Haiti: the unlucky nation

Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world and by far the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.  More than three-quarters of the population has income of less than $2 a day.  More than half have income of less than $1 a day.

Why is that?  I have friends—middle-class white Americans like myself—who tell me the Haitians are poor because of their bad habits.  They have too many children, causing the population to more than triple in the past-half century.  They have cut down the trees of Haiti for firewood, leading to floods and soil erosion.   Their politicians are corrupt and their indigenous religion, Voodoo, is wicked and corrupt.

I say that the Haitian people are just plain unlucky.  They are unlucky in their geography and they are unlucky in their history.   Arguably they are the unluckiest nation in the world.

Haiti is right in the middle of the principal hurricane track for its region, and it is right on the major fault line between the Caribbean and North American tectonic plates.   Their further misfortune is that conditions on Haiti are perfect for growing sugar and that their part of the island of Hispaniola was colonized by the French, not the Spanish.

The need for labor on sugar plantations meant the importation of African slaves, who worked under exceptionally harsh conditions.  The French called Haiti the Pearl of the Antilles, because it was the largest sugar-producing area in the world, but Haiti’s riches were not shared by the slaves who produced them.  One reason for the harsh conditions was that sugar was the principal source of wealth for the French colonies, while the Spanish gave lower priority to sugar because their principal source of wealth was gold mines.

Slavery in British North America and the southern United States was bad enough, but the French sugar plantations were comparable to the Nazi labor camps.   Jon Henly, writing in The Guardian, quoted a former slave.

“Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? … … Have they not forced them to eat excrement? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss?”

via The Guardian.

The Haitians revolted, defeated the armies of Napoleon and won their independence in 1804.  They become the second independent republic in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States, and the first black nation to win its independence from a European colonial power.

The success of the Haitian Revolution convinced Napoleon that it was futile to try to maintain a French colonial empire in the Americas.  As a result, he sold the vast Louisiana territory to President Jefferson for a bargain price.  If not for the success of the Haitian Revolution, the westward expansion of the United States would not have proceeded how and when it did.  But because the Haitian example was seen as a threat to slavery in the United States, the U.S. government did not grant diplomatic recognition to Haiti until 1862.  That was only one of the new republic’s troubles.  As Henley reported in his Guardian article:

In exchange for diplomatic recognition from France, the new republic was forced to pay enormous reparations: some 150 million francs, in gold. It was an immense sum, and even reduced by more than half in 1830, far more than Haiti could afford.

“The long and the short of it is that Haiti was paying reparations to France from 1825 until 1947,” says [historian Alex] Von Tunzelmann. “To come up with the money, it took out huge loans from American, German and French banks, at exorbitant rates of interest.  By 1900, Haiti was spending about 80 percent of its national budget on loan repayments.  It ­completely wrecked their economy.  By the time the original reparations and interest were paid off, the place was basically destitute and trapped in a ­spiral of debt.  Plus, a succession of leaders had more or less given up on trying to resolve Haiti’s problems, and started looting it instead.”

via The Guardian.

Julian Assange: a profile in courage

The United States and British governments treat Julian Assange like the ultimate terrorist threat.

Members of the London Metropolitan Police, wearing Kevlar vests, surround the Ecuadorian embassy, where Assange has taken refuge, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  They occupy the front steps and entrances, they occupy street corners nearby, one police officer occupies a room in a building adjoining Assange’s room.  Chris Hedges, a journalist and former war correspondent, said the Metropolitan Police spent the equivalent of $4.5 million in surveillance of Julian Assange just through January 31.

Behind the United Kingdom government is the power of the U.S. government.  A dozen government agencies are working on the Julian Assange case.  They have waged economic warfare and cyberwarfare to try to shut down Assange’s WikiLeaks operation.  They interrogate and try to recruit WikiLeaks supporters every time they pass through a U.S.-controlled airport.  Assange’s lawyers believe that Bradley Manning, who leaked confidential government information to WikiLeaks, could plea bargain for a reduced sentence by testifying that Assange solicited the information.

A secret grand jury in Arlington, Va., reportedly has handed down a sealed indictment of Assange.  Hedges reported that the Department of Justice is mounting a major effort on this.  It spent $2 million this year alone for a computer system to handle Assange prosecution documents.  The U.S. Congress in 1989 authorized the federal government to seize anyone, anywhere in the world, who is accused of a crime under U.S. law, even if this is done in violation of international law or the law of the country concerned.

I read a lot about the partisan divisions in the U.S. government, but Democrats and Republicans, the so-called liberals and the so-called conservatives, are united in their desire for the U.S. government to capture Julian Assange.   If this happens, Julian Assange can look forward to spending the rest of his life in the equivalent of the Soviet Gulag.

What is Julian Assange’s crime?  What makes him such a threat?  What he has done is to break the wall of secrecy which makes possible the “disposition matrix,” “signature strikes,” “extraordinary renditions,” “enhanced interrogation” and all the other secret Orwellian activities of government.  If he is guilty of revealing secret information to the enemy under the Espionage Act, it is only if the U.S. government regards the American people as its enemy.

The remarkable thing is that, with all this power arrayed against him, Julian Assange is not afraid.   The powers-that-be are afraid of him.  He is not afraid of them.  Trapped in a corner, he continues his work, to make known what the world’s governments want to hide.  To the extent that freedom and democracy survive the next few decades, he will be regarded as one of our era’s greatest heroes.

Click on The Death of Truth: Chris Hedges Interviews Julian Assange for Hedges’ full report and links to the interview.

Abortion USA: the basic facts

The Guttmacher Institute is a non-profit organization devoted to research and education in birth control, sexual education, reproductive health, reproductive rights and population issues.  Recently the institute published five infographics summing up the basic facts about abortion in the United States today.

1.   Nearly half of American woman have unwanted pregnancies and nearly one in three will have an abortion before age 45.

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2.  Poor American women are five times as likely to have abortions as higher-income women.

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3.  Black and Hispanic American women are more likely than white American women to have both unplanned births and abortions

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4.  Most abortions are paid for out-of-pocket, even though most abortion patients have health insurance.

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5.  Many American women must travel long distances and overcome government barriers to obtain abortions.

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Click on Roe at 40: New Infographics Illustrate Key Facts for more detail.

Behind the genocide trial of Rios Montt

It’s rare for a tyrant to go on trial for crimes against his people, unless he is defeated in war and tried by the victors.  But it appeared that an exception would be made in the case of General Efrain Rios Montt, ruler of Guatemala in 1982-83, who, with U.S. government approval, ordered his army to massacre and torture Mayan villagers, including women, children and sick people, in a campaign to stamp out guerrilla resistance.

This would have been an important precedent, leading to—who knows?—rulers of the world’s powerful nations being held legally accountable for crimes against humanity.  But as things stand today, it appears that the trial will not go forward.

View the videos for more about the charges against Rios Montt.

Hat tip to Oidin.

[Update 5/11/13]  Rios Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison after being convicted of genocide.

Back-alley abortions in the 21st century

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In my home town in the western Maryland panhandle in the 1960s, a women who wished to terminate a pregnancy had no place where she could legally go.  But it was said (I don’t know if this was true) that if she were to pay a certain lawyer an agreed-on sum of money, he would tell her to be on a certain street corner at a certain time of night.  There she would be met and driven blindfolded to a farmhouse in Pennsylvania, where an abortion would be performed.

Those of us who believed abortion rights hoped, after the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973, that places like that would be closed down, and that, in the words of President Bill Clinton, abortion would become safe, legal and rare.   But what has come to light in the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, an abortion doctor now on trial in Philadelphia for first-degree murder, is like the worst nightmare of back-alley abortions.

Dr. Gosnell has not been convicted nor made his defense, so I won’t call him a murderer, but the Grand Jury indictment says that he delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy and killed them by severing their spinal columns with scissors.  He is accused of overdosing his patients with dangerous drugs, spreading venereal disease with infected instruments and causing the deaths of at least two women with incompetent surgery.

He was charged as a result of an FBI raid based on a tip that Dr. Gosnell’s “Women’s Medical Society” was illegally selling prescription drugs.  According to the Grand Jury, here’s what the FBI found: “There was blood on the floor.  A stench of urine filled the air.  A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs.  Semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with blood-stained blankets.  All the women had been sedated by unlicensed staff.”

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Abortion after the 24th month of pregnancy is (rightly) illegal under Pennsylvania law, which is consistent with Roe vs Wade.  Killing an infant capable of living outside the womb is murder by any definition.   The existence of Dr. Gosnell’s clinic represents a failure of enforcement of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, and the reasons for that failure are a legitimate issue.   But I would like to raise a different question.  Why in the era of Roe vs. Wade would poor women pay cash to somebody such as Gosnell?

Part of the answer is that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the anti-abortion movement have been doing their best to make it as difficult as possible for women to get abortions from legitimate clinics in an early state of pregnancy.   Medicaid funding for abortions is denied under federal and Pennsylvania law except in cases of rape, incest or a threat to the life of the mother.  The out-of-pocket cost of an abortion is equal to a month’s income for people receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

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Some women are afraid to run the gantlet of anti-abortion protestors at Planned Parenthood or other legitimate providers of abortion.  Abortion doctors have been murdered by anti-abortion terrorists, and others face death threats.   There are only 13 clinics in all of Pennsylvania that provide abortion services, down from 22 two years ago.

If you want to prevent more horror stories such as Dr. Gosnell’s, you should be willing to allow abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy by qualified obstetricians, in which abortion is safe procedure and does not take the extinguish the life of a human mind in a recognizable human body.  And if you want to reduce the number of abortions, you should encourage the dissemination of birth control information, encourage adoption and work for an economy in which any man or woman willing to work can get a job with a wage sufficient to support a child.

Why was Latin America a rendition-free zone?

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A report by Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), a New York-based human rights organization, has identified 54 governments that helped in the United States “extraordinary rendition” program.

This involved seizing people thought to be aiding the enemies of the United States, and sending them to secret sites around the world for interrogation, usually involving torture.  Some were interrogation centers operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, some were operated by foreign governments.   The most common destination, according to OSJI, was Syria.

If you think this is a good idea, what would you think about such a program being operated by some other powerful country, such as Russia or China.

It is interesting that both Libya and Syria hosted detention sites.  I bet this made Libya’s Qaddafi and Syria’s Assad think they were in the good graces of the U.S. government.   They must have been surprised when Washington turned on them.

What is especially interesting about the map is that one big region of the world, namely Latin America, had no governments known to have helped with the rendition program.   Greg Grandin, writing in Mother Jones, explained this is because of Latin America’s experience with a previous U.S. “war on terror”.

Even before the 1959 Cuban Revolution, before Che Guevara urged revolutionaries to create “two, three, many Vietnams,” Washington had already set about establishing two, three, many centralized intelligence agencies in Latin America.  As Michael McClintock shows in his indispensable book Instruments of Statecraft, in late 1954, a few months after the CIA’s infamous coup in Guatemala that overthrew a democratically elected government, the National Security Council first recommended strengthening “the internal security forces of friendly foreign countries.”

In the region, this meant three things. First, CIA agents and other US officials set to work “professionalizing” the security forces of individual countries like Guatemala, Colombia, and Uruguay; that is, turning brutal but often clumsy and corrupt local intelligence apparatuses into efficient, “centralized,” still brutal agencies, capable of gathering information, analyzing it, and storing it.  Most importantly, they were to coordinate different branches of each country’s security forces—the police, military, and paramilitary squads—to act on that information, often lethally and always ruthlessly.

Second, the US greatly expanded the writ of these far more efficient and effective agencies, making it clear that their portfolio included not just national defense but international offense. They were to be the vanguard of a global war for “freedom” and of an anticommunist reign of terror in the hemisphere.

Third, our men in Montevideo, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Asunción, La Paz, Lima, Quito, San Salvador, Guatemala City, and Managua were to help synchronize the workings of individual national security forces.

The result was state terror on a nearly continent-wide scale. In the 1970s and 1980s, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s Operation Condor, which linked together the intelligence services of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile, was the most infamous of Latin America’s transnational terror consortiums, reaching out to commit mayhem as far away as Washington D.C., Paris, and Rome.  The US had earlier helped put in place similar operations elsewhere in the Southern hemisphere, especially in Central America in the 1960s.

By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans had been tortured, killed, disappeared, or imprisoned without trial, thanks in significant part to US organizational skills and support. Latin America was, by then, Washington’s backyard gulag. Three of the region’s current presidents—Uruguay’s José Mujica, Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega—were victims of this reign of terror.

via Mother Jones.

After the 9/11 attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld flew to Chile to urge Latin American governments to join in the current “war on terror.”  Leaders in Latin America remembered their history too well to go along.  What, I wonder, will be the legacy of the present policy 20 or 30 years from now?

The new Pope and the Argentine military junta

Many Latin American prelates, most famously Dom Helder Camaro of Brazil and the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romaro of El Salvador, spoke out in the 1970s and 1980s against military dictatorships, death squads and torture.  The new Pope Francis was not one of them.

Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio

[Jorge Mario] Bergoglio was the head of the Jesuits in Argentina during the military dictatorship of 1976-1983, during which the military murdered upwards of 30,000 people (as well as kidnapping hundreds of children whose parents the regime had tortured and murdered). Unlike Catholic officials in neighboring Chile and Brazil, where priests, bishops, and even cardinals spoke out against human rights abuses and defended victims of abuses, in Argentina, the Catholic Church was openly complicit in the military regime’s repression.

Bergoglio was not exempt from this involvement: military officers have testified that Bergoglio helped the Argentine military regime hide political prisoners when human rights activists visited the country.  And Bergoglio himself had to testify regarding the kidnapping of two priests who he stripped of their religious licenses shortly before they were kidnapped and tortured.

This isn’t just a case of Bergoglio being a member of an institution that supported a brutal regime; it’s a case of Bergoglio himself having ties, direct and indirect, to that very regime.  For those who hoped for a Pope who might represent a more welcoming and open path for the Catholic Church, the selection of Bergoglio has to be a let-down.

via Americas South and North.

In November 2005, Cardinal Bergoglio was elected head of the Argentine Conference of Bishops for a three-year term, which was renewed in 2008.  At the time he was chosen, the Argentine church was dealing with a notorious political scandal, that of the Rev. Christian von Wernich, a former chaplain of the Buenos Aires police who had been accused of aiding in the questioning, torture and death of political prisoners.

The church authorities had spirited Father von Wernich out of the country and placed him in a parish in Chile under a false name, but he was eventually brought back to Argentina and put on trial. In 2007, he was found guilty on seven counts of complicity in homicide, more than 40 counts of kidnapping and more than 30 of torture, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Father von Wernich was allowed to continue to celebrate Mass in prison, and in 2010 a church official said that “at the appropriate time, von Wernich’s situation will have to be resolved in accordance with canonical law.” But Cardinal Bergoglio never issued a formal apology on behalf of the church, or commented directly on the case, and during his tenure the bishops’ conference was similarly silent.

via NYTimes.com.

I never was bothered by the fact Pope Benedict XVI was a member of the Hitler Youth as a teenager.  He was a boy and too young to know better, he never personally participated in Nazi atrocities and he never supported or showed sympathy for Naziism as an adult.  Cardinal Bergoglio was an adult when he supported the fascist Argentine military junta, and, so far as I know, he never expressed regrets.  (If I am wrong on this point, I would be grateful for better information).

[Note added 3/16/13.  Argentina's bishops in October 2012 issued a collective apology for failing to protect their flock during the dictatorship.]

The Papacy is important to everyone and not just Catholics.  The Roman Catholic Church is not only the world’s largest religious communion, it is the world’s largest membership organization—period.  There are more than a billion Catholics in the world.   A majority of the world’s Christians are Catholics.  What the Pope does, and what the Catholic Church does, are hugely important to the world, for good and bad.

Now it may be that as Pope, Pope Francis will be able to put his past history behind him.  Maybe he will support Catholic social teaching at its best, rather than Catholic authoritarianism at its worst.  I hope so.  It’s possible.  Such a change of heart wouldn’t be unprecedented.  But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Presidential death warrants and U.S. citizens

The White House has so far refused to give a straight answer to the question of whether the President claims to have authority to kill Americans on American soil based on his sole determination.

The police and the military have not only a right but a duty to use lethal force to protect human life.  Police have the right to use lethal force to take someone into custody who is charged with committing a crime or of whom there is probable cause to believe committed a crime.  If Americans wage war against their government, as in the Civil War, the government has the right to use lethal force to defeat them.

But in all these examples, the use of lethal force is limited to the specific situation.  The question is whether the President has an open-ended right to issue a death warrant against someone not engaging in an act of terrorism, not charged with a crime, not resisting arrest, not bearing arms against U.S. forces, but whom the President has determined is a threat to national security.

As it happens, I don’t think the President should have unlimited authority to order the killing of foreigners or people living in foreign countries, either.  But Obama administration’s response to the question about Americans on American soil shows how foolish it is to imagine that it is possible to grant a ruler absolute power and think it always will be used against somebody else.

So far as I can tell, the Obama administration has never acknowledged any legal restriction on the President’s power whatsoever.   I think this is a greater long-range threat to American freedom than anything our foreign enemies are doing.  You can be sure that whatever power is claimed by President Obama will be claimed by his successors, on whichever party.

I think Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky deserves great credit for pressing this question.   It is an example of how some Republicans libertarians, conservatives and even Tea Partiers are more principled defenders of liberty than many of us liberals.

[Update 3/7/13]  Attorney General Eric Holder sent Rand Paul a letter saying that the President does not have authority to use weaponized drones against American citizens not engaged in combat on American soil.  Click on Eric Holder answers Ron Paul (sort of) for my follow-up post.

Could Obama order a hit on Julian Assange?

The Obama administration has refused to give a clear answer on whether the President claims authority to order the killing of an American citizen on American soil, based on the President’s sole determination that the person is a threat.

I have a different question.   Does President Obama believe he has the authority to order the killing of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks?  Assange has never participated in an act of violence against Americans, and never has advocated violence against Americans.  Yet Assange is accused of being a threat to American national security because he has provided a means of publishing secret information that is damaging to the U.S. government’s reputation.

I do think Julian Assange is safer in the Ecuadorian embassy in London than he would be anywhere else.   It isn’t paranoid to think that, if he were free to move about, he might be found dead some morning in a hotel room or along a lonely country road.   My guess is that he will be in the Ecuadorian embassy for a longl— just like Cardinal Mindszenty, who was sentenced to life imprisonment on trumped-up charges by the Communist government of Hungary during the Cold War era, and found asylum for 15 years in the U.S. embassy in Budapest.

But my question is not about President Obama’s intentions.  My question is what limits, if any, exist in his eyes to his power to issue death warrants.

If only Obama’s deeds matched his words

President Obama, say what you will about him, is a outstanding speaker, both in style and substance.  His second inaugural address was characteristic.  He connected the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and of President Lincoln’s second inaugural with the struggles for women’s rights, black civil rights and gay rights.  His speech was, as usual, wonderfully balanced.  He offered comfort to the marginalized without attacking the successful.  He performed his usual feat of walking through a minefield, rallying his supporters without offering any obvious opening to his opponents.  If all I knew about the President were his speeches, I would have voted for him.

Unfortunately, I also know his record—the drone strikes and kill lists, the bailout of Wall Street, the prosecution of whistle-blowers, the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations which would subject U.S. worker, health and environmental laws to a corporate-dominated international tribunal.  Most of my friends are liberal Democrats, like me.  When I mention these things, they seem momentarily disturbed, then recover their equilibrium and ask:  What about the Tea Party?  What about the NRA?  What about the crazy religious fundamentalists and right-to-lifers?

The fact that Obama is such a great speaker, the fact that his words have the power to stir me, gives me all that greater a sense of betrayal when his deeds are contradictory to his rhetoric.  But rhetoric matters.  His articulation of liberal ideals brings them out of the margins and into the center.  It is not nothing.  It sets a goal of those who come after him to follow.

Click on Inaugural Address by President Barack Obama for the full text of his speech.

Click on Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall if you’re not sure what the President meant by these words.