Haiti, Cholera, and Canada

What's the connection? Well, just like Canada along with the rest of NATO, wasn't able to meet the relatively modest demands of the Afghan people for a decent government, because our elites simply don't care about these people but only want to plunder them, so too, is our second-biggest international investment a titanic failure, because our elites despise the people of Haiti as well.

Haiti is our second-biggest foreign policy investment and our largest in the Western Hemisphere. We've been interfering in Haiti since 2004 when Paul Martin joined bush II and some French asshole in implementing the overthrow planned at the "Ottawa Initiative" for Haiti sometime previously. Aristide was a thief and a bully who ran his country into the ground. Under the new imperialist rationale "The Responsibility to Protect" Canada was morally obliged to overthrow Aristide and help install a gang of raping, murdering kleptocrats, who could slice their fellow Haitians with machetes while the UN (MINUSTAH) looked on indifferently.

Thanks to the benevolence of the Western powers, poor Haitians were eventually reduced to eating dirt. Then, when the 2008 earthquake hit, it turned out that the Haitian government was so incompetent that it couldn't provide any sort of disaster response. Western governments pledged billions in reconstruction aid, of which, they probably seriously considered giving half, most of which would go to home-country NGO's to make out like bandits while enjoying a private beach in Haiti. Tens of thousands of people have been living in tents for two years, still starving, with Haitian women at constant risk of rape in the lawlessness and hopelessness. And now, a cholera epidemic.

Port-Au-Prince, Haiti -- The death toll has risen to at least 1,344 in the cholera outbreak in Haiti that has sickened nearly 57,000 people, the Haitian government said Monday.

The announcement came as international health officials predicted that the scale of Haiti's cholera epidemic will exceed initial estimates of 200,000 over the coming months.

"Having seen how the bacteria is behaving in this environment with these people, having seen just how poor and how hungry the people are, we know we have to revise our numbers up," Nyka Alexander, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization, said in a phone call with CNN.

This isn't an unfortunate accident. This is the direct result of Canadian (and other imperialist nations') indifference and depravity.

A good article about activists giving Paul Martin a hard time.

A good article about the Afghan insurgency. I point this out:

He highlighted another major difference with the Taliban of two years ago. Then, the foot soldiers had all been trained in the madrasas. Now they were less ideological.

"It's a mistake to call all of the fighters Taliban. The Taliban are madrasa students and I am a mullah, but most of my fighters are peasants and farmers and students who come from the government schools.

"In winter we send them to Pakistan to get some religious training, but they are not Taliban," Halimi said.

Indeed. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't like those guys, Taliban or not. But for years now, people with their heads screwed on right have been trying to get it across that a lot of the insurgency isn't "Taliban." It's peasants who have been robbed, perhaps into destitution, by the Karzai government. Or people who have been abused by Karzai or NATO. Or people who have lost loved ones to our cowardly air-strikes. Any number of rotten policies has caused millions of people to rise up to expel us. Because the men behind this travesty simply don't care about people, Haitian, Afghan, or any of us really. Bye.

Oh yeah. Another bullshit election imposed by us.