and manned mostly by american crews. but even maritime groups admit that the u.s. merchant marine industry is shrinking. so what about foreign ships? they ve got two options. first, dock at a puerto rican port and pay tariffs, fees, and taxes. or stop at a mainland port like jacksonville, florida, and transfer to an american flagged ship. costs of goods passed on to the puerto rican customer. it cost the puerto rico economy $537 million in 2010. university of puerto rico economists found that over the proceeding 20 years, the island lost over $17 billion from its economy as a result. in case you re wondering about the areas of texas and florida affected by harvey and irma, the jones act was waived in those situations. like for new orleans after katrina. the department of homeland security has not received a formal waiver request and has not decided if it will give puerto rico the waiver. the reasoning, the island s
million because some of the vans were expected to use natural gas fuel. that gave them an entitlement to this green energy loan, $50 million. they re shuttered, jobs gone, they re out of business. gretchen: it seems like you don t have to prove a lot of green energy usage to be able to get these loans. we were seeing that first with solyndra. $530 million down the tubes. then you have fiskar, electric car consider, $537 million. there is a long list. look at the screen. b.p.g., that is the latest embarrassment for the green energy policy. gretchen: it would be interesting to see whether or not some of these loans have since been approved. i know there were directly after the failure of solyndra. it would be interesting to see if they are still being approved at the rate they were. listen to the president s speech in texas this week. he s going down there in
after the department of defense, the next largest department is the one supposed to take care of returning soldiers, the department of veterans affairs. commonly referred to as the v.a. it s even bigger than it used to be. the v.a. added more than 4,000 new workers since 2008. they ve spent $537 million on a new computer system. one they never even had before the last secretary took over in 2009. let me say that again slowly. the year 2009. they got a computer system. in other words, the v.a. simply didn t have a computer system for dealing with the veterans claims until then. now that they do, everything is working great, right? well, according to the march 11th report in the center for investigative reporting, not only are claims still on paper, but the backlog of claims increased during the current administration.
right for america to stand with you. mitt romney trailing in polls when they are asked which candidate would handle foreign policy better. it s a critical time for him to recover from what some say were big gaffes made in britain. michelle is the co-chair of the obama campaign s national security committee and former defense secretary under president obama and in the situation room during the osama bin laden raid. nice to see you. thank you for talking us with this morning. do you see a big difference between mitt romney s foreign policy stance when it comes to iran and president obama s foreign policy stance when it comes to iran? they both talked about no option being off the table. there really isn t that much substantive difference, soledad. the president has made clear his policy is to prevent iran from gaining a nuclear weapon and that all options are on the table. right now we re focused on imposing the most crippling sanctions in the history of any country. those
solyndra is one case of a company that went belly-up for sure. it s not the prod december of the bailout package. when he look at mitt romney s record in massachusetts, the he had two donors to his campaign getting nearly $5 million in government subsidies that also went belly-up. it seems the height of here pock crazy for him to make these claims. let me remind everybody watching at home. solyndra s application was forwarded by both democratic and republican administration. the bush administration was forwarded applications from solyndra as well and they received this money through a grant and program developed in the part of energy create under the bush administration. heather: mary catherine who made the decision to give it to solyndra. i think they ve fast tracked it. the e malls from the white house, it s pretty clear they president bush into this 537 million-dollar investment. and to most people that is not