Please donate the time required to read the books about Haiti that I discuss below, at least one of them, and then speak up about what you learn.

An impressive, and growing, body of work explains how the "international community" (the USA and a handful of allies) worked with the Haitian elite to make a murderous and very successful assault on Haitian democracy as the twenty-first century began. It is an assault that continues today as the generosity that millions of people around the world displayed towards Haitians after an earthquake has been scandalously wasted and even used to bolster the Haitian and foreign elites who run Haiti. Peter Hallward's "Damming the Flood" thoroughly refutes the lies that were sold, and are still sold, about the "international community's" role in Haiti since 2000. Unfortunately, Hallward's book was written before the 2010 earthquake that killed perhaps as many as 250,000 Haitians, and before Wikileaks' release of US embassy cables. Thankfully, two new books about Haiti - Justin Podur's "Haiti's New Dictatorship" and Jeb Sprague "Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti" - update and greatly expand on Hallward’s work.

The very ugly story these books tell begins in the year 2000 when free and fair elections in Haiti that were widely smeared as "fraudulent" or "deeply flawed". There were legislative and presidential elections in 2000 that resulted in a landslide victory for Jean Bertrand Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas party. A murderous, low intensity terrorist campaign based in the Dominican Republic gathered momentum against Haiti's government between 2000 to 2004. Deadly hit and run attacks plagued Haiti while the "international community" and the human rights industry looked the other way. As terrorists assailed Haiti throughout these years, the "international community" implemented extremely harsh economic sanctions against Haiti's democratically elected government. At the same time, tens of millions of dollars in assistance flowed to Aristide’s political opponents – many of whom were financing terrorists as Sprague shows in detail. Legitimate attempts by the Haitian government to defend itself against terrorists were denounced as "human rights abuses". NGO's like Human Rights Watch, Reporters without Borders, and Amnesty International did a lot to make the sanctions seem reasonable by putting out shoddily researched statements that were heavily influenced by a well-connected anti-Aristide minority in Haiti. The Dominican Republic based paramilitaries inflicted a great deal of damage but were probably incapable of overthrowing Aristide’s government. They were ultimately upstaged on February 29 of 2004 by troops from the USA, France and Canada. US troops shipped Aristide off to the Central African Republic in the middle of the night while Canadian troops guarded Haiti’s international airport. The US and its allies easily brushed off calls for the UN to formally investigate Aristide's claim that he was kidnapped. US troops who were soon replaced by troops from Brazil, China and various other countries - MINUSTAH as the UN "peacekeeping" force in Haiti is called.

A dictatorship under Gerard Latortue (from 2004 to 2006) presided over the murder of thousands of Fanmi Lavalas partisans - at least 4000 murders according to the only scientific study done to investigate the matter. The perpetrators were mainly paramilitary groups and the Haitian police which was quickly revamped (under close US supervision) to include hundreds of the terrorists formerly based in the Dominican Republic. The UN troops (MINUSTAH) perpetrated some massacres of unarmed protestors and bystanders. However, most of the dirty work was done by the revamped Haitian police and their paramilitary allies with MINUSTAH acting in a supporting role.

And then she summarized:

And Economic systems influence culture and social values. An economics of commodification creates a culture of commodification, where everything has a price, and nothing has value… The growing culture of rape is a social externality of economic reforms. We need to institutionalize social audits of the neo-liberal policies, which are a central instrument of patriarchy in our times.

There is also an archaic feudalist system; there is the disgraceful caste system, there is religious lunacy: all having a detrimental effect on shaping both social values, and culture.

There is also ignorance, the result of a chronic lack of learning and education, as India is home to the greatest number of illiterate people anywhere on earth.

And there is sexual oppression, associated elsewhere with the 19th century, or much earlier days; there are feudal sexual master-slave relations, extreme prohibitions on sexuality, medieval guilt that religions attach to sexuality, unnatural men to women ratios (result of aborting female fetuses and killing baby-girls); all that adding fuel to already unstable, explosive conditions in the society.

The primary victims of this state of affairs are, of course, Indian women.

Through the later 20th century, patients from developing countries came to western hospitals seeking high-tech medical care unavailable at home. That flow has started to reverse. With costs in countries such as the US increasing sharply, and waiting times in Europe getting longer, patients from the West now go to developing countries for cheap, quick medical care no longer accessible at home, in a booming medical tourism industry valued at $60bn worldwide. This year, reports the Deloitte Centre for Health Solutions, over 1.6 million Americans will go on “scalpel safaris” to lower costs and avoid queues.

Advocates of medical tourism claim that Indian surgeries should be seen as a boon for ailing western healthcare systems, a kind of medical outsourcing, equivalent to the call centres that have allowed western companies to cut service costs by 40% or more (2). Western insurance companies such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and Aetna seem to agree. Both have quietly added hospitals in India and in the developing world to their lists of covered providers (3).

‘We should set our own house in order’

But questions on the ethics of providing sophisticated medical care for foreigners while many ordinary Indians lack access to basic health services go unanswered (4). “We should set our own house in order rather than cater to foreigners,” said New Delhi surgeon Samiran Nundy, a prominent critic of the privatisation of healthcare in India. India spends around 1% of its GDP on public health, one of the lowest rates in the world. Fewer than half of India’s children are fully immunised, and a million Indians die every year from treatable tuberculosis and preventable diarrhoeas. Medical expenses drive nearly 40 million Indians into poverty every year (5).

Drug-resistant bacteria are a global problem, with bugs such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus) plaguing western hospitals. But medical tourism, poverty and government policy in India make the spread of NDM-1 worrying. The first NDM-1 infection was spotted in 2008 in a Swedish patient who had recently been hospitalised in India. In 2009 the UK national health service issued a warning that patients in the UK who had been hospitalised in India and Pakistan had NDM-1 infections. In 2010 three cases of NDM-1 infection were discovered in the US. All three patients had received medical treatment in India (8). Since then, NDM-1 infections have been discovered in 35 countries, in many cases tied to medical tourism to India. There is also evidence that NDM-1 bacteria have started to spread more widely, infecting people with no history of travel to South Asia.

Think of 2013 as the Year Zero in the battle over climate change, one in which we are going to have to win big, or lose bigger. This is a terrible thing to say, but not as terrible as the reality that you can see in footage of glaciers vanishing, images of the entire surface of the Greenland Ice Shield melting this summer, maps of Europe’s future in which just being in southern Europe when the heat hits will be catastrophic, let alone in more equatorial realms.

For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it, a planet whose atmosphere, temperature, air, water, seasons, and weather were precisely calibrated to allow us — the big us, including forests and oceans, species large and small — to flourish. (Or rather, it was we who were calibrated to its generous, even bounteous, terms.) And that gift is now being destroyed for the benefit of a few members of a single species.

Its victories also capture what a lot of our greenest gifts look like: nothing. The regions that weren’t fracked, the coal plants that didn’t open, the mountaintops that weren’t blasted by mining corporations, the children who didn’t get asthma or mercury poisoning from coal emissions, the carbon that stayed in the Earth and never made it into the atmosphere. The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline bringing the dirtiest of dirty energy from Canada to the Gulf Coast might have already opened without the activists who ringed the White House and committed themselves across the continent.

In eastern Texas, for instance, extraordinary acts of civil disobedience have been going on continuously since August, including three blockaders who this month crawled inside a length of the three-foot-in-diameter pipeline and refused to leave. People have been using their bodies, getting in the way of heavy equipment, and going to jail in an effort to prevent the pipeline from being built. A lot of them are the same kind of robust young people who kept the Occupy encampments going earlier in 2012, but great-grandmothers, old men, and middle-aged people like me have been crucial players, too.

Idle No More is forcing many Canadians to be Willfully Blind No More.

Ostensibly, the movement spearheaded by Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence is about the protection of First Nations' treaty rights. At its core, though, might be something more profound, perhaps best described as a demand for all of us in this country to re-think the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. The relationship is, of course, an uneven one, though it might be far more uneven than most of us in this country care to acknowledge.

Against this backdrop, policy makers and average Canadians alike would be well advised to ring in the New Year by considering the lessons Michelle Alexander highlights in her important book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindedness. The context is American, but the lessons may hit closer to home. In the book, Alexander writes the following in regards to African-Americans and the United States' criminal justice system:

"It is fair to say that we have witnessed an evolution in the United States from a racial caste system based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by marginalization (mass incarceration). While marginalization may sound far preferable to exploitation, it may prove to be even more dangerous. Extreme marginalization, as we have seen throughout world history, poses the risk of extermination."

As Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence enters her fourth week on a hunger strike outside the Canadian parliament, thousands of protesters in Los Angeles, London, Minneapolis and New York City voice their support. Spence and the protesters of the Idle No More Movement are drawing attention to deplorable conditions in Native communities and recently passed legislation C-45, which sidesteps most Canadian environmental laws.

“Flash mob” protests with traditional dancing and drumming have erupted in dozens of shopping malls across North America, marches and highway blockades by aboriginal groups from across Canada and their supporters have emerged from as far away as New Zealand and the Middle East.

This weekend, hundreds of Native people and their supporters held a flash mob round dance with hand drum singing at the Mall of America near Minneapolis, again as a part of the Idle No More protest movement. This quickly emerging wave of Native activism on environmental and human rights issues has spread like a wildfire across the continent.

“Idle No More” is Canadian for, “That’s Enough BS, We’re Coming Out to Stop You” – or something like that. Spence is the leader of Attawapiskat First Nation — a remote Cree community from James Bay, Ontario. The community’s on-reserve 1,549 residents (a third of whom are under 19) have weathered quite a bit: the fur trade, residential schools, a status as non-treaty Indians, and limited access to modern conveniences — like toilets, or maybe electricity. Conditions like these are all too commonplace in the north, but they have become exacerbated in the past five years with the advent of a huge diamond mine.

Do you know how one can turn a little child; say 5 or 6 years old, into the most productive beggar? I did not know, but I was told by a mother who was pimping her own girls at night, while forcing them to beg during the day:

“Make sure that the kids are suffering from malnutrition, that their bellies are swollen, hair unnaturally light-colored, and tears rolling down their cheeks. And when the children begin bringing home loads of money, prevent them from recovering. Whenever in doubt, there is UNICEF in Phnom Penh, as well as many NGO’s: they will coach you on how to prevent your children from malnutrition; so do exactly the opposite and you will never be poor.”

Thai Airways is on time. As it rolls down the runway, I repeat as I have so many times before: “never again… I don’t ever want to come back to this country”.

But I know I will. I cannot resist Cambodian stories, as most Malaysians can’t resist love songs and horror movies.