Haiti... 6 months later....

[Ben]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/haitians-wait-in-tents-for-a-recovery-that-has-still-barely-begun-2023128.html

[GroobySteven]

Who gives a fuck?

I don't mean that in a rude way to you Ben - but this is one of the things that frustrates me most about the media, it's all over the news when it's flavour of the week until the next "big seller" comes along - and it simply drops off the radar and nothing gets done.

Remember that oil spill we had in the gulf ... I'm not hearing much more about that?

[alyssaluxor]

GOSHHH!!!

message to short

[Faldur]

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

[Solitary Brother]

I hear the Haitians are hopelessly fucked.
Why?
The Haitian government as part of its agreement to accept aid stipulated that the aid be giving to them to be given out......
Well I have heard and this is VERY verifiable that the haitian government sells the food to haitians and doesnt give it away.
How fucking evil is that?
Like I said its very verifiable what I said and true.

[Nicole Dupre]

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

And if you teach him voodoo, can he prevent earthquakes?

What's your point? lol

[anon451]

Haiti is fucked because the UN is a global bureaucratic disaster, the Haitian government is a corupt group of greedy despots and the rest of the world doesn't give a shit. Look at the tally at who gives the most around the world. Look at the printing on all the bags of grain. A gift from the people of the United States of America. Go to the guarded warehouses in Port Au Prince and see the stacks of Aid just sitting there.There is only one solution to fixing the worlds troubles. Overwhelming force, with compassion...

[bellamy]

Haiti is a disaster. Haiti was a disaster. Until Haiti makes a fundemental change at its core it will continue to be a disaster. Look in a map, Haiti and the Dominican Republic are the same place. Not the the Dominican Republic is perfect but they have there shit together why can't Haiti.

[Ben]

Who gives a fuck?

I don't mean that in a rude way to you Ben - but this is one of the things that frustrates me most about the media, it's all over the news when it's flavour of the week until the next "big seller" comes along - and it simply drops off the radar and nothing gets done.

Remember that oil spill we had in the gulf ... I'm not hearing much more about that?

That's the problem: the mainstream media (and it isn't really mainstream, as mainstream means common or average... and the media doesn't reflect average opinion) focus on their own interests which are commercial interests.
Haiti is a poor country [not of their own design] and so there isn't really any concern or interest.
Haiti has been punished for leading a successful slave rebellion. And with that successful slave uprising America and France punished them.
I mean, take, say, Cuba. America has punished Cuba for leading what's called "successful defiance." You can't tolerate independence. You've gotta punish it.
And America invaded Haiti in 1915 to reestablish slavery. I mean, it goes on and on and on. So-called free trade destroyed Haitian rice farmers -- and on and on....

Noam Chomsky explicates the current crisis in Haiti:

YouTube- Noam Chomsky CBC Interview 2010-03-30 part 2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIp3IH_SBak)

[Ben]

Washington and International Donors Have Failed Haiti

by Mark Weisbrot


The "international community" is in charge of rebuilding Haiti, (http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=y3VXB2Ii4rLTWdwA%2FTTNHwfftCmU1u0j) and one thing has become clear: they are not interested in any kind of democracy there, not even the low level of "democracy" that they have committed to in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Haiti's provisional electoral commission (CEP) has now decided once again that the country's largest political party, Fanmi Lavalas, will not be allowed to participate in parliamentary elections scheduled for November.
This is the equivalent of excluding the Democratic Party (actually something quite a bit larger) from U.S. Congressional elections in November.
So far there are no indications that the Obama administration, which has - to put it mildly - enormous influence over the government of Haiti, has any objections. They had supported the last elections in April 2009 which also excluded Fanmi Lavalas, even though the exclusion led to a boycott of some 90 percent of voters.
To follow the historical thread, Fanmi Lavalas is headed by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who became Haiti's first democratically elected president in 1990. He was overthrown by the military seven months later, in a violent coup that had a lot of Washington's fingerprints on it. President Clinton restored Aristide three years later, but Aristide offended Washington by, among other things, getting rid of Haiti's brutal army - which was not so much a military force as an instrument of political violence on behalf of Haiti's ruling elite.
Paul Farmer of Harvard Medical School is Bill Clinton's Deputy Special Envoy at the UN. His "Partners in Health" has nearly 5,000 people in Haiti. Testifying (http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=giSjErOqkxbUc9ccp%2Fd8R2dOutYkBnBJ)recently at a Congressional briefing, he described what happened after Aristide and his party were elected for a second time, in 2000:
"Beginning in 2000, the U.S. administration sought . . . to block bilateral and multilateral aid to Haiti, having an objection to the policies and views of the administration of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, elected by over 90% of the vote . . . Choking off assistance for development and for the provision of basic services also choked off oxygen to the government, which was the intention all along: to dislodge the Aristide administration."
It was the second Bush administration that finally overthrew Aristide (http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=8uFvN%2Fl7wluqf6ZjHak2KAfftCmU1u0j) for the second time - in the coup of March 2004. But as Farmer notes, the process was initiated under the Clinton administration in 2000. And the Obama administration is currently silent on Aristide's forced exile from Haiti, a violation of Haiti's constitution.
If only Washington were a tenth as good at rebuilding Haiti as it was at destroying the country before the earthquake. But six months after the catastrophe, less than 2 percent of the 1.6 million homeless have homes. Hundreds of thousands have nothing at all; and 80 percent of the homeless that do have shelter are living under tarps where the ground under them turns to mud when it rains. And less than 2.9 percent of all aid money has gone to the Haitian government (http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=KeectvTDRhm1qxSpTOI2h2dOutYkBnBJ), which makes reconstruction nearly impossible. With a hundred thousand children wounded from the earthquake, public hospitals are closing.
The land that is needed for shelter is owned by rich Haitians, who have other plans. The Haitian government has the authority to take this land, with compensation. The international community can make this happen.
It's time for members of the U.S. Congress to step up to the plate and change our foreign policy toward Haiti, as they did after the 1991 military coup. Congress can make sure that the aid flows to where it is needed, that land and shelter are available, and that Haitians are allowed to elect their own government. After all that Washington has done to punish Haiti, this is the least they can do.
© 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (http://www.cepr.net/) (CEPR), in Washington, DC.

[Solitary Brother]

In order for Haiti to come out from under not just this tragedy but the tragedy of Haiti itself is to get rid of the criminal element in Haiti.

[Jericho]

In order for Haiti to come out from under not just this tragedy but the tragedy of Haiti itself is to get rid of the criminal element in Haiti.

That's a real nice soundbite.
How are you going to implement it?

[Ben]

Now: one year, of course....

YouTube - Haiti: A Pawn in US Foreign Policy (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_fDhGvwF9w)

YouTube - 'Progress' in Haiti, a Cruel Joke? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJfzHUWLUnc&feature=channel)

[mildcigar_2001]

I think the problem is with the "learned helplessness" of the Hatian people. Can you imagine a good portion of the country is sitting in refugee type camps waiting for someone to do something. The Hatians need to start helping themselves and if international aid arrives fine. Instead of sitting in camps they need to put some sweat equity into their country.

[Ben]

Wednesday, January 12, 2011 by The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/article/157646/haiti-wheres-money) Haiti: Where's the Money?

by Isabel MacDonald

After a devastating earthquake killed more than 200,000 people in Haiti on January 12, 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned (http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/03/139313.htm) that there could be dire consequences “if the effort to rebuild is slow or insufficient, if it is marked by conflict, lack of coordination, or lack of transparency.” At a March 31 UN conference, the international community pledged $5.3 billion dollars for 2010-11 (http://content.undp.org/go/newsroom/2010/march/reconstruction-of-a-new-transformed-haiti-begins.en) to help Haiti “build back better,” with the US pledging $1.15 billion.
Yet excluding debt relief, the governments and international institutions that promised to help Haiti rebuild have disbursed just $1.28 billion (http://www.haitispecialenvoy.org/press/press_releases/analysis-shows-63-6-percent-disbursement-rate-for-haiti-recovery-among-public-sector-donors-in-2010/) of the pledges they made at the UN conference, according to the UN Office of the Special Envoy to Haiti. The US has disbursed only $120 million of its pledge, according to Office of the Special Envoy’s most recent update.
Of the European Community’s pledge of $294 million for 2010-11, it had paid $97.2 million, or about a third, by December 2010. Canada, which was originally reported (http://content.undp.org/go/newsroom/2010/march/reconstruction-of-a-new-transformed-haiti-begins.en) to have pledged $375 million for Haiti’s reconstruction, had disbursed only $55.3 million by December 2010. Meanwhile, France has delivered less than a quarter of the $30 million it pledged to the Haiti Reconstruction Fund (http://www.haitireconstructionfund.org/hrf/background), according to the fund’s website (http://www.haitireconstructionfund.org/hrf/members).
A scathing recent report by Oxfam (http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/MUMA-8CU2M7/%24File/full_report.pdf) found that “neither the Haitian state nor the international community is making significant progress in reconstruction,” and called this lack of progress “deeply disappointing.” The report, which cited donor governments' slow progress on delivering on UN pledges, urged donors to "release funds promised at the New York conference in March 2010 and improve transparency related to pledges and disbursements."
The private relief sector, which also made pledges at the UN conference, has also been slow in delivering aid to Haiti. Of the $1.4 billion private American donors gave charities to help Haitians after the earthquake, a Chronicle of Philanthropy survey (http://philanthropy.com/article/Haiti-Aid-Falls-Short-of-Other/125809/?sid=&utm_source=&utm_medium=en) of sixty major relief organizations published on January 6 showed that just 38 percent of the donations had been spent.
The Washington DC-based American Red Cross (ARC) alone raised $479 million (http://www.redcross.org/portal/site/en/menuitem.53fabf6cc033f17a2b1ecfbf43181aa0/?vgnextoid=183b9f4a01956210VgnVCM10000089f0870aRCR D&currPage=cca71483d9c4d210VgnVCM10000089f0870aRCRD) through its Haiti earthquake appeals. In an email to The Nation on January 11, ARC spokesperson Julie Sell stated that "We are now at about $200m spent." But that’s less than half of what the organization raised. ARC projects that it will have signed contracts by the time of the anniversary of the January 12 quake to spend $78 million more. But for now, Sell says the remaining millions are being kept in “short-term, conservative government-backed investments. Any interest generated will be spent on Haiti,” she added.
Similarly, World Vision (which reports (http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2011/01/05/f-haiti-earthquake-anniversary-aid-agencies.html) spending $107 million of the $194 million it raised through appeals to help Haitian earthquake survivors) is keeping unspent millions of Haiti donations in “low-risk investment accounts,” according to spokesperson Amy Parodi. She told The Nation that the organization plans to “re-invest” any interest accrued into World Vision’s Haiti response program.
Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has observed that such surpluses are particularly worrying when one considers that the UN was unable to raise $164 million (http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/EGUA-8C8V2A?OpenDocument) with an emergency appeal to combat the spread of cholera. The disease is easily preventable when people have access to clean water and sanitation. But in the context of the slow pace of post-earthquake recovery, it has killed 2,100 and infected more than 93,000 in recent months.
“These organizations have been much too slow to spend their money from the beginning, and again with the cholera epidemic,” Weisbrot said. “When people donated money to these organizations in the aftermath of the earthquake, they weren't donating money for some kind of long-term strategy, they wanted disaster relief: housing, clean water, disease prevention, clearing the rubble. Not saving the money for something else.”
Haiti relief and reconstruction efforts have also fallen short of the UN conference participants’ bold rhetoric about transparency and accountability. A recent survey by the Disaster Accountability Project reported on by the CEPR’s blog, Haiti Relief and Reconstruction Watch (http://www.cepr.net/index.php/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/), found an alarming lack of transparency and accountability amongst the private charitable organizations that raised funds for earthquake relief and recovery.
Other discrepancies abound. For example, according to the Office of the Special Deputy Envoy to Haiti (http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:nQnFJvxcM48J:s3.amazonaws.com/haiti_production/assets/22/Overall_financing_key_facts_Nov_original.pdf+haiti +and+september+2010+us+changed+pledge&hl=en&gl=ca&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShHfaojoUsi-uQoF6oTgDCAXILRyB7BkBPxdOM_Z7wsZK-NBTMVwVDF6UbZkgbWrGaPnv3ka98hrYbyrl7kSoSjzeJzpHDSc _8RpiTUO84x30wUhS9-J6xUqxu2Yn45H683Vsen&sig=AHIEtbRl0scCKwfJEcINR7gIsfLYdmQzvg&pli=1), the US had originally made its pledge of 1.15 billion “for 2010.” However, the same fact sheet lists the US contribution of $120 million as “100 percent” of its pledge for 2010. As the document explained in a footnote, “In September 2010, the United States indicated that it intends to program the $1.15 billion in fiscal year 2011 (1 October 2010—30 September 2011). The Haiti pledge data set has been amended to reflect this change.” But Lee Bailey, the spokesperson for the Office of the Special Deputy Envoy to Haiti told The Nation in a telephone interview, “we do allow donors to change the pledge.”
© 2011 The Nation
Isabel MacDonald is a Montreal-based freelance journalist.

[Ben]

YouTube - A Brief History of Haiti that Every American Should Know (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxUk2NSwcEs)

[PomonaCA]

Meanwhile Chile had TWO massive earthquakes and is doing infinitely better than Haiti.

[Ben]

And why can't Jean Aristide return to his own country....

YouTube - Jean-Bertrand Aristide discusses the current situation in Haiti and the upcoming election (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGWxrI8SdHI&playnext=1&list=PL60F94AD1EF453FFB&index=65)

[Ben]

Meanwhile Chile had TWO massive earthquakes and is doing infinitely better than Haiti.

Well, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

[Ben]

Who gives a fuck?

I don't mean that in a rude way to you Ben - but this is one of the things that frustrates me most about the media, it's all over the news when it's flavour of the week until the next "big seller" comes along - and it simply drops off the radar and nothing gets done.

Remember that oil spill we had in the gulf ... I'm not hearing much more about that?

It's referred to as "parachute" journalism. Or, well, disaster porn.

[PomonaCA]

Well, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

Like Africa is the poorest continent in the world.