Neoliberalism K—UMich 2013 neg 1NCs 1NC: Generic
I: Oppressive/Political Agency
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- Neoliberalism imposes control on unwilling societies and represses political dissidents
- American capitalism destroys workers’ lives—causes violence, exhaustion, and massive wealth gaps
- I: Inequality
I: Oppressive/Political AgencyExposure to international markets adversely affects workers in less developed countries—can’t effectively mobilizeRudra, Associate Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh 02 (Nita, “Globalization and the Decline of the Welfare State in Less-Developed Countries”, International Organization 56:2, Spring 2002, JSTOR)//AS Globalization is likely to adversely affect government commitments to social welfare in nations highly endowed with low-skilled labor. This theory challenges the view that labor in LDCs will experience both economic and political gains with globalization; following such logic, if exposure to international markets is increas- ing, abundant labor should be in a better political position to demand greatergovernment social-welfare spending. I suggest, however, that labor in LDCs is in a weak bargaining position because the sizeable population of low-skilled workers faces collective-action problems that are exacerbated by large pools of surplus labor_ Labor in LDCs, unlike in developed countries, does not generally have national labor-market institutions that can help mitigate these problems and strengthen workers' bargaining power. Thus globalization in LDCs will lead to less, not more, social-welfare spending. Neoliberalism imposes control on unwilling societies and represses political dissidentsPeck and Tickell, Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy ,Professor of Geography, University of British Columbia and Professor at Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography, University of British Columbia respectively, 02 (Jamie and Adam, “Neoliberalizing Space”, Antipode 34:3, July 2002 The new religion of neoliberalism combines a commitment to the extension of markets and logics of competitiveness with a profound antipathy to all kinds of Keynesian and/or collectivist strategies. The constitution and extension of competitive forces is married with aggressive forms of state downsizing, austerity financing, and public- service "reform." Andwhile rhetorically antistatist, neoliberals have proved adept at the (mis)use of state power in the pursuit of these goals.For its longstanding advocates in the Anglo-American world, neoliberalism represents a kind of self-imposed disciplinary code, calling for no less than monastic restraint. For its converts in the global south, neoliberalism assumes the status of the Latinate church in medieval Europe, externally imposing unbending rule regimes enforced by global institutions and policed by local functionaries. Meanwhile, if not subject to violent repression, nonbelievers are typically dismissed as apostate defenders of outmoded institutions and suspiciously collectivist social rights. American capitalism destroys workers’ lives—causes violence, exhaustion, and massive wealth gapsResnick and Wolff, professors of economics at Amherst and Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University (Wolff) 03 (Stephen and Richard, “Exploitation, Consumption, and the Uniqueness of US Capitalism”, Historical Materialism 11:4, Brill)//AS We propose to argue a simple basic thesis about US capitalism relating to a certain uniqueness of its contradictions.1 On the one hand, capitalism has delivered a stunning standard of living to US workers across the last 150 years, perhaps the best such showing by any capitalist country. The result is that workers in the US today enjoy exceptional levels of personal consumption and wealth as well as formal political freedoms. These aspects represent the success of US capitalism. On the other hand, this capitalism has subjected productive labourers to probably the highest rate of class exploitation (ratio of surplus to necessary labour) in the capitalist world. Such exploitation contributes to the exceptional levels of exhaustion, stress, drug-dependency, loneliness, mass disaffection from civic life, dysfunctional families and endemic violence pervading US workers’ lives. Extraordinary exploitation yields a robust US capitalism yet also one dependent on, and ultimately vulnerable to, a working class in deep distress. It yields a huge and growing gap between the rich and powerful few and the mass. The sweep of US history since the Civil War generated a capitalism that was both very strong and very weak. I: InequalityNeoliberal policies are profoundly hypocritical—impose the very inequality and destruction they seek to preventBrenner and Theodore, Professor of Urban Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Associate Professor in the Urban Planning and Policy Program at the University of Chicago respectively 02 (Neil and Nik, “Associate Professor in the Urban Planning and Policy Program”, Antipode, 2002, http://metropolitanstudies.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/222/Brenner.Theodore.NL.pdf)//AS Among activists and radical academics alike, there is considerable agreement regarding the basic elements of neoliberalism as an ideo- logical project. For instance, Moody (1997:119-120) has described neoliberalism concisely as "... a mixture of neoclassical economic fundamentalism, market regulation ir1 place of state guidance, economic redistribution in favor of capital (known as supply-side economics), moral authoritarianism with an idealized family at its center, inter- national free trade principles (sometimes inconsistently applied), and a thorough intolerance of trade unionism." However, as Moody and others have emphasized, there is also a rather blatant disjuncture between the ideology of neoliberalism and its everyday political operations and societal effects. On the one hand, while neoliberalism aspires to create a "utopia" of free markets liberated from all forms of state interference, it has in practice entailed a dramatic intensification of coercive, disciplinary forms of state intervention in order to impose market rule upon all aspects of social life (see Keil this volume; MacLeod this volume). On the other hand, whereas neoliberal ideology implies that self-regulating markets will generate an optimal allo- cation of investments and resources, neoliberal political practice has generated pervasive market failures, new forms of social polarization, and a dramatic intensification of uneven development at all spatial scales. In short, as Gill (1995:407) explains, "the neoliberal shift in government policies has tended to subject the majority of the popu- lation to the power of market forces whilst preserving social protection for the strong." During the last two decades, the dysfunc- tional effects of neoliberal approaches to capitalist restructuring have been manifested in diverse institutional arenas and at a range of spatial scales (see Amin 1997; Bourdieu 1998; Gill 1995; Isin 1998; Jessop and Stones 1992; Peck and Tickell 1994). As such studies have indicated, the disjuncture between the ideology of self-regulating markets and the everyday reality of persistent economic stagnation- intensifying inequality, destructive interplace competition, and generalized social insecurity-has been particularly blatant in pre- cisely those political-economic contexts in which neoliberal doctrines have been imposed most extensively. Neoliberalism’s ever-expanding poverty, volatility, and insecurity encourages a predatory mindset shift within the working classGiroux, Ph.D. @ Carnegie-Mellon University, Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department, 2008 (Henry A., “Beyond the biopolitics of disposability: rethinking neoliberalism in the New Gilded Age,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, Vol. 14.5, pp 593-594)//SG One example of the predatory mindset entailed by neoliberal policies appeared in the New York Times at the beginning of 2008and told the story oftwo elderly men who were arrested while ‘pushing a corpse, seated in an office chair, along the sidewalk to a check- cashing store to cash the dead man’s Social Security check’. In a desperate attempt to cash the late Mr. Cintron’s $335 check, thetwo men ‘parked the chair with the corpse in front of Pay-O-Maticat 763 Ninth Avenue’, a business that Mr. Cintron had frequented.The attempt failed, as the newspaper reported, because ‘Their sidewalk procession had already attracted the stares of passers-by who were startled by the sight of the body flopping from side to side as the two men tried to prop it up, the police said’(Lambert & Hauser, 2008). Police and an ambulance arrived asthe two men attempted to maneuver the corpse and chair into the office. The story offered no reasons for such behavior and treated the narrative as a kind of odd spectacle more akin to the workings of the Jerry Springer Show than a serious commentary aboutthe sheer desperation that follows the collapse of the social state, accompanied by an ever-expanding poverty, volatility, and insecurity that encroach on whole populations in the United States. Another even more brutal account in the mainstream press told of howa New York City police detective and his girlfriend kidnapped and forced a 13-year-old girl to provide sexual favors for the couple’s friends and other interested buyers. According to the story,the detective and his girlfriend would parade the girl at parties and other places where adult men had gathered and force her to have sex with them for money $40 for oral sex, $80 for intercourse. The child was an investment. The couple allegedly told her thatshe had been purchased for $500 purchased, like the slaves of old, only this time for use as a prostitute. (Herbert, 2008, p. A27)While the story connected the fate of this young child to the growing sex trade in the United States, it said nothing about the ongoing reification of young girls in a market society that largely reduces them to commodities, sexual objects, and infantilized accessories for boys and men.While the sex trade clearly needs to be condemned and eliminated, it is an easy target politically and morally when compared withthe music, advertising, television, and filmindustries that treat young people as merchandise, turn them into fodder for profit, and appear indifferent to the relentless public debasement of young girls and women. A third story provides yet another glimpse of the treatment accorded to those others rendered dispensable and deemed unworthy of humanity or dignity. In this narrative, Benn Zipperer (2007)contemplates on the emergence of prison rodeos that are used to entertain large crowds by organizing gameswhere Americans buy tickets to watch inmates wrestle bulls and participate in crowd favorites like ‘Convict Poker’.Also called ‘Mexican Sweat’, the poker game consists of four prisoners who sit expectantly around a red card table. A 1,500-pound bull is unleashed, and the last convict to remain sitting wins. Especially thrilling for the audience is the chaotic finale ‘Money the Hard Way’ in whichmore than a dozen inmates scramble to snatch a poker chip dangling from the horns of another raging bull. In spite of their differences,all of these stories are bound together by a politics in which the logic of the marketplace is recalibrated to exploit society’s most vulnerable even to the point of transgressing the sanctity of the dead and to inflict real horrors, enslavement, and injuries upon the lives of those who are poor, elderly, young, and disenfranchised, because they are without an economic role in the neoliberal order. And as the third story illustrates, a savage and fanatical capitalism offers a revealing snapshot of howviolence against the incarcerated largely black, often poor, and deemed utterly disposable now enters the realm of popular cultureby producing a type of racialized terrorism posing as extreme entertainment, while simultaneously recapitulating the legacy of barbarism associated with slavery.Most of these stories place the blame for these crimes on individualized acts of cruelty and lawlessness. None offer a critical translation of the big picture, one that signals the weakening of social bonds and calls the very project of US democracy into question. And yet these narratives demand something more, a different kind of optic capable of raising serious questions regarding the political culture and moral economy in which such representations are produced, the pedagogies of reification, vengeance, and sadistic pleasure that enable people to ignore their warning, andthe inherent instability of a democracy that is willing to treat human beings as redundant and disposable, denied the rights and dignities accorded both to citizens and even to humanity.And while such images conjure up startling representations of human poverty, misery, deepening inequality, and humiliation,they bear witness to a broader politics of exploitation and exclusion in which, as Naomi Klein (2002) points out, ‘Mass privatization and deregulation have bred armies of locked-out people, whose services are no longer needed, whose lifestyles are written off as ‘‘backward’’, whose basic needs go unmet’ (p. 21). These stories are decidedly selective, yet, they point to something deeper still in the current mode of neoliberal regulation, the rise of a punishing state and its commitment to the criminalization of social problems, the unburdening of ‘human rights from a social economy’ (Martin, 2007, p. 139), and the wide circulation of and pleasure in violent spectacles of insecurity and abject cruelty. As the social state is displaced by the market, a new kind of politics is emerging in which some lives, if not whole groups, are seen as disposable and redundant. Within this new form of biopolitics apolitical system actively involved in the management of the politics of life and death new modes of individual and collective suffering emerge around the modalities and intersection of race and class. But what is important to recognize is that the configuration of politics that is emerging is about more than the processes of social exclusion or being left out of the benefits of the market,it is increasingly about a normalized and widely accepted reliance upon the alleged ‘invisible hand’ of a market fundamentalism to mediate the most important decisions about life and death. In this case, the politics managing the crucialquestions of life and death is governed by neoliberalism’s power to define who matters and who doesn’t, who lives and who dies. Questions about getting ahead no longer occupy a key role in everyday politics. For most peopleunder the regime of neoliberalism, everyday life has taken an ominous turn and is largely organized around questions of who is going to survive and who is going to die. Under such circumstances, important decisions about life and death have given way to a range of anti- democratic forces that threaten the meaning and substance of democracy, politics, human condition, and any viable and just vision of the future. In its updated version,neoliberal rationality also rules ‘our politics, our electoral systems, our universities, increasingly dominat[ing] almost everything, even moving into areas that were once prohibited by custom in our country, like commercializing childhood’ (Nader, 2007). Neoliberalism’s rapid requirement for urbanization exacerbates the rich-poor divide resulting in ruined livelihoods, increased inequality, increased poverty, detrimental environmental impacts, and horrific living conditionsGreenberg, Ph.D in Anthropology at University of Michigan, 2012 (James B., Thomas Weaver (Ph.D. in Anthropology at University of California at Berkeley), Anne Browning-Aiken (Ph.D. in Anthropology at University of Arizona), William L. Alexander (Professor of Anthropology at University of Arizona), “The Neoliberal Transformation of Mexico,” Neoliberalism and Commodity Production in Mexico, University Press of Colorado, pp 328-329)//SG Neoliberal development has led tothe accoutrementsof modernization and prog- ress, such as arguably better infrastructure and certainly greater opportunities for a narrow set of Mexican and foreign elites. For the masses,however, neoliberalism has created toll roads they can’t afford to use. While free trade has harmonized prices between the UnitedStatesand Mexicofor most commodities, forworking people incomes remain flat and putting food on the table, let alone buying the foreign goods that flood the market, remains a struggle.Neoliberal development has made the rich richer and the poor desperate. Beyond its costs for Mexico’s masses, the economy and the environment have paid the price of neoliberal devel- opment. Although conditions were far from good before,employment, working conditions, distribution of income, and living conditions have become markedly worse for the masses under neoliberalism. As these conditions have worsened, so have violence, oppression, and environmental degradation.The implementation of neoliberal policy was brutal, particularly for Mexico’s rural poor. Rather than helping the poor, these policies have deepened poverty and ruined livelihoods. Even by the World Bank’s own accounts, 5 to 10 percent of Mexico’s rural population still lives on under a dollar per day, and another 20 percent lives on less than two dollars a day (World Bank 2004:xx).National fig- ures, however, hide rural poverty. By 1996, following neoliberal restructuring and NAFTA, 80 percent of the rural population fell below this line. Rural poverty numbers improved slowly between 1998 and 2006, according to the World Bank, because of public and private transfers (the latter from migrant remissions) and increases in tourism and services; the poverty rate fell to 55 percent. But as the US economy soured, rural poverty again began to rise and stood at 61 percent in 2008 (World Bank 2012). Under neoliberalism, inequality has also been increas- ing in the United States since the 1980s (Glasmeier 2007; Uchitelle 2007). Beyond the growing inequalities in wealth, widespread and growing poverty comes with other social costs. As displaced rural migrants pour into Mexico’s cit- ies, they face both large-scale unemployment and horrific living conditions;the only housing they may be able to afford is improvised out of cardboard and other temporary materials and they seldom have heat, electricity, or water. Without sewers and sanitation, these slums are breeding grounds for diseases of poverty and deteriorating health (Davis 2006).These problems are only the down-payment on the social costs of neoliber- alism. For peasants and smallholders fleeing ruined rural economies, migration entails a process of class transformation: unable to make a living working their own lands, they must now work for someone else. Working for wages changes the basic logic of livelihoods. Whether the migrants find work in Mexico or in the United States, working for wages rewards households that send more workers into labor markets, and the people left behind must find ways to earn cash. This situation irrevocably changes the gender division of household labor. Download 1.47 Mb. Share with your friends:
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