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News from the Tyee:

Vancouver’s two major newspapers are sponsoring a government-run centre that will tell international media covering the 2010 Winter Olympics about how the province is dealing with homelessness issues in the city’s troubled Downtown Eastside. [...]

News that BC Housing and the City of Vancouver wanted to establish a centre to “showcase the range of programs and services that have been undertaken to address the issues of homelessness” was first reported by Public Eye in November. ”We think there’s a good story to tell about what we’ve done in B.C. for homelessness, mental health, drug addiction,” Housing and Social Development Minister Rich Coleman later explained in an interview with The Globe and Mail’s Frances Bula.

Now it comes to light that six private sector interests — including The Vancouver Sun and The Province — are sponsoring that centre, which is being set up in the Woodwards building and will also target the city’s international visitors.

(Hat tip: Sean Orr at Beyond Robson.)

In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, the Guardian published an informative article by Peter Hallward that provides some some much-needed context on the disaster:

The full scale of the destruction resulting from this earthquake may not become clear for several weeks. Even minimal repairs will take years to complete, and the long-term impact is incalculable.

What is already all too clear, ­however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in the western hemisphere”. This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.

The noble “international community” which is currently scrambling to send its “humanitarian aid” to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) “from absolute misery to a dignified poverty” has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.

Aristide’s own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.

This website has more information on that 2004 coup. The short version is that Canada, the US, and various other countries, increasingly dissatisfied with Haiti’s existing government, got together in early 2003 and decided that Aristide had to be removed; violent unrest in Haiti the following year provided a convenient cover for them to carry out their plans.

Hallward’s article continues:

Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population “lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day”. Decades of neoliberal “adjustment” and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.

The Times of London sheds some additional light on the origins of Haitian poverty:

After a dramatic slave uprising that shook the western world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared independence. But France demanded reparations: 150m francs, in gold.

For Haiti, this debt did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged country could afford. Haiti was the only country in which the ex-slaves themselves were expected to pay a foreign government for their liberty. By 1900, it was spending 80% of its national budget on repayments. In order to manage the original reparations, further loans were taken out — mostly from the United States, Germany and France. Instead of developing its potential, this deformed state produced a parade of nefarious leaders, most of whom gave up the insurmountable task of trying to fix the country and looted it instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.

This brutal legacy — originating with reparation demands from Haiti’s slave-owning overlords and perpetuated by Canada, the US, and other Western countries through the International Monetary Fund — is one reason why the news that the IMF may cancel Haiti’s international debt is such a big deal. (I’ll believe it when I see it.)

With a history like that, what should we expect from the American and Canadian response to Haiti’s latest disaster? Let’s see what advice the Heritage Foundation (the fifth most influential think tank in the United States) has to offer:

In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region.

The U.S. government response should be bold and decisive. It must mobilize U.S. civilian and military capabilities for short-term rescue and relief and long-term recovery and reform. President Obama should tap high-level, bipartisan leadership. Clearly former President Clinton, who was already named as the U.N. envoy on Haiti, is a logical choice. President Obama should also reach out to a senior Republican figure, perhaps former President George W. Bush, to lead the bipartisan effort for the Republicans.

While on the ground in Haiti, the U.S. military can also interrupt the nightly flights of cocaine to Haiti and the Dominican Republic from the Venezuelan coast and counter the ongoing efforts of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to destabilize the island of Hispaniola. This U.S. military presence, which should also include a large contingent of U.S. Coast Guard assets, can also prevent any large-scale movement by Haitians to take to the sea in rickety watercraft to try to enter the U.S. illegally.

Meanwhile, the U.S. must be prepared to insist that the Haiti government work closely with the U.S. to insure that corruption does not infect the humanitarian assistance flowing to Haiti. Long-term reforms for Haitian democracy and its economy are also badly overdue.

Congress should immediately begin work on a package of assistance, trade, and reconstruction efforts needed to put Haiti on its feet and open the way for deep and lasting democratic reforms.

The U.S. should implement a strong and vigorous public diplomacy effort to counter the negative propaganda certain to emanate from the Castro-Chavez camp. Such an effort will also demonstrate that the U.S.’s involvement in the Caribbean remains a powerful force for good in the Americas and around the globe.

Well, that’s what the Heritage Foundation originally said. After Naomi Klein called them out, they changed the text of their article — among other things, altering the headline from “Amidst the Suffering, Crisis in Haiti Offers Opportunities to the U.S.” to the less blatant “Things to Remember While Helping Haiti.”

Why does the Heritage Foundation think Haiti’s economy is in need of reform? They don’t say, but the Globe & Mail’s business section has some ideas:

Why was Haiti the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, its people surviving on foreign aid, mostly from the United States, and remittances from exiled Haitians, also mostly from the U.S.? (This money accounted for more than 40 per cent of Haiti’s GDP.) The most obvious reason is not sufficiently identified amid all the pervasive lamentations for Haiti’s forlorn fate. For all practical purposes, throughout its history, Haiti had prohibited commerce. And it’s hard to survive without it.

Haiti lacked the one prerequisite necessary for economic advance — freedom of trade. Yes, many Haitians toiled for subsistence in the informal economy. But their governments had always imposed prohibitive costs on acts of commerce. Haitian governments had always run the country’s major businesses (including the banks) themselves. It was precisely Haiti’s lack of freedom to do business that led the Index of Economic Freedom (published jointly by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal) last year to rank Haiti as the 147th least-free country in the world (out of 179 countries).

Conspicuously absent from this article, of course, is any mention of the global North’s role in the impoverishment and destabilization of Haiti. Instead, we get the Heritage Foundation again, keeping company with one of the primary propaganda organs of the US business elite — much like the Globe & Mail here in Canada.

Meanwhile, other mainstream media outlets have been busy manufacturing hysteria over the aftermath of the quake. There’s no question that Haitians are suffering: perhaps as many as 200,000 people are dead, the country’s infrastructure is in ruins, and there have certainly been outbreaks of horrific violence. But there is good reason to believe that, just like the stories about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, reports of rampaging mobs are exaggerated. And, just like Katrina, we can expect that the Haiti earthquake (and the exaggerated reports of the ensuing chaos) will be used as a pretext to impose a regime of disaster capitalism on a shocked and suffering population. Project Haiti continues.

According to progressive economist Erin Weir, in the near future, any major cuts to public spending in Canada are likely to happen at the provincial level, rather than being imposed by our resident dictator prime minister and his cronies.

The federal government spends money on three things: transfers to individuals (Old Age Security, Employment Insurance and child benefits), transfers to provincial governments, and federally-delivered services. The Conservatives have pledged not to cut either type of transfer.

I see no reason to be sanguine about those “transfers to individuals” — EI, for example, has been systematically gutted over the years — but let’s assume for the sake of argument that the Conservatives keep their pledge and Erin Weir’s analysis holds true on this point.

In 2008-09, the last complete fiscal year, the federal government spent $108.1 billion on major transfer programs, $30.2 billion on transfers through other programs, and $69.6 billion on federal departments and agencies. If all transfers are untouchable, then only one-third of federal expenditures are eligible for cuts (i.e. $69.6 / $207.9 = 33%).

Out of that third, National Defence was $18.8 billion and Public Safety was $8.9 billion. If anything, the Conservatives would like to spend more in these areas.

These “untouchable” ministries so dear to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives are, of course, the ministries responsible for occupying foreign countries, handing over Afghan prisoners to be tortured, using security certificates to imprison Canadian residents indefinitely on the basis of secret evidence (a practice which remains legal in Canada despite recent court victories for Adil Charkaoui and Hassan Almrei), and protecting Canada from Teh Gay. But I digress.

The Canada Revenue Agency was $7.1 billion and the Treasury Board was $2.2 billion. These entities are presumably indispensable in collecting taxes and managing expenditures. Crown-corporation expenses were $8.1 billion, funding needed to deliver the mail, insure mortgages and generate Crown-corporation revenues.

Excluding these expenditures leaves only $24.5 billion from which the Conservatives could realistically cut. To put that number in perspective, it is less than half of this year’s deficit, about half of the deficit projected for 2010-11, and a few billion below the deficit projected for 2011-12. So even if the Conservatives completely eliminated the federal departments of Agriculture, Environment, Fisheries, Foreign Affairs, Health, Human Resources, Indian Affairs, Industry, Justice, Natural Resources and Public Works, they would still not save enough to balance the budget next year or even the year after that. [...]

Therefore, I tend to believe that the federal government will just try to restrict spending growth and wait for revenues to recover along with the economy. As Carl Sonnen suggested to Straight Goods, the real and imminent threat of cutbacks is from provincial governments.

Here in BC, I’m not sure what’s left to cut. During the last provincial election, the BC Liberals insisted that the deficit would not exceed $495 million. Then, as soon as the election was over, they released a budget that showed a record $2.8 billion deficit. The result? Cuts to libraries and student aid in the middle of a recession, when more people than ever need those services. An 81% reduction in arts spending (no, I’m not missing a decimal point). $8.8 million in cuts to BC’s Environmental Protection Agency. Balanced-budget requirements for health authorities which have resulted in a plethora of hard-to-track cuts to health care services. A freeze on school district budgets will have similar effects on education. A 6% increase in monthly health care fees — again, bad news for those hit hard by the recession, those on fixed incomes, and those who were already barely getting by. And that’s just since last September.

Then there’s the Olympics. Total public spending is difficult to calculate, in part because of a lack of government transparency, but also because there are plenty of projects — the Sea-to-Sky highway expansion, for example — that are only happening because of the Olympics but which will never be included in any official tally of public spending. Still, it’s been estimated that the people in power, provincially and federally, are spending something like $6 billion on the 2010 Games. That includes the creation of a $900-million security apparatus to keep those dirty protesters out of sight prevent terrorist attacks during the Games. This is what the state has chosen to spend your tax dollars on — not fundamental public services like health care and education, but a bloated and pointless spectacle.

What we’re seeing here is the ongoing erosion of the government-funded social safety net in Canada. First, there are tax cuts, which reduce government revenues. (As Erin Weir points out, the Conservative government’s tax cuts “will cost $44.4 billion per year in lost revenue by 2014-15.”) If there’s a budget deficit, it’s used to justify cuts to public services; if there’s a surplus, as we saw under Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, it’s used to pay down the debt and cuts are justified as “keeping our house in order.” Then something like the current economic crisis comes along, decimating government revenues. The result is a budget shortfall which justifies additional cuts. When the economy eventually “recovers,” it’s used as an excuse to introduce further tax cuts, which we’re told we can afford because times are good. And so on.

Who benefits from this? The same people who own the politicians who claim to speak for us: the people with money, the elite class that owns and operates the businesses most of us work for. Low taxes serve their interests, since they end up with more profits in their pockets; so does a weak social safety net, which makes for a compliant workforce (you’ll put up with lower pay and inferior working conditions if, for one reason or another, you can’t afford to leave your job). As long as essential public services are funded by governments in thrall to business interests — and in a capitalist system, all governments are ultimately in thrall to business interests — then those essential public services will always be under threat, and politicians will cut as much as they can get away with in order to please their masters.

Big news from Google:

In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. … [W]e have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. … [A]s part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. …

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. [my emphasis]

It would be naive to believe that Google is making this decision on purely ethical grounds, and we’ll have to wait and see to what extent they actually follow through on this. And I still have a long list of very serious objections to Google, not the least of which is that they have been collaborating with Chinese state censors for years. But I think they are doing the right thing here.

Best wishes to Google’s employees in China. Hopefully they won’t end up paying for their American bosses’ change of heart.

An announcement overheard at an American airport over the holidays:

The current threat assessment level, as established by the Department of Homeland Security, is orange. We ask for your assistance in reporting any suspicious behavior, or unattended baggage, to law enforcement or TSA personnel immediately.

A new sign posted at BC Ferries terminals:

SECURITY NOTICE
This facility is currently operating at MARSEC LEVEL 1. Entering this facility is deemed valid consent to security screening or inspection. Failure to consent to security measures will result in denial or revocation of authorization to travel.

Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, p. 47:

Is this not the state we are approaching in developed countries around the globe, where this or that form of the emergency state (deployed against the terrorist threat, against immigrants, and so on) is simply accepted as a measure necessary to guarantee the normal run of things?