Our Man in Moscow

So who is the guy?

Edward Snowden has spent 32 days inside a Moscow airport; a Russian news agency reports that Snowden's request for asylum is in process, and that he may spend up to a year in temporary asylum in the country.

The question has been all along: what’s motivating this guy? What makes him tick? Why did he choose to do what he did, and how well planned was it?

One website has part of the answer—maybe. According to addictinginfo.org, Snowden is a gun-loving, pro-NRA, libertarian dickhead. Think I’m wrong? Catch this alleged exchange from a techie chat room, Ars Technica.

SNOWDEN: save money? cut this social security bullshit

User11: hahahayes

User18: Yeah! Fuck old people!

User11: social security is bullshit

User11: let’s just toss old people out in the street

User18: Old people could move in with [User11].

User11: NOOO

User11: they smell funny

SNOWDEN: Somehow, our society managed to make it hundreds of years without social security just fine

SNOWDEN: you fucking retards

SNOWDEN: Magically the world changed after the new deal, and old people became made of glass

SNOWDEN: yeah, that makes sense

User11: wow

User11: you are just so fucking stupid

SNOWDEN: yeah, [User11]. and you’re quite a gem

User19: and magically, life expectancy has doubled in the last 100 years.funny how that works.

SNOWDEN: [User19], you don’t think modern medicine has something to do with that? no? it’s social security? wow. I guess I missed that.

User11: hurr wait a second, life expectancy has shot up in recent times along with the dissolution of the communal family unit in exchange for the nuclear family

User11: gee i guess we might need to create a safety net for the sudden glut of helpless elderly????

SNOWDEN: they wouldn’t be fucking helpless if you weren’t sending them fucking checks to sit on their ass and lay in hospitals all day

User11: you are so goddamned stupd*pid

User11: PUT OLD PEOPLE TO WORK IN THE FIELDS

SNOWDEN: my grandmother is eighty fucking three this year, and you know what? she still supports herself working as a goddamned hairdresser

Right—and here he is on guns:

User: the restrictions were made to appease the conservatives to get another bill passed. fucking cons.

SNOWDEN: See, that’s why I’m goddamned glad for the second amendment. Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished.

From the website, it appears that Snowden had no problem spying on people during the Bush administration: he lambastes The New York Times for revealing the existence of the phone metadata collection in 2006, and thinks the whistleblower should be shot in the balls. But he changes his tune when Obama is elected.

Throughout it all, Snowden has seemed just this side of paranoid and delusional. There is the persistent story that the United States will find a way to off him; to avert that, he has given top secret, highly damaging documents to various people, who will reveal causing enormous damage after Snowden’s murder.

As well, Snowden seems to be winging it completely. He takes hard drives with all his information into China; one expert said that the best practice is to take nothing into China except a clean, empty hard drive. Why? Because anything can be copied—and likely will be—while you’re out for a Coke and a burger.

And speaking of China—OK, Hong Kong—Snowden arrived, stayed in a fancy hotel, and then was running out of money. Hunh? Couldn’t he have stayed somewhere else? And why Hong Kong, since China does have an extradition policy with the US?

Look, if I were Snowden, I might have done this: look for a country that has no extradition to the US, but does have a decent way of life, and a good record on civil liberties. Load up as much cash as I could, buy a ticket, fly to the country, immediately request amnesty, and sit tight while I did so. Once I’m in, I’d start talking.

Oh, and speaking of civil liberties—I went onto Amnesty International’s website, just to check out the Russian Federation’s track record on human rights; the site reminded me that the Federation had just passed, by something like 441 to 0, a draconian bill against gay people. In Russia, you can’t even talk gay issues without getting thrown in the jug.

So this guy—who apparently thinks he is John Galt—ends up in Russia, and is considering places like Cuba, Venezuela, or Bolivia? I read the Times today, reporting from Havana, and guess what? None of their sources would give their last name. These countries make the United States look like a bastion of liberty.

So now Snowden is in Russia, looking for a job. Guess what? He’s got one. He’ll be “working” for the Russian intelligence agency, who will expect him to deliver. And no—no programming but all the information he has about the NSA. And if he doesn’t?

Don’t think it’ll be a pink slip.

Somehow, this guy has ended up in deep shit. I applaud him for speaking out, but how could a bright guy botch it so badly?

Two Wings and a Lady

Cuba y Puerto Rico son

De un pájaro las dos alas

It’s a famous quote from a poem by Lola Rodríguez de Tió, and can be translated roughly as “Cuba and Puerto Rico are two wings of the same bird.”

Well if true, it may be that the wings of the bird are flying in completely different directions.

From the video below, it seems that the Cuban wing is set to soar. Raúl Castro has had to face the inevitable: the economy, supported all those years by the Iron Curtain buying Cuba’s sugar at inflated prices, was broke. The fields—five million acres of them—were overrun with a weed called marabú (marabou.) Nor is it just a weed—it’s highly invasive and thorny. If you attack it with a machete—pretty much the only thing at hand in lightly mechanized Cuba—you’ll end up bloody at the end of the day.

The buildings are falling down in Havana, and the state workers, who are supposed to repair the houses, are backlogged and slow to respond. How slow? One woman interviewed has waited 16 years with her ceiling propped up with four-by-fours. She worries that the roof will collapse every time it rains.

Seventy percent of the food has to be imported; supplies in the state-run shops are scant. Doctors make twenty-five dollars a month; one doctor interviewed makes a better living selling copper tubing on the side.

And so, you say, how can the wing be flapping skyward?

Well, Cuba’s economy grew 3% last year, and is expected to grow about the same this year as well. Sure, it’s not quite the 3.6% that Castro wanted, but it’s not far off.

And by allowing 181 jobs to be done by licensed private individuals, the government has at last introduced some incentive to work. In the past, there was a saying, “the government pretends to pay us; we pretend to work.” Now, there’s the beginning of an independent, free market economy.

And let’s face it, where was Miami before the Cubans arrived?

My friend Harry has a story. In those days when Harry was selling shoes, he entered a small shop, got tossed out, and went to a café. Still burning with the humiliation, he overheard a conversation among the boys—a group of middle-aged guys who were complaining: the damned Cubans had come and taken all the jobs away in Puerto Rico. Harry turned to address them.

“If the Cubans are working and you are not, it’s because they are NOT sitting in cafés drinking beer at 10 o’clock in the morning. They came with nothing and got a bike and sold what they could sell and now they have multinational corporations and live in gated communities. Oh, and I’m not Cuban but Puerto Rican….”

Which will explain why the Puerto Rican wing seems to be plummeting.

La producción propia es la tarea urgente contra la dependencia de fondos federales en Puerto Rico

That’s one of the headlines in today’s El Nuevo Día. Economists are urging us—as they have for all the twenty odd years I’ve lived here, to create jobs to avoid dependency on federal funds.

And on the double, since 24,200 fewer people are working here on the island than last year. Granted, that may not be a problem, since we are also shrinking in population, but government (the largest employer on the island) is reporting 20,600 fewer jobs this year than last.

Here’s Caribbean Business Report on the subject:

Puerto Rico’s population was pegged at 3,725,789 in the 2010 Census, down from the 3,808,610 registered in the 2000 Census. It marked the first time the island population had declined between census counts. The 2010 Census also showed there were 4.7 million Puerto Ricans living in the states, marking the first time more Puerto Ricans lived stateside than on the island. Only one state, Michigan, registered a drop in population in the 2010 Census, dipping 0.6 percent.

It’s happened before—in the Great Depression, droves of Puerto Ricans left, primarily workers who would man the factories of the (then) industrialized North East. Who’s leaving now?

Young professionals.

Which is why the article in Caribbean Business Report ends thus:

The population drop of nearly 83,000 over the last 10 years and the continuing exodus raises the prospect of less federal funding for Puerto Rico, increased pressure on the financially ailing public-pension system and a dramatically aging population with fewer financial resources.

Yes and no.

I’m sitting in a terrific local business, Poet’s Passage, run by a great lady, and named in fact, Lady. She explained this curious fact by noting that her father’s family came from Australia via Scotland, where they were all lords and ladies. (Tactfully, I never inquired as to the exact circumstances of the move to Australia).

And Lady has been here since 11AM—busy getting her sister store adjoining the café ready for an activity tonight. Which means that she will be here until the wee hours of the morning.

“There’s money in poetry,” she told me once, “and I sat down with the board of directors of WesternBank and convinced them—I’d made a great business plan. And in six years of business, I’ve never missed a payment.”

She’s less person than dynamo, raising the emotional temperature by several degrees every time she comes into the café. She kisses everyone; she calls out, “Hi, Marc!” from fifty feet away. She’s home-schooling her child or she’s painting one of her poems onto a piece of canvas or she’s busy telling a customer about poetry night, every Tuesday night at 7 PM. She admits it privately—some of the poetry heard there may not last in the canon of Puerto Rican / Latin American literature, but that’s not the point. She’s seen poets grow, as she has; she’s seen self-esteem bloom. It’s a space, a necessary space.

An embracing space. How embracing? The gentleman at the table two doors down is busy working at his computer. He also serves me coffee—and very good it is—when he’s working. How many other workers choose to hang out at their workplace when not on the job? (I except bars….)

Lady dropped out of high school to help in the family business. But it hasn’t stopped her. “Who’s your favorite female poet of the 20^th century,” she once asked me, and we went on to talk about Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore—an army of great poets. I was sweating to hold up my end of the conversation. 

The only resource Puerto Rico has is an amazing human potential. And looking at Lady charge into her café, greet the customers, kiss the staff, give the order to clean the bathrooms, and then take a dirty plate off the table while kissing the customer—I’m convinced.

The two wings can soar upward again.