The United States Should assume Primary Responsibility of the rebuilding of Haiti Options

[BamBamBoogie]

Agree or disagree?: The United States Should assume Primary Responsibility of the rebuilding of Haiti

[vehvih]

Yes we do have an obligation because we f*cked them up.

Before I begin, keep in mind that Haiti, before the country started dwindling down in the 1990s, they were living a sustainable life. Right after they achieved independence from colonization of the French? The large scale agriculture was diminished and all the lands were distributed to the Haitian people. And they stopped exporting goods, instead they grew their own food. They didn't have a commerce economy but they were able to sustain life because they grew their own food. And also some tourism supplemented their economy.

In the 1990s, I believe, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank (their objective is to supposedly help countries advance their economy) offered Haiti a loan. Than loan was going to be used I guess to do whatever Haiti on some infrastructures, industrialization, etc. It's basically like a stimulus package.

On return, Haiti not only has to pay the money AND the interest back, they have to abide some laws. It's called the Structural Adjustment Plan (or SAPS). Under that law it states that

1. Cutting in spending for health, education, and all forms of social welfare
2. Privatizing of all state-owned enterprises
3. Opening the economy to foreign competitors and direct foreign investment
4. Allowing the market TO DETERMINE INTEREST RATE
5. Managing currency exchange rates to keep them stable
6. State gov. having to broaden the tax base in order to collect more revenue, deregulate labor markets, and stop using public monies to subsidize commodities

(http://www.mnstate.edu/anthearth/facultys/Gooding/Chapter%2017.pdf)

Then they started doing large scale agriculture, and grew commodities. The lands that were domestically owned were put into the market. And then a series of chain reactions occur.

Remember that since 1970s we started SUBSIDIZING for corn, soybeans, wheat, rice. So when we started subsidizing them, the prices of of those commodities went absolutely down.

SO basically what happened was under the SAP policies, import tariff was LOWERED from 35% to 3% when the agreement policies took into place in 1995

(http://www1.american.edu/TED/haitirice.htm)

On top of that, they have to follow some capitalistic agendas with little to almost no welfare programs (those welfare programs are incentives for people to work) AND REPAY the loans with interest CONSIDERING, the commodities they were growing were worth a dime.

I believe they still have some money the owe to those monopolizing/globalizing banks, while they clean up the debris from the earthquake.

WE have help them. WE issued them those loans.

And Haiti was not the only country that had been issued loans by those bitches. They're all over the world. If Haiti was located just right below America, most Haitians would probably have immigrated.

The same shit happened to Mexico.