Published on Thursday, May 13, 2004 by the Globe and
Mail / Canada
[
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/]
Jobs Down, Thumbs Up
American soldiers caught up in the Iraq abuse scandal
are collateral
damage
from a U.S. economy that is losing good jobs
by Naomi Klein
In 1968, the legendary U.S. labor organizer Cesar
Chavez went on a
25-day
hunger strike. While depriving himself of food, he
condemned abusive
conditions suffered by farm workers. The slogan of his
historic union
drive
was "Si se puede!" Yes, we can.
Last week, U.S. President George W. Bush went on a
four-day bus ride.
While
stopping for multiple pancake breakfasts, he praised
tax cuts and
condemned
everyone who says American workers need protection in
the global
economy.
His battle cry for laissez-faire economics? "Yes,
America can."
The echo was probably intentional. Mr. Bush is so
desperate for the
Hispanic vote that he has taken to shouting, "Vamos a
ganar! We're
going to
win!" during stump speeches in Ohio.
The main purpose of the "Yes, America can" bus tour,
of course, was to
shift the attention of U.S. voters away from the Iraq
prison scandal
toward
safer ground: the recovering job market. According to
a U.S. Labor
Department Report, 288,000 jobs were created in April.
Mr. Bush's
campaign
has seized on these numbers to further cast John Kerry
as the dour New
England pessimist, always droning on with the bad
news. Mr. Bush, on
the
other hand, is the bouncy Texan optimist, always
flashing an easy smile
and
a thumbs-up.
"The President has to make sure that we're optimistic
and confident in
order for jobs to be created," he told a carefully
screened crowd in
Dubuque, Iowa.
Some jobs, however, are more responsive than others to
the power of
positive presidential thinking. More than 82 per cent
of the jobs
created
in April were in service industries, including
restaurants and retail,
while the biggest new employers were temp agencies.
Over the past year,
272,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost. No wonder
the President's
economic report in February floated the idea of
reclassifying fast-food
restaurants as factories. "When a fast-food restaurant
sells a
hamburger,
for example, is it providing a 'service' or is it
combining inputs to
'manufacture' a product?" the report asks.
Not all of the job growth in the United States has
come from
burger-flipping and temping. With more than two
million Americans
behind
bars (one of the ways unemployment stats stay
artificially low), the
number
of prison guards has grown from 270,317 in 2000 to
476,000 in 2002,
according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Watching Mr. Bush give the thumbs-up in the face of so
much economic
misery
put me in mind of a certain widely circulated
photograph taken in Iraq.
There are Specialist Charles Graner and Private
Lynndie England, the
happy
couple, standing above a pile of tortured Iraqi
inmates, grinning and
giving the double thumbs-up. Everything is fine, their
eyes seem to be
saying, just don't look down.
There's something else connecting the sorry state of
the U.S. 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 Mr. Bush's so-called economic
recovery. The résumés
of
the soldiers facing abuse charges come straight out of
the April U.S.
Labor
Department Report.
There's Specialist Sabrina Harman, of Lorton, Va.,
assistant manager of
her
local Papa John's Pizza. There's Specialist Charles
Graner, a prison
guard
back home in Pennsylvania. There's Sergeant Ivan
Frederick, another
prison
guard, this time from the Buckingham Correctional
Center in rural
Virginia.
Before he joined what prisoner-rights advocate Van
Jones calls
"America's
gulag economy," Sgt. Frederick had a decent job at the
Bausch & Lomb
factory in Mountain Lake, Md. 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 NAFTA, the
vast majority in manufacturing.
Free trade has turned the U.S. labor 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 at state colleges
up by more than
50
per cent since 1990.
And that's where the U.S. military comes in: The army
has positioned
itself
as the bridge across the United States'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 372 Military Police Company to pay for
college, hoping
to
replace her job at the chicken-processing plant with a
career in
meteorology. Her colleague Sabrina Harman told The
Washington Post, "I
knew
nothing at all about the military, except that they
would pay for
college.
So I signed up."
The poverty of the soldiers at the center of the
prison scandal has
been
used both as evidence of their innocence, and to
compound their guilt.
On
the one hand, Sergeant First Class Paul Shaffer
explains that at Abu
Ghraib, "you're a person who works at McDonald's one
day; the next day
you're standing in front of hundreds of prisoners, and
half are saying
they're sick and half are saying they're hungry." And
Gary Myers, the
lawyer defending several of the soldiers, asked The
New Yorker's
Seymour
Hersh, "Do you really think a group of kids from rural
Virginia decided
to
do this on their own?"
On the other side, the British Sun tabloid has dubbed
Lynndie England
the
"Trailer trash torturer," while Boris Johnson wrote in
The Daily
Telegraph
that Americans were being shamed by "smirking jezebels
from the
Appalachians."
The truth is that 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 United States 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.
They are his children in another way, too: It's in the
ubiquitous
thumbs-up
sign that they flash, seemingly oblivious to the
disaster at their
feet.
This is the quintessential George Bush pose. Convinced
that U.S. voters
want a positive president, the Bush team has learned
to use optimism as
an
offensive weapon: No matter how devastating the
crisis, no matter how
many
lives have been destroyed, they have insistently given
the world the
thumbs-up.
Donald Rumsfeld? "Doing a superb job," according to
the
optimist-in-chief.
The mission in Iraq? "We're making progress, you bet,"
Mr. Bush told
reporters one year after his disastrous "mission
accomplished" speech.
And
the U.S. job market, which has driven so many into
poverty? "Yes,
America
can!"
We don't yet know who taught these young soldiers how
to torture their
prisoners effectively. But we do know who taught them
how to stay
happy-go-lucky in the face of tremendous suffering;
that lesson came
straight from the top.
Naomi Klein is the author of 'No Logo' and 'Fences and
Windows'.
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