This interview about the economy is also relevant and interesting:

Re Mumia, Chomsky said, speaking at U-Penn in 2002:

http://hbjournalist.googlepages.com/noam

Hans: Looking at the counterinsurgency war here at home, you’ve written about the FBI’s repression of the Black Panther Party & personally attending the funeral of the assassinated BPP leader Fred Hampton. Being here today in Philadelphia, could you please say something about anti-corporate journalist and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal?

Noam: You know all about Mumia Abu-Jamal so I don’t really have to say anything about it in that regard, and my opinion is probably the same as yours. We have to keep in mind that it’s one case that is symbolic of something much broader. Around the world, the US is almost alone in applying the death penalty. I don’t even want to mention the other countries that we are in league with in this regard. That’s one of the reasons that Europe will not extradite people to the US. The U.S. prison system is simply class and race war. Class and race correlate in the US so much that it is hard to distinguish them. The whole incarceration movement is a neo-liberal program to get rid of “unnecessary” people. Take a look at the way the prison population has gone up since 1980. Before it was approximately the same as the rest of the industrialized world. Now it’s five to ten times as high. During the Clinton years it went up about 50%.

Mumia Abu-Jamal and other prisoners are the kind of people that get assassinated by what’s called “social cleansing” in US client states like Colombia. They’re put away. A very substantial part of the poor population (which happens to be largely Black and Latino) are just stuck away. Add that to unemployment figures and the famous unemployment rate of the United States would disappear pretty fast. These are policies of class and race war. The Mumia’s case is just one illustration of that. Its an important case, but is also a much more general phenomenon.