Fantasy Island, page 20
One of the most infamous lobbying connection stories begins with the College Republicans of the early 1980s—students finding ways to empower themselves on campuses while surrounded by the burgeoning left liberalism and subsequent apathy of the youngest Baby Boomers coming of age. In 1981 Ralph Reed, Jack Abramoff, and Grover Norquist bonded over their ideas of activism and political theater. Like much of this New Right, they read Saul Alinsky and aimed to refashion New Left tactics and remake them into a fresh message of social and fiscal conservatism. The three figures not only deeply influenced the Republican Right over the next twenty-plus years; they also were heavily involved in either making lobbying deals or engaging political consultancies that combined dirty business with leveraging political causes, paving the way for the horrific synthesis of white supremacism with oligarchic corruption that Donald Trump epitomizes.
After moving on to get a PhD in history from Emory University, Reed ultimately crossed paths with evangelical Christian Pat Robertson and, with $64,000 donated by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, formed the Christian Coalition. The cynical use of fundamentalist Christianity to create a large swath of the right Republican base was one of the origins of the revived white supremacist use of victimization to amass political power. By 1994 Republicans were calling for “draining the swamp” in Washington. Three years later Reed began to transition to political consultant, forming Century Strategies, which combined a host of media relations, voter outreach, business development, and organizing services. One of his first major clients was the infamous Enron Corporation, which had already entered a tailspin when it hired him but still paid him $30,000 a month until it went bankrupt.
Reed’s next venture was Puerto Rico. Following up on Ronald Reagan’s idea that Hispanics were all Republicans but just didn’t know it yet, Reed spun a narrative that framed Puerto Ricans as victims of colonialism and, as a family-oriented and Christian people, deserving of an immediate path to determining their own status. This kind of rhetoric fit nicely with the NPP’s conservative tendencies, including not only law-and-order but also “family values” rhetoric. It resonated with the conservative Catholicism of the NPP’s base in the sprawling San Juan suburbs. As he was lobbying in Puerto Rico, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay—who would later be convicted of money laundering, conspiracy, and campaign finance violations8—threw their support behind the Young Bill. Among the lobbying firms hurling money at Congress were Jack Abramoff’s pro-statehood Future of Puerto Rico, Inc. and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Abramoff had been famously involved in scandals involving cheating Native American groups who wanted lobbying force to get casinos built on their territory as well as activities in the Marianas Islands that involved fraud, labor exploitation, and even covering up sex slavery.
In the 1980s the firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly was involved in lobbying for Puerto Rico. It had been hired by the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, essentially the island’s main connection to lobbyists. Paul Manafort and Roger Stone were both subjects in the Mueller investigation of potential ties between Russian operatives and the Trump administration, and both have a long history of questionable financial and public relations actions and tactics. Charles Black has been lobbying for PRFAA since the 1980s, and long been associated with Jack Abramoff, and has also been a lead lobbyist for the PDP.
The connection between College Republicans and the Puerto Rico Statehood Students Association, formed in 1979 by Luis Fortuño and one-time Resident Commissioner Kenneth McClintock, is not clear. However, it does share a link with the Young Republican Federation of Puerto Rico, the organization that first nurtured current Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González, who is an active supporter of conservative policies, as her uncritical support of Trump indicates. PRSSA is also a nexus for the crossover between centrist statehooders, like Pierluisi and McClintock, and hardliners, embodying the strange continuum within it. The NPP seems to encapsulate both tendencies of the seemingly insurmountable partisan divide of the United States without any of its fraught complications because it cannot be a part of US politics. It’s not a contradiction that McClintock backed Vietnamese American US Representative Stephanie Murphy (Democrat) in her primary race,9 while the Rosselló administration sent out press releases congratulating Jeff Sessions when he was appointed attorney general. Rosselló can support Andrew Gillum for governor of Florida while Jenniffer González supports Rick Scott. That’s what happens when it’s openly acknowledged that lobbying and paying for political access is the only route to being influential in Washington.
In the aftermath of the Young Bill’s failure, the Rosselló administration pushed on, insisting on a plebiscite that November anyway. The 1998 vote was famous because the option “None of the Above” won 50.3 percent of the vote. It was favored by supporters of what was called Enhanced Commonwealth, which would provide for some of the extended powers listed earlier. However, the US State Department position since the time of the plebiscite has been that such enhancement is unconstitutional. Furthermore, the idea that the United States could sign on to a new status designation that Puerto Rico independently conceived of is well beyond the US conception of territorial law. These realities—as well as the rhetorical resonance of the phrase “none of the above”—suggested to Puerto Ricans that the status argument itself was becoming futile, particularly because of the threats to national integrity of countries all over the world as global capital was reorganized—national sovereignty itself was seemingly a rapidly vanishing illusion. The rise of authoritarian nationalism in France, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party, and the Brexit phenomenon in England as well as other European examples demonstrate pushback against the globalizing force of the European Union.
This became evident to certain sectors of the Puerto Rican left around the turn of the millennium. The 1998 referendum was a spectacular failure for the independence option, which received only 2.5 percent of the vote, well below what PIP candidates receive in general elections. The erosion of support indicated a lack of passion not necessarily for independence but for the PIP establishment itself, which had become increasingly perceived as a party for elitist liberals who did not necessarily have a worldview in step with an increasingly intersectional and antinationalist globalized left. Puerto Ricans who lean toward independence, particularly in the intelligentsia and among university students, have sought political expression through labor struggles as well as other socialist projects. There is also the factor of the “melon” voters, who vote for commonwealth out of pragmatism yet ultimately prefer independence.
A group of seven academics captured much of the impetus behind the new progressive movement. Having studied at the University of Puerto Rico as undergrads, in 1998 Juan Duchesne, Chloé Georas, Ramón Grosfoguel, Agustín Lao-Montes, Frances Negrón Muntaner, Pedro Ángel Rivera, and Aurea Maria Sotomayor proposed the idea of “radical statehood” in an attempt to wrest the goal of becoming the fifty-first state from conservative reactionaries and make it into something of a progressive political strategy. They had all made significant contributions to interdisciplinary Latinx studies, Puerto Rican studies, the decolonial school, and queer studies, both in the United States and Puerto Rico. Together they authored “Statehood from a Radical-Democratic Perspective (An Invitation to Dialogue for All Inhabitants of the Puerto Rican Archipelago),” which at first garnered considerable support among progressive activists and thinkers. However, nationalist Puerto Ricans generally rejected it for its suggestion that they abandon the quest for independence to engage in a Quixotic pragmatism that could allow colonial subjects to change their oppressor from within.
The manifesto was on the cutting edge of a line of thinking that seeks to unify islanders and the diaspora through a notion of identity that isn’t a stark binary choice between total assimilation to the United States and a kind of rigid nationalism—found in hard-socialist states like Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua—that still seems to affect socialist and progressive movements in Latin America. Radical statehood was an attempt to recapture what had been lost from the movements of the 1960s that tried to fuse disparate agendas like class struggle, feminism, and gender liberation.10
Although I understood the nationalist rejection as passionate and righteous, at the same time I felt that the radical statehood idea was visionary in the way it assessed Puerto Rico’s postcolonial and neocolonial reality. In addition, it suggested a blueprint for the role of US Latinos as supporters and collaborators of Latin American workers and marginalized people that still resonates today. The radical statehood doctrine, which suggests that Puerto Rico would be better off as a progressive democratic fifty-first state than an independent country, reflected a desire for the island to play a role in helping to “forge a multiracial, multicultural, democratic, pacifist and internationalist Nuestra América,” echoing Cuban icon José Martí. The authors also said they didn’t want to “Americanize” by assimilating culturally.
On the contrary, because Puerto Ricans have long participated in “institutions, practices and discourses of the metropolis,” as US citizens living on both the island and the mainland, their call for statehood is intended as an act of radical democracy. “We need to make alliances with the more liberal sectors in the U.S.,” it asserts early on in the text, alluding to those Puerto Ricans who have been able to increase their engagement with the “political, professional, trade union, ecological, sexual, feminist, public health, educational, artistic, and social practices” of the mainland left.
The manifesto also points out how blind nationalism can gloss over the ways elite sectors of Latin American nations collaborate with the hemispheric neoliberal agenda at the expense of subordinated local social classes, many of whom are forced to emigrate to the United States. Indeed, in the United States—in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—many Latinx can potentially come to understand the power of unifying as Latinos, comparing notes about our idiosyncrasies and common ground and learning to struggle together.
The manifesto suggests that the best choice for Puerto Ricans is to “fight from inside the U.S. body politic, to extend to all groups the rights that white citizens of the metropolis enjoy—to increase the minimum wage, to improve environmental legislation, and to restructure the welfare state along more human dimensions.” It is a call to break away from stagnant ideas about cultural nationalism in Puerto Rico that view independence as a panacea (without coherent strategies for postindependence economic development), and to instead ally with US progressive movements in the hopes of addressing the persistent racism and homophobia that existed either overtly or covertly in Puerto Rican nationalism.
The challenges facing radical statehood today are twofold. One, the most obvious, is that any kind of statehood is virtually politically impossible given the state of Puerto Rico after Hurricane María and its massive debt. Further, even without those realities, Congress has never seemed enthusiastic about the idea, and they have the final say. Secondly, Congress’s implementation of PROMESA has made statehood an idea unappealing to most Puerto Ricans who consider themselves progressives or on the left. Still, as US Democrats took control of the House in 2019, some observers have floated the idea that progressives might call for statehood for both Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia if a Democrat takes the White House. In the end there is a strong need for US Latinx to engage in a political agenda that seeks to merge the interests of nonelite classes living here and in Latin America. Yet in Puerto Rico, it’s hard to imagine progressives embracing statehood at this point.
Although this idealism was soundly rejected both by academics and activists as well as citizens at the ballot box, it set the stage for new political perspectives to emerge in Puerto Rico in the new millennium. The fragile notion that Puerto Rican politics would forever be a contest between commonwealth, statehood, and independence was rapidly falling apart even before the debt crisis set in. In the mid-2000s, under Governor Fortuño, the NPP started to move more in the direction of authoritarianism, focusing on social conservatism, anti-unionism, shrinking government aid programs and responsibilities, and heavy-handed use of police authority. Meanwhile the PDP scrambled to float new ideas about an enhanced commonwealth that appealed to voters but had little chance of happening, and progressive-left forces splintered, with many abandoning the PIP to form political alliances that focused more on everyday struggles for workers, marginalized people, and the environment.
LOBBYING, THE NPP, THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, AND A DOJ INVESTIGATION: A CASE STUDY
The unhealthy symmetry between lobbying, the NPP, and the Democratic Party came into sharp relief during the early 2010s, when Obama’s Justice Department, headed by Eric Holder, investigated overzealous and discriminatory police procedures enacted by the Puerto Rico Police Department. The investigation came after successful pressure by the ACLU chapters in both New York and San Juan. Unwarranted police violence was used on multiple occasions, including when students and workers demonstrated after Governor Fortuño announced that he was going to cut twenty thousand government jobs and increase tuition at the University of Puerto Rico. There was also evidence of over a decade of systematic police abuse directed against residents of poor neighborhoods like La Perla in San Juan and Loiza, the island’s most Afro–Puerto Rican municipality, and Dominican immigrants, both legal residents and undocumented.
Immediately following an incident at the capitol building in San Juan involving police use of tear gas and billy clubs, which had resulted in several injuries, the Colegio de Abogados, or Puerto Rican Bar Association, held hearings. Many of the injured and aggrieved testified before a stunned audience, and within a month the Colegio de Abogados issued a 132-page document detailing the various violations the department committed, testimonies of the victims, and its recommendations. Predictably, this report did not generate the desired response; instead, NPP senator Roberto Arango announced legal action to revoke the bar because of its defense of students who, he said, had committed “illegal actions.”
Since its inception in 1840—but particularly since membership became compulsory in 1932—the Colegio de Abogados had inspired attacks because of its function as a forum for advancing civic debates, and it had weathered them all. But even though its membership contained partisans from all three of Puerto Rico’s major political parties, the attack from right-wing supporters of Governor Fortuño only intensified. In 2010 the law firm of Indiano & Williams won a class-action suit against the Colegio de Abogados, claiming that its practice of requiring members to purchase compulsory life insurance to practice law violated the First Amendment. The ruling awarded over $4 million in damages. But because most of the members of this class-action suit were never informed that they were in the class and in order to lower the amount of damages, Colegio de Abogados president Osvaldo Toledo began urging its members to opt out of the class in the lawsuit. In response, Judge José A. Fusté, who had been appointed by President Reagan in the 1980s, charged Toledo with violating a gag rule imposed on the case and ordered him to be imprisoned for five days after Toledo refused to pay a $10,000 fine. Fusté, who also happened to be the judge who sentenced Al Sharpton to ninety days in prison for protesting Vieques, is an old friend of Carlos Romero Barceló. The Vieques protests at least temporarily united local activists with those in the diaspora, making it an international struggle. Sharpton, along with figures like Harry Belafonte, salsa singer Rubén Blades, and other social justice activists, all made appearances at protests in New York, at times allowing themselves to be arrested as an act of civil disobedience.
In the summer of 2011 I went to visit Toledo in his office as part of my investigation of the circumstances that led up to the police misconduct in Puerto Rico. I was curious about rumors that mysterious lobbying on behalf of the NPP was delaying or even attempting to quash the DOJ report. Toledo, however, wanted to talk about the continuing harassment campaign against the Colegio de Abogados and shared the same suspicions about the delay. “The government wants to strangle us,” he said. “They say the Colegio is filled with Communists, that we are a bunch of terrorists. On our thirty-two-member board of directors I have seven statehooders. Some of them came to the jail to support me.”
One of the lawyers who participated in the Indiano & Williams suit was Harvard Law School graduate Andrés W. López, who is an ardent statehood supporter.11 López is a prominent pro-statehood activist who is a DNC member, and in September 2009 President Barack Obama appointed him to the Committee to Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of the American Latino. It’s striking that he shares this NPP affiliation with Luis Fortuño, whose reign as governor resulted in slashing government jobs and increasing authoritarian use of police repression against demonstrators.
According to Open Secrets, a database run by a nonprofit research organization focused on tracking lobbying and campaign contributions, López was one of Puerto Rico’s principal donation bundlers for the Obama campaign, having raised at least $500,000 on his behalf. López had been prominent in Obama’s outreach to the Latinx community, including coordinating the president’s appearance at a Super Bowl party at the Miami home of Emilio Estefan, López’s fellow member of the National Latino Museum study committee. López was also a key figure in helping to organize Obama’s fundraising visit to Puerto Rico in June of 2011.
One of López’s key connections to Obama was Jeffrey Berman, who was hailed during the 2008 presidential campaign as the main force behind the Obama camp’s ability to secure uncommitted delegates, delivering the surprise victories in early primaries that allowed him to overwhelm the Clinton campaign in the long run.12 After Obama entered office, Berman left government for a job in the private sector at Bryan Cave Strategies, the public-policy division of Bryan Cave, a major K-street lobbying firm.
