Richard Hawley

Im feeling terribly frustrated and angry about whats happening with the aid in Haiti.
I dont fuckin understand why there are warehouses full of supplies that people urgently need (have they not gone through enough already ?? ) last night i watched video on the news of a lorry full of stuff arriving , bags of rice being given out and because they were having a scuffle scrambling to get food, desperate to feed what family they have left,, they took all the bastard food off them, loaded it back on the lorry and bugged off back to the warehouse??????????
another video showed solidiers doing a band practice and marching up and down in a yard??????????? why arnt they helping get the aid out, thats where they are needed. what the fuck is going on??????? we have sent millions like other countries ... who the fuck is organising the aid to get to where it should be .
Those people who survived are sooo lucky to be here, they have had a few weeks of pure hell..everything lost, loved ones taken, everything they knew and had made from the years of their lives.....gone ....... why cant food and water (the most basic of things) be given out???? bullets for the soldiers guns seem to be getting through for them to shoot at looters ... and i dont expect that the solidiers went hungry after their fucking band practice.......
i cant carry on here im just way to upset and angry...sorry for my swearing folks

US army is being given priority landing space over aid transport. Looks like they're trying to get their grubby hands on Haiti again.

thanks alan for adding to this thread. glad im not the only one whos pissed at this

Natural disasters are terrible things wherever they happen,but even worse when they occur in a tragic ,third world country like Haiti
A country with no natural resources,industry or recognised commerce.This country was, for decades,run by lunatics who created a national mindset for it's impoverished people,of grasping at any opportunity to make a buck for themselves over their natural instint to help others.It's awful but it's no surprise to see the chaos in a country that can't think beyond next week let alone have a long term financial plan.They have completely deforested the country for short term sales of timber rather then exploit it's natural beaty.Sad very sad.

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I'd rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by faith.

Wilco have put some live stuff for download on their web site asking that people donate to Haiti.

There's also this web site working on the same principle

http://www.pastemagazine.com/songsforhaiti

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There's a raven in the distance, his inscription's all around you, you can't hide

https://www.facebook.com/LiamMcKaheyandtheBodies
https://cousteaux.com/music

PS i thought this thread was Josephine being upset at the mocking of her family photos.

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I'd rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by faith.

nahhh..im not that easily upset its all a laugh, which is why i put em up

I just feel so helpless about the above, I had saved up £260 to re-deck my decking (which has rotten because i did it myself out of reclaimed timber ) anyway, i sent £200 off last week to help the people there....it felt right at the time but now im not sure those poeple will see any good come of my hard earned cash..i have two kids that i bring up alone and its not easy to save cash.

Your on a hiding to nothing there.£200 quid for a good cause and rotting decking.I suggest getting rid of the old decking as it's so last decade.

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I'd rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by faith.

its not decking as you know it!!!!!!!!! its very rustic..its my own little ranch im drunk, again

Flipping heck!!! I hardly have the news or and I don't buy papers anymore.............that is fucking outrageous what the fuck are they thinking taking the food back anyone in that situation would do anything to get their hands on food and water, it's not like kids fighting over sweets and they get taken away and told off!!!! I wonder if M&S will do any fundraising cos they do do a lot???? I'm gonna ask........

Apologies for the length of this post. I couldn't find the source online and the text was just e-mailed to me

Very intersting article


Haiti’s never-ending tragedy has American roots
Sunday, January 17, 2010 By Vincent Browne

Late last week, the White House website carried details of a 30-minute phone conversation last Friday morning between President Barack Obama and René Préval, the president of Haiti.

It reported: ‘‘President Obama said that the world had been devastated by the loss and suffering in Haiti, and pledged the full support of the American people for the government and people of Haiti as it relates to both the immediate recovery effort and the long-term rebuilding effort.

‘‘President Préval said that he has been touched by the friendship of the American people, and expressed his condolences for the loss of American citizens in Haiti.”

The report continued: ‘‘President Préval closed by passing a message to the American people - ‘From the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the Haitian people, thank you, thank you, thank you’.”

It would be churlish to criticise the president of a country devastated by tragedy, when he was pleading with the world for support at a time of such crisis for his people. But he could have been forgiven for being less wholehearted, for the story of Haiti is maybe the most vivid representation of imperialist murderous oppression in world history. That oppression added hugely to the tragedy that the earthquake brought last Tuesday to the people of Haiti.

Right from the beginning of the reports on the earthquake last Tuesday night, Haiti was repeatedly referred to as the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Rarely was it explained why this was so.

The island on which Haiti and the Dominican Republic are situated was inhabited thousands of years ago by the Taino people, a branch of the Arawak, who populated the Caribbean and the eastern coast of South America down to Brazil. These were the people encountered by Christopher Columbus in 1492. He called the island Hispaniola.

The native population was quickly decimated and eventually extinguished when the civilising Europeans ‘‘discovered’’ it.

The Spaniards began importing African slaves into Hispaniola in the early 16th century.

In 1697, the Treaty of Ryswick divided the island between the Spanish and the French, with France receiving the western third, Haiti. It became the richest French colony in the New World, earning for its colonisers huge profits from sugar and coffee and the labour of the African slaves.

The French enacted the Code Noir, which sanctioned the most brutal treatment of slaves .A memoir from the time described how slaves were hung up with heads downward, drowned in sacks, crucified on planks, buried alive, thrown into boiling cauldrons, or consigned to man-eating dogs.

The French Revolution in 1789 prompted a revolution by the slaves in Haiti, and the French National Assembly abolished slavery. Following an unsuccessful intervention by Napoleon in the early 19th century, Haiti won independence and proclaimed itself a republic on January 1,1804.

In 1825,Charles X of France attempted to reconquer Haiti.

The then president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, agreed to pay the equivalent of €20 billion in today’s money as compensation for the profits lost by the French colonists by the abolition of slavery. Not surprisingly, many Haitians still demand that France repay this ransom.

A succession of coups followed into the 19th century. In 1888,US Marines supported a revolt against the government. The Germans did the same in 1892 and, in 1915, the US invaded and occupied the island until 1934.

The instigation for this occupation arose from a consortium of American investors, assembled by the National City Bank of New York, taking control of Banque Nationale d’Haiti, the country’s only commercial bank.

It and other US banks which had lent money to the Haitian government urged the then US president, Woodrow Wilson, to invade Haiti and take control.

A new constitution was imposed and approved in a plebiscite in which only 5 per cent of the people of Haiti voted.

Forced labour was imposed.

The Haitian economy was opened to American imports.

The law forbidding foreigners from taking control of Haitian companies was repealed. Another regime of gross human rights abuses followed. Franklin Roosevelt ended the occupation in 1934, but the US retained control of Haiti’s external finances until 1947.

A decade later, the Americans engineered the imposition of the Duvalier tyranny on Haiti, as a bulwark against the spread of communism from Cuba. This family dictatorship lasted until 1986.

In December 1990, JeanBertrand Aristide was elected president with 67 per cent of the vote. The Americans covertly supported a coup against him in 1991. In 1994,US President Bill Clinton engineered the return of Aristide on terms that forced him to adopt the neoliberal programme promulgated by the candidate he defeated in 1990, and which the country had rejected.

Aristide was disbarred from standing in the presidential election in 1996, but he won the presidency back in 2000. In 2004, the Americans again engineered his removal, this time arranging for him to be kidnapped and deported to the Central African Republic.

Meanwhile, Haiti was ravaged by corruption and the imposition of economic policies that drove people out of agriculture into the slums of cities where they died in their tens of thousands last Monday, unprotected by the ramshackle hovels in which they were forced to live.

Tens of thousands have gone illegally to the US over the past few decades, to escape the misery of Haitian life. Most formed families and had children; then, in 2008, a move was made to deport some 20,000 of them. The Bush administration deferred deportations following the hurricanes in Haiti that year but, almost as soon Barack Obama came to office a year ago, the deportations were ordered to commence.

The pity of this latest tragedy is that the president of Haiti says thank you, thank you, thank you, to America for all it has done.

The whole of the civil structure in Haiti is in ruins, therefore to reach the people who desperatly need help, is twice as difficult. In a humanitarian crisis like this, the first thing to do is to organize the logistics, how to get there and how to distribute the aid. At the moment there is no structure in place to do very much at all. There is no roads, the port is in tatters, etc. In order to distribute help, the rubble needs to be cleared, engineerings need to get there too. Think about it, there is no standing hospitals, the goverment palace is in ruins. The difference between the tsunamy in Indonesia and Haiti is that Indonesia's goverment structure was intact, and the goverment acted fast, hand by hand with humanitarians agencies. Haiti, streactly speaking has no goverment right now. The president Mr. Preval is living on a tend. The place is in chaos, and the country is pretty much been runned by the UN and the US.
I know people who work in the British red cross and Oxfam, and this is the reality. And is heartbreaking.

I am not actually surprised.

Greg Palast is a *great* journalist -

http://www.gregpalast.com/

and his recent thoughts on this....

The Right Testicle of Hell:
History of a Haitian Holocaust

Blackwater before drinking water

by Greg Palast for The Huffington Post
Sunday 17 January 2010

long way 1. Bless the President for having rescue teams in the air almost immediately. That was President Olafur Grimsson of Iceland. On Wednesday, the AP reported that the President of the United States promised, "The initial contingent of 2,000 Marines could be deployed to the quake-ravaged country within the next few days." "In a few days," Mr. Obama?

2. There's no such thing as a 'natural' disaster. 200,000 Haitians have been slaughtered by slum housing and IMF "austerity" plans.

3. A friend of mine called. Do I know a journalist who could get medicine to her father? And she added, trying to hold her voice together, "My sister, she's under the rubble. Is anyone going who can help, anyone?" Should I tell her, "Obama will have Marines there in 'a few days'"?

4. China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China, Mr. President. China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US bases in Puerto Rico: right there.

5. Obama's Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "I don't know how this government could have responded faster or more comprehensively than it has." We know Gates doesn't know.

6. From my own work in the field, I know that FEMA has access to ready-to-go potable water, generators, mobile medical equipment and more for hurricane relief on the Gulf Coast. It's all still there. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who served as the task force commander for emergency response after Hurricane Katrina, told the Christian Science Monitor, "I thought we had learned that from Katrina, take food and water and start evacuating people." Maybe we learned but, apparently, Gates and the Defense Department missed school that day.

7. Send in the Marines. That's America's response. That's what we're good at. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after three days. With what? It was dramatically deployed — without any emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.

8. But don't worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully equipped and self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed immediately with ten metric tons of tools and equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced communication equipment and water purifying capability. They're from Iceland.

9. Gates wouldn't send in food and water because, he said, there was no "structure ... to provide security." For Gates, appointed by Bush and allowed to hang around by Obama, it's security first. That was his lesson from Hurricane Katrina. Blackwater before drinking water.

10. Previous US presidents have acted far more swiftly in getting troops on the ground on that island. Haiti is the right half of the island of Hispaniola. It's treated like the right testicle of Hell. The Dominican Republic the left. In 1965, when Dominicans demanded the return of Juan Bosch, their elected President, deposed by a junta, Lyndon Johnson reacted to this crisis rapidly, landing 45,000 US Marines on the beaches to prevent the return of the elected president.

11. How did Haiti end up so economically weakened, with infrastructure, from hospitals to water systems, busted or non-existent - there are two fire stations in the entire nation - and infrastructure so frail that the nation was simply waiting for "nature" to finish it off?


Don't blame Mother Nature for all this death and destruction. That dishonor goes to Papa Doc and Baby Doc, the Duvalier dictatorship, which looted the nation for 28 years. Papa and his Baby put an estimated 80% of world aid into their own pockets - with the complicity of the US government happy to have the Duvaliers and their voodoo militia, Tonton Macoutes, as allies in the Cold War. (The war was easily won: the Duvaliers' death squads murdered as many as 60,000 opponents of the regime.)

12. What Papa and Baby didn't run off with, the IMF finished off through its "austerity" plans. An austerity plan is a form of voodoo orchestrated by economists zomby-fied by an irrational belief that cutting government services will somehow help a nation prosper.

13. In 1991, five years after the murderous Baby fled, Haitians elected a priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who resisted the IMF's austerity diktats. Within months, the military, to the applause of Papa George HW Bush, deposed him. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. The farce was George W. Bush. In 2004, after the priest Aristide was re-elected President, he was kidnapped and removed again, to the applause of Baby Bush.

14. Haiti was once a wealthy nation, the wealthiest in the hemisphere, worth more, wrote Voltaire in the 18th century, than that rocky, cold colony known as New England. Haiti's wealth was in black gold: slaves. But then the slaves rebelled - and have been paying for it ever since.


From 1825 to 1947, France forced Haiti to pay an annual fee to reimburse the profits lost by French slaveholders caused by their slaves' successful uprising. Rather than enslave individual Haitians, France thought it more efficient to simply enslave the entire nation.

15. Secretary Gates tells us, "There are just some certain facts of life that affect how quickly you can do some of these things." The Navy's hospital boat will be there in, oh, a week or so. Heckuva job, Brownie!

16. Note just received from my friend. Her sister was found, dead; and her other sister had to bury her. Her father needs his anti-seizure medicines. That's a fact of life too, Mr. President.

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And as for this fucking moron, Pat Robertson. "Haiti did a deal with the Devil to free from themselves from the French, and have been suffering since..."

Beyond belief - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59NCduEhkBM

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