Just last month Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe public officials. It's a spectacular fall for a man whose rise to power began 25 years ago with his election as chairman of the College Republicans. Despite its innocuous name, the organization became a political attack machine for the far right and a launching pad for younger conservatives on the make. Karl Rove had once held the same job as chairman. So did Grover Norquist, who ran Abramoff's campaign and would become the most powerful operative in Washington for advancing the movement's strategies. At their side was a youthful $200-a-month intern named Ralph Reed. Over the next several years they would yoke politics and religion to turn the conservative revolution into a rapacious racket.
Ralph Reed found Jesus and wound up running Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. Time magazine put him on their cover as "the Right Hand of God." Reportedly after seeing "Fiddler on the Roof" Abramoff became an Orthodox religious Jew who finagled fake awards to provide himself with credentials in the new piety-soaked world of conservative Washington politics. One of those bogus awards named him "a distinguished Bible scholar." He received the "Biblical Mercantile Award" from an organization which laundered money for Tom DeLay's junkets to plush golf clubs.
It's impossible to treat all the schemes and scams this crowd concocted to subvert democracy in the name of God and greed. But here are two examples.
Before it was over the Indian tribes had paid them $82 million dollars, much of it going directly into Abramoff's and Scanlon's pockets. But some of the money found its way to the righteous. Ralph Reed, for one, had his hand out. Reed was the religious right's poster boy against gambling. "We believe gambling is a cancer on the American body politic," Reed had said. "It is stealing food from the mouths of childrenÅ [and] turning wives into widows." Reed was right about that, of course, but his distaste for gambling was no match for his desire to make himself some moolah by helping to protect Abramoff's gambling interests. When Reed resigned from the Christian Coalition - just as it was coming under federal investigation and slipping into financial arrears - he sent Abramoff an email: "Now that I am leaving electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accountsÅ I'm counting on you to help me with some contacts."
Abramoff came through. According to published reports, he and his partner Michael Scanlon paid Reed some $4 million to whip up Christian opposition to gambling initiatives that could cut into the profits of Abramoff's clients. Reed called in some of the brightest stars in the Christian firmament - Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly - to participate in what became a ruse in Abramoff's behalf. They would oppose gambling on religious and moral grounds in strategic places (Texas, Louisiana, Alabama) at decisive moments when competitive challenges threatened Abramoff's clients. Bogus Christian fronts were part of the strategy. Preachers in Texas rallied to Reed's appeals. Unsuspecting folks in Louisiana turned on their radios one day to hear the voice of God - with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson doing the honors - thundering against a riverboat gambling scheme which Abramoff wanted defeated because it threatened one of his own gambling clients. Reed even got James Dobson, whose nationwide radio "ministry" reaches millions of people, to deluge phone lines at the Interior Department and White House with calls from indignant Christians. In 1999 Abramoff arranged for the Mississippi Choctaws, who were trying to stave off competition from other tribes, to contribute over $1 million to Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, which then passed the money along to the Alabama Christian Coalition and to another anti-gambling group Reed had duped into aiding the cause. It is unclear how much these Christian soldiers, "marching as to war," knew about the true purpose of their crusade, but Ralph Reed knew all along that his money was coming from Abramoff. When he fiddled, his brethren on the Christian right danced.
It gets worse.
And here we get to the heart of darkness.
One of Abramoff's first big lobbying clients was the Northern Marianas Islands in the Pacific. After World War II the Marianas became a trusteeship of the United Nations, administered by the U.S. government under the stewardship of the Interior Department. During World War II thousands of Marines died on the Marianas, fighting for our way of life and our freedoms. Today, these islands are a haven for tourists - first-class hotels, beautiful beaches, championship golf courses. But that's not the whole story. The islands were exempted from U.S. labor and immigration laws, and over the years tens of thousands of people, primarily Chinese, mostly women, were brought there as garment workers to live in crowded barracks in miserable conditions. The main island, Saipan, became known as America's biggest sweatshop.
In 1998 a government report found workers there suffering severe malnutrition and health problems and subjected to unprovoked acts of violence. Many had signed "shadow contracts" which required them to pay up to $7000 just to get the job. They also had to renounce their claim to basic human rights. They were forbidden to engage in political and religious activities, to socialize or to marry. Some of the biggest names in the retail clothing industry were enabled to slap "made in the USA" labels on the clothes and import them to America while paying the workers practically nothing.
When these scandalous conditions began to attract attention, the sweatshop moguls fought all efforts at reform. Knowing that Jack Abramoff was close to Tom DeLay, they hired him to lobby for the islands. Conservative members of Congress lined up as Abramoff's team arranged for them to visit the islands on carefully guided junkets. Conservative intellectuals and journalists, for hire at rates considerably above what the women on the islands were making, also signed on for expense-free trips to the Marianas. They flew first-class, dined at posh restaurants, slept in comfort at the beachfront hotel, and returned to write and speak of the islands as "a true free market success story" and "a laboratory of liberty."
Abramoff took Tom DeLay and his wife there, too. DeLay practically swooned. He said the Marianas "represented what is best about America." He called them "my Galapagos" - "a perfect petri dish of capitalism."
These fellow travelers - rightwing members of Congress, their staffs and their lapdogs in the rightwing press and think tanks - became a solid phalanx aimed at any and all attempts to provide workers on the islands with a living wage and decent living conditions. When a liberal California Democrat, George Miller, and a conservative Alaskan senator, Frank Murkowski, both indignant at the "appalling conditions," tried to raise minimum wages on the islands and at least prevent arbitrary deportation of the workers, they were stopped cold.
After the 2000 election, when the spoils of victory were being divided up, Abramoff got himself named to the Bush transition team for the Interior Department. He wanted to make sure the right people wound up overseeing his clients in the Marianas. He enlisted Ralph Reed, who said he would raise the matter with Rove, to stop at least one appointment to Interior that might prove troublesome. It was about this time that Reed wrote an email to Enron's top lobbyist touting his pal Abramoff as "arguably the most influential and effective GOP lobbyist in Congress. I share several clients with him and have yet to see him lose a battle. He also is very close to DeLay and could help enormously on that front. raised $ for bushÅ[sic]"
For his services to the Marianas Jack Abramoff was paid nearly $10 million dollars, including the fees he charged for booking his guests on the golf courses and providing them copies of Newt Gingrich's book
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