Re: Told you so... Rich western investors will be screwed.
>If there were more evil rich people there to take advantage of them, they wouldn't be so poor.
Dude, what are you talking about? I am not talking about "evil capitalists" or "bad multinationals" corrupting "poor innocent third worlders" and generating "bad wealth".
Duvalier wasn't creating wealth and he sure wasn't a capitalist. He was just robbing his people.
Notwithstanding the current absence of business and abject general poverty of Haiti, I am sure that some people are still getting rich there.
Not in a capitalist or wealth-creating sense of "rich", which I don't necessarily object to, but in old style corruption and feudal oppression type of rich, like the Putins, Mugabes and Duvaliers of this world, which I do object to.
When a place has 5 million people living on $1-2 a day (probably ballpark figure in Duvalier's time) and when it has few natural resources, you can figure out for yourself how much of a cut it takes to maintain the lifestyle people like him had. It's not the 1%, more like the 0.001%.
Haiti might do well, or not, from more foreign capitalism - it doesn't have much of it right now. I'd be inclined to think it would do better.
And I don't blame Western countries for it either - there is only so much we can be expected to fix other people's problems for them if we did not cause them.
I am not confusing "rich" with "evil" or "robbery". And sorry if I was unclear in my quip about fur coats. But don't confuse "rich" with "productive" either.
Sorry if I seem bitter, I have lived near Haiti, layovered at its airport a few times - after a rain you can see the ecological disaster from erosion runoffs as a band of brown water on the coastline and I have met quite a few Haitians. It is just very sad that the place is like that and seems like it won't ever improve.