DNC: ‘One And The Same’

Democrats blasted the Republicans for their close ties with the Tea Party movement, warning that some Tea Party ideas could find their way into Republican policies.

14 Weeks

by Republican Governors Association

14 Weeks from Republican Governors Association on Vimeo.

Land Ownership at the Crux of Haiti’s Stalled Reconstruction

Written by Kim Ives
Wednesday, 14 July 2010 14:00
Source: Haiti Liberte

At a UN Conference on Mar. 31, about 60 countries and multilateral banks promised $5.3 billion for Haiti’s reconstruction over the next 18 months. Only about 10% of those promises have been delivered on (some of it just forgiven debt), and of that money delivered into a World Bank managed fund, only a fraction has been spent to help Haiti.

Meanwhile, private citizens around the world gave hundreds of millions of dollars to NGOs and impromptu efforts like the Clinton-Bush Foundation, but (where statistics are available) less than 25% of those contributions, sometimes much less, have been spent while desperation in Haiti grows. Much of the blame for Haiti’s faltering recovery has focused on this trickling release of money and the disorganization of inefficient, administratively costly NGOs which have received most of the funds to date.

But big NGOs reply that they are ready to build new storm resistant houses – the most urgent priority, everybody agrees, as the hurricane season bears down on the 1.7 million displaced people still living under tents and tarps. The problem, Bekele Gelata, the secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross Societies said last week, is that the Haitian government has not provided open land on which to build large numbers of houses. “We have high hopes that the Red Cross will get a little land soon,” he said.

In this way, the Jan. 12 earthquake reveals that the principal fault-line in Haiti is not geological but one of class. A small handful of rich families own large tracts of land in suburban Port-au-Prince which would be ideal for resettling the displaced thousands. The lands are located near the city, often with water and some trees, and are largely undeveloped.

However, these same families control the Haitian government and, more importantly, have great influence in the newly formed 26-member Interim Commission to Reconstruct Haiti (CIRH), co-chaired by former President Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. Thirteen of the CIRH directors represent multilateral banks like the IMF, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank and donor nations like the U.S., France and Canada. The other thirteen members represent Haiti’s elite.

The most prominent elite representative on the CIRH is Reginald Boulos, who heads one of the Haitian bourgeoisie’s most powerful families and backed both the 1991-94 and 2004-06 coups d’état against former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. (Despite regular and massive demonstrations asking for the Haitian government to facilitate his return, Aristide remains in exile in South Africa, without a passport or laisser-passer to return home.)

The CIRH is empowered for the next 18 months under a “State of Emergency Law” to seize land for rebuilding as it sees fit. (It is no coincidence that the time period for the “state of emergency” and the $5 billion injection coincide). But the elite families on this body in charge of expropriations are not volunteering their own well-situated land to benefit Haiti’s homeless.

As a result, only one major displaced person camp, Corail-Cesselesse, has been built about 10 miles north of the capital, on a forbidding strip of sun-baked desert situated between Titayen and Morne Cabrit, two desolate zones where death-squads dumped their victims during the anti-Aristide coups. The 6,000 person camp is several kilometers from Route National One, where transport toward the capital runs. One resident said he had to leave the camp at 4 a.m. for a three hour commute to his job in the city. Another resident said bus fares cost $1, a lot of money in Haiti.

Long-time democracy activist Patrick Elie told Democracy Now! on the quake’s six month anniversary that “the Haitian elites over centuries [have] appropriated land which [...], especially after independence and the end of slavery, would have been common property, and they appropriated vast tract of land, pushing the peasants – the newly freed slaved who did not want to work on the plantation system anymore – to the mountains.”

This appropriation process – some call it theft – is not ancient history. Some of Haiti’s best suited land for post-quake resettlements is located just north of the capital between the Freres Road and Tabarre. Over the past 25 years, Haiti’s bourgeoisie bought up large swaths of this fertile valley, where the Haitian American Sugar Company used to grow sugarcane. Now it is home to a Miami-style luxury home development known as Belle-Ville, an amusement park for rich kids , the Vorbe family car dealership, Brazil’s military base (Brabatt), and a giant new U.S. Embassy, among other things. “The elite paid the peasants pennies for the land not long ago, pushing them off,” Elie told Haiti Liberté. “Now they will look to sell it for a huge profit.”

The bourgeoisie has placed itself in charge of resettlement and is looking to make a killing. “The government had appointed Gerard-Emile ‘Aby’ Brun, president of Nabatec Development, a consortium owned by some of Haiti’s most powerful families, to be in charge of relocating the squatter camps in Port-au-Prince,” explained the AP’s Jonathon Katz in a Jul. 11 story. Brun then put Corail-Cesselesse on land owned by Nabatec, thereby making his company “first in line to gain part of $7 million the government will spend compensating landowners.”

And, Katz continues, “that’s just a small part of the potential payoff. Nabatec is also a lead negotiator with South Korean garment firms to build factories that Haitian officials say will likely go into Corail-Cesselesse.” Forty years ago, Cité Soleil, Haiti’s biggest and worst slum, was also built as a model development (then Cité Simone) to provide workers for the first industrial park near the airport, built and owned by the same wealthy families with U.S. support.

So the bourgeoisie keeps its best land and sells its worst for a huge, guaranteed profit. This is the Haitian equivalent of the U.S. bank bailout.

In this way, the Préval government and CIRH appear ready to squander the millions contributed to Haiti by buying land at inflated prices from the bourgeoisie, land which was often stolen or obtained by ruse in the first place.

Land is also needed to grow food for Haiti’s increasingly hungry masses, especially as post-quake humanitarian aid begins to drop off. Haiti’s bourgeoisie and big landowners are more interested in building assembly industries, office buildings and luxury homes, not on developing fields of rice, millet or corn. In the past six months, four new industrial parks, according to one report, have been built to take advantage of Haiti’s $3 a day minimum wage.

This struggle for Haiti’s principal means of production – the land – has now been thrown into sharp relief as sharks and vultures use this moment of a weakened state to expand their real estate holdings, not contribute them to their devastated compatriots.

A good example of this is in Ganthier, a town of about 72,000 located 18 miles east of the capital near the Dominican border. Half the town’s residents are peasant farmers who survive by farming on state lands used as a commons to grow food for over 80 years. But in recent weeks, two businessmen have laid claim to this state land.

Two weeks ago, the businessmen sent out a bulldozer that began to clear the peasants’ plots. The peasants banded together, burned the bulldozer, and blocked the road from the border. The local mayor, Ralph Lapointe sided with the peasants and was arrested for a few hours. He credits his partial freedom to immediate local protests and barricades. His office’s general director was imprisoned for more than 24 hours.

“We are both now under virtual house arrest,” he told journalists from Haiti Liberté and Democracy Now! “My life is in danger if I leave my home. As a government representative, I am supposed to defend the interests of the local population. Instead the judicial authorities are allying themselves with the marauding businessmen and are attacking the peasants and those that defend them, like myself.”

Meanwhile the interlopers, armed with false deeds to the land (the elite’s age-old weapon of choice), have enlisted the police in a manhunt for the leaders of the peasant rebellion against the land grab. Mayor Lapointe identified the two businessmen trying to take the land as Frank Galette and Gérald Brutus. “Because I don’t agree with their actions, they have promised to assassinate me,” the mayor said.

This stand-off in Ganthier does not bode well for Haiti’s reconstruction under the leadership of Préval and the CIRH. To build Haiti back better, Haitian authorities will need to expropriate at least some of the land the elite has stolen and accumulated over the past 200 years. Instead, landowners’ thugs, often in concert with police and UN troops, are brutally uprooting people, often at gunpoint and at night, from spontaneous settlements without giving them any alternative homes. The internally displaced just have to move farther up the mountainsides or further into the Arizona-like desert north of the capital.

Of course, seizing the ruling class’ land would exacerbate the already simmering class war, of which Ganthier is just an opening skirmish. “The landowners say if they’re not compensated, the ‘new Haiti’ in Corail-Cesselesse will end up making the violent slums of pre-quake Port-au-Prince look tame,” Katz wrote. “Every squatter seems to have had an encounter with gangsters they believe are sent by landowners.”

The need was there before, but the earthquake made it even more crying. Haiti needs a social revolution where the land of the rich is transferred to the ownership of the poor – that is, nationalized, as it was under Dessalines – so that it can serve not just as a means of production but also to build shelters from the coming storms.

NYT: We Stopped Calling Waterboarding ‘Torture’ Because The Bush Administration Didn’t Approve

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/01/nyt-responds-to-study-abo_n_632724.html?view=print
By Jason Linkins, July 3, 2010

Yesterday, we made note of a new study from the Kennedy School of Government that found that America’s major newspapers, after decades of reliably and accurately referring to waterboarding as torture, suddenly stopped doing so around 2002, when America started waterboarding people like the dickens! Adam Serwer offered this comment on the matter:

As soon as Republicans started quibbling over the definition of torture, traditional media outlets felt compelled to treat the issue as a “controversial” matter, and in order to appear as though they weren’t taking a side, media outlets treated the issue as unsettled, rather than confronting a blatant falsehood. To borrow John Holbo’s formulation, the media, confronted with the group think of two sides of an argument, decided to eliminate the “think” part of the equation so they could be “fair” to both groups.

Well, today Yahoo’s Michael Calderone has comment from a New York Times spokesman, who—while maintaining that the Times’s official position is that the study is “misleading”—nevertheless comes right out and confirms that they are in fact precisely the unrescueable cowards that Adam Serwer says they are:

However, the Times acknowledged that political circumstances did play a role in the paper’s usage calls. “As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement. “When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”

The Times spokesman added that outside of the news pages, editorials and columnists “regard waterboarding as torture and believe that it fits all of the moral and legal definitions of torture.” He continued: “So that’s what we call it, which is appropriate for the opinion pages.”

Isn’t that great? Waterboarding is totally torture so long as we are “outside of the news pages,” where journalists at the Times are free to believe that waterboarding “fits all of the moral and legal definitions of torture.” And, obviously, they want to make it clear that they feel that they deserve credit for having these important feelings about morality, despite the fact that they are too terrified to evince these principles in the “news pages” of a “newspaper” that’s best known for publishing “pages of news.”

[What’s especially dumb about all of this, is that waterboarding wouldn’t be newsworthy at all if it weren’t torture. If waterboarding was nothing more than say, a light splashing of water to the face, there would be no stories written about it at all. But for decades the New York Times wrote stories about waterboarding specifically because it was torture, referring to it as “torture."]

Of course, none of this explains the other side to the study, which found that, “In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible.” It’s pretty clear that at the New York Times, as a matter of policy, when someone other than the United States straps a person to a board and performs a harrowing simulation of drowning on them to extract information or mete out punishment, things get a whole lot clearer, morally and legally—and then suddenly, the very same “news pages” become a lot braver.

At any rate, the big takeaway here is that as long as you are able to frame immorality as an interesting point of view in a political dispute, the New York Times is ready to suspend decades of crystal-clear judgment, subserviently.

Arizona Police Already Feeling Pressure From New Immigration Law

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/01/arizona-police-immigration-law_n_633108.html
JONATHAN J. COOPER | 07/ 1/10 08:01 PM

PHOENIX — Police enforcing Arizona’s toughest-in-the-nation immigration law are allowed to consider if a person speaks poor English, looks nervous or is traveling in an overcrowded vehicle.

They can even take into account whether someone is wearing several layers of clothing in a hot climate, or hanging out in an area where illegal immigrants are known to look for work.

But top police officials issued a stern warning to officers Thursday, telling them in a training video not to consider race or ethnicity and emphasizing that “the entire country is watching.”

The officials cautioned that opponents of the law may secretly videotape police making traffic stops in an effort to prove that they are racially profiling Hispanics.

“Without a doubt, we’re going to be accused of racial profiling no matter what we do on this,” Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villasenor tells officers on the video, which was posted online. The recording demonstrates how officers should determine when they can ask someone for proof they are in the country legally.

Arizona’s law, sparked by anger over a surging population of illegal immigrants in the border state, generally requires officers enforcing another law – like speeding or jaywalking – to question a person’s immigration status if there’s a reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally.

Under the law, officers are also allowed to consider if a person does not have identification or tried to run away. But the stakes for making a mistake are high: Officers can be fired if they start asking questions because of a person’s race, then lie about it later, the video warns.

“It is also clear that the actions of Arizona officers will never come under this level of scrutiny again,” said Lyle Mann, executive director of the state agency that trains police. “Each and every one of you will now carry the reputation for the entire Arizona law enforcement community with you every day.”

The law applies only to a traffic stop, a person who is detained or an arrest – not when a person flags down an officer. Police are not required to ask crime victims or witnesses about their immigration status, and anyone who shows a valid Arizona driver’s license is presumed to be in the country legally.
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“The entire country is watching to see how Arizona and in particular Arizona law enforcement responds,” Mann said.

The law restricts the use of race, color or national origin as the basis for triggering immigration questions. But civil rights groups and some police officials argue that officers will still assume that illegal immigrants look Hispanic.

Arizona’s 460,000 illegal immigrants are almost all Hispanic. Yet Arizona also has nearly 2 million Hispanics who are U.S. citizens or legal residents, about 30 percent of the state’s population.

In the training video, an expert advises officers to ask themselves whether they would reach the same conclusion about a Hispanic person’s immigration status if the subject were white or black.

“If any officer goes into a situation with a previous mindset that one race or one ethnicity is not equal to another’s, then they have no business being a law enforcement officer in this state,” Arizona Police Association President Brian Livingston said in the video.

To determine whether the person is legally in the United States, officers dealing with a suspected illegal immigrant are told to call the Border Patrol, a police officer certified to enforce immigration laws or a federal immigration hotline.

They are supposed to ask federal immigration authorities to come pick up illegal immigrants. If the feds refuse, officers can arrest immigrants or take them to a federal detention center.

The instructional video and supporting paperwork will be sent to all 170 Arizona police agencies.

Police departments will decide the best way to teach their forces. There is no requirement that all 15,000 Arizona police officers complete the training before the law takes effect July 29.

Law enforcement officials around the state said they were reviewing the training materials. Most hadn’t decided yet how to use them.

Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, home to smuggling corridors south of Phoenix, said he’s going to require all of his officers to watch the video, and he created a supplemental video with information specific to his agency.

“I have full faith and confidence in all of us as professionals to apply the law in a very professional way,” he said.

Stephen Montoya, a lawyer representing police officers suing to block the law, said the video is “a good introduction” but isn’t sufficient to train officers on immigration law.

“I thought it would be more detailed. I thought it would be more thorough. I thought it would be more expansive,” he said.

Gov. Jan Brewer ordered the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board to develop the training program when she signed the law April 23.

Opponents have challenged the measure as unconstitutional and have asked that a federal court block it from taking effect. U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton plans to hear arguments on the request later this month.

President Barack Obama on Thursday called the law an understandable byproduct of public frustration with the government’s inability to tighten the immigration system. But he also said it is ill-conceived, divisive and would put undue pressure on local authorities.

The law was passed in part with the lobbying muscle of unions representing rank-and-file police officers who argued that they should be allowed to arrest illegal immigrants they come across.

It was opposed by police chiefs who worried it would be expensive to implement and would destroy the trust they have developed in Hispanic neighborhoods.