| THE HANDSTAND | FEBRUARY-MARCH2010 |
Painting,
Montas Antoine
Resolution on Haiti Adopted by
the National Executive Committee of the CUT Trade Union
Confederation of Brazil
(January 19, 2010)
The National
Executive Committee of the CUT, meeting in São Paulo,
Brazil, on January 19, 2010, reaffirms its solidarity,
manifested since January 13, with the earthquake victims
in Haiti. The CUT has decided to launch a campaign to
help the reconstruction of Haiti, emphasizing its support
to the Haitian trade union movement, through the
collection of funds among the Brazilian trade unions and
members. These funds will be sent to the organizations in
Haiti with which the CUT has relations.
The CUT has been in
touch with Haitian trade union leaders who were part of
the international delegation that attended the 10th
CONCUT [CUT National Convention] in August 2009. The CUT
was informed of the full scope of the catastrophe that
has befallen the people of Haiti. Many trade unionists
were killed, many others had their homes destroyed. The
commitment of the CUT is to help rebuild the workers'
organizations and to assist the families of the trade
unionists and workers in Haiti.
The current
disastrous situation in Haiti was not inevitable. It is
the result of the historical exploitation and pillage by
the Big Powers, such as France and the United States, of
a country that became the first independent Black nation
in the world in 1804.
The CUT underscores
the fact that the huge number of victims (some sources
speak of up to 200,000 deaths and millions left homeless
in a country of 8 million inhabitants) and the extent of
the damage suffered in the region of Port au Prince, the
capital city, were not inevitable. These are the direct
result of deprivation and poor conditions of
infrastructure and housing in a situation where over 60%
of the work force is unemployed and salaries are
appallingly low, while the government of Haiti continues
to pay millions of dollars monthly to the foreign banks
on its foreign debt.
The earthquake was an
act of nature, but the fact there are no hospitals, no
means of transportation, and no organized public services
to attend to the victims is not a "natural"
phenomenon. It is the result of a policy applied for
years under the discipline of the International Monetary
Fund in the interest of the Big Powers that supported the
dictatorship of the Duvaliers until 1981 and then
fomented the coup that ousted President Aristide in 2004.
The CUT, which
supports the sovereignty of the Haitian people, notes
with concern that this tragedy has been answered by the U.S.
government with a veritable military occupation. The more
than 13,000 troops sent by Washington, all fully prepared
for war, now practically control the entire country. And
what they are doing is dumping supplies from low-flying
aircraft to a starving population, leaving without any
food the children, the elderly and the injured -- all of
whom are unable to scramble and secure a "humanitarian
package" for themselves.
What Haiti needs is
doctors, nurses, engineers -- and not occupation forces,
whether from the United States or the United Nations.
The CUT calls for the
immediate cancellation of Haiti's foreign debt by the
creditor countries and the return of all reparation funds
paid to France by Haiti at the time of its emancipation.
The CUT calls for the opening of all borders in the
countries to which the Haitians may wish to travel. It
calls for solidarity and material aid, respecting the
dignity of the sister people of Haiti, as well as the
repeal of all restrictions to foreign aid. And it
reaffirms that it is necessary to aim to restore to the
Haitian people their sovereignty, with the end of foreign
military occupation.
We call upon
affiliated unions and branches and state CUTs to deposit
their contributions at the Bank of Brazil, Agência 3324-3
current account 956251-6 (SOS Haiti Union), mandating the
CUT to deliver this assistance to the national trade
unions in Haiti with which it has relations.
We also propose the
organization of brigades of workers, organized by the CUT,
to help in the reconstruction of Haiti, particularly of
the Haitian trade union movement. In addition to assuming
its own responsibility in providing aid to the Haitian
trade union movement, the CUT is willing to participate
in united relief efforts with other trade unions and
popular movements with the aim of strengthening the
solidarity with the workers and people of Haiti in this
difficult time.
signed/
National Executive
Committee of the CUT
************************************************************************************
Global Marshall Plan Required to Rebuild Haiti
Statement by Dr. Ron Daniels,
President of the Institute of the Black World 21st
Century and Founder of the
But, “truth crushed to earth will rise
again.” The Haitian people are remarkably resilient
and strong. It was this strength and resiliency that
enabled their forebears to become the first enslaved
people in recorded history to rise up to defeat their
slave masters and establish the first
The
It is through the prism of this historical
context that we must view the current catastrophe in
Though the effort to rebuild
Beyond the demand for a Global Marshall Plan,
however, people of African descent must mount a massive,
coordinated effort to rebuild
To avoid duplication of effort and to respond
effectively to the needs of community- based/grassroots
agencies and organizations on the ground in
HSP’s Haiti Relief Fund enjoys widespread
support across the country. In addition to being
recommended by the National Urban League,
the National Action Network, National
Coalition for Black Civic Participation and Churches
United to Support Haiti, HSP has entered into a
collaboration with the American Urban Radio
Networks (AURN) to promote and solicit
contributions for the Haiti Relief Fund. And, Warren
Ballentine, Host of the Warren
Ballentine Show, Radio-One XM/SIRIUS,
Bev Smith, Host of the Bev
Smith Show (AURN) and Mark Thompson,
Host of Make It Plain,
SIRIUS/XM are actively publicizing the Haiti Relief Fund
as a credible vehicle to receive contributions. Moreover,
the Institute of the Black World 21st Century
and the Haiti Support Project have developed a range of
other important initiatives and collaborations designed
to address the crisis in
With the Haiti Relief Fund and associated
collaborations and initiatives, we are prepared to
undertake what history will record as one of the greatest
triumphs of the 21st Century, the recovery,
restoration and reconstruction of the first
Full details about the Haiti Support Project’s Haiti Relief Fund and related Initiatives can be found on the website www.ibw21.org. For further information, please call 718.429.1415.
To arrange interviews with Dr. Ron Daniels, contact Carolyn McClair Public Relations, 917.686.0854.
*****************************************************************************************
TOXIC WASTES AND HAITI
by Mitchel Cohen
Two decades ago, the garbage barge, the Khian Sea, with
no place in the U.S. willing to accept its garbage, left
the territorial waters of the United States and began
circling the oceans in search of a country willing to
accept its cargo: 14,000 tons of toxic incinerator ash.
First it went to the Bahamas, then to the Dominican
Republic, Honduras, Bermuda, Guinea Bissau and the
Netherlands Antilles. Wherever it went, people gathered
to protest its arrival. No one wanted the millions of
pounds of Philadelphia municipal incinerator ash dumped
in their country.
Desperate to unload, the ship's crew lied about their
cargo, hoping to catch a government unawares. Sometimes
they identified the ash as "construction material";
other times they said it was "road fill," and
still others "muddy waste." But environmental
experts were generally one step ahead in notifying the
recipients; no one would take it. That is, until it got
to Haiti. There, U.S.-backed dictator Baby Doc Duvalier
issued a permit for the garbage, which was by now being
called "fertilizer," and four thousand tons of
the ash was dumped onto the beach in the town of Gonaives.
It didn't take long for public outcry to force Haiti's
officials to suddenly "realize" they weren't
getting fertilizer. They canceled the import permit and
ordered the waste returned to the ship. But the Khian Sea
slipped away in the night, leaving thousands of tons
toxic ash on the beach.
For two years more the Khian Sea chugged from country to
country trying to dispose of the remaining 10,000 tons of
Philadelphia ash. The crew even painted over the barge's
name -- not once, but twice. Still, no one was fooled
into taking its toxic cargo. A crew member later
testified that the waste was finally dumped into the
Indian Ocean.
The activist environmental group, Greenpeace, pressured
the U.S. government to test the "fertilizer."
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Greenpeace
found it contained 1,800 pounds of arsenic, 4,300 pounds
of cadmium, and 435,000 pounds of lead, dioxin and other
toxins. But no one would clean it up.
The cost of the cleanup at Gonaives had been estimated to
be around $300,000. Philadelphia's $130 million budget
surplus would more than cover it, but Philadelphia lawyer
Ed Rendell -- then mayor of that city and later Chairman
of the Democratic National Committee -- refused to put up
the funds. Joseph Paolino, whose company (Joseph Paolino
and Sons) had contracted to transport the waste ash
aboard the infamous Khian Sea garbage barge owned by
Amalgamated Shipping, refused as well.
In July of 1992, the U.S. Justice Department -- under
pressure from environmental groups throughout the world
-- finally filed indictments against two waste traders
who had shipped and dumped the 14,000 tons of
Philadelphia incinerator ash. Similar indictments were
brought against three individuals and four corporations
who illegally exported 3,000 tons of hazardous waste to
Bangladesh and Australia, also labeled as "fertilizer."
But none of the waste traders were charged with dumping
their toxic cargo at sea, nor even with falsely labeling
it as fertilizer and abandoning it on the beaches of
Haiti, Bangladesh, and Australia. They were charged only
with lying to a grand jury. ("Indictments Announced
in Philadelphia's Haiti Ash Scandal; Greenpeace Calls for
Immediate Cleanup," Greenpeace News, July 14,
1992, and "Philadelphia and U.S. EPA Get Unexpected
Ash Packets," Greenpeace Waste Trade Update,
March 22, 1991.)
A month earlier, similar watered-down indictments were
announced against three individuals and four corporations
who illegally exported 3,000 tons of hazardous waste to
Bangladesh and Australia, also labelled as "fertilizer."
Meanwhile, the government stonewalled, for years; it took
more than a decade for the U.S. government to clean up
the waste.
U.S. law was interpreted to protect the dumpers, not the
dumped on. Unwilling recipients of toxic wastes are
offered no recourse. In recent years, much of the waste
from industrialized countries is exported openly, under
the name of "recycled material." These are
touted as "fuel" for incinerators generating
energy in poor countries. "Once a waste is
designated as 'recyclable' it is exempt from U.S. toxic
waste law and can be bought and sold as if it were ice
cream. Slags, sludges, and even dusts captured on
pollution control filters are being bagged up and shipped
abroad," writes Peter Montague in Rachel's Weekly.
"These wastes may contain significant quantities of
valuable metals, such as zinc, but they also can and do
contain significant quantities of toxic by-products such
as cadmium, lead and dioxins. The 'recycling' loophole in
U.S. toxic waste law is big enough to float a barge
through, and many barges are floating through it
uncounted."
Every year, thousands of tons of "recycled"
waste from the U.S., deceptively labeled as "fertilizer,"
are plowed into farms, beaches and deserts in Bangladesh,
Haiti, Somalia, Brazil and dozens of other countries. The
Clinton administration followed former President George
Bush's lead in allowing U.S. corporations to mix
incinerator ash and other wastes containing high
concentrations of lead, cadmium and mercury with
agricultural chemicals and are sold to (or dumped in)
unsuspecting or uncaring agencies and governments
throughout the world. (Greenpeace Toxic Trade Campaign,
"United States Blocks Efforts to Prohibit Global
Waste Dumping by Industrial States," December 2,
1992.)
These dangerous chemicals are considered "inert,"
since they play no active role as "fertilizer"
-- although they are very active in causing cancers and
other diseases. Under U.S. law, ingredients designated as
"inert" are not required to be labeled nor
reported to the buyer.
President Clinton -- expanding the policies of his
ignominious predecessors -- continued to obstruct the
rest of the world from regulating the disastrous
international trade in hazardous wastes. At a critical
March 21-25 1994 international conference in Geneva, the
United States stood with only a handful of waste-producing
countries against the entire world in opposing a
resolution banning the shipment of hazardous wastes to
non-industrialized countries.
Shadowy covert operations figures spent the next two
decades promoting schemes involving the shipment to Haiti
of U.S. toxic wastes.
In November 1993, Time Magazine reported that a former U.S.
government operative had detailed "an elaborate plan
to tap U.S. aid funds for low-interest loans that would
be used to transport New York City garbage to Haiti,
where it would be processed into mulch to fertilize
plants bioengineered to provide high-quality paper pulp.
'We could collect $38 a ton for the garbage,' claims [Henry]
Womack ... who helped oversee construction of the base
that the Reagan Administration-backed contras used to
stage attacks against the Sandinista government in
Nicaragua." Womack has similar dreams for Haiti:
"We'd make a bundle, and the government could get
enough to pay the whole army's salaries." (Jill
Smolowe, "With Friends Like These: A Host of Shadowy
Figures is Helping Haiti's Military Rulers Hatch a Plot
to Sideline Aristide Permanently," Time Magazine,
November 8, 1993.) Womack lived in a South Miami house
with a couple: the sister of Michel François, who headed
the death squads in Haiti and served as chief of its
national police, and her husband.
Although most agents are not usually as candid as Womack,
such plans are common. In August 1991, for example,
Almany Enterprises, a company also headquartered in Miami,
proposed shipping 30 million tons of incinerator ash from
various U.S. cities to Panama over the subsequent four
years. Almany would pay the government only $6.50 per ton
of toxic waste received in Panama. The ash is believed to
be highly contaminated with cadmium, copper, lead and
zinc. Almany proposed to landfill the ash in marshlands
near the free zone of Colon. Dozens of similar schemes
are rampant. Throughout the Caribbean and Central America
the devastating health crisis is exacerbated -- if not
directly caused -- by international capital's "recycling"
of toxic wastes. (Indeed, Haitian women who have
emigrated to the U.S. have been found to have double or
triple the cervical cancer rates as women born in the U.S.)
Said Ehrl LaFontant of the Haiti Communications Project:
"Instead of repatriating Haitian refugees to Haiti,
the U.S. government should repatriate this toxic waste
back to its own country."
Toxic waste dumping in Haiti was, after all, a lucrative
source of income for the Duvalier dictatorship. Former
Haitian despot Duvalier profited handsomely in his
relationship with the U.S., to the tune of hundreds of
millions of dollars. That relationship included allowing
U.S. toxic fertilizer to be dumped in Haiti, at the
expense of the Haitian people.
Duvalier's U.S.-based lawyer, Ron Brown, also did well,
economically, by their relationship. In the early 1980s,
Brown was a partner at the powerful Washington law firm
of Patton, Boggs & Blow. Duvalier secured his
services by paying him $150,000 as a retainer, and Brown
went to work for the brutal dictator on Capitol Hill.
Before his death while flying over Yugoslavia and
scouting U.S. investment opportunities, Brown had been
personally linked to Lillian Madsen, who had married into
an extremely wealthy Haitian family with vast holdings in
coffee and beer. (She later divorced.) Madsen lived in an
expensive Washington townhouse that had been purchased
for her in 1992 by the commerce secretary himself and by
his son, D.C. lobbyist Michael Brown. The Madsens were
major backers of Duvalier and among the main domestic
financial backers of the September 1991 coup against
elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Brown uttered
nary a word to support the return of Aristide and
democracy to Haiti, nor did he protest the U.S.'s toxic
practices there.
Brown also represented Fritz Bennett, the brother of
Michelle Bennett Duvalier, wife of the deposed dictator,
when the brother was arrested in Puerto Rico for
trafficking in narcotics. (Michelle Duvalier's touch with
reality herself can be somewhat shaky, as when, in exile,
she said: "Flee Haiti? Why do you say we were
fleeing Haiti? The president and I decided it was time to
leave. Nobody can ever say we had to leave Haiti. We
wanted to go.")
Brown was also the subject of a scandal involving
Vietnamese businessman Nguyen Van Hao, who was the Deputy
Prime Minister for Economic Development under the corrupt
U.S.-backed Saigon dictatorship in the early 1970s. Hao
alleged that Brown agreed to be paid $700,000 in exchange
for his help in lifting a trade embargo against Vietnam.
Hao, who previously lived in Haiti, and Brown had a
mutual Haitian friend, Marc Butch Ashton -- Lillian
Madsen's brother-in-law. Ashton was a financial advisor
to Baby Doc. A large landholder and owner of Haiti Citrus,
a lime exporter, Ashton allegedly used a squad of 40
Tonton Macoutes death squads to guard his properties.
Poor farmers who leased their land to Haiti Citrus say
they were intimidated and tortured by Ashton's thugs when
they tried to get better terms. (Counterpunch,
December, 1993)
Brown himself detailed his services to Duvalier in a nine-page
memo. Brown's letter, written in French on Patton, Boggs
& Blow letterhead, blamed Monsieur Le President's
problems on an unfair image created by the U.S. media. As
to his efforts on Haiti's behalf, Brown wrote that "We
continue to dedicate a considerable amount of time to the
improvement of relations between the Republic of Haiti
and members of congress and the American government, with
the goal of substantially increasing American aid to
Haiti. Early success in this regard," crowed Brown,
"is essentially the result of our Washington team."
(Counterpunch, December 1993)
Brown also informed Duvalier that he was looking after
Haiti's long-term interests by maintaining good relations
with leading American political figures:
"While we have always enjoyed excellent relations
with the government of President Reagan, we have also
established personal contacts with almost all the
Democratic candidates in order to ensure that we continue
to have access to the White House regardless of who wins
the presidential election in 1984." Brown boasted
that his "leading role in the Democratic National
Committee has served us in these efforts, while a certain
number of my colleagues in the Republican Party assure
the permanence of our access and the excellence of our
relations with the government of President Reagan."
Juan Gonzalez, writing in the New York Daily News,
continued the story:
"When Brown wrote his memo, Amnesty International
had accused the Duvalier regime of torture, detentions
without trial and `disappearances'.
"Here is some of what Brown reported to Baby Doc:
" 'Despite the unfair image of Haiti by the American
media, and despite the opposition expressed by some
members of Congress, it is certain that today ... a
growing number of people -- both members of Congress and
government officials -- stand ready to defend the
interests of Haiti. This ... is essentially due to the
work of our Washington team. ...
" 'We continue to pay a great deal of attention to
the Black Caucus and to other liberal members of Congress
... [who] are now, thanks to our efforts, ready to help.
Although some of them continue to make negative comments
about Haiti, all, without exception, have proved to be
cooperative on the issue of aid.' "
Brown was reporting on his success in getting Congress to
say one thing but do another. On foreign aid, he proved
more than worth his annual retainer. While he represented
Haiti, annual U.S. assistance increased from $35 million
to $55 million.
Brown offered not a word in the memo about human rights.
Brown went on to serve as President Clinton's Secretary
of Commerce, which is one of the agencies that oversees
toxic waste shipments and promotes corporate investment
in Haiti, particularly in the notorious assembly zones
established by the International Monetary Fund's
structural adjustment program there. (The assembly zones
were populated by the IMF's removal of 1/3rd of the rural
population from their lands, now to be used for export
crops to the U.S. and elsewhere).
In his confirmation hearings before the Senate, Brown was
not asked a single question concerning toxic wastes, nor
of his relationship with the Duvalier dictatorship.
---------------------------
Mitchel Cohen hosts "Steal This Radio," a
weekly show on http://www.NYTalkRadio.net, and is the Chair of WBAI radio's (99.5-FM)
"Local Station Board". He works with the
Brooklyn Greens / Green Party.
Mitchel Cohen
2652 Cropsey Avenue, #7H
Brooklyn, NY 11214
(718) 449-0037
mitchelcohen@mindspring.com
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