Back in 1998, a few of the voices in the wilderness that dared to oppose the unionization of public employees warned that it would take away from the Governor and the Legislature a big part of the power to control the government budget.
The argument was that once the employees in government agencies had the right to collective bargaining to negotiate salary raises, economic benefits and many other working conditions, the agencies would effectively lose control over their budgets.
This past week, Sergio Marxuach of the Center for the New Economy, summarized the proposed budget for fiscal 2009. There is something interesting in the numbers. Contrary to popular opinion, the total budget and the total number of public employees are going down. The fiscal 2006 budget was $26.518 billion: the proposed 2009 budget is $26.331. This is a reduction of $186. The number of public workers was 224,021 in 2006: it will go down to 213,741 in 2009: a significant reduction of 10,280.
But at the same time the general fund payroll is going up. It was $5,257 billion in 2006 and will go up to $5,528 in 2009. This is a hefty increase of $271 million, or 5.16 percent.
Everyone, of course, is in favor of better salaries for teachers, policemen, health care workers. But the issue -- rather critical precisely in Puerto Rico – is who determines government salaries: who determines when to increase them, how much, in what time frame. In a government that is so deficient in providing many vital services for lack of funds, who makes the critical decisions as to spending priorities?
Setting priorities, especially in determining salaries, requires balancing two things: “justice” to the public employees, and “justice” to the people of Puerto Rico. Yes, the highest possible salaries for the employees, but not sacrificing vital services. Yes, raise the salaries, but insure that in return you get greater efficiency and quality of service for the people of Puerto Rico that pays for those increases.
The effect of Law 45, the 1998 law that authorized public employees to unionize and engage in collective bargaining, is to tilt the balance increasingly, relentlessly, in favor of unions in detriment to the people.
A good example is the gigantic Education Department. Everyone knows that as vital as public education is, and the great effort of many thousands of teachers and others, the quality of public education is tragically low, due in large part to the enormous lack of funds in the Education Department. Education Secretary Rafael Aragunde testified in the Legislature this past week that the department will close this fiscal year with a $53.3 million deficit.
To cite one example, an important administrative matter that came up in the public hearings. Legislators asked about the massive theft of student records, used for identity fraud: no less than 9,3535 files stolen in 39 schools in the past two years. Aragunde said that he simply does not have the money, $3 million, to digitize the files.
But the overriding challenge facing Aragunde and every Education Secretary before him is much bigger: in one word, payroll. Even a small salary increase has a huge budget effect. The Department has 72,000 employees. Of the proposed $2.46 billion general fund budget for fiscal 2009, no less than $2.08 billion is for payroll.
Last January, the Teachers Federation decided to strike for big salary increases that the Department could not remotely pay. The Federation ignored the fact that as a Law 45 union, it is specifically prohibited from going on strike. Gov. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá responded by decertifying the union. In the end, however, the teachers got a big raise. The Governor signed an executive order giving them a $250 a month increase: $100 now and $150 in July. Meanwhile, non-teaching employees will also get a $100 monthly increase in July, the result of their own collective bargaining. So as Aragunde told the legislators, as he struggles with the department’s budget shortfalls, he must come up with $200 million to pay for these pay raises.
Multiply many times the enormous pressure the Law 45 unions apply on the government. In the past three years, the Acevedo administration has negotiated some 80 collective bargaining agreements. This explains why while the Governor has reduced public spending and the public workforce, the percent of the total general budget for payroll goes up from 54.87 in 2006, to 58.27 percent in 2009.
This is the point. It will continue to rise, regardless of the economic situation in Puerto Rico, regardless of the deepening budget crisis, regardless of what else has to be sacrificed in vital services, regardless of what the Governor and the Legislature believe is best for all the people of Puerto Rico.
What we are seeing today, and will continue to see in the future, is precisely what those few voices in the wilderness tried to communicate back in 1998: those elected and appointed to determine payroll policies, to set critical spending priorities, have lost a large part of the control over the budget.
And in so doing, they have lost a vital part of the power to govern.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Sunday, May 11, 2008
PUERTO RICO AND THE UNITED STATES
When it seemed that the Democratic Party presidential primary here would be important, island political leaders were delighted that it would focus the attention of the American people on Puerto Rico. But is this such a good idea?
Take the May 6th front page of the Wall Street Journal. Although readers know that there is more to the WSJ than business news, it was still surprising to see a sports story from Salinas, Puerto Rico about a boxer with the interesting name of McJoe Arroyo. One quickly discovers, however, that there is more to the story.
The reporter, Barry Newman, describes what he calls an “oddity” in Puerto Rico. Everywhere on this island, he writes, the American and Puerto Rican flag fly side by side – except in one place: the Albergue Olympico in Salinas. There the Puerto Rican flag flies alone.
Why? Because in what the story describes as Puerto Rico’s “half-in-half-out status as a Commonwealth of the U.S.,” the island will participate in the Beijing Olympics, as it has since 1948 as an “entity”, that is, the same as an independent nation.
Arroyo, the report declares, has a chance to win the bantamweight medal, joining the other six Puerto Rican boxers that have won medals. Just how “ferocious” is Puerto Rico’s patriotic pride in the Olympics is dramatized by the fact that the only Puerto Rican to win a gold medal was the tennis star, Gigi Fernández. But although she actually won two gold medals, “she doesn’t rate a footnote” in the new Olympic Museum. Why? Because she competed under the U.S. flag.
“We don’t like our people playing on the U.S. team,” the WSJ reporter quotes a pro-independence man attending a basketball game in Caguas. “That is offensive,” someone else says. The greatest moment in island sports, they told the reporter, was when Puerto Rico’s Olympic basketball team beat the U.S. “dream team” in 2004: as great as Roberto Clemente getting his 3,000th hit.
In 1996, the report continues, the International Olympic Committee ruled that from now on only independent nations members of the U.N. can send new teams. So, if Puerto Rico became a state, the IOC would no more accept Puerto Rico than it would the state of Alaska. This obviously is not what pro-statehood leaders want to hear, since many continue to insist that as a state Puerto Rico would retain its Olympic standing.
But the effect of having the American people focus on Puerto Rico, I think, could be deeper than Puerto Rico’s participation in the Olympics, or in the Miss Universe contest where the island has had no less than five winners. It could unveil the very nature of the relation between Puerto Rico and the U.S.
In the past century, island leaders favoring independence or statehood have insisted that the essential nature of the relationship is unjust, abusive, “colonial.” Now the pro-Commonwealth party, after the federal grand jury indictment of Gov. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, is saying pretty much the same: that Puerto Rico is victim of U.S. “political persecution.”
So the question: is the fundamental nature of the relation to the U.S., in fact, abusive?
Lets go back to the WSJ report. It did not mention that while the reporter observed Arroyo training, the government of Puerto Rico was feverishly working to distribute to hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans the $1.282 billion it has received from the U.S. government for economic stimulus. Certainly it would seemed “odd” to readers in the U.S. that Puerto Rico, exempt of federal income taxes, would be receiving this so-called “tax rebate.”
Puerto Rico gets another $13 billion a year from the U.S. government, about half of it grants to the government and individuals. Just one program, food stamps, brings about $1.5 billion a year directly to the recipients. It may also seem odd that every now and then students at the public university, that receive Pell grants from the U.S. government that more than covers their tuition costs, feel motivated to protest the U.S. “abuse” of Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rican leaders that believe that the relationship with the U.S. is in its nature “abusive”, “colonial,” want the American media and the American people to see this island and its people as a “victim” of American power.
But if one believes, as I do, that with all the well-known juridical defects, the relationship is highly beneficial to Puerto Rico, it is important to know exactly what is being communicated to the American people. Not a story of “abuse” but a story of “privilege.”
Why should Puerto Rico have what no state of the union can have -- its own Olympic team under its own flag? Why should an island exempt of federal income taxes get $1.282 billion in “tax rebates?”
The question that I suspect the editors of the Wall Street Journal found in the McJoe Arroyo story of interest to the American people is: if Puerto Ricans so passionately fly only the Puerto Rican flag at its Olympic compound, why will it send no less than 63 delegates to the Democratic convention to select the presidential candidate?
The deeper point in all this is that the more the American people focuses not on the rhetoric, but on the reality of the relationship with Puerto Rico, the more it will ask itself: “Hey, how did the Puerto Ricans get what sure seems to be such a sweet deal for themselves?”
When it seemed that the Democratic Party presidential primary here would be important, island political leaders were delighted that it would focus the attention of the American people on Puerto Rico. But is this such a good idea?
Take the May 6th front page of the Wall Street Journal. Although readers know that there is more to the WSJ than business news, it was still surprising to see a sports story from Salinas, Puerto Rico about a boxer with the interesting name of McJoe Arroyo. One quickly discovers, however, that there is more to the story.
The reporter, Barry Newman, describes what he calls an “oddity” in Puerto Rico. Everywhere on this island, he writes, the American and Puerto Rican flag fly side by side – except in one place: the Albergue Olympico in Salinas. There the Puerto Rican flag flies alone.
Why? Because in what the story describes as Puerto Rico’s “half-in-half-out status as a Commonwealth of the U.S.,” the island will participate in the Beijing Olympics, as it has since 1948 as an “entity”, that is, the same as an independent nation.
Arroyo, the report declares, has a chance to win the bantamweight medal, joining the other six Puerto Rican boxers that have won medals. Just how “ferocious” is Puerto Rico’s patriotic pride in the Olympics is dramatized by the fact that the only Puerto Rican to win a gold medal was the tennis star, Gigi Fernández. But although she actually won two gold medals, “she doesn’t rate a footnote” in the new Olympic Museum. Why? Because she competed under the U.S. flag.
“We don’t like our people playing on the U.S. team,” the WSJ reporter quotes a pro-independence man attending a basketball game in Caguas. “That is offensive,” someone else says. The greatest moment in island sports, they told the reporter, was when Puerto Rico’s Olympic basketball team beat the U.S. “dream team” in 2004: as great as Roberto Clemente getting his 3,000th hit.
In 1996, the report continues, the International Olympic Committee ruled that from now on only independent nations members of the U.N. can send new teams. So, if Puerto Rico became a state, the IOC would no more accept Puerto Rico than it would the state of Alaska. This obviously is not what pro-statehood leaders want to hear, since many continue to insist that as a state Puerto Rico would retain its Olympic standing.
But the effect of having the American people focus on Puerto Rico, I think, could be deeper than Puerto Rico’s participation in the Olympics, or in the Miss Universe contest where the island has had no less than five winners. It could unveil the very nature of the relation between Puerto Rico and the U.S.
In the past century, island leaders favoring independence or statehood have insisted that the essential nature of the relationship is unjust, abusive, “colonial.” Now the pro-Commonwealth party, after the federal grand jury indictment of Gov. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, is saying pretty much the same: that Puerto Rico is victim of U.S. “political persecution.”
So the question: is the fundamental nature of the relation to the U.S., in fact, abusive?
Lets go back to the WSJ report. It did not mention that while the reporter observed Arroyo training, the government of Puerto Rico was feverishly working to distribute to hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans the $1.282 billion it has received from the U.S. government for economic stimulus. Certainly it would seemed “odd” to readers in the U.S. that Puerto Rico, exempt of federal income taxes, would be receiving this so-called “tax rebate.”
Puerto Rico gets another $13 billion a year from the U.S. government, about half of it grants to the government and individuals. Just one program, food stamps, brings about $1.5 billion a year directly to the recipients. It may also seem odd that every now and then students at the public university, that receive Pell grants from the U.S. government that more than covers their tuition costs, feel motivated to protest the U.S. “abuse” of Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rican leaders that believe that the relationship with the U.S. is in its nature “abusive”, “colonial,” want the American media and the American people to see this island and its people as a “victim” of American power.
But if one believes, as I do, that with all the well-known juridical defects, the relationship is highly beneficial to Puerto Rico, it is important to know exactly what is being communicated to the American people. Not a story of “abuse” but a story of “privilege.”
Why should Puerto Rico have what no state of the union can have -- its own Olympic team under its own flag? Why should an island exempt of federal income taxes get $1.282 billion in “tax rebates?”
The question that I suspect the editors of the Wall Street Journal found in the McJoe Arroyo story of interest to the American people is: if Puerto Ricans so passionately fly only the Puerto Rican flag at its Olympic compound, why will it send no less than 63 delegates to the Democratic convention to select the presidential candidate?
The deeper point in all this is that the more the American people focuses not on the rhetoric, but on the reality of the relationship with Puerto Rico, the more it will ask itself: “Hey, how did the Puerto Ricans get what sure seems to be such a sweet deal for themselves?”
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
THE MISSING QUESTION AT THE PDP ASSEMBLY
Gov. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá gave the political performance of his life. The theme was “March 24, 2008”, the day he was indicted by a federal grand jury. It’s a bit of a stretch to compare it to December 7, 1941, and he did not use the phrase “a date which will live in infamy,” but he came close.
To say that the April 27th Popular Party assembly was “orchestrated” is to put it mildly. He punctuated his speech with many of the familiar PDP campaign battle cries – “Sin Miedo! – Without Fear!” – at regular intervals his voice raising in indignation, shouting and beating the air with his fist, at that precise moment his words drowned by the loud music of familiar PDP campaign songs, throwing the thousands of PDP flag-waving militants in front of him into a frenzy.
The message is that Puerto Rico has been “attacked” – not exactly like the U.S. at Pearl Harbor or on 9/11, but yes, “attacked.” Bringing up past battles – the “bombing of Vieques” by the U.S. Navy, the police killing of two independentistas at Cerro Maravilla, the FBI killing of Machetero leader Filiberto Ojeda, letting him “bleed to death” – Acevedo cried at the top of his voice that after “March 24th”, Puerto Rico must decide whether it will drop to its knees and surrender, or whether it will fight back.
With a deafening roar, an enormous out pouring of patriotic emotion, the thousands of PDP militants demanded that Acevedo lead this battle to defend Puerto Rico – its dignity, its honor, its identity – indeed, its very survival as a people.
It was indeed a great performance. Acevedo achieved his goal. At the end, he had even the PDP mayors that a day before asked him to step down, now joining the frenzy to have him remain as candidate. And he made “March 24th” a symbol of the excessive use of U.S. power in Puerto Rico: another battle over political status. This should surprise no one. This is what island political leaders always do. Whatever is wrong in Puerto Rico, there is always one cause. When an independentista or, lately, a statehooder is convicted by a federal grand jury, there is always one cry: “colonialism!”
Acevedo was careful not to use the word. But no one at the assembly, or watching it on TV, had any doubt that this is precisely what he was talking about. Since Commonwealth status was created in 1952, he said, Puerto Rico has been losing its autonomy. So, he cried out, “March 24th” forces Puerto Rico to finally “resolve the status issue:” to fight as never before for greater self-government. The first thing he will do after he and the PDP win the November elections will be to legislate a “constitutional assembly”.
But there was something missing.
What happened on March 24th was that a federal grand jury made up of Puerto Ricans accused Acevedo and 12 others of 27 counts of violation of federal and local campaign finance laws. What was missing in Acevedo’s speech, and certainly at the PPD assembly, was any indication that anyone seemed to care whether the indictments are true or not. It did not matter. It was enough for him to say, as he did in the beginning, that everyone in Puerto Rico knows that they are “politically motivated.”
Of course, the indictment of a Governor of Puerto Rico months before the November elections has a big political impact. But political impact and “political motivation” are not the same. The fact that an indictment will necessarily hurt a political leader is not proof that that was the purpose. If the U.S. Justice Department, or the Puerto Rico Justice Department, were guided by the political impact of its actions, they will never investigate or indict a political leader.
#And clearly the justice departments have a special responsibility to investigate precisely political leaders that may have violated the law. In the case of the federal prosecutors in Puerto Rico, for years they relentlessly investigated and the federal courts convicted scores of pro-statehood, New Progressive Party leaders, Acevedo’s political opponents, many of them ending up in prison.
Since the consensus in Puerto Rico, backed by the opinion polls, was that there was no way Acevedo could win in November due to the economic crisis, the “political” decision would have been to dodge the political firestorm sitting on the indictments until after he lost the elections. The decision to seek indictment in March, and not wait, certainly seems to confirm what the prosecutors say – that today, as yesterday, they are driven not by politics but by the facts, the evidence.
Now Acevedo, in this masterfully orchestrated assembly, hopes to turn what appeared to be a sure defeat into another “miracle victory.” It won’t be easy. To do so, he will have to do something that historically has been difficult in the mass of the Puerto Rican people: that nationalistic, patriotic fervor trumps economic reality on election day.
One more point. Anyone that knew Luis Muñoz Marín knows that it is not a good idea to speculate on how Muñoz would have reacted to this or that. Muñoz was complex and the chances of error are big. But Acevedo mentioned him a lot, quoting from one of his books. And I have to think that if Muñoz had read the 55-page indictment, the question he would have asked, indeed demanded answered, is: is this true or not?
And I have to think that had he been at the assembly, he would have been struck that this was precisely the question that the party he created, the once great party that transformed Puerto Rico, was determined not to ask.
Gov. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá gave the political performance of his life. The theme was “March 24, 2008”, the day he was indicted by a federal grand jury. It’s a bit of a stretch to compare it to December 7, 1941, and he did not use the phrase “a date which will live in infamy,” but he came close.
To say that the April 27th Popular Party assembly was “orchestrated” is to put it mildly. He punctuated his speech with many of the familiar PDP campaign battle cries – “Sin Miedo! – Without Fear!” – at regular intervals his voice raising in indignation, shouting and beating the air with his fist, at that precise moment his words drowned by the loud music of familiar PDP campaign songs, throwing the thousands of PDP flag-waving militants in front of him into a frenzy.
The message is that Puerto Rico has been “attacked” – not exactly like the U.S. at Pearl Harbor or on 9/11, but yes, “attacked.” Bringing up past battles – the “bombing of Vieques” by the U.S. Navy, the police killing of two independentistas at Cerro Maravilla, the FBI killing of Machetero leader Filiberto Ojeda, letting him “bleed to death” – Acevedo cried at the top of his voice that after “March 24th”, Puerto Rico must decide whether it will drop to its knees and surrender, or whether it will fight back.
With a deafening roar, an enormous out pouring of patriotic emotion, the thousands of PDP militants demanded that Acevedo lead this battle to defend Puerto Rico – its dignity, its honor, its identity – indeed, its very survival as a people.
It was indeed a great performance. Acevedo achieved his goal. At the end, he had even the PDP mayors that a day before asked him to step down, now joining the frenzy to have him remain as candidate. And he made “March 24th” a symbol of the excessive use of U.S. power in Puerto Rico: another battle over political status. This should surprise no one. This is what island political leaders always do. Whatever is wrong in Puerto Rico, there is always one cause. When an independentista or, lately, a statehooder is convicted by a federal grand jury, there is always one cry: “colonialism!”
Acevedo was careful not to use the word. But no one at the assembly, or watching it on TV, had any doubt that this is precisely what he was talking about. Since Commonwealth status was created in 1952, he said, Puerto Rico has been losing its autonomy. So, he cried out, “March 24th” forces Puerto Rico to finally “resolve the status issue:” to fight as never before for greater self-government. The first thing he will do after he and the PDP win the November elections will be to legislate a “constitutional assembly”.
But there was something missing.
What happened on March 24th was that a federal grand jury made up of Puerto Ricans accused Acevedo and 12 others of 27 counts of violation of federal and local campaign finance laws. What was missing in Acevedo’s speech, and certainly at the PPD assembly, was any indication that anyone seemed to care whether the indictments are true or not. It did not matter. It was enough for him to say, as he did in the beginning, that everyone in Puerto Rico knows that they are “politically motivated.”
Of course, the indictment of a Governor of Puerto Rico months before the November elections has a big political impact. But political impact and “political motivation” are not the same. The fact that an indictment will necessarily hurt a political leader is not proof that that was the purpose. If the U.S. Justice Department, or the Puerto Rico Justice Department, were guided by the political impact of its actions, they will never investigate or indict a political leader.
#And clearly the justice departments have a special responsibility to investigate precisely political leaders that may have violated the law. In the case of the federal prosecutors in Puerto Rico, for years they relentlessly investigated and the federal courts convicted scores of pro-statehood, New Progressive Party leaders, Acevedo’s political opponents, many of them ending up in prison.
Since the consensus in Puerto Rico, backed by the opinion polls, was that there was no way Acevedo could win in November due to the economic crisis, the “political” decision would have been to dodge the political firestorm sitting on the indictments until after he lost the elections. The decision to seek indictment in March, and not wait, certainly seems to confirm what the prosecutors say – that today, as yesterday, they are driven not by politics but by the facts, the evidence.
Now Acevedo, in this masterfully orchestrated assembly, hopes to turn what appeared to be a sure defeat into another “miracle victory.” It won’t be easy. To do so, he will have to do something that historically has been difficult in the mass of the Puerto Rican people: that nationalistic, patriotic fervor trumps economic reality on election day.
One more point. Anyone that knew Luis Muñoz Marín knows that it is not a good idea to speculate on how Muñoz would have reacted to this or that. Muñoz was complex and the chances of error are big. But Acevedo mentioned him a lot, quoting from one of his books. And I have to think that if Muñoz had read the 55-page indictment, the question he would have asked, indeed demanded answered, is: is this true or not?
And I have to think that had he been at the assembly, he would have been struck that this was precisely the question that the party he created, the once great party that transformed Puerto Rico, was determined not to ask.
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