Huffington Post: The Law, Slaves and Jack Abramoff

[PhilipShore]

02.14.2007

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-meyerhoff/the-law-slaves-and-jack-_b_41185.html

It's a new Congress and a new day. Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff is now Inmate No. 227593-112. Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay is facing criminal charges in Texas. California's Congressman Richard Pombo lost his seat to a windpower man. The forces of evil have been driven from Washington DC. God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.

Well, not quite. And not yet at least in Saipan, a small island in the West Pacific, part of the U.S. Commonwealth for the Mariana Islands ("CNMI"). For decades this very Abramoff-Delay-Pombo trio helped maintain a system of bonded labor in sweatshops generating billions of dollars in sales of "Made in the U.S.A.," clothing. Tens of thousands of indentured workers, primarily women from mainland China, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, worked six or seven day weeks in sweatshop conditions.

These "guest workers," according to a 1998 report for the U.S. Department of Interior, "were victims of fraudulent recruitment practices, substandard living conditions, health problems and unprovoked acts of violence". They were paid barely half the U.S. minimum wage and, because U.S. immigration laws do not apply, could be deported on a whim. "Shadow contracts" waived most basic human rights such as to join a union, marry or get pregnant.

For some fifteen years, California's Congressman George Miller fought an often lonely battle to clean up the Islands and extend the minimum wage. Several years ago, even the Republican controlled U.S. Senate agreed, passing an amendment by Senator Frank Murkowski (of a zero AFL CIO rating) to apply U.S. labor laws to Saipan. Yet this legislation was blocked in the House for which Jack Abramoff was paid more than a million dollars, first by the local CNMI government, and then by factory owners. On one visit, then Majority Leader Delay described the Saipan sweatshops as "a shining light . . . you represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America. . . ." Later, he would tell The Washington Post that conditions in Saipan constituted "a perfect Petri dish of capitalism. It is like my Galapagos Island." You can't make this stuff up.

[tridim]

1. Why the hell isn't Delay in prison yet?

What's taking so long?