Please Don’t Superdome Haiti by Michelle Chen
For those who know how race and media intersect in times of crisis, the earthquake in Haiti has probably sent a bump through your pop-cultural seismograph. Now it’s becoming a flashpoint.
Continue reading Haiti slum district hit hard
Disaster Capitalism Headed to Haiti
By Stephen Lendman
January 18, 2010
In her book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” Naomi Klein explores the myth of free market democracy, explaining how neoliberalism dominates the world with America its main exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic shifts, and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere.
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The Rescue Operation’s Priorities in Haiti
Class and Race Fear
By Nelson P. Valdés
January 18, 2010 – counterpunch.org
“The contempt we have been taught to entertain for blacks, make us fear many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience.”
– Alexander Hamilton in letter to John Hay, 1799.“Only those who hate the black population, see hatred in blacks”
– José Martí, Montecristi Manifesto, 1895
The recent earthquakes that have demolished the city of Port au Prince and its surroundings has left Haiti stateless, ever poorer, desperate and in need of long term global assistance. A world-wide rescue operation has been initiated. But, it is questionable to what extent the best interests of the people of Haiti have been and will be considered, in the long run.
Continue reading The Rescue Operation’s Priorities in Haiti
Political Accommodation and UNC Leadership Race
By Stephen Kangal
January 18, 2010
It appears to me that the most critically dominant and indeed the determining factor that will influence the outcome of the UNC’s January 24 internal elections would appear to and should be:
which one of the three candidates vying for the UNC leadership presents the brightest and most convincing prospects for forging sustainable and credible unity/accommodation with the COP at the next general elections?
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Disputes emerge over Haiti aid control
France, Venezuela, Nicaragua Accuse the US of Occupying Haiti
The United Nations must investigate and clarify the dominant U.S. role in earthquake-ravaged Haiti, a French minister said Monday, claiming that international aid efforts were about helping Haiti, not “occupying” it.
Chavez says U.S. occupying Haiti in name of aid
Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez on Sunday accused the United States of using the earthquake in Haiti as a pretext to occupy the devastated Caribbean country and offered to send fuel from his OPEC nation.
Clash over Haiti aid flights
Alain Joyandet, French co-operation minister, told reporters at the airport he had protested to Washington via the US ambassador about the US military’s management of the airport where he said a French medical aid flight had been turned away.
Ortega warns of US deployment in Haiti
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega says that the United States has taken advantage of the massive quake in Haiti and deployed troops in the country.
“What is happening in Haiti seriously concerns me as US troops have already taken control of the airport,” Ortega said on Saturday.
Continue reading Disputes emerge over Haiti aid control
Reparations, not handouts, for Haiti
By Raffique Shah
January 17, 2010
SO we cry for Haiti again. Yet another natural disaster, this time an earthquake of horrendous magnitude, has all but flattened what was left of that ‘cussed’ country. In the Caribbean, so full of heart are we, even those who survive barely above the poverty line give, be it cash or clothes or food. But will our generosity, will the US$1 billion or so in help that will flow over the next year make a difference to 4.5 million of seven million people who live on less than US$1 day?
Continue reading Reparations, not handouts, for Haiti
Help Haiti: The Unforgiven Country Cries Out
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.
The 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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Haiti: The Aid Masquerade
By Kerry Trueman
January 14, 2010 – Green Fork
The 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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Cuba is Missing… From US Reports on the International Response to Haiti’s Earthquake
By Dave Lindorff
January 15, 2010 – thiscantbehappening.net
There 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.
Continue reading Cuba is Missing… From US Reports on the International Response to Haiti’s Earthquake
Catastrophe in Haiti
By Ashley Smith
January 14, 2010 – socialistworker.org
A 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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