Hell is Privatized in Haiti

A street in Port Au Prince, Haiti.
PHOTO /United Methodist News Service

By Steve Miller

Many of the people reporting on the radio from Haiti talk about how hard the post-earthquake situation is on the poor. For the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, this is the vast majority of the people.
There is water, the reports go, but it is only for sale on the streets as bottled water. The public delivery of water, already quite decimated by years of government cutbacks, is non-existent – unless you can pay. Food is available, too, but only at a price. If you can afford it, you’ve got it. If you can’t, you go without.
Haiti may be Hell on Earth, but it shows that Hell, too, has been privatized. The government of Haiti, full of criminals, since the 2006 coup, and re-empowering fascist death squads, totally bought into something that might sound familiar: “Government is the problem, not the solution; it needs to be shrunk down; big government simply can’t do the job; the private sector is best equipped to provide services and solve social problems.”
New Orleans, too, experienced Privatization-Hell. Hurricanes and earthquakes are natural occurrences; but the withdrawal of social support for suffering people is planned and implemented. It was all privatized, to operate at a profit for private corporations. Haiti’s government abdicates all responsibility toward passing out the necessities of life to devastated people for free. Why that’s the role of the market!
This monstrous crime has been organized internationally for years by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In country after country, in exchange for loans, they have demanded the end to social services, like price supports for cooking oil, government support of health clinics, and public government infrastructure projects. This destroyed any semblance of a safety net. Everything is for sale. Clear out if you can’t afford it.

Oh Haiti oh Haiti! you are the battered face of what we do and what we are poorest of poor:  poor made poorer crushed and abandoned with the vultures of exploitation wheeling around your broken bones dipping their beaks in your blood sending in their soldiers and guns to keep you again from what you need: a scrap of food a rag to lie on when all the blankets are laid across broken bodies oh Haiti! thin from your fare of starvation your stomach on fire from your diet of mud left to you by the global profiteers in your immiseration by sweatshop-peddling ex-presidents and the crooked gamblers of ghoul capital by the architects of slums the poisoner privateers the mercenaries of hunger behold: the tender babes thrown into the jaws of a man-made earthquake we’ve seen it here:  how they let us drown and bring in the troops to gun us down when we try to take what we need out of the ruins that nature makes everyone’s how much violence will it take to enforce this separation of food and mouth of life and limb? how much more will it take till we take it back again? will they who have least of all and nothing to lose and all taken all show us how it’s done out of this utter rubble? —Sarah Menefee

Ezili the world responds to the horror with what you are---Love   Ezili the eyelid of a dead child of nine feels your kiss   Everyone wakens and knows to be or to be not is the same. How much   has died? Can you weigh it? Will it answer your question about whether there is rock and roll in heaven? I promise I will keep you   like a caress in my days ago. All who die before their time,   but how can that be? Nothing is without a cargo of smiles   on the boat that is carrying even hell home.        —Jack Hirschman