WikiLeaks: Haiti Disaster Capitalism's Latest Electroshock Patient

[babsbunny]

By Michael Busch, July 11, 2011

http://www.fpif.org/blog/wikileaks_haiti_disaster_capitalisms_latest_electroshock_patient

Naomi Klein was asked today about what additional case studies she would add to future editions of her 2007 Shock Doctrine. Klein's answer: Greece and Wisconsin.

Fair enough, but I was surprised that she did not also include Haiti which, if recently released Wikileaks documents are accurate, provides a textbook case of disaster capitalism. The embassy documents, obtained by Haïti Liberté and The Nation, paint a disturbing if not unexpected picture of American coercion of the struggling Caribbean nation between 2004 and the month following the 2010 earthquake that flattened Port-au-Prince.

Among other important revelations that emerged over the past six weeks or so, the cables reveal that the Barack Obama administration aggressively lobbied the Haitian government to resist calls to raise the national minimum wage from 24 to 61 cents an hour. The Atlantic notes that