- Jean-Bertrand Aristide's move to raise Haiti's minimum
wage was the last straw for American corporations and elitist U.S. factions.
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- This week, the Bush administration added another violent
"regime change" notch to its gunbelt, toppling the democratically
elected president of Haiti and replacing him with an unelected gang of
convicted killers, death squad leaders, militarists, narcoterrorists, CIA
operatives, hereditary elitists and corporate predators -- a bit like Team
Bush itself, in other words.
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- Although the Haiti coup was widely portrayed as an irresistible
upsurge of popular discontent, it was of course the result of years of
hard work by Bush's dedicated corrupters of democracy, as William Bowles
reports in Information Clearinghouse. Bushist bagmen funded the political
opposition to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, smuggled guns to exiled
Haitian warlords and carried out a relentless strangulation of the county,
cutting off long-promised financial and structural aid to one of the poorest
nations on earth until food prices were soaring, unemployment spiked to
70 percent and the broken-backed government lost control of society to
armed gangs of criminals, fanatics and the merely desperate. Meanwhile,
Haiti was forced to pay $2 million per month on debts run up by the murderous
U.S.-backed dictatorships that ruled the island for decades after the American
military occupation of 1915-1934.
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- The ostensible reason for Bush's deadly squeeze-play
was Haiti's disputed elections in 2000. That vote, only the nation's third
free election in 200 years, was indeed marred by reports of irregularities
-- although these were not nearly as egregious as the well-documented hijinks
which saw a certain runner-up candidate appointed to the White House that
same year. There was no question that Aristide and his party received an
overwhelming majority of legitimate votes; however, out of the 7,500 offices
up for grabs, election observers did find that seven senate results seemed
of dodgy provenance.
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- So what happened? The seven disputed senators resigned.
New elections for the seats were called, but the opposition -- two elitist
factions financed by Washington's favorite engines of subversion, the Orwellian-monikered
"National Endowment for Democracy" and "International Republican
Institute" -- refused to take part. The government broke down because
the legislature couldn't convene. When Bush came in, he tightened the screws
of the international blockade of the island, insisting that $500 million
in desperately needed aid could not be released unless the opposition participated
in new elections -- while he was simultaneously paying the opposition not
to participate.
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- The ultimate aim of this brutal pretzel logic was to
grind Haiti's destitute people further into the ground and destroy Aristide's
ability to govern. His real crime, of course, was not the Florida-style
election follies or the reported "tyranny." Bush loves that stuff
-- witness his eager embrace of the nuke-peddling dictatorship of Pakistan,
the human-boiling hardman of Uzbekistan, the torture-happy tyrant of Kazakhstan,
the drug-running warlords of Afghanistan and so forth.
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- No, Aristide did something far worse than stuffing ballots
or killing people -- he tried to raise the minimum wage to the princely
sum of two dollars a day. This move outraged the American corporations
-- and their local lackeys -- who have for generations used Haiti as a
pool of dirt-cheap labor and sky-high profits. It was the last straw for
the elitist factions, one of which is actually led by an American citizen
and former Reagan-Bush appointee, manufacturing tycoon Andy Apaid.
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- Apaid was the point man for the Reagan-Bush "market
reform" drive in Haiti. Of course, "reform," in the degraded
jargon of the privateers, means exposing even the very means of survival
and sustenance to the ravages of powerful corporate interests. For example,
the Reagan-Bush plan forced Haiti to lift import tariffs on rice, which
had long been a locally grown staple. Then they flooded Haiti with heavily
subsidized American rice, destroying the local market and throwing thousands
of self-sufficient farmers out of work. With a now-captive market, the
American companies jacked up their prices, spreading ruin and hunger throughout
Haitian society.
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- The jobless farmers provided new fodder for the factories
of Apaid and his cronies. Reagan and Bush chipped in by abolishing taxes
for American corporations who set up Haitian sweatshops. The result was
a precipitous drop in wages -- and life expectancy. Aristide's first election
in 1990 threatened these cozy arrangements, so he was duly ejected by a
military coup, with Bush I's not-so-tacit connivance.
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- Bill Clinton restored Aristide to office in 1994 -- but
only after forcing him to agree to, yes, "market reforms." In
fact, it was Clinton, the privateers' pal, who instigated the post-election
aid embargo that Bush II used to such devastating effect. Aristide's chief
failing as a leader was his attempt to live up to this bipartisan blackmail.
As in every other nation that's come under the IMF whip, Haiti's already-fragile
economy collapsed. Bush family retainers like Apaid then shoved the country
into total chaos, making it easy prey for the warlords whom Bush operatives
-- many of them old Iran-Contra hands -- supplied with arms through the
Dominican Republic, the Boston Globe reports.
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- When the terrorist warlords attacked last month, Bush
flatly refused Aristide's plea for an international force to preserve Haiti's
democracy. Instead, he sent armed men to "persuade" Aristide
to resign. Within hours, the Bush-backed terrorists were marching through
Port-au-Prince, executing Aristide's supporters, the NY Times reports.
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- Guess they won't be asking for two dollars a day now,
eh? Mission accomplished!
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- Thus, just like his father, Bush has overthrown Aristide,
and for the same reason: He represented a threat to their "natural
order" -- unchecked rule by pampered, protected elites. Terrorism,
despotism, torture, WMD trafficking: All of this can countenanced, even
embraced. But Aristide's alternative -- democratic, capitalist, but with
"a prejudice for the poor," as enjoined by the Gospels -- this
evil can never be tolerated.
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