Puerto Rico disaster and trade unions

This video from the USA says about itself:

Trump Campaign Donor Gets HUGE Puerto Rico Power Contract

24 October 2017

You scratch Trump’s back, he’ll scratch yours… as long as it’s with taxpayer money. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, hosts of The Young Turks, discuss.

“A tiny Montana utility company that received a $300 million contract to help restore power to Puerto Rico after its electrical grid was devastated by Hurricane Maria is financed by major Trump donors and run by a CEO friendly with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, a series of recent reports has revealed.

The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority’s granting of the huge contract to Whitefish Energy Holdings, a two-year-old company that reportedly had two full-time employees when the hurricane first hit, was first reported by the Weather Channel last week.

The Washington Post and the Daily Beast on Tuesday offered more details on the company’s backers. The Post noted that the firm is based in Zinke’s hometown and that its CEO, Andy Techmanski, is friendly with the Interior secretary, while the Daily Beast reported that Whitefish’s general partner maxed out donations to the Trump primary and general election campaigns, as well as a Trump super PAC, in 2016.

That newly surfaced information has raised eyebrows about just why Whitefish was awarded a contract to restore electricity to hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rico residents.”

Read more here.

By Mark Gruenberg in the USA:

US labour movement steps up for Puerto Rico

Wednesday 25th October 2017

US trade unionists decry the Trump administration’s failure to aid the island’s hurricane victims, writes MARK GRUENBERG

PUERTO RICO’s plight, a month after Hurricane Maria smashed the island commonwealth to smithereens, dominated a day at the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO) convention in St Louis.

It also gave the trade unionists there a good reason to trash the Trump administration’s response, or lack of it, to the disaster.

One after another, unionists stood up in the hall at America’s Centre on October 22, to describe what they found when their plane with more than 300 volunteers — union nurses and doctors, electrical workers, firefighters, teachers, operating engineers and others — landed in San Juan four weeks before.

And they contrasted it with Trump’s plaudits for himself and for his Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).

Fema has alternated between not providing basic supplies, such as food, medicine and water, and requiring residents whose homes were wrecked to go through pages of forms on the internet to apply for aid, on an island that still lacks electricity for the most part.

Fema is offering loans, not grants, to people on an island commonwealth whose official jobless rate, even before the hurricane hit, exceeded 12 per cent. And Puerto Rico has been in a recession since in 2006.

The union volunteers started their work in Puerto Rico “even before the government had responded,” said Jose Rodriguez-Baez, the commonwealth’s AFL-CIO president.

“They were taking care of the sick and bringing water and food to those who need it.

“But as you can see,” he warned, “it’s necessary to have a lot more help to stop a humanitarian crisis.”

The big problem, Rodriguez-Baez said, is lack of clean water, which could lead to “a real health crisis” afflicting people forced to drink contaminated water for lack of an alternative.

“There has been no reaction from Fema and the government to take care of those who really need it, especially in the mountains,” he explained.

Rodriguez-Baez was mild, compared to some of the others.

Bonnie Castillo, who headed National Nurses United’s 50-nurse Registered Nurses Relief Network volunteers to Puerto Rico, said her members “had to turn into first responders” rescuing people from the devastation they found.

“There was no water, no food, no roofs” on houses “and mould was beginning to set in. They found dehydrated babies lying in the arms of their mothers. And water is now like gold in Puerto Rico.”

Meanwhile, Trump gave himself and Fema an “A+” for their efforts in helping the 3.4 million US citizens in Puerto Rico. He also blamed the Puerto Ricans for throwing the federal budget out of whack.

And as one trade unionist who listened to the press conference featuring Trump and Puerto Rico’s governor told Press Associates, “Trump used the ‘I’ word 18 times.”

“Every one of our returning nurses is saying: ‘Where is our government’?” Castillo replied.

“You can’t be human and not be affected by devastation” of the people in the island’s mountainous interior, added Reggie Davis of the Utility Workers.

Though the unionists did not say so, Trump’s reaction to Puerto Rico shares one fact with his reaction to the neonazi white separatist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, and his stands during the 2016 campaign: The victims and/or targets are minorities.

In Puerto Rico, they’re Latino Americans. In the campaign, they were women, African-Americans, journalists, Asian-Americans and Jews.

“Some political leaders are seeking to take advantage” of Maria’s devastation, said Mine Workers president Cecil Roberts, presenting the AFL-CIO resolution demanding positive action from the Trump administration to aid Puerto Rico.

Instead, for the administration, it’s “an opportunity to carry out an anti-union agenda … The time for political posturing has long since passed,” he commented.

“Creating greater hardship should not be an objective in dealing with these conditions.”

The delegates approved a strong resolution demanding the federal government really step forward to aid Puerto Rico. It also said Wall Street should forgive Puerto Rico’s $72 billion debt.

“I’m proud the labour movement has stepped up, but it can’t do it alone,” Roberts concluded.