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Broken Arrow | 2 | Union | David Galoob |
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Broken Arrow | 4 | idk |
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Grennhill | 4 | Rowland Hall | Kirk Evans |
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Broken Arrow | 4 | Opponent: idk | Judge: This is the Cap K we read |
Grennhill | 4 | Opponent: Rowland Hall | Judge: Kirk Evans 1ac was some mexico stuff we lost |
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Capitalism KTournament: Broken Arrow | Round: 4 | Opponent: idk | Judge: Last week, on the eve of the Summit of the Americas held in Trinidad and Tobago, President Barack Obama announced new measures to permit unlimited Cuban-American travel and remittances to the island. These relaxations immediately set off predictions that the entire travel ban would soon be lifted. And in fact, there are bills in both the House and Senate that aim to do just that. The excitement over these new possibilities, however, should be tempered with a note of caution. Although there have always been important voices raised in the United States over the injustice of the embargo, much of the progressive mobilization effort of recent years has focused on a complete end to the travel ban, demanding the right to travel “for all, not for some.” The campaign has generated support partly by casting the embargo as a violation of U.S. citizens’ freedom to travel. But as full liberalization of travel now looms, it is clearer than ever that a progressive opposition to U.S. Cuba policy needs to focus on ending the entire embargo, and for the right, big-picture reasons: The embargo violates Cuban sovereignty and is patently imperialist. Otherwise, the momentum for U.S. Cuba policy reform will be co-opted by representatives of the tourism, agricultural and telecommunication industries. The new relaxations announced by Obama are, of course, mostly positive and welcome; any measures that diminish the daily hardships endured by Cubans would be. But these changes will also ensure that money and goods sent to Cuba will go through private hands and family networks, rather than allowing the Cuban state to guide the distribution of those resources. While the socialist government has a decidedly mixed record on overturning historic inequalities based on race and class, we nevertheless know, based on what happened during the Special Period, that resources funneled through private channels greatly exacerbate existing class and especially race tensions. Obama's reforms will play out differently among Miami's increasingly diverse Cuban community. Recently emigrated, less educated, darker-skinned migrants will likely use the reforms to help improve their families' situation back on the island, primarily at the level of everyday purchases like food, clothes, and home repairs. However, assistance sent by Miami's more established and affluent Cuban-Americans could help their relatives on the island acquire centrally-located property on the black market or proffer the substantial bribes that have increasingly become necessary to secure small business licenses and sometimes even to obtain plum jobs in the tourist sector. Thus, the new measures will not benefit all Cubans equally. They will raise the consumption levels of those with family abroad and, less directly, of those employed in the service sector in Havana and other tourist destinations. But the embargo, which remains firmly in place through the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, will still block things like the importation of badly needed modern farming equipment and key infrastructural improvements. Fully ending the travel ban is necessary and desirable, but doing so while leaving the embargo in place is one way that Washington is trying to scuttle Havana's ability to guide its own internal affairs. The capital’s youth population is already particularly frustrated with the inaccessibility of certain consumer goods and the difficulties of receiving permission to travel abroad. An avalanche of iPod-toting U.S. spring-breakers will only exacerbate this frustration. A U.S.-induced tourist boom also stands to increase the steady stream of migration from places like the impoverished easternmost province of Oriente toward Havana. These migrants already face difficulty legalizing their residency in Havana and are often forcibly deported back to their place of origin. In either case, tensions with their Havana neighbors and police could grow. Anyone who has spent time in Miami knows that Bush’s draconian restrictions, imposed during his campaign for reelection in 2004, never managed to fully contain visits and remittances. Countless small outfits sent money through unofficial channels and paid “mules” to carry goods to the island. Cuban-Americans flew through third countries to visit their relatives and friends. Such endeavors were costly and complicated, but they were rarely if ever prosecuted. The embargo has never been about fully blocking all movement of people and goods. Instead, it has sought to define which channels are legitimate. Goods distributed through individuals, family, church, and the rare humanitarian assistance effort were deemed acceptable. Exchanges promoted by political solidarity movements or formal bilateral trade relations were off limits. In other words, give Cubans charity, not solidarity; give them sporadic aid, not trade. It has been clear to U.S. authorities ever since the early 1960s that economic pressure alone would not topple the Cuban government. The embargo has been more about making a lesson out of Cuba, showing the rest of Latin America the kinds of consequences that would accompany a socialist revolution. Despite Washington's rhetoric about using sanctions as leverage to promote democracy, the embargo has always harbored a cruel subtext of punishing Cubans for supporting Fidel Castro. Capitalism causes endless war and the creation of death zones globally, and especially in Latin America. The world of peace promised by the affirmative is a mask for capitalism’s continual production of death, dispossession, and violence as a condition of its existence. Locating imperialism and the legacies of colonialism in contemporary forms of capitalism is central to the theoretical development of necrocapitalism. Violence, dispossession, and death that result from practices of accumulation occur in spaces that seem to be immune from legal, juridical, and political intervention, resulting in a suspension of sovereignty. In the modern era the democratization of sovereignty is still fundamentally determined by and grounded in mechanisms of disciplinary coercion (Foucault 1980) – coercion that was more apparent and visible during colonial times but is more sophisticated in its operation in the postcolonial era. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s (1985) definition of sovereignty as one ‘who decides on the state of exception’, Agamben (1998: 17) argues that through the state of exception, the sovereign ‘creates and guarantees the situation that the law needs for its own validity’. Agamben describes the Nazi state, the current status of Palestine, and ‘legal civil wars’ as examples of states of exception in the modern era. The US Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay is perhaps one of the latest examples of a state of exception where ‘enemy combatants’ that are incarcerated there are not legal subjects or prisoners of war but have become ‘legally unnameable and unclassifiable beings entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight’ (Agamben 2005: 4). Violence, torture, and death can occur in this space of exception without political or juridical intervention. The state of exception thus creates a zone where the application of law is suspended but the law remains in force. Agamben (1998: 27) develops the ancient Roman legal notion of homo sacer or sacred man – ‘one who may be killed but not sacrificed’. In ancient Roman law, homo sacer referred to people whose deaths were of no value to the gods and thus could not be sacrificed but could be killed with impunity because their lives were deemed be of no value to society. Homo sacer occupied a space both outside (and hence inside) divine law and juridical law; they were objects of sovereign power but excluded from being its subjects; ‘mute bearers of bare life deprived of language and the political life that language makes possible’ (Gregory 2004: 63). A sovereign decision to apply a state of exception invokes a power to decide the value of life, which would allow a life to be taken without the charge of homicide. The killings of mentally and physically handicapped people during the Nazi regime was justified as ending a ‘life devoid of value’, a life ‘unworthy to be lived’. Sovereignty thus becomes a decision on the value of life, ‘a power to decide the point at which life ceases to be politically relevant’ (Agamben 1998: 142). Sovereignty has always been a moving target and despite Westphalian notions of the independence and ‘supreme authority’ of nation states, the jurisdiction of borders have been routinely transgressed as ‘sovereignty has become progressively unbundled from territoriality’ (Raustiala 2005). Far from being a fixed political and legal category, sovereignty was always a ‘sociological praxis full of exceptions, fissures and fractures’ (Shenhav and Berda 2008). Benton’s (2002: 10) analysis of legal politics during the colonial era reveals what she calls the ‘jurisdictional politics’ of conflicts arising from multiple legal procedures and authorities. ‘Jurisdictional fluidity’ and ‘legal jockeying’ enabled the creation of a space to govern the colonies in India and Africa while expanding European claims to sovereignty. In the historical praxis of colonialism the state of exception in the colonies was more the rule, resulting in multiple and interrupted sovereignties that were used to govern the natives. However, in both Foucault’s formulation of sovereignty and the production of the biopolitical body and Agamben’s deployment of homo sacer and states of exception, the omission of the colony is notable. The colony, as Mbembe (2003: 14) points out, represented a permanent state of exception where sovereignty became an exercise of power outside the law, where ‘peace was more likely to take on the face of a war without end and where violence could operate in the name of civilization’. In fact, as Anghie (2005) points out, colonialism and imperialism (Anghie uses these terms interchangeably) were constitutive of European notions of sovereignty, international law, and development. Discourses of ‘civilization’ and ‘development’, for example, created and sustained the binary categories of civilized–barbaric and developed–underdeveloped, where sovereignty always remained on the side of the ‘civilized’ and ‘developed’. Once sovereignty was established along the dimensions of civilization and development, the key ‘universal’ problem was how to create order among sovereign states by developing techniques to ‘normalize the aberrant society’ (Anghie 2005: 4). As Hussain (2003) argues, the historical formation of colonialism reveals the self-generative epistemic space of the West in its ability to create the rule and the exception. Thus, the European notion of sovereignty that became the basis of international law has its roots in colonialism and tends to reproduce and reinforce colonial modes of control even in the present era. While transgressions of sovereignty were common in the colonial era where the colony marked a permanent state of exception, there are different levels of sovereignties in today’s neoliberal political economy. In contemporary political economy, states of exception, uneven sovereignties, and gradations of rights are produced and maintained by what Stoler (2006: 128) calls ‘imperial formations’ which she describes as ‘states of becoming, rather than being’. Imperial formations in today’s political economy do not reflect a ‘steady state’ enclosed by national sovereign boundaries but have more to do with how the economy and polity are organized. A ‘politics of dislocation’ characterizes imperial formations involving ‘systematic recruits and transfers of colonial agents, native military, redistribution of peoples and resources, relocations and dispersions, contiguous and overseas territories’ (Stoler 2006: 138). States of exception created by imperial formations are not restricted to the former colonies ‘out there’ but include ‘the West’. The ‘West’ operates not so much as a particular set of geographical locations, or indeed a specific collection of locationally defined peoples, but is a discursive space formed by a network of economic and power relations (Banerjee and Linstead 2001). Spaces of imperial exception also occur in metropolitan contexts – for example, the migrant bodies, the ‘illegal’ or ‘undocumented bodies’ that labor in the ‘ethnic enclaves’ that contain the sweatshops of New York, London, and Paris (Ong 2006). The American brand of neoliberalism that seems to be embraced by the supranational institutions that govern the global economy and adopted by several countries in the developing world represents a type of ‘radicalized capitalist imperialism’ (Ong 2006: 1) that is increasingly tied to military action, often in the name of maintaining ‘security’. The imperial formations that create states of exception and multiple sovereignties in the postcolonial era are enabled and sustained by the formation of economic states of exception created by neoliberal policies. Thus, ‘neoliberalism as exception’ produces specific arrangements of sovereignty and citizenship that are enabled by the ‘infiltration of market logic into politics’ while constructing subjectivities that reflect market citizenship and a ‘reconfiguration of relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge and sovereignty and territoriality’ (Ong 2006: 6). If the sword of commerce was most visibly active in the days of empire, its activity in the postcolonial era continued the violence in a more covert manner, often with the complicity of the political elites in the former colonies. Ong (2006) develops the notion of ‘graduated sovereignty’ to describe how some countries in South East Asia, notably the so-called ‘Asian tigers’, embraced the global market with a combination of governmental political strategies and military repression. Her research on globalization in Indonesia and Malaysia showed that the interaction between states and transnational capital resulted in a differential state treatment of the population already fragmented by race, ethnicity, gender, class, and religion as well as a reconfiguration of power and authority in the hands of transnational corporations operating in special export processing zones. The neoliberal turn in these regions follows a different trajectory where the interplay of market versus state results in differing levels of sovereignty: some areas of the economy have a very strong state presence and in other areas, markets and foreign capital rule. State sovereignty is dispersed because global markets and capital, with the collusion of governments, create states of exception where coercion, violence, and killings occur. State repression against rebel populations and separatist movements is often influenced by market forces: as Ong (2006) argues, territories are cleared of rebels (‘outlawed citizens’) to make way for logging concessions, petroleum pipelines, mines, and dams. Thus, necrocapitalism creates states of exceptions where ‘democratic rights are confined to a political sphere’ while continuing forms of domination, exploitation, and violence in other domains (Wood 2003: 80). Accumulation by Death and Dispossession Violence, death, and dispossession and their relationship with capitalism is not new: in Volume I ofCapital, Marx (1867: 926) wrote: ‘If money comes into the world with a congenital blood stain on one cheek, then capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.’ Early capitalist practices of recruiting labor involved violence, often sanctioned by law. The legislation against ‘vagabondage’, for example, transformed peasants who were driven off the land into vagabonds to be ‘whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system’ (Marx 1867: 899). Colonialism added a racial dimension to the exploitation of labor – for example, Marx describes the colonial capitalist practices in Africa as ‘extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population … and the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins’ (Marx 1867: 915). In his analysis of death metaphors in Marx’s work, Neocleous (2003) draws parallels between capital and death, arguing that Marx’s critique of political economy is ultimately a ‘political economy of the dead’. At various points in Capital, Marx refers to capital as ‘dead labor’ in opposition to ‘living labor’ where capitalist rule is the ‘independent conditions of labor over the worker … the rule of things over man, of dead labor over living’ (Marx 1867: 989). However, rather than reduce death to distinctions between labor whether in a colonial or a metropolitan context, it is necessary to understand necrocapitalism as a practice that operates through the establishment of colonial sovereignty, and the manner in which this sovereignty is established in the current political economy where the business of death can take place through states of exception. In the postcolonial era the imperial prerogative, as Chatterjee (2005: 495) argues, is the ‘power to declare the colonial exception’. Thus, while the ‘international community’ agrees that nuclear proliferation should be stopped, it becomes an imperial right for some to decide that while India and Israel may be allowed to have nuclear weapons, it is unacceptable for North Korea or Iran to do so. The entities in this colonial space of exception must either be disciplined by violence or ‘civilized by culture’ to become normalized. The colonial state of exception is also the space where more profits accrue whether it is through the extraction of resources, the use of privatized militias or through contracts for reconstruction. In this sense, it is necessary to read the manner in which colonial sovereignty operates to create states of exception conducive to the operation of necrocapitalist practices. Mbembe (2003) extends Foucault’s notion of sovereignty as power that produces and regulates a biopolitical body, or the power to ‘make live or let die’ (Foucault, 1978) to develop his concept of necropolitical power that involves the subjugation of life to the power of death. These forms of necropolitical power literally create ‘death worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of the living dead’ (Mbembe 2003: 40). Situating necropolitics in the context of economy, Montag (2005: 11) argues that if necropolitics is interested in the production of death or subjugating life to the power of death then it is possible to speak of a necroeconomics – a space of ‘letting die or exposing to death’. Montag explores the relation of the market to life and death in his reading of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments(Smith 1986). In Montag’s reading of Smith, it is ‘the dread of death, the great poison to the happiness ... which while it afflicts and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society’ (cited in Montag 2005: 12). If social life was driven solely by unrestrained self-interest, then the fear of punishment or death through juridical systems kept the pursuit of excessive self-interest in check, otherwise people would simply rob, injure, and kill for material wealth. Thus, for Smith the universality of life is contingent on the particularity of death, the production of life on the production of death where the intersection of the political and the economic makes it necessary to exercise the right to kill. The market then, as a ‘concrete form of the universal’ becomes the ‘very form of universality as life’ and requires at certain moments to ‘let die’. Or as Montag theorizes it, ‘Death establishes the conditions of life; death as by an invisible hand restores the market to what it must be to support life. The allowing of death of the particular is necessary to the production of life of the universal. The market reduces and rations life; it not only allows death, it demands death be allowed by the sovereign power, as well as by those who suffer it. In other words, it demands and requires the latter allow themselves to die. Thus alongside the figure of homo sacer, the one who may be killed with impunity, is another figure, one whose death is no doubt less spectacular than the first and is the object of no memorial or commemoration: he who with impunity may be allowed to die, slowly or quickly, in the name of the rationality and equilibrium of the market’. (Montag 2005: 15) Montag, therefore, theorizes a necroeconomics where the state becomes the legitimate purveyor of violence: in this scenario, the state can compel by force ‘those who refuse to allow themselves to die’ (Montag 2005: 15). However, Montag’s concept of necroeconomics appears to universalize conditions of poverty through the logic of the market. My concern, however, is the creation of death worlds in colonial contexts through the collusion between states and corporations. If states and corporations work in tandem with each other in colonial contexts, creating states of exception and exercising necropower to profit from the death worlds that they establish, then necroeconomics fails to consider the specificities of colonial capitalist practices. I argue that necrocapitalism emerges from the intersection of necropolitics and necroeconomics, as practices of accumulation in (post)colonial contexts by specific economic actors – transnational corporations, for example – that involve dispossession, death, torture, suicide, slavery, destruction of livelihoods, and the general management of violence. It is a new form of imperialism, an imperialism that has learned to ‘manage things better’. The fundamental feature of necrocapitalism is accumulation by dispossession and the creation of death worlds in colonial contexts. Land privatization and the subsequent forceful expulsion of peasants, conversion of public property into private property, restrictions on public use of common property resources, neocolonial practices of asset appropriation, control over natural resources in the former colonies, and the suppression of alternate, indigenous forms of consumption and production are some forms of dispossession in contemporary political economy (Harvey 2005: 145). In contemporary forms of accumulation, the corporation is a powerful actor and in conjunction with nation states, supranational bodies, and international agencies contributes to a necrocapitalist privatization of sovereignty. The transformation of European colonialism to a new ‘imperialism without colonies’ also required coercive power and brute force often with the collusion of postcolonial political elites in the former colonies where local states emerged as sites of power for capitalist accumulation. Thus, rather than marking the ‘death of the nation state’, the globalization of markets is dependent on a system of multiple states which required ‘a new doctrine of extra-economic, especially military, coercion. An endless invisible empire, which has no boundaries, even no territory, requires war without end, an infinite war, and a new doctrine of war to justify it’ (Wood 2003: 161). And to further clarify the relationship between markets and war, President George W. Bush, in an attempt to address concerns about the dramatic decline in tourism and air travel in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, told airline employees that ‘one of the great goals of this war is to tell the traveling public: Get on board’ (cited in Gregory 2004). Thus, for the American tourist to ‘get on board’ to enjoy a holiday, stimulate the tourism market, and save airline jobs it becomes necessary for some people to die, as homo sacer, in a state of exception outside national and international law. The creation of new spaces of exceptions is a weapon for the ideological arsenal of empire where the imposition of an economic relationship becomes paramount, using force if required. Thus, the right to rule is justified ‘by the right, indeed the obligation, to produce exchange value’ (Wood 2003: 157). Economic domination where markets manage much of the imperial work extends the powers and reach of colonial states. New economic doctrines require new military doctrines as well. War without end does not necessarily mean endless fighting: the coercive mechanisms of capital require an endless possibility of war. ‘War without end’ has an impressive genealogy in the West. Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1907: ‘Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked … The seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry.’ (cited in Katz 2006) The nexus between economic interests and military power, which characterized the colonial project, continues to operate in the new imperial formations that constitute the contemporary neoliberal project and is another enabling condition of necrocapitalism. Political sovereignty becomes subservient to corporate sovereignty and economics rather than politics determines war zones. In imperial formations, power is deployed to repress ‘symptoms of despair’, and to establish behavioral and economic norms in ‘a system for regulating disorder’ (Joxe 2002: 14). The involvement of US multinationals along with the CIA in fomenting military and political coups in Latin America (notably United Fruit Inc. in Guatemala and Colombia and ITT in Chile and Brazil) is well documented (Dosal 1993; Grandin 2006). Millions of dollars were spent by the US government to destabilize Chile in the 1970s – on learning that Chile had elected a Marxist president in 1970, Nixon instructed the CIA to ‘make their economy scream’ in an effort to ‘smash Allende’ (Grandin 2006). Corporate strategies to ensure ‘safe havens’ for their investment included obtaining US government support for dictatorial regimes, violent reprisals using state military and police to suppress dissent, and bribes and kickbacks to political elites. Because violence was deployed in these states of exception, both governments and corporations were able to kill with impunity: Colombia in 1929, when the military gunned down striking United Fruit workers killing at least 400 (Kepner and Soothill 1935), and the US-backed military coup in Guatemala in 1954, where more than 200 union leaders were killed, are two of the more widely publicized cases involving violence and multinational capital (Chomsky and Herman 1979). Privatization of the commons through corporate control of natural resources is another ‘sword of commerce’ that subjugates lives and destroys livelihoods by creating states of exception in many developing regions. In Latin America, for example, it is estimated that more than 2000 government industries were sold off between 1985 and 1992, many of them below their market value to private buyers ‘with connections’ to the military and US corporate and government interests (Grandin 2006). The collusion of local states is instrumental in the battle over natural resources: a 1975 Philippine government advertisement placed in Fortune magazine declared: ‘To attract companies like yours ... we have felled mountains, razed jungles, filled swamps, moved rivers, relocated towns … all to make it easier for you and your business to do business here’ (cited in Korten 1995). The effects of creating a ‘business friendly climate’ are often violent, leading to loss of life and the creation of death worlds. For instance, a combination of trade liberalization in agriculture (agriculture is ‘liberalized’ in the Third World and protected in the First) and the failure of genetically modified seeds has been linked to a 260 increase in suicide rates of farmers in India (Milmo 2005). More than 4000 farmers have committed suicide in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh since the imposition of agricultural reforms. The suicide rate among farmers is the highest in cash crop growing regions. In 2005 there were 520 suicides by farmers in Vidarbha, the largest cotton growing region in India. Six journalists covered the ‘farmer suicides story’ in February 2006. That same week 512 journalists were jostling for space in Mumbai for the Lakme Fashion Week where models were exhibiting the new chic cotton dresses made from cotton grown by farmers who were killing themselves less than 500km away. Roy (2001: 46) claims that ‘India’s rural economy which supports 700 million people, is being garroted. Farmers who produce too much are in distress, farmers who produce too little are in distress, and landless agricultural laborers are out of work as big estates and farms lay off their workers. They’re all flocking to already overcrowded cities in search of employment.’ Roy (2001) has also documented the displacement of villagers in large-scale dam projects in India. She estimates that between 30 and 50 million people have lost their traditional lands as a result of dam projects. A single project, the Sardar Sarovar dam project will displace 400,000 tribal peoples once it is completed. is the case in all developing countries, the dispossessed do not participate in any of the benefits: the electricity generated by the dams is for use by city dwellers and the water for irrigating large industrial agriculture farms. Necrocapitalist practices deny people access to resources that are essential to their health and life, destroy livelihoods, and dispossess communities. The privatization of water in Africa and South America is a case in point: in almost every case where water was privatized the poorer segments of society ended up paying not only higher prices for water but paid with their lives as well. In South Africa during 2002–2003 more than 100,000 people were infected with cholera, leading to the deaths of 200 people after the South African government (following World Bank ‘recommendations’) denied water and sanitation services to thousands of citizens in KwaZulu-Natal province who were too poor to pay their water bills (Barlow and Clarke 2002). World Bank water policies encourage ‘cost recovery’: however, the problem is that corporate costs are recovered at the expense of people who are denied access to clean water and sanitation. Race and class also determine who suffers, who lives and who dies: in South Africa 600,000 white farmers consume 60 of the country’s water supplies for irrigation while 15 million black people have no access to clean water (Barlow and Clarke 2002). A similar situation exists in the maquiladoras of Mexico where clean water is scarce because it is mainly reserved for use by foreign-owned industries in the region. And when Bolivia’s economy was ‘structurally adjusted’ by the World Bank, one of the conditions was to sell off the national water company, which the Bolivian government did to Bechtel. Not long after the purchase, water bills rose by 200 for an already impoverished citizenry, with the government even attempting to charge citizens for collecting rainwater for personal use. Extended protests by the people forced the Bolivian government to take over the water supply again, leading Bechtel to exit Bolivia, albeit with a $25 million payout (Grandin 2006). Other contemporary cases of accumulation by dispossession that can be seen as necrocapitalist practices are the privatization of war resulting from the increasing use of privatized military forces and conflicts over natural resources between transnational corporations and indigenous communities in the Third World, which I will discuss in the next section. The alternative is solidarity with revolutionary struggle against capitalism. Voting negative is a refusal of the tepid half-measures of the 1AC in favor of clearing the space for a truly just and equitable society. In a sense, this is indeed the community of interests of the "haves" against the "have nots," of the Old against the New. The "collaborationist" policy of the Soviet Union necessitates the pursuance of power politics which increasingly reduces the prospect that Soviet society, by virtue of its basic institutions alone (abolition of private ownership and control of the means of production: planned economy) is still capable of making the transition to a free society. And yet, the very dynamic of imperialist expansion places the Soviet Union in the other camp: would the effective resistance in Vietnam, and the protection of Cuba be possible without Soviet aid? However, while we reject the unqualified convergence thesis, according to which -at least at present -the assimilation of interests prevails UPOIl the conflict between capitalism and Soviet Socialism, we cannot minimize the essential difference between the latter and the new historical efforts to construct socialism by developing and creating a genuine solidarity between the leadership and the liberated victims of exploitation. The actual may considerably deviate rom the ideal, the fact remains that, for a whole generation, "freedom," "socialism," and "liberation" are inseparable from Fidel and Che and the guerrillas -not because their revolutionary struggle could furnish the model for the struggle in the metropoles, but because they have recaptured the truth of these ideas, in the day-to-day fight of men and women for a life as human beings: for a new life. What kind of life? We are still confronted with the demand to state the "concrete alternative." The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops. If we could form a concrete concept of the alternative today, it would not be that of an alternative; the possibilities of the new society are sufficiently "abstract," i.e., removed from and incongruous with the established universe to defy any attempt to identify them in terms of this universe. However, the question cannot be brushed aside by saying that what matters today is the destruction of the old, of the powers that be, making way for the emergence of the new. Such an answer neglects the essential fact that the old is not simply bad, that it delivers the goods, and that people have a real stake in it. There can be societies which are much worse – there are such societies today. The system of corporate capitalism has the right to insist that those who work for its replacement justify their action. But the demand to state the concrete alternatives is justified for yet another reason. Negative thinking draws whatever force it may have from its empirical basis: the actual human condition in the given society, and the "given" possibilities to transcend this condition, to enlarge the realm of freedom. In this sense, negative thinking is by virtue of its own internal concepts "positive": oriented toward, and comprehending a future which is "contained" in the present. And in this containment (which is an important aspect of the general containment policy pursued by the established societies), the future appears as possible liberation. It is not the only alternative: the advent of a long period of "civilized" barbarism, with or without the nuclear destruction, is equally contained in the present. Negative thinking, and the praxis guided by it, is the positive and positing effort to prevent this utter negativity. The concept of the primary, initial institutions of liberation is familiar enough and concrete enough: collective ownership, collective control and planning of the means of production and distribution. This is the foundation, a necessary but not sufficient condition for the alternative: it would make possible the usage of all available resources for the abolition of poverty, which is the prerequisite for the turn from quantity into quality: the creation of a reality in accordance with the new sensitivity and the new consciousness. This goal implies rejection of those policies of reconstruction, no matter how revolutionary, which are bound to perpetuate (or to introduce) the pattern of the unfree societies and their needs. Such false policy is perhaps best summed up in the formula "to catch up with, and to overtake the productivity level of the advanced capitalist countries." What is wrong with this formula is not the emphasis on the rapid improvement of the material conditions but on the model guiding their improvement. The model denies the alternative, the qualitative difference. The latter is not, and cannot be, the result of the fastest possible attainment of capitalist productivity, but rather the development of new modes and ends of production "new" not only (and perhaps not at all) with respect to technical innovations and production relations, but with respect to the different human needs and the different human relationships in working for the satisfaction of these needs. These new relationships would be the result of a "biological" solidarity in work and purpose, expressive of a true harmony between social and individual needs and goals, between recognized necessity and free development -the exact opposite of the administered and enforced harmony organized in the advanced capitalist (and socialist?) countries. It is the image of this solidarity as elemental, instinctual, creative force which the young radicals see in Cuba, in the guerrillas, in the Chinese cultural revolution. Solidarity and cooperation: not all their forms are liberating. Fascism and militarism have developed a deadly efficient solidarity. Socialist solidarity is autonomy: selfdetermination begins at home -and that is with every I, and the We whom the I chooses. And this end must indeed appear in the means to attain it, that is to say, in the strategy of those who, within the existing society, work for the new one. If the socialist relationships of production are to be a new way of life, a new Form of life, then their existential quality must show forth, anticipated and demonstrated, in the fight for their realization. Exploitation in all its forms must have disappeared from this fight: from the work relationships among the fighters as well as from their individual relationships. Understanding, tenderness toward each other, the instinctual consciousness of that which is evil, false, the heritage of oppression, would then testify to the authenticity of the rebellion. In short, the economic, political, and cultural features of a classless society must have become the basic needs of those who fight for it. This ingression of the future into the present, this depth dimension of the rebellion accounts, in the last analysis, for the incompatibility with the traditional forms of the political struggle. The new radicalism militates against the centralized bureaucratic communist as well as against the semi-democratic liberal organization. There is a strong element of spontaneity, even anarchism, in this rebellion, expression of the new sensibility, sensitivity against domination: the feeling, the awareness, that the joy of freedom and the need to be free must precede liberation. Therefore the aversion against preestablished Leaders, apparatchiks of all sorts, politicians no matter how leftist. The initiative shifts to small groups, widely diffused, with a high degree of autonomy, mobility, flexibility. To be sure, within the repressive society, and against its ubiquitous apparatus, spontaneity by itself cannot possibly be a radical and revolutionary force. It can become such a force only as the result of enlightenment, education, political practice -in this sense indeed, as a result of organization. The anarchic element is an essential factor in the struggle against domination: preserved but disciplined in the preparatory political action, it will be freed and aufgehoben in the goals of the struggle. Released for the construction of the initial revolutionary institutions, the antirepressive sensibility, allergic to domination, would militate against the prolongation of the "First Phase," that is, the authoritarian bureaucratic development of the productive forces. The new society could then reach relatively fast the level at which poverty could be abolished (this level could be considerably lower than that of advanced capitalist productivity, which is geared to obscene aflluence and waste). Then the development could tend toward a sensuous culture, tangibly contrasting with the gray-on-gray culture of the socialist societies of Eastern Europe. Production would be redirected in defiance of all the rationality of the Performance Principle; socially necessary labor would be diverted to the construction of an aesthetic rather than repressive environment, to parks and gardens rather than highways and parking lots, to the creation of areas of withdrawal rather than massive fun and relaxation. Such redistribution of socially necessary labor (time), incompatible with any society governed by the Profit and Performance Principle, would gradually alter society in all its dimensions -it would mean the ascent of the Aesthetic Principle as Form of the Reality Principle: a culture of receptivity based on the achievements of industrial civilization and initiating the end of its self-propelling productiVity. Not regression to a previous stage of civilization, but return to an imaginary temps perdu in the real life of humankind: progress to a stage of civilization where humans has learned to ask for the sake of whom or of what s/he organizes his/her society; the stage where he checks and perhaps even halts his incessant struggle for existence on an enlarged scale, surveys what has been achieved through centuries of misery and hecatombs of victims, and decides that it is enough, and that it is time to enjoy what he has and what can be reproduced and refined with a minimum of alienated labor: not the arrest or reduction of technical progress, but the elimination of those of its features which perpetuate humanity's subjection to the apparatus and the intensification of the struggle for existence -to work harder in order to get more of the merchandise that has to be sold. In other words, electrification indeed, and all technical devices which alleviate and protect life, all the mechanization which frees human energy and time, all the standardization which does away with spurious and parasitarian "personalized" services rather than multiplying them and the gadgets and tokens of exploitative affiuence. In terms of the latter (and only in terms of the latter), this would certainly be a regression -but freedom from the rule of merchandise over man is a precondition of freedom. The construction of a free society would create new incentives for work. In the exploitative societies, the so-called work instinct is mainly the (more or less effectively) introjected necessity to perform productively in order to earn a living. But the life instincts themselves strive for the unification and enhancement of life; in nonrepressive sublimation they would provide the libidinal energy for work on the development of a reality which no longer demands the exploitative repression of the Pleasure Principle. The "incentives" would then be built into the instinctual structure of men. Their sensibility would register, as biological reactions, the difference between the ugly and the beautiful, between calm and noise, tenderness and brutality, intelligence and stupidity, joy and fun, and it would correlate this distinction with that between freedom and servitude. Freud's last theoretical conception recognizes the erotic instincts as work instincts -work for the creation of a sensuous environment. The social expression of the liberated work instinct is cooperation, which, grounded in solidarity, directs the organization of the realm of necessity and the development of the realm of freedom. And there is an answer to the question which troubles the minds of so many men of good will: what are the people in a free society going to do? The answer which, I believe, strikes at the heart of the matter was given by a young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do. | 12/15/13 |
China DATournament: Broken Arrow | Round: 2 | Opponent: Union | Judge: David Galoob Once upon a time, as many fairy tales start, the United States was the prevailing force in Latin America. It had a coherent policy for its southern neighbors, and its opinions mattered to those who governed in the region. Despite President Barack Obama's recent trip to Mexico and Costa Rica, and Vice President Joe Biden's upcoming trip to the region, that is no more. The days when John F. Kennedy created the Alliance for Progress and was a hero to the young throughout the western hemisphere have been gone for more than half a century. The time when Jimmy Carter pledged to back only those governments that respected human rights and encouraged that caudillos be ousted is also a historical footnote. True, the world has changed. The attacks of September 11, 2001 made everyone look to the East; to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Iran, Syria and other countries in the Middle East. Israel is still crucial to American foreign policy, more so now that militants are willing to die to kill Americans and Israelis. Latin America also changed when the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez was elected. The rising price of oil gave Chávez riches beyond belief and he began sharing it with similar-minded leaders in Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay and Argentina; just to name a few. Colombia once depended greatly on the Plan Colombia assistance from the United States to fight the FARC guerrillas and the drug lords that governed much of the country. The emphasis on the Plan Colombia since Juan Manuel Santos took office has decreased. Santos also believes in negotiations with the FARC and closer ties to those who govern in Venezuela. Mexico counted on American intelligence assistance and money to fight the drug cartels until Obama's visit to Enrique Peña Nieto, recently elected president. The communique at the end of the meeting talked about new economic cooperation between the two nations and how together they would fight the drug cartels. Not highlighted was the Mexican-imposed position that the United States agents would no longer be welcome in their country and that the cooperation would be respectful of their sovereign rights. Peña Nieto, the candidate of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) wanted a different approach to the war on drugs; one that would mitigate the violence that had killed thousands of Mexicans in the last decade. Finally, China has helped change the equation. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, for several years the United States was the only super power. When American presidents spoke, the world listened. Now China offers both a challenge to the United States, as a second super power, and has become an alternative economic trading partner for countries throughout the world. Still, it is inconceivable that American media and officials pay so little attention to the region. Maybe those around President Obama have not told him that Iran has close ties with Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela. Certainly the administration must know Cuba and Venezuela are so close that many critics of President Nicolás Maduro are now saying Cubans are helping to keep him in power. They talk, only part in jest, that there is a new country in the region called Cubazuela – the alliance between Cuba's Raúl Castro and Maduro's supporters is so close. It is true all have heard the main culprit of the drug trade in the world is American and European consumption. Yet the United States has waged war on the producers and importers, and not on the consumers at home. Seldom has Latin America been further from American influence. Many of the leftists' presidents in the region consider the United States their enemy. Others maintain cordial, or even friendly relations with Washington, but are quick to negotiate economic deals with China. The task is not easy, granted. Yet it would help if the United States and the Obama Administration articulated a policy for its neighbors in Latin America. They should not be a second thought in America foreign policy. The region deserves better. So does the United States. This country needs to improve those ties or continue to lose status as a premier world power. This is no fairy tale. Plan shuts out China—economic relations in Latin America are zero sum
What is China doing in the Americas? It’s a good question—and an increasingly important one for policymakers in Washington. According to one U.S. analyst, it’s about “goodwill, good business and strategic position.”1 Perhaps. But the jury is still out, mostly because China’s interest in the Western Hemisphere is barely a decade old. For many years, beyond attempts to wean Latin American and Caribbean nations away from support for Taiwan and efforts to build Third World solidarity, China’s footprint in the Americas was light. That has now changed. Since then-President Jiang Zemin’s 13-day trip to Latin America in April 2001 and the subsequent visits of President Hu Jintao in 2004 and 2011, Chinese engagement with the region has exploded. Today, China is the top trade partner of Brazil and Chile, and the second trade partner of Argentina and Peru. By late 2010, Chinese enterprises had invested almost $44 billion in the region, according to China’s National Development and Reform Commission, almost a quarter of which was invested in 2010 alone. Top investment targets included Brazil, but also Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. Innovative financing by Chinese entities was often behind the deals—and in some cases, such as Ecuador and Venezuela, investments took the form of loans secured by guaranteed future deliveries of oil. That is a marked change from 2003, the year before Hu’s first visit, when China invested just $1 billion in all of Latin America. By now the outlines of the story are well known. As part of the dash for economic growth that the Chinese Communist Party believes will help to maintain its legitimacy—an average annual rate of 9.8 percent from 1979 to 2009, including an 8.7 percent growth rate in 2009 when much of the rest of the world faced economic collapse—Beijing is on a global quest to lock in the natural resources that fuel its growth. From Southeast Asia to Africa to Latin America and beyond, China is scouring the globe to invest in primary commodities. By the end of 2011, more than $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves provided an impressive war chest from which to purchase the global assets that China’s leaders believe they need to support economic growth—and thus political stability—for the medium to longer term. As China faces its own near-term leadership transition, efforts to purchase domestic political stability with foreign trade and investment are likely to intensify. At the same time, Latin American nations that have been the primary trade and investment partners with China have also gained handsomely, at least in the short term, in the sectors that produce primary goods. Longer term questions abound regarding the balance and terms of trade, the nature of the investments that China is making, and the values that are being promoted or undermined by such investments.2 Additionally, nations that are not supplying significant amounts of commodities to China, including Mexico and Central America, view China more as an aggressive competitor than as an economic partner. The costs and benefits of trade with China are unequally distributed across the Americas. 2. CCP instability leads to nuclear war. What, then, is the gist of this wild, last-ditch gamble? To put it in a few words: A cornered beast is fighting desperately to survive in a battle with humanity. If you don’t believe me, read some passages directly from the speeches. 1) “We must prepare ourselves for two scenarios. If our biological weapons succeed in the surprise attack on the US, the Chinese people will be able to keep their losses at a minimum in the fight against the U.S. If, however, the attack fails and triggers a nuclear retaliation from the U.S., China would perhaps suffer a catastrophe in which more than half of its population would perish. That is why we need to be ready with air defense systems for our big and medium-sized cities. Whatever the case may be, we can only move forward fearlessly for the sake of our Party and state and our nation’s future, regardless of the hardships we have to face and the sacrifices we have to make. The population, even if more than half dies, can be reproduced. But if the Party falls, everything is gone, and forever gone!” 2) “In any event, we, the CCP, will never step down from the stage of history! We’d rather have the whole world, or even the entire globe, share life and death with us than step down from the stage of history!!! Isn’t there a ‘nuclear bondage’ theory? It means that since the nuclear weapons have bound the security of the entire world, all will die together if death is inevitable. In my view, there is another kind of bondage, and that is, the fate our Party is tied up with that of the whole world. If we, the CCP, are finished, China will be finished, and the world will be finished.” 3) “It is indeed brutal to kill one or two hundred million Americans. But that is the only path that will secure a Chinese century, a century in which the CCP leads the world. We, as revolutionary humanitarians, do not want deaths. But if history confronts us with a choice between deaths of Chinese and those of Americans, we’d have to pick the latter, as, for us, it is more important to safeguard the lives of the Chinese people and the life of our Party. That is because, after all, we are Chinese and members of the CCP. Since the day we joined the CCP, the Party’s life has always been above all else!” Since the Party’s life is “above all else,” it would not be surprising if the CCP resorts to the use of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in its attempt to extend its life. The CCP, which disregards human life, would not hesitate to kill two hundred million Americans, along with seven or eight hundred million Chinese, to achieve its ends. These speeches let the public see the CCP for what it really is. With evil filling its every cell the CCP intends to wage a war against humankind in its desperate attempt to cling to life. That is the main theme of the speeches. This theme is murderous and utterly evil. In China we have seen beggars who coerced people to give them money by threatening to stab themselves with knives or pierce their throats with long nails. But we have never, until now, seen such a gangster who would use biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons to threaten the world, that all will die together with him. This bloody confession has confirmed the CCP’s nature: that of a monstrous murderer who has killed 80 million Chinese people and who now plans to hold one billion people hostage and gamble with their lives. | 11/16/13 |
Food Security DATournament: Broken Arrow | Round: 2 | Opponent: Union | Judge: David Galoob Unable to afford the fertilizers and pesticides that 20th-century agriculture had taken for granted, the country faced extreme weather events and a limit to the land and water it could use to grow food. The rest of the world will soon face many of the same problems: In the coming decade, according to the OECD, we’ll see higher fuel and fertilizer costs, more variable climate patterns, and limits to arable land that will drive cereal prices 20 percent higher and hike meat prices by 30 percent—and that’s just the beginning. Policymakers can find inspirational and salutary ideas about how to confront this crisis in Cuba, the reluctant laboratory for 21st-century agriculture. Cuban officials faced the crisis clumsily. They didn’t know how to transform an economy geared toward sweetening Eastern Europe into one that could feed folk at home. Agronomists had been schooled in the virtues of large-scale industrial collective agriculture. When the “industrial” part became impossible, they insisted on yet more collectivization. The dramatic decline in crop production between 1990 and 1994, during which the average Cuban lost 20 pounds, was known as “the Special Period.” Cubans have a line in comedy as dark as their rum. Cuban peasants proved more enterprising than the government and demanded change. First, they wanted control over land. The state had owned 79 percent of arable land, and most was run in state cooperatives. Initially the government refused to listen, but the depth of the crisis and the demands of organized farmers created some space for change. Through reform, the government decentralized farm management. The land remains in government hands, but now it is also available with “usufruct” rights to tenants, who can invest in the soil and pass the land onto their children. But that took the farmers only so far. So some of the country’s agronomists, plant breeders, soil scientists, and hydrologists (Cuba has 2 percent of Latin America’s population but 11 percent of its scientists) found themselves being put to use by Cuban peasants in the fields. Their task: figure out how to farm without the fossil-fuel products upon which the country’s agricultural systems had become dependent. With no fertilizer, pesticide, or herbicide, and no means to import substitute chemicals, many in the scientific community landed on “agro-ecology.” To understand what agro-ecology is, it helps first to understand why today’s agriculture is called “industrial.” Modern farming turns fields into factories. Inorganic fertilizer adds nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous to the soil; pesticides kill anything that crawls; herbicides nuke anything green and unwanted—all to create an assembly line that spits out a single crop. This is modern monoculture. Agro-ecology uses nature’s far more complex systems to do the same thing more efficiently and without the chemistry set. Nitrogen-fixing beans are grown instead of inorganic fertilizer; flowers are used to attract beneficial insects to manage pests; weeds are crowded out with more intensive planting. The result is a sophisticated polyculture—that is, it produces many crops simultaneously, instead of just one. In Cuba, peasants encouraged scientists to adopt this approach. One of their most important ideas, borrowed from elsewhere in Central America, was a model of knowledge diffusion called “Campesino a Campesino”—peasant to peasant. Farmers share their results and ideas with one another and with scientists, which has helped agro-ecological systems spread. The paragraphs below describe the items requiring a license for anti-terrorism (AT) reasons for export or reexport to the designated terrorist-supporting countries, as appropriate. Pursuant to the 1993 determination of the Acting Secretary of State, and subsequent action consistent with such determination, certain items are controlled pursuant to Section 6(j) of the Act, while others are controlled pursuant to Section 6(a). The Department of Commerce refers all license applications for items controlled for AT reasons to the Department of State for review. Transactions involving exports or reexports of items controlled pursuant to Section 6(j) to military or other sensitive end-users in designated terrorist-supporting countries, as described in paragraph A below, are subject to a general policy of denial. With respect to items controlled pursuant to Section 6(a) (including exports or reexports of items described in paragraph A below to non-sensitive end-users), a determination must be made regarding whether the requirements of Section 6(j) apply. If the Secretary of State determines that the particular export “could make a significant contribution to the military potential of the destination country, including its military logistics capability, or could enhance the ability of such country to support acts of international terrorism,” the Department of Commerce and the Department of State must notify the appropriate congressional committees 30 days before issuing a license, consistent with the provisions of Section 6(j) of the Act. Transactions not subject to such requirements are generally reviewed on a case-by-case basis. However, as described further in Chapter 5, the United States maintains comprehensive embargoes on exports and reexports to Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria. As a result, the U.S. Government reviews license applications for exports and reexports of most items to these countries based on a general policy of denial, with certain very limited exceptions. The Department of Commerce continues to maintain AT controls with respect to these countries, though such controls and the related licensing policies are secondary to the comprehensive embargoes in place. A. Pursuant to Section 6(j) of the Act, the Department of Commerce requires a license for the export or reexport of the following items to military or other sensitive end-users in all six designated terrorist-supporting countries for AT reasons: All items subject to national security controls (Wassenaar Arrangement). (7) All items subject to chemical and biological weapons proliferation controls (Australia Group). All items subject to missile-proliferation controls (Missile Technology Control Regime). All items subject to nuclear weapons-proliferation controls (Nuclear Referral List). All military-related items (items controlled by CCL entries ending with the number 18). B. Pursuant to Section 6(a) of the Act, the Department of Commerce requires a license for the export of the following items to non-sensitive end-users in all six designated terrorist-supporting countries for AT reasons: Aircraft, including helicopters and engines, and related spare parts and components controlled under 9A991. Ammonium nitrate, including certain fertilizers containing ammonium nitrate controlled under 1C997. Bearings and bearing systems controlled under 2A991. Canopies, harnesses, and platforms controlled under 9A992. Certain chemical mixtures controlled under 1C995. Certain fluorocarbon compounds for cooling fluids for radar and supercomputers controlled under 1C006.d. Commercial charges and devices controlled under 1C992. Computer numerically controlled machine tools controlled under 2B991. Computers for processing fingerprints controlled under 4A980. Cryptographic, cryptanalytic, and cryptologic equipment controlled under 5A992. Digital computers controlled under 4A994. Electronic test equipment controlled under 3B992. Equipment for test, inspection, or production of navigation or avionics equipment controlled under 7B994. Explosives detection equipment controlled under 2A983. Fibrous materials for use in composite structures controlled under 1C990. Gear cutting machines controlled under 2B993. General electronic equipment controlled under 3A992. Gravity meters with static accuracy 100 microgal or with quartz elements controlled under 6A997. Heavy-duty on-highway tractors controlled under 9A990. Lasers controlled under 6A995. Machine tool parts controlled under 2B998. Magnetic or optical storage manufacturing equipment controlled under 4B994. Magnetometers with sensitivity 1.0 nt rms per root hertz controlled under 6A996. Manual dimensional inspection machines controlled under 2B996. Marine and submarine engines controlled under 8A992. Materials for production of hard drives controlled under 4C994. Microprocessors with a clock speed greater then 25 MHz controlled under 4A994. Navigation, direction finding, and radar equipment controlled under 7A994. Non-numerically controlled machine tools controlled under 2B992. Off-highway wheel tractors controlled under 9A990. Optical materials controlled under 6C994. Optical sensing fiber controlled under 6C992. Optical sensors controlled under 6A992. Optics controlled under 6A994. Positive resists controlled under 3C992. Preforms for optical fibers controlled under 5C991. Protective and detection equipment and components controlled under 1A995. Radar, systems, and equipment controlled under 6A998. Robots employing feedback information in real time controlled under 2B997. Semiconductor manufacturing equipment controlled under 3B991. Specially designed tools for the manufacture or measure of gas turbine blades controlled under 9B991. Specially designed tools to manufacture lasers controlled under 6B995. Submersible systems controlled under 8A992. Telecommunications test equipment controlled under 5B991. Telecommunications transmission equipment controlled under 5A991. Underwater photographic equipment controlled under 8A992. Vaccines, immunotoxins, diagnostic, and food testing kits controlled under 1C991. Vessels and boats including inflatable boats controlled under 8A992. Vibration test equipment controlled under 9B990. Software and technology for the items above may also be controlled ? Different Models: Agroecology versus Industrial Agriculture | 11/16/13 |
SecurityTournament: Grennhill | Round: 4 | Opponent: Rowland Hall | Judge: Kirk Evans | 11/16/13 |
T - IncreaseTournament: Broken Arrow | Round: 2 | Opponent: Union | Judge: David Galoob B. Violation: The aff does not increase economic engagement directly, but rather removes a barrier that allows for future increases C. Voting issue for competitive equity
2. Ground- All disad links are based on direct increase. 3. FX T- Only the effect of the plan is topical. This is an independent voter because it allows for unfair advantages like spike outs. | 11/16/13 |
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