When ignorance turns to stupidity

Yesterday, some 300 student activists crowded in front of the Gap flagship store in downtown San Francisco hoisting signs about clothes made in sweatshops here. Interesting that ignorance has taken over young minds who never bothered to find out the whole truth. They are being used as pawns of convenience in a controversy they don’t even understand.

“Protester Emma Berkman, a bicycle messenger, says she no longer buys clothing ‘unless it is union-made. You can’t trust anybody otherwise’.” Ms. Berkman’s statement simply confirmed my repeated assertion that it’s the textile labor unions who’s behind a Marianas bashing strictly designed to ruin the local apparel industry by regurgitating old fodder. I mean, college students are supposed to be smart and would challenge conventional wisdom at every turn.

But in this case, I have the strange feeling that they are the hired guns of both the textile labor unions and some federal agencies to further taint the image of the islands. I wonder if they are wary that California’s apparel industry is notorious for the violation of federal minimum wage and labor laws. That they never sought the whole truth in this mess confirms my belief that not only have they allowed their better judgment to be used at will by the textile labor unions, but have also turned ignorance into a sterling case of stupidity.

If these kids do their homework, they’d find out that the NMI’s apparel industry is the safest the world over, including California and New York. Furthermore, complacency in California’s apparel industry, specifically, its inability to compete on a global basis is no excuse to ruin what today is the leading industry and income earner of the NMI. If justice has any meaning for Congressman Miller, then he as a paragon of human rights must come to terms with the rights of this group of US Citizens to fully partake in economic opportunities of wealth and jobs creation as part of the greater American Economic Community.

Miller and OIA’s helmsman can’t ram their agenda through the US Congress, thus the bent determination to do through the use of ignorant students most of whom do not even know the location of the NMI. So much for being a hypocrite as a fallen star of human rights. It’s discrimination at best, bigotry at worse!

Notes from Capitol Hill

Guam’s Non-Voting Delegate Robert Underwood said in a recent statement before the US House of Representatives that some 200 Chinese were smuggled to Guam from Saipan. It’s statistics reported by our primary detractor, the US Department of Interior’s Office of Insular Affairs.

At issue are two glaring factors: 1). Underwood should exercise caution in using OIA’s statistics for they were obviously propped-up to portray negligence on the part of the NMI in this scam. 2). Inefficiency in the handling of this case is with the US Immigration and Naturalization Service which tells us it would be foolhardy to extend such inefficiency to the NMI.

Illegal smuggling of large numbers of Chinese into Guam is done on a direct basis far from OIA’s warped assertion that it is being done through Saipan. A recent Time Magazine account details how this scam has affected the 40,000 illegal Chinese being shipped in decrepit boats right into New York and other coastal states via South and Latin American countries.

Perhaps there’s also a need to convey this information to California Congressman George Miller to ensure that he cleans his own backyard before volunteering hopelessly to tidy-up a perceptual scam that doesn’t exist in these isles. Furthermore, he should be handed all illegal immigrants so he finds them employment in the capital of garment manufacturing (California) where blatant violations of federal minimum wage and other pertinent laws by his constituency–textile labor unions. I never knew hypocrisy can be turned into a forte, too.