[Cid_Yama]

Hurricane Maria is the deadliest storm of the 21st century
2nd deadliest hurricane to ever hit the US

According to a new study released by George Washington University (GW), 2,975 people died as a result of the hurricane. The government of Puerto Rico now accepts that number as an accurate death toll.

The newest count puts Hurricane Maria in second place as the deadliest hurricane to ever hit the United States, behind the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 which reportedly took 6,000 lives or more.

In early July, researchers at Harvard released a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine which estimated that in excess of 4,500 people died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria by surveying more than 3,000 houses.

link

Talk about a political cover-up. They effectively failed to respond to, dragged their feet, then covered up the second deadliest Hurricane to ever hit the United States. Why? Because they were predominantly Spanish speaking brown people, even though they were US citizens. The kind of officially sanctioned Racism that should only be found in history books.

Another moment of shame delivered upon the American people by this Administration.

Yes, it really happened, and yes, it becomes a permanent shameful chapter in the history of our nation.

[Cog]

How did I know this would be a hit piece on Trump? As if he went down there and personally kicked the weather machine into gear to kill those brown people. Dang nazis are everywhere. If only Hillary had won, all those brown people would be alive today to continue their care free island life.

[Cid_Yama]

No, if only Trump and the Banana Republicans weren't such Racists. They had just mobilized massive resources for Texas and Florida who were not hit nearly as bad, then refused to do the same for Puerto Rico, coming up with every excuse they could think of NOT to help them.

You are a loathsome creature. No remorse, no compassion. Who can't bring himself to even apologize, or admit he was wrong.

THOUSANDS died that wouldn't have, had only the Trump administration responded at the same level as Texas and Florida.

But No. This was a HISTORIC disaster, that was dismissed, then blamed on the victims, and then the victims were treated like freeloaders. All the while, the Trump administration dragged their feet, refusing to provide adequate or timely assistance, and ran a PR campaign to cover their inaction.

I know YOU could care less about the deaths of thousands of Spanish speaking brown people, even though they WERE Americans.

You are a FUCKING asshole. You deserve a special place in Hell.

[Cog]

If Trump weren't such a racist he could have created Puerto Rico a 1000 miles closer to the mainland or built a bridge to it. Hillary would have done that.

If Trump weren't a klan member he would have wished a modern electrical grid into place overnight to replace the barely functional one that they had. Trump would have waved that magic wand if only they were good white Republicans like me. But just like Bush before him, he killed thousands of black people in New Orleans by blowing up the levees. Darn racist republicans.

[Cid_Yama]

Let Cog's own words seal his fate.

[Cog]

Next time we have a hurricane we will let Cid and Ray Nagin run the relief efforts. The comedy alone would be worth the risk.

[onlooker]

I think probably the death count should be be quite larger. All the people who indirectly died from related effects to the Hurricane. Car accidents, heart attacks, disruption of life saving machines, overheated conditions due to AC not available etc. etc. No way they are now counting all those incidental deaths. Oh and Cid, don't bother with others. You either feel for those people or you don't. You do. Some apparently do not.

[Cog]

Yes it is sad the people in Puerto Rico are saddled with a corrupt and Democrat government. A government who cares not if they live or die. Time to end throwing money into this cesspool until new leaders can be elected.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/puerto-ric ... n-charges/

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- A mayor and two former government officials in Puerto Rico face public corruption charges in separate cases that involve a total of $8 million in federal and local funds, authorities said Thursday. The suspects are the mayor of the southwest town of Sabana Grande and the former directors of finance for the northern town of Toa Baja, which has struggled to pay its employees amid an 11-year recession.

U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodriguez told reporters that the former officials from Toa Baja are accused of using nearly $5 million worth of federal funds to pay the town's public employees and municipal contractors.

"Not only is that illegal, it's immoral," she said.

Officials said former finance director Victor Cruz Quintero deposited some $2.5 million worth of funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development into the town's general and payroll accounts in October 2014.

He also is accused of making similar deposits and transfers of more than $1.75 million in funds from HUD and the Department of Health and Human Services from September 2014 to February 2016.

Toa Baja's former interim finance director, Angel Roberto Santos Garcia, is accused of making similar transactions worth $650,000 using funds from those two federal agencies

[KaiserJeep]

Listen up, dumb shits.

Trump didn't kill anybody. The corrupt PR officials didn't kill anybody. A hurricane - a natural disaster - killed either 64 people or 2975 people, depending upon which figures you choose.

Possibly some could have been saved by a bigger, faster response. But the official death toll placed the scale of this disaster below that of the annual tornado casualties, the annual Chicago murders, and way below traffic fatalities.

In fact the official death toll is 64 for Maria. It hasn't yet been changed, and having anybody except the Feds change it isn't the way things are done. BTW, the official death toll of 64 places Maria below two other recent storms (Harvey killed 68 in 2017, Sandy killed 73 in 2012). There are all kinds of ways of counting casualties and attributing the various causes, the numbers generated by media organizations, online sources, and "studying destroyed houses" are suspect. I have a suspicion that most of the thousands of people no longer occupuying those damaged and destroyed homes didn't die, rather they were evacuated and today don't live on the island of PR any more. Maybe some were killed - maybe the number needs to change.

Of course, the fact that unstable PeakOil members simply could not wait to verbally abuse one another over useless numbers is indicative of the degree of dysfunction in politics today. I take no position on this one, other than to say, let us wait for the official casualty figure - and if it changes, so be it. We can talk about it afterwards, not before. Remember that 3.7 million people inhabit the island, and the discrepancy of 2900 or so is about 0.08%. It's not like we had good records to begin with, either.

[onlooker]

The point is that the level of response was clearly substandard especially as compared to the responses of Florida and Texas. Whether that is due to Republicans or Spanish people or whatever does not change this assessment

[KaiserJeep]

Who's assessment? If you think that the infrastructure of the island of PR is in any way comparable to Florida or Texas, think again. The place is predominently rural and undeveloped. The cities which the storm damaged are in business again. Not every pig farm, marijuana patch, or tequila distillery in the countryside is back in business. The priorities in rebuilding rural infrastructure are based on the number of people served by a particular power line, road, water works, or sewage treatment plant. Some people in the hinterlands will wait years to get back what they had.

[Cog]

And lest we forget everything had to be transported by air or sea. Any response you do is going to be a lot slower than just rolling semi trucks loaded with supplies and driving right to the job site with legions of electricians.

[GHung]

Who's assessment? If you think that the infrastructure of the island of PR is in any way comparable to Florida or Texas, think again. The place is predominently rural and undeveloped. The cities which the storm damaged are in business again. Not every pig farm, marijuana patch, or tequila distillery in the countryside is back in business. The priorities in rebuilding rural infrastructure are based on the number of people served by a particular power line, road, water works, or sewage treatment plant. Some people in the hinterlands will wait years to get back what they had.

Welcome to our future. The periphery becomes neglected/degraded as the the costs of supporting complexity become unsustainable.

[onlooker]

Yes to what Ghung said. And we are seeing that across the continental US. We have a thread going that is Rural America fades. Well. heartland USA is hurting even as on both coasts it is relatively better.
But, you also see this world wide as some countries are clearly in collapse mode already. An apt analogy is a Darwinian survival of the fittest dynamic is now in play

[ROCKMAN]

Cid – “THOUSANDS died that wouldn't have, had only the Trump administration responded at the same level as Texas and Florida.” Sorry to sound so harsh, Bro, but what f*cking universe do you live in? Show one link of any Texas resident saved by anyone from the federal govt. First, every death I’m aware of happened while Harvey was hitting us. No responders could have saved them because they weren’t allowed out during the storm. And as far as the rescue of the many thousands of folks afterwards none of that happened by the feds. Even Texas emergency personnel are responsible for a minority of those: local citizens with their own boats (including our friends form La. – the Cajun Navy) saved the vast majority. And then shelters that housed tens of thousands were primarily the city of Houston and the stricken counties. And the vast majority of folks working them were local volunteers.

The feds did eventually help out greatly. But that was with their checkbook…not boots on the ground. Don’t argue with me: living just east of Houston in Baytown I watched the show live nonstop the entire time: had no choice…there was nothing else on TV.

We all know there’s an almost endless list of President Trump’s f*ckups you can run through. You don’t need to invent one.

[Outcast_Searcher]

THOUSANDS died that wouldn't have, had only the Trump administration responded at the same level as Texas and Florida.

Not are you completely wrong on the facts, as per responses above, but you neglect reality.

In places like Tesas and Florida, they pay federal income taxes. Taxes that pay for things like helping clean up from such a mess.

In Puerto Rico, they voted NOT to become a US state, and thus got out of having to pay US federal income taxes.

Well, actions have consequences. Just like in Greece, for example. Something for nothing is a nice wishful thinking mode popular with liberals, but in the real world it doesn't work.

If the folks in Puerto Rico want stable efficient infrastructure and fast efficient cleanup after a storm, the first step would be paying to have the needed resources put in place.

[Cid_Yama]

Puerto Rico pays taxes. The US is obligated to help it just as much as Texas and Florida.
FEMA is required to treat the territory like any other state.

Puerto Rico is a US territory and not a state, so its residents don’t pay federal income tax unless they work for the US government. Even so, workers there pay the majority of federal taxes that Americans on the mainland pay — payroll taxes, social security taxes, business taxes, gift taxes, estate taxes and so on.

The recent economic crisis on the island has put a huge dent in the federal tax revenue collected from Puerto Rico, but it still added up to $3.6 billion in fiscal year 2016. That’s not much less than some states where residents do pay income tax: Vermont and Wyoming paid $4.5 billion in federal taxes that year.

Disaster relief isn’t based on a state’s financial health

There are no official estimates out yet on the cost of the hurricane damage to Puerto Rico, but just fixing the electrical system will cost billions of dollars, a Department of Energy responder told me. Then there's the cost of rebuilding hospitals, water pumping stations, and other critical infrastructure.

It's true that the government of Puerto Rico is bankrupt, and, as President Trump likes to point out, partially to blame for its own fiscal mess. And measured on a per capita basis, Puerto Ricans pay fewer taxes per capita than residents of any of the 50 states.

But that is irrelevant. The federal government doesn't operate business transactions with each state, giving the best services to the states that pay the most taxes. That's not how the government works.

The Stafford Act, which governs federal response to major disasters, says the government must provide help to Puerto Rico like it would to any other state. It doesn’t say that help should be based on the state’s financial health. If it did, that would mean the government should give less help to Illinois after a disaster because the state is nearly bankrupt.

Nor does it say disaster relief depends on how much it puts the budget “out of whack,” in Trump’s words. After all, the majority of states get more back from the federal government than they pay in taxes. One of them is Louisiana, where the federal government spent $9.9 billion rebuilding after Katrina. Nobody complained about the cost. In fact, President George W. Bush was criticized for not doing more for Katrina victims.

link

The median income in the U.S. in 2017 was about $31,000. According to the Pew Research Center, two thirds of people in the States who earn $30,000 or less per year pay no income tax. The average income in Puerto Rico in 2017 was roughly $19,000, which means that most Puerto Ricans would not have had to pay federal income taxes even if the federal law applied to the territory.

In addition, many tax filers in the U.S. receive additional credits — more than they paid in — including the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC) which aren’t offered in Puerto Rico as they are in the states.

Low income workers in Puerto Rico may be better off if they had to file a U.S. tax return. They may be missing out on refunds they would have qualified for, such as the EITC and CTC. Considering the societal benefits of the EITC and CTC, it is possible that Puerto Rico more broadly is missing out as well.

The fact that Puerto Ricans do not pay the same federal income taxes as their fellow U.S. citizens in the states is often used to justify unequal treatment of Puerto Rico under federal programs.

Puerto Rico is treated unequally in Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security Insurance (SSI) and Nutrition Assistance Programs

The implications of decades of unequal treatment were brought into the open after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. The weak Puerto Rico health care infrastructure reflected billions of dollars in Medicaid funding never received over the years. The mass migration to the states was inspired in part by more generous benefits that would be granted to recipients in the states. There have been numerous claims that Puerto Rico would be treated better post-Hurricane Maria if it were a state.

link


Yes, Puerto Rico pays federal taxes. Here’s how much

[Cog]

Cid' thread did not work out the way he hoped it would.

[KaiserJeep]

So why are we saying that PR is in any way getting less relief than "real" US states? At last count, there were still thousands of PR citizens living in mainland hotels, mostly in Florida. I said "thousands" but it's an estimate, because - as in the case of the fatality figures - we don't have detailed records. What happened on that front recently is that we exceeded the timeframe where FEMA rules allowed them to pay for 100% of the hotel bills, and the PR government would have been responsible for 10% of the bill, and they refused to pay their share. If PR doesn't pay, some of their citizens are likely to end up in those infamous FEMA trailers.

Certainly there were things destroyed by hurricane Sandy in places like the Jersey Shore that have never been rebuilt, and propably never will be. There are also ongoing efforts to replace the damaged housing, the long-running PBS series This Old House did a series of episodes on rebuilding Sandy-damaged homes in 2017, fully five years after the storm. Some neighborhoods were delayed in reconstruction because of damaged infrastructure - power and water and sewer services.

I'm simply not seeing a disparity in the Federal response, in spite of the MSM's efforts to create such an impression. I am seeing a definate lack of effective response from the PR government.

[Cid_Yama]

Cid' thread did not work out the way he hoped it would.

You mistake me for someone who cares what you or your brainwashed cohorts think. Had no delusions with regards to you idiots.

This was a historical level of devastation experienced by a significant US population that was dismissed by the Trump Administration based on racial predjudice, and these people suffered and died because of it.

Because this Hurricane was the 2nd most devastating to ever hit the US, with the second highest death toll, this will be a permanent embarrassing chapter in the history books for our nation.

Whether YOU want to accept it, matters absolutely not. You don't write the history, and there will be consequences for the Banana Republicans. (And unfortunately for the rest of the Republican party as well.) You have done nearly irreparable damage to the party that will be remembered for a long time. I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump Administration actually kills the party.

The stain of the Trump Administration is a permanent part of the historical record now.