http://www.fantasylandmedia.org
Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine. News that the people in charge, the corporations and your government want keep from the public eye.
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Business Insider:
"A Wikileaks post published on The Nation shows that the Obama Administration fought to keep Haitian wages at 31 cents an hour.
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)."
http://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-haiti-minimum-wage-the-nation-2011-6
-->All those Americans who gave disaster relief to the poor in Haiti were just throwing their money away because the state department, pressured by US corporations, cut the minimum wage in half. Good thing The NY Times didn't publish this story, the ugly face of the US occupation.
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Democracy Now:
"The Nation magazine, in partnership with the Haitian weekly newspaper, Haïti Liberté, has launched a series of reports based on more than 19,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. Called 'The PetroCaribe Files,' the series begins with an exposé of how the United States—with pressure from Exxon and Chevron—tried to interfere with an oil agreement between Haiti and Venezuela that would save Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, $100 million per year.
'It’s really amazing to see an ambassador pushing around a president, and all his officials telling them what to do, that they don’t understand this, they don’t understand that, trying to tell them what Haiti’s interests are. It’s the epitome of arrogance,' says the report’s co-author, Kim Ives."
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/3/wikileaks_cables_reveal_secret_history_of
-->Again, US corporations cheating the impoverished Haitian people. This is what US imperialism in Haiti looks like. Is it any wonder that Latin America sees the US as its greatest threat to peace and prosperity? Thankfully, readers of The NY Times are spared any knowledge of how their brutal empire works.
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Common Dreams:
"In January, the government of the United States of America saw fit to seize $4.207 million in funds allocated to Cuba by the United Nations Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for the first quarter of 2011, Cuba has charged.
The UN Fund is a $22 billion a year program that works to combat the three deadly pandemics in 150 countries. 'This mean-spirited policy,' the Cuban government said, 'aims to undermine the quality of service provided to the Cuban population and to obstruct the provision of medical assistance in over 100 countries by 40,000 Cuban health workers.'
Most of the funds are used to import expensive AIDS medication to Cuba, where antiretroviral treatment is provided free of charge to some 5,000 HIV patients."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/05/30-1
-->Has Obama changed the cruelty and arrogance of US policy in Latin America? Readers of The NY Times may think so, but that is because our newspaper of record just doesn't run stories critical of the empire. This story never made it to print.
