More Abramoff , Bush and The Marianas
Picture courtesy Drew Steitz
Please read this post from Obsidian Wings, and then the following.
From the USA Today/Associated Press via Raw Story , that shows the direct connection between the profits of the slave labour factories of the Marianas and President Bush.
“Abramoff and his wife each gave $5,000 to Bush’s 2000 recount fund and the maximum $1,000 to his 2000 campaign. By mid-2003, Abramoff had raised at least $100,000 for Bush’s re-election campaign, becoming one of Bush’s famed “pioneers.”
Money also flowed from the Marianas to Bush’s re-election campaign: It took in at least $36,000 from island donors, much of it from members of the Tan family, whose clothing factories were a routine stop for lawmakers and their aides visiting the islands on Abramoff-organized trips.
Two Tan family companies gave $25,000 each to the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the 2002 elections. Greenberg Traurig, too, was a big GOP giver. Its donations included $20,000 to the Republican National Committee for the 2000 elections and $25,000 each to the GOP’s House and Senate fundraising committees in 2000 and again in 2002.
The Marianas’ lobbying paid off ? it fended off proposals in 2001 to extend the U.S. minimum wage to island workers and gained at least $2 million more in federal aid from the administration.
Abramoff’s team bragged to the cash-strapped Marianas government that the taxpayer money would cover its lobbying bill: “We believe that this additional funding ? along with other funds we expect to secure by the end of the year ? will make clear to even our biggest critics that we pay for ourselves,” Abramoff teammate Kevin Ring wrote in October 2001, copying in Abramoff.”
The Texas Observer:
“In the late 1990s this remote out-post of America, 9,000 miles across the Pacific from California, offered a vision of what the nation might look like if Tom DeLay had his deregulatory way. DeLay?s adventure in Saipan illustrates how his agenda had changed: from trying to disable the EPA to imposing his ideology and will on whole territories and economies. And the implementation of his ideas would increase the riches of the loyalists who in turn keep the maw of his political leviathan stuffed with money. Here was a land newly born to American dominion, a place and people that had never been corrupted by federal regulation. Saipan was his grand experiment?a construction of the world as he wished it to be. ?It is a perfect Petri dish of capitalism,? DeLay enthused in 1997. ?It?s like my Galapagos Island.?
That’s what Bush and Cheney want for the US too, and if you follow their fascistic doctrines of unfettered executive power, of pre-emptive warfare, their disregard for international law and their unbridled capitalism to their logical conclusion, then it’s what they want for the rest of us too.
Corporations, uber alles. It’s all getting a bit too SFnal for comfort.
