Does it really matter how many people died in the Haiti earthquake?

Every move the U.S. is making in Haiti right now is governed by these cold imperialist calculations—not regard for human life. When the U.S. Marines take control of the airport in Port-au-Prince, the message is: The U.S. is in charge and we're going to be setting the terms for everything that goes on here. Why is Haiti So Poor?

Why Did So Many Have to Die? With the eyes of the world on Haiti, many people are seeing how intense poverty severely multiplied the earthquake's toll. But people need to ask, WHY is Haiti so poor?

And WHY did you have a city like Port-au-Prince where so many people were so vulnerable to the devastating effects of such an earthquake? First of all, Haiti is poor and impoverished because of a long history of U.S. domination and oppression. U.S. Marines invaded and occupied Haiti from 1915 until 1934.

The U.S. seized land and distributed it to American corporations. And the heroic resistance that arose against the U.S. was brutally crushed. Starting in 1957 the U.S. propped up the pro-U.S. dictatorial Duvalier governments—first Papa and then Baby Doc—and the murderous Haitian military, along with the Tontons Macoute gangs that terrorized the people.

After popular uprisings ousted these dictators the U.S. maneuvered and intervened—opposing any forces that threatened U.S. interests and working to keep a puppet government in power. In 2004, the U.S. was directly involved in overthrowing the popularly elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. (See "The U.S. in Haiti: A Century of Domination and Misery.") Through all this, the economic and social structures of Haiti have been distorted and geared toward serving the needs of foreign, especially U.S., investments.

All this is why Haiti is so poor and dependent. Over 80 percent of people in Haiti live in abject poverty. Over half the population lives on less than a dollar a day.

Over 80 percent of the people do not get the minimum daily ration of food as defined by the World Health Organization. Less than 45 percent have access to potable water. Life expectancy in Haiti is 53 years.

Only one in every 100,000 Haitians have access to a physician. Speaking of the U.S. role in Haiti, Bill Quigley, legal director at the Center for Co "We have kept the country dependent. We have kept the country militarized.

And we kept the country impoverished. We have dumped our excess rice, our excess farm produce and that stuff on the country, thereby undercutting the small farmers who would make up the backbone of the place... We didn't create the earthquake, but we created some of the circumstances that made the earthquake so devastating...." (Democracy Now! The extremely impoverished conditions of Haiti, including the lack of infrastructure—that created a situation in which the earthquake was so devastating—is due to the long history of U.S. domination.

Thirty years ago the Haitians subsisted on corn, sweet potatoes, cassava and domestic rice—along with domestic pigs and other livestock production. Then in 1986 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million—but only on the condition that Haiti reduce tariff protections on Haitian rice, other agricultural products and some industries. This was aimed at opening up the country's markets to competition from outside countries.

Haitian farmers could not compete with rice growers in the U.S., who were being subsidized by the U.S. government. Some of the cheap rice that flooded into Haiti was in the form of "food aid." The local rice market in Haiti collapsed and thousands of farmers were forced to move to the cities to look for work.

Around this same time the U.S. insisted that the Haitian peasantry do away with its huge and valuable pig population—due to a supposed threat to the U.S. pig population. These are key factors in why there is so much hunger in Haiti today. This was powerfully expressed in the food riots in 2008.

Imported rice, which had now become the staple of the Haitian diet, doubled in price—and people could not afford to eat. Many were forced to eat and sell cakes made of mud and vegetable oil to stave off hunger pangs. In 1994 the U.S. made it possible for Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been forced out of the country, to resume his presidency—but only on the condition that he implement IMF and World Bank (WB) policies aimed at opening Haiti's markets even more to international trade.

This is how Haiti's agriculture was destroyed and how it became dependent on imported food, especially rice from the U.S. And in only a few decades hundreds of thousands of people were driven from the rural areas into Port-au-Prince—and forced to live in the most impoverished living conditions, where unemployment in some areas is as high as 90%. Port-au-Prince used to have only 50,000 people in the 1950s. But when the earthquake hit, over 2 million people lived in this capital city.

And tens of thousands died because they were in shantytowns, substandard housing, schools and other buildings that collapsed because they were so badly and cheaply built. Brian Concannon, director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, talked about why so many people lived on the hillsides where they were vulnerable to the effects of an earthquake: "They got there because they or their parents or grandparents were pushed out of Haiti's countryside, where most Haitians used to live. And they were pushed out of there by policies thirty years ago, when it was decided by the international experts that Haiti's economic salvation lay in assembly manufacture plants.

And in order to advance that, it was decided that Haiti needed to have a captive labor force in the cities. So a whole bunch of aid policies, trade policies and political policies were implemented, designed to move people from the countryside to places like Martissant and the hills—hillsides that we've seen in those photos of the devastation." (Democracy Now! As part of enforcing imperialist relations of domination, the World Bank and IMF have imposed structural adjustment policies on Haiti—requiring the government to reduce or eliminate many social service programs in order to repay foreign debt.

Growing poverty in the countryside has severely affected the very landscape—including exacerbating conditions that make things more dangerous when things like hurricanes or earthquakes occur. For example less than two percent of Haiti's forests remain—most have been cut down for export or for the charcoal industry. Some have been destroyed because poor people have cut down trees to make charcoal to survive.

When hurricanes struck Haiti in 2008 more than 1,000 people died around the town of Gonaïves. This was in large part due to flooding and landslides from erosion caused by deforestation. Dr. Paul Farmer, who runs an organization called Partners in Health, saw how the absence of trees created flash-floods that sweep people away.

Farmer said, "It's the ecological disaster that underpins the entire process. Many of the farmers and peasants forced into Port-au-Prince in the last few decades have ended up unemployed and living in shantytowns of cheaply constructed housing—shacks of cinderblocks, tin and sometimes even straw. When the earthquake hit, these and other structures, like schools made of concrete without any reinforced steel, were some of the most vulnerable buildings that quickly became deathtraps.

For more than a decade geologists have warned of the likelihood of a major quake in southern Haiti, where the faultline between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates runs. And as recently as 2008, the mayor of Port-au-Prince estimated that 60 percent of the capital's buildings would be unsafe in the event of a major quake. But in a poor country like Haiti there is no money for quake-proofing structures which have been shoddily built.

Last year a school in Pétionville, a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince, collapsed just by itself. In the wake of this huge tragedy in Haiti, the U.S. continues to press forward its plans to further dominate and exploit the Haitian people. Obama put George W.

Bush and Bill Clinton in charge of U.S. aid to Haiti. Bush's resume for this job is that he is the one who presided over the crimes against the people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Bill Clinton's credentials are that he is the point man for a much-praised plan for Haiti that involves setting up tourist areas and sweatshops where Haitians will be paid 38 cents an hour.

If you really want to talk about looting—and on a grand scale—this is what Bill Clinton had to say after the earthquake: "Once we deal with the immediate crisis, the development plans the world was already pursuing have to be implemented more quickly and on a broader scale. I'm interested in just pressing ahead with it. Haiti isn't doomed.

Let's not forget, the damage from the earthquake is largely concentrated in the Port-au-Prince area. That has meant a tragic loss of life, but it also means there are opportunities to rebuild in other parts of the island. So all the development projects, the agriculture, the reforestation, the tourism, the airport that needs to be built in the northern part of Haiti—everything else should stay on schedule.

In other words, Clinton now sees the massive destruction in Haiti as an opportunity to press forward with his plans for setting up profitable sweatshops and tourist areas. Clinton has already enlisted Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines into investing $55 million to build a pier along the coastline of Labadee, which it has leased until 2050. The $40 million plan involves transforming various small towns into tourist villages, eco-tourism, archaeological exploration and visits to Vodou rituals.

Clinton's plan also includes a major expansion of the sweatshop industry in Haiti and the U.S. has already put in place provisions for duty-free treatment of Haitian apparel exports. The U.S. government and the bourgeois media continue to paint the U.S. as the most generous and caring country that will "not forget the Haitian people." But everything the U.S. has been doing is aimed NOT at rescue and relief, is NOT helping the Haitian people—but has in fact meant many more deaths and much more suffering.