50 Cents on the Dollar in the Dominican RepublicWritten by Bob Kelly
The Dominican Republic is a tin-pot third world banana republic. There is extreme poverty everywhere and complete government mismanagement. Things have gotten even worse with new president Leonel Fernandez. He has devalued dollar by 50% and raised taxes and prices to insure poverty for his people. There is no money- dollars or pesos in circulation. The only people who have it worse are neighboring Haitans! The dollar exchange rate continues to decline and prices continue to rise. There are people striking and hunger and poverty in streets. Every day merchants can be seen raising their prices out of greed and hoping that no one will notice. I went shopping and noticed that Super Polo and La Sirena stores seem to be particularly guilty of this practice of raising prices daily. The Denny’s store in Santiago seems to be only store that is not gouging consumers.
| | Tsunami AftermathWritten by Ryan Fyfe
On December 26, 2004 a massive tsunami swept through Thailand killing thousands of people, and changing lives of thousands more. Although Tsunami happened months ago, we are still feeling affects of it today.The massive destruction that occurred because of tsunami has a huge impact today. Thousands of villagers in Thailand who live on a very low income to begin with lost all they had in tsunami, as water took it away or destroyed it altogether. These are villagers who are having an incredibly hard time now trying to scrape by and replace what it is tsunami took from them. Agriculturally Thailand was hit very bad with tsunami as well. Where water was reported to have traveled 7-8 miles inland farms are suffering loss of crops and livestock, as salt that remains on their fields isn’t producing crops that are needed to support themselves and their families.
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