes and other underhanded campaign tactics.

The recent CNN report gave a glimpse into only one issue of how money is mishandled by our government. The reporters gathered a lot more information than they used in their report. They heard from Samoans who not only lost loved ones to the tsunami, but were afraid to speak out because of fear of government retribution. A telling condition found often under dictatorships and communist regimes. I’m certain they were pointed to many of the things addressed here. I think we just had a strong political earthquake, and we should now expect a political tsunami. My only hope is that it washes away the corrupt and stupid from our leadership so we can come in and clean up, advancing forward under God, a proud American Samoa.
 

(Due to the nature of this editorial, the author wishes to remain anonymous)