Puerto Rico testing ground for right-wing agendas

[Derechos]

News of gutting collective bargaining rights through parliamentary maneuvers by Republican state senators in Wisconsin was greeted with a sense of dé-jà vu in Puerto Rico.

An uncannily similar law "Ley 7" was passed two years ago here, but few in the United States caught wind of the coming storm because Puerto Rico is mostly invisible to the U.S. media, perhaps because of its territorial status since the Spanish-American War of 1898.

For the Pro-Statehood Republican Gov. Luis Fortuño, an unabashed Reagan aficionado, and the right-wing flank of his party, debate is superfluous, as ramming policy through the state legislature has all but become the norm.

snip

Wisconsin is yet another grim reminder of how Puerto Rico integrates into right-wing agendas in the United States, as Puerto Rico has long been a testing ground for policies, be they military, corporate or governmental. To wit, pharmaceutical companies developed the birth control pill in the 1950s by first testing dangerously high doses on underprivileged women here without informed consent; the U.S. Navy bombed the Puerto Rico island of Vieques for more than 50 years to practice simultaneous land/air/sea exercises; Monsanto tested genetically-engineered crops in Puerto Rico as early as 1987, nearly a decade before wide use in the United States (according to Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero, director of the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety).

Now the frontier is disaster capitalism and the immediate target, public sector collective bargaining.

"Clearly this is coordinated at the highest circles from Washington D.C. or New York to go after what's left of the U.S. labor movement," says Prof. Dana Frank, a labor historian with the University of California, Santa Cruz. "They're going after the fundamental rights of working people."

Fortuño is busily networking with other Republican governors through such organizations as the National Governors Association. A recent interview on the Koch-financed Reason.tv, showcases Fortuño's policies as a model for newly elected Republican governors. Ohio now seems the next in line for public union busting.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd/wisconsin-and-puerto-rico_b_836903.html

[eowyn_of_rohan]

1. Verrrry interesting -- thank you for posting this -nt