Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Chomsky interview on Haiti incites flame war: New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson throws temper tantrum after being debunked

¡Reclama!'s interview with Noam Chomsky is already becoming the subject of controversy at the Indypendent blog.

In one of the questions to Chomsky regarding the treatment of Haiti in the media, ¡Reclama! mentions various comments made in the U.S. media regarding the country:

Any comments on the U.S. media regarding Haiti following the earthquake? For example, Pat Robertson’s “pact with the devil,” David Brooks’ “progress-resistant culture,” pleas with transnational capital to create more sweatshops (Kirstof), Aristide being a despot and a cheat (Jon Lee Anderson). Even Amy Wilentz has compared Aristide to Duvalier in The New York Times.

Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer for The New Yorker and one of the most celebrated mainstream commentators on Latin America, took exception. He spouted a wide range of allegations--none of which was borne out by the facts--including serious accusations that ¡Reclama! had misquoted him, taken his comments out of context, unfairly and unjustifiably included him with the rest of mainstream media (again, he's a staff writer for The New Yorker), and that ¡Reclama! had carelessly referred to Pat Robertson as a journalist, among other invective. He didn't attempt to address any of ¡Reclama!'s points in the following exchange. He has yet to retract any of his defamatory claims, or even reconcile the argument of his original article with the meaning he had intended, described below:
**jon lee Anderson Says:
March 8th, 2010 at 2:29 pm

Please dont misquote me. To clarify, in my recently published piece on haiti in The New Yorker, I called Papa Doc and Baby Doc ‘despots’, and Aristide a ‘cheat.’ And I stand by that statement. Based on all the available evidence i have seen, that is precisely what he was. To take it out of context as you have done, in an apparent attempt to paint me with some kind of “mainstream media” tarbrush is both unjustified and unfair; my characterization of Aristide as a cheat is part of a sentence in a six thousand-word piece I wrote recently about Haiti, and was meant only to illustrate the idea that, overall, Haiti has been poorly served by some of its leaders in the past half-century. Few people could quibble with that assertion, I believe,


**Keane Says:
March 9th, 2010 at 11:32 am

I’m sorry Mr. Anderson feels misrepresented. My intention was to give a very brief flavor of the commentary regarding Haiti in the US. If the information I present below is simply due to a careless, honest mistake on the part of Anderson, I hope he can clarify the matter for his readers. I would promptly change the quote in any reproduction of this interview. My larger point is that careless mistakes, like comparing Aristide with real despots, is something that is not corrected within the establishment press.

The direct quote from Mr. Anderson’s piece, “Neighbor’s Keeper,” with context:

“[Haiti’s] traditional exports, coffee and sugar, have collapsed, and manufacturing has been in decline for decades. It has suffered riots and hideous violence and depressingly regular political upheavals, led by a succession of despots and cheats: Papa Doc, Baby Doc, the priest Aristide.”

From the sentence in question, it is impossible to logically infer a distinction between the first two persons, Papa Doc and Baby Doc as being solely despots, and Aristide being exclusively a cheat. To belabor the point, both qualifiers are in the plural form; two terms are used to describe three people. Therefore my attribution to Anderson in the interview, “Aristide being a despot and a cheat” is a logical inference.

For Mr. Anderson’s complaint to achieve a level of plausibility, he would have had to write: “It has suffered riots and hideous violence and depressingly regular political upheavals, led by a succession of despots and *a cheat*: Papa Doc, Baby Doc, the priest Aristide.”

Certainly with context added, Anderson’s original claim is even bolder, attributing in an even less specific way the riots, violence and political upheaval to the three leaders in question, further muddying up any way to clearly and discretely attribute the events and roles of the three leaders.

Again, if Mr. Anderson would like to clarify his point to the readers of the New Yorker in an addendum, I will promptly change my extraction in future versions of the interview.

This is not the proper forum to rebut Anderson’s characterization of Aristide as a cheat and I will let readers do the research. A good place to start is with the works of Chomsky, Paul Farmer, Mark Weisbrot and Peter Hallward, particularly his “Damming the Flood.” Mainstream critics of the 2004 coup like Jeffrey Sachs also make important points. I hope the readers’ research will provide more information than all the available evidence Mr. Anderson has seen.


**jon lee Anderson Says:
March 9th, 2010 at 12:52 pm

Mr. Bhatt: Thanks so much for that lesson in grammar and ethics. I feel much better now about being made to share a pew alongside with Pat Roberston in your characterization of the “U.S. media,” whom I now learn, in your inference, is an actual journalist and not, as I have long thought, a Christian “televangelist.” Perhaps the distinction was unintended, a mistake made by Mr. Bhatt in a moment of carelessness. Am I splitting hairs here?


**Josephus P. Franks Says:
March 9th, 2010 at 2:34 pm

Keane’s reply was the kindest, most grandfatherly b***h slap I have ever read.

As if additional proof other than his original article were needed, what Jon Lee’s responses prove is his ignorance of Haiti, which he wrote about for… whatever the name of that magazine I always see lying around dentists’ offices is.

As for his hair-splitting, it is a transparently ineffectual attempt to distract attention from the fact that by casting aspersions against Aristide in the same breath, so to speak, as the Duvaliers, John Lee in effect put on a dunce cap and leaned sloppily on the pulp passing for journalism in the United States.


**Michael Galhouse Says:
March 9th, 2010 at 3:37 pm

I fail to see where the interviewer suggests that “US media” figures are equivalent to journalists. The names are lumped together because as members of the media they influence public opinion. In fact, it seems quite generous that he named Mr. Anderson after Brooks and Kristof. If one reads carefully, Bhatt seems to provide a logical progression of journalistic authority regarding Haiti. The appropriate response would have been for Mr. Anderson to realize his mistake and clarify his intended meaning.


**jon lee Anderson Says:
March 9th, 2010 at 6:59 pm

Keane, Josephus, Michael, thanks a whole bunch! I enjoyed our little repartee down the Indy alley here, even if it has felt a little-one-sided at times. But I must leave now and get back to Main Street, out there where all those other ineffectual dimwits in dunce caps are. Whenever I feel the need of some bitch-slapping by you guys — if you can get out of the group-grope long enough to o it — I’ll be sure to check back in. Au-revoir!

We were hoping for a more civil, well-constructed response from one of the contributors to a well-respected publication like The New Yorker. Guess we shouldn't have held our breath.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Obama's praise of 'very savvy businessmen' - Krugman weighs in

¡Reclama!'s piece, "The Failure of the Left" in the print edition of ¡Reclama! is not the only place where Obama is taken to task.

Paul Krugman, liberal economist and winner of the Nobel Prize also weighs in on Obama's praise of the bailed-out bankers.

But first, the quotes themselves:

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

Obama sought to combat perceptions that his administration is anti-business and trumpeted the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies. He plans to reiterate that message when he speaks to the Business Roundtable, which represents the heads of many of the biggest U.S. companies, on Feb. 24 in Washington.

Krugman comments:

Oh. My. God.

First of all, to my knowledge, irresponsible behavior by baseball players hasn’t brought the world economy to the brink of collapse and cost millions of innocent Americans their jobs and/or houses.

And more specifically, not only has the financial industry has been bailed out with taxpayer commitments; it continues to rely on a taxpayer backstop for its stability. Don’t take it from me, take it from the rating agencies...The point is that these bank executives are not free agents who are earning big bucks in fair competition; they run companies that are essentially wards of the state. There’s good reason to feel outraged at the growing appearance that we’re running a system of lemon socialism, in which losses are public but gains are private. And at the very least, you would think that Obama would understand the importance of acknowledging public anger over what’s happening...Obama thinks his key to electoral success is to trumpet “the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies.”

We’re doomed.


"Rebuilding Haiti" - the logic of sweatshop-led development

The ¡Reclama! interview with Noam Chomsky touches on some of the trends of economic development in Haiti:
KB: You mentioned Clinton, now UN special envoy to Haiti, who intends to woo foreign investors and continue on a low-wage textile focus for Haitian economic development. The lens of neoliberal economist Paul Collier, special adviser to the UN in 2009, dominates the UN perspective of Haiti. An advocate of sweatshop-led growth himself, he’s lavished praise on the much-resented MINUSTAH occupation force there, and has even said that the Dominican Republic "is not engaged in the sort of activities, such as clandestine support for guerrilla groups, that beset many other fragile states.” Can a true humanitarian like Paul Farmer—representing a different development model based on fair wages, public health, strengthening the Haitian state—influence the UN as deputy special envoy?

NC: It's a hard choice. I don't blame him for trying. We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people. Like Father Jean-Juste and the marines.

Further information can be found on a piece by David L. Wilson, who makes a compelling point regarding the very viability of such a plan:

The garment export industry in the Caribbean Basin has been in a sharp decline for the past five years. The current round of jobs losses in the region's apparel maquiladoras -- the Spanish name for the assembly plants -- started with the growth of competition from industrial powers like China and has intensified with the economic crisis in the United States, the main market for the industry's products.

The Dominican Republic, Haiti's closest neighbor, lost 73,000 garment jobs from 2005 through 2007, according to an informative article by Marion Weber and Jennifer Blair in the July/August 2009 NACLA Report on the Americas. The six countries that signed on to the 2005 Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) -- in addition to the Dominican Republic, the U.S.-sponsored trade zone includes Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua -- saw their combined exports fall from a 13.3% share of the U.S. import market in 2004 to 9.8% in 2008.7

The job situation continues to deteriorate. Garment jobs in the Dominican "free trade zones" (FTZs) -- the special areas where the maquilas are clustered -- fell another 15.05% in 2008, from 58,546 to 49,735.8 In Honduras, site of Latin America's most recent coup d'état, textile and apparel production for the first six months of 2009 was down by 17.9% compared to the same period the year before. The Honduran maquiladora sector lost 15,000 jobs in 2008 and about 8,000 in the first eight months of 2009, leaving it with some 114,000 employees.

After all, the common thread in current, post-earthquake decisions is that which is missing from all the leading development plans, concocted in Montreal, or in Davos, or at a G7 meeting, and now recently in New York. What's missing is the input of the Haitian people.

As acclaimed aid organization Oxfam bluntly states, "this month, international leaders will make sweeping decisions about Haiti's reconstruction at a meeting in New York – and Haitian community leaders haven't been invited."

Oxfam goes on to say:

If we don't act now, the inequality and poverty that plagued this country for so long could be built into the very fabric of Haiti's reconstruction process.

The banks and governments planning Haiti's recovery need to listen...

    ...to the local leaders who know what camp residents need as the rainy season approaches,

    ...to the poor farmers who need help overcoming already-low crop yields,

    ...to community groups fighting for thousands of people about to be resettled to new areas.

Chomsky agrees:

[T]he aid ought to be going to Haitian popular organizations. Not to contractors, not to NGOs—to Haitian popular organizations, and they’re the ones that should be deciding what to do with it. Well you know, that’s not the agenda of G7.

Wilson again:

Anti-sweatshop activists Barbara Briggs and Charlie Kernaghan used to warn back in the 1990s that this type of "economic development" would create a "race to the bottom" in which workers in different countries would have to compete by accepting lower and lower wages. And that's exactly what happened.

Haitians have learned not to listen to people like Prof. Collier and Special Envoy Clinton. In August 2009 thousands of Haitian sweatshop workers went on strike to demand a higher minimum wage. They ignored arguments that they needed to keep their wages competitive -- it took tear gas and UN troops to get them back into the factories.13 Grassroots organizations meeting in Port-au-Prince since the earthquake have been working on proposals for rebuilding Haiti through a sustainable development plan rooted in Haitian reality.

Links:

1. the Oxfam petition demanding participation of Haitian civil society in development of the country

2. "Haiti--The Politics of Rebuilding", a video feature by Avi Lewis [transcript here]

Note: Both Avi Lewis and David L. Wilson's pieces suffer from the unfortunate reliance on Camille Chalmers, who's reasonable in his micro-economic commentary and stance against neoliberal practices. However, his role in legitimizing the anti-Lavalas forces and hence the 2004 coup d'etat which overthrew the democratically-elected Aristide is something that one suspects is not questioned by well-meaning but uninformed foreign reporters.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Welcome to the blog!

Due to time and economic constraints, we expect the print edition of the magazine to be published quarterly. To promote a more active discussion of the issues, we've launched this blog to complement the magazine.

“The Tragedy of Haiti” from Noam Chomsky's 1993 book Year 501
Diana Barahona details 43 confirmed political murders related to Honduras coup
Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America

More updates coming soon!
Click on the cover page to download the magazine in PDF