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Paul Shirley Tells the Truth about Haiti
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Kimbop

Joined: 31 Mar 2008

Posted: Fri Jan 29, 2010 8:45 pm Post subject:

NovaKart wrote:

It's not the Haitian people's fault what happened any more than Americans are responsible for their government or any other country. Should the average Haitian be denied aid because of the mistakes their leaders have made?

I will gladly bandage the suffering, but will not enable or encourage irresponsible reproduction and environment devastation. HAVE BABIES ONLY IF YOU ARE PREPARED TO CARE FOR AND FEED THEM.

NovaKart wrote:

People are responsbile for electing someone into office. What those people do while in office is not really under our control. We can protest it but that doesn't mean it's going to change anything.

In a place like Haiti which doesn't have a stable democracy and many people are more concerned with survival than with protesting government policies it's even more difficult.

A majority of the Haitian population is more concerned with having sex and committing crimes.

By continuing to allow foreign aid to flow unfettered into Haiti, we are propping up a corrupt family-ruled system and thereby perpetuating the problem. It's called "enabling behavior", and it's analogous to your mother supporting your drug habit by permitting you to live for free in her basement. That's not to say we shouldn't provide humanitarian disaster relief. I contribute to the French aid agencies that are digging out bodies, while a majority of natives loot and look on.

Kimbop

Joined: 31 Mar 2008

Posted: Fri Jan 29, 2010 8:54 pm Post subject:

kabrams wrote:

Quote:

for putting itself into a position

Spoken like a true person who has no idea the history of Haiti.

http://news.discovery.com/history/why-is-haiti-so-poor.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Haiti
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_debt_of_Haiti
http://www.openculture.com/2010/01/jared_diamond_explains_haitis_enduring_poverty.html

You don't have to agree with everything, but at least PLEASE think about the history of slavery, colonialism, rebellion, the Great Depression, foreign debt, environmental and social problems etc. before you just say, OMG Haitians are poor because they have a bunch of kids and spend all their time murdering each other and doing drugs.

Seriously, people. RESEARCH, READ, and THINK FOR YOURSELVES.

I will "think for myself" without yours or Wyclef Jean's help, thank you very much.

Many individual Haitians "put themselves into a position" where they have 5 kids and are unable to feed them properly. Or clothe them. Or raise them. This is a culture of entitlement and irresponsibility, and I refuse to contribute to it. I think it's fairly common knowledge that Haitians were trained to be illiterate by their white masters, coupled with being plucked from the African wild and plopped onto that island. (Koreans were slaves, as were Ukrainians, Jews, etc) But your suggestion is to keep paying them so that they can..... reproduce? kill each other? decimate their environment?

They are suffering, and it's sad. What's worse is that "aid" will really not aid them or their civilization.

kabrams

Joined: 15 Mar 2008
Location: your Dad's house

Posted: Sat Jan 30, 2010 5:46 pm Post subject:

Quote:

I will "think for myself" without yours or Wyclef Jean's help, thank you very much.

Who is Wyclef Jean and what does he have to do with anything?

Quote:

Many individual Haitians "put themselves into a position" where they have 5 kids and are unable to feed them properly. Or clothe them. Or raise them.

Hahaha, for real? So a high population is the cause of Haitian poverty, and not a symptom of it?

Quote:

I think it's fairly common knowledge that Haitians were trained to be illiterate by their white masters, coupled with being plucked from the African wild and plopped onto that island.

??

Er..."plucked from the African wild"...? Oh God, you are not ready. You probably think slave traders just randomly ran into the bush and grabbed naked Africans, right?

LOL.

Quote:

But your suggestion is to keep paying them so that they can..... reproduce? kill each other? decimate their environment?

I said nothing about "payment". You need to reread my post, especially the links posted.

catman

Joined: 18 Jul 2004

Posted: Sat Jan 30, 2010 9:44 pm Post subject:

Quote:

As grim accounts of the earthquake in Haiti came in, the accounts in U.S.-controlled state media all carried the same descriptive sentence: "Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere..."

Gee, I wonder how that happened?

You'd think Haiti would be loaded. After all, it made a lot of people rich.

How did Haiti get so poor? Despite a century of American colonialism, occupation, and propping up corrupt dictators? Even though the CIA staged coups d'�tat against every democratically elected president they ever had?

It's an important question. An earthquake isn't just an earthquake. The same 7.0 tremor hitting San Francisco wouldn't kill nearly as many people as in Port-au-Prince.
"Looking at the pictures, essentially it looks as if (the buildings are of) breezeblock or cinderblock construction, and what you need in an earthquake zone is metal bars that connect the blocks so that they stay together when they get shaken," notes Sandy Steacey, director of the Environmental Science Research Institute at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. "In a wealthy country with good seismic building codes that are enforced, you would have some damage, but not very much."

When a pile of cinderblocks falls on you, your odds of survival are long. Even if you miraculously survive, a poor country like Haiti doesn't have the equipment, communications infrastructure or emergency service personnel to pull you out of the rubble in time. And if your neighbors get you out, there's no ambulance to take you to the hospital--or doctor to treat you once you get there.

Earthquakes are random events. How many people they kill is predetermined. In Haiti this week, don't blame tectonic plates. Ninety-nine percent of the death toll is attributable to poverty.

So the question is relevant. How'd Haiti become so poor?

The story begins in 1910, when a U.S. State Department-National City Bank of New York (now called Citibank) consortium bought the Banque National d'Ha�ti--Haiti's only commercial bank and its national treasury--in effect transferring Haiti's debts to the Americans. Five years later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops to occupy the country in order to keep tabs on "our" investment.

From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines imposed harsh military occupation, murdered Haitians patriots and diverted 40 percent of Haiti's gross domestic product to U.S. bankers. Haitians were banned from government jobs. Ambitious Haitians were shunted into the puppet military, setting the stage for a half-century of U.S.-backed military dictatorship.

The U.S. kept control of Haiti's finances until 1947.

Still--why should Haitians complain? Sure, we stole 40 percent of Haiti's national wealth for 32 years. But we let them keep 60 percent.

Whiners.

Despite having been bled dry by American bankers and generals, civil disorder prevailed until 1957, when the CIA installed President-for-Life Fran�ois "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Duvalier's brutal Tonton Macoutes paramilitary goon squads murdered at least 30,000 Haitians and drove educated people to flee into exile. But think of the cup as half-full: fewer people in the population means fewer people competing for the same jobs!

Upon Papa Doc's death in 1971, the torch passed to his even more dissolute 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. The U.S., cool to Papa Doc in his later years, quickly warmed back up to his kleptomaniacal playboy heir. As the U.S. poured in arms and trained his army as a supposed anti-communist bulwark against Castro's Cuba, Baby Doc stole an estimated $300 to $800 million from the national treasury, according to Transparency International. The money was placed in personal accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere.

Under U.S. influence, Baby Doc virtually eliminated import tariffs for U.S. goods. Soon Haiti was awash predatory agricultural imports dumped by American firms. Domestic rice farmers went bankrupt. A nation that had been agriculturally self-sustaining collapsed. Farms were abandoned. Hundreds of thousands of farmers migrated to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince.

The Duvalier era, 29 years in all, came to an end in 1986 when President Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. forces to whisk Baby Doc to exile in France, saving him from a popular uprising.

Once again, Haitians should thank Americans. Duvalierism was "tough love." Forcing Haitians to make do without their national treasury was our nice way or encouraging them to work harder, to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Or, in this case, flipflops.
Anyway.

The U.S. has been all about tough love ever since. We twice deposed the populist and popular democratically-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The second time, in 2004, we even gave him a free flight to the Central African Republic! (He says the CIA kidnapped him, but whatever.) Hey, he needed a rest. And it was kind of us to support a new government formed by former Tonton Macoutes.

Yet, despite everything we've done for Haiti, they're still a fourth-world failed state on a fault line.

And still, we haven't given up. American companies like Disney generously pay wages to their sweatshop workers of 28 cents an hour.

What more do these ingrates want?

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/14-13

Kimbop

Joined: 31 Mar 2008

Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 7:55 am Post subject:

kabrams wrote:

Quote:

I will "think for myself" without yours or Wyclef Jean's help, thank you very much.

Who is Wyclef Jean and what does he have to do with anything?

Hahaha, for real? So a high population is the cause of Haitian poverty, and not a symptom of it?

??

Er..."plucked from the African wild"...? Oh God, you are not ready. You probably think slave traders just randomly ran into the bush and grabbed naked Africans, right?

LOL.

I said nothing about "payment". You need to reread my post, especially the links posted.

You add nothing to the discussion.

pkang0202

Joined: 09 Mar 2007

Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 9:14 am Post subject:

Fox wrote:

NovaKart wrote:

It's not the Haitian people's fault what happened any more than Americans are responsible for their government or any other country.

The Americans are responsible for their government, and the same is true of the Haitians.

Not just the Americans. I think the cause of Haiti's lack of development as a country was the result of multilateral actions by many countries. Don't pin the blame solely on the US. Some folks across the Atlantic also have a hand in it.

However, Americans feel guilty about Haiti because of the fact Haiti is our neighbor. You can tell by the amount of money, support, and concern shown by the American public. Thats not to say Europeans and Asians don't care. they do. Because of Haiti's proximity, the US is shouldering the responsibility of Haiti.

I said earlier that a year from now, most Americans won't care. I hope that isn't the case. However, it usually is. There's always a new cause to support, while the old cause gets tossed away. Remember Darfur? Look how many people jumped off the Darfur bandwagon and jumped onto Haiti's.

NovaKart

Joined: 18 Nov 2009
Location: Iraq

Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 12:44 pm Post subject:

Fox wrote:

NovaKart wrote:

People are responsbile for electing someone into office. What those people do while in office is not really under our control. We can protest it but that doesn't mean it's going to change anything.

Protests, replacing the encumbant in the next election, recall votes, and outright revolution are all possibilities.

NovaKart wrote:

In a place like Haiti which doesn't have a stable democracy and many people are more concerned with survival than with protesting government policies it's even more difficult.

This is true. There are always very understandable reasons why a populace lets its government get away with things, but in the end, they're still just reasons. Struggling to survive every day while the government inhibits rather than supports that task is like trying to use a pail to bail all the water out of a bathtub with the spigot on. You're never going to get anywhere until you fix the real problem. Yes, it's an easier thing to say than to do, but it's still true.

I suppose you're talking about a collective responsibility. If we all got involved to change things then it would happen. It's not very realistic though. People have their own life to live and not everyone is cut out to be an activist.

People risk their lives for a revolution. Even when it happens it's often no better than the previous government. The problems are so complex and I certainly wouldn't hold Haitian people responsible for their government.

kabrams

Joined: 15 Mar 2008
Location: your Dad's house

Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 5:28 pm Post subject:

Kimbop wrote:

kabrams wrote:

Quote:

I will "think for myself" without yours or Wyclef Jean's help, thank you very much.

You add nothing to the discussion.

It's funny that you think this is even a discussion.

Smile

kabrams

Joined: 15 Mar 2008
Location: your Dad's house

Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 5:31 pm Post subject:

pkang0202 wrote:

Fox wrote:

NovaKart wrote:

It's not the Haitian people's fault what happened any more than Americans are responsible for their government or any other country.

The Americans are responsible for their government, and the same is true of the Haitians.

For real. France in particular has been cruel to Haiti and the debt that Haiti has is just ridiculous.

Fox

Joined: 04 Mar 2009

Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 6:01 pm Post subject:

NovaKart wrote:

All I can say is that it's a proven fact people can get together, form effective governments, and then build an effective society. It's also indeed true that some groups of people face greater challenges in that regard than others; cultural problems, ethnic group problems, and so forth can make things much more difficult. None the less, the people of a given nation are, ultimately, where the buck stops. They're the ones with something to gain by reforming, they're the ones who will lose out if they don't reform, and they're the ones who really have the power if they choose to embrace it.

These problems really aren't that complex if the people get involved rather than simply focusing on daily subsistence. Mind you, I don't blame them for wanting to focus just on themselves, it just has consequences.

I want the people of Haiti to have the best life possible; I want that for everyone. Unfortunately, the only people who can make that happen is the people themselves. Even in the West, many countries are sliding away from good governance and towards increasingly corrupt messes due to lack of diligence from their citizen bases.

Fox

Joined: 04 Mar 2009

Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 6:06 pm Post subject:

pkang0202 wrote:

Fox wrote:

NovaKart wrote:

It's not the Haitian people's fault what happened any more than Americans are responsible for their government or any other country.

The Americans are responsible for their government, and the same is true of the Haitians.

I think you misunderstood, but that may be because I worded my statement poorly. I meant the Americans are responsible for their own government (read: the United States Government), and the Haitians are responsible for the Haitian Government.

I don't feel guilty about Haiti at all. I feel bad for them, and I want better for them, but responsibility for improving their country rests on them. Responsibility for resisting potentially harmful foreign influence rests on them.

I only care particularly about Haiti's current plight because they suffered from a recent natural disaster. Aid in light of that disaster is warranted to minimize human suffering caused by that unavoidable occurance, but beyond that, they need to work things out for themselves. As far as I'm concerned, their position is no different than that of many poor nations in the world: they ultimately perpetuate their own problems.

Kimbop

Joined: 31 Mar 2008

Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 6:24 pm Post subject:

Run away if you don't want to debate, but facts remain: Haiti, like many parts of impoverished Africa, is a quagmire. A hole of a country inhabited by barbarians who were brutalized by their white masters. I gotcha. But how this demographic trend originated is not as important as the fact that "aid" will be of little help aside from ensuring that women and children do not starve, and that the ruling families of Haiti will maintain their grip on power. It also doesn't explain why Haitians decided to destroy their environment: http://www.justhaiti.org/images/haiti_dr_border.jpg You also fail to explain how South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, Ireland, etc and other countries with a long history of enslavement and brutalization are able to demonstrate enough civility to form a proper line and humbly bring back a food ration to their families.

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