Haiti's new president nominates power company executive to be his prime minister

[Judi Lynn]

Haiti's new president nominates power company executive to be his prime minister
By Associated Press
7:49 p.m. EDT, May 20, 2011

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Haiti's new president has formally nominated a power company executive to be his prime minister.

The nomination of Daniel-Gerard Rouzier on Friday may face opposition in parliament, which has few members from the party of recently inaugurated President Michel Martelly.

As Haiti's No. 2 official, the prime minister will play a key role in efforts to get moving with stalled reconstruction after the devastating damage of after last year's earthquake.

Rouzier is president of a private power company and owns a car dealership. He also has served on the board of a religious charity based in Coconut Creek, Florida.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-cb-haiti-prime-minister-nominated,0,7830266.story

[Peace Patriot]

1. Haiti's new president represents about 15% of the people, so it is no surprise at all that he

picks one of the rich elite to run the Haitian rich elite's and the U.S. corporate agenda.

The reason he represents only about 15% of the people is that only about 25% of the people voted in the last election. And the reason for that is that the U.S. FORBADE the Lavalas party--the party of former president Aristide--to be on the ballot. MOST Haitians belong to the Lavalas party.

The election officials, under the most recent former president, (U.S. tool) Preval, said, at the last minute, that Aristide, head of the Lavalas party, had to sign the party roster for the ballot IN PERSON--a rule they made up on the spot. Aristide, of course, was in South Africa, after a coup d'etat perpetrated by the Bush Junta. They said he couldn't fax his signature--he had to sign it in the election office in Haiti. He had long desired to return to Haiti. The U.S.-controlled Preval--although he promised during his own election campaign to bring Artistide back--hadn't granted Aristide a passport back to his own country, of which he has been the ONLY legitimate president in many decades. Thus, SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT of Haitian voters were disenfranchised.

The farcical election went forward. However, SOMETHING happened between the first and second rounds of the 25% election to cause alienation between U.S. tool Preval and his U.S. sponsors. Don't know what it was. Probably had to do with the $9 billions in international aid money that Bill Clinton and Blivet control (yup, Jr.) The U.S. (Hillary) formed its own "election monitoring" group, using the OAS name (which in itself needs to be investigated), comprised of six members of Haiti's traditional oppressors (the U.S., France and U.S. lackey Canada) and one Jamaican. They "recounted" the primary election and bumped Preval's candidate out of the running. The U.S. furthermore arranged for the heinous dictator of Haiti, "Baby Doc" Duvalier, to emerge from his luxury life in France and return to Haiti without valid papers. This could not have occurred without the help of France's rightwing government, the CIA, and the U.S. military (which runs the Haitian airport), and was undoubtedly intended as a warning to Haitians: If they continue to object to U.S.-run fraudulent elections and continue to seek REAL democracy, the price will be getting hacked up or shot by rightwing death squads.

Preval, pissed off at last (probably because he and his cohorts were cut out of the billions of dollars in contracts that are pending), finally granted Aristide a passport. Aristide, the most popular man in Haiti and the best president they ever had, has now returned to Haiti. Unlike "Baby Doc," he had to wait for a valid passport cuz he had to make it through the U.S. military controlled airport to return to his own country. And he and his supporters (75% of Haitians) now have to watch this clown, Martelli--a pop singer with mafia/"Baby Doc" connections--dole out contract pittances to his cronies, while U.S. corporations get most of the money and rebuild Haiti to U.S. corporate specifications.

A look at a map tells you part of why Haiti is such a "prize" to U.S. corporations and war profiteers. Haiti is only a few miles off Cuba (the Guantanamo Bay end) at about 12 o'clock in the U.S. "circle the wagons" region--Central America/the Caribbean--with the whole string of islands that the U.S. wants, from Cuba to Grenada, from 11 o'clock to 3 o'clock, Venezuela's oil coast at 5 o'clock, Colombia (major U.S. client state) at 6 o'clock and Honduras (U.S. supported coup d'etat) at 9 o'clock. This is the area that the U.S. 4th Fleet is now roaming (mothballed since WW II, reconstituted by the Bush Junta), with new U.S. military bases going into Honduras, lots of U.S. military bases already in Colombia (including a new one overlooking the Gulf of Venezuela), and U.S. military bases on the Dutch islands right off Venezuela's oil coast and in other places on the "circle" (more an oval than a circle).

Of these "circle the wagons" countries, the U.S. has bludgeoned about half of them into submission, and most of the other half has formed a barter trade group, ALBA, under Venezuela's and Cuba's leadership, to create collective clout against U.S. bullying and aggression. In fact, Honduras joining ALBA was one of the main reasons that the elected president, Mel Zelaya, had his house shot up in the middle of the night, by the U.S. trained Honduran military, and found himself removed from his own country at gunpoint, with a refueling stop at the U.S. military base in Soto Cano, Honduras.

U.S. military bases. U.S. corporate trade (sweatshop labor, extraction of resources with no benefit to the people who live there, etc.) Those are the main issues in this U.S. "circle the wagons" area. What they are "circling the wagons" against is the rise of South America as a major economic powerhouse, with CLEAN elections and thus with leftist leaders committed to social justice--and also with unity (collective clout) on their minds (recently institutionalized in CEPAC--the anti-OAS, comprised of all Latin American countries and excluding the U.S. and Canada).

Haiti can't have real democracy. Nor can any country in this U.S. acquisition area achieve real democracy or retain their democracy without a constant struggle against great odds. The U.S. has bought and paid for toady leaders in this "circle the wagons" area--including Martelli in Haiti--and is pouring billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars through USAID-NED, CIA and other filters to rightwing causes and candidates, and into U.S. "war on drugs" militarization and mayhem, to cement power in client states (such as Colombia and Honduras) and to soften up resistant countries or countries teetering to the left (Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador).

I thought the U.S. toady in Haiti was to be a former first lady of Haiti--educated at the Sorbonne--whose campaign slogan was "capitalism with a friendly face." I was wrong. The U.S. chose a malleable novice instead, one whom Haitians say has organized crime and "Baby Doc" connections. This does not bode well as to the methods that the U.S. intends to use to keep control of the $9 billion in aid money and direct it to U.S. 'contractors,' and to secure this 12 o'clock position in the U.S. "circle the wagons" region. In Colombia and Honduras, thousands of trade unionists and other community activists have been murdered, by the U.S. trained and funded militaries (about half) and by their closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads. This is what the U.S. unofficially defines as "democracy"--dead labor leaders.

There are SOME indications that the Obama administration is not quite as bad as the Bush Junta on Latin America policy--but that isn't saying much. Not quite as bad. And it looks as if the Obamites have finally gotten a dose of reality from South America's leftist leadership--probably delivered by President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, on Obama's recent visit there--to the effect that Latin America will no longer tolerate U.S. coups (as in Honduras) and now has the collective clout to punish and exclude U.S. corporations and defy the U.S. on its various foreign policy dictates, and the U.S. had better get used to this, if it wants to do its corporate masters' business in Latin America. Rousseff, Lula da Silva's protege, was horribly tortured by the U.S.-backed fascist dictatorship in Brazil. She is strongly committed to the key leftist alliance--Brazil and Venezuela--upon which so much social and economic progress has been built. I think she made all this clear to Obama--that Latin America is now independent and cannot be pushed around any more.

It's quite interesting what has happened in Colombia recently--the CIA pulling Bush Junta tool, Alvaro Uribe, who was actively seeking a war against Venezuela and Ecuador (leftist governments, lots of oil) and his replacement with a new rightwing president, Manuel Santos, who declared peace with Venezuela and re-opened the borders. Bushwhack/Uribe warmongering was especially worrisome to the leftist leadership which now dominates the region. They were appalled at the secretly negotiated U.S./Colombia military agreement which would have meant at least seven MORE U.S. military bases in Colombia (as well as "total diplomatic immunity" for all U.S. military personnel and all U.S. 'contractors' in Colombia).

The Obama administration is pretty obviously protecting and even coddling Uribe--who was running Colombia as a criminal enterprise (protecting him from prosecution in Colombia, likely to cover up Bush Junta crimes in Colombia)--and now wants U.S. corporations to benefit from that bloodsoaked ground--labor and community leadership decapitated, five MILLION peasant farmers displaced from their land by state terror--with the U.S./Colombia "free trade for the rich" agreement, which will sail through the Scumbag ES&S-Diebold Congress as soon as it sails in from the White House. That's what I mean by it is "not saying much" that they are better than the Bushwhacks. They are only slightly better, in that they may have shifted from oil war goals to economic goals, in response to certain realities (including the Bushwhack-induced Great Depression here and the need to cut military spending). (But it would be interesting to study the U.S. "war on drugs" budget, in this respect--it's a major tool for sneakier conquest.)

Haiti needs to be seen in this context. It is NOT the fault of the Haitian people--more than a million of whom are STILL living under tarps--not even tents--tarps!--post-earthquake, while $9 BILLION in aid sits off-shore controlled by the U.S. and used as a bludgeon to destroy Haitian democracy and create a U.S. corporate/military haven. Most Haitians are "dirt poor"--literally living in the dirt--while the U.S. "fixes" their elections and prepares to dole out the billions to U.S. 'contractors" no doubt along the lines of U.S. 'contractors' in Afghanistan and Iraq: 75% of the money stays in U.S. hands and the rest is eked out to U.S.-friendly local mafias. These poor people have been brutally kicked around by the U.S. for many decades--and the earthquake (like U.S. bombing) has created conditions in which the people simply cannot fight back. They are dependent on the U.S. for water and food. They cannot even exist--they cannot LIVE--without pittance help from the U.S. They have no wherewithal to rebel. They are quite a good, democratic and enterprising people, who have shown great kindness and a communal spirit amidst the devastation. But they are suffering horribly--from malnutrition, disease and dreadful living conditions.

What the U.S. is doing in Haiti is appalling. What it did in Honduras is appalling. We can hope that these are anomalies, in an Obama administration foreign policy in South America that is shifting from overt aggression to more realistic goals (U.S. corporate recognition of a new and more level "playing field"), but I think the evidence is overwhelming that they are NOT anomalies in the Central America/Caribbean region--where the U.S. is quite clearly "circling the wagons" against South American economic/political unity.

[Demeter]

2. +15 Trillion BRAZILLIAN!

This nation will never be free of the sins of the W, St. Ronnie, and the Oman himself is just running up the list.

[Judi Lynn]

3. The war wagon rumbles on, no matter who's in charge, apparently.

Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the world about it in his final official speech as President, but clearly no one paid any attention to what a highly valued WWII general said about the military/industrial complex and it's genuine threat to democracy. I even wonder if the corporate media even carried the speech at the time.

When Haiti is called the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, it should always be added that this is because there has been constant manipulation and exploitation of them to their own severe detriment ever since they dared to rise up against their French slave owners. The caucasian world is still obsessed with the need to see them crushed, and to keep them crushed.

[Peace Patriot]

4. Yup, it's one of those hard facts about tragic hero Thomas Jefferson that is impossible to ignore.

He basically opposed the Haitian slave rebellion in the midst of the most remarkable--even dizzying--worldwide revolution for democracy and human rights, initiated by the U.S.A.--initiated by Jefferson himself, as one of the main leaders, thinkers and articulators of "the revolution."

He really was a tragic hero--in the classic sense of fatally flawed. His mind was one of the best in human history--a soaring mind that imagined, and was able to articulate, the human passion for freedom in a way that gives me chills even now, in my jaded old age. And all the while he was owning slaves and dependent on his slaves and Virginia's slave economy for his income and his (truly) elegant and (truly) high-minded life style.

I just read Annette Gordan-Reed's assessment of Jefferson in her book, "The Hemingses of Montecello," which is focused round Jefferson's slave mistress, Sally Hemingses and her extended family. Great book! Must read!

Gordan-Reed is both female and black, and she lays into Jefferson every chance she gets about his mind-boggling hypocrisy, but she is also FAIR to him. That's quite an amazing feat. And I think she is basically arguing with other black historians who have seen Jefferson and Sally Hemings as symbols, not as people.

Sally Heminges is easy to use as a symbol because there is so little known about her (much of it very likely erased by Jefferson's white heirs). But there is a great deal known about her brothers--also "owned" by Jefferson--and that is the topic on which Gordan-Reed excels, for she demonstrates what a torn man Jefferson was--the very definition of a tragic hero.

He wanted his closest slaves to LIKE him--even to LOVE him. He wanted them to be his family. He lavished them with educations, fine clothing, the freedom to travel, SALARIES. He took one of Sally's brothers to Paris for a long stay when Jefferson was U.S. ambassador to France, and paid for this youngster--a slave in Virginia, a free man in Paris--to undertake apprenticeship with THE top chef in Paris. (He took well to this profession and became a top chef himself, whom Jefferson later sought out for White House chef--the brother was living on his own in Boston--although that story ends tragically.) When Sally arrived in Paris, Jefferson bought her a fine wardrobe, and, when she became pregnant with their first child, just before Jefferson left Paris to return to Virginia, he did not force her to return with him; instead, he bargained with her, offering her a good life at Montecello and freedom for their children. This apparently was the thing she wanted most of all--that her children not be slaves. So she agreed. Both she and her brother could have gone into a French court, at any time, and obtained their freedom. (The Paris court, at the time, was granting all such requests--even before the French Revolution.) Neither chose to do that. Both had professions by that time--the brother a top chef and Sally a trained seamstress. Neither was forced back to Virginia and slavedom. Both decided to go back.

Though Gordan-Reed sticks it to Jefferson--for many justifiable reasons (including the continued servitude of the farm slaves, most of whom did not receive any special consideration)--she does say that she believes that Jefferson and Sally Hemingses LOVED each other, and the story she meticulously documents is one of Jefferson trying to acquire SONS for himself, in her two brothers. (The one who stayed in Virginia also received special training--as a master carpenter--freedom to travel, a salary, etc.)

She also illuminates Virginia society in a way that I have not seen done so well before this. She emphasizes, for instance, that Jefferson's white wife--Martha, who died young, early in the marriage--was Sally's HALF-SISTER, and she goes into all those family connections and how things worked in slave families and in white families in that disreputable fiefdom, Virginia (--so very like medieval feudalism). Jefferson was born to this mindbogglingly complex and inhuman social/economic system. From our perspective, we think, 'Well, why didn't such a gold-plated revolutionary do the right thing and FREE his slaves?' In today's terms, we might ask, 'Why doesn't everybody stop shopping at Walmart, for all that plastic shit that is polluting the oceans, made by slave labor in Asia?' The answer is that most people don't know what they're doing--and have been heavily propagandized to behave as they do. Jefferson--despite his towering intellect--was a human being. He was trapped, like we all are, by our conditioning, by our economic situation, by our times. Some of us can and do see "outside the box" but to completely LIVE "outside the box" is difficult if not impossible to do.

In Gordan-Reed's book, you can track Jefferson's excruciating compromises with slavery all along his road, from the inheritor of slaves, in a slave economy, to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence, to "liberty, fraternity and equality" in pre-revolutionary Paris, and back to Virginia, and thence to the White House. It is a tragic trail, in which sometimes he understands himself and his era and sometimes he doesn't--he just makes the best of what is. And so does Sally. And so do her brothers. And so does everybody, basically. He knew that slavery was wrong. He knew that slavery had to end. In his old age, he wrote back to one abolitionist that he had already done one revolution; he was too tired to do another; it was up to the next generation.

By the time he becomes the third president of the United States--with the British about to attack the U.S. again, to undo the American Revolution (which they tried in the War of 1812, and very nearly succeeded)--he is responsible, not only for keeping the south on board, in the union, but for dealings with European powers who could well make the difference, including France, for whom Haiti and its slave labor economy was a major source of revenue, and which remained the top potential U.S. ally against England. Though he was suspicious of Napoleon's plans in the western hemisphere (esp. New Orleans), England and Napoleonic France were at war, just prior to the War of 1812, in which the British burned the White House to the ground, as then President Madison fled on horseback. The English were interfering with U.S. trade and kidnapping Americans off American ships for "pressed" service in the British navy. They did not recognize American citizenship or American trade rights. A second war with England was coming, and the Haitian slave rebellion occurred in this context.

In addition, the white slave owners in the south were mortally afraid of a slave rebellion on their own plantations. Jefferson--for all his ambivalence about slavery--was one of them. Thus, his policy and U.S. policy went back and forth about Haiti--almost like a football in a game between other, bigger foreign powers--but was mainly against the new Haitian democracy declared by the former slaves.

And thus, we have U.S. policy on Haiti, ever since that time, which has been hostile to Haitian democracy.

I sometimes wonder if Haitians had spoken English instead of French, if things would have been different. There was not enough of a cultural connection between poor black French slaves in Haiti and the white powers-that-be in the U.S. to make the U.S. of that era a champion of Haitian democracy. It could have been part of the War of 1812, with the U.S. surprising win of that war helping to establish Haitian independence as well. But Jefferson was not ready to champion freedom for the slaves in Virginia or the rest of the south. And if he had done so--and had rended the country in two, fifty years before the civil war--the U.S. would have lost the War of 1812. There is no question about it. The crucial battle took place in New Orleans, led by slave owner Gen. Andrew Jackson (who also had some ambivalence--for instance, he paid freed slaves the SAME wages as white soldiers in the Battle of New Orleans). Unity was critical to American independence, at that critical juncture. You could speculate that, had the British won the War of 1812, slavery might have been ended in the U.S. earlier than it did. (The British outlawed the slave trade well before the U.S. did.) But what would have happened to the ideas of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" that the American Revolution inspired around the world for two centuries afterward? Would the U.S. have ended up with the wherewithal to defeat Hitler? Would we all be colonies of the Third Reich today?

Useless speculation, I guess. But one thing is clear: It's time we stopped destroying the slave rebellion in Haiti.

[Bacchus39]

5. Britain established slavery in the US colony, remember that

the US was a British colony and slavery was instituted by the British for their benefit. the ending of the slave trade did not end slavery, it put an effective end to the transatlantic slave trade but not to slavery within British colonies.

the mantra that the US and other powers do not want a democratic or successful Haiti because of the slave revolt is preposterous. look at the rest of the countries of the English speaking Caribbean.

while this will never happen, I would be all for the US pulling out of Haiti and letting it join ALBA or whatever international group they aspire to. Let someone else have a go at Haiti.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Those countries have never been known as the most abjectly poor country in the hemisphere,either.nt