The Continuing Decline Of Western Civilization

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God Bless Capitalism

Via Obsidian Wings and TPM.

Perhaps you've been following the DeLay/Abramoff corruption mess, as inditement after inditement flows down the pipe. Perhaps not. Perhaps, like many Americans, you just assume that in Washington, this sort of quid pro quo with lobbyists is so commonplace, that singling out DeLay is gross and obvious political revenge. OK, you probably don't think that, but here's something new. The govenor-elect of the Marianas Islands (a US territory) is flipping on Abramoff and DeLay. Maybe. Hopefully. Why should we hope this is the case? One, because quid pro quo is hard to prove without assistance from one of the parties, and two, because of exactly what went down in the CNMI. Conditions have improved, this is a bit of a history lesson.

I know a lot of people don't have the time for long articles, but I really recommend going over to Obsidian Wings and reading the full article there. I'll try to condense. In 1999, Abramoff lost his contract as a lobbyist for the Marianas government, due to fiscal difficulties. Fitial was then up for Speaker. Two of DeLay's former aides visited the island and spoke with two of the representatives there. They switched their votes and Fitial won for Speaker. Fitial pressured the governor to reinstate Abramoff's contract, which he did, and both of the districts those congressmen represented got tidy little bundles of US Gov funding for various things. Delay served on the committees which arranged for both of those funding bundles.

So what was Abramoff doing as a lobbyist for the CNMI anyway? Getting Delay to help keep the US regulators off of their backs.

The islands became a commonwealth ruled by the US during the Reagan Administration, and regulators gave them control over their own workplace regulations. This gave them a nifty little loop-hole. They were a duty-free port, so they bypassed US quotas and tariffs, and they also bypassed US labor laws. All they needed was a labor force, and 'recruiters' from China, and the poorer SE Asian countries gave them exactly what they needed: indentured servants.

Quote time, cause I can't paraphrase this. Again, go read the whole thing. From CNN

"Today, Frank Murkowki is the governor of Alaska, but from 1980 to 2002, he was a conservative Republican senator from Alaska. How conservative? His voting record earned him zero ratings from organized labor's AFL-CIO and the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, and perfect 100s from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Conservative Union.

But as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Frank Murkowski became furious at the abusive sweatshop conditions endured by workers, overwhelmingly immigrants, in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, of which Saipan is the capital. (...)

Moved by the sworn testimony of U.S. officials and human-rights advocates that the 91 percent of the workforce who were immigrants -- from China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh -- were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage and were forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks minus plumbing, work 12 hours a day, often seven days a week, without any of the legal protections U.S. workers are guaranteed, Murkowski wrote a bill to extend the protection of U.S. labor and minimum-wage laws to the workers in the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas. So compelling was the case for change the Alaska Republican marshaled that in early 2000, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Murkowski worker reform bill.

But one man primarily stopped the U.S. House from even considering that worker-reform bill: then-House Republican Whip Tom DeLay.

According to law firm records recently made public, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, paid millions to stop reform and keep the status quo, met personally at least two dozen times with DeLay on the subject in one two-year period. The DeLay staff was often in daily contact with Abramoff."

Rep. George Miller has published a report (PDF) detailing the conditions in the CNMI. He estimates approximately 66 thousand US jobs were lost to the CNMI between 1990 and 1996. The clothing is of course marked 'Made In The USA'. Of far greater scale were the abuses, which are too numerous to list here. A sample, from the report:

In a particularly egregious case, Congressman Miller met several young Chinese men who had been recruited at a cost of $7,000 apiece on the promise of making $1,000 a month in the construction industry on Saipan. They were originally denied entry into the CNMI because they were told their prospective employer, JNJ International, a Chinese-Korean partnership, was bankrupt (although there was wide speculation that they were temporarily denied entry because of the presence of federal officials.) Although these men asserted they had signed no contract with JNJ, they were admitted one month later to work for the same supposedly bankrupt employer, who abandoned them. (...) The men told Congressman Miller they dared not return to China without the money to repay the loan sharks who had advanced them the money to pay their recruitment fees. In desperation they asked the Congressman if he could help them arrange the sale of their kidneys to cover their loans and finance their return to China.

Other activities include employer supplied (and enforced) housing for a hundred and twenty women with 3 working toilets and four showers, the cost of which came out of their paychecks; seven day work weeks, often several 24 hour days in a row with no break; a massive case of food poisoning which infected over three hundred workers at one factory; and forced prostitution for women who were promised restaurant jobs. The pay was $3.05 an hour, more than two dollars below federal minimum, minus their food and shelter (which the company provided and deducted from their checks) and the several thousand dollars they had each paid or borrowed to get the job in the first place. If you were lucky enough to actually get the job that was promised to you, and were actually paid, which in the case of the Bangladeshis was usually not the case. I particuarly enjoyed the bit about how several Bangladeshis were told you could take the train from Saipan, America, (the capital) to L.A.

DeLay called this situation "a capitalist petri dish, my own personal Galapagos".

posted by tcdowc - 10:51 pm - 12.08.05

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If I get knocked down, I get up again, bitches can't kept me down.

I've just had an epiphany. A significant section of the Republican base aren't conservatives, they're libertarians. And everyone knows it's a short move from libertarian-ville to anarchist-stan. They're like, just down the street. Different zipcode, same subway. So clearly, everything in Iraq is going according to plan, and the troops will come home just as soon as the Iraqis have a sufficent disdain for law & order and everybody who wanted to be a cop is slaughtered.

Anyway, Fafnir has an interview with Condoleezza Rice up.

posted by tcdowc - 8:30 pm - 12.08.05

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