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In the wake of the disastrous 2010 earthquake in Haiti, where 316,000 bodies lay buried under rubble, another 300,000 Haitians sustained injuries, and 1.3 Million Haitians were displaced, Hillary Clinton’s family and monied cronies cashed in on the backs of this tragedy-stricken Caribbean country. Immediate help was needed and the world responded with $20 Billion in relief funds to be overseen by The Clinton Foundation. 5 years later nothing has changed. (Jerome Hudson for Breitbart).

Foreign Development – Haiti is an example of Hillary’s work as Secretary of State. As she wrote in her memoir Hard Choices, rebuilding Haiti was “an opportunity . . . to road-test new approaches to development that could be applied more broadly around the world.” Her approach to development in the US is going to be at least similar to those used in Haiti. The “new” approach was the same old “sweatshop model of development,” in a slick new package, and it had the same disastrous results. (Nikolas Barry-Shaw for Jacobin)

Minimum Wage – Even before the Earthquake disaster , Hillary was hard at work. In 2009, Hillary Clinton was at the State Dept working with U.S. corporations to pressure Haiti not to raise the minimum wage to 61 cents an hour from 24 cents.” The State Department’s content of the memos show that U.S. Embassy officials in Haiti clearly opposed the wage increase. (Linda Qiu for Politifact)

Women’s Equality – But first she had to control the government. She and the state department intervened and prevented Mirlande Manigat who holds a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne from becoming its first elected female president, after she indicated that she would not co-operate with the corruption. Michel Martelly, who had only 11% of the popular votes won the election with the record lowest voter participation (less than 25%) and soon appointed close Clinton ally Laurent Lamothe as prime minister, but Lamothe was forced to step down two years later. (Theodore Hamm for The Daily Beast)

Election Tampering – The island’s deeply flawed elections were backed by over $33 million in US funding. President Michel Martelly, whom The Post in 2002 characterized as “favorite of the thugs who worked on behalf of the hated Duvalier family dictatorship before its 1986 collapse,” was Washington’s pick to win. He surrounded himself with a network of friends and aides who have been arrested on charges including rape, murder, drug trafficking and kidnapping. Though the voting was badly marred by irregularities the United States pushed for quick results. (Karen Attiah for The Washington Post).

Corrupt Government – Michel Martelly was a risqué, misogynist musician. Yet despite his volatile character, once in office, Micky remained a consistent ally of the Clintons. Dogged by scandal, he ruled with virtually no checks on his power, which was marked by endemic corruption, weak institutions, poverty, poor public education, terrible roads and other factors that have historically made it extremely difficult for development efforts to succeed. (Various sources)

Misappropriation of Funds – Instead of providing immediate housing for the over one million homeless and starving, The Clinton Foundation built an industrial complex at Caracol, after 366 farmers were evicted from their lands. This area 60 miles north of the capital, was not heavily affected by the earthquake. Martelly proclaimed that the Caracol project, a $224 million signature project of the Clinton Foundation where a lot of post-earthquake aid money had ended up, would deliver more than 100,000 jobs, while the Clinton Foundation vowed that it would bring 60,000 in five years. As of mid-2015, the actual number was closer to between 2,600 and 5,000. In the Worker Rights Consortium report, all 24 garment factories studied cheated workers out of legally-entitled minimum wages, which was still at 24 cents an hour. (Theodore Hamm for The Daily Beast)

Human Rights – Housing outside of the project was inadequate and way over budget, and prompting criticism from the Government Accountability Office in a June 2013 report. They were so badly built they were in need of repair. Meanwhile, mammoth new slum areas sprung up north of Port-au-Prince, a testament to the mind-boggling decision to prioritize building luxury hotels for foreign tourists, NGO workers and businesspeople over permanent housing for the over one million Haitians made homeless by the quake. (Nikolas Barry-Shaw for Jacobin)

Shaun Penn writes, “It was the most grotesque act of cynicism that I’ve seen for some time.” “It struck me as desolate, but we had an emergency, and this was an emergency-relocation area — I never said it was anything else,” he insists. “I feel like shit. I hope those guys are OK when it rains out there. I feel an extra responsibility — of course I do. But we were betrayed.”
Foreign Aid – Thirty-eight percent of resettlement camps still lack regular water supplies. Nearly a third of camps don’t have toilets. Where toilets are provided, each one is shared by an average of 273 people. The shelter installations in which displaced Haitians live are progressively deteriorating. The members of Congress urged the secretary “to work with Haitian authorities and our international partners to ensure a speedy, short-term response.” (Trenton Daniel for ABC News)

Cronyism – Together the Clintons were the two most powerful people who controlled the flow of funds to Haiti from around the world. A number of companies that received contracts in Haiti happened to be entities that made large donations to the Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation selected Clayton Homes, a construction company owned by Warren Buffett to build “hurricane-proof trailers” The trailers were structurally unsafe, with high levels of formaldehyde and insulation coming out of the walls. They were ill-constructed and unusable .The Clintons also funneled $10 million in federal loans to a firm called InnoVida, headed by Clinton donor Claudio Osorio. The company, however, defaulted on the loan and never built any houses. Osorio is currently serving a twelve-year prison term on fraud charges related to the loan.

The Clintons claim to have built schools in Haiti. In reality, “The Clinton Foundation’s sole direct contribution to schools was a grant for an Earth Day celebration and tree-building activity.” Denis O’Brien, who owns Digicel and is a close friend of the Clinton’s, secured three speaking engagements in his native Ireland that paid $200,000 apiece right at the time that Digicel was making its deal with the U.S. State Department. The United States government paid Digicel (a phone company) $45 million to open a hotel in Port-au-Prince to attract foreign investors and provide jobs for locals. This particular hotel employs only a few dozen locals and the rooms are mostly unoccupied. Hugh Rodham, Hillary’s brother who has no mining experience, was hired by one of two mining companies awarded gold mining permits for the first time in 50 years. The gold reserves are valued at $2 Billion. (Dinesh D’Souza for The National Review)

Illegal Contributions – A $500,000 contribution was given by the Algerian government for earthquake relief in Haiti The foundation has acknowledged that this violated the terms of an ethics agreement with the Obama administration. The Clintons also helped mobilize an effort in which international donors pledged $10.4 billion, including $3.9 billion from the United States. Bill Clinton’s trade policies as president, which he later called a “mistake,” were devastating to Haiti’s rice production and made it harder for the country to feed itself. 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 mens dress shirts. (Kevin Sullivan and Rosalind S. Helderman for The Washington Post)

Disaster Relief – The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that, of the $1.14 billion allocated by Congress for Haiti in one year, only $184 million has been “obligated.” In a letter to the Obama administration, 53 Democratic members of Congress blasted the “appalling” conditions in the refugee camps. “The unprecedented relief effort has given way to a sluggish, at best, reconstruction effort,” said Rep. Barbara Lee, who demanded an accounting of how the relief money was being spent. There is, she said, a “lack of urgency on the part of the international community.” Haiti’s capital is still buried under some 8 million cubic meters of rubble — enough, according to one expert, to build a road from Port-au-Prince across the ocean to Los Angeles and back again. Some 1,000 camps, or “informal settlements,” have sprung up in seemingly every available space in the city: vacant lots, basketball courts, soccer fields, road medians, the large gated plaza in front of the prime minister’s office, even the Champs de Mars park, across from the National Palace, home now to some 10,000 people.

Media Influence – With few exceptions, the American media has not reported on the nearly complete failure of the international rebuilding effort, a shameful record for which Bill and Hillary Clinton have considerable responsibility. BOID (Departmental Brigade of Operations and Interventions), which in a few months has already become notorious in Haiti. The special unit, which dresses in black, hit hard, killing several people, destroying property, and robbing small businesses. The American refusal to speak out against human rights violations and undemocratic practice has become an established pattern. The National Hospital is as bad as ever.“It’s supposed to be a public hospital,” a homeless Haitian said “but they make you pay for a bed. If you can’t pay, they leave you on the ground.” Bill Clinton’s Haiti Reconstruction Commission got up to $2.5 billion in aid pledges and Clinton promised to “build back better,”

Election Rigging – Before the election, President Martelly’s strategy was clear: frighten Haitians into letting this candidate win. His thugs violently disrupted voting and the US embassy said nothing, aside from feeble admonitions. There was open vote-buying at the Lycee Jean-Jacques Dessalines on Avenue Christophe, and a young poll-watcher for Narcisse angrily denounced irregular vote-counting procedures in the Christ Roi neighborhood. Martelly’s election-rigging strategy became clearer. The 53 different candidates for president merited a mandataire, or poll-watcher. Nearly all these so-called ‘poll-watchers’ were actually working for the power. They got into the voting places early in the morning, stuffed the ballot boxes, and then opened the doors for the real voters.” The vast majority of the promised aid was intercepted before it even got to the country. Most of the money pledged by foreign governments had never been meant for Haitian consumption. (James North for The Nation)

Media Manipulation – Secretary Clinton supervised the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the leading donors in the $16 billion effort, referred to as a “gold rush” by Ambassador Kenneth Merten. Some Clinton-backed projects didn’t come through, such as a $2 million housing expo for thousands of new housing units. The Governement Accountability Office found poor planning and unsustainable outcomes for taxpayer-funded projects through USAID, such as a $170 million power plant and the port for the Caracol Industrial Park, which the Clinton Foundation promoted. Secretary Clinton writes: “We need to monitor media and rebut inaccuracies and outright misstatements. Judith McHale caught Al Jazeera reporting that what we were doing in Haiti was like what we did in Baghdad. I will talk with her and PJ to set up such a monitoring system.” Mark Schuller for The Huffington Post

Incompetence – Chelsea Clinton was blunt in her report to her parents, “The incompetence is mind numbing. The UN people I encountered were frequently out of touch … anachronistic in their thinking at best and arrogant and incompetent at worst. There is NO accountability in the UN system or international humanitarian system. The weak Haitian government, which had lost buildings and staff in the disaster, had something of a plan. Yet because it had failed to articulate its wishes quickly enough, foreigners rushed forward with a proliferation of ad hoc efforts by the UN and INGOs [international nongovernmental organizations] to ‘help,’ some of which have helped … some of which have hurt … and some which have not happened at all.” (Jonathan M. Katz for Politico)

Foreign Policy – Haiti may be the nation most vulnerable to the psychopathologies of Clintonian political economy and philanthropy. Now, if this had occurred only in Haiti, it would be bad enough. But this same approach can be seen throughout the world. Clinton helped install a regime that has been killing women and men at an impressive clip. Death squads have returned to the country of Honduras. Plan Colombia, as the assistance program was called, provided billions of dollars to what was the most repressive government in the hemisphere. Hillary Clinton said, “We need to do more of a Colombian Plan for Central America.” Bill Clinton was paid $800,000 by the Colombia-based Gold Service International to give four speeches in Latin America, where he advocated for the agreement.

Clinton successfully pushed for the free-trade agreement with Panama, despite being warned that it would make it easier for the rich to hide their money, and would make the kind of money-laundering we learned about from the Panama Papers even more pervasive. the Clinton State Department help open up of Mexico’s oil sector to foreign capital, a number of Clinton’s close aids then moved into the private sector to profit from that opening. Bill Clinton’s multibillion-dollar aid program went to one of the worst human-rights violators in the world, Plan Colombia (Greg Grandin for The Nation)

Delusion – Here is what the Clinton Foundation sees, “More than five years after the January 2010 earthquake, the Clinton Foundation remains committed to Haiti’s long-term recovery by focusing on economic development and job creation. By highlighting the unique arts and handicrafts that are part of Haitian tradition, and helping these artisans to expand their operations, improve their production facilities and processes, and find new national and international buyers and retailers, President Clinton and the Clinton Foundation have succeeded in helping this sector to grow. Clinton Foundation Haiti Fund and raised $16.4 million from individual donors for immediate relief efforts. Since 2010, the Clinton Foundation has raised a total of more than $30 million for Haiti, including relief funds as well as funds for projects focused on restoring Haiti’s communities, sustainable development, education, and capacity building.” They are committed to the money, but not to action.

Conclusion – As Hillary Clinton has done for more than 5 years in the past, with unlimited funds and unrestrained power, Haiti becomes the symbol, the example, and a strategy of how she will handle money and power in the future. Her policies are an example of failed business development, opposition to raising the minimum wage, no support for women’s equality, out of control elecction tampering, pervasive government corruption, misappropriation of funds, human rights violations, botched foreign aid, chronyism, illegal contributions, ineffective disaster relief, media influence and manipulation, incompetence as a leader, and a horendous foreign policy.

Credits – Because the facts or what happened in Haiti in the last 5 years are almost unbelievable, most of this article is taked from many other writers from the across the political spectrum. The following people contributed to this article; Theodore Hamm for The Daily Beast, Dinesh D’Souza for The National Review, Frances Robles for The New York Times, Jonathan M. Katz for Politico, Linda Qiu for Politifact, Nikolas Barry-Shaw for Jacobin, Michelle Yee Hee Lee for The Washington Post, Greg Grandin for The Nation, Kevin Sullivan and Rosalind S. Helderman for The Washington Post, Mark Schuller for The Huffington Post, Karen Attiah for The Washington Post, Trenton Daniel for ABC News, James North for The Nation, Jerome Hudson for Breitbart and Shaun Penn

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