The Denver Post story today is a crippling blow for Bob Schaffer. It has just about everything in it: association with Abramoff, a fancy trip to a posh resort, corruption in the Mariana Islands, Schaffer spouting the party line, and some whacko religious group footing the bill.
Nobody wants to have their name surface in connection with Jack Abramoff. That's bad enough, but what's even worse is that Schaffer goes to a place known for labor abuse and human rights violations, and comes back saying everything is just hunky-dory.
A class-action lawsuit filed the year Schaffer toured the islands alleged that many of those workers lived in slum conditions, housed seven to a room in barracks surrounded by barbed wire designed to keep the workers in. Workers in some factories labored 12 hours a day, seven days a week, the suit alleged — without pay if they fell behind set quotas.
A U.S. Interior Department investigation found that pregnant workers were forced to get illegal abortions or lose their jobs. Some were recruited for factories but forced into the sex trade instead.
Yet, Schaffer burbles, "The workers were smiling, they were happy." Then, he suggests that the Marianas approach could be used here as a "model" for our own immigration debate. The Marianas are exempt from U.S. minimum wage applications and U.S. immigration laws. The program in the Marianas has produced slavery, child prostitution, and beatings. TPM: "The overwhelmingly female foreign workers are housed in shacks with no plumbing surrounded by barbed wire." Schaffer sees this as a "model"?
The trip was financed by the Traditional Values Coalition, which is a right-wing outfit that supposedly has an interest "in human rights," but which was really a Abramoff front. You'd think that "forced abortions" thing would bother the Traditional Values Coalition, but guess not.
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