Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

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