The Times reported earlier this month that city manager Robert Rizzo makes $787,637 a year, probably the highest in the country for someone in his position; Police Chief Randy Adams makes $457,000, 50% more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck; and Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia makes $376,288, more than most city managers.

The mayor has apologized and will serve the remainder of his term without pay, or so has been reported.

Hey, we should email the mayor of Bell and some of the city officials who will soon be left without a job to come be politicians here in Puerto Rico. All we have to do is explain to them how the dieta (lunch money for politicians you can live on) works here, in addition to high-paid salaries. That is more than enough money to intrigue them. The real perk? Is that here there is no scandal and politicians are shameless.

With stories like these, I have to wonder: Puerto Rico sets 15% renewable electricity target for 2020.

That should have been the target from 1995 to 2000. Or even 2000 to 2005. Lord knows we have been paying a tariff in our electricity bill into a fund for the study of such alternative energy sources; cough, B.S., cough. Sorry, I had to clear my throat.

Where was I? Oh, yeah….

So the target now is 2020 and only 15%? I am willing to bet that 2020 will come and we will still be where we should have been back in 2000. And companies will continue to shun Puerto Rico because of the high cost of doing business, hell… by 2020, we might be an agrarian economy again.

I used to get angry at career politicians and their ever unfolding nightmare on the rest of us sane enough not to buy into their bullshit. Not anymore. I've learned that the nightmare will never end, so why fight it?

El articulo es publicado en Ingles.

Por favor, para que se enteren como el gobierno Puertorriqueño realmente trata a su ciudadanos.

How to siphon money off the top. The rip-off at the State Insurance Fund continues!

Update (July 15, 2010): The article is no longer available for free, you will have to be a paying customer to read it. It is one of the best investigative reports I have seen done on this problem. (http://www.caribbeanbusinesspr.com)

I have to ask? Where was his security? The egg thrower actually escorted himself out of the auditorium. LOL!

The young man, err… egg thrower, was making a political statement against recent contracts Microsoft struck with the government that would be paid by tax payers.

If Americans were not so naive when voting, the United States of America would not be the most indebted-nation of the entire civilized history of the earth!

And you don't need Michael Moore to point this out to you!

For example, lets take CBS' 60-Minutes program. Every Sunday at 7 PM this program pretty much tells it like it is.

Case in point, in this 60-minutes piece, Under the Influence: How Lobbyists Wrote and Bought the Rx Drug Bill. They make you aware of how politicians sell out their government, their voters, and even their mother if they could, to make sure they land million-dollar-a-year jobs from companies that lobby them when they are in power.

This piece shows just how disgusting these senators are, how they pushed this bill at 2 AM in the morning, how they kept the voting session going for 3-hours—when the rules state it should be 15 minutes. All because they were arm twisting their fellow senators into voting "Yes" for this boondoggle of a bill.

Some of the members were in tears! Now what the hell are members of congress doing crying because they don't have the balls to vote their conscious? How many of you were aware of this information? I bet very few.

First, in cases like the above, every voter should find out if their senator or representatives were in tears and vote that person out on his or her ear! You need people up there with a backbone.

Second, find out who voted "yes" for this bill and vote them out, as well. That is, if they haven't left already for their million-dollar-a-year job.

I believe that the United States of America will be the nation our forefathers envisioned when the voters take responsibility for their government. What astonishes me the most is that the information to be an empowered voter is so readily available (this isn't a communist country, yet). You don't have to wait for Michael Moore. But voters remain ever so naive.

How many of you have really listened to presidential candidates like Mike Gravel or Ron Paul? I bet most of you are looking at the same lying Democrat and Republican candidates that have taken most of your rights away and that will continue to bullshit you for years to come. Any candidate still advocating staying in Iraq, for example, should not even be given the time of day. This is a war so akin to Vietnam that the only thing that comes to my mind to write is "how we never learn from history." And by the looks of things yet to come, I fear we never will.

NarTube – Watch Video

And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there?

Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission.

How did this happen?

Who's to blame?

Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high king, George W. Bush. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.

Let me ease the pain your feeling. School sucks! So don't feel bad.

I dropped out of junior high school in the 8th grade in Philadelphia, PA. Sadly, I should have been in the 10th grade, but how was I suppose to pass if I hardly attended. All I did at school was get picked on and fight to defend myself. Not to mention that the class clowns were many. When I did attend and it just happened to be on a day of an exam, I would pass. My English teacher (my home class teacher) would always scratch his head and tried hard, with the help of the math teacher, to get me to stay and attend more. I would look at him and say "I learn a lot more at home!"

I am not making this up! I didn't learn computer programming at school. I didn't learn the algebra needed for the computer programming I was doing at school! I learned all this at home with the help of an Atari 8-bit computer running at 1.77 mHz and books like Oh! Pascal!. Granted I was introduced to personal computers in school, but this was an after school program for an hour. Not much you can learn in this time, but was enough to get me started.

As far as history was concerned, LMAO, I got a better education watching PBS on channel 12! Most of the history text books provided in school were a joke when it came to this topic as well! My history teacher told us once that Hitler's body was never found and that no one knew what had happened to Hitler after the war. Having watched PBS I had already known that his body was cremated (partially) outside the bunker were he spent the last days of the war and that the Russians had found the bunker and not the Americans. Talk about the failures of public education. I also bought books on many of these topics at the time. My books were a thousand times better than anything the public schools had to offer. Public libraries were available to me, but I hardly ever visited them. Besides, I always wanted books by favorite authors, those who were knowledgeable in their fields.

As far as being alone? At least you have a father that you can sit down with and have a meaningful conversation with. I come from a long line of alcoholics. My dad is an alcoholic, my grandfather was an alcoholic, most of my uncles on my father's side are alcoholics. What can I say? This is what Puerto Rico has cultivated in my part of the island (sadly, I don't think my situation is that much different than most here–we just like to sweep it under the rug).

As far as searching out people here that can engage me in a conversation that has nothing to do with alcoholic drinks, the next dance craze, cars, or gossip, I am out of luck. Most of the time I keep to myself.

The only education you need in this world you will never find in a public school anyway. And that is economics. The irony of living in a capitalist society is that in its public schools you are never thought that all important education you need to make it in our society!

You have to find a way to educate yourself in this area because your government and its public schools will never teach you this.

Once you do educate yourself in this area and can tell the difference between when your government puts out a report on the latest jobless rate, and you know the real numbers are never reported, congratulate yourself because you have seen the light and are on your way to becoming a complete human being. But only you have that power.

TROUBLE ON WELFARE ISLAND

May 25th 2006

Overbearing government and the welfare state are hurting the United States' poorest citizens

AS THE mayor of Aguadilla, on Puerto Rico's north-west coast, Carlos Mendez is proud of his town. He likes to take visitors onto the balcony of the town hall and challenge them to spot a scrap of paper in the plaza. There are none; but here, and all around the centre of town, there are no busy people either. The shops and offices are shabby, with little going on in them. The buildings along the beautiful beachfront look run-down. A few men sit in the shade, and have apparently been planted there as long as the tree has.

Puerto Rico has been a United States territory for more than a century, and its people have been citizens since 1917. They do not vote in national elections or pay federal income taxes, but those are not the biggest differences between Puerto Rican residents and their fellow American citizens. The island is distinguished by its poverty and joblessness, which are far worse than in any of the 50 states. The territory's economy, moreover, has fallen further behind the national one over the past three decades. Bad government–not just locally, but also federally–is largely to blame. Yet most Americans are oblivious to the Caribbean island's problems.

The place did earn a rare and brief mention in some mainland newspapers earlier this month. Its government had hit a borrowing limit and partly shut down for a couple of weeks, putting 95,000 civil servants out of work. Then leaders in San Juan–the commonwealth's capital–agreed on a budget deal that let the government borrow more and resume paying people. The drama ended, and life there reverted to its depressing former state.

Some Puerto Ricans are doing well. Most of Aguadilla's 70,000 people, for example, live in the richer suburbs that surround the city. The area has many of the same fast-food and retail chains that pervade the United States, and companies from the mainland, such as Hewlett-Packard and Micron Technology, have built factories nearby. Much of the island, however, is like Aguadilla's town centre, full of low incomes and idle hands.

Puerto Rico's annual income per person was around $12,000 in 2004, less than half that of Mississippi, the poorest state. More than 48% of the island's people live below the federally defined poverty line. That poverty rate is nearly four times the national average, and more than twice as high as in poor states such as Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and West Virginia.

Half the working-age men in Puerto Rico do not work. Officially, only 46% of those who are not pursuing a degree have formal jobs, compared with a United States average of 76%. The territory does have a big informal economy. But Maria Enchautegui at the University of Puerto Rico and Richard Freeman at Harvard University have looked into this, and reckon that counting unofficial workers boosts the employment rate only to 55%, at best. Their research is included in a new book on the island's problems, put together by two think-tanks: the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, and the Centre for the New Economy in San Juan.*[1]

Puerto Rico ought to be doing much better, because being part of the United States gives it many advantages over other low-income economies. Most important may be America's legal system, which offers excellent protection, by developing-economy standards, for private property, contracts, patents, free speech and so forth. These guarantees tend to attract outside capital, spur local investment and let commerce and innovation flourish. The island can also trade freely with the giant mainland economy. And its workers can migrate to and from the 50 states at will, gaining skills, creating business connections and making money.

In some ways, generous United States taxpayers have also been useful. To help the territory catch up, they have paid for infrastructure and a huge leap in education levels. The average length of schooling in Puerto Rico rose from 3.7 years in 1950 to 11 years in 2000.

CRUTCH DISEASE

With these advantages, Puerto Rico grew impressively in the decades after the second world war, even outperforming Asian "tigers" such as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore (which has roughly Puerto Rico's population). Since the 1970s, however, Puerto Rico has been outpaced badly by the Asian tigers and Ireland, another place to which it is often compared. It has also diverged from the United States, losing ground even to lowly Mississippi.

Many things have gone wrong. Most important, however, is that the United States government assumed too big a role in the Puerto Rican economy, and its largesse enabled the commonwealth's government to do the same. Through hubris, clumsiness and sheer size, these governments knocked Puerto Rico off the promising path that it was following, and the island's economy is now lost in a thicket of bad incentives. Two federal intrusions stand out: an oversized welfare state, and misguided rules on business investment.

Federal transfer payments to Puerto Rico rose sharply in the 1970s. Some programmes have been modified since then, but transfers still make up more than 20% of the island's personal income. These federal handouts reflect the sensibilities of a wealthy country. So by Puerto Rican economic standards, they are huge. And the more a man or woman earns through paid work, the more they decrease.

Puerto Ricans are eligible for federal disability payments, for example, through Social Security. Ms Enchautegui and Mr Freeman point out that, in the territory, federal disability allowances are much higher than the United States average as a share of wages and pension income. Unsurprisingly, therefore, one in six working-age men in Puerto Rico are claiming disability benefits.

Many families do not view the federal handouts as temporary. Neither does Raul Vega, who owns a consumer-finance outfit in Aguadilla. His firm treats the benefits as income when deciding whether to lend people money for new televisions.

Some Puerto Rican households, of course, would barely struggle along without federal assistance. For many people, however, the money that can be earned through federal transfers and a little informal work is more than the market wage–and requires much less effort. Meanwhile, in a strange echo of America's immigration debate, people from the Dominican Republic do many of the jobs in Puerto Rico that pay too little to attract the locals.

RELAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION

What do Puerto Rico's men do all day? Some get into trouble. But many others hang out in pleasant places that require little money, such as beaches, shopping malls and the armchairs in Borders bookstores. They also watch plenty of television. Downtown Aguadilla may be shabby, but satellite dishes sprout from many rooftops. People always have money for that bill, says Mayor Mendez.

Through tax laws, the federal government has also favoured some business investments in Puerto Rico over others. Most notorious is "Section 936″, a rule that skewed investment towards technologies that were too advanced for Puerto Rico's stage of development. Drug firms and chemical producers built factories that used lots of capital and few workers, because doing so lowered their global tax bills. In a recent book on the territory's economy, James Dietz described this distorted evolution well.†[2]

High technology sounds wonderful. But what Puerto Rico has needed over the past few decades is more medium-tech plants. These would employ more people, teach them skills better suited to the island's level of development, and tighten links to local suppliers and business services. More service jobs for the unskilled would be good, too. Steven Davis at the University of Chicago's business school, another contributor to the Brookings/CNE studies, points out that jobs in tourism and recreation engage a lower share of the workforce in Puerto Rico–despite its beautiful beaches–than in any of the 50 states.

In short, by lowering demand for less educated workers, lopsided investment has exacerbated the welfare-driven distortions in the island's labour supply. The result is lots of idle poor. The Section 936 rules were phased out between the mid-1990s and 2005, but the damage will persist. Many Puerto Ricans have acquired few useful habits and skills over the past three decades; and the welfare state, though smaller than before, is still pervasive enough to lock many of the labour distortions in place.

Puerto Rico's bloated government also bears much of the blame. Around 30% of the territory's jobs are in the public sector. Among other things, a big and coddled bureaucracy undermines Puerto Rico's educational achievements in two ways. First, nearly half those on the education department's payroll are not teachers; quality has fallen because of low accountability and mismanagement. Second, because of the small private sector, too few well-educated Puerto Ricans are gaining useful skills and experience in the marketplace.

As he walked through Aguadilla's town hall recently, Mr Mendez boasted about each employee's university or graduate-school credentials as he introduced them. The trouble, he says, is that "All they want to do is find security only. They have no ambition…Everybody wants to work for the government." Manuel Reyes, of the Puerto Rico Manufacturers Association, also sees little hope that the government's role will shrink. "There is no light at the end of the tunnel," he says, "because we are still in denial." And the rest of America is still indifferent.

Why do we have laws of consent? That's simple:

Although some young people may feel that they are mature enough to engage in a sexual relationship, others may lack the emotional development to deal with this or to feel confident enough to say 'no'. Age of consent laws are there to protect young people from being sexually exploited by adults.

It's when we over apply these laws that I have a problem with them and with the media that goes overboard and ape-shit and make the parties involved into victims when they clearly are not. Take the case of Mary Kay Letourneau (now married to the so-called victim and going by the married name of Mary Kay Fualaau) that was clearly a love story–I don't recall Mary Kay screwing every student in her class. Clearly these two were victims of the morally strict laws of the U.S. system.

What has prompted me to write this post today is the case of Debra Lafave. In this case, according to the Associated Press:

The victim has suffered extreme anxiety from the media attention, a psychiatrist previously told Marion County Circuit Judge Hale Stancil.

There you have it, the media and society making someone into a victim when they clearly were not otherwise. I was 14-years-old once, and I had many fantasies about doing my teachers and even that hot checkout clerk at the grocery store. I can only guess as to what I would have given to have had the opportunity to screw any of those hot babes I came across in my youth.

Now I am not condoning rape, so let's be clear about this, in this case there was no rape. I bet this 14-year-old was high-five'ing everyone of his friends and the excuse not to testify in court clearly has nothing to do with being a victim, but of the media who took this case, out of the many cases that are going on right now, some that are clearly violations, and blown this one all out of proportion! I bet the hot blonde clearly had something to do with it. The other cases I looked at don't have the hot blonde ex-model, just plain teachers, and Mary Kay's case already had the plain teacher spin.

A really bad case is that of Adrianne Hockett. Accused of having sex with a 16-year-old special-needs student in a Houston apartment. The boy has testified the pair would "have sex, drink beer and smoke weed." Nice, start the kid into a life of drugs and alcoholism while you're screwing his brains out.

Also laws of consent are different in many states and even then in many of its counties. In California the age of consent is 18-years-old. In Connecticut it is 16-years-old. So in California you can go to prison for having sex with a 16-year-old and in Connecticut you can go celebrate the loss of your virginity with your love partner.

The age of consent laws have one mayor inane flaw. They don't take into account the sexual needs of teens. You just can't regulate a horny 14-year-old with laws. They will have sex with each other as well as that ugly hag next door if given a chance! We need to take into consideration the laws of nature when crafting such laws. Clearly some teen girls are sexually mature at the age of 12! Is it surprising that we have so many teen pregnancies? I don't think so. Nature always finds a way. It is for this reason that we should stop making victims out of something that comes' well… naturally!

Mi experiencia con esta agencia de Puerto Rico fue muy horrible. En 1995 tuve un accidente cuando una de las mezcladoras de masa de pan me pincho tres dedos de la mano. Trabajaba en la compañía Los Cidrines (unas de la mas horribles fabricas para trabajar en todo Puerto Rico).

El caso fue empeorado cuando el gerente de la planta fue cambiado por un Dominicano desgraciado que no quiso firmar unos papeles necesario para continuar la terapia. Y ni hablar de la doctora desgraciada que también quería que me fuera a trabajar con la mano hinchada. El único que estaba a mi favor era el doctor privado que me estaba atendiendo. El se sorprendió cuando le notifique lo que la doctora del fondo había hecho con mi caso. Al fin, no continúe la lucha contra el fondo, los mande al carajo y me fui para Filadelfia en Febrero del 1996.

Hoy en día me he encontrado con muchos que se han quejado del fondo y han demandado por sus derechos. Con tantas demandas, pienso que es la única manera de bregar con el fondo.

Un caso que conozco muy bien es del hijo de mi vecino. Un doctor en el fondo le dijo que no entendía por que estaba luchando el seguro social, que lo que hacia era perdiendo su tiempo, porque, según el doctor, el no tenia nada. ¡Bueno, si me lo dice a mi yo lo pongo en su sitio, y con mucho gusto! Esta persona parece de la espina dorsal y de los nervios. A pesar de lo que pensaba el doctor, se le aprobó el seguro social. Y después de la aprobación del seguro social tuvo que demandar al fondo por un dinero que le habían negado. Al fin le gano el caso y todavía no le ha llegado el cheque.

Bueno, aquí tienen la oportunidad de dejarme saber sobre sus experiencias con el fondo, buenas o malas.