Let Them Eat Dirt
This is Jimmie’s first post for PoliGazette. Welcome Jimmie!
Good God, how is this happening in our own back yard?
It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.
I distinctly remember Bill Clinton charging our soldiers in to help the people of Haiti. There was some general milling about and then…nothing. Apparently, things have been steadily going downhill and food prices have been rising to the point where dirt pancakes are the daily fare.
And why have food prices been rising? What has made a very bad situation even worse, perhaps even hopeless?
Ethanol. Biofuels. Climate change panic.
The Cult of Global Warming is now killing people in Haiti. Hallelujah.
But, hey, at least Al Gore has his shiny Nobel Prize.
Meanwhile, some mom in Haiti is eating dirt three times a day and wondering why her nursing baby is sick. I wonder how she’d feel if she knew that we were burning up the equivalent of God knows how many nutritious meals in our cars while we had readily accessible supplies of oil that we won’t touch because there’s some slim chance that perhaps maybe we could possibly cause a freaking bear to have to live a few miles from where it lives now. You think she’d give us all Wonderful Citizens of the World medals if she knew that her village was dying slowly of starvation because we care more about the comfort of a hypothetical bear than we do about her and her family and friends.
Maybe someone should have mentioned that in Bali, while the world’s elite were snacking on sumptuous hors d’oeuvres, sipping their organically-grown and environmentally friendly wines, and agonizing over a grim future of their imagination, Hatians were sitting down to their third meal of Dirt and Oil Surprise. Not that they would have paused to do much else but frown a little moue of concern before getting back in their private jets and carbon-spewing their way back home, but at least we could say that they knew.
(via Hot Air headlines)
(cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)
Well you might want to actually investigate this further. Try reading this detailed human rights study at http://www.law.miami.edu/cshr/CSHR_Report_02082005_v2.pdf The UNited States, Canada, and France all have worked continually to overthrow elected governments in Haiti. The only accept democracy in Haiti if it means privatization, drop of government subsidies for poor, and US embassy control of the police. Haiti has been wrecked because of the policies of our countries and institutions in the west. They really do deserve billions in reparations truth be told.
Well, you know Bill Clinton said we were going to have to suck it up. As always, it will hit the poorest the hardest. Sometimes bleeding-heart liberals don’t bleed so much.
Ah, unsupported assertions — the very grist of the radical mill.
I think it’s a bit much to blame Al Gore for ethanol. We’ve had many years of bi-partisan pandering to big agriculture in this country. What do you think the Iowa caucuses are about? Candidates all kowtow to the corn industry, which means pushing ethanol. And I repeat: it’s bi-partisan. Bob Dole used to be called the Senator from Archer Daniels Midland.Setting aside your misplaced attack on Gore, and by extension people who would prefer not to see the world environment damaged, we have national security reasons for finding sources of energy other than middle eastern oil. A portion of every oil dollar we spend ends up in a Hams, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda or Iranian National Guard bank account.Haiti’s problems are not a result of environmental pressure. They are a result of hideously corrupt and ineffective government in a country with no natural and few human resources. Haiti is a basket case that produces very little, with that little being stolen by its own government.You want to save Haiti? Maybe you should be arguing for a UN or US take-over. That might accomplish something. Sneering at Al Gore won’t.
When did the kignapping start in Haiti? When did hunger become prevalent in Haiti? All these things started occuring after the arrival of the U.S-U.N back mission. As long as the U.N. remains there things will stay the same and after they leave, the situations might improve a little. I’m not in politics in Haiti or anywhere else but it bothers me how quickly we all seem to forget that the country was progressing slowly under Aristide. As for Haiti, the country will never change unless the people change themselves; no one can consciously denied that Christianity and democracy are the roots of our trauma. We need to reflect and proceed from where our revolution was redrailed.
If by "progressing", you mean "people shoved into prisons or executed on the streets for disagreeing with Aristide", then sure, you’re right.