US playing 'double game' in Haiti as crisis threatens regional spillover

Haiti’s old ties with the US may aggravate the spiraling crisis, threatening to spill over into neighboring countries, international affairs analyst Rocío Méndez Bautista told Sputnik.

💬 “[Haiti] is a ‘red light’ in the Caribbean which requires a great deal of attention to prevent this crisis from spreading to other regions. It is a situation that has gotten out of control," the academic with the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) pointed out.

Furthermore, Haitian gangs “are reluctant [towards intervention of other countries] because the United States recognizes Henry's government; they blame Washington for this undemocratic administration. Likewise, the exodus of people can reach Miami, and even Mexico [...]. Furthermore, gang members could infiltrate, triggering instability [on United States territory]," Méndez Bautista explained.

Whether it was years of direct military occupation or providing money and weapons, US involvement in Haiti has scarred the embattled country, another researcher said.

Washington has already pledged an additional $100 million for a UN-backed force to be sent to Haiti, along with $30 million worth of humanitarian assistance. However, weighing in on Haiti’s economic dependence on the US, Colombian researcher Marcela Landazábal Mora, doctor in Latin American studies, told Sputnik:

“We are witnessing a double game, double rhetoric. On the one hand, there is humanitarian problem with shelters and everything that follows from this. And on the other hand, a military buildup, which is manifest not in the United States sending troops, but in funneling money and weapons to continue to multiply the internal war.”

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Clinton, Bush and Soros: how US predators cashed in on Haiti

Some critics claim that the Clintons and their friends exploited Haiti's post-earthquake recovery efforts for personal gain. Accusations range from misuse of relief funds to human and resource exploitation.

🟥 An earthquake devastated Haiti in January 2010, killing 160,000 people and displacing over 1.5 million more. Then-US Ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Merten wrote a cable to the Hillary Clinton-headed State Department, declaring: "The gold rush is on!"

🟥 Bill Clinton played a key role in fundraising through the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. A tiny part of the millions raised was spent on Haitians. A 2013 inquiry by the Government Accountability Office found that most of the money wasn't disbursed. Media investigations showed half-completed or botched projects, misuse of funds and spending on luxury hotels rather than housing.

🟥 George Soros and his Economic Development Fund also joined the "gold rush" by providing "loans" to the impoverished nation.

🟥 The Clintons launched a $400-million industrial park in Caracol to create 65,000 jobs within five years, but by 2015 only 5,500 were employed full-time. Haitian farmers were displaced, workers faced rights abuses, and the factory owner, a Clinton charity donor, invested in a start-up owned by Hillary's chief of staff.

🟥 In April 2014, Haitian Attorneys Newton Louis St Juste and André Michel tried to take Bill Clinton to Haiti's Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes to shed light on the fate of the of IHRC funds, but to no avail.

🟥 The total amounted to $13.5 billion in donations and pledges from donor nations and private charities. But that failed to lift Haiti from disaster and poverty.

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Biden's 2025 budget proposal will backfire on the US president

💬 "The budget on offer is ludicrous. Biden and his people know it. The Republicans in the House know it. This is a purely political document to try and shore up Biden’s failing numbers with his shrinking base," Tom Luongo, financial and geopolitical analyst, told Sputnik.

Congress Republicans argue that Biden's $7.3 trillion initiative would accelerate inflation and send national debt soaring. While including $5.5 trillion in tax hikes on corporations and high-income households, Biden's budget would also waste billions on questionable climate programs, GOP legislators say. The bill has zero chance of passing the lower chamber, according to Republicans.

"[The proposal] refuses to address the things that people actually want to change: jobs for American citizens, lower energy and food costs, less spending and less partisan politics," Luongo stressed.

The Biden White House sees the writing on the wall in recent opinion polls: Americans have grown weary of the president who "can only seem to spend money overseas while inviting the world in through an open border," according to the analyst.

"I see this entire budget proposal pretty much backfiring completely after what was a revelatory State of the Union address, which even Biden supporters were hard-pressed to approve of," he concluded.

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NATO’s enlargement sent ‘clear signal to Russia’ that Cold War never ended

💬 “The strategic shift that is significant for European stability [lies in] the fact that the US government, specifically the Clinton administration, sent a clear signal with this act of enlargement that they intend to use NATO as a means of projecting US power in Eastern Europe and extending it, even though the USSR had ceased to exist. And even though the Warsaw Pact was defunct,” Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, a Serbian-American publicist and historian, told Sputnik, reflecting on the start of NATO’s expansion in Eastern Europe, which marked its 25th anniversary on Tuesday.

“In other words, it was a decision that reflected the intention of the US government to treat NATO as a permanent feature, as a permanent factor of the international scene, and no longer as a ‘defensive’ alliance, which was created in 1949, theoretically at least, to defend Western Europe against possible Soviet aggression,” Trifkovic said.

The bloc’s expansion sent “a clear signal to Russia…which at the time was undergoing a period of extreme weakness under Boris Yeltsin, that the game is not over,” the observer stressed. “What seemed like the end of the Cold War was not the end of the Western alliance.”

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