Distractions In the Time of Cholera

So Donald Trump landed in Puerto Rico, and to everybody's pseudo-shock, immediately discerned that as bad as things might seem to the naked lying eye, they don't hold a candle to the real American disaster known as Katrina. He does have a point, though, because given the delayed federal response and the lack of vehicles and fuel and personnel, they still haven't gotten around to bringing out all the bodies. So far, maybe two dozen people have officially been declared dead, compared to the nearly two thousand who were robbed, by dint of infrastructure neglect, of their lives in New Orleans. And the aftermath of Hurricane Maria promises to be a very long and lethal disaster indeed.

  But as reported by The Hill, a Beltway political gossip organ, the most important scandal today is not that the collapsed electrical grid had deliberately been primed for destruction by the austerity measures imposed from on high by the US government and predatory Wall Street creditors on the say-so of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The real scandal of Trump's stage-managed visit is that he rudely snubbed his latest Twitter nemesis, the female mayor of San Juan, when he proffered his gratuitous thanks to the military and other dignitaries.

 He wouldn't even say her name. Carmen Cruz apparently isn't doing a heckuva job. She is sadly not a Perfect Ten.

So to protect all the guilty, the media emphasis has been duly placed upon how doubly unappealing Donald Trump is whenever his serial misogyny collides with his serial racism. Cue the outrage. And definitely change the subject, which in a just and sane world would be the hidden human suffering of serially ignored people.

In other news which serves to direct all the blame toward Donald Trump, and to deflect it from cruel, longstanding bipartisan US policy decisions adversely affecting the economic and social well-being of Puerto Ricans, New York Times pundit Paul Krugman has created a nice little journalistic side-scandal of his own.

It seems that the good professor and Laureate of a generous bank-issued Nobel prize had falsely claimed that not only is there an outbreak of deadly cholera in Puerto Rico, Trump himself had caused it! (Trump's ramping-up of Barack Obama's terroristic drone wars with the help of the US-weaponized Saudis has indeed caused an actual cholera outbreak in Yemen, but that saga of human suffering has, for the most part, been dutifully ignored by American media.)

On September 30th, Krugman feverishly tweeted:

Cholera. In a US territory. Among US citizens. In the 21st century. Heckuva job, Trumpie.

He later partially retracted this false information by allowing that it was not (yet) confirmed. But it was his days-long delay in actually scrubbing* his original Tweet that is the most troubling aspect of this brouhaha. Even real journalists make factual mistakes on Twitter all the time, and they usually make prompt corrections and apologize when they're called out.

Not Paul Krugman, though.

But he finally did respond publicly today in a terse "explainer" in the Times' deliberately obscure new "Reader Center" section - complete with a fawning  introduction by his editors, who gratuitously mention his academic bona fides in the apparent hope of softening the credibility blow to one of their star columnists. Krugman will not apologize - he will merely be thoughtfully rueful as befits his status:

The Reader Center is a newsroom initiative that is helping The Times build deeper ties with our audience.

In this piece, Paul Krugman, an Op-Ed columnist for The Times and a Nobel laureate, reflects on (my bold) sending an inaccurate tweet about the presence of cholera in Puerto Rico.

"On cholera, in the heat of the moment, I got sloppy. I saw a tweet about cholera from someone I usually take seriously, assumed there was reporting behind it, and tweeted it out. I was wrong, and admitted the error.

That’s a warning about Twitter, and how easy it is to be careless; I will be more careful next time.

What’s important is not to let some exaggeration distract from the terrible reality in Puerto Rico."

As of this writing, I am the only reader to become distracted enough by his distraction from all the distractions to take advantage of these deeper audience ties and actually reply to his pabulum. My published comment:

 "Reader Center" is not a worthy substitute for the now-defunct Public Editor's position. Margaret Sullivan probably would never have allowed Paul Krugman to get away with this flippant pseudo-apology.

He tries to blow the whole thing off with a "let's move on, nothing to see here, folks" excuse for his Tweet, which displayed not so much compassion for Puerto Ricans as it did gratuitous contempt for Trump.

Additionally, he only partially retracted his original Tweet, with a shoulder-shrugging "OK, cholera not confirmed. Conjunctivitis yes; lack of clean water (situation worsening, not improving) makes it a risk. But not certain."

Moreover it took him days to actually scrub* the original Tweet, after it had garnered more that 32,000 "likes" and about 14,000 retweets. In other words it went about as "viral" as an epidemic of dysentery. His choleric correction, on the other hand, got only 1600 likes and 500 retweets.

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2017/10/u-professor-emeritus-kr...

 It's telling that Mr. Krugman has only chosen to address this issue after the CDC, PolitiFact, and Princeton called him out on it. When such dicey outlets as Breitbart and Infowars instantly raised the alarm, it apparently was a matter of nasty Fake News sniping about virtuous but "oops" Fake News. No need to delete, let alone deign to reply.

The damage to credibility is already done. Heckuva job, Professor.

 * Correction: I'd assumed, in the heat of the moment, that because PolitiFact's link to Krugman's original false tweet led to nothing, that the professor had probably wisely deleted it. Then I double-checked. I was wrong; it's still posted on his account, and it's more popular than ever. I apologize for the error! (and hopefully the Twitter execs will include it in the cache of fake news that Congress is so intent upon acquiring.)

Trump To Puerto Rico: Drop Dead

 **9/28 Updated below.

OK, so maybe that's a little harsh. But more likely, it's not harsh enough, given that Donald Trump's administration is actually in the business of hastening death - be it by attempting to yank health care from millions, reducing public housing assistance, destroying environmental protections, scoffing at banking regulations, and of course, waging endless wars and expanding drone strike assassinations to wherever on the globe "terrorist" Muslims live, breathe and drive. (not counting, of course, his good oil-rich friends in Saudi Arabia.)

Trump took a break from his racist tirades against professional football players, and has finally gotten around to hurling his white supremacist racism against Puerto Rico.  Following the All-American austerity Bible of foisting "personal responsibility" upon the poor for the benefit of the predatory billionaire class, the president, in a triple whammy of a Tweet, dutifully blames the American citizens of this island commonwealth for their own plight:

"Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble....

It's (sic) old electrical grid, which was in terrible shape, was devastated, with billions of dollars....

owed to Wall Street and the banks, which, sadly must be dealt with. Food, water and medicine are top priorities - and doing well #Fema."

As bad as this sounds, it's really nothing worse than how United States leaders have treated Puerto Rico for the past 120 years of its unwanted status as a de facto United States colony plundered by banksters, sugar barons and drug-makers. At least Trump is not ordering the Air National Guard to bomb our fellow American citizens, as Harry Truman did back in 1950, for having the audacity to seek their independence from Uncle Sam. 

It was not until many decades later that the FBI, under a Freedom of Information Act demand, released files which revealed that about 100,000 Americans residing on that island had been systematically harassed, and often jailed and tortured and experimented on and killed, for participating in the nationalist movement. Naturally, US officials used the same tried and untrue and permanent excuse of "Russian meddling" to justify their own atrocities.

So in the long run, Donald Trump's clumsy bloviating against Puerto Rico might even have the silver lining of causing mainland Americans who hadn't even realized that this island is part of the United States to join forces against him, and to demand an immediate government response to a "natural" humanitarian catastrophe caused, in large part, by man-made climate change.

As the New York Times reports, 

A new poll of 2,200 adults by Morning Consult found that only 54 percent of Americans know that people born in Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States, are U.S. citizens. (Because Puerto Rico is not a state, they do not vote in presidential elections, but they send one nonvoting representative to Congress.) This finding varied significantly by age and education. Only 37 percent of people ages 18 to 29 know people born in Puerto Rico are citizens, compared with 64 percent of those 65 or older. Similarly, 47 percent of Americans without a college degree know Puerto Ricans are Americans, compared with 72 percent of those with a bachelor’s degree and 66 percent of those with a postgraduate education.

Inaccurate beliefs on this question matter, because Americans often support cuts to foreign aid when asked to evaluate spending priorities. In our poll, support for additional aid was strongly associated with knowledge of the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans. More than 8 in 10 Americans who know Puerto Ricans are citizens support aid, compared with only 4 in 10 of those who do not.

Unlike the presidents before him, Trump is not even remotely trying to cover up the historical, institutional and corporate racism inherent in America's ongoing "War Against All Puerto Ricans." 

This disdain had heretofore been carefully hidden under the usual benevolent "white man's burden" kinds of platitudes. At least, unlike Teddy Roosevelt, Trump isn't ordering that only English be taught in this Spanish-speaking territory's schools.

A longtime protectionist ban (the Jones Act) on any non-US shipping to or from the island remains in place, meaning that emergency humanitarian aid from South America, Central America and Cuba, and all unaffected, or less-affected Caribbean locales, is still ridiculously outlawed, at great human cost. The Trump administration has denied a request for a waiver which would allow, among other things, swift lifesaving foreign shipments of gasoline to power the generators of Puerto Rico's sweltering hospitals.

That's outrageous, to put it very mildly. (**see update) But where was all the liberal outrage in 2015/16, when officials from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (unelected American governing bodies) foisted a Greece-like austerity regimen upon Puerto Rico when it defaulted on a $58 million predatory loan repayment? The Obama White House was certainly very quick to nix the kind of bailout it had only recently gifted to the Wall Street banks which had plundered Puerto Rico in the first place.

  At the same time that the big banks were underwriting subprime mortgages on the mainland and turning ("securitizing") them into fraudulent toxic financial instruments, they were going on an orgiastic Puerto Rican bond-buying spree, and foisting the paper on colluding hedge funds. When that all went kaput, the neoliberal solution was to reduce the federally mandated minimum wage for select groups of Puerto Rican Americans, to close public schools and fire teachers, to cut pension funds, to freeze the wages of public employees, to raise college tuition, to reduce Medicare and Medicaid payments to physicians (causing a mass exodus of doctors from the island to the mainland), and to cut food stamp stipends.

As World Bank economist Anne Krueger wrote at the time, cutting the too-generous-for-Puerto Ricans minimum wage of $7.25 makes perfect sense,  "because higher labor costs force Puerto Rican businesses to raise prices, making the island more expensive for tourists than neighboring Caribbean nations."

In other words, the dark-skinned Puerto Ricans should sacrifice and get paid less money to buy fewer expensive groceries so as to dissuade wealthy, cost-conscious (and white) tourists from vacationing instead in Jamaica or the Bahamas, where the dark-hued servants earn even smaller pittances. Moreover, Krueger went on, the $7.25 minimum wage also discourages multinationals from locating their businesses in Puerto Rico. After all, the big pharmaceutical companies have already left in a snit for much friendlier wage-slave countries.  This exodus, in turn, had the awful effect of "causing more workers to opt for collecting welfare over working." So let's cut their welfare assistance even more, to get them out of their hammocks of dependency and send them to work at a special introductory rate as low as $4.25 an hour.

Paul Krugman, resident New York Times liberal columnist and self-limited critic of only the GOP side of institutional white supremacy and austerity, dutifully approved:

  A recent report commissioned by the commonwealth’s government argues that its economy is hurt by sharing the U.S. minimum wage, which raises costs, and also by federal benefits that encourage adults to drop out of the work force. In principle these complaints could be right. In particular, even economists who support a higher U.S. minimum wage, myself included, generally agree that it could be a problem if set too high relative to productivity — and Puerto Rican productivity is far below mainland levels.

 Trump, in his own brash and insensitive way, is merely repeating what the poobahs of the Neoliberal Thought Collective have been dictating to the world for decades: it's the poor who must bear every burden and who must be blamed when they're not "productive" enough to fix the problems caused by the rich. Trump simply lacks the necessary finesse, the concern-trolling obfuscation, the colorblind beneficence of the modern colonial mindset as displayed by the Kruegers and the Krugmans and the Obamas of the world.

In spite of his own ignorant self, Donald Trump is turning out to be a damned good educator. 

  Therefore, may his ugly campaign of divide-and-conquer have the unintended consequence of actually uniting more people in both the pursuit of knowledge and in class/race solidarity.

*Update: Responding to criticism, Trump said he'll visit the island next Tuesday, scope it out, and continuously praise the strength and resiliency (neoliberal code for "you're so screwed") of the great Puerto Rican people. "It's very, very tough because it's an island... sitting in the middle of an ocean, and it's a big ocean, a really really big ocean," he insightfully prattled.

Meanwhile, CNN has amped up its coverage of the Puerto Rico catastrophe, with pundit Nia Malika Henderson even voicing the hope that since Trump watches a lot of cable news, perhaps he'll stop congratulating himself on the "great ratings" for his lackluster response long enough to allow his brain to soak up some of the awful human suffering going on outside his own self-involved little world.

We'll see. People are literally running out of time.

**Update 9/28: After initially refusing to waive the Jones Act lest the profits of the American shipping industry be reduced, Trump, through his Homeland Security secretary, reversed course and waived it after mounting pressure from the Puerto Rican governor and members of Congress, as well as from Defense Secretary James Mattis, who cited "national security" rather than humanitarianism as the prime reason. The war department obviously fears an outbreak of civic dissent on the island. This waiver will allow international disaster aid to flow to Puerto Rico. The most necessary commodities are water and fuel.

Meanwhile, long-term disaster assistance is still on hold, although Wall Street banks and hedge funds have "charitably" offered to strangle Puerto Ricans with even more debt in order to repair their destroyed electrical grid. Whatever happened to the quaint notion of the  Army Corps of Engineers performing this task as an ordinary public service? Maybe they're all tied up building infrastructure elsewhere, such as Graveyard of Empires, Afghanistan.

And here's the cruel catch (isn't there always a cruel catch?) The Jones Act waiver is cruelly limited to only 10 days. This means that emergency shipments from foreign countries will have precious little, if any, time to load up supplies and get to their destination. Trump obviously doesn't want his faux-concern for suffering Puerto Ricans to overcome his very real concern for American shipping magnates. This waiver is nothing but a one-way ticket to hell.

I hereby double down on my original title, Trump to Puerto Rico: Drop Dead!