Free money and 130,000 jobs: neoliberal state strategies for infrastructure privatization.(Author abstract)

Publication: Urban Anthropology & Studies of Cultural Systems & World Economic Development

Publication Date: 22-DEC-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 The Institute Inc.

Within 10 months of taking office, Indiana's newly elected Governor Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr., or Mitch, as he likes to be called, announced a plan to put up for bid a lease that would privatize a major Indiana highway, the Indiana Toll Road, part of the cross-country Interstates 80 and 90. Daniels called his plan to lease the Indiana Toll Road "Major Moves," appropriate since he had campaigned on a promise to shake things up in this conservative state. (1)

However, before he could sign the lease for the Toll Road, Daniels had to persuade the state legislature to pass a new law that would make that act legal. (2) Debate about the law centered on both the provisions of the lease and the wisdom of putting state assets in the hands of the foreign company that won the bid, a Spanish and Australian Consortium called Cintra-Macquarie. I was watching the hearings on a webcast when a senior Republican asked a question about how the money received for the lease would be handled. While the expert who could answer the question shuffled to the microphone, the web camera stayed on the representative, who rocked back in his chair, as he chuckled, "I said three point eight billion dollars; I should have said three point eight FIVE billion dollars. Three point eight FIVE billion dollars." His eyes glittered. "I always forget to add that point five billion dollars" (Indiana General Assembly 2006).

Three point eight five billion dollars is, as Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has said, an astounding sum of money to receive for a leased road. Indeed, Daniels was counting on just that mesmerizing quality to put into action his plan to get that money. As it happened, the mere mention of that amount of money did not secure the governor's plan; much to his surprise, he found there was objection on the part of the people of the state. First, he pouted. Then, he acted. This paper discusses the governor's subsequent undertakings as a specific neoliberal strategy designed to mobilize supporters and address the opposition. Daniels changed the terms of the debate about what constitutes a "public benefit." He justified the position of his central administration authority at the expense of the public at large by employing the discourses of crisis, the supervision of very large capital accumulation and the management of "the deal" that, he maintained, the sale of such valuable public infrastructure involved.

There is a significant literature that describes a new role for citizens with respect to the governing authority in the neoliberal states. Nicolas Rose and others have proposed that as the post-welfare state withdraws funds from social programs, it increasingly creates policies that make people responsible for their own welfare. Founding his argument on Foucault's (1991) ideas of governmentality, Rose (1993, 1994) argues that this change centers on a transformation in the management of expertise. In the contemporary neoliberal state, he argues, government has devolved expertise to the citizen, making social welfare into a series of choices that the new citizen-expert must be authorized and educated to select. When the state insists that issues of public policy and distribution of resources come down to questions of individual preference, it purports to give to citizens influence that it does not in practice grant to them (Rose 1993: 286; 1994: 384; 1996: 40-41). This move disempowers citizens, particularly those most in need of services, and it keeps the state at an increasing distance from its constituency. In this article, I show that another kind of neoliberal state policy, privatization of state assets, can produce yet another kind of subject position for its residents, but the end result is similar. The citizen as shareholder in a state run as a capital-intensive business concern, like the citizen-as-consumer, can be kept at a distance from the power centers of government.

Several ethnographies have provided detailed examples of the way that the market strategies of neoliberal regimes make the citizen as consumer of services into a focus of the technology of rule (Lukose 2005; Foley 2001; Paley 2001; Ong 1999: 88-109; Friedman 2005; Mankekar 1998; Shore and Wright 1997, and I cite only a representative few). (3) Susan Hyatt (1997) and Jeff Maskovsky (2000), for example, show that under regimes of neoliberalism, it is no longer legitimate for the poor to be the recipients of public services; consequently, the poor are turned into consumers to justify the withdrawal of state funds from social programs. These same ethnographies also document the way that the discourse of consumption makes the relation of state and people profoundly non-political because social welfare is premised on personal choice (Paley 2001a; see Micheletti 2003 for a counter-argument). Structures of state authority under liberal regimes can grant themselves the freedom to maneuver when the compliance of the citizens is ensured. (4)

In this article, I offer evidence to confirm Rose's argument that the management of expertise is a critical factor in strategies of government. However, I also contribute to the literature on the neoliberal state by analyzing the practices and consequences of a business-oriented discourse that justifies the centralization of command in the state executive office. In this case, the citizen-as-consumer is not the focus of governmental policy. The Toll Road privatization scheme did reflect the neoliberal business-oriented strategy that imposes market efficiencies and fiscal strategies: that is what privatization does. But Daniels' approach was innovative in that he also argued that his administration was forced by the circumstances of the sale to take advantage of its unique management skills to broker an unprecedented, capital-intensive deal. In contrast to Rose's argument that neoliberal governance claims to disperse expertise to citizens, Daniels maintained that the techne of government could only be effective when operated out of the "CEO's" office. As a senior lobbyist told me, "It's not just Major Moves, it's the Governor's Major Move" (personal interview February 22, 2006). The Major Moves initiative cast citizens as passive members of the corporation, Indiana, Inc. As in a corporation, Daniels contended that the managers must be allowed to make the decisions because they have the requisite expertise and understanding. Citizen involvement would be unnecessary and inappropriate, especially with a deal at hand that would present the state with a large sum of money: $3.85 billion. Indeed, Daniels and his supporters made no attempt to consult with the public before the deal was announced, and made little effort to deal with the strongly articulated public objections afterwards, except to extol the benefits of the "deal."

I will show that Daniels employed variations on the discourse of management and production to generate a specific set of meanings for the State of Indiana and its needs. As he sought to take the Toll Road private, Daniels created a sense of crisis to justify his insistence that Major Moves should be passed because the state required immediate and substantial investment of capital in highway infrastructure. He contended that the $3.85 billion came to the state free of charge, and the winning of such an impressive sum made questioning his decisions not just mistaken but irrational. Daniels positioned the state at once in the midst of competitive national and international powers, and implied that salvation lay only within the state border (Appadurai 1996). Within these bounds, he implied, underdevelopment threatened the livelihood of state residents, a dramatization of the plight of Indiana in this harsh financial environment (Ferguson 1994). He cited a seemingly impressive number to justify the employment gains that privatization would bring, but as Jacqueline Urla has demonstrated (1993; see also Comaroff and Comaroff 2006), the use of statistics in argument is hardly a neutral form of knowledge production. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997: 17; Ferguson and Gupta 2002) argue that the legitimization and authentication of identities and especially in this case, boundaries, must be understood in relation to shifting political and economic relations on different national and sub-national scales. This act of place making, of creating a "local" inside an ambiguous and threatening force field, is not an effort to designate any kind of "Hoosier identity" but rather is the creation of a political space for governing that contains and focuses command. (5)

The campaign for Major Moves can be seen as one aspect of a range of governmental strategies in the present day, especially since what have been termed neoliberal practices do not present a complete, historically continuous "package" of state-level developments (Hoffman el al. 2006). This becomes particularly clear when we study a state policy initiative, where the work of putting into place one policy in a particular context may ultimately generate a set of justifications distinct from the discourses produced by other state policies (Shore and Wright 1997). Thus, a state governor may maintain that the power to make decisions is best dispersed to its citizens while at the same moment he can choose to promote that same power as the domain of the executive office. In both strategies, as Rose (1996: 55) suggests, no regime gives up the intention to govern (see also Clarke 2004). And while I freely use the term "neoliberal" to represent Governor Daniels' effort to privatize the Indiana Toll Road, the resulting discourse is part of a diversity of ideologies that, as Susan Philips (2004: 231) has stated, seem to be "bombarding people with multiple social realities"; see also Sawyer 2001; Appadurai 2002). Daniels ultimately won this battle, but his spectacular assumption of authority was hardly complete. He made himself a public target and citizens aimed penetrating protests at his actions, dissent which required Daniels and his allies to devise a series of counter moves. Daniels succeeded when he combined the creation of a crisis and the assumption of authority, a parallel to the discourse of impeding fiscal disaster and subsequent corporatization of New York City that Julian Brash has described (2003, 2006).

The use of language and images is particularly critical to the way the Daniels administration presented Major Moves, and is the major focus of this analysis. Indeed, the legal situation put a premium on the justifications for privatization, since Daniels could only put his plan into action by giving a majority of state legislators a reason to vote for selling the Toll Road. However, the language use that surrounded Major Moves implied far more than the routine institution of a policy position, and analysis of language provides the methodological basis for understanding the conflict and outcome of Major Moves. In this discussion, I follow the approach of Shore and Wright who argue that policy language and discourse "provides a key to analyzing the architecture of modern power relations ... the relationship between governance, policy and subjectivity ..." (1997: 12). The discourse of policy initiatives constructs citizens as objects of power, and presents normative statements, put forward as the definition of a problem and its solution, "as if these were the only ones possible, while enforcing closure or silence on other ways of thinking or talking" (1997: 3). I evaluate the power relations constructed through...

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