Easy Money

I barely understand it, and that should tell the story in itself.

Look, I’m of average intelligence—nah, come clean. I’m probably smarter than most people, due more to luck than anything I’ve ever done. By which I mean that I was born into an upper middle-class family in a good university town; the public schools were very good, I was expected to bring home good grades and I did.

So I was curious to know how John McCain—not known for fiery liberalism—came up with this statement.

“I have long advocated for modernizing our broken and uncompetitive tax code, but that cannot and must not be an excuse for turning a blind eye to the highly questionable tax strategies that corporations like Apple use to avoid paying taxes in America. The proper place for the bulk of Apple’s creative energy ought to go into its innovative products and services, not in its tax department.”

And just to show you that—remarkably—bipartisanship is not dead, here’s what Democrat Carl Levin had to say, as cited in the same source as above:

“Apple wasn’t satisfied with shifting its profits to a low-tax offshore tax haven,” said Sen. Levin. “Apple sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance. It has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars, while claiming to be tax resident nowhere.

OK—all of the comments above were reported in May of this year. So why, trolling through Facebook, did I come across a link to an article, “Apple Under Investigation for Over 1 Billion in Tax Fraud?”

Let’s start at the beginning (I can hear you out there singing, “a very good place to begin….”) What Apple is doing is what many corporations, such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, are doing, and it’s legal, if not right. Apple, yes, is based in Cupertino, California, and presumably much of the work—creatively, administratively—gets done there. 

So you get it into your head—hey, let’s buy the new iPad! It weighs less than a hummingbird, and is just as fast! Wow—retina display! Gazillions of apps!

You get the picture—you’re entranced with your toy (full disclosure—charging right next to me is a first generation iPad, a dinosaur that refuses to die, dammit, so that I can buy a new one….) And you probably know that the iPad was manufactured in China. But who thought up the idea in the first place?

Obviously, somebody in California. And that somebody was working for Apple, and his job was to think things up. This idea—known as intellectual property—is now owned by Apple.

Of course, Apple could contract directly with a manufacturer in China to make that iPad you are now holding in your hand. But that would mean that it would be slugged with a corporate tax rate of 35% in the United States. And guess what? They guys down in finance are howling, because that’s high, by international standards. So what do they do?

RobertW. Wood, writing in Forbes, explains the strategy:

Facebook sent $700 million to the Cayman Islands as part of a “Double Irish” tax reduction strategy. Google used the Double Irish and the Dutch Sandwich to save billions in U.S. taxes. The Double Irish involves forming a pair of Irish companies to turn payments for intellectual property into tax-deductible royalty payments.

The U.S. parent company forms a subsidiary in Ireland. The parent signs a contract giving European rights to its intangible property to the new company. In return, the new subsidiary agrees to market or promote the products in Europe.

Thus, all the European income—income that previously would have been taxed in the U.S.—is taxed in Ireland instead. Then the Irish company changes its headquarters to Bermuda. No Irish tax, no Bermuda tax, and no U.S. tax.

Finally, the parent forms a second Irish subsidiary that elects to be treated as disregarded under U.S. tax law—by filing a one-page form. The first Irish company (now in Bermuda) can license products to the second Irish company for royalties. The net result is one low 12.5% Irish tax compared to 35% in the U.S. 

Put it this way—Apple in Cupertino send its legal guys over to Ireland where, presumably, they work with the Irish guys. So the boys create an Irish company, which turns around and incorporate in Bermuda. That’s lovely—not for the pink sandy beaches or the hairy legs poking out from the famous shorts—but because there’s no income tax in Bermuda.

Now the guys in Apple California run off to Ireland again, and guess what they do? They set up a company in Ireland! We now have two companies: Bermuda / Irish and Irish / Irish.

Now then, people in Italy and France want iPads too, so how to get it into their hands? Well, the Irish company in Bermuda is given the rights to the plans for the iPad—the “recipe” or the intellectual property. So the Bermuda / Irish company allows to Irish / Irish company to make the product, market it, and sell it all over Europe.

Irish / Irish runs over to China and gets a whole bunch of people to work for nothing (or thereabouts) and produce the iPad. Of course, even with the market and distribution and manufacture, Irish / Irish is now sitting on a huge pot of money because guess what? Everybody in Europe has to have an iPad.

And that’s bad, because Ireland could now come after Irish / Irish. So that’s when Bermuda / Irish steps in, and asks for a huge royalty payment—very fair, they did give the right to Irish / Irish to produce and distribute their idea, right?

So after that big payment, Irish / Irish now has to pay very little money to the tax authorities in Ireland, and Bermuda / Irish is sitting on a huge sum. And as long as that money stays in Bermuda, it’s not taxable anywhere in the world.

There are several other things to consider. First, the Bermuda / Irish company has no employees and not even an office in Bermuda—everything is run out of the US, and the board meetings are in California (gee—I wonder where it could be!) Second, Apple went to the tax authorities in Ireland and negotiated a “sweetheart” deal with them—Apple pays just 2% taxes on its Irish / Irish company, not the (still low) 12.5%.

Third, the sum of money we’re talking about is huge; here’s what the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations says:

Ireland asserts tax jurisdiction only over companies that are managed and controlled in Ireland, but the United States bases tax residency on where a company is incorporated. Exploiting the gap between the two nations’ tax laws, Apple Operations International has not filed an income tax return in either country, or any other country, for the past five years. From 2009 to 2012, it reported income totaling $30 billion.  

Lastly, what Apple is doing is nothing special, in the world of business. In 2011, The New York Times reported that GE paid no taxes in the US, despite making 5 billion bucks in their domestic market. Knowing the Times to be a hotbed of fire-breathing radicals, I turned to the more conservative Forbes for the answer. And here it is:

Its finance arm, GE Capital, lost a lot of money during the financial meltdown (roughly $30 billion) and it’s still carrying those losses forward and deducting them from current income. As GE spokesman Gary Sheffer wrote in his response to the Times story: “Without these financial crisis losses at GE Capital, GE’s tax rate would have been near the average of other multinational corporations.” He added, “In short, when you lose money, you don’t pay taxes.”

But that’s not all. Because according to the law, when you make money overseas, you don’t pay taxes (until the money comes in to the country). But when you have a loss overseas? That can be deducted from your US taxes. Here’s Forbes again:

Overseas profits stay overseas, beyond the arm of Uncle Sam. But when losses happen, like in the credit crunch, they can be netted against U.S. profits. Just another balancing act in the global marketplace.

Now then, all of this came out in a subcommittee hearing in May. So why was my friend publishing a link to a recent article?

Well, it turns out that the Italians—better known for amore / fashion / opera than high financial probity—are charging that Apple is tax avoiding them! Why? Because Apple Italy channeled all its profits to Apple Irish / Irish which had to pay enormous sums to Apple Bermuda / Irish which pays no taxes to Bermuda or to the United States but which is owned and operated by Apple / Cupertino / California.

There is a reader of this blog who has quite distinct views to my own. He honors me by reading and commenting, and I welcome his views. My intention—throwing him a bone—was to post the video below about the squatting going on in a 45-storey unfinished condominium in Caracas. I was going to point out that it is completely outrageous for people to expect the government to provide you housing, food, water, health care for free. Also, that it’s outrageous to squat—to assume that you have the right to move into a building just because you have nowhere to live.

I would also point out that in Puerto Rico we have a substantial core of people who don’t work, who are living on welfare; generations of people who have lived on what’s called the mantengo. It’s crazy and outrageous.

Those people are maintained by the handful of people who still have jobs, and who get a W-2 form at the end of the year. And come April 15, you’re pretty much stuck. As it happens, I don’t have a W-2 form, but I do have a good idea for a company. Here’s what I’m gonna do…

Start a company that will incorporate individuals that will be located in Ireland but will then be incorporated in Bermuda but will be operated and managed out of Viejo San Juan. Your employer will have to pay the company in Ireland, which will have to pay the company in Bermuda, which, come to think of it, I may have to move to.

Right—small price to pay for easy money!

Spiderman Attacks

Readers of this blog will have to be more than usually indulgent today, since the noise that has been a constant but without (though many times directly under) has now become a noise that has come within.

Readers will also know that for the last several months, I’ve been besieged by men working to depave and brick the street below me; they’ve put in new sidewalks as well. What you may not know is that while all of this has been going on, a ficus tree has been growing relentlessly on the side of the wall of my interior patio, between my floor and the floor above.

In fact, the tree grew some fifteen feet or so, and the roots extended some fifteen feet easily below. They also extended into our apartment, growing against and onto the walls of the gallery. Oh, and roots shot through the gallery ceiling as well, since a tap root had grown laterally underneath the floor above us, and then hurtled downward. Such is the power of thirst in either the mammalian or vegetative world; we had the unique if not particularly enjoyable experience of living under a tree.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

…and here’s what it looked like from the roof:

This, mind you, is from a building in Los Angeles; my own photos are locked in a camera with a low battery.

A ficus on the side of the building is picturesque, right? Absolutely, as long as no one is living in the building, and you have no particular disinclination to see the building gradually tumble down from damp and rot. For that’s what happened to us, or rather, what might have happened. Because I just examined the thickest section of the taproot, and it was easily half a foot in circumference.

Which meant that the root of the tree had caused a six-inch crack in the wall, and had lifted up the floor of the apartment above me. And that six-inch crack? Well, every time it rained, water poured into the gallery from above. And the walls are stained green—no, not stained. The walls are green, but not with paint—with mold. Right—so we were living under a tree as well as in a Petri dish.

The problem was that rain, when it falls in the tropics, tends to fall hard, and at an angle. And the winds—as luck would have it—blow directly against the wall in which the crack had developed. Thus, water was being directed against the wall as if from a garden hose. Or rather, a hundred garden hoses.

For a long time, I was a sort of meteorological prisoner—would it rain today? For most, that means a decision no weightier than whether to take the umbrella. For me, it meant whether I would cancel my classes for the day and stand in wait with the mop.

That was one tool of the trade; the others were two white plastic basins Taí had bought to soak her feet in, and three or four disposable turkey roasting pans that Mr. Fernández had ridiculously kept, claiming that at some point in this century or the next a use might be found for them. He was not slow to point this fact out, when I reached in panic for the pans….

And then it occurred to me. I had complained for years about the activities of the neighbor or tenants above us. We had filed a complaint with the pertinent government authority—nothing was done. With the neighbor below, we filed a lawsuit that dragged on forever, and was eventually settled.

Nor were we alone in our complaints—everyone on the street, especially those who had done business with the neighbor, had a story of their own. Oh, and I’ve just checked the webpage for ramajudicialpr.gov—the judicial system’s electronic records. The neighbor has six cases against her listed. Seven, since our own does not appear….

We do many things superlatively well in Puerto Rico. We make extraordinary friends; we work harder and smarter than many, many other people. What is our stumbling block?

In an island where everything is intensely personal, we tend not to think of systems. Which means that our own system of law and order is, in general, broken. If, in Wisconsin, I had a problem with a neighbor about a tree that needed pruning / removing, I would talk to the neighbor. Most likely we would agree, the problem would be resolved, and life with the neighbor would proceed—if perhaps a bit coldly.

But everyone I know has a neighbor story—a man or woman is vacuuming floors above them at 3 in the morning (my in-laws), or leaving the building door open at 11:30PM (also my in-laws, but because of a different neighbor), or using surreptitiously the hot water (my sister-in-law).

It was my sanity or else; the Stockholm syndrome set it. In the face of continued assaults, I gave in; which is not to say that I fell in love with what had become my captor. Rather, I stopped caring.

I also stopped mopping up the floor; as well, I removed the buckets collecting the water that was pouring into our apartment. I let the water fall—as it was already falling, despite my futile efforts—into the store on the ground level below.

A store that is part of a nation-wide chain of shoe stores, with headquarters located in some Midwestern city. And then, the predictable happened.

Well, not before my friends and I had made a joke of it. The store had the predictable gunmetal gray industrial carpet, which became sopping wet.

I spurred Nydia into—at least in our imaginations—walking into the store, wrinkling her nose, and saying loudly, “¡Ay, fó! ¡Qué peste!” (“Ugh! It stinks in here!”)

Or how about….

“Oiga, ¿dónde conseguió este tono de verde para estas paredes?” (“Hey, where’d you get that shade of green on the walls?”)

Or my personal favorite…

“¿Cuánto cuestan esas setas en la parte de atrás de la tienda?” (“Say, how much are those mushrooms in the back of the store?”)

At last it happened. Corporate home office called the owner of the first floor, and told him bluntly to fix the problem or else they’d walk, if a store could walk.

A meeting was called, voices were raised, photos were taken, and the air was thick with invective. Yesterday, I spent the morning opening doors, counting cats, dealing with Carlos and José, and especially with the Spanish-born, volatile owner of the first floor, who was shouting from the roof to the workers who were working in the patio. And they, of course, were shouting back.

Today?

They reappeared, with ropes and pulleys. A man has lowered himself from the roof, entrusting his life to a rope and a ratchet. The tree has been cut—a simple affair that took no more than five minutes and a machete. The real problem was the taproot, which had burrowed fifteen feet down and in the side of the patio wall.

Well, it took no more than an hour to remove the limestone / cement surfacing that covered the side of the brick / sand / rock / who-knows-what-else mixture that forms the three-feet walls of our building; this is called mampostería, for those who have lived in Old San Juan. We now have a fair portion of the wall exposed to the elements.

Was it enough? For the workers had gone silent. Had they gone? Was I free? No—they were downstairs, eating lunch, and when they returned, they brought with them a second weapon of assault: a large, gasoline-powered device the size of a generator. What did they propose? To roar the thing to life in my patio, in order to power-wash its walls.

It’ll only take various minutes, they said.

It’s been two hours.

And now?

I have dared to peek out the window.

There is a man attached to a rope and ratchet with a power washer walking, and lashing jets of water…

…down the wall of my patio.

Those Randy Republicans

Who knows how I stumbled on to this? Perhaps it was meeting a very engaging professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, and discovering—what did we do before Google?—that she had written an article about the convergences of Wisconsin under Walker and Puerto Rico under our former governor, who is so conservative that he was rumored to be a member of Opus Dei. (caps by tradition and nothing else….)

Right—read the article, which is excellent, and then remembered having seen something about Paul Ryan. But what was it? Well, it was three in the morning, so I tripped—almost literally—off to bed; this morning I remembered: Paul Ryan’s ideological mentor is or was Ayn Rand.

Look, let’s be fair. When you are 17, and when the beauty of purely abstract thought is freshly sprung upon you, you can be forgiven for loving Ayn Rand. Similarly, when at the same age you choose to bathe in the emotions, you are permitted to love Tchaikovsky. The point? You’re supposed to grow up.

Rand’s philosophy, which she called Objectivism, is deeply attractive to the adolescent mind; in fact, it almost feels that it was created for it. And there may be a reason for it—Rand could have stopped her cognitive development because of a traumatic incident. At age 12, she saw the Bolsheviks seize her father’s pharmacy in St. Petersburg.

She was told it was for “the people;” she saw it as rank injustice to her father, who had worked and struggled and dared and succeeded. And so she developed a philosophy, the philosophy of Objectivism. Its cornerstone was reason, and the first floor was selfishness, which she hailed as the greatest good. From that, the corollary was a hatred of altruism, or doing anything that was not in some way in your self-interest. And then came a hatred of religion—Rand was a staunch atheist, because who was more sickeningly altruistic than Jesus, curing all those lepers and washing whores’ feet? Screw that.

Now then, anything that prevents you from your capitalism, from making your fortune or pursing your goals, is bad—so that means government, unions, social groups pressuring on you or regulating you or even just taxing you. So—zero, or at least minimal, government.

Rand came to the United States and started writing—she cranked out The Fountainhead, which was pretty good, and then got to work on her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. At 1200 pages—60 pages of which are a long speech that the main character presents outlining Rand’s objectivist principles—it makes an excellent doorstop. The hitch? It’s completely unreadable.

“What’s it about?” you may be asking.

Well, I got through, those days when I was reading Rand, but only because of the discipline practicing cello six hours a day had given me. And confession time—the book is so bad, it’s a soporific. In the same way that new mothers are said to forget the agony of labor an hour past, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged recedes into a fog of words. Or perhaps it’s just buried under them.

OK—here goes. A Great Man, John Galt (did I hear the sharp intake of breath, somewhere? You know, the one the denotes surprise and adoration?) is a great industrialist, but what happens? The fleas, the blood suckers, the leeches—read government, unions, church, social groups—drive him to abandon his enterprise and go off, with everybody like him, to form their own perfect, objectivist world. And so we’re fucked.

Dear Reader, calculate your hourly rate and the amount of time it would take to read a 1200 page blowup of the idea above. Then send your check to me….

Of course everybody hated it, but guess what? According to William F. Buckley—neither an intellectual lightweight nor a rabid liberal—it was the best-selling novel of all time. Is it still, after Twilight and the Fifty Shades of Gray? A better blogger would look that up….

Whether yes or no, it’s sold a lot of copies, and sales of the damn thing spiked two years ago when it was announced that Paul Ryan, the cute and chilling boy senator from Wisconsin whom Romney picked to give some pizazz to his ticket, had read it, been deeply influenced by it, and had given it to his aides as required reading. I presume, by the way, not on the taxpayer’s nickel, which would have driven Rand out of her grave and charging to Capitol Hill.

For the conservatives, you see, have taken the same approach to Rand as they have to the Bible: pick and choose. Rand’s atheism? OK—skip that. Her views on homosexuality, which were that she wasn’t into it, but the government had no business saying one thing or another about it? Err, move on. Her belief that sex…wait, let Wikipedia tell the story….

In rejecting the traditional altruistic moral code, Rand also rejects the sexual code that, in her view, is the logical implication of altruism. In Atlas Shrugged Rand introduces a theory of sex that is based in her broader ethical and psychological theories. Rather than considering sexual desire a debasing animal instinct, Rand portrays it as the highest celebration of human values, a physical response to intellectual and spiritual values that gives concrete expression to what could otherwise be experienced only in the abstract.

Right, maybe a mistake there, though the writing above does give you a fair taste of the 1200 page work itself. I can put it simpler—fuck whom you want. As Rand did, by having an affair for umpteen years with the husband of her close friend. Oh, and there are three adulterous affairs in the book—all very much glorified as the supreme and crowning physical expression of noble, selfish beings.

The conservatives have also forgotten that Rand scorned Ronald Reagan, whom she thought (rightly) was a nitwit. Nor did she think he was a true capitalist, but rather a “mixed-government” type. Here she is:

In conclusion, let me touch briefly on another question often asked me: What do I think of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: But I don’t think of him—and the more I see, the less I think. I did not vote for him (or for anyone else) and events seem to justify me. The appalling disgrace of his administration is his connection with the so-called “Moral Majority” and sundry other TV religionists, who are struggling—apparently with his approval—to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.

The threat to the future of capitalism is the fact that Reagan might fail so badly that he will become another ghost, like Herbert Hoover, to be invoked as an example of capitalism’s failure for another fifty years.

Observe Reagan’s futile attempts to arouse the country by some sort of inspirational appeal. He is right in thinking that the country needs an inspirational element. But he will not find it in the God-Family-Tradition swamp.

Well, we have the John Galt Society and the Ayn Rand Institute and a whole host of organizations that espouse the carefully pruned views of Ayn Rand. In fact, Rand had a whole coterie of followers, some quite influential, like Alan Greenspan. And so Paul Ryan went off to speak to the Atlas Society in 2005; here’s what he said:

The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.”

Or consider this, from 2009:

“what’s unique about what’s happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault.”

Well, well—the election came along and it had to be admitted: there were some serious issues that Rand espoused that the right wing didn’t want to get into. So when someone trotted over to ask Ryan about all this, here’s what he had to say:

He admitted that he had “enjoyed her novels,” but, as Mak notes, he stressed that, “I reject her philosophy. It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas.”

Wow—that’s class! Epistemology? Thomas Aquinas? Well, I looked it up: what was the epistemological view of Aquinas? And here it is:

Thomas believed "that for the knowledge of any truth whatsoever man needs divine help, that the intellect may be moved by God to its act."

Reading further, I came upon this, from the wicked and atheist pen of Bertrand Russell:

He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times.

Oh, I thought—isn’t that another word for apologetics? So I trotted over to look that up, and yes, it’s suspiciously close—apologetics is the defense of (usually) a religion by making formal arguments (when possible). Oh, and as an example, I found a wonderful graphic used to explain the trinity, a concept that has mystified everyone for a millennium or two. Here goes:

 See? What could be clearer? Well, got that cleared up!

All this, and before lunch!

A Walk Through a New Day

Right—time to take a walk through the new day. Or rather, The New Day, since that’s what the premiere and maybe at this point only newspaper on the island is called: El Nuevo Día. So what kind of day are we having?

Rotten, if the Day is to be believed. We start off grimly enough with the news that many of us, living in violence-prone communities, now have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder—the same PTSD that soldiers coming back from Iraq are experiencing. So what percentage of the population suffers from PTSD in these communities? Forty percent.

I know all of this because I saw the headline online—The Day, however, has taken to not publishing its main story online: you have to buy the paper in paper, or buy the paper in eInk (at last! A red squiggle I like—I’m totally with you, computer….) So I went to the drug store, where I bought the paper—approximately the size of the New York City telephone book, or at least the one twenty years ago, before people had smart phones….

“It’s Like Living a Civil War,” says the lead story, which goes on to point out that in the last six years, we’ve had 5,637 murders on the island versus 2,291 deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan. Granted, at its peak the US presence in Afghanistan was only 140,000 soldiers, versus a population of 3.7 million people on the island. But still—what to make of the fact that New York City, with 8 million people or so, has considerably fewer murders than Puerto Rico? 

Particularly worrisome is how are kids are doing: 40,000 have major depression and 53,000 are said to have suicidal ideation. Say what? Almost by definition, wouldn’t you assume that anyone with suicidal ideation suffers from major depression? Seems screwy to me….

We are, in short, all cocked up. So what’s the solution? Well, the Day has the answer (or perhaps The Answer), and that is integration of programs that have proven effective in Puerto Rico. And the Day lists them; curiously, all but one of the nine programs is named in English.

Well, that’s good to know, and very much needed, because on turning the page we get to the story about the school principal who got gunned down on a highly transited road while driving at 7:30 in the evening. Oh, and there are no leads, though lieutenant Elexis Torres, who’s investigating the case, said there has to be someone who saw the car, or the color of the car, or even the license plate of the car. But guess what? No one’s talking….

OK—wrap my head around that, and doesn’t it seem logical that the next page is a long interview with our new chief of police, James Tuller, who was born in New York but lived on the island for much of his childhood and has “close ties” to the island. He has, however, 40 years experience of being a cop, all of it in New York City.

And he was around for the “broken window” program, more formally known as the Bratton Plan. You’ll remember the theory—go after the small stuff and the big stuff will take care of itself. So that meant cracking down on people who were jumping over the turnstiles in the subway, fixing broken windows, fining the guys out washing car windows and shaking down the motorists who hadn’t wanted the service.

Well, Tuller is going to have his hands full. Or rather, there are many opportunities here. We could start with the people who are selling parking on public streets, and promising to offer “protection” for your car. Who knows what might happen? You wouldn’t want to come back and find your windshield broken—would you? Just a few bucks and everything will be all right. Worth it, really, for the peace of mind….

Right, skip gently over the news that DTOP—that’s the Department of Transportation and Public Works—is offering a 35% amnesty on traffic tickets. Oh, and we’re getting a new president of the University of Puerto Rico, which, it turns out, gets a third of its funds from federal money.

Lastly, we come to an opinion piece by Benjamín Torres Gotay, who uses the sorry situation of the putative super port of Ponce as a metaphor for our society.

Ponce, you see, is our second largest city, and is incidentally one of the fifteen most crime-ridden cities from page 4. And twenty years ago, the mayor of Ponce hit on the idea: expand and dredge the harbor, get the big cranes in, and make a super port. Merchandise would come in from Asia or wherever in huge ships, and then get put into smaller ships to be shipped around the Caribbean and the Americas.

Great idea, right? Nor is it just an idea—since in the twenty years since the idea was proposed, some quarter of a billion dollars has been spent. And not without something to show for it.

I’ve seen them—the two cranes—and they are massive. I saw them on a voyage into the absurd that my friend Harry drove me through last year. First we passed a wind farm with some 50 or 60 massive turbines that were supposed to be spinning. They weren’t, so what was the problem? Well, the company that made them had announced that the blade was falling on some identical models somewhere else in the world. But that wasn’t the only problem, because if seemed that the valley had insufficient wind. In fact, there is nowhere on the island where there is enough wind to make this project profitable.

We then got to the Playa de Ponce , a community so poor that a nun—the sister of a former governor—had to start a community center for the people there. And what was there? Two enormous piles of junk metal.

“It’s the only thing we export,” said Harry gloomily. “Oh sure, some specialty coffee, and some specialty fruits—but nothing else. The only thing that the world wants or needs from Puerto Rico? Our trash—that’s all we produce….”

Then we went a bit further, and came to the massive cranes—erected who knows when and never used. What’s happened? Well, they’ve been the focus of political squabbles –the most recent of which is whether the project should be in the hands of the municipality of Ponce or of the central government.

Guys?

Twenty years, and you are arguing this? And Torres Gotay says it best: in the time that we have spent arguing whether the color should be yellow or orange, the Dominican Republic—as corrupt as it is—has managed to build a super port of its own. So guess what? We may as well skip the idea, wait until the salt air takes its toll and the cranes are in imminent danger of collapse.

And then what?

Well, there’s a nice pile of junk metal nearby….  

Back Home

Now then, this will be a short post, because in just an hour or so, I’ll have to take my non-ESA to the vet.

What? Surely you’ve heard of ESA?

OK, I’ll stop trying to shame you—I didn’t know about it either, until this morning, when I was awoken by the sound of a jackhammer below the balcony. This was both usual and unusual, since it is Saturday morning—a time normally devoted to getting rid of and over Friday night. So why were they working?

Well, in fact they have been working for months, now, and on Saturdays and even Sundays. And on the next block, they’ve even taken to working evenings, to lessen the number of days of annoyance as we speed along toward Christmas.

And what are they doing?

They are destroying and then restroying—well, seems logical to me, computer—the street outside. The street had been asphalt you see, unlike other streets in Old San Juan, which have wonderful blue adoquines. Here, see for yourself:

Well, most of the streets have these blue iridescent (especially when wet) cobblestones, and so somebody decided (somebody who lives in a gated community far, far away from the old city) to put in cobblestones everywhere. There was just one little problem: the charming old blue cobblestones are no longer made, and even if they were, they couldn’t be used. Why? Because the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture would never allow it.

It’s odd, though strangely logical—anything new in Old San Juan cannot look old. Instead, it has to look new. So therefore, the new cobblestones are not lovely iridescent blue but an ugly dull grey. Take a look….

Well, the new adoquines are made locally, so that’s a stimulus to the economy. And of course, it took about six months of labor to de-and-re-stroy the street. Oh, and the sidewalks? They used to be a very nice slate. Now they have to be a somewhat darker stone—could it be granite? Don’t think so….

Well, all of this doesn’t come cheap: one source said that repaving a four or five block street had cost more than four million bucks. And the street—Tetuán—is right behind a street that has various good and expensive restaurants. Since the kitchens are all in the back, and since the kitchens’ vents are churning fumes out during hours of operation, Tetuán has become a virtual back alley. There’s nothing there, and the smell—to me—is atrocious.

But it got done, and it got opened, and the photographers came and the media as well and the mayor at the time—Jorge Santini—was happy. That lasted about a week, until he noticed—the restaurants were throwing their greasy trash out on the sidewalk, and the adoquines looked awful. Here’s a lively account of the matter:

Tanta fue la rabia que le dio a Santini que, en la misma Tetuán, advirtió que aumentaría las multas por tirar basura y desperdicios en la calle. Fue incluso más lejos y dijo que, para comer a expensas de tirar manteca, mejor era cerrar. Poco le faltó para añadir que mejor era no comer.

“Es un crimen ambiental lanzar grasa de esa manera”, dijo en un arranque de peritaje en asuntos ecológicos y aceitosos.

Dejó claro, además, que la capital tiene que estar “a la altura” del millón de cruceristas que recibe cada año. Pudo haber dicho también a la altura de los residentes, pero ni modo.  

A rough translation:

Such was the rage that it gave Santini that, in the very same street, he warned that he would increase the fines for throwing trash and wastes in the street. He went further and said that, to eat at the expense of throwing grease, better it would be to close. He only missed adding that better it would be not to eat.

“It’s an environmental crime to throw grease in this manner,” he said, breaking down into an expert in ecological and greasy affairs.

He made it clear, as well, that the capital has to be “at its highest” for the million of cruise ship visitors which it receives every year. He could have mentioned it being at its highest for the residents, but no matter.

Ah yes, the residents, of which I am one. Or rather, the prisoners, since it was impossible, for the last six months, to be in or especially work in my apartment. Whatever noise the three jackhammers and two generators the narrow street reverberated with was deemed insufficient was augmented by the happy shouts of a horde of workers, all of whom separated from each other when attempting to communicate, all the better to strengthen their vocal chords. What am I trying to say? It was ferociously loud.

And hot, as August and September are, in the gropics (meant tropics, but shouldn’t there be a word “gropics?” Like it, somehow…), hot like hell itself. Oh, and did I mention that Luis, the sculptor, came back—and resumed his creative endeavors, which apparently involve banging violently the floor above me with various blunt (I hope) objects?

Well, guess what? The street, at long last, is done. So why, I asked, was there someone with a jackhammer out there at 8AM on a Saturday morning? Easy enough to see: it was the water company, and what are they doing? What they do, which is to break up the sidewalk, shattering all the lovely granite that was so costily (well, we have “expensively,” don’t we, computer?) and arduously and most especially noisily installed.

Mr. Fernández can be easily persuaded to launch into a jeremiad about this, a jeremiad in which the British will be held up as behaving in a civilized—OK, civilised in the honor …err, honour—manner by carefully removing the slate on the sidewalk, placing it neatly to the side, going about their subterranean business, and then neatly replacing it, so that passerby never knew that anything had occurred.

Unfortunately, I observed this on my first trip to London.

Which means that they don’t do what the boys did below—leave a pile of shattered granite shards around a gaping hole, over which a wooden saw board has been placed. Nor do they do what the gas company did down on Tetuán Street, which was to take the jackhammer to several hundred of the 164,700 new adoquines, breaking them up, piling them on the sidewalk, and leaving a crater several feet in diameter in the street, which is now impassable. Oh, wrong—passable if you drive on the sidewalk, which is no problem.

See?

“It’s the quietest building in New York,” said John, and it’s true. How true? I tested it the next morning, and spent a lovely five minutes hearing the clock tick. And now?

Back home!  

(Update on this highly important post—the little granite shards surrounding the water meter are not there. Instead, they have been whisked away? But why? Why go through all that trouble? Then I remembered—in the last craft fair—seeing someone selling little granite paperweights, the stone appearing identical to the sidewalk stone. But that wasn’t the point. On the stone had been painted the flag of Puerto Rico, and it has to be said: so lusty is our love of our island, that you can sell anything as long as it has the flag of Puerto Rico. Wow—so that lady walked away with a purse-load of twenties! See? There’s a purpose for everything….)

Bad Policy

It was a day when nothing much got done. Yes, I wrote a longish post in the morning, and then it was time to go, time to take the train to 42d street, examine the map, and decide that the A train to Far Rockaway was the ticket out of the city. Time to leave, time to go home.

And what had I seen in New York? Oddly, everything was as normal, except that there seemed to be a new breed of poverty and homelessness. There had always been street people, but they had seemed different—maybe drunks, maybe drugs, maybe just crazy. The point was that they couldn’t fit in—that’s why they were on the streets.

There was the woman sitting halfway down the stairs to the 42nd Street subway. She was sitting on cardboard on the landing; the air was a mix of the 40 degrees outside and the 60 degrees inside. Still, it was cold enough that she was bundled up and yet still shivering. And her sign was clever: Donate What You Can to Polish Your Karma.

Nor was she the only one—there were many more people like her. “One in five of our neighbors can’t put food on their tables,” stated the public service ad on the subway. Is it true? What would a Google search reveal?

Well, as usual, the picture isn’t clear. Yes, the rate of poverty in New York City inched up to 21.2%; it had been 20.9 the year before. But Bloomberg came out blazing—he stated that of the 20 largest cities in the country, New York was the only one whose level of poverty had not risen since 2000. It was 21.2% then, it’s 21.2% now. In other words, it’s gotten worse for every other city except New York.

It’s also true that I was in Manhattan all of the time I was there, unless you count passing through Brooklyn to get to the airport. And The New York Times has this to say about Manhattan:

Manhattan retained the dubious distinction of having the biggest income gap of any big county in the country. The mean income of the lowest fifth was $9,635, compared with $389,007 for the top fifth and $799,969 for the top 5 percent — more than an eightyfold difference between bottom and top.

All of this is based on new data from the Census Bureau, which leads me to wonder—how do you count homeless people? And in fact, looking it up, it appears that the Census Bureau itself has come out and said that its count of the homeless for 2010 was off by three million. Not surprising, really, since many state and city ordinances prohibit sleeping, loitering, or camping in public. So there are a lot of people who go uncounted.

The train to the airport had the usual buskers—in this case a really bad mariachi duo (a singer and an accordion) and a good trio singing songs from the 40s. But nobody except for the out-of-towners—maybe Minnesota nice?—seemed to be giving anything. Oh, and there were the people selling candy for a dollar—often their signs proclaimed them homeless or out of work.

It was a study in contrasts. The city has unimaginable wealth, both now and in the past. And I had been staying with my brother and sister in law, who live on Riverside Drive. Their apartment is hardly palatial, neither is it small; but that’s not the point.

And that is? John and Jeanne are living a bit better than their parents did. They had had good public school educations, they had gone to graduate programs, they were now taking vacations and spending in ways that their parents wouldn’t have dreamed of. And that’s good—that’s the way it should be. The American Dream, right?

Assuming a level playing field, yes. But I sat next to a young black woman and her daughter; mother had clearly picked up the five-year old from school. And her first action, on entering the train? Take out and power up a small tablet and hand it to the girl.

Two days earlier, I had been in a bus in Manhattan watching a white mother talking to her son of roughly the same age. No tablet, instead it was questions to the child—what had he learned at school, was his teacher happy with the class, was everybody there? By the end of ten blocks, the mother had gotten the boy to remember the material presented in school, had reinforced it, and had added to it.

Nor is it a white / black thing. There were black guys in very good three-piece suits who were getting on and off the subway in midtown New York. But I would wager any money that their parents had done the same thing that the woman on the bus in Manhattan was doing.

“I am a girl, and I am beautiful just the way I am,” the child with the tablet on the subway began to recite. She was reading a poster on the train. And as kids at that age will do, she started to repeat it endlessly.

I know what the lady on the bus would have done. She would have agreed, she would have probed—what were the best things about you, she would have asked. What things are most important to you? What kind of person do you like and what kind of person do you want to be?

The mother on the train shushed her child up.

Which was a shame, really, because the child was obviously very intelligent. There’s something about the eyes, you know, and the quickness of response to stimuli—you could tell this kid could go places.

“It was my librarian,” said Jeanne, when I asked who had made the difference in her life. Her parents had never read, never even completed high school—but the librarian had hooked Jeanne on books, and gave her the message: you’re sharp, you’ll go far.

Will there be anyone there for the little girl, who is beautiful just the way she is? Or will our cuts in education, arts programs, and Head Start mean that only the rich have a shot at a better life? I wish we could see that neglecting people, and especially kids, has another dimension than morality or equality.

It’s also disastrous economic policy.