#odiousdebt — Public Fediverse posts

When is it time to call #OdiousDebt?

#odiousdebt

Reg @[email protected] · 2025-10-16 · 08:31 UTC

When is it time to call #OdiousDebt?

#odiousdebt

Reg @[email protected] · 2025-10-16 · 08:31 UTC

When is it time to call #OdiousDebt?

#odiousdebt

Reg @[email protected] · 2025-10-16 · 08:31 UTC

When is it time to call #OdiousDebt?

#odiousdebt

Reg @[email protected] · 2025-10-16 · 08:31 UTC

When is it time to call #OdiousDebt?

#odiousdebt

Reg @[email protected] · 2025-08-21 · 13:56 UTC

#odiousdebt

Reg @[email protected] · 2025-08-21 · 13:56 UTC

#odiousdebt

Reg @[email protected] · 2025-08-21 · 13:56 UTC

#odiousdebt

Reg @[email protected] · 2025-08-21 · 13:56 UTC

#odiousdebt

Reg @[email protected] · 2025-08-21 · 13:56 UTC

https://socialistproject.ca/2025/03/open-letter-to-kristalina-georgieva-imf/

#odiousdebt

Miguel Afonso Caetano @[email protected] · 2025-03-28 · 20:05 UTC

"In the case that concerns us here, the request to the IMF for a loan violates not only the National Constitution but also Law 27,612, passed in 2021, whose second article states that “any financing program or public credit operation carried out with the IMF, as well as any extension of the amounts – in addition to terms and conditions – of such programs or operations, shall require a law of the Honorable Congress of the Nation that expressly approves it.” In short, Javier Milei’s government is acting in open violation of the Constitution and the laws of this country, something that prima facie would violate the IMF’s own regulations, whose Board, if it did not take this situation into account, would become an accomplice in a violation of the Constitution and the laws of Argentina.

In view of this accumulation of irregularities, the debt that Argentina may contract becomes an “odious debt” not enforceable by the eventual creditors, in this case the IMF. This is something that has been sustained by US jurisprudence since the end of the 19th century up to the present day. "

#IMF #Argentina #Milei #Authoritarianism #PublicDebt #OdiousDebt

#imf #argentina #milei #authoritarianism #publicdebt #odiousdebt

Miguel Afonso Caetano @[email protected] · 2025-03-28 · 20:05 UTC

"In the case that concerns us here, the request to the IMF for a loan violates not only the National Constitution but also Law 27,612, passed in 2021, whose second article states that “any financing program or public credit operation carried out with the IMF, as well as any extension of the amounts – in addition to terms and conditions – of such programs or operations, shall require a law of the Honorable Congress of the Nation that expressly approves it.” In short, Javier Milei’s government is acting in open violation of the Constitution and the laws of this country, something that prima facie would violate the IMF’s own regulations, whose Board, if it did not take this situation into account, would become an accomplice in a violation of the Constitution and the laws of Argentina.

In view of this accumulation of irregularities, the debt that Argentina may contract becomes an “odious debt” not enforceable by the eventual creditors, in this case the IMF. This is something that has been sustained by US jurisprudence since the end of the 19th century up to the present day. "

https://socialistproject.ca/2025/03/open-letter-to-kristalina-georgieva-imf/

#IMF #Argentina #Milei #Authoritarianism #PublicDebt #OdiousDebt

#imf #argentina #milei #authoritarianism #publicdebt #odiousdebt

Miguel Afonso Caetano @[email protected] · 2025-03-28 · 20:05 UTC

"In the case that concerns us here, the request to the IMF for a loan violates not only the National Constitution but also Law 27,612, passed in 2021, whose second article states that “any financing program or public credit operation carried out with the IMF, as well as any extension of the amounts – in addition to terms and conditions – of such programs or operations, shall require a law of the Honorable Congress of the Nation that expressly approves it.” In short, Javier Milei’s government is acting in open violation of the Constitution and the laws of this country, something that prima facie would violate the IMF’s own regulations, whose Board, if it did not take this situation into account, would become an accomplice in a violation of the Constitution and the laws of Argentina.

In view of this accumulation of irregularities, the debt that Argentina may contract becomes an “odious debt” not enforceable by the eventual creditors, in this case the IMF. This is something that has been sustained by US jurisprudence since the end of the 19th century up to the present day. "

https://socialistproject.ca/2025/03/open-letter-to-kristalina-georgieva-imf/

#IMF #Argentina #Milei #Authoritarianism #PublicDebt #OdiousDebt

#imf #argentina #milei #authoritarianism #publicdebt #odiousdebt

Miguel Afonso Caetano @[email protected] · 2025-03-28 · 20:05 UTC

"In the case that concerns us here, the request to the IMF for a loan violates not only the National Constitution but also Law 27,612, passed in 2021, whose second article states that “any financing program or public credit operation carried out with the IMF, as well as any extension of the amounts – in addition to terms and conditions – of such programs or operations, shall require a law of the Honorable Congress of the Nation that expressly approves it.” In short, Javier Milei’s government is acting in open violation of the Constitution and the laws of this country, something that prima facie would violate the IMF’s own regulations, whose Board, if it did not take this situation into account, would become an accomplice in a violation of the Constitution and the laws of Argentina.

In view of this accumulation of irregularities, the debt that Argentina may contract becomes an “odious debt” not enforceable by the eventual creditors, in this case the IMF. This is something that has been sustained by US jurisprudence since the end of the 19th century up to the present day. "

https://socialistproject.ca/2025/03/open-letter-to-kristalina-georgieva-imf/

#IMF #Argentina #Milei #Authoritarianism #PublicDebt #OdiousDebt

#odiousdebt #publicdebt #authoritarianism #milei #argentina #imf

Miguel Afonso Caetano @[email protected] · 2025-03-28 · 20:05 UTC

"In the case that concerns us here, the request to the IMF for a loan violates not only the National Constitution but also Law 27,612, passed in 2021, whose second article states that “any financing program or public credit operation carried out with the IMF, as well as any extension of the amounts – in addition to terms and conditions – of such programs or operations, shall require a law of the Honorable Congress of the Nation that expressly approves it.” In short, Javier Milei’s government is acting in open violation of the Constitution and the laws of this country, something that prima facie would violate the IMF’s own regulations, whose Board, if it did not take this situation into account, would become an accomplice in a violation of the Constitution and the laws of Argentina.

In view of this accumulation of irregularities, the debt that Argentina may contract becomes an “odious debt” not enforceable by the eventual creditors, in this case the IMF. This is something that has been sustained by US jurisprudence since the end of the 19th century up to the present day. "

https://socialistproject.ca/2025/03/open-letter-to-kristalina-georgieva-imf/

#IMF #Argentina #Milei #Authoritarianism #PublicDebt #OdiousDebt

#imf #argentina #milei #authoritarianism #publicdebt #odiousdebt

bsmall2 @[email protected] · 2024-09-15 · 01:41 UTC

Oldie but Goodie (1998 writing about Jubilee 2000!) I'm still in touch with people I met thanks to the Jubilee Kyushu movement. One was a university student then an a mother of two daughters now. She's been fighting the good fight all that time, 12 years ago she was helping a Thai environmental journalist tour Japan, meeting the places and people fighting against the damage from dams and for reparations to the victims of pollution disasters. Now she's fighting for the rivers and mountain people against more wasteful dams... It's fascinating to think how movements might not effect an immediate change in the one issue that brings people together at one time, but people go on struggling against injustice and try to help each other out...

There are other relevant precedents. When the U.S. took over Cuba 100 years ago it cancelled Cuba’s debt to Spain on the grounds that the burden was “imposed upon the people of Cuba without their consent and by force of arms.” Such debts were later called “odious debt” by legal scholarship, “not an obligation for the nation” but the “debt of the power that has incurred it,” while the creditors who “have committed a hostile act with regard to the people” can expect no payment from the victims. Rejecting a British challenge to Costa Rican laws cancelling the debt of the former dictator to the Royal Bank of Canada, the arbitrator — U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft — concluded that the Bank lent the money for no “legitimate use,” so its claim for payment “must fail.” The logic extends readily to much of today’s debt: “odious debt” with no legal or moral standing, imposed upon people without their consent, often serving to repress them and enrich their masters. ^1

...

The picture generalizes, and breaks little new ground. A study of the global economy points out that “defaults on foreign bonds by US railroads in the 1890s were on the same scale as current developing country debt problems.”5 Britain, France, and Italy defaulted on US debts in the 1930s. After World War II, there was reported to be heavy flow of capital from Europe to the United States. Cooperative controls could have kept the funds at home for post-war reconstruction, but, some analysts allege, policymakers preferred to have wealthy Europeans send their capital to New York banks, with the costs of reconstruction transferred to US taxpayers. The Marshall Plan approximately covered the “mass movements of nervous flight capital” that leading economists had predicted. ^2

https://chomsky.info/19980515/

While searching for this link I just saw it became a chapter in Rogue States. A quick glance makes me think it may have been rearranged and edited a bit: and has more sources too!

^1 Patricia Adams, Odious Debts (Earthscan, 1991); Lissakers, Banks, Borrowers. Witness for Peace, A Bankrupt Future: The Human Cost of Nicaragua’s Debt (WFP, 2000); Envio (Managua, Nicaragua: UCA), 18.220, Nov. 1999.

^2 Eric Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance (Cornell Univ. Press, 1994).

#Jubilee2000 #JubileeKyushuu #MarshallPlan #CapitalFlight #OdiousDebt #OdiousDebts #RogueStates by #NoamChomsky

#^Jubilee 2000

The Noam Chomsky Website.

#jubileekyushuu #capitalflight #marshallplan #jubilee2000 #odiousdebts #roguestates

bsmall2 @[email protected] · 2024-09-15 · 01:41 UTC

Oldie but Goodie (1998 writing about Jubilee 2000!) I'm still in touch with people I met thanks to the Jubilee Kyushu movement. One was a university student then an a mother of two daughters now. She's been fighting the good fight all that time, 12 years ago she was helping a Thai environmental journalist tour Japan, meeting the places and people fighting against the damage from dams and for reparations to the victims of pollution disasters. Now she's fighting for the rivers and mountain people against more wasteful dams... It's fascinating to think how movements might not effect an immediate change in the one issue that brings people together at one time, but people go on struggling against injustice and try to help each other out...

There are other relevant precedents. When the U.S. took over Cuba 100 years ago it cancelled Cuba’s debt to Spain on the grounds that the burden was “imposed upon the people of Cuba without their consent and by force of arms.” Such debts were later called “odious debt” by legal scholarship, “not an obligation for the nation” but the “debt of the power that has incurred it,” while the creditors who “have committed a hostile act with regard to the people” can expect no payment from the victims. Rejecting a British challenge to Costa Rican laws cancelling the debt of the former dictator to the Royal Bank of Canada, the arbitrator — U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft — concluded that the Bank lent the money for no “legitimate use,” so its claim for payment “must fail.” The logic extends readily to much of today’s debt: “odious debt” with no legal or moral standing, imposed upon people without their consent, often serving to repress them and enrich their masters. ^1

...

The picture generalizes, and breaks little new ground. A study of the global economy points out that “defaults on foreign bonds by US railroads in the 1890s were on the same scale as current developing country debt problems.”5 Britain, France, and Italy defaulted on US debts in the 1930s. After World War II, there was reported to be heavy flow of capital from Europe to the United States. Cooperative controls could have kept the funds at home for post-war reconstruction, but, some analysts allege, policymakers preferred to have wealthy Europeans send their capital to New York banks, with the costs of reconstruction transferred to US taxpayers. The Marshall Plan approximately covered the “mass movements of nervous flight capital” that leading economists had predicted. ^2

https://chomsky.info/19980515/

While searching for this link I just saw it became a chapter in Rogue States. A quick glance makes me think it may have been rearranged and edited a bit: and has more sources too!

^1 Patricia Adams, Odious Debts (Earthscan, 1991); Lissakers, Banks, Borrowers. Witness for Peace, A Bankrupt Future: The Human Cost of Nicaragua’s Debt (WFP, 2000); Envio (Managua, Nicaragua: UCA), 18.220, Nov. 1999.

^2 Eric Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance (Cornell Univ. Press, 1994).

#Jubilee2000 #JubileeKyushuu #MarshallPlan #CapitalFlight #OdiousDebt #OdiousDebts #RogueStates by #NoamChomsky

#^Jubilee 2000

The Noam Chomsky Website.

#jubileekyushuu #capitalflight #marshallplan #jubilee2000 #odiousdebts #roguestates

bsmall2 @[email protected] · 2024-09-15 · 01:41 UTC

Oldie but Goodie (1998 writing about Jubilee 2000!) I'm still in touch with people I met thanks to the Jubilee Kyushu movement. One was a university student then an a mother of two daughters now. She's been fighting the good fight all that time, 12 years ago she was helping a Thai environmental journalist tour Japan, meeting the places and people fighting against the damage from dams and for reparations to the victims of pollution disasters. Now she's fighting for the rivers and mountain people against more wasteful dams... It's fascinating to think how movements might not effect an immediate change in the one issue that brings people together at one time, but people go on struggling against injustice and try to help each other out...

There are other relevant precedents. When the U.S. took over Cuba 100 years ago it cancelled Cuba’s debt to Spain on the grounds that the burden was “imposed upon the people of Cuba without their consent and by force of arms.” Such debts were later called “odious debt” by legal scholarship, “not an obligation for the nation” but the “debt of the power that has incurred it,” while the creditors who “have committed a hostile act with regard to the people” can expect no payment from the victims. Rejecting a British challenge to Costa Rican laws cancelling the debt of the former dictator to the Royal Bank of Canada, the arbitrator — U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft — concluded that the Bank lent the money for no “legitimate use,” so its claim for payment “must fail.” The logic extends readily to much of today’s debt: “odious debt” with no legal or moral standing, imposed upon people without their consent, often serving to repress them and enrich their masters. ^1

...

The picture generalizes, and breaks little new ground. A study of the global economy points out that “defaults on foreign bonds by US railroads in the 1890s were on the same scale as current developing country debt problems.”5 Britain, France, and Italy defaulted on US debts in the 1930s. After World War II, there was reported to be heavy flow of capital from Europe to the United States. Cooperative controls could have kept the funds at home for post-war reconstruction, but, some analysts allege, policymakers preferred to have wealthy Europeans send their capital to New York banks, with the costs of reconstruction transferred to US taxpayers. The Marshall Plan approximately covered the “mass movements of nervous flight capital” that leading economists had predicted. ^2

https://chomsky.info/19980515/

While searching for this link I just saw it became a chapter in Rogue States. A quick glance makes me think it may have been rearranged and edited a bit: and has more sources too!

^1 Patricia Adams, Odious Debts (Earthscan, 1991); Lissakers, Banks, Borrowers. Witness for Peace, A Bankrupt Future: The Human Cost of Nicaragua’s Debt (WFP, 2000); Envio (Managua, Nicaragua: UCA), 18.220, Nov. 1999.

^2 Eric Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance (Cornell Univ. Press, 1994).

#Jubilee2000 #JubileeKyushuu #MarshallPlan #CapitalFlight #OdiousDebt #OdiousDebts #RogueStates by #NoamChomsky

#^Jubilee 2000

The Noam Chomsky Website.

#jubileekyushuu #capitalflight #marshallplan #jubilee2000 #odiousdebts #roguestates

bsmall2 @[email protected] · 2024-09-15 · 01:41 UTC

Oldie but Goodie (1998 writing about Jubilee 2000!) I'm still in touch with people I met thanks to the Jubilee Kyushu movement. One was a university student then an a mother of two daughters now. She's been fighting the good fight all that time, 12 years ago she was helping a Thai environmental journalist tour Japan, meeting the places and people fighting against the damage from dams and for reparations to the victims of pollution disasters. Now she's fighting for the rivers and mountain people against more wasteful dams... It's fascinating to think how movements might not effect an immediate change in the one issue that brings people together at one time, but people go on struggling against injustice and try to help each other out...

There are other relevant precedents. When the U.S. took over Cuba 100 years ago it cancelled Cuba’s debt to Spain on the grounds that the burden was “imposed upon the people of Cuba without their consent and by force of arms.” Such debts were later called “odious debt” by legal scholarship, “not an obligation for the nation” but the “debt of the power that has incurred it,” while the creditors who “have committed a hostile act with regard to the people” can expect no payment from the victims. Rejecting a British challenge to Costa Rican laws cancelling the debt of the former dictator to the Royal Bank of Canada, the arbitrator — U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft — concluded that the Bank lent the money for no “legitimate use,” so its claim for payment “must fail.” The logic extends readily to much of today’s debt: “odious debt” with no legal or moral standing, imposed upon people without their consent, often serving to repress them and enrich their masters. ^1

...

The picture generalizes, and breaks little new ground. A study of the global economy points out that “defaults on foreign bonds by US railroads in the 1890s were on the same scale as current developing country debt problems.”5 Britain, France, and Italy defaulted on US debts in the 1930s. After World War II, there was reported to be heavy flow of capital from Europe to the United States. Cooperative controls could have kept the funds at home for post-war reconstruction, but, some analysts allege, policymakers preferred to have wealthy Europeans send their capital to New York banks, with the costs of reconstruction transferred to US taxpayers. The Marshall Plan approximately covered the “mass movements of nervous flight capital” that leading economists had predicted. ^2

https://chomsky.info/19980515/

While searching for this link I just saw it became a chapter in Rogue States. A quick glance makes me think it may have been rearranged and edited a bit: and has more sources too!

^1 Patricia Adams, Odious Debts (Earthscan, 1991); Lissakers, Banks, Borrowers. Witness for Peace, A Bankrupt Future: The Human Cost of Nicaragua’s Debt (WFP, 2000); Envio (Managua, Nicaragua: UCA), 18.220, Nov. 1999.

^2 Eric Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance (Cornell Univ. Press, 1994).

#Jubilee2000 #JubileeKyushuu #MarshallPlan #CapitalFlight #OdiousDebt #OdiousDebts #RogueStates by #NoamChomsky

#^Jubilee 2000

The Noam Chomsky Website.

#odiousdebt #noamchomsky #roguestates #odiousdebts #jubilee2000 #marshallplan

bsmall2 @[email protected] · 2024-09-14 · 04:57 UTC

CW: Haiti now one of the (two?) most impoverished countries in the world was once one of the richest and made France richer than the other enslaved place made the UK rich. A paragraph from Adam Hochschild's Bury The Chains explains. The explanation is a good entry to Paul Farmer mention the 21 biillon that France owes to Haiti as Aristide figures.

Bury The Chains by Adam Hochschild

.> St. Domingue [Haiti] was no ordinary colony. Although hard to imagine when we see the desperately poor Haiti of today, St. Domingue was the undisputed crown jewel of all European colonies anywhere. Such was its mystique that slave merchants in France sent their shirts across the Atlantic to be washed in its mountain brooks, which were said to whiten linen better than European rivers. St. Domingue was more than twice the size of the largest British Caribbean island, Jamaica; its soil was so rich and so well irrigated that its plantations yielded half again as much sugar per acre as the best land in Jamaica. It produced more than 30 percent of the world's sugar and more than half its coffee, not to speak of cotton and other crops. Thousands of slaves were at work clearing mountainside forests for new coffee estates, but the massive erosion this caused would not take its toll until the next century. The colony's eight thousand plantations accounted for more than one third of France's foreign trade, and its own foreign trade equaled that of the newly born United States. St. Domingue's annual production of sugar and other crops was roughly double that of all the British West Indian islands put together. No colony anywhere made so large a profit for its mother country.

Who removed Aristide? by Paul Farmer

.> Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ... should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles....
The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’. On 1 January this year, during the bicentennial celebrations, Aristide announced he would replace a 21-gun salute with a list of the 21 things that had been done in spite of the embargo and that would be done when restitution was made. The crowd went wild. The French press by and large dismissed his comments as silly, despite the legal merits of his case. Many Haitians saw Aristide as a modern Toussaint l’Ouverture, a comparison that Aristide did not discourage. ‘Toussaint was undone by foreign powers,’ Madison Smartt Bell wrote in Harper’s in January, ‘and Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from outside interference.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n08/paul-farmer/who-removed-aristide
#AdamHochschild on #StDomingue #Haiti's riches and #PaulFarmer on #OdiousDebt and #FrenchDebt #HaitiRestitution
#HaitiAndJamaica #HaitiAndFrance

On the night of 28 February, the Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced from power. He claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a 20-hour flight, he was told that he and his wife would be landing ‘in a French military base in the middle of Africa’. He found himself in the...

#haitirestitution #haitiandjamaica #adamhochschild #haitiandfrance #stdomingue #paulfarmer

bsmall2 @[email protected] · 2024-09-14 · 04:57 UTC

CW: Haiti now one of the (two?) most impoverished countries in the world was once one of the richest and made France richer than the other enslaved place made the UK rich. A paragraph from Adam Hochschild's Bury The Chains explains. The explanation is a good entry to Paul Farmer mention the 21 biillon that France owes to Haiti as Aristide figures.

Bury The Chains by Adam Hochschild

.> St. Domingue [Haiti] was no ordinary colony. Although hard to imagine when we see the desperately poor Haiti of today, St. Domingue was the undisputed crown jewel of all European colonies anywhere. Such was its mystique that slave merchants in France sent their shirts across the Atlantic to be washed in its mountain brooks, which were said to whiten linen better than European rivers. St. Domingue was more than twice the size of the largest British Caribbean island, Jamaica; its soil was so rich and so well irrigated that its plantations yielded half again as much sugar per acre as the best land in Jamaica. It produced more than 30 percent of the world's sugar and more than half its coffee, not to speak of cotton and other crops. Thousands of slaves were at work clearing mountainside forests for new coffee estates, but the massive erosion this caused would not take its toll until the next century. The colony's eight thousand plantations accounted for more than one third of France's foreign trade, and its own foreign trade equaled that of the newly born United States. St. Domingue's annual production of sugar and other crops was roughly double that of all the British West Indian islands put together. No colony anywhere made so large a profit for its mother country.

Who removed Aristide? by Paul Farmer

.> Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ... should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles....
The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’. On 1 January this year, during the bicentennial celebrations, Aristide announced he would replace a 21-gun salute with a list of the 21 things that had been done in spite of the embargo and that would be done when restitution was made. The crowd went wild. The French press by and large dismissed his comments as silly, despite the legal merits of his case. Many Haitians saw Aristide as a modern Toussaint l’Ouverture, a comparison that Aristide did not discourage. ‘Toussaint was undone by foreign powers,’ Madison Smartt Bell wrote in Harper’s in January, ‘and Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from outside interference.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n08/paul-farmer/who-removed-aristide
#AdamHochschild on #StDomingue #Haiti's riches and #PaulFarmer on #OdiousDebt and #FrenchDebt #HaitiRestitution
#HaitiAndJamaica #HaitiAndFrance

On the night of 28 February, the Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced from power. He claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a 20-hour flight, he was told that he and his wife would be landing ‘in a French military base in the middle of Africa’. He found himself in the...

#haitirestitution #haitiandjamaica #adamhochschild #haitiandfrance #stdomingue #paulfarmer

bsmall2 @[email protected] · 2024-09-14 · 04:57 UTC

CW: Haiti now one of the (two?) most impoverished countries in the world was once one of the richest and made France richer than the other enslaved place made the UK rich. A paragraph from Adam Hochschild's Bury The Chains explains. The explanation is a good entry to Paul Farmer mention the 21 biillon that France owes to Haiti as Aristide figures.

Bury The Chains by Adam Hochschild

.> St. Domingue [Haiti] was no ordinary colony. Although hard to imagine when we see the desperately poor Haiti of today, St. Domingue was the undisputed crown jewel of all European colonies anywhere. Such was its mystique that slave merchants in France sent their shirts across the Atlantic to be washed in its mountain brooks, which were said to whiten linen better than European rivers. St. Domingue was more than twice the size of the largest British Caribbean island, Jamaica; its soil was so rich and so well irrigated that its plantations yielded half again as much sugar per acre as the best land in Jamaica. It produced more than 30 percent of the world's sugar and more than half its coffee, not to speak of cotton and other crops. Thousands of slaves were at work clearing mountainside forests for new coffee estates, but the massive erosion this caused would not take its toll until the next century. The colony's eight thousand plantations accounted for more than one third of France's foreign trade, and its own foreign trade equaled that of the newly born United States. St. Domingue's annual production of sugar and other crops was roughly double that of all the British West Indian islands put together. No colony anywhere made so large a profit for its mother country.

Who removed Aristide? by Paul Farmer

.> Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ... should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles....
The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’. On 1 January this year, during the bicentennial celebrations, Aristide announced he would replace a 21-gun salute with a list of the 21 things that had been done in spite of the embargo and that would be done when restitution was made. The crowd went wild. The French press by and large dismissed his comments as silly, despite the legal merits of his case. Many Haitians saw Aristide as a modern Toussaint l’Ouverture, a comparison that Aristide did not discourage. ‘Toussaint was undone by foreign powers,’ Madison Smartt Bell wrote in Harper’s in January, ‘and Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from outside interference.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n08/paul-farmer/who-removed-aristide
#AdamHochschild on #StDomingue #Haiti's riches and #PaulFarmer on #OdiousDebt and #FrenchDebt #HaitiRestitution
#HaitiAndJamaica #HaitiAndFrance

On the night of 28 February, the Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced from power. He claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a 20-hour flight, he was told that he and his wife would be landing ‘in a French military base in the middle of Africa’. He found himself in the...

#haitirestitution #haitiandjamaica #adamhochschild #haitiandfrance #stdomingue #paulfarmer

bsmall2 @[email protected] · 2024-09-14 · 04:57 UTC

CW: Haiti now one of the (two?) most impoverished countries in the world was once one of the richest and made France richer than the other enslaved place made the UK rich. A paragraph from Adam Hochschild's Bury The Chains explains. The explanation is a good entry to Paul Farmer mention the 21 biillon that France owes to Haiti as Aristide figures.

Bury The Chains by Adam Hochschild

.> St. Domingue [Haiti] was no ordinary colony. Although hard to imagine when we see the desperately poor Haiti of today, St. Domingue was the undisputed crown jewel of all European colonies anywhere. Such was its mystique that slave merchants in France sent their shirts across the Atlantic to be washed in its mountain brooks, which were said to whiten linen better than European rivers. St. Domingue was more than twice the size of the largest British Caribbean island, Jamaica; its soil was so rich and so well irrigated that its plantations yielded half again as much sugar per acre as the best land in Jamaica. It produced more than 30 percent of the world's sugar and more than half its coffee, not to speak of cotton and other crops. Thousands of slaves were at work clearing mountainside forests for new coffee estates, but the massive erosion this caused would not take its toll until the next century. The colony's eight thousand plantations accounted for more than one third of France's foreign trade, and its own foreign trade equaled that of the newly born United States. St. Domingue's annual production of sugar and other crops was roughly double that of all the British West Indian islands put together. No colony anywhere made so large a profit for its mother country.

Who removed Aristide? by Paul Farmer

.> Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ... should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles....
The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’. On 1 January this year, during the bicentennial celebrations, Aristide announced he would replace a 21-gun salute with a list of the 21 things that had been done in spite of the embargo and that would be done when restitution was made. The crowd went wild. The French press by and large dismissed his comments as silly, despite the legal merits of his case. Many Haitians saw Aristide as a modern Toussaint l’Ouverture, a comparison that Aristide did not discourage. ‘Toussaint was undone by foreign powers,’ Madison Smartt Bell wrote in Harper’s in January, ‘and Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from outside interference.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n08/paul-farmer/who-removed-aristide
#AdamHochschild on #StDomingue #Haiti's riches and #PaulFarmer on #OdiousDebt and #FrenchDebt #HaitiRestitution
#HaitiAndJamaica #HaitiAndFrance