Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

In a place like San Francisco, it gets embarrassing: I can’t walk across the Berkeley campus—literally—without twenty people coming up and asking me to sign something. That doesn’t make any sense. WOMAN: It does feel unnatural. It is, it’s completely missing the point. It’s simply not factually accurate, for one thing—because like I say, the real work is being done by people who are not known, that’s always been true in every popular movement in history. The people who are known are riding the crest of some wave. Now, you can ride the crest of the wave and try to use it to get power, which is the standard thing, or you can ride the crest of the wave because you’re helping people that way, which is another thing. But the point is, it’s the wave that matters—and that’s what people ought to understand.

But since On the Waterfront combined that anti-union message with “standing up for the poor working man,” it became a huge hit. On the other hand, Salt of the Earth, which was an authentic and I thought very well-done story about a strike and the people involved in it, that was just flat killed, I don’t even think it was shown anywhere.

So the answer I give is, I think the smartest thing to do is to read everything you read—and that includes what I write, I would always tell people this—skeptically. And in fact, an honest writer will try to make it clear what his or her biases are and where the work is starting from, so that then readers can compensate—they can say, “This person’s coming from over here, and that’s the way she’s looking at the world, now I can correct for what may well be her bias; I can decide for myself whether what she’s telling me is accurate, because at least she’s making her premises clear.” And people should do that.

MARK ACHBAR: Noam, one of the best things you said that didn’t end up in the film was, “It’s not so much a matter of what you read, it’s a matter of how you read.” When people ask me about sources for information, I recommend the New York Times as quickly as I recommend Z Magazine. Yeah, I do too—I absolutely agree with that. Take, say, Business Week: it’s useful to read it, it’s useful to read what the ruling class tells its people. You can learn an awful lot from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and so on.

you can lie as much as you want in the Boston Globe or something, but the people who read the Wall Street Journal have to have a tolerable sense of reality when they go out to make money. So in journals like Business Week and Fortune, you’ll typically find an awful lot of very useful information. These are journals that you shouldn’t buy, incidentally, they’re too expensive; but you should steal them if you can. They’re also in the library.6

As a more general matter, though, if you really want to educate yourself politically, what you have to do is become part of a group—because unless you’re a real fanatic about it, you’re just not going to be able to do it all by yourself. I mean, I do it, but I know I’ve got a screw loose, and I don’t expect anybody else to be that crazy. On the other hand, a group working together can do it very well. Take a look at the Central America solidarity movements in the 1980s, for example—they were usually church-based groups around the country, and they just kept working at it together. They had people going down there, they had their own literature, they circulated information around, and the result was, there were people I met in those groups who knew more about Central America than I do—and I work on it hard. They certainly knew more about it than the C.I.A., which is no big thing actually, or than people in a lot of the academic departments.

people are becoming extremely isolated. I just got a sense of it yesterday afternoon. I was getting ready to go off for a couple of weeks, so I did my monthly making out of checks to all the, you know, worthwhile organizations around the world. And it’s amazing when you see it. You take any topic you like, no matter how narrow it is—I mean, health rights in the southern part of Guatemala, let’s say—and there are fifteen separate organizations working on it, maybe right next door to one another, so you have to make out fifteen checks.

WOMAN: What exactly has the left done that you think is so self-destructive? In part the problem is just divisiveness—it’s passionate commitment to a very narrow position, and extreme intolerance of anyone who doesn’t see it exactly the way you do. So if you have a slightly different view from the person next door on, say, abortion rights, it’s a war—you can’t even talk to each other, it’s not an issue that you can even discuss.

Or take a look at the intellectual left, the people who ought to be involved in the kinds of things we’re doing here. If you look at the academic left, say, it’s mired in intricate, unintelligible discourse of some crazed postmodernist variety, which nobody can understand, including the people who are involved in it—but it’s really good for careers and that sort of thing. That again pulls a ton of energy into activities which have the great value that they are guaranteed not to affect anything in the world, so therefore they’re very useful for the institutions to support and to tolerate and to encourage people to get involved with.

The Gulf War was the first time in history that there were huge demonstrations and protests before a war started—that’s never happened before. In the case of the Vietnam War, it was five years before anybody got out in the streets; this time, there were massive demonstrations with hundreds of thousands of people involved before the bombing even started.

In fact, the attitudes of the general population are absolutely astonishing. For example, 83 percent of the American population thinks that the economic system is inherently unfair, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”—meaning things should just be radically changed.10 Well, what is the left doing about that mere 83 percent of the population that thinks everything has to be radically changed? What we’re doing is alienating them, or making them feel that we have nothing to say to them, or something like that.

I think it’s possible to work through the electoral process. But the point we have to remember is, things will happen through the electoral process only if there are popular forces in motion in the society which are active enough to be threatening to power. So for example, take the Wagner Act of 1935 [i.e. the National Labor Relations Act], which gave American labor the right to organize for the first time.17 It was a long time coming—most of Europe had the same rights about fifty years earlier—and it was voted through by Congress. But it wasn’t voted through by Congress because Franklin Roosevelt liked it, or because he was a liberal or anything like that—in fact, Roosevelt was a conservative, he had no particular interest in labor.18 The Wagner Act was voted through by Congress because the people who do have power in the society recognized that they’d better give workers something, or else there was going to be real trouble. So therefore it was voted through, and workers got the right to organize—and they kept that right as long as they were willing to struggle for it, then they basically lost it, it doesn’t get enforced much anymore.

Up until the mid-1960s, Canada and the United States had the same capitalist health service: extremely inefficient, tons of bureaucracy, huge administrative costs, millions of people with no insurance coverage—exactly what would be amplified in the United States by Clinton’s proposals for “managed competition” [put forward in 1993].21 But in 1962 in Saskatchewan, where the N.D.P. is pretty strong and the unions are pretty strong, they managed to put through a kind of rational health-care program of the sort that every industrialized country in the world has by now, except the United States and South Africa.

for example, we have a national election coming up in the United States soon [in 1996], and I don’t really know of any very strong arguments one way or another about who to vote for—but that’s not to say that that judgment is an unimportant one: I think it’s very important. I mean, I’ll vote for Clinton, holding my nose—but the reason has nothing at all to do with big policy issues; there I can’t really see too much difference. What it has to do with are things like who’s going to get appointed to the judiciary: there are some differences between the Republicans and Democrats on questions like that, and who’s appointed to the judiciary happens to have a big effect on people’s lives.

Yeah, there really is no answer, unless there are organizations—in this case, unions—that are strong enough to fight for them. I mean, if you don’t have solidarity and organization and you’re just out there alone fighting a big system of power, there’s not very much that you can do. It’s like if you’re walking down the streets of Haiti [under the military junta] and somebody comes up to you and says, “What should I do?”—the answer “Go attack the police station” is not very helpful. The only thing that these people looking for workmen’s comp can do is be involved in strong enough organizations, and in this case that means unions—or maybe they can get somebody from the National Lawyers Guild [progressive law organization] or something to help them work through the legal structures.

there are already laws on the books that make hiring scabs illegal, but laws only get enforced if people are willing to fight for them, otherwise they don’t get enforced. I mean, it’s nice to have the laws, but it’s nice partly because it makes it easier to struggle for your rights—it’s not that the laws give you the rights. Laws can be on the books and mean absolutely nothing, as in this case.

at this point the left is basically offering nothing in the way of alternatives. What it ought to be getting across is the message, “Look, this is not the full range of alternatives, there are others”—and then it should present the others. And the others are not utopian. I mean, just look at the history of inner-city schools in the United States: there was a period, not so far back, when many of the inner-city schools here were extremely good—in fact, some of the black inner-city schools in Washington had among the highest college-acceptance rates in the country.29 Or take my own family, for example: they were immigrants from Eastern Europe—not peasants, but from a very poor Eastern European background—and they went through ordinary city schools in New York, some of them went to the City College, and they got very good educations. In fact, the City College of New York used to be one of the best schools in the country: public city school, no reason why it shouldn’t be. So good public education can certainly be achieved—but of course, like everything else, it’s going to depend on the general social and economic structure in which it operates. I mean, it’s true that things like violence and rotten schools are destroying the cities—but they’re destroying them because of a social structure that we’ve just got to change, from the bottom up. And yes, until people can see some hope of changing it, they’re going to pick from within the rotten set of options that are being presented...

So I think that it’s completely realistic and rational to work within structures to which you are opposed, because by doing so you can help to move to a situation where then you can challenge those structures. Let me just give you an analogy. I don’t like to have armed police everywhere, I think it’s a bad idea. On the other hand, a number of years ago when I had little kids, there was a rabid raccoon running around our neighborhood biting children. Well, we tried various ways of getting rid of it—you know, “Have-A-Heart” animal traps, all this kind of stuff—but nothing worked. So finally we just called the police and had them do it: it was better than having the kids bitten by a rabid raccoon, right? Is there a contradiction there? No: in particular circumstances, you sometimes have to accept and use illegitimate structures. Well, we happen to have a huge rabid raccoon running around—it’s called corporations. And there is nothing in the society right now that can protect people from that tyranny, except the federal government. Now, it doesn’t protect them very well, because mostly it’s run by the corporations, but still it does have some limited effect—it can enforce regulatory measures under public pressure, let’s say, it can reduce dangerous toxic waste disposal, it can set minimal standards on health care, and so on.

And it doesn’t have to stop at their own pensions, you know: what about the factories in which they work? Why should they be in the hands of private investors? That’s not a law of nature. Why should a corporation have the rights of an individual?31 A corporation is a public trust: you go back just a century, and governments were taking away corporate charters because corporations weren’t living up to the “public interest.”32 It’s a very recent idea that these totalitarian institutions should be totally unaccountable.

MAN: What do you think the role of law is generally in the whole scheme of control? Well, law is a bit like a printing press—it’s kind of neutral, you can make it do anything. I mean, what lawyers are taught in law school is chicanery: how to convert words on paper into instruments of power. And depending where the power is, the law will mean different things. MAN: So you don’t think there’s any legal basis for the hegemony of American corporations, especially in the way that the Fourteenth Amendment was interpreted to consider them individuals, with individual rights? Well, you know, “legal basis” is a funny notion: what has a legal basis is a matter of power, not law—like, the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t say anything about corporations. During the nineteenth century, there was just a change in the legal status of corporations—a change which would have absolutely appalled Adam Smith, or Thomas Jefferson, or any other Enlightenment thinker. In fact, Smith warned against it, and Jefferson lived long enough to see the beginnings of it—and what he said is, if what he called the “banks and moneyed incorporations” got the rights that they in fact ended up receiving, we would have a form of absolutism worse than the one we thought we were fighting against in the American Revolution.34 And those rights simply were granted—they weren’t granted by Congress, and in other countries they weren’t granted by Parliaments; they were granted by judges, lawyers, corporate representatives, ...

MAN: Noam, we’ve been discussing a number of activist strategies and problems—I’d like to talk for a moment about some of the reasons why people don’t get involved in activism. Suppose somebody convinced you, at the level of your belief in most things, that it was impossible to change the country, that the basic institutional structures we have now are going to remain in place for the next 200 years—you know, more or less adapted, but the same basic structures. I’m wondering, would you behave any differently? Zero. MAN: You would behave exactly the same way? Same way. In fact, you don’t even have to make it hypothetical—when I first got seriously involved in anti-Vietnam War activity, I was a hundred percent convinced that absolutely nothing could be done. I mean, into 1965 and ’66, if we wanted to have an anti-war meeting in Boston, we’d have to find six topics—you know, “Let’s talk about Venezuela, Iran, Vietnam, and the price of bread, and maybe we can get an audience that’ll outnumber the organizers.” And that went on for a long time. It looked impossible.

MAN: But, nevertheless, because in fact a great many people not understanding that point do feel this way, or tend to feel this way sometimes, and get depressed at those moments—what I’m wondering is, anyway, in any event, what gets you up each morning to do the things you do? Is it that you think in terms of winning a little way down the road, or is it something else? Well, it’s hard to introspect, but to the extent that I introspect about it, it’s because you basically have two choices. One choice is to assume the worst, and then you can be guaranteed that it’ll happen. The other is to assume that there’s some hope for change, in which case it’s possible that you can help to effect change. So you’ve got two choices, one guarantees the worst will happen, the other leaves open the possibility that things might get better. Given those choices, a decent person doesn’t hesitate.

Look, if you’re walking down the street and you see a kid eating an ice-cream cone, and you notice there’s no cop around and you’re hungry, you can take the ice-cream cone because you’re bigger and just walk away. You can do that—probably there are people who do. But we call them pathological. On the other hand, if they do it within existing social structures, we call them normal—but it’s just as pathological, it’s just the pathology of the general society.

So look at something like the Columbia strike, which was the big thing in 1968 [hundreds of students took over Columbia University buildings for eight days to protest war-related research and the school’s relations with the surrounding community]. If you remember what it was like back then, you’ll recall that the sense on the Columbia campus—quite literally, I’m not exaggerating—was: “If we close down Columbia and have fun smoking pot for three weeks, the revolution will be here, and then it’ll all be over and everybody will be happy and equal and free, and we can go back to our ordinary concerns.” Well, you waited three weeks, the cops came in and smashed you up, and nothing changed. And there were a lot of results from that.

So the fact that it was dominantly a youth movement in the Sixties had good and bad aspects, and one bad aspect was this sense that if you don’t achieve quickly, you’d might as well quit. But of course, that’s not the way changes come. The struggle against slavery went on forever, the struggle for women’s rights has been going on for centuries, the effort to overcome “wage slavery”—that’s been going on since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, we haven’t advanced an inch. In fact, we’re worse off than we were a hundred years ago in terms of understanding the issues. Well, okay, you just keep struggling.

If you see somebody beating a child to death, should you say, “Well, you know, that’s human nature”—which it is in fact: there certainly are conditions under which people will act like that. To the extent that the statement is true, and there is such an extent, it’s just not relevant: human nature also has the capacity to lead to selflessness, and cooperation, and sacrifice, and support, and solidarity, and tremendous courage, and lots of other things too. I mean, my general feeling is that over time, there’s measurable progress—it’s not huge, but it’s significant. And sometimes it’s been pretty dramatic. Over history, there’s been a real widening of the moral realm, I think—a recognition of broader and broader domains of individuals who are regarded as moral agents, meaning having rights. Look, we are self-conscious beings, we’re not rocks, and we can come to get a better understanding of our own nature, it can become more and more realized over time—not because you read a book about it, the book doesn’t have anything to tell you, because nobody really knows anything about this topic. But just through experience—including historical experience, which is part of our personal experience because it’s embedded in the culture we enter into—we can gain greater understanding of our nature and values.

MAN: Where do you think “values” come from in the first place? That’s an interesting question. Any answer we give is based on extremely little understanding, so nothing one says is very serious. But just from the conditions of moral judgment, I don’t see how it can fail to be true that moral values are basically rooted in our nature—I think that must be true. And the reason why I say that is pretty elementary. I mean, undoubtedly the way in which we look at things and make judgments about them and assess them has a significant and notable cultural factor. But that aside, we certainly are capable, and everybody does it, of making moral judgments and evaluations in entirely new situations—we do that all the time; we may not be consciously evaluating all the new circumstances we’re faced with, but we’re certainly at least tacitly doing it, and the results of those evaluations are the basis for our choices of action, our doing one thing and not another.

there is a framework of basic, fundamental principles of language that are invariant in the species, they’re just fixed in our biological nature somehow—they hold for all languages, and they allow for only a very limited degree of modification, which comes from early experience. Then as soon as those wired-in options for variation are fixed, children have a whole linguistic system which allows them to say new things, and to understand new things, and to interpret new expressions that nobody’s ever heard before—all kinds of things like that. Well, qualitatively speaking, that’s what our system of moral judgment looks like, so it’s conceivable that it has a similar kind of basis—but again, you have to find the answer, you can’t just guess. MAN: Obviously the underlying principles can’t be simple—they can’t just be something like, “Thou shalt not kill.” No—because we decide much more complex things than that. I mean, we really don’t know what the fundamental principles of moral judgment actually are, but we have very good reason to believe that they’re there. And that’s simply because we can, in fact, make relatively consistent moral judgments, judgments which are understood by other people, and appreciated by them (sometimes with disagreement, in which case we can have moral discourse), and we can do all of that under new conditions that we’ve never seen before, and facing new problems and so on. Okay, unless we’re angels, the structures that perform those functions got into...

So to go back to the original question, I don’t think we can reasonably doubt that moral values are indeed rooted in our nature. MAN: Then if people do have this shared set of moral values, you still have to explain why everything is as corrupt and hierarchical and war-laden as it is. But why not ask another question? Why not ask how come there’s so much sympathy, and care, and love, and solidarity? I mean, that’s also true. MAN: That’s the way I always answer the objection—there should be none of those things, because the institutions don’t breed them. Well, there’s no such thing as, “why is there so much of this and so much of that?”—there is what there is. But what there is doubtless is conditioned by the opportunities and choices that are imposed and available to people under particular social, cultural, economic, and even physical settings. So the point is to try to get to a situation where the society and all its institutions and arrangements are set up so as to maximize the options for people to pursue the healthier alternatives. And I really don’t think there’s been a better period in modern history for organizing towards that than there is right now, actually. I mean, there’s tremendous disillusionment all across the country—and it’s world-wide incidentally: there have been cross-national studies of this, and the level of pessimism across the entire industrial world is just extraordinary. In the United States, for example, about three-quarters of the population th...

In Sweden, mothers and fathers both get substantial parental leave to take care of their children, like a year or something—because taking care of children is considered something that has value in that society, unlike in the United States, where the leadership elements hate families.3 I mean, Newt Gingrich and the rest of these people may talk about supporting “family values,” but they actually want families destroyed—because families are not rational from the point of view of profit-making.

Instead what the Times editors devote the cover-story of their Book Review to is another extremely deep problem the United States is facing—in case you aren’t aware of it, you’d really better read this. We’re facing the problem that “bad genes” are taking over the United States—and part of the proof of that is that scores on S.A.T.s and I.Q. tests have been steadily declining in recent years, children just aren’t doing as well as they used to. Well, somebody who’s really unsophisticated might think that the problem could have something to do with social policies that have driven 40 percent of the children in New York City below the poverty line, for example—but that issue never arises for the New York Times.5 Instead the problem is bad genes.

In fact, according to the last statistics I saw about this, 30 million people in the United States are suffering hunger. 30 million is a lot of people, you know, and that means plenty of children.8 In the 1980s, hunger declined in general throughout the entire world, with two exceptions: sub-Saharan Africa and the United States—the poorest part of the world and the richest part of the world, there hunger increased. And as a matter of fact, between 1985 and 1990, hunger in the United States increased by 50 percent— it took a couple years for the Reagan “reforms” to start taking hold, but by 1985 they were beginning to have their effects.9 And there is just overwhelming evidence, in case it’s not obvious from common sense, what the effects of this kind of deprivation are on children—physically, emotionally, and mentally.

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

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 thei...

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.

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 ...

The other thing the Clinton “New” Democrats and Gingrich 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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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...

Similarly, there was a great article in the London Economist—you know, the big free-trade pop-ideology journal—about the fact that Eastern European countries have been voting Socialists and Communists back into power. But the basic line of the article was, don’t worry about it, because as they said, “policy is insulated from politics”—meaning, no matter what games these guys play in the political arena, policy’s going to go on exactly the way it is, because we’ve got them by the balls: we control the international currencies, we’re the only ones who can give them loans, we can destroy their economies if we want to, there’s nothing they can do. I mean, they can play all of the political games they want to, they can pretend they have a democracy if they like—anything they please—so long as “policy remains insulated from politics.”63

it’s what has sometimes been called an emerging “de facto world government.” That’s what all of the new international trade agreements are about, N.A.F.T.A., G.A.T.T., and so on; it’s what the E.E.C. [European Economic Community] is about; it’s increasingly taking shape in international financial organizations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Trade Organization, the G-7 planning meetings of the rich industrial countries, and so on and so forth. These are all efforts to try to centralize power in a world economic system geared towards ensuring that “policy is insulated from politics”—in other words, towards ensuring that the general populations of the world have no role in decision-making, and that the level of policy planning is raised to be so remote from people’s knowledge and understanding and input that they have absolutely no idea about the various decisions that are being made that will affect their lives, and certainly couldn’t influence them if they did. The World Bank has its own term for the phenomenon: they call it “technocratic insulation.”

In the international business press, this has all been described pretty frankly as “The New Imperial Age.” And that’s quite accurate: it’s certainly the direction things are going in.64

If you look back to the history of the reconstruction of post-World War II Europe, American planners were very intent on preventing the rise of popular-democratic movements there which would have been based in the former anti-fascist resistance, which had a lot of prestige right then. And the reason was, the world in general was very social-democratic after the war, especially as a result of the anti-fascist struggles that had taken place. And with the traditional order discredited and a whole lot of radical-democratic ideas around, powerful interests in the United States were extremely concerned that a unified labor movement could develop in a place like Germany or Japan. Actually, the same kind of problem also existed at home right then as well: the U.S. population was very social-democratic after the war—it was extremely pro-union, it wanted more government involvement in regulating industry, probably a majority thought there should even be public industry—and business was terrified by it, they were very scared. They in fact said in their publications things like, “We have about five or six years to save the private enterprise system.”74 Well, one thing they did was to launch a huge propaganda program in the United States, aimed at reversing these attitudes.75 It was actually called at the time part of “the everlasting battle for the minds of men,” who have to be “indoctrinated in the capitalist story”; that’s a standard straight quote from the P.R. literature.76 So in ...

take Haiti, the most impoverished country in the Hemisphere. I don’t know if any of you have ever traveled to Haiti, but if you go there, you can barely believe it—I’ve gone to a lot of parts of the Third World, and Haiti is just something else. But in Haiti in the late 1980s, under extremely repressive and impoverished conditions, Haitian peasants and slum-dwellers were able to create an organized civil society: they succeeded in creating unions, and grassroots organizations, and a whole network of popular groupings which achieved such strength that, with no resources at all, they were able to take over the government. Now, it turns out they immediately got smashed by a military coup which we were assisting—but that shows you what people can do in the world.84 If you read the American press when the coup collapsed [in 1994], they were all saying, “Now we have to go down and teach lessons in democracy to the Haitians”—but anybody except a complete commissar ought to have burst out in ridicule at that. We have to learn about democracy from the Haitians, Haitian peasants have a lot to teach us about democracy, they show how it really works.