peasant

US rice exports to Haiti, which account for the bulk of supplies of the country’s key food staple, contain unhealthy levels of arsenic and cadmium, heavy metals that can increase risks of cancer and heart disease, according to a recent study by the University of Michigan.

Haiti is among America’s top buyers of rice, alongside Mexico and Japan, and cheap imports are more affordable than local options in the Caribbean nation, the poorest state in the western hemisphere.

According to the study, average arsenic and cadmium concentrations were nearly twice as high in imported rice compared to the Haitian-grown product, with some imported samples exceeding international limits.

Nearly all imported rice samples exceeded the US Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation for children’s consumption. [...]

The study, which attributed the dominance of imported rice to lower import tariffs and long-term contracts signed during [US-supported] political turmoil in the late 1980s and 1990s, said Haiti imports nearly 90 per cent of its rice, almost exclusively from the US.[...]

When researchers ran the study in 2020, they found that Haitians on average consumed 85kg of rice per year, compared to 12kg in the US

Trade data vizualisation showing main countries US exports rice to

How the United States Crippled Haiti’s Rice Industry - Haiti Action Committee

Haiti’s hunger crisis is no accident – it is the direct result of US economic policies imposed on rural Haiti beginning in the 1980s. The story of how the US undermined Haiti’s domestic rice industry exemplifies how a nation of farmers can no longer feed itself.[...]

Rice cultivation in the United States is deeply rooted in slavery. Black Rice author Judith Carney writes, “Few Americans identify slavery with the cultivation of rice, yet rice was a major plantation crop during the first three centuries of settlement in the Americas… By the middle of the eighteenth century, rice plantations in South Carolina and the black slaves who worked them had created one of the most profitable economies in the world.” European settlers knew nothing about the complexities of growing, harvesting and threshing rice. But enslaved Africans did.

A basic staple of the Haitian diet, rice has been cultivated in Haiti since its 1804 independence. Until the 1980s, Haitian farmers produced most of the rice consumed in Haiti. Under the US-backed dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and the brutal military regimes that followed, domestic rice cultivation began to plummet. In the space of a few decades, Haiti became the world’s fourth largest market for American rice. By 2004, the value of US rice exports to Haiti amounted to $80 million.[...]

Food aid played a key role in undermining Haiti’s domestic rice production. President Aristide observed, “What good does it do the peasant when the pastor feeds his children? For one night, he is grateful to the pastor, because that night he does not have to hear the whimpers of his children, starving. But the same free foreign rice the pastor feeds the peasant’s children is being sold on the market for less than the farmer’s own produce. The very food that the pastor feeds the peasant’s children is keeping the peasant in poverty, unable himself to feed his children.”

Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Caribbean Basin Initiative prompted a major increase in US food aid to Haiti. In 1984, Haiti received $11 million in food aid; from 1985-1988, Haiti received $54 million in food aid. The Caribbean Basin Initiative called for integrating Haiti into the global market by redirecting 30% of Haiti’s domestic food production towards export crops, a plan that USAID experts systematically carried out. The United States fully recognized that this would lead to widespread hunger in rural Haiti, as peasant land was converted to grow food for foreigners. Food aid was supposed to compensate rural Haitians for this attack on their livelihood. Food aid benefits the big American companies who grow and transport it, but wrecks local economies. As cheap American food undersold Haitian farmers’ produce, domestic agriculture became even less sustainable. In effect, food aid created a dependence on foreign imports.

How was the United States able to impose its will on rural Haiti? At the time, Jean-Claude Duvalier, the son of Haiti’s infamous dictator, Francois Duvalier, ruled Haiti. Like his father, the younger Duvalier held onto power by controlling Haiti’s repressive security forces. He received millions in US aid intended to maintain US influence in the Caribbean as a bulwark against Cuba. The Reagan administration conditioned US aid on Duvalier’s support for the plan to restructure Haiti’s economy. Thus began the most massive foreign intervention in Haiti since the 1915-1934 American occupation.[...]

In February 1986, a popular uprising forced Baby-Doc Duvalier out of power. After he fled Haiti, raiding the treasury as he left, a military junta headed by General Henri Namphy took power. Predictably, the United States aligned with the junta and intensified measures to restructure Haiti’s economy. In 1987, Namphy received IMF loans valued at $24.6 million in exchange for agreeing to slash rice tariffs from 150% to 50%, the lowest in the Caribbean. He opened all of Haiti’s ports to commercial activity and agreed to stop what little support the government had offered Haitian farmers. Meanwhile, Haiti’s military elite saw an opportunity to make a profit smuggling American rice.

In the United States, the passage of the 1985 Farm Bill significantly boosted subsidies to American rice growers. By 1987, 40% of American rice growers’ profits came from the government. Heavily subsidized American rice could sell at prices far below the market value of Haitian rice. Haitian farmers never stood a chance against this unfair competition.

In Haiti, imported American rice is called “Miami rice” because it is shipped from Miami in sacks stamped “Miami, FLA.” By December 1987, Haiti’s rice production had shrunk to 75% of Haitian needs. Outraged Haitian peasants barricaded highways and ports for three months to protest the cheap American rice that had begun to flood Haitian markets. They attacked truckloads of Miami rice with machetes, picks and clubs, dumping rice onto the earth.[...]

By 1990, the year Fr. Jean Bertrand Aristide was elected President in Haiti’s first democratic election, US rice imports outpaced domestic production. Aristide was the candidate of Haiti’s popular movement Lavalas. He won with 67% of the vote. His February 1991 inauguration marked a victory for Haiti’s poor majority after decades of Duvalier family dictatorships and military rule, signaling participation of the poor in a new social order. The new administration began to implement programs in adult literacy, health care, and land redistribution; lobbied for a minimum wage hike; and proposed new roads and infrastructure. Aristide enforced taxes on the wealthy, and dissolved the rural section chief infrastructure that empowered the paramilitary force known as Tonton Macoute. He closed Fort Dimanche, the dreaded Duvalier-era torture center. The Aristide government met with a large coalition of farmers’ associations and unions and proposed buying all Haitian-grown rice in order to stabilize the price, limiting rice imports during periods between harvests.[...]

Just seven months after his inauguration, President Aristide and the democratic government were overthrown in a bloody military coup led by General Raoul Cedras. Trained in the United States and funded by the CIA, Cedras commanded the Haitian Army. His regime unleashed the collective violence of Haiti’s repressive forces against its own people. From 1991-1994, nearly five thousand Lavalas activists and supporters of the constitutional government were massacred; many others were savagely tortured and imprisoned. [...]

In September 1992, barely a year after the coup, American Rice, Inc negotiated a nine-year contract with the illegal Haitian government, importing American rice under its newly formed Rice Corporation of Haiti.

American Rice, Inc is a subsidiary of Erly Industries, a powerful international agribusiness. The company holds an almost monopolistic position in Haiti’s rice market. In the 1980’s American Rice, Inc imported rice under its brand Comet Rice, which constituted much of the Miami rice that ravaged Haitian rice production at the time.

In the 1990s, American Rice, Inc supplemented its profits in “legal” rice imports by smuggling rice to avoid paying import taxes. Lawrence Theriot, the Washington lobbyist for American Rice, Inc was a former director of Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative. He had powerful friends in Washington, DC like Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-NC). In March 2000, the Haitian government fined American Rice, Inc $1.4 million for evading Haiti’s customs duties. Jesse Helms retaliated by withholding $30 million in US aid, and denying high-ranking Haitian officials visas to enter the United States. The American Securities & Exchange Commission later found Theriot and two other American Rice, Inc executives guilty of corrupt foreign practices for smuggling rice into Haiti.[...]

Bill Clinton’s 1992 election took place during Haiti’s repressive Cedras regime, when President Aristide lived in exile in the United States. After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, Clinton famously apologized for forcing Haiti to lower its rice tariffs during his administration. He acknowledged that he helped big Arkansas agro-businesses reap profits at the expense of Haiti’s rice farmers. But Clinton left a lot out of the story.

Clinton posed as mediator between the coup leaders and President Aristide to negotiate the return of Haiti’s democratically elected government. He took advantage of this role to use the threat of continued repression as a bargaining chip.[...] Aristide resisted the US neoliberal plan. He insisted that discussions demanded by the financial institutions for the proposed sales of state-owned enterprises include benefits for the poor – opportunities for co-ownership, funding for health and education, reparations to the victims of the coup. Aristide would later refuse to move forward with privatization, disband the Haitian military over strong US objections, raise the minimum wage and bring paramilitary leaders charged with extra-judicial killings to justice.

After mass protests, the President of Pakistan was forced to resign, along with many other members of the ruling party.

Worldwide, hundreds of people – many rich and powerful – were arrested.

Billions in stolen assets were returned to the people.

And 82 countries changed their laws to crack down on the wealth hoarding the papers revealed.

(Source here)

To say the Panama Papers accomplished nothing is an insult to Daphne Galizia’s memory. Her work, and the work of the hundreds of other journalists who contributed to the Papers, changed the world.

Disinformation like this is designed to discourage you, to make you feel you’re powerless against the monsters of the world. They want you to feel that way, because they are terrified of your power to make change.

During the 2020 George Floyd protests, the anger, the protesting, and the rioting was at least as much about him as it was about George Floyd in the Denver/Aurora area. Local violinists showed up to a protest to perform in memory of him and they were tear gassed for it.

One of the cops was recently acquitted and got to keep his job and walk away with $200,000 in back pay.

As the war in Ukraine erupted, I was instantly compelled to dive into writing and research. In my novel, I envisioned a scenario teetering on the brink of World War III. I depicted agents from the Mossad in Ukraine, deeply involved in covert operations. They meticulously monitored the activities of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis, even observing as these extremists engaged in arms trade with terrorists.

My narrative also explored a dramatic geopolitical shift in South America. I imagined a Venezuelan dictator under the pretext of combating gangs, launching an invasion into Guyana. This aggressive move, a thinly veiled attempt to annex territory, triggers a broader regional conflict. Brazil, Colombia, and France step in, but the dense, unforgiving tropical terrain leads to a drawn-out, attritional struggle across the continent.

In my book, I further explored a hypothetical scenario in which Russia manipulates perceptions to suggest that the United States is indifferent to Ukraine's plight. I envisioned numerous possibilities for this narrative, but a recurring theme was the Ukrainian-Russian conflict being overshadowed by another crisis involving a U.S. ally.

anyways heres some material on it

ibm and the holocaust

hitlers american friends

ap press cooperation with nazis

hitlers american model

general motors and nazi germany

operation paperclip

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism

THIS is the main reason American superheroes were fighting in World War 2. It wasn’t intentional military propaganda, it was comic writers and artists, MOST OF WHOM WERE JEWISH, trying to fight fascism in the public consciousness.

Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Siegel and Shuster, and more, were all REGULARLY receiving antisemitic hate mail and death threats, they were WATCHING THEIR FRIENDS AND FAMILY BE ROUNDED UP AND SLAUGHTERED IN EUROPE while their governments did NOTHING to stop, and even ENCOURAGED, those very same values at home.