Directly engaging the political, technological, & economic systems that continue to lock so many people into perpetual poverty

The title of my comments is copied out of the article by Ken Wilber and Martin Burt. "Directly engaging the political, technological and economic systems" that lock Haitians into poverty requires our looking honestly at the behaviors of France and the United States. Haiti was the first nation to overthrow slavery and this did not please France nor a United States that still practiced slavery. The U.S. has been invading Haiti, engineering its economy to Haiti's devastation and supporting dictators who align themselves with the U.S. agenda for a long time. Most recently (2004) the United States kidnapped democratically elected President Aristide and deported him to Africa. He is still in South Africa today. He would like to return and even has a plane full of supplies but his chances of landing in Haiti are zero with the U.S. military in charge of the airport and distribution. When you find Doctors Without Borders and the medical group Partners in Health saying that their supply planes are not being allowed to land, you know you have a problem with the U.S., not with the Haitians. I therefore encourage people not to think in terms of "poverty" in Haiti as if it began and ended with their own faulty lack of infrastructure and inadequate economic and political structures, but to think instead of how the political interests of foreign occupiers have destroyed Haiti's countryside and locked it into years of debt repayment that prevented it from developing. Currently there is racist nonsense in the press about the "violence" and "security problem" in the country which is interfering with the distribution not only of food, but of supplies to doctors, with the result that people are dying daily for lack of surgical care. So keep an open heart and feel the suffering as much as you can, but also keep an open mind and do not base your thinking on the use of a term like "poverty" as an end-all and be-all phrase because the real and complete story is there for the reading. Please read up and then speak and act based on an educated compassion. Don't use terms like "poverty" and "alleviating poverty" as your guideposts because you will be looking in the wrong direction for the source of the problems. A physician with Doctors Without Borders was on KPFK tonight saying that he was out on the road until almost 3am this morning bringing in people to be operated on. The surgeons are operating in the courtyard of the hospital because the hospital building itself is unsafe. He said, "Please tell people there is absolutely a 'non-security' issue here. This is a racist non-issue. The people are quietly waiting for help. You could hear a pin drop." Yet Doctors Without Borders are about to run out of supplies due to the U.S. military holding up supply planes at the airport because of rumored "security issues". So again, please don't think "poverty"; think "What is the rest of the story?" and get it before you write articles about what is really true of Haiti and their poverty. Have compassion because of what our government has done to them. And take responsibility to speak out, to engage in what Andrew Cohen calls "creative friction". This is where the change has to come - here at home. The poverty is in our own country's soul, that we would still be dominating Haiti and still interfering after all these years with their efforts to become a democracy. This is where we need to engage - with our own political and economic system, not with that of Haiti. Their current government is simply the most recent manifestation of our obsession with controlling Haiti and of our hypocritical behavior in claiming to care and promote democracy, and yet kidnapping and flying out of the country (U.S. Marines) their own democratically elected President.