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

"While I have done some work for the government," [John Manley] said of Prime Minister Harper, "I disagree with it on a lot of things." As for the Liberals, they are so angry at Manley for supporting a war Liberals chose and proposing a policy Liberals wound up endorsing that he will probably never be asked to run for them again.

— Inkless Wells

Martin: And these things pass.
Camille: What things?
Martin: These... passing things.

— When Night is Falling

Darren Ell: What message would you like to pass on to Canadian and American readers? In your view, what should they be thinking about if they want to help Haiti?

Patrick Elie: Become citizens in your own countries. You're nothing but consumers. You've lost control of your governments. Open up your eyes and ears to the lies you're being fed about other countries. Also, Canada should stop robbing, literally looting Haiti of its better minds that are so needed here, especially in the last five or 10 years.

— Interview between Darren Ell and Patrick Elie

I've seen Patrick speak; he's fascinating and nuanced in his presentation of the political situation in Haiti.

An alternative path would be for [Canada] to simply remain committed to the values we hold -- and to try to advocate them in the world -- regardless of the contrary direction the United States might take. [Canadian Ambassador to the US Allan] Gotlieb rejects this approach, suggesting instead that we avoid taking positions aimed at creating "counter-weights to U.S. power." Rather, Canada should simply accept U.S. power as "the dominant feature of the contemporary international order" and avoid asserting positions -- even on morally important issues -- that put us at odds with Washington. Even when the U.S. does things that offend our sensibilities and our sense of justice, Gotlieb would apparently have us keep our eyes cast demurely downward.

So if the United States chooses to invade Iraq, to launch a lawless "war on terror," to start an arms race in space or to obstruct worldwide efforts on climate change, Canada should quietly stand by her man. Similarly, we should avoid supporting causes -- like banning land mines or protecting children in combat zones -- for fear that this sort of "sanctimonious" behaviour might annoy Washington. If we want to disagree with our powerful boyfriend, we should whisper softly in his ear, not embarrass him in public. We should confine ourselves to being the manipulative little woman behind the scenes, using our wiles to get what we want from him and using our position of influence over him as our ticket to status in the outside world.

Leaving aside for a minute any skepticism about the effectiveness of such a role -- whether the manipulative little woman really does manage to influence her man -- there is the aching question of what it means for us as a nation to take on this role.

It is hard to imagine a more demeaning vision for a woman -- or a country.

— Linda McQuaig, Holding the Bully's Coat: Canada and the U.S. Empire

I'm enjoying this book, although I think it suffers from an unwillingness to view Canada as a nation that pursues an imperialist agenda over those nations (such as Haiti) where it has the strength to play that role. In McQuaig's worldview, when we're good, it's because Canada is Good! And when we're bad, it's because we're being sycophantic puppets of the U.S.

What does neutrality mean? Do people who publish about malaria deaths need to be neutral about malaria?

— Les Roberts, co-author of The Lancet paper, "Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey"

I am so afraid of people's words.
They describe so distinctly everything:
And this they call dog and that they call house,
here the start and there the end.

I worry about their mockery with words,
they know everything, what will be, what was;
no mountain is still miraculous;
and their house and yard lead right up to God.

I want to warn and object: Let the things be!
I enjoy listening to the sound they are making.
But you always touch: and they hush and stand still.
That's how you kill.

Rilke, In Celebration of Me

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

— Langston Hughes, "A Dream Deferred"

The problem, obvious in retrospect, was the premise on which his entire theory rested: the idea that before healing can happen, everything that existed before needs to be wiped out. [Electro-shock experimenter Ewen] Cameron was sure that if he blasted away at the habits, patterns and memories of his patients, he would eventually arrive at that pristine blank slate. But no matter how doggedly he shocked, drugged and disoriented, he never got there. The opposite proved true: the more he blasted, the more shattered his patients became. Their minds weren't "clean;" rather, they were a mess, their memories fractured, their trust betrayed.

Disaster capitalists share this same inability to distinguish between destruction and creation, between hurting and healing. It's a feeling I had frequently when I was in Iraq, nervously scanning the scarred landscape for the next explosion. Fervent believers in the redemptive powers of shock, the architects of the American-British invasion imagined that their use of force would be so stunning, so overwhelming, that Iraqis would go into a kind of suspended animation, much like the one described in the [CIA interrogation] Kubark manual. In that window of opportunity, Iraq's invaders would slip in another set of shocks -- these ones economic -- which would create a model free-market democracy on the blank slate that was post-invasion Iraq.

But there was no blank slate, only rubble and shattered, angry people -- who, when they resisted, were blasted with more shocks, some of them based on those experiments performed on Gail Kastner all those years ago. "We're really good at going out and breaking things. But the day I get to spend more time here working on construction rather than combat, that will be a very good day," General Peter W. Chiarelli, commander of the U.S. Army's First Cavalry Division, observed a year and a half after the official end of the war. That day never came. Like Cameron, Iraq's shock doctors can destroy, but they can't seem to rebuild.

— Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine

The guest house I stayed at in Haiti had some copies of Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization by Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Tonight, I decided to read the one I purchased while I was there; it's a short book, but a nicely-written one.( Some quotes )

I finished reading How to Save the World in Your Spare Time while waiting in line for my film festival tickets. I enjoyed these quotations:

Life as an activist isn't what anyone would call normal. It is better.

I did not always know this.

I know of groups who have seized on the opportunity of major blizzards to invent meetings to cancel. With major weather events, cancellations are read out on the radio over and over again. "The meeting of the Friends of the Sacred Grove is cancelled due to the weather" is an announcement that gives your group profile -- and may surprise members who did not know there was supposed to be a meeting!

There is a lot of discussion these days about work-life balance. This may well be important if working in a corporate culture. However, I do not think it fits in thinking about our work in the environmental movement. Saving the world is not a nine-to-five commitment. Environmentally aware people do not stop recycling because they are on vacation. [...] This life is not work. This life is life.

After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who -- through some peculiarity of his nature -- instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history. He wants to understand. He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice, and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara, like the youth of the sixties, with indignation. He is a Third Worlder of time. The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past is as unbearable to him as to them the existence of poverty in their present.

Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

As difficult as it may be, when assessing Cheney's actions [...], it's important to resist the temptation to blame it on Cheney's individual "evilness." While immensely fun, explaining Cheney's behavior as "evil" is too simple. More to the point, it reduces complex social phenomena to fairy-tale morality narratives. In the terrorism context for instance, words like "evil" are often lazy shortcuts that people use to avoid grappling with the complexities and structural causes of the problem.

Similarly, dismissing Cheney as "evil" is too easy. Cheney is not some one-time moral aberration, he is the product of deeper, more structural flaws in the American political system. For that reason, we can expect future Cheneys if these fundamental flaws aren't recognized and addressed.

— publius, "Cheney: Beyond Good and Evil"

To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment.

— Chuang Tzu

A riot is a political action lacking in analysis.

-- Eleanor Arnason

I am therefore somewhat uneasy about calling the first half of this volume "Bearing Witness." Some of my anxiety has legitimate sources: the boundary between bearing witness and disrespectful (or self-interested) rooting is not always evident, even to those seeking to be discerning. And, to be honest, writing of the plight of the oppressed is not a particularly effective way of assisting them. As Philippe Bourgois notes, paraphrasing a warning issued by Laura Nader years ago: "Don't study the poor and powerless, because everything you say about them will be used against them." I hope to have avoided lurid recountings that serve little other purpose than to show, as anthropologists love to do, that I was there.

— Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power

Looking through some past interesting quotations:

[...] you can be either a Magic Momma or a Trembling Sister.

[...] Since we are all struggling with the Feminine Imperative, one of the ways achieving women combat the guilt of success is by agreeing to be Magic Mommas.

[Magic Momma]s give to others -- eternally.

[Magic Momma]s are totally selfless.

[Magic Momma]s have infinite time and energy.

[Magic Momma]s love all other women, always.

[Magic Momma]s never get angry at other women.

[Magic Momma]s don't sleep.

[Magic Momma]s never get sick.

If [Magic Momma]s don't fulfill the above conditions, they feel horribly, horribly guilty.

[Magic Momma]s know that they can never do enough.

Like the Victorian mother, the Magic Momma pays for her effectiveness by renouncing her own needs. But these don't go away. The [Magic Momma] feels guilt over her achievements, guilt over not doing more (in fact, this is the common female guilt over not doing everything for everyone) [...]

Meanwhile the Trembling Sister has plenty to be enraged about too. Having avoided the guilt of being effective, she's allowed to feel and express her own needs, but she pays for these "advantages" by an enforced helplessness which requires that somebody fill her needs for her, since she's not allowed to do so herself.

The trouble is that nobody can.

No matter how much being taken care of the [Trembling Sister] manages to wangle out of others, it is never enough. For being taken care of is exactly what she does not need. It reinforces her helplessness, while what she really needs is access to her own effectiveness -- and that is something no one can give another person.

[...]

Put the [Magic Momma] and the [Trembling Sister] together and you get the conventional female role.

You also get trashing.

Trashing in the feminist community has always proceeded from "below" "upwards," directed by the Trembling Sister [...] at the self-elected (or merely supposed) MM. The hidden agenda of trashing is to remain helpless and to fail whatever the ostensible motivation. [...] I believe that trashing, far from being the result of simple envy, arises from a profound ambivalence towards power.

— Joanna Russ, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts

The situation we face is not only one of a struggle for power, it involves a humanitarian crisis and the potential to permanently change the course of Haitian history. President Aristide is clearly a serious aggravating factor in the current crisis and unless he gives dramatic early signs that he is implementing the CARICOM road map then the OAS, CARICOM and possibly UN will have to consider the options including whether a case can be made for the duty to protect.

— confidential memo from Canadian Ambassador to Haiti, Kenneth Cook, to the Canadian Privy Council, February 11th, 2004.

On February 29th, Aristide was out of power.

You excluded me! You deliberately excluded me! Who do you think you are? My high school?

— Diane Flacks, Gravity Calling

According to a new report that will be presented to members of Parliament today by UN Watch, a Geneva-based non-governmental organization, Canadians can be proud that their nation ranks at the very top — in both the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly — for its record of consistent support for positive initiatives, and solid opposition to malicious measures. The study, Human Rights Scorecard: Canada at the UN in 2006-2007, also shows, however, that Canada falls short in its failure to speak out often or strongly enough for victims of most of the world's worst regimes, or to initiate proceedings that would hold violators to account.

— The Globe and Mail, emphasis added