Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

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 plac...