Yves here. As this Real News Network interview underscores, Puerto Rico is well on its way to looking like a textbook case of Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism. Almost half the island’s population has no drinking water. Drugstores and grocers are closing due to a lack of diesel fuel. This is a public health crisis in the making.
From an article in the New York Post:
The island of 3.4 million people is without electricity, and water, and looters have taken over as police and the National Guard enforce a strict 6 pm to 6 am curfew — leaving Americans in chaos, abandoned by their government.
“It’s a war zone,” [former New Yorker Christina] Beckles said by email. “There is no power or water. We are under curfew from 6 pm to 6 am. Food is becoming scarce and people are getting desperate. Looting has already begun. The lines to get gas are seven to ten hours long — to receive $10 worth of gas.”
And the Administration hasn’t been giving Puerto Rico the same emergency relief that it did to Houston and Florida. From Amy Goodman at Democracy Now!:
One week after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, President Donald Trump says he’ll visit the island next Tuesday, under withering criticism. Maria was the most powerful hurricane to strike the U.S. territory in nearly a century, coming just after Hurricane Irma, and destroyed the island’s entire electrical grid, caused severe flooding, widespread damage to homes and infrastructure. Most of the three-and-a-half million U.S. citizens who live in Puerto Rico remain in the dark, without access to power, clean water, food and fuel. It took President Trump five full days to respond to the plight of Puerto Rico. He did not tweet about it over that period. Over the weekend, he tweeted 17 times about athletes protesting police violence and refusing to visit the White House. Facing criticism, Trump held a news conference Tuesday in which he congratulated himself on his response to Puerto Rico’s disaster, repeating nearly a dozen times that he was doing a “great,” “amazing,” “tremendous” and “incredible” job. He denied he had neglected Puerto Rico…
But many Puerto Ricans are criticizing the U.S. government and saying aid has not been arriving fast enough. Nongovernmental organizations are even reporting charter planes that brought donations for them to distribute never reached the groups, because the government decided to centralize all distributions….
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the Trump administration denied a request from several members of Congress to waive shipping restrictions to help get gasoline and other supplies to Puerto Rico as it recovers. The decision came even though the Department of Homeland Security waived what’s called the Jones Act twice in the last month, following hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which hit the mainland United States. Republican Senator John McCain called the decision “unacceptable” and called on the agency to reconsider.
Puerto Rico was already facing the end-game of Latvia and Ireland when they were put on the rack of austerity: large-scale emigration, particularly by the young and educated. Now that so much housing, infrastructure, and personal possessions have been destroyed, people who have any way to leave (as in enough relatives and contacts on the mainland) probably will. And what does that mean for those who remain? Greece has shown how far creditors are allowed to go in squeezing a population. It looks like we are going to see a rerun of that movie in our neighborhood despite the fact that Hurricane Maria’s destruction of wealth and businesses in a saner world would make relief the only priority and a debt reset the next step.
AARON MATÉ: It’s The Real News. I’m Aaron Maté. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico is facing a humanitarian disaster. 60% of residents are without water and all of them are without electricity. Even before this crisis, Puerto Rico was already in a state of emergency. A crippling debt crisis was already posing a major threat to the island’s future. Héctor Figueroa is president of the Service Employees International Union 32BJ and vice chair of the Working Families Party National Committee. Héctor, welcome.
HÉCTOR FIGUEROA: Thank you.
AARON MATÉ: What do you understand is the situation right now and the island’s biggest needs?
HÉCTOR FIGUEROA: The situation continues to be one of tremendous risk to the lives of the 3.5 million American citizens who live in Puerto Rico. There is at least 40% of the population have no running water. Over 80% of the population has no electricity. Those who have electricity, it’s not ongoing. It’s based on generators and other improvised means of providing electricity. The whole power grid has been destroyed. Food is beginning to be very scarce. In fact, towns in parts of the island in the mountain region have not been reached yet by the authorities, so the real damage of this hurricane has not been completely assessed.
AARON MATÉ: Let’s talk about what I alluded to: this crisis that Puerto Rico faces starting well before this hurricane hit, in terms of the crippling debt and how that’s affected the infrastructure. There have been ongoing protests for a long time against this Control Board that was appointed to run Puerto Rico’s affairs, to deal with its $70 billion debt. Can you explain where all this stands right now as Puerto Rico deals with this disaster?
HÉCTOR FIGUEROA: Well, you are right. Puerto Rico has been hit not just by two hurricanes but by three, not just Irma and Maria but way before, the real hurricane that hit Puerto Rico was an economic financial crisis that began many decades ago but became absolutely acute with the unfolding of the financial recession that we all experienced in 2008-2009, from which Puerto Rico has not recovered.
As a result of changes in Congress, the Puerto Ricans have no way of influencing. The U.S. changed the very way in which Puerto Rico was allowed to attract industrial investments, and the island began to suffer a drain of capital, a drain of jobs and the government went into borrowing and borrowing and borrowing more to sustain the services for the population. That has really come to a point in which the portion of the debt service is eating so much of the annual budget of the island that the island is fundamentally insolvent.
The Fiscal Oversight Board was created to try to figure out what fiscal adjustments Puerto Rico could do to pay the debt and move on with its economy, but the problem is austerity in the function of the IMF Bank doesn’t work in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is actually contracting. The population can easily move to the mainland, which has been happening in large numbers. What we see now is the decline of the economy, a decline of the population, and now with these hurricanes, it’s quite apparent that there is absolutely no way that Puerto Rico can service its debt and be able to be back on its feet.
Many of us are actually saying that the Fiscal Oversight Board should recognize this situation, should be honest with the bondholders, Wall Street hedge funds who have acquired the debt hoping that they will make enormous profits. They should cut their losses and we should figure out a way to restart the economy of Puerto Rico. We’re going to have a lost generation in Puerto Rico, but if we don’t start now, this is going to be even much worse. We have to find a means for the island to be able to invest in education, on its roads. The electrical grid again has been destroyed. Its schools have been devastated. That should be the priority now.
AARON MATÉ: Right. The fact that people were fleeing even before this crisis unleashed by Hurricane Maria because of the dire economy, now people without water, 60% without water, everybody without power and especially the power issue could last for months. What does that mean for the motives for people to have to leave the island? What else can they do but try to leave?
HÉCTOR FIGUEROA: Yeah. We’re already getting pictures as flights to Puerto Rico have begun to be resumed. We’re seeing pictures of people desperately in the airports without even a ticket, just waiting to see if there is a plane that can get in. The level of desperation is unbelievable. I want to make the point that it’s not just Puerto Rico, Saint Kitts, the Virgin Islands, the whole region was impacted by Hurricane Maria and Irma before that in such a devastating way that we now have disrupted the entire fabric of that part of the Caribbean that we are responsible for. Americans need to realize that these are part of the U.S. whether by choice or by the legacy of the Spanish-American War.
These are U.S. citizens and they need our support. They need to get the full benefit of the FEMA aid and all the other means that the federal government has to assist the people. We need to avoid this collapse in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. This is really dangerous. Things are so bad. I myself have been in touch with my sister. I don’t know if my 92-year-old father, who lives in a remote town near the mountains, which has been very difficult to establish communication with him, I don’t know about half of my family. Like me, 3.8 million Puerto Ricans who live in the States are anxious and hoping to find some way of helping our brothers and sisters.
AARON MATÉ: Let’s compare that to how President Trump has responded so far. He was silent on Puerto Rico for days, spending his time attacking NFL players protesting police brutality and racism. Finally, he weighed in on Twitter yesterday and this is what he said: He talked about much of the island was destroyed, and then he says, “With billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks,” which he said, “sadly must be dealt with.” His priority right now is that Puerto Rico, in the midst of this disaster, still apparently make its debt payments to the Wall Street banks that have preyed on it over these years because of this crisis. Your response to that, Héctor?
HÉCTOR FIGUEROA: My response is that if he begins to look at the pictures, listen to the reports on the ground, it would become immediately apparent that that is not a sustainable position. Of course the banks are holding on. The banks want to be paid. They even filed, on the day of the hurricane, many of the hedge funds, they filed to get priority in the bankruptcy proceedings but they just need to abandon that illusion. Puerto Rico has been fundamentally decimated from the point of view of an active economy.
What we need to make sure now is that its people are alive, that the economy can grow again, that agriculture can be reestablished, that food begins to go to Puerto Rico and may eventually be grown again on the island. The tourist industry will be incredibly difficult to attract tourists to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands in this period of time, but we should help that industry be reestablished.
Then we need to guard, defend Puerto Rico because what the last thing that we need is for people to lose their homes, to lose their land, to lose their buildings, their hotels, their small businesses, to the people that they owe to. We need relief from the debt that Puerto Ricans have, that now the assets that was backing that debt has been destroyed and relief for the government from the debt that it had to incur when the economic model was capriciously changed in Congress.
I think the president is wrong in thinking that Wall Street is going to be able to get back its money. That’s not going to happen. The way we need to deal with this is the way we dealt with AIG, the way we dealt with Lehman Brothers, the way we dealt with the big banks. Those banks were not forced to pay their debtors. We basically bailed them out. Puerto Rico needs the same thing. We need a Marshall Plan for Puerto Rico the same way we had a Marshall Plan for the European countries after World War Two. We didn’t ask them to pay the money they owed to Washington or London. We basically said, “That money will be forgiven and then Europeans, you can build your country. You can rebuild back again without that burden.” Puerto Rico needs nothing less than that.
AARON MATÉ: Héctor, I’m just thinking we should also perhaps bring the same level of criticism of economic management that we brought to Venezuela, where we read so much about how they’ve mishandled their economy through things like not having a faulty currency system. We should perhaps bring that to our own actions in Puerto Rico. Aside from all these things you’ve mentioned, isn’t it also just difficult to import basic goods into Puerto Rico right now?
HÉCTOR FIGUEROA: It’s very difficult. There is something called the Jones Act that fundamentally requires the shipping of goods to Puerto Rico to be done in ships that have the U.S. flag. If you’re trying to sail to Puerto Rico bananas made in the Dominican Republic, oil from Venezuela, cars from Germany, you have to first go to a port in the U.S., get the merchandise and then move it from that boat to a boat that then go to Puerto Rico because it’s in the U.S.’s own fleet, or you have to make that change at sea, which is even more expensive. You have an economy that is artificially inflating the cost to Puerto Rican consumers of goods. We have asked of the president to waive that Jones Act requirement. It was done, is our understanding. The Washington Post reported on it that it was waived for fuel imports in Texas and Florida. Why cannot we waive it for all the things that Puerto Ricans need right now?
AARON MATÉ: I just want to clarify that. Very close to Puerto Rico is the Dominican Republic, for example. If they wanted to send something to Puerto Rico, they’d first have to sail it to a U.S. port?
HÉCTOR FIGUEROA: Or to have a U.S. flagged ship at harbor in the Dominican Republic to bring the merchandise. We cannot have goods, commodities coming into Puerto Rico on a ship that has a foreign flag. That’s what the Jones Act requires. There may be some minor exceptions associated with situations, delegations. Things like that do happen, but the bulk of the commodities that go into Puerto Rico cannot be imported unless it’s a U.S. ship that has a U.S. flag. If it doesn’t, it’s confiscated or high penalties are applied if you try to do it otherwise.
AARON MATÉ: Héctor Figueroa, president of the Service Employees International Union 32BJ, vice chair of the Working Families Party National Committee. Thank you.
HÉCTOR FIGUEROA: Thank you so much for having us and caring about Puerto Rico. I hope your audience, the people who listen to your show will sympathize and give all you can to help the people of Puerto Rico at this time.
AARON MATÉ: Héctor, quickly, any suggestions for what people should give to any organizations that they can go to right now to help?
HÉCTOR FIGUEROA: Yes, certainly. Most Americans usually give to the Red Cross. The Red Cross has a very complex labyrinth of eventually people receiving the aid. I would strongly recommend that people search for organizations like the Center for Popular Democracy, which is working with groups in the ground who are helping people who have lost their homes, people who are trying to revitalize their communities. They already have the connections with grassroots organizations. The Hispanic Federation also based in New York has a very complex network, over 90 different groups in the U.S. If you give the funding, your contribution to the Hispanic Federation, that’s another way that you can make sure it eventually gets in the hands of Puerto Ricans. Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, if you Google it, it has over 40 different links to organizations that you can give money that goes directly to somebody who needs it.
AARON MATÉ: Héctor, thank you, and thank you for joining us on The Real News.
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Create a new electric company to build a new grid. Don’t give the contract to the “legacy” utility !
Debt stays with the old utility.
The grid was owned by the island. It’s budgt crises likly forced uner-investment maing he grid fragile. Now that it has colapsed, the plan may be to do exactly as you say, create a new grid owned by a corperation, hand them what remains of the infrastructure, and let PR to contiue to cary its debt from past operations. Hell, I am sure they will find a way to force PR to pay for the privet instillation.
It’s a privitzation scam.
I don’t think reports of looting are correct. Local contacts on the Island deny it. The police say roads are “dangerous” due to debris everywhere but neither the police or local papers report looting.
The national guard are protecting hospitals, gasoline stations and are prominent in San Juan.
The situation is dire but what is really needed is a floating hospital and believe it or not lots of mosquito netting and deet. Some sort of epidemic is possible in the current conditions.
While I agree aid would be great (especially to install a new type of power grid) I felt that we should have done more for New York, Detroit and other cities and states in trouble.
Send in the Clinton foundation… it worked a treat last time…
Thank you, Skippy.
That is fantastic idea, especially as Yves highlights the “public health crisis in the making”. Chelsea, armed with her public health doctorate from Oxford, is the BBC’s go to expert on such matters, much to the merriment, if not chagrin, of health care professionals (and Oxford alumni) like my dad.
Your dad is not the only old boy growing hair on their back teeth, not that I haven’t watched over some considerable time feeling the same.
Abject ethical vacuum filled with credentialed butter bars w/o any relevant applied life experience, nobs.
disheveled… I could make twice the packet in degree work, tho I can keep standards in my currant employment. I’ll take that hair cut gladly….
To answer the question posed by the title of this article:
“Because Puerto Rico and it’s lobbyists don’t donate billions of dollars to the campaign coffers of the political class.”
Look for P.R. to become the new Greece.
I was going to say almost the same thing. Puerto Rico has no representation in Washington, D.C. Wall Street has quite a lot. In fact, Wall Street’s representatives have been insisting that we squeeze Puerto Rico to repay its debts to Wall Street since long before this storm.
That’s one factor.
2. Puerto Rico does not vote in Presidential elections.
3. Power brokers don’t have second homes or golf clubs on Puerto Rico, so they are unfamiliar with it
4. Puerto Rico speaks Spanish, not English.
5. Puerto Rico was actually crushed by NAFTA unlike most other areas of the US – when the tax benefits of siting plants in Puerto Rico were removed by Congress and NAFTA opened up Mexico, many plants and jobs moved to Mexico in the 90s, gutting much of their economy.
The Hurricane Maria destruction is one of the most predicted weather disasters ever – Puerto Rico was in the forecast’s bullseye for a week before it hit. I am baffled why there wasn’t a serious US Navy and Marines contingent floating around south of Cuba waiting to steam into port a day or two after the storm passed through. This was different from Katrina where the failure of the flood control system in New Orleans was unexpected – it was pretty clear that a second Cat 4-5 hurricane was going to hit the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, either head on or on the edge.
The Hurricane Harvey prediction was quite good as well – its just that nobody believed it due to the odd loop pattern that resulted in the 40 inches of rain. Irma was fairly good with the primary question being when it turned north. Irma running 10-20 miles south and scraping Cuba reduced its strength a lot which helped save Florida.
Not to quibble but there are lots of golf courses on Puerto Rico. Ironically/perversely, one of them used Trump’s name under license, but went bankrupt two years ago.
…And Trump’s bankrupt golf course cost them $33m.
We have lots of golf courses near where I live. Wall Street moguls and Washington power brokers don’t play on them.
haha I take your point, I mainly just wanted to bring up the Trump-licensed course.
Goldman Sachs and Puerto Rico
Rent from road tolls
Goldman buying up land and foreclosed houses because of PR’s bankruptcy
It’s a simple playbook.
Buy distressed debt at a big discount
Get the Feds to either force the debtor to pay or bail them out
Profit.
Shock doctrine playbook: buy up PR assets for pennies on the $. Get nice fat bailout check from Uncle Sam. Population can move to mainland and provide steady stream of low,wage labor. Eventually invest in resort hotels / gated “communities” – built to withstand cat 5+ storms w hardened backup power etc.
Kinda weird that with Puerto Rico being virtually destroyed, that a siting President would be obsessing with the billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks which he said must be dealt with. Forgetting the desperate need for water, food and shelter by that unhappy island might I suggest a lesson from Economics 101? Simply put, for a debt to be paid back, an economy must be in place to generate the funds to do so but from what I can see from my perch, Puerto Rico doesn’t even have an economy at the moment.
The Wall Street vs Puerto Rico bailout contrast is a bit disingenuous. In a law signed by President Obama last June, Puerto Rico was given legal authority to negotiate a debt restructuring — a quasi-bankruptcy procedure to which none of the 50 states has access.
Héctor Figueroa (a native of Ponce) refers obliquely to Section 936 of the IRS code of 1976, which gave tax incentives to manufacturers in Puerto Rico. Big Pharma responded enthusiastically. Twenty years on, Bill Clinton signed a repeal of Section 936 which phased it out over ten years. The yanqui giveth, and the yanqui taketh away.
Likely emergency aid for Puerto Rico will be appropriated, similar to the $8 billion for Hurricane Harvey relief enacted last month. Signing checks is a lot easier than the head-busting labor of doing a total rethink of Puerto Rico’s future, an intellectual challenge which Kongress reflexively shuns (at least till lobbyists offer some easy, prepackaged solutions).
What no one will admit publicly is that stricken Puerto Rico is a harbinger for the mainland. Like Puerto Rico, US states cannot meet their pension promises. Currently they aren’t allowed to go bankrupt. But Promesa’s quasi-bankruptcy in fact is a template for the 50 states, which some of them are going to need in the 2020s.
What’s interesting is that PR has a net positive balance of trade. So it’s not like PR needs fiscal stimulus to offset negative trade flows with the continental US. Though if memory serves, I think fiscal transfers from the Fed Gov to PR took a hit at some point in relation to DoD spending there.
This points to it being a problem in collecting taxes. And if memory serves, the tax-free status of the Pharm industry was part of that tangled history. But it goes beyond that as well.
With respect to the quasi bankruptcy process, you are right that other states do not have access to it.
As I understand it, they do not need it. Unlike actual states Puerto Rico needs congressional approval for much of its behavior. Congress ultimately controls the purse strings and Congress has always been loath to give Puerto Rico the sovereignty it needs to handle its debt directly. If they did so then Puerto Rico would be less subject to this kind of predatory capitalism.
The states on the other hand are financially sovereign (to use a loose term) as such they don’t need access to special mechanisms they can restructure debt on their own.
Bankruptcy is a federal process, stipulated in Article I, Section 8 of the constitution.
Any attempt by a state to restructure its own debt would be challenged in federal court — successfully — as unconstitutional.
This is why the federal government will play a role when NJ, CT and IL smack the wall in years to come.
You are right, I stand corrected. I was muddling the distinction between cities and counties and states.
In Puerto Rico post-Maria, a new shortage: Cash
Maybe it’s time for a different type of experimenting in PR. Maybe it’s time for the Gov of PR to engage in MMT with their own currency. Just make sure they get the tax collection working at the same time. If they can get this “virtuous cycle” working, then who knows, maybe they could cut the cord with the US currency permanently.
Here’s another article which goes into more depth on how the Fed Reserve is at the ready, making sure the local banks (and therefore ATM machines) have plenty of cash. Yay, disaster averted, lol.
Cash demand soars in Puerto Rico after hurricane hit ATMs, card systems
Question is, will people need to go to the ATM machines for months, either drawing down savings or going more deeply into personal debt? If so, I think people are going to need a different source of cash.
With Katrina, the response was more tardy than anything else, but this one is different in that not only is the help late, but it’s vengeful and brooding over spilt financial milk that went sour long ago.
Joseph Tainter wrote a keeper of a book about the collapse of complex societies, and that’s us.
He had a list of 11 factors that figured into prior collapses, The lack of response to PR, being #4.
1) Depletion or cessation of a vital resource
2) The establishment of a new resource base
3) The occurrence of some insurmountable catatrosphe
4) Insufficient response to circumstance
5) Other complex societies
6) Intruders
7) Class conflict, societal contradictions, elite mismanagement or misbehavior
8) Social dysfunction
9) Mystical factors
10) Chance concatenation of events
11) Economic factors
Where is the investigative journalism comparing the mainly successful Cuban response and the abject failure US response to similar hurricane hits on their nations?
Will Trump ask Castro for some help? Tips? Cigars?
More frequent and more intense hurricanes, flooding, and drought are all predicted as some of the consequences of global warming. This ongoing hurricane season has been especially damaging — and might promise more disasters yet. A similarly destructive season next year … and the year after should convince even those most reluctant to believe — that our climate is changing. And it is changing in ways which could make large portions of our country uninhabitable.
Helping those affected by these many disasters must be our short term priority. The effectiveness of disaster relief by our government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) along with the informal disaster relief given by the families, friends, and caring associates of the victims serves as a first standard of measure for our government, NGOs, and our society. I believe we are failing this first measure — though I have no knowledge on which to make this judgment other than the haphazard repairs I observed in my own state after Sandy did some relatively mild damage. The stories from Katrina and the images from Houston and Florida offer little solace. In my opinion — our government’s response to the disasters in Puerto Rico appears nothing short of horrific. Hurricanes like Maria could strike almost anywhere along the East Coast or Gulf Coasts — yes some areas are at greater risk than others. But the patterns of travel and behaviors of hurricanes and tropical storms grow more random much as our local weather has. As in the old song — “there but for fortune” — the failures in helping Houston, Florida and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are failures which foretell what we all might expect from our government. The harsh treatment of Puerto Rico should offer dire warnings.
Over a somewhat longer term the problems of repair and rebuilding present other concerns. How much should areas particularly at risk — given current sea levels and degree of storms — be rebuilt? Perhaps now might be a good time to help re-settle the people of such high risk areas to safer areas on the mainland. Many will re-settle themselves drawing on their family, friends and caring associates — but why should such heavy burdens fall on individuals? — and what of those who have no one to call upon for help? A very large part of our populations will be forced to re-settle in the near future which makes how we handle this problem now especially important. And we should not forget the peoples on the many Pacific Islands our country annexed.
Excellent comment. There is a need, no an essential priority, for a return to the commons. There are so many primary human survival aspects in this day and age that cannot be privatized. However, money in politics has debased the core idea that we all have to live, or die, in the same ecosystem. It is amazing that John McCain, facing mortal death at this stage in his life, has voted and lobbied for what he has never supported in past. If the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had been more in tune with humanity as a whole at the time, corporations would have never been granted essentially human life status.
…if $$$$ = speech, speech isn’t free…(“citizens united”)
let alone fact republican supreme dictate involves not actual “1880’s” legislative language written in legislation, rather preamble to legislation they sited…
in other words, yet another lie…found on pages 200=210 (for only one example), “Age of Betrayal-Triumph of money in America, 1865-1900”, by Jack Beatty…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hscXDworvCE
Background posted on link: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/09/28/puerto-rico-merely-colonial-possession.html
Washington has never taken Puerto Rico seriously. Following Orwell, PR used to be an “aircraft carrier” and one of its islands a target/range for military ordinance. PR has seen governance, along the lines of Klein’s disaster capital, where islanders have been denied full and equal status as US citizens. The recent hurricanes have underlined PR’s status as a neocolonialist project, and provided the basis for a neoliberal asset grab. The history of PR has been one of imperial capture, with all the usual suspects (CIA) deeply implicated in the usual meso- and south american project of the US battle for democracy.
It is comforting to think Puerto Rico is a special case. But how special is it? “The recent hurricanes have underlined PR’s status as a neocolonialist project, and provided the basis for a neoliberal asset grab.” Remove “have underlined PR’s status as a neocolonialist project, and” from that sentence. Puerto Rico was much harder hit than Houston or Florida and so provides much greater opportunity for “a neoliberal asset grab” than they do, and Puerto Rico’s status a territory — not a state — makes the asset grab easier. Are you so sure the powers that be are any less inclined to make “a neoliberal asset grab” wherever they can in our states or cities? I think Detroit might suggest an answer to that.