Por LAURA N. PEREZ SANCHEZ
The Associated Press
SAN JUAN -- Tras varias semanas de protestas y actos de desobediencia civil, organizaciones civiles alistan un paro nacional para el jueves en repudio al despido de más de 20.000 empleados públicos.
Varios economistas advirtieron el miércoles que las cesantías prolongarán la recesión económica en la isla y que el paro de un día tendrá un impacto económico de al menos 32 millones de dólares.
Jefes de familia despedidos se mostraron esperanzados en que el gobernador Luis Fortuño escuche el reclamo del paro nacional y revierta las cesantías.
"Yo espero que si este hombre (Fortuño) tiene un poquito de compasión con los que no tenemos nada... eche para atrás todo este disparate que ha cometido. Creo que es indigno quitarle el trabajo a otro", manifestó Adolfo Ayala, un oficial administrativo del Departamento de Educación de 40 años.
Según el reverendo metodista Juan Vera de la organización Todo Puerto Rico por Puerto Rico, que encabeza el paro nacional, "una masa inmensa paralizará el país como señal de que esa es la vocación y el sentir de toda la sociedad puertorriqueña".
Plaza Las Américas, el centro comercial más grande del Caribe, permanecerá cerrado el jueves como una medida de seguridad ante la celebración en sus alrededores del paro nacional. En los 300 establecimientos del centro comercial laboran unos 10.000 empleados y recibe más de 50.000 visitantes al día.
La televisora WAPA mostró trabajadores colocando paneles de madera en algunas puertas del complejo comercial como parte de los preparativos por la manifestación.
La presidenta de la Asociación de Economistas, Martha Quiñones, dijo que en diciembre de 2008 la firma evaluadora de crédito Standard & Poors advirtió al gobierno que reducir el gasto público sin asegurarse de que el sector privado podía absorber a los trabajadores despedidos podría "aumentar la brecha recesionaria".
Según la Cámara de Comercio, a lo largo de 2009 se han perdido al menos 4.000 empleos mensuales en el sector privado.
La Junta de Reestructuración y Estabilización Fiscal, nombrada por Fortuño, anunció en septiembre el despido de 16.970 empleados gubernamentales para reducir el déficit fiscal por 3.200 millones de dólares.
Otros 7.816 empleados fueron destituidos en mayo, pero poco más de 3.000 maestros transitorios y conserjes tuvieron que ser reclutados nuevamente al inicio del curso escolar en agosto.
Los manifestantes planifican reunirse temprano en diversos puntos de la capital y marchar hasta converger en la entrada principal del centro comercial Plaza Las Américas, cuyos dueños no han descartado la posibilidad de detener operaciones debido al posible bloqueo de las vías de acceso.
Varias organizaciones obreras han anunciado su intención de paralizar la actividad económica en ese centro comercial, el más grande de Puerto Rico.
Fortuño advirtió que se podrían radicar cargos de terrorismo contra los que entorpezcan el flujo de suministros en los muelles y puertos del país, pero la fiscalía estadounidense en la isla dijo que, para llegar a esa conclusión, habría que analizar cada caso.
La tasa de desempleo ascendió a 15,8% en septiembre y el gobierno estima que subirá a 17,1% cuando la mayoría de los 16.970 empleados públicos queden sin trabajo el 6 de noviembre.
Transmisión en vivo del Paro Nacional desde los diferentes puntos.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
No Peace, No Prize
President Barack Obama's Nobel peace surprise was given "primarily for his work on and commitment to nuclear disarmament," according to Agot Valle, a Norwegian politician who served on the award committee. Valle told the Wall Street Journal that the stewards of the prize wanted to "support" Obama's goal, as expressed recently at the United Nations, "of a world without nuclear weapons."
It's tough to think of a goal more widely espoused than the dream of an H-bomb-free planet. Ronald Reagan and Jane Fonda, political opposites, came together on this one - in his second term, Reagan stunned his own advisers and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev by suggesting a treaty that would take nuclear arsenals down to "zero."
As long as a nukeless world remains wishful thinking and pastoral rhetoric, we'll be all right. But if the Nobel committee truly cares about peace, they will think a little harder about actually trying to make it a reality. Open a history book and you'll see what the modern world looks like without nuclear weapons. It is horrible beyond description.
During the 31 years leading up to the first atomic bomb, the world without nuclear weapons engaged in two global wars resulting in the deaths of an estimated 78 million to 95 million people, uniformed and civilian. The world wars were the hideous expression of what happens when the human tendency toward conflict hooks up with the violent possibilities of the industrial age. The version of this story we are most familiar with today is the Nazi death machinery, and so we are often tempted to think that if Hitler had not happened, we would never have encountered assembly line murder.
The truth is that industrial killing was practiced by many nations in the old world without nuclear weapons. Soldiers were gassed and machine-gunned by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of World War I, when Hitler was just another corporal in the Kaiser's army. By World War II, countries on both sides of the war used airplanes and artillery to rain death on battlefields as well as cities, until the number killed around the world was so huge the best estimates of the total number lost diverge by some 16 million souls. The dead numbered 62 million, or 78 million - somewhere in there.
So, when last we saw a world without nuclear weapons, human beings were killing each other with such feverish efficiency that they couldn't keep track of the victims to the nearest 15 million. Over three decades of industrialized war, the planet had averaged around three million dead per year. Why did that stop happening?
A world with nuclear weapons in it is a scary, scary place to think about. The industrialized world without nuclear weapons was a scary, scary place for real. But there is no way to un-ring the nuclear bell. The science and technology of nuclear weapons is widespread, and if nukes are outlawed someday, only outlaws will have nukes.
Instead of fantasies about a nuke-free planet where formerly bloodthirsty humans live together in peace, what the world needs is a safer, more stable nuclear umbrella. That probably means fewer nukes in fewer hands - when President Obama talks about strengthening the non-proliferation regime and stepping up efforts to secure loose nukes, he is on the right track. Nuclear weapons are only helpful if they are never used.
But zero weapons is a terrible idea. As bad as they are, nukes have been instrumental in reversing the long, seemingly inexorable trend in modernity toward deadlier and deadlier conflicts. If the Nobel committee wants someday to honor the force that has done the most over the past 60 years to end industrial-scale war, they will award a peace prize to the bomb.
There is a slight whiff of condescension attending the announcement that Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. There is the sense that he has won simply by not being George W. Bush. Effete Europe is congratulating rowdy America for cleaning up its act and not bringing guns to the dinner table.
Well, I'm as relieved as anybody that the Bushian gunslingers have been given the gate and, as regular readers know, I'm a big fan of patient, rigorous diplomacy--and there's a certain lovely irony to any prize that brings the Taliban and the neoconservative Commentary crowd together in high dudgeon--but let's face it: this prize is premature to the point of ridiculousness. It continues a pattern that holds some peril for Obama: he is celebrated for who he is not, and for who he might potentially be, rather than for what he has actually done. If he doesn't provide results that justify the award, this Nobel will prove a millstone come election time.
And so, how to handle this "triumph" becomes a strategic puzzle that requires serious thought. Two immediate thoughts occur: he can't reject it, but accepting it can't be about him. He can and should immediately say something like, "I don't deserve this." That's a no brainer. The question is, what should he say after that?
Perhaps: "But the American people do." For creating and sustaining a stable and civil democracy that is the envy of the world. And he should celebrate the essential American idea: that the things we have in common as human beings are more important than the things that divide us. It doesn't matter who you are, where you come from, whether you believe in God or not--this American principle, the belief in certain inalienable rights, should be the basis for international interactions as well.
This should be followed by the necessary caveats--the things that conservatives call "apologies" but are required for credibility--especially the idea that we haven't always abided by our founding principles in dealing with the rest of the world.
But enough of the high-blown stuff: the Nobel needs to be an excuse for an action agenda. One idea, which Zbigniew Brzezinski has been touting, would be to announce the parameters for a Middle East peace settlement--and recruit the rest of the world to get behind it. This would not please those Israelis--and their American enablers--who want to hold onto lands that they gained by conquest, nor would it please those Palestinians harboring fantasies of regaining lands they left 60 years ago, but most people have a rough sense of what constitutes justice in this tortured patch of earth and Obama might use his Peace Prize to actually create some peace in the world's most vexing place.
I'm sure there are other things he can and should do--starting with finding an appropriate place to donate the $1.4 million that comes with the award. I'd give it to Greg Mortenson or someone else who has a successful track record of building schools in difficult places.
In the end, this premature prize is a significant challenge for the President: Will Barack Obama use it to demonstrate that he actually has the courage, moral fortitude, intelligence and creativity that the award portends? The expectations bar has always been set impossibly high for Obama. This raises it.
It's tough to think of a goal more widely espoused than the dream of an H-bomb-free planet. Ronald Reagan and Jane Fonda, political opposites, came together on this one - in his second term, Reagan stunned his own advisers and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev by suggesting a treaty that would take nuclear arsenals down to "zero."
As long as a nukeless world remains wishful thinking and pastoral rhetoric, we'll be all right. But if the Nobel committee truly cares about peace, they will think a little harder about actually trying to make it a reality. Open a history book and you'll see what the modern world looks like without nuclear weapons. It is horrible beyond description.
During the 31 years leading up to the first atomic bomb, the world without nuclear weapons engaged in two global wars resulting in the deaths of an estimated 78 million to 95 million people, uniformed and civilian. The world wars were the hideous expression of what happens when the human tendency toward conflict hooks up with the violent possibilities of the industrial age. The version of this story we are most familiar with today is the Nazi death machinery, and so we are often tempted to think that if Hitler had not happened, we would never have encountered assembly line murder.
The truth is that industrial killing was practiced by many nations in the old world without nuclear weapons. Soldiers were gassed and machine-gunned by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of World War I, when Hitler was just another corporal in the Kaiser's army. By World War II, countries on both sides of the war used airplanes and artillery to rain death on battlefields as well as cities, until the number killed around the world was so huge the best estimates of the total number lost diverge by some 16 million souls. The dead numbered 62 million, or 78 million - somewhere in there.
So, when last we saw a world without nuclear weapons, human beings were killing each other with such feverish efficiency that they couldn't keep track of the victims to the nearest 15 million. Over three decades of industrialized war, the planet had averaged around three million dead per year. Why did that stop happening?
A world with nuclear weapons in it is a scary, scary place to think about. The industrialized world without nuclear weapons was a scary, scary place for real. But there is no way to un-ring the nuclear bell. The science and technology of nuclear weapons is widespread, and if nukes are outlawed someday, only outlaws will have nukes.
Instead of fantasies about a nuke-free planet where formerly bloodthirsty humans live together in peace, what the world needs is a safer, more stable nuclear umbrella. That probably means fewer nukes in fewer hands - when President Obama talks about strengthening the non-proliferation regime and stepping up efforts to secure loose nukes, he is on the right track. Nuclear weapons are only helpful if they are never used.
But zero weapons is a terrible idea. As bad as they are, nukes have been instrumental in reversing the long, seemingly inexorable trend in modernity toward deadlier and deadlier conflicts. If the Nobel committee wants someday to honor the force that has done the most over the past 60 years to end industrial-scale war, they will award a peace prize to the bomb.
There is a slight whiff of condescension attending the announcement that Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. There is the sense that he has won simply by not being George W. Bush. Effete Europe is congratulating rowdy America for cleaning up its act and not bringing guns to the dinner table.
Well, I'm as relieved as anybody that the Bushian gunslingers have been given the gate and, as regular readers know, I'm a big fan of patient, rigorous diplomacy--and there's a certain lovely irony to any prize that brings the Taliban and the neoconservative Commentary crowd together in high dudgeon--but let's face it: this prize is premature to the point of ridiculousness. It continues a pattern that holds some peril for Obama: he is celebrated for who he is not, and for who he might potentially be, rather than for what he has actually done. If he doesn't provide results that justify the award, this Nobel will prove a millstone come election time.
And so, how to handle this "triumph" becomes a strategic puzzle that requires serious thought. Two immediate thoughts occur: he can't reject it, but accepting it can't be about him. He can and should immediately say something like, "I don't deserve this." That's a no brainer. The question is, what should he say after that?
Perhaps: "But the American people do." For creating and sustaining a stable and civil democracy that is the envy of the world. And he should celebrate the essential American idea: that the things we have in common as human beings are more important than the things that divide us. It doesn't matter who you are, where you come from, whether you believe in God or not--this American principle, the belief in certain inalienable rights, should be the basis for international interactions as well.
This should be followed by the necessary caveats--the things that conservatives call "apologies" but are required for credibility--especially the idea that we haven't always abided by our founding principles in dealing with the rest of the world.
But enough of the high-blown stuff: the Nobel needs to be an excuse for an action agenda. One idea, which Zbigniew Brzezinski has been touting, would be to announce the parameters for a Middle East peace settlement--and recruit the rest of the world to get behind it. This would not please those Israelis--and their American enablers--who want to hold onto lands that they gained by conquest, nor would it please those Palestinians harboring fantasies of regaining lands they left 60 years ago, but most people have a rough sense of what constitutes justice in this tortured patch of earth and Obama might use his Peace Prize to actually create some peace in the world's most vexing place.
I'm sure there are other things he can and should do--starting with finding an appropriate place to donate the $1.4 million that comes with the award. I'd give it to Greg Mortenson or someone else who has a successful track record of building schools in difficult places.
In the end, this premature prize is a significant challenge for the President: Will Barack Obama use it to demonstrate that he actually has the courage, moral fortitude, intelligence and creativity that the award portends? The expectations bar has always been set impossibly high for Obama. This raises it.
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