Update III: Haiti's Hurting, What's New? (Rotting Roadblocks)

Crime, Democracy, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Taxation, The West

Haiti 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]

Update III: Haiti’s Hurting, What’s New? (Rotting Roadblocks)

Crime, Democracy, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Taxation, The West

Haiti 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]

A Tale Of Two Countries

Business, China, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank

CHINA AND THE US: Two countries whose respective central banks are pursuing distinctly different policies.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s reason for living is to lower interest rates and inject liquidity into an overinflated economy. When Ben announced, a few days back, that he remains “open to using the blunt tool of higher interest rates to avert or pop future asset bubbles … particularly if other approaches aren’t working”—people were floored. (Yes, Ben considers raising interest rates a “blunt tool,” but keeping them artificially low quite okay.) For now, Our Ben is keeping rates near zero.

The People’s Bank of China, on the other hand, has moved to restrain lending by raising “the proportion of deposits that banks must set aside as reserves by 50 basis points starting Jan. 18.” This, anticipates Bloomberg.com, “may foreshadow higher interest rates.”

China is cooling its economy; Ben is heating ours’ up, as he tries to pump stale air into deflating balloons.

Update II: Reid & The Knee-Jerk Jerks (LOTT)

Barack Obama, Democrats, Etiquette, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

What Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said about President Barack Obama is not remotely wrong, or racist.

Reid commended Obama to the authors of the forthcoming book Game Change as a highly electable, “light-skinned” African American, “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

Indelicate language, but certainly not racist.

Now let’s hear Republicans say as much—and then demand that their candidates be given the same intellectually honesty treatment when they fall short on racial etiquette. Even more magnanimous and impressive: demand Reid resign for his health-care putsch, not for his inartful remarks about Obama.

Here is my version of the Reid Remarks:

The election of Obama is no racial milestone; it’s not that whites have come to their senses. But rather that African Americans have finally done what’s right (to paraphrase the childish, churlish prose of one Rev. Lowery). For the first time in a long time, the black community has put forward a candidate of caliber; a candidate the American people were only too willing to consider for the highest office in the land.
Until Barack, the black community had disgorged the likes of Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton. Be he black, brown, yellow or red (Rev. Lowery’s classification)—no sane American would elect those two phonies to serve on their local PTA board, much less in the Oval Office.

Update I (Jan. 12): Reid displays “soft condescension,” says the reader below. Fine. But I don’t understand the, “Where is Reid coming from,” and the, “Why did he feel the need to articulate this truth.” Or “Why would it surprise him that a black man speaks non-ebonics (‘white’)?”

If the statement Reid made about obama’s uniqueness among the black community’s political leaders is true—why should it not be articulated? Obama’s diction and demeanor are indeed uncommon among black leaders, academics, etc. Is there something wrong about saying so?

Harry was expressing an objective reality. He forgot, for a moment, to be the two-faced player he usually is. How ironic that the one time the man (Reid) speaks the truth, he is crucified for it.

Update II (Jan. 12): LOTT’S LOT.

Republicans seeking Sen. Harry Reid’s resignation as majority leader over racial remarks he made about Barack Obama say yes — that Reid should be held to the same standard as former GOP Sen. Trent Lott, whose own racial gaffes cost him the Senate leadership in 2002

[Yahoo News]

From “Lancing the Lott”:

“Only seasoned and cynical opportunists could suggest that it was for segregation that Lott was pining, when he praised Strom Thurmond’s 1948 party platform at the octogenarian’s 100th birthday bash.”

“In 1948, Americans didn’t want the government to be involved in general, Frank Newport of the Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing told an unreceptive Jerry Nachman of MSNBC. When asked, the majority polled insisted, for instance, that issues revolving around employer ‘discrimination’ be left to employers and the states. The same goes for the adjudication of lynching. Nothing in the poll suggests an approval of the crime. Rather, Americans were emphatic about keeping the federal government out of state affairs.”

“When Strom Thurmond went up against Harry S. Truman and Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, it was about states’ rights. Dixiecrats was the derogatory name the Media Ministry gave to what was really the States Rights Democratic Party. Considering that the Constitution consigns law enforcement to state and local governments, the position the Dixiecrats took was hardly subversive.”