The News From Haiti

TPM is still live-blogging. Tyler Cowen is gloomy:

[It's] not just a matter of offering extra food aid for two or three years. Very rapidly, President Obama needs to come to terms with the idea that the country of Haiti, as we knew it, probably does not exist any more. 

In what sense does Haiti still have a government?  How bad will it have to get before the U.N. or U.S. moves in and simply governs the place?  How long will this governance last?  What will happen to Haiti as a route for the drug trade, the dominant development in the country's economy over the last fifteen years?  What does the new structure of interest groups look like, say five years from now?

(Photo: A worker of the morgue arranges the bodies of victims outside the morgue in Port-au-Prince on January 14, 2010, following a devastating earthquake that rocked Haiti on January 12. Desperate Haitians awaited a global effort to find and treat survivors from the quake that left streets strewn with corpses and a death toll that may top 100,000. Hundreds of thousands of homeless, injured and traumatized victims spent a second night on the streets and sidewalks, transforming Port-au-Prince into a gigantic and under-equipped refugee camp. By Juan Barretto/AFP/Getty.)