How Many Haitians Must Die
Before We Impeach Obama?
by Dennis Small
March 3—Acting as the real American President, Lyndon LaRouche on Feb. 22 issued an urgent call for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to work with the Haitian government to help relocate up to a million Haitians, now homeless, and living amid the rubble of shattered Port-au-Prince, in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed over a quarter million people.
The immediate emergency, LaRouche noted, is that the rainy season is upon us, and under current conditions, Port-au-Prince, within weeks, at best, will be subjected to floods, hit by mudslides, and be inundated by deadly sewage from the 1.3 million people who are now homeless and destitute in that city, and the immediately surrounding area. These people have been forced to live in the streets and slums under bits of plastic, and amid human excrement that is not being removed—because there is no ability to do so, nor even a place to take it.
Even before the earthquake, Haiti—long the victim of the globalization and free-trade policies of London-centered financial predators—did not have a single public sewage treatment plant. And now it is worse.
If we do not act, LaRouche stressed, Haiti will soon face conditions in which dengue, cholera, malaria, typhoid, and other epidemics will spread, with devastating consequences. Haiti is the image of what awaits all of humanity under the current, bankrupt British-imperial international financial system: It is the face of the New Dark Age. We must stop it in Haiti, if we are to have the moral fitness to survive on this planet.
To prevent another wave of mass deaths and total national disintegration, a bilateral treaty agreement between the United States and Haiti should be promptly reached, to evacuate up to a million people to secure sites, to be built outside the coastal flood plain where Port-au-Prince lies—as part of a 25-year treaty agreement for national reconstruction to make Haiti a modern, industrialized nation, to be signed by the two sovereign nations.
LaRouche stated that President Obama, by refusing to act, is implementing a policy of intentional British-dictated Malthusian genocide; he must be impeached, or forced to resign, for this crime as well as numerous others. "How many Haitians are going to have to die before it becomes obvious that Obama has to be impeached?" LaRouche demanded.
Obama's Thumbs Down
EIR has learned that, a few days after LaRouche issued his call to action, senior U.S. political figures, who are also personally knowledgable on Haiti, went to the White House and presented on their own an urgent proposal for the U.S. to help Haiti relocate hundreds of thousands of Haitians to higher ground before the serious rains start. A similar strategy was being worked on by the Préval government in Haiti, with particular emphasis on the Central Plateau, which lies about 100 km north of Port-au-Prince—and is the area where the Franklin Roosevelt government, in the 1930s, helped to carry out the Artibonite River Valley Project, as part of its Good Neighbor Policy.
At the most senior level, the Obama Administration instantly shot the proposal down. Nothing of the sort would be done: Let the displaced Haitians simply return to the rubble of their old neighborhoods, perhaps with a sheet of donated thin plastic to shield them from their fate. Like Nero turning his thumb down at the Roman Circus, Obama condemned hundreds of thousands of black Haitians to probable death.
An error, you say? A miscalculation? A regrettable bit of simple political expedience?
Not on your life. Obama was coldly carrying out, with the stroke of a pen, the policy of intentional genocide dictated by the British Empire and its financial power center, the Inter-Alpha Group, a policy which he has otherwise implemented in his health-care proposals, his destruction of NASA, his shameless bailout of Wall Street predators... and on, and on.
"Our solution for Haiti, as we have assessed it," LaRouche countered on Feb. 24, "is, first of all, as long as Obama is President, there is no hope for Haiti. So either Haiti survives, or Obama survives, one of the two." And he added: "Haiti is exemplary. What's happening in Haiti, reveals, symptomatically, what the hell is going on globally. And what's going on globally, is the Ides of March, one way or the other."
Haiti: Past, Present, and Future
Informed of the Obama Administration death sentence, the Haitian government was left with the thankless task of informing the world, on Feb. 26, of what some in the media described as an "abrupt shift" in policy: that homeless earthquake victims would now be urged to return to their old Port-au-Prince neighborhoods—the very ones whence they fled, and which remain in rubble.
The utter insanity of this "plan," forced by the Obama Administration's criminal inaction, is evident to all. No one working on the ground in Haiti believes it will actually work. And yet everyone is going through the motions of failure, as if mesmerized by the looming, certain catastrophe. For example, a dejected architect with the government's reconstruction committee summed up the implications of the new approach: "Everything has to be done before the start of the rainy season, and we will not be able to do it," said Gerald-Emile Brun. Edmond Mulet, the head of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, agreed: "What the earthquake did not bring down, the rains will."
But the coming rains are no inexorable "natural disaster." Nor was the Jan. 12 magnitude-7 earthquake. The quake nearly extinguished the nation because decades of looting under British-system economic policies had already left the country totally vulnerable to such an event, reducing its 10 million people to African levels of misery and degradation no human being should have to endure, with 80% living in poverty, unemployment levels ranging from 50-70%, scarcely 40% literacy among adults, and no infrastructure to speak of (Figure 1). Haiti was indeed a holocaust waiting to happen.
To restate the point: The 250,000-300,000 Haitians who died as a direct result of the Jan. 12 earthquake, had already been condemned to death by internationally imposed Malthusian economic policies decades earlier, many of them even before they were born.
Those same policies, left in place, will ensure that the mass murder set in motion in the past, and underway at present, will continue over the next weeks and months, possibly with another quarter million victims.
If Haiti is to be saved, the effects of those global policies of the British Empire's Inter-Alpha group—past, present, and future—must be eradicated. It is perhaps the only way to give lasting meaning, at this late date, to the countless lives who perished at their hand.
Concretely, that means acting now in such fashion as to simultaneously address the immediate threat of flood and disease threatening Haiti, and the country's longer-term reconstruction needs, through a 25-year U.S.-Haitian partnership for high-technology development, in the spirit of FDR.
Under such a treaty agreement, Haiti's population and labor force will be treated like productive human beings, not cattle. They will be pulled out of their 50-70% unemployment into productive jobs rebuilding their nation, alongside trainers from the Army Corp of Engineers and associated American youth formed in Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)-style brigades.
Haiti needs food. Modern agriculture, coastal fishing (an excellent source of protein for a malnourished nation), and extensive reforestation will be undertaken.
Haiti needs health care and education to create a qualified, productive labor force.
Haiti needs modern infrastructure, including high-speed rail for the entire island of Hispaniola which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic.
Haiti needs housing with sanitation services, including the rebuilding of devastated Port-au-Prince, from the ground up.
Haiti needs abundant energy and clean water, with major hydroelectric projects that would simultaneously control flooding and provide needed irrigation, as well as nuclear energy provided by floating nuplex plants that could be placed along the coastline.
There are those who say such a plan is "too ambitious," that it can't possibly succeed, that "no grand vision" will ever work in Haiti. Those who do so, are parroting—wittingly or otherwise—a British imperial lie, imposed over decades and even centuries to keep Haiti in virtual slavery.
As John F. Kennedy would have put it, the U.S. must take on the shared task of saving Haiti, of industrializing the nation, and of educating its now-desperate youth to be scientists and artists, and to join in mankind's endeavor of colonizing Mars, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. It is a debt we in the U.S. owe ourselves, as well as Haiti's liberator, Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the creation of the first free republic of the Americas by former slaves, whose significance has been understood over the years by the likes of Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In the following pages, we will tell you how it can be done.
