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Obama's offered HOPE is sweatshop slavery

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Obama's offered HOPE is sweatshop slavery: Regarding paternalism, exploitation in Haiti, then the US-Euros to the Rescue! - Analyzing Paul Collier's article "Beyond the begging bowl" and Ban Ki Moon, Susan Rice, President Clinton's push for sweatshop jobs in Haiti
 
 

Ezili Dantò's Note:

Apaid-like sweatshop jobs as Paul Collier advocates in the article, entitled "Beyond the Begging Bowl" and as recently hawked by Ban Ki Moon, Susan Rice, Bill Clinton and Wyclef Jean, during their recent visit to Haiti, are not the new panacea for famine-stricken, storm-ravaged Haiti. This is tantamount to asking Haitians to collaborate in their own containment-in-poverty, endless indebtedness to the World Bank/IMF and dependency.

The hypocrisy inherent in Paul Collier's plan is too hideous. First, France, Canada and the Unite States take out Haiti's electoral democracy in 2004. They support an imposed US/Boca Raton-regime in Haiti that gives three years tax break to the rich, cuts Haiti's already low minimum wage in half and pays 10-years back pay to the bloody Haitian army that had not been securing US/Euro interests because of the democratic government in place. Said Boca Raton imposed regime helps slaughter as many Haitian dissenters to the Bush regime change and coup d'etat as possible (from 14,000 to 20,000 from 2004 to 2006), imprison as many as possible (about 8,000 most illegally incarcerated since the 2004 regime change) with Brazilian guns guns used to slaughtering the impoverished in their own favelas! Then, UN troops replaces the US Marine-led forces to continue a 30-year neoliberal economic policies, corporatocracy privatization schemes and unfair trade that dumps subsidized US farm goods to continue destroying a basically agricultural country. To compound matters Maxine Waters and the Congressional Black Caucus consistently request US aid monies "for Haiti" (aid = "begging bowl" monies) that goes, not to the Haitian government but directly to USAID, the foreign NGOs and Haiti's Oligarchy/mafia families and NEVER reach the poorest of the poor and mostly pays NGO salaries and the Haitian Oligarchy and administrative and shipping fees. The Bush regime change orchestrators would eventually, in February 2006, replace Haiti's electoral democracy with the puppet President Preval government under a UN protectorate, ratchet up the misery, plan to deport 30,000 Haitians in the US back to Haiti and then presto, the US-Euros announce stability, success and that their "rescue" of Haiti from Haitian incompetence may be sustained through "giving" HOPE Act II sweatshop-slavery jobs to Haiti! That is, then President Obama comes along and sends Pres. Bill Clinton with the Clinton Global Initiative ("CGI"), UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and former Brookings Institutes' senior fellow, Susan Rice with the Obama-Collier plan for the "management" of the US-Euro orchestrated and inflicted misery in Haiti.

These sweatshop jobs almost never pay even the low Haiti minimum wage, which is now 70gourdes or approximately $1.60 PER DAY and just only covers the workers' (mostly poor Haitian women) transportation to work and lunch! These HOPE Act sweatshop jobs being hawked by Paul Collier, Bill Clinton, Susan Rice, Wyclef Jean and UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon created the slums of Site Soley in the first place which gave the UN its excuse to be in Haiti since 2004!, making $600million per year, to control "gang violence." As if the world's elite actual cares about the human rights of poor Black Haitians, living in Site Soley, Haiti?!! in the first place...All this is the excuse to steal Haiti's resources, keep it in World Bank/IMF debt (modern day slavery) and continue to promote the Tarzan/Western Superhero/paternalistic narrative that feeds and masks the US/Euro corporatocracy's plunder and pillage in Haiti. All the poverty pimps are making money off Haiti's impoverishment- the charitable NGOs, the Breton Woods institutions and their USAID subcontractors, US security companies - DYNCORPS, Brown & Root, MINUSTAH, US Embassy cronies, et al and the Haitian Oligarchy. See: Energy and Mining in Haiti; Haiti's Riches and Rich countries use trade deals to seize food from the world's hungriest people, on Ezili's HLLN website.

"...Then, when the Haitians were once again pauperised, the experts and their elite allies introduced the nearest thing to slavery known to this century - free zones, where Haitians laboured for the price of less than one Jamaican patty a day. The women were injected with drugs which stopped their monthly periods so they wouldn't need time off to have babies. They were prohibited from joining unions.Hold on tight to your screams!..." The Audacity of Hopelessness, John Maxwell, April 05, 2009

What to do:

Assembly jobs aren't the whole answer. Haitians need food sovereignty, investment in environmental rehabilitation, domestic agriculture and food production, domestic manufacturing and jobs that circulates capital and investment IN Haiti. Haiti needs a stop to deforestation, investment in infrastructure, construction of flood-resistant bridges, roads and investment in such renewable energy as biofuels, wind turbines, solar, water and micro-hydro. Haiti needs cash crops, food production and alternative energy, immediately. A New US-Haiti Partnership is essential. The Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN)'s policy statement outlines what Haitians and Haitian-Americans are working to change in collaboration with the new US Congress and President Obama so to implement a more effective foreign polity with Haiti that centers on promoting sustainable development, self-sufficiency, and a sovereign, prosperous and stable Haiti. For more, go to: Haiti Policy Statement for the Obama Team;

and

What Haitian Americans Ask of the New US Congress and President

The assembly industry has not and will not help build Haiti's national economy, which should most naturally be agriculture. Ban Ki Moon's neo-liberal economic political plan for Haiti is as exploitative as the UN occupation brought on by sweatshop kingpin Andre Apaid for just this very purpose with the forceful ouster of Haiti's democratically elected government in 2004.

The UN, the Rwanda Genocide Model and the Vaccination Campaign:

In a March 30, 2009 editorial in the New York Times entitled Haiti’s Big Chance , Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General of the United Nations, wrote about expanding Haiti’s export zones, speaking glowingly about how assembly plant jobs in Uganda and Rwanda assisted in their "development." This mention of Rwanda and Uganda further solidifies that the international plan was always to secure Haiti through forceful depopulation, as was done during the Rwanda genocide under President Clinton, where the Hutus slaughtered almost one million Tutsis and Hutu political moderates with the UN peacekeepers then in Rwanda doing nothing to stop it. It's notable to recall that Susan E. Rice, Obama's US Ambassador to the US, who was on the Haiti visit with Ban Ki Moon and Clinton, was, during the Rwanda genocide, the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during President Bill Clinton's second administration and part of the Clinton decision makers refusing to use the word "genocide" to describe the slaughter in Rwanda. Susan Rice is credited with opining that: “If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?"

The specters and connections lifted up to Rwanda by the recent high-level International group visiting Haiti and recommending Haiti should be more like Rwanda and Uganda are profoundly disturbing. Concerned Haitians - who have suffered through the lack of empathy of such Internationals towards the consequences of their actions and policies in Haiti and in Africa - are reminded how on August 20, 2005, at a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and International Organization for Migration (OIM)-sponsored soccer match, attended by 5000 Haitian youths in UN-occupied Haiti , during intermission, foreign-imported machetes, ala-Rwanda, were handed out and directions were given to kill the Haitians ala that Rockstar video game - "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City." A UN headquarters was less than 100 yards away... Was the intention for the Haitians to do to each other what the Hutus did to Rwanda's Tutsis and Hutu political moderates? Could both of the coup d'etat's - in Haiti and Rwanda- that brought on the civil strifes, have been engineered to bring about more neo-liberal economics and financial colonialism? Today, after the genocide of almost one million of the Tutsis, Rwanda is in IMF/World Bank "development" success!!! The Haitians did not fulfill the US/UN expectations that day during the USAID/OIM-sponsored soccer game, although over 30 Haitian soccer fans were indiscriminately cut to pieces...So the scenario was allowed a replay the next day on August 21, 2005, and more Haitians chopped up ala-Rwanda style.... (No major news ever truly reported this, you may find it on our website).

A few years before Ban Ki-Moon's New York Times's declaration about how Haiti should follow the neo-liberal path of Rwanda and Uganda, in November of 2006, in an article entitled "Le Rwanda et Haiti 12 ans après," former International Republican Institutes' Stanley Lucas, one of the chief architects of the Bush 2004 Regime change/coup d'etat in Haiti which accounts for the UN occupation in Haiti in the first place, explained why Rwanda, known for, in less than one year, getting rid of almost one million of its own people is his inspiration and the model for "progress" that Haiti should emulate. (See also, Comment on an HLLN post: Rwanda and Uganda's role in the genocide in the Congo...and UN/US support for Rwanda and Uganda, erzilidanto, 04/01/2009).

Food Crisis

Clorox hunger in Haiti is when the hunger pains are so severe the people say their stomachs burn like they've swallowed Clorox. Perhaps it's just a coincidence and nothing to do with genocide and systematic de-population of Haiti that Haiti is famine-stricken and its people are dropping dead of intense Clorox hunger while the international "friends of Haiti" consider imposing the very same policies that caused the famine.

Perhaps the high level meeting in Ottawa on Haiti in 2003, known as the Ottawa Initiative , orchestrated by Western diplomats, including the OAS and European Union, where they planned for regime change in Haiti before January 1, 2004, meant something other than a Western intention to de-populate Haiti, by any means necessary, when Canada's Denis Paradis, reportedly stated that Haiti's internal problems is a "threat" to North American countries because Haiti might have, by some estimates, a population of 20 million by 2019. "It is a time bomb," Paradis said, "which must be defused immediately." (See, Haiti Progres' Canadian Officials Initiate Planning for Military Ouster of Aristide and, Coincidence or Intentional? - Is there an International plan to depopulate and exterminate a large portion of Haiti's population? by Ezili Dantò, November, 2006 ).

The Gran Ravine & Soccer Massacre and death squads roaming free in UN-occupied Haiti

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Human Rights Lawyer, Èzili Dantò is dedicated to correcting the media lies and colonial narratives about Haiti. An award winning playwright, a performance poet, author and lawyer, Èzili Dantò is founder of the Haitian (more...)
 

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