How to live on $577 a month
By Ariel Gore
Apr. 19 — Why I entertained the fantasy that Bush would
send me $400 I can’t explain.
The Social Security Administration recently informed me that I’ve
earned enough “credits” for my child to receive $577 per month
in benefits “if you die this year.”
Five hundred and seventy-seven dollars a month. It’s funny. I used
to get exactly that on welfare: a young broke single mom with her sweet
fat baby. Five hundred and seventy-seven dollars. But that was a long
time ago — before Newt explained to me “personal responsibility;”
before my 21-year-old self was blamed for everything from economic decline
to the moral decay of Western Civilization; before Clinton signed welfare
reform while getting a blowjob from an intern; before Bush Jr. stole
the White House; before my baby morphed into a teenager.
Five hundred and seventy-seven dollars a month. Was it enough? Of course
not. But it was rent or utilities or food, take your pick. Five hundred
and seventy-seven dollars a month: Now I have to die to get it.
When my middle-class friends started receiving their $400 tax credits
in the mail (supposed to make them turn a blind eye to the $350 billion
tax giveaway Bush Jr. handed the wealthiest Americans), I waited by
my mailbox.
Mine was a working family, was it not? But, no? It seems that although
I’ve been working at least 40 hours a week and earning income since
I got out of school and got off welfare, I, like hundreds of thousands
of low-paid military personnel, didn’t earn enough to qualify mine
as a “working family.”
Why I entertained the fantasy that Bush would send me $400 I can’t
explain. Maybe it’s the same naïveté that made me imagine
I could treat my daughter to a public school education and not expect
military recruiters to meet her at the door when she entered middle
school. Naïveté because, alas, buried deep in the No Child
Left Behind Act — W’s education law passed in 2001 —
is a provision requiring all public secondary schools to provide military
recruiters with access to facilities and contact information for students.
So at the tender age of 11, despite my specific protests, my girl-child
came home from school with a US Navy Frisbee and an attitude that said,
“Mom, you just don’t understand what these nice people want
to do for kids.”
These nice people and their $577 a month.
If I didn’t know better, I could listen to their rhetoric and imagine
that the transfer of resources in this country was from rich to poor
rather than the other way around. We nanny their children. We pay their
mortgages with our rent checks. We till their fields. And when they
offer us $577 a month, they act as if they are giving us a gift. When
we demand it, they say we suffer from “a sense of entitlement.”
“You haven’t really worked,” they say.
So, if not working, what exactly have I been doing these past 33 years
to earn Social Security “credits”?
Besides having a 14-year-old daughter I have to protect from Uncle Sam
and the Supreme Court on a daily basis — a girl-child who grew
up on welfare and food stamps but who nonetheless is apparently healthy
enough to fight for a government that never fought for her — I
teach high school. Yep. I work with the folks Education Secretary Rod
Paige referred to as “a terrorist organization.” And you thought
you’d have to do more than instruct kids on the art of metaphor
to be labeled an enemy combatant.
Apparently, Rod was kidding.
Not kidding was the baby-faced student who walked into my senior creative
writing workshop a day later and announced that he couldn’t wait
to get home and tell his mama that she wouldn’t have to pay his
college tuition after all.
“How’s that?” I piped up, imagining that this gifted
student had gotten a full scholarship from the Rotary Club or the United
Negro College Fund.
“I’ve joined the Army! My mom’s been working her butt
off all her life for me, but now I’m taking responsibility for
my own education!”
My baby-faced student — one of just a handful I thought understood
the concept of “metaphor.”
“Why you trippin’?” he stammered as my face fell.
The following week, he showed up with a crew cut. And he never wrote
me another metaphor.
It’s almost enough to make you start rooting for the draft. At
least then the children of the corporate criminals who are profiting
from this war might have to go, too.
But when I turn on my television, who’s the corporate criminal
preparing to go to prison? It’s the single mom and housewife extraordinaire
— Martha Stewart — who will pay for a thousand illegal stock
trades, a thousand atrocious sweatshops. The mother. The housewife.
The woman so uppity as to think she was entitled to more than $577 a
month.
Source: In These Times
Return to Haiti: The American learning
zone
By Tom Reeves
Apr. 14— I returned this month from Haiti as part of the
first independent US observer delegation since the removal on Feb. 29
of President Jean Bertrand Aristide. More than a decade ago, I helped
organize the New England Observer Delegations to Haiti — nine diverse
groups of prominent Boston area people who went to Haiti after the first
coup d’etat against President Aristide. We witnessed a reign of
terror by the Haitian military, in which at least 3,000 democracy activists
were slaughtered. We also witnessed the almost universal jubilation
of the Haitian urban and rural poor (85 percent of the population) on
Aristide’s return.
This time I went to see the results of another coup against Aristide,
one clearly planned, funded and orchestrated by the US. I felt a terrible
déjà vu: massive violence against the poor, especially
against Aristide’s Lavalas movement; the very same paramilitary
and former Haitian army officers committing the atrocities. Convicted
mass murderers acting as judges, administrators, and police. Despite
intimidation and brutal attacks on the poorest neighborhoods, we saw
overwhelming support for Aristide among the poor, and violent hatred
of Aristide by the tiny elite. A crucial difference was the attitude
of the professionals and many intellectuals. They expressed a sense
of betrayal by Aristide, and joy at his fall. Yet one of them told me,
“The Haitian people elected Aristide, and only they should have
been able to take him down.”
We heard from people who witnessed night-time raids against Lavalas.
In one case in the poor neighborhood of Bel Air, we were told US helicopters
came with blinding lights, heavily armed US soldiers fired into crowds,
killing between five and twenty persons (March 17). Members of our group
interviewed relatives of victims and eyewitnesses to this attack. In
case after case, we were told that known criminals and former army men
were incorporated into the police. They harassed or beat Lavalas supporters
and hounded for “arrest” former government officials.
A stream of people came to see us from their hiding places at great
risk to tell us this. Jeremy was one. Now 21, he met Aristide at age
11. He worked for Children’s Radio (Radio Ti Moun) funded by Aristide’s
foundation. Jeremy tearfully recalled the past month: He fled the radio
station as it was trashed. He was chased and saw his young companions
beaten. He ran from his aunt’s house as three former military came
looking for him. They shot his aunt and she died on the way to the hospital.
This happened a week before we arrived. Jeremy had been afraid to go
to her funeral.
A woman came to us from the community group, Ai Bobo Brav, victims of
the last coup. I’d met her last March when she told me, “Every
Haitian baby knows Bush’s game.” Back then she’d forecast
the coup. Now she was living it. “While your President was sleeping
in his bed, they kidnapped our president. They dragged him off. It was
so disrespectful. It hurt me so.”
Driving back to Port Au Prince from Jacmel on Friday, I saw a cow munching
on garbage by a sign in English advertising a school. The sign said,
“Welcome to the American Learning Zone.” The US State Department
point man on Haiti, Roger Noriega (also involved in the Iran-Contra
plot in Nicaragua) told an audience in Washington last year that Cuba
and Venezuela should pay close attention to events in Haiti. One of
the first acts by US marines after landing in Haiti this year may have
been to establish a perimeter around Mole St. Nicolas, the peninsula
opposite Guantanamo, jutting into the narrow strait between Haiti and
Cuba. Local residents reported to Haitian news media that US military
structures were being built on the site long sought by the US as a companion
base to Guantanamo.
What interests provoke such an expensive, brutal lesson in Haiti? Haiti
has no oil. Of course there are thousands of sweat shop workers who
toil for less than a dollar a day. Of course there are big US companies
that supply rice, wheat and other staples supplanting Haitian rice and
cassava, so that nearly 70 percent of the food consumed by Haitians
must be imported, mostly from the US. And then there is Aristide, the
little Liberation Theology priest who preached a message of conflict
between the tiny elite and the desperately poor majority. Haiti is so
close to Cuba — that other obsession of US foreign policy. One
of Aristide’s first acts was to establish ties with Cuba. More
than 500 Cuban doctors remain in Haiti, helping the poorest communities.
They must be remembering Grenada, where a US occupation twenty years
ago ousted Cuban doctors. Most of all, Haiti sits in what the US sees
as it’s back yard, it’s playground, it’s lap. Upstart,
uncontrolled forces there are just too close to home. So — Venezuela
and Cuba and others beware: Haiti is the American (imperial) learning
zone.
Haiti should be a learning zone for all Americans who would understand
and counter the imperial US policy of intervention world — wide.
If the US can get away with covert and overt support for a “rebellion”
in Haiti led by former military and paramilitary, many of whom have
been convicted of murders and other human rights violations dating to
the last coup, it will be psyched for similar operations in Venezuela
and perhaps even in Cuba. The evidence is clear: US weapons (intended
for the Dominican army) were smuggled into Haiti by former Haitian military
and paramilitary, many of whom were trained and long funded by the CIA
and other US agents. US money, both government and private, flowed into
the coffers of NGOs attached to the “opposition” — the
right-wing Convergence and the neo-liberal “Group of 184,”
led by the Haitian business elite (including the sweatshop owners) and
widely publicized by the ultra—conservative “Haiti Democracy
Project”(HDP) in Washington, DC. Among the funders and organizers
of the opposition were the IRI and NDI, the international NGOs closely
tied to the US Republican and Democrat Parties respectively. IRI and
HDP operatives were present at meetings organized by FRAPH (a CIA—funded
para—military group) and former Haitian military in the Dominican
Republic — at which Dominican authorities claimed plans were laid
a year ago for a Haitian coup.
Aristide did accept a compromise when he returned. He did include, at
US insistence, elements of the former army and even Duvalierists in
his regime. Yet the government put in place by this recent coup is far
worse: it is full of such Macoutes, and worse — convicted mass
murderers. It has already militarized the police and is preparing the
return of an unreconstructed Haitian army — the instrument of US
and elite oppression in Haiti since it’s creation by the US at
it’s first invasion in 1915.
Aristide also compromised terribly on the issues of structural adjustment
— he did put in place the first Free Trade Zone, and lay plans
for a second one, a bitter insult to Haitian labor. He did begin privatization.
He did not protect Haitian products adequately. Yet he did not compromise
on everything. He continued to agitate for a better minimum wage, against
the sweat shop owners. He resisted most of the demanded privatization.
He held out for collective bargaining rights for the Free Trade Zone
workers. He continued to make small steps toward agrarian reform. As
Paul Farmer and others have shown, he made greater strides in fighting
AIDS and promoting literacy than any previous government. The Latortue
government from the start has been wholly dominated by free trade enthusiasts,
neoliberal theoreticians and the worst of the sweatshop owners and other
business elite.
The women’s groups told us bluntly that the situation under Aristide
was the worst in Haiti’s history — worse than Duvalier and
worse than Haiti during the 1991—1994 coup period. Yet I met these
groups during that time. They were in hiding then, terrified by the
very same elements now roaming Haiti freely, committing atrocities now
as then. When US and other international delegations visited them a
year ago, under Aristide’s rule, they functioned openly. They did
not appear terrorized. Aristide’s alleged abuses pale beside the
documented reports of the “rebels” slaughtering police and
Lavalas and mutilating their bodies; of summary executions; of groups
of Lavalas herded into containers and dumped into the sea.
Perhaps worst of all, I listened again (as I had a year ago) to the
litany of abuses the NCHR (National Coalition for Haitian Rights) says
it documented against officials of the Aristide government and the Lavalas
movement. They rightly protested cases like that of the journalist Jean
Dominique and a dozen other high profile attacks on opposition activists
and as many as three opposition journalists. Yet during the two years
leading up to this latest coup, they adamantly refused to investigate
now-verified allegations of murders, arson and bombings against the
government and Lavalas by former military and FRAPH.
Although they were the only human rights group in the country adequately
funded and having trained monitors throughout Haiti, the NCHR became
completely partisan: anti-Lavalas, anti-Aristide. This is simply not
proper for a group calling itself a “Haitian Rights” organization.
We also heard from PAPDA (Platform to Advocate for Alternative Development)
which had called for Aristide’s ouster on the grounds of his compromises
with “US imperialism,” as well as corruption and human rights
violations. PAPDA had functioned openly in its offices under Aristide,
right up to and through this year’s coup.
Together, some 40 similar anti—Aristide “left” groups
have formed the RDP (Popular Democratic Regroupment) to put forward
an alternative opposition program to the government, even while some
work within that government.
International human rights organizations, especially Human Rights Watch
and Journalists Without Borders, and to a lesser extent Amnesty International,
have taken the NCHR reports uncritically and failed to develop other
impartial human rights contacts in Haiti. Progressive funders like Grassroots
International and NGOs in Canada, the US and Europe also listened uncritically
to their “partners” and funded groups in Haiti like PAPDA,
SOFA, Batay Ouvriye and MPP.
The primary lesson to be learned for funders and NGOS, and for all solidarity
activists, is that solidarity must first of all be with the people of
Haiti — by the assertion of their will by voting, as Haitians did
for Aristide in 2000 (the OAS and international NGOs certified that
at the time). Beyond that, international funding and solidarity groups
(and here the criticism is equally valid for those who were wholly supportive
of Lavalas without critique) must not put on blinders when they visit
Haiti. They must listen critically to all sides. They must watch for
concrete evidence of the mass base of the organizations they fund —
and evidence that the rank and file feel as the “leaders”
do.
It remains to be seen whether the US empire will gain more from its
exercise in the learning zone of Haiti, or the international solidarity
movement. Let us hope for the latter — since the next learning
zones may come sooner than we expect, especially if the Bush regime
lives through its debacle in Iraq and survives the November election.
