REPORTING ON HAITI, DEBATING THE ECONOMY, DISCUSSING NEW COLLEGE

September 8th, 2008 - by: danny

US REPORTING FROM HAITI—-

Dan Beeton offers this analysis”

Bad News From Haiti: U.S. Press Misses the Story
September/October 2008, NACLA Report on the Americas

Protests in Haiti over high food prices have dominated U.S. media coverage of the country in recent months. While these reports have drawn international attention to an urgent situation, they have often lacked proper context. Haiti’s problems did not suddenly arise, yet the media began paying attention to them only after the food protests erupted in April, especially after six people were killed and the prime minister, Jacques-Edouard Alexis, was forced out of office.

If the U.S. media have failed to cover the story of political instability in Haiti with the depth it deserves, it is certainly not the first time. In fact, it is the latest episode in a pattern of U.S. reporting on Haiti that has given many of the most important stories only a cursory glance. To get an idea of how and why this happens, I interviewed several U.S. journalists who have reported from Haiti, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity.

This is how one reporter describes some editors’ views on Haiti: “Everyone knows the place is a mess, so what are you going to tell me that’s new? What goes on there does not affect people in the U.S.” Such lack of editorial interest has led to a near total absence of coverage of some of the most shocking incidents of violence, including the killing of unarmed civilians by United Nations forces, the Haitian National Police (HNP), and death squads.

The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (Minustah), which began its mission in June 2004, has been marred by scandals of killings, rape, and other violence by its troops almost since it began. As has been documented by human rights investigators and declassified U.S. government documents, Minustah conducted a number of raids into Haiti’s slums – ostensibly to target armed gangs – that have repeatedly left scores of unarmed civilians dead.[2]

In a now infamous case, Minustah mounted an assault into CitÃƒÂ© Soleil, Haiti’s largest slum, on July 6, 2005. According to declassified cables sent that day from the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince to the State Department, UN troops fired 22,000 shots in seven hours in a neighborhood where most people live in structures made of flimsy sheet metal.[3] Perhaps as many as 30 people were killed by the time it was over, including a number of children. Freelance journalist Kevin Pina and his colleagues documented the immediate aftermath of the shootings and the statements of victims’ family members and other witnesses on video.[4]

Even though Pina’s documentation became available two days later, just over a few dozen U.S. newspapers even mentioned the incident during the month of July, according to a Nexis search, most of them running short newswire briefs. These items typically described the incursion as an example of the UN mission’s success in its stated goal of eliminating gang members, ignoring reports of civilian deaths.

Similar Minustah assaults in late 2006 and early 2007 received little attention. On December 22, 2006, for example, Minustah troops staged another raid on CitÃƒÂ© Soleil in which, according to the Associated Press, at least five people were killed (Reuters estimated 20).[5] A Nexis search reveals that only four U.S. papers reported the incident; three of these ran an AP briefÃ¢â‚¬Â¦.

BANNED BOOKS LIST: I AND OTHERS WERE SNOOKERED– SCORE ONE FOR PALIN

There’s No evidence books were censored!

FIGHTING CORPORATE GREED

Jim Bernard writes

It seems like we could be entering an era of government intervention in the economy, to attempt to eliminate the chaos that often occurs after unrestrained corporate greed has gone too far.

I might be wrong but It seems to be the US treasury which is taking responsibility for the largest troubled mortgage companies.

Better the Treasury than the federal reserve.

It is a huge irony, but most finance in the US has emanated from the major banks and the federal reserve, even though they cannot legally create monetary value under the constitution.

The true source of finance should always have been the federal Treasury.

But if the Treasury is belatedly intervening in the economy – how far could they go ?

The sky is the limit.

And it is not as though taxpayers would be left with big bills, because the Treasury is simply creating new finance.

Normally the federal reserve would not be happy about competition from the Treasury, as the federal reserve is basically the head office of the private Banks, but they might be overwhelmed by the debts that they on their books and can’t easily take on more.

So this mighty sleeping Giant called the federal Treasury might just be waking up and be prepared to flex its muscles a little.

WHITHER NEW COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA?

Adam Cornford takes issue with my take on the demise of San Francisco’s New College:

In your most recent blog you say concerning the sad collapse of New College of California:

“Internal conflicts and contradictions within the faculty and student body brought it down.”

Having been in the thick of the internal politics of NCOC, I can state categorically that this is not true. Yes, some self-righteous students and their faculty enablers dealt the College some hard blows (mostly by generating and spreading bad publicity) when it was already on its knees. And yes, there were real tensions within the faculty. But those tensions were mostly the product of an autocratic, incompetent, unaccountable patronage-style system run by then-President Martin Hamilton, his mentor and predecessor Peter Gabel, and a group of cronies–mostly staff, not faculty.

Basically, NCOC programs operated as separate fiefdoms in a kind of academic feudalism with Hamilton as king. He doled out money and set salaries in a completely arbitrary way, altered budgets without notice, created entire new programs with little or no process, and spent college money on pet projects (like the Roxie cinema) that were quixotic at best. He rewarded two categories of faculty: those who sucked up to him, and those he feared. He repeatedly and persistently undermined the governance structures set up in advance of each WASC accreditation visit by disempowering or simply ignoring them, despite the fact that WASC had repeatedly criticized NCOC for lacking such governance. The patronage system and wild inequality in treatment of programs predictably combined with the lack of authentic academic governance to create suspicion and resentment between programs. It’s pretty clear at this distance that this was deliberate divide-and-rule.

Likewise, Hamilton repeatedly appointed totally unqualified people he just happened to like to two of the most important positions in the College: Registrar and Development Director. NC only had one properly credentialed Registrar in its history, and the last two or three were so bad that when the US Dept of Ed came in to do an audit, they found that academic records were a complete shambles (which accords with my personal experience). Hamilton resisted even having a Development office for many years, preferring to schmooze small gifts out of a few acquaintances he presumably felt were no threat to his power. The next-to-last “Development Director” was a very nice jazz musician who confessed freely that he had absolutely no fundraising experience. In general, there was a culture of cronyism and complete lack of accountability in the administration, again commented on by WASC in repeated visiting team reports and Commission proceedings.

Danny, I don’t understand why you’re letting the NC administration off the hook. I can verify what I’m saying, backed by the experience of many faculty. The line that conflicts among faculty and students brought NCOC down is the self-exculpating rubbish of Hamilton, Gabel, and their diehard loyalists. All the likes of Jay Taber and the “Activism and Social Change” crew did was kick an already fallen and dying horse. If the story you’re putting out is true, why is that completely different from what was said in all the WASC letters and reports, and how is it that internal faculty-student conflict could have messed up student records to the point at which the Dept of Ed was ready to turn off the financial aid tap (and cut it to a trickle) in August, a month after WASC’s damning letter putting NCOC on probation for egregious violations of all four of its accreditation standards?

Ã¢â‚¬Â¦ Someone’s been feeding you some bad kool-aid.

DISSECTOR RESPONDS:

Dear Adam

I shared the impression I had and my own feelings after interacting with some faculty members and seeing a destroyed campus that was very vital when I visited last.

I am not letting anyone off the hook, not Hamilton or anyone, but I lament the fact that in a crisis this community could not come together to negotiate a solution and save the institution.

When everyone is RIGHT, nothing is left.

I have no information of all the details nor do I have the knowledge to dispute your assessment or join the blame game.

I am not writing a study on it, just a blog entry to lament the loss of an important institution.

I am not surprised to learn that there was cronyism or what you call patronage—it, and academic politics, is pervasive in most universities and it is hard for me to believe that all of this was just a case of Machiavellian manipulation from the top, stupidity or naivete or incompetence perhaps. NC clearly didn’t have the endowments and capital that allow other institutions to make mistakes and survive.

….Clearly big mistakes were made and there is a lot of anger and frustration all around. I did not intend to malign anyone nor claim to have the truth. It seems like there are many truths depending on who you speak to

Also re the “Palin Book List,” I correct above. Yes, folks, sometimes journalists make mistakes. I don’t do so knowingly, and, yes, there is something to the criticism that I move too fast and try to do too much. It does lead to sloppiness.

This blog is a one person operation for the most part–save the great work David Degraw does in sending the blog out and on Mediachannel. Would I like an editor or even an assistant? You bet. Can I afford to hire anyone? Nope. Have I found the right volunteers? Not yet. Will this go on forever? I doubt it. I am not being defensive, just realistic…. Sorry to those who can’t access the links. I think I am uploading them right. Will ask for some help. Thanks for asking…. 9/11 is coming, the 8th anniversary of my writing this daily dissection.

Maybe it’s time….

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