Lady and the Monkey

It was a day when about all I could do was listen to the story of Lady and the monkey.

I could have written about the son of a Federal judge, Salvador Casellas; the trial of the son is in its 11^th day, and everybody is talking about it. Nor is it looking very good for Casellas, who is accused of killing his wife as she sat by the pool one weekend morning last year. The wife is reported not to have struggled against her assailant; a neighbor—though admittedly a junkie—reported seeing a man driving a light grey Mercedes. Nothing too unusual there, but how often do you see someone fling a quite rare and expensive pistol out a car window? Fortunately, the junkie knew what to do: he went down to the drug punto and sold it for a thousand bucks (and some marijuana) to the pushers there. Oh, and today’s news is that the bullets match the gun that Casellas reported as stolen months before the murder.

OK—so a guy whom a friend told me was seriously entitled even as a child is—apparently—not getting away with murder. Anything else happening on the island?

Well, the teachers are furious, as are the judges—both groups got their pensions slashed. So the judges did what judges do: go to court. The teachers went to two very predictable allies—the fire-and-independence breathing archbishop and the new mayoress of San Juan. And the archbishop instantly invoked the magic word: without teachers, he thundered, there is no patria.

Astute readers of this blog will know: anytime you want to talk independence covertly, the word patria is invoked. So the archbishop and mayoress are getting together at the Colegio de Abogados de Puerto Rico, along with assorted others, to forge together “amendments” to the bill.

It’s hard to imagine what amendments could be done to the bill, but it’ll fun to see. In all likelihood, the teachers will propose to increase their retirement to higher levels than they were before the reform, and will lower the number of years teaching to be eligible to retire from thirty to five.

People aren’t getting it—we’re broke, and one more degradation of our credit rating will sink us into junk category; the party, as one economist put it, is over. Nor is it just the central government: El Nuevo Día reports that 16 of our towns have unemployment rates above 20%; one town up in the mountains has a rate of 27.5%.

“Mommy, the teachers begin teaching the moment the bell rings,” said the son of a friend of a friend, whose mother had sent him for a year to Alabama to learn English. The child was astonished—in Puerto Rico, the teachers chat in the hall for ten or fifteen minutes before ambling into the classroom.

So the question on everybody’s lips is whether the two-day strike that the teachers announced for next week will really only be two days. Or will the strike be extended? No one knows.

That said, it seemed easier, yesterday, to hear the story of Lady and the monkey.

“I never liked that monkey,” said Lady, who owns the coffee shop and two other businesses, and she showed me a picture of it: it was barring its teeth in a truly frightening way.

Nor was it an empty threat; the monkey attacked and nearly killed Lady’s stepfather. Among other things, it carried the stepfather up a tree and then dropped him. So Lady’s mother had to go wrestle with the monkey, who was pulling the legs one way as mother was pulling the shoulders the opposite way. Eventually, the monkey let go, and mother dragged the stepfather into the house.

It was a brutal mauling, with large chunks of flesh….OK, I’ll spare you. And Lady, then seven years old, was stunned

There was a bar next door, and one of the patrons, who was completely sloshed, decided that someone had to dispense the monkey. This he proposed to do, if he could get out the door. To no one’s urging, he left the bar, found the monkey, whipped out a gun, and on the first shot got the monkey right between the eyes.

“He was a hero in the town, after that,” said Lady.

“Nonsense,” said Saúl, who had stopped by to use the Internet, and who had stories of his own. “It was just a lucky shot.”

Lady considered this, and went on with the story. A hurricane arrived—these things happen in Puerto Rico—a few days later, and since everybody wanted to be close to the hospitalized stepfather, and nobody wanted to be up in the mountains, their veterinarian offered to take the kids. And Lady was having a hard time of it—having frequent nightmares and flashbacks of the monkey.

And one night she had a particularly bad nightmare, woke up screaming and crying, and went down to get some milk—not knowing that there were two refrigerators: one for food, one for dead animals. So what did she see when she opened the refrigerator door?

Right—the monkey!

We go on to talk about animals—which ones can interact with humans, which cannot. Crows, says Saúl, are very intelligent; snakes are—well—snakes. And he once knew a guy who had a 20-foot long python, as well as a six-year old daughter. And one day, the python began losing weight. The vet, when consulted, was stumped, until he asked, “were there any kids in the house?”

“The python is making room for your daughter,” said the vet, “so tell me what to do with it, ‘cause you’re not taking it home….”

We sit and ponder this for a moment; Lady has to go off to paint casitas, the ornamental plaster house facades that she sells.

“It’s like a sit-com, coming into this place,” said one of the employees. “You know that the regulars will be there, in their usual places, doing their usual things.”

Lady comes by, kisses me, tells me, “I love you.”

“I love you too.”         

A Christmas Reform

It was close and it was bitter, but last night the senate approved the “reform” of the teachers’ retirement plan.

In fact, it couldn’t have been closer—since it passed 14 to 13 with four members of the ruling Popular party breaking ranks and voting no. And the final product wasn’t entirely without a few sweeteners. For one thing, teachers over 55 with 30 years of service actually got an increase in the minimum pension to $1625, and there’s a window for teachers with 28 to 30 years to retire with 70% of their monthly salary. Oh, and teachers got a raise of $25, as well.

“They haven’t been doing their jobs,” said a friend, just now. Her child is being home-schooled, but parents who can afford it send their kids to private schools. Why? Because if Missi or Míster—as teachers are known here; it’s a Puerto Rican thing—is sick, the school lets the kids go home. Or maybe home, since nobody may be there; so that means the streets. So if—unreasonably—you insist on knowing where your kids are and what they are doing, you shell out eight to ten thousand per kid per year for a private school.

Well, somebody came out and said it, namely an adviser to the president of the House; and here, dear Readers, are his intemperate words:

“Faltan cada rato. Trabajan cinco horas diarias. Tienen 60 días de vacaciones al año. Ganan más que el salario promedio anual. No pagan seguro social. Salen de la escuela antes que los estudiantes. Llevan 15 años con los mismos planes y materiales. Ah, pero ni pal car...jo le pidas que pongan de su parte porque te muerden, te gritan suciedades y te rompen las puertas. Sí. Así son”, dijo Hernández en una entrada a su cuenta el pasado 19 de diciembre.

El mismo día, Hernández declaró: “Y si después de pasar por 12 años por 12 manos de diferentes maestros no aprendes inglés, agradece a un maestro o a los 12 que no hicieron ningún esfuerzo por lo que se les paga”.

(“They call in sick. They work 5 hours a day. They have 60 days of vacation a year. They earn more than the average annual salary. They don’t pay Social Security. They leave the school before the students. They’ve spent 15 years with the same lesson plans and school materials. But don’t frigging ask them to do their part because they bite you, shout obscenities and break down the doors. Yup, that’s how it is,” said Hernández in an entry on his Facebook page on 19 December.

The same day, Hernández declared, “And if after 12 years of passing through 12 hands of different teachers you don’t know English, thank a teacher or the 12 who didn’t make any effort to do what they’re paid for.”)

Understandably, the teachers were howling—nor did it help that Hernández has a contract for $84,000, whereas the base salary for teachers is $21,000. Hernández’s boss came out and stated that the opinions were not his nor the House’s, and that he regretted that such expressions had been made.

Did Hernández back down? Nope, he responded to The New Day’s lead—which used the word insulto and yes, it means what you think—and said this:

No he insultado a nadie. Di mi opinión basada en mi experiencia en las escuelas donde han estudiado mis hijos. Sin faltar respeto a nadie". 

(“I haven’t insulted anybody. I gave my opinion based on my experience in the schools where my children have studied. There was no lack of respect for anyone.”)

Well, the governor has just signed the legislation, and the teachers? They’re threatening a strike, which—according to the governor—is unconstitutional.

It’s the usual story: who is to blame for the sorry situation we’re in? The usual culprits…

…everyone and no one!

The Teachers Mutiny

T’was the week before Christmas and…

“…we had a coup d’état,” in the words of Jaime.

Who should know, being a lawyer and an astute observer. So what happened? Well, the governor of the island called a special session of the legislature to pass a “reform” of the teachers’ retirement system, which currently has almost 40,000 pensioners. This follows a move in April to reform the government workers retirement system, which caused protests across the island.

It’s not the chickens but rather the eagles come home to roost; since 1952, governments have had two or three essential strategies to reduce unemployment. The first was legitimate—manufacturing, especially pharmaceuticals. That Valium you mother chugged down to tide her through your terrible twos? Thanks, Puerto Rico!

The other modes were a little less kosher….

“He shipped ‘em all off to New York!” sputtered Mr. Fernández, when someone suggested that Luis Muñoz Marín—a close relative of the devil, in the eyes of Mr. Fernández—had reduced unemployment.

The other solution? Put everybody on the government payroll, give them one task to do, and pay them substantially less than the private sector. So you had an enormous government; if memory serves... well wait. Here’s a graphic:

So everybody knew for years that we were heading for disaster. And thus the last governor passed legislation that slashed 30,000 government jobs. Last April, the present governor took the machete to the government retirement system and raised taxes. And now, it’s the teachers’ turn.

There are two reasons for this. First, the system is broke; here’s what the president of the Senate, Eduardo Bhatia, had to say:

To have a retirement system you have to square the end of the month and it is broken. For every dollar you have to give a person who retires today there are 17 cents in the piggy bank. The question is where the other 83 cents go, and that is the decision we have to make as a country. Are there additional 83 cents in the General Fund? No, not there,’ said the Senate leader.

Put it another way—the norm is to have a plan 80% funded, we are only at 17%.

The other factor at play? A little company called Moody’s, which has our credit rating one notch above junk, and is watching Puerto Rico closely.

Well, “watching” may be generous. Moody’s, in fact, has Puerto Rico quite securely by part of a gentleman’s most prized anatomical possessions. And Cate Long, writing for Reuters states it openly: she wrote, “Moody’s identified this reform as one of the factors that will compose its review of Puerto Rico.”

So what happened? The governor sent legislation to one of the two teachers’ unions on the island, and they erupted. And as you can see in the video below, they not only protested but broke the doors to the Senate and charged in. So soon, the entire island was glued to their televisions, watching as hundreds of chanting teachers gathered in the capitol.

Damage? $55,000. One part of which may have been a senator’s chair, on which, according to The New Day, a child was permitted or possibly urged to urinate. Oh, and a security official got bitten, though the attacker didn’t draw blood.

And what did the Senate do? Well, they got the hell out of Dodge City, which in this case meant retreating into an adjacent room, the Hall for Illustrious Ladies. They continued the debate until seven PM, when they adjourned.

To make a sorry situation worse, the teachers do not receive Social Security, and so their pension is the only thing they have.

The reaction from the guv? He came out and called it “reproachable,” which seems a bit mild, given the damage done and the precedent it sets.

You can argue—the teachers should have seen it coming; it was clear that the system was unsustainable. It’s also true that we have a very expensive government, and that our legislators make a killing, both when they’re in office and when they come back as “advisers.” Nor does it help that—according to Mr. Fernández—the Department of Education has the highest proportion of non-docent versus docent personnel in the country.

The saddest thing? According to an analysis by Joanisabel González in the print edition of El Nuevo Día, “Lo increíble es que Puerto Rico entrará en esta nueva parte del ciclo sin garantías de que escapará a la degradación crediticia”.

Simple translation! Even if we do this—and the House has in the last hour just passed the legislation—it may not be enough.