by Scott Creighton
The Clintons, the poster children for neoliberal globalist sell-out politicians, gave a rousing tutorial the other day in New York on how to promote fascist ideology while being revered as “heros” on the left.
They patted themselves on the back for
- stealing the aid money that was given to help the suffering people of Haiti
- building a “free-trade zone” industrial park with it
- setting up a South Korean sweat shop company (with a history of human rights and workers rights violations) with plenty of free resources, buildings, tariff free exporting to the US and a massive pool of near slave wage labor.
Steve Lendman put it best in July of this year when he wrote:
“Haiti’s problems are severe. Deep poverty, deprivation, and unemployment torment millions. Earthquake devastation compounded them. Little relief came. It was stolen for commercial development.” Steve Lendman
Hillary Clinton bragged about an “initiative’ which used “public private partnership’ money (your tax money) to furnish the South Korean company with 800 sewing machines to get those starving Haitian women and girls to work on the sweat shop floor.
“(Hillary) Clinton praised an initiative in Haiti that brought sewing machines to Caracol, the impoverished country’s new industrial park, so that the 800 employees of one of Korea’s largest garment manufacturers could get to work. Most of those workers are women, she said, and most have never held formal employment before.
While public-private partnerships are key to creating jobs, fostering the fundamental building blocks of struggling countries is a responsibility the wealthy need to take on, Clinton said.” Huffington Post
The company produces garments for WalMart and so at some point, sitting on a stage with the CEO of Wal-Mart and a dictator’s wife from Jordan, Bill suggested that WalMart get over to Libya and open up some new stores. Goddamn, that is just what Libya needs: some more drone strikes and Wal-Marts.
“Speaking at his eighth annual Clinton Global Initiative summit on Sunday, he challenged Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke to open a store in the troubled region to create jobs and foster international cooperation.” Saloon
“Reuters described Clinton as having “lauded” Walmart’s practices during the Sunday opening meetings for its efforts toward social responsibility.” Global Mail
It’s called the Caracol Industrial Park. The US State Department is a developer in this project. They, along with the Inter-American Development Bank and Haiti’s National Society of Industrial Parks are going to build the massive industrial park, a heavy fuel power plant to supply it, a ghetto to imprison house the Haitian slaves laborers and finally a port to load up the crap goods to get them on the open market where there will be no US tariffs on these products. They will be shipped directly to a WalMart near you.
The first industrial resident of this park,Sae-A Trading, has a history of creating sweat-shop garments for Wal-Mart in 3rd world countries. The deal they get out of it is pretty sweet:
“In exchange, thanks to a deal that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton helped broker, Sae-A looked forward to tax exemptions, duty-free access to the United States, abundant cheap labor, factory sheds, a power plant, a new port and an expatriate residence outfitted with special kimchi refrigerators.” New York Times
The plans for this industrial park have been sitting on a shelf long before the earthquake in Haiti, but they couldn’t get the companies to shell out their own profits to do all of this. So along comes the quake and all those well meaning human beings who donated, and Bill Clinton gets put in charge of the relief money… and here we go. No help to the people of Haiti.
“Still, the park, contemplated before the earthquake, gained urgency only afterward. As shelter construction lagged — the American government has yet to build and deliver a single house — Caracol became the beacon of recovery.” New York Times
Fascism ladies and gentlemen, is the merging of the state and the corporate landscape to the point where one is not discernible from the other. Where the “small government” state only serves to enrich the corporations and the financial sector at the direct cost of the governed making the people the unwitting bearer of the externalities of the fascist merger.
Days ago at the Global Infrastructure Conference in Washington DC, Hillary Clinton addressed several heads of state from neoliberalized nations such as Colombia, India, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates. She also spoke to heads of various businesses at the same time because as you know, a US politician can’t take a piss without a “business leader” there to tell him how.
Her point was to express her undying fealty to the business class and to point out that she is well aware of the “transitional” period in which we live today.
This is part of what she said. This transcript comes straight from the government website:
We are very honored to be joined by distinguished guests from Colombia, India, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates. I hope this will be a very productive day for all of you. And I’m delighted to have so many business leaders from the United States with us as well. We’re always looking, as Tom said, for more ways to partner with the private sector here at home and around the world. And this is truly a team effort, because in addition to State, Commerce, and Transportation, we are also working closely with our colleagues from Treasury, the Export-Import Bank, USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the Trade Development Agency.
Now why are we doing that? Because, I think it’s obvious to state, that we are living through a transformative period in history. The world has never seen so many people ascend economically so quickly. From Asia to South America, people are moving from rural areas into urban areas, earning more money, buying more cars, more televisions, more refrigerators, surfing the web, joining the middle class, and that’s great news. It’s great news for them and for their economies and societies, but it’s great news for the rest of the world as well, because these are tangible improvements in people’s lives. Hundreds of millions of people are being lifted out of poverty, benefiting from higher living standards. But it also puts a major strain on infrastructure – the roads they drive on, the electric grids that power all those new appliances, the mobile networks that connect their apps. And it puts a strain on our natural resources – our water, our air, our energy.
So the world keeps building to meet today’s needs. But to meet the needs of future generations, we have to start to build differently. We have to use innovative technologies like smart grids, data analytics, and communications networks. We need to make our infrastructure smarter, more sustainable, and more efficient.
Building this infrastructure will be expensive. Global construction spending will grow from $6 trillion a year today to nearly $9 trillion a year by 2020.” Hillary Clinton Sept. 20 2012
Yes, taking an open republic and turning it into a closed fascist state is a “transformation” I have to give her that.
But one thing I take exception to is her bragging about the economic boon that it currently happening in various neoliberalized 3rd world countries while the economy in this country is sliding further into a depression. Of course that isn’t actually true in those neoliberalized nations either. The wealthy business owners are making a killing but the people are impoverished as this business model always does.
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“Hundreds of millions of people are being lifted out of poverty, benefiting from higher living standards.”
Translation: Countless people are now getting shitty jobs with no social benefits and wages that don’t even allow them to survive a day. Of course, neoliberal standards deliberately don’t measure this fact.
She forgot to mention the fact that we are in the early stages of a systematic worldwide economic collapse, and possibly WWIII. Lifting people out of poverty? Becoming middle class? Really? You have to hand it to those Clintons, what great jokesters.