You've probably encountered many of the same reports that I have:

Haiti's president tonight issued a desperate appeal for international aid following the earthquake that has devastated his country, as fears grew that the death toll could rise above 100,000.

René Préval said the damage caused by the magnitude 7.0 tremor was "un­imaginable" and appealed for help, describing hearing the screams of those trapped under collapsed buildings while he and his wife stepped over bodies lying in the streets.

"Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed. There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them. All of the hospitals are packed with people. It is a catastrophe," said Préval.

With chaotic scenes in and around the capital, Port-au-Prince, officials said it was impossible to gauge accurately the scale of the disaster, but the country's prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, told CNN that the final death toll could be well over 100,000. "I hope that is not true … But so many, so many buildings, so many neighbourhoods are totally destroyed, and some neighbourhoods we don't even see people, so I don't know where those people are."

The people of Haiti are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. Here are three possibilities that have been brought to my attention by friends and family for anyone interested in making a donation to facilitate Haitian relief efforts, First, the National Nurses United:

More than 1,500 registered nurses from across the U.S. have responded in less than one day to the call by the nation’s largest organization of registered nurses for volunteers to provide assistance to residents of earthquake devastated Haiti —leading the RNs to now issue an urgent appeal for the public to support these efforts with donations of funds to support travel costs and medical supplies on their upcoming emergency nursing mission.

Press and nurses are invited to a conference call Thursday morning at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time for an overview of the efforts and their logistics, including the details on the first teams of nurses traveling to the area. Press can call in for the briefing at (866) 320-4709 using the access code 143135, or gather with local nurses and representatives in Boston, Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Miami.

The relief efforts are being coordinated by the Registered Nurse Response Network (RNRN), a project of the 150,000-member National Nurses United (NNU), formed last month through the unification of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, United American Nurses and Massachusetts Nurses Association. RNRN/NNU is hoping to have nurse volunteers on the ground in Haiti within the next few days and is coordinating with Haitian nurses on the effort.

Details are still being worked out, but those able to support the efforts of these nurses can get involved via:

www.NationalNursesUnited.org to sign up to volunteer or donate

@NationalNurses on twitter or by following: #haitiRN

Call the RNRN hotline: 1-800-578-8225

Support the RNRN/NNU disaster relief effort in Haiti by sending checks c/o California Nurses Foundation, 2000 Franklin St., Oakland, CA 94612. Charitable contributions will be used to pay for travel/related costs and medical supplies for volunteer RNs on their emergency nursing mission in Haiti.

RNRN sent hundreds of nurse volunteers to the Gulf region following Hurricane Katrina. RNRN has also sent volunteers to Sri Lanka after the South Asia tsunami and to help following huge Southern California wildfires. RNRN is affiliated with National Nurses United, AFL-CIO, the national union and professional association for registered nurses.

“The need for help has never been so acute. We need financial support to transport them,” said NNU Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro. “Nurses will be fundamental to the disaster relief process, to provide immediate healing and therapeutic support to the patients and families facing the devastation from this tragic earthquake,” DeMoro said.

Second, Mercy Corps:

Mercy Corps is deploying an emergency response team to the island nation.

Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, is plagued by hunger and political instability. This disaster will drastically increase the needs of families who had little to lose in the first place.

Families need your help -- food, shelter and other supplies -- in the aftermath of the worst disaster to strike the region in years.

Mercy Corps has a long history of helping earthquake survivors meet their immediate needs and recover what they've lost. We aided families after earthquakes in Peru in 2007, China and Pakistan in 2008, and Indonesia last year.

Lastly, there is also a local (for me), Sacramento area effort, Children's Hope, founded by Leisa Faulkner. Faulkner has traveled to Haiti numerous times and raised funds to support social programs there through Children's Hope:

As you probably have seen today, a huge earthquake (7.3) has hit Haiti just 10 miles southwest of the center of Port-au-Prince (PAP). Children's Hope needs your help. Three of the major centers of our humanitarian work in Haiti are centered in PAP, are still not responsive and we are very concerned for the children and families: the boys home (St. Josephs) is located on Delmas, PAP, Sopudep School (for street children) is in PAP, and "The Lamp" free clinic is in low lying Cite Soleil, PAP. Early reports have many structures down on Delmas, the presidential palace in collapse, and the large local hospital is down. Fear of rising water may further threaten the low laying Cite Soleil, where our clinic "The Lamp" is located. I have not been successful in getting through by phone. We here are sick with worry at early reports like the one below. If you have a few dollars to spare, lives will be saved. We are sending emergency funds starting tomorrow, and then as soon as pledges come in, since the need is urgent. We also really need to raise shipping money for the supplies already donated by a local hospital here (Marshall Hospital of Placerville) to send these supplies to Haiti. If you pledge, please remember to then send the check to Children's Hope. But please pledge now, so we can get new medicines ordered now, and help on the way.

Children's Hope
3025 A Cambridge Road
Cameron Park, CA 95682

Please feel free to post contact information for any other organizations that are involved in the relief effort. Long time readers of this blog know that I'm not a big fan of the American Red Cross. There are, of course, socioeconomic dimensions to this catastrophe that should be explored, and I may do so, but, for now, humanitarian assistance is urgently required.

Labels: CNA, Earthquake, Haiti, Humanitarian Assistance

Contributions to the Carter Center have apparently declined significantly. Amazingly, Abe Foxman, delighting in Carter's pitiful act of self-flagellation, is oblivious to the fact that Carter is essentially conflating Jewish identity with Israel. Or, perhaps, that's one of the reasons Foxman likes it so much. Carter remains one of the most embarrassingly overrated figures among liberals and even some leftists.

Labels: Democrats, Haiti, Israel, Palestine

Given the past record of US abroad and the insistence upon preserving global neoliberal economic policies, the latter is the more probable choice in response to growing hunger and unrest:

Hunger bashed in the front gate of Haiti’s presidential palace. Hunger poured onto the streets, burning tires and taking on soldiers and the police. Hunger sent the country’s prime minister packing.

Haiti’s hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, spiking as much as 45 percent since the end of 2006 and turning Haitian staples like beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.

Saint Louis Meriska’s children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, “They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.”

That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.

In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

Indeed, as it roils developing nations, the spike in commodity prices — the biggest since the Nixon administration — has pitted the globe’s poorer south against the relatively wealthy north, adding to demands for reform of rich nations’ farm and environmental policies. But experts say there are few quick fixes to a crisis tied to so many factors, from strong demand for food from emerging economies like China’s to rising oil prices to the diversion of food resources to make biofuels.

Not surprisingly, the reporter, Marc Lacey, avoids interviewing indigenous voices, replacing them with more professional, internationally rspected voices, like Jeffrey Sachs.

If Lacey had done so, he might have discovered that the people in these countries perceive very different reasons for their predicament: the evisceration of public health, education and social services, including subsidies for food, in order to satisfy the demands of finance capital, the inability of their economies to generate employment much beyond the informal sector, or to put it more inelegantly, the street, despite these concessions, the willingness of finance capital and international institutions to permit pliable local elites to amass great fortunes by looting the country's resources, and the willingness of the US, as it has specifically done it Haiti, to promote violent unrest.

But no. As Lacey implies in relation to Haiti, the problem is that these countries haven't become investment friendly enough. Curiously, he doesn't explain what measurs that Haiti, and other countries like it, might undertake to do so. So, again, the question: Feed them or shoot them? The acceleration of events is pressing the question with greater and greater urgency.

Labels: American Empire, Food Crisis, Haiti, Neoliberalism, New York Times, Political Violence

Father Jean Juste returns:

Pere Gerard Jean-Juste, an outspoken Haitian voice for human rights, economic justice and democracy, returned to Haiti last weekend for the first time since being hustled out of a prison cell by heavily armed guards and put on a waiting plane to Miami in January of 2006. Pere Jean-Juste, a Catholic priest, had spent nearly six months in a series of Haitian prisons for refusing to stop his public criticisms of human rights abuses by the coup government which overthrew elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide. Once in Miami, Father Jean-Juste was immediately hospitalized for treatment of leukemia by Dr. Paul Farmer, a long-time friend, who had secretly performed a biopsy on Jean-Juste in his prison cell.

Now, a year and a half later, Pere Jean-Juste was coming home, not knowing how he would be received. As the plane landed in Port au Prince, Father Jean-Juste quietly blessed himself as he saw his home parish, St. Claire, from the window.

As he walked towards the entrance to the Toussaint L'Ouverture airport, dozens of people waved and clapped from the balconies overlooking the landing space. Inside, airport officials, police officers, media and church members crushed in on him. Patting his back, shaking his hands, giving him hugs, the crowds pressed in and called out "Mon Pere!"

A new Haiti greeted him. The unelected coup government had finally left the country. The people elected President Rene Preval. Democracy had returned.

Inside, TV cameras, microphones, and tape recorders were thrust in his face. Many wanted to know if he was going to be a candidate for Presidency of Haiti in the next election. Father Jean-Juste laughed and said, "The only election in the Catholic Church is for Pope and since the Pope is in good health, I do not see an election anytime soon."

Father Jean-Juste spoke of the disappearance of the human rights activist Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, called for the return of President Aristide, and urged people interested in human rights in Haiti to keep the pressure on nonviolently. He was returning to Haiti on a pilgrimage. Was he afraid of death he was asked? "I am a Christian," he replied. "I know where I am going. If I die, I know the struggle will continue. The struggle must continue for human rights and democratic principles."

Someday, the United States and its surrogates in the UN will allow the Haitian people to chart their own course. Must they be forever punished for one of the most successful revolutions in history against imperialism and white supremacy?

Labels: American Empire, Haiti, Neoliberalism

Brian Concannon of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti explains how the electoral process was manipulated from its inception in an attempt to disenfranchise the impoverished majority. Concannon also describes his participation in the successful prosecution of the Haitian military for the April 1994 Raboteau massacre. Unfortunately, the subsequent removal of Aristide lead to unanticipated, tragic consequences for some of those who bore witness, as he explains.

Concannon displays a profound respect for the resiliency of the Haitian people in the face of tremendous adversity. Go here to listen or download the archived program. The interview commences about 5 minutes into the program. It will be available through this Friday, February 27th, 5pm, Pacific time.

Labels: Activism, Elections, Haiti, KDVS, Political Violence