Also known as debt slavery. We need to stand up for each other.
Ostensibly designed for the benefit of the Haitian people, Caracol has shown mixed results. As we have already seen, the best intentions often go awry in a place like Haiti. One thing is clear, however: the most obvious beneficiaries of the deal were three family-owned companies with a long history of supporting the Clintons.
The link is here.
To start things off, a major clothing manufacturer had to be induced to build a factory. Sae-A, a South Korean textile company, was lured to Haiti with a State Department commitment of $124 million for a power plant and basic infrastructure, as well as for employee housing.
The Inter-American Development Bank promised another $100 million. The Haitian government gave Sae-A a fifteen-year break on taxes. Meanwhile, in the spring of 2010, Hillary, Bill, and Cheryl Mills pushed for and secured the passage of the Haiti Economic Lift Program (HELP), a law that would allow textiles to enter the United States from Haiti tariff-free.
Construction then began. However, before the omelet could be made, a few eggs had to be broken. Three hundred sixty-six farmers, relatively prosperous by Haitian standards, were evicted from their land to make way for the factory.
The earthquake didn't get them-but the factory did. “We watched, voiceless," Jean-Louis Saint Thomas, an elderly farmer, said. “The government paid us to shut us up."
The construction contract for employee housing went to a Minnesota-based firm called Thor Construction. In addition to the contract rate, the firm received "danger pay" and “hardship pay," increasing its take by over 50 percent.
Thor Construction executives, including the CEO, are heavy contributors to Democrats. The parameters of the job soon changed. The original estimate was that the worker houses would cost $8,000. But due to cost overruns, the price tag quickly jumped to $23,409.
The original plan was to build twenty-five thousand homes. In the end, according to the GAO, little more than six thousand were constructed. In July 2012 Hillary and Bill showed up in Caracol for the factory's grand opening, even as rubble still clogged the streets in the capital city of Port-au-Prince.
The link is here.
The Clintons were joined by actors Sean Penn and Ben Stiller, billionaire businessman Richard Branson, and fashion icon Donna Karan to celebrate the factory's opening.
Hillary touted it as a great day for Haiti. Bill teared up. For his part, Bill Vastine, a member of the USAID Shelter Team that established the project's original parameters, was aghast at the results. "If the American people saw the cost of this, they'd say 'you've got to be out of your mind," he told a reporter in 2014.
Perhaps those happiest were the US retailers-all of whom enjoy long-standing connections with the Clintons-who would benefit from selling the low-cost products coming out of Caracol.
These included GAP, whose chairman and CEO Robert Fischer sat on the Hillary for President finance committee. The Fischer family had been longtime Clinton financial supporters. Another big beneficiary: Target Stores, which was founded and is still controlled by the Dayton family.
Attempts were made to manipulate my good intentions so I would go along with the Q circus. An agent who got me on the phone laughed about “useful idiots”.
The Daytons have also been longtime Clinton financial supporters. Wal-Mart also received tariff-free clothing from the factory. Hillary had sat on the Wal- Mart board back when Bill was governor of Arkansas. While some Walton family members do not share the Clintons' politics, several have written checks to a pro-Hillary superpac since the factory opened.
The link is here.
Regrettably, Caracol has failed to live up to its hype. The project's sponsors claimed that it would create sixty thousand jobs. The actual number: about three thousand. The daily wage for workers is two hundred gourdes, which is roughly five dollars. For workers at the factory this is obviously better than nothing. But it is hard to believe such meager results were justified at such great expense.
The link is here.
In sum, little of the money that has poured into Haiti since the 2010 earthquake has money ended up helping Haitians. And how that money was spent was largely up to Hillary and Bill. This fact has prompted two Haitian lawyers to petition Haiti's Supreme Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes to demand an audit of Bill Clinton's tenure on IHRC.
The link is here.
It's difficult to understand a person's circumstances or motivations and something approximating the truth can be found through the fog of media disinformation.
The lawyers, Newton Louis St-Juste and André Michel, have asked for information “to determine the relationship between the former Head of State William Jefferson Bill Clinton and the firms that benefited from contracts during and after his term as head of the IHRC."
In the meantime, the rubble-strewn streets of Port-au-Prince are still populated by those who saw their homes destroyed in 2010. These victims' net worth hasn't changed but that of the Clintons and their associates surely has.
CHAPTER 11
Quid pro Quo?
December 9, 2009, the State Department beamed out a video message from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The occasion was "International Anti-Corruption Day." Seated in front of the camera, she spoke about the important fight against political corruption around the world and praised the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) work combating bribery and graft.
Graft, as understood in American English, is a form of political corruption, being the unscrupulous use of a politician's authority for personal gain.Similarly, political graft occurs when funds intended for public projects are intentionally misdirected in order to maximize the benefits to private interests.
The OECD is an international body of the world's largest economies. Hillary herself chaired the group in 2011, on its fiftieth anniversary. In the video, Hillary lauded OECD's Anti-Bribery Convention as "a milestone in global efforts to encourage responsible and accountable governance." She went on to declare that the United States "fully supports the OECD's anti-corruption agenda."