Values voters and their sweatshop loving congressman

Senate candidate Bob Schaffer went to the Mariana Islands in 1999 on what he called a fact finding tour in which he claimed he was going to investigate some of the nations notorious sweatshops, others have called it a Abramoff funded junket.
Another facet to the story is the group that paid for Schaffer and and his wife to tour the islands, is called the Traditional values caolition. I will let the Denver Post take it from here:

Schaffer’s $13,000 trip was paid for by the Orange County, Calif.-based Traditional Values Coalition, which Schaffer described as a religious group “concerned with human rights.”

“Whatever involvement (Abramoff) had with Traditional Values Coalition wasn’t known at the time,” Wadhams said.

Later investigations have shown that in many instances, TVC — which claims to represent 43,000 churches — acted virtually as a political arm of Abramoff’s lobbying operation.

Bob Schaffer thought the Mariana Islands were great and thinks that the US should model our immigration system after theirs even though it leads to things like:

A class-action lawsuit filed the year Schaffer toured the islands alleged that many of those workers lived in slum conditions, housed seven to a room in barracks surrounded by barbed wire designed to keep the workers in. Workers in some factories labored 12 hours a day, seven days a week, the suit alleged — without pay if they fell behind set quotas.

A U.S. Interior Department investigation found that pregnant workers were forced to get illegal abortions or lose their jobs. Some were recruited for factories but forced into the sex trade instead.

At the heart of the Abramoff scandal was the exploitation of the reilgous right to benefit wealthy clients, in fact some might argue that is the heart of modern conservatism is to benefit the rich at the expens of the poor. It is interesting that all those family values seem to lower the taxes of the wealthy. Hopefully the religous right has caught on to people like Bob Schaffer and will stop supporting people like Mr Schaffer who seem to only value money.