Pity poor Ralph Reed. It’s soooo hard to be both a corporate bootlicker and a good antichoicer. The corporate bootlicking’s coming back to haunt him:
In August 1999, political organizer Ralph Reed’s firm sent out a mailer to Alabama conservative Christians asking them to call then-Rep. Bob Riley (R-Ala.) and tell him to vote against legislation that would have made the U.S. commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands subject to federal wage and worker safety laws.
The Northern Marianas are part of the US but thanks to the campaign cash of folks like Jack Abramoff and the cravenness of politicians like Reed and Tom DeLay, are not subject to US wage, hour and safety laws. The result is that a lot of companies set up sweatshops there with Chinese workers who are kept as virtual slaves while they work to pay back the “recruitment” fees for getting them their fabulous jobs in the US– and forced into prostitution and to have abortions if they become pregnant — and, because Saipan is US territory, those companies can then slap a “Made in the USA” label on their products to fool consumers who are cognizant about that kind of thing but who aren’t looking for the union label.
Here’s the text of the mailer Reed sent out:
“The radical left, the Big Labor Union Bosses, and Bill Clinton want to pass a law preventing Chinese from coming to work on the Marianas Islands,” the mailer from Reed’s firm said. The Chinese workers, it added, “are exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ” while on the islands, and many “are converted to the Christian faith and return to China with Bibles in hand.”
So, it’s okay to pay these indentured servants slave wages, pimp them out to sex tourists, forcibly abort their pregnancies, and expose them to excessive hours and dangerous conditions because, hey! They’re a captive audience, ripe for prosetylization while they slump over their sewing machines, and they’ll get a shiny new Bible to take back with them to China, where they’ll undoubtedly be much worse off than when they left. Don’t believe me?
A year earlier, the Department of the Interior — which oversees federal policy toward the U.S. territory — presented a very different picture of life for Chinese workers on the islands. An Interior report found that Chinese women were subject to forced abortions and that women and children were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry.
It also alleged that the garment industry and other businesses set up facilities on the Northern Marianas to produce products labeled “Made in the USA,” while importing workers from China and other Asian countries and paying them less than U.S. minimum wage under conditions not subject to federal safety standards.
Check the spin from Reed’s spokeswoman:
“As a defender of the unborn, Ralph was unaware of any allegations regarding inhumane or illegal treatment of workers, and he would strongly object to such practices, if true,” she added.
Has he, though? And given how close he was to Abramoff (and how neck-deep in Abramoff’s other lobbying abuses he was), I doubt he could have been completely unaware:
Reed’s close friend and political ally, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, represented the commonwealth as a partner of Greenberg Traurig. The islands’ government paid Abramoff $4.04 million from 1998 to 2002. Greenberg Traurig hired Millennium Marketing to print the mailing.
. . .
The Mariana mailing adds another hurdle to Reed’s campaign, which already has been plagued by the disclosures that Abramoff paid Reed more than $4 million to conduct grass-roots lobbying on behalf of Indian casinos seeking to prevent potential competitors from getting approval to open new facilities.
Remember, this is the guy that “moderate” Rudy Giuliani has campaigned for and endorsed. But Rudy doesn’t necessarily pick his friends well — just look at Bernie Kerik.