Excerpt: \r\n\"the United Nations tries to monitor the international drug \r\ntrade, and their estimates are on the order of $400 to $500 billion---half a trillion dollars a year--- in trade alone, which makes it higher than oil, something like 10 percent of the world trade. Where this money comes goes to is mostly unknown, but general estimates are that maybe 60 percent of it passes through US banks. After that, a lot goes to offshore tax havens. It's so obscure that nobody monitors it, and nobody wants to. But the Commerce Department every year publishes figures on foreign direct investment, where US investment is going, and through the '90s the big excitement has been the \" new emerging markets \" like Latin America. And it turns out that a quarter of US foreign direct investment is going to Bermuda, another 15 percent to the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands, another 10 percent to Panama, and so on. Now, their not building steel factories. The most benign interpretation is that it's just tax havens. And the less benign interpretation is that it's one way of passing illegal money into places where it will not be monitored. We really don't know, because it is not investigated. This is not the task of the Justice Department, which is to go after a black kid in the ghetto who has a joint in his pocket.\" \r\n<\/p>
\r\n-Caveat Lector-\r\n<\/p>
\r\nInformative reading.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nhttp:\/\/www.ariannaonline.com\/interact\/phorum\/read.php?f=5&i=24&t=24\r\n<\/p>
\r\nhttp:\/\/www.hal-pc.org\/~clyndes\/political-chomsky.html\r\n<\/p>
\r\nNoam Chomsky on The Drug War Industrial Complex<\/b>\r\nAuthor: nl5x (---.parker1.co.home.com)\r\nDate: 04-23-01 05:30\r\n<\/p>
\r\n\r\nInterview With Noam Chomsky\r\n<\/p>
\r\nA Hundred years from now Noam Chomsky is going to figure in the history\r\nbooks as the prime voice of conscience, dissent and reason in the wars and\r\nsocial catastrophes of the late 20th century. At the Massachusetts Institute\r\nof Technology in the 1950's, he began an intellectual revolution in the\r\nunderstanding of linguistics which very efficiently challenged and subverted\r\nthe old knee-jerk behavioristic worldview that nourished the Cold War. His\r\nseamless critical essays on American foreign and domestic policies since\r\nthen have unerringly diagnosed their fallacies, relentlessly dissecting the\r\npropaganda of the power establishment. We thought it was time he addressed\r\nthe Drug War.\r\n<\/p>
\r\nHT: You've defined the War on Drugs as an instrument of population control.\r\nHow does it accomplish that?\r\n
\r\nNoam Chomsky: Population control is actually a term I borrowed from the\r\ncounterinsurgency literature of the Kennedy years. The main targets at the\r\ntime were Southeast Asia and Latin America, where there was an awful lot of\r\npopular ferment. They recognized that the population was supporting popular\r\nforces that were calling for all kinds of social change that the United\r\nStates simply could not tolerate. And you could control people in a number\r\nof ways. One way was just by terror and violence, napalm bombing and so on,\r\nbut they also worked on developing other kinds of population-control\r\nmeasures to keep people subjugated, ranging from propaganda to concentration\r\ncamps. Propaganda is much more effective when it is combined with terror.\r\nYou have the same problem domestically, where the public is constantly\r\ngetting out of control. You have to carry out measures to insure that they\r\nremain passive and apathetic and obedient, and don't interfere with\r\nprivilege or power. It's a major theme of modern democracy. As the\r\nmechanisms of democracy expand, like enfranchisement and growth, the need to\r\ncontrol people by other means increases.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nSo the growth of corporate propaganda in the United States more or less\r\nparallels the growth of democracy, for quite straightforward reasons. It's\r\nnot any kind of secret. It is discussed very frankly and openly in business\r\nliterature and academic social-science journals. You have to \"fight the\r\neverlasting battle for the minds of men,\" in their standard phraseology, to\r\nindoctrinate and regiment them in the way that armies regiment their bodies.\r\nThose are population control measures. This engineering or manufacture of\r\nconsent is the essence of democracy, because you have to insure that\r\nignorant and meddlesome outsiders-meaning we, the people-don't interfere\r\nwith the work of the serious people who run public affairs in the interests\r\nof the privileged.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nHT: How does the War on Drugs fit into this?\r\n
\r\nChomsky: Well one of the traditional and obvious ways of controlling people\r\nin every society, whether it's a military dictatorship or a democracy, is to\r\nfrighten them. If people are frightened, they'll be willing cede authority\r\nto their superiors who will protect them: \" OK, I'll let you run my life in\r\norder to protect me,\" that sort of reasoning.\r\nSo the fear of drugs and the fear of crime is very much stimulated by state\r\nand business propaganda. The National Justice Commission repeatedly points\r\nout that crime in the United States, while sort of high, is not off the\r\nspectrum for industrialized societies. On the other hand, fear of crime is\r\nfar beyond other societies, and mostly stimulated by various propaganda. The\r\nDrug War is an effort to stimulate fear of dangerous people from who we have\r\nto protect ourselves. It is also, a direct form of control of what are\r\ncalled \" dangerous classes,\" those superfluous people who don't really have\r\na function contributing to profit-making and wealth. They have to be somehow\r\ntaken care of.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nHT: In some other countries you just hang the rabble.\r\n
\r\nChomsky: Yes, but in the U.S. you don't kill them, you put them in jail. The\r\neconomic policies of the 1980's sharply increased inequality, concentrating\r\nsuch economic growth as there was, which was not enormous, in very few\r\nhands. The top few percent of the population got extremely wealthy as\r\nprofits went through the roof, and meanwhile median-income wages were\r\nstagnating or declining sharply since the '70's. Your getting a large mass\r\nof people who are insecure, suffering from difficulty to misery, or\r\nsomething in between. A lot of them are basically going to be arrested,\r\nbecause you have to control them.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nHT: It's absolutely true, but how do you prove it?\r\n
\r\nChomsky: Just by looking at the trend lines for marijuana. Marijuana use was\r\npeaking in the late '70's, but there was not much criminalization. You\r\ndidn't go to jail for having marijuana then because the people using it were\r\nnice folks like us, the children of the rich. You don't throw them into jail\r\nany more than you throw corporate executives into jail-even though corporate\r\ncrime is more costly and dangerous than street crime. But then in the '80's\r\nthe use of various \" unhealthy \" substances started to decline among more\r\neducated sectors: marijuana and tobacco smoking, alcohol, red meat, coffee,\r\nthis whole category of stuff. On the other hand, usage remained steady among\r\npoorer sectors of the population. In the United States, poor and black\r\ncorrelation-they're not identical, but there's a correlation-and in poor,\r\nblack and Hispanic sectors of the population the use of such substances\r\nremained steady.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nSo take a look at those trends when you call for a War on Drugs, you know\r\nexactly who you're going to pick up: poor black people. You're not going to\r\npick up rich white people: you don't go after them anyway In the\r\nupper-middle class suburb where I live, if somebody goes home and sniffs\r\ncocaine police don't break into their house.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nSo there are many factors making the Drug War a war against the poor,\r\nlargely poor people of color. And those are the people they have to get rid\r\nof. During the period these economic policies were being instituted, the\r\nincarceration rate was shooting up, but crime wasn't, it was steady or\r\ndeclining. But imprisonment went way up. By the late '80's, in terms of\r\nimprisoning our population, we were way ahead of the rest of the world, way\r\nahead of any other industrial society.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nHT: Who benefits from incarcerating young black males?\r\n
\r\nChomsky: A lot of people. Poor people are basically superfluous for the\r\nwealth production, and therefore the wealthy want to get rid of them. The\r\nrich also frighten everyone else, because if you're afraid of these people,\r\nthen you submit to state authority. But beyond that, it's a state industry.\r\nSince the 1930's, every businessman has understood that a private capitalist\r\neconomy must have massive state subsidies; the only question is what form\r\nthat state subsidy will take? In the United States the main form has been\r\nthrough the military system. The most dynamic aspects of the\r\neconomy-computers, the Internet, the aeronautical industry,\r\npharmaceuticals-have fed off the military system. But the crime-control\r\nindustry, as it's called by criminologists, is becoming the fastest-growing\r\nindustry in America.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nAnd it's state industry, publicly funded. It's the construction industry,\r\nthe real estate industry, and also high tech firms. It's gotten to a\r\nsufficient scale that high technology and military contractors are looking\r\nto it as a market for techniques of high-tech control and surveillance, so\r\nyou can monitor what people do in their private activities with complicated\r\nelectronic devices and supercomputers: monitoring their telephone calls and\r\nurinalyses and so forth. In fact, the time will probably come when this\r\nsuperfluous population can be locked up in private apartments, not jails,\r\nand just monitored to track when they do nothing wrong, say the wrong thing,\r\ngo the wrong direction.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nHT: House arrest for the masses.\r\n
\r\nChomsky: It's enough of an industry so that the major defense-industry firms\r\nare interested; you can read about it in \" The Wall Street Journal.\" The big\r\nlaw firms and investment houses are interested:\r\n
\r\nMerrill Lynch is floating big loans for prison construction. If you take the\r\nwhole system, it's probably approaching the scale of the Pentagon.\r\nAlso this is a terrific work force. We hear fuss about prison labor in\r\nChina, but prison labor is standard here. It's very cheap, it doesn't\r\norganize, the workers don't ask for rights, you don't have to worry about\r\nhealth benefits because the public is paying for everything. It's what's\r\ncalled a 'flexible' workforce, the kind of thing economists like; you have\r\nthe workers when you want them, and you throw them out when you don't want\r\nthem.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nAnd what's more it's an old American tradition. There was a big industrial\r\nrevolution in parts of the South in the early part of this century, in\r\nnorthern Georgia and Kentucky and Alabama and it was based mostly around\r\nprison labor. The slaves had been technically freed, but after a few years,\r\nthey were basically slaves again. One way of controlling them was to throw\r\nthem in jail, where they became a controlled labor force. That's the core of\r\nthe modern industrial revolution in the South, which continued in Georgia to\r\nthe 1920's and to the Second World War in places like Mississippi.\r\nNow it's being revived. In Oregon and California there's a fairly\r\nsubstantial textile industry in the prisons, with exports to Asia. At the\r\nvery time people were complaining about prison labor in China, California\r\nand Oregon are exporting prison-made textiles to China. They even have a\r\nline called \" Prison Blues.\"\r\n
\r\n
\r\nAnd it goes all the way up to advanced technology like data processing. In\r\nthe state of Washington, Boeing workers are protesting the exports of jobs\r\nto China, but they're probably unaware that their jobs are being exported to\r\nnearby prisons, where machinists are doing work for Boeing under\r\ncircumstances that the management is delighted over, for obvious reasons.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nHT: And most of these prisoners are nonviolent drug offenders.\r\n
\r\nChomsky: The enormous rate of growth of the prison population has been\r\nmostly drug related. The last figures I saw showed that over half the\r\nfederal prison population, and maybe a quarter in state prisons, are drug\r\noffenders. In New York State, for example, a twenty-dollar street sale or\r\npossession of an ounce of cocaine will get you the same sentence as arson\r\nwith intent to murder. The three-strikes legislation is going to blow it\r\nright through the sky. The third arrest can be for some minor drug offense,\r\nand you'll go to jail forever.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nHT: The Drug Czar's office estimates that Americans spend $57 billion\r\nannually on illegal drugs. What effect does this have on the global economy?\r\n
\r\nChomshy: Well, the United Nations tries to monitor the international drug\r\ntrade, and their estimates are on the order of $400 to $500 billion---half a\r\ntrillion dollars a year--- in trade alone, which makes it higher than oil,\r\nsomething like 10 percent of the world trade. Where this money comes goes to\r\nis mostly unknown, but general estimates are that maybe 60 percent of it\r\npasses through US banks. After that, a lot goes to offshore tax havens. It's\r\nso obscure that nobody monitors it, and nobody wants to. But the Commerce\r\nDepartment every year publishes figures on foreign direct investment, where\r\nUS investment is going, and through the '90s the big excitement has been the\r\n\" new emerging markets \" like Latin America. And it turns out that a quarter\r\nof US foreign direct investment is going to Bermuda, another 15 percent to\r\nthe Bahamas and the Cayman Islands, another 10 percent to Panama, and so on.\r\nNow, their not building steel factories. The most benign interpretation is\r\nthat it's just tax havens. And the less benign interpretation is that it's\r\none way of passing illegal money into places where it will not be monitored.\r\nWe really don't know, because it is not investigated. This is not the task\r\nof the Justice Department, which is to go after a black kid in the ghetto\r\nwho has a joint in his pocket.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nHT: What do you think of the US policy of offering trade and aid favors to\r\ncountries who promulgate so-called antidrug initiatives?\r\n
\r\nChomsky: Actually, US programs radically increase the use of drugs. Look at\r\nthe big growth in cocaine production that has exploded in the Andes over the\r\nlast few years, in Columbia and Peru and Bolivia. Why are Bolivian peasants,\r\nfor instance producing coca? The neoliberal structural-adjustment policies\r\nof the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which are run by the US,\r\ntry to drive peasants into agro-export, producing not for local consumption\r\nbut for sale abroad. They want to reduce social programs, like spending for\r\nhealth and education, cutting government deficits by increasing exports. And\r\nthey cut back tariffs so that we can pour our highly subsidized food exports\r\ninto their countries, which of course undercuts peasant production. Put all\r\nthat together and what do you get? You get a huge increase in Bolivian coca\r\nproduction, as their only comparative advantage.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nThe same is true in Columbia, where US \" food for peace\" aid, as it is\r\ncalled, was used to destroy wheat production by essentially giving food---at\r\nwhat amounts to US taxpayer expense---through US agro-exporters to undercut\r\nwheat production there, which later cut coffee production and their ability\r\nto set prices in any reasonably fashion. And the end result is they turn to\r\nsomething else, and one of the things they turn to is coca production. In\r\nfact, if you look at the total effect of US policies, it has been to\r\nincrease drugs.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nHT: Well, anybody who looks into the history of American drug policies in\r\nthis century.................\r\n
\r\nChomsky: I'm putting aside another factor altogether, namely clandestine\r\nwarfare. If you look into the history of what is called the CIA, which means\r\nthe US White House, it's secret wars, clandestine warfare, the trail of drug\r\nproduction just follows. It started in France after the Second World War\r\nwhen the United States was essentially trying to reinstate the traditional\r\nsocial order, to rehabilitate Fascist collaborators, wipe out the Resistance\r\nand destroy the unions and so on. The first thing they did was reconstitute\r\nthe mafia, as strikebreakers or for other such useful services. And the\r\nmafia doesn't do it for fun, so there was tradeoff: Essentially they allowed\r\nthem to reinstitute the heroin-production system, which had been destroyed\r\nby the Fascists. The Fascists tended to run a pretty tight ship; they didn't\r\nwant any competition, so the wiped out the Mafia. But the US reconstituted\r\nit, first in southern Italy, and then in southern France with the Corsican\r\nMafia. That's where the famous French Connection comes from.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nThat was the main heroin center for many years. Then the US terrorist\r\nactivities shifted over to Southeast Asia. If you want to carry out\r\nterrorist activities, you need local people to do it for you, and you also\r\nneed secret money to pay for it, clandestine hidden money. Well if you need\r\nto hire thugs and murderers with secret money, there aren't many options.\r\nOne of them is the drug connection. The so-called Golden Triangle around\r\nBurma, Laos and Thailand became a big drug-producing area with the help of\r\nthe United States, as part of the secret wars against those populations.\r\nIn Central America, it was partly exposed in the Contra hearings, though it\r\nwas mostly suppressed. But there's no question that the Reagan\r\nadministration's terrorist operations in Central America were closely\r\nconnected with drug trafficking.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nAfghanistan became one of the biggest centers of drug trafficking in the\r\nworld in the 1980s, because that was the payoff for the forces to which the\r\nUS was contributing millions of dollars: the same extreme Islamic\r\nfundamentalists who are now tearing the country to shreds.\r\nIt's been true throughout the world. It's not that the US is trying to\r\nincrease the use of drugs, it's just the natural thing to do. If you were in\r\na position where you had to hire thugs and gangsters to kill peasants and\r\nbreak strikes, and you had to do it with untraceable money, what would come\r\nto your mind?\r\n
\r\n
\r\nHT: Where do you stand on drug legalization?\r\n
\r\nChomsky: Nobody knows what the effect would be. Anyone who tells you they\r\nknow is just stupid or lying., because nobody knows. These are things that\r\nhave to be tried, you have to experiment to see what the effects are.\r\nMost soft drugs are already legal, mainly alcohol and tobacco. Tobacco is by\r\nfar the biggest killer among all the psychoactives. Alcohol deaths are a\r\nlittle hard to estimate, because an awful lot of violent deaths are\r\nassociated with alcohol. Way down below come \" hard \" drugs, a tiny fraction\r\nof the deaths from alcohol and tobacco, maybe ten or twenty thousand deaths\r\nper year. The fastest growing hard drugs are APS, amphetamine-type\r\nsubstances, produced mostly in the US.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nAs far as the rest of the drugs are concerned, marijuana is not known to be\r\nvery harmful. I mean, it's generally assumed it's not good for you, but\r\ncoffee isn't good for you, tea isn't good for you, chocolate cake isn't good\r\nfor you either. It would be crazy to criminalize coffee, even though it's\r\nharmful.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nThe United States is one of very few countries where this is considered a\r\nmoral issue. In most countries it's considered a medical issue. In most\r\ncountries you don't have politicians getting up screaming about how tough\r\nthey're going to be on drugs. So the first thing we've got to do is move out\r\nof the phase of population control, and into the sphere of social issues.\r\nThe Rand Corporation estimates that if you compare the effect of criminal\r\nprograms versus educational programs at reducing drug use, educational\r\nprograms are way ahead by about a factor of seven.\r\n
\r\n
\r\nHT: But alarmist drug-propaganda programs like DARE and the Partnership for\r\na Drug-Free America's TV ads have been found to increase experimentation\r\namong teenagers.\r\n
\r\nChomsky: The question is, what kind of education are you doing? Educational\r\nprograms aren't the only category. Education also has to do with the social\r\ncircumstances in which drugs are used. The answer to that is not throwing\r\npeople in jail. The answer is to try and figure what's going on in their\r\nlives, their family, do they need medical care and so on? This very striking\r\ndecline in substance abuse among educated sectors, as I said, goes across\r\nthe spectrum---red meat, coffee, tobacco, everything. That's education. It\r\nwasn't that there was an educational program that said to stop drinking\r\ncoffee, it's just that attitudes toward oneself and towards health, how we\r\nlive and so on, changed among the more educated sectors of the population,\r\nand these things went down. And none of it had to do with criminalization.\r\nIt just had to do with a rise in the cultural and educational level, which\r\nled to more care for oneself.\r\n
\r\n
\r\n\r\nhttp:\/\/www.geocities.com\/CapitolHill\/Senate\/3761\/drugs.html\r\n
\r\n
\r\n\r\nhttp:\/\/www.hal-pc.org\/~clyndes\/political-chomsky.html\r\n<\/p>\n","contact":"","link":"","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/html","summary":" Overview of the vast interconnection of the \"war\" on drugs and the related capitalist industries which rely on this class\/race trap.","numcomment":0,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/2001\/07\/chomsky__r.txt","filesize":"20.8 kibibytes","article_url":"\/news\/2001\/07\/8368.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[]}