Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (78 page)

Look, the Pentagon’s never really been about defense: the Pentagon is about the fact that rich people can have their own computers, after decades of development paid for by the public through the state-sector—and it’s about the fact that I.B.M. and other private corporations and investors are making huge profits off them. Or it’s about the fact that the biggest civilian exporter in the country is the Boeing corporation, and the biggest single industry in the world, tourism, is founded largely on technology that was developed through the American military system—namely, airplanes—and that it’s been pouring huge sums of money into sectors of the American economy for decades.
  ²²
Well, the Clinton administration and Congress have increased all of those subsidies—in fact, Clinton’s military budget is well above the Cold War average—and the Contract With America programs include plenty of other forms of direct handouts and subsidies to the wealthy as well.
  ²³

The second kind of welfare payment that’s being extended is regressive fiscal measures—which are just another way of disguising welfare to the rich. So for example, if you increase tax deductions for business expenses, let’s say, that is the exact financial equivalent of giving out a welfare check. I mean, suppose there’s a mother with six kids and no job, and she gets a hundred-dollar check—okay, that’s welfare. Now suppose it’s me, somebody who’s rich, and I get a hundred dollars of tax relief because I have a home mortgage: it’s the same government payment. I mean, one of them is a direct sum of money and the other is hidden in regressive fiscal measures, but from an economic standpoint, they’re exactly the same thing—like, it would come out exactly the same if they gave me the hundred dollars and took a hundred dollars off her taxes.

Well, if you take a look at all of the welfare that goes to the rich through regressive fiscal measures like these, it is absolutely huge. Take tax write-offs for charitable contributions: almost all of that goes to the rich, it’s a way for them to cut down on their taxes—which means it’s a subsidy, exactly the equivalent of a welfare check. Or take tax deductions for home mortgages: about 80 percent of that welfare goes to people with incomes of over $50,000 a year, and the deductions get disproportionately greater the higher your income—like, if you have a million-dollar home, you get a much bigger write-off than if you have a two hundred thousand-dollar home or something.
  ²⁴
Or just look at income-tax deductions for business expenses: that is a massive welfare program, and it all goes to the rich. So there’s a book by a Canadian writer, Linda McQuaig, which estimates that the tax loss in Canada for what are called “business entertainment deductions”—like taking your friends out to hundred-dollar seats at the baseball game, and to fancy dinners and all that kind of stuff—is not far below what would be needed to give daycare to 750,000 Canadian kids who now can’t get it.
  ²⁵
And remember, Canada’s a far smaller country than the United States is, far smaller. Well, those are all welfare handouts too—and what’s happening is they’re being increased, while at the same time anything that might help poor people is being cut back.

It’s striking to see the way they’re doing it, actually. For instance, they decided not to go after Medicare for now—they probably will sooner or later, but for now they’re not. And the reason is, rich people get Medicare. But they
are
going after Medicaid right away, because that only goes to poor people [Medicare is a federal health insurance program for the elderly and disabled, and Medicaid is a federally-funded health care program for those with low incomes]. In fact, there were three big programs that they intended to go after right from the time of the ’94 election: one was Medicaid, one was Aid for Families with Dependent Children, and the third was Food Stamps. Well, Food Stamps quickly got kicked off the list. You know why? Because there’s a big agri-business lobby behind it. See, Food Stamps does happen to feed poor people, but it’s also a major handout to high-tech commercial agriculture and big commerce, so those interests immediately started to lobby for it—because they want it. So that was taken off the list.
  ²⁶

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 for a specified period]. It’s these seven-year-old kids who now have to be forced to internalize our values: that there are no human rights, they don’t exist, the only human rights people have are what they can gain for themselves on the labor market. And the way they’re going to be forced to learn those lessons is by driving their mothers to work—instead of all this non-work like raising children. I mean, it’s astonishing the sexism that has been so institutionalized in the culture that people just accept the idea that raising children isn’t “work”—“work” is things like speculating in financial markets. Child-care’s just taken for granted, it’s supposed to come free because you don’t get a paycheck for it.

Crime Control and “Superfluous” People

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
Furthermore, the prisons in the United States are so
inhuman
by this point that they are being condemned by international human rights organizations as literally imposing torture.
  ³³
And these people all want to increase that—they’re statist reactionaries, remember: what they really want is a very powerful and violent state, contrary to what they might say.

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