This is a story about the United States Protectorate of American Samoa. The Samoans are a tall, athletic, good-natured people. Aside from them, there are no heroes in this story.

It all started with a pretty ugly scandal involving another US protectorate, the Northern Mariana Islands. Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R, Texas) took stacks of money from business concerns operating in the Northern Marianas in return for turning a blind eye to horrendous labor rights violations. We’re not talking about simple sweat shops here; we’re talking about indentured servitude and forced abortions of female workers (because pregnant workers aren’t as productive). When the scandal broke, it had a lot to do with putting Abramoff in federal prison and unraveling the Republican control of the House of Representatives.

One aspect of this whole business was the federal minimum wage. Federal laws have, for many years, exempted both the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa from the federal minimum wage. The Northern Marianas has the sort of diversified economy more likely to benefit from a hefty minimum wage increase. In the case of American Samoa, the island is dependent on a single industry, Tuna, which faces pretty strong wage competition from Asian and South American canneries. As a result, minimum wages were set in American Samoa every two years by the Department of Labor, after careful on-site study, and they did a pretty good job of keeping wages up without killing the island’s industry. So maybe I spoke too soon when I said there were no other heroes in this story. Chalk one up for the pointy-headed bureaucrats.

When the 2007 federal minimum wage bill was rolled out by a Democratic congress, it repealed the exemption for the Northern Marianas but kept the exemption for American Samoa and continued the successful Department of Labor monitoring procedure. This should have been a no-brainer, right? The Republicans and Democrats had always agreed on American Samoa’s exemption from the minimum wage and its monitoring by the Department of Labor. But the Republican leadership decided that it was more important to cause some political pain to the other side than it was to support a policy with which they agreed.

Del Monte Corporation, which owns StarKist Tuna, one of American Samoa’s largest employers, is headquartered in the congressional home district of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The Republican leadership charged, through a variety of outlets and spokespeople, that the exemption of American Samoa was a “Fishy Favor” granted by Pelosi to a major campaign contributor to both her and the non-voting representative from American Samoa, Congressman Faleomavaega, and that she stood to gain personally because her husband owned $17 million worth of Del Monte stock. The truth was that the Pelosis owned no Del Monte stock and while Del Monte executives had been major contributors to republican candidates, neither Pelosi nor Faleomavaega had accepted a penny of contributions from any of them.

The truth.

Campaign contributions and assets are matters of public record. Looking them up and verifying accusations about who gave what to whom is tedious work, but we actually have people whose job is to do that work and keep the public discourse honest. This is where the news media jumps in and sets the record straight, right?

Wrong. You can believe that parts of the media have become players in the partisan debate and so willingly repeat false claims knowing they are false and not caring, but that doesn’t explain why centrist media would do so as well. What does? Cowardice? Laziness? Incompetence? Take your pick. None of the explanations are very flattering.

The media watchdog group Media Matters For America identified the following specific days when news outlets repeated the Republican charges as true and without mentioning that every previous Republican-sponsored minimum age bill had also included the exemption for American Samoa:

The Associated Press on January 13
CNN’s “The Situation Room” on January 12
CNN’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on January 12 and “Lou Dobbs This Week” on January 13
Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” on January 23
Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes” on January 12 and 16
Fox News’ “Special Report with Brit Hume” on January 12
Fox News’ “The Big Story with John Gibson” on January 12
The New York Post on January 13
The Wall Street Journal (editorial) on January 16
The Washington Times on January 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, and 23

Just for fun, here’s a web link to FNC “scooping” everyone else on January 12, including a transcript from Fox & Friends in which just about every statistic and factual statement – aside from the fact that Del Monte is headquartered in San Francisco — is wrong.

Okay, time for the Democratic Leadership to show what it’s made of. Time to tell why American Samoa was exempted and face down Lies with Truth.

Sorry. Wrong again. Time to fold up like a cheap carnival sideshow after the last geek has bitten the head off the last chicken. The Democratic response was to pull the Samoan exemption from the bill and start raising the Samoan minimum wage in escalating increments. It was the wrong policy for American Samoa, and everyone – everyone — on both sides of the aisle knew it, but making a fight of it would have been hard.

Somebody needs to let these guys know that the first prerequisite of leadership is courage.

And what has the tuna industry done? Chicken of the Sea has closed its tuna cannery in American Samoa, putting about 10% of the Samoan labor force out of work. And to which third-world low-wage hell-hole will Chicken of the Sea relocate the cannery?

Georgia. And I don’t mean the one south of Ukraine. That’s interesting, because even after the wage hikes in Samoa, the Georgia minimum wage is still two dollars higher. Hmmm.

Del Monte knew who it had and hadn’t given money to. It could have spoken up and snipped this in the bud, but chose not to. As Congressman Faleomavaega observed in the middle of the controversy, “Throughout the minimum wage debate, Del Monte has chosen to remain silent while Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been unfairly attacked by Republicans who suggested that she received campaign dollars from you in exchange for lower minimum wages in American Samoa. As you know, neither Speaker Pelosi nor I have ever received or accepted one penny from Del Monte or StarKist and a respectable company would have gone on record and made this known.”

To put it another way, anyone who thinks Big Tuna’s actions during the debate or afterwards were driven by market forces instead of politics is living in dream land.

Now, of course, the opponents of minimum wage laws argue that this proves the minimum wage – any minimum wage – is bad and destroys jobs. How can they argue that when the jobs moved to Georgia, where the minimum wage is higher? Easy. Like everyone else in this debate, they have freed themselves from the strangling restrictions of reality-based thinking.

Nobody in this whole mess – government, media, business — seems to have remembered they had a responsibility to the Truth, and they had a responsibility to the people of American Samoa. Nobody. Truth and American Samoans came in dead last in this race. Character and Courage didn’t finish much better. Cowardice, dishonesty, and narrow political self-interest did pretty well, though.

Democracy will never be perfect because, like any human institution, it is made to work by people, and people are imperfect. So Democracy will have good days and bad days.

This was a pretty bad day.

About the Author: The major landmarks in Frank's historical interests range from ancient Persia through the Crimean War, World War II, and the modern U.S. Armed Forces, with a lot of stops in between. Frank is fascinated by the unusual, the overlooked, and the surprising. He is the New York Times number one best-selling author of the Desert Shield Fact Book (1991) and he is currently writing an historical novel on Alexander's conquest of Persia – from the Persian point of view.

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