Much Darkness, Many Candles: What I Can Do

Chris Floyd

I put together this piece -- more like a fragment perhaps -- a few months ago, but I thought it might have some relevance, at some points at least, to current events in Haiti.

As for what you can do, I would suggest continuing to support Partners in Health, which had more than 5,000 people working at the grassroots level in Haiti before the quake. No fair weather friend -- or foul weather tourist -- there. As Ashley Smith notes in a devastating report on the militarist-corporatist--NGO symbiosis that has devastated Haiti for years and is serving it extremely ill in the aftermath of the earthquake:

While some NGOs like Partners in Health have done and are doing amazing work to provide services for quake victims, overall, the catastrophe in Haiti revealed the worst aspects of the U.S. government and the NGO aid industry.

As many analysts have noted, the U.S. in fact used its "relief" operation to disguise a military occupation of Haiti, intended to prevent a flood of refugees reaching the U.S., impose even greater sweatshop development on Haiti, and signal to the rest of Latin America, the Caribbean and the world's most powerful governments that U.S. aims to reassert its power in the region.

As a result, relief aid from the U.S. has played second fiddle to its imperial ambitions--and the NGO-centered aspect of its response is an important part of its strategy.


How to Reach A Larger Audience

Washington's Blog

Stop preaching to the choir! Start reaching a larger audience!

The people you talk with and the websites which publish what you write might think you're great, but the vast majority of people out there aren't hearing it. You're Reaching a Very Small Audience

Communications experts like George Lakoff (who I recently interviewed) and Frank Luntz say that most people don't make political decisions based on fact and logic. Instead, they make decisions based on their ideas of morality and pre-existing "frames" of reference.

So if you are just reciting facts, you are not going to persuade anyone except the minority of people who reason and make decisions based on logic. (You may say "but all of the websites I read and people I talk to make decisions based on logic". Okay, but that only means that you don't read the overwhelming majority of websites or talk to the overwhelming majority of people who make decisions based on other factors. See this and this).


Global Sweatshop Wage Slavery

Stephen Lendman

In its mission statement, the National Labor Committee (NLC) highlights the problem stating:

"Transnational corporations (TNCs) now roam the world to find the cheapest and most vulnerable workers." They're mostly young women in poor countries like China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Haiti, and many others working up to 14 or more hours a day for sub-poverty wages under horrific conditions.

Because TNCs are unaccountable, a dehumanized global workforce is ruthlessly exploited, denied their civil liberties, a living wage, and the right to work in dignity in healthy safe environments. NLC conducts "popular campaigns based on (its) original research to promote worker rights and pressure companies to end human and labor abuses. (It) views worker rights in the global economy as indivisible and inalienable human rights and (believes) now is the time to secure them for all on the planet."


Israel has no legitimacy. Period

Khalid Amayreh

In short, Hamas is against Israel because Israel is evil, not because Israel is Jewish. Any claim or insinuation to the contrary is a lie.

Recent statements by Palestinian Islamic leader Professor Aziz Duweik about the possibility of amending or even abandoning some clauses in Hamas’s charter have elicited a plethora of reactions in occupied Palestine and abroad. Some hostile groups have been quick to conclude that Hamas is now willing to recognize the legitimacy of Israel. Moreover, PA propaganda organs have deliberately twisted Duweik’s remarks, claiming that Hamas is finally following the footsteps of the PLO.

Well, the truth is that none of this is true since sidestepping or even abandoning the so-called “Hamas charter” should never be confused with the Islamic liberation movement’s principled stance on the Zionist entity.

To begin with, the so-called Hamas’s charter was not a “Quran” or a religiously-binding constitution that must be followed meticulously. Nor was it an immutable ideological constant that any deviation from it would consign the deviator to hellfire for eternity.

In fact, the charter was no more than a hastily-formulated mobilizing document issued in the beginning of the first intifada in 1988 for the purpose of recruiting and encouraging people to resist the Israeli occupation.

Therefore, the charter should not be viewed as especially sacred or misconstrued as an inviolable covenant. And while many people would readily accept its basic premises especially with regard to Israel, namely that Israel is essentially an illegitimate body that must be eliminated, others would perfectly legitimately voice reservations concerning the stringent wording of the charter.


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