Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  Also, if you just look at the composition of the prison population, you’ll find that the crime-control policy that’s been developed is very finely honed to target select populations. So for example, what’s called the “War on Drugs,” which has very little to do with stopping the flow of drugs, has a lot to do with controlling the inner-city populations, and poor people in general. In fact, by now over half the prisoners in federal prisons are there on drug charges—and it’s largely for possession offenses, meaning victimless crimes, about a third just for marijuana. 34 Moreover, the “Drug War” specifically has been targeted on the black and Hispanic populations—that’s one of its most striking features. So for instance, the drug of choice in the ghetto happens to be crack cocaine, and you get huge mandatory sentences for it; the drug of choice in the white suburbs, like where I live, happens to be powder cocaine, and you don’t get anywhere near the same penalties for it. In fact, the sentence ratio for those drugs in the federal courts is 100 to 1. 35 Okay?

  And really there’s nothing particularly new about this kind of technique of population control. So if you look at the history of marijuana prohibitions in the United States, you’ll find that they began with legislation in the southwestern states which was aimed at Mexican immigrants who were coming in, who happened to use marijuana. Now, nobody had any reason to believe that marijuana was dangerous or anything like that—and obviously it doesn’t even come close to alcohol, let alone tobacco, in its negative consequences. But these laws were set up to try to control a population they were worried about. 36 In fact, if you look closely, even Prohibition had an element of this—it was part of an effort to control groups like Irish immigrants and so on. I mean, the Prohibition laws [which were part of the U.S. Constitution from 1919 to 1933] were intended to close down the saloons in New York City, not to stop the drinking in upper New York State. In Westchester County and places like that, everybody just continued on drinking exactly as before—but you didn’t want these immigrants to have saloons where they could get together and become dangerous in the urban centers, and so on. 37

  Well, what’s been going on with drugs in recent years is kind of an analog of that, but in the United States today it also happens to be race-related, for a number of reasons, so therefore it’s in large part aimed against black and Latino males. I mean, this is mainly a war against the superfluous population, which is the poor working class—but the race/class correlation is close enough in the inner cities that when you go after the poor working class, you’re mostly going after blacks. So you get these astonishing racial disparities in crime statistics, all across the board. 38 And the point is, the urban poor are kind of a useless population from the perspective of power, they don’t really contribute to profit-making, so as a result you want to get rid of them—and the criminal justice system is one of the best ways of doing it.

  So take a significant question you never hear asked despite this supposed “Drug War” which has been going on for years and years: how many bankers and chemical corporation executives are in prison in the United States for drug-related offenses? Well, there was recently an O.E.C.D. [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] study of the international drug racket, and they estimated that about a half-trillion dollars of drug money gets laundered internationally every year—more than half of it through American banks. I mean, everybody talks about Colombia as the center of drug-money laundering, but they’re a small player: they have about $10 billion going through, U.S. banks have about $260 billion. 39 Okay, that’s serious crime—it’s not like robbing a grocery store. So American bankers are laundering huge amounts of drug money, everybody knows it: how many bankers are in jail? None. But if a black kid gets caught with a joint, he goes to jail.

  And actually, it would be pretty easy to trace drug-money laundering if you were serious about it—because the Federal Reserve requires that banks give notification of all cash deposits made of over $10,000, which means that if enough effort were put into monitoring them, you could see where all the money’s flowing. Well, the Republicans deregulated in the 1980s—so now they don’t check. In fact, when George Bush was running the “Drug War” under Reagan, he actually canceled the one federal program for this which did exist, a project called “Operation Greenback.” It was a pretty tiny thing anyway, and the whole Reagan/Bush program was basically designed to let this go on—but as Reagan’s “Drug Czar,” Bush nevertheless canceled it. 40

  Or why not ask another question—how many U.S. chemical corporation executives are in jail? Well, in the 1980s, the C.I.A. was asked to do a study on chemical exports to Latin America, and what they estimated was that more than 90 percent of them are not being used for industrial production at all—and if you look at the kinds of chemicals they are, it’s obvious that what they’re really being used for is drug production. 41 Okay, how many chemical corporation executives are in jail in the United States? Again, none—because social policy is not directed against the rich, it’s directed against the poor.

  Actually, recently there’ve been some very interesting studies of urban police behavior done at George Washington University, by a rather well-known criminologist named William Chambliss. For the last couple years he’s been running projects in cooperation with the Washington D.C. police, in which he has law students and sociology students ride with the police in their patrol cars to take transcripts of what happens. I mean, you’ve got to read this stuff: it is all targeted against the black and Hispanic populations, almost entirely. And they are not treated like a criminal population, because criminals have Constitutional rights—they’re treated like a population under military occupation. So the effective laws are, the police go to somebody’s house, they smash in the door, they beat the people up, they grab some kid they want, and they throw him in jail. And the police aren’t doing it because they’re all bad people, you know—that’s what they’re being told to do. 42

  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

  MAN: 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?

  MAN: Yeah.

  Who wants them—the people in the slums?

  MAN: Well, the mayor ran his election campaign on this; it’s a pilot proje
ct in California. 45

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

  MAN: 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.

  WOMAN: 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.