VLVL2 (15): REX 84

Fri May 21 06:21:43 CDT 2004

In data 19 May 2004, verso le 7:46, Dave Monroe si trovò a scrivere 
su VLVL2 (15): REX 84:

> There over 600 prison camps in the United States, all fully operational
> and ready to receive prisoners. They are all staffed and even
> surrounded by full-time guards, but they are all empty. These camps are
> to be operated by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) should
> Martial Law need to be implemented in the United States. 

This connects with this here li'l article by Ms Naomi Klein.

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'.

umberto rossi
___________________

		"A mulatto
		An albino
		A mosquito
		My libido"