#5984: Re: #5077: Haiti Progres (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: "K. M. Ives" <kives@gateway.net>

Joel should not read too much into Haiti Progres' "Black Jacobins" series. It
was published for the Bwa Caiman August anniversary and to diversify the column,
not to avoid any "analyses of the debate over the legitimacy of the election."
We have analyzed that debate quite extensively and think it's settled. They're
legitimate.

As for "the growing isolation of the Aristide-Preval regime," I think it is
rather the other way around, both nationally and internationally. Within Haiti
(this week's outrage over gas price hikes notwithstanding) the opposition has
never been more unrepresentative and reviled, along with its foreign backers. On
a world scale, the Millenium Summit offered an interesting barometer of how fed
up the Third World is becoming with U.S./European monopolization of economic,
political, and technological power. In speech after speech, previously sheepish
leaders lambasted the developed world's policies and formulas which have only
expanded the chasm between rich and poor, trampled national sovereignty,
generated wars, pollution, and waste of resources, and pushed  our planet to the
brink of ecological catastrophe and political explosion. No, I think it's
Washington which is isolated.

By the way, readers really appreciated the series, and asked for more. We'll try
to come up with others.

Kim Ives