Go Lean…Caribbean

Go Lean Commentary

Fool me once, shame of you; fool me twice, shame on me.

Haitians in the Diaspora (Miami) were fooled by the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump in 2016.

He asserted that he cared …

He did not!

Almost immediately after his inauguration he started disrespecting Haitians and undermining their progress. See this actuality in the reporting of this news article here:

Title: Trump And Haitians: He Said He’d Be Their Champ. Many Now Feel Like Chumps.
Sub-title: Donald Trump won a surprising number of Haitian-American votes in 2016. But since then he’s burned a lot of bridges to Little Haiti. Will it burn him next week?

AUDIO Podcast:
https://soundcloud.com/wlrn/645-am-trump-and-haitians-he-said-hed-be-their-champ-many-now-feel-like-chumps

WLRN

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By: Tim Padgett
In September 2016, then Republican presidential candidate came to Miami’s Little Haiti and made an unexpected pitch to Haitian-American voters, who have historically backed Democrats.

“I’m running to represent Haitian-Americans,” Trump told a supportive crowd at the Little Haiti Cultural Center. “I really want to be your greatest champion, and I will be your champion.”

And it worked. Surprisingly, an estimated fifth of Haitian voters in Florida, and many elsewhere in the U.S., cast ballots for Trump.

But it didn’t take long for President Trump to start burning his bridges with Haitians.

Less than a year after he took office, Haitians were protesting in front of his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. They were angry that he’d moved to end the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, that had been given to Haitians in the U.S. after Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake; that he’d accelerated deportations of Haitians — and that he’d called Haiti a “shithole” country.

“It hurt. It was a visceral hurt,” says Pierre Imbert, one of the Haitian-Americans who voted for Trump — and now regrets it.

“President Trump unfortunately has been horrible to Haitians.”

Imbert, who was born in Haiti and lives in Aventura, is a founding director of the Ayiti Community Trust, an NGO based in North Miami that promotes development in Haiti.

He’s a registered independent and — despite the anti-immigrant and race-baiting rhetoric that drenched Trump’s 2016 campaign — he voted for Trump hoping he’d change decades of failed U.S. policy in Haiti.

Failure, Imbert adds, that was especially frustrating after the earthquake, when U.S.-led reconstruction projects seemed to ignore regular Haitians like his relatives there.

“Close family members put together, in Haiti, a supermarket serving an area that was deprived and then folded because small and mid-size business enterprises couldn’t get the assistance that they needed,” Imbert recalls.

“It made it more difficult to nourish hope. And Trump presented himself as a viable alternative, a champion of Haiti causes.”

I voted for Trump in great defiance of my friends, my colleagues and family expectations. And I have had four years to pay for it.- Pierre Imbert

But Imbert says Trump’s disdainful neglect of Haiti since then has only helped to worsen its poverty and political chaos. Trump’s vulgar remark about Haiti was the low point — a betrayal that hurt more, Imbert says, because he’d gone out on a personal limb to support Trump.

“It was in great defiance of my friends, my colleagues and family expectations,” he says. “And I have had four years to pay for it.”

Imbert says this time he’ll vote for Trump’s Democratic opponent, Joe Biden. And that’s also a change from 2016. That year many Haitians, even if they didn’t support Trump, stayed home not to vote for Hillary Clinton.

CLINTON BACKLASH
Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, were particularly unpopular with the Haitian-American community. Their nonprofit Clinton Foundation was widely criticized for its work in post-earthquake Haiti.

The Clintons deny any wrongdoing, but Haitians felt there was a lack of transparency and accountability involving the spending of billions of dollars the international community pledged for Haiti’s reconstruction. And many, fairly or not, associated the Clintons with the U.S. and international mishandling of Haiti aid and crises like a cholera epidemic.

“There was a feeling of exploitation,” says Gilbert Saint-Jean, a Haitian-American scientist in Miami who works with the Haitian-American Voter Empowerment Coalition (HAVE).

“2016 represented a burgeoning movement within the Haitian-American community to hold their elected representatives accountable,” he says. “That backlash against the Clintons was a manifestation of that.”

Saint-Jean says it also reflected frustration that Washington rarely consults the Haitian diaspora.

“To have Donald Trump, a major U.S. presidential candidate, actually come visit the community was of significance.”

So Biden made a point of visiting Little Haiti himself this month — Trump, who is much less welcome in Little Haiti these days, has not visited during this campaign.

Haitian diaspora groups also sent Biden a letter this month laying out the issues they want him to address if he wins, such as TPS.

“I believe Biden has shown more support for Latin America and the Caribbean, and for Haiti too,” says Imbert. “But if we learned any lesson from 2016, it’s that we have to leverage our growing voter strength and hold whomever we support accountable.”

Even if far fewer Haitians are expected to vote for Trump this time, the Haitian expat who helped organize his visit here in 2016 has no regrets.

“We are facing two parties, Democrat and Republican, who don’t see us Haitians as allies,” says Ringo Cayard, a government lobbyist in North Miami.

Like many Haitians these days, Cayard feels if Haitians avoid becoming a monolithic bloc and instead split their vote, neither party will take them for granted or ignore them.

“We cannot put all our eggs in one basket,” he insists

Some Haitians do still plan to put their votes in Trump’s basket next week. WLRN reached out to at least half a dozen of them; but unlike four years ago, when Haitian-American Trump voters were usually vocal about their preference, none wanted to talk this time — including a Palm Beach Haitian expat who runs a Facebook page called “Haiti for Trump.”

In 2016 — when Trump won Florida by little more than 100,000 votes — his boost in the Haitian community might have helped put him over the top. In 2020, the apparent drop in enthusiasm could hurt Trump in a Florida race that looks to be as close — if not closer.

Related: Biden Senior Adviser Says Economic Plan Targets Left- and Right-Leaning Haitian Voters

Source: https://www.wlrn.org/2020-10-26/trump-and-haitians-he-said-hed-be-their-champ-many-now-feel-like-chumps posted and retrieved October 26, 2020.

Did the Haitian Diaspora, Caribbean emigrants from a majority Black country, really need the 4 years of the Trump Administration to know that Donald Trump would fool them?

No, his years as president were not his first act of foolery towards Black populations. He had previously disrespected, assaulted and insulted the Black community. He said and showed who he truly was … from before.

“From the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” – The Bible Luke 6:45

See “Donald Trump’s long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2011″ in the Appendix below.

Every month, the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean presents a Teaching Series to address issues germane to Caribbean life and culture. For this month of October 2020, we are looking at the US General Election of November 3. It is amazing that we in the Caribbean are relevant in America’s Decision 2020. This is because our numbers are strong – upwards of 22 million people, 7 percent of the US population; this is enough to have relevance in a political race.

This is entry 2-of-5, continuing the thesis that the Caribbean member-states finally get to voice their disgust for actions (or inactions) of the last 4 years. Caribbean people have more to say; people are listening now. Consider here, the full catalog of the series this month:

1. Decision 2020: Puerto Rico claps back at Trump
2. Decision 2020: Haiti’s Agenda 2016 ==> 2020 – Trump never cared
3. Decision 2020: Latino Gender Gap – More ‘Toxic Masculinity’
4. Decision 2020: More Immigration or Less
5. Decision 2020: What’s Next for Cuba & Venezuela

Decision 2020 allows us to analyze the motivations and sensibilities of the Caribbean heart.

What is the Haitian Agenda for 2020? What is the Haitian Diaspora Agenda?

It should be the same as every other Caribbean member-state:

To make the homeland a better place to live, work and play.

But hoping for some Foreign Man in Washington – Trump or Biden – to do it for us is a fallacy. The heavy-lifting for change must be accomplished “for us by us“.

So yes, now is the time to vote Trump out, but then we need to engage a sound roadmap to make real change in Haiti and the other 29 Caribbean member-states.

How?

This is the key question … and possible answers has been detailed in previous commentaries; see this chronological sample here:

Fixing Haiti – Can the Diaspora be the Answer? – September 30, 2017
Haiti continues to be the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. They boast bad dysfunction!

Many people may argue – and they would be correct – that the reformation and transformation of Haiti should come from Haiti and Haitians first. …

But can Haiti’s Diaspora be their “panacea” – the cure-all for all its societal ills?

Haiti’s problems have been too tumultuous for Haitians on the island to assuage on their own. Consider the news [articles]; as a poor country with a far-flung Diaspora, there is some hope for Diaspora financing. So the people within this community continue to hope that their panacea – solution, cure-all for their ills – may come from their Diaspora.

Here we go again. We have seen how one Caribbean country after another put their hope and faith in their young people that they send off to the “mainland”. …

When will “our” Caribbean people learn? A trip (relocation) from the Caribbean to the mainland, tends to be One-Way.

In many of the Caribbean homelands, there is such a high societal abandonment rate that the population of the citizenry is approaching a distribution where half of the citizens live in the homeland and the other half live abroad – in the Diaspora. When this is not the case – as in Haiti – then a majority of the educated population have fled. One report presents that abandonment rate of 70 percent. …

The movement behind the book Go Lean … Caribbean has been consistent in urging the governments of the Caribbean member-states to NOT put their hope and faith in their Diaspora to look back to their homelands and be the panacea that their societies need. …

Yes, the problem of this Diaspora-outreach strategy is that it double-downs on the failure of why the Diaspora left in the first place. When we look at Haiti and see the many failures of that country, we realize that the Haitians on the island and the Haitians in the Diaspora cannot, single-handedly or collectively, solve the problems on that homeland. No, something bigger and better is needed.

Enter the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). This is presented as the organizational solution for Haiti; this is the panacea. We need people to stay in their Caribbean homelands, not flee. We need them to prosper where planted. Governments cannot expect to derive revenues from the emigrated Diaspora; this is equivalent to demanding alimony after a divorce. This is unrealistic and impractical as a government policy. There needs to be a better system of governance.

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Haiti – Beauty ‘Only a Mother Can Love’ – January 10, 2018
While this country [Haiti] has some beautiful terrain, poverty and mis-management has sullied a lot of its natural beauty. In some places, Haiti is a land where “only a mother can love”.

Yet still, many mothers have stepped in, stepped up and are showing love to this land!

May we all be inspired by their examples. …

The movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean … double-downs on the homeland; it advocates for the Caribbean Diaspora – like the above “Sheroes” – to return to their communities and for in-country residents to not leave in the first place. While no society is perfect anywhere in the world, the Go Lean book posits that the Caribbean is easier to reform and transform. Plus the inherent beauty of the islands, coastal states, cultures and hospitality makes the heavy-lifting to transform our community worth all the effort and sacrifice.

There is no doubt that Haiti has seen a lot of dysfunction; the country flirts with Failed-State status. But change is afoot!

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt new community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines of Caribbean society. One advocacy is the deployment of Self-Governing Entities – industrial sites though physically located in a member-state, like Haiti, actually administered by agencies of the CU Federation (Page 105). Another advocacy is the “Reboot of Haiti”. The book posits that solutions for the Caribbean must first come from the Caribbean. Therefore, the roadmap calls for a Caribbean-styled Marshall Plan. …

A big concern for Haiti is the lack of jobs – [one] article cited a 60 percent poverty/unemployment rate. The Go Lean roadmap seeks to assuage this economic challenge by the facilitation of formal jobs and informal gigs, especially on the Self-Governing Entity job sites. Welcome to the Gig Economy …

A gig economy is an environment in which temporary positions are common and organizations contract with independent workers for short-term engagements. The trend toward a gig economy has begun. A study by financial systems company, Intuit, predicted that by 2020, 40 percent of American workers would be independent contractors.

We can ride this trend in the Caribbean as well. Haiti would be perfectly suited.

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The Spoken and Unspoken on Haiti – January 16, 2018
Donald J. Trump called Haiti a “shit-hole” country while negotiating the details for an immigration reform bill with his political opponents.

This declaration spewed controversy and disgust in the US … and abroad; even here in the Caribbean. …

For people to say something like the above about a Caribbean country shows that truly, they have no regard for that country. Take away their words and study their actions (i.e. policies) and we see a consistent trend – spoken or unspoken – that there is really no regard for Haiti – and other Caribbean member-states.

The movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean have said a lot about Haiti. We have told the truth, and the truth is not pretty.

Haiti is effectively a Failed-State.

Yet, still we make this statements in love – not hate; not bias; not prejudice nor blatant racism. We have also followed-up from “talking this talk” to “walking the walk” and have presented an Action Plan, a Way Forward for reforming and transforming Haiti.

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Marshall Plan – Haiti: Past time for Mitigation – May 12, 2019

Europe endured a lot of dysfunction during the 20th Century; think World War I and World War II. Let’s face it, these European countries did NOT deserve any kindness or help (such as the $13 Billion in the Marshall Plan) that were eventually given to them after WWII; it was a kindness and an investment from the US to the Europeans. It was Grace!

…

All of this time, and before, the Caribbean country of Haiti languished. They were past the time that they needed Grace and help; but such deliveries were fleeting. …

This is the assertion by the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean – and the whole world knows it – that due to Haiti’s Black-and-Brown population demographic, their country was ignored or maybe even further abused. …

Will someone walk-up to Haiti and give them $13 Billion (or $91 Billion in today’s dollars) to reboot, recover and turn-around the prior 2 centuries of dysfunction?

Probably, not!

(What’s really sad, is people walk-up to further exploit and abuse Haiti and Haitians).

It will be up to the Caribbean to solve the Caribbean’s problems. We do have more than one Failed-State; think Cuba; and we have many other member-states, just a few notches behind Cuba & Haiti on the Failed-State indices. So we must execute strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to effect the needed reboot, recovery and turn-around.

Yes, we can succeed, the same as post-World War II Europe succeeded with the 4-year execution of their Marshall Plan. Yes, we can!

Haiti is already a member-state in the Caribbean Community (CariCom). So they have already embraced the concept of regional interdependence. What’s missing now is the leveraging of the Single Market, adding “teeth to the prospect” of  a unified neighborhood with “Trade & Security” initiatives.

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Trump won in 2016 thanks to the Haitian Diaspora vote. They were fooled!

Now, let’s abandon WRONG politics and work only for real political change in the Caribbean region.

To reform the Caribbean,we do need politics and politicians: Top Down change is a requirement – referring to Public Leaders, Private Sector Leaders, & Public-Private Partnerships. Within this roadmap, we do plan to have a presence and our own advocacy in Washington (Go Lean book Page 117):

[Trade Mission] Office in Washington
This Washington-DC office will facilitate the interaction with the US federal government and its different agencies in the nation’s capital. There is also the need to lobby: the elected Congressmen representing the US territories (Puerto Rico & Virgin Islands) and the many NGOs based in Washington. The CU mission to facilitate repatriation with their US earned entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, etc.) will take some tense negotiations and acute coordination.

The CU will also petition the US applicable departments (Defense, State) for grants/aid to facilitate military acquisitions.

But Bottoms-Up change is essential too. This refers to the aggregation of people, organizations and institutions demanding reform and transformations – building momentum.

This is the purpose of this roadmap, commentary, and the Go Lean movement in general: to do the heavy-lifting to finally:

Become a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

About the Book
The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), for the elevation of Caribbean society – for all member-states. This CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives:

• Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion and create 2.2 million new jobs.
• Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
• Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt new community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines of Caribbean society.

Download the free e-Book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

Who We Are
The movement behind the Go Lean book – a non-partisan, apolitical, religiously-neutral Community Development Foundation chartered for the purpose of empowering and re-booting economic engines – stresses that reforming and transforming the Caribbean societal engines must be a regional pursuit. This was an early motivation for the roadmap, as pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 12 – 13):

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

xiii.   Whereas the legacy of dissensions in many member-states (for example: Haiti and Cuba) will require a concerted effort to integrate the exile community’s repatriation, the Federation must arrange for Reconciliation Commissions to satiate a demand for justice.

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxiv. Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

Sign the petition to lean-in for this roadmap for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation.

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Appendix – Title: Donald Trump’s long history of racism, from the 1970s to [2011] 2020
Sub-title: Trump has repeatedly claimed he’s “the least racist person.” His history suggests otherwise.
By: German Lopez

If you ask President Donald Trump, he isn’t racist. To the contrary, he’s repeatedly said that he’s “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.”

Trump’s actual record, however, tells a very different story.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly made explicitly racist and otherwise bigoted remarks, from calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, to proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the US, to suggesting a judge should recuse himself from a case solely because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.

The trend has continued into his presidency. From stereotyping a Black reporter to pandering to white supremacists after they held a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to making a joke about the Trail of Tears, Trump hasn’t stopped with racist acts after his 2016 election.

Most recently, Trump has called the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” — racist terms that tap into the kind of xenophobia that he latched onto during his 2016 presidential campaign; Trump’s own adviser, Kellyanne Conway, previously called “kung flu” a “highly offensive” term. And Trump insinuated that Sen. Kamala Harris, who’s Black, “doesn’t meet the requirements” to run for vice president — a repeat of the birther conspiracy theory that he perpetuated about former President Barack Obama.

This is nothing new for Trump. In fact, the very first time Trump appeared in the pages of the New York Times, back in the 1970s, was when the US Department of Justice sued him for racial discrimination. Since then, he has repeatedly appeared in newspaper pages across the world as he inspired more similar controversies.

This long history is important. It would be one thing if Trump misspoke one or two times. But when you take all of his actions and comments together, a clear pattern emerges — one that suggests that bigotry is not just political opportunism on Trump’s part but a real element of his personality, character, and career.

Trump has a long history of racist controversies

Here’s a breakdown of Trump’s history, taken largely from Dara Lind’s list for Vox and an op-ed by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

• 1973: The US Department of Justice — under the Nixon administration, out of all administrations — sued the Trump Management Corporation for violating the Fair Housing Act. Federal officials found evidence that Trump had refused to rent to Black tenants and lied to Black applicants about whether apartments were available, among other accusations. Trump said the federal government was trying to get him to rent to welfare recipients. In the aftermath, he signed an agreement in 1975 agreeing not to discriminate to renters of color without admitting to previous discrimination.
• 1980s: Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle, accused another one of Trump’s businesses of discrimination. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” Brown said. “It was the eighties, I was a teenager, but I remember it: They put us all in the back.”
• 1989: In a controversial case that’s been characterized as a modern-day lynching, four Black teenagers and one Latino teenager — the “Central Park Five” — were accused of attacking and raping a jogger in New York City. Trump immediately took charge in the case, running an ad in local papers demanding, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” The teens’ convictions were later vacated after they spent seven to 13 years in prison, and the city paid $41 million in a settlement to the teens. But Trump in October 2016 said he still believes they’re guilty, despite the DNA evidence to the contrary.
• 1991: A book by John O’Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted Trump’s criticism of a Black accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Trump later said in a 1997 Playboy interview that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”
• 1992: The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino had to pay a $200,000 fine because it transferred Black and women dealers off tables to accommodate a big-time gambler’s prejudices.
• 1993: In congressional testimony, Trump said that some Native American reservations operating casinos shouldn’t be allowed because “they don’t look like Indians to me.”
• 2000: In opposition to a casino proposed by the St. Regis Mohawk tribe, which he saw as a financial threat to his casinos in Atlantic City, Trump secretly ran a series of ads suggesting the tribe had a “record of criminal activity [that] is well documented.”
• 2004: In season two of The Apprentice, Trump fired Kevin Allen, a Black contestant, for being overeducated. “You’re an unbelievably talented guy in terms of education, and you haven’t done anything,” Trump said on the show. “At some point you have to say, ‘That’s enough.’”
• 2005: Trump publicly pitched what was essentially The Apprentice: White People vs. Black People. He said he “wasn’t particularly happy” with the most recent season of his show, so he was considering “an idea that is fairly controversial — creating a team of successful African Americans versus a team of successful whites. Whether people like that idea or not, it is somewhat reflective of our very vicious world.”
• 2010: In 2010, there was a huge national controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque” — a proposal to build a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, near the site of the 9/11 attacks. Trump opposed the project, calling it “insensitive,” and offered to buy out one of the investors in the project. On The Late Show With David Letterman, Trump argued, referring to Muslims, “Well, somebody’s blowing us up. Somebody’s blowing up buildings, and somebody’s doing lots of bad stuff.”
• 2011: Trump played a big role in pushing false rumors that Obama — the country’s first Black president — was not born in the US. He claimed to send investigators to Hawaii to look into Obama’s birth certificate. Obama later released his birth certificate, calling Trump a “carnival barker.” The research has found a strong correlation between birtherism, as the conspiracy theory is called, and racism. But Trump has reportedly continued pushing this conspiracy theory in private.
• 2011: While Trump suggested that Obama wasn’t born in the US, he also argued that maybe Obama wasn’t a good enough student to have gotten into Columbia or Harvard Law School, and demanded Obama release his university transcripts. Trump claimed, “I heard he was a terrible student. Terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?”

For many people, none of these incidents, individually, may be damning: One of these alone might suggest that Trump is simply a bad speaker and perhaps racially insensitive (“politically incorrect,” as he would put it), but not overtly racist.

But when you put all these events together, a clear pattern emerges. At the very least, Trump has a history of playing into people’s racism to bolster himself — and that likely says something about him, too.

And, of course, there’s everything that’s happened through and since his presidential campaign.

See the full article here for many more evidence  of Trump’s blatant racism:  https://www.vox.com/2016/7/25/12270880/donald-trump-racist-racism-history posted August 13, 2020; retrieved October 26, 2020.
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