Over 100,000 people are believed dead after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck near the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, on Tuesday afternoon. The quake buried countless buildings, from shantytowns to the presidential palace. All hospitals in Port-au-Prince have been leveled or abandoned. The United Nations headquarters and the city's main prison have collapsed as well. Thousands of residents are homeless and without food, water, or electricity.
On the ground in Port-au-Prince
Haiti is in a state of chaos, as Kayla Coleman reports for Care2. "The streets...are flooded with the rubble of collapsed buildings and displaced people. ... The earthquake has destroyed much of the already fragile and overburdened infrastructure."
Because all hospitals have been destroyed, there is nowhere to take the injured. According to Coleman, the United Nations says it will immediately release $10 million from its emergency fund to aid relief efforts.
Haiti before the earthquake
And though Americans are now paying attention to Haiti in the wake of this disaster, little to no attention was paid to the "daily chaos and misery" that plagues the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, as James Ridgeway writes for Mother Jones. "It is hard to imagine what a magnitude 7 earthquake might do to a city that on any ordinary day already resembles a disaster area."
Ridgeway also cites a 2006 New York Times report that details how the Bush administration helped destabilize Haiti in the years leading up to the 2004 coup.
Ridgeway writes:
"For the most part, Europe and the United States have continued to sit by as Haiti has grown poorer and poorer. When I was there you could find the children just outside Cite Soleil, the giant slum, living in the garbage dump, waiting for the U.S. army trucks to dump the scraps left from the meals of American soldiers. There they stood, knee deep in garbage, fighting for bits of food. As for the old, they people every street, gathering at the Holiday Inn at Port-au-Prince in wheelchairs, waiting at the doorway in search of a coin or two. They have no social safety net. And nobody with any money-no bank, no insurance company, no hedge fund, no mutual fund-ever makes any serious investment in the country."
Will prevailing attitudes towards Haiti change?
At RaceWire, Michelle Chen writes that Haiti, a place "where buildings have been known to suddenly collapse on their own, even without the help of a natural disaster," was still trying to recover from the severe tropical storms last spring that leveled hundreds of schools and left tens of thousands homeless.
Now the situation is desperate. "There will be an outpouring of sympathy across borders, a spasm of humanitarian aid," Chen writes. But "will there be an attitude shift in the power structures that have long compounded natural disaster with politically manufactured crisis?"
'Supporting the right kind of aid'
For those in Haiti, outside help is crucial. The country is in need of search and rescue volunteers, field hospitals, emergency health, water purification, and telecommunications. To ensure that you are supporting the right kind of aid-"the kind that builds local self-resilience, strengthens the local economy, and fosters local leadership," as Sarah van Gelder details for Yes! Magazine-donate to one or more groups with a proven track record, such as Doctors without Borders, Grassroots International, Partners in Health, and Action Aid, among others.
Hip-hop artist and Haitian native Wyclef Jean has led efforts to help Haiti for years through his charity Yele Haiti. Jessica Calefati at Mother Jones reports that Yele spends $100,000 a year on athletic programs for Haitian children and helps feed 50,000 people a month with food donated by the UN. When Jean received word of the disaster, he immediately acted, sending a "flurry of tweets" for people to donate $5 by texting 501501. He has already returned to Haiti to help.
How you can help
For more details about how you can donate effectively, check out Yes!, Mother Jones,Care2, and The Nation's roundups. You can also watch Free Speech TV's action update video for more information.
GritTV aired a segment on Haiti featuring Danny Glover, Marie St. Cyr, and a performance by the Welfare Poets. The video (below) covers the devastation in Haiti after the quake as well as the state of the country prior to the crisis:
How not to help
For an example of how not to help in a time of crisis, take a look at televangelist Pat Robertson, who claimed yesterday that the quake was Haiti's payback for a "pact with the devil" that slaves made to obtain independence from French colonials. As a rebuttal, Afro-Netizen points out how Haiti's liberation greatly benefited the United States, and Tracy Viselli at Care2 writes that "if there is a god, Pat Robertson is one of the devil's pied pipers."
More coverage of the crisis
For more information about relief efforts in Haiti, what you can do to help, and some historical context, check out the below list of coverage by Media Consortium members.
Video from the Real News Network on how World Bank policies led to famine in Haiti.
Garry Pierre-Pierre of Inter Press Service reports on humanitarian efforts of Haitian-American leaders in New York.
Monica Potts explains why Americans should concentrate on our policies toward Haiti for The American Prospect.
Erin Rosa at Campus Progress writes about Ansel Herz, a young journalist that is on the ground at Haiti.
Video from The UpTake of President Obama's pledge to send aid.
This post is a special report on Haiti and features links to the best independent, progressive reporting by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. For more updates, follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Something I don't think we've ever done is communicate with each other on Twitter very much. I find it has increasingly equalled or surpassed my use on Facebook, and for me, has also been extremely useful for political organizing this year. I know a couple of you are on, but happy to know more.
So, a quick run-down of us front-pagers who are on:
@openleft (all front-page posts get sent out on this thread throughout the day, so if you want to make sure you don't miss any, follow @openleft. We also send out action alerts. Oh, and Chris also does occasional highly amusing sports Tweeting)
Ah, yes, two great topics for the Thanksgiving dinner table (no, I will not be watching the Dallas or Detroit games today, but may catch some of the Giants/Broncos). This year, I noticed they started intermingling in even cooler ways.
As many of you may know, I'm a die-hard Bills fan, and there has been a movement underway since he was re-hired in December to can our moron of a former head coach, Dick Jauron. In October, a northern PA Bills fan launched a campaign to buy billboard advertising in the Buffalo area asking our owner, Ralph Wilson, to fire Jauron. He raised several thousand dollars over his website and a Facebook group, bought the billboard, and got it covered by ESPN, Sports Illustrated, the Sporting News, CBS Sports, FOX Sports, and other outlets.
Another fan created the now-famous FireDick t-shirts and pushed their sales over Facebook and Twitter. They even have several variations now:
If you haven't heard the wonderful news, last week Jauron was finally fired, I think in no small part because of efforts like these.
Earlier this week, I read that six college football fans had actually created a federal PAC to get the NCAA to change its flawed system from the BCS to a playoff system.
Playoff PAC is a federal political committee dedicated to establishing a competitive post-season championship for college football. The Bowl Championship Series is inherently flawed. It crowns champions arbitrarily and stifles inter-conference competition. Fans, players, schools, and corporate sponsors will be better served when the BCS is replaced with an accessible playoff system that recognizes and rewards on-the-field accomplishment. To that end, Playoff PAC helps elect pro-reform political candidates, mobilizes public support, and provides a centralized source of pro-reform news, thought, and scholarship.
The bad side of that is that one of them is the former Republican campaign finance counsel to McCain's campaign, and the other bad side is that they just hired Ari Fleischer to consult- so I would be cautious about giving- but I think it's cool nonetheless. I wonder what their theory of change even is to accomplish that at the congressional level, but I look forward to observing them.
Anyway, if you've got some sports fans in your family, and tonight Uncle Harry mocks your DFH blog-reading, or Grandma asks why you waste your time with your Facepage or Tweeter or whatever, ask them what they've done lately to change the sports world!
In addition to your generosity, a number of people have stepped up to help us meet our costs at OpenLeft. Like debcoop, whose matching offer Chris wrote about today, and Raven Brooks w/Netroots Nation, whose Twitter offer I mentioned yesterday.
If you're not able to give personally, I have two more folks who stepped up.
Tim Tagaris, a longtime friend of OpenLeft who worked for the Lamont campaign in 2006 and now is with SEIU, is giving $1 for each new Twitter follower up to 250 before midnight EST. He started at 1,120. He's now at 1,155. That's not a lot. Let's bump it up. And trust me, he's worth following.
The same goes for Robert Greenwald with Brave New Films and his generous offer. His Twitter feed is here.
If you're on Twitter, two hours left to start following. We're just over halfway towards our goal. Thanks to Tim and Robert, and thanks to you for helping us out.
Week before last it was Newt Gingrich tweeting, "White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw." A week later, on his website, Newt wrote:
The word "racist" should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person,
as if some stranger had done it, not Newt himself.
Today, it was Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, usually regarded as one of the few non-insane Republicans on Capitol Hill, making a fool of himself on Twitter:
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley... issued two angry "tweets" Sunday morning as the president wrapped up an overseas tour.
For months Obama had left the details of health care legislation to Congress, then inserted himself firmly into the debate in recent days, including using his weekly radio address Saturday to declare "it's time to deliver" on health reform.
Grassley's first tweet: "Pres Obama you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us 'time to deliver' on health care. We still on skedul/even workinWKEND."
A short time later: "Pres Obama while u sightseeing in Paris u said 'time to delivr on healthcare' When you are a 'hammer' u think evrything is NAIL I'm no NAIL."
Old habits die hard, I guess. The Republicans had a good long run snarling at everyone and everything in sight. It's pitch perfect for talk radio or cable TV. But it's not 1994 or even 2001 anymore. And Twitter is not Faux News. You don't impress or intimidate anyone when you strike a belligerent pose on Twitter for no good reason whatsoever, except that you're a one-trick pony and that's your trick; you just come across as a petulant twit. Which, of course, you are.
Asked to respond to Grassley's Twitter commentary, White House spokesman Reid Cherlin said: "President Obama is gratified that the Senate is working hard to bring a health reform bill to the floor on schedule. He looks forward to continuing his work with them upon his return from the commemoration of Allied heroism at D-Day."
Stephen Colbert nailed the connection between special-interest campaign contributions and results in Congress (in a way only he could).
In the process, he also nailed Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), who Colbert accuses of selling out to the Payday Loan industry for a mere $10,000. Gutierrez dramatically watered down his "Payday Loan Reform Act" in a way that will make the Payday industry billions -- at the expense of the little guy.
It was a smart investment for the Payday industry. But it's horrible for our democracy.
Colbert's segment basically made the case for why Congress needs to pass the bipartisan Fair Elections Now Act, which would put in place public funding of congressional elections (while still allowing Obama-style small donations, matching them four to one).
Check out the Colbert video for yourself on the Change Congress website by clicking here. On that page, you can also take action to get Congress to pass this crucial reform bill.
(If you want to help spread the reform message to others, share this post over email, Facebook, or Twitter. #gutierrez #politics #money. Disclosure: I work for Big Reform group Change Congress.)
Thinking Twitter had finally hit the mainstream, as evidenced by Nightline doing a feature on it, I recently wrote in this space a brief summary on what Twitter actually is. Since then, I feel like Twitter—or more accurately, talk of Twitter—has been everywhere.
It started with some members of Congress thinking Twitter was a useful way for them to reach their constituents. A minor hullaballoo arose when a few of these Congresspeople continued to "tweet," through Obama's recent, don't call it a State of the Union, address before Congress. Not only were they disrespectful, they were inane.
For example, Congressman John Culberson (R-TX) was really excited "Sully" was there. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) "did a big woohoo for Justice Ginsberg." And there's everyone's favorite, Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) with this gem:
When Nightline covers a topic, it's safe to say it's hit the mainstream. Therefore, Twitter, on Nightline this past Wednesday has reached the public consciousness, albeit tepidly.
Even Nightline seems to have misgivings. While one host, Terry Moran has amassed a very respectable following of 28,617 people (as of this writing) on Twitter, Martin Bashir seemed proud to announce that he doesn't Twitter. Despite his apparent antipathy, Twitter has racked up six million users as measured by Complete.com, a website that follows such things.
Taking a step back to explain, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform. Users publish very short missives, of up to 140 characters, and these are displayed for other users who have signed up to receive them. You can "tweet," as it's called, from twitter.com, from your cellphone, and applications on your computer. (Here's a guide to get started if you're interested.)
Andrew Sullivan recently linked to some bloggers who don't like Twitter. Now, Twitter is a social networking platform, but, unlike Google and Facebook, I have no problem with Twitter, so I am going to defend it here.
I spent the debate reading twitter, on IM, and going around the blogs and traditional media sites. In the background was Obama and McCain chattering, and occasionally I looked up and saw the TV. So no cone of silence, but no real focus on the debate. What I'm seeing from the chatter and the analysis afterwards is that Obama held his own in this debate, which is an area in which McCain was supposed to dominate.
Lots of blinking from McCain, and there's a general sense of depondency from the progressive side. Perhaps it's all the 'John is right' lines coming from Obama. The McCain campaign is taking advantage of those lines by pushing out that Obama agrees with John McCain. The Obama camp is sending out fact check after fact check.
More soon. What coverage are you watching and what are you hearing?
#dontGo Movement founder Eric Odom today called upon Americans nationwide to leave their homes for Washington, D.C. to protest high gasoline prices.
"Since Congress is at home for recess, we figure that there should be some angry Americans waiting for them when they finally come back to Congress," said Odom.
"We'll be waiting for them," he added
Here's a quick lesson in organizing. Real protest organizers tend to distinguish between themselves and 'Americans nationwide'. Paid staffers from conservative interest groups don't.
On the other hand, they are twittering at all hours of the day and night. US News and World Reports, cover this mass movement now!
A few days ago, I mentioned in a sort of offhand post that the conservative Drill Drill Drill campaign is not actually part of some new grassroots movement. My evidence was that it was launched by Newt Gingrich, the House GOP, oil companies, and billionaires, its events are populated by paid staffers, and it is organized to benefit an extraordinarily powerful lobby that has a string of victories under its belt this Congressional session. I didn't think this was a particularly controversial claim, and it's not, but the 'rightosphere' has apparently taken offense, mostly because they are stupid.
Here's one conservative 'grassroots activist', Eric Odom, responding to my claim.
Some of you are wondering why I wrote so aggressively about Michael Capuano's proposed rules for House use of the web. Simply put, I've tried to work with members of the House and Senate to do neat internet projects (like Legislation 2.0, or putting legislation online), and ethics and franking rules always create bottlenecks to carrying them out. It's very irritating to have a neat project ready to go and be told "I have to ask ethics whether we can host this on an outside website" and then have the project drop because a 55 year old bureaucrat doesn't understand the internet. The mindset here is similar to the one that called the use of blogs a loophole in campaign finance reform laws and argued for regulating them. It's regulation for regulation's sake.
In an example of an early failure to foresee how the Internet would change everyday communication, the rules restricted members from sending e-mails to their family and friends, and from using the Internet to access Web sites that may be considered outside the realm of "official" business. As one House aide later complained, "Some Members say you should be able to e-mail your son, but you can't send franked mail to your son."
- The Open House Project Final Report
For Personal Democracy Forum's Rebooting America, I wrote about something called an Obviousmeter:
The Obviousmeter compares cultural trends and existing power centers and asks, "Can a sixteen year old do something our government can't?" If the answer in any particular area is yes, then that's a place to find out where the future is going to smack us in the ass.
I used the example of members being unable to post Youtube videos on their official web sites as a clear example of how Congress is unprepared for the future. As it so happens, the controversy over member restrictions on web use is now heating up.
The Sunlight Foundation (for which I consult) has started an advocacy campaign called Let Our Congress Tweet to let members of Congress use twitter to communicate with their constituents. Right now, Congresspeople have to clear all internet communications with the Franking Commission, a body that censors speech to make sure it's not 'political' in nature. In the 1970s, members used their 'franking' powers, which is just a complicated way of saying that members are allowed to mail their constituents for free, to advocate for their reelection and solicit political funds. This is now illegal, and rightfully so. It's not fair that members get to mail their constituents on the government's dime for their own reelection, since that helps incumbents at the expense of challengers. They do it anyway, on both sides, like Dave Reichert and Leonard Boswell, who send out huge glossy brochures to their constituents during election season. But they shouldn't, because it's illegal and an abuse of power.
What does this have to do with Twitter? And who really cares about Twitter? Good questions, which I'll answer.
