Contexts

“If you asked me two years ago whether I’d have a baby and give it away for money, I wouldn’t just laugh at you, I would be so insulted I might hit you in the face,” said Indirani, a 30-year old garment worker and gestational surrogate mother.

“Yet here I am today. I carried those twin babies for nine months and gave them up.” Living in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, married at 18, and with two young children of her own, she had delivered twins a month earlier for a Tamil couple in the United States.

I met Indirani when she was still pregnant and living in a dormitory run by Creative Options Trust for Women, Bangalore’s only surrogacy agency at the time. COTW works with infertility specialists who rely on the Trust to recruit, house, care for, and monitor surrogate mothers for their clients. Straight and gay couples arrive from all over India and throughout the world to avail themselves of Bangalore’s expertise in building biological families. Indirani and other mothers introduced me to 70 other surrogates they had gotten to know through their line of work. Some of them, including Indirani herself, double as recruiting agents, bringing new laborers into Bangalore’s reproductive assembly line.

India is emerging as a key site for transnational surrogacy, with industry profits projected to reach $6 billion in the next few years, according to the Indian Council for Medical Research. In 2007, the Oprah show featured Dr. Nayna Patel in the central Indian town of Anand, Gujarat, who was harnessing the bodies of rural Gujarati women to produce babies for American couples. Subsequent newspaper articles and TV shows, as well as blogs by users of surrogacy, popularized the nation as a surrogacy destination for couples from the United States, United States, England, Israel, Australia and to a lesser extent Italy, Germany, and Japan.

A mother shows a photograph of her surrogate baby with his biological father (right), next to her own husband and child (left). Photo by Sanjit Das (sanjitdas.com)

Indirani’s life typifies that of other women in Bangalore’s garment factories. Paid low wages, she works intermittently in one of the city’s many garment factories. She quit when she became pregnant, and joined the line again when her two children attended school, taking time away when she was sick, or to care for sick family members. Bangalore’s reproduction industry affords women like her the possibility of extracting greater value from their bodies once they have been deemed unproductive workers in garment factories. Because of its life affirming character, Indiriani and others see surrogacy, however exploitative, as a more meaningful and creative option than factory work.

Disposable Workers

The popular understanding is that women who have large debt burdens and are destitute opt to become surrogate mothers. But while they are in debt, the 70 mothers I met were not among the poorest in Bangalore. Many were part of dual or multiple income households, and tended to be garment workers who earn more than the average working woman in the city.

Photo by Sanjit Das (sanjitdas.com)

Like garment workers in sweatshops across the world, women in Bangalore are underpaid and overworked. In order to meet short production cycles set by global market demands, they work at an inhumanely fast pace, with few or no breaks. They frequently suffer from headaches, chest pain, ear and eye pain, urinary tract infections, and other health problems. Sexual harassment and abuse are rampant on the production line. The supervisors, almost all men, castigate women in sexually derogatory terms when they do not meet production quotas, and often grope the women as they instruct them on how to work better. “Sometimes,” says Indirani, “I wouldn’t take a lunch break when pieces piled up. I didn’t want to be shamed in front of everyone. I would go to any length to avoid calling the supervisor’s attention to me.”

Indirani earned $100 to $110 monthly, depending upon her attendance, punctuality, and overtime hours. Frequently, she and her co-workers were unable to meet the inordinately high production targets and were required by supervisors to stay past regular working hours to meet their quotas. “Playing” catch-up, however, did not necessarily result in overtime pay. Indirani’s husband became suspicious if her paycheck did not reflect her overtime hours. He wondered whether she was really at the factory, or whether she was cavorting with another man. Indirani, like many of the women I interviewed, reported that she felt debased at work and at home.

Prior research on Bangalore’s female garment workers suggests that they work an average of 16 hours a day in the factory and at home doing laundry, cooking, taking care of children, and commuting to work. Working in the factory all day, and then returning home to complete household tasks was absolutely exhausting. Indirani’s friend Suhasini, who was also a surrogate mother, avoided garment work altogether. Her mother, sister, and other women family members had worked the line, and she knew it was not what she wanted for her life. “But I need money,” she told me. “For us,” she says, “surrogacy is a boon.” She describes Mr. Shetty who started COTW, as “a god to us.” When I met her again in December 2011, Suhasini was receiving hormonal injections so that she could be a surrogate mother for a second time.

For much of her working life Indirani has been intermittently employed in one of Bangalore’s many garment factories. She quit when pregnant, and joined the line again when her two children attended school. She also stopped factory work when she was sick, or had to care for sick family members. From the perspective of the garment factories, when Indirani is healthy she is a valuable worker for the firm. But during her pregnancies and illnesses, or when she has to attend to her family’s needs, she loses her value as a worker, and the company replaces her. She is, as anthropologist Melissa Wright calls it, a “disposable worker.” Upon recovering her health, or managing family chores efficiently, Indirani cycles back into the garment factory again, this time miraculously having regained her value for the production process. Over her working life, Indirani has shifted from being valuable, to becoming an undesirable worker who must seek other forms of employment to help support her family.

Making Babies

Indirani and her auto-rickshaw worker husband have struggled for much of their married life to make ends meet, and to support their small children. Indirani’s husband did not earn much money. He rented his vehicle from an acquaintance, and the daily rental and gasoline costs cut significantly into the household income. So Indirani and he decided to borrow money from her cousin to purchase an auto-rickshaw of their own. Their troubles worsened when they were unable to pay back the loan, and the cousin would often arrive at their door, demanding his money and screaming expletives at them. He would come to the factory on payday and take Indirani’s entire paycheck. She said, “I’d work hard, facing all sorts of abuse. And at the end of it I wouldn’t even see any money. I felt so bad I contemplated suicide.” When a friend at work suggested that she sell her eggs to an agency called COTW for approximately $500, Indirani jumped at what she perceived as a wonderful opportunity. After “donating” her eggs, Indirani decided to try surrogacy; she became pregnant with twins on her first attempt.

Photo by Sanjit Das (sanjitdas.com)

Indirani did not find surrogacy to be debasing work. She earned more money as a reproduction worker than she did as a garment worker, and found the process much more enjoyable. She was exhausted physically and emotionally working as a tailor in the factory and then cleaning, cooking, and taking care of her family. Upon getting pregnant, however, Indirani lived in the COTW dormitory. At first she missed her family, often wondering what her children were doing. Was her mother-in-law taking care of them? “I was in a different place surrounded by strangers,” she recalled. But soon she began to like the dormitory. She didn’t have to wake up by 5 am to prepare meals for the family, pack lunches for everyone, drop the children off at the bus stop so they could get to school, and then hop onto the bus herself to get to the garment factory. Instead, she slept in, and was served breakfast. She had no household obligations and no one made demands on her time and emotions. Surrogacy afforded her the luxury of being served by others. She did not remember a time in her life when she felt so liberated from all responsibilities.

Surveillance and Sisterhood

As she got to know the other women in the COTW dormitory, Indirani began to feel as though she was on vacation. For Indirani and many of the surrogate mothers I interviewed, it was easier to talk with the friends they made in COTW than with childhood friends and relatives; they felt they had more common with one another. Through the surrogacy process, many women told me, they lost a baby but gained sisters for life.

Photo by Sanjit Das (sanjitdas.com)

Noting the closed circuit cameras that monitored the
mothers’ every move in the dormitory, I asked how they felt about them. Indirani said they didn’t bother her; in fact, most of the mothers did not register the cameras’ presence. While this initially surprised me, I soon realized that they were accustomed to surveillance in their everyday lives. Living under the gaze of relatives and inquisitive neighbors, and housed in one-two room homes where it was common for six to eight households to share a bathroom, notions of privacy were quite foreign.Surveillance at the dormitory was benign in comparison to the surveillance and punishment meted out for supposed infractions on the garment shop floor, where long conversations with teammates, taking a few minutes of rest, or going on breaks were all curtailed. In comparison, surveillance at COTW, designed to check on whether the women were having sex with their men folk who visited the facilities, seemed relatively banal.

The surrogate mothers delivered their babies through caesarian surgeries between the 36th and 37th week of gestation in order to conform to the scheduling needs of potential parents. Indirani was initially fearful of going under the knife, but she saw many mothers survive caesarians and was no longer anxious. In the end, she found the caesarian method of delivering the twins she had carried easier than the vaginal births of her own two children.

Photo by Sanjit Das (sanjitdas.com)

Indirani claimed she does not feel any attachment to the twins she carried. “They were under contract. I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything for them,” she told me. “They were never mine to begin with, and I entered into this knowing they were someone else’s babies.” It is hard enough for her to take care of her own two children, she said. “Why do you think I’m going through all this now? What would I do with two more? They are burdens I cannot afford.” On the other hand, some mothers professed deep attachments to the babies they had given up. Roopa, a divorced mother who gave birth to a baby girl three years ago, always celebrated her contract baby’s birthday. “June 21st akka,” she said, “I cook a special meal. My daughter doesn’t know why we have a feast, but it’s my way of remembering my second child. I still cry for that little girl I gave away. I think about her often. I could never do this again.”

Life out of Waste

Regardless of how they felt about the babies they had given up, the women almost all said they derived far more meaning from surrogacy than they did working under the stern labor regimes of the garment factory. In our conversations, time and again, women described the many ways they are deemed worthless in the garment factory. Their labor powers exhausted, their sexual discipline suspect, their personal character under question, they are converted to waste on the shop floor—until they are eventually discarded. On the other hand, Bangalore’s reproduction industry, they said, gave them the opportunity to be highly productive and creative workers once more.

Indirani contrasted the labor processes in producing garments and producing a baby: the latter was a better option, she said. “Garments? You wear a shirt a few months and you throw it away. But I make you a baby? You keep that for life. I have made something so much bigger than anything I could ever make in the factory.” Indirani observed that while the people who wore the garments she’d worked on would most probably never think about her, she was etched forever in the minds of the intended parents who took the twins she bore.

Indirani and the other mothers I met did not necessarily see selling eggs or surrogacy as benign processes. Nor did they misread their exploitation. However, given their employment options and their relative dispossession, they believed that Bangalore’s reproduction industry afforded them greater control over their emotional, financial, and sexual lives. In comparison to garment work, surrogacy was easy.

Surrogacy was also more meaningful for the women than other forms of paid employment. Because babies are life-affirming in ways garments are obviously not, surrogacy allowed women to assert their moral worth. In garment work their sexual morality was constantly in question at the factory and at home. At the dormitory, in contrast, they were in a women-only space, abstaining from sex, and leading pure, virtuous lives.

Through surrogacy, Indirani said, she had built a nuclear family unit and fulfilled one infertile woman’s desire to be a mother. In the process, she had attempted to secure the future of her own family and her own happiness. As a garment worker Indirani felt she was being slowly destroyed, but as a surrogate mother she said she was creating a new world. She was ready to go through surrogacy once again to earn money for her children’s private schooling. The last time we met in December 2011, Indirani asked me, “If anyone you know wants a surrogate mother, will you think of me? I want to do this again.”

Recommended Resources

Haimowitz, Rebecca and Vaishali Sinha. Made in India (2010). This is a feature length documentary film on surrogacy in India, which explains the organization of the industry through the journey of one American couple to an Indian surrogate.

Pande, Amrita. “Commercial Surrogacy in India: Manufacturing a Perfect Mother-Worker,” Signs (2010) 35: 969-992. This is an account of surrogate mothers living in dormitories in Anand, India.

Teman, Elly. Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self. (University of California Press, 2010). The book documents the relationships between straight women and their surrogates in Israel, where assisted reproductive technologies are subsidized for heterosexual couples.

Wright, Melissa. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism. (Routledge, 2006). An anthropological description of how women in the global south are seen as bad workers, and yet their work is crucial to multinational companies’ profits.

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Social scientific research is uniquely poised to document the patterned and probabilistic evidence helpful in achieving legal accountability for mass atrocities—and offers a voice to those who would not otherwise be heard.

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During eight years of a U.S.-led occupation, Iraqi attitudes have shifted away from sectarianism and toward a national identity. Coupled with increased support for the separation of politics and religion, this shift may pave the road for a functioning national government.

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An imbalanced sex ratio in the 1970s and 1980s has led South Korean men to seek wives abroad. Though a solution to one problem, this spike in interracial marriage has posed new social conundrums for the formerly homogenous society.

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In her time as a researcher in Abdijan, Jordanna Matlon explored the African city’s peripheral economies and the men who make their livings and identities in these spaces.

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The United States, we are told ever more frequently and emphatically, is heading toward fiscal disaster, unable to simultaneously pay for its extensive military involvements around the world, its current commitments to social programs, and the investments in education, infrastructure, and research needed to compete with China and other rivals.

If current trends continue, American economic and military dominance will be lost, the era of American empire over. Whether the U.S. will be succeeded by a new hegemon or the world will enter an era of multiple power centers is as yet uncertain.

What is the cause of the fiscal crisis at the root of American decline and how can it be solved?

The dominant view, shared by almost all those on the right and many “centrists,” is that fiscal crisis is due to rising spending on social programs. (An alternative version of this theory points to increases in military spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.) From this perspective, excessive spending produces fiscal crisis which, in turn, causes decline. The solution, then, is to cut back social benefits (or military commitments) in order to head off a run on the U.S. dollar and drastic increases in interest rates that would fatally weaken the U.S. economy.

This approach doesn’t square with basic facts about American state spending. The federal budget in the U.S. has held steady as a share of GDP since 1968 (see below). That lack of growth is possible in part because social benefits in the U.S. are among the skimpiest of any industrialized country, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of the thirty-three richest countries. The OECD also reports that poverty rates are higher in the U.S. than most other rich countries. The last expansion of Federal social programs occurred with the Great Society of the 1960s. And military spending, again as a percentage of GDP, has actually declined drastically since the Cold War (see below).

If neither military nor overall spending are increasing burdens on the U.S. economy, then they cannot account for U.S. decline. Instead, I hope to show that the real problem is the misallocation of government revenue and expenditure, resulting in resources being diverted from the tasks vital to maintain economic or geo-political dominance.

To understand American economic and geopolitical decline we must identify the elites who determine much of the federal spending and then explain how the transformation of U.S. politics in recent decades has allowed those elites to exert control over governmental resources and agencies. Sociologists, beginning with C. Wright Mills, have found that elites—the heads of large corporate and governmental organizations—exercise disproportionate power in the United States. I have found that conflicts among elites and with non-elites shaped the emergence of capitalism in early modern Europe and, as we will see in the next section, the decline of dominant powers in that era.

Our understanding can be clarified if we compare U.S. dominance and decline with the histories of two previous great powers.

Great Powers, War, and Decline

Just as social spending is incorrectly blamed for the U.S.’s current budgetary woes, military expenses are viewed as the cause of past great powers’ fiscal crises and decline. In his 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, British historian Paul Kennedy argued that for the most powerful nations, whose interests span the globe, the costs of their military commitments outweigh the benefits of empire. Eventually, “imperial overstretch” saps economic growth as resources are diverted to the costs of empire, and the dominant power’s economy declines until it’s no longer able to afford the military needed to sustain its position. That, in Kennedy’s view, was the cause of each previous great power’s decline—and, he predicted, so it would be for the United States.

In fact, as I’ve previously found, the temporal sequence was the opposite of what Kennedy describes: military defeats and the loss of colonies preceded each hegemon’s fiscal crisis. The Netherlands won its independence and took colonies from Spain when its budget was a fifth of its former ruler’s. The Dutch, in turn lost most of their colonies to Britain while their budget was three times greater. The problem wasn’t the availability of resources: colonies yielded enough revenues to pay for the general costs of fighting wars against other European nations and controlling empires. Rather, European powers lost wars and colonies because they were unable to gain central control over the troops and weapons their budgets bought, or to ensure that colonial profits and domestic taxes actually arrived in the central treasury.

The Netherlands was a coalition of provinces, cities, and chartered companies that defeated Spain when they fought together. The Dutch grabbed colonies on three continents, because Amsterdam and the companies were able to send their own ships and men around the world without getting approval or resources from the provinces that did not share their interests or daring. In so doing, the Dutch became the dominant economic and naval power of the seventeenth century.

However, when the Netherlands needed to mobilize greater resources against the rising British, their fragmentation ensured defeat. Even though the Dutch were richer than the British and had more ships, they were divided into separate navies (seven of them!) that did not fight in unison because they didn’t share the same commercial or geo-strategic interests. Proposals to centralize governmental authority or create a unified military command were blocked by provincial interests, and colonial companies were able to withhold revenues from the national government. While these problems were apparent to Dutch state officials and to outside commentators who formulated reform proposals, their proposals were blocked by provincial elites who retained the capacity to protect their particular interests even at the expense of their nation’s geopolitical and economic dominance.

Britain was alone among the European great powers in creating a government able to prevent particular families or elites from appropriating tax revenues or claiming hereditary rights to offices and military commands. The national parliamentary system forged in the Civil War and institutionalized after the Glorious Revolution allowed the gentry and big London merchants to block each other’s unilateral grabs for office and resources, and it forced those elites to build party coalitions spanning counties and interests. Unable to exit those coalitions by appropriating private privileges, British elites forged agreements that controlled policy and operated the state’s fiscal levers in their collective self-interest. While nobles and gentry dominated the highest ranks in the navy and army, there was promotion from below and incompetent highborn officers were not entrusted with key commands. Britain’s military was reformed in time for the decisive showdown with Napoleon.

The corrupt East India Company and its army had been nationalized in the eighteenth century when self-dealing by corrupt company officials threatened Britain’s economic and military hegemony in Asia. The nineteenth century reform of the civil service maintained Britain’s advantage in state capacity, guaranteeing the nation’s continued fiscal and military dominance over its European rivals. Britain was able to finance its imperial and military costs out of the profits of empire until World War I.

The Military Now

The contemporary American military faces the same problem of divided commands and misallocation of resources that plagued the seventeenth century Dutch (and all the other European powers except Britain). Even as U.S. military spending has fallen as a share of GDP, its advantage over other powers has increased. In 2009, according to data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the U.S. accounted for 43 percent of total world military spending—more than the next fifteen biggest spenders combined. This margin is far greater than that enjoyed by any of the dominant powers in the past 500 years, and probably ever in world history. At present, though fighting just two wars that by historical standards are small (as seen in the chart on p. 47, the number of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan combined peaked in 2009 at 190,000, far less than the maximums of 550,000 in Vietnam and 480,000 in Korea) and not particularly bloody (U.S. deaths in the two current wars totaled 5,316 at the end of 2009, less than a tenth of the Vietnam fatalities and a seventh of Korea’s), the American military describes itself as “overextended” and its forces as “tapped out.” How can that be?

Much of America’s military budget is still spent on weapons systems designed to counter the Soviet Union but now worthless for fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, or any other area the country might plausibly become involved in. Despite having twice run on a platform of military restructuring (to fight precisely the sorts of wars he initiated), President George W. Bush succeeded in only canceling the Army’s Crusader Artillery system. President Obama cancelled the F-22 fighter jet in his first year. If he attempts to further reorient military spending, the President will meet resistance from all who benefit from current priorities.

The misallocation of American military budgets is not mainly caused by the self-dealing of oligarchs who control military spending, as was the case in early modern Europe, although the recent privatization of some military functions is diverting an increasing fraction of the military budget. Rather, I have found that consolidation of the defense industry has allowed interlocking elites (defense contractors, military service heads, and bankers) who have financed industry consolidation to resist the reallocation of spending away from highly profitable though strategically worthless weapons systems. New weapons systems and types of forces proposed by military reformers as appropriate for the actual wars fought by the U.S. today aren’t expensive enough to generate sufficient profits to justify the capital invested in the merged defense firms.

Such institutional interests are embodied in and reinforced by the structure of careers within the U.S. military. Officers are assigned to units that man and deploy specific weapons systems. A naval officer, for example, commands submarines designed to fire nuclear missiles or aircraft carriers built to allow fighter planes to shoot down enemy air forces. A decision to invest in mine sweepers to counter the sort of low-cost and low-tech challenge most likely to be posed by today’s actual enemies would stymie the careers of officers attempting to rise in the resultantly stagnant submarine or carrier corps. And since officers almost never receive further promotions and often have to leave the military if they transfer from one weapons system to another, they’re naturally reluctant to take command of forces devoted to counterinsurgency, civilian administration, or low-tech weapons designed for actual combat.

budget priorities

These days, competition among putative hegemons is mainly economic rather than military—a marked change from at least the past 500 years. Investment in infrastructure, scientific research, and education are paramount, and this is the realm in which China has focused almost all its efforts. In fact, Johns Hopkins sociologist Giovanni Arrighi has argued that China hasn’t even attempted to compete with the U.S. militarily. Unlike previous challenges to dominant powers (like those mounted by Germany and Japan to Britain and the U.S. in the first half of the twentieth century), the Chinese threat comes from economic growth, not military might.

America’s economic and military competitiveness have been hobbled as elites have gained greater control over civilian spending and taxes to the detriment of the kinds of investment fundamental to long-term economic growth. Federal outlays for “general science, space, and technology” are by far the largest source of the basic scientific research that is essential to compete with rival economic powers, but they fell from 4 percent of the budget and 0.786 percent of GDP in 1967 to 0.93 percent of the budget and 0.21 percent of GDP in 2009. Spending on infrastructure has stagnated as bridges collapse, air and road traffic snarl, and a shrinking network of passenger trains struggle to reach early twentieth-century speeds. From arrival at the airport to the high-speed train or subway trip into town, a visit to most countries in Europe and East Asia can seem to an American like a journey to Tomorrowland, never to be realized in the U.S. outside of Disney World.

Instead of addressing these needs, our budget is languishing in terms of GDP, and, as documented by non-partisan organizations like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, increasing portions are spent on unproductive subsidies to well-connected firms and elites. Current examples include: subsidies, water rights, and access to federal lands for the overproduction of certain agricultural commodities; a commitment to a Medicare drug plan that pays prices significantly higher than anywhere else in the world for drugs developed mainly in federal or university labs (or for copycat drugs designed to extend patents with no medical advantage over older generic drugs); free access to federal lands for mining, ranching, and logging with no obligation to pay for environmental effects which are then borne by public funds and health; and federal tax benefits and direct subsidies for the export of technology and capital to foreign subsidiaries and customers.

The 40-year stability of the federal budget masks a dramatic reallocation of the taxes that support it (see below). Corporate, inheritance, and gift taxes have declined as a share of revenue (from 25 percent in 1967 to 13 percent in 2008). That decline has been made up entirely by increases in Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes. The top income tax rate, which was 75 percent in 1968, is now 35 percent, and President Obama has faced resistance to his modest proposal to return it to the 39.6 percent level of the Clinton years. The top estate tax rate dropped from 77 percent in the 1960s to 45 percent by 2008, and (at least temporarily) to 0 percent in 2010 (and every twenty-first century Republican presidential candidate and virtually every GOP member of Congress has pledged to permanently abolish that tax, which falls only on the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, and mainly on the richest 0.1 percent.

In this context, it is not surprising that many taxpayers resist further increases to make up for tax cuts for those at the top and instead support politicians who advocate tax cuts for all. Nor is it surprising that the wealthiest seek to maintain the political structures and politicians who have delivered tax cuts and subsidies to them that dwarf those in every other developed nation. What needs explanation is the absence of any significant effort by the state to force elites to coordinate spending in a way that would provide the infrastructure, research, and trained workers needed to compete internationally.

Political Sources of Decline

The shift in spending from programs that further national productivity and competitiveness toward ones that don’t is a consequence of the restructuring of elite relations in the U.S. over the past four decades, This process has been traced most clearly by sociologist Mark Mizruchi, who writes that the U.S. was characterized, until the 1980s, by a dual elite structure. Like the similar structure in imperial Britain, this set up ensured that local and national elites could limit each other’s attempts to appropriate state powers and offices. That, in turn, gave federal officials a high degree of autonomy to appropriate revenues and to implement policies that furthered national military and economic dominance, even at the expense of individual elites.

National banks, linked together by directors who serve on multiple corporate boards coexisted with regional and local banks and firms that were shielded from competition with bigger rivals thanks to federal and state regulations. Local elites had the political muscle to sustain these through influence on their Congressional delegations and in their state governments. Both national and local firms in most industries, then, had enough political power to prevent each other from fully capturing state agencies and from monopolizing markets or governmental resources.

But this structure of elite relations has been transformed in recent decades by waves of mergers in sectors such as banking, telecommunications, media, utilities, retail sales, and agriculture and by the declining capacity of national banks to control firms. Once-dominant banks face competition from new regional behemoths created by the merger of smaller competitors and from non-bank firms freed by federal deregulation to issue their own financial instruments. Competition and the relaxation of federal regulations have led national banks to focus their resources on more lucrative investment banking, further removing them from active involvement in the management of industrial firms.

Mergers have also reduced intra-industry differences over government policy, creating unified voices push legislative changes to enactment. The banking and telecommunications “reform” acts of the 1990s failed to pass Congress in earlier decades due to counter-lobbying by (mainly regional) sectors of those industries with opposed interests. But mergers resolved those disagreements as secondary sectors were brought into larger firms (or merged themselves to form new large firms) and so came to share the most general interest of their industries. Deregulation opened the way to further waves of mergers and acquisitions, intensifying elite consolidation within major industries.

Consolidation within sectors facilitates the capture of government agencies and their powers and budgets by firms: the bigger the firms, and especially the less competition they face within their sectors, the greater the slice of the federal budget they control. The drastic fall in the share of workers in unions and the decline of national membership organizations have weakened the main sources of popular challenges to elite control over government resources and policies.

Future Prospects

As previous great powers faced decline, there were voices in each polity that correctly diagnosed the problem and proposed solutions, which, in retrospect, would have made significant differences. Each had schemes to eliminate tax privileges, end elite control over offices and governmental powers, and reform the military. Voices called for measures to invest in infrastructure and to hold or attract skilled craftsmen and businessmen and their enterprises from foreign competitors. Almost all of those reforms were stillborn. Only in Britain, where single elites or families were limited in their ability to seize and hold pieces of the state, were significant reforms enacted, and that’s why British dominance lasted so much longer than previous hegemons or, it now appears, the United States.

All of President Obama’s proposed (and enacted) reforms—in health care, energy, research funding, infrastructure investment, and financial regulation—are premised on winning support by accommodating elites and firms through continued subsidies and privileges. But such offers have the double effect of deepening the federal government’s fiscal crisis and fostering popular cynicism about the possibilities of genuine reform within the American political system.

Scenarios for significant change are based on hopes that the financial or other crises will foster a sprit of sacrifice among the public at large. However, decline and fiscal crisis are reversed only when elites are forced to surrender privileges. Ralph Nader’s most recent book, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! (2009), a utopian novel that imagines billionaires undermining corporate power and revitalizing citizen action, shows how much current progressive plans are based on hopes for elite generosity rather than realistic efforts at political mobilization. It is especially revealing, and depressing, that this book is the latest word from the American who has been the most successful at building citizen organizations over the past forty years. Claims that the Internet might foster effective political movements that can replace defunct or shrunken unions and mass organizations have yet to be realized.

Good ideas and high hopes did not save previous imperiums. There is no historical or social scientific basis for expecting they will do so for the United States—unfortunately, if we examine the contemporary U.S. as cold-eyed sociologists, rather than as hopeful citizens, our elites seem to match the capacities of their Dutch (and Habsburg Spanish, czarist Russian, and imperial Roman) predecessors to block reforms and withhold resources, thus remaining first class passengers on a sinking ship.

Recommended Readings

Giovanni Arrighi. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2007). Identifies the bases for China’s rapid rise and considers its future.

Paul Kennedy. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (Random House, 1987). The classic argument that global military dominance leads to economic decline.

Richard Lachmann. “Greed and Contingency: State Fiscal Crises and Imperial Failure in Early Modern Europe,” American Journal of Sociology (2009), 115:39-73. Explains how elite self-dealing weakened European great powers and blocked reform except in Britain.

Mark S. Mizruchi. “Berle and Means Revisited: The Governance and Power of Large U.S. Corporations,” Theory and Society (2004), 33:579-617. Traces the decentralization and growing autonomy of U.S. elites.

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The remaking of the Old Fort in Johannesburg, South Africa illustrates how heritage sites create a collective sense of history and how developing these sites is about more than just memory. Politics, economics, and the need for national healing all converge when it comes to preserving the past.

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For More Information

• Official website for Constitution Hill
• The Constitution of South Africa
• City of Johannesburg (including maps of the city)
• History of South Africa (government website)

Parents in the United States and the Netherlands take very different approaches to adolescent sexuality. While religion and economics play a role, a closer look at the two countries reveals different cultures of independence and control that shape attitudes toward teen sex. Implications are also discussed.

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More From Amy Schalet

Read more by Amy Schalet in The Washington Post, Mother Talkers, and on ACT for Youth (PDF).

Also check out Amy Schalet's "Must We Fear Adolescent Sexuality" (PDF), named Medscape General Medicine's best article on Women's Health in 2004.

I left the facility with a strong desire to wash my hands, perhaps to shed any trace of horror in my body. Yet as an Argentine, how could I not be implicated in the history of state violence that still haunts the nation?

More than two decades after the last military dictatorship in Argentina ended (1976-1983), its legacy of terror is still an open wound. In the name of national security and of defending Western Civilization from the threat of leftist “subversion,” the military regime tortured and “disappeared” tens of thousands of people. One emblematic site of such practices is the E.S.M.A. (Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, School of Naval Mechanics), a facility I gained access to in 2007 as part of a guided visit. The E.S.M.A. was among around 500 facilities turned into clandestine detention centers during Argentina’s dictatorship. It operated as a concentration camp, torture center, and platform from which detainees were taken on “death flights” to be thrown into the ocean or river to drown.

Now open to the public and managed by human rights groups, the E.S.M.A. has been transformed into a “Space of Memory and for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights.” As I left the E.S.M.A., the cold, humid quality of the buildings seemed to have penetrated my bones. The screams of the people subjected to torment remained in the silent walls. Reverberating in my head were the words capucha (hood) and capuchita (little hood) (rooms where detainees were kept shackled with eyes covered), “avenue of happiness” (corridor in a torture area), and “the Sardá” (a small room—named after the Maternity Sardá—where pregnant detainees gave birth, only to have their babies taken away). The military regime’s penchant for twisting the meanings of words mirrored its systematic distortion of other aspects of reality. After all, what is the meaning of security when a government brutally turns against its own population?

The experience of state terrorism in Argentina embodies social suffering which anthropologists Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock say stems from “what political, economic, and institutional power does to people, and, reciprocally, from how these forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems.” How do people collectively struggle with trauma related to state-sponsored atrocities? How do movements seek to redress such events? The following pictures feature various strategies of memorialization linked with the goal of bringing about truth and justice. The photo essay focuses on four sites in Buenos Aires, Argentina: the Park of Memory and the Human Rights Walk (places of remembrance and tribute to the victims of state terrorism) and the E.S.M.A. and “Olimpo” (former clandestine detention centers, now refashioned by human rights organizations). The pictures illustrate the diverse methods human rights advocates use to raise awareness, construct memory, and garner political support: testimony, displays, public art, and cultural events that build cross-movement solidarity. Above all, these images capture the critical roles that the reclamation and resignification of formerly terrifying physical spaces play in grappling with social suffering and human rights.

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Further Reading

Books by Barbara Sutton

Sutton, Barbara, Sandra Morgen, and Julie Novkov, eds. 2008. Security
Disarmed: Critical Perspectives on Gender, Race, and Militarization. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Sutton, Barbara. 2010. Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and Women's Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.

Organizations

• Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Linea Fundadora
• Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo
• Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo
• Asociación de Ex-Detenidos Desaparecidos
• H.I.J.O.S. ( Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio)
• CELS (Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales)
• Secretaría de Derechos Humanos de la Nación
• Instituto Espacio para la Memoria
• Memoria Abierta