Children of Bush's America

[crossroads]

Children of Bush's America

The torturers of Abu Ghraib were McWorkers who ended up in Iraq because they could no longer find decent jobs at home.

>snip<

"There's something else connecting the sorry state of the US job market and the images coming out of Abu Ghraib. The young soldiers taking the fall for the prison abuse scandal are the McWorkers, prison guards and laid-off factory workers of Bush's so-called economic recovery. The resumés of the soldiers facing abuse charges come straight out of the April US labour department report.
There's spc Sabrina Harman, of Lorton, Virginia, assistant manager of her local Papa John's Pizza. There's spc Graner, a prison guard back home in Pennsylvania. There's Sergeant Ivan Frederick, another prison guard, this time from rural Virginia.
Before he joined what Van Jones, a prisoners' rights lawyer, calls "America's gulag economy", Frederick had a decent job at the Bausch and Lomb factory in Mountain Lake, Maryland. But according to the New York Times, that factory shut down and moved to Mexico - one of the nearly 900,000 jobs that the Economic Policy Institute estimates have been lost since the North American Free Trade Agreement came into force in 1994, the vast majority in manufacturing.
Free trade has turned the US labour market into an hourglass: plenty of jobs at the bottom, a fair bit at the top, but very little in the middle. At the same time, getting from the bottom to the top has become increasingly difficult, with tuition fees at state colleges up by more than 50% since 1990.
And that's where the US military comes in: the army has positioned itself as the bridge across America's growing class chasm: money for tuition in exchange for military service. Call it the Nafta draft.
It worked for Lynndie England, the most infamous of the Abu Ghraib accused. She joined the military police to pay for college. Her colleague Sabrina Harman joined up for the same reason.
Of course, the poverty of the soldiers involved in prison torture makes them neither more guilty, nor less. But the more we learn about them, the clearer it becomes that the lack of good jobs and social equality in the US is precisely what brought them to Iraq in the first place. Despite his attempts to use the economy to distract attention from Iraq, and his efforts to isolate the soldiers as un-American deviants, these are the children George Bush left behind, fleeing dead-end McJobs, abusive prisons, unaffordable education and closed factories."

>snip<

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1218981,00.html

:kick:

[Dogmudgeon]

1. The Poweless got drunk on Power

Now, they have to bear the shame and guilt until the ends of their lives.

While Bush dictates his "memoires" to his ghostwriter.

Injustice working overtime.

--bkl

[Mountainman]

2. I have a co-worker who owes $14,500 on her student loan

She studied to be a occupational safety expert. She did not like the work so now she is an $8/hr receptionist and can't make her student loan payments on time. She has two kids. She would be prime fodder for Bush's wars.