THE fact that Luxury cruise liners are still docking in Haitian ports, not very far from the epicentre of the earthquake, which has killed up to 200,000 people says it all about the relationship between capitalism and imperialism and the people of Haiti.
It is the relationship between a deadly exploiter and the much abused super-exploited. Mass deaths are not being allowed to keep the rich away from their pleasures, provided off the backs of the super-exploited people of Haiti, the poorest people on the planet.
However, the rich are not taking any risks, since their pleasure zones are surrounded by heavily armed men prepared to shoot any foragers for food and shelter on sight!
It is one of the bitter twists of the situation, that the super-rich can still get into Haiti as they wish, and live it up, while the heavily armed and equipped US armed forces, that have invested the airports and the docks for the past week are absolutely incapable of distributing aid to the hungry and the dying, outside of dropping some of it from a few helicopters, or throwing it off a few moving vehicles, and then watching the poor fight for their lives.
In fact, the whole approach of the military to the crisis has been a security approach, and one full of imperialist suspicion of a ‘troublesome’ people.
The Haitians are seen as ‘trouble’, capable of eruptions of anger and revolutions, so the primary interest of the various US military and security agencies has been not to feed the hungry and the starving, but to get their forces into place so that as the expected looting is replaced by a mass movement, a revolutionary uprising, which is in the history of Haiti, the bodies of armed men, the 82nd airborne division plus others, are in place to deal with the threat to the existing political order.
This is why hundreds of millions of dollars for aid has been raised all over the world, but none has reached Haiti. What is reaching Haiti along with the cruise ships of the rich, are very large military forces from the nearby US naval base in Guantanamo Bay in US-occupied Cuba.
Never have so many troops and other agencies been used too so little effect as far as saving lives and feeding starving people are concerned.
However, there have been discussions about what the rules of engagement should be once the troops hit the streets of Port-au-Prince – this is while a whole people have been dying in their hundreds of thousands of hunger and disease!
More than 10,000 US troops have now arrived, with President Obama signing an executive order calling up extra military reserves to ‘help Haiti’ by securing the capital city, Port-au-Prince.
The US is now about to embark on restoring order, and no doubt installing the government of its choice.
The reality is that the US ruling class is now using the horrific earthquake to take over control of Haiti and to establish yet another major base in the Caribbean in order to have the forces necessary to act against the people of the Caribbean, and Central and South America as required.
Haitians are already saying that they will oppose a US occupation.
They are already demanding that aid must be delivered now, and that neutral states and established aid agencies should deliver it.
Many more are demanding the return of the legitimate government led by Jean Bertrand Aristide that was overthrown by the military, and deported from Haiti by the US and France.
The Haitian people want aid now. They do not want a US occupation, and US troops in the streets.
The 10,000 US troops must be withdrawn from Haiti, and legitimate aid organisations allowed to immediately bring the aid to the Haitian people, who will provide all the necessary forces and organisation to see that it is properly distributed.
