"Without the estate tax, you in effect will have an aristocracy of wealth, which means you pass
down the ability to command the resources of the nation based on heredity
rather than merit." Warren Buffet
I heard. Someone else posted an article here about it.
Perhaps this is the kind of society that Bush truly wants. Isn't he in Mexico where sweat
shops abound? And remember how Tom Delay, the Republican Senate Whip, bragged about the usefulness of Sweat Shops to a nation's economy in his all expense paid tour to Saipan where there isn't a minimum wage.
Tom DeLay, DEFENDER OF SWEATSHOPS
THE GOP WHIP THINKS THAT
AMERICAN COMPANIES USING
UNDERPAID GARMENT WORKERS IN
DISTANT SAIPAN IS JUST FINE.
By JEFF STEIN
www.salonmagazine.com/news/1999/02/04news.html
An excerpt from JEFF STEIN's article:
" But the faceless, nameless sweatshop
garment workers of Saipan suddenly have some
legal muscle.
The story really begins back in June 1944, when
71,000 U.S. Marines took Saipan from the
Japanese Army at a terrible cost in blood. Planting
the American flag there turned out to be critical.
Fourteen months later a B-29 took off from nearby
Tinian carrying the atomic bombs that would
abruptly end the war. For the next half century the
Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands,
as they would become known, generally enjoyed
the benign neglect of Washington. In 1986, the
27,000 islanders were granted American
citizenship.
It was around this time, however, that mandarins
from Hong Kong and the People's Republic of
China began setting up textile factories on Saipan
and importing labor from the mainland, as well as
from Bangladesh and the Philippines, to cut and
stitch cloth for garment makers including JC
Penney, the Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Liz Clairborne,
Jones New York, Abercrombie & Fitch, Levi
Strauss, Nautica and many others -- a virtual Who's
Who of designer labels. The idea was to slip under
the radar of U.S. quotas and duties, which would
cost the manufacturers millions more if the
garments were made outside U.S. territory.
Garments from Saipan are made from foreign
cloth, assembled by foreign workers on U.S. soil
and labeled "Made in the USA."
And they are made cheaply. Wages in the factories
average about $3 per hour -- more than $2 less
than the U.S. minimum wage of $5.15. No
overtime is paid for a 70-hour work week. But
that's hardly the worst of it. Far away from the
swank beachside hotels, luxurious golf courses and
the thousands of Japanese tourists snorkling around
sunken U.S. Navy landing craft in the clear waters,
some 31,000 textile workers live penned up like
cattle by armed soldiers and barbed wire, and
squeezed head to toe into filthy sleeping barracks,
all of which was documented on film by U.S.
investigators last year.
The unhappy workers cannot just walk away,
either: Like Appalachian coal miners a generation
ago, they owe their souls to the company store,
starting with factory recruiters, who charge Chinese
peasants as much as $4,000 to get them out of
China and into a "good job" in "America." Their
low salaries make it nearly impossible to buy back
their freedom. And so they stay. The small print in
their contracts forbids sex, drinking -- and dissent.
"I am very tired," wrote Li Zhen Hua, a
29-year-old Chinese woman in a letter to a friend
obtained by the weekly Dallas Observer. "I want to
go back to my country but I can't because we must
keep [sic] two years ... Very busy. So hard. Every
day work up to 1:30. I've to work on Sunday. Too
much to respond to your letters."
Enter Tom DeLay and his Texas Republican
sidekick, Dick Armey. When the Clinton
administration sought to yank Saipan's factories
into the 20th century in 1994, requiring the workers
be paid a minimum wage, overtime and their living
conditions improved, the island government hired a
platoon of well-connected Washington lobbyists,
headed by former DeLay aide Jack Abramoff, to
block the plan. Abramoff, in turn, personally or
through his family, contributed $18,000 to DeLay's
campaign coffers. So far, the island government
has paid the firm of Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas
Meeds $4 million for their efforts, records show.
They also treated DeLay and Armey to trips to the
island, where they played golf, snorkled and made
whirlwind visits to factories especially spiffed up
for the occasion, according to several accounts.
"Even though I have only been here for 24 hours, I
have witnessed the economic success of the
Marianas," DeLay told a banquet crowd. As for the
critics of the plantation system, DeLay told the
dinner crowd darkly, "You are up against the forces
of big labor and the radical left."
The whip was apparently referring to the Clinton
administration, whose official in charge of the
Marianas, Insular Affairs Chief Al Stayman,
wanted to change the sweatshop system. In a
private e-mail from Abramoff to island officials,
which was made available to Salon, the lobbyist
vowed he would "impeach Stayman and his
campaign."
Stayman is still on the job, but the Republicans, led
by DeLay, have blocked every effort by the
Democrats to hold hearings on the issue.
Help may be on the way, though, via a California
law firm that this month filed a multimillion dollar
suit against the factories in the name of "John Does
1-23." The suit, filed last week in Saipan and state
and federal courts, accuses the firms of exploiting
thousands of indentured foreign workers in
sweatshop conditions on U.S. soil.
"A free market success," DeLay calls Saipan's
indentured worker system. If the Republicans take
a drubbing at the polls in 2000, however, DeLay
shouldn't be surprised if vengeance is in the air,
even from his fellow Texas fat cats. Scores of
textile plants in cities like El Paso and Dallas have
had to shutter their doors in the face of cutthroat
competition from companies like those in Saipan.
All of which is ironic, considering how DeLay
recently stood up for Chinese dissidents in a
different context. On the eve of the president's visit
to China last June, DeLay and 150 other
Republicans signed a letter urging Clinton to call off
his trip because of Beijing's treatment of religious
and political dissenters.
Beijing had been cracking down on dissidents since
the Tiananmen Square massacre a decade earlier,
of course, but that didn't stop DeLay from making
his own trip, paid for by a private foundation
backed by private corporations with business in
China.
"Some might say that gives hypocrisy a bad name,"
cracked Rep. Maurce Hinchey, a New York
Democrat. But as the records unearthed from
DeLay's extermination company this week showed,
he's become an expert in that.
SALON | Feb. 4, 1999
Washington writer Jeff Stein is a frequent contributor to
Salon.
salon.com
DeLay, ---- DEFENDER OF SWEATSHOPS. ...
www.salonmagazine.com/news/1999/02/04news.html |
