WASHINGTON – Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders released a plan for Puerto Rico on Monday that proposes extending Chapter 9 bankruptcy protections to the commonwealth’s municipalities and contains several healthcare and environmental initiatives.
“We need to do everything we can to allow Puerto Rico to restructure its debt in a rational way that does not harm its people, ordinary investors or pension funds in the United States,” Sanders said in the proposal, which was posted on his campaign website. “The reason Puerto Rico has such unsustainable debt has everything to do with the policies of austerity and the greed of large financial institutions.”
He added Puerto Rico’s debt should be audited to determine whether all of the debt was incurred legally. Sanders and others raised constitutionality questions during a Senate hearing in October on the commonwealth’s approximately $70 billion of debt. The Vermont senator said during the hearing and again in his campaign proposal that any debt found to have been issued outside the limits of the Puerto Rico constitution should be immediately set aside.
Sanders also said he would help Puerto Rico to solve ongoing questions both about its status as a territory and its aging energy infrastructure. Under his plan, Puerto Rico would have a congressionally sanctioned and binding referendum for Puerto Rican people to decide whether the commonwealth should become a state, an independent country, or reform the current commonwealth agreement. He said he would also work to have Puerto Rico move away from a fossil fuels-based energy system to one that relies on renewable energy like wind, solar and geothermal.
Some of Sanders’ larger campaign initiatives would have an effect on Puerto Rico, according to his plan. His education plan to allow “every American who studies hard in school” to go to college would help with educational opportunities for Puerto Ricans and his proposed single payer, Medicare-for-all plan would apply equally in Puerto Rico as it would in the other states and territories, he noted.
