Friday, April 20 will mark seven months since Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria. Are things getting any better on the island? It really depends on who you ask. For those who are still without power, the answer is a clear no. While gains have been made in terms of restoring electricity to homes and businesses, things remain unstable and unpredictable. In fact, just last week there was another massive power outage that left 700,000 residents in the dark. And while we know that Maria brought about the longest blackout in American history, according to CNN, it now also represents the second largest blackout in world history.
As Doug Criss writes:
Since the monster storm slammed into the American Caribbean territory in September 2017 and heavily damaged the power grid, more than 3.4 billion hours of electricity have been lost there. That makes it the second-longest blackout in world history, according to a report from the Rhodium Group, an economic research firm.
The only blackout in world history bigger than Puerto Rico's is the one that came after Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines in 2013. About 6.1 billion hours of power were lost after that massive storm.
But it’s not just power that the people of Puerto Rico have been left without. The island’s government has recently announced plans to close 283 schools in the next year. While they claim that this is due to declining student enrollment, they are also planning to implement privatization efforts by introducing charter schools and issuing school vouchers. This plan will impact tens of thousands of students and thousands of teachers. So while it’s a plan that most certainly works to the benefit of private investors and those business people who stand to benefit from the deconstruction of public schools, it is not at all good for the majority of people on the island—especially those who are poor and in need.
Another group of stakeholders that would say that everything is going just fine and dandy in Puerto Rico is its creditors. According to the New York Post, local and federal government officials are forecasting that Puerto Rico will be able to make debt service payments in 2018 at higher rates than it did prior to Hurricane Maria.
Puerto Rico bonds have been the best-performing fixed income investment thus far in 2018. Following the devastation of last year’s Hurricanes Maria and Irma, and the expected migration to the mainland of more than 10 percent of the island’s population, how can this be?
The answer lies in the tens of billions of emergency-reconstruction dollars appropriated by Congress, including $18 billion in housing grants alone, and in the dangerously optimistic forecasts of Puerto Rico’s own government. [...]
Now, notwithstanding the virtual destruction of its electrical grid, serious damage to other productive infrastructure, the shuttering of many of its businesses and the exodus of many workers and taxpayers, the government is happily forecasting that it could make payments up to 40 cents on the dollar.
This makes little to no sense. Not only has much of the island’s economy been crippled by the hurricane but prior to the back-to-back storms of Irma and Maria, Puerto Rico had been going through a long economic crisis, with an economy that declined 15 percent in a decade. This is the cruel logic of disaster capitalism—that money is to be made during the reconstruction after a natural disaster or crisis. Yet this influx of cash does nothing for residents and, in Puerto Rico’s case, will leave them in the very same position they were in before.
As the New York Post notes:
The island’s infrastructure can be rebuilt with large-scale funding from Washington, but at best its productive capacity would only be restored to its pre-hurricane level. The influx of federal reconstruction dollars certainly could temporarily raise the rate of growth and pull up the level of output. Yet once recovery spending wanes, that effect should largely go into reverse — leaving in place long-standing problems like high unemployment and the highest poverty rate in the United States.
Importantly, structural reforms such as changes to “ease of doing business” and labor laws cannot by any reasonable economic analysis be powerful enough in themselves to offset the loss of federal Medicaid funding, the potential drag from recent changes to the corporate income tax code and the eventual withdrawal of disaster aid.
So there you have it. Things in Puerto Rico are only getting better for the wealthy who stand to profit off tragedy. For the island’s actual residents, they are living, struggling and trying to make it in a place that has been ignored for the past seven months (and dating back much longer) by the local and federal government who now have the distinction of presiding over a disaster which has become the second biggest blackout in the world.