From Naomi Klein's article
Jobs down, thumbs up in the
Globe and Mail. She asks, who are the people directly involved in the torture at Abu Ghrayb, and why were they there:
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.
What is responsible?
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. 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 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.
This is not to say that they aren't responsible for their part in what they did.
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.
She goes on to mention the effects of the endless false optimism in American politics.