Garment worker challenges DeLay (ignored sweatshop)

[Robbien]

By Marty Schladen
The Daily News

Published June 6, 2005
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay says he found no victims of sweatshops, sex slavery or forced abortions on the Pacific island of Saipan in the mid-1990s. But Carmencita Abad says that’s because DeLay did not want to see them.

“My answer is, Mr. DeLay, I am that person,” Abad said in a telephone interview. “I am an example of an individual who can prove that the accounts of sweatshop labor and forced prostitution are not just allegations but true accounts of working conditions in the Marianas Islands when Mr. DeLay traveled there and turned a blind eye to our misery.”

. . .

The press conference was sponsored by the Campaign for a Clean Congress, a national organization, the Harris County AFL-CIO and Houston Interfaith Worker Justice. It was called, in part, to counter claims DeLay made last month when he told The Daily News that there were no human rights violations taking place on Saipan in the 1990s.

As he entered Tuesday’s luncheon, DeLay was again asked about the allegations. “The workers there were very well treated,” he said. “There may have existed some problems in certain instances, but not when I was there.”

. . .

In the 1990s, Abramoff, a close associate of DeLay’s, was paid millions by the garment industry and the indebted Saipan government to keep the federal government from forcing the territory to adopt the federal minimum wage or U.S. immigration laws. DeLay carried that fight to Capitol Hill — despite the fact that Republican Sen. Frank Murkowski was pushing reform legislation.

http://galvestondailynews.com/story.lasso?ewcd=2e5931afec8226b9

[knowbody0]

1. what a puke of a man

[Robbien]

2. ABC even has video of Tom Delay deliberately ignoring the situation

ABC has video, first of DeLay speaking at a party or dinner or something. More damaging, they had hidden-camera footage of a factory owner saying that DeLay had promised that anti-sweatshop legislation would go nowhere in Congress

Crooks & Liars has a copy
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/04/06.html#a2332

and all Tom got out of it was an all expense paid luxury week vacation for him and his wife.

[Fridays Child]

4. Good find.

I remember watching that.

[Fridays Child]

3. Abramoff belongs in the cell right next to that cockroach, DeLay.

What a slimeball.

[dArKeR]

5. I believe it was MSWHORE published an article, "Delay Nicked the Partiot

Act". It was a brushing of the reports below but named Delay as the person who changed the Patriot Act so that American Tobacco companies could not be prosecuted for using terrorists to smuggle tobacco products into Central/South America to avoid paying taxes to those countries' gov.

Big Tobacco - by Mark Schapiro

Tobacco is one of the most globalized industries on the planet. More cigarettes are traded than any other single product, some trillion "sticks," as they're known in the business, passing international borders each year. As a result, American brands have been propelled into every corner of the world, with just four companies controlling 70 percent of the global market. Marlboro, Kool, Kent: They have become as omnipresent around the world as they are here in the United States. With declining sales in this country, foreign markets have become increasingly critical to the tobacco companies' financial health: The top US tobacco firms now earn more from cigarettes sold abroad than in the United States. How they got there is a tale that leads straight into a global underground of smugglers and money launderers who have played a key role in facilitating the tobacco companies' entry into foreign markets…

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020506&s=schapiro

+++++++++++++++++++

How Big Tobacco Subverted Anti-Terror Act

How Big Tobacco nicked terror act Firms accused of smuggling cigarettes feared language on laundering

Mark Shaprio
MSNBC

NEW YORK, June 13 — On the one-month anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the tobacco industry took aim at Congress’ first effort to respond to the crisis with a major piece of new legislation — the Patriot Act. Why would America’s largest tobacco companies take an interest in a bill designed to go after America’s terrorist adversaries?

THE ANSWER: legal liability. Not that the tobacco companies are terrorists, but some of their marketing and distribution strategies look awfully similar to the illegal financing systems used by terrorists. At least they do from the U.S. Department of Justice perspective.

To get to the bottom of this story, we need to return to those traumatized days last fall, in which our lives were filled with fears of another terrorist attack, the retaliation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and shock and horror at the revelation that anthrax had contaminated the halls of
Congress.

http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/intl-tobacco/2002q2/000750.html

++++++++++++++++

Cigarette giant denies smoking leads to cancer - Imperial Tobacco

A giant British tobacco company is to take the unprecedented step this week of denying there is a proven causal link between smoking and lung cancer in the first case against a cigarette firm to go to a UK court.

The unique defense, to be heard in Scotland's Court of Session, denies decades of scientific proof of such a link, which was accepted by the British Government in 1957.

Imperial Tobacco is being sued for £500,000 (US$835,000) by Margaret McTear, whose husband, Alf, a 60-a-day smoker from Beith near Glasgow, died of lung cancer in 1993. The case, which starts tomorrow, will be scrutinized across Europe by lawyers who want to bring similar actions against tobacco firms.


http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2003/10/06/2003070628

[Ilsa]

6. I saw a snip of this on KLRN (PBS) in San Antonio late

last night. I was going to bed and couldn't stay up to see the whole program. I hope it aired at another time as well to reach more people.

[Robbien]

7. Looks as if this is getting buried

Tom Delay promoting sweatshops is an important story and this Galveston paper has been trying to get the story out there. They had another huge article just last month on it.

But the MSM just talks about Delay's trips. The trips are not the problem. The problem is what Delay does when he is on those trips.

[The_Casual_Observer]

8. Delay is obviously a crook. And not a very cleaver one at that.

[Roland99]

9. Much like Gitmo was cleaned up for visits by officials.

DeLay is just TOTAL SLIME!

[struggle4progress]

10. kick