Neoliberalism K—UMich 2013 neg 1NCs 1NC: Generic

I: Genocide

The affirmative reinforcement of American neoliberal politics will inevitably result in genocide

If the former politics of the USA is continued, it will mean an accelerated accumulation of elements of barbarism in the USA itself and worldwide. The unleashing of capitalism will give rise to a further decivilisation. Already ‘terror suspects’, ‘poverty refugees’ on the high seas, the victims of ecological and social catastrophes as well as of state failures in the Third World have no human rights. They are similar to those who were made ‘stateless’ by National Socialism. These victims are still ‘collateral damage’ and there are no extermination camps. But there have been many steps taken in the direction of lawlessness. If this development is not stopped, there will be a barbarisation of unleashed imperialist capitalism, which will tip over into genocide.

I: Bare Life

Neoliberalism’s politics of disposability necessitates Otherization and the exclusion of the “Other” reducing them to a state of “bare life”

Giroux, 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 604-605)//SG

Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ is clearly recognized at home in the horrific images that followed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Giroux, 2006),which exposed a politics of disposability that could not be defined by invoking the colonial reference of the alleged barbarism of ‘less developed’ countries. On the contrary,TV cameras provided countless images of hundreds of thousands of poor people, mostly blacks, some Latinos, many elderly, and a few white people, stranded on rooftops, or isolated on patches of dry highway without any food, water, or any place to wash, urinate, or find relief from the scorching sun.Newspapers printed shocking stories about dead people, mostly poor African-Americans, left uncollected in the streets, on porches, in hospitals, nursing homes, electric wheelchairs, and collapsed houses, prompting some people to claim that New Orleans resembled a ‘Third World Refugee Camp’ (Brooks, 2005). While the dominant media reduced the Katrina debacle to government incompetence, the real agenda responsible forKatrina reveals a political rationality that is closer to Agamben’s metaphor of ‘bare life’. In this case,Katrina revealed the emergence of a new kind of politics, one in which entire populations are now considered expendable,an unnecessary burden on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves. At the same time, Katrina also revealed what Angela Davis (2005) insists ‘are very clear signs of . . . impending fascist policies and practices’,which not only construct an imaginary social environment for all of those populations rendered disposable but also exemplify a site and space ‘where democracy has lost its claims’ (pp. 122, 124).The biopolitics of neoliberalism as an instance of ‘bare life’ is not only coming more and more to the foreground but is also restructuring the terrain of everyday life for vast numbers of people. As an older politics associated with the social state and the ‘social contract’ (however damaged and racially discriminating)13 gives way to an impoverished vocabulary that celebrates private financial gain over human lives, public goods, and broad democratic values,the hidden inner workings of ‘bare life’ become less of a metaphor than a reality for millions of people whose suffering and misery moves from benign neglect to malign neglect (Agamben, 1998, p. 9). Beyond the very visible example of Katrina, there is a host of less visible instances affecting those dehumanized by a politics of disposability.The logic of disposability as an instance of ‘bare life’ is visible in the Bush administration’s indifference to the growing HIV crisis among young black women who ‘represent the highest percentage (56 percent) of all AIDS cases reported among women, and an increasing proportion of new cases(60 percent)’ (Cromie, 1998). Hidden behind the rhetoric of color blindness and self-help that assists in camouflaging the racist under- pinnings of much of contemporary society, the HIV epidemic spreads but gets almost no attention from ‘leaders in public health, politics, or religion’(cited in ABC Primetime, 2006).14 The politics of bare life also informs the fury of the new nativism in the United States at dawn of the twenty-first century. Stoked by media panics and the hysterical populist rhetoric of politicians, racist commitments easily translate into policies targeting poor youth of color as well as immigrant men, women, and children with deportation, incarceration, and state-backed violence.Extending the logic of disposability to those defined as ‘other’ through the discourse of nativism, citizen border patrols and ‘migrant hunters’ urge the government to issue a state of emergency to stop the flow of immigrants across the United States’ southern border(Buchanan & Holthouse, 2006, pp. 29􏰀32). Leading public intellectuals inhabit the same theoretical discourse as right-wing vigilante groups. For example, internationally known Harvard University faculty member, Samuel P. Huntington (2004), unapologetically argues in Who Are We? The Challenge to America’s Identity that Western civilization, as it is said to be represented in the United States, is threatened by the growing presence of Hispanic-Americans, especially Mexican-Amer- icans, shamelessly defined as the ‘brown menace’.15 The New York Times (2007a) claims that ‘toughness’ is the new watchword in immigration policy, which translates not only into a boom in immigration detention but also in some cases death to immigrants denied access to essential medicines and healthcare (p. A22). For them, the new biopolitics of disposability is also evident in the fact that for many black men and women, the war on drugs signals the emergence of ‘the prison as the preeminent US racial space’(Singh, 2006, pp. 83􏰀84). Biopolitics combines with biocapital in one of its most ruthless expressions as the carceral state increasingly runs for-profit prisons and uses inmates in prison jobs that provide profits for private contractors while exposing the prisoners to ‘a toxic cocktail of hazardous chemicals’ (Moraff, 2007, pp. 1􏰀3).The logic of disposability as an instance of ‘bare life’ also gains expression in the slave-like conditions many guest workers endure in the United States. Routinely cheated out of wages, held captive by employers who seize their documents, and often forced to live in squalid conditions without medical benefits, such workers exist in a state that Congressman Charles Rangel characterizes as ‘the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery’, a statement amply supported by the Southern Poverty Law Center report (2007), Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States.The growing armies of the ‘living dead’ also include the 750,000 who are homeless in America on any given night(Eaton-Robb, 2007), along with the swelling ranks of the working poor and unemployed who are either under insured or uninsured and unable to get even minimum health care. Needless to say,the logic of disposability as an instance of ‘bare life’ is clearly visible in all of these examples.

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