All posts by Philipe Schoene Roura

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  Draining the Tax Swamp

  When Puerto Rico’s Treasury secretary, Francisco Parés, and Justice secretary, Domingo Emanuelli, announced they had landed several of the biggest fish in the tax fraud swamp, the tandem had reason to feel they were changing a culture...

  • Posted August 3, 2022
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  The Promesa Wolf Visits Abuelita

  Back in 2017, when the Puerto Rico Oversight and Economic Stability Act (Promesa) was just a wolf pup, this journal delivered a conference on the Hill focusing on Title V—for the expediting of critical infrastructure—in the federal...

  • Posted July 22, 2022
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  Insurrection…It is Going to Be ‘Yuge’

  The ongoing congressional hearings on the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol brought to the fore testimonies by several members of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration that point to a concerted insurrection. In a parade...

  • Posted July 15, 2022
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  The Song Remains the Same

  There is nothing like interviewing the past to bring truth to the forefront. The following is a now-present-tense version of an editorial written in 2018 that still rings true today: When you prompt the same dog to...

  • Posted July 8, 2022
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  Jagged Fiscal Peaks

  For all its beauty, pristine beaches, forests and centuries-old architecture, Puerto Rico today is known widely as the land of fiscal cliffs and empty basins. Those rocky debt promontories and infrastructure valleys have come to the forefront...

  • Posted July 1, 2022
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  The Fire this Time

  At the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, as lives were being consumed at wildfire speed, both the health care and the pharmaceutical industries the world over struggled mightily to control the blaze. On the health care front,...

  • Posted June 24, 2022
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  Businesses in Extinction

  There is a rule in journalism that most of us old-timers— Brontosaurus, really—follow: We do not report about things that affect us directly. No se hace. I am going to break that rule today because I believe...

  • Posted June 10, 2022
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  Under Their Eye, Again

  “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great worldhistoric facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” So commences the “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis...

  • Posted June 4, 2022
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  Hold Your Pharma Horses

  Although much has been written about the throttling of the Internal Revenue Code’s section 936—the 10-year phaseout of the erstwhile tax break, which concluded in 2006, marks the epicenter of the Puerto Rico economy’s precipitous decline into...

  • Posted May 27, 2022
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  Cowboys and Indians Revisit the Federal Realm

  The recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that the U.S. Constitution does not require Congress to extend Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits to residents of Puerto Rico, more than an act of territorial discrimination, reaffirmed the...

  • Posted May 14, 2022