JUST DO A SEARCH FOR BANKSTERS GOLDMAN SACHS IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION
“Much of the Island was destroyed, with billions of dollars...owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with.”
Trump to
devastated Puerto Rico: Wall Street must be paid!
27 September 2017
The US colonial territory of Puerto Rico has been devastated by a
disaster that has left its population of 3.5 million in the midst of a
full-blown humanitarian catastrophe.
Much of the island looks like it was hit by an atomic bomb. The
already fragile electrical grid has been largely destroyed, leaving millions
literally in the dark and without power for air-conditioning or even fans, as
Puerto Rico faces 90-degree temperatures and high humidity.
While the official death toll stands at 16, there are no doubt
many more fatalities that have gone uncounted, and the threat is that far more
people, particularly among the elderly and the sick, some of them trapped in
high-rise apartment buildings or small villages cut off from relief, will lose
their lives.
San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz told the media, “What’s out there
is total devastation. Total annihilation. People literally gasping for air” in
the merciless heat. She spoke of people being taken from their homes in
“near-death conditions,” including dialysis patients unable to get treatment
and people whose oxygen tanks had run out.
At least 60 percent of the population lacks access to clean water,
and food is in short supply. Hospitals report that they are within days of
running out of medicine, essential supplies and fuel to run generators. Garbage
is going uncollected, while many streets are still flooded. Conditions are
growing for the spread of deadly diseases, including cholera.
At least 15,000 people have taken refuge in shelters, while many
tens, if not hundreds, of thousands more are camping out in homes left in
shambles and without roofs by Maria’s 155-mile-an-hour winds. Meanwhile, some
70,000 Puerto Ricans are still in danger from a possible failure of the
Guajataca dam, which would wipe out entire towns and villages.
Cell phone service has been wiped out for three quarters of the
population. The country’s agriculture has been devastated, with 80 percent of
its crops destroyed.
Descriptions of conditions in Puerto Rico as “apocalyptic” are
anything but hyperbole.
As in every such “natural disaster,” Hurricane Maria has exposed
the deep-going social oppression, poverty and inequality that existed before
the storm ever made landfall in a territory where the poverty rate approaches
50 percent, and unemployment 12 percent.
“We’ve not seen any help. Nobody’s been out asking what we need or
that kind of thing,” Maria Gonzalez, 74, in the Santurce district of San Juan,
told Reuters. Pointing to Condado, the Puerto Rican capital’s tourist area of
hotels and restaurants, she added, “There’s plenty of electricity over there,
but there’s nothing in the poor areas.”
Nearly one week after Hurricane Maria struck the island with the
full force of a near-Category 5 storm, US President Donald Trump took his first
public notice of the disaster with a Monday night tweet. “Texas & Florida
are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken
infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble,” Trump tweeted. “Much of
the Island was destroyed, with billions of dollars...owed to Wall Street and
the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with.”
The combination of ignorance and arrogance contained in this
statement is the product not just of Donald Trump’s fascistic and pathological
social outlook, but rather an expression of the criminal negligence, parasitism
and predatory character of an entire social system. Trump’s apparent intention
was to contrast Texas and Florida—both “doing great”—with Puerto Rico, which he
suggests is responsible for the catastrophe that has befallen it because of its
status as a bankrupt debtor to the Wall Street banks.
The reality is that large portions of the populations of Houston
and Florida, the working class and the poor, are doing anything but “great,”
having lost their homes, their cars and, in some cases, their jobs, and left
struggling to obtain the means to live.
As to Puerto Rico’s $73 billion debt—roughly equal to the $72
billion that is now estimated in damages caused by Hurricane Maria—it is the
legacy of over a century of colonialism dating back to the Spanish American War
of 1898.
The so-called “Associated Free State” of Puerto Rico (established
in 1952 following the brutal suppression of a nationalist revolt) supposedly
gave Puerto Ricans local self-government as well as American citizenship. It
was a second-class citizenship at best, however, without congressional
representation or the right to vote in presidential elections.
While at the time Washington fostered the development in its
“perfumed colony” of manufacturing, principally pharmaceuticals, textiles,
petrochemicals and electronics, through corporate tax breaks and low-wage
labor, these measures were later rescinded as cheaper labor platforms became
available to American capital in Asia and elsewhere.
Local self-government has been effectively abrogated with the
creation of a US-appointed Fiscal Supervisory Board (JSF), which has overriding
power over the territory’s budget and is charged with imposing austerity
measures aimed at meeting payments to Wall Street bondholders and the predatory
hedge funds that sought out distressed Puerto Rican debt.
This is Trump’s main concern—that blood be soaked from the stone
of an island thrust back a century in terms of its economic and social
conditions.
The shameful failure of the US government to provide adequate
relief to the Puerto Rican people is driven by considerations of profit and the
interests of billionaire bankers and hedge fund chiefs. They are already
calculating how the devastation of Hurricane Maria can be exploited through
privatization fire sales of public infrastructure and the reaping of further
super-profits off America’s Caribbean colony.
Trump has idiotically attempted to excuse this failure to provide
adequate aid by asserting—falsely—that Puerto Rico is “in the middle of
a...really, really big ocean."
No one can claim with a straight face that if Puerto Rico were the
target of an invasion—such as Iraq in 2003—the Pentagon would not have already
opened its ports and made its airport fully operational. As it is, relief
supplies collected by Puerto Rican and American working people in the US sit in
warehouses and on docks in Miami and elsewhere because the incentive to aid the
island’s people is nowhere near that which drives US wars of aggression across
the globe.
The one thing that Washington has been able to do efficiently is
dispatch troops and police to the island with the objective of suppressing
social revolt.
The disaster in Puerto Rico, like those in Houston and Florida
that preceded it, has made it abundantly clear that neither recovery, much less
protection, from devastating disasters like those wrought by Hurricanes Harvey,
Irma and Maria can be achieved outside of a frontal assault on the stranglehold
exercised by the ruling financial oligarchy over social wealth and the
productive forces of society.
It is the working class of Puerto Rico, united with workers in the
United States and internationally, which must accomplish this task through a
revolutionary struggle to reorganize society on the foundations of socialist
ownership of the means of production and the world’s resources.
Bill Van Auken
THE DEATH GAP: INEQUALITY IS KILLING AMERICA!
CALL IT OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS OR TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE SUPER
RICH!
TWITTER TRUMPER trades WALL for tax cuts for the super
rich…. But he doesn’t pay taxes!!!
TRUMP: For more tax cuts for the rich, NO (REAL) WALL,
NO E-VERIFY, NO LEGAL NEED APPLY and NO ENFORCEMENT!
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM destroyed a TRILLION DOLLARS
in home equity… and they’re still plundering us!
Barack Obama created
more debt for the middle class than any president in US
history, and also
had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
OXFAM reported that during Obama’s
terms, 95% of the wealth created went to
the top 1% of the world’s wealthy.
TRUMP OFFERS VICTIMS OF HARVEY AND IRMA $15 BILLION or
about HALF of what California hands their Mexican welfare state!
IS IT YET TIME TO REBUILD AMERICAN AND END THE
BUILDING AND REBUILDING OF MUSLIM DICTATORSHIPS OVER THERE?
THE BIG “DEAL MAKER”
TWITTER TRUMP WORKS OUT A NO WALL DEAL WITH NARCOMEX
….. LA RAZA WILL NOT BE
PAYING FOR THE ALL THAT MIGHT IMPEDED THEIR SUCKING OF $100 BILLION PER YEAR
OUT OF AMERICA’S OPEN AND UNDEFENDED BORDERS!
THE DEATH GAP: INEQUALITY IS KILLING AMERICA!
CALL IT OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS OR TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE SUPER
RICH!
TWITTER TRUMPER trades WALL for tax cuts for the super
rich…. But he doesn’t pay taxes!!!
TRUMP: For more tax cuts for the rich, NO (REAL) WALL,
NO E-VERIFY, NO LEGAL NEED APPLY and NO ENFORCEMENT!
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM destroyed a TRILLION DOLLARS
in home equity… and they’re still plundering us!
Barack Obama created
more debt for the middle class than any president in US
history, and also
had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
OXFAM reported that during Obama’s
terms, 95% of the wealth created went to
the top 1% of the world’s wealthy.
TRUMP OFFERS VICTIMS OF HARVEY AND IRMA $15 BILLION or
about HALF of what California hands their Mexican welfare state!
IS IT YET TIME TO REBUILD AMERICAN AND END THE
BUILDING AND REBUILDING OF MUSLIM DICTATORSHIPS OVER THERE?
THE BIG “DEAL MAKER”
TWITTER TRUMP WORKS OUT A NO WALL DEAL WITH NARCOMEX
….. LA RAZA WILL NOT BE
PAYING FOR THE ALL THAT MIGHT IMPEDED THEIR SUCKING OF $100 BILLION PER YEAR
OUT OF AMERICA’S OPEN AND UNDEFENDED BORDERS!
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