How Long Until The Media Starts Debating Haiti ‘The Money Pit’?

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by Glynnis MacNicol | 9:12 am, January 15th, 2010

» 4 comments

Get ready. This is the sort of storyline we can probably expect to see emerging in the next few weeks. Since Tuesday’s earthquake in Haiti a number of media folks on the right have been taken to task for questioning how much financial help the U.S. should be dolling out to Haiti, a “corruption” ravaged country that has that prior to this week had very little infrastructure, and now basically has none (things are so dire that U.S. airplanes bearing aid had to be turned away yesterday because the airport in Port-au-Prince was unable to handle any more traffic). It’s not, of course, a question of Americans’ generosity (it never is), but it will likely soon become a question of where the money is going and how much of it the country is willing to spend in a recession.

It is that recession spending that Obama is likely going to have to address once the dust begins to settle in Haiti (media reporting wise…by all accounts it will likely be decades before the country is able to recover from this). You can see the questions beginning already in places other than FOX and talk radio. Last night CNN interrupted Anderson Cooper’s on-the-ground reporting from Haiti to discuss Haiti “the money pit” and how “years of corruption” had resulted in this week’s devastation, and “how virtually there has been no Haitian response.” This however, is likely to be the focal point going forward: “Since 1960 the U.S has spent a lot of money about $5 billion” which has basically been an “abject failure.”

CNN accurately points out this is in part because the U.S. was handing it to the dictators we were propping up instead of giving it to the people who needed it. I imagine that fact may get lost in the weeks ahead, however. What probably isn’t going to get lost in the cable chatter to come is how much money a financially-strapped U.S. government should be handing over to a nation that has been unable to run itself, and whether the country is ready for a whole other kind of nation building. A preview below:

anderson cooper, barack obama, Bill O'Reilly, CNN, haiti earthquake, Rush Limbaugh, Talk Radio

Rachel Sklar

How long? I guess….’til right now! (see headline, post)
http://www.swissarmyjew.com Keeva

Hmmm. Since 2005, the US has spent over $300 billion on New Orleans, giving it to a known corrupt government that has shut out the poorest of the poor and helped the well heeled first. Note that the football stadium was done immediately and some neighborhoods still look the same as the week after the storm and floods. Money pit?

In the last 20 months, the US has given well over a trillion dollars to Wall Street, yet the economy still suffers and credit still is tight and getting tighter. Money pit?
http://www.facebook.com/people/Janet-Shan/1127645593 Janet Shan

The reality is that America’s relationship with Haiti goes back to Papa Doc Duvalier. They pumped money into Haiti knowing darn well that it wasn’t going to help the people but in the pockets of Papa Doc and his cronies. It didn’t end there either. The money kept flowing into Haiti and the poor people were literally getting nothing. IIt is a sad commentary when I wrote about poor Haitians eating mud because they couldn’t afford to feed themselves and their families, while food rot on the docks. Haiti has been a mess for as far back as I can remember. It is time for a complete paradigm shift in sending money to this country and others, I might add. There has to be measurable and visible results of the money being used in that country.

Still, this mindset of giving money to other regimes that are rife with corruption nothing new with America. I hope President Obama isn’t just going to hand these people millions of dollars in aid and money, without taking care of people in the United States.

http://blackpoliticalthought.blogspot.com
Cactus

Certainly this debate has started outside of the media. Even some of my most left-leaning friends suggested to me yesterday that “we should just let Haiti fail”. As if the country was another AIG…

As the dozens of overcrowded, poorly made watercraft attempting to reach Florida over the years have proven, we can’t just ignore everything there. Even the most rabid nationalists should see that if we were to just ignore this, it would become our problem in a different form.

That said, corruption thrives in anarchy… so I can’t even imagine how to deal with the short, medium, and long-term problems ahead.