Who is Ricardo Martinelli, David? Yes, the G8 are guilty of neglect, but what have we done? Have we taken in a single Haitian?

Here is a related story, the people suffering are mainly Black!

Red tape delays Africa aid airlift
Flights carrying food for drought-stricken Horn of Africa rescheduled owing to administrative complications.
Last Modified: 27 Jul 2011 10:10

The UN is preparing to airlift food aid to the drought-stricken areas of the Horn of Africa, but flights have been delayed due to administrative complications. Airlifts were to begin on Tuesday to the Somali capital of Mogadishu, Dolo in Ethiopia and Wajir in Kenya. Now, officials say, they will not start until Wednesday.

The CDB represents member countries, does it mean that pledges from member countries did not materialize?

AN EXHIBITION CALLED “THINK”
http://www.rastafarivisions.com/ART.html

http://www.rastafarivisions.com/THINK.html

Do we see white people in Barbados suffering? Do they (whites) all live above the law? When we talk about race – look at our prisons here in Barbados, only Black Bajans are found with illegal drugs and those of a certain socio-economic bracket. Let us cleanup Barbados first then help others.

If we do not clean up our own back yard can we help another. Let us take the beam out of our own eyes and then see clearly to take the mote (much smaller) out of our neigbours’ eye.

@Home..your submission, interesting as it is, does contain some generalizations and inaccuracies. It ignores the plight of the poor whites of Barbados and those marginal lower middle class whites who survive from pay cheque to pay cheque like so many of their fellow Barbadians. Many years ago, on another island, I once set an exam question on poor whites, only to be told to remove it, as “they were of no importance.” And yes, they are an anomaly in a situation where the accepted stereotype is the “poor black man, the rich white man.” So poor whites do not fit into this neat equation, in fact, they challenge it. Yet, historically, most of Barbados’ white population has been poor and have been despised for their poverty. Read any traveler’s account. Considered dispensable by the plantation owners after emancipation, hundreds of poor white elderly and children starved to death, after they were thrown off the plantations where they eked out a meager living. That’s when Governor Rawson started a migration scheme that sent poor white families to St Vincent, Bequia and Grenada where their descendants live today. Jamaica refused to take any, very contemptuously noting that they did not want any “walk and nyam buckra.”
Regarding the racial make up of prisoners at Dodds, it should not be surprising, given existing race ratios, that an overwhelming majority of prisoners there are black Barbadians. However, there are many whites among them..mostly mules caught in drug trafficking or local whites who fall prey to drug consumption and embark on petty criminal activities to pay for their habit.
Regarding the complex situation of Haiti, there is some apparent “donor fatigue” complicated by the existing world economic situation and by events on the ground in Haiti itself, where power is often contested. But Barbados does have
or has had a helping presence there, through the actions of private individuals or groups, who without much fanfare, have visited Haiti to provide technical help, food, clothing etc. The “widow’s mite” maybe, but greatly appreciated by Haitians.

BIG OIL BEHIND HAITI QUAKE?

By Victor Thorn

Did American petroleum companies murder hundreds of thousands of Haitians while extracting oil from their shores? In an exclusive Jan. 28 interview, social commentator and human rights attorney Ezili Danto believes “hydraulic fracturing” caused by drillers searching for oil may have caused the Jan. 12 earthquake.

Yes, oil is Haiti’s smoking gun. Why do you think 20,000 American troops now occupy and control this impoverished nation? On Jan. 28, 2009, geologist Daniel Mathurin revealed, “Haiti’s oil reserves are larger than those of Venezuela. An Olympic pool compared to a glass of water is the comparison.”

Indeed, Haiti may have 20 times more oil than Venezuela. Daniel and Ginette Mathurin mapped 20 oil sites (five of them major), and, oddly enough, the quake’s epicenter occurred in the exact same area where the Port-au-Prince resources exist. Imagine, one of the largest caches of oil in the Western Hemisphere, and now over a million residents are displaced or deceased.

In a Jan. 26 commentary, Pastor Chuck Baldwin asked, “Why was an
earthquake of this magnitude not felt beyond Port-au-Prince?” He continues, “People living in the adjoining country of Dominican Republic universally say they felt nothing.” He concludes, “It is being called ‘miraculous’ that an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale did not
produce a colossal tsunami.”

Ms. Danto also found the localized destruction very suspicious.

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“Port-au-Prince hasn’t had an earthquake since 1771,” she said. “What we’re seeing is similar to Hurricane Katrina. Look at how many people never returned to where they originally lived. Perhaps the oil cartels needed to get rid of certain people near the coastline where they wanted it cleared. If Haiti were a piece of dirt with just black people and no oil or minerals, they would have left us alone. We wouldn’t see all the investment money and troops; nor would the U.S. have built the fifth largest embassy in the world in this tiny little country.”

To whom specifically is she referring? U.S. companies have known since 1908 that Haiti teemed with oil reserves. In the 1950s and 1960s, two different contractors were bought off to not develop these sites. CIA files also show that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) verified contracts in 1962 regarding these possible oil reserve sites.

Ms. Danto explores the economic ramifications of this situation: “Oil companies in the 1960s and 1970s didn’t want to add more supply to the market and allow prices to plummet,” she said. “So, they locked down these deposits and kept them in reserve until the 21st century when Middle Eastern reserves began waning. For the past 50 years, Haiti has been called the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. Oil profits could have vastly changed the lives of these people. Now we’re being fleeced, and our resources are being stolen. Haiti has always been a dumping ground, including the theft of our forests and minerals.”

In mining Haiti’s riches, Ms. Danto recounts, “There were areas in Haiti hidden behind UN guns, fenced off where Haitians knew nothing about what these soldiers were doing,” she said. “There were barricades around Port-au-Prince, and we couldn’t see what the UN soldiers were doing. This activity started after the Bush-led coup d’état in 2004. The areas blocked off were the same places where experts said oil reserves existed.”

To illustrate the abundance of this natural resource, Dr. Georges Michel wrote on March 27, 2004, “In 1975 we bathed in the waters of Les Cayes and noticed that our feet were covered by a sort of black oil seeping from the seabed.”

An even more interesting point is Ms. Danto’s revelation that a series of minor “earthquakes” registering near 2.0 on the Richter scale have been occurring for the past couple of years. A geologist also informed her that the 7.0 earthquake took place six miles below where oil companies were drilling.

Also curious is a Jan. 15 statement by Bob Brewin, a military-technology writer and editor at the popular web site Next Gov.com. Brewin said that one day prior to the earthquake, Jean Demay of the Defense Information Systems Agency visited the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, where U.S. forces were conducting exercises on how to deal with a major earthquake in Haiti.

Indeed, one day later this catastrophe transpired. As the U.S. military now controls Port-au-Prince, are U.S. government efforts to rebuild their infrastructure simply a ruse to grab Haiti’s oil?

Ms. Danto answers this question very adroitly. “Most of Haiti’s major deep water ports have been privatized since the Bush 2004 regime change in Haiti.” She then noted in 2009, “If there are substantial oil and gas reserves in Haiti, the U.S.-Euro genocide and crimes against the Haitian population has not begun.”

American Free Press.

Transcript
REAL NEWS NETWORK.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay, coming to you from Washington DC. And joining us now from Frankfurt, Germany, is William F. Engdahl. He’s the author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. Thanks for joining us, William.

WILLIAM F. ENGDAHL, ECONOMIST AND AUTHOR: Thank you, Paul.

JAY: So, William, you’ve written recently about the possibility of a massive oil find underneath Haiti and how this might connect to US strategy in the Caribbean. Talk a bit about what you’ve written.

ENGDAHL: Well, if you look at a geophysical map of Haiti and the Caribbean, it jumps out that Haiti and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, lies right along the conjunction of what are called tectonic plates, but three separate tectonic plates. If you can imagine a China vase that falls off the table and gets broken in many pieces and you glue it back together, well, these tectonic plates are a bit similar in terms of images. But three of those converge right at the land area that’s called Haiti, and generally where we have such a conversion of tectonic plates, we have a great amount of geophysical motion, energy, and so forth. They tend to be along�in the Pacific you have the Ring of Fire, which is literally the ring of vulcanic activity�. Indonesia is in one such zone; Saudi Arabia and the giant oil fields of the Middle East, from Kuwait and so forth, the Persian Gulf, are another such convergence of such plates. And up until now there’s been very little talk about petroleum and Haiti, but it’s not because there hasn’t been interest in petroleum in Haiti. My take on it is that there are�according to geophysicists knowledgeable about the geophysics of the Caribbean basin�you probably have large multinational oil companies, US, British oil companies and their allies, who are aware that with a little bit of exploration onshore and offshore, that there are probably enormous oil finds. And you just had, two years ago, offshore Cuba, just north of Haiti, a giant�supergiant, actually, oil discovery, with several billion barrels of believed reserves of oil there that the Russians are helping the Cubans to exploit. So it stands to reason that the same geological fault line of these tectonic plates�the Caribbean plate, the North American plate, and the South American plate�they all converge north of Venezuela and in the area that’s called Haiti. That also makes Haiti ripe for other unusual minerals, such as uranium, gold, and so forth. And my own sense from talking with geophysicists on this whole Haiti question is that Haiti is probably one of the undeveloped treasures of mineral wealth on the planet.

JAY: Now, why do think it’s been so undeveloped for so long? Because there’s been some suggestions of oil and perhaps other minerals, if I understand correctly, even as far back as the 1970s.

ENGDAHL: I think for the following reason: As I wrote in an earlier book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics, the question for the United States and Britain since World War II, the question of oil reserves around the world, has not been an economic question, a business question of developing new oil fields, to sell it at so many dollars a barrel for the profit of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, whatever, but it has been a geopolitical question. It’s been one of the power pillars, if you want to call it that, of the United States’ power projection in the post-World War II world. The United States, through its control of the Middle East oil supplies, especially Saudi, Kuwait, earlier control of Iran when the Shah was in power, that gave the United States an enormous weapon over the European economies, over the world economy, actually, and over the Soviet Union during the Cold War era, because they had the power, by controlling the quantities of oil in the world market, to raise the price of oil at their behest, and also, as they did in 1986, to collapse the price of oil. Why has Haiti not been exploited? I think the very reason the world is swimming in oil, and the US oil multinationals, and the US government that works intimately with them around the world, wants to prevent that anyone else develops the oil resources of a place like Haiti. They’re extremely unhappy, no doubt, about the discovery in Cuba, and I think they would like to keep this oil off the market as long as possible. Haiti for them is a stone’s throw away, and they could develop it any time they have need. But to keep it off the development market, I think, is their strategy�strategic denial of those oil resources.

JAY: Now, certainly while Aristide was in power, but even some of the Caribbean countries have very good relations with Venezuela, with Bolivia, some of the CARICOM [Caribbean Community] countries actually get cheap oil from Venezuela. So in terms of the geopolitics of the region, what would the significance be of Haitian oil? And how would that affect US strategy in the region?

ENGDAHL: Well, I think the answer to that depends on who’s controlling the government of Haiti, and by all accounts, the Pr�val government that’s been essentially put into power with US backing since they ousted Aristide in 2004 and put him into exile in South Africa, the government has been intimately tied to the five families (as they call it in Haiti, the “little mafia” that run Haiti). And these five families are like in Russia after the collapse of communism, like the oligarchs in Russia: they literally control the economy of Haiti like their own plantation. And the question is: who would control, and for what purposes, the oil resources? If those five families are in control and Pr�val is doing their bidding, then, by all accounts I’ve seen, it wouldn’t matter, because it wouldn’t benefit the economy and the livelihood of the ordinary Haitians. So if that were to be developed as a national resource in a way that could benefit the overall economy of the Haitian people, then that would be a different question. So I think it’s a question of who controls the politics of Haiti.

JAY: Which must be somewhat in flux when you have the country in such chaos and all the normal infrastructures of the state in disarray, other than�I guess the US military is kind of taking up the role of the state, other than the private armies that work for these five, six families. So the real issue connected to oil is going to be: Is this kind of tradition of popular politics in Haiti going to be able to assert itself? Or do they get back to politics as usual?

ENGDAHL: Yeah, that I have no means of calling. I think the fact that the latest figures are 13,000 US troops on that tiny little island, that’s quite a lot of military power. I think probably the need is for less military projection and more humanitarian�food, water, and shelter aid from�. And this is what the Haitian websites have been pleading for ever since the January earthquake. But I’m a little bit uneasy about the agenda of the Pentagon in Haiti, with their overwhelming military presence. The Doctors Without Borders in Geneva protested immediately after the quake that their planes, their transport planes, were turned back from Haitian airports by US soldiers who refused them landing rights�and they had emergency humanitarian aid. This wasn’t some kind of a, you know, Soviet, Cold War-era spy game; this was a humanitarian effort, and they protested quite loudly that the US was hindering that. So it’s unclear at this point what the US agenda is for Haiti, but the signs and the fact that George W. Bush was appointed special envoy, along with Bill Clinton as UN envoy, gives one grounds for pause here, I think.

JAY: Well, where George W. Bush seems to be, there usually is oil. Thanks very much for joining us, William.

ENGDAHL: Thank you.

JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWlcw_7-fd4&w=460&h=278]

http://youtu.be/2JzZot3ISHU