THE garment industry and Jack Abramoff’s lobbying efforts in the 1990s remain highly contentious subjects in the CNMI (or even in the U.S., among those who may still remember those long ago events). As in most controversies, your opinion about it usually depends on your politics.
We begin, in any case, at the beginning.
It was 1995, and the U.S. Republicans had taken over both houses of the U.S. Congress for the first time in 40 years. Among the Republicans who were now in leadership positions was Congressman Elton Gallegly of California who wanted to federalize CNMI minimum wage and immigration laws.
A year before, the CNMI’s reform governor, Democrat Froilan C. Tenorio, was sworn in, and he vowed to address federal concerns regarding local labor and immigration issues. The then-Democratic leaders of the U.S. House and Senate believed him, and were willing to give the CNMI a chance to “clean up its act.”
And then the Republican “Revolution” happened.
For the CNMI, at stake was the survival of its growing economy that was paying for many of the Commonwealth’s obligations to its people.
What to do. What to do.
As for the mainstream media in the U.S. at the time, it was open season on the CNMI.
“The CNMI was accused of being a slave colony, of systematically abusing foreign workers, of running an island-wide brothel,” wrote Jack Abramoff in his very entertaining autobiography, “Capitol Punishment.”
The CNMI, he said, committed the grievous sin of outcompeting U.S. garment manufacturers. “Since the CNMI was a U.S. territory, [its] garments could bear the ‘Made in the USA’ label, which so many producers coveted. This didn’t sit well with the U.S. garment makers’ unions and their allies. Instead of the media lauding the incredible success of the Pacific Islanders and the fact that, thanks to tourism and garment manufacturing, they were not constantly begging for congressional appropriations, a campaign of vilification commenced.”
The CNMI’s Democratic administration was looking for a Washington, D.C. lobbyist when it met with Abramoff, a former College Republican National Committee national chairman and the producer of the 1989 action film “Red Scorpion” and its 1994 sequel, “Red Scorpion 2.” Following the Republican takeover of Congress, the Seattle-based, “traditionally liberal” firm Preston Gates & Ellis had offered Abramoff a lobbying job which he accepted.
In his meeting with CNMI officials, Abramoff said he could “beat the effort to take away [local] minimum wage and immigration control.” He was then told that “every other firm [the CNMI] met with in Washington had said there was no way to win this fight….”
The CNMI hired Abramoff.
Asked by a key U.S. Republican congressional staffer if Abramoff was sure “they [the CNMI] are not doing the things they are being accused of,” the lobbyist replied, “I’m not sure since I have yet to go there, but I am going within the month and will find out. If they are, I am not going to represent them. The issue is not whether there is any abuse in the CNMI. There might be. There is abuse two blocks from this building in Washington, D.C. The issue to me…is whether it’s systemic and whether the government there is doing all it can to stop it. If they are then there is no reason to destroy their economy.”
Abramoff visited the islands for the first time with former Democratic Congressman Edwin Lloyd Meeds, a partner in the law firm of Preston Gates Ellis, & Rouvelas Meeds, the D.C. office of Preston Gates & Ellis.
“From the moment we landed in Saipan,” Abramoff wrote, “it was clear the Island had been inundated with federal officials, mostly meter-maid-like citation writers from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The Congressional takeover issues were the topic of almost every conversation virtually everywhere we turned. Even our taxi cab driver knew the most intricate details of the legislative process…. [He asked,] ‘So, do you think the Senate takeover bill will be inserted into the Interior Appropriations Bill during the conference session?’ We had never encountered this level of engagement on a political matter by the general public.”
On Saipan, Abramoff and Meeds met with the governor and other CNMI government officials. Abramoff said they toured the islands themselves and visited a dozen or more garment factories, and hotels. They spoke with workers and supervisors.
“I suspected that [Meeds] was determined to find something wrong, so we would have to forego [representing the CNMI],” Abramoff said. Meeds “insisted on meeting all government officials charged with enforcing laws related to the garment industry or hotels. He reviewed the codes and met with those who enforced them. He demanded to know details about the various raids conducted by the Labor and Immigration Department. He met with the Attorney General of the island. He met with the police. With the church leaders. With everyone on island but our original cab driver.”
On the flight home, Abramoff said Meeds “gave me a preview of what he was going to tell [their] firm: ‘Not only can we accept this client, but we must do so. They have been horribly maligned and, if we can save them, then we should. That is not to say that there is no abuse of workers on the island, but the government is doing all it can to stop it, and there is far less abuse there than in most major U.S. cities.’ As far as [Meeds] was concerned, we needed to move full steam ahead.”
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Jack Abramoff
