printHaiti is forever convulsed by political or natural disasters. The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where four out of five people live in poverty and more than half in abject poverty (NYT), was struck by a massive, magnitude-7.0 earthquake, on Tuesday afternoon.
The rescuers, spokespersons, geological surveyors and geophysicists; the missionaries, medicine- and military men and women; the aid-deliverers—most are Westerners. Western countries prop up their Third-World creations. That’s how it is.
In the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, the gravest danger was an epidemic; the greatest danger in the wake of the Haiti disaster is a crime wave worse than before.
The Big O is promising to devote—and divert—all the resources he has no right to toward the rescue effort in Haiti.
I say “YES TO US AID, NO TO USAID”:
Americans are the most generous people on earth. “The extent and the depth of charitable giving” in the US is such that “the average donation in the U.S. is three-and-a-half times more than in Canada.” As a percentage of their aggregate income, Americans give more to charity than citizens of any other country. BO will go ahead and “pledge” a puny few hundred million to Haiti on behalf of a people that gave $241 billion to charity in 2003.
American largess makes the United States Agency for International Development, and other the compassionate pickpockets, as unnecessary as it is unethical.
Update I (Jan. 14): Since Haitians are now refugees and candidates for Minute-Maid immigration, it takes an immigration hawk to highlight the following: Haitians, by and large, speak Creole. Their faith is more Black Magic than Roman Catholic. Thoroughly schooled in violence, Haitians are, at the same time, utterly uneducated, although not in the ways of the world – they’ve been ravaged by AIDS-HIV, and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Update II: “The liberal West honestly believes that bad leaders are what shackle backward peoples.” In this context, how often have you heard that Haiti is what it is because of bad leadership; a deficit in democracy, on and on? Lo: a veteran disaster relief specialist told CNN that the current “serious crime problem” was less of an issue under Papa Doc’s “nasty dictatorship,” when “lots of people were killed. But infrastructure and services worked better then than they do now.”
“It was safer to use public transport then than it was last year, certainly in terms of crime,” he said. “Over the last 10, 15, 20 years, the gangs and the drug culture have taken hold of Haiti …”
Is it possible that a dictatorship—preferably a benevolent one, but never-the-less an authoritarian regime—might work better in certain cultures than a tyranny of the majority? Perish the thought.
Update III: Barbarism. “ANGRY Haitians set up roadblocks with corpses in Port-au-Prince to protest at the delay in emergency aid reaching them after a devastating earthquake.” Shaul Schwarz, a photographer for TIME magazine, is understanding:
“It’s getting ugly out there, people are fed up with getting no help.” [news.com.au]
Ironically, Obama wants to LIMIT tax deductions for charitable aid. That is the one loophole I truly truly favor. If we did have a small tax, I would let people who donated to emergency food/shelter/medical/clothing to the indigent to take a large portion deducted while ELIMINATING the WELFARE STATE. E.G. – Donate 15% of your money to avoid a 10% tax rate – and so we could replace USAID with Individual Aid. Obama moves in the opposite direction from morality and common sense.
Salvation Army type organizations can do so much better than the FEMA bureaucrats – so $ 1 donated to them probably is more effective than $ 3 of FEMA morons.
Switzerland
Swaziland.
What’s the difference?
If you can answer this then you know what ails Haiti.
Citizens give to charity out of the goodness of their hearts. Governments give to charity for public show. I’ll let everybody decide on their own which motive is the most dependable.
I was disturbed by this issue and I’m glad you have addressed it. The first news I heard of relief efforts were those undertaken by Christian organizations. That will happen as a natural outcome of people operating in accord with their faith, and not government coercion. We need more of the former and less of the latter.
Obama believes in charity. I forget the actual numbers but an article stating his tax return for 2008 he gave something like 800 dollars to private charity and 800K to his favorite nonprofit charity the US government in taxes. By limiting the deduction for private charity, he is supporting his favorite group. Bush committed 300 million in regard to the tsunami and the other nations said it was too small an offer, though not one other nation gave over a tenth of that. The private citizens of the US obscured Bush’s offer but received no credit for it. No nation stood up in the UN and said ‘thank you.’ I received all kinds of e-mails from Democrats telling me how cheap Bush was, yet Obama only offered 100 million and no one is saying anything. As Ilana inferred, we the private citizens of this country will probably bury the country in help and Obama will get the credit for it.