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Sorry we haven’t posted anything the past couple of days, we are udating there are gonna be alot of new features and MyAyiti.Com Presents – “L’Union Fait la Force” Unity Makes Strength Vol. 2 is coming out soon!
Thank you again for all the support, myayiti.com will be offline for a couple of days 
~ Pwa
By Robert Reich
Robert Reich is the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book is “Supercapitalism.” This is his personal journal.
Telling automakers to make more fuel-efficient cars as a condition of being bailed out is like telling Citigroup or any other big bank to issue more affordable loans to Main Street as a condition of being bailed out. It won’t happen. Conditions like these make the public feel better about using their tax dollars to bail out private firms, but they’re useless. Automakers, like the big banks, will do the minimum required, and you can bet their lawyers and lobbyists will find ever more clever ways of avoiding even that minimum. Without lots of buyers who want fuel-efficient cars, automakers won’t produce them, period. (Without credit-worthy borrows able and willing to pay the costs of bank loans, they won’t be issued, either.)
You might think that the recent memories of $5-a-gallon gas would transform nearly everyone into prospective buyers of hybrids that get more than 30 miles a gallon. Think again. Consumer memories are dreadfully short. With gas prices settling down to half that sum, buyers (to the extent they still exist in this recession) are moving back to SUVs and pickup trucks, which automakers are all too happy to provide given the larger profits that come with gas-guzzlers. We’re witnessing a repeat of what occurred immediately after the oil crises of the 1970s. As soon as cheap gas was readily available, consumers who had said they wanted fuel efficiency went back to their old ways — and so did the Big Three.
By Jean H Charles
A fault point is a structural fissure that will cause major damage at any time due to current or unusual pressure on existing ill conditions. In the case of Haiti these fault points are the following:
1. Lack of vision to create a nation that shall be hospitable to all.
2. Lack of compassion to take the necessary steps to even initiate the process of true rehabilitation for those who have been left behind.
3. Lack of coordination to take advantage of the many resources national and international already available.
4. Lack of leadership to marshal the good will of those who want to help in combating the destructionist volition of the few, for the common good of all as a whole.
I have visited the Caribbean region often enough to make the observation that the economic and environmental situation in Haiti is even more damaging than one can imagine! I have seen only in Haiti, such degradation of the ecology, the leveling from the bottom of values and of standards, as well as the complete disregard for the rule of law in urbanization, condoned by and facilitated with the connivance of local authorities.
This essay has for goal to sensitize the policymakers, national and international, in bringing about incremental change that will affect for the best, the majority of the people of Haiti.
“Unions once served a purpose, but they don’t anymore.”
Throughout the past 30 years, that assessment of the union movement in America has been heard repeatedly, mostly from people who work in the so-called technological, information, or other “industries,” where workers don’t sweat much (at least, from the skin) and who believe that they are in control of their own destinies.
The mergers, downsizing, and consolidation of those “industries” since the 1980s have drastically changed the minds of millions of those workers, when they were put to the curb with nothing but their thin resumes. And this includes engineers and many others in the professional class.
Many of them now know that, if they had had a contract when the crisis arose, they might have had a right to severance pay, possibly a pension when they were older, job retraining, and health insurance for some period of their unemployment. That is, if they were among the lucky few to have any benefits at all.
To have a contract that would have provided what other developed countries consider normal benefits, those white collar workers would have to have had a union. Without a union, there is little hope for any rights on the job, including the right to speak out about working conditions or anything else.
By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD.
Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialization of production; it, so to speak, drags capitalists, against their own will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialization… Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few… the bulk of the profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation… Monopoly, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small and weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations – all these have given rise to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compels is to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.
-Lenin, “Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism”
PBS’s Frontline presents a documentary titled War Briefing. An “expert” on the Afghanistan war states that the Taliban could be won over to “our side,” its sounds natural to the ear. Some few Taliban, good Taliban will remain in place as leaders to lord over villages of the poor and women with impunity. It will be a better life for the Afghanis – nestled into the hierarchical structure that best benefits corporations like Exxon-Mobile. And of course, Exxon-Mobile, providing a service for all, will have its route to oil.
The producers can assume its audience is caught up in the rhetoric of freedom” Only in America can I watch and listen to a “free,” “educational” broadcast in a “free” nation!
By Susie Scott Krabacher
Last week, 26 severely malnourished children died in Haiti. The Associated Press quoted officials there as saying more deaths are imminent unless help comes quickly.
“The situation is extremely, extremely fragile and dangerous,” said Max Cosci, who heads the Belgian contingent of Doctors Without Borders in Haiti.
Those of us who work on the ground in Haiti know that this is just the tip of the iceberg. There will be more deaths from starvation, frustration and violence unless we take action immediately.
It’s entirely possible that Haiti, known as the “Jewel of the Caribbean” during the ’70s and early ’80s, could have been a flourishing and independent economic success today. Haiti’s acumen in the sugarcane and textile trades and its bewitching allure for adventure-seeking tourists could easily have translated into prosperity.
If not for the rampant corruption in virtually every level of government — especially within the remnants of the judicial system — Haiti could be more like the Dominican Republic, which attracts more than 4 million tourists annually and has about a 30 percent direct foreign investment rate.
By Makendal
If anyone is familiar with Stanley Crouch and his history in the American jazz scene, and if anyone is familiar with his dismissal/revocation from JazzTimes after his statements that the jazz scene is a “union of white people” committed to “the elevation of white jazz musicians over their black betters.”
Being that Stanley Crouch has been a staunch critic of the jazz scene, sometimes praising and often times berating, he has become an impresario of sorts for jazz.
He has defined jazz within narrow limits—a music that doesn’t stray far from the blues or the techniques that have traditionally produced it, musicians who never, ever forget where and how the sound was born. One doesn’t have to be black to find a groove but one must be willing to bow to the “Negro aesthetic.” He is convinced that the white establishment resents a musical history from which it can’t help but feel alienated, and so champions jazz that sounds “white” instead of jazz that looks backward. In this view, the desire to innovate past swing is tantamount to fearing its origins and the people who created it. The lines between the advancement of a music and the rejection of its history become entangled in the vast mire of racial politics.
That being said…what would Stanley Crouch think of the HMI, and what seems to be the disregard for the very roots of Haitian music? What would Stanley crouch say if her were an adept and knowledgeable critic of the HMI /Konpa regarding the quick elevation and admiration of certain bands based either on their skin color and/or based on their gravitation towards sounds and mixtures of music that in no way reflect or respect the roots/beginnings of konpa?
By David Brooks
At the beginning of every recession, there are people who see the downturn as an occasion for moral revival: Americans will learn to live without material extravagances. They’ll simplify their lives. They’ll rediscover what really matters: home, friends and family.
But recessions are about more than material deprivation. They’re also about fear and diminished expectations. The cultural consequences of recessions are rarely uplifting.
The economic slowdown of the 1880s and 1890s produced a surge of agrarian populism and nativism, with particular hostility directed toward Catholics, Jews and blacks. The Great Depression was not only a time of F.D.R.’s optimism and escapist movies, it was also a time of apocalyptic forebodings and collectivist movements that crushed individual rights.
The recession of the 1970s produced a cynicism that has never really gone away. The share of students who admitted to cheating jumped from 34 percent in 1969 to 60 percent a decade later. More than a quarter of all employees said the goods they produced were so shoddily made that they wouldn’t buy them for themselves. As David Frum noted in his book, “How We Got Here,” job dissatisfaction in 1977 was higher than at any time in the previous quarter-century.
____________
The social
consequences of
an economic downturn.
____________
by John Maxwell
John Maxwell
The people of Haiti are as poor as human beings can be.
According to the statisticians of the World Bank and others who speculate about how many Anglos can dance on the head of a peon, Haiti may either be the second, third or fourth poorest country in the world.
In Haiti’s case, statistics are irrelevant.
When large numbers of people are reduced to eating dirt – earth, clay – it is impossible to imagine poverty any more absolute, any more desperate, any more inhuman and degrading.
The chairman of the World Bank visited Haiti this past week. This man, Robert Zoellick, is an expert finance-capitalist, a former partner in the investment bankers Goldman Sachs, whose 22,000 ‘traders” last year averaged bonuses of more than $600,000 each.
Goldman Sachs paid out over &18 billion in bonuses to its traders last year, about 50% more than the GDP of Haiti’s 8 million people.
The chairman of Goldman took home more than $70 million and his lieutenants – as Zoellick once was – $40 million or more, each.
Pierre Malchair, left, a physician with Doctors Without Borders, examines a girl in the arms of a relative in a Gonaives, Haiti, shelter in the wake of three hurricanes and a tropical storm that slammed the island. With field teams in 60 countries, the group's U.S. operations are funded in full by private donations; 89% of its global work is privately funded.
Americans are expected to donate more than $300 billion to non-profit organizations this year, says Bob Ottenhoff, president of GuideStar, a Washington, D.C.-based clearinghouse for the USA’s more than 1.7 million non-profits. With all that money at stake, some fraudulent groups will try to take advantage of unsuspecting donors’ generosity.
The Federal Trade Commission received 1,843 complaints of charity fraud last year. But the number of incidents is probably far greater because most contributors don’t realize they’ve been defrauded, says Lois Greisman, associate director of the FTC’s division of marketing practices.
Donors increasingly are seeking more accountability from the charities they help, Ottenhoff says. Many donors continue to steer dollars to religious, educational and health care institutions, but more are donating to groups that focus on a pet cause; as a result, they’re “raising their expectations of what they expect an organization to do and how they expect it to perform,” he says.
Ottenhoff and other watchdogs urge people to do a little homework before making a donation to ensure that their money goes to the cause or community for which it was intended.
