Puerto Rico - U.S. Virgin Islands
POSTED BY: SHINYGOODGUY
UPDATED: Saturday, July 25, 2026 15:29
VIEWED: 19797
PAGE 8 of 16
“I just want to tell you that right from the beginning this governor did not play politics,” Trump said during his visit to Puerto Rico on Tuesday. “He didn’t play it at all. He was saying it like it was. And he was giving us the highest grades.” Trump tweeted: Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello just stated: "The Administration and the President, every time we've spoken, they've delivered......
The idea that everything is fine because Governor Rosselló says it’s fine has been a consistent theme of Trump’s commentary on the storm.
And while Rosselló has, when not discussing matters with Trump, expressed considerable concern that Congress hasn’t yet appropriated the kind of money his island is going to need, he has maintained a consistent posture of public support for Trump. It’s extended as far as seeming to slow-walk updates of the death count, which Trump has repeatedly cited as evidence of the smooth recovery process.
As a tactic for dealing with a president who reportedly receives a daily briefing document full of flattering press accounts of his own activities, Rosselló’s strategy makes sense. Puerto Rico is going to need money and possibly debt relief. A worst-case scenario for Rosselló is one in which he angers Trump and Trump retaliates by taking a hard line against the island’s interests. Trump’s taste for flattery is becoming a disaster for Puerto Rico because it is in real trouble but Trump only wishes to hear good news out of Puerto Rico.
Trump gives no sign of having begun to wrestle with the severity of either the short-term humanitarian or the long-term economic issue on anything other than the most superficial level. The upshot of his emphasis on denouncing media scrutiny and elevating official flattery is that he never will.
The good news for Trump, the country, and the world is that though the fate of Puerto Rico’s 3 million people is important to them, it’s limited in its broader impact on the outside world.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/5/16425954/trump-flattery-puer
to-rico
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Yeah. Like I said, they have nothing to offer.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Second, did you just say that Puerto Ricans are stuck
with bailing themselves out?
If so, I'm wrong to imagine that US manufacturers use
them for cheap labor. If they were valuable to business
interests here, then we would help them.
I wonder why they are so undeveloped commercially.
... oooOO}{OOooo ...
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by Oonjerah:
Second, did you just say that Puerto Ricans are stuck
with bailing themselves out?
If so, I'm wrong to imagine that US manufacturers use
them for cheap labor. If they were valuable to business
interests here, then we would help them.
I wonder why they are so undeveloped commercially.
That's how I read this last part...
Quote:
The good news for Trump, the country, and the world is that though the fate of Puerto Rico’s 3 million people is important to them, it’s limited in its broader impact on the outside world.
After filtering out obligatory the anti-trump bias and the ridiculous statement that this is important to the rest of the world, of course.
It's not really important to anybody besides people in Puerto Rico, and people who have family or friends that live in Puerto Rico. Sure, I could sit here and virtue signal all day about how my heart and prayers go out to them to make me feel better about myself, but what good is that doing anybody in Puerto Rico.
The fact that they really have nothing to contribute to the rest of the world is especially damning for their situation right now.
I'm not trying to be a dick here, and I agree with you 100% that if they were valuable to business interests here than we would be helping them more. All I'm saying is that their situation sucks and nobody is going to do anything much that helps them if they don't do it for themselves. Everybody that's posting about it online today won't even remember it happened 3 weeks from now.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
How a heartbroken doomsday prepper who lost everything
is now saving hurricane victims
http://www.nj.com/burlington/index.ssf/2017/09/how_a_heartbroken_dooms
day_prepper_who_lost_everyt.html
"MEDFORD TWP. — You probably wouldn't expect to find a doomsday prepper's
compound at the end of a nice cul-de-sac off of Tuckerton Road, otherwise
lined with large houses with pools. ..."
... oooOO}{OOooo ...
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Now that's an awesome story.
Thanks for sharing that OONJ.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Puerto Rico's debt to the U.S. will prohibit any type of economic abandonment by Congress, too much has been invested already. So, what to do? Good question. Perhaps, as has been suggested, the island should be left to fend for itself, you know break ties with the U.S. No more Commonwealth!
Because, as has been suggested, "they" have nothing to offer. So, as it says in the song in West Side Story, "let it sink back in the ocean."
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/10/2/16403236/puerto-r
ico-economy-utilities-power-prepa-disaster
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/5/16403952/hurricane-m
aria-puerto-rico-migration
Some economic background
Quote:
The Maria-fueled exodus is really an acceleration of a trend that’s been underway for years. Puerto Ricans are US citizens, part of the US labor market, and can take jobs and move wherever they want. And due largely to Puerto Rico’s economic crisis and persistently high unemployment, its residents have been leaving in large numbers in recent years.
Pew Research Center estimates that the Puerto Rican population peaked in 2004, and the territory lost 446,000 people between then and 2016, nearly 12 percent of the population. In 2015 alone, 89,000 Puerto Ricans left for the US mainland, and 64,238 of them have not returned. San Juan, the capital, lost about 10 percent of its population in the decade from 2005 to 2015.
The financial crisis and recession hit Puerto Rico slightly before the US as a whole, beginning with the end of tax breaks that Congress had offered manufacturers for locating in Puerto Rico. The breaks had allowed Puerto Rican subsidiaries of US companies to send earnings back to the mainland without paying federal corporate taxes. US politicians widely viewed this as an illegitimate corporate tax giveaway, and in 1996 Congress opted to phase it out gradually over 10 years. In 2006, the full brunt of the breaks' removal hit, and manufacturers, in particular pharmaceutical companies, began closing plants; an estimated 100,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost, with more indirect jobs going away as a result.
The result was a recession, worsened by the US mainland financial crisis and recession in 2007 and 2008.
Meanwhile, federal law had also caused an explosion in the territory’s public debt. Puerto Rican debt is “triple exempt” from taxes: Bonds issued by the territory’s government are exempt from state/territory-level, municipal, and federal taxation. There’s other triple-exempt debt in the US too, but you generally have to live in the place in question to enjoy it; Californians buying California state debt, for instance, get a triple exemption. Puerto Rico’s debt, however, is triple-exempt no matter who buys it. That naturally led a lot of people to want to buy it, giving the government a reason to take out lots of debt.
The sudden collapse of the territorial (and national) economy in the late 2000s made repaying that debt tough. That led to pressure for austerity policies that made the economic situation as experienced by ordinary Puerto Ricans even worse. Even now, after the continental US has largely recovered from the Great Recession, unemployment in Puerto Rico is above 10 percent; it peaked at 17 percent in 2010. The Census Bureau estimates the poverty rate at 43.5 percent. In those conditions, relocating to the mainland, which has always enjoyed far higher household incomes than Puerto Rico, starts to look very attractive.
“If you compare it to the historic periods where there’s been the greatest levels of migration, like after WWII and in the ’80s, the last 10 years are another one of those peaks,” Elizabeth Aranda, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern Florida who studies Puerto Rican migrant communities, says. “It might even surpass migration in the 1980s.”The Maria-fueled exodus is really an acceleration of a trend that’s been underway for years. Puerto Ricans are US citizens, part of the US labor market, and can take jobs and move wherever they want. And dueNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Is there anything that Trump could do right now about Puerto Rico that would make you happy? I give the ultimate handout solution and say bring the entire island over here as refugees, and you still don't like that solution.
1- Handout solution - it's funny, Big Corporations get bailouts (really corporate welfare) and very little is said - barely a blip on the radar screen - and yet...
2- It brings me to the "refugees" statement - can Americans, within their own country, be called refugees?
There is a solution that would both rebuild the island, and repay the Bonds held (despite the fact they were illegally obtained by UBS) against Puerto Rico. Restructure the debt and rebuild the infrastructure. Now that is, of course, that the bond holders don't want to take over the island and bypass the statehood option.
With statehood Puerto Rico would go the way of Hawaii and become another luxury playground for the rich and famous, and employ the natives of the island as a type of indentured slaves.
I don't think that the US Congress will opt to make PR a state, there's too much at stake. I believe that they will be allowed to suffer and literally 'sink' into the ocean. Wall Street will call in their notes and put the squeeze on PR, and be made to repay their debt by surrendering the island as so much collateral. I'm not sure of the logistics, but somehow the island will wind up in others hands. Properties will be bought up for pennies on the dollar, and packaged to investors. Wall Street will get paid and the island will be made into a type of Hawaii/Disneyland, as I said, a playground for the wealthy. A new style colonialism.
Just sayin'
SGG
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by SHINYGOODGUY:Quote:
Is there anything that Trump could do right now about Puerto Rico that would make you happy? I give the ultimate handout solution and say bring the entire island over here as refugees, and you still don't like that solution.
1- Handout solution - it's funny, Big Corporations get bailouts (really corporate welfare) and very little is said - barely a blip on the radar screen - and yet...
2- It brings me to the "refugees" statement - can Americans, within their own country, be called refugees?
There is a solution that would both rebuild the island, and repay the Bonds held (despite the fact they were illegally obtained by UBS) against Puerto Rico. Restructure the debt and rebuild the infrastructure. Now that is, of course, that the bond holders don't want to take over the island and bypass the statehood option.
With statehood Puerto Rico would go the way of Hawaii and become another luxury playground for the rich and famous, and employ the natives of the island as a type of indentured slaves.
I don't think that the US Congress will opt to make PR a state, there's too much at stake. I believe that they will be allowed to suffer and literally 'sink' into the ocean. Wall Street will call in their notes and put the squeeze on PR, and be made to repay their debt by surrendering the island as so much collateral. I'm not sure of the logistics, but somehow the island will wind up in others hands. Properties will be bought up for pennies on the dollar, and packaged to investors. Wall Street will get paid and the island will be made into a type of Hawaii/Disneyland, as I said, a playground for the wealthy. A new style colonialism.
Just sayin'
SGG
1 - A lot of people had huge problems with the bailouts. I was one of them. These happened both under GWB and Obama.
2 - Yes they can. If California were falling into the ocean, or the same thing that happened to Puerto Rico happened instead to Hawaii, we'd be calling them Refugees. The term's orginal use was just for persons seeking refuge. Refuge itself meaning "shelter or protection from danger or distress".
The current use of the word is bullshit and is under discussion currently for redefinition...
Quote:
In 2014, James Paul criticized the original 1951 definition on three accounts:[9]
"refugees have been defined in terms of those moving across nation-state borders, as if national identity excludes all other displacements of equal consequence ...";
"the neat definition of Article 1 glides over the ?ne print a little further down the page that allows state signatories to choose to restrict the definition of refugees to only those who have come from Europe, and during a very particular time-period ...";
"it gives credence to the notion that personal individualized 'fear of being persecuted' is the core reason for needing support. War, upheaval, famine and pestilence do not in the conventional definition make for refugee status. It does not matter that civilian deaths as a proportion of deaths in war escalated to 10% in World War I, and to more than 90% of the 40 million killed since 1945. It only matters that persons fear the persecution of their state."
Not all reasons for seeking asylum in another country satisfy the definition of "refugee" according to article 1A of the 1951 Refugee Convention. In 1951, the parties of the treaty had the idea that slavery was a thing from the past and therefore escaped and fleeing slaves are a group not mentioned in the definition.[citation needed] Fleeing droughts and hunger, fleeing economic hardship, natural disasters and not even war or terror satisfied the definition of 1951.
Add to that the fact that Puerto Ricans are Americans only in the very loosest sense of the word.
Quote:
However, the prevailing consensus among scholars, lawmakers and policymakers is that Puerto Ricans are notNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Puerto Rico cancer patients, elderly to arrive in Miami
https://www.local10.com/weather/hurricane/puerto-rico-cancer-patients-
elderly-to-arrive-in-miami
Much of island remains without power after Hurricane Maria
.
.
"What would happen to these people if they wouldn't be able to get
on this flight? They would probably die," Betancourt said.
The official death count in Puerto Rico is 36, but many people fear
that number is likely much higher -- stressing the urgent need for
these types of operations to take place.
The charter flight being used in this case was donated.
... oooOO}{OOooo ...
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME