Orientalism

Their epistemology claims are wrong—our authors are capable of making non-racist assumptions—they link to all of their knowledge production claims and re-entrench Orientalism.

Teitelbaum 6—Senior Fellow, Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East and African Studies, Tel Aviv U. Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Middle Eastern History, Bar Ilan U. PhD, Tel Aviv U—AND—Meir Litvak—Senior Research Fellow, Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies. Associate Professor, Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv U. PhD, Harvard (Joshua, Students, Teachers, and Edward Said: Taking Stock of Orientalism, March 2006, http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/2493, AMiles)

The critics did not deny that Western culture and scholarship in the past has included ethnocentric, racist, or anti-Islamic components, but argued that these had been greatly exaggerated, to the point of being made universal. Out of more than 60,000 works on the Middle East published in Europe and the United States, he chose only those needed in order to prove his case that there was a discourse which he termed Orientalism. In order to arrive at this conclusion he ignored much evidence critical to the historical documentation of research and literature, material which would have supported the opposite position.[19] His choices, as Kramer writes, rejected "all discrimination between genres and disregarded all extant hierarchies of knowledge." This was particularly true regarding Said's deliberate conflation of Middle Eastern studies as a research discipline and the popular, artistic, or literary perspective of the Orient. It also disregarded the key question of which were the field's main texts and which were those purely on the margins.[20] This approach led Said to ignore several leading researchers who had a decisive influence on Middle Eastern studies. For example, there is his almost complete ignoring of Ignaz Goldziher's work--which made an undeniable contribution to the study of Islam--since his persona contradicts Said's claims. Said chose to attack Goldziher's criticism of anthropomorphism in the Koran as supposed proof of his negative attitude toward Islam, while Goldziher himself felt great respect for Islam and had even attacked Ernest Renan for his racist conceptions.[21] Malcolm Kerr, for example, criticized Said's ignorance of the role and importance of Arab-American Middle East researchers, who played an important role in the field and could not easily be labeled anti-Arab or anti-Islamic. Reina Lewis and Joan Miller argued that Said ignored women's voices which, they maintained, contradicted the monolithically masculine representation which Said wished to present.[22] Said's selectivity enabled him to paint scholarship of the Middle East as an essentialist, racist, and unchangeable phenomenon, whereas the evidence he ignored would have proven that the Western understanding and representation of the Middle East--especially of the Arabs and Islam--had become quite rich and multi-faceted over the years. Many scholars and literary figures were actually enamored with the residents of the Middle East, and the "Orientalist discourse" was not nearly as dominant as Said would have his readers believe, as few examples among many would show. British literary figures and activists, like Wilfred Scawen Blunt, actively sought to improve the lot of the Arabs. Traveler and M.P. David Urquhart promoted Ottoman Turkey as a partner for Christian Europe. Marmaduke Pickthall, a famous convert to Islam and a translator of the Koran, looked to Turkey for the formation of a modernist Islam. Finally, Cambridge Persian scholar E.G. Browne wrote in favor of the Iranian revolution of 1906-1911 and published articles against Curzon. These examples demonstrate the existence of discourses on the Middle East other than that characterized by Said.[23] Moreover, a number of researchers have demonstrated that though Islam was perceived as Europe's enemy in the Middle Ages, even then it had already gained respect and appreciation in the fields of science and philosophy, to the point of even idealizing it as a philosopher's religion.[24] A prominent example of the complexity of the Western perspective on Islam is the attitude of the Enlightenment movement in the eighteenth century, which Said perceives as the parent of modern Orientalism. True, some attacked Islam as a part of their rational, secular perception which criticized unenlightened religiosity--parallel arguments were simultaneously made by them against Christianity and Judaism. Moreover, at times it was clear that their criticism of Islam was actually a camouflaged criticism of Christianity. Yet, other contemporary writers viewed Islam as a rational religion closer to the ideas of the Enlightenment than Christianity. They saw it as a religion balanced between a commitment to morality and an acknowledgement of the basic needs of man, as opposed to Christianity's distorted attitude toward sex. There were among them, too, people who spoke admiringly of Islam and its tolerance of minorities, and juxtaposed it with Christian fanaticism. An important factor in shaping the complex perspective of Oriental studies in the nineteenth century was the entry of Jewish researchers into the field. They brought a deep knowledge of Judaism to a comparative study of Islam. Unlike some Christian researchers of Islam, they had no missionary approach or nostalgia for the Crusades or much interest in the political aspects of the contemporary "Eastern Question." For these Jewish scholars, Islam did not represent the same kind of religious challenge to Judaism that it did to Christianity, and therefore they were free of most of the prejudices that tripped up many Christian scholars. On the contrary, many Jewish researchers evolved an almost romantic approach toward Islam. They emphasized its tolerant attitude toward the Jews, as opposed to Medieval Europe and the rising anti-Semitism of the nineteenth century. Some of them tended to portray Jewish history in Muslim lands as a continuous golden age.[25] They stood somewhere between the two worlds, as Jews with histories both Middle Eastern and European, contrary to Said's portrayal of unflagging European ethnocentrism. It was thus convenient for Said to leave them out of his one-dimensional portrayal of the Orientalist discourse. Middle Eastern Jews present a problem for the Saidian Orient-Occident dichotomy. He deals with this by pointedly connecting "Oriental Jews" with Palestinians when writing

of Israeli (i.e., Western) discrimination. That the Jewish concept of peoplehood spans the West and the East is perhaps too threatening to the dichotomy so central to his theory.[26] The argument that the Occident (or actually Europe prior to the twentieth century) primarily defined itself in opposition to the Orient may be questioned as over-simplifying and essentialist. According to Keith Windschuttle, Europeans identify themselves as joint heirs of classical Greece and Christianity, each tempered by the fluxes of medieval scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modernism. In other words, Western identity is overwhelmingly defined by historical references to its earlier selves rather than by geographical comparisons with others. To claim otherwise is to deny the central thrust of Western education for the past one thousand years.[27] Conversely, the argument that Islam was the ultimate "other" in Western culture, may be challenged as well. Christian theology and doctrine emerged to a large degree as an antithesis to Judaism. Likewise, in popular culture the image of the Jew was much more frightening than that of the Muslim. It can be argued that the number of explicit anti-Jewish tracts--theological or political--throughout western history was probably higher than those devoted to Islam. The point here is not made to win the race of victimhood, but rather to argue that the picture of defining the "self" and the "other" in European culture was much more complex than the one Said presented; the "Orient" was not necessarily the defining "other" of the Occidental self. In the final analysis, then, contrary to what Said would have his readers believe, his idea of "Orientalism" is exaggerated and fails to encompass the entirety of how the West understood and conceived Islam; just as it cannot be said that because of anti-Semitism, all of European thought was hostile toward Jews, is it not true that the West viewed the Middle East in a closed circle of interpretation disconnected from other historical developments. New ideas that surfaced in intercultural contact undermined a priori assumptions time after time. Prejudices and stereotypes were endemic but never shaped into an unchangeable united discourse on the Middle East. In reality, academics who led the discourse often took the lead in undermining prejudices. Said, concluded Bayly Winder, did to Western scholars of Islam exactly what he accused them of doing to the Middle East.[28] Said's disregard of the scope and complexity of research on Islam and the Middle East motivated Rodinson to comment that Said was not familiar enough with the main body of scholarly research on the Middle East.[29] However, Said's disregarding of this scholarship does not appear to result from a lack of familiarity, but rather from a political agenda, and the proof of this is that he continued to make his arguments regarding the monolithic character of Middle Eastern studies years after publishing this criticism. In order to demonstrate the nature of scholarship as an instrument of domination Said excoriates scholars of the Middle East for dividing into categories, classifying, indexing, and documenting "everything in sight (and out of sight)."[30] Does this, asks the Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, imply something vicious or is it simply characteristic of all scientific academic work, essential for a proper understanding of human societies and cultures altogether?[31] Thus, Said's condemnation of the generalizations made by Western scholars of the Middle East and his insistence that they study the Arabs and Muslims as individuals made some of his Arab critics wonder if this meant that it was impossible or unnecessary to study collective entities. If the inclusion of Marx in Orientalism comes from his lack of attention to individual cases, added James Clifford rhetorically, perhaps it is simply impossible to form social or cultural theory, and perhaps there is no room for research fields such as sociology?[32] Said's over-generalized and non-historic conception of "Orientalism" is at its most radical when he writes that "every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, and imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric."[33] According to Nikki Keddie, who was praised by Said and who found positive points in his book, this argument generally encourages people to believe Westerners have no right to study the Middle East and insists that only Muslims and Arabs can investigate correctly Middle Eastern history.[34] Even the doyen of Middle Eastern scholarship of the Middle East, Albert Hourani, a Christian Arab like Said, shared the feeling that the book might lend support to a Muslim counter-attack based on the idea that no one understands Islam better than Muslims.[35] While Said denied that this was his intention,[36] the actual text of the book and the conclusion of many readers belie this assertion. Moreover, disqualifying all researchers who come outside the examined group--in every area of the world--would put an end to all serious academic research. It also neglects the fact that outside researchers may have certain advantages, since as an outsider the scholar might be free from the myths or preconceptions which insiders share. Said also raises a doubt as to whether anyone can study (in his words, "represent") any subject in any manner other than in an entirely subjective way, which is determined by the culture of the scholar-observer. He believes that the unknown, the exotic, and the foreign have always been perceived, assimilated, and represented in these terms. This leads him to doubt that any scholarship can even come close to the truth, or in his words, "whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any or all representations, because they are representations," are so intertwined with the institutions, language, and culture of the representer to render the truth impossible.[37] The obvious conclusion from this argument, as Winder and al-Azm show, is that according to Said, "Orientalism" is inevitable since such distortions are inevitable. If one accepts this argument, however, as al-Azm suggests, this only means the West was merely doing what all cultures must do: examine other cultures through the concepts and frameworks it already holds.[38] If this is true, Winder explains, that everyone

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who sees the "other" distorts it, then the West is no different from other cultures, including Islamic culture, which also has a distorted perspective of the "other." If indeed, Winder wonders, Said demands that Westerners should be better, does he not accept that they have a certain supremacy, a certain mission that makes them superior? Or should different criteria apply to the West simply because it was more "successful" than other societies? Thus, Said himself is promoting a clearly "Orientalist" perspective, accepting and forgiving the "weakness" of Middle Eastern society. "Westerners," claims Winder, "are not better, but Western science, including ‘Orientalism,' is self-bettering in that it is self-corrective."[39] By determining that all "representations" of the other are by definition distortions, Said is saying that people can only study themselves, that only Muslims can properly "represent" Islam. In our experience this has led to a crippling timidity amongst non-Muslim or non-Arab students. While it is good scholarship to control for bias, Said's influence has made students chary of writing about Islam and the Arabs from a point of view not necessarily shared by the objects of their research. They give more weight to an Arab or Islamic viewpoint and are fearful of developing an opinion of their own. ORIENTAL STUDIES AND IMPERIALISM Said's selectivity drove him to ignore the important intellectual achievement of the German and Hungarian scholars of the Middle East. According to his argument, "the major steps in Oriental scholarship were first taken in either Britain and France [sic], then elaborated upon by Germans."[40] There is no historical basis for this argument. The main reason for his ignoring research in these countries is that an accurate assessment of it would have undermined his central argument that Orientalism was integrally linked to imperialism as an expression of the nexus between knowledge and power, and therefore that Orientalists wished to gain knowledge of the Orient in order to control it. To support his claims, Said even back-dated the development of British and French imperialism in the Middle East to the seventeenth century, which is clearly a historical error. Considering German leadership in Oriental studies, it is unlikely that they took much from British and French scholars. No doubt, agrees Bernard Lewis, some of the scholars of the Middle East served imperialism or gained from it. Yet as an explanation of academic research of the Islamic world as a whole, this argument is flawed. If the effort to gain power through knowledge is the main or only motive, why did the study of Arabic and Islam in Europe begin hundred of years before Western imperialism in the Middle East had appeared even as an ambition? Why did these studies blossom in European countries that didn't take part in the European domination effort? Why did scholars invest so much effort in trying to decipher or study the monuments of the ancient East which had no political value and were forgotten even by the local people? The importance of the German and Hungarian scholars was tremendous in terms of their contribution to Middle East scholarship, even though they were not residents of countries with any imperialist interest in the region, and therefore the connection between power and knowledge did not exist in this case, sums up Lewis. [41] Said also ignored the fact that many scholars opposed imperialism, and therefore the connection he creates between their academic works and imperialism is forced. Edmond Burke, like Said, criticizes Oriental studies scholars who at the start of the twentieth century dealt with minor issues: "studies on obscure manuscripts, folk traits, rural sufism and popular religion," instead of dealing with topics he considered to be more important, such as study of the national movements that developed in the region.[42] Yet again, if these scholars were so "impractical," then obviously their studies had to do more with a search for knowledge rather than an effort to help imperialism. Ironically, if they had been as Said and Burke would have them, they would have focused on precisely the issues Burke criticizes them for ignoring. It appears then that many of Said's "Orientalists" actually pursued knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Said cannot have it both ways, complaining that scholars of Islam and the Middle East dealt with the trivial and at the same time asserting they were agents of imperialistic domination. In addition if there were any researchers who participated in an "academic effort to embalm Islam," to use Said's words, these were the Germans, but this was not because of imperialism. This was rather due to their more comprehensive approach to the study of cultures, which they applied to their own society as well. It is very likely, writes Emmanuel Sivan, that if the Germans had been involved in the imperialist effort, they would have been more conscious of Islam being a living and dynamic tradition. Actually, the British and the French, who imitated the Germans, could not afford to be pure classicists because of their country's imperialist demands. They studied Islam as a living civilization. Sivan concludes that the reality of the situation was much more complicated and ironic than that presented by Said.[43] While Said disregarded German Middle Eastern studies scholars because they were not connected to imperialism, if he had taken the time to examine their work, he would have discovered that many saw Islam and the Middle East in all its variety, without essentializing.[44] Al-Azm raises another issue, namely, the problematic cause and effect connection that Said makes between Orientalism as a cultural-social phenomenon and imperialism. It is impossible to avoid the impression, al-Azm remarks, that for Said the presence of observers, administrators, and intruders in the Middle East--such as Napoleon, Cromer, and Balfour--had become inevitable and actually was caused by literary and intellectual Orientalism. Therefore, according to Said, we can understand better the political inclinations and the aspirations of European imperialists if we turn to literary figures, among them Barth?lemy d'Herbelot and Dante Alighieri, rather than if we actually explore strategic and economical interests.[45] Another difficulty in Said's approach of connecting academic research to imperialism lays, according to Halliday, in the assumption that if ideas come to the world in circumstances of domination or even directly in the service of the dominator, they are not valid. Yet according the Halliday, trying to subdue a land requires producing as accurate an image as possible of it. For example, French ethnographers serving French imperialism in North Africa did not necessarily produce worthless research, as Said would have his readers believe. On the contrary, in order for the studies of those academic researchers to serve the French, they had to be accurate. "To put it bluntly," writes Halliday, "if you want to rob a bank, you would be well advised to have a pretty accurate map if its layout....."[46] An ironic twist to the connection between political establishments and scholarship was visible after Martin Kramer's fierce attack against the American academy for identifying with Said's Orientalism critique. Kramer argued that Middle Eastern studies were so compromised by Said's world view that they should no longer receive U.S. government aid. Said's supporters, who in the past had attacked the connection between academic research and the political establishment, were quite alarmed at the notion. In effect they were arguing that the large amounts of monies their institutions took from the government did not undermine their intellectual independence, even as many of them characterized U.S. policy as imperialistic. Clearly, they do not really believe that a connection with the political establishment, even an "imperialistic" one, has any effect on their own research. Yet if that is so, then government funding does not necessarily influence academic discourse. If this is true of today, it might well be true of the past as well, despite Said's critique.

AG

The tech is simple --- Cuba’s expertise is not needed

Rajendran et al. 08 – Professor of Zoology @Vivekananda College (P., E. Jayakumar, Sripathi Kandula & P. Gunasekaran, “Vermiculture and Vermicomposting Biotechnology for Organic Farming and Rural Economic Development,” Eco Web, February 2008, pg. http://www.eco-web.com/edi/080211.html)

Vermitechnology is popular because it is a simple methodology with low investment and does not need sophisticated infrastructure. To process one ton of organic matter daily, it would require about 1500 sq meters of space with 6 workers. It would produce about 70 tons of earthworm casting annually (Gupta, 2003). Innovative, interested and talented rural people can be successful entrepreneurs in vermicompost production and accruing profits will enhance their life style and income. They will be able to spend time usefully by getting job opportunities with the help of self-employment schemes.

2ac --- PIC

Permutation do the CP --- removing the blockade is an instance of the CP, the word “Normalize” is a term of art used to describe trading status, which encompasses the CP as well as other possible results --- here is the ev they keep asking for

French 9 – editor of and a frequent contributor to The Havana Note. She has led more than two dozen research trips to Cuba (Anya, “Options for Engagement A Resource Guide for Reforming U.S. Policy toward Cuba” http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/library/resources/documents/Cuba/USPolicy/options-for-engagement.pdf)

the path to “normal” trade relations If the United States were to lift its trade embargo against Cuba, this would not automatically confer “normal” status to the bilateral trade relationship. It would mean that the United States and Cuba have the opportunity to begin trading in more goods and services than they have in the last fifty years. Whether much expanded trade actually occurs depends on whether the United States were to take additional steps beyond lifting the embargo: the most important of which is the provision of Normal Trade Relations (NTR). NTR is a technical term which refers to the provision of nondiscriminatory treatment toward trading partners. Cuba and North Korea are the only two countries to which the United States continues to deny “normal trade relations.” All other countries either have permanent normal trade relations or temporary, renewable normal trade relations with the United States.161 Assuming that the Cuba-specific trade sanctions contained in the Cuban Assets Control Regulations (the continuity of which was codified by the 1996 Helms-Burton Act) were to be eliminated, achieving normal trade relations between Cuba and the United States would not be a simple matter. A first stumbling block could be the 1974 Trade Act provision dubbed “Jackson-Vanik,” which prohibits non-market economy countries from receiving normal tariff treatment, entering into a bilateral commercial agreement, or receiving any U.S. government credits or loan guarantees, until the President has reported to Congress that such a country does not: 1) deny its citizens the right to emigrate, 2) impose an unreasonable tax or fine for emigrating, and 3) impose more than a “nominal tax, levy, fine, fee or other charge on any citizen as a consequence of the desire of such citizen to emigrate to the country of his choice.”162 Thus, Cuba’s restrictions on its citizens’ emigration rights pose an obstacle to normalization of bilateral trade. Only once the requirements set forth by the Jackson-Vanik amendment have been met, (and absent any other Cuba-specific sanctions, such as the Export Administration Act controls on countries found to be supporting international terrorism), could the United States begin negotiations of a bilateral commercial agreement with Cuba. To begin to extend normal trade relations to Cuba, the United States would need to enter into a reciprocal trade agreement with Cuba (not equivalent to a “free trade agreement”) that would provide a balance of trade benefits and protections to U.S. exports and commercial entities doing business with Cuba, at the same time it would provide such benefits to Cuba. Such an agreement would need to include protection for U.S. patents and trademarks and for “industrial rights and processes,” include a safeguard mechanism to prevent market disruptions due to trade, and provide that the agreement, and its continuation, be subject to the national security interests of both parties.163 Assuming bilateral relations had reached the appropriate milestones to begin discussing two-way trade, negotiating such an agreement could potentially take years, as both countries would need to adopt statutory and regulatory changes.

Language is fluid – assigning it a negative value re-creates the violence & hierarchies of the language itself

SHAPIRO 98 Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai'i, [Michael J. Shapiro, Peace Review; Dec98, Vol. 10 Issue 4]

Of late, critical and polemical commentaries aimed at politicizing language have been focusedon the damaging effects of what Judith Butler has called "excitable speech," utterances intended to incite violence toward persons with recognizable social identities: religious groups, ethnic groups, and gays and lesbians, among others. Apart from the problem of neglecting the meaning slippage involved in assigning an unmediated causal effect to speech acts, the position of those who are arguing, for example, in favor of juridical responses to censor hate speech confronts a paradox. In order to militate against one kind of linguistic violence-the damaging effects of utterances on persons--they have to commit another kind of violence. By assigning a unitary identity to the targets of hate speech, the protectors of vulnerable bodies engage in a violence of representation. They must attribute to speech-act victims a unitary and unambiguously coherent identity; they must dissolve hybridities, turning pluralistic and contingent historical affiliations into essential characteristics. As a result, their arguments in favor of protecting the vulnerable reinforce the identity perspectives presupposed in the discourses they oppose. The paradox evident in juridically oriented attempts to sanction hate speech is part of a more pervasive historical phenomenon toward which JacquesDerrida has pointed in his warning about attempts at definitively expunging violence. As he has famously put it, a commitment to total non-violence risks the "worst violence;" it perpetuates the illusion that an absolute peace is possible. Strategies for attaining such a peace have varied from the structural approach, e.g. the Hobbesian idea of concentrating violence at one point above the social formation, to the conceptual approach, e.g. the Kantian commitment to a universalizing cognitive enlargement at the levels of both the individual and global society.

Hinging agency on linguistic limitations crushes political hope by trapping us in the prison-house of words-Also proves you can NEVER solve the aff

McNally 97 David McNally (prof. PoliSci at York University) 1997in defense of history: marxism and the postmodern agenda	p. 26-27

We are witnessing today a new idealism, infecting large sections of the intellectual left, which has turned language not merely into an independent realm, but into an all pervasive realm, a sphere so omnipresent, so dominant, as virtually to extinguish himan agency. Everything is discourse, you see; and discourse is everything. Because human begins are linguistic creatures, because the world in which we act is a world we know and describe through language, it allegedly follows that there is nothing outside language. Our language, or “discourse,” or “text” – the jargon varies but not the message – defines and limits what we know, what we can imagine, what we can do. There is a political theory here too. Oppression is said to be rooted ultimately in the way in which we and others are defined linguistically, the way in which we are positioned by words in relation to other words, or by codes which are said to be “structured like a language.” Our very being, our identities and “subjectivities,” are constituted through language. As one trendy literary theorist puts it in David Lodge’s novel Nice Work, it is not merely that you are what you speak; no, according to the new idealism, “you are what speaks you.” Language is thus the final “prison-house.” Our confinement there is beyond resistance; it is impossible to escape from that which makes us what we are. This new idealism corresponds to a profound collapse of political horizons. It is the pseudoradicalism of a period of retreat for the left, a verbal radicalism of the word without deed, or, rather, of the word as deed. In response to actual structures and practices of oppression and exploitation, it offers the rhetorical gesture, the ironic turn of phrase. It comes as little surprise, then, when one of the chief philosophers of the new idealism, Jacques Derrida, tells us that he “would hesitate to use such terms as ‘liberation’” 1 Imprisoned within language, we may play with words; but we can never hope to liberate ourselves from immutable structures of oppression rooted in language, itself. The new idealism and the politics it entails are not simply harmless curiosities; they are an abdication of political responsibility, especially at a time of ferocious capitalist restructuring, of widening gaps between rich and poor, of ruling class offensives against social programs. They are also an obstacle to the rebuilding of mass movements of protest and resistance.

Using this language intensifies our responsibility for it and allows us an opportunity to negotiate its meaning

Butler 97 Judith Butler, Chancellor's professor in the department of rhetoric and comparative literature at the U of California, Berkeley, 1997, Excitable Speech, p. 27

We might be tempted to understand the existence of injurious language as posing an ethical question on the order of: what kind of language ought we to use? How does the language we use affect others? If hate speech is citational, does that mean that the one who uses it is not responsible for that usage? Can one say that someone else made up this speech that one simply finds oneself using and thereby absolve oneself of all responsibility? I would argue that the citationality of discourse can work to enhance and intensify our sense of responsibility for it. The one who utters hate speech is responsible for the matter in which such speech is repeated, for reinvigorating such speech, for reestablishing contexts of hate and injury. The responsibility of the speaker does not consist of remaking language ex nihilo, but rather of negotiating the legacies of usage that constrain and enable the speaker's speech.

The counterplan’s use of euphemisms fails to challenge assumptions and makes their impacts inevitable

American Enterprise 99 (“From Euphemisms to Bloody Lies”, http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-61487372/euphemism-bloody-lies.html)

In the eighteenth-century France of painters Fragonard and Watteau, a lady told her confessor that she had "esteem" for a certain courtier. "Et combien de fois a-t-il vous estime?" ("And how many times has he `esteemed' you?"), the priest responded. Euphemisms aren't always as witty, but they all serve the same purpose: concealment, denial, obfuscation. When limited to the traditional areas--sex, the bathroom, and death--euphemisms are white lies, expedient illusions. When they overtake a discourse, they are dangerous--for the language itself and for human freedom. We live in an age of euphemisms. In America it's O.K. to think bad thoughts or do bad deeds. But it is not O.K. to say them out loud or call them by their right name. You aren't lying, you're "telling your own personal truth." You're not promiscuous but "sexually expressive." You're not a plagiarist, you just practice "voice-merging." Political correctness is the euphemism made instinctive. It is the systematic substitution of wish-fulfillment for reality. The U.S. Postal Service issues a commemorative stamp honoring the painter Jackson Pollock but airbrushes out the cigarette in the famous photo of him. The aim is to stamp out cigarettes, and perhaps it is a worthy aim, but the erasure not only bullies the populace but dishonors the truth, Pollock's truth, which is that he was not only a great painter but also a highly volatile, hard-drinking chain-smoker hell-bent on self-destruction. The Postal Service wants to clean up Pollock's image. But that is not so desirable as it may appear. A citizen defending the erasure says the stamp properly focuses our attention on the painter's art rather than on his addictions. But isn't it possible--more than possible--that the two cannot be sundered so easily? Many public lies are benign at the beginning. The sexless "flight attendant" is adopted, and "stewardess" retired, toward the elimination of sexual discrimination.But what is the actual effect of eliminating the sex of the subject? Does it not imply that the suffix, "ess," connotes inferiority and therefore expresses condescension? Whatever effect the change may have on sexual harassment or sexist attitudes, it has the definite effect of weakening the language by making it less specific, less vigorous, more verbose, and in the instance of "flight attendant" or "waitperson" more nearly neutered.

Censorship bad – worsens the effects of offensive language

Roskoski and Peabody 91 (Matthew and Joe, “A Linguistic and Philosophical Critique of Language ‘Arguments,’” http://debate.uvm.edu/Library/DebateTheoryLibrary/Roskoski&Peabody-LangCritiques)

If language "arguments" become a dominant trend, debaters will not change their attitudes. Rather they will manifest their attitudes in non-debate contexts. Under these conditions, the debaters will not have the moderating effects of the critic or the other debaters. Simply put, sexism at home or at lunch is worse than sexism in a debate round because in the round there is a critic to provide negative though not punitive feedback. The publicization effects of censorship are well known. "Psychological studies reveal that whenever the government attempts to censor speech, the censored speech - for that very reason - becomes more appealing to many people" (Strossen 559). These studies would suggest that language which is critiqued by language "arguments" becomes more attractive simply because of the critique. Hence language "arguments" are counterproductive. Conclusion Rodney Smolla offered the following insightful assessment of the interaction between offensive language and language "arguments": The battle against {offensive speech} will be fought most effectively through persuasive and creative educational leadership rather than through punishment and coercion... The sense of a community of scholars, an island of reason and tolerance, is the pervasive ethos. But that ethos should be advanced with education, not coercion. It should be the dominant voice of the university within the marketplace of ideas; but it should not preempt that marketplace. (Smolla 224-225).1 We emphatically concur. It is our position that a debater who feels strongly enough about a given language "argument" ought to actualize that belief through interpersonal conversation rather than through a plea for censorship and coercion. Each debater in a given round has three minutes of cross-examination time during which he or she may engage the other team in a dialogue about the ramifications of the language the opposition has just used. Additionally even given the efficacy of Rich Edwards' efficient tabulation program, there will inevitably be long periods between rounds during which further dialogue can take place.

2ac --- Capitalism

Policy solutions are key, reject the negatives improbable alternative --- our evidence is Latin America specific

Giordano and Li 12 - *Paolo, PhD in Economics from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, Lead Economist @ the Integratoin and Trade Sector of the IADB, **Kun, Research Fellow @ IADB

(“An Updated Assessment of the Trade and Poverty Nexus in Latin America,” p. 375-377)

Despite the move towards more open trade regimes, Latin American economies are still ¶ relatively closed to international trade. Under the pressure of globalisation, it is likely that in the ¶ coming years the region will need to open further and adjust to compete in an increasingly ¶ challenging global environment. Latin America being one of the most unequal regions of the ¶ world, the assessment of the trade and poverty nexus is crucial to devise policies aiming at ¶ better distributing the gains from trade. Latin America-specific research on this topic will ¶ provide policymakers and stakeholders with evidence necessary to underpin a debate which ¶ seems to be nurtured more by anxiety than rigorous knowledge. ¶ In this light, it is useful to refer to a few conclusions with the aim of building up a solid base ¶ for policy debates and future research.¶ There is a gap in the availability of methodologies to explore the link between macro policy ¶ reforms like trade liberalisation and micro-economic determinants of welfare and poverty. It is ¶ therefore crucial to invest in the generation of data and research techniques, to adapt the ¶ research agenda to the specificity of Latin America and to consider qualitative issues that are ¶ difficult to measure. Meanwhile, normative statements referring to the trade policy nexus should ¶ cautiously consider the limitations of current positive knowledge.¶ Trade openness, inequality and poverty are wide multidimensional concepts. Measuring and ¶ attributing causal relations among these variables without carefully qualifying the specific ¶ dimensions explored or the particular transmission mechanisms at play may be misleading. It is ¶ important to disentangle the specific dimension of the trade and poverty nexus from the wider ¶ debate on globalisation and financial integration, the competing concepts of relative and ¶ absolute inequality and the objective and subjective dimension of poverty and deprivation.¶ Despite the impossibility to rigorously and unambiguously assert that trade openness is ¶ conducive to growth and poverty reduction, the preponderance of evidence supports this ¶ conclusion. However, the majority of empirical macro studies also show that the impact of trade ¶ on growth and poverty is also generally small and that the causes of indigence are to be found ¶ elsewhere. But it is in fact extremely arduous to find evidence that supports the notion that trade ¶ protection is good for the poor. The question is therefore how to make trade and growth more ¶ pro-poor and not how to devise improbable alternatives to trade integration aiming at improving ¶ the livelihood of the poor.¶ Specific evidence on Latin America reveals that deductive generalisations of the neoclassical ¶ trade theory and global cross-country empirical studies may be of little help in understanding ¶ the trade and poverty nexus in the region. Several factors may explain why the integration of ¶ Latin America into the global economy may not necessarily bring about rising wages of ¶ unskilled workers and poverty reduction. The most compelling arguments are related to the ¶ existence of rigidities in the labour markets, the historical pattern of protection that created rents ¶ in unskilled intensive sectors, the emergence of low wage countries such as China and India that ¶ shifts the comparative advantage of Latin American economies, and institutional factors that ¶ protract the effects of an initial unequal distribution of factor endowments against the poor.¶ Trade liberalisation may in fact be associated with rising inequality. But country case studies ¶ present contrasting indications. Although there is some evidence of rising inequality in the ¶ aftermath of trade opening, such as in the case of Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Chile, it ¶ seems that the specific effects of trade liberalisation are small or indirect. Skill-biased technical ¶ change, often directly related with the increase of foreign direct investment or with capital ¶ account liberalisation, seems to have a stronger explanatory power than trade liberalisation. ¶ There is also little evidence that trade opening has generated more informality. On the other ¶ hand, the case of Brazil, where trade liberalisation seems to have contributed to the reduction of ¶ wage inequality, is illustrative of the conditions under which trade reforms may have ¶ progressive distributive effects¶ The empirical analysis addressing the direct effect of trade integration on poverty reveals a ¶ similar landscape. Trade integration seems to be good for the poor but the effects are small. ¶ Generalisations should be taken with a great deal of caution because this is a domain where data ¶ may present considerable shortcomings. In any event it seems that foreign trade reforms are ¶ more important for poverty reduction than unilateral ones or than the national component of ¶ reciprocal trade reforms. The countries of the region may therefore expect further contributions ¶ of trade integration to poverty reduction, particularly from the liberalisation of the agriculture ¶ sector where the greatest pockets of residual protectionism are still concentrated. However, ¶ predicting ex ante the pro-poor effects of trade reforms is an extremely sensitive task highly¶ dependent on the quality of the data and the correct specification of the simulation instruments. ¶ It is hard to overstate the importance of strengthening the capacity of policymaking in this area.

Our environment reps are key to change --- this card specifically answers their framework.

Crist 4 (Eileen, Professor at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science and Technology, “Against the social construction of nature and wilderness”, Environmental Ethics 26;1, p 13-6, http://www.sts.vt.edu/faculty/crist/againstsocialconstruction.pdf)

Yet, constructivist analyses of "nature" favor remaining in the comfort zone of zestless agnosticism and noncommittal meta-discourse. As David Kidner suggests, this intellectual stance may function as a mechanism against facing the devastation of the biosphere—an undertaking long underway but gathering momentum with the imminent bottlenecking of a triumphant global consumerism and unprecedented population levels. Human-driven extinction—in the ballpark of Wilson's estimated 27,000 species per year—is so unthinkable a fact that choosing to ignore it may well be the psychologically risk-free option.¶ Nevertheless, this is the opportune historical moment for intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences to join forces with conservation scientists in order to help create the consciousness shift and policy changes to stop this irreversible destruction. Given this outlook, how students in the human sciences are trained to regard scientific knowledge, and what kind of messages percolate to the public from the academy about the nature of scientific findings, matter immensely. The "agnostic stance" of constructivism toward "scientific claims" about the environment—a stance supposedly mandatory for discerning how scientific knowledge is "socially assembled"[32]—is, to borrow a legendary one-liner, striving to interpret the world at an hour that is pressingly calling us to change it.

Epistemological debate is irrelevant and concrete action is inevitable – pragmatism is key to useful knowledge

Friedrichs 09 [Jorg, University Lecturer in Politics at the Oxford Department of International Development, “From Positivist Pretense to Pragmatic Practice Varieties of Pragmatic Methodology in IR Scholarship” Pragmatism and International Relations]

As Friedrich Nietzsche ([1887] 1994:1; cf. Wilson 2002) knew, the knower isstrangely unknown to himself. In fact, it is much more hazardous to contemplate the way how we gain knowledge than to gain such knowledge in the ﬁrst place.This is not to deny that intellectuals are a narcissistic Kratochwil lot, with a penchant for omphaloskepsis. The typical result of theirnavel-gazing, however, is not increased self-awareness. Scholars are more likely to come up with ex-post-facto rationalizations of how they would like to see their activity than with accurate descriptions of how they go about business. As a result, in science there is a paradoxical divide between positivist pretenseand pragmatic practice. Many prominent scholars proceed pragmatically in gen-erating their knowledge, only to vest it all in a positivist cloak when it comes topresenting results. In the wake of Karl Popper (1963), fantasies about ingeniousconjectures and inexorable refutations continue to hold sway despite the muchmore prosaic way most scholars grope around in the formulation of their theo-ries, and the much less rigorous way they assess the value of their hypotheses. In proposing pragmatism as a more realistic alternative to positivist idealiza-tions, I am not concerned with the original intentions of Charles Peirce. Theseare discussed and enhanced by Ryto¨ vuori-Apunen (this forum). Instead, Ipresent various attempts to make pragmatism work as a methodology for IR scholarship. This includes my own preferred methodology, the pragmaticresearch strategy of abduction. As Fritz Kratochwil and I argue elsewhere,abduction should be at the center of our efforts, while deduction and induction areimportant but auxiliary tools (Friedrichs and 2009).Of course, one does not need to be a pragmatist to proceed in a pragmatic way. Precisely because it is derived from practice, pragmatic commonsense is a sold as the hills. For example, James Rosenau (1988:164) declared many yearsago that he coveted ‘‘a long-held conviction that one advances knowledge most effectively by continuously moving back and forth between very abstract and very empirical levels of inquiry, allowing the insights of the former to exert pressurefor the latter even as the ﬁndings of the latter, in turn, exert pressure for the for-mer, thus sustaining an endless cycle in which theory and research feed on eachother.’’ This was shortly before Rosenau’s turn to postmodernism, while he wasstill touting the virtues of behaviorism and standard scientiﬁc requisites, such asindependent and dependent variables and theory testing. But if we take his state-ment at face value, it appears that Rosenau-the-positivist was guided by a sort of pragmatism for all but the name. While such practical commonsense is certainly valuable, in and by itself, it does not qualify as scientiﬁc methodology. Science requires a higher degree of methodological awareness. For this reason, I am not interested here in pragma-tism as unspoken commonsense, or as a pretext for doing empirical researchunencumbered by theoretical and methodological considerations. Nor am I con-cerned with pragmatism as an excuse for staging yet another epistemological debate. Instead, I am interested in pragmatism as an instrument to go about research with an appropriate degree of epistemological and methodologicalawareness. Taking this criterion as my yardstick, the following three varieties of pragmatist methodology in recent IR scholarship are worth mentioning: theory synthesis, analytic eclecticism (AE), and abduction.Theory synthesis is proposed by Andrew Moravcsik (2003), who claims that theories can be combined as long as they are compatible at some unspeciﬁedfundamental level, and that data will help to identify the right combination of theories. He does not explicitly invoke pragmatism but vests his pleading in apositivist cloak by using the language of theory testing. When looking closer,however, it becomes apparent that his theoretical and methodological noncha-lance is far more pragmatic than what his positivist rhetoric suggests. Moravcsiksees himself in good company, dropping the following names: Robert Keohane,Stephen Walt, Jack Snyder, Stephen Van Evera, Bary Buzan, Bruce Russett, John O’Neal, Martha Finnemore, and Kathryn Sikkink. With the partial excep-tion of Finnemore, however, none of these scholars explicitly links his or herscholarship to pragmatism. They employ pragmatic commonsense in theirresearch, but devoutly ignore pragmatism as a philosophical and methodologicalposition. As a result, it is fair to say that theory synthesis is only on a slightly higher level of intellectual awareness than Rosenau’s statement quoted above. Analytic eclecticism, as advertized by Peter Katzenstein and Rudra Sil, links acommonsensical approach to empirical research with a more explicit commit-ment to pragmatism (Sil and Katzenstein 2005; Katzenstein and Sil 2008).The 7 Even the dean of critical rationalism, Karl Popper, is ‘‘guilty’’ of lapses into pragmatism, for example when hestates that scientists, like hungry animals, classify objects according to needs and interests, although with the impor-tant difference that they are guided in their quest for ﬁnding regularities not so much by the stomach but ratherby empirical problems and epistemic interests (Popper 1963:61–62). 646 Pragmatism and International Relations idea is to combine existing research traditions in a pragmatic fashion and thusto enable the formulation and exploration of novel and more complex sets of problems. The constituent elements of different research traditions are trans-lated into mutually compatible vocabularies and then recombined in novel ways.This implies that most scholars must continue the laborious process of formulat-ing parochial research traditions so that a few cosmopolitan colleagues will beenabled to draw upon their work and construct syncretistic collages. 8 In additionto themselves, Katzenstein and Sil cite a number of like-minded scholars such asCharles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, Paul Pierson, and Robert Jervis. 9 The ascription isprobably correct given the highly analytical and eclectic approach of these schol-ars. Nevertheless, apart from Katzenstein and Sil themselves none of these schol-ars has explicitly avowed himself to AE.My preferred research strategy is abduction, which is epistemologically asself-aware as AE but minimizes the dependence on existing research traditions.The typical situation for abduction is when we, both in everyday life and as socialscientists, become aware of a certain class of phenomena that interests us for somereason, but for which we lack applicable theories. We simply trust, although we donot know for certain, that the observed class of phenomena is not random. Wetherefore start collecting pertinent observations and, at the same time, applyingconcepts from existing ﬁelds of our knowledge. Instead of trying to impose anabstract theoretical template (deduction) or ‘‘simply’’ inferring propositions fromfacts (induction), we start reasoning at an intermediate level (abduction). Abduction follows the predicament that science is, or should be, above all amore conscious and systematic version of the way by which humans have learnedto solve problems and generate knowledge in their everyday lives. As it iscurrently practiced, science is often a poor emulator of what we are able toachieve in practice. This is unfortunate because human practice is the ultimatemiracle. In our own practice, most of us manage to deal with many challenging situations.The way we accomplish this is completely different from, and far moreefﬁcient than, the way knowledge is generated according to standard scientiﬁc methods. If it is true that in our own practice we proceed not so much by induction or deduction but rather by abduction, then science would do well tomimic this at least in some respects. 10 Abduction has been invoked by numerous scholars, including Alexander Wendt, John Ruggie, Jeffrey Checkel, Martin Shapiro, Alec Stone Sweet, andMartha Finnemore. While they all use the term abduction, none has ever thor-oughly speciﬁed its meaning. To make up for this omission, I have developedabduction into an explicit methodology and applied it in my own research oninternational police cooperation (Friedrichs 2008). Unfortunately, it is impossi-ble to go into further detail here. Readers interested in abduction as a way toadvance international research and methodology can also be referred to my recent article with Fritz Kratochwil (Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009).On a ﬁnal note, we should be careful not to erect pragmatism as the ultimateepistemological fantasy to caress the vanity of Nietzschean knowers unknown tothemselves, namely that they are ingeniously ‘‘sorting out’’ problematic situa-tions. Scientiﬁc inquiry is not simply an intimate encounter between a researchproblem and a problem solver. It is a social activity taking place in communitiesof practice (Wenger 1998). Pragmatism must be neither reduced to the utility of results regardless of their social presuppositions and meaning, nor to the 8 Pace Rudra Sil (this forum), the whole point about eclecticism is that you rely on existing traditions to blendthem into something new. There is no eclecticism without something to be eclectic about. 9 One may further expand the list by including the international society approach of the English school (Ma-kinda 2000), as well as the early Kenneth Waltz (1959). 10 Precisely for this reason, abduction understood as ‘Inference to the Best Explanation’ plays a crucial role inthe ﬁeld of Artiﬁcial Intelligence. 647 The Forum fabrication of consensus among scientists. Pragmatism as the practice of dis-cursive communitiesand pragmatism as a device for the generation of useful knowledge are two sides of the same coin

Realism’s inevitable – interdisciplinary research proves

Wohlforth 09 (William professor of government at Dartmouth College) 2009 “ Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War”Project Muse

Mainstream theories generally posit that states come to blows over an international status quo only when it has implications for their security or material well-being. The guiding assumption is that a state’s satisfaction [End Page 34] with its place in the existing order is a function of the material costs and benefits implied by that status.24 By that assumption, once a state’s status in an international order ceases to affect its material wellbeing, its relative standing will have no bearing on decisions for war or peace. But the assumption is undermined by cumulative research in disciplines ranging from neuroscience and evolutionary biology to economics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology that human beings are powerfully motivated by the desire for favorable social status comparisons. This research suggests that the preference for status is a basic disposition rather than merely a strategy for attaining other goals.25 People often seek tangibles not so much because of the welfare or security they bring but because of the social status they confer. Under certain conditions, the search for status will cause people to behave in ways that directly contradict their material interest in security and/or prosperity.

No root cause of war

Thompson 3

William, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of International Relations at Indiana University, “A Streetcar Named Sarajevo: Catalysts, Multiple Causation Chains, and Rivalry Structures,” International Studies Quarterly, 47(3), AD: 7-10-9

Richard Ned Lebow (2000–2001) has recently invoked what might be called a streetcar interpretation of systemic war and change. According to him, all our structural theories in world politics both overdetermine and underdetermine the explanation of the most important events such as World War I, World War II, or the end of the Cold War. Not only do structural theories tend to fixate on one cause or stream of causation, they are inherently incomplete because the influence of structural causes cannot be known without also identifying the necessary role of catalysts. As long as we ignore the precipitants that actually encourage actors to act, we cannot make accurate generalizations about the relationships between more remote causation and the outcomes that we are trying to explain. Nor can we test the accuracy of such generalizations without accompanying data on the presence or absence of catalysts. In the absence of an appropriate catalyst (or a ‘‘streetcar’’ that failed to arrive), wars might never have happened. Concrete information on their presence (‘‘streetcars’’ that did arrive) might alter our understanding of the explanatory significance of other variables. But since catalysts and contingencies are so difficult to handle theoretically and empirically, perhaps we should focus instead on probing the theoretical role of contingencies via the development of ‘‘what if ’’ scenarios.

Capitilism prevents conflict --- prefer our evidence --- its backed by comprehensive studies

Gartzke 07, associate professor of political science and a member of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, 07 (Erik, “The Capitalist Peace”, American Journal of Political Science 51:1, 1/07, JSTOR

The discovery that democracies seldom fight each other has led, quite reasonably, to the conclusion that democ- racy causes peace, at least within the community of liberal polities. Explanations abound, but a consensus account of the dyadic democratic peace has been surprisingly slow to materialize. I offer a theory of liberal peace based on capi- talism and common interstate interests. Economic devel- opment, capital market integration, and the compatibility of foreign policy preferences supplant the effect of democ- racy in standard statistical tests of the democratic peace. In fact, after controlling for regional heterogeneity, any one of these three variables is sufficient to account for effects previously attributed to regime type in standard samples of wars, militarized interstate disputes (MIDs), and fatal disputes.' If war is a product of incompatible interests and failed or abortive bargaining, peace ensues when states lack dif- ferences worthy of costly conflict, or when circumstances favor successful diplomacy. Realists and others argue that state interests are inherently incompatible, but this need be so only if state interests are narrowly defined or when conquest promises tangible benefits. Peace can result from at least three attributes of mature capitalist economies. First, the historic impetus to territorial expansion is tempered by the rising importance of intellectual and financial capital, factors that are more expediently enticed than conquered. Land does little to increase the worth of the advanced economies while resource competition is more cheaply pursued through markets than by means of military occupation. At the same time, development actually increases the ability of states to project power when incompatible policy objectives exist. Development affects who states fight (and what they fight over) more than the overall frequency of warfare. Second, substantial overlap in the foreign policy goals of developed nations in the post-World War II period further limits the scope and scale of conflict. Lacking territorial tensions, consensus about how to order the international system has allowed liberal states to cooperate and to accommodate minor differences. Whether this affinity among liberal states will persist in the next century is a question open to debate. Finally, the rise of global capital markets creates a new mechanism for competition and communication for states that might otherwise be forced to fight. Separately, these processes influence patterns of warfare in the modern world. Together, they explain the absence of war among states in the developed world and account for the dyadic observation of the democratic peace. The notion of a capitalist peace is hardly new. Montesquieu, Paine, Bastiat, Mill, Cobden, Angell, and othersaw in market forces the power to end war. Unfortu- nately, war continued, leading many to view as overly op- timistic classical conceptions of liberal peace. This study can be seen as part of an effort to reexamine capitalist peace theory, revising arguments in line with contempo- rary insights much as Kantian claims were reworked in response to evolving evidence of a democratic peace. Existing empirical research on the democratic peace, while addressing many possible alternatives, provides an incomplete and uneven treatment of liberal economic processes. Most democratic peace research examines trade in goods and services but ignores capital markets and of- fers only a cursory assessment of economic development (Maoz and Russett 1992). Several studies explore the im- pact of interests, though these have largely been dismissed by democratic peace advocates (Oneal and Russett 1999a; Russett and Oneal 2001). These omissions or oversights help to determine the democratic peace result and thus shape subsequent research, thinking, and policy on the subject of liberal peace. This study offers evidence that liberal economic processes do in fact lead to peace, even accounting for the well-documented role of liberal pol- itics. Democracy cohabitates with peace. It does not, by itself, lead nations to be less conflict prone, not even to- ward other democracies. The argument and evidence provided here are bound to draw criticism. Skepticism in the face of controversial claims is natural, reasonable, even essential for the cumu- lation of knowledge. The democratic peace observation is supported by an exceptionally large and sophisticated body of research.2 At the same time, excessive deference to previous conclusions privileges conventional wisdom.3 A willingness to doubt that which we have come to believe is a hallmark of scientific inquiry. Indeed, the weight of existing evidence does not directly contradict this study as previous research has typically failed to address the claims of classical liberal political economists like Mon- tesquieu, Richard Cobden, and Norman Angell. As with previous research, this study finds support for a liberal peace, though the key causal variables, and some major policy implications, are considerably changed.

Capitalism is sustainable

ICCA 12 (“ICCA & Sustainability: The Global Chemical Industry’s Contributions to Sustainable Development and the Green Economy” June, Prepared by the International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA) for Rio+20— the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development http://www.icca-chem.org/ICCADocs/ICCA%20SustainabiIity%20Report.pdf?epslanguage=en, ken)

TWENTY YEARS AGO, the governments of 172 countries, along with thousands of concerned stakeholders, came together at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, to lay out a path toward more sustainable environ- mental practices, economic growth and global development. Today, Rio+20 offers a unique opportunity to assess our collective progress and to address new challenges that have emerged in the years since. The world faces a daunting challenge: to meet the needs of a growing population and encourage opportunity for all, with increasingly fewer resources, in a way that does not harm our shared environment or our health and safety. The global chemical industry is playing a vital role in meeting this challenge through development of new, innovative products and more efficient technologies. The International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA) participated at the UNCED conference in 1992 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 and is actively engaged in intergovernmental efforts to promote sustainability, safety and responsible use of chemicals in the industry and throughout the entire supply chain. Around the world, the chemical industry is enabling the very solutions we need to meet global challenges by providing: More reliable and cleaner sources of energy, Improvements in the development and delivery of life-saving medicines, Safer, more efficient transportation options, Access to cleaner, safer drinking water and effective, non-polluting sanitation systems, Sustainable agricultural methods that enable more abundant, nutritious food, New construction materials that provide energy-efficient, low-cost alternatives for housing and infrastructure, and Enhancements and innovation in global manufacturing processes. Rio+20 should catalyze government action toward providing the enabling environment necessary to accelerate and intensify deployment of innovative products and technologies to address sustainable development goals. The global chemical industry will be instrumental in the development, production and delivery of these products and technologies. At Rio+20, ICCA supports a flexible, pragmatic, integrated approach to global development and a roadmap to a green economy that accommodates all three dimensions of sustainable development—social equity, economic growth and environmental protection. Reform of the Institutional Frame- work for Sustainable Development must be pragmatic, and form must follow function. This report offers examples of the contributions of chemistry in six core areas: Enhancing sustainability; Ensuring product safety and stewardship; Minimizing adverse impacts of chemicals; Enabling energy efficiency and renewable energy; Driving innovation and technological advances; and Economic development. It also addresses the chemical industry’s role in helping to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and improving global health. ■ “In these times of austerity and economic uncertainty, public sector efforts alone will not be sufficient. Limited public sector resources will need to leverage much larger pools of private sector financing and know-how... Rio offers a tremendous chance to expand economic opportunity, strengthen equity and protect the environment... We need everyone at the table—investors, CEOs, governments, civil society groups, technical experts and practitioners—working in common cause.” TO ACHIEVE TRUE GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY, we have to eradicate poverty and encourage economic opportunity for all—in a way that does not harm our shared environment, health or safety. Partnerships and cooperation between the public and private sectors together with civil society will be key to progress, particularly in the face of persistent world poverty and lingering global economic uncertainty. Innovative, efficient solutions are required to achieve sustainable development. And contributions of the global chemical industry play an essential role in the transition to a green economy envisioned by Rio+20.

The alternative will fail because it is too radical --- concrete policy proposals are key

Grossburg 92 – Professor of COMS @ UNC

Lawrence, Communication Studies Professor at UNC, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, pg. 388-389

If it is capitalism that is at stake, our moral opposition to it has to be tempered by the realities of the world and the possibilities of political change. Taking a simple negative relation to it, as if the moral condemn notion of the evil of capitalism are sufficient (granting that it does establish grotesque systems of inequality and oppression) is not likely to establish a viable political agenda. First, it is not at all clear what it would mean to overthrow capitalism in the current situation. Unfortunately, despite our desires, the “masses” are not waiting to be led into revolution, and it is not simply a case of their failure to recognize their own best interests, as if we did. Are we to decide—rather undemocratically, I might add—to overthrow capitalism in spite of their legitimate desires? Second, as much as capitalism is the cause of many of the major threats facing the world, at the moment it may also be one of the few forces of stability, unity and even, within limits, a certain “civility” in the world. The working system is, unfortunately, simply too precarious and the alternative options not all that promising. Finally, the appeal of an as yet unarticulated and even unimagined future, while perhaps powerful as a moral imperative, is simply too weak in the current context to effectively organize people, and too vague to provide any direction. Instead, the Left must think of ways to rearticulate capitalism without either giving up the critique or naively assuming that it can create capitalism with a human heart.” Leaving such images to Hollywood, the Left can organize to change specific axiomatics of capitalism in particular local, regional, national and global contexts. For example, there is good evidence that the ways in which contemporary American corporations have chosen to deal with labor are not necessarily the most effective in terms of capital productivity itself. This does not entail simply championing unions as they have existed, but restructuring unions to meet the new demands of a changing labor force and to work within the new systems of global capitalism. we can recognize and argue that the rich are no longer primarily entrepreneurs being rewarded for taking risks, but managers (CEOs)and financial manipulator, even criminals of various sorts. The expansion of capital as a social utility has given way to its immediate private appropriation. this little reinvestment into capitalism's future. It therefore seems reasonable to limit the ability to privately appropriate wealth In this context we might argue a guaranteed minimum and maximum income, linking such arguments to notions to the value of human life. We might propose to limit investors’ abilities to reap short-term profits by a number of means, including linking executives’ salaries to capital gains and investments rather than profits.