Five things to read to make sense of the U.S. response to the earthquake in Haiti:

In the past decade, CNN, Time, the New York Times, The New Yorker, Vice, and many, many other American news media sources published glossy photo spreads and graphic dispatches from the “front lines” documenting the abandonment of urban Detroit and landscapes of post-Katrina New Orleans. In this essay—part diagnosis, part lamentation—Finoki, an architectural theorist who writes about ruins and disasters, draws a straight line between the popular obsession with the spectacle of ruined places and a willful blindness to “the degradation of state power and the heightened role of sovereign corporations in the production of space” that is written on every shuttered building and “redevelopment” project constructed to amend such “eyesores.”

Key passage: Ruin porn is a war on memory, dislocating the political dynamics of ruin in favor of momentary sensations and lurid plots. The state of ruin is seen as exactly that: a condition rather than a continually unfolding process. In fact, ruins evolve over time; they are the result of construction as much as of destruction; they are forms that fluctuate as other processes transform the landscape. Decay is, in this sense, a political morphology, a timepiece for decoding the narratives of social failure, disentangling the relationship between initial crises and the “second crisis” of political fallout, gauging institutional rot. But architects and filmmakers, journalists and television producers, religious zealots and conspiracy theorists, novelists and video-game developers have all become mesmerized by the grandeur of ruins, submitting themselves to a state of aesthetic arrest; the apocalyptic image reigns supreme. (1)

Published before the January 12 earthquake in Haiti, Finoki’s essay nonetheless nails the mix of lurid obsession and historical amnesia that characterize American media coverage of the event and its aftermath. Ben Ehrenreich, in his Slate article “Why did we focus on securing Haiti rather than Helping Haitians?” probes, with palpable anger, the particular historical blunder committed by the Obama administration in its response to the Haitian catastrophe. The “anarchy” and rioting promised by Defense Secretary Robert Gates were actively, from the beginning, refuted again and again by sources in Haiti. Nevertheless, the U.S. military wasted several precious days establishing “security” at the Port-au-Prince airport, delaying shipments of vital supplies while Haitians died from lack of medical attention.

Key passage: Why the mad rush to command and control, with all its ultimately murderous consequences? Why the paranoid focus on security above saving lives? Clearly, President Obama failed to learn one of the basic lessons taught by Hurricane Katrina: You can’t solve a humanitarian problem by throwing guns at it. Before the president had finished insisting that “my national security team understands that I will not put up with any excuses,” Haiti’s fate was sealed. National security teams prioritize national security, an amorphous and expensive notion that has little to do with keeping Haitian citizens alive . . . New Orleans and Port-au-Prince have one obvious thing in common: The majority of both cities’ residents are black and poor. White people who are not poor have been known, when confronted with black people who are, to start locking their car doors and muttering about their security. It doesn’t matter what color our president is. Even when it is ostensibly doing good, the U.S. government can be racist, and, in an entirely civil and bureaucratic fashion, savagely cruel. (2)

Ehrenreich only hints at the reason the U.S. Armed Forces and Obama administration could be interested in establishing military control of the island. A week after the quake, with the U.S. presence in Haiti looking more and more like an occupation, Colin Dayan, professor at Vanderbilt University published “‘Civilizing’ Haiti” in the Boston Review. Dayan’s take on the Administration’s actions is unambiguous:

Every disaster and every coup—including the numerous coups abetted by the U.S. government, such as those against Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and 2004—never ceases to inspire an old vision for the country: a site for multinational investment. Once a colony, then an occupied territory, then a land under the thumb of USAID and the World Bank. (3)

The history of U.S. intervention in Haiti is long, sordid, and, as Dayan demonstrates, principally interested in guaranteeing the right of U.S. investors to do business in Haiti, even when (as was the case during the U.S. occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934) they had to rewrite the Haitian Constitution to make it legal to do so. Or when, as Kim Ives—journalist for the newspaper Haiti Liberté, interviewed last week by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now—notes, it means backing the ouster of a democratically-elected president, whose successor then agrees to sell state-owned assets to American companies, which promptly shut them down:

KIM IVES: So, about twelve years ago under the first administration of René Préval, they privatized the Minoterie d’Haiti and Ciment d’Haiti, the flour mill, the state flour mill, and the state cement company. Now, for flour, obviously, you have a hungry, needy population. You can imagine if the state had a robust flour mill where it could distribute flour to the people so they could have bread. That was sold to a company of which Henry Kissinger was a board member. And very quickly, that flour mill was closed. Haiti now has no flour mill, not private or public.

AMY GOODMAN: Where does it get its flour? This is the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

KIM IVES: It has to import it, and a lot of it is coming from the United States. (4)

Ives’s and Dayan’s suspicions—that what we are beginning to see in Haiti is the sinister beginnings of “disaster capitalism”—specifically, of the United States installing itself in its prone neighbor to the south in order to create “development opportunities” for American businesses, or alternately a bulwark of American imperial capitalism in a region where Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, and the Castros command popular, international attention and support. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on January 25th, in Montréal, seems to confirm this intention on the part of the Obama Administration, if not the imperialist flavor Ives and Dayan give to it:

I would emphasize what the prime minister said about the importance of effectiveness and responsibility. As we work together to design the mechanism that will be used to deliver assistance and create the conditions for sustainable development, we bear a responsibility to our taxpayers to assure that the money that our government commits will be well spent, transparently, and with results on the ground for the Haitian people. I think that is also true for all of the private donations that will be joined with government funds, through NGOs, so that together, we can point to the outcomes that everyone is hoping to achieve on behalf of this reconstruction and redevelopment effort. (5)