George Clooney Haiti Telethon: Sting, Bono and Timberlake to Perform
Filed Under: Music | By: Tina Chubb
Jan 18, 2010 | Comments 2
When actor George Clooney appeared at the 2010 Golden Globe Awards last night, he used the opportunity to reveal some of the massive names that will be performing at his Haiti fund-raising concert, which takes place on January 22nd.
According to a report at nme.com, Clooney has managed to recruit the likes of Sting, U2’s Bono, Alicia Keys, Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake, for his Haiti benefit gig, which will be hosted by Clooney himself, along with Haiti-born singer Wyclef Jean.
The telethon aspect of the event, which is called “Hope for Haiti,” will be raining money for Red Cross, Oxfam, Partners in Health and Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti Foundation, who are all trying to bring aid to the country after last week’s devastating earthquake.
As we mentioned in a post a few days ago, the January 22nd concert will be televised on all MTV channels, and reports say that Joel Gallen, who is the man behind the 9/11 telethon, is all set to be the producer of the show. Will you be watching?
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EVERYTHING YOU need to know about the U.S. aid effort to assist Haiti in the wake of the catastrophic earthquake can be summed up by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s touchdown in Port-au-Prince on Saturday, January 16: they shut down the airport for three hours surrounding her arrival for “security” reasons, which meant that no aid flights could come in during those critical hours.
If there was one day when the Haitian people needed aid to flow all day long, that was the day, because the people trapped under the rubble on Tuesday evening couldn’t survive much beyond Saturday without water.
Defenders of Clinton will say that her disimpassioned, monotone, photo-op speech was needed to draw attention to the plight of the Haitians. But no one north of hell can defend her next move: according to airport personnel that I spoke to during my recent evacuation from Haiti, she paralyzed the airport later that same day to have a new outfit flown in from the Dominican Republic.
I am having a hard time readjusting to life back home after having survived the earthquake and witnessed so much death, so even typing those words is making my heart pound uncontrollably. I guess for America’s rulers, a new pantsuit is more valuable than the lives of poor, Black Haitians.
Unfortunately, Clinton’s model of diverting and delaying critical aid to the Haitian people, while emphasizing security, has become standard operating procedure.
Alain Joyandet, the French minister responsible for humanitarian relief in Haiti, charged the U.S. with treating this as a military operation rather than an aid mission. Mr. Joyandet told the Daily Telegraph that he had been involved in an argument with a U.S. commander in the airport’s control tower over the flight plan for a French evacuation flight, saying, “This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti.”
But with the U.S. occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, and funding the Israeli occupation of Palestine, it seems our government knows how to do little else when it comes to international affairs.
The day I left via Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport, I saw lots of crates of food, water and medical supplies piled on the tarmac. But I didn’t see that aid being transported out of the airport to actually get to Haitians.
Undoubtedly, there has been some aid distributed, but because there was no serious effort to disperse that aid in the first four days after the quake, tens of thousands of people trapped under rubble have died needlessly because they couldn’t get a sip of water.
The Geneva-based organization Doctors Without Borders has been turned away from the airport numerous times to allow U.S. troops to land. A ring of U.S. warships surrounds Haiti to make sure that Haitians don’t escape the disaster and try to get to the United States.
The U.S. has taken control of Haiti’s main airport and seaport, and is in the process of deploying 18,000 U.S. troops to bolster the 9,000 UN troops already occupying the island nation–and as an eyewitness, I can tell you those troops are guarding their own compounds rather than distributing aid.
Enough Is Enough.
Ok, the United States has raised over 528 Million (Headline) “Help Haiti Exceed $528-Million, Chronicle Tally in Philly. “ Now we did more than any other country and it’s time to collaborate right in the United States and help clean up our own backyard.
There is a Reverend, named Trey Noran in the Denver area that has a desire to open two homeless hotels, his web site Hislovestreetministries.com I read and heard of this man from face book and just last evening on WCAN Radio. My suggestion is that George Clooney followers and other Stars assist Reverend Noran right here in this country.
Dr. Sophia Hudson