Few countries show the depravity & barbarism of neoliberal capitalism more starkly than the US & UN in Haiti. The scale of depredation, the racist hatred, the callous indifference to massive human suffering render words inadequate.

Five years since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti: 50 regimes pledged nearly $9 billion for reconstruction. The Red Cross alone collected $486 million in donations for earthquake relief. There are reportedly 10,000 NGOs operating there. Only a tiny percent of the pledged aid was ever delivered ($686 million) but there is still nothing to show for the $1,172 billion that was except a $300 million industrial park housing sweatshops in rural Haiti, where most people don’t live. Under political pressure, the Red Cross finally released an accounting, saying all of the dough had been dispersed & used to provide clean water & sanitation services for over 545,000 people, but they can’t point to a single port-au-potty as proof.

An estimated 400,000 people still live in 123 camps without clean water, garbage removal, without shower or toilet facilities. Only 5,700 permanent houses have been built, mostly by aid groups such as Habitat for Humanity. Only 15,000 homes have been repaired with reconstruction assistance. Only 125,000 transitional one-room plywood houses were built–not earthquake or hurricane-resistant in an area where hurricane season is annual. The Haitian government does not have a housing reconstruction plan or program. Not a dime of US aid went to housing.

During his election campaign in 2010, President Michel Martelly (who stinks from corruption & collaboration with the US) pledged to close all camps within six months but his pledge did not mean relocation to new homes; it meant forcible eviction, often without prior notice. Rather than building & reconstructing public housing, the Haitian government along with private landowners, police & UN peacekeepers are on a rampage to clear the camps at gunpoint, using tear gas grenades & live ammo. Paramilitary groups armed with machetes & clubs have attacked camps, assaulting people & setting camps on fire. With no homes to go to, 60,000 have simply been made homeless.

This is a photo of Cité-Soleil, a section of Port-au-Prince with about half a million people. It’s been there since the late 1950s but when Haiti began implementing US free trade policies & neoliberal agribusiness in the 1980s, over 830,000 rural Haitians were dispossessed, displaced & ended up in urban slums. Like the temporary camps, Cité Soleil has no sewer or sanitation system, no access to potable water, & few health clinics.

The colonial overlords, orchestrated by the two Clintons, considered it more important to set up industrial parks & sweatshops than provide sanitation. What takes your breath away is that Haiti is going through a cholera epidemic brought on by UN troops in 2010. An estimated 700,000 people have contracted cholera & over 8,000 people have died. In 2012, Ban Ki-moon pledged $2.27 billion in UN funds to fight the epidemic but once again there are still not enough clinics to serve the afflicted so what the hell are they doing with the money?

Last Friday, a US federal judge dismissed a class action lawsuit against the UN to hold them accountable for the epidemic. The judge claimed UN immunity against such charges. The suit was brought by the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti to provide compensation to the victims of the epidemic. The decision will be appealed but may not see more justice than Bhopal victims against Dow Chemical.

Impunity pretty much sizes up UN operations in Haiti. They’ve occupied the country since 2004 & are frequently used by the regime against democracy protesters & against “armed gangs” in Cité Soleil. Allegedly these gangs are completely lawless, engaging in murder, rape, kidnapping, looting, shootings which terrorize the area. Since 2007, UN forces regularly flood the area & engage in shootouts with the gangs–not unlike the LAPD in the Black neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Which makes the story worth questioning. In neoliberal parlance, outlaw gangs is code for Blacks or very poor.

Of course not all of the NGOs working in Haiti are washouts like the Red Cross. Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) runs a hospital in Cité Soleil & Samaritan’s Purse built a large free cholera treatment center there. What little has been done is mostly by these NGOs, many of them religious groups.

Haiti’s in a hell of a spot & like so many other peoples, has stood alone a long time. It’s long since time for the big battalions of international solidarity to enter the fray & begin to educate about what the US & UN are doing there. It’s just a matter of time before they start doing it here. And if we stand silent, that will be a matter of chickens coming home to roost.

(Photo by Susan Schulman)

This is the fifth anniversary of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti & in preparing an update on developments there I came across this post I wrote October 25th 2012 which lays out US neoliberal plans for Haiti & the role of the Clintons & their entourage of movie stars. I’ve only updated the photo which is from Cité-Soleil, a section of Port-au-Prince with about half a million people & one of the poorest slums in the Western Hemisphere. It plays an important role in the UN occupation which I will describe in my update:
Haiti is open for plunder! Both of the Clintons joined Haitian president, Michel Martelly–along with a glamorous entourage of movie stars Sean Penn, Maria Bello, & Ben Stiller, fashion designer Donna Karan, model Petra Nemcova, British flyboy Richard Branson, USAID & State Department functionaries, bankers from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) & other investors–in the opening ceremony of the $300 million Caracol Industrial Park in northern, rural Haiti. According to media flattery, the work of both Clintons in Haiti–in particular this industrial park–will shape their political legacy. Damn straight it will! It already earns them a special place in hell & merits them a special tribunal for human rights crimes against the people of Haiti. But loathsome as the Clintons are, they are not down there in some rogue capacity; they are agents of US government policy.

After the January 2010 earthquake, US & other international power brokers moved swiftly to establish a decision-making system in Haiti which took all power out of the hands of Haitians & institutions run by & accountable to them. They set up the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) headed by Bill Clinton–not because of his organizing talents but because of his treachery. Michel Martelly was the IHRC candidate of choice to run for president in 2011. Martelly is a former honky-tonk singer, committed Duvalierist, & admitted participant in the Tonton Macoutes, paramilitary death squads Duvalier used in a reign of terror against political opponents: hundreds of thousands of people were disappeared, tortured, murdered, stoned, burned alive, their corpses put on display & often hung in trees. Family members who tried to remove the bodies for burial often disappeared themselves.

When the Clintons speak they are at pains to explain how they’re “working for the Haitians,” are “Haitian-led” & “helping the Haitian people to achieve their own dreams.” If that’s true they have to explain why this project is at odds not with the dreams but the expressed demands of the Haitian people. The Clintons, et al, explain this industrial park will bring up to 65,000 Haitian jobs. But of course, just to remove the earthquake rubble, find ways to reuse it, construct & repair homes, build sanitation systems, health clinics & schools would take even more workers–in the cities where they live & not in the countryside where they don’t. The IHRC has prioritized & fast-tracked infrastructure projects like this industrial park, highways, telecom, building the tourist industry, & privatizing public services not because these are the dreams of Haitians but because they suit the needs of international capital & exploitation which wants to turn Haiti into a Caribbean sweatshop.

Even a cursory look at this park project will expose the truth since it’s what’s not explained that damns the whole project: first of all, more than 300 small farmers were forcibly displaced from their holdings to make way for the industrial park; the Haitian government simply claimed the land as state property. It is prime agricultural land & environmentally essential. Turning it into a giant sweatshop reduces the already compromised ability of Haiti to produce food for its people, & the oil-burning power plant funded by USAID will destroy the environment.

The park’s anchor tenant is Sae-A, a South Korean garment company notorious & nearly run out of Guatemala on a rail for egregious labor violations, including violence against workers. They expect to pay workers $5 a day to make clothes for stores like Walmart & the Gap. In fact, Sae-A recently shipped its first order of Haitian-made garments to Walmart. They were persuaded to set up the sweat shop by walking into a ready-made factory with tax & tariff accommodations to make it super-profitable to them. Sean Penn, the willing stooge of US colonialism in Haiti, lauds Sae-A for their “maverick nature” but sycophants like him can’t distinguish the antisocial from the maverick. The only other tenant so far is Peintures Caraïbes, a Haitian paint manufacturer, who expects to hire 300 workers max. Their presence is a gesture to cover the colonialism of the whole project.

The reason Penn & the other movie stars are there is to help peddle this crap not just to Haitians but to the rest of us; the reason Karan is there is likely so she’ll get her ritzy clothes made there cheap; & the reason Branson is there is because building up tourism is part of the master plan for Haiti, which includes expansion of the Cap Haitien airport to accommodate international flights. Of course, this master plan was determined by international power brokers & predators, not subject to the voice of the Haitian people themselves. The good news is there are reports of massive protests in Port-au-Prince against the policies of Martelly & neoliberalism. Demand the US & its predatory allies get the hell out of Haiti; Haiti for & by the Haitians!

(Photo by Susan Schulman)

Satire just can’t keep up with reality. They report the news, you think you’re in the Fourth Dimension. First we have the assembly of international mass murderers leading a march for free speech in Paris–because if anyone is going to be taking people out for what they stand for, it’s going to be them. They adhere the right of terrorism entirely to themselves.

Feudalism has its own contribution to make to this travesty. This is Felipe VI observing a minute’s silence in Madrid to support the Charlie Hebdo rally. He looks like a fool but at least he had the good sense to stay home since Spain is trying to impose a draconian Public Security Law gagging free speech & outlawing all protest.

When Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the satirist Tom Lehrer declared satire dead & went back to teaching math. George Carlin & Lenny Bruce are dead. Today we’re left with Charlie Hebdo & Bill Maher-type satire that draw laughs from social hatred.

Satire isn’t dead but we shouldn’t have to go back in history to find great stuff–like Daumier & Swift. Young writers with an eye for the ironic & an outrage at injustice need to start sharpening their tongues because we’re going to need a lot of laughs to get us through the barbarism of neoliberalism. Cynicism is not an option. We have a world to change.

(Photo by Imago/Barcroft Media)

Perhaps it’s fitting that what began as tragedy ends up as farce in the official French tribute to Charlie Hebdo. After all, if we’ve learned nothing else from this massacre, it is that you can play anything for a laugh.

It’s customary that US antiwar protests are led off by antiwar veterans because of the moral authority they have on the barbarity of war. So it’s disconcerting to see a political rally led off by war criminals. It’s disturbing to see them lead a march for free speech when they send riot cops with tear gas, grenades, water cannons, rubber bullets against unarmed protesters in their own countries. Will the Russian foreign minister go back to Putin now & argue against repression? Will they stop incarcerating dissidents? Will France stop banning Palestinian solidarity rallies? Will Eric Holder come back & have a chat with Obama about pulling SWAT teams out of the Black community? And will the US now rethink that surveillance system that monitors our every email & FB post?

It’s not an accident Netanyahu is center stage in this criminal line-up. Israel’s murderous siege on Gaza discredited the Exodus myth so carefully cultivated for 66 years & that jeopardizes neoliberal capitalism’s plans for the Middle East. This is rehab mode, street theater, farce. It is also an act of aggression against Muslims.

In response, we continue to build the economic & cultural boycott (BDS) of Israel; we continue to demand US-NATO get the hell out of Afghanistan & Iraq; we demand civil liberties to march for those demands without being attacked by riot cops.

(Photo is screen shot from CNN video)

It’s reported that power in Gaza is on only four hours a day. Thousands remain homeless in a brutal winter. Three babies & one man recently froze to death. Gazan resident, Haidar Eid calls this “slow motion genocide.”

Palestinian cartoonist  Mohammad Saba’aneh was jailed in 2013 by Israel for drawing cartoons they thought were about Hamas.
But Netanyahu will be in Paris today denouncing the barbarism of the CH massacre.

Does sarcasm get better than that!? But of course, Zionists & Islamophobes are redefining satire so that it’s indistinguishable from racism. Slap a smiley face on hate & you can get away with murder. It’s getting so you don’t know when to laugh & when to cry.

Build the economic & cultural boycott of Israel! Demand they lift the siege of Gaza.

French president François Hollande, who gained ignominy by evicting & deporting thousands of Roma, hosts a mass rally in Paris tomorrow to honor the Charlie Hebdo staff. Politicians from around the world will be putting on their pouty faces to attend.

In the entourage of elite protesting the CH massacre will be Abdullah of Jordan, recently in the news (again) because of extreme violence against immigrant workers in sweatshop zones; Netanyahu, whose name is synonymous with Palestinian ethnic cleansing; & the leaders of several regimes with NATO troops still in Afghanistan. The rally will likely gather some of the most right-wing elements of French society.

That’s a hell of a legacy. May they RIP.

I want to talk about the apologies being extracted from Muslims, the requirement they distance themselves from the CH massacre by 50 miles of condemnations. It is politically judicious for imams & Muslim politicians to speak out as a defensive measure against vandalism & assaults on mosques & Muslims. But it is grotesque that two billion Muslims must endure interrogation about where they stand on terrorism or whether they’re glad CH got taken out.

Because this resonates in my life, I’m going to intrude into the story. When I was a child in the 1950s my family moved to Fergus Falls in northern Minnesota. It was during the McCarthy era & a time of religious & political intolerance. The town was predominantly Lutheran at the time & there was considerable hostility toward Catholics. It was my first encounter with social hatred. Not only did classmates taunt us but teachers too. I vividly recall a lesson in elementary school on the Inquisition & watching the teacher relish my extreme discomfort.

Lutheran boys were not allowed to date me nor girls be friends. The girl scout leader would ask unseemly, nosy questions about my parents (who had a lot of kids) & my home life–& I eventually had to leave the troupe from discomfort. Such crap went on for years until my family moved to another city. From such experiences, rebels are born. But also more timorous souls get crushed. My response was to become more ardently Catholic. And later more ardently rebel.

That happened within Christian denominations with relatively inconsequential theological differences. The way history is taught in US schools, entire continents & empires are lopped off to buttress Eurocentrism. When I first encountered the Islamic Empire in my own reading it was like discovering a parallel universe. For those without access to Arab scholarship, it’s not easy to study because so little is available in US libraries. I know that because I’ve scoured the shelves in at least four major city library systems. That’s why many people don’t know enough to query the media narrative about Islam & terrorism.

It is certain that most people don’t know squat about Islam since most haven’t mastered their own catechisms. I still can’t define the differences between Lutherans & Catholics that so plagued my childhood. It’s easy to patronize Muslims by saying they needn’t be defensive, no apologies necessary, but this isn’t just a personal thing. It’s a matter of mosques being vandalized, women in veils being attacked, children being shunned, civil liberties being denied, & wars being promoted.

You can’t compensate for the lack of available scholarship to understand political developments by talking through your hat. Islamic fundamentalism is not near as scary nor as powerful as US-NATO aggression. That I know. We condemn the slaughter of children & the kidnapping of young girls by Islamist paramilitary groups but not more vigorously than we do US-NATO bombing. Because in truth, the history of Islamic fundamentalism is not rooted in theology but in the barbarism of colonialism & war.

Just watched CBS explain the shootout in Paris today & wonder if there was a problem in translation because the story doesn’t add up in English. We aren’t likely to learn the full truth about this incident & it’s not politically productive to fixate on it anymore than on 911 or other alleged conspiracies because it dead-ends. Our work lies with figuring out how to respond to the problems this assault creates for civil liberties, antiwar opposition & Palestinian solidarity.

CBS ended their mangled narrative with a homily explaining why Charlie Hebdo was not reckless in their caricatures. The news reader offered the pompous justification that freedom of the press is “absolute”–which is simply not true in any country. Freedom of the press, which is part of freedom of speech, has all sorts of restrictions including on porn, defamation, incitement, obscenity, copyright violations.

In France, the Press Law of 1881 governing media has a rich political history with specific provisions against hate speech & incitement to racism or violence as crimes. Other European countries also have hate laws implemented in the wake of the holocausts of WWII. Several prominent figures have been prosecuted under this law including Bridget Bardot, designer John Galliano, and Charlie Hebdo.

In truth, France has selective freedom of speech because just last summer it attempted to ban Palestinian solidarity protests as a “threat to public order” & protesters were threatened with prison & hefty fines. France also has a long political tradition undaunted by such threats & there were several massive protests.

This morning The International Business Times published a story on alleged links between Israeli intelligence & the CH shootings but pulled it within a few hours calling it a lapse in judgement beneath their journalistic standards. It’s a plausible connection–maybe even likely–but because it can’t be documented it really can’t be charged & is fruitless to speculate. There’s much more important political work to do than play detective with the masters of deceit.

In 2001, as the anti-globalization movement was erupting around the world, a Swedish nonentity named Johan Norberg wrote a book titled “In Defense of Global Capitalism.” At the time, our man’s resume was pretty paltry for taking on the daunting task of defending neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism. His only credential for the job–other than considerable vanity–was a brief youthful foray as an anarchist. He was commissioned by a Swedish libertarian think tank to do the job so perhaps he has a way with words along with his willingness to mangle reality.

It’s now translated into several languages & as happens with all those who sing for their supper, Norberg’s fortunes & prestige are enhanced. He’s now ensconced in the global network of think tanks promoting libertarian policies & neoliberal predation according to the gospel of Milton Friedman.

One shouldn’t condemn a book one refuses to read but is there really anything to learn from a book arguing neoliberal plunder has reduced poverty, hunger, infant mortality, & inequality? You get a better education watching “Jeopardy.” Or for that matter, reading the side panel on a cereal box.

The book was praised in Canadian media as a refutation of Naomi Klein & in US media as a refutation of “dull old Marxists.” The kiss of death was the rave review by Ben Stein, the Fox News commentator who is a cornucopia of right-wing idiocy & cruelties. Stein opposes women’s reproductive rights; disavows climate change; campaigns for creationism; defended Israel’s commando raid on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza (nine unarmed solidarity activists were shot & killed in 2010); denounced Black residents of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina as gangsters, gang bangers, & looters; & claimed Michael Brown in Ferguson was not unarmed because he was “full of muscles.” If that fool found Norberg’s book a “stunningly insightful, brilliantly detailed refutation of the crank theories of the anti-globalists” it might best go straight to toilet paper.

Those think tanks can hire the best brains money can buy (Norberg & Stein would not be among them) but there’s no thinking their way out of the vortex of political, social, & economic crises erupting across this planet where the ratio of human impoverishment & suffering grows in direct relationship to neoliberal plunder. There are few options & no solutions within the system; that’s why police & military repression are so ubiquitous.

This tiny boy is running from burning electrical wires in a dumpsite in Manila, Philippines where the unemployed scavenge for recyclables. This is of course neoliberal waste management. Working people have the right to dream big for their kids, to want their kids raised in a world that doesn’t stink of manure, or where they have to pick through garbage to earn a living. We need to look at our own options.

(Photo by Aaron Favila/AP)

Under pressure, Cleveland police finally released the full video transcript of the police murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice while he played with a toy gun in a public park. He was shot November 22 & died the next day. Police had responded to a 911 call reporting a child with a gun. The video shows there was no attempt by cops to discern the facts or negotiate. Tamir was shot within seconds of their arrival.

Police have resisted its release & its damning exposure of police brutality. As Tamir’s 14-year-old sister rushed to help him, one of the cops shoved her to the ground, handcuffed her, & threw her in the squad car. His mother said on nightly news they threatened her with arrest if she interfered.

Can media explain to us once again how exposing & protesting this violent & arrant criminality against Black kids endangers the lives of cops? Cause it’s really hard to get that when you see them shoot down a young boy & wrestle his young sister to the ground.

May young Tamir RIP & may we help his family find justice.

(Photo of Tamir Rice from sun.ie)