Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (79 page)

Well, part of the Contract With America was to increase all of this. They weren’t satisfied with the 1994 Crime Bill—and the reason is, the original 1994 Crime Bill still allowed for things like Pell Grants for people in prison [i.e. college subsidies available to capable, low-income students], which are a very small expense. See, most of the people who are in jail have never completed high school, and Pell Grants help give them some degree of education. Alright, there are many studies of this, and it’s turned out that the effect of Pell Grants is to cut back on recidivism, to cut back violence. But for people like the Gingrich Republicans, that doesn’t make any sense—they
want
people in jail, and they want violence, so they’re going to cut out small expenses like that so that we can have even more people thrown into jail.
  ⁴³

Also, all of this “crime control” spending is another huge taxpayer stimulus to the economy—mainly to parts of the construction industry, and to lawyers, and other professionals. Well, that’s another very useful way to force the public to keep paying off the rich—and by now “crime control” spending is approaching the Pentagon budget in scale; it’s still not quite as favored as the Pentagon, because the spending’s not as sharply skewed towards the wealthy, but nevertheless it’s useful.
  ⁴⁴
And as the society keeps taking on more and more Third World-type characteristics, we should certainly expect that the repression will continue—and that it will continue to be funded and extended, through the Contract With America or whatever other technique they can come up with.

Violence and Repression

M
AN
: Dr. Chomsky, around where I work out in Fresno, California, the local government has instituted a policy where they have three S.W.A.T. teams roving the streets with rifles, to reduce the level of violence. My question for you is, as an organizer, how can one deal with the fact that this is what the people really want?

What is what the people really want? They want S.W.A.T. teams?

M
AN
: Yeah
.

Who wants them—the people in the slums?

M
AN
: Well, the mayor ran his election campaign on this; it’s a pilot project in California
.
  ⁴⁵

And who voted for him—the people in the slums?

M
AN
: I don’t really know
…

Well, there are a couple of points to be made. First of all, I don’t know Fresno specifically, but the way it usually works is, voting in the United States is a very skewed affair: the wealthy have a huge amount of clout, largely because of business propaganda, but also through a whole range of other methods, including things like gerrymandering. So that’s one point.

But another thing is, this whole bit about “combating violence” is something you’ve really got to look at more closely. So I don’t know the particular area you’re talking about very well, but the fact is, a large portion of the country’s population is being dismissed as superfluous because they do not play a role in profit-making—and those people are increasingly being cooped up in concentration camps, which we happen to call “slums.” Now, it’s true that internal to those concentration camps there’s a lot of violence—but that’s kind of like violence internal to a family or something: wealthier sectors are pretty well insulated from it.
  ⁴⁶

So take me: I live in a mostly lily-white, very liberal professional suburb just outside Boston, called Lexington. And we have our own police force, which is mostly for finding stray cats and things like that. Except for one thing: it’s also a Border Patrol. I mean, nobody there will tell you this, but if you want to find it out, just get some black friend of yours to drive a broken-down car into Lexington and watch how many seconds it takes before he’s out.

Well, that’s how the panic about combating violence tends to play out. But if you actually look at the
facts
about the general level of violence in the U.S., there’s really no evidence that it’s increased over the past twenty years—in fact, the statistics say it’s actually decreased.
  ⁴⁷
Furthermore, contrary to what a lot of people believe, crime rates in the United States are not all that high relative to other countries—if you look at other developed countries, like Australia and France and so on, U.S. crime rates are sort of at the high end, but not off the spectrum. In fact, about the only category in which U.S. crime rates are way off the map is homicides with guns—but that’s because of crazy gun-control laws here, it doesn’t particularly have to do with “crime.”
  ⁴⁸

Now, the popular
perception
certainly is that violence is greater today—but that’s mostly propaganda: that’s just a part of the whole effort to make people frightened, so that they’ll abandon their rights. And of course, it all has a real racist undertone to it, there are little code words that are used, “Willie Horton” kinds of things, to try to get everyone to think there’s some black man out there trying to rape their daughter. [Horton was a black prisoner who raped a white woman while on furlough from prison; his image was used by the Republicans in T.V. ads to portray the Democrats as “soft on crime.”] Yeah, that’s the kind of image you want to convey if your goal is to keep people divided and calling for more repression in the society. And the success of it all in the last few years has been very dramatic.

In fact, the perception of more violence is rather like what’s happened in the case of welfare: people’s
image
is that welfare has gone way up, but the reality is, it’s gone way, way down.
  ⁴⁹
So I don’t know if you’ve looked at the polls on this, but people’s attitudes are really quite striking. For example, when you ask them, “Do you think we’re spending too much on welfare or too little?,” 44 percent say we’re spending too much, and 23 percent say we’re spending too little. But if you take exactly the same question and you just replace the word “welfare” with “assistance to the poor”—so now you’re saying, “Are we giving too much or too little assistance to the poor?”—the numbers change radically: 13 percent say it’s too much, and 64 percent say it’s too little.
  ⁵⁰
Alright, that’s kind of funny: what’s welfare? It’s assistance to the poor. So how come you get this strange result? Because people have bought the racist line. The image they have of “welfare” is black mothers driving Cadillacs past some poor white guy who’s working: Reaganite propaganda. And I think it’s pretty much the same kind of story with the perception of more violence.

Look: the public relations industry doesn’t spend billions of dollars just for the fun of it.
  ⁵¹
They do it for reasons, and those reasons are to instill certain imagery, and to impose certain means of social control. And one of the best means of controlling people has always been induced fear: for Hitler it was Jews and homosexuals and Gypsies; here it’s blacks.

So yes, there
is
violence—but it’s mostly the kind of violence that results from being cooped up in concentration camps. I mean, if you look at Hitler’s concentration camps during World War II, there was also internal violence. That happens: if people are sufficiently deprived, they’ll turn on one another. But when you say that people in California want S.W.A.T. teams, I doubt that the people in the concentration camps do—because those S.W.A.T. teams are at war with them. It’s just that those people typically are not a part of the “public” that actually decides on things in the United States; more powerful elements do. And they decide the way they do for the same reason the liberals out in Lexington want a Border Patrol, although they won’t say so of course: because you want to confine the violence somewhere else, so your own family won’t be affected.

Like, take Cobb County, Georgia, the rich suburb outside Atlanta that’s Newt Gingrich’s district—which gets more federal subsidies than any suburban county in the United States, incidentally, despite its leader’s calls to “get government off our backs” (only Arlington, Virginia, the home of the Pentagon, and Brevard County, Florida, where the Kennedy Space Center is, get more). Well, in Cobb County, I’m sure they’re also very afraid of violence and want S.W.A.T. teams to insulate them from any urban infection that might make its way out from downtown Atlanta.
  ⁵²
Sure, and it’s the same thing all over the place. So I suspect that’s probably what you’re seeing in Fresno as well.

Now, if you
really
want to talk about violence, there’s plenty of it—but not the kind you’re talking about. For example, take the biggest killer of them all: tobacco. Compared with tobacco, hard drugs don’t even
exist
. Deaths from tobacco
far
outweigh deaths from all hard drugs combined, probably by a factor of more than a hundred.
  ⁵³
Do you see Jesse Helms in jail? I mean, there used to be a House Committee that regulated among other things the tobacco industry—it’s gone now, because it was flat taken over by a tobacco company—but in its last meeting, its members released a study that made it to the back pages of the newspapers, and was very interesting. It turned out that the data that everybody had been using for the last couple years on the effects of passive smoking [i.e. breathing of smoke from other people’s cigarettes] were coming from tobacco-industry studies—and they were faked. People re-did the studies and found that they were a total fraud, they made the problem look far less significant.
  ⁵⁴
Alright, that means these tobacco-industry executives and their U.S. government puppets have been killing thousands and thousands of people—they’re killing young children, say, whose mothers are smoking. Are they in jail? Why isn’t that violence?

In fact, right now U.S. state power is being used to force Asian countries to open their markets to advertising for American tobacco. For instance, we’re telling China, “You don’t allow us to advertise tobacco to the emerging markets of women and youth, and we’ll close off your exports”—so then they just have to do it. Alright, recently there was a study done at Oxford University which estimated that of the kids under 20 alive today in China, about fifty million of them are going to die from tobacco-related diseases.
  ⁵⁶
Killing fifty million people is fairly impressive, even by twentieth-century standards—why isn’t that “violence”? That’s the violence of the American state working for the interests of American tobacco manufacturers. You wouldn’t need S.W.A.T. teams to go after that kind of violence, you’d just need to apply laws. The trouble is, it’s the rich and the powerful who enforce the laws, and they don’t want to apply them to themselves.

W
OMAN
: Noam, you just mentioned that Gingrich’s county in Georgia is one of the leading recipients of federal government subsidies—I was wondering, why didn’t the Democrats make that an issue during the 1994 elections? I’ve never heard it before, but you’d have thought that would be a very strong tactic for them to use at the time, given the Gingrich group’s campaign strategy?

That’s an interesting side-light to the ’94 election story, isn’t it—the absolute silence of the Democrats about that? I mean, during the whole campaign, Newt Gingrich was just slaughtering them with the line that they’re always pushing the “welfare state” and the “nanny state” and all this government spending all the time—but no one in the press or in the political system ever once made the obvious rejoinder that would have wiped him out in three minutes: that
Newt Gingrich
is the leading advocate of the welfare state in the entire country. I mean, that would have been the end of the entire discussion—but the Democrats never even raised a peep. Like, nobody raised the fact that the largest employer in Cobb County is the Lockheed corporation [an armaments contractor], a publicly-subsidized/private-profit corporation that wouldn’t
exist
except for taxpayer subsidies. Or nobody pointed out that 72 percent of the jobs in Cobb County are white-collar jobs in industries like electronics and computers—which are all very carefully tended by the “nanny state,” and in fact wouldn’t be around in the first place if it hadn’t been for massive public subsidies through the military system for decades.
  ⁵⁶

And I think the reason for that lack of comment is pretty obvious, actually. I think the reason is that class interests overpower narrow political interests, and there’s a real and very important class interest, shared right across the board in the United States, that the rich always must be protected from market discipline by a very powerful welfare state—that simply can’t be called into question at all. I mean, the
poor can
be subjected to the market—that’s perfectly fine. But not the rich: they need constant subsidies and protection, like they get in Cobb County.

Well, you can’t say any of that
publicly
, of course, because then people might start to get the idea—and that would be very dangerous. So therefore, even if they get smashed in the elections, the Democrats still won’t tell you the truth: that Newt Gingrich is the leading advocate of the “nanny state,” and that what he wants is a big, powerful, interventionist government that will keep providing the rich with constant economic subsidy and protection. The 1994 elections were a perfect illustration of the point—and again, it’s another sign of the kind of democracy we really have in the United States that nobody even mentioned it.

International Capital: the New Imperial Age