Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: 3 | Opponent: InterlakePuget LM | Judge: Dont Remember, I should write that down

1nc

1

counter advocacy stop the round and have a discussion with everyone in the room about the aff
we can work out ballot stuff after with glen bbecause he is sitting right here but it is a way to all endorse the 1ac but a better pedagogical space to do so.

this is a question to the affirmative tteam. Stop us at anyb point of this speech to give us your answer

2

A. Interpretation – The affirmative must advocate the resolution through an instrumental defense of action by the United States federal government

Resolved requires a policy
Louisiana House 3-8-2005, http://house.louisiana.gov/house-glossary.htm-http://house.louisiana.gov/house-glossary.htm**
Resolution  A legislative instrument that generally is used for making declarations,  stating policies, and making decisions where some other form is not  required. A bill includes the constitutionally required enacting clause; a  resolution uses the term "resolved". Not subject to a time limit for  introduction nor to governor’s veto. ( Const. Art. III, §17(B) and House  Rules 8.11 , 13.1 , 6.8 , and 7.4)

United States federal government is only three branches
Black’s Law 90 (Dictionary, p. 695)
"~Government~ In the United States, government consists of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in addition to administrative agencies.  In a broader sense, includes the federal government and all its agencies and bureaus, state and county governments, and city and township governments."

"Economic engagement" is limited to expanding economic ties
Çelik 11 – Arda Can Çelik, Master’s Degree in Politics and International Studies from Uppsala University, Economic Sanctions and Engagement Policies, p. 11

Introduction
Economic engagement policies are strategic integration behaviour which involves with the target state. Engagement
AND
position of one state affects the position of others in the same direction.

B. Violation – the aff is not an economic policy enacted through the federal government

Vote Negative: 

1. Predictability  - The resolution proposes the question the negative is prepared to answer – even if it’s good to talk about the 1AC, they have to prove that we could have logically anticipated it – that’s key to Advocacy Skills because otherwise affirmatives will never have to defend their position against well prepared negative arguments.

That’s key to the aff – a predictable topic forces pre-round internal deliberation which is the only way to convince people you’re right
Goodin and Niemeyer 03 (Robert and Simon, Australian National University, "When Does Deliberation Begin? Internal Reflection versus Public Discussion in Deliberative Democracy" Political Studies, Vol 50, p 627-649, WileyInterscience)

What happened in this particular case, as in any particular case, was in
AND
least one possible way of doing that for each of those key features.

2. Switch Side Debate –Defending a topical affirmative is the only way to ensure that teams must research and debate both sides of an argument and learn from multiple perspectives about the topic. Forcing a rigid adherence to the topic facilitates the advocacy of things you don’t necessarily believe in.

That’s key to critical thinking
Harrigan 8 (Casey, Associate Director of Debate at UGA, Master’s in Communications – Wake Forest U., "A Defense of Switch Side Debate", Master’s thesis at Wake Forest, Department of Communication, May, pp. 6-9)

Additionally, there are social benefits to the practice of requiring students to debate both
AND
Hunt and Louden, 1999; Colbert, 2002, p.82).

3. Policymaking Education – debates about government policy are key to connect theory and practice, regardless of whether we become policymakers
Esberg 26 Sagan 12 (Jane Esberg is special assistant to the director at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. Scott Sagan is a professor of political science and director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation "NEGOTIATING NONPROLIFERATION: Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Nuclear Weapons Policy," 2/17 The Nonproliferation Review, 19:1, 95-108)

These government or quasi-government think tank simulations often provide very similar lessons for
AND
quickly; simulations teach students how to contextualize and act on information.14

The aff cedes power to right-wing crazy people
McClean 2001 – adjunct professor of philosophy at Molloy College in New York (David, presented at the 2001 conference of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, "The cultural left and the limits of social hope", www.american-philosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion20papers/david_mcclean.htm)

Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country
AND
to consciousness America’s own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action."
Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural
AND
may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain.
Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury
AND
one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?"
The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory
AND
critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."

We control external impacts – abandoning politics causes war, slavery, and authoritarianism
Boggs, 97 (Carl Boggs, Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, 1997, "The great retreat: Decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America," Theory and Society, Volume 26, Number 6, December, Springer)
The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series
AND
embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.
Switch Side debate and policy simulation key to activism training
Joyner  ’99 – Professor of International Law in the Government Department at Georgetown University
(Christopher C., Spring, 199, 5 ILSA J Int’l 26 Comp L 377)
Use of the debate can be an effective pedagogical tool for education in the social
AND
the real world of policy analysis, political critique, and legal defense.

2

Academia and debate have already been infiltrated by the military – the affirmative’s radical strategy of visibility and calls for dialogue will be co-opted for sovereign violence

Forte 2009 Maximilian C., Professor of Anthropology Montreal, May 22, "Useless Anthropology": Strategies for Dealing with the Militarization of the Academy « ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY, http://zeroanthropology.net/2009/05/22/e2809cuseless-anthropologye2809d-strategies-for-dealing-with-the-militarization-of-the-academy/~~23print

One does not need to seek employment with the Pentagon, take part in counterinsurgency
AND
is simply to leave here today and continue to conduct business as usual.

Thus, we advocate a politics of opacity.  Rather than trying to make the Other intelligible, we get off the grid, re

The affirmative’s attempt to "understand the other" as a starting point for their ROTB is a colonial tactic of making the other transparent.  Only opacity solves

Britton 99 ~Celia, Professor of French teaches French Caribbean literature and thought, postcolonial theory; surrealism in the Caribbean; psychoanalysis and colonialism; literature and ideology; images of community; the Nouveau Roman, Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance, pgs. 18-25~

More controversially, opacity is also a defense against understanding, at least in the
AND
, that¶ determines the relations between "discoverer" and "discovered."

ONLY an ethics of opacity solves their arguments –

Walker 2011 ~Corey Walker, Brown University, "How Does It Feel to be a Problem?": (Local) Knowledge, Human Interests, and The Ethics of¶ Opacity" TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World,¶ School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, UC Merced http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/0xj5402h-http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/0xj5402h~~

Inspired by the work of Charles Long, the ethics of opacity establishes the critical
AND
develop a theory of knowledge in critical relation with an ethics of opacity?

3

Debating about government policy towards Latin America and specific policies is key to building an epistemic community that can educate the public and policymakers about the dangers of US Military expansion into the region

Blanke 10 – (Svenja, "Civic Foreign policy" Doctoral Thesis paper in
AND
Institution in Washington, DC , was a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University.
Paul Adams is a specialist in politics and society of North America. He multiple PhDs and has been a professor at many universities such as the UChig, and worked at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies. The Organization of American Historians awards since 2003 every two years to Willi Paul Adams Award for the best book on American history, Available online @ http://www.diss.fu-berlin.de/diss/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/FUDISS_derivate_000000000975/1_Kapitel1.PDF?hosts=)//ghs-mm
Conclusion: The Civic Factor in the Context of U.S. Foreign¶
AND
, civic foreign policy toward Central America has ¶ not been very vocal.

 The end of the Cold War facilitated the peace processes in¶ Nicaragua,
AND
the society seem vital for democratic policymaking in an increasingly interdependent ¶ world. 

Extinction

Boggs 5 - (Carl, mil•i•ta•rism, n, A military state or condition; reliance on military force in administering government, Professor of Social Science at National University, Imperial Delusions p. xxi-xxv, Published 2005)ghs-mm
The ceaseless global expansion of U.S. military power since the early 1940s
AND
risks, costs, and consequences of a militarism veering out of control. 

4

It’s impossible for us to join their movement so their advocacy only promotes unimpassioned conflict

Ruth Lessl Shively, Associate Professor, Political Science, Texas A26M University, POLITICAL THEORY AND PARTISAN POLITICS, 2K, p. 183-184.

This is the ordinary ebb and flow of debate. Argument continues as long as
AND
protect speech and action from violence, manipulation and other forms of tyranny* 

Debate activism is counter-productive to effective social participation:

1. Insulation is good – exchanging ideas is key to debate

2. Hierarchy – ideological focus fosters elitism

Alan Coverstone, debate coach, "An Inward Glance: A Response to Mitchell’s Outward Activist Turn," DRG 1995, www.wfu.edu/Student-organizations/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Coverstone1995China.htm

Yet, Mitchell goes too far. In two important areas, his argument is
AND
outward activist turn threatens to subvert the very values it seeks to achieve.

First-hand experience with social movements demonstrates that inexperience with specific policy advocacy undermines their political efficacy

Frank Bedek, Economic and Social Historian, McMaster University, "Why I Don’t Do Demonstrations Anymore,"PIRGspectives, Spring 1999, www.opirg.org/mcmaster/spring99.htm~23demo

I’ve attended, or stood by sympathetically, at demonstrations for prisoner’s rights, the
AND
offered more pointless gatherings will only serve to dispirit and discourage their participants.

Protest divorced from specific policy proposals devolves into nihilistic violence

Frank Bedek, Economic and Social Historian, McMaster University, "Why I Don’t Do Demonstrations Anymore,"PIRGspectives, Spring 1999, www.opirg.org/mcmaster/spring99.htm~23demo

I think that one of the weaknesses of demonstrations comes out of a misconception of
AND
.  The biggest impediment to making mass rallies a focus for effecting real change

 is the current absence of a genuine left alternative to rally around. At
AND
society bewildered and apathetic from the stresses neo-liberalism continues to impose.

Tournament: Lexington | Round: 4 | Opponent: Pace BR | Judge: Nicho Fiori

1

A. Interpretation – toward means in the direction of

Michigan Supreme Court 1914 ~Michigan Reports: Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of Michigan, Volume 180, Google Books~
Under 3 Comp. Laws, § 11510 (5 How. Stat. ~
AND
toward" means in a course or line leading in the direction of.

B. Violation – the resolution says economic engagement TOWARD Cuba, Mexico, or Venezuela, means the engagement can only be uni-directional. The aff engages in TTP which is a multilateral trade agreement

C. Voting Issue 

1. Limits – tons of bi-directional affs that they could read – explodes the neg research burden
   2. Ground – they jack bi-directional CP ground and DA links based off of uni-directional action
   3. Advantage skew – they can garner advantages based off of other non-topic countries with multi-lateral trade agreements like TTP

2

The images of catastrophe and destruction they present are like a drug, used by the first world nations to feed off the suffering of the rest of the world.  Their efforts to solve these problems are coproductive with the disasters themselves, and this constant search for new spectacle will lead to the destruction of the human species as the ultimate reality TV show.
Baudrillard in 94 ~Jean, "The Illusion of the End" p. 66-71~
We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the ’other
AND
- it, too, the waste-product of its own history.
The South is a natural producer of raw materials, the latest of which is
AND
fate, it will prefer to stage its own death as a species. 

3

The Affirmative’s view of death through its harms is obscured by the fright of death. Death and misfortune are inevitable. They are ignoring the reality that things die everyday. They view it as pure silence and nothingness. Death is a part of our life and is part of a never-ending cycle. Life is death. If we desire to avoid death, we desire to avoid life. Life then looses all of it’s value. The joy of life comes in accepting things as they are. The aff has no impact- vote neg on presumption.

Slabbert 1-Taoist teacher and philosopher (Jos, "Tao Te Ching: How to Deal with Suffering," 2001, http://www.taoism.net/theway/suffer.htm)rcy

If you open yourself to loss, you are at one with loss and you
AND
the more we tamper with it, the more damage we will do.

The alternative is to take a new stance on the idea of life and therefore the idea of death. We are going to approach a radical laxity and radical incompetence in response to the case harms. By saying "no" to the imperative to prevent death we can access desire as a positive force and live life fully.

_

Deleuze 26 Guattari 72 (Gilles, professor of philosophy at U of Paris Vincennes, and Felix, psychoanalyst and political activist, Anti-Oedipus p. 330-39) rcy
But it seems that things are becoming very obscure, for what is this distinction
AND
-machine, a part that must itself be judged, evaluated in the
functioning of the machine and the system of its energetic conversions, and not as
AND
, the identity in nature is on the contrary at its minimum; and
where the identity in nature appears to be at its maximum, the regimes differ
AND
end up following behind and being swallowed up-a question of regime. 

4

Neoliberalism has had its chance—in the 80’s we spread globalization and free market economics throughout Latin America which caused radical instability due to revolutions as well as deteriorating economic conditions rampant with income inequality and poor living conditions—this invisible violence remains covered up by modern economists who preach it’s beneficial for the greater good—the question we should ask is when will it be good for the people of Latin America?
Pineo, 13 – Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, and Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Towson University (Ron, Posted on April 11, 2013 - See more at: http://www.coha.org/22227/~~23sthash.L5CsywQs.dpuf
Poverty in Latin America has been reduced substantially in the last three decades. In
AND
age of cneoliberalism is ending. It is time for some good economics. 

Competitiveness decides who lives and who dies based on capitalist market performance
Bristow, Cardiff University School of City and Regional Planning, 5
(Gillian, 4/13/2005, "Everyone’s a ’winner’: problematizing the discourse of regional competitiveness," Journal of Economic Competitiveness 5, p. 286-287, bs)

Competitiveness is usually used to refer to firm performance. The discourse of firm competitiveness
AND
firm ’must doX in order to be competitive’ (Schoenberger, 1998).

Manufacturing is the epitome of Capitalism. It prevents innovation and technology development and makes mass nuclear annihilation inevitable.
Webb, 04 (Sam Webb, National Chairman, Communist Party USA. "War, Capitalism, and George W. Bush." 4-20-04. http://www.pww.org/article/view/ 4967/1/207/O)

Capitalism was never a warm, cuddly, stable social system. It came into
AND
within and between classes and social movements at the national and international level.  

Structural violence outweighs everything
Abu-Jamal 98-~Mumia, award winning Pennsylvania journalist, quotes James Gilligan, Professor at Harvard/NYU, "A quiet and deadly violence", http://www.flashpoints.net/mQuietDeadlyViolence.html-http://www.flashpoints.net/mQuietDeadlyViolence.html~~

The deadliest form of violence is poverty.  —Ghandi    It has often been observed
AND
away, so that their great and terrible violence passes away with them.

Capitalism causes extinction and destroys value to life

Simonovic 7 ~Ljubodrag, Ph.D. in Philosophy; M.A. in Law; author of seven books, 2007, A New World is Possible, "Basis of contemporary critical theory of capitalism."~ Gender edited

The final stage of a mortal combat between ~hu~mankind and capitalism is
AND
of the capitalist society, the withering away of life is taking place. 

Our alternative is to vote negative to reject the affirmative as a refusal to participate in activities which support capitalism.  We must hollow out capitalist structures by refusing to invest our energy in reforms and rescue operations—avoids transition wars  
Herod 4-Social Activist since 1968, owns an awesome website, Attended Columbia University and spent a year abroad at the University of Beirut (Lebanon) ~James, Getting Free, 2004, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm~~

It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely,
AND
. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction.  

5

A. Fiat double bind – Either the harms to the 1AC are true and they cannot solve for extinction before they control the levers of power OR their harms are constructed for the purpose of alarmism which makes them symbolic terrorists.

B. Their model of fiat cedes the political and papers over personal responsibility
Kappeler 95 (Susanne, The Will to Violence: The politics of personal behavior, Pg. 10-11)
Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian
AND
values’ according: to the structures and the values of war and violence.

Case

Manufacturing
Collapse now is key to prevent extinction
Barry 8 – President and Founder of Ecological Internet, Ph.D. in Land Resources from U-Wisconsin-Madison (Glen, "Economic Collapse And Global Ecology", http://www.countercurrents.org/barry140108.htm)

Humanity and the Earth are faced with an enormous conundrum — sufficient climate policies enjoy
AND
sabotage to hasten the day. It is more fragile than it looks. 

The TPP would deny the production of AIDS drugs

HG 11 - Public Citizen, Health GAP, Global Access Project, Healthgap.org, ("The Trans Pacific Free Trade Agreement Deadly Big-Pharma Greed Threatening AIDS Drugs", June 16, 2011, http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/9727221/1663267868/name/TPP+Health+Gap+1+Page.pdf)//sawyer-http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/9727221/1663267868/name/TPP+Health+Gap+1+Page.pdf)//sawyer

The Trans Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement (or TPP for short) is  currently
AND
drugs  plus drive down wages,  environmental standards,  and Wall Street regulation21 

The TPP will increase carbon emissions, fracking, and lng exports

SC 12 -Sierra Club’s Labor and Trade Campaign, ("An Explosion of Fracking?
One of the dirtiest secrets of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement", 2012, h http://www.sierraclub.org/trade/downloads/TPP-Factsheet.pdf-http://www.sierraclub.org/trade/downloads/TPP-Factsheet.pdf)//sawyer-http://sierraclub.org/trade/downloads/TPP-LNG Factsheet FINAL.pdf)sawyer
The United States is quietly negotiating an expansive trade agreement with ten other countries that
AND
building a deliberate energy policy that protects the interests of the American  public.

Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: Semis | Opponent: Dowling | Judge: Skoog, LeDuc, Doty

1

Neoliberalism has had its chance—in the 80’s we spread globalization and free market economics throughout Latin America which caused radical instability due to revolutions as well as deteriorating economic conditions rampant with income inequality and poor living conditions—this invisible violence remains covered up by modern economists who preach it’s beneficial for the greater good—the question we should ask is when will it be good for the people of Latin America?
Pineo, 13 – Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, and Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Towson University (Ron, Posted on April 11, 2013 - See more at: http://www.coha.org/22227/~~23sthash.L5CsywQs.dpuf
Poverty in Latin America has been reduced substantially in the last three decades. In
AND
client states so plainly worsened the economic situation and needlessly caused considerable human misery
that the IMF’s reputation was badly damaged. In the wake of IMF’s subsequent mishandling
AND
age of cneoliberalism is ending. It is time for some good economics. 

Removing cuba from the state sponsors of terrorism list would open the floodgates of US consumerism and business interests
Patrick Ryan, The Hill, April 30, 2013, "Former U.S. diplomat Patrick Ryan: Time to drop Cuba from terror list," http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/guest-commentary/296867-former-us-diplomat-patrick-ryan- (Ryan is a 12-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service who previously worked on Capitol Hill. Recently having returned after 14 years away, he has a degree in International Studies from Johns Hopkins and is currently consulting in D.C. on issues that have nothing to do with Cuba, the embargo, or potential business interests there)
Ironically, these members of Congress support Cubans’ ability freedom to travel to the United
AND
that allegedly violated their airspace, ensuring the embargo and listing would continue. 

Structural violence outweighs everything
Abu-Jamal 98-~Mumia, award winning Pennsylvania journalist, quotes James Gilligan, Professor at Harvard/NYU, "A quiet and deadly violence", http://www.flashpoints.net/mQuietDeadlyViolence.html-http://www.flashpoints.net/mQuietDeadlyViolence.html~~

The deadliest form of violence is poverty.  —Ghandi    It has often been observed
AND
away, so that their great and terrible violence passes away with them.

Capitalism causes extinction and destroys value to life

Simonovic 7 ~Ljubodrag, Ph.D. in Philosophy; M.A. in Law; author of seven books, 2007, A New World is Possible, "Basis of contemporary critical theory of capitalism."~ Gender edited

The final stage of a mortal combat between ~hu~mankind and capitalism is
AND
of the capitalist society, the withering away of life is taking place. 

Our alternative is to vote negative to reject the affirmative as a refusal to participate in activities which support capitalism.  We must hollow out capitalist structures by refusing to invest our energy in reforms and rescue operations—avoids transition wars  
Herod 4-Social Activist since 1968, owns an awesome website, Attended Columbia University and spent a year abroad at the University of Beirut (Lebanon) ~James, Getting Free, 2004, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm~~

It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely,
AND
. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction.  

2

A. Interpretation - Engagement is the attempt to influence the political behavior of a state by increasing contacts with that state – economic engagement means using exclusively economic contacts like trade, loans and grants

Resnik, 1 – Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yeshiva University (Evan, Journal of International Affairs, "Defining Engagement" v54, n2, political science complete)

A REFINED DEFINITION OF ENGAGEMENT
In order to establish a more effective framework for dealing with unsavory regimes, I propose that we define engagement as the attempt to influence the political behavior of a target state through the comprehensive establishment and enhancement of contacts with that state across multiple issue-areas (i.e. diplomatic, military, economic, cultural). The following is a brief list of the specific forms that such contacts might include:
DIPLOMATIC CONTACTS
Extension of diplomatic recognition; normalization of diplomatic relations
Promotion of target-state membership in international institutions and regimes
Summit meetings and other visits by the head of state and other senior government officials of sender state to target state and vice-versa
MILITARY CONTACTS
Visits of senior military officials of the sender state to the target state and vice-versa
Arms transfers
Military aid and cooperation
Military exchange and training programs
Confidence and security-building measures
Intelligence sharing
ECONOMIC CONTACTS
Trade agreements and promotion
Foreign economic and humanitarian aid in the form of loans and/or grants
CULTURAL CONTACTS
Cultural treaties
Inauguration of travel and tourism links
Sport, artistic and academic exchanges(n25)
Engagement is an iterated process in which the sender and target state develop a relationship
AND
hope that this will precipitate political change from below within the target state.
This definition implies that three necessary conditions must hold for engagement to constitute an effective
AND
, and the near-total collapse of its national economy.(n28)
Third, the target state must perceive the engager and the international order it represents as a potential source of the material or prestige resources it desires. This means that autarkic, revolutionary and unlimited regimes which eschew the norms and institutions of the prevailing order, such as Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany, will not be seduced by the potential benefits of engagement.
This reformulated conceptualization avoids the pitfalls of prevailing scholarly conceptions of engagement. It considers the policy as a set of means rather than ends, does not delimit the types of states that can either engage or be engaged, explicitly encompasses contacts in multiple issue-areas, allows for the existence of multiple objectives in any given instance of engagement and, as will be shown below, permits the elucidation of multiple types of positive sanctions.

B. Violation – the affirmative only alters a governmental list

C. Voting issue –

1. limits – they explode the topic – blurring the lines between economic and other forms of engagement makes any interaction with another country topical.  It’s impossible to predict or prepare

2. negative ground – the economic limit is vital to critiques of economics, trade disads, and non-economic counterplans

Turns the case —- without predictable ground, debate becomes meaningless and produces a political strategy wedded to violence

Shively 00 (Ruth Lessl, Assistant Prof Political Science – Texas A26M U., Partisan Politics and Political Theory, p. 182)
The point may seem trite, as surely the ambiguists would agree that basic terms
AND
good arguments. Such agreements are simply implicit in the act of argumentation. 

3.  Precision – it’s key to effective policy analysis

Resnik, 1 – Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yeshiva University (Evan, Journal of International Affairs, "Defining Engagement" v54, n2, political science complete)

In matters of national security, establishing a clear definition of terms is a precondition
AND
"engagement," they undermine the ability to build an effective foreign policy.
The refined definition I propose as a substitute for existing descriptions of engagement is different
AND
the information necessary to better manage the rogue states of the 21st century.

4. Effects T –

Removing restrictions may be T, but the act of removing from terror list is not so, they rely on the effect to lift restrictions

Unpredictable – impossible to do determine what their aff could include because -

Everything can effect another nation’s economy

Derrick, 98 - LIEUTENANT COLONEL ROBERT R. DERRICK United States Army ("ENGAGEMENT: THE NATIONS PREMIER GRAND STRATEGY, WHO’S IN CHARGE?" http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA342695-http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA342695)

It is becoming common knowledge that "...international issues now affect every American."13
AND
interest of the US to at least maintain regions at the status quo.

This kills predictable limits – this means they could advocate for anything – whetehr it be domestic policies or electing a president that would eventualy change the economy

All of their advtantages characterize the terror list as a symbolic act – not an economic policy

This means they gardner advantages off of the symoblism

5. Vagueness – don’t specify what type of trade restrictions they remove – kills stable links, neg ground and predictability

3

The United States federal government should substantially increase its economic engagement with Cuba by removing Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list while keeping on all sanctions pertaining to agricultural products or services

4

Ending the trade embargo undermines Cuba’s worm tech exports.  Their expertise exist because of financial constraints – not choice

Ewing 08 ~Ed Ewing-http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/edewing, "Cuba’s organic revolution," guardian.co.uk-http://www.guardian.co.uk/, Thursday 3 April 2008 20.02 EDT, pg. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/04/organics.food

But when the USSR collapsed in 1990/91, Cuba’s ability to feed itself
AND
pesticide and fertiliser use mainly due to "financial constraints, not choice".

Worms are key to our planetary survival.  Vermicomposting expertise is limited

Blakemore 10 - Studied ’VermEcology’ for 30 years and holds qualifications in ecology, computing and permaculture. ~Dr. Rob Blakemore, "Wonder Worm to the rescue," Our World 2.0, July 2, 2010, pg. http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/wonder-worm-to-the-rescue/-http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/wonder-worm-to-the-rescue/ - gender edited

Can worms help save the planet? I think so and, before arguing my
AND
-process organic ’wastes’ via worms, for a natural compost fertilizer.

5

A. Fiat double bind – Either the harms to the 1AC are true and they cannot solve for extinction before they control the levers of power OR their harms are constructed for the purpose of alarmism which makes them symbolic terrorists.

B. Their model of fiat cedes the political and papers over personal responsibility
Kappeler 95 (Susanne, The Will to Violence: The politics of personal behavior, Pg. 10-11)
Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian
AND
values’ according: to the structures and the values of war and violence.

Case

Free trade causes monoculture

David Frawley, Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, No Date, "Western Monoculture and Indic Pluralism," http://www.hssworld.org/homepage/html/boudhik/articles/vamadev1.html
Monoculture does quite well with free trade and the spread of global consumerism, which
AND
world, as if apart from the agribusiness no one could feed themselves21 

Extinction results without sustained genetic diversity

Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney, Rural Advancement Fund International, Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, 1990, p. ix
While many may ponder the consequences of global warming, perhaps the biggest single environmental
AND
exports may have spread the blight to Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Tournament: Glenbrooks Invitational | Round: 4 | Opponent: Will Update | Judge: Dont Remember

T

Interp. Engagement and appeasement are distinct

Resnick 1 (Evan, Assistant Professor and coordinator of the United States Programme at RSIS, "Defining Engagement," Journal of International Affairs, 0022197X, Spring2001, Vol. 54, Issue 2, http://web.ebscohost.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/ehost/detail?sid=1b56e6b4-ade2-4052-9114-7d107fdbd01940sessionmgr1226vid=226hid=2426bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ3d3d~~23db=mth26AN=4437301-http://web.ebscohost.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/ehost/detail?sid=1b56e6b4-ade2-4052-9114-7d107fdbd01940sessionmgr1226vid=226hid=2426bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ3d3d)

Thus, a rigid conceptual distinction can be drawn between engagement and appeasement. Whereas
AND
or in exchange for certain concessions on the part of the target state.

B. Violation – appease Cuba through "offering" and not signing

C. Voting issue

1. Limits – infinite amount of restrictions the aff can remove – explodes neg research burden

2. Ground – Lose spending links based off of increases in funding

And they are extra T – they claim to sign a deal while also offering to do so

This allows them to garner advantages off of the act of appeasement

Voter

Predictability – we cannot predict all the extra possible political or other mechanisms they can garner advantages off of

Education – they divert the debate away from the resolution and instead on the advantages of appeasement – kills clash and education

CAP

Neoliberalism has had its chance—in the 80’s we spread globalization and free market economics throughout Latin America which caused radical instability due to revolutions as well as deteriorating economic conditions rampant with income inequality and poor living conditions—this invisible violence remains covered up by modern economists who preach it’s beneficial for the greater good—the question we should ask is when will it be good for the people of Latin America?
Pineo, 13 – Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, and Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Towson University (Ron, Posted on April 11, 2013 - See more at: http://www.coha.org/22227/~~23sthash.L5CsywQs.dpuf
Poverty in Latin America has been reduced substantially in the last three decades. In
AND
client states so plainly worsened the economic situation and needlessly caused considerable human misery
that the IMF’s reputation was badly damaged. In the wake of IMF’s subsequent mishandling
AND
age of cneoliberalism is ending. It is time for some good economics. 

Science is the false justification for economic expansion

Dickens 9 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, May, The Sociological Review, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 68-82, jam)
First, there is considerable emphasis on the ’pure’, universal, scientific knowledge
AND
asteroids, the Moon and Mars are readily available on the NASA website.

Capitalism inhibits scientific development—the alternative solves
Palecek 9 (Mike, writer, "Capitalism Versus Science" http://www.marxist.com/capitalism-versus-science.htm JF)

We are constantly bombarded with the myth that capitalism drives innovation, technology, and
AND
our fingertips. The only thing that stands in our way is capitalism.

Structural violence outweighs everything
Abu-Jamal 98-~Mumia, award winning Pennsylvania journalist, quotes James Gilligan, Professor at Harvard/NYU, "A quiet and deadly violence", http://www.flashpoints.net/mQuietDeadlyViolence.html-http://www.flashpoints.net/mQuietDeadlyViolence.html~~

The deadliest form of violence is poverty.  —Ghandi    It has often been observed
AND
away, so that their great and terrible violence passes away with them.

Capitalism causes extinction and destroys value to life

Simonovic 7 ~Ljubodrag, Ph.D. in Philosophy; M.A. in Law; author of seven books, 2007, A New World is Possible, "Basis of contemporary critical theory of capitalism."~ Gender edited

The final stage of a mortal combat between ~hu~mankind and capitalism is
AND
of the capitalist society, the withering away of life is taking place. 

Our alternative is to vote negative to reject the affirmative as a refusal to participate in activities which support capitalism.  We must hollow out capitalist structures by refusing to invest our energy in reforms and rescue operations—avoids transition wars  
Herod 4-Social Activist since 1968, owns an awesome website, Attended Columbia University and spent a year abroad at the University of Beirut (Lebanon) ~James, Getting Free, 2004, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm~~

It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely,
AND
. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction.  

CP:

Plan: The United States federal government should sign a science and technology agreement with Cuba.

DA

Appeasement kills credibility – it shows countries that the US isn’t hard line - playing a weak hand doesn’t work

Weissberg 10 - Professor of Political Science-Emeritus, University of Illinois-Urbana (Robert, "President Obama’s Compulsive Appeasement Disorder", August 27 of 2010, American Thinker, http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/president_obamas_compulsive_ap.html-http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/president_obamas_compulsive_ap.html)
There’s a simple explanation: we are no longer feared. Superpowers of yesteryear,
AND
it. Israel long ago learned this lesson, regardless of world outrage.

Appeasement independently collapses the global order – turns case

Henriksen 1999 (Thomas H. Henriksen, U.S. foreign policy, international political and defense affairs, rogue states, and insurgencies, "Using Power and Diplomacy To Deal With Rogue States"  February 1, 1999 http://www.hoover.org/publications/monographs/27159-http://www.hoover.org/publications/monographs/27159 )
¶ Conclusion and Recommendations¶ At the dawn of a new millennium, the United
AND
.S. diplomacy, we await the dire consequences of our feebleness.

Tournament: TOC | Round: 4 | Opponent: Cuba People | Judge: 

off

The United States federal government should lift all sanctions against Cuba, excluding all sanctions pertaining to agricultural goods or services

1nc Module

Trade liberalization causes cycles of food shortages

Seedling, October 1996, http://www.grain.org/publications/oct961-en.cfm
In the South, the different elements of trade liberalisation often translate directly into food
AND
when India’s economy was most integrated though the globalisation of the colonial period." 

Blips in food prices kill billions

Tampa Tribune, 1-20-96 p. 46
On a global scale, food supplies - measured by stockpiles of grain - are
AND
-income countries already spend more than half of their income on food.

Food shortages lead to World War III

William Calvin, theoretical neurophysiologist at the University of Washington, Atlantic Monthly, January, The Great Climate Flip-Flop, Vol 281, No. 1, 1998, p. 47-64
The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling. Plummeting crop yields would
AND
longer do so if it lost the extra warming from the North Atlantic.

1nc Module

Free trade causes monoculture

David Frawley, Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, No Date, "Western Monoculture and Indic Pluralism," http://www.hssworld.org/homepage/html/boudhik/articles/vamadev1.html
Monoculture does quite well with free trade and the spread of global consumerism, which
AND
world, as if apart from the agribusiness no one could feed themselves21 

Extinction results without sustained genetic diversity

Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney, Rural Advancement Fund International, Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, 1990, p. ix
While many may ponder the consequences of global warming, perhaps the biggest single environmental
AND
exports may have spread the blight to Africa, Latin America and Asia.

1nc

Ending the trade embargo undermines Cuba’s worm tech exports.  Their expertise exist because of financial constraints – not choice

Ewing 08 ~Ed Ewing-http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/edewing, "Cuba’s organic revolution," guardian.co.uk-http://www.guardian.co.uk/, Thursday 3 April 2008 20.02 EDT, pg. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/04/organics.food

But when the USSR collapsed in 1990/91, Cuba’s ability to feed itself
AND
pesticide and fertiliser use mainly due to "financial constraints, not choice".

Worms are key to our planetary survival.  Vermicomposting expertise is limited

Blakemore 10 - Studied ’VermEcology’ for 30 years and holds qualifications in ecology, computing and permaculture. ~Dr. Rob Blakemore, "Wonder Worm to the rescue," Our World 2.0, July 2, 2010, pg. http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/wonder-worm-to-the-rescue/-http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/wonder-worm-to-the-rescue/ - gender edited

Can worms help save the planet? I think so and, before arguing my
AND
-process organic ’wastes’ via worms, for a natural compost fertilizer.

Next off

Lifting the embargo would open the floodgates of US consumerism and business interests

Patrick Ryan, The Hill, April 30, 2013, "Former U.S. diplomat Patrick Ryan: Time to drop Cuba from terror list," http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/guest-commentary/296867-former-us-diplomat-patrick-ryan- (Ryan is a 12-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service who previously worked on Capitol Hill. Recently having returned after 14 years away, he has a degree in International Studies from Johns Hopkins and is currently consulting in D.C. on issues that have nothing to do with Cuba, the embargo, or potential business interests there)
Ironically, these members of Congress support Cubans’ ability freedom to travel to the United
AND
that allegedly violated their airspace, ensuring the embargo and listing would continue. 

Capitalism causes extinction and destroys value to life

Simonovic 7 ~Ljubodrag, Ph.D. in Philosophy; M.A. in Law; author of seven books, 2007, A New World is Possible, "Basis of contemporary critical theory of capitalism."~ Gender edited

The final stage of a mortal combat between ~hu~mankind and capitalism is
AND
of the capitalist society, the withering away of life is taking place. 

Our alternative is to vote negative to reject the affirmative as a refusal to participate in activities which support capitalism.  We must hollow out capitalist structures by refusing to invest our energy in reforms and rescue operations—avoids transition wars

Herod 4-Social Activist since 1968, owns an awesome website, Attended Columbia University and spent a year abroad at the University of Beirut (Lebanon) ~James, Getting Free, 2004, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm~~

It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely,
AND
. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction.  

2nc

Overview General

Capitalism causes incalculable deaths—nothing can outweigh—this is war

Herod 7-Social Activist since 1968, owns an awesome website, Attended Columbia University and spent a year abroad at the University of Beirut (Lebanon) (James, 2007, "Getting Free" Pg. 22-23)

We must never forget that we are at war, however, and that we
AND
Hun look like boy scouts. This is a terrible enemy we face. 

A-Priori ethical obligation to reject capitalism

Zizek 26 Daly 4-(Slavoj, PhD in Philosophy @ the University of Ljubljana
AND
Essex University and Manchester University, Conversations with Zizek page 14-16) 

For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol
AND
abject Other to that of a ’glitch’ in an otherwise sound matrix.

Tournament: TOC | Round: 4 | Opponent: Cuba People | Judge: 

off

The United States federal government should lift all sanctions against Cuba, excluding all sanctions pertaining to agricultural goods or services

1nc Module

Trade liberalization causes cycles of food shortages

Seedling, October 1996, http://www.grain.org/publications/oct961-en.cfm
In the South, the different elements of trade liberalisation often translate directly into food
AND
when India’s economy was most integrated though the globalisation of the colonial period." 

Blips in food prices kill billions

Tampa Tribune, 1-20-96 p. 46
On a global scale, food supplies - measured by stockpiles of grain - are
AND
-income countries already spend more than half of their income on food.

Food shortages lead to World War III

William Calvin, theoretical neurophysiologist at the University of Washington, Atlantic Monthly, January, The Great Climate Flip-Flop, Vol 281, No. 1, 1998, p. 47-64
The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling. Plummeting crop yields would
AND
longer do so if it lost the extra warming from the North Atlantic.

1nc Module

Free trade causes monoculture

David Frawley, Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, No Date, "Western Monoculture and Indic Pluralism," http://www.hssworld.org/homepage/html/boudhik/articles/vamadev1.html
Monoculture does quite well with free trade and the spread of global consumerism, which
AND
world, as if apart from the agribusiness no one could feed themselves21 

Extinction results without sustained genetic diversity

Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney, Rural Advancement Fund International, Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, 1990, p. ix
While many may ponder the consequences of global warming, perhaps the biggest single environmental
AND
exports may have spread the blight to Africa, Latin America and Asia.

1nc

Ending the trade embargo undermines Cuba’s worm tech exports.  Their expertise exist because of financial constraints – not choice

Ewing 08 ~Ed Ewing-http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/edewing, "Cuba’s organic revolution," guardian.co.uk-http://www.guardian.co.uk/, Thursday 3 April 2008 20.02 EDT, pg. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/04/organics.food

But when the USSR collapsed in 1990/91, Cuba’s ability to feed itself
AND
pesticide and fertiliser use mainly due to "financial constraints, not choice".

Worms are key to our planetary survival.  Vermicomposting expertise is limited

Blakemore 10 - Studied ’VermEcology’ for 30 years and holds qualifications in ecology, computing and permaculture. ~Dr. Rob Blakemore, "Wonder Worm to the rescue," Our World 2.0, July 2, 2010, pg. http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/wonder-worm-to-the-rescue/-http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/wonder-worm-to-the-rescue/ - gender edited

Can worms help save the planet? I think so and, before arguing my
AND
-process organic ’wastes’ via worms, for a natural compost fertilizer.

Next off

Lifting the embargo would open the floodgates of US consumerism and business interests

Patrick Ryan, The Hill, April 30, 2013, "Former U.S. diplomat Patrick Ryan: Time to drop Cuba from terror list," http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/guest-commentary/296867-former-us-diplomat-patrick-ryan- (Ryan is a 12-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service who previously worked on Capitol Hill. Recently having returned after 14 years away, he has a degree in International Studies from Johns Hopkins and is currently consulting in D.C. on issues that have nothing to do with Cuba, the embargo, or potential business interests there)
Ironically, these members of Congress support Cubans’ ability freedom to travel to the United
AND
that allegedly violated their airspace, ensuring the embargo and listing would continue. 

Capitalism causes extinction and destroys value to life

Simonovic 7 ~Ljubodrag, Ph.D. in Philosophy; M.A. in Law; author of seven books, 2007, A New World is Possible, "Basis of contemporary critical theory of capitalism."~ Gender edited

The final stage of a mortal combat between ~hu~mankind and capitalism is
AND
of the capitalist society, the withering away of life is taking place. 

Our alternative is to vote negative to reject the affirmative as a refusal to participate in activities which support capitalism.  We must hollow out capitalist structures by refusing to invest our energy in reforms and rescue operations—avoids transition wars

Herod 4-Social Activist since 1968, owns an awesome website, Attended Columbia University and spent a year abroad at the University of Beirut (Lebanon) ~James, Getting Free, 2004, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm~~

It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely,
AND
. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction.  

2nc

Overview General

Capitalism causes incalculable deaths—nothing can outweigh—this is war

Herod 7-Social Activist since 1968, owns an awesome website, Attended Columbia University and spent a year abroad at the University of Beirut (Lebanon) (James, 2007, "Getting Free" Pg. 22-23)

We must never forget that we are at war, however, and that we
AND
Hun look like boy scouts. This is a terrible enemy we face. 

A-Priori ethical obligation to reject capitalism

Zizek 26 Daly 4-(Slavoj, PhD in Philosophy @ the University of Ljubljana
AND
Essex University and Manchester University, Conversations with Zizek page 14-16) 

For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol
AND
abject Other to that of a ’glitch’ in an otherwise sound matrix.

Tournament: Wake Forest | Round: 2 | Opponent: pace br | Judge:
look in open source for round 2

Tournament: Wake Forest | Round: Quarters | Opponent: westminster BG | Judge:
iovnuiesvoyishvueiprw

Tournament: bronx | Round: 2 | Opponent: mcdonough | Judge: idk
in open source

Tournament: usc RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: south east | Judge: idk
1

Gut check no one knows what the aff plan does
Before the round when we asked them they said “well it is pretty much removing the embargo” but when we asked them in cross X it was something different- proves their lack of predictability

Also there is no such thing as “substantially easing”

There are several implications:
no solvency- none of their ev supports the rhetoric they support
they are vague allowing them to spike out of our offense making them an unpredictable and killing clash
plan texts are the focus of the debate. Even if they win that it is a good idea, it is not written correctly- that’s a reason to reject the team

They could have read lift the embargo, normalize trade relations, or remove cuba from the state sponsors of terrorist lists- they all solve the aff without linking to our offense
2
Capitalism has had its chance—in the 80’s we spread globalization and free market economics throughout Latin America which caused radical instability due to revolutions as well as deteriorating economic conditions rampant with income inequality and poor living conditions—this invisible violence remains covered up by modern economists who preach it’s beneficial for the greater good—the question we should ask is when will it be good for the people of Latin America?
Pineo, 13 – Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, and Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Towson University (Ron, Posted on April 11, 2013 - See more at: http://www.coha.org/22227/#sthash.L5CsywQs.dpuf
Poverty in Latin America has been reduced substantially in the last three decades. In the late 1980s, nearly half of Latin America’s population lived in poverty. Today the fraction is about a third. 21 This marks important progress, and it has continued in some area nations. However, it is worth noting that between 2002 and 2008, poverty contracted most in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Argentina, countries which had largely abandoned neoliberalism; in Brazil, which had at least partially rejected neoliberalism; and in only two other states, Honduras and Perú, which still remained, at least partially, committed to free market polices. 22 It was mostly factors beyond economic policy that helps to account for recent declines in the rate of Latin American poverty. One factor was increasing remittances from Latin Americans laboring in the developed world, especially in the United States. Total remittances from Latin American workers rose from $12 billion USD in 1995, to $45 billion in 2004, and $68 billion in 2006. 23 However, “by far the main contributor to the reduction in the poverty rate,” as Jaime Ros has noted, was “the fall in the dependency ratio.” 24 The indicator measures the number of non-working age people—children and the elderly—who are supported by the working age population. The higher the dependency number, the greater the economic burden. Source: foreignpolicyblogs.com Latin America’s past demographic history underlies this shift in the dependency ratio. The late 1940s in Latin America witnessed lower overall death rates (the number of people who died a year divided by the total population), especially due to lower infant and childhood mortality rates. Initially, birth rates stayed high even as death rates fell, but after a generation passed Latin America’s birth rates began to drift downward to match the lower death rates. The time gap between the fall in death rates beginning in the late 1940s and the eventual fall in birth rates by the late 1970s resulted in an unprecedented population explosion. Latin America’s population rose from 167 million in 1950 to 285 million by 1970. As this population cohort has aged, Latin America’s dependency ratio fell too, dropping from a very high rate of 87.3 in the years 1965-1970, to 55.0 for 2005-2010, an all-time low for the region. The people born during the population explosion are of working age now, bringing the region a historic but one-time economic advantage, the “demographic bonus” or “demographic dividend.” As a result, Latin America temporarily enjoys a situation of a very large number of workers providing for a greatly reduced number of dependent people. The region’s demographic bonus means that there is, for the moment, less poverty due, in large part, to the increased number of working age people per household. 25 A drop in the dependency ratio carries with it greater female participation in the workforce, for lower fertility means there are fewer children to care for, freeing women to enter the paid workforce. Lower fertility also means better overall lifetime health for women, resulting in more years spent in the paid workforce for adult females. The fertility rate (the number of children born per woman per year) fell in Latin America from 5.6 for the years from 1965 to1970, to 2.4 for the years 2005 to 2010. The resulting demographic bonus has provided a significant, but fleeting, economic asset. By 2025, as the current population ages, Latin America will need to support a very large elderly dependent population. 26 It is fair to conclude that the reduction of poverty in Latin America in recent years was produced mainly by some short-term victories in the commodity lottery (as explained in Part I, the commodity lottery refers to short-term price rises for selected raw material exports), as well as a spike in remittances, and most of all, a one-time reduction in the dependency ratio. Income inequality data for Latin America is less positive. In the 1980s and 1990s, inequality increased significantly in Latin America. For example, from 1984 to 1994, the income of the top 10 percent of the Mexico’s population rose by 21 percent, while the income of the country’s bottom 10 percent fell by 23 percent. Nevertheless, there have been improvements, albeit modest ones, in lowering the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality with 0 being the least inequality—everyone has the same income, and 1.0 being the most inequality—one person has all the income). Source: norlarnet.uio.no From 2002 to 2008, the Gini coefficient improved in seven Latin American states; five of these seven countries—Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Paraguay—have traveled the farthest in rejecting neoliberalism. Outside of these nations inequality stayed the same or even increased, including in the largely neoliberal states of Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala. In 1970, the richest 1 percent of Latin Americans earned 363 times more than the poorest 1 percent. By 1995, it was 417 times more. Latin America continues to show, by far, the greatest income inequality of any region in the world. Of the 15 most unequal economies in the world today, 10 are in the area. If Latin America’s income were only as unevenly distributed as that of Eastern Europe or South Asia, its recent economic growth, though sometimes anemic, would have reduced the percentage of those living in poverty to 3 percent of the population. 27 The Economist, in its 2010 review of the Latin American economic situation, concluded that the region was “well on the way to building middle-class societies.” 28 The evidence, however, contradicts this assertion. The informal sector—where people arrange irregular employment in itinerant retail sales, as day workers, or other loosely arranged jobs—today accounts for more than half of all workers in Latin America. More than eight of ten new jobs in Latin America are in the informal sector. 29 Informal sector workers enjoy no protective regulation or benefits. They live by their wits, striving to scratch out a living, day by day. Meanwhile, union membership among active workers in Latin America fell from around one-fourth in the 1980s to under one-sixth in the 1990s. Source: laht.com Moreover, significant areas of severe poverty remain in Latin America, expressed along class, racial, gender, and regional divides Poverty underlies poor health, contributing to elevated rates of infant, childhood, and maternal mortality. Of those living in poverty in Latin America, nearly half are children. Due to their undernourishment, a quarter of Latin American children (and as many as half in rural Perú and Guatemala) are stunted in their development. Across Latin America malnutrition is an underlying cause in more than half of the deaths of children under the age of five. In Guatemala maternal mortality among indigenous women is 83 percent higher than the national average. Among the poorest fifth of the Perú’s population, 85 percent of births are not attended by trained personnel, compared to only 4 percent among the wealthiest fifth. Two-thirds of Latin American municipalities do not treat their sewage prior to dumping it into adjacent rivers or the sea. In Panamá, three in ten homes lack access to improved sanitation (sewage disposal), and in Perú, nearly four in ten lack this essential service. Yet with all this effluvium flowing out, still three-quarters of Latin America municipalities do not check public drinking water supplies for impurities. One-quarter of Latin Americans do not have in-home potable water. 30 In Latin America nearly two-thirds of hospital admissions are due to diseases related to the lack of sanitation. Diarrhea accounts for six of every ten deaths of children under the age of five in Latin America. Fresh water can save lives; for each percentage point increase in potable water coverage, the infant mortality rate drops 1 death per 1,000 live births. Yet, Latin America is falling behind in terms of life expectancy. Life expectancy in Latin America was five years longer than East Asia in the mid-1960s, but by the mid-1990s, it was 1.2 years shorter. 31 The weight of this evidence leads to an inescapable conclusion. Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang has put it most succinctly, “Over the last three decades, economists…provided…theoretical justifications for financial deregulation and the unrestrained pursuit of short-term profits…They advanced theories that justified the policies that have led to slower growth…and higher inequality…Economics has been worse than irrelevant. Economics, as it has been practiced in the last three decades, has been positively harmful for most people.” 32 The Twilight of Neoliberalism “There is no alternative to free market policies,” the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once pronounced, but across Latin America, there has been a steady erosion of support for the free market model. At present three-quarters of Latin America governments can be fairly characterized as being governed by center-left or left-oriented leaders. Moreover, there has been a far-reaching reassessment of the relevance of IMF advice, especially after the organization’s punishingly controversial response to the 1997-1998 Asian economic crisis. The Asian economic meltdown brought the reflexive recommendations from the IMF in the form of harsh austerity measures. However, the pro-cyclical policies demanded by the IMF of its client states so plainly worsened the economic situation and needlessly caused considerable human misery
that the IMF’s reputation was badly damaged. In the wake of IMF’s subsequent mishandling of the 1998 economic crises in Russia and Brazil, large private lenders, especially among the European ones, stopped requiring IMF assurances that borrowing nations follow neoliberal strictures. As Richard Peet has noted, “the…IMF’s reputation has never recovered, even in circles that the Fund values. ... The power of the IMF has been reduced by failed crisis management, with countries paying up as quickly as possible and distancing themselves” from the IMF. 33 European lenders concluded that new loans to non-neoliberal Latin American states would perform handsomely, which, in fact, they have. The IMF’s power to impose neoliberal policies on debtor nations has been seriously compromised. Source: herslookingatyousquid.worldpress.com Argentina, following its severe economic crisis in 2001-2002, proved that a nation could successfully challenge the IMF. Argentina defaulted on its $100 billion USD foreign debt and renegotiated its obligations, paying off its loans at a fraction of the original cost. Buenos Aires finished retiring its debt to the IMF in 2005, benefitting greatly from Venezuelan assistance. In offering the money, the late Hugo Chávez promised that, “if additional help is needed to help Argentina finally free itself from the claws of the International Monetary Fund, Argentina can count on us.” 34 Other Latin American nations looked on as Argentina defied the IMF, and continued to watch as Argentina’s economy soared, growing faster than any other nation in the Western Hemisphere after it abandoned IMF-imposed economic policies. Soon a stampede of those flouting IMF mandates followed, with each new defection providing courage to all those nations rejecting neoliberalism. Other international lenders appeared as well. Venezuela loaned money to other countries in the region, including Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, but only if they ignored the counsel of the IMF. The Bank of the South, established in 2007, joined Venezuela with Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay as an alternative source for credit. China, which does not particularly care what the IMF recommends, is also supplying capital. Furthermore, some primary commodity export prices have increased, in part due to the demand for Chinese imports (for example, Argentine soya). This has allowed several Latin American states to build up their financial reserves, making new foreign borrowing less pressing. Today the IMF can coerce only the most feeble economies, mainly now in sub-Sahara Africa. The political landscape has shifted too. By the late 1990s, many of the aging left-wing political parties built around organized labor had been flattened by the assault on unions mounted under neoliberalism. At first voters were willing to give candidates who supported the neoliberal program a chance; nevertheless, as it became increasingly clear that these policies were failing, those who spoke out against neoliberalism were elected in growing numbers. The trouble was that once in office they too often carried out neoliberal programs anyway, as for example with Abdalá Bucaram (1996-1997) or Lucio Gutiérrez (2003-2005) in Ecuador, either because they secretly favored such policies, because the IMF persuaded them to do so, or both. With the traditional left-leaning parties marginalized in several countries and the abandonment of anti-neoliberal promises by elected politicians, ordinary citizens had to develop new political methods to defend themselves. Neoliberal policies so savaged the working class, as well as the urban marginalized and the hard-pressed peasantry, that they had no choice but to organize and fight back. To this end, they created new organizations and, in some cases, used them to seize power. By pressing the neoliberal agenda, the Latin American élites appeared to have overplayed their hand, and they paid for it by losing control of governments that they had controlled for many years, in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and beyond. A 2009 Latinobarómetro Survey found that support for democracy (as preferable to all other forms of government) was the strongest in countries that flatly rejected neoliberalism. Of the top five nations in popular support of democracy, four were governed by progressive leaders: Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay, and El Salvador. 35 Hope for the Future? Supporters of the free market approach have continued to counsel patience. They argue that stronger economic growth will eventually come, and that all will benefit in the long run. While neoliberal reforms might cause some short-term belt tightening, defenders explain that such adjustments, though sometimes painful, are necessary for the greatest good. We should not give in to “reform fatigue,” but should stay the course. 36 But neoliberal policies have been in place for over 30 years now. How long is the long run? How long must we wait? As John Maynard Keynes famously observed, “In the long run we are all dead.” In 1937 U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt observed, “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals. We know now that it is bad economics.” 37 The age of cneoliberalism is ending. It is time for some good economics.
Easing trade restrictions on Cuba would open the floodgates of US consumerism and business interests
Patrick Ryan, The Hill, April 30, 2013, “Former U.S. diplomat Patrick Ryan: Time to drop Cuba from terror list,” http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/guest-commentary/296867-former-us-diplomat-patrick-ryan- (Ryan is a 12-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service who previously worked on Capitol Hill. Recently having returned after 14 years away, he has a degree in International Studies from Johns Hopkins and is currently consulting in D.C. on issues that have nothing to do with Cuba, the embargo, or potential business interests there)

Ironically, these members of Congress support Cubans’ ability freedom to travel to the United States but not Americans’ freedom to travel to Cuba, and use the terrorist justification for this. If we truly want to undermine the Castro regime, the best way would be to end the listing, including the embargo and travel ban, and flood Cuba with American visitors, as well as our products and democratic ideas. Ending the restrictions would also demonstrably help the Cuban people — a stated aim of these same politicians. In comparison, most Vietnamese-Americans — who also lost a civil war to communists, 16 years after the Cubans — long ago accepted reality and supported the 1994 normalization of relations with Vietnam. The U.S. buried the hatchet and engaged a country whose human rights record, like Cuba’s — and China’s — has been disappointing, and with whom we were actually involved in a war that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans. So why not Cuba? The fact that members of the Basque separatist group ETA have retired to the island with the blessing of the Spanish government, that FARC members are residing in Cuba during peace talks hosted by Havana and supported by the Colombian government and that various fugitives from American justice — none of whom have been accused of terrorism, by the way — have lived in exile there since the 1970s, are simply not credible arguments for maintaining the designation. Frankly, it’s well past time that U.S. policymakers had the courage to tell the most vocal Miami exiles to acknowledge reality and move on, as many of them already have. Fortunately, the younger generation of Cubans in Miami isn’t as obsessed with the island as their forebears — and Cubans are no longer a majority of the Latin American population in South Florida. President Obama won Florida twice, and is in a unique position to remove Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism and push Congress to end the embargo in his second term. As Cuba continues its sporadic offshore oil exploration with foreign partners, including U.S. allies, it would seem advantageous for it to be a part of the process, in order to help ensure there will not be another disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, not to mention the economic benefits it would receive from increased exports to the island. The only way to do so is to take Cuba off the terrorism list.

Cap results in massive structural violence-that outweighs everything
Abu-Jamal 98-Mumia, award winning Pennsylvania journalist, quotes James Gilligan, Professor at Harvard/NYU, “A quiet and deadly violence”, http://www.flashpoints.net/mQuietDeadlyViolence.html
The deadliest form of violence is poverty.  --Ghandi    It has often been observed that America is a truly violent nation, as shown by the thousands of cases of social and communal violence that occurs daily in the nation.    Every year, some 20,000 people are killed by others, and additional 20,000 folks kill themselves. Add to this the nonlethal violence that Americans daily inflict on each other, and we begin to see the tracings of a nation immersed in a fever of violence.    But, as remarkable, and harrowing as this level and degree of violence is, it is, by far, not the most violent features of living in the midst of the American empire.    We live, equally immersed, and to a deeper degree, in a nation that condones and ignores wide-ranging "structural' violence, of a kind that destroys human life with a breathtaking ruthlessness. Former Massachusetts prison official and writer, Dr. James Gilligan observes;    By "structural violence" I mean the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of the class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society's collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting "structural" with "behavioral violence" by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. --(Gilligan, J., MD, Violence: Reflections On a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage, 1996), 192.)    This form of violence, not covered by any of the majoritarian, corporate, ruling-class protected media, is invisible to us and because of its invisibility, all the more insidious. How dangerous is it--really? Gilligan notes:  Every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths; and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. Gilligan, p. 196    Worse still, in a thoroughly capitalist society, much of that violence became internalized, turned back on the Self, because, in a society based on the priority of wealth, those who own nothing are taught to loathe themselves, as if something is inherently wrong with themselves, instead of the social order that promotes this self-loathing. This intense self-hatred was often manifested in familial violence as when the husband beats the wife, the wife smacks the son, and the kids fight each other.    This vicious, circular, and invisible violence, unacknowledged by the corporate media, uncriticized in substandard educational systems, and un-understood by the very folks who suffer in its grips, feeds on the spectacular and more common forms of violence that the system makes damn sure -that we can recognize and must react to it.    This fatal and systematic violence may be called The War on the Poor.    It is found in every country, submerged beneath the sands of history, buried, yet ever present, as omnipotent as death. In the struggles over the commons in Europe, when the peasants struggled and lost their battles for their commonal lands (a precursor to similar struggles throughout Africa and the Americas), this violence was sanctified, by church and crown, as the 'Divine Right of Kings' to the spoils of class battle. Scholars Frances Fox-Piven and Richard A Cloward wrote, in The New Class War (Pantheon, 1982/1985):   They did not lose because landowners were immune to burning and preaching and rioting. They lost because the usurpations of owners were regularly defended by the legal authority and the armed force of the state. It was the state that imposed increased taxes or enforced the payment of increased rents, and evicted or jailed those who could not pay the resulting debts. It was the state that made lawful the appropriation by landowners of the forests, streams, and commons, and imposed terrifying penalties on those who persisted in claiming the old rights to these resources. It was the state that freed serfs or emancipated sharecroppers only to leave them landless. (52)    The "Law", then, was a tool of the powerful to protect their interests, then, as now. It was a weapon against the poor and impoverished, then, as now.    It punished retail violence, while turning a blind eye to the wholesale violence daily done by their class masters.    The law was, and is, a tool of state power, utilized to protect the status quo, no matter how oppressive that status was, or is.    Systems are essentially ways of doing things that have concretized into tradition, and custom, without regard to the rightness of those ways. No system that causes this kind of harm to people should be allowed to remain, based solely upon its time in existence. Systems must serve life, or be discarded as a threat and a danger to life. Such systems must pass away, so that their great and terrible violence passes away with them.
Capitalism causes extinction and destroys value to life
Simonovic 7 Ljubodrag, Ph.D. in Philosophy; M.A. in Law; author of seven books, 2007, A New World is Possible, “Basis of contemporary critical theory of capitalism.” Gender edited

The final stage of a mortal combat between humankind and capitalism is in progress. A specificity of capitalism is that, in contrast to "classical" barbarism (which is of destructive, murderous and plundering nature), it annihilates life by creating a "new world" – a "technical civilization" and an adequate, dehumanized and denaturalized man. Capitalism has eradicated man from his (natural) environment and has cut off the roots through which he had drawn life-creating force. Cities are "gardens" of capitalism where degenerated creatures "grow". Dog excrement, gasoline and sewerage stench, glaring advertisements and police car rotating lights that howl through the night - this is the environment of the "free world" man. By destroying the natural environment capitalism creates increasingly extreme climatic conditions in which man is people are struggling harder and harder to survive – and creates artificial living conditions accessible solely to the richest layer of population, which cause definitive degeneration of man people as a natural beings. "Humanization of life" is being limited to creation of micro-climatic conditions, of special capitalistic incubators - completely commercialized artificial living conditions to which degenerated people are appropriate. The most dramatic truth is: capitalism can survive the death of man as a human and biological being. For capitalism a "traditional man person" is merely a temporary means of its own reproduction. "Consumer-man person" represents a transitional phase in the capitalism-caused process of mutation of man towards the "highest" form of capitalistic man: a robot-man. "Terminators" and other robotized freaks which are products of the Hollywood entertainment industry which creates a "vision of the future" degenerated in a capitalist manner, incarnate creative powers, alienated from man, which become vehicles for destruction of man and life. A new "super race" of robotized humanoids is being created, which should clash with "traditional mankind", meaning with people capable of loving, thinking, daydreaming, fighting for freedom and survival - and impose their rule over the Earth. Instead of the new world, the "new man" is being created - who has been reduced to a level of humanity which cannot jeopardize the ruling order. Science and technique have become the basic lever of capital for the destruction of the world and the creation of "technical civilization". It is not only about destruction achieved by the use of technical means. It is about technicization of social institutions, of interpersonal relations, of the human body. Increasing transformation of nature into a surrogate of "nature", increasing dehumanization of the society and increasing denaturalization of man are direct consequences of capital's effort, within an increasingly merciless global economic war, to achieve complete commercialization of both natural and the social environment. The optimism of the Enlightenment could hardly be unreservedly supported nowadays, the notion of Marx that man imposes on himself only such tasks as he can solve, particularly the optimism based on the myth of the "omnipotence" of science and technique. The race for profits has already caused irreparable and still unpredictable damage to both man and his environment. By the creation of "consumer society", which means through the transition of capitalism into a phase of pure destruction, such a qualitative rise in destruction of nature and humankind has been performed that life on the planet is literally facing a "countdown". Instead of the "withering away" (Engels) of institutions of the capitalist society, the withering away of life is taking place. 

Our alternative is to vote negative to reject the affirmative as a refusal to participate in activities which support capitalism.  We must hollow out capitalist structures by refusing to invest our energy in reforms and rescue operations—avoids transition wars  
Herod 4-Social Activist since 1968, owns an awesome website, Attended Columbia University and spent a year abroad at the University of Beirut (Lebanon) James, Getting Free, 2004, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm

It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells.    This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want.    Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing everything we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence.    This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs.    But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly.    We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work.    It’s quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods.    Another clarification is needed. This strategy does not call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing capitalism, totally, with a new civilization. This is an important distinction, because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms, as a system. We can sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and win some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system.    Thus our strategy of gutting and eventually destroying capitalism requires at a minimum a totalizing image, an awareness that we are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with another, and not merely reforming one way of life into something else. Many people may not be accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is, or a way of life, and that is the way we should approach it.    The thing is this: in order for capitalism to be destroyed millions and millions of people must be dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is not useful to think of this as a new ideology. It is not merely a belief-system that is needed, like a religion, or like Marxism, or Anarchism. Rather it is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way, and not to live another way. If this pressing desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in democratically controlled communities, to participate in the self-regulating activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be destroyed. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction.  

3
We Begin with Our Alternative – Reject their Performance of Pre-Emption within the First Affirmative Constructive. 

Starting Communication with Pre-Emption Must Be Rejected – Attempts to Track and Predict Opponents Collapses Deliberation – It Produces a Situation Where ‘Coincidence’ Takes the Place of ‘Communication’
Crandall, 2k6. (Jordan Crandall, Media Artist, Theorist, Assistant Professor of Visual Arts @ the Univ of California. “Precision + Guided + Seeing” 1000 Days of Theory. Ctheory. Online @ http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=502#bio J.Miller AAAAA)
When, in a competitive consumer-security culture, machine-aided perception moves toward the strategic, the panoptic, and the pre-emptive, then we no longer see but track.  TRACKING ARISES as a dominant perceptual activity in a computerized culture where looking has come to mean calculating rather than visualizing in the traditional sense4 and where seeing is infused with the logics of tactics and maneuver -- whether in the mode of acquisition or defense. Such processes of calculation, and their necessary forms of information storage (memory), are distributed and shared in a larger field of human and technological agency. The object is dislodged from any inherently fixed position, and instead becomes a mobile actor in a shared field of competitive endeavor. In Virilio's terms, the object becomes a traject. What happens when we track? We aim for a real time perceptual agency, in a more direct and precise relation to the moving object at hand. We aim to detect, process, and strategically codify a moving phenomenon -- a stock price, a biological function, an enemy, a consumer good -- in order to gain advantage in a competitive theater, whether the battlefield, the social arena, or the marketplace. The power to more accurately "see" a moving object is the power to map its trajectory and extrapolate its subsequent position. In an accelerated culture of shrinking space and time intervals, tracking promises an increased capacity to see the future. Leapfrogging the expanding present, it offers up a predictive knowledge-power: a competitive edge. It promises to endow us with the ability to outmaneuver our adversaries, to intercept our objects of suspicion and desire. To track is to endeavor to account for a moving object -- which could be one's self, since we track our own activities and rhythms -- in evermore precise terms so as to control or manage it, lest it become unruly, wasteful, dangerous, or unattainable as property. It is to somehow access the moving object more fully and deeply. When the suspicious and acquisitive eye tracks its objects, it fixes its sights on them as targets to be managed, eliminated, or consumed. In so doing, it inscribes itself in the real, in a process that brings both object and embodied subject into being. Tracking necessarily strives to narrow its scope, to move more directly into the space of the body substrate, as if it could then fully and completely "own" its object of attention. Through this process, its subject comes to know itself and "readies" itself to act -- more quickly, efficiently, safely. It cuts through the clutter. So the drama goes.   +++ WHILE TRACKING is about the strategic detection and codification of movement, it is also about positioning. It studies how something moves in order to predict its exact location in time and space. It fastens its objects (and subjects) onto a classifying grid or database driven identity assessment, reaffirming precise categorical location within a landscape of mobility. Rather than being fully about mobility on the one hand, or locational specificity on the other, tracking is more accurately about the dynamic between. We might call this inclination-position. Based on my previous patterns of writing and the literary
CONTINUED?
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conventions that it follows, I am likely to write three more sentences in this paragraph. Based on previous patterns of keystrokes, I am likely to take a break at 3:10. Based on previous airport records, my flight is likely to depart in two hours and eighteen minutes. The tracked object may be THERE, but it is moving like THIS and will be in THIS future position at THIS future moment. This is a landscape in which signifiers have become statistics. It is how computers think, and how we begin to think with them.  TRACKING EMERGED out of the mid-century demands of war and production.5 It emerged through the development of computing, the wartime sciences of information theory and cybernetics, and the development of structuralism. It coalesced out of a fear of the enemy Other, and helped bring a modality of both friend and enemy into being.6 Rather than performing a historical analysis, let us set the stage for a performance. We begin at the historical tipping-point where tracking coalesced as a techno-discursive ensemble -- that is, as a cluster of tools, procedures, and metaphors, which function at the level of language, materiality, and belief.7 For as Guattari would point out, technologies do not merely convey representational contents, but contribute to the development of new assemblages of enunciation.8 These techno- discursive ensembles become stored in the operational strata of organization and practice.9 They are bundled into tracking. Character background. Back-story.
Continued… STRATEGY GAMES also play an important role in this historical drama. Especially during the Cold War, increasingly powerful modeling and prediction technologies were needed in order to reach into the future and anticipate events, since actual weapon technology could not be used. This fueled an orientation of pre-emptive seeing: a form of vision that was always slightly ahead of itself, which not only anticipated probable events but, in some corner of the imaginary, seemed to mold reality to fit the simulated outcome. Simulated worlds paralleled real worlds, and beliefs about each were reflected in both. To be prepared was to anticipate the worst, and the worst could only be modeled. Once modeled, it was introduced into reality. Assumptions, beliefs, and mind-sets arise out of the technicalsemiotic machinery of simulations as they are practiced, as such orientations in turn get embedded in its operational strata. A mechanism of training, or rehearsal, in new forms of movement, combat, and identification. From mid-twentieth century onward, the systematic, logical rules of computing helped produce the sense that everything -- ground realities, warfare, markets -- could be formalized, modeled, and managed. Reality was figured as mathematical and "capturable" through a formal programming logic. The world became predictable, pliable; the future controllable.12 Again, this is not something that military technology alone produces: it is bound up in a much larger historical enunciative field -- in this case, a field of structuralist orientation, where reality began to be seen as determined by linguistic codes, and attention turned to the codes and conventions that produce meaning. One could suggest three intersecting conditions, descending from this wartime technicaldiscursive ensemble, that are bundled into tracking from the start. First, the perpetuation of an idealist orientation where humans have no access to unmediated reality and the world is actively constructed in terms of relational information systems. Here the world is scripted as inherently controllable, filtered through a scrim of information that modifies both system and materiality. Second, following from the first, is an emphasis on data patterns over essence: an ever-greater abstraction of persons, bodies, and things, and an emphasis on statistical patterns of behavior, where the populace is pictured as a calculus of probability distributions and manageable functions. Third, a fundamentally agonistic orientation, deriving from a world built on confrontation and oppositional tactics, of tactical moves and countermoves. These conditions form part of the operational strata of all contemporary media. Particularly with television and Internet, the media viewer is infused with an artificial sense of control over the machine and an exterior world represented on the screen. Reality is subsumed within the dictates of the interface. An unruly or unproductive situation is dominated, over and through the technology, and a de facto power relation is established between observer and observed. The stage is set. Moving through a world of information and communications technology, information is increasingly seen as more essential than that which it represents. Pattern is privileged over presence.   
Continued…  IF TRACKING moves toward an instantaneity of action -- eliminating time and space intervals and connecting multiple actors, human or not, as if they were one -- then in the extreme case, as Virilio would have it, this real time arena is one in which "coincidence" takes the place of communication 26, and the emphasis shifts from the "standardization of public opinion" to the "synchronization of public emotion."27 In a real time world where there is less and less time to act, or where action plays out in barely-measurable fractions of seconds, interpretive attention must turn away from exterior movements and instead toward "interior" states: dispositions to act that accumulate just at the horizon of the visible.  
4
The United States federal government should lift all sanctions against Cuba, excluding food
5
Free trade causes monoculture
David Frawley, Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, No Date, “Western Monoculture and Indic Pluralism,” http://www.hssworld.org/homepage/html/boudhik/articles/vamadev1.html
Monoculture does quite well with free trade and the spread of global consumerism, which is monoculture economics. Other economic systems are not allowed and are systematically undermined. The economic might of the monoculture levels any economic diversity, moving towards a single financial standard or currency worldwide. A uniform world economy destroys local economies and their rich diversity of expression and interactions based on an organic dependency. The rule of multinational businesses takes the place of local economies. Global corporate solutions are applied to local management issues, often with disastrous results. Corporate agriculture, the new agricultural monoculture, for example, is advertising its ability to feed the world and end world hunger, portraying itself in the benefic aspect of the church or a socialist government selflessly aiding the poor. What it is really doing is undermining the most basic of human rights, the right to feed oneself and to control one’s food sources. What the global agribusiness envisions is control of the world food market, so that it can force entire countries to bow down before it, who cannot even eat without its favor. Among its tools are genetically engineered crops, including terminator seeds that destroy local plant varieties, fertilizers that weaken the soils and breed dependency, and patents on plants that afford corporate ownership to nature’s bounty. Meanwhile, those who oppose the global food business are deemed backwards, causing hunger and starvation in the world, as if apart from the agribusiness no one could feed themselves! 

Extinction results without sustained genetic diversity
Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney, Rural Advancement Fund International, Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, 1990, p. ix
While many may ponder the consequences of global warming, perhaps the biggest single environmental catastrophe in human history is unfolding in the garden. While all are rightly concerned about the possibility of nuclear war, an equally devastating time bomb is ticking away in the fields of farmers all over the world. Loss of genetic diversity in agriculture—silent, rapid, inexorable—is leading us to a rendezvous with extinction—to the doorstep of hunger on a scale we refuse to imagine. To simplify the environment as we have done with agriculture is to destroy the complex interrelationships that hold the natural world together. Reducing the diversity of life, we narrow our options for the future and render our own survival more precarious. It is life at the end of the limb. That is the subject of this book. Agronomists in the Philippines warned of what became known as southern corn leaf blight in 1061.' The disease was reported in Mexico not long after. In the summer of 1968, the first faint hint that the blight was in the United States came from seed growers in the Midwest. The danger was ignored. By the spring of 1970 the disease had taken hold in the Florida corn crop. But it was not until corn prices leapt thirty cents a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade that the world took notice; by then it was August—and too late. By the close of the year, Americans had lost fifteen percent of their most important crop—more than a billion bushels. Some southern states lost half their harvest and many of their farmers. While consumers suffered in the grocery stores, producers were out a billion dollars in lost yield. And the disaster was not solely domestic. U.S. seed exports may have spread the blight to Africa, Latin America and Asia.
6
Ending the trade embargo undermines Cuba’s worm tech exports.  Their expertise exist because of financial constraints – not choice
Ewing 08 Ed Ewing, “Cuba's organic revolution,” guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 April 2008 20.02 EDT, pg. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/04/organics.food

But when the USSR collapsed in 1990/91, Cuba's ability to feed itself collapsed with it. "Within a year the country had lost 80 of its trade," explains the Cuba Organic Support Group (COSG). Over 1.3m tonnes of chemical fertilisers a year were lost. Fuel for transporting produce from the fields to the towns dried up. People started to go hungry. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (UNFAO) estimated that calorie intake plunged from 2,600 a head in the late 1980s to between 1,000 and 1,500 by 1993. ¶ Radical action was needed, and quickly. "Cuba had to produce twice as much food, with less than half the chemical inputs," according to the COSG. Land was switched from export crops to food production, and tractors were switched for oxen. People were encouraged to move from the city to the land and organic farming methods were introduced. ¶ "Integrated pest management, crop rotation, composting and soil conservation were implemented," says the COSG. The country had to become expert in techniques like worm composting and biopesticides. "Worms and worm farm technology is now a Cuban export," says Dr Stephen Wilkinson, assistant director of the International Institute for the Study of Cuba.¶ Thus, the unique system of organoponicos, or urban organic farming, was started. "Organoponicos are really gardens," explains Wilkinson, "they use organic methods and meet local needs." "Almost overnight," says the COSG, the ministry of agriculture established an urban gardening culture. By 1995 Havana had 25,000 huertos – allotments, farmed by families or small groups – and dozens of larger-scale organoponicos, or market gardens. The immediate crisis of hunger was over. Now, gardens for food take up 3.4 of urban land countrywide, and 8 of land in Havana. Cuba produced 3.2m tonnes of organic food in urban farms in 2002 and, UNFAO says, food intake is back at 2,600 calories a day.¶ Organoponico plaza¶ A visit to Havana's largest organoponico, the three-hectare Organoponico Plaza, which lies a stone's throw from the city's Plaza de la Revolución and the desk of Raul Castro, confirms that the scheme is doing well. Rows of strikingly neat irrigated raised beds are home to seasonal crops of lettuces, spring onions, chives, garlic and parsley. ¶ Guava and noni fruit trees provide shade around the perimeter, while on the far side compost piles sit next to plastic tunnels used to raise seedlings. Outside in the shop, signs extol the virtues of eating your greens. ¶ The shop is open only on Mondays. Produce is sold by the people who work the garden (they keep 50 of sales, so are motivated to produce a lot) to the people who live nearby. In this case, the organoponico serves an estate that wouldn't look out of place in Tower Hamlets or Easterhouse. Yet inside, butterflies flit and the head gardener, Toni, turns sod like he is digging at Prince Charles's Highgrove estate.¶ A success then? "In terms of improving the diet of the population it has had a beneficial effect," says Wilkinson.¶ "And it has been a success in terms of meeting some of the food security needs," he says, "but it has not resolved the problem since the island still imports a great deal of food."¶ And change is on the horizon, which might be good for living standards, but not be so good for Cuba's commitment to pesticide-free food. The US trade embargo is losing its "symbolic meaning", says Julie M Bunck, assistant professor of political science at the University of Louisville and author of Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba, and as that happens, "Cuba will evolve, embrace the market in some way, begin to produce and buy and sell normally." General farming will "most likely" move away from organic methods says Wilkinson. Farming on a large scale after all, he says, has seen a reduction in pesticide and fertiliser use mainly due to "financial constraints, not choice".
Worms are key to our planetary survival.  Vermicomposting expertise is limited   
Blakemore 10 - Studied ‘VermEcology’ for 30 years and holds qualifications in ecology, computing and permaculture. Dr. Rob Blakemore, “Wonder Worm to the rescue,” Our World 2.0, July 2, 2010, pg. http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/wonder-worm-to-the-rescue/

Can worms help save the planet? I think so and, before arguing my case, please let me state my position from the start: I am an ecologist. Not just the type of trendy person who faithfully recycles — although I am fashionably green and a semi-vegetarian who tries to recycle as many beer bottles as possible. No, I am also the other, scientific kind. ¶ The science of ecology is generally defined as a study of organisms and their environment, i.e., everything! However, I would be somewhat more categorical and say that it is “The study of organisms, their products whether alive or dead, and their environment” — i.e., even more of everything, including fossil fuels and human endeavour!¶ An ecologist then, is someone who considers holistic workings of a natural ecosystem in all its complexity and diversity throughout its time-cycle while breaking it down into its component parts and honing in on its few key, controlling entities. Simultaneously practicing as a generalist and as a multi-faceted specialist. Deeds of the dirt¶ The experience of growing up in rural England alongside my grandfather, the village farrier who was also a bee keeper and gardener, as well as my weekend work with farmers and gamekeepers, immersed me in general natural history. This education was formalized by academic degrees in terrestrial and aquatic biology and, for me the key to life, soil ecology. The main movers and shakers in the soil are the living organisms, paramount amongst which is the humble, hidden earthworm.¶ Here I must air my strong objections to marine biologists such as Sylvia Earle who pointed out after winning the TED 2009 Prize that the oceans make up 70 of the surface of the Earth and the rest is just “dirt”.¶ Approximately 99.4 of our food and fibre is produced on land and only 0.6 comes from oceans and other aquatic ecosystems combined, according to FAO. The calorific value obtained from ocean catches, freshwater fishing and aquaculture adds up to just about 10-16 of the current human total. (These figures are slightly skewed for maritime countries like Japan and Iceland but still, more than 80 of our nutrition is terrestrial in origin).¶ Furthermore, I am sure Dr. Earle accepts that the oceanic ecosystem is wholly dependent upon dissolved nutrients washed down or blown from the soil and is similarly affected by pollution mainly from activity on the land. Her survival depends as much as anyone’s on the “just dirt” part.¶ Thus it is abysmal that scientific knowledge of the oceans is infinitely deeper than for terrestrial ecosystems. Moreover, Leonardo da Vinci’s observed 500 years ago that “We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot” and this still rings true today. The journal Science, realizing that our knowledge is so scant, produced a special 2004 issue entitled Soils — The Final Frontier.¶ Why waste precious funds and brain resources on the vain discovery of useless planets overhead or new deep-sea species that will still be there tomorrow, while vital unrecognized organisms literally beneath our feet disappear at an increasingly alarming rate and to our peril?¶ Why are we not concentrating our efforts and valuable resources on protecting and preserving the tangible deeds of our earthly home patch for current and future generations of Earthlings? Where on earth is our Soil Ecology Institute?¶ Global worming ¶ We talk of greenhouse gasses and global warming yet it is the lithosphere, not the oceans nor trees, that acts as the major global carbon sink. This is especially so following the discovery just over a decade ago of glomalin, a tightly bound organic molecule accounting for an extra 30 of stored soil carbon. (The energy crisis too can be cured by simply tapping freely into subterranean geothermal energy, as recounted in an Our World 2.0 article on this ‘ red hot power’.)¶ Proper management of our arable, pastoral and forest soils is the most practically feasible mechanism to sequester atmospheric carbon without any adverse effects. Atmospheric carbon is entirely recycled via the soil from plants in around 12-20 years — all of this being processed through the intestines of worms.¶ Vermicomposting of organics and encouraging soil biodiversity by rebuilding humus provides a natural closed-system remedy with neither waste nor loss of productivity.¶ Down-to-Earth soil species ¶ All manner of dirt and disease always ends up in the sod and consequentially its ecology is naturally robust. Yet, the soil suffers the most profound and significant effects from over-exploitation and faces the greatest threat from erosion, destruction and pollution with artificial chemicals and/or transgenes.¶ Despite its importance, soil biodiversity is so poorly known that even obvious organisms like the relatively large worms are mostly unclassified. On each field trip I find new species and, of the 10,000 that have been given scientific names thus far (perhaps less than a third of the total), we know something of the ecology about a dozen species.¶ But what we do know doesn’t look good. Unprecedented loss of species abundance and diversity combined with high extinction rates are bringing Earth into new and uncharted territory. We urgently need triage.¶ Laboratories crammed with scores of ecologists could study just worms for their whole careers and still we would only progress slightly from our current poor state of knowledge, but our gain would be justifiable and have tangible effects on resolving pressing environmental issues. But this is not the current situation.¶ Fundamentally we can justify study of soil ecology because it affects all our lives and is a crucially important issue for immediate survival of humans and all other terrestrial organisms. Whereas earthworm specialists are an endangered and rapidly declining breed, some scientists attempt to defend their studies that look at a single crop or pest. In contrast, I would argue that without earthworms there would be no healthy soil in which any healthy crop could develop in the first place.¶ If we ask “Which group of organisms would cause the most disruption to life support systems on the Earth if lost?” My answer would be that — rather than fish, birds and bees, or humans — it is the earthworms. They are key links in food chains (not just for fish and fowl), they act as hosts and vectors for diverse symbionts and parasites, and they are the major detritus feeders responsible for soil mineralization and recycling of organic matter. Can other scientists, outside of medicine, claim such importance for their study subject? Looking forward to the past¶ One of the main predictions, highly optimistic, in the revolutionary move into our post-industrial era (see Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave for details) was that genetic engineering would provide new production methods and have profound effects on future development. In many ways this has been borne out in medical use and microbial ‘manufacture’ with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that provide some potential benefit and serve some purpose, albeit at huge cost.¶ But there are equally large risks. Rather obviously, the main characteristic of life is to reproduce and disperse. The architects of the modified corn, cotton, soy, wheat, rice and spuds are often of exactly the same companies (or at least profit-driven mind-sets) that produced the toxic chemicals that they are now telling us their new GMO technology will replace — just as chemical engineers promised solutions to all our problems previously.¶ In 1962 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring first alerted us to risks of agricultural chemical pollution, exacerbated by bioaccumulation in body tissue (especially of invertebrates such as earthworms) and bioconcentration further up the food-chain. But whatever the problem, these chemicals will eventually disperse and decline once production halts.¶ With biology the reverse is true. Design a plant to be herbicide or insect resistant and it will increase and spread by its own means, by cross-pollination or genetic drift. Case in point is the illegitimate escape in Japan of feral oilseed rape ( Brassica napus) genetically modified to resist herbicide that, as with any similar calamity, will continue in an uncontrollable fashion.¶ Rather than addressing immediate environmental issues per se, much of scientific resources are diverted into molecular studies, mostly for industrial agricultural production, that are inordinately expensive, or into agronomic trials of effective toxic biocide applications. Mostly this is not requested by informed consumers nor by farmers who must rely on the advice of often industry-funded ‘experts’ and extension officers (hopefully not advertisers).¶ Surprisingly and shamefully, almost zero funding is available for research on organic production ‘alternatives’ that are dismissed as impractical fads. Yet it is their implementation, since the start of the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, that has brought us this far.¶ Let’s not let topsoil slip through our fingers ¶ Topsoil is the most valuable resource upon which civilizations depend. Its rapid loss combined with soil fertility and soil health decline are of greatest immediate concern.¶ How important is loss of topsoil? Basically without fertile topsoil there is no plant growth and no life on land. How big an issue is loss of topsoil? The 1991 UN funded Global Survey of Human-Induced Soil Degradation Report showed significant problems in virtually all parts of the world. Just 11 of the Earth’s terrestrial surface is cultivated and of the total available, approximately 40 of agricultural land is seriously degraded, according to the UN’S 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA).¶ Loss of topsoil has been due to the combined effects of desertification, salinization, erosion, pollution and urban/road or other development activities. In the United States alone it is estimated to cost about $125 billion per year. The MEA, which despite its scope did not consider ‘Soil Systems’ separately, nevertheless ranked land degradation among the world’s greatest environmental challenges, claiming it risked destabilizing societies, endangering food security and increasing poverty. Among the worst affected regions are Central America, where 75 of land is infertile, Africa, where a fifth of soil is degraded, and Asia, where 11 is now unsuitable for farming.¶ In addition to those pollutants commonly recognized as originating from biocides and fertilizers, there are many other sources — such as antibiotics associated with intensive animal production, plus a ‘cocktail’ of human-processed pollutants like drugs, solvents and synthetic hormones from birth control pills — that all make their way into the environment in an infinite variety of unforeseeable combinations.¶ Suggested remediation to soil decline and agricultural production are to use GMO crops and other high-tech applications, because there is an assumption that topsoil formation is a centuries-old process that is essentially non-renewable and thus is gone forever. This view is false and there are several examples of methods that can be applied to restore fertile topsoils to farms, and in a time frame as short as a matter of a few years.¶ Feed the worm ¶ “When the question is asked, ‘Can I build top-soil?’ the answer is ‘Yes’, and when the first question is followed by a second question, ‘How?’ the answer is ‘Feed earthworms’,” so wrote Eve Balfour in the introduction to Thomas J. Barrett’s book, Harnessing the Earthworm.¶ Indeed there are many instances of organic farms around the world preserving or restoring healthy soils. Organic farming has many approaches, with Rudolph Steiner’s biodynamics being one manifestation. All these solutions comfortably find a home under the wide umbrella of permaculture, as defined by Bill Mollison. This philosophy and approach to designing our natural environment for efficient and effective production and for comfortable living under prevailing conditions is well known and widely adopted by national and local communities and individuals worldwide.¶ William Blake urged us “to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower”. Soil survey of the abundance and diversity of earthworms in a soil will provide a good measure of natural fertility, as these are the monitors and mediators of soil health. That some of our honourable predecessors appreciated the worm’s role is manifest by one translation of the Chinese characters for ‘earthworms’ being ‘angels of the earth’.¶ Seeing a worm turned up by the plough and eaten by a bird started Prince Siddhartha (Gautama Buddah) on his contemplative path to understanding the Cycle-of-Life. In the Classical world, the ‘father of biology’, Aristotle, called earthworms the “soil’s entrails” and it is reported that Cleopatra decreed them sacred.¶ Charles Darwin, British naturalist and father of evolution, also had an interest in earthworms. In 1881, the year before he died, his 40 year study culminated in publication The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. As a founder of soil ecology, he was one of the first scientists to give credence to conventional wisdom from earlier civilizations about the beneficial effects of earthworms on soils and plant growth, and thus on human survival.¶ Believing his worm work one of his most crucial contributions, Darwin stated:¶ “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures…¶ “The vegetable mould humus which covers, as with a mantle, the surface of the land, has all passed many times through their bodies.”¶ Hopefully it will continue thus.¶ In 1981, as a centennial tribute to Darwin’s seminal work, I completed a survey on Lady Eve Balfour’s Haughley experimental farm that showed organic methods encourage healthy soil and an earthworm abundance. Significantly higher maintenance of temperature, moisture and organic matter in the soil equated with double the carbon content. In this way we could readily fix runaway CO2 in the atmosphere. Moreover, crop production was equable between organic and non-organic management regimes, even without factoring in the cost savings in chemicals and environmental degradation. (Details are presented here.)¶ Look up to the worm ¶ My thesis is that each of the three major interlinked influences on our world – mass extinction of species due mainly to human activity, global warming from excessive anthropogenic generated carbon, and risk of social and political dysfunction from impending resource and food shortages caused by population pressure — can all be redressed by educating people (and politicians!) about restoring soil health and fertility. One way to start is to re-process organic ‘wastes’ via worms, for a natural compost fertilizer.
7
Trade liberalization causes cycles of food shortages
Seedling, October 1996, http://www.grain.org/publications/oct961-en.cfm
In the South, the different elements of trade liberalisation often translate directly into food insecurity. Among these elements the following have the most severe impacts on peoples livelihood. In addition they easily result in internal migration, urban growth and environmental destruction: * undoing land reform and allowing concentration of land ownership * privatising water * introducing monopoly control on seeds through IPRs * diverting land from food to cash crops for exports * diverting food from local to global markets Volatile prices and globalisation are creating an unstable, insecure and costly food system and undermine the ecological security of agriculture, the livelihood security of farmers and the food security of both poor and affluent consumers. "We in the South Asian subcontinent have more than the World Bank indices as our guide. We have our history", says Vandana Shiva. "India's worst famines took place when India's economy was most integrated though the globalisation of the colonial period." 

Blips in food prices kill billions
Tampa Tribune, 1-20-96 p. 46
On a global scale, food supplies - measured by stockpiles of grain - are not abundant. In 1995, world production failed to meet demand for the third consecutive year, said Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C. As a result, grain stockpiles fell from an average of 17 percent of annual consumption in 1994-1995 to 13 percent at the end of the 1995-1996 season, he said. That's troubling, Pinstrup-Andersen noted, since 13 percent is well below the 17 percent the United Nations considers essential to provide a margin of safety in world food security. During the food crisis of the early 1970s, world grain stocks were at 15 percent. "Even if they are merely blips, higher international prices can hurt poor countries that import a significant portion of their food," he said. "Rising prices can also quickly put food out of reach of the 1.1 billion people in the developing world who live on a dollar a day or less." He also said many people in low-income countries already spend more than half of their income on food.

Food shortages lead to World War III
William Calvin, theoretical neurophysiologist at the University of Washington, Atlantic Monthly, January, The Great Climate Flip-Flop, Vol 281, No. 1, 1998, p. 47-64
The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling. Plummeting crop yields would cause some powerful countries to try to take over their neighbors or distant lands -- if only because their armies, unpaid and lacking food, would go marauding, both at home and across the borders. The better-organized countries would attempt to use their armies, before they fell apart entirely, to take over countries with significant remaining resources, driving out or starving their inhabitants if not using modern weapons to accomplish the same end: eliminating competitors for the remaining food. This would be a worldwide problem -- and could lead to a Third World War -- but Europe's vulnerability is particularly easy to analyze. The last abrupt cooling, the Younger Dryas, drastically altered Europe's climate as far east as Ukraine. Present-day Europe has more than 650 million people. It has excellent soils, and largely grows its own food. It could no longer do so if it lost the extra warming from the North Atlantic.
Case
Health
The Cuban health care isn’t damaged by the embargo
Garrett, July 2010Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, 2010
(Laurie, “Castrocare in Crisis,” Foreign Affairs, 89:4, July/August, EBSCOhost)
The two keys to Cuba's medical and public health achievements are training provided by the state and a community-based approach that requires physicians to live in the neighborhoods they serve and be on call 24 hours a day. In the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, more than one-third of Cuba's doctors fled, mostly to the United States, leaving the country with just 6,300 physicians and a doctor-patient ratio of 9.2 per 10,000, according to the Cuban Ministry of Public Health. In response, Fidel Castro declared public health and doctor training to be paramount tasks for the new socialist state.¶ By the early 1980s, Cuba led the socialist world -- including its patron, the Soviet Union -- in all health indicators. Between 1959 and 1989, Cuba's doctor-patient ratio more than tripled, soaring to 33 per 10,000, and health-care expenditures rose by 162 percent. Cuba today has the highest doctor-patient ratio in the entire world, with 59 physicians per 10,000 people -- more than twice the ratio of the United States. Cuba is the world's only poor country that can rightly say that basic health is no longer an existential problem for its people. Its achievement in this respect is unparalleled.¶ Cuba now boasts more than 73,000 practicing doctors (half of whom work in primary care), 107,761 nurses, and a total health-care work force of 566,365, according to government figures. About 12 percent of Cuba's adult population is employed by the state in the health-care sector. Because of economic exigencies that have limited Cuba's access to advanced technology for diagnosing and curing ailments, the Cuban health system has focused -- successfully -- on prevention. Between 1959 and 2000, Cuba reduced its infant mortality by 90 percent, and the number of mothers who died from pregnancy-related complications dropped from 125 per 100,000 live births to 55 per 100,000.
No risk of the impact – Cuba has substantial trade with the EU
Vassiliki Tzivelis  , student at the College of Europe, Brussels campus. He is working toward a Masters. Degree in European Studies, March 2006, EU Commission, “The European Union’s Foreign Policy towards Cuba: It Is Time to Tie the Knot “, http://www6.miami.edu/eucenter/Tzivelisfinal.pdf MN
First of all, this was a time of very positive bilateral relations between certain Member States and Cuba, thanks to activities that varied from trade to tourism, to humanitarian aid. As one EU official said, “if a country is good enough to visit, trade with, have cultural exchanges with and provide aid to, then why is it not good enough to have political relations with?”78 Secondly, the Cuban government had implemented reforms to facilitate foreign investment and economic exchange with Cuba.79 Thirdly, supporters of Cuba’s membership to Cotonou emphasized the Island’s “achievements in the sectors of social affairs, education and health” and the fact that Cuba was placed 56th in the UNDP human-development index of 2000.80 Finally, the adhesion of Cuba to this Convention would have greatly diminished the risks of encountering US opposition the way that a bilateral agreement would.81

Tournament: bronx round robin | Round: 3 | Opponent: centennial KK | Judge: idk
in open source

Tournament: TOC | Round: 4 | Opponent: XXX | Judge: XXX
Off
The struggle over the question of who counts as human is THE question of the debate—the system of colonialism instituted by European powers in the 15th and 16th centuries haunts the present in the form of coloniality—an epistemological structure that privileges the Western subject as the only legitimate expression of human knowledge.  The question of Latin American engagement can only be answered when we first unsettle the coloniality of knowledge and being that has demarcated the majority of the world as subhuman populations given over to death.
Wynter 2003 (Sylvia, Professor of Romance Languages at Stanford University, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom
Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3.3 (2003) 257-337, MUSE)
THE ARGUMENT PROPOSES THAT THE STRUGGLE OF OUR NEW MILLENNIUM WILL be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. Because of this overrepresentation, which is defined in the first part of the title as the Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom, any attempt to unsettle the coloniality of power will call for the unsettling of this overrepresentation as the second and now purely secular form of what Aníbal Quijano identifies as the "Racism/ Ethnicism complex," on whose basis the world of modernity was brought into existence from the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries onwards (Quijano 1999, 2000), 2 and of what Walter Mignolo identifies as the foundational "colonial difference" on which the world of modernity was to institute itself (Mignolo 1999, 2000). 3 The correlated hypothesis here is that all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources (20 percent of the world's peoples own 80 percent of its resources, consume two-thirds of its food, and are responsible for 75 percent of its ongoing pollution, with this leading to two billion of End Page 260 earth's peoples living relatively affluent lives while four billion still live on the edge of hunger and immiseration, to the dynamic of overconsumption on the part of the rich techno-industrial North paralleled by that of overpopulation on the part of the dispossessed poor, still partly agrarian worlds of the South 4 )—these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle. Central to this struggle also is the usually excluded and invisibilized situation of the category identified by Zygmunt Bauman as the "New Poor" (Bauman 1987). That is, as a category defined at the global level by refugee/economic migrants stranded outside the gates of the rich countries, as the postcolonial variant of Fanon's category of les damnés (Fanon 1963)—with this category in the United States coming to comprise the criminalized majority Black and dark-skinned Latino inner-city males now made to man the rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex, together with their female peers—the kicked-about Welfare Moms—with both being part of the ever-expanding global, transracial category of the homeless/the jobless, the semi-jobless, the criminalized drug-offending prison population. So that if we see this category of the damnés that is internal to (and interned within) the prison system of the United States as the analog form of a global archipelago, constituted by the Third- and Fourth-World peoples of the so-called "underdeveloped" areas of the world—most totally of all by the peoples of the continent of Africa (now stricken with AIDS, drought, and ongoing civil wars, and whose bottommost place as the most impoverished of all the earth's continents is directly paralleled by the situation of its Black Diaspora peoples, with Haiti being produced and reproduced as the most impoverished nation of the Americas)—a systemic pattern emerges. This pattern is linked to the fact that while in the post-sixties United States, as Herbert Gans noted recently, the Black population group, of all the multiple groups comprising the post-sixties social hierarchy, has once again come to be placed at the bottommost place of that hierarchy (Gans, 1999), with all incoming new nonwhite/non-Black groups, as Gans's fellow sociologist Andrew Hacker (1992) earlier pointed out, coming to claim "normal" North American identity by the putting of visible distance between themselves and the Black population group (in effect, claiming "normal" human status by distancing themselves from the group that is still made to occupy the nadir, End Page 261 "nigger" rung of being human within the terms of our present ethnoclass Man's overrepresentation of its "descriptive statement" Bateson 1969 as if it were that of the human itself), then the struggle of our times, one that has hitherto had no name, is the struggle against this overrepresentation. As a struggle whose first phase, the Argument proposes, was first put in place (if only for a brief hiatus before being coopted, reterritorialized Godzich 1986) by the multiple anticolonial social-protest movements and intellectual challenges of the period to which we give the name, "The Sixties." The further proposal here is that, although the brief hiatus during which the sixties' large-scale challenge based on multiple issues, multiple local terrains of struggles (local struggles against, to use Mignolo's felicitous phrase, a "global design" Mignolo 2000) erupted was soon to be erased, several of the issues raised then would continue to be articulated, some in sanitized forms (those pertaining to the category defined by Bauman as "the seduced"), others in more harshly intensified forms (those pertaining to Bauman's category of the "repressed" Bauman 1987). Both forms of "sanitization" would, however, function in the same manner as the lawlike effects of the post-sixties' vigorous discursive and institutional re-elaboration of the central overrepresentation, which enables the interests, reality, and well-being of the empirical human world to continue to be imperatively subordinated to those of the now globally hegemonic ethnoclass world of "Man." This, in the same way as in an earlier epoch and before what Howard Winant identifies as the "immense historical rupture" of the "Big Bang" processes that were to lead to a contemporary modernity defined by the "rise of the West" and the "subjugation of the rest of us" (Winant 1994)—before, therefore, the secularizing intellectual revolution of Renaissance humanism, followed by the decentralizing religious heresy of the Protestant Reformation and the rise of the modern state—the then world of laymen and laywomen, including the institution of the political state, as well as those of commerce and of economic production, had remained subordinated to that of the post-Gregorian Reform Church of Latin-Christian Europe (Le Goff 1983), and therefore to the "rules of the social order" and the theories "which gave them sanction" (See Konrad and Szelenyi guide-quote), as these rules were articulated by its theologians and implemented by its celibate clergy (See Le Goff guide-quote). End Page 262 The Janus face of the emergence of Mignolo's proposed "modernity/coloniality" complementarity is sited here. As also is the answer to the why of the fact that, as Aníbal Quijano insists in his Qué tal Raza! (2000), the "idea of race" would come to be "the most efficient instrument of social domination invented in the last 500 years." In order for the world of the laity, including that of the then ascendant modern European state, to escape their subordination to the world of the Church, it had been enabled to do so only on the basis of what Michel Foucault identifies as the "invention of Man": that is, by the Renaissance humanists' epochal redescription of the human outside the terms of the then theocentric, "sinful by nature" conception/ "descriptive statement" of the human, on whose basis the hegemony of the Church/clergy over the lay world of Latin-Christian Europe had been supernaturally legitimated (Chorover 1979). While, if this redescription was effected by the lay world's invention of Man as the political subject of the state, in the transumed and reoccupied place of its earlier matrix identity Christian, the performative enactment of this new "descriptive statement" and its master code of symbolic life and death, as the first secular or "degodded" (if, at the time, still only partly so) mode of being human in the history of the species, was to be effected only on the basis of what Quijano identifies as the "coloniality of power," Mignolo as the "colonial difference," and Winant as a huge project demarcating human differences thinkable as a "racial longue durée." One of the major empirical effects of which would be "the rise of Europe" and its construction of the "world civilization" on the one hand, and, on the other, African enslavement, Latin American conquest, and Asian subjugation.

White supremacy is a global system of oppression that normalizes genocidal modalities of violence and domination.
Rodriguez ‘07 Dylan, PhD in Ethnic Studies Program of the University of California Berkeley and Associate Proffessor of Ethnic Studies at University of California Riverside, “American Globality And the US Prison regime: State Violence And White Supremacy from Abu Ghraib to Stockton to bagong diwa”, Ateneo de Manila University, 2007, Kritika Kultura 9 (2007): 022-048

For the theoretical purposes of this essay, white supremacy may be understood as a logic of social organization that produces regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized “human” difference, enforced through coercions and violences that are structured by genocidal possibility (including physical extermination and curtailment of people’s collective capacities to socially, culturally, or biologically reproduce). As a historical vernacular and philosophical apparatus of domination, white supremacy is simultaneously premised on and consistently innovating universalized conceptions of the white (european and euroamerican) “human” vis-a?-vis the rigorous production, penal discipline, and frequent social, political, and biological neutralization or extermination of the (non-white) sub- or non-human. to consider white supremacy as essential to American social formation (rather than a freakish or extremist deviation from it) facilitates a discussion of the modalities through which this material logic of violence overdetermines the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that compose American globality and constitute the common sense that is organic to its ordering. While the US prison industrial complex constitutes a statecraft of perpetual domestic crisis that emerges from this social logic of white supremacy, the US prison regime is becoming profoundly undomesticated in a twofold sense: the technologies of carceral racial domination have distended into localities beyond the US proper (they are extra-domestic), while the focused and mundane (though no less severe) bodily violence of the prison’s operative functions have constituted a microwarfare apparatus, accessing and penetrating captive bodies with an unprecedented depth and complexity (the regime is in this sense defined by an unhinged, undomesticated violence). In this context, the (racial) formations of punishment and death inscribed on the various surfaces of the US prison regime—from the nearby to the far away—are in fact generally unremarkable. It cannot be overemphasized that this carceral formation produces a normal and trite violence, a naturalized facet of American social intercourse across scales and geographies, forming the underside of a civil society that is historically unimaginable outside its modalities of formal exclusion and civil/ social neutralization. Yet, it is precisely as this prison regime rearranges, remobilizes, and redeploys its normalized structure of white supremacist bodily violence into geographies beyond the American everyday that it momentarily surfaces as a spectacle of public consumption and even a critical public discourse, in such moments as the photographic revelation of the uS military’s torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. While the “national” scope of the US prison industrial complex constitutes a profound social and political crisis of epochal scale, it also composes an institutional symbiosis that has yielded an authentic conjunctural articulation of state violence that is both organic to the domestic US carceral and capable of rearticulation, appropriation, and mobilization across global geographies. Thus, to understand the prison as a regime is to focus conceptually, theoretically, and politically on the prison as a pliable module or mobilized vessel through which the state generates particular practices of legitimated violence and bodily immobilization. “Prison regime” is a conceptual and theoretical (not a discretely “institutional”) phrase that refers to a modality through which the state organizes, rationalizes, and deploys specific technologies of violence, domination, and subjection—technologies that are otherwise reserved for deployment in sites of declared war or martial law: in this usage, “prison regime” differentiates both the scale and object of analysis from the more typical macro- scale institutional categories of “the prison,” “the prison system,” and, for that matter, “the prison industrial complex.” the conceptual scope of this term similarly exceeds the analytical scope of prison management, prison policy, and “the prison (or prisoner’s) experience,” categories that most often take textual form through discrete case studies, institutional reform initiatives, prison ethnographies, and empirical criminological surveys. Rather, the notion of a prison regime invokes a “meso” (middle, or mediating) dimension of processes, structures, and vernaculars that compose the state’s modalities of self-articulation and self-conceptualization, institutional crafting, and “rule” across the macro and micro scales. It is within this meso range of fluctuating articulations of power that the prison is inscribed as both a localization and constitutive logic of the state’s production of juridical, spatial, and militarized dominion. A genealogy of the prison regime foregrounds the essential instability—the unnaturalness—of its object of discussion, suggesting a process of historical analysis and theorization that methodologically extends beyond 1.) the particular and mystified institutionality of the discrete and narrowly bounded entity we know as the Prison; and 2.) the juridical and institutional formalities of the state’s supposed “ownership” of and orderly proctorship over the Prison as it is conventionally conceived.

Scholarship decoupled from raced subject positions and an explicit analysis of actively produces a system where knowledge production acts to maintain colonial structures because neutrality is inherently white
Grosfoguel, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, ‘7 (Ramon, “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn” Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, TandF Online)
Epistemological Critique The first point to discuss is the contribution of racial/ethnic and feminist subaltern perspectives to epistemological questions. The hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciences in the ‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’ for the last 500 hundred years assume a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view. Chicana and black feminist scholars (Moraga and Anzaldua 1983, Collins 1990) as well as thirdworld scholars inside and outside the United States (Dussel 1977, Mignolo 2000) reminded us that we always speak from a particular location in the power structures. Nobody escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the ‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’. As feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988) states, our knowledges are always situated. Black feminist scholars called this perspective ‘afro-centric epistemology’ (Collins 1990) (which is not equivalent to the afrocentrist perspective) while Latin American Philosopher of Liberation Enrique Dussel called it ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ (Dussel 1977) and following Fanon (1967) and Anzaldúa (1987) I will use the term ‘body-politics of knowledge’. This is not only a question about social values in knowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. The main point here is the locus of enunciation, that is, the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks. In Western philosophy and sciences the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis. The ‘ego-politics of knowledge’ of Western philosophy has always privilege the myth of a non-situated ‘Ego’. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and the subject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledge that covers up, that is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and body-political epistemic location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks. It is important here to distinguish the ‘epistemic location’ from the ‘social location’. The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations, does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. Precisely, the success of the modern/colonial world-system consist in making subjects that are socially located in the oppressed side of the colonial difference, to think epistemicaly like the ones on the dominant positions. Subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledge coming from below that produces a critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power relations involved. I am not claiming an epistemic populism where knowledge produced from below is automatically an epistemic subaltern knowledge. What I am claiming is that all knowledges are epistemically located in the dominant or the subaltern side of the power relations and that this is related to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge. The disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity of the ego-politics of knowledge is a Western myth. Rene Descartes, the founder of Modern Western Philosophy, inaugurates a new moment in the history of Western thought. He replaces God, as the foundation of knowledge in the Theo-politics of knowledge of the European Middle Ages, with (Western) Man as the foundation of knowledge in European Modern times. All the attributes of God are now extrapolated to (Western) Man. Universal Truth beyond time and space, privilege access to the laws of the Universe, and the capacity to produce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed in the mind of Western Man. The Cartesian ‘ego-cogito’ (‘I think, therefore I am’) is the foundation of modern Western sciences. By producing a dualism between mind and body and between mind and nature, Descartes was able to claim non-situated, universal, God-eyed view knowledge. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gomez called the ‘point zero’ perspective of Eurocentric philosophies (Castro-Gomez 2003). The ‘point zero’ is the point of view that hides and conceals itself as being beyond a particular point of view, that is, the point of view that represents itself as being without a point of view. It is this ‘god-eye view’ that always hides its local and particular perspective under an abstract universalism. Western philosophy privileges ‘ego politics of knowledge’ over the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ and the ‘body-politics of knowledge’. Historically, this has allowed Western man (the gendered term is intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only one capable of achieving a universal consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve universality. This epistemic strategy has been crucial for Western global designs. By hiding the location of the subject of enunciation, European/Euro-American colonial expansion and domination was able to construct a hierarchy of superior and inferior knowledge and, thus, of superior and inferior people around the world. We went from the sixteenth century characterization of ‘people without writing’ to the eighteenth and nineteenth century characterization of ‘people without history’, to the twentieth century characterization of ‘people without development’ and more recently, to the early twenty-first century of ‘people without democracy’. We went from the sixteenth century ‘rights of people’ (Sepulveda versus de las Casas debate in the school of Salamanca in the mid-sixteenth century), to the eighteenth century ‘rights of man’ (Enlightment philosophers), and to the late twentieth century ‘human rights’. All of these are part of global designs articulated to the simultaneous production and reproduction of an international division of labor of core/periphery that overlaps with the global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans/non-Europeans. However, as Enrique Dussel (1994) has reminded us, the Cartesian ‘ego cogito’ (‘I think, therefore I am’) was preceded by 150 years (since the beginnings of the European colonial expansion in 1492) of the European ‘ego conquistus’ (‘I conquer, therefore I am’). The social, economic, political and historical conditions of possibility for a subject to assume the arrogance of becoming God-like and put himself as the foundation of all Truthful knowledge was the Imperial Being, that is, the subjectivity of those who are at the center of the world because they have already conquered it. What are the decolonial implications of this epistemological critique to our knowledge production and to our concept of world-system?

Our alternative is to reject the 1ac in favor of addressing a prior question of racialized identity
The only thing whites can do in the struggle against whiteness is recognize what it means to be white. Only once you grapple with what it is to be white can you understand the privilege you have
Cooper 2013, Dr. Brittney Cooper is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University., Emory University with a Ph.D. in American Studies, Howard University, with a bachelor's degrees in English and Political Science. The first rule of blackface: It’s not hard to understand, everyone http://www.salon.com/2013/10/29/the_first_rule_of_blackface_its_not_hard_to_understand_everyone/
Notice that I said myth. I understand that white folks without access to good anti-racist education might attempt to understand this group of people who are continually subject to the machinations of white supremacy by trying their damnedest to understand what it feels like to be black. My suggestion to those people: Just stop. The whole point of white supremacy beyond having a global monopoly on power and domination is that white people are never supposed to feel their race. In fact, that is my question: How does it feel to be white? How does it feel to move through the world without being accused, for instance, of “shopping while black”?  How does it feel to know police officers are there to help you rather than surveil you? How does it feel to have the full range of your experiences represented on the big and small screen? How does it feel to be the dominant race in the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, almost all 50 governorships, every state legislature in the country and most cities and local governments too? I imagine that that feels good. Safe. I’m not asking for a perverse descent into white guilt here. I am asking white people to recognize that that goodness and innate comfort that you feel in your own skin, that uncompromised sense of your own humanity is exactly how you are supposed to feel. I am asking you to recognize that black people and brown and native people are supposed to feel any way other than that. When you grapple with how it feels to be white, you will be much closer to understanding how it feels to be black. There may be no redemption for these foolish racists who clearly have no moral compass. Caitlin Cimeno is no innocent bystander herself. On her Facebook page, she mocked a picture of a little black girl in a T-shirt that said, “Black Girls Rock.” Caitlin intimated that if she “told the truth” using the converse logic that “white girls rock” she’d be called racist. I won’t spend time explaining that any more than I spend time explaining why we don’t have white entertainment television and white history month. White people are not that obtuse. And the ones who are willfully ignorant. Ain’t nobody got time for that. Instead, for those folks who consider themselves enlightened, I will simply say that one of the easiest ways to not be racist this Halloween season is to say no to blackface and tell your less enlightened friends to say no, too.Black America and the diasporic black world thank you.

Case
Neoliberal reforms in Mexico created disincentives for the lower class to challenge the state.
Holzner 7
(Claudio A. The Poverty of Democracy: Neoliberal Reforms and Political Participation of the Poor in Mexico
Latin American Politics and Society, Volume 49, Number 2, Summer 2007, pp. 87-122. University of Miami)

By transforming the basic functions of the state—what it does and for whom—neoliberal policies changed the logic of political participa- tion in Mexico. On the one hand, the centralization of policymaking, coupled with the retreat of the state from core activities since the 1990s, means that the poor now have fewer and fewer incentives to target the state to fulfill their basic needs. On the other hand, successive adminis- trations have dismantled Mexico’s elaborate welfare system, leading many low-income Mexicans to the conclusion that politicians have turned their backs on Mexico’s poor (Gutmann 2002). This has had harmful consequences for lower-class political efficacy and engagement.¶ Macroeconomic reforms shape political behavior by restructuring the relationship between citizens and the state in ways that create pow- erful incentives or disincentives for becoming involved in politics. In Mexico, repeated austerity programs since the 1980s, which gutted fed- eral spending programs and eliminated subsidies for basic foodstuffs; a decline in the spending and scope of rural development programs; and a general shrinking of state budgets made the state less relevant for the poor.10 Other free market reforms, such as the privatization of state- owned enterprises, the deregulation of the market for coffee and other cash crops without agricultural extension services, and attempts to pri- vatize ejidos (a form of collective property in rural areas), have rein- forced the perception among popular groups that the state cannot or will not provide for them.¶ Central to this change in incentives was the government’s shift away from comprehensive welfare, poverty alleviation, and rural develop- ment programs to more limited programs that carefully target people on the basis of individual need. Grindle (1986) has argued that rural devel- opment projects were core elements of the state’s strategy to extend its presence as deeply as possible into the Mexican countryside. In reality, it was precisely because of state-building efforts during the 1950s and 1960s and because of comprehensive development programs like PIDER-COMPLAMAR, SAM, and CONASUPO in the 1970s and 1980s that peasants had more and more incentives to target the state when seek- ing solutions to their material needs (see also Fox 1993). Similarly, Craig and Cornelius argue that Recent reforms have dismantled this welfare system, eliminating many of the incentives the poor had for engaging in political activity. The poverty alleviation initiatives of Ernesto Zedillo’s administration (1994–2000) particularly signaled a retreat of the state from the lives of the poor. A central characteristic of the new era of government-spon- sored poverty alleviation programs, such as PROGRESA; its successor, Oportunidades; and agricultural subsidy programs like PROCAMPO is that they target individuals on a strict need basis, using formulas for cal- culating the level of support that individuals and households receive. This rationalization of public spending may be good economic policy because it insulates policymakers from political pressures; but by elim- inating much of the discretionary power that parties, corporatist organ- izations, and politicians had in allocating benefits to their most loyal clients, it makes political participation irrelevant, if not irrational. Per- haps even more damaging, the selective allocation of social assistance often divides communities between those receiving assistance and those left out of programs. This fragmentation of interests atomizes the rural and urban poor, places them in competition with each other, and weak- ens their capacity for collective action (Kurtz 2004).¶ The net effect of these changes has been to increase the cost of tar- geting the state while making it less likely that political action will be successful. In the following interview excerpt, Norma explains how her interactions with the CNC and government officials have changed over the past few years. Notice that she places particular emphasis on decreasing benefits, declining access, and an inability to use her posi- tion as a representative of the CNC to guarantee preferential treatment for her group.
Neoliberal violence is everywhere and nowhere – while the 1AC holds us in thrall of supposed wars, the slow violence of neoliberalism infects every area of the globe, producing billions of anonymous victims beyond the reach of our moral concern.
Di Leo and McClennen 2012
(Jeffrey R., Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston–Victoria; Sophia A. professor of international affairs and  directs Penn State's Center for Global Studies as well as its Latin American Studies program; Postscript on Violence symploke, Volume 20, Numbers 1-2, 2012, pp. 241-250 (Article))

Violence is everywhere. It could be argued that we are in one of the most¶ violent eras in human history. The scope of violence today is global and its¶ magnitude immense. It is seen in the death counts from perpetual wars and¶ the injury reports from fierce protests; it is found in the oil-soaked waters of¶ the Gulf of Mexico and the radiation-contaminated earth of Japan; it is heard¶ in the screams of women subject to sexual violence and the children who¶ are the victims of predators. It is in the blood we are served by televised¶ news and the brutal visions of an increasing violence-driven entertainment¶ industry.¶ Though our various critical and cultural studies relate features of it, and¶ our social and physical sciences capture aspects of it, the violence in our world¶ is far too overwhelming to contain. No study can capture it in its entirety and¶ no report can present us with a complete set of data on it. For many, the¶ violence that surrounds and engulfs us is an abomination and a threat, something¶ to be fought and eliminated; though for many more, violence serves a¶ social and economic end—and is as American as apple pie. “Rooted in everyday¶ institutional structures,” writes Henry Giroux, “violence has become the¶ toxic glue that bonds Americans together while simultaneously preventing¶ them from expanding and building a multiracial and multicultural democracy”¶ (2002, 231).¶ The “toxic glue” of violence is a threat to individual and social well-being¶ as well as to democracy itself. One of the imperatives of critical pedagogy¶ must be to reveal its manifestations—another must be to work toward its¶ elimination. And progressive intellectuals must continue to utilize the public¶ sphere through print and social media to bring about a better understanding¶ of the dangers of an increasingly violent world and to work toward eliminating¶ the toxic glue of violence.¶ Violence is nowhere. While violence is everywhere more apparent, it¶ is also everywhere ignored and hidden. The violence that is unseen and¶ unknown must be engaged just as much as the violence that is seen and¶ known. While violent video games and movies premised on the spectacle¶ of violence are not difficult to discern, they often have the unintended consequence¶ of closing off consideration and understanding of other forms of¶ violence, in particular the myriad types of violence that cannot be staged.¶ Much of the violence that is unseen and unheard happens on a temporal¶ scale that is beyond the capacities of our senses. Termed by Rob Nixon, “slow¶ violence,” it has been described by him as “a violence that occurs gradually¶ and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across¶ time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence¶ at all” (Nixon 2). The slow violence of “mass droughts in China, flooding in¶ Australia, food crises, super twisters, earthquakes linked to geo-engineering,¶ arctic melt-off and so on” (Cohen 2012, i); “Climate change, the thawing¶ cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnifications, deforestation, the radioactive¶ aftermath of war, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding¶ environmental catastrophes” (Nixon 2).¶ This was not the violence addressed by the theorists and critics of the¶ twentieth-century. Much of this violence unfolds over spans of time better¶ described as geological rather than human. Or, better yet, over spans of time¶ from which “the human” is viewed as but a passing moment. The theoretical¶ work here that is just beginning to take shape promises to reframe the very¶ ways we think about history, time, and change.1¶ However, if the exanthropic violence of climate change is the future of¶ theory, what of the anthropic violence that has been the focus of much attention,¶ particularly since the rise of women’s studies, gender studies, and ethnic¶ studies in the sixties and seventies? How are we doing here with forms of¶ violence that are visible and seen and felt by women, children, and the disenfranchised¶ across the globe? Unfortunately, not well.¶ In today’s media-saturated world, violence is always visible but rarely¶ felt. The prevalence of media violence is especially high in U.S. culture. Our¶ entertainment industry is adept at aestheticizing violence and transforming¶ the most violent and morally extreme members of our society into culture¶ products suitable for mass consumption and celebration. Take for example,¶ the serial killer Aileen Wournos, who paradoxically became the object of¶ revulsion and attraction when presented to us by the American entertainment¶ industry. Many marveled at how the angelic Hollywood actor Charlize¶ Theron had been transformed into the “monster” Wournos, and found themselves¶ comparing the “real” Theron to the image of Wournos presented by¶ her in the film, Monster (2003). “She is my favorite of the night,” said a fashion¶ editor from Glamour magazine commenting on Theron’s appearance at the¶ Golden Globes that year, “especially because you have the contrast of her¶ in that movie and the way she looks tonight.”2 This entirely commonplace¶ comment reveals a semiotic process wherein serial killing and its aesthetic¶ image become hopelessly intertwined, and ultimately confused.¶ In the translation of serial killing to its performance and promotion, a¶ complex semiotic process creates multiple layers of signification concerning¶ the event and its perpetrator. The result is both a greater understanding¶ (albeit a superficial one) of the killers and the horrific events in which they¶ participated, and a growing sense of confusion between the “real” and the¶ image. Carefully packaged, promoted and sanitized by the culture industry,¶ American psychos such as Jeffrey Dahmer, Aileen Wournos and John Wayne¶ Gacy increasingly become less despicable objects of moral revulsion, and¶ more objects of fascination and entertainment. Their final entry into the sign¶ system of celebrity entertainment is signaled by becoming household names¶ as readily recognizable as our sports, movie and television icons. For the average¶ culturally literate American, naming three contemporary serial killers is¶ about as challenging as naming three talk show hosts. However, the realness¶ of these killers and their violent crimes gets buried under multiple layers of¶ signification. A “hyperreal”—and “hypermoral”—image soon displaces any¶ remaining fragments of the reality of the horrific events perpetrated by them.¶ The cultural celebration of violence though does not end with the remediation¶ of increasingly macabre, sadistic, and cruel behavior. Rather, it creates¶ a culture where violence has become a—if not “the”—standard form of entertainment,¶ and where our children are targeted as major consumers of this¶ violence. From the hyper-real violence of many of the video games played¶ by children to the scenes of fighting, killing, and torture found in many of the¶ movies our children watch, there is no escaping the toxic glue of violence.¶ Even the “G” rated Pixar family movie, Cars 2 (2011), featured two deaths¶ and one torture scene (a crime syndicate tortures a car until it blows up).¶ How else can this be explained except as a primer on violence for children?¶ It is not going to be a surprise to anyone familiar with the American film¶ industry that violence is one of its main commodities—and one that is internationally¶ consumed. However, there is some reason to believe that more¶ people are beginning to understand the negative impact of repeated cultural¶ consumption of violence. If nothing else, the tragic events surrounding the¶ shooting of moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado this past summer facilitated this¶ discussion. However, the solution is not to be found in say banning The Dark¶ Knight Rises (2012) from theaters because of its alleged connection to an act¶ of violence. This would be about as effective as taking Sweet Tarts away from¶ children in an effort to stop tooth decay. Rather, the solution is to be found¶ in understanding how making violence into a commodity connects with a¶ broader and more pernicious neoliberal social and economic agenda. Once¶ this is understood, then just as with eating candy, you can consume violence¶ at your own risk.¶ Neoliberal economic practices have increased biopolitical violence. The¶ devastating effects of neoliberalism have been well documented. “Under¶ neoliberalism,” writes Henry Giroux, “everything either is for sale or is plundered¶ for profit” (2004, xii). He continues:¶ Public lands are looted by logging companies and corporate ranchers;¶ politicians willingly hand the public’s airwaves over to broadcasters¶ and large corporate interests without a dime going into the¶ public trust; Halliburton gives war profiteering a new meaning as¶ it is granted corporate contracts without any competitive bidding¶ and then bilks the U.S. government for millions; the environment¶ is polluted and despoiled in the name of profit-making just as the¶ government passes legislation to make it easier for corporations¶ to do so; public services are gutted in order to lower the taxes of¶ major corporations; schools increasingly resemble malls or jails,¶ and teachers, forced to raise revenue for classroom materials,¶ increasingly function as circus barkers hawking everything from¶ hamburgers to pizza parties—that is, when they are not reduced to¶ prepping students to get higher test scores. (2004, xii-xiv)¶ When extreme free-market capitalism becomes the source of values,¶ violence is given a reprieve from moral indignation. Democratic values as¶ well as basic notions of human rights and economic justice are overlooked¶ when the market reveals profits to be had—or losses to be avoided. As¶ neoliberalism widens the gulf between the rich and the poor, and the enfranchised¶ and the disenfranchised, it also places at risk of violence the poor and¶ the disenfranchised. Therefore, it should be no surprise that the devastation¶ of the environment and the violation of human rights is often more extreme¶ in less affluent parts of the world.¶ Moreover, the celebration of violence in the American entertainment¶ industry must be seen as an extension of the neoliberal militaristic transformation¶ of the country. Arguably, the state of permanent war of the United States¶ has benefited an entertainment industry which views increased militarization¶ as a marketing dream. Toys, games, videos, movies and clothing associated¶ with the military and its values increase in times of war. The permanent¶ state of war in the United States thus provides increasing opportunities for¶ corporations endlessly to exploit nationalistic jingoism and the glorification¶ of violence. In light of neoliberalism and its economic Darwinism, the recent¶ resurrection of Captain America—the defender of American “ideals”—is less¶ a nostalgic nod to comic history’s past, than a market-driven embrace of our¶ increasingly militarized, violent, and jingoistic culture.

Monoculture isn’t more susceptible to disease – wheat proves
4ICSC, 2004
(Fourth International Crop Science Congress, “Wheat monoculture is sustainable,” September 27, http://www.cropscience.org.au/icsc2004/a/media/cs040927_mono.htm)
Cultivation of the same crop in the same field year after year – a practice called monoculture – has long been regarded as unsustainable because of declines in yields after about three years.  The yield loss is generally attributed to soil-borne pathogens that infect the roots of that crop, but that die out while the field is planted to a different crop.  However, recent researchat Washington State University (WSU) has documenteda remarkable and apparently widespread microbiological control of a root disease in wheat and barley when these crops are grown continuously in the same location. “The root-associated microbes are responsible for the well-documented decline of the disease‘take-all’ and a corresponding increase in yields following one or more outbreaks of the disease,” said R. James Cook, interim dean of WSU’s College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences. Dr Cook is a strong advocate for crop rotation for many reasons, but points out that crop monoculture also has advantages and can be achieved sustainably with the help of soil microbes. Cook and his colleague David M. Weller studied the pathogens responsible for four major root diseases of wheat and barley grown in the inland Pacific Northwest.  “Breeding for host plant resistance has provided only useful tolerance for management of one of these, Fusarium crown rot, and no useful resistance or tolerance to take-all, Rhizoctinia root rot and Pythium root rot,” Cook said.  “Considering the fact that the forebears of modern wheat evolved as a virtual monoculture, the lack of genes for resistanceto root diseases implies that some other defence mechanism exists. Such protection develops against take-all with wheat monoculture.” He said that wheat and barley selectively stimulate and support populations of antagonistic microorganisms in the root zone. “Often four to six consecutive crops are required before the onset of take-all decline, but the exact number of consecutive crops may vary.”  
Even if diversity loss occurs, seed banks solve the impact
Rissing, 2008
(Steve, Biology professor at Ohio State University, “Seed banks protect crops from growing list of threats,” March 11, http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/science/stories/2008/03/11/sci_rissing11_ART_03-11-08_B5_A99I7L6.html?type=rssandcat=andsid=101)
The first several million seeds for the long-planned Global Seed Vaultarrived last month. Their new home, in the frozen side of a mountain 700 miles from the North Pole, cost $8 million to build. The vault joins 1,400 other banks of various kinds that preserve seeds and other tissues of crop plants. Indeed, the vault exists partly to restockany of those banks after disastersthat might befall them. Civil unrest in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, resulted in destruction of seed banks there, according to a recent report in The New York Times.The world depends on a shrinking group of crop plants attacked by a growing number of parasites, predators and pathogens.In the 1970s, a previously unknown variety of grassy stunt virus appeared in rice crops around the world. A variety of insect, also previously unknown, spread the virus. A search for plants resistant to the virus found a single, wild rice relative in a seed bank operated by the International Rice Research Institute. Botanists bredthat resistance intoa line of rice just in time to avert a global collapse in rice production. A similar situation occurred in the summerof 1970 whena previously unknown variety of Southern corn leaf blight destroyed 15 percent of the U.S. corn crop. Genetic uniformity of the corn permitted the fungus to spread through the Corn Belt like wildfire, according to later studies.
The Aff’s funds don’t actually go to poor farmers; most of the funds will go to mid-level farmers, who will use the money to buy out their neighbors and augment the neoliberal system, gutting solvency
Robinson 08-American professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, 2008, “Latin America and Global Capitalism”, pgs107-108
Just as there are local losers in NTAE industries, there are also winners. Local benefits include new employment and income opportunities, access to new consumer goods, social and productive infrastructure, and so on. But these benefits are very unevenly distributed. The NTAE industry has benefited a class of medium-level producers and local investor groups, often -urban-based. Many people in these groups have bought out their poorer neighbors thereby changing the class structure. It is interesting to observe the local social groups often involved in the NTAE industry. In the case of Central America or of Chile, for instance, local influence over the industry is exercised largely through finances. Under the neoliberal program state banks providing low-cost credit to peasant producers have been closed or restructured along market lines. Most credit for NTAEs comes from private banks, from TNCs that provide commercial credits for their contractors (or simply use their own capital for direct investment), and increasingly, from investment houses in urban areas, known as financieras. These financieras function like investment funds, where urban professionals and middle strata, along with capitalists, invest their money in shares. Urban import-export groups, such as those that own foreign automobile or computer dealerships, have entered NTAE production by organizing these fancieras, which replace state credits that were established in the pre-globalization period of ISI and state-led development (for these details, see Robinson, 2003).
The idea of a ‘gift’ is status booster- gives authority to the gift giver
Stanford 11 Richard A. Stanford (EDUCATION:¶ Public Schools of Duval County (Jacksonville), Florida; graduated with¶ honors, June, 1961, Robert E. Lee High School.¶ Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina, 1961-65; graduated,¶ cum laude, June, 1965, major in Economics, minors in Political¶ Science and Mathematics.¶ University of Georgia, 1965-1968, doctoral progam in Economics,¶ National Defense Education Act Fellowship; Ph.D. in Economics¶ conferred August, 1971.¶ EMPLOYMENT HISTORY: September 1968, Department of Economics and Business Administration, Furman University; tenured 1974; promoted to Associate Professor, 1975; leave of absence from Furman University during 1976-77 academic year to serve as visiting associate professor of management in Troy State University's M.S. in Management Program in Europe; promoted to Full Professor at Furman University, 1984; appointed the David C. Garrett, Jr., Professor of Economics, 1993; served as department chair, 1988-1993; retired and accorded emeritus status, May, 2008.) “Economy and Government in the Postmodern Era.” 2011. http://www.dickstanford.com/EG/EG6.html
Several Postmodern thinkers have advocated replacing both market capitalism and authoritarian forms of economic organization with a “gift economy”. The concept of a gift economy has emerged more at the hands of anthropologists than economists. It seems that there are numerous examples of what economists might have called a "transfer economy" in the primitive societies usually studied by anthropologists.¶ Anthropological literature contains accounts of various tribal and feudal societies within which a wealthy member, often the tribal chief or lord of manor, provided sustenance and other bequests to members of the local community, and in so doing achieved and maintained elevated status within the community. Such "gifting" may have served as the basis of allegiance and loyalty. It could preserve the status of authority and control as long as the benefactor was able to continue the beneficence. ¶ ¶ Gifts in the Modern Economy¶ Eric Raymond argues that gift cultures are predicated upon material abundance.1 In contrast, market-based economies have arisen to deal with allocating resources and distributing product through trade in an environment of material scarcity.¶ Most transactions in a modern market economy are of the quid pro quo nature, i.e., a two-way (bilateral) exchange of values, "this for that." A "transfer" is a one-way (unilateral) flow of value from one party to another with no counter flow of value, "quid non quo". Such transfers may occur at the individual level or the international level. Examples of individual-level transfers include birthday and Christmas gifts and charitable contributions. Contributions to support foreign mission efforts are international transfers. Foreign aid is a so-called "unilateral transfer" of purchasing power, commodities, weapons and ordinance, etc., from one government to another.¶ In modern market-based economies, status has traditionally been ascribed to members of society on the basis of education, earning power, and inherited or accumulated wealth. Lewis Hyde points out that in a gift economy, status is accorded to those who give the most to others.2 In the early twenty-first century, people like Michael Blumberg and Bill and Melinda Gates have been socially acclaimed not only because of their great accumulations of wealth, but also for their generosity in giving away substantial portions of their wealth. To the extent that status ascription by giving becomes more prominent, education, earning power, and inheritance will recede as bases of social status. This leaves ever less room for those at the lower ends of the income/wealth spectrum to achieve social status. For churches and other charitable organizations to take advantage of status ascription by giving, ways will have to be found to make public both the identities of the givers and the amounts given. ¶ ¶ True Gifts¶ A "true gift" is a unilateral transfer of value that does not incur any obligation to reciprocate to the giver. "Gifts" that are predicated upon the expectation of a return gift or which elicit a return gift are actually quid pro quo transactions, possibly with a delay built in between the original gift and the reciprocal gift.¶ Within a household, the sustenance provided by parents to their offspring is usually construed as a true gift, but it may not be a true gift if there is a hope on the part of the parents that the offspring who mature to adulthood will reciprocate care and sustenance to the parents in their dotages. Aside from expectation of care during old age, parental sustenance may be a true gift to offspring even if it creates an obligation on the part of the children to "pay it forward" to their offspring in subsequent generations.¶ If the motivation to donate to a charity or contribute to a church is a "feel-good" effect in return, it can be argued that such donations and contributions are not true gifts, but rather implicit quid pro quo transactions. From the perspective of the economic theory of consumer behavior, it is rational for a person to incur the cost of doing something only if he or she can expect the same or greater value in return. People often assist neighbors during times of need with the expectation that the neighbors would do the same for them in their times of need. Such neighborly assistance would also be a form of implicit quid pro quo transactions rather than true gifts. What about the Old Testament dictum of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? How do Jesus' teachings bear upon this? Do unto others..., ...turn the other cheek, the rich young ruler instructed to give away all, the good Samaritan, the widow's mite, etc. ¶ ¶ Micro-Level Gift Economies¶ There are numerous examples of modern gift economies at the microeconomic level, e.g., the household, churches, charities, close communities, etc., all of which are nested within macroeconomies organized around markets with invested capital, i.e., "market capitalism". It is also possible and likely that micro-level gift economies have existed in authoritarian economies (e.g., fascism and authoritarian socialism) within households and very close local communities.¶ Micro-level gift economies seem to be quite workable as long as the number of constituents remains relatively small, perhaps no more than 150, the so-called Dunbar number first proposed by R. I. M. Dunbar as a theoretical limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.3 Once the number of members of a micro-level economy increases beyond some such relatively small number, quid pro quo market transactions enabled by the formal institution of contract law make it possible for people who do not know each other well to take advantage of specialization and division of labor and to engage in exchange.
The images of catastrophe and destruction they present are like a drug, used by the first world nations to feed off the suffering of the rest of the world, their efforts to solve these problems are coproductive with the disasters themselves, and this constant search for new spectacle will lead to the destruction of the human species as the ultimate reality TV show.
Baudrillard in 94 Jean, “The Illusion of the End” p. 66-71
We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' 'autre monde. We must today denounce the moral and sentimental exploitation of that poverty - charity cannibalism being worse than oppressive violence. The extraction and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution which has become the equivalent of oil deposits and gold mines. The extortion of the spectacle of poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history- the main thing is to recycle them to produce a new energy source.We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the Marxist analysis, that material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw material that is the misery of peoples, which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich countries and media nourishment for our daily lives.The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum. The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the white world repents and seeks absolution - it, too, the waste-product of its own history.
The South is a natural producer of raw materials, the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference, Medecins sans frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order. Other people's destitution becomes our adventure playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality merely the second phase of the war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact, merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable: we see to it that extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental equilibrium of the West.In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it.There can be no finer proof that the distress of the rest of the world is at the root of Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the inauguration, on the roof of the Arche de la Defense, with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of the finest photos of world poverty. Should we be surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d' Alliance. for universal suffering hallowed by caviar and champagne?Just as the economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of the rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it is no longer able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.). We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor countries are the best suppliers - as, indeed, they are of other drugs. We provide them, through our media, with the means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to exhaust their natural resources with our technologies. Our whole culture lives off this catastrophic cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and carried forward in moral mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it and ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for perpetuating under-development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice has been compensated a hundredfold by the moral gain. But when the catastrophe market itself reaches crisis point, in accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation, when we run out of disasters from elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities, the West will be forced to produce its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its need for spectacle and that voracious appetite for symbols which characterizes it even more than its voracious appetite for food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The Great Crash, the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us Westerners, but only when we are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from the other half of the world.Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East, Bangladesh, black Africa and Latin America are really going flat out in the distress and catastrophe stakes, and thus in providing symbolic nourishment for the rich world. They might be said to be overdoing it: heaping earthquakes, floods, famines and ecological disasters one upon another, and finding the means to massacre each other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without any let-up and our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The misery with which they generously overwhelm us is something we shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado or two, a few tiny holocausts on the roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as much greater gains for us, whereas our kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one immeasurably worse: the demographic catastrophe, a veritable epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures.In short, there is such distortion between North and South, to the symbolic advantage of the South (a hundred thousand Iraqi dead against casualties numbered in tens on our side: in every case we are the losers), that one day everything will break down. One day, the West will break down if we are not soon washed clean of this shame, if an international congress of the poor countries does not very quickly decide to share out this symbolic privilege of misery and catastrophe. It is of course normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear weapons, that they should refuse to allow the spread of the catastrophe weapon. But it is not right that they should exert that monopoly indefinitely. In any case, the under-developed are only so by comparison with the Western system and its presumed success. In the light of its assumed failure, they are not under-developed at all. They are only so in terms of a dominant evolutionism which has always been the worst of colonial ideologies. The argument here is that there is a line of objective progress and everyone is supposed to pass through its various stages (we find the same eyewash with regard to the evolution of species and in that evolutionism which unilaterally sanctions the superiority of the human race). In the light of current upheavals, which put an end to any idea of history as a linear process, there are no longer either developed or under-developed peoples. Thus, to encourage hope of evolution - albeit by revolution - among the poor and to doom them, in keeping with the objective illusion of progress, to technological salvation is a criminal absurdity. In actual fact, it is their good fortune to be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no longer know where it is leading. In any case, a majority of these peoples, including those of Eastern Europe, do not seem keen to enter this evolutionist modernity, and their weight in the balance is certainly no small factor in the West's repudiation of its own history, of its own utopias and its own modernity. It might be said that the routes of violence, historical or otherwise, are being turned around and that the viruses now pass from South to North, there being every chance that, five hundred years after America was conquered, 1992 and the end of the century will mark the comeback of the defeated and the sudden reversal of that modernity.The sense of pride is no longer on the side of wealth but of poverty, of those who - fortunately for them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed glory in being privileged in terms of catastrophes. Admittedly, this is a privilege they could hardly renounce, even if they wished to, but natural disasters merely reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards them by the wealthy – by those whom God visibly scorns since he no longer even strikes them down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up their whiteness. It is a good bet that repentance will reach its highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas. We are going to have to lift the curse of the defeated - but symbolically victorious - peoples, which is insinuating itself five hundred years later, by way of repentance, into the heart of the white race.No solution has been found to the dramatic situation of the under-developed, and none will be found since their drama has now been overtaken by that of the overdeveloped, of the rich nations. The psychodrama of congestion, saturation, super abundance, neurosis and the breaking of blood vessels which haunts us - the drama of the excess of means over ends – calls more urgently for attention than that of penury, lack and poverty. That is where the most imminent danger of catastrophe resides, in the societies which have run out of emptiness. Artificial catastrophes, like the beneficial aspects of civilization, progress much more quickly than natural ones. The underdeveloped are still at the primary stage of the natural, unforeseeable catastrophe. We are already at the second stage, that of the manufactured catastrophe - imminent and foreseeable - and we shall soon be at that of the pre-programmed catastrophe, the catastrophe of the third kind, deliberate and experimental. And, paradoxically, it is our pursuit of the means for averting natural catastrophe - the unpredictable form of destiny - which will take us there. Because it is unable to escape it, humanity will pretend to be the author of its destiny. Because it cannot accept being confronted with an end which is uncertain or governed by fate, it will prefer to stage its own death as a species.
Their demand for the ballot in response to descriptions of suffering is an attempt to commodify the other --- their advocacy may sound empathetic but it fails as a political strategy by comforting the Western observer and reinforcing the status quo.
Bystrom, 12 - Kerry L. is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Research Program on Humanitarianism at the Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut, Storrs, "Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (review)." Human Rights Quarterly 34.4 (2012): 1214-1217. Project MUSE)A-Berg
*gender modified
Over the past decade, a growing body of work has brought humanities perspectives to human rights scholarship and challenged still widely-held assumptions that the task of advancing human rights is most fundamentally a matter of law and politics. Texts such as Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith's Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (2004), Anne Cubilié's Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights (2005), and Joseph R. Slaughter's Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form and International Law (2007) have inaugurated a lively and expansive discussion about the work of culture and representation in human rights activism, not to mention its centrality in shaping the larger social imaginary within which this activism takes place. Wendy S. Hesford's provocative and important book Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms adds further vitality to this discussion, as it shifts attention from the narrative to the visual axis and mounts a compelling argument about the significance of notions and practices of visibility and spectatorship in contemporary human rights work. Hesford poses international human rights as a regime constitutively bound up with practices of vision and discourses of sight; she notes that "the history of human rights can be told as a history of selective and differential visibility, which has positioned certain bodies, populations, and nations as objects of recognition and granted others the power and means to look and to confer recognition."1 From this perspective, human rights activism—as it takes place across the "truth-telling genres" she surveys, from photography to documentary film and theater, testimony, and ethnography— becomes a "spectacular rhetoric" aimed at making formerly "invisible" subjects "visible" to the Western and often specifically American audience of rights holders.2 Moments or "scenes" of this activism participate in and extend what Hesford calls the larger "human rights spectacle," not a single image or set of images but "the incorporation of subjects (individuals, communities, nations) through imaging technologies and discourses of vision and violation into the normative frameworks of a human End Page 1214 rights internationalism based on United Nations (UN) documents and treaties."3 As Hesford deftly argues, being made visible through this process of incorporation is not all it is cracked up to be, because the human rights spectacle relies on structures of sight that may ultimately enable human rights abuses to continue (about which more below). Yet, she also rightly points out, "the human rights spectacle is not fully allied with abusive power" and activists can mine its very paradoxes and complications to open up new ways of seeing.4 How might the human rights spectacle perpetuate—or at the very least not fundamentally alter the structure of—violation? The basic argument to this end is set forth in Chapter One, "Human Rights Visions and Recognitions," a theoretical chapter that explains the "ocular epistemology" or visibility-based system of knowledge through which human rights developed and connects it with what is posed as the central problem of "recognition." Recognition, Hesford argues—and in dialogue with a sometimes-dizzying array of thinkers from the fields of politics, philosophy, literary theory, and performance studies—has been the paradigm through which human rights internationalism recruits and defines human subjects. In the context of human rights, it is tied to spectacular scenes of trauma and suffering, where the subject of human rights discourse becomes visible through her their representation as a feminized victim with whom the spectator must sympathize or identify. The problem with this paradigm, Hesford argues, is that it often re-affirms the self of the Western, neoliberal spectator rather than enabling true (and materially based) response to the generally non-Western rights claimant. Hesford notes that the rights claimant's coding as "victim" further means that she is they are incorporated into the spectator's self—and into the framework of human rights—in a manner that constrains her their agency and pegs her them to a relation of inferiority. Phrased more pointedly, recognition and the attendant incorporation of previously "invisible" subjects by US audiences often perpetuates hierarchical visions of human rights bound up with capitalism and concerned mainly with rescuing traumatized women and children from the Global South. Such visions lionize Western activists and activism as they re-victimize the "victims" of abuse and obscure the material contexts and transnational interests that allow abuses to occur. By participating in this visual economy, activist scenes, quite contrary to their intentions, can be complicit in reproducing the status quo of global power and inequality in which violation is rooted. Lest this sound too abstract, Hesford gives concrete examples in each of the chapters that follow, which present case studies of activism surrounding the War on Terror (Chapter Two: "Staging Terror Spectacles"), rape warfare (Chapter Three: "Witnessing Rape Warfare: Suspending the Spectacle"), global sex work and trafficking in women (Chapter Four: "Global Sex Work, Victim Identities and Cybersexualities") and infringements of children's rights (Chapter Five: "Spectacular Childhoods: Sentimentality and the Politics of (In)visibility"). For instance, in "Staging Terror Spectacles," Hesford shows how the use of the Abu Ghraib photographs in the 2004 International Center for Photography exhibition "Inconvenient End Page 1215 Evidence," meant to criticize US abuses of human rights in Iraq, intersects with the George W. Bush administration's narrative of the US as a traumatized nation that underwrote the Iraq war.5 "Spectacular Childhoods"—one of the book's most compelling chapters—similarly shows how good intentions go awry through a sensitive and nuanced reading of Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski's Academy Award-winning documentary about children from a red-light district in Calcutta, Born Into Brothels (2004). While careful not to dismiss the positive achievements of the film, Hesford argues that its staging of a version of the recognition paradigm described above—one in which exploited and impoverished children move beyond their trauma by learning to express themselves in art, and in this way claim visibility in the international community—can reinforce counterproductive human rights visions. The film "recreates the spectacle of salvation" through Briski's actions as an activist art teacher in Calcutta and reinforces "Western humanitarianism's investment in transnational sentimentality and capitalist consumption."6 Not only may this perpetuate colonialist stereotypes of the unfit "third world" parent and lead to regressive policies such as child removal, but it also ignores certain effective forms of local activism and obscures many of the intersecting structural conditions that narrow life options for the children featured in the film. Configuring the visibility of these children through the dominant forms of the human rights spectacle, then, according to Hesford, may not be the most helpful way to resolve their problems. This is a strong (albeit justified) critique. As already mentioned, however, Spectacular Rhetorics moves beyond critique to a positive agenda, which helps Hesford's book avoid the trap of a facile or overly zealous rejection of human rights that can characterize certain strands of humanistic inquiry into the field. Throughout the book Hesford traces forms of advocacy that may exploit or unsettle the dominant human rights spectacle and offer modes of responding to the erstwhile "victims" of human rights abuse that reconfigure or work beyond the recognition paradigm. Key to this endeavor are activist scenes that—by doing more than "simply turning passive or silent voices into compelling speech, or reproducing the traumatic real" and instead creating scenes that "reconfigure witnessing in rhetorical and ethical terms"—help spectators cultivate an active and complex practice of witnessing.7 This positive project is outlined theoretically in the Introduction and Chapter One, and gains depth and clarity in the case studies. Of particular note is "Witnessing Rape Warfare: Suspending the Spectacle." Here, Hesford examines a series of what she shows to be ethical and potentially useful representations of rape in the former Yugoslavia, including Midge Mackenzie's documentary film The Sky: A Silent Witness (1995) and Melanie Friend's visual and acoustic exhibition Homes and Gardens (1996), as well as Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincic's documentary film Calling the Ghosts: A Story about Rape, War and Women (1996). The first two pieces, End Page 1216 Hesford argues, "suspend the human rights spectacle" by boycotting the image of the rape victim—in the first case, by refusing to show the visual image of a woman giving oral testimony about her rape and posing instead the image of water and the sky, and in the second by juxtaposing another set of oral testimonies with ordinary or intimate images of domestic life in Yugoslavia before the war.8 Hesford shows how the discordance created in these pieces between searing spoken testimony and non-spectacular visual images can help to draw attention to the dangers of identification or recognition, and may prompt in the spectator an awareness of the "crisis of witnessing" that seeing or hearing testimony should prompt—ultimately producing what Hesford, after Dominick LaCapra, calls "empathetic unsettlement."9 This is a move away from recognition through identification to a more nuanced interaction that respects otherness even as it allows for connection. Calling the Ghosts goes even further towards turning spectators into ethical witnesses, Hesford argues, as it foregrounds the status of rape "victims" as survivors and activists; self-consciously stages the dilemmas of representation; troubles the notion that legal recognition is the end-point for the women in question; and calls for ongoing global response. As Hesford puts it, "the differentiated politics of recognition and reflexive witnessing that Calling the Ghosts puts forth may provide a model for the emergence of new transnational publics to offset the nationalist politics of recognition and the spectacular gaze of the international community in the face of wars and other violent conflicts."10 Overall, Spectacular Rhetorics is a timely and resonant book that clearly demonstrates "the rhetorical force that visual media exert in mediating the public's engagement with human rights principles and inscribing human rights internationalism into the texts of global capitalism and its nationalist and militarist correlates."11 Its casting of human rights advocacy as a "spectacular rhetoric" is a move that opens exciting ground for future research. Further, the book is carefully organized such that each case study extends and enriches the theoretical questions advanced in the opening chapters, raising new directions for critical inquiry and presenting both challenges and opportunities for current human rights activists. Spectacular Rhetorics might make for demanding reading for non-humanities scholars, in part because of the tendency to re-route assertions through citations from other scholars and in part because of its reliance on a dense theoretical vocabulary. But the book's potential difficulty also stems from the fact that it makes critiques that can feel quite close to home and provides readers with a thick accretion of ideas that take time to work through and grapple with—and these are surely aspects of scholarship that should be celebrated. Hesford's book deserves this time, thought, and celebration. End Page 1217
The subaltern is subsequently reduced to a fungible object, a passive object for the consumption of the debate community – the affirmative absorbs the power of alterity only to toss its carcass back into the dust
Chow 93 (Rey, Andrew W. Mellon, Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, Writing Diaspora: Contemporary Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, Indiana University Press, pg. 12-13.)
In the “cultural studies” of the American academy in the 1990s. The Maoist is reproducing with prowess. We see this in the way terms such as “oppression,” “victimization,” and “subalternity” are now being used. Contrary to the Orientalist disdain for the contemporary native cultures in the non-West, the Maoist turns the precisely disdained other into the object of his/her study and, in some cases identification. In a mixture of admiration and moralist, the Maoist sometimes turns all people from non-Western cultures into a generalized “subaltern” that is then used to flog an equally generalized “West.” Because the representation of “the other” as such ignores (1) the class and intellectual hierarchies within these other cultures, which are usually as elaborate as those in the West, and (2) the discursive power relations structuring the Maoist’s mode of inquiry and valorization, it produces a way of talking in which notions of lack, subalternity, victimization and so forth are drawn upon indiscriminately, often with the intention of spotlighting the speaker’s own sense of alterity and political righteousness. A comfortably wealthy white American intellectual I know claimed that he was a “third world intellectual” citing as one of his credentials his marriage to a Western European woman of part-Jewish heritage; a professor of English complained about being “victimized” by the structured time at an Ivy League Institution, meaning that she needed to be on time for classes; a graduate student of upper-class background from one of the world’s poorest countries told his American friends that he was of poor peasant stock in order to authenticate his identity as a radical “third worlder representative; male and female academics across the U.S. frequently say they were “raped” when they report experiences of professional frustration and conflict. Whether sincere or delusional, such cases of self-dramatization all take the route of self-sub-alternization, which has increasingly become the assured means to authority and power. What these intellectuals are doing is robbing the terms of oppression of their critical and oppositional import, and thus depriving the oppressed of even the vocabulary of protest and rightful demand. The oppressed, whose voices we seldom hear, are robbed twice - the first time of their economic chances, the second time of their language, which is no longer distinguishable from those who have had our consciousnesses “raised.”