The Roots of Puerto
RicoÕs Economic Disaster
To get to the bottom of the growing economic
calamity in Puerto Rico,
one really needs to go back to the mindless act of 1898 when the United States
took control of the island as part of the spoils from the Spanish-American War. With a distinctive Afro-Spanish culture
very much like that of its Caribbean neighbors, Cuba and the Dominican
Republic, Puerto Rico, on balance, has always been an economic and political
burden to the United States. The
economic burden had been somewhat ameliorated by Puerto RicoÕs
industrialization program known as Operation Bootstrap. The main shot in the arm for that
program came from Puerto RicoÕs own Industrial Incentives Act of 1947 that took
advantage of its unique territorial situation in the U.S. tax code in which U.S.
corporate profits were not taxed, even if the Puerto Rico government should
choose not to tax them. One can
read a reasonably good brief summary of the program at Encyclopedia.com.
Here is how I summed up the arrangement in ÒCIA Plots
Puerto Rico StatehoodÓ:
A U.S.
company excused from a tax in a foreign country would no longer have the
foreign tax credit and would have to make it up dollar for dollar with U.S.
taxes. Similarly, such a company excused from state taxes would lose the state
tax deduction and his federal taxes would be just that much higher. No one, in
short, could offer what Puerto Rico could in terms of freedom from the taxman,
and advertisements were begun to welcome manufacturers to "Profit Island
USA."
This relatively enlightened economic
development program, though, eventually fell victim to the bane of the island,
its political status politics. Most
commentators on the change in the U.S. tax code that took place in1996 describe
it as just the natural reaction of the U.S. government to the loss in federal
tax revenue that resulted. In fact,
the real culprits were Puerto RicoÕs own political leaders at the time, its
governor and its resident commissioner, the non-voting delegate in
Washington. Obsessed with
finalizing the U.S. conquest of the island by having Puerto Rico become a U.S. state—against
the wishes of a very large percentage of the islandÕs population—they saw
the tax arrangement that had gone a long way toward rescuing the island from
its poverty as an impediment to their statehood goal and stopped defending it
against its attackers from the U.S. Treasury.
This supreme act of folly had very predictable
consequences, which I in fact predicted with my early 1998 article, ÒPuerto
Rico Statehood: Imminent Danger,Ó reproduced below. What I failed to anticipate were the borrowing
gymnastics that the Puerto Rico government would engage in to turn the economic
disaster into a financial one and delay their day of reckoning.
Now in their desperation the people of Puerto
Rico have turned to the son of the man who bears the greatest responsibility
for their plight and elected him governor.
He is the 38-year-old statehooder Ricardo
ÒRickyÓ Rossell—, who assumed office at the beginning of this year. Right off the bat he did the predictable
and conducted a new status referendum, apparently seeing
statehood as the cure for all the islandÕs ills. One may read the warning I wrote back in
1998 and readily conclude that not only would Puerto Rico statehood make the
island a bigger economic and political problem for the United States than it is
now, it would also worsen Puerto RicoÕs economic problems substantially.
Puerto Rico Statehood: Imminent Danger
It was
a treat for me as well as for our visitors from the U.S. Department of the
Treasury. It was 1979 and I was in my second year working as an economist for
Puerto Rico's Economic Development Administration, the industrial promoters,
and I was accompanying a couple of my federal counterparts from Washington who
were in San Juan primarily to look into the question of the effectiveness of
federal tax breaks for U.S. companies on the island. We were given a V.I.P.
tour of La Fortaleza (the fortress), the oldest continually occupied
chief executive's residence in the Western Hemisphere. Our tour guide was one
of Governor Carlos Romero Barcel—Ôs
top aides. His pride in his heritage was palpable as he took
us around the old structure, whose outer ramparts constitute one of the
earliest parts built of the wall that still surrounds the oldest part of Puerto
Rico's capital city. This part, as the city has grown and spread is known in
this century as Old San Juan. Just a few houses away, it was pointed out, is
another impressive and venerable structure, La Casa Blanca, the home of
the family of the founder (in 1508) of this long-time Spanish colony, one of
the officers in Christopher Columbus' voyages of discovery, Juan Ponce de Le—n. Ponce de Le—n's
remains are in a cathedral just up the street.
Our tour ended beside an old grandfather clock
that stands in a prominent place on the main floor of the residence. It was not
running. In fact, the aide told us, it had not run since the last Spanish
military governor struck it with his sword in anger when the Americans began
their naval bombardment of San Juan in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The
time had not been changed since then, we were told.
Riding back to the office in our car, one of the
Treasury officials asked, in puzzlement, "Are you sure this is a
pro-statehood government? Listening to that guy I would have thought they were
for independence."
And so would most Americans, given their concept
of what it means to be a state of the United States and, consequently, what
they imagine a pro-statehooder in Puerto Rico to be
like. It is a misunderstanding that the statehood advocates lobbying in
Washington have done very little to correct, though Romero, now Puerto Rico's
resident commissioner (non-voting House delegate) in Washington, did tell a
Congressional panel conducting a hearing on Puerto Rico's political status a
few years ago that he rejected the metaphor of the melting pot for the United
States, preferring instead the metaphor of a salad bowl. The remark was
intended for home consumption--only Puerto Rican newspapers hang on every word
spoken by their politicians in Washington. For U.S. mainland consumption
statehood advocates usually stress the fact that residents of Puerto Rico have
been U.S. citizens since 1917 and ever since that time they have been drafted
and have fought in U.S. wars as a part of the U.S. Armed Forces.
Mutual misunderstanding has been a hallmark of
the U.S.-Puerto Rico relationship since the U.S. took the island from Spain
along with the Philippines and Guam as war booty in a war that was ostensibly
fought over Cuba's independence. Spanish governance had been harsh, and as
unenlightened as their rule at home, and the Americans were, for the most part,
welcomed with open arms. Initially, almost all of Puerto Rico's politicians
were for statehood, misperceiving the U.S. as a sort of republic of republics
and thinking that as a state they would at least have the sort of autonomy they
had just been granted, on the Cuban coattails, by Spain. The Americans, for
their part, were shocked by the widespread poverty and illiteracy they
encountered and quickly convinced themselves that these people were not fit for
self-government and perhaps never would be. They immediately clamped down upon
the island their own form of military colonial government. The Army government
lasted little more than a year, but Puerto Rico remained under the War
Department until 1934 when it passed to the Department of the Interior, and its
governors, U.S. mainland politicians all, were appointed by Washington for a
half century (The first native Puerto Rican to be appointed, Jesus T. Pi–ero, was named by President
Harry Truman in 1946. Puerto Rico was permitted to elect its own Governor for
the first time in 1950, and the current commonwealth status giving Puerto Rico
more apparent autonomy than they had ever had went into effect in 1952).
Once the reality of American rule, economically
generous but politically stingy, set in, so did disillusionment among Puerto
Rico's leaders. Unlike the firebrand Cubans, the Puerto Ricans, whose lamb on
their official seal is said to symbolize their obeisance to Spain, had never
wanted more than greater autonomy, of the sort it appeared their founding
country had granted them in 1897. Now that they saw they weren't going to get
it, the manner of adaptation to the new reality split the old Autonomist party into
two new parties. The Unionist Party, led by Luis Mu–oz
Rivera, which claimed most of the island's political and economic elite and
demanded greater political autonomy, of the sort that had just been wrested
from Spain, and the Republican Party of Dr. JosŽ
Celso Barbosa. As unattainable as the Americans had
made it appear from the very beginning, the Republicans continued to have
statehood as their objective.
The two dominant political parties in Puerto
Rico have changed leaders and have changed names through the years, but their
make-up, their personalities, and their goals and objectives have remained
surprisingly consistent.
|
Though
Barbosa was a black, his Republican party included poor whites from the
coast; his political trajectory, as he himself claimed, was diaphanous' in
its consistency. He had always stressed equality within Spanish sovereignty;
he now claimed equality as an American subject. He sought collective American
citizenship for Puerto Ricans as a precondition for the ultimate acceptance
of Puerto Rico as a state of the Union. Statehood and citizenship were, to
Barbosa, not the demands of a subservient people, but an assertion of
dignity. (Raymond Carr, Puerto Rico, a Colonial Experiment, Vintage
Books, 1984, p. 48) |
Talk about a misunderstanding! There is
something truly quixotic and sad about a black man, an accomplished physician
and political leader in a society with great class discrimination but free and
open racial intermarriage, particularly among the lower classes, and thus with
no perceptible color line, demanding, for the sake of dignity and equality, to
be integrated into the United States of the early 20th century. Even today U.S.
racial divisions amount to a caste system compared to Puerto Rico, but the
United States of the early 1900s was a country in which the Jim Crow laws, the
Ku Klux Klan, and the lynch mob were still powerful forces. And strong racism
and discrimination were not just a Southern phenomenon. None of the cities
where major league baseball was played were in the Old South, but the teams
were still many decades away from permitting blacks to participate, and
Hollywood had not yet even created the unthreatening, "yassuh,
nossuh" talking, bug-eyed ghost-fearing
subservient black male stereotype that dominated the screen for so many years.
The statehood cry had everything to do with
Puerto Rican realities, not U.S. ones. At the risk of oversimplifying only a
little, Barbosa and his followers were the "outs," always demanding
to be treated with greater equality and dignity versus the smug, comfortable,
elite "ins." The autonomist "ins" looked wistfully back to
aristocratic Spain for their model. And in the Latin American pattern, wealth
and privilege were hardly worth having if not to lord it over the "outs."
The pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party, so long dominant in Puerto Rican
politics, is the inheritor of this autonomist tradition. It received an
infusion of egalitarianism from the early leadership of Mu–oz Rivera's son,
Luis Mu–oz Mar’n, but in his later years and afterward, it
has reverted to type. One of the main reasons for the massive rejection of the Populares in 1992
was not that pro-statehood sentiment was on the rise but that, in his second
consecutive four-year term (third overall), Governor Rafael Hern‡ndez Col—n had
begun to take on regal airs and had spent too much time off the island,
particularly in Spain. He even went to live in Spain after his retirement and
his party's crushing defeat.
Populist Authoritarians
The pro-statehood New Progressive Party is in
many ways just like Barbosa's Republican Party. Even in its U.S. advertisements
in favor of the new legislation that would push Puerto Rico along toward
statehood, one can see that it is energized not by a love of all things
American but by a profound dislike for its Puerto Rican political opponents and
a revulsion over the existing political status in which Puerto Ricans lack the
dignity of full, first-class U.S. citizenship. In this latter consideration it
is like the long-term mistress who really doesn't love the sugar daddy she
services but demands to be made his wife for respectability's sake. And though
in their advertisements in the conservative Washington
Times they try to paint the Populares as
socialists for some of the muddle-headed statist schemes the leaders of that
party have hatched in the past, they are very much true to the traditions of
Barbosa in their own simplistic populism. Statehood
is for the Poor, after all, is the title of Romero's book, and the main
reason given is that, as a state, Puerto Rico would, on balance, get a lot more
in federal transfer payments. As soon as he settled into his current Washington
office he joined in with fellow Democrats in the Congress in railing against
the U.S. manufacturing companies that form the backbone of the Puerto Rican
economy, calling the federal tax breaks that lured them to the island in the
first place mere "corporate welfare." And the New Progressives have
always had close ties with organized labor. They have consistently favored the
application of all federal minimum wage laws to Puerto Rico, and, most
recently, Governor Pedro Rossell— introduced
legislation that would permit the unionization of all Commonwealth government
employees.
As for the better-known welfare, even though out
of power, the pro-statehood lobbyists were the biggest single force behind the
Congressional action that has largely given Puerto Rico its transfer-payment
dependence. I speak of the food stamp program. Using the dignity-of-American-citizens
argument they persuaded the Congress to treat Puerto Rico as though it were a
state in 1974, a move that the incumbent governor, Hern‡ndez
Col—n, initially opposed. Soon the cupones rained down upon the island like manna from
heaven, though the demonstrated need hardly compared to that of the Israelites
in the desert. By 1982, with the annual food stamp tab for Puerto Rico about to
crest one billion dollars, the Congress realized that things were a bit out of
hand. They took Puerto Rico off food stamps and replaced it with a block grant,
initially capped at $825 million and misleadingly entitled the Nutrition
Assistance Program. Actually it was not misleading until Romero, who by that
time was in his second term as governor, got through with it. To "save
administrative costs," he did not institute his own program of food stamps
with the money. He simply had his Department of Social Services send those
families deemed eligible a monthly check in the mail. Now, with the annual
expenditure for the program over a billion dollars and with the appropriation
still part of the mammoth agriculture bill, as though its purpose were to help
U.S. farmers by giving poor people the wherewithal to buy their output, this is
still how the program is administered.
Like Latin American populism of the Peronist stripe, the Puerto Rican version also comes tinged
with authoritarianism. Romero is nicknamed El Caballo
(the horse) because of, let us say, his forceful qualities, and as governor
from 1977 through 1984 he behaved very much like the traditional Latin American
caudillo, or strong man. Never before had the agencies of government
been so thoroughly politicized, and though any Puerto Rican governor who also
controls the legislature is like a four-year dictator in that there is always
the strictest party loyalty in all-important votes, Romero carried the loyalty
requirement one step further. Party loyalty for him was not enough; personal
loyalty was what counted. Dos jueyes macho en la misma cueva (two male land
crabs in the same cave), was the commonly heard, very
Puerto Rican expression about his clashes with cabinet officials with the
slightest sign of an independent thought.
His governorship eventually foundered when the
opposition won control of the legislature beginning his second term in 1980.
They held public, televised hearings that revealed that two young independence
advocates, one the son of a prominent pro-independence writer, ostensibly
killed in a "shootout"
with police
in an attempt to sabotage a television relay tower had actually been set up by
a police provocateur, captured alive, and summarily executed. No personal legal
blame was ever pinned on Romero for the political murders, but his opponents
did not shrink from reminding the voters that he had very quickly showered the
police with praise when the killings occurred and his appointees had
orchestrated the ensuing cover-up. The episode was a major factor in his defeat
in his attempt at re-election in 1984.
Another factor in his defeat might have been the
political status question. He ran in 1976 on a "good government"
platform, promising that political status would not be an issue with him, but
once he was in he soon made it the issue. There was a great deal of quite
infuriating, insulting talk from the Romero camp about educating the people on
political status, as though all those people who favor independence or
continued commonwealth status do so out of simple ignorance. Never mind the
quite perceptive observation of noted dramatist RenŽ MarquŽs that there is no such
thing as a Puerto Rican intellectual who is not an independentista. Romero also promised
that if reelected he would immediately call for a new referendum on political
status, something that had not taken place since 1967 when Luis Mu–oz Marin was
at the crest of his power, and commonwealth had won overwhelmingly. If
statehood were to win by a majority of only one vote, he said, he would
forthwith petition the U.S. Congress for admission to the union as the 51st
state.
Trinidadian novelist and social commentator,
V.S. Naipul, has written that in Argentina people
"live for their enemies." Robert Crassweller,
the biographer of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo has noted that the English
word "compromise" really has no exact counterpart in Spanish, and
that at least in the Dominican Republic, the concept comes across as something
akin to cowardice. The culture of Puerto Rico, especially among its political
leaders, one is constantly reminded, is not too far removed from that of these
other Latin American societies. Sometimes one gets the impression certain
actions are taken not because they will make governing any easier or even that
it will make reelection any easier but simply because it will be so galling to
one's political enemies. Those in power seem to take a particular pleasure in
rubbing the noses of those out of power in the fact of their powerlessness by
going out of their way to do what will irritate their opponents, that is to say
their political enemies, the most.
The current governor and statehood leader,
former physician Pedro Rossell—, has shown many of
these same compromise-and-consensus-be-damned, authoritarian tendencies as
well. He is the only governor in the nation who has used the National Guard for
massive drug busts, sealing off public housing projects with troops for extended
periods of time. Most recently, in January of this year, he was personally
accused by Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) delegation chairman Danilo Arbilla, a Uruguayan
publisher, of dictatorial tendencies for actions he has taken against Puerto
Rico's leading newspaper, El Nuevo Dia. Upon hearing the remarks, Rossell— rushed up to the podium
and physically confronted the publisher. "My people told me that I should
hit him," he told a radio interviewer. Rossell— was accused of violating an IAPA declaration that
he signed in 1995 that states, "Withdrawal of government advertising may
not be used to reward or punish the media." That appears to be precisely
what he has done to El Nuevo D’a at considerable expense to
that paper. In Puerto Rico the government owns such normally private functions
as the telephone company and the one electric power utility and their
advertisements are substantial. The paper's offense was pointing out instances
of government corruption and mismanagement.
There are several ironies here. One, of course,
is for a governor elected under the flag of the world's leading democracy, the
United States, and the leader of a movement to add a star representing his
state to that flag, should be in violation of the democracy norms of an international,
largely Latin American press body. Another is that he should
be lectured on his own turf by a man from a country not noted for its
strong democratic traditions. A final irony is that the newspaper he appears to
be trying to bring to its knees for having the temerity to criticize his
government has a strong pro-statehood editorial position.
From the U.S. perspective this episode is but
one more illustration of the misconception that those in Puerto Rico who most
want to be "part of us" are necessarily the ones who are "most
like us," or even that they are the ones who like Americans the most.
Romero's dignity-based call for statehood often has the ring of the strongest
pro-independence rhetoric. He has written that if rejected by the Congress in a
statehood petition he would see no other option but to turn toward
independence. He has also written, and repeated many times, that Puerto Rico's
Spanish language and its culture are non-negotiable. The message seems to be,
"I want to be closer to you not because I like you but because I don't
like what you've been doing to me (apart from giving me a lot of money, though
less than my due) all these years." One detects no indication in his
rhetoric that he can empathize in the least with any Americans who might be
wary about taking the unprecedented step of adopting as a state an entity of a
different culture on the basis of one bare majority vote. "I know that I
have never asked you to marry me, but if I do you'd better say yes quickly, or
I will leave." Is it love?
On the political status front, Governor Rossell—'s actions have
been completely in the Romero mold.
In fact Romero, who has become an even greater statehood militant as
resident commissioner than he was as governor, has probably tugged him along.
Mistaking the huge election victory in 1992 as a statehood endorsement rather
than a repudiation of the leadership of Hern‡ndez
Col—n and his party, Rossell— called for a plebiscite on political
status, which commonwealth won by a vote of 48.6 percent to 46.3 percent, with
4.4 percent choosing independence.
There is an irony here in that another reason
for the pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party's defeat is that the little
attention Governor Hern‡ndez Col—n gave to his job in his second term mainly went
toward an unsuccessful and thoroughly ill-considered push in Washington to gain
an improvement in the terms of commonwealth. Rossell— apparently did not see that status
partisanship is not an electoral winner, or perhaps he was driven by the even
stronger imperative, to take care to do that which will most anger one's
opponents. Hern‡ndez Col—n's big nod toward that imperative, in addition to
his misbegotten greater-autonomy push, had been his party's formal elimination
of English as one of the two official languages of Puerto Rico. That move was
certainly not popular with the statehooders and they
quickly undid it when they got back into power. Unfortunately for Mr. Hern‡ndez Col—n, it was
also quite unpopular with most of the citizenry, especially with the business
community, which found itself having to submit paperwork in Spanish when
previously English had been acceptable.
Not to be outdone when it comes to actions
pleasing to one's status partisans, galling to one's domestic opponents, but
also broadly unpopular because it is harmful to the basic interests of the
populace, Rossell—
and, even more enthusiastically, Romero soon acquiesced in the elimination by
the U.S. Congress of the federal tax incentive, Section 936 of the Internal
Revenue Code. This very favorable tax arrangement which evolved from a
provision originally designed simply to put U.S. businesses on an equal tax
footing with foreign competitors in the U.S. possession of the Philippines in
the 1920s, is almost completely responsible for transforming Puerto Rico from a
backward agricultural island to a reasonably advanced industrial one. The U.S.
companies lured by the tax deal also account, directly or indirectly, for a
substantial share of the island's jobs. The statehood leaders' rationale was
pure status politics. As a state, Puerto Rico could not get a tax break
unavailable to the other states, which makes for a pretty strong economic
argument for not becoming a state. If the tax break were to be eliminated so,
too, would be that argument, and so it was, regardless of the long-term risks
to the economy.
That had been one excuse for the loss of the
status plebiscite, the commonwealthers
had played greatly on the fears of the voters that their jobs would be lost
with the loss of Section 936 that would accompany statehood. Now with it gone,
that took care of that. The other excuse had been that each of the parties had
been permitted to define its status as it chose, and the commonwealthers
had offered up a pie-in-the-sky enhanced commonwealth of a type that the
Congress would never buy, and the gullible voters, as the statehooders
saw it, had gone for it. Now that had to be fixed. But how?
Governor Rossell—'s enthusiastic endorsement, and work for
the passage of, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was a big
mystery to many economists and business people in Puerto Rico. When the
Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) had first been proposed by the Reagan
administration they recognized that the concerns of Puerto Rico might be a
problem. They sent a large delegation down to smooth any possible ruffled feathers
and eventually put in a provision to assure that the island lost none of its
rum excise tax because of new Caribbean competition. But the CBI was no danger
to Puerto Rico at all compared to the NAFTA. Both eliminated quotas and duties
on imports for the favored countries, but virtually the only industries in
which the quotas and duties make a significant difference are the low-wage
industries of apparel and footwear. The CBI made an exception for those
industries and kept their restrictions in place. The NAFTA did not.
Clearly, the industries most endangered by
NAFTA-enhanced Mexican competition would be the low-wage industries of apparel
and footwear. Puerto Rico, as it happens, with the lowest wages in the country,
also has a higher percentage of its manufacturing work force in apparel than
any state. A governor loudly speaking up for Puerto Rico's clear economic
interests and opposing the NAFTA, as close a thing as its passage was, could
have at least gained leverage for some kind of compensation for the damage the
NAFTA was certain to do to Puerto Rico. It made no sense that the governor
would throw that leverage away and turn cheerleader for the NAFTA right off the
bat.
But then, too, it does not seem to make a lot of
sense that a Republican Congressional leadership would conspire in the crafting
of unprecedented legislation heavily tilted toward making Puerto Rico, with its
poverty, its heavy welfare dependency, its statist liberal-Democratic leanings,
and its different language and culture, a state. It is also puzzling that the
national news organs who did not stint on their coverage—all favorable—of the NAFTA,
would hardly report at all on legislation concerning another southern,
Spanish-speaking neighbor that is of much greater consequence for the future of
the nation.
Let us now put two and two together. The
powerful triumvirate of Democratic leadership, Republican leadership, and big
media pushed through the generally unpopular NAFTA. Big media, in this case,
did their part by providing massive favorable publicity. The latest in a long
string of corrupt Mexican presidents, Carlos Salinas, was painted as a
veritable saint, and anyone with NAFTA doubts was tarred as a misguided
"protectionist." There was no way the media could sell Puerto Rico
statehood, however, so they just stayed silent while the Congress attempted to
put a mechanism in place that would virtually make statehood inevitable over a
period of years.
The United States-Puerto Rico Political Status Act
The legislation of which we speak, H.R. 856, the
United States-Puerto Rico Political Status Act, passed the House of
Representatives on March 4, 1998, by a vote of 209 to 208. It has the
enthusiastic backing of President Clinton, who has promised to sign it if it
passes the full Congress, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is one of the
bill's co-sponsors. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott has said he will not take
it up, but at least the first major hurdle has already been crossed.
The bill, which characterizes itself as the
first-ever "step in the process of self-determination" for Puerto
Rico takes care of the second main statehooder explanation
for the commonwealth victory in 93 by taking the power to determine the
definition of the three choices out of the hands of the local parties. Claiming
to set in place "procedures through which the permanent political status
of the people of Puerto Rico can be determined," the plebiscite definition
of commonwealth is prescribed this way:
|
(1)
Puerto Rico
continues the present Commonwealth structure for self government with respect
to internal affairs and administration; (2) provisions of the
Constitution and laws of the United States apply to Puerto Rico as determined
by Congress; (3)
Puerto Rico remains a locally self-governing
unincorporated territory of the United States. |
And if that is not sufficient reminder of how
truly politically unsatisfactory anything other than statehood or independence
is, and will continue to be, we find the following summarizing statement in the
"Findings" section:
|
Full
self-government for Puerto Rico is attainable only through establishment of a
political status which is based on either separate Puerto Rican sovereignty
and nationality or full and equal United States nationality and citizenship
through membership in the Union and under which Puerto Rico is no longer an
unincorporated territory subject to the plenary authority of Congress arising
from the Territorial Clause. |
Instead of finally completing the process of
conquest of the Puerto Rican people begun by the United States military in
1898, the Congress, one is led to believe, is finally getting around to
cleaning up its colonialism problem. However, the reader cannot help wondering
why, if this lack of "full self-government" is now, for the first
time, so intolerable in Congressional eyes for the people of Puerto Rico, it
still remains perfectly tolerable for the foreseeable future for the people of
Washington, D.C., the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the
Northern Marianas.
The bill calls for a referendum by the end of
the year and if statehood should gain a majority of just one vote, a mechanism
for making Puerto Rico a state is set into motion. Should Puerto Ricans remain
obstinate and still not read the writing on the wall and continue to favor
commonwealth, another referendum is prescribed for ten years hence, and for
every ten years thereafter, as regular as the census. One final reminder of how
powerless and helpless before the will of a capricious benefactor Puerto Rico
continues to be as long as it is not a state is provided by the following
passage:
|
AUTHORITY
OF CONGRESS TO DETERMINE STATUS- Since current unincorporated territory
status of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is not a permanent, unalterable or
guaranteed status under the Constitution of the United States, Congress
retains plenary authority and responsibility to determine a permanent status
for Puerto Rico consistent with the national interest. The Congress
historically has recognized a commitment to take into consideration the
freely expressed wishes of the people of Puerto Rico regarding their future
political status. This policy is consistent with respect for the right of
self-determination in areas which are not fully
self-governing, but does not constitute a legal restriction or binding
limitation on the Territorial Clause powers of Congress to determine a
permanent status of Puerto Rico. Nor does any such restriction or limitation
arise from the Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act (48 U.S.C. 731 et seq.). |
So, the act that created the commonwealth
arrangement that went into effect in 1952 was not really "adopted in the
nature of a compact" between two peoples as both U.S. and Puerto Rican
leaders proclaimed at the time. It was, in effect, a sham, as has been the U.S.
claim before the United Nations ever since that Puerto Rico is no longer a
colony. Most important to the Puerto Rican voter is the chilling reminder that
the only guarantee against Puerto Rico being involuntarily kicked out into the
cold, cruel world and made independent against their will, or for Puerto Ricans
to be stripped of their U.S. citizenship, is to agree to become a state.
Having set things up so it is highly likely that
Puerto Rico will be pushed over the hump and those remaining few votes will, at
one time or another, be picked up, the bill then provides for a ten-year
transition-to-statehood phase within which time there will be two additional
referenda to make sure that the terms worked out are acceptable to the Puerto
Rican people. No, let's put that another way. Though all Puerto Rican political
parties are to be conferred with, the only Puerto Ricans who ultimately have to
be pleased by this monumental and irrevocable change in political identity are
the ones who voted for it in the first place, because only the same simple
majority is required for approval.
The astute reader will have noticed that while
that same group of voters, the simple majority, that might have been coaxed
into choosing statehood is appealed to time and again for their approval—and
all the while the losers, one could be certain, would be growing as mad as
hornets—and another important group is ignored altogether. That is the
American people. While a big show is made of respecting the wishes of some of
the Puerto Rican people, none of the American people are taken into account. To
those who would say that the actions of Congress reflect the wishes of the
American people we present as a counter-argument the recent example of the
passage of the NAFTA, pushed most vigorously and shamelessly by a president who
seemed to be against it when he campaigned for the presidency, the
strengthening of the GATT by an extraordinary lame duck session of the
Congress, and the little-heralded passage by the House of this Puerto Rico
statehood legislation itself.
Even with all these recent examples, all of
which would seem to be high on the global-government agenda, a thoroughly
unwarranted complacency seems to exist among the general public about the
prospects for Puerto Rico statehood. Some of this complacency rests upon the
erroneous belief that the acceptance of a new state into the union by the
Congress is more difficult, constitutionally, than is the passage of any
run-of-the-mill bill. It is not. And most shockingly of all, Congress with H.R.
856 actually goes so far as to set passage of statehood on a fast track by
giving itself a short deadline for action as soon as Puerto Rico should produce
its simple majority and by curtailing in advance various ways in which bills
are often slowed down such as extended debate, the raising of points of order,
the offering of extraneous amendments, and the referral to numerous committees.
Admitting a new state into the union is not like
a treaty and it is not like a constitutional amendment. The founding fathers
were wary of "foreign entanglements" such as George Washington warned
against, so they put in a requirement that any treaties, which are negotiated by
the executive, be ratified by a vote of two thirds of the Senate. They feared
the "rule of the mob" represented by majority vote on everything and
they were duly proud of their handiwork, so they made it difficult for the
Constitution to be amended. Two-thirds of both the House and the Senate had to
approve and then three-fourths of the state legislatures. But they were looking
at a largely empty continent to their west, and they saw no reason to make it
difficult to expand the nation through the addition of new states.
Still, we hardly need to be reminded that the
adding of continental states didn't always go smoothly, the dispute over
whether new states would have legal slavery or not having been the fuse that
ignited the Civil War. The framers of the Constitution might well have
anticipated that problem, having wrestled with the slavery question when they
formed the Union and then having simply pushed the thorny issue off onto
posterity. But it is doubtful that they ever envisioned that we would evolve
into an imperial power. Had they done so, given their wise
"entanglement" phobia, there is a good chance that they would have
put some Constitutional obstacles in the way of Congressional attempts to
digest permanently any little nations that we might have swallowed.
A Curious Sort of Pride
It is not too late to start thinking about
correcting their oversight. The dignity-based demand for statehood for Puerto
Rico is fraught with dangers for both the people of Puerto Rico and for the
United States. It must puzzle most of the world, with one Western power after
another having given up its colonies in this century and with so many new
nations just having been created because of the break-up of the Soviet Union
and Yugoslavia. "Where is the dignity in surrendering yourself utterly to
a conquering nation of a vastly different culture?" they must wonder. And
there is a chance that the old Barbosa-like misunderstanding continues. A
German diplomat related to me an amazing conversation she had with a
pro-statehood official in the Romero administration during a state visit.
"What happens if you try statehood and you don't like it?" she had
asked. "We will simply request to get out of it," came the reply.
Also baffling to many is how one can proudly
make of one's society a sort of beggardom based on the concept of pride and
dignity, a beggardom which, as promised in Romero's Statehood is for the Poor, would likely be made greater, that is to
say, made worse by the advent of statehood. As noted previously, the continuing
argument of the statehooders for being treated like a
state for any federal program is that as U.S. citizens, it is nothing more than
their due. Their pride, as it were, demands that they demand U.S. taxpayers'
money. To their eternal discredit, the commonwealthers,
too, have found it politically expedient, after initial resistance on
ideological grounds, to join in this refrain. Free money is a hard thing to
resist, especially when one's political opponent is trying to hog the credit
for it.
They and the American
public need to be reminded that the heavy dependence of Puerto Rico on the
federal dole is of fairly recent vintage. We do not have a case here of a bad
situation that is growing steadily better. U.S. proponents of statehood seem to
have the fuzzy-headed notion that the push for statehood, growing prosperity
and Americanization, as well as greater use of English among the populace
somehow come to us in one large pleasant package.
|
If
only a quarter of Puerto Rico's population shares the national language in
any meaningful way, the island is no more ready for statehood than someone
who can't read English is ready for a citizenship exam. But all that is changing, and should change
even more, as English classes expand from 50 to 90 minutes a day in Puerto
Rican high schools. When all courses can be taught in English, as they are in
most American classrooms, Puerto Rico will be ready for statehood--if its
people want it. (Paul Greenberg, The
Washington Times, March 9, 1998). |
Here's news for Mr. Greenberg: Citizenship exams
in the U.S. are now being passed every day by people who can't read English,
and not even the strongest Puerto Rican statehooder
has any intention of making English the dominant medium of instruction in
school. What does he think, "Our language and our culture are
non-negotiable," means? For the first half of the century the U.S.
attempted to make little Americans out of Puerto Ricans. Our appointed
governors had them use English-language textbooks and many native English
speakers were brought down from the states as public school teachers. It may
not have been the same as the Japanese with their colonial occupation of Korea,
where all Koreans were given Japanese names and teachers beat children if they
were heard speaking Korean. And Puerto Rico manifested nothing like Korea's
1919 nationwide nonviolent uprising that provoked violent reprisal in which
thousands were killed. The closest they have come was the Ponce Massacre of 1937 in which 20
died and the Nationalist troubles of 1950 that took 32 lives.
Eventually, cultural resistance and the advent
of self-government in the 1950s caused the velvet-gloved Americanization policy
to be scrapped. That, and the general deterioration of the quality of the
public schools, along the same lines and for many of the same reasons as the
worst U.S. inner-city public schools, means that someone under fifty years old
is less likely to be proficient in English in Puerto Rico than someone over
fifty. Statehooders like to blame the problem on the commonwealthers, saying that they intentionally keep the
people ignorant of English for partisan reasons, but the teaching of English in
the public schools improved not one iota during the eight years that the arch-statehooder Romero was governor, and one is hard-pressed to
find results these days that match the current rhetoric.
Bleak Economic Outlook
The economic backslide has been comparable. In
1965, at the height of the success of the famous "Operation
Bootstrap" industrialization program, a success that dampened much of the
political unrest, federal expenditures in Puerto Rico were 15.6 percent as
great as total personal income. In 1996 after the coming of food stamps and
other programs, the $10.4 billion in total federal expenditures (about $28.5
million per day, some half of which were pure transfers, as opposed to earned
rewards like social security toward which Puerto Ricans contribute and federal
workers' salaries and retirement benefits) were 34.5 percent of personal
income. During the decade in which the food stamps and other federal programs
were introduced, from 1975 to 1985, Puerto Rico's GNP grew in real terms by a
total of 24 percent versus a 40 percent increase in the U.S. By contrast, from
1960 to 1970 real GNP in Puerto Rico had grown by 90 percent in Puerto Rico
versus 47 percent in the U.S. With cause and effect running in both directions,
as transfer-payment dependence has grown, the wide gap between the economies of
the U.S. and Puerto Rico has grown as well. At Puerto Rico's high water mark in
1971, its GNP per capita was 35.0 percent of U.S. GNP per capita. In 1996 it
was 28.5 percent of U.S. GNP per capita. Per capita income, long stuck at half
that of the poorest state, Mississippi, has now slid a
bit under that level.
Unfortunately, the chances are very small that
we have seen the worst of it. What Puerto Rico had to sacrifice on the road to
statehood and statehood itself bid fair to leave those behind this pride-based
quest with very little to be proud of, at least of a material nature. Depriving
the commonwealth advocates of their most powerful argument next to the cultural
one by acquiescing in the elimination of the Section 936 tax treatment has left
Puerto Rico without a basis to attract very profitable industries like
pharmaceuticals, medical instruments, and electronics. The effect has hardly
been felt yet because the U.S. economy has been doing well and the price of
imported crude oil, on which Puerto Rico is much more dependent than the U.S.,
is at an all-time low in real terms, and the companies already on the island
negotiated a quite generous ten-year phase-out of their tax benefits. The main
effect will be felt as very few new employers come to replace those that in due
time run out of after-tax competitiveness on the island. At the low end of Puerto
Rico's manufacturing sector the passage of the NAFTA is certain to have major
negative consequences, and here, too, because the NAFTA provides for a phasing
out of the tariffs and quotas, the greatest effect will be felt down the road a
ways.
And though Romero is right that statehood would
bring, even on balance with Puerto Rico's federal tax payments figured in, a
quite large increase in federal expenditures, the effect, in the final
analysis, on Puerto Rico's economy is still likely to be negative. The big new
expenditures will come in Supplemental Security Income for Aged Disabled and
Blind (SSI), from which Puerto Rico is currently excluded, and from the removal
of the cap on Nutrition Assistance and putting Puerto Rico back on food stamps.
Those two alone are likely to account for an additional two billion dollars or
so. Removing the quite low caps on Aid to Families and Dependent Children and
Medicaid will also produce a big increase in expenditures, but it is difficult
to say how much. These are matching programs that depend on how much Puerto
Rico would be willing and able to ante up, and in this ability to ante up comes
the rub. Puerto Rico supports a bloated, inefficient government sector mainly
through income taxes that are higher than federal and state combined and a
hidden sales tax in the form of an excise tax that is higher than most state
sales taxes. The income tax base is very narrow, so that not all that much
could be expected in gross revenues would be added to the U.S. Treasury, but
those who do pay, pay heavily. Unless Puerto Rico drastically lowers its tax
rates when federal taxes are imposed, those even with modest incomes will face
a much-increased tax burden, and those with higher incomes will find the burden
crushing. Income earners with skills will be forced to seek out employment in
the mainland where they will be left with something in their pay checks after
withholding, leaving the island more and more to the dole earners.
Wealth-creating business venturers will find Puerto Rico one of the most
uninviting places on the face of the planet to reside.
If, on the other hand, Puerto Rico does bring
its taxes into harmony with those of other states, something will have to be
done to provide for the huge government work force that it would no longer be
able to support. They, too, would face either emigration or, along with the
no-longer-competitive industrial workers, the ever-inviting, burgeoning federal
dole. And given the wrenching difficulty that governments everywhere face in
downsizing, there is a very good chance that vital services would suffer rather
than bureaucratic fat being trimmed neatly away.
In sum, the prospect of Puerto Rico becoming the
51st state is chilling, not only to patriots from Aguas
Buenas to Akron, but also to the colder,
green-eye-shade types concerned about the dollars and cents of the matter.
There is no magic wand in statehood. The island state of Hawaii, dominated by
Anglo-Asian culture, is supported primarily by tourism and U.S. military
spending. Puerto Rico, lacking Hawaii's strategic significance, has a
negligible U.S. military presence, and what there is has generated great
conflict with local residents. As for tourism, with more than three times
Hawaii's population to support, it has less than one tenth the number of hotel
rooms; less than half as many, in fact, as the single Caribbean resort of
Cancun, Mexico; fewer even than Fairfax County, Virginia. The counterpart twin
pillars of Puerto Rico's economy have been the low-tax-and-wage-induced U.S.
manufacturers and the federal transfer payments—the dole, if you will.
Now, sacrificed on the altar of statehood, it would appear that the former are
not long for this world, leaving only the latter, surely not an appealing
prospect for a 51st state already shockingly poor by U.S. standards and heavily
welfare-dependent by anyone's standards.
The Cultural Wrecking Ball
As big as these problems are, bigger by far is
the problem of culture. Just as not much has changed in the nature of the two
dominant political parties in Puerto Rico in a century, surprisingly little has
changed in the perceptions, misperceptions, and conflicts between the two
peoples since the end of the Spanish-American War, and statehood would likely
magnify those conflicts to an unimaginable degree. Like the first Americans
arriving on the island, modern Americans, more materialistic than ever, are
simply convinced that Puerto Ricans, being poorer, are inferior, and knowing
less history than ever, they have no appreciation of how far the island has
come and how much it has accomplished in the last forty years. This, at least,
is how a substantial share of Americans think about
Puerto Rico when they think of it at all. For the most part, it is simply out
of sight and out of mind. Come statehood and the mounting U.S. taxpayer cost of
this "four-million person Indian reservation in the Caribbean" (more
densely populated than any state except New Jersey) as it could well be widely
perceived, and Puerto Rico's absence from the public consciousness would no
longer be possible. The fact that Puerto Rico would have six Representatives in
the House and two Senators would guarantee their notice. These representatives
would replace six current state Congressmen because the law caps the total at 435.
Such a situation would hardly be likely to engender kind feelings toward Puerto
Rico and Puerto Ricans on the mainland. And what if Americans could witness the
eternal, fractious, uncompromising political squabbling that goes on on the island, where Clausewitz is turned on his head and
"politics is war by other means"? How could Puerto Ricans say with
any confidence, "To know us is to love us," when the impression given
is that they dislike one another very much?
From the Puerto Rican perspective, statehood is
not at all likely to mean that love of all things American is likely to grow.
They are likely to continue to feel estranged and different from the cold,
efficient, very foreign invaders from a thoroughly alien, unfathomable culture,
regardless of the face pro-statehooders currently try
to present. "Yes, we have deep and bitter divisions among us, they will
say, "but isn't divide and conquer' always the method of the colonial
master?" The often-repeated saying that "every Puerto Rican is an independentista after two drinks" will contain
as much truth as ever, and the battle among the contending Puerto Rican parties
for the Puerto Rican soul will go on with at least as much emotion as before.
Certainly that existing bare majority of Puerto Ricans who oppose statehood are
not likely to feel more charitable toward those whom they accuse of wanting to
sell out la patria once the deed has actually been accomplished. The
happy notion of a society as a "salad bowl" with widely differing
cultures at the same time keeping their distinctiveness and blending
harmoniously is an even greater fiction in Puerto Rico, one of the least
cosmopolitan, most insular of societies, than it is in the United States. Not
very different from Japanese families who have lived too long out of the
country, Puerto Ricans who move to Puerto Rico from the States often have a
very difficult time adjusting and being accepted.
|
The
balanced interaction between all the single norms of social behavior
characteristic of a culture accounts for the fact that it usually proves
highly dangerous to mix cultures. To kill a culture, it is often sufficient
to bring it into contact with another, particularly if the latter is higher,
or is at least regarded as higher as the culture of a conquering nation
usually is. The people of the subdued side then tend to look down upon
everything they previously held sacred and to ape the customs
which they regard as superior. As the system of social norms and rites
characteristic of a culture is always adapted, in many particular ways, to
the special conditions of its environment, this unquestioning acceptance of
foreign customs almost invariably leads to maladaptation. Colonial history
offers abundant examples of (cultural interaction) causing the destruction
not only of cultures but also of peoples and races. Even in the less tragic
case of rather closely related and roughly equivalent cultures mixing, there
usually are some undesirable results, because each finds it easier to imitate
the most superficial, least valuable customs of the other. The first items of
American culture imitated by German youth immediately after the last war were
gum chewing, Coca-Cola drinking, the crew cut, and the reading of color comic
strips. More valuable social norms characteristic of American culture were
obviously less easy to imitate. (Konrad
Lorenz, On Aggression, Bantam Books, 1963, p.253) |
Puerto Rico falls a bit farther along the
continuum of a culture adversely influenced to a culture completely destroyed
than does post-war Germany. If, as is likely, Puerto Ricans after statehood
were to cling as doggedly to their language and culture as do the people of
Quebec today, attempting to stamp out what English is currently tolerated, it
would not be the worst eventuality, even from the American perspective. The
most realistic alternative, you see, is not the Puerto Rican turned into the
pragmatic, frugal Yankee, rather it is the dispirited Puerto Rican
"reservation Indian," with all the complicated social norms that gave
his life meaning having been destroyed, resigned to living on the conqueror's
handouts. And don't expect that he will feel appreciation for all that
Americans have done for him. Instead, he will more likely resent Americans for
what he perceives that they have done to him.
It would not take long after the achievement of
statehood, either, for the awareness to set in that the age old dream of JosŽ Celso Barbosa, that is, simply to be treated as equals, was
as distant as ever. At this point we could anticipate, wonder of wonders, a
coalescing between the "moderate" autonomists, who had not joined
with the former independence advocates--by this time called secessionists--in
more militant action, over one important thing that they could agree upon. That
is that many of their persistent problems in getting along in American society
are caused by the fact that their language and culture don't get the proper
respect. That is because, they will likely conclude, the larger society is
monolingual in English. The true descendants in spirit of both Barbosa and Mu–oz
Rivera would then turn their attention to the effort, as the Quebecois
have done in Canada, toward making the United States a bilingual and bicultural
society. Down that road lies national Balkanization.
In 1945 Wenzell Brown,
one of the many American mainlanders brought down to Puerto Rico to teach in
the schools in the 1930s published a memoir that was in equal parts charming
and alarming. The title was Dynamite on our Doorstep. Very few people
yet know it, but the United States Congress is very close to bringing the
dynamite into the living room.
David Martin
March 13, 1998
Fortunately, we escaped
by the skin of our teeth in 1998.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott did not even bring the Puerto Rico
status bill up in the Senate. Maybe
it had nothing to do with his fall from power, but in 2002 a big fuss was made
over some kind words that Lott had for segregationist Strom ThurmondÕs run for
president in 1948 and he was forced to relinquish his Senate leadership. If one believes that statehood for
Puerto Rico is a major item on the globalistsÕ agenda, then it is not hard to
believe that this was a manufactured scandal done as an act of retribution for
LottÕs audacious act of defiance.
June 16, 2017
Addendum
In spite of Puerto RicoÕs economic collapse, the
danger that the U.S. Congress will make it the 51st state has not
passed. Republican Don Young of
Alaska, who was the principal sponsor of the United States-Puerto Rico
Political Status Act discussed above, is still in the Congress and heÕs still
pushing for statehood for the island.
This is from his press release of yesterday:
Congressman Young speaking on the House floor in
favor of Puerto Rican statehood
ÒI had
the privilege last Sunday to be an observer in Puerto Rico for the plebiscite
and I watched the people of Puerto Rico make the decision that theyÕd like to
be the 51st state,Ó said Congressman Don Young. ÒI think itÕs
time for this Congress to make our 3,400,000 American citizens part of the
United States – in full grandeur, as every one of us has the chanceÉ I
think itÕs the time America should stop colonizing. If IÕm not mistaken, this
is one of the last nations that has a colony. The
great nation of the United States has a colony. I think itÕs
time that we change that and vote in Congress to make sure we have the 51st
state.Ó
House
Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) joined Congressman
Young on the House floor to share his support for Puerto Rican
self-determination and addressing the decades old issue of political-status.
ÒThe
Puerto Rican election that was held overwhelmingly voted for statehood as the
option of governance they would like to pursue,Ó Minority Whip Hoyer stated
on the House floor. ÒIt is now, it seems to me, the responsibility of the
United States Congress and the administration to recognize the overwhelming
sentiment of the Puerto Rican people expressed in a free and open election. I
want to thank my friend from Alaska for his leadership on this effort."
The statement from the Maryland Democrat and House Minority Whip Hoyer
is on his web
site here. Both
congressmen ignore the fact that Puerto RicoÕs statehood opponents boycotted
the referendum. Young also seems to
be unaware of the U.S. territories of Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin
Islands, and even the District of Columbia. This is in spite of the fact that they all, like Puerto Rico, provide him with colleagues in the
Congress who have precisely the same powers as does Puerto RicoÕs resident
commissioner, though they are called Òdelegates,Ó instead. They can vote in committees but not on
the House floor, and they tend not to be appointed by the House leadership to
the most powerful committees.
The unholy alliance between the news media and
much of the U.S. Congress continues.
The article from The Hill on Puerto RicoÕs status
referendum to which we link extensively quotes a supposed independent Òexpert
on territorial affairs,Ó Jeffrey Farrow.
Farrow is a native of the U.S. Virgin Islands and was staff director for
the subcommittee that deals
with the territories
when the Democrats controlled it during the early years of the Clinton
administration. From my 14-year
experience with the government of Puerto Rico in Washington, in which I
interacted with Farrow a great deal, I can tell you that he has consistently
been little more than a shill for Puerto RicoÕs statehood proponents. If they were paying him to do it I donÕt
see how he would act any differently.
David Martin
June 17, 2017
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