Sunday, January 31, 2010

Haiti and the End of Poverty

Turn Your TV Off!

It's amazing how you can identify tv watchers just by their opinions. they're usually pretty conservative and fearful, and sound similar to other people who watch tv as their prime news source. many viewers will use the same adjectives to describe the latest horror they've witnessed: words like "they" (...want to kill us/ hate us for our freedom/ whatever) or the latest i've heard, "Obama and his henchmen forced banks to loan poor people money". this one is particularly hilarious since the banks control everything, including Obama.

Haiti

which brings us to the latest debacle: Haiti. i've heard even liberals defend Haiti (from the Rush Limbaughs and Pat Robertons of the world) by saying "...they just happen to be poor!" ... and so starts another argument. a little review of history, which they don't teach in school or talk about on television, will tell us that Haiti did NOT "just happen to be poor" -- they're supposed to be poor. this has been American and European policy for two centuries. ever wonder why Preval has been president for so long? (similar to Karzai in Afghanistan.) why are there no real elections in these places? why is Aristide currently in exile in S Africa? well the answer is simple: it's U.S. policy.

Why Do We Do This?

well this has another simple answer: money. which brings me to an amazing new movie called The End Of Poverty. "Poverty is no accident" -- you'll find right on their website (theendofpoverty.com). refreshingly honest, and very true. our supposed "aid" to the poorest countries in the world is literally robbing and killing them.

Charity Is No Match For Ignorance

there's been a lot of giving to the tune of $500 million for Haiti. although this aid does, i hope, help, remember that it is no match for what our governments and corporations are taking from the same people you're trying to give to. there's no way 20, 50 or even 1000 dollars is going to cover the literally billions in raw materials and cheap labor that places like Haiti provide for our companies.

Want To Help?

the greatest aid you can give to Haiti and most other incredibly poor countries (Somalia, Congo, all of Latin America until recently) is true democracy. sure you can give money to organizations like PIH.org, who know the roots of the problems of the Haitian people. but we have to battle television, which is in every household broadcasting nightly without any regard to history. when Americans, armed with this knowledge, care, then more than half the battle will be won..

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Avatar, the Pope, China and general mayhem

A Shack Taking on the Bulldozers

Avatar: it's great to see a pop film that's so subversive. the storyline is a reminder of what humans do: covet the stuff they "find". whether it's Palestine, the Americas or Australia (and probably every other place on earth), humans take what they want and destroy a lot in the process. i mean seriously -- god forbid there was a life form on the moon who didn't have guns! we'd annihilate them and take their dirt.

so .. it's nice to see a film about such atrocities actually doing really well in the box office. it's obvious that JUSTICE, something we're denied on a daily basis, resonates with the people of the world. and of course the usual suspects are against it, like the Pope and China. the pope (i'm sick of capitalizing this word) thinks it's sacrilegious because the fictional na-vi people worship nature instead of god proper. and the chinese, well they're used to taking land from their own people whenever they want, since most property is owned by "the people", meaning the government. and if the real people of china found dragons to fly, well "the people" of the government would be screwed.

so chalk one up for the good guys. i mean, it's fiction, but we can dream, can't we?