After leaving their own armed forces, these soldiers found themselves in low-paying jobs. So they agreed to risk injury or death in Iraq for $1,000 to $1,500 a month, ($5-$7 an hour) a good salary for them, but far below the $10,000-$15,000 monthly pay for American contract employees. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90000722
In addition:
“Official statistics show that more than 68,000 foreign-born military individuals are serving the U.S. How many of these individuals have relatives who do not have a legal right to be in the United States is not known. Figures from the National Center for Immigration Law show that one in ten U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq have been immigrants.
One estimate claims that five percent of those serving in the American military are illegal immigrants who joined with false papers. The military does not recruit illegal immigrants. Yet, given the shortages of volunteers, meeting quotas may put pressure to close some eyes. Illegal immigrants know that joining the military will help them and their families obtain legal papers in addition to other benefits.” http://www.alternet.org/story/61729/
Appreciate the irony of this:
With the well-paid help of troops recruited in poor countries (owing to the fact that Americans no longer support the war or want to serve its imperial purpose), Bush leads us to Armageddon in the Mideast while he personally prepares to bail when and if things get REALLY BAD as a result. And like sheep being led to slaughter, most Americans blindly allow all this to go down . . as they humbly pay through the nose for it. The result: Our national debt of $9 trillion keeps rising, the value of our houses plummet, foreclosures become commonplace, wages continue to stagnate, bridges collapse from lack of maintenance, and the economy begins to fall apart around us.
How and why might things get “really bad” in the course of the next few years?
Andrew Gould, CEO of the giant oil services firm Schlumberger recently explained:
“An accurate average available-oil decline rate is hard to estimate, but an overall figure of 8% per annum is not an unreasonable assumption.
An 8% yearly decline would cut global oil production by a whopping 50% in less than nine years. If a 5% cut in production caused prices to triple in the 1970s, what do you think a 50% cut is going to do?”
Other experts are predicting decline rates as high as 10% to 13%. Some geologists now believe 2005 was the last year of the cheap-oil bonanza, while many estimates coming out of the oil industry indicate "a seemingly unbridgeable supply/demand gap opening up after 2007," which will lead to major fuel shortages and increasingly severe blackouts beginning around 2008-2012. As we slide down the downslope slope of the global oil production curve, we may find ourselves slipping into what some scientists are already calling the coming "post industrial stone age." http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
Let’s face it: Civilization as we know it may well be coming to an end soon. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse bible prophecy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best paid, most widely-respected geologists, physicists, bankers, and investors in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by a phenomenon known as global "Peak Oil."
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