So much for our aid being welcome

The never ending misery that is Haiti was caused in great measure by the USA and European countries who pillaged their resources.

not being productive citizens because some of their great grand parents where slaves?

After the earthquake, Bill O’Reilly suggested that humanitarians were romanticizing aid as a solution for Haiti: “One year from today, Haiti will be just as bad as it is right now.” I criticized him at the time, but he wasn’t far off. Haiti has certainly improved since the immediate aftermath of the quake, and aid kept alive many who would otherwise have died. But reconstruction has barely started. Most of the rubble is still waiting to be cleared off, and more than one million people are still living in tents.

Part of the problem is that the government, crippled by the quake, has done little. Another is that aid groups created a parallel state that further diminishes the government — and a country needs a central authority to make decisions. The limitations of aid are very much on display in Haiti.

aid kept alive many who would otherwise have died.

Little very little to do with the US and the country who bear 99 percents of the blame is France.

Shortly afterwards, the United States, responding to complaints to President Woodrow Wilson from American banks to which Haiti was deeply in debt, occupied the country. The occupation of Haiti lasted until 1934. The US occupation was self-interested, sometimes brutal, and caused problems that lasted past its lifetime.

...

When the newly elected National Assembly refused to pass this document and drafted one of their own preserving this prohibition, it was forcibly dissolved by Gendarmerie commandant Smedley Butler. This constitution was approved by a plebiscite in 1919, in which less than 5% of the population voted. The US State Department authorized this plebiscite presuming that “The people casting ballots would be 97% illiterate, ignorant in most cases of what they were voting for.”[15]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Haiti

The "least worst" defence of US power. I love this one. The reviewer defends the US government from Chomsky's critique on the grounds that it is not as bad as [insert random bad-people]. Here its Communist China. It could be Stalin, or the Nazis or whoever. Those, apparently, are the standards by which we judge our governments. The simple idea that we might live up to our own (repeatedly and loudly) claimed liberal standards is too zany and radical to be considered. The mild suggestion that we might, say, stop backing some of the most vicious tyrannies and human rights abusers in the Middle East, stop backing Israel's brutal colonisation of Palestine, not launch aggressive wars, not impose economic policies on poor countries that impoverish them further while enriching our own elites, all that is "an abstract ideal of beneficent global stewardship".

Maybe later I'll go out and mug a pensioner, and then, when brought before the judge, argue that I can't be expected to live up "an abstract ideal of beneficent citizenship" and that, in this best of all possible words, at least I didn't kill her.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/04/hopes-and-prospects-chomsky-review

but in the case of Haiti we was a very very secondary actor and did not cause or set up the conditions on that island.

agree, Bill. The US simply took advantage of the poor condition that the French left Haiti in to continue pillaging the resources of Haiti. In some ways that could be considered much worse, you know, kicking someone when they're badly injured.

Haiti’s poverty is the result of the theft and exploitation of Haiti by the world’s wealthy countries and their corporations. Haiti’s poverty is not, as asserted in Amiel Blajchman's article, directly linked to deforestation. But, if one repeats this assertion long enough, as has been done with Haiti, it becomes sort of a journalistic boilerplate. But that does not mean it's the truth, the whole truth and based on verifiable facts.

Haiti's poverty began with a US/Euro trade embargo after its independence, continued with the Independence Debt to France and ecclesiastical and financial colonialism. Moreover, in more recent times, "the uses of U.S. foreign aid, as administered through USAID in Haiti, basically serves to fuel conflicts and covertly promote U.S. corporate interests to the detriment of democracy and Haitian health, liberty, sovereignty, social justice and political freedoms. USAID projects have been at the frontlines of orchestrating undemocratic behavior, bringing underdevelopment, coup d'etat, impunity of the Haitian Oligarchy, indefinite incarceration of dissenters, and destroying Haiti's food sovereignty essentially promoting famine. Recall, for instance, USAID project such as the slaughter of the Kreyòl pigs that greatly impoverished the peasants, the Peligre dam that made landless peasants, the Miami rice that destroyed Haiti's domestic rice, the trade laws that brought sweatshops enticing rural Haitians to the capital and created the slum of Site Soley when the US companies closed shop and went elsewhere." (See, HLLN on oversight needed on USAID).

Throught its "democracy enhancement program," USAID financed the projects of subversion, infiltration, military deception and psychological operations that the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the International Foundation for Election Systems ("IFES") carried out in Haiti t0 destabalized the Constitutionally elected Aristide/Preval government and ouster it in 2004 bringing the UN proxy occupation for the U.S." (See, Matters to be investigated.)

But, if we stick only to deforestation here, Haiti’s deforestation is due as much to the use of wood for charcoal as the soil erosion occurring right now in Haiti (because of the current destruction of Haiti's mountains) is due to digging up for cement, marble, granite, aggregate, gold and copper by the Haitians peasant for constructing their houses! Haiti's peasants could be using charcoal and raw mountain materials for construction to meet their sustainable daily needs for centuries and would not have denuded the mountains or dug them up to the extent visible today, leaving Haiti with the soil erosion it is currently experiencing and the craters that will be left when Haiti’s remaining mountain ranges and natural protection have been more thoroughly exploited and mined by the transnational corporations now in Haiti. Mining Haiti's mountains for extraction of raw materials for the foreign construction industry has been steadily going on for decades in Haiti and since before the 1980s. The digging up of Haiti, for the construction industry and, to a smaller scale at present, for its mineral wealth (gold, copper...), post-Bush Regime Change/2004 coup d'etat, has intensified.

The Euro/US companies carting off Haiti's natural resources, by digging its mountains right now, and before that, by razing whole Haitian forests to the ground for lumber to meet Western profit needs, along with the destruction of Haiti's peasant economy (elimination of Haiti’s indigenous black pigs and dumping of US rice that destroyed domestic agriculture) so that the peasant could not afford other fuel, are the primary reasons for the environmental degradation in Haiti.

It's a process that started in colonial times, continued under the 19-year US occupation (1915-1934) and now, it's Haiti's mountains that are being dug up, mined and destroyed by the International companies taking the mineral wealth of Haiti that are in the mountain rocks (gold, copper, uranium, iridium, granite, marble, coal, limestone oil and gas explorations) behind these UN guns. That's why, contrary to, the article's assertions, Haiti is no longer the "poorest in the Western Hemisphere, Nicaragua is! But that little colonial narrative - also having NOTHING to do with the realities of Haitian lives - will also be repeated and reprinted, ad nausea, and also readily believed by uninformed readers. For more, go to:

Ezili Dantò/HLLN's counter-colonial narrative on Haiti's deforestation;
Interview on the Mining of Haiti's Resources;
Haiti Riches;
Pointing Guns at Starving Haitians: Violent Haiti is a myth; and,
Comparing crime, poverty and violence in the rest of the Hemisphere to Haiti

The poor Haitian peasants' meager and what would otherwise - without the centuries of plunder of Haiti forests and mountains by Western profit extraction companies - have been a sustainable use of charcoal for daily fuel is primarily blamed for Haiti's poverty, Haiti's soil erosion and deforestation. The multiple causes which accelerated the deforestation in Haiti and that don’t involve blaming the poor Haitian are simply not addressed in most writings about Haiti's soil erosion and environmental degradation.

Ezili Dantò
Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network ("HLLN")
May 11, 2009
Email: [email protected]

http://open.salon.com/blog/ezili_danto/2009/05/11/hlln_on_the_causes_of_haiti_deforestation_and_poverty

U.S. corporate interests to the detriment of democracy and Haitian health, liberty, sovereignty, social justice and political freedoms. USAID projects have been at the frontlines of orchestrating undemocratic behavior, bringing underdevelopment, coup d'etat, impunity of the Haitian Oligarchy, indefinite incarceration of dissenters, and destroying Haiti's food sovereignty essentially promoting famine. Recall, for instance, USAID project such as the slaughter of the Kreyòl pigs that greatly impoverished the peasants, the Peligre dam that made landless peasants, the Miami rice that destroyed Haiti's domestic rice, the trade laws that brought sweatshops enticing rural Haitians to the capital and created the slum of Site Soley when the US companies closed shop and went elsewhere." (See, HLLN on
oversight needed on USAID).

PORT-AU-PRINCE—Haiti's cholera death toll has risen to 3,759, government figures showed Thursday, but daily fatalities linked to the persistent epidemic appeared to trend downward in the first days of 2011.

The figure, which marks the total toll from the discovery of the outbreak in mid-October through January 7, is just over 100 more than the Health Ministry's previous toll released one week ago.

Total infections rose to 181,000 in Haiti, including 101,000 people who have been treated in hospital

Misery in Haiti is not news, and nobody wants to hear anymore about it.

Wouldn't it be nice, would it be just ******* grand if we could point to an actual situation where the USA really tried to help a country instead of pillaging their wealth. You know, something that would match the line of bullshit that the US has been feeding its citizenry and the world since forever.

A big part of the problem is that the government of Haiti is a scam