by Noam Chomsky
And the growing hunger here isn’t just among children—it’s also been increasing among the elderly, to name one group. So as the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out in a front-page story, hunger is “surging” among the elderly: about five million older Americans, about 16 percent of the population over 60, are going hungry, they’re malnourished, many of them are literally starving to death. 11 Now, in the United States we don’t have starvation the way they do in Haiti or Nicaragua or something—but the deprivation is still very real. In many places it’s probably worse than it is in Cuba, say, under the embargo.
So just take Boston, for example, where I live—which is a very rich city, and also maybe the world’s leading medical center. There are some very fancy hospitals there, but there’s also a City Hospital, which serves the rest of the population. Well, that hospital, which is not a bad hospital I should say, established a malnutrition clinic a few years ago—because after the impact of the Reaganite economic policies began to be felt, they were starting to find Third World levels of malnutrition in Boston. And it gets worse over the winter, because then families have to make the choice: do you let your kids starve, or do you let them die of the cold? Okay? That’s in one of the richest cities in the world, a major medical center. That’s just criminal in a country as rich as this—or anywhere, for that matter. 12
And it’s not just hunger: it turns out that contact time between parents and children has declined by about 40 percent in the United States since the 1960s—that means that on average, parents and children have to spend about 10 or 12 hours less time together a week. 13 Alright, the effects of that also are obvious: it means television as supervision, latch-key kids, more violence by children and against children, drug abuse—it’s all perfectly predictable. And this is mostly the result of the fact that today, both parents in a family have to put in 50- or 60-hour work-weeks, with no child-support system around to help them (unlike in other countries), just to make ends meet. 14 And remember, this is in the 1990s, a period when, as Fortune magazine just pointed out, corporate profits are at a record high, and the percentage of corporate income going into payrolls is near a record low—that’s the context in which all of this has been happening. 15
Well, none of these things are discussed in the New York Times Book Review article either. They are discussed in the U.N.I.C.E.F. book I mentioned, but the Times chose not to review that one.
So to return to your question, you ask: what would have to happen for us to get social policies different from all of these? I don’t think there’s any reason why the “Anglo-American model” Hewlett identifies has to continue—and be extended by things like the Contract With America [a Republican Congressional policy platform launched in 1994] and the Welfare Reform Act [the “Federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act,” which President Clinton signed in August 1996]. These aren’t laws of nature, after all; they’re social-policy decisions—they can be made differently. There’s a lot of space for changing these things, even in a society with the same corporate control as ours.
But why not ask another question. Why not ask why absolutist organizations have any right to exist in the first place? I mean, why should a corporation—technically a fascist organization of enormous power—have any right to tell you what kind of work you’re going to do? Why is that any better than having a king tell you what kind of work you’re going to do? People fought against that and overthrew it, and we can fight against it again and overthrow it.
There’s plenty of challenging, gratifying, interesting, productive work around for people to do, and there are plenty of people who want to do it—they simply aren’t being allowed that opportunity under the current economic system. Of course, there’s also plenty of junky work that has to get done too—but in a reasonable society, that work would just be distributed equally among everybody capable of doing it. If you can’t get robots to do it, fine, then you just distribute it equally. 16
Okay, I think that’s the kind of model we have to try to work towards now—and frankly, I don’t see any reason why that’s an impossible goal.
WOMAN: Mr. Chomsky, I just wanted to say that I saw the New York Times review you were discussing, and I was absolutely appalled by it. If I was a black man in this country, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself—it would just be a burning fire inside, I would feel such rage.
How about if you were a black woman? That article took seriously the idea that black women don’t nurture their children—because they evolved in Africa, where the environment was such-and-such. It was pure racism, something straight out of the Nazis.
But look: it’s really not even worth talking about it. The right way to respond is just to ask, what are they doing it for? And they’re doing it for a very simple reason. 30 million people in the country go hungry. 40 percent of the children in New York City, most of them black and Hispanic, live below the poverty line—which means they’re destroyed, okay? And that is the result of very definite social policies that these people are supporting. Well, you want to keep making all your money, but you don’t want to face any of the rest of it, so you need some kind of a cover. And what’s the cover? “Bad genes.” Okay, once you understand what’s really motivating all of this, then at least you’re in a position to deal with it.
The point is, just as it was proper at some point for the Nazis to say, “Jews are a virus that’s destroying our society,” it is now proper for the New York Times to run articles taking seriously the idea that black mothers don’t nurture their children, and for the mainstream intellectual culture to pretend that these farcical books on I.Q. have any kind of scientific legitimacy. 17
But these are such transparent ideological weapons we shouldn’t even waste our time arguing about them. We should just understand them transparently for what they are: the product of a real commissar culture that is dedicated to obscuring the most elementary truths about the world, and rich, powerful people trying to justify the fact that they are pursuing social policies which are forcing children to die. It’s understandable why nobody would want to face that—but it’s also clear how we can change it.
Welfare: the Pea and the Mountain
WOMAN: You mentioned the “Contract With America” and the “Welfare Reform Act” [which replaced the Aid for Families With Dependent Children program, ending receipt of public assistance benefits by families that include an adult who has received welfare for five years, and requiring all “able-bodied” adult recipients to secure a job within two years]. I’m wondering, how do you explain the surge to the right in Washington over the past several years, beginning with the Republicans’ big Congressional triumph in 1994? And what do you think is the real point of these new programs?
Well, let me just begin with the 1994 elections, and the so-called “Contract With America.” You’re right that in the media that whole election was called a “landslide for conservatism” and a “political earthquake” and so on—but you really have to look at that kind of rhetoric a lot more carefully. There was an interesting fact about the Republicans’ agenda, the so-called “Contract With America”—that is, only a very small number of voters even knew what it was, and when people were asked about most of its specific provisions, big majorities opposed it. So there was never really a vote on it, nobody knew what it was. And even after months of intensive and unremitting propaganda about it, less than half of the U.S. population said they had even heard of the Contract With America. 18 And it wasn’t hidden, it was in the headlines every day. That’s the “landslide for conservatism.” And that’s just a way of saying that democracy has collapsed.
As far as what it’s been about, that couldn’t be more obvious: it’s standard free-market doctrine—huge state-subsidies for the rich, cut out everything for the poor. Very brazen. So just take a look at some of the specific provisions. For example, they had one section in the “Contract” called the “Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act”—the things under it were, subsid
ies to business, tax cuts to business, and then there was one little line at the bottom which said that the “program to increase wages and create jobs” will be to eliminate “unfunded mandates,” which are one of the main mechanisms to ensure that States do things like provide social programs, set regulatory standards, and so on [i.e. the “mandates” are imposed on state and local governments by Congress]. 19 Okay, that’s the program to “raise wages and create jobs”—and that’s kind of like a symbol for the whole thing.
The main target that they’ve gone after, both Clinton and Congress, is what’s called “welfare”—meaning that tiny component of welfare that goes to poorer people, which is approximately the size of a pea on a mountain. Meanwhile, they continue to enhance the real welfare—that is, the mountain of welfare that goes to richer people. And they’re continuing to enhance it in the traditional two ways: first, by straight handouts to business; and second, through regressive fiscal measures [i.e. ones having a greater adverse impact on those with less money].
So first take the straight handouts part, which is the bulk of welfare. The straight handouts part is things like military spending, for example. Now, the United States isn’t defending itself from anybody—that’s not even a joke. We have almost half the military spending in the world, and who’s attacking us? 20 The United States hasn’t been attacked since the War of 1812—there is no country in the world that has as limited security threats as we do. 21 But we are defending rich people, that’s true—the rich are defending themselves against the poor and the poor are paying for it, so for that, it’s true, you have to keep increasing military spending. In fact, that’s the main reason we have the Pentagon system in the first place: it’s a vehicle to channel hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the wealthy, through military contracts and technology research and so on.
Look, the Pentagon’s never really been about defense: the Pentagon is about the fact that rich people can have their own computers, after decades of development paid for by the public through the state-sector—and it’s about the fact that I.B.M. and other private corporations and investors are making huge profits off them. Or it’s about the fact that the biggest civilian exporter in the country is the Boeing corporation, and the biggest single industry in the world, tourism, is founded largely on technology that was developed through the American military system—namely, airplanes—and that it’s been pouring huge sums of money into sectors of the American economy for decades. 22 Well, the Clinton administration and Congress have increased all of those subsidies—in fact, Clinton’s military budget is well above the Cold War average—and the Contract With America programs include plenty of other forms of direct handouts and subsidies to the wealthy as well. 23
The second kind of welfare payment that’s being extended is regressive fiscal measures—which are just another way of disguising welfare to the rich. So for example, if you increase tax deductions for business expenses, let’s say, that is the exact financial equivalent of giving out a welfare check. I mean, suppose there’s a mother with six kids and no job, and she gets a hundred-dollar check—okay, that’s welfare. Now suppose it’s me, somebody who’s rich, and I get a hundred dollars of tax relief because I have a home mortgage: it’s the same government payment. I mean, one of them is a direct sum of money and the other is hidden in regressive fiscal measures, but from an economic standpoint, they’re exactly the same thing—like, it would come out exactly the same if they gave me the hundred dollars and took a hundred dollars off her taxes.
Well, if you take a look at all of the welfare that goes to the rich through regressive fiscal measures like these, it is absolutely huge. Take tax write-offs for charitable contributions: almost all of that goes to the rich, it’s a way for them to cut down on their taxes—which means it’s a subsidy, exactly the equivalent of a welfare check. Or take tax deductions for home mortgages: about 80 percent of that welfare goes to people with incomes of over $50,000 a year, and the deductions get disproportionately greater the higher your income—like, if you have a million-dollar home, you get a much bigger write-off than if you have a two hundred thousand-dollar home or something. 24 Or just look at income-tax deductions for business expenses: that is a massive welfare program, and it all goes to the rich. So there’s a book by a Canadian writer, Linda McQuaig, which estimates that the tax loss in Canada for what are called “business entertainment deductions”—like taking your friends out to hundred-dollar seats at the baseball game, and to fancy dinners and all that kind of stuff—is not far below what would be needed to give daycare to 750,000 Canadian kids who now can’t get it. 25 And remember, Canada’s a far smaller country than the United States is, far smaller. Well, those are all welfare handouts too—and what’s happening is they’re being increased, while at the same time anything that might help poor people is being cut back.
It’s striking to see the way they’re doing it, actually. For instance, they decided not to go after Medicare for now—they probably will sooner or later, but for now they’re not. And the reason is, rich people get Medicare. But they are going after Medicaid right away, because that only goes to poor people [Medicare is a federal health insurance program for the elderly and disabled, and Medicaid is a federally-funded health care program for those with low incomes]. In fact, there were three big programs that they intended to go after right from the time of the ’94 election: one was Medicaid, one was Aid for Families with Dependent Children, and the third was Food Stamps. Well, Food Stamps quickly got kicked off the list. You know why? Because there’s a big agri-business lobby behind it. See, Food Stamps does happen to feed poor people, but it’s also a major handout to high-tech commercial agriculture and big commerce, so those interests immediately started to lobby for it—because they want it. So that was taken off the list. 26
What about Aid for Families with Dependent Children? Well, for one thing, it’s dropped very sharply since 1970, even without “Welfare Reform.” I mean, compared to 1970, maximum A.F.D.C. benefits for an average family had fallen by about 40 percent in real terms by 1995. 27 In fact, we always hear in the media and from politicians how there’s so much welfare for the poor in the United States, but the reality is that the United States is completely off the international spectrum in this respect—we give far less than any other industrialized country. 28
Well, A.F.D.C. still has around nine million young children on it; these guys want to take five million of them off. Alright, those are children—average age: seven. 29 And if you just look at the families who are receiving welfare under the program, what you find is that a substantial number of the mothers are young women who’ve been raped, or abused, or never had any educational opportunities, and so on. Well, under the current dogmas, their children, seven-year-old children, they have to be taught “fiscal responsibility”—but not Newt Gingrich’s constituents. They have to keep being funded by the public. 30
So Bill Clinton and all these others are talking about “welfare reform” these days—but no one’s suggesting that we put executives to work: they’re going to keep getting welfare, it’s only poor mothers who are supposed to be forced into “work obligations” [i.e. parents must obtain jobs or lose benefits after receiving welfare for a specified period]. It’s these seven-year-old kids who now have to be forced to internalize our values: that there are no human rights, they don’t exist, the only human rights people have are what they can gain for themselves on the labor market. And the way they’re going to be forced to learn those lessons is by driving their mothers to work—instead of all this non-work like raising children. I mean, it’s astonishing the sexism that has been so institutionalized in the culture that people just accept the idea that raising children isn’t “work”—“work” is things like speculating in financial markets. Child-care’s just taken for granted, it’s supposed to come free because you don’t get a paycheck for it.
Crime Control and “Superfluous” People
The other thing the Clinton “New” Democrats and G
ingrich Republicans both want is to build up crime control—and there’s a very simple reason for that: you’ve got a big superfluous population you aren’t letting survive in your system, what are you going to do with them? Answer: you lock them up. So in Reagan America, the jail population in the U.S. more than tripled—tripled—and it’s been going up very fast ever since. 31 In the mid-1980s, the United States passed its main competitors in per capita prison population: South Africa and Russia (though now that Russia’s learned our values, they’ve caught up with us again). So by this point, well over a million and a half people are in prison in the United States—it’s by far the highest per capita prison population of the Western countries—and it’s going to go way up now, because the 1994 Crime Bill was extremely harsh. 32 Furthermore, the prisons in the United States are so inhuman by this point that they are being condemned by international human rights organizations as literally imposing torture. 33 And these people all want to increase that—they’re statist reactionaries, remember: what they really want is a very powerful and violent state, contrary to what they might say.