'Destruction everywhere' in Port-au-Prince

UPI ^ | January 13, 2010

[sionnsar]

beyond contributing to the Red Cross I am not sure what to do.

Forget the Red Cross. There are more honest charities out there. Mercy Corps comes to mind...

[Balding_Eagle]

Hopefully, they will have someone in charge of the incoming money. They have to be accountable and make sure it gets to the people.

LOL! It reads like you said that with a straight face!

[conimbricenses]

For over a century the US, UK and most of Europe pretended that Haiti didn't exist...iow, no trade. Without trade there is no revenue for growth.

That's utter and complete bullsh*t, most likely spouted by a source that wants to blame Haiti's many economic and political problems on everything but Haiti itself.

The Treasury Department's register of commercial regulations indicates that the United States first requested and officially received from the "Republic of Hayti" a statement of its existing tariff rates and commercial laws on international trade with the United States way back in 1819.

The State Department's list of foreign diplomatic postings shows that we've maintained a U.S. consulate in Port au Prince since at least 1833.

And in terms of actual trade, the irrefutable reality is that the United States was engaged in regular commerce with Haiti since its founding. The first year that the Treasury Department recorded imports coming into the U.S. by country was in 1815 - barely a decade after Haiti's independence. Our trade in goods from Haiti that year was valued at just under $60,000. The largest categories were molasses, rum, and sugar.

The volume of Haiti's exports to the United States at the time also made it our third largest trading partner in the Caribbean and South America. Haiti exported more to us than Brazil, Florida (a Spanish colony at the time), and all of the Danish, Dutch, and French West Indies. Only the very sizable British and Spanish colonies surpassed it.

And all of those facts are even more amazing when you consider that the government of Haiti was a politically dysfunctional basket case in perpetual revolution, more or less from its inception till the 1870's - the first time a Haitian president left office voluntarily and peacefully at the end of his term.