Exploiting Puerto Rico's Fuzzy Sovereignty

With the homeland as neither nation nor state, Puerto Ricans twist in the wind of political whimsy.

Theme: Human rights geography

Subject Article: "The problem with Puerto Rico's debt."

Other Links: 1. "Murder at Sea: Captured on Video, but Killers Go Free."
2. "American Experience: The Pill."
3. "The Insular Cases: Constitutional experts assess the status of territories acquired in the Spanish–American War."

Postscript: "Reconsidering the Insular Cases: The Past and Future of the American Empire."

Over a century has passed since the United States Supreme Court decided a series of cases, known as the “Insular Cases,” that limited the applicability of constitutional rights in Puerto Rico and other overseas territories and allowed the United States to hold them indefinitely as subordinated possessions without the promise of representation or statehood. Essays in this volume, which originated in a Harvard Law School conference, reconsider the Insular Cases. Leading legal authorities examine the history and legacy of the cases, which are tinged with outdated notions of race and empire, and explore possible solutions for the dilemmas they created. Reconsidering the Insular Cases is particularly timely in light of the latest referendum in Puerto Rico expressing widespread dissatisfaction with its current form of governance, and litigation by American Samoans challenging their unequal citizenship status. This book gives voice to a neglected aspect of U.S. history and constitutional law and provides a rich context for rethinking notions of sovereignty, citizenship, race, and place, as well as the roles of law and politics in shaping them.

Thinking about the Insular Cases in a generic sense, citizenship in any space at any scale is not a binary. In terms of territory or turf, citizenship is experience on a continuum. In a neighborhood, newcomers do not enjoy the full benefits of citizenship that the most tenured residents enjoy. Newcomers are expected to conform and labor to fit in, prove they belong. For example, Spike Lee's rant about the gentrification of Brooklyn:

Then comes the motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfuckin’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfuckin’-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He’s not — he doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic! We bought the motherfuckin’ house in nineteen-sixty-motherfuckin’-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the fuck outta here!

Nah. You can’t do that. You can’t just come in the neighborhood and start bogarting and say, like you’re motherfuckin’ Columbus and kill off the Native Americans. Or what they do in Brazil, what they did to the indigenous people. You have to come with respect. There’s a code. There’s people.

In this passage, Spike Lee is anti-newcomer. He isn't anti-gentrification. He invokes tenure as the measure for the right to define cultural space. Hey Spike Lee, get the fuck outta here with your xenophobic bullshit.

You Go Where You Know

Who you are predicts where you will go in the city.

Theme: Geography as a social science

Subject Article: "The Emerging Science of Computational Anthropology: Location-based social networks are allowing scientists to study the way human patterns of behavior change in time and space, a technique that should eventually lead to deeper insights into the nature of society."

Other Links: 1. "Indigenization of Urban Mobility."

Postscripts: Geography is the social science discipline without a home. Geographers steal theory from other disciplines. Other disciplines do geography and call it anthropology or economics or political science. For decades, geopolitics (the dark art of geography) was banned from US universities. It was taboo. Even today, rankings of graduate programs often overlook geography departments. Geography as a form of knowledge production is illegitimate.

Talent Migration Geopolitics: Turkey

Migrants link two regional or national economies. It isn't a matter of working in one place or the other. We view geographic mobility as a zero sum game, ignoring the importance of the transnational experience. The talent flow from Europe is quietly transforming Turkey:

Once a month, about 50 of them meet in a fashionable bar in downtown Istanbul. It is a time for chat and the swapping business cards and job offers, but everyone is talking German. “German is my mother tongue,” insists Emine Sahin, the 37-year-old real-estate project manager, who organises the monthly meet of German-Turks who, like her, have chosen to come and live on the banks of the Bosphorus. ...

... According to a survey by the German Futureorg institute, one third of dual nationality students in Germany are thinking about a career in Turkey. Companies on the other side of the Rhine have understood how to take advantage of this phenomenon. The Turkish subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz now reseves 30% of its management positions for German-Turks. Government institutions, hoping to benefit from their dual culture, are also opening their doors to Euro-Turks. “Turkey is developing very quickly and needs people like us,” remarks Belgian born and educated Ilker Astarci, who was recently appointed as an advisor to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “There are more opportunities than there are in Europe. I felt it was important to do something for Turkey, which is my country of origin.”

Instead of trying to retain talented Euro-Turks, EU companies are taking advantage of the trend. This approach can work at the regional level. The Sun Belt boomtowns now hemorrhaging people should piggyback on this migration and redevelop the local economy. Exodus is an opportunity, not a harbinger of doom.

The typical reaction to outmigration is to only the see the leaving with no attention paid to where this talent is moving. This is brain drain, the local labor market losing people. That's the end of it. The act of getting out of town is just the beginning. How far and where they go is very important. Hopefully, they go where there is the most growth so the town they left behind can benefit the most. Inevitably, expatriates are caught between two places. But their hometowns don't seem to notice or care.

Burgh Energy Report: More Shale Gas Geopolitics

Just for the record, Kathryn Klaber (Marcellus Shale Coalition) on the geography of shale gas investment capital:

Yet as our production expands in Pennsylvania, the competition for the critical capital needed to produce a Marcellus well — each requires about $4 million — grows stronger and fiercer by the day. Other shale gas-producing states — particularly Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas — want those investments, and those jobs, just as much as we do.

But we’re not just competing with other states for these opportunities. Poland, China, Canada and other foreign nations are working aggressively to secure the capital needed to expand their energy production, too. There’s a reason officials at the Kremlin read news clips from the Marcellus region every morning — and it’s not because they’re looking for coupons.

It’s no secret that our elected officials in Harrisburg are considering a new tax on shale gas production. Unfortunately, some don’t seem to understand that global competition for capital will react to the magnitude of the tax, evidenced by their consideration of a tax that would be the nation’s highest and least competitive.

Nothing scares away investment like uncertainty. Yet the unresolved tax issue in Pennsylvania hasn't frightened away dollars. No one seems concerned that the senate GOP leadership has pushed deliberations into next year. The outcome doesn't matter.

There is greater uncertainty elsewhere, particularly outside the United States:

AB also said that either Russia/Asia could deliver the gas on time, still insisting on the old canard that the EU will force the lights out by 2016 when coal has to close. No mention of US LNG imports, apart from saying "under some circumstance gas could play a major role as a bridge fuel" and "I hope you're right".

All in all, it was uncertainty and risk all round, unless of course the customer dips in and pays any amount of levies for security of supply. Which he still seems to believe that we have!

He seemed concerned that LNG import facilities won't get funded, worried about Turkmenistan can't supply gas, stressed how Nabucco would be insecure, and the sky is generally falling.

Doubts abound over LNG, said it was a forecasting nightmare from Japan and Korea (although the International Energy Agency seems to handle it OK) and said that LNG was more expensive than pipe, which just ain't so.

Shale had the same old issues Gazprom digs up: Lengthy timeframe (15 years!), cost and the environment and technical issues.

Same old, same old and the mainstream media: no where to be found.

The above is via Burrito Bites, which I'll plug again as a must-read blog for SW PA. AB stands for "Alistair Buchanan of Ofgem" and the picture painted is particularly dire for investment in European shale gas. By comparison, the Marcellus Play is a slam dunk. Dollars are not going to run from Pennsylvania to Poland.

At this juncture, I wouldn't trust anything coming from the Marcellus Shale Coalition. It's all deception and misinformation, an army of straw men. The golden goose isn't likely to migrate for another quarter of a century.

Divided Michigan

Don't expect any cooperation between Great Lakes states in your lifetime. The megaregion is not a functioning geography. How can I be so sure? First and foremost, the states themselves are fractured and dysfunctional. A good example is Michigan (via Brian Kelsey) and the divisions between East and West:

So far, 34 states have voted on whether to ban union shops. Michigan has never gotten that far, but right-to-work supporters have a new approach.

The latest tactic? A law that allows right-to work zones as small as a county, rather than a statewide ban on union shops.

Some in West Michigan believe this region should be a test case.

Zones are ad hoc spaces that speak to the inefficacy of the dominant political geography. Detroit's hold on state power isn't working for Western Michigan. Cities such as Grand Rapids have more in common with Chicago than Detroit and highlight the folly of the Great Lakes Economic Initiative.

Ironically, Brookings is one of the loudest voices for a reconsideration of policy geography:

Here we are in new spatial territory, as a new metropolitan map is emerging that defines not the U.S. but our relationship to the world. Networks form the unifying thread of the new map. American metros relate to each other through complex supply chain networks and migration patterns that are based on the endowed assets, distinctive economic clusters and social/cultural histories of individual metros. Likewise, U.S. metros relate to foreign metros through trading relationships and the exchange of goods, services, people, and goods.

The new map defies our conventional way of thinking about the world. Proximity of place to place (say Cleveland to Pittsburgh) only counts for so much in the new world. The essence of what a place does (i.e., what goods it produces, what services it provides) matters more. ...

... At the same time, Florida's focus on megaregions (and the high speed rail that he says should link these places) is overly expansive. It is doubtful whether connecting Cleveland to Chicago is rooted in any economic connections and trading relations that matter today. In a constrained fiscal climate, such cross-metro infrastructure investments will just crowd out the kinds of transformative interventions that are needed within metros (e.g., rightsizing of cities around anchors, multimodal facilities at major logistical hubs, new energy infrastructure).

The new map is not a network of cities within some contiguous region. It is a connectivity profile of metros. Zachery Neal's research supports this perspective:

In the past, dominated largely by agriculture and mass commodity production, bigger was better. America’s largest cities served as what Walter Christaller dubbed ‘central places.’ These central places served people living in the surrounding territory, as a place to purchase goods and services, and to sell crops and livestock. Bigger cities drew people in from further away, fueling their economic growth. However, as technological developments allowed people and goods to be transported more quickly and cheaply, people were no longer as shackled to the closest big city. Well connected cities, tied to other places by rail lines and highways, and more recently by airline routes and the internet, could benefit from consumers’ demand and workers’ labor in other places.

Driven by such technological advances, the economic prosperity of American cities has become more tied to their connectedness than their sheer size. But, exactly what kind of connectedness is important can vary from place to place. Cities like New York or Chicago, which drew strength from their size in the past, today thrive largely by being well connected to other cities globally by multiple types of networks, serving simultaneously as transportation hubs, stock exchanges, and cultural centers.

The megaregion is a product of central place theory. I'm astounded that we still cling to such an antiquated way of thinking. It's an economic geography from a time before the last round of globalization that birthed the Rust Belt. We need to look forwards, not backwards.

In terms of talent management and workforce development, network geographies are nowhere to be found. Human capital connectivity and the prosperity derived from geographic mobility are foreign ideas. No wonder the United States is falling behind the rest of the world:

Many people have observed how the networks of overseas Chinese and Indians benefit their respective motherlands. Diasporas speed the flow of information: an ethnic Chinese trader in Indonesia who spots a commercial opportunity will quickly alert his cousin who runs a factory in Guangdong. And ties of kin, clan or dialect ensure a high level of trust. This allows decisions to be made swiftly: multimillion-dollar deals can sometimes be sealed with a single phone call. America is linked to the world in a different way. It does not have much of a diaspora, since native-born Americans seldom emigrate permanently. But it has by far the world’s largest stock of immigrants, including significant numbers from just about every country on earth. Most assimilate quickly, but few sever all ties with their former homelands.

Replace the countries of China and India with metros (e.g. Guangdong). That's the dominant economic landscape of today, not megaregions of multiple contiguous states. Via Cuyahoga County Planning Commission Weblog, a possible functioning policy geography:

The Cities in Transition Initiative is a three-year project designed to build a sustained network of leading policymakers and practitioners in five older industrial U.S. cities: Detroit and Flint, Michigan; Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio; and the greater Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania region. Through annual study tours, working meetings, and charrettes, participants in this network will work together closely to articulate critical policy challenges facing their communities and to identify and adapt innovative solutions that European older industrial cities have implemented to address the myriad challenges associated with urban disinvestment and economic restructuring. In each of its three years, the project will zero in on a different policy area affecting these cities: respectively, land use; manufacturing; and workforce development.

The results won't apply universally to Rust Belt cities. What works for Detroit won't necessarily benefit Grand Rapids. The box that is Michigan is part of the problem, not the solution.