Haiti: Aid racket increases suffering | Green Left Weekly
It is more than a month since the January 12 earthquake that laid waste to Port-au-Prince, killing more than 200,000 people and thrusting millions of people into desperate conditions.
But according to the US government, Haitians have a lot to be thankful for. On February 12, the US Ambassador to Haiti Ken Merten boasted to the press: “In terms of humanitarian aid delivery … frankly, it’s working really well, and I believe that this will be something that people will be able to look back on in the future as a model.”
What are the facts? the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported in a February 12 statement: “Over 1.1 million people are homeless, many of them still living under sheets and cardboard in makeshift camps. the government of Haiti estimates that at least 300,000 people were injured during the quake.”
So far, the relief effort has only managed to provide 270,000 people with basic shelters like tents. More than 1 million people still have little access to food and water and have to scrape by to find sustenance.
Even worse, because the relief operation is so inefficient, Haitians report that some of the food spends so long at the airport it is rotten by the time it gets to the hungry.
On February 7, thousands of Haitians marched in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Petionville to protest their desperate circumstances and the failure of aid delivery.
Medicins sans Frontieres (MSF) summed up the grave situation in a February 11 statement: “It’s hard to believe that four weeks after the quakes, so many people still live under bedsheets in camps and on the street …
“One can only wonder how there could be such a huge gap between the promise of a massive financial influx into the country and the slow pace of distribution.”
Some NGOs, such as Partners in Health, have done and are doing amazing work to provide services for quake victims. But the catastrophe in Haiti has revealed the worst aspects of the US government and the NGO aid industry.
The US has used its “relief” operation to disguise a military occupation of Haiti, intended to prevent a flood of refugees reaching the US, impose even greater sweatshop development and signal to the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean that it aims to reassert its power in the region.
The NGO-centred aspect of the US response is an important part of its strategy. instead of aiding the Haitian state and building up its capacity to handle the crisis, the US is funneling US$379 million in aid through its own agencies and then through NGOs.
Associated Press said on January 27: “Each American dollar roughly breaks down like this: 42 cents for disaster assistance, 33 cents for U.S. military aid, nine cents for food, nine cents to transport the food, five cents for paying Haitian survivors for recovery efforts, just less than one cent to the Haitian government …”
The big NGOs, which are getting the bulk of the money, see the crisis as an opportunity to raise funds and their profile. Thus, instead of a centralised relief effort, something only a sovereign state could provide, the NGOs are competing with one another, literally branding areas they serve with their logos.
On January 22, the British Telegraph quoted British medical journal The Lancet as saying that NGOs are “jostling for position, each claiming that they are doing the most for earthquake survivors … the situation in Haiti is chaotic, devastating and anything but coordinated.
“Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavory characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts.
“Media coverage as an end in itself is too often an aim of their activities. Marketing and branding have too high a profile.
“Perhaps worst of all, relief efforts in the field are sometimes competitive, with little collaboration between agencies, including smaller, grassroots charities that may have better networks in affected counties, and so are well placed to immediately implement emergency relief.”
The NGOs are businesses in their own right. They sport well-paid bureaucrats that raise money from the disastrous impact of neoliberalism around the world.
They are not accountable to the local populations they supposedly serve, but instead to the international donors that fund them — most often, corporate-backed formations like George Soros’s Open Society Institute and capitalist governments.
Moreover, given that NGOs can pay local leaders more than either the government or social movements, they often recruit people who would traditionally lead leftist movements.
They play a role very similar to the one that missionary religious institutions played in the earlier history of empire. They provide moral cover — a civilising mission to help the hapless heathens — for the powers that are plundering the society.
And just as religious institutions justified imperial war, many NGOs, abandoning their traditional standpoint of neutrality in conflicts, have become advocates of military intervention.
Nowhere is this pattern clearer than in Haiti.
In the 1980s, the US convinced the dictator Baby Doc Duvalier to implement a neoliberal development plan that Haitians call “the plan of death”. this dropped tariffs on US agriculture, encouraged sweatshop development and opened tourist resorts for the international elite.
The plan increased absolute poverty by 60%.
But the Haitian poor rose up and overthrew the dictatorship in 1986. They elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide president in 1990 on a platform of anti-neoliberal reform.
Aristide was overthrown in a US-backed coup in 1991, with the coup regime carrying out a reign of terror against his supporters. Aristide was again elected in 2000, and overthrown by another US-backed coup in 2004.
Haiti now has the most neoliberal economy in the region.
The US, other powers and international donors responded to the subsequent collapse of the state by funding NGOs. Soon, the World Bank reported that there were 10,000 NGOs in the country, doing everything from trash collection to health care and food provision in a chaotic patchwork of services that have replaced the incapacitated state.
These NGOs are non-governmental only in name. the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and other similar government-funded agencies from other countries provide 70% of NGO funding.
The NGOs have proliferated in lockstep with the collapse in the Haitian standard of living.
When the “plan of death” was implemented in Haiti, undercutting peasant agriculture, it flooded the market with subsidised US products and caused a food crisis. Peasants became dependent on food aid.
USAID funded CARE International to feed the impoverished peasants. the NGO began to distribute US crops as food aid, during both bad and good harvests, further undermining Haitian peasants’ ability to compete for the market.
Often, the food aid was taken by local elites and sold on the market, with the CARE brand still affixed to the packaging.
The US also manipulated NGOs to build political opposition to any reform movement. In the run-up to its second coup against Aristide in 2004, the US enforced an embargo on Aristide’s government for alleged electoral manipulations and escalated funding for anti-Aristide NGOs.
Many, if not most, of the NGOs that supported the coup were on the US payroll.
In 1935, retired US Major General Smedley Butler famously concluded that his role at the head of the US military had been to serve as a “racketeer for capitalism”. the same could just as easily be said of many NGOs involved in humanitarian aid today — it is a racket for empire.
Haiti: Aid racket increases suffering | Green Left Weekly
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Categories: News and Events Tags: cardboard, port au prince
Editorial: Download and Downsize
February 5, 2010 – I realize I’m probably in the minority here, but I simply cannot tolerate any more junk in my house.
And I define junk as excess physical possessions of any and all kinds, whether an extraneous set of throw pillows on the couch or yes, a media cabinet full of game and movie boxes and discs. it seems I’ve spent a lifetime collecting things.
As a kid, it was the entire catalog of He-Man figurines and accessories — Man at Arms, Castle Grayskull, and everything in-between; I didn’t get out much, but Orko never judged me. as I grew older, my affinity for toys was replaced by an obsession with videogames and movies.
Dusty cartridges cluttered and clogged the nooks and crannies of my room. Weathered game boxes, the cardboard worn and ripped, lined the shelves of my living space. as the years passed, carts gave way to compact discs, CDs to DVDs, and inevitably DVDs to Blu-rays.
(Like any self-loathing, masochistic early adopter, I even enjoyed a short, forgettable semi-like affair with HD-DVD. I briefly supported the obsolete format because it allowed me access to high-definition Dawn of the Dead 2004 and Serenity before Blu-ray, but ill-conceived choices like these warrant another editorial, or perhaps a book.)
There was a time when it made perfect sense to possess these things. There was frankly no other option available to me. If I wanted to play Super Mario 64, I had only to survey my shelves lined with cartridges, find the game, slot it into my Nintendo 64 and off I went. and if I wanted to watch ex-football-star-turn-FBI-agent Johnny Utah chase down bank-robbing surfers, my Point break DVD always lingered in a media cabinet nearby. it was comforting, I suppose.
Over the years, I’ve amassed an embarrassingly large collection of movies and games. Enough to fill several bulky moving boxes, as I recently discovered. and when I did, an epiphany hit me. Why do I own all of this stuff? I rarely, if ever, come back to it. It’s true. So many forgotten games and movies crammed and overflowed from those boxes. did I really need to save five different versions spanning as many years of Madden football? (And why the heck did I own four copies of Ico for PlayStation 2? The game’s amazing, but really? in the disorganized mess, I had actually forgotten I purchased it three other times. and by the way, that should give you some insight into my broken brain.)
For me, the era of physical media is rapidly approaching its end. it was fun while it lasted, but in today’s digital, always-connected world, there’s less need for all this unnecessary consumption and dwindling benefits to these enormous, room-filling collections. It’s become clutter — for comfort, for bragging rights, and for some semblance of traditional ownership.
Whether or not physical media is convenient — well, that’s a matter that’s open to debate. I would argue that abandoning your discs and going digital might prove more convenient in many ways. Take, for example, that old copy of Super Mario 64. I could spend an hour looking for the game in one of those moving boxes, and then I’d have to seek out and hook up my N64, too. Or, if I own a Wii and have access to the Internet — check and check — I could simply download Super Mario 64 in two minutes flat.
When digital distribution was in its infancy — it’s graduated to toddlerhood — I held onto my discs and my reservations about the emerging infrastructure. I figured I might be able to download some games and movies, but that it would never be the same as truly owning them. somewhere between Xbox Live and iPhone, though, I finally let go of my skepticism and embraced the new age. The fact is, I do own the games I download. I can delete them and re-download them at will, free of charge. If I buy a movie, the same is true. That’s ownership. I’m merely retrieving files off a server and not discs from a shelf, but the concept is the same.
I initially bought a PlayStation 3 for its Blu-ray player. I’ve since grown to love the console for its games and a multitude of other features (Home not included). however, I no longer purchase Blu-ray movie discs. I gave them up about a year ago when I realized that between Xbox Live, PSN, streaming Netflix, and DirecTV on Demand, I had access to the majority of movies I cared to buy in high-definition. I didn’t have to drive to Best Buy for them, and they were cheaper. in addition, my living room is clean and clutter free.
I’ve painted a one-sided picture. There are, of course, still some lofty barriers to a purely digital lifestyle. I recognize that. It’s all good and fine where iPhone is concerned. I can download everything I need and I can usually do it on the fly over a 3G network, which is fantastic. but it’s not all sunshine and rainbows where home media consumption is involved, especially when you’ve got large file sizes coming down the pipe. If you’re particularly lucky, you might just have access to a fiberoptic Internet connection and speeds which allow downloads of feature-length HD movies in minutes and not hours. but not everybody is so fortunate. For most people, it can take a very, very long time to download a movie — enough time that you could easily drive out, rent it, come home and likely watch the thing before the digital version is all finished transferring. So there’s that, and while this bottleneck exists, we can’t completely ignore brick and mortal retail stores in favor of online ones.
There’s also the question of availability. true enough, a lot of games and movies are now accessible for download on the same day they appear in retail — and usually cheaper. but certainly not all of them. Major game publishers seem to arbitrarily allow some new releases digitally and ignore others. on PSN, you could buy Warhawk and Socom: Confrontation day and date with the physical discs. but the trend hasn’t continued. Indeed, I recently asked the man in charge of the PlayStation Network if we would get more full PS3 games via download any time soon and he more or less told me not to hold my breath. Microsoft allows only a handful of titles. Wii owners have no means to grab disc-based software through Nintendo’s Shop Channel at all. and Hollywood studios, fearing the worst for DVD sales, have started instituting policies with partners so that digital versions of movies arrive much later than their disc-based counterparts — a blow to the emerging infrastructure.
These issues are expected — growing pains in the evolution of the format. Nintendo begrudgingly stepped beyond cartridges to discs when it created GameCube, but it did eventually come around. Studios didn’t embrace the DVD format overnight — they clung stubbornly to VHS, waiting for the market to expand before throwing their collective weight behind it. I’m confident the same will happen of digital distribution in the not-too-distant future because the technology — both speed of delivery and storage — are finally available to adequately accommodate the needs of consumers.
I cannot untether myself from one ongoing concern over longterm ownership, though. If I inevitably purchase an entire catalog of games and movies on my Xbox 360, what happens when Microsoft’s next-generation console comes about? will those purchases carry over or will I be forced to buy everything again? as an early adopter, it’s relatively easy to justify re-purchases when there are gains to be had. For example, the greater visual clarity in Blu-ray discs versus their DVD predecessors. but if I’m forced to repurchase exactly the same movies with identical resolutions and compression techniques solely because my license of ownership doesn’t translate to the next home console, well, that’s trouble.
Even so, I’m hooked into the digital age and eagerly await its progression, slow as it may be. Whether I’m buying a full game or movie on PSN or Live (or, for that matter, Direct2Drive or Steam), downloading the latest Arcade or WiiWare effort, or streaming a new high-definition movie over a plethora of fast and reliable services, my connection has made my media consumption much easier. The next time I move, I’m hoping I won’t need to spend hours packing and unpacking boxes and discs of games and movies that I haven’t played or watched in years. I’ll still own it, but it’ll exist in the cloud or on my hard drives, always just a few clicks away.
Editorial: Download and Downsize
Categories: Technology Tags: blu ray, cardboard, nooks, possessions
