Puerto Rico On Strike

While CNN was obsessing over that damn Balloon Boy (who wasn't actually in the balloon and therefore was an even bigger waste of time than tea party protests), Puerto Rico had a historic general strike. Estimates range between 100,000-200,000 people in the streets marching. Of course, the corporate media ignored it. I wrote about it for Global Comment--as usual, I'll start the piece here and encourage you to read it over there, since they help pay my bills (and there's other stuff worth reading there as well!)

Fortuño’s plans fought: lessons from protest in Puerto Rico

I’ve seen a focus in the United States on mass political action in the past year like nothing I’ve seen in my lifetime. From the huge crowds at Barack Obama’s campaign rallies and the unprecedented amount of donors and volunteers that helped elect the man President to the recent cynical discovery of organized dissent by the Republican party, we’ve watched groups large and small take to the streets.

Whether this is a sign of a newly energized, engaged American body politic will take some time to say. After all, some demonstrations still receive more attention than others, with the right-wing media machine led by FOX News trumpeting the success and inflating the numbers of tea party protests while decrying protests from the left, and the purported liberal media spending a good chunk of time arguing those numbers and attempting to root out the funders behind the right-wing actions—often while genuine grassroots action goes on under their noses, ignored or even punished by those in charge.

Almost completely ignored this week was the one-day general strike in Puerto Rico following the attempted imposition of shock-therapy-style economic reforms by the new governor. Chief among those reforms was a decision to lay off more than 20,000 public employees. The layoffs would drive Puerto Rico’s already-astounding 15 percent unemployment rate to over 17 percent.

More than 100,000 workers took to the streets to protest on October 15–Eliseo Medina, Service Employees International Union Executive Vice President, told me he thought the crowd was over 150,000. “It was tremendous. I’ve been in the labor movement for 44 years and this was the most impressive event I’ve ever seen. It was up there with the immigrant mobilizations of 2006,” Medina said. “It was one of the most diverse events that I’ve ever seen in a society. Lawyers, workers, students, psychologists, priests and minsters and nuns and everyday people. It was truly an amazing sight. It was pretty clear, our rejection of Governor Fortuño’s policies.”

Read the whole thing.

Hey, Derek Jeter - You Can't Gloss Over the U.S.'s 11-1 loss to Puerto Rico

I understand players trying to downplay the U.S.'s 11-1 mercy-rule loss to Puerto Rico yesterday. 11-1 in a tournament like this is pretty tough, and unlike the regular season, you can't just say, "oh well - there are 162 games."

That said, Derek Jeter is either fooling nobody himself, or he just straight-up doesn't understand the WBC, when he said after the loss that "2-1 or 11-1, we're still in the same position." Um....no. Not this time. See, Derek, in the WBC, like in the World Cup upon which the WBC is modeled, tiebreakers are determined by run differentials. If Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. all finish 2-1 (with Netherlands going 0-3 - and this is if), but Venezuela and Puerto Rico beat their opponents by a greater run differential (which seems more than possible, given that Puerto Rico already has a 10-spot to work with), then the U.S. goes home. So no, 11-1 is not the same as 2-1; the margin of loss yesterday could end up determining the outcome of the second round for the U.S. and its bracket-mates.

So nice try on the effort to gloss over the total beatdown you got yesterday (by a U.S. "territory," which, per my "colonized/colonizers" sports rule, has a certain gleeful irony about it, even if my "home" team lost), but it falls short of glossing anything over. And if you really think that it's the same as losing 2-1, well....

...UPDATE: OK, so apparently, as elm points out here, I somehow missed the fact that it's not round robin this time around, but double-elimination, and I can't find anything that says anything about tiebreakers for this year (though they were in place in 2006, but that was round-robin).

That said, an 11-1 mercy rule loss is still not a 2-1 9-inning loss, and if Jeter thinks that the morale effect of 11-1 is the same as 2-1 in a double-elimination system where you are one loss away from elimination, well....he's either really good at fooling himself, or just fooling nobody. And tiebreakers or not - Derek Jeter is stupid for even trying to convince anybody of this.

A Doomsday Scenario in Puerto Rico

Pledged delegates for the democratic primary are allocated based on population, and several U.S. territories, like American Samoa, Guam, and Puerto Rico participate in the nomination process. This is a nominal way for the citizens of these places to participate in the selection process of the government that is intricately involved in their lives. The population allocation math used grants Puerto Rico 55 pledged delegates, which is more than states like Oregon and Oklahoma (Oregon actually edges out Puerto Rico by two delegates if you include the unpledged superdelegates).

This is of little consequence now, but imagine what would happen if the race were tighter. Puerto Rico, with its 55 pledged delegates, could have been the deciding factor as the last big delegate cache (the Puerto Rico primary is just days before Montana and South Dakota, which combined, only have 31 delegates). Can you imagine the uproar if Clinton (who, according to the only recent poll in Puerto Rico, leads Obama by a wide margin) were closer in the overall delegate count and then pulled the 15% victory in the territory, edging out Obama for the nomination at the last minute? Superdelegates would certainly have a case to support Obama (arguing that the superdelegate votes would ensure that the votes of full U.S. citizens be honored), but the Clinton camp in this case would be furious. This technically could have happened, and it would have been ugly.

I’m not making the argument that U.S. territories should be shut out of the system, but it seems that allocating pledged delegates according to the same metric used for the fifty states is courting disaster. Ideally, the democratic party should revisit this insane nominating process altogether. And by revisit, I mean (to paraphrase Hillary Clinton) obliterate.