A Land So Fair

Boy, were they quiet about it! Consider that I’m a news junkie, that I’m from Wisconsin, and that I care I-suppose-you-could-say passionately about environmental issues. So why didn’t I know about line 61, about which the company that operates it says this:

As part of our ongoing efforts to meet North America’s needs for reliable and secure transportation of petroleum energy supplies, Enbridge is expanding the average annual capacity of Line 61 from 560,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 1.2 million bpd.

And where is that expansion? Check it out:

OK—Enbridge wants to transport over a million barrels of tar sand oil through Wisconsin every day: Is that a problem?

Regular crude oil is plenty toxic, but the tar sand oils are an environmental disaster at every level.

Let’s start with the sand that you need to fracture the oil wells: That sand has to be very fine, and Wisconsin has the fortune or misfortune to have the largest source of the rock that produces the sand in the nation. So there was a boom in production of the sand in the last decade or so, a boom four which the state’s environmental protection agency was completely unprepared.

Hmmm…or was it? According to my lights, it had been very carefully prepared indeed, and from many angles, and it was prepared to do absolutely nothing.  Why? Well, consider this quote from the Scientific American, tellingly and heart-breakingly titled “How Scott Walker Dismantled Wisconsin’s Environmental Legacy.”

Since taking office in 2011 Walker has moved to reduce the role of science in environmental policymaking and to silence discussion of controversial subjects, including climate change, by state employees. And he has presided over a series of controversial rollbacks in environmental protection, including relaxing laws governing iron mining and building on wetlands, in both cases to help specific companies avoid regulatory roadblocks. Among other policy changes, he has also loosened restrictions on phosphorus pollution in state waterways, tried to restrict wind energy development and proposed ending funding for a major renewable energy research program housed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

So now we have an explosion of sand mines, and that sand is extremely fine, making it easy for it to become airborne, and also causing silicosis, which can lead to lung cancer. And according to one source, 79 percent of air samples in frac sand sites exceed the levels of silicone established by OSHA. Right—the miners wear masks, but what do you do about little Billy, five years old and living downwind from a mine?

So the sand is bad enough, but the fracturing? Well, first of all, it requires a huge amount of water, and then produces a correspondingly huge amount of very contaminated sludge, about which nobody knows what to do, so people have been digging ponds, most of which are leaking. And as you can see in the video below, wildlife is severely affected, both by drinking it and by—in the case of birds—being coated in it.

And so what gets produced? Well, it's tar sand oil, the bulk of which is drilled in Alberta, Canada, and it's particularly nasty stuff: It can lead to things as minor as a headache to diseases as lethal as leukemia. So from a public health point of view, wouldn’t it be logical not to expose as many people as possible to the oil? Of course, but what have we done? Chosen to ship—either by rail or by pipeline—the stuff all the way across the country.

Which is precisely what Enbridge, the largest distributer of natural gas in Canada, and the operator of—in their words—“the longest crude oil and liquid hydrocarbons transportation system in the world” does.

How long is that system? Well, it goes from Superior, Wisconsin, to a refinery near Chicago, but that’s only the system in the USA (on different lines of the system, the pipelines cover 1900 miles); in Canada, the figure falls to a little over 1400 miles. So that’s 3300 miles of pipeline for both countries; that’s not bad if you’re piping water, it’s potentially disastrous if you’re piping oil.

And in fact, it was either very nearly disastrous or absolutely disastrous, depending on your point of view, when the pipeline broke on 25 July 2010 near Marshall, Michigan, and began flowing into a creek that fed into the Kalamazoo river that would later flow into Lake Michigan.

Back up five years—that’s when, according to an investigation by the National Traffic and Safety Board, Enbridge first knew that they had problems on that part of the line, but chose not to, or at least didn’t, act. Why would they do that? According to one critic-turned-whistleblower, John Bolenbaugh, it was financially a better deal to let a spill happen, and then have the insurance company pick up the tab, than it was to do routine maintenance. (As an aside, the tar sand oil is apparently especially toxic and corrosive on pipes.)

Nor was that all: Enbridge decided that the alarms were false, due to a bubble in the pipeline, so the solution? Instead of shutting down, they increased the pressure on the line, so that when finally, after 17 hours, they realized they had a leak, 81 percent of the amount spilled occurred in those 17 hours.

 That was because the boys in the monitoring station were in Edmonton, Canada, and not smelling what the boys fishing down by the river were smelling, which was very strong indeed. Oh, and they were also getting headaches….

How bad was it? The worst inland spill in the country, nor was that all, because it turns out that tar sand oil reacts differently in water than crude oil. Crude oil stays on the surface and is relatively easy to collect: We were in uncharted seas with tar sand oil. So we had to learn that tar sand oil initially stays on the surface, releases hydrocarbons such as benzene, and then sinks to the sea or river floor, and what to do with that?

Ah, for the days of American ingenuity! Because I would love to have read, as I now will love to write, “Enbridge’s expert team of haz-mat professions instantly realized and conceived a special vacuuming process (since patented) that scoured each millimeter of the river bed, collected any trace of oil or other chemicals, transferred it to custom-made tanks, which were then taken to a disaster response center, which had rockets ready in order to shoot the hazardous material into space, to incinerate the material as well as the rocket itself outside of the fragile tissue of our precious atmosphere. At Enbridge, we care!”

No, that wasn’t the sentence (run-on intended, all the better to obfuscate and lull you into passivity) that got written.  Instead, Enbridge pretty much told the EPA what they were going to do, which is why I could view in one video the fascinating spectacle of the side of the boat, the oil-drenched river, and the hand reaching down to clean up this toxic mess with…

…a paper towel!

Guys? That’s something I’d do!

Well, they got more clever as time went on. According to whistle-blower Bolenbaugh, they scooped up whatever was visible, took it to a field, dumped in out, pulled layers of burlap or canvas or whatever, put a topping of soil on that, and then seeded it. Viola! Instant meadow—just don’t dig to deep.

Or stir the riverbed too much, since, as the videos make clear, you’ll get a plume of oily who-knows-what floating down the river. So they poured in rocks, then sand, and…

This was too much for even the EPA, which ordered further dredging. It was all bad enough for the director of the NTSB, Deborah Hersman, to say that Enbridge officials acted, “like the Keystone cops.”

Unless, of course, you were the whistle-blower, who got the ax the very morning after he blew the whistle, and then started getting death threats. All of which were freaking him out enough to start putting videos of his motorcycle with two screws missing on the front tire, and his neighbor opining that those screws were designed never to come out.

Full disclosure—yes, he looks nuts. But remember that old adage that even paranoiacs have enemies? It’s all on his website: you judge.

Nor was the public unaffected, and Bolenbaugh got all of that on camera, too, and pretty compelling it is, especially if you have never seen a person having a seizure. I have, and if the video’s is an act, I hope it wins the Oscar.

Nor was it the case that you had to be sick to get Enbridge’s attention, you had to be sick in the right location, which meant that unless you had the river passing through your living room—right, I know I should edit that out, but watch the videos, and you’ll get steamed, too—well, you were probably a malingerer or hoping for a handout.

Apparently, it was all so bad that Enbridge had to buy 134 houses. The catch? Well, they got them at fire sale prices, cleaned up their mess (maybe) and then sold at a higher price. So says—of course—the whistleblower.

The videos are wrenching in part because of the constant complaint, which I find utterly true, that “they don’t care”—with the “they” being Enbridge. To which I would reply that of course they don’t care, and perhaps they shouldn’t. Why? Because corporations don’t care until it’s too expensive not to care, which is why we have regulatory bodies like the EPA and the NTSB that have enough teeth to gnash the corporation into shreds and fed it to their cubs, and then loll in the sun, looking at the bones and the carnage. Then—trust me—the corporations will care.

So it was a disaster, a disaster of over one million US gallons of extremely toxic muck spilled that got into the creek and then into the river, and almost—though who knows, maybe it did—got into Lake Michigan. Which is connected, you do remember from 5^th grade geography, to all of the other Great Lakes, and which are scenic, yes, but also provide a lot of water for however-many-millions to drink.  

One final irony: Everybody is reporting seriously that they “closed” the river, which I found curious, because I have seen rivers, including the mighty Mississippi, and it was very much my impression that a river flowed, so had someone found the faucet handle that could turn off a river? If so, not doing so was criminal negligence when we had all that flooding five or ten years ago. But no, closing a river simply meant that humans could not swim or boat or even go near it. But what about fish and wildlife? You know the answer.

A long piece, I know. But Enbridge, this Enbridge, this fair country—sorry, company—is the very company that wants to “upgrade” the pipeline so that one million barrels will pass through…. OK—I think I did the math, which was to figure out that a barrel contains 31.5 US gallons, multiply that by 1,000,000 (barrels per day), divide by 24 (hours per day) and then get the figure of 1,312, 500 (gallons per hour). And that means? That we could have a spill as bad as Michigan’s in under an hour. A spill in Wisconsin, my home state.

Remember Wisconsin?

Stay tuned!

A Crisis on Ideological Grounds

“I never read the newspaper, it’s too depressing,” would say my students.

And my reaction?

“An informed citizenry is necessary to maintain a democracy, so you don’t have a choice. Your responsibility is to keep yourself informed.”

My students, by and large, loved me: They rarely, however, took me seriously. There was the time that I argued for ride sharing and car pools, but this, of course, was impossible, since what would happen if their child took sick, and needed to be taken from school?

“It’s precisely for you children, and their future, that you should give up your car!”

So the students continued driving to work, and listening to local radio, most of which were addressing the vital issues of what local star Maripily was currently up to, or speculating on what person infected local model La Taína with HIV.

But there were two or three subjects guaranteed to stir discussion: There was the fact that virtually everyone was scrambling to send their kids to private schools, since what happens when the teacher is sick? Well, they’re sent home, if there’s a home to be sent to, since most of the parents were working. So that means that the kids were on the street, and that was where you didn’t want them.

A sort of Stockholm Syndrome had overtaken them, those good students of mine, since how could they simply shrug, pay five or six thousand a year to a private school, all the while driving past a “free” public school? “Free” in quotes since they were paying for it via taxes. Shouldn’t they be pounding on the principal’s desk, demanding that he or she get a substitute teacher?

“I’d be shouting that if anything happened to my kids while they were out on the streets, I’d sue the pants off him or her,” I used to say. But no, there was no system of substitutes in Puerto Rico? Why? Well, there just wasn’t.

Nor was it the case that the principals were shouting, since for years I took the bus to Rio Piedras, home of the University of Puerto Rico, and went to the center of the city to take a bus to Caguas. Fine, but I had to leap over a drain that was spewing sewage, and had been doing so for months. The drain was immediately in front Hawthorne School, but where was the good New England outrage? Where were the parents, and where was the principal?

There can be no outrage without an implied belief in the system, and it has been that cynicism that has brought us to this default of more than 70 billion in municipal bonds.

“Son todos pillos,” they’re all thieves, said my students of the politicians.

“Then it’s our responsibility to elect politicians who are honest,” I would say.

More shrugs!

We all accepted it—the government was never meant to provide services, it was meant to provide jobs to all of our relatives when the party they supported was in power. Right—if we were part of the ruling / technocrat class, the government was meant to be a siphon for kickbacks and corruption schemes. So everybody had a story about their father or mother, laboring fiercely in whatever government agency it happened to be, but the three or four people around them? Hah, just sitting on their….

So the government got huge, and that meant unwieldy, and nobody objected when there were three or four agencies doing or more like not doing the same thing. So in my infant years in Puerto Rico, I would ask Mr. Fernández stupid questions, like…

“So why does Puerto Rico have twice as many people as Wisconsin on the government payroll, even though Wisconsin has—roughly—twice as many people? Oh, and it’s a lot larger….”

Mr. Fernández would sigh….

So the government borrowed for years, and then the winds of the coming crisis began to be felt, and what was our response to that? ¡Qué paguen los ricos! Or Let the rich pay, but tell me, somebody, who are the rich? I had breakfast with a Cuban guy who came here at age 8, started his company, which now employs 200 people, and so is he “un rico?” You bet, but why should he pay? If a Cuban is providing jobs to 200 Puerto Ricans, well, shouldn’t we be thanking him and not sticking it to him?

So the last time we went to the bond market, didn’t we know perfectly well what we were doing? Bonds usually yield a 3 percent interest, ours were going for nine to ten. Why was that? Because they were high-risk, and that was the only was to sell them. And who buys high risk? Hedge funds, and their nastier cousins, the vulture funds.

If capitalism courses through your veins, you would point out that the vulture funds do what vultures do in the woods: clear out the dead and rotting flesh. Those of a more liberal bent would say that, well, usury is usury.

So hedge funds make up about half of our holders of debt, but the other half? Retirees, 401K contributors, and in the fight between the hedge funds and the ordinary investor, guess who comes into the ring fifty pounds heavier, and fifty fights more experienced? Which is why, of course, they forced us to promise various things—like any litigation be done in New York, not San Juan, and …oh, wasn’t there something about paying them first?

So it’s going to be long and messy, because the only sure thing is that the lawyers will have a merry day ahead, since there’s no orderly was to get out of this situation, which means that everything will get into the courts, and then have to be appealed.

Yes, long and messy, but who ultimately bears the responsibility? Isn’t blaming the vulture funds like blaming the pusher for your cocaine addiction? Yes, the cabotage laws that require us to use on US flagged cargo ships are unfair…but wait, are they? Caribbean Business doesn’t think so, and here’s the link. And yes, The Walmarts and Walgreen’s are the dandelions on our economic lawn, but do you do your shopping at Colmado Morales?

And certainly the United States hasn’t bothered to do anything about our political status, and so for 115 years or so, we’ve been a colony. But we’re here in the Caribbean, and we’re surrounded by former colonies from Trinidad / Tobago up to Cuba. So why has Puerto Rico not done through peaceful or violent means what all the other islands have done? Is it really up to the US to figure out what to do with us? Trust me, if the answer is yes, and statehood were imposed, well, as a gringo, I think I’d stay home that day. OK—month.

And now, we have only 40% of the population working, the rest being subsidized with food stamps and housing and the government health card. Most of it coming from the feds, and isn’t it time to say that the colonial relationship between the Congo and Belgium is hardly the same as ours with the US? Or is that pitiyankee?

V. S. Naipaul once wrote, if I remember correctly, that the tragedy of the Caribbean islands is that they never developed a national idea of what they represented, of their purpose or mission in the world. We are, most of us, descended from slaves or pirates, and how far have we travelled?    

I have questions, I have no answers, but what do I know?

The answers are coming and…

…I don’t want to see them.

        

Puerto Rico and the Vultures

Here’s the thing about money: Very few of us understand it, and most of us fear it.

Nor am I an expert, which may or may not be a good thing. Because the experts will throw you into an ocean of terms and concepts and expect you to swim. What can I do? Tell you a simple story.

Two people in their mid-80’s did everything they were supposed to do, and did it very well. They worked hard, they were frugal, they sent their children to get Master’s degrees even though they themselves had never travelled to Europe. The husband invested in Puerto Rico bonds, which were considered safe, and which had the advantage of being free of taxes on the federal, state, and municipal levels.

They didn’t do the one thing that everyone with a little money should do: Spread it around. Don’t put your eggs in one basket: buy real estate, invest broadly in the stock market, and invest in bonds, and throw some money into a savings account. Why? Because if one thing goes sour, well, at least two of the others are likely to be OK. (I know, if there’s a general collapse of the market—a financial melt-down—you’re screwed, but so is everyone else, so we can all be miserable together, and hey—there’s always the beach!)

So Puerto Rico issued bonds, as does every other municipality, and a bond is nothing more than a loan that bondholders make in return for—usually—very low interest. Why the low interest? Because the investments are considered safe: The municipality will repay, since the growth in the economy will mean increased revenue.

Now, the elderly couple mentioned above? Well, the husband was an excellent engineer, but what did he know about money? So he went to the expert, who did know about money, and who told him to buy Puerto Rico bonds, which were excellent investments, and which were tax-exempt. Being a proud Puerto Rican, he did just that.

That may have been a mistake, and when the red flags were raised, a couple of years ago, the engineer’s son scrambled to sell all those bonds, some at a profit, most not. But what about me? Am I any smarter? Because when I was working, I contributed to my 401K plan, and did I examine my fund’s portfolio, to see if it had any Puerto Rican funds? Of course not, who does? And look, it’s not just Puerto Rico, it has been variously Detroit, Spain, Greece and Argentina. So I very likely hold some Puerto Rican bonds, and the likelihood is that every small investor, frugally saving for retirement, does as well.

Now then, for people like me who are unwilling or disinclined to spend ten or twelve hours a day watching their money and probing into global markets, trends, and politics, there are the credit rating firms, and their job—in theory—is to protect the investor. And these people do what I don’t, and they saw very clearly the writing on the wall, and were very open in their warnings. They said it again and again, and they lowered our credit rating notch by notch, until we were at junk rating.

This was a disaster, but one that only now is beginning to be felt, because what did Puerto Rico do? Here’s Bloomberg on the topic:

The U.S. territory sold the securities March 11, in the largest junk deal ever for the $3.7 trillion municipal market. The borrowing came the month after the island was cut to speculative grade, and gave officials enough cash to pay bills through June 2015 as they try to revive a shrinking economy. Most of the original purchasers were hedge funds, and first-day trading in the bonds exceeded $5 billion.

Date of article: 23 March 2014. And the amount of debt sold? 3.5 billion.

The whole thing was profoundly immoral, but was it a secret? Did it happen behind closed doors? Of course not, since I was reading all about it and scratching my head and thinking, ‘who in God’s name would buy this terrible debt?’

Well, we now know, and even more cynical was that the bonds were marketed specifically for the hedge funds and their more rapacious cousins, the vulture funds. Why? Because the minimum price was 100,000$, and if anybody out there reading this has that kind of money, well, leave a comment below, because I’d really like to meet you!

The politicians got into bed with the hedge funds and now? The left is gearing to go nuts about the austerity measures, as evidenced by this headline:

Hedge funds tell Puerto Rico: lay off teachers and close schools to pay us back

That’s The Guardian, hardly a fly-by-night operation. Because the hedge funds have been keeping an eye on the island, and they are perfectly capable of producing a chart like this:

OK—firing teachers makes a great headline, but wait: Can you explain why spending on education has soared while the number of students has plummeted? I’m a teacher, myself, and the last group of people I’d go after is educators. But has all of that spending actually gotten down to the teachers? Are the parking lots filled with Porches? Are students issued MacBook Pros every year?

Sorry—wrong questions. How’s this: Is there even any toilet paper in the schools?

So the hedge funds own how much of Puerto Rico’s debt? About half, according to The Nation, and yes, it’s hard to weep for hedge funds, especially as compared to the little kids trooping into Escuela Luis Muñoz Marín. But I might have some tears for the engineer—remember him?—who saw half his wealth disappear. Might just as well have gone to Europe.

And I’m especially sorry for him, since I know very well who is going to take the hit, because the hedge funds? They’ve already lined up counsel, they’ve already planned their strategy, and the little guy who is left standing by the mailbox? All he can do is read his investment statement, and watch his money go down the drain.

The other element in all of this, unfortunately, is colonialism, but I wonder if the real issue at hand will be addressed. Because it is not the big bad United States that imposed…. Nor is it the incompetent, lazy leeches down in Puerto Rico….

Puerto Rico has excellent professionals; we have the expertise to run our government. What don’t we have? The curse of colonialism is that it maintains you societally in a perpetual adolescence: You are never fully responsible, nor do you enjoy full rights. And how irresponsible have the politicians--and by extension all of us, since by the way, didn't we elect them?--been. Well, check out this graphic….

Enter the last part of the equation: An uninformed, ill-educated populace that despite the billions of dollars poured somewhere into our education system cannot tell me basic facts, such as what part of the island Mayagüez is located. I know: I used to teach the cardinal points in ESL classes for 25 years. And what will happen as the busses are cut, the schools closed, the benefits slashed, and the austerity begins for real?

I think I know, and oh…

Do I wish I didn’t.

The Nuncio Gets Away With It

I freely admit it: I’m out of control on the subject, though I had tried hard to rein myself in, since even I, a Norwegian-American, can summon up enough moral Nordic rectitude to deal with the Catholic church and its treatment of the sexual abuse scandals. At a certain point, there’s nothing more to say: Yes, the priests f…cked around and the bishops covered it up.

That said, the case of Józef Wesolowski certainly is unlike any other. You may remember, he was the papal nuncio for the Dominican Republic and the apostolic delegate for Puerto Rico, since one of the most crushing blows about not being an independent state is that we cannot have formal relations with the Vatican. Ouch—boys, that one really hurt!

Wesolowski showed complete lack of imagination in his sexual tastes, though it was shoeshine boys and not altar boys, but he was certainly industrious, since reports have that he had more almost 100,000 pornographic images on his computer. So on 21 August 2013, Wesolowski was recalled to the Vatican, as was another Polish priest, Wojciech Gil.

Well, that’s the official story. The unofficial story is that the archbishop of Santo Domingo was sufficiently alarmed at the press that was going to explode that he ran off to Rome and talked to Pope Francis, who recalled Wesolowski.

Can anyone believe that this pope is serious about the abuse scandal? Well, tell it to the numerous Romans who saw Wesolowski walking the streets of Rome, outside of Vatican City. Right, so when they got enough flak about that, they placed Wesolowski on house arrest, and then began the slow, tedious process of determining what to do with Wesolowski.

They did the only thing possible: They defrocked him. OK—here’s the catholicnews.com on the subject:

The Vatican announced in June that a canonical court had investigated Wesolowski on charges of sex abuse in the Dominican Republic and concluded by dismissing him from the clerical state, depriving him of all rights and duties associated with being a priest except the obligation of celibacy.

Guys? You’re expecting a man with a tenth of a million pornographic photos on his computer to be celibate? This creep is a predator with a major addiction to porn, and you think he’s gonna be celibate?

Right—so then it was a much-touted criminal trial, due to begin ten days ago. But Wesolowski’s lawyer walked into court, the morning of the first day of the trial, and announced that Wesolowski was in intensive care at a Rome hospital. Of course, of course, no one could say what ailed (or rather, what else ailed) the former papal nuncio, but remember, this is Rome, and those Italian tongue? They quite frequently wag.

So six days later, a Roman newspaper published a rumor of what I immediately suspected: The ex-prelate had arrived at the hospital confused and dazed from a mixture of alcohol and drugs. In short, Wesolowski was about to add the sin of suicide to the long list of others. So the trial was delayed, and then, three days after he was hospitalized, Wesolowski was released.

OK—it was eye rubbing, but was it worth writing about? Were we all just a little tired of it all? Yup, but I was still following the saga, when I came upon this:

The Vatican said in a June 15 statement that Wesołowski has been accused of a number of offenses, “some committed during his stay in Rome from August 2013 until the moment of his arrest, on Sept. 22, 2014.” Other offenses were allegedly committed when he was nuncio to the Dominican Republic and apostolic delegate to Puerto Rico, from 2008 to 2013, the Vatican said.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/illness-forces-postponement-of-former-nuncios-criminal-sexual-abuse-trial/#ixzz3gXmCAYnL   

OK—it’s clear: While being recalled by the Vatican for an investigation of sexual abuses, Wesolowski had continued his predatory behavior under Francis’s nose. But in the statement above, is the Vatican alleging that Wesolowski committed offenses here, in Puerto Rico?

OK—followed the link and got this, in Italian. Do I speak the language? Of course not, but anybody who has studied Latin, French and Spanish can figure it out:

La prima udienza del processo è fissata per il giorno 11 luglio 2015. All’ex Prelato vengono contestati taluni reati commessi sia durante il suo soggiorno a Roma dall’agosto 2013 sino al momento del suo arresto (avvenuto il 22 settembre 2014), sia nel periodo trascorso nella Repubblica Dominicana, nei cinque anni in cui ha ricoperto l’Ufficio di Nunzio Apostolico (il 24 gennaio 2008 era stato nominato Nunzio nella Repubblica Dominicana e delegato apostolico a Porto Rico, uffici da cui si è dimesso il 21 agosto 2013).

OK—so that Vatican is not alleging that Wesolowski committed crimes in Puerto Rico, but who is? Well, as you can see in the clip below, a number of the parishioners are: Wesolowski had visited the island frequently and had stayed in the parish of St. Martín de Porres, apparently as a guest of José Colón Otero, a priest who was removed after allegations of abuse…

…OK, the story is wacky enough to warrant its own paragraph. According to witnesses, boys were seen staying over at the parish house, and the next morning they were unable to look anybody in the eye. So the Vatican at last looked into it, and then defrocked Colón Otero. So what did the pope do, when the ex-priest appealed the decision? Partially reinstated him, since it could there wasn’t enough “moral certainty” to convict him of abuse, only of violating the sanctity of the confession.

What’s interesting about this case is what hasn’t happened, as much as what has. The Dominican Republic hasn’t requested Wesolowski’s extradition, perhaps because they don’t have a treaty that allows them to do so. But Poland requested extradition, and got turned down. The reason? Diplomatic immunity. But what about now, when Wesolowski has been defrocked? Presumably, that no longer applies; on the other hand, it might.

What else hasn’t happened? Well, the church has played a very old game: Out wait your enemies. And so the problems in the archdiocese of Arecibo, and the predation of a papal nuncio or an apostolic delegate or whoever he was have been completely forgotten, because everybody has just discovered that we owe some undetermined billions of dollars.

That’s one explanation. But the conspiracy theorist in me can’t help but wonder: The island is overwhelmingly Catholic, especially in the upper classes. The quiet word can be so very effective, when whispered in the right ear. I can only believe two things.

Wesolowski committed crimes on American soil, and…

…he’ll never pay for it.