The United States of Foreclosures
Foreclosures Are Rising And Not Just Homeowners Are Affected: A Haitian Family Loses Island Home In Earthquake, NY Home in “Bankquake”
The financial crisis started as a housing bubble with the financial industry convinced that home values never fall. How wrong they were even as they leveraged and securitized their investments to create a global crisis.
Now brace yourself, because not only isn’t it over until it’s over, but in some respects it’s only just begun. There will be more foreclosures this year than last and as a result more suffering for American families
Ed Harrison who monitors this industry for a website called Credit Write Downs sees a “second wave coming”—like a new tsunami in a industry that All of Obama’s horses and all of Obama’s men have not been able to…
Voodoo Practitioners Shrug Off Blame for Haitian Quake
From the Telegraph:
In a whirl of limbs and with eyes bulging, the woman is helped to a squat in the ramshackle shed and starts cackling maniacally like a terrified chicken.
“Kaaaa! Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka,” she screams and stutters, her right arm bent in front of her.Around her, the other Voodoo worshippers look on, unsurprised but expectant as their ceremony reaches its climactic mid-point. Someone ties a red cloth to her arm, which stops shaking.
In their eyes, she is possessed by a spirit of the dead – one of the 220,000 estimated to have perished in Haiti’s January quake perhaps – and is thus, in a way, blessed.
When she picks up a rusty knife and swings clockwise around the room, gulping from a bottle of cherry-flavored alcohol, they do not draw away.
Instead they embrace…
Danny Schechter: Haiti One Month Later
Danny Schechter, director of the forthcoming disinformation® documentary Plunder: The Crime of our Time, dissects the failure of the Haiti relief efforts, which have been slow and sluggish from the start:
Idaho Baptists Charged With Kidnapping 33 Haitian Children
Wow, talk about breathtaking arrogance. Evangelicals from Idaho thought it’d be alright to abduct some Haitian children for Jesus. From the NY Times:
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Members of a Baptist congregation…were charged Thursday with abduction and criminal association, according to prosecutors.
The Americans were arrested as they tried to take 33 Haitian children to what they had said was an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. A Web site for the orphanage said that children there would stay in a “loving Christian environment” and be eligible for adoption.
But several of the 33 children had at least one living parent, and some of those parents said that the Baptists had promised simply to educate the youngsters in the Dominican Republic and said the children would be able to return to Haiti to visit their families.
…
Disaster Profiteers See Dollar Signs In Haiti
In The Nation, Jeremy Scahill writes on how Blackwater-esque private security companies are chomping at the bit for huge paydays offering their ’services’ in the reshaping of Haiti:
We saw this type of Iraq-style disaster profiteering in New Orleans, and you can expect to see a lot more of this in Haiti over the coming days, weeks and months. Private security companies are seeing big dollar signs in Haiti thanks in no small part to the media hype about “looters.”
Among the services offered are: “High Threat terminations,” dealing with “worker unrest,” armed guards and “Armed Cargo Escorts.”
Haiti in Context: Trying to Visualize the Disaster
Posted on the Rasmussen College website:
150,000 is a big number by anyone’s standards, but for a small country like Haiti, it is unfathomable. This is what America would look like if we lost a proportionate number of our citizens to a natural disaster…
The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti
F. William Engdahl writes on Global Research:
Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.
Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world’s most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another — the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3…
Haiti Earthquake: Orphans For Sale For $50
By Nick Allen in Haiti for the Telegraph:
Orphans in Haiti are being offered for sale to foreigners for as little as £30 amid warnings that up to one million children in the country have been left vulnerable to abuse and trafficking in the wake of the earthquake.
In a remote area north of Port-au-Prince, a man was reported to have offered to sell a young boy to a Canadian man for just $50.
The first confirmed case of a child being offered for sale since Haiti was devastated by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Jan 12 took place near Gonaives, 150km north of Port-au-Prince.
It was reported by Noel Ismonin, a Canadian pastor who rescues orphans in the area. A man offered to sell him the boy but the pastor refused.
Meanwhile, in camps…
Danny Schechter: Bungled Aid Hurts More Than It Helps
“Knock, knock journalists? Many of you have done a great and compassionate job of documenting this tragedy and showing the pain of the victims. Now let’s investigate how and why this relief operation imploded and became worse than Katrina. Who is responsible and who should be held accountable? Why can?t we have more international cooperation of the kind the Cubans are asking for? Why is the focus on military security–is France right that the US is acting like an occupying power? If the Haitian government isn’t working, why not allow Aristide to come back and re-energize it? It is sickening to watch all this pain compounded by incompetence. The relief operation needs relief and it needs”–Danny Schechter, director of Plunder: The Crime of our Time.
Radiohead Raises More Than $500,000 for Haiti
I’ve noticed that Radiohead always ends up in the news for what I like to call “non-Metallica-like” reasons. They have a great relationship with their fans, and a terrible one with the record industry. If those aren’t enough reasons to like Radiohead, here’s one more:
From MSNBC:
Attendees bid online for tickets to show, some paying as much as $4,000.
Radiohead raised more than $500,000 for Haiti earthquake relief at a special weekend concert that attracted celebrities and die-hard fans.The band performed for more than two hours Sunday at the Henry Fonda Theatre. The star-studded crowd included Justin Timberlake, Jessica Biel, Charlize Theron, Anna Paquin and Daniel Craig.
Attendees bid online for tickets, with proceeds going to Oxfam International, a group that works with developing countries. Prices went as high as $4,000 for a…
Rush Limbaugh: I Don’t Even Want To Be Alive Anymore
Via The Onion:
I know there are a lot of people out there who are upset about some of the things I’ve been saying on my radio program lately. My comments about the situation in Haiti have hurt and angered many Americans who genuinely care about the plight of the Haitian people, and that hurt and anger will likely never go away. Many of you are probably wondering, “What would compel a human being to say things like that?” Well, here’s your answer: I am a very bad person. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t really want to be alive anymore.
Try to look at it from my point of view. I have no reason to live. In my 59 years, I’ve made millions of dollars, built a veritable media…
Oil in Haiti – Economic Reasons for the UN/US Occupation
From the Pakalert Press blog, an October 2009 article by Marguerite Laurent:
There is evidence that the United States found oil in Haiti decades ago and due to the geopolitical circumstances and big business interests of that era made the decision to keep Haitian oil in reserve for when Middle Eastern oil had dried up. This is detailed by Dr. Georges Michel in an article dated March 27, 2004 outlining the history of oil explorations and oil reserves in Haiti and in the research of Dr. Ginette and Daniel Mathurin.
There is also good evidence that these very same big US oil companies and their inter-related monopolies of engineering and defense contractors made plans, decades ago, to use Haiti’s deep water ports either for oil refineries or to develop oil tank farm sites or…
Scientologists Using Touch to ‘Heal’ Haitian Earthquake Victims
Charles Onians writes on the AP via Yahoo News:
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Amid the mass of aid agencies piling in to help Haiti quake victims is a batch of Church of Scientology “volunteer ministers”, claiming to use the power of touch to reconnect nervous systems.
Clad in yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the controversial US-based group, smiling volunteers fan out among the injured lying under makeshift shelters in the courtyard of Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital.
A wealthy private donor provided his airplane to fly in 80 volunteers from Los Angeles, along with 50 Haitian-American-doctors, in a gesture worth 400,000 dollars, said a Parisian volunteer who gave her name as Sylvie.
“We’re trained as volunteer ministers, we use a process called ‘assist’ to follow the nervous system to reconnect the main points, to bring back communication,”…
Christian Leader: ‘Satan’ has had ‘Free Reign’ in Haiti
From The Raw Story:
The head of a Christian child sponsorship program says Haiti is a nation “that you can literally feel the evil in.”Dr. Wesley Stafford, president and CEO of Compassion International, told Focus on the Family that Haiti was a disaster before the earthquake ever struck.
Haiti … has been a disaster in almost every way long before this ever struck. And it is a nation, between you and me, I guess, that Satan has had absolutely free reign in that nation. And while the missionary effort and the church effort has been enormous, this is a nation that you can literally feel the evil in it.
But then as the church lives out its faith, having come through this deep, deep valley, my great prayer is that there will be a…
The Real Story About Relief in Haiti
From Collective Evolution:
Haiti was hit on January 12th 2010 with a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that caused a great deal of “devastation” to close to 3,000,000 of Haiti’s population.
Whether this earthquake was caused by the government using HAARP or whether it was a natural disaster is not the question here. If we look in the right places, away from the mass manipulating that’s going on, we will see what is actually going on in Haiti.
Disaster strikes and the first on the scene is the world police themselves, THE UNITED STATES. They jump in and take control of the airport in Haiti, supposedly assisting with aid. No aid here, only military with lots of guns to make sure those fallen concrete bricks don’t try to steal any of the food they are supplying. You are seeing what looks a lot more like a war than a natural disaster…
Danny Schechter: U.S. Has Let Haiti Down
Russia Today interviews “news dissector” Danny Schechter, who slams the United States government for its continuing failure to assist Haitians.
Haitians Flee in Fear as Big Aftershock Hits
Those solar-powered Bibles must really be working, reported by the AP via Yahoo News:
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A powerful aftershock sent Haitians screaming into the streets on Wednesday, collapsing buildings, cracking roads and adding to the trauma of a nation stunned by an apocalyptic quake eight days ago.
The magnitude-5.9 jolt matched the strongest of the aftershocks that have followed the huge quake of Jan. 12 that devastated Haiti’s capital.
The new temblor collapsed seven buildings in Petit-Goave, the seaside town closest to the epicenter, according to Mike Morton of the U.N. Disaster Assessment and Coordination agency, but there were no reports of people crushed or trapped, perhaps because the earlier quake frightened most people into sleeping outside.
Wails of terror erupted in Port-au-Prince, where the aftershock briefly interrupted rescue efforts amid the broken concrete of…
Haitian Earthquake Survivors Get Solar-Powered Bibles
Reported by Reuters via news.au.com:
As international aid agencies rush food, water and medicine to Haiti’s earthquake victims, a US faith-based group is sending Bibles to Haitians in their hour of need.
Not just any Bible.
These are solar-powered audible Bibles that can broadcast the holy scriptures in Haitian Creole to 300 people at a time.
Called the “Proclaimer,” the audio Bible delivers “digital quality” and is designed for “poor and illiterate people”, the Faith Comes By Hearing group said. According to their website, the Proclaimer is “self-powered and can play the Bible in the jungle, desert or … even on the moon!”
The Albuquerque-based organisation said 600 of the devices were already on their way to Haiti. It said it was responding to the Haitian crisis by “providing faith, hope and love through God’s…
Cruise Ships Still Escorting Vacationers (and supplies) to Haiti
via NY Daily News
As Haiti reels from the devastating earthquake, luxury cruise ships are creating controversy by dropping off vacationers at private beaches only 60 miles away from the carnage.
Florida’s Royal Caribbean International was docking the 3,100-passenger Navigator of the Seas on Monday so tourists can jet-ski, para-sail and picnic in the sand.
Another ship, the Independence of the Seas, anchored off on Haiti’s north coast on Friday at the resort of Labadee, according to The Guardian. It’s a tony, wooded resort peninsula with five pristine beaches that’s leased from the government and protected by 12-foot fences and armed guards.
The ships have, and will, come loaded with relief supplies, says Royal Caribbean, which has luxury liners scheduled to dock Monday, Tuesday and Thursday bearing more than 100 pallets of supplies each.
“This is equivalent to over three semi-trucks-full two or three times a week,” Royal Caribbean associate vice president John Weis wrote in a blog post to guests.
The vessels are also sending extra lounge chairs, bedding and mattresses to a a gymnasium in Cap Haitian that’s being used as a makeshift hospital.The decision to bring tourists to sunbathe in Haiti, despite the massive death and destruction, sparked considerable internal debate at Royal Caribbean.
