Source: Z Magazine, March 1997 (excerpt) Contact: Expanding the Floor of the Cage An interview with Noam Chomsky By David Barsamian I know you've just been on a monthlong trip to Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. I want to tell you about a little trip that I took with Howard Zinn to Florence. N.C.: Florence, Italy? I wish. Florence, Colorado, the home of a new maximum security prison. It was about the same time that I read that classrooms in New York City schools are so overcrowded that students are meeting in cafeterias and gyms and locker rooms. I found that quite a juxtaposition, this building in Colorado, brandnew, high ceilings, glass everywhere, tile floors, and then what's going on in the nation's largest public school system. N.C.: There are several reasons for it. They're certainly related. Both of those activities target the same population, a kind of superfluous population there's no point in educating because there's nothing to do with them. You put them in prison because we're a civilized people and you don't send death squads out to murder them. But it's not in the rich, professional suburbs that kids are sitting on the streets. They have classrooms. They're not going to prison, either, even if they commit plenty of crimes. For example, the prisons are being filled by mostly drugrelated crimes, usually pretty trivial ones. But I haven't seen any bankers in there, although probably more than half the narcomoney passes through U.S. banks. I think they're not only related, they're the same phenomenon. They're targeting the same population, which is useless from the point of view of shortterm profit making. They're treated differently in different societies. There's another factor, too. Prison construction is a state industry, and by now it's a fairly substantial stimulus to the economy. It's not on the scale of the Pentagon, but it's growing. For some years now it's been growing enough that the big financial institutions like Merrill Lynch are interested in floating bonds for prison construction, and even hightech industries are interested. Hightech industry has for some years been turning to the idea of administering prisons with high tech equipment, meaning supercomputers and (maybe some day) implanted electrodes and so on. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if we find that prison incarceration levels off and that more people are imprisoned in their homes. Because if you think about the capacity of the new technology, it's probably within reach to have surveillance devices which will control people wherever they are. There's a lot of attention to crime in the streets. The FBI estimates that it's about $4 billion a year, a figure that's been fairly stable in the last few years. Ralph Nader talks about "crime in the suites," whitecollar crime. Multinational Monitor estimates that it's somewhere around $200 billion a year. N.C.: First of all, crime in the streets, you say there's a lot of attention to it. That's correct, but the question is whether crime in the streets is high. Fact is, it hasn't changed much for a long time. Although it's high by the standards of comparable societies, it's not out of sight. There's only one major domain in which the U.S. is off the map. That's murders with guns. But that's because of the gun culture. If you look at other crimes, the U.S. is sort of toward the high end of the industrial societies. That hasn't changed much. So why the attention? I think it's not because of the problem of crime. It's because of the problem of social control. There is a very committed effort to convert the U.S. into something which has the basic structure of a Third World society, meaning sectors of enormous wealth and a lot of people without security or benefits or jobs and a lot of superfluous people. And you have to do something with them. First of all, you have to make sure that they don't notice that something is wrong and do something about it. The best way to do that, traditionally, is to get them to hate and fear one another. Every coercive society immediately hits on that idea. Crime is perfect for that. So, you get people to worry about crime, not the fact that their salaries are going down and that somebody else has got money coming out of their ears. You get them to focus on the fact that they don't want to get robbed by the kid from the ghetto, or the welfare mother who is having too many children. That's a technique of social control. Another technique is needed for those that you don't have any use for, whose jobs you can more easily send out to Mexico. That gives you a superfluous class, and they have to be controlled in another way, sometimes by social cleansing, sometimes by incarceration. So the attention on crime certainly serves a purpose. It's striking that the U.S. is perhaps the only society in which crime is considered a political issue. Politicians have to take a stand on who's tougher on crime. In most parts of the world it's a social problem. It's not something you fight about at elections. Most of the incarceration by now is drugrelated, certainly a very high percentage of it, targeting mostly smalltimers. On the other hand, if you can believe the international estimates, like the OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development), more than half of the dirty money, the narcomoney, goes through U.S. banks. The last estimate I saw was over a quarter of a trillion dollars a year. There's something rather suggestive, at least, about the figures on foreign investment. The latest figures that I've seen from the Commerce Department for foreign direct investment in the Western Hemisphere, excluding Canada, which is part of Europe, but the rest of the Western Hemisphere, are for 1994that was when there was all the excitement about emerging markets It turns out that in 1994 about a quarter of the foreign direct investment went to Bermuda and another 15 percent or so went to the Cayman Islands ant other tax havens, some more to Panama and the rest mostly shortterm speculative money picking up as sets in Brazil and so on. That means something close to half of what they call foreign direct investment is some sort of dirty money . They're not building manufacturing plants in Bermuda. The most benign interpretation is it's some form of tax evasion. A less benign interpretation is it has to do with handling the flow of narcocapital, which is conceivable. Corporate crime, however, is not really considered crime. If you take, say, the S&Ls, is that crime? Only a very narrow part of it is considered crime Most of it is just picked up by the taxpayer with bailouts. If we look at things that actually fall under the category of crime, they are mostly not investigated and not prosecuted. Is that surprising? Why should rich and powerful people allow themselves t be prosecuted? You mentioned that the U.S. ranks very high in gun deaths, 24,000 a year. Russell Mokhiber of the Corporate Crime Reporter has written about this, contrasting these two statistics, 24,000 gun deaths a year, 56,000 Americans die from jobrelated accidents and induced diseases. N.C.: In the 1980s, the Reagan Administration essentially informed the business world that they were not going to prosecute them for violating the law. One of the things that happened is that OSHA, the Office of Safety and Health Administration, regulations were either not investigated or prosecuted. The number of industrial deaths and accidents went up rather high. That's the state telling you, Look, commit any workplace crimes you like. We're not going to bother with it. If it kills lots of people, fine. The same is true of environmental issues. If you weaken the regulatory apparatus on, say, toxic waste disposal, sure, you're killing people. On what scale? The effort to deregulate, decrease infrastructure spending harms people, a lot of them, to the point of killing them. It harms a lot of them in other ways. Is it criminal? Well, that's a doctrinal judgment, not a legal judgment. ...(article continues)