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- Do look for organizations with prior experience and expertise, and
- Do consider holding off some of your donations until later in the rebuilding process
"One of two piers at the port serving the Haitian capital has reopened, and a gravel road was laid off of it, clearing a major route for aid to come into the city, officials said. A Dutch Navy ship, the Pelikaan, unloaded 90 tons of humanitarian aid Thursday morning. Two other ships previously offloaded containers for trucks to carry supplies into Port-au-Prince" (CNN article)
"In a country whose government has all but stopped functioning, in a city whose crowded shanties remain largely unreached by aid cargoes, it has fallen to communities on the ground to fill the gap as best they can. Religious missions, with their deep community connections, are proving to be particularly critical conduits of help, both spiritual and material." (WSJ article)
This Daniel Indiviglio article at The Atlantic discusses "Glaxo-SmithKline's recent decision to put thousands of chemical compounds which may cure malaria into the public domain." An interesting discussion of the balance between responsibility to shareholders and responsibility "for the greater good"
This NY Times article from Sunday talks about "Baumol’s cost disease," which refers to businesses that don't benefit from increased efficiency and therefore labor costs continually rise - such as "the performing arts...education, police work and garbage collection." "Cost disease helps explain why low-income Americans can now afford flat-screen televisions that were out of reach a decade ago, but health insurance that was unaffordable in January 2000 remains unaffordable in January 2010."
"A divided Supreme Court on Thursday swept away decades of legislative efforts to restrict the role of corporations in election campaigns, ruling that severe restrictions on corporate spending are inconsistent with the First Amendment's protection of political speech." (Washington Post) Wonderful - more power for businesses to "vote themselves largesse from the publc treasury"
In this Washington Post article, President Obama said "We were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values." Nice spin. 2009 was spent not reforming the financial system, not creating jobs, not reforming health care, not inproving education, and not changing the energy sector. 2009 was not about "getting stuff done" -- it was about sticking to an agenda and finding out that even a supermajority of Democrats in Congress couldn't pass it. Rahm Emanuel didn't want the crisis to "go to waste". To date, not only have they failed in exploiting the crisis for their agenda, but they have also increased the overall uncertainty that is preventing businesses from investing and growing the economy. Obama plans to rectify all of this by telling everyone how angry he is at Wall Street.
Evan Newmark's "Mean Street" blog in the WSJ says "Apparently, this is now how we treat success in America. We damn it — and then we punish it by enacting loopy, politically — expedient measures such as caps on Wall Street trading and principal investments...We need people to come together, but we engage in populist divisiveness. We need millions of jobs, but we kill the incentives and destroy the capital that will create them."
From George Will's column in today's Washington Post:
"We are on the precipice of an achievement that's eluded Congresses and presidents for generations."
-- President Barack Obama, Dec. 15, on health-care legislation
Precipice, 1. a headlong fall or descent, esp. to a great depth.
-- Oxford English Dictionary
"Some are More Equal Than Others" Read responses to the WSJ's article on union member's special exemption from the proposed 40% tax on "Cadillac" health care plans.
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