Well, it must be true, because I read about it in The New
York Times: The whole damned island is depressed.
Or not, since the financial crisis elicits varying responses
of anger, rants, and problem-solving. Oh, and also a good deal of
finger-pointing, as evidenced by this:
Yes—we spend 39 million a year to drive our governors
around, and provide police protection, which is certainly needed, since the
last governor laid off 20,000 people, and do you think he’d survive a bus ride
through Cataño? Not likely. OK—then there’s this:
Well, the governor is sure that we’ll all be willing to make
sacrifices, just as he and Wilma have, but allegedly his Ferragamo shoes cost
nearly 700 bucks, when you add in our 11.5% sales tax.
Do I need to add more? A more serious blogger would look up
the picture someone took of Melba Acosta drinking wine and eating lobster,
although as I recall it, the wine was obvious but the lobster couldn’t be
verified. At least I didn’t see it.
 |
| Found it! I'm serious after all! |
What was the point? The point was that the financial crisis
is not my problem, dammit, it’s the politicians who stole the money and
gave suspicious contracts to their cronies borrowed and borrowed and now? Fuck
‘em!
Then we have the outsiders peering in, often with little or
no knowledge of the island or the culture. So Don
Young of Alaska thinks Puerto Rico is at the boiling point, ready for
revolution; Paul
Krugman, however, tells us that Puerto Rico is no Greece. Great to know!
Politics—of course!—gets into it. The folk favoring
independence will tell you: The Jones Act that mandates that we use American
shipping costs us a lot of money (does it? Who knows?) Statehooders: If
we weren’t a colony and were a state, we could refinance our debt through
bankruptcy, just as all the other states can. And lastly, the deluded group
that holds that we are a separate country joined in a bilateral union with the
United States? Well, along with Wilma and the governor, we’re all (meaning
everybody but Wilma and the governor and the ruling classes) yes, we are all
(please revisit last parentheses) going to have to make sacrifices. Oh, and the
governor just stumbled upon those Ferragamo shoes at the Salvation Army—one of
those lucky days!
It’s all nonsense, of course, since there are a lot of guys
out there in the business district of San Juan who are wearing shoes every bit
as expensive as the governor. And the 39 million for police protection for
former governors? Look, in the face of 73 billion, it’s nothing.
What is something, and what no one is talking about,
is that our government has 230,000
employees, as compared to the 110,000
public employees of the state of Wisconsin, and do I really have to trawl
through the Internet to tell you that Wisconsin has almost twice as many people
and a lot more land and also something called snow, a lot of which fell for six
months between October and (probably) May, and which is hugely expensive to
remove?
And you know, we’re all complicit in this, because although
of course your mother or sister or brother-in-law or maybe the whole
damn family are ferociously working public servants, veritably pounding the
streets outside, pestering the passers by with offers to help the citizenry! Of
course, of course, we all know that! It’s all the other lazy, shiftless,
indolent-with-attitude shirkers that are clogging up the government. Still, it
has to be said, there are a lot of everybody else’s brothers and sisters and
whole damn families.
And those politicians? All of those thieving bastards that
got us into this mess? Guess what—they’re there because we voted for them, and
if we had been reading the newspaper, all those years, we could have seen very
clearly what was coming, since it was the headline year after year about the
government deficit, and the borrowing, and the issuing of more and more bonds.
But no, we don’t read the newspapers because it’s too
depressing and the politicians are all crooks and they just steal the money and
there’s nothing we can do about it. So now, all of a sudden, it’s the
hedge-funds—read vultures—who are circling above and extorting exorbitant
interest for that drop of water on the dying man’s tongue! Hah! Bastards!
God knows, it’s hard to defend a hedge fund, but if you need
a loan until payday, where do you go? First to the bank, and then after they
begin to look funny and then reject you, you go to the little payday loan store
and then, if even that doesn’t work, you go down to the corner to the loan
shark, and guess what? At this point, your rate is not the 3% that Banco
Popular was charging you. And that’s where we are, folks!
So now we’re in trouble—enough trouble to get the government
to commission the Krueger
Report, which meant that three economists came down and told us what we’ve
heard repeatedly and never acted upon. The tax base is eroding, we are
uncompetitive in terms of labor costs, there’s no plan to develop the economy,
and we can’t pay the debt or go back and get some more. Oh, and nobody is
working or if they are, it’s in the informal economy—and who cooked up that
term, by the way? Whatever happened to “black market?”—and a huge number of us
are receiving benefits of some sort.
They walk among us, folks, since the guy who sold me the
Perrier I’m now drinking told me, in passing, that he has both the state health
card and the Department of Family card—the “informal economy” equivalent of “food
stamps.” Another employee is working full-time but getting title 8 housing,
because she’s supposedly unemployed. And a customer came in recently and
complained that his cell phone got lost, and then when he went to replace it at
whatever government agency replaces cell phones, well, guess what? Somebody
made a mistake and he was listed on the wrong list, or the government changed
providers, and so he has go to Sprint or somewhere, all because of the
government inefficiency, and isn’t that outrageous? No, but what is
outrageous….
But what I really wanted to tell you is the story of
a guy who is painting my apartment and doing a wonderful job of it, though the
work is coming along slowly, since he has a full time job, he’s in the Army
Reserves and so that’s his part time, and he is still broke because he’s paying
child support.
The point is, this guy used to have a construction company,
with his father-in-law or ex-father-in-law. So the economy went bust and his
company went bust, and then he couldn’t pay his child support, so he went to
court, and then he went, in handcuffs and shackles, to a solitary cell,
awaiting transfer to jail.
“I just sat there and shook. I mean, I saw my whole life go
down the toilet. Look, when I had money, I paid! And so how is putting me in
jail for six months gonna help? First, I’m gonna lose my job. Then, the army is
gonna give me a dishonorable discharge, ‘cause they’re looking for any excuse
to get rid of people and reduce the benefits they gotta pay. And when I
realized that absolutely everything was gone, I broke down and sobbed.”
Guys? This is an army guy, this is a guy who does
construction and likes chicks—fatally so. This is not a guy who breaks
down and sobs.
He got two breaks: His ex-wife relented and talked to the
judge, and I gave him some money for child support. So he’s free, except not,
because after he finished the morning work of painting my apartment, he took
public transportation to Bayamón, then walked 45 minutes under the blazing sun
to his hospital job, and then worked his 8-hour shift, walked that 45 minutes back
to the public transportation, went through three municipalities and stumbled on
home. Dear Reader—did you get tired just reading that sentence?
Unsurprisingly, this guy gets sick a lot, especially now,
when the sky has turned an eerie milky blue, since huge amounts of Sahara sand
have drifted over the Atlantic and are now above us, slowly drizzling down and
blotching our cars and acting like asbestos in our lungs. So not a problem, if
you’re in air-conditioning all day and night, but that hour and a half that
he’s walking daily on the streets of Bayamón? He’s got a sandbox in his lungs.
This financial crisis, as invisible as the Saharan sand, as
felt and weakening and sickening, as insidious, as gradually and inevitably
lethal? Yes, we are all complicit, but some more so than others, and if today
the guy who has three jobs has failed to show up to finish the painting? I know
perfectly well: He’s exhausted, he sleeping, and all he can handle today is one
job, not two.
So the question is not the Ferragamo shoes or the lobster or
the policemen driving our corrupt governors back and forth from the country
clubs. Yes—we’re all complicit, but some more than others. And yes, we’ll
certainly join you and Wilma, Guv, in making those sacrifices! But while do I
feel that the burden of those sacrifices will not be felt by the people who are
living and eating off the government? And why do I feel that you and Wilma
won’t feel too much of a sting, either? Why is it, in fact, that I know
perfectly well whose shoulders this is going to fall on, and you do too, and
you’ve even seen him, or you could have, since he’s quite visible and
quite exposed, as you drive past him, Guv and Wilma, in your air-conditioned SUV
with the tinted windows and the police escort. Yes, he’s perfectly visible,
that guy who’s going to made the sacrifices, that guy out there….
…walking the streets of Bayamón!
