www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/823977/posts
They want us off their island but they want us to keep sending them money? Welfare recipients don't have any interest in working, but they want money! We 14 handicappers don't have any interest in practicing or talent, but we want to play the tour. We amateurs don't have any interest in practicing, but we want to play Mozart like Alicia de la Rocha. Some airlines don't care about customer service, but they want passengers. Sila Calderon, who had pressed for a halt to the training, said Wednesday that her government will lobby for the base to remain open. Sila Calderon, who had pressed for a halt to the training, said Wednesday that her government will lobby for the base to remain open. So how about we stop the training and just keep the people on the payroll and they can sit around and drink coffee and play cards all day? What's worse, the Dept of the Interior nazis are gonna take it over, and NOBODY will be able to go there. In exchange for that, we pump many Yankee dollars into your otherwise non-existent economy. This is a well known process sometimes known as "we'll scratch your back, quid pro quo" etc. If we simply hand over money for nothing that would be welfare and I know you would never allow that. As a Puerto Rican I have a deep resentment not only of my compatriots behabing in this manner, but it is similar to behavior expressed by other people supported and protected by the United States who will the turn around spit on the United States while demanding that the dollars don't stop. Didn't Al Sharpton and the other liberals explain to the people of PR that there would be no need for a base once the training grounds were closed? We can save that $300 million or give it to the next island who agrees to host a trainging range. Of course with the ascension of Hildebeast to the Armed Services committee, and her interest in PR nationalists, it may not be so easy for the Navy to tell them eat sh*t. Stop your live-fire exercises, but keep pumping millions of dollars into our economy? What do you bet the (brighter) government of some small, poor island nearby calls the Pentagon pronto and offers up their island as a bombing range (if the jobs come along with it)? Come on, this Governor has either got to be kidding, or worse, is actually too stupid to think that when you take away one of the only underlying values of a base, that the Navy is going to want to keep financially supporting it? I would rather the Navy used the $300,000,000 the base injects into the local economy for something that will help keep the brave men and women serving alive. PR's governor would hardly be raising such a stink if she thought that she was going to get the $300 million even without the naval base being left on her island. Sila Calderon, who had pressed for a halt to the training, said Wednesday that her government will lobby for the base to remain open. Excuse me, governor, but can you see which finger I'm holding up? You'll have no one to blame but yourself for the failure of your economy. The 18 billion we send them in food stamps and other aid will just go up. On the other hand, since we no longer have a military base stationed there, what exactly do we need Puerto Rico for anyway? Grant them independence and let them sink or swim according to their own devices. It's a nice place to visit, but why should we be burdened maintaining an island that is little more than a welfare state. It is a lot harder to close a base then it is to cut welfare payments. Remember, half of America thinks Gore is a genius, and we elected Clinton twice. So if half of Puerto Rico is leftist, that would only be par for the course. And it is primarily the left that is complaining about Vieques, and mainly it is non-Puerto Ricans that are leading the charge. Puerto Ricans work there, and are dependent on the base for their employment. The good governor is the equivalent to a US Democrat, and so has been trying to have it both ways, as Democrats normally do. The island's Republicans proudly display the flag, the US flag that is. It is only a small leftist sliver of mostly academics and similar types who are advocating independence, and even they are hedging their bets, telling people that they would be able to vote independence and retain their US citizenship, an obvious lie. Which should tell you that there is no real support for independence, and no real anti-Americanism there. They are very comfortable with their American citizenship. Don't make the mistake of buying into the left's propaganda. We are at this website because we know the press can't be trusted. Puerto Rico has a vibrant economy, it is heavily industrialized, and most of the tax breaks that drew industry there years ago have been discontinued. They now face tough competition from Mexico as a result of NAFTA. NAFTA wasn't intended to hurt Puerto Rico, but that has been the effect. Still, the island flourishes, it is not anti-American (outside of college campuses), and it is a living rebuke to the rest of Latin America. I do not have how much we spend in other assistance to PR but I am sure in is at least in the billion dollar range. What makes you think the taxpayers will not get screwed in this deal? We'll chalk it up to mis-information by the Democrats and the usual "take advantage" of people while utilizing anti-Bush rhetoric. Wonder what kind of bene's her new best friend promised her. She protested the use of the base at the time of her visit with "violent" rhetoric. Upon my visit to Vieques, being an American I was curious about how the locals viewed the presence of the Naval bomb training unit. They led me to believe (this was in the eighties) that they were fully aware that their economy benefitted greatly and were quite happy to have them there. In my opinion, this thing was totally engineered by agitators from the outside. In Puerto Rico the left is represented by the "independentistas", an openly socialist faction that comprises maybe 4 or 5 per cent of the population, and, of course on our mainland the part of the left that took up the Vieques cause were the greens and the peaceniks. What you have to understand is that "Rosey Roads" is a huge naval base on an island that is 35 by 100 miles and the Vieques training effort is a very small contingent on an island one mile by two miles long. What the lefties wanted was the elimination of the target practice on Vieques but never dreamed it would cause the navy to yank Rosey Roads! I believe the Clinton administration gave them assurances that this wouldn't happen. Is this under the category of "be careful what you wish for, or what? Personally, I believe that the Vieques issue has been handled in an alarmist fashion ever since that tragic day in 1998 when a civilian working for the Navy was killed due to an errant bomb. Instead of viewing this for what it was---a single fatal incident in the 60 years in which the Navy had used the Vieques bombing range---the governor at the time, Pedro Rossello (of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party), paid attention to the phony statistics provided by left-wing groups that claimed that Navy bombing was causing cancer in the civilian population of Vieques and declared that Navy bombing should stop (Rossello was actually a pretty good governor, but being a practicing pediatric surgeon, he was always a bit of a softy on health issues). Normally, the pro-American majority in Puerto Rico would have never been in favor of the Navy leaving Vieques; But given the fact that Governor Rossello, who is as American as apple pie, announced that it was every Puerto Rican's right as an American to not have bombing in Vieques, hundreds of thousands of pro-statehood Puerto Ricans began to oppose Navy bombing. As the 2000 elections approached, Rossello made a deal with Clinton to allow the Navy to keep using the bombing range until May of 2003. The opposition party (the pro-Commonwealth "Populares") immediately denounced Rossello as having "sold out," and Sila Calderon (who was the Populares' gubernatorial nominee) started making ridiculous claims that she could get the Navy to leave in 90 days after she took office. The pro-state...
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