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Open in TheBrain

Haiti

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shithole country REALLY POOR AND REALLY BLACK? // CONGO?

on trump shortlist with somALIA

see eat pets 9 24

trump refuse protected status tho emergency?

jdv said ok to lie to wake US up

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[## STEVE BANNON: "NEW YORK'S A FOREIGN CITY. GO LOOK AT THE KNICKS PARADE."

06/24/26 11:39 AM EDT](https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-new-yorks-foreign-city-go-look-knicks-parade)

100k tps?!

MEGYN KELLY REACTS TO SUPREME COURT TPS DECISION: “GO BACK TO FUCKING HAITI”

06/25/26

https://www.mediamatters.org/megyn-kelly/megyn-kelly-reacts-supreme-court-tps-decision-go-back-fucking-haiti)

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an 6 25

"What could possibly go wrong?"

That's a questionNew York Times readers sarcastically asked on social media last Wednesday, after the newspaper reported that Erik Prince, founder of the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater and a key ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, is working with Haiti's interim government "to conduct lethal operations against gangs that are terrorizing the nation and threatening to take over its capital."

The newspaper noted that Prince declined to comment, and while Blackwater is now defunct, the former Navy SEAL "owns other private military entities." The reporting is based on unnamed American and Haitian officials and other security experts.

"Haiti's government has hired American contractors, including Mr. Prince, in recent months to work on a secret task force to deploy drones meant to kill gang members," who "have been killing civilians and seizing control of vast areas of territory" in the Caribbean country, the Times detailed.

"Mr. Prince's team has been operating the drones since March, but the authorities have yet to announce the death or capture of a single high-value target," according to the paper. Pierre Espérance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network in Haiti, said the drone attacks have killed more than 200 people.

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American journalist Michael Deibert said on social media, "If this story is accurate, on what authority does Haiti's unelected, temporary interim [government] invite foreign forces into the country and by what means—with whose money—do they intend to pay them for their work there?"

The U.S. State Department has poured millions into Haiti's National Police but told the Times it is not paying Prince.

Deibert said that "as someone who has reported on Haiti's armed groups for 25 years, it's hard to overstate how badly wrong bringing in foreign mercenaries, such as those allied with Erik Prince, will likely go given the current security, social, and political dynamics in the country."

Also weighing in on social media, Keanu Heydari, a history Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan, said: "A lot's going on here! A majority-Black nation, hollowed out by decades of foreign intervention, 'turning to' a white war profiteer to restore 'order.' That is not about logistics, this is about coloniality."

Heydari continued:

This isn't a story about drones and gangs. It's about how the world has made it structurally impossible for Haiti to govern itself—then offers mercenaries as a "solution." Haiti's sovereignty has been chipped away by debt, coups, U.N. missions, and now private warlords.Why does Erik Prince show up where Black and Brown countries are in crisis? Because the global market rewards violence disguised as security, especially when it's sold by Westerners to postcolonial states. It's racial capitalism in full view.}:

The NYT missed the story: This isn't a desperate government making tough choices. It's a story of empire outsourcing control, where mercenaries profit from the very chaos empire helped produce. Haiti deserves justice, not occupation by other means. DISASTER CAPL?

The Times article follows The Economist's reporting earlier this month that Haiti's interim government, the Transitional Presidential Council, "is so desperate that it is exploring deals with private military contractors. It has been talking to Osprey Global Solutions, a firm based in North Carolina. The founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince, visited Haiti in April to negotiate contracts to provide attack drones and training for an anti-gang task force. The council declined to comment."

In response to that paragraph in the May 7 article, Jake Johnston, director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti*, also asked, "What could possibly go wrong?"

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// ITALIANS GOING FOR WHITE STATUS?

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AN 11 24 PRO PUB

Texas Democrats have long viewed the state’s growing Latino population as their ticket to eventually breaking through the Republican Party’s dominance. Tuesday night, however, showed that the GOP has made significant gains in peeling away those voters, and nowhere was that more apparent than along the border.

After years of losing the statewide Latino vote by double digits, Republicans set a high-water mark with Donald Trump capturing 55% of the critical voting bloc, besting Vice President Kamala Harris’ 44% share, according to exit polls.

In the traditionally Democratic strongholds along the border, Trump managed a near sweep.

He won 14 out of the 18 counties within 20 miles of the border, a number that doubled his attention-grabbing 2020 performance in the Latino-majority region. He carried all four counties in the Rio Grande Valley just eight years after drawing a mere 29% in the region — a feat that included delivering 97% Latino Starr County to Republicans for the first time since 1896. And, though he lost El Paso, one of the border’s most populous counties, he narrowed margins there in ways not seen in decades.

His gains along the border were the most for a Republican presidential candidate in at least 30 years, exceeding even the inroads made by native Texan George W. Bush in 2004.

Trump’s success in appealing to heavily Latino communities was evident throughout the country as he became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Miami-Dade County in more than three decades and nearly doubled his share of the Latino vote in Pennsylvania, even after a comedian at one of his rallies called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” But Trump’s performance is particularly striking in Texas, where Democrats have all but tied their fate to the idea that, as long as the state’s Latino electorate continued to grow and stayed reliably blue, Republicans would one day cease to win statewide elections.

In addition to dominating the presidential race, Republicans saw other gains along the border. U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, a Republican from Edinburg, held onto a key GOP seat anchored in the Rio Grande Valley, and Republicans picked up a state Senate seat and two state House districts in South Texas that were previously held by Democrats. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who won reelection by carrying a majority of Latino voters, said the results amounted to “generational change.”

Democrats saw their own bright spots. Eddie Morales Jr., a state representative for a sprawling border district that stretches from Eagle Pass to El Paso, held onto his seat on Tuesday, though he narrowly eked out a victory two years after winning by a more comfortable 12-point margin. U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Laredo, also won by an unexpectedly narrow margin of about 5 percentage points against a GOP challenger whom he vastly outspent.

Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said it’s too early to tell if Republican gains will hold or extend beyond Trump himself. But, Blank said, Democrats would be wise to worry about the possibility that this shift endures.

Trump’s success among Latino voters seemed to stem from an understanding that, in places like Texas, many Latinos “think of themselves as multiracial” and have grown up in communities where race and ethnicity are not top of mind, Blank said. Trump targeted Hispanic men who rarely vote by appealing “to their pocketbooks, to their masculinity, to their place in culture and society, but not directly to an identity as a racial and ethnic minority.”

“Does that mean that these voters are going to stay in the Republican column? We don’t know. Does it mean that they’re going to support somebody who’s not named Donald Trump? Unclear,” Blank said. “But he has changed the terms of the debate in a way that I think Democrats are uncomfortable with.”

Not unlike his appeal among other constituencies, Trump won over Latino voters by hammering Harris on economic challenges that many of them — rightly and wrongly — blame on President Joe Biden.

University of Houston political science professor Jeronimo Cortina said Trump’s challenge now would be to deliver on his promises to improve voters’ economic fortunes. And he said he’d expect voters to hold Trump accountable if he doesn’t. Cortina noted that many Latinos supported Bush’s 2004 reelection, only to desert the Republican Party in favor of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 amid a flailing economy.

“Realignments occur when there’s a sustainable change, and right now, it’s not clear we have that,” Cortina said.

He also said it would be premature to say whether Trump’s appeal — to say nothing of the Republican Party’s — was anything other than fleeting because, in local races, Latinos still tended to prefer Democrats.

One such example is the race for sheriff in Val Verde County, nearly three hours west of San Antonio.

In that race, Democrat Joe Frank Martinez held onto his seat, beating his Republican challenger after receiving 57% of the vote, even as Trump won the county with 63% of the vote.

According to Martinez, Project Red TX, a GOP-backed PAC, initially tried to get him to switch parties. When he declined, the PAC backed his opponent, who ran a campaign centered around the issue of immigration, even though that is not part of the sheriff’s job.

This year, the group supported more than 50 local candidates, primarily in border counties. The three candidates it backed in Val Verde County lost, though Wayne Hamilton, a veteran GOP operative who heads the group, noted that he also supported a number of local candidates who won their races with Trump carrying the county atop the ballot. One such case was in Jim Wells County, where Trump received 57% and the Democratic sheriff was narrowly ousted by a Republican challenger.

Hamilton said Latino voters living at or near the border flocked to Trump over what they see as the Biden administration’s “collapse in border enforcement and failing to do their job” by preventing more migrants from crossing into Texas.

Record numbers of arrivals overwhelmed border infrastructure in numerous communities. In Val Verde, some 20,000 mostly Haitian migrants arrived almost at once in 2021, forcing officials to shut the international port of entry while they figured out how to respond to the situation.

Public outcry was most acute, Hamilton said, in counties with high poverty rates where residents were more likely to feel that their community was “being overrun by people that are even poorer, with even greater needs.”

Hamilton celebrated that Trump flipped Starr by 16 points this year, a 76-point swing from his 60-point deficit there in 2016.

Down the ballot, though, Democrats, including the incumbent sheriff, managed to hold on to their positions despite aggressive campaigns on the Republican side. “All of those candidates that ran as Democrats, all won, so the Trump presidency is basically an isolated seat,” Starr County Democratic Chair Jessica Vera said.

Still, she said, if national and statewide Democrats want to keep the county blue, they need to work together with local leaders to connect with voters there.

Hamilton said some newly converted Trump voters might feel less inclined to vote against their local Democratic officials, especially in the smaller border counties, because they tend to be known in the community.

“The further down the ballot you go, it all becomes more personal,” Hamilton said. “It’s not a guy I see on TV, right? It’s the guy I go to Mass with.”

Local Democratic Party officials, including Sylvia Bruni in Webb County, a longtime Democratic stronghold, said they had warned their state and national headquarters about the advances Republicans were making in their districts. But she said she had gotten little support and instead had to rely almost entirely on whatever funds her group could raise on its own.

That’s not going to be good enough in the future, Bruni said. “We need help.”

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September 27, 2024, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): The Harris-Biden regime, they are stuffing foreigners in the reddest communities across the country, in small town red America, I think partially as revenge. Blake might not agree with this, but I think that they get, like, off on this sinister, like, we're gonna go send the Haitians into red America.

BLAKE NEFF (CO-HOST): Maybe a bit of that. Maybe a bit of that.

KIRK: I think there's an element there. You can't convince me. I have no evidence of that, but it's just gut instinct. I'm not gonna get into what states can do to resist this yet because I wanna win the election and do this properly through the federal government. If we lose in November, it's gonna get very, very messy. I'm just gonna be honest. Like, it's gonna get messy of states being —

NEFF: Especially if they start packing the courts, then you're you really have to start thinking, like, OK. What are we gonna do about, like, this truly out of control wants it all —

KIRK: Do we have a country at this point?

NEFF: Yeah.

KIRK: And I don't wanna get there yet, Emily. But, Emily, just so we're clear, the Haitians that are in Huntsville that are raping your women and hunting you down at night — it's only gonna get worse if — unless Donald Trump wins. A new report from Fox News shows that across the border, 13,000 people convicted of murder, 15,000 people convicted of rape on the non-detained list — meaning they're currently roaming free around our country. So right now, roaming free on the interior of the United States are 13,000 convicted murderers, 15,000 convicted rapists. And they're just — they're having a field day, and they're coming for your daughter next.

...

KIRK: I want you to understand this. That means that they're coming across the border, they run a background check, or someone knows, and then they say, just have fun. That's what that means. That means that they — we know who they are, and then we just release them into the interior and say —

NEFF: It just shocks me, like, the level of control you can have over media narrative that. Like, you know, The New York Times or whoever can blow this off. 13,000 homicide convictions just roaming the US as an elective policy choice.

KIRK: And the election is close. I mean, the election is close. It's very close. And, it — again, there was a poll that just showed up here. Arizona women voters, favor Kamala Harris 52%, 43%. And that does not include the 2 million gotaways. And since those are the border jumpers who avoid border encounters, it's safe to conclude the proportion of convicted criminals is even higher than that 2 million plus of them. Thank you for being a member, and stay safe in Alabama, and pray Trump wins, or else things are gonna get really bad.@@ They're gonna get even worse. There will be hundreds of thousands of Haitians brought into Alabama, and they will become your masters.

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JD Vance, Springfield, and how MAGA media spun a racist lie out of control

Vance’s office was told it was “baseless” from the beginning

Written by Matt Gertz

:{Published 09/18/24 mma

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance told reporters on Tuesday that it was their job — not his — to fact-check his claim that Haitians were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. The Wall Street Journal did just that, revealing on Wednesday morning that Springfield’s city manager told Vance’s office that the story was baseless, soon after the Republican vice presidential nominee started publicly making the racist claim.

A Vance staffer contacted Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck on the morning of September 9 and “asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” Heck told the Journal. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”

The Haitian immigrant saga is a testament to the right’s refusal to abide by anything resembling evidentiary standards, their demagogic response when anyone dares to point out that their claims are unsubstantiated — and how their lies can spiral wildly out of control.

Thousands of Haitian immigrants have settled in Springfield and its environs in recent years, fleeing violence, political unrest, and economic collapse in their home country while being drawn by local jobs and a “dire labor shortage.” The population surge has created real but surmountable challenges for local governance, resulting in an influx in state assistance and calls for federal aid.

Local businesses and church leaders, however, praise the new residents, who “are here legally,” according to the Springfield government.

Earlier this month, a Springfield resident published a since-deleted post to a private local Facebook group spreading “vague, third hand gossip” about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets in the area.

The internet rumor spread to X on September 5 and spiraled through the right-wing media apparatus for days. Then on the morning of September 9, Vance, who is extremely online, promoted the claims on X, triggering a slew of supportive coverage from right-wing media.

Springfield’s city manager told Vance’s staffer such claims were “baseless” soon after, the Journal reported. Vance kept his post up and added another the next day in which he acknowledged that he was promoting “rumors” that may “turn out to be false,” but nonetheless urged his supporters to “keep the cat memes flowing.”

That night Donald Trump cited what his running mate had acknowledged were “rumors” that his office had been informed were baseless at a presidential debate before an estimated television audience of nearly 70 million Americans.

The former president, who shares the evidentiary standards of the average denizen of right-wing fever swamps, told the public that Democrats had allowed “millions and millions of people to come into our country” and that “in Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people that live there.”

ABC News moderator David Muir responded by telling Trump what he could have learned from speaking to his running mate’s staff if he were marginally interested in saying true things.

“ABC News reached out to the city manager there,” Muir said. “He told us ‘there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.’”

:{Video

CitationFrom the September 10, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox News Democracy 2024 - ABC Presidential Debate

This mild rebuttal of what Trump’s running mate had publicly called a “rumor” which could be false — along with a handful of similar fact-checks of right-wing media nonsense Trump promoted that night — triggered a massive right-wing freakout targeting ABC.

Over the following days, Trump and his allies called for government retribution against the network and its parent company and even criminal charges, while promoting absurdly thin claims about an “ABC whistleblower” who was exposing the purportedly rigged debate.

Meanwhile, Trump’s right-wing propagandists scrounged for evidence even vaguely resembling the initial claims which immediately collapsed under scrutiny, including a photo purportedly showing a Haitian immigrant carrying a dead goose to eat, a video purportedly showing a cat being grilled in neighboring Dayton, Ohio, false claims that Haitians were causing an increase in “communicable diseases like HIV and TB,” and an attack on Haitian immigrants in Pennsylvania.

Springfield’s community has experienced significant disruption since Vance and Trump took a rumor from the right-wing fever swamps, gave it a national audience, and mired the city in a ridiculous national debate.

Local schools, colleges, churches, and government buildings have suffered bomb threats that resulted in evacuations. The Proud Boys, a violent Trumpist gang, marched through the streets, while “fliers from a group affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan” circulated. Haitian residents say they fear for their safety and are keeping their children home from school.

Ohio’s Republican governor Mike DeWine publicly urged Trump and Vance to end their “very hurtful” attacks on Haitian immigrants. Springfield’s mayor Rob Rue, also a Republican, added that "It would be helpful if they understood the weight of their words and how they could harm a community like ours.”

But Vance, Trump, and their right-wing media allies are undeterred. Their aim, as Vance admitted in a Sunday interview, is to “create stories” by uplifting bullshit in order to drive media attention to the purported horrors of immigrants (and presumably away from covering unpopular aspects of their agenda, like restricting abortion, raising grocery prices, and rolling back protections on health coverage for preexisting conditions).

On Tuesday, he denied any sense of responsibility for his actions and their consequences.

“A woman who was behind an early Facebook post about the Haitian migrants in Springfield has now apologized for spreading false rumors,” a reporter told Vance at a Q & A during a rally in Wisconsin. “You say that you have a responsibility to share what your constituents tell you, but don’t you also have a responsibility to fact-check them first?”

“I think the media has a responsibility to fact-check the residents of Springfeild, not lie about them,” Vance replied, to cheers from the crowd. “I actually think this is really interesting, and I’ve learned a lot about the American media over the last week, and none of it is good.”

Vance went on to claim that his office had heard the story about pets from “multiple people” and the media has descended on the town and engaged in “bullying on an industrial scale” that he called “disgraceful.”

:{Video

CitationFrom a September 17, 2024,YouTube video of a JD Vance campaign event

Vance’s office, meanwhile, had provided the Journal with one new piece of evidence, “a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors,” which instantly dissolved when the paper went about trying to “fact-check” it.

“But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement,” the Journal reported on Wednesday.

“Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.”

Don’t expect similar apologies from Vance, Trump, or any of the right-wing propagandists peddling this story.

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Right-wing media are gleefully promoting a false, racist rumor that Haitian migrants are eating pets

09/10/2

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an 9 24

“Haitian immigrants aren’t just eating cats and dogs. They eat HUMANS,” Loomer baselessly claimed Thursday. “Remember their leader? Known as ‘Barbeque’? Only Hannibal Lecter himself would want to bring more of them to the United States!”

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Right-wing media are gleefully promoting a false, racist rumor that Haitian migrants are eating pets

Right-wing figures have called Haitian people “locusts,” zombies,” and “weird Third World aliens”

Written by Chloe Simon & Reed McMaster

Research contributions from Gideon Taaffe

Published 09/10/24 mma

On September 9, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance claimed that Haitian migrants had “abducted and eaten” pets in Springfield, Ohio, seemingly referencing debunked social media rumors.

Though local officials explained that there was no truth to the claim, right-wing media immediately jumped on the bandwagon, amplifying Vance’s allegations and pushing racist narratives about Haitian immigrants.

Some right-wing figures accused Haitian migrants of consuming “cats and ducks” and comparing them to “zombies” and “locusts.”

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big pix 4 horse

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-failure-of-militarized-neoliberalism-is-laid-bare-in-iraq-and-haiti/

no lnx

The failure of militarized neoliberalism is laid bare in Iraq and Haiti

Written by Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J. S. Davies October 10, 2019

This season could be called the Autumn of Discontent, as people from the Middle East to Latin America and the Caribbean have been rising up against corrupt neoliberal governments. Two of the countries in crisis, Haiti and Iraq, are on opposite ends of the earth but have something important in common. Not only are they reeling from protests against government corruption and austerity programs, like Ecuador and Algeria, but in both Haiti and Iraq, their corrupt neoliberal governments were imposed on them by the use of U.S. military force.

In 2003 and 2004 respectively, U.S. forces illegally invaded Iraq and Haiti, removed their internationally recognized governments from power and replaced them with U.S.-backed regimes. Both countries have since been governed in line with the dominant neoliberal ideology that the U.S. and its allies have imposed on most of the world since the 1980s. The protests and savage repression in Iraq and Haiti today are only the latest evidence of the utter failure of neoliberalism and the extraordinary human cost of U.S. efforts to impose it by military force on countries that resist.

In the first week of October, more than 100 people were killed and 6,000 wounded in Baghdad, Nasiriyah and other Iraqi cities, as the Iraqi Army and police fired into large demonstrations. Young Iraqis have risen up against government corruption, unemployment and poverty that leave them with dismal prospects, even as record oil production fills the pockets of the ruling elite in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

Meanwhile, at least 17 people have been killed in the Haitian government’s repression of protests calling for the resignation of U.S.-backed President Jovenel Moise. Public anger has boiled over into the streets as Moise faces credible charges of embezzlement and corruption. His government has utterly failed to improve the lives of most Haitians. Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, with a per capita GDP of only $870 per year and 60 percent of the population living below a poverty line of $2.41 per day.

In a Foreign Affairs article in January 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warrenexplained how the U.S.:

began to export a particular brand of capitalism, one that involved weak regulations, low taxes on the wealthy, and policies favoring multinational corporations. And the United States took on a series of seemingly endless wars, engaging in conflicts with mistaken or uncertain objectives and no obvious path to completion.

The impact of these policy changes has been devastating.

What Senator Warren skated over, without connecting the dots, was that the real objective of those wars, coups and other regime change operations was precisely to impose the “particular brand of capitalism” she described, and, if necessary, to do so by the illegal and deadly use of military force.

While Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet empire and made peace with the West, the U.S. exported neoliberal capitalism to Eastern Europe without needing to use its war machine it had squandered our country’s wealth for 45 years to build.

Instead, Western political and economic experts like Jeffrey Sachs fanned out across the region reciting Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism. They convinced Eastern European leaders to surrender their countries and their people to the “shock therapy” of corporate conquest, privatization, drastic cuts in public services and plutocratic oligarchy, superficially legitimized by Western-style multi-party elections.

But the U.S. and its allies then faced two thorny dilemmas. What should they do about countries that remained obstinately independent from their neoliberal empire, countries like Iraq, Iran, Libya, Cuba and North Korea? And what should they do with the U.S. and NATO war machine that Gorbachev’s peacemaking had rendered redundant?

U.S. officials of both major parties, from neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz to “humanitarian interventionists” like Madeleine Albright, peddled the simplistic notion that the U.S. war machine could be repurposed to impose neoliberalism by force on dissident countries around the world. Twenty years on, the results of those policies have been universally catastrophic.

Even in the U.S., at the very heart of the neoliberal empire, a new generation raised on the myths of neoliberalism now rejects its absurdities: trickle-down economics; the magic of the market; union-busting; privatized health care and education; the best Congress money can buy; the shrinking middle class; the rampant destruction of the natural world; and so on.As British economist J.M. Keynes reportedly said in the 1930s, “Laissez-faire capitalism is the absurd idea that the worst people, for the worst reasons, will do what is best for all of us.”

But as corrosive as neoliberalism has been to working people in the U.S., it has been far more destructive wherever the U.S. and its allies have tried to impose it by military force.

Afghanistan and Iraq

In Afghanistan, after 18 years of war, 80,000 U.S. bombs and missiles dropped in U.S.-led airstrikes, and hundreds of thousands of violent deaths, the Afghan people are so disillusioned with the U.S.-sponsored “democratic system” that only 25 percent turned out to vote in the September presidential elections, a record low. The unending violence and the unbridled corruption of successive U.S.-backed governments have enabled the Taliban to make a comeback and set up a viable shadow government across more and more of the country.

In Iraq, 16 years after the U.S. invasion, a succession of corrupt U.S.-backed governments has boosted oil production to about 4.6 million barrels per day, the second-highest production in OPEC. But in line with U.S. neoliberal orthodoxy, the profits have been pocketed by Iraq’s new U.S.-installed ruling class, not redistributed to provide universal health care, education, housing and other public services as they were under Iraq’s nationalist and Baathist governments between 1958 and 2003, including under Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship.

Iraq was plunged back into full-scale war in 2014, as the alienated population in the north and west of the country fell under the sway of the Islamic State. The U.S. military responded with a campaign of air and artillery bombardment that destroyed most of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and many other towns and cities across Iraq and Syria, killing tens of thousands of civilians in Mosul alone.

The U.S. invasion and the unending waves of violence and chaos it unleashed have destroyed Iraq. The U.S.-imposed neoliberal model has empowered a series of corrupt governments to steal and squander Iraq’s oil wealth, while the rest of the population still struggles to recover from this unending “Made in the U.S.A.” national trauma. Voter turnout in Iraqi elections declined from 80 percent in 2005 to 45 percent in 2018. Now a desperate and angry new generation of Iraqis is taking to the streets to demand a government that will finally share their country’s wealth with its people.

The Tragedy of Haiti

In 2000, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, was elected for a second term on a platform that explicitly rejected the neoliberal “free market,” debt and austerity policies imposed on Haiti by the U.S., the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

The U.S. responded to Aristide’s reelection by cutting off foreign aid to Haiti and setting up training camps in the Dominican Republic, where up to 200 U.S. special operations forces trained Haitian death squads to cross the border, assassinate Aristide’s supporters and terrorize the population.

In February 2004, these U.S.-trained death squads joined forces with a militia called the Cannibal Army in Gonaives, where they sacked the police station and took control of the city. Two weeks later, they seized Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city.

As the U.S.-trained death squads threatened to march on the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, a U.S. embassy official and U.S. special operations forces entered the Presidential Palace and “persuaded” Aristide and his family to leave with them. A thousand U.S. Marines, plus French, Canadian and Chilean troops, invaded and occupied Haiti.

The U.S. flew Aristide to Antigua and then to the Central African Republic (CAR), where General Francois Bozize had just seized power in a Western-backed military coup. The Jamaican government rescued Aristide and his family from the CAR and brought them to Jamaica for a few months until they were granted permanent sanctuary in South Africa. Aristide was finally allowed to return to Haiti in 2011, and he is still widely seen as the only popular democratic leader Haiti has ever had.

Since 2004, when Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party was banned,elections in Haiti have been so obviously rigged and illegitimate that voter turnout has declined from at least 50 percent in 2000 (despite an opposition boycott), when Aristide won 92 percent of the votes, to 22 percent in 2011, 29 percent in 2015 and 18 percent in 2016, allowing every election to be won by openly corrupt U.S.-backed right-wing politicians and parties.

After the devastating 2010 earthquake, the 2011 election was won by Michel Martelly, a Haitian pop singer supported by Bill and Hillary Clinton. He was quickly mired in scandal over a $2.6 million bribe from a Dominican construction firm to whom he awarded $200 million in no-bid contracts for post-earthquake rebuilding work, triggering large anti-corruption protests in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

The latest election in 2016 was another fiasco. Evidence of massive election fraud triggered huge anti-government demonstrations before Jovenel Moise, the declared winner, even took office. Exit polls showed Moise only winning 6 percent of the votes in the first round, a small fraction of his official 33 percent share that won him a place in the run-off.

Now Haitian government auditors have released a 600-page report detailing how Moise has embezzled millions of dollars, mainly from the PetroCaribe fund. Under this program, Venezuela supplied Haiti with oil but deferred payment for 25 years so that Haiti could spend the money on badly needed infrastructure, hospitals and social programs. The audit revealed how Moise siphoned millions of dollars from these funds into his own personal bank accounts.

Haiti remains under UN military occupation to this day. UN troops have used force against the public and unleashed a cholera epidemic. The UN mandate for the remaining 1,275-member UN police force, supported by about 300 Indian troops, finally expires on October 15, when it is due to be replaced by a 30-member UN political mission.

Neoliberalism Begets Resistance

Neoliberalism is an inherently corrupt system. It creates a vicious circle in which ruling classes can leverage their wealth to gain dominant political power and then use that power to cut taxes and rewrite laws to further enrich themselves. This is a powerful engine to generate ever more concentrated wealth and political power for the 1 percent, with impoverishment and political marginalization for everybody else.

Neoliberalism reduces politics mainly to a choice between politicians and parties who represent factions of the same corrupt ruling class, which retains a monopoly on power whichever party wins. But the fatal flaw in the neoliberal view of the world is the presumption that ruling classes can safely ignore the 99 percent of the population they disenfranchise, exploit or even kill.

This idea that only the elites in each country matter has led directly to the U.S. policy of “regime change,” in which leaders who resist neoliberalism are overthrown by whatever means necessary. It should be no surprise that the new governments installed by all these U.S. wars and coups are among the most corrupt regimes on earth.

But as U.S.-led occupation armies have discovered in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and as we can see right now in Iraq and Haiti, ordinary people still insist on having their say about the future of the world we all live in. U.S. policy is largely responsible for the life or death predicaments now facing young people in these countries, so they deserve our solidarity as they rise up to resist.

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK for Peace, is the author of Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK, and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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2/10

http://inthesetimes.com/article/5572/helping_haiti_for_a_price

Within hours of the earthquake that caused the deaths of an estimated 200,000 Haitians on January 12, U.S.-based private security firms sprang into action.

On January 13, as stories of looting and lawlessness in Port-au-Prince began appearing in news reports, the private security industry member organization theInternational Peace Operations Association (IPOA)created a new page on its website listing companies “prepared to provide a wide variety of critical relief services to the earthquake’s victims.” Listed firms include Triple Canopy, which last year took over Blackwater Worldwide’s (now called XE) contract to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq.

On January 15, Florida-based All Protection and Security registered the web domain www.haiti-security.com to assure “companies considering a Haiti project that professional security”–including armed guards to deal with “worker unrest” and “high threat terminations”–“is available.” The firm has since secured multiple contracts to protect representatives of U.S. companies looking to build textile and food processing facilities there, All Protection President Donna Smith told In These Times.

While Smith’s company and many IPOA members can provide services and items vitally needed in Haiti–such as temporary housing, cargo transport, and medical supplies–some question whether a growing industry that annually rakes in tens of billions of dollars in contracts with governments, corporations and nongovernmental organizations ought to profit off a natural disaster that has devastated the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

With the U.S. government already pledging more than $183 million in aid to Haiti as of late January, it’s “inevitable” that long-term relief efforts will end up being contracted out to private U.S. firms, says David Isenberg, an independent analyst of private military and security contractors and the author of Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq. The government agency that will manage relief efforts, the U.S. Agency for International Development, now has little internal capacity, so private companies will step in to do the job.

Given this rosy outlook for the private sector, Isenberg says, security firms should consider offering services pro bono during the short term. “There’s only so much they can do for free,” says Isenberg, who last year ran the Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers project at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. “But on the other hand, we know you’re going to get paid in the end. You can afford to do something for free.”

Doug Brooks, founder and president of IPOA, says some of the organization’s member companies have begun operating in Haiti since the earthquake. Brooks said that IPOA companies have offered free disaster-zone services in the past, but he was unable to name specific firms that have done so thus far in Haiti. In March, the association will co-sponsor a conference in Miami aimed at NGOs with “stability operations” in Haiti, Brooks said. “We would hope to get some business out of it,” he added. All conference profits will be donated to relief efforts.

But Brooks takes issue with the notion that private security companies with unique disaster relief capabilities ought to donate those skills and services. “You don’t just say that because a doctor can cure cancer, that the doctor should do it for free for the rest of his life,” he says. It costs money for companies to deploy their “enormous” and “cost-efficient” resources, he said.

Smith says All Protection has given to charities and offered any religious organization free security during religious services. “There’s not a lot we can do from a corporate standpoint,” she says. The company has also sponsored a training program to help Haitians become guards and know “how to make an American company happy with your services.”

Smith is unapologetic about her decision to market her company’s services by creating www.haiti-security.com after the earthquake, saying people should know that safe travel to Haiti is possible because security is available. “When there’s another disaster [in another country], I’ll be putting up that website too,” she says. “That’s business.”

While mindful of security companies’ valuable capabilities, Isenberg remains skeptical about their generosity. “For years, people in industry on the trade advocacy side…have talked about the wonderful things the private sector can do in conflict-torn or unstable countries,” he says. “But by and large, you don’t see them doing a lot before having a contract in hand first.”

JEREMY GANTZ

Jeremy Gantz is a contributing editor at the magazine. He is the editor of The Age of Inequality: Corporate America's War on Working People (2017, Verso), and was the Web/Associate Editor of In These Times from 2008 to 2012.

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Haiti’s deadly riots fueled by anger over decades of austerity and foreign interference

Vincent Joos, Florida State University

After weeks of protest in Haiti, sparked by a sudden rise in fuel prices, at least seven are dead and the prime minister is out. Foreign creditors pushed for the price hike as an austerity measure.

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https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-june-13-2018/

https://kpfa.org/program/against-the-grain/

6/13/18

Struggles Across Borders

From at least the Haitian Revolution to the present, black and brown people in the Western Hemisphere have linked arms in solidarity with each other. Historian Paul Ortiz discusses how we can’t understand the United States and its past without looking beyond its borders. (Encore presentation.) Resources: Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History … Continued

Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States Beacon Press, 2018

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storming the wall bk

haiti earthquake geo built camp for detainees from sea? many CC cutters deployed [gitmo?]

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The oft-repeated tag of Haiti being "the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere" is true but this did not just happen. It is the result of a history of colonialism, slavery, imperialism, foreign military intervention, foreign-imposed dictatorships and unjust debt.

The Caribbean nation's indigenous people were all but wiped out by 1520 due to the disease and exploitation that came with the arrival of the Spaniards in 1492. After France and Spain divided the island of Hispaniola into Haiti and the Dominican Republic, French and Spanish settlers arrived.

The colonisers brought enslaved Africans with them to establish tobacco, sugar and coffee plantations.

The slave plantations began Haiti's environmental destruction, the destabilisation of its soils, helping make natural disasters, such as landslides, much more destructive.

After a successful slave revolt, Haiti became the world's first post-colonial black state.

In 1791, the heavily African-majority northern plains of Haiti were home to the beginning of the slave revolution. Led by former slave Toussaint L'Overture, the Haitians defeated the French slave owners.

Appealing to the ideology and principles of the French Revolution, the Haitians secured the abolition of slavery throughout French territories in 1794. It was in the name of the revolutionary French Republic that the Haitians defeated armies from Spain and Britain.

The British lost more troops against the former slaves in Haiti than in any other campaign during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

But by 1801 France, was under Napoleon Bonaparte's military dictatorship. In December, Bonaparte sent a force of 20,000 elite troops to invade Haiti and re-establish slavery.

Although Toussaint was captured by treachery, the Haitian ex-slaves, now led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, defeated the invaders and declared independence in 1804.

The repercussions of this were immense. The abolition of the Atlantic slave trade three years later and the end of slavery in the Caribbean (except Cuba) within 30 years was a direct result. As the first independent state in Latin America, it served as a launching pad for the revolutionary struggles in the early 19th century that liberated much of South America from Spanish rule.

For the European colonial powers and the US (where slavery remained until the 1860s), an independent state of self-liberated slaves was an abomination. An international embargo was imposed.

This was lifted in 1825 in return for a Haitian commitment to compensate France for loss of their property — the Haitian slaves. This was the beginning of Haiti's crippling debt (see box).

In 1915, the US invaded and occupied Haiti, transferring the gold reserves of the Haitian National Bank to US-owned Citibank. Haiti's constitution was changed to allow for US ownership of land.

This fuelled the creation of large, lucrative plantations, in the process driving peasant farmers from their land into urban slum areas — where 90% unemployment remains.

This was a military-driven economic and political takeover, hugely profitable for US capitalists.

Haitians resisted the de facto US take over. But they were brutally repressed, with the death toll somewhere in the tens of thousands.

The US trained the hated and repressive Haitian National Army to control the population after US troops withdrew in 1934.

From the late 1950s, the US backed the psychotic dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, and, after his death in 1971, his son, Jean-Francois "Baby Doc" Duvalier.

Papa Doc created the infamous terror squads known as the Tonton Macoutes. His son established 11-cent-per-hour US-owned sweatshops in the slum areas. During the Duvaliers' reign, it is estimated that more than 50,000 people were killed by the Tontons.

Baby Doc was overthrown by an uprising in 1986. Following a string of military regimes, anti-Duvalier movement leader and pro-poor priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide, was elected president in 1991.

Hugely popular among Haiti's poor, Aristide and his Lavalas party had a commitment to mass education, health care, and development of local agriculture. He lasted nine months before a US-orchestrated coup removed him.

Outraged Haitians rebelled, demanding his return. Thousands were killed in areas, such as Port-au-Prince's Cite Soleil where Lavalas had popular support.

In 1994, Aristide was restored as president with US assistance. During his exile, Aristide was given the choice of accepting US support, which was tied to accepting neoliberal IMF and World Bank "reforms", or have Haiti face ongoing rule by the murderous coup regime.

Despite the conditions imposed by the IMF and World Bank, ongoing social reform still took place under Lavalas, particularly after Aristide's landslide re-election in 2000.

These reforms included disbanding the hated Haitian army, building more schools than in the entire of Haiti's prior history, encouraging local farming, providing health care, and fostering grassroots organisations.

This led to a second US-backed coup against Aristide.

Kidnapped from his bed by the US military, on February 29, 2004, he was flown to the Central African Republic as a new regime was installed.

US marines and Haitian death squads unleashed a new reign of terror against the people. In June, they were replaced by a force of 7000 UN troops, mainly Brazilian, who have also been cited for human rights violations.

In 2005, a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) statement "called publicly on all armed groups to respect the safety of civilians and allow the wounded to obtain emergency care".

"Ironically, the following day, the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti launched a day-long military operation in the Cite Soleil slum, and the trauma centre received 27 gunshot victims — three-quarters of whom were women and children."

After the earthquake, Haiti certainly needs our solidarity, support and funding. But we also need to remember how and why it is so poor and stand in solidarity with Haitian movements calling for an end to its debt, for a real democracy based on self-determination and sovereignty free from foreign occupation, for and endogenous (internal) development rather than aid.

From GLW issue 823