But, it removed this revealing statement from its blog posting on what the U.S. response should be. Still, the conservative policy think tank's blog posting suggests that:
""the U.S. must be prepared to insist that the Haiti government work closely with the U.S. to insure that corruption does not infect the humanitarian assistance flowing to Haiti. Long-term reforms for Haitian democracy and its economy are also badly overdue. Congress should immediately begin work on a package of assistance, trade, and reconstruction efforts needed to put Haiti on its feet and open the way for deep and lasting democratic reforms." [emphasis added]
James M. Roberts, Research Fellow for Economic Freedom and Growth in the Center for International Trade and Economics, and Ray Walser, Ph.D., Senior Policy Analyst for Latin America in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation, wrote this in "American Leadership Necessary to Assist Haiti After Devastating Earthquake":
"Congress should immediately expand U.S. trade preferences for Haiti. The 2006 Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act, and an extension approved in 2008, helped to create jobs and boost apparel exports and investment by providing tariff-free access to the U.S. market. The apparel sector represents about two-thirds of Haitian exports and nearly one-tenth of Haiti's GDP.
The U.S. should also establish trade preferences for other manufactures and agriculture commodity exports from Haiti to the U.S. Benefits for both Haitian and American importers and exporters are available under the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act--which provides for duty-free export of many Haitian products assembled from U.S. components or materials--the successor program to the Caribbean Basin Initiative."
If you read this Internationalist story from on Haitians battling over starvation wages and neocolonial occupation, you might wonder what trade preferences the Heritage Foundation hopes to see expanded.
Roger F. Noriega published a response to the disaster in Haiti on the American Enterprise Institute website:
"...Before the hurricanes, flooding, mudslides, and earthquakes that have befallen Haiti in the last decade came the man-made disaster. Ineffective political institutions, a predatory state, corrupt and venal politicians, and a weak civil society have conspired to wreck Haiti's western third of the island of Hispaniola. You can literally see dysfunction from space: satellite photos of the island that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic show the denuded hillsides on the Haitian side of the border.1 Muddy hills routinely swallow up Haitian hamlets because the state does not have the wherewithal or the interest to keep villagers from stripping the hillside of trees that can be burned to warm a hovel or heat an evening meal..."
Noriega's contempt for the state government in Haiti and his convenient ignorance of the reasons why political institutions may be ineffective, why the state may be predatory, why politicians may be corrupt, and why civil society may be weak should not go unchallenged. Noriega was once the U.S. permanent representative to the Organization of the American States, an organization that pushed for the removal of Aristide.
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