Anybody Out There Got Twenty Grand?

On an island where the improbable happens more often than the probable, it made perfect sense: they were, after all, just across the street from Plaza las Américas (“the largest shopping mall in the Caribbean”, as it never stops telling us.) And everyone knows that Plaza has an excellent air conditioning system, with enough capacity to cool the place down to about thirty degrees in ten minutes. So why shouldn’t the 4000 members of the Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego (UTIER) just saunter over to the mall to have a little protest? They had, after all, just voted to strike.

To those who don’t know, UTIER is the union representing the workers who run the island’s power company. OK—so why are they striking? Because the legislature has voted and the governor has signed a budget that—while still 100 million dollars short—is being declared “balanced.”

Caveat—I’m swimming in two deep waters here, the first being Spanish, and the second being economics. In fact, “swimming” implies considerably more adeptness than I have: “struggling to tread water” is more like it. I can, however, use a calculator. But first, consider this statement:

La deuda del Estado Libre Asociado y sus corporaciones públicas alcanza la cifra de $71 billones de dólares, producto de décadas de decisiones que ponen primero los intereses de los acreedores. La deuda es tan grande que ya supera el tamaño de nuestra economía.*

(“The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and its public agencies’ debt has reached the sum of 71 billion dollars, the product of decades of decisions which put the interest of the creditors first. The debt is so large that it now is greater than the size of our economy.”)*

OK—so we owe “71 billion”. And how many of us are there? Here’s your answer:

La población total de la isla bajó de unos 3,7 millones en 2010 a 3,6 millones en 2013. Las mayores bajas se registraron en San Juan y en el oeste y sur de la isla.

(“The population of Puerto Rico dropped from 3.7 million in 2010 to 3.6 million in 2013. The greatest drops were registered in San Juan and the west and south of the island.”)

So the question of the hour: how much would each of us—man, woman, child, infant—have to pay to pay off the debt tomorrow?

Well, let’s make it simple: let’s say that the debt is “only” 70 billion, and that the population has further dropped to 3.5 million. So how much is it?

Twenty thousand bucks.

Guys—would you buy a bond issued by a government so heavily in debt?

Well, if you said yes, you are considerably more rosy-eyed than the three companies who make it their business to advise investors about such things, since earlier in the year, all three of them reduced out bond ratings to junk status. And so we headed off from being La Isla del Encanto and became La Isla de la Deuda—and yes, that means what you think it means.

Enter the 242,000 people who are “working” for the government—and anyone who has tried to get service from our government knows haw richly justified those quotes are. The governor has promised to not cut jobs, but asked that the public unions make concessions about fringe benefits and payment for sick leave. The unions—reputedly—said yes, but wanted the governor to include language that would reinstate the benefits, once the crisis is over. This, the governor was unwilling to do.

And so, yesterday, the water utility and the power company decided to strike. OK, what have they vowed to do? Well, borrowing a page from the legislature, they’ve resolved to act in secret, as well as at night. Oh, and they’ve vowed to close off the airport, major shopping centers, and also Old San Juan. So what happens if my aging mother-in-law suffers a fall? Will we have to medevac her out?

Oh, and what is this going to do to our economy? Well, here’s one economist:

Una paralización en los servicios públicos como energía eléctrica, el agua, el Banco Gubernamental de Fomento y corporaciones públicas que ya están en situación económica y financiera delicada, esto le puede dar el golpe de muerte a las mismas”. 

(“A paralysis in public services such as power and light, the Government Development Bank and public corporations which now are in delicate economic and financial health could be the death blow for these agencies.”)

Absolutely possible, because what did the head of UTIER advise listeners to do, this morning on WKAQ Radio? Stop paying the light and the water bills!

The announcer stopped to scratch his head.

“OK—so what happens when they come to cut the service?”

Guess what? The answer should be obvious.

“Who’s going to come to cut your service? Not us!”

See? 

_____________

* The author of the first piece cited above uses the term “71 billion” the US way. In fact, the debt is named at 71,000 million dollars (which in Spanish would be termed 71 millardos and is 1,000 times less than 71 billion.)

The UPR Blunders Forward

I’m biased, of course, since I spent several decades working as a sort of teacher, but I have to agree with Dr. Manuel Pérez Quiñones, a professor at Virginia Tech, when he says that the worst crime in Puerto Rico has been the savage intrusion of politics on the university system.

This will sound bad—a large part of our murder rate (twice New York City’s with half the population) is drug related. And though the death of any man diminishes me—well, sorry….no. I don’t care if one pusher offs another.

But in the twenty years at which I made a living teaching ESL, it would occasionally occur to me: how can it be that I have this job? Every kid has twelve years in English classes—shouldn’t everybody be bilingual?

Oh, and why was it that I knew the rules for accentuation in Spanish, and they didn’t?

Or there was the time I was buying a $24 product that had a 35% discount. The clerk stood open-mouthed at the register—there was no calculator. $17.80, I told the clerk. Well, we waited several minutes, which I devoted to telling the clerk—once a teacher, always a teacher—the three ways that I had dreamed up to calculate the sum. But it took a manager with a calculator to prove it to him.

I am telling you, then, that we have a serious problem in Puerto Rico. And if we are ever going to get out of this morass, we’ll have to start with kids, teach them, prepare them, and then hope they’ll do a better job than we’ve done.

What Pérez Quiñones bemoans is real. I somehow slid through the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but even I knew that the university’s School of Engineering was very strong. University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez has a school that is just as good, if not better.

According to Pérez Quiñones—well, let the man speak for himself:

The UPR as it has always been, was once again invaded by local Puerto Rican politics. In 5 years at Mayagüez, the campus had 4 Chancellors (i.e., campus president). The turn over in positions from Chancellor, to Deans, to Department heads was so regular, that it was a common joke to ask "who is the Dean this week?" The situation continued to deteriorate. Recently on the press there was an article about the sanctions imposed by NSF to the UPR system after an investigation of misuse of federal funds. The UPR system cancelled the Presidential Fellowships that paid the graduate studies in the US to future UPR faculty. And the faculty at their several campuses continued to either fight for their academic lives or simply hang up the boxing gloves and move on to a better (bitter?) future.

Alert readers of this blog are wondering—what’s the deal with the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds?

If it were irregularities, that would be fine—almost. But it’s much more than that. Which is why in April of this year, the FBI charged onto campuses and locations holding university servings and—reportedly—confiscated a bunch of material.

That’s bad—worse is that the NSF stopped paying 50 million dollars for research projects. Or perhaps it’s 90 million dollars—the Internet is shaky today, and I can’t verify.

Nor is it the case that the NSF simply dropped this on them. The investigation has been going on since 2006, and the university was given the chance to make a Corrective Action Plan (CAP). OK—that was approved, but the university couldn’t follow its own plan.

What was the problem?

Caribbean Business Reports has this to say:

To pay professors involved in research—in addition to their basic salary and a reduced academic schedule—professors are assigned a sum of money from the grants, which can't exceed 30% of their wage as compensation for their participation, according to circular A-21.

The source said the way to report time & effort was out of control, and some professors' salaries had increased by more than 100%. "You could see professors whose basic wages were about $80,000 a year, and suddenly they were earning $300,000 annually."

Right—so you can see why the NSF was a little peeved.

There were other problems, too. Some professors were reportedly receiving money as compensation from funds earmarked for other uses, such as indirect costs.

Well, the university had to get some money from somewhere—so where to turn? To our Government Development Bank, locally called Fomento. So the university submitted a loan application to…

…the wrong people. Somehow, the university ended up submitting the application of the General Fund of the University of Puerto Rico. So they had to do it over again.

Into this comic-horrific scene came the 2012 gubernatorial elections, which the party then out of power won. So what did that mean? That the university’s president had to be changed. And guess what? The gentleman who consistently has assured us that the problem with the NSF has been resolved—only to be told by the NSF that it has not—is now the interim director!

Comic-horrific, I wrote in the last paragraph. Sorry—I’ll take that back.

We’re a strange mix, down here. Half of us don’t work. The other half works harder and often better than anyone else. And our professionals—in general—are more highly trained and educated than any I’ve seen.

They deserve so much more.