Puerto Rico’s Distress Shows Trump’s Contempt for Poor People of Color
“Eighteen months after Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico, residents have received little of the federal assistance they were promised. Now food-stamp cuts have left over a million Puerto Ricans in desperate circumstances, the Washington Post reported on Monday. Island households already lived close to the bone. Just over 44 percent of the island’s population lives in poverty — a rate higher than that of any U.S. state — which may help explain why an estimated 130,000 people left the island and did not return after Hurricane Maria. Thanks in part to congressional inaction, HIV patients sit in soiled diapers that health-care workers cannot afford to replace, the Post reported. Families slash food budgets and plan to eat less. ‘It’s very hard. It is so unfair. That cut is going to kill us,’ the administrator of a clinic for HIV patients told the Post.”