Browsing by Subject "Neoliberalism -- United States"

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    ‘Overworked and Underpaid’ : Low-level Bureaucrats and the Politics of Neoliberal Food Assistance Administration.
    (2010) Tung, Diana; Hart, Laurie Kain; Shipley, Jesse
    In this essay I examine how neoliberalism, in the form of revitalized market-based ideologies and policies, impact the ways in which low-level bureaucrats deliver food assistance policies to their low-income clients. The justification of government retrenchment and devolution in the post-Welfare Reform era can be seen as a convergence of pre-existing ideologies, such as individual responsibility and historical racial/ethnic prejudices. Neoliberalism promotes policies that mandate stringent eligibility criteria for clients to separate the "deserving" from the "undeserving" poor, and to transform citizens into economic actors. Neoliberalism also promotes the cutting back of administrative budgets, which inadvertently creates systematically overworked caseworkers. The bureaucrat, operating within this framework, enacts the neoliberal project through implementing official policies that craft citizens into economic "subjects of value," and utilizing "bureaucratic disentitlement" to de-incentivize clients from accessing food stamps. I demonstrate how the configuration of these elements serves to manage poverty and food insecurity, rather than work toward their eradication. Ultimately, these processes further perpetuate conditions of poverty, rather than address their root causes.
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    País de Ganadores: Tracing the Roots of Neoliberal Propaganda from Chile’s Sí Campaign to Iron Man
    (2014) Brown, Brian; Castillo Sandoval, Roberto; Roberts, Deborah H.
    In this thesis, I argue that a post-9/11 Hollywood blockbuster--John Favreau's Iron Man (2008)--and a series of 1988 television spots advocating the reelection of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet engage in parallel discourses as propaganda pieces. The Sí campaign, in its attempt to define the legacy of the fifteen-year Pinochet government, prefigures the methods with which Iron Man demarcates heroism and situates it in a 21st-Century, post-9/11 context. Using McKenzie Wark's article, "Gamer Theory," as a lens for understanding Iron Man's distillation of plot down to a series of decontextualized plot twists and victories, I suggest that protagonist Tony Stark's heroism stems from the repeated act of victory itself, a succession of mini-catharses that an increasingly global--and globalized--audience can enjoy vicariously without having to triumph over the constantly shifting terms of their lived realities. The Sí campaign, I argue, characterizes Chilean society and the dictatorship's experiment with early neoliberal economics by constructing the same kind of victory narrative, albeit half-formed and less finely-tuned than the streamlined power fantasies that would emerge more prominently in Iron Man. In their respective fetishizations of victory, in their use of constructed villains (caricatured Marxist militants or loosely-Islamic terrorists depending on the era) as both sites of triumph and scapegoats for social insecurity, as well as in their reluctance to acknowledge the state violence of their political context, these texts demonstrate the gestation of an ideology and its ascension to a place of privilege in the dangerously sacred haven of popular entertainment.
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    The Dominance of American Neoliberalism within U.S. Immigration Policy
    (2018) Rodriguez, Kerry; Isaacs, Anita, 1958-
    This thesis deals with anti-immigrant sentiments and its deteriorating nature between the 1970s––which marks the time when politicians began to conflate immigration with national security––and the present moment. It examines, on the one hand, the growing disconnect between Congress’ disparaging depiction of immigrants and the peaceful lives most undocumented migrants lead in the United States. That immigrants commit less crime and are one-half to one-fifth as likely as their American counterparts to be incarcerated raises serious concerns over Congress’ continual insistence of imposing stricter punishments against these “harmful” non-citizens. On the other hand, this thesis examines anti-immigrant sentiments along the grain of neoliberal policies and the immigration industrial complex. It explores how private companies have made tremendous profit off capturing, detaining, and deporting undocumented migrants, and relates it to federal government’s strong allegiance to neoliberal principles like individual choice, markets, private property, and efficiency. Ultimately, this thesis aims to answer two research questions. First, what truly explains the current rise of anti-immigrant sentiments? Second, and more important, what differences lie between this present form of nativism and those found in earlier periods throughout American history? The importance of asking the latter question resides in the special circumstances created by the 9/11 attacks. Prior to 2001, strains of xenophobia usually materialized in times of financial crises or cultural and racial tensions. Yet, this present angst against the other comes at a time when the United States suffered its worst terrorist attacks to date. The only other period immigrants posed such an imminent threat to national security occurred during World War II when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order to incarcerate people of Japanese ancestry out of fear that they were possible Axis agents. Thus, is it possible that the conditions caused by 9/11 mirror that of World War II? Or is it the case that this current frenzy over immigration is stemming from an entirely different, novel source? I argue that anti-immigrant sentiments have dramatically changed with the advent of neoliberalism and the rise of the immigration industrial complex during the 1970s. The industrial complex, in which neoliberal policies serve as its foundation, not only exacerbates but institutionalizes anti-immigrant sentiments such that it has inflamed the animosity between Americans and the undocumented to new and unforeseen heights. Additionally, it has allowed the federal government to scale its anti-terrorism efforts in ways it could not have done before without the support of private actors, thereby rendering immigrants not as proxy soldiers of enemy states but as internal threats to public safety, national security, and American traditions. While anti-immigrant policies are not unique to American history, the rise of public-private partnerships––contractual arrangements that permit more private sector involvement in infrastructure projects and government services (Cokorinos 2009) ––have allowed the federal government to widen the impacts of its anti-immigrant efforts, thereby jeopardizing even larger swathes of migrant communities. The implications of American neoliberalism and the immigration industrial complex on immigration reform ultimately spell danger for the undocumented migrants in the United States. This is true for a number of reasons. First, the introduction of private actors into the public domain has shifted which concerns are heard and acted upon by private and public officials. Considering that corporations need a steady stream of revenue to remain functional, private actors are more likely to yield to their shareholders’ concerns than to a constituency. As a matter of fact, shareholders care about the criminalization of immigration insofar as it remains a lucrative investment. Hence, when private prison corporations are not acting in ways that maximizes profits, shareholders can exert tremendous pressure to change the behavior of these companies, which underscores how much influence investors have over a company in comparison to the American public. The end result is that private prison corporations will do their best to generate a steady stream of profit off of undocumented migrants. Second, the emergence of an immigration industrial complex makes it very easy for public and private officials to popularize the false misconception that immigrants are criminals and possible terrorist suspects. In doing so, public officials downplay the importance of necessary immigration reform, since their main priority involves improving security and reducing the risks posed by undocumented migrants. We especially see this preference towards bolstering national security under the Trump Administration, which recently allowed for the expansion of private prisons within the U.S. immigration system. Finally, the prominence of American neoliberalism ultimately undermines the trust between the American government and the Latino population. The passage of any bill which increases the rate of detention and deportation only worsens the lived experiences of Latino communities, since they are likely to be undocumented or know someone who is. As such, these very communities may retaliate against the political party at fault by using their electoral power to vote these public officials out of office. As the Latino population continues to grow in the United States, so will their electoral power which they leverage against conservative lawmakers.