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Jan. 16, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:10
1559 True News: The Truth About Haiti
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I have on the line Karl Linskug, who is, although he wants to be clear, and I think it's fair to say that he is not a professor emeritus of Haitian history, he has done some significant research on the history of Haiti.
And I think that what he has to say is very important to the untold story of the current catastrophe that has occurred this week and is continuing to occur.
As it's snowballing into a humanitarian crisis from the origins.
Now I think it's very important whenever you look at a particular catastrophe in the world, The roots of it tend to go very deep and you won't get the roots of the story whether it's Somali pirates or 9-11 or the Rwandan genocide you don't get to see the roots of the story and so I like to find people who have some expertise in the field and get them to give a richer and deeper background you really can't understand the world by looking at the surface of things it's like trying to figure out the layout of a house by looking at the paint on the outside so I thank you so much for taking the time Carl and I thought that The way that you explicated what was beneath the tip of the iceberg that is occurring in Haiti this week was very interesting,
so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the agricultural policies and the social engineering policies and the general foreign policy disasters that have been exercised by the US government that have helped contribute to this scale and depth of the catastrophe.
Yes, I'd definitely be happy to and thanks for having me on.
Well, the thing that I've been learning about most recently in my research which focuses more on Haitian immigration and Haitians in the United States, but I also of course in my research wanted to look at what was the beginning part in Haiti was driving people to migrate internally but also then externally.
And what I found in part is that Some of the policies that were American-led, but especially through the United States Agency for International Development, also working with IMF and the World Bank, really started happening after Jean-Claude Baby Doc Duvalier came into power.
And what they tried to do, along with Baby Doc, was to sort of transform the This started in the early 70s and went through the 80s and in many ways continued afterwards.
But what they wanted to do was try to replace a largely sort of subsistent agricultural economy with an export-oriented manufacturing economy.
And so the way they did this, they said, Haiti, you have A comparative advantage, which is the language that the IMF and the World Bank often use.
You have a comparative advantage that you can offer to the world economy.
And your comparative advantage is cheap labor.
Your poverty means that that's the thing that you have to offer to the world.
And as a result, the thing that you should do is transform your economy, make your cities into places that house assembly industry, which relies on labor-intensive, cheap labor.
And that's going to be your key to economic development.
And so the USAID and IMF sort of required Haiti to sort of start doing that and transform the economy along those lines.
And at the same time, what they did is they worked with agro-processing and large agricultural producers in the countryside to also transform the agricultural product into export-oriented products.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to point out to the listeners that for all of the talk that you hear from international agencies around democracy and consultation with the indigenous people and so on,
all of this radical transformation of the Haitian economy was neither driven by innate market forces, in other words, there was not a huge demand for goods and services that could be produced by the local Haitians, and neither was it driven By any kind of democratic process because of course Papa Doc who ruled from the 50s to the early 70s was a dictator and his son Baby Doc who I think was overthrown in 86 was also a dictator so this is all being imposed by central planners in the true communist model from the outside.
It is not driven by market forces.
It is certainly not driven. That's absolutely right.
I think that's definitely fair to say.
And it's an important point to know that this wasn't happening naturally or indeed at the lead of the Haitian people themselves.
I think that's right. And indeed you can see how The changes that these planning and these plans resulted in also weren't in the interest or to the benefit of the Haitian people.
You had a huge migration of Haitian peasants who could no longer survive in the countryside to the cities.
There, of course, they were promised by USAID and IMF and Inter-American Development Bank that there would be manufacturing jobs waiting for them, but of course there were far too few, and the wages, even for those people who could find jobs, weren't great enough for them to really survive in the cities.
And so it just led to this deeply entrenched poverty and overpopulation in and around Port-au-Prince and some of the other urban areas that we found.
On the day the earthquake happened, in some of the writing and speaking I've been doing, I wanted to make clear that that was what happened before the earthquake hit and greatly magnified the devastating impact that the earthquake had.
Right, so I think you're talking about a sort of a pull economy which is that people are promised these generous wages or at least wages better than what subsistence farming can provide which of course the more you draw people into a wage situation the greater demand there is for jobs and therefore the lower the wages will become and I think the question many people would then ask is like well if the jobs weren't available in the in the urban manufacturing areas why did they leave I think your answer to that is very important.
Why not just go back to the farm if you don't have a job?
Why would you end up living in a slum?
That's a good question.
The final destination wasn't always to stay in the slum areas of Bel-Air or Cite-Sole outside of Port-au-Prince or Port-au-Prince.
For many, if they could get out of the country, it was to migrate externally to go abroad to the U.S. or elsewhere.
So that wasn't always the final destination, but it's a good question.
Why did people keep coming into Port-au-Prince if there weren't enough jobs or if the wages weren't high enough?
Well, the answer, I think, to that is because they couldn't survive in the countryside.
They might have been able to scrape together existence in the city through an informal economy, selling things on the street or doing odd jobs or All the different aspects of the informal economy, but the reason they couldn't survive in the countryside was, first of all, they couldn't continue to compete with the large agricultural producers that were setting up shop with American and international aid.
They also couldn't compete with surplus agricultural products that were being dumped by the United States on the country of Haiti.
And so when you have So many tons of American rice coming in while the small-scale agriculture in Haiti couldn't survive anymore.
And so that was the reason.
And so they might have had to make a bad choice between trying to scrape by in the city or the countryside, but many decided that it just wasn't feasible to stay in the countryside as a result of this competition, both with foreign imports and also with large agricultural producers that started in this time.
Right. So again, here we have anti-democratic and anti-market forces at work, which I think is really, really, really important for people to understand the degree to which this latest earthquake is simply the last in a whole series of domino exploitations of the indigenous population.
As you said, the agricultural Companies or corporations that were set up, I think you said they were subsidized.
Can you talk about ways in which they were subsidized?
Because most people who are native to a particular climate and a particular agricultural scenario can very easily compete with foreigners who come in, who are going to make all the mistakes that people coming new to a complex system like agriculture are going to make.
But how is it that the agricultural organizations that were set up were subsidized from the outside that led them to be so able to blow these people out of the water in terms of competition?
A lot of the large-scale production, whether you're talking about agriculture or manufacturing, requires a lot of initial investment.
But once you have that initial investment, then they can afford often to be much more efficient and to produce on a scale That produces a much larger product than the small-scale producers can do.
And that initial investment, that assistance they got to set up these large agro-processing facilities and things like that was assistance they got from International Aid.
USAID and IMF decided that TD not only was going to export manufactured items, but that they should also be selling what they can produce agriculturally for the international market.
And so they got that aid from the U.S. and the IMF and World Bank.
And that initial investment then allowed them to set up these large agro-processing facilities after which the small-scale local farming wasn't able to compete as well.
And then when you add into the equation Surplus exports, which are done to basically benefit or exported from the United States to benefit the American farmers, when that's also being dumped on local producers in Haiti, that made it even harder because that drove down the prices they could get for their products.
Right, and again, I just want to make sure that that's clear to the listeners.
Economically, if Carol and I are competing, and Carol is an indigenous, even small-time farmer, And I come in and have to spend 50 million dollars setting up some sort of, you know, monstrously mechanized agricultural business.
Then whenever I sell my products, I have to add on the price that I need to pay for my 50 million dollars.
So I borrow 50 million dollars to set up all of these factory farms.
Then everything that I sell has to have an additional price, which Karl doesn't have to tack on to his products.
in order to pay for the mechanization and that is a sort of free market level playing field but if I get the 50 million dollars for free or you know some sort of subsidized loan Then the amount that I have to tack on is much less than it would be under the free market, which means that it is a completely unfair competitive situation and the market forces don't get a chance to even things out, which I think ends up with people being driven off the land.
And you might say, well, why don't the small farmers get together and combine into large farms, which would be the natural response?
I assume that the Haitians are as economically self-interested and as intelligent and as creative and as entrepreneurial as everybody else on the planet.
But of course, getting together to borrow the $50 million, nobody's going to lend the $50 million to you to compete with the agribusiness that's been subsidized, because the agribusiness is subsidized, so they know that you can't compete.
And that's again what drives people off the land.
And as the agribusinesses start to do well, they can then buy up more land, which people are desperate to sell because they can't compete.
They end up in the cities. Again, I'm sort of extrapolating economically, but does that seem to fit with the patterns that you've been seeing?
Yeah, I think that the aid that international agencies gave to these large export-oriented agricultural productions definitely gave them an unfair advantage over the small-scale producers.
So I would definitely agree with that.
And there have been attempts, and there continue to be attempts, to set up sort of peasant cooperatives and that sort of thing.
But again, to reach to the scale of these large export-oriented agricultural They would have to be enormous.
And also, another thing is they might not necessarily be interested in being export-oriented agricultural production.
They might be interested in growing food for local production and local consumption.
And so that's another thing that factors in when peasant cooperatives consider how they want to operate.
And I think that there is also a concern on the part of any kind of dictatorship that when The peasants so to speak begin to combine into larger entities that that also may represent a political threat much like large-scale unionization and so there's often a drive on the part of the dictators to break up any kind of combination on the part of the peasants because as they become more unified and as they start to develop more of an economic interest in less government power which of course would be more for the free market that does I think tend to represent a threat and quite often the The military dictatorships can act against that kind of combination on the part of the peasants.
I think that's right. I think you can't consider how people would respond or governments would respond to this without looking at the political side of it.
So I think you're right about that.
Now, I think one of the things that is not very conscious to people in America, because it's just not reported on by the mainstream media, Is the degree to which third world poverty, and I think it's fair to class Heishi in that category, third world poverty is hugely negatively affected by the amount of agricultural dumping that occurs.
And this is unbelievable hypocrisy on the part of the American special interest groups, of course, because the moment that China is able to undersell some TV manufacturer, he cries dumping and goes to Congress to get taxes and tariffs laid upon the importing goods.
But I don't think people understand the degree to which third world agriculture has been decimated by the dumping of heavily subsidized or even free agricultural products on these markets which just creates a huge dependency on the foreign government, creates an enormous class of underutilized or unemployed people, destroys local agricultural traditions which then has problems because then you don't get the land irrigated which means that it sometimes reverts back to desert and so on.
I think that it's a huge silent cataclysm that is occurring around the world that I don't think people are very aware of.
And I was wondering if you could touch on how this may have affected things in Haiti.
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
I think this has affected developing countries around the world, including Haiti, many also neighbors in the Caribbean.
There's a very good documentary about how this has happened in Jamaica.
I believe it's called Life and Debt.
I might be wrong about that, but it exactly shows what you're describing.
And yeah, I mean, Yeah, I mean, it's important for people to understand that this is a huge sort of exception to what we claim is our standard policy of free markets and open exchange.
And what's supposed to be the beautiful thing about globalization is that things are exchanged freely and there's no unfair competition imposed by any big organization.
But then we have this very unfair thing where powerful countries that are able to produce a lot of agricultural products are basically giving an advantage to their agricultural producers in their country by saying,
okay, if you have This much extra corn, this much extra wheat, this much extra rice, we'll do you a favor and we're going to go and dump it over here so that your prices aren't driven down by that surplus product.
And you're absolutely right.
In countries like Haiti, where local producers, small-scale agricultural producers in the countryside are already not necessarily able to compete as well as with large-scale producers, then when you have this added There's a disadvantage for them of tons and tons of exported products coming in from other countries and dumped on them.
There's really no way they can compete, and that's why we saw this exodus to the cities, and then that's part of the reason there was this international exodus by Haitians in the 70s, 80s, and that's not the only part.
Of course, it's political as well, but that's part of the story here.
Right. So what then essentially has happened, if I understand it correctly, is you have had basically people herded.
I mean, they might as well have been herded directly by whips and cattle prods, kicked off their land through aggressive statist policies, herded into these shanty towns and with extreme poverty.
And of course, what this means is that then when an earthquake hits, People are really jammed together and they're sort of stacked up like cordwood and there's this awful situation where the earthquake is then basically shaking up a sardine can or a can of a subway car full of really overcrowded travelers and that's one of the reasons why the death toll has been so immense that really it is a stacked up shantytown that's being shaken from below.
That's absolutely right and I was distressed that we weren't and we continue to not hear very much about that in the media coverage of the effect of this devastating earthquake.
Some people are familiar with the favelas on the hillsides in the cities in Brazil and they have things almost exactly like that in and around Port-au-Prince.
People cram together with very sort of minimal housing and Very little security.
So when you have a huge magnitude earthquake like this, the density as a result of these structural changes that have been happening for the last 20-30 years, the density then is going to ensure that the impact is going to be much, much worse than it would have been.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really important for people to remember and to take this skeptical approach when they hear these kinds of news items.
This is, of course, not the first earthquake that's hit Haiti.
And this is a culture that has lived with earthquakes for thousands and thousands of years.
And so when a culture goes through this kind of convulsion where you have a huge and cataclysmic death toll from a natural disaster that has occurred many times before, I think it's really important to look at the factors that have changed.
Why have people been prevented from Creating abodes that are secure from this kind of stuff.
And it's not to say that there would be no death toll if they were free, but the death toll would have been much, much less had they not been herded virtually at gunpoint and through financial extremity and economic extremity into this packed crowded living conditions that they know very well how to deal with earthquakes to the best of their ability, having lived with them far longer than of course anybody from the outside.
And I think it's really important for people to say, well, why is the death toll so high, rather than looking at it as a natural disaster?
The only thing that's natural about the disaster is the earthquake.
Everything else that is contributing to the high death toll is exceedingly unnatural.
Is that a fair statement?
Yes, I think so.
I think there's been some things, some articles out that have called it an unnatural disaster.
And I think that's exactly right.
And I think to look at the roots of this, And to look at how man-made a lot of this is, is the correct way to approach it.
I agree with you on that.
And the last thing I'll say, and I'm certainly happy to hear more if there's more that you want to talk about, but I think, and again, I know that you don't want me to call you an expert, which is perfectly fair, but you're much more of an expert than I am.
One of the huge issues that occurs when a culture is no longer, the political structure of a culture is no longer aligned To at least to some degree satisfying the citizens.
Because normally a political culture, even a dictatorial culture, gets the majority of its resources through taxation or other means.
The majority of its resources come from its citizens, which means the citizens have to have at least some of their needs met.
But I think it's important for people to realize that when foreign aid organizations come in, whether they're public or semi-public, USAID, the IMF and other kinds of international aid When these companies come in and begin to pump money and resources into the local government, the local government shifts priorities away from the satisfaction of at least some of the local population's needs and becomes almost completely politically aligned to the source of its revenue.
And since the source of its revenue is no longer the people, but these international aid organizations, the voice of the people becomes almost completely lost in that alteration.
And I think that's another one of the tragedies that is occurring.
Right. I think that's true.
That's part of this story from the history of Haiti in the 70s and 80s.
I would argue that the voice of the people shined through brilliantly in 1990 when they elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide and that was sort of a political upset from looking at Haiti's history and also was not very welcome from the perspective of these international agencies and a lot of Haiti's international neighbors.
Aristide proposed to do a lot of things that were in the interest and reflected the interest of the Haitian people, including raising the minimum wage, doing things that would have been advantageous for bettering the Haitian people.
But of course, he was put out in a coup in 1991.
And might I add that the United States was very involved in supporting Aristide's domestic opposition.
But then before he was placed back into power, the Clinton administration and other international players basically required Aristide to agree to drop a lot of his initial vision for how he would like to transform Haiti in the interest of Haitians and accept some of the neoliberal plans that had been imposed before of the sort that we're talking about, export-oriented production, that sort of thing.
And so there was a There still continues to be the chance, but there was a chance in the 90s for the voice of the Haitian people to come through and sort of take a step away from this externally imposed neoliberalism, and that was squelched with the toppling of Aristide and then the conditions put on his return.
I think that's another important part of this history.
Right, and when you say the toppling of Aristide, and he was in power for less than two years, the toppling of Aristide, obviously that was not something that was generated from within the indigenous population, because they'd already voted for their guys, so what was the backing behind that?
Well, there was a small group of Haitians who were interested in seeing Aristide go, because he was proposing things that would benefit the Haitian masses, but you're right that The domestic opponents received a great amount of assistance from the United States,
working covertly and supporting something called FRAP, which was a sort of, you might call it, I don't know exactly how to describe it, but it was It was a major force that led to the coup and a lot of the terror after the coup.
But yes, the huge majority of the Haitians voted for Aristide after he was put out of office.
They continued to call for Aristide's return.
And you're right that this was very much not in the interest of the Haitian people and aided by international interests including the United States that were So, Carl, if I understand this correctly, you're saying that, and I believe that this is completely unique in U.S. foreign policy, that the U.S. actually armed and supported anti-democratic forces.
I can't think of any other place where that's occurred except, oh no wait, every other single place that the U.S. has had an interest.
So, I guess it's not that unusual after all.
The last question that I'd like to ask you, if you don't mind, is, I'm always I always try to figure out why it is that people are pursuing the courses that they're pursuing.
And of course, when you say, well, not you, but when you as a central planner, right, as somebody who's, you know, mucking about in somebody else's market and culture with guns and money, the surface story is, well, all we want to do is help them develop.
All we want to do is help them to develop into a more forward-looking or modernized economy which from the United States is completely insane because that's not at all how the United States developed into a modern economy.
There was no external power that was funneling money and guns to the United States government.
It was a sort of organic and spontaneous process which Was largely, I think, shielded by a lack of government interference or a lack of coercive interference in the economy.
So the exact opposite of how the US economy developed is always imposed on these other countries.
Do you think that this idea that people have that we can go in, you know, with guns, butter and money to change all of these foreign cultures, and of course it's not limited to Haiti, but everywhere that the US and other imperialistic powers operates, Do you think that they go in with a genuine, blind, naive desire to, quote, help the people?
Or do you think that the approach of, quote, helping the people is simply a cover story for more nefarious and self-interested economic motives?
And I know that this is pure speculation, so I'm not going to put your reputation on the line for this.
I'm just curious what you think about it.
Very good question.
I've thought about that a lot of times and talked to people about that.
I believe that there are some people within USAID and the World Bank and these organizations that help impose these policies that generally believe that it's in the interest of the Haitian people or the Indian people or Mexican people to have an export-oriented economy and they believed when they were doing this that this was going to be the way to achieve economic development for Haitians.
With that said, I think that where these policies are crafted and I would guess, it's again speculation, but that the huge majority of these people who figure out how to apply these policies to different countries like Haiti recognize that these are policies that reflect their own interests as powerful and wealthy people and that these are policies that are going to benefit them far more than they're going to benefit the people that they are claiming they're going to benefit.
While I'm sure there are some people who believe this story about how this was intended to benefit the Haitian people or whatever, I think that the people who are at the helm of stealing these policies and creating these policies recognize that it's in their interest to do so and therefore not in the interest of Haitian peasants or Haitian city dwellers.
Right, right. I think that just my particular opinion is that I sort of apply three standards to answering this question, and I think that we're on the same page as far as that goes.
The first is, are the central planners applying policies that are the exact opposite of what worked within their own culture?
And I think that to me is a very, very important question.
If the central planners are applying the exact opposite policies that worked within their own culture, then they have, I don't think they have very good intentions, or they've deluded themselves to the point where it doesn't really matter.
The second is the degree to which the central planners are nimble and responsive to increasing bad news.
So if they say, well, we want this to help the Haitian people, even though it's the opposite of what worked within their own culture, and then when they see that it's not working, they don't change their policies, again, that to me signifies some nefarious motives.
And the third, which I think is not quite as important, It's the degree to which they're honest about their failures after the fact.
The degree to which they go on and say, listen, we really wanted to do this.
The exact opposite happened.
We didn't change our policies and now this disaster has occurred and you should really blame us, not the Haitian people.
And none of those standards have been met in this case.
So I think that it's...
My belief is that the ideology is a cover story for more nefarious economic motives.
Yeah, I mean, I agree.
With a lot of that, and I think that the people at the World Bank or USAID or the IMF or whichever institution you want to look at, they're not stupid people, and they're sort of trained to do this sort of assessment of what seems to be working, what's not,
what's going to be the outcome, did we achieve that outcome, and all they have to do is look at the impact these policies have had now for decades in Haiti, and they would be able as smart, reasonable people to We learn that this isn't helping the Haitian people as they claimed it would.
And if they were, as you say, if they were genuinely interested in benefiting the Haitian people, they would backtrack, transform these policies.
But basically the general structure of this neoliberal policy that benefits external interests and powerful people much more than it benefits Haitians has continued.
So that's why now Haiti doesn't own its own flour industry.
It doesn't own its own concrete industry.
These are all things that have been privatized, and now when Haitians can't produce their own bread, they can't produce their own concrete anymore to rebuild their city and their country.
Well, that's again the product of the same thinking that I was talking about earlier, and it's not in the interest of Haitian people, so I agree with you on that.
Right. And if there are people who want to learn more about this, if you could just email me some links, I will put them on the video for people who want to dig into this further.
But I think it's very important for us as a culture to not be paternalistic towards the Haitians and say, oh, these poor people, you know, they just didn't know how to plan for or deal with this kind of catastrophe.
And also to mistake the help that we're giving them as a culture as mere generosity.
I think it's very very important that if we, and again I'm using the collective very very loosely here, but if we as a culture, and particularly our government, has pursued policies that have been incredibly detrimental then it's very important that we recognize that it's not the fault of the Haitian people.
They really have been herded into a compound and then that compound has been set on fire.
It's not because they don't know how to deal with these natural disasters.
And I think that we might want to go beyond just calling ourselves generous for helping and again look at the root causes so that we can work to prevent these kind of catastrophes Rather than just sort of rising up in a kind of after-the-fact generosity, which is much less helpful than trying to prevent this stuff in the future.
Yes, I absolutely agree.
And I think that a better way to approach it rather than, you know, American or international benevolence or generosity is what responsibility, looking at the history of Haiti and the United States or Haiti and the national community, what responsibility do we have Not, you know, what aid are we going to benevolently give to these four people, but how have we contributed to this problem, and therefore, what is our responsibility in rebuilding and helping the situation now as a result?
Yeah, to use a gruesome metaphor, if I hack a guy's leg off, I can't call myself a humanitarian if I give him a crutch.
I think far better is to not do the violence in the first place.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time.
Is there anything else that you'd like to add?
I know I've been sort of peppering you with questions from Seven Dimensions.
Is there anything that you'd like to add before we sign up?
No, I think not.
Actually, I'd say yes.
An important thing for people who are hearing this and are sympathetic to this perspective An important area of action for the future would be to call on international agencies to drop Haiti's international debt.
They've been carrying a heavy load of debt since they freed themselves from slavery in 1804, and that has been a huge part of Haiti's poverty throughout its history, and so now if we really want to help out, we can give assistance as we are all doing as a country and as individuals, but we can also take action to Call on IMF and the World Bank and other strong international players to to release Haiti from that debt because they've already paid far too much.
Yes and I just for those who don't know much about the history of it and again I'm not claiming any expertise but generally the pattern with the third world is the money is lent to the government it is stolen by the dictators and then the people are on the hook for it forevermore the people who did not see the benefits either in terms of Tax reductions or better infrastructure.
The people who are then on the hook for the money that has been stolen by those in power and that is very unjust and destructive.
It turns human beings into a kind of tax livestock, which I think is just horrendous.
So I think that is a very powerful perspective to have.
Thank you. Alright, well thank you very much and I will put forward the links if you send me and thank you so much for taking the time and for writing the articles that you have written to help bring some of this to light.
Yes, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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