Portside

Puerto Ricans are all U.S. citizens. They pay taxes and serve in the military and don't need a passport to come to the U.S. mainland, and they deserve the same help the people of Texas and Florida received when they were hit by hurricanes. Puerto Rico is a colony, and like other colonial empires, the United States has brutally exploited it's colony.

Puerto Rico has been hit by a triple disaster - Hurricane Maria; outrageous debt owed to vulture hedge funds; racist, colonial indifference by the Trump Administration. Puerto Ricans - on the island, and in the U.S. have called for the lifting of the Jones Act, as it applies to Puerto Rico; canceling the debt; and abolishing PROMESA. Yesterday a solidarity flight of medical and emergency organized by AFL-CIO unions brought needed supplies and aid workers to the island.

Presidential action needed when 3.4 million Americans are living without electricity, 40% of them without potable water, and hundreds of thousands without shelter. When some 80% of its agricultural crops were wiped out. This is an apocalyptic scenario. We can't even know what is going on very much because there is no wifi most places. Some entire towns haven't been heard from! But this President tweets about football players who protest racism.

In Belgium, in the Congo, as much as in the slave South of the United States, there remain too many monuments to exploiters, not enough of resistors.

The plan by the oversight board for Puerto Rico will depress the economy further and fuel a debt spiral, in which Puerto Ricans, US taxpayers, and in the long run, even the creditors will lose

While inequality has become a topic of increased popularity and politicization in recent years, most of the attention has focused on how 1% own an increasingly large share of the world’s wealth, rather than on inequalities between nations. In a global context in which national borders and citizenship pose few barriers to the mobility of capital, the reality is also a story of the world’s richest nations continuing to reap a disproportionate amount of the globe’s profits.

The actions taken recently by law enforcement at the Dakota Access pipeline site have made it plain that the climate crisis cannot be adequately addressed until we come to terms with the history that climate change and the policing of communities of color share.

There's evidence some of it is illegal - and activists agree that Washington's colonial control over the island's economy helped create the crisis. We are urging members of Congress to put the people of Puerto Rico first and oppose H.R. 5278 as currently written, said SEIU 32BJ President Hector Figueroa. We need a real solution and Congress must get back to work immediately to provide a path forward that allows Puerto Rico to negotiate a feasible debt restructuring plan.