Financial Oversight and Colonialism in Puerto Rico

118 years after U.S. troops landed at Guánica, Puerto Rico, the liberal political site the New Republic asks, "Why Are We Colonizing Puerto Rico?" The occasion for this comically tardy acknowledgment of Puerto Rico's colonial status is a Republican proposal to deal with the island's $72 billion debt problem by allowing a cabal of unelected technocrats carry out austerity measures against the will of the Puerto Rican people. Or, as the bill puts it: "To establish an Oversight Board to assist the Government of Puerto Rico ... in managing its public finances."

The Republican plan most certainly would "spell disaster for vulnerable Puerto Rican citizens, and create a bonanza for private corporations looking to take over public functions," as David Dayen writes in the New Republic piece. But Dayen is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

As I reported recently, vulnerable Puerto Ricans are already facing disaster in the form of cuts to social programs and oppressive increases in taxes. Private corporations have already taken over public functions, including the island's largest airport and its largest highway. Former Governor Luis Fortuño created the Public Private Partnership Authority to allow the firesale of public assets to corporate vultures nearly seven years ago.

Alternative plans have been advanced in the Senate and the Obama administration. Both of these would allow restructuring of Puerto Rico's debt, which the House Republican plan would not. While the Republican legislative proposal for Puerto Rico is vastly inferior to either of the other options, neither the Democratic Senate plan nor the White House plan would be fair to Puerto Rico's residents.

The Senate plan would grant priority for pensions over bondholders. This would directly challenge the outrageous clause in Puerto Rico's colonial Constitution which mandates that if revenues are ever insufficient to cover appropriations, the interest on public debt must be paid before anything else.

The plan introduced by New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez would also grant Puerto Rico tax credits and address lower distributions to Puerto Ricans of Medicare and Medicaid funds they contribute to through payroll taxes. The White House also submitted a proposal for restructuring all of Puerto Rico's debt that would grant similar protections as Chapter 9 without formal bankruptcy proceedings.

The catch is that both the Senate and White House plans, like the House Republican one, would include a financial board to oversee (read: dictate) economic policy. Despite proclamations that the board would function in merely an advisory role, there is no doubt that in practice they would serve the same purpose as all unaccountable technocrats: implementing structural adjustment and slashing social spending, policies that populations would never submit to willingly through their own freely elected representatives.

Dayen laments that an oversight board "effectively moves the capital of Puerto Rico from San Juan to Washington. The discussion draft proposes a war on self-government."

It's unclear whether Dayen is entirely ignorant of Puerto Rico's history, or whether he is cynically implying that U.S. control over Puerto Rico for more than a century has actually been based on a disinterested desire to help people while denying them the democratic rights it grants to citizens in the incorporated states.

Regardless of which U.S. government "solution" to Puerto Rico's financial crisis is carried out, Puerto Ricans will not be losing any sovereignty over affairs they previously controlled on their own. Since the invasion of 1898, the United States has claimed sovereignty over the island. The people of Puerto Rico are unable to make foreign policy, enter into trade agreements, control their borders, issue tariffs, or provide universal public health care.

Though Puerto Rico's political structure was modified in 1952 with the passage of a new Constitution which created a nominal Commonwealth, the island's political status remained equivalent to what it had been for the previous half century: a colony of the United States without self-determination.

Puerto Ricans cannot vote for President of the United States, nor elect their own representatives to Congress. (They do elect a Resident Commissioner, but the position is non-voting.) They are unable to change their political status. That right is reserved for the U.S. Congress. It is a political arrangement without even the pretension of consent of the governed.  

The U.S. courts already play the same role that an oversight board would play in dictate political and economic policy. Their decisions for the island are based on a legal system developed and maintained without any input from the Puerto Rican people themselves or regard for their interests. Puerto Rico's political system and its laws must fit within the framework of the U.S. Constitution, which they have no ability to amend.

Recently the Puerto Rican government implemented a "Walmart tax" on big-box retailers. The special tax would apply to businesses with revenue of more than $2.75 billion. Hugely profitable foreign companies, who send most of their earnings to investors on the mainland, would thereby face a greater responsibility for contributing to the territory's coffers. This would in turn alleviate the financial burden on working people and local businesses in Puerto Rico. 

But a judge in the United States District Court in Puerto Rico struck down the tax last week as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The clause prohibits states from giving advantages to their own businesses at the expense of those located in other states. Puerto Rico, which is not even a state, must give corporations like Walmart the same unfettered access to its domestic markets as companies owned and operated by locals. 

As I have written before, this directly subverts Puerto Rico's self-sufficiency. Several years ago, a federal judge sided with milk processors and blocked Puerto Rico from enforcing regulations that allowed locally produced milk to be directed to a state-run company to produce dairy products like yogurt, cheese, and UHT milk, and determined how to divide up the proceeds of milk sales between producers and distributors. The decision struck a blow against the viability of Puerto Rico's dairy industry, one of the only successful industries producing foodstuffs locally for the population.

While restructuring Puerto Rico's debt is imperative and would help temporarily alleviate the humanitarian and economic crisis that has been well underway for a decade, it would be a band-aid that would not even address the fundamental issue at its root. Proposals to deal with Puerto Rico's debt problem without ending colonialism are distractions from the U.S. government's ongoing exploitation and subjugation of the Puerto Rican people. 

Media Manufacture Narrative of U.S. Benevolence Towards Cuba

Last month Cuban baseball stars and brothers Lourdes and Yulieski Gourriel left the national team in the Dominican Republic in order to pursue careers in Major League Baseball. It was reported widely from the official Communist Party newspaper Granma to regional and national news outlets. The coverage certainly represents a change from some years ago, when the issue would have been considered taboo, but was unremarkable considering the progression of Cuban society and media since then. But for New York Times editorial writer Ernesto Londoño the incident represented a dramatic emergence of free expression in Cuba, which, he argues, has been brought about only by the Obama administration's change in policy toward the island.

The move by the Gourriel brothers was not a surprise inside or outside of Cuba. Rumors that Yulieski's days were numbered with the national team were reported as early as June 2015 on Cuban blogs and shared on social media by Cubans.

While the Cuban government allows its players to compete in foreign sports leagues, the U.S. government does not permit Cubans to obtain visas due to the embargo. Consequently, Cubans seeking to play in MLB must establish residency in a third country and declare they do not intend to return to Cuba.

The decision to play in MLB is literally a decision to abandon one's country. Granma's story noted that the Gourriel brothers abandoned their hotel "in frank attitude of handing themselves over to the merchants of hired, professional baseball." Londoño, however, makes the official line sound significantly more hostile in his translation, saying the brothers were criticized for "surrendering to mercenaries" of for-profit professional baseball.  

Londoño's political bias is most salient when he calls Cuba "the most repressive country in the hemisphere." Similar right-wing propaganda has been used for decades against the progressive government for challenging U.S. political and economic control by "the threat of a good example."

Since the late 1950s, the U.S. government has sponsored client states throughout the hemisphere ruled by military dictatorships who eliminated political opposition, clergy, students and peasants with death squads whose bloody campaigns reached genocidal levels in countries like Guatemala and El Salvador.

In Londoño's native Colombia, the government and its affiliated paramilitaries kill hundreds of labor and human rights activists annually and dispossess tens of thousands more. In the last two weeks alone, Telesur reports four activists have been killed. With nearly six million internally displaced persons, Colombia is second in the world behind only Syria.

In Cuba, on the other hand, political disappearances and killings are unheard of since the Revolution assumed power in 1959. Nor is there even one single refugee from violence.

In his opinion piece "Pushing the Boundaries of Free Speech in Cuba," Londoño cites Cuban journalists lamenting the state of their country's baseball league in the wake of the Gourriel brothers incident, and questioning whether Cuban youths are apolitical, as evidence of a trend driven by U.S. policy:

"American critics of the Obama administration's rapprochement with Cuba have called the shift in policy a failure by focusing on how rigid the socialist government has remained. They're missing something important: The new relationship has done much to diminish the culture of fear and obedience the state has long used to control its citizens. For years, those who criticized the government paid a high price and were branded as traitors, but today Cubans from a broader cross-section of society are speaking out with less fear."  

This statement contains several spurious claims. First, that the Cuban government has remained "rigid." Under President Raúl Castro, the Communist Party Congress decided to reform its economic model. Since millions of Cuban participated in nationwide debates in 2007, the government has deliberately implemented consensus reforms that emerged from this process. In 2012, Castro expressed a desire to adapt to present challenges "without haste."

Second, the claim Cuba has a "culture of fear and obedience" is clearly ideologically driven. Londoño doesn't provide any examples to substantiate this allegation. It is taken for granted this is how Communist governments behave. Violence has never been a tool of population control by the Cuban Revolution. And it is not clear who allegedly paid a "high price." It would be impossible to name even a single person who paid the ultimate price of his life.

Lastly, after failing to establish that the political culture he describes ever actually existed, Londoño argues that culture has now changed - thanks to the U.S. policy shift under the Obama administration.

This is a non sequitur. Yes, the U.S. and Cuban governments started the normalization process in December 2014. And subjects that were once taboo are now discussed more openly in 2016. But that does not mean the former has any connection to the latter, much less that there is a causal relationship.

Cubans unsurprisingly reject a narrative that puts the United States at the center of the changes in their politico-economic system. Juan Manuel Alvarez, a computer sciences engineer in Havana, disputed the idea that Granma's publication of the Gourriel brothers departure had anything to do with encouraging Cubans to test the limits of free expression.

"For a long time in the country, internal problems have been discussed with much more freedom, and that is not at all related to December 17, 2014 (the bilateral announcement of normalization between the two countries)," Alvarez said in an email. "The whole dynamic that Londoño refers to, in which the blogs and regional journalism web sites like the Vanguardia are included, has been driven by the Communist Party itself and its main leaders, because before there definitely existed a strong control over all that."

According to the imperialist narrative, the Cuban government is not capable of representing the political aspirations of its people. So any positive development - real or perceived - is attributed instead to the American government, who do represent the political aspirations of Cubans.

But the assumption of American benevolence towards Cuba is belied by the historical record, which shows American officials wanted to create "disenchantment and disaffection" among the "majority of Cubans" who supported the Revolution.

"Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba," wrote Lester Mallory in a secret memo, "to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government."

The embargo and isolation of Cuba are complementary tactics in an economic war waged on the country for more than half a century. The United States government and media must acknowledge that U.S. policy towards Cuba has never had noble intentions; on the contrary, it was illegal and immoral.

And it cannot be retroactively justified by any alleged benefits. Change, to the extent that Cubans want it, should and will be brought about Cubans themselves, without any involvement of the United States.

The most benevolent thing the U.S. government can do for Cuba is to cease hostilities against the country. The normalization process is only a partial, first step in that direction. It must also be followed by the complete termination of the embargo; the end of the occupation of Cuban territory and return of the Guantanamo Naval Base to Cuba; termination of financial support for domestic political opposition; and payment of reparations for the hundreds of billions in damages caused by the embargo and decades of terrorism.

A recent editorial in Granma laid out the principles by which mutual engagement between the two governments should take place:

"Cuba affirms its will to advance relations with the United States, on the basis of the observance of the principles and intentions of the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, signed by the officials of the State and Government of the region, which include the absolute respect for its independence and sovereignty, the inalienable right of all states to choose their political, economic, social and cultural system without interference of any kind; equality and reciprocity."  

Cuba has shown they are willing to move beyond decades of the U.S. government's interference, subversion, terrorism and aggression against them. So far, the Obama administration has shown no willingness to oblige. Media narratives that take for granted an American role in Cuba's evolution encourage the U.S. government to continue its meddling.

The notion that the U.S. government's new relationship will bring about positive societal changes in Cuba should be disposed of, along with the imperialist mindset that assumes such an outcome is even possible. U.S. policy should be judged by the extent which the U.S. government stops trying to influence politics in Cuba and lets the island develop independent of any outside pressure.

Hillary Clinton, The Council on Foreign Relations and The Establishment

When asked by Wolf Blitzer in January if she was "the establishment," Hillary Clinton replied: "I just don't understand what that means. He's been in Congress, he's been elected to office a lot longer than I have." Several weeks later, her Democratic primary opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders made the case in a debate that the issue was who enjoyed the support of more powerful elected officials, arguing that "more governors, mayors, members of the House" back Clinton.

Clinton framed the notion of "the establishment" as consisting solely of political bodies of elected officials. Sanders simply argued that a better indicator of belonging to the establishment is one's power and influence within political circles.

As part of the "two for the price of one" that Bill Clinton promised during his rise to the Presidency, Hillary is forced to hide from her role in the creation of the neoliberal New Democrats, the dominant faction of the party. During their joint reign in the White House, the Clintons steered the party far to the right with their draconian criminal justice measures, assault on welfare, liberalization of trade, and deregulation of banking. Their cronies continue to staff the highest ranks of the party and the Obama administration.

Clinton, in a desperate piece of deflection, resorted to playing the gender card: "Senator Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the establishment." This fatuous identity politics is meant to distract from her decades-long tenure at the top of the political system and collusion with those who exercise control over it. Of course, as Bernie points out, Hillary most represents and enjoys the support of the Democratic faction of the political establishment.

But framing the issue as simply a matter of party politics and the electoral system misses the point. Elected officials are merely the public face of the ruling establishment. The broader establishment is composed of the elite class that determines economic policy.

There is no building that says "Establishment" on the door, but there is a century-old institution made up of wealthy and influential representatives of business, Wall Street, corporate law, academia and government. It is a creation of the elite ruling class to ensure their control over shaping policy for their own benefit. Their decisions result in funneling money - and, hence, power - into the hands of a small percentage of capitalists who exercise control over the political process in a positive feedback loop.

In their book Imperial Brain Trust, Laurence Shoup and William Minter write that: "The Council on Foreign Relations is a key part of a network of people and institutions usually referred to by friendly observers as 'the establishment.' " [1]

The Council was founded after World War I in response to growing domestic social tensions and labor unrest. Socialism was gaining in popularity among the American public in an economic environment marred by exploitative working conditions and skyrocketing inequality.

The Council's mission was to carry out long-term planning for a national agenda. The agenda was meant to undermine a domestic-oriented program that would involve collective decision making to achieve self-sufficiency, and thereby reduce the country's dependence on foreign resources, trade, and other governments.

Some of the many multinationals that subscribed to the CFR's Corporation Service included General Motors, Exxon, Ford, Mobil, United States Steel, Texaco, First National City Bank and IBM. [2]

"The Council, dominated by corporate leaders, saw expansion of American trade, investment, and population as the solution to domestic problems. It thought in terms of preservation of the status quo at home, and this involved overseas expansion," Shoup and Minter write. [3]

This imperialist agenda was achieved through manufacturing the consent of the masses (what they called "public enlightenment"), as well as developing foreign policies and ensuring government officials supported and executed these policies.

The Council has been remarkably successful in its mission. It has achieved a monopoly over foreign policy planning, and become thoroughly integrated with the government that carries out policy prescriptions. Entire administrations have drawn their foreign policy officials from the ranks of the Council. There is a steady two-way flow of personnel between the Council and government.

Both Bill and Chelsea are current members of the CFR. While Hillary herself is not a member, she is no doubt influenced by her immediate family's ties to the Council. Additionally, she collaborated closely with the Council while she served as Secretary of State, as she made clear in a 2009 speech at the Council's office in Washington:

"I am delighted to be here in these new headquarters. I have been often to, I guess, the mothership in New York City. But it's good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won't have as hard a go to be told what we should be doing, and how we should think about the future."

One of many people whose career was launched by his association with the Council was Henry Kissinger. In the late 1950s, he was appointed the director of a study group on nuclear weapons, in collaboration with several of the Council's directors. The result was a book authored by Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.

Kissinger went on to serve as possibly the most influential foreign policy official in American history under Richard Nixon (and later Gerald Ford), as both Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. He helped carry out war crimes when he transmitted President Nixon's order "anything that flies on anything that moves" to General Alexander Haig, directing a massive, secret bombing campaign of Cambodia hidden from Congress and the American public.

Kissinger's tenure also saw him intimately involved with the military coup led by General Pinochet to overthrow and kill democratically-elected President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973; the invasion by Indonesia of East Timor in 1975 and the subsequent genocide against the native East Timorese; the South African invasion of Angola in 1975 and attempted installation of a puppet ruler amenable to the apartheid regime; and the Dirty War in Argentina in which leftist opposition members were killed an disappeared.

Rather than being subjected to prosecution, or even suffering a loss of prestige, Kissinger has seen his reputation rise in the decades following his genocidal actions.

Clinton wrote that "Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state."  She noted that they share "a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order."

Clinton's abstract and idealistic rhetoric exemplifies the bipartisan, imperialist agenda formulated and propagated by the Council on Foreign Relations. The humanitarianism is a guise for the ruthless pursuit of United States political and economic hegemony across the world. The people who belong to this elite club have internalized the imperialist worldview that the U.S. is an "indispensable nation" that upholds "a just and liberal" world order, and use this belief to rationalize their Machiavellian exertions of power abroad.

The American establishment that matters most is not limited to any one party, gender, or government organization. It is limited to people who are involved, directly or peripherally, in formulating and carrying out the plans of a tiny elite class - plans that ignore the 99 percent of the Americans in whose names they act, and the billions of people whose lives their decisions impact. There is no one whose social relationships and professional career typifies this more than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

References

[1] Shoup, Laurence H. and William Minter. Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & United States Foreign Policy. Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice Press, 1977/2004. (pg. 9)

[2] Ibid. (pg. 50)

[3] Ibid. (pg. 23)

Puerto Ricans Suffer as Creditors Feast on Debt Colony

The La Perla neighborhood of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Just an hour before my wife an I landed in her native Puerto Rico last month, the island's government had defaulted on $1 billion in bond interest payments. It was the second default in five months for the cash-strapped government whose debt now totals $72 billion. None of this was evident as we waded through the crowds in Rafael Hernández airport in Aguadilla, which had been converted into a civilian airport after the closure of Ramey Air Force Base 40 years earlier. People hugged their relatives, welcoming them back home or bidding them farewell. It was a normal scene you'd see at any airport in the world. But the situation in Puerto Rico is not normal, and you don't have to spend long there to see how regular people are suffering more every day under the crushing burden of debt.

You notice every time you make a purchase at the store or get the check at a restaurant. The sales tax in Puerto Rico now stands at 11.5 percent, after being raised 64 percent in July from 7 percent. The measure was approved by the island's governor, Alejandro García Padilla, in conjunction with a package of austerity measures to raise money to pay the interest on the island's debt to creditors.  

This might not sound like an astronomical amount, but the impact is felt more in Puerto Rico than it would be in any of the states. Sales taxes are regressive. People with lower incomes spend more of their earnings on things that are taxed than those who can afford to store their income as savings. This means the lower your income, the harder you will be hit by the sales tax. 

Puerto Rico's median average income of less than $20,000 is 50 percent less than the poorest American state. For families already struggling to pay the bills on such meager earnings, the additional sales tax burden is eating away their little disposable income, or worse, forcing them to borrow to pay for their basic necessities.  

Outside a beachfront restaurant in Aguada, I noticed an SUV with a bumper sticker that summed up the feelings of many Puerto Ricans. "The debt is not ours, it belongs to the Empire," it read. Many people may believe this represents Puerto Ricans failing to take responsibility for running up a tab they now can't pay. But this would falsely assume that Puerto Rico exercises independent control over the conditions that created the debt. In reality, Puerto Rico is a colony whose political and economic structures are determined by the dictates of the empire they belong to. 

Constrained by the neoliberal capitalist system of the United States, Puerto Rico is unable to chart its own course for independent economic development. The Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution makes it impossible for Puerto Rico to protect its own industries. They must allow American businesses equal access to Puerto Rico's markets. The Cabotage Laws make shipping to and from Puerto Rico prohibitively expensive, impeding demand for exports and driving up prices on imports. 

The detrimental effects of U.S.-imposed restrictions on Puerto Rico's economy have forced them to incur debt to pay for social spending. Unlike every other industrial country in the world, the United States does not provide universal health care to its citizens. The federal programs that are supposed to guarantee insurance for the poor and the elderly do not apply equally to Puerto Rico. 

Puerto Rico only receives half the rate of federal healthcare funding as the 50 states, even though its residents pay the same rates in payroll taxes. This strain was further exacerbated last month when the U.S. government cut payments to Puerto Rico's Medicare Advantage program by 11 percent. My in-laws told us how their prescription deductibles and their co-pays under their Medicare Advantage plans had increased. The Puerto Rican Healthcare Crisis Coalition (PRHCC) called the decision by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services a “blow to the health of the entire Puerto Rican community.” 

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which is supposed to guarantee health insurance to the rest of the population, does not apply equally to Puerto Rico either. While Puerto Rico passed its own laws requiring features of Obamacare - such as prohibiting denial of insurance based on pre-existing conditions and caps on coverage - there is no individual mandate. The result is a “death spiral" for private insurance plans. Elderly and sick people purchase coverage, while younger and healthier customers, who don't need the same level of costly care, opt not to participate. This drives up premiums drastically, making plans prohibitively expensive for those who need them most. 

With federal government spending and local tax revenue insufficient to meet the population's health care needs, the Puerto Rican government must assume more debt to cover the difference. 

Privatization of Public Assets

Like countries across the global South who have found themselves indebted to U.S.-run institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Puerto Rico has been encouraged to privatize its public assets and use the money to pay its creditors. 

Under former Governor Luis Fortuño in 2009, Act 29 was passed to allow government to enter into public-private partnerships for infrastructure and other projects. It created the Public Private Partnership Authority (PPPA) to “identify, evaluate, and select the projects that shall be established as Public Private Partnerships.”

The first target for private takeover of Puerto Rico's public infrastructure was the island's most traveled highway, PR-22. Autopistas Metropolitanas de Puerto Rico, LLC (Metropistas), was awarded a 40-year lease for $1.49 billion to operate both the PR-22 and PR-5 highways. The company is a consortium of a Goldman Sachs infrastructure investment fund and a Spanish toll concession company.

PR-22 runs from San Juan west through 12 municipalities towards Aguadilla. Metropistas recently raised the toll prices after the expiration of an initial period where they were prohibited from doing so. But apparently tolls are not the only way they are generating revenue.

A friend explained how the electronic toll collection system, AutoExpreso, had been malfunctioning and issuing fines for not having enough money in your account to pay the toll, even when the account did actually have money. He said that he received four separate fines, none of which was valid. When he tried to contest the fines he was told that based on a technicality (not submitting an appeal in writing by an arbitrary deadline) the fines would stand, even though they should have never been issued in the first place. When he complained, he was told he had a choice to pay or to find another route. Of course, the only alternative for commuters in that heavily populated area of the island is to use inaccessible and inconvenient back roads.

Puerto Rico's main airport, Luis Muñoz Marin in San Juan, was also recently privatized. The Mexican company Grupo Aeroportuario del Sureste SAB de CV and private-equity firm Highstar Capital received a 40-year lease to operate the airport. The deal was negotiated under the previous administration, but did not take effect until García Padilla took office. Unsurprisingly, the first time I visited after the privatization I discovered the airport no longer offered free Wifi.

That Puerto Rico's public assets have been turned into investment opportunities for American and foreign creditors should come as no surprise. Since its inception as a Commonwealth (a euphemism for colony), the interests of capital have taken priority over the general population. Puerto Rico's Constitution grants creditors first priority for payment, ahead of even the population whose will the Constitution is supposed to represent.

Daliah Lugo explains this mystifying legal arrangement in her Opinion and Order blog: "That's right: the entity we know as 'Puerto Rico' was in fact set up by Congress and its allies as a corporation, its first duty always to its investors."

A political arrangement that does not prioritize the people who purportedly consent to it is farcical. Puerto Rico has never achieved self-determination, despite the fact the UN removed the island from its list of Non-Self-Governing territories in 1952. The UN's Special Committe on Decolonization has recognized this as recently as 2014 when they called on the United States to end their "subjugation" of Puerto Rico and allow its people to "fully exercise their inalienable right to self-determination."

But the United States does not want to acknowledge that, having failed to grant sovereignty to Puerto Rico, they legally hold "the obligation to promote to the utmost ... the well-being of the inhabitants of these territories," according to Article 73 of the UN Charter. Only the U.S. Congress - not Puerto Rico's legislature - has the ability to change Puerto Rico's political status. But they have never given any indication they intend to do so, despite a 2012 referendum in which Puerto Ricans decisively rejected the current colonial status. 

Few Americans are aware of the social and economic crisis consuming Puerto Rico, which is rarely covered by mainstream news organizations (other than some notable exceptions). But as expenses rise - for housing, health care, groceries, utilities - and economic opportunities disappear, families find themselves in a more and more precarious situation. A change in political status that would finally grant the Puerto Rican people a right to govern themselves in their own interest is the only hope to reverse the devastation 117 years as a debt colony has wrought. 

Media More Outraged by Possible Murder by Putin Than Definite Murder by Obama

The British government, whose foreign policy is overtly hostile to their Russian counterpart, declared last week that their investigation into the killing of a former Russian intelligence agent in London nearly a decade ago concluded there is a "strong probability" the Russian FSB security agency was responsible for poisoning Alexander Litivenko with plutonium. They further declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin "probably approved" of the act. The British investigation, which was likely politically motivated, seemingly raised more questions than it answered. But American corporate media were quick to use the accusations against Putin to demonize him, casting him as a pariah brazenly flaunting his disregard for international conventions.

The Washington Post (1/23/16) editorial board wrote that "Robert Owen, a retired British judge, has carefully and comprehensively documented what can only be called an assassination... Mr. Owen found (Andrei) Lugovoi was acting 'under the direction' of the FSB in an operation to kill Mr. Litivenko - one that was 'probably approved' by the director of the FSB and by Mr. Putin."

Actually, Owen did not find that former KGB operative Lugovoi was acting under the direction of the FSB to kill Litivenko. He found there was a "strong probability" this was the case. This means that even in Owens's view, there is not near certainty, which would meet the legal standard of reasonable doubt that would preclude a guilty judgement. There is even more doubt that even if it were the case the FSB ordered the murder, they did so on Putin's orders.

The New York Times editorial board (1/21/16) finds the investigation's results "shocking." For the Times, this confirms a pattern of Putin's rogue behavior. They claim Putin's "deserved reputation as an autocrat willing to flirt with lawlessness in his global ventures has taken on a startling new aspect."

Both of the prestigious and influential American newspapers argue that the British findings impugn Putin's respectability in international affairs. The Times says:

Mr. Putin has built a sordid record on justice and human rights, which naturally reinforces suspicion that he could easily have been involved in the murder. At the very least, the London inquiry, however much it is denied at the Kremlin, should serve as a caution to the Russian leader to repair his reputation for notorious intrigues abroad.

The more hawkish Post says: "This raises a serious question for President Obama and other world leaders whose governments do not traffic in contract murder. Should they continue to meet with Mr. Putin as if he is just another head of state?"

Putin's alleged "sordid record on justice and human rights," which is taken for granted without providing any examples, is seen as bolstering the case for his guilt in the case of the poisoning death of Litivenko. This, in turn, adds to his "notorious" reputation as a violator of human rights.

The Post draws a line between the lawless Putin and the respectable Western heads of state, such as Obama. Though they frame their call to treat Putin as an outcast as a question, it is clearly intended as a rhetorical question.

It is curious that The Post draws a contrast between Putin and Obama, whose government is supposedly above such criminality. The newspaper does not mention the U.S. government's drone assassination program, which as of last year had killed nearly 2,500 people in at least three countries outside of declared military battlefields. Estimates have shown that at least 90 percent of those killed were not intended targets. None of those killed have been charged with any crimes. And at least two - Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdul Rahman - were Americans.

Obama himself is personally responsible for those killed by missiles launched from unmanned aircraft over the skies of sovereign countries. Several news reports have indicated that Obama is presented in meetings each week by military and national security officials with a list of potential targets for assassination. Obama must personally approve each target, at which point they are added to the state-sanctioned "kill list."

The British government has also assumed for itself the power to assassinate its own citizens outside a declared battlefield. Last fall, Prime Minister David Cameron ordered the deaths of two British citizens in Syria, who were subsequently disposed of in a lethal drone strike.

The Washington Post editorial board (3/24/12) claimed that Obama was justified in carrying out lethal drone strokes that kill American citizens "to protect the country against attack." Their lone criticism was that "an extra level of review of some sort is warranted."

After it was revealed that an American hostage was inadvertently killed in a drone strike in Pakistan, The Post (5/1/15) said that the issue of whether the American government continues to conduct drone strikes should not be up for debate. "(T)here is little question that drones are the least costly means of eliminating militants whose first aim is to kill Americans," they wrote.

While they tacitly accept the legal rationale for Obama's assassination program, the New York Times editorial board at least demonstrated some skepticism. In "A Thin Rationale for Drone Killings" (6/23/14), they called the memo "a slapdash pastiche of legal theories - some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law - that was clearly tailored to the desired result." They say that "the rationale provides little confidence that the lethal action was taken with real care."

Yet they do not chastise Obama for his "intrigues abroad" nor do they condemn this as an example of his "sordid record on justice and human rights," language they used for Putin. The idea that relying on what are transparently inadequate legal justifications for killing an American citizen without due process would merit prosecution is clearly beyond the limits of discussion for the Times.

Recently Faheem Qureshi, a victim of the first drone strike ordered by Obama in 2009 (three days after his induction as President), who lost multiple family members and his own eye, told The Guardian that Obama's actions in his native lands are "an act of tyranny. If there is a list of tyrants in the world, to me, Obama will be put on that list by his drone program."

Surely both The New York Times and Washington Post disagree with Qureshi, because they believe the U.S. government is inherently benevolent and its motives are beyond reproach. But based on their editorials about the British investigation of the Litivenko poisoning, if Putin was responsible and was described by Qureshi in the same way, they would wholeheartedly agree.

The U.S. government and its allies in NATO, like Great Britain, have a clear agenda in vilifying Russia and its President. The US-NATO alliance supported the government that came to power in Ukraine in 2014 through a coup. After provinces in Eastern Ukraine - the vast majority of whose population is ethnically Russian and Russian-speaking - refused to recognize the NATO-backed coup government in Kiev, the Russian government supported them.

It should be easy to see how, from Russia's perspective, the Ukranian conflict can be understood as an extension of NATO encroachment towards Russia's borders that has continued unabated since James Baker told Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 NATO would move "not an inch east."

"We're in a new Cold War," Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies and politics, told Salon. "The epicenter is not in Berlin this time but in Ukraine, on Russia's borders, within its own civilization: That's dangerous. Over the 40-year history of the old Cold War, rules of behavior and recognition of red lines, in addition to the red hotline, were worked out. Now there are no rules."

Additionally, Russia's support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since 2011 throughout that country's civil war, and more recently its direct military intervention in the conflict that has turned the tide against US-backed rebels, has strongly rankled Washington.

The language used by top government officials to describe Russia has been astoundingly combative. Defense Secretary Ash Carter, the man in charge of the entire US military, claimed Russia is responsible for aggression and is "endangering world order."

The U.S. government's hyping of the Russian "threat" has been used to justify massive spending on the U.S. space program and other military expenditures, such as $1 trillion to upgrade nuclear weapons.

One could even argue that the narrative of an aggressive and belligerent Russia is the principal justification for the continued existence of the NATO itself, two and a half decades after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The alliance allows the US military to be stationed in hundreds of bases throughout Europe under the guise of a purely defensive organization.

The U.S.'s most prominent media organizations should demonstrate the strongest skepticism towards the policies and actions of their own government. At the very least, they should hold their own country's leaders to the same standards as they do others. But time and again, the media choose to act as a mouthpiece to echo and amplify Washington's propaganda. They do the government's bidding, creating an enemy and rallying the public towards a confrontation they would otherwise have no interest in, while allowing the government to avoid accountability for its own misdeeds.

The New York Times's Double Standard on Iran's Nuclear Program

As the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verified over the weekend that Iran has completed the measures necessary to comply with the nuclear deal reached last July with the P5+1  governments,  the New York Times Editorial Board proclaimed "the world is now safer for this." They lauded the deal as a "testament to patient diplomacy" and President Barack Obama's "visionary determination to pursue a negotiated solution to the nuclear threat."

The Editorial Board takes for granted that Iran presents a threat. Iran has always maintained it has never intended to build nuclear weapons, and that it's nuclear program was strictly meant to use nuclear technology as a source of energy production. In fact, in 1957 the United States government itself provided Iran with its first nuclear reactor while the country was ruled by U.S. ally - and murderous dictator - Shah Reza Pahlavi. Iran would later sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1968 and ratify it two years later.

Several years ago Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that "(w)e believe that nuclear weapons (in the world) must be obliterated, and we do not intend to make nuclear weapons." Previously he had said making nuclear weapons was a "sin."

But regardless of their professed intentions, the New York Times is skeptical the Iranian government can be trusted. They claim that there still exist "daunting challenges ahead" as the other parties to the agreement need to ensure "the deal is strictly adhered to." The New York Times's skepticism is unsurprising. While the Times certainly will not repeat George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" language, they internalize the same ideological framework.

Is the Times's skepticism warranted by the Iranian government's record? That would be hard to argue, as the revolutionary regime in power since 1979 has never invaded another country. Unstated and assumed to be self-evident is the idea that Iran is dangerous and unable to be trusted because it is not aligned with Washington. Rather, it exercises its own independent foreign policy outside of American control.

If there were not a double standard in play, the Times would treat the United States government with the same skepticism as Iran. After all, the United States, which possesses at least 7,200 nuclear warheads, is the only country in history to have used nuclear weapons - twice, against a country seeking for months to negotiate a conditional surrender.

Unlike Iran, the United States is not complying with the NPT. As a state already in possession of nuclear weapons, the United States has a responsibility under its treaty obligations to pursue disarmament. The Times itself detailed the U.S. government's own modernization of its nuclear weapons in a front-page article on January 11.

The article by William J. Broad and David E. Sanger notes that Obama promised to work towards nuclear disarmament early in his presidency, saying he would "reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy."

However, the $1 trillion plan that later emerged called for the modernization of current nuclear weapons by redesigning and improving them. The Times quotes a critical report developed by two former national security officials as saying Obama's plan could be seen "as violating the administration's pledge not to develop or deploy" new nuclear weapons. Neither the report nor the Times questions whether this is also a violation of the government's obligations under the NPT.

The Times shows a graphic depiction of the enhancements, including a steerable fins, a navigation system and safety features. "The result is a bomb that can make more accurate nuclear strikes and a warhead whose destructive power can be adjusted to minimize collateral damage and radioactive fallout," the caption reads. This may make them "more tempting to use," according to critics.

The title of the article, "As U.S. Modernizes Nuclear Weapons, 'Smaller' Leaves Some Uneasy," is evidence that the debate around the Obama administration's plan is seen as a matter of strategy and cost efficiency, rather than as a violation of international law and a threat to peace. The people left "uneasy" are all close to the national security establishment. Their concerns don't have to do with the program's contravention of the U.S. government's responsibilities under the NPT. The debate is merely one of philosophical differences between policy makers.

Despite Iran's compliance with the nuclear agreement (their continued compliance with the NPT is not even mentioned), the Times Editorial Board states that this doesn't mean they "should not be subject to criticism or new sanctions for violation of other United Nations resolutions or American laws." Indeed, they had previously called the Obama administration's plans to impose new sanctions for Iran's ballistic missile tests "wise."

Aside from the dubious position that the U.S. government should unilaterally impose sanctions related to UN resolutions, they claim that Iran should be subject to the extraterritorial application of American laws. Under international law, no state is bound to respect the domestic laws of another state. The U.S. Supreme Court declared "the laws of no nation can justly extend beyond its own territories except so far as regards its own citizens. They can have no force to control the sovereignty or rights of any other nation within its own jurisdiction."

The Times does not call for any legal or economic repercussions against the United States. The U.S. government's $1 trillion program to upgrade its nuclear weapons is not in any way presented as a grave threat that affects the rest of the world. They don't demand controls by outside powers the U.S. must strictly adhere to, as they do for Iran. Their framing of the story and absence of any editorial condemnation makes it clear the paper views the actions of the U.S. government as unquestionably beyond reproach.

The paper's calls for the strict enforcement of the nuclear deal and application of new sanctions on the Iranian government are not grounded in any moral or legal principles. They are a reflection of the Times's acceptance of the U.S. government's patronizing doctrine that threats to peace only emanate from countries outside of American control, who must be dealt with using coercion and punishment that the U.S. itself is always exempt from.

Interview with Gorilla Radio

I spoke with Chris Cook of Pacific Free Press and Gorilla Radio about my articles on Jimmy Carter's legacy (Part 1 and Part 2). The podcast is available at the Gorilla Radio Web site:

http://www.gorilla-radio.com/index.php?id=848