Some time ago, it occurred to me that I live simultaneously in two very different worlds. ( leftist, fannish, or part of the government? )
On Sunday, President Rene Preval chose Ericq Pierre, 63, a respected Haitian economist with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, to be the country's prime minister.
Oh, for Christ's sake. An economist with the IDB?
In THAC, we often have conversations about the almost-stolen election of 2006. Préval is one of the good guys, and there's evidence that the elections officials destroyed many of his ballots. If Haitians had not marched in the streets in protest over fishy early results, the election may have gone very differently. (Canada, by the way, brags about the $30 million that it spent on the elections).
One of the guys in THAC talks about how it's too easy for leftists to say, "Whew, the good guys won. Fight over." Really, Haitians saved the Presidency, but the balance of power in the Senate, municipal and other government bodies was compromised. When Alexis was forced out a few weeks ago, that was a real blow for Lespwa (Préval's new party) and for Lavalas. It's not surprising that the Convergence-dominated senate ganged up on him. How shocking is it that he's been replaced with an IDB economist?
Edit: Here are two leftist analyses of this announcement. This passage, from the second (and quoted in the first) is intersting:
Preval was also pressured to choose Ericq Pierre by several visiting foreign officials such as Alain Joyandel, French Secretary of State for Cooperation and Francophonie, Jose Miguel Insulza, Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), and Miguel Angel Moratinos, Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation.
One of the big issues that's going to emerge in the new few years is that, with both Préval and Aristide now out of the running for next president, Haiti needs the next batch of respected and popular political leaders. One of the reasons I take Lovinsky's kidnapping so hard is that I believe that he could have one day become Haiti's president. He is known, respected and politically connected.
I got two apologies in my email, recently. The first was from WisCon, apologizing for the computer glitchy-ness relating to panel assignments. Me, I think, hey, I know that WisCon is done on a totally volunteer basis, and the still do better than any other con I've been to. So. While apologies are always a mark of class in my mind, it's only icing on an already perfectly chocolaty cake. Maybe I'm just too much in love with WisCon to see any of its faults, but, with me, its credit is so high it'd need to do something horrific to lose my faith. Thank you, WisCon volunteers, for everything you do.
The second apology was from Expedia. Remember how they screwed up my flight last October? How I was on hold for four and a half hours before giving up? Did I mention that I never did get to speak to someone there, and that their first email response was just simply wrong (after taking a week) and my follow-up email was never responded to and that I ultimately had to contact American Airlines directly to get a refund on my ticket.
Well, now, seven months later, they sent me an apology. According to them, their problems have been resolved, and they're offering me a $50 certificate by way of compensation. Unlike WisCon, Expedia is a business, and this, in my opinion, fails to entice me to ever try their service again. Screw you, Expedia.
I'm about 3/4 of the way through The Carhullan Army, which was I picked up primarily because it won this year's Tiptree. I'm enjoying it, but I'm a bit fascinated by how little happens.
I'm a very lazy reader, and if a book can't hook me quickly, I often fail to get into it (I think it's interesting to contrast that with how patient I am as a movie watcher; I'll give a film a lot of time to build a mood or a story).
My cow-orker mentioned to me an announcement by International Development Minister Beverley Oda. Oda is the minister responsible for the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), which I've been following because of its fishy role in Haiti.
The announcement is okay. Canada is giving more food to more people. Haiti will get $10 million. The one part that seems, on face value, to be interesting is that we're going to untie food aid. What that means is that Canadian agencies who get their money from CIDA (such as, for example, the Canadian Feed the Children organization that I donate to) will not be required to buy a certain amount of their food directly from Canadian farmers. My initial read of that is that it sounds like a good thing, but I'd like to see how it plays out (if the US sells us the food, it'll look a bit fishy, for example).
Today, at around 4:45, I read stories in the online forms of the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. A passage in the latter of those two articles stood out to me: a suggestion that a big cause for the rising price of food relates directly efforts at ethanol/biofuel production (which is a big U.S. initiative). The paragraph talked about how Beverley Oda avoided the topic during her announcement.
We had a bit of a conversation in our project room about how ethanol is a very inefficient fuel: it takes far more fossil fuel (in the form of fertilizer) to create the crops from which you derive the ethanol than you'd save by switching a vehicle from gas to ethanol. Our project manager suggested that this is an exercise driven by the wheat lobby, and I buy that.
Half an hour later, I went back to those two articles and that passage was gone. There's another article in the Globe on this topic, but the paragraph has been removed from the original article.
Edit: it looks like the latter article was written by one of the authors of the original piece. Perhaps the author decided to break the point out into a separate story.
Does one say "Poppy Zed Bright" or "Poppy Zee Bright"? Is that a choice the speaker makes, or is the pronunciation determined by the named person?
(I confess, when I want to screw with people's brains, I sometimes say things like "Zed Zed Top", but it's clearer to me, in that case, what the correct pronunciation is).
- Between 1991 and 2001 the City of Toronto grew by 9% but transit funding was cut by half in the same time period. Funding cuts led the TTC to cut the bus fleet by 22% and to close two operating garages.
- The TTC is more reliant on revenues from fares than any other transit system in the developed world.
- The TTC is the only major transit system in the developed world to fund regular operations entirely from the property tax base and from fares.
- In Toronto, 80% of the TTC's operating budget is paid by riders. This compares with 58% in Montreal, 46% in Vancouver, 59% in New York and 52% in Chicago. The Canada-wide average is 62%. In the US, the overall average is 41%.
- Fares have more than doubled since 1990 and ridership has fallen by 10%.
- The Province of Ontario used to provide 50% of the operating costs for the TTC but under the Harris Tories, this was eliminated entirely.
- Capital investment per capita in public transit in Canada, at US$60, is less than half the recent level of investment in Seattle, New York, Denver and San Francisco.
I think that these numbers are a coupl'a years out of date (I think they're for 2005) but I don't think they've changed that much in the last few years.
From Wikipedia:
Until the mid-1990s, the TTC received operational subsides from both the municipal level of government, and the provincial level. When the Harris Conservatives in Ontario ended those subsidies, the TTC was forced to cut-back service, with a significant curtailment put into effect on February 18, 1996 and an increased financial burden was placed on the Municipal government. Since then, the TTC has consistently been in financial difficulties. [...] As a result, the TTC became the largest transit operator in Anglo-America not to receive provincial/state funding (the largest transit operator in the United States not to have this type of funding is the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA))
Dear Dalton,
If you make the legislature vote to force the TTC back to work, I'm gonna want you to explain how you keep avoiding proper funding.
Also:
Dear Mike Harris,
Even your legacy sucks.
What bugs me is the reversed "I've got mine so screw you" meme; there seems to be a "I don't have a secure, well-paid job, so why should the TTC workers?" vibe going around which suggests that we as a citizenry should be content with a lowest common denominator standard, rather than striving towards a place where *everyone* has reasonable compensation and job security.
—
charmingmonstrs, in a locked post (quoted with permission)
There are elements of the TTC strike that I wish had gone down differently. But, more than that, I wish people's attitudes toward collective bargaining and strike action were a lot different than what they are.
I've just submitted my taxes. All done for another year! Yay!
I had a bike rack installed in the parking spot of my condo unit today. Since it was going to be installed in the middle of the day and I needed to be back at my building to point the guy to the right place, I took the car in to work. And since I was driving the car, I offered the_siobhan a ride to her place.
Anyway, we're at an intersection and there's an SUV in front of us, and I said something snarky about the SUV driver's signaling skills. Sio quizzes me about being snarky and I say, "I'm especially critical with anyone who drives an SUV."
Sio: "I get that. It's like how I always squee when I see a Smart Car." And, at that moment, we just happened to pass a Smart Car and Siobhan squee-ed on cue.
I looked over at her, a look of shy apprehension on my face, and said, "My car... is it good enough to be touched?"
And lo, she told me how beautiful my Prius was.
"It's a bit dusty, though," she said after running her hand over the dashboard.
Really good THAC meeting tonight. We had a coupl'a people heavily involved in immigration and refugee work talking about the recent dynamics involving Haitian refugees to Canada (the numbers have really jumped up recently for a variety of complicated reasons).
We're endorsing the No One Is Illegal march on May 3rd, which sounds like it's gonna be cool.
I went out on the weekend and picked up a coupl'a books. I think my brain is full of non-fiction at the moment, so I went to Bakka and got a few sf books. Two were short story collections. I really really really enjoyed Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald", and China Miéville's "Reports Of Certain Events In London." Regarding the latter, I think I'm a sucker for the "documents of the event" story structure; Timothy Findley's The Wars still stands out in my mind.
First grey hair.
CBC has an interview with Peter Hallward (author of Damming the Flood) on The Current. I think it's only an okay interview. Peter Hallward is interviewed in the latter half of Part One (after an interview with Guyler Delva.
Edit: There's also an impassioned review of Damming the Flood on Global Research.
In the name of Venezuela, I have decided to send 200 tons of food to the people of Haiti who are being assaulted by hunger and misery. Brotherly and heroic are the people of Haiti who are already suffering from the attacks of the empire’s global capitalism and the lack of true and profound solidarity from all of us. It is the least we can do for Haiti.
— Hugo Chavez
So, this afternoon I learned about a film, Lost and Delirious, and, fortunately, my DVD place had a copy. It's a Canadian film about three teenage girls in a boarding school, two of whom are in a relationship that ends because one of the girls can't bring herself to come out. It stars Piper Perabo as the broken-hearted Paulie, and it has a few common Canadian actors, including Graham Greene and Jackie Burroughs.
I'm not sure what I think of this movie. On the one hand, it's one of these movies that ends in death, 'cause queerfolk can't have happy endings. On the other hand, it has Ani Difranco in the soundtrack, in a really moving sequence. I'm not sure if it comes off seeming like a caution about The Threat Of Lesbianism, or what.
Forbes magazine has named Haiti one of the world's 10 most dangerous destinations, along with Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.
The Associated Press has called Port-au-Prince the kidnapping capital of the Americas.
The U.S. government maintains a perpetual travel warning on Haiti, while diplomats, journalists and aid workers spend much of their time holed up in fortified hotels.
The image stems largely from two violent years after the 2004 U.S. ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide when the slums of Port-au-Prince erupted in gunbattles between gangs, Haitian police and U.N. peacekeepers, plus a wave of kidnappings.
Today, Haiti's reputation is undeserved, say security analysts and officials from the U.N. peacekeeping mission. They argue that Haiti is no more violent than any other Latin American country.
"It's a big myth," said Fred Blaise, spokesman for the U.N. police force in Haiti. "Port-au-Prince is no more dangerous than any big city. You can go to New York and get pickpocketed and held at gunpoint."
— Reed Lindsay, "BRIEFING: Haiti's image of fear 'a big myth' to some", The Washington Times
You don't see many articles about Haiti that suggest that Haiti's reputation as a dangerous place is over-hyped. This is one of the few.
I met with Reed Lindsay during one of my trips to Haiti (he lives there full time). He has some great journalistic insights into the country.
What happens to poor countries when they embrace free trade? In Haiti in 1986 we imported just 7000 tons of rice, the main staple food of the country. The vast majority was grown in Haii. In the late 1980s Haiti complied with free trade policies advocated by the international lending agencies and lifted tariffs on rice imports. Cheaper rice immediately flooded in from the United States where the rice industry is subsidized. In fact the liberalization of Haiti's market coincided with the 1985 Farm Bill in the United States which increased subsidies to the rice industry so that 40% of US rice growers' profits came from the government by 1987. Haiti's peasant farmers could not possibly compete. By 1996 Haiti was importing 196,000 tons of foreign rice at the cost of $100 million a year. Haitian rice production became negligible. Once the dependence on foreign rice was complete, import prices began to rise, leaving Haiti's population, particularly the urban poor, completely at the whim of rising world grain prices. And the prices continue to rise.
What lessons do we learn? For poor countries free trade is not so free or so fair. Haiti, under intense pressure from international lending institutions, stopped protecting its domestic agriculture while subsidies to the U.S. rice industry increased. A hungry nation became hungrier.
In a globalized economy, foreign investment is trumpeted as the key to alleviating poverty. But in fact, the top beneficiary of foreign investment from 1985-95 was the United States, with $477 billion. Britain ran a distant second at $199 billion. Mexico, the only third world country in the top ten, received only $44 billion in investment. When the majority of this money fled the country overnight during Mexico's meltdown in 1995, we learned that foreign investment is not really investment. It is more like speculation.
— Jean Bertand Aristide, Eyes of the Heart
