The Real Problem With Puerto Rico

We might as well just face it.  The United States of America is a lousy Colonial power. 

We just don’t know how to do it right. Heck, we don’t really know how to do it at all.

Wait, you say. We are not a colonial power at all. Never were. We rebelled against the King of England and became a free nation, denouncing colonial control and becoming the world’s first real democracy. Just read the history books.

Well, not quite. I’ll give you a little quiz to show you what I mean. What do the following places have in common - Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Wake Island, Midway Atoll. And, for good measure, add Washington, D.C.

You guessed it. They are all colonies of the United States, although we use nicer words to describe them. Territories is the most common one. Footnotes might be more accurate. Here’s why.

Anyone living in Puerto Rico is a United States citizen. So is anyone living in Washington, D.C. And, if they lived somewhere else, they would have the right - as all citizens do - to elect their own national government and their elected representatives would decide on their own budgets and taxes.

But Puerto Ricans can only vote for President if they move to another state. And they do have an elected observer in Congress who can sit on committees, but can not vote. Pretty much the same thing for the folks in Washington. Funny that both places have enormous financial problems, and that it is our Congress which really has the biggest role in setting their budgets.

And, hey, do you know who the top official is in Puerto Rico? Not the governor, actually. The person with the most power is the President of the United States. Not that the President actually uses that power much. Too much work, very few details, poor options all around and - in the end - not a single vote in the next federal election.

So, when our President and Congress get around to doing things, the problems of Virginia and Utah and Oklahoma and New Jersey and all the other states seem to come first, and the colonies end up at the back of the line. Works that way for Republicans and Democrats alike. Like I said, footnotes.

There are 16 possessions outside the United States under our nation’s control - the simple word colony will save a lot of space - although it paints a false picture, since seven of them are uninhabited and five are just two square miles or less in size. Ah, but those tiny specks of land give us control of vast stretches of ocean for fishing and other things. We even turned the uninhabited MIdway Atoll into a National Wildlife Refuge.

Now, we got these colonial possessions in different ways. We got American Samoa under the Treaty of Berlin in  1899.  Captain William Reynolds sailed into Midway on the USS Lackawanna and took possession in 1867. The Treaty of Paris gave the United States Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico on 1899, after we won the Spanish-American war. We got the U.S. Virgin Islands the more honorable way, we bought them from Denmark in 1917.

Traditionally, great nations acquire colonies because those far away places have something that the nation wants...things like coal and rubber and diamonds and cheap labor come to mind. Or, they may simply be geographically important, or - in a few cases - they are a convenient place to dump things those nations don’t want. The penal colony on Devil’s Island is a fine example of that.

Now, sooner or later, colonies will rise up and create problems for the nations that own them. After all, who wants to live in a colony where your work hard, see a lot of your money going overseas to an absentee owner, pay more than anyone else for a lot of your basic necessities, pay for soldiers who are there to “protect” you from other would-be owners of your colony, and have someone else make all the important rules governing your community.

When those problems get big enough, there is revolution. There is anger. It becomes more expensive for the owning nation to keep the colony than to set it free, and so the colony is set free. The people can govern themselves

Well, we fought that kind of tyranny during the American revolution.  We won, after great sacrifice of lives and treasure.  It was the beginning of a noble experiment. Which brings us, inevitably, to Puerto Rico - our biggest colony.

By now, you might be pretty mad. Puerto Rico - at least for people whose closest experience to that island is staying at a Hilton on vacation a couple of times or just watching West Side Story - has a pretty bad image. The people are lazy, the country is bankrupt, and there is little gratitude for the prompt response we made after the hurricane hit and all the billions of dollars we have spent in aid.

It’s the same kind of attitude that the English had, the French had, the Germans had, the Dutch had. And, probably, every colonial power going back to the Egyptians and the Romans and the Greeks. But, that’s ancient history. Let’s look at today.

Today, Puerto Rico is bankrupt. Which is to be expected. Things haven’t been good there since all the industry left.

What industry, you ask. Well, all those factories which were built after our Congress gave them a gift - a decade or so of not having to pay taxes on any money they earned in Puerto Rico. Of course, someone had to provide the infrastructure - the roads and the water and the electric power - but those things came courtesy of the local government which created several government monopolies to run them, got unlimited power to sell bonds to build infrastructure, and then had to figure out how to pay those bonds off. Guess how? More government bonds.

Well, things worked out reasonably well until the rug was pulled out. The wonderful tax exemption went away, other countries with cheaper labor offered their own incentives, and the businesses left. So, there was poor Puerto Rico, with nothing but empty factories and mountains of debt.

Which they might have started to pay off if they had an income tax. A really big one, like a thousand percent. Wait, you can’t have a tax that big. And, if everything you buy - from cars to milk to toilet paper - costs more than it does on the mainland United States because you are paying extra import taxes and transportation costs just to get the stuff across what our President calls a “big ocean,” then you sink deeper and deeper into debt. And you quibble with each other over who should be solving things, and you don’t maintain the roads and the electric grid. Just like us, in the mainland United States, with all our aging bridges and electric grids. inadequately maintained.

And, then, the hurricane hits. Just like here.

Well, as I said, our poor non-voting colony isn’t at the top of the list to get help. We just don’t know how much money there will be until we get this tax cut thing figured out. But, here’s one thing we do know -  half the people on Puerto Rico will never know I wrote this. 

They have been without electric power for two months, and electricity isn’t expected to be fully restored until around Christmas. Imagine the outcry if half of Queens or half of Kansas City were to be without power for four months.

Well, Congress has approved $3.5 billion in emergency aid to Puerto Rico, and the island nation is asking for 94 billion more.

We’ll worry about that later. Sometime after the newest sex scandal is thoroughly examined. After all, isn’t that the job - and now the economic necessity - of today’s journalism? Give the audience what it wants. Otherwise, they will just change the channel.