Postcards from an island of ruin: Puerto Rico after Hurrican

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Re: Postcards from an island of ruin: Puerto Rico after Hurr

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Jan 19, 2019 6:55 pm

Puerto Rico May Be Trump’s Ultimate Stain

The president tried to withhold relief from the U.S. territory — can you guess why?

Jamil Smith January 18, 2019 4:06PM ET
Update: The special counsel’s office has released a statement in response to Buzzfeed’s report: “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” wrote special counsel spokesperson Peter Carr. Original text below.

In the din of horrible presidential deeds and possible smoking guns revealed just in the last week, you may have missed a Washington Post story about the resignation of Pam Patenaude.

Until last month, Patenaude was Ben Carson’s deputy at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. She resigned for what she called personal reasons, but the report cites her disagreements with the administration’s revanchist approach to Obama-era housing segregation rules. It also notes her concern about President Trump’s desire to defund the Hurricane Maria recovery effort in Puerto Rico. To be sure, the president did not merely want to cut back or to slow the flow of federal disaster funding in the U.S. territory — he wanted to cut it off altogether.

Trump reportedly told John Kelly and Mick Mulvaney that he did not want “a single dollar” going to Puerto Rico “because he thought the island was misusing the money and taking advantage of the government,” the Post report claims. He reportedly wanted the Congressional appropriations redirected at his whim to fund recoveries in Texas and Florida, which would be just as illegal as diverting them to build a border wall. Apparently, Trump “was not consolable about this.”

This is a week in which we have learned that the insidious practice of family separation was more widespread than we were led to believe. We also saw this president toy around with the safety of Speaker Nancy Pelosi by revealing her plans to visit a Middle Eastern war zone, blowing up her itinerary in a retributive act. Then we learned that Trump may have committed an unequivocally impeachable act, as BuzzFeed reported that he allegedly told his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a proposed business deal with Russia.

This isn’t a competition, but the Puerto Rico travesty belongs at the forefront of our attention and at the very top of Trump’s political epitaph.

An estimated 2,975 people died in the aftermath of the storm, and Trump would have the island rot. It is clear, from the negligence that the government has shown Puerto Rico since Maria hit, that this president is not interested in helping an island full of brown people. To Trump, Puerto Rico is a low-income housing tenant that he was forced to take on and that he now wishes that he could evict.

In a way, Trump has found a scheme to deny Puerto Rico the money. The HUD funding that Patenaude fought for is sitting somewhere idle in the government coffers right now thanks to Trump’s border wall crusade, which has shut down the government for a record amount of time.

What may be the oddest thing in the report is Patenaude’s pledge to support the same president who worked against her goals and now is blocking her accomplishment. “I’m going to continue to be supportive of the president and his agenda,” she said in an interview. “I’m going to be working very hard for his reelection.”

If that was the only friend Puerto Rico had at HUD, I tremble to think what is next.

This story has been updated to reflect the Special Counsel’s statement regarding the original BuzzFeed News report.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... ds-781386/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: Postcards from an island of ruin: Puerto Rico after Hurr

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 01, 2019 8:23 am

Senate Barreling Towards Showdown On Disaster Relief For Puerto Rico

Carlos Giusti/AP
WASHINGTON (AP) — A fight between President Donald Trump and Democrats over hurricane relief for Puerto Rico is imperiling a widely backed disaster aid bill that is a top priority for some of Trump’s Southern GOP allies.

The amount of money in dispute is relatively small, but Trump feels antipathy toward the U.S. territory’s government and Senate Republicans are taking a hard line — for now — in denying Democratic demands for more aid for Puerto Rico, which was devastated by back-to-back hurricanes in 2017.

Democrats are threatening to block the GOP bill in a showdown Senate vote on Monday afternoon. What would happen next is unclear, but top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York appears confident that a successful filibuster won’t kill the bill outright, but instead drive Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell toward compromise.

The $13.5 billion Senate measure mostly mirrors a $14.2 billion measure passed by the House in January, combining aid to Southern farmers, California communities devastated by last summer’s wildfire, and rebuilding help for hurricane-hit states such as Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.

Democrats want to add almost $700 million more to unlock further disaster aid for Puerto Rico and several states and to help them rebuild badly damaged water systems. Democrats are also seeking language to force the administration to release billions of dollars in rebuilding funds that have already been approved.

McConnell, R-Ky., however, has maneuvered to shut off any opportunity for Democrats to amend the bill.

“I think that’s a mistake. I think we have a good package that the House would accept. If we could bring it onto the floor and have a vote on it I think it would pass,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Democrats’ point man on the legislation. “These are Americans who are suffering. I think we ought to be able to come together on it. So I think it’s unfortunate to have just a take-it-or-leave-it bill.”

The parliamentary setup, however, is complicated and gives Democrats some advantages. And the political momentum for the measure — strongly backed by Trump’s allies in Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina, among other states — has only been heightened by the outbreak of massive flooding in Midwestern states such as Iowa and Nebraska.

Trump has yet to veto a spending bill despite some tough talk and he has signed off on $600 million to ease food stamp cuts in Puerto Rico. But he poor-mouthed the island’s government at a meeting with Senate Republicans last week and suggested Puerto Rico has gotten too much disaster help compared with states such as Texas.

“I have taken better care of Puerto Rico than any man ever. We have $91 billion going to Puerto Rico. We have $29 billion to Texas and $12 billion to Florida for the hurricane,” Trump said Thursday. “They have to spend the money wisely. They don’t know how to spend the money and they’re not spending it wisely.”

Trump’s $91 billion estimate, said a White House spokesman, includes about $50 billion in expected future disaster disbursements, along with $41 million that’s already been approved.

Caught in the middle are pragmatic Republicans such as Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby of Alabama, who is looking for a deal. Democrats controlling the House have made it clear that the measure won’t clear Congress for Trump’s signature without additional money for Puerto Rico and badly needed Medicaid funding for the Northern Mariana Islands.

“Let’s hope that between now and next week we can keep talking and reach something,” Shelby told reporters. “This is a three-legged stool. The House, the Senate and the president are involved in this.”

“There’s always more you can do, but we need to get this done,” said Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla. “I think Schumer is just playing politics.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/sena ... uerto-rico


KATRINA REDUX
Trump ‘Very Bitter and Sensitive’ About Puerto Rico, and Dems Say His Team Is Stonewalling Their Investigation
As the island faces a new round of crises, the president has tripled down on blaming others—and Democratic lawmakers investigating the hurricane response say they’re being blocked.
Sam Brodey,
Asawin Suebsaeng
04.01.19 5:11 AM ET

Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast/Getty
It was arguably the biggest scandal and outrage of Donald Trump’s young, already scandal-ridden presidency.

There was a large American body count piling up, along with mounting reports and questions about the administration’s mismanagement of the relief efforts, with few answers forthcoming. With the bodies barely cold, the president instead launched sustained, petty public-relations warfare against politicians who he felt had crossed him and, at times, appeared to go to war with the victims of the storms.

It was “Trump’s Katrina,” and then some.

Now, a year and a half after hurricanes Irma and María ravaged Puerto Rico, the island is grappling with a whole new round of crises, Trump has been telling his GOP allies that Puerto Rico is receiving too much assistance from the federal government, and lawmakers leading an investigation into what happened after the storms are being stalled.

Some Democratic lawmakers are all but accusing the Trump administration of stonewalling them in their inquiries.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), who chairs the House Oversight Committee’s subcommittee on government operations, told The Daily Beast he still hasn’t seen key documents from the administration detailing its response to the hurricanes. He said the committee should be prepared to use its subpoena power to obtain those documents—and, if necessary, to hold officials in contempt of Congress if they don’t comply.

“This is not an academic exercise,” said Connolly. “People lost their lives.”

At a lunch Tuesday with Republican senators, Trump once again revived his complaints about the disaster aid spent on the U.S. territory, according to The Washington Post. The president reportedly complained that too much money had been given to the island, compared to what South Carolina and Texas had gotten, following their respective hurricane damage.

The remarks came as Democratic lawmakers are accusing Trump and his administration of dragging their feet on recovery funding, and as the Post reported that the devastated island is facing a food-stamp crisis.

Of course, none of that stopped the president from insisting to White House reporters on Thursday, “I’ve taken better care of Puerto Rico than any man ever,” just as he was getting ready to fly off to a political rally in Michigan.

The disaster and its aftermath left nearly 3,000 people dead, and the island is still struggling to recover nearly two years later.

Trump, however, has tripled down on blaming others and insisting that, somehow, everything he and his officials had done was perfect. A senior Trump administration official who has discussed Puerto Rico with the president said that in conversations on the topic, Trump has shown he feels he “has nothing to apologize” for and is far more likely to insult Democratic politicians for, in his view, trying to use the disaster and high death toll to make him look bad, than to to talk about ways to ameliorate suffering on the U.S. territory.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-ver ... estigation
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Postcards from an island of ruin: Puerto Rico after Hurr

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 10, 2019 3:54 pm

David Begnaud

BREAKING: The FEMA official in Puerto Rico, in charge of power restoration after Hurricane Maria, has been arrested by the FBI, as has the fmr. CEO of Cobra Energy (which got $1.8B in contracts) & a 2nd FEMA official...all accused of enriching themselves & defrauding the fed govt



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This is a picture of Asha Tribble, the FEMA official who was arrested by the FBI. She no longer works for FEMA.
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Correction: she DOES still work for FEMA. I’m waiting for a FEMA statement.

These individuals were indicted and arrested.

Defendant Donald Keith Ellison is “a decorated Army Ranger who served in Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, was CEO of Cobra from January 2017 until June.” More form the @TheOklahoman

I asked FEMA for a statement regarding the indictment and arrest of 2 of their employees.
This was the response:


As for why Tribble is still employed by FEMA: here is what the agency just said:

Image

Video shows @fema’s Ahsha Tribble talking about the “risk” that Whitefish Energy & Cobra (which got 1.8 billion in contracts)…


JUST IN: Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority says it’s cooperating with federal authorities regarding arrests of the top…
Show this thread

Replying to @DavidBegnaud @travis_view
The company they hired with no employees first and a stupid contract - the owner that was behind it - was a very big Trump donor. There are pics of High Reps, like Lindsay Graham at a party with this guy on the internet. The Trump donor was on a petition for dismissal/racism.

Leigh Crosby


Yep, Whitefish Energy.


Waiting for Normalcy


@BestButterCup Who hired them???

Must read from 2yrs ago about Cobra. Congress has failed at oversight



There’s a Shady Puerto Rico Contract You Didn’t Hear About
Kate Aronoff
October 31 2017, 11:57 a.m.
National outrage has led to the cancellation of a suspicious $300 million contract doled out to a tiny Montana company that was oddly tasked with rebuilding large parts of Puerto Rico’s electric grid. A separate $200 million contract has faced little scrutiny, but may ultimately be even more scandalous for what it says about the effort to rebuild the island in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

The deal was inked with a company called Cobra Acquisitions LLC, which didn’t even exist until this year. It’s a subsidiary of an Oklahoma-based fossil fuel company, suggesting that neither the Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority nor the federal government has much interest in seizing the opportunity presented by the storm to rebuild Puerto Rico in a sustainable way that relies on renewable energy rather than imported oil.

Unlike the Whitefish contract, the Cobra deal with PREPA involved heavy input from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which — according to a recent conference call convened by Mammoth Energy Services — was “in the room” and there “every step of the way” as it was being meted out so as to be in line with the agency’s reimbursement requirements. (Neither FEMA nor PREPA representatives have responded to The Intercept’s multiple requests for comment.)

“We expect this to be a credit to our corporate margin,” an unidentified Mammoth executive (likely Chief Financial Officer Mark Layton) said on the conference call. “Quite honestly, we wouldn’t have entered this contract if we didn’t think we’d get paid.”

“The Cobra contract is less flashy and less obviously crazy,” Cathy Kunkel, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told The Intercept. “But together with [the Whitefish contract] shows the nexus of PREPA with oil and gas interests — the kind of companies that are go-to companies for PREPA.”

Mammoth, Cobra’s parent firm, is primarily an oilfield services company, with several smaller subsidiaries selling a range of support offerings to fracking and other fossil fuel extraction operations. HBC Investments, one of Whitefish’s major financiers, owns several fossil fuel holdings. PREPA itself, like most island energy systems, is also inordinately dependent on imported oil, generating 47.4 percent of its power from that source alone.

PREPA is currently $9 billion in debt and gives more than $1 billion a year to off-island oil and gas companies. Yet even as the utility’s leadership has acknowledged that its fiscal sustainability relies on a transition away from oil, its plan has been to transition not to distributed renewables — which are more resilient to storms — but to centralized natural gas. In 2010, Puerto Rico’s legislature set out a plan to get a full 12 percent of energy from renewables by 2015. As of 2015, just 3.3 percent of its power was derived from clean energy. Nearly a third of the island’s generating capacity, meanwhile, came from natural gas, and PREPA’s plan for 2035 includes the construction of a $400 million liquid natural gas import terminal. Currently, all signs point to PREPA rebuilding its energy system back to the pre-storm status quo — or worse.

There are reasons to be concerned about Cobra beyond its ties to the fossil fuel industry, though. Cobra’s creation is Mammoth’s first foray into the utility sector, the result, Mammoth CEO Arty Straehla said on the call, of their expectation that it would produce a “stable cash flow” and the “potential for significant growth,” adding later that the utility business is “less cyclical” and “less capital-intensive” than its other work. Earlier in the year, he said, “we hired an experienced management team with an average of 25 years of industry experience at much larger companies to begin the process of entering the energy infrastructure business,” officially forming Cobra in the second quarter of 2017. Straehla said Cobra is currently operating 58 fleets across the United States and employs 275 “highly trained professionals” as of October. They hope to have as many as 500 personnel in Puerto Rico in the near future.

Cobra, then, is an even younger firm than Whitefish, founded when Mammoth acquired two small transmission and distribution companies for around $8 million total, at which point Mammoth “quickly deployed capital to expand,” Straehla said on the call. According to Mammoth’s most recent SEC filings, one of those companies — the only one acquired before the filing date — is Higher Power Electrical LLC, based in Plainview, Texas. According to the Better Business Bureau, Higher Power had been operating for five years before its acquisition by Mammoth and its owner’s name is listed as Robert Malcolm. On the conference call, Straehla noted that another firm that was part of the acquisition was based on the East Coast.

Alongside FEMA, Mammoth negotiated a $15 million payment from PREPA upfront and will be paid biweekly. The initial contract is for 120 days of work, though Mammoth stated repeatedly on the conference call that they expect that to be extended. “We hope,” Straehla said, “this leads to additional work in rebuilding the infrastructure after the emergency situation.”

According to a presentation about its PREPA contract, Cobra-employed workers will in the short-term be tasked with providing a “comprehensive damage assessment of existing electrical grid”, “engineering services to aid in the design of a new electric utility grid to PREPA specifications,” “construction services to rebuild the electric grid,” as well as housing, food, and water for all of its employees and contractors so as not to create “an additional strain on the local population.”

The stated expertise and experience may be a bit misleading. By phone, Wilson clarified to The Intercept that it was four top managers of Cobra that together hold an average of 25 years of experience in the utility sector, though he was unable to provide more information as to those executives’ names, which companies or utilities they had worked for, or the specific nature of their utility experience. While he and executives on the call said Cobra had been involved in grid restoration work following hurricanes Irma and Harvey, the company currently has no ongoing storm-related contracts outside of Puerto Rico. Wilson and executives on the call also each emphasized that Cobra has a history of working with private, investor-owned utilities (Cobra’s “main customers,” according to Straehla), but provided no details as to which IOUs Cobra has worked with.

Neither Wilson nor the call offered much detail on how the contract originally came about, either. “Our leadership team went to Puerto Rico proactively to meet the authorities there and offer our services and expertise,” Mammoth wrote in a statement shortly after the contract was signed. “We did not have a previous relationship with the team at PREPA. We flew around the island to examine the situation, presented our expertise in storm response and utility infrastructure, including working in Texas and Florida to respond to the recent hurricanes, and look forward to helping Puerto Rico recover.”

Beyond the specifics of either the Whitefish or Cobra Acquisitions contract is a larger one about why PREPA entered into any agreements at all with private contractors post-Maria. The standard procedure for near-term disaster response is for utilities to enter into mutual aid agreements with their counterparts in other states, facilitated by the American Public Power Association. Puerto Rico is entitled to these type of agreements, and — with the Whitefish contract severed — will now begin receiving such aid from utilities in Florida and New York.

In all likelihood, Cobra Acquisitions’ management probably has more experience getting utilities back online than their counterparts at Whitefish Energy. The issues surrounding its contract, though, reflect broader problems plaguing PREPA: a startling lack of transparency, costly mismanagement, and an abiding fondness for the fossil fuel industry — all compounded by crippling debt and a catastrophic storm. The fiscal oversight board and others on the island see the solution to these problems as privatization. Late last week, that federally appointed body — now in charge of the island’s finances and government — cited PREPA’s pursuance of the Whitefish contract as rationale for wanting to install a Flint-style emergency manager to oversee the utility, a move many expect will pave the way for selling it off to the highest bidders.

If PREPA’s brushes with private industry thus far have been any indication, privatization will be anything but a solution to the utility’s problems.

Top photo: A car passes among dark homes as people wait for electricity to be restored after Hurricane Maria passed through on Oct. 6, 2017 in Utuado, Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico experienced widespread damage, including to most of the electrical, gas, and water grid, as well as agriculture.
https://theintercept.com/2017/10/31/pue ... act-cobra/

JV

You mean a Republican led congress failed to oversight... shocking!
https://twitter.com/BestButterCup/statu ... 3509033984
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
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