By Scott Wright

I don't think it makes a whole lot of difference whether or not Rep. Tom DeLay, the embattled Texas congressman and current House majority leader known as the “Hammer,” took a handful (more like a double handful) of lobbyist-funded trips in violation of House rules. Probably half the members of Congress have done the same thing, either knowingly or otherwise. So, if exploiting his position as a powerful member of the United States Congress in order to take a few trips abroad doesn't make Tom DeLay a politically and ethically corrupt piece of trash, then you may be wondering what does, exactly.

I'm glad you asked. Allow me to enlighten you.

Let's take a trip back to 1997. Grab the nearest globe you can find, place the United States squarely in your field of view, and spin old Mother Earth from west to east about a quarter-turn. Stop. Right before your eyes, just an inch or so below Japan and a pinkie-finger length to the right of the Philippines, you should find a scraggly-looking cluster called the Northern Mariana Islands. The story of the majority leader's interest in this island chain provides a keen example of why we should all be aghast at Tom DeLay's blind loyalty to the almighty dollar and total lack of compassion for his fellow man.

But first I'll need to set the stage for you.

During World War II, Gen. Douglas McArthur's island-hopping campaign across the Pacific included stops in the Marianas, including Saipan. (Over 17,000 U.S. soldiers were killed or injured taking that island from the Japanese.) After the war, the Marianas became a territory of the United Nations with the United States established as the administering authority. The U.S. Navy governed the islands until 1962, when the Department of the Interior took over. In 1975, the inhabitants of the island voted to become a commonwealth of the United States.

In an effort to establish an independent economy on the islands, federal negotiators allowed the self-elected government to assume control of immigration, wage and workplace standards. Soon thereafter, rich people in Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea became interested in establishing factories on the islands. Working with one of the most affluent and powerful men in the Marianas -- naturalized American citizen Willie Tan -- venture capitalists from other parts of the Far East created a garment industry that was fully protected by U.S. trade laws and “virtually immune to the obstructions of federal regulation,” according to Lou Dubose and Jan Reid in their 2004 book “The Hammer.”

Basically, various loopholes allowed unlimited, duty-free imports into the Marianas. It also allowed clothing made on the islands to enter the continental United States just as if they were boxes of socks stitched and packaged in Fort Payne. To simplify, most of the equipment, money and even the raw textiles used in the Marianas during this time came from China or other Asian nations. And everything that left the islands headed for the American mainland carried the label “Made in the U.S.A.” Some of the companies that took advantage of this bureaucratic F.U.B.A.R. included Gap, Sears, Wal-Mart, J. Crew, Tommy Hilfiger and Abercrombie & Fitch.

Yes, yes. Shop away, good citizens. Oh, but did I tell you about the working conditions in the Marianas?

Wait until you hear about the scale of this human tragedy, and the irrational rationale of Tom DeLay and others who defended the status quo and even fought to allow it to continue. It'll make you proud to be an American. (Not.)

The capitalists -- Mr. Tan and his friends from China and South Korea -- contracted with recruiting squads which, according to Dubose and Reid, “roved the provinces of China, the Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and other Asian countries” looking for a cheap labor force. They found laborers, but the cost wasn't cheap -- at least, it wasn't for the laborers.

The recruits were typically forced to pay somewhere around $6,000 for the privilege of being relocated to the Marianas so they could work in the factories. Once there, they signed one-year contracts which enabled them to “work, receive housing and health care benefits,” according to Dubose and Reid. But the majority of recruits couldn't raise the $6,000, so they were directed to loan sharks who had backdoor deals with the recruitment agencies. Many of the recruits got the money to travel, but received none of their weekly wages until their “recruitment fees” were fully repaid (with interest, of course). Beginning around the early 1980's, thousands of Asians and Pacific islanders were shipped off to the Marianas as slaves, basically. At the very best, as Dubose and Reid noted, they were indentured servants.

Surely, you must be saying to yourself, no American could be proud of this horrible process? Actually, as it turned out, good old Tom DeLay didn't mind one damned bit.

And it only gets worse.

Dubose and Reid claim most of the workers in the 30 or so factories that eventually sprang up in Saipan were mothers with small children who typically worked about 70 hours a week in miserable conditions with no overtime pay. They were paid $3.05 an hour at a time when the federally-mandated minimum wage was $5.15. And they were billed for their lodging and food, on top of the thousands withheld to pay off those “recruitment fees.”

There was no Occupational Safety and Health Administration oversight, either. The young women breathed air filled with dust and lint, and there were no first aid stations. When the islands became overcrowded with immigrants whose contracts were worthless because the influx of humanity had already filled the jobs they had been recruited for, thousands found themselves destitute, stranded in a foreign land. By 1995, the island had an unemployment rate of 14 percent and the sex trade began to boom. According to Dubose and Reid, “Young Chinese women recruited for restaurant jobs were ordered to work in karaoke and topless bars where managers told them they had to drink and have sex with customers.”

A few years went by before this pattern of abuse became a cause for consternation here at home. In 1986, Ronald Reagan's Interior Department voiced concerns and eventually proposed an immigration cap; In 1992, George H. W. Bush administration officials testified that the garment industry in Saipan “has been built on a foundation of cheap alien labor, favorable tariff treatment for goods shipped to U.S. markets … and tax breaks, rebates and other assistance underwritten by the United States government.” In 1995, the Labor Department sued five garment factories owned by the dubious Mr. Tan and fined him $9 million in back pay owed to over 1,200 workers.

Tan probably made it all back in a few weeks.

By mid-1997, the Clinton administration was ready to put the kibosh on the entire operation. According to Dubose and Reid, President Clinton himself wrote Marianas governor Froilan Tenorio and told him that “certain labor practices in the islands … are inconsistent with our country's values.” Clinton even went so far as to propose giving workers on Saipan the same rights as American workers.

Tom DeLay must have laughed out loud at that one. The born-again Baptist didn't give a single, solitary hoot about the thousands of sex slaves, the miserable working conditions or the duplicitous, money-grubbing bigwigs running the sweatshops in Saipan. As a matter of fact, as Dubose and Reid noted in their book, DeLay called the economic situation in the Marianas a “miraculous” turnaround, said the island chain was “a perfect Petri dish of capitalism,” and after a tour of one of the factories, feigned ignorance as to why anyone would refer to the places as sweatshops because, as he said, “I saw some of those factories. They were air-conditioned. I didn't see anyone sweating.”

Predictably, the man who got Tom DeLay involved in the Marianas was his good buddy Jack Abramoff, the Washington lobbyist who purportedly paid for a ton of the overseas trips DeLay has taken over the years and who DeLay now claims he hardly knows. Unfortunately, that comment -- as is the case with so much that seems to emanate from DeLay's mouth, anymore -- is a bald-faced lie.

Over the New Year's holiday in 1998, during a dinner held in Saipan to honor the crooked, conniving Willie Tan, keynote speaker DeLay referred to Abramoff as “one of my closest and dearest friends.” DeLay event admitted that Abramoff “invited” him to the islands for the holidays. Did I mention that Abramoff was the lobbyist for Tan and his Marianas business interests at the time?

He was. Tan paid him almost $8 million between 1995 and 2001.

No worries. Tan probably made it all back in a few weeks.

Anyway, Tan was forking over millions in lobbying fees to Abramoff, who was yakking in DeLay's ear about how the feds were about to crack down on the graft and exploitation in the sweatshops of Saipan. Before long, DeLay had relabeled Clinton's attempts to shut down the sweatshops, calling them a liberal plot to “kill prosperity on the islands.”

A few weeks later, Rep. George Miller of California traveled to the Marianas looking for confirmation of stories he'd been told of the horrible working conditions in the Marianas.

“They were terrified,” Miller said of the workers he encountered. “When we got back (to the hotel) people were literally slipping notes under our doors … Workers were being abused in so many ways. They had no rights, young women were being forced into prostitution, yet here's Mr. Conservative Morality, Tom DeLay, telling the world that this is a good system.”

In 1998 the United States Senate held hearings after learning of the mess in the Marianas. Tom DeLay had heard the stories, too, and had even seen the sweatshops with his own eyes. Still, he refused to allow similar hearings in the House. The Senate eventually enacted legislation co-sponsored by over 200 members of DeLay's own House of Representatives.

Four months later, the Department of Labor charged three garment companies in Saipan with violation of U.S. trade and labor laws and recovered over $2 million in unpaid wages. They collected another $1 million over the next two years.

“The United States is serious about ending worker exploitation in the (Marianas),” said Clinton spokeswoman Alexis Herman.

But not Tom DeLay. Not even kinda-sort of.

Six years later, the situation in the Marianas is little better. The workers in the sweatshops still make $3.05 an hour. A new governor is trying to enact changes that he hopes will improve working conditions, but Rep. Miller said it will take action from the U.S. Congress to permanently fix the problems in Saipan.

But DeLay has repeatedly, in his own words, promised to “defend the current system” on the Marianas, apparently on the basis that less government interference is better for free enterprise. I reckon DeLay reckons it's just too bad for the people there that his blind battle against government regulation is destroying the lives of the very people the system was intended to benefit in the first place.

Miller said this about the situation: “We're engaged in this race to globalization, and we go the last mile, and at the finish line we find Tom DeLay, making a virtue of slavery.”

It sounds to me like Rep. Miller was pretty disgusted with the whole affair in the Marianas. Considering Rep. Tom DeLay's callous lack of concern and compassion for the people there, and taking into account the fact that he's one of the most powerful men in Washington -- and could do something about the problem if he wanted -- I think everyone in America should be disgusted with the man from Sugar Land and anyone who defends him.

Scott Wright is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and an award-winning member of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is a native of Cherokee County.