Crime and punishment

There's been a tendency over the last few years for local TV news programs to concentrate on crimes, rapes, kidnappings, etc. Now this is spilling over into the national network news programs.

That's true, but it's just a surface phenomenon. Why is there an increase in attention to violent crime? Is it connected to the fact that there's been a considerable decline in income for the large majority of the population, and a decline as well in the opportunity for constructive work?

But until you ask why there's an increase in social disintegration, and why more and more resources are being directed towards the wealthy and privileged sectors and away from the general population, you can't have even a concept of why there's rising crime or how you should deal with it.

Over the past twenty or thirty years, there's been a considerable increase in inequality. This trend accelerated during the Reagan years. The society has been moving visibly towards a kind of Third World model.

The result is an increasing crime rate, as well as other signs of social disintegration. Most of the crime is poor people attacking each other, but it spills over to more privileged sectors. People are very worried -- and quite properly, because the society is becoming very dangerous.

A constructive approach to the problem would require dealing with its fundamental causes, but that's off the agenda, because we must continue with a social policy that's aimed at strengthening the welfare state for the rich.

The only kind of responses the government can resort to under those conditions is pandering to the fear of crime with increasing harshness, attacking civil liberties and attempting to control the poor, essentially by force.

Do you know what "smash and grab" is? When your car is in traffic or at a stop light, people come along, smash in the window and grab your purse or steal your wallet.

The same thing is going on right around Boston. There's also a new form, called "Good Samaritan robbery." You fake a flat tire on the highway and when somebody stops to help, you jump them, steal their car, beat them up if they're lucky, kill them if they're not.

The causes are the increasing polarization of the society that's been going on for the past twenty-five years, and the marginalization of large sectors of the population. Since they're superfluous for wealth production (meaning profit production), and since the basic ideology is that a person's human rights depend on what they can get for themselves in the market system, they have no human value.

Larger and larger sectors of the population have no form of organization and no viable, constructive way of reacting, so they pursue the available options, which are often violent. To a large extent, those are the options that are encouraged in the popular culture.

You can tell a great deal about a society when you look at its system of justice. I was wondering if you'd comment on the Clinton crime bill, which authorizes hiring 100,000 more cops, boot camps for juveniles, more money for prisons, extending the death penalty to about fifty new offenses and making gang membership a federal crime -- which is interesting, considering there's something about freedom of association in the Bill of Rights.

It was hailed with great enthusiasm by the far right as the greatest anticrime bill ever. It's certainly the most extraordinary crime bill in history. It's greatly increased, by a factor of five or six, federal spending for repression. There's nothing much constructive in it. There are more prisons, more police, heavier sentences, more death sentences, new crimes, three strikes and you're out.

It's unclear how much pressure and social decline and deterioration people will accept. One tactic is just drive them into urban slums -- concentration camps, in effect -- and let them prey on one another. But they have a way of breaking out and affecting the interests of wealthy and privileged people. So you have to build up the jail system, which is incidentally also a shot in the arm for the economy.

It's natural that Clinton picked up this crime bill as a major social initiative, not only for a kind of ugly political reason -- namely, that it's easy to whip up hysteria about it -- but also because it reflects the general point of view of the so-called New Democrats, the business-oriented segment of the Democratic Party to which Clinton belongs.

What are your views on capital punishment?

It's a crime. I agree with Amnesty International on that one, and indeed with most of the world. The state should have no right to take people's lives.

Radio listener: Does this country have a vested interest in supporting the drug trade?

Gun control

Advocates of free access to arms cite the Second Amendment. Do you believe that it permits unrestricted, uncontrolled possession of guns?

It's pretty clear that, taken literally, the Second Amendment doesn't permit people to have guns. But laws are never taken literally, including amendments to the Constitution or constitutional rights. Laws permit what the tenor of the times interprets them as permitting.

But underlying the controversy over guns are some serious questions. There's a feeling in the country that people are under attack. I think they're misidentifying the source of the attack, but they do feel under attack.

The government is the only power structure that's even partially accountable to the population, so naturally the business sectors want to make that the enemy -- not the corporate system, which is totally unaccountable. After decades of intensive business propaganda, people feel that the government is some kind of enemy and that they have to defend themselves from it.

It's not that that doesn't have its justifications. The government is authoritarian and commonly hostile to much of the population. But it's partially influenceable -- and potentially very influenceable -- by the general population.

Many people who advocate keeping guns have fear of the government in the back of their minds. But that's a crazy response to a real problem.

Do the media foster the feeling people have that they're under attack?

At the deepest level, the media contribute to the sense that the government is the enemy, and they suppress the sources of real power in the society, which lie in the totalitarian institutions -- the corporations, now international in scale --that control the economy and much of our social life. In fact, the corporations set the conditions within which the government operates, and control it to a large extent.

The picture presented in the media is constant, day after day. People simply have no awareness of the system of power under which they're suffering. As a result -- as intended -- they turn their attention against the government.

People have all kinds of motivations for opposing gun control, but there's definitely a sector of the population that considers itself threatened by big forces, ranging from the Federal Reserve to the Council on Foreign Relations to big government to who knows what, and they're calling for guns to protect themselves.

Radio listener: On the issue of gun control, I believe that the US is becoming much more like a Third World country, and nothing is necessarily going to put a stop to it. I look around and see a lot of Third World countries where, if the citizens had weapons, they wouldn't have the government they've got. So I think that maybe people are being a little short-sighted in arguing for gun control and at the same time realizing that the government they've got is not exactly a benign one.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 736