Right, wrong, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Jesus, you, and me

There is a difference between right and wrong. And if you care about the difference, you damn well better care about politics. Because politics defines what’s being done in your name. A case in point...

Join us on a visit to The Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, in, say, the year 2001.

You’re on U.S. soil. But workers here, unprotected by U.S. labor standards, face the rawest forms of 19th century capitalism all by themselves. We’ll let The Texas Observer tell the story...

[Willie] Tan and other venture capitalists had realized they could create a garment industry that was fully protected by U.S. trade laws and virtually immune to the obstructions of federal regulation... All the capitalists needed was a labor force...

[They] contracted with recruitment squads that roved the provinces of China, the Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and other Asian countries. The arm’s-length arrangement meant the recruiters’ methods could not be directly connected to corporations chartered in the United States. Typically, the recruits were obligated to pay $5,000 to $7,000 for the privilege of signing one-year labor contracts...

...Large families and communities of peasants raised the money for some of these young workers, whose riches earned in America were supposed to help feed and clothe them. But many recruits could never raise that kind of money. Some were steered to loan sharks... more signed agreements in which they would see none of their wages until the “recruitment fees” were paid back. They were indentured workers, at best.

...They came off the plane and were hustled through immigration and aboard buses, their faces staring out in bewilderment and apprehension as the drivers sped through the winding back streets of the capital city... Their new homes were security-fenced compounds set far back in the jungle. With maybe a sheet thrown over a cord for privacy, the women slept on cots, as many as ten jammed in one small room. They had a dripping showerhead with no privacy or hot water, and a single toilet they lined up to share. Rats and cockroaches roamed freely...

There were about thirty factories. The young women worked upwards of seventy hours a week with no overtime pay, sometimes around the clock for two or three days to meet impossible quotas. They were paid $3.05 an hour to keep the sewing machines humming (the federal minimum wage was then $5.15 an hour)... they quickly found out they had no chance of coming out ahead; the employers billed them for their lodging and food, on top of withholding for the thousands of dollars many still owed on their contracts.

Squares of raw fabric were piled up around their machines as high as they could reach; a glaring electronic production counter nagged them to work harder, longer, faster. The air was filled with dust and lint. Workers were not afforded the low-cost filter masks commonly worn by people with respiratory difficulties; for relief they wore rags over their noses and mouths like the bandanas of Old West desperadoes. If they fell asleep and ran a needle through a finger, there was no first aid station; all they got was a rebuke from a shouting supervisor who called them stupid. And those were the lucky ones...

The story truly does get worse from here. Much worse. Please read it yourself.

We’ll pause to mention that clothes made in the Northern Marianas can say “Made in the USA” -- thereby appealing to patriotic buyers who think they’re avoiding sweatshop merchandise. Which made companies like Wal-Mart, The Gap, J. Crew, and Tommy Hilfiger extremely happy.

Into this worker’s paradise strides a now-familiar face: Representative Tom DeLay, R-TX.

Tom DeLay, his wife Christine, his daughter Dani, and three staff members arrived to celebrate the New Year’s holiday in 1998. They stayed in a posh Hyatt Regency and found time for a couple of rounds of golf under the caring watch of the staffs of the governor and Willie Tan...

When he returned from the trip and a reporter pressed him about sweatshops in the Marianas, he said, “I saw some of those factories. They were air-conditioned. I didn’t see anyone sweating.” Then he laughed.

Inspired by the labor model he saw on Saipan, he threw out a daring and philosophical idea: the United States should establish an identical “guest worker” program “where particular companies can bring Mexican workers in.” The Mexicans would be paid “at whatever wage the market will bear.”

Republican DeLay took the lead in fighting Bill Clinton’s efforts to impose U.S. labor standards on the Northern Marianas. DeLay had plenty of help. Much of it came from a lobbyist who was thoroughly wired into the Republican power elite, and now represented the conservative, free-market government of the Northern Marianas. A gentleman DeLay called “one of my closest and dearest friends.”

A certain Jack Abramoff.

With Abramoff’s help, Democratic-sponsored legislation to extend U.S. protections to Marianas workers got nowhere. In Montana, for example, Republican Senator Conrad Burns, formerly neutral, was suddenly an opponent:

Burns voted against a bill in May 2001 that would have strengthened U.S. oversight over the commonwealth's labor and immigration laws. A little more than a year before Burns had not opposed an identical measure.

Burns has said the $5,000 donation from an Abramoff client had nothing to do with his 2001 change in stance on the bill...

Read it all, and decide for yourself...

Philosophers can debate whether there’s true evil in the world. As far as I’m concerned, when privileged politicians fight for wealthy tycoons against the impoverished people they’ve virtually enslaved, that’s evil. And when we vote for politicians like that -- whether through ignorance or venality -- we are complicit in what they do.

When last heard from, DeLay was complaining that he’s being unfairly targeted for his Christian convictions. If Jesus does return in the near future, seems to me he’ll throw this new gang of moneychangers out of the temple harder and faster than he did the first time.

UPDATE: Just after I posted, I came across this useful summary of the latest in the Abramoff/sweatshop/Republican scandal. For more (including the picture of George W. Bush and the Tan family hanging in their Hong Kong offices), see here.

Medicare Part D: You get what you vote for

Want to know how George W. Bush’s Medicare Part D program is working? Read this, from Newsday:

... 95 percent of Medicare beneficiaries who need coverage have yet to decide whether and how to enroll. During the first 11 months after passage of original Medicare in 1965, 93 percent of those eligible had enrolled.

No one knows yet how many of the 6.4 million "dual eligibles," poor or disabled Medicaid beneficiaries also eligible for Medicare, were automatically switched from Medicaid to Part D on New Year's Day, as the law required, without missing their vital medicines. My guess is that thousands of the sickest and most vulnerable people were not successfully switched and will be desperate for their medications. But CMS, at the Department of Health and Human Services, has not figured out what to do to tide over such people. After the dual eligibles are switched, they can choose their own drug coverage. Although Part D is supposed to be voluntary, if a dual eligible does not enroll in Part D, he or she would lose Medicaid coverage for other health services.

If you have health insurance from a former employer and you signed up for Part D drug coverage, be careful; you and your dependents could lose all your health coverage. Companies and unions that took subsidies to continue retiree coverage will not receive the subsidies for retirees who join Part D. Therefore, they will end all retiree health benefits for beneficiaries and their covered spouses and dependents if the retiree signs up for Part D - and they might not tell you. So check with your former employer and, if necessary, disenroll from Part D.

To make matters worse, a dual eligible's family could lose all their retiree coverage without knowing it if he or she is automatically signed up for Part D. Many of those beneficiaries are in nursing homes. Again, if your family is getting retiree health coverage, check with your former employer and, if necessary, quit Part D.

Meanwhile, in California...

Even as the state spends millions of dollars on emergency prescription drug coverage for more than 200,000 elderly, poor and disabled Californians, many of their claims are still being denied, healthcare groups said Tuesday.

Patients' advocates and others said they continue to get reports from throughout the state that many enrollees in the federal prescription drug program are being told that their medicines are not covered, or are being charged hundreds of dollars instead of the $1 to $5 co-pay they actually owe.

This is health care George W. Bush’s way. (Keep that in mind when he proposes -- one more time -- his miserable privatized healthcare Health Savings Accounts in this year’s State of the Union address. And recall: if it were up to him, by now Social Security would be well along the way down a comparably horrid path.)

As usual, they can’t say they weren’t warned about the impending Medicare Part D disaster by someone objective and independent (though, doubtless, they will...)

...a Government Accounting Office report, issued in December, [warned] that the Bush administration hadn't done enough to make sure the most medically and financially vulnerable Medicare beneficiaries could actually get their drugs.

If you do get around to reading it, make sure to check out the part where Mark McClellan, director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, says the GAO has it all wrong--the part where he insists that "CMS has established effective contingency plans to ensure that dual-eligible beneficiaries will be able to obtain comprehensive coverage and obtain necessary drugs beginning January 1, 2006...”

Or, perhaps they will say that any huge government program will have, well, a few glitches (ignoring the fact that the original Medicare program, far bigger, launched with hardly a hiccup back in 1965. Why? Because the Johnson administration put people in charge who were actually committed to making government work...

Today, the man directly responsible for Medicare is Mark McClellan, a physician and former Stanford economist. Though hardly a Michael Brown, McClellan has no prior experience when it comes to implementing social insurance programs. (His predecessor, Tom Scully, left CMS to become a lobbyist almost immediately after the Medicare bill passed.) The man Johnson tapped to run Medicare was Robert Ball, a longtime civil servant who had worked his way up through the Social Security Administration starting in 1939. He and other veterans helped design the program--urging, among other things, that the law take effect in summer, when hospitals would be least crowded.

Another difference between the two administrations is their willingness to take initiative. Last year, experts repeatedly warned the Bush administration that it had inadequate contingency plans in place, culminating in a December Government Accountability Office report that predicted with eerie accuracy exactly what has happened at pharmacies around the country these past two weeks. LBJ's team was far more cautious. Although confident that hospitals could handle any potential surges, it still drew up plans for transferring patients to overflow facilities, even lining up helicopters in Texas to provide speedy transport.

But then, it never really was about honest and competent government, was it? Because if it were,

...Bush’s people wouldn’t have hidden the program’s actual cost, to the point of threatening Medicare’s chief actuary with being fired if he told Congress the truth...

...nor would the Republican leaders of Congress have illegally attempted to bribe members of Congress to vote for their misbegotten plan...

If they ever do get this thing working the way it’s supposed to, millions of Americans will find themselves without benefits right in the middle of the year, thanks to the plan’s built-in $2,850 “donut hole”...

While the pharmaceutical industry keep pocketing billions of dollars in windfall profits all year long...

No, from the very first, it never was about actually governing (that’s hard work):

“There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," says [former Bush aide] DiIulio. "What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

In a seven-page letter sent a few weeks after our first conversation, DiIulio, who still considers himself a passionate supporter of the president, offers a detailed account and critique of the time he spent in the Bush White House.

"I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions," he writes. "There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical nonstop, twenty-hour-a-day White House staff.

Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue."

From Iraq to Hurricane Katrina to Medicare Part D, George W. Bush is nothing if not consistent. You get what you vote for.