Professional Documents
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1ac Critical Financial Surveillance Pedagogy - DDI 2015 KS
1ac Critical Financial Surveillance Pedagogy - DDI 2015 KS
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.
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 debts. 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
challenge
Weeks 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 ftal 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.
this task
principles that allow us to do something about human suffering, as the late Susan Sontag has recently suggested.[19] Part of
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
Lipsitz
of prompting them to think about changing the world around them so as to expand and deepen its democratic possibilities. George
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 legislators 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
. As Amy Gutmann
and dialogue as a condition for social intervention and transformation in the service of an unrealized democratic order