I no longer watch corporate media news, but I was informed about some talking heads out there claiming Haiti is getting what they deserved. That is why I don’t watch corporate media news. I don’t care if those pundits came from one of the most respected think tanks, those are the most dangerous ones for reinforcing dogma. To claim that any country in the western hemisphere is solely responsible for their own tragedies is either blissfully ignorant or diabolical. A closer look at our role in the western hemisphere is warranted.
During my family’s work camp experience in the Dominican Republic I learned that, because of the large role IBM has in their economy, a small hit to that company from our perspective amounts to a full scale recession there. This provides insight as to the impact of corporations in a global economy. Corporations centralize resources to expand markets. There is nothing sinister about that, but there are certain unavoidable costs and benefits associated with that economic practice. If you concentrate resources you can do some impressive things, but the natural resiliency that comes through decentralized diversity is lowered. Every ecologist knows this principle, and the study of resource distribution known as economics should be aware as well. In our country we have some built in resiliency to corporations because our economy is so large that even large corporations are still part of a diverse mixture. The same cannot be said for small countries.
So multinational corporations in small countries generally means huge vulnerability to economic disturbances but, hey, don’t they get the huge capital gains advantage of a large corporation as well? The answer, unfortunately, is no. Economists have long championed the principle of comparative advantage, which asserts that in a global economy a country that can produce both high and low value goods should focus on the high value while other (underdeveloped) countries focus on the low value goods. This may be good for the global economy in a “greatest average utility” sense, and certainly good for the few richest countries in this global context, but not for the many countries that produce mainly the low value goods. A bigger problem still is the practice of paying labor at the market equilibrium of a developing country and selling the goods at the market equilibrium of a developed country. That’s a clever manipulation of multiple markets that really does not abide by free market principles, particularly since the excess capital formed through this practice tends to be concentrated in the country that consumes rather than the one that produces. “Having your cake and eating it to” is normally a strange saying to me, but is appropriate for describing the benefits to developed countries in a global economy.
Ah, but don’t the underdeveloped countries yet deserve the capital drain that results, since they consent to playing an inferior role in a global economy? I suppose you could use the word “consent,” but “extortion” is a more accurate term. Since 1893, when we sponsored our first overthrow of a foreign government in Hawaii, the United States has been better and more prolific at overthrowing governments than any other country in the world. Granted, in different eras we needed different approaches. During the “banana republic” years we were pretty brazen about sending some of our troops in to support the overthrow of Central American governments, at times replacing fledgling democracies for an effective dictatorship that would be more friendly to fruit corporations. During the more recent “Operation Condor” era we had a more underground approach to backing the right kind of South American governments with the right kind of sympathies for multinational corporations. Suffice it to say this was a busy, busy time for the CIA.
There really is no government in the western hemisphere that we have not influenced towards our advantage, their disadvantage, or both. Yet the amount and type of influence varies. Puerto Rico and Haiti provide examples of perfect opposites. We have been fully committed in our involvement with Puerto Rico, to the extent that they became one of our territories. Ironically, with this full commitment comes a bit of self-governing autonomy, perhaps even more autonomy in some ways than possessed by one of the fifty states. In contrast, Haiti became an independent country early on, 1804 I believe, but independent only in the context that they became a separate nation state. In reality they have been in a colonial tug-of-war between France and our country and dependent on both. For our own part, Haiti has never been a big enough interest a la Puerto Rico to engage our focused efforts and good will but, hey, they are in OUR hemisphere and we’ll be damned if we let those Frenchies get away with their colonial intentions. The well-connected of Haiti have benefited from this colonial game, but the vast majority of the population have not.
OK, OK, so perhaps we should not put all the blame on Haiti for their troubles, save for the wealthy few propped up by either colonial power for the sake of our own interests. Yet our country dishes out massive foreign aid already, do we need to do more than that? The topic of Haitian giving comes next.
