I'm still trying to get up to speed on Haiti but this piece looks like flawless propaganda.

[EFerrari]

History shows obstacles can block Haiti's recovery
By ANDREW O. SELSKY, Associated Press Writer Andrew O. Selsky, Associated Press Writer – 7 mins ago

Former President Bill Clinton, now the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, says the country can be made into a better place than existed before the devastating earthquake struck. But can it? Or do the lessons of history and the country's special circumstances bode otherwise?

Through the ages, cities have received death blows. Almost 2,000 years ago, Pompeii was buried by volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius. Less than 15 years ago, much of the Caribbean island of Montserrat was engulfed by pyroclastic flows. Its capital Plymouth is now a graveyard of buildings, half buried in volcanic debris. A new capital is being built on another part of the island.

Sometimes cities recover. Nagasaki and Hiroshima made comebacks after being blown apart and poisoned with radiation during World War II. And San Francisco, wrecked in a 1906 earthquake and fire, launched an ambitious reconstruction effort within days, with California Gov. George Pardee correctly predicting the metropolis would be "replaced on a much grander scale than ever before."

However, Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country, faces numerous obstacles on the road to recovery.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100124/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_haiti_road_to_recovery_1




It lowers expectations, inserts Bill Clinton (of all people) as an idealistic cheerleader, nebulously blames Haiti for its poverty as if it was airborne on the island, misrepresents the US/French/Canadian ouster of Aristide with US trained paras, misrepresent exactly who was locked up in that prison, and of course, the unsaid Big Lie, that Haiti somehow is incapable of governing itself by comparing the present puppet to Somoza. Well, the comparison is apt as both were propped up by D.C.

Wow.

[Derechos]

1. Who removed Aristide?

Although this articel is several years old, its povides interesting background.

On the night of 28 February, the Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced from power. He claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a 20-hour flight, he was told that he and his wife would be landing ‘in a French military base in the middle of Africa’. He found himself in the Central African Republic.

An understanding of the current crisis requires a sense of Haiti’s history.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n08/paul-farmer/who-removed-aristide

[Peace Patriot]

2. It's the Associated Pukes. What do you expect? They want our tax dollars to go to banksters

and war profiteers and the super-rich--a class of parasites who are good at pitting the poor against the poor: the increasingly poor US worker and taxpayer vs the miserably poor of Haiti.

Write it off as Pompeii! Jeez.

This is so typical of the twisted, lying, disinformationist, propagandistic vomit that we have become used to, from the Associated Pukes and all their brethren.

The corporadoes either want to dry up the public funds, so there is no accountability, or suck up the public funds to their own purposes. Seems like they are at cross purposes here. Dry it up? Or suck it up? Which is it?

And the thing about Pompeii is that all the people died, frozen in time by the lava. There are millions of people alive in Haiti. They are not a ruined monument. They are a people. Respect them, give them back their real president, restore their democracy, help them in their tragedy and their immediate dire need, and then get out. They don't need UAE skycrapers full of empty rooms! They don't need "free trade" zones where they have no rights. They don't need "free trade" tankers dirtying up the sea. They don't need the US military anywhere in their country, after the initial help. They need FREEDOM, and they will build their own nation, just as they have helped each other out, when aid didn't arrive, just as they have built their own tent cities and temporary communities, in an orderly and cooperative fashion, just as they have shared what little food they had, just as they have dug people out of the rubble with their bare hands.

After a certain triage period--months, not years--the aid money and donation money should start going directly to the people of Haiti, in grants to start small businesses, to buy machinery and other equipment and raw materials from whoever they choose to buy it from, and to start building homes and schools and community centers and libraries and medical clinics, to start making things and selling things and to purchase farm land from the oligarchs who own 99% of the land. The Haitians will rebuild their own country, in their own way. And, by God, France should give Haiti the $20 billion they owe them in slavery reparations and now would be a good time to do it.

I wish we were more like the USA of the Marshall Plan--not a country of corporate vultures ready to pounce on others with "shock doctrines." We weren't a perfect country during the FDR era, by any means--but we had some great ideas about the proper uses of the power that WW II had given us--the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions, the Marshall Plan for Europe, the rebuilding of Japan.

We need to rekindle those ideals and create new ones as well. We need to become a better country. We could have started by, for once in our entire history, treating Haiti right. But it doesn't look like that is possible.

I don't really to know what to make of the Associated Pukes' idea of just dropping Haiti off the edge of the world and forgetting it. It is so profoundly racist that it amazes me, even from the Pukes. A country isn't BUILDINGS, for godssakes! And their historical disinformation...well, it just makes you want to....

:puke:

[EFerrari]

3. I actually thought it was a great example of effective propaganda.

If my kids were still small and I was still working full time and had limited time to read, I'd probably take it as mostly true.

[Peace Patriot]

4. Well, amazingly, I don't think that's true--or much less true than we think.

I will never forget what I discovered during the Iraq War. I really wanted to know: Had my fellow and sister Americans gone nuts, goose-stepping to Bush? Had I so misread my country-men and women? Or was something else going on? So I really delved into the opinion polls during that period, and what I found amazed me. Nearly 60% of the American people opposed the Iraq War--Feb. 2003, all polls. About half of that 60% opposed it outright; the other half would only agree if it were a UN peacekeeping mission (i.e., international consensus that something needed to be done). In other words, they didn't trust Bush. And, of course, the UN declined to act--their weapons inspectors were on the ground in Iraq, proving that there were no WMDs--and major allies also balked.

Our people have never been subjected to such intense propaganda, coming from all quarters--not just the Bushwhacks, but every corporate TV news/opinion outlet, every print newspaper outlet, even the frigging NYT--on the propaganda wagon--and of course many of our mealy-mouthed Democratic leaders.

The people, on the whole, by a big majority, did not believe the propaganda.

The Bushwhacks, of course, rode right over "the will of the people" and went and slaughtered a hundred thousand innocent Iraqis in the first weeks of bombing alone.

I researched other issues as well--and came away with the same conclusion: The great majority of Americans are pretty progressive in their views--and the government and the corporate media just ignore them. We don't count.

I think the upshot is demoralization and feelings of disempowerment--not agreement with the crappola that tired, full time workers or mothers or others see on TV or scan the headlines of, if they have the time. I think most people know that we are being royally screwed by our corporate rulers and war profiteers, and by their servants in government, and that something is very wrong with US foreign policy as well. But they don't know what to do about it--and that is where their fatigue and their responsibilities come in. They vote, and nothing changes. Maybe they even take more time than that--as many people did, really went out of their way, in the Kerry campaign and the Obama campaign and some others. They do that, and nothing changes. We can't seem to bust through the corporate blockades to change and reform. We just keep getting the same result--the result that the corporadoes and war profiteers want. I think most people retreat, maybe stop even scanning the news, seek escape entertainment when they have a few moments to rest. People can only get battered so often, and they retreat and turn off.

Part of the demoralization and disempowerment comes from people not know what's gone wrong with our democracy and what to do about it. There is no practical plan, no strategic goals that are doable, no good analysis of the situation, and very little available for people TO do, that isn't controlled by "Blue Dogs" and will just have the same old results. People flail around from activism to despair to retreat. My remedy is the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, but it doesn't seem to have caught on yet. That could well be THE issue that gets a really big anti-corporate campaign going, and, in my opinion, it is the first layer of the blockade against reform that we must peel back. The election of Obama and a "Blue Dog" Congress took the steam out of that movement. I think it will come back, and could be huge--but it may take time, and I don't know how much time we have to fix it, before it's used to bring the Big Boot down here. That is a real danger.

They have wounded us deeply, in our main power as a people--our vote.

Just one other thought about that nearly 60% opposition to the Iraq War. There was a simultaneous reading of public opinion on whether or not Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. Right now, I can't recall the stat, but it was big (55%?). It seemed to indicate that the majority had swallowed that lie whole. However, when you put these two things together--nearly 60% against the war, yet a majority also believed the 9/11 B.S. about Saddam Hussein, you realize that people were making a very discriminating judgment about all this. Some portion of that nearly 60% against the war also believed that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. So they must have been thinking something like this: 'Maybe he had something to do with it, but it was probably minor, and not cause for war, where lots of innocents will die." Despite all the propaganda and brainwashing, and lack of information, and disinformation, people were applying their common sense, were evaluating what they were being told and were making up their own minds about it.

That is reason for hope.