Why the Blood Is On Our Hands

As grim accounts of the earthquake in Haiti came in, the accounts in U.S.-controlled state media all carried the same descriptive sentence: “Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere…”

Gee, I wonder how that happened?

You’d think Haiti would be loaded. After all, it made a lot of people rich.

How did Haiti get so poor? Despite a century of American colonialism, occupation, and propping up corrupt dictators? Even though the CIA staged coups d’état against every democratically elected president they ever had?

It’s an important question. An earthquake isn’t just an earthquake. The same 7.0 tremor hitting San Francisco wouldn’t kill nearly as many people as in Port-au-Prince.

“Looking at the pictures, essentially it looks as if (the buildings are of) breezeblock or cinderblock construction, and what you need in an earthquake zone is metal bars that connect the blocks so that they stay together when they get shaken,” notes Sandy Steacey, director of the Environmental Science Research Institute at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. “In a wealthy country with good seismic building codes that are enforced, you would have some damage, but not very much.”

When a pile of cinderblocks falls on you, your odds of survival are long. Even if you miraculously survive, a poor country like Haiti doesn’t have the equipment, communications infrastructure or emergency service personnel to pull you out of the rubble in time. And if your neighbors get you out, there’s no ambulance to take you to the hospital—or doctor to treat you once you get there.

Earthquakes are random events. How many people they kill is predetermined. In Haiti this week, don’t blame tectonic plates. Ninety-nine percent of the death toll is attributable to poverty.

So the question is relevant. How’d Haiti become so poor?

The story begins in 1910, when a U.S. State Department-National City Bank of New York (now called Citibank) consortium bought the Banque National d’Haïti—Haiti’s only commercial bank and its national treasury—in effect transferring Haiti’s debts to the Americans. Five years later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops to occupy the country in order to keep tabs on “our” investment.

From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines imposed harsh military occupation, murdered Haitians patriots and diverted 40 percent of Haiti’s gross domestic product to U.S. bankers. Haitians were banned from government jobs. Ambitious Haitians were shunted into the puppet military, setting the stage for a half-century of U.S.-backed military dictatorship.

The U.S. kept control of Haiti’s finances until 1947.

Still—why should Haitians complain? Sure, we stole 40 percent of Haiti’s national wealth for 32 years. But we let them keep 60 percent.

Whiners.

Despite having been bled dry by American bankers and generals, civil disorder prevailed until 1957, when the CIA installed President-for-Life François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Duvalier’s brutal Tonton Macoutes paramilitary goon squads murdered at least 30,000 Haitians and drove educated people to flee into exile. But think of the cup as half-full: fewer people in the population means fewer people competing for the same jobs!

Upon Papa Doc’s death in 1971, the torch passed to his even more dissolute 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. The U.S., cool to Papa Doc in his later years, quickly warmed back up to his kleptomaniacal playboy heir. As the U.S. poured in arms and trained his army as a supposed anti-communist bulwark against Castro’s Cuba, Baby Doc stole an estimated $300 to $800 million from the national treasury, according to Transparency International. The money was placed in personal accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere.

Under U.S. influence, Baby Doc virtually eliminated import tariffs for U.S. goods. Soon Haiti was awash predatory agricultural imports dumped by American firms. Domestic rice farmers went bankrupt. A nation that had been agriculturally self-sustaining collapsed. Farms were abandoned. Hundreds of thousands of farmers migrated to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince.

The Duvalier era, 29 years in all, came to an end in 1986 when President Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. forces to whisk Baby Doc to exile in France, saving him from a popular uprising.

Once again, Haitians should thank Americans. Duvalierism was “tough love.” Forcing Haitians to make do without their national treasury was our nice way or encouraging them to work harder, to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Or, in this case, flipflops.

Anyway.

The U.S. has been all about tough love ever since. We twice deposed the populist and popular democratically-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The second time, in 2004, we even gave him a free flight to the Central African Republic! (He says the CIA kidnapped him, but whatever.) Hey, he needed a rest. And it was kind of us to support a new government formed by former Tonton Macoutes.

Yet, despite everything we’ve done for Haiti, they’re still a fourth-world failed state on a fault line.

And still, we haven’t given up. American companies like Disney generously pay wages to their sweatshop workers of 28 cents an hour.

What more do these ingrates want?

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Lost Your Job? The IRS Thinks You’re Loaded

My friend was a survivor. Until she wasn’t. She’d made it through 14 rounds of layoffs at her accounting firm. Then came number 15: “I was a telecommuter. When my boss told me to come into the office for a meeting, I knew I was done for. I told her to cut the crap, save me the trip, and fire me over the phone.”

I told her how to file for unemployment benefits. In New York, you can get up to $405 a week plus $25 in extra “Obama bucks” approved by the feds back during the hope and change days. (Most states pay less.) Then I warned her: “Remember, set some of that aside. Unemployment benefits are taxable.” In New York, that means roughly 40 percent.

She was shocked.

You probably are too.

When people lose their jobs, they spend their savings. They take out loans against their house. They’re poor—but that’s not how the federal government sees them. The IRS sees them as big, fat cash cows. Hey, someone has to pay for those missiles we shoot at Afghan wedding parties—not to mention those bonuses for executives at AIG and Goldman Sachs. Why not people a couple of months away from foreclosure? The unemployed are living phat!

The bizarre unemployment tax goes back to 1985, while the Reagan Administration was busily waging class war against the poor and middle class.

It was Reagan’s idea, marketed as an easy way to raise $2.3 billion over five years. But it was Congressional Democrats, exhibiting their characteristic cowardice, who pushed through the measure. “This is a real step back from a traditional Democratic position,” said Rep. Brian Donnelly (D-MA) at the time. “Under the guise of tax reform, we agreed to raise $2.3 billion from people who don’t have jobs.”

It was also hypocritical for Republicans, who rail against “double taxation” when they argue for the repeal of taxes on the estates of the wealthy. Unemployment benefits, after all, were already taxed once; while employed, workers pay into the federal and state unemployment compensation systems. When they get downsized, they’re merely getting back what they put in.

The official the unemployment rate is over 10 percent and rising. With lots of folks out of work for at least a year, savings are running out. Tight credit and the housing bust means they can’t subsist on home equity loans. And there’s no recovery in sight. In other words, if you’re not out of work yet, you could be soon.

As banks and insurance firms wallow in hundreds of billions of federal bailout dollars, it seems unbelievably churlish to tax unemployment checks, which are the only “income” received by millions of people—and are keeping many of them just barely afloat. It’s also utterly absurd. Why should the government send out money to the jobless, then take it right back?

The Obama Administration should repeal the Reagan Tax on the unemployed, and it should do so this instant. Call your Congressman (it’s more effective than email) and demand that he or she take action on the Unemployment Benefit Tax Suspension Act of 2009 (S. 155), currently stuck in committee because Congress cares more about bankers than struggling unemployed Americans. You can find contact information for your representative and senators here.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Columnists everywhere are attempting to name the decade just ended. Here’s my nomination: The Fear Decade.

Since 9/11, We’ve Embraced Our Inner Coward

Home of the free and the brave. Live free or die. Shoot first; ask questions later. Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out. These were the mottos of a brash, impetuous, audacious-to-a-fault nation.

That nation is dead.

Once we Americas did brave things: We sat on boats, crossing the English Channel, knowing that most of us would die on the beach in Normandy. We sat at the lunch counter in the Deep South, waiting for white goons to beat us up. We also did brave things that were stupid: When the president sent us to Vietnam, some of us went, risking death. Others went to Canada, sacrificing everything for principle. We bungee jumped. We tried New Coke. Bravery can be dumb.

But it’s still brave.

Then came 9/11/01. It was the defining event of the decade that ends today, a fin-de-siècle moment for a previously proud nation’s once glorious history.

The Fear Decade had begun.

Bin Laden wanted the destruction of the World Trade Center to smack oblivious Americans’ upside their collective heads, to draw their attention to their nation’s toxic foreign policy (especially in the Middle East), maybe even to demand that the U.S. stop propping up dictators. It didn’t work.

Rather than prompt them to reassess their government’s behavior, Americans got angry. Anger, as any shrink will tell you, comes from fear. And fear makes you do stupid things.

Fear of future attacks. Fear of Muslims. Of anyone wearing a turban. Foreigners. The next thing we knew, the paranoid delusionals leading us convinced us that fearful people and things were everywhere. Mail full of anthrax. Gas stations stalked by snipers. Threat levels: orange, red, etc. (but it’s always orange). Avian flu. Eeek! Stop these things! Do whatever it takes!

Throwing innocent Muslim men in prison? It was worth it to (possibly, probably not) prevent one attack. Torture? We couldn’t take any chances—what if the victim knew that a bomb was about to go off? Because one lunatic tried to blow up his joke of a shoe bomb on a flight from Paris to Miami, America’s 800 million air travelers are ordered to take off their 1.6 billion shoes every year. Because a half-dozen Brits thought about trying to blow up planes using hair peroxide and Tang (yes, really), millions of nursing mothers were told to dump bottles containing thousands of gallons of breast milk into trashcans at airport security checkpoints. Never mind the scientists who said such plots couldn’t work. And now, the most fearsome fear of all: the Paris-to-Detroit underwear bomber. Airport security is about to turn really ugly.

Governments act stupid and mean. That’s normal. What the Fear Decade made different was us. It made us let the government do whatever it wanted.

Fear is irrational. As I pointed out at the time, Iraq’s longest-range missiles couldn’t reach Europe, much less the United States. In other words, it didn’t matter if Saddam had had WMDs. It didn’t matter to us, anyway. Yet we destroyed our economy and murdered two million people to invade Iraq.

I watched a legless vet, humiliated and detained by a TSA agent as he repeatedly explained why the metal detector kept going off: his body was full of titanium, courtesy of the Iraqi insurgency. I watched. So did other passengers. We said nothing.

We were afraid.

Not just at the airport. We were afraid at work. Unions were deader than dead, the government was in the hands of gangster capitalists, and the economy started tanking the instant Bill Clinton began packing his bags. We were overleveraged, maxed out and one paycheck away from losing everything. Ask for a raise? Demand longer vacations? Are you crazy, brother? Like Jews assembled in the freezing courtyard of a concentration camp, we stared straight ahead, terrified, hoping not to be noticed, to live to see the next “selection.”

Fear everywhere! National Guardskids, all of 20 years old and decked out in their best Kevlar, brandishing automatic weapons taller than they are at women and children as they came out of commuter rail stations. Annoying, sure—but what if…what if…what if something happened? We heard that the government was listening to our phone calls and reading our email but instead of summoning up outrage at this brazen and illegal violation of privacy we took cold comfort in that hoary chestnut: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”

But we were afraid. We all were. We still are.

Then we elected Barack Obama. We didn’t vote for him because he was accomplished. He wasn’t. Or because we liked his ideas. He hardly had any. We voted for him because he seemed so calm.

But he was afraid too. More than that, he wanted us to keep being scared—of the same exact stuff Bush had had us so frightened of! Lions and tigers and Muslims, oh my! The Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, even though the Pentagon said there were fewer than 100 Al Qaeda guys in the whole country! Iraq, still, although he couldn’t quite explain why, and the bad guys who didn’t do anything wrong at Guantánamo, just in case.

Now it’s all fear, all the time. Fear of diseases (H1N1). Fear of evil banks (feed them or they’ll go away, which would somehow be worse). We were arrogant once, loud and silly and funny and crazy as hell, and we were Americans.

Now we’re timid and pissy and pissed off, and I don’t recognize, much less like, what we’ve become.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Why the Imperfect is the Enemy of the Good

MP3s exemplify “disruptive technology,” a new product initially ignored by major investors due to its low quality yet catches fire due to its convenience. The history of recorded sound has been at the vanguard of the Good Enough Revolution throughout the 20th century: 78 rpm records sounded better than 33s, analog 33s delivered higher fidelity sound than brittle, cold, digital CDs, which make compressed MP3 files sound like dog poop.

People like poop. Wired magazine reported: “Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford University, recently completed a six-year study of his students. Every year he asked new arrivals in his class to listen to the same musical excerpts played in a variety of digital formats—from standard MP3s to high-fidelity uncompressed files—and rate their preferences. Every year, he reports, more and more students preferred the sound of MP3s, particularly for rock music. They’ve grown accustomed to what Berger calls the percussive sizzle—a.k.a. distortion—found in compressed music. To them, that’s what music is supposed to sound like.” MP3 poop sounds like angels singing. And MP3s don’t scratch, take up room, or get stolen by your roommate.

From the ridiculously portable Flip video camera to streaming video through a laptop to the low-tech Predator drone plane that screws up the best-laid plans of Afghan wedding planners, Good Enough dominates the technology world. Cheap and easy, that’s how we like it.

At least at first glance. Convenience isn’t always, well, convenient. The Flip records videos in a file format that’s hard to manipulate. I have 25 feet of shelf space dedicated to compact discs but I won’t suffer like my friend Mary, whose computer decided to melt down at the same time as her back-up hard drive, taking $15,000 worth of iTunes downloads with them. Print newspapers are hurting, but they can’t be turned off with the flip of a switch as the governments do in China and Iran whenever the Internet masses get rambunctious. And dispensing death from the Predator’s ticky-tacky lawnmower-engine buzz is a surefire prescription for blowback by inspiring the Pakistani jihadis of the future.

In the world of ideas, President Obama has come to symbolize the triumph of Good Enough. (Candidate Obama, he of “hope” and “change,” has been discontinued.) Obama, along with his PR flacks and Congressional allies, loves to paraphrase Voltaire: “Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Better to move forward incrementally than not at all.

Repeatedly ceding ground from the wimpy compromises he made by negotiating against himself, Obama deploys this mantra against anyone who pushes for significant change. “We can’t afford to make perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary,” said the president after bailing out bankers but not Americans who had lost their jobs and/or homes. Now he’s using the same mantra to tout the toothless, inconsequential mess that came out of the global warming summit in Copenhagen, and a healthcare bill that manages to make the current disaster even worse.

“The general consensus [on healthcare] was that we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good,” said Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana and a key Obama ally.

Unfortunately for us, Obama’s argument relies on a historical example that doesn’t apply today.

Obamaite pundit Jonathan Alter summarizes liberal thinking: “You don’t always get everything you want the first time up at bat,” he argues. “Roosevelt was constantly going back to Congress to strengthen…Social Security, which was not until he had been in office for more than two years. A lot of New Deal types really hated Roosevelt’s Social Security plan because they thought it was so weak. And then later they changed it, and they changed it again, and they changed it again.”

Other Obamaites point to the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s, which started out weak but wound up strong and meaningful under LBJ. Perfect isn’t achievable now, they argue. But Good Enough is. Get half-assed reforms through on long-standing problems like the economy, climate change and healthcare, they say, and we’ll improve upon them later. But this approach relies on two logical fallacies.

First, Good Enough often turns out to be Even Worse Than Before. Prices of insurance company stocks rose sharply on news that Obamacare was close to passage—an ominous sign for patients. “All in all, relative to the last version of health reform issued by the Senate, things have turned out pretty well for the health insurance industry,” said Carl McDonald, an analyst at Oppenheimer. “In particular, all versions of a government-run health plan have largely been eliminated.” Companies like Sigma and Aetna will be allowed to pass new federal taxes on to their patients, which will include tens of millions of new “customers” forced by the government to sign up—at their own expense. Obamacare will be like a smash to the face for the 20 percent-plus of workers already reeling from many months of unemployment.

Second, looking to the middle of the 20th century doesn’t make sense. Back then historical progress was assumed to be a continuous process. Organized labor, civil rights groups and New Left activists fought hard for movement forward for higher wages and equal rights. They never settled, and they didn’t let Congress settle either.

Our times are different. Although we are clearly entering a period where breakdown, collapse and even revolution could occur, we’re currently stuck with late-period American capitalism and its political leadership. They are stagnant, devoid of dynamism, and alienated from the people. Obama’s half-assed compromises on issues like gays in the military, torture, Guantánamo, healthcare and global warming will be touted as triumphs in the next few elections. Neither Obama nor Congress will view them as building blocks, part of a continuous movement toward historical progress. We will not revisit these debates. They will be over.

Good Enough will always be good enough for Obama. But not for us. Like the kids who’ve been made to believe that MP3s sound OK, we would be better off with nothing at all.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.”)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL