Ronel Thelusmond is the director of the technical division of the National Institute for the Application of Agrarian Reform (INARA), part of the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture. An element of INARA’s mission is to manage land conflicts, particularly as they relate to national development. We asked Ronel how the government could [...]

While the eyes of the world are on Haiti’s illegitimate elections and the return of the deposed dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, about 1.5 million displaced earthquake survivors continue to live in sub-human conditions. In the absence of large-scale or systemic responses by the government, international community, or aid organizations, progressive civil society [...]

“I came to protest so we can find a solution. Misery is killing me,” said Mascarie Sainte-Anne, 70, at the edge of a rally in front of Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive’s office on October 12. Haitians have been taking to the streets with increasing frequency since August in calls for redress of the economic and social [...]

Looming losses from the mortgage scandal dubbed “foreclosuregate” may qualify as the sort of systemic risk that, under the new financial reform bill, warrants the breakup of the too-big-to-fail banks. The Kanjorski amendment allows federal regulators to pre-emptively break up large financial institutions that—for any reason—pose a threat to U.S. financial or economic stability. Although downplayed [...]

The unspoken ideological taboo in most public discussion of the economic crisis prohibits seeing or treating the problem as systemic, as a problem of capitalism as a system. Instead, our political, journalistic, and academic leaders mostly see only symptoms and "develop policies" only for those symptoms. Alarms about one symptom -- and contested efforts to address it -- soon shift to another symptom and "policy responses" for it. Often such policies for one symptom actually worsen another symptom. Today's alarms focus on housing and huge government subsidies there. To see the systemic problems of the US housing industry, consider its basic economics.

What are some of those concrete and brick towers that line the highways of most Southern New England cities- from New Bedford to New Haven? Skyscrapers to house the poor urban elderly. In the 1960s, dozens of towers from Massachusetts to Connecticut were built to house the working people displaced by Federal highway construction. Between 1952 [...]

"You see all these people who lost their houses who don’t have the means to build other houses. In the camp, someone who has a tent is someone who’s found someone to give them a gift; the majority of people are living in tonèl, a little shelter made of a tarp over [four sticks of] wood. They’ve taken a little wood and some nails and they’ve built a little place to live. I can’t say that this is bad because people need a place to stay and no one is doing it for them, so they’re making do the only way they can. But the authorities should have foreseen this. Especially now that we’re in hurricane season until November… For people who don’t have a good tonèl or tent, when the rains come, they spend the entire night standing up on their two feet. After seven months, people are tired."

It will be five years since Katrina on August 29. The impact of Katrina is quite painful for regular people in the area. This article looks at what has happened since Katrina not from the perspective of the higher ups looking down from their offices but from the street level view of the people – a view which looks at the impact on the elderly, the renter, people of color, the disabled, the working and non-working poor. So, while one commentator may happily say that the median income in New Orleans has risen since Katrina, a street level perspective recognizes that is because large numbers of the poorest people have not been able to return.

Grassroots groups in Haiti are developing strategies to respond to one of the greatest lingering crises of many after the January 12 earthquake: homelessness for 1.9 million people whose houses crumbled or were too damaged to occupy. FRAKKA represents one initiative, though still fledgling, to unite grassroots groups and residents of internally displaced people’s camps to win their human right to housing. Yet amidst current conditions of desperation, tents and other emergency supplies are being withheld and stockpiled for a future humanitarian crisis by some international NGOs.

Colette Lespinasse: "We hear that in the camps there are groups who have started organizing themselves to assert their demands around housing as a right. They’re thinking about alternatives and starting to put pressure on the government to respect those rights. The first thing to do is some education so more people understand that housing is a right. Second is to help people organize to demand these rights from the state. We need a popular movement to mobilize around the question of housing. I think the work that lies before us in the next year is to organize these different groups into a larger movement in Haiti. Because the government isn’t talking about it at all. But a great mobilization of people would make the government prioritize this."