Author: Ophelia Benson

Did you read the excerpts from Rebecca Clarren’s article about near-slave labour in the Mariana islands and the sterling work Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff did to block all legislative attempts to reform the situation? That’s the far right for you, revealed in all its squalid glory – peel away all the heavy breathing about culture of life and family values and Christian nation, and what you find is the reality: destitute Asian women worked practically to death for execrable wages and in execrable conditions while fat prosperous happy safe white men collect huge payments to bribe each other and take each other on junkets all in aid of preventing those overworked underpaid Asian women from being paid the minimum wage. It’s bottomlessly disgusting.

30,000 “guest workers” — predominately women — from China, the Philippines and Thailand sew clothing for top-name American brands, which are then allowed to label them “Made in USA” because the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) is a U.S. territory. But workers in these factories are not covered by U.S. minimum-wage and immigration laws. Coming from rural villages and the big-city slums of poor Asian countries, these garment workers arrive in Saipan with a huge financial debt, having borrowed money (at interest rates as high as 20 percent) to pay recruiters as much as $7,000 for a one-year contract job. In a situation akin to indentured servitude, workers cannot earn back their recruitment fee and pay for housing and food without working tremendous hours of overtime…Abramoff and his team brought in nearly $11 million in fees from the Northern Marianas government and Saipan garment manufacturers to block congressional efforts to raise the minimum wage and eliminate the islands’ exemptions from U.S. immigration laws. His efforts focused on the House Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over U.S. territories. And he also cultivated powerful allies in the House leadership — notably Tom DeLay, who, as Majority Whip at the time, could keep a bill off the House floor even if the Resources Committee voted in its favor.

Could, and did. And then apparently slept well at night. A pretty picture, is it not? Powerful rich men keeping powerless poor women in wretched grinding poverty, because they’ve been paid to do so.

Update: Terri Gross interviewed Rebecca Clarren, the reporter who wrote the story, and Katherine Spillar, the editor who commissioned it, on Fresh Air last Tuesday. They say more about DeLay’s work to block legislation than appears in the extracts at Alternet and TomPaine. I’d link to the full article but it appears not to be online. The interview is pretty gripping.

Well, no, since you ask, I couldn’t resist; of course not. What do you take me for? It would take a saint, or rather a hero, to resist, and I’m not either of those things, nor a martyr neither, I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger – no, wait, that’s a song. I’m just a poor shlub at a keyboard, and I don’t resist stuff. I don’t have the grit and the fibre and the steel it would take to resist hooting with laughter at New Statesman readers voting for Thatcher as one of their top heroes. Snerk, snort, shriek. She’s in the top five.

It’s scary when they start shooting up judges. Very scary, in the same way it’s scary (terrifying, actually) when there are Congressional representatives willing to try to pass legislation as grotesquely unconstitutional as the mockingly-named Constitution Restoration Act, and when an angry (and thoroughly corrupt) senator threatens judges from the floor of the Senate. It’s scary when theocrats start to target the judiciary, because in a secular state, the judiciary is the only institution that can block majoritarian moves to establish theocracy.

And they know that in Turkey. They are scared, and they’re pissed.

Tens of thousands of people have marched through the Turkish capital, Ankara, in protest at the killing of a judge by a suspected Islamist gunman. Protesters waved Turkish flags and chanted slogans that the country must remain a secular state. A man calling himself “a soldier of Allah” shot dead Judge Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin and wounded four others at a top administrative court on Wednesday…Correspondents say the attack may have been linked to the court’s record in upholding the ban on Muslim headscarves in universities and government offices – a decision condemned as illegal by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose ruling party has Islamist roots…The gunman reportedly burst into a committee meeting of the Council of State, shouting “Allahu akbar!” (God is great) as he fired his weapon…”This massacre attempt is directed against the secular republic. We strongly denounce it,” said the statement read by Sumru Cortoglu, chairwoman of the Council of State.

Bad, bad, very bad.

The Turkish newspapers are interesting. Bekir Coskun in Hurriyet for instance:

Whether they have a gun or a bomb in their hand, their target is the same: To wipe out the secular republic, to prevent modernity and civilization and push Turkish society into a way of life from the Middle Ages, to make Sharia law dominant.

Bad.

So I suppose right now somewhere in the middle of London (where is the ICA, anyway? I forget. Piccadilly? Bedford Square? next to Hatchard’s? I have no idea) some people (how many, I wonder? fifty? a hundred? two?) are listening to three or four guys talking about truth. I wonder what they’re saying about it. That it can be hard to get at, perhaps. That it’s in a well. That Bacon named an essay after it. That it’s not a bad thing to aim at, on the whole. That people who play certain public roles have a particular obligation to aim at it, and to avoid aiming at the other thing. That it’s just a matter of common sense, when you get right down to it. No, not that last one, that one’s a joke.

Well, I hope they’re all enjoying themselves, at any rate.