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The island of Puerto Rico is many things: a tropical paradise, a U.S. territory and an economic mess. After years of deficits, state-owned institutions in Puerto Rico owe investors some $73 billion. That's four times the debt that forced Detroit into bankruptcy two years ago. The bill is now due.

One of the most visible signs of the crisis is a tent city on the plaza in front of Puerto Rico's historic Capitol building in San Juan. For several weeks, a group of protesters has been camped out, with signs, rallies and music. The group is opposing plans by Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla to raise taxes to help cover Puerto Rico's crippling debt.

Labor organizer Javier Lopez says, "We want fair reform. Those who have more should pay more, not the working poor."

For months now, the financial crisis has been front page news in Puerto Rico, and people are getting angrier.

Sergio Marxuach, an analyst with the Center for a New Economy in San Juan, says he gets asked about it all the time, on the street and even in his local pharmacy. Marxuach says the pharmacist asked him, " 'Do you think, should I move to Miami? I got this offer to work at a pharmacy in Miami.' I said, 'Well, I have no idea what your financial situation is. I can tell you what's going on in Puerto Rico.' But people are very worried."

For 25 years, Puerto Rico has been caught in a debilitating economic spiral. Decades of recession and slow economic growth forced a succession of governments to take out loans to cover budget deficits.

"What we have been doing is basically borrowing to survive today," Marxuach says. "Unfortunately, our debt levels have gotten to a point where the rating agencies have downgraded our credit to below investment grade."

With a junk status rating, Puerto Rico is trying to negotiate a new bond sale with Wall Street investors. At the same time, the island's troubled energy company, PREPA, is desperately trying to stave off default.

As president of the Government Development Bank, Melba Acosta-Febo is Puerto Rico's point person on its economic crisis. For months, she has shuttled between the island, Washington, D.C., and New York City.

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Nearly 20 Wall Street bankers filed out of her office in San Juan just before her interview with NPR. They'd just finished grilling Acosta-Febo for more than an hour, but she was unruffled.

"In these meetings," she says, "most of the questions are very similar questions. I mean, about all issues — liquidity, finances."

Acosta-Febo says the Padilla administration inherited the huge debt and the troubled economy. But after years of mismanagement and borrowing, there aren't any easy solutions.

To deal with its debt, Puerto Rico passed a law that would allow troubled agencies like the state-owned power company to seek bankruptcy protection. A federal judge struck down the law, though, ruling it violated the federal Bankruptcy Code.

The commonwealth is appealing that decision. It's also pushing for a law in Congress to amend the Bankruptcy Code to include Puerto Rico.

In the meantime, the island needs to find money to pay its creditors. And that means raising taxes.

But in Puerto Rico, raising taxes is one thing — collecting them is another. Tax evasion is rampant. A recent study by consultant KPMG reported that Puerto Rico collects just 56 percent of the sales tax that's due.

Economist Marxuach says, "You could see doctors here who charge you on a cash basis only. We're talking people who went to Harvard Med, Johns Hopkins, you know. And would have this sign that said: No Checks, No Credit Cards, No ATM Cards. Just Cash."

To combat tax evasion, Puerto Rico recently passed a law requiring merchants to take some other payment in addition to cash. The Padilla administration also wants to adopt a value-added tax, a consumption tax that would be more difficult to evade.

Development bank head Acosta-Febo concedes that small businesses are likely to take the biggest hit from the new tax. But that's only fair, she says.

"Many of those people don't report the whole revenues or overreport expenses," she says. "So now suddenly, because they're paying consumption, they're paying more. But that's part of what we're doing to curtail tax evasion and to bring more money to the system."

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Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla (right) delivers his budget plan for Puerto Rico's upcoming fiscal year at the Capitol in San Juan on April 30. Legislators rejected his call to raise taxes as a way to compensate for the island's rampant tax evasion. Ricardo Arduengo/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Ricardo Arduengo/AP

Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla (right) delivers his budget plan for Puerto Rico's upcoming fiscal year at the Capitol in San Juan on April 30. Legislators rejected his call to raise taxes as a way to compensate for the island's rampant tax evasion.

Ricardo Arduengo/AP

Even some within Padilla's own party are skeptical about raising taxes to pay down the debt. Puerto Rico's House recently voted down his tax plan. San Juan Sen. Ramon Luis Nieves says he believes in the end, the commonwealth may simply be unable to pay its $73 billion debt in full.

"At some point," Nieves says, "we will have to decide either to pay for the debt service, or pay for our schools and hospitals, health care and social services for the poor. I don't want to reach that point."

But without enough money to pay its debts and with bankruptcy currently not an option, ultimately it may not be Puerto Rico, but bondholders on Wall Street who will decide the island's future.

Puerto Rico

financial overhaul

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And when a policeman in Compton's grabbed a drag queen, she threw a cup of coffee in his face. The cafeteria "erupted," according to Susan Stryker, a historian who directed Screaming Queens. People flipped tables and threw cutlery. Sugar shakers crashed through the restaurant's windows and doors. Drag queens swung their heavy purses at officers. Outside on the street, dozens of people fought back as police forced them into paddy wagons. The crowd trashed a cop car and set a newsstand on fire.

"We just got tired of it," St. Jaymes told Stryker. "We got tired of being harassed. We got tired of being made to go into the men's room when we were dressed like women. We wanted our rights."

If the famous Stonewall riots in New York City were the origin of this nation's gay rights movement, the Tenderloin upheaval three years before was "the transgender community's debut on the stage of American political history," according to Stryker. "It was the first known instance of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment in United States history."

Stonewall is often thought of as an uprising of gay men. In reality, "it was drag queens, Black drag queens, who fought the police at the famous Stonewall Inn rebellion in 1969," wrote lesbian novelist and playwright Sarah Schulman in a 1985 novel. "Years later, a group of nouveau-respectable gays tried to construct a memorial to Stonewall in the park across from the old bar. The piece consisted of two white clone-like thin gay men and two white, young lesbians with perfect noses. They were made of a plaster-like substance, pasty and white as the people who paid for it."

While the legacy of Stonewall was whitewashed, the rage and resistance of the San Francisco group went largely unremarked — even among each other.

"We didn't think this was a big deal," Ching told me. "It was a natural thing for people to do back then, to protest."

Besides memories of police and patrons who were there that night, the only record of the riot that survived into the present is a short article by gay activist Raymond Broshears. He wrote it for the program of the first San Francisco gay pride parade, in 1972. Decades later, Stryker found his account and began to seek out the whole story. Her search for people who had been in the Tenderloin back then who spent time at Compton's or took part in the riot led her to Ching, St. Jaymes and another trans woman named Felicia Elizondo.

Courtesy of Tamara Ching

Ching grew up in San Francisco. She recalls hanging out with beatniks on Grant Avenue and began doing sex work as a teenager, in 1965. "My mom was an alcoholic and she let me run the streets and do my own thing."

Ching wasn't at the riot that night, but she knew Compton's well. "It was good to go and be seen and talk to people about what happened during the night. To make sure everybody's OK, everyone made their coins, everybody's coming down off drugs and didn't overdose, and that you didn't go to jail that night," she said.

"Compton's nourished people. People would sit there for days drinking a cup of coffee. I would buy a full meal. I don't cook and I loved eating at Compton's — it was like downtown."

The Tenderloin in the 1960s was a red light district and a residential ghetto. Stryker told me that the neighborhood was a particular destination and home to "young people who maybe had been kicked out by their families and were living on the street. And trans people who could lose a job at any moment or not be hired, who wouldn't be rented to, who had to live in crappy residential hotels in a bad part of town, and who had to do survival sex work to support themselves."

"We sold ourselves because we need to make a living but we sold ourselves because we wanted to be loved," Elizondo says in Stryker's film. Ching told me sex work in the Tenderloin empowered her. She had a job with the government but still worked the streets at night.

Whether for survival, pleasure or some combination of both, sex work left women vulnerable to violence and put them in closer contact with police. But even those who weren't hustling had frequent encounters with law enforcement. St. Jaymes, who ran the residential hotel, told Stryker she was arrested frequently, even though she wasn't a sex worker. "If we had lipstick on, if we had mascara on, if our hair was too long, we had to put it under a cap. If the buttons was on the wrong side, like a blouse, they would take you to jail because they felt it was female impersonation."

"The police could harass you at any time," Ching told me. "They would ask you for pieces of ID. You had to have your male ID if you were born male and didn't go through a sex change. They would pat you down, and while they're patting you down, of course they're feeling you up," she continued. "They would arrest you and put you in the big van, Big Bertha, and drive you around town. When they turned a corner they turned sharply, so people would fall. They'd go over a bump, fast down the hill and make you look a mess by the time you got to the booking station."

Police relations with the trans, drag and gay communities in the Tenderloin reached a boiling point in 1966. Across San Francisco resistance was in the air. Local anti-war protests were gaining momentum. Civil rights activists and religious leaders at a Tenderloin church organized to bring government anti-poverty resources to the neighborhood. A group of radical young queers calling themselves Vanguard started pushing back against discrimination by police and business owners. After Compton's management started kicking them out of the restaurant, they picketed outside on July 18, 1966. Viewed in the context of 1960s activism, identity politics and anti-poverty efforts, the riots that occurred a few weeks later seem inevitable.

Though it can take decades to understand motivations for a particular riot or movement of militant resistance in the streets, there are plenty of instances when a group's anger and frustration over injustice is later celebrated as a civil rights victory. We have a parade every year to commemorate the Stonewall riots — three nights when rioters burned down a bar and tried to overturn a paddy wagon. Now that Bruce Jenner has told Diane Sawyer, "I'm a woman," and Oprah interviewed Janet Mock, we can look at a charge like "female impersonation" and see the Compton's riot as another act of resistance against injustice. One day, history books, pundits and academics could very well talk about the recent unrest in Baltimore or Ferguson the same way.

Right after the Compton's episode, Ching heard about what had happened. "To me, nothing was out of the ordinary," she told me. "We lived to survive day to day. We didn't realize we'd made history."

Nicole Pasulka has contributed to Mother Jones, The Believer, BuzzFeed and Vice.

President Obama says he wants consumers around the world buying more products stamped, "Made in the U.S.A."

That's one reason he's pushing a controversial Asian trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Obama has chosen a curious setting to make his pitch for the trade agreement this week. He'll be speaking Friday at the Beaverton, Ore., headquarters of the Nike Corporation.

"All of their footwear, all of their clothing is produced in contract factories in places like Vietnam and Indonesia and China," said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a watchdog group that monitors overseas factories.

"Nike is one of the companies that helped perfect the sourcing model that now defines production in footwear and garments and other major light manufacturing sectors. And it's a model based on cheap labor and poor working conditions," Nova said.

Nike, which had $28 billion in sales last year, did not respond to telephone and email requests for comment.

After a burst of bad publicity in the 1990s, Nike tried to clean up factory abuses such as child labor. But the company's most recent report on "sustainable business performance" acknowledges nearly a third of the factories making its products fall short of Nike's own standards. Hours and wages are the most common complaints.

That raises eyebrows of critics who ask why the president would choose such a setting to make the case for his Asia-Pacific trade deal. The administration says the proposed agreement is designed to raise labor standards in the 12 participating countries including Vietnam, the No. 1 source for Nike shoes.

"The president believes that by raising labor standards and raising environmental standards throughout the Asia-Pacific region, that will level the playing field for American businesses," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest. "No longer will companies be able to gain an unfair advantage by capitalizing on low labor standards."

When Nike first blazed the trail of offshore manufacturing in the 1960s, more than 90 percent of the shoes Americans wore were still made domestically. But since then, nearly every other American shoemaker has followed Nike's path, and today more than 99 percent of our shoes are imported, mostly from China, Vietnam and Indonesia.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, who represents Nike's home state of Oregon, is one of the leading supporters of the trade deal. He wrote a letter two years ago arguing there's no justification for the tariffs levied on imported shoes, now that there's virtually no domestic manufacturing left to protect. Shoe tariffs totaled $2.7 billion last year, of which about $460 million was for shoes from countries covered by the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Supporters say lowering those tariffs would give a boost to the shoe design and marketing jobs that are still located in the United States.

"It will help us design more shoes. It will help us sell more shoes. And when we're selling more shoes, we're creating more jobs throughout the supply chain," said Matt Priest, president of the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America, an industry trade group.

Indeed, the Asia-Pacific trade deal is less about defending labor-intensive manufacturing than promoting intellectual property, services and agriculture sectors where the U.S. has a competitive advantage. But that raises a question: Why doesn't the president's West Coast pitch for the trade deal take him to a movie studio or a rice farm — businesses where the products still say "Made in the U.S.A."?

Looking for new growth and promising better restaurant experiences for customers, McDonald's President and CEO Steve Easterbrook is changing how the chain manages global markets and plans to boost the number of franchised restaurants.

"The reality is, our recent performance has been poor," Easterbrook said in a video released Monday. "The numbers don't lie. Which is why, as we celebrate 60 years of McDonald's, I will not shy away from resetting this business."

McDonald's will change the way it organizes global markets, putting leaders in charge of four main groups. The new structure relies less on geography and more on market maturity and growth prospects:

The United States: more than 40 percent of operating income in 2014.

International Lead Markets: Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the U.K., where established markets represent another 40 percent of operating income.

High-Growth Markets: China, Italy, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands (10 percent of operating income).

Foundational Markets: Around 100 markets, which will mostly be franchised (independently owned).

Calling it "a global turnaround," Easterbrook, who was named CEO in January — after a year in which global sales and revenue decreased — said McDonald's will become a "modern progressive burger company."

Its slump has also led McDonald's to tinker with its menu — including the addition last month of a $5 burger. NPR's Marilyn Geewax reported for The Salt:

"McDonald's has been struggling in recent years to keep pace with fast-casual chains like Five Guys and Chipotle Mexican Grill.

"So the fast-food giant is testing different menu options to lure back customers. Starting later this month, McDonald's diners will be able to choose a $4.99 sandwich — the Sirloin Third Pound burger."

Other changes Marilyn covered included a new range of toppings, all-day breakfast and new pastries, such as a bundt cake.

Aside from the promises of better food with better service, Easterbrook's video address was also notable for his ability to keep his eyes open for long periods of time without blinking. By our count, in one stretch, he went nearly a minute without closing his eyes.

McDonald's