Helping Haiti

From Freedom Road Socialist Organization:

Haiti Emergency Step One: Donations!

Written by Dennis O'Neil

As this is being written, there is no way to tell how bad the catastrophe that has hit Haiti will get. The government there is estimating the earthquake has caused an almost unbelievable 100,000 deaths!

There are important political lessons to be drawn, and already analyses and denunciations of US imperialism's culpability are flooding the left blogosphere. This is well and good--important work--but it is not the main task before us for the next few days.

Millions of folks in this country, and around the world, are filled with horror and sympathy and want to respond. When Katrina hit, people all over took up collections of food and supplies, threw everything in the biggest truck around, popped the clutch and headed towards NOLA. Communities opened their homes to the displaced. That stuff is not so easy to do in Haiti's case and the main thing that people are doing, besides praying, is giving money.

Several charities have set up phone numbers one merely has to dial or text to make an automatic $5 or $10 donation. Oxfam and the Red Cross and other big dogs in what we might call the NGO-industrial complex are spamming and phonebanking like crazy. So are religious charities.

The immediate task for progressives and revolutionaries for the next couple of days is to try and capture some of this flood of resources for the grassroots organizations of the Haitian people (and of course to do some education in the process).

One such group is the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund established by a group of folks in the US who have been doing Haiti solidarity work since 1991, working closely with Haitians to build and support mass-based civic groups on the ground there--unions, peasant cooperatives, schools, women's organizations and more.

Read more...

From the Quixote Center: see more here.

Also check out the perspectives and work at TransAfrica Forum.

The AFL-CIO suggests that we go to Doctors Without Borders, Partners in Health, Red Cross International Response Fund, RN Response Network, Solidarity Center Education Fund or United Way Worldwide Disaster Fund.