Maria, politics hurting Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico needs relief, and from more than just the hurricane.
Right now, about 3.4 million American citizens are dealing with a worst-case-scenario. In the wake of Hurricane Maria’s destruction, the island is almost entirely without power, fresh water and communication services.
President Donald Trump on Thursday heeded calls by legislators and aid groups to lift the Jones Act, which restricted shipping to the island, and that was a good step. Still, the relief efforts from the mainland have been slow and inadequate, especially in comparison to the work in Texas and Florida. Our fellow citizens are suffering.
This is a natural disaster, yes, but it’s also one made significantly worse by human action. Scientists already agree that human activity — namely the burning of fossil fuels — is causing major increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. The Atlantic hurricane season already has broken records, with September proving the most active month on record.
There’s another form of human activity that has contributed to Puerto Rico’s current woes. It’s the kind of thing we have much more direct control over, too: politics.
In April of 2016, John Oliver delivered an excellent rundown of the economic situation on his program, “Last Week Tonight.” It was eerily prescient, predicting the crisis we now see on the island as the result of discriminatory and predatory political decisions.
We’re seeing heartbreaking stories about hospitals and senior centers unable to keep their power on, aid reaching the island but lacking means to be distributed, fuel in short supply, the majority of cell towers down and communication practically non-existent.
All of this and more is a direct result of years of infrastructure neglect and the forced prioritization of debt payments over basic government services — the stuff that helps keep people alive and society functioning on the best of days, and becomes all the more crucial when disaster strikes.
Why? Because the U.S. Congress and certain lobbyists have seen fit to treat Puerto Rico as a tax haven for wealthy people and corporations, without giving the territory any kind of real power (no vote in Congress) to stop them running roughshod over the best interests of its people.
The government of Puerto Rico only compounded the problems by enshrining in the constitution that “certain bondholders” of the island’s municipal bonds must be paid back before money can be put toward basic government services, right on down to buying gas for school buses and police cars.
Combined with the loss of manufacturing business after a tax break was eliminated by Congress in 2007, right about when the recession hit, Puerto Rico has dealt with its massive budget shortfalls by issuing huge numbers of municipal bonds (essentially IOUs) — which, again thanks to U.S. law, are triple tax exempt, and therefore very appealing for investors.
There’s more: Given the staggering amount of debt held, and its inability to cover basic services thanks to continued budget shortfalls, the solution anywhere else would be to declare bankruptcy. Thanks, however, to an obscure provision wedged into a 1984 law by then-Sen. Strom Thurmond, Puerto Rico is barred from using Chapter 9 for bankruptcy protection. In layman’s terms, they’re hosed. President Barack Obama signed a relief package in June 2016 aimed at helping Puerto Rico address its debt issues, but it included Republican-backed provisions that lowered the minimum wage for some of the island’s workers, and created a problematic, shadow government-like oversight board that Sen. Bernie Sanders railed against, not least because the deal required that local governments act in the best interests of its creditors, rather than, say, its citizens.
Which is how Puerto Rico got into this mess in the first place.
There’s much we can and must do as a country to provide immediate relief to our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico. That relief must involve crucial aid in the form of food, clean water, fuel, and sanitation services — but it must also involve substantial debt forgiveness, and a people-first restructuring of the laws that govern it.
In addition to how we deal with the clean-up in Texas and Florida, the crisis in Puerto Rico is an opportunity for us to show the path forward toward a more just and sustainable future. Otherwise, it will instead serve as the harbinger of worse to come for us all — an inevitable result of unfettered capitalistic greed and anti-science ideologies. It’s our choice.