Bob Marley Interview

IMF to Haiti: Freeze Public Wages

Since a devastating earthquake rocked Haiti on Tuesday--killing tens of thousands of people--there's been a lot of well-intentioned chatter and twitter about how to help Haiti. Folks have been donating millions of dollars to Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti (by texting "YELE" to 501501) or to the Red Cross (by texting "HAITI" to 90999) or to Paul Farmer's extraordinaryPartners in Health, among other organizations. I hope these donations continue to pour in, along with more money, food, water, medicine, equipment and doctors and nurses from nations around the world. The Obama administration has pledged at least $100 million in aid and has already sent thousands of soldiers and relief workers. That's a decent start.

But it's also time to stop having a conversation about charity and start having a conversation about justice--about recovery, responsibility and fairness. What the world should be pondering instead is: What is Haiti owed?

Haiti's vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor--by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.

Now, in its attempts to help Haiti, the IMF is pursuing the same kinds of policies that made Haiti a geography of precariousness even before the quake. To great fanfare, the IMF announced a new $100 million loan to Haiti on Thursday. In one crucial way, the loan is a good thing; Haiti is in dire straits and needs a massive cash infusion. But the new loan was made through the IMF's extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.

For Haiti, this is history repeated. As historians have documented, the impoverishment of Haiti began in the earliest decades of its independence, when Haiti's slaves and free gens de couleur rallied to liberate the country from the French in 1804. But by 1825, Haiti was living under a new kind of bondage--external debt. In order to keep the French and other Western powers from enforcing an embargo, it agreed to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave owners (yes, that's right, freed slaves were forced to compensate their former masters for their liberty). In order to do that, they borrowed millions from French banks and then from the US and Germany. As Alex von Tunzelmann pointed out, "by 1900, it [Haiti] was spending 80 percent of its national budget on repayments."

It took Haiti 122 years, but in 1947 the nation paid off about 60 percent, or 90 million francs, of this debt (it was able to negotiate a reduction in 1838). In 2003, then-PresidentAristide called on France to pay restitution for this sum--valued in 2003 dollars at over $21 billion. A few months later, he was ousted in a coup d'etat; he claims he left the country under armed pressure from the US.

Then of course there are the structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF and World Bank in the 1990s. In 1995, for example, the IMF forced Haiti to cut its rice tariff from 35 percent to 3 percent, leading to a massive increase in rice-dumping, the vast majority of which came from the United States. As a 2008 Jubilee USA report notes, although the country had once been a net exporter of rice, "by 2005, three out of every four plates of rice eaten in Haiti came from the US." During this period, USAID invested heavily in Haiti, but this "charity" came not in the form of grants to develop Haiti's agricultural infrastructure, but in direct food aid, furthering Haiti's dependence on foreign assistance while also funneling money back to US agribusiness.

A 2008 report from the Center for International Policypoints out that in 2003, Haiti spent $57.4 million to service its debt, while total foreign assistance for education, health care and other services was a mere $39.21 million. In other words, under a system of putative benevolence, Haiti paid back more than it received. As Paul Farmer noted in our pages after hurricanes whipped the country in 2008, Haiti is "a veritable graveyard of development projects."

So what can activists do in addition to donating to a charity? One long-term objective is to get the IMF to forgive all $265 million of Haiti's debt (that's the $165 million outstanding, plus the $100 million issued this week). In the short term, Haiti's IMF loans could be restructured to come from the IMF's rapid credit facility, which doesn't impose conditions like keeping wages and inflation down.

Indeed, debt relief is essential to Haiti's future. It recently had about $1.2 billion in debt canceled, but it still owes about $891 million, all of which was lent to the country from 2004 onward. $429 million of that debt is held by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), to whom Haiti is scheduled to make $10 million in payments next year. Obviously, that's money better spent on saving Haitian lives and rebuilding the country in the months ahead; the cancellation of the entire sum would free up precious capital. The US controls about 30 percent of the bank's shares; Latin American and Caribbean countries hold just over 50 percent. Notably, the IDB's loans come from its fund for special operations (i.e. the IDB's donor nations and funds from loans that have been paid back), not from IDB's bonds. Hence, the total amount could be forgiven without impacting the IDB's triple-A credit rating.

Finally, although the Obama administration temporarily halted deportations to Haiti, it hasn't granted Haitians temporary protected status (TPS), which would save them from being deported back to the scene of a disaster for as long as 18 months, allow them to work in the US and, crucially, send money back to relatives in Haiti. In the past, TPS has been given to countries like Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998 after Hurrican Mitch, but it has never been extended to Haitians, even after the 2008 storms, presumably because immigrations officials fear a mass exodus from Haiti.

But decency, as well as fairness, should trump those fears now. As Sunita Patel, an attorney with CCR, told me, "We have granted TPS to El Salavador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan following natural disasters. To apply different rules here would fly in the face of the administration's efforts to build good will abroad."

(UPDATE: It has just been announced that the Obama administration has granted Temporary Protected Status to Haiti. This is a great relief to Haitians in the US and a victory for those who pressured the administration to do so.)

Catastrophe in Haiti by Ashley Smith

DEVASTATING earthquake, the worst in 200 years, struck Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, laying waste to the city and killing untold numbers of people. The quake measured 7.0 on the Richter scale, and detonated more than 30 aftershocks, all more than 4.5 in magnitude, through the night and into Wednesday morning.

The earthquake toppled poorly constructed houses, hotels, hospitals and even the capital city's main political buildings, including the presidential palace. The collapse of so many structures sent a giant cloud into the sky, which hovered over the city, raining dust down onto the wasteland below.

According to some estimates, more than 100,000 people may have died, in a metropolis of 2 million people. Those that survived are living in the streets, afraid to return inside any building that remains standing.

Around the world, Haitians struggled to contact their family and friends in the devastated country. But most could not reach their loved ones since phone lines were down throughout the country.

One person who did reach relatives, Garry Pierre-Pierre, editor and publisher of the Brooklyn-basedHaitian Times, stated, "People are in shock. They're afraid to go out in the streets for obvious reasons, and most of them can't get inside their homes. A lot of people are sitting or sleeping in front of the rubble that used to be their homes."

President René Préval issued an emergency appeal for humanitarian aid. He described the scene in Port-au-Prince as "unimaginable. Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed. There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them. All the hospitals are packed with people. It's a catastrophe."

The weak Préval government was unable to respond to the crisis, and the United Nations--which occupies Haiti with close to 9,000 troops--was completely unprepared to manage the situation. Many UN leaders and troops died in buildings that collapsed, including their own headquarters.

International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally said that 3 million out of Haiti's 9 million people would need international emergency aid in the coming weeks just to survive. The UN, U.S., European Union, Canada and countless non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have promised humanitarian aid.

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WHILE MOST people reacted to the crisis by trying to find a way to help or donate money, Christian Right fanatic Pat Robertson stooped to new depths of racism. He explained that Haitians were cursed because they made a pact with the devil to liberate themselves from their French slave masters in the Haitian revolution two centuries ago.

The corporate media at least reported that shifting tectonic plates along a fault line underneath Port-au-Prince caused the earthquake--and that Haiti's poverty and the incapacity of the Préval government made the disaster so much worse. But they didn't delve below the surface.

"The media coverage of the earthquake is marked by an almost complete divorce of the disaster from the social and political history of Haiti," Canadian Haiti solidarity activist Yves Engler said in an interview. "They repeatedly state that the government was completely unprepared to deal with the crisis. This is true. But they left out why."

Why were 60 percent of the buildings in Port-au-Prince shoddily constructed and unsafe in normal circumstances, according to the city's mayor? Why are there no building regulations in a city that sits on a fault line? Why has Port-au-Prince swelled from a small town of 50,000 in the 1950s to a population of 2 million desperately poor people today? Why was the state completely overwhelmed by the disaster?

To understand these facts, we have to look at a second fault line--U.S. imperial policy toward Haiti. The U.S. government, the UN, and other powers have aided the Haitian elite in subjecting the country to neoliberal economic plans that have impoverished the masses, deforested the land, wrecked the infrastructure and incapacitated the government.

The fault line of U.S. imperialism interacted with the geological one to turn the natural disaster into a social catastrophe.

During the Cold War, the U.S. supported the dictatorships of Papa Doc Duvalier and then Baby Doc Duvalier--which ruled the country from 1957 to 1986--as an anti-communist counterweight to Castro's Cuba nearby.

Under guidance from Washington, Baby Doc Duvalier opened the Haitian economy up to U.S. capital in the 1970s and 1980s. Floods of U.S. agricultural imports destroyed peasant agriculture. As a result, hundred of thousands of people flocked to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince to labor for pitifully low wages in sweatshops located in U.S. export processing zones.

In the 1980s, masses of Haitians rose up to drive the Duvaliers from power--later, they elected reformer Jean-Bertrand Aristide to be president on a platform of land reform, aid to peasants, reforestation, investment in infrastructure for the people, and increased wages and union rights for sweatshop workers.

The U.S. in turn backed a coup that drove Aristide from power in 1991. Eventually, the elected president was restored to power in 1994 when Bill Clinton sent U.S. troops to the island--but on the condition that he implement the U.S. neoliberal plan--which Haitians called the "plan of death."

Aristide resisted parts of the U.S. program for Haiti, but implemented other provisions, undermining his hoped-for reforms. Eventually, though, the U.S. grew impatient with Aristide's failure to obey completely, especially when he demanded $21 billion in reparations during his final year in office. The U.S. imposed an economic embargo that strangled the country, driving peasants and workers even deeper into poverty.

In 2004, Washington collaborated with Haiti's ruling elite to back death squads that toppled the government, kidnapped and deported Aristide. The United Nations sent troops to occupy the country, and the puppet government of Gérard Latortue was installed to continue Washington's neoliberal plans.

Latortue's brief regime was utterly corrupt--he and his cronies pocketed large portions of the $4 billion poured into the country by the U.S. and other powers when they ended their embargo. The regime dismantled the mild reforms Aristide had managed to implement. Thus, the pattern of impoverishment and degradation of the country's infrastructure accelerated.

In 2006 elections, the Haitian masses voted in longtime Aristide ally René Préval as president. But Préval has been a weak figure who collaborated with U.S. plans for the country and failed to address the growing social crisis.

In fact, the U.S., UN and other imperial powers effectively bypassed the Préval government and instead poured money into NGOs. "Haiti now has the highest per capita presence of NGOs in the world," says Yves Engler. The Préval government has become a political fig leaf, behind which the real decisions are made by the imperial powers, and implemented through their chosen international NGOs.

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THE REAL state power isn't the Préval government, but the U.S.-backed United Nations occupation. Under Brazilian leadership, UN forces have protected the rich and collaborated with--or turned a blind eye to--right-wing death squads who terrorize supporters of Aristide and his Lavalas Party.

The occupiers have done nothing to address the poverty, wrecked infrastructure and massive deforestation that have exacerbated the effects of a series of natural disasters--severe hurricanes in 2004 and 2008, and now the Port-au-Prince earthquake.

Instead, they merely police a social catastrophe, and in so doing, have committed the normal crimes characteristic of all police forces. As Dan Beeton wrote in NACLA Report on the Americas, "The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which began its mission in June 2004, has been marred by scandals of killings, rape and other violence by its troops almost since it began."

First the Bush administration and now the Obama administration have used the coup and social and natural crises to expand the U.S.'s neoliberal economic plans.

Under Obama, the U.S. has granted Haiti $1.2 billion in debt relief, but it hasn't canceled all of Haiti's debt--the country still pays huge sums to the Inter-American Development Bank. The debt relief is classic window-dressing for Obama's real Haiti policy, which is the same old Haiti policy.

In close collaboration with the new UN Special Envoy to Haiti, former President Bill Clinton, Obama has pushed for an economic program familiar to much of the rest of the Caribbean--tourism, textile sweatshops and weakening of state control of the economy through privatization and deregulation.

In particular, Clinton has orchestrated a plan for turning the north of Haiti into a tourist playground, as far away as possible from the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince. Clinton lured Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines into investing $55 million to build a pier along the coastline of Labadee, which it has leased until 2050.

From there, Haiti's tourist industry hopes to lead expeditions to the mountaintop fortress Citadelle and the Palace of Sans Souci, both built by Henri Christophe, one of the leaders of Haiti's slave revolution. According to the Miami Herald:

The $40 million plan involved transforming the now quaint town of Milot, home to the Citadelle and Palace of Sans Souci ruin, into a vibrant tourist village, with arts and crafts markets, restaurants and stoned streets. Guests would be ferried past a congested Cap-Haïtien to a bay, then transported by bus past peasant plantations. Once in Milot, they would either hike or horseback to the Citadelle...named a world heritage site in 1982...

Eco-tourism, archaeological exploration and voyeuristic visits to Vodou rituals are all being touted by Haiti's struggling boutique tourism industry, as Royal Caribbean plans to bring the world largest cruise ship here, sparking the need for excursions.

So while Pat Robertson denounces Haiti's great slave revolution as a pact with the devil, Clinton is helping to reduce it to a tourist trap.

At the same time, Clinton's plans for Haiti include an expansion of the sweatshop industry to take advantage of cheap labor available from the urban masses. The U.S. granted duty-free treatment for Haitian apparel exports to make it easy for sweatshops to return to Haiti.

Clinton celebrated the possibilities of sweatshop development during a whirlwind tour of a textile plant owned and operated by the infamous Cintas Corp. He announced that George Soros had offered $50 million for a new industrial park of sweatshops that could create 25,000 jobs in the garment industry. Clinton explained at a press conference that Haiti's government could create "more jobs by lowering the cost of doing business, including the cost of rent."

As TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson told Democracy Now! "That isn't the kind of investment that Haiti needs. It needs capital investment. It needs investment so that it can be self-sufficient. It needs investment so that it can feed itself."

One of the reasons why Clinton could be so unabashed in celebrating sweatshops is that the U.S.-backed coup repressed any and all resistance. It got rid of Aristide and his troublesome habit of raising the minimum wage. It banished him from the country, terrorized his remaining allies and barred his political party, Fanmi Lavalas, the most popular in the country, from running for office. The coup regime also attacked union organizers within the sweatshops themselves.

As a result, Clinton could state to business leaders: "Your political risk in Haiti is lower than it has ever been in my lifetime."

Thus, as previous U.S. presidencies have done before, the Obama administration has worked to aid Haiti's elite, sponsor international corporations taking advantage of cheap labor, weaken the ability of the Haitian state to regulate the society, and repress any political resistance to that agenda.

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THESE POLICIES led directly to the incapacitated Haitian state, dilapidated infrastructure, poorly constructed buildings and desperate poverty that combined with the hurricanes and now the earthquake to turn natural disasters into social catastrophes.

While everyone should support the current outpouring of aid to help Haiti, no one should do so with political blinders on. As Engler said:

Aid in Haiti has always been used to further imperial interests. This is obvious when you look at how the U.S. and Canada treated the Aristide government in contrast to the coup regime. The U.S. and Canada starved Aristide of almost all aid. But then after the coup, they opened a floodgate of money to back some of the most reactionary forces in Haitian society.

We should therefore agitate against any attempt by the U.S. and other powers to use this crisis to further impose their program on a prostrate country.

We should also be wary of the role of international NGOs. While many NGOs are trying to address the crisis, the U.S. and other governments are funneling aid to them in order to undermine Haitians' democratic right to self-determination. The international NGOs are unaccountable to either the Haitian state or Haitian population. So the aid funneled through them further weakens what little hold Haitians have on their own society.

The Obama administration should also immediately lift the ban against Aristide's return to Haiti, as well as the political ban on his party, Fanmi Lavalas, from participating in the electoral process. After all, a known drug criminal and coup leader, Guy Philippe, and his party Front for National Reconstruction (FRN) has been allowed to participate in the electoral process. Aristide and his party, by contrast, are still the most popular political force in the country and should have the right to participate in an open and fair vote.

The U.S. should also stop deportations of Haitians who have fled their crisis-torn country and grant Temporary Protected Status to Haitian refugees. That would allow any Haitians who have fled the political and social crisis since the coup, the hurricanes and now the earthquake to remain legally in the U.S.

On top of that, we must demand that the U.S. stop imposing its neoliberal plans. The U.S. has plundered Haitian society for decades. Instead of Haiti owing any debt to the U.S., other countries or international financial institutions, the reverse is the case. The U.S., France, Canada and the UN owe the people of Haiti reparations to redress the imperial plunder of the country.

With these funds and political space, Haitians would be finally able to begin shaping their own political and economic future--the dream of the great slave revolution 200 years ago.

Alert about Haiti

Already there are talks of using the shock of the disaster in Haiti to forward imperial policy. Be careful to whom you donate and let's keep our eyes on Haiti. The following statement was put out and then hastily taken back by the Heritage Foundation:

"In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region."

This ideology is not coincidentally of the same sort on play in Iraq, Afghanistan, and New Orleans. Let's mobilize funds to good organizations and monitor what is happening in terms of policy in Haiti!

black rage

by Drew Costley

words are like women to me

i'm not married to em these days

It's all the rage
People want to be black
But they missed the step
Where they learned the facts
Not in a platonic sense
Where truth is obscure
And facts get a rinse
I'm talking about the pure
Dirty scars scabbed over
Mud packed huts knocked over
For mixed minerals
Brick by brick you think you slick
Military homes in Shaw get flipped
Put it on TV but what about DC
Families whose roots have been transplanted
Transatlantic do you understand it?
If you do then you get my rage
Rumbles in my sleep
As the lion turns in his grave
Awake in his rest
From them getting the best
Of this black rage
Spinning it to chaotic stages
Then trying to build it up
With sandy pages and trap door cages
Blind mice running around for ages
Lab rats without hazmats
Say drink this and pass that
Without checking the label
About how this renders you lifeless
Unstable
The price of no fables
Is equal to or greater than my black rage

heroin dreams

by Megan French

I laugh carelessly,
attempting to slow anguished neurons that pulse at my throat.
They force a hesitation I cannot put to words as
I watch you pick the scabbed mark that divulges private terror.
While you try, you never escape into numbness,
she dances too close to your eyes.

There are days I see her,
taut fingers grip at the back of your scalp.
Yet, she never pulls you towards her,
as you yearn for, even now.

Your preoccupied eyes meet mine for a second where
recognition is terrifying and
I feel your hand on me, though not gently.
An attempt to resist my question.
When did your punishment become about yourself,
no longer an effort to purge her from your clouded mind?

Your gaze returns to your arm.
As the crust loosens,
I am distracted by the blood that
you allow to stain the edge of your bright white T.
And though you let the red run, it only frustrates you for
when the vacancy you rely on begins to dissipate,
the nightmares always re-appear.

You hesitate, aware of my fear for the first time.
The zombies masked in clown suits make existing less unbearable, but
I wish they were not here today.
They do not ask, you say, even as
your look begins to seek.
Wanting, afraid.
Almost at once, they bring us back to feigned existence with laughter
too abrupt for the stillness we neared.

You are relieved, quieted by their interruption.
The pixies swallowed like the little white pills you keep loose in your pocket.
I too, find myself reassured, though it’s not what I want.

I will not ask, I say, as I let your hand steady my lie.
You smile.
Then respond to the circus above our heads.
While I am not yet ready to leave, I know you already have.
Nevertheless, more and more
I wonder if our loneliness was our same


Stain

Super Hero

by my good friend David Scott (if any of you have connections with folks who publish, please get at me, this dude needs to be published!)

At this hour, the blinking stop-lights mirage red carpet and the homeless and the junk are just flickers. It figures because I can't help feeling that everything with you could've been perfect; that we could've worn these streets like houseshoes, once. up to the thousand rooftops where we pulled eachother to bed every night; hung an attic in the moon's waxing to keep-safe our favorite kisses and when full we would remember all the corners that brought us to these heights.

But in the days since I forgot how to fly, the only lights are the question marks of lampposts: Why am I anywhere with them when I could still be with you?

Do you remember when I told you:

To look past the streetlamps and read how the twilight calls you darling with its sparkle

To open the thousand doors of your face to me and let the stories behind them pour out and run to my eyes like the wounded light from a murdered star

So that in the summers where they fall you can see that they are us

that long ago we pushed these chests out dry and sea-thirsty like lonely shores and matchboxes and when fingers struck we felt flames before we ever saw them That nothing has said "You Are and You are Full of Fire" like the stroke of the Index finger our touch has been censored in these empires of sandcastle

where we are the sandmen and sandwomen held prisoner by our own Dreaming so grasp me grenade-like and swing these napalms against the walls between ourselves and the Seven Billion Pieces of God

and we did

And when I was inside of you the buildings fell from the city like fruit slipped free of its peel, and out of the disaster people everywhere bulleted through offices and the capitols like a rebellion of bottled fireflies.

we snapped the workweek's back between our grinding teeth

until we could take no more and came in war chants that shook Air Force One out of the sky like a daydreaming child, rocked the entire NAVY into seasickness with the way our lower bellies made the oceans boil.

and when we gently clothed eachother afterwards

the mobs fell upon the police until all that was left was the wheeze of sirens drowning under a buzzing of stars returning to the sky

and they called our romance terrorism, as we walked stumbling and lovedrunk into true night, and bent its road past madness until we saw the sunrise of its good sense to a clearing where we had children who had everything and knew of Ronald Reagan only as a crucified villain to a long bedtime story

I want you to remember how no one did a thing, could do a thing, could dream of doing a thing, because I was invincible when I was with you.

So please know that even when my bones become separated by time and its haunts Holes in the wooden floores of me a spooky house, a dusty woodwind you will stir me still when I remember you My wet eyelashes will xylphone your melody perfect the kiss of molotov to your touch and the way you walked, the same way we made love like this world hadn't broken into our hips much too early for us to be this proud of our bodies.

I miss wearing the scarf you made. Even though it wasn't really comfortable. But it was my cape and costume. And I miss the feeling of flying when we danced on rooftops to no music and the brief moments of teleptahy where we held hands and knew what the other was thinking.

I miss having the unbelievable strength to lift the laughter out of you even during the nights where you mistook me for you shadow and fought me for trying to hold on. But these days I have only these arms, and these hands, pretty odinary. So I'm writing you this.

Because the other day when I saw you, it was all wrong. The clouds had rolled in like laughter, and the buildings and the satellites had us hemmed in like linebackers, as if they were daring us to do something about it. As if they didn't know that we used to be superheroes.