Are you a loser?

And what to do with the “losers”? They are deemed disposables (and remember, we are all ultimately disposable under neoliberalism). And so we see poor folk—especially poor folk of color—killed by police without consequence. We see postindustrial communities no longer deemed valuable by state governments and left without clean, safe drinking water, as in Flint, Michigan. We see poor youth abandoned without affordable and excellent education. We see refugees forced to flee their homes by war or social and economic collapse but rejected at the border or forced to languish in refugee camps. We see undocumented workers exploited but reviled for supposedly taking away jobs from “real” and “good” citizens.

And we see millions of people—again, disproportionately poor and of color—confronted by (increasingly militarized) police forces and flung into (increasingly privatized) prisons. Given historical and structural racism, poor people of color start the neoliberal race with the least advantage and so are likely to fall behind fastest and furthest. To cope with the armies of the most dramatically dispossessed, neoliberalism has developed a “criminal industrial complex.” The War on Drugs, for example, has been waged especially vigorously against poor people of color. Initiated by President Richard Nixon, the War on Drugs was rooted in the soil of racism. H. R. Haldeman, onetime assistant to Nixon,commented that the president “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem really is the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while appearing not to.”(Duggan, Twilight of Equality?, 18)— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 49–50