I just got back from a six-day trip to northern Haiti. Been without Internet access, so I’m posting this story here a week late! It aired last Thursday on Free Speech Radio News.
I just got back from a six-day trip to northern Haiti. Been without Internet access, so I’m posting this story here a week late! It aired last Thursday on Free Speech Radio News.
I spoke to Dr. Farmer at the Inter-American Development Bank’s Haiti investor conference at Hotel Caribe last Thursday evening following speeches by UN Special Envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton and Haitian President Rene Preval. As the crowd of investors, journalists, and officials moved to a neighboring ballroom to hear Clinton’s next speech, we stayed in the room to interview Farmer, who co-founded Partners in Health and authored “The Uses of Haiti.” I asked him about democracy in Haiti, the struggle over the minimum wage here, accountability to Haitians, and criticisms of Clinton-led efforts to attract investment to Haiti. Farmer was later driven away from the hotel in a $200,000 armored vehicle, according to a one blog. Background noise largely fades away after start of interview.
MP3. Pictures of Farmer, Clinton, Preval, and Prime Minister Michelle Pierre-Louis, and other photos of Haiti taken over the past 11 days at my Flickr photostream.
UPDATE: Rough transcript below. (more…)
I ran into Al Jazeera English Fault Lines correspondent Josh Rushing in the Dallas Fort-Worth airport a few hours ago. He lives in Austin now, apparently. The U.S. military spokesman-turned-journalist said he’s been touring the country speaking to journalism students, telling them to choose a place or subject area upon graduation and dive into it as a reporter. He said too many of them are following the beaten path of traveling to New York City or some other media hub, hoping to work their way up the ladder in a (probably dying) news company.
So he was glad to hear that I’m on my way to Haiti, not the Big Apple. Later today I arrive in Haiti’s capitol city, Port-Au-Prince. I’ve been studying Haitian Creole all summer, but haven’t had a chance to practice speaking it. If I can pick up the language, I’ll be in Haiti working as a freelance multimedia journalist for a number of the coming months.
The American people are woefully misinformed on the historical and ongoing impact of U.S. foreign policy on Haiti. That’s partly because there is little to no in-depth feature reporting by U.S. journalists working in Haiti. When Haiti does receive attention on occasion, it is too often with sensational stories of extreme poverty (or success). In that sense, I’m “going to where the silence is.” (more…)
Thanks to Mike Shinoda – rapper/producer extraordinaire for Linkin Park – for the shout-out on his blog. Here’s my favorite song featuring Mike on the mic… and RIP Roc Raida.
Have a look around! Some of you might be interested in this post from earlier this summer: As The Pirate Bay sinks, 20 radical technology truths from Eben Moglen.
On Sunday leading former members of the Young Lords Party, a militant Puerto Rican community organization active from 1969 to 1971, gathered at the First Spanish Methodist Church in East Harlem to reflect on the impact of the group. The New York Young Lords took over the church the first time in 1969 an attempt to use it as a base for community food and health programs. Months later they occupied it again, this time brandishing weapons, in protest of the hanging of Julio Roldan, a Young Lords member who was found dead in his cell after a police raid.
It’s unfortunate that the Young Lords are not as well known among broader public as the Black Panthers. The group was arguably more progressive for its time. Patriarchy and other oppressions within the Young Lords started to break down quickly when members challenged those hierarchies inherited from society. The Lords had deep roots in and support from the “El Barrio” community.
Which makes the New York Lords’ sudden and swift decline all the more puzzling. Why did the group fall apart after just two years of success? What can radicals learn from the Young Lords?
I cannot find any audio or video from Sunday’s forum online, oddly, to help answer those questions. You can hear Democracy Now co-host and Lords co-founder Juan Gonzalez speak on his experience in this interview.
I attempted to answer the question posed above myself last year in a paper for a ‘Radical Social Movements’ class. I’m posting it online now, to share it with y’all and Google’s indexer. The paper is entitled “The Young Lords: Examining Its Deficit of Democracy and Decline. Read it here →
An opening summary paragraph is below, but consider reading the paper itself. It analyzes the Lords’ rise and fall in some detail. (more…)