NY Times: Haitian-Americans Speak of Clintons with Contempt

[amborin]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/us/politics/hillary-clinton-haiti.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

But as she seeks the world’s most powerful job and Haiti plunges into another political abyss, a loud segment of Haitians and Haitian-Americans is speaking of the Clintons with the same contempt they reserve for some of their past leaders.

In widely read blogs, in protests in Port-au-Prince and outside Mrs. Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, and on popular call-in radio shows in Florida, where primaries will be held on Tuesday, the Clintons have become prime targets of blame for the country’s woes.

Among the litany of complaints being laid at their feet: Fewer than half the jobs promised at the industrial park, built after 366 farmers were evicted from their lands, have materialized. Many millions of dollars earmarked for relief efforts have yet to be spent. Mrs. Clinton’s brother Tony Rodham has turned up in business ventures on the island, setting off speculation about insider deals.

“A vote for Hillary Clinton means further corruption, further death and destruction for our people,” said Dahoud Andre, a radio show host in New York who has helped organize protests against the Clintons. “It means more Haitians leaving Haiti and not being able to live in our country.”

[Cheese Sandwich]

1. This makes sense considering the Clintons' history with Haiti

[ibegurpard]

2. those ungrateful peasants!

Don't they know charity when they see it?

[ebayfool]

3. Kicking for more eyes! And rec'd!

snip/

But to many Haitians, the most significant moment of Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state was in 2011, when she flew to Haiti to pressure President René Préval to admit Michel Martelly, a popular recording artist known as “Sweet Micky,” into a two-person runoff to be Mr. Préval’s successor. Mr. Martelly had come in third in initial voting, but the Organization of American States believed that the man who had come in second, Mr. Préval’s pick, had benefited from vote fraud.

The night of the runoff, which Mr. Martelly won, Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl D. Mills, wrote a congratulatory note to top American diplomats in Haiti.

“You do great elections,” Ms. Mills wrote in a message released by the State Department among a batch of Mrs. Clinton’s emails. She wrote that she would buy dinner the next time she visited: “We can discuss how the counting is going! Just kidding. Kinda. ”

Ms. Mills’s email may have been intended as tongue-in-cheek, but it has fed a suspicion among Haitians, if lacking in proof, that the United States rigged the election to install a puppet president.

[Peace Patriot]

4. Clinton did worse in Honduras, but what she did in Haiti was bad enough!

It was a one-two punch in Haiti: Bush Jr. ousted the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a highly popular leftist leader, in 2004. Clinton, as Sec of State, made sure Aristide never returned to his rightful, elected office, though he was and remains by far the most popular and people-oriented Haitian leader.

A quickie timeline:

1990 Aristide elected w 67% of the vote; begins reforms to help the poor
1991 Military/CIA coup, Artistide ousted from Haiti
1994 huge demos for Artistide; intense internat'l pressure, Bill Clinton arranges Aristide's return
2000 Aristide re-elected president
2004 classic CIA destabilization; Aristide forced out of Haiti by U.S. (see Rep. Maxine Waters)

Aristide in exile in So. Africa, which supported him.

2009-2010: huge demos for Aristide return; US tries to prevent it; rigs Haiti election to exclude Aristide and his Lavalas party which represents about 75% of Haitians. (This was Sec of State Hillary Clinton.)
Current: Aristide in Haiti but under constant persecution by U.S.-installed gov't. Clintons raise huge money on the Haiti earthquake but spend it on cronyism or haven't spent it at all--little help to Haitians.

Some of Aristide's accomplishments when he wasn't beset by CIA/U.S. and RW coup thugs:

Achievements in education

During successive Lavalas administrations, Jean-Bertrand Aristide and René Préval built 195 new primary schools and 104 secondary schools. Prior to Aristide's election in 1990, there were just 34 secondary schools nationwide. Lavalas also provided thousands of scholarships so that children could afford to attend church/private schools. Between 2001 and 2004, the percentage of children enrolled in primary school education rose to 72%, and an estimated 300,000 adults took part in Lavalas sponsored adult literacy campaigns. This helped the adult literacy rate rise from 35% to 55%.[79]

Achievements in health care[edit]

In addition to numerous educational advances, Aristide and Lavalas embarked on an ambitious plan to develop the public primary health care system with Cuban assistance. Since the devastation unleashed by Hurricane George in 1998, Cuba entered a humanitarian agreement with Haiti whereby Haitian doctors would be trained in Cuba, and Cuban doctors would work in rural areas. At the time of 12 January earthquake, 573 doctors had been trained in Cuba.[80]

Despite operating under an aid embargo, the Lavalas administration succeeded in reducing the infant mortality rate as well as reducing the percentage of underweight newborns. A successful AIDS prevention and treatment program was also established, leading the Catholic Institute for International Relations to state: the "incredible feat of slowing the rate of new infections in Haiti has been achieved despite the lack of international aid to the Haitian government, and despite the notable lack of resources faced by those working in the health field".[81]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Bertrand_Aristide

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

In Honduras, Hillary Clinton did something very similar--acted to ensure that President Mel Zelaya, who had been kidnapped by the Honduran military at gunpoint and flown out of the country (with a refueling stopover at the U.S. air base in Honduras) would never be returned to his ELECTED office. Zelaya, too, was a populist leftist leader who raised the minimum wage, provided poor workers with free bus passes and started school lunch programs for the poor.

In both cases--Haiti and Honduras--there has been fascist persecution of leftists including many murders. Most notable was the murder a few weeks ago of Honduran Berta Caceres, a winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, and an Indigenous activist against the Honduran coup. RW thugs are roaming the country, murdering people like Caceres and persecuting, raping and murdering many women for peaceful opposition. The two of the earliest murders were of men protestors: one decapitated and his body left in the road for all to see, and another, a teacher, shot to death in front of his students. Also, gays are being targeted and persecuted.

Hillary Clinton is directly responsible for unleashing these brutal RW forces in Honduras. The U.S. (H. Clinton) and France are responsible as to destroying both Haiti's democracy and Aristide's leftist reforms, as well as for RW violence. (Aristide had demanded reparations from France for its history of slavery and wealth extraction in Haiti.)

And in both cases, the goal of the U.S. was to secure slave labor for U.S. transglobal corporations and to "circle the wagons" in Central America for U.S. "free trade for the rich" against the powerful influence of leftist populism coming from South America (Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, etc.)

Indeed, one of the coup generals in Honduras admitted that their coup d'etat against Zelaya was intended "to prevent communism from Venezuela reaching the United States." (--quoted in a report on the coup by the Zelaya government-in-exile). NOTE: Hugo Chavez was NOT a communist, and he was NOT a dictator. He was a very popular, ELECTED socialist, in an election system that Jimmy Carter called "the best in the world." And he, too, like Aristide and Zelaya, built many schools, greatly improved health care for the poor, and insisted on decent wages and benefits, as well as encouraging public participation and voting. It's interesting to speculate where this Honduran coup general got his notions of protecting the U.S. from leftists.

[tk2kewl]

5. kick