What's your take on the whole Haiti situation?

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To be honest. I'm fed up with seeing it on the news every broadcast everyday, and then asking us for money. I don't know about everybody else but my parents are in enough financial termoil as everybody else. I mean. What gives ? (I dont know what that means, but people say it when they're ranting so...)

Yup, the only thing I do when I hear Haiti is to switch off the telly!

It is an example of the future. Poor, overpopulated, and one more disaster will have all 9,000,000 thinking about how to get to Florida. They have a colony there.

If it had been Mexico City they can walk to the border, all 26,000,000 of them. They have colonies, and a historic claim to the northern half of Mexico stolen in 1845.

Overall, the billion people of Europe, North America, have six billion people thinking of moving there.

Haiti has been run as a detention camp for fifty years. They are used to American troops in the streets.

Lately it has been UN forces, but we pay for that.

They picked up the pay check for international police, running the camp Haiti detention center, but when it came, the UN building fell, and there was no water system, food supplies, in a place where disaster is common, they were not prepared.

UN programs for everything, and missions, but they all were doing nothing.

First actions should have been building, a water system, roads, schools, hospitals, but that was left to the local government, who pocketed the money. The construction machines should be in place, with roads to shift resources around as needed. All the money was spent on administration.

It was the same during Katrina, or 9/11, billions spent to prepare, then finding nothing when disaster strikes. Most of the Katrina response was filling up five star hotels for six months. Aid was given to Baton Rouge, who kept it. Half of New Orleans is still in ruins, and half the people never returned.

Unlike America, you cannot just bus Haitians to Houston, Atlanta, and give them six months welfare.

Feeding nine million will cost billions a year, Most of the housing is gone, schools, hospitals, we are looking at a trillion dollar rebuild, to get back to third world poverty. No one has that kind of money.

People are living in tents made of bed sheets, in a place where the rain is tropical, and hurricanes come several times a year. Several hundred thousand dead, several million homeless, hungry, thirsty.

The UN is in charge, they were, and are in deep now. This disaster can use up all the money they were going to spend for administration, world wide.

This will be on going in the world, more people living on the edge just waiting. Another Mexico City quake, who is going to help 25 million?

New Madrid is coming, an all American problem, it will affect us all, and be a disaster for 10-30 million. Post Katrina, we half million, the response was not good. All of our roads worked, the airport, but that will not be the case for New Madrid.

Haiti was a 7, New Madrid will be a 9, with large after shocks for a year.

I was not prepared, now I have a pack, tent, sleeping bag, some food, but should have a medical kit, water purification tablets. I left for Katrina wearing Bally slip ons, now I have boots, double front jeans, a rain coat, a hat, If I had to walk a hundred miles, I might make it.

Katrina was my wake up call, let Haiti be a warning, you may have nothing and no place to go. A week without water, a month without food, a winter without shelter, it is not good.

Somehow I also feel the suffering of Haiti. Everything is wiped out, Haiti becomes hollow and empty with no nothing, with all the tears in people's eyes and all the thorns in people's hearts.

Now, I can only hope and pray that things will become better, but I don't want to hear too much of it. I know such sufferings and I feel hurt, but as Eric Clapton sings, 'I must be strong to carry on...'

Haiti was forced to pay a huge indemnity to France in 1825 that they were still paying in 1946. As a result, they had to pay 80% of their budget for the indemnity for much of that time. They borrowed money for that purpose and ran afoul of other creditors - when the Americans invaded in 1915 they seized all the money in the bank and took it to New York!

The state there is very weak, has been for a very long time. Recently, international forces have used their leverage to hollow the state out even more and outsource everything to NGOs.

The source of the problem is the indemnity, really. They never had a chance. Since then, powerful outsiders have capitalised in its weakness mercilessly.

Haitian President Aristide brought up the indemnity to the French in 2003 during a tight period when all financial institutions and development agencies froze all loans and assistance to Haiti - the French were not at all pleased with that.

In 2001, Haiti was cut off completely from all assistance, though groups devoted to overthrowing the government were being financed. This culminated in the coup d'etat of 2004 followed by the invasion and continued occupation of Haiti. Just recently, it was decided that the country's most popular political party would be banned from running for elections.

This trick (using an election dispute between the unwanted leftist government and an opposition financed by you in order to cut off international assistance) is ongoing now with Nicaragua - same situation, though the government is still in power there.

Haiti was being run by UN people under international supervision, really... it's a lot like Bosnia with the Peace Implementation Council and the High Representative with the power to fire elected leaders. The nominal leader of Haiti is Rene Preval, who rose to prominence as Aristide's prime minister and his successor in 1996. He is weak and more cooperative than Aristide - the reforms agreed to by blackmail (getting Cedras to overthrow Aristide in a bloody coup, offer to bring him back only if he passes the reforms) were done by Preval in the 1996-2001 period and this caused the destruction of Haiti's ability to grow its own rice, for instance, when heavily-subsidised US rise was allowed to pass into the country with minimal tariffs.

Preval was followed again by Aristide who was overthrown in 2004 in the coup. The international occupation set up a presidential election in 2006, Preval won because he was supported by Aristide's people, but since then has been under the control of the anti-Aristide international factors. At first, there were attempts to steal the vote from Preval because in part of international reluctance to have him in power... Preval at one point married the widow of Leslie Delatour, a man who helped with Haitian neoliberal reforms in the '80s - in fact Aristide was ordered in 1994 to put him in the government...

Most government functions now are done by the UN or by NGOs... they argue that this is necessary because of corruption. The huge corruption under the US-backed Duvaliers has been used to crack down on elected governments and make them impotent. There has been vitriolic anti-Aristide propaganda from the Republican right for a long time, calling him a psychotic, a communist, and accusing him of looting the treasury when there's no proof of this at all...

There have been more and more intrusive forms of international government in recent times. Cambodia in the early '90s had such an international authority to help implement the peace agreement between the warring factions there (including the Khmer Rouge, by the way)... then came Bosnia under international rule starting in 1996 with a far more intrusive regime and open-ended. Then came Kosovo, and then came East Timor... In Haiti the first entry of US and UN troops in 1994 started the process there. The 2004 intervention created a full-fledged international regime.

The native Americans did not have the power in 1915 to march into a country and rob its bank.

Duh!

But the European Americans had the guns...

And do they owe Haitians a lot of money, I wonder?

I think so and hope something gets done about it.