[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 10]
[House]
[Page 13892]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                PROMESA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Illinois (Mr. Gutierrez) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GUTIERREZ. Mr. Speaker, there is an important meeting in the 
Financial District of New York City, right in the heart of stock 
traders, the investment banks, and the bond buyers and sellers who 
trade in the debt of companies, countries, and municipalities. Right 
there in the nerve center of our financial market, they are holding a 
meeting.
  Is it a meeting about Wells Fargo opening up thousands of accounts 
without the knowledge or consent of their customers? No, nothing like 
that. Nor anything related to the financial meltdown that our country 
is still recovering from that started right there. Nope.
  This is the first meeting of the Puerto Rico financial control board, 
the junta de control, that has supreme power to rule over Puerto Rico.
  Now, in case there is any confusion with the geography, New York City 
has a lot of Puerto Ricans, but it is not, in fact, the capital of 
Puerto Rico. My staff checked. San Juan is still the capital of Puerto 
Rico.
  No, the meeting of the junta de control that has dominion over all 
aspects of the Puerto Rican people is not meeting in Puerto Rico. The 
meeting is taking place pretty close to Wall Street, which, I think, is 
symbolic of the way the junta de control over Puerto Rico came about.
  It is a very bad omen for the future. Let me explain.
  There are seven people--not elected, but appointed--who oversee every 
aspect of Puerto Rico's governance. Four are Republican nominees, there 
are three Democrats, and there is one nonvoting member of the junta.
  Several of the members of the Puerto Rico junta de control appear to 
have deep ties to Wall Street, where you can find many of the 
bondholders who traded and profited off Puerto Rico's $72 billion in 
debt.
  Judge Juan R. Torruella, the first Hispanic appointed by Ronald 
Reagan to the prestigious U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals summed it 
up pretty well. He said to the Colegio de Abogados, the Puerto Rican 
Bar Association, that: ``The principal purpose of PROMESA is to 
establish a collection agency for bondholders.''
  The person who is rumored to be the executive director of the junta 
de control is a big-time corporate energy lobbyist. He is the former 
head of the Center for Liquefied Natural Gas, a trade association of 
energy producers, which makes everyone concerned about Puerto Rico's 
environment nervous--with good reason.
  So holding the first meeting in Lower Manhattan confirms to Puerto 
Ricans that the junta de control is by, for, and about the bondholders 
and corporate interests on Wall Street. So I consider the junta meeting 
on Friday as a home-court game.
  The board will elect their chairman on Friday. Yeah, they are going 
to elect a chairman. Kind of ironic because they are electing the 
chairman to an unelected board because, well, democracy is good for 
some people--just not the people of Puerto Rico.
  We have been told that members of the control board met secretly in 
Washington last week at the Treasury offices. Whether this is actually 
the first meeting of the control board is in great doubt.
  And all of this raises the bigger problem of transparency. There 
isn't any. Under the law, this group can meet in secret anywhere in the 
world, and their proceedings can be conducted in executive session.
  The board members can receive unlimited and unreported gifts, meals, 
even tickets to Hamilton and anything else, and we will never know. The 
scandal is coming. They are under no obligation to translate anything 
into Spanish, which, in case you forgot, is the language of the people 
that they are to control.
  I will say, to their credit, that, after I wrote to each member of 
the control board and asked for a public commitment to transparency, a 
few of them wrote back. None of them made a public commitment to 
transparency, but a few acknowledged that keeping Puerto Ricans 
informed, making the meetings publicly accessible, and translating 
materials in the language of the people being governed were good 
principles.
  It remains to be seen whether anyone on the junta de control really 
fights to inform the people of Puerto Rico, really sets up to be a 
champion for the schoolteachers and the doctors and the moms and the 
dads who are struggling, and the firemen, and the policemen who serve 
the people of Puerto Rico and are heroes.
  And it is unclear that this control board will step up on behalf of 
the Puerto Rican people and make creating jobs, creating more jobs and 
creating more jobs the number one priority of the junta. That is the 
way we create a tax base for Puerto Rico. That is the way we give 
puertoriquenos a viable option to live and work in Puerto Rico rather 
than moving to Florida or some other State.
  So, Mr. Speaker, as we leave Washington this week and head home for 
the great exercise in American democracy in November, I want all of us 
to keep in mind that the island of Puerto Rico, our colony in the 
Caribbean Sea, is a place that now, more than ever, only dreams of true 
democracy.

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