Giroux, 14 Henry A. Giroux, Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University

Individualism

Neoliberalism gives the promises of “hard work” leading to success, but doesn’t accommodate for racism. It will always deny the racist tendencies of institutions.

David J. Roberts and Minelle Mahtani 18 FEB 2010 (‘Neoliberalizing Race, Racing Neoliberalism: Placing “Race” in Neoliberal Discourses’ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00747.x/abstract)

Specifically, it has meant the establishment of a market orientation to this relationship. Ideally, within a neoliberal theorization of society, the success of the individual is directly related to his/her work output. Modalities of difference, such as race, do not predetermine one’s success as each individual is evaluated solely in terms of his or her economic contribution to society. What becomes clear is that this ideal relationship is not equally realized by all members in society. For immigrants to Canada, there appears to be a different set of rules and expectations. Herein lies the double-edged sword of neoliberalism. Constituting the immigrant as not-quite Canadian allows for the continued disconnect between their ability to play the neoliberal game and the rewards that they receive for successful play. This can be seen through policies that continue to disregard foreign degrees or other credentials that is at the heart of the deskilling process, for example. Yet, as immigrants are racialized within the economy of Canada, claims of racism under neoliberalism are fundamentally ruled as outside of the way in which society—especially Canadian society—is structured. Davis, again, provides a useful articulation of this process: Under neoliberal racism the relevance of the raced subject, racial identity and racism is subsumed under the auspices of meritocracy. For in a neoliberal society, individuals are supposedly freed from identity and operate under the limiting assumptions that hard work will be rewarded if the game is played according to the rules. Consequently, any impediments to success are attributed to personal flaws. This attribution affirms notions of neutrality and silences claims of racializing and racism (Davis 2007:350). As a consequence, neoliberalism effectively masks racism through its value-laden moral project: camouflaging practices anchored in an apparent meritocracy, making possible a utopic vision of society that is non-racialized. David Theo Goldberg’s articulation of racist culture is particularly useful in understanding how race is both evoked and suppressed under neoliberal discourse. Goldberg’s project in Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning is to “map the overlapping terrains of racialized expression, their means and modes of discursive articulation, and the exclusions they license with the view to contending and countering them” (Goldberg 1993:9). His central thesis is that modern racist culture is marked, fundamentally, by its refusal to acknowledge the role that racism plays in everyday structures of society and how these structures work to fundamentally disguise and, simultaneously, reify the power of racism within society. He intricately describes the ways liberalism sanctions racist institutions and reproduces racial knowledge with every outwardly progressive gesture, which works to normalize racism as just an aspect of life. Along similar lines, Henry Giroux insists that the meanings and definitions of racism alter for each generation, and that the challenge for scholars is to develop a new language for understanding how race redefines the relationship between the public and the private (Giroux 2008). Giroux points out that race, and in particular, long histories of racism and injustice are effectively eradicated within neoliberal discourse because human agency is understood as a series of individualized choices: “success is attributed to . . . entrepreneurial genius while those who do not succeed are viewed either as failures or utterly expendable . . . neoliberal racism either dismisses the concept of institutional racism or maintains that it has no merit” (Giroux 2008:65, 71). Thus, in trying to understand the connection between race and neoliberalism, it is important to examine not just the momentary eruptions of race or racism that seemingly result from neoliberal policy reforms, and instead consider race as an organizing principle of society that neoliberalism reinforces and modifies. As Giroux reminds us, “even more than being saturated with race, neoliberalism also modifies race” (Giroux 2005; see Davis 2007:349). Neoliberalist policy is sneaky because it can force the hand of apparent race-blindness by insisting that race does not play an important role. What our analysis of the discourses on immigration in The Globe and Mail suggests is that the neoliberal myth that contribution to society will translate into acceptance is undermined by processes of racialization and racism within Canadian society. Immigrants are vital for the continued success of the economy and are invited to enter the workforce as neoliberal subjects, but are not necessarily rewarded with the ascendancy normally offered to neoliberal (read: white) citizens. This is not just because the policies resulting from neoliberal reforms have disparate impacts on racialized or immigrant groups, but rather that the race and the racialization of immigrants is embedded in the philosophical underpinning of these policies.

Internet

Neoliberalism manifests itself through the Internet: corporations use it to trade private data for cash

Morozov 11, (Evgeny, Senior Editor at the New Republic, “Two Decades of the Web: A Utopia No Longer” 6/22/11 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/morozov-web-no-utopia-twenty-years-short-history-internet LAO)

Why the venture capitalists found the internet so appealing is a mystery: the market for online advertising at the time was tiny and the number of internet users negligible. In 1995, there were only 15m users, according to the website Internet World Stats. Start-ups were everywhere, but most were trading in promises of a bright future, not real services. The investors’ disregard for traditional methods of gauging financial performance—which eventually led to the dotcom bubble—suggests that their judgement was clouded by a toxic combination: rhetoric from the internet’s New Age cheerleaders; and neoliberal promises of new ways of doing commerce. Pets.com, which sold pet products to retail customers, is a textbook example. At one point, the website was spending close to $12m on advertising on revenues of $619,000. In 2000, the company collapsed in a heap of debt.The logical end of this ever-increasing personalisation is of each user having his or her own online experience. This is a far cry from the early vision of the internet as a communal space. Instead of the internet, we may as well start talking of a billion “internets”—one for each user. Even the browser, the last bastion of shared experience, is on the way out, replaced by a panoply of apps for mobile phones and tablets such as the iPad that each provide a customised experience. This seems a clear deviation from the original plan.It is not the only deviation. For many internet users, empowerment was an illusion. They may think they enjoy free access to cool services, but in reality, they are paying for that access with their privacy. Much of our information-sharing seems trivial—should we really care that some company knows what music we like? But, once this information is analysed alongside data from other similar services, it can generate insights about individuals and groups that are deeply interesting to most marketers and intelligence agencies. Based on its extensive data-mining across the web, RapLeaf, a San Francisco start-up, came up with the conclusion that Google’s engineers tend to eat more junk food than Microsoft’s. If they can find out what you eat, they can find out what you read as well; from there, it’s not so hard to predict your political preferences—and manipulate you. We are careening towards a future where privacy becomes a very expensive commodity. There are already several start-ups providing privacy “at a fee.” Ironically, venture capitalists love these companies, and are busily funding solutions to the very problems they have previously helped to create. The removal of online material is also a booming industry. For a fee that ranges from $3,000 to $15,000, a company such as Reputation.com can ensure that any sensitive information is buried deep in the last pages of Google’s search results, or disappears from the internet altogether. That company rose to prominence after it removed from the internet hundreds of photos of a Californian teenager who died in a car crash, at the request of the victim’s family. This, too, creates new kinds of inequalities: the maintenance of online reputation is dependent on ability to pay. At this point, the law can intervene, as in Finland, for example, where employers are banned from Googling the names of prospective employees. In Germany too, companies cannot check a potential employee’s social networking sites; but it is unlikely that such measures would take off in countries with weaker employment protection laws.¶ While we are being empowered as consumers, we are simultaneously being disempowered as citizens, something that the cyber-libertarian digital prophets didn’t foresee. “Electronic town halls” never took off either. When Barack Obama tried to hold one shortly after being elected president, the most popular question posed to him concerned the legalisation of mari-juana. The internet does not and cannot replace politics—it augments and amplifies it. The Tea Party in the US does not limit its activism to social media, but uses it as part of a broader political campaign. Politics is still primary and technology secondary.

The US approach to internet diplomacy reflects western neoliberal norms privileging corporations over public interest and social good

Prabir and Bailey 14

(Purkayastha, Prabir, and Rishab Bailey. "U.S. Control of the Internet: Problems Facing the Movement to International Governance." (August 2014): n. pag. Web. 14 July 2015. Prabir is a founder of the Delhi Science Forum and is a well-known science and engineering activist. Bailey is a consultant for the society for knowledge commons in India and an expert on IT and communication law)

The view of the multistakeholder model embedded in the IANA transition offered by the Obama administration is—in our view—a neoliberal multistakeholder model.41 It demands that governments play little role in internet governance, and that any role they actually play be placed on an equal footing with other stakeholders, and decisions on all aspects of Internet governance be made through consensus. Any criticism of such a model, or discussions on the different roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders, are then labeled a multilateral or a statist model paving the way for repressive governments to capture the Internet. Such a binary formulation—multistakeholder versus multilateral—misses the fact that while some issues such as technical protocols can be worked out between various stakeholders through a consensual process (global standards are created in this way), the issues change when public policy is involved. Essentially, policy issues demand that a concept of public interest be introduced to override the sectoral interest of certain stakeholders. The neoliberal multistakeholder model of decision making—with all stakeholders on an equal footing, and through consensus—does not take into account that stakeholders have differing interests. For example, corporations and consumers have obvious differences in objectives. This model, in effect, gives veto power to private corporations and denies public good or public interest. Such a model would allow the corporate stakeholder section to block any consumer interest regulation simply by not allowing consensus to form on the issue. The problem with such a model also becomes apparent if we take examples from other sectors. In pharmaceuticals, for instance, there is agreement that all stakeholders, including pharmaceutical companies, should make decisions by consensus on issues such as safety or the pricing of drugs. If such a principle had indeed been followed for retrovirals in AIDS treatment, for example, it would have meant a death sentence for a large number of AIDs patients. Public interest demands that states regulate drug prices in the interests of their people; similarly, for the safety of drugs.

The US abuses the internet through censorship and the regulation of online property in the name of national security

Prabir and Bailey 14

Purkayastha, Prabir, and Rishab Bailey. "U.S. Control of the Internet: Problems Facing the Movement to International Governance." (August 2014): n. pag. Web. 14 July 2015. Prabir is a founder of the Delhi Science Forum and is a well-known science and engineering activist. Bailey is a consultant for the society for knowledge commons in India and an expert on IT and communication law

The DNS and the IP address system—the basis on which the interconnected, interoperable network runs—is, juridically speaking, controlled through ICANN.25 There are thirteen root servers with a “hidden” or “master” server which updates all thirteen public root servers.26 Together these servers act as the central repository of the Internet’s address book. The Master Server is operated by VeriSign Inc. (formerly Network Solutions Inc.), though it is subject to oversight by ICANN, and, ultimately, the U.S. Department of Commerce. The present procedure for modifying the authoritative root zone file is that the requests from TLD operators are received by ICANN, which forwards them to the Department of Commerce for approval.27 The Department of Commerce then transmits the approved requests to VeriSign, which edits and generates the new root zone file. The unilateral control of the DNS system by the United States is problematic for a variety of reasons. The most important of these is that it enables the U.S. government to control the creation and deletion of online property. We have seen instances of the U.S. government or courts forcing registries the world over to remove domain names from the addressing system.28 This is what happened, for example, with Wikileaks and ‘.iq’ before the Iraq war. The problem is not that the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)—the body tasked with the IANA contract—routinely interferes with ICANN decisions. The control of the DNS system by the U.S. government U . S . & G L O B A L I N T E R N E T G O V E R N A N C E 109 means that it can be used in a U.S. version of permanent war based on global “national security” concerns to harm organizations and other countries. It is important to stress that the U.S. control over the DNS is not just through the Department of Commerce, but also through the U.S. judicial system, which has jurisdiction over ICANN and VeriSign. The United States also continues to have technical and economic leverage over the digital ecosystem. What this means is that the bulk of billions of dollars of virtual real estate is “owned” by registries in the United States and other developed countries. Verisign has revenue of over a billion dollars for the g-TLD of .com, created by the U.S. enclosure of the global domain name system. ICANN currently generates revenue of about $400 million from the DNS system—all registrars have to give a part of the money they realize from sale of domains. (Registrars are retailers of domain names, registries are wholesalers.) It is a myth that the functions carried out by organizations such as IANA and ICANN are purely “technical” in nature. The day-to-day maintenance and administration of the DNS system is a technical matter—but the policies imposed for the management of the DNS space are public in nature. For example:

Law and race

Legal approaches to racial equality ignore market ideologies that construct the individual as free and equal – this prevent racial consciousness in the area of economic subordination.

Valdez & Cho in 2011 (Francisco & Sumi, Professor of Law, University of Miami & Professor of Law, DePaul University College of Law, “Critical Race Materialism: Theorizing Justice in the Wake of Global Neoliberalism”, Connecticut Law Review, http://archive.connecticutlawreview.org/documents/ValdesandCho.pdf)

Although Critical Race Theory (CRT) has produced an impressive, if not wide-ranging, set of scholarly and political projects deconstructing law in the past two decades, we suggest a new iteration to theorizing justice that we call “critical race materialism.” Critical race materialism signifies an approach to interpreting law and society by reading the past to understand how “race” (in an intersectional, non-essentialized sense) and economics are deeply constitutive. In this sense, law is reflective of synergistic cultural practices and values that are raced (gendered, sexed) and classed, and identity categories are constructed and reinstantiated by law. By adopting this term, we hope to emphasize the primacy of an interimbricated analysis of culture and material structure as mutually reinforcing that returns to CRT’s original ambition twenty years ago. Going forward, we argue that two undeniable forces—global neoliberalism and its attendant “social structures of accumulation,” combined with the decline of the U.S. as the unipolar hyper power in the existing worldsystem—demand that a structural economic analysis that exceeds the boundaries of the nation-state figures more prominently alongside a structural racial/identitarian analysis in our critical assessments of law and society. Such restructuring to our analyses also requires an accompanying restructuring to agenda-setting and organizing to achieve racial and social justice in the wake of global neoliberalism.1 Our analysis helps shed light on an intriguing question posed by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in her lead Article to this volume that, she points out, is seldom-asked: “Why did [Critical Race Theory] emerge out of law, and perhaps not some of the other fields where similar pressures were percolating?”2 We consider this question from the particular temporal and spatial vantage point of CRT’s emergence and dissemination in the late stages of the Cold War era within the world economic system. In short, CRT sprung from law here, in the United States, because core elites in this nation-state most successfully have used law not only to create markets for oppression and injustice, but to do so along intensely racialized grids of political, cultural, and material stratification. Intentionally and insistently, privileged elites in the U.S. have deployed to incentivize racialized exploitation of humans and the planet’s resources with great zeal and for greater profits. Yet, these dispossessing accumulations, which disproportionately impact the subalterns in the U.S., are accompanied by facial neutrality, and by intensified racial erasure that increasingly is pushed both from within and without that existing framework of nation-states. Within the traditional nation-state,3 the legal regime of colorblindness and its new normative counterpart, post-racial politics and discourse, combine to erase liberational color consciousness. Beyond the nationstate, and in the service of a world economic system, the fundamentalist ideology that the profit motive and “free” trade treat all humans equally inhibits racialized or identity-based analysis and problem-solving in ways that predictably entrench the racial hierarchy of colonialism and imperialism under the banner of global neoliberalism. In this sense, the practice of racialized colorblindness and post-racialism (think antiaffirmative action statutes upheld as constitutional that demand elimination of “racial preferences,” effectively excluding racial minorities from viable remedies) within the nation-state or within the world-system is the colorline of the twenty-first century, both in content and consequence. In each of these contexts—within and beyond the traditional nation-state— law proves central to race, and the strategic erasure of cultural and material subordination based on identity in the service of white privilege is the racial project of the moment.

Prisons

The neoliberal state’s focus on consumption requires less production – those no longer needed to maximize production are rendered useless, ending up in prisons

Passavant, 5

(Paul, Associate Professor of Political Science and PhD in Political Science “The Strong Neo-liberal State: Crime, Consumption, Governance” 8/3/2005 https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/8.3passavant.html Project Muse LAO)

Today, scholars contend that disciplinary institutions are everywhere in crisis, and that we should understand this crisis as a shift towards post-disciplinary societies of control.20  In control societies, new communications technologies enable the coordination of deterritorialized production, telecommuting, extensive surveillance of public places through CCTV, an intimate surveillance of workers through keystroke counts (or GPS technology for non-office workers), and a simultaneous control and incitement of consumption through credit ratings and supermarket discount cards.21  The turn from the Keynesian welfare state and its institutions of social solidarity to the post-Fordist neo-liberal state has produced especially glaring consequences in the areas of criminology and penology.  During the era of the welfare state, imprisonment rates in the U.S. decreased in relation both to the number of crimes recorded and offenders convicted.  In the period between 1973 and the late 1990s, however, the number of inmates incarcerated increased by more than 500 percent, the rate of incarceration per 1000 index crimes nearly quadrupled, and the prison population has become significantly racially disproportionate.22  In the U.S., we have witnessed, particularly in the 1990s, a period offalling crime rates and rising imprisonment rates.  David Garland describes these trends by contending that the "prison has once again transformed itself," meaning that the prison fulfills a different function under post-Fordist economic conditions than it did under Fordist conditions. 23  Rather than being understood as a correctional institution to reform individuals and to prepare them to return as productive members of society to the production line, the prison is seen now as an institution to incapacitate and to contain monsters.  Otherwise put, due to the positioning of the U.S. in the global capitalist economy and its coinciding shift from the production-oriented Fordist state to the consumer-oriented post-Fordist state, there is less need for maximizing production in the United States.  This means, in turn, that prisons are becoming institutions to warehouse increasingly large numbers of subjects no longer needed as workers and poorly suited as consumers to contain the threat they potentially pose to this consumer capitalist order.2

Privacy

Increased surveillance and piece-meal reforms like the aff cannot resolve matters of privacy- Neoliberalism necessarily expands the scope of surveillance

Bowley & Loo, 12

(Barbara and Dennis, “Secrecy, Surveillance, and Suppression: Neoliberalism and the Rise of Public Order Policies, 26 Oct. 2012, http://www.stateofnature.org/?p=5345)

Given this distorted political framework in which the entire populace is now perceived as a threat – because nearly the entire population is threatened by neoliberal policies [2] and because authorities cannot carry out these policies except through concealment and misdirection so that ordinary forms of public supervision and observation, free speech and assembly, and what used to be investigative journalism and the watchdog function of mass media become deeply threatening – it comes as no surprise to see the creation of a security state in which data collection has reached Orwellian levels. An explosion in the amount of surveillance of the populace is the new norm, in addition to a sea change in the manner in which data have been and are being collected. This information is being used to intimidate, extort, and suppress the public (including public officials such as any members of Congress or other public officials such as governors [3] who might think to protest even aspects of the radically changing nature of the political system).¶ Although conventional surveillance techniques such as wiretapping have been in existence as long ago as the 19th century, with the rise of neoliberalism, the scope of surveillance has increased by quantum leaps, with the unholy alliance of neoliberal policies and the technological infrastructure of a wired society.¶ Now surveillance has extended to the dragnet sweeps of emails, web-browsing activity, and tracking of GPS information. Authorities have expanded the scope of their surveillance of religious activities and peaceful political protests, making routine that which had been proscribed during the 1960s’ era. Richard Nixon’s attempts to quash the anti-war and civil rights movements and to punish his political foes by, among other things, wiretapping Democrats, led to his resigning in the face of certain impeachment. As an indication of the difference between the 1960s’ era and contemporary American politics, Bush and Cheney’s transgressions make Nixon look like a moderate or even liberal, and yet Bush and Cheney were not forced to resign by Congress. In fact, when Bush and Cheney were caught lying and breaking the law, Congress under a Democratic majority (beginning in 2006) and with a Democrat in the White House (as of 2009), retroactively approved of those transgressions and granted immunity from prosecution for crimes as grotesque as wars of aggression, torture, and murder by torture.¶ The trajectory of Bush and Cheney’s activities has not lessened under Obama; it has only become more secretive and is best described as a rebranding and intensification of the Bush regime’s policies. In explaining his refusal to prosecute Bush and Cheney et al for torture and their felonious circumvention of the FISA court with massive warrantless surveillance, Obama declared that he’s “looking forward, not backward.” Looking backward, of course, is exactly how jurisprudence works: you are prosecuting someone for doing something in the past because you cannot rightly prosecute him or her for something they have not yet done.¶ One can, however, “look forward” if you hold people on the basis of suspicion that they might commit a terrorist act in the future. Obama has said he will do – and has been doing – exactly this. It is a testament to the degree to which neoliberalism’s attitudes towards facts and the truth – if it’s not convenient, then deny it and/or suppress it and offer a fictional version in its place – has taken over the public sphere that the mass media raised not even a mild protest when Obama stated that he would hold individuals indefinitely, even after all other judicial processes were completed, if he thought that they posed a future threat.

Race/Anti-blackness

Neoliberalism creates racism and massive inequality- ensures that black populations stay in poverty while white elites control the economy

-neoliberalism will create and re-create anti-black policies – the plan is irrelevant

Rivera 14

(Enrique, Reporter for NPR, pursuing PhD in Latin American studies at Vanderbilt University “Reading Neoliberal Anti-Blackness into the Dominican Republic’s Immigration Policies” 2014 https://nacla.org/news/2014/2/2/reading-neoliberal-anti-blackness-dominican-republic%E2%80%99s-immigration-policies LAO)

Anti-Black, anti-Haitianism has deep roots in the Dominican Republic, despite the fact that the vast majority of Dominicans are of African descent. Anti-Haitianism commenced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Haitian revolutionaries launched the only successful slave revolt in human history. The Haitians occupied Santo Domingo (present day Dominican Republic) with the aim of guarding the revolution against its western enemies, and of extending abolition to the eastern side of the island. Most critics have failed to recognize, however, the central role of neoliberalism in the Dominican Republic’s most recent wave of anti-Black policies. The Dominican Republic has followed neoliberal doctrine for decades, maintaining low tariffs in order to induce foreign trade, and relying on tourism, low-wage jobs from international corporations, and cheap export products such as sugarcane to sustain its economy. Although the country’s economy has expanded during the past decade, this wealth has flowed to a small elite sector of society and has failed to “trickle down” to most Dominicans. Even the World Bank’sconservative estimations state that over 40 percent of Dominicans live in poverty, while 15 percent are unemployed. The minimum wage varies according to profession, but is as low as $39 a month. For Haiti, neoliberal rule is manifested in a sweatshop economy that produces goods for multinational corporations, such as The GAP, Target, and Wal-Mart. These neoliberal practices expose the entrenched connections between racism and capitalism: they are designed to benefit white elites, while ensuring the poverty of Black laborers. These policies fuel anti-Black attitudes, as many Dominicans are frustrated with the paralyzing effects of neoliberalism, which have brought extreme inequality, and blame the inability of the country’s wealth to “trickle down” on the presence of Black “outsiders” who are supposedly taking jobs and wasting government money. This recent wave of anti-Black laws should be seen, therefore, as an attempt by the Dominican government to reign in the effects of a global neoliberal order—one that they have arduously promoted.

Neoliberal markets are built on racialized and imperialist stratification and allows the establishment of elites

Valdez & Cho in 2011 (Francisco & Sumi, Professor of Law, University of Miami & Professor of Law, DePaul University College of Law, “Critical Race Materialism: Theorizing Justice in the Wake of Global Neoliberalism”, Connecticut Law Review, http://archive.connecticutlawreview.org/documents/ValdesandCho.pdf)

Residing in the belly of this beast, CRT is positioned like no other formation to understand, map and challenge the continuation of this status quo: CRT work during the past two decades has helped to make plain that, for so long as legal profits are made by racialized subjugation, racialized subjugation not only will continue but also flourish.4 This view, we hope, helps to explain not only why CRT emerged where it did during the closing decades of the last century, but also why it remains uniquely positioned to unmask and resist the latest practices of racial injustice both within and beyond the nation-state. We will then consider challenges confronting CRT’s relevance in this century, where the struggle for social justice under global neoliberalism must be understood to transcend the boundaries of the nation-state. We begin in Part I with a brief materialist account of the larger world economic system5 and its “social structures of accumulation” that evolve following World War II that allow core identitarian elites in the United States to enjoy a “golden age” of unprecedented economic prosperity and political prominence. CRT emerges at the moment of accumulation crisis due to the decline of these established social structures of accumulation, and prior to the emergence of the new social structures of accumulation not yet consolidated or identified at the time. Part I also elucidates the connection between this transitional moment in capital accumulation and its connection to law, hegemony, and counter-hegemonic movements. We conclude Part I with a summary of the fundamental role of law in the constitution both of society and of hegemonic Euro-heteropatriarchy as an expression of that system (and the nation-state), ending with the promise of CRT as a counter-hegemonic ideology. We then turn in Part II to similar dynamics and concerns regarding law and race under the increasingly globalized politics and world system of domination and subjugation based on old, racialized patterns of colonial and imperial power politics and on the prophesized rise of the so-called “market-state.”6 Throughout this account, we observe how both national and transnational trajectories of legal politics and rule-making dovetail today in the practice of neocolonial racial erasure, in order to help discern future projects and pending priorities for a next generation of CRT scholarship and praxis. In related future work, we will continue this analysis to help identify key features of the new and current social structure of accumulation—global neoliberalism—and identify the ways in which the law is deployed in its service to perpetuate identity-based systems of privilege and oppression established during colonial and imperial eras. We will also suggest how CRT might operate with a midterm agenda to attempt to counteract and resist global neoliberalism’s structuring of accumulation, and the particular challenges and difficulties of doing so as (mostly) law professors from the Global North. The twentieth century witnessed the consolidation of internationalized capitalist markets and a hierarchical world-system of nation-states built upon the architecture of colonialism and imperialism, a material and cultural architecture designed substantially and persistently in the forms of identitarian systems of stratification, including racialized (and gendered) stratification.8 Thus, the transnational dynamics of colonial and imperial subjugation never did stop, and certainly not at the gates of any particular nation or state. That century thereby occasioned both the consolidation of public, national sovereignties in the form of nation-states that enabled established identitarian elites to construct the modern world-system and its exploitation-based economy, and continued colonial and imperial power logics that increasingly (and ironically) have put the nation-state itself under new pressures.

Neoliberalism segregates racially without being openly racist to improve their governing actions

Goldberg in 08 (David Theo, “Racisms without Racism” PMLA, Vol. 123, No. 5, Special Topic: Comparative Racialization (Oct., 2008), pp. 1712-1716, JSTOR)

The concept of racisms without racism, then, is the peculiar expression of neoliberalizing globalization. It is the way of governing distinction, in the global scheme of enduring freedom, considered too different and difficult to deal with. It is the (^institutionalizing of racism gone private, the privatizing of institutionalized racisms. Racisms cut off from their historical fertilizer. Racisms born again, renewed, but shorn of referential language. The inherited critical vocabulary for identifying, articulating, and condemning them no longer fits. This vocabulary comprises political expressions unrecognized as free because they are driven by forces outside themselves, illegible to those external to their circles of persuasion. At worst, they are projected as beastly violence against the inevitable advance of freedom and democracy. The consequent counterviolence of containment cannot possibly be racist not just because no races exist but also because the threatening expressions it seeks to contain are unrecognized as properly human. The projected action as metonym for the person, for the (national) character, is beastly, monstrous, mutant, after all. They behead; doing so is a condition of their culture. The action is outside legitimate human conduct. Hence, we can't be racist just as we don't torture. Even though a bad apple or two may. The individualization of wrongdoing, its localization as a personal and so private expression of preferences, erases institutional racisms as a conceptual possibility. As strictly and reductively moral matters, racist acts and institutional patterns or effects are unlikely to be prosecuted under the law; they are regarded as personally offensive, morals offenses, more like consuming pornography than causing injury. Even "hate crimes," as crimes exacerbated by hate, are recognized as crimes first, crimes accentuated by a condition that makes the matter worse, the potential sentence longer. The personalization of hate, its psychologizing of an irreducibly social condition, is an add-on, a legislative afterthought, institutionalizing a matter that by premise ought not to be but just won't go away. These are the awkwardnesses, the inconsistencies, produced when racist expression is restricted to the private sphere, when racisms proliferate in the reductive impossibility of being recognized as precisely racist. Racisms without racism offer (up) a porous social prophylaxis, condomizing neo liberalizing society as much against itself as against its constitutive outsides. The society resorts to two interactive modes of prophylactic population management. As fuel to financialized interaction, privatized preferences, and the incessant expansion of capital and informational flows and individual consumption, it orchestrates mixtures of people across de mographic divides. These mixtures, nevertheless, are constrained by cultural and criterial horizons identified with structures of racial whiteness. Where mixture fails to contain, constrain, and conduct flows where rogue elements (threaten to) disrupt commerce? The violent force of security-state apparatuses is invoked to prevent interruption of the circulations conducive to wealth production for the fortunate few. Racial neoliberalism, in the final analysis, extends by building silently on the structural conditions of racism while evaporating the very categories of their recognizability. It is, as I have undertaken to reveal, nothing short of racisms without racism.

Social Media/Media in general

Neoliberalism normalizes and commercializes mainstream media.

Robert McChesney, (Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy, The New Press, 2013, http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/debate-is-idiot-distraction-accelerationism-and-the-politics-of-the-internet/)

The most interesting aspect of the book is its focus on the internet’s impact on news media, an area which celebrants have been particularly emphatic about apparently innovative and more democratic changes taking place. The research suggests otherwise. Studies have shown that the proliferation of media in recent years has led to less and less original reporting. McChesney points to a 2010 Pew Centre for the People and the Press study which examined how news stories were generated and received among the public, focusing on the Baltimore area. Eight out of ten stories regurgitated already published information while more than ninety-five per cent of original news stories were still generated by old media, particularly the Baltimore Sun. However the Sun’s production of original news stories was down more than thirty per cent from ten years ago and seventy-three per cent from twenty years ago. The decline of journalism was underway before the internet but it has nevertheless accelerated the crisis. No more than six companies control more than eighty per cent of the American news. Fewer journalists are attempting to cover more and more areas with the inevitable consequence that the vast majority of news stories originate from official sources and press releases rather than independent investigation. The feeling that we are increasingly inundated with ‘news’ disguises a decline in actual investigative journalism. The pressure to keep journalistic content free online means increasingly commercialized sources of funding have to be found with the result that content is increasingly dictated by advertising. The senior editors of the Washington Post, for example, “have embraced the view that studying [Internet user] traffic patterns can be a useful way to determine where to focus the paper’s resources”. Their unambiguous aim is to “find the content that will appeal to desired consumers and to the advertisers who wish to reach affluent consumers. In this relationship, advertisers hold all the trump cards, and the news media have little leverage. In the emerging era of ‘smart’ advertising, this means shaping the content to meet the Internet profiles of desired users, even personalizing news stories alongside personalized ads.” When AOL purchased the Huffington Post in 2011 an internal memo from AOL CEO Tim Armstrong summed up the editorial/commercial logic: he ordered all editors to evaluate future stories on the basis of “traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turnaround time. All stories, he said are to be evaluated according to the ‘profitability consideration’.” Such downward economic pressure on journalists again leaves it increasingly likely for news stories to offer little more than rewrites of PR press releases. The corporate corruption of mainstream media is well known and has led to enthusiastic embraces of alternatives such as Wikileaks. However, the relative weakness of WikiLeaks’ impact on public opinion in proportion to the shocking details of the released documents is a striking and unsettling testament to right-wing hegemony in the media, and the power of institutional channels of popular communication in framing narratives and opinion. Following the release of secret documents to the public, Heather Booke described how “documents languished online and only came to the public’s attention when they were written up by professional journalists. Raw material alone wasn’t enough”. McChesney then highlights the complete lack of independent journalism to respond to the U.S. government’s successful PR and media blitz to discredit WikiLeaks: How revealing that a news media that almost never does investigative work on the national security state or its relations with large corporations does not come to the defense of those who have the courage to make such information public! Citizen journalism, blogging and alternative media provide some necessary alternatives to vacuous mainstream reporting.

Neoliberalism fetishizes critical discussion though alternative news and social media

Robert McChesney, (Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy, The New Press, 2013, http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/debate-is-idiot-distraction-accelerationism-and-the-politics-of-the-internet/)

Valorizing such media can, however, lead to a sense of insular segregation from the popular sphere: the already-converted preach to each other within micro-communities. It can be sometimes easy to forget the disparity of opinion between your twitter feed and the majority of the electorate. Amidst the celebratory rhetoric about its democratizing nature, we need to be reminded of the limitations and shortcomings of alternative media. McChesney’s research on the limitations of apparently ‘democratic’ and participatory media finds a more militant reinforcement in the theoretical work of Jodi Dean. Her work on communicative capitalism identifies a technological fethishism among many media theorists, bloggers, leftists, and conscientious web participants, which covers over a lack on the part of the subject. The fetish appeases guilt and sustains a somewhat deluded faith that we are well-informed, politically engaged citizens. The technological fetish condenses and simplifies political complexities such as organisation, struggle, sustaining strategic modes of resistance over a period of time, and representation, into one problem to be solved: information. The problem is simply that we need to be better informed. Persistently framing the debate in terms of information, as WikiLeaks-enthusiasts and advocates of participatory media regularly do, does not pay adequate attention to media hegemony and the way in which narratives are deeply embedded in the social psyche, despite an abundance of information that contradicts those narratives. As Dean also emphasises, valorising micro-political activity and online debates through social media “displaces political energy from the hard work of organisation and struggle.” We are persistently invited to ‘join the debate’, share an article, and express our opinion in a variety of ways. We feel like we are politically engaged when really, as Nick Land put it, “debate is idiot distraction”. The persistent exhortations to indulge in debates where apparently YOUR opinion counts contributes to and fosters an (un)critically relativist culture. Everything, we are often led to believe, is subjective, and thus it becomes more and more difficult to assert authoritative criticism. The technology fetish encourages immediacy over sustained reflection and engagement. Filesharing is political. A website is political. Everything is political. Theoretically endowing banal quotidian action with a ‘political’ status was prominent in much neo-anarchist theory before web 2.0 but it has, again, been even more problematically exacerbated in online activity.

The ‘everything is political’ mantra is a dangerous one because, while true in itself, its discursive use can encourage a paradoxical depoliticization and retreat from politics into individual ethics, which actually plays into the hands of power and capital. An interesting example of this kind of techno-political optimism is McKenzie Wark’s updating of the Situationist International in which he makes such claims as: “every kid with a BitTorrent client is an unconscious Situationist.” Again, this sense of immediacy and insistence that peer-to-peer file-sharing is political operates as an unthreatening form of micro-politics and horizontalism. McChesney’s book also hints at these misguided approaches to technology and politics in his criticism of the arrogance of hackers who, he says, often persist in the naïve faith that the “the revolutionary nature of the technology could trump the monopolizing force of the market”. The valorization of such horizontal politics frequently encourages a complacency and sense of self-satisfaction with one’s own apparent radicalism, which leaves little hope of ever having an impact on the public at large. Zones of spontaneous autonomy, whether on the street or online, pose little threat to prevailing ideology and often only come into popular consciousness in the form of a carnivalesque sideshow to actual political struggle. Faced with repeated insistences that ‘everything is political’, it begins to feel like nothing is political. McChesney’s research on the development of the internet and inadequacies of online journalism, Dean’s theory of communicative capitalism, and the insufficient responses of advocates of neo-anarchist micro-politics on the left all attest to a persistent lowering of the horizon of ambition which neo-liberalism imposes on political and cultural activity. Don’t worry if right-wing hegemony poisons public opinion and creates horrible social divisions: you can find a quick release for your rage on an obscure ‘lefty’ blog that a few of your mates might read. These impotent responses are symptomatic of the engulfing power of neoliberalism, not condemnations of individual actors. The fact that intellectually discredited neoliberalism continues in zombie-like form seems to have actually strengthened the stronghold of capitalist realism, as described by Mark Fisher, in leftist responses as well as the popular imagination. The resurgence of accelerationist theory in recent years points towards strategies of engagement with technology, politics and media which audaciously attempt to seriously raise the horizon of ambition. Accelerationism was coined as a term of critique by Benjamin Noys in his compelling theoretical work The Persistence of the Negative. Noys used the term to identify and critique a strange trend in the wake of May 68 among French thinkers, most notably Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard and Baudrillard. The common thread was a nihilist embrace of forces of disenchantment as the means for achieving a “strange kind of liberation through absolute immersion in the flows and fluxes of a libidinised capitalism”. Leftist politics often entails slowing things down, putting on the emergency brake. On the contrary, this thought embraces speeding things up, embracing the flows of the market. Nick Land took up this trajectory with the CCRU in the nineties embracing a deterritorialization free of the caution which Deleuze and Guattari advised. Land attempted to uproot the association of the market with capitalism arguing that the latter is stagnating while the former can be used to deterritorialize and accelerate towards a post-human post-capitalist society. Where Land’s writing was an anti-political celebration of the irrelevance of human agency, the emergence of a left accelerationism in recent years offers a more enlightened politicized theory. Land’s misconception of capital as a sole and primary accelerator of innovation is even more glaringly obvious in its divorce from reality today. As Alex Williams has written: Technological progress, rather than erasing the personal, has become almost entirely Oedipalized, ever more focused on supporting the liberal individual subject. The very agent which Land identified as the engine of untold innovation has run dry. This is alienation of an all-too familiar, ennui-inducing kind, rather than a coldly thrilling succession of future-shocks. All of this opens up a space for the political again: if we desire a radically innovative social formation, capital alone will not deliver. The CCRU embraced technology and the internet for the potential of acceleration and immersive intensity. On the level of consumption however, our experience of technology is not especially immersive. The relentless circulation of information, and mere accumulation of gadgetery and apps, among other less than exhilarating developments, has led to a dispersal of attention and something akin to a state of permanent distraction. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has written (in Precarious Rhapsody and other works) on how time and stimuli are being accelerated while experience is being decelerated. The hyper-abundance of information available, the sense of permanent distraction and increasingly precarious nature of labour for a cognitive workforce means that anxiety prevails over intensity. Late Capitalism’s hijacking of our time to feel or experience takes the ultimate form of disconnection, for Berardi, in online pornography. There is no time for the slow immersive intensity of erotic experiences, replaced instead by the quick-fix neuro-short-circuiting of pornography. While Berardi has written on the decelerative nature of consumption and experience in online and everyday activity, Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds have written on deceleration in cultural production. As Fisher put it recently, reinforcing Reynolds’s argument in Retromania: We live in a moment of profound cultural deceleration. The first two decades of the current century have so far been marked by an extraordinary sense of inertia, repetition, and retrospection, uncannily in keeping with the prophetic analyses of postmodern culture that Fredric Jameson began to develop in the 1980s. Tune the radio to the station playing the most contemporary music, and you will not encounter anything that you couldn’t have heard in the 1990s. A sense of cultural deceleration has repeatedly manifest itself in nostalgia, whimsicality, and retreat and regression from politics. This has been equally characteristic of many cultural attitudes towards the internet. While the advance of the net has had its major disappointments, the logical conclusion should not be to disconnect. When middle-class bestselling writers like Jonathan Franzen berate virtually everything about the internet and implores writers to ‘disconnect’ , it not only betrays a completely clueless understanding of the realities of cultural and cognitive production for the twenty first century anxiety-ridden precarious worker, it also feebly and misguidedly responds to technological advances with an injunction to disengage and switch off. Rhetoric which encourages us to ‘disconnect’ comes across as a literary equivalent of folk troubadours such as Bon Iver, who leave the frantic pace of gentrified city life to go and find themselves anew in a cabin in the woods, armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a broken heart. Responses to disappointments with contemporary culture and technology do not have to result in self-indulgent retreat. Accelerationist aesthetics refuses such vain quests for a ‘lost identity’ and searches instead to rediscover ‘future-shock’, to awaken us from a sense of ahistorical slumber in a perpetual now. As a political proposition, accelerationism has not been entirely convincing, as strong critiques by Benjamin Noys in particular attest. However it opens up a space of debate and a desire to engage with political thought on an ambitious macro-level, which I suggested has been lacking in much leftist writing on the internet. In relation to the media in particular, it offers challenging provocations. It critiques neo-anarchist thought and activism for too often abandoning the struggle for hegemony and for not giving sufficient consideration of how to effectively communicate radical ideas on a genuinely popular level. While not giving up on the democratising potential of new media, the Accelerationist Manifesto rightly insists that traditional media are still crucial in the framing of popular narratives and thus these institutions need to be fought for and brought as close as possible to popular control through wide-scale media reform. The manifesto offers a provocative challenge to micro-politics. The rhetoric has a somewhat unsavoury macho tone which warrants critical rebukes. However its particular raising of political thought to a macro- level of complexity that simultaneously engages with the popular is enticing: “We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been built-in from the very beginning. By contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.” Technology is thus embraced but the manifesto is careful to distance itself from ‘techno-utopianism’. It is not given inherent qualitative judgements but considered in relation to a socio-political dialectic. Technology is a tool to be used in aiding radical communication and accelerating towards a post-capitalist society. It can also be a source of exhilaration, but one always influenced by socio-political factors shaping it. It is thus, as Robert McChesney’s research demonstrates, not to be valorized in itself. While accelerationism is the subject of warranted criticism for possible political complicity with neoliberalism and a problematically macho tone, accelerationist writing is also criticised for self-conscious seriousness . The tone of seriousness, however, actually carries a compelling implicit argument: in an era saturated by nostalgia and regressive whimsicality in culture and politics, and a dearth of ambition, we would do well to approach collective experience with a sense of seriousness. Accelerationist theory carries the implicit demand that we raise the standards of what passes for culture, and reinvest cultural production with a sense of authority (as well as cultural criticism for that matter), while explicitly arguing for a maximal politics of collective self-mastery, that issues a necessary challenge to the limitations of micro-political ‘direct action’.

Terrorism/Islamophobia

Neoliberalism creates a consumer-criminal binary where those who are not good consumers are deemed terrorists.

Passavant, 5

(Paul, Associate Professor of Political Science and PhD in Political Science “The Strong Neo-liberal State: Crime, Consumption, Governance” 8/3/2005 https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/8.3passavant.html Project Muse LAO)

With the end of the Cold War, we have seen the reemergence of the racial discourse of Western civilization versus the savage or barbarian as the predominant mode for mapping the world and America's place within it.34  The Bush National Security Strategy makes clear a twist to this racial discourse that has become particularly prominent since September 11th.  As this document indicates, the enemy of "civilized nations" -- and the American "homeland" -- is "terrorism."35  This document borrows from the racial discourse that underwrote 19th century colonialism and imperialism, but with an important difference.  Now, the other is no longer represented merely as racially inferior but also as a criminal.  The Bush National Security Strategy articulates together two strands of the present -- consumer capitalism and fear of crime.  As William Finnegan has noted, it is both interesting and odd that a national security strategy would devote as much space as the Bush Strategy does to discussing economic policy.36  As is clear from the section entitled "Ignite a New Era of Global Economic Growth through Free Markets and Free Trade," however, it is in fact official U.S. policy to promote -- presumably through military means since this has been identified as a vital U.S. national security interest by its placement in the Bush National Security Strategy -- a neo-liberal global economic regime.  Freedom to be a consumer is the form of freedom that U.S. policy seeks to make enduring through U.S. military operations as the strategy represents political difference -- those who oppose the promotion of the neo-liberal capitalist enterprise -- as criminal: the terrorists.  This only makes clear what had been prefigured in the immediate aftermath of September 11th by The New Republic's Peter Beinart who also represented anti-global capital protesters as equivalent to terrorists in an article published in the September 24, 2001 issue of that magazine.37  Thus, U.S. national security policy is an external projection of the consumer-criminal double. In the months immediately after September 11th, the government engaged in a virtual roundup of Arab and Muslim non-citizens, detaining more than 1,200 people.44  Utilizing a number of different mechanisms, such as a "Special Registration" program for males from predominantly Arab and Muslim countries between the ages of 16 to 45, a "voluntary" interview program that targeted 5,000 young males who had entered the United States after January 1, 2000 from countries with an al-Qaeda "presence" (extended to include Iraqi-born individuals who might be either citizens or non-citizens), or Operation Liberty Shield that is detaining asylum seekers from 33 nations or territories where al-Qaeda is "believed" to operate, the United States has continued this policy of preventative detention for non-Europeans.45  One estimate puts the number of domestic detentions as of May, 2003 at over 5,000, while thousands more have been placed in deportation proceedings.46  The government has also directed that the names of those detained post-September 11th , and the deportation proceedings of what the executive branch deems to be "special interest" cases, remain secret.  In words that eerily echo the suspension of the Weimar Constitution, a federal appeals court judge wrote, upholding secret court proceedings, "in the wake of September 11, 2001," the "primary national policy must be self-preservation."47  Today, even if a person should prevail in deportation proceedings, new rules provide for the continued detention of the individual pending the government's appeal.48  Although not one of those detained through these mechanisms has been charged with any involvement in the September 11 attacks, this policy of zero-risk acceptability urged by Bush and embraced by Ashcroft means that the U.S. is implementing a policy that identifies certain subjects -- those who bear signs that read "potential terrorist" for the "civilized" -- as presumed guilty in increasing numbers.  Under such a logic, this presumption is no problem since there is the possibility (which cannot be ruled out epistemologically however unlikely probabilistically) that these subjects could be either potential terrorists or members of a sleeper cell (potentially potential terrorists).

Women’s Rights

Neoliberalism marginalizes attempts to improve women’s rights

Christa Wichterich No Date (20 years after: the Women’s Human Rights paradigm in the neoliberal context, http://wideplus.org/20-years-after-the-womens-human-rights-paradigm-in-the-current-neoliberal-context/)

In the 1990s, it was the biggest achievement of the international women’s movement and the global women’s lobby to introduce the women’s rights paradigm, including violence against women as human rights abuse, into the human rights agenda of the UN and into the various global governance regimes like environment and sustainability, population and development, peace and security. These interventions raised a lot of hope that through participation in various global governance regimes, quantitative and substantial, it could be insured that women’s human rights would be respected, protected, promoted and fulfilled. However, the rise of the women’s human rights paradigm coincided with the emergence of the neo-liberal global order. Neoliberalism is based on a withdrawal of the state from the market, an economisation, privatisation and financialisation of many goods that have been outside of the market, and with a shift of responsibility to the individual as entrepreneur of her/himself. While this neoliberal turn implies an attack on livelihoods and social cohesion, increasingly weaker sections of society and women were included into the liberalised markets. They got more access to paid labour and to financial services such as microcredit, mortgage, private insurances and credit cards. But this was a highly paradoxical economic and financial inclusion: the majority of women got precarious, low‐paid, flexible, informal jobs, or micro- and subprime‐credits with high interest rates that pulled many of them into indebtedness. Still, for many women, those new market opportunities implied a step forward in terms of access to market rights and individual empowerment. Nancy Fraser called this dilemma or trap an “uncanny congruence” of feminism and neo-liberalism. The neo-liberal political regime incorporates, sucks in or makes use of the human rights and the gender equality agenda and it co-opts progressive discourses and language.