from Owen Jones
Showing posts with label Bill Clinton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Clinton. Show all posts
Saturday, November 2, 2024
Monday, February 11, 2019
“I Feel Their Paaaaaiiiiiiiinnnnnn!” Bill Clinton Makes His Apology for the Neoliberalization of Haiti as He Gears Up to Do It Again
(archived from April 2010)
by Scott Creighton
I wish I could tell you this was an April Fools joke. I really do.
About a month ago Bill Clinton sat in congress and admitted that he played a vital part in the willful destruction of the agricultural base of Haiti in order to “relieve them of the burden of producing their own food so they could leap right into the industrial revolution“. Not only does he try to pass off their neoliberalization scheme as a “mistake” but he admits it was really only good for ”some of my farmers (subsidized rice farmers) in Arkansas“.
Well, not only was it good for “his farmers” from his home state who just happened to be political donors as well, but it was also very good for another interest he had back in the day; the company that created a Board of Directors chair for his wife when he became Governor of Arkansas.
You see, the “leap into the industrial revolution” Bill Clinton was talking about was the predicted migration to the urban centers that the population of the rural farming areas had to make. This “blight flight” produced a vast number of dislocated migrant workers living in shanty towns who would work for next to nothing in all the sweatshops that Bill Clinton helped set up.
And of course who benefited from that? Walmart. Bill Clinton’s good old friends, the Forbes 500 top ten billionaire Walton Family.
by Scott Creighton
I wish I could tell you this was an April Fools joke. I really do.
About a month ago Bill Clinton sat in congress and admitted that he played a vital part in the willful destruction of the agricultural base of Haiti in order to “relieve them of the burden of producing their own food so they could leap right into the industrial revolution“. Not only does he try to pass off their neoliberalization scheme as a “mistake” but he admits it was really only good for ”some of my farmers (subsidized rice farmers) in Arkansas“.
Well, not only was it good for “his farmers” from his home state who just happened to be political donors as well, but it was also very good for another interest he had back in the day; the company that created a Board of Directors chair for his wife when he became Governor of Arkansas.
You see, the “leap into the industrial revolution” Bill Clinton was talking about was the predicted migration to the urban centers that the population of the rural farming areas had to make. This “blight flight” produced a vast number of dislocated migrant workers living in shanty towns who would work for next to nothing in all the sweatshops that Bill Clinton helped set up.
And of course who benefited from that? Walmart. Bill Clinton’s good old friends, the Forbes 500 top ten billionaire Walton Family.
“Since 1981, until about a year or so ago we started rethinking it, we thought that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food so that, thank goodness, they can leap right into the industrial era. It has not worked. It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas but it has not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a party to, I am not pointing the finger at anybody, I did that. I have to live everyday with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce their rice crop in Haiti to feed those people.” Bill Clinton, March 2010Clinton’s mia culpa is clearly too little too late, especially considering the fact that he has been appointed, by his Secretary of State wife no less, to become the defacto emperor of Haiti.
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