Haitians receive little help despite promises - Mail & Guardian Online: The smart news source

Haitians receive little help despite promises - Mail & Guardian Online: The smart news source

World leaders pledged massive aid programmes to rebuild Haiti but desperate earthquake survivors were still waiting on Sunday for food, water and medicine.

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Five days after a 7.0 magnitude quake killed up to 200 000 people, international rescue teams clawed away at the rubble of collapsed buildings in the wrecked capital, Port-au-Prince, in a race against time to find more survivors.

But logistical logjams kept major relief from reaching the hundreds of thousands of hungry Haitians waiting for help, many of them sheltering in makeshift camps on streets strewn with debris and decomposing bodies.

"I'm going there with a very heavy heart. This is one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades. The damage, destruction, loss of life is just overwhelming," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said as he boarded a flight for Haiti on Sunday.

The United Nations was feeding 40 000 people a day and hoped to increase that to one million within two weeks, he said. "The challenge at this time is how to coordinate all of this outpouring of assistance." ...

After Haiti's earthquake: Growing deadlier | The Economist

After Haiti's earthquake: Growing deadlier | The Economist

SIX days after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, the extent of the damage and suffering is becoming clearer. The misery exceeds even the most pessimistic expectations. There are no reliable estimates of the death toll, but according to Jean-Max Bellerive, the prime minister, the government disposed of 20,000 bodies in the first four days after the tremor, most of them dumped into mass graves without any attempt to determine their identities. Despite these efforts, Port-au-Prince, the capital, is still littered with corpses and survivors have resorted to placing toothpaste or orange peel under their noses to fight the stench. On Sunday January 17th, Mr Bellerive guessed that 70,000 people had died in Port-au-Prince and Leogane (the city closest to the epicentre), before counting those killed in the country’s heavily affected south-western peninsula.

Both Haiti’s endemic misery and the obstacles for rescue workers are in the spotlight. Earthquakes of similar magnitude have struck bigger cities in richer countries and claimed just a few dozen lives. But the absence of building codes in Haiti, as well as a severe wood shortage because of mass deforestation, mean that many structures in urban areas are made of thin, low-quality concrete. Such concrete is both prone to collapse and dangerous for those who are hit by it or buried beneath it. Ironically, some of the country’s poorest benefited from living in tin-roofed shacks, which were much easier to escape from.

SIX days after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, the extent of the damage and suffering is becoming clearer. The misery exceeds even the most pessimistic expectations. There are no reliable estimates of the death toll, but according to Jean-Max Bellerive, the prime minister, the government disposed of 20,000 bodies in the first four days after the tremor, most of them dumped into mass graves without any attempt to determine their identities. Despite these efforts, Port-au-Prince, the capital, is still littered with corpses and survivors have resorted to placing toothpaste or orange peel under their noses to fight the stench. On Sunday January 17th, Mr Bellerive guessed that 70,000 people had died in Port-au-Prince and Leogane (the city closest to the epicentre), before counting those killed in the country’s heavily affected south-western peninsula.

Both Haiti’s endemic misery and the obstacles for rescue workers are in the spotlight. Earthquakes of similar magnitude have struck bigger cities in richer countries and claimed just a few dozen lives. But the absence of building codes in Haiti, as well as a severe wood shortage because of mass deforestation, mean that many structures in urban areas are made of thin, low-quality concrete. Such concrete is both prone to collapse and dangerous for those who are hit by it or buried beneath it. Ironically, some of the country’s poorest benefited from living in tin-roofed shacks, which were much easier to escape from. ...

US waves white flag in disastrous 'war on drugs' - Americas, World - The Independent

US waves white flag in disastrous 'war on drugs' - Americas, World - The Independent

After 40 years of defeat and failure, America's "war on drugs" is being buried in the same fashion as it was born – amid bloodshed, confusion, corruption and scandal. US agents are being pulled from South America; Washington is putting its narcotics policy under review, and a newly confident region is no longer prepared to swallow its fatal Prohibition error. Indeed, after the expenditure of billions of dollars and the violent deaths of tens of thousands of people, a suitable epitaph for America's longest "war" may well be the plan, in Bolivia, for every family to be given the right to grow coca in its own backyard.

The "war", declared unilaterally throughout the world by Richard Nixon in 1969, is expiring as its strategists start discarding plans that have proved futile over four decades: they are preparing to withdraw their agents from narcotics battlefields from Colombia to Afghanistan and beginning to coach them in the art of trumpeting victory and melting away into anonymous defeat. Not surprisingly, the new strategy is being gingerly aired in the media of the US establishment, from The Wall Street Journal to the Miami Herald.

Prospects in the new decade are thus opening up for vast amounts of useless government expenditure being reassigned to the treatment of addicts instead of their capture and imprisonment. And, no less important, the ever-expanding balloon of corruption that the "war" has brought to heads of government, armies and police forces wherever it has been waged may slowly start to deflate.

Prepare to shed a tear over the loss of revenue that eventual decriminalisation of narcotics could bring to the traffickers, large and small, and to the contractors who have been making good money building and running the new prisons that help to bankrupt governments – in the US in particular, where drug offenders – principally small retailers and seldom the rich and important wholesalers – have helped to push the prison population to 1,600,000; their imprisonment is already straining federal and state budgets. In Mississippi, where drug offenders once had to serve 85 per cent of their sentences, they are now being required to serve less than a quarter. California has been ordered to release 40,000 inmates because its prisons are hugely overcrowded.

At the same time, some in the US are confused and fear that the new commission proposed by Congressman Eliot Engel, a man with a record of hostility to the Cuban and Venezuelan governments, may prove to be a broken reed. As he brought in his bill he added timidly: "Let me be absolutely clear that this bill has not been introduced to support the legalisation of illegal drugs. That is not something that I would like to see."

Part of the reason for the slow US retreat from the "war" is that the strategy of fighting it in foreign lands and not at home has proved valueless. Along the already sensitive frontier with Mexico the effect of US attempts to enforce a hard line by blasting drug dealers away has been bloody. Anxious to keep in check the flood of illegal immigrants into territory that once belonged to Mexico, Washington is building a wall and fence comparable to that which once cut through Berlin and that which is today causing havoc between Israelis and Palestinians.

In the areas of Mexico closest to the US frontier the toll of deaths in drug-related violence exceeded 7,000 people in 2009 (1,000 of them dying in January and February). This takes the death toll over three years to above 16,000, figures far in excess of US fatalities in Afghanistan. The bloodshed has continued despite – or perhaps because of – the intense US pressure on President Felipe Calderon to station a large part of the Mexican army in the region. It is deploying 49,000 men on its own soil in the campaign against drugs, a larger force than the 46,000 Britain sent to take part in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. But still the blood flows.

As in Colombia, where a multibillion-dollar US subsidy maintains that country's armed forces, there are well-founded suspicions that military operations are often rendered futile because the miserably paid local commanders and individual soldiers are easily bought off by drug dealers.

The quiet expiry of the "war" has dawned slowly on a world focused on the US's more palpable conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last month, the US House of Representatives gave unanimous approval to a bill creating an independent commission to reconsider domestic and international drug policies and suggest better ones. Congressman Engel, a Democrat from the Bronx and the sponsor of the bill, declared: "Billions upon billions of US taxpayer dollars have been spent over the years to combat the drug trade in Latin America and the Caribbean. In spite of our efforts, the positive results are few and far between." ...

GOP, Warning Of A 'New EPA', Oppose Independent CFPA

GOP, Warning Of A 'New EPA', Oppose Independent CFPA

Senate Republicans are determined to prevent the creation of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency because they consider it as threatening as their current arch-nemesis regulator: the Environmental Protection Agency.

Consumer advocates, meanwhile, say the CFPA must have strong, independent authority to craft and enforce rules. Anything less, they argue, would be too much of a concession to banks that have gotten enough already.

"From the Republican point of view, the idea of a separate agency is still anathema," said Sen. Robert Bennett of Utah, a senior Republican on the banking committee. An independent agency, he said, can go too far in the direction of tight regulation without taking into account the effect of the rules it creates on business and the economy. He said he's seen it happen before.

"Can you say EPA?" he asked, lifting his eyebrows. The Republican Party has regretted for years that President Richard Nixon made the EPA independent. ...

RebelReports - Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know

RebelReports - Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know

Contrary to popular belief, the US actually has 189,000 personnel on the ground in Afghanistan right now—and that number is quickly rising.

By Jeremy Scahill

A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversight subcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone—that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo [PDF] released by McCaskill’s staff, “From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000.”

At present, there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan. According to a report this week from the Congressional Research Service, as a result of the coming surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, there may be up to 56,000 additional contractors deployed. But here is another group of contractors that often goes unmentioned: 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors. That means that the current total US force in Afghanistan is approximately 189,000 personnel (68,000 US troops and 121,000 contractors). And remember, that’s right now. And that, according to McCaskill, is a conservative estimate. A year from now, we will likely see more than 220,000 US-funded personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.

The US has spent more than $23 billion on contracts in Afghanistan since 2002. By next year, the number of contractors will have doubled since 2008 when taxpayers funded over $8 billion in Afghanistan-related contracts.

...

As for waste and abuse, the subcommittee says that the Defense Contract Audit Agency identified more than $950 million in questioned and unsupported costs submitted by Defense Department contracts for work in Afghanistan. That’s 16% of the total contract dollars reviewed.