Puerto Rico Drowning in Debt
Vulture Hedge Funds Circle on Higher Ground
as Puerto Rico Drowns in
Debt
with
University of Puerto Rico
Prof. Rafael Bernabe Riefkohl, Working People's Party spokesperson and
candidate for the Governor of Puerto Rico, and noted co-author of
Puerto Rico in the American Century A History
since 1898
Puerto Rico’s fiscal
perils are currently in the news. It is an island with a poverty rate
approaching 50 percent, a public debt that amounts to over $20,000 per
inhabitant (more than its median income of $19,518). While most of the
attention in Puerto Rico’s case focuses on technical issues relating to the
solvency of municipal bonds and austerity measures, the history of U.S.
policies have resulted in more than three and a half million Puerto Ricans
being treated as second class citizens. With a poverty rate of more than 45
percent (more than double that of Mississippi), Puerto
Rico has had serious
long-term economic problems that, like its current massive public debt, have
been historically papered over. Meanwhile, the hedge fund vultures and Wall
Street banks and lawyers charging over $1.4 billion in a seven-year period
for charges like swap termination fees are circling Puerto Rico. They are
sensing a fiscal death spiral they can feed off and caring little about the
consequences for nearly four million residents as they manipulate a
financial system largely devoid of any social conscience. The bottom line
is that Puerto Rico is the United States’ largest colony that it decided to
take by force 117 years ago and has since treated like a resented orphan it
has consistently undernourished politically and economically. Puerto Rico’s
current fiscal crisis is, in this sense, really a crisis of American
colonial policies and will the United States accept responsibility for the
negative consequences of its imperialist past? Prof. Barnabe Riefkohl,
candidate for Gov. of Puerto Rico talks about this and approaches for
the Island’s recovery and more long term solutions for Puerto Rico’s fiscal
problems.
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