HAITI AFTER THE QUAKE: IMPERIALISM WITH A HUMAN FACE (Part 2)

LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN, 5 Apr 2010

Ashley Smith – International Socialist Review

Problems with the NGOs

Haiti has approximately 10,000 NGOs operating within its borders, one of the highest numbers per capita in the world. The international NGOs are unaccountable to either the Haitian state or Haitian population. So the aid funneled through them further weakens what little hold Haitians have on their own society. These NGOs have taken deep hold in Haiti at the very same time that the conditions in the country have gone from bad to apocalyptic.

Amid this crisis, some of the NGOs and their employees have tried valiantly to fill the vacuum left by the U.S. and UN. But most of them did not have real forces inside the country to respond to the disaster. The Red Cross, for example, only had 15 employees on the ground, but has received the bulk of donated money—more than $200 million—from people around the world. Add to this the reluctance of the big NGOs to act without “security,” as mentioned above.

Moreover, as the British medical journal The Lancet argues, many of the international NGOs are engaged in a fierce battle for funds and have allowed that competition to distort their provision of food, water, medical aid, and services amidst the crisis. After calling aid an “industry in its own right,” the Lancet noted that NGOs are jostling for position, each claiming that they are doing the most for earthquake survivors. Some agencies even claim that they are “spearheading” the relief effort. In fact, as we only too clearly see, the situation in Haiti is chaotic, devastating, and anything but coordinated. Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavory characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts. Media coverage as an end in itself is too often an aim of their activities. Marketing and branding have too high a profile. Perhaps worst of all, relief efforts in the field are sometimes competitive with little collaboration between agencies, including smaller, grass-roots charities that may have better networks in affected countries and so are well placed to immediately implement emergency relief.52

Repatriating and jailing refugees

As Haitians’ needs continued unmet, the U.S. occupation devolved into policing the disaster, including preventing the flight of refugees from Haiti. It is true that activists finally compelled Obama to grant Haitians Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Obama’s decision delayed the deportation of 30,000 Haitians and will make TPS available to 100,000 to 200,000 more. These provisions, however, have strict limitations.

First of all, the U.S. plans to exclude victims of the earthquake, offering TPS only to those who arrived in the U.S. without legal documents before January 12. Those who quality must prove they are indigent and at the very same time pay $470 in application fees.53 Those Haitians who are granted TPS will only be allowed to stay in the U.S. for eighteen months before they must return to Haiti. If they do qualify for the program they will become known to the authorities and thus make themselves more vulnerable to repatriation. Moreover, given the scale of destruction in Port-au-Prince, there is no way that the city or country will be in better condition in a year and a half. So if the U.S. enforces this eighteen-month limitation, it will return Haitians to an ongoing disaster area.

To enforce the bar on Haitians coming to the U.S., a flotilla of military vessels has surrounded the country. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano tried to spin this in humanitarian terms. “At this moment of tragedy in Haiti,” she lectured, “it is tempting for people suffering in the aftermath of the earthquake to seek refuge elsewhere, but attempting to leave Haiti now will only bring more hardship to the Haitian people and nation.”54 In a far more blunt statement of the actual policy, Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Chris O’Neil, in charge of Operation Vigilant Sentry declared, “The goal is to interdict them at sea and repatriate them.”55

The U.S. made sure to broadcast this threat to Haitians. A U.S. Air Force transport plane spends hours in the air above Haiti every day, not ferrying food and water, but broadcasting a radio statement in Creole from Haiti’s ambassador to the U.S., Raymond Joseph. “I’ll be honest with you,” Joseph says, according to a transcript on the State Department’s Web site. “If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. And they will intercept you right on the water, and send you back home where you came from.”56

To prepare for the eventuality that some Haitians may get through the military cordon around Haiti, Obama, like Bush and Clinton before him, has prepared jail space to incarcerate refugees at Krome Detention Center in Florida and at the U.S. military base in Guantánamo, Cuba.57

Asserting who’s boss in Latin America

Days after the quake, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation posted an article detailing what it considered should be Washington’s aims in occupying Haiti. The U.S. military presence, they argued, in addition to preventing “any large scale movements by Haitians to take to the sea…to try to enter the U.S. illegally,” also “offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region.” At the same time, it argues, the U.S. military presence could “interrupt the nightly flights of cocaine to Haiti and the Dominican Republic from the Venezuelan coast and counter the ongoing efforts of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to destabilize the island of Hispaniola.” There is no evidence of Venezuelan cocaine flights or efforts to “destabilize” Haiti, but the point is clear: The U.S. sees Haiti as part of an effort to assert more control over the region and contain “unfriendly” regimes.58

The military response to Haiti’s crisis cannot be separated from Washington’s regional interests. As Greg Gandin writes in the Nation,

In recent years, Washington has experienced a fast erosion of its influence in South America, driven by the rise of Brazil, the region’s left turn, the growing influence of China and Venezuela’s use of oil revenue to promote a multipolar diplomacy. Broad social movements have challenged efforts by US- and Canadian-based companies to expand extractive industries like mining, biofuels, petroleum and logging.59

Faced with such regional and international competition, the U.S. under Bush and now Obama is angling to launch a counteroffensive. The U.S. tried to topple Chávez in 2002, it succeeded in overthrowing Aristide in 2004, and last year backed the coup against President Zelaya in Honduras. As Grandin reports, the U.S. is actively promoting the right-wing opposition to the various reform socialist governments in the region. It is backing up this political initiative with an expansion of its military bases in the region, particularly in Colombia. “In late October,” Grandin writes, “the United States and Colombia signed an agreement granting the Pentagon use of seven military bases, along with an unlimited number of as yet unspecified ‘facilities and locations.’ They add to Washington’s already considerable military presence in Colombia, as well as Central America and the Caribbean.”60 Haiti is thus a stepping-stone for further U.S. interventions in the region.

“Shock doctrine” for Haiti

For Haiti itself, the U.S. is preparing to impose its old neoliberal plan at gunpoint. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein documents how the U.S. and other imperial powers take advantage of natural and economic disasters to impose free-market plans for the benefit of the American and native capitalists. The U.S., other powers, the IMF, and World Bank had their shock doctrine for Haiti immediately on hand. Hillary Clinton declared, “We have a plan. It was a legitimate plan, it was done in conjunction with other international donors, with the United Nations.”61 This is the Collier Plan, the same old plan of sweatshops, plantations, and tourism.

The U.S., a few other imperial powers, a few lesser countries, and the UN convened a meeting on January 26 in Montreal to profess their concern and promises to aid Haiti. The fourteen so-called “Friends of Haiti” made sure to include the Haitian prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, to at least give the illusion of respect for the country’s sovereignty. But outside a protest organized by Haiti Action Montreal opposed the meeting with signs demanding “medical relief not guns,” “grants not loans,” and “reconstruction for people not profit.”

In the Guardian, Gary Younge criticized the summit for failing to produce any solutions to the crisis in Haiti. “Even as corpses remained under the earthquake’s rubble,” he wrote, “and the government operated out of a police station, the assembled ‘friends’ would not commit to canceling Haiti’s $1 billion debt. Instead they agreed to a 10-year plan with no details, and a commitment to meet again—when the bodies have been buried along with coverage of the country—sometime in the future.”62

By contrast, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and his Latin American and Caribbean allies assembled in the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) announced their opposition to America’s shock doctrine. They denounced Washington’s neoliberal plans, called for relief not troops and for the cancellation of Haiti’s debt. Venezuela itself immediately cancelled Haiti’s debt and began sending shiploads of relief offering over $100 million in humanitarian aid with no strings attached.63

No such humanitarian motives animate the U.S., its capitalist corporations, and the international financial institutions. These vultures began circling above Haiti almost immediately. The Street, an investment Web site, published an article misleadingly entitled, “An opportunity to heal Haiti,” that lays out how U.S. corporations can cash in on the catastrophe. “Here are some companies,” they write, “that could potentially benefit: General Electric (GE), Caterpillar (CAT), Deere (DE), Fluor (FLR), Jacobs Engineering (JEC).”64 The Rand Corporation’s James Dobbins wrote in the New York Times, “This disaster is an opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms.”65

Over the last few years, the U.S. has been trying to give a facelift to the international financial institution that it uses to impose its plans in Haiti. As Jim Lobe reports,

Last June, 1.2 billion dollars in Haiti’s external debt, including that owed to the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), was cancelled after the Préval government completed a three-year Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) program. Over half of that debt had been incurred by Haiti’s dictatorships, notably the Duvalier dynasty that ruled the country from 1957 to 1986. But the cancellation covered debt incurred by Haiti only through 2004. In the last five years, the country has received new loans—some of them to help it recover from the floods and other hurricane damage—totaling another 1.05 billion dollars.66

In other words, the U.S. and the financial institutions exchanged the old debts for new so-called “legitimate loans,” trapping Haiti yet again in debt. Eric Toussaint and Sophie Perchellet call this “a typical odious debt-laundering maneuver.”67

In the wake of the crisis, the bankers were at Haiti’s door yet again, ready, incredibly, to loan Haiti money with the usual conditions. The IMF offered Haiti a new loan of $100 million with the usual strings attached. As the Nation’s Richard Kim writes,

The new loan was made through the IMF’s extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage, and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.68

Debt cancellation activists like Jubilee pushed back against the IMF and scored a victory over it. “On Jan. 21,” Lobe reports, the World Bank announced a waiver of Haiti’s pending debt payment for five years and said it would explore ways that the remaining debt could be cancelled. The IDB [Inter-American Development Bank] has said it is engaged in a similar effort and will present alternatives for reducing or canceling the debt to its board of governors. On Jan. 27, the IMF, which lacks the authority to provide outright grants, announced that it would give Haiti a 102 million-dollar loan at zero-percent interest and that would not be subject to any of the Fund’s usual performance conditions.69

The pressure even forced the U.S. to call for all new monies extended to Haiti to be in the form of grants, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner called for debt relief in the run up to the G-7 conference in February.70

While activists can claim these concessions by the U.S. and the international financial institutions as victories that open up the possibility for even more progress in demanding full cancellation of Haiti’s debt and all third world debt, no one should look at this situation through rose-colored glasses. The U.S. is using this promise—and it is just a promise at this point—to cover up its determination to implement the Collier Plan for tourism, sweatshops, and mango plantations to exploit Haiti’s desperately poor workers and peasants. In fact, the U.S. does not need to use the leverage of debt to force Haiti to agree to the plan; it has secured colonial rule over the country and can impose its plans directly at gunpoint.

Resistance and solidarity

The left has a responsibility to cut through the propaganda of the Obama administration and the mainstream media. The U.S. is not engaged in humanitarian relief, but old-fashioned imperialism in Haiti. Humanitarianism has long been one of the means the U.S. uses to provide a cover story for its military actions abroad. But whether it was saving the Cuban people from Spanish brutality, sending the marines into Mogadishu in 1993 to feed starving Somalis, or overthrowing the Taliban to “liberate women,” the real aims and practical results of these interventions diverged radically from their alleged noble intentions.

Humanitarian military intervention was heavily promoted in the 1990s during the latter part of the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration—in particular during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Its purpose was to reestablish the legitimacy of U.S. military intervention in the wake of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, as part of a policy intended to erase what was known as the “Vietnam syndrome.” It is being revived again in the wake of the unpopularity of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and weariness toward the “war on terror,” for similar reasons. The U.S. hopes that it can re-legitimize its military as a force for good so that it can lay the groundwork for more U.S. interventions in the region and around the world.

Even if the U.S. gets away with its new plans for Haiti, it will inevitably breed resistance in the population and throughout the region where through bitter experience workers and peasants have learned to oppose U.S. designs on their countries. In Haiti, workers and peasants will find their way to organize in the countryside on the plantations, in the sweatshops, and in the shantytowns.

Already Haitian organizations have come out against the U.S. agenda. A statement issued on January 27 from the Coordinating Committee of Progressive Organizations announced:

We must…declare our anger and indignation at the exploitation of the situation in Haiti to justify a new invasion by 20,000 U.S. Marines. We condemn what threatens to become a new military occupation by U.S. troops, the third in our history. It is clearly part of a strategy to remilitarize the Caribbean Basin in the context of the imperialist response to the growing rebellion of the peoples of our continent against neo-liberal globalization. And it exists also within a framework of pre-emptive warfare designed to confront the eventual social explosion of a people crushed by poverty and facing despair. We condemn the model imposed by the U.S. government and the military response to a tragic humanitarian crisis. The occupation of the Toussaint L’Ouverture international airport and other elements of the national infrastructure have deprived the Haitian people of part of the contribution made by Caricom, by Venezuela, and by some European countries. We condemn this conduct, and refuse absolutely to allow our country to become another military base.71

The Haitian left has thus already started building opposition to the U.S. occupation and the Collier Plan. Every year since the U.S. coup in 2004, activists have marched on February 28 in Port-au-Prince against the UN occupation and to demand the end of Aristide’s exile. Workers’ organizations just last year protested in the thousands for an increase in the minimum wage that Préval opposed. Lavalas activists had protested before the earthquake against their exclusion from the scheduled parliamentary elections. Now amid crisis and occupation, Préval, who has proved to be a puppet for the U.S. agenda, thus losing what little political support he had, has cancelled those elections. No doubt Préval’s behavior will provoke political opposition from below against his government’s collaboration with the United States.

Outside Haiti, the left must build solidarity with that struggle and make several demands on the Obama administration. First, Obama must immediately end the military occupation of Haiti, and instead flood the country with doctors, nurses, food, water, and construction machinery. Second, the U.S. must also stop its enforcement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s exile and the ban on his party, Fanmi Lavalas, from participating in elections. Haitians, not the U.S., should have the right to determine their government.

Third, the left must demand that the U.S., other countries, and international financial institutions cancel Haiti’s debt, so that the aid money headed to Haiti will go to food and reconstruction, not debt repayment. More than that—France, the U.S., and Canada, the three countries that have most interfered with Haiti’s sovereignty—should pay reparations for the damage they have done. France can start by repaying the $21 billion dollars that it extracted from Haiti from 1824 to 1947. Fourth, leftists must agitate for Obama to indefinitely extend Temporary Protected Status to Haitians in the U.S.—and open the borders to any Haitians who flee the country. Finally, the left must direct all its funds to Haitian grass-roots organizations to provide relief and help rebuild resistance to the U.S. plan for Haiti.

Only through agitating for these demands can we stop the U.S. from imposing at gunpoint its shock doctrine for Haiti. In this struggle, the left must educate wider and wider layers of people, already suspicious of U.S. motives after Hurricane Katrina, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, that the U.S. state never engages in military actions for humanitarian motives. As the great American revolutionary journalist John Reed declared, “Uncle Sam never gives anybody something for nothing. He comes along with a sack stuffed with hay in one hand and a whip in the other. Anyone who accepts Uncle Sam’s promises at their face value will find that they must be paid for in sweat and blood.”72

NOTES:

1 “President Obama on U.S. rescue efforts in Haiti, www.America.gov.

2 Bill Quigley, “Haiti: still starving 23 days later,” Huffington Post, posted February 4, 2010.

3 Soumitra Eachempati, Dean Lorich, and David Helfet, “Haiti: Obama’s Katrina,” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2010.

4 Rich Schapiro, “Rev. Pat Robertson says ancient Haitians’ ‘pact with the devil’ caused earthquake,” New York Daily News, January 13, 2010.

5 David Brooks, “The underlying tragedy,” New York Times, January 14, 2010.

6 For an overview of the French colony and the slave revolution see Ashley Smith, “The Black Jacobins,” International Socialist Review (ISR) 63, January–February 2009.

7 Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politicsw of Containment (New York: Verso Books, 2007), 12.

8 Quoted in Sidney Lens, The Forging of the American Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2003), 270.

9 For an overview of the history of U.S. imperialism in Haiti see Helen Scott, “Haiti under siege,” ISR 35, May-June 2004.

10 Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994), 108.

11 Alex Dupuy, Haiti in the New World Order (New York: Westview Press, 1996), 37.

12 For an analysis of Baby Doc’s neoliberal plans see chapter 2 of Alex Dupuy, The Prophet and the Power (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).

13 Eric Toussaint and Sophie Perchellet, “Debt is Haiti’s real curse,” Socialist Worker, January 20, 2010.

14 Regan Boychuck, “The vultures circle Haiti at every opportunity, natural or man-made,” Znet, February 3, 2010.

15 Dupuy, Haiti in the New World Order, 31.

16 Quoted in Amy Wilentz, The Rainy Season (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 137.

17 Quoted in Ashley Smith, “The new occupation of Haiti: Aristide’s rise and fall,” ISR 35, May–June, 2004.

18 For an analysis of Lavalas after Aristide’s restoration see chapter 5 of Robert Fatton, Haiti’s Predatory Republic (Boulder: Lynne Reiner Publishers, 2002).

19 For a perhaps overly generous portrait of Aristide in his second term see chapters 6 and 7 of Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood.

20 Clara James, “Haiti free trade zone,” Dollars and Sense, November/December 2002.

21 Hallward, Damming the Flood, 155.

22 See Bill Quigley, “Haiti human rights report,” www.ijdh.org/pdf/QuigleyReport.pdf.

23 Mo Woong, “Haiti’s minimum wage battle,” Caribbean News Net, August 25, 2009.

24 See Ashley Smith “Natural and unnatural disasters,” Socialist Worker, September 23, 2008.

25 Mark Shuller, “Haiti’s food riots,” ISR 59, May–June 2008.

26 Paul Collier, “Haiti: From natural catastrophe to economic security,” FOCALPoint, Volume 8, Issue 2, March 2009.

27 Quoted in Polly Pattullo, Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005), 20.

28 Jacqueline Charles, “Royal Caribbean boosts Haiti tourism push,” Miami Herald, September 26, 2009.

29 Collier, “Haiti from natural catastrophe to economic security.”

30 Mark Shuller, “Haiti needs new development approaches, not more of the same,” Haiti Analysis, June 18, 2009.

31 Quoted in Ashley Smith “Catastrophe in Haiti,” Socialist Worker, January 14, 2010.

32 Jacqueline Charles, “Bill Clinton on trade mission on Haiti,” Miami Herald, October 1, 2009.

33 Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

34 Bill Quigley, “Too little too late for Haiti? Six sobering points,” Huffington Post, January 15, 2010.

35 “With foreign aid still at a trickle,” Democracy Now!, January 20, 2010.

36 Marc Lacey “The nightmare in Haiti: untreated illness and injury,” New York Times, January 21, 2010.

37 Quoted in Nick Allen “West urged to write off Haiti’s $1 billion debt,” Telegraph.co.uk, January 25, 2010.

38 Mark Lander, “In show of support, Clinton goes to Haiti,” New York Times, January 17, 2010.

39 “U.S. military begins aid drops in Haiti,” CBS News, January 18, 2010.

40 Andrew Cawthorne and Catherine Bremer, “U.S., U.N. boost Haiti aid security as looters swarm,” Reuters, January 19, 2010.

41 Nelson P. Valdés, “Class and race fear: The rescue operation’s priorities in Haiti,” Counterpunch, January 18, 2010.

42 Quoted in Lenora Daniels, “We are Haitians. We are like people like anybody else,” Common Dreams, January 31, 2010.

43 Sasha Kramer, “Fear slows aid efforts in Haiti: Letter from Port-au-Prince,” Counterpunch, January 27, 2010.

44 “Doctor: Misinformation and racism have slowed the recovery effort,” Democracy Now!, January 19, 2010.

45 “Chávez says U.S. occupying Haiti in name of aid,” Reuters, January 17, 2010.

46 Rory Carroll, “U.S. accused of annexing airport,” Guardian (UK), January 17, 2010.

47 Quoted in Giles Whittell, Martin Fletcher, and Jacqui Goddard, “Haiti has a leader in charge, but not in control,” The Times (UK), January 19, 2010.

48 Richard Seymour, “The humanitarian myth,” Socialist Worker, January 25, 2010.

49 “Union nurses respond to Haiti,” Socialist Worker, January 27, 2010.

50 Shaila Dewan, “U.S. suspends Haitian airlift in cost dispute,” New York Times, January 30, 2010.

51 The Al Jazeera report is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F5TwEK24sA.

52 “The growth of aid and the decline of humanitarianism,” Lancet, Volume 375, Issue 9711, January 23, 2010; 253.

53 James C. McKinley Jr., “Vows to move fast for Haitian immigrants in the U.S.,” New York Times, January 21, 2010.

54 Richard Fausset, “U.S. to change illegal immigrants status,” Los Angeles Times, January 16, 2010.

55 “U.S. to repatriate most Haitian refugees, Washington Times, January 19, 2010.

56 Curt Anderson, “U.S. prepares for Haitian refugees,” Washington Examiner, January 19, 2010.

57 Tom Eley, “Washington shuts door to Haitian refugees” Global Research, February 8, 2010.

58 Jim Roberts, “Things to remember while helping Haiti,” The Foundry; http://blog.heritage.org/2010/01/13/things-to-
remember-while-helping-haiti/.

59 Greg Grandin, “Muscling Latin America,” Nation, January 21, 2010.

60 Ibid.

61 Nicholas Kralev, “Clinton says plan exists for Haiti,” Washington Times, January 26, 2010.

62 Gary Younge, “The West owes Haiti a big bailout,” Guardian (UK), January 31, 2010.

63 Magbana, “Venezuela cancels Haiti’s debt,” January 26, 2010.

64 Quoted in Isabel McDonald, “New Haiti: Same old corporate interests,” Nation, January 29, 2010.

65 James Dobbins, “Skip the graft,” New York Times, January 17, 2010.

66 Jim Lobe, “Haiti: U.S. lawmakers call for debt cancellation,” IPS, February 4, 2010.

67 Eric Toussaint and Sophie Perchellet, “Debt is Haiti’s real curse.”

68 Richard Kim, “IMF to Haiti: freeze public wages,” Nation, January 15, 2010.

69 Lobe, “Haiti: U.S. lawmakers call for debt cancellation.”

70 Ibid.

71 Haiti After the Catastrophe, “What Are the Perspectives? Statement by the Coordinating Committee of the Progressive Organizations,” http://www.normangirvan.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/haiti-statement-prog-orgs.pdf.

72 Quoted in John Riddell ed., To See the Dawn (New York: Pathfinder, 1993), 136.

______________________

Ashley Smith is a member of the ISR editorial board, and the author of “Aristide’s Rise and Fall” in ISR 35 and “The Black Jacobins” in ISR 63.

GO TO ORIGINAL – INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVIEW

Share this article: email mastodon facebook 🔗 copy link

DISCLAIMER: The statements, views and opinions expressed in pieces republished here are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of TMS. In accordance with title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. TMS has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is TMS endorsed or sponsored by the originator. “GO TO ORIGINAL” links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the “GO TO ORIGINAL” links. This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Comments are closed.