Since when did it become the job of the State Dept to lobby for slave wages in foreign countries?

[Skwmom]

This is seriously fucked up. (An yes, this type of crap deserves strong language).

n June 2009, the Haitian Parliament unanimously passed a law requiring that the minimum wage be raised to $0.61 an hour, or $5 a day. (The average cost of living is estimated to be the equivalent of about $23 a day.) This pay raise was staunchly opposed by foreign manufacturers who had set up shop in the country, and the United States Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development backed those manufacturers. After Haiti's government mandated the raise, the United States aggressively (and successfully) pushed Haiti's president to lower the minimum wage for garment workers to what factory owners were willing to pay: the equivalent of about $0.31 an hour (or $2.50 per eight-hour day).

In 2011, WikiLeaks released a set of previously-secret diplomatic cables. The American publication The Nation partnered with Haitian news organization Haïti Liberté to cover them, finding (among other things) how strongly the United States had opposed the minimum wage hike:

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.”

So it's true that the State Department (then led by Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State) strongly opposed a minimum wage increase in Haiti in 2009. However, the State Department's efforts did not occur in a political or economic vacuum, and Clinton wasn't the sole architect of efforts to quash a minimum wage hike (as the meme suggests). It was a concerted effort on the part of Haitian elites, factory owners, free trade proponents, U.S. politicians, economists, and American companies that kept the minimum wage so low, and to lay the blame squarely at the feet of any sitting Secretary of State would be an incomplete assessment, and thus inaccurate.

[arcane1]

1. Hillary literally privatized the State Department, to serve private interests.

It's been used that way before, but she made it an art form.

[Skwmom]

2. No wonder Libya was forgotten after the Regime change and the hundreds of requests for security

were ignored. They didn't have the time to worry about such matters. There was corporate exploitation of the masses to carry out.

[arcane1]

3. You mean "Business Opportunities". "Corporate exploitation" sounds so... accurate. n/t

[restorefreedom]

6. practicing for the tpp. nt

[questionseverything]

4. to keep people from making 61 cents an hour..is this what my tax dollar goes for?

i disagree with the last paragraph which says hc alone is not responsible, since it is hc and her 1% backers, i don't see any difference

[MisterP]

5. ever since the ex-SoS believed that she could campaign without opposition

Democrats have swallowed it all down before, or even cheered lustily and begged for more because it was a charismatic guy being attacked by the GOP who did it

[yurbud]

7. what do people think the state department does?

Or that our foreign policy is?

[Skwmom]

8. Well I (and everyone I have spoken to) NEVER knew this is what our State Dept did. It's not like

the corporate media EVER talks about it.

[yurbud]

9. There's some pretty riveting reading that could fill you in:

OVERTHROW by Stephen Kinzer of the NY Times that covers all the government we overthrew starting with Hawaii.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HITMAN by John Perkins

THE PRIZE by Daniel Yergin, a history of oil that I read before 9/11, that in a broad way made it very clear that everything our government was saying about the Middle East was bullshit. Oil company execs do not ask senators, secretaries of state, or even presidents for favors--they give orders.

Everything politicians say about why we are doing things in other countries is bullshit. Everything.

It's all about money.

The greatest example was the collapse of communism. Like a lot of people, I really believed the Cold War hype, that we were in an ideological war with communism. Therefore, when the Cold War was over, we would never have a beef with Russia again since they were reduced to a regional power instead of superpower. But with in a very short time, new conflicts arose, and since they were now capitalist, democratic, and easily better on human rights than some of our closest allies, the excuses for conflict rang especially false.