Tracking Wealth Through the AI Lens
Tracking Wealth Through the AI Lens
In the first week of October 2025, two fundamentally different blueprints for the future of Puerto Rico were laid on the table. One arrived via a court order, the other via a Pentagon press release. One depicts a decentralized island powered by the sun, house by house. The other shows an island repurposed as a forward operating base, bristling with some of the most advanced military hardware on the planet.
These are not complementary visions. They are mutually exclusive, representing a profound strategic dissonance at the heart of U.S. policy. Analyzing the data points behind these two events reveals a federal government simultaneously funding two opposing outcomes for the same American territory.
On Thursday, October 3rd, the U.S. District Court in Puerto Rico delivered a landmark ruling. It found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had violated federal law by failing to consider rooftop solar and other distributed renewable energy sources in its plan to rebuild the island’s electrical grid. The plan involves a substantial sum of money, at least $12 billion allocated in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. FEMA’s original strategy was, simply, to rebuild the same centralized, fossil-fuel-dependent system that had already proven catastrophically fragile. Legal Victory: FEMA Must Consider Rooftop Solar for Puerto Rico’s Ailing Grid
The court’s language was unusually blunt. It described the existing grid as “inadequate, unreliable, and extremely vulnerable,” a conclusion any observer of Puerto Rico’s chronic outages would find painfully obvious. The ruling effectively forces FEMA back to the drawing board, mandating that it analyze a future where Puerto Ricans generate their own power, a stark contrast to the top-down model that has failed them for decades.
This decision is significant not just for its environmental implications, but for what it represents structurally. The lawsuit was driven by a coalition of local organizations (eight community groups, to be precise) who argued that a resilient, distributed grid is not a luxury, but a necessity for survival. This legal victory codifies a vision of Puerto Rico that is self-sufficient and empowered from the ground up. It aligns with the island’s own public policy—a 2019 law setting a target of 100% renewable energy by 2050—and is supported by a 2023 Department of Energy report confirming that the island has more than enough renewable potential to meet its needs. I’ve analyzed countless federal spending proposals, and the initial FEMA plan to simply rebuild the old, failing system represents a staggering lack of foresight. The court's intervention here is less a surprise and more a necessary correction of an obvious analytical error. The data was always there; the will to use it was not.
Just one day before that ruling, on October 2nd, the Pentagon published the first official images of a very different federal project in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Ten U.S. Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II stealth fighters were photographed on the tarmac at the former Roosevelt Roads Naval Station. They arrived on September 13th, part of a much larger military buildup in the Caribbean. This force includes an Amphibious Readiness Group, multiple guided-missile destroyers, a nuclear submarine, MQ-9 Reaper drones, and even a shadowy special operations mothership known as the M/V Ocean Trader. F-35s Deployed To Puerto Rico Showcased In First Official Images (Updated)
The stated mission is counter-narcotics. The hardware suggests something else entirely. An F-35B is a fifth-generation strike fighter designed for penetrating sophisticated enemy air defenses. Using it for drug interdiction is like using a surgical laser to slice a birthday cake. It’s a wildly disproportionate application of force and capability. The deployment’s true focus becomes clearer when you note the asset's flight patterns, which open-source trackers and the Venezuelan Defense Minister claim have skirted Venezuelan airspace. This, combined with the Trump administration’s recent designation of drug cartels as "unlawful combatants," signals a potential shift toward direct military action against state-affiliated groups, with Venezuela’s Maduro regime squarely in the crosshairs.
Here, Puerto Rico is not being envisioned as a network of resilient communities. It’s being used as a fixed piece of strategic real estate—an unsinkable aircraft carrier from which to project American power into the Southern Caribbean. This is a vision of the island as a centralized, hardened federal asset. It's a top-down directive that places geopolitical priorities far above the island's internal development. Attempting to build a distributed, community-led power grid on an island simultaneously being converted into a staging ground for potential kinetic military operations is like trying to install a hyper-local mesh WiFi network on a battleship. The core functions are fundamentally at odds.
This contradiction in purpose is where the analysis gets truly interesting. One federal agency, under court order, is now required to fund a future of autonomy and resilience for the Puerto Rican people. Another federal agency is actively re-militarizing the island, reinforcing its historical role as a dependent colonial outpost. Where does the White House stand? President Trump’s administration has been openly hostile to clean energy while simultaneously slashing FEMA’s budget, yet the Maria funds being debated were already allocated by Congress. The left hand isn’t just unaware of the right hand; it’s actively working against it.
And then there's the cultural variable, an outlier in this entire equation. Just as these two visions clash, the island’s most famous cultural export, Bad Bunny, was announced as the headliner for the Super Bowl halftime show. For three straight years, he was the most-streamed artist on the planet. His global influence projects an image of a confident, vibrant Puerto Rico with its own powerful voice on the world stage. This cultural ascendancy is happening completely independently of Washington's contradictory plans. It represents a third vision, one where the island's identity and future are defined not by federal blueprints, but by its own people.
Which signal should we trust? The court order for a green, decentralized future? The deployment orders for a gray, militarized future? Or the Spotify streaming numbers that suggest a future driven by a cultural confidence that needs no federal permission slip?
My analysis suggests there is no coherent federal strategy for Puerto Rico. What we're witnessing is not a plan but a portfolio of contradictions. The U.S. government is simultaneously underwriting two mutually exclusive futures for the island—one of local empowerment and one of federal control. This isn't strategic ambiguity; it's systemic incoherence. Investing in both rooftop solar and stealth jet runways on the same small island is a high-stakes bet on two horses running in opposite directions. The most probable outcome isn't synergy, but sustained friction, leaving the people of Puerto Rico caught between two powerful, competing visions of what their home is supposed to be.