Time to end Republican-sponsored sex slavery on Saipan

By now the story of Tom DeLay's epic battle to preserve garment sweat shops and sex slavery in the Marianas Islands is well known.  As Mark Shields put it in 2005:

According to law firm records recently made public, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, paid millions to stop reform and keep the status quo, met personally at least two dozen times with DeLay on the subject in one two-year period. The DeLay staff was often in daily contact with Abramoff.

DeLay traveled with his family and staff over New Year's of 1997 on an Abramoff scholarship endowed by his client, the government of the territory, to the Marianas, where golf and snorkeling were enjoyed.

DeLay fully approved of the working and living conditions. The Texan's salute to the owners and Abramoff's government clients was recorded by ABC-TV News: "You are a shining light for what is happening to the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and leading the world in the free-market system"

Later, DeLay would tell The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin that the low-wage, anti-union conditions of the Marianas constituted "a perfect petri dish of capitalism. It's like my Galapagos Island."[1]

So what was it that Tom DeLay and his Republican allies (including his right-hand man Eric Cantor) fought so hard to defend?

Teeming with strip clubs and massage parlors, the red-light district of Saipan has a magnetic draw for Asian businessmen, and for U.S. Navy sailors on three-day furloughs from duty stations in the Pacific and beyond. "Every time a ship arrives, they want women," says a local taxi driver. "They say, `I want a nice fuck tonight. Give me a nice lady.'"

There are no reliable statistics, but an estimated 90 percent of the island's prostitutes are former Chinese garment workers, who sell sexual favors for about $50 a night. Women recruited to work in Saipan as waitresses, or in other legitimate jobs, often end up being forced to become strippers or prostitutes, according to Timothy Riera, director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Honolulu office.

"I thought I was coming to work as a dancer," says a young Filipina woman, her voice barely a whisper as she speaks behind a curtain of her hair. "I was so surprised on the first night in the club when they told me I had to strip. The only way to get tips was by picking up the money with your breasts and your vagina. And there was a VIP room in the back where people could have sex."[2]

In recent days Virginia's slavery apology resolution has generated chest thumping denials from Virginia's right-wing bloggers.  Many of these Republican bloggers have offered to apologize to any living victims of slavery in the United States.  I hope they can afford the airfare to Saipan. 

As for the Democratic majority in Congress: they must act quickly to investigate Saipan fully and then pass comprehensive legislation ending the human rights abuses on Saipan and the rest of the Marianas Islands.  Let President Bush veto this legislation if he dares.

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