To be an American is to be diseased. We Americans are diseased in many ways but I want to concentrate on our emotionally diseased state. I am not a globetrotter, I’ve only been to Colombia so maybe this disease is to be found in other developed nations but I wouldn’t know. In the American soul as I see it there’s a consistent cowardice persona. A hurt and spiteful persona. A self interested yet neglected soul. This manifests itself in a chaotic and dishonest relationships. Self serving lies are propagated, illusions of love and trust are created and maintained as a natural form of a relationship. Every individual is both someone you hate and love. You hate others while you are with them, but hate them when you are with others.

I know very few Americans personally that I believe are honest to themselves or others. I know few Americas that I would consider loyal. Some might argue such qualities are rare around the world, and I’d agree but within the American population they are very rare indeed. When I went to Colombia the hospitality, the warmth, the honesty and earnestness overwhelmed to such a degree I never wanted to leave. The people were different. Something in the conversations was radically different from any conversation I had had in America. Some would argue this is simply cultural differences, something of preference. I agree but the preference for humans I believe should be something outside of the realm of personal relations within America. I don’t believe anyone is happy with the American disease, namely Americans. I see in most people’s faces here, an total and utter emptiness. A lack of purpose and vision. I can barely think of Americans I know that seem to be truly happy and content. I see people that say they are happy, but everything in their actions tells a story of insecurity and hopeless.

This American disease of the emotional culture rose from the economic and social system of the U.S. Consumerism propagated by powerful corporations have highjacked our culture, our narrative and our value system. What it has produced is a soulless, anti-human way of being. We live in our day to day lives as any human does, having the usual traumas and triumphs. But our lives as reflected in the other reality we had no say in; our popular culture, our work culture has made us ashamed of being human. Consumerism places values on objects, our status and worth derived from them. Regardless if you are swimming in a pool or scrounging for name brand shoes, the insecurity in your psyche is pervasive. The ideal is always within grasp but also at the edge of being lost. Our popular culture, all pervasive weaves narratives and tales that are laughable but when digested 24/7 and inescapable they become the model we compare ourselves to. The emotionally stunted characters on TV and in the tabloids become templates we work from. We are raised by our parents and the people we watch on TV. It seems in todays culture, legitimacy and whether something is real is identified by if its’ on TV. Our problems are the reflection of what popular culture has depicted not the other way around. We compare our lives to the popular narrative.

So much stale manufactured lives has diseased our souls. Friendships, marriages seem to be in the decline. We don’t meet people, we network, to see what we can get out of them. We don’t have life long friendships, we have business contacts. Our relationship models are investment opportunities. Loyalty and hard work outside of the economic sphere seems cliche. “I’m going to get mine and fuck everyone else” seems to be the catch phrase for our current state.

Peter Morgan

It is becoming increasingly common for some commentators to argue that gay oppression is a thing of the past. The Economist said recently, ‘The first members of a unique new class are emerging: young gay people who have never feared abuse or assault… They are the front edge of a generation that might be called post-gay: one that may grow up wondering what all the fuss was about’.¹ It went on to suggest that if you look at some parts of the world – the ‘cosmopolitan patches of certain Western countries’ – then to be gay is glamorous. The media treat gay issues with seriousness: it is more common to see gay characters on television; more and more celebrities have come out of the closet. ‘Today if homosexuality were a choice’, they argue, ‘now would be a great time to choose it.’

Even many writers on gay politics support this rose tinted view of the world. Andrew Sullivan, author of the best selling book Virtually Normal, argued recently in the US periodical The New Republic that ‘gay people [are] already prosperous, independent and on the brink of real integration’.² And in the same publication Jonathan Rauch says that we are now moving beyond gay oppression:

The standard political model sees homosexuals as an oppressed minority who must fight for their liberation through political action. But that model’s usefulness is drawing to a close. It is ceasing to serve the interests of ordinary gay people, who ought to be disengaging from it, even drop it.³

The basis for this, according to Rauch, is because gays are now more affluent. He cites recent surveys which allegedly show that the impoverishment of gays compared to the rest of the population is now a thing of the past:

As more and more homosexuals come out of hiding, the reality of gay economic and political and educational achievement becomes more evident. And as that happens, gay people who insist they are oppressed will increasingly, and not always unfairly, come off as yuppie whiners, ‘victims’ with $50,000 incomes and vacations in Europe. They may feel they are oppressed, but they will have a harder and harder time convincing the public.⁴

But if we look at the position of gays and lesbians in capitalist society today we see that, despite the gains of the last three decades, in particular in the advanced industrialised countries, it is beyond any doubt that oppression continues. Of the 202 countries in the world, in only six countries does the law protect gay men and lesbians against discrimination. Being gay is illegal in 74 of them. To be gay or lesbian in Cuba, for example, means you are likely to be sent to jail. In Bangladesh and Bahrain the official view is that homosexuality does not exist. In Pakistan homosexual behaviour is illegal and is punished by anything from two years to life imprisonment. In Saudi Arabia homosexual acts can be punished with the death penalty. In Australia anti-discrimination laws were passed in 1986 which affect employment, but homosexual relationships are still discriminated against in the areas of immigration, adoption and fostering. It was only in 1994 that homosexuality was legalised in the state of Tasmania. And in the United States although legal protection against discrimination now exists in the states of California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont and Wisconsin, in six others (Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Montana and Nevada) anal/oral sex between people of the same gender is a crime. And, despite the promises from Bill Clinton in 1993, he has failed to reverse the ban on gays and lesbians in the military. Instead he hid behind a compromise ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy which led to large numbers of lesbians and gays being driven out of the armed forces.⁵

In Britain discrimination also exists some 30 years after the partial legalisation of male homosexuality. A 1993 Stonewall survey, Less Equal than Others, found that 16 percent of respondents faced discrimination at work because of their sexuality, and 48 percent had been harassed. This was supported by an independent report by the Social and Community and Planning Research study, ‘Discrimination against Gay Men and Lesbians’ (1995), which found that 4 percent had lost their jobs because of their sexuality, 8 percent had been refused promotion and 21 percent had been harassed.⁶ The age of consent for gay sex was reduced from 21 to 18 in 1994 but this still discriminates against gay men because the age of consent for heterosexuals is 16. Lesbians and gay men also face discrimination in immigration law, pension benefits, tax and inheritance law, housing and adoption law.

So as we approach the end of the 20th century there is a strange paradox. On the one hand there are those who argue that gay oppression has become so marginal it is virtually a thing of the past. Yet a look around the world shows continuing discrimination, and gay oppression, while it may be ameliorated, remains a structural feature of capitalist society. This article looks at why this contradiction exists. A key reason for the gap between reality and what many writers would have us believe is the differing class positions of the vast majority of gays and lesbians and a thin layer who have been able to find a niche within the system. What I intend to do is to look at what is commonly called ‘the gay community’ and show that it is a myth to talk as if there is a common interest between all gays and lesbians. In fact lesbians and gays are no more united because of their sexuality than are women, blacks or any other group of the oppressed. Instead there is a division that runs right through the heart of the gay community based on class. And this affects people’s experience of oppression, their politics, and their strategy for fighting for liberation.

One mistaken idea that flows from ignoring this class distinction, and regarding more open and visible middle and ruling class gays as representative of a whole community, is that all gays and lesbians have more spending power, or are more affluent than the rest of the working class. But this notion not only mangles reality and obscures the recognition of gay oppression, it also provides ammunition for those who want to resist any moves towards basic equality for gays, let alone liberation.

Gay scene and the pink pound

Over the last few years there has been mounting criticism about the gay scene, the commercialisation of the annual Pride march in London and the growth of the ‘pink economy’. Arguments which were once almost completely the preserve of socialists are now being voiced by those who once defended the pink economy from left wing criticism. A book called Anti-Gay, edited by Mark Simpson, argues that the scene offers little for the mass of gays and lesbians today. Instead of coming out as gay, he says, we should be in favour of returning to the closet – of escaping from the scene and all that lifestyle entails.⁷ Others have argued that the Pride march is now becoming too commercialised. In a particularly powerful article in Gay Times Tony Leonard said:

The festival has embraced the free-market world of Thatcher and her successors in a way that was once unimaginable… This year’s theme is ‘P.R.I.D.E. What Does It Mean To You?’ For the organisers, it seems, the answer is another five letter word – M.O.N.E.Y… If you thought Pride was about community, strength through togetherness, fighting against intolerance and bigotry, and any number of other social, political and spiritual concerns, it’s time to think again. The only hopes, dreams and aspirations we’re interested in here are those involving hard cash.⁸

Pride, which began as an annual march in London as a demonstration for gay rights and a political statement of resistance, has now become a major advertising opportunity for some very large and powerful companies – such as Virgin, Budweiser, or United Airlines which, incidentally, does not extend gay rights to its own workers. The idea that the event is something that benefits the whole community equally is a myth – there are important corporate interests involved. So keen were the organisers of Pride to use the event to generate large quantities of money that they even considered taking out a copyright on the word ‘Pride’ – although the proposals were eventually dropped. But reports of debts and unpaid beills have meant the tensions over Pride have come to a head, and a new group – called National Pride – have put forward proposals to run the festival in 1998. We now face the prospect of two festivals taking place simultaneously in Lodon on the same weekend as the two groups fight it out.

Some of those who now recognise that the gay scene does not provide some form of liberation flip over completely from their previous faith in it. Whether for ironic effect or out of desperation some have even called for the gay scene to be shut down. Beneath the hyperbole they have realised how thoroughly the commercial gay scene is permeated by market values. But the impact of capitalist relations does not stop with major multinational companies trying to capture the gay market. The market itself shapes what it is supposed to mean to be gay. The class divisions that arise from capitalism mean there are both capitalist and working class gays; there are those with an interest in preserving the system and those with an interest in overthrowing it. The pink economy, which countless gay theorists have told us is what holds the gay community together, shows these divisions and antagonisms very sharply.

During the 1980s and 1990s we have seen a growth in the gay scene in the major cities in the US and to a lesser extent in Britain – Soho in London and The Village in Manchester are two of the most popular. In 1984 gay bosses formed the Gay Businesses Association whose express aim was to ‘serve the gay business community’. Gary Henshaw, a gay business consultant and co-owner of the Kudos cafe at Charing Cross, said:

I am motivated by money and power. There is a certain amount of power and prestige in being recognised as a businessman on the gay scene and I do enjoy that. I happen to be a capitalist in the extreme. I grew up watching Dynasty and I believe that dream that you must struggle forward, you keep expanding and you get bigger until some day I would like to build an empire. Power is very much connected with wealth.⁹

Gay bosses say they intend to serve the community as a whole – offering gay men and lesbians jobs, opportunities and the like. For them this is one important step on the way towards real liberation. Gary Henshaw describes the good fortune of those who work for him:

I think it’s a good environment. A lot of young people go and work in a gay business basically to liberate themselves. They’ve grown up with the problems being gay, suddenly they come out and they work in a gay bar or club and they find people accept them and they have a great time. Then they can go back into the straight environment with total confidence in themselves.¹⁰

In fact there is nothing liberating about working for gay bosses or working in a gay bar. Like the rest of the industry the workers are subjected to the same pressures as other workers – forced to work long hours on low pay with very little security. The so called ‘community’ is there to serve only one interest, that of the gay bourgeoisie and big business. As one employee said who worked for Bass Taverns (a ‘gay friendly’ pub which sponsors Pride): ‘We get paid less per hour after tax than the price we were charging for a pint. Hours would be cut in half without warning. The attitude was, “If you don’t like it, fuck off”.’¹¹

The Gay Business Association was also involved with the organisers of Pride in establishing a ‘gay friendly’ networking forum whose stated aim is ‘to connect the consumer with gay friendly business thereby increasing freedom of choice for the gay consumer and expanding the market’. The launch was at a conference organised by Marketing Week magazine called ‘Marketing to the Pink Economy’ and it said, ‘Regardless of your personal opinion, you can no longer afford to ignore the pink economy.’ So while the gay bosses may make noises about the need to end discrimination, the need for equality, or the necessity to combat homophobia, they are very much committed to the capitalist system, and they have a material stake in the system on which their profits depend. Gay businessmen identify with the gay community in so far as this is the source of their income. But politically they may identify with quite right wing ideas – the market, free enterprise, cuts in public spending, the need to tax business less and so on.

Gay bosses hold to the idea of the ‘gay community’ as a way of legitimising their activities. This centres on the idea that all gays and lesbians are in the same boat – that they all suffer discrimination, and so they should all come together to fight it. Yet such phrases hide the class nature of oppression, the fact that those at the bottom of society face gay oppression in a much different form to those at the top. Many on the left accept this idea of a common gay community. In Britain Peter Tatchell said, ‘What unites lesbian and gay men are our common sexual experiences and our suffering discrimination as a result of prejudices against our sexuality. A wealthy gay white man is in much the same boat if he loses his job because he is gay as a poor black lesbian who loses her job for the same reasons’.¹² But gay people do not face the same degree of oppression. Clearly if you are wealthy you can afford the trappings of that lifestyle that allow you a greater degree of freedom to express your sexuality.

Just a brief look at the lifestyle of those gays who are part of the ruling class in society shows they live in a world apart from the majority of the gays and lesbians who are part of the working class. The Advocate, one of the biggest selling gay magazines in the US, recently featured an interview with Alan Gilmour. He tells us of the difficulty he had in coming to terms with his gay sexuality, the way in which he was accepted in the company after he came out, and how he was able to overcome a certain amount of prejudice. But until 1994 Alan Gilmour was the vice-chairman of Ford, the second largest car company in the US. This made him one of the most influential bosses in the US. In 1994 he resigned from Ford yet he remains on the board of Prudential Insurance, Dow Chemicals, Detroit Edison, US West and Whirlpool. The interview in The Advocate tells us that, despite his busy life, he still has time to oversee the construction of his dream home, a four floor, 13,000 square foot mansion in Detroit.

Whilst we may have every sympathy with Gilmour’s struggle to come to terms with his sexuality, nevertheless his lifestyle, income and wealth are a world apart from those workers who are forced to work long hours for low pay on a Ford production line, many of whom will be gay or lesbian. In fact, as the article tells us, Alan Gilmour was able to go on many expensive holidays and business trips which all helped him in coming to terms with being gay. For most working class people in the US, who since the 1970s have suffered a decline of wages in real terms of 19 percent, this is a luxury they are denied. Their main concerns are housing, health, education or simply having enough food for the kids and keeping warm during winter.

The affluent consumer?

The so called ‘pink pound’ is used to define a gay lifestyle. The market, or the commercialisation of the ‘gay identity’, has reached many different aspects of people’s lives. This is not something unique to the fight for gay rights. Many other struggles that began as a challenge to the system have been expropriated by the system as the bosses realise the possibility to exploit the market. Now to be gay or lesbian is not simply a statement of sexuality but a statement of lifestyle: it defines what clothes you wear, what magazines you read, what furniture you have, or what vodka you drink. For some, formerly on the left, this is no bad thing. As one writer explained:

Political activism, focusing on the injustices and discrimination we face, has a negative aura. In contrast, the pursuit of young-at-heart hedonism offers positive ways of flaunting, rather than bemoaning, gay sexuality. If affirming your sexuality is reduced to a choice between wearing badges, carrying placards, talking about gay oppression and getting arrested, or mincing up and down Old Compton Street, drinking pavement-cafe cappuccino and showing off carefully toned physiques under skin-tight T shirts – the second option is quite simply more fun… If consumerism is the defining characteristic of the gay nineties, and if we have never had it so good, there must be some relationship between hedonism and political gain. It is not necessarily a negative one… Consumerism is not antithetical to political gain, but an integral part of the very process through which these gains are slowly but surely being made.¹³

The fight to end gay and lesbian oppression, therefore, becomes not one of fighting back against the system, but one of buying into the system, not resistance to the market but the acceptance of the market. It has been accepted by many that most gays and lesbians are an affluent group of consumers, with a disproportionate amount of spending power compared to the rest of the population, who are just dying to rush out and spend all their money on a whole host of consumer goods and products.

Advertising gurus and marketing managers claim this is a discovery they have made in the 1990s. But the image of the well to do gay man goes back to the late 19th century when homosexuality was outlawed. For over a century portrayals of gay men as actors and artists, wealthy and flamboyant individuals have been stock stereotypes. These stereotypes played the pernicious role of suggesting that ordinary people simply could not be gay. That in turn reinforced anti-gay attitudes among workers. The updated version, of gays as yuppies, plays a similar role and has been supported by two recent surveys in the US.

The first was done in 1988 by the Simmons Market Research Bureau which did a survey of eight gay and lesbian newspapers in the US. Its data was one of the original sources for the argument that gays and lesbians are unusually well educated and affluent. Its results found that 59 percent of gays and lesbians had degrees compared to 18 percent of the rest of the population. And 49 percent of gays and lesbians had managerial or professional occupations compared to 15 percent for the rest of the population.¹⁴ This was supported by the Overlooked Opinions survey in 1990 whose results found that gays and lesbians were disproportionately wealthy: 34 percent had incomes over $50,000 (compared to 25 percent for the population as a whole). On the basis of this it was calculated that the ‘gay communities’ income potential was around $514 billion. The Wall Street Journal called it ‘a dream market… gay households have characteristics sought by many advertisers. Average annual [gay] household income is $55,430′.¹⁵ Both surveys were used to persuade many major companies to advertise in the gay press in the US which, at the time, was desperately in need of a financial boost. Nor were these surveys confined to the US. In Britain a survey of 1,788 gays and lesbians in 1994 came to the same conclusion – that they were better educated (27 percent having degrees compared to 9 percent in the rest of the population) and lesbians were said to earn on average £3,000 more per year than heterosexual women.¹⁶

In fact recent evidence suggests that the reliability of these surveys is open to question. Firstly the data they use is highly selective: it’s mainly middle class, better educated and more affluent people who reply to these type of questionnaires, so the results are not surprising when you have such a highly selective group. As Lee Badgett says in a recent essay, ‘Beyond Biased Samples: Challenging the Myths on the Economic Status of Lesbians and Gay Men’:

Getting a random sample of gay people in the US is no simple matter. Government agencies and academic statisticians spend a lot of time and money to get representative samples of the US population. Unfortunately few such surveys ask the right questions that would allow a direct comparison of incomes between gays/lesbians/bisexual people and heterosexuals.¹⁷

Secondly, it is precisely the class position of middle and upper class gays that allows them them to be out about ther sexuality. Therefore it makes it difficult for any selective sample to be indicative of all gays and lesbians in society. Simply as a result of the numerical preponderence of the working class, most gays and lesbians are likely to come from its ranks. The idea that the majority of working class gays and lesbians can buy into the pink economy is false. For most people this is something that is simply beyond their means. So the idea of a gay lifestyle which apparently transcends class boundaries is, in fact, a particular form of middle class lifestyle. As Peter Weir, one of the contributors to Anti-Gay, explains:

The gay community represented in Ikea ads, the comfy image of middle class white guys out shopping for furniture, is one that has been identified as the mainstream. It is a lie… The true division in the gay community is between the entrenched, privileged, politically active urban and suburban trend-setters and policy makers, and the mass of people with homosexual urges.¹⁸

There is new research which questions the conclusions of both surveys and throws doubts on their reliability. Interviews with over 15,000 voters in the 1992 election in the US found 466 who identified themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual, and a comparison of their income with that of heterosexual voters revealed that gay voters tended to be in the lower income bracket. This was supported by the 1993 Yankelovich Monitor survey on consumer attitudes which included a question on sexual orientation. What it found was that gay respondents had an average household income of $37,400 and lesbians $34,800 – both well below the $55,430 that the other surveys concluded was the average income of gays and lesbians.¹⁹ Lee Badgett concludes that ‘all the evidence from better surveys shows that gay people do not earn more than straight people, and two detailed studies even show a more disturbing pattern: lesbian, gay and bisexual people earn less than heterosexual people’.²⁰

One of these is a study by Badgett himself when he examined data from the US General Social Survey 1989-1991. He found that gay and bisexual male workers earned 11 to 27 percent less than heterosexual male workers with the same experience, education, occupation and marital status. And he found similar figures for lesbians. Yet even here he adds a note of caution and acknowledges that the reason little is known about the economic effects of sexual orientation is because of the limitations and reliability of the data.²¹

So the idea that all gays and lesbians are affluent is a myth. What has come to represent the stereotypical gay person is, in fact, just a small proportion of all gays and lesbians in society, essentially from the middle and upper class. Working class gays and lesbians are ‘excluded’ simply because they do not have sufficient purchasing power.

The drift to the right

The repercussions of this debate, particularly in the US, have fuelled a right wing offensive against gay and lesbian rights. For example, in the US state of Colorado an amendment was passed to the state’s constitution which, if enacted, would have removed gays and lesbians from civil rights protection. Amendment 2, as it was known, became the focus for a number of right wing and religious groups to go on the offensive against gays. The Colorado for Family Values group put out a leaflet which said, ‘Are homosexuals a disadvantaged minority? You decide! Records show that even now, not only are gays not economically disadvantaged, they’re actually one of the most affluent groups in America’.²² And they quoted a number of figures from gay publications which argued that gays are three times more likely to have a college degree, three times more likely to have a professional or managerial job, and four times more likely to travel overseas than the average American.

Likewise, in his testimony against the Employment Non-discrimination Act of 1994 that passed through the US Congress, Joseph E Broadus argued, ‘Homosexual households had an average income of $55,400 compared with a national average of $36,500… This is not a profile of a group in need of special civil rights legislation in order to participate in the economy or to have an opportunity to hold a decent job. It is the profile of an elite’.²³ So the image of the well off affluent gay consumer has now turned full circle and is being used by those intent on denying the fact that gay oppression exists.

Part of the reason why the right wing has felt confident to go on the attack over gay rights is because there has been a retreat by the left in gay politics since the heady days of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) which emerged following the Stonewall riots of the 1960s. Then there were attempts to link the fight for gay rights with a general fight against capitalism. Today conservative thinking and strategy dominate many of those who write about gay politics, such as Andrew Sullivan, quoted above. They believe the rights of gays and lesbians can be realised within capitalist society through gradual, piecemeal reform. This thinking dominates groups such as Stonewall which remain very much committed to working within the system. Indeed when thousands of young gays and lesbians threatened to break down the doors of the House of Commons and virtually rioted outside following the failure of MPs to vote for an equal age of consent in 1994, Stonewall was one of the first to object and denounce the demonstrators the next day.

Compare this to the fight for gay rights in the 1960s. Then the GLF declared its solidarity with other revolutionary movements of the oppressed and exploited. In some quarters this was reciprocated. Huey Newton of the Black Panthers wrote from his prison cell in 1970 to express his support for the new gay movement. In Britain the GLF organised sit-ins in bars which refused to serve gays, various marches and protests and contingents on demonstrations like the TUC’s march against the Tory Industrial Relations Bill. The excitement of the new movement temporarily made up for the lack of any clear idea of how to overcome gay and lesbian oppression. However, the vision of change was very vague and, as the initial enthusiasm waned and the movement had to confront deeper questions – What causes oppression? Can the oppressed unite? and so on – confusion took its toll. Many activists began to see homophobia not as a product of the nuclear family under capitalism but as an inherent attitude in all straights.

Since then the retreat has continued into what is known as ‘identity politics’, the idea that simply asserting your identity is the way to overcome oppression. But this also leads away from collective struggle. For those who can afford it, it is possible to assert your identity on the gay scene. Clubbing, shopping or fashion become seen as liberating activities, although they are inaccessible to the majority of gays and lesbians. Identity politics therefore centres on expanding the pink economy, making money for gay businessmen, rather than challenging homophobia in the rest of society. Central to identity politics is the idea that the personal is political and the idea of autonomy, that movements against oppression should be separate and distinct, that there should be a gay movement, a women’s movement, a black movement.²⁴

This approach represents a retreat from class politics, and the idea that the working class could be central to the struggle to end oppression. Today the slogan ‘The personal is political’, far from leading to collective political action, only leads to the idea that politics based on lifestyle can bring about change. But the problem is that ‘personal politics’ does not bring about change or challenge the system in which we live. It is not simply a question of alternative lifestyles, or of ‘empowerment’ through spending, but of challenging the existing order of society which produces and breeds discrimination.

Marxism and gay oppression

The standard attack on the Marxist analysis of gay oppression, as well as the Marxist approach to oppression generally, is that it is economistic. Marxism is discounted, on the one hand, for being unable to explain gay oppression using economic categories and, on the other, for being irrelevant to movements against oppression because gay liberation either does not fit into its strategy for social change or is merely a byproduct of a socialist revolution. For socialists the starting point for gay oppression is that it is rooted in capitalist society, that it serves the interests of the ruling class. Oppression serves to divide and weaken the working class. It sets gays against straights, blacks against whites, men against women, thus dividing one section of the working class against another, promoting inequality and discrimination.

More specifically gay oppression and women’s oppression also exist because of the importance of the nuclear family under capitalism. The family is the means by which what Marx called the ‘reproduction of labour power’ is carried out. This makes it a central institution of capitalist society. In the early days of capitalism whole families were forced to work in factories – and for a while the survival of the working class family as an institution appeared under threat (as both Marx and Engels believed). However, in the late 19th century a concerted attempt was made by the ruling class to consolidate the family as the main unit for the reproduction of labour, from day to day, and one generation to the next. It was at this time that the modern concept of a homosexual identity became articulated. In 1869 the term ‘homosexuality’ appeared for the first time in an anonymous pamphlet distributed in Germany. This is not to say that homosexuality began at this point – indeed one of the main arguments used against those from the right who argue that homosexuality is somehow ‘unnatural’ is to point to the fact that this is one form of activity that has existed throughout human civilisation. But it was towards the end of the 19th century that the ruling class moved towards making homosexuality an activity that was illegal. In Britain Section 11 of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act deemed all male homosexual acts short of buggery, whether they be commited in public or private, illegal. And 13 years later the Vagrancy Act of 1898 clamped down on homosexual ‘soliciting’. Jeffrey Weeks declares that ‘these two enactments represented a singular hardening of the legal situation and were a crucial factor in the determination of modern attitudes’.²⁵

The working class family was a cheap way of ensuring the supply of necessary labour. As the nuclear family became more important to capitalism it became increasingly important to portray it as the only way of living. That is why alongside the consolidation of the family came the first laws to criminalise homosexuals. There have been important changes to the family over the last century. Capitalism operates to break down the family – through migration and the demand for greater mobility of labour; through the pressures on the family which have led to increased divorce rates and more single parents; by virtue of the fact that fewer people are marrying in the first place, and more and more children are born out of wedlock. But despite this the family remains the key institution for the reproduction of labour. Working class people still cling to the family as the repository of love and calm from the outside world. Marriage and childbirth are still seen as inevitable for most working class women – even though the reality is still somewhat different. As Lindsey German explains:

One of the most surprising features of the family today is the astonishing tenacity with which most workers cling to it… While these changes have fundamentally altered the families of millions of workers, there is a countervailing tendency for workers to cling to the family, and to attempt to reinforce its supposed traditional values. This is shown by the increased ideological importance of the family and the centrality of the home under late capitalism.²⁶

Gay sexuality threatens the ideal image of the present day family firstly because it challenges the family’s rationale in the reproduction of labour power, but also because it challenges the ideology of the family. The idea of same sex partners challenges the man-wife relationship essential for the nuclear family. As Tony Cliff says:

So long as the traditional family is an economic unit, for rearing children and satisfying the consumption needs of the adults, homosexuals are bound to be considered deviant: the homosexual male is not seen to fit the man’s role as the provider for wife and children, and the homosexual female is not seen to act the role of mother and wife. The contemporary family is not only a prison for those in it, but also enslaves those who do not fit into the sex-role stereotypes connected with it.²⁷

This is merely a brief outline of the theory of the family and gay oppression which various Marxists have developed since Marx and Engels themselves. But a number of key features of it are worth stressing. First, Marxism explains how gay oppression is structured into capitalism. It is not simply a consequence of reactionary ideas, rather those ideas rest on the way we are forced to live in capitalist society. The driving force of capitalist society, and its central contradiction, is exploitation. But the way capitalism has developed historically has given rise to forms of oppression which are so firmly built into capitalism they cannot just be reformed away. Gay theorists used to denigrate Marxism for downgrading gay oppression by accounting for it as a byproduct of class exploitation. Instead, they argued, gay oppression is rooted in a permanent antagonism between gays and straights. Some of them even argued such heterosexism was the root of every other oppression and the division of society into classes. Interestingly many of the same people have now interpreted partial advances for gays within capitalism as a sign that gay oppression, which they once thought immutable, can be swept away by the extension of gay business, just pulling yourself together, and quietly lobbying for changes in the law.

The second point about the Marxist theory of gay oppression is not only that it accounts for the oppression itself, but also it explains why mistaken ideas, like the notion that we are living in a post-gay world, can have such a hold. Understanding the class divisions in society is not only key to explaining oppression. It also reveals the class basis of other theories of oppression – how the advantages the middle classes enjoy in society, and the contradictory position of middle class gays, enable them to project their own experiences and class interests as strategies for gays as a whole.

The centrality of class

The history of the struggle against gay oppression is bound up with the history of class struggle and of socialism. And whenever the working class fights back class divisions become more apparent. This was something clearly understood by the Russian socialist Alexandra Kollontai when she argued why you cannot have unity between women of different classes in the fight for women’s liberation. The same is equally applicable to gays: ‘If in certain circumstances the short term tasks of women of all classes coincide, the final aims of the two camps, which in the long term determine the direction of the movement and the tactics to be used, differ sharply’.²⁸ Put simply, class interests divide the oppressed – and working class gays have more to gain from fighting alongside other working class people than they do from uniting with ruling class sections of the gay community who have a completely different agenda. Most of the time the divisions inside the working class seem all too powerful – between gays and straights, blacks and whites, men and women. Yet whenever workers struggle, this division breaks down. This was clearly seen during the days of the Russian Revolution of 1917 when workers took power for the first time. In so doing many reactionary ideas broke down.

In December 1917, just two months after the revolution, the Bolsheviks abolished all laws against homosexuality. At the same time abortion on demand was made legal, divorce by request was granted and the age of consent laws were repealed. As Lauristen and Thorstad state:

The sweeping reforms in sex-related matters that were an immediate byproduct of the Russian Revolution ushered in a new atmosphere of sexual freedom. The atmosphere, which gave an impetus to the sexual reform movement in Western Europe and America, was consciously extended to include homosexuality. ‘It was necessary, it was said, to take down the walls which separated the homosexuals from the rest of society’… This attitude was generally shared by the rest of the population. The official Soviet attitude under the Bolsheviks was that homosexuality did nobody any harm…²⁹

In just two months at the beginning of the century in 1917, the Bolsheviks achieved more than was done in decades elsewhere. The gains by gays and lesbians brought about by the revolution were greater than has been achieved in many Western countries since, although the revolutionary gains were reversed under Stalin.

Today the opportunity to put class back at the heart of gay politics is greater than it has been for many years. Over the last few years we have seen a change in attitudes towards gays and lesbians – now it is undoubtedly true that the majority of working class people reject discrimination. For example, the percentage of people who say that ‘homosexual men and lesbians should have the same rights under the law as the rest of the population’ has increased from 65 percent in 1991 to 74 percent in 1995. The percentage of those who believe that homosexual relationships between consenting adults should be legal has gone up from 58 percent in 1977 to 74 percent in 1993. And even responses on the one issue that is often used to whip up anti-gay prejudice – the question of whether a homosexual person should be a school teacher – show that, while in 1983 the majority view was that it was not acceptable (53 percent), by 1993 the majority view was that it was acceptable (55 percent).³⁰

For years gays and lesbians have suffered attacks from the Tories, from the introduction of Clause 28 to the continued ban on gays and lesbians in the military. So the election of a government that not only promised greater tolerance but also had the first openly gay MP in the cabinet has brought a renewed sense of optimism. But Tony Blair has shown himself to be absolutely committed to the idea of the nuclear family, not just in terms of photo opportunities, but ideologically. The nuclear family plays a crucial role in his vision of a ‘New Britain’. The attacks on health, education and single parents is all about shifting the burden onto the family.

And no matter what the liberal credentials of New Labour over sexuality, a glance across the world shows how there can be sudden upsurges of homophobia as capitalism is thrown into crisis and right wing forces seek to build out of people’s despair. Gay oppression continues, albeit at a lower level than in the 1950s. That in itself wrecks people’s lives and, given the efforts of groups from the Christian Coalition in the US to Le Pen’s National Front in France, it would be foolish to imagine it will always stay at relatively lower levels.

At the same time alternatives to Marxism are in crisis. The gay movement, as any sort of radical coherent force, collapsed into the reformism of the Labour left in the 1980s. That has been followed by an even more stark collapse of its ideas. No sooner had identity politics and the tactics of groups like Queer Nation in the US and OutRage! in Britain become the orthodoxy among radicalised lesbians and gays than the theorists of the gay movement abandoned the notion that there was really anything to fight against. None of this means that gays and lesbians will automatically look towards revolutionary socialism as a way to fight oppression. Many hold out hopes for reform within the system. But that does not have the radical gloss enjoyed by the self-appointed gay leaders of the last two decades. Consequently, Marxism can find a ready audience among gays and lesbians who are sick of being told to emulate an impossible middle class lifestyle and who want to see the banner of gay liberation firmly on the battlefield in the sharp social conflicts that lie ahead.

Notes

1 From ‘Now for a Question about Queer Culture’, The Economist, 12 July 1997.

2 A Sullivan, ‘The Politics of Homosexuality’, in The New Republic, 10 May 1993, p36.

3 J Rauch, ‘Beyond Oppression’, in The New Republic, 10 May 1993, p18

4 Ibid, p23.

5 Figures taken from C Spencer, Homosexuality: A History (Fourth Estate, 1995).

6 ‘Discrimination in the Workplace’, Stonewall Factsheet, 1996.

7 M Simpson (ed), Anti-Gay (London 1996).

8 T Leonard, ‘Give Us Back Our Pride’, in Gay Times, June 1997, p37.

9 Quoted from N Field, Over the Rainbow (Pluto, 1995), p78.

10 Ibid, p80.

11 Quoted in T Leonard, op cit, p38.

12 P Tatchell, Gay Times, August 1993.

13 S Edge, ‘The Nineties So Far’, Gay Times, February 1996, pp18-24.

14 A Gluckman and B Reed, ‘The Gay Marketing Moment’, in A Gluckman and B Reed, Homo Economics (Routledge, 1997).

15 From M Badgett, ‘Beyond Biased Samples’, in A Gluckman and B Reed, op cit, p65.

16 From the Pink Paper, 12 August 1994.

17 M Badgett, op cit, p68.

18 P Weir in M Simpson (ed),op cit, p32.

19 Figures from M Badgett, op cit, p68.

20 Ibid, p66.

21 M Badgett, ‘The Wage Effect of Sexual Orientation Discrimination’, in Industrial and Labor Relations Review, vol 48, no 4 (July 1995).

22 M Badgett, ‘Beyond Biased Samples’, op cit, p65.

23 Ibid, p65.

24 See S Smith, ‘Mistaken Identity’, International Socialism 62, Spring 1994, for a description and analysis of identity politics.

25 J Weeks, Coming Out (London, 1990), p15.

26 L German, Sex, Class and Socialism (London, 1989), pp44-45.

27 T Cliff, Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation (Bookmarks, 1984), p223.

28 A Kollontai, ‘The Social Basis of the Woman Question’, in A Holt, Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai (London, 1977), p59.

29 J Lauristen and D Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935) (New York, 1974), p63.

30 All figures quoted from Stonewall Factsheet, ‘Public Opinion on Gay and Lesbian Rights’.

Christian Parenti | July 15, 2010

In the wake of the BP oil spill, some captains of industry have begun calling for government leadership to spur a clean-energy revolution. In June billionaire software mogul Bill Gates visited Washington and encouraged lawmakers to pony up public subsidies to triple clean-tech R&D funding from $5 billion to $16 billion annually. Gates explained to the Washington Post that much of what is touted as free-market innovation was born of government subsidies: “The Internet and the microprocessor, which were very fundamental to Microsoft being able to take the magic of software and having the PC explode, were among many of the elements that came through government research and development.” And on his website Gates wrote, “When it comes to developing new sources of energy, and ways to store that energy, I believe the federal government needs to play a more active role than it does today.”

Gates’s acknowledgment of the need for government intervention is welcome, but he and many others are stuck on “innovation.” The fixation on new “game-changing” technology is omnipresent. Think of the metaphors we use: a green Manhattan Project or a clean-tech Apollo Program. It recalls Tocqueville’s observation that “the American lives in a land of wonders, in which everything around him is in constant movement, and every movement seems an advance. Consequently, in his mind the idea of newness is closely linked with that of improvement.”

Yet according to clean-tech experts, innovation is now less important than rapid large-scale implementation. In other words, developing a clean-energy economy is not about new gadgets but rather about new policies.

An overemphasis on breakthrough inventions can obscure the fact that most of the energy technologies we need already exist. You know what they are: wind farms, concentrated solar power plants, geothermal and tidal power, all feeding an efficient smart grid that, in turn, powers electric vehicles and radically more energy-efficient buildings.

But the so-called “price gap” is holding back clean tech: it is too expensive, while fossil fuels are far too cheap. The simple fact is that capitalist economies will switch to clean energy on a large scale only when it is cheaper than fossil fuels. The fastest way to close the price gap is to build large clean-tech markets that allow for economies of scale. So, what is the fastest way to build those markets? More research grants? More tax credits? More clumsy pilot programs?

No. The fastest, simplest way to do it is to reorient government procurement away from fossil fuel energy, toward clean energy and technology—to use the government’s vast spending power to create a market for green energy. After all, the government didn’t just fund the invention of the microprocessor; it was also the first major consumer of the device.

Call it the Big Green Buy. The advantage of this strategy is that it is something Obama can do right now, without waiting for Congressional approval to act. As such, it amounts to a real test of his will to make progress in the fight against climate change.

Consider this: altogether federal, state and local government constitute more than 38 percent of our GDP. Allow that to sink in for a moment. The federal government will spend $3.6 trillion this year. In more concrete terms, Uncle Sam owns or leases more than 430,000 buildings (mostly large office buildings) and 650,000 vehicles. The federal government is the world’s largest consumer of energy and vehicles, and the nation’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. Add state and local government activity, and all those numbers grow by about a third again.

A redirection of government purchasing would create massive markets for clean power, electric vehicles and efficient buildings, as well as for more sustainably produced furniture, paper, cleaning supplies, uniforms, food and services. If government bought green, it would drive down marketplace prices sufficiently that the momentum toward green tech would become self-reinforcing and spread to the private sector.

The good news is that despite our sclerotic, largely right-wing Congress, government agencies are turning toward procurement as a means to jump-start clean tech and cut emissions.

Perhaps the most important move in this direction came in October 2009, when President Obama quietly signed Executive Order 13514, which directs all federal agencies to “increase energy efficiency; measure, report, and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions from direct and indirect activities; conserve and protect water resources through efficiency, reuse, and stormwater management; eliminate waste, recycle, and prevent pollution; leverage agency acquisitions to foster markets for sustainable technologies and environmentally preferable materials, products, and services; design, construct, maintain, and operate high performance sustainable buildings in sustainable locations.”

The executive order also stipulates that federal agencies immediately start purchasing 95 percent through green certified programs and achieve a 28 percent greenhouse gas reduction by 2020. The stimulus package passed in 2009 included $32.7 billion for the Energy Department to tackle climate change, and some of that money is now being dispersed to business and federal agencies.

Already some federal agencies are installing energy management systems and new solar arrays in buildings, tapping landfills to burn methane and replacing older vehicles with plug-in hybrids and soon some all-electric vehicles. But it is the green procurement part of the executive order that is most interesting.

Government has tremendous latitude to leverage green procurement because it requires no new taxes, programs or spending, nor is it hostage to the holy grail of sixty votes in the Senate. It is simply a matter of changing how the government buys its energy, vehicles and services. Yes, in many cases clean tech costs more up front, but in most cases savings arrive soon afterward. And government—because of its size—is a market mover that has already shown it can leverage money-saving deals.

Currently, the price gap relegates clean tech to boutique status: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom owns an electric car; SF City Hall has three electric-vehicle charging stations; nationwide there are about 55,000 electric vehicles and 5,000 charging stations. Groovy.

However, back on Planet America the asphalt transportation arteries are clogged with 250 million gasoline-powered vehicles sucking down an annual $200–$300 billion worth of fuel from more than 121,000 filling stations. Add to that the cost of heating and cooling buildings, jet travel, shipping, powering industry and the energy-gobbling servers and mainframes that are the Internet, and the US energy economy reaches a spectacular annual tab of $2–$3 trillion.

The clean-tech price gap is partly the result of old dirty tech’s history of subsidies ($72.5 billion between 2002 and 2008), but it is also the result of the massive economies of scale that the fossil fuel industry enjoys. In other words, gas pumps and gasoline are cheaper when you buy in bulk.

Closely associated with the price gap is another concept, which clean-tech developers call the “valley of death.” This is the time in a technology’s life cycle when capital dries up, the time between a technology’s initial invention and its successful application as a moneymaking commodity.

A report by Ernst & Young found that a typical technological innovation—like the flatscreen TV or the cellphone—costs about $20–$100 million to invent but about $1 billion to deploy at competitive prices. Between government subsidies and capital markets, there is often enough financing available to invent new gadgets or buy into a mature and profitable business. But there is a dearth of capital for new companies trying to cross that gap between victory in the lab and victory in the market.

Smith Electric Vehicles, of Kansas City, is one company that would benefit immensely if government started robust green procurement. Currently Smith, the US affiliate of a British firm that has been making electric delivery trucks for eighty years, turns out about twenty units a month. The vehicles—flatbeds, refrigerator trucks, basic box-style delivery trucks—all require components that Smith buys on the open market.

“If we could buy gear boxes in batches of a hundred rather than ten at a time, they could be cast to our specifications rather than each one machined. That would immediately cut the cost by 30 to 40 percent,” says Smith CEO Bryan Hansel. Similar savings would be available for other inputs like steel chassis, cabs, drive shafts, suspensions and wiring harnesses, all of which are purchased from the same suppliers used by diesel- and gas-powered vehicle makers.

In March Smith received a $32 million Energy Department grant that will help it offset the cost of its trucks. But what would really give it a boost is an order of 1,000 trucks a year for the next ten years, from, say, the Defense Department or the Postal Service or the General Services Administration (GSA). If that happened, Smith’s plans to open twenty more small manufacturing facilities around the country would shift into high gear.

“We have approached the DoD about nontactical vehicles, like trucks that are used on bases here in the US. They bought four of our vehicles for testing. So we’re hopeful,” says Hansel. The Defense Department has 160,000 nontactical vehicles, many of which are suitable for electrification.

In other respects, the military is one of the most avid adaptors of clean technology. Of all the energy the federal government consumes, 80 percent is used by the Defense Department. The cost of delivering fuel to forward operating areas can be as high as $400 a gallon, by some estimates. And according to an Army Environmental Policy Institute report, 170 soldiers died and many more were horribly maimed just protecting fuel in combat zones during 2007. For purely strategic reasons the military is trying to free itself (at least a bit) from its clumsy and very long fossil fuel tether.

Thus the military is experimenting on a large scale with green technology. Fort Irwin, in California, is building a 500 megawatt (that is big) solar power plant and is on track to become self-sufficient in electricity use within a decade. Fort Leavenworth is undergoing an energy retrofit that a Pew report described thus: “energy efficiency improvements are made by a private-sector firm at no upfront cost to the Army, with resulting savings shared by the base and the contractor.” The list goes on, but unfortunately most of the changes are relatively small scale.

Government procurement, particularly the military’s, would become significantly greener if two recently introduced bills became law. The Department of Defense Energy Security Act of 2010, introduced by Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, would require the department to derive a quarter of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025. And—good news for Smith Electric Vehicles—the bill also calls, rather ambitiously, for a full-scale conversion of the military’s nontactical vehicle fleet to electric, hybrid or alternative-fuel vehicles by 2015.

A similar bill, introduced by Democrat José Serrano of New York, would require the Postal Service to purchase at least 20,000 electric vehicles by 2015. That goal is reasonable, and the USPS is a perfect place to start, as most of its vehicles travel in loops of less than 20 miles each day and always park in the same garage. Thus, even current battery technology is sufficient. Many other government fleets fit the same profile: they have regular routes of less than 100 miles a day and use the same parking spot each night, so they are easy and cheaper to charge because the price of juice drops at night.

Right now a vehicle from Smith is about 20 percent more expensive than a standard gas or diesel truck. But the cost per mile to run an electric truck is about one-third the cost per mile of a gas- or diesel-powered one. Hansel says that with enough large orders his product will reach cost parity with dirty-tech options. When that happens, large private-sector fleets, like UPS, FedEx, Staples and Frito-Lay, will start buying electric vehicles simply because it will be the cheaper option.

In anticipation of that day, Nissan is releasing the 2011 Leaf, a fully electric plug-in car. It plans to make 90,000 of them. Chevy is coming out with the Volt—10,000 of them. Will this first generation of EVs really have a market, and sufficient charging options? Who knows? But you can be sure they would if Big Government made the Big Green Buy.

Buildings also use lots of energy. The US Green Building Council reports that buildings account for about 36 percent of America’s total energy use and emit roughly the same proportion of greenhouse gases. But if properly constructed and managed, many buildings could actually generate energy for their own use, for vehicles or to put back into the grid.

The government’s building manager—its janitor, if you will—is the GSA. The GSA constructs, repairs and manages federal buildings; it buys the supplies and keeps the heat and AC on; and it buys and maintains much of the government’s nonmilitary vehicle fleet. It also acts as a purchaser and contractor of sorts for most other federal agencies. The GSA is about as dull an agency as you can imagine. It has pocket-protector and brown shoes written all over it. But in the age of climate change, its brief has taken on vital importance. The implications of Executive Order 13514 have put the GSA, along with the military, at the cutting edge of the Big Green Buy.

“We’re taking this very seriously,” says Martha Johnson, administrator of the GSA. “We are normally sort of overlooked, but we were thrilled, really excited, when the president gave us such prominent place in his environmental strategy.”

President Bill Clinton issued four executive orders on sustainable clean procurement, but they lacked specific targets or enforcement mechanisms and thus achieved very little. “Our progress in general in buying these products stinks,” said Dana Arnold, senior program manager at the White House Office of the Federal Environmental Executive in a recent interview with the Federal Times.

This time it may be different, and the GSA is gearing up to be the point agency in what is sometimes called Environmentally Preferable Procurement, or “green supply chain management.” The GSA is putting up solar arrays, buying a few electric cars and hybrids, trying to produce energy at its buildings and buying renewable energy like biomass, solar and wind power, which now account for 10.8 percent of the GSA’s federal building power supply. It is also creating monitoring systems to track progress and keep federal agencies accountable.

The GSA’s sustainability plan requires “a minimum of three percent renewable energy source for all competitive electricity supply contracts and requires that renewable energy be from a plant that was recently built in order to stimulate greater investment in the industry.” The agency has reduced its own energy use by 15 percent, as measured against a 2003 baseline, and plans to reduce energy consumption in its buildings by 30 percent from that baseline by 2020. Already the GSA’s building stock—mostly offices—is about 22 percent more efficient than similar private-sector buildings.

In addition, the GSA is working on cutting the amount of jet travel its workforce requires and, when possible, increasing telecommuting and home-based work. It is also pressuring other agencies to shut off unused data centers—the USDA, for example, uses only between 10 percent and 20 percent of its total computing capacity, but its huge, largely empty servers run at 100 percent of power.

Other federal agencies, however, are lagging far behind. “It is amazing to us to find out the low level of awareness,” says Linda Mesaros, a consultant for sustainable purchasing. State and local governments are also moving toward green procurement, but few have been very aggressive or ambitious.

Nor are the main pieces of energy and climate legislation focusing on procurement. The American Energy Innovation Council—which includes Bill Gates and executives from companies like Xerox, General Electric and Bank of America—is lobbying for a research plan and money and pilot programs all focused on expensive and spectacular new technology, like small fourth-generation nukes. The plan totally ignores the Big Green Buy strategy.

Another group, the Electrification Coalition—made up of CEOs from FedEx, Nissan and PG&E—has published an ambitious 180-page plan for converting America’s light-duty vehicle fleet to 75 percent electric miles by 2040. It also calls for radically upgrading America’s old, overburdened, semi-deregulated and thus chaotic electrical grid, which loses about twice as much power in transmission as it did in the 1970s. The EC is lobbying hard and has helped shape the Electric Drive Vehicle Deployment Act of 2010, legislation being championed by Representative Ed Markey.

But again, neither Markey’s staff nor the EC is comfortable demanding the Big Green Buy. “We don’t think that is the best approach” was all I could get from a Markey staffer. Instead, the EC proposes a Rube Goldberg–style scheme of geographic target areas that will receive multiple layers of consumer and industry tax credits and tax breaks—$7 billion total. That may sound big, but in the face of the climate crisis it is Lilliputian.

This approach is emblematic of the intellectual poverty of the political class and business elites. The bill is entirely too clever for its own good, painfully complicated in its tinkering instrumentalism, which in the end would do very little and do it too late, like an impoverished family scrounging for dinner money on the eve of their eviction. And the Electric Drive Vehicle Deployment Act will be red meat to the climate deniers and fiscal hawks. You can almost hear the derision now: if yuppies in Berkeley want to drive funny new plug-in cars, why do we have to pay for it?

Viewed broadly, there are four simple things the government can do to help close the clean-technology price gap and aid clean-tech business across the valley of death.

First, it can boost R&D as Gates has requested, but that alone won’t bring mass-scale green power on line.

Second, it can set up a Green Bank tasked with financing clean-tech businesses as they cross the valley of death. Along with loans, the government can offer more loan guarantees, which encourage otherwise frightened private capital to invest in clean-energy start-ups. The Waxman-Markey climate bill of last year included language to do that, but nothing like it is yet law.

Third, the government can impose mandates on the private sector requiring companies to adopt electric vehicles, purchase clean energy and conserve energy. Industry already lives with numerous rules that put limits on the anarchy of production. Yet in the crazy world of American politics circa 2010, forcing green procurement mandates on business would be very difficult.

So let’s get real. The fourth path is the best: a robust program of green procurement is the most immediate and politically feasible thing government can do to boost the clean-tech sector. And the only number that approaches the scale of the energy economy is government spending on energy. We need to be talking not about millions or billions but trillions of dollars going in a new direction. If the government is serious about electric vehicles—then just buy them already!

At one level, the mad Tea Partyers are correct: government is leviathan—a monster. But it is our monster, and with proper leadership even this government in the current climate could jump-start a clean-energy revolution.

By STUART J. LAWRENCE

President Obama’s decision to sue Arizona over its proposed immigration enforcement law may have reflected the administration’s honest judgment that such laws are repugnant and violate federal authority.  But the lawsuit was also calculated election-year politics, a way of stigmatizing the GOP, and rallying the liberal faithful, especially Latinos.   A Gallup poll in June found that Latinos were increasingly disaffected from Obama and his policies, while the President’s favorability rating with Whites and Black was unchanged.  From a high of 69% in January, Obama’s rating with Latinos had fallen 12 points to 57%.   Among Spanish-speaking Latinos, the drop was even more precipitous:  25%.  According to Gallup, the slide was largely due to Obama’s failure to pursue comprehensive immigration reform, a cause that is near and dear to the country’s fastest-growing ethnic constituency, which some pollsters rightly refer to as the “sleeping giant” of American politics.

But thus far the Obama gambit isn’t working – and that spells trouble.   According to the most recent polls, a majority of Latinos – nearly 60%, in fact – are still disappointed with his handling of immigration.  Unless that perception is reversed, the Democrats face electoral disaster this November.

Without a strong Latino turnout in at least 30-35 congressional races where their votes could sway the outcome, the GOP is almost certain to recapture the House, regaining control of the key committee and subcommittee chairmanships that will shape the nation’s policy agenda – including immigration – leading up to 2012.  And Republicans could also win a majority of the governorships and state legislatures which would allow them to dominate the upcoming federal redistricting process, influencing the composition of the House for at least another decade – perhaps two.

Let’s face it:  the idea that a high-profile immigration lawsuit could undo Obama’s increasingly damaged standing with Latinos was politically naïve.   Latinos aren’t African-Americans who traditionally vote in lockstep with Democratic candidates, and whose political ear is finely attuned to anything that smacks of “racism.”  In fact, Latino political attitudes and voting patterns aren’t radically different from those of the public at large.   They do have a special concern for immigration, but on the whole, they’re just as troubled about rising joblessness, higher taxes, and fiscal deficits as the “average” American.    No amount of pre-election pandering, and calculated GOP-bashing, on immigration was going to reverse that trend overnight.

One often hears the argument from Democratic spokespersons that whatever the party’s current troubles with Latinos, the GOP’s embrace of anti-immigration politics will make it impossible for Republicans to attract significant Latino support in the future, making GOP candidates less electable.   The problem with this view is twofold.  First, the Latino share of the American electorate is not growing anywhere near as fast as its share of the US population.  Only a minority of the nation’s 48 million Latinos are old enough to vote, and are US citizens, and therefore, legally eligible to cast ballots.  And Latino registration and voting levels are still fairly low.   In 2008, only 9% of the total US electorate was Latino.  It’s growing, but extremely slowly, and with half of Latino population growth still due to immigration, relatively low levels of voter participation may continue for some time – at least a decade or more, according to Leslie Sanchez, a top GOP pollster.

But the second reason to doubt that Democrats can rest comfortably on their laurels comes back to Latino voting patterns.  A good 20-25% of Latinos, it turns, out are as hostile to illegal immigration as any xenophobic white voter might be.   This is especially true of long-time Latinos who do not identify as immigrants, or as children or even grandchildren of immigrants.  Many, in states like Arizona and New Mexico, have American ancestry dating back generations.  Some are wealthy or upwardly mobile, and many no longer speak – if they ever did – Spanish.  They simply don’t identify with the recent waves of Latino immigrants and resent being associated with them.

In fact, only about 35-40% of Latinos could be described as dyed-in-the-wool Democratic voters, those who so identify with the party, its social policies, and its message of “inclusion” and “diversity” that they consistently vote for Democratic candidates, almost regardless of who’s running.  That leaves another 35-40%, mainly Spanish-speaking and recently naturalized Latinos, who tend to swing, depending on variety of factors, immigration policy increasingly being one, but other factors relating to the candidate and his or her perceived character, being just as important.

In the past, Latinos, have demonstrated unusual fondness for moderate Republican male candidates who project leadership command, family values, compassion and fairness, and a genuine openness to promoting social mobility and equal opportunity for all.  That’s what allowed former California Gov. Peter Wilson to win such as sizable percentage of the Latino vote in 1992 – before he pissed it all away by supporting Proposition 187 in 1994.  It’s that same set of qualities – plus his embrace of immigration reform – that once drew Latinos so compellingly to George W. Bush.

And that same political dynamic is still in play.  We saw it last spring when a little-known state attorney general, Robert McDonnell, pulled off a stunning victory over L. Creigh Deeds, the national Democratic party’s chosen candidate, in the governor’s race in Virginia, despite furious last-minute lobbying by Obama and former president Clinton.  Virginia was one of the crown jewels of Obama’s 2008 victory, and an early referendum on his presidency.  Deeds’ loss pre-figured subsequent Democratic defeats in Massachusetts and New Jersey, which set the stage for Obama’s slow decline ever since.

Largely unnoticed at the time, McDonnell ran neck-and-neck with Deeds in pre-election polls among Virginia’s rapidly growing Latino population, thanks to his campaign’s aggressive outreach with all of the state’s immigrant groups.   McDonnell downplayed his past opposition to illegal immigration and even hinted that he might support some kind of attempt to “integrate” rather than deport them.   But he also emphasized the importance of English as the nation’s first language – a suffused and subtle code that says to nervous whites: we are still the dominant culture.  Deeds seemed oblivious to his opponent’s cagey tactics, and fell into the trap of thinking that bashing McDonnell as a right-winger – and taking the Latino vote largely for granted, as Democrats have so often in the past – would be enough.  It wasn’t.

So, is a swing back to the GOP – not a majority swing, but one on par with Bush’s unprecedented 44% of the Latino vote in 2004 – actually possible?   The prospect shouldn’t be ruled out.   In fact, a just-released CNN poll found that only 54% of Latinos currently leaned toward Obama and the Democrats, while an astounding 39% leaned toward the GOP.   The poll was conducted well after the Obama administration had announced its intention to sue Arizona over SB 1070, but before the latest offensive by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) attacking “birth citizenship” for  illegal aliens.   What it shows, though, is that Latino concerns about immigration, as important as they are, don’t necessarily trump their broader concerns over the larger direction of the country.  Especially when Democrats, despite their reform rhetoric, have done no more to push the immigration reform agenda than Republicans have – and indeed, are deporting illegal aliens, mostly Latinos, at record levels, with no end in sight.

Whether the current polling trend holds, though, could well depend on how Republicans play their cards after November, and whether – once the current Tea Party upsurge is sufficiently exploited to sweep Republicans back into office – they start tacking back to the center, and projecting themselves as the party of “yes” on immigration and everything else – especially job creation – in the run up to 2012.   Leading Republicans – everyone from presidential hopeful Mitt Romney to GOP chairman Michael Steele and even former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin – have been urging the GOP to make its immigration message more “positive” and “inclusive.”  Palin, like McDonnell in Virginia last spring, has even hinted that some kind of legal status for the undocumented should be considered.

If nothing else, the growing Latino disaffection with Obama should be a wake-up call for Democrats.  Janet Murguia, the head of the National Council for La Raza, one of the nation’s leading Latino lobbies, has repeatedly warned both parties that the Latinos ”belong to no one” and their votes “shouldn’t be taken for granted.”   It may seem improbable now, but should the GOP win big in November, and decide to recast immigration reform to include a modest legalization program, a considerable number of fence-sitting Latinos might continue to swing their way.   And as the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections demonstrated, in the critical states, it doesn’t take that much of a Latino swing to decide the final outcome.

All of this assumes, however, a reasonably even distribution of the white vote.   For the Latino vote doesn’t exist in isolation.  It matters right now because it’s an important “swing” factor.  But there’s a countervailing trend underway that is leading to a powerful swing of white voters – and not just men, or independents – to the GOP.   If it reaches 60%, which is increasingly likely, the GOP may not even need the Latino vote, at least not to the degree currently forecast.

Which means that Democrats who so confidently predict that Republican “nativism” holds long-term peril for the GOP don’t even have half the story right.  Obama’s race-baiting on Arizona hasn’t galvanized Latinos, but it’s further polarizing whites.  And therein lies the real peril for the President and his party in the run-up to 2012.

Stewart J. Lawrence is a Washington, DC-based an immigration policy specialist.  He can be reached at stewartlawrence81147@gmail.com

By Dick Meister

Union members, as everyone knows  – or should know – typically earn more than non-union workers doing the same job. And now comes the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) with a new report showing that unionized workers also have much better benefits than non-union workers.

An earlier BLS report on wages showed that union members average $4.95 an hour more than non-union workers doing the same work, a difference of nearly $10,000 a year.

The unionized workers’ benefit advantage is also substantial. For instance: 93 percent have access to health insurance, whereas the percentage non-union workers with access is almost 25 percent lower.  The report also shows that the unionized workers have lower co-pays for doctor visits, prescription drugs and other health care costs they share with employers.

The other health care advantages are many. Unionized workers on average pay 11 percent of their premiums for individual coverage, for instance, and 18 percent of their premiums for family coverage. The percentage non-union workers have to pay for individual coverage is almost double the percentage union workers pay for coverage, and triple the percentage unionists who pay to cover their families.

What’s more, unionized workers are much more likely to have retirement benefits, employer-paid sick leave and paid personal leave, as Michael Kuchta, treasurer of the AFL-CIO’s International Labor Communications Association, notes in his report of the BLS findings.

It’s a lot different, however, for part-time and temporary workers, as it is for lower-paid workers generally and for workers at large employers compared with those working for small employers.

Only 24 percent of part-time workers have access to health insurance, for instance, and only 29 percent have retirement plans, compared with almost 80 percent of full-timers. Only about one-fourth of the part-time workers have paid sick leave, compared with almost 80 percent of full-timers.

It’s even worse for workers in the bottom quarter of the wage scale.  Only 41 percent have access to health insurance, only 43 percent have retirement plans, only 35 percent paid sick leave.

But up in the top quarter of the wage scale, more than 90 percent have access to health insurance and nearly 90 percent have retirement plans and paid sick leave.

Workers for small employers don’t do much better than low-scale workers. Only slightly more than half of those working for employers with fewer than 100 workers have retirement plans, for example. Only 60 percent have access to health insurance, compared with the 90 percent of workers for larger employers.

“Amid all the talk about the need to free up small businesses to create new jobs,”  says  the AFL-CIO’s Michael Kuchta, “the BLS report offers a reminder that jobs at small companies may not be all that great for workers.”

Kuchta also notes findings in another BLS report that public employees typically have better benefits than workers in private employment.  About 90 percent have access to healthcare, for example. But conventional wisdom to the contrary, the better benefits are not necessarily in exchange for lower pay.

Kuchta says public employees generally are paid less than workers in private employment with similar education, experience and credentials. But they are paid more, on average, than other workers. That, as he notes, is what “enemies of the public sector have seized on in their crusade to shrink, starve and privatize government services.”

Whatever the reason, public employees do generally have much better benefits than most other workers. About 90 percent have access to health insurance, retirement plans and paid sick leave. More than 60 percent have paid personal leave, almost twice that of privately employed workers.

All those figures and comparisons can be confusing. But whatever the precise figures, the new federal report yet again makes obvious the advantages of union membership. It means more pay, more and better benefits and lots of other advantages that the report doesn’t cover.

But though the figures make clear why many more workers would want to unionize their workplaces, they are nevertheless kept from it by employer interference. It’s interference that’s allowed by the labor laws.  The laws must be reformed if we are to democratically honor the wishes of American workers.

Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based columnist who has covered labor and politics for a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com

By Mark Weisbrot
Source: The Guardian Unlimited
The government of Hungary has taken on a lot of powerful interests in the last couple of months, and so far appears to be winning – despite provoking outrage from “everybody who’s anybody.”

“The IMF should hold the line,” shouted the Financial Times in an editorial the day after Hungary sent the IMF packing in July. “With so many countries in vulnerable positions, it cannot be seen to be a soft touch. Showing a few yellow and red cards is a good way to send a signal to other governments that might be tempted to flirt with indiscipline.”

This is the great fear among the defenders of European “pro-cyclical” policies – that is, policies that weaken the economy during a recession or when it is barely growing. Hungary’s defiance could conceivably spread to other governments currently being squeezed by the IMF and European authorities.

First the Hungarian government decided in early July to levy a new tax on banks and other financial companies that would raise some $855 million dollars this year and next. Foreign banks, who made a fortune during Hungary’s bubbly growth years prior to the crash in 2007, screamed and lobbied, but – despite having the IMF in their corner- did not prevail.

Then the government refused to give in to IMF demands for further budget deficit reduction. Hungary has already been through nearly four years of austerity in which the deficit was reduced from 9 percent to 3.8 percent of GDP. More importantly, the country’s current account deficit – its imbalance with the rest of the world — which was more than 7 of GDP in 2008, is less than one percent for this year. With unemployment having risen from 7 percent in 2007 to nearly 12 percent today, and the economy still barely growing, Hungarians were understandably beginning to wonder when they would see light at the end of this long tunnel. Negotiations with the IMF over conditions for further access to IMF funds broke down on July 17^th.

Now the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose party won a landslide with more than two-thirds of the Hungarian parliament in April, has taken aim at the country’s central bank, blaming it for keeping interest rates too high and thereby delaying the recovery. The government cut the salary of Andras Simor, the governor of the central bank, by 75 percent. (If only we could have done that to Ben Bernanke or Alan Greenspan, just to make an example out of them for missing the two biggest asset bubbles in world history and thus guaranteeing our worst recession since the Great Depression.)

The central bank is holding policy interest rates at 5.25 percent, one of the highest in Europe (compare this to our own Federal Reserve’s policy rate of zero to 0.25 percent, since the end of 2008).

All of these decisions by the Orban government have some economic logic to them. The bank tax amounts to about one-half percent of GDP, which is significant for a government that is trying to reduce the deficit; and the banks – whose reckless lending practices, as in the United States and elsewhere, had a lot to do with causing the mess that Hungary faces – are already profitable while the economy is still stagnating. This is a good place to collect taxes. The pro-cyclical policies demanded by the IMF (budget cuts and tax increases) have kept the economy from recovering; at some point someone has to say “enough is enough.”

And the same is true for the central bank’s high interest rates: they have been much too high through most of the downturn, between 8 and 11.5 percent in 2008 while the economy was in decline. Last year Hungary’s GDP fell by 6.3 percent, while policy rates were still between 6.25 and 9.5 percent. A crash of this magnitude, with the economy barely growing this year, indicates policy failure.

But the government’s actions have elicited harsh rebuke from on high. The standard orthodoxy is that central banks must be “independent” of the government – which often means that they look out for the interests of bankers rather than the general public. Credit rating agencies such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s – the folks who brought us triple-A rated toxic junk in the form of mortgage backed securities a couple of years ago – have put Hungary on review for possible downgrade due to its failure to reach agreement with the IMF.

As the New York Times reported on Tuesday, the fight in Hungary “reflects a larger struggle that is expected to play out over the next year or so as most European politicians . . . seek to impose fiscal discipline on their increasingly unruly citizens.”

We can only hope that they get more unruly. The governments of Spain and Greece, for example, have a lot more bargaining power and a lot more alternatives than they have been willing to use. It is ironic that a center-right government in Hungary has taken the lead here; but if the socialist governments of Spain and Greece were to stand up to the European authorities and the IMF, they could also rally popular support. And then we would see a new playing field in Europe that would allow for a more rapid recovery, and possibly end the current assault on the living standards of the majority.

By JONATHAN COOK

Two of the United States’ closest allies in the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are on the brink of signing large arms deals with the US in a move designed to ratchet up the pressure on Iran, according to defence analysts.

America has agreed to sell Saudi Arabia 84 of the latest model of the F-15 jet and dozens of Black Hawk helicopters. The deal also includes refurbishing many of the kingdom’s older F-15s, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

Israel is believed to have opposed the $30 billion deal. However, in a concession to Israel, the new F-15s, made by the Boeing Company, will not be equipped with the latest weapons and avionics systems available to the US military.

The last such major arms sale by the US to Saudi Arabia was in 1992, when the kingdom received 72 F-15s. On that occasion, Israel tried to block the $9bn deal by lobbying the US Congress, straining relations with the White House of George H W Bush.

Meanwhile, the US is preparing to provide Israel’s air force with the F-35, the latest jet fighter made by Lockheed Martin, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported last week.

The F-35’s stealth technology, which allows it to evade radar detection and anti-aircraft missiles, comes with a hefty price tag of up to $150 million aplane — a cost that Israel had been balking at.

But, according to the reports, the US has offered Israeli firms defence contracts worth $4bn to supply parts for the F-35 — a deal some Israeli analysts believe is designed to buy Israel’s silence over the Saudi deal and ensure it gets through the US Congress.

It is one of the largest such deals in Israel’s history and it would offset much of the cost to Israel of buying its first batch of F-35s.

The aircraft is not expected to enter service until 2014. If Israel signs up for a single squadron of 20 F-35s, as expected in the next few weeks, it would be the first country outside the US to secure the jet. Israel has been given an option to buy 55 more.

Last year Israel had threatened to abandon negotiations over the F-35 and opt instead to buy the advanced F-15. Saudi Arabia’s reported purchase of that jet appears to make such a scenario less likely.

The Obama administration has faced heavy lobbying from Israel to prevent the sale of the F-15s to Saudi Arabia.

“Today these planes are against Iran, tomorrow they might turn against us,” Haaretz quoted an unnamed security official as saying last month.

Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister, told the Washington Post last month that the US administration was committed to making sure Israel was not left in an “inferior situation” and was “doing a lot to support Israel’s qualitative military edge”.

The Saudis have become one of the largest purchasers of US-made arms since they bought the first AWACS surveillance planes in the 1980s. According to a recent Congressional report, the Gulf kingdom spent $36 billion world-wide on arms in the seven years to 2008.

Today, Saudi Arabia has the third largest air force in the Middle East behind Israel and Iran. The Royal Saudi Air Force has 280 “combat capable” aircraft, according to data compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, compared to Israel’s 424 and Iran’s 312.

The Wall Street Journal did not specify the model of F-15 being bought by Riyadh, but experts widely assumed it to be the upgraded Strike Eagle. The jet, designed for precision air-to-surface attacks, was the main one used by the US in destroying Iraq’s radar and missile systems during the 2003 invasion.

Analysts said the joint strengthening of the Saudi Arabian and Israeli militaries was seen as a key regional interest for the US, given the belief in Washington that Iran is seeking to develop a nuclear warhead and is rapidly amassing a large arsenal of missiles.

If, as Iran reportedly claimed last week, it is in possession of Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, the F-35 stealth technology would give Israel an important advantage in an attack.

However, some analysts have questioned the wisdom of the US arms sales.

Trita Parsi, an analyst at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and an expert on Israeli-Iranian relations, said it was a “misguided policy” aimed at keeping Tehran “isolated and subdued”.

“All that is achieved by heavily arming Arab states and Israel is to increase Iran’s sense of insecurity and therefore make the region less secure,” he said.

Stephen Zunes, a US-based Middle East policy analyst, accused Washington of setting the stage for another “arms race” in the region.

“This is a pattern we’ve seen before. The US offers Arab states expensive modern armaments, and then turns around to Israel and tells it it needs to have even better weapons to stay ahead in the race. Then the pressure again mounts on the Arab states. It’s a racket that has been a bonanza for US arms manufacturers,” he said.

Israel receives $3bn annually in US military aid, more than any other country and covering about a quarter of Israel’s defence expenditure. Unlike other recipients, Israel is allowed to spend 26 per cent of the aid on the development and production of its own weapons systems.

However, Israeli officials are reported to fear that a combined squeeze on the country’s defence budget and a massive outlay on buying a large number of F-35s would leave the military without money to replenish its stocks of ammunition and bombs.

Last month Washington agreed to an additional military subsidy of $420 million to help Israel develop its “missile shield” programmes, designed to intercept short-, mid- and long-range missiles.

Israel has been concerned by the growing stockpiles of rockets and missiles that Hamas and Hizbullah have accumulated close to its borders as well as the more advanced arsenals of Iran and Syria.

In addition to the question of the price of the F-35, Israel and the US have been at loggerheads over whether Israel should be allowed to install its own avionics and weapons systems. So far the US has refused, and last month denied Israel a test aircraft.

In the past, Tel Aviv and Washington have fallen out over Israel copying and selling on American systems to other regimes.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

By CHRISTIAN CHRISTENSEN

The release of the Afghan War Diaries on Wikileaks, with stories published in The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel by agreement with Wikileaks, has made news around the world. Le Monde Diplomatique, in conjunction with Owni and Slate.fr, have also made the documents available online via a dedicated website. The security implications of the leaked material will be discussed for years to come. Meanwhile the release of over 90,000 documents has generated debate on the rising power of digital journalism and social media. Many of the discussions are rooted in what I call internet or digital myths — myths which are rooted in romantic, deterministic notions of technology.

Myth 1: The power of social media

Media experts and commentators are commonly asked what the Wikileaks case tells us about the power of social media in contemporary society, particularly in the coverage of war. There is nothing wrong with this question, but it does illustrate a troubling tendency to place all forms of social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Wikileaks) under the same huge umbrella. The myth is that social media are homogenous by virtue of their technologies. But Wikileaks is nothing like Twitter or YouTube. What separates it from other forms of social media is the review process that submitted material must go through in order to be posted to the site. This might seem like a detail, but it strikes at the heart of “techo-utopian” notions of an “open commons” where anyone and everyone can post (almost) anything for all to read, hear and see.

The real power of Wikileaks is not so much the technology (it helps, but there are millions of websites out there) but the trust readers have in the authenticity of what they are reading; they believe that those working at Wikileaks stand behind the veracity of the material. There are literally hundreds of videos on YouTube from Iraq and Afghanistan showing coalition forces engaged in questionable, and in some cases obviously illegal, acts of aggression. Yet none of these clips have had anything like the impact of the single video posted to Wikileaks showing scores of civilians (and two Reuters journalists) gunned down by high-powered aircraft artillery in a Baghdad suburb. Why? Because while complete openness might be attractive in theory, information is only as valuable as its reliability, and Wikileaks has an organisational review structure in place that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and most blogs (for obvious reasons) do not. All social media are not created equal, and so their power is far from equal.

Myth 2: The nation-state is dying

If the Wikileaks case has taught us anything, it is that the nation-state is most certainly not in decay. A great deal of discourse surrounding the internet, and social media in particular, revolves around the premise that we now live in a borderless digital society.

The notion of the nation-state in decline has had a great deal of currency within certain spheres of academia for a number of years, but the events of the past few weeks should give us pause. Those in charge of Wikileaks clearly understand the vital role of the nation-state, particularly when it comes to law. Despite New York University media scholar Jay Rosen’s claim that it is “the world’s first stateless news organisation,” Wikileaks is very much territorially bound.

Wikileaks is semi-officially based in Sweden and has all the protection offered to whistleblowers and guarantees regarding anonymity of sources under Swedish law. As the New Yorker reported in June 2010, Wikileaks is hosted on a Swedish ISP called PRQ. Material submitted to Wikileaks first goes through PRQ, and then to servers located in Belgium. Why Belgium, you may ask? Because Belgium has the second strongest laws for the protection of sources. And Wikileaks founder Julian Assange chose Iceland as the location for decrypting the aerial video footage of the killings in Baghdad. Iceland recently passed the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, devised to make the country a global haven for whistleblowers, investigative journalism and freedom of speech.

Beyond Wikileaks, we have other reminders of the importance of states and laws in the fluid digital world: the recent decisions by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to instigate bans on the messenger function on BlackBerry handsets, or the seemingly never-ending legal ban on YouTube Turkey. While it’s true that the Wikileaks structure is set up to bypass the laws of certain countries (enabled by digital technology), it also makes use of other countries’ laws. Wikileaks isn’t lawless – it’s just moving the entire game to places where the rules are different.

Myth 3: Journalism is dead (or almost)

Reports of the death of journalism have been greatly exaggerated (to borrow from Mark Twain). The Wikileaks case speaks to the power of technology to make us re-think what we mean by “journalism” in the early 21st century. But it also consolidates the place of mainstream journalism within contemporary culture. Wikileaks decided to release the Afghan documents to The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel weeks before they were released online — mainstream media outlets, not “alternative” (presumably sympathetic) publications such as The Nation, Z Magazine or IndyMedia. The reason is surely that these three news outlets are top international news agenda-setters. Few outlets (leaving aside broadcasters such as the BBC or CNN) have so much clout as the New York Times and the Guardian – and being published in English helps exposure. The Wikileaks people were savvy enough to realise that any release of the documents online without prior contact with select news outlets would lead to a chaotic rush of unfocused articles the world over.

As it was, attention turned straight to the three newspapers in question, in which a large number of the documents had already been analysed and summarised. And the role of Wikileaks was not lost in an information maelstrom. In the death of journalism thesis (as in that of the death of the nation-state), change is mistaken for elimination. The release of the Afghan Diaries shows that mainstream journalism still holds a good deal of power, but the nature of that power has shifted (compared to 20 or 30 years ago). An example is Executive Editor Bill Keller’s recounting of the contact between New York Times editorial staff and the White House following the release of the documents:

“The administration, while strongly condemning WikiLeaks for making these documents public, did not suggest that The Times should not write about them. On the contrary, in our discussions prior to the publication of our articles, White House officials, while challenging some of the conclusions we drew from the material, thanked us for handling the documents with care, and asked us to urge WikiLeaks to withhold information that could cost lives. We did pass along that message.”

This is an astonishing admission by the executive editor of the US’s most respected newspaper. For two reasons. The description of the encounter with the White House shows pride in the White House’s praise, at odds with traditional notions of the press as the watchdogs over those in power. Second, the New York Times’s role as intermediary between the US government and Wikileaks illustrates an interesting new power dynamic within news and information in the US.

At the heart of the death of journalism myth (and that of the role of social media) is the presumption of a causal relationship between access to information and democratic change. The idea that mere access to raw information de facto leads to change (radical or otherwise) is as romantic as the notion that mere access to technology can do the same. Information, just as technology, is only useful if the knowledge and skills required to activate such information are present. Wikileaks chose its three newspapers not because they necessarily represented ideological kindred spirits for Julian Assange and his colleagues, but because they were professionally, organisationally and economically prepared for the job of decoding and distributing the material provided.

In a digital world that is constantly being redefined as non-hierarchical, borderless and fluid, Wikileaks has reminded us that structure, boundaries, laws and reputation still matter.

Christian Christensen is associate professor of Media and Communication Studies in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University in Sweden. His work focuses on political, economic and cultural aspects of global media. He can be reached at: christian.christensen@im.uu.se.

This article was originally published by Le Monde Diplomatique.

Jobs, Stimulus and Debt

By MARK WEISBROT

In much of the world, including the United States and Europe, a debate is taking place about whether the government’s first responsibility should be to reduce unemployment – which is at elevated levels – or to reduce government deficits and debt. Many of the arguments for deficit reduction are simplistic, based on ignorance, or ideologically-based. For example, there are inappropriate comparisons of government to household debt, a fixation on absolute numbers without any comparison to national income, or just right-wing opposition to government in general. Although these are the most commonly propagated views on television and through the media, it is worth taking a moment to examine the (ostensibly) more sophisticated and economics-based arguments and see whether they hold water.

Kenneth Rogoff is professor of economics at Harvard University and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This week he responded to some of the pro-stimulus arguments:

“Some portray Japan, with nearly a 200 percent government debt to income ratio, as a poster child for extremely indebted countries with low interest rates. Japan’s ‘success,’ of course, has a lot to do with its government’s ability to sell debt domestically. How the country will handle its finances as saving by retirees shrinks and as its labour force rapidly shrinks, remains to be seen.”

Some background: Japan has a gross debt-to-GDP ratio of about 227 percent of GDP. This is more than three times the level of the United States. But more than 100 percentage points (of GDP) of this debt is owed to the Japanese central bank. This means that the interest payments on this debt go to the government of Japan, so there is no interest burden added by this part of the debt. In fact, Japan’s net interest payments are less than 2 percent of GDP, which is a modest amount.

It also means something else that most of the economists in this debate are not eager to talk about: Japan has financed nearly half of its public debt by creating money. In otherwords, instead of the government borrowing money from investors, the central bank created money and lent it to the government. In the popular imagination, this creation of trillions of dollars (in yen) to finance government deficits has to cause serious inflation. However, the Japanese experience has been the opposite: Over the last 20 years, Japan’s consumer price index has risen about 5 percent – that’s the 20-year total, not annual inflation.

Rogoff is correct to say that the domestic ownership of Japan’s debt is key to its success. But this is just an additional argument for the United States, or Europe, to finance deficit spending through money creation at this time. Such financing is by definition domestic ownership – i.e. ownership by the central bank. In the Eurozone, the ECB would have to agree to refund the interest payments on the debt to the borrowing countries, so as to duplicate what Japan (and the United States) has done with its own central bank.

Of course, Japan’s debt that is held by the public is also held mostly by domestic investors. So this part of Rogoff’s argument is really making the case for avoiding the chronic trade deficits that the United States has run for decades. It is the overvalued dollar, and the resulting trade deficits, that drive foreign borrowing in the United States.

As for the warnings about what might happen when savings and the labor force shrink, we have heard this rhetoric for decades from deficit hawks in the United States and Europe. Suffice it to say that there are many options open to rich countries should they ever face the problem of a “labor shortage.” But unfortunately our problem for the foreseeable future is the opposite. It is a shortage of jobs, not labor.

Rogoff cites his own work, with Carmen Reinhart, in arguing that debt-to-GDP ratios of more than 100 percent are “above the threshold where growth might be affected.” But their paper really doesn’t show much at all, especially for economies such as the United States and the Eurozone that can borrow in their own currencies. Countries that end up with debt greater than 100 percent of GDP are likely to have other problems that got them there. As others have also noted, without controlling for these other factors – which this paper decidedly does not do – there is no way of establishing causality. In fact, the authors do not even control for changes in population growth, since they look only at GDP growth rather than per capita GDP.

Rogoff adds another self-defeating argument: “Importantly, governments that emphasize long-term fiscal sustainability are likely to have an easier time inducing their central banks to maintain highly supportive monetary conditions.”

In other words, he is saying that central banks might react to expansionary fiscal policy in the present situation by tightening monetary policy. But this just means that the central bank should be subordinated to national economic policy, instead of the other way around. He is taking for granted that central banks must be “independent.” But as experience has demonstrated – e.g. the U.S. Federal Reserve somehow missing the two biggest asset bubbles in world history – this doesn’t necessarily mean independent of Wall Street, it means independent of the public interest. So yes, a government that wants to use expansionary fiscal policy will need the co-operation of its central bank. And should have it.

Rogoff argues that “anemic growth with sustained high unemployment is par for the course in post-financial-crisis recoveries.” Par for whose course? If past governments made stupid mistakes and/or didn’t care about condemning a generation of low-income young people to years of unemployment, does that mean we should do the same? At the end of the day, Rogoff provides no convincing economic argument why either the United States or Europe cannot, or should not, finance the necessary stimulus until unemployment approaches more normal levels.

Mark Weisbrot is an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: the Phony Crisis.

This article was originally published in The Guardian.

A Movement Rises in Arizona

By JORDAN FLAHERTY

Three months ago, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law the notorious SB 1070, a bill that put her state at the forefront of a movement to intensify the criminalization of undocumented immigrants.

Since then activists have responded through legal challenges, political lobbying, grassroots organizing and mass mobilizations. More than a hundred thousand people from across Arizona marched on the state capitol on May 29. Today, hundreds more have pledged to risk arrest through nonviolent direct action. These are the public manifestations of an inspiring and widespread struggle happening in this state. The organizations leading this fight offer a vision for people around the US concerned with human rights.

A Rogue State

Yesterday, Federal District Court Judge Susan Bolton issued a preliminary injunction against sections of Arizona law SB 1070, which is scheduled to go into effect today. The judge put a hold on some of the most outrageous parts of the bill, such as language that mandates racial profiling by officers. However, Judge Bolton left much of the rest of the law intact, including sections that specifically target day laborers.

For Arizona activists, the legal ruling represents – at best – a small respite. “It’s not a victory, it’s a relief,” says Pablo Alvarado of the National DayLaborer Organizing Network (NDLON). “We’re putting a band aid on a wound.”

Alvarado and the organizers with NDLON are part of a broad network of national organizations and volunteers who have joined with local organizers to fight not just against this unjust law, but also against a general climate of anti-immigrant hatred. “Arizona is a rogue state,” says Alvarado. “We’re going to use every single means that we have at our disposal to fight back.”

Puente Arizona, a Phoenix-based organization that describes itself as a human rights movement working to “resurrect our humanity,” has formed Barrio Defense Committees in neighborhoods across the city. Emulating the structure of groups founded by popular movements in El Salvador, the community-based structure work to both serve basic needs, and also build consciousness and help bring people together. According to Puente activist Diana Perez Ramirez, the committees host regular “know your rights” trainings and ESL classes, and are organizing “Copwatch” projects. “We ask the community to unite and organize themselves,” says Ramirez. “And we are just there to support that.” More than one thousand people have joined these neighborhood organizations so far, with more joining every day.

Puente has made use of volunteers from across the US, utilizing national support to help with local organizing, and initiating direct action with the support of out of town allies like the Ruckus Society, Catalyst Project, and various chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They have issued calls to action including a Human Rights Summer (modeled after the civil rights movements’ Freedom Summer) and “30 Days for Human Rights,” a month of actions culminating today, the day SB 1070 will become law.

Just after midnight, as the law took effect, the first protest of the day began, as nearly 80 people blocked the intersection at the entrance to the town of Guadelupe, a small (one square mile) Native American and Hispanic community just outside of Phoenix. The town has a long history of struggle against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has been one of the main public faces of SB 1070, and most of the protesters (and all of the organizers) were from the community. Holding signs declaring their opposition to the new law and leading chants against police brutality, activists declared that Arpaio’s officers are not welcome in their town. The stand off against police lasted more than an hour, before protest leaders in consultation with the town’s mayor decided to open the intersection. Several more actions are planned for today.

Working Proactively

The Repeal Coalition, a Flagstaff- and Phoenix-based grassroots immigrants-rights organization, was formed in 2007. The group came together because they saw a vacuum in the immigrants’ rights movement in Arizona. “Some of the left here were not being very audacious,” explains Luis Fernandez of the Repeal Coalition. “The positions in the public debate ranged from ‘kick them all out,’ to ‘get their labor and then kick them out.’” The Repeal Coalition has staked out a position of calling for the elimination of all anti immigration laws, declaring, “We fight for the right for people to live, love, and work wherever they please.” With this call, says Fernandez, “Now we have a real debate.”

When the coalition was founded, organizers brought in labor activists to advise them on how to build an organization along similar models to those that have built strong unions, utilizing house calls, neighborhood mapping, and group meetings. Although they are an all-volunteer group with little to no funding, they have developed a structure that has initiated large protests and provided direct service, and they are now strategizing more ways to take direct action in the post SB 1070 era.

Fernandez says that this struggle is ultimately about overcoming fear and moving from reaction to proactive action. “We’ve been in a crisis in Arizona for a long time,” he explains. “Even if SB 1070 weren’t implemented, it wouldn’t matter. The political crisis would continue.” To address this crisis, Fernandez believes organizations must build unity across race and class. “Traditionally in America, when the working class starts suffering, instead of connecting together and looking upwards at the cause of the problem, they look sideways or downwards for who to blame.” Most importantly, he believes activists must take action to seize the initiative.

In this vision, he has been inspired by young organizers working on the federal DREAM ACT, a federal law that creates a path to citizenship for undocumented youth. “They came to Arizona and said, ‘we’re undocumented and we’re going to commit acts of civil disobedience.’” At first, Repeal Coalition members tried to talk them out of this action, but the youth explained, “We are going to lose our fear because it is the fear of being arrested or the fear of being deported that fuels the inability of political action.” The bravery and vision of these youth has inspired Fernandez to continue to search for new and bold ways to take action, rather than just continually respond to right wing attacks. “We need to set the agenda,” explains Fernandez. “We have to say, ‘No, you’re going to react to us.’”

Despite a range of tactics and philosophies, one thing organizers here have in common is a dedication to exporting the lessons of their struggle. While Arizona’s law is the first and most draconian, similar laws are pending across the country. And during this current national economic crisis, more and more politicians have found that they can score political points by demonizing immigrants. “The last two months we’ve had a lot of people calling us asking what they can do to help Arizona,” says Fernandez. “We say, organize in your own town. You don’t have to come to Arizona because Arizona is coming to you.”

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. Haymarket Books has just released his new book, FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org.