Thom Hartmann: What’s really going on in Haiti? Here we have a country that has been absolutely devastated by a major earthquake. Now this earthquake was shallow and was strong. If it hit Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, god forbid, or any other city in the world it would do major damage. But it did particularly major damage in Haiti because Haiti is so poor and with that poverty, along with poverty comes a lack of building codes and a lot of kind of hastily made, thrown together construction, particularly with hand made bricks and home made bricks that fall on people and are very heavy and kill and crush people. And thus the destruction is far greater than it would have been had Haiti been, you know, a little more prosperous shall we say. This is no accident. Both over the long term and over the short term. And over the short term it’s been getting even worse.
Max Blumenthal is with us. Max has been on our program many times in the past, he’s the award winning journalist, best selling author, fellow, writing fellow for The Nation Institute. His most recent book, "Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party". And I guess this is part of the Republican Gomorrah, Max Blumenthal, welcome to our show first of all.
Max Blumenthal: Yeah, great to be with you. Can you hear me okay, I’m on Skype.
Thom Hartmann: Yeah it sounds just fine, Max and thanks for being back with us. Back in 2004 for Salon.com, you wrote an article called "The other regime change", which I admit I did not read at the time, I was unaware of, I read it this morning and it just astounded me about the International Republican Institute. I did a lot of reporting on the IRI’s activities in the, you know, in 2008 in the whole mess up and curfuffle that was going on in the former soviet states. But they were active down in Haiti. Tell us the story.
Max Blumenthal: Well, I gotta first apologize because I wrote this in 2004 and I haven’t covered Haiti since and I just read it a half hour ago actually because this is all just kind of coming up, but I think it’s relevant because this is the story of how a group of right wing operatives in Washington and in Haiti connected to the Republican Party undermined the Aristide government and thereby undermined Haiti’s infrastructure and ability to respond to disasters like this, weakened its police force and basically eroded any chance Haiti had of being a viable state and they did it out of, for political reasons. So it all starts with, you know, in Washington in 1992 at the International Republican Institute and just tell me if we’re running short on time.
Thom Hartmann: No that’s okay. It wasn’t just political reasons, though, it was ideological as well, wasn’t it? I mean it was like let's turn this nation over to the transnational corporations that are also the pay masters of the Republican Party, Max.
Max Blumenthal: Well exactly and, well, it started when Aristide came into power and Duvalier, this US-friendly dictator who was happy to turn his country into one big sweatshop, and his Tonton Macoutes that were the army that was used primarily just to repress dissidents and those who wanted to create a viable state out of Haiti, possibly a socialist state, were overthrown by Aristide who was a slum priest who believed in liberation theology and was you know a big fan of Salvador Allende and Che Guevara. And so of course Jesse Helms and the right wing republicans in congress identify him as the next Fidel Castro even though his agenda was totally different.
And they turned to the International Republican Institute which is a republican-linked wing of the National Endowment for Democracy, taxpayer-funded group which supposedly promotes democracy around the globe but what it actually does is it creates opposition to supposed perceived opponents of the United States. They attempted to overthrow Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and I know they’re trying to do the same thing to Evo Morales in Bolivia. So they tapped someone named Stanley Lucas, really shady character from Haiti who was sort of the Haitian Ahmed Chalabi, because he had republican friends in Washington. He was a judo master, he also had connections with the Tonton Macoute, the army that Aristide disbanded. And he started, he was training some of these figures for an insurgency in Haiti while he was making friends with people in Jesse Helms’ office. He became the IRI’s chief program officer in Haiti and what that…
Thom Hartmann: This is in the 1990s.
Max Blumenthal: This was in the 1990s. So Aristide was briefly overthrown by a military coup, this is really important, this wasn’t actually in my piece. He was overthrown by a military coup of a bunch of guys trained at the School of Americas at Fort Bragg, fascist characters. The black congressional caucus protests, and Bill Clinton agrees to reinstall Aristide as president on the condition, on the condition that he sign a series of free trade agreements to agree to basically drop Haiti’s tariff on rice, obliterating the rice economy.
Thom Hartmann: Right, which wiped out the rice farmers and so they left the land and they all came into the cities and thus more cheap labor for the big corporations who were hoping to turn Haiti into a sweatshop nation.
Max Blumenthal: So Bill Clinton is not innocent here, nor are the democrats. And they created this, they created this problem which we’re gonna get to, which is a problem that led to the mass casualties in Port-au-Prince.
Thom Hartmann: Okay, we’ve got about three minutes, Max, by the way.
Max Blumenthal: So, the IRI spends 3 million dollars to train all these parties who are opposed to Aristide, these are the worst parties, some of the worst figures in Haiti, including people who were prosecuted for violently torturing their opponents. It eventually led to the violent coup in 2004 which was led by Guy Philippe, a close personal friend of Stanley Lucas, IRI’s chief program officer, in Haiti.
Thom Hartmann: IRI, once again for people who might have just tuned in, the International Republican Institute, running out of Jesse Helms’ office at the time.
Max Blumenthal: And his political director was having meetings, IRI training seminars where they were training the opposition on how to overthrow Aristide. So a US, a supposed pro-democracy group operating out of Washington with close ties to the Republican Party, republicans in Congress, was directly involved in a violent insurgency in Haiti that overthrew the most coherent government they ever had.
We saw days if not weeks of looting that caused hundreds of millions of damage to Haitian businesses after Aristide was overthrown and what this all did was not only weaken Haiti’s ability to respond to this earthquake, it decimated Haiti’s world economy, its world culture forcing millions of people to move into Port-au-Prince looking for work, living in slums like Cité Soleil which have no infrastructure, and when this earthquake hit, it primarily centered on Port-au-Prince and decimated that population and there is no ability in Haiti to respond, there is no national police force because it was embargoed by people like Helms, they embargoed almost all equipment to the Haitian national police force in this plot to get Aristide. And, so here we are. And the national media, if you turn on CNN or even MSNBC, there’s no analysis, there’s no discussion of it.
Thom Hartmann: There’s no context at all. Nobody is talking about the fact that our, that we blew up their agricultural base by forcing free trade on them, which is by the way, you know to the extent that free trade has been forced on the United States by Bill Clinton with WTO and NAFTA and GATT, it’s blowing us up too. Obama can’t figure out why the jobless numbers are still so bad. But there’s absolutely no analysis of that. In the minute we left Max Blumenthal, why not? MaxBlumenthal.com by the way, great website. Why not?
Max Blumenthal: Why not?
Thom Hartmann: Why are these, why are the big corporations that run ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN why are they not talking about this context?
Max Blumenthal: It’s just, this is just the way we cover disasters. It’s disaster porn, and if we talk the way we’re talking it’s called politicizing a disaster. We’re just supposed to donate some money to salve our conscience but what we need to talk about is the fact that sweatshops, you know, Bill Clinton is proposing these sweatshops as the future of Haiti. Our leaving Haiti in the wake of this earthquake, firing all their workers en masse we're seeing this across the board, they’re moving to the Dominican Republic, contributing to the unemployment rate, and they’re not helping, they’re not being part of the community and Haiti is, if you can imagine Haiti being worse off, it is. And it all goes back to this campaign waged from Washington against this country.
Thom Hartmann: Amazing. Max Blumenthal, MaxBlumenthal.com. The article is called “The Other Regime Change” it’s over at Salon.com, and Max, I’m assuming you’ve got a link to it on your home page?
Max Blumenthal: I’ll put it up right now.
Thom Hartmann: Okay, great. Good talking with you Max, thanks for being with us.
Max Blumenthal: Thanks Thom.
Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.
