As chief of staff and counselor to Hillary Clinton at the State Department, Cheryl D. Mills worked ceaselessly to help a South Korean garment maker open a factory in Haiti, the centerpiece of United States government efforts to jump-start the island nation’s economy after the 2010 earthquake.
Ms. Mills took the lead on smoothing the way for the company, Sae-A Trading, which secured millions of dollars in incentives to make its Haiti investment more attractive, despite criticism of its labor record elsewhere. When she presided over the project’s unveiling in September 2010, she introduced Sae-A’s chairman, Woong-ki Kim, as the most important person at the ceremony, which included Mrs. Clinton and the Haitian prime minister.
Mr. Kim would later become important to Ms. Mills in a far more personal way — as a financial backer of a company she started after leaving the State Department in 2013. The company, BlackIvy Group, is pursuing infrastructure projects in Tanzania and Ghana, the only African nations in the “Partnership for Growth,” an Obama administration initiative that Mrs. Clinton helped introduce that promotes investment in developing countries.
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With respect to the investments in Haiti, some will see them only as boons to Haiti's economy, while others will see not only that, but that these production facilities will become sweatshops, operating just above the threshold of slave labor.
ReplyDeleteAs for economic boon to the country, its government is subverted by incredibly corrupt players (evidently including some of our very own); scarcely any of the money provided by taxes or fees of any sort will find its way to improving, or even supporting public health, education, and infrastructure, the last with the exception of those improvements that benefit the industry owners.