welcome to the colonies
news and information on america's quasi states
december 2022
puerto rico
*articles*
*BIG OIL IS BEHIND CONSPIRACY TO DECEIVE PUBLIC, FIRST CLIMATE RACKETEERING LAWSUIT SAYS(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Puerto Rico has a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build a clean energy grid – but FEMA plans to spend $9.4 billion on fossil fuel infrastructure instead
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*New Trump Disability Rule Targets Non-English Speakers
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Trump team finally releases billions in hurricane relief for Puerto Rico—with major strings attached(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Puerto Ricans left homeless after biggest quake in century
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Puerto Rico to approve cockfighting, defy federal ban
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Trump intervened to cut Puerto Rico's Medicaid funding in spending bill: report
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*HUD WITHHOLDS $18 BILLION IN DISASTER AID FROM PUERTO RICO, LAWMAKERS THREATEN TO FIGHT BACK BY DENYING AGENCY FUNDS(ARTICLE BELOW)
*La Borinqueña Inspires the “Ricanstruction” of Puerto Rico
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*THE ECONOMICS OF STATEHOOD
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Team Trump admits holding back billions for Puerto Rico disaster recovery
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*SANDERS AND OCASIO-CORTEZ CALL FOR REVERSAL OF PUERTO RICO AUSTERITY MEASURES
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria. It's about to lose $400M more to Trump's border wall(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Teachers Fighting for Public Schools Were Key to the Uprising in Puerto Rico
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*CORPORATIONS ARE POISONING PEOPLE IN PUERTO RICO WITH COAL ASH
(ARTICLE BELOW)
-------
us virgin islands
*Jeffrey Epstein case threatens to drag Virgin Islands elite into the muck. Will it matter?(ARTICLE BELOW)
*EDUCATORS GATHER AT GOVERNMENT HOUSE ST. CROIX IN PROTEST OF LOW WAGES, WORKING CONDITIONS(ARTICLE BELOW)
*THE INSULAR CASES: WHY PUERTO RICO AND THE U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS ARE COLONIES AND NOT STATES(ARTICLE BELOW)
Climate crisis
Big oil is behind conspiracy to deceive public, first climate racketeering lawsuit says
Lawyer in a civil lawsuit launched by towns in hurricane-hit Puerto Rico describes
why it is using laws used to target mob bosses
Nina Lakhani
the guardian
Tue 20 Dec 2022 04.00 EST
The same racketeering legislation used to bring down mob bosses, motorcycle gangs, football executives and international fraudsters is to be tested against oil and coal companies who are accused of conspiring to deceive the public over the climate crisis.
In an ambitious move, an attempt will be made to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for “decades of deception” in a lawsuit being brought by communities in Puerto Rico that were devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017.
“Puerto Rico is one of the most affected places by climate change in the world. It is so precariously positioned – they get hit on all fronts with hurricanes, storm surge, heat, coral bleaching – it’s the perfect place for this climate litigation,” said Melissa Sims, senior counsel for the plaintiffs’ law firm Milberg.
The 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act was originally intended to combat criminal enterprises like the mafia, but has since been used in civil courts to litigate harms caused by opioids, vehicle emissions and even e-cigarettes as organised crime cases.
Now, the first-ever climate change Rico case alleges that international oil and coal companies, their trade associations, and a network of paid thinktanks, scientists and other operatives conspired to deceive the public – specifically residents of Puerto Rico – about the direct link between their greenhouse gas-emitting products and climate change.
This fossil fuel enterprise, which remains operational according to the lawsuit, resulted in multitude of damages caused by climate disasters that were foreseen – but hidden – by the defendants in order to maximise profits.
The plaintiffs are 16 municipalities in Puerto Rico – towns and cities that were hit hard by two powerful hurricanes in September 2017, Irma and Maria – which led to thousands of deaths, food shortages, widespread infrastructure damage and the longest blackout in US history.
Sims, the senior counsel, said: “What’s different about this [Rico] case is that we have their enterprise in writing – the decision by rival companies, their front groups, scientists and associations to act together to change public opinion regarding the use of their consumer products by telling people something that they knew was not true.”
According to the lawsuit – filed in the US federal district court of Puerto Rico – evidence of the conspiracy dates back to 1989 when the defendants, which include ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Rio Tinto, individually and through trade association formed the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) as a “not-for-profit corporation to influence, advertise, and promote the interests of the fossil fuel industry by giving false information to their consumers and the public at large”.
It argues that so-called rival companies conspired for a common purpose – to deceive consumers and sow confusion in order to keep fossil fuel sales high and profitable – and that the GCC was a propaganda machine specifically set up to oppose the Kyoto protocol, the first major international effort to combat climate change. To do this, a written action plan was devised in 1998 to mislead consumers by convincing them that “global warming” was not occurring, and if it did happen, there was no scientific consensus on whether fossil fuels were to blame.
In other words, the action plan was allegedly a climate change denial plan executed through a network of dark money ploughed into thinktanks, research institutions, trade groups and PR firms, and provided a roadmap for an open-ended enterprise that is still implemented today.
The lawsuit argues that the oil and coal companies knew that Puerto Rico was a “sitting duck” because of its geographic location, which made the island and its people particularly vulnerable to climate change events – namely hotter and wetter storms, extreme heat and rising sea level – caused by their carbon products.
Over the past two decades, Puerto Rico – along with Haiti and Myanmar – has been among three territories most affected by extreme weather such as storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts, according to the Germanwatch Climate Risk Index, which are becoming more intense due to human-made global heating driven by greenhouse gases. In September, Hurricane Ian left much of the island without power and water, as well as damaging essential infrastructure like roads and bridges.
The damages resulting from the 2017 storms – and the likelihood of worse climate disasters battering the island in the future – come down to the acts and omissions of the defendants, as the oil and coal companies, along with their worldwide co-venturers, are collectively responsible for at least 40.01% of greenhouse gases, the lawsuit argues.
It’s the latest in a wave of civil class actions brought by municipalities – towns and cities – against corporations and organizations accused of causing harm to residents. According to Sims, who has also represented Puerto Rico municipalities in opioid litigation which resulted in compensation for damages, cites have an almost unfettered ability to use their nuisance laws and local ordinances.
Sims, a Republican and Christian, said: “Cities across the nation have woken up to this power and are starting to exercise their rights almost like mini attorney generals. They are now often the first ones bringing cases on opioids, Juul electronic cigarettes, pollution, reverse red-lining and now climate change, using their rights pursuant to racketeering and other laws we’ve helped fine-tune over the years.”
Seven oil firms, three coal companies, and hundreds of organisations and operatives are among the defendants accused of consumer fraud, racketeering, antitrust, fraudulent misrepresentation, conspiracy to defraud, products liability and unjust enrichment among other crimes.
The American Petroleum Institute and the National Mining Association did not respond to requests for comment. Several of the defendants have made statements criticising the lawsuit.
In an ambitious move, an attempt will be made to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for “decades of deception” in a lawsuit being brought by communities in Puerto Rico that were devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017.
“Puerto Rico is one of the most affected places by climate change in the world. It is so precariously positioned – they get hit on all fronts with hurricanes, storm surge, heat, coral bleaching – it’s the perfect place for this climate litigation,” said Melissa Sims, senior counsel for the plaintiffs’ law firm Milberg.
The 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act was originally intended to combat criminal enterprises like the mafia, but has since been used in civil courts to litigate harms caused by opioids, vehicle emissions and even e-cigarettes as organised crime cases.
Now, the first-ever climate change Rico case alleges that international oil and coal companies, their trade associations, and a network of paid thinktanks, scientists and other operatives conspired to deceive the public – specifically residents of Puerto Rico – about the direct link between their greenhouse gas-emitting products and climate change.
This fossil fuel enterprise, which remains operational according to the lawsuit, resulted in multitude of damages caused by climate disasters that were foreseen – but hidden – by the defendants in order to maximise profits.
The plaintiffs are 16 municipalities in Puerto Rico – towns and cities that were hit hard by two powerful hurricanes in September 2017, Irma and Maria – which led to thousands of deaths, food shortages, widespread infrastructure damage and the longest blackout in US history.
Sims, the senior counsel, said: “What’s different about this [Rico] case is that we have their enterprise in writing – the decision by rival companies, their front groups, scientists and associations to act together to change public opinion regarding the use of their consumer products by telling people something that they knew was not true.”
According to the lawsuit – filed in the US federal district court of Puerto Rico – evidence of the conspiracy dates back to 1989 when the defendants, which include ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Rio Tinto, individually and through trade association formed the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) as a “not-for-profit corporation to influence, advertise, and promote the interests of the fossil fuel industry by giving false information to their consumers and the public at large”.
It argues that so-called rival companies conspired for a common purpose – to deceive consumers and sow confusion in order to keep fossil fuel sales high and profitable – and that the GCC was a propaganda machine specifically set up to oppose the Kyoto protocol, the first major international effort to combat climate change. To do this, a written action plan was devised in 1998 to mislead consumers by convincing them that “global warming” was not occurring, and if it did happen, there was no scientific consensus on whether fossil fuels were to blame.
In other words, the action plan was allegedly a climate change denial plan executed through a network of dark money ploughed into thinktanks, research institutions, trade groups and PR firms, and provided a roadmap for an open-ended enterprise that is still implemented today.
The lawsuit argues that the oil and coal companies knew that Puerto Rico was a “sitting duck” because of its geographic location, which made the island and its people particularly vulnerable to climate change events – namely hotter and wetter storms, extreme heat and rising sea level – caused by their carbon products.
Over the past two decades, Puerto Rico – along with Haiti and Myanmar – has been among three territories most affected by extreme weather such as storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts, according to the Germanwatch Climate Risk Index, which are becoming more intense due to human-made global heating driven by greenhouse gases. In September, Hurricane Ian left much of the island without power and water, as well as damaging essential infrastructure like roads and bridges.
The damages resulting from the 2017 storms – and the likelihood of worse climate disasters battering the island in the future – come down to the acts and omissions of the defendants, as the oil and coal companies, along with their worldwide co-venturers, are collectively responsible for at least 40.01% of greenhouse gases, the lawsuit argues.
It’s the latest in a wave of civil class actions brought by municipalities – towns and cities – against corporations and organizations accused of causing harm to residents. According to Sims, who has also represented Puerto Rico municipalities in opioid litigation which resulted in compensation for damages, cites have an almost unfettered ability to use their nuisance laws and local ordinances.
Sims, a Republican and Christian, said: “Cities across the nation have woken up to this power and are starting to exercise their rights almost like mini attorney generals. They are now often the first ones bringing cases on opioids, Juul electronic cigarettes, pollution, reverse red-lining and now climate change, using their rights pursuant to racketeering and other laws we’ve helped fine-tune over the years.”
Seven oil firms, three coal companies, and hundreds of organisations and operatives are among the defendants accused of consumer fraud, racketeering, antitrust, fraudulent misrepresentation, conspiracy to defraud, products liability and unjust enrichment among other crimes.
The American Petroleum Institute and the National Mining Association did not respond to requests for comment. Several of the defendants have made statements criticising the lawsuit.
Puerto Rico has a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build a clean energy grid – but FEMA plans to spend $9.4 billion on fossil fuel infrastructure instead
the conversation
October 4, 2021 9.10am EDT
The Biden Administration has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help Puerto Rico transition to a greener and more resilient energy future, but it’s on the verge of making a multibillion-dollar mistake.
Since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, many residents and environmental advocates have called for new clean energy sources for the island. Currently Puerto Rico gets more than 97% of its electricity from imported fossil fuel. Power is expensive and unreliable.
Puerto Rico adopted laws that called for generating 15% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, 40% by 2025, 60% by 2040 and 100% by 2050. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which controls relief funding for the island, appears ready to underwrite a rebuild of the old fossil fuel system.
As environmental lawyers and professors of law, we are surprised to see FEMA move forward on a path that runs directly counter to the White House’s energy and climate policy. President Joe Biden has called for a governmentwide approach that promotes clean energy, protects public health and the environment, and advances environmental justice.
In our view, FEMA’s actions don’t support those goals. They also ignore legal requirements for federal agencies to carefully weigh the environmental impacts of major actions.
Rebuild or replace with a more resilient green system?
In September 2017, Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico with sustained winds of 155 mph. It tore a diagonal 100-mile swath across the island, demolishing tens of thousands of homes and washing away roads and bridges.
The storm toppled transmission and cell towers, snapped concrete power poles, battered power plants and plunged the island into darkness. It killed an estimated 3,000 people and caused over US$90 billion in damages.
In response, Congress authorized some $23 billion in disaster aid, including at least $10 billion to restore or replace Puerto Rico’s electricity grid. It also passed the Disaster Recovery Reform Act to promote a more flexible energy system that could withstand and recover quickly from climate disruptions.
FEMA, which administers the funds, has allocated $9.4 billion for rebuilding Puerto Rico’s electricity system and will start approving projects after it receives more details explaining how the work will be performed. So far, none of this money has been earmarked for renewable power, except for a small sum to repair a hydroelectric dam that provides less than 1% of the island’s power.
The organizations making decisions in Puerto Rico are the Commonwealth’s Electric Power Authority, known as PREPA, and Luma Energy, a private company that received a 15-year contract in 2021 to manage power transmission and distribution on the island. PREPA and Luma have proposed hundreds of projects for the coming decade, but none include federal funding for rooftop solar, community solar, battery storage or microgrids.
Advocates say that this kind of small-scale local generation would make the island’s electricity cheaper, cleaner and more reliable.
A 2015 study by the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that investing in solar and wind power and energy efficiency could transform Puerto Rico’s electrical system into a resilient grid. And in 2020, the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated that rooftop solar power in Puerto Rico could generate roughly four times as much electricity as residents currently use.
Federal law requires weighing the options
Spending almost $10 billion to rewire an island with 3 million residents is clearly a major federal action with significant environmental impacts. Under the National Environmental Policy Act, agencies undertaking such actions must prepare an environmental impact statement that takes a hard look at alternatives and invites meaningful public input.
PREPA and Luma’s proposed plan includes reconstructing and hardening nearly all of Puerto Rico’s transmission lines and building at least two new natural gas-fired power plants. Burning more natural gas will affect air and water quality and contribute to climate change. Natural gas is shipped to Puerto Rico in liquid form, so using more of it also means expanding import facilities and pipelines.
Instead of producing a full-scale environmental impact statement, FEMA produced a superficial programmatic environmental assessment – a narrower study that did not weigh other options. It concluded that there would be “no significant impact” from rebuilding Puerto Rico’s fossil fuel-based energy system. The study did not mention climate change, which scientists widely agree is making hurricanes larger and more destructive.
Beyond a pro forma invitation for public comment, FEMA made no effort to engage with overburdened communities of color that have disproportionately suffered from pollution and climate change under Puerto Rico’s energy system. This directly contradicts Biden’s order to place environmental justice at the center of federal energy and climate policy.
The National Environmental Policy Act also requires agencies to “study, develop and describe appropriate alternatives to recommended courses of action.” FEMA’s environmental assessment only considers rebuilding and hardening the existing grid, and does not mention renewable energy. When some public commenters criticized this omission, FEMA responded that it was not responsible for considering alternative means of generating electricity.
Advancing the public interest
Both PREPA and Luma are proponents of an energy strategy that centers on importing natural gas. Federal law requires FEMA to take a broader approach and ensure that it spends federal money in ways that support U.S. environmental goals.
Courts have held that environmental justice is not simply a box to be checked. In our view, the law clearly requires FEMA to give Puerto Ricans – who have lived with a creaky power system for four years – a seat at the table before it starts writing checks for projects that affect their lives.
Since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, many residents and environmental advocates have called for new clean energy sources for the island. Currently Puerto Rico gets more than 97% of its electricity from imported fossil fuel. Power is expensive and unreliable.
Puerto Rico adopted laws that called for generating 15% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, 40% by 2025, 60% by 2040 and 100% by 2050. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which controls relief funding for the island, appears ready to underwrite a rebuild of the old fossil fuel system.
As environmental lawyers and professors of law, we are surprised to see FEMA move forward on a path that runs directly counter to the White House’s energy and climate policy. President Joe Biden has called for a governmentwide approach that promotes clean energy, protects public health and the environment, and advances environmental justice.
In our view, FEMA’s actions don’t support those goals. They also ignore legal requirements for federal agencies to carefully weigh the environmental impacts of major actions.
Rebuild or replace with a more resilient green system?
In September 2017, Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico with sustained winds of 155 mph. It tore a diagonal 100-mile swath across the island, demolishing tens of thousands of homes and washing away roads and bridges.
The storm toppled transmission and cell towers, snapped concrete power poles, battered power plants and plunged the island into darkness. It killed an estimated 3,000 people and caused over US$90 billion in damages.
In response, Congress authorized some $23 billion in disaster aid, including at least $10 billion to restore or replace Puerto Rico’s electricity grid. It also passed the Disaster Recovery Reform Act to promote a more flexible energy system that could withstand and recover quickly from climate disruptions.
FEMA, which administers the funds, has allocated $9.4 billion for rebuilding Puerto Rico’s electricity system and will start approving projects after it receives more details explaining how the work will be performed. So far, none of this money has been earmarked for renewable power, except for a small sum to repair a hydroelectric dam that provides less than 1% of the island’s power.
The organizations making decisions in Puerto Rico are the Commonwealth’s Electric Power Authority, known as PREPA, and Luma Energy, a private company that received a 15-year contract in 2021 to manage power transmission and distribution on the island. PREPA and Luma have proposed hundreds of projects for the coming decade, but none include federal funding for rooftop solar, community solar, battery storage or microgrids.
Advocates say that this kind of small-scale local generation would make the island’s electricity cheaper, cleaner and more reliable.
A 2015 study by the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that investing in solar and wind power and energy efficiency could transform Puerto Rico’s electrical system into a resilient grid. And in 2020, the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated that rooftop solar power in Puerto Rico could generate roughly four times as much electricity as residents currently use.
Federal law requires weighing the options
Spending almost $10 billion to rewire an island with 3 million residents is clearly a major federal action with significant environmental impacts. Under the National Environmental Policy Act, agencies undertaking such actions must prepare an environmental impact statement that takes a hard look at alternatives and invites meaningful public input.
PREPA and Luma’s proposed plan includes reconstructing and hardening nearly all of Puerto Rico’s transmission lines and building at least two new natural gas-fired power plants. Burning more natural gas will affect air and water quality and contribute to climate change. Natural gas is shipped to Puerto Rico in liquid form, so using more of it also means expanding import facilities and pipelines.
Instead of producing a full-scale environmental impact statement, FEMA produced a superficial programmatic environmental assessment – a narrower study that did not weigh other options. It concluded that there would be “no significant impact” from rebuilding Puerto Rico’s fossil fuel-based energy system. The study did not mention climate change, which scientists widely agree is making hurricanes larger and more destructive.
Beyond a pro forma invitation for public comment, FEMA made no effort to engage with overburdened communities of color that have disproportionately suffered from pollution and climate change under Puerto Rico’s energy system. This directly contradicts Biden’s order to place environmental justice at the center of federal energy and climate policy.
The National Environmental Policy Act also requires agencies to “study, develop and describe appropriate alternatives to recommended courses of action.” FEMA’s environmental assessment only considers rebuilding and hardening the existing grid, and does not mention renewable energy. When some public commenters criticized this omission, FEMA responded that it was not responsible for considering alternative means of generating electricity.
Advancing the public interest
Both PREPA and Luma are proponents of an energy strategy that centers on importing natural gas. Federal law requires FEMA to take a broader approach and ensure that it spends federal money in ways that support U.S. environmental goals.
Courts have held that environmental justice is not simply a box to be checked. In our view, the law clearly requires FEMA to give Puerto Ricans – who have lived with a creaky power system for four years – a seat at the table before it starts writing checks for projects that affect their lives.
more racist policies!!!
New Trump Disability Rule Targets Non-English Speakers
Too many Puerto Ricans are getting disability benefits, the administration claims.
By Arthur Delaney - huff post
02/20/2020 08:16 am ET
The Trump administration is finalizing a new rule barring Social Security disability examiners from considering someone’s inability to speak English as a factor in whether they should be eligible for benefits.
It’s one of several cuts to Social Security Disability Insurance that President Donald Trump is pursuing as part of an overall assault on “welfare.” The push circumvents Congress with a series of regulations targeting food, health and housing benefits.
The federal government pays disability benefits worth about $1,200 per month to people with extensive employment histories who can’t continue working due to the onset of a severe illness or injury.
Part of the claims process can involve evaluating whether someone could switch to a new line of work that would accommodate their disability. The evaluation considers not just a person’s physical or mental impediments, but also their age, work history, education level, and the availability of suitable jobs.
The new rule, set for final publication in the coming months, eliminates the “inability to communicate in English” factor when evaluating a person’s education level. The administration says that non-English speakers are generally more successful than they used to be in the U.S. labor market, that they’re better educated than their lack of English implies, and that the criteria is used too much by people living in Puerto Rico.
Most disability claims are denied. The number filed each year, as well as overall caseloads, have been declining since 2013. But Republicans still say too many undeserving people get benefits.
“There has been, unfortunately, a lot of fraud,” Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), the top Republican on the House committee that oversees Social Security, told HuffPost.
For Republican policymakers, “fraud” is sometimes a colorful word for borderline cases they think should be judged more harshly. With Trump’s appointees in charge, changes that for years have germinated within the Social Security Administration are potentially coming to fruition. One is the English rule. Another measure would alter the so-called medical-vocational guidelines, which could have a major impact on benefit awards. The agency also wants to ramp up reviews of whether current claimants are still disabled.
“It’s important that the disability plan services those people that really are in need of it, and that are really in bad shape,” Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul told AARP last month.
Only 1% of all disability awards went to residents of Puerto Rico in 2016, but the territory accounted for almost one-third of benefits awarded partly on the basis of an inability to speak English ― a “seemingly disproportionate” amount, according to the Trump administration. Most Puerto Ricans speak Spanish, so the administration says it shouldn’t matter if someone there can’t speak English.
But nobody wins benefits solely because they can’t speak English; it’s considered alongside physical or mental disabilities in claimants who are at least 45 years old. Of the 2.5 million initial disability decisions in 2016, English proficiency was a factor in only 0.29%. Critics of the Trump administration’s change say it would be wrong to kill the language criteria over a subset of such a small number of claims in a single year.
“It would be arbitrary to change the rules for all applicants and beneficiaries because of the experience of such a small group,” the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said in a formal comment on a draft of the proposed rule. “In most parts of the United States, the inability to communicate in English poses a significant barrier to work for the older, unskilled, impaired individuals who would be affected by this proposed rule.”
The administration cited a 2015 Social Security inspector general report that found 244 instances of such awards from 2011 to 2013. The Trump administration said there were 777 such cases in 2016. Democrats and disability experts call the discrepancy in the number of cases over the years another problem with the rule.
When a federal agency writes a new regulation, it posts a draft on the Federal Register website and invites comments from stakeholders, then responds to the comments when it finalizes the rule. Since the disability changes have all been happening through regulation rather than legislation, the Register comments have been the main venue for debating the policy.
Congressional Democrats argue the comments themselves show why the administration should not finalize the rule. “Commenters included 157 national or regional organizations who oppose the proposal, and only one in support,” Democrats wrote in a comment letter led by Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Rep. Richard Neal (Mass.).
The lone supportive comment from an organization came from the Opportunity Solutions Project, a little-known conservative advocacy group that generally supports restrictions on social programs. “By itself, the inability to communicate in English is not a disability and, consequently, should not be considered a relevant factor within the disability determination process,” the group wrote.
Agencies have no obligation to heed comments. A source with knowledge of the process said the final version of the English rule wouldn’t be substantially different from the draft version first published last year.
One of the most frequent criticisms of the disability proposal is that it directly contradicts the administration’s position in another regulation: a Department of Homeland Security initiative that sits at the nexus of Trump’s efforts to stymie both welfare use and immigration.
In 2018, DHS updated its “public charge” rule disallowing legal immigrants who might wind up on welfare. One of the changes would allow the department to consider English proficiency, since “an inability to speak and understand English may adversely affect whether an alien can obtain employment.”
In other words, the Trump administration is saying in one regulation that lack of English proficiency presents a serious obstacle to gainful employment, and in another regulation that it doesn’t.
The final version of the DHS public charge rule, which was published last summer, even acknowledged the data that the Social Security Administration cited supporting its contrary position. But even though a lot of non-English speakers have jobs, DHS said, “such lower paying jobs may not denote the same level of self-sufficiency as jobs that may be held by an individual who [is] able to effectively communicate in English and who may be employed in a higher skilled, higher paying job.”
Another possible problem with the English rule is that it might become obsolete. The Social Security Administration is in the midst of a much broader effort to revamp its outdated occupational listings and the vocational grid it uses to evaluate whether someone with a disability can find other work. The Center on Budget and other experts fear the new approach could seriously harm disabled people, as it would presumably sweep away English proficiency and a variety of other considerations that are not physical or mental disabilities.
Linda Landry and Svetlana Uimenkova, senior attorneys with the Disability Law Center, noted in a comment that with such big changes on the horizon, fussing with the English rule is like “changing the wallpaper in a house with a flawed foundation, about to be demolished.”
It’s one of several cuts to Social Security Disability Insurance that President Donald Trump is pursuing as part of an overall assault on “welfare.” The push circumvents Congress with a series of regulations targeting food, health and housing benefits.
The federal government pays disability benefits worth about $1,200 per month to people with extensive employment histories who can’t continue working due to the onset of a severe illness or injury.
Part of the claims process can involve evaluating whether someone could switch to a new line of work that would accommodate their disability. The evaluation considers not just a person’s physical or mental impediments, but also their age, work history, education level, and the availability of suitable jobs.
The new rule, set for final publication in the coming months, eliminates the “inability to communicate in English” factor when evaluating a person’s education level. The administration says that non-English speakers are generally more successful than they used to be in the U.S. labor market, that they’re better educated than their lack of English implies, and that the criteria is used too much by people living in Puerto Rico.
Most disability claims are denied. The number filed each year, as well as overall caseloads, have been declining since 2013. But Republicans still say too many undeserving people get benefits.
“There has been, unfortunately, a lot of fraud,” Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), the top Republican on the House committee that oversees Social Security, told HuffPost.
For Republican policymakers, “fraud” is sometimes a colorful word for borderline cases they think should be judged more harshly. With Trump’s appointees in charge, changes that for years have germinated within the Social Security Administration are potentially coming to fruition. One is the English rule. Another measure would alter the so-called medical-vocational guidelines, which could have a major impact on benefit awards. The agency also wants to ramp up reviews of whether current claimants are still disabled.
“It’s important that the disability plan services those people that really are in need of it, and that are really in bad shape,” Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul told AARP last month.
Only 1% of all disability awards went to residents of Puerto Rico in 2016, but the territory accounted for almost one-third of benefits awarded partly on the basis of an inability to speak English ― a “seemingly disproportionate” amount, according to the Trump administration. Most Puerto Ricans speak Spanish, so the administration says it shouldn’t matter if someone there can’t speak English.
But nobody wins benefits solely because they can’t speak English; it’s considered alongside physical or mental disabilities in claimants who are at least 45 years old. Of the 2.5 million initial disability decisions in 2016, English proficiency was a factor in only 0.29%. Critics of the Trump administration’s change say it would be wrong to kill the language criteria over a subset of such a small number of claims in a single year.
“It would be arbitrary to change the rules for all applicants and beneficiaries because of the experience of such a small group,” the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said in a formal comment on a draft of the proposed rule. “In most parts of the United States, the inability to communicate in English poses a significant barrier to work for the older, unskilled, impaired individuals who would be affected by this proposed rule.”
The administration cited a 2015 Social Security inspector general report that found 244 instances of such awards from 2011 to 2013. The Trump administration said there were 777 such cases in 2016. Democrats and disability experts call the discrepancy in the number of cases over the years another problem with the rule.
When a federal agency writes a new regulation, it posts a draft on the Federal Register website and invites comments from stakeholders, then responds to the comments when it finalizes the rule. Since the disability changes have all been happening through regulation rather than legislation, the Register comments have been the main venue for debating the policy.
Congressional Democrats argue the comments themselves show why the administration should not finalize the rule. “Commenters included 157 national or regional organizations who oppose the proposal, and only one in support,” Democrats wrote in a comment letter led by Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Rep. Richard Neal (Mass.).
The lone supportive comment from an organization came from the Opportunity Solutions Project, a little-known conservative advocacy group that generally supports restrictions on social programs. “By itself, the inability to communicate in English is not a disability and, consequently, should not be considered a relevant factor within the disability determination process,” the group wrote.
Agencies have no obligation to heed comments. A source with knowledge of the process said the final version of the English rule wouldn’t be substantially different from the draft version first published last year.
One of the most frequent criticisms of the disability proposal is that it directly contradicts the administration’s position in another regulation: a Department of Homeland Security initiative that sits at the nexus of Trump’s efforts to stymie both welfare use and immigration.
In 2018, DHS updated its “public charge” rule disallowing legal immigrants who might wind up on welfare. One of the changes would allow the department to consider English proficiency, since “an inability to speak and understand English may adversely affect whether an alien can obtain employment.”
In other words, the Trump administration is saying in one regulation that lack of English proficiency presents a serious obstacle to gainful employment, and in another regulation that it doesn’t.
The final version of the DHS public charge rule, which was published last summer, even acknowledged the data that the Social Security Administration cited supporting its contrary position. But even though a lot of non-English speakers have jobs, DHS said, “such lower paying jobs may not denote the same level of self-sufficiency as jobs that may be held by an individual who [is] able to effectively communicate in English and who may be employed in a higher skilled, higher paying job.”
Another possible problem with the English rule is that it might become obsolete. The Social Security Administration is in the midst of a much broader effort to revamp its outdated occupational listings and the vocational grid it uses to evaluate whether someone with a disability can find other work. The Center on Budget and other experts fear the new approach could seriously harm disabled people, as it would presumably sweep away English proficiency and a variety of other considerations that are not physical or mental disabilities.
Linda Landry and Svetlana Uimenkova, senior attorneys with the Disability Law Center, noted in a comment that with such big changes on the horizon, fussing with the English rule is like “changing the wallpaper in a house with a flawed foundation, about to be demolished.”
Trump team finally releases billions in hurricane relief for Puerto Rico—with major strings attached
Hunter
Daily Kos Staff
Thursday January 16, 2020 · 11:10 AM PST
Donald Trump and his team have continued to withhold disaster relief funds from Puerto Rico for the hurricanes that hit the island in 2017, and a series of recent earthquakes that have further damaged homes and infrastructure. Trump has continued to express contempt for the American territory as well, claiming "corruption" as the reason for his instructions that Puerto Rico aid be delayed, reduced, or simply blocked outright.
The good news is that finally, at long last, the administration has been pressured into releasing $16 billion of $20 billion allocated by Congress for hurricane recovery. The bad news is that, yep: Again, Trump's team of white nationalists and government saboteurs are attaching their own conditions to the aid, conditions so onerous as to apparently be intended as further sabotage of the disaster recovery effort.
Among the supposed anti-"corruption" measures are a prohibition against paying the Puerto Rico minimum wage, $15 an hour, on the projects the federal money funds. The money also can't be used for the island's electrical grid—even though the money that was separately allocated for the electrical grid also is being held up by Team Trump. And the whole recovery effort will be supervised by the federal "fiscal control board" that the administration insists is an anti-corruption measure but Puerto Ricans themselves see as yet another thumb in the eye.
So it appears that even after Trump's team ran out of reasons to stall giving the same allocated disaster aid to Puerto Rico that Trump-supporting places like Texas got almost immediately, Donald's team is continuing to make sure the money is spent at as slow a pace as possible, and with as many restrictions as possible. The reasons for these acts can only be speculated on but are not, in the slightest, hard to imagine.
The good news is that finally, at long last, the administration has been pressured into releasing $16 billion of $20 billion allocated by Congress for hurricane recovery. The bad news is that, yep: Again, Trump's team of white nationalists and government saboteurs are attaching their own conditions to the aid, conditions so onerous as to apparently be intended as further sabotage of the disaster recovery effort.
Among the supposed anti-"corruption" measures are a prohibition against paying the Puerto Rico minimum wage, $15 an hour, on the projects the federal money funds. The money also can't be used for the island's electrical grid—even though the money that was separately allocated for the electrical grid also is being held up by Team Trump. And the whole recovery effort will be supervised by the federal "fiscal control board" that the administration insists is an anti-corruption measure but Puerto Ricans themselves see as yet another thumb in the eye.
So it appears that even after Trump's team ran out of reasons to stall giving the same allocated disaster aid to Puerto Rico that Trump-supporting places like Texas got almost immediately, Donald's team is continuing to make sure the money is spent at as slow a pace as possible, and with as many restrictions as possible. The reasons for these acts can only be speculated on but are not, in the slightest, hard to imagine.
Puerto Ricans left homeless after biggest quake in century
By DANICA COTO - ap
1/7/2020
GUANICA, Puerto Rico (AP) — Cars, cots and plastic chairs became temporary beds for hundreds of families who lost their homes in southwest Puerto Rico as a flurry of earthquakes struck the island, one of them the strongest in a century.
The magnitude 6.4 quake that struck before dawn on Tuesday killed one person, injured nine others and knocked out power across the U.S. territory, and more than half a million Puerto Ricans remained without electricity early Wednesday.
In addition, hundreds of people were staying in government shelters in the island’s southwest region as U.S. President Donald Trump declared an emergency and Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez activated the National Guard.
The hardest hit municipality was the southwest coastal town of Guánica. More than 200 people had taken shelter in a gymnasium after a quake on Monday, only for the latest shake to damage that structure — forcing them to sleep outside.
Among them was 80-year-old Lupita Martínez, who sat in the dusty parking lot with her 96-year-old husband by her side. He was sleeping in a makeshift bed, a dark blue coat covering him.
“There’s no power. There’s no water. There is nothing. This is horrible,” Martínez said.
The couple was alone, lamenting that their caretaker had disappeared and was not answering their calls. Like many Puerto Ricans affected by the quake, they had children in the U.S. mainland who urged them to move there, at least until the earth stops shaking.
While officials said it was too early to estimate the total damage caused by the string of quakes that began the night of Dec. 28, they said hundreds of homes and businesses in the southwest region were damaged or destroyed. Just in Guánica, a town of roughly 15,000 people, nearly 150 homes were affected by the quake, along with three schools, including one three-story structure whose first two floors were completely flattened.
In Guánica itself, “We are confronting a crisis worse than Hurricane Maria,” said Mayor Santos Seda, referring to the 2017 storm that devastated the island . “I am asking for empathy from the federal government.”
He said officials believe the homes of 700 families in his municipality are close to collapsing.
Tuesday’s quake was the strongest to hit Puerto Rico since October 1918, when a magnitude 7.3 quake struck near the island’s northwest coast, unleashing a tsunami and killing 116 people.
More than 950 quakes and aftershocks have been recorded in the area of Tuesday night’s event since Dec. 31, though most were too weak to be felt, according to U.S. Geologic Survey.
The USGS said that while it’s virtually certain there will be many aftershocks in the next week, the chance of a magnitude 6 quake -- similar to Tuesday’s -- or stronger is around 22 percent.
In Guánica, some people dragged mattresses outside their homes or set up small tents.
Authorities were trying to figure out where to shelter them all as they handed out blankets, food and water to families gathered at the gymnasium for a second night in a row. Many had their belongings in large garbage bags as they sat haphazardly on unstable plastic chairs. Some slept. Others cradled their dogs and many simply stared listlessly into the distance. One elderly man spent an entire day in his wheelchair, refusing to lay down on a cot.
Meanwhile, a handful of people slept in their cars, in chairs or on the ground as cots ran out.
“Now I’m afraid of the house,” said 49-year-old Lourdes Guilbe as she wiped away tears and confided that she felt overwhelmed caring for the nearly dozen relatives gathered around her, including her more than 90-year-old grandfather, who sat in a wheelchair wearing green pajamas and socks.
Guilbe said her home is cracked and her daughter’s home collapsed, so they weren’t sure where they would live in upcoming days.
Psychologists met with Guilbe and dozens of other people affected by the earthquakes, going door-to-door on Monday in affected neighborhoods and then visiting people in shelters on Tuesday. Among them was Dayleen Ortiz, who set up a speaker on the roof of her car to blast uplifting salsa music and provided crayons and paper to children and urged adults to shake their fears.
“There is a lot of uncertainty,” she said. “We don’t know if this is going to continue.”
One young girl tapped Ortiz on her leg repeatedly: “I want to play beautician,” she said.
Ortiz dug behind cases of water bottles, chairs and blankets in her car and produced eight small new nail polishes and the girl smiled wide. It’s a trick the psychologist learned to entertain children after Hurricane Maria hit, causing an estimated 2,975 deaths and more than $100 billion in estimated damage.
Reconstruction has been slow, and the earthquake was the newest blow to an island where thousands of people have been living under a blue tarps since the hurricane and the power grid remains fragile.
“I can’t stand this,”said 64-year-old Zenaida Rodríguez as she sat under a tree and the ground again rumbled. “Did you feel that?”
The magnitude 6.4 quake that struck before dawn on Tuesday killed one person, injured nine others and knocked out power across the U.S. territory, and more than half a million Puerto Ricans remained without electricity early Wednesday.
In addition, hundreds of people were staying in government shelters in the island’s southwest region as U.S. President Donald Trump declared an emergency and Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez activated the National Guard.
The hardest hit municipality was the southwest coastal town of Guánica. More than 200 people had taken shelter in a gymnasium after a quake on Monday, only for the latest shake to damage that structure — forcing them to sleep outside.
Among them was 80-year-old Lupita Martínez, who sat in the dusty parking lot with her 96-year-old husband by her side. He was sleeping in a makeshift bed, a dark blue coat covering him.
“There’s no power. There’s no water. There is nothing. This is horrible,” Martínez said.
The couple was alone, lamenting that their caretaker had disappeared and was not answering their calls. Like many Puerto Ricans affected by the quake, they had children in the U.S. mainland who urged them to move there, at least until the earth stops shaking.
While officials said it was too early to estimate the total damage caused by the string of quakes that began the night of Dec. 28, they said hundreds of homes and businesses in the southwest region were damaged or destroyed. Just in Guánica, a town of roughly 15,000 people, nearly 150 homes were affected by the quake, along with three schools, including one three-story structure whose first two floors were completely flattened.
In Guánica itself, “We are confronting a crisis worse than Hurricane Maria,” said Mayor Santos Seda, referring to the 2017 storm that devastated the island . “I am asking for empathy from the federal government.”
He said officials believe the homes of 700 families in his municipality are close to collapsing.
Tuesday’s quake was the strongest to hit Puerto Rico since October 1918, when a magnitude 7.3 quake struck near the island’s northwest coast, unleashing a tsunami and killing 116 people.
More than 950 quakes and aftershocks have been recorded in the area of Tuesday night’s event since Dec. 31, though most were too weak to be felt, according to U.S. Geologic Survey.
The USGS said that while it’s virtually certain there will be many aftershocks in the next week, the chance of a magnitude 6 quake -- similar to Tuesday’s -- or stronger is around 22 percent.
In Guánica, some people dragged mattresses outside their homes or set up small tents.
Authorities were trying to figure out where to shelter them all as they handed out blankets, food and water to families gathered at the gymnasium for a second night in a row. Many had their belongings in large garbage bags as they sat haphazardly on unstable plastic chairs. Some slept. Others cradled their dogs and many simply stared listlessly into the distance. One elderly man spent an entire day in his wheelchair, refusing to lay down on a cot.
Meanwhile, a handful of people slept in their cars, in chairs or on the ground as cots ran out.
“Now I’m afraid of the house,” said 49-year-old Lourdes Guilbe as she wiped away tears and confided that she felt overwhelmed caring for the nearly dozen relatives gathered around her, including her more than 90-year-old grandfather, who sat in a wheelchair wearing green pajamas and socks.
Guilbe said her home is cracked and her daughter’s home collapsed, so they weren’t sure where they would live in upcoming days.
Psychologists met with Guilbe and dozens of other people affected by the earthquakes, going door-to-door on Monday in affected neighborhoods and then visiting people in shelters on Tuesday. Among them was Dayleen Ortiz, who set up a speaker on the roof of her car to blast uplifting salsa music and provided crayons and paper to children and urged adults to shake their fears.
“There is a lot of uncertainty,” she said. “We don’t know if this is going to continue.”
One young girl tapped Ortiz on her leg repeatedly: “I want to play beautician,” she said.
Ortiz dug behind cases of water bottles, chairs and blankets in her car and produced eight small new nail polishes and the girl smiled wide. It’s a trick the psychologist learned to entertain children after Hurricane Maria hit, causing an estimated 2,975 deaths and more than $100 billion in estimated damage.
Reconstruction has been slow, and the earthquake was the newest blow to an island where thousands of people have been living under a blue tarps since the hurricane and the power grid remains fragile.
“I can’t stand this,”said 64-year-old Zenaida Rodríguez as she sat under a tree and the ground again rumbled. “Did you feel that?”
Puerto Rico to approve cockfighting, defy federal ban
By DANICA COTO - ap
12/18/19
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Puerto Rico will defy the U.S. government and approve a law to keep cockfighting alive in a bid to protect a 400-year-old tradition practiced across the island despite a federal ban that goes into effect this week, officials told The Associated Press on Tuesday night.
The move brought cautious rejoicing in the cockfighting business despite concerns that the U.S. territory is trying to override a federal law that President Donald Trump signed a year ago.
“We are certainly challenging a federal law. We know what that implies,” Rep. Gabriel Rodríguez Aguiló, who co-authored the bill, told the AP.
He said that Gov. Wanda Vázquez was scheduled to sign the bill Wednesday morning and that he expected the fight to end up in federal court.
As word spread, those in the cockfighting industry cheered the news.
“There’s going to be work!” exclaimed Domingo Ruiz, who owns more than 30 cocks and has spent more than half a century in the business. “We’re going to keep the fight alive.”
Cockfighting generates an estimated $18 million a year and employs some 27,000 people, according to the bill approved by Puerto Rico’s House and Senate.
Puerto Rico has 71 cockfighting establishments in 45 municipalities licensed by the island’s Department of Sports and Recreation, said Secretary Adriana Sánchez. She defended the cockfighting tradition and contended the U.S. government banned fights for economic and not animal welfare reasons.
“Their instinct is to fight,” she said of people in the business. “The people who dedicate themselves care for them and train them.”
Animal rights activists have long pushed to end cockfights in U.S. territories, saying they are cruel and noting they are illegal in all 50 U.S. states.
Wayne Pacelle, founder of the Washington- based Animal Wellness Action, said he doesn’t believe the statistics on Puerto Rico cockfighting.
“They are widely exaggerating the economic value,” he said. “Watching animals slash each other just for human entertainment and gambling is not judged as a legitimate enterprise by mainstream people.”
The measure says it is legal for Puerto Rico to host cockfights as long as people don’t export or import cocks or any goods or services related to cockfighting. The latter actions would violate the federal law, based on how Puerto Rico officials interpret it.
“It remains to be seen whether that’s how federal authorities understand it,” said Rep. Luis Vega Ramos.
Vega sought unsuccessfully to amend the measure to add authorization for local officials to not cooperate with federal agents in prosecuting people for cockfighting. But several municipalities, including the capital of San Juan, have authorized municipal police not to crack down on cockfighting.
The move brought cautious rejoicing in the cockfighting business despite concerns that the U.S. territory is trying to override a federal law that President Donald Trump signed a year ago.
“We are certainly challenging a federal law. We know what that implies,” Rep. Gabriel Rodríguez Aguiló, who co-authored the bill, told the AP.
He said that Gov. Wanda Vázquez was scheduled to sign the bill Wednesday morning and that he expected the fight to end up in federal court.
As word spread, those in the cockfighting industry cheered the news.
“There’s going to be work!” exclaimed Domingo Ruiz, who owns more than 30 cocks and has spent more than half a century in the business. “We’re going to keep the fight alive.”
Cockfighting generates an estimated $18 million a year and employs some 27,000 people, according to the bill approved by Puerto Rico’s House and Senate.
Puerto Rico has 71 cockfighting establishments in 45 municipalities licensed by the island’s Department of Sports and Recreation, said Secretary Adriana Sánchez. She defended the cockfighting tradition and contended the U.S. government banned fights for economic and not animal welfare reasons.
“Their instinct is to fight,” she said of people in the business. “The people who dedicate themselves care for them and train them.”
Animal rights activists have long pushed to end cockfights in U.S. territories, saying they are cruel and noting they are illegal in all 50 U.S. states.
Wayne Pacelle, founder of the Washington- based Animal Wellness Action, said he doesn’t believe the statistics on Puerto Rico cockfighting.
“They are widely exaggerating the economic value,” he said. “Watching animals slash each other just for human entertainment and gambling is not judged as a legitimate enterprise by mainstream people.”
The measure says it is legal for Puerto Rico to host cockfights as long as people don’t export or import cocks or any goods or services related to cockfighting. The latter actions would violate the federal law, based on how Puerto Rico officials interpret it.
“It remains to be seen whether that’s how federal authorities understand it,” said Rep. Luis Vega Ramos.
Vega sought unsuccessfully to amend the measure to add authorization for local officials to not cooperate with federal agents in prosecuting people for cockfighting. But several municipalities, including the capital of San Juan, have authorized municipal police not to crack down on cockfighting.
now he is letting americans die!!!
Trump intervened to cut Puerto Rico's Medicaid funding in spending bill: report
BY JUSTIN WISE - the hill
12/17/19 07:14 PM EST
President Trump reportedly intervened to slash billions of dollars worth of Medicaid funding the federal government was preparing to allocate to Puerto Rico as part of a new $1.4 trillion spending package.
Politico, citing four sources familiar with the situation, reported on Tuesday that lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Finance Committee had backed legislation that would send about $12 billion in Medicaid funds to Puerto Rico over a four-year time frame. But the president took issue with the amount, saying it was too much, three sources told the news outlet.
Lawmakers on Monday then unveiled a spending package allocating up to $5.7 billion in Medicaid funds for the island over two years. The House overwhelmingly passed the spending package the legislation was included in on Tuesday. It now heads to the Senate.
A White House spokesperson told Politico that the Puerto Rico Medicaid funding agreement was a "win for President Trump and the American people."
Chase Jennings, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, also told the news outlet that the final deal represented the administration's commitment to "properly prioritizing U.S. taxpayer dollars."
"With the historical waste we have faced in Puerto Rico, additional funding was not needed or fiscally responsible," Jennings said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for further comment from The Hill.
Puerto Rico's Medicaid program, which cover more than 1 million low-income people, has reportedly been relying on short-term funding extensions since the fall of this year. Its latest series of funding installments is set to expire on Friday.
Congress has meanwhile been pushing for stronger measures to block inappropriate spending and monitor the territory's contracting practices in the wake of a corruption scandal involving a former Puerto Rican health administration official.
Politico noted that funding negotiations for the U.S. territory have been especially fraught in light of political turmoil and the aftermath of destructive hurricanes. Trump has repeatedly targeted the territory, calling it one of the "most corrupt places on earth" in August. He has also continually denounced its politicians as "crooked" and "incompetent."
The president came under widespread criticism in 2017 for his administration's response efforts to Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island.
Puerto Rican officials on Tuesday praised the latest funding deal. Jennifer Storipan, executive director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, said that the territory would "continue to work hand-in-hand with the federal government to achieve a longer-term funding mechanism that provides stable healthcare to the people of Puerto Rico."
Politico, citing four sources familiar with the situation, reported on Tuesday that lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Finance Committee had backed legislation that would send about $12 billion in Medicaid funds to Puerto Rico over a four-year time frame. But the president took issue with the amount, saying it was too much, three sources told the news outlet.
Lawmakers on Monday then unveiled a spending package allocating up to $5.7 billion in Medicaid funds for the island over two years. The House overwhelmingly passed the spending package the legislation was included in on Tuesday. It now heads to the Senate.
A White House spokesperson told Politico that the Puerto Rico Medicaid funding agreement was a "win for President Trump and the American people."
Chase Jennings, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, also told the news outlet that the final deal represented the administration's commitment to "properly prioritizing U.S. taxpayer dollars."
"With the historical waste we have faced in Puerto Rico, additional funding was not needed or fiscally responsible," Jennings said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for further comment from The Hill.
Puerto Rico's Medicaid program, which cover more than 1 million low-income people, has reportedly been relying on short-term funding extensions since the fall of this year. Its latest series of funding installments is set to expire on Friday.
Congress has meanwhile been pushing for stronger measures to block inappropriate spending and monitor the territory's contracting practices in the wake of a corruption scandal involving a former Puerto Rican health administration official.
Politico noted that funding negotiations for the U.S. territory have been especially fraught in light of political turmoil and the aftermath of destructive hurricanes. Trump has repeatedly targeted the territory, calling it one of the "most corrupt places on earth" in August. He has also continually denounced its politicians as "crooked" and "incompetent."
The president came under widespread criticism in 2017 for his administration's response efforts to Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island.
Puerto Rican officials on Tuesday praised the latest funding deal. Jennifer Storipan, executive director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, said that the territory would "continue to work hand-in-hand with the federal government to achieve a longer-term funding mechanism that provides stable healthcare to the people of Puerto Rico."
HUD WITHHOLDS $18 BILLION IN DISASTER AID FROM PUERTO RICO, LAWMAKERS THREATEN TO FIGHT BACK BY DENYING AGENCY FUNDS
BY RAMSEY TOUCHBERRY - newsweek
ON 12/6/19 AT 6:00 AM EST
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is withholding an additional $8 billion in unmet needs disaster relief from Puerto Rico—two times the amount the department is already illegally delaying—and Congress wants answers.
The holdup of the additional money, which lawmakers recently discovered, is further stalling the island nation's ability to recover from Hurricanes Maria and Irma in 2017 and to prepare for future natural disasters.
In total, HUD is delaying the release of two tranches of aid worth roughly $18 billion that Congress appropriated for the U.S. territory. The money is a mixture of mitigation and unmet needs funds designed to upgrade infrastructure and help residents better embrace the effects of Mother Nature, such as hardening electrical grids or rebuilding homes, businesses and bridges in a stronger manner. But HUD fears the funds could fall victim to corruption.
As a result, Democrats are contemplating whether Congress may need to explore more "drastic moves" to force HUD to release one portion of the money and to provide answers for the other. Lawmakers are considering suing the agency or—the more likely scenario—using the appropriations process to defund a portion of the federal agency.
The delays, which lawmakers chalk up to a political game, have one prominent local official furious.
"It puts the Puerto Rican people at the mercy of the next hurricane," San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz told Newsweek in an interview. "It puts the Puerto Rican people at the mercy of inefficient, bureaucratic idiots that really are doing this out of spite. It's vengeful behavior simply because the federal government and the Trump administration could not get it done."
HUD has illegally withheld—which the department has acknowledged—roughly $10 billion in mitigation funds from Puerto Rico for 3 months, money that is meant to beef up its infrastructure in anticipation of future devastating storms.
The two aid portions are part of HUD's Community Development Block Grant – Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) Program. Department officials conceded to lawmakers in October they were singling out Puerto Rico and illegally withholding a batch of congressionally appropriated money from 2018—$8.3 billion for mitigation projects—by not providing the territory with guidelines to apply for the grant money and submit an action plan. The HUD officials testifying said they ignored the mandated September 4 deadline lawmakers included in a June supplemental bill over fears the money would succumb to corruption and be misused by Puerto Rican officials. Once approved and a grant agreement is signed, Puerto Rico could begin receiving the money.
Thursday marked more than three months since HUD was supposed to begin the process of allowing Puerto Rico to apply for one of the withheld aid batches—about $10 billion—and 22 months since the funds were signed into law.
Rep. David Price (D-NC) accused HUD of "singling out Puerto Rico once again" with the second tranche of delayed money, which was on the brink of being delivered to Puerto Rico until the department in recent weeks suddenly chose not to approve the island nation's grant agreement. An aide for Price, who chairs an appropriations subcommittee that oversees HUD, said they've been notified by HUD that it signed the grant agreements for each state receiving the same tranche of funds—minus the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
Price said he's been offered no explanation by HUD as to why the grant agreements for the two U.S. territories were not signed, despite HUD giving their action plans the green light. The move has left him to wonder whether the White House may have played a role. The HUD officials who testified to Price in October said they would allow Puerto Rico to apply for the first tranche of illegally delayed aid "very soon" and claimed the decision to withhold it was based on HUD's overall concerns about corruption—not a directive from Secretary Ben Carson.
After the publication of this story, HUD provided the following statement, attributed to an unnamed department spokesman. The department noted that Puerto Rico has only spent a fraction of the funds they already have access to.
"The Administration has taken historic action to help the people of Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Maria. Given the Puerto Rican government's history of financial mismanagement, corruption, and other abuses; we must ensure that any HUD assistance provided helps those on the island who need it the most. This process must be handled in a prudent manner with strong financial controls to mitigate the risk to Federal taxpayers. In addition, it is worth noting that Puerto Rico already has access to $1.5 billion and has so far only spent $5.8 million—less than one percent of those funds."
HUD did not address Newsweek's questions about who determined the two tranches of aid should be withheld or why Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands' grant agreements were not signed. The White House did not respond for comment.
"They're asking for it, wouldn't you say?" Price told Newsweek in an interview on the prospects of defunding a portion of the agency. He chairs the appropriations subcommittee responsible for overseeing HUD.
"What the legal options might be, we need to consider. But what we do know, appropriations bills do offer leverage," Price said. "The best approach is not to have this problem. But if you do have it, you write a deadline into the bill. If that's ignored, then you start thinking about more drastic moves, like withholding funds for something HUD wants."
In October, the HUD officials would only go so far as to say Puerto Rico could begin applying for the funds "very soon."
"The other day, I had a mayor call me and ask, 'could we sue the federal government for their inefficiency, bureaucracy and ineffectiveness?'" Cruz claimed.
The corruption argument by HUD and Republicans is moot, Democrats like Price have said, because Congress placed safeguards that require the money to be monitored by HUD as it's dispersed. HUD's Office of Inspector General also pledged to conduct audits as additional oversight.
"I think all of us who are scratching our heads over this are wondering whether maybe all this traces back to some kind of order from the top or desire to please the president. We just don't know," Price said.
Throughout his tenure, Trump has made false claims about the U.S. territory, such as inflating the amount of hurricane relief aid and refusing to acknowledge the high death toll of Hurricane Maria. He's also feuded with Puerto Rican leaders, like Cruz and ousted Governor Ricardo Roselló.
And Price and his Democratic colleagues aren't the only ones who are casting doubts on HUD's motives.
"It's blatant racism," Cruz, San Juan's mayor, told Newsweek. "It's blatant discrimination."
She doesn't like the way HUD handles its disaster block grant program to begin with, much less when the department singles out Puerto Rico.
Cruz said she feels the entire system is designed to help big businesses and powerful people profit from the misfortunes of those whose communities were devastated by tragedy, rather than operate as a system that aims to weed out corruption. She said local governments are required to choose from a certain list of contractors or companies to complete the major projects that they outline in action plans for HUD, which are required in order to receive the federal grants.
"For anyone from the federal government to be talking about corruption with the most corrupt president of the United States sitting on a chair an inch away from being impeached," Cruz added, "it's really the pot calling the kettle black."
Prior arguments show that HUD contends that recent events are why, in part, they need to keep a close eye on such a large amount of money. The department maintains financial monitors on the island and has reiterated its concerns over Puerto Rico's recent political unrest with Roselló's ouster and a debt crisis that has for years handicapped the local government.
Cruz doesn't buy HUD's concerns, however, citing the safeguards that Congress put in place to have the aid routinely monitored for fraud or waste.
When aid is withheld from an island nation that's been devastated by hurricane after hurricane year after year, Cruz explained, those who don't live in Puerto Rico fail to realize the real-world effects that will have on local communities. And when HUD officials continue to offer few or no explanations, she feels it only hinders their preparation for the next Hurricane Maria.
"People die because of the federal government's and Trump's ineffectiveness," the mayor said. "People continue to die."[...]
RELATED: HUD Secretary Ben Carson has been illegally withholding aid to Puerto Rico for months
The holdup of the additional money, which lawmakers recently discovered, is further stalling the island nation's ability to recover from Hurricanes Maria and Irma in 2017 and to prepare for future natural disasters.
In total, HUD is delaying the release of two tranches of aid worth roughly $18 billion that Congress appropriated for the U.S. territory. The money is a mixture of mitigation and unmet needs funds designed to upgrade infrastructure and help residents better embrace the effects of Mother Nature, such as hardening electrical grids or rebuilding homes, businesses and bridges in a stronger manner. But HUD fears the funds could fall victim to corruption.
As a result, Democrats are contemplating whether Congress may need to explore more "drastic moves" to force HUD to release one portion of the money and to provide answers for the other. Lawmakers are considering suing the agency or—the more likely scenario—using the appropriations process to defund a portion of the federal agency.
The delays, which lawmakers chalk up to a political game, have one prominent local official furious.
"It puts the Puerto Rican people at the mercy of the next hurricane," San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz told Newsweek in an interview. "It puts the Puerto Rican people at the mercy of inefficient, bureaucratic idiots that really are doing this out of spite. It's vengeful behavior simply because the federal government and the Trump administration could not get it done."
HUD has illegally withheld—which the department has acknowledged—roughly $10 billion in mitigation funds from Puerto Rico for 3 months, money that is meant to beef up its infrastructure in anticipation of future devastating storms.
The two aid portions are part of HUD's Community Development Block Grant – Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) Program. Department officials conceded to lawmakers in October they were singling out Puerto Rico and illegally withholding a batch of congressionally appropriated money from 2018—$8.3 billion for mitigation projects—by not providing the territory with guidelines to apply for the grant money and submit an action plan. The HUD officials testifying said they ignored the mandated September 4 deadline lawmakers included in a June supplemental bill over fears the money would succumb to corruption and be misused by Puerto Rican officials. Once approved and a grant agreement is signed, Puerto Rico could begin receiving the money.
Thursday marked more than three months since HUD was supposed to begin the process of allowing Puerto Rico to apply for one of the withheld aid batches—about $10 billion—and 22 months since the funds were signed into law.
Rep. David Price (D-NC) accused HUD of "singling out Puerto Rico once again" with the second tranche of delayed money, which was on the brink of being delivered to Puerto Rico until the department in recent weeks suddenly chose not to approve the island nation's grant agreement. An aide for Price, who chairs an appropriations subcommittee that oversees HUD, said they've been notified by HUD that it signed the grant agreements for each state receiving the same tranche of funds—minus the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
Price said he's been offered no explanation by HUD as to why the grant agreements for the two U.S. territories were not signed, despite HUD giving their action plans the green light. The move has left him to wonder whether the White House may have played a role. The HUD officials who testified to Price in October said they would allow Puerto Rico to apply for the first tranche of illegally delayed aid "very soon" and claimed the decision to withhold it was based on HUD's overall concerns about corruption—not a directive from Secretary Ben Carson.
After the publication of this story, HUD provided the following statement, attributed to an unnamed department spokesman. The department noted that Puerto Rico has only spent a fraction of the funds they already have access to.
"The Administration has taken historic action to help the people of Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Maria. Given the Puerto Rican government's history of financial mismanagement, corruption, and other abuses; we must ensure that any HUD assistance provided helps those on the island who need it the most. This process must be handled in a prudent manner with strong financial controls to mitigate the risk to Federal taxpayers. In addition, it is worth noting that Puerto Rico already has access to $1.5 billion and has so far only spent $5.8 million—less than one percent of those funds."
HUD did not address Newsweek's questions about who determined the two tranches of aid should be withheld or why Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands' grant agreements were not signed. The White House did not respond for comment.
"They're asking for it, wouldn't you say?" Price told Newsweek in an interview on the prospects of defunding a portion of the agency. He chairs the appropriations subcommittee responsible for overseeing HUD.
"What the legal options might be, we need to consider. But what we do know, appropriations bills do offer leverage," Price said. "The best approach is not to have this problem. But if you do have it, you write a deadline into the bill. If that's ignored, then you start thinking about more drastic moves, like withholding funds for something HUD wants."
In October, the HUD officials would only go so far as to say Puerto Rico could begin applying for the funds "very soon."
"The other day, I had a mayor call me and ask, 'could we sue the federal government for their inefficiency, bureaucracy and ineffectiveness?'" Cruz claimed.
The corruption argument by HUD and Republicans is moot, Democrats like Price have said, because Congress placed safeguards that require the money to be monitored by HUD as it's dispersed. HUD's Office of Inspector General also pledged to conduct audits as additional oversight.
"I think all of us who are scratching our heads over this are wondering whether maybe all this traces back to some kind of order from the top or desire to please the president. We just don't know," Price said.
Throughout his tenure, Trump has made false claims about the U.S. territory, such as inflating the amount of hurricane relief aid and refusing to acknowledge the high death toll of Hurricane Maria. He's also feuded with Puerto Rican leaders, like Cruz and ousted Governor Ricardo Roselló.
And Price and his Democratic colleagues aren't the only ones who are casting doubts on HUD's motives.
"It's blatant racism," Cruz, San Juan's mayor, told Newsweek. "It's blatant discrimination."
She doesn't like the way HUD handles its disaster block grant program to begin with, much less when the department singles out Puerto Rico.
Cruz said she feels the entire system is designed to help big businesses and powerful people profit from the misfortunes of those whose communities were devastated by tragedy, rather than operate as a system that aims to weed out corruption. She said local governments are required to choose from a certain list of contractors or companies to complete the major projects that they outline in action plans for HUD, which are required in order to receive the federal grants.
"For anyone from the federal government to be talking about corruption with the most corrupt president of the United States sitting on a chair an inch away from being impeached," Cruz added, "it's really the pot calling the kettle black."
Prior arguments show that HUD contends that recent events are why, in part, they need to keep a close eye on such a large amount of money. The department maintains financial monitors on the island and has reiterated its concerns over Puerto Rico's recent political unrest with Roselló's ouster and a debt crisis that has for years handicapped the local government.
Cruz doesn't buy HUD's concerns, however, citing the safeguards that Congress put in place to have the aid routinely monitored for fraud or waste.
When aid is withheld from an island nation that's been devastated by hurricane after hurricane year after year, Cruz explained, those who don't live in Puerto Rico fail to realize the real-world effects that will have on local communities. And when HUD officials continue to offer few or no explanations, she feels it only hinders their preparation for the next Hurricane Maria.
"People die because of the federal government's and Trump's ineffectiveness," the mayor said. "People continue to die."[...]
RELATED: HUD Secretary Ben Carson has been illegally withholding aid to Puerto Rico for months
La Borinqueña Inspires the “Ricanstruction” of Puerto Rico
puerto rico report
Posted November 18, 2019
Comic strips have a history of activism, and Puerto Rico has added to that history with a superhero called La Borinqueña. Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, the creator of the series, received the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award at Comic-Con, a major conference for fans and professionals in the comic world. La Borinqueña’s costume was displayed at the Smithsonian Institution’s superhero exhibit, and the first installment of her story remains on permanent display at the National Museum of American History. Miranda-Rodriguez also served as the keynote speaker at the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’s Latinx Heritage Month event.
La Borinqueña is the superhero alto ego of a Brooklyn geology student, Marisol, who visits Puerto Rico to study the Island’s caves. In the course of her studies, she meets up with the spirits of ancient Taino deities and is granted super powers through the use of ancient crystals. In the original series, there is a lot of focus on educating readers on aspects of Puerto Rican culture.
La Borinqueña’s next adventure is to join other members of The Justice League in an anthology of stories and art from multiple authors and artists, Ricanstruction: Reminiscing & Rebuilding Puerto Rico. Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman join her in this anthology. Sales have raised about $250,000 for the rebuilding of Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.
Miranda-Rodriguez is using the proceeds to fund grants to grass-roots organizations in Puerto Rico. “La Borinqueña is a reflection of Puerto Rican’s resilience and strength,” he said. “She is also a reminder to all of us here in the U.S. not to forget Puerto Rico and her U.S. citizens. Each and every one of us can show the world and ourselves that we have the power to help the island rebuild. We can, and we will be part of the Ricanstruction of Puerto Rico.”
La Borinqueña is the superhero alto ego of a Brooklyn geology student, Marisol, who visits Puerto Rico to study the Island’s caves. In the course of her studies, she meets up with the spirits of ancient Taino deities and is granted super powers through the use of ancient crystals. In the original series, there is a lot of focus on educating readers on aspects of Puerto Rican culture.
La Borinqueña’s next adventure is to join other members of The Justice League in an anthology of stories and art from multiple authors and artists, Ricanstruction: Reminiscing & Rebuilding Puerto Rico. Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman join her in this anthology. Sales have raised about $250,000 for the rebuilding of Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.
Miranda-Rodriguez is using the proceeds to fund grants to grass-roots organizations in Puerto Rico. “La Borinqueña is a reflection of Puerto Rican’s resilience and strength,” he said. “She is also a reminder to all of us here in the U.S. not to forget Puerto Rico and her U.S. citizens. Each and every one of us can show the world and ourselves that we have the power to help the island rebuild. We can, and we will be part of the Ricanstruction of Puerto Rico.”
The Economics of Statehood
PUERTO RICO REPORT
Posted November 13, 2019
In the course of U.S. history, thirty-two territories have transitioned to become States of the Union, and it is easy to forget that all of them had anti-statehood factions.
In Hawaii, where 90% of registered voters turned out for the statehood vote and the results were seventeen to one in favor of statehood, anti-statehood forces mostly worried about Communism taking over in Hawaii if it became a state.
Alaska’s anti-statehood faction was concerned that being a state would be too expensive. Arizona’s statehood movement was tangled up with the movement for women’s suffrage to the point of widespread confusion.
But anti-statehood arguments for the states of the 20th century, the 19th century, and even the earliest states didn’t dwell on the possible costs to the United States. Discussions of statehood didn’t ask, “Can the U.S. afford Colorado?” or “How much will Wisconsin take from my pocket?”
And yet discussions of Puerto Rico statehood often bring up precisely these questions.
“Making Puerto Rico the 51st state would only add another mass of people who want to live on welfare,” one recent comment ran. “We don’t need another money pit.” This kind of remark is based on some assumptions. The facts are different.
Puerto Rico is not a liability
In 2014, the Government Accountability Office prepared a report estimating that Puerto Rico as a state could receive $5 to $10 billion more from federal programs than it does as a territory. The GAO figured that Puerto Rico as a state might bring in as much as $2.3 billion in additional federal taxes from individuals and $9.3 billion in corporate taxes. The report included a great deal of uncertainty, since it rested on a number of assumptions about what might happen in the future.
However, using the best possible data and methodology, the GAO provided data that does not support a claim that Puerto Rico would cost the federal government much more as a state than as a territory.
Territories, on the other hand, inevitably bring in less revenue than states. Hawaii’s real personal income increased at a rate of 4% per year in the transition from territory to State. Oregon’s population tripled in its first 20 years of statehood. The new state of Michigan had such an economic boom that it became a bubble — which burst. It took a decade to rebuild the economy, but it never fell to pre-statehood levels. Each State has its own story, but every one shows that statehood brings prosperity.
A prosperous state of Puerto Rico will certainly bring in more money for the federal government than an impoverished territory of Puerto Rico.
The United States is already responsible for Puerto Rico
Comments at news sites and in social media sometimes show an entirely un-American spirit, replacing “Give me your poor…” with “Don’t ask me to help.” But they also imply that the United States would become responsible for Puerto Rico if the Island became a State.
In fact, the United States is already responsible for Puerto Rico. The United States owns Puerto Rico. No other nation bears any responsibility for Puerto Rico.
Nearly half the population of Puerto Rico lives in poverty, compared with 12.3% of the U.S. citizens living in the States. The federal government has the legal right to treat territories differently from States, so there would be some additional costs when Puerto Rico becomes a State. However, the inequality of U.S. citizens living in Puerto Rico is already America’s problem.
Puerto Ricans can already live in a state
Since people born in Puerto Rico can move to a State just as easily as people born in a State can move to any other State, one solution to the inequity in Puerto Rico is to move to a State. Upon settling in Florida or South Carolina or Vermont, a U.S. citizen from Puerto Rico immediately becomes eligible for all the benefits of living in a State.
Public education, publicly funded healthcare, public nutrition assistance, and all other federal and State welfare programs are readily available for anyone willing to leave Puerto Rico for the mainland.
There are more than 5 million people of Puerto Rican descent living in the States, and about 3.2 million living in Puerto Rico. 8% of Puerto Ricans living in States rely on public assistance. That means that 92% do not. This does not support the idea that Puerto Ricans are waiting eagerly to “live on welfare.”
The dwindling population of Puerto Rico is an economic problem for the Island. But it shows that Puerto Ricans already have the option of accepting more from the federal government, if they choose to move. As a State, Puerto Rico will probably see population growth (as other territories have, when they became States). Until then, the costs of supporting people who need help can be shifted to the States.
The United States has never required territories to become solvent before becoming States. Territories have become States when they were at war, during droughts, and in the midst of financial crises. The idea that poverty makes a territory unsuitable for statehood is a misconception.
In Hawaii, where 90% of registered voters turned out for the statehood vote and the results were seventeen to one in favor of statehood, anti-statehood forces mostly worried about Communism taking over in Hawaii if it became a state.
Alaska’s anti-statehood faction was concerned that being a state would be too expensive. Arizona’s statehood movement was tangled up with the movement for women’s suffrage to the point of widespread confusion.
But anti-statehood arguments for the states of the 20th century, the 19th century, and even the earliest states didn’t dwell on the possible costs to the United States. Discussions of statehood didn’t ask, “Can the U.S. afford Colorado?” or “How much will Wisconsin take from my pocket?”
And yet discussions of Puerto Rico statehood often bring up precisely these questions.
“Making Puerto Rico the 51st state would only add another mass of people who want to live on welfare,” one recent comment ran. “We don’t need another money pit.” This kind of remark is based on some assumptions. The facts are different.
Puerto Rico is not a liability
In 2014, the Government Accountability Office prepared a report estimating that Puerto Rico as a state could receive $5 to $10 billion more from federal programs than it does as a territory. The GAO figured that Puerto Rico as a state might bring in as much as $2.3 billion in additional federal taxes from individuals and $9.3 billion in corporate taxes. The report included a great deal of uncertainty, since it rested on a number of assumptions about what might happen in the future.
However, using the best possible data and methodology, the GAO provided data that does not support a claim that Puerto Rico would cost the federal government much more as a state than as a territory.
Territories, on the other hand, inevitably bring in less revenue than states. Hawaii’s real personal income increased at a rate of 4% per year in the transition from territory to State. Oregon’s population tripled in its first 20 years of statehood. The new state of Michigan had such an economic boom that it became a bubble — which burst. It took a decade to rebuild the economy, but it never fell to pre-statehood levels. Each State has its own story, but every one shows that statehood brings prosperity.
A prosperous state of Puerto Rico will certainly bring in more money for the federal government than an impoverished territory of Puerto Rico.
The United States is already responsible for Puerto Rico
Comments at news sites and in social media sometimes show an entirely un-American spirit, replacing “Give me your poor…” with “Don’t ask me to help.” But they also imply that the United States would become responsible for Puerto Rico if the Island became a State.
In fact, the United States is already responsible for Puerto Rico. The United States owns Puerto Rico. No other nation bears any responsibility for Puerto Rico.
Nearly half the population of Puerto Rico lives in poverty, compared with 12.3% of the U.S. citizens living in the States. The federal government has the legal right to treat territories differently from States, so there would be some additional costs when Puerto Rico becomes a State. However, the inequality of U.S. citizens living in Puerto Rico is already America’s problem.
Puerto Ricans can already live in a state
Since people born in Puerto Rico can move to a State just as easily as people born in a State can move to any other State, one solution to the inequity in Puerto Rico is to move to a State. Upon settling in Florida or South Carolina or Vermont, a U.S. citizen from Puerto Rico immediately becomes eligible for all the benefits of living in a State.
Public education, publicly funded healthcare, public nutrition assistance, and all other federal and State welfare programs are readily available for anyone willing to leave Puerto Rico for the mainland.
There are more than 5 million people of Puerto Rican descent living in the States, and about 3.2 million living in Puerto Rico. 8% of Puerto Ricans living in States rely on public assistance. That means that 92% do not. This does not support the idea that Puerto Ricans are waiting eagerly to “live on welfare.”
The dwindling population of Puerto Rico is an economic problem for the Island. But it shows that Puerto Ricans already have the option of accepting more from the federal government, if they choose to move. As a State, Puerto Rico will probably see population growth (as other territories have, when they became States). Until then, the costs of supporting people who need help can be shifted to the States.
The United States has never required territories to become solvent before becoming States. Territories have become States when they were at war, during droughts, and in the midst of financial crises. The idea that poverty makes a territory unsuitable for statehood is a misconception.
Team Trump admits holding back billions for Puerto Rico disaster recovery
October 23, 2019
By Mc Nelly Torres, DCReport @ RawStory
Trump administration officials have admitted that last summer they knowingly withheld billions of dollars Congress appropriated to help Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Maria. House Democrats say withholding the relief money violates the law.
Federal law requires that our government help Americans hit by natural disasters. But two Housing and Urban Development officials acknowledged at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on Oct. 17 that HUD blocked the Puerto Rico relief funds.
The HUD delay meant the island missed a deadline to apply for billions of dollars in disaster relief funds, raising doubts about when, if ever, the money will flow to the island devasted in September 2017 by the Category 5 hurricane.
The federal money is part of a $19 billion supplemental disaster relief bill that Congress passed in June. It came with stipulations requiring HUD to provide funding notices to nine states and two American territories, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The agency published the required guidance in the federal register for 9 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands on Aug. 30, 2019. But HUD intentionally left Puerto Rico out of the notices, the HUD officials admitted.
Without the required guidance, the island territory could not apply for the disaster money appropriated by Congress. The guidance required the nine states and the U.S. Virgin Islands to submit detailed plans on how each jurisdiction would spend HUD Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery Program funds.
Puerto Rico is supposed to be the largest recipient of these funds, with $8.3 billion for large mitigation projects to prepare for future storms and prevent a repeat of the catastrophic devastation from Hurricane Maria.
In a Sept. 5 letter to HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Representative David Price, a North Carolina Democrat. who chairs the House Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Subcommittee and Representative Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat chairs the Appropriations Committee, expressed concerns about delaying the funds.
“Special Urgency”
“If anything, Puerto Rico should [receive] a special urgency,” Price said. “The delay is not acceptable and it’s certainly not acceptable to single-out Puerto Rico. The president’s rhetoric on this raises a lot of questions about what’s going on here and where this directive is coming from.”
Even the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, a Miami area Republican, criticized HUD’s holding back funds in “this critically important program.”
Cautiously, Diaz-Balart said “I’m troubled… and of course, have a special concern” when requirements in Congressional appropriations are not met because it may mean even greater taxpayer costs in the future.
At the hearing, Irv Dennis, HUD’s chief financial officer, and David Woll, deputy assistant secretary for community planning and development, defended the action.
They cited talking points that HUD Secretary Carson, Trump and others have used in asserting that funds were withheld because of “concerns about misuse of funds,” “alleged corruption, fiscal irregularities and Puerto Rico’s capacity to manage the funds” especially after the governor resigned amid protests and a corruption scandal.
Woll claimed that millions of federal relief dollars had already been wasted and didn’t reach the people of Puerto Rico. He also asserted that officials were concerned after the mass protests that eventually led to the Aug. 2 resignation of Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló.
Woll also noted that HUD is not a first-line disaster relief agency, as if that were relevant.
Chairman Price wasn’t buying.
“I think you are posing a false choice and … with respect of obeying the law, it shouldn’t be a difficult job, should it?” Price asked during the committee’s hearing Thursday.
Incredulous at the HUD conduct, Price said, “You had the option of ignoring the law because of alleged troubles in Puerto Rico… that justifies you breaking the law?”
Trump has a contentious, even contemptuous, relationship with Puerto Rico, often lashing out at local lawmakers on Twitter. He famously tossed rolls of paper towels to people suffering without electricity and drinkable water after Maria passed.
The slow response from the federal government that has been blamed for the death of thousands of people, somethingRosselló also denied for months. Trump has refused to accept that 2,975 people died. He also has denied that the federal government relief response was slow.
Instead, Trump has attacked his critics on Twitter noting that he has “taken better care of Puerto Rico than any man ever.”
Trump claims that the island has received $90 billion in Hurricane Maria disaster relief. That’s false. Puerto Rico has only received $14 billion in funds from the $42.8 billion Congress allocated.
Holding back more than $28 billion in relief money isn’t all Team Trump is doing to hurt the islands more than 3 million residents. Trump is trying to divert $155 million from FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help build his border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, an issue expected to be explored in a future Congressional hearing.
Today a least 30,000 Puerto Rico homes are without a roof two years after the hurricane brought flooding, destroyed the electrical grid and deprived thousands of drinking water and shelter. Many homes now rely on blue tarps stretched overhead to keep rain from falling into their homes.
Federal law requires that our government help Americans hit by natural disasters. But two Housing and Urban Development officials acknowledged at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on Oct. 17 that HUD blocked the Puerto Rico relief funds.
The HUD delay meant the island missed a deadline to apply for billions of dollars in disaster relief funds, raising doubts about when, if ever, the money will flow to the island devasted in September 2017 by the Category 5 hurricane.
The federal money is part of a $19 billion supplemental disaster relief bill that Congress passed in June. It came with stipulations requiring HUD to provide funding notices to nine states and two American territories, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The agency published the required guidance in the federal register for 9 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands on Aug. 30, 2019. But HUD intentionally left Puerto Rico out of the notices, the HUD officials admitted.
Without the required guidance, the island territory could not apply for the disaster money appropriated by Congress. The guidance required the nine states and the U.S. Virgin Islands to submit detailed plans on how each jurisdiction would spend HUD Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery Program funds.
Puerto Rico is supposed to be the largest recipient of these funds, with $8.3 billion for large mitigation projects to prepare for future storms and prevent a repeat of the catastrophic devastation from Hurricane Maria.
In a Sept. 5 letter to HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Representative David Price, a North Carolina Democrat. who chairs the House Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Subcommittee and Representative Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat chairs the Appropriations Committee, expressed concerns about delaying the funds.
“Special Urgency”
“If anything, Puerto Rico should [receive] a special urgency,” Price said. “The delay is not acceptable and it’s certainly not acceptable to single-out Puerto Rico. The president’s rhetoric on this raises a lot of questions about what’s going on here and where this directive is coming from.”
Even the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, a Miami area Republican, criticized HUD’s holding back funds in “this critically important program.”
Cautiously, Diaz-Balart said “I’m troubled… and of course, have a special concern” when requirements in Congressional appropriations are not met because it may mean even greater taxpayer costs in the future.
At the hearing, Irv Dennis, HUD’s chief financial officer, and David Woll, deputy assistant secretary for community planning and development, defended the action.
They cited talking points that HUD Secretary Carson, Trump and others have used in asserting that funds were withheld because of “concerns about misuse of funds,” “alleged corruption, fiscal irregularities and Puerto Rico’s capacity to manage the funds” especially after the governor resigned amid protests and a corruption scandal.
Woll claimed that millions of federal relief dollars had already been wasted and didn’t reach the people of Puerto Rico. He also asserted that officials were concerned after the mass protests that eventually led to the Aug. 2 resignation of Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló.
Woll also noted that HUD is not a first-line disaster relief agency, as if that were relevant.
Chairman Price wasn’t buying.
“I think you are posing a false choice and … with respect of obeying the law, it shouldn’t be a difficult job, should it?” Price asked during the committee’s hearing Thursday.
Incredulous at the HUD conduct, Price said, “You had the option of ignoring the law because of alleged troubles in Puerto Rico… that justifies you breaking the law?”
Trump has a contentious, even contemptuous, relationship with Puerto Rico, often lashing out at local lawmakers on Twitter. He famously tossed rolls of paper towels to people suffering without electricity and drinkable water after Maria passed.
The slow response from the federal government that has been blamed for the death of thousands of people, somethingRosselló also denied for months. Trump has refused to accept that 2,975 people died. He also has denied that the federal government relief response was slow.
Instead, Trump has attacked his critics on Twitter noting that he has “taken better care of Puerto Rico than any man ever.”
Trump claims that the island has received $90 billion in Hurricane Maria disaster relief. That’s false. Puerto Rico has only received $14 billion in funds from the $42.8 billion Congress allocated.
Holding back more than $28 billion in relief money isn’t all Team Trump is doing to hurt the islands more than 3 million residents. Trump is trying to divert $155 million from FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help build his border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, an issue expected to be explored in a future Congressional hearing.
Today a least 30,000 Puerto Rico homes are without a roof two years after the hurricane brought flooding, destroyed the electrical grid and deprived thousands of drinking water and shelter. Many homes now rely on blue tarps stretched overhead to keep rain from falling into their homes.
SANDERS AND OCASIO-CORTEZ CALL FOR REVERSAL OF PUERTO RICO AUSTERITY MEASURES
Kate Aronoff, Alleen Brown - the intercept
September 24 2019, 10:39 a.m
WHEN HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people poured onto the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico, last July, it wasn’t just the resignation of Gov. Ricardo Rosselló they wanted. “Ricky renuncia y llévate la junta,” many of them cried — “Ricky resign, and take the junta with you.” For three years, a federally imposed Financial Oversight and Management Board, known as the junta or the FOMB, had imposed severe austerity measures on Puerto Ricans, ostensibly in an effort to get a handle on the soaring debt. Like Rosselló’s administration, the junta’s members and consultants were riddled with conflicts of interest. The people had had enough.
Rosselló did resign, but the junta is still in place and pushing punishing austerity in the form of cuts to health care, public pensions, and the public university. The people have not stopped fighting. In dozens of municipalities across the island, newly formed public assemblies are meeting weekly to discuss how to carry forward the energy of the protests. In many of them, fighting debt management policies involving crippling cuts to public services has become a key focus.
On a very hot Saturday morning at the end of August, around 200 people showed up to a public assembly specifically focused on the debt crisis. Many of the retirees there were concerned about a deal the board had made earlier in the summer to cut as much as 8.5 percent of people’s pensions. Luis José Torres Ascencio, president of the Citizen Commission for the Comprehensive Audit of Public Credit, recalled the words of a retired public employee who attended. “I supported PROMESA and the fiscal control board,” he said, referring to the law that created the board. “Today I see that they are doing the same thing we were criticizing our government for. So now I want the board gone.”
On Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and 11 other members of Congress sent a letter to the board. “We agree with the demands of the Puerto Rican people who came into the streets: Puerto Rico must no longer be treated as a colony,” the letter says. Signatories demanded that the board “reverse the crippling austerity imposed on Puerto Rico” and provide details regarding conflicts of interest among members of the board, as well as its consultants. The letter also demands that the board explain exactly how these massive cuts are going to achieve economic growth.
As a window is left open for the board to exploit the island’s governance crisis to exert more control there, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and others appear to be firing back at the idea that the board members are any more responsible than was Rosselló’s administration. “As the Puerto Rican people seek to compel transparency and accountability from decision makers, we believe the FOMB should heed this call.”
“What we are doing with this letter is telling the unelected austerity board that enough is enough,” Sanders, who is running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, said in a statement to The Intercept. “Two years after Hurricane María, they are still working hand in hand with ultra-rich investors to try to squeeze blood from a stone. We are saying, stop dictating Puerto Rico’s economic decisions and let the people decide their own future.”
As Puerto Rico continues to rebuild after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, the stakes of the debt fight are high. “Puertorriqueños will continue to die in the face of a severe health crisis and others are using blue tarps as roofs two years after Maria,” said Ocasio-Cortez in a statement to The Intercept. “We must hold la Junta accountable — otherwise Wall Street vultures will continue to be prioritized over the needs of the people.”
Torres Ascencio offered a measured response. “We are opposed to the existence of the fiscal control board and we are opposed to PROMESA, but while we have to deal with those institutions, we definitely support congressional efforts to oversee what the board has done,” he said.
Steep Cuts and High Fees
The debt restructuring the board was tasked with has been slow-going, involving a dizzying number of actors. On the island, Washington-appointed commissioners — who report to the House Natural Resources Committee — have final say over economic life on the island and have gone toe to toe with the local government in pushing still deeper cuts to everything from pensions to the minimum wage to Christmas bonuses.
Meanwhile, the bankruptcy-like proceedings the PROMESA legislation created, via its Title III, are taking place in the Southern District Court of New York, while debt repayment is on hold. Involving several different classes of creditors, those have also limped along. That there are so many people to pay off also means that any boost in the island’s economy — like the modest bump provided by federal recovery funds and the jobs they created after Hurricane Maria — are used as bargaining chips in the Title III talks by bondholders eager to scrape as much as they can. Rather than disburse that money to the Puerto Ricans desperate for jobs and aid to rebuild homes and infrastructure, recovery would mean more money available to the vultures.
After the largest demonstrations subsided and Rosselló stepped down, the board had said it planned to submit a new restructuring plan this month, though it hasn’t yet. As Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s letter notes, the board’s most recent fiscal plan proposes hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to health care and public education, having this summer won steep cuts to public-sector retiree pensions. “They are determining the economic development of Puerto Rico for the next 40 to 50 years,” said Julio López Varona, a member of the steering committee of Vamos4PR, who advocated for a letter from Congress members.
In exerting control over the island’s budget, the board has operated under the premise that cutting local taxes and scaling back labor protections and social programs would create a welcoming business climate for investors, increasing islanders’ incentives to work for cheap and thus, fuel economic growth. It’s not an uncommon approach, deployed by the International Monetary Fund in its so-called structural adjustment packages and the Troika in Greece in the wake of that country’s debt crisis. But as the bicameral letter points out, the strategy has been better at delivering lucrative fees and contracts to banks and consultants than recovery to Puerto Ricans, living in a painful recession that has lasted well over a decade.
The consultancy firm McKinsey & Company has already collected $50 million from the board, whose budget is furnished by Puerto Ricans. “In what appears to be blatant disregard for conflict-of-interest norms,” the letter notes that McKinsey “is also a holder of Puerto Rican debt and stands to make millions on any potential restructuring deal for investors.”
Revolving doors between those tasked with reining in the debt and those who either engineered or stand to profit from it aren’t unique in Puerto Rico. Board member Carlos M. García, for instance, oversaw a massive bond issuance as the head of Puerto Rico’s Government Development Bank, deals underwritten by the Spanish bank Santander where he has served as a top executive. For Wall Street especially, underwriting new Puerto Rican debt has proven profitable.
“FOMB members are reported to have been involved in government institutions that contracted billions of dollars of debt; served as officials in banks that underwrote that debt; and currently maintain familial relations to some of the largest financial institutions in Puerto Rico. Under federal statute, board members are required to provide financial disclosures and reveal any conflicts of interest. However, we are deeply concerned by the apparent failure to comply with the law,” the letter states, citing García’s failure to disclose third-party compensation. “These incomplete disclosures make the full scope of possible conflicts of interest impossible to assess.”
By October 7, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and their co-signers, who include Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Cory Booker and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, call for detailed accounts from the board, including an “explanation for the increasing fiscal surplus available to creditors despite the absence of significant changes in the FOMB’s economic assumptions,” an analysis of potential negative effects of budget cuts, and “all documents related to the FOMB’s consulting arrangements” with banks and contractors that could profit off debt repayment deals.
They’re also requesting any and all documents about the board’s internal conflict of interest policy and a “full accounting of each member’s professional or familial ties to any institutions and people who hold Puerto Rico’s debt or maintain contracts with the FOMB, and thorough financial disclosures of each board member, including details of outside compensation.”
Calling for a Citizens’ Audit
This isn’t Sanders or Ocasio Cortez’s first foray into Puerto Rico issues. Sanders has introduced a “Marshall Plan” for Puerto Rico’s recovery. And Ocasio-Cortez has called for a full audit and cancellation of the debt, as well as the abolition of the junta.
Congressional intervention has been meaningful in the past. This past winter, after years of pressure from activists, the board took a half-measure in the direction of its demands, declaring $6 billion in bonds illegal. But months went by without any corresponding action penalizing the banks involved. After members of Congress sent the board a letter, a series of lawsuits were filed.
“What we have seen is that, because the local government has no power over the control board, it is important that Congress uses its oversight capacity to hold the board accountable,” said López Varona.
But it’s not just any intervention that people on the ground want. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, recently said he would hold a hearing in October to present proposed reforms to the PROMESA law. Among the proposals he’s considering is the cancellation of unsecured debt, as well as a debt audit. He’s also calling for the appointment of a federal reconstruction coordinator to oversee Hurricane Maria recovery and new federal funding for the FOMB, which is currently funded by Puerto Rican taxpayers. He would also include measures to protect funding for education, health, and retirement.
“We support any effort by any governmental entity to conduct an investigation on the debt. But our project is a citizens’ audit,” said Torres Ascenscio. “We’re not going to endorse a federally created governmental audit commission.”
López Varona also pushed back on the idea of a new PROMESA. “We as a coalition of groups in Puerto Rico and the U.S. continue to oppose PROMESA and any other legislation that imposes federal oversight in Puerto Rico, because it hasn’t worked,” he said, referring to a coalition that includes Vamos4PR, the Center for Popular Democracy, Boricuas Unidos en la Diáspora, Diáspora en Resistencia, Diáspora en Acción, and Construyamos Otro Acuerdo. “The summer uprising showed people want democracy; they want to be part of the decisions being made.”
Rosselló did resign, but the junta is still in place and pushing punishing austerity in the form of cuts to health care, public pensions, and the public university. The people have not stopped fighting. In dozens of municipalities across the island, newly formed public assemblies are meeting weekly to discuss how to carry forward the energy of the protests. In many of them, fighting debt management policies involving crippling cuts to public services has become a key focus.
On a very hot Saturday morning at the end of August, around 200 people showed up to a public assembly specifically focused on the debt crisis. Many of the retirees there were concerned about a deal the board had made earlier in the summer to cut as much as 8.5 percent of people’s pensions. Luis José Torres Ascencio, president of the Citizen Commission for the Comprehensive Audit of Public Credit, recalled the words of a retired public employee who attended. “I supported PROMESA and the fiscal control board,” he said, referring to the law that created the board. “Today I see that they are doing the same thing we were criticizing our government for. So now I want the board gone.”
On Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and 11 other members of Congress sent a letter to the board. “We agree with the demands of the Puerto Rican people who came into the streets: Puerto Rico must no longer be treated as a colony,” the letter says. Signatories demanded that the board “reverse the crippling austerity imposed on Puerto Rico” and provide details regarding conflicts of interest among members of the board, as well as its consultants. The letter also demands that the board explain exactly how these massive cuts are going to achieve economic growth.
As a window is left open for the board to exploit the island’s governance crisis to exert more control there, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and others appear to be firing back at the idea that the board members are any more responsible than was Rosselló’s administration. “As the Puerto Rican people seek to compel transparency and accountability from decision makers, we believe the FOMB should heed this call.”
“What we are doing with this letter is telling the unelected austerity board that enough is enough,” Sanders, who is running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, said in a statement to The Intercept. “Two years after Hurricane María, they are still working hand in hand with ultra-rich investors to try to squeeze blood from a stone. We are saying, stop dictating Puerto Rico’s economic decisions and let the people decide their own future.”
As Puerto Rico continues to rebuild after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, the stakes of the debt fight are high. “Puertorriqueños will continue to die in the face of a severe health crisis and others are using blue tarps as roofs two years after Maria,” said Ocasio-Cortez in a statement to The Intercept. “We must hold la Junta accountable — otherwise Wall Street vultures will continue to be prioritized over the needs of the people.”
Torres Ascencio offered a measured response. “We are opposed to the existence of the fiscal control board and we are opposed to PROMESA, but while we have to deal with those institutions, we definitely support congressional efforts to oversee what the board has done,” he said.
Steep Cuts and High Fees
The debt restructuring the board was tasked with has been slow-going, involving a dizzying number of actors. On the island, Washington-appointed commissioners — who report to the House Natural Resources Committee — have final say over economic life on the island and have gone toe to toe with the local government in pushing still deeper cuts to everything from pensions to the minimum wage to Christmas bonuses.
Meanwhile, the bankruptcy-like proceedings the PROMESA legislation created, via its Title III, are taking place in the Southern District Court of New York, while debt repayment is on hold. Involving several different classes of creditors, those have also limped along. That there are so many people to pay off also means that any boost in the island’s economy — like the modest bump provided by federal recovery funds and the jobs they created after Hurricane Maria — are used as bargaining chips in the Title III talks by bondholders eager to scrape as much as they can. Rather than disburse that money to the Puerto Ricans desperate for jobs and aid to rebuild homes and infrastructure, recovery would mean more money available to the vultures.
After the largest demonstrations subsided and Rosselló stepped down, the board had said it planned to submit a new restructuring plan this month, though it hasn’t yet. As Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s letter notes, the board’s most recent fiscal plan proposes hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to health care and public education, having this summer won steep cuts to public-sector retiree pensions. “They are determining the economic development of Puerto Rico for the next 40 to 50 years,” said Julio López Varona, a member of the steering committee of Vamos4PR, who advocated for a letter from Congress members.
In exerting control over the island’s budget, the board has operated under the premise that cutting local taxes and scaling back labor protections and social programs would create a welcoming business climate for investors, increasing islanders’ incentives to work for cheap and thus, fuel economic growth. It’s not an uncommon approach, deployed by the International Monetary Fund in its so-called structural adjustment packages and the Troika in Greece in the wake of that country’s debt crisis. But as the bicameral letter points out, the strategy has been better at delivering lucrative fees and contracts to banks and consultants than recovery to Puerto Ricans, living in a painful recession that has lasted well over a decade.
The consultancy firm McKinsey & Company has already collected $50 million from the board, whose budget is furnished by Puerto Ricans. “In what appears to be blatant disregard for conflict-of-interest norms,” the letter notes that McKinsey “is also a holder of Puerto Rican debt and stands to make millions on any potential restructuring deal for investors.”
Revolving doors between those tasked with reining in the debt and those who either engineered or stand to profit from it aren’t unique in Puerto Rico. Board member Carlos M. García, for instance, oversaw a massive bond issuance as the head of Puerto Rico’s Government Development Bank, deals underwritten by the Spanish bank Santander where he has served as a top executive. For Wall Street especially, underwriting new Puerto Rican debt has proven profitable.
“FOMB members are reported to have been involved in government institutions that contracted billions of dollars of debt; served as officials in banks that underwrote that debt; and currently maintain familial relations to some of the largest financial institutions in Puerto Rico. Under federal statute, board members are required to provide financial disclosures and reveal any conflicts of interest. However, we are deeply concerned by the apparent failure to comply with the law,” the letter states, citing García’s failure to disclose third-party compensation. “These incomplete disclosures make the full scope of possible conflicts of interest impossible to assess.”
By October 7, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and their co-signers, who include Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Cory Booker and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, call for detailed accounts from the board, including an “explanation for the increasing fiscal surplus available to creditors despite the absence of significant changes in the FOMB’s economic assumptions,” an analysis of potential negative effects of budget cuts, and “all documents related to the FOMB’s consulting arrangements” with banks and contractors that could profit off debt repayment deals.
They’re also requesting any and all documents about the board’s internal conflict of interest policy and a “full accounting of each member’s professional or familial ties to any institutions and people who hold Puerto Rico’s debt or maintain contracts with the FOMB, and thorough financial disclosures of each board member, including details of outside compensation.”
Calling for a Citizens’ Audit
This isn’t Sanders or Ocasio Cortez’s first foray into Puerto Rico issues. Sanders has introduced a “Marshall Plan” for Puerto Rico’s recovery. And Ocasio-Cortez has called for a full audit and cancellation of the debt, as well as the abolition of the junta.
Congressional intervention has been meaningful in the past. This past winter, after years of pressure from activists, the board took a half-measure in the direction of its demands, declaring $6 billion in bonds illegal. But months went by without any corresponding action penalizing the banks involved. After members of Congress sent the board a letter, a series of lawsuits were filed.
“What we have seen is that, because the local government has no power over the control board, it is important that Congress uses its oversight capacity to hold the board accountable,” said López Varona.
But it’s not just any intervention that people on the ground want. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, recently said he would hold a hearing in October to present proposed reforms to the PROMESA law. Among the proposals he’s considering is the cancellation of unsecured debt, as well as a debt audit. He’s also calling for the appointment of a federal reconstruction coordinator to oversee Hurricane Maria recovery and new federal funding for the FOMB, which is currently funded by Puerto Rican taxpayers. He would also include measures to protect funding for education, health, and retirement.
“We support any effort by any governmental entity to conduct an investigation on the debt. But our project is a citizens’ audit,” said Torres Ascenscio. “We’re not going to endorse a federally created governmental audit commission.”
López Varona also pushed back on the idea of a new PROMESA. “We as a coalition of groups in Puerto Rico and the U.S. continue to oppose PROMESA and any other legislation that imposes federal oversight in Puerto Rico, because it hasn’t worked,” he said, referring to a coalition that includes Vamos4PR, the Center for Popular Democracy, Boricuas Unidos en la Diáspora, Diáspora en Resistencia, Diáspora en Acción, and Construyamos Otro Acuerdo. “The summer uprising showed people want democracy; they want to be part of the decisions being made.”
Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria. It's about to lose $400M more to Trump's border wall.
The Pentagon is taking money from 127 projects in 23 states and three territories to build Trump's long-promised wall along the southern border.
Sept. 4, 2019, 7:55 PM PDT
By Dareh Gregorian, Mosheh Gains and Alex Moe - nbc news
President Donald Trump is building his wall, and Puerto Rico is going to pay for it.
The Department of Defense released a list of 127 military construction projects that are being delayed as the agency moves $3.6 billion to pay for construction of fencing along the southern border, and the U.S. territory is one of the hardest hit by the move.
The department said it was holding off on over $400 million in funding for ten construction projects on the island, including a power substation and a National Guard readiness center. A senior Defense official downplayed the potential impact of the move and noted that most of the projects on the island — which is still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017 — weren't slated to begin work until Sept. 2020 at the earliest.
"We don't see ourselves delaying those projects. We're fully committed to that recovery," the official said.
The U.S. territory of Guam — which was threatened with a missile strike by North Korea in 2017 — is set to lose $250 million in construction projects, the agency said.
The diversions also hit 23 states, with New York and New Mexico— both represented by Democrats— taking the brunt of the blow.
New York is losing funding for $160 million of construction projects at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point — $95 million for an engineering center and $65 million for a parking structure. New Mexico is losing funding for an $85 million operations facility at Holloman Air Force Base and $40 million for an information systems facility at White Sands Missile Facility.
“I visited the current RPA training facility at Holloman earlier this year. The building is falling apart, with some equipment being held together with duct tape. To say this facility, which supports training for 100 percent of the Air Force’s MQ-9 crews, urgently needs to be replaced would be an understatement," Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., said in a statement.
He added that the testing and evaluation facility at White Sands "was built in 1962 and recently caught on fire. Stealing funding from these essential military construction projects to pay for the president’s political pet project is an unconscionable attack on military readiness and the health and safety of our men and women in uniform.”
The diversion hit red states as well. Utah is losing $54 million in funding for two projects at Hill Air Force Base.
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said he was "disappointed" by the move.
"Funding the border wall is an important priority, and the Executive Branch should use the appropriate channels in Congress, rather than divert already appropriated funding away from military construction projects and therefore undermining military readiness," Romney said in a statement.
The Marine Corps base in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, which is still recovering from last year's Hurricane Florence, is losing over $40 million in funding for two projects that were slated for early 2020.
The Pentagon announced Tuesday it would be temporarily halting funding for the 127 projects to use the money for border fencing, and taking $1.8 billion from projects slated for inside the United States and another $1.8 billion from military facilities around the globe. The move was authorized by Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Defense officials said they were hopeful that Congress would "backfill" the money that's being taken from the projects. A senior defense official acknowledged there were "no guarantees" the projects would be funded in the future.
Officials released a list of the affected projects on Wednesday. Internationally, U.S. installations in Germany are losing the most funding — over $550 million. That includes money slated for squadron operations, hardening air hangars and building an elementary school.
Bases in Japan are losing about $450 million, including funding for two operations facilities. Bases in South Korea are seeing a $17.5 million command and control facility and a $53 million "unmanned aerial vehicle hangar" have their funding diverted.
Also affected is $18 million in utilities and infrastructure support at an unspecified "classified location."
The senior Defense official said that the Pentagon had reached out to European allies to see if they could contribute to the costs of the delayed projects overseas. "I can tell you that we have you know routine conversations with our allies and partners about burden sharing in general and we reached out to all of them today to talk specifically about the list," the official said.
The Defense Department also released new details about how the $3.6 billion would be spent — building 175 miles of border fencing at 11 locations in California, Texas and Arizona. The Pentagon estimates that each mile will cost about $20 million.
The Pentagon said that of the 11 projects, six are on federal land totaling 94.5 miles, and five are on non-federal property totaling about another 81 miles.
The most expensive part of the construction will be in Laredo, Texas. The D.O.D. plans on building "approximately 52 miles of a new primary pedestrian fence system " along the Rio Grande for over $1.2 billion.
The next most expensive project is $630 million to replace "31 miles of vehicle barriers with new pedestrian fencing" near the Barry M. Goldwater Range in Yuma, Arizona, along with another $527 million for 31 miles of new pedestrian fencing. The range is used for air to ground bombing practice by the Air Force, while another portion of the range is operated by the Marines.
Construction is expected to begin by the end of the year.
Trump declared a national emergency at the border in February in a bid to circumvent Congress and take money from other areas for wall construction. The border wall was one of Trump's earliest campaign promises during the 2016 election. He repeatedly vowed that Mexico would pay for its construction during the campaign.
The top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, praised the president for taking action, saying, "We continue to face a very real crisis at the southern border."
He also called for Congress to add more money to pay for the military construction funding the president diverted.
"I regret that the President has been forced to divert funding for our troops to address the crisis," Thornberry said. "It is important that Congress now restore the military construction funding diverted for border security. Failing to do so only forces our troops to pay for political discord in Washington."
The Department of Defense released a list of 127 military construction projects that are being delayed as the agency moves $3.6 billion to pay for construction of fencing along the southern border, and the U.S. territory is one of the hardest hit by the move.
The department said it was holding off on over $400 million in funding for ten construction projects on the island, including a power substation and a National Guard readiness center. A senior Defense official downplayed the potential impact of the move and noted that most of the projects on the island — which is still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017 — weren't slated to begin work until Sept. 2020 at the earliest.
"We don't see ourselves delaying those projects. We're fully committed to that recovery," the official said.
The U.S. territory of Guam — which was threatened with a missile strike by North Korea in 2017 — is set to lose $250 million in construction projects, the agency said.
The diversions also hit 23 states, with New York and New Mexico— both represented by Democrats— taking the brunt of the blow.
New York is losing funding for $160 million of construction projects at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point — $95 million for an engineering center and $65 million for a parking structure. New Mexico is losing funding for an $85 million operations facility at Holloman Air Force Base and $40 million for an information systems facility at White Sands Missile Facility.
“I visited the current RPA training facility at Holloman earlier this year. The building is falling apart, with some equipment being held together with duct tape. To say this facility, which supports training for 100 percent of the Air Force’s MQ-9 crews, urgently needs to be replaced would be an understatement," Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., said in a statement.
He added that the testing and evaluation facility at White Sands "was built in 1962 and recently caught on fire. Stealing funding from these essential military construction projects to pay for the president’s political pet project is an unconscionable attack on military readiness and the health and safety of our men and women in uniform.”
The diversion hit red states as well. Utah is losing $54 million in funding for two projects at Hill Air Force Base.
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said he was "disappointed" by the move.
"Funding the border wall is an important priority, and the Executive Branch should use the appropriate channels in Congress, rather than divert already appropriated funding away from military construction projects and therefore undermining military readiness," Romney said in a statement.
The Marine Corps base in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, which is still recovering from last year's Hurricane Florence, is losing over $40 million in funding for two projects that were slated for early 2020.
The Pentagon announced Tuesday it would be temporarily halting funding for the 127 projects to use the money for border fencing, and taking $1.8 billion from projects slated for inside the United States and another $1.8 billion from military facilities around the globe. The move was authorized by Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Defense officials said they were hopeful that Congress would "backfill" the money that's being taken from the projects. A senior defense official acknowledged there were "no guarantees" the projects would be funded in the future.
Officials released a list of the affected projects on Wednesday. Internationally, U.S. installations in Germany are losing the most funding — over $550 million. That includes money slated for squadron operations, hardening air hangars and building an elementary school.
Bases in Japan are losing about $450 million, including funding for two operations facilities. Bases in South Korea are seeing a $17.5 million command and control facility and a $53 million "unmanned aerial vehicle hangar" have their funding diverted.
Also affected is $18 million in utilities and infrastructure support at an unspecified "classified location."
The senior Defense official said that the Pentagon had reached out to European allies to see if they could contribute to the costs of the delayed projects overseas. "I can tell you that we have you know routine conversations with our allies and partners about burden sharing in general and we reached out to all of them today to talk specifically about the list," the official said.
The Defense Department also released new details about how the $3.6 billion would be spent — building 175 miles of border fencing at 11 locations in California, Texas and Arizona. The Pentagon estimates that each mile will cost about $20 million.
The Pentagon said that of the 11 projects, six are on federal land totaling 94.5 miles, and five are on non-federal property totaling about another 81 miles.
The most expensive part of the construction will be in Laredo, Texas. The D.O.D. plans on building "approximately 52 miles of a new primary pedestrian fence system " along the Rio Grande for over $1.2 billion.
The next most expensive project is $630 million to replace "31 miles of vehicle barriers with new pedestrian fencing" near the Barry M. Goldwater Range in Yuma, Arizona, along with another $527 million for 31 miles of new pedestrian fencing. The range is used for air to ground bombing practice by the Air Force, while another portion of the range is operated by the Marines.
Construction is expected to begin by the end of the year.
Trump declared a national emergency at the border in February in a bid to circumvent Congress and take money from other areas for wall construction. The border wall was one of Trump's earliest campaign promises during the 2016 election. He repeatedly vowed that Mexico would pay for its construction during the campaign.
The top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, praised the president for taking action, saying, "We continue to face a very real crisis at the southern border."
He also called for Congress to add more money to pay for the military construction funding the president diverted.
"I regret that the President has been forced to divert funding for our troops to address the crisis," Thornberry said. "It is important that Congress now restore the military construction funding diverted for border security. Failing to do so only forces our troops to pay for political discord in Washington."
Teachers Fighting for Public Schools Were Key to the Uprising in Puerto Rico
BY Mercedes Martinez & Monique Dols, Labor Notes - Truthout
PUBLISHED August 17, 2019
In the two months leading up to the uprising which ousted Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Roselló, educators celebrated hard-fought victories against the privatization of their education system. Struggles by teachers and families against school closures and charter schools helped pave the way for July’s unprecedented outpouring of protest.
By the end of the school year in June, it became clear that the struggle to stop charterization had largely won. There is only one actively functional charter school on the island.
Then in July, teachers and families who had fought pitched battles against the closing of 442 public schools by ex-Secretary of Education Julia Keleher were vindicated when Keleher was arrested on corruption charges.
As the new school year starts in August, educators are still fighting to fully fund and staff the schools, reopen those shuttered under Keleher, and keep the charters out. In the weeks and months to come, expect educators to keep playing a critical role in the struggle for democracy, against austerity, and for the dignity of the working class in Puerto Rico.
Saving Teacher Pensions
One of the least known but most critical struggles to keep an eye on in coming months is the fight to save educators’ pensions.
Public workers are under tremendous pressure to tighten their belts in order to ensure repayment of $74 billion in illegitimate debt that the government owes to bondholders.
The debt crisis was created by an economic slump that has lasted since 2006, causing the government to take out loans to operate. These loans were bought up by hedge-fund vultures whose goals are to make huge profits while forcing the government to cut back services to the working people of Puerto Rico.
But as Hurricane Maria and this summer’s uprising have revealed to the world, Puerto Rican workers simply can’t stand to suffer for the rich anymore.
In June, rank-and-file educators in Puerto Rico came together in an incredible movement of solidarity and self-organization to defeat a proposal that would have gutted the retirements of thousands of educators.
The last week of May, the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (AMPR), an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), unveiled a sweetheart deal negotiated directly with the Fiscal Oversight and Management Board. This federally imposed board, known locally as la Junta, acts like a dictatorship as it oversees the process of making workers pay for Puerto Rico’s odious debt.
The AFT spent $3 million in a year-long, closed-door negotiation that went over the heads of the elected government and behind the backs of the teachers. Its proposal would have canceled the pensions of thousands of current educators and replaced them with 401(k) retirement plans, reduced the pensions of current retirees by 8.5 percent, and raised the retirement age from 55 to 63. The deal also eliminated Christmas bonuses and would have required teachers to work on nationally recognized holidays.
But the Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (FMPR), a rival teachers union with a long history of class struggle, along with allies in the fight to save public education, waged a successful Vote No campaign that rejected the deal and unexpectedly stopped the Junta and the AMPR/AFT in their tracks.
The Vote No campaign was an uphill battle. AMPR/AFT spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on deceitful TV and radio campaign ads, portraying the agreement as a necessary compromise which would preserve pensions. Instead of putting polling places in schools or any other public space, the union rented private venues so it could allow its staff and their literature inside and keep out the opposition. AMPR/AFT even called the police in order to prevent neutral observers from entering the polling stations.
Despite these repressive measures, the FMPR mobilized crews to have a presence outside 96 percent of the polling places. With exit polls in hand, the Vote No campaigners helped ensure that the vote was proper and that the election couldn’t be stolen.
Possible Isn’t Enough
This has been a glorious summer, where hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans participated in the biggest general strike ever on the island. The strikes and demonstrations that brought down the Roselló regime were largely spontaneous and broadly democratic, but the seeds of the insurrection were planted by decades of struggle.
These struggles have been led by feminists who fought against gender violence and homophobia, muckraking journalists who uncovered the depths of government corruption, activists organizing for the debt to be dropped, community members building autonomous centers of self-organization, environmentalists who stopped a pipeline, students who went on strike to keep their universities public, artists who preserved and created culture, and unionists who refused to compromise away working people’s futures.
No one party, organization, or union called for the strike and demonstrations. Many groups contributed to their outbreak and political character.
If we can learn something from this victorious moment, it is that the road ahead lies in fighting back for the future and refusing to compromise.
In the labor movement, unions like the AMPR in Puerto Rico and the AFT in the U.S. have negotiated away our rights over and over, under the cover of accomplishing the possible and avoiding the greater evil. This approach allows our opponents to chip away little by little, until we find our public education in shambles, neighborhood schools closed, students’ lives turned upside down, and educators’ future sold out.
Our future depends on fighting for the “impossible,” against the whole logic of a system that will have workers pay with their lives.
Wind in Our Sails
Today the fighters for the future of education in Puerto Rico have huge victories under our belts and the wind in our sails. We have brought down two corrupt governors and are working on our third. The protests, rallies, marches, art performances, and battles on the streets against police brutality complemented each other. It was a triumph for the Puerto Rican people.
While the government continues to flail in crisis, the people are organizing regional assemblies that are spreading and growing. We hope to see a new wave of demands emerge from these assemblies.
The FMPR will call for auditing the debt, reopening our schools, reversing anti-worker laws, revoking the privatization of public agencies, adding an anti-sexist curriculum in schools, and building the quality public education system that the people of Puerto Rico deserve.
The popular insurrection in Puerto Rico has proven once again that “when we fight, we can win.”
By the end of the school year in June, it became clear that the struggle to stop charterization had largely won. There is only one actively functional charter school on the island.
Then in July, teachers and families who had fought pitched battles against the closing of 442 public schools by ex-Secretary of Education Julia Keleher were vindicated when Keleher was arrested on corruption charges.
As the new school year starts in August, educators are still fighting to fully fund and staff the schools, reopen those shuttered under Keleher, and keep the charters out. In the weeks and months to come, expect educators to keep playing a critical role in the struggle for democracy, against austerity, and for the dignity of the working class in Puerto Rico.
Saving Teacher Pensions
One of the least known but most critical struggles to keep an eye on in coming months is the fight to save educators’ pensions.
Public workers are under tremendous pressure to tighten their belts in order to ensure repayment of $74 billion in illegitimate debt that the government owes to bondholders.
The debt crisis was created by an economic slump that has lasted since 2006, causing the government to take out loans to operate. These loans were bought up by hedge-fund vultures whose goals are to make huge profits while forcing the government to cut back services to the working people of Puerto Rico.
But as Hurricane Maria and this summer’s uprising have revealed to the world, Puerto Rican workers simply can’t stand to suffer for the rich anymore.
In June, rank-and-file educators in Puerto Rico came together in an incredible movement of solidarity and self-organization to defeat a proposal that would have gutted the retirements of thousands of educators.
The last week of May, the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (AMPR), an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), unveiled a sweetheart deal negotiated directly with the Fiscal Oversight and Management Board. This federally imposed board, known locally as la Junta, acts like a dictatorship as it oversees the process of making workers pay for Puerto Rico’s odious debt.
The AFT spent $3 million in a year-long, closed-door negotiation that went over the heads of the elected government and behind the backs of the teachers. Its proposal would have canceled the pensions of thousands of current educators and replaced them with 401(k) retirement plans, reduced the pensions of current retirees by 8.5 percent, and raised the retirement age from 55 to 63. The deal also eliminated Christmas bonuses and would have required teachers to work on nationally recognized holidays.
But the Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (FMPR), a rival teachers union with a long history of class struggle, along with allies in the fight to save public education, waged a successful Vote No campaign that rejected the deal and unexpectedly stopped the Junta and the AMPR/AFT in their tracks.
The Vote No campaign was an uphill battle. AMPR/AFT spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on deceitful TV and radio campaign ads, portraying the agreement as a necessary compromise which would preserve pensions. Instead of putting polling places in schools or any other public space, the union rented private venues so it could allow its staff and their literature inside and keep out the opposition. AMPR/AFT even called the police in order to prevent neutral observers from entering the polling stations.
Despite these repressive measures, the FMPR mobilized crews to have a presence outside 96 percent of the polling places. With exit polls in hand, the Vote No campaigners helped ensure that the vote was proper and that the election couldn’t be stolen.
Possible Isn’t Enough
This has been a glorious summer, where hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans participated in the biggest general strike ever on the island. The strikes and demonstrations that brought down the Roselló regime were largely spontaneous and broadly democratic, but the seeds of the insurrection were planted by decades of struggle.
These struggles have been led by feminists who fought against gender violence and homophobia, muckraking journalists who uncovered the depths of government corruption, activists organizing for the debt to be dropped, community members building autonomous centers of self-organization, environmentalists who stopped a pipeline, students who went on strike to keep their universities public, artists who preserved and created culture, and unionists who refused to compromise away working people’s futures.
No one party, organization, or union called for the strike and demonstrations. Many groups contributed to their outbreak and political character.
If we can learn something from this victorious moment, it is that the road ahead lies in fighting back for the future and refusing to compromise.
In the labor movement, unions like the AMPR in Puerto Rico and the AFT in the U.S. have negotiated away our rights over and over, under the cover of accomplishing the possible and avoiding the greater evil. This approach allows our opponents to chip away little by little, until we find our public education in shambles, neighborhood schools closed, students’ lives turned upside down, and educators’ future sold out.
Our future depends on fighting for the “impossible,” against the whole logic of a system that will have workers pay with their lives.
Wind in Our Sails
Today the fighters for the future of education in Puerto Rico have huge victories under our belts and the wind in our sails. We have brought down two corrupt governors and are working on our third. The protests, rallies, marches, art performances, and battles on the streets against police brutality complemented each other. It was a triumph for the Puerto Rican people.
While the government continues to flail in crisis, the people are organizing regional assemblies that are spreading and growing. We hope to see a new wave of demands emerge from these assemblies.
The FMPR will call for auditing the debt, reopening our schools, reversing anti-worker laws, revoking the privatization of public agencies, adding an anti-sexist curriculum in schools, and building the quality public education system that the people of Puerto Rico deserve.
The popular insurrection in Puerto Rico has proven once again that “when we fight, we can win.”
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OP-ED ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH
Corporations Are Poisoning People in Puerto Rico With Coal Ash
BY Jack Aponte, Truthout
PUBLISHED June 10, 2019
Community organizers in Guayama, Puerto Rico, are agitating for the closure of a coal plant operated by the Virginia-based multinational corporation AES, citing research showing that local rates of cancer and asthma have increased substantially since the plant opened in 2002.
Now the fight has spread to the mainland United States: in early May, media reported that AES coal ash is now being shipped to a landfill in Osceola County, Florida. Even as AES continues to plague communities in Puerto Rico, it is now threatening to spread its poison to this Florida county with a large Puerto Rican community.
I first learned of the crisis of the cenizas, or ashes, in January, when I traveled to Puerto Rico with the Queer Trans Solidarity and Service Brigade, a group of U.S.-based activists on a mission to learn more about the political and day-to-day struggles in the archipelago and organize in solidarity with our comrades based in Puerto Rico. We went to Guayama, in the southeast of the main island, for a town forum organized by Comunidad Guayamesa Unidos por tu Salud on the community-wide health effects of the coal ash generated by the AES power plant in the town. Some of us from the U.S. had seen cable news air footage after Hurricane Maria of black sludge, rainwater mixed with thick coal ash from the plant, pouring from drainage pipes into the sea in the nearby town of Peñuelas, but we didn’t yet know the full extent of the coal ash catastrophe.
An Uncontained Mountain of Coal Ash
At the town forum, Luis Bonilla, an environmental researcher from the University of Puerto Rico, cited two separate studies that show the clear negative effects on the health of the residents of Guayama since AES, a Virginia-based multinational corporation, opened the coal plant in 2002. The city has seen notable increases in rates of cancer, asthma, and other diseases that can be linked to the effects of burning coal and the resultant ash filling the air and contaminating the groundwater.
These findings are worrisomely similar to the effects of the Guayama coal ash that was for a time exported to the Dominican Republic for disposal, where it also severely poisoned communities there. Gerson Jiménez, medical director at a local hospital who has practiced in Guayama since 1979, shared that in the years since the plant opened, he saw incidences of diseases linked to coal ash skyrocket as he’d never before seen in his many decades of practice in the area. Community organizers pleaded for people within and outside of Guayama to speak out and demand that the government force AES to stop its harm and make amends. The researchers and organizers concluded their forum with a final, urgent recommendation: to close the AES plant immediately.
Christy Morales and Aldwin Colón, two of the event’s organizers, live in the Miramar neighborhood of Guayama, about a mile away from the plant. Raising their two children there and seeing the effects on their health motivated them to join the efforts against AES. Colón was also diagnosed with kidney cancer in his mid-30s — a diagnosis that he thinks might not have happened if the coal plant had not moved to town — with his doctors telling him they were used to seeing the disease in people in their 60s and 70s. Colón and Morales were angry, and they channeled their anger and pain into their activism, getting people to pay attention to what was happening and take action to stop it.
The organizers offered to take us to see the plant up close. We followed as they expertly navigated their car down the neglected public road just outside the coal plant’s fence. Now we could see the mountains of coal ash towering stories high in the middle of the plant, shockingly uncontained. Each gust of wind blew a cloud of ash westward toward the road where we stood and past us into the residential neighborhoods of Guayama. Soon our eyes were watering, noses and sinuses reacting to the ash-filled air, an especially disturbing sensation given what we’d just learned about how this ash had been poisoning the people here for the past 17 years.
As Hurricane Maria approached in 2017, AES was supposed to cover up the ash with tarps to try to contain it. This strategy was flimsy at best: imagine how little plastic tarps can actually do to contain 120-foot mountains of ash during a Category 5 hurricane. But AES didn’t even use tarps. Maria struck with the mounds uncovered, further polluting the air and the waters around Guayama and sending ash from the dumps in Peñuelas pouring out of drainage pipes into the Caribbean Sea.
The Toxic Coal Ash Heads to Florida
Organizers in Osceola County, Florida, are now also organizing against AES, working to halt shipments of the plant’s coal ash from Puerto Rico to a local landfill. The approval of the plan to ship the coal ash to Florida was tacked onto an Osceola County Commissioners’ meeting as a last-minute addendum item, making it impossible for residents to register their objections before the deal was finalized. Fred Hawkins, commissioner of the district where the J.E.D. landfill is located, has financial and donor connections to Waste Connections, the owners of the landfill.
Community members in Osceola County are now organizing to halt the shipments of coal ash; nearly 44,000 tons have already arrived in Osceolawith another 200,000 planned before the end of 2019. After the public outcry, the county government sent a letter to Waste Connections asking them to stop shipments immediately. The company responded that it would continue accepting the AES coal ash until October 1, 2019, ending three months earlier than originally planned — but ultimately bringing the same amount of toxic waste into the area.
In both Guayama and Osceola County, a fair amount of the organizing around the coal ash issue is happening via Facebook. A group created for the community response in Osceola County includes information about the companies involved; news of the most recent developments; information on how to obtain signs, buttons and stickers; and encouragement to attend county commission meetings, protests and marches against the coal ash.
Some comments posted to the Osceloa County group’s page complain that “they” or “you,” meaning Puerto Ricans, should “clean up your own garbage” from the coal power consumed on the archipelago, with arguments that Florida shouldn’t be taking in “foreign” waste. Others repeatedly respond that AES is a U.S. company; that Puerto Rico is not currently a foreign nation; that the people of Puerto Rico have been protesting the coal plant for years and demanding renewable, clean energy sources; and that AES and other fossil-fuel profiteers spend massive amounts of money ensuring that their business continues unchecked.
These tensions between local residents are striking, though unfortunately not completely surprising, given the shifting demographics in central Florida. The Latinx population in Florida is rapidly growing. Puerto Ricans make up a large percentage of that Latinx population, especially after Hurricane Maria, when more than 200,000 Puerto Ricans moved to Florida after their homes, livelihoods and communities were destroyed by the storm.
When I first saw the Osceola news in the Guayama Facebook group, I commented about how many Puerto Ricans live in the area, including members of my own family. One poster responded that “this environmentally criminal corporation seems to have something personal against Puerto Ricans.”
The connection isn’t lost on others. One Puerto Rican now living in Osceola called the development a “double whammy.” And in a Sierra Club statement, organizer Adriana Gonzales says, “The people of Puerto Rico didn’t fight for years to get this toxic pollution removed from our communities just so AES could turn around and force their poison on Puerto Ricans in Florida. Now AES wants to dump their pollution in the very place that people fled to for safety.”
We Need Renewable Energy to End This Mess
No community that learns about the toxicity of coal ash wants it anywhere nearby. Promises about safe containment and disposal are broken again and again. And ash aside, there are, of course, the terrible, climate-changing effects of the greenhouse gases generated by burning coal. Given all of this, coal and other fossil fuels are simply not viable options for powering any place, especially not a place like Puerto Rico, where the fuels and the waste produced by burning them need to be shipped both in and out, yielding electricity prices nearly twice the U.S. average.
The answer, in Puerto Rico and everywhere, is renewable energy. Community-owned-and-operated solar power made a tremendous difference in post-Maria Puerto Rico, with the potential for building microgrids to provide sustainable power that doesn’t depend on a fragile, centralized system. But this opportunity for far more affordable and environmentally friendly energy is being targeted by government policies, including a proposed tax to penalize those who disconnect from the centralized grid and rely on their own solar power instead. These policies are influenced by corporate lobbyists invested in everyone believing that Puerto Rico has no choice but to rely on imported, expensive, toxic and environment-destroying fossil fuels like coal.
Things are starting to shift, but not nearly quickly enough. In 2017, Gov. Ricardo Rosselló signed a law banning the dumping of coal ash in Puerto Rican landfills, but making exceptions for supposedly safe construction materials made from the ash. This May, after previous failed lawsuits challenging the practice, the Puerto Rican Senate endorsed an amendment to the law to disallow those uses of coal ash as well. Earlier this year Rosselló signed another law to require that Puerto Rico be powered solely by renewable energy by 2050, with coal power eliminated by 2028.
Nine years might seem like a short amount of time to AES and others profiting from their coal plant, but nine more years is an intolerably long time for the residents of Guayama who are being sickened by breathing and drinking the ash. And the 31 years until the promised full conversion to renewable energy is far too long for a people who suffered so greatly when their centralized, fossil-fuel-based power grid was decimated by Hurricane Maria, leaving only the few solar-powered locations across the archipelago as beacons of light and life-saving electricity.
The AES Puerto Rico plant must be forced to stop burning coal now. AES must be forced to dispose of the toxic coal ash in the most responsible, least harmful ways available, at its own expense. The centralized Puerto Rican power grid must shift toward renewable energy immediately. But perhaps most importantly, the citizens of Puerto Rico should be assisted, not impeded, in developing their own solar microgrids and other locally controlled sources of renewable electricity that can endure in the face of hurricanes like Maria, which we know will come again.
Now the fight has spread to the mainland United States: in early May, media reported that AES coal ash is now being shipped to a landfill in Osceola County, Florida. Even as AES continues to plague communities in Puerto Rico, it is now threatening to spread its poison to this Florida county with a large Puerto Rican community.
I first learned of the crisis of the cenizas, or ashes, in January, when I traveled to Puerto Rico with the Queer Trans Solidarity and Service Brigade, a group of U.S.-based activists on a mission to learn more about the political and day-to-day struggles in the archipelago and organize in solidarity with our comrades based in Puerto Rico. We went to Guayama, in the southeast of the main island, for a town forum organized by Comunidad Guayamesa Unidos por tu Salud on the community-wide health effects of the coal ash generated by the AES power plant in the town. Some of us from the U.S. had seen cable news air footage after Hurricane Maria of black sludge, rainwater mixed with thick coal ash from the plant, pouring from drainage pipes into the sea in the nearby town of Peñuelas, but we didn’t yet know the full extent of the coal ash catastrophe.
An Uncontained Mountain of Coal Ash
At the town forum, Luis Bonilla, an environmental researcher from the University of Puerto Rico, cited two separate studies that show the clear negative effects on the health of the residents of Guayama since AES, a Virginia-based multinational corporation, opened the coal plant in 2002. The city has seen notable increases in rates of cancer, asthma, and other diseases that can be linked to the effects of burning coal and the resultant ash filling the air and contaminating the groundwater.
These findings are worrisomely similar to the effects of the Guayama coal ash that was for a time exported to the Dominican Republic for disposal, where it also severely poisoned communities there. Gerson Jiménez, medical director at a local hospital who has practiced in Guayama since 1979, shared that in the years since the plant opened, he saw incidences of diseases linked to coal ash skyrocket as he’d never before seen in his many decades of practice in the area. Community organizers pleaded for people within and outside of Guayama to speak out and demand that the government force AES to stop its harm and make amends. The researchers and organizers concluded their forum with a final, urgent recommendation: to close the AES plant immediately.
Christy Morales and Aldwin Colón, two of the event’s organizers, live in the Miramar neighborhood of Guayama, about a mile away from the plant. Raising their two children there and seeing the effects on their health motivated them to join the efforts against AES. Colón was also diagnosed with kidney cancer in his mid-30s — a diagnosis that he thinks might not have happened if the coal plant had not moved to town — with his doctors telling him they were used to seeing the disease in people in their 60s and 70s. Colón and Morales were angry, and they channeled their anger and pain into their activism, getting people to pay attention to what was happening and take action to stop it.
The organizers offered to take us to see the plant up close. We followed as they expertly navigated their car down the neglected public road just outside the coal plant’s fence. Now we could see the mountains of coal ash towering stories high in the middle of the plant, shockingly uncontained. Each gust of wind blew a cloud of ash westward toward the road where we stood and past us into the residential neighborhoods of Guayama. Soon our eyes were watering, noses and sinuses reacting to the ash-filled air, an especially disturbing sensation given what we’d just learned about how this ash had been poisoning the people here for the past 17 years.
As Hurricane Maria approached in 2017, AES was supposed to cover up the ash with tarps to try to contain it. This strategy was flimsy at best: imagine how little plastic tarps can actually do to contain 120-foot mountains of ash during a Category 5 hurricane. But AES didn’t even use tarps. Maria struck with the mounds uncovered, further polluting the air and the waters around Guayama and sending ash from the dumps in Peñuelas pouring out of drainage pipes into the Caribbean Sea.
The Toxic Coal Ash Heads to Florida
Organizers in Osceola County, Florida, are now also organizing against AES, working to halt shipments of the plant’s coal ash from Puerto Rico to a local landfill. The approval of the plan to ship the coal ash to Florida was tacked onto an Osceola County Commissioners’ meeting as a last-minute addendum item, making it impossible for residents to register their objections before the deal was finalized. Fred Hawkins, commissioner of the district where the J.E.D. landfill is located, has financial and donor connections to Waste Connections, the owners of the landfill.
Community members in Osceola County are now organizing to halt the shipments of coal ash; nearly 44,000 tons have already arrived in Osceolawith another 200,000 planned before the end of 2019. After the public outcry, the county government sent a letter to Waste Connections asking them to stop shipments immediately. The company responded that it would continue accepting the AES coal ash until October 1, 2019, ending three months earlier than originally planned — but ultimately bringing the same amount of toxic waste into the area.
In both Guayama and Osceola County, a fair amount of the organizing around the coal ash issue is happening via Facebook. A group created for the community response in Osceola County includes information about the companies involved; news of the most recent developments; information on how to obtain signs, buttons and stickers; and encouragement to attend county commission meetings, protests and marches against the coal ash.
Some comments posted to the Osceloa County group’s page complain that “they” or “you,” meaning Puerto Ricans, should “clean up your own garbage” from the coal power consumed on the archipelago, with arguments that Florida shouldn’t be taking in “foreign” waste. Others repeatedly respond that AES is a U.S. company; that Puerto Rico is not currently a foreign nation; that the people of Puerto Rico have been protesting the coal plant for years and demanding renewable, clean energy sources; and that AES and other fossil-fuel profiteers spend massive amounts of money ensuring that their business continues unchecked.
These tensions between local residents are striking, though unfortunately not completely surprising, given the shifting demographics in central Florida. The Latinx population in Florida is rapidly growing. Puerto Ricans make up a large percentage of that Latinx population, especially after Hurricane Maria, when more than 200,000 Puerto Ricans moved to Florida after their homes, livelihoods and communities were destroyed by the storm.
When I first saw the Osceola news in the Guayama Facebook group, I commented about how many Puerto Ricans live in the area, including members of my own family. One poster responded that “this environmentally criminal corporation seems to have something personal against Puerto Ricans.”
The connection isn’t lost on others. One Puerto Rican now living in Osceola called the development a “double whammy.” And in a Sierra Club statement, organizer Adriana Gonzales says, “The people of Puerto Rico didn’t fight for years to get this toxic pollution removed from our communities just so AES could turn around and force their poison on Puerto Ricans in Florida. Now AES wants to dump their pollution in the very place that people fled to for safety.”
We Need Renewable Energy to End This Mess
No community that learns about the toxicity of coal ash wants it anywhere nearby. Promises about safe containment and disposal are broken again and again. And ash aside, there are, of course, the terrible, climate-changing effects of the greenhouse gases generated by burning coal. Given all of this, coal and other fossil fuels are simply not viable options for powering any place, especially not a place like Puerto Rico, where the fuels and the waste produced by burning them need to be shipped both in and out, yielding electricity prices nearly twice the U.S. average.
The answer, in Puerto Rico and everywhere, is renewable energy. Community-owned-and-operated solar power made a tremendous difference in post-Maria Puerto Rico, with the potential for building microgrids to provide sustainable power that doesn’t depend on a fragile, centralized system. But this opportunity for far more affordable and environmentally friendly energy is being targeted by government policies, including a proposed tax to penalize those who disconnect from the centralized grid and rely on their own solar power instead. These policies are influenced by corporate lobbyists invested in everyone believing that Puerto Rico has no choice but to rely on imported, expensive, toxic and environment-destroying fossil fuels like coal.
Things are starting to shift, but not nearly quickly enough. In 2017, Gov. Ricardo Rosselló signed a law banning the dumping of coal ash in Puerto Rican landfills, but making exceptions for supposedly safe construction materials made from the ash. This May, after previous failed lawsuits challenging the practice, the Puerto Rican Senate endorsed an amendment to the law to disallow those uses of coal ash as well. Earlier this year Rosselló signed another law to require that Puerto Rico be powered solely by renewable energy by 2050, with coal power eliminated by 2028.
Nine years might seem like a short amount of time to AES and others profiting from their coal plant, but nine more years is an intolerably long time for the residents of Guayama who are being sickened by breathing and drinking the ash. And the 31 years until the promised full conversion to renewable energy is far too long for a people who suffered so greatly when their centralized, fossil-fuel-based power grid was decimated by Hurricane Maria, leaving only the few solar-powered locations across the archipelago as beacons of light and life-saving electricity.
The AES Puerto Rico plant must be forced to stop burning coal now. AES must be forced to dispose of the toxic coal ash in the most responsible, least harmful ways available, at its own expense. The centralized Puerto Rican power grid must shift toward renewable energy immediately. But perhaps most importantly, the citizens of Puerto Rico should be assisted, not impeded, in developing their own solar microgrids and other locally controlled sources of renewable electricity that can endure in the face of hurricanes like Maria, which we know will come again.
puerto rico funnies
u.s. virgin islands
Jeffrey Epstein case threatens to drag Virgin Islands elite into the muck. Will it matter?
2020/2/16 05:47 (EST)
©Miami Herald
ST. THOMAS, U.S. Virgin Islands — The U.S. Virgin Islands opened up a new and explosive front in the battle over Jeffery Epstein’s $600 million estate last week when it included one of the sex offender’s companies, Southern Trust, as a co-defendant in the case.
With that late amendment, the attorney general’s office seemed to be painting a target on some of the island’s most prominent figures, including Gov. Albert Bryan Jr., and a former first lady, Cecile de Jongh.
Social media and the island’s legal community erupted with speculation that the powerful officials might get dragged into the mire created by Epstein’s criminal enterprise and human trafficking ring.
But in an interview with the Miami Herald, USVI Attorney General Denise George squelched those rumors, saying there was no evidence yet that might suggest broader responsibility.
At issue is Southern Trust, a purported data-mining company that Epstein incorporated in the USVI in 2011, and that the government believes was a sham to cover up his illegal activities.
One of Southern Trust’s longtime employees was de Jongh, who is married to former Gov. John de Jongh (2007-2015).
Asked if Southern Trust employees might come under investigation, George said it was too soon to tell.
“People can only be liable for evidence that leads to them,” she said. “Just because a person may be there and working, it does not mean that they committed a crime.”
Likewise, it would be irresponsible to judge people who visited Epstein’s private island, Little St. James, where he allegedly lured and sexually exploited women and girls.
“Just because someone visited the island doesn’t mean they committed offenses on the island. It doesn’t even mean they knew,” she said. “We have to be careful in calling out people or going after people — you can ruin a person unnecessarily. That’s why I’m so focused on following the evidence and seeing where it can go.”
Epstein began ramping up his dealings in the sun-kissed U.S. territory following his 2008 guilty plea to state prostitution charges in Palm Beach County, Fla.
In December of 2012, he went before the islands’ Economic Development Authority (EDA), where Bryan was the chairman at the time, to ask for tax breaks for Southern Trust Co.
According to Epstein, the company would build a “cutting-edge consulting service” that would mine DNA and financial data for a global clientele. Among other things, the database would allow pharmaceutical companies and doctors to use his mathematical models to test drug protocols.
“So my company’s algorithms will, in fact, digest the information as best as they can currently and then spit out its recommendations,” Epstein, just three years removed from serving a jail term in Palm Beach County and registering as a sex offender, told the EDA board. “So you’ll have computer generated solutions for medical problems, which is the next century’s work on how to get people healthy.”
After agreeing to make a $50,000-a-year charitable donation to support the island’s scholarship fund, Southern Trust was given a 90% exemption from its income tax and a 100% exemption from gross receipts, excise and withholding taxes.
According to minutes from that 2012 meeting, Epstein was never questioned about his sex offender status.
Even so, the lucrative deal allowed Southern Trust to avoid paying $73.6 million in taxes from 2013 to 2017 on aggregate income of $656 million, according to court documents. It also allowed Epstein, personally, to avoid an additional $71.3 million in taxes.
“It is clear that Southern Trust Company did not perform the ‘informatics’ business represented to the EDC and could not have generated the business income attributable to that business,” the government said in its amended complaint. “Instead, upon information and belief, Southern Trust Company existed to secure tax benefits for Epstein, to employ individuals associated with the Epstein Enterprise, and to provide a source of income to support his criminal activities and properties in the Virgin Islands.”
Asked if Bryan and other board members should have been aware that Southern Trust Co. was a scam, George said it appeared the agency had been duped.
Epstein “made those representations to the EDA, an independent government agency. The EDA relied on those misrepresentations in order to issue the benefits. So there’s not anything on the EDA, it was Southern Trust that made the representations, and that’s what the complaint is saying.”
Officials at the EDA said they were not immediately authorized to talk to reporters, and the governor’s office did not immediately respond to queries.
Just how Epstein operated beneath the radar for so long has been a running question on the islands.
But George said there was no overt indication that Epstein was doing anything illegal, despite Epstein’s well-publicized legal problems in Palm Beach County, where he initially had been accused by dozens of underage girls of sexual abuse. Although he pleaded guilty to a dramatically reduced charge in Palm Beach County, his privately owned cay in the Virgin Islands came to be known in the tabloid press as Orgy Island or Pedophile Island.
Nonetheless, when George became attorney general in April, she says she scoured police and legal records, there were no complaints filed against him.
To now say that the U.S. Virgin Islands didn’t do enough to stop him is unfair, she said.
“How can you blame the Virgin Islands? It’s almost like blaming a victim for something that happened to them. It’s like blaming a homeowner for a burglary because they might have left the window unlocked,” she said. “Epstein and his enterprise were very, very good at concealing their actions.
“Not only did they elude local authorities, they eluded federal authorities, too,” she added. “Federal authorities are here and human trafficking is a federal offense. That shows you how good they were.”
After the Miami Herald’s series Perversion of Justice, which focused on the women and girls Epstein abused, the financier was rearrested on federal sex trafficking charges and dozens of women have come forward to allege that Epstein sexually abused them when they were minors. Epstein was awaiting trial in New York when he was found dead in his cell. An autopsy found that he hanged himself.
Since then, amid the global media buzz, numerous reports have emerged of people seeing the financier and his friends arriving at the St. Thomas airport with young girls and then being taken to his secluded island by boat or helicopter.
In retrospect those actions seem damning, but even the airport employees who witnessed it didn’t report it at the time, George said, because there were no clear warning signs.
The airport staff “were thinking that it could have been nieces and nephews and grandchildren,” she said. “They didn’t see anything inappropriate … and then they were whisked away from the airport.”
George — who was a USVI prosecutor before becoming attorney general — has emerged as the bane of the Epstein estate.
His lawyers had been pushing to create a voluntary compensation fund — meaning a way to be compensated without having to go to court — for his dozens of victims until she put a lien on the entire estate, which is estimated at more than $600 million.
George says the freeze is necessary to keep Epstein’s lawyers from draining accounts before the scope of the damage is clear.
She also says his legal team has repeatedly failed to provide a complete inventory of his assets or explain their expenses.
In court earlier this month, it was revealed that, after his death, his estate transferred $12 million to Southern Country, a shadowy bank set up by Epstein. When asked by the probate judge about it, Epstein’s lawyers said the transfer had been “a mistake.”
“They don’t want to reveal what their expenses are and that concerns me,” George said of the accounting. “And they have made so many excessive payouts with no explanation. As far as I’m concerned, we cannot afford another $12 million dollar mistake.”
In addition, George says it’s unacceptable for Epstein’s lawyers — some of whom were named co-defendants in the amended complaint — to be involved in setting up the victims’ fund.
“I am very much opposed to what is proposed by the estate; it’s not fair or impartial,” she said. “The victims ought to be compensated in a manner in which they deserve to be. And before that, the estate needs to be accountable and transparent, and that is not happening.”
In addition, George wants the estate to set aside Epstein’s two islands and an undetermined amount of assets for any future claims by the USVI.
Asked what an appropriate amount might be, she said it was “premature” to discuss it until it’s clear what the value of Epstein’s entire estate is.
“I am going to keep focused on what is in the interest of the government of the Virgin Islands and the interest of the victims that have come forward and have not come forward,” she said. “And we want to protect these islands for the future, to curtail these kind of crimes, so this sort of thing never happens again.”
With that late amendment, the attorney general’s office seemed to be painting a target on some of the island’s most prominent figures, including Gov. Albert Bryan Jr., and a former first lady, Cecile de Jongh.
Social media and the island’s legal community erupted with speculation that the powerful officials might get dragged into the mire created by Epstein’s criminal enterprise and human trafficking ring.
But in an interview with the Miami Herald, USVI Attorney General Denise George squelched those rumors, saying there was no evidence yet that might suggest broader responsibility.
At issue is Southern Trust, a purported data-mining company that Epstein incorporated in the USVI in 2011, and that the government believes was a sham to cover up his illegal activities.
One of Southern Trust’s longtime employees was de Jongh, who is married to former Gov. John de Jongh (2007-2015).
Asked if Southern Trust employees might come under investigation, George said it was too soon to tell.
“People can only be liable for evidence that leads to them,” she said. “Just because a person may be there and working, it does not mean that they committed a crime.”
Likewise, it would be irresponsible to judge people who visited Epstein’s private island, Little St. James, where he allegedly lured and sexually exploited women and girls.
“Just because someone visited the island doesn’t mean they committed offenses on the island. It doesn’t even mean they knew,” she said. “We have to be careful in calling out people or going after people — you can ruin a person unnecessarily. That’s why I’m so focused on following the evidence and seeing where it can go.”
Epstein began ramping up his dealings in the sun-kissed U.S. territory following his 2008 guilty plea to state prostitution charges in Palm Beach County, Fla.
In December of 2012, he went before the islands’ Economic Development Authority (EDA), where Bryan was the chairman at the time, to ask for tax breaks for Southern Trust Co.
According to Epstein, the company would build a “cutting-edge consulting service” that would mine DNA and financial data for a global clientele. Among other things, the database would allow pharmaceutical companies and doctors to use his mathematical models to test drug protocols.
“So my company’s algorithms will, in fact, digest the information as best as they can currently and then spit out its recommendations,” Epstein, just three years removed from serving a jail term in Palm Beach County and registering as a sex offender, told the EDA board. “So you’ll have computer generated solutions for medical problems, which is the next century’s work on how to get people healthy.”
After agreeing to make a $50,000-a-year charitable donation to support the island’s scholarship fund, Southern Trust was given a 90% exemption from its income tax and a 100% exemption from gross receipts, excise and withholding taxes.
According to minutes from that 2012 meeting, Epstein was never questioned about his sex offender status.
Even so, the lucrative deal allowed Southern Trust to avoid paying $73.6 million in taxes from 2013 to 2017 on aggregate income of $656 million, according to court documents. It also allowed Epstein, personally, to avoid an additional $71.3 million in taxes.
“It is clear that Southern Trust Company did not perform the ‘informatics’ business represented to the EDC and could not have generated the business income attributable to that business,” the government said in its amended complaint. “Instead, upon information and belief, Southern Trust Company existed to secure tax benefits for Epstein, to employ individuals associated with the Epstein Enterprise, and to provide a source of income to support his criminal activities and properties in the Virgin Islands.”
Asked if Bryan and other board members should have been aware that Southern Trust Co. was a scam, George said it appeared the agency had been duped.
Epstein “made those representations to the EDA, an independent government agency. The EDA relied on those misrepresentations in order to issue the benefits. So there’s not anything on the EDA, it was Southern Trust that made the representations, and that’s what the complaint is saying.”
Officials at the EDA said they were not immediately authorized to talk to reporters, and the governor’s office did not immediately respond to queries.
Just how Epstein operated beneath the radar for so long has been a running question on the islands.
But George said there was no overt indication that Epstein was doing anything illegal, despite Epstein’s well-publicized legal problems in Palm Beach County, where he initially had been accused by dozens of underage girls of sexual abuse. Although he pleaded guilty to a dramatically reduced charge in Palm Beach County, his privately owned cay in the Virgin Islands came to be known in the tabloid press as Orgy Island or Pedophile Island.
Nonetheless, when George became attorney general in April, she says she scoured police and legal records, there were no complaints filed against him.
To now say that the U.S. Virgin Islands didn’t do enough to stop him is unfair, she said.
“How can you blame the Virgin Islands? It’s almost like blaming a victim for something that happened to them. It’s like blaming a homeowner for a burglary because they might have left the window unlocked,” she said. “Epstein and his enterprise were very, very good at concealing their actions.
“Not only did they elude local authorities, they eluded federal authorities, too,” she added. “Federal authorities are here and human trafficking is a federal offense. That shows you how good they were.”
After the Miami Herald’s series Perversion of Justice, which focused on the women and girls Epstein abused, the financier was rearrested on federal sex trafficking charges and dozens of women have come forward to allege that Epstein sexually abused them when they were minors. Epstein was awaiting trial in New York when he was found dead in his cell. An autopsy found that he hanged himself.
Since then, amid the global media buzz, numerous reports have emerged of people seeing the financier and his friends arriving at the St. Thomas airport with young girls and then being taken to his secluded island by boat or helicopter.
In retrospect those actions seem damning, but even the airport employees who witnessed it didn’t report it at the time, George said, because there were no clear warning signs.
The airport staff “were thinking that it could have been nieces and nephews and grandchildren,” she said. “They didn’t see anything inappropriate … and then they were whisked away from the airport.”
George — who was a USVI prosecutor before becoming attorney general — has emerged as the bane of the Epstein estate.
His lawyers had been pushing to create a voluntary compensation fund — meaning a way to be compensated without having to go to court — for his dozens of victims until she put a lien on the entire estate, which is estimated at more than $600 million.
George says the freeze is necessary to keep Epstein’s lawyers from draining accounts before the scope of the damage is clear.
She also says his legal team has repeatedly failed to provide a complete inventory of his assets or explain their expenses.
In court earlier this month, it was revealed that, after his death, his estate transferred $12 million to Southern Country, a shadowy bank set up by Epstein. When asked by the probate judge about it, Epstein’s lawyers said the transfer had been “a mistake.”
“They don’t want to reveal what their expenses are and that concerns me,” George said of the accounting. “And they have made so many excessive payouts with no explanation. As far as I’m concerned, we cannot afford another $12 million dollar mistake.”
In addition, George says it’s unacceptable for Epstein’s lawyers — some of whom were named co-defendants in the amended complaint — to be involved in setting up the victims’ fund.
“I am very much opposed to what is proposed by the estate; it’s not fair or impartial,” she said. “The victims ought to be compensated in a manner in which they deserve to be. And before that, the estate needs to be accountable and transparent, and that is not happening.”
In addition, George wants the estate to set aside Epstein’s two islands and an undetermined amount of assets for any future claims by the USVI.
Asked what an appropriate amount might be, she said it was “premature” to discuss it until it’s clear what the value of Epstein’s entire estate is.
“I am going to keep focused on what is in the interest of the government of the Virgin Islands and the interest of the victims that have come forward and have not come forward,” she said. “And we want to protect these islands for the future, to curtail these kind of crimes, so this sort of thing never happens again.”
EDUCATORS GATHER AT GOVERNMENT HOUSE ST. CROIX IN PROTEST OF LOW WAGES, WORKING CONDITIONS
April 19, 2018
ST. CROIX — Educators here led by St. Croix Federation of Teachers President Rosa Soto-Thomas, descended on Government House in Christiansted on Wednesday for a protest action to raise awareness on a myriad of issues facing teachers, including stagnant wages and the condition of learning facilities.
While the turnout was not large — roughly about 30 persons attended — the action reminded the public of the high level of frustration with the public education system in the Virgin Islands, which has been losing educators for years.
“We are over here having a demonstration to bring awareness to the working conditions that are happening in our schools; the issue of long overdue salary increases, and we’re also echoing the same thing that is happening on a national level,” Mrs. Soto-Thomas said, referring to the National Day of Action Against Gun Violence in Schools, set for April 20 across the U.S.
“There are many issues going on in the Virgin Islands. Our students are getting four hours of education and that’s a major issue for all of us here in the community. We’re hoping for changes, and we’re hoping that our schools are up and going,” Mrs. Soto-Thomas added.
Protesters could be seen holding up signs with various grievances. “We demand definitive deadlines,” read one sign, ostensibly pointing to the Department of Education’s lack of solid dates for the installation of modular units and sprung structures at various schools — a move that would bring an end to split sessions.
“We are owed wage opener, old retro, new retro, [and] 8 percent restoration,” read another, highlighting the number of areas that teachers believe they are being wronged.
Another read, “Personal leave, it’s mine! Leave me alone.” There were also signs about mold and even one that sought to highlight the Government Employees’ Retirement System, which educators pay into and whose survival is in doubt.
Wednesday’s protest action spoke to the compounding problems facing the Department of Education. D.O.E. has been losing teachers at an unsustainable rate. As of January, there were 137 teaching vacancies. Since August 2017, the department had 60 separations: 17 teachers from the STTJ District and 13 from the STX District, and the remaining 30 in support staff. The problem? Educators continue to leave en masse for better opportunities elsewhere, decrying the low pay and unendurable number of deductions from the already low pay.
So they leave, looking to better their lives. “After much thought and trial in trying to make ends meet here, I must inform you of my intent to depart from the D.O.E. .. This is by no means a hasty decision, however, due to the fact I have $500 coming out of each paycheck, I can no longer keep up with my bills,” one departing teacher told D.O.E. in a letter announcing her resignation.
The problem was bluntly admitted by D.O.E. Commissioner Sharon McCollum last year: “Applicants’ interest quickly dissipates when they attempt to negotiate incentives and salary schedules. Our department is simply at a disadvantage and unable to compete with school districts nationally in regards to monetary compensation,” she said.
During a Consortium interview with Governor Kenneth Mapp in January, where the publication chose most of its questions from the community, Mr. Mapp said he could not give a timeline on when teachers would see a pay increase.
The governor said pay increases for not only teachers, but other government employees would come, “As we improve the economy, as we’re able to collect the revenues and support for doing that. But I as a governor would not want to take an irresponsible position, negotiate for higher wages and then send people home,” he said.
Mr. Mapp was responding to a question posed by Mrs. Soto-Thomas on the Consortium’s Facebook platform, asking the governor when would he retract an executive order that placed a halt on all salary negotiations. “We are in 2018 and getting paid in 2010 salaries,” Mrs. Soto-Thomas said. “Teacher vacancies continue to mount. You promised educators that you were going to fix their starting salaries, instead, their expendable income continues to shrink with the slew of deductions.”
The governor, in explaining why he signed the executive order halting salary negotiations, said that when the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in November 2016 that the 8 percent pay cut was unconstitutional, that ruling came because the Virgin Islands government negotiated for wages, came into an agreement with the union, signed a contract and then wrote legislation to reduce wages. “So [the government] cannot negotiate for money it does not have, and then find some other way to cure the deficiency… If you do not have the money — and this is in the opinion — then do not negotiate,” the governor said.
Mr. Mapp acknowledged the tireless work of public servants, but gave no reassurances. “I thank the teachers, and I thank public workers because they work hard and teachers today are working in horrible conditions, because we have in some instances three schools in a building — and the schools are not in the best condition,” he said. But to give a timeline, the governor added, would be “self-serving politics, because you don’t have control on that.”
He added, “I do understand that it is competitive out there and people are going to make decisions in the best interest of their families. I’m going to work hard, and Lieutenant Governor Potter, we’re going to work hard to get to a better day, but we just could not pull that off in three years with the financial condition of the government. And again, I can’t say today what month and what year we’ll be able to do that.”
While the turnout was not large — roughly about 30 persons attended — the action reminded the public of the high level of frustration with the public education system in the Virgin Islands, which has been losing educators for years.
“We are over here having a demonstration to bring awareness to the working conditions that are happening in our schools; the issue of long overdue salary increases, and we’re also echoing the same thing that is happening on a national level,” Mrs. Soto-Thomas said, referring to the National Day of Action Against Gun Violence in Schools, set for April 20 across the U.S.
“There are many issues going on in the Virgin Islands. Our students are getting four hours of education and that’s a major issue for all of us here in the community. We’re hoping for changes, and we’re hoping that our schools are up and going,” Mrs. Soto-Thomas added.
Protesters could be seen holding up signs with various grievances. “We demand definitive deadlines,” read one sign, ostensibly pointing to the Department of Education’s lack of solid dates for the installation of modular units and sprung structures at various schools — a move that would bring an end to split sessions.
“We are owed wage opener, old retro, new retro, [and] 8 percent restoration,” read another, highlighting the number of areas that teachers believe they are being wronged.
Another read, “Personal leave, it’s mine! Leave me alone.” There were also signs about mold and even one that sought to highlight the Government Employees’ Retirement System, which educators pay into and whose survival is in doubt.
Wednesday’s protest action spoke to the compounding problems facing the Department of Education. D.O.E. has been losing teachers at an unsustainable rate. As of January, there were 137 teaching vacancies. Since August 2017, the department had 60 separations: 17 teachers from the STTJ District and 13 from the STX District, and the remaining 30 in support staff. The problem? Educators continue to leave en masse for better opportunities elsewhere, decrying the low pay and unendurable number of deductions from the already low pay.
So they leave, looking to better their lives. “After much thought and trial in trying to make ends meet here, I must inform you of my intent to depart from the D.O.E. .. This is by no means a hasty decision, however, due to the fact I have $500 coming out of each paycheck, I can no longer keep up with my bills,” one departing teacher told D.O.E. in a letter announcing her resignation.
The problem was bluntly admitted by D.O.E. Commissioner Sharon McCollum last year: “Applicants’ interest quickly dissipates when they attempt to negotiate incentives and salary schedules. Our department is simply at a disadvantage and unable to compete with school districts nationally in regards to monetary compensation,” she said.
During a Consortium interview with Governor Kenneth Mapp in January, where the publication chose most of its questions from the community, Mr. Mapp said he could not give a timeline on when teachers would see a pay increase.
The governor said pay increases for not only teachers, but other government employees would come, “As we improve the economy, as we’re able to collect the revenues and support for doing that. But I as a governor would not want to take an irresponsible position, negotiate for higher wages and then send people home,” he said.
Mr. Mapp was responding to a question posed by Mrs. Soto-Thomas on the Consortium’s Facebook platform, asking the governor when would he retract an executive order that placed a halt on all salary negotiations. “We are in 2018 and getting paid in 2010 salaries,” Mrs. Soto-Thomas said. “Teacher vacancies continue to mount. You promised educators that you were going to fix their starting salaries, instead, their expendable income continues to shrink with the slew of deductions.”
The governor, in explaining why he signed the executive order halting salary negotiations, said that when the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in November 2016 that the 8 percent pay cut was unconstitutional, that ruling came because the Virgin Islands government negotiated for wages, came into an agreement with the union, signed a contract and then wrote legislation to reduce wages. “So [the government] cannot negotiate for money it does not have, and then find some other way to cure the deficiency… If you do not have the money — and this is in the opinion — then do not negotiate,” the governor said.
Mr. Mapp acknowledged the tireless work of public servants, but gave no reassurances. “I thank the teachers, and I thank public workers because they work hard and teachers today are working in horrible conditions, because we have in some instances three schools in a building — and the schools are not in the best condition,” he said. But to give a timeline, the governor added, would be “self-serving politics, because you don’t have control on that.”
He added, “I do understand that it is competitive out there and people are going to make decisions in the best interest of their families. I’m going to work hard, and Lieutenant Governor Potter, we’re going to work hard to get to a better day, but we just could not pull that off in three years with the financial condition of the government. And again, I can’t say today what month and what year we’ll be able to do that.”
The Insular Cases: Why Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands Are Colonies and Not States
By David Love - October 19, 2017
From Atlanta Black Star: The post-hurricane devastation facing Puerto Ricoand the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the lack of attention being paid by the federal government to necessary relief efforts. The lack of media attention to the death and destruction facing these U.S. citizens — who are not white and many of whom are of African descent — speaks to their second-class citizenship rooted in white supremacy and systemic racial discrimination.
With nearly half of Americans not realizing Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens — and even Donald Trump apparently not realizing the people of America’s island territories are citizens, or that he is the president of the U.S. Virgin Islands — these Black and Brown territories are American colonies and possessions of conquest in every manner.
The reason why the island territories — not only the Caribbean islands, but also Pacific islands such as Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands — are subjected to separate and unequal treatment, and are not states, is because of the Insular Cases, a series of racist Supreme Court decisions, of which the first were written by the same court that gave us the endorsement of racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. These cases established the racist framework governing nonwhite territories of the United States. The island territories, inhabited by so-called alien races, were designed to give the United States control over the seas but second-class citizenship to their inhabitants. These cases are why these Black and Brown territories — as opposed to former white-controlled territories turned states — are subjected to the control of Congress, and no territory has become a state since Alaska and Hawaii in 1959.
The Spanish-American War led to the acquisition of Puerto Rico, the Philippine Islands and Guam by the United States, at a time of substantial territorial expansion and imperialist aspirations, with the concept of “manifest destiny” and the subjugation of inferior races “for their own good.” These native populations were nonwhite, with different customs and languages from the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture, and the lands were noncontiguous to mainland America. In that regard, these territories were unlike the other territories that existed at the time, including Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma, as was written in Slate.
At the time, Alaska and Hawaii had already been established as sovereign territories incorporated into the United States, with full constitutional safeguards and a pathway to statehood. The American court system rationalized that Alaska was in a different classification from Puerto Rico because it was on the North American continent. Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898, was a distant island populated by nonwhite people like Puerto Rico, yet Congress quickly granted full citizenship to its residents in 1900. Further, the United States was changing its definition of a territory, as Slate noted, opting for a European model of expansion to rescue the savages — a white supremacist message which presidents such as McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt endorsed. Further, President William Howard Taft — later Supreme Court Chief Justice — had a personal bias against Puerto Rican people which proved decisive in the fate of the territory. Taft believed they were unable to understand institutions of “Anglo-Saxon origin” such as the jury system, and he supported citizenship only if the territory was not granted statehood. The American attitude towards these nonwhite possessions reflected both the racism of the day, but also a desire to economically exploit these islands and establish military bases on them.
In one of the Insular Cases, DeLima v. Bidwell, the high court found that Puerto Rico was not a foreign country within the context of tariff laws. In Downes v. Bidwell, the court ruled that Puerto Rico was an unincorporated territory under the control of Congress, but without the full protection of the U.S. Constitution. “If those possessions are inhabited by alien races, differing from us in religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and modes of thought, the administration of government and justice according to Anglo-Saxon principles may for a time be impossible, and the question at once arises whether large concessions ought not to be made for a time, that ultimately our own theories may be carried out and the blessings of a free government under the Constitution extended to them. We decline to hold that there is anything in the Constitution to forbid such action,” the court wrote in its opinion.
In Gonzales v. Williams, the Supreme Court said that a woman from Puerto Rico who moved to New York was not an “alien immigrant,” but rather a “noncitizen national.” In 1917, Congress granted citizenship to people in Puerto Rico.
Formerly the Danish West Indies, the U.S. Virgin Islands became a United States territory in 1917, when the islands were transferred from Denmark for $25 million. Residents of the islands were granted full citizenship rights in 1932 through an act of Congress. Before that time, U.S. courts regarded the people of the U.S. Virgin Islands not as citizens but as “nationals,” which in U.S. colonial policy referred to “inhabitants of colonies to whom the rights of U.S. citizenship were not conferred.”
Although the inhabitants of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico received U.S. citizenship, the racist policies which undergirded America’s treatment of its colonial territories have persisted. This is why people from these islands, who are truly American, often are not regarded as such, particularly after a natural disaster.
Meanwhile, the PR crisis has the potential to change Southern politics, particularly in Florida, potentially giving Democrats an advantage. The states with the greatest influx of Puerto Ricans between 2007 and 2009 were, from highest to lowest, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland.
More than 1 million people of Puerto Rican descent live in Florida, doubling their number since 2001 as a result of a weak economy back home, and as many as 100,000 more are expected to relocate to the state as victims of Hurricane Maria. Leaning heavily Democratic and voting in large numbers, Puerto Rican voters in the mainland voted for Hillary Clinton by a 3-to-1 margin. The Puerto Rican diaspora in Florida and elsewhere, angered by Trump’s inaction in addressing the needs of the storm-ravaged island, and displaying a perceived insensitivity to their plight when he threw paper towels to a crowd during his visit, could galvanize and make a difference in the 2018 and 2020 elections. Although treated not unlike second-class citizens back home, where they cannot vote in national elections, Puerto Ricans on the mainland can register to vote anywhere and participate in races for the Senate, Congress and President, in what may prove the ultimate revenge.
This revenge is against Republicans and Trump — who ignores their plight post-Hurricane Maria and exhibits the racial bias of white U.S. leaders and policymakers a century ago. But this opportunity for payback by Puerto Rican voters also reflects an ability to impact politics on the mainland, after years of political exclusion and marginalization back home, and a colonial limbo status denying them statehood on the one hand, and independence and self-determination on the other.
With nearly half of Americans not realizing Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens — and even Donald Trump apparently not realizing the people of America’s island territories are citizens, or that he is the president of the U.S. Virgin Islands — these Black and Brown territories are American colonies and possessions of conquest in every manner.
The reason why the island territories — not only the Caribbean islands, but also Pacific islands such as Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands — are subjected to separate and unequal treatment, and are not states, is because of the Insular Cases, a series of racist Supreme Court decisions, of which the first were written by the same court that gave us the endorsement of racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. These cases established the racist framework governing nonwhite territories of the United States. The island territories, inhabited by so-called alien races, were designed to give the United States control over the seas but second-class citizenship to their inhabitants. These cases are why these Black and Brown territories — as opposed to former white-controlled territories turned states — are subjected to the control of Congress, and no territory has become a state since Alaska and Hawaii in 1959.
The Spanish-American War led to the acquisition of Puerto Rico, the Philippine Islands and Guam by the United States, at a time of substantial territorial expansion and imperialist aspirations, with the concept of “manifest destiny” and the subjugation of inferior races “for their own good.” These native populations were nonwhite, with different customs and languages from the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture, and the lands were noncontiguous to mainland America. In that regard, these territories were unlike the other territories that existed at the time, including Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma, as was written in Slate.
At the time, Alaska and Hawaii had already been established as sovereign territories incorporated into the United States, with full constitutional safeguards and a pathway to statehood. The American court system rationalized that Alaska was in a different classification from Puerto Rico because it was on the North American continent. Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898, was a distant island populated by nonwhite people like Puerto Rico, yet Congress quickly granted full citizenship to its residents in 1900. Further, the United States was changing its definition of a territory, as Slate noted, opting for a European model of expansion to rescue the savages — a white supremacist message which presidents such as McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt endorsed. Further, President William Howard Taft — later Supreme Court Chief Justice — had a personal bias against Puerto Rican people which proved decisive in the fate of the territory. Taft believed they were unable to understand institutions of “Anglo-Saxon origin” such as the jury system, and he supported citizenship only if the territory was not granted statehood. The American attitude towards these nonwhite possessions reflected both the racism of the day, but also a desire to economically exploit these islands and establish military bases on them.
In one of the Insular Cases, DeLima v. Bidwell, the high court found that Puerto Rico was not a foreign country within the context of tariff laws. In Downes v. Bidwell, the court ruled that Puerto Rico was an unincorporated territory under the control of Congress, but without the full protection of the U.S. Constitution. “If those possessions are inhabited by alien races, differing from us in religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and modes of thought, the administration of government and justice according to Anglo-Saxon principles may for a time be impossible, and the question at once arises whether large concessions ought not to be made for a time, that ultimately our own theories may be carried out and the blessings of a free government under the Constitution extended to them. We decline to hold that there is anything in the Constitution to forbid such action,” the court wrote in its opinion.
In Gonzales v. Williams, the Supreme Court said that a woman from Puerto Rico who moved to New York was not an “alien immigrant,” but rather a “noncitizen national.” In 1917, Congress granted citizenship to people in Puerto Rico.
Formerly the Danish West Indies, the U.S. Virgin Islands became a United States territory in 1917, when the islands were transferred from Denmark for $25 million. Residents of the islands were granted full citizenship rights in 1932 through an act of Congress. Before that time, U.S. courts regarded the people of the U.S. Virgin Islands not as citizens but as “nationals,” which in U.S. colonial policy referred to “inhabitants of colonies to whom the rights of U.S. citizenship were not conferred.”
Although the inhabitants of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico received U.S. citizenship, the racist policies which undergirded America’s treatment of its colonial territories have persisted. This is why people from these islands, who are truly American, often are not regarded as such, particularly after a natural disaster.
Meanwhile, the PR crisis has the potential to change Southern politics, particularly in Florida, potentially giving Democrats an advantage. The states with the greatest influx of Puerto Ricans between 2007 and 2009 were, from highest to lowest, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland.
More than 1 million people of Puerto Rican descent live in Florida, doubling their number since 2001 as a result of a weak economy back home, and as many as 100,000 more are expected to relocate to the state as victims of Hurricane Maria. Leaning heavily Democratic and voting in large numbers, Puerto Rican voters in the mainland voted for Hillary Clinton by a 3-to-1 margin. The Puerto Rican diaspora in Florida and elsewhere, angered by Trump’s inaction in addressing the needs of the storm-ravaged island, and displaying a perceived insensitivity to their plight when he threw paper towels to a crowd during his visit, could galvanize and make a difference in the 2018 and 2020 elections. Although treated not unlike second-class citizens back home, where they cannot vote in national elections, Puerto Ricans on the mainland can register to vote anywhere and participate in races for the Senate, Congress and President, in what may prove the ultimate revenge.
This revenge is against Republicans and Trump — who ignores their plight post-Hurricane Maria and exhibits the racial bias of white U.S. leaders and policymakers a century ago. But this opportunity for payback by Puerto Rican voters also reflects an ability to impact politics on the mainland, after years of political exclusion and marginalization back home, and a colonial limbo status denying them statehood on the one hand, and independence and self-determination on the other.