Tag: Haiti

Slave Trade – International Day of Rememberance – ENCORE

Posted on August 23, 2017 in Ethos, Planning

Today – August 23 – is a BIG day in Caribbean history; it is the “International Day for Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition“.

Yes, that is a real thing!

Not only was the Slave Trade a real thing, but so too this Remembrance. In fact the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) had actually commissioned an artist – Rodney Leon, an American architect of Haitian descent – to erect a monument, at the UN’s New York Headquarters, to highlight these 3 elements:

FIRST ELEMENT: “Acknowledge the tragedy” is a three dimensional map inscribed on the interior of the memorial. This map highlights the African continent at the centre of the slave trade and illustrates the global scale, complexity and impact of the triangular slave trade.
SECOND ELEMENT: “Consider the legacy” features a full-scale human replica carved out of black Zimbabwean granite. This element illustrates the extreme conditions under which millions of African people were transported during the middle passage. The sculpture represents the spirit of the men, women and children who lost their lives in the transatlantic slave trade.
THIRD ELEMENT: “Lest we forget” is a triangular reflecting pool where visitors can honour the memory of the millions of souls that were lost.

Source retrieved August 23, 2017 from: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/events/prizes-and-celebrations/celebrations/international-days/slave-trade-and-its-abolition-2017/the-ark-of-return-memorial/

The Memorial can be visited at:

United Nations Visitors Plaza

1st Avenue and 46th Street

New York, NY 10017

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VIDEO – The Ark of Return – https://youtu.be/sqeMLnxHmy4

Published on Jul 20, 2015 – United Nations – After winning a design competition sponsored by UNESCO in 2013, Rodney Leon’s masterpiece, the Ark of Return, which is the Permanent Memorial in honour of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, was officially unveiled in New York on 25th March 2015.

Category: News & Politics

License: Standard YouTube License

This commemoration is presented with an Encore of the blog-commentary from this day last year (2016) which detailed: “A Lesson in History – Haiti 1804“. This day in 1791 – when Haiti’s slave rebellion began – turns out to be a BIG day in that country’s history as well. See the Encore here:

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Go Lean Commentary – A Lesson in History – Haiti 1804

There are important lessons to learn from history. This commentary considers one particular lesson: the repercussions and consequences from Slavery and the Slave Trade.

Today – August 23 – is the official commemoration of the Slave Trade, as declared by UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization). It measures the date that the 1791 Slave Rebellion in Haiti commenced.

“All of humanity is part of this story, in its transgressions and good deeds” – Irina Bokova, UNESCO Director-General

This is a very important lesson that we glean from this history, no matter our race or homeland. Let’s consider this lesson from the perspective of the Caribbean and for the benefit of Caribbean elevation.

In jurisprudence, there is the concept of felony murder.

… if a perpetrator robs a liquor store and the clerk has a heart-attack and dies, that perpetrator, once caught is tried for felony murder. The definition is the consequence of death in the act of committing a felony. What’s ironic is this charge would also apply if its a co-perpetrator that dies of the heart-attack rather than a victim-clerk.

This justice standard also applies with family discipline. If/when a child is being naughty and accordingly a sibling is unintentionally hurt, the naughty behavior will almost always be punished for the injury, because it was linked to the bad behavior.

A lesson learned from family discipline; and a lesson learned from criminal law. All of these scenarios present consequences to bad, abusive behavior. This sets the stage for better understanding of this important lesson from the international history of the year 1804. After 200 years of the Slave Trade, repercussions and consequences were bound to strike. This happened in the Caribbean country of Haiti. The following catastrophic events transpired in the decade leading up to 1804:

1791 Slave Rebellion – See Appendix A below – A direct spinoff from the French Revolution’s demand for equality
Leadership of Louverture – As Governor-General, Toussaint Louverture sought to return Haiti to France without Slavery.
Resistance to Slavery – The French planned and attempted to re-instate Slavery
Free Republic – The first Black State in the New World
1804 Massacre of the French – See Appendix B below – An illogical solution that killing Whites would prevent future enslavement.

Make no mistake, the Massacre of 1804 – where 3,000 to 5,000 White men, women and children were killed – was a direct consequence of Slavery and the Slave Trade.

See VIDEO here of a comprehensive TED story:

VIDEO – The Atlantic Slave Trade: What too few textbooks told you – https://youtu.be/3NXC4Q_4JVg

Published on Dec 22, 2014 – Slavery has occurred in many forms throughout the world, but the Atlantic slave trade — which forcibly brought more than 10 million Africans to the Americas — stands out for both its global scale and its lasting legacy. Anthony Hazard discusses the historical, economic and personal impact of this massive historical injustice.
Lesson by Anthony Hazard, animation by NEIGHBOR.
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-atlanti…

Category – Education

License – Standard YouTube License

The review of the historic events is more than just an academic discussion, the book Go Lean…Caribbean aspires to economic principles that dictate that “consequences of choices lie in the future”. The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). Haiti – the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere – is one of the 30 member-states for this Caribbean confederacy.

The people of the Caribbean need to understand the cause of this country’s decline and dysfunction; and by extension, the cause of dysfunction for the rest of the Caribbean. It is tied to the events of 1804. How will this lesson help us today?

Reality of the Legacy – The new Black State of Haiti was censored, sanctioned and scorned upon by all European powers (White people). According to a previous blog-commentary, to finally be recognized, France required the new country of Haiti to offset the income that would be lost by French settlers and slave owners; they demanded compensation amounting to 150 million gold francs. After a new deal was struck in 1838, Haiti agreed to pay France 90 million gold francs (the equivalent of €17 billion today). It was not until 1952 that Haiti made the final payment on what became known as its “Independence Debt”. Many analysts posit that the compensation Haiti paid to France throughout the 19th century “strangled development” and hindered the “evolution of the country”. The CU/Go Lean book assessed the near-Failed-State status of Haiti – “it is what it is”; Haiti is as bad as advertised – and then strategized solutions to reboot the economic-security-governing engines of this Republic.
Security assurances must be enabled to complement economics objectives – Slavery was introduced to the New World as an economic empowerment strategy, though it was flawed in its premise of oppressing the human rights of a whole class of humans. The only way to succeed for the centuries that it survived was with a strong military backing – fear of immediate death and destruction. The CU/Go Lean premise is that economics engines and security apparatus must work hand-in-hand. This is weaved throughout the roadmap.
Minority Equalization – The lessons of slavery is that race divides societies; and when there is this division, there is always the tendency for one group to put themselves above other groups. Many times the divisions are for majority population groups versus minorities. If the planners of the new Caribbean want to apply lessons from Slavery’s history, we must allow for justice institutions to consider the realities of minorities. The CU security pact must defend against regional threats, including domestic terrorism. This includes gangs and their junior counterparts, bullies. The CU plans for community messaging in the campaign for anti-bullying and mitigations.
Reconciliation of issues are not optional, more conflict will emerge otherwise – The issues that caused division in Haiti where not dealt with between 1791 and 1803. A “Great Day of Reckoning” could not be avoided. The Natural Law instinct was to avenge for past atrocities – “an eye for an eye”. The CU/Go Lean roadmap accepts that an “eye for an eye” justice stance would result in a lot of “blindness”; so instead of revenge, the strategy is justice by means of Truth & Reconciliation Commissions – a lesson learned from South Africa – to deal with a lot of the latent issues from the last Caribbean century (i.e. Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, etc).

The purpose of the Go Lean roadmap is to turn-around the downward trends in the Caribbean today, to reverse course and elevate Caribbean society. The CU, applying lessons from best-practices, has prime directives proclaimed as follows:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The Go Lean book details a series of assessments, community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to empower all the factions in the Caribbean region:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – “Crap” Happens	Page 23
Community Ethos – Minority Equalization	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations	Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing	Page 35
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness	Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Integrate region for Economics & Security	Page 45
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization	Page 57
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Department of Homeland Security	Page 75
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Department of Justice	Page 77
Implementation – Assemble Existing Super-national Institutions	Page 96
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Foreign Policy Initiatives at Start-up	Page 102
Implementation – Security Initiatives at Start-up	Page 103
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Implementation – Ways to Promote Independence	Page 120
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices	Page 134
Planning – Lessons from the US Constitution	Page 145
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Cooperatives	Page 176
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice	Page 177
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security	Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Mitigate Terrorism	Page 181
Advocacy – Ways to Protect Human Rights	Page 220
Advocacy – Battles in the War on Poverty	Page 222
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti	Page 238

Why bother with all this dark talk about Slavery and the Slave Trade?

UNESCO has provided a clear answer for this question with this declarative statement:

Ignorance or concealment of major historical events constitutes an obstacle to mutual understanding, reconciliation and cooperation among peoples. UNESCO has thus decided to break the silence surrounding the Slave Trade and Slavery that have concerned all continents and caused the great upheavals that have shaped our modern societies.

The subject of Slavery and the Slave Trade relates to economic, security and governing functioning in a society. The repercussions and consequences of 1804 lingers down to this day. There have been a number of blog-commentaries by the Go Lean promoters that have developed related topics. See a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8724	Remembering African Nationalist Marcus Garvey: Still Relevant Today
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7682	Frederick Douglass – Pioneer & Role Model for Single Cause: Abolition
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7221	Street naming for Martin Luther King reveals continued racial animosity
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5695	Repenting, Forgiving and Reconciling the Past Bad Deeds
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5123	A Lesson in History – Royal Charters: Zimbabwe -vs- South Africa
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4971	A Lesson in History – Royal Charters: Truth & Consequence
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=451	CariCom position on Slavery/Colonization Reparations

This commentary purports that there have been watershed events in history since the emergence of the slave economy. They include:

1804 – Haiti’s Massacre of White Slave Advocates
1861 – US Civil War – A Demonstration of the Resolve of the “Pro” and “Anti” Slavery Camps
1914 – World War I: “Line in the Sand”
1948 – United Nations Declaration of Human Rights

No doubt the Massacre of 1804 was a crisis. It was not wasted; it was used in a good way to escalate the abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. It was also used in a bad way to justify further oppression of the African Diaspora in the New World.

A pivotal year.

Let’s learn from this year of 1804; and from the repercussions and consequences from that year. In many ways, the world has not moved! Racism and the suppression of the African race lingers … even today … in Europe and in the Americas.

Our goal is to reform and transform the Caribbean, not Europe or America. We hereby urge everyone in the Caribbean – people, institutions and governments – to lean-in to this Go Lean roadmap. It is time now to move. We must get the Caribbean region to a new destination, one where opportunity meets preparation. This is the destination where the Caribbean is a better homeland to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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Appendix A Title: International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition 2016

— Message from Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO —

In the night of 22 to 23 August 1791, men and women, torn from Africa and sold into slavery, revolted against the slave system to obtain freedom and independence for Haiti, gained in 1804. The uprising was a turning point in human history, greatly impacting the establishment of universal human rights, for which we are all indebted.

The courage of these men and women has created obligations for us. UNESCO is marking International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition to pay tribute to all those who fought for freedom, and, in their name, to continue teaching about their story and the values therein. The success of this rebellion, led by the slaves themselves, is a deep source of inspiration today for the fight against all forms of servitude, racism, prejudice, racial discrimination and social injustice that are a legacy of slavery.

The history of the slave trade and slavery created a storm of rage, cruelty and bitterness that has not yet abated. It is also a story of courage, freedom and pride in newfound freedom. All of humanity is part of this story, in its transgressions and good deeds. It would be a mistake and a crime to cover it up and forget. Through its project The Slave Route, UNESCO intends to find in this collective memory the strength to build a better world and to show the historical and moral connections that unite different peoples.

In this same frame of mind, the United Nations proclaimed the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024). UNESCO is contributing to it through its educational, cultural and scientific programmes so as to promote the contribution of people of African descent to building modern societies and ensuring dignity and equality for all human beings, without distinction.
Source: Retrieved August 23, 2016 from: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/events/prizes-and-celebrations/celebrations/international-days/slave-trade-and-its-abolition/

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Appendix B Title: 1804 Haiti Massacre

The 1804 Haiti Massacre was a massacre carried out against the remaining white population of native Frenchmen and French Creoles (or Franco-Haitians) in Haiti by Haitian soldiers by the order of Jean-Jacques Dessalines who had decreed that all those suspected of conspiring in the acts of the expelled army should be put to death.^[1] Throughout the nineteenth century, these events were well known in the United States where they were referred to as “the horrors of St. Domingo” and particularly polarized Southern public opinion on the question of the abolition of slavery.^[2][3]

The massacre, which took place in the entire territory of Haiti, was carried out from early February 1804 until 22 April 1804, and resulted in the deaths of between 3,000 and 5,000 people of all ages and genders.^[4]

Squads of soldiers moved from house to house, torturing and killing entire families.^[5] Even whites who had been friendly and sympathetic to the black population were imprisoned and later killed.^[6] A second wave of massacres targeted white women and children.^[6]

Writers Dirk Moses and Dan Stone wrote that it served as a form of revenge by an oppressed group that exacted out against those who had previously dominated them.^[7]

Aftermath
By the end of April 1804, some 3,000 to 5,000 people had been killed^[23] and the white Haitians were practically eradicated. Only three categories of white people, except foreigners, were selected as exceptions and spared: the Polish soldiers who deserted from the French army; the little group of German colonists invited to Nord-Ouest (North-West), Haiti before the revolution; and a group of medical doctors and professionals.^[14] Reportedly, also people with connections to officers in the Haitian army were spared, as well as the women who agreed to marry non-white men.^[23]

Dessalines did not try to hide the massacre from the world. In an official proclamation of 8 April 1804, he stated, “We have given these true cannibals war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage. Yes, I have saved my country, I have avenged America”.^[14] He referred to the massacre as an act of national authority. Dessalines regarded the elimination of the white Haitians an act of political necessity, as they were regarded as a threat to the peace between the black and the colored. It was also regarded as a necessary act of vengeance.^[23]

Dessalines was eager to assure that Haiti was not a threat to other nations and that it sought to establish friendly relations also to nations where slavery was still allowed.^[26]Dessalines’ secretary Boisrond-Tonnerre stated, “For our declaration of independence, we should have the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen!”^[27]

In the 1805 constitution, all citizens were defined as “black”,^[28] and white men were banned from owning land.^[23][29]

The 1804 massacre had a long-lasting effect on the view of the Haitian Revolution and helped to create a legacy of racial hostility in Haitian society.^[28]

At the time of the civil war, a major reason for southern whites, most of whom did not own slaves, to support slave-owners (and ultimately fight for the Confederacy) was fear of a genocide similar to the Haitian Massacre of 1804. This was explicitly referred to in Confederate discourse and propaganda.^[30][31]

The torture and massacre of whites in Haiti, normally known at the time as “the horrors of St. Domingo“, was a constant and prominent theme in the discourse of southern political leaders and had influenced American public opinion since the events took place.
Source: Retrieved August 22, 2016 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre

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Haiti, History, Model, Transform

A Lesson in History: Haiti’s Reasonable Doubt

Posted on February 4, 2017 in Government, Locations

Go Lean Commentary

There are important lessons to learn from history … regarding the ongoing theme of America’s War on the Caribbean.

Consider Haiti … again. America has a long and abusive history with Haiti, its oldest and poorest neighbor.

In 1915, more than a century after having eradicated slavery from their country, the people of Haiti suddenly find themselves the victims of a brutal American occupation, reigniting an all too familiar past for the proud, independent nation. – Documentary Synopsis

There is a very important point of consideration: Haiti and the Haitian people have a legitimate case of reasonable doubt for expecting regional leadership from the US. This commentary is also within the consistent theme for the movement behind the book Go Lean…Caribbean, whose goal and aspiration is for Caribbean people to take their own lead for Caribbean elevation. This applies doubly for Haiti.

Consider the full article here:

Title: The Forgotten Occupation
The Forgotten Occupation recounts the 19-year period during which the United States of America subjugated Haiti to a brutal occupation. From 1915 to 1934, the Haitian people found themselves under the rule of a system that was in large part influenced and pushed for by the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank), and that initially found support amongst many Haitians in the country.

The Forgotten Occupation is about Jim Crow, which was imported to Haiti by way of the American marines, whose perceptions of the Haitians they were occupying were rooted in the racist consciousness of the United States South from which most of them came. It is that consciousness that made it easy for the occupiers to kidnap innumerable men, take them away from their homes, and constrain them to forced labor. This process eventually ignited a mass rebellion.

The Forgotten Occupation is about those who resisted and paid for that resistance with their lives. It is about Charlemagne Peralte, the leader of the Cacos (the rebel group formed mainly of Haitian peasants) who, despite being outgunned, outmanned, and having little to no chance of a significant retaliation against the unstoppable force who now claimed their land, fought on as best as they could.

The Forgotten Occupation is about those who were displaced from their land, which was forcibly seized and handed over to corporations, including the Haitian-American Sugar Company and Dole: the American Pineapple Company.

The Forgotten Occupation is also about the rebirth of Haiti. For, due to the rabid racism it suffered under the US presence, Haiti was forced to reevaluate its identity as an extension of French culture and began to develop a deep appreciation for its African roots.

There are a large number of people, including many Haitians, who know nothing of these 19 years. The Forgotten Occupation seeks to shed a light on this significant chapter of Haiti’s history, which has long since faded from the collective mind, but still affects the country to this day.
Source: Retrieved February 4, 2017 from: http://www.theforgottenoccupation.com/

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VIDEO – The Forgotten Occupation (Trailer) – https://youtu.be/n7HjC8n_PsM

Published on Jun 18, 2015 – In 1915, more than a century after having eradicated slavery from their country, the people of Haiti suddenly find themselves the victims of a brutal American occupation, reigniting an all too familiar past for the proud, independent nation.

Category: Film & Animation

License: Standard YouTube License

The reasonable doubt the Haitian people may have toward America is not just 100 years old. It was also relevant 100 days ago; just a few months ago, during the Presidential Election in the US, in the race between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton. Universally in the US, the African-American population supported Hillary Clinton, but there was exception with the Haitian Intelligentsia … and the Haitian right-wing wealthy elite.

Yes, there is a Haitian Intelligentsia!

They have a low regard for Bill and Hillary Clinton … after their Clinton Foundation development initiatives. This regard was shared – make that exploited – by Donald Trump and his camp during the campaign. See here:

Trump’s team glommed onto the possibility that Haitian Americans—generally black, generally Democratic-leaning voters who make up roughly 2 percent of the population of Florida, where Trump and Hillary Clinton are separated by less than a point—might be persuaded to vote against the former Secretary of State (Hillary). The irony of a nativist pandering to thousands of immigrants and refugees aside, there was a logic to this. Many people rightly identify Clinton with failures of humanitarianism and development in Haiti. The Trump team has folded that perception into a half-true narrative in which Haiti—like Whitewater and Benghazi before it—becomes a synecdoche for all the ills, real and imagined, of the Clintons themselves.

There are good reasons the world’s first black Republic has been an island-sized headache for Clinton as she seeks the presidency. Haiti is a place where some of the darkest suppositions that lurk on the left and right about her and her husband take form. Here is an island country of 10 million people where America’s ultimate power couple invested considerable time and reputation. Here is a fragile state where each took turns implementing destructive policies whose highlights include overthrowing a presidential election. Bill Clinton in particular mixed personal relationships, business, and unaccountable power in ways that, if never exactly criminal, arouse the kind of suspicion that erodes public trust. No two individuals, including Haiti’s own leaders, enjoyed more power and influence than the Clintons in the morass of the failed reconstruction following the deadly Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake, when a troubled country managed to go from catastrophe to worse.

…

The reality is a lot more complicated (and interesting) than that, [the conspiracy theory that the Clinton stole billions of dollars from Haiti’s post-earthquake relief funds]. The United States and Haiti were the first two independent republics in the Americas, and our often blood-soaked relationship goes back a lot further than the meeting of a silky Arkansan and an ambitious Illinoisan at YaleLawSchool.

… wealthy Haitians openly loathe Bill Clinton, who ordered the U.S. invasion that put down the [right-wing military] junta and restored Aristide to power [in the 1990’s].

Source: Posted September 22, 2016; retrieved February 4, 2017 from: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/09/the_truth_about_the_clintons_and_haiti.html

Haiti has had to endure American dysfunction for a long time. The Go Lean movement has previously detailed the American societal defects – institutional racism and Crony-Capitalism – and how Caribbean communities have been impacted. There is cause-and-effect of these American dysfunctions in the Caribbean region in general and Haiti in particular. Reflect back on the 1915 Occupation:

“The reason it’s critical to understand the US Occupation is because many of the problems that Haiti has today, are actually of much more recent origin, they’re 20th century problems” – Laurent Dubois

See Appendix B below for more on Citibank – the instigator for American action – and their abusive behavior towards Haiti.

The review of these historic events are more than just an academic discussion, the book Go Lean…Caribbean aspires to economic principles that dictate that “consequences of choices lie in the future”. The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). Haiti – the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere – is one of the 30 member-states for this Caribbean confederacy. This poor status is a direct result of American and European (French) dysfunction over 300 years. Yet, the book asserts that we should not leave it up to these colonial masters to assuage our problems. We need our own expression of governance.

The Go Lean roadmap seeks to optimize the Caribbean governance. This vision is defined early in the book (Pages 10 – 12) in the following pronouncements in the Declaration of Interdependence:

Preamble: As the history of our region and the oppression, suppression and repression of its indigenous people is duly documented, there is no one alive who can be held accountable for the prior actions, and so we must put aside the shackles of systems of repression to instead formulate efficient and effective systems to steer our own destiny.

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.

xii. Whereas the legacy in recent times in individual states may be that of ineffectual governance with no redress to higher authority, the accedence of this Federation will ensure accountability and escalation of the human and civil rights of the people for good governance, justice assurances, due process and the rule of law. As such, any threats of a “failed state” status for any member state must enact emergency measures on behalf of the Federation to protect the human, civil and property rights of the citizens, residents, allies, trading partners, and visitors of the affected member state and the Federation as a whole.

The purpose of the Go Lean roadmap is to turn-around the downward trends for the Caribbean in general – Haiti included – to reverse course and finally elevate Caribbean society. The CU, applying lessons from the last 100 years, has prime directives proclaimed as follows:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & 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.

All of the focus on Haiti is not just history, there is currency as well; consider these developments that are en vogue right now:

The Go Lean/CU book and accompanying blog-commentaries all present a new vision and new values for Haiti’s future.

The Go Lean book details a series of assessments, community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to optimize the societal engines for Haiti … and other locales in the Caribbean region:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – “Crap” Happens	Page 23
Community Ethos – Minority Equalization	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations	Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing	Page 35
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Integrate region for Economics & Security	Page 45
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Department of Homeland Security	Page 75
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Department of Justice	Page 77
Implementation – Assemble Existing Super-national Institutions	Page 96
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Foreign Policy Initiatives at Start-up	Page 102
Implementation – Security Initiatives at Start-up	Page 103
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Implementation – Ways to Foster International Aid – Case Study: Haiti’s Earthquakes	Page 115
Implementation – Ways to Impact [Regional] Elections	Page 116
Implementation – Ways to Promote Independence	Page 120
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices	Page 134
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance	Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice	Page 177
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security	Page 180
Advocacy – Battles in the War on Poverty	Page 222
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti	Page 238

There have been a number of blog-commentaries by the Go Lean promoters that have developed related topics of lessons from history of race relations. See a sample list here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8767	A Lesson in History – Haiti 1804
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7738	A Lesson in History – Buffalo Soldiers
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5183	A Lesson in History – France and Mexico’s Dysfunctional Past
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5695	A Lesson in History – Repenting, Forgiving and Reconciling the Past
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5123	A Lesson in History – Royal Charters: Zimbabwe -vs- South Africa
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4971	A Lesson in History – Royal Charters: Truth & Consequence
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=451	CariCom position on Slavery/Colonization Reparations

Let’s learn from this history of Haiti’s past; and from the repercussions and consequences from those events. See a full related documentary in the Appendix A below. In many ways, Haiti has not moved. Also, America has not moved.

Our goal is to reform and transform Haiti and the Caribbean, not America. We hereby urge everyone in the Caribbean – people, institutions and governments – to lean-in to this Go Lean roadmap. It is time now to reboot Haiti. We must do the heavy-lifting ourselves, and not leave it up to any American elites – like the Clintons. We have reason for reasonable doubt for their aid and others’ aid.

This is what we all want: Caribbean facilitating a new Caribbean that is a better homeland to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

———

Appendix A – Documenting the U.S. Occupation of Haiti – https://youtu.be/nhPNU8aR2Co

Published on Feb 22, 2016 – A discussion with historian and archivist J. Michael Miller about the rich sources housed in the Marine Corps Library at Quantico surrounding the U.S. Occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934. Miller recently made possible the donation of a remarkable and rare text, the Monograph of Haiti, to Duke Libraries, and speaks about this and other sources he has found through his research.

More info: https://fsp.trinity.duke.edu/projects/documenting-us-occupation-haiti

Category: Education

License: Standard YouTube License

———-

Appendix B – Where Does Haiti Fit in Citigroup’s Corporate History?

Citigroup’s history in Haiti is remembered as both among the most spectacular episodes of U.S. dollar diplomacy in the Caribbean and as an egregious example of officials in Washington working at the behest of Wall Street. It’s also a story marked by military intervention, violations of national sovereignty and the deaths of thousands.

In the early 20th century, the National City Bank of New York, as Citigroup was then called, embarked on an ambitious and pioneering era of overseas expansion. Haiti emerged as one of National City’s first international projects. …

Source: Posted June 12, 2012; retrieved February 4, 2017 from: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2012-06-13/on-citigroup-s-anniversary-don-t-forget-its-brutal-past

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Banks, Haiti, History, Power, Security

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A Lesson in History: Haiti 1804

Posted on August 23, 2016 in Ethos, Planning

Go Lean Commentary

There are important lessons to learn from history. This commentary considers one particular lesson: the repercussions and consequences from Slavery and the Slave Trade.

“All of humanity is part of this story, in its transgressions and good deeds” – Irina Bokova, UNESCO Director-General

In jurisprudence, there is the concept of felony murder.

… if a perpetrator robs a liquor store and the clerk has a heart-attack and dies, that perpetrator, once caught is tried for felony murder. The definition is the consequence of death in the act of committing a felony. What’s ironic is this charge would also apply if its a co-perpetrator that dies of the heart-attack rather than a victim-clerk.

1791 Slave Rebellion – See Appendix A below – A direct spinoff from the French Revolution’s demand for equality
Leadership of Louverture – As Governor-General, Toussaint Louverture sought to return Haiti to France without Slavery.
Resistance to Slavery – The French planned and attempted to re-instate Slavery
Free Republic – The first Black State in the New World
1804 Massacre of the French – See Appendix B below – An illogical solution that killing Whites would prevent future enslavement.

Make no mistake, the Massacre of 1804 – where 3,000 to 5,000 White men, women and children were killed – was a direct consequence of Slavery and the Slave Trade.

See VIDEO here of a comprehensive TED story:

VIDEO – The Atlantic Slave Trade: What too few textbooks told you – https://youtu.be/3NXC4Q_4JVg

Published on Dec 22, 2014 – Slavery has occurred in many forms throughout the world, but the Atlantic slave trade — which forcibly brought more than 10 million Africans to the Americas — stands out for both its global scale and its lasting legacy. Anthony Hazard discusses the historical, economic and personal impact of this massive historical injustice.
Lesson by Anthony Hazard, animation by NEIGHBOR.
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-atlanti…

Category – Education

License – Standard YouTube License

Reality of the Legacy – The new Black State of Haiti was censored, sanctioned and scorned upon by all European powers (White people). According to a previous blog-commentary, to finally be recognized, France required the new country of Haiti to offset the income that would be lost by French settlers and slave owners; they demanded compensation amounting to 150 million gold francs. After a new deal was struck in 1838, Haiti agreed to pay France 90 million gold francs (the equivalent of €17 billion today). It was not until 1952 that Haiti made the final payment on what became known as its “Independence Debt”. Many analysts posit that the compensation Haiti paid to France throughout the 19th century “strangled development” and hindered the “evolution of the country”. The CU/Go Lean book assessed the near-Failed-State status of Haiti – “it is what it is”; Haiti is as bad as advertised – and then strategized solutions to reboot the economic-security-governing engines of this Republic.
Security assurances must be enabled to complement economics objectives – Slavery was introduced to the New World as an economic empowerment strategy, though it was flawed in its premise of oppressing the human rights of a whole class of humans. The only way to succeed for the centuries that it survived was with a strong military backing – fear of immediate death and destruction. The CU/Go Lean premise is that economics engines and security apparatus must work hand-in-hand. This is weaved throughout the roadmap.
Minority Equalization – The lessons of slavery is that race divides societies; and when there is this division, there is always the tendency for one group to put themselves above other groups. Many times the divisions are for majority population groups versus minorities. If the planners of the new Caribbean want to apply lessons from Slavery’s history, we must allow for justice institutions to consider the realities of minorities. The CU security pact must defend against regional threats, including domestic terrorism. This includes gangs and their junior counterparts, bullies. The CU plans for community messaging in the campaign for anti-bullying and mitigations.
Reconciliation of issues are not optional, more conflict will emerge otherwise – The issues that caused division in Haiti where not dealt with between 1791 and 1803. A “Great Day of Reckoning” could not be avoided. The Natural Law instinct was to avenge for past atrocities – “an eye for an eye”. The CU/Go Lean roadmap accepts that an “eye for an eye” justice stance would result in a lot of “blindness”; so instead of revenge, the strategy is justice by means of Truth & Reconciliation Commissions – a lesson learned from South Africa – to deal with a lot of the latent issues from the last Caribbean century (i.e. Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, etc).

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The Go Lean book details a series of assessments, community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to empower all the factions in the Caribbean region:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – “Crap” Happens	Page 23
Community Ethos – Minority Equalization	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations	Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing	Page 35
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness	Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Integrate region for Economics & Security	Page 45
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization	Page 57
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Department of Homeland Security	Page 75
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Department of Justice	Page 77
Implementation – Assemble Existing Super-national Institutions	Page 96
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Foreign Policy Initiatives at Start-up	Page 102
Implementation – Security Initiatives at Start-up	Page 103
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Implementation – Ways to Promote Independence	Page 120
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices	Page 134
Planning – Lessons from the US Constitution	Page 145
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Cooperatives	Page 176
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice	Page 177
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security	Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Mitigate Terrorism	Page 181
Advocacy – Ways to Protect Human Rights	Page 220
Advocacy – Battles in the War on Poverty	Page 222
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti	Page 238

Why bother with all this dark talk about Slavery and the Slave Trade?

UNESCO has provided a clear answer for this question with this declarative statement:

Ignorance or concealment of major historical events constitutes an obstacle to mutual understanding, reconciliation and cooperation among peoples. UNESCO has thus decided to break the silence surrounding the Slave Trade and Slavery that have concerned all continents and caused the great upheavals that have shaped our modern societies.

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=8724	Remembering African Nationalist Marcus Garvey: Still Relevant Today
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7682	Frederick Douglass – Pioneer & Role Model for Single Cause: Abolition
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7221	Street naming for Martin Luther King reveals continued racial animosity
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5695	Repenting, Forgiving and Reconciling the Past Bad Deeds
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5123	A Lesson in History – Royal Charters: Zimbabwe -vs- South Africa
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4971	A Lesson in History – Royal Charters: Truth & Consequence
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=451	CariCom position on Slavery/Colonization Reparations

This commentary purports that there have been watershed events in history since the emergence of the slave economy. They include:

1804 – Haiti’s Massacre of White Slave Advocates
1861 – US Civil War – A Demonstration of the Resolve of the “Pro” and “Anti” Slavery Camps
1914 – World War I: “Line in the Sand”
1948 – United Nations Declaration of Human Rights

A pivotal year.

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

—————

Appendix A Title: International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition 2016

— Message from Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO —

—————

Appendix B Title: 1804 Haiti Massacre

Writers Dirk Moses and Dan Stone wrote that it served as a form of revenge by an oppressed group that exacted out against those who had previously dominated them.^[7]

In the 1805 constitution, all citizens were defined as “black”,^[28] and white men were banned from owning land.^[23][29]

The 1804 massacre had a long-lasting effect on the view of the Haitian Revolution and helped to create a legacy of racial hostility in Haitian society.^[28]

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Haiti, History, Model, Transform

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Support sought for kids left behind by UN troops in Haiti

Posted on July 23, 2016 in Ethos, Government, Implementation

Go Lean Commentary

The United Nations – bless their heart – they mean well, but they are a complete failure.

You see, there is intent …

… and then there is delivery. The UN is a failure in delivery. In addition to failures of the UN to provide peace and security in the world – the prime directive of their charter – there is also direct, immediate repercussions of the presence of their Peacekeepers. These are human beings who bring human frailties with them – think love and romance.

So a word to the wise in the Caribbean: “Do not count on the UN nor their Peacekeeping Forces to provide positive solutions for the Caribbean region”.

Who are the Peacekeepers and what do they do? See VIDEO here:

VIDEO – What Exactly Do UN Peacekeepers Do? – https://youtu.be/Ns37jHVUilE

Published on Feb 3, 2016 – How Does The UN Work? http://testu.be/1QUyy2f
Subscribe! http://bitly.com/1iLOHml

So rather than depend on the UN or any foreign Peacekeepers, we need our own local and/or regional solution.

The book Go Lean…Caribbean posits that the region needs to prepare its own security apparatus for its own security needs. We need to not depend on UN peacekeeping nor foreign peacekeeping. The request is that all Caribbean member-states confederate and empower a security force to execute a limited scope on our sovereign territories.

This will help us to avoid some peripheral problems like this one here in the following news report:

By: David McFadden
PORT SALUT, Haiti (AP) — The first time Rosa Mina Joseph met Julio Cesar Posse he was hanging out in civilian clothes on the beach in her hometown in southern Haiti, where he was stationed as a member of a U.N. peacekeeping force.

Within weeks, she says, the Uruguayan marine was showing up every weekend at her family’s shack, pledging his love in Spanish and broken Haitian Creole.

But about a year later when his rotation ended, Posse quietly returned home. He left behind Joseph, a broken-hearted 17-year-old with an infant and no way to support the child without depending on struggling relatives.

“He promised me he’d marry me and would take care of me,” Joseph, now 22, tearfully said in a recent interview at her mother’s house in Port Salut, a town along the southwestern tip of Haiti.

After years of mounting frustration, she and several other women with children fathered by peacekeepers say they will now pursue claims for child support against the absentee fathers and the U.N.

Haitian human rights attorney Mario Joseph said he will file civil suits in Haiti this month. Joseph’s law firm also is involved in a high-profile claim on behalf of 5,000 cholera victims who blame the U.N. for introducing the disease. A U.S. federal appeals panel in New York is weighing whether the lawsuit can proceed or if the United Nations is entitled to immunity.

The peacekeeping force was sent to Haiti in 2004 to keep order following a violent rebellion that toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Since then, some peacekeepers have been accused of rape and other abuse, of using excessive force and of inadvertently introducing cholera because of inadequate sanitation at a base used by troops from Nepal.

U.N. troops have been accused of sexual exploitation elsewhere as well, most recently in the Central African Republic, and “peacekeeper babies,” have long been a legacy of their deployments, as they have for other military forces throughout history.

Rosa Mina Joseph, whose son was born in 2011, said she received an envelope with $300 in cash from the U.N. two years ago when it established paternity. She had to drop out of school to care for the son and her dreams of becoming a nurse have all but vanished.

Posse sent her $100 once from Uruguay, she said, but has not sent anything more.

While Joseph was a minor at the time she gave birth, potential criminal charges against the marine would confront a difficult legal challenge: U.N. peacekeepers can’t be prosecuted in the countries in which they serve under international agreements.

The Associated Press does not typically identify sexual assault victims, but Joseph gave permission as long as a photo of her face was not published.

“I want him to take responsibility to care for his son because I don’t have the means by myself,” she said in the yard where she spends her days doing laundry and cooking.

The U.N. force in Haiti currently includes 4,899 uniformed personnel, a combination of military and civilian police, from more than a dozen countries. That’s down from over 13,000 peacekeepers following Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake.

Ghandi Shukry, head of a Conduct and Discipline Unit in the U.N. mission, which is known by its French acronym MINUSTAH, said 29 claims for paternity have been submitted to the U.N. in Haiti. He said 18 of the claimants have been classified as “victims” by the world body because they were receiving some kind of support.

“We are not facing a current wave of paternity claims. They are all kind of old cases,” said Shukry, stressing that any kind of sexual relations by peacekeepers and locals is prohibited.

The U.N. official confirmed that Joseph and three other Port Salut women represented by the attorney did have paternity established in 2014 after DNA swabs from the mothers, children and peacekeepers were analyzed. He declined to discuss any of the cases in detail.

He said that two members of his unit maintain regular contact with the Port Salut women. MINUSTAH also put the women in touch with a Uruguayan military representative, he said, since the U.N. allows troop-contributing countries to investigate allegations and decide how to pursue paternity claims.

The Port Salut women, however, say contact with U.N. staffers or Uruguay’s military representative is rare and generally bewildering.

A 2015 U.N. report by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged that there were “numerous obstacles to having paternity recognized and to obtaining support for children of United Nations personnel, whether they were born as a result of sexual exploitation and abuse or not.”

MINUSTAH’s uniformed personnel are now barred from leaving bases alone or when wearing civilian clothing and mission rules have changed in recent years to prohibit any fraternization. “Not only sexual relations are prohibited; even having normal relations with the local population is prohibited,” Shukry said.

Uruguay’s Navy spokesman, Capt. Gaston Jaunsolo, acknowledged there have been a small number of paternity cases and said service members found guilty are sanctioned and barred from peacekeeping missions.

He confirmed that Posse continued in the Navy and said service members are forbidden to speak the press without permission. A listed phone number for Posse was out of service. His profile on a social networking site says he’s looking for a young woman between 18 and 25 to start a family with.

The Uruguayan Army issued a statement to AP saying it’s sent roughly 3,000 troops to Haiti since 2011 and four paternity allegations were made against that military branch. There’s been one positive DNA test, the statement said, and no complaints have been made since 2014. It said the soldier who tested positive was punished but not discharged.

Meanwhile, the women struggling to raise their kids in Port Salut are eking out a living with the help of their families. Their children are sometimes teased by other kids who call them “MINUSTAH babies” or mockingly ask where their daddies are.

“When he’s older I’ll find a way to explain things. For now, the only thing I can say is that his father’s not here,” Joseph said as she held a snapshot showing her and Posse together at her 17th birthday party, a heart drawn on the back of it reading “Osemina y Julio.”

___

AP writer Leonardo Haberkorn contributed from Montevideo, Uruguay.

Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/support-sought-kids-left-behind-un-troops-haiti-040556442.html?ref=gs Posted July 14, 2016; retrieved July 20, 2016.

There is a need for a local Caribbean security solution. The book Go Lean … Caribbean promotes the plan to confederate under a unified entity made up of the Caribbean to provide homeland security to the Caribbean. But homeland security for the Caribbean has a different meaning than some other regions and countries. Though we must be on defense against military intrusions like terrorism & piracy, we mostly have to contend with threats that may imperil the region’s economic engines, and crime remediation and mitigation. The CU security goal is for public safety! This goal is detailed in the book as it serves as a roadmap for the introduction of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). The CU is set to optimize Caribbean society through economic empowerment and also security implementations. The book describes that these two dynamics are inextricably linked in the same societal elevation endeavor. In fact, the Go Lean roadmap presents the following 3 prime directives:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The Go Lean book contends that bad actors will emerge just as a result of economic successes in the region. This point is pronounced early in the book with the Declaration of Interdependence (Page 12) that claims:

x. Whereas we are surrounded and allied to nations of larger proportions in land mass, populations, and treasuries, elements in their societies may have ill-intent in their pursuits, at the expense of the safety and security of our citizens. We must therefore appoint “new guards” to ensure our public safety and threats against our society, both domestic and foreign. The Federation must employ the latest advances and best practices … to assuage continuous threats against public safety.

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, including piracy and other forms of terrorism, 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.

The Caribbean appointing “new guards”, or a security pact to ensure public safety is not so new an endeavor on the world scene; security threats have been a constant in the modern world. Since World War II, the UN, by means of its Security Council have tried to be the “new guard” for mitigating threats around the world. And yet, skirmishes, revolts and uprisings are a constant on the world scene. Yes, the UN has failed on the delivery execution of this charter.

There continues to be the need for intervention around the world. The decisioning of UN Peacekeeping Forces comes from this Security Council. The Council, following a mandate for the maintenance of international peace and security, assigns the Peacekeepers for a wide-variety of engagements. Consider the details of these current engagements in Appendix B below.

During the entire existence of the UN, there has not been a need for Peacekeepers in North America (US, Canada or Mexico) among these NAFTA members. There also has not been a need for Peacekeepers in the 27 member-states that now constitute the European Union – once they joined the EU. The truth is that integrated communities can more effectively provide their own security solutions, as an extension of the economic cooperation. This, an integrated community, is the quest of the CU/Go Lean roadmap, and to model the EU structure in our economic and security implementations.

So the Caribbean appointing “new guards”, or a security pact to ensure justice institutions and public safety in this region is not so revolutionary as a concept on the world scene. It is just what the mature democracies do. The Go Lean roadmap calls for a permanent professional security apparatus with naval and ground (Marine) forces, plus its own Military Justice establishment. This security pact would be sanctioned by all 30 CU member-states. The CU Trade Federation will lead, fund and facilitate this security force, encapsulating all the (full-time or part-time) existing armed forces in the region. This CU Homeland Security Force would get its legal authorization from a legal Status of Forces Agreement signed with the CU treaty enhancements.

This implementation will result in lesser social repercussions, because it will be Caribbean people protecting the Caribbean. So the ramifications as depicted in the foregoing news article, and in the Appendix A below, will be lessened.

This problem detailed in the foregoing news article, has not only been a problem for Haiti and the Caribbean. In recent months, revelations have come forth of inappropriate and unprofessional actions of UN Peacekeeping forces in Africa. There had been accusations and convictions of soldiers abusing women and girls in that and other regions.

The truth is: Power abuses; and absolute power abuses absolutely. So this is not just a Pan-African problem, this is a human rights problem, for even those entities bringing relief, as was the intention in Haiti, can cause distress. Accountability and transparency must therefore be present and evident in all justice initiatives. This is the Go Lean plan for the military establishment; as detailed in the book (Page 177):

Military Justice – The CU will carefully monitor the activities of all military units (Marines, Navy & Coast Guard) – this accountability will be the by-product of increased CU funding. The CU will assume Judge Advocate General (JAG) role for military justice affairs.

This CU Security Apparatus is “Step One, Day One” in the Go Lean roadmap, covering the approach for adequate accountability and control. The Go Lean book details a series of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to provide increased public safety & security in the Caribbean region:

Economic Principle – Consequences of Choices Lie in Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Privacy –vs- Public Protection	Page 23
Community Ethos – Anti-Bullying and Mitigation	Page 23
Community Ethos – “Crap” Happens	Page 23
Community Ethos – Minority Equalization	Page 24
Community Ethos – Cooperatives	Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Tactical – Confederating a non-sovereign union	Page 63
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Homeland Security	Page 75
Implementation – Start-up Security Initiatives	Page 103
Implementation – Ways to Foster International Aid	Page 115
Implementation – Reasons to Repatriate	Page 118
Planning – Ways to Model the EU	Page 130
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices	Page 134
Planning – Lessons Learned from the West Indies Federation	Page 135
Planning – Lessons from East Germany	Page 139
Planning – Lessons from the American West	Page 142
Planning – Lessons from Egypt	Page 143
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance	Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Leadership	Page 171
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice – Military Prosecutions	Page 177
Advocacy – Ways to Reduce Crime	Page 178
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security	Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Mitigate Terrorism	Page 181
Advocacy – Ways to Improve for Natural Disasters	Page 184
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Extractions	Page 196
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Fisheries	Page 210
Advocacy – Ways to Protect Human Rights	Page 220
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti	Page 238

Other subjects related to security and justice empowerments for the region have been blogged in previous Go Lean…Caribbean commentaries, as sampled here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7896	The Need for Local Administration: The Logistics of Disaster Relief
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7345	ISIS reaches the Caribbean Region
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=7119	Role Model for the Caribbean: African Standby Force
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6247	Tragic images show refugee crisis at a tipping point in Europe
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=6103	Sum of All Fears – ‘On Guard’ Against Deadly Threats
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5462	The Need for Local Administration: The Red Cross’ Missing $500 Million In Haiti Relief
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5304	Mitigating the Eventual ‘Abuse of Power’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5183	A Lesson in History – Cinco De Mayo and Mexico’s Security Lapses
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5002	Managing a ‘Clear and Present Danger’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4360	Dreading the ‘CaribbeanBasin Security Initiative’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1965	America’s Navy – 100 Percent – Model for Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1554	Status of Forces Agreement = Security Pact
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1531	A Lesson in History: 100 Years Ago – Root Causes of World War I
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1076	Trinidad Muslims travel to Venezuela for Jihadist training
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=809	Muslim officials condemn abductions of Nigerian girls
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=535	Remembering and learning from Boston
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=273	10 Things We Want from the US – #4: Pax Americana

The narrative in the foregoing news article is a “tale as old as time”:

Boy meets girl…
Boy protects girl.
Girl likes boy.
Boy seduces girl and leaves her with a baby … with no regard for future support.

This narrative, though sad, is not uniquely Caribbean nor United Nations. It is just a human (rights) story.

Better command of human rights and security in the Caribbean will lead to mitigation of these sad scenarios.

Charity … (and security) begins at home.

We know that “bad actors” will always emerge; we do not want a few “bad actors” – as in the violent rebellion that toppled Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004 – disrupting the peace of our 42 million Caribbean residents, or the 80 million visitors.

We know too that “wolves, sometimes dressed in “sheep’s clothing”, will always come to prey on the sheep”. This means you: UN Peacekeeper Julio Cesar Posse, who deflowered the innocent 17 year-old girl; and this means you of the UN Peacekeepers who were agitators – though not intentional – of the cholera disease resulting in 5,000 victims in Haiti.

The quest of the CU/Go Lean roadmap is better security and better justice executions for the people of the Caribbean region. Underlying to the prime directive of elevating the Caribbean societal engines – economics, security and governing – is the desire to simply make the Caribbean homeland, a better place to live, work and play.

Let’s do “this” … ourselves. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

————–

Appendix A – Peacekeeping, human trafficking, and forced prostitution

Reporters witnessed a rapid increase in prostitution in Cambodia and Mozambique after UN peacekeeping forces moved in. In the 1996 U.N. study “The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children”, former first lady of Mozambique Graça Machel documented: “In 6 out of 12 country studies on sexual exploitation of children in situations of armed conflict prepared for the present report, the arrival of peacekeeping troops has been associated with a rapid rise in child prostitution.”^[17]

Gita Sahgal spoke out in 2004 with regard to the fact that prostitution and sex abuse crops up wherever humanitarian intervention efforts are set up. She observed: “The issue with the UN is that peacekeeping operations unfortunately seem to be doing the same thing that other militaries do. Even the guardians have to be guarded.”^[18]

Source: Retrieved July 14, 2016 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse_by_UN_peacekeepers

—————

Appendix B – Current Deployment (16)

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nations_peacekeeping_missions

Africa

Start of operation	Name of Operation	Location	Conflict	Website
1991	United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO)		Western Sahara	Western Sahara conflict	[56]
2003	United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL)		Liberia	Second Liberian Civil War	[57]
2004	United Nations Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI)		Côte d’Ivoire	Civil war in Côte d’Ivoire	[58]
2007	United Nations/African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID)		Sudan	War in Darfur	[59]
2010	United Nations Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO)		Congo	Kivu conflict	[60]
2011	United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA)		Sudan	Abyei conflict	[61]
2011	United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan (UNMISS)		South Sudan	Ethnic violence in South Sudan South Sudanese Civil War	[62]
1 July 2013	Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali (MINUSMA)		Mali	Northern Mali conflict	[63]
2014	United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA)		Central African Republic	Central African Republic conflict	[64]

Americas

Start of operation	Name of Operation	Location	Conflict	Website
2004	United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH)		Haiti	2004 Haiti rebellion	[65]

Asia

Start of operation	Name of Operation	Location	Conflict	Website
1949	United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP)		Kashmir	Kashmir conflict	[66]

Europe

Start of operation	Name of Operation	Location	Conflict	Website
1964	United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP)		Cyprus¹	Cyprus dispute	[67]

1999	United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK)		Kosovo²	Kosovo War	[68]

Middle East

Start of operation	Name of Operation	Location	Conflict	Website
1948	United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO)		Middle East	(Monitors the various ceasefires and assists UNDOF and UNIFIL)	[69]
1974	United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF)		Golan Heights	Agreed withdrawal by Syrian and Israeliforces following the Yom Kippur War.	[70]
1978	United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)		Lebanon	Israeli invasion of Lebanon and 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict	[71]

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Haiti, Power, Security

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The Logistics of Disaster Relief

Posted on April 26, 2016 in Government, Implementation

Go Lean Commentary

It is during the worst of times that we see the best in people.

This statement needs to be coupled with the age old proverb: “The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions“…

… especially when it comes to disaster relief.

In previous blog-commentaries promoting the book Go Lean…Caribbean, it was established that “bad things happen to good people”; (i.e. ‘Crap Happens’ – So What Now?, Managing a ‘Clear and Present Danger’). Yes, disasters are a reality for modern life. The Go Lean book posits that with the emergence of Climate Change that natural disasters are more common place.

In addition there are earthquakes …

… these natural phenomena may not be associated with Climate Change, but alas, they too are more common and more destructive nowadays. (People with a Christian religious leanings assert that “an increase of earthquakes is a tell-tale sign that we are living in what the Bible calls the “Last Days” – Matthew 24: 7).

The motives of the Go Lean book, and accompanying blogs is not to proselytize, but rather to prepare the Caribbean region for “bad actors”, natural or man-made. The book was written in response to the aftermath and deficient regional response following the great earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010. Many Non-Government Organizations (NGO) embarked on campaigns to shoulder a response, a relief and rebuilding of Haiti. Many people hold the view that those efforts did a lot of harm, along with some good.

In a previous blog-commentary, it was reported how the fundraising campaign by one group, the American Red Cross, raised almost US$500 million and yet only a “piddling” was spent on the victims and communities themselves.

Now we learn too that many good-intentioned people donated tons of relief supplies that many times turned out to be “more harm than help”. See the story here in this news VIDEO; (and/or the Narration Transcript/photos in the Appendix below):

VIDEO – When disaster relief brings anything but relief – http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/disaster-relief-donations-that-dont-bring-relief

Posted April 24, 2016 – Many of the well-meaning articles Americans donate in times of disaster turn out to be of no use to those in need. Sometimes, they even get in the way. That’s a message relief organizations very much want “us” to heed. This story is reported by Scott Simon, [on loan from] NPR. (VIDEO plays best in Internet Explorer).

This commentary asserts that more is needed in the Caribbean to facilitate good disaster relief, in particular a technocratic administration. This consideration is the focus of the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies of the Go Lean…Caribbean book. The declaration is that the Caribbean itself must be agile, lean, and optimized in providing its own solutions for disaster recovery. The alternative, from past experiences like in this foregoing VIDEO, is that others taking the lead for our solution seem to fall short in some way … almost every time!

The Caribbean must now stand up and be counted!

The Go Lean book declares (Page 115) that the “Caribbean should not be perennial beggars, [even though] we do need capital/money to get started”, we need technocratic executions even more.

What is a technocracy?

This is the quest of the Go Lean movement. The movement calls for a treaty to form a technocratic confederation of all the 30 member-states in the Caribbean region. This will form a Single Market of 42 million. The consolidation and integration allows for economies-of-scale and leverage that would not be possible otherwise. “Many hands make a big job … small”. But it is not just size that will define the Caribbean technocracy but quality, efficiency and optimization as well.

According to the Go Lean book (Page 64), the …

“… term technocracy was originally used to designate the application of the scientific method to solving social and economic problems, in counter distinction to the traditional political or philosophic approaches. The CU must start as a technocratic confederation – a Trade Federation – rather than evolving to this eventuality due to some failed-state status or insolvency.”

The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) to provide better stewardship for the Caribbean homeland. The foregoing VIDEO describes the efforts of non-governmental organizations (NGO) in shepherding disaster reliefs. These NGO’s are stakeholders in this Caribbean elevation roadmap. Even though many of the 30 member-states are independent nations, the premise of the Go Lean book is that there must be a resolve for interdependence among the governmental and non-governmental entities. This all relates to governance, the need for this new technocratic stewardship of regional Caribbean society. The need for this resolve was pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 11 & 14) with these acknowledgements and statements:

i.    Whereas the earth’s climate has undeniably changed resulting in more severe tropical weather storms, it is necessary to prepare to insure the safety and security of life, property and systems of commerce in our geographical region. As nature recognizes no borders in the target of its destruction, we also must set aside border considerations in the preparation and response to these weather challenges.

ii.    Whereas the natural formation of the landmass for our lands constitutes some extreme seismic activity, it is our responsibility and ours alone to provide, protect and promote our society to coexist, prepare and recover from the realities of nature’s occurrences.

x.   Whereas we are surrounded and allied to nations of larger proportions in land mass, populations, and treasuries, elements in their societies may have ill-intent in their pursuits, at the expense of the safety and security of our citizens. We must therefore appoint “new guards” to ensure our public safety and threats against our society, both domestic and foreign. The Federation must employ the latest advances and best practices … to assuage continuous threats against public safety.

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.

xii. Whereas the legacy in recent times in individual states may be that of ineffectual governance with no redress to higher authority, the accedence of this Federation will ensure accountability and escalation of the human and civil rights of the people for good governance, justice assurances, due process and the rule of law. As such, any threats of a “failed state” status for any member state must enact emergency measures on behalf of the Federation to protect the human, civil and property rights of the citizens, residents, allies, trading partners, and visitors of the affected member state and the Federation as a whole.

xxxiii.   Whereas lessons can be learned and applied from the study of the recent history of other societies, the Federation must formalize statutes and organizational dimensions to avoid the pitfalls of [other] communities.

This is the quest of CU/Go Lean roadmap: to provide new guards for a more competent Caribbean administration … by governmental organizations and non-governmental organizations. (NGO would also be promoted, audited and overseen by CU administrators). The Caribbean must do better!

Our quest must start “in the calm”, before any storm (or earthquake). We must elevate the societal engines the Caribbean region through economic, security and governance empowerments. In general, the CU will employ better strategies, tactics and implementations to impact its prime directives; identified with the following 3 statements:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines and the Caribbean homeland.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines.

Former US President George W. Bush shares this advocacy!

He narrated this VIDEO here describing the efficiencies of the American logistics company, UPS, in delivering disaster relief:

VIDEO – Report Logistics and Haiti: Points of Light and President Bush – https://youtu.be/8-gmh1QyWTU

Uploaded on Mar 30, 2011 – [In 2009], Transportation Manager Chip Chappelle volunteered to help The UPS Foundation coordinate an ocean shipment of emergency tents from Indiana to Honduras. Since then, he has managed the logistics of humanitarian aid from every corner of the world to help the victims of floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes and cyclones.

The Go Lean book stresses our own community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies necessary for the Caribbean to deliver, to provide the proactive and reactive public safety/security provisions in the region. See sample list here:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Security Principles – Whistleblower Protection	Page 23
Community Ethos – Security Principles – Intelligence Gathering	Page 23
Community Ethos – Security Principles – “Crap” Happens	Page 23
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Return on Investments	Page 24
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Cooperatives	Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Turn-Arounds	Page 33
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing – Emergency Response	Page 35
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Confederate all 30 member-states/ 4 languages into a Single Market	Page 45
Strategy – Mission – Prepare for the eventuality of natural disasters	Page 45
Strategy – Agents of Change – Climate Change	Page 57
Tactical – Ways to Foster a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Growing the Economy – Post WW II European Marshall Plan/Recovery Model	Page 68
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers – CU Federal Government versus Member-State Governance	Page 71
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers – Homeland Security – Emergency Management	Page 76
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers – State Department – Liaison/Oversight for NGO’s	Page 80
Implementation – Assemble All Regionally-focus Organizations of All Caribbean Communities	Page 96
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Ways to Foster International Aid	Page 115
Planning – 10 Big Ideas – Homeland Security Pact	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices – Governance and the Social Contract	Page 134
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Housing – Hurricane Risk Reinsurance Fund	Page 161
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance	Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security	Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Improve for Natural Disasters	Page 184
Advocacy – Ways to Develop a Pre-Fab Housing Industry – One solution ideal for Haiti	Page 207
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti	Page 238

The Go Lean roadmap seeks to empower and elevate Caribbean societal engines to be better prepared for the eventual natural disasters. The good intentions of Americans, as depicted in the foregoing VIDEO, is encouraging … but good intentions alone is not enough. We need good management! We need a technocracy! While it is out-of-scope for this roadmap to impact America, we can – and must – exercise good management in our Caribbean region. So what do we want from Americans in our time of need? See VIDEO here:

VIDEO – Donate Responsibly – https://youtu.be/14h9_9sopRA

Published on Nov 2, 2012 – A series of PSAs released by the Ad Council explain why cash is the best way to help. The campaign was launched on November 5, 2012 by the Ad Council and supported by the coalition — which includes CIDI, the U.S. Agency for International Development, InterAction, the UPS Foundation and National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster.

The Go Lean book calls on the Caribbean region to be more technocratic: collectively self-reliant, both proactively and reactively. Because of Climate Change or the Last Days, natural disasters (i.e. hurricanes and earthquakes) will occur again and again. Considering that our American neighbors may Pave our Road to Hell with Good Intentions, we need to prepare the right strategies, tactics and implementations ourselves, to make our region a better homeland to live, work and play. 🙂

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

——————

Appendix Transcript – When disaster relief brings anything but relief

When Nature grows savage and angry, Americans get generous and kind. That’s admirable. It might also be a problem.

“Generally after a disaster, people with loving intentions donate things that cannot be used in a disaster response, and in fact may actually be harmful,” said Juanita Rilling, director of the Center for International Disaster Information in Washington, D.C. “And they have no idea that they’re doing it.”

Rilling has spent more than a decade trying to tell well-meaning people to think before they give.

In 1998 Hurricane Mitch struck Honduras. More than 11,000 people died. More than a million and a half were left homeless.

And Rilling got a wake-up call: “Got a call from one of our logistics experts who said that a plane full of supplies could not land, because there was clothing on the runway. It’s in boxes and bales. It takes up yards of space. It can’t be moved.’ ‘Whose clothing is it?’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t know whose it is, but there’s a high-heeled shoe, just one, and a bale of winter coats.’ And I thought, winter coats? It’s summer in Honduras.”

Humanitarian workers call the crush of useless, often incomprehensible contributions “the second disaster.”

In 2004, following the Indian Ocean tsunami, a beach in Indonesia was piled with used clothing.

There was no time for disaster workers to sort and clean old clothes. So the contributions just sat and rotted.

“This very quickly went toxic and had to be destroyed,” said Rilling. “And local officials poured gasoline on it and set it on fire. And then it was out to sea.”

“So, rather than clothing somebody, it went up in flames?” asked Simon.

“Correct. The thinking is that these people have lost everything, so they must NEED everything. So people SEND everything. You know, any donation is crazy if it’s not needed. People have donated prom gowns and wigs and tiger costumes and pumpkins, and frostbite cream to Rwanda, and used teabags, ’cause you can always get another cup of tea.”

You may not think that sending bottles of water to devastated people seems crazy. But Rilling points out, “This water, it’s about 100,000 liters, will provide drinking water for 40,000 people for one day. This amount of water to send from the United States, say, to West Africa — and people did this — costs about $300,000. But relief organizations with portable water purification units can produce the same amount, a 100,000 liters of water, for about $300.”

And then there were warm-hearted American women who wanted to send their breast milk to nursing mothers in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

“It sounds wonderful, but in the midst of a crisis it’s actually one of the most challenging things,” said Rebecca Gustafson, a humanitarian aid expert who has worked on the ground after many disasters.

“Breast milk doesn’t stay fresh for very long. And the challenge is, what happens if you do give it to an infant who then gets sick?”

December 2012, Newtown, Connecticut: A gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Almost instantaneously, stuff start arriving.

Chris Kelsey, who worked for Newtown at the time, said they had to get a warehouse to hold all the teddy bears.

Simon asked, “Was there a need for teddy bears?”

“I think it was a nice gesture,” Kelsey replied. “There was a need to do something for the kids. There was a need to make people feel better. I think the wave of stuff we got was a little overwhelming in the end.”

And how many teddy bear came to Newtown? “I think it was about 67,000,” Kelsey said. “Wasn’t limited to teddy bears. There was also thousands of boxes of school supplies, and thousands of boxes of toys, bicycles, sleds, clothes.”

Newtown had been struck by mass murder, not a tsunami. As Kelsey said, “I think a lot of the stuff that came into the warehouse was more for the people that sent it, than it was for the people in Newtown. At least, that’s the way it felt at the end.”

Every child in Newtown got a few bears. The rest had to be sent away, along with the bikes and blankets.

There are times when giving things works. More than 650,000 homes were destroyed or damaged in Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Thousands of people lost everything.

Tammy Shapiro is one of the organizers of Occupy Sandy, which grew out of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“We were able to respond in a way that the big, bureaucratic agencies can’t,” Shapiro said.

When the hurricane struck, they had a network of activists, connected and waiting.

“Very quickly, we just stopped taking clothes,” Shapiro said. Instead, they created a “relief supply wedding registry.”

“We put the items that we needed donated on that registry,” said Shapiro. “And then people who wanted to donate could buy the items that were needed. I mean, a lot of what we had on the wedding registry was diapers. They needed flashlights.”

Simon asked, “How transportable is your experience here, following Hurricane Sandy?”

“For me, the network is key. Who has the knowledge? Where are spaces that goods can live if there’s a disaster? Who’s really well-connected on their blocks?”

Juanita Rilling’s album of disaster images shows shot after shot of good intentions just spoiling in warehouses, or rotting on the landscape.

“It is heartbreaking,” Rilling said. “It’s heartbreaking for the donor, it’s heartbreaking for the relief organizations, and it’s heartbreaking for survivors. This is why cash donations are so much more effective. They buy exactly what people need, when they need it.

“And cash donations enable relief organizations to purchase supplies locally, which ensures that they’re fresh and familiar to survivors, purchased in just the right quantities, and delivered quickly. And those local purchases support the local merchants, which strengthens the local economy for the long run.”

Disaster response worker Rebecca Gustafson says that most people want to donate something that is theirs: “Money sometimes doesn’t feel personal enough for people. They don’t feel enough of their heart and soul is in that donation, that check that they would send.

“The reality is, it’s one of the most compassionate things that people can do.”

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Disaster, Haiti, History, Model, Security

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Repenting, Forgiving and Reconciling the Past

Posted on June 27, 2015 in Ethos, Locations, Social

Go Lean Commentary

Christendom has a sullied past!

This is well represented in the historicity of the Spanish Inquisition (see Appendix * below), the campaign by the Roman Catholic Church to weed out the Jews and Muslims in Spain! This bad history of ethnic cleansing was at its worst in the 15th Century. See the tongue-in-cheek comedy VIDEO in the Appendix.

How does a community repent, forgive and reconcile from such a bad legacy?

Easier said than done!

For starters, do not proceed as if the events never happened. This is the lesson now being learned in modern day Spain. See the news article here:

Title: Ancient Spanish Village Is No Longer Named ‘Kill Jews’
(Source: Huffington Post – Online News Site; posted: 06/22/2015; retrieved 06/27/2015 from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/22/castrillo-matajudios-name-change_n_7636368.html)

MADRID (AP) — The tiny Spanish village of Castrillo Matajudios — which means “Camp Kill Jews” — on Monday officially changed its name back to Castrillo Mota de Judios (“Jews’ Hill Camp”) following a referendum and regional government approval.

The village, with about 50 inhabitants, voted to change the name in 2014 after the mayor argued that the term was offensive and that the village should honor its Jewish origins.

Documents show the villages’ original name was “Jews’ Hill Camp” and that the “Kill Jews” name dates from 1627, after a 1492 Spanish edict ordering Jews to become Catholics or flee the country. Those who remained faced the Spanish inquisition, with many burned at the stake.

The name change was approved by the regional government of Castilla y Leon and published in the region’s official gazette.

Although Jews were killed in the area, researchers believe the village got its recent name from Jewish residents who converted to Catholicism and wanted to reinforce their repudiation of Judaism to convince Spanish authorities of their loyalty.

Others suspect the change may have come from a slip of the pen.

Although no Jews live in the village today, many residents have ancient Jewish roots and the town’s official shield includes the Star of David.

Spain’s lower house of parliament this month approved a law setting a citizenship path for the descendants of Jews who were forced to flee the country centuries ago.

Spain also has an ancient southeastern town called Valle de Matamoros, which translate as “Kill Muslims Valley.” The town has said it has no plans to change its name. Matamoros is also a surname in Spain.

There is a need to reconcile a lot of bad episodes in Caribbean history. Think:

Haiti
Cuba
Guyana’s border with Venezuela
Belize’s border with Guatemala

The book Go Lean…Caribbean posits that any attempt at unification of the Caribbean 30 member-states region must consider the ancient and modern conflicts some member-states have with others. The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU). A mission of the roadmap is to reverse the societal abandonment and invite the repatriation of the Diaspora by flashing the “Welcome Home” signs. But “old parties” returning can also open “old wounds”. Therefore an additional mission is to facilitate formal reconciliations, much like the model in South Africa with their Truth & Reconciliation Commissions (TRC). This mission will assuage these Failed-State indicators and threats (Page 272):

“Revenge seeking” groups
Group Grievances

The foregoing article depicts a bad episode in history and the best-practices to repent, forgive and reconcile.

The approach is simple, correct the bad “community ethos” from the past. The Go Lean book defines “Community Ethos” as the fundamental character or spirit of a culture; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society; the dominant assumptions of a people or period. The Spanish town in the foregoing article continued to laud the bad actions of “killing Jews” by the continued use of that name. Though none of the villains or victims are alive today, it is just a bad spirit to imbrue from one generation to another. This town name “Camp Kill Jews” is such a bad image to uphold.

The CU/Go Lean vision to elevate Caribbean society must consider the issue of image. There is the need for a sentinel role for Caribbean image, as there are a lot of times that Caribbean life and people are denigrated in works of media arts: film, TV, books, magazines. The Go Lean roadmap calls for the CU to assume that role. Using cutting edge delivery of best practices, the CU will employ strategies, tactics and implementations to impact its prime directives; identified with the following 3 statements:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The Go Lean book speaks of the Caribbean as in crisis and posits that this crisis can be averted, that it is a “terrible thing to waste”. The Go Lean roadmap seeks to optimize the entire Caribbean economic/security/governance eco-system. This vision is defined early in the book (Page 12) in the following pronouncements in the Declaration of Interdependence:

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.

xii. Whereas the legacy in recent times in individual states may be that of ineffectual governance with no redress to higher authority, the accedence of this Federation will ensure accountability and escalation of the human and civil rights of the people for good governance, justice assurances, due process and the rule of law. As such, any threats of a “failed state” status for any member state must enact emergency measures on behalf of the Federation to protect the human, civil and property rights of the citizens, residents, allies, trading partners, and visitors of the affected member state and the Federation as a whole.

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.

The Go Lean book details a lot more, a series of assessments, community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to optimize the image of the Caribbean region:

Community Assessment – Dutch Caribbean – Integration & Secessions	Page 16
Community Assessment – French Caribbean – Organization & Discord	Page 17
Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – People Respond to Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Turn-Arounds	Page 33
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations	Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Promote Happiness	Page 36
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Confederating a Non-Sovereign Union of 30 Member-states	Page 45
Strategy – Mission – Keep the next generation at home; Repatriate Diaspora	Page 46
Tactical – Separation of Powers – State Department – Economic & Diplomatic Relations	Page 80
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Judiciary – Truth & Reconciliation Courts	Page 90
Implementation – Foreign Policy Initiatives at Start-up – Relationships with South & Central American Neighbors	Page 102
Implementation – Ways to Deliver	Page 109
Implementation – Reasons to Repatriate	Page 118
Anatomy of Advocacies	Page 122
Planning – Ways to Improve Image	Page 133
Planning – Improve Failed-State Indices	Page 134
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice – Truth & Reconciliation Commissions	Page 177
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Hollywood – Controlling Image	Page 203
Advocacy – Ways to Preserve Caribbean Heritage	Page 218
Advocacy – Ways to Protect Human Rights – Reconciliations	Page 220
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Cuba – Reconciliations	Page 236
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti – Reconciliations	Page 238
Advocacy – Ways to Impact The Guianas – Venezuelan Foreign Policy Synchronizations	Page 241
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Belize – Guatemala Grand Bargain	Page 242
Appendix – Failed State Indicators & Definitions	Page 271
Appendix – Dominican Republic’s Trujillo Regime – Ethnic Cleansing	Page 306

The foregoing news article conveys that many Spanish/European communities had not come to grips with their discriminatory past. So there is the need for outreach. This relates to anti-Semitism and the historic abuses cast on the Jewish people. For the African Diaspora, the majority population of 29 of the Caribbean member-states, the experience is even more egregious. (French territory St. Barthélemy is the sole demographic exception).

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people and governing institutions, to lean-in for the empowerments described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean. There is reason to believe that these empowerment efforts can be successful. The Go Lean roadmap conveys how single causes/advocacies have successfully been forged throughout the world (Page 122 – Anatomy of Advocacies). We can succeed here as well.

(This movement does not campaign for reparations from slavery nor colonization).

The CU will address past, present and future challenges of human rights abuses and defamation to the Caribbean image.

The Caribbean can succeed in the advocacy to improve the Caribbean image in the region and around the world. There are previous blog commentaries that delve into aspects of Caribbean image:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4971	A Lesson in History – Royal Charter: Truth & Consequence
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4058	Bad Image: New York Times Maledictions on The Bahamas
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2547	Image: Miami’s Success versus Caribbean Failure
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2025	Caribbean Jobs – Attitudes & Images of the Diaspora
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1847	Good Image – Declared “Among the best in the world”
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1568	Bad Image/Bad Tweet: Dutch airline angers Mexico soccer fans
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=857	Caribbean Image: Dreadlocks

The foregoing consideration helps us to appreciate that reconciliation is possible only when the persons doing the wrong accept the forgiveness being offered and repents for what they have done. We applaud the tiny Spanish village of Castrillo Matajudios for showing the world their “Mea Culpa”; this is the best-practice for reconciliation.

This is now a new ethos for the Caribbean, to reconcile conflicts from the past; to repent, forgive and hopefully forget the long history of human rights abuses from the past. All of this effort, heavy-lifting, will make the region a better place to live, work and play. We urge all to lean-in to this roadmap.

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

————–

Appendix * – Spanish Inquisition

The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition (Spanish: Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición), commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition (Inquisición española), was established in 1478 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. It was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms and to replace the Medieval Inquisition, which was under Papal control. It became the most substantive of the three different manifestations of the wider Christian Inquisition along with the Roman Inquisition and Portuguese Inquisition.

The Inquisition was originally intended in large part to ensure the orthodoxy of those who converted from Judaism and Islam. This regulation of the faith of the newly converted was intensified after the royal decrees issued in 1492 and 1501 ordering Jews and Muslims to convert or leave Spain.

Various motives have been proposed for the monarchs’ decision to found the Inquisition such as increasing political authority, weakening opposition, suppressing conversos, profiting from confiscation of the property of convicted heretics, reducing social tensions, and protecting the kingdom from the danger of a fifth column (clandestine activities involving acts of sabotage, disinformation, or espionage executed within defense lines by secret sympathizers of an external force).

The body was under the direct control of the Spanish monarchy. It was not definitively abolished until 1834, during the reign of Isabella II, after a period of declining influence in the previous century.

The Spanish Inquisition is often cited in literature and history as an example of Catholic intolerance and repression. Modern historians have tended to question earlier and possibly exaggerated accounts concerning the severity of the Inquisition. Although records are incomplete, estimates of the number of persons charged with crimes by the Inquisition range up to 150,000, with 2,000 to 5,000 people executed.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition)

————–

Appendix VIDEO – Movie: History of the World Part 1 Inquisition Scene – https://youtu.be/5ZegQYgygdw

Published on Dec 8, 2012 – From Mel Brooks’ “History of the World Part 1”. This is a comedic parody, with song-and-dance!
Category: Entertainment; License: Standard YouTube License

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Civil Rights, Cuba, Diaspora, Haiti, History, Image, Model, Power, Transform

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In Search Of The Red Cross’ $500 Million In Haiti Relief

Posted on June 4, 2015 in Government, Implementation

Go Lean Commentary

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste” – familiar expression coined by American Economist Paul Romer.

This expression is prominent in the introduction of the book Go Lean…Caribbean. The motives of the book publishers are to exploit the post-2008 economic crises to forge change in the Caribbean region. But in this case, it appears that another party has utilized a Caribbean crisis to exploit the public for monies for their own coffers; that party is the American Red Cross.

Immediately after the earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010 many Non-Government Organizations (NGO), including the American Red Cross, embarked on fundraising campaigns to raise money for the response, relief and rebuilding of Haiti. The Red Cross held a Telethon, complete with text message fundraising:

Text [the word] Haiti to 90999

… and boom, $10 would be billed to the respondent’s mobile phone account and encumbered for the American Red Cross’s Aid to Haiti. (Note: this writer contributed via text message in 2010).

How successful was this fundraising campaign? US$500 million! How successful was the relief and rebuilding of Haiti campaign? Still waiting…

VIDEO – Report highlights Red Cross aid failures in Haiti https://youtu.be/cSAZ8cScwro

Published on Jun 3, 2015 – Following the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the American Red Cross raised close to 500 million dollars and promised to help rebuild the country’s communities. A new report by ProPublica and NPR unearth a number of confidential memos and insider accounts that stand in sharp contrast to the public picture painted by the organization. CBSN spoke to co-author of the report, Justin Elliott.

This consideration aligns with the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies of the book Go Lean…Caribbean. The declaration is that the Caribbean must be front-and-center in providing for our own solutions. The alternative, someone else taking the lead for our solution seems to be lacking…every time!

For us in the Caribbean, we need to grow up and more responsible ourselves! We need to stand up and be counted!

The Go Lean book declares (Page 115):

“Haiti should not be a perennial beggar; the Caribbean should not be perennial beggars, but we do need capital/money, especially to get started”.

There was the opportunity to raise $500 million to get started. We lost out!

Instead the American Red Cross provided the “adult supervision” and what do we have to show for it? According to the following AUDIO Podcast, next to nothing; (6 houses):

Appendix AUDIO Podcast: NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ – http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=411524156&m=411812821

By Laura Sullivan – When a devastating earthquake leveled Haiti in 2010, millions of people donated to the American Red Cross. The charity raised almost half a billion dollars. It was one of its most successful fundraising efforts ever.
The American Red Cross vowed to help Haitians rebuild, but after five years the Red Cross’ legacy in Haiti is not new roads, or schools, or hundreds of new homes. It’s difficult to know where all the money went.
Source: National Public Radio (NPR) – Radio Podcast for Fresh Air; posted 06/03/2015; retrieved from: http://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-red-cross-500-million-in-haiti-relief

This is just another example of Crony-Capitalism.

This is not only the Go Lean commentary, but rather many of the general public voiced this same concern on the cited NPR website; see sample here:

Public Comment by “TheUnPossible” on June 3, 2015: Perhaps they should do what they do best. Serve coffee, give-out blankets and draw blood. This reminds me of a lot of the other high-profile charities like Susan G. Komen and United Way that just become a black-hole for donations. They’re like a church. They get people to give them tons of cash and promise salvation if people just believe in them.

Public Comment by “Unpartisan” on June 3, 2015: They’re like a church. They get people to give them tons of cash and promise salvation if people just believe in them.” Sounds like many politicians and government agencies as well, good analogy.

Public Comment by “James Hulsey” on June 3, 2015: I haven’t trusted the American Red Cross since 9/11, when they were fundraising for 9/11 relief efforts and then shunted the extra money into their general fund.

Public Comment by “TravelingOne” on June 4, 2015: No – the Red Cross: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/… And one of the reasons they no longer get any money from me; nor does United Way (UW) however.

Public Comment by “DCRich” on June 4, 2015: Local UW chapters often are worse. They coerce poorly paid employees of agencies they support to contribute with the implication that support to the agency is influenced by this. They try to engage new agencies with the same kind of appeal. Most of their money goes to orgs that have no trouble fundraising on their own like the Y and Scouts. Basically, they’re a middleman that allows the business community to interfere with and take credit or the work of “charity”. Giving money directly to some org[anization] you actually know something about is better than giving a cut to UW or CFC [(Combined Federal Campaign) for federal government employees].

The book and subsequent blogs posit that the Caribbean must not be vulnerable to American Crony-Capitalistic forces.

“We can do bad all by ourselves”.

The dread of Crony-Capitalism was highlighted and detailed in many previous blog commentaries; see Appendix below. Now we have to add the reality of Big Charity to the landscape; referring to the big organizations that fleece the public under the guise of charities but retain vast majorities of the funding as administrative costs, thusly benefiting mostly the charities’ executives and staff rather than the intended benefactors.

The Caribbean must do better! We need a Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on this issue.

The book Go Lean…Caribbean pursues the quest to elevate the Caribbean region through economic, security and governance empowerments. This includes oversight and guidance for NGO’s in the region. The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) to provide better stewardship for the Caribbean homeland. The book describes that NGO’s are Caribbean stakeholders. Even though many of the 30 member-states may be considered independent nations, the premise of the book is that there must be an ethos of interdependence, rather than just independence. This all relates to governance, the need for technocratic – and better – stewardship of regional Caribbean society. This point was also pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 11 & 14) with these acknowledgements and statements:

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.

xii. Whereas the legacy in recent times in individual states may be that of ineffectual governance with no redress to higher authority, the accedence of this Federation will ensure accountability and escalation of the human and civil rights of the people for good governance, justice assurances, due process and the rule of law. As such, any threats of a “failed state” status for any member state must enact emergency measures on behalf of the Federation to protect the human, civil and property rights of the citizens, residents, allies, trading partners, and visitors of the affected member state and the Federation as a whole.

xxxiii. Whereas lessons can be learned and applied from the study of the recent history of other societies, the Federation must formalize statutes and organizational dimensions to avoid the pitfalls of [other] communities.

This is the quest of CU/Go Lean roadmap: to provide new guards for a more competent Caribbean administration … by governmental organizations and non-governmental organizations. (NGO would be promoted, audited and overseen by CU administrators).

This crisis should not be wasted!

In general, the CU will employ better strategies, tactics and implementations to impact its prime directives; identified with the following 3 statements:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant engines and mitigate internal and external “bad actors”.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The Go Lean book stresses key community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies necessary to turn-around the eco-systems of Caribbean governance. These points are detailed in the book as follows:

Community Ethos – Deferred Gratification	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Respond to Incentives in Predictable Ways	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Security Principles – Whistleblower Protection	Page 23
Community Ethos – Security Principles – Intelligence Gathering	Page 23
Community Ethos – Security Principles – “Crap” Happens	Page 23
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Return on Investments	Page 24
Community Ethos – Governing Principles – Cooperatives	Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Turn-Arounds	Page 33
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations – South Africa TRC Model	Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Sharing – Emergency Response	Page 35
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Confederate all 30 member-states/ 4 languages into a Single Market	Page 45
Strategy – Mission – Prepare for the eventuality of natural disasters	Page 45
Strategy – Agents of Change – Climate Change	Page 57
Tactical – Ways to Foster a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Growing the Economy – Post WW II European Marshall Plan/Recovery Model	Page 68
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers – CU Federal Government versus Member-State Governance	Page 71
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers – Treasury Department – Shared Property Recording Systems	Page 74
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers – State Department – Liaison/Oversight for NGO’s	Page 80
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers – Interior Department – Housing & Urban Authority	Page 83
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers – Federal Courts – Truth & Reconciliation Commissions	Page 90
Implementation – Assemble All Regionally-focus Organizations of All Caribbean Communities	Page 96
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change	Page 101
Implementation – Ways to Foster International Aid	Page 115
Planning – 10 Big Ideas – Homeland Security Pact	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices – Governance and the Social Contract	Page 134
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices – Governance and the Social Contract	Page 134
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Housing – Optimizing Property Registration Process	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance	Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security	Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Improve for Natural Disasters	Page 184
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Technology	Page 197
Advocacy – Ways to Develop a Pre-Fab Housing Industry – One solution ideal for Haiti	Page 207
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Foundations – NGO’s can help deliver Social Contract	Page 219
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti	Page 238
Appendix – Philanthropy Pledge Signatories – Billionaires willing to “give” to an optimized technocracy	Page 292

The Go Lean roadmap seeks to empower and elevate Caribbean societal engines. While it is out-of-scope to impact America, we do not want American institutions (or European or Asian for that matter) exploiting our crisis for their gain.

Charity begins at home. (And should be managed at home). Online crowd-sourcing may be a better tool.

The Go Lean book calls on the Caribbean region to be collectively self-reliant, both proactively and reactively. Natural disasters (i.e. earthquakes and hurricanes) will occur again. Considering our efforts in our disaster response, relief and rebuilding – there will be many opportunities to get it right. Once we do … get it right – with an optimized technocracy – there will be more philanthropic funds and charitable donations to help our Caribbean causes. NGO’s, billionaires and their well-funded foundations are attracted to efficiently managed entities:

Take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves – Old Adage.

Our quest is simple, a regional effort to make the Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

————

Appendix – Models of American Crony-Capitalism

Big Defense	Many theorists indicate that the “follow the money” approach reveals the Military Industrial Complex work to undermine peace, so as to increase defense spending for military equipment, systems and weapons.
Big Media	Cable companies conspire to keep rates high; kill net neutrality; textbook publishers practice price gouging; Hollywood insists on big tax breaks/ subsidies for on-location shooting.
Big Oil	While lobbying for continuous tax subsidies, the industry have colluded to artificially keep prices high and garner rocket profits ($38+ Billion every quarter).
Big Box	Retail chains impoverish small merchants on Main Street with Antitrust-like tactics, thusly impacting community jobs. e-Commerce, an area of many future prospects, is the best hope of countering these bad business tactics.
Big Pharma	Chemo-therapy cost $20,000+/month; and the War against Cancer is imperiled due to industry profit insistence.
Big Tobacco	Cigarettes are not natural tobacco but rather latent with chemicals to spruce addiction.
Big Agra	Agribusiness concerns bully family farmers and crowd out the market; plus fight common sense food labeling efforts.
Big Data	Brokers for internet and demographic data clearly have no regards to privacy concerns.
Big Banks	Wall Street’s damage to housing and student loans are incontrovertible.
Big Weather	Overblown hype of “Weather Forecasts” to dictate commercial transactions.
Big Real Estate	Preserving MLS for Real Estate brokers only, forcing 6% commission rates, when the buyers and sellers can meet without them.
Big Salt	Despite the corrosiveness of salt on roads and the environment, it is the only tactic used to de-ice roads. Immediately after the weather warms, the roads must be re-constructed, thus ensuring a continuous economic cycle.
Big Energy	The For-Profit utility companies always lobby against regulations to “clean-up” fossil-fuel (coal) power plants or block small “Green” start-ups from sending excess power to the National Grid. Their motive is to preserve their century-long monopoly and their profits.
Big Legal	Even though it is evident that the promotion of Intellectual Property can help grow economies, the emergence of Patent Trolling parties (mostly lawyers) is squashing innovation. These ones are not focused on future innovations, rather just litigation. They go out and buy patents, then look for anyone that may consume any concepts close to those patents, then sue for settlements, quick gains.
Big Cruise	Cruise ships are the last bastion of segregation with descriptors like “modern-day-slavery” and “sweat-ships”. Working conditions are poor and wages are far below anyone’s standards of minimum. Many ship-domestic staff are “tip earners”, paid only about US$50 a month and expected to survive on the generosity of the passengers’ gratuity. The industry staff with personnel from Third World countries, exploiting those with desperate demands. Nowhere else in the modern world is this kind of job discrimination encouraged, accepted or tolerated.
Big Jails	The private prison industry seem motivated more by profit than by public safety. They attempt to sue state governments when their occupancy levels go too low; a reduction in crime is bad for business.
Big Housing	The American legacy is one of the institutional segregation in American cities. The practice was administered by real estate agents and housing officials executing policies to elevate property values and generational wealth for White families at the expense of a life of squalor for Non-Whites.

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Crony-Capitalism, Disaster, Haiti, Power, Security

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Blog # 300 – Legacies: Cause and Effect

Posted on May 18, 2015 in Ethos, Government

Go Lean Commentary

What is legacy and why is it important?

The actual definition is: 1. anything handed down from the past, as from an ancestor or predecessor; 2. a gift of property, especially personal property, as money, by will; a bequest.

Legacies refer to good and bad. This is the pointed reference of this commentary, the legacies of American and Caribbean empowerments and disestablishments. Two examples are presented here as teaching points for our communities because frankly, these legacies are current and pervasive in the news and daily lives of so many people today.

This is a milestone – Number 300 – for this effort, these commentaries to draw attention to news, models and applications of the book Go Lean…Caribbean. These 300 blogs/commentaries all highlight subjects, issues and advocacies to promote best practices to elevate the Caribbean economic, security and governing eco-system. All previous blogs were grouped into these 10 categories:

The basis for the teaching point of this American legacy is the institutional segregation practiced in American cities that limited non-Whites to ghettos and slums. This was not just an issue in the South, as this AUDIO Podcast reveals:

AUDIO Podcast: Historian Says Don’t ‘Sanitize’ How Our Government Created Ghettos – http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=406699264&m=406749329

Fifty years after the repeal of Jim Crow, many African-Americans still live in segregated ghettos in the country’s metropolitan areas. Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, has spent years studying the history of residential segregation in America. “We have a myth today that the ghettos in metropolitan areas around the country are what the Supreme Court calls ‘de-facto’ — just the accident of the fact that people have not enough income to move into middle class neighborhoods or because real estate agents steered black and white families to different neighborhoods or because there was white flight,” Rothstein tells NPR Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

“It was not the unintended effect of benign policies,” he says. “It was an explicit, racially purposeful policy that was pursued at all levels of government, and that’s the reason we have these ghettos today and we are reaping the fruits of those policies.”

The application of this history does not require an external geographic address to glean. Rather many people within the US, clearly recognize and lament this poor legacy. Notice here the following posted guestbook comments on the Podcast’s website:

“It doesn’t take rocket science or a degree in economics to see how white families would have become wealthier and African Americans would have missed out … by the time equal protection laws were enacted [in the 1960’s]. – Public Comment by “Cat Jones” on May 14, 2015.

“I remember in Lubbock, TX; which is a dry county [(no alcohol sold)]; they attempted to allow liquor stores [only] in the black neighborhoods, stating that it would be an influx of dollars into these neighborhoods. The black Churches came together to vote this down. The whites fought very hard for this to happen. Blacks said ok but why not allow them to be in the entire city. That question was never answered. It was simple we will provide your communities with the industries we have no desire for in our own communities but industries that improve the communities were reserved for white communities. Racism is far from running around shouting racist names. IT is stuff like this. – Public Comment by “bleemorrison” on May 14, 2015.

The book Go Lean…Caribbean pursues the quest to elevate the Caribbean region through economic, security and governance empowerments. This means looking, listening and learning from the lessons in history … old and new. This is especially true when our communities may still be impacted by that history. (The Podcast commences with the acknowledgement that Baltimore’s ghettos were just recently in flames due to the culmination of frustration of urban dysfunction there, ignited by the police killing of a Black Man in custody; this was just the “tip of the iceberg”). The book serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) to provide better stewardship for the Caribbean homeland.

This book and subsequent 300 blogs posit that the Caribbean can do better than our American counterparts, that rather than being parasites, we can be protégés and maybe even provide American communities our model on how to build a progressive society to live, work and play. In a recent blog/commentary, the issue of legacies – from Royal Charters and the resultant effects on powerful families – was detailed. The full appreciation was explored on how good and bad circumstances in life can be extended from generation to generation.

That’s the American example…

The Caribbean example involves the member-state of Haiti. This week the President of France made a proclamation of acknowledgement that the Republic of Haiti has endured a long legacy of paying a debt (in blood and finances) for the natural right of freedom.

http://www.france24.com/en/20150512-hollande-vow-haiti-debt-france-settle-slavery-confusion

VIDEO: France’s Hollande to Pay ‘Moral Debt’ to Haiti – https://youtu.be/5R-hA2KqWs4

Published on May 12, 2015 – French President Francois Hollande pledged to pay back a “moral debt” to Haiti during a visit on Tuesday to the impoverished Caribbean nation founded by former French slaves who declared independence in 1804. His visit marked the first official visit by a French president to the hemisphere’s poorest country, a former colonial jewel still bitter over a debt France forced Haiti to pay in 1825 for property lost in the slave rebellion. Hollande said, “We cannot change the past, but we can change the future.” He spoke at an event with Haitian president Michel Martelly on Port au Prince’s Champ de Mars, in the city center near the presidential palace that was destroyed by a 2010 earthquake.

Haiti revolted its slave colony status in 1791 and fought for its independence in 1804. To finally be recognized, France required the new country of Haiti to offset the income that would be lost by French settlers and slave owners; they demanded compensation amounting to 150 million gold francs. After a new deal was struck in 1838, Haiti agreed to pay France 90 million gold francs (the equivalent of €17 billion today). It was not until 1952 that Haiti made the final payment on what became known as its “independence debt”. Many analysts posit that the compensation Haiti paid to France throughout the 19th century “strangled development” and hindered the “evolution of the country”.

Though many had hoped the French’s President’s cancelation of the moral debt would translate to monetary damages – reparations – it is asserted here that just the acknowledgement of the legacy is profound. The same as the Baltimore legacy restricted a community, the French-Haiti legacy restricted this Caribbean country and a race of people – Haiti continues to be dysfunctional – a failed-state – the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

We see the causes and effects of legacies.

The Go Lean book and accompanying blogs push further and deeper on this subject of legacies, stressing that success can still be derived in the Caribbean, despite any lack of legacies, as some parties in the Americas have enjoyed 500, 200 or 75 years of entitlement. The book therefore stresses that the region can turn-around from “ground zero”, by applying best-practices, and forge new societal institutions to empower the region.

The consideration of the Go Lean book, as related to this subject is one of governance, the need for technocratic stewardship of the regional Caribbean society. This point of governance against the backdrop of societal legacies was pronounced early in the book, in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 10 – 14) with these declarations:

Preamble: As the history of our region and the oppression, suppression and repression of its indigenous people is duly documented, there is no one alive who can be held accountable for the prior actions, and so we must put aside the shackles of systems of repression to instead formulate efficient and effective systems to steer our own destiny.

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.

xii. Whereas the legacy in recent times in individual states may be that of ineffectual governance with no redress to higher authority, the accedence of this Federation will ensure accountability and escalation of the human and civil rights of the people for good governance, justice assurances, due process and the rule of law. As such, any threats of a “failed state” status for any member state must enact emergency measures on behalf of the Federation to protect the human, civil and property rights of the citizens, residents, allies, trading partners, and visitors of the affected member state and the Federation as a whole.

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.

xxxiii. Whereas lessons can be learned and applied from the study of the recent history of other societies, the Federation must formalize statutes and organizational dimensions to avoid the pitfalls of [other] communities.

According to the timeline established in the foregoing AUDIO Podcast, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s was a turn-around; it corrected a lot of the blatant defects in the American racial eco-systems. Haiti still awaits its turn-around.

This is the quest of Go Lean…Caribbean, to impact the Caribbean, not the United States. Haiti is in scope for this roadmap; Baltimore is not. The immediate goal is to analyze case studies, to learn lessons from the past (ancient and recent) of communities; then to assess how the best-practices … will drive success in the Caribbean. The roadmap simply seeks to reboot the region’s economic, security and governing engines, hypothesizing that the American and European colonial stewards did not have societal efficiency in mind when they structure administrations of the individual member-states in this region.

In general, the CU will employ better strategies, tactics and implementations to impact these 3 prime directives:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines and mitigate internal and external threats.
Improvement of Caribbean governance to support these engines.

The Go Lean book stresses key community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies necessary to transform and turn-around the eco-systems of Caribbean society. These points – relevant to the foregoing AUDIO and VIDEO features – are detailed in the book as follows:

Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices	Page 21
Community Ethos – Economic Principles – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations	Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Confederate all 30 member-states / 4 languages into a Single Market	Page 45
Strategy – Mission – Build and foster local economic engines	Page 45
Tactical – Ways to Foster a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Growing the Economy – Post WW II European Marshall Plan Model	Page 68
Tactical – Separation-of-Powers – CU Federal Government versus Member-State Governance	Page 71
Implementation – Assemble All Regionally-focus Organizations of All Caribbean Communities	Page 96
Implementation – Ways to Better Manage Debt	Page 114
Planning – 10 Big Ideas – Haiti Marshall Plan	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Make the Caribbean Better	Page 131
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices – Local Government and the Social Contract	Page 134
Planning – Lessons Learned from the previous West Indies Federation	Page 135
Planning – Lessons Learned from 2008 – Optimizing Economic-Financial-Monetary Engines	Page 136
Planning – Lessons Learned from Omaha – Human Flight Mitigations	Page 138
Planning – Lessons Learned from Detroit – Turn-around from Failure	Page 140
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Governance	Page 168
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage the Social Contract	Page 170
Advocacy – Ways to Improve Homeland Security	Page 180
Advocacy – Ways to Preserve Caribbean Heritage	Page 218
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti	Page 238
Appendix – Failed-State Index for Uneven Economic Development	Page 272

There are other lessons for the Caribbean to learn from considering history; the following previous blog/commentaries apply:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5183	A Lesson in History – Cinco De Mayo
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5123	A Lesson in History – Royal Charter: Zimbabwe -vs- South Africa
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=5055	A Lesson in History – Royal Charter: Empowering Families
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4971	A Lesson in History – Royal Charter: Truth & Consequence
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4935	A Lesson in History: the ‘Grand Old Party’ of American Politics
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4720	A Lesson in History: SARS in Hong Kong
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=4166	A Lesson in History: Panamanian Balboa
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2809	A Lesson in History: Economics of East Berlin
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2480	A Lesson in History: Community Ethos of WW II
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2297	A Lesson in History: Booker T versus Du Bois
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1531	A Lesson in History: 100 Years Ago Today – World War I
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=789	A Lesson in History: America’s War on the Caribbean

There is the effort to remediate American and European societies now. They recognize the futility of the actions of their ancestors and predecessors. They are now battling to try and weed-out the last vestiges of racism and housing discrimination. This is good! Housing investment is the best way to get rich slowly, to create generational wealth. This has been demonstrated time and again in the US, even though “black & brown” populations may have been excluded from participation.

The Go Lean roadmap focuses on the homeland only. It is out-of-scope to impact American cities like Baltimore; our scope is for the Caribbean only; for communities like Haiti.

Our quest is simple, the future, a 21^st century effort to make the Caribbean region a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

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Civil Rights, Haiti, History, Housing, Milestone

[Top]

Migrant flow into US from Caribbean spikes

Posted on January 7, 2015 in Government, Planning

Go Lean Commentary

The subject of nationality is dominant in the news right now. This is due to many illegal migrants fleeing their homelands seeking a better life abroad, for themselves and/or their children, many times at great risk to their lives. The issue of the processing of immigrant children is where the simple desires meets complicated politics.

Do children of illegal immigrants have the right to stay in their new country of birth or be deported back to the homelands of their parents? What if one parent is a citizen of the host country, should gender of the parent matter?

These questions reflect the heavy-lifting burdens that the Caribbean member-states must address regarding nationality and immigration.

The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for elevating Caribbean society, for all 30 member-states. The book does not ignore the subject of nationality and immigration. In fact the roadmap provides perhaps the ultimate resolution to this perplexing problem, that of a regional entity providing a regional solution. Consider the details of this news article:

Title: Migrant flow into US from Caribbean spikes
Associated Press Wire Service; Posted: January 4, 2015
http://news.yahoo.com/migrant-flow-us-caribbean-spikes-145024265.html
By: Jennifer Kay

MIAMI (AP) — Just starting a five-year sentence for illegally re-entering the United States, George Lewis stared at the officers staring back at him at Miami’s federal detention center and considered whether he’d risk getting on another smuggler’s boat — a chance that soaring numbers of Caribbean islanders are taking — once he’s deported again.

U.S. authorities deported Lewis following a four-year sentence for a felony drug conviction in May 2013 to the Bahamas, where he was born but lived only briefly. His Haitian mother brought him to Miami as an infant, and though he always considered the U.S. home, he never became a legal resident.

Just five months after he was deported, he got on a Bahamian smuggler’s boat with over a dozen other people trying to sneak into Florida. It capsized and four Haitian women drowned. He and the others were rescued.

So would he dare make another attempt?

“Yeah,” Lewis, 39, said with a sigh. But, he added, “I would put on a life vest next time.”

A recent spike in Cubans attempting to reach the United States by sea has generated headlines. But the numbers of Haitians and other Caribbean islanders making similar journeys are up even more. And while federal law grants legal residency to Cubans reaching U.S. soil, anyone else can be detained and deported.

That law, the so-called wet foot-dry foot policy, and Coast Guard operations related to migrants remain unchanged even as Cuban and U.S. leaders say they are restoring diplomatic relations after more than 50 years.

“The Coast Guard strongly discourages attempts to illegally enter the country by taking to the sea. These trips are extremely dangerous. Individuals located at sea may be returned to Cuba,” said Lt. Cmdr. Gabe Somma, spokesman for the Coast Guard’s 7th District in Miami.

According to the Coast Guard, in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, U.S. authorities captured, intercepted or chased away at least 5,585 Haitians, 3,940 Cubans and hundreds from the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean countries attempting to sneak into the country.

That’s at least 3,000 more migrants intercepted than in the previous fiscal year. It’s also the highest number of Haitian migrants documented in five years and the highest number of Cubans recorded in six. It’s unknown how many made it to U.S. shores without getting caught, or how many died trying.

More than 1,920 migrants — most of them Cuban or Haitian — have been intercepted so far in the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. The Coast Guard worries that number will only increase as news spreads about recent changes to the U.S. immigration system, including fast-tracking visas for some Haitians already approved to join family here and an executive order signed by President Barack Obama that would make millions already illegally in the U.S. eligible for work permits and protection from deportation.

“Any perceived changes to U.S. immigration policy can cause a spike in immigration because it gives a glimmer of hope,” even to people not eligible under those changes, said Capt. Mark Fedor, chief of response for the Coast Guard’s 7th District.

It’s unclear why the numbers are jumping. Poverty and political repression have long caused Caribbean islanders to attempt the journey, and the outlook remains dismal for many. Coast Guard and U.S. immigration officials think another calm summer without many tropical storms and a recovering U.S. economy might have encouraged more to take to the sea. They also say the increased captures may reflect better law enforcement.

Smuggling operations in the region range from individual opportunists looking to use their vessels for extra money to sophisticated networks that may add drug shipments to their human cargo, said Carmen Pino, an official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Miami. Smugglers also lure people, especially in relatively new routes that send Haitians into the neighboring Dominican Republic to board boats bound for Puerto Rico.

Lewis said he easily talked his way onto a smuggler’s boat with about a dozen Haitians and Jamaicans hoping to make it to Florida under the cover of darkness. He just struck up a conversation with some locals at a sports bar in Bimini, a small cluster of Bahamian islands 57 miles off Miami, where Lewis figured he could find a boat home.

“It was like getting a number from a girl. I just needed the right line,” Lewis said in an interview in November. The failed trip cost $4,000.

After his rescue, U.S. authorities initially accused him of being a smuggler, partly because he was the only person on board with a phone, which he used to call 911 when the boat started taking on water. He scoffed at the allegation. He remembered that on the boat he was talking to a teenage Haitian girl and thinking about his mother’s boat trip from Haiti to the Bahamas as a young girl, a crossing he never thought he would emulate. “I said, ‘Run behind me when we hit land.'” He said. ” I said, ‘Follow me, I’ll get you there.'”

Now Lewis finds himself back in the U.S. but not at home and facing another forced return to the Bahamas, a homeland he doesn’t know and where the government considers Haitians who have migrated illegally and their children an unwanted burden.

Lewis knows he’d try to reach the U.S. again.

“It’s not worth losing your life, but what life do you have when you have a whole country against you? I’m completely alienated from a country where I’m supposed to be from,” Lewis said.

A key problem with this immigration issue is the nationality sensitivity of any audience. As a people, what standards are we willing to tolerate versus what conditions are so deplorable that we must protest for change, with revolutionary fervor?

The American standard, because of its “Super Power” status, tends to influence the “normalized” view for many people in the Caribbean neighborhood for what is right and what is wrong with nationality recognition. But the US standard is bred from lessons learned from hard experiences. The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, (adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments, addressing citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws, and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War of 1860 – 1865), provides that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”^[24] The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes children born to foreign diplomats and children born to enemy forces engaged in hostile occupation of the country’s territory.^[25] Birthright citizenship is a separate concept from “natural-born citizen”, a qualification for the office of President of the United States.

The sensitivities of the issues of migration and nationality are heightened right now because countries in the Caribbean neighborhood have become more exacting in their treatment of Cuban and Haitian refugees, many even considering changes to their constitutions in an effort to tighten immigration policies so as to end the automatic birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants.^[12] This is already the status quo for the Bahamas.

In a previous blog commentary, the issue of the Bahamas versus the Haitian-American Diaspora in Miami was thoroughly detailed. This one point is extracted for consideration here:

The Bahamas does not automatically grant citizenship to people born of foreign parentage in its homeland. There are special provisos even if one parent is a Bahamian citizen; many details of which are gender-biased.

This Bahamian nationality standard creates a repressive circumstance for many born there to foreign parents; they have no status in the Bahamas, nor may they have any in their parent’s homeland. This means they are disqualified for jobs, advanced education or a passport – see experience of George Lewis in the foregoing news article. They cannot prosper where they are planted, nor legally migrate for better opportunities. As depicted in the Appendix A – VIDEO: “they cannot win, cannot break-even and cannot get out of the game”. These ones would rather risk their lives and the lives of their children than accept this status quo.

This previous blog commentary related the Bahamas citizenship standard (jus sanguinis) versus the US/Canadian standard (jus soli), as applied to Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands member-states as well. All the independent countries in the Caribbean ascribe to either the one standard or the other – see ‘Nations Granting Birthright Citizenship’ Appendix B below. The French Caribbean member-states apply French nationality standards and the Netherlands Antilles member-states apply the nationality standards of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The only other Caribbean member-states for nationality consideration are the British Overseas Territories (Bermuda, BVI, Caymans, Montserrat, and the Turks & Caicos); there is a formal Citizenship/Nationality B.O.T. process based on British Nationality standards. This summarizes all 30 member-states.

These Latin phrases, jus soli and jus sanguinis, for the applicable legal concepts are hereby explored:

1. Encyclopedic Reference: Jus soli (Latin: right of the soil) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli – Retrieved January 7, 2015

Jus soli is the right of anyone born in the territory of a state to nationality or citizenship.^[2] As an unconditional basis for citizenship, it is the predominant rule in the Americas, but is rare elsewhere.^[3][4][5][6] Since the Twenty-seventh Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland was enacted in 2004, no European country grants citizenship based on unconditional jus soli.^[7][8] A study in 2010 found that only 30 of the world’s 194 countries grant citizenship at birth to the children of undocumented foreign residents.^[5]

Almost all states in Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania grant citizenship at birth based upon the principle of jus sanguinis (right of blood), in which citizenship is inherited through parents not by birthplace, or a restricted version of jus soli in which citizenship by birthplace is not automatic for the children of certain immigrants. Countries that have acceded to the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness will grant nationality to otherwise stateless persons who were born on their territory, or on a ship or plane flagged by that country.

Jus soli is associated with permissive citizenship rights. Most countries with unconditional jus soli laws tend to give birthright citizenship (and nationality) based on jus sanguinis rules as well, although these stipulations tend to be more restrictive than in countries that use jus sanguinis as the primary basis for nationality.

At one time, jus sanguinis was the sole means of determining nationality in Europe (where it is still widespread in Central and Eastern Europe) and Asia. An individual belonged to a family, a tribe or a people, not to a territory. It was a basic tenet of Roman law.^[9] [This is the premise of the “Christmas” story, the reason why Joseph and a pregnant Mary had to go to Bethlehem to register in accord with the declaration of Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus – Luke Chapter 2:1–5; The Bible].

Lex soli is a law used in practice to regulate who and under what circumstances an individual can assert the right of jus soli. Most states provide a specific lex soli, in application of the respective jus soli, and it is the most common means of acquiring nationality.

[Consider additional sources in the reference work by Jon Feere: “Birthright Citizenship in the United States: A Global Comparison,” Center for Immigration Studies].

————–

2. Encyclopedic Reference: Jus sanguinis (Latin: right of blood) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis – Retrieved January 7, 2015

Jus sanguinis is a principle of nationality law by which citizenship is not determined by place of birth but by having one or both parents who are citizens of the state. Children at birth may automatically be citizens if their parents have state citizenship or national identities of ethnic, cultural or other origins.^[1] Citizenship can also apply to children whose parents belong to a diaspora and were not themselves citizens of the state conferring citizenship. This principle contrasts with jus soli (Latin: right of soil).^[22]

At the end of the 19th century, the French-German debate on nationality saw the French, such as Ernest Renan, oppose the German conception, exemplified by Johann Fichte, who believed in an “objective nationality”, based on blood, race or language. Renan’s republican conception, but perhaps also the presence of a German-speaking population in Alsace-Lorraine, explains France’s early adoption of jus soli. Many nations have a mixture of jus sanguinis and jus soli, including the United States, Canada, Israel, Greece, Ireland, and recently Germany.

Today France only narrowly applies jus sanguinis, but it is still the most common means of passing on citizenship in many continental European countries. Some countries provide almost the same rights as a citizen to people born in the country, without actually giving them citizenship. An example is Indfødsret in Denmark, which provides that upon reaching 18, non-citizen residents can decide to take a test to gain citizenship.

Some modern European states which arose out of dissolved empires, like the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman, have huge numbers of ethnic populations outside of their new ‘national’ boundaries, as do most of the former Soviet states. Such long-standing diasporas do not conform to codified 20th-century European rules of citizenship.

In many cases, jus sanguinis rights are mandated by international treaty, with citizenship definitions imposed by the international community. In other cases, minorities are subject to legal and extra-legal persecution and choose to immigrate to their ancestral home country. States offering jus sanguinis rights to ethnic citizens and their descendants include Italy, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Lebanon, Armenia and Romania. Each is required by international treaty to extend those rights.

The Caribbean member-states are badly in need of reform and remediation, to lower the “push and pull” factors that drive so many to risk their ‘life and limb’, and those of their children, to take flight under dangerous circumstances to seek a better life. Many people of goodwill do not want to live in a society where dead bodies may float up on beaches because people are desperate to leave their homeland at any cost. The Go Lean roadmap opens with the hypothesis that the Caribbean is the greatest address in the world; people should be “beating paths to get here”, not “beating down doors to get out”; (Page 3).

The idea of desperate migration is not just a problem for Cuba, Haiti and the countries in the migrants’ path (Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico) to get to better living conditions. This is a problem for all the Caribbean. There is always someone doing better and someone doing worst. For instance, while the Bahamas may have 80,000 illegal Haitians on their shores, there is a report that there were 70,000 illegal Bahamians in the US as of 2003; (College of The Bahamas 2005 Study on Haitian Migration, Page 10). The problem is so much bigger than just what’s at “face value”, the initial impression. This is a deep, serious issue that cuts at the heart of the Caribbean community ethos and requires heavy-lifting to address.

The Go Lean book and blogs posit that the effort is less to cure the Caribbean homeland than to thrive as an alien in a foreign land. But. this is easier said than done! Yet this is the quest of the Go Lean roadmap, to make the Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work and play for its 42 million residents and 80 million visitors, across the 30 member-states. The CU, applying best-practices for community empowerment has these 3 prime directives, proclaimed as follows:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
Improve Caribbean governance, with consideration for minority equalization, to support these engines.

The vision is to lower the “push and pull” factors that drives many to abandon their Caribbean homeland.

How exactly can the CU impact the most troubled countries that are the source of so many illegal migrants: Cuba and Haiti? The book relates the history of post-war Europe, where the Marshall Plan was instrumental in rebooting that continent. The book Go Lean…Caribbean details a Marshall Plan-like roadmap for Cuba and Haiti, and other failing Caribbean institutions.

The related subjects of economic, security and governing dysfunction among European and Caribbean member-states have been a frequent topic for blogging by the Go Lean promoters, as sampled here:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3473	Haiti’s Failed Attempts to Expand Caracol Industrial Park and Job Engines
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3455	Restoration of Diplomatic Relations with Cuba – Need for Re-boot Now
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3050	Obama’s immigration tweaks leave Big Tech wanting more
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2907	Local Miami Haitian leaders protest Bahamian immigration policy
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2809	A Lesson in History: Economics of East Germany
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2480	A Lesson in History: Community Ethos of WW II
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2330	‘Raul Castro reforms not enough’, Cuba’s bishops say
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1531	A Lesson in History: 100 Years Ago Today – World War I
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1433	Caribbean loses over 70% of tertiary educated citizens to the brain drain
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1014	All is not well in the sunny Caribbean
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=623	Only at the precipice, do they change
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=599	Ailing Puerto Rico open to radical economic fixes

The Go Lean book details a series of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to optimize the “push/pull” factors that send Caribbean citizens to the High Seas to flee their homeland:

Community Ethos – Economic Systems Influence Choices & Incentives	Page 21
Community Ethos – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Anti-Bullying and Mitigation	Page 23
Community Ethos – Minority Equalization	Page 24
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Manage Reconciliations	Page 34
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Integrate region into a Single Market Economy	Page 45
Strategy – Agents of Change – Globalization	Page 57
Tactical – Separation of Powers – Department of Homeland Security	Page 75
Implementation – Ways to Foster International Aid	Page 115
Planning – 10 Big Ideas … in the Caribbean Region – Haiti & Cuba	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Ways to Model the EU – From Worst to First	Page 130
Planning – Reasons Why the CU Will Succeed – Germany Reconciliation Model	Page 132
Planning – Ways to Improve Failed-State Indices – Cuba & Haiti on the List	Page 134
Planning – Lessons from East Germany – European post-war rebuilding	Page 139
Planning – Lessons from the US Constitution	Page 145
Planning – Lessons from Canada’s History	Page 146
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Foster Empowering Immigration – Case Study of Indian Migrants	Page 174
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Justice	Page 178
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the Diaspora	Page 217
Advocacy – Ways to Protect Human Rights	Page 220
Advocacy – Ways to Help Women	Page 226
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Youth	Page 227
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the Dominican Republic	Page 237
Advocacy – Ways to Re-boot Haiti	Page 238
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Trinidad & Tobago – Indo versus Afro	Page 240
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Guyana – Indo versus Afro	Page 241
Advocacy – Ways to Impact US Territories – All is not well	Page 244
Appendix – Puerto Rico Migrations to New York	Page 303

All of the Caribbean needs to deal with these domestic issues … now! We need to learn from the experiences of our neighbors, as depicted in the Go Lean book, and minimize the push-pull factors leading to societal abandonment. The US learned its lessons from a Civil War (Page 145), Canada from the fears of war (Page 146). As depicted in the foregoing news article, our citizens are dying in the waters trying to flee our homelands. When is enough, enough?

The Go Lean/CU roadmap has proposed solutions: CU citizenship; and facilitating the Lex soli process at the CU level – thereby removing the subjectivity and bias to the nationality process. Fragments of this proposed system is already in place with the issuance of CariCom passports. The Go Lean roadmap calls for the assembling of CariCom organs into the CU Trade Federation, the Caribbean passport practice would therefore continue.

Now is the time for all of the Caribbean to learn the lessons from history or other successful (US & Canada) and unsuccessful societies (East Germany, etc.). The Go Lean book posits that the Caribbean is in a serious crisis, but asserts that this crisis would be a terrible thing to waste. The people and governing institutions of Cuba, Haiti and the entire Caribbean region are hereby urged to lean-in for the empowerments described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean.

This is a Big Deal for the region, as real solutions can finally be realized. Then we can present to the world that the Caribbean homeland is truly a better place to live, work, and play.

Download the book Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

————————–

Appendix A – VIDEO: The Wiz – http://youtu.be/3r1ssg1LIt4 The Crow Anthem (1978)

“You can’t win … can’t break-even and you can’t get out of the game”

Appendix B – Nations Granting Birthright Citizenship – Excerpts

(Source: https://www.numbersusa.com/content/learn/issues/birthright-citizenship/nations-granting-birthright-citizenship.html)

Birthright Citizenship is the automatic granting of citizenship to children born within a nation’s borders or territories. The United States and Canada are the only developed nations in the world to still offer Birthright Citizenship to tourists and illegal aliens. 8 U.S.C. § 1401 : US Code – Section 1401 (1952) grants automatic citizenship to any person born in the United States.

The following are among the nations repealing Birthright Citizenship in recent years:

Australia (2007)
New Zealand (2005)
Ireland (2005)
France (1993)
India (1987)
Malta (1989)
UK (1983)
Portugal (1981)

DEVELOPED NATIONS
Birthright Citizenship – Caribbean Neighborhood Only

YES	NO
Canada	Bermuda
United States	Netherlands
	United Kingdom

OTHER NATIONS
Birthright Citizenship – Caribbean Neighborhood Only

YES	NO
Antigua and Barbuda	Bahamas
Barbados	Haiti
Belize	Suriname
Dominica
Dominican Republic
Grenada
Guyana
Jamaica
St. Kitts and Nevis
St. Lucia
St. Vincent and the Grenadines
Trinidad and Tobago

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Cuba, Foreign Policy, Haiti, Image, Security

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Haiti to Receive $70 Million Grant to Expand Caracol Industrial Park

Posted on December 19, 2014 in Economics, Locations

Go Lean Commentary

The book Go Lean … Caribbean introduces the terminology of Self-Governing Entities (SGE), but the concept already exists within the Caribbean. According to the following news article, these sites can be very impactful. In this case it is an industrial park in Haiti, but other versions exists:

Free Trade Zones
Technology Bases
Education and Research Campuses
Foreign Military Bases – i.e. Guantanamo Bay in Cuba; AUTEC in Andros, Bahamas
Aerotropolis – Airport Cities – like the ones with US Pre-Clearance Facilities in Aruba, Bahamas and Bermuda

The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU) to provide a structure for multiple versions of SGE’s throughout the region. The book describes how these bordered site-zone-park-base-campus locales can function as economic engines for their host communities by transcending local limitations and administration.

This approach (strategy, tactic and implementation) represents the basis for change in the region, similar to how the Caracol Industrial Park has impacted change in Cap Haitien (Northern Haiti). The story here speaks to expansions of the Caracol site:

By: The Caribbean Journal staff

Haiti will be receiving $70 million in grant funding to expand its business facilities at the Caracol Industrial Park in the north of the country.

The funding is coming in the amount of $55 million from the Inter-American Development Bank, co-financed by the US government to the tune of $15 million.

The aim of the funding is to expand facilities and “create above-board jobs” in northern Haiti.

The programme aims to create 6,800 jobs by 2018 in companies operating out of the industrial park, according to the IDB, with 65 percent held by women.

The focus of the financing will be on the construction of buildings and factories for industrial activities, the IDB said, along with the expansion of roads and public services.
Caribbean Journal Regional News Service (Posted 12-12-2014; retrieved 12-18-2014) –
http://www.caribjournal.com/2014/12/12/haiti-to-receive-70-million-grant-to-expand-caracol-industrial-park/#

This Caracol project initiated with no help from the CU/Go Lean promoters, but the actuality of this project provided a lot of lessons learned … and a new commitment for best practices in these types of endeavors in the future; see “Highs and Lows of Caracol” experiences in the Appendix below.

The economic impacts of SGE’s are undeniable. A previous Go Lean blog related how one SGE in Orlando Florida contributes $18.2 billion in annual economic activity to that State. The Go Lean roadmap seeks to now emulate the strategic, tacticals and implementation successes of SGE’s of other countries in the 30 Caribbean member-states. (The CU may have no jurisdictions of existing SGE-like facilities except for marshalling economic crimes for the region). The roadmap seeks to elevate the region with economic engines (direct and indirect spin-off activities), by assuming jurisdiction for new Self-Governing Entities in the region and the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the 1,063,000 square miles of the Caribbean Sea. This approach allows for initiation, cooperation and coordination of SGE’s and the EEZ to effectuate change in the region, allowing these 3 prime directives:

Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion GDP and create 2.2 million new jobs.
Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines, specifically in SGE’s and the EEZ.
Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, with a separation-of-powers and SGE exclusivity.

Since the Go Lean book posits that one person can make a difference and positively impact society, the book advocates for a community ethos of investment in the “gifts” that individuals (domestic and foreign) “bring to the table”. The book identifies the quality of geniuses and relates worthwhile returns from their investments. This mode of study allows us to consider this example of contributions from many artists, scientists, industrialists and philanthropists around the world and their corporate/artistic creations. Re-consider this point from these previous Go Lean blog/commentaries:

https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=3276	Role Model Shaking Up the World of Cancer; Perfect for SGE Application
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2750	Disney World – Role Model for Self Governing Entities
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2670	A Lesson in History: Rockefeller’s Pipeline – A Glimpse for SGEs
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2338	Using SGE’s to Welcome the Dreaded ‘Plutocracy’
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=2003	Where the Jobs Are – Ship-breaking under SGE Structure
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1214	Fairgrounds as SGEs and Landlords for Sports Leagues
https://goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=286	Puerto Rico’s Comprehensive Cancer Center Project Breaks Ground – Model of Medical SGEs

The book Go Lean … Caribbean asserts that SGE’s and the EEZ can be strategic, tactical and operationally efficient for elevating Caribbean society. These points are pronounced early in the book with this Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 11 and 14), with these statements:

v. Whereas the natural formation of our landmass and coastlines entail a large portion of waterscapes, the reality of management of our interior calls for extended oversight of the waterways between the islands. The internationally accepted 12-mile limits for national borders must be extended by International Tribunals to encompass the areas in between islands. The individual states must maintain their 12-mile borders while the sovereignty of this expanded area, the Exclusive Economic Zone, must be vested in the accedence of this Federation.

xxvi. Whereas the Caribbean region must have new jobs to empower the engines of the economy and create the income sources for prosperity, and encourage the next generation to forge their dreams right at home, the Federation must therefore foster the development of new industries… In addition, the Federation must invigorate the enterprises related to existing industries like tourism … impacting the region with more jobs.

The Go Lean book itself details the economic principles and community ethos to adopt, plus the executions of strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to forge Self-Governing Entities and industrial growth in the Caribbean:

Economic Principles – People Choose because Resources are Limited	Page 21
Economic Principles – All Choices Involve Costs	Page 21
Economic Principles – People Respond to Incentives	Page 21
Economic Principles – Economic Systems Influence Individual Choices	Page 21
Economic Principles – Voluntary Trade Creates Wealth	Page 21
Economic Principles – Consequences of Choices Lie in the Future	Page 21
Community Ethos – Job Multiplier	Page 22
Community Ethos – “Crap” Happens	Page 23
Community Ethos – Lean Operations	Page 24
Community Ethos – Return on Investments (ROI)	Page 24
Community Ethos – Cooperatives	Page 25
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future	Page 26
Community Ethos – Ways to Foster Genius	Page 27
Community Ethos – Ways to Help Entrepreneurship	Page 28
Community Ethos – Ways to Impact Research & Development	Page 30
Community Ethos – Ways to Improve Negotiations	Page 32
Community Ethos – Impact the Greater Good	Page 37
Strategy – Vision – Confederating 30 Member-states in a Union	Page 45
Strategy – Mission – Build and Foster Local Economic Engines	Page 45
Tactical – Fostering a Technocracy	Page 64
Tactical – Growing Economy – New High Multiplier Industries	Page 68
Separation of Powers – Department of State – Self-Governing Entities	Page 80
Separation of Powers – Interior Department – Exclusive Economic Zone	Page 82
Implementation – Ways to Pay for Change – SGE Licenses	Page 101
Implementation – Steps to Implement Self-Governing Entities	Page 103
Anecdote – French Guiana Space Agency – Example of a SGE	Page 103
Implementation – Benefits from the Exclusive Economic Zone	Page 104
Planning – 10 Big Ideas – Self-Governing Entities	Page 127
Planning – Ways to Improve Trade	Page 128
Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy	Page 151
Advocacy – Ways to Create Jobs	Page 152
Advocacy – Ways to Better Manage Natural Resources – EEZ and SGE’s	Page 183
Anecdote – Caribbean Industrialist & Entrepreneur Role Model	Page 189
Advocacy – Ways to Promote Fairgrounds	Page 192
Advocacy – Ways to Develop Ship-Building as SGE’s	Page 209
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the Prison Industrial Complex as SGE’s	Page 211
Advocacy – Ways to Impact the One Percent – Job Creators Inducements	Page 224
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Urban Living – Self-Governing Entities	Page 234
Advocacy – Ways to Impact Rural Living – Self-Governing Entities	Page 235
Advocacy – Ways to Promote World-Heritage-Sites as SGE’s	Page 248
Appendix – Airport Cities – Models for Self Governing Entities	Page 287

The Go Lean roadmap requires new SGE projects to be negotiated with local and national governments in the affected geographic areas. A project may, or may not, align with community values from one place to another. Does a community cling to egalitarian values or allow individual achiever to rise-and-shine? The Go Lean messaging is important in this regard. The quest of the roadmap is to elevate the entire Caribbean, but reality and history shows that some climb the social-economic ladder faster, and some slower, than others. One size does not fit all!

So the Go Lean ethos is clear: there is a role for the contributions of one impactful person, institution or company, in this vision for the elevation and empowerment of the Caribbean homeland. The Go Lean … Caribbean roadmap invites these contributions. See Appendix below of the historic details of the Caracol project; the “good, bad and ugly”; this experience shows how SGE’s can easily impact a community, economically – bring in a lot of jobs; but the experience also shows how there are security and governing issues associated with these projects as well. This is why the Go Lean roadmap posits that there is the need for technocratic oversight for SGE’s.

Will the CU approach eliminate all risks and problems with these type of SGE projects? Of course not; but the CU will facilitate the accountability factors to ensure best practices. Considering the experiences in the Appendix below, will the CU mitigate minimum wage job placements? Again, of course not; wages are a representation of market forces: supply and demand. Citizens in Caribbean communities will have a choice: step into SGE grounds and accept their employment conditions or decline. The demand may be for higher wages to attract a ready work force; or the SGE operator/facilitator may enable its own supply of direct workers; then the community is limited to only indirect/spin-off economic benefits. This is reality of shepherding the Caribbean in a globalized economy. This heavy-lifting is the role of the CU.

Change has come to the Caribbean. All Caribbean stakeholders are hereby urged to lean-in to this win-win roadmap to make the Caribbean a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

Download the book Go Lean…Caribbean now!

———-

Appendix – Caracol Industrial Park – Highs and Lows

Background: In 2012 the Caracol Industrial Park was built on a square mile, 600 acre, 246 hectare, site near Caracol. The $300 million project, which includes a 10-megawatt power plant, road, a water-treatment plant, worker housing in neighboring communities, and development of a port in nearby Fort-Liberté, was built with hurricane relief funds, a loan from the Inter-American Development Bank,^[1] contributions by the United States government, and The Clinton Foundation. Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, United States Secretary of State, played central roles in supporting and promoting the project. The anchor tenant is SNH Global, S.A, a subsidiary of Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd, Sae-A, a global clothing manufacturer headquartered in South Korea.^[2][3] It began operations in the fall of 2012 with an expected work force of 20,000^[4]. The eventual workforce is projected to increase to near 65,000 and result in a expansion of population in the area. Social and environmental disruption is anticipated as the result of this hastily-planned project.^[3][4]

Source References

“Haiti and its partners lay the foundation stone for the Caracol Industrial Park” (Press release). Inter-American Development Bank. November 28, 2011. Retrieved July 6, 2012.
“New industrial park in Haiti” (Slide 4 of slideshow). The Miami Herald. Retrieved July 6, 2012.
Jacqueline Charles (June 4, 2012). “New industrial park in northern Haiti sparks controversy”. The Miami Herald. Retrieved July 6, 2012.
Deborah Sontag (July 5, 2012). “Earthquake Relief Where Haiti Wasn’t Broken”. The New York Times. Retrieved July 6, 2012.

Highs: Secretary Clinton Delivers Remarks at the Caracol Industrial Park Opening Ceremony – http://youtu.be/lAeMKmo4NEs

Published on Oct 24, 2012 – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivers remarks at the Caracol Industrial Park Opening Ceremony in Cap Haitien, Haiti on October 22, 2012. [Go to http://video.state.gov for more video and text transcript.]

Lows: The Bill and Hillary Clinton Haiti Debacle: Growing anger over reconstruction efforts – http://youtu.be/_Y53HPzCCtE

Published on May 25, 2014 – The news website Tout Haiti reported last month that two prominent lawyers have petitioned Haiti’s Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes, demanding an audit of Bill Clinton’s management of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC). There are powerful interests that won’t want to see the petition succeed and it may go nowhere. But the sentiment it expresses is spreading fast. In the immortal words of Charlie Brown, Mr. Clinton has gone from hero to goat.

Four years after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake toppled the capital city of Port-au-Prince and heavily damaged other parts of the country, hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), allocated to the IHRC, are gone. Hundreds of millions more to the IHRC from international donors have also been spent. Left behind is a mishmash of low quality, poorly thought-out development experiments and half-finished projects…

A June 2013 Government Accountability Office report gave a barely passing grade to USAID’s Haiti reconstruction effort. It said $170 million was allocated to build a power plant and a port near the Caracol Industrial Park, not far from Cap-Haïtien. The two projects “are interdependent; each must be completed and remain viable for the other to succeed,” the GAO explained. The first phase of the power plant was completed on time and under budget. But the port construction was delayed by two years “due in part to a lack of USAID expertise in port planning in Haiti.” Projected costs, according to the report, say the estimated shortfall of $117 million to $189 million is larger than originally estimated. “It is unclear whether the Haitian government will be able to find a private sector company willing to finance the remainder of the project.”

(Consider the source: This video/commentary is from Fox News Channel, a notorious right-wing-leaning media source in the US; they have historically reported with an anti-Clinton slant).

Lows: Caracol: Haiti’s miracle of development turns into nightmare of exploitation – http://youtu.be/qg_DSVwmX6s

Published on Oct 22, 2012 – WORKERS AT NEW CARACOL INDUSTRIAL PARK NOT BEING PAID MINIMUM WAGE

Despite the inauguration for the Caracol industrial park happening today, October 22, 2012, the first factory at the new Caracol industrial park in northern Haiti, Sae-A, began operations months ago. The new workers are being paid only 150 gourdes, or $3.75 US (less than $.50 an hour) for nine hours of work.

For months now, several hundered people have been working in the industrial park before the official launch. The employees, the majority of whom are young women, come from all over the region to work. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Haitian government officials and others come together to celebrate the opening of the industrial park, the women who have been working there are calling for just wages and better working conditions.

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