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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.

When you live in downtown Vancouver, you can’t help noticing what’s on the cover of the Georgia Straight, one of the city’s weekly alternative newspapers. This week’s cover shows Barack Obama and Michael Ignatieff standing close together and grinning at the camera. They look a little bit like old friends at a high school reunion.

It’s a fitting resemblance. After all, as the headline suggests, they’re both “Harvard men.” Obama graduated from Harvard Law School; Ignatieff got his PhD at Harvard and directed the university’s human rights centre for several years before entering Canadian politics (he’s now the Leader of the Opposition).

The Harvard connection is a minor point, but a telling one. Obama and Ignatieff both have ties to Harvard not by some strange coincidence, but because they are both members and representatives of  North America’s political and economic elite. It’s no surprise, then, that there are other, more substantial similarities between the two men on the cover of the Georgia Straight. Politically, they’re both centrists; economically, they’re neoliberals. They’re hawks on Afghanistan, supporters of the War on Terror, and proponents of Western imperialism in general, in the form of what Ignatieff calls empire lite. Neither Ignatieff nor Obama has any intention of questioning the fundamental assumptions of mainstream North American politics.

And we know what happens when you turn those assumptions into state policy. The worst economic crisis in over 60 years. Growing income inequality in both Canada and the United States. The ongoing erosion of civil liberties. Imminent environmental catastrophe. A series of pointless, unwinnable wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, with thousands of dead foreigners as collateral damage (the UN counted 2,118 civilian deaths in Afghanistan alone in 2008; anywhere from 100,000 to well over a million civilians have been killed in Iraq since the invasion). Those are the consequences of the kind of thinking that got Obama and Ignatieff where they are today.

It’s become almost boring to see the same old faces in the news all the time, shilling minor variations on the same old policies on behalf of the same old interests. Obama claimed that he stood for change, but he’s already shown that what he really stands for is a ruling class we can believe in. Ignatieff doesn’t even pretend to represent a break with the past. But a break with the past is precisely what we need. I’d say it’s past time for some real change — the kind of change that doesn’t come from men in suits grinning on the front pages of newspapers.

According to Statistics Canada, the unemployment rate in this country rose to 8% in March, with some 387,000 full-time jobs lost since last October. But the official unemployment rate is a weird and very narrowly defined statistic. It includes only “the percentage of the labour force that actively seeks work but is unable to find work at a given time.” If we add other groups of people that you and I would consider unemployed or underemployed — such as those who have given up looking for work altogether and those working part-time because they can’t find full-time work — the real unemployment rate for March is more like 12.4%. That translates into approximately 1,456,600 people without full-time jobs in Canada.

The real unemployment rate in the United States, by the way, is 15.6%, which works out to more than 13 million people. According to the Center for American Progress, more Americans have lost their jobs in the past year than at any other time since the government started tracking unemployment just after World War II.

Remember when the Bush administration conveniently “lost” 5 million emails? Two public interest groups responded by suing the administration for its “knowing failure to recover, restore and preserve millions of electronic communications created and/or received within the White House.” Bush’s people, of course, spent the remainder of their time in office trying to get the lawsuit dismissed.

And now that Obama’s people are in charge, they’re doing the same thing:

The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails.

Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush’s eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama’s Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration’s bid to get the lawsuits dismissed. [...]

Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government.

The Justice Department ”apparently never got the message” from Obama, Blanton said.

Because, you know, transparency in government is for the other guys.

In 2007, five victims of Bush’s extraordinary rendition program filed a suit against Jeppesen, the Boeing subsidiary that helped the CIA send them overseas to be tortured. The Bush administration tried to block the suit by claiming the case would reveal state secrets and thus endanger national security — a blatant attempt to use executive privilege to cover up the crimes of the American state.

The case was still going when Obama took office. Within days of his inauguration, Obama signed orders shutting down secret prisons and banning torture. Surely, his supporters said, this showed that he was serious about ending the US government’s disregard for basic freedoms.

Sadly, no. In the Jeppesen case, Obama has explicitly and deliberately upheld Bush’s abuse of the state secrets privilege — much to the dismay of the ACLU:

It isn’t merely that the Obama DOJ is invoking the privilege for this particular case, which contains allegations of torture that are as brutal and severe as any. That’s bad enough. But worse is that they’re invoking the most abusive parts of the Bush theory: namely, that the privilege can be used to block the adjudication of entire cases (rather than, say, justify the concealment of specific classified documents or other pieces of evidence), and, worse still, can be used to prevent judicial scrutiny even when the alleged government conduct is blatantly illegal and, as here, a war crime of the greatest seriousness.

They’re embracing a theory that literally places government officials beyond the rule of law. No minimally honest person who criticized the Bush administration for relying on this instrument can defend the Obama administration for doing so here.

It gets worse. Not only is Obama upholding Bush’s drastic expansion of executive power, he’s continuing the rendition program:

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States. [...]

The decision underscores the fact that the battle with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups is far from over and that even if the United States is shutting down the prisons, it is not done taking prisoners.

“Obviously you need to preserve some tools — you still have to go after the bad guys,” said an Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the legal reasoning. “The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice.”

How’s that for change we can believe in?