Month: April 2014

anarcho-queer:

WikiLeaks: Obama Administration Pressured Haiti’s President To Lower Minimum Wage

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

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.

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.

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.

Help an indie author, reblog this! And don’t be afraid to ask for a coupon. This story features openly gay characters (and their relationships are portrayed as just as valid as anyone else’s), and his hysterical to boot.

shadeofroses:

I’m giving 5 free copies of Paul Meets the Ghost of Xmas Past to the 1st 5 people who send me a private tumblr message that includes the word “glitter”. 

It will be a Smash Words coupon. I’d appreciate it if the winners would leave a review after they read it, but no pressure.

Happy Hunting! And let me hear about the glitter! 🙂

BTW – I’ll publish your name as a winner unless you ask me not to…and sorry, no anonymous postings will win.

Now at Barnes & Noble!

“I work for the Office of Arcane Affairs.

You have never heard of us.

If the CIA finds out al-Qaeda has a guy who can bend spoons, they call the OAA, and they send me. When the Office of Naval Intelligence has reports of a strange, giant, glowing squid, “Hey OAA, can Topher scuba dive?” An infestation of rabid, gun-toting, were-jaguars in a South American jungle? No problem. Topher can fix it. Nothing worse than spooked spooks who don’t have a clue what they’re dealing with.

But that’s my job. Because being a wizard means I’m the only one who can handle it.”

Chasing the Wyrm: Christopher Yan – Office of Arcane Affairs

To protect its interests, the U.S. government projects its power militarily, economically, and magically. It leaves the last to the Office of Arcane Affairs. 

Christopher Yan didn’t ask for the job. A wizard born with the power to warp reality, the OAA calls on him to neutralize all arcane threats. Part spy, part fixer, part assassin, Topher searches for a way to make his unique gift serve both his country and his principles. When he makes an enemy of a rogue wizard serving a dying insurgency, he learns the limits his conscience can bear. 

bluntcrusher:

bluntcrusher:

here’s a compilation of some of my artsworks for you guys.

i’m working on like ten more things but i can never finish something before starting other things so those will come later. :3

i reblog this every now and then to showcase my skillz to people who dont give a fuck