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Ki fanm se Mesye te genyen le lajan tap vide nan Fondassyon li yan :

llary Clinton had long shared a personal interest in Haiti, dating back to the time of their honeymoon, part of which was spent in Port-au-Prince.

In his autobiography, Bill says that his understanding of God and human nature were profoundly transformed when they witnessed a voodoo ceremony in which a woman bit the head off a live chicken.

Hillary Clinton says the two of them "fell in love" with Haiti and they had developed a "deep connection" to the country.

So when Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State in 2009, she consciously made the redevelopment of Haiti one of her top priorities.

The country, she announced, would be a laboratory where the United States could "road-test new approaches to development," taking advantage of what she termed "the power of proximity." She intended to "make Haiti the proving ground for her vision of American power." Hillary Clinton selected her own chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, to run the Haiti project.

Mills would be joined by Bill Clinton, who had been deputized by the U.N. as a "special envoy" to Haiti.

Bill's role was not well-defined, and Haitians were curious about what was in store.

Mills wrote in an email to Hillary Clinton that Haitians saw Bill's appointment as "a step toward putting Haiti in a protectorate or trusteeship status." Soon, "joking that he must be coming back to lead a new colonial regime," the Haitian media "dubbed him Le Gouverneur."

The project was heavily focused on increasing Haiti's appeal to foreign corporations.

As Politico reported, Clinton's experiment "had business at its center: Aid would be replaced by investment, the growth of which would in turn benefit the United States."

One of the first acts in the new "business-centered" Haiti policy involved suppressing Haiti's minimum wage. A 2009 Haitian law raised the minimum wage to 61 cents an hour, from 24 cents an hour previously.

Haitian garment manufacturers, including contractors for Hanes and Levi Strauss, were furious, insisting that they were only willing to agree to a seven-cent increase.

The manufacturers approached the U.S. State Department, who brought intense pressure to bear against Haitian President René Préval, working to "aggressively block" the 37-cent increase.

The U.S. Deputy Mission Chief said a minimum-wage increase "did not take economic reality into account" and simply "appealed to the unemployed and underpaid masses." But as Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review explained, the proposed wage increase would have been only the most trivial additional expense for the American garment manufacturers:

As of last year Hanes had 3,200 Haitians making t-shirts for it. Paying each of them two bucks a day more would cost it about $1.6 million a year. Hanesbrands Incorporated made $211 million on $4.3 billion in sales last year, and presumably it would pass on at least some of its higher labor costs to consumers.

Or better yet, Hanesbrands CEO Richard Noll could forego some of his rich compensation package.

He could pay for the raises for those 3,200 t-shirt makers with just one-sixth of the $10 million in salary and bonus he raked in last year.

The truth of the "economic reality" was that the Haitian undergarment sector was hardly likely to become wildly less competitive as a result of the increase.

The effort to suppress the minimum wage was not solely a Clinton project.

It was also a "concerted effort on the part of Haitian elites, factory owners, free trade proponents, U.S. politicians, economists, and American companies." But it was in keeping with the State Department's priorities under Clinton, which prioritized creating a favorable business climate.

It was that same familiar Clinton move "from aid to trade." Bill Clinton's program for Haitian development, designed by Oxford University economist Paul Collier, "had garment exports at its center." Collier wrote that because of "propitious" factors like "poverty and [a] relatively unregulated labor market, Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China." But the Clintons' role in Haiti would soon expand even further.

In 2010, the country was struck by the worst earthquake in its history.

The disaster killed 160,000 people and displaced over 1.5 million more. (The consequences of the earthquake were exacerbated by the ruined state of the Haitian food economy, plus the concentration of unemployed Haitian farmers in Port-au-Prince.) Bill Clinton was soon put in charge of the U.S.-led recovery effort.

He was appointed to head the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which would oversee a wide range of rebuilding projects.

At President Obama's request, Clinton and George W. Bush created the "Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund," and began aggressively fundraising around the world to support Haiti in the earthquake's aftermath.

(With Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State overseeing the efforts of USAID, the Clintons' importance to the recovery could not be overstated; Bill's appointment meant that "at every stage of Haiti's reconstruction--fundraising, oversight and allocation--a Clinton was now involved."

Clinton announced that Haiti would be a laboratory where the United States could road-test new approaches to development, taking advantage of "the power of proximity."

Despite appearances, the Clinton-Bush fund was not focused on providing traditional relief.

As they wrote, "[w]hile other organizations in Haiti are using their resources to deliver immediate humanitarian aid, we are using our resources to focus on long-term development." While the fund would advertise that "100% of donations go directly to relief efforts," Clinton and Bush adopted an expansive definition of "relief" efforts, treating luring foreign investment and jobs as a crucial part of earthquake recovery.

On their website, they spoke proudly of what the New York Daily News characterized as a program of "supporting longterm programs to develop Haiti's business class."

The strategy was an odd one. Port-au-Prince had been reduced to ruin, and Haitians were crowded into filthy tent cities, where many were dying of a cholera outbreak (which had itself been caused by the negligence of the United Nations).

Whatever value building new garment factories may have had as a longterm economic plan, Haitians were faced with somewhat more pressing concerns like the basic provision of shelter and medicine, as well as the clearing of the thousands of tons of rubble that filled their streets.

The Clinton-led recovery was a disaster.

A year after the earthquake, a stinging report from Oxfam singled out Clinton's IHRC as creating a "quagmire of indecision and delay" that had made little progress toward successful earthquake recovery.

Oxfam found that:

...less than half of the reconstruction aid promised by international donors has been disbursed.

And while some of that money has been put toward temporary housing, almost none of the funds have been used for rubble removal.

Instead, the Clinton Foundation, IHRC, and State Department created what a Wall Street Journal writer called "a mishmash of low quality, poorly thought-out development experiments and half-finished projects." A Haitian IHRC members lamented that the commission had produced "a disparate bunch of approved projects.

.

.

[that] do not address as a whole either the emergency situation or the recovery, let alone the development, of Haiti." A 2013 investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that most money for the recovery was not being dispersed, and that the projects that were being worked on were plagued by delays and cost overruns.

Many Clinton projects were extravagant public relations affairs that quickly fizzled.

For example, The Washington Post reported that:

...[a] 2011 housing expo that cost more than $2 million, including $500,000 from the Clinton Foundation, was supposed to be a model for thousands of new units but instead has resulted in little more than a few dozen abandoned model homes occupied by squatters.

Other Clinton ventures were seen as "disconnected from the realities of most people in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere." Politico reported that many Clinton projects "have primarily benefited wealthy foreigners and the island's ruling elite, who needed little help to begin with." For example, "the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund invested more than $2 million in the Royal Oasis Hotel, where a sleek suite with hardwood floors costs more than $200 a night and the shops sell $

Posted September 25 2023 at 5:43 PM

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