Puerto Rico to Trump: 'We Are American Citizens'

[DonViejo]

The island territory’s top representative in Washington says the president’s efforts to blame Puerto Rico for its desperate hurricane recovery are 'shocking.'

By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE October 17, 2017

Just before the interview starts, Jenniffer Gonzalez tries four different numbers she’s been trying to reach back home in Puerto Rico. She gets the same error message for all of them. Can’t connect.

One call that does come through is from the White House, which is trying to explain away the president’s tweets warning that the federal response wouldn’t go on forever. Her reaction was off the record.

Gonzalez, Puerto Rico’s non-voting representative in Congress, is using what limited power she has to wheedle, cajole and beg agencies to help with an island territory she says has been put back a century—some 86 percent of Puerto Ricans are still without electricity, three weeks after the hurricane knocked out the island’s power grid, and 29 percent don’t even have potable water.

She’s calling in favors and firing off text messages to get patients dialysis or chemotherapy, with no time to think about the damage to her own house. Gonzalez happened to be home during the storm, and she was literally holding the door closed. Now in Washington to lobby for a more vigorous relief effort, she’s anxious about all the damage that continues to mount from rain that keeps coming down on homes that don’t have roofs anymore.

“Your life,” Gonzalez told me with tears in her eyes during an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, “is like stopping without knowing what is going to happen next.”

more + podcast
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/17/off-message-puerto-rico-trump-maria-215718

[sweetroxie]

1. You think he cares about ANY

American citizen?!!!