- In 1968, the legendary US labour organiser 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!
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- Last week, George 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."
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- The echo was probably intentional. 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.
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- But the main purpose of the "Yes, American can"
bus tour, of course, was to shift the attention of US voters away from
the Iraq prison scandal towards the recovering job market. According to
a US labour department report, 288,000 jobs were created in April. Bush's
campaign has seized on these numbers to further cast John Kerry as the
dour New England pessimist, always droning on with bad news. 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 crowd in
Dubuque, Iowa.
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- Some jobs, however, are more responsive than others to
the power of positive presidential thinking. More than 82% of the jobs
created in April were in service industries, including restaurants and
retail. 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.
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- But not all of the job growth in the US has come from
burger-flipping and temping. With more than 2 million Americans behind
bars, the number of prison guards has exploded - from 270,317 in 2000 to
476,000 in 2002.
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- Watching 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.
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- 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 resumÈs of the soldiers facing abuse charges come straight out
of the April US labour department report.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- And 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 US 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.
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- Donald Rumsfeld? "Doing a superb job," according
to the optimist-in-chief. The mission in Iraq? "We're making progress,
you bet," Bush told reporters one year after his disastrous "mission
accomplished" speech. And the US job market, which has driven so many
into poverty? "Yes, America can!"
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- We don't yet know who taught these young soldiers how
to torture their prisoners. 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.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1218981,00.html
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