Political Report # 1338 Controversial Contractor Was Behind Island-Wide Blackout, as Puerto Rico Debates Full Privatization

By Kate Aronoff The Intercept

The bulldozer that accidentally triggered an island-wide blackout in Puerto Rico last week was operated by D. Grimm Inc., a company that reports up to the Oklahoma-based firm Mammoth Energy Services. The same subcontractor was blamed for another blackout two weeks ago that affected 870,000 homes. Attempting to repair a downed wire on Wednesday, a bulldozer got too close to a live, high-voltage line, triggering a chain reaction that left most of the island’s 3.4 million residents without power. D. Grimm is a subcontractor hired by Cobra Acquisitions LLC, itself a subsidiary of Mammoth. First signed in October, Cobra’s contract is reminiscent of the one negotiated between the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, and novice Montana-based firm Whitefish Energy Holdings LLC, a $300 million agreement that generated international controversy. The utility’s contract with Cobra - a recently formed amalgamation of a handful of small mainland utility services companies - was less outrageous on its face than the Whitefish deal, and faced less scrutiny. Unlike the Whitefish contract, it was arrived at with the blessing of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which Mammoth claims was in the negotiating room “every step of the way” and will ultimately reimburse PREPA for payments it makes to Cobra. Over the last several months, Cobra’s initial 90-day, $200 million contract ballooned to $445 million in late January and more than doubled again to $945 million about a month later, reportedly allowing it to source construction materials itself, rather than work through third-party contractors. While such generous contracts are an obvious boon for companies like Cobra, Freddyson Martínez, vice president of UTIER, the PREPA utility workers union, doesn’t see them as one for island residents. Wednesday’s blackout took place in the context of a concerted push from both the Puerto Rican government and the Washington-appointed Financial Oversight Management Board, or FOMB, to privatize PREPA, bringing its transmission and distribution capacity under private management and selling pieces of its generation capacity off to different bidders. With these contracts and more federal funding potentially up for grabs via privatization, Martínez predicted “there will be more Whitefishes and more Cobras - more animals of those species - lurking around trying to bite again.”

Political Report # 1324 Movement Building at the Heart of Haitian Peasants’ Response to Climate Change

By Mina Remy And Salena Tramel   Grassroots International

Social movements in the Haitian countryside are dealing with the politicized challenge of climate change through methods that reach back to a rich agrarian tradition and weave in contemporary grassroots solutions. Deep in the Central Plateau, the Peasant Movement of Papaye (MPP) is leading the way towards a new Haiti centered on food sovereignty and climate justice. These twin proposals are not only a way out of hunger and the climate crisis, but are political tools meant to contribute to systemic change in Haiti and beyond. Haitians are used to navigating the intersections that occur where nature meets politics, and the small Caribbean country’s landscape shows the scars of that process. Bare mountains that were once green loom over makeshift, seaside cities where the rural majority once farmed and fished. Every now and then, Haiti, paradoxically isolated from and dependent on the rest of the world, makes the news: a state coup, a massive earthquake, or yet another hurricane. And today, while receiving a lesser degree of international attention than these monumental moments, the increasing impacts of climate change are threatening to break Haiti’s already weakened agricultural backbone. CLIMATE DISRUPTIONS In October 2016, the country was hit by Hurricane Matthew, a category 4 storm which completely flooded large swaths of the country, and devastated Southern Haiti. Hurricane Matthew hit just weeks before harvest, and the country has not recovered since. As a matter of fact, farmers in Haiti are now dealing with periodic flooding. Without respite, they have gone from one extreme to another: in the 2014/15 season, the county’s agricultural production fell by more than 80% due to drought.

Political Report # 1321 Betsy DeVos is Helping Puerto Rico Re-Imagine Its Public School System. That Has People Deeply Worried

By Rachel M. Cohen The Intercept

Puerto Rico, in the midst of the chaos and instability following Hurricane Maria, is moving quickly forward with plans to institute a wide swath of education reforms, with the help of the aggressively ideological federal education department, helmed by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Puerto Rico's governor and education secretary have expressed openness to the concerns raised by parents, teachers and community members, and stress they are not looking to implement an extreme version of privatization. Yet at the same time, they have stoked fears by pushing forward a notably vague charter law that does little to address what people are most worried about. This "trust us" mentality has not been helped by the engagement of DeVos, nor by Gov. Ricardo Rosselló's recent visit to a notorious charter chain in Philadelphia last week - a prime example of the kind of low-performing, fiscally reckless charter that school advocates warn about. At a time when the island is starved of investment and inching slowly through a storm recovery, many Puerto Ricans worry that the government is treating this more as an opportunity to disrupt education, rather than stabilize it - while also potentially opening the doors for supercharged corruption.

Political Report # 1297 Puerto Ricans Fear Schools Will Be Privatized in the Wake of Hurricane Maria

By Aida Chavez and Rachel M. Cohen The Intercept

AS HURRICANE MARIA departed Puerto Rico, leaving utter ruin in its wake, one community in Vieques picked itself out of the wreckage by focusing on getting school back open. "The community took out of their own time and said, 'Let's do this, we need to repair and reopen this,' and we started working," Josuan Aloyo told The Intercept in Spanish. "Cleaning out the trash and debris, and trying to find people that had the proper tools." Aloyo, assistant director of Escuela Adrienne Serrano, said the school opened up immediately. Aloyo said they were determined to take in as many students as possible in the hopes of giving even a bit of order back to their lives. Right after the hurricane, Escuela Adrienne Serrano had 40 students, a number that steadily increased each week until they managed to bring 80 students back. But then, on October 18, Humacao School District's regional director told Escuela Adrienne Serrano to suspend classes. School administrators were told they "couldn't have students until they authorized us to open the school," Aloyo said. "We couldn't have classes until the firefighters certified us." "Ever since that moment, we didn't listen to them. We kept receiving the students that arrived but Friday, we ran out of potable water, so we had to start turning down students," Aloyo said. "We hope tomorrow, if we get water, we can start receiving students. Whoever shows up, we'll receive them. If there's no food in the cafeteria, well, we can just cook for them ourselves and make a simple breakfast and lunch."

Political Report # 1284 Hurricane Victims Don't Have the 'Complexion for Protection'

By Lois Gibbs,  Campaign for America's Future

Millions of Puerto Ricans are still without water, food, electricity and shelter, four weeks after Hurricane Maria destroyed the island. With waterborne illnesses on the rise, a full-blown humanitarian crisis is on the horizon. "Raw sewage continues to be released into waterways and is expected to continue until repairs can be made and power is restored," the EPA warns in a memo. When the agency issued this statement, eighty-four percent of Puerto Rico was without electricity, and sixty percent of water treatment plants out of service. "Water contaminated with livestock waste, human sewage, chemicals, and other contaminants can lead to illness when used for drinking, bathing, and other hygiene activities," the EPA says. To make matters worse, Puerto Rico is home to 21 Superfund sites - the nation's most deadly depositories of toxic chemicals. The island also has a five-story-high coal ash dump in Guayama that was hit by the storm.

Abstract, Aftershocks of Pinochet’s Constitution: The Chilean Postearthquake Reconstruction

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Aftershocks of Pinochet’s Constitution: The Chilean Postearthquake Reconstruction
by Ignacio Arana Araya                           


The criticism of the reconstruction that followed the cataclysm in Chile in 2010 has centered on contingent factors including the performance of politicians. An examination of the way structural factors conditioned the governmental response to the 8.8 earthquake shows that the constitution created by the military regime shaped the reconstruction through provisions that limited vertical and horizontal accountability in intrastate and state-society relations. The subsidiary state, executive-legislative power relations, the binomial electoral system, and the appointment rather than election of regional authorities favored a recovery effort that has been underinstitutionalized, privatized, characterized by scant participation of victims, and marred by irregularities. An analysis of governmental reports, media outlets, polls, and semistructured interviews conducted with legislators, social leaders, and scholars sheds light on the relation between the constitution and the recovery.

Abstract, Civil Society Reconstruction: Popular Organizations in Postearthquake Concepción

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Civil Society Reconstruction: Popular Organizations in Postearthquake Concepción
by Jeanne W. Simon and Katia Valenzuela-Fuentes                               


The Chilean province of Concepción was little prepared for the impact of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that took place on February 27, 2010. Because of the destruction of roads and bridges, the power outage, and ineffective communication, each neighborhood was essentially left to fend for itself with virtually no assistance from local and provincial authorities. Within the first 24 hours, panic hit, with stores being looted and local politicians calling for a military presence, and neighbors joined together to protect their property from looting gangs, even in the poorest neighborhoods. Most of these committees were not based on the traditional neighborhood councils that had emerged since the return to electoral democracy in 1990. In the emergency camps established by families that had lost their houses, the new leaders established a more autonomous and horizontal leadership style in their search for decent living conditions and a definitive housing solution. At first glance, these new leaders appear to be a return to the autonomous popular organizations that emerged during the dictatorship but were demobilized under electoral democracy. Ironically, the earthquake and the new center-right government seem to have offered a political opportunity for the reemergence of a more autonomous civil society.

Abstract, Social Policy Responses of the Chilean State to the Earthquake and Tsunami of 2010

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Social Policy Responses of the Chilean State to the Earthquake and Tsunami of 2010
by Walter Imilan and Luis Eduardo González                                   


Decades of neoliberal policy have left Chile with a skeletal state that administers social policy through targeting and outsourcing in public-private partnerships that lack coordination. The reconstruction after the 2010 earthquake and tsunami responded to the emergency largely according to these same principles. While official reports on the reconstruction effort show a state that is complying with its goals, evidence from fieldwork in the city of Constitución illustrates that this method is highly inadequate in the context of a natural disaster. Chile should establish a social policy structure for natural disasters that allows for a rapid response to a social emergency based on universal or near-universal allocation criteria.

Abstract, Attempts at Neoliberal Urban Planning in Postearthquake Chile: Master Plans for Reconstruction

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Attempts at Neoliberal Urban Planning in Postearthquake Chile: Master Plans for Reconstruction
by Walter Imilan and Luis Eduardo González                                   


Urban and regional reconstruction after the February 27, 2010, earthquake and tsunami in Chile was organized by master plans at the local level. These plans, based on public-private partnerships, can be considered an innovation as an instrument of postdisaster reconstruction. They emerged as a commitment to privatization of urban planning in Chile. An analysis of two master plans based on field research carried out between 2011 and 2014 reveals that they had limited impact because of weak public-private ties, lack of comprehensiveness, and lack of legitimacy. They can be read as failed attempts at neoliberal deepening at the level of urban and regional administration.