Kamala Sheds Crocodile Tears for Haitian Immigrants Whom Trump Demonizes, But Her Democratic Party Has Attacked Haitians No Less Than the GOP In Haiti

The Democrats attack the Haitians in Haiti, forcing them to flee to the U.S., where the GOP demonizes them in the U.S. as pet-eaters.

When it comes to attacking Haitians, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are bi-partisan oppressors of those unfortunate people. The difference is that the Democratic Party politicians pretend to be the friends of the Haitian have-nots, while the Republican Party politicians don’t even hide their contempt for them. It’s a “good cop/bad cop” routine!

The Democratic Party Politician “good cop”:

The Republican Party politician “bad cop”:

Now you’ve already read above the short version of this post. But I invite you to take a deep dive and read the gory details to know just how truly horrifying has been the role of the “good cop” Democratic Party, with a focus on Bill “I feel your pain” Clinton. It will be worth your time.

Here’s how Bill Clinton, the oh-so Haitian-loving “first black president” (note the quote marks!)—and Democratic Party super-star never to be denounced by the likes of Kamala Harris—made sure Haitians would have to flee as refugees to places such as the United States for their safety and very survival

Let’s start with the years Bill Clinton was president, before we look at the years after his presidency when he purported to be helping Haitians recover from the terrible earthquake of 2010.

For the years when Clinton was president I will rely on the wonderful book, The Uses of Haiti, by Paul Farmer, first published in 1994. The chapter I’m relying on starts like this:

This chapter covers recent history, so to get some perspective on the longer term historical context, please know that Haitian poverty has been due in large measure to bi-partisan United States efforts to keep the extremely oppressive rich in power in Haiti. I posted earlier about this in a post titled, “Haitians Made the First Successful Slave Revolution and First Black-Led Republic, For Which "Crime" the World's Upper Class Has Been Punishing them Severely Ever Since,” in which I discuss the horrible role of President Thomas Jefferson—a hero of William (Bill) Jefferson Clinton—

in attacking the Haitians for their crime of overthrowing slavery, as well as the similar role of the French back then and even more recently.

First the French rulers and then U.S. rulers kept Haitians, who enriched France when they were slaves, dirt poor ever since their glorious revolution

Read about this in some detail in this article, which reports:

SUMMARY OF ROOTS CAUSES for Haiti’s Poverty

Poverty and misery in Haiti are human created. The root causes are the political and economic systems which have dominated Haiti for over 182 years. These oppressive factors come from the international community, especially France and the United States. However, the Haitian elite, comprising only 3% of Haitians has been a major factor in creating and continuing these oppressive conditions.

Causal roots are not visible. Rather, they are the basis of the more visible and immediate factors. Even the overt human rights abuses are not visible on a daily basis. However, the Duvalier years were especially bad. Tens of thousands of people died or disappeared. Hundreds of thousands more felt forced to flee their homeland and seek a safer life elsewhere. Nearly everyone in the country felt the terror of the Duvaliers and their Tonton Macoute [government-sponsored thugs who beat or killed for dominance].

and

1. POST WORLD WAR II UNITED STATES DOMINATION The occupation ended in 1934. However, the U.S. presence in both the economy and internal government affairs was well established. Ever since the occupation and increasingly since 1946, the United States, through the power of its aid packages, has played a central role in Haitian politics. In this way the U.S. has contributed to the misery of Haiti since it has given oppressive governments comfortable aid packages which kept these rulers in power.

For a sweeping history of Haiti from 1492 to 2024 see this informative timeline.

The unprecedented election of Aristide, a man on the side of the poor

Before Bill Clinton became president on January 20, 1993, a major event in Haiti took place. On December 16, 1990, the liberation-theology priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide won the election for president of Haiti with almost 70% of the vote. Aristide was 100% for the poor and against their oppression by the rich, which had been ongoing ferociously for many decades under the rule of dictators such as the notorious François Duvalier (‘Papa Doc’) and then his dictator son, Jean-Claude Duvalier (“Baby Doc”) and the many subsequent similar dictators.

And then what happened?

As night follows day a military coup removed Aristide from power on September 29, 1991, and replaced him with the head of the military, General Raoul Cedras, as president.

There are reports that in the first few days after the coup that more than 1,500 people were killed. Yet no one could find all the bodies, so a report got out that these figures had been exaggerated. Not at all. This is what took place: when those in the slums came out in great numbers after the coup, the Army descended on them and then shot into the crowd as people were running away from the soldiers. The Army used quick, high-powered guns. They loaded the bodies on trucks and hauled them away. After unloading the bodies, they drove back, loaded more bodies. They repeated this time after time until all the bodies had been removed. [Farmer, pg. 154]

U.S. president at the time, George W. Bush, being a good Republican, did not even pretend to support the poor Haitians.

In an October 8 article entitled “The White House Refuses to Link Aristide’s Return and Democracy,” New York Times diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman wrote that,

“American officials…signaled privately that they were moving away from their unequivocal support of Father Aristide in light of concerns over his human rights record…Today, when the White House spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, was asked if that was the case, he responded with a less than ringing endorsement for the Haitian president, and suggested that Washington was most interested in the restoration of constitutional democracy in Haiti, not a particular individual.” [Farmer, pg. 156]

The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article titled, “Haiti’s Richest Families Financed Coup that Toppled Aristide” which reported “Haiti’s small and wealthy elite provided money, food and transport to the rebellious soldiers who took over the country late last month” and documented shipment of some 2,000 Israeili-made Uzi submachine guns and Galil assault rifles, which arrived in Haiti almost a month prior to the coup.

Farmer writes,

The you-got-what-you-had-coming explanation of the coup was soon upstaged by an even more vulgar attempt at character assassination, this one from the CIA. In a document later denounced as a crude forgery, the agency described Aristide as a manic-depressive who had been prescribed lithium in the past. In testimony solicited by Senator Jesse Helms, CIA analyst Brian Latell went even further, referring to Aristide as “a murderer and a psychopath.” General Cedras, Latell’s report continued, belonged to “the most promising group of Haitian leaders to emerge since the Duvalier family.”

Although some U.S. statesmen were later said to be scandalized by the report on Aristide, the endorsement of Cedras seemed to cut across party lines. Representative Robert Torricelli, a Democrat from New Jersey who sits on the House Intelligence Committee observed that “the U.S. Government develops relationships with ambitious and bright young men at the beginning of their careers and often follows them through their public service. It includes people in sensitive positions in the current situation in Haiti.” [Farmer, pg. 161, my emphasis]

The Organization of American States imposed a trade embargo on Haiti in 1991 in response to the military coup; it allowed only food and medicine to enter Haiti.

At the close of 1991, as the embargo began to bite, what was at stake for the various parties involved came more clearly into focus. The Bush administration could hardly be termed a strong advocate of a left-leaning priest who espoused liberation theology. gut there were other reasons for the U.S. government to want an end to the violence in Haiti: the ‘hordes’ of refugees pouring out of Haiti in boats. The U.S. government—and perhaps its citizens, as well—simply did not want boat people washing up on the shores of Florida. [Farmer, pg. 161-2]

[T]he peasants and urban poor fought for their survival. They were hungrier and sicker than they had previously been; the dissolution of the weak public health sector would soon mean thousands of easily preventable deaths from measles, for example. Above all, they were cornered and frightened. Peasant movements, such as the Mouvman Peyizan Papay [MPP] in the Central Plateau, were almost wiped out: soldiers and other representatives of the state killed key movement leaders, drove others underground, and destroyed tool banks, grain-storage facilities, and other modest infrastructures it had taken over two decades to build. Representatives from Americas Watch visited MPP headquarters ten months after the coup:

When we visited the MPP headquarters on July 2 [1992], the buildings remained much as the army had left them the previous October. Not one door remained on its hinges, nor a piece of furniture in any room Every building was littered with a three-inch layer of ripped papers, posters, books and files. The repression in the Central Plateau against people affiliated with the MPP remained so severe tht no one dared clean up the mess, much less to resume using the buildings for fear of being labeled an MPP sympathizer and carried off to jail. [Farmer, g. 162-3]

There were negotiations with the now-exiled Aristide about his returning to form a “consensus” government.

What did all this diplomacy mean? In Haiti, the bad faith of the army, the parliament, and the Bush administration was widely assumed…One also heard a number of oft-repeated questions. It seemed unthinkable to most Haitians that the United States had been oblivious to the plottings for a coup. After all, weren’t key army officers in the pay of the CIA? Had they not attended training programs at Fort Benning in Georgia?” [Farmer, pg. 166]

The United States [in the spring of 1992], acting unilaterally, announced that it would halt the influx of all refugees and return them forcibly to Haiti. As many in the pro-democracy movement noted, this plan revealed, to any doubters, that the real Bush policy was pro-putsch: administration lawyers were obliged to defend their policy by insisting lamely that there was no repression in Haiti. [Farmer, pg. 167]

Now for President Bill Clinton, inaugurated January 20, 1993

Clinton was expected to initiate an altogether different U.S. foreign policy towards Haiti. He had, after all, promised as much in his campaign. [Farmer, pg. 172]

Throughout the spring of 1993, the United Nations and the OAS had strengthened their presence in Haiti; their representatives were able to witness, often first hand, the sometimes spectacular violence endemic to post-coup Haiti. Bishop Willy Romelus, by now an outspoken opponent of the regime, told of one incident in his diocese:

“On April 26, while priests were saying Mass in our Church of Ste. Helene, soldiers came and surrounded the building…After the Mass, the soldiers demanded one of the priests, Father Samedi, but the congregation had hidden him in the back of the church before taking him away to the presbytery. When the soldiers realized that no priest was to be found, they proceeded to kill some of the worshippers and beat and arrest others.” [Farmer, pg. 174]

On June 4, 1993 Clinton announced that he favored sterner sanctions against the Cedras regime and that he wanted negotiations to succeed in allowing Aristide to return to form a “consensus” government with amnesty for the Cedras regime persons.

Haitian social reality, always tense, split into an increasingly surreal juxtaposition of diplomatic pronouncements and acts of unrestrained barbarity by the men with the guns. The divide between actions and words yawned ever wider as the members of the U.N./OAS team were obliged to witness the military’s violence against the poor. [Farmer, pg. 176-7]

Negotiations led to an agreement on August 17, 1993 in which Aristide would return to the Palace as president on October 30, but would be required to appoint the pro-business Robert Malval as prime minister, with a new cabinet by and large devoid of progressives. A few days later the embargo sanctions were lifted.

Typically, this step, too, was accompanied by paroxysms of violence. The new minister of foreign affairs, Claudette Werleigh, a Catholic social activist, was threatened at gun point during her first hour in office. Evans Paul, elected Mayor of Port-au-Prince in 1990 with over 90 percent of the vote, was attacked as he attempted to resume his post: five people were killed although Paul escaped unharmed. One student bled to death over the course of four hours, pleading for assistance until the end. [Farmer, pg 179]

On September 11, Aristide’s prominent supporter and businessman, Antoine Izmery,

announced that a mass would be held in honor of the memory of all those who died through military repression. Although he surely had his own brother in mind, the date was that of the 1988 sack of Saint-Jean Bosco…On the morning of the mass, in the Eglise Sacre-Coeur in Port-au-Prince, Izmery and his family—including members of his brother Georges’ family—were putting the finishing touches on the program…A truckload of almost 50 soldiers patrolled the neighborhood throughout the service; they must have been interested in the disturbance created when, in the middle of the mass, Iznery was dragged at gun point from the church into the busy street. He was executed with bullets in the head at point-blank range. Unlike his brother, Antoine Izmery died quickly. [Farmer, pg. 179-80]

[During the rest of September] [t]he U.N./OAS mission reported that ‘death lists’ were being drawn up throughout the country; those found on these lists were to be executed if the terms of the Governor’s Island [where the negotiations that agreed on Aristide’s return were held], meaning Aristide’s return, were met. Attaches [agents of the military] were kind enough to type and then fax copies of these lists to many of the concerned parties. [Farmer, pg. 180]

On October 11, the USS Harlan County, with 218 American troops that were to be joined by a multinational force of 1300 troops to keep peace for Aristide’s return, was violently prevented from docking by the Army. The United States and the UN re-imposed sanctions the next day. Hours later military attaches gunned down the new Justice Minister—Guy Malary, a wealthy lawyer with strong ties to business whom Aristide had assigned the task of ‘retraining’ the army—and his entourage in Port-au-Prince. [Farmer, pg. 181]

Another group of military attaches occupied the National Assembly, took hostages and vowed that they were planning to ‘cut off head and burn down houses’ and referred to their death lists of those to be executed as plans advanced to restore the deposed president. At this time Clinton announced that the 46 U.S. troops remaining in Haiti (like the 51 Canadian troops) would be withdrawn “if the Haitian security forces would not guarantee their safety.” At the same time the worst of the Duvalierist torturers returned to Haiti and told journalists of his plans for Haiti’s future. The U.N. and OAS observers had their radio system and telephone lines cut and the Security Council ordered their removal to the Dominican Republic. [Farmer pg. 182.]

Keeping in mind that President Bill Clinton had at his command the U.S. Marines, a military force that was perfectly experienced in invading South American nations to overthrow undesirable (to U.S. rulers) governments¹ and was capable of overthrowing the illegal (and CIA trained) notoriously violent (against defenseless civilians) terrorist anti-democracy Haitian military force, and keeping in mind also that Bill Clinton was not reluctant to use military violence and bombs for “U.S. interests” in 1995 and 1999, now read the understated (deliberately ironical?) words of Paul Farmer:

Well before the targeted return date of October 30, the Clinton-U.N. attempts to restore democracy to Haiti were in tatters—rent, it would seem, by a small number of men willing to go to great lengths to protect their privilege and by a great number of international power-brokers who had consented to treat that privilege as a legitimate diplomatic interest. [Farmer, pg. 182]

[H]ints regarding the nature of U.S.-Haitian relations came into light during the last weeks of 1993. A number of key Haitian officers were discovered to be in the pay of the CIA. On November 14, 1993, The New York Times reported that ‘the agency paid key members of the junta now in power for political and military information up until the ouster of Father Aristide in 1991.’ These payments were pasrt of a significant CIA operation in Haiti, which had trained a secret intelligence unit unbeknownst to the elected government. ‘The unit evolved into an instrument of political terror whose officers at times engaged in drug trafficking, American and Haitian officials say.’ One of those officers was Raoul Cedras [the military coup leader.] The Haitian National Intelligence Service unit, which went under the sublime name of SIN, received up to one million dollars per year from U.S. coffers… The New York Times points out that senior members committed acts of political terror against Aristide supporters, including interrogations and torture, and threatened last year to kill the local chief of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.[Farmer, pg. 183-4]

Bill Clinton’s secretary of commerce at this time was Ron Brown.

In the 1980s…Ron Brown represented the Haitian government through Patton, Boggs & Blow. Although Brown insisted in a 1989 news conference that he ‘never had any involvement either on a client basis or any other basis with the [Duvalier] family,’ his November, 1983 memorandum to Baby Doc suggests otherwise. The memo was a progress report on his lobbying on behalf of the Haitian government:

“My current role as deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee has served us well in these efforts, while my contacts with my counterparts in the Republican Party assure continued access and excellent relations with the government of President Reagan.”

When it comes to serving the hyper-oppressive and violent rich elite who ruled Haiti, not much light, other than rhetoric, can shine through any crack between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party while Bill Clinton was president.

Now let’s fast forward to 2010 when Bill Clinton, no longer president, was the husband of the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and was the top man providing relief to Haiti after it was devastated by the worst (till then!) earthquake in its history. The following is an article on currentaffairs.org.

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 $150 designer purses and $120 men’s dress shirts.”

Predictably, the Royal Oasis didn’t do an especially roaring trade; The Washington Post reported that “[o]ne recent afternoon, the hotel appeared largely empty, and with tourism hardly booming five years after the quake, locals fear it may be failing.” In a country with a 30-cent minimum wage, investing recovery dollars in a luxury hotel was not just offensive, but economically daft. Sometimes the recovery projects were accused not only of being pointless, but of being downright harmful. For instance, Bill Clinton had proudly announced that the Clinton Foundation  would be funding the “construction of emergency storm shelters in Léogâne.” But an investigation of the shelters that the Foundation had actually built found that they were “shoddy and dangerous” and full of toxic mold. The Nation discovered, among other things, that the temperature in the shelters reached over 100 degrees, causing children to experience headaches and eye irritations (which may have been compounded by the mold), and that the trailers showed high levels of carcinogenic formaldehyde, linked to asthma and other lung diseases. The Clinton Foundation had subcontracted the building of the shelters to Clayton Homes, a firm that had already been sued in the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) for “having provided formaldehyde-laced trailers to Hurricane Katrina victims.” (Clayton Homes was owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, and Buffett had been a longstanding major donor to the Clinton Foundation.) The Nation’s investigation reported on children whose classes were being held in Clinton Foundation trailers. Their semester had just been cut short, and the students sent home, because the temperature in the classrooms had grown unbearable. The misery of the students in the Clinton trailers was described:

Judith Seide, a student in Lubert’s sixth-grade class [explained that] she and her classmates regularly suffer from painful headaches in their new Clinton Foundation classroom. Every day, she said, her “head hurts and I feel it spinning and have to stop moving, otherwise I’d fall.” Her vision goes dark, as is the case with her classmate Judel, who sometimes can’t open his eyes because, said Seide, “he’s allergic to the heat.” Their teacher regularly relocates the class outside into the shade of the trailer because the swelter inside is insufferable. Sitting in the sixth-grade classroom, student Mondialie Cineas, who dreams of becoming a nurse, said that three times a week the teacher gives her and her classmates painkillers so that they can make it through the school day. “At noon, the class gets so hot, kids get headaches,” the 12-year-old said, wiping beads of sweat from her brow. She is worried because “the kids feel sick, can’t work, can’t advance to succeed.”

The most notorious post-earthquake development project, however, was the Caracol industrial park. The park was pitched as a major job creator, part of the goal of helping Haiti “build back better” than it was before. The State Department touted the prospect of 100,000 new jobs for Haitians, with Hillary Clinton promising 65,000 jobs within five years. The industrial park followed the Clintons’ preexisting development model for Haiti: public/private partnerships with a heavy emphasis on the garment industry. Even though there were still hundreds of thousands of evacuees living in tents, the project was based on “the more expansive view that, in a desperately poor country where traditional foreign aid has chronically failed, fostering economic development is as important as replacing what fell down.” Much of the planning was focused on trying to lure a South Korean clothing manufacturer to set up shop there, by plying them with U.S. taxpayer funding. The Caracol project was “the centerpiece” of the U.S.’s recovery effort. A gala celebrating its opening featured the Clintons and Sean Penn, and it was treated as the emblem of the new, “better” Haiti, that would demonstrate the country’s commitment to being “open for business.” In order to build the park, hundreds of poor farmers were evicted from their land, so that millions of dollars could be spent transforming it.

But the project was a terrible disappointment. After four years, it was only operating at 10% capacity, and the jobs had failed to materialize:

Far from 100,000 jobs—or even the 60,000 promised within five years of the park’s opening— Caracol currently employs just 5,479 people full time. That comes out to roughly $55,000 in investment per job created so far; or, to put it another way, about 30 times more per job than the average [Caracol] worker makes per year. The park, built on the site of a former U.S. Marine-run slave labor camp during the 1915-1934 U.S. occupation, has the best-paved roads and manicured sidewalks in the country, but most of the land remains vacant.

Most of the seized farmland went unused, then, and even for the remaining farmers, “surges of wastewater have caused floods and spoiled crops.” Huge queues of unemployed Haitians stood daily in front of the factory, awaiting jobs that did not exist. The Washington Post described the scene:

Each morning, crowds line up outside the park’s big front gate, which is guarded by four men in crisp khaki uniforms carrying shotguns. They wait in a sliver of shade next to a cinder-block wall, many holding résumés in envelopes. Most said they have been coming every day for months, waiting for jobs that pay about $5 a day. From his envelope, Jean Mito Palvetus, 27, pulled out a diploma attesting that he had completed 200 hours of training with the U.S. Agency for International Development on an industrial sewing machine. “I have three kids and a wife, and I can’t support them,” he said, sweating in the hot morning sun. “I have a diploma, but I still can’t get a job here. I still have nothing.”

For some, the Caracol project perfectly symbolized the Clinton approach: big promises, an emphasis on sweatshops, incompetent management, and little concern for the actual impact on Haitians. “Caracol is a prime example of bad help,” as one Haiti scholar put it. “The interests of the market, the interest of foreigners are prioritized over the majority of people who are impoverished in Haiti.”

But, failure as it may have been, the Caracol factory was among the more successful of the projects, insofar as it actually came into existence. A large amount of the money raised by Bill Clinton after the earthquake, and pledged by the U.S. under Hillary Clinton, simply disappeared without a trace, its whereabouts unknown. As Politico explained:

Even Bill’s U.N. Office of the Special Envoy couldn’t track where all of [it] went—and the truth is that still today no one really knows how much money was spent “rebuilding” Haiti. Many initial pledges never materialized. A whopping $465 million of the relief money went through the Pentagon, which spent it on deployment of U.S. troops—20,000 at the high water mark, many of whom never set foot on Haitian soil. That money included fuel for ships and planes, helicopter repairs and inscrutables such as an $18,000 contract for a jungle gym… Huge contracts were doled out to the usual array of major contractors, including a $16.7 million logistics contract whose partners included Agility Public Warehousing KSC, a Kuwaiti firm that was supposed to have been blacklisted from doing business with Washington after a 2009 indictment alleging a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government during the Iraq War.

The recovery under the Clintons became notorious for its mismanagement. Clinton staffers “had no idea what Haiti was like and had no sensitivity to the Haitians.” They were reportedly rude and condescending toward Haitians, even refusing to admit Haitian government ministers to meetings about recovery plans. While the Clintons called in high-profile consulting firms like McKinsey to draw up plans, they had little interest in listening to Haitians themselves. The former Haitian prime minister spoke of a “weak” American staff who were “more interested in supporting Clinton than helping Haiti.”

One of those shocked by the failure of the recovery effort was Chelsea Clinton, who wrote a detailed email to her parents in which she said that while Haitians were trying to help themselves, every part of the international aid effort, both governmental and nongovernmental, was falling short. “The incompetence is mind numbing,” she wrote. Chelsea produced a detailed memorandum recommending drastic steps that needed to be taken in order to get the recovery on track. But the memo was kept within the Clinton family, released only later under a Freedom of Information Act disclosure of Hillary’s State Department correspondence. If it had come out at the time, as Haiti journalist Jonathan Katz writes, it “would have obliterated the public narrative of helpful outsiders saving grateful earthquake survivors that her mother’s State Department was working so hard to promote.”

The Clintons’ Haiti recovery ended with a whimper. The Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund distributed the last of its funds in 2012 and disbanded, without any attempt at further fundraising. The IHRC “quietly closed their doors” in October of 2011, even though little progress had been made. As the Boston Review’s Jake Johnston explained, though hundreds of thousands remained displaced, the IHRC wiped its hands of the housing situation:

[L]ittle remained of the grand plans to build thousands of new homes. Instead, those left homeless would be given a small, one-time rental subsidy of about $500. These subsidies, funded by a number of different aid agencies, were meant to give private companies the incentive to invest in building houses. As efforts to rebuild whole neighborhoods faltered, the rental subsidies turned Haitians into consumers, and the housing problem was handed over to the private sector.

The Clintons themselves simply stopped speaking about Haiti. After the first two years, they were “nowhere to be seen” there, despite Hillary’s having promised that her commitment to Haiti would long outlast her tenure as Secretary of State. Haiti has been given little attention during Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, even though the Haiti project was ostensibly one of great pride for both Clintons.

The widespread consensus among observers is that the Haiti recovery, which TIME called the U.S.’s “compassionate invasion,” was a catastrophically mismanaged disappointment. Jonathan Katz writes that “it’s hard to find anyone these days who looks back on the U.S.-led response to the January 12, 2010, Haiti earthquake as a success.” While plenty of money was channeled into the country, it largely went to what were “little more than small pilot projects—a new set of basketball hoops and a model elementary school here, a functioning factory there.”

The widespread consensus is that the Haiti recovery was a catastrophically mismanaged disappointment.

The end result has been that little has changed for Haiti. “Haitians find themselves in a social and economic situation that is worse than before the earthquake,” reports a Belgian photojournalist who has spent 10 years in Haiti:

Everyone says that they’re living in worse conditions than before… When you look at the history of humanitarian relief, there’s never been a situation when such a small country has been the target of such a massive influx of money and assistance in such a short span of time… On paper, with that much money in a territory the size of Haiti, we should have witnessed miracles; there should have been results.

“If anything, they appear worse off,” says Foreign Policy of Haiti’s farmers. “I really cannot understand how you could raise so much money, put a former U.S. president in charge, and get this outcome,” said one Haitian official. Indeed, the money donated and invested was extraordinary. But nobody seems to know where it has gone.

Haitians direct much of the blame toward the Clintons. As a former Haitian government official who worked on the recovery said, “[t]here is a lot of resentment about Clinton here. People have not seen results. . .. They say that Clinton used Haiti.” Haitians “increasingly complain that Clinton-backed projects have often helped the country’s elite and international business investors more than they have helped poor ‘Haitians.” There is a “suspicion that their motives are more to make a profit in Haiti than to help it.” And that while “striking a populist pose, in practice they were attracted to power in Haiti.”

Now let’s take a look at how the rich exploit the labor of have-nots in Haiti, and in particular how they did it in 1996 when Bill Clinton was president and refused to call in the Marines to remove what was arguably one of the world’s most vicious and oppressive regime of thugs.

The following is an article at libcom.org:

Rich Companies, Poor Workers: The US-Haiti Connection

Documentation into working conditions in outsourced textile factories in Haiti in the 90's.

Submitted by Reddebrek on December 30, 2016

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Multinational Monitor, April 1996

Port-au-Prince, Haiti-Quality Garments S.A., a clothing contractor in the SONAPI Industrial Park, is typical of assembly plants in Port-au-Prince. The factory is hot, dimly lit, crowded. The air is heavy with dust and lint. There is no ventilation to speak of. Piles of material-scraps of pajamas, dresses, skirt hems-clutter every aisle and every corner. The workers have sad, tired faces. They hunch over antiquated sewing machines, some more than 20 years old, sewing "Kelly Reed" dresses to be sold in Kmart and other products destined for U.S. retailers.

The workers at Quality Garments work eight to 10 hours per day, Monday through Saturday. When the company has orders to fill, they are required to work Sundays as well. Last August, several workers reported that they had worked seven Sundays in a row-in other words, more than 50 days straight without a day off, up to 70 hours per week-during the hottest season of the year. Asked if this schedule created a problem for the employees or the factory as a whole, plant manager Raymond DuPoux, says, "The problem is mine, because I can't go to the beach. So I have problems with my wife."

For their labor, the workers are in many cases paid as little as 15 gourdes per day, or 12 cents per hour, well below the legal minimum wage of 30 cents per hour. The workers are paid on a piece-rate system, and production quotas are raised to the point where the majority of workers have no hope of meeting them. For example, one experienced worker says she is supposed to sew seams on 204 pairs of children's pajamas in a day, for which she would be paid $2.67; in 8 hours, however, she is only able to complete 144 pairs for which she is paid $1.87. In Creole, this system is referred to as "sa ou fe, se li ou we," or, roughly translated, "what you do is what you get."

The average worker at Quality Garments earns about $1.67 per day, 73 cents less per day than the minimum wage. The company pays straight time on weekends, not time-and-a-half as Haitian law requires. Transportation for most workers costs between 40 and 53 cents per day, and lunch-a small plate of rice and beans and a glass of juice-costs 47 cents. This means that the average worker takes home between 67 cents and $1 per day, or between 8 and 13 cents for every hour of work. This comes to less than $6 for a standard work-week, which provides less than 25 percent of the minimum needs of a family of five.

It was precisely to eliminate such abuses that then-Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide raised the minimum wage from $1 (15 gourdes) per day to $2.40 (36 gourdes) per day on May 4, 1995. In his decree, President Aristide specifically banned the sort of piece-rate abuses that are common at Quality Garments and factories like it. The law requires employers to ensure that piece-rate workers earn at least the minimum wage by paying "make-up"-the difference between their piece-rate pay for the day and the daily minimum wage.

At Quality Garments, however, it seems that the rule of law is taken lightly. There is a large sign on the wall next to the plant's time clock which, translated into English, reads,

"Effective Friday, March 17, 1995, there will be no more 'make-up' at this factory. Here we only want workers who are willing to work for their money."

A pattern of abuses

Quality Garments is not unique. Such wanton disregard for the law is common among factory owners in Haiti.

More than half of the approximately 50 assembly plants producing in Haiti for the U.S. market are paying less than the legal minimum wage, including the following (all of which were paying according to the "sa ou fe, se li ou we" piece rate system):

* Seamfast Manufacturing produces dresses for Ventura Ltd. under the "Ventura" label, sold at Kmart and J.C. Penney, and for Universal Manufacturing, a subsidiary of Kingley Corp., under the "Kelly Reed" and "Kelly Reed Woman" labels, sold exclusively at Kmart. Wages at the plant are among the lowest in Haiti. One woman with three years experience reports earning 87 cents for eight hours of work cutting dress material.

Abraham Felix, the owner of the plant, says one of the main problems facing the company is that "the workers can't work effectively, because they don't eat enough."

* Chancerelles S.A., a subsidiary of Fine Form of Brooklyn, New York, produces bras and underpants for Elsie Undergarments of Hialeah, Florida. The garments are sold under the "Shuly's" and "Elsie" labels at J.C. Penney and smaller retailers. Asked if the company was paying the minimum wage, John Whistler, the U.S. director of the plant, says, "Yes, yes. It's the law. You have to pay them whether they do the work or not." Workers at the plant say they make an average of $1.73 to $1.80 per day, and are often shortchanged on payday.

The supervisors, especially chief supervisor Franck Charles, verbally abuse the workers on a regular basis, calling them "bitch," "whore," "shit" and "dog," among other names.

Whistler, though, says the supervisors "empathize with the people too much."

* National Sewing Contractors produces Disney pajamas under contract with L.V. Myles. The company also produces girls' clothes for Popsicle Playwear of New York, sold under the "Sister Sister" label at Wal-Mart, Kmart, J.C. Penney and Kids R Us. Wages at the plant vary widely, with some workers making as little as $1 for eight hours of work-12 cents per hour.

The owner of the plant, Charles Chevalier Jr., is openly nostalgic for the days of the Duvalier dictatorship, when workers who attempted to organize were routinely murdered by state-sponsored death squads. "Jean-Claude [Baby Doc] Duvalier was a great man compared to these ...," he said recently in an interview with labor researcher Marcelo Hoffman. "I mean, his administration was good compared to what's happening now."

Like most factory owners who pay less than the minimum wage, Chevalier insists that he abides by the labor code. "Haitians do not work for less than the minimum wage," he said. "Even if they tell you so, they're Iying."

* Excel Apparel Exports, jointly owned and operated with Kellwood Co., produces women's underwear for the Hanes division of Sara Lee Corp., under the "Hanes Her Way" label, sold at Wal-Mart. The plant also produces women's slips sold at Dillard Department Stores and night wear for Movie Star, to be sold at Sears and Bradlees. Many workers earn less than $1.33 per day and the company raises its quotas at will. Before President Aristide raised the minimum wage, the quota for a typical operation-sewing waistbands on underpants-was 360 pieces per day. Now the quota is 840 pieces-a 133 percent increase. The workers did not have the right to object to the speed-up; they do not even have the right to speak to one another at work.

* Alpha Sewing produces industrial gloves for Ansell Edmont of Coshocton, Ohio, which is owned by Ansell International of Lilburn, Georgia, which in turn is owned by Pacific Dunlop Ltd. of Melbourne, Australia. Ansell Edmont boasts in its promotional literature that it is the world's largest manufacturer of safety gloves and protective clothing, but the workers at Alpha Sewing do not have even the most basic safety protection. They produce Ansell Edmont's "Vinyl-Impregnated Super-Flexible STD" gloves with bare hands; polyvinyl chloride (PVC), the chemical that toughens the glove, also takes off layers of skin. And the dust from the production of the "Vinyl-Coated Super Comfort SeamsRite" gloves causes respiratory problems for many workers.

Hours at the plant are from 6 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday, and often from 6 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on Sunday as well-a 78-hour work week. Approximately 75 percent of the workers make less than the minimum wage. In April 1995, a worker who refused to work on Sunday so that he could go to church was fired. When he returned to pick up his severance pay, the manager called the UN police and reported a burglar on the premises. The UN police arrived and promptly handcuffed the worker. After protests from the other employees, the UN police finally let the worker go. The next day, management began firing all those workers who had protested the arrest.

Alpha Sewing is owned by the Apaid family, led by Andre Apaid, a notorious Duvalierist. When asked at a business conference in Miami soon after the coup in 1991 what he would do if President Aristide returned to Haiti, Apaid replied vehemently, "I'd strangle him!" At the time, Apaid was heading up the United States Agency for International Development's (U.S. AID's) PROMINEX business promotion project, a $12.7 million program to encourage U.S. and Canadian firms to move their businesses to Haiti.

U.S. tax dollars at work

U.S. AID, the main U.S. agency in Haiti dealing with V economic issues, allocated $215 million in 1995 specifically on aid and economic development to Haiti. Of this, $8 million has been committed to the Program for the Recovery of the Economy in Transition (PRET), which provides direct assistance to U.S. and Haitian businesses-by sponsoring conferences, guiding tours of U.S. businesspeople and establishing a network of business contacts.

The U.S. government has shown an aggressive commitment to court U.S. businesses to invest in Haiti, but it has shown no commitment to the workers who produce for those U.S. companies. According to a U.S. AID status report, the first of PRET's three main objectives is to "promote a sound legal and regulatory environment for private enterprise to recover and prosper." But Lawrence Crandall head of the U.S. AID mission in Haiti, said recently in an interview that violations of the minimum wage law were not the responsibility of the agency, and that U.S. AID "has no position" on the wage issue.

In fact, for several years, U.S. AID has actively and consistently opposed any increase in the minimum wage. In June 1991, when President Aristide was proposing raising the minimum wage from 15 gourdes to 25 gourdes per day, (which at the 1991 exchange rate represented an increase from $1.76 to $2.94 per day, or from 22 cents to 37 cents per hour), the agency wrote in a project paper that "wage systems should not be the forum for welfare and social programs," and that Haiti should not jeopardize its main "comparative advantage," which the report termed "its highly productive, low-cost labor force."

U.S. AID maintained its opposition to raising the minimum wage after the military coup of September 30, 1991 ended President Aristide's attempts to implement his proposals.

On October 15, 1994, the day President Aristide returned to Haiti, Brian Atwood, the administrator of U.S. AID, was asked at a news conference whether or not U.S. AID favored a wage increase. Atwood replied, "I don't think that the economy is ready ... for such measures." Atwood did not mention the fact that Article 137 of the Haitian Labor Code requires the minimum wage to be raised every time inflation totals more than 10 percent for the year, as it has for the past six consecutive years.

It seems that U.S. AID's pressure has paid off. As late as April 30, 1995, the day before he was scheduled to announce a new minimum wage, President Aristide argued in a speech to peasant leaders at the National Palace that, taking inflation into account, the minimum wage would have to be raised to at least 45 gourdes simply to bring it to 1991 levels. Given the fast-rising cost of living, he added, even 75 gourdes was not enough for a family to live on. But after several days of behind-the-scenes lobbying-in which the role of U.S. AID and the U.S. Embassy is unclear-President Aristide was pressured into accepting a compromise minimum wage of 36 gourdes.

Because of rising consumer prices, the new wage of 36 gourdes (US$2.40) per day (30 cents per hour) is worth less in real terms than the old minimum wage of 15 gourdes was worth in 1990. In other words, even after the recent increase, minimum wage workers in Haiti have less buying power now than they did in 1990, before President Aristide's election. And since Oct. 1, 1980, when Baby Doc Duvalier first set the minimum wage at 13.20 gourdes, the real value of the minimum wage has declined by almost 50 percent.

The daily struggle to survive

As Haitian factory owners and U.S. corporations profit from the low wages, Haitian workers struggle every day just to feed themselves and their families. A wage-earner in Haiti typically supports more than five people, and the minimum wage simply does not cover the basic expenses of such a family. The typical diet for minimum wage workers consists largely of rice and cornmeal and beans; vegetables are rare, and meat is an unheard-of luxury.

Workers in Port-au-Prince estimate that to satisfy the most basic nutritional needs of their family, they need to spend $1.67 per day. In addition, workers pay 40 to 67 cents per day for transportation, depending on how far away they live from their workplace, and 47 cents for a small lunch. To rent a small one- or two-room shack in a slum in Port-au-Prince costs between $100 and $133 for a six-month period. To send a child to the cheapest schools costs between $60 and $133 per year, depending on the school and the age of the child. Thus, to satisfy minimum needs for food, shelter, and education, a family in Port-au-Prince must spend-at the very least-$24.20 per week.

However, a minimum-wage worker working 8 hours per day, 6 days a week in Haiti earns $14.40 per week. In other words, a full-time minimum-wage salary provides less than 60 percent of a family's basic needs. A salary of $1 per day, common in apparel plants producing for U.S. companies, provides less than 25 percent of a family's basic needs.

Many workers say that they are not able to make ends meet and are falling deeper and deeper into debt, which compounds their problems. Food vendors on the street outside many factories will sell on credit, but at a premium of 20 to 25 percent. A five-pound sack of rice, for example, sells for $1.47 cash, and $1.87 on credit. Money-lenders in poor neighborhoods-Haitian workers do not have access to banks-generally charge a rate of 25 to 50 percent interest per two-week period.

The economic situation is becoming increasingly desperate for workers in Haiti. Many face a real risk of starvation if they lose their jobs, and are therefore compelled to do whatever their boss asks of them, which for many women involves sexual favors. In interviews with women workers in Cite Soleil, an enormous slum in Port-au-Prince, a Columbia University anthropologist found that roughly 17 percent of female factory workers in her survey had been forced to have sex with their bosses, on penalty of termination if they refused.

Many families in Cite Soleil have taken to selling the last of their worldly belongings-chairs, cooking utensils, plates and bowls, beds and children's shoes-simply in order to survive.

Eric Verhoogen is a labor researcher with the New York-based National Labor Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America.

So Kamala, puleeeeeeeze stop shedding crocodile tears for the Haitians whom YOUR party has oppressed no less than Trump’s.

Postscript. This came to my attention after initially writing this post:

1. Gilbert Bigio: Israel’s Man in Haiti and the Architect Behind the US Migrant Crisis, by Kit Klarenberg. Here’s an extract from it:

In December 2022, Canada imposed strict sanctions on Gilbert Bigio, frequently referred to as “Haiti’s only billionaire” and the deeply impoverished country’s “richest man.” He, along with two other super-wealthy Haitian citizens, was accused by Ottowa of using his outsized influence and power in the country “to protect and enable the illegal activities of the armed criminal gangs” that have been tearing Port-au-Prince apart for years. Since then, Bigio has remained at liberty and unpunished – meanwhile, Haiti has slid ever further into catastrophe.

Markedly, no other Western country – notably the sanctions-happy U.S. – followed Canada’s lead. While wave upon wave of UN-mandated peacekeepers from every corner of the world have been deployed to Haiti in recent years, they have been unable to quell – and often exacerbated – the violence that has left the country without a functioning state or civil society. Kenya, currently leading an international “anti-gang” initiative in Port-au-Prince, recently called for the effort to be transformed into a dedicated U.N. peacekeeping operation.

For his part, Latin American & Caribbean Studies Professor Danny Shaw has zero doubt that Bigio and others like him are fundamentally responsible for encouraging and facilitating Haiti’s collapse. He tells MintPress News, “Only a tiny, well-connected clique of white warlords completely isolated from the needs and reality of the 99.9% of the Haitian population has the necessary private airports, ports and border contacts to smuggle guns and other contraband objects into the country.”

That the arms have kept flowing all along, and no action has been taken to neutralize the international criminal networks operated by Bigio, undergirding that influx, tends to suggest the tycoon’s illicit activities are actively, if quietly permitted by powerful elements within Western governments. As we shall see, Israel may lie at the forefront of Bigio’s international protection racket. Comprehending how he furthers Israel’s interests in Haiti and the wider region may be crucial to understanding how Tel Aviv’s tendrils extend elsewhere overseas.

1. Major General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine, says it all: