Haitians yearn for change after year in "hell"

[cory777]

Source: Reuters

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – As Haitians mark the anniversary on Wednesday of the earthquake that flattened much of the capital Port-au-Prince, hopes that a better nation could rise from the rubble have given way to a crushing sense of bitterness and despair.

Reconstruction work has barely begun despite billions of dollars in pledged aid, profiteering by Haiti's tiny and notoriously corrupt elite has reached epic proportions, and a national cholera epidemic has added to the misery of a country where the quake killed about 250,000 people and left more than a million homeless.

Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country, was in bad shape before the quake. But promises from the international community to "build Haiti back better" now ring hollow to many of the country's most vulnerable.

Banks, schools and government offices were ordered closed for the anniversary and a national day of mourning was to kick off with a service offered by the papal envoy to Haiti at the quake-shattered remains of the National Cathedral in downtown Port-au-Prince.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110112/hl_nm/us_haiti_quake_anniversary

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Activist News http://activistnews.blogspot.com

[Jefferson23]

1. The nightmare continues with no end in sight...disgraceful. n/t

[Peace Patriot]

2. Two blockheads unrec'ed this! I find it incomprehensible that...

...a mainstream news media article about conditions in Haiti would be unrec'ed. WHY?

I rec'ed it. And my rec got this article a "minus 1" rec. That means TWO others unrec'ed it. What could possibly be anyone's interest in public ignorance about conditions in Haiti, other than the usual suspects (CIA, State Department, Pentagon, shilling for the multinational corps that want sweatshops in Haiti and a military base that purports to be for the U.S. "war on drugs" but is actually for surveilling Cuba and Venezuela, plotting reconquest of the region and enforcing U.S. "free trade for the rich")?

LOL! Well, I guess there are plenty of motives for suppressing what our multi-millions of tax dollars were really for, in alleged earthquake aid, and what our "military-industrial complex"'s interest is, in Haiti. And I suppose, also, that besides RW meanies who hate the poor, especially the black poor, as a low level reflex of their primitive brain functions, there are corporate/government agents monitoring and interfering at sites like DU--just like they interfere within Latin America/Caribbean countries--with psyops and disinformation. The double unrec'ing of a post like this is a "tell" of the presence of "operatives." No ordinary, reasonable person would unrec this post.

But perhaps the more interesting question is what Rotters is up to, in this article. They rarely differ from the Associated Pukes, et al, on corpo-fascist spin. It could be that the failure of the aid program gives them an opportunity to dis Clinton, who, for all his corpo-fascism, remains an untrustworthy figure to our corpo-fascist rulers--perhaps because he prefers democracy cosmetics to brutal domination, and our corpo-fascist rulers, having gotten a banquet of bloodshed from the Bushwhacks, have lost patience with "softer" methods. Clinton takes a hit in the article. He, as Chief Aidgiver, and all the visiting rich are portrayed as flying over the tent cities in helicopters and attending fancy ceremonies, while thousands die of cholera and the ravages of a ruined city, where a quarter of a million people died, pass beneath them like one of the lower realms of Dante's Inferno.

However, the article largely blames Haiti's own rich, corrupt, tiny elite, who are portrayed as profiteering off the aid, at the expense of the majority poor (very poor). They get mentioned twice as malefactors. And the U.S. having bullied its way in, with military power, to take charge of the entire aid program, is mostly exonerated. Clinton/the U.S. is mostly let off the hook because (in Rotter's view) Haiti's own tiny rich elite is making it impossible for the aid program to work. The "disconnect" between Outside Aid and Haiti's very poor people is blamed on Haitians themselves.

That certainly is a corpo-fascist 'meme.' And we have to wonder if it is true. Is not Haiti's tiny rich elite the very entity that the U.S. has been in cahoots with all along? Are those elite's interests in collusion with U.S. corporate/war profiteer interests not why the U.S. kidnapped and removed Haiti's elected president, Aristide? Are those colluding interests not why Haiti has been grossly interfered with, recently and for over a hundred years (ndeed, since the initial slave revolution)? The U.S., as Corporate Ruler In Charge of Haitian Aid, is surely in a position to control Haiti's tiny rich elite and is not doing so.

There are French interests involved (France owes Haiti billions in reparations). And there are EU corporate interests involved. But mostly there are U.S. corporate/war profiteer interests involved. Rotters could angling for more French/European corporate control. (That is a matter on which they might differ from U.S.-based corpo-fascist media.)

Anyway, worth thinking about, when any corpo-fascist 'news' organization puts out an article that seems to be pro-poor people. Such articles are NEVER straight news reporting--not in my experience. There is ALWAYS a Big Money interest that is being served.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Haitians fought for freedom from conditions far worse than anything the US faced under the British,

and has been condemned to hell for it from the moment they secured their "freedom." They fight for their lives every day against unbearable hardship.

What a shame it is when you finally get an understanding of what has actually happened to Haiti. People who move to discourage information about Haiti are beneath contempt. No question about their character.

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