1. The Northern Marianas have weaker labor laws than the mainland U.S. and the garment industry likes it that way. They bring in labor -- some would say slave labor -- from China and other Asian countries, and pay them a pittance while exploting them. Some go into prostitution.
2. CMNI hired Jack Abramoff to lobby for them and paid him roughly $9 million to prevent the Clinton Administration from stregthening labor and human rights standards.
3. As part of Abramoff's lobbying, Tom DeLay took a trip with his family and some staff members there in 1998. While there, as ABC News caught on tape, DeLay extolled the factories as the way capitalism ought to operate. When he returned he declared the Clinton Administration efforts to raise wages and clamp down on immigration dead on arrival.
4. Abramoff also funneled more than a million dollars, it appears, to David Lapin, who is a conservative rabbi, for promoting ethics in government. Rabbi Lapin later ran a school, now defunct, that was supported by Abramoff. CMNI cannot account for what David Lapin did for the islands. MORE...
http://dailydelay.blogspot.com/2005/04/northern-mariana-islands-abramoff.htmlDeLay's Lavish Island Getaway
April 6, 2005 — A Washington lobbyist under federal investigation for his lobbying activities arranged a lavish overseas trip to the island of Saipan for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, over the New Year's holiday in 1997.
DeLay, his wife and daughter, and several aides, stayed for free at a beachfront resort. more...
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=647725&page=1Conservative Con: Tom DeLay Denies His Corruption Regarding Mariana Islands Forced Prostitution
http://www.moveleft.com/moveleft_essay_2005_05_16_conservative_con_tom_delay_denies_his_corruption.aspThe Abramoff-DeLay-Mariana Islands Connection
The paths of retired Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) and disgraced lobbyist Jack Ambramoff intersect not just in Washington, D.C., but in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a chain of 17 small islands in the North Pacific. More...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5492833DeLay's Unregulated Pacific "Paradise"
As Tom DeLay preached his pro-business/anti-regulation theology in the US, his model of perfection was far from the mainland. The U.S. protectorate of the Northern Mariana Islands -- 14 islands in the North Pacific -- have become something of a free-enterprise petting zoo for DeLay and those he wishes to convert to his way of thinking.
At the end of World War II, the U.S. acquired the islands, which are located off the coast of booming Asia. To encourage development and self-sufficiency Congress exempted the islands from the very kinds of U.S. business regulations and oversight DeLay despised. Even today the island's minimum wage is only $3.05. Other work and safety regulations either do not apply at all or are rarely enforced.
In short, the Marianas embodied many of the key ideals DeLay and other House Republicans were pushing in their 1994 Contract With America.
For Asian sweatshop operators, the Marianas became the Promised Land incarnate. Since the islands were officially U.S. territory, garment factories there were able to tag their products with the coveted "Made in the USA" label. No rules, no regulators, no inspectors, no health and safety laws. What more could a sweatshop operator ask for? More...
http://www.alternet.org/story/13140/Slave Labor: Made in the U.S.A.
Under the influence of disgraced super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay became an apologist for slave labor camps — on American soil.
Deep in a humid tropical island jungle, in poorly ventilated buildings ringed with barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards, impoverished Asian women — most of them Chinese — toil for 80 hours a week making brand-name apparel for export to the United States.
The female garment workers were lured to the labor camps, which are run by members of the Chinese Communist Party, with promises of wages extravagant by their standards, up to 60 percent of what their counterparts in the U.S. earn. But before they were hired, the women had to sign “shadow contracts” that effectively made them slaves to the company. Their activities are strictly regimented, and since they depend on the company store for most of their necessities, what they earn is recycled back into company hands. Furthermore, most of the workers had to borrow huge sums of money, at extortionate rates of interest, to pay, up front, the human traffickers responsible for transporting them to the island.
As is the case wherever the Chinese Communist Party claims jurisdiction, the female garment workers are subject to the regime’s repulsive one-child policy. They are forbidden to marry or have boyfriends. Those who become pregnant are forced to have their children aborted. more...
http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/article_3116.shtmlIs it any wonder that other despotic world leaders just laugh at Bush, when he speaks of "Human Rights" and "Freedom?"
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