In Haiti, President Moise refused to leave when his term was over, and hundreds of thousands have protested in the streets demanding his resignation. Canada and the U.S. have supported dictators and coups in Haiti for decades. Joining Paul is Jafrik Ayiti, an author, radio show host, public speaker, activist, artist; and Yves Engler, a Montreal-based activist, and author. He has published 11 books, including his latest “House of Mirrors: Justin Trudeau’s Foreign Policy.”
Proud to Live in a Nation of Holers
Let’s not mince words: Moldova is a hole. Modify with any four letters you wish.
I mention Moldova because it’s where my paternal grandfather was born in 1901. An anti-Semitic rampage in his hometown, Kishinev, soon forced his family to leave for New York, where my great-grandfather labored as a carpenter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for eight dollars a week. Low skills, low wages, minimal English, lots of children and probably not the best hygiene — that’s half of my pedigree. The other half consisted of refugees.
I’m not alone. America is a nation of holers. It is an improbable yet wildly successful experiment in the transformation — by means of hope, opportunity and ambition — of holers into doers, makers, thinkers and givers. Are you of Irish descent? Italian? Polish? Scottish? Chinese? Chances are, your ancestors did not get on a boat because life in the old country was placid and prosperous and grandpa owned a bank. With few exceptions, Americans are the dregs of the wine, the chaff of the wheat. If you don’t know this by now, it makes you the wax in the ear.
.. Liberals can be squeamish about calling poor countries bad names, while conservatives such as Mark Steyn chortle that “nobody voluntarily moves to Haiti.” Which, let’s be real, is basically right.
Yet that’s beside the point. We are not talking about Haiti, El Salvador, Nigeria or any other country on the president’s insult list. What counts are the people from these countries
.. But immigrants are more likely to be fleeing those dysfunctions and prejudices than they are to be bringing them
- .. Dorsa Derakhshani, the international chess master from Iran who came to the United States last year because, as she wrote in an op-ed for The Times, the mullahs “cared more about the scarf covering my hair than the brain under it.”
- Vietnamese boat people did not bring fratricidal hatreds with them to America.
- Soviet refuseniks did not bring a Soviet work ethic.
.. They don’t bring crime to cities. They drive out crime by starting businesses and families in shrinking cities or underserved neighborhoods.
.. sub-Saharan Africans have “among the highest college-completion rates of any immigrant group.”
.. As for Haitians, MPI found they had a higher labor participation rate than the overall work force, and had median household incomes of $47,200 — lower than the overall U.S. median, but robust by any developed nation standard.
.. How can this be? It shouldn’t be a mystery. Immigrants self-select.
.. To really see it clearly, you must first rise up from a hole.
Donald Trump has not, to say the least, risen from a hole. But he is sinking into one.
.. It may be that it won’t damage him politically — Republican Party leaders, increasingly unshameable, will mumble mild disapproval until the news cycle turns — but it does damage the country. We have a president even more ignorant of America than he is of the rest of the world.
Senator Contradicts Trump Denial of Using Crude Remark in Immigration Meeting
Sen. Dick Durbin, who was in the immigration meeting, confirmed Friday that Mr. Trump said all of the comments attributed to him
.. President Donald Trump on Friday disputed reports that he had questioned why the U.S. would admit immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa, as leaders from the U.S. and abroad condemned his reported comments.“The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used,” the president wrote on Twitter... His tweet was immediately contradicted by Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), who was in the meeting. Speaking to reporters in Chicago, Mr. Durbin confirmed that Mr. Trump said all of the comments attributed to him... “In the course of his comments [Mr. Trump] said things that were hate-filled, vile and racist. I use those words advisedly,” he said. “I cannot believe in the history of the White House, in that Oval Office, any president has ever spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak yesterday.”.. It also raised the chances of a partial government shutdown. Congress must pass a new funding measure by Friday, Jan. 19, to keep the government running. Such a measure will require Democratic support, and many Democrats want to use their leverage to demand action for the Dreamers... South Africa’s ruling African National Congress said Mr. Trump’s remark was “offensive.” Botswana’s government summoned the U.S. ambassador to explain the comments. A spokeswoman for the African Union, the continental bloc, said she was “frankly alarmed” by the reports. United Nations human-rights spokesman Rupert Colville said “there is no other word one can use as racist.”
Culture and Revolution: by Ben Horowitz
So how should founders building companies (or leaders trying to turn their company around, address disruption, beat competition, and so on) go about creating a true winning culture? Horowitz shares key takeaways from the only successful slave revolution in the history of humanity — the Haitian revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture in 1791 — in this keynote first given at a16z’s inaugural summit event. How did this 18th century leader essentially “re-program” an entire culture to win?