The Battle For Paradise

by Naomi Klein

The island gets an astonishing 98 percent of its electricity from fossil fuels. But since it has no domestic supply of oil, gas, or coal, all of these fuels are imported by ship. They are then transported to a handful of hulking power plants by truck and pipeline. Next, the electricity those plants generate is transmitted across huge distances through above-ground wires and an underwater cable that connects the island of Vieques to the main island. The whole behemoth is monstrously expensive, resulting in electricity prices that are nearly twice the U.S. average.

This broad collapse, Massol-Deyá explained, was now helping him make the case for a sweeping and rapid shift to renewable energy. Because in a future that is sure to include more weather shocks, getting energy from sources that don’t require sprawling transportation networks is just common sense.

As in Adjuntas, residents here have seized on the post-Maria electricity failures to advance solar power, through a project called Coquí Solar.

Months into the rolling disaster set off by Maria, dozens of grassroots organizations are coming together to advance precisely this vision: a reimagined Puerto Rico run by its people in their interests.

and the 130-year-old colonial relationship with a U.S. government that has always discounted the lives of Puerto Rico’s Black and Brown people.

“Everything we consume comes from abroad and our profits are exported,” said Massol-González, his hair now white after decades of struggle. It’s a system that leaves debt and austerity behind, both of which made Puerto Rico exponentially more vulnerable to Maria’s blows.

This is just one part of a sweeping vision that sees Puerto Rico transforming itself into a “visitor economy,” one with a radically downsized state and many fewer Puerto Ricans living on the island. In their place would be tens of thousands of “high-net-worth individuals” from Europe, Asia, and the U.S. mainland, lured to permanently relocate by a cornucopia of tax breaks and the promise of living a five-star resort lifestyle inside fully privatized enclaves, year-round.

One dream is grounded in a desire for people to exercise collective sovereignty over their land, energy, food, and water; the other in a desire for a small elite to secede from the reach of government altogether, liberated to accumulate unlimited private profit.

You don’t have to relinquish your U.S. citizenship or even technically leave the United States to escape its tax laws, regulations, or the cold Wall Street winters. You just have to move your company’s address to Puerto Rico and enjoy a stunningly low 4 percent corporate tax rate—a fraction of what corporations pay even after Donald Trump’s recent tax cut. Any dividends paid by a Puerto Rico–based company to Puerto Rican residents are also tax-free, thanks to a law passed in 2012 called Act 20.

Thanks to a clause in the federal tax code, U.S. citizens who move to Puerto Rico can avoid paying federal income tax on any income earned in Puerto Rico. And thanks to another local law, Act 22, they can also cash in on a slew of tax breaks and total tax waivers that includes paying zero capital gains tax and zero tax on interest and dividends sourced to Puerto Rico. And much more—all part of a desperate bid to attract capital to an island that is functionally bankrupt.

Puerto Rican residents, it’s worth noting, are not only excluded from these programs, but they also pay very high local taxes.

Still, the idea of turning an island that cannot keep the lights on for its own people into “the epicenter of this multitrillion-dollar market” rooted in the most wasteful possible use of energy is a bizarre one and is raising mounting concerns of “crypto-colonialism.”

Now rather than simply shopping for mansions in resort communities, the Puertopians are looking to buy a piece of land large enough to start their very own city—complete with airport, yacht port, and passports, all run on virtual currencies.

Still, there is something about rapidly becoming rich from money that you literally created—or “mined”—yourself that lends an especially large dose of self-righteousness to the decision to give nothing back.

For those harboring these Randian secessionist fantasies, Puerto Rico is a much lighter lift. When it comes to taxing and regulating the wealthy, its current government has surrendered with unmatched enthusiasm. And there’s no need to go to the trouble of building your own islands on elaborate floating platforms—as one Puerto Crypto session put it, Puerto Rico is poised to be transformed into a “crypto-island.”

Gov. Rosselló himself seems to agree. In February 2018, he told a business audience in New York that Maria had created a “blank canvas” on which investors could paint their very own dream world.

Vieques—more than two-thirds of which used to be a U.S. Navy facility where Marines practiced ground warfare and completed their gun training—was a testing ground for everything from Agent Orange to depleted uranium to napalm.

The list could go on and on. The appeal of Puerto Rico for these experiments was a combination of the geographical control offered by an island and straight-up racism.

They are visible in the shells of factories that were abandoned when U.S. manufacturers got access to even cheaper wages and laxer regulations in Mexico and then China after the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed and the World Trade Organization was created.

The deepest scars may be even harder to see. Colonialism itself is a social experiment, a multilayered system of explicit and implicit controls designed to strip colonized peoples of their culture, confidence, and power.

He said that at such a high-stakes moment—when so many outsiders are descending wielding their own plans and their own big dreams—“we need to know where are we heading. We need to know where is our ultimate goal. We need to know what paradise looks like.” And not the kind of paradise that “performs” for currency traders with a surfing hobby, but that actually works for the majority of Puerto Ricans.

The problem, he went on, is that “people in Puerto Rico are very fearful of thinking about the Big Thing. We are not supposed to be dreaming; we are not supposed to be thinking about even governing ourselves. We don’t have that tradition of looking at the big picture.” This, he said, is colonialism’s most bitter legacy.

Ooof

Puerto Ricans now know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that there is no government that has their interests at heart, not in the governor’s mansion, not on the unelected fiscal control board (which many Puerto Ricans welcomed at first, convinced it would root out corruption), and certainly not in Washington, where the current president’s idea of aid and comfort was to hurl paper towels into a crowd.

Casa Pueblo is just one example among many. With next to no resources, communities have set up massive communal kitchens, raised large sums of money, coordinated and distributed supplies, cleared streets, and rebuilt schools.

They shouldn’t have had to do all this. Puerto Ricans pay taxes—the IRS collects some $3.5 billion from the island annually—to help fund FEMA and the military, which are supposed to protect U.S. citizens during states of emergency.

When students watch plants grow that they planted from seeds, it’s a reminder that despite all of the damage inflicted by the storm, “You are part of something that is always protecting you.” The apparent rupture between themselves and the land begins to heal.

Roughly 85 percent of the food Puerto Ricans actually eat is imported.

According to Puerto Rico’s Department of Agriculture, more than 80 percent of the island’s crops were completely wiped out in the storm, a $2 billion blow to the economy.

But after decades of U.S. government policy that equated campesino life with underdevelopment and set Puerto Rico up as a captive market for U.S. imports, all that remains, Avilés said, are “islands” of these agro-ecological farms scattered through the archipelago’s three inhabited islands.

Now Organización Boricuá is joining with many others who have been constructing their own “islands” of self-sufficiency—not just farms, but also solar-powered oases like Casa Pueblo, as well as mutual aid centers and groups of educators and economists with plans for how Puerto Ricans can confront international capital and remake their economy and public institutions.

by drawing on long-protected indigenous knowledge about what seeds and tree species can survive extreme events, as well as the kind of energy and sturdy social structures that can withstand these shocks—are creating a model not just for the island, but for the world. A way to “start really thinking about how you prepare for the fact that climate change is here.”

“We will sell PREPA’s assets to the companies that will transform the power generation system into a modern, efficient, and less costly system for our people,” Rosselló said. It turned out to be the first shot in a machine-gun loaded with such announcements.

This deliberate exploitation of states of emergency to push through a radical pro-corporate agenda is a phenomenon I have called the “shock doctrine.”

The board, which is essentially charged with overseeing the liquidation of Puerto Rico’s assets to maximize debt repayments and approving all major economic decisions, is known in Puerto Rico as “La Junta.” For many, the name is a commentary on the fact that the board represents a kind of financial coup d’état: Puerto Ricans—unable to vote for president or Congress but forced to live under U.S. laws—already lacked basic democratic rights.

A popular movement calling for an independent audit of the debt was quickly gaining ground, spurred by the conviction that if its causes were closely examined, as much as 60 percent of the more than $70 billion Puerto Rico supposedly owes would be found to have been accumulated in violation of the island’s constitution and is therefore illegal.

Not every battle was won, but it was clear that there would be no all-out shock doctrine–style makeover of Puerto Rico without a fight.

it will not be because Puerto Ricans suddenly overwhelmingly approve of these policies. It will be because the tremendous impact of the storm has disassembled life for millions of people, making the reconstitution of the pre-storm, anti-austerity coalition a herculean challenge.

desperation, distraction, despair, and disappearance.

that should not be confused with consent. The apparent passivity is at least partly the result of so much pain being directed inward.

The exodus also conveniently helps create the “blank canvas” that the governor has bragged about to would-be investors.

“What they want is our land, and they just don’t want our people in it.”

Each one of these decisions, even when they were ultimately reversed, set recovery efforts back further. Is this all a masterful conspiracy to make sure Puerto Ricans are too desperate, distracted, and despairing to resist Wall Street’s bitter economic medicine?

many governments have deployed a starve-then-sell strategy when it comes to public services: cut health care/transit/education to the bone until people are so disillusioned and desperate that they are willing to try anything, including selling off those services altogether.

As Casa Pueblo and Coquí Solar are attempting to show, this is far from the truth. There are other energy models—implemented successfully in countries like Denmark and Germany—that would greatly improve Puerto Rico’s broken and dirty state-run utility, while keeping power and wealth in the hands of Puerto Ricans.