[Peace-discuss] Obama, Bush, Clinton & the crimes of US imperialism in Haiti

[C. G. Estabrook]

	The Right Testicle of Hell:
	History of a Haitian Holocaust
	Blackwater before drinking water
	by Greg Palast for The Huffington Post
	Sunday 17 January 2010

1. Bless the President for having rescue teams in the air almost immediately. 
That was President Olafur Grimsson of Iceland. On Wednesday, the AP reported 
that the President of the United States promised, "The initial contingent of 
2,000 Marines could be deployed to the quake-ravaged country within the next few 
days." "In a few days," Mr. Obama?

2. There's no such thing as a 'natural' disaster. 200,000 Haitians have been 
slaughtered by slum housing and IMF "austerity" plans.

3. A friend of mine called. Do I know a journalist who could get medicine to her 
father? And she added, trying to hold her voice together, "My sister, she's 
under the rubble. Is anyone going who can help, anyone?" Should I tell her, 
"Obama will have Marines there in 'a few days'"?

4. China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China, Mr. 
President. China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US bases in 
Puerto Rico: right there.

5. Obama's Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "I don't know how this 
government could have responded faster or more comprehensively than it has." We 
know Gates doesn't know.

6. From my own work in the field, I know that FEMA has access to ready-to-go 
potable water, generators, mobile medical equipment and more for hurricane 
relief on the Gulf Coast. It's all still there. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who 
served as the task force commander for emergency response after Hurricane 
Katrina, told the Christian Science Monitor, "I thought we had learned that from 
Katrina, take food and water and start evacuating people." Maybe we learned but, 
apparently, Gates and the Defense Department missed school that day.

7. Send in the Marines. That's America's response. That's what we're good at. 
The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after three days. With 
what? It was dramatically deployed — without any emergency relief supplies. It 
has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.

8. But don't worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully equipped and 
self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed immediately with ten 
metric tons of tools and equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced 
communication equipment and water purifying capability. They're from Iceland.

9. Gates wouldn't send in food and water because, he said, there was no 
"structure ... to provide security." For Gates, appointed by Bush and allowed to 
hang around by Obama, it's security first. That was his lesson from Hurricane 
Katrina. Blackwater before drinking water.

10. Previous US presidents have acted far more swiftly in getting troops on the 
ground on that island. Haiti is the right half of the island of Hispaniola. It's 
treated like the right testicle of Hell. The Dominican Republic the left. In 
1965, when Dominicans demanded the return of Juan Bosch, their elected 
President, deposed by a junta, Lyndon Johnson reacted to this crisis rapidly, 
landing 45,000 US Marines on the beaches to prevent the return of the elected 
president.

11. How did Haiti end up so economically weakened, with infrastructure, from 
hospitals to water systems, busted or non-existent - there are two fire stations 
in the entire nation - and infrastructure so frail that the nation was simply 
waiting for "nature" to finish it off?


Don't blame Mother Nature for all this death and destruction. That dishonor goes 
to Papa Doc and Baby Doc, the Duvalier dictatorship, which looted the nation for 
28 years. Papa and his Baby put an estimated 80% of world aid into their own 
pockets - with the complicity of the US government happy to have the Duvaliers 
and their voodoo militia, Tonton Macoutes, as allies in the Cold War. (The war 
was easily won: the Duvaliers' death squads murdered as many as 60,000 opponents 
of the regime.)

12. What Papa and Baby didn't run off with, the IMF finished off through its 
"austerity" plans. An austerity plan is a form of voodoo orchestrated by 
economists zomby-fied by an irrational belief that cutting government services 
will somehow help a nation prosper.

13. In 1991, five years after the murderous Baby fled, Haitians elected a 
priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who resisted the IMF's austerity diktats. Within 
months, the military, to the applause of Papa George HW Bush, deposed him. 
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. The farce was George W. 
Bush. In 2004, after the priest Aristide was re-elected President, he was 
kidnapped and removed again, to the applause of Baby Bush.

14. Haiti was once a wealthy nation, the wealthiest in the hemisphere, worth 
more, wrote Voltaire in the 18th century, than that rocky, cold colony known as 
New England. Haiti's wealth was in black gold: slaves. But then the slaves 
rebelled - and have been paying for it ever since.

 From 1825 to 1947, France forced Haiti to pay an annual fee to reimburse the 
profits lost by French slaveholders caused by their slaves' successful uprising. 
Rather than enslave individual Haitians, France thought it more efficient to 
simply enslave the entire nation.

15. Secretary Gates tells us, "There are just some certain facts of life that 
affect how quickly you can do some of these things." The Navy's hospital boat 
will be there in, oh, a week or so. Heckuva job, Brownie!

16. Note just received from my friend. Her sister was found, dead; and her other 
sister had to bury her. Her father needs his anti-seizure medicines. That's a 
fact of life too, Mr. President.

***
Through our journalism network, we are trying to get my friend's medicines to 
her father. If any reader does have someone getting into or near Port-au-Prince, 
please contact Haiti at GregPalast.com immediately.
Urgently recommended reading - The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the 
San Domingo Revolution, the history of the successful slave uprising in 
Hispaniola by the brilliant CLR James.


C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>     Bush, Clinton and the crimes of US imperialism in Haiti
>     18 January 2010
> 
> The Obama administration has announced that former presidents Bill 
> Clinton and George W. Bush will head the fundraising for relief efforts 
> in the wake of the Haiti earthquake. In his radio speech Saturday, Obama 
> declared: “These two leaders send an unmistakable message to the people 
> of Haiti and the world. In a moment of need, the United States stands 
> united.”
> 
> The message of the Clinton-Bush appointment is indeed significant, but 
> hardly what the White House and the American media have suggested. In 
> selecting his two immediate predecessors, those who have set US policy 
> in the Caribbean since 1993, Obama demonstrates that the devastating 
> human tragedy in Haiti will not bring any alteration in the rapacious 
> role of US imperialism in that impoverished semi-colonial country.
> 
> For eight years apiece, Clinton and Bush were directly and deeply 
> involved in a series of political machinations and military 
> interventions that have played a major role in perpetuating the poverty, 
> backwardness and repression in Haiti that have vastly compounded by the 
> disaster that struck that country last Tuesday. Both men have the blood 
> of Haitian workers and peasants on their hands.
> 
> Clinton took office in the immediate aftermath of the military coup 
> which ousted Haiti’s first democratically elected president, the 
> populist cleric Jean-Bertrand Aristide. That coup was backed by the 
> administration of Bush’s father, who saw Aristide as an unwanted and 
> potentially dangerous radical.
> 
> The new Democratic Party administration undertook a tactical shift in 
> policy. Clinton imposed economic sanctions on the Haitian junta, which 
> destroyed Haiti’s fledgling export industries, then dispatched the 
> Marines to Haiti—for the third time in the 20th century—to compel Gen. 
> Raoul Cedras, the junta leader, to depart. The US restored Aristide to 
> the presidency, after he had given assurances that he would do nothing 
> to challenge the domination of either Washington or the native Haitian 
> elite, and that he would leave office in 1996 without seeking reelection.
> 
> After Aristide obediently left office on schedule, he was succeeded by 
> René Préval, who served the first of his two terms as president from 
> 1996 to 2001, carrying out the dictates of an International Monetary 
> Fund “structural adjustment” program that slashed employment, cut public 
> services, and ruined domestic rice farmers.
> 
> When Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party won a clear victory in May 2000 
> legislative elections, the Clinton administration and the 
> Republican-controlled Congress refused to accept the election and cut 
> off US aid. Aristide himself returned to the presidency after winning a 
> landslide election victory in November 2000, only to face an implacable 
> enemy in the incoming Bush administration.
> 
> For three years, Haiti was systematically starved by the US aid cutoff 
> and measures taken by the Bush administration to block international aid 
> and isolate the Aristide government. Finally, in February 2004, amid 
> protests fomented by the Haitian ruling elite with covert American 
> backing, the US military again intervened in the country, seizing 
> Aristide and shipping him out of the country to exile.
> 
> The Marines turned over effective control of the country to a United 
> Nations peacekeeping force, with Brazil providing the biggest troop 
> contingent, propping up a series of unelected Haitian prime ministers 
> until elections in 2006, from which candidates of Fanmi Lavalas were 
> largely excluded. René Préval was elected president for the second time, 
> in a term scheduled to end late this year. Once a supporter and 
> professed political “twin” of Aristide, Préval has long since made his 
> peace with both Washington and the Haitian ruling elite, and his second 
> term has been characterized by slavish subservience to the economic 
> prescriptions of Wall Street and the International Monetary Fund.
> 
> Throughout the Clinton and Bush administrations, US demands for 
> adherence to IMF austerity policies were combined with a vicious program 
> of repression against Haitians fleeing the country of their birth to 
> seek refuge and a better life in the United States. In his first 
> campaign for the presidency, in 1992, Clinton criticized the persecution 
> and forced repatriation of Haitian refugees, only to reverse himself and 
> continue those policies unaltered. For the next 17 years—and continuing 
> with no change from Obama—hundreds of refugees have died in small boats 
> seeking to evade the US Coast Guard blockade.
> 
> Most recently, Clinton has been the official UN envoy for Haiti, backing 
> the corrupt Préval regime and seeking to develop Haiti as a base for a 
> profitable US-run garment industry founded on near-starvation wages. 
> Food riots swept the country in April 2008, but that did not stop Préval 
> from blocking legislation that would have raised the minimum wage of 
> $1.72 a day for workers in the garment factories.
> 
> As for George W. Bush, his selection as co-leader of a supposed 
> humanitarian campaign is an insult to the people of both Haiti and the 
> United States. His appointment by Obama is in keeping with the 
> Democratic president’s unflagging efforts since his election, the result 
> of popular hatred of Bush and his party, to rehabilitate the Republicans.
> 
> An unapologetic war criminal who is responsible for the slaughter of a 
> million Iraqis, Bush’s signature domestic “achievement” was the abject 
> failure of the US government either to prevent the devastation of New 
> Orleans and the Gulf Coast in Hurricane Katrina, or to mount an 
> effective relief and recovery effort afterwards.
> 
> This is the record of the two men whom Barack Obama has selected as the 
> public face of the latest US initiative in Haiti. Bush and Clinton made 
> a series of media appearances over the weekend, including interviews on 
> all five Sunday television news programs, during which they emphasized 
> the need to restore “stability” to Haiti, and the important role that 
> the United States would have to play in that effort.
> 
> Bush and Clinton personify the pernicious and reactionary role that 
> American imperialism has played in Haiti for the last century. It is no 
> exaggeration to say that the policies of their administrations have 
> caused as much death and devastation in that country as last Tuesday’s 
> earthquake.
> 
> Patrick Martin
> 
> http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/pers-j18.shtml
> 

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