I’d like to see some one yanked from the White House, remove the cancerous growth and all it’s tentacles. And then watch the rebirth of a nation. We are a nation in crisis,
Puerto Rico is the place in the US that needs to rebuilt. After a storm like Trump raging thru who and what wouldn’t need a major reconstruct.
To the matter in the article, how symbolic is the ‘Little Fish’, symbolic of worst of the worst. Backed by major Trump donors, it’s SICK. And usual just like clock work, Donald has done it again. He does and says what he wants and NEVER pays the consequences. So they wait for weeks to get started, they wait until everyone is desperate and will settle for ANYTHING and then does what he wants, regardless of tradition, rules or the law. They are calling our bluff here. Like THAT ever happen. In the mean time Trump and his friends get richer on OUR dime. Of course we DON’T exactly have anything to say about it,
When is it going to STOP? Reference my first paragraph, that’s how.
I wonder if their are members in Congress who will benefit from the ‘LITTLE FISH’ crime? Big fish feed on little fish.
Little Fish donors have ‘BIGGER fish to FRY’. Three hundred million dollars is a drop in the bucket compared the GOLD they have their eyeballs set on. What feast at hand with Trump holding the keys to the vault.
For the last month, most of the images of Cruz were during times of great stress, where she was frazzled and probably not thinking much about prepping for the camera. She actually is pretty, based on her publicity photos. She’s not afraid to be seen on camera wading through sewage, wearing emergency crew gear, sans makeup or hair retouches. A very tough and admirable woman.
Of course the real reason she has become a rock star is her untiring fearless advocacy and work for her people. I’ve been following her pretty closely on twitter since the hurricane. I’m happy to see her more relaxed, being her nasty woman self. She is amazing.
@thunderclapnewman I’m with ya, thunder. It has gnawed at me that Whitefish is also “home” to Richard Spencer, and the location for his mother’s business, which Spencer claimed was being “hurt by local “Jews””, as a pretext for a demonstration by his neo-Nazi buddies, before a number of people quashed (including Zinke, it should be noted before his appointment as Secy of Interior). There is indeed something fishy about the place, with due respect to @jeffrey’s Mum.
ETA: @spacesaver Oops. Hadn’t read all the way down. But, yeah…
I can sympathize with PREPA being in a bind and looking for help ASAP on limited funds. But Whitefish has no right to act pissy about transparency in how the contract was acquired, especially since we know there will be scammers circling like vultures over the entire rebuilding phase.
Above all, Whitefish was way out of bounds threatening the mayor. I suppose they thought they were protected because they’re millionaires and good buddies with Zinke. Even though they have apologized, this is bad publicity for them.
Agreed, but who’s going to kick them out? The governor is a trump sycophant, the principals are buddies with Zinke, and PREPA hired them outside the normal contracting rules during an emergency.
The San Juan mayor questions the procedure and gets shut down. I don’t see anyone with enough authority questioning, much less ending, this giveaway to friends of the administration.
Certainly Congress has no interest in investigating this kind of corruption.
Different contract. Puerto Rico newspaper El Nuevo Dia had an article yesterday on both contracts. Included in the article was the information that prior to awarding both contracts, the Autoridad de Energia Electrica had announced that they had a total budget of $500M for repair and recovery. So, the two contracts exhausted their stated budget. The Mammoth Energy contract is to subsidiary Cobra Acquisitions LLC. The duration of Cobra’s $200M contract is three months. I found the El Nuevo Dia article by googling Whitefish Energy and so was able to slip behind their paywall. The article also lists the hourly and per diem rates in both contracts.
Mass protests plus a public outreach to real engineering firms like a Bechtel, Parsons, Fluor etc. could help. What I would do is actually higher one of these firms as an outside consultant to oversee the performance and essentially have them take it over and provide recommendations to hire different firms/specialists to execute.
I read that the Army Corps has already contracted with Fluor, and a few other major engineering firms have begun work in reconstructing the grid, with thousands of people already in place.
Whitefish so far is a dinky player, barely able to gear up to a hundred workers on site and apparently reporting only to PREPA. The big guys will barely notice them. Having the feds and their consultants oversee Whitefish and insist on progress reports is a good idea, though.
That’s good news. But who is running the project management? I feel like Whitefish is throwing its weight around but lacks true capability. PR needs to get a handle on it and use whatever leverage it has to make sure this project is being managed appropriately.
this has cartoonish overtones of stereotypical Mob behavior all over it -
Washing huge amounts of money through a shell company that is aligned with & controlled by the power bosses
AND
The ridiculous mouthy behavior by the junior players (Whitefish) - it looks like these Whirefish gavones got full of themselves and decided to mimic the arrogant attitude & comments of Trump …
and then… (Ha Ha) much like a classic mob movie - ( when a seriously junior underling sees the Big Boss slap a certain significant person around - and then decides to swagger over and do a little slapping of their own - and the Big Boss wheels around and lays a smack down on the junior underling) … well it looks like Whitefish got a white-hot smack-down phone call telling them to
“cut it the F*** Out - shut up and get your job done … got it?”
Donated is a very lenient term, given this contract. Pre paid for no bid contracts is probably closer to the mark.
And a hedge fund manager isn’t going to be putting up the sort of working capital to make a contract like this actually work. My bet is that the entirety of the $2 million that got up front is already spent on that, and that they are doing an awful lot of deferred payment contracts everywhere…using the $300 million payout as collateral.
And I am probably being extremely generous with these assumptions. My suspicion is there is an even bigger shell game going on here, and there is no good faith intent to ever fulfill the contract…merely to get paid.
The “saving grace” here is that being so incompetent to threaten to withdraw your subcontractors in a tweeter snit, probably indicates that these two don’t really have that much on the ball. Drawing attention like that when you are already under national scrutiny for this contract? Might be one the stupidest business moves of all time.
You won’t have to dodge any paywalls to view the Whitefish contract embedded in this Caribbean Business article. The article is about the Cobra contract, but the embedded document is, at least until CB makes a correction, the Whitefish contract.
FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers are ostensibly managing the overall recovery and rebuilding, backed by $400M in federal funds so far. But the whole story is a complicated one. It appears PREPA may have fucked up right after the hurricane, but it’s hard to judge from the outside. Here’s a good summary of how it was handled from the beginning:
And I think Spencer upped sticks to Georgia or Florida, no?
The Flathead Valley, which includes a number of other Whitefish-sized communities (pop. 5K +/-) as well as Kalispel, was no stranger to RW extremists well before Spencer raised is ugly head. Whitefish, which may not even have any Jewish residents, lives and dies by tourism and so if Spencer and others like him left, the town would be glad for that.
I don’t share that suspicion. Whitefish gets a massive windfall by sticking to the contract and keeping PREPA (and FEMA) happy enough that PREPA keeps assigning work to Whitefish until the $300 million is gone. The contract rates of pay for labor and equipment have tremendous amounts of profit built into them.
I expect most of the work will be good quality work. Whitefish is using real, experienced electric-utility line crews from the mainland to do work the crews are qualified to do. No doubt there will be some mistakes, oversights, and bad decisions, but I believe that most of the harm will take the form of excess cost rather than equipment failure.
However, I believe that the proper path at this point is for FEMA to give PREPA notice that the current Whitefish contract will only receive FEMA funding for work done in the next 45 days, and that PREPA needs to solicit bids for one or more new contracts to use the remaining balance of FEMA funding. The contract process should include FEMA observers.
Defenders of the Whitefish contract will almost always talk about the urgency of the situation and Whitefish’s willingness to accept the terms PREPA could offer. That’s all fine for the initial, small contract, but the larger contract now includes FEMA financing and covers work that will be carried out over a period of many months. The terms of the initial contract reflected PREPA’s desperation. The expanded contract should reflect determination to use the money available to to the best job possible of restoring reliable power at a rapid pace.
