The Other Inconvenient Americans

The irony is that a population that is significantly deeply religiously conservative is being clearly driven into the liberal camp. Might not seem relevant since Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory without a right to vote for either the president or a voting member of Congress, but life is so bad in what’s left of that territory that tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans (or more) are moving to Florida… where their vote is enough to turn a swing state in a federal election into a blue state. Irony, yes, but what the Republican Congress and Donald Trump have done to Puerto Rico is immoral if not downright illegal. But I guess shame is simply not important to a once-great political party – the party of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower – that has now taken to mendacious slogans to justify callous votes against anyone and anything other than the richest elites and the most fundamental evangelicals in the land.

And as much as the victims of recent federal action – from disaster relief to the tax reform act – are littered across the United States, conveniently worse in blue states where Republicans’ hold has all but slipped entirely away, no one region can claim a higher level of suffering and pain than Puerto Rico. It started long before Hurricane Maria slammed into the island in September, decimating homes, people, the entire power grid and the water supply system. The territory had been floating in a pseudo-bankruptcy, unable to pay its bond burden and saddled with an unworkable GOP-Congressional bill of insolvency-lite. Its infrastructure was in dire straits, governmental services were shutting down and its credit rating trashed into oblivion.

Then came Hurricane Maria, taking down much of what was left of the physical part of this island territory. Federal emergency action instantly became bogged down from a combination of the island’s location, underwhelming actions from FEMA (which was totally unprepared for the magnitude of the damage and injuries) as well as the rest of the federal government and sheer ignorance on the part of Donald Trump and his administration that Puerto Rico is actually a part of the United States of America, that its citizens are also full-fledged American citizens. Red tape hindered assets being put into place to relieve the death, injury and destruction that pretty much has rendered the entire island a “do-over” at almost every level.

As the water system shut down, the entire electrical system collapsed, as patients in hospitals lost oxygen and access to vital meds (and as hospital backup power systems ran out of fuel to sustain life support systems), supplies just sat on the docks with no viable way to deliver those necessities to the people who needed them. Roads everywhere were impassible. As the feds finally realized that only a well-organized military effort, with trucks capable of traversing rough terrain, helicopters and ships, a momentary respite helped some of the people with some of the issues. But even there, federal red tape kept a hospital ship off-shore virtually empty of patients (only six beds were filled), even as Puerto Ricans were dying from lack of medical care.

And then came the litany of fake news. A visiting Donald Trump symbolically tossed rolls of paper towels to the small crowd gathered soon after he landed. He feuded with the mayor of San Juan, twisted the words of the governor to suggest that the federal relief efforts were sufficient, and left never having seen the true death and destruction the hurricane had actually inflicted. As people lay dying, exposed and without much hope, Donald Trump kept harping on Puerto Rico’s pre-storm financial issues as if these factors “trumped” the desperate need of the local people.

As of this writing, the official death toll sits at 64. At least 911 additional deaths were officially recorded in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria as “natural causes,” but there are still people listed as missing who are probably dead. The problem with those “natural causes” is that no one examined the bodies to determine if those “natural causes” occurred because people could not get life-saving medication, oxygen or medical attention by reason of the hurricane damage or would have died no matter what.

“A CNN survey of 112 Puerto Rican funeral homes in November found that there were at least 499 storm-related deaths reported between Sept. 20 to Oct. 19. On Dec. 8, a New York Times review of the island's daily mortality rate found that 1,052 more people than usual had died in Puerto Rico in the 42 days after the hurricane struck. Puerto Rico's Center for Investigative Journalism also reported that at least 985 more people died in the 40 days after the hurricane, when compared to the same time period in 2016.” BuzzFeed.com, December 18^th. Since the stench of rotting corpses had led to many bodies simply being burned for sanitation reasons, we may never get a full count of the storms true death toll. Under pressure to report the numbers accurately, in mid-December, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló ordered a re-examination of those reported “natural causes” fatalities.

Meanwhile, FEMA tells us that 95% of the island’s population now had restored routine access to “potable” water in what seems to be yet another false fact from the government. If seriously contaminated and bacteria laden water falls within your definition of “potable,” then FEMA is right. If you use a medical definition, most of Puerto Rico’s water supply does not meet those standards. Also, over a third of the island is still without electrical power, months after the storm.

Writing for the December 21^st Washington Post, Mekela Panditharatne, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, presents a very different picture: “[Power] power problems are water problems by another name. And a substantial portion of the island is still in the dark. According to the government of Puerto Rico, 34 percent of the territory, more than 1 million people, remains without power. Power and water are intimately connected: Water treatment plants are hooked to the electricity grid and rely on consistent energy. When treatment plants and pumping stations are propped up with generators, power can — and does — fail, resulting in frequent water shutoffs, as the island’s water authority indicates. Local officials in Puerto Rico say their water service typically goes in and out. 

“There are numerous accounts of waterborne disease and bacterial illness in Puerto Rico. Leptospirosis, an often deadly bacterial disease, has seen a significant uptick in cases. Whether these illnesses are caused by floodwaters, drinking water or other sources of water exposure, they are a cause for serious concern.” 

So with all this negativity, you’d think Congress just might wake up and do its job? Instead, the GOP Congress/Trump cabal just made things for Puerto Ricans a whole lot worse. Not only has disaster relief fallen incredibly short – proportionately less than the aid to states impacted by Hurricane Harvey – but the Republican-controlled federal government has singled out Puerto Rico, treating it as if it were a foreign country, for harsh treatment under that disastrous tax reform act they passed without a single Democratic vote.

Writing an Op-Ed for the December 20^th Washington Post, Armando Valdés Prieto, a lawyer and political consultant in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and a former director of Puerto Rico's Office of Management and Budget, tells us: “A 12.5 percent tax on profits derived from intellectual property held in foreign jurisdictions [including the U.S. Territory of Puerto Rico!!!], included in the final version of the tax legislation, would be the latest setback. Puerto Rico is a domestic jurisdiction in U.S. law — except for tax purposes. For decades, this arrangement has exempted Puerto Rico residents from paying federal income taxes, although individuals do pay into Social Security through withholdings. It also has allowed for the attraction of needed investment and high-paying jobs in manufacturing, which now accounts for 47 percent of the island’s gross domestic product, or more than $48 billion. Much of that sector is composed of pharmaceuticals and medical devices that generate revenue from patented drugs and technologies.

“This new tax is designed to make offshore operations less profitable, thereby putting pressure on companies to relocate back to the United States. Because Puerto Rico is considered foreign by the Internal Revenue Service, and the most significant manufacturing outfits on the island are organized as controlled foreign corporations, the tax would be levied on these operations, potentially costing thousands of American citizens their jobs. Leaders from both of the island’s major political parties joined with a broad private-sector coalition to request an exception, but Congress didn’t listen…

“A second such knockout punch to the island’s most important economic sector now, after the virtual collapse of the economy in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, would be catastrophic not just for employment and investment, but also for Puerto Rico’s ailing public finances. Fully 30 percent of General Fund net revenue, close to $3 billion, depends on manufacturing. Driving those companies away would make it impossible to implement a fiscal plan under PROMESA, an Obama-era law ostensibly designed to return the local government to solvency…

“Today, despite a period of significant growth spurred by local leadership and collaboration with the federal government between the 1940s and the 1980s, the economy is again in a shambles. A recent study by researchers at the University of Puerto Rico concluded that Hurricane Maria produced an increase in the poverty level from 44.3 percent to 52.3 percent. Worse, a Census Bureau projection made public three days before the storm’s landfall pointed to a decline in the island’s population from 3.4 million today, to just under 3 million by 2025 and 2.1 million by 2050, 121,000 fewer residents than in 1950. And that doesn’t even take into account the migration off the island the storm has since caused.

“Now on top of all of that, the Trump administration and the Republican Party are signaling that Puerto Rico will be treated as something wholly foreign. It’s not just the tax legislation; the president also came to Puerto Rico and complained about the cost and duration of storm recovery efforts, as if citizens here were not entitled to the same response by the federal government as in Texas, Florida or California.” As full-fledged American citizens, Puerto Ricans are free to relocate anywhere in the United States, and once out of PR, they have a full vote in any state where they move. Hey Donald and the GOP Congress, guess who they are not voting for anytime soon. And they are moving back to the states in droves.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the colossal greed and rather dramatic lack of empathy represented by the GOP and particularly Donald Trump and his base – in what would seem to be the antithesis of the evangelical Bible – are beyond callous and shocking to me.

The Big American Reset

For the few die-hard supply-side economists, and there are very few of those anymore unless they are paid to fabricate for partisan reasons, even they question the value of applying a massive tax cut stimulus-boost, and incurring a massive deficit, when the economy is already flying high. But unlike the majority of economists who question the very value of trickle-down economics (good luck with that job creation lie, these skeptics maintain), even supply-siders think that after a momentary uptick in 2018, 2019 will bring rapidly increasing inflation, which will trigger a rather serious recession for an entirely different reason. The GOP hopes no one figures out these approaching clouds until after the 2018 mid-term elections; they want a focus only on the momentary sugar rush in 2018.

And while we will have to wait a bit to see this reality sink in, there are other tea leaves that suggest the United States is slip-sliding downwards in many other ways as well. For example, as Republicans rejoice at having slammed the biggest pillar of the Affordable Care Act – the tax reform legislation removed the mandatory enrollment in the ACA which provided most of the healthcare subsidy funding – and rather openly want to curtail Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security to pay for that tax cut, the government’s Centers for Disease Control tell us that our life expectancy numbers are going the wrong way.

“The life expectancy figure is based on the year of one’s birth, current death trends and other factors. For decades, it was on the upswing, rising a few months nearly every year. But last year marked the first time in more than half a century that U.S. life expectancy fell two consecutive years… A baby born last year in the U.S. is expected to live about 78 years and seven months, on average, the CDC said. An American born in 2015 was expected to live about a month longer, and one born in 2014 about two months longer than that.

“The dip in 2015 was blamed on drug deaths and an unusual upturn in the death rate for the nation’s leading killer, heart disease. Typically, life expectancy goes back up after a one-year decline, said Robert Anderson, who oversees the CDC’s death statistics. The last time there was a two-year drop was 1962-63. It also happened twice in the 1920s… ‘If we don’t get a handle on this,’ he said, ‘we could very well see a third year in a row. With no end in sight.’” Los Angeles Times, December 26^th. The reasons: mounting deaths from the opioid epidemic and heart and other related problems due to our rising obesity rates. But wait, there’s more.

Immigration policies are deflecting highly-trained scientists and engineers – the real job-creators – north to Canada or European locations. The folks with these advanced college degrees either cannot breakthrough for themselves for a coveted H1B visa or, even if they can, they are not able to bring their wives and children. Canada has responded by making it easier for such experts (and their families) to enter Canada, and American firms seeking these specially-educated workers are now opening facilities in other countries so as not to lose their skills.

In most of the rest of the world, politicians enhance their stature by opposing just about anything Donald Trump has embraced, mostly his reversing decades of prior efforts by other American presidents from both sides of the aisle. Not only have we lost influence by withdrawing from well-established policies – from trade agreements, climate change commitments and our recent move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – but the fact that one president can undo the pledges, policies and treaties of past presidents has called into question whether the world can ever take America’s word on anything ever again.

Trump’s threat-tweeting and name-calling (Kim Jong-Un, is “little rocket man”) represent a reverse of our entire history of diplomatic actions. The bluster of a North Korean dictator is nothing new, but political cat-calls by a nation that was until recently the spokes-country for the free world are viewed as a nation gone rogue, supporting a president who seems hell-bent on provoking a nuclear war. Kim comes out unscathed; America is viewed as the true villain. Lots of threats but almost no real follow-through, from opioid addiction to international issues.

Trump constantly contradicts policies from his most qualified advisors, instead choosing to cater to his religiously-driven base whose positions have long since been rejected by most of the rest of the world. He has undermined his own intelligence agencies (even those in the military), the Department of State and the FBI and is in the process of eviscerating the Departments of Energy, Interior, Education, OSHA, the SEC, the FCC and the EPA.

In a cover story in the December 26^th Los Angeles Times, entitled Foreign Leaders Say U.S. Losing Stature, global correspondents Tracy Wilkinson, Alexandra Zavis and Shashank Bengali, write: “China has now assumed the mantle of fighting climate change, a global crusade that the United States once led. Russia has taken over Syrian peace talks, also once the purview of the American administration, whose officials Moscow recently deigned to invite to negotiations only as observers.

“France and Germany are often now the countries that fellow members of NATO look to, after President Trump wavered on how supportive his administration would be toward the North Atlantic alliance… And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.S., once the only mediator all sides would accept, has found itself isolated after Trump’s decision to declare that the U.S. recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

“In his wide-ranging speech on national security [on December 18^th], Trump highlighted what he called the broadening of U.S. influence throughout the world… But one year into his presidency, many international leaders, diplomats and foreign policy experts argue that he has reduced U.S. influence or altered it in ways that are less constructive. On a range of policy issues, Trump has taken positions that disqualified the United States from the debate or rendered it irrelevant, these critics say…

“‘The president can and does turn things inside out,’ said Manoj Joshi, a scholar at a New Delhi think tank, the Observer Research Foundation. ‘So the chances that the U.S. works along a coherent and credible national security strategy are not very high.’

“As the U.S. recedes, other powers including China, Russia and Iran are eagerly stepping into the void… Nicholas Burns, who served as a senior American diplomat under Republican and Democratic administrations, said the administration’s strategy was riddled with contradictions that have left the U.S. ineffective… Trump ‘needs a strong State Department to implement’ its strategy, he said. ‘Instead, State and the foreign service are being weakened and often sidelined.’

“Trump’s ‘policy of the last 12 months is a radical departure from every president since WWII,’ Burns said in an interview. ‘Trump is weak on NATO, Russia, trade, climate, diplomacy. The U.S. is declining as a global leader.’

“The most recent example of U.S. isolation came with Trump’s decision to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, delighting many Israelis, but angering Palestinians and reversing decades of international consensus…

“For the last quarter-century, successive U.S. governments have held themselves up as an ‘honest broker’ in mediating peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. Trump insisted he is not giving up on a peace deal, but most parties involved interpreted his announcement as clearly siding with Israel.

“‘From now on, it is out of the question for a biased United States to be a mediator between Israel and Palestine,’ Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a summit of more than 50 Muslim countries that he hosted in Istanbul. ‘That period is over.’

“Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, said that if a peace deal is to be made now, ‘it won’t be from American policy… Trump took himself and the administration out of the peace process for the foreseeable future’…

“Regional leaders and analysts also say that for all of Trump’s tough rhetoric, they see few concrete steps by the U.S. to counter Iran’s steady expansion of its military, economic and political influence, a perception that Iranian leaders are happy to exploit.”

So here are just some of Donald Trump’s New Year’s gifts to Americans everywhere: a tax bill that is aimed at making the rich richer, which will slam us into a recession after the sugar high of 2018; healthcare that will continue to decrease our life expectancies, complaining about issues but doing nothing to improve health for most of us; and a vastly more dangerous world in which the United States and its best interests decreasingly matter to most of the earth. Welcome to the big American reset! Expectations and reality. We seem to have made America Grate Again.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you are a realist – left, right or center – it’s time to doff partisan politics and do what’s best for the country… returning to pragmatics based on facts and not wannabee bogus slogans.

Truth? LOL

The political campaigns for the 2018 mid-terms are beginning. So with all the noise about fake news and Russian dissemination of disinformation, all the pledges by the social media giants to fix the problem, guess what? Nothing is changing. As Cale Guthrie Weissman writes in the December 23^rd FastCompany.com: “When tragedy struck this year, platforms became riddled with seemingly journalistic content that peddled fabricated stories. YouTube, for instance, was instantly awash in conspiracy theories, especially in the wake of mass shootings. In October, a lone shooter in Las Vegas opened fire on a crowd of people, killing over 50 people. In a matter of days, conspiracy theorists flocked to platforms like YouTube and disseminated false information. Many deemed the attack a ‘false flag.’ Others said the shooting was staged and the victims were ‘crisis actors.’

“Even as I write this, the first recommended search term in YouTube after ‘Las Vegas shooting’ is ‘Las Vegas shooting conspiracy.’ This isn’t an isolated issue either–every highly publicized attack generated endless posts on YouTube claiming the attacks to be fake or from some highly organized conspiracy. And these videos raked in hundreds of thousands of views.

“Similarly, Facebook and Google were also caught promoting fake content in the wake of the Las Vegas tragedy. As the news broke, both platforms began to promote content from unverified blogs that misidentified both victims and the shooter.

“Both companies apologized for the mishaps, yet their platforms are still predicated on promoting the most shareable content. This is ultimately the genesis of fake news: clickable content from lord knows where, intended to be shared before being verified. Sometimes it’s the most sensational–as opposed to factual–that gets to the top of their pages. Indeed, watchdog groups like Snopes have existed for years because fake news has plagued social media since well before the election.”

The obvious problem: folks who live off those alt-right and far left conspiracy theories believe that the “corrections” are the fake news and that those catchy misstatements are what’s real. If you think any of this is manageable in a world where truth and the First Amendment seem to be at war with each other, where Russian robotized social media tracking and infestation has been wildly successful, think again. Web tracking software scrapes your emails for key words suggesting various political susceptibilities and can automatically direct a targeted fake news story in your direction that taps those vulnerabilities. Notwithstanding droves of big social media staffers waiting to jump on, quash or negate “false facts” on their platforms, by the time they do their jobs, it’s just too late.

What happened in June of this year, as a self-appointed reporter incorrectly posted photographs purportedly showing Obama-supporters loading busses for an anti-Trump protest is illustrative of the pattern of dissemination and credibility. “The erroneous post got shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook and 16,000 times on Twitter, mostly by right-wing Americans drawn to the idea that people on the left had orchestrated an anti-Trump conspiracy. [Trump himself tweeted the false story]…

“Tucker subsequently acknowledged his error in a new tweet. But a week later, the truthful post had only gotten retweeted 29 times, according to the debunking website Snopes.

“Why did the false tweet get so much more attention? A new study published June 26 in the journal Nature looks into why fake posts like Tucker's can go so viral.

“Economists concluded that it comes down to two factors. First, each of us has limited attention. Second, at any given moment, we have access to a lot of information — arguably more than at any previous time in history. Together, that creates a scenario in which facts compete with falsehoods for finite mental space. Often, falsehoods win out.

“Diego F. M. Oliveira, the study's lead author and a post-doctoral fellow at Indiana University and Northwestern University, tested this idea by creating a theoretical model for the spread of information. The model was loosely based on epidemiological models that public health researchers use to study the spread of disease. Oliviera's team had bots or ‘agents’ produce messages containing new memes — essentially fake news — on sites like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, and re-share messages created or forwarded by their neighboring bots in a network.

“‘Quality is not a necessary ingredient for explaining popularity patterns in online social networks,’ Oliveira wrote in his paper, adding, "Paradoxically, our behavioral mechanisms to cope with information overload may ... increas[e] the spread of misinformation and mak[e] us vulnerable to manipulation.’

“In other words, the study suggests that most people only focus on real news for short amounts of time, so adding fake news to the mix leads to more competition for our attention. Every few minutes, we make quick decisions about which facts to accept and which to discard. In the process, we may end up disregarding factual information simply because there is so much of it out there.” BusinessInsider.com, June 26^th.  

Oliveira and his colleagues discovered that even after test subjects who received intentionally false information were presented with corrected information, which they even acknowledged, about 75% of those test subjects, when asked about the story six months later, only recalled the original story and not the correction.

Russian intelligence has finally found a process that the West seems unable to stop. It’s been a good year for KGB-trained Vladimir Putin: “As Putin looks back on this year, he’ll see it as a good year for him. The thing that he fears most—the spread of democracy and specifically Western liberal democracy—has become confused and splintered because of his actions. That’s serious return-on-investment for him.” The Cipher Brief, December 26th. Vladdy even offered to act as an intermediary between North Korea and the United States. Hmmm….

Truth? Hold on for a rough ride. To too many Americans, truth is only that which confirms what they already believe. Fake news is everything else.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I just wonder if uncontrolled fake news can actually destroy democracy.