Haiti - the backstory

Help Haiti: The Unforgiven Country Cries Out

The relentlessly maintained, deliberately inflicted political and economic ruin of Haiti has a direct bearing on the amount of death and devastation that the country is suffering today after the earthquake. It will also greatly cripple any recovery from this natural disaster. As detailed below, Washington's rapacious economic policies have destroyed all attempts to build a sustainable economy in Haiti, driving people off the land and from small communities into packed, dangerous, unhealthy shantytowns, to try to eke out a meager existence in the sweatshops owned by Western elites and their local cronies. All attempts at changing a manifestly unjust society have been ruthlessly suppressed by the direct or collateral hand of Western elites.

The result? Millions of people -- weakened by hunger, deprivation, malnutrition, disease -- living jammed together in precarious, substandard housing. A lack of the physical, financial and civic infrastructure needed to support a decent life in ordinary times -- and to provide proper assistance, and a strong framework for rebuilding, when disaster strikes. Even a far lesser earthquake than the one that struck this week would have caused an unconscionable amount of unnecessary suffering in a nation that has been as ruthlessly and deliberately throttled as Haiti.

Read the whole piece by Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque


See also:

Stand with the people of Haiti! – What the U.S. government isn’t telling you

The Truth about Haiti’s Suffering By Finian Cunningham

What war?

Turse and Engelhardt, Shooting Gnats with a Machine Gun

The current president, like the last one, claims that we are “at war.” If so, it’s a war of one, since al-Qaeda and the U.S. military are essentially not in the same war-fighting universe, which helps explain why repeatedly knocking off significant punortions of al-Qaeda’s leadership (even if never finding bin Laden and Zawahiri) doesn’t seem to end the threat.

But let’s stop here and try, for a moment, to imagine these two enemies side by side in the same universe of war. What, in that case, would the line-up of forces look like?

Read the whole article

They still won't listen

It’s time to pass the baton to the next generation

In last week's issue of this magazine, we lamented the trivial bickering and crude electioneering of the party leaders as the election approaches and asked: "Where are the ideas? Where is the vision? Where are the policies to create a fairer and more democratic society?"

Despite three consecutive and historic general election victories for the Labour Party over the past 13 years, the triangulations of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson have left mainstream progressive politics in the UK intellectually hollowed out, bereft of an animating or compelling vision of "the good society".

Not a quote from some Tory rag or right-wing blogger but from the leader in the New Statesman.

8yr old on watch list - a myth? No!

Mikey Hicks, 8, Can’t Get Off U.S. Terror Watch List

Michael Winston Hicks’s mother initially sensed trouble when he was a baby and she could not get a seat for him on their flight to Florida at an airport kiosk; airline officials explained that his name “was on the list,” she recalled. The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried. After years of long delays and waits for supervisors at every airport ticket counter, this year’s vacation to the Bahamas badly shook up the family. Mikey was frisked on the way there, then more aggressively on the way home. “Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch — someone is patting your 8-year-old down like he’s a criminal,” Mrs. Hicks recounted. “A terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don’t catch him. But my 8-year-old can’t walk through security without being frisked.”

It is true that Mikey is not on the federal government’s “no-fly” list, which includes about 2,500 people, less than 10 percent of them from the United States. But his name appears to be among some 13,500 on the larger “selectee” list, which sets off a high level of security screening.

And all this because he shares the name of a suspicious person. Jeez. These people really are nuts.

Avatar not liberal enough

They're Joking. Aren't They?: Liberal Heaven: still not Paradise

From a film that only just avoids showing George W Bush raping Pocahontas upstairs in a men only bar on Wall Street (except perhaps by the most artistic of implications: nothing tawdry or trite here in 3-D you understand), and all that just after eating a meal of manatee fritters with Bald Eagle eggs, easy on the panda, somehow it just isn’t liberal enough.

To ban or not to ban

Islam4UK: free speech is never absolute

Anjem Choudary's group has incited violence and banning it is the right course for a society fighting terrorism

First they came for the extremist groups…

Alan Johnson’s decision to ban, which he believes is a “necessary power to tackle terrorism”, will make it illegal to be a member of the organisation. The maximum sentence for the “crime” is ten years in prison. Isn’t this a little steep? Brown may call its activities “disgusting and offensive”, but the fact that its actions lack “public support”, or that it voices opinions that are unpalatable to many, shouldn’t be justification enough to criminalise it.

The government's decision to ban Islam4UK will only strengthen hardline Islamists—and drown out moderate Muslim voices

Choudary and his followers will thrive on their newly-acquired victim status and draw even more publicity than before (as evidenced by Choudary’s appearance on Newsnight immediately after the ban was announced). There is also the possibility that in a few weeks Choudary will simply create another group with a different name but the same ideas, and the process will begin all over again.

Truth is, I suspect, that it makes little difference either way. It is, like most of the 'anti-terror- bollocks, mostly window-dressing and showboating.

Update: Also check out Free speech for idiots? at Stumbling and Mumbling

Beyond this place of wrath and tears...*

Invicta: what a terrible choice of poem - Matthew Parris

Invictus, (the poem that Gordon Brown says he finds strength in) was chosen by Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, as his only statement before his judicial execution in 2001. The mass-murderer had killed 168 innocent people by collapsing an office block on to them. At his execution McVeigh passed a handwritten copy of Invictus to his warden, then went to his death in silence. The truth to which McVeigh’s and Mr Brown’s chosen verse points this reader is that, although we cannot win by an act of will alone, nobody can deny us the right, by an act of will alone, to lose.

Less sensationally than McVeigh, Mr Brown now looks set to demonstrate this.

* Lies defeat, retirement from politics and a lucrative career working for multinationals.

Is it too big, is it too small...?

Five Reasons Why Libertarians Shouldn't Hate Government - Reason Magazine

Five Reasons Why Libertarians Shouldn't Hate Government: Plus, Five Big Projects That Went Well and Five That Were Disasters

William Eggers and John O'Leary, the authors of the new book If We Can Put a Man on The Moon..., make the case that if libertarians want to shrink the size and scope of government, they need to figure out the ways in which government can succeed at the tasks with which it is legitimately charged.

Tizer Woods

Tiger Woods "Pop Art" Bust

A Colorado artist who replaced the labels on 100 Gatorade bottles with a picture of Tiger Woods and his wife and the word "unfaithful" - and then returned the items to store shelves - has been charged with tampering with the sports drink. The artist, Jason Kay, has been hit with a felony charge and two misdemeanor counts, which carry a combined maximum of five years in federal prison.

Bonkers?

The J-Walk Blog: Preventing Obama’s Re-Election

If President Obama wants to run for re-election he would need to produce proof of both his U.S. birth and citizenship to get on the ballot in Arizona, if one state lawmaker gets her way. "With what's happening throughout the world, we need to make sure that our candidates are certifiable," she said.

Well the one before Obama certainly was!

Stop moaning about the weather!

There were two stories that caught my eye on the local news last night. One was about farmers throwing away milk because the dairy tankers were unable to get up their snow covered farm tracks and the other story was how much extra the cold spell will add to this winter's heating bills.

 Can't farmers organize themselves to clear a bit of snow? They are farmers, FFS. They have tractors. In Scotland the local farmers are used and paid by the local authority to clear local roads, not just their own tracks. Instead the farmer last night simply moaned that his (private) road hadn't been cleared and gritted by the council.

As for paying higher bills. Use some of the money that you saved over the last few years when we had extremely mild winters. It's swings and roundabouts. Stop moaning, for fuck's sake.

Build character, skint yourself!

Liberal Conspiracy -  It’s not class war, Dave, it’s just character building…

Life, for David Cameron, has been, for the most part, far too easy and far too short on genuine adversity and the kinds of difficult personal experiences that, once upon a time, would have been universally referred to as ‘character building’.

Difficult personal experiences?

There was a time when the worst we could expect from Unity was to be bored to death with his Wikipedia-lite blogposts but since he's got his feet under the LibCon table and his head  up the sainted Sunny's arse he's now not just boring but self-righteous and unpleasant to boot. He's in good company. Tedious cunt.