Decades of inexpensive imports — especially rice from the U.S. — punctuated with abundant aid in various crises have destroyed local agriculture and left impoverished countries such as Haiti unable to feed themselves. While those policies have been criticized for years in aid worker circles, world leaders focused on fixing Haiti are admitting for the [...]
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Also tagged Agriculture, Apologies, Bill Clinton, Exports, Food Security, Free Market, Imports, Local Food, Subsidies, Tariffs, Washington Consensus
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Ten American missionaries arrested as they tried to take 33 Haitian children across the border to the Dominican Republic were charged last night with child abduction and criminal conspiracy. The Baptists from Idaho, who claimed to be rescuing orphaned children from the chaos that followed the earthquake in Haiti, appeared at a hearing in Port-au-Prince [...]
Police seized five men and five women with US passports, as well as two Haitians, as they tried to cross into the neighbouring Dominican Republic with 33 children, aged between two months to 14 years, late Friday, Haitian authorities said. Border police “saw a bus with a lot of children. Thirty-three children. When asked about [...]
Last week started with a conference in Montreal, called by a group of governments and international agencies calling themselves Friends of Haiti, to discuss the long and short term needs of the recently devastated Caribbean nation. Even as corpses remained under the earthquake’s rubble and the government operated out of a police station, the assembled [...]
For the recreational-vehicle and trailer industry, which lost thousands of jobs during the recession, the push to send the units to Haiti is motivated by more than charity. Bidding is under way in an online government-run auction to sell the trailers in large lots at bargain-basement prices — something the RV industry fears will reduce [...]
Saturday, January 30, 2010
In a modest office in the neighborhood of Petionville, Haiti, engineers, architects, aid workers and government officials are working on the earthquake-ravaged country’s future. They call it Haiti 2.0. They gathered Friday to discuss logistics and planning of the reconstruction operation, which will likely to take years. The first step is to reduce the population [...]
Thursday, January 28, 2010
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viUokrVXwPg[/youtube] Filmmaker Michael Moore joins Democracy Now! for a wide-ranging interview about Haiti, the Supreme Court decision on corporate campaign financing, President Obama’s first year in office, the Democrats, and much more. “The Democrats don’t have the guts. They don’t have the courage of their own convictions. They’re disgusting. I’m embarrassed,” Moore says. “I want [...]
Shortly after Haiti was hit by a 6.1 aftershock on January 20, 2010, Amy Goodman and Kim Ives of Haiti Liberté report from the Port-au-Prince airport. Amy and Kim discuss how centuries of Western domination of Haiti has worsened the impact of the devastating earthquake, from the harsh reaction to Haiti’s independence as a republic [...]
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Also tagged Amy Goodman, Bill Clinton, Capitalism, Corporatism, Coup, Disaster Capitalism, Earthquake, Free Market, George HW Bush, George W Bush, Hillary Clinton, IMF, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Kim Ives, Privatization, Washington Consensus, World Bank
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Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Today, the IMF put out an announcement clarifying the terms of its new loan to Haiti–it’s “an interest-free loan of $100 million in emergency funds.” A spokesman for the IMF emailed me to confirm that “the US$100 million loan does not carry any conditionality. It is an emergency loan aimed at getting the Haitian economy [...]
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
The American Red Cross has received more than $22 million in U.S. text-message donations for Haiti earthquake relief efforts, far outpacing the charity’s previous record of $400,000 for emergency relief using similar technology. [...] The text-messaging effort involves sending the word “Haiti” in a cellphone text message to the number 90999, which automatically adds a [...]
And here come these two “respected” men, one a spokesman for a segment of a major political party and the other a “man of God” who preaches to millions of followers; here they come to foul the air even as it reeks of blood and desperation. It is not the first time for these two, [...]
Meanwhile, the IMF has typical neo-liberal conditions attached to its $100 million dollar loan, and TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson told Democracy Now! that Bush himself was responsible for “destroying Haitian democracy” when he backed the violent coup to overthrow President Aristide in 2004. via Bush warns: Watch out for ’shysters’ | Raw Story. Shysters, inDEED. We speak [...]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsGDP-yfduo[/youtube] Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine warned of the rise of “disaster capitalism” under which governments and corporations use disasters as a chance to push through free-market policies unachievable in times of stability. Where most see a crisis, neoliberal actors spy new market opportunities. And with poor countries desperate for any kind of aid, they [...]
Are you or a loved one trying to locate someone in quake-struck Haiti? Google has an app for that. Using technologies written after Hurricane Katrina, Google has created a Web application that allows users to search an add to a vast missing persons database. The code may also be embedded into Web sites. via Google [...]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayAOqX4XWq0[/youtube] As the President continues to work on immediate job creation, he discusses his proposal for a new fee on the largest financial institutions to ensure that every cent of taxpayer assistance gets paid back. Saying that, “we’re not going to let Wall Street take the money and run,” he goes on to discuss the [...]
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Also tagged Banking, Barack Obama, Corporatism, Corporatists, Disaster Capitalism, Financial Sector, IMF, Poverty, Regulation, Shock Doctrine, Wall Street, World Bank
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Thomas and about 45 other self-described “techies and geo-geeks” and other volunteers met at USC to collaborate on ways to use computers to design improved maps of battered Port-au-Prince neighborhoods, concoct better family-locater services for quake victims and speed more accurate and timely relief information from more closely coordinated data feeds. Computer programmers organized companion [...]
As of Saturday, the Navy had nine ships scheduled to support the people of Haiti through air, hospital and supply operations. The forces are creating a “sea base” for staging humanitarian operations to provide assistance as quickly as possible. A testament to the naval forces agile operational ability, these ships combined can produce more than [...]
What the world should be pondering instead is: What is Haiti owed? Haiti’s vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor–by France, the United States, Great [...]
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