The Puerto Rico Thread

This is wildly exaggerated, of course! My translation: "Danish muscles rebuild St Croix – the Americans are standing by and watching them"
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The article seems a bit more balanced. (Google translation);

The Danes have immediately started repairs. As they work, the soldiers, as the federal government of the United States has sent to St. Croix, look at and coordinate.
- Under federal law, federal authorities are unable to perform much work themselves. They must coordinate and then they must buy local to carry out the work, says Allan Kirk Jensen.
- They can not put a soldier to remove trees and repair the electric master. It pays the local entrepreneurs for.
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I'm a little nauseated to have read that FEMA's otherwise well performing director Brock Long has said the agency is "filtering out the political nonsense"... AKA San Juan Mayor Cruz. :boggled:

I think he drank the Kool-Ade. :(
 
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"they had these beautiful soft towels, very good towels, and I came in and there was a crowd of a lot of people and they were screaming and they were loving everything."

You couldn't make it up!
 
The Vegas gunman seems to have pushed Puerto Rico out of the headlines. And of course how can the American people be expected to pay attention to a humanitarian situation when there's an ongoing national anthem crisis?

I just look at what happened there, and I wonder why we can't do better. The people on the ground are, by all accounts, working very hard, but either there aren't enough of them or they aren't being used effectively. The outcomes just aren't acceptable. I can understand people in remote mountain villages being cut off at this late date, but there are people in urban areas still without drinking water. Only 15% of the island has had electrical power restored.
 
Meadmaker said:
The Vegas gunman seems to have pushed Puerto Rico out of the headlines. And of course how can the American people be expected to pay attention to a humanitarian situation when there's an ongoing national anthem crisis?
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There's also the massive wildfire in California now.

Meadmaker said:
I just look at what happened there, and I wonder why we can't do better. The people on the ground are, by all accounts, working very hard, but either there aren't enough of them or they aren't being used effectively. The outcomes just aren't acceptable. I can understand people in remote mountain villages being cut off at this late date, but there are people in urban areas still without drinking water. Only 15% of the island has had electrical power restored.
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Puerto Rico's lack of statehood really hurts it here. If there were EC votes at stake, there'd be a more robust response. Being American in name only comes with a myriad of problems, like only 54% of Americans knew Puerto Ricans are American, and the debt crisis they were going through before has many people looking at them jaundiced eyes.
 
Stacko said:
Ugh.



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If that's an A+ performance from the Trump Administration, I'd hate to see what a C- would be.

I presume with all the other stuff, California fires, Las Vegas, the NFL kneeling, the Tillerson moron comments, allegations that the White House is a daycare centre and so on, that several million Americans being without power and potable water has been shoved off the front pages and out of the nation's consciousness.
 
Dr. Keith said:
A town [Refugio] name whose pronunciation alone let's people know if you are from the area or not.
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My friend Gilbert (pronounced Jilbert) from PR translated for another PR friend who works in immigration. They do have language "tests" to sniff out possible illegal immigrants. They might hold up objects that are pronounced or named differently in PR than in other parts of the Spanish speaking world.
 
With the thousands of military and other FEMA people in PR, one wonders what they are doing. FEMA is out and about helping people with paperwork. :mad:

I don't understand the distribution problem. MSNBC showed that the roads were cleared at least to a town that needed food and water, but all they got were the FEMA paper pushers.


Ryan in the press conference this morning said the additional loan to PR was because they lost their income base: No jobs, no income. No income, no taxes.
 
Why are they insisting on doing this as a loan?

Puerto Rico will get a loan of $4.9 billion out of that same pot, money to be used for maintaining basic government operations. President Donald Trump had previously requested that amount in loan form. With practically no tax receipts collected since last month’s hurricane destroyed the island — 85 percent of homes remain without power three weeks after the storm — Puerto Rico faces a cash-flow crisis. Officials estimate that the government could run out of money and have to shut down on October 31.

This is critical for Puerto Rico, which*has had trouble borrowing from private credit markets because of its existing $74 billion debt. But instead of replenishing the coffers with a grant, this is a loan — one Puerto Rico will also need to repay.
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Stacko said:
Why are they insisting on doing this as a loan?
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I'm trying to be a bit of an optimist here, so work with me. Maybe this loan thing is not nearly as bad as it seems.

The way I see it, the chance of Puerto Rico ever paying off its debt is pretty darned close to zero. Bankruptcy is pretty much inevitable. By giving them money in the form of a loan, when the creditors get paid off whatever tiny fraction they will get, the US government gets a little bit more than they otherwise would have, while other bondholders get a little bit less.

Trump may have just swiped a tiny bit of money from Wall Street while dishing out some aid.



Or would that be too good to be true?
 
Meadmaker said:
I'm trying to be a bit of an optimist here, so work with me. Maybe this loan thing is not nearly as bad as it seems.

The way I see it, the chance of Puerto Rico ever paying off its debt is pretty darned close to zero. Bankruptcy is pretty much inevitable. By giving them money in the form of a loan, when the creditors get paid off whatever tiny fraction they will get, the US government gets a little bit more than they otherwise would have, while other bondholders get a little bit less.

Trump may have just swiped a tiny bit of money from Wall Street while dishing out some aid.



Or would that be too good to be true?
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They can't declare bankruptcy. States and territories are barred from it. Congress passed a law to allow them to effectively declare a form of bankruptcy earlier this year but creditors are fighting it in court.
 
Meadmaker said:
I'm trying to be a bit of an optimist here, so work with me. Maybe this loan thing is not nearly as bad as it seems.

The way I see it, the chance of Puerto Rico ever paying off its debt is pretty darned close to zero. Bankruptcy is pretty much inevitable. By giving them money in the form of a loan, when the creditors get paid off whatever tiny fraction they will get, the US government gets a little bit more than they otherwise would have, while other bondholders get a little bit less.

Trump may have just swiped a tiny bit of money from Wall Street while dishing out some aid.



Or would that be too good to be true?
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It's too good to be true. :mad:

The "vulture" funds will get their money paid in full, the people of Puerto Rico will continue to suffer substandard infrastructure and to be treated as third or fourth class citizens.

If the GOP stay in control for the next decade, I wouldn't be too shocked to find some kind of jiggery-pokery going on whereby people from Puerto Rico (and other US territories) ARE US citizens but they have rather fewer rights to live and work elsewhere in the US than citizens of the "proper" US.
 
Meadmaker said:
I'm trying to be a bit of an optimist here, so work with me. Maybe this loan thing is not nearly as bad as it seems.

The way I see it, the chance of Puerto Rico ever paying off its debt is pretty darned close to zero. Bankruptcy is pretty much inevitable. By giving them money in the form of a loan, when the creditors get paid off whatever tiny fraction they will get, the US government gets a little bit more than they otherwise would have, while other bondholders get a little bit less.

Trump may have just swiped a tiny bit of money from Wall Street while dishing out some aid.



Or would that be too good to be true?
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Puerto Rico is required by law to pay back it's loans and bonds even before paying for government operations. So, no, your optimism is sadly misplaced.
 
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