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Last June 13, residents from Puerto Rico’s coastal town Salinas staged a righteously angry and spirited protest in the courtyard of the most luxurious apartment complex in San Juan’s main urban center. Its principal owner is Nicholas Prouty, a key figure in the damning roster of real estate and finance investors currently feeding off Puerto Rico’s energy and economic crisis, which they caused. This guy sharpened his teeth on the hedge fund market and today bites off foreclosed homes all over the United States and Puerto Rico, where he relocated for the 100% tax exemption on interest and dividend income offered to wealthy investors from outside (but not offered to locals).
These speculators aren’t just helping themselves. Their actions actually worsen the living conditions for masses of people. Hedge Clippers, a U.S.-based watchdog group, described recent legislation favoring the developers as “starving the island of tax revenue” of $2.22 billion during 2017-23 and of an estimated $4.4 billion by 2026. They concluded that this tax drain and the speculation in real estate is “fueling the housing crisis” and “harming the environment.”
Energy production is another target of capitalist plunder and destruction. The island consumes almost 70 times more energy than it produces, much of it serving big business and the well-off. Almost all of the energy is dirty: 58% petroleum, 28% natural gas, 12% coal and about 1% renewables. (U.S. Energy Information Administration, International Energy Statistics, Puerto Rico, 2021) By 2023, renewables (2/5 of which consist of solar panels) were up to only 3% of electricity-generated power – a drop in the bucket in an island blessed with a superabundance of sun, wind and water.
Businesses and politicians dangle promises of a future eco-heaven of clean, sustainable energy while also claiming fossil fuels are still “indispensable.” Yet, as energy moguls resist any threat to the old fuels, they also pull profits from the alternatives people seek. Their latest proposal calls for massive installations of solar panels – on some of the most fertile agricultural fields in the world! They would sacrifice one resource for another more profitable one, the people’s health be damned. Meanwhile, the solar panels go up spontaneously and chaotically, mindless of the social and environmental impact on communities, where not everybody can afford them.
ENERGY IS A CLASS QUESTION
In the long run, the energy question is tied to larger questions of the economy, social structure, environment, political control, etc. This is part of what Puerto Rican working class communities have been enduring under the heels of American and local capitalists, with 43% of the people living below the poverty line in 2021. The dire situation follows two disastrous decades of natural and unnatural calamities such as hurricanes and earthquakes; a manufactured financial and economic collapse; dismantling of social services; cutbacks in public housing, schools and hospitals and the crippling Covid epidemic.
70% of the infrastructure destroyed within the last decade is yet to be rebuilt. Rather than rebuild better, the system used these disasters to produce more profit and seize more power, resulting in massive displacement of people. Most working people who lost their homes have lost them forever. Costs have risen even more than in the United States, including that of housing, energy, and food (85% of which is now imported from the mainland to this agriculturally rich island!).
For working people, the painful reality of housing, services and energy is similar to that of American workers, but magnified. Puerto Rico’s per capita income is lower than Mississippi’s (the lowest among the United States), and it can’t bargain directly with other countries for sources of energy – or anything else – because of the island’s colonial subjugation to U.S. capital. While capitalists like Prouty and corrupt politicians profit from catastrophe, people pay with their physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
UNITING AGAINST THE COMMON ENEMY
The failure to repair and renovate the energy grid for everybody has had a critical impact on regular, working folk whose communities live with constant outages and blackouts that disrupt and endanger lives. People who depend on respiratory machines risk dying. With the new norm of repeated extreme heat waves, outages that stop fans and air conditioners threaten even more people’s lives. “Big energy” has its eye on its prize – profits – but people need a society in which humanity’s interest dictates what happens.
Some communities face all this while also dealing with the loss of ancestral lands now threatened by the drive for privatization of communal beaches, forests, and grounds by the likes of Nicholas Prouty and his political henchmen. This is the spark of the struggle for the people of Salinas, who for generations have depended on their beaches, coasts and rich waters. They inherited these lands and waters from the Indigenous people who cared for them for millennia and their heirs are fighting for preservation because they understand that privatization inevitably brings about degradation.
This cannot be solved under capitalist, profit-based rule. It is the same struggle being waged in the U.S. mainland against a common class enemy – but more intense – as capital’s offensive in the colony is even more brazen. In fact, Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens and have died in American wars since the U.S. seized the island in the Spanish-American War of 1898. At present, our struggles here and there remain disjointed for capital’s gain and our loss. Profit-hungry capitalists see no borders and freedom-loving workers shouldn’t either.
Published on August 28, 2024
This article originated in Rally!
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