Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (77 page)

Well, that’s just the wrong story for the
New York Times
—so that study never gets reviewed. 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. The problem is that blacks, who evolved in Africa, evolved in kind of a hostile climate, so therefore they evolved in such a way that black mothers don’t nurture their children—and also they breed a lot, they all breed like rabbits. And the effect is, the gene pool in the United States is being contaminated, and now it’s starting to show up in standardized test scores.
  ⁶

This is real hard science.

The
Times
’s review starts off by saying, well, maybe the facts in these books aren’t quite right, but nonetheless, one thing is clear: these are serious issues, and any democratic society which ignores them does so “at its peril.”
  ⁷
On the other hand, a society doesn’t ignore “at its peril” social policies that are depriving 40 percent of the children in New York City of the minimal material conditions which would offer them any hope of ever escaping the misery, destitution and violence that surround them, and which have driven them down to levels of malnutrition, disease and suffering where you can predict perfectly well what their scores are going to be on the “I.Q.” tests you give them—none of that you even mention.

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. For one thing, it’s well known that neural development simply is reduced by low levels of nutrition, and lack of nurturance in general. So when kids suffer malnutrition, it has permanent effects on them, it has a permanent effect on their health and lives and minds—they never get over it.
  ¹⁰

And the growing hunger here isn’t just among children—it’s also been increasing among the elderly, to name one group. So as the
Wall Street Journal
recently pointed out in a front-page story, hunger is “surging” among the elderly: about five million older Americans, about 16 percent of the population over 60, are going hungry, they’re malnourished, many of them are literally starving to death.
  ¹¹
Now, in the United States we don’t have starvation the way they do in Haiti or Nicaragua or something—but the deprivation is still very real. In many places it’s probably worse than it is in Cuba, say, under the embargo.

So just take Boston, for example, where I live—which is a very rich city, and also maybe the world’s leading medical center. There are some very fancy hospitals there, but there’s also a City Hospital, which serves the rest of the population. Well, that hospital, which is not a bad hospital I should say, established a malnutrition clinic a few years ago—because after the impact of the Reaganite economic policies began to be felt, they were starting to find Third World levels of malnutrition in Boston. And it gets worse over the winter, because then families have to make the choice: do you let your kids starve, or do you let them die of the cold? Okay? That’s in one of the richest cities in the world, a major medical center. That’s just criminal in a country as rich as this—or anywhere, for that matter.
  ¹²

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

Well, none of these things are discussed in the
New York Times Book Review
article either. They
are
discussed in the U.N.I.C.E.F. book I mentioned, but the
Times
chose not to review that one.

So to return to your question, you ask: what would have to happen for us to get social policies different from all of these? I don’t think there’s any reason why the “Anglo-American model” Hewlett identifies has to continue—and be extended by things like the Contract With America [a Republican Congressional policy platform launched in 1994] and the Welfare Reform Act [the “Federal Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act,” which President Clinton signed in August 1996]. These aren’t laws of nature, after all; they’re social-policy decisions—they can be made differently. There’s a lot of space for changing these things, even in a society with the same corporate control as ours.

But why not ask another question. Why not ask why absolutist organizations have any right to exist in the first place? I mean, why should a corporation—technically a fascist organization of enormous power—have any right to tell you what kind of work you’re going to do? Why is that any better than having a king tell you what kind of work you’re going to do? People fought against that and overthrew it, and we can fight against it again and overthrow it.

There’s plenty of challenging, gratifying, interesting, productive work around for people to do, and there are plenty of people who want to do it—they simply aren’t being allowed that opportunity under the current economic system. Of course, there’s also plenty of junky work that has to get done too—but in a reasonable society, that work would just be distributed equally among everybody capable of doing it. If you can’t get robots to do it, fine, then you just distribute it equally.
  ¹⁶

Okay, I think that’s the kind of model we have to try to work towards now—and frankly, I don’t see any reason why that’s an impossible goal.

W
OMAN
: 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 their children, and for the mainstream intellectual culture to pretend that these farcical books on I.Q. have any kind of scientific legitimacy.
  ¹⁷

But these are such transparent ideological weapons we shouldn’t even waste our time arguing about them. We should just understand them transparently for what they are: the product of a real commissar culture that is dedicated to obscuring the most elementary truths about the world, and rich, powerful people trying to justify the fact that they are pursuing social policies which are forcing children to die. It’s understandable why nobody would want to face that—but it’s also clear how we can change it.

Welfare: the Pea and the Mountain

W
OMAN
: You mentioned the “Contract With America” and the “Welfare Reform Act” [which replaced the Aid for Families With Dependent Children program, ending receipt of public assistance benefits by families that include an adult who has received welfare for five years, and requiring all “able-bodied” adult recipients to secure a job within two years]. I’m wondering, how do you explain the surge to the right in Washington over the past several years, beginning with the Republicans’ big Congressional triumph in 1994? And what do you think is the real point of these new programs?

Well, let me just begin with the 1994 elections, and the so-called “Contract With America.” You’re right that in the media that whole election was called a “landslide for conservatism” and a “political earthquake” and so on—but you really have to look at that kind of rhetoric a lot more carefully. There was an interesting fact about the Republicans’ agenda, the so-called “Contract With America”—that is, only a very small number of voters even knew what it was, and when people were asked about most of its specific provisions, big majorities opposed it. So there was never really a vote on it, nobody knew what it was. And even after months of intensive and unremitting propaganda about it, less than half of the U.S. population said they had even
heard
of the Contract With America.
  ¹⁸
And it wasn’t hidden, it was in the headlines every day.
That’s
the “landslide for conservatism.” And that’s just a way of saying that democracy has collapsed.

As far as what it’s been about, that couldn’t be more obvious: it’s standard free-market doctrine—huge state-subsidies for the rich, cut out everything for the poor. Very brazen. So just take a look at some of the specific provisions. For example, they had one section in the “Contract” called the “Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act”—the things under it were, subsidies to business, tax cuts to business, and then there was one little line at the bottom which said that the “program to increase wages and create jobs” will be to eliminate “unfunded mandates,” which are one of the main mechanisms to ensure that States do things like provide social programs, set regulatory standards, and so on [i.e. the “mandates” are imposed on state and local governments by Congress].
  ¹⁹
Okay, that’s the program to “raise wages and create jobs”—and that’s kind of like a symbol for the whole thing.

The main target that they’ve gone after, both Clinton and Congress, is what’s called “welfare”—meaning that tiny component of welfare that goes to poorer people, which is approximately the size of a pea on a mountain. Meanwhile, they continue to enhance the
real
welfare—that is, the mountain of welfare that goes to richer people. And they’re continuing to enhance it in the traditional two ways: first, by straight handouts to business; and second, through regressive fiscal measures [i.e. ones having a greater adverse impact on those with less money].

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. In fact, that’s the main reason we have the Pentagon system in the first place: it’s a vehicle to channel hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the wealthy, through military contracts and technology research and so on.