San Juan Mayor, Trump and Reality

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz has decided she would like to get into the crazy emotional political storm by saying:

If anybody out there is listening to us, we are dying and you are killing us with the inefficiency and the bureaucracy

First a little bit about the mayor of San Juan Puerto Rico, a city of approximately 390,000 people.  It is being reported that she says she belongs to the Popular Democratic Party (PDP), from what I can find according to a site called the Puerto Rico Report:

The PDP strongly supports the development of the Commonwealth to the highest of autonomy compatible with the principles of permanent union with the United States and American citizenship of Puerto Ricans.  The Popular Party rejects any modification of status that deviates from these principles and that threatens our Puerto Rican nationality or that harms our linguistic or cultural identity.

Other than that, from her policies and statements she seems to be extremely left on the ideological scale.

Mayor Cruz won a surprising vicotry by securing the support of a coalition of left-leaning interests from the LGBTQ community to university students to financially powerful unions.

After Mayor Cruz won she began creating more debt for the city by starting a million-dollar urban renewal program.  This program renovated public parks and plazas and unionized San Juan employees as promised during her campaign.

Critics of the Mayor have questioned her management style, and some early supporters, including people who occupied key positions, have resigned or been dismissed.

One interesting move by Mayor Cruz, according to reports by the AP, was she offered a government job to a:

Puerto Rican independence militant Oscar Lopez Rivera, whose prison sentence was commuted in January by then-President Barack Obama. Rivera was released from prison in May after serving 35 years for his involvement with a group that claimed more than 100 bombings in the 1970s and ‘80s that killed or maimed dozens on the U.S. mainland.

That should tell you quite a bit about her ideology.

The mayor of another city in Puerto Rico, Guaynabo’s mayor, Angel Perez, said in an interview with The Daily Caller that his experience with the federal government has been different from Cruz’s:

in part because — unlike Cruz — he has been participating in meetings with officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other federal agencies.

If she is not showing up to such important meetings then how does she actually know what the Federal government is doing?

You might say she is busy with helping the people of San Juan but as mayor her help would be best suited in working with the Federal government.

She was interviewed by Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera, in which he asked her about her “people are dying” comment.  It went as follows:

Rivera said,

But are people dying? I’ve been traveling around, I don’t see people dying. I spoke to the doctors, they say they saw 53 patients and they had a person who was septic, but nobody dying.

Mayor Cruz responded,

Dying is a continuum. If you don’t get fed for seven, eight days and you’re a child, you are dying. If you have 11 people like we took out of a nursing home, severely dehydrated, you are dying.

By that brilliant logic she has been a Mayor of a city before this tragedy where people are dying, why would she allow that to happen.  Remember as the Mayor stated “dying is a continuum”.

By the way according to reports the death count was 16 a week ago. It remains 16 today.

This seems to be another politician attempting to be political in the worst of times.  That time being during a horrendous tragedy.