Haiti (Finally) Gets a New Prime Minister

The most powerful man in Haiti is not the President – it is the Prime Minister. Under the Haitian Constitution, the Prime Minister holds absolute control of the purse strings, appointment of members of the Cabinet, and control over lower level Government appointments.

In a battle reminiscent of Republicans holding up Democrat appointments in the US – the Haiti Senate has roadblocked President Martelly’s appointments to the Prime Minister position since President Martlelly took office in May. Two candidates have been outright rejected.

What this has meant for the country is that reconstruction of the major infrastructure has been at a complete standstill. There has been virtually no work done on any of the critical systems in the country, other than that done by the sheer guts and perspicacity of the local citizenry. Announcements of various projects, or international investments and aid have been largely symbolic, as since the resignation of the previous Prime Minister there has be no one in the Haitian Government with the authority to sign a contract on behalf of the Government of Haiti.

So the appointment and ratification by the Haitian Congress of Dr. Cornille is being greeted warmly by the international and local Haitian communities. Hopefully – nearly 2 years after the devastating earthquake.

Bill Clinton aide confirmed as Haitian prime minister

Haiti’s Senate confirmed the nomination of Garry Conille, an advisor to former US president Bill Clinton, to be the country’s prime minister.

Conille, a 45-year-old physician by training, was the third candidate put forward by President Michel Martelly for the post in a bid to end a three-month long impasse over the makeup of his fledgling government.

Seventeen senators voted in favor of Conille’s candidacy, three voted against it and nine abstained during the hours-long session.

Conille’s selection was approved by the lower house of parliament last month.

Senate president Rodolphe Joazile announced that the candidacy had been ratified, but Senator Joseph Lambert of the opposition UNITE party said the body had not given Conille a “blank check” and that he should also seek a vote of confidence from the two chambers of parliament.

The prime minister in Haiti is appointed by the president and mainly serves as cabinet chief.

Conille has been serving as chief of staff to Clinton who, as the UN special envoy for Haiti, is a key player in deciding how the impoverished country will spend millions of dollars in international reconstruction aid.

Conille was educated in Haiti and received graduate training in health administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Fulbright scholar.

He has also worked as the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) resident representative for Niger.

Martelly, a popular former singer elected by a wide margin, was sworn in as president of Haiti on May 14 but has not yet put his government in place amid resistance from the opposition-dominated parliament.

Martelly vowed to “change Haiti” upon taking office, promising to restore order and confidence in a country struggling to emerge from one of the most destructive earthquakes of modern times.

Much of the capital was leveled in a 7.0-magnitude quake in January 2010 that killed more than 225,000 people and left one in seven homeless in a nation that was already the poorest in the Americas.

The pace of reconstruction has been painfully slow for hundreds of thousands of traumatized survivors who lost everything and are forced to live in squalid tent cities around the still-ruined capital.

UN aid chief Valerie Amos called for continued humanitarian assistance to Haiti on Thursday, stressing that it was still a country in crisis.

Visiting the country during a two-day evaluation mission, Amos said the 600,000 people still living in camps have urgent needs for basic food, water, sanitation and housing services.

The humanitarian situation has been further aggravated by a cholera epidemic that has killed more than 5,000 people, food insecurity for 4.5 million and an active hurricane season that has already destroyed homes and crops.

626… Not Just Tuskeegee

More about medical experiments conducted by the US Government on patients in Guatemala. The studies are chillingly similar to the sort of experimentation done on prisoners by the Nazis and Japanese during WWII.

Black Americans before Civil Rights feared going to hospitals in some parts of the country…

Perhaps for good reason. Dr John Cutler appears to be our very own Dr. Mengele.

Guatemala Experiments: Syphilis Infections, Other Shocking Details Revealed About U.S. Medical Experiments

A presidential panel on Monday disclosed shocking new details of U.S. medical experiments done in Guatemala in the 1940s, including a decision to re-infect a dying woman in a syphilis study.

The Guatemala experiments are already considered one of the darker episodes of medical research in U.S. history, but panel members say the new information indicates that the researchers were unusually unethical, even when placed into the historical context of a different era.

“The researchers put their own medical advancement first and human decency a far second,” said Anita Allen, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

From 1946-48, the U.S. Public Health Service and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau worked with several Guatemalan government agencies to do medical research – paid for by the U.S. government – that involved deliberately exposing people to sexually transmitted diseases.

The researchers apparently were trying to see if penicillin, then relatively new, could prevent infections in the 1,300 people exposed to syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid. Those infected included soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis.

The commission revealed Monday that only about 700 of those infected received some sort of treatment. Also, 83 people died, although it’s not clear if the deaths were directly due to the experiments.

The research came up with no useful medical information, according to some experts. It was hidden for decades but came to light last year, after a Wellesley College medical historian discovered records among the papers of Dr. John Cutler, who led the experiments.

President Barack Obama called Guatemala’s president, Alvaro Colom, to apologize. He also ordered his bioethics commission to review the Guatemala experiments. That work is nearly done. Though the final report is not due until next month, commission members discussed some of the findings at a meeting Monday in Washington.

They revealed that some of the experiments were more shocking than was previously known.

For example, seven women with epilepsy, who were housed at Guatemala’s Asilo de Alienados (Home for the Insane), were injected with syphilis below the back of the skull, a risky procedure. The researchers thought the new infection might somehow help cure epilepsy. The women each got bacterial meningitis, probably as a result of the unsterile injections, but were treated.

Perhaps the most disturbing details involved a female syphilis patient with an undisclosed terminal illness. The researchers, curious to see the impact of an additional infection, infected her with gonorrhea in her eyes and elsewhere. Six months later she died.

Dr. Amy Gutmann, head of the commission, described the case as “chillingly egregious.”…

Threat of Beer Shortage Forces Republicans to Capitulate in Minnesota

President Obama – I have a solution for you!

Since the debt crisis will force a government shutdown – perhaps what needs to happen is to shut down beer production and delivery…

As the Olympic Beer riot showed, white folks in this country will go crazy with no beer! It would be National Tar and Feather a Rethugly Day…

In about 2 weeks.

One by one, bars get tapped out

Hundreds of bars, restaurants and stores across Minnesota are running out of beer and alcohol and others may soon run out of cigarettes — a subtle and largely unforeseen consequence of a state government shutdown.

In the days leading up to the shutdown, thousands of outlets scrambled to renew their state-issued liquor purchasing cards. Many of them did not make it.

Now, with no end in sight to the shutdown, they face a summer of fast-dwindling alcohol supplies and a bottom line that looks increasingly bleak…

Dayton, GOP reach a budget deal to end the two-week government shutdown

DFL Gov. Mark Dayton and GOP legislative leaders announced Thursday evening they have reached a budget deal to end a two week government shutdown.

After a three-hour meeting with GOP leaders, Dayton said the shutdown will be done “very soon, within days.”

Dayton agreed to drop his insistence on a tax hike and accept the Republican offer to borrow money to balance the budget.

But the governor said the deal must include a $500 million bonding package for new building projects around the state, withdrawal of the divisive social issue proposals now threaded through Republican spending bills, and elimination of the GOP proposal to reduce the state workforce by 15 percent.

House Speaker Kurt Zellers, R-Maple Grove, said he will have the votes in the House to pass the agreement.

Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch, R-Buffalo, agreed. “We believe the caucus will ultimately support this.”

Site Visit – Haiti

Been out of country for a few days working on several projects. One of my stops was to Haiti, where I attended a conference by the new President elect, Mickey Martelli on his administrations plans to move forward…

Haiti's President-Elect - "Sweet Mickey" Martelli

BTX3 made all 3 of the local channel’s news shows, and apparently CNN according to the locals.

Good thing I brought along a suit and tie!

Hope is running really high here for the new Government. Here’s hoping that the new government can finally get things moving in the right direction.

Back in the US (maybe) tomorrow.

Ghadaffi Toast?

Under the heading of “Where in the world is Muammar?”

Venezuela denies Libya’s Gaddafi en route

The government of President Hugo Chavez denied on Monday reports Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was traveling to Venezuela following violent protests in the fellow OPEC member nation.

Attracted to Gaddafi’s revolutionary past, the socialist Chavez also casts himself as an anti-U.S. stalwart on the international stage, and the pair enjoy warm ties.

Adding to media rumors, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said earlier on Monday he had seen information to suggest Gaddafi had fled Libya and was on his way to the South American oil-exporting nation.

The Venezuelan government “denies such information,” a senior government source told Reuters.

Another Dictator bites the dust?

 

Young Man, Raised By Lesbian Couple – Kicks Hell Out of Iowa Republican Bigots

You have to love the Republican Argument that Obamacare is “the Governmen regulating people’s lives” …

But passing legislation to ban gay marriage isn’t. Tossing aside any moral considerations about whether homosexuality fits or doesn’t fit one’s religious beliefs – for me at least it is the core issue that goes back to the ideological ancestors of the current Republicans institution of anti-miscegenation laws to block people of different races from marrying (laws that weren’t overthrown that long ago in Loving vs. Virginia) now trying to control people by sexual orientation.

The very same people squealing the loudest about the government “controlling their lives”.

Too bad there aren’t any bought judges like Thomas, Scalia, and Alito on the liberal side. It would be downright amusing to see a decision that while the government can’t mandate you have Health Care…It also can’t mandate who you can or can’t marry. Seems to me if it can’t be in your personal life one way – it can’t be in your personal life in another…

Eat that, conservative scum!

Hillary Clinton In Haiti

Push come to shove time in Haiti. This week is it, relative to US involvement in negotiating an end to the corrupt political machine in Haiti. Hillary is there to make a point… Time to get off the pot.

Clinton heads to Haiti to mediate political crisis

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is flying to Haiti to mediate in a political crisis there while other administration officials are keeping watch on violent protests halfway across the world in Egypt.

Clinton will meet Sunday with President Rene Preval and the three candidates vying to succeed him during her visit. She will also see a treatment center for the cholera epidemic that has killed almost 4,000 people.

Haiti’s political crisis stems from a first-round presidential election in November that was marred by fraud.

The U.S. wants Preval’s preferred candidate, Jude Celestin, to bow out because the Organization of American States says he had the least support. The U.S warns that continued aid for Haiti’s reconstruction from last year’s earthquake is at stake.

Haiti’s presidential run-off is in March.

Egypt Shuts Down It’s Internet

There have been several bills before the US Congress to allow this to be done in the US.

This is the first time a country has shut down their entire public access Internet communications system, although other repressive governments such as Iran and China have sought to limit Internet access. There are 5 major Internet carriers in Egypt, which has about 58 million cell phones riding the 4 Cell Carriers – the primary connectivity methodology in third world countries. Apparently, Noor – the carrier on which most government traffic, and the Egyptian Stock Exchange is carried is still active.

Egypt Shuts Down Internet As Protests Intensify

As civil unrest continues to spread and intensify across Egypt, authorities within the country have taken a drastic and apparently unprecedented step: they’ve shut down the entire Internet.

The blackout began at about 12:30 a.m. local time, when four of the Egypt’s major service providers abruptly shut down. Calling the nationwide outage “an action unprecedented in Internet history,” the U.S.-based Internet analysis firm Renesys found that the simultaneous shutdown rendered virtually every Egyptian site inaccessible, from anywhere in the world. The country’s four major ISPs (Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, and Etisalat Misr) have all suspended network services, with Noor Group standing as the lone exception. (The country’s stock exchange, perhaps not coincidentally, is still active at a Noor address.) According to statistics from BGPmon, a full 88-percent of the “Egyptian Internet” has been completely wiped out.

Looks like the Egyptian Government is getting ready to get “down and dirty”, and wants to cut the ability of the outside world to know about it. Today’s protests may well be running into something a bit more lethal than tear gas, and protest leaders could be looking at being “disappeared”.

The shutdown also is heavily impacting mobile phones, knocking out text messaging, email, and the ability to send images. IP based carriers would be down entirely, and (especially outbound)  communication with the outside world would be largely shut down, although inbound calls might still be possible.

US Drops to 22nd in Corruption Index

Now we got the Chamber of Commerce and Republicans taking money from Communist China and India to sell American jobs…

U.S. slips to historic low in global corruption index

The United States has dropped out of the “top 20″ in a global league table of least corrupt nations, tarnished by financial scandals and the influence of money in politics, Transparency International said on Tuesday.

Somalia was judged the most corrupt country, followed by Myanmar and Afghanistan at joint second-worst and then by Iraq, in the Berlin-based watchdog TI’s annual corruption perceptions index (CPI).

The United States fell to 22nd from 19th last year, with its CPI score dropping to 7.1 from 7.5 in the 178-nation index, which is based on independent surveys on corruption.

This was the lowest score awarded to the United States in the index’s 15-year history and also the first time it had fallen out of the top 20.

In the Americas, this put the United States behind Canada in sixth place, Barbados at 17th and Chile in 21st place.

Jointly heading the index — in which a score of 10 indicates a country with the highest standards, and 0 as highly corrupt — were Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore with 9.3. They were also at the top of the table last year.

Somalia scored 1.1. The watchdog group said its table was based on “different assessments and business opinion surveys carried out by independent and reputable institutions.”

U.S. “INTEGRITY DEFICIT”

Nancy Boswell, president of TI in the United States, said lending practices in the subprime crisis, the disclosure of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and rows over political funding had all rattled public faith about prevailing ethics in America.

“We’re not talking about corruption in the sense of breaking the law,” she said. “We’re talking about a sense that the system is corrupted by these practices. There’s an integrity deficit.”

Various financial scandals at state and city level had encouraged the impression that the regulatory oversight was weak and that influence could be bought, she added.

The index showed a number of countries — including Iran — climbing up the chart significantly from 2009, though TI said this could often be ascribed to the fact that different surveys were being used that offered no direct comparison to last year.

The fact that nearly three quarters of the countries scored 5.0 or less showed corruption was still a major global problem, said Robin Hodess, director of policy and research at TI.

However, the watchdog identified Bhutan, Chile, Ecuador, Macedonia, Gambia, Haiti, Jamaica, Kuwait, and Qatar as states where improvement had been made over the past year.

By contrast, it highlighted the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Madagascar, Niger and the United States as nations where perceptions had deteriorated.

 

Tuskegee 626… In Guatemala!

Seems that rural black folks weren’t the only ones used in unethical scientific experiments… What you have to realize – is in the 30′s and 40′s and even into the 60′s – our medical and scientific community really wan’t all that different from Hitler’s.

U.S. apologizes for syphilis experiment in Guatemala

The United States apologized on Friday for an experiment conducted in the 1940s in which U.S. government medical researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates with syphilis.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and other top officials issued a statement about the experiment, which echoed the infamous 1960s Tuskegee study in which black American men were deliberately left untreated for syphilis.

“The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical,” the statement reads.

“Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health. We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices.”

The experiments, aimed at testing whether penicillin could prevent syphilis, were discovered by Susan Reverby, professor of women’s studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

“In 1946-48, Dr. John C. Cutler, a Public Health Service physician who would later be part of the Syphilis Study in Alabama in the 1960s and continue to defend it two decades after it ended in the 1990s, was running a syphilis inoculation project in Guatemala, co-sponsored by the PHS, the National Institutes of Health, the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the Pan American Health Organization), and the Guatemalan government,” she wrote.

“It was the early days of penicillin and the PHS was deeply interested in whether penicillin could be used to prevent, not just cure, early syphilis infection, whether better blood tests for the disease could be established, what dosages of penicillin actually cured infection, and to understand the process of re-infection after cures.”

The prison inmates were deliberately infected by prostitutes, but were treated with penicillin afterwards.

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, said regulation prohibited such “risky and unethical” research today.

Tea Bagger Republican Senate Candidate From Kentucky, Rand Paul Supports Segregation

This was a veritable train wreck. Rand Paul is the son of Congressman Ron Paul whose racist associations with the C of CC and white nationalist groups are well documented. Rand Paul takes the Libertarian view that the Government cannot regulate discrimination by private businesses – which as Rachel points out during this interview means that businesses, primarily in the South by the time of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would be able to legally exclude Minorities as customers or workers on the basis of being private enterprise…

Ergo the Bus Boycott of Montgomery, and the Wallgreen lunch counter protests would have been illegal…

On the part of the Civil Rights workers.

What this is, is a thinly veiled regurgitation of David Duke’s “new new new” KKK in suits philosophy – sometimes expressed in their terminology as a “Right of Association”.

SEC Staffers Watched Porn As The Economy Tanked, and Wall Street Pirates Stole Billions

The newest attack on the SEC by Republicans is that SEC Officials are too busy watching Porn to be entrusted with watching Wall Street. According to Republican Rep. Darrell Issa -

“This stunning report should make everyone question the wisdom of moving forward with plans to give regulators like the SEC even more widespread authority,” he said. “Inexplicably, rather than exercise its existing regulatory enforcement authority, SEC officials were preoccupied with other distractions.”

Of course this ignores the fact that what the SEC Staffers who were guilty of this were doing is against Federal Regulations (and caught by Government filters and reported to the Inspector General), and normally such behavior as misuse of a Government Computer is grounds for administrative punishment or termination. Which leaves us to the point of – who was in charge, and what did they do about it?

Some SEC Employees Watching The Wrong Things

And the second question being – since Congress and their staff is exempt from this regulation…

What would a survey of Congress’ computers turn up?

SEC staffers watched porn as economy crashed

As the country was sinking into its worst financial crisis in more than 70 years, Security and Exchange Commission employees and contractors cruised porn sites and viewed sexually explicit pictures using government computers, according to an agency report obtained by CNN.

“During the past five years, the SEC OIG (Office of Inspector General) substantiated that 33 SEC employees and or contractors violated Commission rules and policies, as well as the government-wide Standards of Ethical Conduct, by viewing pornographic, sexually explicit or sexually suggestive images using government computer resources and official time,” said a summary of the investigation by the inspector general’s office.

More than half of the workers made between $99,000 and $223,000. All the cases took place over the past five years.

This also begs an interesting question. Since many of the people making that level of salary would be Presidential Appointees – that means that most of the people at that level would have been Republican appointees.

France – Bus Fare for Rachida Dati

Could you imagine the uproar in the US if the next time Joe Biden sticks his foot in his mouth…

Obama would take away his perks of office?

Rachida Dati

I mean – back to riding Amtrak every day, Joe! On your own dime!

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French Prime Minister, who apparently hasn’t met a good-looking French woman of color he couldn’t appoint to a cabinet position…

At least now that he is married.

And with Rachida Dati, Rama Yade, and newly appointed Jeannette Bougrab, Sarkozy has a lock on the most attractive women of color on the “continent”.

Such charm doesn’t come without a cost apparently – as Rachida has “stepped in it” -

Ex-French minister Dati loses perks: report

Jeannette Bougrab

France’s ex-justice minister Rachida Dati has lost her chauffeur-driven limousine and bodyguards after annoying President Nicolas Sarkozy with a recent TV appearance, reports said Wednesday.

Dati, who fell out of favour with Sarkozy last year and now serves as a member of the European parliament, turned up on national television this month to comment on regional elections in which Sarkozy’s party was roundly defeated.

After spotting Dati on the screen and complaining that she had been absent from the campaign trail, Sarkozy called the head of national police and asked that she be stripped of her limousine, chauffeur and security detail, the Canard Enchaine satirical weekly reported.

Rama Yummy..errrr...Yade

Aides to Dati confirmed some aspects of the report.

“We are talking essentially about three police officers who were told to end their assignment on March 14″, the night that Dati went on television, said the official.

“It’s not clear that it was a decision taken by the president,” he said. “What is certain is that it was a decision by the interior minister.”

The interior ministry said former ministers are allowed to keep their limousines and security detail for six months after they leave the government and that Dati’s time had expired.

The 44-year-old Dati became the first French Arab woman to hold a powerful post in government when she was named justice minister in 2007 after Sarkozy’s election.

A fixture of celebrity magazines, Dati has recently been seen once again in Sarkozy’s entourage, fuelling speculation that she could return from political exile in the Strasbourg assembly.

Damn… this is a hell of a lot more fun than ugly-assed Republicans…

Career in Government? It Pays More…

A recent survey by USA Today shows that in a number of occupations which exist both in the Government and commercial world - “the Government pays better”. That is not actually always true – but it makes good press.

Might be a real good idea for those aspiring college graduates to get a resume into the Government to pursue a career as a G-man or G-woman.

The key to this though, isn’t that the Federal Government pay scale has gone whacky. There are two factors contributing to the differential.

First is the age of the average Federal Government worker.

In the United States, for example, 60 percent of the federal civil service is older than 45 years – nearly double the 31 percent in the private sector. Furthermore, only 3 percent of the federal workforce is less than 25 years old.

In the Federal Government’s pay system, additional pay is given for each year of seniority in a position. So, a person who is new to a job makes less than someone with 10 years experience at the same job. The impact of an older workforce is to artificially push up the average salaries.

Second, is how commercial corporations have reduced their payroll by eliminating older workers – pushing down the average age of the workforce, while lowering expense due to salaries. This sort of age discrimination is fairly rampant – and has resulted in a massive real income loss for the average American Family. Where it gets truly ugly is the fact that this strategy has forced perhaps as many as 5 million older American workers into unemployment, or under-employment in what should have been their prime earning years – socking away a large portion of their retirement funds. In combination with the massive losses Wall Street has inflicted on pension and retirement plans – this means that the cost of this generation nearing retirement has been pushed off onto the Government, as massive numbers of people will be dependent on Social Security as their only income.

Ergo – the “shinola” is about to hit the fan.

Cornel West Speaks Truth to Obama

Cornel West nails this one. I think it’s time the Obama Administation spend a lot more time on running the country, instead of running from criticism from the right. There comes a point when an appeal to reason doesn’t work, cajoling, doesn’t work, and shaming doesn’t work…

And the only appeal to logic left is a good left hook, firmly planting the recalcitrant on their kiester. President Obama needs to come out swinging against the right wing syncopates and corporate bought lackeys – and start serving the people who elected him in the first place.

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