Last night Rachel Maddow gave a stunning example of her analytical and didactic powers. Her lesson on how falsehoods are generated and ampli-fied by each successive commentator on the ultra right circuit should be taught in every social studies class.

Of course, it won’t.  Nor will students receive any useful information as to the proper role of government when they learn about Haiti’s triple whammy: first, last January’s earthquake, then floods, and now cholera.

Bill Clinton has been leading the Haitian relief effort, but he believes that getting the rubble out of Port au Prince eight months after the earthquake is an accomplishment, since it allows access to the tourist hotels that have been built while Haitians survive in tents.

There’s a visible gradation from the right’s outright lies, to the center’s blind-sided focus, to the valiant afternoon and evening news anchors at MSNBC, who still cannot bring themselves to pronounce the word social democracy, even when they could point out that it has nothing in common with national socialism, which is another word for fascism, and is the way the right describes Obama’s government.

Please, Ed Schultz, leave your hot buttons alone for a while and give your listeners some food for thought:  Haiti has been a United States pawn for the last hundred years.  Cuba has a fifty-year-old communist regime. Haiti’s few can fly to the U.S. if their homes perish in an earthquake, but even with international aide, the many are left indigent.

The story on neighboring Cuba is very different: No matter how many deprivations Cubans have suffered, in part because they would not give an inch to their powerful northern neighbor, even the dissident are glad they’re not Haitians. However meager the rations, when disaster strikes the government takes responsibility. It is able to do so because during their fifty years of defiance the Cubans have trained medical staff, built hospitals, and organized block by block to ensure the safety of all.

America’s internal enemies would take us back to a time when a popu-lation equal to that of Chicago today, had an area one-tenth the size of the lower forty-eight to do their thing in. They didn’t need income tax (although the government assessed one as early as 1862 because, unlike present governments, it didn’t think it could pay for war without one).  Carriages rode over dirt roads, there was no such thing as a life ‘saved’ by chemistry; most daily necessities were made or grown at home.

The Tea Party wants us to fight terrorism while being left alone by govern-ment. Maybe the militias in our northern woods plan to build a few gunships and sail over to Pakistan via India to take on the Taliban?

As Markos Moulitsas emphasizes in American Taliban , American fundamentalists and the Taliban are culturally in synch.  Maybe our Taliban fighters will get used to doing without television while they’re at it.

While assuring Haitians that they will not be abandoned, President Obama has named former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton as special envoys to the devastated island. Both of them in turn removed the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who sits in exile in South Africa and would once again like to come home, where most Haitians want him to be.

Try to hear Democracy Now this evening if you missed it in the morning or at noon, for an excellent primer on why Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere.  It is provided by the African-American lawyer, writer and political activist Randall Robinson. His latest book is An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President, Perseus Books Group, 2007. See his unusual bio on Wikipedia.

When you see the pictures of Haiti’s lush countryside on television, you wonder why the country can’t feed itself.  Then you follow a few links on-line and learn that even though it has been an independent country for most of the last century, the United States in effect has dominated its economy, in particular destroying its agriculture and forcing Haiti to buy U.S. food.

When you are told by CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta,sent to practice a little medicine as he tells the story of Haiti’s disaster, you wonder why “there are no doctors, the hospitals lack even the basic medications such as Tylenol.” The sight of a hospital in Haiti’s capital, Port au Prince, looks strikingly similar to hospitals in Gaza and other destitute places around the world that Americans are given to contemplate in passing on the occasion of some tragedy.

The Dominican Republic, which shares a Caribbean Island with Haiti, has sent no aid.  There is a history of discrimination on the part of its “lighter” inhabitants.

From a little more than 50 miles across the Windward Passage of the Caribbean, Cuba has trained 500 doctors who are working in rural areas of Haiti, and is training 500 more, with government scholarships.

Venezuela sent the first plane the day after the quake.  It carried 19 doctors, 10 firemen and rescue specialists, 17 civil protection experts and three members of the Simon Bolivar International Brigade that is visiting affected areas and evaluating damages.

P.S. Philadelphia 76ers Haitian-born player Samuel Dalembert is raising funds for relief efforts in Haiti. He is the founder of the Samuel Dalembert Foundation, which has teamed with UNICEF, the Red Cross and Feed the Children to support humanitarian aid to his home country, and has pledged to match the total of donations collected at tonight’s game.

Here is a link to a Haitian organization trying to build democracy in Haiti

http://www.fonkoze.org/.  You can donate on their website.

How many countries will have to suffer natural disasters before the world realizes that it needs a permanent corps of relief doctors, workers, and equipment?

The scramble to appear ready and willing is unseemly.  rescue operations cannot wait for governments to make phone calls, decide who will do what, fuel up planes, detour ships, all the while putting our messages of pain and support.

Just today, a member of the American negotiating team at the December Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen stated that it was the fault of the ALBA nations of Latin America, citing Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador and Bolivia, the four left most nations of the alliance) if the negotia-tions had failed.  He said they weren’t interested in saving the planet, but only in “equalizing wealth around the world”, or words to that effect.

Coming amidst the cries of the Haitian victims, that vitu-perative declaration was particularly cynical.  The alternative news sites gave full play to U.S. involvement in Haiti’s disastrous 20th century history, which continues to this day, and has prevented the island nation from acquiring an infrastructure that serves the people rather than the multi-national corporations.  Shantytowns built on deforested hillsides were wiped out while concrete bypasses suitable for the vehicles of the elite could be seen still standing on the newsreels.

Nature and morality agree on the need to share the wealth  and spare the planet.  The rulers think they can get by with piecemeal measures that illustrate Al Qaeda’s rants.