Puerto Rico Suffers While Federal Government Fails

You rarely hear news about disaster recovery in Puerto Rico anymore though you may have heard about the 2 day power outage on the island recently. Given the dearth of coverage you could be forgiven for believing that all is well but you’d be wrong. In fact between 10% and 20% of the population is still without power a full seven months since hurricane Maria devastated the island. Many homes are still not in livable condition and yet they’ll be eligible for foreclosure starting May 18.

Puerto Rico is an American territory with a population of over 3.3 million United States citizens, that’s more than the population of entire states of Iowa, Utah, Mississippi and 17 other states. Puerto Rico is about the same size and population as Connecticut.

It’s nearly hurricane season again and tens of thousands of the island’s residents are essentially homeless and living in shelters or doubling up with family and friends. The electrical grid is incomplete and unstable as evidenced by the recent two day island-wide outage. This is on top of rolling blackouts lasting anywhere from 1 to 16 hours at a time.

While the president made excuses immediately after hurricane Maria last year that it’s difficult to provide assistance because “This is an island surrounded by water, big water, ocean water,” that’s no longer an acceptable excuse if it ever was.

Back in January the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) stopped providing water and food aid even though tens of thousands are will without access to safe drinking water let alone running water. The situation is so bad that thousands of people are still getting their water from springs that aren’t officially tested for contamination.

In order to protect their community’s health it has become a project at Maricao high school students to test water are community sites daily and put up warning signs with recommended treatment precautions. The project started when water activist Steve Tamar offered his citizen-science training at Maricao High School in western Puerto Rico this past October. He expected perhaps a dozen students, instead, the sweltering hot auditorium was packed with teenagers looking to help test the island’s water. Eventually the whole school got involved one way or another with teachers incorporating the theme of water testing into their curriculum.

Earlier this year Congress allocated $2 billion to the recovery effort but the federal government has yet to make any of that available to Puerto Rico. While that sounds like a lot of money, consider that Puerto Rico asked for $17 billion just to restore the electric grid. Florida citrus growers got $2.3 billion in hurricane recovery assistance so you can see the disproportionate allocation of assistance.

Between November 2017 and January 2018 Puerto Rico’s health department recorded triple the number of calls to their suicide hotline from those who had already attempted suicide. Mental health workers are concerned about widespread post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the effects of the upcoming hurricane season.

The fact that recovery in Puerto Rico still lags and is underfunded is a failure of the federal government. The fact that we as citizens are mostly unaware of the lag in recovery and its cause is a failure of our national news media. It is incumbent on us as citizens to hold both our government officials and our media accountable.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - April 27, 2018

Is a Fraternity Just a Gang for White Men?

I came across an eye opening essay today, written by Professor Ibram X. Kindi, titled What’s the Difference Between a Frat and a Gang? His essay points out that a college fraternity may be just as frequently violent as an urban street gang and the statistics bear that out. In fact just as studies show that being a member of an urban street gang makes a boy three times more likely to engage in violence as a similar boy who is not a gang member so to does membership in a fraternity make it three times more likely that a young man will engage in sexual assault than a non-fraternity affiliated college man.

Now flip this around and look at how victims are treated. Most victims of violent crime who report to the police are treated with dignity and it is assumed that they are indeed victims. An officer is assigned to the case and an investigation is started, a prosecutor will get involved if a perpetrator is identified. Victims of rape on a college campus are often stigmatized, demeaned and called liars by authority figures including campus police and administration officials work hard to avoid investigating the crime let alone prosecuting the perpetrator.

Even when a 20 year old college man is prosecuted for a campus rape much is made of their potential and attempts are made to excuse the behavior as a youthful mistake that shouldn’t cost them their future. We don’t treat 16 year old members of urban street gangs that way, instead we want them punished as adults and given harsh sentences. Why, what’s the difference? The answer is usually the gang member is black or Latino and poor while the fraternity member is usually white and often from a privileged background.

In the 1990’s when violent urban crime peaked 7.4 percent of urban residents reported being victims of violent crime. The response by the public was to demand action and District Attorneys have been running for office with “tough on crime” as their slogans ever since. By 2016, only 2.9 percent reported being victims of violent crimes but “tough on crime” is still demanded by the public.

A nationwide survey of 27 universities conducted for the 2014-2015 academic year found that 16.9 percent of female freshmen reported being victims of non-consensual sexual contact by force and incapacitation. In the same study 27.2 percent of senior women reported being victims of inappropriate sexual contact over the course of their collegiate life. Where is the call for “tough on campus crime”?

During the Obama administration an effort to was made to address campus sexual violence and funds allocated toward that goal, recently current Education Secretary Betsy DeVos terminated that program. She claimed the Obama-era guidelines represented federal overreach by putting an undue burden on accused students to defend themselves.

Even though violent crime is 60% lower than it was two decades ago Trumpian Republicans have recently declared war on gangs. In an October 2017 address Attorney General Jeff Sessions said “We cannot afford to be complacent in the face of violence that threatens too many of our communities.”

Professor Kindi doesn’t offer solutions but he does ask us to expand on the question that is the title to his essay. I would ask, how about we spend less effort on a problem we’ve already largely resolved and more effort on one that we’ve hardly scratched the surface on? How about we treat adolescent boys of color a little more like white adult men on college campuses and white men more like those adolescent boys?

Published in the Seguin Gazette May 20, 2018

Reverse Robin Hood at the federal and state level

Imagine for a moment that you are the manager a successful family business owned by your retired parents and you also own a separate business. You have a reputation for borrowing very little and calling out others who do. Now further imagine that in order to pay for the lifestyle you believe you deserve you started paying yourself more than your personal company was earning and it will soon go into debt. You then decide to reduce the monthly payment your parents have been getting from the business you manage for them so you can transfer difference to your personal business in order to prop it up. I think you’ll agree that would make you a lousy daughter or son and a lying hypocrite.

Now replace the family business with Social Security, the personal business with the rest of the Federal Government and you with Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. That’s exactly what Ryan is calling for as the congress resumes after Easter break. He’s scheduled a vote on a bill that would reduce Social Security benefits claiming that federal revenues aren’t keeping pace with spending and therefore the national debt is going to increase. What he’s trying hard not to mention is that the reason the budget is out of balance has nothing to do with Social Security because as in the example above it has its own revenue stream and expenditures completely separate from the rest of the federal budget. Not only that the entire reason that the budget is out of balance and the country will borrow a trillion dollars this year is the massive tax cut Republicans just gave to the wealthiest among us and which most of the rest of us got little or nothing. That makes Paul Ryan a lousy representative of the people, and a lying hypocrite.

It’s like reverse Robin Hood, stealing from the poor, Social Security recipients, and giving to the rich. If this were Sherwood Forest I’d be rooting for Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Sadly Texas has its own very similar situation, Lt Governor Dan Patrick is running around lying to the public by claiming that school districts are at fault for property taxes going up. He says he has a plan to reduce property taxes by putting limits on how high school districts can set their tax rates. Patrick fails to mention that the reason school districts keep raising their rates is that he keeps lowering the state’s portion of funding for public education.

Just like Paul Ryan, Dan Patrick is both responsible for the mess and blaming it on the victims so he can cut taxes on his wealthy patrons. He too is a lousy representative of the people, and a lying hypocrite.

In November we have an opportunity to replace Dan Patrick with someone who will tell the truth and has a plan for restoring state funding for public education without increasing the burden on the average Joe. Mike Collier is running for Lt. Governor and he wants to change the way real estate purchases are reported to local taxing authorities so that wealthy individuals and big businesses can’t hide the price they pay for multi-million dollar homes and business sites. Just making our property taxes fair by taxing those properties the same way your home is taxed will go a long way toward restoring the balance between state and local funding for public education.

Check out Mike Collier, you’ll find he’s a straight shooter and if you elect him you won’t feel like rooting for the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Trump Takes Overtime Away

This week 100,000 Americans lost the right to overtime pay and what’s worse is that they are just the tip of the iceberg. Monday’s Supreme Court decision in the case Encino Motorcars v. Navarro was all about whether or not service advisors at auto dealerships are exempt from overtime provisions in the Fair Labor Standards Act which was originally passed in the 1930’s. The result was disappointing though unsurprising as the Supreme Court had ruled much the same way two years ago when sending the same case back to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals with orders to rethink their prior decision in favor of the service advisors.

The five conservatives on the court claim that “if you ask the average customer who services his car, the primary, and perhaps only, person he is likely to identify is his service advisor.” The four liberals disagree, and I’ve got to say while I’ve never spoken to a mechanic at any dealer where I’ve had my car repaired I know darn well that the service advisor isn’t the one doing the work if for no other reason than they’re sitting in an air conditioned room talking to customers like the receptionist at the doctor’s office. I’ll bet you’re not fooled for a minute either.

While it’s frustrating that anyone loses their right to overtime pay you might think, “well it’s only service advisors at auto dealerships so this is a really limited issue”, but you’d be wrong. You see when Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the decision he made a point of also declaring that prior decisions which were based on narrow interpretations of exemptions to requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act were also wrong. This means that a lot more people stand to lose not only overtime protections but any number of other protections of the law. Experts believe that we’ll be seeing new court cases over employers seeking to cut their employees pay, benefits, and other protections of the law for years to come.

When we elect a president we aren’t just getting that one person or just their ideas and actions, we’re getting a whole list of appointees both in the cabinet and in the courts. When we elect members of Congress we aren’t just getting one person to act on our behalf, we’re getting the entire party they belong to for good or ill. In this case Ted Cruz and John Cornyn are just as responsible for taking away overtime protection from the service advisors and others who will lose those and other benefits in the coming years as Donald Trump. They were active participants in stealing the Supreme Court seat that allowed Trump to appoint Neil Gorsuch when they withheld hearings on President Obama’s nominee claiming that a year was too close to an election to name a new Supreme Court Justice.

The next time a friend or family member tells you they aren’t political so they don’t vote or that it doesn’t matter who is elected, remind them that overtime, family leave, sick pay and any number of other benefits they take for granted can be taken away due to who gets elected. In November Texans have an opportunity to forcibly retire Ted Cruz by electing Beto O’Rourke to the United States Senate. That will go a long way toward stopping further Trump appointees who would stand for corporations and billionaires at the expense of every day working people like you and me.

I wonder how many service advisors are rethinking their vote for Trump now.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 6, 2018