The book offers an inside glimpse into the life of a Washington lobbyist, and the ways in which money is used to influence American politics.
Abramoff has also spent most of the last week appearing on TV talk shows, including CBS’ well-known “60 Minutes.” On the air, he has created a lot of buzz by largely renouncing his former ways, talking about the extent of corruption in Washington (He thinks it’s nearly universal), and pointing out the need for change.
For this, he’s been praised by reformers from every end of the political spectrum, including progressive superstar Michael Moore, who encountered him backstage at MSNBC where both men were doing interviews for The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. Moore was so impressed with Abramoff that he said, “He is 100 percent revealing everything and encouraging the American people to stop people like him. That’s a very powerful thing to do.”
One place where he is clearly not revealing everything, however, is Guam. We checked through Abramoff’s book and found that, despite the fact that the Superior Court of Guam funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars of court funds to Abramoff’s lobbying firm, and Abramoff himself represented Guam’s courts in Washington for a time, the book hardly mentions the island at all, and when it does, it is only in passing. There is no reference to the money paid, nor to what, if anything, Abramoff did on behalf of the Guam Superior Court.
As most people on Guam will probably remember, the lobbying money was paid through a third-party attorney in multiple checks of slightly less than $10,000 each. The court presumably authorized the payments, but never went on the record to explain the objectives of the lobbying effort. At the time, Congress was considering a reorganization of the Guam judiciary and creation of a Guam Supreme Court, which would supersede the authority of the presiding judge.
Abramoff pays more attention in his book to the CNMI, but here again, very little is “revealed.” Rather, a number of pages are spent describing his golf games with various dignitaries, and even more justifying his years of lobbying to prevent the minimum wage from being raised in the Northern Marianas. He also goes to great lengths to support the laissez-faire capitalism philosophy behind this defense, and stress what Abramoff seems to regard as his own importance in this multi-year, highly partisan fight.
In his words, “By 2006, the Democrats had taken control of the Congress, and the CNMI’s days were numbered. The Democrats passed their long-desired takeover legislation as part of a federal minimum wage increase in 2007. For almost a decade, we stood between the peoples of the Northern Marianas and the hostile bureaucrats and congressmen bent on their destruction. Now, the enemy had won. The garment industry folded quickly, and the CNMI economy tanked.”
On her “Unheard No More” blogsite, former Rota teacher Wendy Doromal said: “The book contains such a distorted portrait of the CNMI that it is insulting to anyone with even a minimal knowledge of the history of the Mariana Islands’ over the last 30 years.”
She added, “In one of the most ignorant claims in the book, Abramoff praised Willy Tan, the garment magnate that built an empire on the back of foreign workers kept in slave-like conditions. He said, ‘His garment factories were showcases of efficiency and cleanliness.’
“The truth is, according to garment workers, that the factories were hell-holes where water was scarce, the barbed wire faced inwards, quotas were impossible to meet and Chinese law was enforced in shadow contracts on U.S. soil. In 1992 five of Tan’s CNMI garment factories were sued by the U.S. Department of Labor and Willie Tan was fined $9 million, which was the largest fine the department had ever given.”
