Category: Current Affairs

Maybe you thought Obama was the "health care President" or perhaps the "Afghanistan President", but to my eyes right now he looks like the "Haiti President."  I predict we'll have over a million Haitians living in refugee camps for the foreseeable future.  (It depends how many of the homeless of those can be absorbed by northern Haiti.)  If people don't make it into camps they will be sleeping on the street with little or no means of food or water or employment.

It's a mistake to think there's any brick-by-brick way out of that predicament.  It's not like the earthquake in Armenia or for that matter eighteenth century Lisbon.  Haiti has no functioning government, no working legal system, and very little remaining infrastructure.  There's no formal means to make decisions about reconstruction and no capital to clear away the mess.  As I've written, the country as we know simply doesn't exist any more (view the second video or try these photos).  Port-Au-Prince is destroyed and the city was the heart of the country, economically, politically, and otherwise.  Léogâne, Jacmel, and other significant locales are mostly destroyed as well and they're not receiving much assistance.

Obama will (and should) do something about this situation.  First, I believe he sincerely wants to help but also he cannot ignore his African-American constituency, especially after former President Clinton devoted so much attention to Haiti and especially if health care reform doesn't go through as planned.  Yet he will have a festering situation on his hands for the rest of his term.  If "looting" (a bad word in this context) increases or continues, how quickly will the American people lose sympathy with the Haitians?  How can the "reconstruction" possibly go well?  Ugly gang rule isn't even the worst case scenario.

Obama now stands a higher chance of being a one-term President.  Foreign aid programs are especially unpopular, especially relative to their small fiscal cost.  Have you noticed how Rush Limbaugh and others are already making their rhetoric uglier than usual?  It will be a test of the American populace; at what point will people start whispering that he is "favoring the other blacks"?

Just as it's not easy to pull out of Iraq or Afghanistan, it won't be easy to pull out of Haiti.

Maybe you thought health care was a hard problem.  Maybe you thought that cap and trade would make health care look easy.  This may be the hardest problem yet and it wasn't on anybody's planning ledger.  Obama won't have many allies in this fight either.  A lot of Democratic interest groups might, silently, wish he would forget about the whole thing.

Mass starvation wouldn't look good on the evening news either.  What does it mean to preside over the collapse of a country of more than nine million people?  It's Obama who's about to find out, not the increasingly irrelevant Rene Preval.  Everyone in Haiti is looking to President Obama.

By the way, I favor such graphicness, but I am wondering:

The images coming out of Haiti are more graphic than those from recent natural disasters, and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…

Or is Haiti simply an exception? Is there something about the essential status of the entire country and its people that gives the media new license?

The usual conventions of suggesting rather than displaying trauma seem to have been punctured, at least for now. Bodies caked in dust and plaster, faces covered in blood, the dead stacked in the streets without sheets to hide them — these are all violations of the unwritten code that death can only be seen, in the established etiquette of the mainstream media, by analogy or metaphor or discreet substitute.

Here is more detail.  You'll note there is a long history of portraying Haiti in lurid terms.

“Something like 40 to 50 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince is kids,” he said. “Kids are much more fragile – a 30-pound block of a wall that would only seriously injure an adult will kill a child. They die much more rapidly of dehydration, of loss of blood, of shock. An infection will cause explosive diarrhea, which can kill a trapped child. Everything about this is devastatingly worse for kids than for adults.”

That's Dr. Irwin Redlener from Columbia University and the full story is here.

The media are not paying attention to this kind of problem.  Richard Morse, who once sold me four Antoine voodoo flags to finance a record album, is providing very good Twitter coverage of Haiti.

Just two days ago I was trying to convince a group of my colleagues to come to Haiti with me for a three-day weekend outing.  Had we gone, we would have stayed in what is now the epicenter of the earthquake.  The hotel I had in mind…I believe it does not exist any more but has fallen down the hills into oblivion.  It is difficult for me to fathom what must be going on there and how it will continue to play out.  In addition to thousands of lives, much of the Haitian cultural heritage has been destroyed.  Here is an image of Simbi, god of healing. 

Here is one reputable place to donate.  Here is another.

…there were growing reports of mass destruction — a hospital is believed to have collapsed, along with a sections of the National Palace. Haitian President René Préval is said to be seeking safe haven on the island…

Part of the road to Canape Vert has collapsed, as have houses in the mountains of Petionville, where the quake was centered. Petionville is a suburb some 10 miles from Port-au-Prince, the capital.

Several aftershocks have followed, according to The Associated Press.

The article is here; Twitter updates are here.  There are reports that the major government buildings, among many other structures, have collapsed.  Most buildings of more than one story are down; Richard Morse reports: "people in large numbers are singing prayers downtown"  The UN mission building has collapsed as well.

A spokesman for the Maryland-based company said a Comfort Inn will open in the Caribbean coastal city of Jacmel this May.

The 32-room motel will be owned by a New York-based group of Haitian-American investors. The partners also plan a 120-room upscale hotel at the nearby Belle Rive tourism development this fall.

The full story is here.  Over the last year Haitian exports rose 23 percent and the country is expected to grow at a rate of 2.4 percent, only one of two countries in the Caribbean expected to have positive growth, Guyana being the other.  Here are the recent economic growth rates of Haiti.  Here is a photo of Jacmel.

Government officials say their rationing plan should help the country reach May, when seasonal rains are predicted to return. But even Chavez concedes the situation is serious. His past efforts to solve the problem have included sending cloud-seeding planes to produce rain with the help of Cuba.

I count at least seven.  The broader story, which has even more scary ideas, is here.  It seems quite possible that over seventy percent of Venezuela could end up without electrical power, within a year.

On the brighter side, they've finally devalued the currency.