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Haiti & the Sweet Canadians: Minimum Wage of $2 a Day is Too Much

Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit

Counterpunch - Sep 6, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/engler09062007.html

Haiti and the Responsibility to Protect

Where a Minimum Wage of $2 a Day is Too Much for the Lords of Industry

By YVES ENGLER

Why did Canada help overthrow Haiti's elected government in 2004?
That's a question I heard over and over when speaking about Canada in
Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority, a book Anthony Fenton and I
co-wrote. Most people had difficulty understanding why their country -
and the US to some extent - would intervene in a country so poor, so
seemingly marginal to world affairs. Why would they bother?

I would answer that Canada participated in the coup as a way to make
good with Washington, especially after (officially) declining the Bush
administration's invitation (order) to join the "coalition of the
willing" in Iraq.

It is also worth noting that at the start of 2003 the Haitian minimum
wage was 36 Gourdes ($1) a day, which was nearly doubled to 70 Gourdes
by the Aristide government. Of course, this was opposed by domestic and
international capital, but especially Canadian capital. The largest
blank T-shirt maker in the world, Montreal-based Gildan Activewear
employs up to 5,000 people in Port-au-Prince's assembly sector. Most of
Gildan's work is subcontracted to Andy Apaid, who was the leader of the
Group 184 domestic "civil society" that opposed Aristide's government.

It is also clear that some Canadian mining companies saw better
opportunities in a post-Aristide government (A recent Toronto Star
article explained, "Another Canadian-backed company recently resumed
prospecting in Haiti after abandoning its claims a decade ago. Steve
Lachapelle - a Quebec lawyer who is now chair of the board of the
company, called St. Genevieve Haiti - says employees were threatened at
gunpoint by partisans of ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.").

Another reason for the intervention came out of the contempt,
heightened during the country's 200-year anniversary of independence,
directed at Haiti ever since the country's revolution dealt a crushing
blow to slavery and white supremacy. The threat of a good example -
particularly worrisome for the powers that be, since Haiti is so poor -
contributed to the motivation for the coup. Aristide was perceived as a
barrier to a thorough implementation of the neo-liberal agenda. The
attitude seems to have been, "If we can't force our way in Haiti, where
can we?"

But, I was never entirely satisfied with my answers. That was one
motivation for spending hundreds of hours over the past year in the
McGill University library researching the history of Canadian foreign
policy. So, why did Canada help overthrow the elected Haitian
government? Here's what I've learned so far:

Historically, countries' foreign affairs were mostly about "projecting
force" in a hostile world. This meant the use of power (military or
economic) for protection or to gain advantage. In the modern era, the
"advantage" to be gained and then protected was capitalist entitlement,
the ability to make a profit. In other words, foreign affairs have
mostly been about asserting and protecting the "rights" of a country's
wealth owners.

The Canadian government, from its beginning, was part of the command
and control apparatus of the world economic system. At first, Canada
served as an arm of the British Empire, but, given the country's
location, quickly became intertwined with the USA. Canada's role over
the past five decades, as assigned by the dominant power, has typically
been some sort of "policing" operation, usually called peacekeeping.
Since Canada has primarily been a "policing" rather than "military"
power one must look to the language of policing to discover the
motivations for our Haitian policy.

Over the past decade there has been much discussion of something called
"pulling our weight" in external affairs. In laymen's terms this means
spending more of the country's resources on defending and expanding the
ability to make a profit around the world, for Canadian capitalists in
particular, but also for the system in general. While the less
sophisticated neoconservatives have simply called for more military
spending and a pro-US foreign policy, the more liberal Canadian
supporters of capitalism have been busy creating an ideological mask,
called the "responsibility to protect" that will accomplish the same
end.

The "responsibility to protect" is essentially a justification for
imperialism using the dialect of policing instead of the old language
of empire and militarism. It says there are "failed states" that must
be overthrown because they do not provide adequately for their own
citizens and because they threaten world order. This is the
international equivalent of the "zero tolerance" (also called the
"broken window") strategy of the New York City police department. The
policy is to aggressively go after petty crimes in order to create an
environment that discourages more serious law breaking. In the same
fashion, the international community should go after "failed states"
that do not directly threaten other countries by invasion but only
create an environment where "crime" may thrive.

(Noam Chomsky has used the Mafia analogy to explain the less
sophisticated, older imperialist version of this policy. Any and all
challenges, even minor ones, must be met with violence until "order" is
established. The "responsibility to protect" differs in form but not in
substance.)

The coup in Haiti was a Canadian-managed experiment in the use of the
"responsibility to protect" doctrine. Aristide was overthrown precisely
because Haiti is so unimportant to the world economic system and
because cracking down on it is the international economic equivalent of
the New York City police cracking down on graffiti writers. Once again
Haiti was an example to the rest of the world, a message from the
world's rich and powerful.

The question to answer now is what next? And one can only hope that
history will not be our guide. The first Haitian revolution was the
earliest and most successful challenge to the entitlement of capitalist
wealth owners in the era of slavery. In the late 1700s Haiti was home
to some of the most brutal large-scale labour exploitation the world
has ever seen. Stolen and shipped from Africa, nearly half a million
slaves worked under horrific conditions as the "property" of
approximately ten thousand white landowners and a few thousand property
owners of mixed race. Up to 40 percent of France's GDP came from Haiti
in the mid 1700s. The profitability of Haiti's sugar plantations was
that era's equivalent of Middle East oil.

The slave revolution from which Haiti was born was a rejection of the
capitalist system as it then existed. But the country never found its
way to an alternative economic system. Instead, within three years of
independence the lighter-skinned plantation owners overthrew and
murdered the country's liberation hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines (the
French having killed the famous revolutionary, Tousaint Louverture,
prior to independence). Excluded from international commerce by the
world's capitalists, and facing threats of invasion, Haiti promised to
repay its former exploiters. In 1825 Haiti agreed to pay $21 billion
(in 2004 dollars) to compensate French slaveholders for their loss of
property (land and now free Haitians). The price for its reintegration
into the world economic system was extremely high.

Foreign powers, especially Germany, France and the US, repeatedly sent
gunboats into Haitian waters. The most common reason was to press Haiti
to pay debts (often to businesses from these countries) it was unable
to afford. In one instance, US marines secretly entered Port-au-Prince
and took the national treasury. The 1915 US invasion/occupation of
Haiti was partly about forcing the country to repay its debt. And
during that occupation, the US took over Haiti's independence debt to
France, which was not finally repaid until 1947. The Haitian state
became dependent on foreign governments, autocratic and extremely
repressive, because its primary role was ensuring the repayment of debt.

Once again the Haitian people and government are being forced along an
economic path dictated by the world's economic elite and I fear the
result will be the same as before. Of the $1.2 billion in "aid" for
Haiti announced at a Washington donors' conference in July 2004, more
than half was loans, which Haitians must repay. Haitians will have to
repay this money even though they did not choose the Gerard Latortue
regime that got most of the money, the US, France and Canada did. Much
like compensating French slaveholders Haitians will (literally) be
paying for the coup in the years to come. Already, under the thumb of
Haiti's debt holders and a foreign occupation, the elected government
of Rene Preval is privatizing the last of Haiti's state-owned companies.

Supporters of capitalism sometimes argue, incredibly, that Haiti's
impoverishment is a result of the country's lack of capitalism. But, as
even a short visit to Haiti quickly demonstrates, the country has no
shortage of entrepreneurs or a willingness to work. Rather, a study of
history reveals that the economic system commonly called capitalism has
only ever been interested in profiting from the super exploitation of
the vast majority of Haitians and ignoring their humanity.

[Yves Engler is the author of two books: Canada in Haiti: Waging War on
the Poor Majority (with Anthony Fenton) and Playing Left Wing: From
Rink Rat to Student Radical. He can be reached at:
yvesengler@hotmail.com ]

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