Read: “Wikileaks Haiti, Let Them Live on $3 a Day”

Wikileaks recently unveiled some damning cables about the US government’s involvement in Haiti’s economy via The Nation and Haïti Liberté. To sum up:  Haiti planned to raise its minimum wage from 24 cents per hour to 62 cents, angering the contractors for U.S. corporations such as Levis and Hanes, who pay these ridiculously low wages to Haitians who sew American clothing. Apparently the Obama administration was not pleased with this development, or should I say attempted development.

According to Doug Coughlin of The Nation and Kim Ives of Haïti Liberté:

Contractors for Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi’s worked in close concert with the US Embassy when they aggressively moved to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest-paid in the hemisphere, according to secret State Department cables.

The factory owners told the Haitian Parliament that they were willing to give workers a 9-cents-per-hour pay increase to 31 cents per hour to make T-shirts, bras and underwear for US clothing giants like Dockers and Nautica.

But the factory owners refused to pay 62 cents per hour, or $5 per day, as a measure unanimously passed by the Haitian Parliament in June 2009 would have mandated. And they had the vigorous backing of the US Agency for International Development and the US Embassy when they took that stand.

To resolve the impasse between the factory owners and Parliament, the State Department urged quick intervention by then Haitian President René Préval.

“A more visible and active engagement by Préval may be critical to resolving the issue of the minimum wage and its protest ‘spin-off’—or risk the political environment spiraling out of control,” argued US Ambassador Janet Sanderson in a June 10, 2009, cable back to Washington.

Two months later Préval negotiated a deal with Parliament to create a two-tiered minimum wage increase—one for the textile industry at about $3 per day and one for all other industrial and commercial sectors at about $5 per day.

Still the US Embassy wasn’t pleased. A deputy chief of mission, David E. Lindwall, said the $5 per day minimum “did not take economic reality into account” but was a populist measure aimed at appealing to “the unemployed and underpaid masses.”

Haitian advocates of the minimum wage argued that it was necessary to keep pace with inflation and alleviate the rising cost of living. As it is, Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere and the World Food Program estimates that as many as 3.3 million people in Haiti, a third of the population, are food insecure. In April 2008 Haiti was rocked by the so-called Clorox food riots, named after hunger so painful that it felt like bleach in your stomach.

According to a 2008 Worker Rights Consortium study, a family of one working member and two dependents needed at least 550 Haitian gourdes, or $12.50, per day to meet normal living expenses.

The revelation of US support for low wages in Haiti’s assembly zones was in a trove of 1,918 cables made available to the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté by the transparency group WikiLeaks. As part of a collaboration with Haïti Liberté, The Nation is publishing English-language articles based on those cables.

In an emailed statement, the State Department declined to comment on the disclosures in this article, citing a policy against commenting on documents that purport to contain classified information and stating that it “strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of such information.” However, the State Department spokesperson added in the email:

“In Haiti, approximately 80 percent of the population is unemployed and 78 percent earns less than $1 per day”— actually, according to the UN Development Program, 78 percent of Haitians live on less than $2, not $1, a day—and “the US government is working with the government of Haiti and international partners to help create jobs, support economic growth, promote foreign direct investment that meets ILO labor standards in the apparel industry and invest in agriculture and beyond.”

For a twenty month period between early February 2008 and October 2009, U.S. Embassy officials closely monitored and reported on the minimum wage issue. The cables show that the Embassy fully understood the popularity of the measure.

The cables said that the new minimum wage even had support from a majority of the Haitian business community “based on reports that wages in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua (competitors in the garment industry) will increase also.”

Still, the proposal engendered fierce opposition from Haiti’s tiny assembly zone elite, which Washington had long been supporting with direct financial aid and free trade deals.

In 2006, the U.S. Congress passed the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) bill, which gave Haitian assembly zone manufacturers preferential trade incentives. Two years later, Congress passed an even more generous version of the duty-free trade bill called HOPE II, and USAID provided technical assistance and training programs to factories to help them expand and take advantage of the new legislation.

U.S. Embassy cables claimed that those efforts were imperiled by parliamentary demands for a wage hike to keep pace with soaring inflation and high food prices. “[Textile i]ndustry representatives, led by the Association of  Haitian Industry (ADIH), objected to the immediate HTG 130 (USD 3.25) per day wage increase in the assembly sector, saying it would devastate the industry and negatively impact the benefits of the Haitian Hemispheric through Opportunity Partnership Encouragement Act (HOPE II),” said a June 17, 2009, confidential cable from Charge d’Affaires Thomas C. to Washington.

Tighe said that the “ADIH and USAID funded studies on the impact of near tripling of the minimum wage on the textile sector found that an HTG 200 Haitian gourde minimum wage would make the sector economically unviable and consequently force factories to shut down.”

Bolstered by the USAID study, the factory owners lobbied heavily against the increase, meeting with Préval on multiple occasions and with more than forty members of Parliament and political parties, according to the cables.

The Haiti cables also reveal how closely the US Embassy monitored widespread pro–minimum wage demonstrations and openly worried about the political impact of the minimum wage battle. UN troops were called in to quell student protests, sparking further demands from Haitians for the end of the 9,000-strong UN occupation.

As the Haitian Platform for Development Alternatives put it in a press release in June 2009, “Every time the minimum wage has been discussed, ADIH has cried wolf to scare the government against its passage: that raising minimum wage would mean the certain and immediate closure of industry in Haiti and the cause of a sudden loss of jobs. In every case, it was a lie.”

In related news: How Washington and big oil fought Venezula’s PetroCaribe deal in Haiti.

In related news: How the US, EU rubber-stamped and paid for an election that they knew was flawed from the start.

Read: About Bank of America’s $410 Million Overdraft Suit

This story may be somewhat old but due to the lack of coverage on this important issue we thought it still worthy of reposting.

According to Robert Selna of the SF Chronicle (published February 5, 2011):

Bank of America has agreed to pay $410 million to settle a lawsuit in which the lender is accused of manipulating debit transactions to maximize overdraft fees.

The agreement, made public Friday by the U.S. District Court in Miami, is believed to be the first financial settlement by a large bank in a case alleging deceptive overdraft practices. It may presage the outcome of related claims consolidated in Miami against 30 other lending institutions, including San Francisco’s Wells Fargo, Citibank, Chase, Union Bank and U.S. Bank.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo is embroiled in a separate lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco brought by California customers. That case started before the multistate legal action, but has not concluded because Wells has filed an appeal.
In August, U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued a scathing ruling ordering Wells Fargo to pay its California clients $203 million. He said the bank’s goal was to “maximize the number of overdrafts and squeeze as much as possible” out of customers.

The crux of the claims against all the banks is that they processed debit transactions from largest to smallest, instead of the order in which they occurred, depleting accounts faster and boosting the number of overdrafts, which cost as much as $35 per transaction.

At the time of Alsup’s ruling, a Wells Fargo representative said the bank continued to follow the practice because it gives priority to larger payments, which tend to be customers’ priority payments.

In the Bank of America case, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argued that in addition to its selective ordering of transactions, BofA deceived customers by not disclosing to them that they could opt out of the overdraft plan and by failing to unequivocally explain that transactions would be ordered from high to low.

IAccording to the complaint, BofA told clients that it might use its discretion in ordering, processing and posting items to the account.

“This statement is deceptive and/or unfair because it is, in fact, the bank’s practice to always reorder debits from the highest to lowest … and (the bank) reorders them so that higher debits that occurred on subsequent days are posted to its customers’ accounts before lower debits that occurred on earlier days, contrary to the terms of the Bank Deposit Agreement and its customers’ reasonable expectations,” the complaint stated…

From the last paragraph of page two:

Fees have become a central part of big banks’ business model. According the Center for Responsible Lending, overdraft fees cost customers $10 billion in 2004, $17.5 billion in 2006, and $23.7 billion in 2008. Wells Fargo collected $1.4 billion in overdraft fees in California alone from 2005 to 2007, according to court documents.

Read the full article here

If you bank with any of the aforementioned financial institutions you might think about moving your money to a smaller bank in your community. Move Your Money is good web resource to help you do just that.

Read: British Royalty Dined on Human Flesh (But Don’t Worry it Was 300 Years Ago)

This painting of Charles I’s execution in 1649 shows people surging forward to mop up the former king’s blood. It was thought to have healing properties.

According to The Mail Online (published May 21, 2011):

They have long been famed for their love of lavish banquets and rich recipes.  But what is less well known is that the British royals also had a taste for human flesh. A new book on medicinal cannibalism has revealed that possibly as recently as the end of the 18th century British royalty swallowed parts of the human body. The author adds that this was not a practice reserved for monarchs but was widespread among the well-to-do in Europe.

Even as they denounced the barbaric cannibals of the New World, they applied, drank, or wore powdered Egyptian mummy, human fat, flesh, bone, blood, brains and skin.

Moss taken from the skulls of dead soldiers was even used as a cure for nosebleeds, according to Dr Richard Sugg at Durham University.

Dr Sugg said: ‘The human body has been widely used as a therapeutic agent with the most popular treatments involving flesh, bone or blood…”

Read full article here

The book mentioned in the article is called Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires, will be published on June 29 by Routledge and charts the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians.

Read: Vanity Fair’s “Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door”

A photographer’s representation of a typical scene at one of the motels in Central Connecticut used for sex trafficking. photo by Larry Fink

Not only this story but entire notion of human trafficking makes my soul hurt. I can only hope there is special place in hell for the pimps and johns that support this deplorable industry.

According to Amy Fine Collins of Vanity Fair (published: May 24, 2011):

Even as celebrity activists such as Emma Thompson, Demi Moore, and Mira Sorvino raise awareness about commercial sex trafficking, survivor Rachel Lloyd publishes her memoir Girls Like Us, and the Senate introduces a new bipartisan bill for victim support, the problem proliferates across continents, in casinos, on streets, and directly into your mobile device. And, as Amy Fine Collins shows, human trafficking is much closer to home than you think; victims, younger than ever, are just as likely to be the homegrown American girl next door as illegally imported foreigners. Having gained access to victims, law-enforcement officials, and a convicted trafficker, Collins follows a major case that put to the test the federal government’s Trafficking Victims Protection Act….

There are more young American girls entering the commercial sex industry—an estimated 300,000 at this moment—and their ages have been dropping drastically. “The average starting age for prostitution is now 13,” says Rachel Lloyd, executive director of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (gems), a Harlem-based organization that rescues young women from “the life…”

From page 2:

In the fall of 2003, after turning 18, Gwen headed down to Hartford to visit her Aunt Lucy, her mother’s sister. Her aunt, in turn, introduced her niece to Brian Forbes. “She told me he was a really nice guy and stuff,” Gwen said. Employing a technique not unlike the “love-bombing” used by cults, Brian Forbes began to wine and dine her. “He was really nice,” Gwen recalled. “You know, he could give me, you know, anything I wanted.” Pimps refer to this trust-building courtship phase as “seasoning,” and they can be extremely patient. Forensic pediatrician Dr. Sharon Cooper, a specialist in treating juvenile victims of sex trafficking, terms the process “grooming.” Girls acquainted with “the life” call it “spitting game.” Forbes, Scates notes, was a master at singling out, on the high-school campus or at the shopping center, the vulnerable girl with abysmal self-esteem. “And,” she says, “he sensed what lines would be most effective on which girl.”

When Forbes took Gwen to his two-bedroom apartment above a hair salon in East Hartford, he introduced her to “Toni,” a woman in her 20s living there. Toni (real name: Shanaya Hicks), he explained, was his girlfriend. Gwen was startled, as she had every reason to believe that Forbes had fallen head over heels for her.

Gwen’s Aunt Lucy, of course, had set her up. Intra-familial recruiting of sex slaves is a common practice. Eva, a Norwich, Connecticut, girl, was forced by her mother-in-law—via starvation, drugs, and threats to her baby boys—into prostituting herself at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, the Connecticut casinos. Caroline, the former 4-H member, was taken to a brothel by her best friend’s mom and a pastor, the Reverend Henry L. Price. Gwen was especially easy prey for her aunt and Forbes because, before she had even left Vermont, she was hooked on heroin—a virtual epidemic nowadays in the New England and New York suburbs because of its current purity, potency, and cheapness…

Read the full article here

The documentary Very Young Girls by David Schisgall deals with this same same heartbreaking issue and interviews many of the girls participating in Rachel Lloyd’s GEMS program. Very Young Girls is available on Netflix’s watch instantly.

Infographic: Do Students Eat Like Prisoners?

Via GOOD:

Hopefully you haven’t gotten the chance to taste jailhouse cuisine, but if you’re a product of the American school system, you probably have childhood memories of standing in line for grey mashed potatoes, half-thawed mystery meat, and slimy canned peaches. How do the trays measure up?

Take it from someone who’s eaten both, I’d choose the prison food. At least prisons in Kansas offer some solid vegetarian options to pick from. Check out PETA’s list of the top 10 vegetarian prisons here