Credit reporting is a pervasive but overlooked form of financial surveillance that investigates and commoditizes individualsJosh Lauer, doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, April 2008, Technology and Culture Volume 49 Number 2, “From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in Nineteenth-Century America,” http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tech/summary/v049/49.2.lauer.html

The textualizing of bodies for the purpose of social control is intimately connected to the rise of the modern nation-state. Passports, identity cards, anthropometry, and rationalized systems of criminal identification all brought citizens under the purview of state authority as visible subjects . Not surprisingly, then, emerging scholarly interest in the historical development of surveillance is largely devoted to state practices.1 This perspective, however, overlooks one of the most totalizing and invasive systems of surveillance to emerge anywhere in the nineteenth-century world: the American commercial credit-reporting agency, or "mercantile agency."2 Beginning [End Page 301] in the 1840s, these private-sector agencies brought thousands of U.S. citizens—merchants, traders, manufacturers, and artisans—into a massive network of social monitoring designed to facilitate safe business relationships in a world increasingly inhabited by strangers.

This article describes the development and operation of the nineteenth century mercantile agency in the interest of illuminating a pivotal though neglected chapter in the history of modern surveillance practice. As the author of a 386-page diatribe against these agencies fumed in 1896, "The history has not yet been written of the American Inquisition."3 In addition to challenging the primacy of the nation-state in the evolution of American mass surveillance, this article also underscores one of the mercantile agency's most consequential effects: the invention of disembodied financial identity.

The model for these early credit-reporting agencies was established in 1841 by Lewis Tappan, an evangelical Christian and noted abolitionist who ran a silk wholesaling business in New York City with his brother Arthur.4 Emerging nearly bankrupt from the panic of 1837, an economic crisis precipitated by a cascade of defaulted debt, Tappan launched the Mercantile Agency—a name that became generic for such institutions—to implement a national system of credit checking. "This Agency," he announced in an 1843 advertisement, "was established . . . for the purpose of procuring by [End Page 302] resident and special agents, information respecting the standing, responsibility, &c., of country merchants. . . . It is not a system of espionage, but the same as merchants usually employ—only on an extended plan—to ascertain whether persons applying for credit are worthy of the same and to what extent."5 As one agency advocate explained in 1858: "False and fraudulent representations by a purchaser are mercilessly exposed by the Agency; plausible swindlers are detected; the weak and incompetent trader described, and the extravagant checked."6

The mercantile agency , like the nineteenth-century nation-state, sought to render the individual legible. 7 Such legibility centered upon texts: handwritten reports , correspondence, ledgers, notes, and, later, printed reference volumes and newsletters that compressed an individual life into a brief statement of creditworthiness, ultimately represented by a numerical value. At the core of Tappan's reporting system was a library of imposing ledgers in which all known businesses in the United States were documented, along with detailed reports on the personal character, financial means, and local reputations of their proprietors.8 This information was tightly controlled. Until coded reference books appeared in the late 1850s, subscribers—wholesalers, merchants, bankers, and insurance companies—received it only in the offices of the Mercantile Agency, and only as read by discreet clerks who summarized the contents of the

ledgers; copies were not available, and no written traces other than the subscribers' notes could leave the premises.

After Tappan relinquished his stake in the agency in 1854, his system was continued by several associates, including Robert Graham Dun, who took over in 1859 and ran the firm as R.G. Dun and Company. Tappan's agency was the first to achieve wide success, but it was not the only one in existence. Its chief rival was the Bradstreet Company, founded in 1849 by John M. Bradstreet, a former dry goods merchant and attorney based in Cincinnati. In 1855, Bradstreet moved his base of operations to New York City, and the two companies competed aggressively until 1933, when they merged to form Dun & Bradstreet, one of the preeminent commercial credit-rating firms in the world today. [End Page 303]

The American mercantile agency system represented a radical new technology of institutional surveillance. Credit reporting served a different purpose than other forms of bureaucratic centralization and communication that emerged during the mid-nineteenth century, notably those associated with the railroad and telegraph.9 The mercantile agency's raison d'être was to collect information about people. In the absence of certified financial statements, the basis of corporate credit assessment today, nineteenth century commercial credit reporting was a study of individuals rather than faceless organizations. As nineteenth-century businesses were typically sole proprietorships or small partnerships, commercial credit reporting entailed investigations into the integrity of these particular people. Moreover, the information processed by these agencies was not primarily for internal recordkeeping or administrative use, but for commodification and distribution.10

The credit-based financialisation of everyday life is a form of neoliberal control that replicates the competition of the work space.Alex Law, teaches sociology at the University of Abertay Dundee, 31 Aug 2009, “The Callous Credit Nexus': Ideology and Compulsion in the Crisis of Neoliberalism,” Sociological Research Online 14(4)5, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/14/4/5.html

3.1 Following the mass resistance to the Poll Tax a shift to a war of position becomes evident. Working on the intermediate institutions of civil society to supplement coercive state authority, a sustained attempt was made to consolidate, deepen and entrench market fetishism as an abstract form of social compulsion (Mészáros, 1995). Inside the workplace, labour is disciplined by abstract controls alongside more direct hierarchical ones , directed by information technologies, numerical targets, internal competition, bonus culture, performance management, and stringent accounting measurements (Mooney and Law, 2007). Outside the workplace, abstract control operates through the credit-based financialisation of everyday life, which reciprocally conditions practices within workplaces . Where the value of wages is degraded relative to the costs of social reproduction , goods and services essential to a culturally tolerable style of life are made available on the basis of personal creditworthiness. In the phase of roll-out neoliberalism, record levels of personal indebtedness were enforced through mortgages, personal loans, credit cards, mail-order catalogue accounts , and so on (Law and Mooney, forthcoming).

3.2 More so than ideology per se, coercive commodification accounts for the neoliberal repositioning of agents in social space. How neoliberal commodification alters the network of social relations is therefore of primary significance. The coercive logic of capital was deepened by exposing greater swathes of society to commodification through the credit-led re-construction of ‘market forces’ and its managerialist surrogates in the workplace. Financialisation as a style of life was rooted in the value structure of political elites, corporate boardrooms and the higher strata of the new middle class, strikingly different from the ascetic morality of the traditional petty bourgeoisie or the post-war corporate reorganisation of the propertied classes. Manager-entrepreneurs were rewarded not only with substantial salaries but also,

increasingly, financialised incentives like financial performance-related pay and stock options. Shareholder fundamentalism conspired to demand that organisational and personal change become a way of life through the ‘spontaneous’ regulation of the self as a flexible, adaptable and available neoliberal subject.

Creditworthiness is assessed on the basis of race and gender – African American and Latina women are dispropritonately assessed as subprime because they fail to meet social norms. Deemed exotic assets, now toxic assets, women of color are told to pay up their debts.Cooper and Mitropolous 9 [Melinda Cooper, Assoc. Prof. Sociology and Public Policy @ Univ. of Sydney, and Angela Mitropolous, writer and activist based in Australia and author of Contract & Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia, 27 May 2009, “In Praise of Usura,” Mute, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/praise-usura]

Insofar as the agenda of the incoming administration is to restore the integrity of the US dollar as the global reserve currency, it will also, necessarily, entail a more or less violent reinscription of the oikos. It is the North American household, after all, that most unassuming of categories in the budget itemising of economic theory, which has played the role of the world's consumer of last resort for the past decade or so, coupling the economies of China and the US in a creditor-debtor relation from which, it seemed until recently, there was no way out. More than this, the North American household had been targeted as an emerging consumer market for a proliferating range of new financial risk products, many of them designed to finance the everyday life of people who had long replaced the deferred gratification of the Keynesian wage with the borrowed time of the credit card. The evaluation of risk is not , of course, an exact science and relies much more on the psychology of confidence, trust and indeed moral judgement as on any probabilistic calculation of mathematical chance. This much was again confirmed by retrospective enquiries into the subprime debacle, which show that the ‘creditworthiness' of borrowers (prime, semi-prime and subprime) was more often than not calculated on the intangibles of race, gender and marital status as on net income, credit histories, and assets. What is known is that the greater proportion of subprime was composed of women, and African-American and Latina women in particular (most of those demographed as ‘single parent' households or living in non-normative ‘arrangements'). What is also clear is that the interest rates and contractual conditions of the subprime market were more exacting than in other loan markets - in some instances, those women were relegated to subprime loans even when earning as much as their white male counterparts. When the deceptively homogeneous category of the household is scrutinised then, it splits open to reveal a Koch's curve of deflections from the norm. For while it may be true that we are ‘all subprime now' (in that the Keynesian ideal of life-long stable employment is the exception rather than the rule), in practice the pricing of risk is overtly contingent on the more or less normative (familial, sexual, racial) status of the borrower. Esteemed to embody the least exotic and least profitable of risks, the white male borrower was also offered the safest of mortgage contracts. Other contractors were assigned to the volatile fortunes of the variable interest rate. It was these risks, deemed to be the most exorbitant on offer, which would be repackaged into the more ostensibly exotic mortgage-backed securities, promising to render profits as vertiginous as their dangers - threatening also, at some point, to test the limits of market confidence in their long term investment quality. In the meantime what were once casually referred to as exotic financial instruments, by virtue of their incalculable promise, are now just as blatantly renamed toxic assets, which everyone wants to purge from their balance sheets. As Keynes explains in the General Theory, the pricing of risk in the capital markets is comparable to a beauty contest in which investors assign their votes not so much on the basis of ‘real or fundamental aesthetic value', but rather on a continual, nervous assessment of other peoples' judgements. While the

housing boom momentarily offered a kind of renewable redemption contract for the erstwhile Welfare Queen and other undesirables of the US economy, the very terms of the subprime contractual arrangement meant that these minority contestants would be the first to suffer the consequences of declining investor confidence. Pushing beyond the limits of normalisable risk, the specificity of late 20th century financialisation is the expansion of credit of all kinds to the riskiest of ‘at risk' populations including, it would seem, undocumented migrants. Now that the manic phase of credit creation has lost its nerve, the subprime class in the US is exhorted to live within its means in a virtuous gesture of belt- tightening - that is, to return to the ranks of race, sex and class. As the exotic sours into toxic, the expansion of investor confidence, ecumenical, liberal and even daring in its tastes, suddenly demands the immediate redemption of all debts.

Viewed in this way, the political calculus of Obama's rhetoric of faith - household, work and confidence - assumes its full complexity. Obama's familial politics incorporates a moral discourse on the African-American household which is - for the moment, at least - benevolent rather than punitive, restorative rather than disciplinary and (perhaps most notably) directed more toward the African-American father than the welfare mother. This much distinguishes Obama's rhetoric from that of his predecessors. It remains, however, a moralising rhetoric. One which responds in very astute terms to the combined predicament of the subprime household and the faltering US dollar. Vowing to renew America's promise and redeem the trustworthiness of the US currency, Obama locates the foundation of this promise in the North American household - with a particular focus on its African-American incarnation. If the future of this household has been gutted by the subprime crisis then the solution offered by Obama is first of all a re-normalising one, most notably by restoring all fathers, black and white, to their position of responsible paternal figures. As stated in his campaign publication, Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama believes that of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, family is the most important. Fathers are critical to this foundation, but since 1960, the rate of American children without fathers in their lives has quadrupled, and more than 25 million children live without their biological fathers today. [...] Barack Obama believes [in] promoting responsible fatherhood and supporting families Yet, in the absence of a credible bail-out directed at the subprime household, the discourse remains purely moralistic, a more or less veiled imputation of guilt through overconsumption (too much fun has been had, not pointing any fingers) which finds its counterpart in Black Nationalism and may some day be radicalised by more overtly nativist, survivalist and white supremacist elements in American political life, precisely those that have been reinvigorated by the groundswell of white working class opposition to Obama's election. Dion Dennis, writing for CTheory, astutely traces the history of prohibitionism through the time of Roosevelt's New Deal, suggesting that this finds one of its most recent expressions in an escalation of the war on filesharing and remix cultures.3 To his account, it might be added that the Great (Livejournal) Strikethrough of 2007 was as much a conflict over the norms of the sexual contract as it was the mark of that conflict's limit in digital labour's contractarian imaginary - these mechanisms presuppose the limit of the border construed as frontier, beyond which all forms of violence are permitted.4 In other words, this prohibitionist impulse makes its way through every possible formulation of identity (class, race, gender, citizenship, sex, generation, and so forth) on the basis of a morally radiating distinction between counterfeit and authentic, seeking the demarcation of zones and acts of illegal (re)production and, more significantly, reconstituting the powers to decide these distinctions (which is to say, to bring a legitimated, if not entirely naturalised, violence to bear). Karl Marx's ambivalence on the question of the labour theory of right - an ambivalence that continues in the divergent legacies of socialist productivism and the refusal of work - is no more cause for hesitating in the face of these repatriations than can his critical remarks on the attachment of rights to production be set aside for the sake of conforming with the rise of a seemingly inexorable neo-Keynesian consensus. Indeed, when it comes to discussing usury, in

the third volume of Capital Marx refers to it as the ‘occult property' of interest-bearing capital, insisting that it exploits the conditions in which it finds itself but in no way should be considered as having created them.5 For him, usury ‘lives in the pores of production, as it were, just as the gods of Epicurus lived in the space between worlds'. He goes on to say that ‘the usurer knows no other barrier but the capacity of those who need money to pay or to resist.' These reallocations - whether rendered as the liquidation of that which is toxic or (in the recent Italianate) a clearing away of the rubbish - seek to restore the borders, the filters and walls, between those who need money to pay and those who need it to resist. Here, violence is made rightful on the ground of the labour theory of right. As George Caffentzis puts it, ‘If the rentier, through his/her right of exclusion, disrupts the productive development of a profitable industry, then there is a right of the "more productive" to lay claim to the right of exclusion'.6 And what counts as labour is that which might, simply put, be counted, exchanged, made indifferent. Put schematically, the rentier lays out fence lines - within which there exists a monopoly on violence, including that which secures the legitimacy of the currency - can command labour to be exerted, guarantee contracts and so on. The rentier shifts from being a good (finance) capitalist to a parasitic usurer when they lend to those who cannot (or will not) repay. But the question for those of us who do not concern ourselves with balance sheets is how this ostensible conflict between good and bad capitalism unleashes a redemptive, morally sanctioned violence to, as Obama remarked, put ‘people back to work' or, on the other hand, declare them superfluous, parasitic or simply a barrier to more productive pursuits. Whether this legitimated violence unfolds in the form of what Tatjana Greif (in Reartikulacija) has referred to as the New Inquisition (against unproductive sex and gender indeterminacy) recently announced by Pope Benedict XVI in his pre-2008 Christmas address to the Roman Curia or, as with the emergence of the welfare state last century, in the expansion and proliferation of wars more officially declared and undertaken, the question is of the domestication of the crisis. There is no such thing as a non-violent counter-cyclical. For Marx, the restoration of limits and boundaries does not mark the resolution of capital as such (as the moral critique of capitalism always imagines), but rather the retraction of credit which occurs once the expansive phase of capitalist debt creation has ceased to be profitable. Capital oscillates between the poles of credit expansion and credit retraction, and is maintained in tension between the two poles in a dynamic that is neither dialectical nor progressive. As such the restoration of boundaries of all kinds is a periodic necessity of capitalist accumulation, as intrinsic to the capitalist dynamic as the expansive production of credit. Yet while Marx acknowledged that the moment of restoration, in its abstraction, can take on any number of geographical, contractual and productive forms (from the enclosures to the wage contract to the creation of the poor houses) he was unable to perceive the dynamics of restoration in its most intimate operations. In other words, in those moments when it claims to reimpose proper boundaries on the sexual transaction, to reconfine production within the household economy of familial reproduction, and sexual transit within the genealogical limits prescribed by the race, people or nation.

Credit scoring disproportionately targets Hispanics and African Americans who are calculated as financial risksPreeti Vissa, Chief Operating Officer of The Greenlining Institute, 12/15 2010, “How Credit Scores Disproportionately Hurt Communities of Color,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/preeti-vissa/credit-scores-and-the-for_b_797148.html

To most of us, credit scores are an obscure subject, something to think about only when we're applying for a loan. But they're deeply tied to the foreclosure crisis and the cloud of gloom surrounding the housing market and the economy generally. They have contributed to the disproportionate effect of the

foreclosure crisis on minorities, and have the potential to create a vicious cycle that will pound communities of color even further.

Case in point: Last week, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition   filed   a discrimination complaint against twenty-two lenders, charging that they were discriminating against minority borrowers by denying FHA-backed mortgages to applicants who met the FHA requirement of a FICO score of 580 or better. The lenders, NCRC charged, were insisting on FICO scores far higher than the FHA demands.And there's plenty of evidence that credit scoring as it's now done puts borrowers of color at a disadvantage.

FICO scores (from the Fair Isaacs Co.), for example, are based on the following: payment history, including bankruptcy or foreclosure status (35 percent), level of outstanding debt and debt utilization (30 percent), length of credit history (15 percent), new credit and credit inquiries (10 percent) and types of credit used (10 percent).

While some details vary at other companies providing credit ratings, the essential components are similar -- and what's missing is important. Credit history -- mortgages, car loans, credit cards, etc. -- is included in these models, but other types of bill-paying are not. Much information, such as payments for rent and utilities, is not reported to credit agencies.

This puts those who have little experience with credit but a long, stable history of on-time payments of rent, utility bills, etc. at a huge disadvantage. Because credit scoring models consider mortgage payments but not rent, there is a built-in advantage for whites: 74.7 percent of whites now own their own homes, compared to rates of 47 percent for Latinos, 45 percent for African Americans and 57.3 percent for other races. Clearly this contributes to the fact that people of color on average have lower credit scores than non-Hispanic whites.Another thing credit scores don' t do is account for changes in individual or neighborhood circumstances that may temporarily cause an otherwise responsible borrower to miss payments . And several indicators suggest that the current recession has had a disproportionate impact on minority communities .

As of November 2010, the unemployment rate for whites was 8.9 percent, accordingto the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to 13.2 percent for Latinos and 16.0 percent for African Americans. And an impact index released last year by the Center for Social Inclusion found that states with higher percentages of people of color were hit harder by the recession overall -- with Florida, which has a large Latino population, hit hardest of all.

As I've noted before, there is evidence that blacks and Latinos with high credit scores were more likely to receive high-cost   subprime mortgages   than whites with comparable scores. Add this to the likelihood that these borrowers have artificially low credit scores due to factors that have nothing to do with their willingness to pay their debts, and you have a sort of double jeopardy.And it could get worse. Millions more homes are in danger of foreclosure. Many of these are due to circumstances that have little or nothing to do with the borrower's long-term creditworthiness , such as misleadingly marketed and predatory loans or recession-related job losses.

Credit and debt are inseparable which is axiomatic in credit-debt relationsGustav Peebles, Special Adv to Prov & Assoc Prof of Anthropology at The New School, October 2010, Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 39: 225-240, “The Anthropology of Credit and Debt,” http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/9GKtmKGiv5jMPGJiYgAC/full/10.1146/annurev-anthro-090109-133856

When one surveys decades of anthropological literature on credit and debt, an astonishing consistency shines through much of the ethnographic data. Seemingly everywhere that credit and debt are discussed, we find many informants who enunciate a moral stance that credit is considered beneficial and liberating for the creditor (e.g., Nugent 1996, Truitt 2007, Zelizer 1994), whereas indebtedness is more likely to be seen as burdensome and imprisoning for the debtor (e.g., Howe 1998, Lowrey 2006, Taussig 1987). According to this frequently voiced opinion, the former is productive and the latter destructive, which sits in striking contrast with Rabelais's almost Maussian celebration of indebtedness in the epigraph above.1 This hierarchy between credit and debt is so pervasive that Maine (1866) noticed long ago a deep and sustained favoritism directed toward creditors in many legal systems. In short, a near universal crystallizes out from ethnographic reports, in which local populations describe credit as power and debt as weakness.

Long ago, Mauss (1954) examined the ubiquity of this common belief, and his research led him to develop his now axiomatic paradox regarding credit and debt relations. In The Gift (anthropology's foundational text on credit and debt), Mauss asserts that credit and debt greatly contribute to the building of hierarchy and dominance, but they are also the keys to building group solidarity. Malinowski's (1922) evidence that the “handing over of wealth is the expression of the superiority of the giver over the recipient” goes hand-in-hand with building a cohesive and peaceful trade network still stands as the most famous ethnographic example of this paradox (p. 177). Simmel (1907) made the same point, a contrario, by speaking with such enthusiasm of a future society constituted more by a supposedly freer direct exchange, which would thereby be less colored by the inherently binding domination that he saw in credit and debt relations.

In the years since Mauss's opening salvo in favor of the benefits of debt, careful ethnographic work has lent credence to his notion that credit and debt stand as an inseparable, dyadic unit. As he writes, “[t]he nature and intentions of the contracting parties, the nature of the thing given, are all indivisible (1954, p. 60, see also p. 36). Thus, because debt is always already a dyadic relation that requires its opposite, I henceforth refer to credit/debt rather than trying to distinguish the two, except when working to disentangle the dyad for specific reasons. Although popular understandings of the relationship between credit and debt, as documented by the ethnographers cited here, rely on a hierarchy between the two,

anthropology's contribution to this field of inquiry has been not so much in avowing or disavowing the potential legitimacy of this folk theory, but instead in engaging its effects. In some instances, perhaps creditors are socially powerful usurers and debtors are their weak targets, but on other occasions, debtors can be enormously powerful too , as the American Insurance Group revealed to the global public in late 2008. Ethnographic inquiry can hope to clarify such matters, which may be viewed differently by different social parties at different times; indeed, scholars such as Dunn (2004) have even shown us that the same economic resource can be seen as a credit by one owner, but as a debt by a new owner to whom it is transferred.

Debt exacerbates and makes it almost impossible to get out of povertyYvette Hartfree( research fellow university of Bristol) and Sharon Collard( professor of personal finance n the True Potential Centre for the Public Understanding of Finance at the open university) , Poverty, debt and credit: An expert-led review Final report to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, March 2014

The consequences of problem debt, as outlined above, can exacerbate poverty and increase the risk of remaining in poverty. As found by Berthoud and Kempson (1992), once low-income families got into difficulties with debt it was almost impossible to get straight again unless there was a dramatic improvement in their circumstances. However, overall there is limited (recent) evidence on the extent to which problem debt makes it more difficult for people to move out of poverty.

The evidence refers to a 'debt trap': a cycle in which people service their debts (i.e. they pay the minimum repayment amount and other charges 15 that are owed), but are unable to pay off the capital they originally borrowed (Ellison et al., 2011). It is also used to describe the negative psychological impacts of having problem debt where people feel too overwhelmed by their financial circumstances to be able to address them (Dearden et al., 2010; Disney et al., 2008). There are no figures available on the number of households in this position. Qualitative evidence reports that adverse impacts of problem debt on people's mental health, well-being and self-confidence may also undermine their ability to seek employment (Dearden et al., 2010; Civic Consulting, 2013) which is a key route out of poverty. In one study qualitative evidence found that being in arrears was a barrier to work due to people’s fear that creditor forbearance (in the form of reduced repayments) would end and creditors would demand increased or full repayments when they moved into employment. However, this was not identified as a barrier to work in the survey data (Kempson et al., 2004). 16 R

Debt is used to justify violence and violence based relations- the perpetrators of violence makes it seem as if the victim is doing something wrongDavid graeber, (anthropologist, anti globalization activist, and professor at the London school of

economics) debt the 1st 5000 years, may 2011, Melville house publishing

The very fact that we don't know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power. If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt - above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong . Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies. For thousands of years, violent [people ] men have been

able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they "owe them their lives " (a telling phrase) because they haven't been killed.

Nowadays, for example, military aggression is defined as a crime against humanity, and international courts, when they are brought to bear, usually demand that aggressors pay compensation. Germany had to pay massive reparations after World War I, and Iraq is still paying Kuwait for Saddam Hussein's invasion in 1990. Yet the Third World debt, the debt of countries like Madagascar, Bolivia, and the Philippines, seems to work precisely the other way around. Third World debtor nations are almost exclusively countries that have at one time been attacked and conquered by European countries-often, the very countries to whom they now owe money. In 1895, for example, France invaded Madagascar, disbanded the government of then-Queen Ranavalona III, and declared the country a French colony. One of the first things General Gallieni did after "pacification," as they liked to call it then, was to impose heavy taxes on the Malagasy population, in part so they could reimburse the costs of having been invaded, but also, since French colonies were supposed to be fiscally self-supporting, to defray the costs of building the railroads, highways, bridges, plantations, and so forth that the French regime wished to build. Malagasy taxpayers were never asked whether they wanted these railroads, highways, bridges, and plantations, or allowed much input into where and how they were built.1 To the contrary: over the next half century, the French army and police slaughtered quite a number of Malagas y who objected too strongly to the arrangement (upwards of half a million, by some reports, during one revolt in 1947). It's not as if Madagascar has ever done any comparable damage to France. Despite this, from the beginning, the Malagasy people were told they owed France money, and to this day, the Malagasy people are still held to owe France money, and the rest of the world accepts the justice of this arrangement . When the "international community" does perceive a moral issue, it's usually 6 DEB T when they feel the Malagasy government is being slow to pay their debts.

Credit is risk society, it is a calculation that categorizes groups based on risk and sustains neoliberalism. Risk society is intertwined with surveillance. Fear causes people to seek more privacy which requires more surveillance. This only worsens trust.Richard Victor Ericson, Professor of sociology at the Universtiry of Toronto, 1997, Policing Risk Society, pg 6

Part II provides a broader theoretical discussion of the risk society context in which policing takes place. Risk society operates within negative logic that focuses on fear and t he social distribution of ‘bads’ more than on progress and the social distribution of ‘goods.’ Collective fear and foreboding underpin the value system of an unsafe society, perpetuate insecurity, and feed incessant demands for more knowledge of risk . Fear ends up proving itself, as new risk communication and management systems proliferate. The surveillance mechanisms of these systems create profiles of human populations and their risks to ascertain what is probable and possible for those populations . People are fabricated around institutionally established norms : risk is always somewhere on the continuum of imprecise normality.

Risk communication systems are entwined with privacy and trust. The more that foreboding and fear lead people to withdraw from public involvement , the more they value privacy and withdraw into privatized lifestyles. The greater the privacy, the greater the need for surveillance mechanisms to produce the knowledge necessary to trust people in otherwise anonymous institutional transactions. Paradoxically, these mechanisms intrude on privacy and are a constant reminder of the uncertainties of trust. Yet is only

in a framework of trust that patterns of risk can be adequately institutionalized and form the basis of decisions. Privacy, trust, surveillance, and risk management go hand in hand in policing the probabilities and possibilities of action.

Risk dissolves distinctions non-risk based distinctions. When a group is deemed a risk, such as minorities are by credit agencies, the groups other features disappear and the group is marginalized Ulrich Beck 09 (sociologists, professor at the University of Munich and also held appointments at theFondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) in Paris, and at the London School of Economics.) Ulrich beck 2009 Critical Theory of World Risk Society: A Cosmopolitan Vision

– First there is its boundless thirst for reality: the category of risk consumes and transforms everything . It obeys the law of all or nothing. If a group represents a risk, its other features disappear and it becomes defined by this “risk.” It is marginalized and threatened with exclusion .

– Classical distinctions merge into greater or lesser degrees of risk: Risk functions like an acid bath in which venerable classical distinctions are dissolved. Within the horizon of risk, the “binary coding” – permitted or forbidden, legal or illegal, right or wrong, us and them – does not exist. Within the horizon of risk, people are not either good or evil but only more or less risky. Everyone poses more or less of a risk for everyone else. The qualitative distinction either/or is replaced by the quantitative difference between more or less. Nobody is not a risk – to repeat, everyone poses more or less of a risk for everyone else.

– Existent and non-existent: Risk is not the same as catastrophe, but the anticipation of the future catastrophe in the presence. As a result, risk leads a dubious, insidious, would-be, fictitious, allusive existence: it is existent and non-existent, present and absent, doubtful and real. In the end it can be assumed to be ubiquitous and thus grounds a politics of fear and a politics of prevention. Anticipation necessitates precaution and this obeys, for example, the calculation: spend a cent today, save a Euro tomorrow – assuming that the threat which does not (yet) exist really exists.

– Individual and social responsibility: Even in the smallest conceivable microcosm, risk defines a social relation, a relation between at least two people: the decision-maker who takes the risk and who thereby triggers consequences for others who cannot, or can only with difficulty, defend themselves. Accordingly, two concepts of responsibility can be distinguished: an individual responsibility that the decision maker accepts for the consequences of his or her decision, which must be distinguished from responsibility for others, social responsibility. Risks pose in principle the question of what “side effects” a risk has for others and who these others are and to what extent they are involved in the decision or not.

– Global space of responsibility: In this sense global risks open up a complex moral and political space of responsibility in which the others are present and absent, near and far, and in which actions are neither good nor evil, only more or less risky. The meanings of proximity, reciprocity, dignity, justice and trust are transformed within this horizon of expectation of global risks.

– Risk communities – a kind of “glue” for diversity: Global risks contain in nuce an answer to the question of how new kinds of “risk communities,” based neither on descent nor on spatial presence, can evolve and establish themselves in the cacophony of a globalized world.1 One of the most striking and heretofore least recognized key features of global risks is how they generate a kind of “compulsory cosmopolitanism,” a “glue” for diversity and plurality in a world whose boundaries are as porous as a Swiss cheese, at least as regards communication and economics.

The market functions as a carceral technology. The slavery of the past is the ontological and economic equivalent to modern punishment. Under neoliberalism, the market and prison are structured by anti-blackinessDillon 12 [Stephen Dillon, Asst. Prof. Queer Studies @ Hampshire College, 2012, “Possessed by Death: The Neolbieral-Carceral State, Black Feminism, and the Afterlife of Slavery, Radical History Review, Issue 112 (Winter 2012) doi 10.1215/01636545-1416196, p. 113-5]

For Shakur, the regulations of a burgeoning neoliberal-carceral state possessed life in ways that rendered the free world an extension of the prison. An assemblage of race, gender, capital, policing, and penal technologies produced a symbiosis between the de-industrialized landscape of the late-twentieth- century urban United States and the gendered racisms of a n emerging prison-industrial complex. Diffuse structural networks of racism and sexism mimicked the steel bars of a cage. This is the complicity between freedom and captivity, the entanglements between the living and the living dead, and the hemorrhaging of a buried past into the imagined progress of the present. For Shakur, prison looked like and felt like nineteenth-century chattel slavery: “We sit in the bull pen. We are all black. All restless. And we are all freezing.”2 In the essay, affect continually forces the past to open directly onto the present.3 Frozen skin speaks in a way that words cannot. In prison, shivering black flesh weighted with chains looked like slavery to Shakur. As a fugitive who now has political asylum in Cuba, she understands herself as a twenty-first- century runaway slave, a “maroon woman.”4

Although Shakur’s essay does not name neoliberalism explicitly, we can read it as a black feminist theorization of neoliberalism at the very moment of its emergence . Indeed, it is a narration of the drastic racialized and gendered restructurings of social and economic life in the 1970s United States from the perspective of someone detained for resisting those changes. Written by a captured member of the underground black liberation movement, the text names the discourses and (state) violence neoliberalism requires yet erases. Neoliberalism is most certainly an economic doctrine that prioritizes the mobility and expansion of capital at all costs, but its mechanisms exceed the liberation of the market from the repression of the state. By reading black feminist texts from the 1970s as implicit theories of neoliberalism, we can come to understand the formation and implementation of neoliberalism in a new light . Shakur not only connects an emergent neoliberalism to a rapidly expanding prison regime, she also links the contemporary prison to chattel slavery — an institutional, affective, and discursive connection apprehended by Angela Davis’s phrase, “From the prison of slavery to the slavery of prison.”5

The connections made by Shakur between the prison and neoliberalism, and between slavery and the prison, have been thoroughly explored by many scholars.6 Indeed, during the past two decades, a growing body of scholarship has affirmed and extended Shakur’s analysis of blackness, slavery, and the prison by exploring what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery.”7 By centering racial terror in a genealogy of the prison , scholars have come to understand the barracoons, coffles, slave holds, and plantations of the Middle Passage as spatial, discursive, ontological, and economic analogues of modern punishment that have haunted their way into the present.8

If the carceral becomes a functional surrogate for slavery’s production of social and living death, then Shakur’s text also hints at another connection that has garnered less attention — slavery’s haunting possession of neoliberalism. If slavery’s antiblack technologies inhabit and structure the prison, how do they live on in the operations of the market? In this essay, I examine the ways that Shakur theorizes the relationship between the carceral, the market, the population, and the body. I consider how the

necropolitics of slavery inhabit and drive the biopolitics of neoliberalism . I argue that under neoliberalism, the market — which, along with the prison, is structured by antiblackness — functions as a carceral technology. Further, I argue that Shakur’s text helps us to understand the ways that slavery’s logics and technologies not only haunt but also possess the present. If haunting names the lingering presence of the dead in the realm of the living — the present absence of what is there and yet hidden, the feeling that there is something in the room with you even when your eyes tell you otherwise — then possession is when the ghost does not haunt, but rather, takes hold. Possession is when the ghost inhabits and controls. The spirit of slavery does more than meddle in the present; rather, it has intensified, seduced, enveloped, and animated contemporary formations of power. Possession names the ways that the operations of corporate, state, individual, and institutional bodies are sometimes beyond the self-possessed will of the living. Something else is also in control, something that may feel like nothing even as it compels movement, motivates ideology, and drives the organization of life and death. In this way, slavery is not a ghost lingering in the corner of the room — rather, its spirit animates the architecture of the house as a whole. The past does not merely haunt the present; it composes the present. As Toni Morrison writes, “All of it is now, it is always now.”9

Thus we advocate the USFG should prevent surveillance on its citizens for credit scores which sustains the system of debt.

We get rid of debt. This will relieve a great amount of suffering and remind us that money is not ineffable and paying one’s debts is not the basis of moralityDavid graeber, (anthropologist, anti globalization activist, and professor at the London school of

economics) debt the 1st 5000 years, may 2011, Melville house publishing

In this book I have largely avoided making concrete proposals, but let me end with one. It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee: one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt . It would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering , but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one's debts is not the essence of morality , that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way. It is significant, I think, that since Hammurabi, great imperial states have invariably resisted this kind of politics. Athens and Rome established the paradigm: even when confronted with continual debt crises, they insisted on legislating around the edges, softening the impact, eliminating obvious abuses like debt slavery, using the spoils of empire to throw all sorts of extra benefits at their poorer citizens (who, after all, provided the rank and file of their armies) , so as to keep them more or less afloat-but all in such a way as never to allow a challenge to the (1971 - T HE B E GINNING ... ) 391 principle of debt itself. The governing class of the United States seems to have taken a remarkably similar approach: eliminating the worst abuses (e.g. , debtors' prisons) , using the fruits of empire to provide subsidies, visible and otherwise, to the bulk of the poulation; in more recent years, manipulating currency rates to flood the country with cheap goods from China, but never allowing anyone to question the sacred principle that we must all pay our debts.

At this point, however, the principle has been exposed as a flagrant lie. As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debt s . Only some of us do. Nothing would be more important than to wipe the slate clean for everyone, mark a break with our accustomed morality, and start again. What is a debt, anyway ? A debt is j ust the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence . If freedom (real

freedom) is the ability to make friends, then it is also, necessarily, the ability to make real promises. What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another? At this point we can't even say. It's more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.

Impossible demands are good – they only appear unrealistic within the ideological and discursive context the demand addresses. Our demand shifts the discursive terrain and prefigures a different world made possible through our challengeWeeks 12 [Kathi, Assoc. Prof. Women Studies @ Duke, “The Future is Now: Utopian Demands and the Temporalities of Hope,” https://libcom.org/library/future-now-utopian-demands-temporalities-hope]

In the current political climate, the demands for basic income and shorter hours could of course be dismissed as "merely utopian." Rather than waste time on impractical and untimely demands, so the argument goes, feminists and others should conserve their meager energies and set their sights on more politically feasible goals . This familiar logic makes it easy to write such demands off as unrealistic , and therefore as potentially dangerous distractions from the necessarily modest and small-scale parameters of political reform. That is, the supposed utopianism of these demands is often considered a fàtal flaw. One could perhaps contest the claim that these demands are aptly designated utopian in this time and place, and certainly I have tried to point out their practicality in relation to current economic trends. But there is another way to respond to the critique. What if the utopianism of these demands is not a liability but an asset? 'What if we were to respond to the charge of utopianism not with embarrassment or defensive denial but with recognition and affirmation? And what might such a utopianism without apology look like? Rather than deny the applicability of the appellation "utopian" to escape its pejorative connotations, in this chapter I want to accept the label, reconsider utopianism as a distinctive mode of thought and practice, and explore what a utopian demand is and what it can do.

Of course, part of what is in dispute here is the status of the term. The definition of "utopia" in this chapter is broadly conceived, including not just the more traditional list of literary and philosophical blueprints of the good society, but also, as I will describe, a variety of partial glimpses of and incitements toward the imagination and construction of alternatives. One of these more fractional forms, the "utopian demand" - as I use the phrase - is a political demand that takes the form not of a narrowly pragmatic reform but of a more substantial transformation of the present configuration of social relations; it is a demand that raises eyebrows , one for which we would probably not expect immediate success. These are demands that would be difficult - though not impossible - to realize in the present institutional and ideological context; to be considered feasible, a number of shifts in the terrain of political discourse must be effected. In this sense, a utopian demand prefigures - again in fragmentary form - a different world, a world in which the program or policy that the demand promotes would be considered as a matter of course both practical and reasonable. It is not, however, just the status of the program or policy that is at stake; as the proponents of wages for housework recognized, the political practice of demanding is of crucial importance as well.

Our pedagogy is the most productive for resistance. It prepares us for a world where the levers of power are controlled by neoliberals. Only talking about our methodology of our actions can produce education that enables us to resist out of round.Giroux ‘4

(Henry, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, “Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Neo-liberalism: making the political more pedagogical”, Policy Futures in Education, Volume 2, Numbers 3 & 4, 2004, http://www.cws.illinois.edu/IPRHDigitalLiteracies/GirouxPublicPFinE2004.pdf)

-thatTheir

The moral implications of pedagogy also suggest that our responsibility as public intellectuals cannot be separated from the consequences of the knowledge we produce, the social relations we legitimate, and the ideologies and identities we offer up to students. Refusing to decouple politics from pedagogy means, in part, that teaching in classrooms or in any other public sphere should not only simply honor the experiences students bring to such sites, but should also connect their experiences to specific problems that emanate from the material contexts of their everyday lives . Pedagogy in this sense becomes performative in that it is not merely about deconstructing texts, but is also about situating politics itself within a broader set of relations that address what it might mean to create modes of individual and social agency which enable rather than shut down democratic values, practices, and social relations. Such a project

recognizes not only the political nature of pedagogy, but also situates it within a call for intellectuals to assume responsibility for their actions, to link their teaching to those moral principles that

allow us to do something about human suffering, as the late Susan Sontag has recently suggested.[19] Part of this task necessitates that cultural studies theorists and educators anchor their own work, however diverse, in a radical project that seriously engages the promise of an unrealized democracy against its really existing forms. Of crucial importance to such a project is the rejection of the assumption that theory can understand social problems without contesting their appearance in public life. More specifically, any viable cultural politics needs a socially committed notion of injustice if we are to take seriously what it means to fight for the idea of the good society. I think Zygmunt Bauman is right in arguing that: ‘If there is no room for the idea of wrong society, there is hardly much chance for the idea of good society to be born, let alone make waves.’[20] Cultural studies theorists need to be more forceful, if not committed, in linking their overall politics to modes of critique and collective action that address the presupposition that democratic societies are never too just or just enough. Such a recognition means that a society must constantly nurture the possibilities for self-critique, collective agency, and forms of citizenship in which people play a fundamental role in critically discussing, administrating, and shaping the material relations of power and ideological forces that bear down on their everyday lives. At stake here is the task, as the late Jacques Derrida insisted, of viewing the project of democracy as a promise – a possibility rooted in the continuing struggle for economic, cultural, and social justice.[21] Democracy in this instance is not a sutured or formalistic regime, it is the site of struggle itself. The struggle over creating an inclusive and just democracy can take many forms, offers no political guarantees, and provides an important normative dimension to politics as an ongoing process of democratization that never ends. Such a project is based on the realization that a democracy which is open to exchange, question, and self-criticism never reaches the limits of justice. By linking education to the project of an unrealized democracy , cultural studies theorists who work in higher education can make clear that the issue is not whether higher education has become contaminated with politics, but rather that it is more importantly about recognizing that education is already a space of politics, power, and authority . At the same time, they can make clear their opposition to those approaches to pedagogy that reduce it to a methodology like ‘teaching of the conflicts’ or, relatedly, to simply

opening up a culture of questioning. Both of these positions not only fail to highlight the larger political, normative, and ideological considerations that inform such views of education and pedagogy , but they also collapse the purpose and meaning of higher education , the role of educators as engaged scholars, and the possibility of pedagogy itself into a rather short-sighted and sometimes insular notion of method, albeit one that narrowly emphasizes argumentation and dialogue. There is a disquieting refusal in such discourses to raise broader questions about the social, economic, and political forces shaping the very terrain of higher education – particularly unbridled market forces, or racist and sexist forces that unequally value diverse groups of students within relations of academic power – or about what it might mean to engage pedagogy as a basis not merely for understanding, but also for participating in the larger world. There is also a general misunderstanding of how teacher authority can be used to create the pedagogical conditions for critical forms of education without necessarily falling into the trap of simply indoctrinating students.[22] For instance, liberal educator Gerald Graff believes that any notion of critical pedagogy that is self-conscious about its politics and engages students in ways that offer them the possibility for becoming critical – or what Lani Guinier calls the need to educate students ‘to participate in civic life, and to encourage graduates to give back to the community, which through taxes, made their education possible’ [23] – either leaves students out of the conversation or presupposes too much and simply represents a form of pedagogical tyranny. While Graff advocates strongly that educators create the educational practices that open up the

possibility of questioning among students, he refuses to connect pedagogical conditions that challenge how they think at the moment to the next step of prompting them to think about changing

the world around them so as to expand and deepen its democratic possibilities. George Lipsitz criticizes academics such as Graff, who believe that connecting academic work to social change is at best a burden and at worst a collapse into a crude form of propagandizing, suggesting that they are subconsciously educated to accept cynicism about the ability of ordinary people to change the conditions under which they live.[24] Teaching students how to argue, draw on their own experiences, or engage in rigorous dialogue says nothing about why they should engage in these actions in the first place . How the culture of argumentation and questioning relates to giving students the tools they need to fight oppressive forms of power, make the world a more meaningful and just place, and develop a sense of social responsibility is missing in work like Graff’s because this is part of the discourse of political education, which Graff simply equates to indoctrination or speaking to the converted.[25] Here, propaganda and critical pedagogy collapse into each other. Propaganda is generally used to misrepresent knowledge, promote biased knowledge, or produce a view of politics that appears beyond question and critical engagement. While no

pedagogical intervention should fall to the level of propaganda, a pedagogy that attempts to empower critical citizens cannot and should not avoid politics. Pedagogy must address the relationship between politics and agency, knowledge and power, subject positions and values, and learning and social change while always being open to debate, resistance, and a culture of questioning. Liberal educators committed to simply raising questions have no language for linking learning to forms of public scholarship that would enable students to consider the important relationship between democratic public life and education, politics and learning. Disabled by a depoliticizing, if not slavish, allegiance to a teaching methodology, they have little idea of how to encourage students pedagogically to enter the sphere of the political , which enables students to think about how they might participate in a democracy by taking what they learn ‘into new locations – a

third grade classroom, a public library, a legislator’s office, a park’ [26], or, for that matter, by taking on collaborative projects that ad dress the myriad of problems citizens face in a diminishing

democracy. In spite of the professional pretense to neutrality, academics need to do more pedagogically than simply teach students how to be adept at forms of argumentation. Students need to argue and question, but they need much more from their educational experience. The pedagogy of

argumentation in and of itself guarantees nothing, but it is an essential step towards opening up the space of resistance towards authority, teaching students to think critically about the world

around them, and recognizing interpretation and dialogue as a condition for social intervention and transformation in the service of an unrealized democratic order. As Amy Gutmann argues, education is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency and the ability to struggle with ongoing relations of power, and is a precondition for creating informed and critical citizens.[27] This is a notion of education that is tied not to the alleged neutrality of teaching methods but to a vision of pedagogy which is directive and interventionist on the side of

reproducing a democratic society. Democratic societies need educated citizens who are steeped in more than the skills of argumentation. And it is precisely this democratic project that affirms the

critical function of education and refuses to narrow its goals and aspirations to methodological considerations. This is what makes critical pedagogy different from training. And it is precisely the failure to connect learning to its democratic functions and goals that provides rationales for pedagogical approaches which strip the meaning of what it means to be educated from its critical and democratic possibilities.