| | | | |  | | By Gloria Gonzalez | With help from Brakkton Booker, Joseph Gedeon, Minho Kim, Ella Creamer and Charlie Mahtesian
| 
Downed power lines on a road in Puerto Rico, as the island awoke to a general power outage on Sept. 19, 2022. | Jose Jimenez/Getty Images | What up, Recast family! President Joe Biden declares the pandemic is over, and questions arise over whether Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had the budget authority to fly migrants to Martha's Vineyard. Plus, Adnan Syed, whose case inspired the megahit podcast "Serial," is freed from prison. First though, we focus on the latest unfolding in Puerto Rico. The latest collapse of Puerto Rico's power grid after it was thrashed by Hurricane Fiona over the weekend was a foreseeable crisis that activists, including Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, have been working to prevent — a crisis deeply rooted in the island's status as a U.S. territory. Turn back the calendar to five years ago today: Hurricane Maria, coming less than two weeks after Hurricane Irma, was the strongest hurricane to hit the island in nearly a century. Maria, a Category 4 storm that caused an estimated 2,975 deaths, decimated Puerto Rico's power, water and health care systems. The island has never truly recovered from that blow.
| 
Downed power lines and debris are seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, on Sept. 26, 2017. | Gerald Herbert/AP Photo | In those intervening years, those living on the island have had to endure multiple crises, including earthquakes that further destabilized the power grid, not to mention the Covid-19 pandemic. With Fiona, the island suffered yet another total blackout Sunday when the then-Category 1 storm knocked out power to 1.5 million customers, dumped some 32 inches of rain on some parts of the island and triggered catastrophic flooding and widespread loss of water service.
| 
Twitter | Power has been restored to 19 percent of those customers as of Tuesday morning. Fiona is not an outlier. Puerto Ricans living on the island frequently deal with the possibility of losing power, regardless of whether or not a storm is passing through. In April, an island-wide blackout caused by a possible equipment failure knocked out power to parts of the island for five days. The unplanned outages pose threats to equipment essential for businesses and hospitals, including the refrigerators people need to store their daily medications such as insulin used by diabetics. And drinking water has been disrupted to two-thirds of people living on the island, at least partly due to the lack of electricity and flooding that has overrun systems. "Life on the island is becoming unsustainable, but at the same time people are there fighting for things to get better," Lía Fiol-Matta, senior counsel at LatinoJustice, an organization that advocates for decolonization of the island.
| 
| Bad Bunny is one of those people. The rapper's latest music video, released last week for his song El Apagón, features news reports about LUMA Energy, which he's sharply criticized at his concerts for the power grid failures. LUMA took over management of the electric grid in June 2021, which had previously been operated by the government-run Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, which had gone bankrupt. "The situation in Puerto Rico is linked to the colony status of the island," said Sheilla L. Rodríguez Madera, a professor of global and sociocultural studies program with Florida International University. Activists blame the ongoing impact of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act — commonly known as PROMESA, or promise in English — which was signed into law by President Barack Obama.
| 
| It created a program to restructure Puerto Rico's $72 billion debt and established the Financial Oversight and Management Board, which imposed austerity measures that advocates argue have only worsened the poverty crisis. "It's the powerlessness of people on the island to make major decisions about their own lives and their own destinies," Fiol-Matta said. It was the federal government that created PROMESA and made the decision to establish the board to take control of Puerto Rico's finances — and some say the island's future. Not having voting representation in Congress and not being able to cast votes in the presidential election "does not help the situation here," said Ruth Santiago, a community and environmental attorney in Puerto Rico and a member of the activist group Queremos Sol, or We Want Sun. But even if Puerto Rico had voting power, it would experience similar challenges to places like New Orleans and Houston with majority Black or brown populations, she said. "What we're seeing is when these natural disasters strike, injustices are perpetrated," Santiago said.
| 
Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi pictured at a press conference in 2019 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. | Angel Valentin/Getty Images | Puerto Rican legislators and Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, a Democrat, gathered last week at the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., to urge Congress to pass the "Puerto Rico Status Act." It would facilitate a binding vote in 2023 for the residents of Puerto Rico to determine what their status should be. "It is time to end colonialism within America. It is time to end the territorial relationship of Puerto Rico with the United States," Pierluisi said. Should that legislation pass both chambers of Congress and be signed into law by Biden, one option residents of Puerto Rico could consider would be independence from the United States. Jenniffer González-Colón, the island's non-voting member of Congress, says she's confident Puerto Ricans would choose statehood instead.
| 
| For all the bombast Pierluisi displayed in Washington last week, residents say his administration at least bears some of the responsibility for the island's current woes, including the ongoing power disruptions. Pierluisi, who has previously defended LUMA, called the system "stable" in an interview with POLITICO earlier this year — which has infuriated residents living with the ongoing outages. But, more recently, he said "his patience is running out" and there would be "consequences" for the company if the situation didn't change immediately. Much of activists' anger, though, is reserved for the energy company, LUMA.
| 
People march along Las Americas Highway to protest the LUMA Energy company in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Oct. 15, 2021. | Carlos Giusti/AP Photo | For its part, LUMA has blamed the fragility of the power system on "decades of mismanagement and neglect," stemming partly from under-investment in basic maintenance by the bankrupt, government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority. The complaints about the state of the grid are intertwined with a fierce debate over shifting Puerto Rico toward solar power and away from its traditional reliance on fossil-fuel energy and long-distance power lines. By one estimate, 135,000 people left the island in the wake of Hurricane Maria as employment dried up and infrastructure that collapsed during the storm never recovered. We'll be keeping tabs on whether Fiona's aftermath exacerbates that trend. All the best,
The Recast Team
| | | | 
| Power dynamics are changing. With The Recast, you'll get a twice-weekly breakdown of how race and identity are the DNA of American politics and policy. Was this forwarded to you by a friend? Subscribe to the newsletter here.
| | | ARIZONA'S POLICE FILMING LAW SHELVED
| 
Phoenix Police officers watch protesters rally on June 2, 2020, in Phoenix during demonstrations over the death of George Floyd. | Matt York, File | A first-in-the-nation law, which was days away from going into effect in Arizona making it a crime for the public to record the law enforcement within an 8-foot radius during a police stop, has been blocked by a federal court. POLITICO's Joseph Gedeon breaks down the latest. U.S. District Judge John J. Tuchi issued a preliminary injunction last week blocking the law from taking effect Sept. 24. He noted there were already state laws barring interference with police. Additionally, the office of the Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich, in a motion filed earlier this month , sidestepped responsibility for defending the law, saying "the Attorney General is not the proper party to defend the merits" of the law, adding that "local and county prosecutors are the proper entities to defend this statute." The attorney general's office also said it did not oppose the preliminary injunction.
| 
| "I'll be looking at the judge's injunction ruling to find out exactly what the constitutional issues were, and I fully intend to be back in January introducing an amended version that will test judicial scrutiny," John Kavanagh, a former police officer and current Arizona state representative who sponsored the bill, told The Recast on Monday. Kavanagh says its goal is not to infringe on individual rights, but to create a protective space between police and bystanders. "The need for the bill came after I heard that there were organized groups critical to police that were following police around or maybe responding to radio calls and videotaping the interchange with the person, which is fine," he said. "But some of these people were very in-your-face and they were walking up to within a foot or two of the encounter. I know a distraction like that can be very dangerous." As the law stands now, civilian video — like the one that captured the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis in 2020 — would be illegal, unless the officers on scene granted permission for onlookers to record. The ACLU and several news organizations in Arizona filed a lawsuit against the measure, arguing it violated First Amendment protections. Legal scholars also note that citizens recording law enforcement activities have increasingly become a primary tool for police accountability and transparency. "Even if they don't know about this law going into practice, they might not realize that they're committing a criminal violation, because they're accustomed to police wanting to shut down recordings even without a specific statutory basis," Ben McJunkin, an associate professor of law at Arizona State University.
| 
A pedestrian photographs a member of the U.S. National Guard as he patrols Hollywood Blvd., in Los Angeles. | Chris Pizzello, File | At least seven states require police to wear body cameras – Arizona is not one of them. The National Conference of State Legislatures told POLITICO they were unable to find an anti-police recording law in any other state. McJunkin says copycat laws should "absolutely" be expected in other states, as citizen recording police interactions has not been an issue challenged in higher courts.
| | | THE ROUNDTABLE
| 
Wisconsin voters cast their ballots in the state's primary at the South Shore Park Pavilion in 2016 in Milwaukee. | Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photo | Following the 2020 elections, there was plenty of evidence of Republican Party inroads with Latino voters. This fall's midterm elections will be yet another test of whether those gains will continue. A few weeks ago, The Recast talked to Latino Democrats in Illinois, who said the Republican gains with this bloc are marginal at best. In the neighboring state of Wisconsin though, even a marginal political shift to the right among Latinos could be detrimental to Democrats, as they are now the largest minority group in the state.
| 
| Are the Republican efforts paying off in Milwaukee, a Democratic bastion with a sizable Hispanic population? POLITICO's Minho Kim spoke with Marty Calderon, an evangelical pastor who spent years building Latino support for conservatives, and Veronica Diaz , a church organizer and a former Republican candidate for Wisconsin House in 2019. THE RECAST: What turned you to the Republican Party? What's the appeal of the party to Latino voters? DIAZ: A lot of Latinos have voted [Democrat] based on how their parents voted, not for values they were passionate about: faith, family, education and hard work. I had hard-working parents who busted their tail for little money. They wanted to be a role model for us, so that we work hard, go to school and create our success. [I did that] for myself, and I know it can work for everyone else. CALDERON: For many years, I had been addicted to drugs. But the connection I made with God changed my life. [As a pastor,] I remind those who come to my door that they can change their lives, be held accountable and turn things around. I'm about working with everybody, but there are things I stand strongly for. I'm pro-life; I am for families. I believe in school choices and that we need to work and earn our wages. THE RECAST: Are Latino voters in the city swinging more favorably toward the Republicans? CALDERON: Yes. Milwaukee has been a Democratic city for so long. People are tired of same-old politics. Conservative Latinos who had been challenged by their friends and families are now coming out and speaking for themselves. The community never sees [politicians] again, [after] you come out to vote. [That's why] turnouts are horrible. Democrats need to be held accountable for preaching one message and then doing something different. Democrats talk about [reducing] gun violence, but they need to be here to do it. People want those who keep their message strong and truthful. DIAZ: I think [Republican support] is going to grow. We're voting Democrat, but we're poor, have more crime and have less companies wanting to come into the city. So I'm happy to see more Republican presence. They have an office now: RNC Hispanic Community Center in the heart of the South Side of Milwaukee. There was an RNC tent at Fiesta Mexicana, letting people know about their candidates. Latinos get to open their eyes about the Republican party [at] events like that.
| | "The End of the Digital Divide?" — Join The Recast's Brakkton Booker in person or virtually on Thursday, Sept. 29, for POLITICO's AI and Tech Summit. He'll be co-moderating with reporter Rebecca Kern on if the $65 billion broadband investment in the Biden administration's landmark infrastructure law can close gap between the have and have nots of internet access. Panelists include: Gov. Andy Beshear (D-Ky.), Andy Berke of the Commerce Department, Joi O. Chaney of the National Urban League and Jonathan Spalter of USTelecom. Sign up and send us your questions! | | | | | ICYMI @ POLITICO
| 
| WATCH: Biden declares the pandemic is "over"
| 
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at a rally on Aug. 19, 2022, in Pittsburgh, Pa. | Jeff Swensen/Getty Images | Migrant flights scrutinized — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) stands by his decision to fly scores of mostly Venezeulan migrants to Martha's Vineyard. But as POLITICO's Gary Fineout reports, some Democrats are questioning if the flights were legal "since they originated in Texas and not Florida." Running again? — Speaking of Texas, the state's junior Sen. Ted Cruz is embarking on a midterm tour that will take him to some 17 states before November. Some of those states include Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. POLITICO's Alex Isenstadt has more.
| | | THE RECAST RECOMMENDS "Serial" Release — A Baltimore circuit judge overturned Adnan Syed's 1999 murder conviction in the killing of Hae Min Lee, his high school classmate. This legal drama was the basis for the podcast "Serial." More from The Baltimore Sun, which also captured Syed's first steps of freedom in 23 years. Back to school — The second season of one of TV's most heartwarming programs, " Abbott Elementary," debuts tomorrow night, on the heels of the show's bigwins at this month's Emmys Awards season.
| 
| Recommended reading — "Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and OurPolitical Future." The collection of essays by Brandi Collins-Dexter out today, explores the tenuous and fraught relationship between Black voters and the Democratic party. Ling Ma — author of the powerhouse sci-fi novel "Severance" — brings us a short story collection, "Bliss Montage." It's out now, and we're a little obsessed with the cover art. Apple Is in a Pickle — The content creator faces a tough decision over what to do with its Civil War-era film "Emancipation" starring Will Smith. The studio had visions of Oscar contention, but that was shot before "Slapgate" unfolded. BLACKPINK "Shut Down" the haters in a fiercely confident new music video.
| 
| TikTok of the day: Dad gets no love.
| 
| | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
Comments
Post a Comment