[Peace] Correction: Haiti event Feb. 16!

Sat Feb 13 13:47:50 CST 2010

Below is corrected information. We inadvertently sent out the wrong date in
our last email. Sorry for any confusion.

 Eyewitness from Haiti: An Unnatural Disaster
 A Public Forum and Relief Fundraiser
Tu. Feb. 16, 7 PM
Gregory Hall R. 307

*JESSE HAGOPIAN* was in Port-au-Prince with his 1-year-old son to visit his
wife when the earthquake hit. His wife, an aid worker, works until the
evening on most days, but by sheer luck, she came to the hotel where they
were staying early on Tuesday--just minutes before the quake struck at 4:53
p.m. This spared Jesse and his family agonizing hours or days trying to find
one another amid the chaos

Within hours, the hotel where they were staying became known as a place
where some medical help was available, because another hotel guest happened
to be an emergency medical technician. Jesse got a crash course in treating
severe injuries--broken bones, head wounds and more--as people desperate for
help kept arriving. After five days Jesse and his family were evacuated and
have returned to Seattle.

*Come hear first hand from Jesse* about the situation in Haiti as he calls
in *via skype*. Learn about what happened in the immediate aftermath of the
quake, and why help hasn’t reached most of the victims of Haiti’s
earthquake--because the priority of the U.S. government is on imposing its
control. Most Haitians have seen little humanitarian aid so far. What they
have seen is guns, and lots of them. Armored personnel carriers cruise the
streets. UN soldiers aren’t there to help pull people out of the rubble.
They’re there, they say, to enforce the law. Instead of sending ample food,
water and rescue teams to help the victims of this devastating
earth-quake, the Obama administration is essentially organizing an
occupation ofHaiti. Come discuss what it would take for Haitians to rebuild
their country, and how we can stand in solidarity with them.

We will also be collecting donations for the following grassroots aid
organizations in Haiti:

 The Haiti Emergency Relief
Fund<http://www.haitiaction.net/About/HERF/1_12_10.html>,
organized by the solidarity organization Haiti Action, delivers resources
directly to grassroots organizations:

http://www.haitiaction.net/About/HERF/1_12_10.html

It was founded in 2004 after the coup d'etat that forced President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of office. For more information, including a
telephone contact, go to the Canada Haiti Action
Network<http://canadahaitiaction.ca/> Web
site:

http://canadahaitiaction.ca/

The Zanmi Lasante Medical Center <http://www.pih.org/home.html> is located
in the Central Plateau of Haiti and delivers health care through a network
of clinics. The health center survived the earthquake and delivering aid to
the disaster zone. You can donate to the center through the U.S. non-profit
organization Partners in Health <http://www.pih.org/home.html>:

http://www.pih.org/where/haiti/haiti.html

SOPUDEP is a pioneering school <http://www.sopudep.org/donate> in
Petionville. The resources of the school and its teachers are being
mobilized to assist the neighboring population. You can support the school
via the Canadian-based Sawatzky Family Foundation<http://www.sopudep.org/donate>
:

http://www.sopudep.org/donate
This forum is sponsored by the International Socialist Organization. For
more info, call 415-713-6260 or email iso.champaign at gmail.com

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

http://socialistworker.org/2010/02/08/shock-doctrine-for-haiti

 ANALYSIS: ASHLEY SMITH

The "shock doctrine" for Haiti

Ashley Smith reports that the U.S. is reviving what Haitians call "the plan
of death."

February 8, 2010

 [image: Hillary Clinton celebrates job creation in Haiti inside a clothing
factory]Hillary Clinton celebrates job creation in Haiti inside a clothing
factory

ONE MONTH after the devastating earthquake, Haiti continues to suffer under
apocalyptic conditions.

The quake killed more than 200,000 people, injured 250,000 and has left over
3 million dependent on assistance for food, water and housing. Contrary to
the puff pieces in the media, the relief operation has been a miserable
failure. The United Nations admitted at the end of January that had only
been able to feed 1 million people, leaving many more without access to
food. Whole sections of Port-au-Prince and surrounding towns never even saw
relief convoys.

Amid this catastrophe, imperial powers and corporate vultures are circling,
eyeing the profits to be made from reconstruction.

The Street, an investment Web site, published an article, misleadingly
titled "An Opportunity to Heal Haiti," that lays out how U.S. corporations
can cash in on the catastrophe. "Here are some companies," they write, "that
could potentially benefit: General Electric, Caterpillar, Deere, Fluor,
Jacobs Engineering."

Other commentators--like James Dobbins, a former U.S. special envoy to Haiti
under President Bill Clinton--likewise see an opportunity to remake Haiti
along free market lines. As he wrote in the *New York Times*, "This disaster
is an opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms." As director of the
International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corporation,
the reforms he advocates are not designed to meet people's needs, but to pad
corporate profits through mechanisms like privatization.

*New York Times* columnist Nicholas Kristoff attempted to pass off the
exploitation of cheap labor as a humanitarian initiative:

[T]he best strategy for Haiti: building garment factories. The idea
(sweatshops!) may sound horrific to Americans. But it's a strategy that has
worked for other countries, such as Bangladesh, and Haitians in the slums
would tell you that their most fervent wish is for jobs. A few dozen major
shirt factories could be transformational for Haiti.

All of this reads like a sick parody of Naomi Klein's arguments in her book
*The Shock Doctrine*. There, she documents how the U.s. and other imperial
powers take advantage of natural and economic disasters to impose
free-market plans for the benefit of the elites and their corporations, and
to the detriment of the victims. She writes:

Disaster capitalists have no interests in repairing what was. In Iraq, Sri
Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called "reconstruction" began
with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of
the public sphere and rooted communities, then quickly moving to replace
them with a kind of corporate New Jerusalem--all before the victims of war
or natural disaster were able to regroups and stake their claims to what was
theirs.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE U.S. actually had a Shock Doctrine for Haiti on hand--the same one that
it has imposed for decades.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. used the dictatorship of Baby Doc
Duvalier to impose what the International Monetary Fund calls a "structural
adjustment program." Haitians called it "the plan of death."

Duvalier opened up the Haitian economy to heavily subsidized U.S.
agricultural exports, especially rice, which undermined the ability of
Haitian peasants to compete on the market. Dislocated peasants flooded into
Port-au-Prince, swelling the population from 760,000 in the early 1980s to
close to 3 million before the earthquake.

The U.S. set up export processing zones in the capital city to take
advantage of the new cheap labor. But with only about 80,000 jobs, the
sweatshops could not meet the demand for employment. As a result, hundreds
of thousands were reduced to desperate poverty in the sprawling shantytowns.
They maintained a desperate existence based on irregular employment and
remittances from relatives who fled abroad to the U.S., Canada and
elsewhere.

The U.S. and its multinationals also cut deals with Baby Doc to set up
several resorts along the coast to cater to U.S. tourists and the Haitian
elite. Club Med opened a swank facility in 1975, and it was joined by dozens
of others, mainly around Port-au-Prince and in the country's north,
especially around the famous Labadee beach. Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton
joined the party for their honeymoon in 1975 and have professed their love
of the island's potential riches for decades.

To finance the neoliberal plan, Baby Doc racked up enormous debts to
international financial institutions. To Haitian workers, the urban poor and
the peasantry, it was a social disaster.

But out of the poverty, the Haitian masses built a mass movement, Lavalas,
that drove Baby Doc from power in 1986. In 1990, in the country's first free
and democratic elections, one of the leaders of Lavalas, Jean Bertrand
Aristide, won two-thirds of the vote on a program to reverse the plan of
death.

The U.S., however, would not tolerate any kind of reform. So it backed two
coups, one in 1991 and another in 2004 to stop even modest changes to the
plan of death. Each coup regime, backed up by the U.S., other governments
and the United Nations, attacked the Lavalas movement, killing thousands.
The UN has occupied the country since 2004. Since 2006, a former ally of
Aristide, René Préval, now the president, has overseen the reimplementation
of the American neoliberal plan.

The earthquake has exposed its social consequences. As David Wilson wrote at
MRZine, "The results were predictable: a decimated rural economy, a
virtually nonexistent infrastructure, and an impoverished, overpopulated
urban center so badly constructed that tens of thousands of people, at
least, were certain to die when a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck."

The U.S. has taken advantage of this natural disaster. It has deployed
20,000 troops to Haiti to buttress the UN occupation of 12,500 soldiers. Now
secretary of state, Hillary Clinton convinced Préval to declare emergency
powers, which have been largely delegated to the U.S.. From its position of
power, the U.S. has pushed for implementing a new version of the same old
plan.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE U.S., a few other imperial powers, some lesser countries and the UN
convened a meeting on January 26 in Montreal to profess their concern and
promise to aid Haiti.

The 14 so-called "friends of Haiti" at the conference made sure to include
Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive to at least give the illusion of
respect for the country's sovereignty. But outside, a protest organized by
Haiti Action Montreal challenged the meeting with signs demanding "Medical
relief not guns," "Grants not loans" and "Reconstruction for people not
profit."

*Guardian* columnist Gary Younge criticized the summit for failing to
produce any solutions:

Even as corpses remained under the earthquake's rubble, and the government
operated out of a police station, the assembled "friends" would not commit
to canceling Haiti's $1 billion debt. Instead, they agreed to a 10-year plan
with no details and a commitment to meet again--when the bodies have been
buried along with coverage of the country--sometime in the future.

By contrast, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian Alternative for the
Americas grouping of Latin American and Caribbean nations opposed to U.S.
neoliberal plans has called for relief not troops and cancellation of
Haiti's debt. On his weekly television show, Chávez declared that thousands
of "soldiers are arriving, Marines armed as if they were going to war. There
is not a shortage of guns there, my God. Doctors, medicine, fuel, field
hospitals--that's what the United States should send. They are occupying
Haiti undercover."

While the Montreal summit offered few clues about what the U.S. aimed to do,
Hillary Clinton spilled the beans before the meeting when she said, "We have
a plan. It was a legitimate plan, it was done in conjunction with other
international donors, with the United Nations."

The author of the plan is Oxford University professor Paul Collier. Collier
wrote *The Bottom Billion*, a book widely read in development circles. In
it, he advocates a neocolonial strategy for crisis-torn societies. He argues
that to be effective, great powers and international bodies like the UN must
intervene militarily and occupy failed states. After setting up shop, they
then can impose development plans to reconstruct their economies.

In Jean Bricmont's apt phrase, Paul Collier is a "useful idiot for
imperialism," providing intellectual justification for conquest and
exploitation.

Before the earthquake, Bill Clinton, named by Barack Obama to be a special
envoy to Haiti, was already pushing for the implementation of Collier's plan
as he outlined it in a paper titled "Haiti: From Natural Catastrophe to
Economic Security."

Collier and Clinton call for--surprise, surprise--investment in the tourist
industry, re-development of the sweatshop industry in cities,
export-oriented mango plantations in the countryside and construction of
infrastructure to service this development. Each of these projects serves
the interests of multinational corporations and the Haitian elite at the
expense of the workers and peasants.

The tourist industry is especially infamous in the Caribbean. As Polly
Patullo documents in her book, *Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the
Caribbean*, the industry is completely controlled by multinational
corporations, mainly from the U.S. Patullo quotes one critic of the tourist
industry, who argues:

When a Third World economy uses tourism as a development strategy, it
becomes enmeshed in a global system over which it has little control. The
international tourism industry is a product of metropolitan capitalist
enterprise. The superior entrepreneurial skills, resources and commercial
power of metropolitan companies enable them to dominate many third world
tourist destinations.

The Clinton and Collier plan for sweatshops is even less appealing. Collier
practically celebrates the poverty wages that corporations can get away with
in Haiti. "Due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labor market,"
Collier writes, "Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with
China, which is the global benchmark. Haitian labor is not only cheap, it is
of good quality. Indeed, because the garments industry used to be much
larger than it is currently, there is a substantial pool of experienced
labor."

Given the abolition of tariffs on many Haitian exports to the U.S., Haiti is
primed, according to Collier, for a new sweatshop boom.

But this is no sustainable development plan for Haitian workers. At best,
Collier promises 150,000 or so jobs. As anthropologist Mark Schulman argues,
"Subcontracted, low-wage factory work does not contribute much to the
economy besides jobs. Being exempt from taxes, it does not contribute to the
financing of Haiti's social services." The jobs themselves don't even pay
enough to support life--they pay for transport and lunch at about $1.60 a
day.

The U.S. will want to keep wages low, since that is the profitable basis for
investment. Already last year, the U.S. pressured Préval to prevent an
increase in the Haitian minimum wage.

For the peasant majority in Haiti, Clinton and Collier advocate construction
of vast new mango plantations. According to them, such new plantations will
both create an export crop and aid the reforestation of the country. While
it may create jobs for poor peasants, such plantations won't rebuild the
agricultural infrastructure of the country so that it can return to the
self-sufficient food system it had before the 1980s. Such self-sufficiency
goes against the grain of U.S. policy to control the international food
market with its subsidized crops.

Finally, Collier argues for investment in infrastructure--airports, seaports
and roads--not so much to meet people's needs as to service the new
investments in tourism, sweatshops and plantations.

As a result, Collier's plan will actually increase infrastructural
inequities. Businesses will get what they need to export their products,
while the needs of the Haitian masses--for navigable roads, for
example--will be left unaddressed. Even worse, Collier advocates increased
privatization of Haiti's infrastructure, especially the port and the
electrical system.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

IN REALITY, this "new plan" is the same old plan--"the plan of death" that
Haitians rose up against in the 1980s. Nevertheless, in the wake of the
disaster, Bill Clinton is pressing ahead.

At a joint press conference with Bill Clinton, UN Secretary General Ban Ki
Moon declared, "We have three priorities. First, continuing to provide the
humanitarian assistance with effective mechanisms to deliver all these
relief items to the people who need it. Second, provide security and
stability for people. Thirdly, the reconstruction of the Haitian economy."

The U.S. and UN have failed largely in their relief operation, but have
succeeded in establishing military control of the country--effectively
seizing control of the country and bypassing the Haitian state.

Beyond this, the *Economist* magazine argues for the U.S. to set up "a
temporary development authority with wide powers to act. Given the local
vacuum of power, this is the best idea around. The authority should be set
up under the auspices of the UN or of an ad hoc group (the United States,
Canada, the European Union and Brazil, for example). It should be led by a
suitable outsider (Bill Clinton who is the UN's special envoy for Haiti,
would be ideal, perhaps followed by Brazil's Lula after steps down as
president in a year's time) and a prominent Haitian, such as the prime
minister."

With its intervention in Haiti, the U.S. is sending a signal to the rest of
Latin America and the Caribbean--where masses of people have rejected
neoliberalism and elected reform socialist leaders like Hugo Chávez, who aim
to tame the excesses of capitalism and pass reforms to address social needs.

The U.S. already toppled Aristide in 2004. The U.S.-backed coup in Honduras
last year is another step down the same road. Washington has expanded its
network of military bases in Latin America--especially in Colombia, where it
has opened seven new bases. "Barack Obama's administration," writes Greg
Grandin in *The Nation*, has disappointed "potential regional allies by
continuing to promote a volatile mix of militarism and free-trade orthodoxy
in a corridor running from Mexico to Colombia."

The U.S. intervention in Haiti shows that the U.S. wants to reverse its
setbacks of the last decade, reassert its geopolitical dominance and
re-impose its economic program--the "plan of death"--throughout the region.

-- 
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ISO Resources:
isochampaign.org
internationalsocialist.org
haymarketbooks.org
socialistworker.org
isreview.org
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