Amid accusations that the US Government is using the disaster in Haiti as a pretext to militarily occupy and control the country, and while the deputy commander of U.S. Southern Command, Lieutenant-General Ken Keen, has said that he thinks the eventual Haitian death toll from the earthquake will be between 150,000 and 200,000 people, there are now also video reports from on the ground in Haiti of people there seeing more guns than food as the most visible face of ‘humanitarian’ aid efforts, and of starving people being given food containing ‘bugs and worms’:

Latest video news about Haiti from English Al-Jazeera

(3 very short videos posted at YouTube today January 17, 2010)

The United Nations says Haiti’s earthquake is the worst disaster it has ever had to deal with.

Aid is now pouring in, with a steady flow of relief getting through the nation’s only airport.

The World Food Programme says it expects to feed a million people. But survivors say help is not happening fast enough as dead bodies lie scattered on the capital’s streets.

Tarek Bazley reports.

Zbigniew Brzezinski,

The Grand Chessboard:

“For America the chief gepolitical prize is Eurasia… America’s global primacy is directly dependant on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”

“About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in it’s enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”

“America’s withdrawal from the world or because of the sudden emergence of a successful rival – would produce massive international instability. It would prompt global anarchy.”

“The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role.”

The Real News Network’s Paul Jay interviews Zbigniew Brzezinski, former member of the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State from 1966 to 1968, chairman of the Humphrey Foreign Policy Task Force in the 1968 presidential campaign, director of the Trilateral Commission from 1973 to 1976, and principal foreign policy adviser to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential campaign.

From 1977 to 1981, Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. He was also a member of the President’s Chemical Warfare Commission (1985), the National Security Council-Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (1987-1988), and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1987-1989). In 1988, he was co-chairman of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force, and in 2004, he was co-chairman of a Council on Foreign Relations task force that issued the report Iran: Time for a New Approach.

Part 2 of this interview on the flip…

It’s a big, bad, nasty dangerous world out there. Full of fanatical killers who hate you because you’re free. You got to make sure you’re safe. That’s the most important thing, right?

Everything else ain’t worth sh*t without you’re safe and secure, right?

Right. No question.

I heard on the news today that they’re closer now. In my town.

Sh*t. Now what? I’ve got it! I’ll put up a steel fence around the house. To be safe and secure.

Ahhh, that’s better.

Haiti and her people have not only been treated to catastrophe by nature, but have also suffered unimaginably at the hands of other countries. Reminiscent of the ten year sanctions war that killed over a million people in Iraq, mostly women and children, Haiti’s people have for a long time been victims of the global trade system, which has forced Haitians to buy imported food staples, despite the existence of a once-robust agricultural economy.

In April 2008 Raj Patel of UC-Berkeley’s Center for African Studies and author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, spoke with Paul Jay of The Real News about Haiti’s suffering. (video on the flip)

Hat Tip to Vox Humana at MyLeftWing for pointing me to this. It should give you an idea of her present circumstances and the relief work our own TheMomCat who is now in Haiti with MSF is doing there…

Médecins Sans Frontières  / Doctors Without Borders

Teleconference on Emergency Response to Haiti Earthquake

January 13, 2010

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams already working on medical projects Haiti have treated hundreds of people injured in the quake and have been setting up clinics in tents to replace their own damaged medical facilities. Paul McPhun, MSF’s operations manager for Haiti, described the current situation for MSF teams on the ground during a press conference on January 13.

Download audio

Transcript follows on the flip…

“It is nowhere written that the American empire goes on forever.”

–Eugene Jarecki

Is American foreign policy dominated by the idea of military supremacy? Has the military become too important in American life? Jarecki’s shrewd and intelligent polemic would seem to give an affirmative answer to each of these questions.

He may have been the ultimate icon of 1950s conformity and postwar complacency, but Dwight D. Eisenhower was an iconoclast, visionary, and the Cassandra of the New World Order. Upon departing his presidency, Eisenhower issued a stern, cogent warning about the burgeoning “military industrial complex,” foretelling with ominous clarity the state of the world in 2004 with its incestuous entanglement of political, corporate, and Defense Department interests.

“Why We Fight”

99 minutes