Haiti "probably the most privatized country in the world"

[Enrique]

Interview with a former offical, an ally of Aristide.

http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/1736

(...)

We are probably the most privatized country in the world, but they want to weaken the state even more. People in Canada and the US probably think we have a strong government, a Cuban-style state, and that we need to liberalize our economy. The reality is that 84 per cent of kids go to private schools. This has tremendous and terrible consequences. It's the same for public transportation: it's totally private. Water distribution is privatized. Health care is almost totally private. If you go to the General Hospital, the main public hospital in Port au Prince, you will find it completely surrounded by private clinics and drug stores, all run by the doctors working in the hospital. What interest do they have in providing good health care in the hospital? Security is increasingly privatized. There are 6,000 police officers in Haiti, but 15,000 private security agents. Everything that should be in the hands of the state has been taken away by business interests or by the plague of NGOs. NGOs are being used to slowly remove all the flesh from the state. Unless we react to this invasion, it could be the thing that finally vanquishes us.

Look at the matter of Teleco, our once-public telephone company. Any serious government in Haiti should go back and arrest every general director of Teleco. Telecommunication represents a huge market in Haiti. Teleco used to be our only telecom. It was publicly owned, it had a huge head-start and it was the first one to start a wireless service. But it was deliberately ruined and undermined so that Digical and other private firms could come in and rob Haitians of profits that could have been reinvested by the state for their benefit. As it is, it's simply making rich people richer.

The idea that the state cannot manage things correctly is pure hogwash. Cuba is an example of a country functioning much better than Haiti and other countries I won't mention. It's nonsense that a state can't run something efficiently. You simply have to extirpate corruption. That is entirely possible to do. Rather than selling state-owned enterprises to private interests and giving control to unelected, unaccountable people--which will not solve the problem of corruption--the answer is to clean up corruption. Because the people financed the creation of these companies, they belong to the people. The people need to be mobilized into this fight by showing them what they are losing because of corruption and by showing them what they lose when these companies are simply given away. Privatization is not the way forward. We've already seen what happened because of the privatization of water resources in Latin America. We've also seen how the USSR has gone from a superpower to a Third World country by giving away what the state owned.

(...)

[aquart]

1. And if we privatize further, we'll be just like them.

Completely unprepared for any emergency.

[Fridays Child]

3. Not to mention the grinding poverty that all but a privileged few Americans would experience.

That is the goal. We are resources, ciphers on a ledger sheet, to be used up, bled dry.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. Yes, when people go on and on about how poor Cuba is

(and it is), I can't help looking at the slides that people from my church bring back from goodwill visits there and thinking, "Looks better than what I've seen of Haiti and about the same as a lot of other Latin American countries."

Haiti has low literacy, poor health care, high unemployment, vast shanty slums, people reduced to baking mud cakes to stave off hunger--AND no democracy.

If I had been given the choice of being born as an ordinary person in Haiti and an ordinary person in Cuba, I would have chosen Cuba without hesitation.

[alfredo]

7. And Cuba has suffered a half century of embargoes.

[annabanana]

4. I wish this fact would get even just the tiny littlest smidgeon of coverage.

But I'm not holding my breath.

[SandWalker1984]

5. And who 'helped' Haiti on the road to privatization? Pres Bill Clinton, that's who.

I found the paragraph below from this article very enlightening:

Haiti – Regime Change: Caught between a rock and a Bush
By William Bowles

Food First, a US NGO in a report identified US policies as directly responsible for the destruction of Haiti’s indigenous food production. Moreover, the Clinton administration demanded that the main condition for the removal of the military junta which had deposed Aristide’s government in 1991 was the acceptance of US-imposed conditions which included,

" eliminat the jobs of half its civil servants, massively privatize public services, dramatically slash tariffs and import restrictions, get rid of price and foreign exchange controls, grant "emergency" aid to the export sector, reinforce an "open foreign investment policy," create special corporate courts where "judges are more aware of the implications of their decisions for economic efficiency," rewrite its corporate laws, limit the scope of state activity and regulation and diminish the power of the executive branch in favor of the traditionally more conservative Parliament."

Please go to
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3594.ht...
to read the rest of the informative article.

*****************************

It appears Bill Clinton forced on Haiti back then the same game plan now being sold to us by corporate hacks as good for Americans.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. Stuff like that is one of the many reasons that I voted for Nader in 1996

Bill Clinton was another Smiling Face who did the dirty work of the corporate elites.

[subterranean]

9. Straight from the "Shock Doctrine" playbook.

By the way, the link you posted didn't work.

[Grey]

6. Good article,

I went over to Dominionpaper.ca and read half a dozen articles printed there.
I was appalled by what I read, if even half of that is true, I am so ashamed.
Dog, I hate harper.

[Matariki]

10. Haiti is an unfortunate example of where Reaganomics/Repbulican policy would take us.

I don't think Haiti even has public schools. If kids can't afford tuition and uniforms they go without education. The literacy rate is 45% and the unemployment rate is 60%

This is a great article. It needs to be sent to everyone's right-wing friends and relatives who still worship Ronald Reagan.

[troubledamerican]

11. Uniquely American.

Think about it.

[bullwinkle428]

12. When can we start shipping them our Freepers?