Foley & Mariana's tourism connection ..(did he "tour" the Islands?)

[SoCalDem]

http://www.gngateway.com/news.php?url=http://www.saipantribune.com/


Monday, November 26, 2001

NMI included in Feds' $100M tourism promotional package

By Jayvee L. Vallejera
Editor

A $100-million promotional grant for tourism may soon be made available to all states and territories of the United States, including the CNMI, as an added stimulus to an industry that is seeing all-time lows due to the 9/11 tragedy.

A bill has been introduced at the US House of Representatives that seeks to authorize the Secretary of Commerce to issue grants to states and territories to be used for advertising that stimulates economic activity by promoting travel and tourism.

House Resolution 3321, which was introduced by Rep. Mark Foley, has been referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Majority of lawmakers have already expressed support for the measure and have promised to expedite its passage into law.

snip...

The amount to be given to each state and insular territory would be half the amount that a particular state or territory spent for tourism advertising in 2000. “The federal share of the cost of an activity carried out with a grant under this section shall not exceed 50 percent,” a portion of the bill reads.

The money would be coursed through the government agency that handles the local tourism promotions and advertising. In the CNMI's case, it would be the Marianas Visitors Authority.

Besides Foley, the measure was also co-sponsored by Reps. Shelley Berkley, Mary Bono, Shelley Moore Capito, Donna Christensen, Sam Farr, and Benjamin A. Gilman.

and

did Foley go to the Marianas on this junket..Oct '04

http://www.saipantribune.com/newsstory.aspx?cat=1&newsID=41496

and some Delay & Abramoff stuff too in the local Marianas' newspapers.

http://www.gngateway.com/news.php?url=http://www.saipantribune.com/

[SoCalDem]

1. Another very interesting connection to Abramoff & Delay

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:-3UEzxPXtvQJ:isamericaburning.blogspot.com/2006/10/is-stench-of-corruption-foul-enough-to.html+Allen+Stayman+%2B+mark+foley&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1

Sunday, October 08, 2006

IS THE STENCH OF CORRUPTION FOUL ENOUGH TO MAKE AMERICANS CLEAN HOUSE??
Source: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/10/04/the_email_slime_trail.php

The E-Mail Slime Trail
Paul Waldman
October 04, 2006


Try, for a moment , to remember what your life was like before e-mail. When you wanted to talk to your co-workers, you actually got up out of your chair and walked down the hall. If you needed to communicate something to someone in a different office, you had to pick up the phone. E-mail and instant messaging make things speedy, easy and possible to do without lots of forethought and planning.

Like carrying out a scheme to defraud Indian tribes of millions of dollars. Or seducing teenage boys. But as some people are finding out, electronic communication does something else that phone and in-person contact doesn’t: it leaves evidence behind. And because we use it so often and so casually, it ends up revealing our true selves. If you’re corrupt, your e-mails prove it. If you’re a pedophile, the evidence will be there, too, the slime trail laid out in ones and zeros.

So many Republican bad deeds have come to light in the last couple of weeks that it's getting difficult to keep them all straight. You have Bob Woodward’s “revelations” that the administration was telling the public the precise opposite of what it knew to be true about Iraq (I know, we’re all shocked). You have Mark Foley, now the fourth Republican congressman leaving office in disgrace and potentially facing jail (to refresh your memory, the others are Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, and Bob Ney), and the Republican leadership that knew what he was up to and tried to keep it under wraps for months.

You have the Inspector General of the Department of Housing and Urban Development discovering that HUD contracts were awarded based on Republican loyalty. And you have the latest details on our old friend Jack Abramoff, released in a damning report by the House Government Reform Committee that shows that when the White House said they barely knew Abramoff, they were not quite telling the truth.


much more follows...with more links

[wakeme2008]

2. MMMmmmm

http://www.democrats.com/node/9066

Ralph Reed Pimped Child Sex Slavery
..cut..

year earlier, the Department of the Interior -- which oversees federal policy toward the U.S. territory -- presented a very different picture of life for Chinese workers on the islands. An Interior report found that Chinese women were subject to forced abortions and that women and children were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry.

I would bet Yes to that question... :shrug:

[mucifer]

3. I don't understand how they get away with the Marianas scandal where

underaged girls are forced into sex trade and forced abortions and republicans made lots of money off of it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/07/AR2006060701673.html

"The bill aims to apply U.S. immigration law and basic labor protections, including the U.S. minimum wage, to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a U.S. territory 3,900 miles west of Hawaii. Human rights and labor investigators have found rampant abuses there over the years, notably the trafficking of women for a commercial sex trade and the exploitation of mostly female workers from poor Asian countries in a largely foreign-owned garment-manufacturing industry that uses the territory to turn out "Made in U.S.A." clothing exempt from U.S. tariffs and quotas.

As a lobbyist for the Northern Marianas government and, subsequently, the garment industry on the main island of Saipan, Abramoff enlisted DeLay and other Republican leaders in a battle against the Clinton administration, human rights groups, labor unions and a bipartisan group of lawmakers to preserve local control over immigration and the minimum wage."


If you google the controversy you can find lots of back page articles about it. But, most people don't know about it. George Miller dem from California still hasn't been able to get a bill passed to protect these women. Why isn't headline news? I only hear about it on Al Franken's radio show where he discusses it on a regular basis.

[SoCalDem]

4. Young brown girls thousands of miles from the US.

That's why it doesn't "matter"..

[ellacott]

5. It's very true that color might be a factor

I also question why this story hasn't gotten more exposure.

[SoCalDem]

6. Accusations are made, but media is not all that interested

because it didn't happen in Des Moines or Fargo..