UH Students for Fair Trade

On November 18 we brought a huge ass card to Khator’s office to thank her for making more fair trade coffee available on campus this semester. The Daily Cougar put a front page story about it in their paper. Check it out here: newspaper story

As we noted in our last post the Daily Cougar (DC) editor Caitlin Cuppernull and the opinion editor are actively involved in censoring Student for Fair Trade members who submitted editorials. More than 10 days have passed since we asked for a copy of a policy Cuppernull and the opinion editor swear exists. They claim there is a DC policy stating that they are not allowed to print editorials critical of the Daily Cougar!!!  Sounds like something out of a dictatorship doesn’t it? Not from a country built on FREE SPEECH. When we recently emailed the opinion editor to follow up on our request for a copy of this policy we were met with a resounding sound of silence. It appears that the Daily Cougar is a mere propoganda tool for the crooked adminstration. Stay tuned because we’ve got a few more moves to expose these students who bow to every whim of the adminstration.

The Daily Cougar has been suppressing our editorials for several months now. Member Markos Mendoza wrote an editorial about our campaign back in July that they refused to print and a couple of weeks ago Tiffany Le sent in an editorial that Caitlin Cuppernull, the editor claimed was a letter not an editorial. The editor claimed Le would have to cut it from 800 words to 250 to get it published. When we went to discuss this injustice, Cuppernull made some unrelated references to Houston Chronicle editorial policies and insisted that she would not run Le’s editorial.

A chat with the opinion editor had the same results. He also referred to a policy that he couldn’t produced an insisted that his publication did not suppress student views and even claimed that ” he didn’t want to students to be automotons when we get out in the real world.” The news is that we are in the real world and the Daily Cougar and its student staff continues the oppression on our campus by censoring our editorials. This is done to delegitimize our cause and prop up the crooked administration who thinks the university soley exists for corporate profit. Lost in that corporate robot mentality is the fact that our school was founded to give working class people the opportunity to get a college education.

Read the story about our fair trade month actions here: Fair trade month story