Hurricane devastation in Haiti "catastrophic." US does nothing.

Continuing the US government's history of complete disinterest and antipathy of Haiti, we are turning a blind eye while hundreds of thousands of people, not too far from us, starve to death.

This is an excellent op-ed from the Aurora Sentinel in Colorado. Reprinted in full.

There's one Bush pattern that needs to change before the president leaves office in January.

Once again, life has become desperate in flood-ravaged, desperately poor Haiti, and the United States stands by disinterested in a calamity affecting tens of thousands of people.

Tropical Storm Hanna is soaking the flood-plagued Caribbean island nation and causing another wave of mudslides and floods, making worse the calamity Haitians have been living since the middle of August when Hurricane Faye tore through the country.

Stories yesterday pointed out that overcrowded hospitals were being flooded, tens of thousands of the luckiest people were in some kind of shelters, and that there were entire families stranded on rooftops, not begging, but screaming for help.

On the same day, the Bush administration announced it would seek to immediately send $1 billion in aid to Georgia to help rebuild that country unnerved by Russian intervention in a brewing civil war.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Haitians have no homes, no food and no hope.

This isn't the first time this ailing nation has been overlooked, Four years ago, the misery was nearly the same after two late-summer hurricanes left more than 80,000 people with absolutely nothing to eat. Disease was rampant as dead bodies floated everywhere, and the government couldn't even find the machinery or fuel to create mass graves for thousands of dead.

The United States provided $60,000 in aid. It was embarrassing and cruel.

There's not even a mention of any aid being funneled to the Haitians this time.

If for no other reason, the United States should selfishly donate all they can to Haitians to prevent more rounds of boat people descending on American shores.

But the best reason for us to help the Haitians is that this poor, disaster-racked country desperately needs generous help from the United States, and every able country in the world, to save hundreds of thousands of people from horrible fates.

The United States needs to give now.

This reminded me of an op-ed the Washington Post ran two years ago. It's about trade and not humanitarian aid, but it drives home the point that the US government couldn't care less about the people of Haiti. (Then again, they hardly care about the people of the US.) From the Post, circa 2006:

WHEN IT COMES to Haiti, the hemisphere's poorest country, the United States has a perverse history of being more generous with its troop deployments than its terms of trade. The time is ripe for a new approach.

For the past two years, Congress has turned a deaf ear to pleas that Washington extend trade preferences to Haitian-manufactured T-shirts, hospital scrubs and other apparel. The effect has been devastating for the nation's garment industry, once one of the few bright spots in an otherwise supine economy. Clothing assembly plants, already hit hard by the political violence of recent years, are closing nearly every month as customers move their business to Asia. A sector that once provided 100,000 jobs now employs only 12,000 to 20,000 and stands in peril of disappearing entirely.