With friends like these...
The long-suffering people of Haiti suffered a catastrophic blow in 2/04 when U.S. Marines kidnapped & deposed democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The U.S., supported by Canada & France, forced him into exile, forbade him from even returning to the hemisphere, & reestablished a despotic interim puppet government backed & enforced by so-called UN peacekeepers & a brutal Haitian National Police.
Why did the U.S. plan and carry out this act of savage banditry against a leader beloved by his people and last reelected in 2000 with 92% of the vote? It was because he cared about the 80% or more desperately poor and disadvantaged Haitians and was committed to improving their lives. He was determined to serve their interests rather than those of his dominant northern neighbor.
That policy of any nation, especially less developed ones, is always unacceptable to the predatory neoliberal agenda of all U.S. administrations, the giant transnational corporations whose interests they serve, and in Haiti, their elite junior business partners.
The Bush administration, in league with these dominant business interests, intend[ed] to return this nation of 8.5 million people, the poorest in the Americas, to its pre-Aristide status of virtual serfdom. To do it they destroyed Haiti's freedom and first ever democracy in its history and turned the country into a killing field."
Stephen Lendman
"Large ‘humanitarian’ NGOs (and ‘conservation’ NGOs) operate as de facto multinational corporations revolving around massive private profits and human suffering. In places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Darfur these NGOs also provide infrastructure, logistical and intelligence collaboration that supports U.S. military and government agendas in the region. Most are aligned with big foundations, corporate sponsors and USAID-itself a close and long-time partner for interventions with AFRICOM and the Pentagon."
keith harmon snow
(2002)Oxfam appears to have refocused its strategy in such a way that it is not in conflict with World Bank policies. A Washington Post article stated:
"Breaking with some of its anti-globalization allies, the aid agency Oxfam International issued a report yesterday that praised international trade as a potentially enormous boon to the world's poor ... 'The extreme element of the anti-globalization movement is wrong,' said Kevin Watkins, a senior policy adviser for Oxfam who wrote most of the report. 'Trade can deliver much more [for poor countries] than aid or debt relief.'"
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oxfam
In 1910, a U.S. State Dept-National City Bank of NY (now Citibank) consortium bought Haiti’s only commercial bank & its national treasury. 5 years later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops to occupy the country in order to keep tabs on “our” investment. From 1915-34, the U.S. Marines imposed harsh military occupation, murdered Haitian patriots & diverted 40% of Haiti’s gross domestic product to U.S. bankers.
Haitians were banned from government jobs. Ambitious Haitians were shunted into the puppet military, setting the stage for a half-century of U.S.-backed military dictatorship. From the standpoint of the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the entrenched poverty of the Haitian masses could be used to force them into low-paying jobs sewing baseballs and assembling other products.
But USAID had plans for the countryside too. Not only were Haiti’s cities to become exporting bases but so was the countryside, with Haitian agriculture also reshaped along the lines of export-oriented, market-based production. To accomplish this USAID, along with urban industrialists and large landholders, worked to create agro-processing facilities, even while they increased their practice of dumping surplus agricultural products from the U.S. on the Haitian people.
Under U.S. influence, dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier virtually eliminated import tariffs for U.S. goods. Soon Haiti was awash with predatory cheap agricultural imports dumped by American firms. Domestic rice farmers could not compete and went bankrupt. A nation that had been agriculturally self-sustaining collapsed. Farms were abandoned. Hundreds of thousands of farmers migrated to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince.
American foreign “aid”, along with the structural changes in the countryside predictably forced Haitian peasants who could no longer survive to migrate to the cities, especially Port-au-Prince where the new manufacturing jobs were supposed to be. However, when they got there they found there weren’t nearly enough manufacturing jobs go around. The city became more and more crowded. Slum areas expanded. And to meet the housing needs of the displaced peasants, quickly and cheaply constructed housing was put up, sometimes placing houses right “on top of each other.”
Ted Rall, Carl Lindskoog
Why did the U.S. plan and carry out this act of savage banditry against a leader beloved by his people and last reelected in 2000 with 92% of the vote? It was because he cared about the 80% or more desperately poor and disadvantaged Haitians and was committed to improving their lives. He was determined to serve their interests rather than those of his dominant northern neighbor.
That policy of any nation, especially less developed ones, is always unacceptable to the predatory neoliberal agenda of all U.S. administrations, the giant transnational corporations whose interests they serve, and in Haiti, their elite junior business partners.
The Bush administration, in league with these dominant business interests, intend[ed] to return this nation of 8.5 million people, the poorest in the Americas, to its pre-Aristide status of virtual serfdom. To do it they destroyed Haiti's freedom and first ever democracy in its history and turned the country into a killing field."
Stephen Lendman
"Large ‘humanitarian’ NGOs (and ‘conservation’ NGOs) operate as de facto multinational corporations revolving around massive private profits and human suffering. In places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Darfur these NGOs also provide infrastructure, logistical and intelligence collaboration that supports U.S. military and government agendas in the region. Most are aligned with big foundations, corporate sponsors and USAID-itself a close and long-time partner for interventions with AFRICOM and the Pentagon."
keith harmon snow
(2002)Oxfam appears to have refocused its strategy in such a way that it is not in conflict with World Bank policies. A Washington Post article stated:
"Breaking with some of its anti-globalization allies, the aid agency Oxfam International issued a report yesterday that praised international trade as a potentially enormous boon to the world's poor ... 'The extreme element of the anti-globalization movement is wrong,' said Kevin Watkins, a senior policy adviser for Oxfam who wrote most of the report. 'Trade can deliver much more [for poor countries] than aid or debt relief.'"
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oxfam
In 1910, a U.S. State Dept-National City Bank of NY (now Citibank) consortium bought Haiti’s only commercial bank & its national treasury. 5 years later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops to occupy the country in order to keep tabs on “our” investment. From 1915-34, the U.S. Marines imposed harsh military occupation, murdered Haitian patriots & diverted 40% of Haiti’s gross domestic product to U.S. bankers.
Haitians were banned from government jobs. Ambitious Haitians were shunted into the puppet military, setting the stage for a half-century of U.S.-backed military dictatorship. From the standpoint of the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the entrenched poverty of the Haitian masses could be used to force them into low-paying jobs sewing baseballs and assembling other products.
But USAID had plans for the countryside too. Not only were Haiti’s cities to become exporting bases but so was the countryside, with Haitian agriculture also reshaped along the lines of export-oriented, market-based production. To accomplish this USAID, along with urban industrialists and large landholders, worked to create agro-processing facilities, even while they increased their practice of dumping surplus agricultural products from the U.S. on the Haitian people.
Under U.S. influence, dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier virtually eliminated import tariffs for U.S. goods. Soon Haiti was awash with predatory cheap agricultural imports dumped by American firms. Domestic rice farmers could not compete and went bankrupt. A nation that had been agriculturally self-sustaining collapsed. Farms were abandoned. Hundreds of thousands of farmers migrated to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince.
American foreign “aid”, along with the structural changes in the countryside predictably forced Haitian peasants who could no longer survive to migrate to the cities, especially Port-au-Prince where the new manufacturing jobs were supposed to be. However, when they got there they found there weren’t nearly enough manufacturing jobs go around. The city became more and more crowded. Slum areas expanded. And to meet the housing needs of the displaced peasants, quickly and cheaply constructed housing was put up, sometimes placing houses right “on top of each other.”
Ted Rall, Carl Lindskoog