If you haven’t seen John Oliver’s brilliant explication of the debt crisis in Puerto Rico, it needs to be viewed and shared widely.
Oliver gives a better and clearer history of the situation than many politicians, and media analysts have done.
He was joined by Pulitzer Prize winner, creator and star of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Raw Story had this coverage:
Puerto Rico is in crisis. Last month, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose parents came to New York from Puerto Rico before he was born, visited Congress to plead with them to pass legislation that would help the territory restructure its $72 billion debt.
“We have a humanitarian crisis on our hands,” Miranda, who created the Broadway hit Hamilton said in his address. “We face a financial crisis that triples anything you’ve experienced in the United States. It is a solvable, fixable crisis, and what we really need is help from Congress. What we need is the ability to restructure and get Puerto Rico out of the hole it’s in.”
Oliver spoke about the role Wall Street has played in the crisis:
Because Puerto Rico is a territory and not a state, there are several loopholes in U.S. law that have led directly to its current situation. For one, Puerto Rican bonds were deemed “triple tax exempt,” making them incredibly appealing for Wall Street, but ultimately terrible for Puerto Rico. “You might even own Puerto Rican bonds and not even know it,” Oliver said, due to sketchy laws about how the bonds are labeled.
Miranda appeared before Congress in March:
“Hamilton” star and composer, Lin-Manuel Miranda, joins Congressional Democrats at a news conference to announce a new push to address the humanitarian and economic crisis in Puerto Rico.
He also wrote an Op-Ed forThe New York Times:
On Aug. 31, 1772, a hurricane devastated the island of St. Croix, the home of the teenage Alexander Hamilton. In a letter one week later, he described the force of the storm and the destruction it caused as “sufficient to strike astonishment into angels.”
His letter included this plea for help for his countrymen: “O ye, who revel in affluence, see the afflictions of humanity and bestow your superfluity to ease them. Say not, we have suffered also, and thence withhold your compassion. What are your sufferings compared to those? Ye have still more than enough left. Act wisely. Succour the miserable and lay up a treasure in Heaven.” So vivid was his account of the disaster that the letter was published in a newspaper in the Virgin Islands, The Royal Danish American Gazette, and used to support relief efforts for the island.
I’m invoking Hamilton’s words today, in this plea for relief for Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico is going to need millions of Hamiltons to move out of this crisis. Contact your senators and congresspeople to make that happen.