USA consollidates hold on Haiti with 12,000 troop invasion

[Ed Jewett]

Clinton’s Plan for Haiti: Coca-Cola Plantations and Sara Lee Sweatshops

Posted on May 1, 2010 by willyloman
by Scott Creighton
Clinton Plan for Haiti

President Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, pulled the strings and put her husband in charge the billions of dollars set aside for the rebuilding of Haiti. In most countries that would be considered a conflict of interest if not outright fraud. In this country, that might have even been considered illegal at some point in time, before the Great Neoliberal Imperialism that is. Hell, didn’t Rod Blagojevich get kicked out of his office for merely SUGGESTING his wife “get something out of” his choice to fill Obama’s vacant senate seat? Blago talked about the possibility, and he got impeached, but when a Clinton actually does it, actually puts her greedy globalist husband in charge of billions and billions of dollars, nobody says a word.

The Herald wrote that the commission would be co-chaired by the Haitian prime minister and “a distinguished senior international figure engaged in the recovery effort.” The Herald suggested that this figure would probably be former President Bill Clinton, a recent US envoy to Haiti and the husband of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. WSWS

That’s the Globalist Camelot in action.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton will co-chair a committee overseeing at least $3.8 billion in post-quake aid to Haiti, the ravaged country’s prime minister said. gaeatimes

So what is Queen Clinton’s husband going to do first in Haiti? Well, he already talked about rebuilding their agricultural sector and admitted he was “wrong” for destroying it in the first place with his IMF trade policies. But he isn’t talking about empowering Haitian farmers to grow crops themselves in order to feed their nation… no, that task will still be left to the ultra-cheap, subsidized U.S. agribusiness conglomerates and their genetically modified products.
Made by real, live slaves! Haitians get the HOPE, Coke gets the CASH!

No. Instead of empowering the people of Haiti to rebuild the agricultural base that Clinton himself admitted he destroyed on purpose, Slick Willy is going to take a bunch of Haitian land and give it too Coca-Cola so they can use the cheap slave-wage labor to make “Haiti Hope Juice”.
Why not just put a picture of Obama and his HOPE poster right on the package? Instead it seems they went with a colored hand picking a mango…. yeah, that’s a choice. I think I would have gone a different way, but what do I know. I haven’t killed any union organizers recently.

MUHTAR KENT, CEO & CHAIRMAN, COCA-COLA COMPANY: The idea was how can we create a sustainable business that actually benefits the people of Haiti, that actually contributes to the society of Haiti? And there was the idea of this — Haiti Hope Juice was born. CNN

The Coca-Cola Company today announced the creation of the Haiti Hope Project, bringing together a coalition of business, government and civil society partners to create opportunity for 25,000 Haitian mango farmers and their families by supporting the development of a sustainable mango juice industry in the country. Coca-Cola website

Let’s just pretend that we don’t know Coca-Cola was killing union organizers in Colombia and their workers down there are too terrified to even talk to reporters about it.
What Slick Willy is talking about is taking all that fertile farm-land which hasn’t been worked for decades, and handing it all over to Coca-Cola so that they can mass farm ingredients for their new Coke product. Coke will get tax breaks for going down there, the land will be seized by the Haitian government and given to Coke, and Bill Clinton will make sure that they have all the “slave wages” labor they need to ensure massive profits.

Here’s what they do. They come up with this drink. Odwalla, as you may know, is a Coca-Cola brand. And this is called Mango Limeade. It’s made from mangos that are all from Haiti. Bill Clinton was actually there last night. He took a sip of it. He liked it. CNN

And that is just stage one of Bill Clinton’s plan; create corporate plantations in Haiti. Stage two is more sweatshops.
Stage two is showing its ugly head now on the neoliberal propaganda network, CNN. A reporter went down to Haiti and followed a “businessman” who is just beside himself with all the opportunities developing in the New Haiti. tariffs are being laxed, start-up money is flowing, and the slimmiest and greediest neoliberal that every walked the face of the earth is in charge; Bill Clinton. According to the article, there are about 25,000 sweatshop workers in Haiti… the Clinton plan is to increase that by another 80,000.

Gelman’s mission is simple in theory. He wants Americans to help earthquake-devastated Haiti the best way they know how: by shopping.
Buy a shirt made in a Haitian factory, he says. This way, a Haitian gets a much-needed income, and a once-thriving industry in this Caribbean nation can get a jump-start on a second life. CNN

They want you to go “look for the Haitian label” when buying your clothes. They want you to THINK you are helping the people of Haiti by supporting companies that are flocking to the devastated area to take advantage of the Disaster Capitalism market. They want you to FEEL good about paying a little EXTRA to help all those poor people down in Haiti.

His products will carry a special tag announcing where they were made. He thinks U.S. customers will steer toward a Haitian product if they know that it was made here.
It’s all about taking advantage of the sentiment that surged after the earthquake. CNN

They don’t want people to donate to help indigenous Haitian business or farmers… no. They want you to support the massive multi-national corporations that are paying the poor Haitians next to nothing for their labor and keeping them in perpetual indentured servitude… THAT is how they want you to “help Haiti”… by supporting sweatshops.

It’s the mantra of former President Clinton, the special United Nations envoy to Haiti: jobs, not charity.
… “We received a lot of aid after the earthquake, which is good, because it helped people survive,” he said, surveying his factory floor. “Now it is for people to sustain themselves, and what better way to sustain yourself than having a job?” CNN

The idea of helping someone find a job rather than simply giving them a handout is a gross oversimplification of the situation in Haiti. The “handouts” could be used to help keep poor Haitians from HAVING to accept the slave-wage jobs in the “free market zones” that Clinton helped create in the first place. The “jobs’ that they are talking about have no benefits and offer about $5 dollars a day for the workers, which the CNN neoliberal apologist who wrote this propaganda actually had to admit, way down near the end of his article.

He concedes that these are not high-quality jobs. The workers make about 200 gourdes (about $5) a day. But it’s better than no job. CNN

The old “its better than nothing” adage again. The same thing they used to pass the insurance company bailout plan a month or so ago.
But in this case, the “better than nothing” campaign serves to make a few well-connected businessmen very wealthy indeed, a fact that the interviewer couldn’t help but giggle about. Its all about “taking advantage of the sentiment”.

It’s a good ending for this trip to Haiti. He does not pretend to be solely a do-gooder. “Unquestionably,” he said,” it’s about making money. We’re not a nonprofit.”
Greed, he says, half joking, can be a very good thing. CNN

Yes, greed can be a good thing when you have desperate and hungry slaves in a nation that no one is going to be paying attention to for a decade or so. Especially if you have the Ultimate Globalist himself, Bill Clinton, in charge of the whole shooting match.
It was Gordon Gekko who said “Greed ladies and gentlemen, for the lack of a better term, is good.” Gekko was the epitome of the mergers and acquisitions corporate raider from the film Wall Street. That’s the inside joke in case you missed it.
If you want a clear understanding of the kinds of “jobs” that Bill Clinton helped bring to the people of Haiti back in his days in the White House, it’s not hard to find… the following is from 1996 when Slick Willy was in office.

Take, for example, the Pocahantas pajamas you see at Wal-Mart for $11.97. They are made by workers at L.V. Miles, an assembly plant in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. L.V. Miles, under contract to the Walt Disney Company, pays each worker about $3.33 a day.
In one day, then, 20 workers earn $66.60, and together they produce 1,000 pairs of pajamas. That is $11,970 worth of pajamas for $66.60. Less than seven cents per pair goes to pay the workers who produced it. And the remaining $11.90? Disney CEO Michael Eisner was paid $203 million in salary and stock options in 1993.
A recent report, The U.S. in Haiti: How to Get Rich on 11 cents an Hour, says, If a Haitian minimum wage worker worked full-time, six days a week, sewing clothes for Disney, it would take her approximately 1,040 years to earn what Michael Eisner earned on one day in 1993, and notes that although L.V. Miles pays the minimum wage, it further subcontracts work to shops that pay even less. Julia Lutsky

Yes, greed is good for people like Eisner… hell it’s VERY good. It used to be good for the plantation owners in America. They had a great deal til that little “Civil War” thing came along.
But this is the Washington Consensus and it is quite simply the only game in town right now. Bleed the people dry while pretending to “do the right thing”. Its easy with a compliant media and a major PR firm writing you copy. But beneath it all, if one just peers a little, is the horrible reality of it all.

Among the criteria for establishing sweatshops in Haiti, companies consider primarily low wages, because you … find your lowest wage rates naturally where the greatest pool of available labor is, said Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the NLC, in a report entitled, Behind Closed Doors: U.S. Businesses Eye Haiti. Commenting on the lowest wage theory, he says, In other words, you look for third world countries where high unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, misery and desperate need ‘naturally’ generate low wages. A good example of such favorable conditions would be Haiti, where the wage is … 30 cents an hour, or Honduras where the wage is 37 cents an hour. Julia Lutsky

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Filed under: Globalization, Haiti, Neocons = Neolibs, Obama™, Rod Blagojevich, Scott Creighton, Team DLC Obama™ Brand, disaster capitalism, propaganda