It’s a system built on greed and a gullible passive populace. This system cannot continue to work for its heads without the complicity of a gullible, passive, cowardly populace. We must change if we are tired of all the slavery, murder and exploitation.
Merten's cable specifically mentioned the arrival of longtime Clinton friend and confidant General Wesley Clark in the weeks after the earthquake.
Like Bill, Clark was from Arkansas and had been NATO commander during Bill's presidency. Indeed, Clark had been one of Clintons' favorite generals and received several military promotions when Bill was in the White House.
As the New Yorker points out, Clark's last three army jobs, including two at the highest rank, were awarded to him without the army's recommendation.
When Clark sought the Democratic nomination for president in 2004, Bill strongly backed his candidacy. When Hillary ran for president in 2008, Clark raised money for her campaign.
Clark also serves on an advisory board of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). Much later, in 2013, he signed the first fundraising letter for a superpac backing a 2016 Hillary presidential bid. According to Merten's cable, Clark quickly scored a meeting with Haitian president René Préval.
Clark had come to Port-au-Prince in search of a home-building contract for a south Florida company called Innovida, a manufacturer of building materials. (Clark sat on the board of the company along with former Florida governor Jeb Bush.)
Clark was a big cheerleader for the company. "It can do more for housing in Haiti, better and faster, than any other technology out there," he said. Innovida's ties to the Clintons ran even deeper than Clark.
According to the South Florida Business Journal, Innovida's CEO Claudio Osorio was a “big fundraiser" for the Hillary 2008 campaign and had contributed to CGI. Innovida had little track record of actually building homes.
Yet the company saw its project fast-tracked by the Haitian government and the State Department.
InnovIda received a $10 million loan from the US government to build five hundred houses in Haiti. Sadly, the houses were never built. In 2012 Osorio was indicted and convicted of financial fraud.
Prosecutors would later accuse Osorio, who drove a Maserati and lived in a Miami Beach mansion, of using the money intended for relief victims to "repay investors and for his and his co-conspirators personal benefit and to further the fraud scheme." He was ultimately sentenced to twelve years in jail. Innovida collapsed.
It is hard to overstate the power the Clintons wielded in the disbursement of US taxpayer money for Haitian relief. Esquire magazine called Bill the "CEO of a leaderless nation," because of his role as the cochair of IHRC.
The Miami Herald repeatedly referred to Bill as the “co-czar of the recovery effort." Others called him “president of Haiti" or “viceeroy" because of his powers. Hillary, as secretary of state, had ultimate control over the dispersement of US taxpayer aid dollars.
Many Haitians believed the Clintons further demonstrated their power in Haiti when Garry Conille became prime minister in October 2011. Conille had worked for Bill as a speechwriter and as his UN special envoy chief of staff.
Conille's appointment was seen as a compromise, and the fact that he was backed by Bill Clinton was touted by some Haitians as one of the reasons for his selection. What happened in Haiti was the classic Clinton Blur, mixing philanthropy, politics, and business.
Bill arrived in Port-au-Prince wearing several hats and pursuing myriad agendas, both public and private. As the Economist succinctly noted, The strange multi-dimensional role that Mr. Clinton plays as co-chair of the IHRC, special UN envoy, former US president, spouse of the US secretary of state, and head of his own foundation which supports projects in the country, will continue to lead to confusion about who he advocates for and to whom he ultimately answers.
Pushback from within IHRC came almost immediately. In October 2010 Jean-Marie Bourjolly, a member of IHRC, wrote a memorandum to the cochairs and the other com- mission members cautioning that by "vesting all powers and authority of the Board in the Executive Committee [Clinton and Bellerive], it is clear that what is expected of us [the rest of IHRC] is to act as a rubber-stamping body."
Bourjolly's concerns were not appreciated. Indeed, his memorandum was not included in the official minutes of the October IHRC meeting. Other commission members and employees confirmed that Bill and Hillary got what they wanted when it came to Haiti projects and contracts.
As one employee noted, projects were approved because "they were submitted by USAID and State." Moreover, “as long as USAID is submitting it and USAID is paying for it, they would be approved."
In December 2010 nine of the fourteen Haitian IHRC members wrote an official complaint to Clinton and Bellerive; they felt "completely disconnected from the activities of the IHRC."
The link is here. This may be disinformation but there’s some truth here.
IHRC was moving forward on projects that didn't seem to conform to the action plan that the Haitian government and donor nations had agreed to in the months following the tragedy.
The members warned that "we risk ending up with a variety of ill-assorted projects, some of which are certainly interesting and useful taken individually, but which collectively can neither meet the urgency nor lay the foundation for the rehabilitation of Haiti, and even less its development."