Freedom Isn't Free: The Hidden Cost of America's Regime

From a young age, children in the USA are taught to be proud to be an American. Anthems are sung, pledges recited, star spangled banners raised to flap in the wind above the home of the brave. Thousands of bumpers boast yellow ribbons and stickers, calling out that they support our troops, proudly sporting the red, white, and blue symbolizing our freedom. Rarely, if ever, do we stop and consider the price we have paid - and continue to pay - to maintain what we consider "our God-given rights."

Our freedom comes at a cost. The cost is to humanity, as wage-slave and sweatshop laborers toil worldwide to provide the clothes on our backs and the food on our plates. The cost is to terrorism, as the United States makes continual attacks weaker countries that may have something worth taking. The cost is to environment, as our gasoline and electric plants steadily destroy our air, our earth, and our water. And the cost includes our own freedom, as a tangled web of deception unravels to hide our shameful deeds.

About 250 million children under the age of 14 labor in sweatshops worldwide, many of them in terrible conditions (James, par. 1). America's consumerist economy is built on the backs of these children. Hundreds of main-stream businesses in the USA rely on sweatshop products for their inventory, selling made-in-China toys, games, clothing, and electronics. The workers, many of them children, work long hours and into the night for miniscule wages; one veteran compliance manager estimates that workers in the garment, electronics and export factories work more than 80 hours a week, for only 42 cents an hour (Dexter, par. 4). Attempting to hide these atrocities, the percentage of Chinese suppliers contributing false payroll records has risen from 46% to 75% in the past five years (par. 4). Big corporations in the US, desperate to keep prices "cheap at any cost," are only too willing to turn a blind eye.