Neoliberalism K—UMich 2013 neg 1NCs 1NC: Generic
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I: DemocracyExpansion of neoliberalism in Latin America destroy any hope of democracy – increases poverty, exploitation, and risk of economic declineSpring, Professor and researcher at the National University of Mexico, 2008 (Ursula Oswald, “Globalization from Below: Social Movements and Altermundism — Reconceptualizing Security from a Latin American Perspective,” Globalization and Environmental Challenges - Hexagon Series on Human and Environmental Security and Peace, Vol 3, 388-91. SpringerLink.)//SG Low confidence in institutions and the ambiguous role of the military all over Latin America indicates also a low trust in democracy. Not only electoral frauds, very long and expensive election campaigns, favouring television companies, but also corrupt governments, have destroyed the well-being of entire nations. Probably the most dramatic case is Argentina, a world economic power in the early 19th century. During the crisis at the end of the 1990’s half of its population became impoverished. Similar processes occurred in all other countries of the subcontinent by transferring wealth from the majority to a tiny minor- ity (tables 26.2, 26.3). Figure 26.9 expresses this lack of confidence and a mixed feeling with democracy. Debates, collective decision-making, and solidarity belong to their own system of traditional ruling (Olvera 2002). For a neo- liberal world of monopolized mass media and central- ized decision-making these traditions are too slow. On the other side, the imposition of a world market, glo- bal capital flows, instant communications, social vul- nerability, imposition of the SAP by IMF, have reduced hope in democracy and livelihood. In 2005, a study by the Latinobarómetro showed that a great majority would again prefer a military dictatorship to an economic crisis. These results can be explained by two decades of loosing income and well-being. Fur- thermore, in many countries in LA the trust in a dem- ocratic government, transparent elections or changes in the conditions of life through election processes were disappointed, especially in Paraguay, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico with high degree of distrust (figure 26.9). A social reaction has been a renewed political radicalization in most countries of LA (MST, piqueteros13, Zapatistas; Ouviña 2005). This has cre- ated a complicated political and institutional situa- tion, but has offered LA an enormous potential for growth, investment and well-being, and for civil soci- ety to organize better.Mexico, having a border of more than 3,000 km with the U.S., was not exempt from these processes of re- gressive globalization. The first economic crisis and the first SAP agreement imposed by IMF started in 1976. In 1994, Mexico started with a severe economic crisis in the era of neoliberalism and globalization. Similar crises occurred a few years later in Asia, Rus- sia, Brazil, and Argentina. However, the crisis of the peasants started earlier, due to the exhaustion of the model of stable development(CEPAL 1978; IMF 1977), but primarily due to the interests of the na-tional elite to link up with globalization. The excessive bureaucracy and an inefficient bourgeoisie controlling the government were unable to cope with a new phase of globalization(Kaplan 2002). The substitu- tion of the import-based modernization process and the rapid urbanization were reducing the rural accu- mulation, and major financial resources were drained into the urban and industrial sectors. As a result, the rural development was subsumed under the urban and since the 1950’s an important process of urbaniza- tion was underway, making Mexico City the biggest city in the Third World (Negrete/Ruíz 1991). Since the 1960’s, peasants started to migrate to the U.S., later also to Canada with legal permissions and in the 1980’s, when U.S. migration policy changed, they became illegal (figure 26.10).Environmental de- struction, aggravated by climate change, highly subsi- dized world basic food prices, and since 1982 a rapid opening of the domestic to the global market had drastically worsened the situation of peasants and in- digenous people. This process of exclusive globaliza- tion was reinforced with the signing of NAFTA (Ar- royo/Villamar 2002),which reconfigured traditional alliances and opposition along non-national lines. Un- equal terms of trade in the world market obliged pro- ducers to associate themselves within product lines: coffee, pineapple, and fair trade was an alternative for organized peasants to mitigate the negative affects of dumping and overproduction in the world market. In this context, the Ejército Zapatista de Lib- eración Nacional (EZLN: Zapatistas) in Chiapas14 surprised the Mexican government and the festivities of the bourgeoisie on 1 January 1994 with a declara- tion of war. The military response was directly moni- tored by foreign governments and social groups due to a new internet channel controlled by the Catholic Church (laneta.com), which was at the service of the uprisings. After ten days of intensive repression, inter- national pressure forced the Mexican government to declare an armistice.Simultaneously, the public expo- sition of indigenous discrimination and poverty con-fronted the country with the ‘other Mexico’ (Bonfil 1987) of the poor, ill, abandoned, and exploited. The apparently modern nation(last under the OECD countries)showed the world how regions and social groups live in absolute poverty and underdevelopment similar to Haiti and Ethiopia, due to the unequal de- velopment and resource exploitation.International and national solidarity started, forcing a peace agree- ment; but both the chamber of deputies and senators objected to the agreed modification of the Constitu- tion, leaving the indigenous population in the same marginal situation. Democracy in the neoliberal state simply utilizes a politics of disposability to decide who get to vote and and who gets to exist – effectively considering all others a “disposed” populationGiroux, 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 606-607)//SG At the dawn of the new millennium, it is commonplace for references to the common good, public trust, and public service to be either stigmatized or sneered at by people who sing the praises of neoliberalism and its dream of turning ‘the global economy . . . into a planetary casino’(Castoriadis, 2007, p. 47). Against this dystopian condition, the American political philosopher, Sheldon Wolin, has argued thatbecause of the increasing power of corporationsand the emergence of a lawless state (given immense power during the administration of George W. Bush),American democracy is not only in crisis, it is also characterized by a sense of powerlessness and experiences of loss. Wolin (2000) claims that this sense of loss is related ‘to power and powerlessness and hence has a claim upon theory’ (p. 3). In making a claim upon theory,loss aligns itself with the urgency of a crisis, a crisis that demands a new theoretical discourse while at the same time requiring a politics that involves contemplation, that is, a politics in which modes of critical inquiry brush up against the more urgent crisis that threatens to shut down even the possibility of critique.For Wolin, the dialectic of crisis and politics points to three fundamental concerns that need to be addressed as part of a broader democratic struggle. First, politics is now marked by pathological conditions in which issues of death are overtaking concerns with life. Second, it is no longer possible to assume that democracy is tenable within a political system that daily inflicts massive suffering and injustices on weak minorities and those individuals and groups who exist outside of the privileges of neoliberal values, that is, those individuals or groupswho exist inwhat Achille Mbembe (2003) calls ‘death-worlds,new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of lifeconferring upon them the status of the living dead’(pp. 3940).Third, theory in some academic quarters now seems to care more about matters of contemplation and judgment in search of distance rather than a politics of crisisdriven by an acute sense of justice, urgency, and intervention. Theory in this instance distances itself from politics, neutered by a form of self-sabotage in which ideas are removed from the messy realm of politics, power, and intervention. According to Wolin (2000), Even though [theory] makes references to real-world controversies,its engagement is with the conditions, or the politics, of the theoretical that it seeks to settle rather than with the political that is being contested over who gets what and who gets included. It is postpolitical. (p. 15) Download 1.47 Mb. Share with your friends:
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