Puerto Rico University students take to the streets in protest against massive debt and budget cuts incurred by their government that was neither one’s fault – PB/TK
Puerto Rican Students Take on Wall Street Vultures – March 31 2017
This week, students at the University of Puerto Rico located in the metropolitan area of Río Piedras declared a strike which has effectively closed down the main campus of the island’s public university system. The students are protesting a plan to cut $450 million in funding to the university system which was demanded by a seven-person Fiscal Control Board imposed under the Obama administration and agreed to by the current colonial administration of Ricardo Rosselló. The planned cuts represented about a third of the public university system’s total budget and would directly affect academic programming, tuition costs and staffing.
Along with these severe cuts to the most important post secondary institution in the country, the Fiscal Control Board has also imposed a series of austerity measures that significantly reduce spending on healthcare, K-12 education and affordable housing programs, impose wage freezes and layoffs on public sector workers, promote the privatization of public entities and increase consumption and property taxes. The current administration recently had to submit a Fiscal Plan to the unelected board for approval and is now required to give regular accounts on the fiscal impact of all new legislation.
The pretext for this combination of cuts to social spending, attacks on labor and increased tax burdens is the $70 billion debt that the colonial government has incurred over several decades. While there is much evidence suggesting that large portions of this debt was incurred illegally, the current administration has vowed to repay despite the disastrous social consequences of the austerity measures being imposed.
Continue to counterpunch.org article: http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/31/puerto-rican-students-take-on-wall-street-vultures/
