Photo:
Haiti Connect charity workers, who on the way to Haiti, stopped
off for a week in Florida for team meetings ...in topless bars and
by the pool (published May 15, 2010, in an Irish, Sunday Mail news
paper; written by Warren Swords and Valerie Harley. The article
is not online but there is a scan available here.)
Here's a discussion with Evert Bopp, the head of Haiti Connect on
the Sunday Mail article. See also Evert Bopp's story ; the post
entitled: Why I don’t agree with Haiti Connect and With Haiti in
Ruins, Some U.N. Relief Workers Live Large on 'Love Boat'; Following
the Aid Money to Haiti and Why Don’t They Spend the Money Now, When
People Need It?)
***
The corruption and violence
to Haiti, to Africa, to most parts of Asia, to Australia's autochthones,
et al..., are structural, not perpetrated just by the large NGOS and
charity organizations, the elite corportocracy and imperialist powers
that backs them up. No. It's as structural as white privilege. An
inheritance some bare the brunt of on this planet while others profit.
No paradigm change may
come about if this is ignored. Haiti's majority starve, suffer, grieve
and die, while thrill seekers, disaster tourists and the various "missionaries,"
"non-for-profits (NPOs)" and "peacekeepers" sunbath,
swim at the beaches, at Labadie on vacation, on salary or hourly rate
for a "charity" or, for taking pictures of us crushed, grieving
, deprived and dead for international photo contests to "help
us."
That some good is done by some charity workers doesn't justify the
horror of the poverty pimping system whatsoever. (See, Travesty in
Haiti: A true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud, food
aid and drug trafficking ; Travesty in Haiti - Reviewed by Ezili Dantò/HLLN
; and The Slavery the Media Won't Expose.)
The majority of humanity continues to be enslaved by a dominant system
that thrives on poverty.
Haiti's founding father, Jean Jacques Dessalines (Janjak Desalin)
said, "I Want the Assets of the Country to be Equitably Divided"
and for that he was assassinated. That was the first coup d'etat.
The Haitian holocaust - organized exclusion of the masses, misery,
poverty and the impunity of the economic elite - continues (with Feb.
29, 2004 marking the 33rd coup d'etat.) (See, Haiti and the Aid Racket
: How NGOs are Profiting Off a Grave Situation ; and The Two most
common neocolonial storylines about Haiti .)
The Violence and Corruption is Structural,
Global
CBS News investigated the 5 major Haiti charities - CARE, the American
Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the Clinton-Bush Haiti
Fund, and the Clinton Foundation Haiti Fund - and found that they
had collected vast amounts of monies for the emergency in Haiti but
did not use but a fraction of it to ease the people’s emergency
sufferings, claiming the 80 to over 90% emergency monies still in
their coffers, four months after the earthquake, were for “future
projects.” Thing is, many Haitians will have no future. When
you’re having a heart attack, it’s an emergency and if
the ambulance gets there months in the future, you’re dead already.
These folks know this. That’s why we say they’re letting
the people die.
That’s part of what Ezili’s HLLN means when we write about
the "poverty pimps masturbating on Black pain."
The charity industry and USAID’s money pool is for its cronies
and the elite corporatocracy. It’s their corporate welfare -
bourgeoisie freedom. What Haitian-Africans have been struggling against
since 1503. The good-hearted public can’t absorb such evil,
so they generally prefer not to know. And those of us who pour our
life-force out, no matter the repercussions and marginalization, to
expose how these evil folks make a living from letting the poor die
or get sicker and use disasters as an opportunity to sell their pesticides,
herbicides, nutritional supplements, vitamins, vaccines, guns, weapons,
security services, construction services, consultancy services, hybrid
seeds or to take over their lands and silence the poor into accepting
even more lower wage jobs and sub-standard living, seem to be the
ones who are labeled “not constructive.” This disaster
capitalism is practiced on the poor, Black and the Brown all over
the world, including New Orleans USA with Katrina. (See, Naomi Klein
Issues Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert ; Lessons for Haiti from the
Asian Tsunami; Saving Haiti from disaster capitalism ; Naomi Klein
on Disaster Capitalism in Haiti ; and Profiting From Haiti's Crisis:
Disaster Capitalism in Washington's Backyard.)
In 2008, four back-to-back- hurricanes hit Haiti. A million people
were left homeless and 1,000 died in Gonaives Haiti, alone. USAID
and the NGO industry in Haiti collected over $3billion donor dollars
on the pains of Haitians from the 2004 and 2008 Gonaives hurricanes
and storms. They said the same thing as they’re saying now about
why once the cameras where gone, even the food, water and medicine
dried up, much less any “future projects” were ever undertaken.
Gonaives Haiti is still devastated from the floods of 2004 and 2008.
The people have not gotten any major help in rebuilding their lives,
major roads, bridges, flood barriers, even though the good public
coughed up hundreds of millions of dollars for this.
Miami Herald photographer Patrick Farrell won a Pulitzer for his harrowing
images of the Haiti victims of the storms and hurricanes that ravaged
Haiti in 2008. Mr. Farrell did an excellent job and we at HLLN followed
his work with great interests because he and his crew dropped the
camera many times to help save a life or ease the suffering of a sentient
being. But, did the pictures push the large NGOs or USAID that collected
vast sums of monies in the name of the Haiti storm victims to give
a check to the Gonaives victims so they could rebuild their lives,
or were the monies used to rebuild their houses or to build flood
barriers to protect the lives of these Haitians from the next hurricane?
No. The prizes to come from the epic horror of the earthquake photographers
will soon be announced. Meanwhile the people shall continue to die.
For
entire essay, go to - The
Poverty Pimps' Masturbating on Black Pain: Monsanto joins the pack.
***
