Abu Ghraib and the Bush economy

[eridani]

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

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.
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.

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.

[izzie]

1. What is going on is very odd.

I guess we will be like those poor Asian Countries and ship our workers in to country to run them as we do in SA. We do the higher jobs along with Indians and other poor countries sweep streets and become maids. I am sure as Americans we are looking for ward to that.Nice, we will all work. Then we pay some one 20 million to run our phone co.and tell the workers to do twice the work if he wants a job.