The Empire at Work in Haiti: US led neoliberal capitalism helped create vulnerability to earthquakes

[Karmadillo]

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/23640

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Earthquakes are natural developments, but vulnerability to them is richly anthropogenic ("man made") and is not spread evenly across the fractured and intersecting global landscapes of race, class, and empire. As Mike Davis pointed out in his 2006 book Planet of Slums, a chilling expose of the atrocious living (and dying) conditions that US.-led neoliberal capitalism has imposed on the ever more mega-urbanized poor of the global South: "Even more than landslides and floods, earthquakes make precise audits of the urban housing crisis...seismic destruction usually maps with uncanny accuracy to poor-quality brick, mud, or concrete residential housing...Seismic hazard is the fine print in the devil's bargain of informal housing..."

The "relaxation" of regulations on housing planning and construction combines with the concentration of much of the South's urban population "on or near active tectonic plate margins" to put millions in peril.

"Seismic risk is so unevenly distributed in most cities," Davis learned, that one leading "hazard geographer" (Kenneth Hewitt) coined the phrase "classquake" to describe 20th century earthquakes' "biased pattern of destruction," which fell mainly on "slums, tenement districts, poor rural villages."

Davis' (and Hewitt's) analysis clearly applies to the current Haitian tragedy, vastly magnified by the desperately impoverished and informal, unregulated housing conditions of masses of marginalized people in and around the sprawling slums of Port au Prince. In that city's most notorious slum, Cite-Soliel, David noted, population densities are "comparable to cattle feedlots" crowding more residents per acre into low-rise housing than there were in famous congested tenement districts such as the Lower East Side in the 1900s or in contemporary highrise cores such as central Tokyo and Manhattan." <1>

Haiti's crushing poverty has long made it something of the Western hemisphere's Bangladesh - a symbol of almost total wretchedness. Like Bangladesh, however, Haiti awed its European "discoverers" with vast natural wealth and ease of life.

The Europeans put a brutal end to that ease, turning Haiti into a killing ground and then a viciously exploited slave colony that served for many years as leading source of France's wealth. When the slaves rebelled and overthrew their colonial masters to set up and independent black republic in the early 19th century, they were shunned and embargoed by the great slave-owners' republic to their north (that glorious beacon of freedom the United States) and were forced to make a huge reverse-reparations payment to their former masters.

Things didn't get much better in the 20th century, thanks in no small part to the U.S. and its supposed great liberal-humanitarian president Woodrow Wilson. In his conservative campaign book The Audacity of Hope (New York, 2006), a monument to historical whitewashing, the future liberal war president Barack Obama praised Wilson for seeing that "it was in America's interest to encourage the self-determination of all peoples and provide the world a legal framework that could help avoid future conflicts" <2>.

Not really. The Wilson administration showed "how the United States shoulder its responsibilities" and expressed its racism when it undertook a brutal U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1915. As Noam Chomsky wrote, "Wilson's troops murdered, destroyed, reinstituted virtual slavery and demolished the constitutional system in Haiti." These actions followed in accord with Wilson Secretary of State Robert Lansing's belief that "the African races are devoid of any capacity for political organization" and possessed "an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature."

A major food crisis that broke out in Haiti in early 2008 could be "traceback directly to Woodrow Wilson's invasion of Haiti, which was murderous and brutal and destructive. Among Wilson's many crimes," Chomsky noted last year, "was to dissolve the Haitian parliament at gunpoint, because it refused to pass what was called progressive legislation, which would allow US businesses to take over Haitian lands. Wilson's marines then ran a free election, in which the legislation was passed by 99.9 percent of the vote. That's of the five percent of the population permitted to vote." <3>

more...

[snot]

1. K&R'd

And protesting the unrec function.

[anonymous171]

2. Yet another reason to hate Woodrow Wilson. nt

[stray cat]

3. Next thing we will be blamed for the earthquake and not just the poverty in other nations

[Leopolds Ghost]

4. So what is Z Mag proposing? That we enforce California style building code & slum clearance regs?

Tear down the shanties, evict hundreds of thousands from prime real estate made "inaccessible" to motor vehicles by shanty dwellings, and build freeways and vertical slums like they are trying to do to Dharavi in India? Modernize the slums to US standards (8-lane roads, high-rise or single story suburban "hyperbolic slums") in the name of "reversing" the "relaxation of (colonial) regulations"?

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/05/dharavi-mumbai-slum/jacobson-text

I'm hearing the exact opposite, that the devastation hit modern buildings hardest, and places like Cite Soleil experienced less death and destruction since the buildings were smaller, albeit much flimsier... but those rumors could be wrong.

Bottom line is, you can't turn the whole world into Los Angeles like we're trying to do in New Orleans.

Brazilians fought hard to modernize and preserve their favelas when Westerners wanted to demolish them in the name of "bettering the slum dwellers of the Global South".

So-called "informal housing" in most nations translates to "the way we traditionally build and develop land" as opposed to the way Westerners want to divide up land using zoning and automobile rights of way to maximize land value by confining large parcels (1/4 acre lots, etc.) in the hands of property owners and demolishing "slums, alley dwellings, and public housing" instead of improving them.

Like we're doing in New Orleans -- well-intentioned liberals fighting to end public housing and destroy the New Deal.

[stray cat]

5. Maybe DUers can put up enough money to pay for Haitians to keep things to code?

[Leopolds Ghost]

9. Code is already used for slum clearance in the US, since anything urban in US violate suburban code

F'ed up suburban code designed to create nightmare places like most post-1965 US suburbs

Which we are now exporting to every country abroad, particularly China which is engaged in the largest freeway building program ever to move 1 billion people from bikes to cars.

How is that any better than shantytowns, which are at least walkable and less likely to
trap people under hundreds of feet of rubble?

[Leopolds Ghost]

7. Oh and Brazilians from the Slum Dwellers Association are now fighting to save Dharavi in India.

Not that people who are against public housing and against the "western created nightmare of loose regulated informal housing" care.

Neocolonial policies created the mass exodus to the cities, maybe. You can't "blame" anyone for not wanting to live in a modern high-rise slum surrounded by a US-funded freeway instead of a shanty built under traditional land use methods, however.

But western policies are CERTAINLY to blame for creating those poorly constructed vertical concrete nightmare high rises.

So why is the Obama Admin trying to tear down low-rise, garden-style public housing built by FDR in New Orleans?

[malaise]

10. If the Multilaterals pushed by the neo-liberals in Washington

hadn't destroyed the agricultural sector and live stock sectors in developing countries, large numbers of urban slum dwellers would still be producing food for the cities and not denuding the hillsides around the cities and tourist towns.

That's the truth.

[Leopolds Ghost]

11. You call it denuding the hillsides, they call it a neighborhood. All of Haiti is denuded by poor ag

That's why it's so poor (read Collapse by Jared Diamond).

Why not focus your ire on the huge, sprawling tracts on the wealthy parts of any 2nd or 3rd world nation that are built to Western standards and take up 3x as much space to house 1/4 as many people as the adjacent favelas and shantytowns?

[malaise]

12. Valid point but the truth is that

we can all build green rather than make everyone vulnerable by destroying the protective trees, shrubs and grasses.

[Leopolds Ghost]

14. In Haiti's case, it's easy to start fresh since the entire country has been deforested.

Similar to Katrina in some ways that the answer is on a huge scale environmental restoration of the vast hinterlands around the city (in New Orleans, to build a barrage across the Gulf Outlet and restore the cypress swamps) in order to protect the city and give people living in it access to a better life.

[malaise]

15. Well the good news is that the entire establishment has

been wiped out so maybe finally there can be a new start

[Leopolds Ghost]

17. Definitely check out Jared Diamond's book Collapse, he has a section on Haiti vs. DR

A former dictator of the Dominican Republican happened to be a big environmentalist and unintentionally pulled that country from the brink of poverty by helping preserve its forests from being cut down for charcoal and timber, and preventing mass environmental collapse.

The Haiti / DR line can be seen on a map, like many old-growth jungles around the world (sadly).

Diamond traces the rise of Japan and its rapid modernization in the late 1800s to a similar edict by the Shogunate setting aside environmental preservation of 80 percent of the country's forests during the period of isolation.

England even tried to do something similar, but failed, the peasantry rebelled against royal forest protection, seeing it as a form of "enclosure" (an early form of corporate ownership siezing land formerly held in common by the peasants of the village). So England lost its forests and had to rely on coal, leading to urban poverty and colonial expansion (mass exporting of England's poor, since the surviving poor people in 1700s and 1800s either starved in the factory slums or shipped overseas... British upper middle class literally outbred England's vast urban and rural lower class during the Industrial Victorian period, and exported the survivors -- England's slums had terrible life expectancy, and the rural areas had been deforested and enclosed by wealthy land owners -- to the US and Australia... many Americans are the survivors of Britain's former lower class, while most British are the descendents of downwardly mobile aristocracy who benefited from industrialization. All those Victorian slum dwellers either made it into the middle class or starved to death.)

British Parks laws today are descended from those policies dating back to William the Conqueror in 1066 (who was actually hated for his strict forest protection laws in Royal Forests that covered much of the country and limited hunting of wildlife, cutting of trees and vegetation, etc.)

[malaise]

18. I'll order Collapse today

Nice post. The problem with the use of the commons and other forests is that the ruling class banned all but themselves from the land. They were protecting it for themselves. That never works.
There's a classic by E.P. Thompson called The Making of the English Working Class - I think you'd enjoy that.

[Leopolds Ghost]

13. But yeah, obviously Western policies make it worse by institutionalizing poor practices.

Jared Diamond's book is a good reference, and any book on the sociology of shantytowns and so-called informal housing

(read: housing built without the approval of Western imposed corporate property ownership, automobile and personal utility hookup, relying on the community for those resources instead.)

Every country including US is overpopulated and eating petroleum in the form of imported corn and soy products for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Obviously many slums are merely encampments for the desperately poor. They are not to blame for their plight... They can't simply be shipped off to the country... and many wouldn't want to live outside the city, they'd rather starve in a slum with access to resources than starve on a denuded farm with no access to neighbors... farmland has to be converted back to private parcels away from corp. agriculture first, and even then, the countries are just too overpopulated which is why people fled the farmland to the city... only mass urban warfare or epidemic (as in Somalia) is the only thing proven to cause an exodus back to the "real" rural areas, as in the fall of Rome. most plans for slum "restoration" amount to slum clearance, replacing shanties with poorly constructed high-rises. Which of course, everyone in those dies in the next earthquake or hurricane. But for some reason they are never the target of Western neoliberal/neocon ire, because they take up less space. Except in the US cities where the goal seems to be: eliminate ALL low-income housing, e.g. from New Orleans.

[Mari333]

6. boy, unrec's really live in denial about the history of the USA

they are waving their rah rah banners and hate to look in the mirror. at anything we do, or have done, as a country.
puhlease. grow up.

knr

[malaise]

8. Must read

We've all be structurally adjusted by the Washington Consensus model.

Rec

[EmeraldCityGrl]

16. Garbage Warrior

I just finished watching the documentary on Michael Reynolds.,The work he is doing would create cheap, sustainable, green homes that are attractive
and would survive an earthquake. He built many of these homes in Asia after the tsunami .


"A documentary telling the epic story of maverick US architect Michael Reynolds.

Hippie architect Michael Reynolds has spent the past 35 years creating eco-friendly homes known as 'Earthships'. Using beer cans and tyres to hold the structures together, he came up with a way of life that requires none of the traditional household fuels. Running foul of American planning mandates, he found his buildings threatened, but in the wake of the Boxing Day Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, he has found recognition at last. Brit filmmaker Oliver Hodge's documentary initially depicts its subject as a bit of an ass, but it gradually becomes obvious that Reynolds is a true humanitarian, offering a real alternative to modern living."

http://www.garbagewarrior.com/press.html

[Karmadillo]

19. Thanks for posting this. I've seen photos on the web from time to time, but

had not heard about the documentary.