Positive Universe Abstracts

Green Left Weekly

Malik Miah, San Francisco

What I found most striking about President Barack Obama’s first “State of the Union” address before Congress on January 27 was what he didn’t say.

As Obama is the first US president of African heritage, I expected his 70-minute speech on the economy to highlight the special impact of the recession on Blacks.

The last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, always spoke of the special concerns of African Americans — even when he didn’t mean it.

Clinton, for example, adopted the conservatives’ position on gutting the welfare system that led to tens of thousands of poor African Americans losing their benefits.

Obama, however, decided not to mention the special problems of African Americans — even in a situation where the blows of the Great Recession disproportionately hurt African Americans.

Official unemployment is nearly 50% higher for African Americans than for whites. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said in November unemployment for whites was 9.3%, but 15.6% for Blacks.

The long-term unemployment rate (those jobless for 27 weeks) is twice as high for African Americans. Black men working at full-time jobs earn on average 74.5% of the wage for white men.

Instead, Obama talked about the 25 tax cuts” his administration has already given to business (with more on the way). He said the cuts went to “95% of all Americans”, but refused to note how discrimination is still alive and well or its special impact on Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities.

Obama tells African Americans the positive programs the government is working on that will benefit equally all social groups. In other words, Obama accepts the conservatives’ argument that by improving the situation for the “middle (and upper) class” in general, it will lift the poor, including African Americans. [more]

Telegraph.co.uk

Austrian millionaire Karl Rabeder is giving away every penny of his £3 million fortune after realising his riches were making him unhappy.

By Henry Samuel in Paris

Mr Rabeder, 47, a businessman from Telfs is in the process of selling his luxury 3,455 sq ft villa with lake, sauna and spectacular mountain views over the Alps, valued at £1.4 million.

Also for sale is his beautiful old stone farmhouse in Provence with its 17 hectares overlooking the arrière-pays, on the market for £613,000. Already gone is his collection of six gliders valued at £350,000, and a luxury Audi A8, worth around £44,000.

Mr Rabeder has also sold the interior furnishings and accessories business – from vases to artificial flowers – that made his fortune.

“My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “Money is counterproductive – it prevents happiness to come.”

Instead, he will move out of his luxury Alpine retreat into a small wooden hut in the mountains or a simple bedsit in Innsbruck.

His entire proceeds are going to charities he set up in Central and Latin America, but he will not even take a salary from these.

“For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness,” he said. “I come from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things, and I applied this for many years,” said Mr Rabeder.

But over time, he had another, conflicting feeling.

“More and more I heard the words: ‘Stop what you are doing now – all this luxury and consumerism – and start your real life’,” he said. “I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need.

I have the feeling that there are lot of people doing the same thing.” [more]

By Nick Egnatz Online Journal

Online Journal Contributing Writer

Feb 1, 2010, 00:31

With the devastation of the Haitian earthquake of January 12, many Americans are literally learning of Haiti for the first time. The following is an attempt to present a very brief outline of Haiti’s history: first being dominated by Spain, then France and certainly for the last two centuries the United States.

The inspiration to write this came from reading and studying William I. Robinson’s Promoting Polyarchy — Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony. Haiti, along with the Philippines, Nicaragua and Chile are case studies examined in detail.

Professor Robinson demonstrates how U.S. foreign policy changed in the 1970s from supporting dictators across the globe to an official policy of “democracy promotion.” Unfortunately the democracy being promoted was not the small ‘d’ democracy that Lincoln defined as government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” It was polyarchy instead in which there is elite rule and the masses are given the illusion of democracy by participating in regular elections for pre-screened candidates. In polyarchy, the emphasis is on the forms and institutions of democracy such as regular elections, political parties and the rules and laws governing such. This is what passes for democracy in the U.S. There is no concern of what the results are. Whether these forms of democracy produce a government of, by and for the people is of no concern. While other sources are listed throughout the paper, it is Professor Robinson that is the source and my hope is that I have been able to do justice to a much needed understanding of the effects of U.S. foreign policy on our neighbors and ourselves.

We witness nightly on our television screens the courage and independence of the Haitian people who won their freedom defeating Napoleon’s army and then dealt with isolation from the great powers. Especially the United States which ignored its neighbor for the first century and then invaded, occupied and manipulated the Haitian government in pursuit of its own agenda of neo-liberal globalization (free trade, free markets, no regulations and tax cuts for the wealthy).

1492-1700, Columbus Leads the Spanish Genocide and Slavery

Second only to Cuba in size amongst Caribbean islands, Hispaniola is made up of the Dominican Republic on the Eastern two thirds, while Haiti comprises the Western one third. In 1492 after first stopping at San Salvador, Christopher Columbus, on a military/business mission to colonize the Orient, landed in Hispaniola. He was welcomed with gifts and kindness by the three million Taino Arawak Indians that lived in relative peace on the island. The man whose holiday we celebrate every October repaid this hospitality with enslavement, massacres and genocide. [more]

Center for Research on Globalization

by Cynthia McKinney

Global Research, January 19, 2010

President Obama’s response to the tragedy in Haiti has been robust in military deployment and puny in what the Haitians need most: food; first responders and their specialized equipment; doctors and medical facilities and equipment; and engineers, heavy equipment, and heavy movers. Sadly, President Obama is dispatching Presidents Bush and Clinton, and thousands of Marines and U.S. soldiers. By contrast, Cuba has over 400 doctors on the ground and is sending in more; Cubans, Argentinians, Icelanders, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and many others are already on the ground working–saving lives and treating the injured. Senegal has offered land to Haitians willing to relocate to Africa.

The United States, on the day after the tragedy struck, confirmed that an entire Marine Expeditionary Force was being considered “to help restore order,” when the “disorder” had been caused by an earthquake striking Haiti; not since 1751, 1770, 1842, 1860, and 1887 had Haiti experienced an earthquake. But, I remember the bogus reports of chaos and violence the led to the deployment of military assets, including Blackwater, in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One Katrina survivor noted that the people needed food and shelter and the U.S. government sent men with guns. Much to my disquiet, it seems, here we go again. From the very beginning, U.S. assistance to Haiti has looked to me more like an invasion than a humanitarian relief operation.

On Day Two of the tragedy, a C-130 plane with a military assessment team landed in Haiti, with the rest of the team expected to land soon thereafter. The stated purpose of this team was to determine what military resources were needed.

An Air Force special operations team was also expected to land to provide air traffic control. Now, the reports are that the U.S. is not allowing assistance in, shades of Hurricane Katrina, all over again. [more]

Belfast Telegraph

A French minister has called on the United Nations to investigate the dominant US role in Haiti saying aid efforts should be about helping Haiti, not “occupying” it.

US forces turned back a French aid plane carrying a field hospital from the damaged, congested airport in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince last week, prompting a complaint from French co-operation minister Alain Joyandet. The plane landed safely the following day.

Mr Joyandet, in Brussels for an EU meeting on Haiti, persisted: “This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti.”

Geneva-based charity Medecins Sans Frontieres backed Mr Joyandet’s calls to clarify their role saying lives are being put at risk as planes carrying medical supplies are being turned away by US air traffic controllers. [more]

Fog City Journal

Naomi Klein Issues Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert.

By Stephen Lendman January 18, 2010

In her book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” Naomi Klein explores the myth of free market democracy, explaining how neoliberalism dominates the world with America its main exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic shifts, and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere.

As a result, wars are waged, social services cut, public ones privatized, and freedom sacrificed when people are too distracted, cowed or in duress to object. Disaster capitalism is triumphant everywhere from post-Soviet Russia to post-apartheid South Africa, occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, Honduras before and after the US-instigated coup, post-tsunami Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia, New Orleans post-Katrina, and now heading to Haiti full-throttle after its greatest ever catastrophe. The same scheme always repeats, exploiting people for profits, the prevailing neoliberal idea that “there is no alternative” so grab all you can.

On Her web site, Klein headlines a “Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert: Stop Them Before They Shock Again,” then quotes the extremist Heritage Foundation saying:

“In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the US response to the tragic 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.” [more]

Pacific Free Press

by Chris Floyd

The relentlessly maintained, deliberately inflicted political and economic ruin of Haiti has a direct bearing on the amount of death and devastation that the country is suffering today after the earthquake. It will also greatly cripple any recovery from this natural disaster. As detailed below, Washington’s rapacious economic policies have destroyed all attempts to build a sustainable economy in Haiti, driving people off the land and from small communities into packed, dangerous, unhealthy shantytowns, to try to eke out a meager existence in the sweatshops owned by Western elites and their local cronies. All attempts at changing a manifestly unjust society have been ruthlessly suppressed by the direct or collateral hand of Western elites.

The result? Millions of people — weakened by hunger, deprivation, malnutrition, disease — living jammed together in precarious, substandard housing. A lack of the physical, financial and civic infrastructure needed to support a decent life in ordinary times — and to provide proper assistance, and a strong framework for rebuilding, when disaster strikes. Even a far lesser earthquake than the one that struck this week would have caused an unconscionable amount of unnecessary suffering in a nation that has been as ruthlessly and deliberately throttled as Haiti. [more]