Tag Archives: Puerto Ricans

Boricua Futuristics Part 2

3 Jul

OK mi gente,

Here is my strategic suggestion… Boricua activists out there have their hedge fund hit list….

• Fir Tree partners
• Appaloosa Management
• Paulson & Company
• Blue Mountain Capital
• Fundamental Advisors.
• Whoever Paulson sold to
• Charles Blitzer a former IMF official is advising the hedge funds

We find out all we can about them. Find out if there are Boricuas/Latinos,as in every level from partner to janitor. See if we can get intelligence about them. We can reach out to our Occupy Wall Street friends to get intel on how to do the corporate protests.

Then we have Teach ins about the Puerto Rican situation and about debt, municipal, state and national in general. There is the Greece, Argentina, Detroit, Naomi Klein forum.

Get our congressmen and women to hold hearings on these guys to get them into the light of day. Get our city council representatives to hold hearings on them to get them into the light of day.

Same time, start fleshing out the future. For example, get a congressional agenda together of all the measures that would benefit Puerto Rico in dealing with the crisis.

Then you get the presidential candidates starting with the Dems to come out publicly with their positions re the congressional actions and what they would do vis a vis executive orders.

Remember, this is really about the 1%!!

Then the butt activists target each of these Hedge Fund villains and hold demonstrations against them. Protest them in the hearings as well.

Then we get our sustainability friends & allies (WEACT, Rocky Mountain Institute etc.) to come up with alternative energy plans for Puerto Rico to replace in the market place the fucked up power authority with distributed wind and solar alternatives.

What do ya’ll think?
J

Tags: , ,

Boricua Futuristics…. Part 1

3 Jul

Hello all,

I have didn’t write new posts for my blog for some time. I haven’t gotten back to flowers in a while due to the exigencies of my work life. HOWEVER, I feel compelled to put out some thinking on what I am calling Boricua Futuristics or how to think about the future of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. I am compelled because of the dire situation that Puerto Rico is in.

In a “Back to the Future” kind of way, I reflect upon this, thinking of some young man and some woman who, because of economic hardship, are or are planning to leave Borinquen. They may come to meet here in the USA and they may have children. Those children may come to have children. Amongst those children of children, there may be a boy who grows up and dreams.

I am speaking as that boy. A person that is the child of a child of a migrant. My abuelos came to this country 91 years ago because of an economic crisis in those days. An economic crisis that happened 26 years after the invasion of Puerto Rico by the United States in 1898 and 8 years after the USA legislated that all Puerto Ricans were US citizens. A child that was born in the year 1898 and a citizen in 1917 could have been the parent of my grand parents and probably were. There was very few opportunities for them in those days because of a vast economic transformation grinding poverty was rampant and they came to NYC to make a better life. Their child was born about 17 years before another upheaval caused the big wave of Boricuas to come to NYC and other destinations.

91 years later I am observing a similar situation. A vast economic transformation is causing migration. People are leaving in droves. The economics calls upon us to contemplate the politics and sociology and indeed the future. This is what I’m going to do.

One future I can imagine is a Puerto Rican dystopia where the island is depopulated and non-Puerto Ricans become the majority. You might see it as transnational gentrification, the whites move in to the neighborhood the original residents can’t afford anymore.

This would be the beginning of the end of Puerto Ricans…with no cultural anchor…the culture will disintegrate and pass into the dustbin of history. Kind of a cultural extinction event. Cultures, like species can become extinct.

There are other peoples that have been driven off their land. Just ask Palestinians and Native folks. The continuance of their cultures is a real issue. We are talking about glacially slow, but inexorable processes.

This is all happening in the era of the meteoric rise of the 1%…the “Masters of the Universe” that are in control of many more planetary resources than ever before. The city, state and national bankruptcies are just the footprints of the behemoths striding across the globe. The various cities in the USA (in Detroit and other small municipalities, Stockton CA) States such as Illinois and nations such as Puerto Rico and Greece. We have to think, not just about how we got here, but where are we going.

I’m going to try to do a little bit of that.

Tags: , , ,