In my Reflection of January 14, two days after the catastrophe in Haiti, which destroyed that neighboring sister nation, I wrote: “In the area of healthcare and others the Haitian people has received the cooperation of Cuba, even though this is a small and blockaded country. Approximately 400 doctors and healthcare workers are helping the Haitian people free of charge. Our doctors are working every day at 227 of the 237 communes of that country. On the other hand, no less than 400 young Haitians have been graduated as medical doctors in our country. They will now work alongside the reinforcement that traveled there yesterday to save lives in that critical situation. Thus, up to one thousand doctors and healthcare personnel can be mobilized without any special effort; and most are already there willing to cooperate with any other State that wishes to save Haitian lives and rehabilitate the injured.”
“The head of our medical brigade has informed that ‘the situation is difficult but we are already saving lives.’”
Hour after hour, day and night, the Cuban health professionals have started to work nonstop in the few facilities that were able to stand, in tents, and out in the parks or open-air spaces, since the population feared new aftershocks.
The situation was far more serious than was originally thought. Tens of thousands of injured were clamoring for help in the streets of Port-au-Prince; innumerable persons laid, dead or alive, under the rubbled clay or adobe used in the construction of the houses where the overwhelming majority of the population lived. Buildings, even the most solid, collapsed. Besides, it was necessary to look for the Haitian doctors who had graduated at the Latin American Medicine School throughout all the destroyed neighborhoods. Many of them were affected, either directly or indirectly, by the tragedy.
Some UN officials were trapped in their dormitories and tens of lives were lost, including the lives of several chiefs of MINUSTAH, a UN contingent. The fate of hundreds of other members of its staff was unknown.
Haiti’s Presidential Palace crumbled. Many public facilities, including several hospitals, were left in ruins.
The catastrophe shocked the whole world, which was able to see what was going on through the images aired by the main international TV networks. Governments from everywhere in the planet announced they would be sending rescue experts, food, medicines, equipment and other resources.
In conformity with the position publicly announced by Cuba, medical staff from different countries –namely Spain, Mexico, and Colombia, among others- worked very hard alongside our doctors at the facilities they had improvised. Organizations such as PAHO and other friendly countries like Venezuela and other nations supplied medicines and other resources. The impeccable behavior of Cuban professionals and their leaders was absolutely void of chauvinism and remained out of the limelight.
Cuba, just as it had done under similar circumstances, when Hurricane Katrina caused huge devastation in the city of New Orleans and the lives of thousands of American citizens were in danger, offered to send a full medical brigade to cooperate with the people of the United States, a country that, as is well known, has vast resources. But at that moment what was needed were trained and well- equipped doctors to save lives. Given New Orleans geographical location, more than one thousand doctors of the “Henry Reeve” contingent mobilized and readied to leave for that city at any time of the day or the night, carrying with them the necessary medicines and equipment. It never crossed our mind that the President of that nation would reject the offer and let a number of Americans that could have been saved to die. The mistake made by that government was perhaps the inability to understand that the people of Cuba do not see in the American people an enemy; it does not blame it for the aggressions our homeland has suffered.
Nor was that government capable of understanding that our country does not need to beg for favors or forgiveness of those who, for half a century now, have been trying, to no avail, to bring us to our knees.
Our country, also in the case of Haiti, immediately responded to the US authorities requests to fly over the eastern part of Cuba as well as other facilities they needed to deliver assistance, as quickly as possible, to the American and Haitian citizens who had been affected by the earthquake.
Such have been the principles characterizing the ethical behavior of our people. Together with its equanimity and firmness, these have been the ever-present features of our foreign policy. And this is known only too well by whoever have been our adversaries in the international arena.
Cuba will firmly stand by the opinion that the tragedy that has taken place in Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, is a challenge to the richest and more powerful countries of the world.
Haiti is a net product of the colonial, capitalist and imperialist system imposed on the world. Haiti’s slavery and subsequent poverty were imposed from abroad. That terrible earthquake occurred after the Copenhagen Summit, where the most elemental rights of 192 UN member States were trampled upon.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, a competition has unleashed in Haiti to hastily and illegally adopt boys and girls. UNICEF has been forced to adopt preventive measures against the uprooting of many children, which will deprive their close relatives from their rights.
There are more than one hundred thousand deadly victims. A high number of citizens have lost their arms or legs, or have suffered fractures requiring rehabilitation that would enable them to work or manage their own.
Eighty per cent of the country needs to be rebuilt. Haiti requires an economy that is developed enough to meet its needs according to its productive capacity. The reconstruction of Europe or Japan, which was based on the productive capacity and the technical level of the population, was a relatively simple task as compared to the effort that needs to be made in Haiti. There, as well as in most of Africa and elsewhere in the Third World, it is indispensable to create the conditions for a sustainable development. In only forty years time, humanity will be made of more than nine billion inhabitants, and right now is faced with the challenge of a climate change that scientists accept as an inescapable reality.
In the midst of the Haitian tragedy, without anybody knowing how and why, thousands of US marines, 82nd Airborne Division troops and other military forces have occupied Haiti. Worse still is the fact that neither the United Nations Organization nor the US government have offered an explanation to the world’s public opinion about this relocation of troops.
Several governments have complained that their aircraft have not been allowed to land in order to deliver the human and technical resources that have been sent to Haiti.
Some countries, for their part, have announced they would be sending an additional number of troops and military equipment. In my view, such events will complicate and create chaos in international cooperation, which is already in itself complex. It is necessary to seriously discuss this issue. The UN should be entrusted with the leading role it deserves in these so delicate matters.
Our country is accomplishing a strictly humanitarian mission. To the extent of its possibilities, it will contribute the human and material resources at its disposal. The will of our people, who takes pride in its medical doctors and cooperation workers who provide vital services, is huge, and will rise to the occasion.
Any significant cooperation that is offered to our country will not be rejected, but its acceptance will fully depend on the importance and transcendence of the assistance that is requested from the human resources of our homeland.
It is only fair to state that, up until this moment, our modest aircrafts and the important human resources that Cuba has made available to the Haitian people have arrived at their destination without any difficulty whatsoever.
We send doctors, not soldiers!
Fidel Castro Ruz
January 23, 2010
5:30 p.m.
January 29, 2010
January 26, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010: Victims are not enemys, CANADIAN & US MILITARY SHOULD NOT TREAT VICTIMS OF EARTHQUAKE AS ENEMY, Rebel Youth Blog
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
EXAGGERATED REPORTS OF LOOTING THREATEN VICTIMS
(January 19, 2010) The Canada Haiti Action Network is deeply concerned about the militarization of the relief efforts in Haiti and exaggerated reporting on ‘looting’ and potential violence.
“There is an exaggerated focus on unlawfulness,” says one the group’s representatives in Toronto, Niraj Joshi. “Taking food and water from destroyed stores does not constitute looting,” she said. “It is an instinct of human survival, caused by the failure of the international relief effort to provide timely and effective assistance.”
Many poor neighbourhoods in Port-au-Prince have yet to see any assistance. Yet reports from CHAN’s colleagues and friends in Port au Prince say that human solidarity and a quiet determination to survive prevail. Reports on CBC television and radio are saying the same thing.
Meanwhile, Canada’s emergency relief teams have been sent home, told they will not be deployed.
Roger Annis of CHAN’s affiliate in Vancouver commented, “Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs told the country on anuary 16 that its disaster relief teams are not equipped for Haiti, that only soldiers can do the job. Canadians have apparently been labouring under the false impression that its disaster relief teams are able to handle earthquake disasters.”
“Like Washington,” he said, “Ottawa has quite simply prioritized the sending of its military to Haiti over disaster relief. Are Canadians comfortable with that choice, and what is the purpose of this military show of strength?”
The group says that earthquake victims need food, water, medical treatment and shelter, not more guns pointed at them.
In February 2004, some 500 Canadian troops were dispatched to Haiti as part of a UN Security Council-endorsed mission that followed the overthrow of its elected government and exile of its elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. As the AP news service reported today, there is a growing clamour in the poor neighbourhoods of Haiti for the return of the only president in their recent, troubled history that took measures to alleviate their suffering.
Representatives of the Canada Haiti Action Network are available to speak to media in cities across Canada. Consult the “About CHAN” page on the website below
http://canadahaitiaction.ca/
January 24, 2010
[Not merely a US issue!] "Abolish Corporate Personhood": Molly Morgan and Jan Edwards
http://www.californiademocracy.org/resource/abolish-morgan-edwards.html
The history of the United States could be told as the story of who is and who is not a person under law. Women, poor people, slaves, and even corporations had long been considered persons for purposes of following the law. This is because early laws were written “No person shall . . .” Corporate lawyers had tried to avoid these laws by claiming corporations were not persons and therefore not required to follow the law. So it was decided that for purposes of following the law, corporations were persons. This allowed corporations to sue and be sued in court among other things. But corporations were not persons with rights in the law, and neither were women, slaves, indentured servants, or poor people. We know some of the ongoing story of human beings' struggle to gain the rights of persons under law, but how did corporations gain these rights?
To understand the phenomenon of corporate personhood, we start by looking at the foundation of US law, the Constitution. This document was written by 55 gentlemen cleverly described by one historian as “the well-bred, the well-fed, the well-read, and the well-wed.” As some of the wealthiest, most privileged people in the new country, they were highly aware that their power had everything to do with how much property they owned — land, crops, buildings, personal goods, and, for most of them, property in the form of human beings, their slaves. As some of the best-educated men in the world, at least by European standards, they also knew a lot about democracy, and they understood what a threat the real thing represented to their personal power. The kind of democracy they prized and wrote about so eloquently could only be practiced by people like them — certainly not by the rabble. Many of them wrote and spoke at length about the inability of the common people to be self-governing.
So the word “democracy” appears nowhere in the Constitution. What they created was a republic designed to protect property, not people. This didn't play very well with many people in the new United States — at least half of the population was very much opposed to the Constitution. They could see how much power it would take away from them, how much it would compromise the democratic ideals in the Declaration of Independence, and they wanted no part of it. But the Federalists who proposed the Constitution had the finances and the unity to promote their ideas strongly. After a lot of politicking they got the Constitution ratified — but only with the assurance that a Bill of Rights would be added to protect people from the abuses by the government that would be possible under the new system. So let's look at the basic structure they created to protect property.
The Constitution only mentions two entities: We the People and the government. The people are on one side of a line, and we are sovereign and have individual rights. On the other side of the line is the government, which is accountable to the people and has specific duties to perform to the satisfaction of the people. We delegate some of our power to the government in order to perform tasks we want government to do. In a representative democracy, this system should work just fine.
The problem is that the phrase “We the People” is not defined in the Constitution. In 1787, in order to be considered one of “We the People” and have rights in the Constitution, you had to be an adult male with white skin and a certain amount of property. (The states determined who could vote; some states had religious restrictions.) At the time of the Constitution, this narrowed “We the People” down to about 10% of the population. Those who owned property, including human property, were very clear that this was rule by the minority — and that's the way they wanted it.
So here is the first definition of who gets to be a person in the United States. Ninety percent of the people — all the immigrants, indentured servants, slaves, minors, Native Americans, women, and people who don't own property (the poor) — are, legally, not persons. They were not persons with rights, but were persons for following the law. They're like subhumans. The law didn't label people this way in so many words — which is part of the brilliance of the system and why it's lasted so long — but the net effect was clear. By allowing only wealthy, white males to be “persons,” a class system was put in place.
Those who could vote in the republic were able to elect people for the House of Representatives. So the United States held within its republican form the possibility of democracy. More human beings could become part of We the People. And they did. It was not easily won, but eventually all adult citizens became legal persons.
Without using the words “slave” or “slavery,” the Constitution ensures that even if slaves get to free soil, their status as property remains the same. This is just one of the clauses defining property in the Constitution. It also defines contracts, labor, commerce, money, copyright, and war as the province of the federal government. So the Constitution, the foundation of all US law, was not written to protect people — it was written to protect property. The Constitution does contain some protection for people in Section 9, but the Bill of Rights is the concentration of rights for We the People.
Most people believe that the Constitution — specifically, the Bill of Rights — guarantees our rights to freedom of speech, religion, and press, to peaceably assemble, and so forth. People of all political stripes say this. But the truth is, it does no such thing. Almost all of our constitutional protections are expressed as the absence of a negative rather than the presence of a positive. So the First Amendment, for example, does not say, “All citizens are guaranteed the right to free speech”; it only says, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . .” The First Amendment just restricts the government from specific encroachments; it doesn't guarantee anything. This was not a concern for the people because they had strong bills of rights in their state constitutions, and at that time, the states had more power than the federal government. The US Constitution allowed slavery throughout the United States, for example, but it was each state's constitution that created free or slave states. Over time, however, the states have lost power to the federal government. The federal laws are now usually ruled to supercede the states' laws. The federal Bill of Rights is where we look to protect our freedoms. The lack of positive protection of these rights weakens them greatly.
If those rights were actually guaranteed in the Constitution, people could, for example, take the Bill of Rights into the workplace, but we can't. Anyone who thinks workers have free speech while they're on corporate property should ask the workers or talk to a union organizer. Because corporations are property, and because the Constitution protects property rights above all, most people have to abandon the Bill of Rights in order to make a living. The way different groups of people — like African Americans and women — have, one by one, acquired rights and become persons under the law is by getting protection from abuse by the government, usually through amendments to the Constitution — not a guarantee.
Another word that appears nowhere in the Constitution is “corporation,” and the reason is that the writers of the Constitution had no interest in using for-profit corporations to run their new government. In colonial times, corporations were tools of the king's oppression, chartered for the purpose of exploiting the so-called “New World” and shoveling wealth back into Europe. The rich formed joint-stock corporations to distribute the enormous risk of colonizing the Americas and gave them names like the Hudson Bay Company, the British East India Company, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Because they were so far from their sovereign — the king — the agents for these corporations had a lot of autonomy to do their work; they could pass laws, levy taxes, and even raise armies to manage and control property and commerce. They were not popular with the colonists.
So the writers of the Constitution left control of corporations to state legislatures (10th Amendment), where they would get the closest supervision by the people. Early corporate charters were very explicit about what a corporation could do, how, for how long, with whom, where, and when. Corporations could not own stock in other corporations, and they were prohibited from any part of the political process. Individual stockholders were held personally liable for any harms done in the name of the corporation, and most charters only lasted for 10 or 15 years. But most importantly, in order to receive the profit-making privileges the shareholders sought, their corporations had to represent a clear benefit for the public good, such a building a road, canal, or bridge. And when corporations violated any of these terms, their charters were frequently revoked by the state legislatures.
That sounds nothing like the corporations of today, so what happened in the last two centuries? As time passed and memories of royal oppression faded, the wealthy people increasingly started eyeing corporations as a convenient way to shield their personal fortunes. They could sniff the winds of change and see that their minority rule through property ownership was under serious threat of being diluted. States gradually started loosening property requirements for voting, so more and more white men could participate in the political process. Women were publicly agitating for the right to vote. In 1865 the 13th Amendment was ratified, freeing the slaves. Three years later, the 14th Amendment provided citizenship rights to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and two years after that, the 15th Amendment provided voting rights to black males. Change was afoot, and so the ruling class responded.
During and after the Civil War there was a rapid increase in the number and size of corporations, and this form of business was starting to become a more important way of holding and protecting property and power. Increasingly through their corporations, the wealthy started influencing legislators, bribing public officials, and employing lawyers to write new laws and file court cases challenging the existing laws that restricted corporate behavior. Bit by bit, decade by decade, state legislatures increased corporate charter length while they decreased corporate liability and reduced citizen authority over corporate structure, governance, production, and labor.
But minority rulers were only going to be able to go just so far with this strategy. Because corporations are a creation of the government — chartered by the state legislatures — they still fell on the government side of the constitutional line with duties accountable to the people. If minority rule by property was going to be accomplished through corporations, they had to become entitled to rights instead, which required them to cross the line and become persons under the law. And their tool to do this was the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868. From then it took the ruling class less than 20 years to shift corporations from the duty side of the line, where they're accountable to the people, to the rights side, where they get protection from government abuse.
The 14th Amendment, in addition to saying that now all persons born or naturalized in the US are citizens, says that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law; nor deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.” The phrase about not depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without the due process of the law is exactly the same wording as the Fifth Amendment, which protects people from that kind of abuse by the federal government; now with the 14th Amendment, the states can't abuse people in that way, either. These are important rights; they're written in a short, straightforward manner; and after the Civil War and all the agony over slavery, the people in the states that ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were clear that they were about righting the wrong of slavery.
But that clarity didn't stop the railroad barons and their attorneys in the 1870s and '80s. As mentioned before, those who wanted to maintain minority rule were losing their grip. There was real danger of democracy creeping into the body politic. Until the Civil War, slavery was essential to maintaining the entire economic system that kept wealth and power in the hands of the few — not just in the South, but in the North as well. It was the legalization of a lie — that one human being can own another. Slavery was at the core of a whole system of oppression that benefitted the few, which included the subjugation of women, genocide of the indigenous population, and exploitation of immigrants and the poor. Now that the slavery lie could no longer be used to maintain minority rule, they needed a new lie, and they used the 14th Amendment to create it. Because these rights to due process and equal protection were so valuable, the definition of the word “person” in the 14th Amendment became the focus of hundreds of legal battles for the next 20 years. The question was: who gets to be a person protected by the 14th Amendment.
The watershed moment came in 1886 when the Supreme Court ruled on a case called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. The case itself was not about corporate personhood, although many before it had been, and the Court had ruled that corporations were not persons under the 14th Amendment. Santa Clara, like many railroad cases, was about taxes. But before the Court delivered its decision, the following statement is attributed to Chief Justice Waite: “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.” The statement appeared in the header of the case in the published version, and the Court made its ruling on other grounds. How this statement appeared in the header of the case is a matter of some mystery and competing theories, but because it was later cited as precedent, corporate personhood became the accepted legal doctrine of the land.
What was it in the 14th Amendment that was so valuable to corporate lawyers and managers? Why did they pursue it so aggressively? At the time, as is still true today, corporations were chartered by state governments, and the 14th Amendment reads “No state shall . . . ” If the word “person” in the 14th Amendment included corporations, then no state shall deny to corporations due process or equal protection of the laws. This allowed corporate lawyers to allege discrimination whenever a state law was enacted to curtail corporations. But this was also the beginning of federal regulatory agencies, so because corporations were now persons under the 14th Amendment, it would be discriminatory not to give them the same rights under federal laws. With the granting of the 5th Amendment right to due process (Noble v. Union River Logging, 1893), corporate lawyers could challenge — and the Supreme Court could find grounds to overturn — democratically legislated laws that originated at the federal as well as state levels.
Corporations acquired legal personhood at a time when all women, all Native Americans, and even most African American men were still denied the right to vote. And this was not an era of good feelings between the average person and corporations. It was the time of the robber barons, and the Supreme Court was filled with former railroad lawyers. It was the time of the Knights of Labor and the Populist movement. 1886 was the year of the Haymarket Massacre, the Great Southwestern Strike, and the next year the Pullman Strike. The people were struggling for real democracy and the wealthy ruling class did whatever it took to keep them down.
Ten years later, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court established the “separate but equal” doctrine that legalized racial segregation through what were known as “Jim Crow” laws. In less than 30 years, African Americans had effectively lost their legal personhood rights while corporations had acquired them. And for those still wondering whether the primary purpose of the Constitution and the body of law it spawned is about protecting property rather than people, consider this. Of the hundreds of 14th Amendment cases heard in the Supreme Court in the first 50 years after its adoption, less than one-half of one percent invoked it in protection of African Americans, and more than 50% asked that its benefits be extended to corporations. “Equal protection under the law” turns out to mean: whoever has enough money to go to the Supreme Court to fight for it. Railroad robber barons did; women didn't; and African Americans most certainly didn't. In fact, the pattern over more than two centuries of US legal history is that people acquire rights by amendment to the Constitution — a long and difficult, but democratic, process — and corporations acquire them by Supreme Court decisions.
Once corporations had jumped the constitutional line from the government side to the people side, their lawyers proceeded to pursue the Bill of Rights through more Supreme Court cases. As mentioned above, in 1893 they were assured 5th Amendment protection of due process. In 1906 they got 4th Amendment search and seizure protection (Hale v. Henkel). In 1922 they got the “takings” clause of the 5th Amendment (Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon), and a regulatory law was deemed to be a “takings.” In 1936 (Grosjean v. American Press Co.) and 1947 (Taft-Hartley Act) they started getting First Amendment protections.
In 1976 the Supreme Court determined in Buckley v. Valeo that money spent for political purposes is equal to exercising free speech, and since “corporate persons” have First Amendment rights, they can contribute as much money as they want to overturn ballot initiatives or referenda (First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti). Every time “corporate persons” acquire one of these protections under the Bill of Rights, it gives them a whole new way of exploiting the legal system in order to maintain minority rule through corporate power. And since 1886, every time people have won new rights — like the Civil Rights Act — corporations are eligible for it, too.
It is important to remember what a corporation is to understand the implications of corporate personhood for democracy. A corporation is not a real thing; it's a legal fiction, an abstraction. You can't see or hear or touch or smell a corporation — it's just an idea that people agree to and put into writing. Because legal personhood has been conferred upon an abstraction that can be redefined at will under the law, corporations have become superhumans in our world. A corporation can live forever. It can change its identity in a day. It can cut off parts of itself — even its head — and actually function better than before. It can also cut off parts of itself and from those parts grow new selves. It can own others of its own kind and it can merge with others of its own kind. It doesn't need fresh air to breathe or clean water to drink or safe food to eat. It doesn't fear illness or death. It can have simultaneous residence in many different nations. It's not male, female, or even transgendered. Without giving birth it can create children and even parents. If it's found guilty of a crime, it cannot go to prison.
Corporations are whatever those who have the power to define want them to be to maintain minority rule through corporations. As long as superhuman “corporate persons” have rights under the law, the vast majority of people have little or no effective voice in our political arena, which is why we see abolishing corporate personhood as so important to ending corporate rule and building a more democratic society.When the Constitution was written and corporations were part of the government, having duties to perform to the satisfaction of the people, the primary technique for enforcing minority rule was to establish that only a tiny percentage could qualify as “We the People” — in other words, that most people were subhuman. As different groups of people struggled to become persons under the law, the corporation acquired rights belonging to We the People and ultimately became superhuman, still maintaining an artificially elevated status for a small number of people.
Today the work of corporatists is to take this system global. Having acquired the ability to govern in the United States, the corporation is the ideal instrument to gain control of the rest of the world. The concepts, laws, and techniques perfected by the ruling minority here are now being forced down the throats of people everywhere. First, a complicit ruling elite is co-opted, installed, or propped up by the US military and the government. Then, just as slavery and immigrant status once kept wages nonexistent or at poverty levels, now sweatshops, maquiladoras, and the prison-industrial complex provide ultra-cheap labor with little or no regulation. Just as sharecropping and the company store once kept people trapped in permanently subservient production roles, now the International Monetary Fund and World Bank's structural adjustment programs keep entire countries in permanent debt, the world's poorest people forced to feed interest payments to the world's richest while their own families go hungry. Just as genocide was waged against native populations that lived sustainably on the land, now wars are instigated against peoples and regimes that resist the so-called “free trade” mantra because they have the audacity to hold their own ideas about governance and resource distribution. Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and divisive religious, ethnic, ideological, and cultural distrust were all intentionally instituted to prevent people from making common cause against the ruling minority, and those systems continue their destructive work today.
What would change if corporations did not have personhood? The first and main effect would be that a barrier would be removed that is preventing democratic change — just as the abolition of slavery tore down an insurmountable legal block, making it possible to pass laws to provide full rights to the newly freed slaves. After corporate personhood is abolished, new legislation will be possible. Here are a few examples. If “corporate persons” no longer had First Amendment right of free speech, we could prohibit all corporate political activity, such as lobbying and contributions to political candidates and parties. If “corporate persons” were not protected against search without a warrant under the Fourth Amendment, then corporate managers couldn't turn OSHA and the EPA inspectors away if they make surprise, unscheduled searches. If “corporate persons” weren't protected against discrimination under the 14th Amendment, corporations like Wal-Mart couldn't force themselves into communities that don't want them.
So what can we do to abolish corporate personhood? Within our current legal system there are two possibilities: the Supreme Court could change its mind on corporations having rights in the Constitution, and/or we can pass an amendment to the Constitution. Either scenario seems daunting, yet it is even more difficult than that. Every state now has laws and language in their state constitutions conceding these rights to corporations. So corporate personhood must be abolished on a state as well as a national level. The good news is that almost anything we do towards abolishing corporate personhood helps the issue progress on one of these levels. If a city passes a non-binding resolution, declaring their area a “Corporate Personhood Free Zone,” that is a step toward passing a constitutional amendment at their state and eventually at the national level. If a town passes an ordinance legally denying corporations rights as persons, they may provoke a crisis of jurisdiction that could lead to a court case. We think both paths should be followed. However, it was undemocratic for the Supreme Court to grant personhood to corporations, and it would be just as undemocratic for this to be decided that way again. An amendment is the democratic way to correct this judicial usurpation of the people's sovereignty.
As the rights of human persons in the US are diminished and restricted by the Patriot Act on the one hand, they are also squeezed by corporate personhood on the other. We, the real people, have our rights caught between a rock and a hard place, while the rights of the corporate person continue to expand.
These systems of oppression weren't established overnight; they were gradually and sometimes surreptitiously introduced and refined in ways that made them acceptable. At the time of the Constitution, corporations were widely reviled, but a century later they were a commonplace business institution, and a century after that they've become our invisible government. They accomplished this over decades, changing the law incrementally when most people weren't looking.
Resistance to these oppressions evolved in a similar way. Those who wished to end slavery, for example, worked for many years collecting information, refining their analysis, and debating among themselves. They came to understand the issue as one of human rights and that the whole institution of slavery was fundamentally wrong. They didn't come up with a Slavery Regulatory Agency or voluntary codes of conduct for slave owners. They called themselves Abolitionists — the whole thing had to go.
We look at corporate personhood the same way. We see that corporate personhood was wrongly given — not by We the People, but by nine Supreme Court judges. We further see that corporate personhood is destructive, because it was the pivotal achievement that allowed an artificial entity to obtain the rights of people, thus relegating us to subhuman status. And finally, because of the way corporate personhood has enabled corporations to govern us, we must eradicate it.
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person. Like abolishing slavery, the work of eradicating corporate personhood takes us to the deepest questions of what it means to be human. And if we are to live in a democracy, what does it mean to be sovereign? The hardest part of eliminating corporate personhood is believing that We the People have the sovereign right to do this. It comes down to us being clear about who's in charge.
The history of the United States could be told as the story of who is and who is not a person under law. Women, poor people, slaves, and even corporations had long been considered persons for purposes of following the law. This is because early laws were written “No person shall . . .” Corporate lawyers had tried to avoid these laws by claiming corporations were not persons and therefore not required to follow the law. So it was decided that for purposes of following the law, corporations were persons. This allowed corporations to sue and be sued in court among other things. But corporations were not persons with rights in the law, and neither were women, slaves, indentured servants, or poor people. We know some of the ongoing story of human beings' struggle to gain the rights of persons under law, but how did corporations gain these rights?
To understand the phenomenon of corporate personhood, we start by looking at the foundation of US law, the Constitution. This document was written by 55 gentlemen cleverly described by one historian as “the well-bred, the well-fed, the well-read, and the well-wed.” As some of the wealthiest, most privileged people in the new country, they were highly aware that their power had everything to do with how much property they owned — land, crops, buildings, personal goods, and, for most of them, property in the form of human beings, their slaves. As some of the best-educated men in the world, at least by European standards, they also knew a lot about democracy, and they understood what a threat the real thing represented to their personal power. The kind of democracy they prized and wrote about so eloquently could only be practiced by people like them — certainly not by the rabble. Many of them wrote and spoke at length about the inability of the common people to be self-governing.
So the word “democracy” appears nowhere in the Constitution. What they created was a republic designed to protect property, not people. This didn't play very well with many people in the new United States — at least half of the population was very much opposed to the Constitution. They could see how much power it would take away from them, how much it would compromise the democratic ideals in the Declaration of Independence, and they wanted no part of it. But the Federalists who proposed the Constitution had the finances and the unity to promote their ideas strongly. After a lot of politicking they got the Constitution ratified — but only with the assurance that a Bill of Rights would be added to protect people from the abuses by the government that would be possible under the new system. So let's look at the basic structure they created to protect property.
The Constitution only mentions two entities: We the People and the government. The people are on one side of a line, and we are sovereign and have individual rights. On the other side of the line is the government, which is accountable to the people and has specific duties to perform to the satisfaction of the people. We delegate some of our power to the government in order to perform tasks we want government to do. In a representative democracy, this system should work just fine.
The problem is that the phrase “We the People” is not defined in the Constitution. In 1787, in order to be considered one of “We the People” and have rights in the Constitution, you had to be an adult male with white skin and a certain amount of property. (The states determined who could vote; some states had religious restrictions.) At the time of the Constitution, this narrowed “We the People” down to about 10% of the population. Those who owned property, including human property, were very clear that this was rule by the minority — and that's the way they wanted it.
So here is the first definition of who gets to be a person in the United States. Ninety percent of the people — all the immigrants, indentured servants, slaves, minors, Native Americans, women, and people who don't own property (the poor) — are, legally, not persons. They were not persons with rights, but were persons for following the law. They're like subhumans. The law didn't label people this way in so many words — which is part of the brilliance of the system and why it's lasted so long — but the net effect was clear. By allowing only wealthy, white males to be “persons,” a class system was put in place.
Those who could vote in the republic were able to elect people for the House of Representatives. So the United States held within its republican form the possibility of democracy. More human beings could become part of We the People. And they did. It was not easily won, but eventually all adult citizens became legal persons.
Without using the words “slave” or “slavery,” the Constitution ensures that even if slaves get to free soil, their status as property remains the same. This is just one of the clauses defining property in the Constitution. It also defines contracts, labor, commerce, money, copyright, and war as the province of the federal government. So the Constitution, the foundation of all US law, was not written to protect people — it was written to protect property. The Constitution does contain some protection for people in Section 9, but the Bill of Rights is the concentration of rights for We the People.
Most people believe that the Constitution — specifically, the Bill of Rights — guarantees our rights to freedom of speech, religion, and press, to peaceably assemble, and so forth. People of all political stripes say this. But the truth is, it does no such thing. Almost all of our constitutional protections are expressed as the absence of a negative rather than the presence of a positive. So the First Amendment, for example, does not say, “All citizens are guaranteed the right to free speech”; it only says, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . .” The First Amendment just restricts the government from specific encroachments; it doesn't guarantee anything. This was not a concern for the people because they had strong bills of rights in their state constitutions, and at that time, the states had more power than the federal government. The US Constitution allowed slavery throughout the United States, for example, but it was each state's constitution that created free or slave states. Over time, however, the states have lost power to the federal government. The federal laws are now usually ruled to supercede the states' laws. The federal Bill of Rights is where we look to protect our freedoms. The lack of positive protection of these rights weakens them greatly.
If those rights were actually guaranteed in the Constitution, people could, for example, take the Bill of Rights into the workplace, but we can't. Anyone who thinks workers have free speech while they're on corporate property should ask the workers or talk to a union organizer. Because corporations are property, and because the Constitution protects property rights above all, most people have to abandon the Bill of Rights in order to make a living. The way different groups of people — like African Americans and women — have, one by one, acquired rights and become persons under the law is by getting protection from abuse by the government, usually through amendments to the Constitution — not a guarantee.
Another word that appears nowhere in the Constitution is “corporation,” and the reason is that the writers of the Constitution had no interest in using for-profit corporations to run their new government. In colonial times, corporations were tools of the king's oppression, chartered for the purpose of exploiting the so-called “New World” and shoveling wealth back into Europe. The rich formed joint-stock corporations to distribute the enormous risk of colonizing the Americas and gave them names like the Hudson Bay Company, the British East India Company, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Because they were so far from their sovereign — the king — the agents for these corporations had a lot of autonomy to do their work; they could pass laws, levy taxes, and even raise armies to manage and control property and commerce. They were not popular with the colonists.
So the writers of the Constitution left control of corporations to state legislatures (10th Amendment), where they would get the closest supervision by the people. Early corporate charters were very explicit about what a corporation could do, how, for how long, with whom, where, and when. Corporations could not own stock in other corporations, and they were prohibited from any part of the political process. Individual stockholders were held personally liable for any harms done in the name of the corporation, and most charters only lasted for 10 or 15 years. But most importantly, in order to receive the profit-making privileges the shareholders sought, their corporations had to represent a clear benefit for the public good, such a building a road, canal, or bridge. And when corporations violated any of these terms, their charters were frequently revoked by the state legislatures.
That sounds nothing like the corporations of today, so what happened in the last two centuries? As time passed and memories of royal oppression faded, the wealthy people increasingly started eyeing corporations as a convenient way to shield their personal fortunes. They could sniff the winds of change and see that their minority rule through property ownership was under serious threat of being diluted. States gradually started loosening property requirements for voting, so more and more white men could participate in the political process. Women were publicly agitating for the right to vote. In 1865 the 13th Amendment was ratified, freeing the slaves. Three years later, the 14th Amendment provided citizenship rights to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and two years after that, the 15th Amendment provided voting rights to black males. Change was afoot, and so the ruling class responded.
During and after the Civil War there was a rapid increase in the number and size of corporations, and this form of business was starting to become a more important way of holding and protecting property and power. Increasingly through their corporations, the wealthy started influencing legislators, bribing public officials, and employing lawyers to write new laws and file court cases challenging the existing laws that restricted corporate behavior. Bit by bit, decade by decade, state legislatures increased corporate charter length while they decreased corporate liability and reduced citizen authority over corporate structure, governance, production, and labor.
But minority rulers were only going to be able to go just so far with this strategy. Because corporations are a creation of the government — chartered by the state legislatures — they still fell on the government side of the constitutional line with duties accountable to the people. If minority rule by property was going to be accomplished through corporations, they had to become entitled to rights instead, which required them to cross the line and become persons under the law. And their tool to do this was the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868. From then it took the ruling class less than 20 years to shift corporations from the duty side of the line, where they're accountable to the people, to the rights side, where they get protection from government abuse.
The 14th Amendment, in addition to saying that now all persons born or naturalized in the US are citizens, says that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law; nor deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.” The phrase about not depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without the due process of the law is exactly the same wording as the Fifth Amendment, which protects people from that kind of abuse by the federal government; now with the 14th Amendment, the states can't abuse people in that way, either. These are important rights; they're written in a short, straightforward manner; and after the Civil War and all the agony over slavery, the people in the states that ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were clear that they were about righting the wrong of slavery.
But that clarity didn't stop the railroad barons and their attorneys in the 1870s and '80s. As mentioned before, those who wanted to maintain minority rule were losing their grip. There was real danger of democracy creeping into the body politic. Until the Civil War, slavery was essential to maintaining the entire economic system that kept wealth and power in the hands of the few — not just in the South, but in the North as well. It was the legalization of a lie — that one human being can own another. Slavery was at the core of a whole system of oppression that benefitted the few, which included the subjugation of women, genocide of the indigenous population, and exploitation of immigrants and the poor. Now that the slavery lie could no longer be used to maintain minority rule, they needed a new lie, and they used the 14th Amendment to create it. Because these rights to due process and equal protection were so valuable, the definition of the word “person” in the 14th Amendment became the focus of hundreds of legal battles for the next 20 years. The question was: who gets to be a person protected by the 14th Amendment.
The watershed moment came in 1886 when the Supreme Court ruled on a case called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. The case itself was not about corporate personhood, although many before it had been, and the Court had ruled that corporations were not persons under the 14th Amendment. Santa Clara, like many railroad cases, was about taxes. But before the Court delivered its decision, the following statement is attributed to Chief Justice Waite: “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.” The statement appeared in the header of the case in the published version, and the Court made its ruling on other grounds. How this statement appeared in the header of the case is a matter of some mystery and competing theories, but because it was later cited as precedent, corporate personhood became the accepted legal doctrine of the land.
What was it in the 14th Amendment that was so valuable to corporate lawyers and managers? Why did they pursue it so aggressively? At the time, as is still true today, corporations were chartered by state governments, and the 14th Amendment reads “No state shall . . . ” If the word “person” in the 14th Amendment included corporations, then no state shall deny to corporations due process or equal protection of the laws. This allowed corporate lawyers to allege discrimination whenever a state law was enacted to curtail corporations. But this was also the beginning of federal regulatory agencies, so because corporations were now persons under the 14th Amendment, it would be discriminatory not to give them the same rights under federal laws. With the granting of the 5th Amendment right to due process (Noble v. Union River Logging, 1893), corporate lawyers could challenge — and the Supreme Court could find grounds to overturn — democratically legislated laws that originated at the federal as well as state levels.
Corporations acquired legal personhood at a time when all women, all Native Americans, and even most African American men were still denied the right to vote. And this was not an era of good feelings between the average person and corporations. It was the time of the robber barons, and the Supreme Court was filled with former railroad lawyers. It was the time of the Knights of Labor and the Populist movement. 1886 was the year of the Haymarket Massacre, the Great Southwestern Strike, and the next year the Pullman Strike. The people were struggling for real democracy and the wealthy ruling class did whatever it took to keep them down.
Ten years later, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court established the “separate but equal” doctrine that legalized racial segregation through what were known as “Jim Crow” laws. In less than 30 years, African Americans had effectively lost their legal personhood rights while corporations had acquired them. And for those still wondering whether the primary purpose of the Constitution and the body of law it spawned is about protecting property rather than people, consider this. Of the hundreds of 14th Amendment cases heard in the Supreme Court in the first 50 years after its adoption, less than one-half of one percent invoked it in protection of African Americans, and more than 50% asked that its benefits be extended to corporations. “Equal protection under the law” turns out to mean: whoever has enough money to go to the Supreme Court to fight for it. Railroad robber barons did; women didn't; and African Americans most certainly didn't. In fact, the pattern over more than two centuries of US legal history is that people acquire rights by amendment to the Constitution — a long and difficult, but democratic, process — and corporations acquire them by Supreme Court decisions.
Once corporations had jumped the constitutional line from the government side to the people side, their lawyers proceeded to pursue the Bill of Rights through more Supreme Court cases. As mentioned above, in 1893 they were assured 5th Amendment protection of due process. In 1906 they got 4th Amendment search and seizure protection (Hale v. Henkel). In 1922 they got the “takings” clause of the 5th Amendment (Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon), and a regulatory law was deemed to be a “takings.” In 1936 (Grosjean v. American Press Co.) and 1947 (Taft-Hartley Act) they started getting First Amendment protections.
In 1976 the Supreme Court determined in Buckley v. Valeo that money spent for political purposes is equal to exercising free speech, and since “corporate persons” have First Amendment rights, they can contribute as much money as they want to overturn ballot initiatives or referenda (First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti). Every time “corporate persons” acquire one of these protections under the Bill of Rights, it gives them a whole new way of exploiting the legal system in order to maintain minority rule through corporate power. And since 1886, every time people have won new rights — like the Civil Rights Act — corporations are eligible for it, too.
It is important to remember what a corporation is to understand the implications of corporate personhood for democracy. A corporation is not a real thing; it's a legal fiction, an abstraction. You can't see or hear or touch or smell a corporation — it's just an idea that people agree to and put into writing. Because legal personhood has been conferred upon an abstraction that can be redefined at will under the law, corporations have become superhumans in our world. A corporation can live forever. It can change its identity in a day. It can cut off parts of itself — even its head — and actually function better than before. It can also cut off parts of itself and from those parts grow new selves. It can own others of its own kind and it can merge with others of its own kind. It doesn't need fresh air to breathe or clean water to drink or safe food to eat. It doesn't fear illness or death. It can have simultaneous residence in many different nations. It's not male, female, or even transgendered. Without giving birth it can create children and even parents. If it's found guilty of a crime, it cannot go to prison.
Corporations are whatever those who have the power to define want them to be to maintain minority rule through corporations. As long as superhuman “corporate persons” have rights under the law, the vast majority of people have little or no effective voice in our political arena, which is why we see abolishing corporate personhood as so important to ending corporate rule and building a more democratic society.When the Constitution was written and corporations were part of the government, having duties to perform to the satisfaction of the people, the primary technique for enforcing minority rule was to establish that only a tiny percentage could qualify as “We the People” — in other words, that most people were subhuman. As different groups of people struggled to become persons under the law, the corporation acquired rights belonging to We the People and ultimately became superhuman, still maintaining an artificially elevated status for a small number of people.
Today the work of corporatists is to take this system global. Having acquired the ability to govern in the United States, the corporation is the ideal instrument to gain control of the rest of the world. The concepts, laws, and techniques perfected by the ruling minority here are now being forced down the throats of people everywhere. First, a complicit ruling elite is co-opted, installed, or propped up by the US military and the government. Then, just as slavery and immigrant status once kept wages nonexistent or at poverty levels, now sweatshops, maquiladoras, and the prison-industrial complex provide ultra-cheap labor with little or no regulation. Just as sharecropping and the company store once kept people trapped in permanently subservient production roles, now the International Monetary Fund and World Bank's structural adjustment programs keep entire countries in permanent debt, the world's poorest people forced to feed interest payments to the world's richest while their own families go hungry. Just as genocide was waged against native populations that lived sustainably on the land, now wars are instigated against peoples and regimes that resist the so-called “free trade” mantra because they have the audacity to hold their own ideas about governance and resource distribution. Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and divisive religious, ethnic, ideological, and cultural distrust were all intentionally instituted to prevent people from making common cause against the ruling minority, and those systems continue their destructive work today.
What would change if corporations did not have personhood? The first and main effect would be that a barrier would be removed that is preventing democratic change — just as the abolition of slavery tore down an insurmountable legal block, making it possible to pass laws to provide full rights to the newly freed slaves. After corporate personhood is abolished, new legislation will be possible. Here are a few examples. If “corporate persons” no longer had First Amendment right of free speech, we could prohibit all corporate political activity, such as lobbying and contributions to political candidates and parties. If “corporate persons” were not protected against search without a warrant under the Fourth Amendment, then corporate managers couldn't turn OSHA and the EPA inspectors away if they make surprise, unscheduled searches. If “corporate persons” weren't protected against discrimination under the 14th Amendment, corporations like Wal-Mart couldn't force themselves into communities that don't want them.
So what can we do to abolish corporate personhood? Within our current legal system there are two possibilities: the Supreme Court could change its mind on corporations having rights in the Constitution, and/or we can pass an amendment to the Constitution. Either scenario seems daunting, yet it is even more difficult than that. Every state now has laws and language in their state constitutions conceding these rights to corporations. So corporate personhood must be abolished on a state as well as a national level. The good news is that almost anything we do towards abolishing corporate personhood helps the issue progress on one of these levels. If a city passes a non-binding resolution, declaring their area a “Corporate Personhood Free Zone,” that is a step toward passing a constitutional amendment at their state and eventually at the national level. If a town passes an ordinance legally denying corporations rights as persons, they may provoke a crisis of jurisdiction that could lead to a court case. We think both paths should be followed. However, it was undemocratic for the Supreme Court to grant personhood to corporations, and it would be just as undemocratic for this to be decided that way again. An amendment is the democratic way to correct this judicial usurpation of the people's sovereignty.
As the rights of human persons in the US are diminished and restricted by the Patriot Act on the one hand, they are also squeezed by corporate personhood on the other. We, the real people, have our rights caught between a rock and a hard place, while the rights of the corporate person continue to expand.
These systems of oppression weren't established overnight; they were gradually and sometimes surreptitiously introduced and refined in ways that made them acceptable. At the time of the Constitution, corporations were widely reviled, but a century later they were a commonplace business institution, and a century after that they've become our invisible government. They accomplished this over decades, changing the law incrementally when most people weren't looking.
Resistance to these oppressions evolved in a similar way. Those who wished to end slavery, for example, worked for many years collecting information, refining their analysis, and debating among themselves. They came to understand the issue as one of human rights and that the whole institution of slavery was fundamentally wrong. They didn't come up with a Slavery Regulatory Agency or voluntary codes of conduct for slave owners. They called themselves Abolitionists — the whole thing had to go.
We look at corporate personhood the same way. We see that corporate personhood was wrongly given — not by We the People, but by nine Supreme Court judges. We further see that corporate personhood is destructive, because it was the pivotal achievement that allowed an artificial entity to obtain the rights of people, thus relegating us to subhuman status. And finally, because of the way corporate personhood has enabled corporations to govern us, we must eradicate it.
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person. Like abolishing slavery, the work of eradicating corporate personhood takes us to the deepest questions of what it means to be human. And if we are to live in a democracy, what does it mean to be sovereign? The hardest part of eliminating corporate personhood is believing that We the People have the sovereign right to do this. It comes down to us being clear about who's in charge.
January 23, 2010
Put Parliament Back to Work: Throw Out the Harper War Criminals! by Dave McKee President, Canadian Peace Congress 22 January 2010
For the second year in a row, the minority Harper government is proroguing Parliament to avoid a crisis of confidence. Last year, the issue was outrage over the Conservatives' economic update, which sought to solve the economic crisis on the backs of working people. This time, the issue is the ongoing scrutiny into allegations of Canada's involvement in the torture of Afghan detainees.
The Canadian Peace Congress adds its voice to those of the labour movement, hundreds of progressive social and community organizations, and millions of Canadians who condemn this suspension of democracy as a move by the Conservatives to continue the war in Afghanistan, to avoid real solutions to the economic crisis and climate change, and to body-check Richard Colvin's explosive allegations that Canada and NATO have committed war crimes. We join in the call for ongoing and escalating protests against the Harper government, with a view to unifying all progressive forces into a movement that can throw out the minority Conservatives at the earliest opportunity.
The unjust, imperialist war in Afghanistan must be ended now – Canadian soldiers must be brought home immediately. The cost of the war currently tops $1.5 billion per year. Military spending in Canada is at its highest level since the Second World War, over $21 billion per year, and the Harper government wants to increase it even more. Harper's Canada First Defence Strategy commits the Canadian people to paying for 25 years of annual increases in military spending, to the tune of half a trillion dollars. These funds are needed – and available – to pay for Canada's eroding infrastructure and social service. They are needed for increases in EI and CPP levels, that can guarantee working people a dignified life through an economic crisis that they did not create.
Parliament must hold an immediate and full public inquiry into the allegations of Canadian participation in torture in Afghanistan. Torture is a war crime. If these allegations are found to be true – which seem likely – the government ministers and military leaders involved must be brought to trial.
As we stated during the prorogue in December 2008:
“The Canadian Peace Congress considers that an economic program to protect Canadians from the economic crisis will be successful if it also includes measures to reverse and reduce the Conservative policy of militarization of the economy. Militarism is an impediment, not a stimulus, to the economic expansion and job creation that can only come from public investment in infrastructure, public housing, public transit, environmental projects, justice for Aboriginal peoples, child care, public education, anti-poverty measures, and capital investments in peaceful production.”
This is a crucial moment. The labour movement and its allies, including the peace movement, must work to build a united, growing mass mobilization and action against the Harper Conservatives. A new and better world is needed.
Canadian Peace Congress Executive Council
January 22, 2010
About the Canadian Peace Congress:
The Canadian Peace Congress was formed in 1949 as an organization of Canadian people that works for world peace and disarmament. We maintain that peace, not militarism and war, is the guarantor of democracy, human rights, and social and economic justice. The Congress is affiliated to the World Peace Council and is a founding member of the Canadian Peace Alliance.
For more information on the Canadian Peace Congress, or to join, please contact:
Dave McKee
President, Canadian Peace Congress
dmckee@canadianpeacecongress.ca
January 19, 2010
Fidel Castro Ruz January 16, 2010: Cooperation Spirit Is Put To The Test In Haiti, Cuban News Agency
The news reported from Haiti describe a great chaos that was to be expected, given the exceptional situation created in the aftermath of the catastrophe.
At first, a feeling of surprise, astonishment and commotion set in. A desire to offer immediate assistance came up in the farthest places of the Earth. What assistance should be sent –and how- to a Caribbean nation from China, India, Vietnam and other countries that are tens of thousands of kilometers away? The magnitude of the earthquake and the poverty that exists in that country generated at first some ideas about probable needs, which gave rise to all types of promises that are possible in terms of resources that later on are tried to be conveyed through every possible way.
We Cubans understood that the most important thing at that moment was to save lives, and we are trained not only to cope with catastrophes like that, but also to cope with other natural catastrophes related to human health.
Hundreds of Cuban doctors were working there, along with quite a number of young Haitians of humble origin, who had become well trained health professionals, an area in which, for many years now, we have been cooperating with that neighboring and sister nation. Some of our compatriots were on vacations, while other Haitians were being trained or studying in Cuba.
The destruction caused by the earthquake exceeded all calculations: the humble clay and adobe houses –in a city with almost two million inhabitants- could not stand. The solid government facilities collapsed; entire blocks of houses crumbled over their tenants who, at that time of the day -almost at dusk- were inside their homes; and they were all buried, dead or alive, under the rubble. The streets were filled with people claiming for help. The MINUSTAH -the UN contingent- the government and the police were left without leaders or headquarters. Soon after the earthquake, the main task of those institutions made up by thousands of persons was to know who were still alive and where they were.
The immediate decision adopted by the dedicated Cuban doctors who worked in Haiti, as well as by the young health professionals from Haiti who had graduated in Cuba, was to establish contact among them, know about each other’s fate and wonder what were the resources available to assist the Haitian people in the midst of that tragedy.
The Cuban doctors who were on vacation in Cuba as well as the Haitian doctors who were taking their specialization courses in our homeland immediately readied themselves to leave for Haiti. Other Cuban surgery experts, who had accomplished difficult missions, volunteered to accompany them. Suffice it to say that in less than 24 hours our doctors had already assisted hundreds of patients. Today, January 16, only three and a half days after the tragedy, there were already thousands of people injured who had been assisted by them.
Today, Saturday, at noon time, the head of our medical brigade reported to us, among other data, the following:
“…the work that is being done by our comrades is really commendable. The general opinion is that the Pakistani earthquake has been put in the shade – that was another huge earthquake, and some of these doctors worked there. In that country, many a time our doctors assisted patients with fractures whose bones were not well knitted together, or who had been crushed. But here reality has exceeded the imaginable: amputations abound, surgeries are being performed virtually out in the public. This is the image they envisaged of a war.”
“…The ‘Delmas 33 Hospital’ is already operational. It has three operating rooms, its own power generation plants, doctors’ visits areas, etcetera, but is absolutely full.”
“Twelve Chilean doctors have joined in. One of them is an anesthesiologist. There are also eight Venezuelan doctors and nine Spanish nuns. It was expected that, at any moment, 18 Spanish, to whom the UN and the Haitian Public Health authorities had handed over the control of the hospital, would come, but they lacked some emergency supplies that had not arrived, so they have decided to join us and start working immediately.”
“Thirty two Haitian resident doctors were sent in; six of them were going straight to Carrefour, a place that was totally devastated. Traveling with them were also the three Cuban surgical teams that arrived here yesterday.”
“…we are operating the following medical facilities at Port au Prince:
‘La Renaissance’ Hospital.
The Social Insurance Hospital.
The Peace Hospital.”
“…Four Comprehensive Diagnostics Centers are already working”.
This information gives only an idea of the work that is being carried out by the medical staff from Cuba and those from other countries working with them, who were among the first to arrive in that nation. Our medical personnel is ready to cooperate and join forces with all other health specialists who have been sent to save lives in that sister nation. Haiti could become an example of what humankind can do for itself. The possibility and the means exist; but willingness is missing.
The longer it takes to bury or incinerate the corpses and to distribute food and other vital supplies, the higher the risks of epidemics and social violence will be.
Haiti will put to the test the endurance of the cooperation spirit before egoism, chauvinism, ignoble interests and contempt for other nations prevail.
A climate change jeopardizes the whole humankind. The earthquake at Port au Prince, hardly three weeks after the Copenhagen conference, is reminding all of us how selfishly and arrogantly we behaved then.
Countries are taking a close look at all that is happening in Haiti. The world’s public opinion and peoples’ criticisms will be ever harsher and unforgiving.
Fidel Castro Ruz
January 16, 2010
7:46 p.m.
January 17, 2010
IMF to Haiti: Freeze Public Wages posted by Richard Kim, The Nation, 01/15/2010
Since a devastating earthquake rocked Haiti on Tuesday--killing tens of thousands of people--there's been a lot of well-intentioned chatter and twitter about how to help Haiti. Folks have been donating millions of dollars to Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti (by texting "YELE" to 501501) or to the Red Cross (by texting "HAITI" to 90999) or to Paul Farmer's extraordinary Partners in Health, among other organizations. I hope these donations continue to pour in, along with more money, food, water, medicine, equipment and doctors and nurses from nations around the world. The Obama administration has pledged at least $100 million in aid and has already sent thousands of soldiers and relief workers. That's a decent start.
But it's also time to stop having a conversation about charity and start having a conversation about justice--about recovery, responsibility and fairness. What the world should be pondering instead is: What is Haiti owed?
Haiti's vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor--by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.
Now, in its attempts to help Haiti, the IMF is pursuing the same kinds of policies that made Haiti a geography of precariousness even before the quake. To great fanfare, the IMF announced a new $100 million loan to Haiti on Thursday. In one crucial way, the loan is a good thing; Haiti is in dire straits and needs a massive cash infusion. But the new loan was made through the IMF's extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.
For Haiti, this is history repeated. As historians have documented, the impoverishment of Haiti began in the earliest decades of its independence, when Haiti's slaves and free gens de couleur rallied to liberate the country from the French in 1804. But by 1825, Haiti was living under a new kind of bondage--external debt. In order to keep the French and other Western powers from enforcing an embargo, it agreed to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave owners (yes, that's right, freed slaves were forced to compensate their former masters for their liberty). In order to do that, they borrowed millions from French banks and then from the US and Germany. As Alex von Tunzelmann pointed out, "by 1900, it [Haiti] was spending 80 percent of its national budget on repayments."
It took Haiti 122 years, but in 1947 the nation paid off about 60 percent, or 90 million francs, of this debt (it was able to negotiate a reduction in 1838). In 2003, then-President Aristide called on France to pay restitution for this sum--valued in 2003 dollars at over $21 billion. A few months later, he was ousted in a coup d'etat; he claims he left the country under armed pressure from the US.
Then of course there are the structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF and World Bank in the 1990s. In 1995, for example, the IMF forced Haiti to cut its rice tariff from 35 percent to 3 percent, leading to a massive increase in rice-dumping, the vast majority of which came from the United States. As a 2008 Jubilee USA report notes, although the country had once been a net exporter of rice, "by 2005, three out of every four plates of rice eaten in Haiti came from the US." During this period, USAID invested heavily in Haiti, but this "charity" came not in the form of grants to develop Haiti's agricultural infrastructure, but in direct food aid, furthering Haiti's dependence on foreign assistance while also funneling money back to US agribusiness.
A 2008 report from the Center for International Policy points out that in 2003, Haiti spent $57.4 million to service its debt, while total foreign assistance for education, health care and other services was a mere $39.21 million. In other words, under a system of putative benevolence, Haiti paid back more than it received. As Paul Farmer noted in our pages after hurricanes whipped the country in 2008, Haiti is "a veritable graveyard of development projects."
So what can activists do in addition to donating to a charity? One long-term objective is to get the IMF to forgive all $265 million of Haiti's debt (that's the $165 million outstanding, plus the $100 million issued this week). In the short term, Haiti's IMF loans could be restructured to come from the IMF's rapid credit facility, which doesn't impose conditions like keeping wages and inflation down.
Indeed, debt relief is essential to Haiti's future. It recently had about $1.2 billion in debt canceled, but it still owes about $891 million, all of which was lent to the country from 2004 onward. $429 million of that debt is held by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), to whom Haiti is scheduled to make $10 million in payments next year. Obviously, that's money better spent on saving Haitian lives and rebuilding the country in the months ahead; the cancellation of the entire sum would free up precious capital. The US controls about 30 percent of the bank's shares; Latin American and Caribbean countries hold just over 50 percent. Notably, the IDB's loans come from its fund for special operations (i.e. the IDB's donor nations and funds from loans that have been paid back), not from IDB's bonds. Hence, the total amount could be forgiven without impacting the IDB's triple-A credit rating.
Finally, although the Obama administration temporarily halted deportations to Haiti, it hasn't granted Haitians temporary protected status (TPS), which would save them from being deported back to the scene of a disaster for as long as 18 months, allow them to work in the US and, crucially, send money back to relatives in Haiti. In the past, TPS has been given to countries like Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998 after Hurrican Mitch, but it has never been extended to Haitians, even after the 2008 storms, presumably because immigrations officials fear a mass exodus from Haiti.
But decency, as well as fairness, should trump those fears now. As Sunita Patel, an attorney with CCR, told me, "We have granted TPS to El Salavador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan following natural disasters. To apply different rules here would fly in the face of the administration's efforts to build good will abroad."
(UPDATE: It has just been announced that the Obama administration has granted Temporary Protected Status to Haiti. This is a great relief to Haitians in the US and a victory for those who pressured the administration to do so.)
But it's also time to stop having a conversation about charity and start having a conversation about justice--about recovery, responsibility and fairness. What the world should be pondering instead is: What is Haiti owed?
Haiti's vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor--by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.
Now, in its attempts to help Haiti, the IMF is pursuing the same kinds of policies that made Haiti a geography of precariousness even before the quake. To great fanfare, the IMF announced a new $100 million loan to Haiti on Thursday. In one crucial way, the loan is a good thing; Haiti is in dire straits and needs a massive cash infusion. But the new loan was made through the IMF's extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.
For Haiti, this is history repeated. As historians have documented, the impoverishment of Haiti began in the earliest decades of its independence, when Haiti's slaves and free gens de couleur rallied to liberate the country from the French in 1804. But by 1825, Haiti was living under a new kind of bondage--external debt. In order to keep the French and other Western powers from enforcing an embargo, it agreed to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave owners (yes, that's right, freed slaves were forced to compensate their former masters for their liberty). In order to do that, they borrowed millions from French banks and then from the US and Germany. As Alex von Tunzelmann pointed out, "by 1900, it [Haiti] was spending 80 percent of its national budget on repayments."
It took Haiti 122 years, but in 1947 the nation paid off about 60 percent, or 90 million francs, of this debt (it was able to negotiate a reduction in 1838). In 2003, then-President Aristide called on France to pay restitution for this sum--valued in 2003 dollars at over $21 billion. A few months later, he was ousted in a coup d'etat; he claims he left the country under armed pressure from the US.
Then of course there are the structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF and World Bank in the 1990s. In 1995, for example, the IMF forced Haiti to cut its rice tariff from 35 percent to 3 percent, leading to a massive increase in rice-dumping, the vast majority of which came from the United States. As a 2008 Jubilee USA report notes, although the country had once been a net exporter of rice, "by 2005, three out of every four plates of rice eaten in Haiti came from the US." During this period, USAID invested heavily in Haiti, but this "charity" came not in the form of grants to develop Haiti's agricultural infrastructure, but in direct food aid, furthering Haiti's dependence on foreign assistance while also funneling money back to US agribusiness.
A 2008 report from the Center for International Policy points out that in 2003, Haiti spent $57.4 million to service its debt, while total foreign assistance for education, health care and other services was a mere $39.21 million. In other words, under a system of putative benevolence, Haiti paid back more than it received. As Paul Farmer noted in our pages after hurricanes whipped the country in 2008, Haiti is "a veritable graveyard of development projects."
So what can activists do in addition to donating to a charity? One long-term objective is to get the IMF to forgive all $265 million of Haiti's debt (that's the $165 million outstanding, plus the $100 million issued this week). In the short term, Haiti's IMF loans could be restructured to come from the IMF's rapid credit facility, which doesn't impose conditions like keeping wages and inflation down.
Indeed, debt relief is essential to Haiti's future. It recently had about $1.2 billion in debt canceled, but it still owes about $891 million, all of which was lent to the country from 2004 onward. $429 million of that debt is held by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), to whom Haiti is scheduled to make $10 million in payments next year. Obviously, that's money better spent on saving Haitian lives and rebuilding the country in the months ahead; the cancellation of the entire sum would free up precious capital. The US controls about 30 percent of the bank's shares; Latin American and Caribbean countries hold just over 50 percent. Notably, the IDB's loans come from its fund for special operations (i.e. the IDB's donor nations and funds from loans that have been paid back), not from IDB's bonds. Hence, the total amount could be forgiven without impacting the IDB's triple-A credit rating.
Finally, although the Obama administration temporarily halted deportations to Haiti, it hasn't granted Haitians temporary protected status (TPS), which would save them from being deported back to the scene of a disaster for as long as 18 months, allow them to work in the US and, crucially, send money back to relatives in Haiti. In the past, TPS has been given to countries like Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998 after Hurrican Mitch, but it has never been extended to Haitians, even after the 2008 storms, presumably because immigrations officials fear a mass exodus from Haiti.
But decency, as well as fairness, should trump those fears now. As Sunita Patel, an attorney with CCR, told me, "We have granted TPS to El Salavador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan following natural disasters. To apply different rules here would fly in the face of the administration's efforts to build good will abroad."
(UPDATE: It has just been announced that the Obama administration has granted Temporary Protected Status to Haiti. This is a great relief to Haitians in the US and a victory for those who pressured the administration to do so.)
January 15, 2010
Au Honduras, les putschistes se parent de légitimité by Cathy Ceïbe In Honduras, the Putschists Adorn Themselves With Legit
ORIGINAL FRENCH ARTICLE: Au Honduras, les putschistes se parent de légitimité
by Cathy Ceïbe
In Honduras, the Putschists Adorn Themselves With Legitimacy
Translated Friday 1 January 2010, by Leslie Thatcher (www.truthout.org) and reviewed by Henry Crapo
Porfirio Lobo was officially declared "president elect" after the November 29 election, the result of which was not recognized by a large part of the international community.
Forty-two murders, 120 disappearances, 4,000 arbitrary detentions ... Human rights have savagely deteriorated since the June 28 putsch.
Well-known analyst of Honduran political life and sociologist at the Francisco-Morazan Teaching University of Honduras Julio Navarro believes that de facto the regime has no choice but to hold talks with the resistance.
Cathy Ceïbe of L’Humanité:
Do you share the much-publicized idea that the November 29 elections have ended the Honduran political crisis?
Julio Navarro: The authors of the coup d’état believed that elections would settle the crisis because the resistance movement was massive. Otherwise, who can believe that they would have executed this forcible coup to stay in power six months only? But the government of Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo, elected by 33 percent of the population, has a legitimacy problem. That ought to favor dialogue with the forces the resistance represents.
For now, "Pepe" Lobo’s actions are moving away from that prospect ...
Julio Navarro: Porfirio Lobo is not acting that way because he believes that, in time, the international community will digest the situation. I believe he’s mistaken. He finds himself in a position all the more complicated in that his Party, the National Party, certainly has an absolute majority in the Congress, but the latter is controlled by close to 100 deputies (out of 128) that constitute the putschist parliamentary bloc.
What are the sticking points for Honduran society?
Julio Navarro: The rupture of the Constitutional order on June 28 and the Constitutional Assembly. If one looks at this country’s antecedents, in 1924, in 1956, in 1965 and in 1982, four coups d’état led to a Constitutional Assembly. But this time will perhaps be the exception. The bloc constituted by the neoliberals, the nationalists, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats is opposed to that process. On the other hand, attention must be paid to other sectors of society. The military, for example, is in favor of a Constitutional Assembly in order to renegotiate its position. Management also needs it in order to redefine the division of wealth and the role of the State. The Honduran church, linked to Opus Dei, is also involved because it wants to keep control over family planning. The coup d’état highlights antagonistic conceptions of society.
And with respect to social inequalities?
Julio Navarro: They have not thrown the thousands of people demanding a better division of economic wealth into the street. Hence, the importance of the resistance which promotes the idea of a recasting of the state to transform the country and its economy structurally.
Has Honduras been the laboratory for a new form of destabilization?
Julio Navarro: In spite of the decisions by the Organization of American States (OAS) and the UN, the military never felt it was in danger because it has the support of the Pentagon. One may talk about a laboratory in the sense that the popular reaction was tested. The best place to do that was Honduras since that country sets off from the cultural given that public opinion has no tradition of vigilance. Now, if the Honduran people have given the lie to that prejudice, imagine elsewhere ... I do not, however, believe in a domino effect, especially in South America where governments have taken precautions by getting rid of the old generations of military. On the other hand, one must remain attentive to this relationship between the military and economic sectors. The day when they reconnect as in Honduras, where the private sector financed the coup d’état, then there will be danger. Whatever happens, the events in Honduras must first serve as a lesson to the region’s presidents. They question the existence of the OAS given that its intentions have no effect. Finally, by its action, the United States leaves behind a damaged and distressing image.
In Honduras, the Putschists Adorn Themselves With Legitimacy: on the Truthout site.
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