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Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in an attack on his private residence early Wednesday, according to a statement from the country’s interim prime minister, who called the killing a “hateful, inhumane and barbaric act."
First Lady Martine Moïse was shot in the overnight attack and hospitalized, interim Premier Claude Joseph said.
Even before the assassination, Haiti had grown increasingly unstable and disgruntled under Moïse. The president ruled by decree for more than two years after the country failed to hold elections and the opposition demanded he step down in recent months.
“The country’s security situation is under the control of the National Police of Haiti and the Armed Forces of Haiti," Joseph said in a statement from his office. “Democracy and the republic will win.”
Haiti's economic, political and social woes have deepened recently, with gang violence spiking heavily in Port-au-Prince, inflation spiraling and food and fuel becoming scarcer at times in a country where 60% of the population makes less than $2 a day. These troubles come as Haiti still tries to recover from the devastating 2010 earthquake and Hurricane Matthew that struck in 2016.
Anyone remember the whole Clinton/Bush effort to collect money in order to help Haiti recover from the earthquake? Here's a detailed review. Go to the link and just skim through the article. They sought to suppress the minimum wages of Haitians in order to benefit wealthy garment companies.
If you really want to understand how elites operate, look at how they treat the Haitians.
The Clinton-led recovery was a disaster. A year after the earthquake, a stinging report from Oxfam singled out Clinton’s IHRC as creating a “quagmire of indecision and delay” that had made little progress toward successful earthquake recovery. Oxfam found that:
…less than half of the reconstruction aid promised by international donors has been disbursed. And while some of that money has been put toward temporary housing, almost none of the funds have been used for rubble removal.
Instead, the Clinton Foundation, IHRC, and State Department created what a Wall Street Journal writer called “a mishmash of low quality, poorly thought-out development experiments and half-finished projects.” A Haitian IHRC members lamented that the commission had produced “a disparate bunch of approved projects. . . [that] do not address as a whole either the emergency situation or the recovery, let alone the development, of Haiti.” A 2013 investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that most money for the recovery was not being dispersed, and that the projects that were being worked on were plagued by delays and cost overruns. Many Clinton projects were extravagant public relations affairs that quickly fizzled.
...
Other Clinton ventures were seen as “disconnected from the realities of most people in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” Politico reported that many Clinton projects “have primarily benefited wealthy foreigners and the island’s ruling elite, who needed little help to begin with.” For example, “the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund invested more than $2 million in the Royal Oasis Hotel, where a sleek suite with hardwood floors costs more than $200 a night and the shops sell $150 designer purses and $120 men’s dress shirts.”
You know it's bad when your kids complain.
One of those shocked by the failure of the recovery effort was Chelsea Clinton, who wrote a detailed email to her parents in which she said that while Haitians were trying to help themselves, every part of the international aid effort, both governmental and nongovernmental, was falling short. “The incompetence is mind numbing,” she wrote. Chelsea produced a detailed memorandum recommending drastic steps that needed to be taken in order to get the recovery on track. But the memo was kept within the Clinton family, released only later under a Freedom of Information Act disclosure of Hillary’s State Department correspondence.
The global Haitian Relief initiative was doomed from the start.
Endless large donations often came with strings to use funds to buy whatever the donor was selling. One of these donations came from the family that previously had the contract to deliver mobile homes to NOLA, in response to Katrina. Essentially, they were tin can. FEMA eventually rejected them.
Fast forward, the family that owned the company pledged $x to the Haitian relief effort on the condition the relief effort buy mobile homes from them. And so the tin cans were shipped to Haiti. From the start, the recipients complained that these homes lacked AC and were too hot during the day. Never mind there was no electricity to power AC. Never mind the tin cans were an upgrade from dwellings that existed prior to the disaster and AC was unheard of.
In the meantime, the donor got a deduction and was able to unload its inventory of tin can mobile homes at a premium.
There are hundreds of similar stories. Toss in the corruption of the national and local governments. Tons of food and water disappeared and not made available to the people donations were intended. And some of the food donations were long past their prime- puffed canned goods.
The Red Cross prematurely exited Haiti which did not go over well with donors to their relief efforts.
The Red Cross realized it was a hopeless situation and reallocated funds to other relief efforts.
Haiti's economic, political and social woes have deepened recently, with gang violence spiking heavily in Port-au-Prince, inflation spiraling and food and fuel becoming scarcer at times in a country where 60% of the population makes less than $2 a day. These troubles come as Haiti still tries to recover from the devastating 2010 earthquake and Hurricane Matthew that struck in 2016.
Anyone remember the whole Clinton/Bush effort to collect money in order to help Haiti recover from the earthquake? Here's a detailed review. Go to the link and just skim through the article. They sought to suppress the minimum wages of Haitians in order to benefit wealthy garment companies.
If you really want to understand how elites operate, look at how they treat the Haitians.
The Clinton-led recovery was a disaster. A year after the earthquake, a stinging report from Oxfam singled out Clinton’s IHRC as creating a “quagmire of indecision and delay” that had made little progress toward successful earthquake recovery. Oxfam found that:
…less than half of the reconstruction aid promised by international donors has been disbursed. And while some of that money has been put toward temporary housing, almost none of the funds have been used for rubble removal.
Instead, the Clinton Foundation, IHRC, and State Department created what a Wall Street Journal writer called “a mishmash of low quality, poorly thought-out development experiments and half-finished projects.” A Haitian IHRC members lamented that the commission had produced “a disparate bunch of approved projects. . . [that] do not address as a whole either the emergency situation or the recovery, let alone the development, of Haiti.” A 2013 investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that most money for the recovery was not being dispersed, and that the projects that were being worked on were plagued by delays and cost overruns. Many Clinton projects were extravagant public relations affairs that quickly fizzled.
...
Other Clinton ventures were seen as “disconnected from the realities of most people in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” Politico reported that many Clinton projects “have primarily benefited wealthy foreigners and the island’s ruling elite, who needed little help to begin with.” For example, “the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund invested more than $2 million in the Royal Oasis Hotel, where a sleek suite with hardwood floors costs more than $200 a night and the shops sell $150 designer purses and $120 men’s dress shirts.”
You know it's bad when your kids complain.
One of those shocked by the failure of the recovery effort was Chelsea Clinton, who wrote a detailed email to her parents in which she said that while Haitians were trying to help themselves, every part of the international aid effort, both governmental and nongovernmental, was falling short. “The incompetence is mind numbing,” she wrote. Chelsea produced a detailed memorandum recommending drastic steps that needed to be taken in order to get the recovery on track. But the memo was kept within the Clinton family, released only later under a Freedom of Information Act disclosure of Hillary’s State Department correspondence.
I remember that, the hotel. Wasn't there a factory or something else with issues that came out of that. I seem to remember election redos as well with their front people.
I remember that, the hotel. Wasn't there a factory or something else with issues that came out of that. I seem to remember election redos as well with their front people.
Regarding the factory - the was a South Korean garment factory built 100 miles away from the earthquake site. The company made donations to the Clinton foundation.
The most notorious post-earthquake development project, however, was the Caracol industrial park. The park was pitched as a major job creator, part of the goal of helping Haiti “build back better” than it was before. The State Department touted the prospect of 100,000 new jobs for Haitians, with Hillary Clinton promising 65,000 jobs within five years. The industrial park followed the Clintons’ preexisting development model for Haiti: public/private partnerships with a heavy emphasis on the garment industry. Even though there were still hundreds of thousands of evacuees living in tents, the project was based on “the more expansive view that, in a desperately poor country where traditional foreign aid has chronically failed, fostering economic development is as important as replacing what fell down.” Much of the planning was focused on trying to lure a South Korean clothing manufacturer to set up shop there, by plying them with U.S. taxpayer funding. The Caracol project was “the centerpiece” of the U.S.’s recovery effort. A gala celebrating its opening featured the Clintons and Sean Penn, and it was treated as the emblem of the new, “better” Haiti, that would demonstrate the country’s commitment to being “open for business.” In order to build the park, hundreds of poor farmers were evicted from their land, so that millions of dollars could be spent transforming it.
But the project was a terrible disappointment. After four years, it was only operating at 10% capacity, and the jobs had failed to materialize
Clinton got donations from the South Korean company to aid in making this project happen.
The modern industrial park, with wide, clear roads connecting rows of low-slung warehouses, would be paid for by the Inter-American Development Bank, which provided $256.8 million in grants to support construction. The bank has donated $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to its website. Large American retailers, including Wal-Mart and Gap Inc., have served as buyers for the clothes shipped from Haiti to the U.S. with special U.S. tax breaks. Wal-Mart has given $1 million to $5 million, and Gap has given $100,000 to $250,000 to the foundation. And in 2012, SAE-A, the Korean garment company that was recruited to become the anchor tenant of the park, gave $50,000 to $100,000 to the foundation.
...
What Sae-A has received, according to State Department records, is the ability to operate a productive garment factory with a nominal tax burden, duty-free access for its products in the U.S. and an enormous — if untrained — pool of inexpensive labor. The Haitian government provided the land for the factory, the development bank paid for the factory’s construction, and USAID built a power plant to provide an uninterrupted flow of electricity and a neighborhood of small pastel-colored dwellings to house many of the workers.
I remember follow ups on that aid and years later the majority of people were still living in pup tents.
All that money got "swallowed up" by the charities....never to be seen again.
Rather than Clinton they should have put Jimmy Carter in charge and you'd see homes built.
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