Reply #2: some background by Stan Goff [View All]

For the few of you who don't know Stan Goff was a part of U.S. Special Forces in Haiti and walked away with deep knowledge of how things really work.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/184.html
Haiti was the world's first independent Black republic. It won that independence in a bloody revolt of slaves, who prevailed against the three dominant European militaries. This shattered the myth of white supremacy at a time when slave labor was still the economic foundation of every surrounding country, to include the new United States. As punishment, Haiti has been attacked, exploited, and vilified every since.

That vilification is continuing apace. Unfortunately, the US press has been led to uncritically collaborate in the distortion and stereotyping of Haiti. The US foreign policy establishment's agenda for Haiti is largely determined by the orthodoxy of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The IMF and World Bank just became the target of massive protests in Washington DC on the 15th and 16th of April. So it may be timely to begin demystifying Haiti's current situation with that in mind.

The International Monetary Find and the World Bank are dominated by the United States, and the dominant stakeholders in those institutions are American finance capitalists. In simple terms, the IMF and the World Bank have much in common with loan sharks. They do not come to countries' rescue. They hold out loans to desperate countries to restructure their debts, and take on more debt-which they can ill afford-in exchange for acceptance of draconian adjustments to economic structures that are beneficial only to a small local elite who are working with transnational corporations (TNCs). These are called structural adjustment programs (SAPs). What's the US objection to Aristide? He might not support this sterling program. The vast majority of Haitians already object to it, but that doesn't fit with Uncle Sam's notion of manageable democracy. Their fear is not that Haiti will fail in the absence of structural adjustment. The fear is that they will progress. That's a very bad example. It's Haiti being independent again, and it won't be tolerated.