by Noam Chomsky
The official stand of the Clinton administration is that Cuba is a national security threat to the US, so that the WTO is an improper forum: “bipartisan policy since the early 1960s [is] based on the notion that we have a hostile and unfriendly regime 90 miles from our border, and that anything done to strengthen that regime will only encourage the regime to not only continue its hostility but, through much of its tenure, to try to destabilize large parts of Latin America.”87 That stand was criticized by historian Arthur Schlesinger, writing “as one involved in the Kennedy administration’s Cuban policy.” The Clinton administration, he maintained, had misunderstood the reasons for the sanctions. The Kennedy administration’s concern had been Cuba’s “troublemaking in the hemisphere” and “the Soviet connection,” but these are now behind us, so the policies are an anachronism.88
In secret, Schlesinger had explained the meaning of the phrase “troublemaking in the hemisphere”—in Clintonite terms, trying to “destabilize” Latin America. Reporting to incoming president Kennedy on the conclusions of a Latin American Mission in early 1961, he described the Cuban threat as “the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one ‘s own hands,” a serious problem, he added later, when “the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes” throughout Latin America, and “the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living.” Schlesinger also explained the threat of the “Soviet connection”: “Meanwhile, the Soviet Union hovers in the wings, flourishing large development loans and presenting itself as the model for achieving modernization in a single generation.”89
The US officially recognizes that “deliberate impeding of the delivery of food and medical supplies” to civilian populations constitutes a “violation of international humanitarian law,” and “reaffirms that those who commit or order the commission of such acts will be held individually responsible in respect of such acts.”90 The reference is to Bosnia-Herzegovina. The president of the United States is plainly “individually responsible” for such “violations of international humanitarian law.” Or would be, were it not for the “general tacit agreements” about selective enforcement, which reign with such absolute power among Western relativists that the simple facts are virtually undetectable.
Unlike such crimes as these, the regular administration contortions on human rights in China are a topic of debate. It is worth noting, however, that many critical issues are scarcely even raised: crucially, the horrifying conditions of working people, with hundreds, mostly women, burned to death, locked into factories; over 18,000 deaths from industrial accidents in 1995, according to Chinese government figures; and other gross violations of international conventions.91 China’s labor practices have been condemned, but narrowly: the use of prison labor for exports to the US. At the peak of the US-China confrontation over human rights, front-page stories reported that Washington’s human rights campaign had met with some success: China had “agreed to a demand to allow more visits by American customs inspectors to Chinese prison factories to make sure they are not producing goods for export to the United States,” also accepting US demands for “liberalization” and laws that are “critical elements of a market economy,” all welcome steps towards a “virtuous circle.”92
The conditions of “free labor” do not arise in this context. They are, however, causing other problems: “Chinese officials and analysts” say that the doubling of industrial deaths in 1992 and “abysmal working conditions,” “combined with long hours, inadequate pay, and even physical beatings, are stirring unprecedented labor unrest among China’s booming foreign joint ventures.” These “tensions reveal the great gap between competitive foreign capitalists lured by cheap Chinese labor and workers weaned on socialist job security and the safety net of cradle-to-grave benefits.” Workers do not yet understand that as they enter the free world, they are to be “beaten for producing poor quality goods, fired for dozing on the job during long work hours” and other such misdeeds, and locked into their factories to be burned to death. But apparently the West understands, so China is not called to account for violations of labor rights; only for exporting prison products to the United States.
The distinction is easy to explain. Prison factories are state-owned industry, and exports to the US interfere with profits, unlike the beating and murder of working people and other means to improve the balance sheet. The operative principles are clarified by the fact that the rules allow the United States to export prison goods. As China was submitting to US discipline on export of prison-made goods to the US, California and Oregon were exporting prison-made clothing to Asia, including specialty jeans, shirts, and a line of shorts quaintly called “Prison Blues.” The prisoners earn far less than the minimum wage and work under “slave labor” conditions, prison rights activists allege. But their production does not interfere with the rights that count (in fact, enhances them in many ways, as noted). So objection would be out of place.93
As the most powerful state, the US makes its own laws, using force and conducting economic warfare at will. It also threatens sanctions against countries that do not abide by its conveniently flexible notions of “free trade.” Washington has employed such threats with great effectiveness (and GATT approval) to force open Asian markets for US tobacco exports and advertising, aimed primarily at the growing markets of women and children. The US Agriculture Department has provided grants to tobacco firms to promote smoking overseas. Asian countries have attempted to conduct educational anti-smoking campaigns, but they are overwhelmed by the miracles of the market, reinforced by US state power through the sanctions threat. Philip Morris, with an advertising and promotion budget of close to $9 billion in 1992, became China’s largest advertiser. The effect of Reaganite sanction threats was to increase advertising and promotion of cigarette smoking (particularly US brands) quite sharply in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, along with the use of these lethal substances. In South Korea, for example, the rate of growth in smoking more than tripled when markets for US lethal drugs were forced open in 1988. The Bush administration extended the threats to Thailand in 1989, at exactly the same moment that its “war on drugs” was prominently declared; the media were kind enough to overlook the coincidence, even ignoring the outraged denunciations by the very conservative Surgeon-General C. Everett Koop. Oxford University epidemiologist Richard Peto estimated that among Chinese children under 20 today, 50 million will die of cigarette-related diseases, an achievement that ranks high even by 20th-century standards.94
While state power energetically promotes substance abuse in the interests of agribusiness, it adopts highly selective measures in other cases. In the context of “the war against drugs,” the US has played an active role in the vast atrocities conducted by the security forces and their paramilitary associates in Colombia, the leading human rights violator in Latin America and the leading recipient of US aid and training, increasing under Clinton, consistent with traditional practice noted earlier. The war against drugs is “a myth,” Amnesty International reports, agreeing with other investigators. Security forces work closely with narcotraffickers and landlords while targeting the usual victims, including community leaders, human rights and health workers, union activists, students, and the political opposition, but primarily peasants, in a country where protest has been criminalized. AI reports that “almost every Colombian military unit that Amnesty implicated in murdering civilians two years ago was doing so with US-supplied weapons,” which they continue to receive, along with training.95
Other International Covenants
The UD calls on all states to promote the rights and freedoms proclaimed and to act “to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance” by various means, including ratification of treaties and enabling legislation. There are several such International Covenants, respected in much the manner of the UD. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted b
y the UN in December 1989, has been ratified by all countries other than the US and Somalia (which has no government). After long delay, the US did endorse the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), “the leading treaty for the protection” of the subcategory of rights that the West claims to uphold, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) observe in their report on continued US non-compliance with its provisions. The Bush administration ensured that the treaty would be inoperative, first, “through a series of reservations, declarations, and understandings” to eliminate provisions that might expand rights, and second, by declaring the US in full compliance with the remaining provisions. The treaty is “non-self-executing” and is accompanied by no enabling legislation, so it cannot be invoked in US courts. Ratification was “an empty act for Americans,” the HRW/ACLU report concludes.96
The exceptions are crucial, because the US violates the treaty “in important respects,” the report continues.97 To cite one example, the US entered a specific reservation to Article 7 of the ICCPR, which states that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” The reason is that conditions in US prisons violate these conditions as generally understood, just as they seriously violate the provisions of Article 10 on humane treatment of prisoners and on the right to “reformation and social rehabilitation,” which the US rejects. Another US reservation concerns the death penalty, which is not only employed far more freely than the norm but also is “applied in a manner that is racially discriminatory,” the HRW/ACLU report concludes, as have other studies. Furthermore, “more juvenile offenders sit on death row in the United States than in any other country in the world,” HRW reports.98 A UN Human Rights inquiry found the US to be in violation of the Covenant for execution of juveniles (who committed the crimes before they were 18); the US is joined in this practice only by Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Executions are rare in the industrial democracies, declining around the world, and rising in the US, even among juveniles, the mentally impaired, and women, the UN report observes.99
The US accepted the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, but the Senate imposed restrictions, in part to protect a Supreme Court ruling allowing corporal punishment in schools.100
HRW also regards “disproportionate” and “cruelly excessive” sentencing procedures as a violation of Article 5 of the UD, which proscribes “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” The specific reference is to laws that treat “possession of an ounce of cocaine or a $20 ‘street sale’ [as] a more dangerous or serious offense than the rape of a 10-year-old, the burning of a building occupied by people, or the killing of another human being while intending to cause him serious injury” (quoting a federal judge). From the onset of Reaganite “neoliberalism,” the rate of incarceration, which had been fairly stable through the post-war period, has skyrocketed, almost tripling during the Reagan years and continuing the sharp rise since, long ago leaving other industrial societies far behind. Eighty-four percent of the increase of admissions is for nonviolent offenders, mostly drug-related (including possession). Drug offenders constituted 22 percent of admissions in federal prisons in 1980, 42 percent in 1990, and 58 percent in 1992. The US apparently leads the world in imprisoning its population (perhaps sharing the distinction with Russia or China, where data are uncertain). By the end of 1996, the prison population had reached a record 1.2 million, increasing 5 percent over the preceding year, with the federal prison system 25 percent over capacity and state prisons almost the same. Meanwhile crime rates continued to decline.101
By 1998, close to 1.7 million were in federal and state prisons, or local jails. Average sentences for murder and other violent crimes have decreased markedly, while those for drug offenses have shot up, targeting primarily African-Americans and creating what two criminologists call “the new American apartheid.”102
US crime rates, while high, are not out of the range of industrial societies, apart from homicides with guns, a reflection of the US gun culture. Fear of crime, however, is very high and increasing, in large part a “product of a variety of factors that have little or nothing to do with crime itself,” the National Criminal Justice Commission concludes (as do other studies). The factors include media practices and “the role of government and private industry in stoking citizen fear.” The focus is very specific: for example, drug users in the ghetto but not criminals in executive suites, though the Justice Department estimates the cost of corporate crime as 7 to 25 times as high as street crime. Work-related deaths are 6 times has high as homicides, and pollution also takes a far higher toll than homicide.103
Expert studies have regularly concluded that “there is no direct relation between the level of crime and the number of imprisonments” (European Council Commission). Many criminologists have pointed out further that while “crime control” has limited relation to crime, it has a great deal to do with control of the “dangerous classes”; today, those cast aside by the socioeconomic model designed to globalize the sharply two-tiered structural model of Third World societies. As noted at once, the latest “war on drugs” was timed to target mostly black males; trend lines on substance use sufficed to demonstrate that. By adopting these measures, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, “we are choosing to have an intense crime problem concentrated among minorities.” “The war’s planners knew exactly what they were doing,” criminologist Michael Tonry comments, spelling out the details, including the racist procedures that run through the system from arrest to sentencing, in part attributable to the close race-class correlation, but not entirely.104
As widely recognized, the “war on drugs” has no significant effect on use of drugs or street price, and is far less effective than educational and remedial programs. But it does not follow that it serves no purpose. It is a counterpart to the “social cleansing”—the removal or elimination of “disposable people”—conducted by the state terrorist forces in Colombia and other terror states. It also frightens the rest of the population, a standard device to induce obedience. Such policies make good sense as part of a program that has radically concentrated wealth while, for the majority of the population, living conditions and incomes stagnate or decline. It is, correspondingly, natural for Congress to require that sentencing guidelines and policy reject as “inappropriate” any consideration of such factors as poverty and deprivation, social ties, etc. These requirements are precisely counter to European crime policy, criminologist Nils Christie observes, but sensible on the assumption that “under the rhetoric of equality, “Congress” envisions the criminal process as a vast engine of social control” (quoting former Chief Judge Bazelon).105
The vast scale of the expanding “crime control industry” has attracted the attention of finance and industry, who welcome it as another form of state intervention in the economy, a Keynesian stimulus that may soon approach the Pentagon system in scale, some estimate. “Businesses Cash In,” the Wall Street Journal reports, including the construction industry, law firms, the booming private prison complex, and “the loftiest names in finance” such as Goldman Sachs, Prudential, and others, “competing to underwrite prison construction with private, tax-exempt bonds.” Also standing in line is the “defense establishment, . . . scenting a new line of business” in high-tech surveillance and control systems of a sort that Big Brother would have admired. The industry also offers new opportunities for corporate use of prison labor, as discussed earlier.106
Other international covenants submitted to Congress have also been restricted as “non-self-executing,” meaning that they are of largely symbolic significance. The fact that covenants, if even ratified, are declared non-enforceable in US courts has been a “major concern” of the UN Human Rights Committee, along with the Human Rights organizations. The Committee also expressed concern that “poverty and lack of access to education adversely affect persons belong
ing to these groups in their ability to enjoy rights under the [ICCPR] on the basis of equality,” even for that subcategory of the UD the US professes to uphold. And while (rightly) praising the US commitment to freedom of speech, the Committee also questioned Washington’s announced principle that “money is a form of speech,” as the courts have upheld in recent years, with wide-ranging effects on the electoral system.107
The US is a world leader in defense of freedom of speech, perhaps uniquely so since the I960s.108 With regard to civil-political rights, the US record at home ranks high by comparative standards, though a serious evaluation would have to take into account the conditions required to enjoy those rights, and also the “accelerated erosion of basic due process and human rights protections in the United States” as “US authorities at federal and state levels undermined the rights of vulnerable groups, making the year [1996] a disturbing one for human rights,” with the president not only failing to “preserve rights under attack” but sometimes taking “the lead in eliminating human rights protections.”109 The social and economic provisions of the UD and other conventions are operative only insofar as popular struggle over many years has given them substance. The earlier record within the national territory is shameful, and the human rights record abroad is a scandal. The charge of “relativism” levelled against others, while fully accurate, reeks of hypocrisy. But the realities are for the most part “kept dark, without any need for any official ban.”