Political Quotes

“Mr. President, we are all concerned about the plight right now of Puerto Rico and what is happening over there financially. And later on this week I will revisit the issue of the 4-year battle of Vieques that took place from 1999 to 2003. I am very much concerned that we might have an opportunity here to rectify something that was done that should not have been done back in 2002. The island off of Puerto Rico called Vieques had been an integrated training center for many years--about 60 years--up until 2002. For purely political reasons at that time, it became quite an issue. First of all, joint training took place on the island of Vieques. Joint training means you have different branches of the military trying to accomplish something together that they couldn't do individually. In the case of Vieques, it was the Marines, the Navy, and the Air Force. We were able to do the type of training we couldn't do anyplace else. It sounds kind of ridiculous, but when they were talking about doing away with using Vieques for a military center--what they had been doing for 60 years--it was all around an establishment called Roosevelt Roads. Roosevelt Roads was a major naval station. We had about 7,000 sailors there. They added something like $600 million a year to the economy of Puerto Rico. Anyway, we found out there was a great effort by a lot of people who I will always suspect wanted to ultimately develop that island for private purposes and to financially gain from that.…”