Made In The USA

Let us take a little trip, to a sunny island paradise: the Northern Marianas Islands.

Ahh...

Now, let's learn a little history!

From a 2006 NPR story:

JOHN YDSTIE, host: Tom DeLay left his seat in Congress last week under a legal cloud. The once powerful Majority Leader has been indicted in Texas for laundering campaign funds. His activities are also under scrutiny in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Two of his former aides have pleaded guilty in that investigation. One of the most interesting connections between DeLay and Abramoff involves a South Pacific island paradise, sweatshops, and Chinese garment manufacturers. The island paradise is the Northern Marianas, a string of islands in the Pacific captured by the U.S. in deadly fighting with the Japanese during World War II.

Ms. WENDY DOROMOL (Human Rights Activist): The islands are very beautiful. Huge breadfruit trees, pristine beaches. It's physically gorgeous and very ugly as far as political corruption.

YDSTIE: Wendy Doromol was a schoolteacher there in the 1980s and '90s, but became a human rights activist fighting sweatshops after guest workers on the islands came to her with tales of abuse.

Ms. DOROMOL: The barbed wire around the factories face inward so that the mostly women couldn't get out. They had quotas that were impossible for these people to reach and if they didn't reach them, they'd have to stay until they finished the quota and they wouldn't be paid for that work. They were hot, the barracks were horrible. A lot of the females were told you work during the day in the garment factory and then at night you can go and work in a club and they'd force them into prostitution at night.

YDSTIE: And they also experienced things like coerced abortion?

Ms. DOROMOL: Yes, if some female got pregnant, they either had to go back to China to give birth or have a forced abortion.

Good times!

Let's continue.

YDSTIE: So you thought that you were going to be going to California or somewhere on the U.S. mainland?

Mr. JAHIDI: Not only me, most of the worker. They were surprised when they see the United States flag and the local island flag and we used the U.S. dollar, we used the U.S. stamp and everything, then people understand that this is only a small island. There is no way that you have the opportunity like what's in the United States.

YDSTIE: Garment manufacturers were attracted to the Marianas, which had become a U.S. commonwealth in 1976, because clothes made there could be labeled made in the U.S.A. and didn't face import quotas or duties. But despite flying the U.S. flag, the islands were exempt from many U.S. labor and immigration standards. As the abuses that Wendy Doromol helped uncover came to light, garment manufacturers there were sanctioned by the U.S. Labor Department. Then in the mid-1990s when it looked like Congress might force the Marianas to adopt U.S. Labor and Immigration laws, the island's government took action. It hired lobbyist Jack Abramoff to protect its special status. Abramoff was paid millions for his work. Here he is in a 1999 NPR story arguing that there were no abuses.

And some boring old Democratic Senator got all indignant about this, back in 98:

Something is fundamentally wrong with a CNMI immigration system that issues entry permits for 12- and 13-year-old girls from the Philippines and other Asian nations, and allows their employers to use them for live sex shows and prostitution. Finally, something is fundamentally wrong when a Chinese construction worker asks if he can sell one of his kidneys for enough money to return to China and escape the deplorable working conditions in the Commonwealth and the immigration system that brought him there.

From Wiki:

Contract laborers arriving from China are usually required to pay their (Chinese National) recruitment agents fees equal to a year's total salary (roughly $3,500) and occasionally as high as two years' salary, though the contracts are only one-year contracts, renewable at the employer's discretion.

Sixty percent of the population of the CNMI [Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands] is contract workers. These workers cannot vote. They are not represented, and can be deported if they lose their jobs. Meanwhile, the minimum wage remains well below that on the U.S. mainland, and abuses of vulnerable workers are commonplace.

So, indentured servitude. Under the US flag.

Anything else?

The activities of TNC [trans-national criminal] gangs includes money laundering and persistent cases of discovery of counterfeit US currency (including the notoriously high quality North Korean made ‘supernotes’). The casino on Tinian [one of the three principal CNMI islands] generates a flow of persons traveling with in excess of US$10,000. While this has long been suspected to be a money laundering activity, lack of proof has meant few seizures, even with an increasing number of suspicious activity reports by local money service businesses since 2000. In common with the other Pacific nations, TNC is present, is embedded in the local economy at all levels, and goes to great lengths to corrupt law enforcement agencies. The Customs Service is their major target. CNMI law enforcement personnel are poorly paid (rarely more than US$2000 per month for junior ranks, and the cost of living is on par with Hawaii). Worse, they receive little post-basic training. They are vulnerable to penetration by Chinese TNC, which is active in the CNMI is trafficking drugs, people and counterfeit goods, while also conducting extortion, money laundering and prostitution. The CNMI are well known as a ‘rest and relaxation base’ for Japanese yakuza and Russian mafia.

Sounds great.

But why is that old interview and the bleatings of some dusty bleeding-heart Hawaiian Senator relevant today? How does this affect your exciting 2012 lifestyle and internet-era concerns? What does a moldy old trade and human-rights issue have to do with this shiny new decade?

From the 2012 GOP platform:

The Pacific territories [which includes the CNMI] should have flexibility to determine the minimum wage, which has seriously restricted progress in the private sector. A stronger private sector can raise wages, reduce dependence on public sector employment, and lead toward local self-sufficiency. All unreasonable economic impediments must be removed, including unreasonable U.S. customs practices.

That right, the GOP has pledged to lower CNMI's regulations even lower than they are now. Now that's a pro-business agenda. And what do you suppose they think an "unreasonable customs practice" is in this context? Whew...

Stay classy, GOP.

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