CRISIS HAITI OVERLOAD

BEFORE THE QUAKE

The drama in Haiti continues adn the press is still eating everything up.
I am a bit overlaoded and it's extremely distracting given my own tasks at hand in my local situation.

Very scant info on the background aspects of this tragedy gets out. The voices of clarity have no real avenue into the mainstream.
There have been "some" genuine reports sent out of eye witness accounts like this one by Dany L.(who neglects to mention that ThomasS. was also with him and Rodney) See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/crossover-dreams/haitian-writer-dany-lafer_b_426365.html

"...People feel that this time, this aid is serious. It's not the theatrical gesture that it had been in the past. You can see that foreign governments really want to do something for Haiti, and also that in this country no one wants to embezzle this aid. Because what just happened is much too serious. There's so much to do, beginning with collecting the dead. This will no doubt take several weeks. Then, the whole city will need to be cleared out to avoid epidemics. But the biggest problem is water, because in Port-au-Prince it's polluted. Normally you boil drinking water, but there's no more cooking gas..."

[original french version from Le Monde]
Another eyrwitness account by a non-haitian is this one

Caption:" And now, the humanitarian tsunami"

A text (signed Naomi Klein) from a german Online journal website presents a good precis as the some of the background info and questions to be posed:

"...Haiti was a nation of farmers, but thanks to the strings attached to U.S. aid, government policies made profitable farming unprofitable. So the farmers were pushed to the cities to provide a cheap manufacturing labor force. All those people you see on the TV in their shattered shantytowns? We helped put them there. With exploitative loans and yes, even a classic CIA-backed coup, we helped create this mess..."

Full text from/at http://de.indymedia.org/2010/01/271037.shtml

A larger and longer essay (writen during W.Bush) can be accessed through http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2507 on the fuller story of the Haitian condition and the relation with the states

"...most consequential of these foreign interventions was launched by Woodrow Wilson in 1915, a counterpart to his punitive assaults on the Mexican Revolution. The us occupation lasted for nearly twenty years, and extended between 1916 and 1924 into a parallel incursion into the Dominican Republic next door. The American military regime proceeded to institute an early version of a structural adjustment programme: they abolished the clause in the constitution that had barred foreigners from owning property in Haiti, took over the National Bank, reorganized the economy to ensure more ‘reliable’ payments of foreign debt, expropriated land to create their own plantations, and trained a brutal military force whose only victories would be against the Haitian people. Rebellions—that of Charlemagne Peralte in the north during the early years of the occupation, or the strike wave of 1929—were savagely repressed. By the time they pulled out in 1934, us troops had broken the back of the initial peasant resistance to this socio-economic engineering, killing between 5,000 and 15,000 people in the process...."

Democracy Now has been one of the better (as usual) outlets for revealing HOW this catastrophe came to be.

The typical mainstream reports uses terms like "Malédiction" and only mention the heroic efforts of 1804's self liberation from the French State and enslavers. here is a good example froma respected (French)news source http://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/article/2010/01/14/haiti-la-malediction_1291437_3222.html
The NewYork Times is known for similar sophistry.

foto: Charlemagne Peralte's body- assissinated and fotographed by the US military as a warning to occupation dissenters