Against welfare p26 Back to CG
There's another aspect of this that's much less discussed. One of the purposes of driving people away from welfare and into work is to lower wages by increasing the supply of workers.
The New York City government is now partially subsidizing workers driven out of the welfare system. The main effect has been to decrease unionized labor. Put a lot of unskilled labor into the workplace, make conditions so awful that people will take virtually any job, maybe throw in some public subsidy to keep them working, and you can drive down wages. It's a good way to make everybody suffer.
Welfare capitalism p27 Back to CG
Welfare capitalism was introduced in order to undercut democracy. If people are trying to take over some aspect of their lives and there doesn't seem any way to stop them, one standard historical response has been to say, We rich folk will do it for you. A classic example took place in Flint, Michigan, a town dominated by General Motors, around 1910. There was a good deal of socialist labor organizing there, and plans had been developed to really take things over and provide more democratic public services. After some hesitation, the wealthy businessmen decided to go along with the progressive line. They said, Everything you're saying is right, but we can do it a lot better, because we have all this money. You want a park? Fine. Vote for our candidate and he'll put in a park.
Their resources undermined and eliminated the incipient democratic and popular structures. Their candidate won, and there was indeed welfare capitalism...until it wasn't needed any more, at which point it was dropped.
People in charge of their own assets - Breaking solidarity 28
There's a campaign to undermine public confidence in Social Security, by saying it's going broke and that when the baby boomers reach retirement age, there'll be no money for them.
Most of the talk about Social Security is pretty fraudulent. Take the question of privatizing it. Social Security funds can be invested in the stock market whether the system is public or private. But putting people in charge of their own assets breaks down the solidarity that comes from doing something together, and diminishes the sense that people have any responsibility for each other.
Corporate crime p37 Back to CG
Why should rich and powerful people allow themselves to be prosecuted? Russell Mokhiber of the Corporate Crime Reporter contrasts two statistics: 24,000 Americans are murdered each year, while 56,000 Americans die from job-related accidents and diseases.
That's another example of unpunished corporate crime. In the '80s, the Reagan administration essentially informed the business world that it was not going to prosecute violations of OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] regulations. As a result, the number of industrial accidents went up rather dramatically. Business Week reported that working days lost to injury almost doubled from 1983 to 1986, in part because "under Reagan and Bush" OSHA "was a hands-off agency."
The same is true of the environmental issues— toxic waste disposal, say. Sure, they're killing people, but is it criminal? Well, it should be.
Howard Zinn and I visited a brand-new maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colorado. The lobby has high ceilings, tile floors, glass everywhere. Around the same time, I read that New York City schools are so overcrowded that students are meeting in cafeterias, gyms and locker rooms. I found that quite a juxtaposition.
They're certainly related. Both prisons and inner-city schools target a kind of superfluous \ population that there's no point educating because there's nothing for them to do. Because we're a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them.
Drug related crime Back to CG
Drug-related crimes, usually pretty trivial ones, are mostly what's filling up the prisons. I haven't seen many bankers or executives of chemical corporations in prison. People in the rich suburbs commit plenty of crimes, but they're not going to prison at anything like the rate of the poor.
There's another factor too. Prison construction is by now a fairly substantial part of the economy. It's not yet on the scale of the Pentagon, but for some years now it's been growing fast enough to get the attention of big financial institutions like Merrill Lynch, who have been floating bonds for prison construction.
High-tech industry, which has been feeding off the Pentagon for research and development, is turning to the idea of administering prisons with supercomputers, surveillance technology, etc. In fact, I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see fewer people in prisons and more people imprisoned in their homes. It's probably within reach of the new technology to have surveillance devices that control people wherever they are. So if you pick up the telephone to make a call they don't like, alarms go off or you get a shock.
It saves the cost of building prisons. That hurts the construction industry, true, but it contributes to the high-tech sector, which is the more advanced, growing, dynamic part of the economy.
It sounds like an Orwellian 7984 scenario you'redescribing.
Call it Orwellian or whatever you like—I'd say it's just ordinary state capitalism. It's a natural evolution of a system that subsidizes industrial
development and seeks to maximize short-term profit for the few at the cost of the many.
Noam Chomsky interviewed by David Barsamian
The Common Good