Haiti... 6 months later....

[Ben]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...n-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:

[Ben]

Washington and International Donors Have Failed Haiti

by Mark Weisbrot


The "international community" is in charge of rebuilding Haiti, 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 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 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, 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 (CEPR), in Washington, DC.