Caribbean, Haiti, International, USA

Help Haiti: The Unforgiven Country Cries Out

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By Chris Floyd
January 15, 2010 – chris-floyd.com

Via Mark Crispin Miller, the Center for Constitutional Rights points to some venues for getting help to the people of Haiti: Partners in Health and the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund. You can find several more in this listing from the New York Times.

I.

HaitiThe relentlessly maintained, deliberately inflicted political and economic ruin of Haiti has a direct bearing on the amount of death and devastation that the country is suffering today after the earthquake. It will also greatly cripple any recovery from this natural disaster. As detailed below, Washington’s rapacious economic policies have destroyed all attempts to build a sustainable economy in Haiti, driving people off the land and from small communities into packed, dangerous, unhealthy shantytowns, to try to eke out a meager existence in the sweatshops owned by Western elites and their local cronies. All attempts at changing a manifestly unjust society have been ruthlessly suppressed by the direct or collateral hand of Western elites.
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Caribbean, Haiti, International, USA

Haiti: The Aid Masquerade

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By Kerry Trueman
January 14, 2010 – Green Fork

HaitiThe horror in Haiti is beyond anything we can imagine in the U.S., but this apocalyptic catastrophe has something in common with Hurricane Katrina; in both cases, a terrible natural disaster was made infinitely worse by human negligence and incompetence. How many thousands of Haitians could have survived the earthquake if the country weren’t crippled by chronic poverty, shoddy infrastructure, environmental degradation and a host of other ills that have plagued Haiti for centuries?
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Caribbean, Haiti, International, USA

Cuba is Missing… From US Reports on the International Response to Haiti’s Earthquake

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By Dave Lindorff
January 15, 2010 – thiscantbehappening.net

HaitiThere are only two US media outlets that have reported on Cuba’s response to the deadly 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti. One was Fox News, which claimed, wrongly, that the Cubans were absent from the list of neighboring Caribbean countries providing aid. The other was the Christian Science Monitor (a respected news organization that recently shut down its print edition), which reported correctly that Cuba had dispatched 30 doctors to the stricken nation.
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Caribbean, Haiti, International, USA

Catastrophe in Haiti

By Ashley Smith
January 14, 2010 – socialistworker.org

HaitiA devastating earthquake, the worst in 200 years, struck Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, laying waste to the city and killing untold numbers of people. The quake measured 7.0 on the Richter scale, and detonated more than 30 aftershocks, all more than 4.5 in magnitude, through the night and into Wednesday morning.

The earthquake toppled poorly constructed houses, hotels, hospitals and even the capital city’s main political buildings, including the presidential palace. The collapse of so many structures sent a giant cloud into the sky, which hovered over the city, raining dust down onto the wasteland below.
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Caribbean, Haiti, International, USA

Our Role in Haiti’s Plight

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If we are serious about assisting this devastated land we must stop trying to control and exploit it

By Peter Hallward
January 13, 2010 – guardian.co.uk

HaitiAny large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti’s capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it’s no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.
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COP, PNM, Politics, UNC

Frontier Theory in UNC-COP Relations

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By Stephen Kangal
January 13, 2010
Trinidad and Tobago News Blog
www.trinidadandtobagonews.com/blog

Kamla Persad-BissessarIt must be made patently clear that the COP is predominantly, but not exclusively, a political derivative of the UNC resulting from the conflict of the contending forces of disintegration/one-manship that is in the DNA of the latter. Accordingly, since the inception of the COP at the Center of Excellence on 10 September 2006, there has not yet emerged or negotiated and/or developed a clear and defining boundary or demarcation line that separates the two political organizations. There is a huge zone of overlapping loyalties. Those lines of demarcation at the individual popular membership level can be considered to be more imaginary than real.
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Caribbean, Haiti, International, USA

7.0 Earthquake Devastates Haiti

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Haiti earthquake aftermath

Wyclef Jean, Fellow Celebs Solicit Support for Haiti

Photos

Large Number Of UN Staff Missing After Haiti Quake -Official

Hundreds feared dead in Haiti earthquake

7.0 quake hits Haiti, hospital collapses
A strong earthquake hit Haiti on Tuesday, where a hospital collapsed and people were screaming for help. The earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 and was centered about 10 miles west from Port-au-Prince, the USGS said. (Jan. 12)
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Entertainment, General T&T, International

Beyoncé a Boundary

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By Raffique Shah
January 10, 2010
Trinidad and Tobago News Blog
www.trinidadandtobagonews.com/blog

BeyoncéShould readers feel I am making light of a serious subject, I plead guilty. With the coming of artiste Beyoncé taking on proportions of the second coming of Christ, I cannot help but enjoy a sense of detached amusement. First, I had to find out just who the hell Beyoncé was. Upon enquiring, I repeatedly mispronounced the name-Beyonce, Beyond-only to be rudely corrected by my daughter.
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International, USA

The American Elite

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By William Blum
January 6th, 2010 – killinghope.org

1900 Campaign poster for the Republican PartyLincoln Gordon died a few weeks ago at the age of 96. He had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard at the age of 19, received a doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, published his first book at 22, with dozens more to follow on government, economics, and foreign policy in Europe and Latin America. He joined the Harvard faculty at 23. Dr. Gordon was an executive on the War Production Board during World War II, a top administrator of Marshall Plan programs in postwar Europe, ambassador to Brazil, held other high positions at the State Department and the White House, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, economist at the Brookings Institution, president of Johns Hopkins University. President Lyndon B. Johnson praised Gordon’s diplomatic service as "a rare combination of experience, idealism and practical judgment".
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