The White Man's Burden Investment Opportunity

Some folks are raising rarely asked questions about Haiti and how the brokest nation in the western hemisphere got to be that way. Man, don't we hate talking about this stuff? But please, read on...

Haiti is only 600 miles or so from Miami. Yet, economically, it's a f*cked up parallel universe. It's the geographic equivalent of the homeless guy a Fortune 500 CEO steps over getting into his Bentley. Why? Largely because it's exploited by multinational corporations as a cheap resource and, like all poor countries, is a playground for first-world NGOs and banks. [At this point, some of your Socialism detectors might spike... but bear with me...]

Us 'first worlders' react with generosity when there's a disaster like the Haitian quake. Good for us. But our interaction with poor countries outside of periods of crisis has always been characterized by exploitation and neo-imperialist notions that the third world is somehow incapable of looking after itself. In less sophisticated times, they used to call this 'the white man's burden'. Now it could be more accurately termed 'the white man's investment opportunity'.

Anyone familiar with the 'economic hitman' strategy will know third-world nations suffer in large part because they're vulnerable to exploitation by dictators intent on turning national economies into personal revenue streams. But the first world is always coy about admitting how many of these dictatorships are installed, protected and run by our own governments and banks via predatory infrastructure loans with generous kickbacks for local dictators - and huge profits for our corporations. This is the main reason countries like Haiti get f*cked.

If you're still unconvinced that we are largely to blame for Haiti's poverty, consider the stark choice: either the third world is poor because they're exploited by us (the money's gotta go somewhere after all) or they're poor because people of color are genetically incapable of establishing prosperous economies of their own. Choose the former and you're unpatriotically accusing your own country of malfeasance and blasphemously attacking the free market. Choose the latter and you're buying into the old-school white supremacism that provided the 'moral' foundation for slavery. No wonder we prefer to not talk about this stuff.