For Haiti: Aid now, then liberty ~ By Roger Hedgecock

Commentary from WorldNetDaily

By Roger Hedgecock Posted: January 18, 2010 ~ 1:00 am Eastern © 2010 The death and destruction in Haiti has fixated the world on this poor country. Aid is pledged from private and public sources in the U.S. and from many other nations. The American people, the most generous people on the planet, are pouring forth a torrent of aid. But beyond burying the dead, treating the injured and comforting the grieving, indeed, beyond the immediate food, water and shelter needs of the survivors, is the longer term question: Independent since 1804, why is Haiti still so poor, so corrupt, so desperate – and so vulnerable to disaster? Putting aside answers like Pat Robertson's "the Haitians made a pact with the devil" and Danny Glover's "the earth retaliated for the failure of the Copenhagen Conference," why did so many Haitians have to suffer now when another 7.0 earthquake centered in the San Francisco Bay during the World Series in 1989 killed just 63 people? The standard answer is that Haiti is poor. That's pretty obvious. Per capita GDP is less than $1,300 a year. The real question is: Why is Haiti so poor? Many other small independent countries in the area have prospered. Next-door neighbor Dominican Republic is a thriving democracy with a growing economy generating about $8,600 per person per year. Barbados and the Bahamas are small island countries nearby with primarily black populations that enjoy many times the per capita income of Haiti. Barbados boasts a thriving democracy and economy – with its own stock market – and per capita GDP of about $19,000 per year. The Bahamas do even better with per capita GDP of about $28,000. Some point out that these successful countries were all ex-colonies of Britain, while Haiti had the misfortune to be colonized by France. It could be something to that – but the influence of colonization is a distant and receding memory. There must be other, more recent, reasons for the wide disparity of experience between these nations. READ FULL STORY >