Chattanooga’s Neo-Liberal Urban Agenda

Chattanooga’s select chosen – land developers, business owners, corporate & non-profit executives – have long moved effortlessly through a revolving door between board rooms and government service, members in good standing of an exclusive (Mountain City) club who continue to use their positions, their wealth, and their influence, along with a compliant and indispensable media, to nourish and perpetuate the neo-liberal order of things. Neo-liberalism is probably best defined as “state-capitalism”, a political orientation based on the principles of deregulation, privatization, and the use of political office to hand out exclusive tickets to an all you can eat buffet at the tax-payer trough. Neo-liberalism is currently the dominant political paradigm in Chattanooga city government. Our elected officials, particularly our mayor, are maniacally fixated with applying “market solutions” to public problems - public problems which are themselves created, perpetuated and made worse by the market. This has created a vicious cycle, a feedback loop of epic proportions that, looking to history, will ultimately end in Chattanooga’s undergoing an inevitable economic collapse on par with that of Detroit, Michigan and Camden, New Jersey.

The stages of the vicious neo-liberal cycle go something like this:

THE RICH DECLARE WAR ON US

Hundreds of millions of dollars are lavished on multi-national corporations by state and municipal governments that, in their frenzy to provide jobs to voters in our struggling economy, are pitted against one another in an unflinching race-to-the-bottom. In addition to the thirty year tax abatements and intensive capital funding we fork out to the likes of Alstom, Amazon and Volkswagen in return for their locating here, the city has found numerous ways to make an official policy out of guaranteeing high profit margins for the wealthy by socializing the cost of doing business. One simple example: tourists ride for free on electric shuttles to downtown businesses and restaurants while the city’s residents who work in those very businesses and restaurants are taxed every time they ride a bus to their home or job. Tax-payers front the costs for a local tourist industry that privatizes the profits. Ironically, our buses don’t even follow a path out to the sites of the very businesses we paid hundreds of millions of dollars to bring here, creating an obvious barrier that excludes thousands of tax-payers from interviewing for the very jobs they will spend the next several decades paying for.

THE BODY COUNT PILES UP

As a direct result of the theft of our communal resources by multinational corporations we are left with dwindling funds with which to meet our most pressing material needs – like repairing our infrastructure, constructing more schools, and expanding social welfare programs to meet the rising needs of our most vulnerable communities. To take one pertinent example, public housing has been systemically starved of all resources for decades in Chattanooga and the Chattanooga Housing Authority has officially slated for ALL our public housing stock to be demolished - historically these demolitions are followed by a political push from the top for the tax-payers to cover the costs for local developers to build expensive condos on prime real estate so long as a handful of units are set aside for the poor. We are currently facing what can only be described as a housing crisis and our city’s official solution is to destroy the stock we have and replace it with fewer units that are privately owned but publicly financed, in the process displacing thousands of people to areas where they are less likely to find jobs, have adequate public transportation and are likely to suffer greater food insecurity.

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE

One crisis begets another in the vicious cycle of applying more market solutions to public crises created by markets – all to the benefit of the wealthy and wicked. Naomi Klein has labeled this cycle of using a crisis to fundamentally re-orient a government's policies towards a hard-line neo-liberal approach as “the shock doctrine”. The “shock doctrine” is in full effect in Chattanooga: unemployment gives rise to a crisis that government officials say will be remedied through “economic development”, a term which in practice entails the dumping of our city’s resources into the laps of corporate executives in return for the crumbs that “trickle down” to us from the top of their table. We are then left with fewer resources, which leads to more cuts to public services and social welfare programs, deepening the crisis being felt by poor and working people in our city. Local policy makers also argue that largely unaccountable for-profit corporations should be provided tax-payer monies for the sake of “efficiency” and to “create a business friendly atmosphere” - all of this is code for shock doctrine neo-liberal policies. We can see how a crisis caused by the market is used as a rationale for the application of "market solutions", and the feedback loop continues and the crisis deepens giving rise to further neo-liberal policies.

TOO BIG TO FAIL

While we cut social services and transfer our wealth to multinationals in return for jobs, we become dependent on those very corporations for our economic life. Their jobs and products become the economic underpinning for the consumer base that provides our tax-revenue, through property and sales taxes. Institutions like VW, Amazon, and Alstom then all become "too big to fail" because too much is riding on their continued presence. They also become "too big to jail" in the case of corporate misconduct (and our society is rampant with corporate misconduct). As more of our community's resources are transferred to the corporate behemoths, the power of indvidual citizens and groups of citizens to influence pubic policy adversarial to the interests of big businesses diminishes. We literally buy our way into slavery - in the process pegging our future on the hope that our masters won't require us to bail them out. In the meantime, their profit margins, made ever higher by the padding provided by the tax-payers who place many of the costs and risks of doing business on their tab, will still be the private reward to stockholders and company executives.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

Appearances can be deceiving. Chattanooga might appear to be bouncing back from the Great Recession with the arrival of Big Business. But what happens when those businesses give up the ghost? What happens when they get a sweet deal for expansion elsewhere or take a downturn for the worse? What happens when their ultimate interests are not aligned with those of our city and the wider public? What happens when we refuse to keep paying their tax-bills and light-bills and ponying up for capital improvements and other costs? If history is any guide, and it always is, then what we have to look forward to is the same future of other cities in our country who relied on huge multi-national corporations as their economic foundation:

UPDATE 3/9/2012: In the paragraph under the header "The Body Count Piles Up" I make the following claim:

To take one pertinent example, public housing has been systemically starved of all resources for decades in Chattanooga and the Chattanooga Housing Authority has officially slated for ALL our public housing stock to be demolished

After a recent conversation with Chattanooga Housing Authority officials I would have to modify this claim. CHA has slated for ALL our public housing stock to be demolished or dispossessed - much as in the case of Harriet Tubman, where CHA does not have the funds to for demolition, so they are hoping to sell the property off. Obviously both dispossession and demolition would require the displacement of residents currently living in those communities, but in the case of dispossession the housing crisis could be made worse by a local land developer buying public housing properties that do not meet federal standards for public housing, but meet the minimum requirements for the market. Developers could then throw on cosmetic changes and open the doors with little to no accountability to residents for the real, long-term material conditions of their homes.
This leaves public housing supporters and residents in a strange Catch-22: supporting the demolition of public housing to prevent a local land developer from purchasing them and turning them into a slum and the subsequent purchase of the property by another developer who will then gentrify the community.