Gulf Coast Slaves (Halliburton story)

[jumptheshadow]

From Salon today, some excellent reporting on a disgusting situation:

<snip> Nov. 15, 2005 | NEW ORLEANS and GULFPORT, Miss. -- Arnulfo Martinez recalls seeing lots of hombres del ejercito standing at attention. Though he was living on the Belle Chasse Naval Base near New Orleans when President Bush spoke there on Oct. 11, he didn't understand anything the ruddy man in the rolled-up sleeves was saying to the troops.

Martinez, 16, speaks no English; his mother tongue is Zapotec. He had left the cornfields of Oaxaca, Mexico, four weeks earlier for the promise that he would make $8 an hour, plus room and board, while working for a subcontractor of KBR, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton that was awarded a major contract by the Bush administration for disaster relief work. The job was helping to clean up a Gulf Coast naval base in the region devastated by Hurricane Katrina. "I was cleaning up the base, picking up branches and doing other work," Martinez said, speaking to me in broken Spanish.

Even if the Oaxacan teenager had understood Bush when he urged Americans that day to "help somebody find shelter or help somebody find food," he couldn't have known that he'd soon need similar help himself. But three weeks after arriving at the naval base from Texas, Martinez's boss, Karen Tovar, a job broker from North Carolina who hired workers for a KBR subcontractor called United Disaster Relief, booted him from the base and left him homeless, hungry and without money.

"They gave us two meals a day and sometimes only one," Martinez said. <snip>

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/11/15/halliburton_katrina/index2.html

An immigration rights worker is quoted as saying: "This is evil on top of evil on top of evil..."

[bluestateguy]

1. This is why I favor the death penalty for white collar corporate crime

n/t

[Selteri]

2. Evil on top of Evil on top of Evil, It must be Bush. NR

[ThoughtCriminal]

3. Don't forget the link please - nt

[jumptheshadow]

4. More information from this story

Salon is a subscription service, so I won't quote it directly. This is more than horrible:

* The reporter was with the immigration rights worker when she visited the "squalid" trailer parks where Latino workers complained they were confined, under the threat of deportation. There were up to 19 unpaid, hungry and medically untreated workers in a trailer...

* There is no central registry of Katrina contracts available, creating a murky line of subcontractors, a situation that has opened the floodgates for abuse.

* Halliburton/KBR deny knowledge of any undocumented workers.

[radwriter0555]

5. The GOP owned Gulf Coast oil cos are the biggest employers of illegal

workers.

Make it a point to repeat that information during any discussion about the GOP cheap labor economics discussion.

[jumptheshadow]

6. So it's a two-fer

You create a horribly abusive situation for the undocumented workers, and you deny jobs to American workers. In this case, while thousands of families crushed by a disaster desperately need the money...

[pop goes the weasel]

7. they intended to abuse them from the get-go

That's obvious. There are hundreds, thousands probably, of people of all races throughout the South who would have jumped at the chance for work at $8/hr plus room and board. But they all have Social Security cards and their employment must be in the light of day. Did they even offer any of that work to the Katrina evacuees? That should have been a requirement, that evacuees be contacted and given the chance for clean-up and rebuilding jobs.

Heckuva job, Bushie.