They tried "pushing the reset button" every few years for the past 20 years or so, and at regular intervals before that ....
First they kicked Duvalier out and installed a "democratically elected President".
When that didn't work they went thru a succession of "President" and coup d'etats until Aristide came in ....
Then they had another coup d'etat and Aristide was removed from power ....
Then the US intervened militarily and reinstated Aristide, AFAIK the US "helped" them re-write practically their entire Constitution to try to stabilize things ..... It didn't work ....
Then Haiti narrowly avoided a civil war and Aristide was exiled from the country (again).
Now it's only a matter of time before Preval proves himself just as crooked as all those whom came before him ...
How many hundreds of thousands of Haitian "expats" are there out there ? (there are somewhere in the 60 thousands right here in Canada that we know of and have the proper papers, with the <actual> number believed to be several times that). Those fines folks whom have chosen to immigrate out of there, are the very same ones that had managed to scrape together the means to lift themselves out of poverty (or were part of the "wealthy elite").
The very people whom <could> eventually lift that country out of it's current abyss, just plain aren't interested in even trying to do so ....
This has nothing to do with 'the Devil'. It has to do with a society that needed a push of the 'reset button' anyway, and if this earthquake didn't do it something else would have. If anything, maybe this will be the tipping point towards some responsibility among the survivors.
-M
Remember that those people whom are now useless, have been so since the Trudeau days when he closed the "institutions", these are people that have neither the physical means nor the mental capacity to thrive on their own. And yes, some people have found this business of warehousing people quite a profitable operation, with 6 figure salaries and everything else that comes with it.
There must be an industry that makes money off of other people's poverty. Support agencies comes to mind.
In Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, it has been reported in the media that $ 1 million dollars of government aid is spent there on a daily basis given the 100 plus "social service support agencies, aka non profit societies" that exist to help the drug addicts and mentally ill that are homeless or living in shelters in the area. Yet after all these years, these same addicts and mentally ill are still there without much improvement in their lives....similar to the situation in Haiti albeit on a much smaller scale (despite years of monetary assistance coming in from the rest of the world). Does make me think what is really going on behind the scenes....