This video from the USA says about itself:
Trump Throws Paper Towels To Puerto Ricans
3 October 2017
What a fun photo op… Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down.
“President Trump lobbed paper towels into a crowd at a church in Puerto Rico Tuesday where he was meeting with Hurricane Maria survivors.
Photos and pool reports documented his visit at the Calvary Chapel in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, at an event for those impacted by the destructive hurricane last month. Trump was handing out supplies as part of a one-day visit to the island to survey hurricane damage.
The weird moment where he took a basketball stance and threw the rolls into the crowd had a lot of viewers at home scratching their heads.”
Read more here.
By Rafael Azul:
Trump’s photo-op in Puerto Rico
4 October 2017
Two weeks after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, leaving millions without electricity, water and other basic necessities, US President Donald Trump did a quick fly-in and fly-out Tuesday to pronounce what a wonderful job his administration has done to address the crisis.
Trump’s entourage included his wife Melania, some cabinet members, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Jenniffer González, chairwoman of the Puerto Rico Republican Party and the island’s nonvoting member of the US House of Representative.
The president’s handlers made sure that Trump—who clearly did not want to be there—appeared in public as little as possible to prevent any opportunity for public protest. After a little more than four hours, the president flew off, an hour ahead of schedule.
The people the president did speak to were preselected. He visited an upscale neighborhood in Guaynabo, west of the capital city of San Juan, which has been one of the fastest areas to have electricity, communication and other services restored. At a local church, he threw rolls of paper towels out to a crowd in the most demeaning fashion, later saying, “There’s a lot of love in this room, a lot of love. Great people.”
During his press conference, however, Trump could hardly contain his contempt for the population of the US territory. The recovery effort and the current situation on the island, he claimed, was “really nothing short of a miracle,” adding that it was nothing like the “real catastrophe” that occurred during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Following the press conference, Trump visited the Muñoz Rivera housing project in Guaynabo. One of the housing project residents, Raúl Cardona, told Trump “he should visit the central parts of the islands, where a lot of people have no food, no water, where a lot of people have died. What he saw in Guaynabo was nothing compared to the rest of the island”, Cardona told the El Nuevo Día newspaper about his words with Trump.
Only four percent of the island’s 3.4 million residents have power, more than half do not have clean water, and many residents are washing in rivers. With temperatures in the 90s, the lack of air conditioning and medical attention could lead to further fatalities, particularly among the elderly and infirm. Roads are blocked with debris and standing water is attracting mosquitos that can carry deadly diseases.
Thousands remain in shelters, gasoline is scarce, ATMs are out of money, and many of the supplies sent to the island have been left on docks because of the lack of diesel for trucks. Public schools, which suffered devastating destruction, may not open for six months or more, officials have said.
Trump repeated the official claim of 16 hurricane-related fatalities. After the president left, Governor Ricardo Rosselló raised the death toll to 34. The number of fatalities is expected to grow once rescuers reach more isolated rural and mountainous areas.
Earlier in the morning, the island’s Secretary of Public Health Héctor Pesquera announced there were more than 100 cadavers in hospitals around the island, which are currently being examined to determine if they died as a result of the hurricane, the most powerful storm to hit Puerto Rico in nearly a century.
Governor Rosselló—the MIT-trained politician who was a Clinton delegate during the Democratic Party convention last year—dutifully suppressed this information during Trump’s visit. The president later praised Rosselló for “not playing politics.”
Trump previously denounced Puerto Rican residents for the massive debt owed to the Wall Street banks, which is the result of the island’s colonial legacy, a decades-long economic recession and wholesale looting by financial speculators who control Puerto Rican debt. Rosselló and his predecessors have imposed savage austerity measures, and the island, which declared bankruptcy last May, is currently under the dictatorship of a financial oversight board imposed by the Obama administration.
During a press conference, Trump—who is proposing the largest tax cut for corporations and the rich in history—complained that the recovery effort was costing the US government too much money. “Now I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico. And that’s fine. We’ve saved a lot of lives.”
Rosselló, who has revised upward his government’s estimate of the cost of rebuilding the island’s infrastructure to $90 billion, is seeking a low-interest emergency line of credit as soon as possible, saying otherwise the government will run out of public funds by next week.
Trump has complained that Puerto Rican residents are not helping themselves enough and are essentially expecting government handouts. Last week he poured scorn via text message from his luxury golf course on local officials, including the mayor of San Juan, for complaining about the slowness of the administration’s response.
Shortly after Trump had left the island, US federal authorities denied Puerto Rico’s petition that recipients of food stamps (which are used by 46 percent of the population) be allowed to purchase meals in fast-food restaurants, given the scarcity of food in the island’s supermarkets.
PUERTO RICO MAYOR SLAMS TRUMP FOR ‘TERRIBLE AND ABOMINABLE’ STUNT For throwing paper towels into the crowd of people while visiting the hurricane-hit territory and not meeting with local leaders. In his visit Tuesday, Trump downplayed the damage in Puerto Rico, saying it’s not “a real catastrophe like Katrina.” The death toll has risen to 34 from Hurricane Maria.
THE DEVASTATION OF PUERTO RICO COULD WRECK THE PHARMACEUTICAL MARKET “Federal officials and major drugmakers are scrambling to prevent national shortages of critical drugs for treating cancer, diabetes and heart disease, as well as medical devices and supplies, that are manufactured at 80 plants in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.” [NYT]
INSIDE THE NEW YORK IVANKA AND DONALD TRUMP JR. STORY THAT HAS THE CITY ABUZZ “Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.’s office was busy probing a felony fraud case involving siblings Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. in 2012. But after Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Marc Kasowitz, intervened, the investigation was dropped within months, according to a report from ProPublica, The New Yorker and WNYC” [HuffPost]
Wall Street demands Puerto Rico pay up: here.
Reblogged this on sdbast.
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Remember that public cabinet meeting a couple months ago, where all
of Trump’s toadies fell all over themselves trying to be the most
subservient and flattering? Didn’t save any of them from being fired
shortly thereafter.
That’s what the scene in Puerto Rico reminded us of yesterday, with
local officials biting their tongues not to say anything critical,
except that in this case it was Trump heaping lavish praise on
himself.
Let the official royal proclamation go out . . . Trump is perfect,
infallible, the most incredible bestest ever, and all else is fake
news.
Oh, but wait! What about the video clips of the things he actually
said and did, are they not real news? Like joking that Puerto Rico
was lucky this was not a “real catastrophe?”
Trump actually said that, this was not like Hurricane Katrina, a REAL
catastrophe. What was this then . . . a fake catastrophe??
The brutally disconnected insensitivity of saying something like that
to people in such wretched condition defies any sense of human
compassion. The only thing Puerto Rico is lucky for is that Trump in
his incompetence had not yet completely wrecked FEMA and its
operational capacity to help in any way.
They just had the worst storm and floods in the last 90 years, you
know, Mr. Trump. Bad enough to wipe out their entire power grid and
most of their bridges and roads.
But hey, more real news, there was Trump, super he-man on the spot,
to throw out a couple rolls of paper towels to the baffled and
battered people. All better now. Maybe they can use those to soak up
all the flood waters. Otherwise, let them eat paper towels.
Speak out against this self-consumed “moron,” which we now learn is
what Secretary of State Tillerson himself thinks Trump is. To help,
we just got in a new shipment of Trump, YOU’re Fired caps. Get yours
here.
Trump, YOU’re Fired, caps: https://www.utalk.us/?g=2:Y
Plus we have.
Lock Him Up/Impeach Trump popcorn boxes: https://www.utalk.us/?g=5:PB
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Friday 6th October 2016
US President Donald Trump’s budget director has dismissed writing off the wrecked island’s $74 billion (£56bn) debt, after his boss mused on Wednesday that “we’re going to have to wipe [the debt] out.”
Mick Mulvaney said not to take Mr Trump’s comments “word for word.”
Puerto Rico was smashed to pieces by Hurricane Maria — and was unlikely to pay the debt in any case.
The Obama administration forced austerity measures on the US colony, where about half the population lives in poverty, after a previous default. Puerto Rico declared bankruptcy in May.
The island’s creditors and vulture funds have heavily lobbied US officials in Washington not to show the impoverished island any leniency.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-21da-US-not-writing-off-islands-$74bn-debt#.WddpHTtpEdU
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