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Dumping CP
Tournament: GBX | Round: 1 | Opponent: Everything | Judge: Text: The United States federal government should implement a policy requiring the dumping of all agricultural waste into the deep ocean
Agricultural waste dumping comparatively beats the case Fountain 09 Nick, Observatory Staff Writer. A Carbon Keeper: Crop Waste Sunk to the Ocean Deep; Accessed online: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/science/earth/03obcrops.html?ref=science A leading idea to fight global climate change is to permanently remove some of the carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere. Here’s one way to do it: deep-six much of the world’s agricultural waste. Plants remove CO2 from the air through photosynthesis, incorporating the carbon in their tissues. So dumping corn stalks, wheat straw and other crop residues into the deep ocean, where cold and lack of oxygen would keep them from decomposing, would in effect sequester atmospheric CO2 on a time scale of millennia. In a world that celebrates high technology, the idea sounds too simple to succeed. But Stuart E. Strand of the University of Washington and Gregory Benford of the University of California, Irvine, concluded that crop waste storage would make more sense than other proposals for carbon sequestration, including gas storage, sequestration directly in the soil, planting of more forests to take up more CO2, and fertilizing the oceans to foster more algae growth. Their findings are published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. The researchers calculated that crop waste burial would be more efficient than some other methods and could be adopted sooner, in part because existing technology and infrastructure could be used. Stalks could be baled in the field, transported to ports and loaded on barges for deep-water dumping. The researchers suggest any environmental impact could be minimized by concentrating the dumping in one area.
11/23/13
Lacan K
Tournament: GBX | Round: 1 | Opponent: Everything | Judge: The myth of hegemony merely plays into the fantasy of wholeness – the world can never be mastered by one power Stavrakakis 99 Yannis Stavrakakis, member of the Essex School of Discourse Analysis. “Lacan and the Political.” Routledge. AP Fantasies of mastery, especially mastery of knowledge, have direct political significance. Thomas Richards, in his book The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of the Empire, explores the importance of fantasy in the construction of the British empire. There is no doubt that no nation can close its hand around the whole of the world. In that sense an empire is always, at least partly, a fiction. Absolute political control is impossible due to a variety of reasons, such as the lack of information and control in distant parts of the imperial territory. This gap in knowledge (in the symbolic constitution of the empire) and control, was covered over by the fantasy construction of the imperial archive, ‘a fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and empire’. In that sense ‘the myth of imperial archive brought together in fantasy what was breaking apart in fact’ and was thus shared widely; it even had an impact in policymaking (Richards, 1993:6). This imperial archive was not a real museum or a real library, it was not a building or a collection of texts, but a fantasy of projected total knowledge: it constituted a ‘collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire’ (Richards, 1993:11). In this utopian space, disorder was transformed to order, heterogeneity to homogeneity and lack of political control and information to an imaginary empire of knowledge and power. It is this constitutive play which can help illuminate a series of political questions and lead to a novel approach to political analysis. As an illustration let us examine a concrete problem of political analysis. How are we, for example, to account for the emergence and the hegemonic force of apartheid discourse in South Africa? Is this emergence due to a positively defined cause (class struggle, etc.)? What becomes apparent now, in light of the structural causality of the political, is that the reasons for the resurgence of Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s are not to be found in some sort of ‘objective’ conditions (Norval, 1996:51). Apartheid can be traced back to the dislocations that conditioned the emergence of this Afrikaner nationalist discourse (associated, among others, with the increasing capitalisation of agriculture, the rate of urbanisation and events such as the Great War). The articulation of a new political discourse can only make sense against the background of the dislocation of the preceding socio-political order or ideological space. It is the lack created by dislocation that causes the desire for a new discursive articulation. It is this lack created by a dislocation of the social which forms the kernel of the political as an encounter with the Lacanian real. Every dislocatory event leads to the antagonistic articulation of different discourses that attempt to symbolise its traumatic nature, to suture the lack it creates. In that sense the political stands at the root of politics, dislocation at the root of the articulation of a new socio-political order, an encounter with the real moment of the political at the root of our symbolisation of political reality. Underlying Lacan’s importance for political theory and political analysis is his insistence on the split, lacking nature of the symbolic, of the sociopolitical world per se. Our societies are never harmonious ensembles. This is only the fantasy through which they attempt to constitute and reconstitute themselves. Experience shows that this fantasy can never be fully realised. No social fantasy can fill the lack around which society is always structured. This lack is re-emerging with every resurfacing of the political, with every encounter with the real. We can speak about the political exactly because there is subversion and dislocation of the social. The level of social construction, of human creativity, of the emergence and development of socio-political institutions, is the level in which the possibility of mastering the real makes itself visible but only to be revealed as a chimera unable to foreclose a moment of impossibility that always returns to its place. Given this context, the moment of the political should be understood as emerging at the intersection of our symbolic reality with this real, the real being the ontological horizon of every play between political articulation and dislocation, order and disorder, politics and the political.2
The impact is violence – as the fantasy fails the only option is to find an external enemy to blame in order to sustain our internal conception of totality Stavrakakis 99 Yannis Stavrakakis, member of the Essex School of Discourse Analysis. “Lacan and the Political.” Routledge. AP In the light of our theoretical framework, fantasy can only exist as the negation of real dislocation, as a negation of the generalised lack, the antagonism that crosses the field of the social. Fantasy negates the real by promising to ‘realise’ it, by promising to close the gap between the real and reality, by repressing the discursive nature of reality’s production. Yet any promise of absolute positivity—the construction of an imaginarised false real—is founded on a violent/negative origin; it is sustained by the exclusion of a real—a non-domesticated real—which always returns to its place. Sustaining a promise of full positivity leads to a proliferation of negativity. As we have already pointed out, the fantasy of a utopian harmonious social order can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. Since the realisation of the utopian fantasy is impossible, utopian discourse can remain hegemonically appealing only if it attributes this impossibility—that is to say, its own ultimate impossibility—to an alien intruder. As Sartre has put it ‘the anti-Semite is in the unhappy position of having a vital need for the very enemy he wishes to destroy’ (Sartre, 1995:28). The impossibility of the Nazi utopia cannot be incorporated within utopian discourse. This truth is not easy to admit; it is easier to attribute all negativity to the Jew: All that is bad in society (crises, wars, famines, upheavals, and revolts) is directly or indirectly imputable to him. The anti-Semite is afraid of discovering that the world is ill-contrived, for then it would be necessary for him to invent and modify, with the result that man would be found to be the master of his own destinies, burdened with an agonising and infinite responsibility. Thus he localises all the evil of the universe in the Jews. (Sartre, 1995:40)12 As Jerrold Post has pointed out, we are always bound to those we hate: ‘We need enemies to keep our treasured—and idealised—selves intact’ (Post, 1996:28–9). And this for ‘fear of being free’ (Sartre, 1995:27). The fantasy of attaining a perfect harmonious world, of realising the universal, can only be sustained through the construction/localisation of a certain particularity which cannot be assimilated but, instead, has to be eliminated. There exists then a crucial dialectic between the universal fantasy of utopia and the particularity of the—always local—enemy who is posited as negating it. The result of this dialectic is always the same: The tragic paradox of utopianism has been that instead of bringing about, as it promised, a system of final and permanent stability, it gave rise to utter restlessness, and in place of a reconciliation between human freedom and social cohesion, it brought totalitarian coercion. (Talmon, 1971:95)
The alternative is to engage in the Act – in the face of the decision of action presented by the 1AC, we instead make the impossible Third choice to disengage from the moment and reorient ourselves in terms of the problem – only then can we disengage from fantasy Zizek 06 Slavoj Zizek. “The Parallax View.” MIT Press. February 17, 2006. AP The universe of cartoons obeys two opposing rules, both of which violate the logic of our ordinary reality. First, a cat is walking above the precipice, with no ground beneath its feet, but it falls down only when it looks down and realizes that there is no firm ground beneath its feet. Second, a character witnesses an act which goes against his interests (someone is driving along in his stolen car, and so on); he smiles benignly, even waves at the passerby, becoming aware only when it is already too late that the car is his own—at that point only, the smile changes into consternation. . . .What these two opposing gags share is the temporal delay: the body falls down only when it becomes aware of its lack of ground; the character notices too late that the process going on in front of him affects him. . . .The role of awareness, however, is inverted: the first case is similar to the one of quantum physics, since taking note of it, registration, being aware of-it, is the condition of the event’s actualization—it actually happens only when one becomes aware of one’s situation; in the second case, awareness comes too late, after the thing has already taken place—not behind the subject’s back, but in full view—and the comic effect occurs when we see the subject clearly seeing what is going on in front of him (someone driving his own car) without being aware of what this means, of how it affects him, of how he is involved in it. Although the two procedures seem surreal, even ridiculous, in both of them a real-life situation reverberates. Is it not true that when a political system is in deep crisis, it drags on only because it doesn’t notice that it is already dead—the moment when those in power (as we usually put it) “lose faith in themselves,” stop believing in themselves, admit that the game is up, is crucial. And there is always a temporal gap between this awareness that “the game is up” and the actual loss of power—those in power can prolong their desperate hold on it; battles can go on, with lots of blood and corpses, even if the game is already up. This same political process of disintegration of a power structure also provides the case of the second process in which consciousness is out of sync with the actual state of things: those in power are not aware that their time is over, that the process they are watching is their own funeral, so they smile and wave like the idiot who waves at the guy driving away his own car. . . . The two opposing procedures can thus be united in a single process: a catastrophic X occurs, but the affected agent remains unaware of it and goes on with life as usual; only when it registers/perceives its state is the catastrophe actualized, does it strike with full force.1 Is this not also the ultimate lesson of Benjamin Libet’s famous experiment (on which more below)?2 Consciousness is in itself deprived of any substantial role, merely registering a process that goes on independently of it—yet this registration is crucial if the “objective” process is to actualize itself. Toward the end of Spielberg’s Minority Report,3 there is a moment which stages something like an ethical act proper. John Anderton (Tom Cruise) finally confronts the man who, six years before, was supposed to have raped and killed his little son;4 when he is on the verge of shooting the killer (as he was predetermined to do, according to the vision of the three “precognitives”), he stops, blocking the execution of his decision, arresting his gesture—does he not thereby confirm Libet’s “Hegelian” insight into how the elementary act of freedom, the manifestation of free will, is that of saying no, of stopping the execution of a decision? At its most elementary, freedom is not the freedom to do as you like (that is, to follow your inclinations without any externally imposed constraints), but to do what you do not want to do, to thwart the “spontaneous” realization of an impetus. This is the link between freedom and the Freudian “death drive,” which is also a drive to sabotage one’s inclination toward pleasure. And is this not why Freud was so fascinated by Michelangelo’s Moses? He read the statue as depicting the moment when, full of rage and intending to smash the tablets containing the Decalogue, Moses summons up the strength to stop his act in the midst of its execution. So when Daniel Wegner,5 in a very Kantian way, claims that “a voluntary action is something a person can do when asked,” the implication is precisely that we thus obey an order which goes against our spontaneous inclination. Here, Badiou is wrong: the elementary ethical gesture is a negative one, the one of blocking one’s direct inclination. This free act fundamentally changes the coordinates of the entire situation: Anderton breaks the closure of future/past possibility. The idea that the emergence of a radically New retroactively changes the past—not the actual past, of course (we are not in science fiction), but past possibilities, or, to put it in more formal terms, the truth value of the modal propositions about the past—was first explored by Henri Bergson. In “Two Sources of Morality and Religion,” Bergson describes the strange sensations he experienced on August 4, 1914, when war was declared between France and Germany: “In spite of my turmoil, and although a war, even a victorious one, appeared to me as a catastrophe, I experienced what William James spoke about, a feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from the abstract to the concrete: who would have thought that such a formidable event can emerge in reality with so little fuss?”6 The modality of the break between before and after is crucial here: before its outbreak, the war appeared to Bergson “simultaneously probable and impossible: a complex and contradictory notion which persisted to the end”;7 afterward, all of a sudden it become real and possible, and the paradox resides in this retroactive appearance of probability: I never pretended that one can insert reality into the past and thus work backwards in time. However, one can without any doubt insert there the possible, or, rather, at every moment, the possible inserts itself there. Insofar as unpredictable and new reality creates itself, its image reflects itself behind itself in the indefinite past: this new reality finds itself all the time having been possible; but it is only at the precise moment of its actual emergence that it begins to always have been, and this is why I say that its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once this reality emerges.8 Such experiences show the limitation of the ordinary “historical” notion of time: at each moment of time, there are multiple possibilities waiting to be realized; once one of them actualizes itself, the others are cancelled. The supreme case of such an agent the solar parallax: the unbearable lightness of being no one of historical time is the Leibnizian God, who created the best possible world: before creation, he had in his mind the entire panoply of possible worlds, and his decision consisted in choosing the best one among these options. Here, possibility precedes choice: the choice is a choice among possibilities. What is unthinkable within this horizon of linear historical evolution is the notion of a choice/act which retroactively opens up its own possibility.9 This is exactly what Anderton does with his negative act: he breaks the closed circle of determinism which legitimizes preemptive arrests, and introduces the moment of ontological openness.10 It does not simply “change the future”; it changes the future by changing the past itself (in the Bergsonian sense of inserting a new possibility into it).
11/23/13
Nietzche K
Tournament: GBX | Round: 1 | Opponent: Everything | Judge: Suffering is inevitable and higher metaphysical learning is pointless Nietzsche 1873 “On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense”, pg 7 Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. _One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly-as though the world's axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. There is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought It is remarkable that this was brought about by the intellect, which was certainly allotted to these most unfortunate, delicate, and ephemeral beings merely as a device for detaining them a minute within existence. For without this addition they would have every reason to flee this existence as quickly as Lessing's son. The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character.
You must refuse to concern yourself with the affirmative's incessant paranoia about our insecure world instead affirming chance as necessary to love life. NIETZSCHE 1879 “Human, all too human”, maxim 284 The means to real peace.— No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one's own morality and the neighbor's immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as does our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because, as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests. And perhaps the great day will come when people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, "We break the sword," and will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling—that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared—this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth. Our liberal representatives, as is well known, lack the time for reflecting on the nature of man: else they would know that they work in vain when they work for a "gradual decrease of the military burden." Rather, only when this kind of need has become greatest will the kind of god be nearest who alone can help here. The tree of war-glory can only be destroyed all at once, by a stroke of lightning: but lightning, as indeed you know, comes from a cloud—and from up high.
THE SINGULAR EVENT OF THE DICEROLL CONTAINS ALL OF DETERMINATION IN DESTINY BUT THROWS IT TO CHANCE IN A CAPRICIOUS ACT OF LIFE’S AFFIRMATION. THIS ACT PRECEDES LIFE AS AN ACT OF CONTINGENCY. DELEUZE 83 Gilles “Nietzsche and Philosophy”, ‘The Dicethrow’, p. 29-30 Whereas the thrown dice affirm chance once and for all, the dice which fall back necessarily affirm the number or the destiny which brings the dice back. It is in this sense that the second moment of the game is also the two moments together or the player who equals the whole. The eternal return is the second moment, the result of the dicethrow, the affirmation of necessity, the number which brings together all the parts of chance. But it is also the return of the first moment, the repetition of the dicethrow, the reproduction and reaffirmation of chance itself. Destiny in the eternal return is also the “welcoming” of chance, “I cook every chance in my pot. And only when it is quite cooked do I welcome it as my food. And truly, many a chance came imperiously to me; but my will spoke to it even more imperiously, then it went down imploringly on its knees - imploring shelter and love with me, urging in wheedling tones; ‘Just see, 0 Zarathustra, how a friend comes to a friend!’ “(Z III “Of the Virtue that makes small” 3 p. 191). This means that there are fragments of chance which claim to be valid in themselves, they appeal to their probability, each solicits several throws of the dice from the player; divided among several throws, having become simple probabilities, the fragments of chance are slaves who want to speak as masters.24 But Zarathustra knows that one must not play or let oneself be played, on the contrary, it is necessary to affirm the whole of chance at once (therefore boil and cook it like the player who warms the dice in his hands), in order to reunite all its fragments and to affirm the number which is not probable but fatal and necessary. Only then is chance a friend who visits a friend, a friend who will be asked back, a friend of destiny whose destiny itself assures the eternal return as such.
11/23/13
OFAC CP
Tournament: GBX | Round: 1 | Opponent: Everything | Judge: Text: Using its licensing authority and enforcement discretion, the United States Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control should exempt transactions involving the good(s)/service(s) affected by the plan from enforcement under the Cuban Assets Control Regulations. First, the counterplan solves via specific exemptions — OFAC has broad discretion over sanctions enforcement. Golumbic and Ruff 13 — Court E. Golumbic, Managing Director and Global Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Bribery and Government Sanctions Compliance Officer at Goldman Sachs and Co., Lecturer-in-Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, former Assistant United States Attorney with the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, and Robert S. Ruff III, Associate in the Securities Litigation practice group at Weil, Gotshal and Manges LLP, 2013 (“Leveraging the Three Core Competencies: How OFAC Licensing Optimizes Holistic Sanctions,” North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulation (38 N.C.J. Int'l L. and Com. Reg. 729), Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis) 2. Ability to Mitigate Collateral Damage Because OFAC prefers to formulate its sanctions program broadly, its economic sanctions can affect the lives of unintended targets, such as ordinary citizens of foreign countries that have no influence in their sanctioned government. n347 The broad reach of U.S. sanctions can also unnecessarily put U.S. citizens and companies at a competitive disadvantage, undermine international support for the sanctions programs, and even undermine the policy objectives of the programs. n348 One way in which OFAC mitigates *792 the collateral damage of its holistic sanctions is by issuing licenses that permit U.S. citizens to export food and medical supplies n349 and provide humanitarian aid n350 to people in sanctioned countries. In an effort to avoid placing private enterprises at an unnecessary competitive disadvantage, which can damage U.S. influence internationally and U.S. interests as a whole, OFAC may also allow certain activities from an otherwise sanctioned country. n351 Additionally, OFAC issues licenses to avoid interfering with the legitimate activities of international and charitable organizations and to permit U.S. persons to participate in such organizations. n352 By licensing these types of activities and transactions, OFAC focuses its sanctions and the punitive consequences thereof, to the extent possible, on those in a position to produce the desired change, rather than on innocent civilians and businesses. n353 Second, the counterplan solves quickly and without political fallout — it doesn’t require legislative or regulatory action. Golumbic and Ruff 13 — Court E. Golumbic, Managing Director and Global Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Bribery and Government Sanctions Compliance Officer at Goldman Sachs and Co., Lecturer-in-Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, former Assistant United States Attorney with the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, and Robert S. Ruff III, Associate in the Securities Litigation practice group at Weil, Gotshal and Manges LLP, 2013 (“Leveraging the Three Core Competencies: How OFAC Licensing Optimizes Holistic Sanctions,” North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulation (38 N.C.J. Int'l L. and Com. Reg. 729), Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis) 3. Adaptability The third core competency of OFAC's licensing practices is the ability to adapt a particular sanctions program quickly in response to political or circumstantial changes. n388 In situations where sanctions goals can change with the tides of revolution, the slow march of legislative and rulemaking processes may be incapable of producing a timely response. Sanctions targeting government-owned or government-operated entities may need to be lifted in response to a positive regime change or re-imposed in the event that the new government fails. n389 OFAC often utilizes general licenses to manage these fast-paced scenarios, either by easing sanctions through license adoption or strengthening sanctions through license revocation. n390 By issuing or revoking general licenses, OFAC can react to the changing political circumstances of a targeted country without requiring a regulatory overhaul or the signing or withdrawal of an executive order. n391
11/23/13
Oil Dsiad
Tournament: GBX | Round: 1 | Opponent: Everything | Judge: A) Russia Economy is on the brink-High oil prices only thing preventing decline Ostroukh and Marson 9/2(Andrey Ostroukh and James Marson, 9/2/13 “Slowdown is Forcing Russia to Trim Spending, Says Putin”, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324432404579051040700939878.html) But Russia's economy is now struggling amid slowing industrial output, capital flight forecast at $70 billion this year and weak investment. Demand for its main exports is dwindling.¶ The Economy Ministry last week cut its 2013 growth forecast for the second time this year, to 1.8.¶ To be sure, Russia hasn't been hit as hard as other emerging markets recently, partly because of still-high oil prices and limited dependence on foreign capital. But growth is still far short of the 6-7 per year Mr. Putin had sought for Russia to catch up with global leaders.¶ After re-election to the presidency in 2012, Mr. Putin set out ambitious long-term targets for economic performance and higher salaries for state workers.¶ While government officials have said that Mr. Putin's goals could be hit by the limp growth, neither they nor Mr. Putin have said publicly which areas could receive less than expected.¶ Mr. Putin has been reluctant to borrow to maintain spending so as to avoid dependence, contrasting his stance with that of heavily indebted Western nations. B) Lifting the embargo will increase oil output: Andres Cala, 2011 (energy expert), ENERGY TRIBUNE, July 7, 2011. Retrieved Apr. 21, 2013 from http://www.energytribune.com/8204/drill-cuba-drill The US should be cheering, not just because any significant oil find will contribute directly and immediately to American energy security. Assuming lifting the embargo is still too politically risky (and it shouldn’t be), Congress should seize the imminent arrival of the rig, the Norwegian designed Scarabeo 9, to relax the embargo on the communist island to allow US energy companies to partake in Cuban exploration and production.¶ Forget the fact that being communist or anti-democratic is no deterrent to American energy industry elsewhere. The US already imports almost 10 percent of its oil from Cuba’s closest ally Venezuela. Should the US now also penalize all companies investing there, including American ones?¶ It makes no sense to thwart Cuban efforts to increase oil output perhaps in as little as three years, especially considering oil prices that will remain stubbornly high because demand growth is rising faster than supply growth. C) A SURGE IN WORLD OIL PRODUCTION WILL DEVASTATE RUSSIA’S ECONOMY. Aimee Duffy, (staff writer), Apr. 20, 2013. Retrieved Apr. 22, 2013 from http://www.fool.com/investing /general/2013/04/20/cheap-oil-may-be-here-before-you-know-it.aspx The problem is that isn't quite how it works. Russia, for one, has always been dependent on oil prices. In fact, it was the collapse of oil prices in the late '80s that ended up being the straw that broke the USSR's back. As Tyler Priest wrote in the Journal of American History last June:¶ The oil price collapse also played a lead role in ending the Cold War. It undermined the economy of the Soviet Union, which had quietly become the world's largest oil producer, dependent on oil export revenues to pay for imported manufactured goods from the West and to support the economies of East European satellites. Plummeting crude prices cost the Soviet Union an alarming $20 billion per year, causing panic in the Politburo.¶ Right there you've got the world leader in oil production combined with the necessity of high oil prices, and all that comes of it is a price collapse -- a collapse caused, I might add, by a surge in world production and OPEC's inability to stick to its quota system. The price of oil was halved in one year, falling to $14 in 1986.?
D) Russian economic decline causes nuclear terrorism FILGER 2009 (Sheldon, author and blogger for the Huffington Post, “Russian Economy Faces Disastrous Free Fall Contraction” http://www.globaleconomiccrisis.com/blog/archives/356) In Russia historically, economic health and political stability are intertwined to a degree that is rarely encountered in other major industrialized economies. It was the economic stagnation of the former Soviet Union that led to its political downfall. Similarly, Medvedev and Putin, both intimately acquainted with their nation’s history, are unquestionably alarmed at the prospect that Russia’s economic crisis will endanger the nation’s political stability, achieved at great cost after years of chaos following the demise of the Soviet Union. Already, strikes and protests are occurring among rank and file workers facing unemployment or non-payment of their salaries. Recent polling demonstrates that the once supreme popularity ratings of Putin and Medvedev are eroding rapidly. Beyond the political elites are the financial oligarchs, who have been forced to deleverage, even unloading their yachts and executive jets in a desperate attempt to raise cash. Should the Russian economy deteriorate to the point where economic collapse is not out of the question, the impact will go far beyond the obvious accelerant such an outcome would be for the Global Economic Crisis. There is a geopolitical dimension that is even more relevant then the economic context. Despite its economic vulnerabilities and perceived decline from superpower status, Russia remains one of only two nations on earth with a nuclear arsenal of sufficient scope and capability to destroy the world as we know it. For that reason, it is not only President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin who will be lying awake at nights over the prospect that a national economic crisis can transform itself into a virulent and destabilizing social and political upheaval. It just may be possible that U.S. President Barack Obama’s national security team has already briefed him about the consequences of a major economic meltdown in Russia for the peace of the world. After all, the most recent national intelligence estimates put out by the U.S. intelligence community have already concluded that the Global Economic Crisis represents the greatest national security threat to the United States, due to its facilitating political instability in the world. During the years Boris Yeltsin ruled Russia, security forces responsible for guarding the nation’s nuclear arsenal went without pay for months at a time, leading to fears that desperate personnel would illicitly sell nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations. If the current economic crisis in Russia were to deteriorate much further, how secure would the Russian nuclear arsenal remain? It may be that the financial impact of the Global Economic Crisis is its least dangerous consequence.
Multiple scenarios for nuclear escalation Ayson 10 Robert – Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies: New Zealand at the Victoria University of Wellington – “After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 7, July, obtained via InformaWorld
A terrorist nuclear attack, and even the use of nuclear weapons in response by the country attacked in the first place, would not necessarily represent the worst of the nuclear worlds imaginable. Indeed, there are reasons to wonder whether nuclear terrorism should ever be regarded as belonging in the category of truly existential threats. A contrast can be drawn here with the global catastrophe that would come from a massive nuclear exchange between two or more of the sovereign states that possess these weapons in significant numbers. Even the worst terrorism that the twenty-first century might bring would fade into insignificance alongside considerations of what a general nuclear war would have wrought in the Cold War period. And it must be admitted that as long as the major nuclear weapons states have hundreds and even thousands of nuclear weapons at their disposal, there is always the possibility of a truly awful nuclear exchange taking place precipitated entirely by state possessors themselves. But these two nuclear worlds—a non-state actor nuclear attack and a catastrophic interstate nuclear exchange—are not necessarily separable. It is just possible that some sort of terrorist attack, and especially an act of nuclear terrorism, could precipitate a chain of events leading to a massive exchange of nuclear weapons between two or more of the states that possess them. In this context, today’s and tomorrow’s terrorist groups might assume the place allotted during the early Cold War years to new state possessors of small nuclear arsenals who were seen as raising the risks of a catalytic nuclear war between the superpowers started by third parties. These risks were considered in the late 1950s and early 1960s as concerns grew about nuclear proliferation, the so-called n+1 problem. It may require a considerable amount of imagination to depict an especially plausible situation where an act of nuclear terrorism could lead to such a massive inter-state nuclear war. For example, in the event of a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States, it might well be wondered just how Russia and/or China could plausibly be brought into the picture, not least because they seem unlikely to be fingered as the most obvious state sponsors or encouragers of terrorist groups. They would seem far too responsible to be involved in supporting that sort of terrorist behavior that could just as easily threaten them as well. Some possibilities, however remote, do suggest themselves. For example, how might the United States react if it was thought or discovered that the fissile material used in the act of nuclear terrorism had come from Russian stocks, FN 40 and if for some reason Moscow denied any responsibility for nuclear laxity? The correct attribution of that nuclear material to a particular country might not be a case of science fiction given the observation by Michael May et al. that while the debris resulting from a nuclear explosion would be “spread over a wide area in tiny fragments, its radioactivity makes it detectable, identifiable and collectable, and a wealth of information can be obtained from its analysis: the efficiency of the explosion, the materials used and, most important … some indication of where the nuclear material came from.”41 Alternatively, if the act of nuclear terrorism came as a complete surprise, and American officials refused to believe that a terrorist group was fully responsible (or responsible at all) suspicion would shift immediately to state possessors. Ruling out Western ally countries like the United Kingdom and France, and probably Israel and India as well, authorities in Washington would be left with a very short list consisting of North Korea, perhaps Iran if its program continues, and possibly Pakistan. But at what stage would Russia and China be definitely ruled out in this high stakes game of nuclear Cluedo? In particular, if the act of nuclear terrorism occurred against a backdrop of existing tension in Washington’s relations with Russia and/or China, and at a time when threats had already been traded between these major powers, would officials and political leaders not be tempted to assume the worst? Of course, the chances of this occurring would only seem to increase if the United States was already involved in some sort of limited armed conflict with Russia and/or China, or if they were confronting each other from a distance in a proxy war, as unlikely as these developments may seem at the present time. The reverse might well apply too: should a nuclear terrorist attack occur in Russia or China during a period of heightened tension or even limited conflict with the United States, could Moscow and Beijing resist the pressures that might rise domestically to consider the United States as a possible perpetrator or encourager of the attack? Washington’s early response to a terrorist nuclear attack on its own soil might also raise the possibility of an unwanted (and nuclear aided) confrontation with Russia and/or China. For example, in the noise and confusion during the immediate aftermath of the terrorist nuclear attack, the U.S. president might be expected to place the country’s armed forces, including its nuclear arsenal, on a higher stage of alert. In such a tense environment, when careful planning runs up against the friction of reality, it is just possible that Moscow and/or China might mistakenly read this as a sign of U.S. intentions to use force (and possibly nuclear force) against them. In that situation, the temptations to preempt such actions might grow, although it must be admitted that any preemption would probably still meet with a devastating response. As part of its initial response to the act of nuclear terrorism (as discussed earlier) Washington might decide to order a significant conventional (or nuclear) retaliatory or disarming attack against the leadership of the terrorist group and/or states seen to support that group. Depending on the identity and especially the location of these targets, Russia and/or China might interpret such action as being far too close for their comfort, and potentially as an infringement on their spheres of influence and even on their sovereignty. One far-fetched but perhaps not impossible scenario might stem from a judgment in Washington that some of the main aiders and abetters of the terrorist action resided somewhere such as Chechnya, perhaps in connection with what Allison claims is the “Chechen insurgents’ … long-standing interest in all things nuclear.”42 American pressure on that part of the world would almost certainly raise alarms in Moscow that might require a degree of advanced consultation from Washington that the latter found itself unable or unwilling to provide.There is also the question of how other nuclear-armed states respond to the act of nuclear terrorism on another member of that special club. It could reasonably be expected that following a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States, both Russia and China would extend immediate sympathy and support to Washington and would work alongside the United States in the Security Council. But there is just a chance, albeit a slim one, where the support of Russia and/or China is less automatic in some cases than in others. For example, what would happen if the United States wished to discuss its right to retaliate against groups based in their territory? If, for some reason, Washington found the responses of Russia and China deeply underwhelming, (neither “for us or against us”) might it also suspect that they secretly were in cahoots with the group, increasing (again perhaps ever so slightly) the chances of a major exchange. If the terrorist group had some connections to groups in Russia and China, or existed in areas of the world over which Russia and China held sway, and if Washington felt that Moscow or Beijing were placing a curiously modest level of pressure on them, what conclusions might it then draw about their culpability? If Washington decided to use, or decided to threaten the use of, nuclear weapons, the responses of Russia and China would be crucial to the chances of avoiding a more serious nuclear exchange. They might surmise, for example, that while the act of nuclear terrorism was especially heinous and demanded a strong response, the response simply had to remain below the nuclear threshold. It would be one thing for a non-state actor to have broken the nuclear use taboo, but an entirely different thing for a state actor, and indeed the leading state in the international system, to do so. If Russia and China felt sufficiently strongly about that prospect, there is then the question of what options would lie open to them to dissuade the United States from such action: and as has been seen over the last several decades, the central dissuader of the use of nuclear weapons by states has been the threat of nuclear retaliation. If some readers find this simply too fanciful, and perhaps even offensive to contemplate, it may be informative to reverse the tables. Russia, which possesses an arsenal of thousands of nuclear warheads and that has been one of the two most important trustees of the non-use taboo, is subjected to an attack of nuclear terrorism. In response, Moscow places its nuclear forces very visibly on a higher state of alert and declares that it is considering the use of nuclear retaliation against the group and any of its state supporters. How would Washington view such a possibility? Would it really be keen to support Russia’s use of nuclear weapons, including outside Russia’s traditional sphere of influence? And if not, which seems quite plausible, what options would Washington have to communicate that displeasure? If China had been the victim of the nuclear terrorism and seemed likely to retaliate in kind, would the United States and Russia be happy to sit back and let this occur? In the charged atmosphere immediately after a nuclear terrorist attack, how would the attacked country respond to pressure from other major nuclear powers not to respond in kind? The phrase “how dare they tell us what to do” immediately springs to mind. Some might even go so far as to interpret this concern as a tacit form of sympathy or support for the terrorists. This might not help the chances of nuclear restraint. FN 40. One way of reducing, but probably not eliminating, such a prospect, is further international cooperation on the control of existing fissile material holdings.
11/23/13
PGS CP
Tournament: GBX | Round: 1 | Opponent: Everything | Judge: CP Text: The United States federal government should authorize the Department of Defense to pursue increase prompt global strike capabilities
Conventional PGS by-passes defense and gives non-nuclear deterrent options Sugden, DOD consultant on WMD, 9 Bruce M. Sugden 9, consultant for the Department of Defense and commercial clients on combating weapons of mass destruction, future global strike force structure alternatives, nuclear policy and strategy and MA in international relations and public policy studies at the University of Chicago and former U.S. Air Force missile launch officer, “Speed Kills: Analyzing the Deployment of Conventional Ballistic Missiles”, International Security, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Summer 2009), l/n, rmg
Proponents of the PGS mission argue that there is an immediate, niche mission that can be fulfilled only by CBMs. They also argue that, over the long term, CBMs might become more useful in large-scale missions to penetrate sophisticated air defenses and provide a wider range of prompt, nonnuclear strike options to the United States. Furthermore, some advocates of CBM deployment assert that the weapons could be used in a large-scale counternuclear role and to shape adversary military investments. As background, the U.S. global strike regime is a comprehensive network of intelligence-gathering sensors; command, control, and communications assets; military bases; logistical support; weapons; weapons delivery vehicles; and decisionmakers. The regime's purpose is to strike high-value targets and to gain and maintain U.S. access to enemy airspace. These strikes may be executed within short time lines and at extended distances from the continental United States and forward operating bases. Within this regime is a six-stage "kill chain": find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess. As discussed below, the PGS mission and CBMs are directed at compressing the "engage" part of the cycle, but some PGS weapons system options, such as aircraft, can play roles in reducing time lines in other areas as well, such as the amount of time required for finding a target. 12
11/23/13
Rice DA
Tournament: GBX | Round: 1 | Opponent: Everything | Judge: 1NC Vietnam Easing the embargo on rice exports steals market share from Cuba Fletcher, 9 ("U.S. rice growers see Obama loosening Cuba embargo", Pascal, March 21, www.reuters.com/article/2009/03/21/us-cuba-usa-rice-idUSTRE52K1D320090321 *citing U.S. Rice Producers Association President and CEO Dwight Roberts) Roberts said that easing the embargo would allow U.S. rice producers to take market share in Cuba from Vietnam, which offers favorable credit terms to the Cubans, but whose shipments included lower-category "broken" rice. "The Cubans know rice, prefer quality ... Even if we're a bit higher (in price), they will buy U.S. rice," he said. The Vietnamese rice sector is crucial to its economy – the plan decreases their exports Nielsen, 2 ("Vietnam in the International Rice Market", Chantal Pohl, Fødevareøkonomisk Institut www.foi.life.ku.dk/Publikationer/Rapporter//media/migration20folder/upload/foi/docs/publikationer/rapporter/nummererede20rapporter/130-139/132.pdf.ashx) This report has highlighted a number of issues related to Vietnam’s position in the international rice market that warrant further empirical research. It has identified the main rice policy instruments of both Vietnam and its major competitors and buyers, and has provided preliminary data that may form the basis for further empirical work. Given the overriding importance of the rice sector in the Vietnamese economy in terms of production, consumption, employment and income generation, an applied general equilibrium framework would be appropriate. To this end a thorough understanding of the way the different rice policy regimes function is necessary. Furthermore, the policy instruments must be quantified, and this may take the more partial based measures such as those presented in this report as a point of departure. Moreover, the importance of the other rice producing countries’ policies for Vietnam’s rice trade performance makes it appropriate to view future policy reforms in a global perspective. Relevant analyses would include an investigation of the impact of Vietnam’s own policy liberalization efforts as well as trade and domestic policy reforms of other rice exporters, and the possible extension of market access by importers. As the ongoing debate about preferential trade agreements shows (see e.g. Panagariya 2000 and Srinivasan 1998), the merits of unilateral trade liberalization versus regional and multilateral trade liberalization are theoretically ambiguous, and hence an empirical evaluation must be resorted to. Vietnamese economic decline crashes Asia’s economy. Myanmar Times 10 — The Myanmar Times, 2010 (“In Vietnam, an impending catastrophe,” Byline Roger Mitton, December 20th, Available Online at http://www.mmtimes.com/2010/news/554/news55404.html, Accessed 08-02-2013) On December 14, the European Chamber of Commerce in Hanoi discussed “The Future of the Vietnam Dong”, with members mulling whether the currency would be devalued for a third time this year and how long the foreign reserves might last. Make no mistake, it is serious. Not only for Vietnam, but for neighbours like Cambodia and other members of the ASEAN grouping. If Vietnam’s economy crashes, the waves will wash over the region and threaten ASEAN, just as the banking crises in Greece and Ireland financially rocked the European Union. Asian economic decline causes war Auslin, 9 (“Averting Disaster”, Michael is a resident scholar at AEI, The Daily Standard, 2/6/2009, http://www.aei.org/article/100044) As they deal with a collapsing world economy, policymakers in Washington and around the globe must not forget that when a depression strikes, war can follow. Nowhere is this truer than in Asia, the most heavily armed region on earth and riven with ancient hatreds and territorial rivalries. Collapsing trade flows can lead to political tension, nationalist outbursts, growing distrust, and ultimately, military miscalculation. The result would be disaster on top of an already dire situation. No one should think that Asia is on the verge of conflict. But it is also important to remember what has helped keep the peace in this region for so long. Phenomenal growth rates in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, China and elsewhere since the 1960s have naturally turned national attention inward, to development and stability. This has gradually led to increased political confidence, diplomatic initiatives, and in many nations the move toward more democratic systems. America has directly benefited as well, and not merely from years of lower consumer prices, but also from the general conditions of peace in Asia. Yet policymakers need to remember that even during these decades of growth, moments of economic shock, such as the 1973 Oil Crisis, led to instability and bursts of terrorist activity in Japan, while the uneven pace of growth in China has led to tens of thousands of armed clashes in the poor interior of the country. Now imagine such instability multiplied region-wide. The economic collapse Japan is facing, and China's potential slowdown, dwarfs any previous economic troubles, including the 1998 Asian Currency Crisis. Newly urbanized workers rioting for jobs or living wages, conflict over natural resources, further saber-rattling from North Korea, all can take on lives of their own. This is the nightmare of governments in the region, and particularly of democracies from newer ones like Thailand and Mongolia to established states like Japan and South Korea. How will overburdened political leaders react to internal unrest? What happens if Chinese shopkeepers in Indonesia are attacked, or a Japanese naval ship collides with a Korean fishing vessel? Quite simply, Asia's political infrastructure may not be strong enough to resist the slide towards confrontation and conflict. This would be a political and humanitarian disaster turning the clock back decades in Asia. It would almost certainly drag America in at some point, as well. First of all, we have alliance responsibilities to Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines should any of them come under armed attack. Failure on our part to live up to those responsibilities could mean the end of America's credibility in Asia. Secondly, peace in Asia has been kept in good measure by the continued U.S. military presence since World War II. There have been terrible localized conflicts, of course, but nothing approaching a systemic conflagration like the 1940s. Today, such a conflict would be far more bloody, and it is unclear if the American military, already stretched too thin by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, could contain the crisis. Nor is it clear that the American people, worn out from war and economic distress, would be willing to shed even more blood and treasure for lands across the ocean. The result could be a historic changing of the geopolitical map in the world's most populous region. Perhaps China would emerge as the undisputed hegemon. Possibly democracies like Japan and South Korea would link up to oppose any aggressor. India might decide it could move into the vacuum. All of this is guess-work, of course, but it has happened repeatedly throughout history. There is no reason to believe we are immune from the same types of miscalculation and greed that have destroyed international systems in the past.
11/23/13
Security K
Tournament: GBX | Round: 1 | Opponent: Everything | Judge: The Affirmative’s Discussion of International Relations, War and Violence is Imbued With the Metaphysical Concept of Security—Speaking this Discourse Brings With it the Assumptions of Violence Inherent in Contemporary Politics Dillon 96 (michael, senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the university of lancaster, the politics of security, p.13-4) There is a preoccupation, which links both the beginning and the end of metaphysics, and so also the beginning and the end of metaphysical politics. It is something, which, because it furnishes the fundamental link between politics and metaphysics, affords me my entry into the relationship, which obtains between them. That something is security. If the question of the political is to be recovered from metaphysical thinking, therefore, then security has to be brought into question first. Security, of course, saturates the language of modern politics. Our political vocabularies reek of it and our political imagination is confined by it. The hypocrisy of our rulers (whosoever 'we' are) consistently hides behind it. It would, therefore, be an easy task to establish that security is the first and foundational requirement of the State, of modern understandings of politics, and of International Relations, not only by reference to specific political theorists but also by reference to the discourses of States. But I want to explore the thought that modern politics is a security project for reasons which are antecedent to, and account for, the axioms and propositions of (inter)national political theorists, the platitudes of political discourse, and the practices of States, their political classes and leaders. Consequently, to conceive of our politics, as a politics of security is not to advance a view held by particular thinkers or even by particular disciplines. It is to draw attention to a necessity (which Heidegger's history of metaphysics will later allow us to note and explore) to which all thinkers of politics in the metaphysical tradition are subject. In pursuing this thought it follows that security turns-out to have a much wider register - has always and necessarily had a much wider register, something which modern international security studies have begun to register - than that merely of preserving our so-called basic values, or even our mortal bodies. That it has, in fact, always been concerned with securing the very grounds of what the political itself is; specifying what the essence of politics is thought to be. The reason is that the thought within which political thought occurs - metaphysics-and specifically its conception of truth, is itself a security project, For metaphysics is a tradition of thought defined in terms of the pursuit of security: with the securing, in fact of a secure arche, determining principle, beginning or ground, for which its under-standing of truth and its quest for certainty calls. Security, then, finds its expression as the principle, ground or arche - for which metaphysical thought is a search - upon which something stands, pervading and guiding it in its whole structure and essence. Hence, as Leibniz wrote: If one builds a house in a sandy place, one must continue digging until one meets solid rock or firm foundations; if one wants to unravel a tangled thread one must look for the beginning of the thread; if the greatest weights are to be moved, Archimedes demanded only a stable place. In the same way, if one is to establish the elements of human knowledge some fixed point is required, on which we can safely rest and from which we can set out without fear. (emphasis added) It is for this reason, therefore, that metaphysics first allows security to impress itself upon political thought as a self-evident condition for the very existence of life - both individual and social. One of those impulses which it is said appears like an inner command to be instinctive (in the form, for, of the instinct for survival), or axiomatic (in the form of the principle of self-preservation, the right to life, or the right to self defense), security thereby became the value which modern understandings of the political and modern practices of politics have come to put beyond question, precisely because they derived its very requirement from the requirements of metaphysical truth itself. In consequence, security became the predicate upon which the architectonic political discourses of modernity were constructed; upon which the vernacular architecture of modern political power, exemplified in the State, was based; and from which the institutions and practices of modern (inter)national politics, including modern democratic politics, ultimately seek to derive their grounding and foundational legitimacy. Thus, for example, and in a time other than our own, the security of an ecumene of belief in the ground of a divinely ordained universe promising salvation for human beings - something that, constituting the Christian Church, provided an ideal of community which continues to pervade the Western tradition -¬insisted: extra ecclesjam nulla salus' (no salvation outside the Church). Salvation was the ultimate form of spiritual security. And that security was to be acquired through being gathered back into where we belong; a belonging, in other words, to God. What is crucial here is not what happens to us after death, but salvation as the expression of the longing for the return to a pure and unadulterated form of belonging; a final closing-up of the wound of existence by returning to a lost oneness that never was. The reverse of Cyprian's dictum was, of course, equally true. No Church without salvation. The outcome of this project was a rejection of the world through the constitution of an ideal world which - not least because of the model it offered, the resentment which it fostered and the economy of salvation and cruelty which it instantiated - acted in the world to constitute a form of redeeming politics. In a way that indicates the continuity of the metaphysical tradition, however, this slogan can be, and was, easily adjusted to furnish the defining maxim of modern politics: no security outside the State; no State without security. And this, in its turn, has given rise to powerful forms of what I would call the disciplinary politics of Hobbesian thought and the actuarial politics of technologies thought. Each of these is also concerned to specify the principle, ground or rule that would satisfy the metaphysically sequestered compulsion for security: thus relieving human beings of the dilemmas and challenges it faces to discover, in its changing circumstances, what it is to be - to act and live - as humans. The basic thought to be pursued is one which, in simultaneously drawing both our current politics and our tradition of political thought into question by challenging their mutual foundation in security, serves, in addition, to illustrate and explore some important aspects of the political implications of Heidegger's thought. My thought, then, is that modern politics is a security project in the widest possible - ontological - sense of the term because it was destined to become so by virtue of the very character or nature of the thinking of truth within which, through which, and by continuous and intimate reference to which, politics itself has always been thought. What is at issue first of all, for me, therefore, is not whether one says yes or no to our modern (inter)national regimes of security, but what Foucault would have called the overall discursive fact that security is spoken about at all, the way in which it is put into political discourse and how it circulates throughout politics and other discourses. I think Heidegger's account of meta physics provides a means of addressing that fundamental question. P 13-14
1NC (2/5)
Security discourses create a will to power and a desire for protection from unknown threats. This need for certainty makes preventing violence impossible. There will always be external threats to world order. Der Derian 95 (James, Professor of Political Science at Brown University, “The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard,” Chapter Two in On Security by Ronnie D. Lipschutz)
The will to power, then, should not be confused with a Hobbesian perpetual desire for power. It can, in its negative form, produce a reactive and resentful longing for only power, leading, in Nietzsche's view, to a triumph of nihilism. But Nietzsche refers to a positive will to power, an active and affective force of becoming, from which values and meanings--including self-preservation--are produced which affirm life. Conventions of security act to suppress rather than confront the fears endemic to life, for ". . . life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation--but why should one always use those words in which slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages." 35 Elsewhere Nietzsche establishes the pervasiveness of agonism in life: "life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war." 36 But the denial of this permanent condition, the effort to disguise it with a consensual rationality or to hide from it with a fictional sovereignty, are all effects of this suppression of fear. The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference--that which is not us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven desire for protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power, which produces an aesthetic affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a truncated life which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science , Nietzsche asks of the reader: "Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who obtain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?" 37 The fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated life, in which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest protection against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative produces, and is sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols : The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause --a cause that is comforting, liberating and relieving. . . . That which is new and strange and has not been experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some kind of explanation, to serve as a cause, but for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation--that which most quickly and frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations. 38 A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility--recycling the desire for security. The "influence of timidity," as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the "necessities" of security: "they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences." 39
1NC (3/5)
We Must Not Ignore These Questions About Security—Continuation of the Status Quo Politics Risks the Totality of Violence and Human Extinction Dillon 96 (MICHAEL, SENIOR LECTURER IN POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LANCASTER, THE POLITICS OF SECURITY)
To put it crudely, and ignoring for the moment Heidegger's so-called `anti humanist' (he thought 'humanism' was not uncannily human enough) hostility to the anthropocentrism of Western thought. As the real prospect of human species extinction is a function of how human beinq has come to dwell in the world, then human beinq has a pressinq reason to reconsider, in the most originary way possible, notwithstanding other arguments that may be advanced for doing so, the derivation of its understandinq of what it is to dwell in the world, and how it should comport itself if it is to continue to do so. Such a predicament ineluctably poses two fundamental and inescapable questions about both Philosophy and politics back to philosophy and politics and of the relation between them: first, if such is their end, what must their oriqins have been? Second, in the midst of all that is, in Precisely what does the creativity of new beqinninqs inhere and how can it be preserved, celebrated and extended? No matter how much we may want to elide these questions, or, alternatively, provide a whole series of edifying answers to them, human beinqs cannot iqnore them, ironically, even if they remain anthropocentric in their concerns, if they wish to survive. Our present does not allow it. This ioint reqress of the philosophical and the political to the very limits of their thinking and of their possibility therefore brinqs the question of Beinq (which has been the question of philosophy, even though it has always been directed towards beings in the answers it has offered) into explicit coniunction with the question of the political once more throuqh the attention it draws to the ontoloqical difference between Beinq and beinqs, and emphasises the abidinq reciprocity that exists between them. We now know that neither metaphysics nor our politics of security can secure the security of truth and of life which was their reciprocatinq raison d'66tre (and, raison d'etat). More importantly, we now know that the very will to security - the will to power of sovereiqn presence in both metaphysics and modern politics - is not only a prime incitement to violence in the Western tradition of thouqht, and to the qlobalisation of its (inter)national palitics, but also self-defeatinq; in that it does not in its turn merely endanqer, but actually enqenders danqer in response to its own discursive dynamic. One does not have to be persuaded of the destinal sendinq of Beinq, therefore, to be persuaded of the profundity - and of the profound danqer- of this the modern human condition.
1NC (4/5)
Our Alternative is to vote negative
Only By Reimagining Politics Through the Rejection of Security Discourse Can We Challenge these Problematic Constructions Dillon 96 (MICHAEL, SENIOR LECTURER IN POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LANCASTER, THE POLITICS OF SECURITY)
Reimagining politics is, of course, easier said than done. Resistance to it - especially in International Relations - nonetheless gives us a clue to one of the places where we may begin. For although I think of this project as a kind of political project, resistance to it does not arise from a political conservatism. Modern exponents of political modernity pride themselves on their realistic radicalism. Opposition always arises, instead, from an extraordinarily deep and profound conservatism of thought. Indeed, conservatism of thought in respect of the modern political imagination is required of the modern political subject. Remaining politics therefore means thinking differently. Moreover, the project of that thinking differently leads to thinking 'difference' itself. Thought is therefore required if politics is to contribute to out-living the modern; specifically, political thought. The challenge to out-live the modern issues from the faltering of modern thought, however, and the suspicion now of its very own project of thought, as much as it does from the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the industrialization and ecological despoliation of the planet, or the genocidal dynamics of new nationalisms. The challenqe to out-live the modern issues, therefore, from the modern condition of both politics and thouqht. This so- called suspicion of thouqht - I would rather call it a transformation of the project of thought which has disclosed the faltering of the modern project of thought - is what has come to distinguish continental thouqht in the last century. I draw on that thouqht in order to think the freedom of human beinq aqainst the defininq political thouqht of modernity: that ontoloqical preoccupation with the subject of security which commits its politics to securinq the subiect. Motivated therefore, by a certain sense of crisis in both philosophy and politics, and by the conviction that there is an intimate relation between the two which is most violently and materially exhibited globally in (inter)national politics, the aim of this book is to make a contribution towards rethinking some of the fundamentals of International Relations through what I would call the political philosophy of contemporary continental thought. Its ultimate intention is, therefore, to make a contribution toward the reconstruction of International Relations as a site of political thouqht, bv departinq from the very commitment to the politics of sublectivity upon which International Relations is premised. This is a tall order, and not least because the political philosophy of continental thought cannot be brought to bear upon International Relations if the political thought of that thought remains largely unthought. P 2
1NC (5/5)
Discourses of security necessarily invoke their opposite—the logic of violence proposes a perpetual counter-violence and insecurity which makes their impacts a self-fulfilling prophecy. Chernus, PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER, 2K1 Ira, Israel and the United States: Fighting Terror in the National Insecurity State, http://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus/SinceSeptember11.htm
In this sense, too, the U.S. is in Israel’s shoes. Both are entrenched in the logic of the insecurity state. That logic flows from two fundamental principles: there is a mortal threat to the very existence of our nation, and our own policies play no role in generating the threat. If our nation bears no responsibility, then we are powerless to eradicate the threat. There is no hope for a truly better world, nor for ending the danger by mutual compromise with "the other side." The threat is effectively eternal. The best to hope for is to hold the threat forever at bay. Yet the sense of powerlessness is oddly satisfying, because it preserves the conviction of innocence: if our policies are so ineffectual, the troubles of the world can hardly be our fault. And the vision of an endless status quo is equally satisfying, because it promises to prevent historical change. If peril is permanent, the world is an endless reservoir of potential enemies. Any fundamental change in the status quo portends only catastrophe. The only path to security, it seems, is to prevent change by imposing control over others. When those others fight back, the national insecurity state sees no reason to re-evaluate its policies; that would risk the change it seeks, above all, to avoid. So it can only meet violence with more violence, while protesting its innocence. Of course, the inevitable frustration is blamed on the enemy, reinforcing the sense of peril and the demand for absolute control through violence. The goal of total control is self-defeating; each step toward security becomes a source of, and is taken as proof of, continuing insecurity. This makes the logic of the insecurity state viciously circular. Why are we always fighting? Because we always have enemies. How do we know we always have enemies? Because we are always fighting. And knowing that we have enemies, how can we afford to stop fighting? In the insecurity state, there is no way to talk about security without voicing fears of insecurity, no way to express optimism without expressing despair. On every front, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy; a self-confirming and self-perpetuating spiral of violence; a trap that seems to offer no way out.
11/23/13
Sugar DA
Tournament: GBX | Round: 1 | Opponent: Everything | Judge: 1nc Sugar Prices Will be high-Demand increase and supply cuts Pardomuan 8/26(Lewa Pardomuan, Writer for Rueters, 8/26/13, “Sugar Prices under pressure, but won’t fall too far- ISO Offical”, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/26/iso-sugar-idUSL4N0GR1K420130826) USA DUA, Indonesia, Aug 26 (Reuters) - A global sugar surplus will keep prices under pressure for the foreseeable future, although the commodity is unlikely to trade below 15 U.S. cents per pound, an official from the International Sugar Organization (ISO) said on Monday.¶ Benchmark New York futures plunged to a three-year low of 15.93 cents a pound in July on the prospect of a bumper crop in Brazil. Even though forecasters have since trimmed their predictions for the world's top producer, it is still expected to rack up record output, and prices last stood at $16.47.¶ ¶ "There is bearish pressure on prices, at least until we see how this 13/14 season goes on. (But) personally, I don't think prices will go below 15 cents," ISO Executive Director Peter Baron told Reuters on the sidelines of an industry conference.¶ Other sources at the event on the Indonesian island of Bali said that low prices could prompt key producers to cut output or curb sales, slightly easing the downward price-momentum.¶ Patches of demand will also help rein in price losses.¶ Indonesia's raw sugar imports could more than double to 5.4 million tonnes in 2013 from 2.5 million tonnes last year after heavy rains hit domestic output and due to rising consumption and population growth.¶ "Total imports could reach 5.4 million tonnes as there is a weather anomaly and there's no increase in plantation areas," Achmad Widjaja, secretary general of the Indonesian Sugar Association, said at the event.¶ And on the supply-side, Brazil's leading forecaster Datagro is expected on Tuesday to lower its 2013/14 cane crush forecast for the key center-south region as well as estimates for Brazil's sugar crop due to a July frost.¶ A senior industry official on Monday added that a sluggish global market could encourage Brazilian growers to produce more ethanol.¶ "Sugar prices need to go up for Brazilians to sell sugar, otherwise Brazilians are going to sell only ethanol," he said.¶ The ISO said last week it expected the sugar surplus to slide to 4.5 million tonnes in 2013/2014 from 10.3 million tonnes in 2012/2013. World sugar output is predicted to fall by 2.1 million tonnes year-on-year to 180.8 million tonnes in the season from October 2013 to September 2014, the group said in its latest quarterly report. (Reporting by Lewa Pardomuan; Editing by Joseph Radford) Lifting the embargo allows for investment and trades off with Caribbean and Central American economies-Causes Instability Suchlicki 2k(Jaime Suchlicki, Founding Director of the Cuba Transition Project at the Univeristy of Miami and Director of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, 6/2000 “ The U.S. Embargo of Cuba”, http://www6.miami.edu/iccas/USEmbargo.pdf) Trade¶ No foreign trade that is independent from the state is permitted in ¶ Cuba. ¶ Cuba would export to the U.S. most of its products, cigars, rum, ¶ citrus, vegetables, nickel, seafood, biotechnology, etc. Yet, since ¶ all of these products are produced by Cuban state enterprises, with ¶ workers being paid below comparable wages, and Cuba has great ¶ need for dollars, the Cuban government could dump products in the ¶ U.S. market at very low prices, and without regard for cost or ¶ economic rationality. ¶ Many of these products will compete unfairly with U.S. agriculture ¶ and manufactured products, or with products imported from the ¶ Caribbean and elsewhere. ¶ If the U.S. were to buy sugar from Cuba, it would be to the ¶ detriment of U.S. or Caribbean producers. Cuban products are not strategically important to the U.S., and are ¶ in great abundance in the U.S. internal market, or from other ¶ traditional U.S. trading partners. ¶ There is little question about Cuba’s chronic need for U.S. ¶ technology, products and services. Yet, need alone does not ¶ determine the size or viability of a market. Cuba’s large foreign ¶ debt, owed to both Western and former Socialist countries, the ¶ abysmal performance of its economy, and the low prices for its ¶ major exports make the “bountiful market” perception a perilous ¶ mirage. ¶ From the U.S. point of view, therefore, the reestablishment of ¶ commercial ties with Cuba would be at best problematic. It would ¶ create severe market distortions for the already precarious regional ¶ economies of the Caribbean and Central America since the United ¶ States would have to shift some of these countries’ sugar quota to ¶ Cuba. It would provide the U.S. market with products that are of ¶ little value and in abundant supply. And, while some U.S. firms ¶ could benefit from a resumed trade relationship, it would not help ¶ in any significant way the overall U.S. economy. Cuba does not ¶ have the potential to become an important client like China, Russia, ¶ or even Vietnam. ¶ Investments¶ Cuba has promoted investments in tourism as its highest priority ¶ and only recently has begun to promote investments in other ¶ sectors. Cuba has not yet attempted to link Foreign Direct ¶ Investments (FDI) with technology transfer. Nor has it permitted reater individual freedom in economic matters. While the Cuban ¶ government is allowing some workers to operate independently, ¶ these activities are highly regulated. Unlike China, Cuba has not ¶ legalized private agriculture or manufacturing. ¶ Investments will be directed and approved by the Cuban ¶ government. The Cuban government is unlikely to create a level ¶ plain field for American companies, allowing some to invest while ¶ discriminating capriciously against others. ¶ U. S. investments in Cuba would be limited, however, given the ¶ lack of an extensive internal market, the uncertainties surrounding ¶ the long-term risk to foreign investment, an uncertain political ¶ situation; and the opportunities provided by other markets in Latin ¶ America and elsewhere. Modest initial investments would be ¶ directed primarily to exploiting Cuba's’ tourist, mining, and natural ¶ resource industries. ¶ The Cuban constitution still outlaws foreign ownership of most ¶ properties and forbids any Cubans from participating in joint ¶ ventures with foreigners. ¶ Joint ventures are only permitted with state enterprises; many of ¶ these are now under military control. ¶ It is illegal for foreign companies to hire or fire Cuban workers ¶ directly. Hiring is done by the Ministry of Labor. Foreign ¶ companies must pay the wages owed to their employees directly to ¶ the Cuban government in hard currency. The Cuban government ¶ then pays out to the Cuban workers in Cuban pesos, which are orth 1/20 of a U.S. dollar, pocketing 90 percent of every dollar it ¶ receives. ¶ While Cuba's foreign investment law provides protection against ¶ government expropriation, all arbitration must take place in the ¶ corrupt and arbitrary government offices where little protection is ¶ given to the investor. There is no independent judicial system in ¶ the island. ¶ Foreign investors must also confront political uncertainties that do ¶ not exist in many other countries. They must contend with the ¶ possibility of the regime’s reversing policy, the legal questions ¶ surrounding previously confiscated properties, and potential ¶ sanctions against foreign investors that cooperated with the Castro ¶ government in the event that an anti-Castro government comes to ¶ power. ¶ Castro's opposition to market reforms will limit the extent to which ¶ the private sector emerges and functions effectively, and thereby ¶ will slow, if not prevent, attaining a measurable degree of economic ¶ recovery. While Castro and hard-liners recognize the need for ¶ economic recovery, they also see the likely erosion of political ¶ power and control that accompanies the restructuring of the ¶ economy along free-market rules. Adoption of market reforms may ¶ well represent a solution to the economic crisis, but a full-blown ¶ reform process carries with it the risk of loss of control over ¶ society, as well as the economy, and threatens to alienate some of ¶ the regime’s key constituencies. HY MAINTAIN THE EMBARGO ¶ The embargo should be held as a carrot to be lifted when Cuba ¶ changes its current system and develops a democratic society. The embargo ¶ is not an anachronism but a legitimate instrument of U.S. policy for ¶ achieving the goal of a free Cuba. ¶ While most of the freely elected governments in Latin America pursue ¶ moderate, neo-liberal economic policies, Castro has deliberately staked out a ¶ position as the last defender of Marxism-Leninism. In October 1997 he held ¶ a meeting in Havana of Communist leaders from all over the world to ¶ reassert the supremacy of communist ideology and to plan for a “comeback” ¶ when capitalism fails. ¶ The lifting of the embargo now will be an important psychological ¶ victory for Castro. It would be interpreted as a defeat for U.S. policy and as ¶ an enforced acceptance of the Castro regime as a permanent neighbor in the ¶ Caribbean. ¶ The long held belief that through negotiations and incentives we can ¶ influence Castro’s behavior has been weakened by Castro’s unwillingness to ¶ provide major concessions. Castro prefers to sacrifice the economic well ¶ being of his people rather than cave in to demands for a different Cuba. ¶ Neither economic incentives nor punishment have worked with Castro in the ¶ past. They are not likely to work in the future. Not all differences and problems in international affairs can be solved ¶ through negotiations or can be solved at all. There are disputes that are not ¶ negotiable and can only be solved either through the use of force or through ¶ prolonged patience until the leadership disappears or situations change. ¶ Ignoring or supporting regimes that violate human rights and abuse ¶ their population is an ill-advised policy. ¶ The Castro era may be coming to an end if for no other reason than ¶ biological realities. Fidel Castro is seventy-three and deteriorating ¶ physically. U.S. policy should stay the course and wait for Castro’s ¶ disappearance. ¶ The gradual lifting of the embargo now will condemn the Cuban ¶ people to a longer dictatorship and the perpetuation of a failed MarxistLeninist society. ¶ The gradual lifting of the embargo entails a real danger that the U.S. ¶ may implement irreversible policies toward Cuba while Castro provides no ¶ concessions to the U.S. or concessions that he can reverse. ¶ A piecemeal lifting of the embargo will guarantee the continuance of ¶ the present totalitarian political structures and prevent a rapid transformation ¶ of Cuba into a free and democratic society. The lifting of the travel ban without meaningful and irreversible ¶ concessions from the Castro regime could provide the Castro brothers with ¶ much needed foreign exchange. It would represent one of the first steps in ¶ ending the U.S. embargo and prolong the suffering of the Cuban people. PECIFIC ISSUES ¶ If the U.S. has relations with China, why not with Cuba? ¶ Relations with China were propelled by U.S. strategic and economic ¶ interests 1) to counter growing Soviet power; 2) to increase U.S. influence in ¶ Southeast Asia; and 3) to tap the one billion-dollar China market. ¶ Cuba is small, poor, and strategically and economically unimportant. ¶ In Latin America, the U.S. has followed a regional policy that fosters ¶ human rights, neo-liberal economic policies, and democratically elected ¶ civilian governments. U.S.-Cuba policy should be no different. ¶ The U.S. has been willing to intervene militarily in Grenada, Panama, ¶ and Haiti to restore democracy. In Chile it established a military embargo ¶ against the Pinochet dictatorship. In other countries it supported free and ¶ transparent elections. Why should U.S. policy toward Cuba be different? ¶ Aren’t the Cubans also entitled to a free society? ¶ The Cubans are suffering economically because of the U.S. embargo. ¶ The Cubans can buy any products, including food and medicine from ¶ any country in the world. Dollar stores in Cuba have numerous U.S. ¶ products, including Coca-Cola, and other symbols of American ¶ consumerism. American dollars can purchase almost anything in Cuba. There are shortages in Cuba of fruits, vegetables, potatoes, bananas, ¶ mangos, boniatos, and other foodstuffs that have been traditionally produced ¶ locally. What do these shortages have to do with the U.S. embargo? ¶ The reason for Cuba’s economic suffering is a Marxist system that ¶ discourages incentives. As in Eastern Europe under Communism, the failed ¶ Communist system is the cause of the economic suffering of the Cubans, not ¶ the U.S. embargo. ¶ Tourism, trade and investment will accelerate the downfall of Communism ¶ in Cuba as it did in the Soviet Union. ¶ There is no evidence that tourism, trade, or investment had anything to ¶ do with the collapse of communism. Tourism peaked in the Soviet Union in ¶ 1980, almost a decade before the collapse of communism. In the Soviet ¶ Union tourism was tightly controlled with few tourists having any contact ¶ with Russians. ¶ The collapse of Communism was the result of a decaying system that ¶ did not work, the corruption and inefficiency of the Communist Party, the ¶ economic bankruptcy of the Soviet Union in part because of military ¶ competition with the West, an unpopular war in Afghanistan, and the ¶ reformist policies of Mikhail Gorbachev that accelerated the process of ¶ change. ¶ he driving force for capitalism in Russia and China is not trade or ¶ investment but a strong domestic market economy, tolerated by the ¶ government and dominated by millions of small entrepreneurs. The will to ¶ liberalize the economy does not exist in Cuba. ¶ Cuba is a potential economic bonanza for U.S. companies. ¶ Given Cuba’s scant foreign exchange, its ability to buy U.S. products ¶ remains very limited. Cuba’s major exports, i.e. sugar, tobacco, nickel, ¶ citrus, are neither economically nor strategically important to the United ¶ States. ¶ Lifting the embargo would create severe market distortions in the ¶ already precarious economies of the Caribbean and Central America since ¶ the U.S. would have to divert some portion of the existing sugar quota away ¶ from these countries to accommodate Cuba. The impact of tourism diversion ¶ toward Cuba would profoundly hurt the economies of the Caribbean and ¶ Central American countries. ¶ Cuba, cited as one of the worst political and commercial risks in the ¶ world by several recently issued country risk guides, lags far behind China ¶ and Vietnam in establishing the necessary conditions for economic ¶ development and successful corporate involvement. Current foreign ¶ investments are small and limited to dollar sectors of the economy such as ¶ the tourist industry and mining. American companies are not “losing out.” ¶ In a free Cuba, U.S. companies will quickly regain the prominent role they ¶ held in pre-Castro Cuba.
Latin America instability causes ethnic cleansing and eventually extinction Manwaring ‘5, (General Douglas MacArthur Chair and Prof of Military Strategy @ U.S. Army War College, Ret U.S. Army Colonel, Adjunct Professor of International Politics @ Dickinson College (Max G, October, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivarian Socialism, and Asymmetric Warfare”, Strategic Studies Institute, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB628.pdf) President Chávez also understands that the process leading to state failure is the most dangerous long-term security challenge facing the global community today. The argument in general is that failing and failed state status is the breeding ground for instability, criminality, insurgency, regional con?ict, and terrorism. These conditions breed massive humanitarian disasters and major refugee ?ows. They can host “evil” networks of all kinds, whether they involve criminal business enterprise, narco-traf?cking, or some form of ideological crusade such as Bolivarianismo. More speci?cally, these conditions spawn all kinds of things people in general do not like such as murder, kidnapping, corruption, intimidation, and destruction of infrastructure. These means of coercion and persuasion can spawn further human rights violations, torture, poverty, starvation, disease, the recruitment and use of child soldiers, traf?cking in women and body parts, traf?cking and proliferation of conventional weapons systems and WMD, genocide, ethnic cleansing, warlordism, and criminal anarchy. At the same time, these actions are usually uncon?ned and spill over into regional syndromes of poverty, destabilization, and con?ict. Peru’s Sendero Luminoso calls violent and destructive activities that facilitate the processes of state failure “armed propaganda.” Drug cartels operating throughout the Andean Ridge of South America and elsewhere call these activities “business incentives.” Chávez considers these actions to be steps that must be taken to bring about the political conditions necessary to establish Latin American socialism for the 21st century.63 Thus, in addition to helping to provide wider latitude to further their tactical and operational objectives, state and nonstate actors’ strategic efforts are aimed at progressively lessening a targeted regime’s credibility and capability in terms of its ability and willingness to govern and develop its national territory and society. Chávez’s intent is to focus his primary attack politically and psychologically on selected Latin American governments’ ability and right to govern. In that context, he understands that popular perceptions of corruption, disenfranchisement, poverty, and lack of upward mobility limit the right and the ability of a given regime to conduct the business of the state. Until a given populace generally perceives that its government is dealing with these and other basic issues of political, economic, and social injustice fairly and effectively, instability and the threat of subverting or destroying such a government are real.64 But failing and failed states simply do not go away. Virtuallyanyone can take advantage of such an unstable situation. The tendency is that the best motivated and best armed organization on the scene will control that instability. As a consequence, failing and failed states become dysfunctional states, rogue states, criminal states, narco-states, or new people’s democracies. In connection with the creation of new people’s democracies, one can rest assured that Chávez and his Bolivarian populist allies will be available to provide money, arms, and leadership at any given opportunity. And, of course, the longer dysfunctional, rogue, criminal, and narco-states and people’s democracies persist, the more they and their associated problems endanger global security, peace, and prosperity.
11/23/13
WTO CP
Tournament: GBX | Round: 1 | Opponent: Everything | Judge: Text: The United States federal government should fully comply with rules for zeroing in antidumping investigations.
The CP is key to resurrect US trade leadership and free trade Markheim 08 (Daniella Markheim, Senior Trade Policy Analyst in the Center for International Trade and Economics, Heritage Foundation, December 28, 2008, “Time to End ‘Zeroing’ in Trade Dumping Calculations,”http:www.heritage.org/Research/tradeandeconomicfreedom/wm2180.cfm)
"Zeroing" is used by the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) in its calculation of dumping margins. The DOC first determines a product's "normal value," which can be based on the product's price in the exporter's home market, the price charged by the exporter in another country, or on the exporter's production costs. The DOC then compares the normal price of the good to the price charged in the U.S. for each sale and calculates the dumping margin--the average of the differences between the two prices. When the normal value of the good is more than the price charged in the U.S., the difference contributes to the dumping margin. However, when the normal value is less than the price charged in the U.S., the DOC assigns a zero value to the transaction rather than deduct the difference from the final dumping margin. This practice of "zeroing" artificially inflates dumping margins, increasing both the likelihood that the DOC will find injury and the value of punitive duties that can be assessed on "dumped" products.1 In cases brought against the U.S. by the EU, Japan, Canada, Ecuador, and others, the WTO has ruled that zeroing is contrary to anti-dumping rules because it distorts the prices of certain export transactions by not considering all comparisons of normal value and export price. By disregarding certain comparison results, the United States has acted inconsistently with the "fair comparison" requirement set out in Article 2.4.2 of the Agreement on Anti-Dumping. The U.S. refuses to accept WTO recommendations that America's anti-dumping methodology be brought into compliance with international trade rules. The longer America defies or ignores these recommendations, the more likely complainants will be allowed to impose retaliatory duties or other punitive measures against U.S. products. The U.S. insists that the law is being misinterpreted and plans to use the WTO Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations to permit zeroing in WTO rules. Fortunately, for the cause of free and fair trade, the effort has met with strong opposition. The U.S. Should Practice What It Preaches When the WTO finds in favor of a U.S. position in a trade dispute, all is fair and good. Yet when it rules against the U.S.--as it has time and time again when considering America's practice of zeroing--Congress cries foul, insisting that the WTO has overstepped its bounds and is violating U.S. sovereignty. America is as assiduous in rooting out the unfair trade practices of the world and demanding their elimination as it is protecting its own. It is time to end the hypocrisy. America's use of zeroing has been found in violation of WTO trade remedy rules and imposes costly distortions on the U.S. economy. At the same time, America's refusal to comply with WTO rulings to eliminate the unfair trade practice erodes the United States' credibility as a champion of free and fair trade and weakens America's influence in multilateral trade negotiations. It is time for America to live up to the same high standards it demands from the rest of the world and end the practice of zeroing in anti-dumping investigations.