Date of publication: September 26, 2005
Source: Minuteman.org
By Jim Hightower
If an ideologically incorrect study is done inside the Bush regime, does
it make a noise?
Not if the White House can squelch it, which is exactly what they've
tried to do to a report about labor abuses in Central America. For more
than a year, the Department of Labor has fought ferociously to block the
release of a study showing that working conditions in six Latin American
nations are abysmal and that government officials in the region do
little to enforce labor protections. These findings do not fit with the
president's ideological insistence that workers worldwide can trust
global corporatization to improve their lives.
The 400-page report was particularly inconvenient and untimely for the
administration, because it had been pushing hard this year to ram
another glob of globaloney called "CAFTA" down our throats. CAFTA - the
Central American Free Trade Agreement - was this summer's number one
legislative priority for Mr. Bush's global corporate backers, and the
last thing they wanted was documentation that their corporate ilk are
already exploiting, injuring and otherwise abusing workers in the CAFTA
region.
In hilarious irony, the study in question was commissioned by - guess
who - Mr. Bush's own Labor Department! It contracted with the
International Labor Rights Fund to do the study - but when the results
were not what the sponsors wanted to hear, they impounded the report,
forbade the Labor Rights Fund from publishing it, and even denied
repeated requests by members of Congress to review it.
Finally, after Rep. Sandy Levin filed a freedom-of-information action to
force the release of the tax-paid study, the Labor Department relented -
but not before trying to taint its own report, blasting it as "rife with
unsubstantiated and unverifiable claims."
To see the report yourself, go to: www.house.gov/levin [1].
Jim Hightower is the best-selling author of "Thieves In High Places:
They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time To Take It Back," on sale now
from Viking Press. www.jimhightower.com [2]