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Various scholars and institutions regard global social instability as the greatest threat facing this decade. The catalyst has been postulated to be a Second Great Depression which, in turn, will have profound implications for global security and national integrity. This paper, written from a broad systems perspective, illustrates how emerging risks are getting more complex and intertwined; blurring boundaries between the economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological taxonomy used by the World Economic Forum for its annual global risk forecasts. Tight couplings in our global systems have also enabled risks accrued in one area to snowball into a full-blown crisis elsewhere. The COVID-19 pandemic and its socioeconomic fallouts exemplify this systemic chain-reaction. Onceinexorable forces of globalization are rupturing as the current global system can no longer be sustained due to poor governance and runaway wealth fractionation. The coronavirus pandemic is also enabling Big Tech to expropriate the levers of governments and mass communications worldwide. This paper concludes by highlighting how this development poses a dilemma for security professionals. Key Words: Global Systems, Emergence, VUCA, COVID-9, Social Instability, Big Tech, Great Reset INTRODUCTION The new decade is witnessing rising volatility across global systems. Pick any random “system” today and chart out its trajectory: Are our education systems becoming more robust and affordable? What about food security? Are our healthcare systems improving? Are our pension systems sound? Wherever one looks, there are dark clouds gathering on a global horizon marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). But what exactly is a global system? Our planet itself is an autonomous and selfsustaining mega-system, marked by periodic cycles and elemental vagaries. Human activities within however are not system isolates as our banking, utility, farming, healthcare and retail sectors etc. are increasingly entwined. Risks accrued in one system may cascade into an unforeseen crisis within and/or without (Choo, Smith & McCusker, 2007). Scholars call this phenomenon “emergence”; one where the behaviour of intersecting systems is determined by complex and largely invisible interactions at the substratum (Goldstein, 1999; Holland, 1998). The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. While experts remain divided over the source and morphology of the virus, the contagion has ramified into a global health crisis and supply chain nightmare. It is also tilting the geopolitical balance. China is the largest exporter of intermediate products, and had generated nearly 20% of global imports in 2015 alone (Cousin, 2020). The pharmaceutical sector is particularly vulnerable. Nearly “85% of medicines in the U.S. strategic national stockpile” sources components from China (Owens, 2020). An initial run on respiratory masks has now been eclipsed by rowdy queues at supermarkets and the bankruptcy of small businesses. The entire global population – save for major pockets such as Sweden, Belarus, Taiwan and Japan – have been subjected to cyclical lockdowns and quarantines. Never before in history have humans faced such a systemic, borderless calamity. COVID-19 represents a classic emergent crisis that necessitates real-time response and adaptivity in a real-time world, particularly since the global Just-in-Time (JIT) production and delivery system serves as both an enabler and vector for transboundary risks. From a systems thinking perspective, emerging risk management should therefore address a whole spectrum of activity across the economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological (EEGST) taxonomy. Every emerging threat can be slotted into this taxonomy – a reason why it is used by the World Economic Forum (WEF) for its annual global risk exercises (Maavak, 2019a). As traditional forces of globalization unravel, security professionals should take cognizance of emerging threats through a systems thinking approach. METHODOLOGY An EEGST sectional breakdown was adopted to illustrate a sampling of extreme risks facing the world for the 2020-2030 decade. The transcendental quality of emerging risks, as outlined on Figure 1, below, was primarily informed by the following pillars of systems thinking (Rickards, 2020): • Diminishing diversity (or increasing homogeneity) of actors in the global system (Boli & Thomas, 1997; Meyer, 2000; Young et al, 2006); • Interconnections in the global system (Homer-Dixon et al, 2015; Lee & Preston, 2012); • Interactions of actors, events and components in the global system (Buldyrev et al, 2010; Bashan et al, 2013; Homer-Dixon et al, 2015); and • Adaptive qualities in particular systems (Bodin & Norberg, 2005; Scheffer et al, 2012) Since scholastic material on this topic remains somewhat inchoate, this paper buttresses many of its contentions through secondary (i.e. news/institutional) sources. ECONOMY According to Professor Stanislaw Drozdz (2018) of the Polish Academy of Sciences, “a global financial crash of a previously unprecedented scale is highly probable” by the mid- 2020s. This will lead to a trickle-down meltdown, impacting all areas of human activity. The economist John Mauldin (2018) similarly warns that the “2020s might be the worst decade in US history” and may lead to a Second Great Depression. Other forecasts are equally alarming. According to the International Institute of Finance, global debt may have surpassed $255 trillion by 2020 (IIF, 2019). Yet another study revealed that global debts and liabilities amounted to a staggering $2.5 quadrillion (Ausman, 2018). The reader should note that these figures were tabulated before the COVID-19 outbreak. The IMF singles out widening income inequality as the trigger for the next Great Depression (Georgieva, 2020). The wealthiest 1% now own more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people (Coffey et al, 2020) and this chasm is widening with each passing month. COVID-19 had, in fact, boosted global billionaire wealth to an unprecedented $10.2 trillion by July 2020 (UBS-PWC, 2020). Global GDP, worth $88 trillion in 2019, may have contracted by 5.2% in 2020 (World Bank, 2020). As the Greek historian Plutarch warned in the 1st century AD: “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics” (Mauldin, 2014). The stability of a society, as Aristotle argued even earlier, depends on a robust middle element or middle class. At the rate the global middle class is facing catastrophic debt and unemployment levels, widespread social disaffection may morph into outright anarchy (Maavak, 2012; DCDC, 2007). Economic stressors, in transcendent VUCA fashion, may also induce radical geopolitical realignments. Bullions now carry more weight than NATO’s security guarantees in Eastern Europe. After Poland repatriated 100 tons of gold from the Bank of England in 2019, Slovakia, Serbia and Hungary quickly followed suit. According to former Slovak Premier Robert Fico, this erosion in regional trust was based on historical precedents – in particular the 1938 Munich Agreement which ceded Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. As Fico reiterated (Dudik & Tomek, 2019): “You can hardly trust even the closest allies after the Munich Agreement… I guarantee that if something happens, we won’t see a single gram of this (offshore-held) gold. Let’s do it (repatriation) as quickly as possible.” (Parenthesis added by author). President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia (a non-NATO nation) justified his central bank’s gold-repatriation program by hinting at economic headwinds ahead: “We see in which direction the crisis in the world is moving” (Dudik & Tomek, 2019). Indeed, with two global Titanics – the United States and China – set on a collision course with a quadrillions-denominated iceberg in the middle, and a viral outbreak on its tip, the seismic ripples will be felt far, wide and for a considerable period. A reality check is nonetheless needed here: Can additional bullions realistically circumvallate the economies of 80 million plus peoples in these Eastern European nations, worth a collective $1.8 trillion by purchasing power parity? Gold however is a potent psychological symbol as it represents national sovereignty and economic reassurance in a potentially hyperinflationary world. The portents are clear: The current global economic system will be weakened by rising nationalism and autarkic demands. Much uncertainty remains ahead. Mauldin (2018) proposes the introduction of Old Testament-style debt jubilees to facilitate gradual national recoveries. The World Economic Forum, on the other hand, has long proposed a “Great Reset” by 2030; a socialist utopia where “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” (WEF, 2016). In the final analysis, COVID-19 is not the root cause of the current global economic turmoil; it is merely an accelerant to a burning house of cards that was left smouldering since the 2008 Great Recession (Maavak, 2020a). We also see how the four main pillars of systems thinking (diversity, interconnectivity, interactivity and “adaptivity”) form the mise en scene in a VUCA decade. ENVIRONMENTAL What happens to the environment when our economies implode? Think of a debt-laden workforce at sensitive nuclear and chemical plants, along with a concomitant surge in industrial accidents? Economic stressors, workforce demoralization and rampant profiteering – rather than manmade climate change – arguably pose the biggest threats to the environment. In a WEF report, Buehler et al (2017) made the following pre-COVID-19 observation: The ILO estimates that the annual cost to the global economy from accidents and work-related diseases alone is a staggering $3 trillion. Moreover, a recent report suggests the world’s 3.2 billion workers are increasingly unwell, with the vast majority facing significant economic insecurity: 77% work in part-time, temporary, “vulnerable” or unpaid jobs. Shouldn’t this phenomenon be better categorized as a societal or economic risk rather than an environmental one? In line with the systems thinking approach, however, global risks can no longer be boxed into a taxonomical silo. Frazzled workforces may precipitate another Bhopal (1984), Chernobyl (1986), Deepwater Horizon (2010) or Flint water crisis (2014). These disasters were notably not the result of manmade climate change. Neither was the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) nor the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004). Indeed, the combustion of a long-overlooked cargo of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate had nearly levelled the city of Beirut, Lebanon, on Aug 4 2020. The explosion left 204 dead; 7,500 injured; US$15 billion in property damages; and an estimated 300,000 people homeless (Urbina, 2020). The environmental costs have yet to be adequately tabulated. Environmental disasters are more attributable to Black Swan events, systems breakdowns and corporate greed rather than to mundane human activity. Our JIT world aggravates the cascading potential of risks (Korowicz, 2012). Production and delivery delays, caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, will eventually require industrial overcompensation. This will further stress senior executives, workers, machines and a variety of computerized systems. The trickle-down effects will likely include substandard products, contaminated food and a general lowering in health and safety standards (Maavak, 2019a). Unpaid or demoralized sanitation workers may also resort to indiscriminate waste dumping. Many cities across the United States (and elsewhere in the world) are no longer recycling wastes due to prohibitive costs in the global corona-economy (Liacko, 2021). Even in good times, strict protocols on waste disposals were routinely ignored. While Sweden championed the global climate change narrative, its clothing flagship H&M was busy covering up toxic effluences disgorged by vendors along the Citarum River in Java, Indonesia. As a result, countless children among 14 million Indonesians straddling the “world’s most polluted river” began to suffer from dermatitis, intestinal problems, developmental disorders, renal failure, chronic bronchitis and cancer (DW, 2020). It is also in cauldrons like the Citarum River where pathogens may mutate with emergent ramifications. On an equally alarming note, depressed economic conditions have traditionally provided a waste disposal boon for organized crime elements. Throughout 1980s, the Calabriabased ‘Ndrangheta mafia – in collusion with governments in Europe and North America – began to dump radioactive wastes along the coast of Somalia. Reeling from pollution and revenue loss, Somali fisherman eventually resorted to mass piracy (Knaup, 2008). The coast of Somalia is now a maritime hotspot, and exemplifies an entwined form of economic-environmental-geopolitical-societal emergence. In a VUCA world, indiscriminate waste dumping can unexpectedly morph into a Black Hawk Down incident. The laws of unintended consequences are governed by actors, interconnections, interactions and adaptations in a system under study – as outlined in the methodology section. Environmentally-devastating industrial sabotages – whether by disgruntled workers, industrial competitors, ideological maniacs or terrorist groups – cannot be discounted in a VUCA world. Immiserated societies, in stark defiance of climate change diktats, may resort to dirty coal plants and wood stoves for survival. Interlinked ecosystems, particularly water resources, may be hijacked by nationalist sentiments. The environmental fallouts of critical infrastructure (CI) breakdowns loom like a Sword of Damocles over this decade. GEOPOLITICAL The primary catalyst behind WWII was the Great Depression. Since history often repeats itself, expect familiar bogeymen to reappear in societies roiling with impoverishment and ideological clefts. Anti-Semitism – a societal risk on its own – may reach alarming proportions in the West (Reuters, 2019), possibly forcing Israel to undertake reprisal operations inside allied nations. If that happens, how will affected nations react? Will security resources be reallocated to protect certain minorities (or the Top 1%) while larger segments of society are exposed to restive forces? Balloon effects like these present a classic VUCA problematic. Contemporary geopolitical risks include a possible Iran-Israel war; US-China military confrontation over Taiwan or the South China Sea; North Korean proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies; an India-Pakistan nuclear war; an Iranian closure of the Straits of Hormuz; fundamentalist-driven implosion in the Islamic world; or a nuclear confrontation between NATO and Russia. Fears that the Jan 3 2020 assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani might lead to WWIII were grossly overblown. From a systems perspective, the killing of Soleimani did not fundamentally change the actor-interconnection-interaction adaptivity equation in the Middle East. Soleimani was simply a cog who got replaced.

Stagflation is an economic phenomenon characterized by a combination of stagnant economic growth, high inflation, and high unemployment. This is an unusual and challenging situation for policymakers, as the traditional methods of boosting growth (such as lowering interest rates) may exacerbate inflation, while measures to combat inflation (such as raising interest rates) may further depress economic growth and increase unemployment.

Stagflation can occur when the economy is hit by both supply-side and demand-side shocks, such as a sharp increase in oil prices, disruptions to supply chains, or a sudden drop in consumer or business confidence. These factors can lead to a decrease in productivity, higher production costs, and reduced consumer spending, which in turn, can cause a rise in prices and a slowdown in economic activity.

With policymakers in the major economies working hard to restore and maintain confidence levels and shifts in sentiment indicators playing a key role in risk assessments of investors, it is worthwhile to consider the various influences on this qualitative economic measure. Our analysis of the various indicators of consumer and business confidence that are regularly published highlight several common factors that have the potential to cause marked shifts in sentiment; including: 1. Changes in interest rates and/or exchange rates, particularly if they are rapid, large and unexpected 2. Swings in the business cycle and associated movements in employment/unemployment levels and business investment intentions 3. Shifts in the relative prices of nondiscretionary goods and services, notably petrol, healthcare, education and utilities prices 4. Large external economic and/or financial shocks, such as the financial crisis of 2008/09 and the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis of 2010/11 5. Announced policy shifts in the stance of government fiscal policy, including large structural spending cuts or increases/decreases in taxation rates.

Optimism has ticked up on Main Street, according to the latest quarterly small business survey from CNBC and SurveyMonkey, but many business owners still have a negative view of the economy. Inflation, labor and supply chain disruptions remain the top three risks, with higher prices far and away the No. 1 concern. In the wake of the collapse of several regional banks, roughly half of small businesses lack confidence in the banking system. While the mood on Main Street has brightened, concerns about the economy, stubborn inflation and the banking system are weighing on small business owners, according to the latest quarterly survey from CNBC and Momentive. Small business confidence for the second quarter rose slightly to 46 from 45 in the first quarter, though that still remains below the baseline for optimism. Forty percent of owners describe their current business conditions as good, up from 34% in the first quarter and nearly half (46%) say they project revenue to increase in the next year. But just 21% say they’d describe the economy as good or excellent — less than half of those that described the economy as “poor” (44%), as challenges continue with inflation and the ongoing labor crunch. The CNBC|SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey was conducted from April 17 through April 24 among more than 2,200 small business owners across the country using Momentive’s platform.

One of the most misunderstood and ignored anti-poverty programs in the United States, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), was designed specifically to help people with disabilities. This community continues to face disproportionately high poverty rates due to ableism and other structural barriers to employment and economic security. SSI provides people with disabilities monthly cash income to help pay for basic living expenses, but the 50-year-old program needs updating.

Before the creation of SSI, people with disparities were often reliant on their families and state governments to provide financial support. Without agency and financial independence, many people with disabilities were forced to depend on their parents or family members until they passed away or were locked away in institutions. And while there are over 1.6 million people with disabilities still locked in institutions, many others have been able to live independently in their communities with the use of SSI and Medicaid.

Punitive governance functions through an unequal distribution of resources and life chances that affects those populations occupying some of the most tenuous positions in Puerto Rican society.11 It has hardened existing discriminatory attitudes and structures that target low-income, Black, queer, and residentially marginalized Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico in ways that have normalized and in some instances increased their vulnerability to harm at the hands of the state and their fellow citizens. As ethnic studies scholar Lisa Marie Cacho argues, the practices of criminalization that ani- mate punitive governance make structures of human value “intelligible through racialized, sexualized, spatialized, and state-sanctioned violences” that target the most vulnerable, especially those who experience overlapping forms of marginalization.12 Within punitive regimes, vulnerable populations experience a form of “social death” that renders them “targets of regulation and containment,” subject to the law’s discipline but excluded from its pro- tection when confronted with violence.13

Yet Puerto Ricans also challenge deadly punitive logics and practices by working toward alternative understandings of justice, safety, and accountabil- ity in ways that are both spectacular and quotidian. This book follows a range of efforts by Puerto Ricans to critique punitive governance and imagine new ways of living in Puerto Rico. From public housing residents strategically using the press to provide their own accounts of the havoc policing has caused in their communities, to underground rappers skewering the absurdities of the war on drugs, to university students trying to build social movements across racial and class differences, to community activists implementing local solutions to violence that decenter policing, the story about punitive govern- ance told in this book is as much one of resilience and resistance as it is one of repression.

Under neoliberal and colonial capitalism, punitive governance functions to contain the effects of a social order that is marked by extreme racial and economic inequality. Literature on the intersections between neoliberal gov- ernance and carceral expansion has focused on the ways in which these regimes of accumulation and dispossession have intensified conditions of precarity, particularly for already marginalized subjects. 29 Puerto Rico is no exception to this trend. The rise and consolidation of punitive governance in Puerto Rico have reproduced hierarchies based on race, class, spatial location, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. In particular, the securitization of urban space and the proliferation of gated residential communities segregated along lines of race and class have resulted in the exposure of economically and racially marginalized communities to greater harm at the hands of the state and their fellow Puerto Ricans. 30

Punitive governance as a response to crisis has not led to greater public safety for many Puerto Ricans. Rather, it has only created the illusion of safety at the expense of low-income and racially marginalized populations, who experience elevated levels of insecurity, discrimination, violence, and death in their communities, much as Giovanni Roberto suggested during our conversation. The ways in which punitive governance targets the most vul- nerable populations in Puerto Rico are of central concern to this work. Throughout this book I detail how punitive governance functions through the reification of already existing hierarchies of value at work in the archi- pelago, which largely target those Puerto Ricans who find themselves at the margins. In particular, this book demonstrates the ways in which punitive governance plays a central role in producing and reinforcing discriminatory understandings of race, which associate Black and dark-skinned Puerto Ricans with crime and subsequently expose them to greater levels of exclu- sion and harm

Zhang 22 {“AOC Slams Supreme Court for Limiting Puerto Ricans’ Access to Disability Checks,” Sharon Zhang (News writer covering politics, climate and labor. Written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. Master’s degree in environmental studies). Truth Out. Published April 22, 2022, Accessed July 2, 2023. truthout.org/articles/aoc-slams-supreme-court-for-limiting-puerto-ricans-access-to-disability-checks/.}–CPSW–TW

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) pushed back on a Supreme Court decision that limits Puerto Ricans’ access to government benefits on Thursday, condemning the decision for advancing the U.S.’s colonialist grip over the territory.

On Feb. 13, Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) formally reintroduced The Social Security Expansion Act to Congress, and this time, he had a lot more support from fellow lawmakers pushing the initiative.

As GOBankingRates previously reported, the Social Security Expansion Act was first introduced on June 9 by Sanders and U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.). Under terms of the bill, anyone who is a current Social Security recipient, or who will turn 62 in 2023, would receive an extra $200 in each monthly check. Meaning, Social Security recipients could get an additional $2,400 a year in benefits if the bill wins approval — something seniors would no doubt welcome as inflation wipes out their annual cost-of-living increases.

After the United States Supreme Court’s overwhelming decision validating (in an 8-1 vote) the exclusion of Puerto Rico residents from the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program in the case of José Luis Vaello Madero, the opportunity to unlock that access seems to be in the hands of the Democratic-majority Congress. The window, however, is short and uphill during Congress’s ongoing session ending in December. The extension of SSI to Puerto Rico residents is currently included in three congressional bills, among them the budget reconciliation bill called “Build Back Better” (BBB), which contains US President Joe Biden’s social agenda. The bill, approved last November in the House of Representatives, includes the extension of the SSI program to Puerto Rico. The Social Security Administration (SSA), which manages SSI, estimated the extension would have an annual cost of $2.27 billion in 2020, out of the roughly $1.85 trillion total in the Build Back Better bill. In a Senate divided halfway and in which US Vice President Kamala Harris can cast the tiebreaker vote– the legislation, being a budget reconciliation bill, could be approved by a simple majority and avoid the filibuster rule, which typically requires 60 votes to bring a bill to a final vote. However, with Republicans in total opposition to the BBB, Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema halted —without taking a stance on the SSI extension to Puerto Rico— a bill that they considered too onerous. The available path in this context would be that Democrats, with greater probability after the November elections, could agree on a bill that includes some of the proposals of the BBB, among them extending the SSI to Puerto Rico. El Nuevo Día newspaper asked all 100 United States senators for their stance on the extension of SSI to Puerto Rico and whether or not they favor Biden’s promise, which so far has not been able to materialize through any of the two available channels, be it judicial or legislative. Only five senators answered. “Puerto Ricans are citizens of the United States, just like any citizen living in the continental US. The recent ruling by the Supreme Court of the US confirming the exclusion of Puerto Rico from Supplemental Security Income is inconceivable,” said Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. GIllibrand said she favors legislation allowing Puerto Ricans to have access to SSI from the island. She also recognized that older and disabled adults rely heavily on SSI for various aspects of their daily lives, and advocated for equal access and rights for Puerto Ricans. Democratic Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts also supports the extension of SSI benefits to Puerto Ricans “through any possible legislative means, including annual appropriations or budget reconciliation processes, and would vote for this extension if it came to that,” for Senate consideration. Markey stressed that United States citizens living in Puerto Rico and other US territories should be able to access the same benefits as Americans in the 50 states and Washington D.C. He also criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in the Vaello-Madero case, noticing that it “reinforces the incorrect and discriminatory notion that Puerto Ricans and other people living in US territories are second-class citizens, in particularly elderly and disabled residents.” Along the same lines, Democratic Senator Robert Menéndez of New Jersey assured he supports the inclusion of the SSI program for Puerto Rico in a budget reconciliation package. “As far as pushing for any potential package to include an extension of SSI benefits for Americans in Puerto Rico and all territories, I would certainly support including such a provision. It’s fair to do so for the millions of Americans who live in Puerto Rico and other excluded territories,” he stated. Besides Puerto Rico, residents of the US Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa also do not have access to this program. None of the Republican senators and other Democrats, including Manchin, answered direct questions about whether they would support a budget reconciliation bill with the SSI extension. Pending on Congress Apart from the Biden administration bill, on April 20 of last year, Senators Bernie Sanders (D-VT), Markey and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) submitted Senate Bill 1228 to create the Territorial Equity Act of 2021 which, among other equality proposals, would extend the SSI to the island. However, nothing has happened beyond the bill’s introduction on Senate. “US citizens living in Puerto Rico should have the same basic support that all other US citizens are entitled to, including Supplemental Security Income benefits. Congress should pass the Territorial Equity Act,” Warren told this news outlet. The same bill was also introduced in the US House of Representatives by Representative Nydia Velázquez (D-NY), with the co-authorship of fellow New York Representatives Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Ritchie Torres, as well as Rep. Representative Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), chair of the Natural Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over Puerto Rican affairs. After being introduced in the House, H.R. 2713 was referred to the committees on Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, Agriculture, Education and Labor, Natural Resources, as well as the Subcommittee on Nutrition, Oversight and Department Operations, and the Subcommittee on Health. But nothing has progressed since June 2021. Previously, Puerto Rico’s non-voting member of Congress, Jenniffer González, a Republican, introduced on January 28, 2021 the bill H.R. 537, or the Supplemental Security Income Equalization Act, to extend SSI to Puerto Rico. The bill was co-authored by Democratic Representatives Torres and Darren Soto (Florida), as well as delegates from the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. After being referred to the Subcommittee on Social Security and the House Ways and Means Committee, nothing has happened. González acknowledged that, considering the November mid-term elections and the way they could affect the House and Senate’s composition, “opportunities are limited”, for the bill she filed or any other congressional measure to extend the SSI. However, after the Supreme Court’s decision in the Vaello-Madero controversy, she said that “it is time to continue pushing the issue and not let it drop.” “This program is created to give financial aid to people who do not have the economic capacity, are below poverty levels and have certain conditions,” she said in an interview with this news outlet. She likewise stressed that many Puerto Rican families “unfortunately have to migrate to the states in order to receive these benefits.” “It is nothing more than inequity and geographical discrimination, based on the zip code, because the need is the same, the poverty of these people and the conditions by which they’re affected are the same, and this is the only remedy or help offered by the federal government for all these families,” she denounced.

Few budgetary concepts generate as much unintended confusion and deliberate misinformation as the Social Security trust funds. The trust funds are invested in Treasury securities that are just as sound as all other U.S. government securities, held by investors around the globe and regarded as being among the world’s safest investments. Starting in 2021, Social Security began drawing down trust fund reserves to help pay for benefits. Although Social Security has a long-term financial shortfall that must be closed, the program’s combined trust funds will not be depleted until around 2034, which gives policymakers time to develop a carefully crafted financing plan. UPDATED APRIL 17, 2023 How Do the Trust Funds Work? Link to this section Social Security’s financial operations are handled through two federal trust funds: the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) trust fund and the Disability Insurance (DI) trust fund. Although legally distinct, they are often referred to collectively as “the Social Security trust fund.” All of Social Security’s payroll taxes and other earmarked income are deposited in the trust funds, and all of Social Security’s benefits and administrative expenses are paid from the trust funds. Social Security is largely a “pay as you go” program, meaning today’s benefits are funded primarily by the payroll taxes collected from today’s workers. For over three decades, however, Social Security collected more in payroll taxes and other income than it paid in benefits and other expenses, and the Treasury invested the surplus in interest-bearing Treasury securities, ultimately reaching a total of $2.9 trillion in trust fund reserves. In 2021 Social Security began redeeming those reserves to help pay benefits. Payroll taxes from current workers will continue to pay for the bulk of benefits. The trust fund reserves will make up the difference between income and costs until the reserves are depleted. At that point, Social Security’s income will still be able to pay roughly 80 percent of promised benefits — even in the unlikely event that policymakers fail to act. What Is the Trust Funds’ Financial Status? Link to this section If Social Security’s trust funds run out of Treasury bonds to cash in, benefits would not stop — contrary to a common misunderstanding. Social Security is adequately financed in the short term but faces a modest long-term financial shortfall amounting to 1.3 percent of GDP over the next 75 years, the period that the program’s actuaries use in evaluating Social Security’s long-term finances. Following the bipartisan Social Security financing deal in 1983, Social Security ran a surplus every year until 2021. Starting in 2021, Social Security’s total cost exceeded its total income. However, the trust funds’ reserves supplement the program’s income — from payroll taxes, income taxes on benefits paid to higher-income beneficiaries, and interest earned on the trust funds’ bonds — to enable Social Security to keep paying full benefits until 2034. If Social Security’s trust funds run out of Treasury bonds to cash in, benefits would not stop — contrary to a common misunderstanding. At that point, if nothing else is done, Social Security could still pay about 80 percent of promised benefits using its annual tax income. Of course, paying less than full benefits is not an acceptable way to run this vital program, and Congress will need to act to strengthen its long-term finances. Most analyses of Social Security focus on the combined OASI and DI trust funds, since both are integral parts of Social Security, but the two trust funds are, in fact, separate. The Trustees project that the DI trust fund reserves will last through the 75-year long-range projection window, contrasting with the 2057 projected depletion forecasted in the 2021 report. However, the much larger OASI fund is projected to last until 2033. Is It Better to Act Sooner Rather Than Later? Link to this section Not necessarily. Some people mistakenly suggest that Social Security’s shortfall gets larger the longer policymakers wait to address it, but that’s only an artifact of the projections. The annual Social Security trustees’ report includes projections that span the next 75 years. Each year’s new report adds a year in which deficits are relatively large. This increases the estimated 75-year gap, even if the shortfall in each individual year of the projection remains the same. That said, acting sooner to address the shortfall — whether by increasing Social Security’s income, reducing its benefits, or some combination of the two — would spread the burden over more generations of workers and beneficiaries and allow for smaller future adjustments. For example, if Social Security tax increases were phased in soon, current workers could contribute to restoring solvency. But if tax increases were delayed, they would fall entirely on younger workers, and the required increase would be larger. At the same time, however, future generations will be more prosperous and better able to afford adjustments. Policymakers will need to balance these competing concerns. Acting sooner to strengthen Social Security’s financing would give workers plenty of notice about changes so that they can plan their work, saving, and retirement. It would also strengthen public confidence in the system by easing worries about its financing. Social Security faces no imminent crisis, however; policymakers have time to carefully craft a financing package that minimizes cuts to the program’s modest but critical benefits. How Are the Trust Funds Invested? Link to this section The Social Security trust funds are invested entirely in U.S. Treasury securities. Like the Treasury bills, notes, and bonds purchased by private investors around the world, the Treasury securities that the trust funds hold are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. The U.S. government has never defaulted on its obligations, and investors consider U.S. government securities one of the world’s safest investments. By the end of 2021, the trust funds had accumulated $2.9 trillion worth of Treasury securities, earning an average interest rate of 1.4 percent during that year. The Social Security Administration provides monthly reports on the investment holdings of the trust funds, their maturities, and interest rates. The trustees project that the trust funds will earn $65.7 billion in interest income in 2023. What Happens to Trust Fund Surpluses? Link to this section When the rest of the budget is in deficit, a Social Security cash surplus allows the government to borrow less from the public to finance the deficit. (The “public” encompasses all lenders other than federal trust funds, including U.S. individuals and institutions, the Federal Reserve System, and foreign investors.) The Treasury always uses whatever cash is on hand — whether from Social Security contributions or other earmarked or non-earmarked sources — to meet its current obligations before engaging in additional borrowing from the public. There is no sensible alternative to this practice. After all, why should the Treasury borrow funds when it has cash in the till? Money that the federal government borrows, whether from investors or from Social Security, is used to finance the ongoing operations of the government in the same way that money deposited in a bank is used to finance spending by consumers and businesses. The bank depositors will get their money back when needed, and so will the Social Security trust funds.

Because Puerto Rico offers substantial tax advantages, a new trend has begun: cryptocurrency traders, hedge-fund managers, and wealthy individuals have been exiting the mainland to Puerto Rico to avoid President Biden’s proposed increases on capital-gains tax. These changes are now the center of a broad-scale Internal Revenue Service review. According to tax attorneys who advise wealthy individuals, a coordinated campaign was launched quietly this past January by the IRS to scrutinize those taking advantage of tax incentives created to draw wealthy corporations and individuals to Puerto Rico. This pattern has been going on since 2012. According to an IRS report delivered to Congress, over 4,000 residents of the United States mainland, as well as certain companies, moved to the territory from 2012 to 2019. This resulted in the IRS losing millions of dollars in tax revenue.

Wealthy Individuals Now Receiving Inquiry Letters

The Justice Department argued in its filing that the proper venue for deciding the issue is Congress and not the courts. “It is to Congress that the Constitution has entrusted the power to govern territories and to spend money for the general welfare,” it said. The filing stems from the case of José Luis Vaello Madero, who lived in New York from 1985 until he moved to Puerto Rico in 2013 to care for his wife. He kept receiving the supplemental benefits until told in 2016 that he was ineligible. A year later, the Social Security Administration filed civil action against Vaello, demanding he return more than $28,000 he had received in the benefits while living in Puerto Rico. The benefits are available to any U.S. citizen living in the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the Mariana Islands, but are denied to those in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa. Biden, however, said in a statement that the provision is inconsistent with his administration’s policies and values. “I call on Congress to amend the Social Security Act to extend these benefits to the residents of Puerto Rico. ... There can be no second-class citizens in the United States of America,” he said. Instead of supplemental benefits, Puerto Rico has a program called Aid to the Aged, Blind and Disabled. People can’t make more than $65 a month to qualify, compared with $750 monthly for the Social Security supplemental benefit. The average benefit received under Puerto Rico’s program is $77 a month, compared with $533 with the Social Security program.

Looking forward, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, including unan- imously upholding Puerto Rico’s oversight board, suggests that the Court will be less solicitous of equal protection challenges.266 And some programs may be more vulnerable to constitutional attack than others. Programs like SSI and SNAP that have benefit levels for the entire nation except certain ter- ritories seem particularly vulnerable, but Medicaid may be less amenable to litigation by Americans in the territories. Medicaid involves a mix of federal and state funding, and the Supreme Court undid the Affordable Care Act’s attempt to create a national standard of eligibility. The unfavorable signals from the Supreme Court and the difference in programs’ susceptibility to court challenges suggest that Congress may be a more receptive forum to changing the status quo of placing territorial Americans outside the welfare state. Despite being a national legislature that denies meaningful participa- tion to some Americans, including those who are the focus of this Article, Congress could eliminate the territorial exceptionalism in the American wel- fare state. The next Section explains how it could do so.

Residents of Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories do not have a constitutional right to receive certain federal benefits that the government provides to people who live in the 50 states, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in an 8-1 decision. The case, United States v. Vaello Madero, involved Supplemental Security Income, a safety-net program that provides cash assistance to older, disabled, or blind Americans who have very low incomes. Congress excluded residents of Puerto Rico and three other territories from the program. Jose Luis Vaello-Madero, a U.S. citizen who lives in Puerto Rico, argued that the exclusion violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment for all. In an opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court rejected that argument. “The Constitution affords Congress substantial discretion over how to structure federal tax and benefits programs for residents of the Territories,” Kavanaugh wrote. Many federal laws, Kavanaugh noted, treat the territories differently from the states — and not always to the detriment of the territories’ residents. For instance, Puerto Rico residents are exempt from federal income tax, though they do pay other federal taxes such as Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment taxes. “In devising tax and benefits programs, it is reasonable for Congress to take account of the general balance of benefits to and burdens on the residents of Puerto Rico,” Kavanaugh wrote. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the lone dissenter. “In my view,” she wrote, “there is no rational basis for Congress to treat needy citizens living anywhere in the United States so differently from others. To hold otherwise, as the Court does, is irrational and antithetical to the very nature of the SSI program and the equal protection of citizens guaranteed by the Constitution.” Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch each wrote separate concurrences. Thomas questioned the court’s longstanding precedent that the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause (which applies to the federal government and was the basis for Vaello-Madero’s constitutional challenge) contains an equal-protection guarantee that is identical to the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment (which applies to the states). Thomas said the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause may offer a more solid constitutional basis for prohibiting racial discrimination by the federal government. Gorsuch called on the court to formally overturn a series of notorious early-20th-century decisions, known as the Insular Cases, in which the court invoked racist stereotypes and held that some constitutional rights do not extend to people living in Puerto Rico and other so-called “unincorporated” territories. As Gorsuch acknowledged, however, neither the federal government nor Vaello-Madero had asked the court to overturn the Insular Cases. Instead, the case was litigated under the assumption that the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection applies in Puerto Rico. Kavanaugh’s majority opinion held that Congress’ exclusion of SSI benefits does not violate that guarantee, a holding that Gorsuch joined. President Joe Biden has urged Congress to end the exclusion and extend the SSI program to Puerto Rico. But even if Congress did so, that would be far from the end of differential treatment of the territories in federal policymaking. Other safety-net programs also withhold benefits from the territories, even though the territories tend to have higher unemployment and lower average incomes than the states. Kavanaugh’s opinion suggests that Congress has wide latitude to continue or even increase this differential treatment so long as the government can point to a rational basis — the lowest level of constitutional scrutiny — for doing so.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a federal law that denies disability benefits to residents of Puerto Rico. The court ruled 8-1 that Congress can deny Supplemental Income Security, or SSI, benefits to Puerto Rico residents because they don’t pay all federal taxes. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the court’s three liberals, whose family stems from Puerto Rico, dissented. SSI benefits are meant to offer regular financial assistance for disabled and elderly people in need. The program is available to people living in the 50 U.S. states, but not to those living in some U.S. territories. The question before the high court centered on whether the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution required Congress to extend SSI benefits to Puerto Rico. A lower appeals court had ruled that excluding SSI benefits to residents there was unconstitutional. The Department of Justice argued before the Supreme Court last year that that the appellate ruling should be reversed. Puerto Rico has been a U.S. territory since the Spanish-American War in 1898, and its residents are U.S. citizens, but they have no vote for president or representation in Congress. They also do not pay federal income tax. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion that “Congress has long maintained federal tax and benefits programs for residents of Puerto Rico and the other Territories that differ in some respects from the federal tax and benefits programs for residents of the 50 States.” Kavanaugh noted that Puerto Rico residents are mostly exempt from federal income, estate and excise taxes, among others. They do pay other federal taxes, such as Social Security, Medicare and unemployment taxes, and they are eligible for the benefits programs that those taxes fund. “But just as not every federal tax extends to residents of Puerto Rico, so too not every federal benefits program extends to residents of Puerto Rico,” Kavanaugh wrote. The case stems from 2013, when New York resident Jose Luis Vaello Madero, who was receiving SSI benefits, moved to Puerto Rico where he continued to receive those benefits payments, which totaled more than $28,000, for several years. The government sued Vaello Madero, but a federal district court and a federal appeals court sided with him. The Supreme Court, however, ruled that the existing legal precedent indicated that Congress had satisfied its requirements in distinguishing Puerto Rico from the 50 states when it comes to SSI benefits. Siding with Vaello Madero could invite a host of “far reaching consequences,” Kavanaugh added, including possibly inflicting “significant new financial burdens on residents of Puerto Rico.” Sotomayor dissented. “In my view, there is no rational basis for Congress to treat needy citizens living anywhere in the United States so differently from others,” she wrote. “To hold otherwise, as the Court does, is irrational and antithetical to the very nature of the SSI program and the equal protection of citizens guaranteed by the Constitution,” Sotomayor wrote.

The Justice Department argued in its filing that the proper venue for deciding the issue is Congress and not the courts. “It is to Congress that the Constitution has entrusted the power to govern territories and to spend money for the general welfare,” it said. The filing stems from the case of José Luis Vaello Madero, who lived in New York from 1985 until he moved to Puerto Rico in 2013 to care for his wife. He kept receiving the supplemental benefits until told in 2016 that he was ineligible. A year later, the Social Security Administration filed civil action against Vaello, demanding he return more than $28,000 he had received in the benefits while living in Puerto Rico. The benefits are available to any U.S. citizen living in the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the Mariana Islands, but are denied to those in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa. Biden, however, said in a statement that the provision is inconsistent with his administration’s policies and values. “I call on Congress to amend the Social Security Act to extend these benefits to the residents of Puerto Rico. ... There can be no second-class citizens in the United States of America,” he said. Instead of supplemental benefits, Puerto Rico has a program called Aid to the Aged, Blind and Disabled. People can’t make more than $65 a month to qualify, compared with $750 monthly for the Social Security supplemental benefit. The average benefit received under Puerto Rico’s program is $77 a month, compared with $533 with the Social Security program.

Gerald Rosenberg's new edition of The Hollow Hope1 repeats his earlier book-length argument against the prospects of social reform through law.2 Complete with tables, charts, and updated statistics, the new edition replies to his critics and extends his analysis to a number of new areas, including same-sex marriage. 3 The new material reinforces his original conclusion that legal rulings fail to spark social progress not already underway.4 Therefore, reformers with limited resources and energy should direct their efforts to avenues such as electoral politics, grassroots organizing, and street activism. Nothing is wrong, according to Rosenberg, with pressing for favorable legal rulings,5 but one should not hold out unrealistic hopes for their efficacy. Roe v. Wade,6 for example, did little to increase a woman's access to abortion services.7 Brown v. Board of Education8 produced a negligible increase in the proportion of black schoolchildren attending integrated schools, and rulings upholding gay marriage, according to the new edition, have yielded similarly unimpressive results.9 If Rosenberg is right, as I believe he is, regarding the difficulty of achieving social reform through the judicial branch, why is his thesis so counterintuitive? In this Essay, I aim to accomplish two goals: explain why Rosenberg's analysis seems to fly in the face of common knowledge, and, second, why his argument is nevertheless sound. Doing so will entail explaining a number of mechanisms that inhibit social change. I. DOES THE COURT SYSTEM REALLY WORK TO EFFECT CHANGE? Why do most readers, at least ones of a liberal persuasion, react to Rosenberg's thesis with shock and disbelief? Most of us take it as an article of faith that law, including the judge-made variety, really does work. We seem to see examples of this every day. If a prosecutor wins a jury verdict, the defendant goes to jail. If a legal services attorney wins a judgment that a poor family's landlord was at fault for maintaining the stairway in a dangerous condition, the landlord must pay to fix it. If the government shows that Smith failed to file a tax return for a certain year, Smith has to pay, including, probably, a fine. In everyday experience, then, judicial rulings make a difference. Legislation does so, too. State X passes a new law providing that no one may allow trees to shade an adjacent house's solar panels. Shortly thereafter, we notice that our neighbors obediently begin topping their trees. A state requires that drivers pass an eye examination starting at age 70 to renew their licenses. Across the state a host of senior citizens buy newer, stronger eyeglasses. Certain unpopular laws-such as ones forbidding marijuana use-may be widely violated.10 But these laws are the exception and usually concern victimless crime and actions that are merely mala prohibita. 11 With acts that society widely condemns and regards as mala in se,12 compliance is much higher. Even laws that compel (rather than forbid) behavior, such as those regarding the filing . The same is true for cases in which a minority group believes the law is both unjust and unlikely to change anytime soon. Then the group may seek actively to frustrate enforcement. Anti-snitching campaigns in the black community or efforts by Latino organizations to provide sanctuary or supplies to undocumented immigrants crossing the desert on foot are recent examples.16 But even here, the law exhibits a kind of efficacy-the group seeking to nullify it has to go through great efforts and incur considerable risk to do so. Everyday experience with cases like these, then, conveys the impression that law "really works." How could Rosenberg seemingly maintain the opposite? The reason is that he is really not talking about individual, relatively routine cases where the only question is enforcement. Instead, he explores whether legal rules effectively change broad social attitudes, mores, and practices. When Brown v. Board of Education came down, did Americans begin thinking about and acting toward blacks differently? By and large they did not; Rosenberg provides impressive evidence on this point." When the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, did a woman's access to abortion services improve? Again, no; social disapproval did the work that an explicit legal prohibition formerly did, so that women desiring abortions were little better off than before.18 And we find the same in other areas where law-reform advocates secure a breakthrough victory.19 Rulings like those upholding same-sex marriage were soon rolled back by narrow construction, administrative foot-dragging, or delay resulting in little progress for the "victorious" group. 20 Two REASONS FOR THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM'S INEFFICACY If judicial rulings are relatively ineffective in changing social values and practices in highly contested areas such as school desegregation, abortion, environmentalism, and same-sex marriage, what accounts for this failure? I believe that the answer has to do with two related mechanisms. I call the first the reconstructive paradox.21 This theory holds, essentially, that the greater a social evil-say, women's subordination or black slavery-the more massive the social effort required to eradicate it.22 Moreover, because the belief or practice is so deeply embedded, it is invisible to many.23 Furthermore, the massive social effort necessary to alter a historical social practice will inevitably collide with other social values-property rights, settled expectations, the southern way of life, etc.-that are widely held.24 This effort will require shifts in spending and changes in the way we relate to one another. These efforts for social change, by contrast, will be out in the open, where they will spark sharp resistance and the accusation that the reformers are totalitarians, moving too fast, imposing costs on innocent people, reviving old grudges, and the like.25 These considerations will enable the opposition to feel righteous and believe that the reformers sacrifice real liberty and security for a nebulous goal. For these reasons, social reform and reconstruction will strike most, at first, as dubious, premature, dangerous, and wrong. 26 A second, closely related, mechanism deals with words and meaning. Suppose, as a hypothetical example, that the Supreme Court one day announces a new approach to pupil assignment rules. Separate but equal educational facilities no longer satisfy the requirements of equal protection.27 Instead, public school authorities may not use race as a criterion for assigning students to schools, especially if they intend to produce separate schools for white and black children. Questions immediately arise as to what the Supreme Court meant. Does the ruling apply only in the South?28 Must school districts bus children to achieve racial balance, or may they rely on remedies that operate on the basis of school choice? 29 What about segregation resulting from housing patterns and neighborhood preferences? 3 Suppose, in the wake of the ruling, most of the white parents move out of a city and take up residence in all-white suburbs? 31 Does the ruling apply to public accommodations, swimming pools, and movie theaters, or just to schools? What about singles ads in newspapers and separate high school proms? Immediately after a law-reform ruling like Brown, public authorities will confront a host of questions like those just listed. And because the new ruling appears to go against the grain, authorities, even those with good will, likely will conclude that the Supreme Court could not have meant that.32 In the end, the surprising new ruling will end up meaning very little. 33 One way to understand this mechanism is by means of a device that narrative theorist Jean Stefancic and I have called the "empathic fallacy.134 A counterpart of the "pathetic fallacy," familiar from literary theory, the empathic fallacy is the mistaken belief that one can change another's beliefs and attitudes through words alone. In literature, the pathetic fallacy holds that nature is like us with moods, feelings, and intentions that we can read and understand. The poet, seeing rain, writes "The world weeps with me. 35 The empathic fallacy, which we coin, holds that narratives are of relatively slight use in dispelling pre-existing ones. A reader confronted with a new narrative-a black heroine, for example, when she has come to believe that blacks are lascivious and lazy, the opposite of heroic-will disbelieve it, or else pronounce the present case an exception. We are, in a sense, our stock of narratives. 36 These long held narratives form the basis against which we judge and interpret new ones, such as ones about intelligent African Americans; brave, resourceful women; energetic, hardworking undocumented aliens; or loving parents who are gay or lesbian. Unless the new narrative is unusually clever, calculated to resonate with another that we already hold, we tend to reject it as outrageous, extreme, or wrong.37 Supreme Court opinions are, of course, narratives-stories-and thus subject to both mechanisms. Over the course of history, a few Supreme Court opinions have contained such memorable language ("Poor Joshua,"38 "There is no caste here"39) that they have moved significant numbers of readers and hastened reform. Rosenberg correctly notes their rarity, although he would be wrong if he maintains that the number is zero. CONCLUSION Rosenberg's new edition, then, soberly reminds reformers not to place undue reliance on courts and litigation. If dispossessed groups wish to combat unfair practices and laws, the legal profession may offer them symbolic victories, but little more. To secure real gains, they will need to explore other avenues, including storytelling and literature, electoral politics, and the oldest remedy of all-self-help and resistance to illegitimate authority.

When the Supreme Court rules on a constitutional issue, that judgment is virtually final; its decisions can be altered only by the rarely used procedure of constitutional amendment or by a new ruling of the Court. However, when the Court interprets a statute, new legislative action can be taken.

Imagine living in a community within the United States where the local government only permits people of the majority race to own land. Those who are not members of the majority race may vote in most elections, but county councils, in accordance with the customs of the majority race, elect the upper house of the bicameral legislature; furthermore, only the heads of families of the majority race--who fulfill their obligations as those customs require--may hold office. While outsiders perceive the community as welcoming and friendly, the view from within differs: The local government has enacted laws mandating preferential hiring for members of the majority race, making it more difficult for "outsiders" to enter certain licensed professions and turning a blind eye to factories staffed by hundreds of de facto slaves of minority races subject to corporal punishment. Although the Supreme Court of the United States has issued decisions holding many of these practices unconstitutional, the local government has publicly asserted that it will not follow those decisions because they are inconsistent with local culture. The above is not a historical description of life in the Jim Crow South. Rather, it represents the current situation in American Samoa, a U.S. territory. Judges and scholars routinely describe the people of American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands as second-class citizens within the United States. (1) At the turn of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court of the United States caused this characterization in the Insular Cases when it established them as "a sub-class of United States citizens, unequal in rights to the rest of the body politic" residing in "what amounts to a political ghetto" based on the premise that "the United States could hold territories and their inhabitants in a colonial status ad infinitum." (2) It should come as no surprise that contemporary legal scholarship portrays the territories as "systematically forgotten and mistreated" and highlights the federal government's perpetuation of economic, political, and other disparities on them. (3) What has drawn virtually no attention, however, is the discrimination that territorial governments have perpetuated--and in some cases continue to perpetuate--against their own citizens based on gender, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, and other immutable characteristics. (4) While territorial governments and their allies frequently urge the Supreme Court of the United States to overturn the Insular Cases in high-profile cases involving their relationship with the federal government, these same territorial governments often embrace the Insular Cases in the lower federal courts and use them as a shield to prevent judicial scrutiny of local legislation or other practices. (5) In doing so, the oppressed become the oppressors and use the tools of their own oppression to establish a subclass within their own subclass--in effect, third-class citizens.