Neoliberalism K—UMich 2013 neg 1NCs 1NC: Generic
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- Neoliberal influence causes disease, starvation, and environmental destruction—leaves the majority without protection
- Neoliberalism is exclusionary, materialistic, and ecologically destructive—affects world perspective
ImpactI: Laundry ListNeoliberalism causes poverty, social exclusion, societal disintegration, violence and environmental destruction—threatens humanityDe La Barra, Chilean political activist, international consultant and former UNICEF Latin America Public Policy Advisor 07-- (Ximena, “THE DUAL DEBT OF NEOLIBERALISM”, Imperialism, Neoliberalism and Social Struggles in Latin America”, 9/1/09, edited by Dello Bueno and Lara, Brill Online)//AS The currently prevailing neoliberal development model has brought with it various technological advances and economic and commercial growth. However, these results ultimately benefit fewer and fewer people while augmenting social inequality, injustices, and promoting serious social and ethical setbacks. It is definitely not eradicating poverty On the contrary, it creates conditions for a growing tendency towards political,economic and social exclusion for the majority of the world’s population.The model exacerbates poverty, social disparities, ecological degradation,violence and social disintegration. Loss of governability flows from its systematic logic of emphasising an ever cheaper labour force, the reduction ofsocial benefits, the disarticulation and destruction of labourorganisations,and the elimination of labour and ecological regulation (de la Barra 1997). Inthis way, it consolidates a kind of cannibalism known as social dumping thatseeks to lower costs below the value of social reproduction rather than organising a process of progressive social accumulation. For most of Latin Americaand the Caribbean, the present minimum wage levels only allow for a portionof the basic consumption package needed by working people (Bossio 2002).At present, the global income gap between the 10% poorest portion of theworld’s population and the wealthiest 10% has grown to be 1 to 103 (UNDP2005). According to this same source, around 2.5 billion people, almost halfof humanity, lives on less than US$ 2. per day (considered the poverty level),while 1.2 billion of these people live on less than US$ 1. per day (consideredthe level of extreme poverty).Given its neoliberal character, globalisation failed to produce the benefitsthat were touted. Indeed, the process has greatly harmed the most vulnerable social sectors produced by the previous phase of capitalist development.The lack of social and ethical objectives in the current globalisation processhas resulted in benefits only in those countries where a robust physical andhuman infrastructure exists, where redistributive social policies are the norm,and where fair access to markets and strong regulatory entities are in place.Where such conditions do not exist, globalisation has led to stagnation andmarginalisation, with declining health and educational levels of its children,especially among the poor. Some regions, including Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Sub-Saharan Africa, and more recently, Latin America andthe Caribbean, as well as some countries within regions and some personswithin countries (poor children and adolescents, rural inhabitants and urbanslum dwellers, indigenous peoples, children of illiterate women, illegal immigrants, etc.) have remained mostly excluded (UNICEF 2001). Neoliberal influence causes disease, starvation, and environmental destruction—leaves the majority without protectionGill, Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University, 95 (Stephen, “Globalisation, Market Civilisation, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism”, Millennium - Journal of International Studies 24:3, 1995, Sage Publications)//AS Nonetheless, as Galbraith has shown, the privileges of the politically powerful and economically strong have been reinforced in the OECD nations since the late 1960s, often to the detriment of the vast majority of the population." The neoliberal shift in govemment policies has tended to subject the majority of the population to the power of market forces whilst preserving social protection for the strong. In the Third World, the counterpart to Galbraith's "˜culture of contentment' are urban elites and ruling and emerging middle classes which benefit from the consumption pattems and incorporation into financial and production circuits of transnational capital." Recent growth in enclave residential development, private provision of security, and private insurance and health care suggests that access to what were often considered to be public goods under socialised provision is now increasingly privatised, individualised, and hierarchical in nature. More broadly, there has been a transformation of the socialisation of risk towards a privatisation and individualisation of risk assessment and insurance provision. Nevertheless, this process is hierarchical: for example, burdens of risk are redistributed, marketised, and individualised (e_g., associated with illness, old age, or pensions) as opposed to being fully socialised through collective and public provision." Despite enormous increases in global output and population since World War II, a significant polarisation of income and of life chances has been central to the restructuring process of the last twenty years. For the 800 million or so affluent consumers in the OECD, there is a counterpart number starving in the Third World, with one billion more that have no clean drinking water or sufficient food to provide basic nutrition." More than half of Afrirfs population lives in absolute poverty. In the 1980s, the income of two-thirds of African workers fell below the poverty line. A disproportionate burden of adjustment to harsher circumstances has fallen on women and children and weaker members of society, such as the old and the disabled." Many of these people also live in war-torn societies, where huge quantities of cheap mass-produced conventional weapons have accumulated, including over 100 million landmines: "˜weapons that never miss'. One million landmines exploded under Third World victims in the last 15 years." A re-emergence of serious global public health problems may be indicated by the growth in contagious diseases once thought to have been conquered in the march of medical progress (ag, cholera or anthrax), as well as in diseases associated with environmental degradation and pollution (e.g., asthma and allergies), and new viruses such as AIDS). During the decades since World War II, life expectancy increased steadily throughout the world. This process has now apparently gone into reverse in a number of countries (notably in the former communist-ruled nations of Eastem Europe): [t]he resurgence of epidemics is a crucial indicator of the state of our world, not only in terms of human suffering, but also in terms of development more generally. It implies the breakdown of the social controls that usually prevent such diseases-hygiene, nutrition, resistance to infection, immunization programmes, housing." The prices of many medical products marketed by transnational pharmaceutical firms have risen and the relaxation of trade barriers, and other market forms of restriction and regulation, has made it simpler to dump expired or unsafe medicines in parts of the Third World." Globally, public health and educational provisions have been reduced, partly because of neoliberal structural adjustment pressures on most governments to exercise monetary restraint, cut budgets, repay debts, balance their international trade, devalue their currencies, remove subsidies and trade and investmentebarriers and, in so doing, restore international credit- worthiness and thereby extend the market civilisation globally. Such pressures emanate from agents in the global financial markets and from _intemationalorganisations like the World Bank and IMF, as well as from within these societies. Nevertheless, in many pans of the Third World and in the former Soviet Union, economic liberalisation has been welcomed as a means of reforming the old, unaccountable political order. Neoliberal globalization is the root of cause of poverty, exploitation, environmental degradation, and violence; the only solution is to eradicate neoliberal globalizationSzentes, Professor Emeritus of the Corvinus University of Budapest and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2008 (Tamas, “Globalisation and prospects of the world society,” CENTRAL EUROPEAN POLITICAL SCIENCE, Vol. 9, pp 1-3, http://cepsr.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ATT81762.pdf#page=9)//SG It’ s a common place thathuman society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace. Without peace countries cannot develop. Althoughsince 1945 there has been no world war, but • numerous local wars took place, • terrorism has spreadall over the world,undermining securityeven in the most developed and powerful countries, • arms race and militarisation have not endedwith the collapse of the Soviet bloc,but escalated and continued, extending also to weapons of mass destruction and misusing enormous resources badly needed for development, •many “invisible wars”1 are suffered by the poor and oppressed people,manifested in mass misery, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, starvation and malnutrition, epidemics andpoor health conditions, exploitation and oppression,racial and otherdiscrimination, physical terror, organised injustice, disguised forms ofviolence, the denial or regular infringement of the democratic rights of citizens, women, youth, ethnic or religious minorities, etc., andlast but not least, in the degradation of human environment,which means that • the “war against Nature”, i.e. the disturbance of ecological balance, wasteful management of natural resources, and large-scale pollution of our environment, is still going on, causing also losses and fatal dangers for human life. Behind global terrorism and “invisible wars”we find striking international and intra- society inequities and distorted development patterns2, which tend to generate social as well as international tensions,thus paving the way for unrest and “visible” wars. It is a commonplace now that peace is not merely the absence of war.The prerequisites of a lasting peace between and within societies involvenot only - though, of course, necessarily -demilitarisation, but also a systematic and gradualelimination of the roots of violence, of the causes of “invisible wars”, of thestructural and institutional bases of large-scale internationaland intra-society inequalities, exploitation and oppression. Peace requires a process of social and national emancipation, a progressive, democratic transformation of societies and the world bringing about equal rights and opportunities for all people, sovereign participation and mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a pluralistic democracy on global level with an appropriate system of proportional representation of the world society, articulation of diverse interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-violent conflict management, and thus also a global governance with a really global institutional system. Under the contemporary conditions of accelerating globalisation and deepening global interdependencies in our world, peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if reduced to a period only after or before war, and cannot be safeguarded in one part of the world when some others suffer visible or invisible wars.Thus, peace requires, indeed, a new,demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide equal opportunities for sustainable development. “Sustainabilityof development” (both on national and world level)is often interpretedasan issue of environmental protection only and reduced to the need for preserving the ecological balance and delivering the next generationsnot a destroyed Nature with over- exhausted resources and polluted environment.However, no ecological balance can be ensured, unless the deep international development gap and intra-society inequalities are substantially reduced. Owing to global interdependencies there may exist hardly any “zero-sum-games”, in which one can gain at the expense of others, but, instead, the “negative-sum-games” tend to predominate, in which everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses. Therefore, the actual question is not about “sustainability of development” but rather about the “sustainability of human life”, i.e. survival of mankind – because of ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism. When Professor Louk de la Rive Box was the president of EADI, one day we had an exchange of views on the state and future of development studies. We agreed thatdevelopment studies are not any more restricted to the case of underdeveloped countries, as the developed ones (as well as the former “socialist” countries) are also facing development problems, such as those of structural and institutional (and even system-) transformation, requirements of changes in development patterns, and concerns about natural environment.While all these are true, today I would dare say that besides (or even instead of) “development studies” we must speak about and make “survival studies”.While the monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical,we live in an almost permanent crisis of the world society, which is multidimensional in nature, involving not only economic but also socio-psychological, behavioural, cultural and political aspects. The narrow-minded, election-oriented, selfish behaviour motivated by thirst for power and wealth, which still characterise the political leadership almost all over the world, paves the way for the final, last catastrophe.Under the circumstances provided by rapidly progressing science and technological revolutions, human society cannot survive unless such profound intra-society and international inequalities prevailing today are soon eliminated. Like a single spacecraft,the Earth can no longer afford to have a 'crew' divided into two parts: the rich, privileged, well- fed, well-educated, on the one hand, and the poor, deprived, starving, sick and uneducated, on the other. Dangerous 'zero-sum-games' (which mostly prove to be “negative-sum-games”) can hardly be played any more by visible or invisible wars in the world society.Because of global interdependencies, the apparent winner becomes also a loser. The real choice for the world society is between negative- and positive-sum-games:i.e. between, on the one hand, continuation of visible and “invisible wars”, as long as this is possible at all, and, on the other, transformation of the world order by demilitarisation and democratization.No ideological or terminological camouflage can conceal this real dilemma any more, which is to be faced not in the distant future, by the next generations, but in the coming years, because of global terrorism soon having nuclear and other mass destructive weapons, and also due to irreversible changes in natural environment. It is, of course, far easier to outline the normative principles of a peaceful democratic social and world order than to state the ways and means of how to achieve it. The causes of inequalities on local, national, regional and world levels are often interlinked.Dominance and exploitation relations go across country boundaries; oppressors are supporting each other and oppressing other oppressors. Societies that exploit others can hardly stay free of exploitation, themselves. Nations that hinder others in democratic transformation can hardly live in democracy. Monopolies induce also others to monopolise. Narrow, selfish interests generate narrow, selfish interest. Discrimination gives birth to discrimination. And so on... The “national societies” of the contemporary world show a great many differences, stemming partly from their own past, partly from their recent transformation.Differences appear not only in the level of economic and technological development and the related world-economic position (as between the “North” and the ”South”)or in respect of the socio- economic system and the related political regime(as in the past between the “East” and the “West”), but also within these groups of countries in terms of natural endowment, geographical and demographic dimensions, historical traditions, cultures, mechanism of management and governance, policy of leadership, etc.At the same time, all societies are subject to the increasing effect of each other and to the impact of globalisation. Neoliberalism is exclusionary, materialistic, and ecologically destructive—affects world perspectiveGill, Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University, 95 (Stephen, “Globalisation, Market Civilisation, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism”, Millennium - Journal of International Studies 24:3, 1995, Sage Publications)//AS By market civilisation, I mean a contradictory movement or set of transformative practices. The concept entails, on the one hand, cultural, ideological, and mythic forms understood broadly as an ideology or myth of capitalist progress. These representations are associated with the cumulative aspects of market integration and the increasingly expansive structures of accumulation, legitimation, consumption, and work. They are largely configured by the power of transnational capital. On the other hand, market civilisation involves pattems of social disintegration and exclusionary and hierarchical patterns of social relations. Indeed, whilst the concept of the longue durêe Suggests the lineage and depth of market practices, it can be argued that a disturbing feature of market civilisation is that it tends to generate a perspective on the world that is ahistorical, economistic, materialistic, "˜me-oriented', short- termist, and ecologically myopic. Although the governance of this market civilisation is framed by the discourse of globalising neoliberalism and expressed through the interaction of free enterprise and the state, its coordination is achieved through a combination of market discipline and the direct application of political power. In this sense, there has been a "˜globalisation of liberalism”, involving 'the emergence of market civilisation: neoliberal globalisation is the latest phase in a process that originated before the dawning of the Enlightenment in Europe, and accelerated in the nineteenth century with the onset of industrial capitalism and the consolidation of the integral nation-state." 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