BROADCASTS.com

The struggle for 3.5 million U.S. citizens is "getting worse by the day", our guest explains today.\xa0 So, unfortunately, is everything else, it seems, as the President of the United States continues to put the nation on a war footing (potentially, a nuclear war footing) in advance of his upcoming trip to Asia. A new report over the weekend cites the U.S. Air Force readying a military base to put "nuclear-armed bombers back on 24-hour ready alert" for the first time since the end of the Cold War in 1991. Why? What is the imagined threat that makes such a dangerous (and expensive) posture necessary? Particularly as nuclear armed silo- and submarine-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles are already in place by the hundreds or thousands, and even as Americans are still fighting for the lives in Puerto Rico, thanks in part, to a shortage of relief funding. Power is still out for some 80% of residents more than a month after Hurricane Maria devastated the island. We're joined today by former Puerto Rico Energy Commissioner RAMON CRUZ, who is now on the Sierra Club's National Board of Directors and serves as an independent advisor on United Nations climate policy.\xa0 Cruz, a Puerto Rican native who recently returned from the island, details the deteriorating situation on the ground, particularly away from the capital of San Juan, and warns, as he did in a recently published op-ed, that the "vultures" are already descending.\xa0 He explains why PR's power grid took such a hit from the storm, why it is so difficult to restore the system to the already-deficient state it was in prior to the storm, and how decentralized energy micro-grids, relying on clean, renewable energy and battery storage, is now more important than ever, even as opportunists descend to take advantage of relief funds and the desperate Puerto Rican people...