http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/clinton-foundation-haiti-117368?o=6
Highlights from article
There’s the Clinton Foundation, which has directed $36 million to Haiti since 2010, but also the $55 million spent through the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund, and the $500 million in commitments made through the Clinton Global Initiative’s Haiti Action Network. On Hillary’s side, there’s her own diplomacy, the State Department’s Office of the Haiti Special Coordinator, and the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, as well asthe U.S. Agency for International Development, whose administrator reported to her.
The amounts of money over which the Clintons and their foundation had direct control paled beside the $16.3 billion that donors pledged in all. Even Bill’s U.N. Office of the Special Envoy couldn’t track where all of that went—and the truth is that still today no one really knows how much money was spent “rebuilding” Haiti. Many initial pledges never materialized. A whopping $465 million of the relief money went through the Pentagon, which spent it on deployment of U.S. troops—20,000 at the high water mark, many of whom never set foot on Haitian soil. That money included fuel for ships and planes, helicopter repairs and inscrutables such as an $18,000 contract for a jungle gym that I found buried in the U.S. Navy’s Haiti bills. Huge contracts were doled out to the usual array of major contractors, including a $16.7 million logistics contract whose partners included Agility Public Warehousing KSC, a Kuwaiti firm that was supposed to have been
blacklisted from doing business with Washington after a
2009 indictment alleging a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government during the Iraq War. (That case is still pending in U.S. federal court.)
The linchpin is the $300 million, 600-acre Caracol Industrial Park, financed by U.S. taxpayer money and Inter-American Development Bank and geared toward making clothes for export to the United States. The Clintons were instrumental at nearly every step in its creation. The development program Bill came to sell as U.N special envoy, written by Oxford University economist Paul Collier, had garment exports at its center.
As only he can, Bill Clinton managed to tout the idea as an exciting departure from Haiti’s past. He successfully lobbied the U.S. Congress to eliminate tariffs on textiles sewn in Haiti. (The powerful Association des Industries d’Haiti lobbied, too, paying at least $550,000 to a D.C. lobbying firm led by Andrew Samet, a former Clinton Labor Department official, and Ronald Sorini, who was the chief U.S. Trade Representative negotiator on textiles during the North American Free Trade Agreement talks.)
Clinton won headlines by apologizing for having maintained as president the import-substitution policies that destroyed Haiti’s food sector—policies built on the dangerously misguided theory that factory jobs obviated the need to produce rice and other food locally. He made a special point to note that the policy had benefited farmers in his home state of Arkansas. The message was clear: This time would be different. And he had grand plans for what the industry could become. Clinton predicted that with the right support to the garment sector, 100,000 jobs would be created “in short order.”
Today’s reality, though, falls far short of the 2012 dream—despite an incredible financial investment. Far from 100,000 jobs—or even the 60,000 promised within five years of the park’s opening—Caracol currently employs just 5,479 people full time. That comes out to roughly $55,000 in investment per job created so far; or, to put it another way, about 30 times more per job than the average Sae-A worker makes per year. The park, built on the site of a former U.S. Marine-run slave labor camp during the 1915-1934 U.S. occupation, has the best-paved roads and manicured sidewalks in the country, but most of the land remains vacant.
But the workers have their own complaints, starting with pay. Aselyne Jean-Gilles, 35, makes the minimum 225 gourdes a day, or about $4.75. She says she spends $3.19 on food, plus 45 cents each way for a group taxi that takes her from her home in Cap-Haïtien to a town where she can catch a free shuttle to work. She does not have children yet. “If you do, you can’t afford to do anything,” she says.
(.. and the rich get richer)