They had a long run, but the end of the GOP protected system of human trafficking, forced sex, sweatshops, labor abuse and money laundering on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) is finally in sight.
This should have ended more than twelve years ago in 1995, when there was broad bi-partisan outrage at the crimes allowed to flourish on the rogue US Territory in the Western Pacific (roughly 40 mile North of Guam).
I’ve posted about these crimes and their connection to the Republican Culture of Corruption for almost three years (I’ve been researching it since 1999). This research helped us win a number of seats in November.
A number of folks have asked me what the Democrats are planning to do about ending this abuse in the 110th Congress. I’ve been curious too.
Well, I’m happy to say that it looks like they plan to take it on and clean up the corruption oozing out of Tom DeLay’s "Petri dish of Capitalism" and the GOP’s Laboratory of Liberty.
To the jump...
Hopes are high that justice will finally come to the workers on the CNMI. That hope is tempered by more than twenty years of failed efforts to extend US Laws and justice to our rogue US territory.
For more that two decades the place has been run like a corrupt gangster town crossed with a kleptocracy. In the first decade it served Chinese entrepreneurs from Hong Kong and the local politicians they bought. Since 1995 the system of corruption was used to fund and grow the Republican Party of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, George W. Bush and their gang of thieves in and out of the government.
Jack Abramoff was their bagman.
He helped move the money around to his Republican cronies and they turned a blind eye to the abuse. More than that, the Republican Leadership ensured that no effort to end the abuse would ever come up for a vote in the House. And once Bush was appointed to the White House, the GOP gang ensured that tax payer dollars would flow to their Chinese patrons and corrupt local officials on the CNMI.
The story of the abuse is not old news. It is current and stories of labor abuse, human trafficking and economic collapse appear in the CNMI press on an almost daily basis (just check out the Marianas Variety and Saipan Tribune).
Currently the CNMI is a failed state.
It is virtually bankrupt.
Rather than addressing real problems twelve years ago, the GOP allowed corruption to flourish. They allowed a modern slave trade to grow on US soil. Roughly half the people on the Mariana Islands are "guest workers" without almost any rights..
Last year, a long-time lawyer on the CNMI explained the CNMI economy:
... former Senate legal counsel Steve Woodruff thinks that the CNMI actually is operating under a much older framework, one that was set during the Trust Territory administration. [snip]
"Everyone is still looking for government employment and the political system is based on handing out benefits." [snip]
Woodruff, a constitutional lawyer and longtime resident of the Northern Marianas, said that during the '80s, the local economy "started changing for the better." [snip]
In the early '90s, "the government was very much on the right track."
That would have been the time before the Gingrich revolution; a time when both the Bush I and Clinton administrations were forcing the locals to end the abuse and clean-up their act. By 1995 it looked certain that Congress would extend US labor, immigration and custom laws to the Marianas Islands, but then the pirates hired Abramoff and the Republican party to protect their criminal enterprise. Woodruff explained what the last twelve years have done to the CNMI economy (emphasis added):
"Now we are back to asking Washington for help," he said.
He said the situation got bad during the mid-'90s [snip]
"A lot of these problems started when the administration at that time did the largest tax increase in CNMI history, and vastly increased the size of the CNMI government, and nobody knows how to reverse [that]," he said.
He said that during the time of Gov. Froilan Tenorio, the government budget went from $140 million to over $200 million. [snip]
The bottom line, he said, is that "the CNMI has been operating with a dual economy for 20 years, and the dual economy is not sustainable."
He said a dual economy is characterized by a "high wage economy for government workers, and low wage economy in the private sector, which pays all the taxes."
This system, he said, "ultimately has to collapse. It ultimately has to either be reformed or it will collapse. Right now, it's on the verge of collapse."
Did you notice that under GOP protection the locals raised taxes and increased the size of government? I wonder how John Doolittle and the others will defend that in 2008, but back to Woodruff and his call for change:
"the only thing that will save the CNMI economy is sensible, intelligent reforms, and that doesn't mean just cutting the government costs or doubling the utility rate."
"It means raising the minimum wage and creating incentives for government employees to move into the private sector, and it means a whole lot of other things..."
Fortunately for the "guest workers" and citizens of the CNMI, the Democrats are now in control of the 110th Congress.
Next week they will pass an increase to the minimum wage and earlier this week, The Hill reported:
House Democrats led by Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) are aiming to undo a controversial vestige of the Jack Abramoff era in the first 100 hours of the 110th Congress. Miller plans to include language raising wages in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in a broader bill increasing the U.S. minimum wage.
The grifters who run the current CNMI government and the Saipan Chamber of Commerce (and who have been living off of US Taxpayers for years) are desperately trying to maintain their access to "free" money and exemptions from US labor, immigration and custom laws. This week they had the Bush Administration’s point-man for US Territories, David Cohen, over for a visit in an attempt to get the White House to spend some (of their vanishing) political capital on protecting the Saipan kleptocrats from a long delayed increase to the local minimum wage ($3.05 an hour for most workers and only $1.80 an hour for domestic/farm workers).
Here is the kind of help Cohen explained they could expect from George W. Bush:
THE Republican White House supports a federal wage hike measure — even if it will also apply to the CNMI, according to visiting U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Insular Affairs David B. Cohen.
"President Bush already announced that he supports a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour which the Democrats are proposing," Cohen said during yesterday’s press conference. "And given that the CNMI provision is attached to the overall national minimum wage bill, it’s very unlikely for the administration to oppose the bill only on the basis of the CNMI provision."
It looks like the Minimum Wage will be passed and it will (finally) apply to the Marianas Islands. Rep. George Miller deserves some high praise for his tireless efforts to end the abuse.
But extending the US minimum wage to the CNMI is only the first step.
It only addresses one aspect of one problem. The Territory MUST come under the jurisdiction of US labor, immigration and custom laws. That will require investigations, hearings and legislation. And once that is done we will still have to deal with the fact that the CNMI economy is in shambles and that we have a failed state as one of our US Territories. It will take years to undo the damage Republican corruption has done to the people who live and work on these islands.
Fortunately, the Democrats of the 110th Congress are already hard at work to bring justice and a sustainable economy to the CNMI. As Mr. Cohen told the Marianas Variety (emphasis added):
Cohen at the same time said federal labor ombudsman personnel on island are reviewing local immigration policies, situations and operations in the CNMI.
He said the new chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and its ranking member, Pete Domenici, R,N.M., have asked Interior "24 very detailed questions about the CNMI that we have to answer in the next two weeks and we’re expecting a hearing on (these questions)."
The deadline for the submission of answers is Jan. 26 but Cohen said his office will have to submit them 10 days in advance. [snip]
"The CNMI should expect challenges and a lot of scrutiny (about the) situation in the CNMI. There’s potential that this place will be different place a year from now compared to yesterday," he added. "In fact these radical changes may begin happening in the next few months."
This is sweet, sweet music to my ears.
I expect that the answers to the 26 questions will be very interesting and that they will lead to some interesting hearings and legislation to end the immigration abuse on the rogue US Territory. We will need to get behind this legislation when it is drafted. The suffering of the "guest workers" on the CNMI helped Democrats take control. We owe them justice.
Cohen explained what changes might be coming to the Saipan Tribune:
"We are working very actively to study the immigration situation. .We have 24 very detailed questions about the immigration system in the NMI that we have to answer in the next few weeks," said Cohen in an interview with the local media Thursday.
To do that, the Interior Department has sent its economist, Wali Osman, to the CNMI for two weeks to work with concerned federal agencies here such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Agency, U.S. Department of Labor, and U.S. Department of Justice.
"This is a very intensive effort on our part to answer these questions. It requires finding a lot of data," said Cohen. [snip]
During the same interview, Cohen said that Congress is likely to discuss CNMI immigration after resolving the minimum wage hike bill. [snip]
"We expect that there will probably be a hearing," he said. [snip]
Cohen said Bingaman has asked the Bush administration if it still supports the old immigration bill offered by then Sen. Frank Murkowski.
He said the administration had supported the bill in 2001.
The measure aims to implement federal immigration in the CNMI over a 10-year period.
"The administration has not responded... [snip]
The U.S. Congress may also tackle the immigration bill authored by Democrat congressman George Miller, which is "more aggressive and speedier federalization" for the CNMI.
"Federalization" is CNMI pirate speak for the extension of US justice to the lawless islands and it can not come fast enough.
It is also ironic that the Murkowski Bill, which Abramoff and the GOP House Leadership fought so hard to kill in 2001, is now being held out as the fall-back option of the kleptocrats of Saipan. We can and should do better than that.
Change is coming. George W. Bush has thrown his CNMI patrons overboard and so have most of the GOP members of Congress (with the exception of John Doolittle and a few others who are still ready to fight to protect the islands sex trade and system of human trafficking).
The loss of protection from the GOP House Leadership crime syndicate has the corrupt business men and government officials of the CNMI in a panic. An editorial in today’s Marianas Variety summed it up nicely:
WHAT local political and business leaders are doing right now reminds me of the proverbial frat boy who, after staying up all night at a beer-helmet-and-bong party, finally remembers, at 3 a.m., that he has to submit a term paper, which he has yet to write... [snip]
Unlike frat boy, the CNMI had these past 20 years to address federal concerns regarding local labor and immigration policies. The commonwealth could long ago have resolved these long-standing concerns locally by agreeing to real reforms at the federal level so they could be out of local politicians’ reach. This would have injected stability into local labor and immigration laws and made the creation of stable industries and long-term investments possible.
But no. CNMI officials preferred to hem and haw while enacting sleight-of-hand "reform measures" to keep alive a Third World industry that they knew would not survive the free trade rules scheduled for implementation in 2005. [snip]
...local officials are apparently either afflicted with selective amnesia or are hoping that the Democrats are. How else to explain these hasty "reform proposals" like the stay limit measure, the sudden support for a gradual wage hike, the resurrection of the wage board, the willingness to "diversify" the economy, the clamor for hiring lobbyists.
While they cram, the congresswoman whom they scolded and insulted a few months ago for describing local labor and immigration policies as "criminal" is being sworn in as the nation’s third highest ranking official... [snip]
The only hope, as I’ve said before, is that the Republican White House will remember its fundraising friends in this corner of the Pacific. But then again, one of its officials was here a few days ago and he told local leaders that "this will be a very challenging year for CNMI to deal with." Which sounded so much like the polite version of the frat-boy-speak "You’re on your own dudes."
The 110th Congress is two days old, but I feel very hopeful that justice is finally coming to the CNMI.
I’ll keep you posted as legislation develops and we will have to watch how this plays out. Justice for these workers could be scuttled in the Senate or by Bush. The fight will not be over for a while, but the opening moves of the Democratic Congress give me hope.
And we will need to keep track of which Republicans are voting to protect the system of human trafficking, forced sex, sweatshops, labor abuse and money laundering on the CNMI. Those votes should bite them in the ass come 2008.
It looks like the Democrats can multi-task and that is a good thing because there is a lot of work to do to save our Nation from Republican corruption and incompetence.
Together we can do this. We can and will take this Country back.
Cheers.