Call For CNMI Leaders To Fight Back On High Airfares
The former representative shared his frustration after attempting to book a four-day roundtrip ticket from Guam to Saipan. Mark Rabago, RNZ Pacific Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas correspondent
Former Northern Mariana Islands lawmaker Edwin K. Propst taken to social media to urge leaders to 'go to war' with United Airlines over what he claims are exorbitant airfares between Saipan and Guam.
The call to action comes amid renewed efforts to reinstate the Essential Air Service program in the CNMI and push for a cabotage exemption.
'Attention all leaders of the Marianas in the public and private sector, it is time to go to war with this airline,' Propst wrote.
The former representative, who now works at the CNMI broadband policy and development office, shared his frustration after attempting to book a four-day roundtrip ticket from Guam to Saipan in June – to find the lowest available fare was US$767.
'For a 25-minute flight?!
'They have just made record-breaking profits and instead of rewarding their customers, they increase their prices.'
Propst called the airfares 'devastating' to the local economy and tourism.
The CNMI is currently seeking exemption from federal cabotage restrictions, which bar foreign airlines from operating domestic routes between US territories such as Guam and the CNMI.
Governor Arnold Palacios mentioned this effort during his State of the Commonwealth Address, saying he had 'actively advocated for potential cabotage waiver [and] essential air services' in recent talks with federal agencies and congressional leaders.
Palacios emphasized the importance of improved regional connectivity to support the CNMI's tourism-dependent economy.
Senate public utilities, transportation and communications committee chair, Senator Jude Hofschneider called Propst's complaints a 'sad reality of economic times,' adding that United's pricing is 'likely a business decision by the air carrier'.
Still, Hofschneider said the moment calls for greater support of Congresswoman Kimberlyn King-Hinds' bill introduced in April to requalify CNMI airports for the Essential Air Service (EAS) program. If passed, the measure would allow federal subsidies to fund daily round-trip flights even if commercial carriers withdraw service.
A quote from CWM Travel International showed a Saipan-Guam roundtrip departing 8 June 8 and returning 12 June costing $420 – significantly cheaper than Propst's booking but still high for an inter-island flight.
The EAS program, created in 1978 and stripped from CNMI eligibility in 2012, was intended to preserve air access for small US communities.
King-Hinds' bill seeks to restore eligibility to Saipan, Tinian, and Rota by placing CNMI alongside Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico in exemption status.
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NZ Herald
5 hours ago
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Genocide and Terrorism Earlier in the 2020s, people such as Paula Penfold and Liz Truss tried to represent the Chinese government's persecution of the East Turkestan (aka Xinjiang) Uyghurs as "genocide". They were 'weaponising' the g-word, part of a wider cross-partisan opportunity to demonise China during the Covid19 pandemic. In the light of recent events in the Levant, an obvious and unmistakeable genocide which too many people refrain from calling a 'genocide', those anti-China representations look rather silly. It is perfectly possible that people using the same identity label can be both victims of genocide and perpetrators of genocide; most likely at different places in different times. Most petty of all, this 'is it a genocide?' has become an elitist word-game. 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Trying to weasel our way around it through an absence of language is a trait which has hard-wired itself, through denial and distractive fig-leaves, into elite cultures of complicity and impunity. Another such word is 'terrorism'. Winston Churchill and his bomber commander Arthur Harris had no doubt about the meaning of that word. So did the victims of their fiery terror, in Hamburg and many other cities. Now the representation of 'terror' through this word is restricted to a selected subset of resistance organisations. Winston Churchill understood that meaning of 'terrorism', too. His friend – Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne – was assassinated in Cairo by fascist Lehi terrorists. (Re Lehi, see Stern: The Man, the Gang and the State, Al Jazeera 13 Aug 2024.) Appeasement This word may be used improperly, as a damaging misrepresentation of a political opponent, or avoided when it is most needed. 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In reality, appeasement has to be done sometimes. New Zealand dairy owners have been routinely asked to appease violent robbers. And, in the movies, when someone points a gun at someone and says "hands up", the victim almost always appeases the gunner, regardless of their moral position. 'Appeasement' is a representation that's both underused and overused; a representation designed to construct a deception. If we cannot distinguish between representation and reality, label and labelled, then we stand to become victims to all kinds of mischievous narratives. Cost of Living The Government and the Opposition both frame the alleged "cost of living crisis" as a problem of inflation rather than deflation. Indeed, the linguistic minefield around economic policy is so problematic that a whole separate article is required to examine it. The key issue for us here is that the 'cost-of-living' framing – ie representation – in government circles is that the economy must be in an inflationary phase and therefore a deflationary policy is required. However, when the New Zealand public complain about the 'cost-of-living' they are saying that prices are too high compared to their incomes; it's an 'affordability crisis', not an inflationary crisis. And clearly the deflationary retrenchment policies – meaning policies to slow the economy down, to instigate a recession – pursued by the government are a critical part of the problem. The government's solution is to represent its actual class-war anti-growth policies as 'pro-growth' policies. And the Labour Opposition completely falls for the way the government frames New Zealand's structural recession as a 'cost-of-living' crisis. At present, New Zealand has near-record-high (north!?) 'terms of trade', only slightly below the record highs of 2022. New Zealand's terms of trade are now 50% higher than they were in 2000, and nearly 100% higher than the dramatic lows of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. As when Brian Easton wrote In Stormy Seas: The Post-War New Zealand Economy in 1997, the terms of trade represented the stormy waves, some bigger than others; and the favourable crests of those waves were when New Zealand expected (and generally got) economic good times. The troughs during the Muldoon years – not Robert Muldoon's fault; he never had the power to shift the tides of a stormy world – were very difficult times for Aotearoa New Zealand. In these terms the twenty-first century has been the 'best of times' for New Zealand, and the 2020s the 'very best of times'. Yet they are also the 'worst of times', to reference Charles Dickens. (Many of our most potent truths come from literature.) New Zealand, like other countries, has experienced economic cycles and economic shocks. Through my lifetime one consistent cycle has been the short 'trade-cycle', on average about 32 months. We are near the crest of that cycle now. The last quarterly growth peak, September 2022, led to an annual growth peak of 4% in the year-to June 2023. Based on the usual timing of the trade cycle, June 2025 will be the next quarterly peak. It will not be pretty, if that will be the best GDP data that we get on this government's watch. Any positivity when the next GDP figures are released in September, in colloquial jargon, may be characterised as a 'dead-cat bounce'. The government is undertaking structural retrenchment under the cover of a 'cost-of-living crisis' that means very different things to different people. Insinuating that New Zealand has a crisis of inflation – taken as a synonym for 'overspending' – when it has a very real crisis of structural recession and growing unemployment, is a particularly cynical misrepresentation of reality. Conclusion We too easily fall for these misrepresentations of reality; for representations that, in our minds, become a reality like treacle; sets of overlayed representations which play tricks on our minds. That makes us, and our political Opposition parties, quite unable to form coherent critiques of the too many misrepresented and problematic things that are happening to us. In New Zealand, although we are allegedly at the 'bottom of the world', in the Far Southeast (fortunately not in the incorrectly named 'Middle East'!). We also pride ourselves as being in the West and in the Global North. What is genuinely true is that Aotearoa New Zealand is geographically very far from most of the rest of humanity. We could use that birds-eye bottom-of-the-world detached perspective to see past the labels, the frames, the self-serving narratives. We don't have to play 'silly buggers' when the rest of the world is so-doing; we can cut through the 'bullshit', to use some more colloquial jargon. We can be the North Star of the South. PS. With escalating geopolitical wars, and plenty of undertested nuclear weapons in the hands of numerous political sociopaths, being at 'the bottom of the world' may not be such a great place to be. All of us of a certain age remember British, American, and French nuclear testing in Oceania. Some, a bit older, remember nuclear testing in Japan. ------------- Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Keith Rankin Political Economist, Scoop Columnist Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s. Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like. Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.
1News
6 hours ago
- 1News
NZ passport redesign to have English words above te reo Māori
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