[lbo-talk] Abramoff II

Joseph Wanzala jwanzala at hotmail.com
Mon Jan 23 13:24:04 PST 2006


http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

January 22, 2006 -- As a follow-on to yesterday's exclusive, Washington insiders report yet another South African tie to convicted GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff. A major link between Abramoff and fundamentalist Christians like Gary Bauer and others are two South African Orthodox rabbis, Daniel and David Lapin. It was Daniel Lapin who introduced Abramoff to indicted Texas Republican Representative Tom DeLay. [See today's Political Chatter After Dark story about TV ads linking DeLay and Abramoff to pay-offs from Russian tycoons (a more gentle term for the "Russian-Ukrainian-Israeli Mafia")]. Lapin is a board member of the American Alliance of Jews and Christians, along with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. President Bush re-appointed Lapin to be a member of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of Heritage Abroad, which helps dole out U.S. tax money for the preservation of cemeteries and historic buildings in Eastern and Central Europe. According to Newsweek, the re-appointment came after Lapin urged his supporters to steer campaign money to Bush's 2004 presidential campaign via Abramoff. Abramoff also helped Lapin found Toward Tradition, a Seattle-based religious group.

Daniel's brother, David Lapin, ran Abramoff's now-defunct yeshiva school in Silver Spring, Maryland. Part of a Federal land deal between Abramoff and indicted former White House aide David Safavian sought to transfer ownership of former Navy land at the White Oak research facility in Silver Spring to Abramoff's yeshiva.

David Lapin is chief executive officer of a Los Angeles-based consulting firm called Strategic Business Ethics. Lapin received a $1.2 million contract from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, an Abramoff client, where textile firms employ foreign nationals as virtual slave laborers. Northern Marianas Attorney General Pat Brown cannot figure what Lapin did under his no-bid contract to promote ethics in the U.S.-administered island chain.

The racism undertones of Abramoff and his Orthodox Jewish, racist Republican, and South African friends are clear. In emails, Abramoff referred to the Native Americans he was robbing blind as "morons and troglodytes." According to new information received from South Africa, Abramoff's apartheid friends were responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses committed against black and white South Africans: the killing of the wife and baby daughter of anti-apartheid activist Marius Schoon in Lubango, Angola; the mail bombing that killed Ruth First, the wife of South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo in Maputo, Mozambique; the shooting death of African National Congress activist Dulcie September in Paris; and the bombing of the ANC offices in London that was targeting ANC President Oliver Tambo. In the Northern Marianas, Abramoff's clients were perfectly happy to lobby for a change in U.S. labor laws to permit virtual slave labor among Chinese, Filipino, and other Asian nationals.

The real face of the GOP's racial policies: assisting in and championing the murder of anti-apartheid activists since the early 1980s: September, First, and Schoon. Abramoff email: Native Americans are "morons and troglodytes." Abramoff and DeLay champion treating Chinese and other Asians, mostly women, as slave laborers in U.S. island colony in Pacific. Payments made from Abramoff's Capitol Athletic Foundation to illegal Orthodox settlers in Beitar Illit on the West Bank for purchase of sniper scopes, thermal imaging devices, and other "security" equipment used to target Palestinians. The racism here is clear and revolting.

Democrats are earnestly trying to find photographic evidence that links Abramoff to George W. Bush. At least five exclusive occasion photos are said to exist. At the same time Abramoff was pressuring Karl Rove to fire Fred Black, the acting U.S. Attorney for Guam and the Marianas, Abramoff's former personal assistant at Greenberg Traurig, Susan Ralston, was hired by Rove as Special Assistant to the President and Assistant to Karl Rove. According to knowledgeable Washington insiders, one of Ralston's major portfolios was working on demoting Black, who was investigating Abramoff's deals in the Marianas, including his representation of the Guam Supreme Court. Two of DeLay's aides, Michael Scanlon (subsequently convicted), and Ed Buckham, the President of the now-defunct propaganda and perception management firm, Alexander Strategies Group, began interfering in Northern Marianas politics in 1999 to help lay the groundwork for regulation-free sweatshops on the islands. After 911, Abramoff lobbied to prevent a tightening of immigration controls into the Northern Marianas. Tom DeLay supported both the loosening of labor regulations and immigration controls.

Bush and Abramoff's former personal assistant Susan Ralston.

PS: Abramoff and his South African and GOP friends are reportedly making noise about suing WMR and/or demanding a retraction and/or an apology. Hell will freeze over before this publication will ever be intimidated by fascists, neo-Nazis, murderers, and racists, no matter where they live, what God they worship, how many crooked lawyers and judges they have in their pockets, or how many friends in the White House they have.



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