REDEYE 9/14/16

UN admits fault: thousands killed through cholera
NYT, 8/18 — …Since a cholera epidemic…imported by the United Nations peacekeepers began killing thousands of Haitians nearly six years ago,…a confidential report sent to [UN Secy.-General] Ban Ki-moon….stated plainly that the epidemic “would not have broken out but for the actions of the United Nations….”
…After more than five years of high-level denial of any involvement or responsibility…the outbreak has killed at least 10,000 people and sickened hundreds of thousands. Cholera victims suffer from dehydration caused by severe diarrhea or vomiting….
The first victims lived near a base housing 454 UN peacekeepers…and waste from the base often leaked into the [Meille] river. Numerous scientists have since argued that the base was the only plausible source of the outbreak — whose death toll…could be much higher than the official numbers state….
…the UN’s cholera eradication program has failed. Infection rates have been rising every year in Haiti….No major water or sanitation projects have been completed….
…A quarter of the sites run by the peacekeepers…were still discharging their waste into public canals as late as 2014, four years after the epidemic began….
The redress demanded by families of the 10,000 people killed and 800,000 affected would each $40 billion….and that figure does not take into account “those certain to die and be infected in the years ahead.”
Yemen: U.S. imprint on every life lost
NYT, 8/17 — A hospital associated with Doctors Without Borders. A school. A potato chip factory….All were bombed…by warplanes belonging to a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, killing more than 40 civilians.
The United States is complicit in this carnage….selling arms to the Saudis….
…The Saudis and their coalition…simply do not care about killing innocent civilians….
…The war has killed more than 6,500 people, displaced more than 2.5 million others and pushed one of the world’s poorest countries from deprivation to devastation….
…Obama has sold the Saudis $110 billion in arms, including Apache helicopters and missiles…. [and] has also supplied the coalition such indispensable assistance as intelligence, in-flight re-fueling of aircraft and help in identifying appropriate targets. Experts say the coalition would be grounded if Washington withheld its support. Instead the State Department…approved the potential sale of $1.15 billion more in tanks and other equipment to Saudi Arabia to replace items destroyed in the war….
…“There’s an American imprint on every civilian life lost in Yemen.”
Capitalism is failing worldwide
NYT, 8/7 — [Capitalism’s] slow growth is anot some new phenomenon, but rather the way it has been for 15 years and counting. In the United States, per-person gross domestic product rose by an average of 2.2 percent a year from 1947 through 2000 — but starting in 2001 has averaged only 0.9 percent. The economies of Western Europe and Japan have done worse than that.
Dead? Student loans still must be paid!
NYT, 7/4 — Amid a haze of grief after her son’s unsolved murder last year, Marcia DeOliveira-Longinetti faced…endless tasks….And then there were the college loans….
…A New Jersey state agency…said, “…the authority has determined that your request does not meet the threshold for loan forgiveness. Monthly bill statements will be continue to be sent to you….”
New Jersey’s loans…come with extraordinarily stringent rules that can easily lead to financial ruin. Repayments cannot be adjusted based on income, and borrowers who are unemployed or facing financial hardships are given few breaks….
…New Jersey can garnish wages, rescind state income tax refunds, revoke professional licenses….
“It’s state-sanctioned loan-sharking,” a bankruptcy lawyer said. “The New Jersey program is set up so that you fail….”
The program’s regulations have destroyed families’ credit and forced them to forfeit their salaries….
Another borrower, Chris Gonzalez, could not keep up with his loans after he got non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and was laid off by Goldman Sachs….New Jersey sued him, seeking $266,000 in payments, and seized a state tax refund he was owed….
The agency…said…”we must…meet our fiduciary duty to our bondholders.”
…Giving borrowers a break would make the bonds sold to finance the loans “less attractive to the ratings agencies and investors.”
Slave trade, basis of U.S. finance capital
NYT, 8/7 — As a result, in part because of cotton passing through the port, the Custom House in New York (now Federal Hall) generated the federal government’s largest source of income by 1860. More goods were manufactured in the city than in the entire South. The city’s hospitality industry depended on Southerners and their slaves....
City officials seriously contemplated secession as a free city-state as late as 1861, but once Southerners fired on Fort Sumter, resilient New York businessmen adapted. Manufacturers even successfully lobbied Congress to allow the purchase of cotton from the Confederacy to replace the shoddy uniforms they were making for Union troops.