The Largest Minority

January 18th, 2010 by Manila Ryce

There are many possible responses to the devastating earthquake in Haiti: shock, horror, profound sadness, empathy and the urge to help.

Tens of thousands of people are dead and much of the capital city, Port-au-Prince, its edge-city slum Carrefour, and its one relatively prosperous suburb, Pétionville, have been reduced to rubble. Those are appropriate responses, but what comes after must be a wholesale rethinking of what international aid can and should do.

Blaming the victim, as in the last paragraph of a lead New York Times article that appeared on the day after the earthquake, is patently absurd.

Simon Romero and Marc Lacey, with others contributing, wrap up their reporting on the human tragedy in Port-au-Prince with the following: “Haiti’s many man-made woes — its dire poverty, political infighting and history of insurrection — have been worsened repeatedly by natural disasters.”

It is true that Haiti has known a remarkable combination of political violence and natural disasters over the course of its history. Are we to infer, though, that Haitians would be better off today had the insurrection that began in 1791 and led to the emancipation of slaves and the creation of the first independent black republic in 1804 not occurred?

Furthermore, should we understand from the phrase “political infighting” that Haitians are their own worst enemies and that they are solely responsible for the man-made woes (and maybe even what insurers call “acts of God”) that befall them? Are we to conclude, after absorbing the lengthy descriptions of death and destruction, that they brought it on themselves?

This paragraph at the end of an article that seems to otherwise bravely and objectively report the facts is part of a long-standing and dispiriting pattern of demonizing Haitians by erasing relevant aspects of their past. (Think: Pat Robertson.) Haiti is often — all too often — referred to as a basket case, a country on the verge of social, political and ecological collapse without any mention of how it might have arrived at that state.

The fact is that many of Haiti’s problems today stem from the response of nations that saw its insurrection as a threat or a taunt. In 1825, the French engaged in a bit of gunboat diplomacy and demanded that Haiti pay compensation of some 150 million francs — a sum derived by figuring the value of the property, in the form of slaves and land, that French planters had lost — or face a total economic blockade. This amount was roughly equal to 10 years’ worth of total revenue in Haiti.

By the end of the 19th century, Haiti’s payments to France still consumed around 80 percent of the national budget. One generation of Haitians had bought its freedom with its blood, and the generations that followed had to pay cash.

In the 20th century, the United States twice occupied Haiti, once from 1915 to 1934, with soldiers bringing the attitudes of the Jim Crow South along for the trip; and again from 1994 to 2000, the second time with arguably better intentions but ambiguous objectives and, consequently, poor results.

Many have argued that the “structural adjustment” imposed on Haiti by the International Monetary Fund in the 1990s led to the liquidation of state assets but promoted little in the way of private investment and, it almost goes without saying, did nothing to benefit the average Haitian. Is it any wonder that the country is characterized by crushing poverty and political instability?

To say this is not to remove all blame from the Haitians themselves. The country’s tiny economic elite has done little other than consolidate its own power in the past 200 years. More recently, groups that opposed former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was democratically elected twice, opted out of a nascent and fragile democratic process, giving it little chance of survival.

And massive emigration has deprived Haiti of many of its most highly skilled citizens, though who could blame them for leaving? Regardless, the responsibility for Haiti’s problems in popular accounts is almost always exclusively borne by Haitians.

The question, then, is what a more nuanced knowledge of Haiti’s past can bring to an understanding of and response to the present catastrophe. People who are reduced, in the imaginations of those who might help them, to violent, irrational, incompetent people solely responsible for their fate are not likely to receive the help they need.

Having lived in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, I worry that what happened there might be repeated in Haiti; namely, the transformation of hungry, frightened and displaced people into a “security threat” first and people in need of immediate and sustained care second, if at all.

Looking further down the road, we need to find ways to help Haiti rebuild its public institutions so that it can rebuild a city and suburbs that were home to 3 million people. Aid needs to be rethought to empower Haitians, not repeatedly “save” them. Perpetuating the boom-and-bust cycle of aid and intervention of that past century is not the solution.

Right now, though, the people of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas need our help. They need clean water (difficult to find for many Haitians in the best of times), medicine, food, clothing, shelter and other basic necessities of survival.

What they clearly do not need, though, is pity mixed with scorn.

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January 14th, 2010 by Manila Ryce

We at the ANSWER Coalition extend our heartfelt solidarity to all of our Haitian sisters and brothers, as well as to all those who have friends and family there, as Haiti copes with the destruction and grief of the massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck yesterday.

All of us are joining in the outpouring of solidarity from people all over the hemisphere and world who are sending humanitarian aid and assistance to the people of Haiti.

At such a moment, it is also important to put this catastrophe into a political and social context. Without this context, it is impossible to understand both the monumental problems facing Haiti and, most importantly, the solutions that can allow Haiti to survive and thrive. Hillary Clinton said today, “It is biblical, the tragedy that continues to daunt Haiti and the Haitian people.” This hypocritical statement that blames Haiti’s suffering exclusively on an “act of God” masks the role of U.S. and French imperialism in the region.

In this email message, we have included some background information about Haiti that helps establish the real context:

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive stated today that as many as 100,000 Haitians may be dead. International media is reporting bodies being piled along streets surrounded by the rubble from thousands of collapsed buildings. Estimates of the economic damage are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Haiti’s large shantytown population was particularly hard hit by the tragedy.

As CNN, ABC and every other major corporate media outlet will be quick to point out, Haiti is the poorest country in the entire Western hemisphere. But not a single word is uttered as to why Haiti is poor. Poverty, unlike earthquakes, is no natural disaster.

The answer lies in more than two centuries of U.S. hostility to the island nation, whose hard-won independence from the French was only the beginning of its struggle for liberation.

In 1804, what had begun as a slave uprising more than a decade earlier culminated in freedom from the grips of French colonialism, making Haiti the first Latin American colony to win its independence and the world’s first Black republic. Prior to the victory of the Haitian people, George Washington and then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson had supported France out of fear that Haiti would inspire uprisings among the U.S. slave population. The U.S. slave-owning aristocracy was horrified at Haiti’s newly earned freedom.

U.S. interference became an integral part of Haitian history, culminating in a direct military occupation from 1915 to 1934. Through economic and military intervention, Haiti was subjugated as U.S. capital developed a railroad and acquired plantations. In a gesture of colonial arrogance, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was the assistant secretary of the Navy at the time, drafted a constitution for Haiti which, among other things, allowed foreigners to own land. U.S. officials would later find an accommodation with the dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and then his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, as Haiti suffered under their brutal repressive policies.

In the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. policy toward Haiti sought the reorganization of the Haitian economy to better serve the interests of foreign capital. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was instrumental in shifting Haitian agriculture away from grain production, paving the way for dependence on food imports. Ruined Haitian farmers flocked to the cities in search of a livelihood, resulting in the swelling of the precarious shantytowns found in Port-au-Prince and other urban centers.

Who has benefited from these policies? U.S. food producers profited from increased exports to Haitian markets. Foreign corporations that had set up shop in Haitian cities benefitted from the super-exploitation of cheap labor flowing from the countryside. But for the people of Haiti, there was only greater misery and destitution.

Washington orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide—not once, but twice, in 1991 and 2004. Haiti has been under a U.S.-backed U.N. occupation for nearly six years. Aristide did not earn the animosity of U.S. leaders for his moderate reforms; he earned it when he garnered support among Haiti’s poor, which crystallized into a mass popular movement. Two hundred years on, U.S. officials are still horrified by the prospect of a truly independent Haiti.

The unstable, makeshift dwellings imposed upon Haitians by Washington’s neoliberal policies have now, for many, been turned into graves. Those same policies are to blame for the lack of hospitals, ambulances, fire trucks, rescue equipment, food and medicine. The blow dealt by such a natural disaster to an economy made so fragile from decades of plundering will greatly magnify the suffering of the Haitian people.

Natural disasters are inevitable, but resource allocation and planning can play a decisive role in mitigating their impact and dealing with the aftermath. Haiti and neighboring Cuba, who are no strangers to violent tropical storms, were both hit hard in 2008 by a series of hurricanes—which, unlike earthquakes, are predictable. While more than 800 lives were lost in Haiti, less than 10 people died in Cuba. Unlike Haiti, Cuba had a coordinated evacuation plan and post-hurricane rescue efforts that were centrally planned by the Cuban government. This was only possible because Cuban society is not organized according to the needs of foreign capital, but rather according to the needs of the Cuban people.

In a televised speech earlier today, President Obama has announced that USAID and the Departments of State and Defense will be working to support the rescue and relief efforts in Haiti in the coming days. Ironically, these are the same government entities responsible for the implementation of the economic and military policies that reduced Haiti to ruins even before the earthquake hit.

On March 20, thousands of people will march in Los Angeles to to oppose the wars and occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. Tens of thousands more will march in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco at the same time. We will also demand an end the foreign occupation of Haiti and reparations to Haiti for the vast wealth that has been looted from the country by foreign imperialist countries.

December 11th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Kabataang maka-Bayan (KmB) is a progressive Filipino youth organization of which I’m honored to be a part of. On November 29th, KmB held Carnival ng Masa, or The Peoples Carnival, to celebrate their ten-year anniversary. There were corn dogs and games, but the highlight of the evening was the educational, yet entertaining multimedia performance at the end of the night. All 11 videos documenting the performance are embedded in the playlist above. Enjoy the show and please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

December 7th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

[The following speech was given on November 30, 2009 at the United Nations as part of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.]

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Secretary-General, Mr. President, Excellencies:

Let me begin by expressing my appreciation to the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People for inviting me to participate in today’s meeting and offering a presentation in connection with the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

My name is Bill Fletcher, Jr. I am the Executive Editor of the on-line magazine BlackCommentator.com and a member of the leadership committee of the coalition known as the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. I am the immediate past president of the advocacy group TransAfrica Forum which was the leading voice within the United States of America against South African apartheid and white minority rule in Africa. I am also a long-time trade union activist.

I sit before you today to discuss a contemporary apartheid: that practiced by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people.

As an African American in and from the United States, I am keenly aware of the similarities between the systems of Israeli apartheid, South African apartheid, and the home-grown apartheid in the United States of America once known as “Jim Crow segregation.” Despite every effort of the Israeli state to wrap its actions in religious garments, to claim a God-given Judaic exclusive right for its actions, the description of the racial differential or national-ethnic differential that exists between the officially sanctioned Jewish citizens of Israel and the Palestinians within Israel, those in exile and those in the Occupied Territories sounds all too familiar. It is also far from Holy. Notwithstanding the efforts of heroic individuals such as William Patterson, Paul Robeson and Malcolm X to bring the case of African Americans before the United Nations, the international ramifications of the oppression suffered here were often and conveniently ignored by the great powers of the global North. The South African apartheid system was, to a great extent, modeled on the Jim Crow system in the United States, a fact noted by many people in South Africa and in the global South. The United Nations failed to take up the challenge to racism in my own country a generation ago; it must not fail to take up the struggle against Israeli apartheid today.

The realities of the Israeli apartheid system, in contrast to South Africa, were often hidden from view, at least outside of Israel and, later, the Occupied Territories. It was, however, the close collaboration-including military and nuclear collaboration-between the Israeli regime and the South African apartheid regime at a point when the South African apartheid regime had become an international pariah state that raised more than a few eyebrows and encouraged many people to more closely examine the theory and workings of the two states.

The parallel between the Israeli apartheid system and the Jim Crow system under which African Americans suffered and died here in the United States of America also helps to explain a phenomenon that seems to puzzle many mainstream commentators. How is it that there exists such a relatively large reservoir of sympathy among African Americans in the United States of America for the cause of the Palestinians? It is a vicious slander to assert that such sympathy is based on anti-Jewish sentiment, though I would be na? to ignore that such sentiment does exist in some isolated quarters. Rather, for African Americans, we can at one and the same time stand with the Jewish victims of the Nazi’s Holocaust, while at the same time reject the Israeli apartheid system and its victimization of the Palestinian people. The horrors of the Holocaust, as the great Martiniquan writer Aime Cesaire pointed out, were not unprecedented, but found their basis in the brutal holocausts committed against the peoples of the global South by the colonial powers and the settler states. It was based on that shared history that African Americans viscerally understood and, therefore, placed ourselves in opposition to the racist motivations that lay behind the actions of the German Nazis and later the Italian Fascists in their persecution and then attempts at annihilation of the Jewish people.

Yet none of this, that is, none of the reality of the Holocaust suffered by European Jews, excuses what has happened to the Palestinian people in the period since World War II, and especially since May 1948. And it is this that many people, in what is colloquially known as “Black America,” understand so well. The Israeli apartheid system that expropriates land from the Palestinians; restricts mixed marriages; condemns Palestinians to separate AND inferior education; and repudiates their internationally recognized right to return to their land and their homes, simply carries with it the same stench of the decadent and oppressive system that we came to know here in the USA as Jim Crow segregation.

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December 3rd, 2009 by Guest

On November 19th, President Barack Obama wrote a stirring tribute in USA Today to the most famous draft resister in US history, Muhammad Ali. On Tuesday, Obama spoke at West Point, calling for an increase of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan, with a speech that recalled the worst shadings of George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”

On November 19th, Obama wrote about why Ali’s photo hangs over his desk, praising “The Greatest” for “his unique ability to summon extraordinary strength and courage in the face of adversity, to navigate the storm and never lose his way.” On Tuesday, Obama showed neither courage nor strength but the worst kind of imperial arrogance. He asserted America’s right to go into a deeply impoverished country that - from Alexander the Great to the USSR to today - has made clear to the world’s empires that it wants to be left the hell alone.

On Tuesday, Obama summoned the spectre of 9/11 and said, “It is easy to forget that when this war began, we were united–bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack, and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear.” He didn’t mention how many innocent Afghans had already died in eight years of “horrific attacks” on their homeland or how many would die in the months ahead, defending their own homeland.

On November 19th, Obama praised Ali as “a force for reconciliation and peace around the world.” On Tuesday the Nobel Peace Prize winner, reconciled himself with war.

Would that Muhammad Ali still had his voice. Would that Parkinson’s disease and dementia had not robbed us of his razor-sharp tongue.

Today, Ali has been described as “America’s only living saint.” But like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, both postage stamps before people, Ali has had his political teeth extracted.

But in a time when billions go to war and prisons while 50% of children will be on food stamps for the coming year, we can’t afford Ali, the harmless icon. Maybe Muhammad Ali has been robbed of speech, but I think we can safely guess what the Champ would say in the face of Obama’s war. We can safely guess, because he said it perfectly four decades ago:

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here….. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”

Replace Vietnam with Afghanistan and it’s a message Barack Obama and our troops need to hear. But we shouldn’t wait for some celebrity or athlete to make that statement for us. Muhammad Ali may have helped shape the 1960s, but those years of resistance also shaped him. We need to rebuild the movement against war. We need to revive the real Muhammad Ali to inspire draft resistors of the future. We need to reclaim Ali from warmongers who would use his image to sell a war that will create more orphans than peace. This is the struggle of our lives and we have the Nobel-minted President of the United States on the other side of the barricades. Barack Obama can have the fawning media, the oadring generals, the RNC, and the liberal apologists on his side.

But he can’t have the Champ. Remove that poster from your wall Mr. President. Your Ali privileges have been revoked.

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October 19th, 2009 by Guest

If Obama was awarded the Nobel for winning the elections in a racist society despite his being African American, Evo deserves it for winning them in his country despite his being a native and his having delivered on his promises.

For the first time, in both countries a member of their respective ethnic groups has won the presidency.

I had said several times that Obama is a smart and cultivated man in a social and political system he believes in. He wishes to bring healthcare to nearly 50 million Americans, to rescue the economy from its profound crisis and to improve the US image which has deteriorated as a result of genocidal wars and torture. He neither conceives nor wishes to change his country’s political and economic system; nor could he do it.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to three American presidents, one former president and one candidate to the presidency.

The first one was Theodore Roosevelt elected in 1901. He was one of the Rough Riders who landed in Cuba with his riders but with no horses in the wake of the US intervention in 1898 aimed at preventing the independence of our homeland.

The second was Thomas Woodrow Wilson who dragged the United States to the first war for the distribution of the world. The extremely severe conditions he imposed on a vanquished Germany, through the Versailles Treaty, set the foundations for the emergence of fascism and the breakout of World War II.

The third has been Barack Obama.

Carter was the ex-president who received the Nobel Prize a few years after leaving office. He was certainly one of the few presidents of that country who would not order the murder of an adversary, as others did. He returned the Panama Canal, opened the US Interests Section in Havana and prevented large budget deficits as well as the squandering of money to the benefit of the military-industrial complex, as Reagan did.

The candidate was Al Gore -when he already was vicepresident. He was the best informed American politician on the dreadful consequences of climate change. As a candidate to the presidency, he was the victim of an electoral fraud and stripped of his victory by W. Bush.

The views have been deeply divided with regards to the choice for this award. Many people question ethical concepts or perceive obvious contradictions in the unexpected decision.

They would have rather seen the Prize given for an accomplished task. The Nobel Peace Prize has not always been presented to people deserving that distinction. On occasions it has been received by resentful and arrogant persons, or even worse. Upon hearing the news, Lech Walesa scornfully said: “Who, Obama? It’s too soon. He has not had time to do anything.”

In our press and in CubaDebate, honest revolutionary comrades have expressed their criticism. One of them wrote: “The same week in which Obama was granted the Nobel Peace Prize, the US Senate passed the largest military budget in its history: 626 billion dollars.” Another journalist commented during the TV News: “What has Obama done to deserve that award?” And still another asked: “And what about the Afghan war and the increased number of bombings?” These views are based on reality.

In Rome, film maker Michael Moore made a scathing comment: “Congratulations, President Obama, for the Nobel Peace Prize; now, please, earn it.”

I am sure that Obama agrees with Moore’s phrase. He is clever enough to understand the circumstances around this case. He knows he has not earned that award yet. That day in the morning he said that he was under the impression that he did not deserve to be in the company of so many inspiring personalities who have been honored with that prize.

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October 13th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

I suppose we should not begrudge Barack Obama his Nobel Peace Prize, though it represents a radical break in tradition, since he’s only had slightly less than nine months to discharge his imperial duties, most concretely through the agency of high explosives in the Hindu Kush whereas laureates like Henry Kissinger had been diligently slaughtering people across the world for years.

Woodrow Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, having brought America into the carnage of the First World War. The peace laureate president who preceded him was Teddy Roosevelt, who got the prize in 1906 as reward for sponsorship of the Spanish-American war and ardent bloodletting in the Philippines. Senator George Hoar’s famous denunciation of Roosevelt on the floor of the US Senate in May of 1902 was probably what alerted the Nobel Committee to Roosevelt’s eligibility for the Peace Prize:

“You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture.”

TR was given the peace prize not long after he’d displayed his boundless compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of Filipino “monkey men” in the 1904 St Louis World Fair as “the missing link” in the evolution of Man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible if necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly dispatched the Great White Fleet (sixteen U.S. Navy ships of the Atlantic Fleet including four battleships) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle Sam’s imperial credentials, anticipating by scarce more than a century, Obama’s award, as he prepares to impose Pax Americana on the Hindukush and portions of Pakistan.

People marvel at the idiocy of these Nobel awards, but there’s method in the madness, since in the end they train people to accept without demur or protest absurdity as part and parcel of the human condition, which they should accept as representing the considered opinion of rational men, albeit Norwegian. It’s a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth: you too can get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or Vietnamese or Afghans and still win a Peace Prize. That’s the audacity of hope at full stretch.

It’s dawning even on those predisposed to like the guy that when it comes to burning issues the first black president of the United States truly hates to come down on one side or the other. He dreads making powerful people mad. He won’t stand up for his own people when they’re being savaged by the nutball right, edges them out, then has his press secretary claim that they jumped of their own accord. This may impress the peaceniks of Oslo, but from the American perspective he’s looking like a wimp.

Obama’s Afghan policy evolved on the campaign trail last year as a one-liner designed to deflect charges that he was a peacenik on Iraq. Not so, he cried. The Global War on Terror was being fought in the wrong place. His pledge was to hunt down and “kill” Osama bin Laden.

Once ensconced in the Oval Office Obama, invoking “bipartiship”, instantly nailed a white flag to the mast by keeping on Robert Gates, Bush’s secretary of defense.

He formed a foreign policy team mostly composed of Clinton-era neo-liberal hawks, headed by Hilary Clinton and Richard Holbrook. His next step was to eject the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, and install Gen. Stanley McChrystal, best known for running the assassination wing of the military’s joint special-operations command. (JSOC). Then he ordered 17,000 new US troops to be deployed to Afghanistan.

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September 26th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Intimidation tactics used against citizens peacefully assembling is a form of state terrorism. Protesters are treated the same around the world, whether we’re talking about Honduras, Iran, or America. That shouldn’t be surprising. We’re all fighting the same capitalist enemy.

By the way, how badass is that dude with the Captain America shield?