This is not breaking news, by any means. I just came upon this clip while browsing Roskam’s YouTube collection. It is from back on February 12, 2009.The House Labor and Education Committee had just heard testimony that anti-labor violence was on the increase in 2008 and that the goverment has been, if not complicit in the killings, negligent in the prosecution of those responsible:

“Despite the great emphasis the current administration is placing on security, after a few years of declining murder rates, violence against labor unions showed a steep increase in 2008”, said Jose Luciano Sanin, director of the Escuela Nacional Sindical (National Labor School). “More than 60 percent of the all murdered unionists in the world are Colombians. The murder rate of unionists in Colombia is five times that of the rest of the countries of the world, including those countries with dictatorships that have banned union activity.”

“Despite the great emphasis the current administration is placing on security, after a few years of declining murder rates, violence against labor unions showed a steep increase in 2008”, said Jose Luciano Sanin, director of the Escuela Nacional Sindical (National Labor School). “More than 60 percent of the all murdered unionists in the world are Colombians. The murder rate of unionists in Colombia is five times that of the rest of the countries of the world, including those countries with dictatorships that have banned union activity.”

Human rights advocates in Colombia contend that many of these killings were planned the leadership of the country’s right-wing paramilitary organization, the A.U.C, as well as the Colombian military, and national police. Although some prosecutions are being conducted, witnesses testified, prosecutions often stop short from holding those who conspired, ordered or paid for anti-labor murders accountable.

“It is a systematic pattern that in all of these criminal acts, the public prosecutor is content to determine the responsibility of the material authors, leaving out the intellectual authors, who are the most important, given that they are the ones who sponsor, order the executions, put up the money, and always remain in impunity,” said Jose Nirio Sanchez, a former Colombian special court judge for labor-homicide cases. “Thus, these crimes will not stop, since the true perpetrators are not prosecuted.”

So the very same day, Peter Roskam goes on on FOX to actively promote the U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement, citing what a boon it would be to Caterpillar, one of his major campaign contributors, and saying how labor leaders and labor organizers  in Colombia are less likely to to be subject to violence than the rest of the population.

Every time I think I might like this guy a little, he reminds me what a bastard he is. We have been having a national conversation about whether empathy is a valuable quality in a Supreme Court justice. Even if it you think it is not, it is certainly something whe should expect in our representatives in Congress. Roskam is absolutely blind to human suffering, both at home in his district and in the world. I guess that’s what enables him to sleep at night as he uses our seat in Congress to promote his ruthless pro-corporate agenda.