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As TomDispatch regular John Feffer suggests today, Donald Trump has a distinct affinity for the kinds of gang leaders we've been hearing about in ever more disastrously chaotic Haiti. Were Americans to reelect him, we could be putting the equivalent of a gang leader in the White House. Today, in fact, Feffer vividly describes just what sort of gang world he might, if not lead (which isn't even a word for You Know Who), then preside over all too chaotically. Let me just add one gang-related note to his piece. Among the crews Donald Trump does help lead, or rather (dis)organize for his own benefit, no one should forget the Aging Billionaires Gang, which is already forking over tens of millions of dollars to ensure that he'll once again be their man in Washington in 2025.
Only the other day, he addressed that gang at a fundraising event in Palm Beach, Florida, billed as "the Inaugural Leadership Dinner." There, they were fed "endive and frisee salad, filet au poivre, and pavlova with fresh berries" and listened to the former president lament that people from the "nice countries" of our world (like Denmark) weren't migrating to America anymore. He did, however, reassure some of the richest people on the planet that they shouldn't fear undocumented immigrants in nearby West Palm Beach from countries "where they're blowing each other up all over the place," who "make the Hells Angels look like extremely nice people." They were, he told them, safe with him, proudly adding that "the most successful people in the whole country are in this room." He then warned them that "this could very well be the last election this country ever has."
That Aging Billionaires Gang reportedly included: "Activist food industry investor Nelson Peltz, 81; Entertainment mogul Isaac Perlmutter, 81; Sugar baron Jose' Fanjul, 80; Hotel owner and aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, 79; Oil tycoon Harold Hamm, 78; Big-data billionaire (and funder of the 2016 anti-Hillary psy ops campaign) Robert Mercer, 77; N[ew] Y[ork] supermarket king John Catsimatidis, 75; and casino tycoon Steve Wynn, 82." And the Trump campaign then claimed -- who knows whether it's a faintly accurate figure or not -- that the crew there contributed $50.5 million for their endive and frisee salads, which would be "a new single-event fundraising record."
With that gang in mind, let Feffer take you from Florida to Haiti to consider some gang-related matters. Tom
Haiti Today, America Tomorrow?
When Democracies Die, Mobs Take Over
By John Feffer
Haiti has descended into chaos. It's had no president or parliament -- and no elections either -for eight long years. Its unelected prime minister Ariel Henry resigned recently when gang violence at the airport in Port-au-Prince made it impossible for him to return to the country after a trip to Guyana.
Haiti is the poorest country in the region, its riches leached out by colonial overlords, American occupying forces, corporate predators, and home-grown autocrats. As if that weren't enough, it's also suffered an almost Biblical succession of plagues in recent years. A coup deposed its first democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, not once but twice -- in 1991 and again in 2004. An earthquake in 2010 killed hundreds of thousands, leaving 1.5 million Haitians homeless, out of a population of less than 10 million. In the wake of that earthquake, nearly a million people contracted cholera, the worst outbreak in history, courtesy of a contingent of U.N. peacekeepers. To round out the catastrophes, in 2016, Hurricane Matthew made landfall, pushing Haiti back even further.
And now the country has been overrun by gangs that emerged as practically the only groups capable of providing services, however meager, to Haiti's long-suffering population. People have become the country's largest export. Anyone who has money, connections, or sufficient courage has fled, even if those who somehow made it to the United States were all too often deported back into the maelstrom. Haiti doesn't have the three things that might prevent the sort of vacuum into which gangs so eagerly rush: robust democratic governance, a strong civil society, and a sufficiently uncorrupt constabulary. As a result, it's returned to what political theorist Thomas Hobbes once called a "war of all against all" in which violence and the urge for power prevail, as fist takes precedence over gavel -- the perfect environment for gangs to flourish.
Political scientists often label places like Haiti "failed states." With the breakdown of order, everything from political institutions to border controls disintegrates. In a comparable fashion, clans contested for power in Somalia in the 1990s and paramilitaries battled each other in the Democratic Republic of Congo during its repeated wars, while rebels and jihadis targeted the Syrian government beginning in 2011. In the end, such diverse groups seem to boil down to one thing: guys with guns.
In Haiti, the gangocracy is organized along the classic lines of criminal enterprises like the gangs that ruled New York City in the mid-nineteenth century (immortalized in the film The Gangs of New York) or the Chinese tongs that warred over San Franciscan turf in the years after the Civil War (featured in the current Netflix series Warrior). The two major Haitian gangs in the capital city Port-au-Prince, GPep and the G9 Family, have similarly hierarchical structures, roots in particular neighborhoods, and flamboyant leaders like the former police officer and current G9 head Jimmy "Barbecue" Che'rizier.
But gangs aren't simply criminal syndicates. The Haitian gangs have close connections to political parties and align themselves with business interests (or run businesses of their own). Sometimes such gangs even begin as anti-gangs, neighborhood self-defense groups meant to help locals survive in an era of lawlessness.
Their mischaracterization resembles the overly narrow understanding of "terrorists." Hamas, for instance, is on the U.S. terrorism list, but it's not just a bunch of guys with guns and a predilection for violence. It's also been a political party, a government, and a service organization that provided food, health care, and other necessities to underserved communities in Gaza.
Don't make the mistake of associating gangs like Haiti's with a "primitive" stage of political development or only with countries on the geopolitical margins. What's happening there today could prefigure the future of the United States, too. In place of the Biblical succession of plagues that swept through Haiti, the U.S. might only need the tinder of climate change and the flint of Donald Trump to go up in similar flames.
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