Obama's offered HOPE is sweatshop slavery

Comprehensive long term solutions means fair trade with Haiti, trade that doesn't further degrade the environment, repress workers rights or contain Haiti in poverty, ignore Haiti's most essential domestic needs for food production. Haiti needs food sovereignty; for a cancellation of its debt to international financial institutions; for the US to grant Haitians TPS and equal immigration treatment; to support release of the political prisoners; justice not impunity; end the UN military occupation, for participatory democracy that means inclusion of the masses in the affairs of their own country; for the US/Euros to provide Haiti with authentic assistance with poverty reduction, domestic agricultural investments and community policing. Most of all, Haiti needs a US trade, aid and investment culture that is committed to integrating all levels of corporate responsibility - economic, social and environmental - in their entire range of operations; and, where U.S. corporations are also patronizing the informal sector of local service providers and generally not exporting all profits and capital but committing to paying equitable custom duties, not dumping assembly goods for export, or dumping subsidized US foods, but investing in mutually beneficial trade, aid and investment, with reasonable percentage of their Haiti profits put back into Haiti. (See, Economic proposals that make sense for the reality of Haiti).

U.S. investment in Haiti ought to focus on supporting local people-centered, self-sustaining projects to rebuild the flood-devastated former bread basket areas of Haiti in the Artibonite valley and Plaine du Sud. According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, (FAO), the rice bowl areas in Haiti alone, are capable of producing food to feed 10 million people. Haiti has a population of 8.5 people and thus, Haiti has the capacity to feed itself. The U.S. should eschew old failed USAID and State Department policies, including voiding the CBI, OPIC, SEZ (HOPE Act) agreements, assembly plants, et al...and support this capacity for food sovereignty. For, these unfair, unbalanced and over-reaching US agreements and policies with Haiti are extremely one-sided, take morally repugnant advantage of Haiti's weak governments, lack of strong allies and have only proven to promote famine, hunger, endless debt and political instability as evidenced by the April 2008 food riots that forced the resignation of the Alexis government in Haiti. (Go to: What Haitian Americans Ask of the New US Congress and President).