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)