Denny Hastert's America

A popular theme, I know. This Salon.com investigative report documents Halliburton's legalized hiring of undocumented Latinos they are alleged to have fed only one meal a day, later not paid, then thrown out to fend for themselves.

The investigative piece notes that Bush re-instated the Davis-Bacon act on 11/3.

Some of us are wondering, however, how Denny Hastert's multi-million dollar press operation failed to ever voice a single word of the slightest discomfort on the part of the Speaker when the President of the United States suspended laws that protect workers, and by decree.

Here are two nice parts to consider (the Salon.com subscription is worth it for the rest):

Halliburton/KBR is the general contractor with overarching responsibility for the federal cleanup contracts covering Katrina-damaged naval bases. Even so, there is an utter lack of transparency with the process -- and that invites malfeasance, says James Hale, a vice president of the Laborers' International Union of North America. "To my knowledge, not one member of Congress has been able to get their hands on a copy of a contract that was handed out to Halliburton or others," Hale says. "There is no central registry of Katrina contracts available. No data on the jobs or scope of the work." Hale says that his union's legislative staff has pressed members of Congress for more information; apparently the legislators were told that they could not get copies of the contracts because of "national security" concerns.
...
"They were going to pay seven dollars an hour, and the food was going to be free, and rent, but they gave us nothing," says the thin Zapotec teenager. Simitrio spent nearly a month at the Seabee base. "They weren't feeding us. We ate cookies for five days. Cookies, nothing else," he says.

Nice oversight, Denny.

What "national security issues" prevent disclosure of this information?