The CNMI FINANCIAL QUAGMIRE: The Devils’ in the Details
- CNMIGA .ORG
- 7 days ago
- 20 min read
A satirical descent, in the manner of Dante, through the nine circles of the Commonwealth’s self-inflicted fiscal purgatory — narrated by one declared persona non grata for the crime of noticing the receipts.
Those approaching the financial Inferno of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands for the first time might benefit from a brief structural description.
This is the journey of a solitary American citizen — Afro-Latino-Seminole by blood, twelve years a resident of these islands by choice, program director of a small advocacy outfit called CNMIGA.ORG, and repeatedly marked persona non grata for the unpardonable sin of asking, out loud and with documentation, where the money went — through the nine circles of CNMI fiscal hell.
The guide is not Virgil the poet but the cold arithmetic of federal audits, Census tables, Department of Labor workforce reports, Single Audit findings, and the accumulated residue of fifteen years of local decisions that somehow always manage to look like progress on PowerPoint while the lights flicker and the water advisories linger.
Beatrice, in this telling, is the abstract ideal of accountable self-government that once called out for an angel of oversight and received, instead, another round of hotel-occupancy-tax projections, another press conference about “resilience,” and another reminder that some questions are simply not welcome at the table.
The nine circles represent a gradual descent into increasing levels of fiscal sin and collective punishment — from the first circle, Limbo of demographic denial, to the ninth circle, reserved for the treachery of those who took American taxpayer dollars while treating American citizens as fourth-class residents on American soil.
Each level represents various types of moral and managerial wrongdoing and the corresponding punishment:
power outages that arrive with the reliability of the tide, hospital wards that remain short-staffed despite Medicaid supplements thick enough to wallpaper a conference room, land that cannot be freely sold by the very citizens whose taxes help keep the lights (sometimes) on, contracts that flow offshore faster than a typhoon warning, and a population that shrinks while the rhetoric of prosperity expands like a campaign speech in August.
This is not a story of external conquest. It is the story of a drunken folly walked into by local hands, one appropriation at a time, one sole-source contract at a time, one “temporary” foreign-worker exemption at a time, one “we’re working on it” at a time.
The American taxpayer has funded the party.
The persona non grata has been shown the door, the side-eye, and the quiet professional freeze-out for pointing out that the band has already packed up and the leftover ice is melting into the same floor drains that still occasionally back up. Satire here is factually based and kept at a polite PG-13: the absurdity is already doing most of the heavy lifting. One needs only to point at the numbers and raise an eyebrow.
Dedication
I wake up and give the Most High the ultimate praise for every extra day that I can still give to my children and my loved ones.
Though my super-hero, my Dad, is no longer with us physically, I put these outlines and ideations together in order to create the prompt that recreated this fantastical idea — a Dantean walk through the financial Inferno we built with our own hands and other people’s money.
Adele-Yemaya — to my Mama & Dad, Old Man, you know I call on you daily, and thanks for keeping me right. To my soul, guiding light, and inspiration. All my kids — y’all are my heart and soul, always. To my real 24/7/365 crew — good, bad, and ugly: the Brown Baby Gang — Zanahari-Yemaya, Zoli-Osuna, Zahzir-Xango, and Zephfraim-Ogun. I give thanks to the Almighty every daybreak. All the Z’s and a D — you know who you are, stay strong. Two J’s — keep shining and pushing forward. Saint Michael (Da Consigliere) — holding it down. Saint Andrew — always got your back, no matter what. My big brotha Don — leading the way with wisdom and power; thanks for everything. Lil’ EJ — git yo chess game up and keep hustling. My entire DREAM in Myanmar — Imma keep grindin’. My big sista Ei-Ei Saw — much love and respect for all you do. The entire Myanmar DJ Charity Association — keep up the good works, y’all. My favorite — it’s been 11 years, dammit — Jasmine: luv ya, always. My otha mama, Mama Carmen Kaipat — your kindness will never be forgotten; always in my heart, thank you. Cray-Cray Auntie Kiki, now Mama Kiki — always bringing the fun and the laughter. All the ones that didn’t catch federal cases in the CNMI — keep your heads up. My homies and ex in Japan — always in my thoughts. Ms. Mary — it’s you always, much love. Jaz’I-Mai — call your dad, love ya. Z’Nia — love you always. Emperor Zu — luv u, my sun. Special shout-outs to the ones still grinding in the quiet, the ones who still ask the uncomfortable questions, and the ones who understand that “persona non grata” is sometimes just the local translation for “person who read the audit.”
To the American taxpayers who have sent, by conservative open-source tallies across the last decade and a half, obligations measured in the billions while receiving in return audited questioned costs measured in the hundreds of millions, unreliable water, intermittent power, and the privilege of watching remittances leave for Manila and Guangzhou with the cheerful efficiency of a well-run money-transfer shop.
To the Northern Marianas Descent landowners whose constitutional shield has, in practice, concentrated opportunity among a smaller circle while the rest of us practice the fine art of the 55-year lease.
To the Carolinians, Chuukese, and other Freely Associated States citizens who live here under the Compact yet find the American Dream rationed like a scarce commodity at the end of the month.
And to every ordinary U.S. citizen who discovered that employment, contracts, and even basic services prefer those already “on the team.”
May this descent serve as both mirror and warning.
The Most High keeps the books.
We are only the temporary stewards who keep losing the receipts.
First Circle of Hell: Limbo
The Demographic Drift — U.S. Census Population Data and the Quiet Exodus
In the first circle, Limbo, dwell those who never quite grasped that a territory’s people are its first and most important capital. Here the shades of population tables wander without the torment of open flame, only the endless, polite repetition of numbers that refuse to grow no matter how many economic-development PowerPoints are projected onto the wall.
The 2010 Census recorded 53,883 residents. The 2020 Census recorded 47,329 — a clean 12.2 percent decline, 6,554 fewer souls. Tinian fell hardest at 34.8 percent, Rota next at 25.1 percent, Saipan by a more modest but still sobering 10 percent. Mid-year estimates continued the gentle slide: roughly 46,000 in the early 2020s, drifting toward 43,500 by 2025 according to the World Bank series that still draws from the same official well.
The Northern Islands gained seven people and the press releases somehow managed to sound optimistic. In Limbo one meets the ordinary demographic facts that local rhetoric prefers to keep in soft focus, the way a restaurant keeps the kitchen door closed when the health inspector is expected.
Filipino- Chamorro ancestry has long formed one of the largest single ethnic blocs; Carolinian and Chuukeke percentages, while culturally central and rightly protected in the constitutional imagination, sit alongside substantial Asian and other Pacific Islander shares.
The workforce data from CNMI Department of Labor tax filings and GAO analyses of the same underlying records show that even after years of CW-1 caps and earnest “U.S. worker first” language, foreign workers still comprised roughly one in three formal workers on average from 2020 through 2024 — approximately 32 percent in the 2024 tax year (around 7,200–7,300 foreign or “other” workers against 15,300-plus U.S. workers).
The majority of those foreign workers continue to come from the Philippines, followed by China and South Korea. The numbers are not a moral judgment; they are simply the arithmetic of an economy that has preferred the convenience of imported labor to the longer, harder work of growing its own skilled base.
The punishment in Limbo is subtle and therefore more durable: the islands grow older and smaller while official speeches still speak of “growth” with the confidence of a man ordering another round on a credit card that is already over the limit.
The persona non grata walks among the tables and hears the same refrain that Dante heard from the virtuous pagans: we did not know, or we knew too late, or we knew but the political calendar did not permit inconvenient truths. The American taxpayer, meanwhile, continues to fund programs calibrated for a larger, more stable population that no longer exists, rather like buying family-size meals for a household that has already downsized to a studio apartment.
The satire writes itself: we are the only place that can shrink in population while expanding in the number of economic-recovery task forces
Second Circle of Hell: Lust
The Lust for Foreign Labor — DOL Employment Data, Occupations, Claims, Tax Outflows, and USCIS Cross-Analysis
The second circle is stormy and dark, a place of perpetual motion without forward progress. Here the souls of those who preferred the convenience of imported labor to the harder work of developing local capacity are blown about by the successive winds of visa regimes, each one announced as temporary and each one somehow still necessary fifteen years later.
CW-1 transitional workers, H-2B, Employment Authorization Document holders, and smaller categories of specialty visas have filled construction, hospitality, food service, and caregiving slots with the reliability of the trade winds.
Construction in particular has remained heavily foreign even as overall foreign-worker percentages declined from earlier peaks near 45–50 percent of the private workforce. GAO and CNMI DOL reports repeatedly note that local U.S. workers are insufficient in number or skill mix for current openings, especially after Super Typhoon Yutu and the long hangover of the pandemic. The result is a structural dependence that official policy simultaneously laments in hearings and renews in practice.
Cross-analysis with USCIS and OFLC data shows the same pattern: petitions approved, workers arrive, wages (often at or near the prevailing rate that is still modest by mainland standards) are paid, and a substantial share of those wages leaves the islands as remittances with the cheerful efficiency of a well-run Western Union counter.
The lust is not merely for cheaper hands; it is for the political ease of avoiding the long grind of training, housing, retaining, and actually competing for American and FAS workers at conditions that would keep them here.
The punishment is the hollowed-out middle: a private sector that cannot easily expand without another round of foreign labor, and a citizen workforce that watches opportunities flow past like cargo ships that never quite stop at the dock.
One can almost hear the circular conversation: “We need more foreign workers because locals won’t take the jobs.” “Locals won’t take the jobs because the conditions and pathways are structured around foreign workers.”
Repeat until the next typhoon or the next federal supplemental. The PG-13 humor here is the realization that we have perfected the art of solving a labor shortage by importing the shortage’s solution and then wondering why the shortage never ends.
Third Circle of Hell: Gluttony
The Gluttony of Federal Inflows — Billions In, Questioned Costs Out
In the third circle the ground is a foul slurry of overindulgence.
Here the shades of those who consumed federal relief without producing lasting capacity wallow in the mud of Single Audit findings, each new report arriving with the same polite surprise that the previous ones somehow failed to produce reform.
Open-source tallies drawn from federal award data, GAO territorial reports, and CNMI Single Audits show obligations in the multi-billion-dollar range across the 2015–2025 window. One detailed compilation places cumulative obligations near $8.2 billion with actual outlays around $3.3 billion plus loans.
CARES Act, ARPA, FEMA disaster recovery after Yutu and earlier storms, Medicaid supplements, infrastructure grants — the taps opened wide and the language of gratitude was loud. Questioned costs followed with the regularity of the rainy season: tens of millions in individual audit years, $74.8 million in one EY-reviewed period, $257.4 million across FY 2020–2022 according to the Office of the Public Auditor and Department of Finance release, with large shares tied to ARPA and CARES. Eligibility verification failures, unsupported claims, procurement weaknesses, and subrecipient monitoring gaps appear so consistently that they have become a kind of local weather pattern.
The gluttony is not that the money arrived; federal generosity after disaster is a feature of the American system, not a bug. The gluttony is that so little of it translated into reliable systems that outlast the press release. The persona non grata notes the rich irony: American taxpayers funded the feast while the hosts argued over the seating chart, the catering contract, and why the leftover ice kept disappearing into the same drains that still occasionally back up during a hard rain. One begins to suspect that the real skill being developed is not fiscal management but the art of looking surprised when the auditors return with the same findings written in slightly larger font.
Fourth Circle of Hell: Greed
CUC & CHCC — Executive Structures, Fiscal Mismanagement of Federal Funds, and the Failure to Deliver Drinkable Water and Stable Power
The fourth circle is the realm of those who hoarded or squandered institutional capacity. Dante and Virgil met Pluto here; the modern traveler meets the Commonwealth Utilities Corporation and the Commonwealth Healthcare Corporation, two institutions that have perfected the art of receiving federal concern while delivering local inconvenience.
CUC has lived for years under EPA scrutiny and court orders related to the Safe Drinking Water Act and Clean Water Act. Federal judges have been asked more than once to appoint receivers for specific projects because deadlines slipped and funding from the CNMI government itself lagged.
Government unpaid utility bills have at times exceeded $27 million — a figure that manages to be both a fiscal problem and a philosophical statement about priorities. Residents and businesses still experience outages and water-quality advisories that feel less like temporary emergencies and more like a lifestyle brand.
CHCC has received repeated Medicaid expansions and emergency supplements thick enough to paper a conference room, yet auditors flag undocumented claims, eligibility problems, and persistent shortages of basic supplies and staff. Patients wait; equipment ages; the corporation and the central government argue over who owes whom how many millions with the energy of a family dispute that has outlasted several administrations.
Executive compensation and administrative overhead continue while the core services — commercial-grade electricity that does not blink during a thunderstorm, water that does not require a boil notice — remain elusive. The reference to Zeno’s Paradox is deliberate and only mildly unfair: progress is always being made toward reliability, yet the goal is never quite reached.
Each new federal grant is announced as the one that will finally close the gap; the gap remains, politely, like a relative who has overstayed but still helps with the dishes.
The call for receivership is not radical; it is the logical next step when local governance has demonstrated, over fifteen years and multiple federal funding cycles, that it cannot or will not deliver the basic public goods that American taxpayers have already paid for — once through federal grants and again through local rates that somehow never quite buy reliability.
The satire is gentle but firm: we have managed to turn “infrastructure investment” into a spectator sport in which the scoreboard never changes and the fans are still expected to buy tickets.
Fifth Circle of Hell: Anger
The 5th & 14th Conundrum — The Takings Clause, Federal Funding Realities, Article XII, and the Henry George Perspective
The fifth circle is the muddy Styx of unresolved constitutional tension.
Here the wrathful and the sullen contend over land, citizenship, and the quiet question of who exactly the American Dream is for in a place that is both American and carefully not.
Article XII of the CNMI Constitution restricts the acquisition of permanent and long-term interests in real property to persons of Northern Marianas descent. The provision was intended as a cultural shield against the historical pattern of indigenous land loss seen elsewhere in the Pacific.
In practice it has produced a bifurcated market: fee-simple ownership for those who qualify, long-term leases (historically capped near 55 years, with periodic proposals to stretch the term) for everyone else, including other U.S. citizens who live, work, pay taxes, and raise children here.
Non-NMD Americans cannot freely own the ground beneath their feet in the same way they could in any state. The result, critics argue from both economic and fairness standpoints, is a smaller circle of real-estate holders who control a scarce asset while the broader American tax base funds the territory’s operations, its disasters, and its shortfalls.
Henry George’s Progress and Poverty supplies the analytical lens that still cuts. Land is fixed in supply; private appropriation of its rising value, unaccompanied by a corresponding public return, concentrates wealth and stifles productive enterprise. In the CNMI the constitutional restriction intensifies the scarcity for non-qualifying citizens and investors, raising the effective cost of capital and complicating long-term financing for anyone outside the circle.
The American taxpayer subsidizes the Commonwealth through federal transfers, disaster aid, and Medicaid while being told, in property terms, that full membership is reserved by blood quantum. The ROI calculation is brutal and only slightly exaggerated for effect: billions in, persistent deficits, pension liabilities that dwarf the modest public-debt figures ($100–120 million range in recent GAO snapshots), and a citizen class treated as perpetual guests on their own national soil.
The anger is not abstract; it is the daily experience of watching opportunity structured by descent rather than by equal citizenship under the flag that pays the bills. One can almost hear the quiet joke among those who have been here long enough:
“Welcome to America — please check your fee-simple expectations at the customs counter.”
Sixth Circle of Hell: Heresy
The Sin of Selective Prosecution — FBI, Guam USAO, Hawaii Field Office, Limited Accountability, and the Case for a Serious Multi-Decade Financial Audit
In the sixth circle the heretics lie in flaming tombs.
The heresy here is the belief that repeated high-profile raids, seized records, public allegations of large-scale misuse, and years of investigation can coexist indefinitely with near-total absence of high-level criminal accountability, and that this state of affairs is somehow normal.
The November 2019 searches that included the Office of the Governor, Imperial Pacific International offices, and related locations produced years of investigation and a great deal of local conversation. By mid-2025 the FBI formally closed the principal political inquiry with no indictments of the top figures; a modest forfeiture action involving roughly $310,000 remained the most visible federal court product of that particular set of warrants.
Smaller cases — school-system procurement fraud, forced-labor complaints against certain contractors — have produced convictions, sentences, and civil judgments. The larger narrative of hundreds of millions in questioned costs, unaccounted federal flows, and systemic contracting irregularities has not produced a comparable body of prosecutions at the altitude where decisions are made.
The persona non grata notes the arithmetic without needing to raise his voice: after multiple high-profile enforcement actions, the public record shows limited criminal accountability at the top.
The call for a multi-decade forensic audit by Treasury, FinCEN, IRS, and related agencies of remittance channels, banking institutions, credit unions, trusts, and the full constellation of federal grant recipients is therefore not paranoia; it is the ordinary demand that public money be traceable when the local systems have repeatedly shown they cannot or will not do the tracing themselves.
Open-source estimates of annual remittance outflows in the $100–130 million range for many recent years, largely to the Philippines, sit alongside the federal inflows with a kind of geometric elegance.
The discrepancy between the volume of funds that arrived and the visible local improvement invites the audit that has not yet been ordered at the scale the numbers appear to require. The gentle satire is that we have perfected a system in which the raids are public, the questions are persistent, and the silence afterward is the loudest sound in the room.
Seventh Circle of Hell: Violence
Violence Against the Territory’s Future — Construction Dominance, Foreign Percentages, Transportation, Tourism, Food Services, and Financial Outflows
The seventh circle is divided into rings of violence against others, against self, and against the possibility of a future that is not simply a more expensive version of the present. In the CNMI version the violence is quieter and more structural: it is the repeated decision to accept capital flight, labor dependence, and sectoral capture as the price of doing business.
Construction has been dominated by firms and workforces that are heavily foreign or foreign-linked: Tan Holdings entities, GPPC, RNV Construction and affiliates, various Chinese contractors on the IPI casino project, and others whose names appear regularly on federal and local contract lists.
Federal disaster-recovery and infrastructure contracts have repeatedly flowed to entities employing large numbers of CW-1 or H-2B workers while local bidder participation remains limited and the complaints about wage practices and working conditions surface with the reliability of the rainy season.
Food-related services and hospitality show similar patterns. Maritime cargo and logistics, tourism service roles, and the remittance businesses themselves complete the picture of an economy in which a high percentage of the private-sector activity that generates immediate cash also generates immediate outflows.
Tourism, the historic engine, has never fully recovered pre-Yutu and pre-COVID levels. Visitor arrivals in recent fiscal years have hovered well below the 400,000-plus peaks of the late 2010s; South Korea has become the dominant market while China remains constrained by air service and other realities. The Marianas Visitors Authority has received tens of millions over the years through hotel-occupancy-tax allocations and supplemental appropriations — budgets that once approached $15 million and more recently have been proposed in the $6–12 million range amid ongoing air-service instability. The return on that investment is a sector still struggling to fill rooms and still structured around the same labor model that produces the same remittance flows.
The cumulative remittance drain — open-source compilations place the 2015–2025 total near or above $1.3 billion — represents capital that left rather than recirculated.
Violence against the future is the decision, repeated annually and with bipartisan consistency, to accept that outflow as normal.
The mild joke is that we have built an economy that is excellent at moving money and less excellent at keeping any of it long enough to build something that does not require another federal grant to keep the lights on.
Eighth Circle of Hell: Fraud
The Malebolge of Particular Sins — Ten Ditches of Local Practice
The eighth circle is the Malebolge, the evil pockets, each a specialized ditch of conscious or habitual betrayal of public trust. The demons here are less horned than they are well-dressed and familiar with the procurement regulations.
• Ditch of the Delegates’ Promises: Decades of federal advocacy that secured funds while the local delivery systems remained unreformed and the same structural problems returned with each new cycle of money.
• Ditch of the Governors: Successive administrations that inherited and then deepened fiscal opacity, pension shortfalls, and contracting patterns that somehow never quite get fixed before the next election.
• Ditch of the Lieutenant Governors and Senior Officials: The long continuity of the same administrative class, the quiet institutional memory that knows how things are done and prefers that they continue to be done that way.
• Ditch of Thirty-Plus Years of Schemes: The accumulated record of sole-source awards, questionable procurements, and grant subrecipient failures documented in audit after audit until the findings themselves begin to feel like local folklore.
• Ditch of the Drug Trade: Fifteen years of cases that surface, produce headlines, and then rarely produce the systemic disruption one might expect from the volume of local concern.
• Ditch of Unsolved Violence: The persistent public perception, supported by limited clearance data, that serious crimes linger without the kind of resolution that builds public trust.
• Ditch of Child Protection Failures: Cases that surface in local media and court records yet never seem to trigger the institutional overhaul the numbers appear to demand.
• Ditch of Fraudulent or Opaque Land Transactions: Deals that test the boundaries of Article XII and leave ordinary citizens questioning title certainty while the sophisticated players navigate the same rules with practiced ease.
• Ditch of CW-1 and Employment Visa Abuse: Documented forced-labor complaints, wage violations, and passport-control practices on major projects that somehow keep recurring under different company names.
• Ditch of the Visitors Authority and Tourism Theater: Large cumulative public funding for an industry that still cannot generate reliable local surplus and still requires the same structural labor model that produces the same outbound flows.
Each ditch has its own minor demons — the consultants, the middlemen, the quiet approvers, the ones who know how to write the justification memo — and its own punishment: the slow, private realization that the money has already left and the next grant application is already being drafted.
OPEN SOURCED TRUTH: ENJOY A READ
Ninth Circle of Hell: Treachery
Betrayal of Lords, Benefactors, and the Compact Itself
The ninth circle is frozen.
Here the traitors to those who trusted them are locked in ice. The ultimate betrayal is the treatment of the American taxpayer and the ordinary American resident as permanent outsiders in a territory that exists by American law, American subsidy, and American military umbrella.
The three-headed figure at the center is not a medieval Satan but the interlocking failure of fiscal accountability, political continuity, and constitutional design that keeps the same patterns in place while the population shrinks and the questioned costs mount like unpaid utility bills.
Brutus, Cassius, and Judas are replaced by the quieter figures who signed the grants, approved the contracts, managed the programs, and then watched the outcomes diverge from the promises while the next cycle of federal generosity was already being prepared.
The treachery is not always personal greed of the cartoon variety; it is the systemic, almost polite decision that the status quo — foreign labor dependence, restricted land markets for non-qualifying citizens, opaque grant management, and limited prosecutorial follow-through at the highest levels — is preferable to the hard, politically costly work of reform.
The ice is the silence that follows the raids, the audits, and the questions. It is cold enough to preserve the pattern for another fifteen years if no one decides to light a fire under it.
Center of Hell and the Possible Climb Toward Something Better
At the frozen center the persona non grata looks up.
The only way out is through.
Receivership for CUC and CHCC is no longer a radical idea; it is the acknowledgment that local capacity has been tested for fifteen years across multiple federal funding surges and found wanting in the delivery of the most basic public goods.
A genuine multi-agency forensic audit of the full federal flow and the corresponding remittance and contracting channels is the minimum due diligence owed to the American public that has paid the bill. Article XII requires an honest, adult conversation about whether its protective intent still serves the broader citizenry or has, in practice, become a mechanism of concentrated control that raises the cost of capital and opportunity for everyone outside the circle.
Workforce policy must finally treat American and FAS workers as the default rather than the exception that requires another exemption.
The climb will not be pretty. It will require admitting that some of the “temporary” arrangements have become permanent by sheer repetition, that some of the questioned costs are not just accounting footnotes, and that a territory that shrinks in population while expanding in the number of recovery plans is not, in fact, recovering. The Most High keeps the ultimate books. The rest of us are only temporary stewards who have grown entirely too comfortable losing the receipts.
Epilogue:
The Carolinians, the Chuukese, the Isolated Reject, and a Narrow Door Called Digital Sovereignty
The final word belongs to those who live in the interstices.
Carolinian and Chuukese communities, along with other Freely Associated States citizens, have long formed part of the social fabric of the CNMI. They work, raise families, contribute under the Compact, and still find the pathways to stable employment, contracting, and full economic participation constrained by the same networks that prefer those already inside the circle.
The persona non grata — non-white in the particular local calculus, non-aligned with the dominant political teams, unwilling to pretend that the numbers add up when the audits say otherwise — experiences a parallel and sometimes sharper exclusion.
Employment opportunities narrow.
Federal program access becomes contested.
The label “persona non grata” is applied not for violence or personal corruption but for the insistence on transparency in a place that has grown skilled at treating transparency as a form of bad manners.
A genuine Digital Sovereignty framework for the Pacific — one that treats data, connectivity, digital economic tools, and the platforms of the next economy as public infrastructure rather than as another site of capture by the same circles — could open pathways that physical land under Article XII and traditional contracting have closed.
It will not solve every historical grievance or erase every questioned cost. It might, however, give the next generation of American citizens in these islands a chance to build something that does not immediately leave on the next flight to Manila or the next wire transfer to Guangzhou.
It might give the Brown Baby Gang, the Z’s, the ones still grinding in Myanmar and Japan and the quiet corners of Saipan, a slightly fairer shot at the American Dream that the rest of the country still pretends is equally available under the same flag.
The gates of this Inferno were not forced open by outsiders. They were walked through, year after year, by those who held the keys and preferred the familiar darkness to the harder light of accountability.
The American taxpayer has paid the toll in the billions. The population has paid in the quiet attrition of people who simply left. The persona non grata has paid in the smaller currency of professional isolation and the daily knowledge that some questions are still unwelcome.
I give thanks to the Most High every daybreak for the extra day, for the children, for the crew that remains, and for the stubborn refusal to stop reading the audits.
The climb begins with the decision to stop calling the current arrangement “normal.”
The rest is just arithmetic, courage, and the willingness to admit that we built this particular hell with our own hands and other people’s money.
The Devils, as the title suggests, really are in the details. And the details are still available for anyone willing to look.
About the Author
Zaji “Persona Non Grata” Zajradhara is a staunch advocate for American workers and indigenous rights in the CNMI.
Labeled a “persona non grata” by the CNMI government for his relentless pursuit of justice and his outspoken criticism of corruption and foreign influence, Zajradhara has become a symbol of resistance against the forces seeking to undermine American sovereignty in the islands.
As an unemployed Afro-American resident and father, Zajradhara's firsthand experience with the CNMI’s dysfunctional labor market, its rigged political system, and the exploitation of vulnerable communities has fueled his activism. He has filed numerous legal claims against companies, including Tan Holdings, for violating labor laws and discriminating against American workers.
His unwavering commitment to exposing the truth, challenging the status quo, and demanding accountability has made him a thorn in the side of the CNMI establishment and a target of their efforts to silence him. However, Zajradhara remains undeterred, determined to fight for the rights of American workers and to protect the CNMI from the grip of foreign influence.
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