Amid this catastrophe, imperial powers and corporate vultures are circling, eyeing the profits to be made from reconstruction.

The Street, an investment Web site, published an article, misleadingly titled “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, Caterpillar, Deere, Fluor, Jacobs Engineering.”

Other commentators–like James Dobbins, a former U.S. special envoy to Haiti under President Bill Clinton–likewise see an opportunity to remake Haiti along free market lines. As he wrote in the New York Times, “This disaster is an opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms.” As director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corporation, the reforms he advocates are not designed to meet people’s needs, but to pad corporate profits through mechanisms like privatization.

THE U.S., a few other imperial powers, some lesser countries and the UN convened a meeting on January 26 in Montreal to profess their concern and promise to aid Haiti.

The 14 so-called “friends of Haiti” at the conference made sure to include 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 challenged the meeting with signs demanding “Medical relief not guns,” “Grants not loans” and “Reconstruction for people not profit.”

Guardian columnist Gary Younge criticized the summit for failing to produce any solutions:

Even as corpses remained under the earthquake’s rubble, 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.

By contrast, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas grouping of Latin American and Caribbean nations opposed to U.S. neoliberal plans has called for relief not troops and cancellation of Haiti’s debt. On his weekly television show, Chávez declared that thousands of “soldiers are arriving, Marines armed as if they were going to war. There is not a shortage of guns there, my God. Doctors, medicine, fuel, field hospitals–that’s what the United States should send. They are occupying Haiti undercover.”

Source: Ashley Smith

In Tennessee, a nuclear waste processing company has settled a lawsuit accusing it of exposing African American workers to higher radiation levels than white colleagues. The company is ironically called RACE, which stands for Radiological Assistance, Consulting and Engineering. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought the suit against RACE. In addition to the excessive radiation exposure, the lawsuit says the company’s white managers assigned African American workers to work near radioactive waste while cordoning off white workers in a separate area. The managers also allegedly manipulated dosimeters that measure radiation exposure to hide their actions. One African American worker was suspended and then fired after complaining his superior had used the N-word and other racist slurs. Twenty-three African American employees will receive a combined $650,000 under the settlement.

Ok, this video starts off normal and then I was like woooooo.  I really hope this kid gets some help…talk to friends or something cause this could turn in another shooting real soon.  Everyone gets picked on in school, I had to deal with it and I hope you can deal with it in a way that is best for you.

Hey everyone.  The time has come to open Today’s Hot Topic up to some talented writers.  Do you like to write?  Do you like to spread your love for on a particular topic?  Well be a guest poster!  As you know Today’s Hot Topic covers so many diverse topics from U.S. politics, international politics, Kpop, international music and the list goes on and on.  So why don’t you share your love for a particular topic and let me know.   Ohh and of course, this is a free gig!  I’m not making any money off of this site, well at least not yet.

So how can you join.  Follow these steps:

1. Contact me here and select “I want to be a guest blogger”.
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As an FYI I use the Wordpress interface.

1. Bless the President for having rescue teams in the air almost immediately. That was President Olafur Grimsson of Iceland. On Wednesday, the AP reported that the President of the United States promised, “The initial contingent of 2,000 Marines could be deployed to the quake-ravaged country within the next few days.” “In a few days,” Mr. Obama?
2. There’s no such thing as a ‘natural’ disaster. 200,000 Haitians have been slaughtered by slum housing and IMF “austerity” plans.
3. A friend of mine called. Do I know a journalist who could get medicine to her father? And she added, trying to hold her voice together, “My sister, she’s under the rubble. Is anyone going who can help, anyone?” Should I tell her, “Obama will have Marines there in ‘a few days’”?
4. China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China, Mr. President. China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US bases in Puerto Rico: right there.
5. Obama’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, “I don’t know how this government could have responded faster or more comprehensively than it has.” We know Gates doesn’t know.
6. From my own work in the field, I know that FEMA has access to ready-to-go potable water, generators, mobile medical equipment and more for hurricane relief on the Gulf Coast. It’s all still there. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who served as the task force commander for emergency response after Hurricane Katrina, told the Christian Science Monitor, “I thought we had learned that from Katrina, take food and water and start evacuating people.” Maybe we learned but, apparently, Gates and the Defense Department missed school that day.
7. Send in the Marines. That’s America’s response. That’s what we’re good at. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after three days. With what? It was dramatically deployed — without any emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.
8. But don’t worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully equipped and self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed immediately with ten metric tons of tools and equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced communication equipment and water purifying capability. They’re from Iceland.
9. Gates wouldn’t send in food and water because, he said, there was no “structure … to provide security.” For Gates, appointed by Bush and allowed to hang around by Obama, it’s security first. That was his lesson from Hurricane Katrina. Blackwater before drinking water.
10. Previous US presidents have acted far more swiftly in getting troops on the ground on that island. Haiti is the right half of the island of Hispaniola. It’s treated like the right testicle of Hell. The Dominican Republic the left. In 1965, when Dominicans demanded the return of Juan Bosch, their elected President, deposed by a junta, Lyndon Johnson reacted to this crisis rapidly, landing 45,000 US Marines on the beaches to prevent the return of the elected president.
11. How did Haiti end up so economically weakened, with infrastructure, from hospitals to water systems, busted or non-existent – there are two fire stations in the entire nation – and infrastructure so frail that the nation was simply waiting for “nature” to finish it off?
12. Don’t blame Mother Nature for all this death and destruction. That dishonor goes to Papa Doc and Baby Doc, the Duvalier dictatorship, which looted the nation for 28 years. Papa and his Baby put an estimated 80% of world aid into their own pockets – with the complicity of the US government happy to have the Duvaliers and their voodoo militia, Tonton Macoutes, as allies in the Cold War. (The war was easily won: the Duvaliers’ death squads murdered as many as 60,000 opponents of the regime.
13. What Papa and Baby didn’t run off with, the IMF finished off through its “austerity” plans. An austerity plan is a form of voodoo orchestrated by economists zomby-fied by an irrational belief that cutting government services will somehow help a nation prosper.
14. In 1991, five years after the murderous Baby fled, Haitians elected a priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who resisted the IMF’s austerity diktats. Within months, the military, to the applause of Papa George HW Bush, deposed him.
    History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. The farce was George W. Bush. In 2004, after the priest Aristide was re-elected President, he was kidnapped and removed again, to the applause of Baby Bush.
15. Haiti was once a wealthy nation, the wealthiest in the hemisphere, worth more, wrote Voltaire in the 18th century, than that rocky, cold colony known as New England. Haiti’s wealth was in black gold: slaves. But then the slaves rebelled – and have been paying for it ever since.
16. From 1825 to 1947, France forced Haiti to pay an annual fee to reimburse the profits lost by French slaveholders caused by their slaves’ successful uprising. Rather than enslave individual Haitians, France thought it more efficient to simply enslave the entire nation.
17. Secretary Gates tells us, “There are just some certain facts of life that affect how quickly you can do some of these things.” The Navy’s hospital boat will be there in, oh, a week or so. Heckuva job, Brownie!
18. Note just received from my friend. Her sister was found, dead; and her other sister had to bury her. Her father needs his anti-seizure medicines. That’s a fact of life too, Mr. President.

Source: “The Huffington Post”

So many people do not know that one of the reasons Haiti is a poor country is because of direct involvement from the United States stemming all the way back to 1910.   Watch and listen to the below report which talks about the conditions in Haiti and the U.S. involvment in Haiti from the Clinton and Bush eras.

Newly disclosed emails show the New York Federal Reserve attempted to keep secret many of the details of the AIG bailout, citing national security grounds. The emails were released last week by the New York Fed ahead of a congressional hearing on the bailout. The Fed’s bailout of AIG remains controversial, in part because it secretly funneled nearly $70 billion to sixteen big US and European banks in what many described as a backdoor bailout. It was later disclosed that recipients of the AIG bailout included Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.

This will be a very interesting topic to discuss further.  Many Americans have no clue as to the American government’s involvement in Haiti ohhh since 1910 give or take a few years.  We must ask ourselves the question, why is Haiti such a poor country?  The answer is that the U.S. government had a lot to do with why Haiti is such in a horrible position.  Also, what role has the CIA played in Haiti.

The below video points out that the Israeli’s who came from half way around the world have already set up field hospitals with modern equipment and surgery rooms.  But the yes, has not.  Hummm why is that?  We will look into this in future post.