patrick.net

Coming to a neighborhood near you! Section 8 bbq's and cannibal crock pots available to steal at Walmart. The Netflix version will have the 20 million dollar lifestyle and only white people being eaten.

Jesus H Christ!! I thought the "cannibal" bit was hyperbole and not actually happening.

There has been no standing army in Dominica since 1981, following the disbandment of the defence forces after two violent coup attempts against Dame Eugenia Charles.

Patrick James is the alias of a U.S. businessperson who previously lived and worked in Haiti. This interview was conducted prior to the negotiated ouster of the illegal Haitian military government and the restoration of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but it remains relevant and timely for the insights it provides about class divisions, power, exploitation and human rights in Haiti.

Multinational Monitor: How would you characterize the Haitian business class as a community?

Patrick James: The interconnectedness of the Haitian business community is amazing. I worked for a company and the guy right across the hallway from me, one of the partners, was General Cedras’s brother; the other was a European businessman. My company had one partner whose sister is married to the European businessman, who’s in business with Cedras’s brother. The elite are somehow interconnected or related. Basically they have to work together in order to keep their power intact.

You can imagine what kind of pressure that must be when you know that there are six million peasants that basically could rise up and tear your house down some night, which, also, I experienced. I’ve witnessed what they call dechoukage where they just basically firebomb, loot and gut a house. Its a terrifying thing.

This is always in the mind of the elite Haitians. They ride around in their armored vehicles, they have their Uzis in their house. It’s not uncommon to hear machine gun fire when you’re in Port-au-Prince just because there’s a thief trying to break in somewhere. And you’d better believe these rich people have got machine guns. The poorest Haitians cannot rise up. I mean there will not be a revolution in Haiti because you cannot fight these machine guns with sticks and rocks and machetes. There’s only so far you can fight.

MM: Where do the U.S. businesses fit into that whole picture economically and politically? Are they part of that elite?

James: The rich Haitian families basically run their own empires. You have partnerships with American businessmen, European businessmen that are very lucrative because you have a monopoly situation in Haiti. There are only a certain amount of players, and if you can provide something that no one else can provide, you’re in. If you have a sister-in-law that’s, say, from Vietnam or Thailand who has connections who can get you all the rice you want to import, then you’re the guy that owns the rice market in Haiti.

MM: Does the U.S. business community fear an uprising?

James: I don’t think the American business community has to worry about it as much, because they have got less to lose, they’ve got a place they can fly away to. It’s the Haitian business community that basically keeps the system in place.

Of course, if you’re an American businessman and you’re offered to become a part of this system where your risks are much lower than they are for the average Haitian businessperson but your profits are equal, of course you’re going to buy into the system. It’s a good deal. In Haiti, I was making about $800,000 or $900,000 a year. I lived in the lap of luxury, with a huge estate with gardens, gardeners, maids, cooks, laundry women. It was a lifestyle that would take me a lot more work to accomplish in the United States.

MM: How profitable are the U.S. companies that have assembly operations in Haiti?

James: These companies benefit from Caribbean Basin Initiative tax incentives for companies that import materials from the United States and then process them in Haiti and send them back. And of course being able to take advantage of the labor costs in Haiti is very advantageous. As far as the profits they take out, I would only be speculating.

How dare those greedy POSs demand $5 a day!!!:

MM: Did you have a sense of how the U.S. embassy or U.S. business people felt about Aristide’s coming to power, and the whole popular movement?

James: I think there was worry about how far Aristide was pushing, especially for a minimum wage, trying to set up a social security system, things like this.

When Aristide first came in he said, “There’s going to be a mandatory $5 minimum [daily] wage, everybody has got to do it.” It was just so outlandish that nobody even took it seriously. You figure the average Haitian probably makes about 20 dollars a month, so you’re talking about five dollars a week to five dollars a day!

Butttt sanctions work!!!:

MM: What kind of profits do local business people usually make?

James: I would say the average retailer will make something like a 60 percent profit. As far as importing and then distributing, a lot depends on the currency exchange. Right now [during the embargo], profits may be as high as 400 percent — that’s just the law of supply and demand. When you have sanctions that are limiting the supply, of course your prices are going to increase.

A 2009 Haitian law raised the minimum wage to 61 cents an hour, from 24 cents an hour previously. Haitian garment manufacturers, including contractors for Hanes and Levi Strauss, were furious, insisting that they were only willing to agree to a seven-cent increase. The manufacturers approached the U.S. State Department, who brought intense pressure to bear against Haitian President René Préval, working to “aggressively block” the 37-cent increase. The U.S. Deputy Mission Chief said a minimum-wage increase “did not take economic reality into account” and simply “appealed to the unemployed and underpaid masses.” But as Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review explained, the proposed wage increase would have been only the most trivial additional expense for the American garment manufacturers...