The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund is Lying to You

By Ansel Herz

Within hours of my op-ed being published in the New York Daily News today, the $50 million Clinton Bush Haiti Fund posted an update on its Facebook page called “Cholera Concern,” which includes this sentence: “While other organizations in Haiti are using their resources to deliver immediate humanitarian aid, we are using our resources to focus on long-term development so that these crises are prevented.”

Look at the screen shot of an Oct. 25 article about Haiti on Fox News. The advertisement for the fund is doubly deceitful: “100% of donations go directly to relief efforts,” it says. That is a lie, period. Relief is what earthquake victims desperately need right now to protect them from an oncoming hurricane. It’s what they’ve needed for the past ten months to make tent camps more livable.

Relief is not the same as long-term development, especially the fund’s chosen brand focusing on Haiti’s business class. I thought planning and executing long-term development was the Haitian government’s job. There are no Haitians on the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund’s board of directors.

“The best way concerned citizens can help is to donate funds…” This is BS, too. Not only because the fund in question is lying and not spending its money on relief efforts. “Concerned citizens” can be informed by serious journalism, the kind major media refuse to practice when it comes to Haiti. “Concerned citizens” can do more than toss spare change at Haiti’s morass of NGOs. “Concerned citizens” can make sure their government’s policies – from financing a dubious election, to supporting a militarized peacekeeping force, to dumping American rice – don’t reinforce poverty on a structural level.

I happen to think that’s “the best way concerned citizens can help”. It’s why I’m here doing this work.

Read the op-ed below. Thanks to the Daily News for publishing it and for historian Peter Hudson ofThe Public Archive for the opening quote.

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1 thought on “The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund is Lying to You

  1. As president both men lied continually NOW we should believe they have a heart or feelings for any human being. There pockets is all they think about.

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