Naomi Klein’s l(ooooo)ongread in The Intercept about the state
of play in Puerto Rico is the comprehensive summary of the post-Maria
fuckery and hope that has gripped America’s colonial laboratory, the
place where taxation without representation, austerity, chemical
weapons, new drugs, and new agribusiness techniques get trialed before
the rest of America are subjected to them.
Puerto Rico has experienced centuries of fuckery,
including a brutal anti-independence regime that murdered and jailed
American citizens for waving a flag, peacefully protesting, and pure
speech acts in which factual recitals of the state of Puerto Rico became
crimes.
The fuckery never stopped. After being colonized for medical
experiments, chemical weapons experiments, and agribusiness experiments,
Puerto Rico was colonized for financial experiments. First the island
offered short-term tax incentives for businesses to locate there (the
dubious benefits of this were wiped off the ledger and converted to
deficits when all the businesses left the island after their tax holiday
ended); then the island floated tax-free bonds that rang up massive
debt; then came even shittier bonds with predatory interest rates that
ballooned to 785%-1000% after their teaser rates expire. The Puerto
Rican government was stripped of its power to govern in favor of an
appointed board of finance industry execs whose job was to ensure that
those bonds got serviced, at any expense – including the shuttering of
critical state institutions and the sale of state assets (often at
sweetheart rates to their friends).
Puerto Ricans had just about had enough in 2017, and waves of protests
and uprisings shook the island, stemming the tide and showing a
solidarity that put the whole neoliberal project in jeopardy. Then
Hurricane Maria hit.
(Naturally, elected Republicans rejected the Warren-Sanders plan to provide $146B in aid to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.)
In the wake of Maria, in the face of seemingly deliberate governmental indifference, community organizers, anarchists and socialists stepped in to fill the void, laying the ground for a new Puerto Rican resistance that could form out of the ruins of Maria.
But the new face of Puerto Rico is ferociously contested. A group of
cryptocurrency speculators have hatched a plan to create “Puertopia,” in
which a radically depopulated island becomes a kind of on-shore
off-shore tax-haven. Puerto Rico already offers a raft of tax-gifts to
fly-in bankers; if you overwinter in Puerto Rico, you can avail yourself
of a 0% capital gains and 0% interest and dividends tax-rates (this tax
deal is not available to year-round, ordinary Puerto Rican residents).
Move your businesses’s registration to Puerto Rico and you’ll enjoy a 4%
corporate tax rate. All without leaving the USA or relinquishing your
US passport!
The Puertopians and the neoliberal management of Puerto Rico have
convergent interests, and those interests likewise converge with
trumpism: since Maria, the island has experienced radical depopulation,
driven by the incompetence of the relief effort; the government projects
(plans) a 20% drop in population overall. There are official plans,
some already underway, to sell off state assets at fire-sale prices, and
to shutter public schools, end independent consumption-crop farming in
favor of corporate cash-crop farms tended by low-wage workers who have
no rights to speak of.
Against this are the green shoots of a new Puerto Rican resistance,
reborn after Maria. The fact that decentralized, renewable energy;
sustainable consumption-crop farming; and publicly run schools all
weathered the storm more-or-less intact is an existence-proof of a
better way for Puerto Rico, one grounded in fiscal sovereignty,
educational sovereignty, food sovereignty, and the refactoring of Puerto
Rican infrastructure to benefit Puerto Ricans and resilience.
Meanwhile, the Puertopians and the island’s technocratic appointed
managers plan to supercharge the factors that created a disaster on
Puerto Rico: more filthy, groaning fossil fuels that poison the people
and the land under normal operating conditions, and then do it a
thousand times more when they’re inundated by severe weather; more
austerity; an end to public education in favor of Devos-compliant
charter-schools; more centralization of the ports where fuel comes in
and cash crops go out – more profitable fragility that assumes that big
business can always get bailed out by the state, while paying virtually
no tax to support that state.
Klein’s story shows how the “sovereignty” sought by the Puertopians –
the power to take away someone else’s island through corrupt
privatization deals and then run the place without any duty to the
people you expropriated – contrasts with the meaningful sovereignty of
Puerto Rican resistance. When Devos tries to close their public schools
and replace them with charter schools, the teachers and parents occupy
their schools and refuse to allow them to be closed. Devos wants “school
choice,” but only if that choice is to funnel tax-dollars to for-profit
charter schools that teach Dominionist gospel.
Klein paints a picture of a wildly overmatched resistance that is
fighting “fast capital,” “unencumbered by democratic norms” where “the
governor and the fiscal control board can whip up their plan to
radically downsize and auction off the territory in a matter of weeks.”
Meanwhile, the resistance is struggling with the administrative
incompetence after Maria, struggling to feed themselves, to stave off
critical illness, to survive.
The Puertopia vision is to transform the island into “a fly-in bedroom
community for tax-dodging plutocrats,” who believe that taxation is
theft and pay lip service to “freedom” – while enthusiastically backing
the governor’s plan to “penalize communities that set up their own
renewable micro-grids.”
But the resistance has an advantage: its history. They’re not starting
from scratch: they’ve been at it for a century, and they reached a
zenith last year, just before Maria. The hurricane smashed the island,
but the reconstruction process has brought people together in hardened,
tight-knit brigades who are fiercely determined to free their homeland
from colonialist exploitation. It’s not a fair fight, but they stand a
chance – especially now, when so much of the world seems to be waking
up to the manifest injustice of inequality and unchecked, late-stage
capitalism.
It’s a great read, and it holds out hope, which we all need – especially the people of Puerto Rico.
