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"Even more outrageous is the idea that a police force in a town with no real law will shoot to kill to protect property from starving people. "
Dear friends,
With television images of the "looting" going on in Haiti, it's easy to miss the real looters of that small island nation who now are pretending to be "donors".
On the link below, my dear friend and brother Elmer Smith of the Philadelphia Daily News delivers a brilliant analysis that reminds us of the real thieves in this whole miserable scenario. Check it out!
G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20100122_Elmer_Smith__There_are__quot_looters_quot__-_and_then_there_s_Baby_Doc.html
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"Genuine economic development is human. In others words, it is not the amount of trinkets and baubles that people produce or even the dollars that they earn that represents growth."
Dear friends,
I saw the article on the link below on a friend's Facebook post. The article was written by Nicholas Kristof, a veteran columnist of the New York Times. Kristof concentrates his work on non-Europeans; I guess because he thinks that he knows what's best for us.
Nevertheless, the aforementioned article is vintage Nicholas Kristof. His answer to Haitian economic development is to create a bunch of sweatshops. This, of course, came after he hinted at the historical exploitation of Haitians, beginning with the French.
Genuine economic development is human. In others words, it is not the amount of trinkets and baubles that people produce or even the dollars that they earn that represents growth. Rather, it is the ability for people to socially reproduce themselves, as a population group, through time, choosing their own direction in life, on their own terms.
Moreover, it’s people like Kristof who argue that slavery was actually good for Africans. Still, we have sweatshops right here in this country. What kind of future lies ahead for those caught up in that cycle of poverty and despair? After all, the people who own the sweatshops and so forth also own the politicians. Let’s keep it real.
G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/opinion/21kristof.html
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"Is the militarization of this earthquake relief effort all about 'security', as I heard one retired US Army general explain on televiion? Let's look down the road as well., while the world is engaged in cleaning up this severely stricken island nation"
Dear friends,
Is the militarization of this earthquake relief effort all about "security", as I heard one retired US Army general explain on televiion? Let's look down the road as well., while the world is engaged in cleaning up this severely stricken nation.
After receiving an e-mail about the prorressive activism of many Americans both here and on the island nation of Haiti, I thought that I should share it on this blog. The 15 minutes-long video on the link below shows the hard-working artist/activist Danny Glover getting some things done. Please check it out!
G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/19/actor_and_activist_danny_glover_on
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This was Port au Prince before the earthquake of 2010, before the hurricanes of 2008, just after the unintended cruelty of a U.S.-backed embargo helped to starve thousands of Haitians for their own good."
Dear friends,
On the link below, the incomparable Elmer Smith of the Philadelphia Daily News puts this whole Haitian disaster in perspective, based upon his personal experience with a land that has been afflicted by both social and natural turmoil countless times. What's next?
G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/columnists/elmer_smith/20100115_Elmer_Smith__Only_latest_disaster_for_poor_Haiti.html
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"In a move that did great credit to its revolutionary credentials, Haiti became the first nation in the world to recognize the legitimacy of the Biafran cause – and to extend diplomatic recognition to the embattled Biafrans. "
"Haiti’s tragedy, Biafran memories"
by Okey Ndibe
Exactly a week ago, Haiti was struck by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake that reduced much of that misfortunate nation to a colossal ruin. The quake’s epicenter was a mere 16 miles offshore on the western side of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s heavily populated capital.
Earthquakes are hardly ever innocuous; but this one was particularly catastrophic. Its proximity to the capital – home to more than three million people – proved disastrous. As I write, Haitian authorities were estimating that 140,000 had perished from the devastating quake. That toll is, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rightly stated, is of biblical proportions. The prognosis is even more dreadful. Some experts predict that many of the tens of thousands officially listed as missing, as well as many of the critically wounded, will explode the casualty figures.
To see the horror of Haiti is to come to terms to a modern-day apocalypse. For me, it was especially harrowing to look at images of children and the elderly with mangled limbs, gashed heads and swollen faces.
When a natural tragedy strikes on this scale, it’s almost as if the living, in their forlorn despair, begrudge the dead the joys of a grave. Except that most of the Haitian dead were not buried, but abandoned on the streets. I was brought to tears when television cameras panned streets strewn with decomposing bodies. Nigerians have fashioned a unique obituary style where each deceased person is “called to heavenly glory.” Glory was not a word that came to mind when one saw the cadavers that littered the streets of Port-au-Prince.
And yet, Haitians, who in 1804 became the first black-run nation ever to achieve independence, have a lot of glory in their past. Two figures from their revolutionary history, Toussaint l’Ouverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines, are venerable heroes not only for Haitians but also for all people of African descent. These two warriors took on and ultimately vanquished the better-armed forces of Napoleonic France. Though Toussaint was tricked by the French, captured, and transported to France where he died in 1803, his collaborator, Jacque Dessalines, lived to become Haiti’s first leader.
Thanks in large part to meddling by France and, more recently, the US, Haiti has fallen short of its revolutionary aspirations. The American media habitually announce, with something approaching glee, that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Haitians are a much-beleaguered people. Eighty percent of the populace lives on less than $2 a day. In recent times, the island nation has been buffeted by hurricanes and widespread hunger that forced desperate people to eat mud.
That specter will become worse in the aftermath of the earthquake. About ten percent of the homes in Port-au-Prince, a hilly city with wide swathes of ghettoes, were destroyed by the quake and its aftershocks. That means that more than 300,000 inhabitants face the grim certainty of prolonged homelessness in a city whose infrastructure, rudimentary to begin with, is now decimated.
It’s in the nature of natural disasters to be blind in their fury and destruction. This earthquake did not discriminate between rich and poor, old and young, the powerful and the feeble. It shook the Presidential palace to its foundations and leveled the Parliament. The offices of the United Nations were wrecked, more than twenty members of the organization’s staff were confirmed dead, and (at the time of this writing) scores more were still trapped in a pile of rubble. Hotels, churches, and hospitals were also laid to ruin.
With a calamity that touched every sector, the task of providing medical care to the legions of the wounded and getting food to the displaced, drifting masses was bound to be difficult. Even though the US, China, Canada and a plethora of relief agencies responded quickly with shipment of food, water and medicines, Haiti’s battered roads frustrated efforts to immediately reach the victims of the earthquake. Four days after the quake, the vast majority of Haitians were yet to receive succor. Doubtless, many of the dead would have survived had help got to them sooner.
A tragic occurrence like an earthquake offers a measure both of our human fickleness and vulnerability as well as our heroism, staying power, and resilience. The Haitian people, great in the past, will – there’s no question – find a way to rise from their current nightmare.
The earthquake is an opportunity for other peoples and nations to demonstrate the depth of their fellow feeling and generosity – and to offer a hand to their besieged Haitian brethren. Many nations and individuals rose, admirably, to the challenge.
Sadly, to one’s profound shame, the Nigerian government failed to stir much less show continental leadership in the face of Haiti’s peril. Nigeria’s invisibility during the darkest time for the people of Haiti betrays a monumental lack of a sense of history among those running (that is to say, more aptly, ruining) the country.
Last week, author Chinua Achebe issued a statement that must have been a veiled rebuke as well as a cry from the heart. He pleaded with Nigeria and South Africa “to more vigorously join the international community – particularly the remarkable and admirable example of the United States and the European Union – and provide much needed funds and other forms of aid to the people of Haiti for disaster relief.”
Achebe’s plea has a particular resonance at this time, the 40th anniversary of the formal end of the Biafran war. In a move that did great credit to its revolutionary credentials, Haiti became the first nation in the world to recognize the legitimacy of the Biafran cause – and to extend diplomatic recognition to the embattled Biafrans.
With the Nigerian idea in disarray, that Haitian position strikes one today as highly discerned. A Nigerian that doesn’t respond to the travail of the Haitian people is a construct of fundamental questioning.
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"Even more outrageous is the idea that a police force in a town with no real law will shoot to kill to protect property from starving people. "
