The content originally appeared on: Latin America News – Aljazeera
Montreal, Canada – Marjorie Villefranche has never experienced anything like it.
For the past six months, the head of Maison d’Haiti (Haiti House), a community centre in Montreal’s St-Michel neighbourhood, has received a wave of unsolicited messages from Haitians, begging for help to leave the country.
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‘Should never have come to this’: What’s next as Henry steps down in Haiti?
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What is the history of foreign interventions in Haiti?
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Who are Haiti’s gangs and what do they want? All you need to know
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“‘Get us out of here please, we are starving, we are afraid, we are in the hands of mobs,’” Villefranche recalled of the messages that have poured in. “That never happened before.”
But this month, Haiti’s years-long crisis reached a new peak of political instability and violence.
Powerful armed groups have maintained their grip on the capital of Port-au-Prince after the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry last week and a shaky political transition is under way.
The attacks have paralysed Port-au-Prince, more than 360,000 people have been displaced, and the country faces a deepening hunger crisis.
For Haitians living outside of the Caribbean nation, the unrest has fuelled a sense of fear and anxiety over the safety of their loved ones back home. It has also spurred growing frustrations over their inability to get family members out of harm’s way, as well as calls to action.
Villefranche told Al Jazeera that more than half of the staff members at Maison d’Haiti have close family in Haiti.
“They’re just on the phone with them all the time because they don’t know what will happen to them. Some of [the relatives], they cannot go out of the house, they don’t have water, they don’t have electricity. You risk your life to go and buy some food,” she told Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile, the international airport in Port-au-Prince has been closed amid the violence and the Dominican Republic – which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti – has largely sealed its land border, too.
“It’s impossible actually to get them out but this is what everyone will like,” Villefranche said. “They want a break from that suffering. Everyone [is] thinking, ‘Can I bring my family here, please?’”
The diaspora
Haitians have migrated to other parts of the Americas region and further afield for many decades.
Some left in search of better employment opportunities or education, while others were pushed out due to natural disasters, political instability and increasingly, violence wrought by armed groups.
Today, there are large Haitian communities in the Dominican Republic, Chile and Brazil, among other countries in Central and South America, as well as in Canada, which is home to nearly 180,000 people of Haitian descent.
But the largest Haitian diaspora is in the United States, where US Census figures showed that more than 1.1 million people identified as Haitian in 2022.
“We’re all connected. I think that every Haitian immigrant is somewhat connected to Haitians in Haiti,” said Tessa Petit, the executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC), a coalition of dozens of community and advocacy groups in the southeastern US state.
Florida counts the largest Haitian community in the country, followed by New York City.
Like Villefranche in Canada, Petit said Haitians in Florida have strong ties to communities in Haiti – and they have been watching the latest developments in Port-au-Prince with alarm over the past several weeks.
“There’s a stress because you’re sitting here, you’re in Miami, you feel powerless,” Petit told Al Jazeera. “You hope that you’re not going to get bad news, that it’s not going to be your turn to lose a loved one.”
People carry water collected in buckets and containers in Port-au-Prince, March 12 [Ralph Tedy Erol/Reuters]
Growing urgency
Petit said there is a growing sense of urgency among Haitians in the US that something must be done to stem the wave of deadly attacks in Haiti’s capital.
Amid the violence, US President Joe Biden’s administration and other foreign governments that had previously backed Henry, Haiti’s unelected prime minister, since he took office in 2021, withdrew their support for him.
They are now backing a political process that will see the establishment of a transitional presidential council, which in turn will choose a temporary replacement for Henry before Haitian elections can be held.
The United Nations has also supported a multinational security mission to help Haiti respond to the gangs but that proposal has been stalled.
The president of Kenya, which is expected to lead the deployment, said last week that the country would send “a reconnaissance mission as soon as a viable administration is in place” to ensure that Kenyan security personnel “are adequately prepared and informed to respond”.
But Petit said people in Port-au-Prince cannot wait for such a mission to arrive. Instead, she urged the international community, including the US, to provide better equipment and training to the overwhelmed Haitian National Police to restore security.
“What’s going to be left of the country if we’re waiting for a Kenyan police force?” she said. “There’s not going to be anything left to fight for.”
‘All is not lost’
Emmanuela Douyon, an anticorruption activist who left Haiti in 2021 amid fears for her safety and is now based in the US city of Boston, echoed the need to act.
“It’s really painful and I’m feeling a lot of emotions at the same time,” she told Al Jazeera about what it has been like to watch the violence in Haiti unfold over the past weeks from afar.
She noted that this month’s crisis is not new, however, but the continuation of years of corruption by Haitian politicians and businessmen who have used armed groups to maintain power and further their economic interests.
“The situation is extremely serious but all is not lost,” said Douyon, who stressed that many Haitians can serve their country and help rebuild state institutions.
“But on their own, without the support of the international community, without the support of international civil society groups, they won’t manage it” in the face of armed gangs that increasingly want political power, she said.
Villefranche at Maison d’Haiti in Canada, also told Al Jazeera that there are many groups and people in Haiti who are well organised and have ideas about how to chart the country’s future.
But these Haitian voices often get excluded, Villefranche said, in favour of “the same old actors who created the problem” in the first place.
“It’s funny because in the Haitian spirit, we’re never discouraged. We always think that there will be a solution, so I think being in despair is not in our DNA. Even if it’s terrible, we just hope that something better will come out of it.
“People are sad, they are angry, and I would say that a lot of them, their body is here but their heart is in Haiti – because their family is there. So this is how we feel, I would say: a little bit empty,” Villefranche added, her voice trailing off.
“But still hoping that something will happen because there are a lot of possibilities in the country – because there are a lot of people still living there and ready to do something.”
The 2024 Election is About the Rich Stealing From the Public
By Sonali Kolhatkar
News Americas, WAHSINGTON, D.C., Sat. March 16, 2024: There are many issues on the line this election year but one that gets little attention is former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax reform law that cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanently reduced the tax rate for big corporations from an already-low 35 percent to a ridiculously minuscule 21 percent. It also lowered tax rates for the wealthiest people from nearly 40 percent to 37 percent. Several provisions of that law are set to expire in 2025, making this November’s Congressional and Presidential elections particularly critical to issues of economic fairness and justice.
A few months after Trump signed the bill, he boasted, “We have the biggest tax cut in history, bigger than the Reagan tax cut. Bigger than any tax cut.” It became a common refrain for him when touting his achievements. But, Trump, who was known for breaking all records on lying to the public while in office, conflated many different facts to come up with a positive-sounding falsehood in a nation already primed by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to view taxation as anathema. Trump’s tax cuts as a whole were the eighth largest in history. But his corporate tax cut was in fact the single largest reduction ever in that category.
Wealthy corporations have for years lobbied for and won so many carve-outs and loopholes to the U.S. tax system, and hidden so much money in offshore tax havens that their pre-2017 effective tax rates were already far lower than the official rates. Then, Trump lowered them even more. Imagine telling the American public that you are responsible specifically for the biggest tax cuts to the biggest corporations in U.S. history. It wasn’t a good look. And so, he lied, saying that he signed history’s biggest tax cut overall.
In the simplest terms, taxes are a way to pool collective resources so we can have the things we all need for safety and security. Progressive taxation is when wealthier individuals (and corporations) are taxed at higher-than-average rates because the richer one is, the less excess money one needs beyond one’s basic necessities. Progressive taxation ensures that wealth inequality doesn’t spiral out of control and helps ensure money that’s being sucked upwards, gets redistributed downward. When wealthy elites pay fewer taxes, they are effectively stealing from the public.
Since the cuts have been in place, many studies have attempted to assess their impact on the U.S. economy. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded in a March 2024 report that “[t]ogether with the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts enacted under President Bush (most of which were made permanent in 2012), [Trump’s] law has severely eroded our country’s revenue base.”
Trump’s law accelerated the draining of our collective revenues to fund the things we need. Even the fiscally conservative Peter G. Peterson Foundation concluded that, as a result of Trump’s law, “The United States collects fewer revenues from corporations, relative to the size of the economy, than most other advanced countries.”
Trump’s tax cuts were quite literally regressive, rewarding the already rich. A 2021 ProPublica report found that just one last-minute provision to the bill demanded by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) for so-called pass-through corporations benefited a handful of the wealthiest people in the nation: “just 82 ultrawealthy households collectively walked away with more than $1 billion in total savings, an analysis of confidential tax records shows.” It only cost about $20 million in bribes to Johnson (i.e., donations to the Senator’s reelection campaign) to enact this windfall.
It’s no wonder that the rich were thrilled with Trump’s presidency and that his virulent white supremacy and fascist leanings were not deal breakers.
It’s also unsurprising that wealthy elites are backing a second term for Trump. They want an extension of those tax bill provisions that are expiring in 2025, and perhaps an even bigger tax cut, if they can get it. If those provisions are left to expire, people making more than $400,000 a year—the top 2 percent of earners—will see an increase in taxation in 2025.
This is a demographic that is already prone to tax cheating given the IRS’s recent announcement that 125,000 Americans making between $400,000 and $1 million a year have simply refused to file taxes since 2017.
If the GOP wins control of the Senate and the House of Representatives this fall, and if Trump beats President Joe Biden, those cuts will become permanent. A GOP sweep in November will also usher in a new wave of threats to people of color, LGBTQ people, especially transgender communities, labor rights, and reproductive justice, as well as an escalation to the already-dire Israeli genocide in Gaza that Biden is fueling. It’s hard to believe but many Americans seem to have forgotten the horrors of 2016 to 2020.
But, at its heart, this election will be about money, for it will take a lot of money to fund the GOP’s reelection campaigns in order for moneyed forces to ensure they retain control of more money—democracy, justice, and equity be damned.
For Trump, this is even more important given his legal challenges. He’s relying on small-dollar donations from his base to cover his mounting legal fees and has had to post a $91 million bond to cover the fines he faces from a defamation lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll. The more desperate Trump gets in his bid to secure the White House, the more willing he and his party will be to sell the nation to the highest bidder. And, he will lie to the public by conflating tax cuts for the rich with tax cuts for all.
We ought to think of tax cuts in terms of public revenue theft. When the wealthy win lowered taxes, they are stealing money from the American public as a whole. As per the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, permanently extending Trump’s tax cuts will result in a loss of $3.5 trillion in revenues through the year 2033. That’s highway robbery.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.
Source: Independent Media Institute
Credit Line: This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.