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The Puerto Rico Government

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…is riddled with corruption and incompetence.

Yes, it is, and has been forever. We spent a lot of time there from ’98 to ’01. It was a mess long before the storms, which simply highlighted how bad it was. But that doesn’t fit the narrative of how it’s all that racist Trump’s fault that brown people are dying.

[Update a few minutes later]

People…OK, not people, partisan morons…were mocking Brock Long yesterday for his interview with Chris Wallace, when he said that this was “the most logistically challenging event the U.S. has ever seen.” Read the responses to this tweet, in which people talk about Apollo, the Berlin Airlift, the war in general…

My responses:

OK, so let’s go to the transcript. Yes, he did say that, but then (as I noted) he clarified, with Wallace’s help.

WALLACE: I want to pick up on something you just said because I have not heard this before. You say this is the most logistically challenging relief effort ever in the history of this country?

LONG: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think people have to take a step back and understand what’s happened over the course of basically the last 40 days. We — you know, FEMA has led the response of the federal government on behalf of governors from Texas to Florida to North Carolina to South Carolina to Georgia to the Virgin Islands, and the bottom line is, is that we’ve registered almost 3 million people for disaster assistance and most likely many of those were uninsured and we’ve been able to get, you know, well over a billion dollars in their hands to support.

It’s not only a logistically complex event, just getting to the islands and being able to support an island that was hit not just by one major hurricane but two within basically a 10-day period. The bottom line is, is you can only shove so much into an island pre-storm because if you pushing too much stuff, the storm may damage it. So, we had to pull back, not only equipment and staff, because we don’t want to soak up vital shelter space, we want to continue to push forward after the fact and move more equipment in.

The ports were damaged. The airports were damaged. This morning, you know, somebody was saying, we’re not seeing flights in San Juan. We are not using San Juan near to the degree we were. Our goal was to open up incident support bases and other airports and we have three of those operating so that commercial flights can come back up in San Juan. [Emphasis added]

Everything he said there was true. And, of course, part of the challenge was in dealing with the local government(s), whose responsibility it should have been to be prepared for this, but was (as was the case in Louisiana with Katrina, and wait for it) incompetent and corrupt. Am I blaming the victims? I guess, to the degree that in a democracy people get the government they deserve. And, as usual…well, OK, as usual when a Republican is in the White House…the federal government (whose responsibility this isn’t) is blamed for local incompetence and corruption. And of course, it didn’t help that the Puerto Ricans threw the Navy out of Roosevelt Roads a few years ago, which would have provided a solid logistics base even in the immediate aftermath of the storm(s).

But let’s unpack the moon landing and war comparisons.

Yes, sending men to the moon was a tremendous logistics challenge, but it was one that was planned years in advance, and on which we expended a significant percentage of a pre-entitlement federal budget for that specific purpose. The Pacific War, the invasion of Italy, the Normandy landing, all took months and years of planning as well. The closest analogy might be the Berlin Airlift, but even there we could see the Soviet blockade coming months in advance, and it was preceded by the little airlift in the spring of ’48. And even then, it took weeks to spool it up.

So, as usual (and as with the Bush administration), the most despicable thing these people do is to force me to defend Trump and his administration, but also as usual, the criticism of the federal government for things that are not its responsibility is ignorant at best, and unfair.

[Update a while later]

Puerto Rico enters the American victim derby.

[Late-morning update]

Glenn Reynolds: Puerto Rico has many problems, but Donald Trump isn’t one of them.

7 thoughts on “The Puerto Rico Government”

    1. Beautiful island (not so much now, but things will grow back), friendly people, beautiful women (not that I was allowed to do anything but look). Nice home base for exploring the rest of the Caribbean on cheap weekend American Eagle flights to other islands. Downside other than government; heat and humidity in the summer, hurricanes.

  2. This highlights the problems of perception that the media creates by what they do and don’t cover. If the media doesn’t cover a tree falling in the woods, did the tree really fall? Is Trump doing anything for PR if the media doesn’t cover it?

    This was used against Bush in Iraq/Afghanistan and also used for Obama in Iraq/Afghanistan. Bush was portrayed as abandoning Afghanistan because the media didn’t cover it and Obama was portrayed as a peacetime President with everything going awesome because the media didn’t cover Afghanistan.

    It also highlights the problems federal/state governments have in responding to incidents like this. They only have so many resources and can not possibly make everything normal overnight. On the mainland, there was a huge civilian effort to bridge the resource gap. That isn’t possible in PR.

    1. I know I’m weird, but I don’t look to media coverage as a barometer of whether something happened. 99.9999% of whatever happens never makes the news. And of the important stuff that happens, what doesn’t make the news is statistically indistinguishable from 100%.

      Yes, I’m cynical. You just noticed?

  3. There’s a lot of things I don’t get here. Like the comment that they couldn’t get drivers or people to distribute the aid. Why didn’t the Governor over there call the National Guard in a situation like this?

  4. Call? Let’s think this through. The governor likely has power, so he can call a base, assuming there is one, and perhaps it has power (it should). But this is the national guard, which means people don’t live on base. They live at home. A home without power. No phone, no cellular, so who picks up? And assuming word goes out by radio, how do you tell people, “the road is gone, how do I get in?” And then you get x% staff in, but how many of that staff is trained to operate heavy trucks? Where are these trucks? What roads will they use?

    Houston was in far better shape than Puerto Rico, and logistics still took a week to recover well enough to keep stores stocked. And Houston retained 95% power. But keeping I-10 open going West (it was closed going East) took the erection of a temporary dam and maintenance of it for two weeks.

    How long ago was Maria?

    1. It’s not like they didn’t have advanced warning the hurricane would hit. They could have simply put those people in the national guard on advanced notice. Seems more like a criminal lack of advance planning to me.

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