Haiti Six Weeks Later: Concerned? Not Good Enough

February 26, 2010 (LPAC)—The U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), a Washington DC based policy group, held a well attended forum event yesterday, entitled, Haiti: Six Weeks Later. The occasion drew high-level participation from officials from the US State Department, US Army SOUTHCOM, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and numerous policy advisors, journalists, and students. The fact that so many people from official Washington participated, clearly indicates a heightened concern with the condition and political future of Haiti, beyond the US aid deployment of Joint Task Force Haiti. However, while many of the formal remarks made by participants did show the greater competence of some policy makers and researchers within Washington, and, additionally, greater compassion than manifestly exists in President Obama, delimitations were clearly evident. And, so, due to high curiosity for big and powerful ideas, the introduction of Lyndon LaRouche's emergency call, for the immediate US-led relocation and evacuation of 1 million disaster stricken Haitians from Port Au Prince, enhanced the discussion beyond the typical formalism and pragmatism of topical discussions, creating the type of intervention needed to advance just such a proposal.

The contributions of every panelist and speaker, as well as the questions asked by attendees, evinced the characteristic points of view underlying the handling of not only Haiti, but of the approach most in Washington take, in general. While a far cry from LaRouche's Four Powers proposal, some noteworthy proposals provided for a useful dialogue. Robert Maguire, chair of the Haiti Working Group at USIP, presented a set of proposals to deal with the manifold dilemmas facing the nation, through establishing functional national sovereignty. Of Maguire's three dilemmas, his third, while not called out by its name—the legacy of British Imperial Globalization—is responsible for the deplorable conditions in Haiti, from which demographic problems and government instability have arisen. Over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, approximately 2.7 million Haitians migrated from rural areas, purposely left undeveloped, into Port-Au-Prince. 78% of Port-Au-Prince's former population of 3 million has survived on less than $2 per day, and unemployment, most severe among Haiti's youth, is everywhere to be seen. In addition, the Government of Haiti has been unable to, well, govern. With globalization, and the pattern of political instability which has wracked the country, the nation, particularly its universities (all of which are in Port-Au-Prince) has been privatized.

Maguire's attack on the problems Haiti faces, included some morally decent proposals, such as a National Civic Service Corps: a Haitian version of President Roosevelt's CCC; nation-wide infrastructure development, proposed for modernizing 200 rural towns, including clustering public education, health and sanitation services, therein, and, a reassignment of the nation's agronomists, from an un-agricultural Port-Au-Prince, to the nation's desperate farmers. However, this, and his other proposals, as well as those of every other participant, suffered from the cultish belief in, The Market. While admitting to LaRouche PAC representatives that Haiti, like all nations, is subject to the usurious predation of a collapsing international monetarist system, Maguire fell back upon, and promoted, the dead-end uses of micro finance and the very Benthamite conditional cash transfers (a new form of indentured servitude), as a way of stirring Haiti's robust informal economy, a.k.a. Black Market. Animal spirits, anyone?

During the question and answer period, LaRouche PAC representative Shannon Chew, intervened into what had otherwise been an attempt by the relevant panelist, Rev. Thomas Streit, to cover over the immense biological disaster befalling disaster stricken Haiti, now. Chew forcefully introduced the reasons why Lyndon LaRouche's Army Corps of Engineers-style relocation and evacuation of lower-elevation city denizens, is absolutely necessary to avert a potential biological holocaust. This met with initial speechlessness and shock from the crowd, and the panelists, too, who decided to take it as a statement for the record.

The relevant panelist, Reverend Streit, is the founder of the Notre Dame Haiti Program, and has reportedly worked for 20 years to eradicate Lymphatic Filariasis (otherwise known as Elephantiasis), as well as several other infectious diseases, but, from his remarks, you might not know it. Reverend Streit was the first to reveal two deplorable propagandistic excuses, which not only suggest his definitive incompetence in something you'd suppose, after 20 years of work, he should know something about, but, which questions his moral disposition. You would expect an expert in infectious diseases, and their link with poverty, to sound the alarm before the oncoming storms of the season produce deadly water borne illnesses, right? The two morally depraved notions, the imputed resilience of the Haitian people, and their quick adaptation to a New Normal, formed the basis for off-handedly excusing the threat of biological catastrophe, in the way only Margaret Mead could do. To paraphrase him: While we are concerned about the outbreak of diarrheal diseases, stemming from close quarters and bad hygiene, we say that the media is to be rightly surprised by the resilience of the Haitian people, and this includes the health sector. Things don't really look so bad. The reason is that the Haitian people have what I call herd immunity. They are sort of immunologically super-human. To survive the first five years of life they must develop plenty of anti-bodies to grow up strong. In fact, because the Haitian people practice a high degree of sanitation, they... I think you get the drift.

Over and over again, from the panelists to audience members like Mark Schneider of the International Crisis Group, came themes such as, we need a modernized and strong Haitian government that can maintain its sovereignty and rule of law throughout; it's not just money, we need technology transfers, like shear walls and modern cement, to hold buildings together (Haiti uses crushed limestone as the basis for their cement); and, decentralize the government. Extend governing power throughout the nation, to stop off-the-land migration.

But, evidently, only one proposal could move to meet such conditions: LaRouche's. In a twist of irony, Tim Sullivan, a panelist and fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, responded to Chew about LaRouche's proposal: I'm with LaRouche on this one.