Clinton Apologizes For Helping Crush Haitian Farmers

I can hardly believe it, but Change.org is reporting the former President Clinton has apologized for his role in bringing (so-called) free trade to Haiti, helping lead to a situation of exacerbating poverty, where "six pounds of imported rice now costs at least a dollar less than a similar quantity of locally-grown rice. So how can a Haitian farmer compete? The past 15 years have shown they simply can't."

Ruth Messinger points out in the piece that

Prior to the era of so-called "free trade," Haiti could feed itself, importing only 19% of its food and actually exporting rice. Today, Haiti imports more than half of its food, including 80% of the rice eaten in the country. The result is that Haitians are particularly vulnerable to price spikes arising from global weather, political instability, rising fuel costs and natural disasters, such as earthquakes that register 7.0 on the Richter scale. In fact, since the January earthquake, imported rice prices are up 25%.

As was pointed out in a previous J-post on Haiti by J-friend K. McAfee

Like other networks and op ed pundits, CNN reporters refer to Haiti's extreme material poverty despite, they say, a history of US efforts to "help". None have any sense of whom was actually helped by the 1915-35 US occupation (US & French banks, agribusiness, and the small Haitian elite), US support of Duvalier and other dictators (same beneficiaries, plus sweat-shop owners), the US aid & trade policies that undermined staple food production and created dependence on US rice exports, or US-backed neoliberal "adjustment" loan conditions and deliberate, ongoing undermining of the imperfect but legitimate Aristide and Preval governments by the US government and the Clinton Foundation.

It's nice to see someone in our government admit to any of this, even if it's after they're out of office. Better than never after all! -- or -- the interesting example where Colin Powell expressed "regret"* at the US role in the Chilean coup of September 11, 1973 that the US most certainly helped instigate (with former SecState Henry Kissinger playing a key role in that particular 9/11 disaster that set a dictatorship into motion that would, among other things, claim over 3,000 lives, among his other adorable war-criminalistic-sheningans that have led him to having to consult a team of lawyers to figure out where he can travel that he may not be extradited to Chile!), but (as can be seen in the same article above) this was followed by the Administration coming out and "clarifying" Powell's regret, so as to give no hint of an admission of guilt, to re-obscure the open secret of our actions in Chile and elsewhere.

If you've read the J/Anekantavada before, you know this isn't the first time I've looked askance at US actions, to say the least. To see us looking back on any of our "mistakes" (which I put in scare quotes because they were often the intentional action of our leaders) and, if this is true about Clinton, apologizing, well... I can't say it gives me hope, or quite makes me particularly proud to be an American, or makes up for the then and continuing actions of American Empire, but... gosh darn it, admitting when we Fucked Someone Else for fun and profit is a step, and a rarely taken one, much less apologizing for it. So, 1.5 cheers I suppose.

*An excerpt of Powell's 2003 comments can be found here. The money shot, in reference to a question of how the US could be the "moral superior" looking to bring democracy to Iraq, after our actions against democracy and human rights with respect to supporting the Chilean dicatorship:

So it is the will of the international community that Iraq disarm, and not just the moral superior position, as you describe it, of the United States. We have no desire to impose upon the Iraqi people a leadership that is to our choosing, but to give them an opportunity to choose their own leadership.

With respect to your earlier comment about Chile in the 1970s and what happened with Mr. Allende, it is not a part of American history that we're proud of. We now have a more accountable way of handling such matters and we have worked with Chile to help it put in place a responsible democracy.

One of the proudest moments of my life was going to Chile in the late '80s and speaking to all of the military officers in the Chilean armed forces, all the senior officers, and talking to them about democracy and elected representative government and how generals such as them and me -- I was a general at the time -- are accountable to civilian authority so that incidents of that kind or situations of that kind no longer arose.

There's quite an interesting implicit admission of wrong-doing here, considering the emphasis he puts on how things "of that kind" can't happen again, despite, of course, the fact that they happened many times before and many times since...

The Clinton Family Fun-Time Minstrel Show

This is my fawning response to a great Slate article here by Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton. The title is "The Clinton Fallacy: Black Americans' love for Bill Clinton is built on a fallacy -- Did blacks really make big economic gains during the '90s?" (The answer is not really.)

A money quote:

In many ways, the scandal-marred, deeply partisan years of the Clinton administration proved disappointing in the face of such early optimism. Welfare reform, the growth of black imprisonment, and the public abandonment of progressive African-Americans like Lani Guinier are some of the most memorable racial disappointments of those years... But there is evidence that Clinton's unmatched popularity among blacks confused many about the true economic impact of his presidency. In a 2005 article I co-authored in the Journal of Black Studies, I analyzed five national surveys from 1984 through 2000. The data show that nearly a third of black Americans held false understandings of black economic conditions during the Clinton years. By the time Clinton left office, many African-Americans incorrectly believed that blacks were doing better economically than whites. In the '80s, barely 5 percent of blacks believed blacks were economically better off than whites. By 2000, nearly 30 percent of African-American respondents believed that blacks were doing better economically than whites. This belief is simply wrong. There is no evidence to suggest that African-Americans were in a better economic position than whites at any time in American history, including during Clinton's presidency.

Damn straight. I was young during the Clinton presidency -- but even when I liked him, I never got why he was "the first black president" -- other than that he possibly did the best job of pretending/showing that he cared about black people than any other president. JFK's "Boston Brahminism" was never the personal touch that Clinton brought, plus his sax-playing and modest beginnings showed a president a little less... Upper-class white (despite that being what he is now) than we'd seen in a while.

Said another way: Clinton was probably the President least like Richard Pryor's impersonations of white people, which can't but have helped his popularity.

This is my slightly less informal response to the article on Slate's Fray:

It was over-time to start discussing Clinton's honorary "blackness" and what he did to deserve it. Identity politics are misunderstood, misused, and unjustly maligned in today's United States, where there are real and profound racial disparities stemming from past and present circumstances. Beyond the inherited disadvantages of lesser wealth and savings from the African-American slave and then underclass, blacks in the US suffer from a system that's convinced itself it's fair when Jim Crow is still in living memory. Many people are alive today who lived under segregation, yet we pretend that it's a past and best-forgotten phase in the US at that.

All this is to say that there are real disparities between races, and adoration of Clinton, who did nothing real to change this, and abandoned black progressives like Gunier and Elders, is as misplaced as the belief that blacks are equal to or better off than whites -- a perception too common among whites, as well, breeding some of the dissatisfaction with affirmative action and related programs. (After all, if black people are equal or better off, why should they get the breaks?) Eric Alterman rightly pointed this out as, in part, a failing of the media to accurately portray reality in the US, dividing blacks on TV news into criminals and stars. Clinton's stardom is part of this syndrome, and he of course has done nothing to correct it.

One can argue about Clinton v. Obama v. abstention or a third party, but one must do it from the knowledge that neither Clinton can lay claim to honorary blackness outside a bubble of hype and misperception -- they stood for business as usual. Indeed, sadly, these misperceptions are what led people like JFK to be revered, when Nixon and Ford did more substantively for civil rights. They were forced to do it politically, but did it all the same -- while people like the Clintons and JFK and perhaps even Obama get a free pass.

Clinton wasn't the first black president. He was the first BLACKFACE president.