Book review: Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, by Saskia Sassen
Now is a dire time to be poor, according to Columbia University sociology professor Saskia Sassen. In this scathing assessment of advanced global capitalism, Sassen says that as inequality widens, have-nots face expulsion from their jobs and homes.
by Saskia Sassen
Belknap Press
4 stars
David Wilson
Now is a dire time to be poor, according to Columbia University sociology professor Saskia Sassen. In this scathing assessment of advanced global capitalism, Sassen says that as inequality widens, have-nots face expulsion from their jobs and homes.
Displaced persons end up on the street, in refugee camps and motel-like, for-profit prisons that thrive on crime. These poor wretches have even less than old-school paupers, Sassen writes.
"The greater our capacity to produce wealth has become over the last 20 years (and finance has played a critical role here), the more radical the condition of poverty has become. It used to be that being poor meant owning or working a plot of land that did not produce much. Today the two billion people living in extreme poverty own nothing but their bodies."
Sassen documents some of the fiscal and ecological woes that pave the way to the rootless state she describes. Her audit of doom includes sub-prime mortgages, land grabs, water grabs, a precious metal-extraction technique called "cyanide heap leaching", and hydraulic fracturing or "fracking". Industrial abuse has made parts of the planet from Norilsk in Russia to Times Beach, Missouri, uninhabitable.
The rising sea is in even worse shape, thanks to carbon dioxide-caused acidification and nutrient pollution creating low-oxygen stretches called "dead zones". Then there are the floating garbage patches, Sassen notes.