Democrats Want to Colonize Puerto Rico by 'Decolonizing' It

By Daniel Greenfield December 21, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog

There have been six referendums on Puerto Rico’s status. Three of those referendums happened in the last ten years. In the 2020 referendum, 52% of Puerto Ricans voted to become a state and 47% voted against.  Democrats and their media, obsessed with rigging the senate by adding two senators, hailed this narrow victory as a clear mandate for statehood.   It’s actually a near split with a mere difference of 60,000 votes.

Compare that to the Alaska statehood referendum which passed by 83% or the Hawaii referendum which cleared by a somewhat more modest 68% but still hit the 2 to 1 mark.

House Democrats, with the complicity of a few of the worse Republicans, managed to pass the Puerto Rico Status Act. The bill only states that it must pass with a “majority of the valid votes.”

That’s not a reference to voter fraud, but to the 2017 referendum in which statehood won by 97%, but only because everyone who didn’t support statehood boycotted the referendum, and the 2012 referendum in which there were 500,000 blank ballots submitted as a protest.

(Puerto Rico’s statehood referendums are as dysfunctional as the territory itself.)

A serious statehood referendum for Puerto Rico would at least ask for a 2 to 1 majority. Democrats will however be perfectly happy if they win a referendum by the population of a square mile of Manhattan, even if it’s against the will of nearly half of Puerto Ricans.

And they call this “decolonization”.

Plenty of Hawaiians resent the United States, but they still want to be part of it. Puerto Ricans would like the benefits of citizenship while maintaining political independence from America.

That’s the so-called ‘commonwealth’ option.

The Puerto Rico Status Act lists three options on the referendum, ‘Independence’, ‘Sovereignty in Free Association with the United States’ and ‘Statehood’. Sovereignty or Commonwealth would allow Puerto Rico to make treaties with foreign nations and still retain our citizenship.

The model for this is the British Commonwealth and its former colonies in the region.

But America isn’t a monarchy. We don’t have a king who is going to formally be Puerto Rico’s monarch even as it signs treaties with Communist China. Nor do we have some obsessive need to prop up an outdated empire by having a bunch of third world countries acknowledge Charles III or Biden I. A commonwealth status for Puerto Rico has no constitutional basis at all.

That hasn’t stopped Pelosi and House Democrats from passing such a bill anyway. And 16 Republicans, who probably barely even read it or understood it, from voting for it anyway.

Putting both the commonwealth and independence on the ballot is supposed to split the nationalist vote and allow statehood proponents to get their bare majority. But as clever as Pelosi and House Democrats think they are, Puerto Rican politics has been based in no small part over debating this issue for generations and suspecting every referendum of being rigged.

The nationalists will accept nothing short of independence. And their terrorists remain heroes to many. Especially New York City’s Puerto Rican politicians. Commonwealth supporters keep arguing about what their imaginary ideal of an impossible relationship looks like. And statehood proponents can only hope to carve out a narrow referendum victory that, if past history is any guide, will be preemptively sabotaged by everyone else who disagrees with them.

Puerto Rico is much too dysfunctional to manage statehood or much of anything else. Anyone who has watched the aftermath of natural disasters play out has seen a little of how broken and corrupt its governmental structures are. And the only real argument statehood proponents have is that with two senators they’ll be able to wrangle a lot more money to go to Puerto Rico.

That much is undeniably true. Puerto Rico has the example of multiple broken cities across America whose citizens don’t work for a living, they vote for a living, and whose politicians exist to trade support for cash. But most Puerto Ricans also know that all that money will, like the massive amounts of aid after every hurricane, find their way into the pockets of politicians.

There will be little left over to improve life for ordinary people.

But Puerto Rico is also so broken that there may be no choice. It exited bankruptcy this summer after its debt was cut by 80% without fixing any of the issues. It has a 44% poverty rate and 60% are on Medicare or Medicaid. Crime is high. The murder rate is four times that of America.

There are more Puerto Ricans living in the United States than there are back home.

Statehood has no purpose except to give Democrats two senate seats and inject even more money into what is already the most corrupt place around. “9th mayor in Puerto Rico this year accused of corruption” is how a typical AP headline sums up the state of affairs.

Responsible officials and activists in Puerto Rico are trying to clean up some of the mess. They have little interest in yet another referendum that isn’t going to do anything about the real problems. They would rather maintain the status quo as a territory without another bout of infighting over proposals that serve no one except fanatics and the politically corrupt.

Democrats are obsessed with statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington D.C., not because they care about either place, but because they have a road map for rigging the senate. And while there’s no doubt that D.C. statehood would lead to two Democrat bloc votes that would be as corrupt as they would be loyal, Puerto Rico’s politics are a whole lot more complicated.

Puerto Ricans were supposed to help turn Florida blue, but Gov. DeSantis won 56% of the Puerto Rican vote. And back home, Puerto Rico is more conservative than the Puerto Ricans living in the United States. Puerto Rico’s legislature has been moving on abortion bans Judge Juan Perez-Gimenez, a Carter appointee, kept on fighting the Supreme Court’s gay marriage position in two decisions, longer than most other federal judges. On a variety of social issues, Puerto Rico is more socially conservative than almost all Democrat areas in the United States.

But, despite the attempts to align the country’s parties with Democrats and Republicans in America, or our political movements, Puerto Rico is not America. Its politics and worldview fit within the culture of the region. Puerto Ricans have their distinct identity and want to be who they are. The current status quo is the best of a bad bargain that would either try to merge a foreign failed state into America or give it the independence to fail on its own.

Puerto Ricans have failed to provide any kind of enthusiastic support for statehood across six disastrous referendums. The two most legitimate referendums in the 90s, which had the highest turnout, stalemated when voters chose the status quo or commonwealth over statehood.

Much like the EU, Democrats want to keep Puerto Ricans voting until they vote their way.

Democrats are attempting to force a narrow victory that they can use to drag Puerto Rico into the United States, even if 48% of the population is opposed, for their own political power. Whatever the outcome, much of Puerto Rico will view it as an illegitimate conspiracy. And they will react accordingly. Puerto Rico can only ever become an unwilling and hostile state.

After the history of Puerto Rican political terrorism, which included an assassination attempt on President Truman, there’s little doubt that Democrats know this and don’t care. All they can see is the possibility of two free senate seats. But most Americans and Puerto Ricans should care.

Democrats claim that they want to ‘decolonize’ Puerto Rico, but what they actually want to do is colonize it. And that’s why plenty of Puerto Ricans remain hostile to their proposal.

Puerto Rico doesn’t want to be America, it wants to be Puerto Rico.

The latest referendum push is a bad idea that America and Puerto Rico are better off without.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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A Hurricane in 2022 Is Trump's Fault

Daniel Greenfield September 28, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Puerto Rico, President Trump approved a major disaster declaration a day faster than Biden did for the island after Hurricane Fiona hit. Trump’s alacrity went unrewarded when local Democrats and the media blamed him for the hurricane.

CNN, which has been much slower to provide coverage of Fiona on the island, flew Anderson Cooper out there to wade uncomfortably around and do interviews with leftist politicians wearing custom-printed, “Help Us, We Are Dying” t-shirts in between posing for glamor shots.

Instead, Cooper is currently promoting a podcast with leftist hack Stephen Colbert.

The dramatic difference in coverage can be summed up with two Reuters headlines, five years apart, “Puerto Ricans say Trump’s disaster response was too slow” and “Puerto Rico power grid no match for Fiona; residents unsurprised.”

The New York Times went even further blaming President Trump for Puerto Rico’s power grid going down in 2022. According to the leftist paper, the number one reason that the island’s power is down is because “the Trump administration also placed restrictions on portions of the island’s aid out of concerns that the money would be mismanaged or squandered.”

There was indeed massive fraud with multiple officials, including Julia Keleher, the former Secretary of Education for Puerto Rico, the head of Puerto Rico’s Association of Certified Public Accountants, and multiple FEMA officials, getting busted.

Amon those arrested was Ahsha Nateef Tribble: Obama’s Senior Director for Response and an interim Deputy Homeland Security Advisor. Obama’s girl pled guilty this May, but the media has not seen fit to cover the minor matter of an Obama NSC official going down or to mention it in relation to the latest disaster in Puerto Rico: this time taking place on Biden’s watch.

Instead, Biden is being praised for lifting anti-corruption restrictions while promising to pour more money into Puerto Rico. The influx of money will only further feed the corruption without actually benefiting ordinary people. There’s plenty of history that makes that all too clear.

Every time there’s a major storm, Puerto Rico’s power grid goes down. That’s been the case long before Trump’s presidential run. Even without storms, the LA Times reported that under Obama, island residents “were suffering power outages at rates four to five times higher than average U.S. customers”. Puerto Rico’s electric grid is ancient, its public utility was broken and its linemen had moved to America. Also the island is notorious for its culture of corruption.

Somehow that became Trump’s fault. And in 2022, it is still somehow his fault.

After trying to blame Trump for restricting funds to fight corruption, the New York Times is forced to admit that the island government isn’t spending the money that it has. Bloomberg notes that, “Of the $21 billion that FEMA has designated for public assistance projects overall in Puerto Rico, only 2% has been spent.” Much as during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria when aid was left sitting in warehouses, what Puerto Rico has isn’t even being used by the local government.

But when the media isn’t blaming Trump, it’s blaming global warming or privatization. Even though it was the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA):, the bankrupt public utility whose defunct equipment, missing employees and general dysfunction had led to the original massive outrage during Hurricane Maria, resulting in overdue privatization.

The one man the media isn’t blaming is Joe Biden. Much as the media didn’t blame Bill Clinton or Obama for the hurricanes that happened on their watch or the resulting consequences. When a hurricane hits Puerto Rico while a Republican is in office, it’s his fault. But when a hurricane hits during a Democrat’s term, then it’s obviously due to either climate change or a Republican.

Even though Biden took a day longer than Trump to approve disaster relief, media coverage has emphasized how much he cares about Puerto Rico. After Maria, the media claimed, with no evidence, that Trump was bigoted toward Puerto Ricans and that his neglect was killing them.

After earthquakes in 2020, the media doubled down on the narrative with CNN headlining its coverage, “Trump stays publicly silent on Puerto Rican earthquakes but has signed emergency declaration”. Democrats rushed to capitalize on the disaster, including Joe Biden who stated, “It’s unconscionable that so much of the hard work of disaster recovery continues to be left undone. We’ve got to deliver concrete support for Puerto Rico now before more lives are lost.”

Now that Biden is in office, the work remains undone. But somehow it’s not his fault.

At a press conference, Biden promised, “We’ll do everything, everything we can to meet the urgent needs you have and we know they’re real and they’re significant. And we’re there. And I know, bad joke, ‘I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help.’ But we really are.”

The federal government has been coming to Puerto Rico to help for generations. It hasn’t helped. After tens of billions of dollars in aid, the island is no better off than it was before.

In 2017, it was asking for $94 billion in aid. That’s all the more startling when you consider that Puerto Rico’s current population is only a little over 3 million. That would have been over $30,000 per person. Even the billions allocated to it come out to about $7,000 per person.

Not that the average Puerto Rican will ever see any of that money.

Instead of telling the truth about that, Puerto Rico’s current state is always Trump’s fault. And will remain his fault until another Republican sets foot in the Oval Office and pulls up a chair.

Much like the inner cities, it’s easier to throw around accusations of bigotry than to reckon with what is actually wrong. And that’s convenient because Democrats profit financially and politically from Puerto Rico’s disasters. The worse things get on the island, the better the odds of winning Florida. Feeding corruption just makes things worse for Puerto Ricans and better for Dems.

Puerto Rico’s real problem isn’t Hurricane Maria or Hurricane Fiona, it’s Hurricane Biden.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. Thank you for reading.

How Obama’s Senior Response Director Profited From Disaster in Puerto Rico

By Daniel Greenfield Thursday, October 10, 2019  0 Comments

By September 2018, despite billions of dollars in aid, Puerto Rico was still a mess. By August, FEMA had stopped paying for the nearly 2,500 displaced Puerto Ricans who had been living in hotels after Hurricane Maria had wrecked their homes. But the FEMA times were good at Casino Del Mar.

San Juan's Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz had become a CNN celeb by wearing a, "Help Us We Are Dying" t-shirt. But no one was dying at the luxury resort in San Juan with its 15,000 square feet of gaming tables and its seven restaurants. Except maybe some especially unlucky gamblers. Its blue neon wave walls were shimmering, the machines were jingling and there were some high rollers at the tables.

One of those high rollers was a FEMA administrator.

Ahsha Nateef Tribble’s job had been to get Puerto Rico working again. That’s why Ahsha had been appointed FEMA's Power Sector Chief and Infrastructure Chief for Recovery.

And she was certainly helping one part of Puerto Rico recover.

At Casino Del Mar, Donald Keith Ellison, the former president of Cobra Acquisitions, who has been indicted alongside Tribble, was seen in surveillance footage picking up $3,000 worth of casino chips. The indictment alleges that Tribble and Ellison were together at the gambling tables and the cash cage.

Tribble and Ellison were gambling in more ways than one. The stakes would have easily broken the Casino Del Mar. Ellison’s Cobra had received $1.8 billion in federal contracts to restore Puerto Rico’s power grid. And Tribble had the authority to dispense $200 million in public assistance projects.

What was a mere $3,000 compared to the millions and billions that they were already playing with?

The indictments of Tribble and Ellison ended the game. The dice have come up snake eyes and the croupier is taking back all the chips. But the game of profiting from catastrophe was a fun one.

At Casino Del Mar, Ahsha Nateef Tribble was enjoying the good life at the top of a meteoric career. But while her annual salary of $149,000 placed her among the top 10% of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), it wasn’t enough to buy her everything she wanted.

And that’s what Ellison was allegedly doing by, in the language of the indictment, promising, offering and giving “Ahsha Nateef Tribble a stream of things of value, including airfare, ground transportation, helicopter fights, hotel rooms, meals, entertainment expenses.” $149,000 a year only goes so far.

Not that Ahsha had anything to complain about. After earning a BS in Math from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, an MS in Meteorology from Florida State, she had traveled out of state to the University of Oklahoma for a PhD in Meteorology. And the year she graduated she was somehow already the Technical Chief of Staff at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Commerce at NOAA.

Two years after graduating, she was the Executive Officer at the NOAA National Hurricane Center.

Five years after graduation, she was the Chief of the Climate Sciences Division for NOAA's National Weather Service.

With that kind of resume, Ahsha must have been brilliant. But her indictment doesn’t suggest a genius. Even an evil genius would have done a better job of cashing in than hotels, a casino and a copter.

There is, unfortunately, another explanation.

And it’s why the blame for the Puerto Rico mess falls squarely on the Obama administration.

Under Obama, the former Florida girl was in D.C. as a senior policy advisor coordinating with the White House. Obama's White House then put her on staff as a director at the National Security Council.

Ahsha Nateef Tribble became Obama's Senior Director for Response and even served as an interim Deputy Homeland Security Advisor.

In the waning days of the Obama regime, Ahsha was appointed a Deputy Regional Administrator at FEMA. Either Ahsha had guessed correctly that the next administration would not have the word 'Clinton' in it or she didn't have the right connections. But she had landed safely. And someone had decided that with her impressive resume, she would be perfect for tackling Puerto Rico's power crisis.

Hadn't she served as a senior advisor to Obama's Secretary of Energy?

And, according to her FEMA bio, "led or supported White House response coordination and operational policy for major disasters including Hurricanes Sandy and Irene."

There was just one problem.

The Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency.

Disaster relief needs competence, not diversity. But FEMA, like every other part of the government, had gone mad for diversity without ever recovering. For Black History Month, its Diversity and Inclusion unit had promoted a livestream of a transgender panel from the U.S. Air Force Academy. FEMA might not be very competent at managing disasters, but it was great at promoting random lefty social agendas and spending taxpayer money.

Ahsha was the daughter of Israel Tribble Jr, an affirmative action advocate who claimed that the education system pandered to European elitism and was unsuited for those who were “dark or different”. The names of his children reflected the academic’s belief in his own form of Afrocentric Egyptology. In Puerto Rico, affirmative action ran into a wall of corruption and human misery.

A casino in San Juan was a long way from Ahsha’s glory days of traveling to disaster sites with Obama and Biden. Or representing the United States at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

But there were still opportunities here. And she allegedly knew how to take them.

Puerto Rico was a crisis. And the thing to do with a crisis was play it up and then cash in. And Ahsha Nateef Tribble was allegedly influencing the payments going to her new friend’s company.

While contracts in the hundreds of millions of dollars were dispensed, she enjoyed the little things, a helicopter ride, a hotel room, and a fun time in a casino. Also riding the Puerto Rico gravy train was Jovanda Patterson, another FEMA employee and a good friend of Ahsha’s, who got a job with Ellison.

“Thank you both for My day will be great when I get a picture of Ahsha getting her treatment today please,” Jovanda had emailed Ellison and Ahsha.

Times were still hard in parts of Puerto Rico, but there were other priorities for FEMA’s best.

“I’m on it. I will get her down there at 1pm,” Ellison replied.

You didn’t have to be in a disaster area to get personal service like that. Just tasked with managing one.

A Twitter account with Jovanda Patterson’s name and tweets about FEMA and Puerto Rico, includes a retweet of anti-American racist activist Colin Kaepernick, Barack Obama and Senator Kamala Harris.

Why was Hurricane Maria so devastating?

The answer has little to do with President Trump and a great deal to do with the existing corruption by local officials in Puerto Rico, which has already resulted in multiple arrests, and within FEMA.

It was one of Obama’s NSC staffers who had traveled with him and with Biden, who allegedly conspired to rob taxpayers and to abuse money meant to help Puerto Ricans.

What happened in Puerto Rico is the same thing that happens in Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore.

In another hurricane procurement scandal, FEMA gave Tiffany Brown a $156 million contract to serve 30 million meals to hurricane victims. Brown's company had no employees and no experience in large-scale disaster relief. And was not able to actually provide the meals. But "Dr. Brown" does boast that her Tribute Contracting LLC is a "a minority-owned government consulting firm".

The government can help people. Or it can help itself.

It can help the minorities it claims to care about. Or it can just help the well-connected ones.

A quick walk around Newark, Los Angeles or San Juan can clue you in on who’s really being helped.

The money that’s supposed to help people never actually reaches them. But that’s fine. There’s better uses for that money. And the worse things get, the more money will be spent on not fixing the crisis.

And, if you’re lucky, you can have a fun night in a casino in San Juan where everyone is always dying.

Network Hosts Disparage Massive Federal Aid Effort in Puerto Rico

By Kathleen Krumhansl | May 2, 2018

  

If you go by what you hear from liberal media outlets, especially Univision, Puerto Rico has received next to nothing in U.S. government aid since Hurricane María struck last September.  For partisan political purposes, Democrat politicians like San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz are all too happy to work hand-in-glove with the liberal media in propagating this myth, as was the case during a recent round of interviews the Mayor had on Univision.  When it was Univision anchor Jorge Ramos’s turn for the interview with the Bernie-aligned Democratic gubernatorial hopeful, the “little help” Puerto Rico has received from the federal government for hurricane recovery turned into “no help.”

The truth, however, is that, according to the official government data, during the first six months following the hurricane, the nation’s largest territory received record-breaking amounts of aid, totaling $9.9 billion, second only to the $13.6 billion the State of Louisiana received during the first six months after Hurricane Katrina.........To Read More....

The Puerto Rican Genocide That Wasn't

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 5 Comments Friday, October 20, 2017

The Mayor of San Juan recently took a break from her tour of every cable news network on the planet to text an accusation of genocide aimed at President Trump.

"WE WILL NOT BE LEFT TO DIE,” Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz texted. “I ask the United Nations, UNICEF and the world to stand with the people of Puerto Rico and stop the genocide.”

The death toll in Puerto Rico currently stands at 48.

Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico on September 20. As we approach October 20, the death toll from the hurricane is a lot less than the death toll from the deadliest month in Chicago.

Despite media arm waving, with only 117 people not accounted for, the actual death toll in Puerto Rico isn’t likely to rise very much. And even a death toll of 48 was only achieved by listing people who died of heart attacks and other medical problems that could not be treated because of hurricane damage. It’s unknown whether some of them might have lived without the hurricane. It’s guesswork.

The previous, incomplete death toll showed that the actual hurricane seemed to have only killed 19 people. 2 suicides were also attributed to the hurricane. As were respiratory failures “indirectly linked” to the hurricane.

But the media has been working hard to inflate the death toll.

"We'll probably never know exactly how many people died," the Washington Post speculates. "Hurricane Maria likely killed more people than Puerto Rico says," the Daily News ghoulishly insists.

Some media accounts fantasize about hundreds of bodies piling up in morgues. How many of those deaths are due to the hurricane and how many to the ordinary course of disease and crime? (Puerto Rico has higher crime rates and mortality rates for many diseases than the United States.)

Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security implying that the "true death toll" is being underreported to "portray relief efforts as more successful than they are".

Velasquez demanded a Federal audit of the local authorities with findings to be delivered in 10 days.

The numbers just aren’t high enough. It’s hard to have a genocide with only 48 people.

And that’s the real agenda.

Velasquez and the Washington Post aren’t trying to help Puerto Rico by raising the death toll. Instead they want a higher death toll because it gives them ammo for their attacks on President Trump.

To have a proper death toll, you need it to be hundreds. Or even better yet, in the thousands.

A genocide of 48 people makes Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz parading around in her “WE ARE DYING” t-shirt for Anderson Cooper look silly.

“We are dying,” the left-wing politician warned on CNN on September 29. These days, she’s warning of some sort of future genocide that will eventually come about due to “the lack of appropriate action of a president that just does not get it.” Weeks later, the genocide has yet to materialize.

The House passed a $36.5 billion disaster relief package, most of which will go to Puerto Rico. Both President Trump and Speaker Ryan came to see the disaster firsthand. Meanwhile there are constant accusations that local politicians and their supporters are stealing relief supplies.

Puerto Rico has major political, social and economic problems that have nothing to do with the hurricane. If President Hillary Clinton were guzzling chardonnay in the White House in between delivering cross presidential addresses about the vital importance of gun control and socialized medicine, Hurricane Maria would have been a passing story in the press.

Hurricane Georges and Tropical Storm Jeanne took out power and water in much the same way as Maria. After Georges, President Clinton didn’t visit Puerto Rico. Hillary Clinton did.

Why did Hillary visit Puerto Rico?

Less than six months later, Hillary’s Senate campaign had begun creaking to life. New York has a large Puerto Rican population. Instead of paying a presidential visit, Bill sent his wife to kickstart her political campaign by exploiting a natural disaster. It’s unsurprising that Hillary attempted to politicize the latest natural disaster in Puerto Rico. That’s just what she soullessly does.

And it’s what the left does.

Their standards are now so low that 48 people dying in a natural disaster qualifies as a genocide.

But this was never about Puerto Rico. Hurricane Maria, like the Las Vegas shootings, was one of many backdrops whose only purpose is political posturing.

The left doesn’t care about Puerto Rico. It’s only sad that more Puerto Ricans didn’t die so that their corpses could be exploited for more partisan political attacks until the next shiny object comes along.

Think how much better their headlines could be if there were 48,000 dead or 480,000 dead.

Meanwhile in San Juan, Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz is still waiting for the genocide while exploring the limits of the local t-shirt printing place whose proprietors are apparently the only survivors.

Them and the guys who have to blow dry Anderson Cooper’s pants each time he gingerly descends down to the waist into the water so that the viewers at home can be properly horrified and impressed.

Puerto Rico is a tragedy, but it’s not a genocide.

The fake news narrative has come apart. The death toll isn’t there. And as the repair crews do their work, as the power comes on, the roads are cleared and drinking water is restored, normalcy will come back. There may be attempts to inflate the death toll by attributing assorted deaths to the storm on dubious grounds. But even then the end result will fall far short of the left’s genocidal fantasies.

But by then the left will have moved on. There will be more shootings to link to gun control or another natural disaster to link to global warming. Any attempts to impose a reality check on the Iran Deal or action against North Korea’s nuclear weapons program will be met with alarmism about nuclear war.

The left will always have something to freak out about. Even now, Harvey Weinstein’s grotesque bulk has pushed Puerto Rico and its genocide off the front pages. And the media is already, with unerring inevitability, trying to clumsily connect the crimes of the top Dem donor to President Trump.

But that is just how the media works. Disaster + Trump = Story. That’s the formula for everything.

The Great Media Puerto Rican Genocide of 2017 didn’t pan out. But neither did Katrina. There will always be another story, another lie, another scandal and another thousand hit pieces wrapped around it. For a brief moment, the cameras of the media turned on Puerto Rico. And even now, they’re turning away. Eventually all the reporters will depart leaving behind only their luggage tags and mango aftershave. The warm wind will blow through their empty rooms and stir their stained bedsheets.

And Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz will sit surrounded by t-shirt mementos that remind her of the time when everyone knew her name.

(This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.)

 

Trump Not Letting Media Turn Puerto Rico Into His 'Katrina'

Larry Elder Oct 05, 2017

President Donald Trump punched back hard against the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, who accused him of insufficient concern about her island. In doing so, Trump shows that he learned from President George W. Bush's mistakes. Bush 43 seemed to expect a certain level of fairness and civility from the media.

When, for example, Sen. Ted Kennedy, about the prewar Iraq intelligence, said, "Before the war, week after week after week after week, we were told lie after lie after lie after lie," the Bush White House did not aggressively push back against that venomous assertion. When critics made the hideous accusations that President George W. Bush was "lying us into war," the White House did little to fight back.

That, at least, is the assessment of both former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, whom I had the privilege of interviewing. Cheney and Rumsfeld lamented their failure to aggressively and loudly refute the accusation. Why didn't they fight back? Both told me that they considered the charges so incredibly offensive and easily refuted that few would believe it.........To Read More....

US militarizes Puerto Rican relief effort

By Rick Moran October 9, 2017

As recovery efforts for Puerto Rico from hurricane Maria enter its third week, the plight of most residents remains perilous. Food and water deliveries are spotty at best, and government officials are pointing the finger at the incompetence of local mayors who are not following through in getting relief supplies to those who need it most. In response, the U.S. is planning to basically militarize relief efforts, doing the job that local mayors appear incapable of doing..........The efforts to politicize the crisis by the Democratic mayor of San Juan, covering up for her own incompetence, aren't working.........Read more

Rivera Refutes ‘Fake News’ Stories About Trump Admin’s Response To Puerto Rico

By Randy DeSoto on October 4, 2017

Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera, who has been on the ground in Puerto Rico for over a week, refuted media reports that the Trump administration has failed to adequately respond on the island following Hurricanes Irma and Maria.  “Whatever you read in the so-called fake news … I think the president and the first lady were amazingly gracious and graciously receiving by the grateful Puerto Rican people,” Rivera said on Fox News on Wednesday.........Appearing on Hannity on Tuesday night, Rivera said the Trump administration is doing good work under difficult circumstances.  Regarding the 34 dead from the storm, Rivera said, “Blame Hurricane Maria for those deaths. Don’t blame President Trump.”.....To Read More....

Big Government: Puerto Rico’s Man-Made Disaster

October 9, 2017 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty 

Puerto Rico is getting lots of attention because Hurricane Maria caused a tremendous amount of economic damage.

That leads to an important discussion about the role of government – particularly the federal government – when there is a natural disaster (and a secondary discussion about the silly Keynesian argument that disasters are good for prosperity).

But let’s focus today on a man-made disaster. Puerto Rico is the Greece of America, and it was a fiscal mess well before the hurricane hit. Indeed, there’s already been partial-bailout legislation from Washington.

The Wall Street Journal opined wisely on the topic, starting with the observation that we shouldn’t feel too much sympathy for investors who purchased bonds from the island’s profligate government.

…they knew what they were getting into. Lenders piled into Puerto Rican bonds that paid high yields that are “triple tax-exempt”—they can’t be taxed by federal, state or local governments in the U.S. Yet lenders also knew that the Puerto Rican government was heading toward a debt crisis. The economy has been contracting for a decade, and the commonwealth has $48 billion in unfunded pensions on top of $72 billion in bond debt. Creditors bet that the high yield was worth the political risk, but the music was bound to stop. One lesson of the last decade that creditors don’t want to learn, even after Detroit and Greece, is that sovereign debt to lousy governments is high risk. The abrogation of debt contracts that will now take place is regrettable, but there is a price for betting on politicians.

It would be a nice lesson if investors learned not to trust governments, especially the ones most prone to destructive statist policies.

But that doesn’t address the underlying problem of how to generate growth in Puerto Rico. The answer, needless to say, is free markets and small government.

…the territory will have to grow faster. This is where bankruptcy alone is inadequate. Puerto Rico will have to cut taxes on investment, rationalize welfare programs that deter working, and pare back labor protections that make France look like Hong Kong. If Mr. Rossello won’t do it, then the control board will have to. Puerto Rico will continue to flounder even with reduced debt if labor participation remains stuck at 40% and unemployment is in the double digits.

Unfortunately, the government has been doubling down on bad policy.

Investor’s Business Daily delves deeper into the issue of how big government is strangling prosperity.

The key is to create the correct incentives for the island’s people to encourage — rather than discourage — their policymakers to implement necessary and difficult reforms. This is particularly true with regard to pension reform. …Emphasis should instead be put on the many necessary changes to Puerto Rican labor laws, welfare programs and business and tax regulations which could spur more private sector business and job creation, encourage more people to work, and allow economic growth to resume. …Changes to U.S. laws and regulations discouraging labor force participation in Puerto Rico, such as the high minimum wage and easier eligibility for Social Security disability benefits for Spanish speakers, would also help greatly. And most importantly, Puerto Rico’s lingering pension crisis must be solved, both because of its fiscal significance and because it illustrates the lack of political courage and imagination by the government and the oversight board. …economic activity in Puerto Rico is now so severely depressed by a heavy government presence.

And even the most establishment-leaning Economist noted that government dependency is a major problem.

The island is distinguished by its poverty and joblessness, which are far worse than in any of the 50 states. The territory’s economy, moreover, has fallen further behind the national one over the past three decades. Bad government—not just locally, but also federally—is largely to blame. …Puerto Rico’s annual income per person was around $12,000 in 2004, less than half that of Mississippi, the poorest state. More than 48% of the island’s people live below the federally defined poverty line.

Why is income so low and why is there so much poverty?

Simply stated, idleness is being heavily subsidized. The welfare state reduces labor supply on the mainland. And the same thing happens in Puerto Rico.

Half the working-age men in Puerto Rico do not work. …Many things have gone wrong. Most important, however, is that the United States government assumed too big a role in the Puerto Rican economy, and its largesse enabled the commonwealth’s government to do the same. …the island’s economy is now lost in a thicket of bad incentives…an oversized welfare state…transfers…make up more than 20% of the island’s personal income. These federal handouts…by Puerto Rican economic standards, they are huge. And the more a man or woman earns through paid work, the more they decrease. …federal disability allowances are much higher than the United States average as a share of wages and pension income. Unsurprisingly, therefore, one in six working-age men in Puerto Rico are claiming disability benefits. …For many people, …the money that can be earned through federal transfers and a little informal work is more than the market wage—and requires much less effort.

In other words, Puerto Rico is just another layer of evidence on the well-established link between government and poverty.

And when people do have jobs, all too often they are employed by a bloated and inefficient government bureaucracy.

Puerto Rico’s bloated government… Around 30% of the territory’s jobs are in the public sector. Among other things, a big and coddled bureaucracy undermines Puerto Rico’s educational achievements…nearly half those on the education department’s payroll are not teachers; quality has fallen because of low accountability and mismanagement. …As he walked through Aguadilla’s town hall recently, Mr Méndez…says, is that “All they want to do is find security only. They have no ambition…Everybody wants to work for the government.” Manuel Reyes, of the Puerto Rico Manufacturers Association, also sees little hope that the government’s role will shrink.

It’s almost as if Puerto Rico is a perfect storm (no pun intended) of bad policy.

The solution is – or should be – obvious. And it’s the same one I suggested for Greece. Allow the government to default on existing debt, but only in exchange for pro-market reforms such as a long-run spending cap, privatization, a freeze on the size and compensation of the island’s bloated bureaucracy, and elimination of destructive regulation.

For all intents and purposes, Puerto Rico should become the Hong Kong of America. The island does have substantial autonomy and local policymakers have demonstrated that they sometimes are willing to do the right thing (they made Puerto Rico a legal tax haven for U.S. citizens). Now it’s time to make a great leap forward.