Let me bring in a little history for you today.
Let’s talk about Haïti . . .
Haïti was once called the “Pearl of the Caribbean” because of its beauty and its profit for the colonizers.
Of course, that profit came at the cost of human misery, torture, sexual abuse, and death.
But that doesn’t matter when profit is the highest good.
The original inhabitants were turned into creatures of labor (“slaves”) by the colonial slave-masters and rapidly died off because hey abuse and beating and torture and all the rest ends up killing the people you’re trying to make a profit from.
So the slave-masters started importing Black Africans—teachers, parents, doctors, scribes, artists, warriors, sages: ordinary people with skills and talents and knowledge—and turned them into creatures of forced labor (“slaves”).
For a few hundred years the colonizer slave-masters killed their enslaved people at such a rate through overwork, starvation, beatings, torture, and execution that they had to keep importing new people to turn into creatures of forced labor.
The people were turned into units of labor in direct opposition of the colonizing slave-masters’ professed religion, all to the higher god of profit.
In 1791 or so, after decades of unrest, the enslaved people of Haïti finally began a revolt that lasted for about 15 years until they had, by herculean effort, booted out their final slave-masters: the French.
But the French, not wanting to leave their profits and their wealth, demanded reparations from the Haitians. Reparations for their lost assets of the people of Haïti who, as their enslaved property, used to make money for the French and in so doing die from abuse and torture and murder and starvation.
The cost of those reparations was too high for the Haitians to pay back themselves, even though they stripped their land of resources in the attempt to buy their freedom (one reason for the dearth of trees in Haïti is that they were sold off as lumber to help finance reparations).
So the Haitians did what desperate people do: they took out loans, with French banks and with American banks.
And after approximately 150 years, Haïti finally paid off their last payment to France in 1947.
150 years of profit and prosperity in Haïti was sucked out from the people of Haïti to be given to the coffee-drinkers in Paris and the speculators in New York.
Money that could have been spent on infrastructure. On schools. On building a stable society. On finding and educating their geniuses. (Every nation has them, but not every nation wants to find them. And some nations simply do not have the resources to find them and elevate them. I have personal stories about this.) Or create a more just and more equal society.
Year after year most Haitians lived in dire, perpetual poverty so that their debt-owners could be paid back a sum that was far in excess of their original debt, and for the entirely obscene reason of paying for their own liberation to people who had simply decided to own them in the first place.
At one point when the bankers were worried that the Haitians, too impoverished by now to continue to pay, they engineered a policy decision by the United States to invade Haïti and take all its gold to a New York Bank “for safe keeping.” And then the U.S. stayed around for about two decades trying to make Haïti an American colony with cheap labor. (In some cases, the labor was unpaid, extracted by American Marines at the point of the gun aimed at Haitians. Such is the need for profit as the American Way, I guess.)
And that invasion of Haïti to safeguard gold that U.S. bankers thought of as theirs has played a large part in setting Haïti back from development.
You might think that Haïti has its troubles, and it does. But when you have a nation that proudly established the first Black republic in the Americas that is then perpetually robbed of its wealth for 150 years, you are going to have a nation that teeters perpetually on the brink of collapse.
It will take several generations to fix the underlying issues of building up a seed bank of prosperity that will eventually result in the prosperity of their grandchildren.
All because of debt as a cost of freedom, debt that was turned into a chain to destroy them and deny them freedom.
This is the same as the student debt that people take on for a chance at future freedom. Often these students signed up for a thing—debt—that was then sold and resold until the original expectations of repayment were lost in the greed for profit.
People with student debt from their 20s are in their 50s and 60s now, a lifetime of debt, a lifetime of reduction in their prosperity, because bankers must have their profits.
It’s an ugly truth, and one that we mostly do not know in America because we do not like ugly stories about our history
We dislike knowing history is because it shows us stories like this, stories we could learn from.
But because we believe in the lie that property & profits matter more than people, we do everything we can to stop up our ears and close our eyes, and instead chant to Make America Great Again through the perpetual debt-peonage of our children and grandchildren.
We could stop this, if we want.
The thing is, do we want that for our kids more than we want our own comfortable illusions?
My prayer for Haïti is always that they would have the people they need to promote justice and govern fairly. But they’re another nation with their own self-determination, and as much as I’d love to have that conversation about what “we” could do, the best thing we can do is to help Haïti solve its own problems without the intervention of well-meaning but ignorant people who proceed to screw things up even more with foolish and nonsensical solutions that don’t fit Haïtian culture, values, and politics.
For my own nation—for the U.S.— I just ask: do we want to close our eyes to the misery of debt because we demand that our richest people become even richer at the expense of our children’s and our children’s children’s future?
Granting a pittance of debt relief is a start, but let’s continue to have that conversation to stop robbing ourselves and our futures by believing this nonsense that the way to make America great is to impoverish our future.
It’s time to revolutionize how we structure higher education. It’s time to take the best of the industrialized world—where they pay to educate their people—and implement those ideas here, so that our children can use all their energy for productive work without the crippling debt that ensnares so many.