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Yeah the American government should get back to what it does best - using the State Dept, CIA or military to bribe, bully, remove or kill any third world leader who is thinking of raising their country's minimum wage or has the audacity to legislate and enforce environmental or safety regulations.

Yup must explain why countries that have highest incidents of human rights abuses & environmental disasters happen to be diametrically opposite the USA. It's all the CIA fault for propping up banana republics.

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A Wikileaks post published on The Nation shows that the Obama Administration fought to keep Haitian wages at 31 cents an hour.

(This article was taken down by The Nation due to an embargo, but it was excerpted at Columbia Journalism Review.)

It started when Haiti passed a law two years ago raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. According to an embassy cable:

This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies (the U.S. minimum wage, which itself is very low, works out to $58 a day).

Haiti has about 25,000 garment workers. If you paid each of them $2 a day more, it would cost their employers $50,000 per working day, or about $12.5 million a year ... As of last year Hanes had 3,200 Haitians making t-shirts for it. Paying each of them two bucks a day more would cost it about $1.6 million a year. Hanesbrands Incorporated made $211 million on $4.3 billion in sales last year.

Thanks to U.S. intervention, the minimum was raised only to 31 cents.

 

 

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-haiti-minimum-wage-the-nation-2011-6#ixzz1UvyKC1Ir

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Yeah lets use the basket case of Western hemisphere as the example. What's not written is the obvious that it wasn't the big corps that complained, but the local partner (as if any foreign company can operate in Haiti without extortion).

 

Corrupt Haitians have had the Dems ears for decades, especially through the Black Caucus to keep the junta in charge, yet it's the American companies that provide jobs to people who otherwise are forced to eat crap are the problem. Way to focus on the real issues.

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Yeah lets use the basket case of Western hemisphere as the example. What's not written is the obvious that it wasn't the big corps that complained, but the local partner (as if any foreign company can operate in Haiti without extortion).

 

Corrupt Haitians have had the Dems ears for decades, especially through the Black Caucus to keep the junta in charge, yet it's the American companies that provide jobs to people who otherwise are forced to eat crap are the problem. Way to focus on the real issues.

Yes it was the Black caucus that planned the ouster of Aristide- you are delusional- and the issue was American government acting " outside proper legal channels" your ilk are outraged the scarce times it happens to the detriment of a corporation but are strangely silent with the many times it happens in favor of corporations- As for BP in an industry that doesn't have the greatest safety or environment record BP is still an incredible negative outlier

 

OSHA statistics show BP ran up 760 "egregious, willful" safety violations, while Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips each had eight, Citgo had two and Exxon had one comparable citation.
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Yes it was the Black caucus that planned the ouster of Aristide- you are delusional- and the issue was American government acting " outside proper legal channels" your ilk are outraged the scarce times it happens to the detriment of a corporation but are strangely silent with the many times it happens in favor of corporations-

 

No, we're pretty consistent in decrying the violation of due process for GM's benefit, too.

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