Word: mu
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Fomento. At that point Puerto Rico, its hungry people jamming an eroded land without oil, coal or iron, looked hopeless. Undeterred. Muñoz counted the island's assets: plentiful labor, an open door through U.S. tariff walls for anything the island could grow or make, a ready-to-hand brain trust of half a dozen bright young U.S.-educated economists, professors and businessmen. Among them: Rafael Pico, now president of the government's bank, and Roberto Sánchez Vilella, now Secretary of State (Vice-Governor). Rex Tugwell. named Governor, implanted an efficient civil service...
...factories going, Muñoz tapped a young pharmacist (University of Michigan '32) named Teodoro Moscoso Jr., who left a job running his family's wholesale drug business in Ponce to form and boss Fomento. The program's principle, as summed up by Moscoso: "Economic development is not an end but a means of attacking poverty." It avoided political doctrines; Muñoz early ruled that Fomento should "have no fixed taboos, no sacred cows in the choice of instruments to achieve a better standard of living...
...experience in the factories was distressingly clear proof that the government would have to raise an unthinkable $1 billion or $2 billion to build enough plants to industrialize the island. Without ado, Muñoz & Co. sold the government-owned plants to get capital for what Moscoso calls the "incentive and promotional approach," aimed at giving a "multiplier effect" to the government's investment. Instead of "permitting" (in the word of many a nationalist demagogue) the entry of outside capital, Puerto Rico resolved to dragoon or inveigle...
Beyond Nationalism. Politically, Muñoz clung to his aspiration for eventual Puerto Rican independence until 1944. "That year," he recalls, "the Popular Party got 64% of the vote as against 38% in 1940. The Planning Board had written a paper on the economic consequences of independence, of being shut out of U.S. tariff walls. A Tariff Commission economist came down here, and I had two or three long talks with him. I said: 'Of course Puerto Rico cannot be independent in the same way as the Philippines, which have greater resources and lower population density...
...Muñoz' thinking from that year went "beyond nationalism." Working with his staff and with the U.S. Congress, he wrote a bill that invented the concept of a "free, associated state." It was enacted "in the nature of a compact" between Congress (which approved it in 1950) and the Puerto Rican people (who ratified it in a referendum). Chiefly, the bill authorized Puerto Rico to write itself a constitution for complete local self-government and provided for U.S.-Puerto Rican relationship. Main effects...