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Tournament | Round | Opponent | Judge | Cites | Round Report | Open Source | Edit/Delete |
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Alta | 1 | All | All |
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1 | emails | emails |
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Meadows | 1 | Gulliver Prep CT | Nathaniel Haas |
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Meadows | 3 | Rowland Hall- St Marks RW | Spenser Silbey |
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Meadows | 5 | Hamilton RS | Josh Miller |
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NDCA | 3 | Lexington AX | Shunta Jordan |
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Notre Dame | 1 | Nevada Union FP | Alex Velto |
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UNLV | 4 | Damien CS | Clara Purk |
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Tournament | Round | Report |
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Alta | 1 | Opponent: All | Judge: All 1AC- Cuban Embargo (Notre Dame Version) with wording change in plan text |
Meadows | 1 | Opponent: Gulliver Prep CT | Judge: Nathaniel Haas 1AC- Cuban Embargo OFAC Multilat |
Meadows | 3 | Opponent: Rowland Hall- St Marks RW | Judge: Spenser Silbey 1AC- Cuban Embargo- OFAC Multilat |
Meadows | 5 | Opponent: Hamilton RS | Judge: Josh Miller 1AC- Cuban Embargo- OFAC Multilat |
NDCA | 3 | Opponent: Lexington AX | Judge: Shunta Jordan 1AC - Braceros |
Notre Dame | 1 | Opponent: Nevada Union FP | Judge: Alex Velto 1AC- Embargo- Multilat |
UNLV | 4 | Opponent: Damien CS | Judge: Clara Purk 1AC - Braceros |
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
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1AC Braceros UNLVTournament: UNLV | Round: 4 | Opponent: Damien CS | Judge: Clara Purk ¶ Capiz and others have worried that Gutiérrez will accept only partial repayment of¶ bracero coffers, not the full $500 million to $1 billion they believe should be given elderly¶ contract workers. In defense of their own approach, members of Braceroproa argue that it is far¶ more important to begin some payment process, and that in so doing they will push forward a¶ more honest historical reckoning with past contract labor, and a more critical account of the¶ causes and consequences of contemporary Mexico-U.S. migration. Gutiérrez emphasized that¶ “For us, the most important thing is that they start paying. Once they start paying one exbracero,¶ they have to pay all of them.”19 That approach may finally pay some dividends, if not¶ sixty years of interest on lost bracero earnings. In December 2004, the Mexican government¶ included in its 2005 fiscal budget a $30 million fund to fund payments to braceros, covering¶ some 9,000 former contract workers who labored in the U.S. between 1942 and 1946. Tempers¶ have since flared as the Mexican government has seemed intentionally to delay the dispersal of¶ those funds. In mid-August of this year, when California’s Ventura Gutiérrez led a rally in¶ Mexico City to demand that the Mexican Interior Ministry begin disbursing checks, the¶ assembled crowd of former braceros and their families threw rocks at the Ministry, broke a glass¶ door, and crowded inside officials’ offices.20 Others have since continued to press the cause of¶ ex-bracero claims, and just within the last several weeks, the Mexican government announced¶ that its first payments, in amounts apparently ranging from $4,000 to $6,000, will begin in¶ November 2005.¶ Those who labored in the United States from 1942 to 1946 will be the first to receive¶ those checks, only those who enrolled with the Mexican government in 2003 will be included at¶ this stage, and BJM activists remain anxious about whether the tens of thousands of braceros not¶ included in this year’s budget will receive their due. Although the Mexican government now¶ seems ready to act, the process of negotiating repayment and respect for past bracero labors¶ remains deeply transnational. Networks of aging contract workers connect distant parts of¶ Mexico, cross into the barrios of Los Angeles and Chicago, and rely heavily on longstanding¶ 17¶ labor groups, and on the immigrant organizations that have gathered U.S. residents together¶ around social activities, and by home state, for decades. In Yucatán, therefore, the first payments¶ to ex-braceros next month will be coordinated by Gladys Pinto Muñoz, president of the Yucatec¶ Federation of California.21 In Los Angeles, the city’s vibrant federation of Mexicans from the¶ state of Zacatecas has played an important role in organizing the most recent ex-bracero¶ campaigns. Responding in part to bracero activism, the United States announced in April 2004¶ that Mexican workers eligible for U.S. Social Security benefits can now have those funds directdeposited¶ into Mexican bank accounts. And in the United States, groups of braceros continue to¶ work with hired attorneys to reopen a class action lawsuit that would force both countries to pay¶ all living braceros a far greater sum of money. Contention two – Modern day slavery C. The Bracero Programs and Operation Wetback¶ In the same way that American employers sought the labor¶ of the Chinese in the late 19th century, agricultural employers¶ made heavy use of Mexicans escaping economic and political¶ persecution after the political upheaval of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. However, when Congress passed the Immigration¶ Act of 1917, agricultural employers worried that the Act’s liter¶ acy and head tax requirements would severely reduce their immi¶ grant labor supply.5° Due to pressure from agribusiness, the¶ government waived these requirements for Mexicans.5’ These¶ official actions were crucial to maintaining an exploitable, non¶ white work force of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans.52¶ As jobs became scarce during the Great Depression, the¶ Mexican worker population was controlled through mass deportations of persons with Spanish sounding names or Mexican features¶ who could not produce formal papers.¶ Mexicans were deported from 1931-1934. Many of these persons were citizens or legal residents, but simply could not prove¶ their status. By 1942, labor shortages and World War II had¶ created the need for more agricultural workers.54 Thus, growers¶ convinced the United States government to enter into the¶ Bracero Program, a large scale contract labor program with Mex¶ ico.5 Braceros were the perfect exploitable underclass, willing¶ to work for low wages and in deplorable conditions.¶ By 1946, it became impossible to separate Mexican Americans from deportable Mexicans. Thus, in 1954, over one million¶ people were deported under “Operation Wetback.”56 Many¶ United States citizens were mistakenly “repatriated” to Mexico,¶ including individuals who looked Mexican but had never even¶ been to Mexico. The program included a relentless media cam¶ paign to characterize the Operation as a national security necessity, and a tightening of the border to deter undocumented¶ immigration.58¶ It found ways to keep more nonwhites from coming and dis-¶ empowering those already here. This system of marginalization¶ of nonwhite immigrants and their descendants continues today.¶ Since the passage of employer sanctions against those who hire¶ undocumented immigrants in 1986, it has become more difficult¶ and less socially acceptable to hire undocumented workers.¶ Since undocumented immigrants can no longer legally serve as¶ cheap labor, their presence in the United States has come under¶ attack from politicians, voters, and legislators. Additionally, the Braceros program was modern day slavery that created a legacy of fear and cultural xenophobia that will continue indefinitely without immediate action. We know about contemporary American slave quarters: the camps¶ for migrant agricultural workers, the city slums that breed horizontal¶ violence among young people, our prisons … especially our prisons. The¶ structure of slavery has not left our bloodstream. Like a renegade gene,¶ it keeps replicating itself, pulling in different ethnic groups to satisfy its¶ cancerous voraciousness for profit. Africans, Irish, Italians, Chinese,¶ Japanese, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Haitians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis,¶ Sudanese, Mexicans. The evil triplets that Martin Luther King, Jr. warned¶ us about—racism, militarism, and capitalism—have shown up at the¶ U.S./Mexico border, and they are busy doing their work.¶ It is impossible to talk with migrants without documents without¶ being reminded of slavery and indentured servitude. Fleeing poverty,¶ civil war, political repression and torture, or genocide, migrants describe¶ how they work multiple menial jobs, often below minimum wage,¶ without workplace safeguards, environmental standards, and workers’¶ representation through unions. While contributing their labor to the¶ common good and part of their earnings to our social security pools,¶ they and their children will not enjoy the benefits of these pools. They¶ are accused of exhausting local resources for health, policing, and¶ education. In a just world the federal government would transfer these¶ social security contributions to the municipalities where the majority¶ of migrants live, taking the pressure off local budgets. Migrants live in¶ the shadows of our cities, surrendering a voice for justice out of fear of¶ being deported and unable to support their families. As DuBois said¶ of African-Americans before them, they are “shut out from their world¶ by a vast veil” of racism.27¶ How ironic the far Right’s discourse on immigration from Mexico¶ sounds when placed in a historical context. “Intruders,” “foreigners,”¶ “parasites,” “illegals,” “carriers of disease.” The historical amnesia is¶ shocking. California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah were¶ the northern part of Mexico 160 years ago. Twenty-five thousand¶ Mexicans died in an effort to retain their national lands. Upon defeat,¶ 100,000 Mexicans became trapped within the new borders of the United¶ States, their families separated by the forcible imposition of a new¶ national border, many forcibly displaced from their land, others lynched¶ and subjected to mob violence.28 Mexicans say, “we did not cross the¶ border, the border crossed us.” Skeptics claim the Bracero program offered economic security and independence to workers – or that the plan trades off with Obama’s agenda– this type of political rationality epitomizes a racist biopolitics that makes war a constant feature of civil society I have thus far discussed Foucault’s triangulation between the discourses of the production of truth, the power that these discourse enact and make available to social agents, and the constitution of a political rationality that is linked to the invention and creation of its horizon of activity and surveillance. I want now to focus on the main theme of this courses’ last lecture. This theme discloses in a unique way the power and perspicacity of Foucault’s method. The theme concerns the kind of power that biopower renders available, or rather, how biopolitics produces certain power effects by thinking of the living in a novel way. We will approach the theme by way of a contrast: whereas the power of the sovereign under Medieval and early Modern times was the power to make die and to let live, the power of the total state, which is the biopower state, is the power to make live and to let die. Foucault discerned here a telling asymmetry. If the sovereign exercised his power with the executioner’s axe, with the perpetual threat of death, then life was abandoned to its devices. Power was exhibited only on the scaffold, or the guillotine –its terror was the shimmer of the unsheathed sword. Power was ritualistic, ceremonial, theatrical, and to that extent partial, molecular, and calendrical. It was also a power that by its own juridical logic had to submit to the jostling of rights and claims. In the very performance of its might, the power of the sovereign revealed its limitation. It is a power that is localized and circumscribed to the theater of its cruelty, and the staging of its pomp. In contrast, however, the power of the biopower state is over life expand. And here Foucault asks “how can biopolitics then reclaim the power over death?” or rather, how can it make die in light of the fact that its claim to legitimacy is that it is guarding, nurturing, tending to life? In so far as biopolitics is the management of life, how does it make die, how does it kill? This is a similar question to the one that theologians asked about the Christian God. If God is a god of life, the giver of life, how can he put to death, how can he allow death to descend upon his gift of life –why is death a possibility if god is the giver of life? Foucault’s answer is that in order to re-claim death, to be able to inflict death on its subjects, its living beings, biopower must make use of racism; more precisely, racism intervenes here to grant access to death to the biopower state. We must recall that the political rationality of biopower is deployed over a population, which is understood as a continuum of life. It is this continuum of life that eugenics, social hygiene, civil engineering, civil medicine, military engineers, doctors and nurses, policeman, and so on, tended to by a careful management of roads, factories, living quarters, brothels, red-districts, planning and planting of gardens and recreation centers, and the gerrymandering of populations by means of roads, access to public transformations, placement of schools, and so on. Biopolitics is the result of the development and maintenance of the hothouse of the political body, of the body-politic. Society has become the vivarium of the political rationality, and biopolitics acts on the teeming biomass contained within the parameters of that structure built up by the institutions of health, education, and production. This is where racism intervenes, not from without, exogenously, but from within, constitutively. For the emergence of biopower as the form of a new form of political rationality, entails the inscription within the very logic of the modern state the logic of racism. For racism grants, and here I am quoting: “the conditions for the acceptability of putting to death in a society of normalization. Where there is a society of normalization, where there is a power that is, in all of its surface and in first instance, and first line, a bio-power, racism is indispensable as a condition to be able to put to death someone, in order to be able to put to death others. The homicidal meurtrière function of the state, to the degree that the state functions on the modality of bio-power, can only be assured by racism “(Foucault 1997, 227) To use the formulations from his 1982 lecture “The Political Technology of Individuals” –which incidentally, echo his 1979 Tanner Lectures –the power of the state after the 18th century, a power which is enacted through the police, and is enacted over the population, is a power over living beings, and as such it is a biopolitics. And, to quote more directly, “since the population is nothing more than what the state takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to slaughter it, if necessary. So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics.” (Foucault 2000, 416). Racism, is the thanatopolitics of the biopolitics of the total state. They are two sides of one same political technology, one same political rationality: the management of life, the life of a population, the tending to the continuum of life of a people. And with the inscription of racism within the state of biopower, the long history of war that Foucault has been telling in these dazzling lectures has made a new turn: the war of peoples, a war against invaders, imperials colonizers, which turned into a war of races, to then turn into a war of classes, has now turned into the war of a race, a biological unit, against its polluters and threats. Racism is the means by which bourgeois political power, biopower, re-kindles the fires of war within civil society. Racism normalizes and medicalizes war. Racism makes war the permanent condition of society, while at the same time masking its weapons of death and torture. As I wrote somewhere else, racism banalizes genocide by making quotidian the lynching of suspect threats to the health of the social body. Racism makes the killing of the other, of others, an everyday occurrence by internalizing and normalizing the war of society against its enemies. To protect society entails we be ready to kill its threats, its foes, and if we understand society as a unity of life, as a continuum of the living, then these threat and foes are biological in nature. And, you have a moral obligation to vote affirmative – traditional impact discussions ignore the way Bracero workers and their families have been disenfranchised by legal and economic rationality – only restitution solves. The act of extending citizenship, or a pathway to citizenship through legal ¶ permanent residence to a new member at birth or through naturalization ordinarily ¶ represents a commitment on the part of a state to protect that person’s civil, ¶ political and social rights throughout his life. ¶ Nearly every nation accepts this responsibility towards the children of its ¶ existing citizens who are accorded citizenship status at birth through the principle ¶ of jus sanguinis. Most countries in the Western Hemisphere including the United ¶ States continue to accept additional responsibility towards children who are born ¶ within their territorial jurisdiction through the principle of jus soli. And nations ¶ assume the discretion to extend citizenship as a status and entitlement to its rights¶ and obligations subsequent to birth through their legal immigration and ¶ naturalization procedures. These legal principles for extending citizenship do not ¶ fully account for a state’s potential obligations towards persons who have been ¶ shaped by its economic, diplomatic, and military interventions abroad to the extent ¶ that it would be difficult, if not impossible for them to continue to live in their ¶ country of origin. A sympathetic case in this class of persons could include military ¶ support personnel in Iraq who have been targeted for collaborating with the United ¶ States. Nor do they account for a nation’s potential obligations towards non-citizen ¶ residents who are contributing to American communities as though they were ¶ citizens, such as unauthorized immigrant children who were raised and educated in ¶ the United States. ¶ These examples raise larger questions that speak to the concerns ¶ of normative democratic theorists about who should be included in a political ¶ community, or at the very least, allowed to take part in its collective decision¶ making processes. Apart from its existing legal mechanisms for extending the rights ¶ and obligations of citizenship to new members, should nations assume further ¶ responsibilities towards persons who have been affected by its policy interventions ¶ abroad? How far should this responsibility extend? Should a nation be required to ¶ include all non-citizens that it has impacted through its policy decisions as ¶ immigrants? Or should it prefer non-citizens who are already giving back to the ¶ community they wish to join? ¶ In its simplest formulation, the “all-affected interests” principle in ¶ democratic theory suggests that a political community has a moral responsibility to ¶ extend the participatory rights that we ordinarily associate with citizenship to non¶ citizens who are affected by a foreign state’s decision-making processes. The most ¶ effective way to ensure that a foreign national is included in a nation’s democratic ¶ decision-making process is to include him as a potential citizen. This feature of civic ¶ membership and its rights and obligations forms the basis for Robert Goodin (2007) ¶ and Rogers Smith’s (2010) proposals to extend a state’s obligations to all persons ¶ whose interests are harmed by its laws, policies and institutions. Both accounts ¶ could be useful as a way of describing why non-citizens might have an “adverse ¶ impact claim” against a state that has intervened in the affairs of their community, ¶ resulting in diminished economic opportunities or personal security for its citizens ¶ at home. An “adverse impact claim” stems from a moral argument that states ¶ which intervene in the affairs of other nations ought to provide compensation to¶ foreign nationals for any harm that can be directly attributed to their policy ¶ decisions over time. This compensation may take the form of economic assistance, ¶ preferential access to that country’s labor market through a new guest worker ¶ program, or reserved visa quotas for citizens of the affected community. The form ¶ of acceptable restitution for an adverse impact claim will depend on the wishes of ¶ the affected persons, who may prefer economic assistance in their communities of ¶ origin over authorization to reside in the United States. ¶ One problem with Goodin and Smith’s proposals is that they treat foreign ¶ nationals who have been shaped by another state’s laws, policies and institutions ¶ as unwitting victims. They do not fully account for a state’s moral claims to non¶ citizens that volunteer to serve on its behalf. Nor do they fully recognize the ¶ claims of non-citizen residents who are already contributing to the welfare of the ¶ communities where they live without the legal right to stay in the country. ¶ States have a greater moral responsibility to non-citizens who voluntarily ¶ contribute to their well-being at home and abroad than non-citizens who were ¶ passively affected by their policies. Some of them will want to remain in, or return ¶ to their country of origin. But if they want to immigrate to the country they served, ¶ or be permitted to stay in the communities they contributed to as residents, they ¶ should receive preference over other applicants for immigration benefits. Thus the plan – The United States federal government should offer reparations to the Bracero Justice Movement and the Bracero proa alliance of Mexico. Contention three – Admitting responsibility More than forty years after the Program’s conclusion, both the United States and Mexico have been forced into heated discussions about the meaning of that labor agreement by former contract workers and their families on both sides of the border. The concerns of ex-braceros to some extent emerged from current calls in both countries to revive that international arrangement, but they also have drawn from longer-term analyses within Mexican American communities, and among scholars of Mexican migration, about the racialized nature of the migrant, agricultural labor system that continues to define much of the rural United States. Political activists have taken on the historical meaning of the Bracero Program with some form of reparations in mind --by which most seem to mean both monetary repayment of aging Mexican workers, but also a formal acknowledgement of bracero contributions to both countries, and perhaps a recognition that both nations remain guilty of creating a migration system that has long been ripe with violations of basic civic and human rights. The Bracero Justice Movement, as it has become known, claims deep roots in the efforts of the contracted Mexicans themselves during the l940s and l950s to earn higher wages and experience the protections and promises of their written contracts. It connects, to some extent. with both recent historiography emphasizing bracero agency” in the workplace. and with the oral traditions of braceros who have long told stories of their own ingenuity in the face of the U.S. and Mexican bureaucracies that negotiated and monitored the Program from above. The Movement also echoes a commonly-heard refrain among labor and civil rights organizers in the United States over in recent decades: The important contributions made to particular local economies and communities by groups marginalized by domestic racism. Finally, and in a way that might seem to contradict claims based on local” contributions, recent efforts by and for Braceros clearly reflect the maturation of transnational political linkages between Mexicans en el extranjero (outside their homeland) and the national political institutions, and the national media, of Mexico. The RiM grew on both sides of the international border, in fact, and its activities in the U.S. context drew heavily from organizations, individuals, and trends that extended their influence into Mexico itself. The plan is a necessary first step to reconsider past atrocities and prevent future injustice. The Bracero proa alliance is calling for reparations– now is key, bracero workers are aging and entrenched in cycles of poverty. Every Tuesday, 76-year-old Miguel Díaz spends the better part of the day outside the House of Representatives in Mexico City. Díaz went to the United States in 1960s as a bracero, a contracted guestworker. Upon returning to Mexico, he and millions of other braceros were never paid the 10 percent of their earnings that had been withheld and sent to the Mexican government in an attempt to ensure braceros’ temporary status.¶ Each week, Díaz is joined outside the House of Representatives by around 100 other braceros, as well as widows and children of braceros. The vast majority are in their 70s or 80s. Some live in Mexico City, but others travel hours from other states to get there. Wearing sombreros to protect themselves from the sun, the braceros hang a large banner on the fence in front of the House that reads, “EPN Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto Pay Us or Kill Us!” According to their organization, the Binational Bracero Proa Alliance, an average of 14 braceros die each day. Their cause is urgent.¶ The braceros’ struggle to recoup decades-old back pay sheds light on the unjust treatment and unexpected consequences of guestworker programs.¶ On September 29, 1942, 71 years ago last month, the first braceros were contracted in Mexico City to work in the fields of Stockton, California. The Bracero Program, the largest and best-known guestworker program in U.S. history, brought 4.5 million Mexican laborers to the U.S. between 1942 and 1964. The program emerged in part due to wartime labor organizing among American farmworkers and economic need in Mexico. “I went to work in the U.S. in order to eat,” said 84-year-old Ezequiel Osorio.¶ Like subsequent guestworker programs, the Bracero Program was designed by the U.S. and Mexico to create a steady, regulated flow of male laborers. Braceros labored mainly in agriculture, but some were hired to work on railroads.¶ While some braceros financially benefitted from working in the US, they did so at a cost. The U.S. and Mexican governments subjected them to physical scrutiny and humiliation. When crossing the border, immigration officials forced them to strip and fumigated their naked bodies from head to toe with DDT, a dangerous insecticide. Those who cleared the medical and immigration screenings worked long hours doing strenuous labor, often living in poor, cramped conditions on the employer’s property. Those who faced abuses could not quit without facing deportation.¶ Despite all of this, many braceros simply want the money they are due – the 10 percent of their earnings the Mexican government never paid them.¶ On May 15, 1998, in Puruándiro, a town in the central Mexican state of Michoacán, a small group of braceros and Ventura Gutiérrez, the son of a bracero, formed the Binational Bracero Proa Alliance. Gutiérrez was born in Puruándiro but moved to the U.S. with his family a year or two later. He grew up in Coachella, California, eventually earned a college degree, and worked in education and labor organizing before moving back to Mexico in the late 1980s. For the last 15 years Gutiérrez has dedicated nearly every waking hour to the bracero movement, traveling by bus or plane around Mexico and to the U.S. Several weeks ago, police in Michoacán detained him during a demonstration.¶ The Binational Bracero Proa Alliance’s mission is to organize braceros and their families in hopes of pressuring the Mexican government to pay the men the money they earned. In recent years, personal differences among leaders have resulted in the formation of a number of splinter groups, but the Binational Bracero Proa Alliance remains the largest, with 8,000 members in California, Arizona, Texas, Chicago, and in almost every Mexican state.¶ The group’s best-known action took place on February 7, 2004, when more than 2,000 braceros and their supporters descended upon the family ranch of then-president Vicente Fox in the State of Guanajuato. A smaller group managed to make it to Fox’s door, where they demanded to be paid. Their protest received attention in the Mexican media and, in part, led Fox to approve a lump sum payment of 38,000 pesos (just under $3,000) to each person who could prove that he had been contracted as a bracero decades ago.¶ Though this was a victory, coming up with the required documents has been difficult for most, and for many 38,000 pesos doesn’t go very far. “Thirty-eight thousand pesos is nothing,” said Adolfo Hernández, a man in his early 80s who lives in Mexico City. “Life is very hard.” Hernández, like most braceros, can no longer find employment because of his age. Others are physically unable to work, struggling to pay for basic necessities like utilities and food.¶ So Hernández continues going to the House of Representatives each Tuesday. Many who have already received the 38,000 pesos also continue to go, to fight for their full 10 percent payment, and to support their fellow braceros – the majority – who have yet to be paid any of the owed 10 percent.¶ The braceros who protest each week at San Lázaro played a key role in shaping U.S. and Mexican history. The fact that they are still fighting to be paid decades later is a reminder of how difficult it is for guestworkers to win even promised compensation for their labor.¶ Not much has changed in the last 71 years. As historian Cindy Hahamovitch recently pointed out, today’s guestworkers are “threatened with violence, housed in storage sheds, underpaid or not paid, and, most important, deported and blacklisted for doing something about it.”¶ Although it is unclear whether Congress will reach an agreement on current immigration reform, both the Senate and House plans would increase the number of guestworkers. Guestworker programs are “an objective reality,” in Gutiérrez’s opinion. “For more than a century there has existed a guestworker or bracero program in one form or another, and it’s going to continue existing until we recognize we’re mistaken.”¶ Based on the braceros’ experience, let’s hope that realization comes sooner rather than later. And, voting affirmative fuses economic policy with racial justice and ethical decision-making. ¶ Such efforts have found considerable support among elected officials in California,¶ Illinois, and other states over the last few years, and despite little recognition of the Bracero¶ Justice Movement by some institutions within the United States (only two articles have appeared¶ in the New York Times about this movement, for instance, with the most recent a 500-word¶ account of Justice Breyer’s decision in 2002) there are countless good reasons for thinking more¶ carefully about this important feature of our recent past. In the first place, the cause of achieving¶ repayment for Mexican contract laborers has become, for many Latinos in the U.S., emblematic¶ of recent efforts to think transnationally about the meaning of racial and economic justice. In the¶ second, this movement history might remind us that it’s imperative to bring the Latino past¶ history into national and international conversations about the legacies of patterns (or programs)¶ defined by racial discrimination, particularly given the growing demographic and political¶ importance of Latinos in all fifty states. And, finally, the bracero case insists that matters related¶ to labor and work, and to legal status and claims to longtime residency, should complicate any¶ easy formula for thinking about how justice might be accorded in the future. As academics and policy makers, we have an ethical obligation to consider the atrocities of the past – silence on matters of injustice breeds hate and intolerance. These movements bring into dialogue aspects of American history¶ many would prefer not to know. For Whites, not knowing or not¶ remembering leads to a false sense of entitlement, an unquestioning¶ acceptance of economic privilege which distorts their image of¶ themselves, their labors, and rights. Keeping the past at bay allows¶ privilege to continue to accrue, balancing economic gain with soul loss.¶ In part, the past can be metabolized and the future created¶ differently by informal exchanges in the present between individuals¶ from groups that have been historically divided. In most towns and¶ cities, meetings between migrants and citizens happen only on top of¶ economic and ethnic divides. Immigrants without documents are not¶ free to speak of their difficult experiences on account of their fear of¶ racism and deportation. There is a collusion of silence that keeps Whites¶ ignorant of the challenges and heartaches borne by their fellow¶ townspeople.¶ To create sites of reconciliation requires insight into the need for¶ them and sustained effort to build bridges across separations established¶ over a long history. The learning of each others’ languages is a first step¶ toward more personal communication. Neighborhoods, workplaces,¶ adult education centers, and religious congregations can set up¶ intercambios, where pairs of people divide the time between speaking¶ in one mother tongue and then the other, all the while sharing the¶ bits and pieces of daily life. Beyond language acquisition is the creation¶ of relationships freed from the usual divisions. Knowing how unsafe¶ migrants feel in the larger community, citizens can offer their support¶ to community centers where migrants go for information about housing¶ and healthcare; they can help with immigration issues; and they can¶ assist in the learning of English. Contention four The act of reparation cannot take away the past, but is the best method of assuming individual responsibility to Bracero workers and their families. Vote affirmative to avoid objectification and commodification of the agrarian laborer. Socrates' deontological advice that it is better to suffer injustice than to cause it (Gorgias 469c) is of small assistance to those who are rasped by the mauvaise conscience that they have already caused injustice. "Self-consciousness is not an inoffensive action in which the self takes note of its being," Levinas says; "it is inseparable from a consciousness ofjustice and injustice" ("Religion for Adults" 16). What he proposes is to replace deontology with a counterfactual ethics of responsibility. If I am not guilty of hurting another I cannot be blamed for it; but if I nevertheless feel accused of it I can take responsibility for it. In this way perhaps I can both ease my conscience and begin to repair any damage that I might have caused. My responsibility to the person I might have hurt-the human Other or Autrui, in Levinas's terminology preempts any claims of my own. Because the injury is counterfactual, because it is not specified and therefore not limited, my relation to the other is a relation of infinite responsibility, which means there is no escaping it ("Transcendence and Height" 20-21).8 In Buder's familiar terms, not to respond is to treat the other as an It rather than a Thou, an object to which things are done rather than a person with whom I might speak. But for Levinas there is no not responding. To ignore another is to shame her, to make her aware of her isolation from me, and thus to duck the responsibility for not hurting her in these ways. Everyone is responsible to another whether he knows it or not. Being human is living in responsibility. Levinas's ethics are not prescriptive, then, but descriptive. It is not that I should be responsible; I already am responsible by virtue of having consciousness. Every new encounter with another raises the question how I am going to respond to her. Either I can accept responsibility or I can default -there is no third alternative. The injustice to another "imposes itself upon me," Levinas says, "without my being able to be deaf to its call or to forget it, that is, without my being able to suspend my responsibility for its distress" ("Meaning and Sense" 54). These days we like to say that knowledge is ideological, by which we mean that it belongs to a historical world and is composed by the particular interests of that world. But a human being cannot be reduced to an object of knowledge; the effort to do so is "disturbed and jostled by another presence," which cannot be "integrated into the world"-namely, the presence of a human face ("Meaning and Sense" 53). This is perhaps Levinas's most famous insight. The human face is the site of human personality. "The face is not the mere assemblage of a nose, a forehead, eyes, etc.," he says; "it is all that, of course, but takes on the meaning of a face through the new dimension it opens up in the perception of a being" ("Ethics and Spirit" 8). The other is always already a Thou, because she has a face; she foredooms every effort to reduce her to an It, because objects do not have faces. When I look upon the other's face, I perceive the presence of something more than a composition of interests: I glimpse a being. Her face establishes her uniqueness, her irreducibility to explanatory context, her being-in-herself. Perhaps I can account for her behavior, but I can never account for her face. Her presence before me, revealed by her face, is a summons to respond, to bestir and thus to identify myself. "here I am" ("God and Philosophy" 182-84).9 The I-Thou relation is constitutive of the self, not the other. I construct myself as a person by how I respond to others. But I can also deconstruct myself. I can withhold myself in unresponsive silence, leaving open the possibility that I have treated the other unjustly, or I can seize her in an effort to know her, committing an act of violence that transforms counterfactual injustice into actual injustice ("Transcendence and Height" 15-17). Ethics precede any “net-benefits” – relating to the other must always come before ourselves to recognize the complicity of our action in oppression – infinite responsibility to the other must be prioritized. Exactly what is motivating this flight from responsibility in politics? Rationalism or liberalism run amok perhaps? One might suggest that it is the obsession with reason in politics that has motivated the divisive treatment of emotion and affect, as they come to be construed as some type of contaminant that perverts political rationality. For those aiming to protect political rationality, shame and empathy alike represent the threat of affect and emotion. One could likewise attribute the degradation of collective responsibility to the prominence of political liberalism and its attendant focus on the individual as the locus of power and right. For the purposes of this paper, however, I would like to focus on the claim that it is the increasingly contractual nature of obligation and responsibility that has eroded our sense of social responsibility. 6. To presuppose that one’s responsibilities to another are to be derived from a social contract – however tacit one’s consent to this contract may be – is to presuppose that these obligations are finite and calculable, and that consequently they are responsibilities from which one might excuse oneself. Hence the litany of excuses that have become all too familiar regarding one’s responsibility for past injustices, excuses that have come to mark various discourses on reconciliation, reparation, and apology. ("I wasn’t even alive then, why should I be held accountable," etc.) Such excuses are indebted firstly to a convenient amnesia regarding the way in which past injustices reverberate in the present – and consequently continue to bestow benefits on some and injustice on others – and second to an inability to recognize that the very being of the oppressor/colonizer has grown and defined itself in reference to the subjugation of the oppressed. It is to presume that complicity is to be debated and chosen, and that it is not always already constitutive of the self. In order to deny one’s complicity in the oppression and suffering of others, one must somehow denigrate the ties that bind one to others historically and materially. To conceive of responsibility as strictly contractual is in many ways to do just that. As Nancy Fraser has suggested, the result of the increasing hegemony of contractual norms is that there appears to be less and less conceptual space for the forms of noncontractual reciprocity and solidarity that constitute the moral basis of citizenship (Fraser 1994: 61). As justice is rendered in reference to the calculus of contract and legality, the space for charity and political generosity is being eroded. This erosion seems to be accomplished as a double movement; firstly in the division of justice and charity, a breach that seems to imply that the two are antithetical, and secondly in the increasing erosion of charity by the calculus of justice. As charity is increasingly construed as the "other" of justice, it is – not unlike the experience of shame – construed as an phenomenon that surpasses and exceeds the obligations to others that are dictated within the parameters of the law, or the discourse on rights. Thus justice and charity are increasingly thought in opposition to each other, as though there is something in charity that is excessive and superfluous, something that the scales of justice do not and should not weigh. The dangerous implication of this way of thinking is that justice is not – nor should it strive to be – charitable. 8. And this is to say nothing of the way in which charity itself is being subsumed beneath the calculus of distributive (and retributive) justice. As the hegemony of the contract helped create the illusion of charity as its other, "charity appeared as a pure, unilateral gift, on which the recipient had no claim and for which the donor had no obligation" (Fraser 1994: 67). When defined only against contractual relations, charity does not simply become the other of more legalistic bonds of reciprocity, but even becomes politicised, as the giver is typically the beneficiary of social commendation while the recipient is only further stigmatised. Thus charity may readily morph into We will win magnitude, time-frame and probability – now is the key moment to open discussions about racism in economic policy- Braceros are key to revealing discrimination Washington, D.C., and many other cities. A hot summer of race news -- Moral Mondays to preserve voting rights in North Carolina,¶ the efforts of the Dream 9 to expose the vagaries of our immigration policy, and those of the Dream Defenders to undo Florida's¶ Stand Your Ground law--have led many to speculate on whether we are at the start of a new civil rights movement.¶ We are definitely at the brink of something. I hope that it is a racial justice movement, one that builds on the legacy of civil rights¶ while bringing crucial new elements to our political and social lives. We have a chance to explore fundamental questions like the¶ nature of racism, what to do with the variety of racial hierarchies across the country, and how to craft a vision big enough to hold¶ together communities who are constantly pitted against one another.¶ Using the racial justice frame allows us to fight off the seductive, corrupt appeal of colorblindness, which currently makes it difficult¶ to talk about even racial diversity, much less the real prize of racial equity. Such language also allows us to move beyond the current¶ limitations in civil rights law to imagine a host of new policies and practices in public and private spaces, while we also upgrade¶ existing civil rights laws at all levels of government. Finally, the modern movement has to be fully multiracial, as multiracial as the¶ country itself. The number and variety of communities of color will continue to grow. If all of our communities stake out ground on¶ race, rather than on a set of proxies, we will more likely be able to stick together when any one of us is accused of race baiting.¶ The Need for Plain Speech¶ We cannot solve a problem that no one is willing to name, and the biggest obstacle facing Americans today is that, in the main, we¶ don't want to talk about race, much less about racism. Our societal silence makes room for inventive new forms of discrimination,¶ while it blocks our efforts to change rules that disadvantage people of color. Unless we say what we mean, we cannot redefine how¶ racism works or drive the debate toward equity.¶ Americans define racism as individual, overt and intentional. But modern forms of racial discrimination are often unintentional,¶ systemic and hidden. The tropes and images of the civil rights era reinforce the old definition. People taking on new forms¶ constantly look for our own Bull Connor to make the case. We can find these kinds of figures. But there's inevitably debate about¶ whether they truly hit the Bull Connor standard, as we can see in popular defenses of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Gov. Rick Scott.¶ Politicians, employers and public administrators have all learned to use codes for the groups they target.¶ The notion that all racism is intentional and overt is a fundamental building block of the false solution of colorblindness.¶ The obsession with examining the intentions of individual actors in order to legitimize the existence of racism undermines efforts to¶ achieve justice. This is because the discussion of racism in the U.S. is devoid of any mention of history, power or policy. The¶ person who notices racial disparities in health care, for example, is vilified for so-called race baiting, while someone like Rep.¶ Steve King is virtually unchallenged when he puts up a sign referring to the State Children's Health Insurance Program as¶ "Socialized, Clintonesque, Hillary Care for Illegals and Their Children." Hey, he didn't say Latino illegals, so that's not racist.¶ Fifteen years of brain research have revealed that ignoring racial difference is impossible, and that most human beings are¶ unconscious of their biases. Thus getting people to acknowledge and change their biases voluntarily is often very difficult, and if it¶ does happen, is insufficient to address the institutional problem.¶ Even people who don't dismiss the need for race talk entirely often have the wrong end goal in mind. They encourage respect for¶ diversity, or multiculturalism. Those are both good things. But neither one is the same thing as justice. It is entirely possible to have¶ a diverse community, city or workplace that is marked by inequity. In restaurants I've worked in and observed, the white workers in¶ the dining room get along perfectly well with black and Latino workers confined to the kitchen and dishroom, but they are not in an¶ equitable situation. In being explicit about working on racial justice, our modern movement has a chance to push past the diversity¶ goal and define justice.¶ Justice and Rights Aren't the Same¶ Justice can include civil rights laws, but civil rights laws don't always include justice. The difference between the two is suggested¶ for me in that old school precursor to jokes, "There oughta be a law." There ought to be lots of laws and we won't get them unless¶ we recognize the limits of the laws we have now in relation to justice.¶ Here is NOLO Press's plain language definition of civil rights.¶ Rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, the 13th and 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution. Civil rights include¶ civil liberties (such as the freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion), as well as due process, the right to vote, equal and¶ fair treatment by law enforcement and the courts, and the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of a democratic society, such as¶ equal access to public schools, recreation, transportation, public facilities, and housing.¶ "Civil" refers largely to political rights, but communities of color need change in economics and culture, too, the kind of change that¶ hasn't yet been encoded in the law. People of color should be able to see ourselves on television and in movies as something other¶ than villains far more often than we do now, but there is no law that calls this a "right." Food justice would mean that people could¶ get access to fresh produce at reasonable prices within a short distance from their homes, yet no law punishes grocery store¶ chains for abandoning poor neighborhoods of color. But laws and other structures could be crafted to change these arrangements¶ that too many people currently accept as "just the way it is." In fact, over time, the kinds of rules and regulations that once supported¶ cultural rights, such as the fairness doctrine in communications law, have been steadily gutted by the same deregulation that¶ created Fox News.¶ People should not be subjected to exploitation on the job, but labor laws, including those against discrimination that are in Title VII¶ of the Civil Rights Act, don't get us anywhere near workplace justice. After New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse¶ examined the comment threads from his reporting on the growing fast food workers strikes, he was moved to tweet that he'd never¶ seen such lack of sympathy for workers. Research by Topos reveals that most Americans do not think of crappy jobs as exploitative¶ jobs. They think "entry level" jobs are meant to pay little, and they put all the responsibility for improvement on the workers¶ themselves, in the form of further education to get a better job. That sentiment was borne out again and again in Greenhouse's¶ comment thread. The fact that people of color, especially black people, are heavily concentrated in the fast food industry strikes me¶ as the trigger for that kind of easy victim blaming.¶ The language of justice simply gives us more options for articulating what fairness looks like than does the language of civil rights.¶ Only a big, broad vision will be exciting enough to mobilize Americans for the hard thinking and action required to meet our¶ upcoming challenges. The country's changing demographics are at the top of the challenge list for me.¶ Going Multiracial¶ When the March on Washington took place in 1963, there was also organizing among Latino, indigenous and Asian communities.¶ These communities were often inspired by and related to the movement against Jim Crow segregation in the South, and they had¶ their own forms of exploitation and discrimination to confront. The exploitative Bracero Program, which recruited Mexican guest¶ workers for farmwork, had to be ended, and so did its brutal aftermath, Operation Wetback, which deported those same workers¶ when they dared to overstay. The effects of Japanese American internment had to be addressed, and American Indians were trying¶ to protect families from having their kids stolen right through the 1970s.¶ Connections surely existed between these groups during the 1960's, and they cannot be minimized. I know, however, that those ties¶ were not nearly as strong as they need to be today. We solve your internal links, an ethical stance in the face of security forces a change from those in power, including the lack of use of nuclear power. (evidence cites empirical examples) Radical alterity figures in Levinas’ thought not as a flaw, an ignorance, an obscurity, a childishness, a laziness or a deferral, but as the non-thematizable charge through which ethics commands. “What oughtto be” –the subject’s response to the Other – relates to “what is” –being essence, manifestation, phenomenon, identity – not by some subtle or crude conversion into “what is,” but by haunting it, disturbing it, raising t to a moral height of which it is not itself capable. The alterity of the other raises the subject in a severe responsibility which bears all the weight of the world’s seriousness in a non-indifference – with no ontological basis – for the other. When in the late 1930s the British colonial administrators asked Gandhi what he expected from his annoying non-violent agitation, the Mahatma replied that he expected the British would quit India. They would quit India on their own because they would come to see they were wrong. Moral force is a scandal for ontological thinking, whether that thinking is gently attuned to being or imposing its subjective will. The power of ethics is entirely different from the power of identities, whether poetic or political, whether knowledge or administration. It escapes and judges the synthesizing, centralizing forces. Ethics is forceful not because it opposes power with more power, on the same plane, with a bigger army, more guns, a finer microscope or a grander space program, but rather because it opposes power with what appears to be weakness and vulnerability but is responsibility and sincerity. To the calculations of power, ethics opposes less than power can conquer. With their lathi sticks the British occupational police struck their opponents, hurt them dreadfully, but at the same time they were hitting their own injustice, their own inhumanity, and with each blow non-violently received were taught a moral lesson. Not that they were necessarily taught a lesson: ethics is not ontology, it is not necessary, one can kill. Moral force, however, the proximity of the face-to-face, the height and destitution of the other’s face, is the ever patient counterbalance to all the powers of the world, including nuclear power, including nuclear power. Moral force is not stronger than the powers of being and essence, the totalizing, synthesizing powers, it is better, and this is its ultimate strength. Ethical action precludes consideration of other impacts as we are obligated to respect certain unconditional rights – failure to do so holds Bracero workers hostage as a means toward securing our own economic and political security. Let us now consider the right mentioned above: a mother's right not to be tortured to death by her own son. Assume (although these specifications arc here quite dispensable) that she is innocent of any crime and has no knowledge of any. What justifiable exception could there be to such a right? I shall construct an example which, though fanciful, has sufficient analogues in past and present thought and action to make it relevant to the status of rights in the real world.6 Suppose a clandestine group of political extremists have obtained an arsenal of nuclear weapons; to prove that they have the weapons and know how to use them, they have kidnapped a leading scientist, shown him the weapons, and then released him to make a public corroborative statement. The terrorists have now announced that they will use the weapons against a designated large distant city unless a certain prominent resident of the city, a young politically active lawyer named Abrams, tortures his mother to death, this torturing to lie earned out publicly in a certain way at a specified place and time in that city. Since the gang members have already murdered several other prominent residents of the city, their threat is quite credible. Their declared motive is to advance their cause by showing how powerful they are and by unmasking the moralistic pretensions of their political opponents. Ought Abrams to torture his mother to death in order to prevent the threatened nuclear catastrophe? Might he not merely pretend to torture his mother, so that she could then be safely hidden while the hunt for the gang members continued? Entirely apart from the fact that the gang could easily pierce. this deception, the main objection to the very raising of such questions is the moral one that they seem to hold open the possibility of acquiescing and participating in an unspeakably evil project. To inflict such extreme harm on one's mother would be an ultimate act of betrayal; in performing or even contemplating the performance of such an action the son would lose all self-respect and would regard his life as no longer worth living.7 A mother's right not to be tortured to death by her own son is beyond any compromise. It is absolute. This absoluteness may be analysed in several different interrelated dimensions, all stemming from the supreme principle of morality. The principle requires respect for the rights of all persons to the necessary conditions of human action, and this includes respect for the persons themselves as having the rational capacity to reflect on their purposes and to control their behavior in the light of such reflection. The principle hence prohibits using any person merely as a means to the well-being of other persons. For a son to torture his mother to death even to protect the lives of others would be an extreme violation of this principle and hence of these rights, as would any attempt by others to force such an action. For this reason, the concept appropriate to it is not merely `wrong' but such others as `despicable', `dishonourable', `base', `monstrous'. In the scale of moral modalities, such con- cepts function as the contrary extremes of concepts like the supererogatorv. What is supererogatory is not merely good or right but goes beyond these in various ways; it includes saintly and heroic actions whose moral merit surpasses what is strictly required of agents. In parallel fashion, what is base, dishonourable, or despicable is not entirely bad or wrong but goes be- yond these in moral demerit since it subverts even the minimal worth or dignity both of its agent and of its recipient and hence the basic presuppositions of morality itself. Just as the supererogatory is superlatively good, so the despicable is superlatively evil arid diabolic, and its moral wrongness is so rotten that a morally decent person will not even consider doing it. This is but another way of saying that the rights it would violate must remain absolute. 6. There is, however, another side to this story. What of the thousands of innocent persons in the distant city Whose lives are imperiled by the threatened nuclear explosion? Don't they too have rights to life which, because of their numbers, are far superior to the mother's right? May they not contend that while it is all very well for Abrams to preserve his moral purity by not killing his mother, he has no right to purchase this at the ex- pense of their Iives, thereby treating them as mere means to his ends and violating their our' rights? Thus it may lie argued that the morally correct description of the alternative confronting Abrains is not simply that it is one of not violating or violating an innocent person's right to life, but rather not violating one innocent person's right to life and thereby violating the right to life of thousands of other innocent persons through being partly responsible for their deaths, or violating one innocent person's right to life and thereby protecting or fulfilling the right to life of thousands of other innocent persons. We have here a tragic conflict of rights and an illustration of the heavy price exacted by moral absolutism. The aggregative consequentialist who holds that that action ought always to be performed which maximizes utility or minimizes disutility would maintain that in such a situation the lives of the thousand must be preferred. An initial answer may be that terrorists who make such demands and Issue such threats cannot be trusted to keep their word not to drop the Bombs if the mother is tortured to death; and even if they now do keep their word, acceding in this ease would only lead to further escalated demands and threats. It may also be argued that it is irrational to perpetrate a sure evil in order to forestall what is so far only a possible or threatened evil. Philippa Foot has sagely commented on cases of this sort that if it is the is duty to kill his mother in order to save the lives of the many other innocent residents of the city, then "anyone who wants us to do something will think wrong has only to threaten that otherwise he himself will do some- thing we think worse".8 Much depends, however, on the nature of the wrong" and the `worse''. If someone threatens to commit suicide or to kill innocent hostages if we do not break our promise to do some relatively unimportant action, breaking the promise would be the obviously right course, by the criterion of degrees of necessity for action. The special difficulty of the present ease stems from the fact that the conflicting rights are tiC the same supreme degree of importance. It may be contended, however, that this whole answer, focusing on the Problem outcome of obeying the terrorists' demands, is a consequentialist argument and, as such, is not available to the absolutist who insists that Abrams must not torture his mother to death whatever the consequences.° This contention imputes to the absolutist a kind of indifference or even callousness to the sufferings of others that is not warranted by a correct understanding of his position. He can be concerned about consequences so long as he does not regard them as possibly superseding or diminishing the right and duty he regards as absolute. It is a matter of priorities. So long as the mother's right not to be tortured to death by her son is unqualifiedly respected, the absolutist can seek ways to mitigate the threatened disastrous consequences and possibly to avert them altogether. A parallel ease is found in the theory of legal punishment: the retributivist. while asserting that punish- ment must be meted out only to the persons who deserve it because of the crimes they have committed, may also uphold punishment for its deterrent effect so long as the latter, consequentialist consideration is subordinated to and limited by the conditions of the former, antecedentalist consideration.1° Thus the absolutist can accommodate at least part of the consequentialist's substantive concerns within the limits of his own principle. Is any other answer available to the absolutist, one that reflects the core of his position? Various lines of argument may be used to show that in refusing to torture his mother to death Abrams is not violating the rights of the multitudes of other residents who may die as a result, because he is not morally responsible for their deaths. Thus the absolutist can maintain that even if these others die they still have an absolute right to life because the infringement of their right is not justified by the argument he upholds. At least three different distinctions may be adduced for this purpose. In the unqualified form in which they have hitherto been presented, however they are not successful in establishing the envisaged conclusion. One distinction is between direct and oblique intention. When Abram refrains from torturing his mother to death, he does not directly intend the many ensuing deaths of the other inhabitants either as end or as means. These are only the foreseen but unintended side-effects of his action or, in this case, inaction. Hence, he is not morally responsible for those deaths Our ethical stance outweighs death, the end of life will not limit our responsibility to alleviate suffering. It’s a cost we must bare by accepting that responsibility This also means that I am not only answerable for what I initiated in a proect or commitment of my will. I am responsible for the situation in which I find myelf, and for the existence in which I find myself. To be responsible is always to have to answer for a situation that was in place before I came on the scene. Responsibility is a bond between my present and what came to pass before it. In it is effected a passive synthesis of time that precedes the time put together by retientions and protentions. I am responsible for processes in which I find myself, and which have a momentum by which they go on beyond what I willed or what I can steer. Responsibility cannot be limited to the measure of what I was able to foresse and willed. IN fact real action in the world is always action in which the devil has his part, int which the force of initiative has force only inasmuch as it espouses things that have a force of their own. I am responsible for processes that go behond the limits of my foresight and intention, that carry on even when I am no longer adding my sustaining force to them—and even when I am no longer there. Serious responsibility recognizes itself to be without limiting my responsibility. There is in this sense an infinity that opens in responsibility, not as a given immensity of its horizons, but as the process by which its bounds do not cease to extend—an infinition of infintity. The bond with alterity of the other is in this infinty. I am answerable before the other in his alterity responsible before all the others for all the others. To be responsible before the other is to make of my susbsistence the support of his order and his needs. His alterity commands and solicits, his approach contests and appeals; I am responsible before the other for the other. I am responsible before the other in his alterity, that is, not answerable for his empirical and mundane being only, but for the alterity of is initiatives, for the imperafive appeal with which he addresses me. To be fesponsible before another is to answer to the appeal by which he approaches. It is put oneself in his place, not to observe oneself from without, but to bear the burden of his existence and supply for its wants. I am responsible for the very faults of another, for his deds and misdeeds. The condition of being hostage is an authentic figure of responsibility. | 2/2/14 |
Braceros Aff - NDCATournament: NDCA | Round: 3 | Opponent: Lexington AX | Judge: Shunta Jordan In 2004 the United States issued 30 million dollars in reparations to Bracero workers --- yet there are tens of thousands who have not been paid for their labor. ¶ Capiz and others have worried that Gutiérrez will accept only partial repayment of¶ bracero coffers, not the full $500 million to $1 billion they believe should be given elderly¶ contract workers. In defense of their own approach, members of Braceroproa argue that it is far¶ more important to begin some payment process, and that in so doing they will push forward a¶ more honest historical reckoning with past contract labor, and a more critical account of the¶ causes and consequences of contemporary Mexico-U.S. migration. Gutiérrez emphasized that¶ “For us, the most important thing is that they start paying. Once they start paying one exbracero,¶ they have to pay all of them.”19 That approach may finally pay some dividends, if not¶ sixty years of interest on lost bracero earnings. In December 2004, the Mexican government¶ included in its 2005 fiscal budget a $30 million fund to fund payments to braceros, covering¶ some 9,000 former contract workers who labored in the U.S. between 1942 and 1946. Tempers¶ have since flared as the Mexican government has seemed intentionally to delay the dispersal of¶ those funds. In mid-August of this year, when California’s Ventura Gutiérrez led a rally in¶ Mexico City to demand that the Mexican Interior Ministry begin disbursing checks, the¶ assembled crowd of former braceros and their families threw rocks at the Ministry, broke a glass¶ door, and crowded inside officials’ offices.20 Others have since continued to press the cause of¶ ex-bracero claims, and just within the last several weeks, the Mexican government announced¶ that its first payments, in amounts apparently ranging from $4,000 to $6,000, will begin in¶ November 2005.¶ Those who labored in the United States from 1942 to 1946 will be the first to receive¶ those checks, only those who enrolled with the Mexican government in 2003 will be included at¶ this stage, and BJM activists remain anxious about whether the tens of thousands of braceros not¶ included in this year’s budget will receive their due. Although the Mexican government now¶ seems ready to act, the process of negotiating repayment and respect for past bracero labors¶ remains deeply transnational. Networks of aging contract workers connect distant parts of¶ Mexico, cross into the barrios of Los Angeles and Chicago, and rely heavily on longstanding¶ 17¶ labor groups, and on the immigrant organizations that have gathered U.S. residents together¶ around social activities, and by home state, for decades. In Yucatán, therefore, the first payments¶ to ex-braceros next month will be coordinated by Gladys Pinto Muñoz, president of the Yucatec¶ Federation of California.21 In Los Angeles, the city’s vibrant federation of Mexicans from the¶ state of Zacatecas has played an important role in organizing the most recent ex-bracero¶ campaigns. Responding in part to bracero activism, the United States announced in April 2004¶ that Mexican workers eligible for U.S. Social Security benefits can now have those funds directdeposited¶ into Mexican bank accounts. And in the United States, groups of braceros continue to¶ work with hired attorneys to reopen a class action lawsuit that would force both countries to pay¶ all living braceros a far greater sum of money. Contention two – Racist Biopolitics First, the Braceros program is the nexus point between militarism, capitalism and structural racism at the root of exploitation and marginalization. C. The Bracero Programs and Operation Wetback¶ In the same way that American employers sought the labor¶ of the Chinese in the late 19th century, agricultural employers¶ made heavy use of Mexicans escaping economic and political¶ persecution after the political upheaval of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. However, when Congress passed the Immigration¶ Act of 1917, agricultural employers worried that the Act’s liter¶ acy and head tax requirements would severely reduce their immi¶ grant labor supply.5° Due to pressure from agribusiness, the¶ government waived these requirements for Mexicans.5’ These¶ official actions were crucial to maintaining an exploitable, non¶ white work force of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans.52¶ As jobs became scarce during the Great Depression, the¶ Mexican worker population was controlled through mass deportations of persons with Spanish sounding names or Mexican features¶ who could not produce formal papers.¶ Mexicans were deported from 1931-1934. Many of these persons were citizens or legal residents, but simply could not prove¶ their status. By 1942, labor shortages and World War II had¶ created the need for more agricultural workers.54 Thus, growers¶ convinced the United States government to enter into the¶ Bracero Program, a large scale contract labor program with Mex¶ ico.5 Braceros were the perfect exploitable underclass, willing¶ to work for low wages and in deplorable conditions.¶ By 1946, it became impossible to separate Mexican Americans from deportable Mexicans. Thus, in 1954, over one million¶ people were deported under “Operation Wetback.”56 Many¶ United States citizens were mistakenly “repatriated” to Mexico,¶ including individuals who looked Mexican but had never even¶ been to Mexico. The program included a relentless media cam¶ paign to characterize the Operation as a national security necessity, and a tightening of the border to deter undocumented¶ immigration.58¶ It found ways to keep more nonwhites from coming and dis-¶ empowering those already here. This system of marginalization¶ of nonwhite immigrants and their descendants continues today.¶ Since the passage of employer sanctions against those who hire¶ undocumented immigrants in 1986, it has become more difficult¶ and less socially acceptable to hire undocumented workers.¶ Since undocumented immigrants can no longer legally serve as¶ cheap labor, their presence in the United States has come under¶ attack from politicians, voters, and legislators. Skeptics claim the Bracero program offered economic security and independence to workers – or that the plan trades off with Obama’s agenda– this type of political rationality epitomizes a racist biopolitics that makes war a constant feature of civil society I have thus far discussed Foucault’s triangulation between the discourses of the production of truth, the power that these discourse enact and make available to social agents, and the constitution of a political rationality that is linked to the invention and creation of its horizon of activity and surveillance. I want now to focus on the main theme of this courses’ last lecture. This theme discloses in a unique way the power and perspicacity of Foucault’s method. The theme concerns the kind of power that biopower renders available, or rather, how biopolitics produces certain power effects by thinking of the living in a novel way. We will approach the theme by way of a contrast: whereas the power of the sovereign under Medieval and early Modern times was the power to make die and to let live, the power of the total state, which is the biopower state, is the power to make live and to let die. Foucault discerned here a telling asymmetry. If the sovereign exercised his power with the executioner’s axe, with the perpetual threat of death, then life was abandoned to its devices. Power was exhibited only on the scaffold, or the guillotine –its terror was the shimmer of the unsheathed sword. Power was ritualistic, ceremonial, theatrical, and to that extent partial, molecular, and calendrical. It was also a power that by its own juridical logic had to submit to the jostling of rights and claims. In the very performance of its might, the power of the sovereign revealed its limitation. It is a power that is localized and circumscribed to the theater of its cruelty, and the staging of its pomp. In contrast, however, the power of the biopower state is over life expand. And here Foucault asks “how can biopolitics then reclaim the power over death?” or rather, how can it make die in light of the fact that its claim to legitimacy is that it is guarding, nurturing, tending to life? In so far as biopolitics is the management of life, how does it make die, how does it kill? This is a similar question to the one that theologians asked about the Christian God. If God is a god of life, the giver of life, how can he put to death, how can he allow death to descend upon his gift of life –why is death a possibility if god is the giver of life? Foucault’s answer is that in order to re-claim death, to be able to inflict death on its subjects, its living beings, biopower must make use of racism; more precisely, racism intervenes here to grant access to death to the biopower state. We must recall that the political rationality of biopower is deployed over a population, which is understood as a continuum of life. It is this continuum of life that eugenics, social hygiene, civil engineering, civil medicine, military engineers, doctors and nurses, policeman, and so on, tended to by a careful management of roads, factories, living quarters, brothels, red-districts, planning and planting of gardens and recreation centers, and the gerrymandering of populations by means of roads, access to public transformations, placement of schools, and so on. Biopolitics is the result of the development and maintenance of the hothouse of the political body, of the body-politic. Society has become the vivarium of the political rationality, and biopolitics acts on the teeming biomass contained within the parameters of that structure built up by the institutions of health, education, and production. This is where racism intervenes, not from without, exogenously, but from within, constitutively. For the emergence of biopower as the form of a new form of political rationality, entails the inscription within the very logic of the modern state the logic of racism. For racism grants, and here I am quoting: “the conditions for the acceptability of putting to death in a society of normalization. Where there is a society of normalization, where there is a power that is, in all of its surface and in first instance, and first line, a bio-power, racism is indispensable as a condition to be able to put to death someone, in order to be able to put to death others. The homicidal meurtrière function of the state, to the degree that the state functions on the modality of bio-power, can only be assured by racism “(Foucault 1997, 227) To use the formulations from his 1982 lecture “The Political Technology of Individuals” –which incidentally, echo his 1979 Tanner Lectures –the power of the state after the 18th century, a power which is enacted through the police, and is enacted over the population, is a power over living beings, and as such it is a biopolitics. And, to quote more directly, “since the population is nothing more than what the state takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to slaughter it, if necessary. So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics.” (Foucault 2000, 416). Racism, is the thanatopolitics of the biopolitics of the total state. They are two sides of one same political technology, one same political rationality: the management of life, the life of a population, the tending to the continuum of life of a people. And with the inscription of racism within the state of biopower, the long history of war that Foucault has been telling in these dazzling lectures has made a new turn: the war of peoples, a war against invaders, imperials colonizers, which turned into a war of races, to then turn into a war of classes, has now turned into the war of a race, a biological unit, against its polluters and threats. Racism is the means by which bourgeois political power, biopower, re-kindles the fires of war within civil society. Racism normalizes and medicalizes war. Racism makes war the permanent condition of society, while at the same time masking its weapons of death and torture. As I wrote somewhere else, racism banalizes genocide by making quotidian the lynching of suspect threats to the health of the social body. Racism makes the killing of the other, of others, an everyday occurrence by internalizing and normalizing the war of society against its enemies. To protect society entails we be ready to kill its threats, its foes, and if we understand society as a unity of life, as a continuum of the living, then these threat and foes are biological in nature. And, you have a moral obligation to vote affirmative – traditional impact discussions ignore the way Bracero workers and their families have been disenfranchised by legal and economic rationality – only restitution solves. The act of extending citizenship, or a pathway to citizenship through legal ¶ permanent residence to a new member at birth or through naturalization ordinarily ¶ represents a commitment on the part of a state to protect that person’s civil, ¶ political and social rights throughout his life. ¶ Nearly every nation accepts this responsibility towards the children of its ¶ existing citizens who are accorded citizenship status at birth through the principle ¶ of jus sanguinis. Most countries in the Western Hemisphere including the United ¶ States continue to accept additional responsibility towards children who are born ¶ within their territorial jurisdiction through the principle of jus soli. And nations ¶ assume the discretion to extend citizenship as a status and entitlement to its rights¶ and obligations subsequent to birth through their legal immigration and ¶ naturalization procedures. These legal principles for extending citizenship do not ¶ fully account for a state’s potential obligations towards persons who have been ¶ shaped by its economic, diplomatic, and military interventions abroad to the extent ¶ that it would be difficult, if not impossible for them to continue to live in their ¶ country of origin. A sympathetic case in this class of persons could include military ¶ support personnel in Iraq who have been targeted for collaborating with the United ¶ States. Nor do they account for a nation’s potential obligations towards non-citizen ¶ residents who are contributing to American communities as though they were ¶ citizens, such as unauthorized immigrant children who were raised and educated in ¶ the United States. ¶ These examples raise larger questions that speak to the concerns ¶ of normative democratic theorists about who should be included in a political ¶ community, or at the very least, allowed to take part in its collective decision¶ making processes. Apart from its existing legal mechanisms for extending the rights ¶ and obligations of citizenship to new members, should nations assume further ¶ responsibilities towards persons who have been affected by its policy interventions ¶ abroad? How far should this responsibility extend? Should a nation be required to ¶ include all non-citizens that it has impacted through its policy decisions as ¶ immigrants? Or should it prefer non-citizens who are already giving back to the ¶ community they wish to join? ¶ In its simplest formulation, the “all-affected interests” principle in ¶ democratic theory suggests that a political community has a moral responsibility to ¶ extend the participatory rights that we ordinarily associate with citizenship to non¶ citizens who are affected by a foreign state’s decision-making processes. The most ¶ effective way to ensure that a foreign national is included in a nation’s democratic ¶ decision-making process is to include him as a potential citizen. This feature of civic ¶ membership and its rights and obligations forms the basis for Robert Goodin (2007) ¶ and Rogers Smith’s (2010) proposals to extend a state’s obligations to all persons ¶ whose interests are harmed by its laws, policies and institutions. Both accounts ¶ could be useful as a way of describing why non-citizens might have an “adverse ¶ impact claim” against a state that has intervened in the affairs of their community, ¶ resulting in diminished economic opportunities or personal security for its citizens ¶ at home. An “adverse impact claim” stems from a moral argument that states ¶ which intervene in the affairs of other nations ought to provide compensation to¶ foreign nationals for any harm that can be directly attributed to their policy ¶ decisions over time. This compensation may take the form of economic assistance, ¶ preferential access to that country’s labor market through a new guest worker ¶ program, or reserved visa quotas for citizens of the affected community. The form ¶ of acceptable restitution for an adverse impact claim will depend on the wishes of ¶ the affected persons, who may prefer economic assistance in their communities of ¶ origin over authorization to reside in the United States. ¶ One problem with Goodin and Smith’s proposals is that they treat foreign ¶ nationals who have been shaped by another state’s laws, policies and institutions ¶ as unwitting victims. They do not fully account for a state’s moral claims to non¶ citizens that volunteer to serve on its behalf. Nor do they fully recognize the ¶ claims of non-citizen residents who are already contributing to the welfare of the ¶ communities where they live without the legal right to stay in the country. ¶ States have a greater moral responsibility to non-citizens who voluntarily ¶ contribute to their well-being at home and abroad than non-citizens who were ¶ passively affected by their policies. Some of them will want to remain in, or return ¶ to their country of origin. But if they want to immigrate to the country they served, ¶ or be permitted to stay in the communities they contributed to as residents, they ¶ should receive preference over other applicants for immigration benefits. Thus the plan – The United States federal government should offer reparations to the Bracero Justice Movement, the Bracero proa alliance of Mexico, Alianza Braceroproa, National Assembly of Ex-Braceros/La Asamblea, Nacional de Ex-Braceros, and the Binational Union of Former Braceros Contention three – Admitting responsibility Voting affirmative shows solidarity with transnational activist movements which combat structural racism – our evidence is comparative, reparations are best. More than forty years after the Program’s conclusion, both the United States and Mexico have been forced into heated discussions about the meaning of that labor agreement by former contract workers and their families on both sides of the border. The concerns of ex-braceros to some extent emerged from current calls in both countries to revive that international arrangement, but they also have drawn from longer-term analyses within Mexican American communities, and among scholars of Mexican migration, about the racialized nature of the migrant, agricultural labor system that continues to define much of the rural United States. Political activists have taken on the historical meaning of the Bracero Program with some form of reparations in mind --by which most seem to mean both monetary repayment of aging Mexican workers, but also a formal acknowledgement of bracero contributions to both countries, and perhaps a recognition that both nations remain guilty of creating a migration system that has long been ripe with violations of basic civic and human rights. The Bracero Justice Movement, as it has become known, claims deep roots in the efforts of the contracted Mexicans themselves during the l940s and l950s to earn higher wages and experience the protections and promises of their written contracts. It connects, to some extent. with both recent historiography emphasizing bracero agency” in the workplace. and with the oral traditions of braceros who have long told stories of their own ingenuity in the face of the U.S. and Mexican bureaucracies that negotiated and monitored the Program from above. The Movement also echoes a commonly-heard refrain among labor and civil rights organizers in the United States over in recent decades: The important contributions made to particular local economies and communities by groups marginalized by domestic racism. Finally, and in a way that might seem to contradict claims based on local” contributions, recent efforts by and for Braceros clearly reflect the maturation of transnational political linkages between Mexicans en el extranjero (outside their homeland) and the national political institutions, and the national media, of Mexico. The RiM grew on both sides of the international border, in fact, and its activities in the U.S. context drew heavily from organizations, individuals, and trends that extended their influence into Mexico itself. The plan is a necessary first step to reconsider past atrocities and prevent future injustice. The Bracero proa alliance is calling for reparations– now is key, bracero workers are aging and entrenched in cycles of poverty. Every Tuesday, 76-year-old Miguel Díaz spends the better part of the day outside the House of Representatives in Mexico City. Díaz went to the United States in 1960s as a bracero, a contracted guestworker. Upon returning to Mexico, he and millions of other braceros were never paid the 10 percent of their earnings that had been withheld and sent to the Mexican government in an attempt to ensure braceros’ temporary status.¶ Each week, Díaz is joined outside the House of Representatives by around 100 other braceros, as well as widows and children of braceros. The vast majority are in their 70s or 80s. Some live in Mexico City, but others travel hours from other states to get there. Wearing sombreros to protect themselves from the sun, the braceros hang a large banner on the fence in front of the House that reads, “EPN Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto Pay Us or Kill Us!” According to their organization, the Binational Bracero Proa Alliance, an average of 14 braceros die each day. Their cause is urgent.¶ The braceros’ struggle to recoup decades-old back pay sheds light on the unjust treatment and unexpected consequences of guestworker programs.¶ On September 29, 1942, 71 years ago last month, the first braceros were contracted in Mexico City to work in the fields of Stockton, California. The Bracero Program, the largest and best-known guestworker program in U.S. history, brought 4.5 million Mexican laborers to the U.S. between 1942 and 1964. The program emerged in part due to wartime labor organizing among American farmworkers and economic need in Mexico. “I went to work in the U.S. in order to eat,” said 84-year-old Ezequiel Osorio.¶ Like subsequent guestworker programs, the Bracero Program was designed by the U.S. and Mexico to create a steady, regulated flow of male laborers. Braceros labored mainly in agriculture, but some were hired to work on railroads.¶ While some braceros financially benefitted from working in the US, they did so at a cost. The U.S. and Mexican governments subjected them to physical scrutiny and humiliation. When crossing the border, immigration officials forced them to strip and fumigated their naked bodies from head to toe with DDT, a dangerous insecticide. Those who cleared the medical and immigration screenings worked long hours doing strenuous labor, often living in poor, cramped conditions on the employer’s property. Those who faced abuses could not quit without facing deportation.¶ Despite all of this, many braceros simply want the money they are due – the 10 percent of their earnings the Mexican government never paid them.¶ On May 15, 1998, in Puruándiro, a town in the central Mexican state of Michoacán, a small group of braceros and Ventura Gutiérrez, the son of a bracero, formed the Binational Bracero Proa Alliance. Gutiérrez was born in Puruándiro but moved to the U.S. with his family a year or two later. He grew up in Coachella, California, eventually earned a college degree, and worked in education and labor organizing before moving back to Mexico in the late 1980s. For the last 15 years Gutiérrez has dedicated nearly every waking hour to the bracero movement, traveling by bus or plane around Mexico and to the U.S. Several weeks ago, police in Michoacán detained him during a demonstration.¶ The Binational Bracero Proa Alliance’s mission is to organize braceros and their families in hopes of pressuring the Mexican government to pay the men the money they earned. In recent years, personal differences among leaders have resulted in the formation of a number of splinter groups, but the Binational Bracero Proa Alliance remains the largest, with 8,000 members in California, Arizona, Texas, Chicago, and in almost every Mexican state.¶ The group’s best-known action took place on February 7, 2004, when more than 2,000 braceros and their supporters descended upon the family ranch of then-president Vicente Fox in the State of Guanajuato. A smaller group managed to make it to Fox’s door, where they demanded to be paid. Their protest received attention in the Mexican media and, in part, led Fox to approve a lump sum payment of 38,000 pesos (just under $3,000) to each person who could prove that he had been contracted as a bracero decades ago.¶ Though this was a victory, coming up with the required documents has been difficult for most, and for many 38,000 pesos doesn’t go very far. “Thirty-eight thousand pesos is nothing,” said Adolfo Hernández, a man in his early 80s who lives in Mexico City. “Life is very hard.” Hernández, like most braceros, can no longer find employment because of his age. Others are physically unable to work, struggling to pay for basic necessities like utilities and food.¶ So Hernández continues going to the House of Representatives each Tuesday. Many who have already received the 38,000 pesos also continue to go, to fight for their full 10 percent payment, and to support their fellow braceros – the majority – who have yet to be paid any of the owed 10 percent.¶ The braceros who protest each week at San Lázaro played a key role in shaping U.S. and Mexican history. The fact that they are still fighting to be paid decades later is a reminder of how difficult it is for guestworkers to win even promised compensation for their labor.¶ Not much has changed in the last 71 years. As historian Cindy Hahamovitch recently pointed out, today’s guestworkers are “threatened with violence, housed in storage sheds, underpaid or not paid, and, most important, deported and blacklisted for doing something about it.”¶ Although it is unclear whether Congress will reach an agreement on current immigration reform, both the Senate and House plans would increase the number of guestworkers. Guestworker programs are “an objective reality,” in Gutiérrez’s opinion. “For more than a century there has existed a guestworker or bracero program in one form or another, and it’s going to continue existing until we recognize we’re mistaken.”¶ Based on the braceros’ experience, let’s hope that realization comes sooner rather than later. And, voting affirmative fuses economic policy with racial justice and ethical decision-making. ¶ Such efforts have found considerable support among elected officials in California,¶ Illinois, and other states over the last few years, and despite little recognition of the Bracero¶ Justice Movement by some institutions within the United States (only two articles have appeared¶ in the New York Times about this movement, for instance, with the most recent a 500-word¶ account of Justice Breyer’s decision in 2002) there are countless good reasons for thinking more¶ carefully about this important feature of our recent past. In the first place, the cause of achieving¶ repayment for Mexican contract laborers has become, for many Latinos in the U.S., emblematic¶ of recent efforts to think transnationally about the meaning of racial and economic justice. In the¶ second, this movement history might remind us that it’s imperative to bring the Latino past¶ history into national and international conversations about the legacies of patterns (or programs)¶ defined by racial discrimination, particularly given the growing demographic and political¶ importance of Latinos in all fifty states. And, finally, the bracero case insists that matters related¶ to labor and work, and to legal status and claims to longtime residency, should complicate any¶ easy formula for thinking about how justice might be accorded in the future. As academics and policy makers, we have an ethical obligation to consider the atrocities of the past – silence on matters of injustice breeds hate and intolerance. These movements bring into dialogue aspects of American history¶ many would prefer not to know. For Whites, not knowing or not¶ remembering leads to a false sense of entitlement, an unquestioning¶ acceptance of economic privilege which distorts their image of¶ themselves, their labors, and rights. Keeping the past at bay allows¶ privilege to continue to accrue, balancing economic gain with soul loss.¶ In part, the past can be metabolized and the future created¶ differently by informal exchanges in the present between individuals¶ from groups that have been historically divided. In most towns and¶ cities, meetings between migrants and citizens happen only on top of¶ economic and ethnic divides. Immigrants without documents are not¶ free to speak of their difficult experiences on account of their fear of¶ racism and deportation. There is a collusion of silence that keeps Whites¶ ignorant of the challenges and heartaches borne by their fellow¶ townspeople.¶ To create sites of reconciliation requires insight into the need for¶ them and sustained effort to build bridges across separations established¶ over a long history. The learning of each others’ languages is a first step¶ toward more personal communication. Neighborhoods, workplaces,¶ adult education centers, and religious congregations can set up¶ intercambios, where pairs of people divide the time between speaking¶ in one mother tongue and then the other, all the while sharing the¶ bits and pieces of daily life. Beyond language acquisition is the creation¶ of relationships freed from the usual divisions. Knowing how unsafe¶ migrants feel in the larger community, citizens can offer their support¶ to community centers where migrants go for information about housing¶ and healthcare; they can help with immigration issues; and they can¶ assist in the learning of English. Contention four The act of reparation cannot take away the past, but is the best method of assuming individual responsibility to Bracero workers and their families. Vote affirmative to avoid objectification and commodification of the agrarian laborer. Socrates' deontological advice that it is better to suffer injustice than to cause it (Gorgias 469c) is of small assistance to those who are rasped by the mauvaise conscience that they have already caused injustice. "Self-consciousness is not an inoffensive action in which the self takes note of its being," Levinas says; "it is inseparable from a consciousness ofjustice and injustice" ("Religion for Adults" 16). What he proposes is to replace deontology with a counterfactual ethics of responsibility. If I am not guilty of hurting another I cannot be blamed for it; but if I nevertheless feel accused of it I can take responsibility for it. In this way perhaps I can both ease my conscience and begin to repair any damage that I might have caused. My responsibility to the person I might have hurt-the human Other or Autrui, in Levinas's terminology preempts any claims of my own. Because the injury is counterfactual, because it is not specified and therefore not limited, my relation to the other is a relation of infinite responsibility, which means there is no escaping it ("Transcendence and Height" 20-21).8 In Buder's familiar terms, not to respond is to treat the other as an It rather than a Thou, an object to which things are done rather than a person with whom I might speak. But for Levinas there is no not responding. To ignore another is to shame her, to make her aware of her isolation from me, and thus to duck the responsibility for not hurting her in these ways. Everyone is responsible to another whether he knows it or not. Being human is living in responsibility. Levinas's ethics are not prescriptive, then, but descriptive. It is not that I should be responsible; I already am responsible by virtue of having consciousness. Every new encounter with another raises the question how I am going to respond to her. Either I can accept responsibility or I can default -there is no third alternative. The injustice to another "imposes itself upon me," Levinas says, "without my being able to be deaf to its call or to forget it, that is, without my being able to suspend my responsibility for its distress" ("Meaning and Sense" 54). These days we like to say that knowledge is ideological, by which we mean that it belongs to a historical world and is composed by the particular interests of that world. But a human being cannot be reduced to an object of knowledge; the effort to do so is "disturbed and jostled by another presence," which cannot be "integrated into the world"-namely, the presence of a human face ("Meaning and Sense" 53). This is perhaps Levinas's most famous insight. The human face is the site of human personality. "The face is not the mere assemblage of a nose, a forehead, eyes, etc.," he says; "it is all that, of course, but takes on the meaning of a face through the new dimension it opens up in the perception of a being" ("Ethics and Spirit" 8). The other is always already a Thou, because she has a face; she foredooms every effort to reduce her to an It, because objects do not have faces. When I look upon the other's face, I perceive the presence of something more than a composition of interests: I glimpse a being. Her face establishes her uniqueness, her irreducibility to explanatory context, her being-in-herself. Perhaps I can account for her behavior, but I can never account for her face. Her presence before me, revealed by her face, is a summons to respond, to bestir and thus to identify myself. "here I am" ("God and Philosophy" 182-84).9 The I-Thou relation is constitutive of the self, not the other. I construct myself as a person by how I respond to others. But I can also deconstruct myself. I can withhold myself in unresponsive silence, leaving open the possibility that I have treated the other unjustly, or I can seize her in an effort to know her, committing an act of violence that transforms counterfactual injustice into actual injustice ("Transcendence and Height" 15-17). Ethics precede any “net-benefits” – relating to the other must always come before ourselves to recognize the complicity of our action in oppression – infinite responsibility to the other must be prioritized. Exactly what is motivating this flight from responsibility in politics? Rationalism or liberalism run amok perhaps? One might suggest that it is the obsession with reason in politics that has motivated the divisive treatment of emotion and affect, as they come to be construed as some type of contaminant that perverts political rationality. For those aiming to protect political rationality, shame and empathy alike represent the threat of affect and emotion. One could likewise attribute the degradation of collective responsibility to the prominence of political liberalism and its attendant focus on the individual as the locus of power and right. For the purposes of this paper, however, I would like to focus on the claim that it is the increasingly contractual nature of obligation and responsibility that has eroded our sense of social responsibility. 6. To presuppose that one’s responsibilities to another are to be derived from a social contract – however tacit one’s consent to this contract may be – is to presuppose that these obligations are finite and calculable, and that consequently they are responsibilities from which one might excuse oneself. Hence the litany of excuses that have become all too familiar regarding one’s responsibility for past injustices, excuses that have come to mark various discourses on reconciliation, reparation, and apology. ("I wasn’t even alive then, why should I be held accountable," etc.) Such excuses are indebted firstly to a convenient amnesia regarding the way in which past injustices reverberate in the present – and consequently continue to bestow benefits on some and injustice on others – and second to an inability to recognize that the very being of the oppressor/colonizer has grown and defined itself in reference to the subjugation of the oppressed. It is to presume that complicity is to be debated and chosen, and that it is not always already constitutive of the self. In order to deny one’s complicity in the oppression and suffering of others, one must somehow denigrate the ties that bind one to others historically and materially. To conceive of responsibility as strictly contractual is in many ways to do just that. As Nancy Fraser has suggested, the result of the increasing hegemony of contractual norms is that there appears to be less and less conceptual space for the forms of noncontractual reciprocity and solidarity that constitute the moral basis of citizenship (Fraser 1994: 61). As justice is rendered in reference to the calculus of contract and legality, the space for charity and political generosity is being eroded. This erosion seems to be accomplished as a double movement; firstly in the division of justice and charity, a breach that seems to imply that the two are antithetical, and secondly in the increasing erosion of charity by the calculus of justice. As charity is increasingly construed as the "other" of justice, it is – not unlike the experience of shame – construed as an phenomenon that surpasses and exceeds the obligations to others that are dictated within the parameters of the law, or the discourse on rights. Thus justice and charity are increasingly thought in opposition to each other, as though there is something in charity that is excessive and superfluous, something that the scales of justice do not and should not weigh. The dangerous implication of this way of thinking is that justice is not – nor should it strive to be – charitable. 8. And this is to say nothing of the way in which charity itself is being subsumed beneath the calculus of distributive (and retributive) justice. As the hegemony of the contract helped create the illusion of charity as its other, "charity appeared as a pure, unilateral gift, on which the recipient had no claim and for which the donor had no obligation" (Fraser 1994: 67). When defined only against contractual relations, charity does not simply become the other of more legalistic bonds of reciprocity, but even becomes politicised, as the giver is typically the beneficiary of social commendation while the recipient is only further stigmatised. Thus charity may readily morph into We will win magnitude, time-frame and probability – now is the key moment to open discussions about racism in economic policy- Braceros are key to revealing discrimination Washington, D.C., and many other cities. A hot summer of race news -- Moral Mondays to preserve voting rights in North Carolina,¶ the efforts of the Dream 9 to expose the vagaries of our immigration policy, and those of the Dream Defenders to undo Florida's¶ Stand Your Ground law--have led many to speculate on whether we are at the start of a new civil rights movement.¶ We are definitely at the brink of something. I hope that it is a racial justice movement, one that builds on the legacy of civil rights¶ while bringing crucial new elements to our political and social lives. We have a chance to explore fundamental questions like the¶ nature of racism, what to do with the variety of racial hierarchies across the country, and how to craft a vision big enough to hold¶ together communities who are constantly pitted against one another.¶ Using the racial justice frame allows us to fight off the seductive, corrupt appeal of colorblindness, which currently makes it difficult¶ to talk about even racial diversity, much less the real prize of racial equity. Such language also allows us to move beyond the current¶ limitations in civil rights law to imagine a host of new policies and practices in public and private spaces, while we also upgrade¶ existing civil rights laws at all levels of government. Finally, the modern movement has to be fully multiracial, as multiracial as the¶ country itself. The number and variety of communities of color will continue to grow. If all of our communities stake out ground on¶ race, rather than on a set of proxies, we will more likely be able to stick together when any one of us is accused of race baiting.¶ The Need for Plain Speech¶ We cannot solve a problem that no one is willing to name, and the biggest obstacle facing Americans today is that, in the main, we¶ don't want to talk about race, much less about racism. Our societal silence makes room for inventive new forms of discrimination,¶ while it blocks our efforts to change rules that disadvantage people of color. Unless we say what we mean, we cannot redefine how¶ racism works or drive the debate toward equity.¶ Americans define racism as individual, overt and intentional. But modern forms of racial discrimination are often unintentional,¶ systemic and hidden. The tropes and images of the civil rights era reinforce the old definition. People taking on new forms¶ constantly look for our own Bull Connor to make the case. We can find these kinds of figures. But there's inevitably debate about¶ whether they truly hit the Bull Connor standard, as we can see in popular defenses of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Gov. Rick Scott.¶ Politicians, employers and public administrators have all learned to use codes for the groups they target.¶ The notion that all racism is intentional and overt is a fundamental building block of the false solution of colorblindness.¶ The obsession with examining the intentions of individual actors in order to legitimize the existence of racism undermines efforts to¶ achieve justice. This is because the discussion of racism in the U.S. is devoid of any mention of history, power or policy. The¶ person who notices racial disparities in health care, for example, is vilified for so-called race baiting, while someone like Rep.¶ Steve King is virtually unchallenged when he puts up a sign referring to the State Children's Health Insurance Program as¶ "Socialized, Clintonesque, Hillary Care for Illegals and Their Children." Hey, he didn't say Latino illegals, so that's not racist.¶ Fifteen years of brain research have revealed that ignoring racial difference is impossible, and that most human beings are¶ unconscious of their biases. Thus getting people to acknowledge and change their biases voluntarily is often very difficult, and if it¶ does happen, is insufficient to address the institutional problem.¶ Even people who don't dismiss the need for race talk entirely often have the wrong end goal in mind. They encourage respect for¶ diversity, or multiculturalism. Those are both good things. But neither one is the same thing as justice. It is entirely possible to have¶ a diverse community, city or workplace that is marked by inequity. In restaurants I've worked in and observed, the white workers in¶ the dining room get along perfectly well with black and Latino workers confined to the kitchen and dishroom, but they are not in an¶ equitable situation. In being explicit about working on racial justice, our modern movement has a chance to push past the diversity¶ goal and define justice.¶ Justice and Rights Aren't the Same¶ Justice can include civil rights laws, but civil rights laws don't always include justice. The difference between the two is suggested¶ for me in that old school precursor to jokes, "There oughta be a law." There ought to be lots of laws and we won't get them unless¶ we recognize the limits of the laws we have now in relation to justice.¶ Here is NOLO Press's plain language definition of civil rights.¶ Rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, the 13th and 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution. Civil rights include¶ civil liberties (such as the freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion), as well as due process, the right to vote, equal and¶ fair treatment by law enforcement and the courts, and the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of a democratic society, such as¶ equal access to public schools, recreation, transportation, public facilities, and housing.¶ "Civil" refers largely to political rights, but communities of color need change in economics and culture, too, the kind of change that¶ hasn't yet been encoded in the law. People of color should be able to see ourselves on television and in movies as something other¶ than villains far more often than we do now, but there is no law that calls this a "right." Food justice would mean that people could¶ get access to fresh produce at reasonable prices within a short distance from their homes, yet no law punishes grocery store¶ chains for abandoning poor neighborhoods of color. But laws and other structures could be crafted to change these arrangements¶ that too many people currently accept as "just the way it is." In fact, over time, the kinds of rules and regulations that once supported¶ cultural rights, such as the fairness doctrine in communications law, have been steadily gutted by the same deregulation that¶ created Fox News.¶ People should not be subjected to exploitation on the job, but labor laws, including those against discrimination that are in Title VII¶ of the Civil Rights Act, don't get us anywhere near workplace justice. After New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse¶ examined the comment threads from his reporting on the growing fast food workers strikes, he was moved to tweet that he'd never¶ seen such lack of sympathy for workers. Research by Topos reveals that most Americans do not think of crappy jobs as exploitative¶ jobs. They think "entry level" jobs are meant to pay little, and they put all the responsibility for improvement on the workers¶ themselves, in the form of further education to get a better job. That sentiment was borne out again and again in Greenhouse's¶ comment thread. The fact that people of color, especially black people, are heavily concentrated in the fast food industry strikes me¶ as the trigger for that kind of easy victim blaming.¶ The language of justice simply gives us more options for articulating what fairness looks like than does the language of civil rights.¶ Only a big, broad vision will be exciting enough to mobilize Americans for the hard thinking and action required to meet our¶ upcoming challenges. The country's changing demographics are at the top of the challenge list for me.¶ Going Multiracial¶ When the March on Washington took place in 1963, there was also organizing among Latino, indigenous and Asian communities.¶ These communities were often inspired by and related to the movement against Jim Crow segregation in the South, and they had¶ their own forms of exploitation and discrimination to confront. The exploitative Bracero Program, which recruited Mexican guest¶ workers for farmwork, had to be ended, and so did its brutal aftermath, Operation Wetback, which deported those same workers¶ when they dared to overstay. The effects of Japanese American internment had to be addressed, and American Indians were trying¶ to protect families from having their kids stolen right through the 1970s.¶ Connections surely existed between these groups during the 1960's, and they cannot be minimized. I know, however, that those ties¶ were not nearly as strong as they need to be today. Voting affirmative advocates a network politics where individuals, policy makers, social justice movements can redress the historical atrocities done to Bracero workers and their families. Our method overcomes the pitfalls of radicalism and liberalism and reconceptualizes politics to focus on disenfranchised peoples and is a necessary first step to breaking down structures of oppression. As we have detailed in the previous chapters, Mexican immigrants have a long-standing relationship with US society, and the demographic shifts that make Latinos the largest minority ground residing in the US drive that point home. After detailing the abuses suffered by workers and finding repeated evidence of the mistreatment of Mexican as disposable laborers, it is clear that we must ask: what is to be done? Instead of justifying complacency by detailing the deleterious effects of economic and racial marginalization, we conclude with a range of possible action strategies. We believe social justice movements offer substantial hope for bettering social relations by ending the historical pattern of exploiting Mexican workers to satisfy the consumption desires of North Americans. We fully acknowledge that the issues Mexicans face in the US are big issues necessitating big answers. Engaging in transformative politics requires building a movement to end the capitalist and racist system on a global scale. As a starting point, we talk about possible solutions or reforms that range from the pragmatic state of Mexican-US relations to anti-systemic global movements. We are concerned that envisioning new worlds through popular education, transformative social practices through grassroots participatory democracy, and transnational social movements is too often precluded by a discursive closure on the topic of Mexican Immigration that reduces all big issues to sets of binary options. Politics itself is too frequently defined by the non-representative political system of political talk shows, although it is clear politics is all-pervasive. We address the binary options that have been presented to this point and weigh in on the positions that may or may not move us closer to the end of capitalist inequalities and institutional racism. As we are considering directions for action, we recognize that in all major conversations on these topics, there are three main approaches to progressive social change: liberal adjustments, social democratic reforms, and transformative politics. Liberal adjustments make minor alterations that rarely address the fundamental causes of immigration dilemmas. They leave the transnational capitalist system intact, this ensuring that Mexican immigrants will continue to be exploited as cheap labor. Social democratic reforms are, in a sense, non-reformist reforms (Gorz 1973) that seek fundamental transformations of the capitalist system through an engagement with policies and legal actions that play on the contradictions of the system to change the social order. The problem with the social democratic reforms is that they all too often suggest that reforms have to be taken for the poor or racialized; they assume those deemed poor or racialized are not able to take action themselves. Transformative approaches get at the roots of the oppressive exploitative system. Rather than being passive agents, transformative subjects are active in reordering social relationships, diagnosing social inequalities, and mobilizing for a better way of socially organizing the world. The discursive closure on US immigration law has precluded any serious discussion of real comprehensive immigration reform, and of which actors should determine a fair, sane system. Even the most progressive of labor unions fall into choosing between either-or options to get a bill passed that eases some of the marginalization associated with undocumented immigration. We discuss potential solutions to the farmworker morass, as well as how to re-envision the notion of comprehensive immigration reform from social democratic and transformative perspectives. While the full demilitarization of the US-Mexico border and decriminalization of illegal immigration may seem like major steps, it must be noted that the militarized border as such has been in place for only 25 years. The border is not nearly as naturalized as is often assumed. Distinguishing between illegal and legal immigrants is also a recent phenomenon that is a direct result of the 1986 IRCA. Thinking beyond the “choices” offered to us by the mainstream media, such as more or less border enforcement and temporary worker programs or enacting harsher criminal penalties, is an essential precursor to pursuing transformative politics. Today, many progressive organizers and educators advocate for coalition politics, based on organizations that come together to collaborate when issues of shared interest and concern arise. The concept of coalitions suggests that organizations are solid and constant in terms of their ideas and practiced; the coalition does not require any changes in intergroup or interpersonal politics. We prefer to envision a concept of network politics because it emphasizes the dynamics of how organizations come together in processes of mutual learning and solidarity. It suggests that new relationships are built through interactions that make central the experiences of historically marginalized or exploited people. Swords (2005, 2007) writes about network politics as the material and cultural practices of neo-Zapatista organizations that challenge procedural democracy and neoliberal development. The Zapatistas and many of their supporters disrupt the territorial and ideological power of state and economic interests by decentering knowledge production and decision-making. To do so, they center indigenous and poor people’s experiences through peace and human rights organizing, caravans, delegations, Euceuntros (international political gatherings), Consultas (popular consultations), elections, community mental health work, struggles for territory, and initial efforts toward autonomy. Learning from the Zapatistas’ network politics suggests that in the US transformative movements must center the experiences of Mexicans, Mexican immigrants, and Mexican Americans, along with experiences of other historically marginalized and exploited groups. One important element of network politics is the telling of stories of exploitation, discrimination, and neglect. Those who build this country must be seen where they have often been invisible. The people often involved in network politics must also come to recognize patterns, the similarities and differences in how exploitation has operated from the Bracero to the post-industrial era. Such patterns include the trends we have documented in Chapters 5 to 11, including anti-immigrant backlash, demographic shifts, and the variety of modes of exploitation, incorporation, and exclusion in different geographic sites. Organizing must include demands for basic survival, as well as rights for workers and immigrants and participation in decision-making about the basic laws that affect health, well-being, integrity, and humanity. We see the development of legal challenges to the racial and class status quo for Mexican laborers as a window into how liberal adjustments and social democratic reforms can potentially lead to a politics of transformation. Recent class-action lawsuits, state congressional inquiries, and proposed federal legislation have brought the sordid history of the Repatriation Movement and the Bracero Program into the present discourse. What began as essentially a liberal adjustment approach to repatriations was based in legal offices and subscribed to the price tag model of just compensation for past wrongs. The lawsuits evolved into a social democratic redress approach in terms of holding corporate and government actors responsible for past events and working to bar them from happening in the future. Of course, laws that secured civil liberties and adherence to the Geneva Convention have been rewritten to allow such abuses as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, so activists must avoid the pitfall of assuming that rogue leaders won’t rewrite laws and bring on ideologues to rewrite history to justify their plans for committing future atrocities. We envision the movement developing a transformative politics approach with truth commissions leading to civil society mobilization, approach with truth commissions as ends in and of themselves. The transformative seeds of the Bracero reparations movement in grassroots organizing may germinate into major social change. Transformative politics does not agree with the liberal reparations model, which claims that monetary compensation fully atones for past transgression. In contrast, highlighting the grassroots movement, such politics sees the potential for a liberal adjustment to contain the seeds of social democratic reform that, if reorganized and plugged into network politics, could read to a transformative approach. Solutions to the exploitation of undocumented labor will bring the role of the immigrant rights movement and network politics to the center of recent efforts at improving the conditions of Mexicans residing in the US as well as addressing attempts at collective redress for past historical injustices. Reparations can never fully remedy past wrongs and the limited monetary settlements will never make up for pain, suffering, humiliations, and outright physical and psychological torture. However, the positive aspect of this liberal adjustment is that it required the collective conscience of a nation to come to grips with its sordid history and to allow those who were wronged to express publicly what they endured as a nation-state either looked away or more likely was complicit. The public dialogue on reparations moves offending nations forward by requiring them to deal with a past they deem so easy to forget. The grassroots organizing that has taken place in Mexico and the US required both nations to seriously examine the historical origins of contemporary racialized predicaments and lingering inequalities. Alianza Braceroproa, National Assembly of Ex-Braceros/La Asamblea Nacional de Ex-Braceros, and the Binational Union of Former Braceros are the more prominently recognized of the social movement organizations placing pressure on the Mexican government for monetary redress. The main means of organizing is to get ex-Braceros together, on a weekly basis, to talk about their shared experiences. Most of these public conversations have focused on the humiliating aspects of the processing centers where Braceros were subjected to the STD and hernia examinations and the DDT delousing ordeal. Recent developments in US courts and Mexican federal decisions have allowed the Mexican government to provide a limited monetary settlement while absolving its culpability for past wrongs. Yet the main contribution of collective action at this point seems to be the shared recognition of past wrongs and ways of remembering, thinking, speaking, and acting that completely counter the subservient roles that the Bracero Program attempted to force on workers. | 4/25/14 |
Cuban Embargo Aff- Alta Plan TextTournament: Alta | Round: 1 | Opponent: All | Judge: All Everything else is the same as the Notre Dame version. | 12/7/13 |
Cuban Embargo Aff- MeadowsTournament: Meadows | Round: 1 | Opponent: Gulliver Prep CT | Judge: Nathaniel Haas That independently strengthens sanctions on Iran That solve Iranian prolif Indeed, amid an array of political transitions and military conflicts around the globe, the prospect of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons has galvanized a global debate on how to stop the regime in Tehran from getting the bomb. This debate has spilled over into the domestic politics of the world’s great powers, becoming a talking point in the 2012 U.S. presidential election and the subject of behind-the-scenes discussion during China’s transition to its next generation of political leadership at their Party Congress this fall. In the Middle East and Central Asia, Iran’s nuclear program has implications for the ongoing civil war in Syria, a political transition beset by economic troubles in Egypt, and U.S. and NATO ground combat operations in Afghanistan entering their 10th year. Oil price surges worldwide threaten economic recoveries around the globe—recoveries Iran could thwart in a number of ways depending on how it reacts to global pressure to come clean on its nuclear program. Events are quickly producing a decision point: A concerned Israel warns the diplomatic community that its window for military options to delay or deny Iran’s potential weapon is not unlimited due to the progress Iran has made in hardening its nuclear facilities beyond Israeli capability to penetrate them. At the same time, a vigorous roster of nations is tightening the burden of economic sanctions against Iran—isolating the country’s already feeble economy, which survives only because of its vast oil reserves. Iran—a longtime supporter of terrorism, both directly and through its proxies, with a track record of dissimulation on its nuclear ambitions—has no reservoir of credibility or good will, and its repeated professions that its nuclear program is peaceful deserve no benefit of the doubt. Of course Iran could quickly defuse the crisis and allow the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency full access to all facilities of interest so it can measure and catalogue Iran’s capability to produce highly enriched uranium (the essential element required for weapons production), and Iran could come clean on its known nuclear weapons research. As IAEA Director General Yukio Amano affirms, Iran needs “to cooperate fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency on all outstanding issues, particularly those which give rise to concerns about the possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program, including by providing access without delay to all sites, equipment, persons and documents requested by the Agency.” It is Iran’s lack of response that fuels concerns about their nuclear ambitions. Importantly, there is a strong bipartisan consensus in America and within the inter national community on this single point—an Iranian nuclear weapon would destabilize the one of the world’s most important oil-producing regions at a critical point in the global economic recovery, would harm Israel’s security, and would severely undermine the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Unfortunately, much of the political debate in this U.S. election year now distracts from these central realities. Today the United States is leading a successful three-year global effort to isolate Iran diplomatically and implement a broad range of strict economic sanctions targeted at undermining its nuclear program. The Obama administration’s initial outreach to the Iranian regime in 2009 did not achieve immediate constructive results, but the demonstration of American good faith forged greater international unity around the problem and served as an important force multiplier for subsequent successful efforts to pressure the regime. Now, as talks with the P5+1 approach, Iran must choose how to respond to the growing global concerns about its nuclear program and make the choice to live up to its international obligations or face increased international isolation. During the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama defended his proposed engagement policy by explaining that “we’re not going to be able to execute the kind of sanctions we need without some cooperation with some countries like Russia and China that...have extensive trade with Iran but potentially have an interest in making sure Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon.” Affirming his goal of “tough, direct diplomacy with Iran,” Obama acknowledged that diplomacy “may not work, but if it doesn’t work, then we have strengthened our ability to form alliances to impose tough sanctions.” Over the past three years, this is precisely what the Obama administration achieved. The engagement policy has served as an important force multiplier for efforts to pressure the Iranian government. By giving Iran repeated opportunities to meet its international responsibilities, this administration has been able to forge a far stronger and more enduring international coalition to pressure Iran. Far from strengthening the Iranian regime, as some critics have alleged, Obama’s engagement effort has in fact further isolated it. The United States and its partners in the P5+1 group are operating from a position of strength that would have been hard to imagine four short years ago. U.S. policy on Iran should not be determined by partisan politics and easy sound bites. Nor will U.S. policy objectives be quickly accomplished. Instead, this crisis requires policymakers and all citizens to challenge their own preconceived notions and make decisions based on facts while preparing fully for all contingencies. Action now is key- attempts to prolif now Only OFAC solves- close multilateral efforts Iranian prolif causes extinction Advantage 2 is Multilateralism Absent a shift to multilateralism, US leadership will collapse and cause global nuclear war U.S. lead Latin American multilateralism is vital to solve hemispheric problems – their influence disads are wrong and selective engagement fails Multiple scenarios – Scenario 1 is Conflict Management Multilateral institutions like the Organization of American States are critical to deescalating riparian disputes and conflict management – contains and outweighs all scenarios Riparian disputes magnify conflict – their defense doesn’t assume future scarcity levels, only we solve Independently, border disputes coming now despite current effort The OAS is key to resolve – it solves hemispheric confidence-building – disputes are inevitable in the squo Scenario 2 is resource competition Competition over resources is inevitable – it’s a question of if effective multilateral frameworks are in place to resolve disputes The US National Intelligence Council’s 2008 report on global trends to 2025 observed that “even actions short of war will have important geopolitical implications as states undertake strategies to hedge against the possibility that existing energy supplies will not meet rising demand”, noting trends including Chinese and Indian purchases of equity stakes in energy fields, energy-deficient states employing “transfers of arms and sensitive technologies and the promise of a political and military alliance as inducements to establish strategic relationships with energy-producing states”, and increased naval competition “in a zone extending from the Persian Gulf to East and Southeast Asia”. As Michael Klare summarizes: “...the leaders of most countries involved in the great energy race have come to view the struggle over hydrocarbon assets as a “zero sum” contest ... a zero-sum mentality leads to a loss of flexibility in crisis situations, while the lens of nationalism turns the pursuit of energy assets into a sacred obligation of senior government officials.” 185 More recently, a similar dynamic has been seen in the context of inter-state competition for land and food , as import-dependent countries seek to agree overseas security of supply deals for food or land. While there is often a lack of transparency about such deals, among the examples reported in the media are Chinese attempts to secure 1.24 million hectares of land in the Philippines (in a deal subsequently blocked), 700,000 hectares in Laos, 2 million hectares for biofuel production in Zambia and 2.8 million hectares for the same purpose in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 186 Other key food importers, including the United Arab Emirates and South Korea, have also sought to improve their good security with similar deals. More acute forms of competition for food include the export restrictions discussed in the previous section. At the same time, countries that are not dependent on imported grain can also contribute to this emerging competition for land and food through their own land use policies: as already noted, the IMF, World Bank and Goldman Sachs all argued in 2008 that the single most significant driver of the food price spike was the diversion of US agricultural land to biofuel production. 187 On water, the key risk comes from trans-boundary fresh water resources. Today, there are 263 rivers that either span or delineate international borders. 188 It is important to note that so far, trans-boundary water resources have tended to trigger cooperation rather than conflicts between the countries that share them: research by Oregon State University, for example, finds that “cooperative interactions between riparian states over the past fifty years have outnumbered conflictive interactions by more than two-to-one.” 189 However, the same research also finds that 158 of the world’s 263 international river basins “lack any type of cooperative management framework.” 190 Moreover, with the prospect of climate change to consider, there is no guarantee that the future will look like the past. A particular concern here is the fact that many water-sharing agreements are based on a set volume of water rather than a percentage of what is available. 191 The risk of glacial retreat, most notably in the Himalayas, has also triggered concern about future water-driven conflict risks – as well as controversy, given the recent furor over erroneous IPCC projections that 80 of Himalayan glaciers would have disappeared by 2035. Existing glaciers provide dry season water resources to 1.3 billion people living in river basins including the Mekong, Irrawaddy, Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yangtze and Yellow River. 192 As temperatures rise, some estimates (still valid, despite the recent IPCC controversy) suggest the risk of future dry season flow reductions of as much as 60-70 on the Ganges. 193 These kinds of forecast have led to increased concern about the potential risk of capture of water resources by particular countries (for instance in India, where there are fears about the potential for China to dam and divert the Brahmaputra river). 194 Another dimension of inter-state strategic resource competition centers on the impacts of climate change, and particularly the effects of rising sea levels . Current international law on maritime borders awards countries territorial rights extending 200 miles offshore from their coastlines, for example – but is silent on what happens if those coastlines recede because of climate change. 195 This grey legal area introduces the potential for future conflicts over issues including: • Border disputes, including in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Mexico; • Ownership of undersea energy resources (notably in the Arctic); • Newly navigable waterways (such as the North-West Passage and Northern Sea Route); • The sovereignty rights, resource claims, and populations of low-lying island states that disappear under rising sea levels; • The fate of ‘climate refugees’, which some estimates suggest could number 200 million by 2050 (although the number is disputed, and UNHCR also questions the very idea of ‘environmental refugees’). 196 Why is multilateral cooperation needed? Of all of the areas of action considered in this paper, it is in the context of strategic resource competition that the case for multilateralism is clearest. While the extent of globalization today may be unprecedented, conflict over resources is one of the oldest stories in the book – and it is, after all, preventing violent conflict between states that forms the principal raison d’être of the UN system. Absent those protectionism and escalatory resource wars are inevitable Protectionism causes nuclear war Continuing calls for curbs on the flow of finance and trade will inspire the United States and other nations to spew forth protectionist legislation like the notorious Smoot-Hawley bill. Introduced at the start of the Great Depression, it triggered a series of tit-for-tat economic responses, which many commentators believe helped turn a serious economic downturn into a prolonged and devastating global disaster. But if history is any guide, those lessons will have been long forgotten during the next collapse. Eventually, fed by a mood of desperation and growing public anger, restrictions on trade, finance, investment, and immigration will almost certainly intensify. Authorities and ordinary citizens will likely scrutinize the cross-border movement of Americans and outsiders alike, and lawmakers may even call for a general crackdown on nonessential travel. Meanwhile, many nations will make transporting or sending funds to other countries exceedingly difficult. As desperate officials try to limit the fallout from decades of ill-conceived, corrupt, and reckless policies, they will introduce controls on foreign exchange. Foreign individuals and companies seeking to acquire certain American infrastructure assets, or trying to buy property and other assets on the cheap thanks to a rapidly depreciating dollar, will be stymied by limits on investment by noncitizens. Those efforts will cause spasms to ripple across economies and markets, disrupting global payment, settlement, and clearing mechanisms. All of this will, of course, continue to undermine business confidence and consumer spending. In a world of lockouts and lockdowns, any link that transmits systemic financial pressures across markets through arbitrage or portfolio-based risk management, or that allows diseases to be easily spread from one country to the next by tourists and wildlife, or that otherwise facilitates unwelcome exchanges of any kind will be viewed with suspicion and dealt with accordingly. The rise in isolationism and protectionism will bring about ever more heated arguments and dangerous confrontations over shared sources of oil, gas, and other key commodities as well as factors of production that must, out of necessity, be acquired from less-than-friendly nations. Whether involving raw materials used in strategic industries or basic necessities such as food, water, and energy, efforts to secure adequate supplies will take increasing precedence in a world where demand seems constantly out of kilter with supply. Disputes over the misuse, overuse, and pollution of the environment and natural resources will become more commonplace. Around the world, such tensions will give rise to full-scale military encounters, often with minimal provocation. In some instances, economic conditions will serve as a convenient pretext for conflicts that stem from cultural and religious differences. Alternatively, nations may look to divert attention away from domestic problems by channeling frustration and populist sentiment toward other countries and cultures. Enabled by cheap technology and the waning threat of American retribution, terrorist groups will likely boost the frequency and scale of their horrifying attacks, bringing the threat of random violence to a whole new level. Turbulent conditions will encourage aggressive saber rattling and interdictions by rogue nations running amok. Age-old clashes will also take on a new, more heated sense of urgency. China will likely assume an increasingly belligerent posture toward Taiwan, while Iran may embark on overt colonization of its neighbors in the Mideast. Israel, for its part, may look to draw a dwindling list of allies from around the world into a growing number of conflicts. Some observers, like John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, have even speculated that an “intense confrontation” between the United States and China is “inevitable” at some point. More than a few disputes will turn out to be almost wholly ideological. Growing cultural and religious differences will be transformed from wars of words to battles soaked in blood. Long-simmering resentments could also degenerate quickly, spurring the basest of human instincts and triggering genocidal acts. Terrorists employing biological or nuclear weapons will vie with conventional forces using jets, cruise missiles, and bunker-busting bombs to cause widespread destruction. Many will interpret stepped-up conflicts between Muslims and Western societies as the beginnings of a new world war. Resource wars cause extinction – best case studies prove The seminal anthropological study by Jared Diamond provides historical support for the proposition that natural resource scarcity can lead to conflict that threatens U.S. security.17 Diamond identified five contributing factors: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and a society’s response to environmental problems that led to conflict among adjoining states and, ultimately, the risk of implosion leading to extinction.18 Diamond asserts that We shouldn’t be so naïve to think that study of the past will yield simple solutions, directly transferable to our societies today. We differ from past societies in some respects that put us at lower risk than them; some of those respects often mentioned include our powerful technology (i.e., its beneficial effects), globalization, modern medicine, etc. . . . . We also differ from past societies in some respects that put us at greater risk than them: mentioned in that connection are, again, our potent technology (i.e., its unintended destructive effects), globalization (such that now a collapse even in remote Somalia affects the U.S. and Europe), the dependence of millions (and, soon, billions) of us on modern medicine for our survival, and our much larger human population. Perhaps we can still learn from the past, but only if we think carefully about its lessons.19 Diamond’s anthropological study of the extinction of civilization on Easter Island in the South Pacific is a useful case study of the linkages between cultural decline and unsustainable use of carbon-based energy sources. Easter Island was blessed with a temperate climate and fertile soil as a result of volcanic activity.20 However, the island’s temperate—as opposed to tropical—climate and its geographic isolation meant that Easter Island was not endowed with as many fish species or freshwater supplies as some of its tropical counterparts.21 Carbon dating of remains discloses that Easter Island was settled sometime around 900 A.D. and thrived until roughly 1700 A.D.22 At one point, Easter Island had extensive agricultural activity, sophisticated systems for raising chicken and other livestock, incredible skill in stone masonry/engineering, and technology to construct large outriggers that could travel thousands of miles through the open ocean to engage in trade.23 By the 1700s, however, the island’s populations of plants, wildlife, and people were in steep decline.24 Diamond notes that during the good years, much of the island became increasingly deforested as the islanders consumed palms and hardwoods for various uses, including the manufacture of charcoal for heating and cooking.25 By the 1400s almost all trees had disappeared.26 Once the trees disappeared, the islanders were no longer able to construct boats for trade.27 Wild sources of food were lost because there were no forests to sustain wildlife, and the population exploited fish stocks to extinction.28 Agriculture also collapsed: the loss of forests led to top soil erosion and nutrient loss as crops were defenseless against wind and rain.29 Starvation became the order of the day, leading to civil war, population crash, and cannibalism.30 Captain Cook visited the island in 1774 and observed that the islanders were “small, lean, timid, and miserable.”31 The number of home sites in the coastal region “declined by 70 from peak values around 1400–1600 to the 1700s. . . .”32 By 1872, only 111 islanders were left on Easter, compared with a minimum population of 6000 to 8000 before the crash began.33 3 Internal Links – Embargo removal is key First, nations see it as a filter for U.S. policy in the region Second, it delegitimizes the OAS Third, removal is a necessary first step to effective conflict resolution models Now is key – ideological shifts at home and potential development in Cuba | 10/26/13 |
Cuban Embargo Aff- Notre DameTournament: Notre Dame | Round: 1 | Opponent: Nevada Union FP | Judge: Alex Velto The Advantage is Multilateralism Unilateralism is the wrong approach for American Diplomacy. There is nothing to suggest its efficacy since 9/11. There is nothing to suggest its usefulness for future conflict. In allowing the US to go it alone, America's partners and allies risk the havoc and catastrophic consequences that will accompany "Imperial Overstretch." The residue of overstretch will include loss of US leadership in the world, an economy whose decline affects billions of dollars in international markets, and certainly emboldens rogue states. The whole world will pay the price if we let unilateralism pervade this century. As the bloodiest 100 years in recorded history, the 20th Century is replete with examples of how policy and practice intersect to foment war. The proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and the constantly mutating dynamic of terrorism inform our current, dangerous reality. Amidst this backdrop of destruction, there are lessons for those who are looking for them. Seeds of peacemaking and conflict resolution were planted which we must germinate in order to halt and then reverse the trend toward violence and chaos. Perhaps the 21st Century could be the first 100 years in which nations invest more in building peace than in making war. In the 20th Century, local conflicts ignited global tensions and genocide on an unprecedented scale, costing incalculable life and treasure. The two world wars and other explosive conflicts erupted over such issues as ethnic disputes, the securing of natural resources, corporate interests, ideology and religion. The international business of war produced economies of scale prompted by the industrial, technological, and communications revolutions. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife in Sarajevo by anarchist Gavrilo Princip was the spark that ignited WWI. In time, some 15 million people would be killed. The sheer brutality of that war led Woodrow Wilson to issue his "Fourteen Points" in 1918, which included the establishment of a League of Nations "for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike." Just like our present-day difficulties in pursuing compromise, the US Congress politicized the concept, bucked the President, and did not support that initiative. The subsequent failure of the League of Nations to prevent WWII may have galvanized our culture's distrust of multilateralism. Throughout the 20th Century and until today, nations and other entities have invested precious financial, intellectual, social, institutional and political capital into arming themselves with weaponry, instead of building their capacity for peace. Technologies change and improve with increasing rapidity, but those advances have included improvements in how to kill more people more efficiently and with smaller devices. WWII was the shining example of multilateralism and its power. Vietnam and Korea were examples of its limitations. South Africa and India demonstrated that the support of the international community could enable countries to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. All these contribute and form the basis of the state of nations today. The 20th Century left us at a crossroads: will we perpetuate the machinery and culture of war or surpass our greatest dreams by encouraging and enforcing peace policies and practices worldwide? The 21st Century began ominously with the attacks of September 11, 2001, which ushered in a new era of US foreign policy and global response to war, conflict and terrorism. Rather than engage a sympathetic world in developing multilateral and inclusive strategies similar to the precursors to the 2003 Iraq War and as was done before the Persian Gulf War, the US squandered its global capital to pursue "pre-emptive" unilateral military action. The equal and increasingly matching reaction is a global culture of military aggression and war. The resulting disintegration of the international community contributed to the most serious economic disaster since the Great Depression. Already struggling to survive amidst broken economies, the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and global terrorism strains multilateralism when it should embolden it. If it is true that every weapon invented is eventually used, we have much to fear if we do not reverse this lethal trend. Since national conflicts frequently spill over into regional and world-wide conflict, multilateral organizations have been very strong supporters of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Even the US found a way to first investigate and then come to terms with its terrible policy of putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps during WWII and apologized and paid reparations to survivors and their children. There were important Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa, supported by the international community. Victims and perpetrators of Apartheid who participated in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions demonstrated in compelling ways the healing and restorative power of those gatherings. Perhaps more importantly, they showed the world that a nonviolent response to unthinkable oppression and injustice can foster the peaceful development of a society intent upon making amends for the past and embarking upon a brighter, shared future. Since conflict-resolution and peacemaking at the local or national level work, why not apply it multilaterally? Concerned about the resurgence of unilateralism in the US's current Marjeh and Kandahar operations in Afghanistan, former Assistant Secretary of State Gene Dewey recently noted that "it's been very lonely being a leading multilateralist in Washington over the last nine years. Too few policy-makers have sensed where our unilateralism has led, and is leading." Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian Islamic countries generated the seeds that not only birthed the terrorists who carried out 9/11, but also attacks in Madrid, London, Mumbai and Chechnya. No matter where terrorists are determined to attempt to disrupt the lives of others, it's time for countries to realize that the only way to confront contemporary terrorism is through multilateralism. This must be a multilateralism that is thoroughly infused with peacemaking and conflict-resolution, instead of only "joint forces." At this crossroads, we can use the knowledge economy, social network and the international community to turn the rhetoric of hope into reality. We sit upon an historical precipice of policies and practices of sustainable, culturally responsive peace-building and violence prevention within and beyond our borders. Despite their faults, the institutions set up after in response to WWII (UN) and the Cold War (NATO) can be the 21st Century's vehicles for peace. We can use those instruments of multilateralism to build the peacekeeping, disaster relief, and conflict resolution forces that bring countries together. "Actually, I believe we have strategically shifted from that of a global war on terror (GWOT) to containing violent extremism (CVE). That said, the reason extremists do what they do is because they recruit from amongst the most desperate people on the earth. And, the reasons for desperation are strategic-~--but not necessarily military in nature. In fact, we have the capability to wage peace that is just as sophisticated as our capability to make war. Water, AIDS, mass migration of people, desertification, poverty, hunger, and disease-~--What would happen if our National Security Strategy became a multilateral one of economic engagement, and used the brain power and resources available to mitigate these issues?" -- Lt. Col. Matthew Canfield, U.S. Army (Currently on his second tour in Iraq) Concerns over economic stability, limited resources and security have divided us. Now is the time to create rather than divide common ground. U.S. lead Latin American multilateralism is vital to solve hemispheric problems – their influence disads are wrong and selective engagement fails While the U.S. position in the world is in relative decline, the country continues to be dominant in a number of aspects. Its economy is the world’s largest and probably the most dynamic. U.S. industries are at the forefront of technological advances and its universities lead the world in terms of investment for research and development. The U.S. is the largest recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the world and is a safe haven for investors in times of crisis. The weight of the United States is amplified at the regional level where, in spite of important regional variations, Latin America’s economies remain (for better or worse) largely dependent on the United States. On the one hand, the United States is the largest investor in Latin America and the largest source of FDI in the region, followed by Spain, Canada, Holland and Japan. On the other hand, it is also the region’s main trading partner: trade between Latin America and the United States is significantly higher than that with China and the European Union combined. Even in South America where several countries have sought new economic partnerships with Asia and Europe and pursued more independent foreign policies, the United States remains the largest trading partner. In 2008, the United States was the largest source of foreign imports and the leading export destination for every major country in the region except Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. For their part, Central America, the Dominican Republic and Mexico, linked to the U.S. economy by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the United States- Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), remain as dependent on the U.S. as ever. Furthermore, the links between the U.S. and Latin America are not only economic but also social and cultural; this is evidenced by consumption patterns, migration and tourism. The bottom line is that the fate of Latin America is still closely tied to that of the United States. The increased presence in the region of extra- hemispheric actors, such as China, India, Iran and Russia (not to mention Japan or Spain), has generated many headlines heralding the end of the Monroe Doctrine. Yet the presence of such extra-hemispheric actors is actually less relevant than it seems. Chinese trade and investment in the region, for example, have grown dramatically but remain heavily concentrated in the commodity sectors of certain South American countries, especially Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru. Furthermore, in other sectors such as textiles, electronics and light manufacturing, China is a fierce competitor, especially for Mexico and Central America. Thus, although the increased presence of Asian and European countries has caused a slight decline in the U.S. position in the region and contributed to a perception that Latin American countries have new options for integration, the U.S. economy remains a key factor in Latin America’s development. The final reason why the new multilateralism in Latin America will not substantially reduce the U.S. role in regional governance is that Latin America faces serious collective action problems to achieve co-operation without the participation of the United States. Past attempts at regional integration have resulted in many forgotten acronyms and even in the most successful cases these attempts have not succeeded in promoting deep integration. Despite the recent efforts of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva and others, Latin American countries are far from reaching agreements to co-ordinate security, energy and development policies, adopt a common currency, or even establish something as simple as a common visa policy. The reality is that Latin American states are divided into distinct subgroups with conflicting political and economic interests. Furthermore, in some cases, such as between Bolivia and Chile, and between Colombia and Venezuela, there is open hostility. In short, the new multilateralism in Latin America has not achieved tangible results which would suggest that U.S. influence in regional governance is decreasing dramatically. At the same time, there are still many steps that can and should be taken to revive and promote co-operation between the U.S. and Latin America. The Obama administration: A new partnership? How should the United States and the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama in particular respond to the new challenges of Latin American multilateralism? In a sense, this question is part of a broader issue related to U.S. foreign policy for it is not only the inter- American system but also the entire architecture of Western-dominated global institutions that need reconfiguration in the new millennium. It makes perfect sense to start the process of reform in the Americas. The United States effectively has two options: maintain the status quo or promote the “new partnership” that Obama defended in his campaign for the presidency. The first option, inherited from former president George W. Bush and softened by Obama, is not ideal, though it has some benefits. The crux of this strategy, described as “multilateralism à la carte,” is to selectively engage interested parties on narrowly defined issues. This strategy allows the United States to develop closer ties with key partners such as Canada, Colombia and Mexico and, at the same time, avoid the conflict entailed by deepening its relations with a broader set of actors and a wider range of topics. The strategy effectively sidelines the hemisphere’s fiercest critics of American policy such as Chávez, former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega in favor of a wait-and-see approach, which is premised on the assumption that these radical regimes will eventually collapse under the weight of their own contradictions before their deepening ties with Iran or Russia pose any substantial security risk to the United States or our allies. The approach is pragmatic, because it minimizes the problems of collective action, and also efficient in the sense that U.S. influence increases in a bilateral or selectively multilateral setting. It is, however, a strategy lacking long-term vision. For one, several of the most important problems in the region —drug trafficking, environmental conservation and migration among others— are essentially transnational issues for which bilateral and partial solutions are insufficient. Second, on issues such as arms control and energy security where the United States has strategic interests at stake, a wait-and-see approach is obviously inadequate. Finally, much like the debate on the reform of the United Nations Security Council and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), these discussions are critical to the legitimacy of the United States. An alternative strategy demands a new commitment to revitalize the hemispheric agenda. Although Obama’s policy proposal for a “New Partnership for the Americas” outlines a number of sensible changes in U.S. policy toward Latin America, the document ultimately fails to respond to the challenges of the new Latin American multilateralism in the region. To adapt to a new global and regional environment, the United States needs to develop a new foreign policy approach that is at once firm and flexible and, above all, must explore multiple mechanisms for co-operation on issues of common interest. Thus, the United States should seek to strengthen traditional inter-American institutions such as the OAS and the IDB but also facilitate the creation of new and potentially more dynamic mechanisms of co-operation. This paper puts forward three ideas on how the U.S. could fulfill the promise of a new partnership with Latin America. First, the Obama administration must continue to distance itself from the unilateral policies of the previous Bush administration. It is important that President Obama makes it clear that multilateral co-operation is the core of U.S. foreign policy and that the unilateralism of the Bush era was a temporary aberration. As was seen during the 2009 Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, the Obama administration’s renewed emphasis on dialogue and diplomacy has paid dividends in terms of the improved U.S. image in the region. Yet the recent (and avoidable) conflicts with regional leaders over the use of military bases in Colombia and the use of military force to deliver humanitarian assistance to Haiti after the country’s devastating earthquake, demonstrate that the countries in the area remain sensitive to the use of U.S. military force in the region. President Obama must therefore show more sensitivity on this issue than he has so far. Second, although it is essential that the United States listens to the leaders of Latin America and encourages the development of regional initiatives, the U.S. presence in the region must remain robust. The recent democratic crisis in Honduras confirms this. Although a consensus was quickly reached on the illegality of the overthrow of former president Manuel Zelaya and on the suspension of Honduras from the OAS, the failure of the United States to articulate a strong and consistent policy led to a power vacuum since no other country in the region had the same level of influence in this country. When the United States subsequently took more decisive actions to break the deadlock in Honduras, it had the unintended consequence of rupturing the regional consensus. This situation caused the United States to be diplomatically upstaged by Brazil on the issue of democracy promotion —even as Lula remained silent about the abuses of power by Chávez and Ortega, and rolled out the welcome mat for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ever since President John Kennedy placed the trade and travel embargo on Castro’s regime, U.S.-Cuban relations have been a proxy for other political concerns—the Cold War struggle against Communism, American global authority and tangled domestic politics within the swing state of Florida, where many Cuban Americans are concentrated. Today, leaders from large nations like Argentina, Mexico and Brazil view the cause of Cuban openness as a proxy for their own relationship with the United States. The dozens of nations in the continent that do recognize Cuba reportedly resent a “Cubanization” of regional policy—and “have made Cuba the litmus test for judging Washington’s policy toward Latin America,” said Julia Sweig, director of Latin Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, at a conference this week. The White House acknowledged as much the same day of its Cuba announcement: The U.S. has “neglected its relationships in this part of the world,” said Ambassador Jeffrey Davidow, director of American presence at the summit. “Whether one agrees with that perception or not, it certainly is a very strongly felt perception.” The U.S. delegation would like to focus the summit on three main subject areas: economic stability, energy action and public safety—the former because some 50 million people could drift back under the poverty line after the gains of the last five to six years, and the latter as violence related to drug trafficking has exploded along the U.S.-Mexican border in 2009. (The Department of Homeland Security recently appointed Alan Bersin as a “border czar” to help confront that problem.) The White House has said it will consider appointing a regional diplomat to handle Latin American issues, similar to the kind sent to handle climate change, the Middle East and Israel/Palestine. But, both because of the new shift in policy and the expectations of summit partners, Cuba may still have an oversized presence in deliberations—a presence it no longer really deserves. Despite today’s heated rhetoric surrounding Cuban human rights abuses, crackdowns on speech, retrograde labor practices or presidential posturing, the island nation has barely been of strategic significance to the United States since the founding fathers thought they would, after annexing Florida, turn Cuba into the next American state. With only 11 million people, it’s a fraction of the size of Brazil, which is hankering to join the UN Security Council, and the same size as Bolivia, which sits on important lithium deposits to be used in next-generation battery technology. It has no weapons, and no real enemies—besides the United States. Still, “unilateral sanctions are bad policy in almost every situation,” says William Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council. And Cuba has been a particularly ridiculous case in point. In addition to being hypocritical (the U.S. promotes free trade and is supposedly anti-terror; yet we don’t trade with Cuba, and former Cuban radicals live in the United States), the embargo is widely recognized to have been a failure. Both Castro and his brother, Raul, after all, are still running the country. And this stubbornness has enervated American allies in the Caribbean—as Obama may soon find out. So there is a large incentive to junk the failed policy toward Cuba—not because doing so would change anything about the 21st century world order, but because it presents an easy opportunity for Obama to signal that he’s a real change agent. Cubans have seen almost a dozen American presidents come and go with no shift in treatment—though polling suggests U.S. public opinion toward the communist state has softened in recent years. Havana is warming to more open relations, too. Todd Omestead, a reporter who recently returned from the city, said “there’s tremendous enthusiasm” in Cuba about the first black president of the U.S. (“Let’s do a trade: You take Raul Castro, we’ll take Barack Obama,” someone told him.) Indeed, even Fidel Castro is reportedly rooting for Obama to succeed. Following a trip to Cuba with the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Laura Richardson of California said that the elder Castro “watched the election, he listened to the speeches, and he wants Barack Obama to succeed…. He sincerely wants in his lifetime to see change in the United States.” This pronouncement and the U.S.’ opposition to Cuba’s future involvement in OAS-related hemispheric gatherings effectively acted as a unilateral veto, as Canada was the only other summit attendee to oppose Cuba’s reintegration, though Prime Minister Stephen Harper reportedly considered supporting the majority position on Cuba’s unconditional readmittance. This stubborn and clearly ideologically-based U.S. move served to do nothing but further alienate the U.S. from the region at a time when it is actively attempting to build both economic and political alliances. Furthermore, by exacerbating the divide between traditional U.S. pan-American policy and the Latin American position through his comments, Obama ensured that the topic of Cuba would continue to dominate the discussion throughout the summit, instead of allowing for a unified hemispheric discourse on other important and pressing regional matters to command media attention. Not surprisingly, amidst the polarizing environment in Cartagena, the Sixth Summit of the Americas concluded without a joint declaration on the agenda’s subjects, further accentuating the dysfunctional nature of current hemispheric politics.¶ Ahead of the Summit, Ecuador’s President, Rafael Correa, wrote a letter to the summit’s host, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, in which he declared his intention to boycott the meeting in protest of Cuba’s ongoing exile. He further pledged that Ecuador would boycott any future gatherings that excluded Cuba as long as he remains in office, and urged fellow ALBA members to do the same. While it appeared last week that no other nation would take similar steps, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega abstained from attending at the last minute, boycotting the event on the same grounds as Correa, despite his government’s presence in Cartagena. There had been speculation prior to the meeting that some Latin American countries, especially those with memberships in ALBA, would decline to join Ecuador in boycotting the event in hopes that the U.S. would soften its position on Cuba during the weekend’s meeting, making a gesture that could worsen trade relations with the U.S. unnecessary. However, after Obama’s steadfast reiteration of the U.S.’ stance, all eight ALBA members moved swiftly to decry the Cuban situation, vowing to boycott all subsequent Summits of the Americas if Cuba is not granted unconditional participation. Perhaps not so surprisingly, this same sentiment was echoed by some of South America’s most influential nations, including Mercosur members Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay.¶ The increasingly vocal and adamant calls for Cuba’s inclusion by Latin America, and the growing number of provocative comments being made by Latin American leaders about ending North American hegemony in the region, are ominous signs for the abiding strength of the U.S.’ influence in the region. With the prospect of the majority of the next Summit’s attendees boycotting the event under the current status quo, the future of the OAS and North American participation in Latin American affairs appears noticeably bleak. There are already a number of regional organizations which exclude the U.S. and Canada, CELAC and UNASUR among them, and their increasing relevance to international cooperation in the Americas does not bode well for North America. If the U.S. continues to persistently adhere to its current stance on Cuba through to the 2015 Seventh Summit of the Americas in Panama, there is a distinct possibility that the OAS could lose all legitimacy as well as its influence as exasperated Latin American countries refuse to participate. This could lead to both a rethinking of U.S. policy towards Cuba, and greater cooperation and concessions by the U.S., pursuant to a more unified and egalitarian Western Hemisphere dynamic. Conversely, if the U.S. continues its archaic and neo-imperialistic stance, bodies like CELAC would stand to gain considerable influence, and could perhaps even replace the OAS as the hemisphere’s primary pan-American body and standard-bearer for regional cooperation.¶ In either scenario, the inescapable reality becomes quite clear; no matter how U.S. policy towards Latin America evolves in the near future, the U.S.’ longstanding and powerful influence in Central and South America is beginning to wane. Newly developing export markets and swift economic growth in Latin America are bolstering the region’s ability to function independently of more developed powers like the U.S., and the more the region continues to develop, the stronger its thirst for self-determinism will become. As Central and South America continue to modernize in their quest to join the ranks of developed world powers, the U.S. will continue to watch its previously formidable regional will diminish. The more Washington is willing to proactively amend its foreign policy towards Latin America to promote a more respectful and reciprocal partnership arrangement, the better its prospects will become in forging long-term amicable alliances and beneficial economic partnerships with a rapidly upsurging region. Third, removal is a necessary first step to effective conflict resolution models At the international political level, President Obama sees resuming relations with Cuba as a real step towards multilateralism and leadership. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made the following statement about then President-elect Barrack Obama’s national election. “He spoke about a “new era of global partnership…I am confident that we can look forward to an era of renewed partnership and a new multilateralism." To highlight this point further, U.N. nations have voted overwhelmingly since 1992 to overturn the Cuban Embargo. In 2007, 184 nations voted against the embargo5 - a powerful statement about U.S. unilateralism with regards to Cuba. The argument can also be made that the U.S. has foreign relations with China, Saudi Arabia and other non-democratic governments while applying a different standard towardsCuba. With growing perception that Cuba no longer poses a credible threat to the U.S., it appears that U.S. policy has changed from coercive to punitive following the end of the Cold War. With a renewed focus on multilateralism, President Obama could go a long way to break this image by spreading the seeds of a “new beginning” in U.S.-Cuba relations. While dismissing Cuba’s immediate security threat to the U.S., we cannot ignore their 90-mile proximity to the U.S. shore. As we struggle to contain the illegal Mexican exodus into the U.S. and all the security concerns it poses, we neglect to see the historical similarities in past encounters with the Cuban government that led to similar incursions. So if we critically reexamine the current U.S. – Cuba embargo, why does the U.S. believe it will only lead to Cuban democratization? What about government collapse? A Cuban government collapse akin to Somalia could create a significant refugee situation not to mention an implied U.S. responsibility to provide humanitarian and even stability operations in Cuba. If catastrophe does occur, a search for causes would certainly lead back to our punitive approaches to U.S. diplomacy towards Cuba. On the other hand, consider that foreign diplomacy achieves a breakthrough under Raul’s Cuba. It could certainly hedge our influence in Latin America. According to Dr. DeShazo, “close bilateral relationships with Venezuela is a product of Fidel Castro-Hugo Chavez friendship and does not enjoy much popular support in Cuba-nor with Raul.” If true, perhaps having a U.S. - Cuba option can become an alternative to that relationship post Fidel Castro. Loosening or lifting the embargo could also be mutually beneficial. Cuba’s need and America’s surplus capability could be mutually beneficial - and eventually addictive to Cuba. Under these conditions, diplomacy has a better chance to flourish. If negotiations break down and a decision to continue the embargo is reached, international support would be easier to garner. Almost 21 years since the wall fell in Berlin, it is time to chip away at the diplomatic wall that still remains between U.S. and Cuba. This paper will further define our interests in Cuba and why President Obama should continue his quest for renewed diplomatic relations with Cuba. It will discuss potential risks associated with retaining the current 50-year diplomatic policy and give some broad suggestions regarding a new U.S. – Cuba foreign policy. Policy and National Interest Present U.S. policy towards Cuba is economic isolation imposed via embargo to coerce Cuba into establishing a representative government. While the basic policy remains unchanged, the same is not true about U.S. interests in Cuba. During the Cold War, stated U.S. interest was to contain Communism, the leading edge of which was Cuba. More than anything the U.S. wanted Castro’s demise but international support hinged on preventing the spread of communism. After 1989, communism was under siege and capitalism was on the rise. U.S. interests now shifted towards peace and regional stability. Of course, removing the Castro regime was still the preferred method, but without Soviet collusion Castro’s Cuba was no longer a credible threat to the U.S. Not surprisingly, international support quickly dwindled leaving the U.S. as the unilateral enforcer. In hindsight many argued it was the right time to loosen the embargo and seek better relations with Cuba. Instead, a renewed passion to topple Castro and establish democracy fractured any hopes to rekindle relations. In retrospect, Kennedy could not have foreseen a 50-year embargo that survives the Soviet Union’s demise but fails to remove Castro. The same cannot be said about the Obama Administration today. This section will analyze U.S. – Cuba policy, past opportunities and ultimate failure over the past 50 years. From 1959 to1964, beginning with President Eisenhower but shaped primarily by the Kennedy Administration, U.S. policy was to remove Fidel Castro and establish Democracy in Cuba.6 It can be argued that this policy resonates today but during the early period the U.S. actively pursued removal as the decisive action that would lead to Democracy in Cuba. Political and military efforts to remove Castro in 1961 were reinforced by the initial embargo implementation and tightening that was most effective. Between1965 and 1970, U.S. attempts to maintain a multilateral embargo failed and its effectiveness withered as western governments refused to acquiesce to U.S. - led sanctions. By the time the OAS officially lifted the embargo, Cuba had successfully diversified its trade portfolio and by 1974, 45 of Cuba’s exports came from western governments.7 The period 1965-1972, although officially endorsing the previous administration’s tough stance, largely ignored its neighbor while it dealt with the more pressing conflict in Viet Nam. Containment and a period of Presidential ambivalence towards Cuba allowed tensions to cool between nations. This coupled with a growing fatigue with the Viet Nam War resulted in a renewed engagement to normalize relations with Cuba. A policy of “rapprochement” or normalization began with the Nixon Administration and received promising traction under the Carter Administration in 1977. The rapprochement period, 1973 – 1980, was President Carter’s attempt to curtail communism in Africa and Latin America. By normalizing relations with Cuba, President Carter could leverage this good will to reverse Cuban presence in Ethiopia, Angola and Zaire. Several overt measures were taken to reduce embargo restrictions and in February, 1977 State Department spokesmen Fred Brown “publically acknowledged and accepted a Cuban proposal to begin bilateral talks on maritime boundaries and fishing rights.”8 In June, U.S. National Security Council decided to end the practice of blacklisting foreign ships that called on Cuban ports. Perhaps the most notable improvement that year was to allow foreign diplomats to occupy each other’s embassies. This allowed direct communication between countries; the previous practice had been to use Swiss and Czech proxies.9 Several incidents including the “Soviet Brigade” and the “Mariel Boatlift” in 1980 intensified this opposition and quickly derailed Carter’s initiatives in Congress. As President Reagan took office in 1980, U.S. – Cuba relations had already soured. The Reagan Administration would reinforce the weakened embargo and a return to a containment strategy under the auspices that Cuba was “promoting terrorism and subversion in virtually every Latin American country”. But strong Congressional opposition against normalizing relations took center stage during the 1980 presidential elections. Several incidents including the “Soviet Brigade” and the “Mariel Boatlift” in 1980 intensified this opposition and quickly derailed Carter’s initiatives in Congress. 10 The White House policy was to “disrupt and destabilize the island’s economy, terminate the Cuban-Soviet alliance, end Cuba’s internationalism, and finally reinsert Cuba within the capitalist politicaleconomic orbit.”11 President Reagan made every attempt to return to an “airtight” embargo but Cuba’s persistent trade with the west subverted the effort. In fact, British and Canadian companies could conduct trade in “America’s back garden without having to compete with U.S. companies.”12 Reagan did however, exact a toll on Cuba’s economy by preventing other nations from allowing Cuba to reschedule its debt: “a process of negotiating new loans to replace existing obligations, either by lengthening maturities, deferring of loan principal payment.”13 This action compelled Cuba to make its most overt concessions towards normalizing U.S. - Cuban relations. Castro removed troops from Africa and reclaimed 2,700 Cuban refugees that had departed to America during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift. Castro even allowed a U.S. Human Rights delegation to visit prisoners in Cuba. In return, the Reagan and Bush Administrations made no significant concessions to Cuba and status quo between countries remained. The last meaningful opportunity for change occurred after the fall of the Berlin Wall and particularly the window it presented the U.S. following the collapse in Soviet – Cuba relations. During the period 1990 – 1993, internal and economic turmoil following the Soviet Union’s break-up led to a drastic cut in Soviet subsidies and trade relations with Cuba. This action compelled Cuba to make its most overt concessions towards normalizing U.S. - Cuban relations. Castro removed troops from Africa and reclaimed 2,700 Cuban refugees that had departed to America during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift. Castro even allowed a U.S. Human Rights delegation to visit prisoners in Cuba. In return, the Reagan and Bush Administrations made no significant concessions to Cuba and status quo between countries remained. 14 This led to a 34 drop in Cuban economy forcing Castro to renew western trade options and relook his own draconian business and commercial practices. The first Bush Administration passed on this precious opportunity, ignoring Cuba’s overt concessions late in the previous administration and choosing instead to enact the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act reversing Carter’s amendment to allow third country U.S. companies from trading with Cuba.15 By the time President Clinton came to office, momentum had already shifted in Cuba’s favor. Cuba’s economy began to rise in 1994 reaching its apex in 1996 with a 41 increase thanks to foreign investments in tourism. The introduction of the HelmsBurton legislation in 1996 gained Congressional traction after the Cuban Air force shot down two, anti-Castro “Brothers in Rescue,” planes over Cuba. The Helms-Burton Act created unrealistic expectations for the Cuban government before U.S. would loosen restrictions with Cuba. A total of eight requirements had to be met and the most controversial of these included; a transitional government in place unlike the Castro regime; the dissolution of the Department of State; Cuba must hold free and fair elections and a controversial property law that allowed property owners that left Cuba as early as 1959, to make claims in U.S. Courts on that property. With Cuba’s economy on the rise, this new measure to tighten the noose failed terribly and only succeeded in further alienating both governments. The second Bush Administration did little to engage Cuba and after September 11, 2001, was completely engrossed in the War on Terror. U.S. policy towards Cuba has changed little in 50 years. Although the embargo continues to fail despite our best efforts to tighten it, our policy has remained steadfast and the U.S. is no closer to normalizing relations with Cuba. A History of Anger and Distrust After 50 years, deep-seated distrust and anger exists between the U.S. and Cuba. Perhaps an obvious assessment, but one that if ignored could undermine attempts to repair diplomatic relations between countries. Several diplomatic pitfalls developed over the years could hinder any attempt to reestablish relations. They could spell disaster and set an already tenuous relationship back decades. These triggers are subtle but recognizable over a long and tumultuous period in U.S. – Cuba relations. A historical account will help identify these political impasses and create favorable conditions for diplomatic success in future U.S. – Cuba relations. Experts argue over who’s started the dispute between nations: was it the Cuban Agrarian Reform Act in 1959 that nationalized agrarian land in Cuba to include U.S. owned lands? Could it have been Cuba’s decision to resume trade with the Soviet 9Union that led to a U.S. imposed embargo on Cuba in 1960? Perhaps the bigger issue was how diplomatic, economic and military efforts by both countries continued to aggravate already strained relations.16 In 1961, Cuban exiles supported by the Central Intelligence Agency failed to topple the Castro government. The Bay of Pigs fiasco sent Cuba a clear signal that the U.S. was not interested in negotiation. Castro answered immediately by allowing Soviets to position nuclear missiles in Cuba, threatening U.S. vital security and leading to the Cuban Missile Crises. These intentions have survived to the present undermining any attempt to pursue common interest and reduce tensions. The underlying fear that U.S. remains committed to toppling the Cuban government constitutes the first diplomatic pitfall in U.S. – Cuban relations. For this very reason, democratic reform will not succeed as a diplomatic bargaining tool with Cuba. Suspicions run deep among Cuban leaders and any inferences to government reform, albeit noble, will impede meaningful relations. Human rights advocacy, free trade and limited business opportunities in Cuba may be more plausible and could eventually encourage the long-term changes U.S. wants in Cuba. The embargo itself remains a perpetual albatross that continues to undermine any real diplomatic progress between nations. A series of coercive measures designed to topple the Castro regime began with U.S. – led efforts to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States (OAS) in January 1962 followed by trade prohibitions on imports and exports to Cuba by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). 17 This was achieved by leveraging an existing 1954 OAS Caracas Resolution designed to prevent trade with communist countries called Trading with the Enemy.18 After bilateral sanctions are established, U.S. pursued broader international support by 10enacting the October 1962 Battle Act prohibiting U.S. assistance to any country that traded with Cuba. An early attempt to persuade the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) nations to comply with the embargo yielded limited success.19 However, a new perceived security threat brought on by the Cuban Missile Crises in late 1962 gave U.S. the leverage it needed in February 1964 to convince NATO nations to effectively cease trade with Cuba. In July 1964, OAS followed NATO’s lead; U.S. had succeeded in isolating Cuba from its western traders.20 Tightening the noose placed extraordinary economic pressure on Cuba considering U.S. multilateral efforts reduced western trade by 73 in 1964. Cuba was obliged to subsidize this deficit with the Soviet Union and China between1961 – 1973. This trend continued by enticing Latin American and other western countries like Canada and England in the 1980s and following the Soviet fall in the 1990s.21Commensurately, Presidential administrations have loosened and tightened the embargo repeatedly as the climate between nations improved or deteriorated. The Cuban Defense Act in 1992 and the Helms Burton Act in 1996 tightened embargo restrictions signaling continued U.S. intentions to remove the Castro regime. But the U.S. - led embargo played right into Castro’s hand. Castro accused the U.S. calling it “another economic aggression” and stating that Cubans would have to undergo “long years of sacrifice.”22 By demonizing U.S. policy, he was able to galvanize Cuban support during the toughest times. The embargo helped create the American enemy, removing any popular support for rebellion and elevating Castro’s struggle to a legitimate Cuban struggle.11Castro was also complicit in the failure to mend U.S. – Cuba relations. Hiscontinued attempts to export communism began in Africa with a total 55,000 troops in Angola and Ethiopia by 1978. He focused efforts closer to Latin America by supporting Puerto Rican independence movement in 1975, the Sandinistas overthrow in Nicaragua in 1979 and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation (FMLN) in El Salvador. Cuba’s support to Columbia’s M19 (Columbian Election Day April 19, 1970) guerilla movement labeled Cuba a “state sponsor of terrorism” in 1982.23 Castro’s expansion efforts fueled U.S. security paranoia and prevented several overt efforts by the Carter Administration to improve relations with Cuba. In April 1980, an incident at the U.S. Mission in Havana led 120,000 Cubans to depart Mariel Port by boat to the U.S.24 The incident better known as the “Mariel Boatlift” became the tipping point that inhibited further relations with Cuba. Despite the growing tensions between the U.S. and Cuba, trade between the west and Cuba increased. NATO compliance with U.S. - brokered trade restrictions broke down after 1966 in particular due to British and Canadian opposition. U.S. efforts to use the OAS embargo to influence the United Nations also failed. In 1974, Latin American leaders pushed to end the OAS embargo. In 1975 the OAS lifted the embargo with Cuba and the embargo returned to a bilateral embargo now condemnedby most western countries.25 In 1982, Cuba’s failing economy led Castro to pursue western trade with a renewed vigor. By “1987, more than 370 firms from twenty-three European, Latin American, and Asian countries participated in Cuba’s largest ever annual trade fair.”26 Castro’s interest in improving U.S. - Cuba relations was perhaps the greatest from 1982-1988. Castro made statements in 1982 to resume talks with the U.S.; he took back more than 1000 Mariel Boatlift criminals that came to the U.S. in 1987 and pulled troops out of Angola in 1988 to mention a few. These rare moments and apparent seams in Castro’s armor were left unanswered by the Reagan and Bush Administrations. Instead renewed efforts to continue ratcheting a now largely ineffective bilateral embargo served only to increase animosity between both countries. It is difficult to quantify, but essential to note, that U.S. action over the years seems to support a hatred for Fidel Castro that interferes with any attempt to established diplomatic relations with Cuba. If true, to neglect this assumption could undermine any efforts to reverse our seemingly punitive approach. Perhaps it can be traced to his support for a Soviet-style communism. After all, few things in 1960 America were feared and despised more than communism. Any country affiliated with the communist movement became an affront to the American way of life. Furthermore, Americans shed blood in Cuba during the 1898 Spanish American War leading to Cuban Independence in 1902.27 Fidel Castro became evil’s face in Cuba and any attempt to partner with Castro seemed equally tainted. Fast forwarding to the present, with communism no longer a threat, perhaps it’s time to let the anger fade and deal with Cuba for its’ diplomatic merit not past indiscretions. The question remains whether clear objectiveness leads U.S. diplomatic efforts with Cuba? It is important to note that what’s at stake here is U.S. national interests and not the legacy of Fidel Castro. Another important pitfall is to exploit democracy as a precondition for diplomacy and economic engagement in Cuba. If democracy is virtuous, then why must we exploit it? It casts a negative shadow on a positive change in government. There is a common perception that U.S. policy with regards to security and stability can only exist under the precondition of a “Democratic Cuba”. It has prevented any real progress in U.S. – Cuba relations because of well placed fears that we mean to subvert the Cuban government. A popular Cuban American lobby group, The Cuban American National Foundation summarizes traditional U.S. beliefs towards Cuba. They suggest, “U.S. – Cuba policy should focus on (1) advancing U.S. interests and security in the region and (2) empowering Cuban people in their quest for democracy and prosperity…that these are “intertwined and one cannot be individually accomplished without the other.”28 The recommendation then focuses largely on steps to pursue a democratic Cuba. To separate security and stability from democratic pursuits in Cuba could benefit both causes. Focusing on better diplomatic relations could further democracy as a byproduct of increased exposure to open markets, businesses and globalization. China is a good example. The U.S. has diffused tensions with China by exposing them to open markets. Although they continue to embrace communism, their version of communism has been somewhat diluted as they modified their business practices, trade and other aspects to compete in the global marketplace. If you take into account that Cuba’s Growth National Product (GDP) decreased by 4 since 2006 while their debt grew by 16 to almost $20B in 2008, Cuba certainly has incentive to do the same.29 By imposing democracy we jeopardize diplomatic avenues to our principal security and stability pursuits. To assuage the Cuban America position on this issue may be simpler today than 10 years ago. Today’s younger Cuban-American generation is more amenable to closer relations with Cuba. The anger carried by their immigrant forefathers14after 50 years may be passing and perhaps the time is right to leverage this new Cuban American generation to open dialogue with Cuba without the democratic preconditions tied to negotiations. As we pursue diplomatic relations with Cuba we should not expect full disclosure, immediate results and a Cuban government anxious to please the U.S. We should expect a cautious and limited first engagement that appears noticeably weighted in U.S. effort. Let us assume the U.S. makes significant diplomatic and economic concessions but Cuba is less willing to provide some reciprocal offering. U.S. policy could conclude that Cuba has no genuine desire to consummate new diplomatic relations and diplomacy could fail. It is imperative to understand that the U.S. has done most of the “taking” and hence will, at least for the near future, do most of the “giving”. A steady, patient and continued engagement is needed until Cuba has the confidence to commit to further diplomatic relations. Current U.S.-Cuba Policy Analysis Understanding the deep-seated animosity and distrust that continues to fuel U.S. - Cuba tensions will aid us in properly analyzing the feasibility, acceptability and suitability (FAS) of current and future U.S. policy with Cuba. Identifying FAS applications to diplomacy, information, military, economic, finance, intelligence and law enforcement (DIME-FIL) will highlight weaknesses in current U.S. – Cuba relations that can be modified for future improvement. The logical question with regards to current U.S. – Cuba policy is whether it’s feasible to continue the current policy. At least for the foreseeable future, the answer is yes. It equates to doing nothing diplomatically, militarily and economically. Perhaps this 15option is appealing given a robust domestic agenda and U.S. involvement in two wars. According to Professor Schwab and other experts however, the U.S. has lost the information campaign targeted at the Cuban people. It has only, “buttressed Fidel’s popularity in Cuba and elsewhere, which eviscerates the very purposes the embargo was set up for.”30 It’s like the classic biblical story of David triumphing over Goliath – the bigger the oppressor the greater the victory. True or not, Fidel has made the case successfully to the Cuban people. While it’s feasible for the U.S. to pursue the current course there is no evidence it will succeed. How acceptable is it to U.S. foreign policy? There are three elements of national power that highlight our current policy: diplomacy, economy and law enforcement. It is subjective to evaluate acceptability strictly in terms of current national power invested and subsequent pay offs in foreign policy. U.S. needs international cooperation to achieve the coercive effects that only complete economic strangulation can accomplish. This is tough to do and North Korea and Iran bear this true. If we look at it from a broader international and economic perspective we can begin to see why it’s not acceptable. Take a UN General Assembly vote renouncing the U.S.-led embargo on Cuba for instance; since1992 there has been overwhelming vote to end the embargo.31 In essence, it has garnered sympathy for Castro and encouraged western nations like Canada and Spain to continue open relations with Cuba. Even if the embargo could work, U.S. diplomacy has failed to yield the international tourniquet needed to bring change in Cuba. Applying economic force without first garnering the necessary diplomatic support failed to achieve intended changes succeeding instead in hurting the Cuban people it hoped to protect. Whether or not an embargo can work in Cuba is suspect but succeeding without international support is impossible. Since the embargo hinges on a larger multinational participation, international and not just U.S. acceptability is necessary to achieve U.S. ends in Cuba. Several embargo refinements over the years like the Libertad Act have further tightened restrictions on Cuba. These restrictions have placed a heavy burden on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) particularly in Miami. A 2007 GAO report highlights these burdens and how they impede other more important Law Enforcement activities in defense of the homeland.32 GAO findings suggest there’s a real need to balance U.S. paranoia for “everything Cuba.” This rebalancing purports an unacceptable cost-benefit to the current law enforcement aspect of the embargo. It diminishes our greater need to defend against terrorist, criminals and other real threats to our national security. In essence, our efforts to impose embargo restrictions are unacceptable tradeoffs for homeland security. In the final analysis, U.S. – Cuba policy is not sustainable because it has failed to meet desired national ends: Cuban democracy and human rights. Prior to 1989, the U.S. could make the argument that the embargo contained communism and generally marginalized the Castro government. It failed however, to depose Fidel Castro and democratize the Cuban government. A post Cold War Cuba no longer poses a threat to the U.S. - communism is contained and Cuba is still under embargo. Despite a 50-year failure to affect change in Castro’s government, our policy with regards to Cuba remains unchanged. We have foregone diplomatic engagement and chosen coercive economic power as our only political tool. Does Cuba Pose A Security Threat to the U.S.? Let’s begin by asking this question: can we afford to escort commerce through Caribbean waters from Cuban pirates? This sounds as farfetched as an attack from an Afghan-based Al-Qaida using commercial airliners to destroy the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This scenario while unexpected is completely contrary to our policy objectives in Cuba. The greater possibility that “something” unfavorable happens in Cuba that threatens U.S. national interests is certainly more relevant. Although Cuba poses no traditional threats to the U.S., geographically, their 90-mile proximity should concern us. Our proximity to Cuba assures U.S. involvement, be it voluntary or involuntary, in a major crisis. Consider a disease outbreak that begins in Cuba over a break down in hygiene, government pollution or other misfortune attributable to economic strife. The disease has no boundaries and quickly reaches the Florida shores via travelling Cuban American citizens. This scenario could be mitigated or even preventable under the auspices of better relations. Aside from the obvious medical benefits a partnership provides, established communications with Cuba would likely prevent an uncontrolled spread in the U.S. There are definite advantages to having healthy regional partnerships to deal with regional problems. While economic pressure has failed to bring about government change, it could trigger a government collapse. If Cuba becomes a “failing” or “failed state” we could see a huge refugee flood into the U.S., increased crime and drug trafficking across U.S. borders, and renewed security and stability issue in the region. In 1980, 120,000 Cuban refugees fled Mariel and 20,000 more in 1994 after Cuba declared an open immigration policy.33 From 2004 – 2007, 131,000 Cubans have made residence in the U.S. Almost 38,000 settled in Florida alone in 2006. Although it’s mere speculation to presume Cuba will fail, if it did, there is no question where Cubans would seek refuge. A failed state could eventually draw U.S. involvement into nation building in Cuba taking a greater toll on our national resources. This scenario, while unexpected, is completely contrary to our policy objectives in Cuba. Current U.S. policy is no longer a sustainable option to achieving our national interests in Cuba. Until realignment can bring national policy back in line with national interests, conditions will not exist for real change in U.S. – Cuba relations. Proposed U.S.-Cuba Policy Analysis If today marks President Obama’s “new strategy” towards Cuba we must begin with U.S. National interests in the broader Latin American context. Over the past 50 years our approach has been germane to Cuba and not the larger Latin American construct. In so doing we have isolated Cuba from Latin America for coercive reasons yes, but also for the very democratic principles we hoped Cuba would follow. The State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs (covers Canada and Cuba) has set the following goals for the region: “Economic partners that are democratic, stable, and prosperous; Friendly neighbors that help secure our region against terrorism and illegal drugs; Nations that work together in the world to advance shared political and economic values.”34 To simplify these goals, let us just say stability, economic prosperity and democracy. Using these as a benchmark, I propose our new diplomatic strategy towards Cuba must be similar - achieve economic stability, security and a representative government as the “end state” goal and not the prerequisite for engagement. President Obama can implement this policy by first building American and Congressional support for engagement. He should establish a formal infrastructure that communicates to Cuba and the International Community at large that we’re serious about diplomatic engagement with Cuba. Finally, we must loosen embargo restrictions and expose Cubans to U.S. open markets, business opportunities and 21st Century living. This combination will improve relations with Cuba by regaining their trust, improving their living conditions and exposing them to the democratic enticements we hope they will emulate. Achieving Congressional approval will be difficult although not impossible in the present economic recession. The economic benefits associated with new business opportunities in Cuba can encourage skeptics in Congress to mobilize. As a counterargument to a continued embargo, the President can point to the dangers associated with failed states like Somalia inadvertently caused by the very environment sanctions create. A strong communication strategy to gain American support coupled with a softening Cuban American stance, shrouded in economic opportunity, could encourage Congressional dialogue and resolution. President Obama can succeed if he sets realistic goals and expresses these to the American public before the media or his opposition defines these. We’ve established that coercive means have failed to achieve democracy and economic stability in Cuba. I’m suggesting there is another mutually beneficial alternative. Using China as an example, their exposure and need to compete in free global markets broadened their horizons and shifted their hard line communist approach to international diplomacy. This was a feat that coercive diplomacy has not accomplished in Cuba. Yet we still have civil disagreements with China on human rights issues, Taiwan’s right to independence and other contentious issues without resorting to coercive measures. Why should Cuba receive different treatment? The confusion lies with our tendency to impose democracy as a precondition for diplomatic relations. How can Cuba subscribe to small business practices, a free economy building block, if business opportunities are not available? Diplomatic engagement and economic encouragement has a better chance. Cuba’s economic condition incentivizes their willingness to begin diplomatic negotiations. The U.S. should begin by focusing efforts to establish diplomatic relations through incentives rather than coercion. We must also set the democratic precondition aside to pursue when the relationship matures and trust is reestablished. Exposing them to new opportunities will eventually, through their own discovery and U.S. shepherding, lead them to a more representative government. If we accept that reestablishing relations with Cuba is the first real step to a democratic end-state then the first action must be to appoint an Ambassador to Cuba. This diplomatic gesture signals that U.S. is serious about foreign relations. The Ambassador’s first actions must include setting the conditions with Cuba to allow a loosening of embargo restrictions. President Obama, in the spirit of multilateralism, should pursue international solidarity since some countries enjoying exclusive trade with Cuba would certainly protest the immediate competition. Choosing a time-phased removal would protect U.S. assets and interests in the remote possibility that Cuba fails to comply with the agreed bi-national or international terms. It might also sooth domestic and partisan anxiety regarding open trade with Cuba. President Obama must accomplish this early in his first term to allow time to reap success or mitigate failure before the next elections. The U.S. cannot afford to miss another opportunity to normalize relations with Cuba. A Cuba without Fidel is an opportunity – whether it is Raul or his replacement in 2013. The U.S. must lay the foundation today for renewed U.S. Cuba relations. Delaying could also signal the contrary to Raul Castro suspiciously awaiting the true purpose of recent U.S. concessions. While a long term goal may be to influence change in government, it cannot be the basis for initial success and continued diplomacy. With diplomatic patience and a prosperous Cuba, we have reason to believe, like China and Russia that capitalism will prevail over communism. But new politicians and a younger generation of Americans who measure success between terms and administrations will not understand if results aren’t immediate or commensurate to U.S. efforts. Instead, the strategy pursued must occur with a measured diplomatic optimism that insures immediate setbacks don’t derail the restoration of trust that must occur before complete reciprocation can be expected. Conclusion Today, 20 years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall – it’s time to chip away at the diplomatic wall that still remains between U.S. and Cuba. As we seek a new foreign policy with Cuba it is imperative that we take into consideration that distrust will characterize negotiations with the Cuban government. On the other hand, consider that loosening or lifting the embargo could also be mutually beneficial. Cuba’s need and America’s surplus capability to provide goods and services could be profitable and eventually addictive to Cuba. Under these conditions, diplomacy has a better chance to flourish. If the Cuban model succeeds President Obama will be seen as a true leader for multilateralism. Success in Cuba could afford the international momentum and credibility to solve other seemingly “wicked problems” like the Middle East and Kashmir. President Obama could leverage this international reputation with other rogue nations like Iran and North Korea who might associate their plight with Cuba.35 The U.S. could begin to lead again and reverse its perceived decline in the greater global order bringing true peace for years to come. Multiple scenarios – The US National Intelligence Council’s 2008 report on global trends to 2025 observed that “even actions short of war will have important geopolitical implications as states undertake strategies to hedge against the possibility that existing energy supplies will not meet rising demand”, noting trends including Chinese and Indian purchases of equity stakes in energy fields, energy-deficient states employing “transfers of arms and sensitive technologies and the promise of a political and military alliance as inducements to establish strategic relationships with energy-producing states”, and increased naval competition “in a zone extending from the Persian Gulf to East and Southeast Asia”. As Michael Klare summarizes: “...the leaders of most countries involved in the great energy race have come to view the struggle over hydrocarbon assets as a “zero sum” contest ... a zero-sum mentality leads to a loss of flexibility in crisis situations, while the lens of nationalism turns the pursuit of energy assets into a sacred obligation of senior government officials.” 185 More recently, a similar dynamic has been seen in the context of inter-state competition for land and food , as import-dependent countries seek to agree overseas security of supply deals for food or land. While there is often a lack of transparency about such deals, among the examples reported in the media are Chinese attempts to secure 1.24 million hectares of land in the Philippines (in a deal subsequently blocked), 700,000 hectares in Laos, 2 million hectares for biofuel production in Zambia and 2.8 million hectares for the same purpose in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 186 Other key food importers, including the United Arab Emirates and South Korea, have also sought to improve their good security with similar deals. More acute forms of competition for food include the export restrictions discussed in the previous section. At the same time, countries that are not dependent on imported grain can also contribute to this emerging competition for land and food through their own land use policies: as already noted, the IMF, World Bank and Goldman Sachs all argued in 2008 that the single most significant driver of the food price spike was the diversion of US agricultural land to biofuel production. 187 On water, the key risk comes from trans-boundary fresh water resources. Today, there are 263 rivers that either span or delineate international borders. 188 It is important to note that so far, trans-boundary water resources have tended to trigger cooperation rather than conflicts between the countries that share them: research by Oregon State University, for example, finds that “cooperative interactions between riparian states over the past fifty years have outnumbered conflictive interactions by more than two-to-one.” 189 However, the same research also finds that 158 of the world’s 263 international river basins “lack any type of cooperative management framework.” 190 Moreover, with the prospect of climate change to consider, there is no guarantee that the future will look like the past. A particular concern here is the fact that many water-sharing agreements are based on a set volume of water rather than a percentage of what is available. 191 The risk of glacial retreat, most notably in the Himalayas, has also triggered concern about future water-driven conflict risks – as well as controversy, given the recent furor over erroneous IPCC projections that 80 of Himalayan glaciers would have disappeared by 2035. Existing glaciers provide dry season water resources to 1.3 billion people living in river basins including the Mekong, Irrawaddy, Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yangtze and Yellow River. 192 As temperatures rise, some estimates (still valid, despite the recent IPCC controversy) suggest the risk of future dry season flow reductions of as much as 60-70 on the Ganges. 193 These kinds of forecast have led to increased concern about the potential risk of capture of water resources by particular countries (for instance in India, where there are fears about the potential for China to dam and divert the Brahmaputra river). 194 Another dimension of inter-state strategic resource competition centers on the impacts of climate change, and particularly the effects of rising sea levels . Current international law on maritime borders awards countries territorial rights extending 200 miles offshore from their coastlines, for example – but is silent on what happens if those coastlines recede because of climate change. 195 This grey legal area introduces the potential for future conflicts over issues including: • Border disputes, including in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Mexico; • Ownership of undersea energy resources (notably in the Arctic); • Newly navigable waterways (such as the North-West Passage and Northern Sea Route); • The sovereignty rights, resource claims, and populations of low-lying island states that disappear under rising sea levels; • The fate of ‘climate refugees’, which some estimates suggest could number 200 million by 2050 (although the number is disputed, and UNHCR also questions the very idea of ‘environmental refugees’). 196 Why is multilateral cooperation needed? Of all of the areas of action considered in this paper, it is in the context of strategic resource competition that the case for multilateralism is clearest. While the extent of globalization today may be unprecedented, conflict over resources is one of the oldest stories in the book – and it is, after all, preventing violent conflict between states that forms the principal raison d’être of the UN system. Climate change and resource scarcity have the potential to pose an existential challenge to globalization. While interdependence, complexity and prosperity have all increased massively over the past few decades as globalization has accelerated, the process has been neither sustainable, nor resilient, nor equitable. Now, scarcity issues – together with other global risks such as financial crises, pandemics like swine flu, or trans-boundary security risks such as terrorism and arms proliferation – are part of a range of threats to globalization that epitomize why this greater sustainability, equity and resilience is needed. Inevitably, the fact that increasing globalization has come with ‘shadow sides’ will lead some voices to argue that the process of globalization should be slowed, halted or even reversed. The risk of protectionism as a misguided response to the credit crunch and the ensuing global downturn remains very real. A global flu pandemic could lead to borders becoming less porous to international travel and migration. Scarcity issues could provide an even larger impetus for pulling away from global interdependence – whether towards greater, or towards intensifying competition (or conflict) for dwindling resources. This paper, however, has suggested that there is an alternative – that rests on more globalization and interdependence, not less. Crucially, though, it has argued that effective multilateral institutions and responsible sovereignty are the key to effecting this shift, and to nudging international relations towards increased levels of non-zero sum cooperation on scarcity issues instead of an intensifying zero sum competition for resources. It is not yet clear whether the process of creating a multilateralism capable of coping with scarcity will be a big bang (perhaps following a systemic crisis) or a slow, evolutionary process. What is already clear, though, is that it is a process that policymakers and publics have no real choice but to embark on together – and soon. Continuing calls for curbs on the flow of finance and trade will inspire the United States and other nations to spew forth protectionist legislation like the notorious Smoot-Hawley bill. Introduced at the start of the Great Depression, it triggered a series of tit-for-tat economic responses, which many commentators believe helped turn a serious economic downturn into a prolonged and devastating global disaster. But if history is any guide, those lessons will have been long forgotten during the next collapse. Eventually, fed by a mood of desperation and growing public anger, restrictions on trade, finance, investment, and immigration will almost certainly intensify. Authorities and ordinary citizens will likely scrutinize the cross-border movement of Americans and outsiders alike, and lawmakers may even call for a general crackdown on nonessential travel. Meanwhile, many nations will make transporting or sending funds to other countries exceedingly difficult. As desperate officials try to limit the fallout from decades of ill-conceived, corrupt, and reckless policies, they will introduce controls on foreign exchange. Foreign individuals and companies seeking to acquire certain American infrastructure assets, or trying to buy property and other assets on the cheap thanks to a rapidly depreciating dollar, will be stymied by limits on investment by noncitizens. Those efforts will cause spasms to ripple across economies and markets, disrupting global payment, settlement, and clearing mechanisms. All of this will, of course, continue to undermine business confidence and consumer spending. In a world of lockouts and lockdowns, any link that transmits systemic financial pressures across markets through arbitrage or portfolio-based risk management, or that allows diseases to be easily spread from one country to the next by tourists and wildlife, or that otherwise facilitates unwelcome exchanges of any kind will be viewed with suspicion and dealt with accordingly. The rise in isolationism and protectionism will bring about ever more heated arguments and dangerous confrontations over shared sources of oil, gas, and other key commodities as well as factors of production that must, out of necessity, be acquired from less-than-friendly nations. Whether involving raw materials used in strategic industries or basic necessities such as food, water, and energy, efforts to secure adequate supplies will take increasing precedence in a world where demand seems constantly out of kilter with supply. Disputes over the misuse, overuse, and pollution of the environment and natural resources will become more commonplace. Around the world, such tensions will give rise to full-scale military encounters, often with minimal provocation. In some instances, economic conditions will serve as a convenient pretext for conflicts that stem from cultural and religious differences. Alternatively, nations may look to divert attention away from domestic problems by channeling frustration and populist sentiment toward other countries and cultures. Enabled by cheap technology and the waning threat of American retribution, terrorist groups will likely boost the frequency and scale of their horrifying attacks, bringing the threat of random violence to a whole new level. Turbulent conditions will encourage aggressive saber rattling and interdictions by rogue nations running amok. Age-old clashes will also take on a new, more heated sense of urgency. China will likely assume an increasingly belligerent posture toward Taiwan, while Iran may embark on overt colonization of its neighbors in the Mideast. Israel, for its part, may look to draw a dwindling list of allies from around the world into a growing number of conflicts. Some observers, like John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, have even speculated that an “intense confrontation” between the United States and China is “inevitable” at some point. More than a few disputes will turn out to be almost wholly ideological. Growing cultural and religious differences will be transformed from wars of words to battles soaked in blood. Long-simmering resentments could also degenerate quickly, spurring the basest of human instincts and triggering genocidal acts. Terrorists employing biological or nuclear weapons will vie with conventional forces using jets, cruise missiles, and bunker-busting bombs to cause widespread destruction. Many will interpret stepped-up conflicts between Muslims and Western societies as the beginnings of a new world war. The seminal anthropological study by Jared Diamond provides historical support for the proposition that natural resource scarcity can lead to conflict that threatens U.S. security.17 Diamond identified five contributing factors: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and a society’s response to environmental problems that led to conflict among adjoining states and, ultimately, the risk of implosion leading to extinction.18 Diamond asserts that We shouldn’t be so naïve to think that study of the past will yield simple solutions, directly transferable to our societies today. We differ from past societies in some respects that put us at lower risk than them; some of those respects often mentioned include our powerful technology (i.e., its beneficial effects), globalization, modern medicine, etc. . . . . We also differ from past societies in some respects that put us at greater risk than them: mentioned in that connection are, again, our potent technology (i.e., its unintended destructive effects), globalization (such that now a collapse even in remote Somalia affects the U.S. and Europe), the dependence of millions (and, soon, billions) of us on modern medicine for our survival, and our much larger human population. Perhaps we can still learn from the past, but only if we think carefully about its lessons.19 Diamond’s anthropological study of the extinction of civilization on Easter Island in the South Pacific is a useful case study of the linkages between cultural decline and unsustainable use of carbon-based energy sources. Easter Island was blessed with a temperate climate and fertile soil as a result of volcanic activity.20 However, the island’s temperate—as opposed to tropical—climate and its geographic isolation meant that Easter Island was not endowed with as many fish species or freshwater supplies as some of its tropical counterparts.21 Carbon dating of remains discloses that Easter Island was settled sometime around 900 A.D. and thrived until roughly 1700 A.D.22 At one point, Easter Island had extensive agricultural activity, sophisticated systems for raising chicken and other livestock, incredible skill in stone masonry/engineering, and technology to construct large outriggers that could travel thousands of miles through the open ocean to engage in trade.23 By the 1700s, however, the island’s populations of plants, wildlife, and people were in steep decline.24 Diamond notes that during the good years, much of the island became increasingly deforested as the islanders consumed palms and hardwoods for various uses, including the manufacture of charcoal for heating and cooking.25 By the 1400s almost all trees had disappeared.26 Once the trees disappeared, the islanders were no longer able to construct boats for trade.27 Wild sources of food were lost because there were no forests to sustain wildlife, and the population exploited fish stocks to extinction.28 Agriculture also collapsed: the loss of forests led to top soil erosion and nutrient loss as crops were defenseless against wind and rain.29 Starvation became the order of the day, leading to civil war, population crash, and cannibalism.30 Captain Cook visited the island in 1774 and observed that the islanders were “small, lean, timid, and miserable.”31 The number of home sites in the coastal region “declined by 70 from peak values around 1400–1600 to the 1700s. . . .”32 By 1872, only 111 islanders were left on Easter, compared with a minimum population of 6000 to 8000 before the crash began.33 So, is warming inevitable? Yes and no, says lead UCLA investigator Professor Alex Hall. "In the study, we examined two emissions scenarios, a 'business-as-usual' scenario where greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at the same rate as they have in the recent past, and a 'mitigation' scenario, where emissions begin to decrease over the next decade or two." "In the mitigation scenario, we see about 70 percent of the warming that we see in the business-as-usual by mid-century. This indicates that some warming is probably inevitable in the region, no matter what decisions are made in the coming decades regarding greenhouse gas emissions," says Hall. "However, beyond mid-century, the choices we make in the coming years make a much larger difference in how much climate change materializes." That's science talk for 'now would be a good time to make some adjustments,' something Pasadena seems to have picked up on again, this time with its bag initiative. Hall was reluctant to give recommendations on how individual efforts can help steer us off this course, but Bill Patzert is more forthcoming: "There's no going back, it's irreversible," says the veteran climatologist. "The length and duration of heat waves have dramatically increased. A two- to three-day heat wave will be the two-week heat wave in the 21st century." Caribbean SIDS now experiences the impacts of human-induced climate change. Time is running out and there is an urgent need to translate ideas into concrete action. In Bali, December 2007, AOSIS remarked that climate change is the critical issue that confronts each and every one of the 44 members estates as SIDS endeavour to advance on a sustainable basis while preserving the core cultural values and unique island identity. For SIDS, the goal of stabilizing temperatures at 2 degrees above pre industrial levels, fails to consider the survival of island states, and means the loss of many critical ecosystem, including coral reef and fisheries, the flood of coastal communities, stronger storms, reduced water supply, increased droughts and desertification and threaten to food security. Consequently AOSIS claimed that the avoidance of adverse impacts on SIDS should be the fundamental benchmark against which all the negotiation of the Bali Roadmap be conducted.
Global climate change poses immediate risks in the Caribbean – laundry list of impacts Global climate change poses a grave, imminent danger to all aspects of development (socio-economic and environmental) in SIDS. What is especially troubling is that small island developing states contribute the least to the problem of global climate change (both in terms of per capita and aggregate greenhouse gas emissions), but are among the most vulnerable to its adverse effects. All SIDS confront development and human life threats that could result in widescale habitat and eco-system destruction. Anthropogenic climate change is expected to6: • Negatively impact on agricultural productivity throughout the tropics and sub-tropics. • Seriously compromise fresh water quantity and quality, especially in Pacific and Caribbean SIDS. • Increase the incidence of malaria, dengue, and other vector-borne diseases in the tropics and sub-tropics. • Harm ecological systems and their biodiversity. • Raise sea levels due to increases in temperature, displacing tens of millions of people living in low-lying coastal zones, and rendering uninhabitable those SIDS that are at or below sea-level. • Shift tourism patterns, a major industry for many SIDS, towards higher altitudes and latitudes. This is projected to result in a potential drop of 20-50 in the tourism sector.7 For example, it is already clear that such SIDS as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean — an increasingly popular tourist destination — are particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise.8 • Yield significant coastal damage, including beach erosion, destruction of valuable coral reefs, loss of coastal areas, and damage to infrastructure (such as roads, bridges, utility lines, bridges). • Make inland areas susceptible to property and infrastructure damage from flooding and soil erosion in areas where upland watersheds are in poor condition, particularly on larger islands. The Caribbean Islands Hotspot is one of the world’s greatest centers of biodiversity and¶ endemism, yet its biodiversity and the natural¶ services it provides are highly threatened. Although¶ the islands have protected areas systems, most ar¶ e inadequately managed and important areas lack¶ protection. This strategy will ensure that CEPF¶ funds are employed in the most effective manner¶ and generate significant conservation results that¶ not only complement the actions of other¶ stakeholders but also enable significant expansion¶ of strategic conservation for the benefit of all.¶ Everyone depends on Earth’s ecosystems and their life-sustaining benefits, such as clean air,¶ fresh water and healthy soils. Founded in 2000,¶ the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF)¶ has become a global leader in en¶ abling civil society to participate in and benefit from conserving¶ some of the world’s most critical ecosystems. C¶ EPF is a joint initiative of l'Agence Française de¶ Développement, Conservation International, the Gl¶ obal Environment Facility, the Government of¶ Japan, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the World Bank. As one of the¶ founding partners, Conservation International ad¶ ministers the global program through a CEPF¶ Secretariat.¶ CEPF provides grants for nongovern¶ mental and other private organizations to help protect¶ biodiversity hotspots, Earth’s most biologically¶ rich and threatened areas. The convergence of¶ critical areas for conservation with millions¶ of people who are impoverished and highly¶ dependent on healthy ecosystems is more ev¶ ident in the hotspots than anywhere else.¶ CEPF is unique among funding mechanisms in th¶ at it focuses on biological areas rather than¶ political boundaries and examines conservation th¶ reats on a landscape-scale basis. A fundamental¶ purpose of CEPF is to ensure that civil society is¶ engaged in efforts to conserve biodiversity in¶ the hotspots, and to this end, CEPF provides ci¶ vil society with an agile and flexible funding¶ mechanism complementing funding currently¶ available to government agencies.¶ CEPF promotes working alliances among commun¶ ity groups, nongovernmental organizations¶ (NGOs), government, academic institutions and¶ the private sector, combining unique capacities¶ and eliminating duplication of efforts for a¶ comprehensive approach to conservation. CEPF¶ targets trans-boundary cooperation for areas rich of¶ biological value that straddle national borders¶ or in areas where a regional approach may be more effective than a national approach.¶ A recent, updated analysis reveals the existence of¶ 34 biodiversity hotspots, each holding at least¶ 1,500 endemic plant species, and having lost at¶ least 70 percent of its original habitat extent¶ (Mittermeier¶ et al¶ . 2005). The Caribbean islands qualify as one of these global biodiversity¶ hotspots by virtue of their high endemicity and high degree of threat.¶ The Caribbean Islands Hotspot is exceptionally important for global biodiversity conservation.¶ The hotspot includes important ecosystems, fro¶ m montane cloud forests to coral reefs, and¶ supports populations of unique species amounting to at least 2 percent of the world’s total¶ species. Infectious diseases cause extinction – threat higher than ever Well, according to new research published December 2 in Nature, the answer is yes—healthy biodiversity is essential to human health. As species disappear, infectious diseases rise in humans and throughout the animal kingdom, so extinctions directly affect our health and chances for survival as a species. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) "Biodiversity loss tends to increase pathogen transmission across a wide range of infectious disease systems," the study’s first author, Bard College ecologist Felicia Keesing, said in a prepared statement. These pathogens can include viruses, bacteria and fungi. And humans are not the only ones at risk: all manner of other animal and plant species could be affected. The rise in diseases and other pathogens seems to occur when so-called "buffer" species disappear. Co-author Richard Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies points to the growing number of cases of Lyme disease in humans as an example of how this happens. Opossum populations in the U.S. are down due to the fragmentation of their forest habitats. The marsupials make poor hosts for the pathogen that causes Lyme disease; they can also better defend themselves from the black-legged ticks that carry the affliction to humans than can white-footed mice, which, on the other hand, are thriving in the altered habitat—and along with them disease-carrying ticks. "The mice increase numbers of both the black-legged tick vector and the pathogen that causes Lyme disease," Ostfeld said. Our soil resource is vital to the survival of the human race. Not only does it provide the literal foundation of our existence, it is the source of most of the agricultural products that sustain us and our way of life—food, fiber, timber, and energy. Because damages to soil quality are nearly always permanent, preservation of this resource is critically important to maintaining agricultural productivity and environmental quality. One of the most widespread threats to soil quality is wind and water erosion, an ever-occurring process that impacts our lives in numerous ways, the direst of which is lost food production. It is estimated that soil erosion is damaging the productivity of 29 (112 million acres) of U.S. cropland and is adversely affecting the ecological health of 39 (145 million acres) of rangeland. In addition to on-site soil loss, erosion results in off-site sediment movement that can cause problems downstream. Sediment can deposit and clog drainage ways, increase potential for flooding, decrease reservoir capacity, and carry nutrients and pesticides that degrade water quality. Current assessments by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of impaired water bodies indicate that 40 of the stream miles and 45 of the lake and reservoir areas are impaired because of sediment. Therefore, minimizing erosion is not only important for saving the soil, it is essential for preserving potable water resources and improving water and air quality. Another possibility is that global environmental damage might increase the gap between rich and poor soci¬eties, with the poor then violently confronting the rich for a fairer share of the world’s wealth. Severe conflict may also arise from frustration with countries that do not go along with agreements to protect the global envi¬ronment, or that “free-ride” by letting other countries absorb the costs of environmental protection. Warmer temperatures could lead to contention over more easily harvested resources in the Antarctic. Bulging populations and land stress may produce waves of environmental refugees, spilling across borders and disrupting relations among ethnic groups. Countries might fight among themselves because of dwindling supplies of water and the effects of upstream pollution.6 A sharp decline in food crop production and grazing land could lead to conflict between nomadic tribes and seden¬tary farmers. Environmental change could in time cause a slow deepening of poverty in poor countries, which might open bitter divisions between classes and ethnic groups, corrode democratic institutions, and spawn revolutions and insurgencies. In general, many experts have the sense that environmental problems will “ratchet up” the level of stress within states and the inter¬national community, increasing the likelihood of many different kinds of conflict—from war and rebellion to trade disputes—and undermining possibilities for cooperation. Independently, environmental destruction leads to global wars Another possibility is that global environmental damage might increase the gap between rich and poor soci¬eties, with the poor then violently confronting the rich for a fairer share of the world’s wealth. Severe conflict may also arise from frustration with countries that do not go along with agreements to protect the global envi¬ronment, or that “free-ride” by letting other countries absorb the costs of environmental protection. Warmer temperatures could lead to contention over more easily harvested resources in the Antarctic. Bulging populations and land stress may produce waves of environmental refugees, spilling across borders and disrupting relations among ethnic groups. Countries might fight among themselves because of dwindling supplies of water and the effects of upstream pollution.6 A sharp decline in food crop production and grazing land could lead to conflict between nomadic tribes and seden¬tary farmers. Environmental change could in time cause a slow deepening of poverty in poor countries, which might open bitter divisions between classes and ethnic groups, corrode democratic institutions, and spawn revolutions and insurgencies. In general, many experts have the sense that environmental problems will “ratchet up” the level of stress within states and the inter¬national community, increasing the likelihood of many different kinds of conflict—from war and rebellion to trade disputes—and undermining possibilities for cooperation. Although the biggest impact on adaptation will result from the actions taken by national governments, there are substantial benefits to be gained from international collaboration in this area. International collaboration refers to activities undertaken jointly by a variety of actors—including governments, international organizations, multilateral financial institutions, the private sector, NGOs, research institutions, and civil society—in pursuit of shared objectives that form part of an agreed agenda. International collaboration should enhance, not displace, independent national initiatives.24 It could support national governments and industries to build market frameworks, strengthen local capacity, and enhance technical know-how through information exchange, networking and facilitation of relationships, and linking local players to international expertise. International collaboration is useful to exchange experiences, learn from each other, and discuss best practices in order to avoid time-consuming and costly mistakes and adopt “short-cuts” to success. By tying national efforts to the broader international community, a country can reap the benefits of adaptation practices, technology improvements, and cost reductions at home, while contributing to the collective scale-up of adaptation practices worldwide. Possible benefits of international collaboration on adaptation could include: • Enhanced knowledge of effective market strategies and mechanisms. • Reduced trade and investment barriers. • Increased South-South and North-South trade opportunities. • Improved employment and income opportunities. • Increased energy access to those in need. For its part, the Organization of American States (OAS) oversees implementation of the Caribbean Sustainable Energy Program (CSEP) funded primarily by the European Union, with some contributions from the U.S. Department of Energy, to enable the tiny island nations of the Eastern Caribbean and the Bahamas to increase the sustainability of their energy supplies while reducing carbon emissions through the development and use of renewable energy and energy efficiency systems. The OAS also oversees implementation of a Caribbean-wide program funded by the Energy Department to facilitate regional dialogue on long-term sustainable energy solutions, and to help national governments promote and implement sustainable energy policies and programs through short-term legal counseling and technical assistance. Overall, the OAS has emerged as a central clearinghouse for disseminating information on ECPA initiatives and bringing together potential public and private sector partners. • Though mitigation is important, there have been extensive resources, projects, and programs dedicated to this area over the last two decades. Thus, the paper focuses primarily on adaptation practices to address climate change in SIDS. • Financing of adaptation in SIDS is a priority, though the paper will need to identify and suggest recommendations for addressing a range of other barriers such as capacity building, policy support, education and outreach, monitoring and evaluation, etc. • Sustainable development and climate change should be jointly addressed and not viewed in isolation of each other. Sustainable development for SIDS is only possible if climate change adaptation is effectively integrated into broader national sustainable development plans, policies, projects, and programs. In particular, urgent and timely attention should be given to linkages with the MDGs, which are central to reducing poverty and enhancing economic and social development by 2015. • Climate risk-management is a crucial element of climate change adaptation and should be addressed in a broad framework that allows for national, regional, and global synergies. Areas to consider include climate change, disaster reduction, and desertification. • Immediate action to mitigate and adapt to the adverse effects of climate change makes sound fiscal and economic sense. The costs of inaction far outweigh the costs of early action. Scenario 3 is Conflict Management One of the key problems limiting cooperation between states in the international system is the lack of an overarching authority to enforce agreements. In the domestic sphere, the government can intervene to enforce contracts. Because of the lack of a central authority internationally, states are forced to find other mechanisms to enforce their agreements. One of the options available is for states to create institutions. Although these institutions do not enjoy the same amount of power as a government, they provide a structure for the enforcement of an agreement that should mitigate the need for militarized disputes to resolve conflict. Institutions offer a potential solution to the problem of managing common water resources. Institutions can serve to provide assurances that treaties will be followed by riparians (Sowers, 2002). A treaty without effective enforcement mechanisms is not likely to offset future conflict. 11 Institutions can serve as an outlet for conflict management by providing an arena for riparians to resolve their differences, by providing neutral information, reducing uncertainty, and minimizing transaction costs (Keohane, 1984). Some institutions explicitly manage water- related conflicts, such as regional trade agreements in Africa (Powers, 2004a, 2004b). When an effective institution is present, a riparian dispute can be referred to the institution for resolution, which diminishes the possibility that the disputing parties will resort to the threat or use of force. Institutions may also have a more passive effect on conflict management (Mitchell and Hensel, 2005), by creating regular forums that facilitate bilateral negotiations between members and encouraging norms of peaceful conflict resolution (Russett and Oneal, 2001). Institutions created by the United States and Canada to resolve their river conflicts provide great examples of the benefits of river-specific institutions for conflict management. The International Joint Commission (IJC) has existed since 1909 and regulates all shared water between the United States and Canada. Disputes between the riparians are referred to this international commission, which works to resolve contentious issues. The IJC has been effective in regulating the Great Lakes and overseeing numerous hydroelectric projects that involve both states. The United States and Canada also belong to a number of regional and global organizations that call for peaceful dispute settlement, such as the Organization of American States, the Rio Pact, and the United Nations. These shared institutional memberships create more general forums for peaceful negotiations over river issues. Thus we expect that institutions (river-specific or general) designed to manage riparian conflict will decrease the likelihood of militarized conflict, and increase the frequency and effectiveness of peaceful conflict management. These results, particularly those for river-specific institutions, suggest that international institutions can help to overcome obstacles to cooperation in an anarchic international system. Even when the issue at stake is as important as water, a vital resource for human existence, we find that river institutions have been quite effective at reducing militarized conflict over the rivers in question and at promoting the success of negotiations over river-related issues. This is particularly consistent with the work of Mitchell and Hensel (2005), who suggest that institutions can have a ‘‘passive’’ effect of promoting conflict resolution among their members, even if they are not having an ‘‘active’’ effect by settling the conflict through direct involvement.34 Several caveats to our analyses are in order, though. First, with respect to the militarization of river claims, it is clear that fewer river claims lead to militarized activity than is popularly believed. For all the academic and policy-oriented discussions of ‘‘water wars’’ dominating future conflict, we have identified only 17 militarized interstate disputes between 1900 and 2001 that explicitly involved attempts to alter the river-related status quo. One partial explanation for this lack of ‘‘water wars’’ e even in the Middle East, the region where most expect the worst conflict to occur e is that river-specific institutions have made a positive contribution to avoid armed conflict over rivers. Such institutions did significantly reduce militarized conflict in our analyses where they were present, although conflict was still rare even where no institutions existed at the time of the claim. Another partial explanation for the relative rarity of armed conflict over rivers may be that these river claims have not taken place in areas with the most extreme water shortages, and that future conflict might be more likely as water demands rise and water supplies decrease in both quality and quantity. Our analyses revealed that greater levels of challenger water scarcity increase the likelihood of armed conflict, so as scarcity levels are expected to rise in coming decades, we might reasonably expect militarized conflict to rise as well e although there is still room for hope if effective river institutions can be put into place to try to manage rivers peacefully. Despite constant presidential summits proclaiming a new era of Latin American economic integration and political brotherhood, an escalation of border conflicts in recent weeks should draw alarm bells everywhere.¶ Judging from what I’m hearing from U.S. and European diplomats, escalating tensions between several Latin American countries over century-old border disputes are not only resulting in growing military expenditures, but are also affecting talks on trade, investment and security issues with the region.¶ U.S. and European officials complain that it’s hard to negotiate agreements with Central American or South American economic blocs because their members refuse to sit at the same table with their neighbors because of border disputes or political conflicts.¶ Among the several territorial disputes that have been heating up in recent weeks:¶ Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, speaking Sept. 18 aboard a warship patrolling waters that are being disputed between his country and Nicaragua, said that Nicaragua’s latest legal claims against Colombia at the International Court of Justice in The Hague are “unfounded, unfriendly and reckless.”¶ Santos, who has said that Colombia will not accept a recent ICJ ruling that would give Nicaragua 30,000 square miles of potentially oil-rich waters between the two countries, accuses Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega of having “expansionist goals.” Many Colombians fear Nicaragua is planning to invite Chinese companies to explore oil in the area.¶ Colombia is expected to bring the issue to the United Nations General Assembly this week.¶ Panama’s President Ricardo Martinelli, who is also accusing Nicaragua of encroaching on his country’s territorial waters, has said that he plans to sign a joint letter with Colombia, Costa Rica and Jamaica to U.N. Secretary Ban Ki-moon denouncing Nicaragua’s expansionist ambitions.¶ Ortega is not only quarreling with Colombia and Panama over territorial waters, but also with Costa Rica over land along the San Juan River on their common border.¶ That long-standing conflict escalated in recent weeks after the Nicaraguan president made a rambling speech before his country’s army seemingly suggesting that Nicaragua may seek to make a legal claim before the ICJ over Costa Rica’s province of Guanacaste.¶ Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla issued a statement on Aug. 15 calling Nicaragua an “adversary country” that “invaded” part of her country two years ago. The two presidents accuse one another of inflaming nationalist passions to cover up for their domestic political troubles.¶ Bolivia earlier this year took its territorial claims against Chile to the ICJ, demanding a passage to the Pacific Ocean through what is today northern Chile. The two countries do not have full diplomatic relations, and Bolivia’s President Evo Morales recently accused his Chilean counterpart of “lying” about the conflict.¶ Peru, which took its dispute with Chile over waters along the two countries’ maritime border to the ICJ in 2008, is expecting a ruling within the next few months.¶ U.S. officials say Washington’s efforts to negotiate economic agreements with the Central American Integration System, the region’s economic bloc, have been hurt by the fact that the presidents of Nicaragua and Costa Rica will often not sit at the same table, or go to summits hosted by the other country.¶ Asked whether the Obama administration is concerned about this, Roberta Jacobson, the State Department’s top official in charge of Latin American affairs, told me that although the United States is not getting involved in these territorial disputes, “it is always a concern when partners and allies in this hemisphere have tensions with each other. It complicates cooperation.”¶ European diplomats, in turn, complain that Paraguay’s suspension from South America’s Mercosur economic bloc and a lingering political dispute between Paraguay and Venezuela over membership in that bloc have further complicated long-delayed European Union-Mercosur free trade negotiations.¶ Jose Miguel Insulza, head of the 34-country Organization of American States, told me in an interview last week that “this is a problem, because no extra-regional interlocutor will be very interested in conducting a negotiation when all parts of the deal are not sitting at the same table.” | 11/3/13 |
EmailsTournament: Email | Round: 1 | Opponent: emails | Judge: emails dylantheconqueror02@gmail.com | 10/28/13 |
Filename | Date | Uploaded By | Delete |
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10/26/13 | caitlinp96@gmailcom | ||
4/25/14 | caitlinp96@gmailcom | ||
11/3/13 | caitlinp96@gmailcom |
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