By Ted Glick
From January 28 to February 7th my wife and I were in Vieques, Puerto Rico, helping as best we could with recovery from Hurricane Maria, which hit on September 20th, almost five months ago. Help
is very much still needed. I don’t think I realized how much that is
true until I got home to New Jersey and experienced all of the things I
didn’t experience during those 10 days:
-the lights and everything electrical turning on or being on all day and night whenever I need it;
-a hot, not cold, water shower;
-not worrying about hitting something or falling when I had to get up and go to the bathroom or move around at night;
-not
hearing (or smelling) loud gas generators behind the house where I was
staying and several other places in the neighborhood as day turned into
night;
-not having to do extra-special filtering of the tap water because of concerns about its quality;
-reliably accessing my cell phone apps, telephone and the internet whenever I want to.
These were the main differences.
I
was staying at Casa de Kathy in Esperanza, the second largest town in
Vieques. The only street in Esperanza that fully had electrical power
when we were there was the Malecon, the downtown street next to the
water where bars, restaurants and hotels are, and they didn’t get that
power until the fifth day we were there. What electrical power there was
elsewhere in town came from gas-powered generators bought by residents
who could afford them.
There was concern about the tap water. Neither the EPA nor anyone else had done tests to determine how safe it is to drink.
There
were still piles of debris and branches that had been blown down by the
storm, as well as collections of stoves and refrigerators disabled by
it.
Despite
all of these serious problems, the sense I had was that people in
general were pulling together, some more than others, to climb out of
the hole the hurricane put them in. They were doing so even though there
was a lot of criticism of FEMA for its slowness and for it denying aid
to a number of people whose homes had been damaged.
I
was glad to learn that the use of solar energy, in different forms, is
growing, from small solar lights, which are popular, to solar panels on
roofs to provide an alternative to an unreliable electric grid.
One
of the big takeaways for me was the reinforcement of something I have
known intellectually for years, that extreme weather events, like the
climate changing which makes them worse and more frequent, hurts
low-income people the most. Middle- and upper-class people who have
access to financial and other resources had found ways to lessen their
suffering or discomfort, like through personal generators. But those
without those resources were in a different situation. I heard of at
least one family that was sleeping in a tent in their living room
because there had been serious damage to their roof that they had not
yet been able to afford getting fixed.
The
pro-statehood Governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rossello, announced just
before we got there that he wanted to privatize that electrical system,
currently publicly owned, which would certainly lead to higher
electrical rates for many struggling Puerto Rican consumers as the
corporate buyer looks to make its profits.
Then
there is the relatively large Puerto Rican debt (though hugely smaller
than the US debt) of $73 billion. There have been calls for that debt to
be forgiven, for obvious reasons. Lin-Manual Miranda, for example,
creator and star of the Broadway hit “Hamilton,” called for that in a
December opinion piece in the Washington Post. He wrote:
“Puerto
Rico’s creditors should do the right thing and walk away. It is the
only way forward. Anything short of full debt forgiveness would be a
brutal form of economic punishment to a people already suffering.”
But
to add insult to injury, the Republican tax bill passed at the end of
2017, unless challenged and changed, will make things even worse.
A December 20th
Washington Post story reported that the Puerto Rican Governor “is
calling on lawmakers to rewrite a key part of the tax bill that he says
might cause the island’s hefty manufacturing sector to contract,
jeopardizing hundreds of thousands of jobs. [It] includes a new 12.5
percent tax on profits derived from intellectual property held by
foreign companies — a move designed to compel those companies to move
back to the United States. The new tax ‘is a big hit, and Puerto Rico
both fiscally and economically is downtrodden, and this is the last
thing they need,’ said Federico de Jesus, a former Puerto Rico
government official who has been tracking congressional relief efforts
for the island.”
US
citizens have a special responsibility to help Puerto Rico, which has
been a colony of the United States since 1898. It is our humanitarian
and moral responsibility, and it is our duty as citizens of the nation
which has the power to help Puerto Rico either move forward or backwards
after Maria. We must do what we can as far as practical hurricane
recovery support but also support groups calling for a cancellation of
the debt, changes to the Republican tax bill and reform of the electric
power system, not its privatization.
Ted
Glick is a former activist with the Puerto Rico Solidarity Committee in
the 1970’s. He was a supporter of the historic civil disobedience
campaign in Vieques in the early 2000’s which led to the removal of the
US Navy. He has been a progressive activist and organizer since 1968.
Past writings and other information can be found at http://tedglick.com, and he can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jtglick.
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