Who will speak for us?

Portada del Daily News del 25 de septiembre de 2010.

Saludos desde Nuyorico, la capital de la diáspora puertorriqueña, donde vivimos la crisis de la globalización en plena calle. The unforgiving streets where el ataque contra lo que planteamos como “la comunidad”, continúa.

Exhibit A: September 25th’s cover story of the Daily News, written by Joanna Molloy, one of the photo-driven tabloid’s long-time gossip columnists.

“Jenny Disses the Block” pregona el titular, criticando a la reina de las fantasías sexuales de los Anglo-Americanos por no tener suficiente amor para su neighborhood in the northeast corner of the Boogie-Down Bronx. No matter what you think of her, La Jenny, through her insistence on representing “real” Nuyorican, is one of our most enduring symbols.

Molloy, who says she grew up in the same block, accuses López of never contributing any part of her vast fortune to their alma mater, Holy Family School. Donde su mamá trabajó por muchos años.

Qué bochinche!

If it’s true that López, owning hundreds of millions of dollars, hasn’t contributed to her old school, that’s newsworthy. Pero ponerla así en la portada semi-desnuda, is this really necessary? The only thing missing was her famous post-racial posterior!

Just when we are catching our breath from this highly sexualized image of one of our own, una Bronxqueña de reputacion impecable, Molloy begins a new assault on her lack of authenticity, mentioning an 8-year–old incident in the Bronx where Jennifer apparently dodged autograph seekers while being interviewed by Dianne Sawyer for 60 Minutes:

She didn’t even give autographs to the kids in 2002, when she rolled up in the back of a black Lincoln Navigator.

“She doesn’t represent,” one kid said then.

Aparentemente Jennifer, who sold millions of records by announcing that she was “Jenny From the Block”, feels free to “play the race card” to profit on the backs of the little people.

Pero casi escondida en esta columna escandalosa is the inconvenient truth. Jennifer López and her mega-trasero were being used to obfuscate the ambivalence we might feel about an emerging phenomenon: mega-rich philanthropy. As if to say, “well this isn’t so important, but I’ll say it anyway,” Molloy comments:

Hey, I’m not saying Lopez should give $100 million, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is doing with Newark’s schools – and he’s not even from New Jersey!

Okay, so J-Lo, who apparently is worth, dice Molloy, “anywhere from $110 million to $260 million” –depending on whether you read Forbes or Fortune- and whose philanthropy profile is barely investigated on in this piece, is compared to Zuckerberg, worth according to Forbes magazine, is worth $6.5 billion. That’s at least 30 times as much as López, and possibly 60 times as much. In fact, the money that Zuckerberg donated to Newark public schools could be equal to J-Lo’s entire net wealth. But for him it’s 1/60th of his holdings. Chump change.

So, La Jennifer is compared to someone who is 60 times as wealthy as she is, and who announced the Newark school donation deal the same week he was: 1) named one of the richest people in the world and 2) the subject of a film that is notorious for having a pretty negative view of him.

How much money would go to public schools in the U.S. if people like Zuckerberg, the wealthiest people in the country, were taxed at the same rate they were before the Bush tax cuts? We don’t know that. But we do know that in August, dozens of U.S. billionaires pledged to give at least half their fortunes to charity.

One can argue that the billionaires are donating the money to avoid taxes, but under the current tax laws, which Democrats are too afraid to change even though they got a mandate from the American voter, they hardly seem vulnerable. What the billionaire’s pledge really means is that very wealthy individuals and very wealthy corporations will have the largest voice in creating public policy, not us. And in the long run, that control over public policy has a a strong potential to create larger and more enduring profits streams.

At least through representative democracy we had the illusion that we were electing public officials who would then use tax dollars to implement policy. Now it’s about very wealthy individuals and corporations evading, for the most part, their fair rate of taxation and taking it upon themselves to shape public policy.

Take education for instance. Last month, unironically premiering in tandem with Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2, Waiting for Superman premiered, a corporate commercial backed, at least philosophically, by Bill and Melinda Gates, the authors of the aforementioned “Giving Pledge”. It was intended as a rhetorical device to convince moviegoers that teacher’s unions, and not public disinvestment, are the reasons for the deterioration of public education. Don’t take my word for it, read this and this and this. I think you can even find a Facebook page for the last one.

“The Giving Pledge,” “Pledge to America,” “pledge” to see Waiting for Superman! [Check it out, the «non-profit» responsible for the «pledge» to see Waiting for Superman is called donorschoose.org. There are some friendly faces here, most notably celebrity liberal hero Stephen Colbert. The chairman of the board of this non-profit organization is someone called Peter Bloom, managing director of General Atlantic, LLC. You tell me, is this Main Street or Wall Street?]

Bill y Belinda Gates

Have corporate control and its total privatization agenda ever been so transparent? Will anyone notice?

Parece que algunos de la comunidad del Barrio (el famoso vecindario “Spanish Harlem”) si se están dando cuenta. No se sabe cuál es el motivo, pero el EDC (Economic Development Corporation) de Nueva York has begun a process to take control of a space in a place called The Julia de Burgos Cultural Center.“La Julia”, como el centro se conoce en la calle, is currently used by an organization known as Taller Boricua. El Taller was founded by activists like the current directors, Fernando Salicrup and Marcos Dimas, and the group houses art galleries, discussions, and more recently, to offset declining revenue, a weekly baile: “Salsa Wednesdays.”

According to Juan González, Nuyorico’s most influential newspaper columnist, the neighborhood has been “swept into a bitter controversy, one that has divided supporters of those old-time artists and backers of a newer generation of more professional and technocratic Latinos.”

When I called the EDC to ask them why they were taking the step of opening up the “Salsa Wednesdays” space to new organizations to present a «vision» (the galleries remain in control of Taller Boricua), they said the prime mover of the action was City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito, previously well known as a union activist and a key figure in the Nuyorico contingent to get the U.S. Navy out of Vieques.

Whether or not Mark-Viverito represents a “newer generation of more professional and technocratic Latinos” remains to be seen, but there is a slow and painful awakening among la comunidad that the old way of doing things ya no vale. The professionalization of attracting funding sources and speaking the language of high-end philanthropy has in this case placed some of our most treasured elders in peril.

The EDC, regardless of Melissa Mark-Viverito’s involvement in this case, speaks for one of the world’s richest men, New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Who will speak for the business of the community? ¿Por el negocio…de la comunidad?