Neoliberalism K—UMich 2013 neg 1NCs 1NC: Generic
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- Neoliberal policies effect several aspects of Latin Americans
I: GenericNeoliberalism’s renounces the social state as wasteful as justification for eliminating government regulation of corporatism, increase tax breaks, and privatization of good, enterprises, and public responsibility where the democratic state is replaced by the corporate stateGiroux, 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 589-90)//SG Since the late 1970s,we have witnessed the return of the Gilded Age under the aegis of a new and more ruthless form of market fundamentalism that has been labeled neoliberalism (Touraine, 2001; Duggan, 2003; Harvey, 2005; Brown, 2005; Saad-Filho & Johnston, 2005; Smith, 2005; Ong, 2006; Martin, 2007; Giroux, 2008).3 As a political- economic-cultural project,neoliberalism functions as a regulative force, political rationale, and mode of governmentality. As a regulative force,neoliberalism organizes a range of flows, including people, capital, knowledge, and wealth, transforming relations between the state and the economyby renouncing big government (a code word for the social state)as wasteful and incompetent except as in the current financial crisis when the bankers who have been ‘living lives fitting of Gilded Age extravagance’ are now relying on the support of the government to bail them out of financial debt.It also eliminates government regulation of corporate behavior, provides enormous tax breaks for the rich and for powerful corporations, pursues free trade agreements, and privatizes government assets, goods, enterprises, and public responsibilities (Kotz, 2003, p. 16). Essential toneoliberalism’s regulative policies andgoals is transforming the social state into a corporate state, one that generously sells off public property to transnational corporations and military contracts to private defense contractors, andone that ultimately provides welfare to an opulent minority. Government activities and public goods are now given over to the private sphere. Corporations and religious organizations benefit from government largess while any activity that might interfere with corporate power and profits is scrapped or dismantled, including environmental regulations, public education, and social welfare programs.Schools and libraries are now privatized; forests are turned over to logging companies; military operations are increasingly outsourced to private security firms like Blackwater while private security services now protect the gated communities of the rich;prisons are now run as for-profit institutions by corporations; and public highways are managed and leased to private firms. Increasingly, government services are being sold to the lowest bidder. In short, capital is now being redistributed upwards, as power is being transferred from traditional political localities to transnational corpora- tions whose influence exceeds the boundaries and constraints formerly regulated by the nation-state. As a mode of rationality, neoliberalism enables and legitimates the practices of managerialism, deregulation, efficiency, cost-benefit analysis, expanding entrepreneurial forms, and privatization, all of which function in the interest of ‘extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action’ (Brown, 2005, p. 42). As Wendy Brown (2005) points out, under neoliberalism, [t]he political sphere, along with every other dimension of contemporary existence, is submitted to an economic rationality; or, put the other way around, not only is the human being configured exhaustively as homo oeconomicus, but all dimensions of human life are cast in terms of a market rationality. While this entails submitting every action and policy to considerations of profitability, equally important is the production of all human and institutional action as rational entrepreneurial action, conducted according to a calculus of utility, benefit or satisfaction against a microeconomic grid of scarcity, supply and demand, and moral value-neutrality.Neoliberalism does not simply assume that all aspects of social, cultural, and political life can be reduced to such a calculus; rather, it develops institutional practices and rewards for enacting this vision. (pp. 4041) Extending this mode of rationality,the neoliberal economy with its relentless pursuit of market values now encompasses the entirety of human relations. As markets are touted as the driving force of everyday life, big government is disparaged as inefficient, monopolistic, incompetent and thus a threat to individual and entrepreneurial freedom, suggesting thatpower should reside in markets and corporations rather than in governments and citizens. Under neoliberal rationality, citizens assume the role of entrepreneurial actors, bonded investors, or avid consumers while the state promotes market values throughout every aspect of the social order. Rather than fade away as some proponents of globalization would have us believe, the state embraces neoliberal rationally as the regulating principle of society in that it no longer merely endorses market relations, it now must ‘think and behave like a market actor across all of its functions, including the law [just as] the health and growth of the economy is the basis of state legitimacy’ (Brown, 2005, p. 42). The social state now becomes the ‘market-state’ and ‘This state’s relationship to its citizens resembles that between a corporation and consumers’(Ferguson, 2008, p. 10).4 Under neoliberalism, everything is either made saleable or plundered for profit while every effort is made to reconstruct the predatory state at work prior to the New Deal.Public lands are looted by real estate developers and corporate ranchers; politicians willingly hand the public’s airwaves over to broadcasters and large corporate interests without a dime going into the public trust. Within this rationality,the democratic state is replaced by the corporate state and ‘a generalized calculation of cost and benefit becomes the measure of all state practices’(Brown, 2005, p. 42). As the state openly embraces and responds to the demands of the market,it invites corporations to drive the nation’s energy policies, and war industries are given the green light to engage in war profiteering as the government hands out numerous contracts without any competitive bidding. Similarly, political and natural disasters are turned into entrepreneurial opportunities, which mark the destruction of the social state, the sale of public infrastructures, the imposition of privatization schemes, and the privatization of the politics of governance(Klein, 2007; Saltman, 2007a; Saltman, 2007b; Gordon & Gordon, 2008). Neoliberal policies effect several aspects of Latin AmericansKlak,A PhD in geography and a BA in Geography and Business Administration ,2004(Thomas, The Spaces of Neoliberalism: Land, Place,and Family in Latin America, The Professional Geographer, 56:1, 151-152)//JS Since the book’s nine chapters are all aboutLatin America as a whole or case studies therein,there is no need to repeatedly mention theregion as I survey the contents in the followingparagraphs. Editor Jacquelyn Chase’s introductorychapter depicts neoliberalism as a hegemonicdiscourse requiring a critical unpackingand sustained efforts both in scholarship and onthe ground to counter its hegemony. Chapter 2,by Cristo´ bal Kay, is a characteristically clearlywritten, widely informed review of agrarianreform over recent decades. Kay concludes thatagrarian reforms have had no single outcome interms of beneficiaries and losers. However, themost general findings are that the traditionallanded oligarchy has been reduced, capitalistfarmers have been the principal winners, andonly some peasants have gained—certainly farfewer than promised.Chapter 3, by Carmen Diana Deere and MagdalenaLeo´ n, extracts from their 2001 book,Empowering Women: Land and Property Rightsin Latin America. That work is an insightful,gender-critical analysis of the cultural andinstitutional constraints operating in twelveLatin American countries that kept womenfrom owning property until recently, and of thebroader dimensions of inequality associatedwith those restrictions.DeereandLeo´ n’s chapterin Chase’s book focuses on the tensions arisingbetween the struggles of indigenous peoplesfor collective land rights and the struggles forgender equity in property rights. Chapter 4,by SorenHvalkof, documents how indigenouspeople living in the upper Ucaya´li region of eastcentral Peru took collective and legal action inthe 1990s to successfully secure 4.4 million ha ofland in the form of communal ownership andreserves. The emancipatory effects are large, as‘‘hundreds of former peons left their patrons tojoin and form new communities’’ (p. 102), hopefullywith a better life ahead.Chapter 5, by Chase, describes the adjustmentsthat formerly secure working householdsare making in the town of Itabira in MinasGerais, Brazil, where a large state mine wasprivatized in 1997. Chase stresses that over recentdecades, women in this mining town havetaken firm control of their fertility, reducing therate to below replacement level by 1991. Thishas helped them manage economic challenges,such as the mine’s closing. Chapter 6, by HelenSafa, explores the gender dynamics in VillaAltagra´cia, a town located 30 km from SantoDomingo in the Dominican Republic, whoselabor market was once dominated by men workingin sugar production. By the 1990s, theprincipal employers sought women to sewgarments in the export-oriented factories. Inwhat Safa terms ‘‘a reassertion of patriarchy’’ (p.152), men demeaned the female factory workersin various ways and took the better jobs. In turn,women’s main response was to emigrate.Chapter 7, by Stephen Gudeman and AlbertoRivera-Gutierrez, describes the behaviors andreactions of average Guatemalans when culturalnorms and market practices intersect with environmentalconcerns. The Guatemalan communitiesfeatured in this chapter go unnamed.It is unclear whether this is to protect theresidents or for other reasons that the authorschoose not to disclose. Chapter 8, by AgustinEscobar Latapi and Mercedes Gonzales de laRocha, depicts working-class survival strategiesin Mexico’s second largest city, Guadalajara,since the 1970s and the end of the era of importsubstitution. Residents have had to developmore creative survival strategies due to fallingwages and increasing consumer costs associatedwith neoliberal restructuring of Mexico’s politicaleconomy. The most revealing aspect of thischapter is the way it depicts Guadalajara ashaving been profoundly transformed over recentdecades as an outcome of changes operatingat different geographical scales. Thesescale-varying changes include production systems,policies, work opportunities, migration,and familial relations.The most intriguing chapter of the book isleft for last. Chapter 9, by Oriol Pi-Sunyer,describes the complex interface of tourism,development, and Mayan culture in QuintanaRoo, a southeastern Mexican state that wasuntil recently ‘‘a region of refuge, a cultural andphysical space protected from outside pressuresby distance and inaccessibility’’ (p. 230). Thechapter usefully shows how Mayan peoplecontend with a daunting array of externallyoriginating forces, from international pressuresto develop archeological sites for tourism andthe creation of locally insensitive protectedzones that are off limits to the people whohave worked the land for generations to hugepopulation inflows, massive forest-clearing, aheavy military presence, and neoliberal impactssuch as privatization. Download 1.47 Mb. Share with your friends:
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