Is Speaker Pelosi ignorant or just racist?

Question

In Pelosi's new "minimum wage" increase bill, she forgot to add American Samoa to the bill. Was she ignorant concerning the fact that American Samoa is part of the USA and its people are US citizens, or is she just racist against Samoans? If it had been a republican who made this error, would the major media be asking this very question?

Pelosi co-sponsored the bill, and had direct oversight in the writing as Speaker and as the leader of her party.

Sorry AD, it is not a lie, it is truth. The bill was re-written after the omission, and is part of the public record. Your partisianship trumps your commitment to truth.

So reporting a fact is a smear against democrats? C'mon dude, be real.

Answer 1

She didn't forget it. She tried specifically to exempt it. However, last I heard, she caved, and it was included in the minimum wage raise...

Actually, the Republicans were consistent for no minimum wage raise, and not including the territories at all. The "foul" was in raising it for everyone including territories EXCEPT for American Samoa...

Answer 2

American Samoa had a lower minimum wage for years and years and years and years before Pelosi took over. If the Republicans cared about it, why did they leave it? The minimum wage is so low to allow the tuna industry to compete against other tuna producers in the Pacific Rim countries. And stuff is cheaper there than here. If this is the best the Republicans can do to try and smear the Democrats, than the Democrats are in good shape.

Answer 3

The truly suspicious part is that both StarKist and Chicken of the Sea are headquartered in California, and StarKist's parent is located in none other than Ms. Pelosi's own San Francisco district.

Answer 4

I don't think there is evidence that she had any racist intent or feeling, but she clearly was ignorant American Samoa's status.

You hit the greater point on the head: If a Republican made this error, it would be front page news.

Answer 5

Whenever a bill is passed, there's a 'list' of 'states and commonwealths' that it would apply to . Omitting American Samoa is not an 'error' . It's a conspiracy .

Answer 6

As "Truth Seeker" said, she wasn't the one who wrote the bill, and wasn't the only one voting for it...HOWEVER, as some others have posted in my question about Hurricane Katrina, she is the LEADER of the House of Representatives, and she should LEAD, and if not, should be BLAMED!!!!!!!

Answer 7

Apparently it was a favor to a corporation headquartered in her district.

It's quite an omission, and should receive much more coverage than it has.

I'd also like to know how much this corporation contributed to her campaigns!

Answer 8

Pelosi didn't write the bill and she wasn't the only one voting for it.

Answer 9

US Territories are not included in the minimum wage law. That is why you can have products that say "Made in the USA" that were actually made under inhumane conditions in US Territories. Its not just Democrats, read the article below on Tom Delay. By the way, the Dems are re-thinking this policy, see the second article below.

The real scandal of Tom DeLay
Monday, May 9, 2005 Posted: 12:14 PM EDT (1614 GMT)

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Creators Syndicate) -- Forget the freebie trips across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Forget the casinos and the allegedly illicit contributions -- they represent only degrees of avarice.

To grasp the moral bankruptcy of the public Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, you only have to know about Frank Murkowski and Saipan.

Today, Frank Murkowki is the governor of Alaska, but from 1980 to 2002, he was a conservative Republican senator from Alaska.

How conservative? His voting record earned him zero ratings from organized labor's AFL-CIO and the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, and perfect 100s from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Conservative Union.

But as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Frank Murkowski became furious at the abusive sweatshop conditions endured by workers, overwhelmingly immigrants, in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, of which Saipan is the capital.

Because they were produced in a territory of the United States, garments traveled tariff-free and quota-free to the profitable U.S. market and were entitled to display the coveted "Made in the USA" label.

Among the manufacturers that had profited from the un-free labor market on the island were Tommy Hilfiger USA, Gap, Calvin Klein and Liz Claiborne.

Moved by the sworn testimony of U.S. officials and human-rights advocates that the 91 percent of the workforce who were immigrants -- from China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh -- were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage and were forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks minus plumbing, work 12 hours a day, often seven days a week, without any of the legal protections U.S. workers are guaranteed, Murkowski wrote a bill to extend the protection of U.S. labor and minimum-wage laws to the workers in the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas.

So compelling was the case for change the Alaska Republican marshaled that in early 2000, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Murkowski worker reform bill.

But one man primarily stopped the U.S. House from even considering that worker-reform bill: then-House Republican Whip Tom DeLay.

According to law firm records recently made public, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, paid millions to stop reform and keep the status quo, met personally at least two dozen times with DeLay on the subject in one two-year period. The DeLay staff was often in daily contact with Abramoff.

DeLay traveled with his family and staff over New Year's of 1997 on an Abramoff scholarship endowed by his client, the government of the territory, to the Marianas, where golf and snorkeling were enjoyed.

DeLay fully approved of the working and living conditions. The Texan's salute to the owners and Abramoff's government clients was recorded by ABC-TV News: "You are a shining light for what is happening to the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and leading the world in the free-market system"

Later, DeLay would tell The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin that the low-wage, anti-union conditions of the Marianas constituted "a perfect petri dish of capitalism. It's like my Galapagos Island."

Contrast that with what then-Sen. Murkowski told me in a 1998 interview: "The last time we heard a justification that economic advances would be jeopardized if workers were treated properly was shortly before Appomattox."

The "Made in the USA" label means standards of quality and standards of conduct.

But more important than how a product is made is how the people who make that product are treated -- as human beings with innate dignity -- who are free to organize and entitled to a living wage.

Did somebody say something about moral values?

Democrats pledge minimum wage to all U.S territories

WASHINGTON (AP): Fending off charges of favoritism, House Democrats say a just-passed minimum wage bill will be changed to cover all U.S. territories _ including American Samoa _ before it reaches President George W. Bush's desk.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, told reporters she has instructed the House Education and Labor Committee to help get the bill changed to "make sure that all of the territories have to comply with the U.S. law on minimum wage.''

Her remark Friday followed accusations from Republicans a day earlier that American Samoa, which is not now covered by the $5.15 (euro3.99) an hour federal minimum wage, was not included in the law raising the federal pay floor to $7.25 (euro5.62) an hour because StarKist has a large cannery in the island chain. StarKist is owned by Del Monte Foods Co., which has its headquarters in San Francisco, Pelosi's district.

"Something is indeed fishy when the federal minimum wage is good for all Americans as espoused by the Democrat majority, yet we exempt a small, in many terms economically struggling island,'' Rep. Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican, told colleagues on the House floor last week.

The bill was passed Wednesday by the House as part of the Democrats' 100-hour agenda.

The measure included in its coverage another U.S. territory, the Northern Mariana Islands, which had been shielded in the past from the wage law with the help of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, and Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, now serving a prison sentence.

Spokesmen for both Pelosi and Rep. George Miller, a California Democrat and the author of the minimum wage bill, said it excluded American Samoa at the request of nonvoting Delegate Eni Faleomavaega, a Democrat who represents the Pacific island territories in the House.

Raising the federal minimum wage would devastate the local tuna industry, Faleomavaega said in a statement last week, noting that American Samoa's economy is "more than 80 percent'' dependent on two U.S. tuna processors, Chicken of the Sea and StarKist. Faleomavaega said the Labor Department reviews Samoa's minimum wages every two years.

Answer 10

the republican under the gun would have resigned already. libs get a free pass.