GOP's uncaring response to Puerto Rico's pain
As most people who are not named President Donald John Trump are aware, Puerto Rico is in extremely dire straits. The 130 mph gusts of Maria - the strongest tropical storm to make a direct hit on the island since 1932 - shredded a power grid that was alre
As most people who are not named President Donald John Trump are aware, Puerto Rico is in extremely dire straits. The 130 mph gusts of Maria - the strongest tropical storm to make a direct hit on the island since 1932 - shredded a power grid that was already suffering from decades of poverty and a Wall Street-addled fiscal crisis, raising the prospect that an area similar in population to Philadelphia and its immediate suburbs won't have electricity for months. Streets are still flooded from the massive storm surge, and much of the island's lush green vegetation is in ruins. So is 80 percent of Puerto Rico's farmland, raising the specter of long-term food shortages, while the island's governor told American TV viewers Monday night that perhaps 60 percent of citizens lack potable water.
Meanwhile, a record heat wave has descended on the island, testing the elderly and the infirm. Desperation is clearly mounting in isolated towns lacking life's fundamentals. "They are not giving us anything, not even hope," 43-year-old Cannabis Angel Nebot told the New York Times, speaking from a coastal town where residents are trying to collect rainwater in the absence of trucks delivering bottled water. "At least, come around and give us hope, even if it's a lie."
Arguably, what Trump and Congress has done so far is worse than that low bar.
The president spent most of the weekend on Twitter seeking to rile up his political base against black athletes who protest for social justice, needlessly ratcheting up tensions with a nuclear North Korea, or reacting to "fake news" on Fox News - suggesting that what he's not doing is holding urgent meetings on how to address the biggest humanitarian crisis of his presidency so far. When he did finally tweet about Puerto Rico Monday night, he did so with all the apparent empathy of a deer tick - reminding the island's starving people that they need to pay back his friends on Wall Street.
His administration says it plans to submit a request for a Puerto Rican aid package sometime in mid-October. No rush, apparently. The Senate is spending most of its time on a (thankfully) futile effort to take health insurance away from 32 million Americans while Puerto Ricans are sticking out their tongues trying to catch a few raindrops. For once, the cliché is actually right on the money: This is Trump's Katrina.
"These 3.4 million American people are U.S. citizens, and yet they have not received the same attention as Florida and Texas, and the president's tweets did not help," Philadelphia city councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sánchez, who was born on the island before moving to Hunting Park as a child, told me Tuesday morning. Like many in the local Puerto Rican community, Quiñones-Sánchez is growing angry at both lackadaisical response from Washington and the banks-first, people-later attitude from Trump, who did announce he will go there next week.
It shouldn't be this way. America needs a laserlike focus on an all-out humanitarian intervention, and when life is finally stabilized, we need to make sure that our brothers and sisters on Puerto Rico are treated like full-fledged citizens, and not the serfs in a 19th century-style colony. Indeed, the United Nations has repeatedly lambasted the United States over the years for its archaic colonial rule of the island - an idea that doesn't seem to even register in a place where people didn't even know Puerto Ricans are citizens.
The island has been saddled with a grossly unfair funding formula for Medicare and Medicaid and an 100-year-old trade law that makes it impossible to compete in the 21st century. It all came to a head in the fiscal crisis in which the board overseeing Puerto Rico's recovery is larded with representatives from Wall Street, not the island's citizens, and which is causing even higher taxes and other austerity hardships to make sure that hedge-fund millionaires and billionaires who speculated on the island's debts get their money back.
Now, 3.4 million Americans are pleading for their lives to a president that they were not allowed to vote for, and praying for an aid package from a Congress where they are denied representation. That's a human rights abuse about which we on the mainland should no longer remain silent.
When President Trump finally touches down in San Juan, I hope he brings not just a big check but also a promise: That in the 21st century the rest of America will stop treating Puerto Rico as a colony. We owe it to our fellow Americans not just to help them get back on their feet but - once that work is completed - to finally hold a full-blown, binding referendum on their future, either as America's 51st state (an option that a large number of island residents prefer), as a commonwealth with a much better deal, or even (though unlikely) as an independent nation. And it's a shame that it takes a deadly hurricane for folks to realize that 100 years of second-class citizenship is way too long.
Will Bunch is a staff columnist. 215-854-2957 @will_bunch