On Board the Haiti-U.S. Express

A little more than a month ago Americans and, for once, the American media issued cries of despair about the plight of New Orleans, a city under attack from nature as well as an irresponsible government. “It looks like Haiti!” pundits exclaimed, aghast at the horrible spectacle.

Little did they know how right they were.

For many who live in poverty in the U.S., and for those citizens who do not close their eyes to it, it is well known that the similarities between our countries run deep. U.S. policy has continuously shaped Haiti’s economic and political existence, to the extent that Haiti is like America—the worst of it. Likewise, the worst of America is a lot like Haiti.

During Katrina, television commentators were drawing conclusions based on color. A more appropriate and disturbing conclusion is that parallel economic and political strategies—paired with a deliberate lack of strategies—continue to determine the fate of many in Haiti and the U.S. (Unfortunately for Louisiana, Republican measures such as suspending the Davis-Bacon Act seem likely to maintain this trajectory.)

A short list of Haiti's current woes is also a dim reflection of us:

• A Texas corporation owner, originally from Haiti, is running for president of that country and, though his candidacy has been deemed illegal, he seems poised to do better than many others. Why let an illegal election stop you?
• Elections are being delayed until February. Only a few hundred polling places are currently planned; compare this to over 10,000 in the previous elections. The inability of the current U.S.-approved puppet government—following the ouster/kidnapping of Aristide—to organize a credible but corrupt election has been much criticized. But the U.S. continues its support...
• A donor’s conference took place this week for Haiti under the auspices of the State Department. In other words, as for Iraq and Louisiana, it’s pay-to-play in the current Haitian economy run by American, European and Canadian-approved politicians.
• As the American Enterprise and Cato Institutes did for the Bush administration in the aftermath of Katrina, policy in Haiti is being dictated by far right-wing organizations such as the International Republican Institute via the National Endowment for Democracy. (Supposedly “dedicated to advancing democracy worldwide,” the IRI pushes for semi- or even non-democratic privatization measures.)

A look at the results of a donor conference that took place this week for Haiti reveals an oppressive triangulation of Western governments, the International Monetary Fund and the few but powerful Haitians that are profiting from this mess. Quoting an IMF statement, an October 21st release from the State Department says that in 2005-2006 Haiti has a strategy that "adequately maintains the focus on preserving macroeconomic stability, enhancing governance and transparency, and increasing spending on infrastructure and social services."

Condoleeza Rice probably used such language in the talking points of her “surprise” visit to Haiti at the end of last September.

Of course, the language of the IMF, of the Department of State, of USAID and many others is duplicitous. It behooves us translate "macroeconomic stability" with toeing a multinational corporate philosophy on privatizing Haiti's infrastructure. The true meaning of the conference is thus evident. Moreoever, the strategy is not Haiti's, but that of the current U.S. administration, one particularly apt at imposing onerous economic regimes abroad and at home.

The unjust imprisonments of Father Jean-Juste and former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, who both have popular support from the Lavalas party that elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide with a huge majority, reflect odious, criminal judicial practices. Such practices are gaining legal traction here in the U.S., as anyone familiar with the Patriot Act and similar legislation knows.

The purpose here is not to trivialize matters. Haiti’s woes are countless, deeper and more widespread than those of the U.S. They affect the staggering majority of Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere, and one of the poorest on the planet.

But Americans should not be fooled either. This week's State Department "donor conference" for Haiti was a meeting to bring business and corrupt politicians into line while pushing for "elections" to add a superficial air of legitimacy to Washington's (Canada's, France's) economic regime. All of this is the standard modus operandi that was seen in the wake of Katrina as politicians handed out contract after contract to "friendly" (read: "contributor") corporations.

So let us take a moment to remember that we are Haiti, and Haiti is us. We are more than alike, we are intertwined. So far only the Congressional Black Caucus has any sort of stable position on this situation in Washington, and even they are not as unified as on other positions. As "elections" approach in Haiti, we should write our representatives to bring this situation further into the open because, in too many ways, the situation is simply our own.

Bill O'Reilly

This is very funny. According to Media Matters, Bill O'Reilly said:

O'REILLY: Yeah, they love me. [Laughing] I'm real big over in France. You know, it's amazing, we're on in France but on the satellite, so we're not, you know -- masses of people don't speak English in France. One of the few countries in Europe that really doesn't speak English on a large level is France, because they don't like us. They don't like the British. So they look down upon our language and our culture --

HILL: But they like their own culture and they try to preserve it.

O'REILLY: And there's nothing wrong with that. Sure, you want to have a croissant, knock yourself out. You like the little escargot; hey, I'm down with that. But when, you know, you don't take a shower for 18 days, you know --

HILL: Stop it.

O'REILLY: I'm sorry. Come on, you know what I'm talking about. Some things they can copy from us. But anyway, so France isn't a country that speaks English, you know, on a wide level like Scandinavia or Holland or even Italy now. You're getting a lot of English speakers. Germany, it's half and half. Up north they speak English, but in the southern part, the more conservative part, they don't.

A part from being ridiculous, racist and quite typical of O'Reilly's and a lot of people's understanding of France, this is also hilarious. I will now resort to Bill's sort of humour--What would Bill do if his young femail colleagues only took showers every 18 days? I mean, his loofah's would last for years that way. I now understand Bill's English-Only position: English for the whole world! Good boy, Bill. Good fascist lackey.

Paris

Juan Cole has put an interesting, balanced and on-the-dot commentary up on his site. It is simply the best one I have read. It takes France to task for the racism embedded in its policies, even the "liberal" ones, which were only marginally decent in the first place. France has a problem. Though there are many middle-class HLM, there are also many that have become ghettos because of a failure of the social system, and it is this system that needs color-blind reform.

Now, anyone who knows me knows that I find racism in U.S. policy as well, but the U.S. is mostly across the board class-based in its discrimination, which also tends to trap Latinos, Blacks, Native Americans and other groups, including huge numbers of Whites. In fact, just like Sarkozy and VIllepin in France are doing now, politicians in the U.S.--especially those on the right--are more than happy with the situation since it allows them to divide the voting public and therefore conquer. Given that, I simply abhor the coverage France gets in the U.S.. It is biased, horrible stuff, and this is primarily because America cannot look itself in the mirror.

Paris is not Burning--I repeat

Here's an interesting conversation on "Source Code," a Boston-Based radio program. It includes Jerôme à Paris (Of dailykos.com) and Jeremy Rifkin.

Revue de presse / Haiti

Today, Bush, brings in a member of the State Department's Foreign Service is to be nominated by President Bush to be the US ambassador to Haiti, as see in Bush taps ex-Tucsonan for Haiti envoy. This person will no doubt be a proud member of the "let's keep crushing Haiti into the ground" team of France, Canada, the IMF and the IRI--all led by the U.S.

Meanwhile, Haiti election supervisors 'quit' according to the BBC. Hmm. Maybe these elections will happen after all once there are no decent supervisors left.

Finally, in Haiti, the UN keeps playing hitman for the US: As Guerillas Strike and UN Troops Kill Again:Election ...,, as seen in Political Affairs Magazine. But, no worries, South Korea will be sending its troops: UN Asks South Korea to Dispatch Troops to Haiti. What a surprise. I'm sure South Korea will bring it's long history of democracy (not!) to Haiti.

France is burning / France is rising up

A lot of people are asking me what I think. I tend to give them a convoluted answer to the many problems in France. What is essential to understand is that France has exactly the same problems as the rest of the West, it is simply becoming "symptomatic," while we remain "asymptomatic," at least in the mainstream consciousness. (If we all understood that men in Harlem and Bangladesh have the same life expectancy, would we still be so convinced of our difference from France, Spain, England, Bolivia, Argentina and, of course, Bangladesh?).

Sterling Newberry has a great piece I completely agree with. I will cite in entirely here:

Mon Nov 7th, 2005 at 10:20:25 AM EDT :: Healthcare

The European political class is in crisis, filled with non-solutions, and unable to lead or persuade its own public, and hoping that another round of neo-liberalization will do what 25 years of it have not done - they now face an open revolt. One which is spreading. 10 officers were shot in last night's riots in France. This rioting is not going to move the core of French public opinion, but will instead harden the battle lines. This bodes ill for the right in France, which has governed because the center-right coalition was far more unified than the center-left coalition.

::

The reality of economics in Europe and the United States is that both places have the same problem, and they are dealing with it by making different choices on how to spread the pain.

The United States, with both more energy and more land, has taken the mode of generating sprawl to generate employment, and selling the US to other nations one barrel of oil at a time, hoping that the rate that the US can generate paper wealth will outpace the rate at which we import energy. This bet is failing, and is, in fact, falling further and further behind. In essence, the US is borrowing to generate employment.

The European core nations have selected an austerity route - higher unemployment, higher social safety net, lower accumulation of foreign debt, and therefore more local control.

However, both roads have been about managing depletion of extraction, most notably oil, and they interlock with the decision of extraction countries to do so as well. While there have been swings in the relative economic power of the different blocs, the road leads in the same direction.

It is dangerous to read too much into these riots, other than the reality that Europe's circulatory system is ebbing, they are having to cut at the margins of their social safety net, and they are under pressure to close the borders. But prosperity will be equalized, whether slowly or quickly, and the attempts to slow down that equalization by protectionism are only worthwhile if they are buying time for preparation. The difference between temporizing and procrastinating is what you buy with the time.

Right now there is little in the way of clear thinking about what to do in the coming post-extraction world, or even a realization that the post-extraction world is coming and it will be beneficial. Right now we are sketching the edges of that world, while people are trying to bring outmoded rental paradigms to bear.

These rental paradigms largely stem from arrangements made almost a century ago as our current economy was emerging in outline.

That economy was based on two important technological ideas - mechanization and broadcast. Our current economic struggles are largely a struggle over keeping the rent flowing on these two - now quite old - innovations in society. It is foolish to blame the French system for a global phenomenon of the playing out of an old economic order. Unrest is rising, because the increase in productivity that it provides is now much smaller than the number of people who want to be part of it. It is exploding in China as inflation is crushing those not attached to the export economy, and the government makes moves to keep wages down by swamping the cities with country dwellers. This is "the city problem," and it is a very poor idea to encourage it.

The unrest is in South America, in Iraq, and in a host of other nations. The amount of global growth available is shrinking, and most of it is consumed by the US, China's export economy, and the resource extraction sectors of a few other nations. The rest of the world is close to what would be

defined as a global recession.

Of course, there is a lot more to this than mentioned here. There are indeed some deep-seated cultural issues, but these are the issues that allow the Center-Right and Right-Wing government to exclude these areas from the current economic plan. The revolt is about exclusion, exclusion, and more exclusion. The Right in particular is interested in allowing these things to continue, just as Bush is interested in keeping America at war. Fortunately, the Left, and perhaps the Center-Left are begining to react, and, because the press in France is slightly more rational, these people actually have a voice and the public generally agrees with them--at least in the sense that they see Villepin, Sarkozy and Barloo manoeuvering to exploit this situation.

Update: Earlier I referred to this situation as Symptomatic. Well, I just read this piece on Tom Paine by Rami Khouri. He states an obvious truth:

Burning cars in Paris and interrupted terror bombings in Sydney may achieve that which a generation of indigenous, patient scholarship, analysis and activism in the Middle East and North Africa have not elicited: serious political and economic reforms that assert the basic rights of Arab citizens to live in societies defined by decency and equality, and the indelible humanity of Arab youth who have been deformed beyond recognition by the inequities of their own tortured political cultures.

Genetically Modified Cropshttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

From Common Dreams:

WASHINGTON - November 7 - The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has decided to expand a controversial give-away in which local farmers grow genetically modified soybeans and corn on Delaware’s at Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) today released a letter protesting the move as wreaking ecological havoc and violating the Service’s own policies.

People who follow this know what is happening here. The acreage is relatively minute, but the symbolism is huge. This is a signal to the corporate purveyors of genetically modified organisms saying "we support you." There is absolutely no need for this ecologically or scientifically speaking. It's only use is to push the conservative agenda a little further and keep the government moving on its slippery slope. Public land should not be for private use without just compensation, and here the trespassing is even more dastardly because the likes of Monsanto and ADM are using farmers to further their corporate agenda.

Revue de Presse: Haiti / Press Review Haiti

Une semaine d'action au Canada / Canadian Action Wee
http://www.newsocialist.org/index.php?id=561

The U.S.-led shakedown continues:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=55&ItemID=9059

Old news, new news: Texas Creole
http://www.caribbeannetnews.com/2005/11/02/uproar.shtml

Disney

Well, Disney certainly was a magic place yesterday. We went there with students studying gender, race, and class. As usual, there's nothing like going into the beast. It was fun riding the rides, and also the critiques.

The commercialization is absolutely astounding. To the left is a "Kodak picture Spot" near Thunder Mountain (I think that's the ride, you know, the hommage to mineral extraction).

Once you start paying attention to it, it can drive you a little crazy. There's the Brawny-sponsored horse show, home to the "happiest horses on earth." There's the Minute-made-sponsored café. The list is long. I suppose that's why the trash cans have the very ambiguous phrase "waste please" on them. What the hell?