I love this “Haiti Is Great Already” tee supporting @JPHRO and @ArtistsforPeace. [tr]

Even the Haitians don’t feel that way.

I’d trade him for a lump of stale cheese

Exactly.

Hmmm...Good point.

For years, I’ve been waiting for someone to make an epic movie over Papa Doc. I always thought it was a five-star saga just over his career, and you could make a whole second movie over Baby Doc.

Is that his nose or the Hood ornament on a 1937 Packard.

I’d be willing to trade Bill for two grains of sand.

Move there and stay, Billy-Boy!

The only thing wrong with Haiti is what the Haitians have done to it.

Bill Mahr 's obviously never been to Haiti. Either that or he's blind or wearing blinders, or maybe somebody just gave him that t-shirt as a gag gift.

I guarantee he didn't pick that up at the Port Au Prince airport gift shop on his way back home from his last vacation.

I agree Haiti is awesome. It sounds like a perfect place to send all the America hating illegals.

Great news, lets send all the Mexicans, Dreamers, and islamists to Haiti

Out of curiosity (why _is_ Haiti so staggeringly dirt poor?), I read a history of Haitian revolutions.

I’m still a bit unclear about its pre-colonial days. Haiti was there, occupied, and nothing of note happening (insofar as world economics cared).
Colonization started, recognizing the vast potential for specialty crops. Coffee & sugar were primary profits, soon in great worldwide demand.
Europeans came, Africans came, you can guess their general roles, and the locals had to deal with it. Nobody actually cared about race at this point, even if practical divisions correlated therewith.
Big money started rolling in from all that hard work & rare environment. This of course led to both fair & greedy dissatisfaction (as humans are wont to do).
People started looking for factions for a good solid “us vs them”, factions began dividing across racial lines (starting with meticulously documented genealogical percentages where nobody previously cared), and eventually the three obvious racial categories were defined on boundaries nobody had previously given a $#!^ about.
Result was a LOOOOOOONG period of groups A, B, and C alternating between fighting against each other, joining forces against the third, betrayals by switching allegiances, burning down towns/cities/plantations/anything as a standard technique, and generally riling things up any time the situation seemed almost settled. The only identity anyone could ultimately cling to was race, and so the previously-nonexistent discrimination (i.e.: slaves may have _been_ black but nobody actually held their color against them; many moved up the power ladder to become plantation owners & other leaders, nobody noticed it as an issue) became the starting point of interactions.
During all this, the Dominican Republic somehow kept _their_ half of the island operating a little more sanely, and made d@mn sure the nonsense happening on the west side didn’t spill over to the east; they were particularly brutal about stopping it regardless of who tried to get DR involved.
Eventually the Europeans were conquered (largely because they tended to arrive, and die from local diseases a couple months later), leaving a cratered economic system occupied by people seriously disinterested in reconstructing the one thing that had made the island a money-making machine and led to the basket case it is now.

[That’s my off-the-cuff vague recollection of dozens of hours of podcasts on the subject. No offenses nor intentions intended. The whole thing actually makes some kind of sense, insofar as too much was made from too many who were compelled to do too much in return for too little, and torches & machetes easily became the preferred way of solving the problem.]

So: yeah, Haiti could be the “gem of the Caribbean” as it once seemed to be, but humans abused each other, all sides decided racism would in fact become a thing, ground the surviving population into abject poverty, and any semblance of productive culture has been beaten/conned/driven out of existence. Gaia hasn’t helped either, whacking the region with debilitating/devastating earthquakes any time the locals start to get back on their economic feet. The carrying capacity now having been exceeded, there’s not much that can seriously be done - earnest though any of us might be in thought of helping the area recover.