NeolibK EarliestBird13

Earliest Bird 2013 1
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1NC
US economic engagement is a vehicle for neoliberal
exploitation the plan becomes a tool for military
intervention and US security interests while strengthening
its economic grip over Latin America
Jacobs 4 (Jamie Elizabeth, Assistant Prof of Polisci at West Virginia
U, "Neoliberalism and Neopanamericanism: The View from Latin
America," Latin American Politics & Society 46.4 (2004) 149-152,
MUSE)
The advance of neoliberalism suffers no shortage of critics, both from its supporters who seek a greater
balance in the interests of North and South, and from its opponents who see it as lacking any real choice
for developing states. The spread of neoliberalism is viewed by its strongest critics as part
of the continuing expression of Western power through the mechanisms of
globalization, often directly linked to the hegemonic power of the United
States. Gary Prevost and Carlos Oliva Campos have assembled a collection of articles that pushes this
debate in a somewhat new direction. This compilation addresses the question from a different perspective,
focusing not on the neoliberal process as globalization but on neoliberalism as the new guise of
panamericanism, which emphasizes a distinctly political overtone in the discussion. The edited volume
argues that neoliberalism reanimates a system of relations in the hemisphere that
reinforces the most negative aspects of the last century's U.S.-dominated
panamericanism. The assembled authors offer a critical view that places neoliberalism
squarely in the realm of U.S. hegemonic exploitation of interamerican
relations. This volume, furthermore, articulates a detailed vision of the potential failures of this
approach in terms of culture, politics, security, and economics for both North and South. Oliva and
Prevost present a view from Latin America that differs from that of other works that emphasize
globalization as a general or global process. This volume focuses on the implementation of free market
capitalism in the Americas as a continuation of the U.S. history of hegemonic control of the hemisphere.
While Oliva and Prevost and the other authors featured in this volume point to the changes that have
altered global relations since the end of the Cold Waramong them an altered balance of power, shifting
U.S. strategy, and evolving interamerican relationsthey all view the U.S. foreign policy
of neoliberalism and economic integration essentially as old wine in new
bottles. As such, old enemies (communism) are replaced by new (drugs and terrorism),
but the fear of Northern domination of and intervention in Latin America
remains. Specifically, Oliva and Prevost identify the process through which "economics had taken
center stage in interamerican affairs." They [End Page 149] suggest that the Washington
Consensusdiminishing the state's role in the economy, privatizing to reduce public deficits, and
shifting more fully to external marketswas instead a recipe for weakened
LeDuc NeoLib

governments susceptible to hemispheric domination by the United States
(xi). The book is divided into two main sections that emphasize hemispheric and regional issues,
respectively. The first section links more effectively to the overall theme of the volume in its chapters on
interamerican relations, culture, governance, trade, and security. In the first of these chapters, Oliva traces
the evolution of U.S. influence in Latin America and concludes that, like the Monroe Doctrine
and Manifest Destiny in the past, the prospect of hemispheric economic
integration will be marked by a dominant view privileging U.S. security,
conceptualized in transnational, hemispheric terms, that is both asymmetrical and not truly
integrated among all members. In this context, Oliva identifies the free trade area of the Americas
(FTAA) as "an economic project suited to a hemispheric context that is politically favorable to the United
States" (20). The chapters in this section are strongest when they focus on the political aspects of
neoliberalism and the possible unintended negative consequences that could arise from the neoliberal
program. Carlos Alzugaray Treto draws on the history of political philosophy, traced to Polanyi,
identifying ways that social inequality has the potential to undermine the stable
governance that is so crucial a part of the neoliberal plan. He goes on to point
out how this potential for instability could also generate a new period of U.S.
interventionism in Latin America. Treto also analyzes how the "liberal peace" could be
undermined by the "right of humanitarian intervention" in the Americas if the NATO intervention in
Yugoslavia served as a model for U.S. involvement in the hemisphere. Hector Luis Saint-Pierre raises the
issue of "democratic neoauthoritarianism," responsible for "restricting citizenship to the exercise of
voting, limiting its voice to electoral polls of public opinion, restraining human rights to consumer's
rights, [and] shutting down spaces to the citizens' participation" (116). While these critiques are leveled
from a structuralist viewpoint, they often highlight concerns expressed from other theoretical perspectives
and subfields (such as the literature on citizenship and participation in the context of economic
integration). These chapters also emphasize the way inattention to economic, social, and political
crisis could damage attempts at integration and the overall success of the
neoliberal paradigm in the Americas. In general, the section on hemispheric issues offers a
suspicious view of the U.S. role in promoting integration, arguing that in reality, integration offers
a deepening of historical asymmetries of power, the potential to create new
justifications for hegemonic intervention, and the further weakening of state
sovereignty in the South. [End Page 150]
Failure to shift from neoliberal economic arrangements
causes extinction
Darder 10 (Professor Antonia Darder, Distinguished Professor of
Education, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, Preface in
Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, & Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy
Movement by Richard V. Kahn, 2010, pp. x-xiii) GENDER
MODIFIED
It is fitting to begin my words about Richard Kahns Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis:
The Ecopedagogy Movement with a poem. The direct and succinct message of The Great Mother Wails
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cuts through our theorizing and opens us up to the very heart of the books messageto ignite a fire that
speaks to the ecological crisis at hand; a crisis orchestrated by the inhumane
greed and economic brutality of the wealthy. Nevertheless, as is clearly apparent, none
of us is absolved from complicity with the devastating destruction of the
earth. As members of the global community, we are all implicated in this destruction by the very
manner in which we define ourselves, each other, and all living beings with whom we reside on the earth.
Everywhere we look there are glaring signs of political systems and social structures
that propel us toward unsustainability and extinction. In this historical
moment, the planet faces some of the most horrendous forms of [hu]man-made devastation ever known
to humankind. Cataclysmic natural disasters in the last decade have sung the
environmental hymns of planetary imbalance and reckless environmental disregard. A striking
feature of this ecological crisis, both locally and globally, is the overwhelming
concentration of wealth held by the ruling elite and their agents of capital. This
environmental malaise is characterized by the staggering loss of livelihood among working people
everywhere; gross inequalities in educational opportunities; an absence of health care for millions; an
unprecedented number of people living behind bars; and trillions spent on fabricated wars
fundamentally tied to the control and domination of the planets
resources. The Western ethos of mastery and supremacy over nature has accompanied, to our
detriment, the unrelenting expansion of capitalism and its unparalleled domination over all aspects of
human life. This hegemonic worldview has been unmercifully imparted through a host of public policies
and practices that conveniently gloss over gross inequalities as commonsensical necessities for democracy
to bloom. As a consequence, the liberal democratic rhetoric of we are all created equal hardly begins to
touch the international pervasiveness of racism, patriarchy, technocracy, and
economic piracy by the West, all which have fostered the erosion of civil rights and
the unprecedented ecological exploitation of societies, creating conditions that now
threaten our peril, if we do not reverse directions. Cataclysmic disasters, such as Hurricane
Katrina, are unfortunate testimonies to the danger of ignoring the warnings of the natural world,
especially when coupled with egregious governmental neglect of impoverished people. Equally
disturbing, is the manner in which ecological crisis is vulgarly exploited by unscrupulous
and ruthless capitalists who see no problem with turning a profit off the
backs of ailing and mourning oppressed populations of every specieswhether they
be victims of weather disasters, catastrophic illnesses, industrial pollution, or inhumane practices of
incarceration. Ultimately, these constitute ecological calamities that speak to the
inhumanity and tyranny of material profiteering, at the expense of precious life. The
arrogance and exploitation of neoliberal values of consumption dishonor the contemporary suffering of
poor and marginalized populations around the globe. Neoliberalism denies or simply mocks
(Drill baby drill!) the interrelationship and delicate balance that exists between all
living beings, including the body earth. In its stead, values of individualism, competition,
privatization, and the free market systematically debase the ancient ecological knowledge of indigenous
populations, who have, implicitly or explicitly, rejected the fabricated ethos of progress and democracy
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propagated by the West. In its consuming frenzy to gobble up the natural resources of the planet for its
own hyperbolic quest for material domination, the exploitative nature of capitalism and its burgeoning
technocracy has dangerously deepened the structures of social exclusion, through the destruction of the
very biodiversity that has been key to our global survival for millennia. Kahn insists that this devastation
of all species and the planet must be fully recognized and soberly critiqued. But he does not stop there.
Alongside, he rightly argues for political principles of engagement for the construction of a critical
ecopedagogy and ecoliteracy that is founded on economic redistribution, cultural and linguistic
democracy, indigenous sovereignty, universal human rights, and a fundamental respect for all life. As
such, Kahn seeks to bring us all back to a formidable relationship with the earth, one that is
unquestionably rooted in an integral order of knowledge, imbued with physical, emotional, intellectual,
and spiritual wisdom. Within the context of such an ecologically grounded epistemology, Kahn
uncompromisingly argues that our organic relationship with the earth is also intimately tied to our
struggles for cultural self-determination, environmental sustainability, social and material justice, and
global peace. Through a carefully framed analysis of past disasters and current ecological crisis, Kahn
issues an urgent call for a critical ecopedagogy that makes central explicit articulations of the ways in
which societies construct ideological, political, and cultural systems, based on social structures
and practices that can serve to promote ecological sustainability and biodiversity or,
conversely, lead us down a disastrous path of unsustainability and extinction. In making his case,
Kahn provides a grounded examination of the manner in which consuming capitalism manifests its
repressive force throughout the globe, disrupting the very ecological order of knowledge essential to the
planets sustainability. He offers an understanding of critical ecopedagogy and ecoliteracy that inherently
critiques the history of Western civilization and the anthropomorphic assumptions that sustain patriarchy
and the subjugation of all subordinated living beingsassumptions that continue to inform traditional
education discourses around the world. Kahn incisively demonstrates how a theory of multiple
technoliteracies can be used to effectively critique the ecological corruption and destruction behind
mainstream uses of technology and the media in the interest of the neoliberal marketplace. As such, his
work points to the manner in which the sustainability rhetoric of mainstream environmentalism
actually camouflages wretched neoliberal policies and practices that left unchecked
hasten the annihilation of the globes ecosystem. True to its promise,
the book cautions that any anti-hegemonic resistance movement that claims social justice, universal
human rights, or global peace must contend forthrightly with the deteriorating ecological crisis at hand, as
well as consider possible strategies and relationships that rupture the status quo and transform
environmental conditions that threaten disaster. A failure to integrate ecological sustainability at the core
of our political and pedagogical struggles for liberation, Kahn argues, is to blindly and misguidedly
adhere to an anthropocentric worldview in which emancipatory dreams are deemed solely about human
interests, without attention either to the health of the planet or to the well-being of all species with whom
we walk the earth.

Vote negative as an explicit rejection of capitalism. Hollowing out
the system from within, in a personal war fought on a daily basis,
can gut capitalism of its power.
Herod 4 (James, renowned philosopher, author, and social activist, Getting Free,
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,
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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 every thing 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 were
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 cant imply
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. Its 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
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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.
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Generic Links
US economic engagement is a vehicle for neoliberal
exploitation the plan becomes a tool for military
intervention and US security interests while strengthening
its economic grip over Latin America
MUSE)
The advance of neoliberalism suffers no shortage of critics, both from its supporters who seek a greater
balance in the interests of North and South, and from its opponents who see it as lacking any real choice
for developing states. The spread of neoliberalism is viewed by its strongest critics as part
of the continuing expression of Western power through the mechanisms of
globalization, often directly linked to the hegemonic power of the United
States. Gary Prevost and Carlos Oliva Campos have assembled a collection of articles that pushes this
debate in a somewhat new direction. This compilation addresses the question from a different perspective,
focusing not on the neoliberal process as globalization but on neoliberalism as the new guise of
panamericanism, which emphasizes a distinctly political overtone in the discussion. The edited volume
argues that neoliberalism reanimates a system of relations in the hemisphere that
reinforces the most negative aspects of the last century's U.S.-dominated
panamericanism. The assembled authors offer a critical view that places neoliberalism
squarely in the realm of U.S. hegemonic exploitation of interamerican
relations. This volume, furthermore, articulates a detailed vision of the potential failures of this
approach in terms of culture, politics, security, and economics for both North and South. Oliva and
Prevost present a view from Latin America that differs from that of other works that emphasize
globalization as a general or global process. This volume focuses on the implementation of free market
capitalism in the Americas as a continuation of the U.S. history of hegemonic control of the hemisphere.
While Oliva and Prevost and the other authors featured in this volume point to the changes that have
altered global relations since the end of the Cold Waramong them an altered balance of power, shifting
U.S. strategy, and evolving interamerican relationsthey all view the U.S. foreign policy
of neoliberalism and economic integration essentially as old wine in new
bottles. As such, old enemies (communism) are replaced by new (drugs and terrorism),
but the fear of Northern domination of and intervention in Latin America
remains. Specifically, Oliva and Prevost identify the process through which "economics had taken
center stage in interamerican affairs." They [End Page 149] suggest that the Washington
Consensusdiminishing the state's role in the economy, privatizing to reduce public deficits, and
shifting more fully to external marketswas instead a recipe for weakened
LeDuc NeoLib

governments susceptible to hemispheric domination by the United States
(xi). The book is divided into two main sections that emphasize hemispheric and regional issues,
respectively. The first section links more effectively to the overall theme of the volume in its chapters on
interamerican relations, culture, governance, trade, and security. In the first of these chapters, Oliva traces
the evolution of U.S. influence in Latin America and concludes that, like the Monroe Doctrine
and Manifest Destiny in the past, the prospect of hemispheric economic
integration will be marked by a dominant view privileging U.S. security,
conceptualized in transnational, hemispheric terms, that is both asymmetrical and not truly
integrated among all members. In this context, Oliva identifies the free trade area of the Americas
(FTAA) as "an economic project suited to a hemispheric context that is politically favorable to the United
States" (20). The chapters in this section are strongest when they focus on the political aspects of
neoliberalism and the possible unintended negative consequences that could arise from the neoliberal
program. Carlos Alzugaray Treto draws on the history of political philosophy, traced to Polanyi,
identifying ways that social inequality has the potential to undermine the stable
governance that is so crucial a part of the neoliberal plan. He goes on to point
out how this potential for instability could also generate a new period of U.S.
interventionism in Latin America. Treto also analyzes how the "liberal peace" could be
undermined by the "right of humanitarian intervention" in the Americas if the NATO intervention in
Yugoslavia served as a model for U.S. involvement in the hemisphere. Hector Luis Saint-Pierre raises the
issue of "democratic neoauthoritarianism," responsible for "restricting citizenship to the exercise of
voting, limiting its voice to electoral polls of public opinion, restraining human rights to consumer's
rights, [and] shutting down spaces to the citizens' participation" (116). While these critiques are leveled
from a structuralist viewpoint, they often highlight concerns expressed from other theoretical perspectives
and subfields (such as the literature on citizenship and participation in the context of economic
integration). These chapters also emphasize the way inattention to economic, social, and political
crisis could damage attempts at integration and the overall success of the
neoliberal paradigm in the Americas. In general, the section on hemispheric issues offers a
suspicious view of the U.S. role in promoting integration, arguing that in reality, integration offers
a deepening of historical asymmetries of power, the potential to create new
justifications for hegemonic intervention, and the further weakening of state
sovereignty in the South. [End Page 150]
Neoliberal energy policy weakens resistance to economic
exploitation furthers the reach of US dominance
Hogenboom 12 (Barbara, Centre for Latin American Research and
Documentation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, "Depoliticized and
Repoliticized Minerals in Latin America,"
http://www.cedla.uva.nl/20_research/pdf/Hogenboom/JDS~28_2-02-
Barbara.pdf)
In the 1980s and 1990s, the tide turned and the Latin American governments profoundly restructured
their economies, including the oil, gas, and mining sectors. The economic circumstances at this time
LeDuc NeoLib

worked against the policies of state ownership. Busting world market prices for minerals, the global
economic crisis, and the regions debt crisis together made it costly to hold state-owned enterprises and
make investments. As global neoliberalism triumphed ideologically, politically, and
economically, civil society groups and political parties that aimed at a statal (and/or societal)
counterweight against foreign capitals power were weakened. Meanwhile, a
young generation of technocrats emerged that helped to implement new
regulations favored by international financial institutions and national
economic elites. The transformation of the private sector into a
predominant force for economic development was the main objective of
both international and national policies of liberalization, and this required a strongly reduced
role of the state in the economy (Fernndez Jilberto & Hogenboom, 2008a). The neoliberal
approach to the mining and energy sector implied a policy U-turn and the extractive
industries were among the most deeply reformed. Previously, oil and other minerals had been
regarded as strategic materials and the central government regulated and taxed these
resources more heavily than other commodities. Yet, under the Washington Consensus,
to attract foreign direct investment in this sector, a rigorous dismantling
of the established system was performed through the well-known combination of
neoliberal policies : privatization, deregulation, and liberalization. Whereas neoliberal
reforms attempted to depoliticize mining policies, and presented extractive industries as a normal instead
of a strategic sector, to many Latin American citizens there is something special about their minerals.
Although there had been problems with large state- owned oil and mining companies, including bad
management, corruption, debts, and low revenues, the historical nationalizations of minerals
had been widely perceived and (later on) politically represented as a highlight of
independent national development, sovereignty, anti-imperialism, and patriotism. An additional
reason for the popular support for these public companies was that they provided for relatively well-paid
and unionized jobs and cheap commodities (for example, low energy prices for the internal market).
Therefore, the neoliberalization of minerals generally gave way to strong social reactions. Let us very
briefl y review three Latin American experiences. In Venezuela, the so-called Oil Opening was the most
important element of the neoliberal policies implemented by the second government of President Carlos
Andrs Prez (19891993) and the government of President Rafael Caldera (19931998). The state-
owned oil company PDVSA was not privatized, but private companies (mostly multinationals) were
allowed to become majority shareholder in joint ventures with PDVSA. These and other neoliberal
policies, including a series of budget cuts, caused widespread popular discontent. In the beginning of
1989, the country witnessed a week of massive protests, known as Caracazo , and this was followed by
years of both organized protests and spontaneous actions (Ellner, 2010). In Bolivia, the fi rst Snchez de
Lozada government (19931997) implemented a package of second generation reforms, including the
new hydrocarbon legislation and the so-called capitalization policy. The latter was a variant of
privatization that was applied to the hydrocarbon sector as well as other sectors, through which the state
abandoned direct operations and instead assumed a regulatory role. While the state-owned gas and oil
company YPFB was privatized, the new Law on Hydrocarbons reduced taxes and fees on newly
discovered reserves to approximately 30 percent. As Assies (2004) argues, the new system, which was
extremely generous with private operators, would turn out to be a seedbed of civic discontent in South
Americas poorest country, especially when large new gas reserves were discovered. Consequently, in
October 2003, after Snchez de Lozada (during his second presidency in 20022003) had announced that
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his government intended to sell Bolivian liquid natural gas to the United States and Mexico (by way of
Chile), a broad range of social movements took the streets. These sweeping protests, known as the gas
war or guerra de octubre , lasted a month and in the end forced Snchez de Lozada to fl ee the country. In
the case of Guatemala, the government decided to substantially lower mining royalties and grant mining
companies free access to the large quantities of water they needed for their operations. To attract
multinational corporations (MNCs) like Glamis Gold to its western highlands, the government also made
major investments in territorial restructuring, using a market-rate loan from the World Bank. The fact that
the government spent substantial public resources on attracting private investors at a time when many
people were suffering from poverty and economic crisis, caused citizens anger and protests. According to
Eric Holz-Gimnez (2008, pp. 2930), the citizens of Guatemala are paying the World Bank for the
privilege of making foreign companies like Glamis Gold very rich. Corporate investors in
these sectors (mainly foreign oil and mining companies) reacted very positively to
the policies that promoted private investment in exploration, exploitation,
and commercialization. Next to privatization, there were a range of policies such as lower
taxes, freeing of capital fl ows, and more labor fl exibility that helped to attract new foreign direct
investment. In addition, in order to further convince foreign companies to invest, these new policies were
locked into fi scal stability clauses (for example, in Chile and Peru) and in bilateral investment treaties.
Such treaties, among other things, offer foreign investors national treatment with respect to mining rights,
and grant them the right to be compensated for future policies that would be less favorable to their
investments. By many citizens, however, the (re-)privatization of minerals was viewed
as a loss of their nations crown jewels. It was perceived as unfair as this natural wealth
should pertain to the nation and benefit the people instead of (foreign)
corporations. Especially at the time of prolonged economic crisis, high unemployment rates, and
growing inequality, this policy fed public resentment. While orthodox theory, which was dominant in infl
uencing policy makers regionally and globally at that time, claimed that state companies tend to be ineffi
cient and corrupt, and that everyone would be better off with modern and competitive private companies,
in reality privatization primarily caused economic concentration, increasingly
rich elites, and greater inequality. This popular perception of the injustice of privatization
showed, for instance, in the results of the civic plebiscite in 2007 in Brazil on Companhia Vale do Rio
Doce (CVRD, or Vale), which is currently one of the worlds largest mining companies. This plebiscite
was organized by two of Brazils largest social organizations the movement of landless peasants,
MST, and the central union confederation, CUT together with 200 other organizations. Ten years after
Vales privatization, 94 percent of the 3.7 million respondents said they preferred a renationalization of
the company. However, President Lula (20032010) hardly responded to these popular sentiments. As a
metallurgic worker, Lula da Silva had been one of the founders of CUT, but as President of Brazil, he
refused to reconsider Vales status ( Americas Program Report , November 26, 2007).

LeDuc NeoLib

Mexico
US economic engagement with Mexico is a vehicle for
neoliberal exploitation for the entire region the plan
becomes a tool for military intervention and US security
interests while strengthening its economic grip over Latin
America
MUSE)
The advance of neoliberalism suffers no shortage of critics, both from its supporters who seek a greater balance in
the interests of North and South, and from its opponents who see it as lacking any real choice for developing states.
The spread of neoliberalism is viewed by its strongest critics as part of the continuing
expression of Western power through the mechanisms of globalization, often
directly linked to the hegemonic power of the United States. Gary Prevost and
Carlos Oliva Campos have assembled a collection of articles that pushes this debate in a somewhat new direction.
This compilation addresses the question from a different perspective, focusing not on the neoliberal process as
globalization but on neoliberalism as the new guise of panamericanism, which emphasizes a distinctly political
overtone in the discussion. The edited volume argues that neoliberalism reanimates a system
of relations in the hemisphere that reinforces the most negative aspects of the last
century's U.S.-dominated panamericanism. The assembled authors offer a critical view that
places neoliberalism squarely in the realm of U.S. hegemonic
exploitation of interamerican relations. This volume, furthermore, articulates a detailed vision
of the potential failures of this approach in terms of culture, politics, security, and economics for both North and
South. Oliva and Prevost present a view from Latin America that differs from that of other works that emphasize
globalization as a general or global process. This volume focuses on the implementation of free market capitalism in
the Americas as a continuation of the U.S. history of hegemonic control of the hemisphere. While Oliva and Prevost
and the other authors featured in this volume point to the changes that have altered global relations since the end of
the Cold Waramong them an altered balance of power, shifting U.S. strategy, and evolving interamerican
relationsthey all view the U.S. foreign policy of neoliberalism and
economic integration essentially as old wine in new bottles. As such, old
enemies (communism) are replaced by new (drugs and terrorism), but the fear of
Northern domination of and intervention in Latin America remains.
Specifically, Oliva and Prevost identify the process through which "economics had taken center stage in
interamerican affairs." They [End Page 149] suggest that the Washington Consensusdiminishing
the state's role in the economy, privatizing to reduce public deficits, and shifting more fully to external markets
was instead a recipe for weakened governments susceptible to hemispheric
domination by the United States (xi). The book is divided into two main sections that emphasize
hemispheric and regional issues, respectively. The first section links more effectively to the overall theme of the
LeDuc NeoLib

volume in its chapters on interamerican relations, culture, governance, trade, and security. In the first of these
chapters, Oliva traces the evolution of U.S. influence in Latin America and concludes that, like the Monroe
Doctrine and Manifest Destiny in the past, the prospect of hemispheric
economic integration will be marked by a dominant view privileging
U.S. security, conceptualized in transnational, hemispheric terms, that is both asymmetrical and
not truly integrated among all members. In this context, Oliva identifies the free trade area of the Americas (FTAA)
as "an economic project suited to a hemispheric context that is politically favorable to the United States" (20). The
chapters in this section are strongest when they focus on the political aspects of neoliberalism and the possible
unintended negative consequences that could arise from the neoliberal program. Carlos Alzugaray Treto draws on
the history of political philosophy, traced to Polanyi, identifying ways that social inequality has the
potential to undermine the stable governance that is so crucial a part of
the neoliberal plan. He goes on to point out how this potential for instability could also
generate a new period of U.S. interventionism in Latin America. Treto also analyzes
how the "liberal peace" could be undermined by the "right of humanitarian intervention" in the Americas if the
NATO intervention in Yugoslavia served as a model for U.S. involvement in the hemisphere. Hector Luis Saint-
Pierre raises the issue of "democratic neoauthoritarianism," responsible for "restricting citizenship to the exercise of
voting, limiting its voice to electoral polls of public opinion, restraining human rights to consumer's rights, [and]
shutting down spaces to the citizens' participation" (116). While these critiques are leveled from a structuralist
viewpoint, they often highlight concerns expressed from other theoretical perspectives and subfields (such as the
literature on citizenship and participation in the context of economic integration). These chapters also emphasize the
way inattention to economic, social, and political crisis could damage attempts at
integration and the overall success of the neoliberal paradigm in the Americas.
In general, the section on hemispheric issues offers a suspicious view of the U.S. role in promoting integration,
arguing that in reality, integration offers a deepening of historical asymmetries of
power, the potential to create new justifications for hegemonic intervention,
and the further weakening of state sovereignty in the South. [End Page 150] If the first
section of the book is joined with skepticism of integration as panamericanism and chooses to focus broadly on the
negative effects of the implementation of these policies, part 2 links these regional issues with the politics of specific
countries. This section offers articles that speak to country-specific issues in a regional context and to ways that
bilateral relations with the United States shape the overall context of regional and hemispheric integration. The
regional issues range from CARICOM's evolution to the different approaches to balancing human security and
globalization in Central America, the special relationship of Mexico and the United States, and the disincentives for
political parties to embrace the Mercosur process. Again, the authors offer continued pessimism about the process of
integration unless Latin American states can exercise more control over its evolution. Key to this idea of alternative
integration are Brazil and Mexico, the former more successful in asserting its independence than the latter, in the
authors' view. Jaime Preciado Coronado singles out the geopolitics of U.S.-Mexican
relations and their magnified effect in the region, where the United
States has collaborated in Mexico's insertion into the world networks of
interdependence and, in return, Mexico promotes the idea of the Washington
Consensus intensely and its model of the promotion of free trade with the United States for the
rest of Latin America, in order to achieve the consolidation of the
continental bloc that maintains American hegemony through the use of the
advantages of the international division of labor.
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Oil extraction in Mexico is neo-colonialism maintains
asymmetry in power dynamics
de Regil 4 (lvaro J, The Jus Semper Global Alliance, "The Neo-
Capitalist Assault in Mexico: Democracy vis--vis the logic of the
market,"
http://www.jussemper.org/Resources/Economic%20Data/Resources/Neo
-capAssaultMexico.pdf)
North-South relationships, from the post-war onward, keep the asymmetric
structures that continue to amply benefit the metropolis and their partners in the periphery. Despite
the repeated demands to balance the terms of trade for the commodities of the Third World in the last fifty
years, the North always maintained an absolute negative, as it continues to do to this date, to open its
markets to the primary products of the South. Nonetheless, the countries of the Third World demand for
decades from the U.S. and the rest of the G7 a treatment similar to that given to Europe and Japan during
the period of reconstruction, asking for asymmetric conditions to benefit their terms of trade. It is thought
that it should be of considerable importance for the U.S. to develop the South so to insure the long-term
growth of the worlds capitalist economy and to eliminate the possibility of the advancement of
communism in the Third World. It is a demand similar to that applied to equalize the development of the
countries of the European Mediterranean basin. But the big powers openly refuse to support the Souths
development. Thus, the failure of the recent WTO conference in Cancun is not at all surprising. The
fact is that the South plays a fundamental role in the worlds capitalist
exploitative system. Besides the advantageous conditions for the North in the terms of trade in
the exchange of goods and services, the North also extracts profit margins far
greater from its operations in the South. Selling manufactured products at high prices
and buying cheap commodities is one thing, but directly participating in the exploitation
of the Souths natural resources represents far greater benefits. Often enough,
with the direct support of the Souths oligarchies, incredible conditions for the
extraction of resources are obtained, including the labour used, which are then
commercialised globally these are precisely the conditions that moved Cardenas to expropriate the oil.
In the case of manufacturing, the royalties for the use of licences and brands are typically one of the best
profits sources for the North. And if a transnational decides to invest in the South, it is because the
comparative advantages guaranteed by the oligarchies, especially in labour, secure profit margins far
greater than those obtained in the North. This has been the essential role of the oligarchies in the centre-
periphery holy alliance. Besides offering wages perversely miserable, the governments from the
South offer all kinds of fiscal incentives and an infrastructure to attract foreign
direct investment and compete amongst themselves to offer the most beneficial
conditions to the transnationals and least beneficial for their countries in exchange for a small share in the
operation and their support to remain in power. This scheme has generated incredible comparative
advantages for the North. In 1978 the income of U.S. transnationals in the South accounted for 35% of
their total foreign income, despite the South accounting for only 25% of their investments, because the
Souths productivity was 65% greater at the expense of the misery of workers. 5 This partnership between
big capital in the North and the oligarchies of the South, the only ones benefiting from the arrangement, is
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the key factor behind NAFTA. It is a re-edition of neo-colonialism where the
centre and the periphery not only participate in an asymmetric exchange
of manufactured products and commodities, but where transnationals
already have as well direct control of almost all sectors of the Mexican
economy and of the factors of production, including the unrestrained use of labour, with the total
connivance of the political-entrepreneurial oligarchy. Economists such as Prebisch and Ankie Hoogvelt
depict this relationship within the so-called Dependency Theory. 6 The theory argues that the North
acts upon the South with a predatory attitude and imposes its political
will, and if necessary its military power, to extract the asymmetric
conditions that it wants. The North requires the natural resources as well as
labour and the sale of its machinery, finished products and technology to sustain the economic
growth of its corporations. The terms of trade and foreign investment are negatively
asymmetric, thus; at the end, it extracts a net benefit extraordinarily favourable. Unfortunately, except for
Asian countries such as South Korea that give priority to social welfare by following its own model, the
great majority of governments in the South elect the easy way of partnering with the North. It is
precisely this relationship, where the Mexican political-entrepreneurial
oligarchy continues to choose to remain a client of the centres of power of
global capital that continues to block Mexicos development.
Economic engagement through resource extraction is
imperialism consolidates elite political and business power
de Regil 4 (lvaro J, The Jus Semper Global Alliance, "The Neo-
Capitalist Assault in Mexico: Democracy vis--vis the logic of the
market,"
http://www.jussemper.org/Resources/Economic%20Data/Resources/Neo
-capAssaultMexico.pdf)
If Echeverria indebted the country and the business oligarchy devaluated it, Lopez Portillo, with his
corruption and irresponsible management of the abundance of oil, buried all governing capacity of
economic policy. Domestically, Lopez Portillo does not attempt to make the necessary fiscal reform and
once again guarantees the oligarchic privileges. Externally, the winds from the North are
already neoliberal. The U.S. has broken with Keynesianism and the gold standard and seeks
to open the markets of the South to its enterprises and to consolidate its currency as the
standard of capitalism. To this effect, the Washington Consensus, the main U.S. imperial
weapon to impose its economic hegemony through the Bretton Woods institutions, is
already on the look out. Weeks after the 1976 devaluation, Mexico commits for the first time to an
agreement with the IMF to stabilize its currency and finance its debt, which implies the initiation of the
neoliberals structural change, which essentially cancels the support of aggregate demand in favour of
supply, the owners of capital. It is the entrance of savage capitalism into Mexico. Lopez Portillo does not
surrender to the IMF joyfully, but manoeuvres in an irresponsible manner. Although it is correct not to
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cede to the opening of the economy without a rational plan, to anchor the economy on oil is irresponsible
populism. To increase even more foreign debt and incur a deficit to sustain growth by speculating with oil
futures and volatile interests without due commitment from business to the fiscal reform and the support
of domestic demand is a suicide act. Washington does not put pressure to follow the IMF recipe only
because Lopez Portillo fulfils its wish to support its strategic oil reserve. In the end, Lopez Portillo hands
down a quadrupled foreign debt that surpasses $80 billion dollars and another populist act of taking state
control of the banking industry. Thus, his negligent management only sinks the country, reducing even
more its freedom of action before the Consensus. In this way, Mexico gives end to a badly managed
Keynesianism, not due to its ineffectiveness but due to the opposition of the industrial oligarchy, the lack
of technological development, U.S. interests and the management of the PRI political apparatus that
decides to continue in partnership with domestic and foreign capital in order to retain power. Structural
Change Starting with Miguel de la Madrid, the PRI governments cease to be merely oligarchic, and they
transform more properly into agents of the Consensus to impose and consolidate U.S. neoliberalism.
Thus, with the direct connivance of the domestic power elite, the neo-capitalist assault is
forged. The bet of the political elite and its twin, the business oligarchy,
continues to be the same: to make themselves suitable to Washingtons
new geopolitical interests, banking to benefit its very private interests on maintaining a
centre-periphery partnership where they can continue to milk the country. Nevertheless, they are not just
partners jointly exploiting with the North the natural and human resources of the country. They are now
more properly agents in charge of imposing the economic structures dictated by the metropolis
institutional investors for benefit of their multinationals (MNCs). This is a new North-South
system, absolutely imperialist, that makes use of resources under a
globally-integrated system that cuts across borders and includes and
marginalises resources and inhabitants in the entire system, according to the national economic
environments generating the maximum efficiencies, which in turn translates into the greatest possible
shareholder values. In this system, the North-South borders become blurred, and the agents of the neo-
capitalist assault are both the leaders of the G7 and those in the periphery. However, the agents in the
South, due to their congenital weakness, are left only with the option of participating in the profits,
depending on their capacity to generate the best efficiencies in infrastructure, in costs of commodities and
of course in high-yield labour, for its extremely low cost and its operative dexterity at the industrial units
of the MNCs. Those offering the best natural resources for exploitation, the best
infrastructure and fiscal incentives and the best workers and most flexible labour legislation, will be
the best bidders to attract foreign capital. Those who build the most
sublime Darwinian ethos will be the winners. The aspirations of true development, of
eliminating poverty, of social justice, of sovereignty, are absolutely frivolous and
strictly remain as rhetoric for domestic consumption. The real thing is the
savage competition of the business/political oligarchies of the countries
of the South to attract capital and participate in the global system of
exploitation. Kissinger said at the start of the government of Vicente Fox that globalization has its
risks, perhaps 20% of the Mexican economy will be able to participate in
the international system of multinationals. But the rest will continue to be marginalised
and with no access to income, employment and the opportunities of globalisation. 9 In this way, the new
role of foreign agent of the Mexican elite becomes evident. Fiscally, the role is strictly as monetary
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regulator with high interest to contain inflation, depress demand and service the foreign debt by
deepening the oil dependency of the economy. The role of balancing supply and demand is eliminated,
and there is exclusive support for export supply; preponderantly the export of labour at misery prices
through in-bond plants, which only export labour, for its local content is barely 2%. At the same time, the
dismantling of the Welfare State and of programs against poverty is initiated. Between 1983 and 1988, the
minimum wage falls 49%. Moderate and extreme poverty increase 33% and 23% respectively. Thus, the
poor become the majority for the first time in many decades. The general subsidies on food are replaced
by focalised aid, another of the commandments of neoliberalism, and the programs on extreme rural
poverty are either reduced or completely eliminated. Clear regressive signs emerge, such as the increase
in the incidence of infant mortality due to avitaminosis. The proportion of death cases due to fetal
underdevelopment and malnutrition boom in absolute terms. Schooling indices drop for the first time in
decades. The GINI inequality index increases from 47 to 53. 1 0
The plan creates a foothold for US economic interests
diversifies the militarys energy needs
Stokes 3 (Doug, Professor in International Security and Strategy in the
Department of Politics at the University of Exeter, "Why the end of the
Cold War doesnt matter: the US war of terror in Colombia," Review of
International Studies (2003), 29, 569585,
http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/200310--02.pdf)
The US has substantial economic interests within Latin America in general
and Colombia more specifically. Colombia is the USs seventh largest oil supplier and has discovered
vast oil reserves within its territory. 59 The US has sought to decrease its post-
Gulf War reliance on Middle East oil and diversify its oil supply purchasing
to Latin America. Anne Paterson, the US ambassador to Colombia, explained that the September
11th attacks have made the traditional oil sources for the United States in the Middle East even less
secure. Sourcing US energy needs from Colombia which after Mexico and
Venezuela is the most important oil country in the region would allow a small margin to work with
and means the US can avoid price speculation. 60 Paul D. Coverdell, a Republican
Senator, explained the wider regional focus of US policy with the destabilization of Colombia directly
affecting bordering Venezuela, now generally regarded as our largest oil supplier. In fact, the oil
picture in Latin America is strikingly similar to that of the Middle East,
except that Colombia provides us more oil today than Kuwait did then. This crisis, like the one in Kuwait,
threatens to spill over into many nations, all of which are allies. 61 This in turn necessitates the
elimination of any threat to US oil interests. This has been illustrated clearly with the Bush
administrations request for $98 m for a specially trained Colombian military counter-insurgency brigade
devoted solely to protecting the US multinational Occidental Petroleums 500mile long Cano Limon oil
pipeline in Colombia. 62 If approved by Congress, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell explained that
the money will be used to train and equip two brigades of the Colombian armed forces to protect the
pipeline to prevent rebel attacks which are depriving us of a source of petroleum. 63 Ambassador
Patterson went on to explain that although this money was not provided under the
pretext of a war on drugs it is something that we must do because it is important for the
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future of the country, for our oil sources and for the confidence of our
investors. 64
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Venezuela
Cooperation over Venezuelan oil is a tactic to collude elite
interest in Latin America and the US causes wealth
concentration and solidifies US military dominance
Petras 11 (James, Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in
Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's
University, "U.S. Venezuelan Relations: Imperialism and Revolution,"
http://lahaine.org/petras/b2-img/petras_usven.pdf)
Within this imperial matrix, Venezuela was of special importance as the
most important provider of petroleum. This was especially true in times of heightened
US and Israeli induced political hostility and military warfare in the Middle East, with the onset of the US
invasion of Iraq and sanctions against Iran, Sudan and other Muslim oil suppliers. Under US hegemony
Venezuela was a major player in the US effort to isolate and undermine the Cuban revolutionary
government. Venezuelan client regimes played a major role in support of the successful US led effort to
expel Cuba from the OAS; in 1961 and brokering a deal in the early 1990s to disarm the guerillas in El
Salvador and Guatemala without regime or structural changes in exchange for legal status of the ex-
combatants. In short, Venezuelan regimes played a strategic role in policing the
Central American-Caribbean region, a supplier of oil and as an
important regional market for US exports. For Venezuela the benefits of
its relations with the US were highly skewed to the upper and the affluent
middle classes. They were able to import luxury goods with low tariffs and invest in real estate,
especially in south Florida. The business and banking elite were able to
associate in joint ventures with US MNC especially in the lucrative oil, gas,
aluminum and refinery sectors. US military training missions and joint military exercises
provided a seemingly reliable force to defend ruling class interests and repress
popular protests and revolts. The benefits for the popular classes, mainly US consumer imports, were far
outweighed by the losses incurred through the outflow of income in the form of royalties, interest, profits
and rents. Even more prejudicial were the US promoted neo-liberal policies which
undermined the social safety net, increased economic vulnerability to
market volatility and led to a two decade long crises culminating in a double digit
decline in living standards (1979 1999). Toward Conceptualizing US-Venezuelan Relations Several key
concepts are central to the understanding of US-Venezuelan relations in the past and present Chavez era.
These include the notion of hegemony in which the ideas and interests of Washington are
accepted and internalized by the Venezuelan ruling and governing class. Hegemony
was never effective throughout Venezuelan class and civil society. Counter- hegemonic ideologies and
definitions of socio-economic interests existed with varying degree of intensity and organization
throughout the post 1958 revolutionary period. In the 1960s mass movements, guerilla organizations and
sectors of the trade unions formed part of a nationalist and socialist counter-hegemonic bloc. Venezuelan-
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US relations were not uniform despite substantial continuities over time. Despite close relations and
economic dependence especially during the 1960s counter-insurgency period, Venezuela was one of the
original promoters of OPEC, nationalized the oil industry (1976), opposed the US backed Somoza regime
and White House plans to intervene to block a Sandinista victory (in 1979). The regression from
nationalist capitalism to US sponsored neo-liberalism in the late 1980s and 1990s reflected a period of
maximum US hegemony, a phenomena that took place throughout Latin America in the 1990s. The
election and re-election of President Chavez beginning in 1998 through the first decade of the new
century marked a decline of US hegemony in the governing and popular classes but not among the
business elite, trade union officials (CTV) and sectors of the military and public sector elite especially in
the state oil company (PDVSA). The decline in US hegemony was influenced by the change in the power
configuration governing Venezuela, the severe economic crises in 2000 2002, the demise and overthrow
of client regimes in key Latin American countries and the rise of radical social movements and left center
regimes. Accelerating the loss of presence of the US and policing of Latin America, were the wars in
the Middle East, Iraq, South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan) and the expanding economic role and trading
relations between Latin America and Asia (mainly China). The commodity boom between 2003 2008
further eroded US leverage via the IMF and WB and enhanced the counter- hegemonic policies of the
center-left regimes especially inVenezuela. A key concept toward understanding the decline of US
hegemony over Venezuela are pivotal events. This concept refers to major political conflicts which
trigger a realignment of inter-state relations and changes the correlation of domestic socio-political forces.
In our study Presidents Bushs launch of the War on Terror following 9/11/01 involving the invasion
of Afghanistan and claims to extra territorial rights to pursue and assassinate adversaries dubbed
terrorists was rejected by President Chavez (you cant fight terror with terror). These events triggered
far reaching consequences in US- Venezuelan relations. Related to the above, our conceptualization of
US-Venezuelan relations emphasizes the high degree of inter-action between global policies and regional
conflicts. In operational terms the attempt by Washington to impose universal/global conformity to its
war on terrorism led to a US backed coup, which in turn fueled Chavez policy of extra hemispheric
alignments with adversaries of the White House. Historical shifts in global economic power and profound
changes in the internal make-up of the US economy have necessitated a reconceptualization of the
principal levers of the US empire. In the past dollar diplomacy , meaning the dominant role of US
industry and banks, played a major role in imposing US hegemony in
Latin America, supplemented via military interventions and military coups especially in the
Caribbean and Central America. In recent years financial capital services have displaced US
manufacturing as the driving force and military wars and intervention have overshadowed economic
instruments, especially with the surge of Asian trade agreements with Latin America. We
reconceptualize US-Venezuelan relations in light of a declining US
economic and rising military empire, as a compensatory mechanism for
sustaining hegemony especially as a tool for restoring client domestic
elites to power. The relation between past imperial successes in securing harmonious hegemonic
collaborating rulers in the 1990s and the profound political changes resulting from the crises of and
breakdown of neo-liberalism, led Washington to totally misread the new realities. The resulting policy
failures (for example Latin Americas rejection of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas) and
isolation and defeat of US policy toward Venezuela, Cuba and Honduras reflects what we conceptualize
as romantic reaction, a failure of political realism: nostalgia for the imperial golden age of hegemony
and pillage of the1990s. The repeated failure by both the Bush and Obama regime
to recognize regime changes, ideological shifts and the new development models and trade
patterns has lead to mindless threats and diplomatic incapacity to develop any
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new bridges to the centrist regimes in the key countries of South
America, especially toward Mercosur (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay). The gap between
past (1975 2000) dominance and present declining hegemony, in Latin America establishes the
parameters for understanding US-Venezuelan relations and in particular the ten years of political
confrontation and the incapacity of Washington to restore its client elites to power, despite repeated
efforts. Likewise despite Venezuelas dependence on single product exports (petrol) and bureaucratic
inefficiencies and corruption, its external policies have gotten around selected US boycotts and hostile
diplomatic moves, while expanding regional ties and forging new trade and investment networks. The
full story of the emergence of this hemispheric and extra hemispheric polarization between
Washington and Caracas which follows tells us a great deal about the future of US-
Latin American relations and equally so of the prospects for US empire at a
time of financial crises and rising militarism.
Oil production will co-opt alternatives to neoliberalism
Parker 5 (Dick, Welsh historian educated in England. He has taught at
the University of Warwick and the University of Chile and is currently a
professor of Latin American studies in the Sociol - ogy Department at
the Universidad Central de Venezuela, "Chvez and the Search for an
Alternative to Neoliberalism," EBSCO)
I have argued that in the current international context there is room for initiatives
designed to break with neoliberal hegemony and that, despite its in - consistencies
and other shortcomings, the Chvez administration has finally moved decisively in the
direction of alternatives that may be feasible. However, the lingering
assumption that additional resources are forthcoming could lead to the
underestimation of the importance of radical changes. Karl (1999) has
convincingly demonstrated that oil rent has perverted the very basis of the social
and political texture of the nation. What is clear, howe ver, is that an eventual failure
will lead to a forceful return to neoliberal formulas, as happened during the short-lived
Carmona regime and as is generally the case when an energetic search for a popular alternative runs out
of steam.

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Cuba
Lifting the embargo allows private corporations to fill-in
causes neoliberalism to creep into the Cuban economy
Moreno 3 (Jenalia, Houston Chronicle (TX), "Capitalism Gains a
Foothold in Cuba," EBSCO)
But from the moment visitors arrive at the Jose Marti International Airport in Havana,
signs abound that capitalism has been seeping into Cuba. For the past five years,
much of that influx has been generated courtesy of U.S. corporations taking
advantage of a relaxation of the embargo and of Cuba's grudging move away from a
purely socialist society. At the Havana airport, officials call out in Spanish, urging passengers to hurry
and board their Continental Airlines flight to Miami. The Continental flights are charters operated by
other companies, but the planes belong to the Houston-based airline, and the pilots and flight attendants
work for Continental. Among other signs of American markets creeping onto
the island are that farmers in the United States can now sell their
products to Cuba. Stop at a Havana shopping center, and it's easy to find an office of American
money-wiring company Western Union. In the late 1990s, the U.S. Treasury Department granted the
company a license to provide wiring services from the United States to Cuba. Once taboo words,
capitalism and consumerism are quickly taking hold here. That's not to say that visitors will
see the Golden Arches or Starbucks in Cuba. But foreign-owned companies are entering
partnerships with the Cuban government to bring more goods and
services to the nation. And Cubans are trying, legally and illegally, to start their own small
businesses. Foreign companies such as Belgium-based DHL deliver packages on the
island. Car dealerships sell late-model imports. Coca-Cola made in Mexico is mixed with Cuban rum
in Cuba Libre cocktails. Italian clothing retailer Benetton Group operates shops in Havana. But while
capitalism has an obvious foothold, heavy-handed regulations and the
lack of capital and spending power strictly limit the role of private
employers in the economy. The rules allow restaurants and other service-industry businesses to
operate, but they strictly limit their potential for growth.

Foreign companies would dominate Cuban agriculture
Regional Business News 2 ("U.S. Could Seize Much of Cuba's Rice
Market by Lifting Embargo, Expert Says By: Kevin Freking, Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock, AR), Feb 12, 2002," EBSCO)
Feb. 12--WASHINGTON--If the embargo on Cuba was lifted today, the United States
could capture about half of the island's rice market immediately, with
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opportunities to expand on that in future years, a professor at the University of Arkansas said. Rice
represents about 18 percent of the calories consumed in Cuba, and the country
now fills most of that demand with imports from Southeast Asia, said Eric Wailes, head of the university's
Global Rice Marketing and Policy Research Program. He agrees with Arkansas lawmakers who say
ending the embargo would be beneficial to the state's farmers. "It would be
very helpful. There is no doubt about that," he said. "We're losing competitively to Thailand and Vietnam
and China, so a market as close as Cuba is sort of a gift at our doorstep if we
could open it up." It's not easy to estimate just how great a gift it would be. Cuba's
economy has been devastated, so there is a question about how much
rice it could afford to buy from the United States. There is also the possibility Cuba will become
more self-sufficient in future years. Its rice yields were above the world average until the Soviet Union
quit subsidizing many aspects of production, such as the cost of fertilizer. Arkansas' Sen. Blanche Lincoln
said a couple of weeks ago that the state lost more than half its rice-export market when the embargo was
imposed in 1962. That assessment was too high, Wailes said; Cuba accounted for about a quarter of the
state's rice exports before the embargo was enacted.
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***Other Links***

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Links Terrorism

Policy to prevent terrorism obscures the role global capital has in
both carrying out imperial policies as well as mystifying the role the
US plays in constructing danger
Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology,
Ljubljana University, 2002, Revolution at the Gates, p. 234-36
Along the same lines, Rightist commentators like George Will also immediately proclaimed the end of the
American holiday from history the impact of reality shattering the isolated tower of the liberal
tolerant attitude and the Cultural Studies focus on textuality. Now, we are forced to strike back, to deal
with real enemies in the real world. . . . Whom, however, do we strike at? Whatever the response,
it will never hit the right target, bringing us full satisfaction. The ridicule of America
attacking Afghanistan cannot fail to strike us: if the greatest power in the world destroys one of the
worlds poorest countries, in which peasants barely survive on barren hills, will this not be the ultimate
case of impotent acting out? In many ways Afghanistan is an ideal target: a country
that is already reduced to rubble, with no infrastructure, repeatedly destroyed by war for
the last two decades ... we cannot avoid the surmise that the choice of
Afghanistan will also be determined by economic considerations: is it
not best procedure to act out ones anger at a country for which no one cares, and where there is nothing
to destroy? Unfortunately, the choice of Afghanistan recalls the anecdote about the madman who searches
for a lost key beneath a streetlamp; asked why there, when he lost the key in a dark corner somewhere, he
answers: But its easier to search under strong light! Is it not the ultimate irony that the whole of Kabul
already looks like downtown Manhattan? To succumb to the urge to act and retaliate
means precisely to avoid confronting the true dimensions of what occurred
on 11 September it means an act whose true aim is to lull us into the
secure conviction that nothing has really changed. The true long-term
threats are further acts of mass terror in comparison with which the memory of the
WTC collapse will pale acts that are less spectacular, but much more horrifying. What about
bacteriological warfare, what about the use of lethal gas, what about the prospect of DNA terrorism
(developing poisons which will affect only people who share a determinate genome)? In this new warfare,
the agents claim their acts less and less publicly: not only are terrorists themselves no longer eager to
claim responsibility for their acts (even the notorious Al Qaida did not explicitly appropriate the 11
September attacks, not to mention the mystery about the origins of the anthrax letters); anti-
terrorist state measures themselves are draped in a shroud of secrecy; all this
constitutes an ideal breeding ground for conspiracy theories and generalized social paranoia. And is not
the obverse of this paranoiac omnipresence of the invisible war its desubstantialization? So, again, just as
we drink beer without alcohol or coffee without caffeine, we are now getting war deprived of its
substance a virtual war fought behind computer screens, a war experienced by its participants as a
video game, a war with no casualties (on our side, at least). With the spread of the anthrax panic in
October 2001, the West got the first taste of this new invisible warfare in which an aspect we should
always bear in mind we, ordinary citizens, are, with regard to information about what is going on,
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totally at the mercy of the authorities: we see and hear nothing; all we know comes from the official
media. A superpower bombing a desolate desert country and, at the same time, hostage to invisible
bacteria this, not the WTC explosions, is the first image of twenty-first-century warfare. Instead of a
quick acting-out, we should confront these difficult questions: what will war mean in the twenty-first
century? Who will they be, if they are, clearly, neither states nor criminal gangs? Here I cannot resist
the temptation to recall the Freudian opposition of the public Law and its obscene superego double: along
the same lines, are not international terrorist organizations the obscene double of the big multinational
corporations the ultimate rhizomatic machine, omnipresent, yet with no clear territorial base? Are they
not the form in which nationalist and/or religious fundamentalism accommodated itself to global
capitalism? Do they not embody the ultimate contradiction, with their particular! exclusive content and
their global dynamic functioning? For this reason, the fashionable notion of the clash of civilizations
must be thoroughly rejected: what we are witnessing today, rather, are clashes within each civilization. A
brief look at the comparative history of Islam and Christianity tells us that the human rights record of
Islam (to use an anachronistic term) is much better than that of Christianity: in past centuries, Islam was
significantly more tolerant towards other religions than Christianity. It is also time to remember that it
was through the Arabs that, in the Middle Ages, we in Western Europe regained access to our Ancient
Greek legacy. While I do not in any way excuse todays horrific acts, these facts none the less clearly
demonstrate that we are dealing not with a feature inscribed into Islam as such, but with the outcome of
modern sociopolitical conditions. If we look more closely, what is this clash of
civilizations really about? Are not all real-life clashes clearly related
to global capitalism? The Muslim fundamentalist target is not only
global capitalisms corrosive impact on social life, but also the corrupt
traditionalist regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and so on. The most
horrifying slaughters (those in Rwanda, Congo, and Sierra Leone) not only
took place and are taking place within the same civilization, but
are also clearly related to the interplay of global economic interests. Even
in the few cases which would vaguely fit the definition of the clash of civilisations (Bosnia and Kosovo,
southern Sudan, etc.), the shadow of other interests is easily discernible. A suitable dose of
economic reductionism would therefore be appropriate here: instead of the
endless analyses of how Islamic fundamentalism is intolerant towards our liberal societies, and other
clash-of-civilization topics, we should refocus our attention on the economic
background of the conflict the clash of economic interests, and of
the geopolitical interests of the United States itself (how to retain privileged links
both with Israel and with conservative Arab regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait).
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Links China

The China threat is a manifestation of a structural issue with capital
commodification leads to antagonistic excess that we cannot deal
with this produces a form of scholarship based upon fear politics
which allows capital to subtly operate
Slavoj Zizek, researcher in sociology at the university of Ljubljana, The
Ticklish Subject: The absent centre of political ontology, 1999, pg. 353-
359
The big news of todays post-political age of the end of ideology is thus the radical depoliticization of
the sphere of the economy: the way the economy functions (the need to cut social welfare, etc.) is
accepted as a simple insight into the objective state of things. However, as long as this fundamental
depoliticization of the economic sphere is accepted, all the talk about
active citizenship, about public discussion leading to responsible collective decisions, and so on,
will remain limited to the cultural issues of religious, sexual, ethnic and other way-
of-life differences, without actually encroaching upon the level at which long-term decisions that affect us
all are made. In short, the only way effectively to bring about a society in which
risky long-term decisions would ensue from public debate involving all
concerned is some kind of radical limitation of Capitals freedom, the
subordination of the process of production to social control the radical repoliticization of the economy.
That is to say: if the problem with todays post-politics (administration of social affairs) is that it
increasingly undermines the possibility of a proper political act, this undermining is directly due to the
depoliticization of economics, to the common acceptance of Capital and market mechanisms as neutral
tools/ procedures to be exploited. We can now see why todays post-politics cannot attain the properly
political dimension of universality: because it silently precludes the sphere of economy from
politicization. The domain of global capitalist market relations is the Other Scene of the so-called
repoliticization of civil society advocated by the partisans of identity politics and other postmodern
forms of politicization: all the talk about new forms of politics bursting out all over, focused on particular
issues (gay rights, ecology, ethnic minorities...), all this incessant activity of fluid, shifting identities, of
building multiple ad hoc coalitions, and so on, has something inauthentic about it, and ultimately
resembles the obsessional neurotic who talks all the time and is otherwise frantically active precisely in
order to ensure that something what really matters will not be disturbed, that it will remain
immobilized.35 So, instead of celebrating the new freedoms and responsibilities brought about by the
second modernity, it is much more crucial to focus on what remains the same in this global fluidity and
reflexivity, on what serves as the very motor of this fluidity: the inexorable logic of Capital. The
spectral presence of Capital is the figure of the big Other which not only remains
operative when all the traditional embodiments of the symbolic big
Other disintegrate, but even directly causes this disintegration: far from
being confronted with the abyss of their freedom that is, laden with the burden
of responsibility that cannot be alleviated by the helping hand of Tradition or Nature todays subject is
perhaps more than ever caught in an inexorable compulsion that effectively runs his life. The irony of
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history is that, in the Eastern European ex-Communist countries, the reformed Communists were the
first to learn this lesson. Why did many of them return to power via free elections in the mid 1990s? This
very return offers the ultimate proof that these states have in fact entered capitalism. That is to say: what
do ex-Communists stand for today? Due to their privileged links with the newly emerging capitalists
(mostly members of the old nomenklatura privatizing the companies they once ran), they are first and
foremost the party of big Capital; furthermore, to erase the traces of their brief but none the less rather
traumatic experience with politically active civil society, they as a rule ferociously advocate a quick
deideologization, a retreat from active civil society engagement into passive, apolitical consumerism
the very two features which characterize contemporary capitalism. So dissidents are astonished to
discover that they played the role of vanishing mediators on the way from socialism to capitalism, in
which the same class as before rules under a new guise. It is therefore wrong to claim that the ex-
Communists return to power shows how people are disappointed by capitalism and long for the old
socialist security in a kind of Hegelian negation of negation, it is only with the ex-Communists
return to power that socialism was effectively negated that is to say, what the political analysts
(mis)perceive as disappointment with capitalism is in fact disappointment with the ethico-political
enthusiasm for which there is no place in normal capitalism.36 We should thus reassert the old Marxist
critique of reification: today, emphasizing the depoliticized objective economic logic against allegedly
outdated forms of ideological passions is the predominant ideological form, since ideology is always
self-referential, that is, it always defines itself through a distance towards an Other dismissed and
denounced as ideological.~~ For that precise reason because the depoliticized economy is the
disavowed fundamental fantasy of postmodern politics a properly political act would necessarily
entail the repoliticization of the economy: within a given situation, a gesture counts as an act only in so
far as it disturbs (traverses) its fundamental fantasy. In so far as todays moderate Left, from Blair to
Clinton, fully accepts this depoliticization, we are witnessing a strange reversal of roles: the only serious
political force which continues to question the unrestrained rule of the market is the populist extreme
Right (Buchanan in the USA; Le Pen in France). When Wall Street reacted negatively to a fall in the
unemployment rate, the only one to make the obvious point that what is good for Capital is obviously not
what is good for the majority of the population was Buchanan. In contrast to the old wisdom according to
which the extreme Right openly says what the moderate Right secretly thinks, but doesnt dare say in
public (the open assertion of racism, of the need for strong authority and the cultural hegemony of
Western values, etc.), we are therefore approaching a situation in which the extreme Right openly says
what the moderate Left secretly thinks, but doesnt dare say in public (the necessity to curb the freedom
of Capital). One should also not forget that todays rightist survivalist militias often look like a
caricaturized version of the extreme militant leftist splinter groups of the l960s: in both cases we are
dealing with radical anti-institutional logic that is, the ultimate enemy is the repressive State apparatus
(the FBI, the Army, the judicial system) which threatens the groups very survival, and the group is
organized as a tight disciplined body in order to be able to withstand this pressure. The exact counterpoint
to this is a Leftist like Pierre Bourdieu, who defends the idea of a unified Europe as a strong social state,
guaranteeing the minimum of social rights and welfare against the onslaught of globalization: it is
difficult to abstain from irony when one sees a radical Leftist raising barriers against the corrosive global
power of Capital, so fervently celebrated by Marx. So, again, it is as if the roles are reversed today:
Leftists support a strong State as the last guarantee of social and civil liberties against Capital; while
Rightists demonize the State and its apparatuses as the ultimate terrorist machine. Of course, one should
fully acknowledge the tremendous liberating impact of the postmodern politicization of domains which
were hitherto considered apolitical (feminism, gay and lesbian politics, ecology, ethnic and other so-
called minority issues): the fact that these issues not only became perceived as inherently political but also
gave birth to new forms of political subjectivization thoroughly reshaped our entire political and cultural
landscape. So the point is not to play down this tremendous advance in favour of the return to some new
version of so-called economic essentialism; the point is, rather, that the depoliticization of the economy
generates the populist New Right with its Moral Majority ideology, which today is the main obstacle to
the realization of the very (feminist, ecological...) demands on which postmodern forms of political
subjectivization focus. In short, I am pleading for a return to the primacy of the economy not to the
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detriment of the issues raised by postmodern forms of politicization, but precisely in order to create the
conditions for the more effective realization of feminist, ecological, and so on, demands. A further
indicator of the necessity for some kind of politicization of the economy is the overtly irrational
prospect of concentrating quasi-monopolistic power in the hands of a single individual or corporation,
like Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates. If the next decade brings the unification of the multitude of
communicative media in a single apparatus reuniting the features of interactive computer, TV, video- and
audio-phone, video and CD player, and if Microsoft actually succeeds in becoming the quasi-
monopolistic owner of this new universal medium, controlling not only the language used in it but also
the conditions of its application, then we obviously approach the absurd situation in which a single agent,
exempt from public control, will in effect dominate the basic communicational structure of our lives and
will thus, in a way, be stronger than any government. This opens up the prospect of paranoiac scenarios:
since the digital language we shall all use will none the less be man-made, constructed by programmers,
is it not possible to imagine the corporation that owns it ins.talling in it some special secret program
ingredient which will enable it to control us, or a virus which the corporation can trigger, and thus bring
our communication to a halt? When biogenetic corporations assert their ownership of our genes through
patenting them, they also give rise to a similar paradox of owning the innermost parts of our body, so that
we are already owned by a corporation without even being aware of it. The prospect we are confronting is
thus that both the communicational network we use and the genetic language we are made of will be
owned and controlled by corporations (or even a corporation) out of public control. Again, does not the
very absurdity of this prospect the private control of the very public base of our communication and
reproduction, the very network of our social being impose a kind of socialization as the only solution?
In other words, is not the impact of the so-called information revolution on capitalism the ultimate
exemplification of the old Marxian thesis that at a certain stage of their development, the material
productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or what is but
a legal expression of the same thing with the property relations within which they have been at work
hitherto?3~ Do not the two phenomena we have mentioned (the unpredictable global consequences of
decisions made by private companies; the patent absurdity of owning a persons genome or the media
individuals use for communication), to which one should add at least the antagonism contained in the
notion of owning (scientific) knowledge (since knowledge is by nature neutral to its propagation, that is,
it is not worn out by its spread and universal use), explain why todays capitalism has to resort to more
and more absurd strategies to sustain the economy of scarcity in the sphere of information, and thus to
contain within the frame of private property and market relations the demon it has unleashed (say, by
inventing ever new modes of preventing the free copying of digitalized information)? In short, does not
the prospect of the informational global village signal the end of market relations (which are by
definition, based on the logic of scarcity), at least in the sphere of digitalized information? After the
demise of Socialism, the ultimate fear of Western capitalism is that another nation or ethnic group will
beat the West on its own capitalist terms, combining the productivity of capitalism with a form of social
mores foreign to us in the West: in the l970s, the object of fear and fascination was Japan; while now,
after a short interlude of fascination with SouthEast Asia, attention is focusing more and
more on China as the next superpower, combining capitalism with the
Communist political structure. Such fears ultimately give rise to purely
phantasmic formations, like the image of China surpassing the West in
productivity while retaining its authoritarian sociopolitical structure
one is tempted to designate this phantasmic combination the Asiatic
mode of capitalist production. Against these fears, one should
emphasize that China will, sooner or later, pay the price for the unbridled
development of capitalism in new forms of social unrest and instability:
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the winning formula of combining capitalism with the Asiatic closed
ethical community life-world is doomed to explode. Now, more than ever, one
should reassert Marxs old formula that the limit of capitalism is Capital itself: the danger to
Western capitalism comes not from outside, from the Chinese or some
other monster beating us at our own game while depriving us of Western
liberal individualism, but from the inherent limit of its own process of
colonizing ever new (not only geographic but also cultural, psychic, etc.) domains, of
eroding the last resistant spheres of non-reflected substantial being,
which has to end in some kind of implosion, when Capital will no longer
have any substantial content outside itself to feed on.39 One should take
Marxs metaphor of Capital as a vampire-like entity literally: it needs
some kind of pre-reflexive natural productivity (talents in different domains of art,
inventors in science, etc.) in order to feed on its own blood, and thus to reproduce
itself when the circle closes itself, when reflexivity becomes thoroughly universal, the whole system
is threatened. Another sign which points in this direction is how, in the sphere of what Adorno and
Horkheimer called Kulturindustrie, the desubstantialization and/or reflexivity of the production process
has reached a level that threatens the whole system with global implosion. Even in high art, the recent
fashion for exhibitions in which everything is permitted and can pass as an art object, up to mutilated
animal bodies, betrays this desperate need of cultural Capital to colonize and include in its circuit even the
most extreme and pathological strata of human subjectivity. Paradoxically and not without irony
the first musical trend which was in a way fabricated, exploited for a short time and very soon forgotten,
since it lacked the musical substance to survive and attain the status of classics like the early rock of the
Beatles and Rolling Stones, was none other than punk, which simultaneously marked the strongest
intrusion of violent working-class protest into mainstream pop culture in a kind of mocking version of
the Hegelian infinite judgement, in which opposites directly coincide, the raw energy of social protest
coincided with the new level of commercial prefabrication which, as it were, creates the object it sells out
of itself, with no need for some natural talent to emerge and be subsequently exploited, like Baron
Munchhausen saving himself from the swamp by pulling himself up by his own hairs. Do we not
encounter the same logic in politics, where the point is less and less to follow a coherent global
programme but, rather, to try to guess, by means of opinion polls, what the people want, and offer them
that? Even in theory, doesnt the same hold for cultural studies in the Anglo-Saxon domain, or for the
very theory of the risk society?40 Theorists are less and less involved in substantial theoretical work,
restraining themselves to writing short interventions which mostly display their anxiety to follow the
latest theoretical trends (in feminism, for example, perspicacious theorists soon realized that radical social
constructionism gender as pefformatively enacted, and so on is out; that people are getting tired of
it; so they start to rediscover psychoanalysis, the Unconscious; in postcolonial studies, the latest trend is
to oppose multiculturalism as a false solution .. .). The point is thus not simply that cultural studies or risk
society theory is insufficient on account of its content: an inherent commodification is
discernible in the very form of the social mode of functioning of what
are supposed to be the latest forms of the American or European academic
Left. This reflexivity, which is also a crucial part of the second modernity, is what the
theorists of the reflexive risk society tend to leave out of consideration.41

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Links Oil Wars

US oil investment ensures militarization of foreign countries with
resources this results in violent conflicts and forced occupations
Michael T. Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at
Hampshire College, October 9, 2004, online:
http://www.countercurrents.org/peakoil-klare091004.htm, accessed
March 13, 2005
American leaders have responded to this systemic challenge to stability
in oil-producing areas in a consistent fashion: by employing military
means to guarantee the unhindered flow of petroleum. This approach was first
adopted by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations after World War II, when Soviet adventurism in
Iran and pan-Arab upheavals in the Middle East seemed to threaten the safety of Persian Gulf oil
deliveries. It was given formal expression by President Carter in January 1980, when, in response to the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the Islamic revolution in Iran, he announced that the secure flow of
Persian Gulf oil was in "the vital interests of the United States of America," and that in protecting this
interest we would use "any means necessary, including military force." Carter's principle of using force to
protect the flow of oil was later cited by President Bush the elder to justify American intervention in the
Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, and it provided the underlying strategic rationale for our recent invasion of
Iraq. Originally, this policy was largely confined to the world's most important oil-producing region, the
Persian Gulf. But given America's ever-growing requirement for imported petroleum, U.S. officials
have begun to extend it to other major producing zones, including the Caspian
Sea basin, Africa, and Latin America. The initial step in this direction was taken by President Clinton,
who sought to exploit the energy potential of the Caspian basin and, worrying about instability in the area,
established military ties with future suppliers, including Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, and with the pivotal
transit state of Georgia. It was Clinton who first championed the construction of a pipeline from Baku to
Ceyhan and who initially took steps to protect that conduit by boosting the military capabilities of the
countries involved. President Bush junior has built on this effort, increasing military aid to these states
and deploying American combat advisers in Georgia; Bush is also considering the establishment of
permanent U.S. military bases in the Caspian region. Typically, such moves are justified as being crucial
to the "war on terror." A close reading of Pentagon and State Department documents shows, however,
that anti-terrorism and the protection of oil supplies are closely related in administration thinking. When
requesting funds in 2004 to establish a "rapid-reaction brigade" in Kazakhstan, for example, the State
Department told Congress that such a force is needed to "enhance Kazakhstan's capability to respond to
major terrorist threats to oil platforms" in the Caspian Sea. As noted, a very similar trajectory is now
under way in Colombia. The American military presence in oil-producing areas of Africa, though less
conspicuous, is growing rapidly. The Department of Defense has stepped up its arms deliveries to military
forces in Angola and Nigeria, and is helping to train their officers and enlisted personnel; meanwhile,
Pentagon officials have begun to look for permanent U.S. bases in the area, focusing on Senegal, Ghana,
Mali, Uganda, and Kenya. Although these officials tend to talk only about terrorism when explaining the
need for such facilities, one officer told Greg Jaffe of the Wall Street Journal in June 2003 that "a key
mission for U.S. forces [in Africa] would be to ensure that Nigeria's oil fields, which in the future could
account for as much as 25 percent of all U.S. oil imports, are secure." An increasing share of
our naval forces is also being committed to the protection of foreign oil
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shipments. The Navy's Fifth Fleet, based at the island state of Bahrain, now spends much of its time
patrolling the vital tanker lanes of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz -- the narrow waterway
connecting the Gulf to the Arabian Sea and the larger oceans beyond. The Navy has also
beefed up its ability to protect vital sea lanes in the South China Sea -- the
site of promising oil fields claimed by China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia -- and in the
Strait of Malacca, the critical sea-link between the Persian Gulf and America's allies in East Asia.
Even Africa has come in for increased attention from the Navy. In order to
increase the U.S. naval presence in waters adjoining Nigeria and other key producers, carrier battle groups
assigned to the European Command (which controls the South Atlantic) will shorten their future visits to
the Mediterranean "and spend half the time going down the west coast of Africa," the command's top
officer, General James Jones, announced in May 2003. This, then, is the future of U.S. military
involvement abroad. While anti-terrorism and traditional national security
rhetoric will be employed to explain risky deployments abroad, a
growing number of American soldiers and sailors will be committed to
the protection of overseas oil fields, pipeline, refineries, and tanker
routes. And because these facilities are likely to come under increasing attack from guerrillas and
terrorists, the risk to American lives will grow accordingly. Inevitably, we will pay a higher price in blood
for every additional gallon of oil we obtain from abroad.

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Links Competitiveness/Innovation

Competitiveness makes environment and econ collapse inev
Bristow 9 (Gillian, School of City & Regional Planning, Cardiff
University, "Resilient regions: re-placeing regional competitiveness,"
Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2010, 3, 153167
In recent years, regional development strategies have been subjugated to the
hegemonic discourse of competitiveness, such that the ultimate
objective for all regional development policy-makers and practitioners
has become the creation of economic advantage through superior
productivity performance, or the attraction of new firms and labour (Bristow, 2005). A major
consequence is the developing ubiquitification of regional development strategies (Bristow, 2005;
Maskell and Malmberg, 1999). This reflects the status of competitiveness as a key
discursive construct (Jessop, 2008) that has acquired hugely significant
rhetorical power for certain interests intent on reinforcing capitalist
relations (Bristow, 2005; Fougner, 2006). Indeed, the competitiveness hegemony is
such that many policies previously considered only indirectly relevant to unfettered economic
growth tend to be hijacked in support of competitiveness agendas (for example
Raco, 2008; also Dannestam, 2008). This paper will argue, however, that a particularly narrow
discourse of competitiveness has been constructed that has a number of negative
connotations for the resilience of regions. Resilience is defined as the
regions ability to experience positive economic success that is socially
inclusive, works within environmental limits and which can ride global
economic punches (Ashby et al., 2009). As such, resilience clearly resonates with literatures on
sustainability, localisation and diversification, and the developing understanding of regions as
intrinsically diverse entities with evolutionary and context-specific development trajectories (Hayter,
2004). In contrast, the dominant discourse of competitiveness is placeless and increasingly associated
with globalised, growth-first and environmentally malign agendas (Hudson, 2005). However, this paper
will argue that the relationships between competitiveness and resilience are more complex than might at
first appear. Using insights from the Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach, which focuses on
understanding the construction, development and spread of hegemonic policy discourses, the paper will
argue that the dominant discourse of competitiveness used in regional development policy is narrowly
constructed and is thus insensitive to contingencies of place and the more nuanced role of competition
within economies. This leads to problems of resilience that can be partly overcome with the development
of a more contextualised approach to competitiveness. The paper is now structured as follows. It begins
by examining the developing understanding of resilience in the theorising and policy discourse around
regional development. It then describes the CPE approach and utilises its framework to explain both how
a narrow conception of competitiveness has come to dominate regional development policy and how
resilience inter-plays in subtle and complex ways with competitiveness and its emerging critique. The
paper then proceeds to illustrate what resilience means for regional development firstly, with reference to
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the Transition Towns concept, and then by developing a typology of regional strategies to show the
different characteristics of policy approaches based on competitiveness and resilience. Regional resilience
Resilience is rapidly emerging as an idea whose time has come in policy discourses around localities and
regions, where it is developing widespread appeal owing to the peculiarly powerful combination of
transformative pressures from below, and various catalytic, crisis-induced imperatives for change from
above. It features strongly in policy discourses around environmental management and sustainable
development (see Hudson, 2008a), but has also more recently emerged in relation to emergency and
disaster planning with, for example Regional Resilience Teams established in the English regions to
support and co-ordinate civil protection activities around various emergency situations such as the threat
of a swine flu pandemic. The discourse of resilience is also taking hold in discussions around desirable
local and regional development activities and strategies. The recent global credit crunch
and the accompanying increase in livelihood insecurity has highlighted
the advantages of those local and regional economies that have greater
resilience by virtue of being less dependent upon globally footloose
activities, having greater economic diversity, and/or having a
determination to prioritise and effect more significant structural change
(Ashby et al, 2009; Larkin and Cooper, 2009). Indeed, resilience features particular strongly in the grey
literature spawned by thinktanks, consultancies and environmental interest groups around the
consequences of the global recession, catastrophic climate change and the arrival of the era of peak oil for
localities and regions with all its implications for the longevity of carbon-fuelled economies, cheap, long-
distance transport and global trade. This popularly labelled triple crunch (New
Economics Foundation, 2008) has powerfully illuminated the potentially
disastrous material consequences of the voracious growth imperative at
the heart of neoliberalism and competitiveness, both in the form of
resource constraints (especially food security) and in the inability of the current
system to manage global financial and ecological sustainability. In so doing,
it appears to be galvinising previously disparate, fractured debates about the merits of the current system,
and challenging public and political opinion to develop a new, global concern with frugality,
egalitarianism and localism (see, for example Jackson, 2009; New Economics Foundation, 2008).

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Links State

The state both makes capital a coherent mode of social interaction
as well as constitutes the framework for global incorporation of
capitalism
Meszaros 95 (Istavan, Prof. Emeritus @ U of Sussex, Beyond Capital:
Towards a Theory of Transition, p 65)
The modern state as the comprehensive political command structure of
capital is both the necessary prerequisite for the transformation of
capitals at first fragmented units into a viable system, and the overall
framework for the full articulation and maintenance of the latter as a
global system. In this fundamental sense the state on account of its constitutive and permanently
sustaining role must be understood as an integral part of capitals material ground itself. Or it contributes
in a substantive way not only to the formation and consolidation of all of the major reproductive
structures of society but also to their continued functioning. However, the close interrelationship holds
also when viewed from the other side. For the modern state itself is quite inconceivable
without capital as its social metabolic foundation. This makes the material
reproductive structures of the capital system the necessary condition not only for the original constitution
but also for the continued survival (and appropriate historical transformations) of the modern state in all
its dimensions. These reproductive structures extend their Impact over everything, from the strictly
material/repressive instruments cid juridical institutions of the state all the way to the most mediated
ideological and political theorizations of its raison dtre and claimed legitimacy. It is on account
of this reciprocal determination that we must speak of a close match
between the social metabolic ground of the capital system on the one
hand, and the modern state as the totalizing political command structure
of the established productive and reproductive order on the other. For
socialists this is a most uncomfortable and challenging reciprocity. It puts into relief the sobering fact that
any intervention in the political domain even when it envisages the radical overthrow of the capitalist
state can have only a very limited impact in the realization of the socialist project. And the other way
round, the corollary of the same sobering fact is that, precisely because socialists have to confront the
power of capitals self-sustaining reciprocity under its fundamental dimensions, it should be never
forgotten or ignored - although the tragedy of seventy years (if Soviet experience is that it had been
willfully ignored that there can be no chance of overcoming the power of
capital without remaining faithful to the Marxian concern with the
withering away of the state.

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Links Environment

Economic contradiction force short-term thinking that results in
environmental catastrophe this causes extinction
Foster, 11 (John B, Capitalism and Degrowth-An Impossibility Theorem, Monthly Review Vol.
62, Iss. 8; pg. 26, 8 pgs , January 2011, proquest)
In the opening paragraph to his 2009 book, Storms of My Grandchildren, James Hansen, the world's
foremost scientific authority on global warming, declared: "Planet Earth, creation, the world in
which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in
imminent peril . . . .The startling conclusion is that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels
on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of
humanity itself - and the timetable is shorter than we thought."1 In making this declaration,
however, Hansen was only speaking of a part of the global environmental crisis currently threatening the
planet, namely, climate change. Recently, leading scientists (including Hansen) have proposed nine
planetary boundaries, which mark the safe operating space for the planet. Three of these boundaries
(climate change, biodiversity, and the nitrogen cycle) have already been crossed, while others, such as
fresh water use and ocean accidification, are emerging planetary rifts. In ecological terms, the economy
has now grown to a scale and intrusiveness that is both overshooting planetary boundaries and tearing
apart the biogeochemical cycles of the planet.2 Hence, almost four decades after the Club of Rome raised
the issue of "the limits to growth," the economic growth idol of modern society is once again facing a
formidable challenge.3 What is known as "degrowth economics," associated with the work of Serge
Latouche in particular, emerged as a major European intellectual movement in 2008 with the historic
conference in Paris on "Economic De-Growth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity," and has
since inspired a revival of radical Green thought, as epitomized by the 2010 "Degrowth Declaration" in
Barcelona. Ironically, the meteoric rise of degrowth (dcroissance in French) as a concept has coincided
over the last three years with the reappearance of economic crisis and stagnation on a scale not seen since
the 1930s. The degrowth concept therefore forces us to confront the questions: Is degrowth feasible in a
capitalist grow-or-die society - and if not, what does this say about the transition to a new society?
According to the Web site of the European degrowth project, "degrowth carries the idea of a voluntary
reduction of the size of the economic system which implies a reduction of the GDP."4 "Voluntary" here
points to the emphasis on voluntaristic solutions - though not as individualistic and unplanned in the
European conception as the "voluntary simplicity" movement in the United States, where individuals
(usually well-to-do) simply choose to opt out of the high-consumption market model. For Latouche, the
concept of "degrowth" signifies a major social change: a radical shift from
growth as the main objective of the modern economy, toward its opposite
(contraction, downshifting). An underlying premise of this movement is that, in the
face of a planetary ecological emergency, the promise of green technology has
proven false. This can be attributed to the Jevons Paradox, according to which greater
efficiency in the use of energy and resources leads not to conservation
but to greater economic growth, and hence more pressure on the
environment.5 The unavoidable conclusion - associated with a wide variety of political-economic
and environmental thinkers, not just those connected directly to the European degrowth project - is that
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there needs to be a drastic alteration in the economic trends operative since the Industrial Revolution. As
Marxist economist Paul Sweezy put it more than two decades ago: "Since there is no way to
increase the capacity of the environment to bear the [economic and
population] burdens placed on it, it follows that the adjustment must come
entirely from the other side of the equation. And since the disequilibrium
has already reached dangerous proportions, it also follows that what is
essential for success is a reversal, not merely a slowing down, of the
underlying trends of the last few centuries."6 Given that wealthy countries are already characterized by
ecological overshoot, it is becoming more and more apparent that there is indeed no alternative, as
Sweezy emphasized, but a reversal in the demands placed on the environment by the economy. This is
consistent with the argument of ecological economist Herman Daly, who has long insisted on the need for
a steady-state economy. Daly traces this perspective to John Stuart Mill's famous discussion of the
"stationary state" in his Principles of Political Economy, which argued that if economic expansion was to
level off (as the classical economists expected), the economic goal of society could then shift to the
qualitative aspects of existence, rather than mere quantitative expansion. A century after Mill, Lewis
Mumford insisted in his Condition of Man, first published in 1944, that not only was a stationary state in
Mill's sense ecologically necessary, but that it should also be linked to a concept of "basic communism . .
. [that] applies to the whole community the standards of the household," distributing "benefits according
to need" (a view that drew upon Marx). Today this recognition of the need to bring economic growth in
overdeveloped economies to a halt, and even to shrink these economies, is seen as rooted theoretically in
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, which established the basis
of modern ecological economics.7 Degrowth as such is not viewed, even by its proponents, as a stable
solution, but one aimed at reducing the size of the economy to a level of output that can be maintained
perpetually at a steady-state. This might mean shrinking the rich economies by as much as a third from
today's levels by a process that would amount to negative investment (since not only would new net
investment cease but also only some, not all, worn-out capital stock would be replaced). A steady-state
economy, in contrast, would carry out replacement investment but would stop short of new net
investment. As Daly defines it, "a steady-state economy" is "an economy with constant stocks of people
and artifacts, maintained at some desired, sufficient levels by low rates of maintenance 'throughput,' that
is, by the lowest feasible flows of matter and energy."8 Needless to say, none of this would come easily,
given today's capitalist economy. In particular, Latouche's work, which can be viewed as exemplary of
the European degrowth project, is beset with contradictions, resulting not from the concept of degrowth
perse, but from his attempt to skirt the question of capitalism. This can be seen in his 2006 article, "The
Globe Downshifted," where he argues in convoluted form: For some on the far left, the stock answer is
that capitalism is the problem, leaving us stuck in a rut and powerless to move towards a better society. Is
economic contraction compatible with capitalism? This is a key question, but one that it is important to
answer without resort to dogma, if the real obstacles are to be understood .... Eco-compatible
capitalism is conceivable in theory, but unrealistic in practice. Capitalism would require a
high level of regulation to bring about the reduction of our ecological footprint. The market system,
dominated by huge multinational corporations, will never set off down the virtuous path of eco-capitalism
of its own accord .... Mechanisms for countering power with power, as existed under the Keynes-Fordist
regulations of the Social-Democratic era, are conceivable and desirable. But the class struggle seems to
have broken down. The problem is: capital won .... A society based on economic contraction cannot exist
under capitalism. But capitalism is a deceptively simple word for a long, complex history. Getting rid of
the capitalists and banning wage labour, currency and private ownership of the means of production
would plunge society into chaos. It would bring large-scale terrorism. . ..We need to find another way out
of development, economism (a belief in the primacy of economic causes and factors) and growth: one that
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does not mean forsaking the social institutions that have been annexed by the economy (currency,
markets, even wages) but reframes them according to different principles.9

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Links Free Trade

Free trade is premised upon a biased ideology that forcibly
integrates the world into the global economy this causes wage
differentials and stratifies the world along a global rich and poor
divide
De Angelis, lecturer in Political Economy at University of East London, July 2000 [Massimo,
Trade, the global factory and the struggles for new commons, Paper presented at the CSE conference
"Global Capital and Global Struggles: Strategies, Alliances, and Alternatives"]
Let us be clear from the outset. There is no such as thing as "faire" trade
liberalisation. To the billion of people in the global economy, trade
liberalisation is part of the project to impose upon them the discipline of
the global factory. This discipline is the competing game itself. Whether is Pakistans textiles that
replaces Italian textile workers or a British telecommunication firm that make Thailand's telecom
workers redundant, it is the game itself that sucks. Whatever gains some group of
workers obtain due to their competitive advantage, some other group of
workers loses out, until they themselves are forced to take notice of a
new competitive force which came to displace them. And if we patently follow
the economists advice to wait for the long-term positive effect of trade, we are left to wonder: isnt it
now the long term of 200 hundreds yeas ago, of 100 years ago, of 50, 40 years ago, of twenty years ago?
The people who died as result of the new enclosures accompanying trade
liberalisation in all these years, the people who suffered war as result of
the disintegration of the social fabric brought about by structural
adjustment and associated export promotion, the people of any country
of the North has to run in the competing rat race no less, but even more
than in the past, just to acquire what is on average necessary to live with
dignity, the average people struggling to overcome an imposed condition
of scarcity when in fact we live in plenty, can we say these people have
benefited of the long term advantage of trade? Nonsense, nobody can make these
sorts of judgements. Without a proper assessment of human, social and environmental costs of modern
trade, one cannot even to start talking about long term or short term advantages of trade. Without
taking into consideration the voice of those without voice the rhetoric of
trade benefits is a bias rhetoric. If there is no way anybody can argue whether trade has
brought advantages or disadvantages, the only thing we can say with certainty is that because of current
patterns of trade the context in which our lives and struggles of today are located is different than the
context of our lives and struggles of yesterday and, if trade liberalisation continues, of tomorrow.
However, the recomposing factors of various movement in Seattle last November, can be summarised by
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the slogan no new round, WTO turnaround. With this slogan the movement sets against the
boundlessness of capitals accumulation, but there is more. No new round, all movements agree. "WTO
turnaround, here is the problem, because people start to ask and debate where to? The problem for us
is to identify, in the context of the large movement emerged in Seattle and that has set a temporary limit
to trade liberalisation, whether it is possible to start to promote a debate towards an independent position
of planetary civil society, one that does not bow to the easy traps of the free trade ideology. To do so, we
must open a debate on the contradictory nature of trade in this phase of
capitalist accumulation, its meaning and implications for a diverse
organisation of human and natural resources of the planet. To gain an
independent position of planetary civil society, we must start to think about proposals
of transformation of current society within a conceptual grid that is
independent from the main current dogmas that sustain capital's
discourse: competition and, especially, the meaning of growth. Behind these
unqualified concepts, there lies the project of todays capitals strategies.

LeDuc NeoLib

Links Hegemony

US hegemony is sustained by imperial domination of the globe this
situates the US as the global economic superpower the impact is
nuclear omnicide and ecological collapse
Foster 5 (John, Professor of Sociology, University of Oregon; Editor,
Monthly Review, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0905jbf.htm)
The unprecedented dangers of this new global disorder are revealed in the twin cataclysms to
which the world is heading at present: nuclear proliferation and hence increased chances of the outbreak
of nuclear war, and planetary ecological destruction. These are symbolized by the
Bush administrations refusal to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to limit nuclear weapons
development and by its failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol as a first step in controlling global warming. As
former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) Robert McNamara stated
in an article entitled Apocalypse Soon in the MayJune 2005 issue of Foreign Policy: The United
States has never endorsed the policy of no first use, not during my seven years as secretary or since. We
have been and remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weaponsby the decision of one person, the
presidentagainst either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do
so. The nation with the greatest conventional military force and the
willingness to use it unilaterally to enlarge its global power is also the
nation with the greatest nuclear force and the readiness to use it
whenever it sees fitsetting the whole world on edge. The nation that contributes
more to carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming than any
other (representing approximately a quarter of the worlds total) has become the greatest
obstacle to addressing global warming and the worlds growing
environmental problemsraising the possibility of the collapse of civilization itself if present
trends continue. The United States is seeking to exercise sovereign authority
over the planet during a time of widening global crisis: economic
stagnation, increasing polarization between the global rich and the
global poor, weakening U.S. economic hegemony, growing nuclear
threats, and deepening ecological decline. The result is a heightening of international
instability. Other potential forces are emerging in the world, such as the European Community and China,
that could eventually challenge U.S. power, regionally and even globally. Third world revolutions, far
from ceasing, are beginning to gain momentum again, symbolized by Venezuelas Bolivarian Revolution
under Hugo Chvez. U.S. attempts to tighten its imperial grip on the Middle East and its oil have had to
cope with a fierce, seemingly unstoppable, Iraqi resistance, generating conditions of imperial overstretch.
With the United States brandishing its nuclear arsenal and refusing to support international agreements on
the control of such weapons, nuclear proliferation is continuing. New nations, such as North Korea, are
entering or can be expected soon to enter the nuclear club. Terrorist blowback from
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imperialist wars in the third world is now a well-recognized reality, generating rising
fear of further terrorist attacks in New York, London, and elsewhere. Such vast and
overlapping historical contradictions, rooted in the combined and uneven
development of the global capitalist economy along with the U.S. drive
for planetary domination, foreshadow what is potentially the most
dangerous period in the history of imperialism. The course on which U.S and world
capitalism is now headed points to global barbarismor worse. Yet it is important to remember that
nothing in the development of human history is inevitable. There still remains an alternative paththe
global struggle for a humane, egalitarian, democratic, and sustainable society.
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Links Prolif

Proliferation is the result of global inequities that force arms races
as an expansion of capital accumulation
Callinicos, Director of the Centre for European Studies at Kings
College, in 04 [Alex, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, 2004 pg.
196-197]
Capitalism has not changed its spots. It is still based on the exploitation of the
working class, and liable to constant crises. The conclusion that Marx drew from this analysis, that
the working class must overthrow the system and replace it with a classless society, is even more urgent
now than in his day. For the military rivalries which are the form increasingly
assumed by competition between capitals now threaten the very survival
of the planet. As Marxs centenary approached, the fires of war flickered across the globein
Lebanon, Iran and Iraq, Kampuchea, southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan and the South
Atlantic. The accumulation of vast armouries of nuclear destruction by the
superpowers, missilerattling in the Kremlin, talk of limited and protracted nuclear war in
Washingtonthese cast a shadow over the whole of humanity. Socialist revolution is
an imperative if we are to change a world in the grip of economic depression and war fever, a world
where 30 million rot on Western dole queues and 800 million go hungry in the Third World. To that
extent, Marxs ideas are more relevant today than they were 100 years ago. Capitalism has tightened its
grip of iron on every portion of the planet since 1883, and is rotten-ripe for destruction, whether at its own
hands through nuclear war, or at the hands of the working class. The choice is between workers power or
the common ruination of the contending classesbetween socialism or barbarism. Many people who
genuinely wish to do something to remedy the present state of the world believe that this stress on the
working class is much too narrow. The existence of nuclear weapons threatens everyone, whether workers
or capitalists or whatever. Should not all classes be involved in remedying a problem which affects them
all? What this ignores is that what Edward Thompson has called exterminism the vast and
competing military apparatuses which control the arms raceis an
essential part of the working of capitalism today. No sane capitalist
desires a nuclear war (although some insane ones who believe that such a war would be the
prelude to the Second Coming now hold positions of influence in Washington). But sane or
insane, every capitalist is part of an economic system which is bound up
with military competition between nation-states. Only a class with the
interest and power to do away with capitalism can halt the march to
Armageddon. Marx always conceived of the working class as the class whose own
selfemancipation would also be the liberation of the rest of humanity. The socialist revolution to whose
cause he devoted his life can only be, at one and the same time, the emancipation of the working class and
the liberation of all the oppressed and exploited sections of society.
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Links Democracy
Capitalism forces democratic priorities to concede to the interests of
corporations that trades-off with genuine representation
Reich 7 (Robert, University of California Berkeley public policy professor and former U.S.
secretary of Labor, How capitalism is killing democracy, September/October 2007,
http://www.robertreich.org/reich/20070901.)
But citizens living in democratic nations arent similarly constrained. They have the ability to alter
the rules of the game so that the cost to society need not be so great. And yet, weve increasingly left
those responsibilities to the private sectorto the companies themselves and their squadrons of
lobbyists and public-relations expertspretending as if some inherent morality or corporate good
citizenship will compel them to look out for the greater good. But they have no responsibility to
address inequality or protect the environment on their own. We forget that they are simply duty
bound to protect the bottom line. Why has capitalism succeeded while
democracy has steadily weakened? Democracy has become
enfeebled largely because companies, in intensifying competition for
global consumers and investors, have invested ever greater sums in
lobbying, public relations, and even bribes and kickbacks, seeking
laws that give them a competitive advantage over their rivals. The
result is an arms race for political influence that is drowning out the
voices of average citizens. In the United States, for example, the fights that preoccupy
Congress, those that consume weeks or months of congressional staff time, are typically contests between
competing companies or industries. While corporations are increasingly writing
their own rules, they are also being entrusted with a kind of social
responsibility or morality. Politicians praise companies for acting
responsibly or condemn them for not doing so. Yet the purpose of
capitalism is to get great deals for consumers and investors. Corporate
executives are not authorized by anyoneleast of all by their investorsto balance profits against the
public good. Nor do they have any expertise in making such moral calculations. Democracy is
supposed to represent the public in drawing such lines. And the
message that companies are moral beings with social responsibilities
diverts public attention from the task of establishing such laws and
rules in the first place. It is much the same with what passes for corporate charity. Under
todays intensely competitive form of global capitalism, companies donate money to good causes only to
the extent the donation has public-relations value, thereby boosting the bottom line. But shareholders do
not invest in firms expecting the money to be used for charitable purposes. They invest to earn high
returns. Shareholders who wish to be charitable would, presumably, make donations to charities of their
own choosing in amounts they decide for themselves. The larger danger is that these conspicuous displays
of corporate beneficence hoodwink the public into believing corporations have charitable impulses that
can be relied on in a pinch. By pretending that the economic success corporations enjoy saddles
them with particular social duties only serves to distract the public from democracys responsibility
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to set the rules of the game and thereby protect the common good. The only way for the citizens in
us to trump the consumers in us is through laws and rules that make our purchases and
investments social choices as well as personal ones. A change in labor laws making it easier for
employees to organize and negotiate better terms, for example, might increase the price of products and
services. My inner consumer wont like that very much, but the citizen in me might think it a fair price to
pay. A small transfer tax on sales of stock, to slow the movement of capital ever so slightly, might give
communities a bit more time to adapt to changing circumstances. The return on my retirement fund might
go down by a small fraction, but the citizen in me thinks it worth the price.
Extended unemployment insurance combined with wage insurance
and job training could ease the pain for workers caught in the
downdrafts of globalization. Let us be clear: The purpose of
democracy is to accomplish ends we cannot achieve as individuals.
But democracy cannot fulfill this role when companies use politics to
advance or maintain their competitive standing, or when they
appear to take on social responsibilities that they have no real
capacity or authority to fulfill. That leaves societies unable to
address the tradeoffs between economic growth and social problems
such as job insecurity, widening inequality, and climate change. As a
result, consumer and investor interests almost invariably trump common concerns. The vast majority of
us are global consumers and, at least indirectly, global investors. In these roles we should strive for the
best deals possible. That is how we participate in the global market economy. But those private benefits
usually have social costs. And for those of us living in democracies, it is imperative to remember that we
are also citizens who have it in our power to reduce these social costs, making the true price of the goods
and services we purchase as low as possible. We can accomplish this larger feat only if we take our roles
as citizens seriously. The first step, which is often the hardest, is to get our thinking straight.
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***Impact Stuff***
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2NC Ethics

Economic engagement through free trade is premised upon a biased
ideology forcibly integrating the world into the global economy
this locks the world, dividing the rich and poor and preventing
movement
De Angelis, lecturer in Political Economy at University of East London, July 2000 [Massimo,
Trade, the global factory and the struggles for new commons, Paper presented at the CSE conference
"Global Capital and Global Struggles: Strategies, Alliances, and Alternatives"]
Let us be clear from the outset. There is no such as thing as "faire" trade
liberalisation. To the billion of people in the global economy, trade
liberalisation is part of the project to impose upon them the discipline of
the global factory. This discipline is the competing game itself. Whether is Pakistans textiles that
replaces Italian textile workers or a British telecommunication firm that make Thailand's telecom
workers redundant, it is the game itself that sucks. Whatever gains some group of
workers obtain due to their competitive advantage, some other group of
workers loses out, until they themselves are forced to take notice of a
new competitive force which came to displace them. And if we patently follow
the economists advice to wait for the long-term positive effect of trade, we are left to wonder: isnt it
now the long term of 200 hundreds yeas ago, of 100 years ago, of 50, 40 years ago, of twenty years ago?
The people who died as result of the new enclosures accompanying trade
liberalisation in all these years, the people who suffered war as result of
the disintegration of the social fabric brought about by structural
adjustment and associated export promotion, the people of any country
of the North has to run in the competing rat race no less, but even more
than in the past, just to acquire what is on average necessary to live with
dignity, the average people struggling to overcome an imposed condition
of scarcity when in fact we live in plenty, can we say these people have
benefited of the long term advantage of trade? Nonsense, nobody can make these
sorts of judgements. Without a proper assessment of human, social and environmental costs of modern
trade, one cannot even to start talking about long term or short term advantages of trade. Without
taking into consideration the voice of those without voice the rhetoric of
trade benefits is a bias rhetoric. If there is no way anybody can argue whether trade has
brought advantages or disadvantages, the only thing we can say with certainty is that because of current
patterns of trade the context in which our lives and struggles of today are located is different than the
context of our lives and struggles of yesterday and, if trade liberalisation continues, of tomorrow.
However, the recomposing factors of various movement in Seattle last November, can be summarised by
the slogan no new round, WTO turnaround. With this slogan the movement sets against the
LeDuc NeoLib

boundlessness of capitals accumulation, but there is more. No new round, all movements agree. "WTO
turnaround, here is the problem, because people start to ask and debate where to? The problem for us
is to identify, in the context of the large movement emerged in Seattle and that has set a temporary limit
to trade liberalisation, whether it is possible to start to promote a debate towards an independent position
of planetary civil society, one that does not bow to the easy traps of the free trade ideology. To do so, we
must open a debate on the contradictory nature of trade in this phase of
capitalist accumulation, its meaning and implications for a diverse
organisation of human and natural resources of the planet. To gain an
independent position of planetary civil society, we must start to think about proposals
of transformation of current society within a conceptual grid that is
independent from the main current dogmas that sustain capital's
discourse: competition and, especially, the meaning of growth. Behind these
unqualified concepts, there lies the project of todays capitals strategies.

Ethics First its an independent reason to vote neg you cannot
separate your ethical orientation from the way in which you come to
understand politics
Towards a Theory of Transition, p 409-410)
Politics and morality are so closely intertwined in the real world that it is
hardly imaginable to confront and resolve the conflicts of any age
without bringing into play the crucial dimensions of both. Thus, whenever it is
difficult to face the problems and contradictions of politics in the prevailing social order, theories of
morality are also bound to suffer the consequences. Naturally, this relationship tends to prevail also in the
positive direction. As the entire history of philosophy testifies, the authors of all major ethical works are
also the originators of the seminal theoretical works on politics; and vice versa, all serious
conceptualizations of politics have their necessary corollaries on the plane of moral discourse. This goes
for Aristotle as much as for Hobbes and Spinoza, and for Rousseau and Kant as much as for Hegel.
Indeed, in the case of Hegel we find his ethics fully integrated into his Philosophy of Right, i.e. his theory
of the state. This is why it is so astonishing to read in Lukcss Tactics and Ethics that Hegels system is
devoid of ethics: a view which he later mellows to saying that the Hegelian treatment of ethics suffers the
consequences of his system and the conservative bias of his theory of the state. It would be much more
correct to say that despite the conservative bias of his political conception Hegel is the author of the
last great systematic treatment of ethics. Compared to that, the twentieth century in the field of ethics (as
well as in that of political philosophy) is very problematical. No doubt this has a great deal
to do eith the ever narrowing margin of alternatives allowed by the
necessary mode of functioning of the global capital system which
produces the wisdom of there is no alternative. For, evidently, there can be no
meaningful moral discourse on the premiss that there is no alternative. Ethics is concerned
with the evaluation and implementation of alternative goals which
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individuals and social groups can actually set themselves in their
confrontations with the problems of their age. And this is where the
inescapability of politics makes its impact. For even the most intensely
committed investigation of ethics cannot be a substitute for a radical
critique of politics in its frustrating and alienating contemporary reality. The slogan
of there is no alternative did not originate in ethics; nor is it enough to reassert in
ethical/ontological terms the need for alternatives, no matter how
passionately this is felt and predicated. The pursuit of viable alternatives
to the destructive reality of capitals social order in all its forms without which the socialist project is
utterly pointless is a practical matter. The role of morality and ethics is
crucial to the success of this enterprise. But there can be no hope of
success without the joint re-articulation of socialist moral discourse and
political strategy, taking fully on board the painful lessons of the recent past. For the left,
on the other hand, politics must be the art of building social force in
opposition to the system. The left must not, therefore, see the people or
popular social force as something given that can be manipulated and
only needs to be stirred up, but as something that has to be built.
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2NC Epistemology

Even if they win our alt doesnt solve you vote negative
neoliberalism frames decision making radically breaking away
from the way the status quo produces knowledge is key to solving
oppression
De Angelis 3 (Massimo, Dept of Economics at East London, The
commoner, http://www.ainfos.ca/03/jan/ainfos00479.html)
Once we acknowledge the existence of the galaxy of alternatives as they
emerge from concrete needs and aspirations, we can ground today's new political
discourse in the thinking and practice of the actualization and the coordination of
alternatives, so as each social node and each individual within it has the power to decide and take
control over their lives. It is this actualization and this coordination that rescues existing
alternatives from the cloud of their invisibility, because alternatives, as with any
human product, are social products, and they need to be recognized and
validated socially. Our political projects must push their way through beyond
the existing forms of coordination, beyond the visible fist of the state, beyond the invisible hand of
competitive markets, and beyond the hard realities of their interconnections that express
themselves in today forms of neoliberal governance, promoting cooperation through competition and
community through disempowerment. As I will argue, this new political discourse is
based on the project of defending and extending the space of commons,
at the same time building and strengthening communities through the social
fields.

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2NC Unsustainable
Tech innovation cant sustain capitalism they cede long-term
planning to short-term profits and consumption
Liodakis, 10 (George, Professor of Political Economy at the Technical University of Crete, Greece,
Political Economy, Capitalism, and Sustainable Development, Sustainability, 8/18/10, proquest)
Coming now to a more detailed explanation of this increasing ecological rift, we might stress that, under
capitalism, an increase in labour productivity is essentially tantamount to a reduction in the amount of
abstract socially necessary labour required for the production of any particular commodity (including
labour power itself), which is a condition for an increased extraction and appropriation of surplus value
[19]. This, as I have noted, is the dominant goal of capitalism, and hence all increases in the productivity
of labour should serve this goal. Under this context, an increasing productivity of labour
does not imply a process economizing on labour or any other productive
resources. On the contrary, insofar as capital can proceed with a free appropriation of nature as a gift
to capital, there will be a permanent bias towards developing a labour-
saving technology, but this technology is conducive to a maximum
throughput of natural resources and energy, which further implies a
rapidly increasing depletion of natural resources and an increasing
pollution contributing to a systemic environmental degradation. A
labour-saving technology, therefore, and a rising productivity of labour do
not necessarily imply an increasing social and ecological efficiency, but
rather an increasing potential for material and energy throughput, with
an enhanced ecologically damaging impact. What is more, even a resource-
saving technological innovation cannot have, under capitalism, an
environmentally protective impact insofar as it will, most likely, imply
lower commodity prices and hence an increasing market demand, which
will result in an increased (rather than decreased) extraction of the natural
resource concerned. This implication is clearly related with the so-called Jevons Paradox
[10,14,18]. Economic efficiency, at a societal level, is not simply a technical issue (a matter of
input/output relation) and should not be understood, in general, as market (capitalist) efficiency. In fact it
is largely determined, not only by the dominant goals of production, but also by the prevailing social
relations and the scale of production, as well as relations of distribution and property regimes. Apart from
other reasons, it should be noted that, insofar as negative externalities (cost shifting) are not taken into
account and positive externalities are insufficiently utilized due to the fragmented and (individually)
antagonistic character of capitalist production, a maximum social efficiency goal cannot be achieved
under capitalism, and this has clear and significant ecological implications [14,16,18,23]. This would also
largely apply within a context of market socialism, but on this issue we will return below. It should
further be stressed that the expropriation and privatization of common property under contemporary
capitalism has increased class tensions, economic inequality and environmental degradation, while mal-
distribution and inequality undermine economic efficiency and the sustainability of production [16,17,30-
32]. On the other hand, a large number of studies have recently questioned the assumed efficiency of
private property and pointed out a remarkably efficient allocation and utilization of resources in some
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traditional or alternative property regimes, such as common property or open access regimes, which partly
explains the long run sustainability of these regimes [18,31-34]. Despite this evidence, the rapid
privatization and commodification of natural resources within the context of the current neoliberal and
rapidly globalizing capitalism, along with the commodification of scientific research and technological
innovation, tend to a detrimental and multifaceted ecological impact [35]. Among other forms of this
ecological degradation, one might stress the rapid loss of biological diversity
and the recent dramatic climate changes, as having far-reaching both
ecological and economic implications. While this ecological degradation
may imply an upward push of the regulating cost of production without
immediately putting absolute barrier to the reproduction of capital, this
process cannot continue without ultimately causing crucial and perhaps
insurmountable economic and environmental problems. Here, of course, we
need to take into account the possibility of extending nature, of producing a second nature or alternative
natures, which may have important implications for the sustainability of capitalism. There is an extensive
research concerning this production of a second nature or alternative natures and their socioeconomic
and ecological implications [29,36-38]. As E. Swyngedouw points out: While one sort of sustainability
seems to be predicated upon feverishly developing new natures ... forcing nature to act in a way we deem
sustainable or socially necessary, the other type is predicated upon limiting or redressing our intervention
in nature, returning it to a presumably more benign condition so that human and non-human sustainability
in the medium and long term can be assured. Despite the apparent contradictions of these two ways of
becoming sustainable (one predicated upon preserving natures status quo, the other predicated upon
producing new natures), they share the same basic vision that technonatural and sociometabolic
interactions are urgently needed if we wish to secure the survival of the planet and much of what it
contains [39]. Although the possibility of producing new nature may extent the potential terrain of
capitalist accumulation, and this may have important implication for an epoch characterized by a
tendency towards a universal subsumption of nature under capital, it must be stressed that it does not
imply that capitalism could ever escape all natural constraints. It is a rather limited and consequential
potential [40]. Distinct from this potential of producing new nature, Neo-Malthusian approaches to the
environmental problem, by assuming a finite availability of natural resources, have tended to overstress
natural limits, presenting them usually in a naturalistic and absolute manner, while blaming
overpopulation as the main source of environmental degradation and crisis [4,6]. On the other hand, Marx
and contemporary Marxists, without ignoring natural and biological limits, conceive that
social (organizational) or technological factors may, occasionally, relax or defer
such limits. Reflecting on Marxs view, P. Burkett points out that, with its exploitative
scientific development of productive forces, its in-built tendency to
reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale, and the attendant
extension of productions natural limits to the global, biospheric level,
capitalism is the first society capable of a truly planetary environmental
catastrophe, one that could ultimately threaten even capitals own
material requirements [23]. As I have argued, referring to a particular example, The
increasing water scarcity, the declining quality of water, and the
inequitable pattern of its use across countries and in each particular
country, along with a green-house warming that increasingly dries up
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mother earth, are not of course the result of some natural evolution, nor
mainly the result of overpopulation, but rather an outcome of a few
centuries of capitalist development and a particularly rapid economic
growth during the last half of the twentieth century [14]. In this case, as also in
the case of energy, neo-Malthusian approaches are misleading insofar as they naturalize external limits
(emphasizing natural scarcity), while largely ignoring the potentially important impact of drastic
technological and organizational changes on both the supply and the demand side. On the latter side,
quantitative and qualitative developments in social needs may be more the result of changes in technology
and social organization, than the result of any population growth. But more importantly, neo-Malthusian
approaches are misleading because they erroneously divorce the allocation of resources from the scale of
production and, taking at face value the presumable allocative efficiency of the market mechanism, end
up stressing a fixed scale of production and hence a steady-state model as a necessary condition for the
sustainability of capitalism [41]. As R. Smith has plausibly argued, however, economic growth (and
growthmania) is an inherent tendency of the market system and capitalism, and therefore a sustainability
of capitalism through a steady-state adjustment is impossible [42]. It becomes rather clear from the
preceding analysis and an increasing number of studies that capitalism, as a specific mode of production,
tends to undermine the most basic conditions of ecological sustainability, jeopardizing thus the survival of
human beings and of the capitalist system itself [14,15,43,44]. It would be rather misleading,
however, to consider ecological sustainability separately from the
conditions of economic and social sustainability of capitalism. Although this
is not the place to expand on the deeper causes of the currently evolving and aggravated economic crisis,
which tends to directly and indirectly undermine the conditions of economic and social sustainability of
capitalism, we should briefly take into account the fundamental role of the law of the tendency of the rate
of profit to fall [28], lying behind the overaccumulation crisis of the early 1970s which continues, with
some fluctuations, until the currently aggravated worldwide recession. This crisis, through a variety of
processes and mechanisms, has fuelled the exacerbation of ecological crisis in various forms. Among
these processes, we might consider the intensification of capitalist competition, the increasing
externalities (cost-shifting), and the over-exhaustive exploitation of both labour power and natural
resources. At the same time, there is an equally important dialectical feedback of the exacerbated
ecological crisis on the further aggravation of economic and social crisis. At this point it may be pertinent
to briefly address the dematerialization hypothesis as it might possibly have significant implications for
both ecological crisis (reduction of materials and energy use) and the economic crisis caused by a rising
organic composition of capital, namely the relation between constant to variable capital (C/V), and falling
profits rates (as noted above). According to this hypothesis, the increasing information and knowledge
content of production in modern capitalism, along with a relative expansion of the sector of services and a
more energy-efficient technology imply a significant reduction in the material requirements of
production. There are good reasons however, to argue that this dematerialization has not any significant
real dimensions [45,46]. More importantly, I would further argue that this presumable dematerialization
trend cannot have a significant impact on the material requirements of production, negating the tendency
towards a rising composition of capital. The capitalist imperatives behind this rising organic composition
of capital relate to three interrelated processes. In the first place, any process of production in capitalism
encompasses a use-value production and a valorization process, and labour has necessarily to be
materialized through the use and transformation of energy and natural resources. Secondly, competition
implies the need of an incessant mechanization and automation drive aiming at an increased labour
productivity. Thirdly, the capitalist need to discipline and exploit labour in production can again be met
by an increasing mechanization. This increasing mechanization requires increased energy and resource
use and implies further a potentially maximum throughput of material resources with a minimum labour
power. It follows, therefore, that these necessities cannot be significantly changed by any
dematerialization trend, and hence it cannot have any significant ameliorating impact of economic and
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ecological crisis. Capital, of course, deploys all sorts of strategies and methods to
stave off or ameliorate crisis, and popular pressure may also have some
effect in limiting the implications of economic and ecological crisis.
Despite this pressure and all attempts or policies aiming at an ecological
adjustment, however, it is rather impossible to adequately tackle the
ecological problem within the context of the currently prevailing
capitalist relations of production [10,14,18,21]. As the evidence available indicates, most
of these attempts, aiming at a green redevelopment, dematerialization and a decoupling of capitalist
economic growth from its negative ecological impact, have rather poor effects and cannot over all ensure
the conditions for the sustainability of capitalism [46]. And as M. Singer notes, although
capitalism has produced an impressive array of technological
innovations, as a global system it is characterized by inherent features
that make it unsustainable and, further, that current efforts to implement
green modifications to increase sustainability do not really address the
central environment-society contradictions of this socioeconomic
system [44]. It becomes increasingly clear that the growing metabolic rift between society and
nature, the exacerbated economic and ecological crisis, the expanding commodification of environmental
goods and the rapid shrinkage of the public goods provision lead to an increasing degradation in the
quality of life and undermine the required conditions for a sustainable human development [17,18,27].
While sustainable human development should be considered as being a major concern by itself and a
crucial condition for the overall sustainability of society, mainstream theorizing and policy
implementation regarding sustainable development are essentially concerned only with the sustainability
of capitalist profitability (and growth), and not with the sustainability of the ecosystem or the conditions
required for a sustainable human development. According to Burketts interpretation of Marx, the
intensification of the contradiction between production for profit and production for the satisfaction of
human needs is a condition for capitalisms historical crisis, [which] represents a generalized crisis of
capitalist relations as a form of human-need satisfaction and human development, and this cannot be
reduced to long-run profitability problems [23]. It is such a crisis that we face today, which clearly
manifests the economic, ecological and social un-sustainability of the capitalist mode of production. The
preceding analysis confirms our argument that a specific treatment of the social organization of
production, which is essentially ignored by mainstream economics, is crucial for exploring the conditions
of social and ecological sustainability. In light of the barriers to capitalist sustainability associated with
the immanent features of the CMP, several researchers clearly point to the need for a historical
transcendence of this particular mode of production [14,23,44,47]. The crucial question is, therefore, to
envisage the appropriate social forces and transitional processes, as well as the specific organizational
restructuring of society ensuring both social equity and sustainability, and ecological sustainability.

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Even if they win that its their burden to prove that
technological innovations solve fast enoughthe squo is a
disad to that
The system is unsustainable the alt is try or die
David Shearman 7, Emeritus professor of medicine at Adelaide
University, Secretary of Doctors for the Environment Australia, and an
Independent Assessor on the IPCC; and Joseph Wayne Smith, lawyer
and philosopher with a research interest in environmentalism, 2007, The
Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, p. 4-6
This impending crisis is caused by the accelerating damage to the natural
environment on which humans depend for their survival. This is not to deny that there
are other means that may bring catastrophe upon the earth. John Gray for example5 argues that destructive war is inevitable as
nations become locked into the struggle for diminishing resources. Indeed, Gray believes that war is caused by the same
instinctual behavior that we discuss in relation to environmental destruction. Gray regards population increases, environmental
degradation, and misuse of technology as part of the inevitability of war. War may be inevitable but it is
unpredictable in time and place, whereas environmental degradation is
relentless and has progressively received increasing scientific evidence.
Humanity has a record of doomsayers, most invariably wrong, which
has brought a justifiable immunity to their utterances. Warnings were
present in The Tales of Ovid and in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and in more recent times some of the
predictions from Thomas Malthus and from the Club of Rome in 1972, together
with the population bomb of Paul Ehrlich, have not eventuated. The
frequent apocalyptic predictions from the environmental movement are
unpopular and have been vigorously attacked. So it must be asked, what is different
about the present warnings? As one example, when Sir David King, chief scientist of the UK government,
states that in my view, climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today, more serious than the threat of
terrorism,6 how is this and other recent statements different from previous discredited prognostications? Firstly, they are
based on the most detailed and compelling science produced with the
same scientific rigor that has seen humans travel to the moon and create
worldwide communication systems. Secondly, this science embraces a range
of disciplines of ecology, epidemiology, climatology, marine and fresh
water science, agricultural science, and many more, all of which agree on
the nature and severity of the problems. Thirdly, there is virtual unanimity of
thousands of scientists on the grave nature of these problems. Only a handful of
skeptics remain. During the past decade many distinguished scientists, including numerous Nobel Laureates, have warned that
humanity has perhaps one or two generations to act to avoid global ecological catastrophe. As but one example of this
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multidimensional problem, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that global warming caused by
fossil fuel consumption may be accelerating.7 Yet climate change is but one of a host of
interrelated environmental problems that threaten humanity. The authors have seen
the veils fall from the eyes of many scientists when they examine all the scientific literature. They become advocates for a
fundamental change in society. The frequent proud statements on economic growth by treasurers and chancellors of the
exchequer instill in many scientists an immediate sense of danger, for humanity has moved one step
closer to doom. Science underpins the success of our technological and comfortable society. Who are the thousands
of scientists who issue the warnings we choose to ignore? In 1992 the Royal Society of London and the U.S. National Academy
of Sciences issued a joint statement, Population Growth, Resource Consumption and a Sustainable World,8 pointing out that the
environmental changes affecting the planet may irreversibly damage the earths capacity to maintain life and that humanitys own
efforts to achieve satisfactory living conditions were threatened by environmental deterioration. Since 1992 many more
statements by world scientific organizations have been issued.9 These substantiated that most environmental
systems are suffering from critical stress and that the developed countries are the main culprits. It
was necessary to make a transition to economies that provide increased human welfare and less consumption of energy and
materials. It seems inconceivable that the consensus view of all these
scientists could be wrong. There have been numerous international conferences of governments, industry
groups, and environmental groups to discuss the problems and develop strategy, yet widespread deterioration of the environment
accelerates. What is the evidence? The Guide to World Resources, 2000 2001: People and Ecosystems, The Fraying Web of
Life10 was a joint report of the United Nations Development Program, the United Nations Environment Program, the World
Bank, and the World Resources Institute. The state of the worlds agricultural, coastal
forest, freshwater, and grassland ecosystems were analyzed using 23
criteria such as food production, water quantity, and biodiversity. Eighteen of the criteria were
decreasing, and one had increased (fiber production, because of the destruction of forests). The report card on the
remaining four criteria was mixed or there was insufficient data to make a judgment. In 2005, The Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment Synthesis Report by 1,360 scientific experts from 95 countries was released.11 It stated that approximately 60
percent of the ecosystem services that support life on earthsuch as fresh
water, fisheries, and the regulation of air, water, and climateare being
degraded or used unsustainably. As a result the Millennium Goals agreed to by the UN in 2000 for
addressing poverty and hunger will not be met and human well-being will be seriously affected.
The alt is try or die most qualified, non-biased ev goes neg
ASU citing Nature 9 (International scientists set boundaries for survival. September 23, 2009.
https://asunews.asu.edu/20090923_planetaryboundaries. Citing Nature article A safe operating space for
humanity, Nature 461, 472-475 (24 September 2009). Authors: Johan Rockstrm, executive director of the
Stockholm Environment Institute and the Stockholm Resilience Centre and professor of natural resource
management at Stockholm University. Will Steffen professor at and executive director of the Australian National
University Climate Change Institute, member of the Australian Climate Commission. Kevin Noone, Professor of
Atmospheric Physics at the Stockholm Resilience Center at Stockholm University, sa Persson, Post-Doctoral
fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. F. Stuart Chapin, III, professor of Ecology at
the Department of Biology and Wildlife of the Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska, former President of
the Ecological Society of America. Eric F. Lambin, Professor at the Department of Geography and Geology at the
University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Timothy M. Lenton, Chair in Climate Change/Earth Systems
Science at the University of Exeter, Marten Scheffer, Professor of Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management
group at Wageningen University, Carl Folke, Professor of Systems Ecology at Stockholm University, fellow at The
Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber,
founding Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Chair of the German Advisory Council
on Global Change. Dr. Bjrn Nykvist is a Research Fellow at Stockholm Environment Institute at Stockholm
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University, Cynthia A. de Wit, Professor of Applied Environmental Science, Stockholm University, Terry Hughes,
Professor, Federation Fellow, and Centre Director at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, Sander
van der Leeuw, Director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, Henning
Rodhe, Professor emeritus of Chemical Meteorology, Sverker Srlin is a Professor in the Division of History of
Science and Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. Peter K. Snyder, assistant professor in the
Department of Soil, Water, and Climate and the Department of Forest Resources at the University of Minnesota,
Robert Costanza, Professor of Sustainability at Portland State University in Oregon, Professor and Senior Research
Fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and former Director of International Affairs at the Swedish Research
Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas). Professor Malin Falkenmark is a
globally renowned water expert and currently serves as Senior Scientific Advisor to the Stockholm International
Water Institute, Louise Karlberg, PhD, is a research fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Robert W. Corell is
an American global climate scientist, Principal for the Global Environment Technology Foundation, an Ambassador
for ClimateWorks, Professor II at the University of the Arctics new Institute of Circumpolar Reindeer Husbandry
and a Professor II at the University of Tromso. He is a Partner of the Sustainability Institute and its C-ROADS
Climate Interactive Initiative, and Head of US Office for the Global Energy Assessment, Dr. Victoria Fabry is a
Professor of Biological Sciences at California State University San Marcos and a Visiting Scientist at USCD Scripps
Institution of Oceanography, James Hansen, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, adjunct professor in the
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, Brian Walker, Chief of the Division of
Wildlife and Ecology at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Chairman of
the Board, Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics, Swedish Academy of Sciences, and chair of
Resilience Alliance. Diana Liverman, Professor and co-director of the University of Arizona Institute of the
Environment, Katherine Richardson is Professor in Biological Oceanography at the University of Copenhagen, Paul
Jozef Crutzen is a Dutch Nobel prize winning atmospheric chemist, professor at Department of Atmospheric
Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Jonathan Foley is the director of the Institute on the
Environment at the University of Minnesota, where he is a professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in the
Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior. Also, Nature is the world's most influential and highly cited
journal in the world, according to the 2010 Journal Citation Reports Science Edition (Thomson Reuters, 2011))
Human activities have already pushed the earth system beyond three of the
planet's biophysical thresholds, with consequences that are detrimental or even
catastrophic for large parts of the world; six others may well be crossed in the next decades,
conclude 29 European, Australian and U.S. scientists in an article in the Sept. 24 issue of the
scientific journal Nature. Both Arizona State University and the University of Arizona are represented
on the international list of co-authors of this groundbreaking report. Scientists have been warning for
decades that the explosion of human activity since the industrial revolution is pushing the earth's
resources and natural systems to their limits. The data confirm that 6 billion people are capable of
generating a global geophysical force the equivalent to some of the great forces of nature just by going
about their daily lives. This force has given rise to a new era Anthropocene in which human actions
have become the main driver of global environmental change. "On a finite planet, at some point, we
will tip the vital resources we rely upon into irreversible decline if our
consumption is not balanced with regenerative and sustainable activity," says co-author
Sander van der Leeuw, who directs the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State
University. Van der Leeuw is an archaeologist and anthropologist specializing in the long term impacts of
human activity on the landscape. He also co-directs ASU's Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative that
focuses ASU's interdisciplinary strength on large-scale problems where an integrated effort is essential to
finding solutions. Defining planetary boundaries It started with a fairly simple question: How much
pressure can the earth system take before it begins to crash? "Until now, the scientific community has not
attempted to determine the limits of the earth system's stability in so many dimensions and make a
proposal such as this. We are sending these ideas out through the Nature article to be vetted by the
scientific community at large," explains van der Leeuw, whose experience includes leading
interdisciplinary initiatives in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "We expect the debate on
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global warming to shift as a result, because it is not only greenhouse gas emissions that
threaten our planet's equilibrium. There are many other systems and they all interact ,
so that crossing one boundary may make others even more destabilized,"
he warns. Nine boundaries were identified, including climate change, stratospheric ozone, land use
change, freshwater use, biological diversity, ocean acidification, nitrogen
and phosphorus inputs to the biosphere and oceans, aerosol loading and chemical
pollution. The study suggests that three of these boundaries -climate change, biological diversity and
nitrogen input to the biosphere may already have been transgressed. "We must make these complicated
ideas clear in such a way that they can be widely applied. The threats are so enormous that it is too late to
be a pessimist," says van der Leeuw. "A safe operating space for humanity" Using an interdisciplinary
approach, the researchers looked at the data for each of the nine vital processes in the earth system and
identified a critical control variable. Take biodiversity loss, for example, the control variable is the species
extinction rate, which is expressed in extinctions per million species per year. They then explored how the
boundaries interact. Here, loss of biodiversity impacts carbon storage (climate change), freshwater,
nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, and land systems. In the Nature report titled "A safe operating space for
humanity," the scientists propose bold move: A limit for each boundary that would maintain the
conditions for a livable world. For biodiversity, that would be less than 10 extinctions per million species
per year. The current status is greater than 100 species per million lost per year, whereas the pre-industrial
value was 0.1-1. The researchers stress that their approach does not offer a complete roadmap for
sustainable development, but does provide an important element by identifying critical planetary
boundaries. "Human pressure on the earth system has reached a scale where abrupt global
environmental change can no longer be excluded. To continue to live and
operate safely, humanity has to stay away from critical hard-wired'
thresholds in earth's environment, and respect the nature of planet's climatic,
geophysical, atmospheric and ecological processes," says lead author professor Johan Rockstrm, director
of the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. "Transgressing planetary boundaries may be
devastating for humanity, but if we respect them we have a bright future for centuries ahead," he
continues. Alarm bells for Arizona "Our attempt to identify planetary boundaries that, if crossed, could
have serious environmental and social consequences has a special resonance in the southwest where
pressures on biodiversity, land use, and water are likely to intersect with climate change to create
tremendous challenges for landscapes and livelihoods," explains co-author Diana Liverman, a professor
of geography and development at the University of Arizona. Liverman, who also is professor of
environmental science and a senior fellow of Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute, is
currently attending an international climate conference at Oxford, United Kingdom. Participants are
discussing the implications for humans and earth ecosystems of a 4 degree Centigrade global temperature
rise. She adds: "Three of the boundaries we identify 350 parts per million of atmospheric carbon
dioxide, biodiversity extinction rates more than 10 times the background rate, and no more than 35
million tons of nitrogen pollution per year have already been exceeded with fossil fuel use, land use
change and agricultural pollution, driving us to unsustainable levels that are producing
real risks to our survival ." In addition to Liverman, Rockstrm and van der Leeuw, the
group of authors includes Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Will Steffen, Katherine Richardson, Jonathan
Foley and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen. Other authors are listed on the paper at http://www.nature.com.

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And that outweighs all your peace argumentsany 1% risk of
random negotiations are determined by human nature might
be able to solve but nature is non-negotiable-as soon as we
pass the tipping point we all die

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2NC Impact Extension
Neoliberal governmentality ensures war, disease, and
environmental collapse- economic decision-making views
people as a disposable resource for producing capital, only
stepping outside this frame for politics can avert extinction
Giroux 6 (Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network
Chair Professorship at McMaster University in Canada. Dirty
Democracy and State Terrorism: The Politics of the New
Authoritarianism in the United States, Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26.2 (2006) 163-177.)
While it would be ludicrous to suggest that the United States either represents a mirror image of fascist ideology or mimics the systemic
racialized terror of Nazi Germany, it is not unreasonable, as Hannah Arendt urged in The Origins of Totalitarianism, to learn to recognize how
different elements of fascism crystallize in different historical periods into new forms of
authoritarianism. Such antidemocratic elements combine in often unpredictable ways, and I
believe they can be found currently in many of the political practices, values, and policies that
[End Page 164] characterize U.S. sovereignty under the Bush administration. Unchecked power at the top of the
political hierarchy is increasingly matched by an aggressive attack on dissent throughout the body politic and fuels both a war abroad and a war at
home. The economic and militaristic powers of global capital spearheaded by U.S.
corporations and political interests appear uncurbed by traditional forms of national and international
sovereignty, the implications of which are captured in David Harvey's serviceable phrase "accumulation by dispossession."
Entire populations are now seen as disposable, marking a dangerous moment for the promise of a global
democracy.8 The discourse of liberty, equality, and freedom that emerged with modernity seems to have lost even its residual value as the central
project of democracy. State sovereignty is no longer organized around the struggle for
life but an insatiable quest for the accumulation of capital, leading to what Achille Mbembe
calls "necropolitics," or the destruction of human bodies.9 War, violence, and death have
become the principal elements shaping the biopolitics of the new authoritarianism that is emerging
in the United States and increasingly extending its reach into broader global spheres, from Iraq to a vast array of military outposts and prisons
around the world. As the state of emergency, in Giorgio Agamben's aptly chosen words, becomes the rule rather than the exception, a number
of powerful antidemocratic tendencies threaten the prospects for both American and global democracy.10 The first is a market
fundamentalism that not only trivializes democratic values and public concerns but also
enshrines a rabid individualism, an all-embracing quest for profits, and a social Darwinism in which misfortune is
seen as a weaknessthe current sum total being the Hobbesian rule of a "war of all against all" that replaces any vestige of shared responsibilities
or compassion for others. The values of the market and the ruthless workings of finance capital become the template for organizing the rest of
society. Everybody is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in
bottom-line, cost-effective terms as the neoliberal mantra "privatize or perish" is
repeated over and over again. Responsible citizens are replaced by an assemblage of
entrepreneurial subjects, each tempered in the virtue of self-reliance and forced to face the increasingly difficult
challenges of the social order alone. Freedom is no longer about securing equality, social justice, or the public welfare but about unhampered
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trade in goods, financial capital, and commodities. As the logic of capital trumps democratic sovereignty, low-intensity warfare at home chips
away at democratic freedoms, and high-intensity warfare abroad delivers democracy with bombs, tanks, and chemical warfare. The
global cost of these neoliberal commitments is massive human suffering and death, delivered not only in the form
of bombs and the barbaric practices of occupying armies but also in structural adjustment policies in which the drive for land, resources, profits,
and goods are implemented by global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Global
lawlessness and armed violence accompany the imperative of free trade, the virtues of a
market without boundaries, and the promise of a Western-style democracy imposed through military solutions,
ushering in the age of rogue sovereignty on a global scale. Under such conditions, human suffering and hardship reach unprecedented levels of
intensity. In a rare moment of truth, Thomas Friedman, the columnist for the New York Times, precisely argued for the use of U.S. power
including military forceto support this antidemocratic world order. He claimed that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without the
hidden fist. . . . And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy
and Marine Corps."11 As Mark Rupert points out, "In Friedman's twisted world, if people are to realize their deepest aspirationsthe longing for
a better life which comes from their very soulsthey must stare down the barrel of [End Page 165] Uncle Sam's gun."12 As neoliberals in the
Bush administration implement policies at home to reduce taxation and regulation while spending billions on wars abroad, they slash funds that
benefit the sick, the elderly, the poor, and young people. But public resources are diverted not only from
crucial domestic problems ranging from poverty and unemployment to hunger; they are also diverted
from addressing the fate of some 45 million children in "the world's poor
countries [who] will die needlessly over the next decade," as reported by the British-based group Oxfam.13 The U.S. commitment to
market fundamentalism elevates profits over human needs and consequently offers few displays of compassion, aid, or relief for millions of poor
and abandoned children in the world who do not have adequate shelter, who are severely hungry, who have no access to health care or safe water,
and who succumb needlessly to the ravages of AIDS and other diseases.14 For instance, as Jim Lobe points out, "U.S. foreign aid in 2003 ranked
dead last among all wealthy nations. In fact, its entire development aid spending in 2003 came to only ten percent of what it spent on the Iraq war
that year. U.S. development assistance comes to less than one-fortieth of its annual defense budget."15 Carol Bellamy, the executive director of
UNICEF, outlines the consequences of the broken promises to children by advanced capitalist countries such as the United States. She writes,
Today more than one billion children are suffering extreme deprivations
from poverty, war, and HIV/AIDS. The specifics are staggering: 640 million children without adequate
shelter, 400 million children without access to safe water, and 270 million children without access to basic health services. AIDS has orphaned 15
million children. During the 1990s alone, war forced 20 million children to leave their homes.16
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***Alt/Framework Stuff***
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2NC Alt Ext

Extend 1NC Herod individuals must embrace an explicit
rejection of capitalism; we must abandon the system only
overt refusal guts the system from within
a. No permutation compromise only beckons capital to
adapt itself and masquerade as reform while perpetuating
slavery uniquely worse because people become apathetic,
preventing true reform
b. Impact turn solvency deficits only a totalizing view can
see capitalism as its enemy
c. Inevitability is irrelevant such claims are only calls for
capitalism to sustain; instead we must challenge those
assumptions and dare to try regardless of the consequences

Ethics First its an independent reason to vote neg you cannot
separate your ethical orientation from the way in which you come to
understand politics
Politics and morality are so closely intertwined in the real world that it is
hardly imaginable to confront and resolve the conflicts of any age
without bringing into play the crucial dimensions of both. Thus, whenever it is
difficult to face the problems and contradictions of politics in the prevailing social order, theories of
morality are also bound to suffer the consequences. Naturally, this relationship tends to prevail also in the
positive direction. As the entire history of philosophy testifies, the authors of all major ethical works are
also the originators of the seminal theoretical works on politics; and vice versa, all serious
conceptualizations of politics have their necessary corollaries on the plane of moral discourse. This goes
for Aristotle as much as for Hobbes and Spinoza, and for Rousseau and Kant as much as for Hegel.
Indeed, in the case of Hegel we find his ethics fully integrated into his Philosophy of Right, i.e. his theory
of the state. This is why it is so astonishing to read in Lukcss Tactics and Ethics that Hegels system is
devoid of ethics: a view which he later mellows to saying that the Hegelian treatment of ethics suffers the
consequences of his system and the conservative bias of his theory of the state. It would be much more
correct to say that despite the conservative bias of his political conception Hegel is the author of the
last great systematic treatment of ethics. Compared to that, the twentieth century in the field of ethics (as
well as in that of political philosophy) is very problematical. No doubt this has a great deal
to do eith the ever narrowing margin of alternatives allowed by the
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necessary mode of functioning of the global capital system which
produces the wisdom of there is no alternative. For, evidently, there can be no
meaningful moral discourse on the premiss that there is no alternative. Ethics is concerned
with the evaluation and implementation of alternative goals which
individuals and social groups can actually set themselves in their
confrontations with the problems of their age. And this is where the
inescapability of politics makes its impact. For even the most intensely
committed investigation of ethics cannot be a substitute for a radical
critique of politics in its frustrating and alienating contemporary reality. The slogan
of there is no alternative did not originate in ethics; nor is it enough to reassert in
ethical/ontological terms the need for alternatives, no matter how
passionately this is felt and predicated. The pursuit of viable alternatives
to the destructive reality of capitals social order in all its forms without which the socialist project is
utterly pointless is a practical matter. The role of morality and ethics is
crucial to the success of this enterprise. But there can be no hope of
success without the joint re-articulation of socialist moral discourse and
political strategy, taking fully on board the painful lessons of the recent past. For the left,
on the other hand, politics must be the art of building social force in
opposition to the system. The left must not, therefore, see the people or
popular social force as something given that can be manipulated and
only needs to be stirred up, but as something that has to be built.

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Alt stuff LA specific
We should imagine post-neoliberal strategies as a starting-
point for movements toward alternative modes of
governance
Kaltwasser 11 (Cristbal Rovira, Foundation postdoctoral research
fellow at the Social Science Research Center Berlin, "Toward Post-
Neoliberalism in Latin America?," Latin American Research Review
Volume 46, Number 2, 2011, MUSE)
Although not all six books reviewed here use the term post-neoliberalism, they do assume that Latin
America is experiencing political change characterized by detachment from the principles of the
Washington Consensus, among other features. Many countries in the region are experimenting with
ideas and policies linked to the left rather than to the right. In Governance after Neoliberalismwhich
offers an overview in three chapters, followed by a series of single-case studiesGrugel and Riggirozzi
declare that their central question is "the extent to which genuinely new [End
Page 227] and alternative models of governance are emerging in
Latin America with respect to those framed under neoliberalism" (3). In
the same book, Corts argues that, "[i]nstead of a new, consolidated paradigm of social policy, we are
witnessing the emergence of gradual and tentative alternative approaches to
neoliberalism" (52). As these arguments suggest, the term post-neoliberalism signifies more the
intent to move beyond the Washington Consensus than any coherent, new model of governance.
Macdonald and Ruckert postulate in the introduction to their volume that "the post-neoliberal era is
characterized mainly by a search for progressive policy alternatives arising out of the many contradictions
of neoliberalism" (6). From this angle, the term post-neoliberalism refers to the
emergence of a new historical moment that puts into question the
technocratic consensus on how to achieve economic growth and deepen
democracy. Similarly, Roberts maintains that, "[s]ince it is not clear whether the region's new leftist
governments have identified, much less consolidated, viable alternatives to market liberalism, it is far too
early to claim that Latin America has entered a post-neoliberal era of development" (in Burdick, Oxhorn,
and Roberts, 1). Panizza offers a different and interesting point of view by analyzing how friends (e.g.,
experts associated with IFIs) and foes (e.g., organizers of the World Social Forum) alike have framed the
terms neoliberalism and Washington Consensus. As economists, technocrats, politicians, activists, and
intellectuals use them, the terms have different meanings. Yet Panizza proposes that neoliberalism
engages a narrative promoting the expansion of free-market economy, whereas Washington Consensus
refers to a set of policies that encourage fiscal discipline, the privatization of public enterprises,
liberalization of the labor market, and deregulation of the financial sector, among other prescriptions. In
consequence, post-neoliberalism seeks not only to contest the technocratic
monopolization of political space but also to favor the expansion of the
national state, particularly in the economic arena. Explanations for the Movement Beyond the
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Washington Consensus All six books offer rich explanations of Latin America's turn to the left and of the
rise of political forces that, through the ballot box or popular mobilization, seek to abandon the neoliberal
paradigm. Borrowing the notion of contentious politics from McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly,1 Silva
constructs, in three initial chapters, a theoretical framework that he then applies to four positive
(Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela) and two counterfactual examples (Chile and Peru). He argues
that market [End Page 228] reforms created significant economic and social
exclusion, thus leading to grievances and demands for change from the popular sector and, in some
cases, from the middle class. However, these episodes of neoliberal contention
depended on two factors: on the one hand, the development of associational power (creating
new organizations and recasting existing ones), and on the other hand,
horizontal linkages between new and traditional movements, as well
as between different social classes. Both factors are decisive in explaining why there has been either
substantial or little motivation for anti-neoliberal protest. Silva finds, for example, that in Peru,
"significant insurrectionary movements and a turn to authoritarianism that closed political space during
Fujimori's presidency inhibited the formation of associational power and horizontal linkages among social
movement organizations" (231). This explanation is shared by Roberts, who, in the introduction to
Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin America?, states that a bottom-up perspective helps
us understand that market reforms may unintentionally have sown the
seeds for protest. That is, the Washington Consensus may have brought with it demands by and on
behalf of the poor and disadvantaged. Lucero explains in this regard that "the neoliberal
moment in Latin America, understood as one providing new political opportunities, increased
economic threats, and clear targets, provided the conditions and catalysts for a new
wave of indigenous mobilization throughout the region" (in Burdick et al.,
64). Goldfrank, in Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin America?, similarly contends that the decentralization
arising from neoliberalism created new political arenas, which made municipal governments more
relevant as potential showcases for leftist actors. Though different in duration and design, Goldfrank's
case studies of the United Left in Lima, the Workers' Party in Porto Alegre,
the Broad Front in Montevideo, the Radical Cause in Caracas, and the Party of
the Democratic Revolution in Mexico City all illustrate that the left could learn
how to develop and implement a new political agenda from the
challenges it has faced.

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Alt Horizontalism
Horizontal organizing is key to producing alternative to
neoliberalism rejecting the state is key
Quandt 10 (Midge, Alliance for Global Justice, "Strategies for Change in
Latin America," http://afgj.org/wp-
content/uploads/2010/03/MidgePartDemocFinal.pdf)
We next turn to the theorizing around the new movements by activists and writers North and South. Their
orientation can be summed up in John Holloways well-known adage Change the world without taking
power. The terms autonomism, self- organization and especially
horizontalism are used at the grassroots and by observers to categorize the
political posture of the mobilizations.17 Horizontalism refers to
decentralized decision-making, participatory democracy without
hierarchy or vanguardism. It represents a break with the idea of power-over. Both the practice
and idea of horizontalism are rooted in the everyday experience of the
marginalized: the failure of all forms of authority, of government, party leaders, union organizers,
bosses and managers, to meet their basic needs; the consequent importance of neighborhood and
geographical space, rather than the factory, as the foci of uprisings and organizing. Experience, practice
and theory interacted as ideas migrated back and forth between protagonists and writers. It is important to
remember here, as activist and anthropologist David Graeber reminds us, that academics usually
overestimate the role of intellectuals in the production of ideas when actually the
process is a two-way street.18 An Argentinian activist put the back-and-forth process this
way: Before the rebellion, only a few circles discussed the idea of the state and read things by people
like John Holloway and Antonio Negri about old concepts of power. The [old] idea was to take power.
There was a reaction of the extreme opposite, that is, forget about the state and build territorial power.19
Many who write about these new movements champion their
commitment to politics from below. Winning control of the state
apparatus as the fulcrum of social change is rejected not only because
Latin American governments could not deliver economic and social
benefits to the poor, but also because all states and political parties, whether
vanguardist or parliamentary, are regarded by this camp as inherently hierarchical
and authoritarian. The post-Marxist dislike of verticalism and preference
for autonomy, together with a participatory process, is important for
understanding the new movements. It predisposes many observers (some of whom cut
their teeth on Marxist analysis) to uphold the idea of change from the bottom up. The notion of power
over, in some cases, even the idea of power at all, is seen as hostile to self-determination and
solidarity.20 Parties and governments on the left are as suspect as others. They still are tainted with the
logic of domination.

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Alt Intellectual Rejection
As an intellectual your rejection of capitalism has emancipatory
results relentless criticism allows capitalism to be challenged.
Kovel 2 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature, p224)
Relentless criticism can delegitimate the system and release people into
struggle. And as struggle develops, victories that are no more than incremental by their own terms-
stopping a meeting stopping the IMF, the hopes stirred forth by a campaign such as Ralph Naders in
2000 can have a symbolic effect far greater than their external result,
and constitute points of rupture with capital. This rupture is not a set of
facts added to our knowledge of the world, but a change in our relation
to the world. Its effects are dynamic, not incremental, and like all genuine insights it changes
the balance of forces and can propagate very swiftly. Thus the release from inertia can
trigger a rapid cascade of changes, so that it could be said that the forces pressing
towards radical change need not be linear and incremental, but can be exponential
in character. In this way, conscientious and radical criticism of the given, even in advance of
having blueprints for an alternative, can be a material force, because it can seize the
mind of the masses of people. There is no greater responsibility for
intellectuals.

Vote negative as an explicit rejection of capitalism. Hollowing out
the system from within, in a personal war fought on a daily basis,
can gut capitalism of its power. Refuse to believe in its inevitability
and benevolence and vote negative
Herod 4 (James, renowned philosopher, author, and social activist, Getting Free,
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,
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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 every thing 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 were
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 cant imply
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. Its 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.
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Framework

1. Trpis that debate should be about competing
methodologiesthe judge is a citizen supporting a political
strategy
2. Finite predictable philosophies we internal link turn
education through different philosophical perspectives
there is a problem if you didnt block out cap
3. Plan focus not key cap shapes our understanding of the world
before we act-- only our framework solves discussion shaping future
changemeans we access their meta-impacts
-Err Affresponsible for its implicationsunlimited
prep deliberately compile every card
-Plan is meaningless in a vacuum justifications provide
the context and framing
4. Policymaking bad most debaters dont end up as
legislators or any part of the policymaking process.

K comes first analysis of neoliberalism and alternatives is
key to effective Latin American economic policy
Walton 4 (Michael, adviser in the Latin America and Caribbean
Region of the World Bank, " Neoliberalism in Latin America: Good,
Bad, or Incomplete?" Latin American Research Review 39.3 (2004)
165-183. MUSE)
Impacts on Inequality and Social Conditions The region's high and
persistent income inequality is of direct concern to citizens (Latinobarmetro 2002),
increases poverty, and is probably a source of lower aggregate development (for a
review, see De Ferranti et al. 2004). The most striking fact is the resilience of high inequality, through
many different policy regimes over the past few decades. As table 2 shows, the 1970s saw some tendency
for mild reductions in inequality, and the 1980s a more marked tendency for increased inequality in the
context of macroeconomic difficulties. The 1990s has seen a more mixed picture: more countries
experienced increases than declines in inequality, but there is no overall pattern. Most striking has been
Argentina's very large rise before and during the crisis; though Mexico actually experienced a slight
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decline in inequality in its crisis, and Brazil a modest but significant distributional improvement over the
decade. Did market-oriented reforms have an impact? In terms of the big picture it is hard to find
dramatic influences. This was the conclusion of an extensive study by Morley (2001) for United Nations
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in the 1990s. As figure 3
illustrates, for the 1990s there is no simple bivariate relationship between changes in inequality and
aggregate indices of the level or change in reform in the past decade. Attempts to separate out the effects
of particular reform dimensions reveal a more complex picture. Table 3 summarizes results from three
studies that essentially use the differential timing of reform changes to try and identify apparent effects on
inequality. These suggest that trade liberalization, financial liberalization, capital
account opening, and tax reform were associated with increases in either wage or
household income inequality; different results were found for privatization in the two studies that
included this variable. More compelling is the evidence from a series of more detailed studies on the
interactions between the supply and demand for different [End Page 171] categories of workers,
especially across skills (see Snchez-Pramo and Schady 2003 for a six-country analysis that is quite
representative of other country studies). These find systematic evidence of increases in the demand for
skilled labor, at secondary and especially tertiary levels, that has only partly been offset by a rising
supply. The work supports the view that these skill-biased demand changes were mediated by trade
opening (if not due to classical Stolper-Samuelson effects of increased trade) and other reforms, which
induce technical and organizational changes that favored higher skills. There is some evidence that the
shift is once-off; in both Chile and Mexico, the two countries that are more integrated into the
international economy, the demand shift to high-skilled labor appears to have leveled off (De Ferranti et
al. 2003). Incomes are only one dimension of well-being. All societies also value health, education, access
to basic services, security, and self-esteem. One measure of government effort in these areas is the level
of social spending. Spending was often squeezed in the difficult macroeconomic times of the [End Page
172] 1980s. However, for the 1990s there have been considerable advances. As figure 4 shows from
ECLAC's analysis, social spending per person rose substantially and systematically across almost all
countries in the region. This was due to a combination of the effects of growth, rising aggregate spending,
and shifts from non-social spending. While a significant share [End Page 173] went into expanded social
security spending, which is typically regressive, for many other categories of social spending the
expansion was highly progressive (De Ferranti et al. 2004). This was driven in large part because of
expansions toward near-universal coverage in basic servicesnotably in basic education and health,
electricity, and waterwith the degree of progressivity depending on initial levels of coverage. This was
complemented by a wide range of experiments in transfers to poorer groups, such as Mexico's
"Oportunidades" (previously "Progresa") program of transfers to very poor households, conditional on
children attending school or clinics. Brazilian farmers' pensions, while not linked to market-based reform
(they were initiated between 1973 and 1974 and extended in the 1988 Constitution), are another example
of a program that has effectively eliminated extreme poverty for this group. On the Need for an Expanded
Prismthe Role of Institutional Context A quick scorecard on market-oriented reforms thus finds some
gains for growth and possibly adverse effects on inequality, notably via the increased demand for skilled
labor. These reforms were consistent with a large and often progressive growth in social spending.
However, focusing on policy choices presents a highly incomplete
approach to assessing development successes and failures in Latin
America, whether of market-oriented policies or other domains. Recent work in
development economics places much more emphasis on the variable
effects of policies or actions conditional on the context, especially with respect to
asset ownership and political and social institutions. Take the two areas of growth and service provision.
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A recent review of growth experience and theories by Dani Rodrik (2003a) [End Page 174] argues that
successes (and failures) are not explicable by a standard list of solutions, but occur in varied institutional
settings. Economic fundamentals such as the influence of markets, responses to incentives, and
the importance of (some form of) property rights always matter. But the particular
configurations of policies and institutions vary greatly [End Page
175] between, say, China's and Chile's high growth episodes. The opposite is also true: China's non-
private township and village enterprises were extraordinarily dynamic in the 1980s and early 1990s for a
particular mix of factors flowing from recent history; such a policy mix could well be disastrous in the
typical Latin American country.2 It is striking that quite similar considerations apply to the much more
"micro" area of service delivery. The historical model of public provision by public servants under the
benign, social-welfare maximizing gaze of ministry officials has not proved a success. This is not because
it was public sector, but because the model was hopelessly incomplete on the
determinants of the behavior of actors both within the public sector (from
policymakers to frontline workers)3 and among the public sector, households, and
private providers.4 Here too, there is recognition that there are some fundamentalsincentives
matter to both public sector workers and households, voice and accountability are important at some
levelbut a lot of other "institutional" or contextual factors
determine how interventions work or do not work. Centralized
schooling produces the highest quality outcomes in the region in Cuba, but very poor results in Honduras.
There are a host of experiments in decentralized schooling, with a wide variety of results.
Decentralization to lower levels of governments can have different outcomes, even within the same
country, depending on the extent to which local conditions are conducive to local elite capture, as
opposed to allowing political groupings to both improve governance and equity. These perspectives have
an important implication: once development practitioners and economists recognize the
centrality of institutions and context, it becomes much more important to
understand how policies work in particular situations and to avoid recipes
or magic bullets. Sorting out what matters is likely to involve looking
at a range of factors, including, for example, the salience and nature of clientelism, extent of
genuine political competition, histories of horizontal alliances
across poorer groups, and socio-cultural questions
associated with social difference and mobilization, and the behaviors
of front-line workers. How does this relate to the Latin American record on economic
and social conditions, and their links with "neoliberalism"? We emphasize one set of issues of
particular salience to the region. Latin America is characterized both by weak
institutional conditions and high levels of inequality in terms of asset ownership and political
influence. There is at least some [End Page 176] evidence to suggest that the mix of "weak and unequal"
institutions is both self-perpetuating and pernicious to both growth and stability. Cross-country work
finds Latin America's institutions to be weak for a wide range of indicators, from (lack of) constraints on
the executive, to the rule of law and control of corruption, whether these come from survey-based
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subjective assessments or considered views of political scientists. Moreover, a number of econometric
analyses on global data bases find institutional weakness to be an important correlate of long-run
economic performance. There are issues of potential two-way causation, since higher incomes may be
causative of more effective institutions. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (2002)
find a robust, exogenous influence from historically determined elements of institutions to long-run
economic performance, while Acemoglu et al. (2002) find adverse long-run influences on macroeconomic
stability. They relate this to historically formed institutional structures that tended
to protect elite influence originally traced back to colonial times. Unequal and
weak institutional structures continued, in various forms, in the transition to independence in the
nineteenth century and the spread of formal democracy in the twentieth century, and are still salient
today.5 Shocks can bring latent distributional conflict into the open, with persistent effects where
institutional mechanisms for the resolution of such conflict are weak (Rodrik 1999). The brief review of
the record and of work on context and institutions suggests the following for policy. Policies
oriented toward the market and macroeconomic stability are often sensible, but are
seriously incomplete , especially with respect to interactions with
inequality and institutions. The selection of policies and their effects
need to be interpreted in terms of interactions with the structure of asset
ownership (including economic, human and cultural capital) and how institutions work.
This has a number of implications for development practice. We conclude with a few observations on
this.

Our positioning as students is key necessary to prevent
neoliberalism from co-opting pedagogical spaces and
reclaiming those spaces for resistances
Giroux 11 (Henry A. Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English
and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, 21 November 2011,
Occupy Colleges Now: Students as the New Public Intellectuals,
http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-colleges-now-students-new-public-
intellectuals/1321891418)
Finding our way to a more humane future demands a new politics, a new
set of values, and a renewed sense of the fragile nature of democracy. In part,
this means educating a new generation of intellectuals who not only
defend higher education as a democratic public sphere, but also frame
their own agency as intellectuals willing to connect their research, teaching,
knowledge, and service with broader democratic concerns over equality, justice, and an alternative vision of what the
university might be and what society could become. Under the present circumstances, it is time to remind ourselves that academe may be
one of the few public spheres available that can provide the educational
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conditions for students, faculty, administrators, and community members to embrace pedagogy as a space of dialogue and unmitigated
questioning, imagine different futures, become border-crossers, and embrace a language of critique and possibility that makes visible the urgency of a politics
necessary to address important social issues and contribute to the quality of public life and the common good. As people move or are pushed by authorities out of their
makeshift tent cities in Zuccotti Park and other public spaces in cities across the United States, the harsh registers and interests of the punishing state become more
visible. The corporate state cannot fight any longer with ideas because their visions, ideologies and survival of the fittest ethic are bankrupt, fast losing any semblance
of legitimacy. Students all over the country are changing the language of politics while reclaiming pedagogy as central to any viable notion of agency, resistance and
collective struggle. In short, they have become the new public intellectuals, using their bodies, social media, new digital technologies, and any other viable educational
tool to raise new questions, point to new possibilities, and register their criticisms of the various antidemocratic elements of casino capitalism and the emerging
punishing state. Increasingly, the Occupy Wall Street protesters are occupying colleges and universities, setting up tents, and using the power of ideas to engage other
students, faculty, and anyone else who will listen to them. The call is going out from the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, Florida State
University, Duke University, Rhode Island College, and over 120 other universities that the time has come to connect knowledge not just to power, but to the very
meaning of what it means to be an engaged intellectual responsive to the possibilities of individual and collective resistance and change. This poses a
new challenge not only for the brave students mobilizing these protests
on college campuses, but also to faculty who often relegate themselves
to the secure and comfortable claim that scholarship should be
disinterested, objective and removed from politics. There is a great deal these students and young
people can learn from this turn away from the so-called professionalism of disinterested knowledge and the disinterested intellectual by reading the works of Noam
Chomsky, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, Elaine Scarry, Pierre Bourdieu and others who offer a treasure trove of theoretical and
political insights about what it means to assume the role of a public intellectual as both a matter of social responsibility and political urgency. In response to the
political indifference and moral coma that embraced many universities and scholars since the 1980s, the late Said argued for intellectuals to move beyond the narrow
interests of professionalism and specialization as well as the cheap seductions of celebrity culture being offered to a new breed of publicity and anti-public
intellectuals. Said wanted to defend the necessity indeed, keep open the possibility of the intellectual who does not consolidate power, but questions it, connects his or
her work to the alleviation of human suffering, enters the public sphere in order to deflate the claims of triumphalism and recalls from exile those dangerous memories
that are often repressed or ignored. Of course, such a position is at odds with those intellectuals who have retreated into arcane discourses that offer the cloistered
protection of the professional recluse. Making few connections with audiences outside of the academy or to the myriad issues that bear down on everyday lives, many
academics became increasingly irrelevant, while humanistic inquiry suffers the aftershocks of flagging public support. The Occupy Wall Street protesters have refused
this notion of the deracinated, if not increasingly irrelevant, notion of academics and students as disinterested intellectuals. They are not alone. Refusing the rewards of
apolitical professionalism or obscure specialization so rampant on university campuses, Roy has pointed out that intellectuals need to ask themselves some very
"uncomfortable questions about our values and traditions, our vision for the future, our responsibilities as citizens, the legitimacy of our 'democratic institutions,' the
role of the state, the police, the army, the judiciary, and the intellectual community."[1] Similarly, Scarry points to the difficulty of seeing an injury and injustice, the
sense of futility of one's own small efforts, and the special difficulty of lifting complex ideas into the public sphere.[2] Derrida has raised important questions about
the relationship between critique and the very nature of the university and the humanities, as when he writes: The university without condition does not, in fact, exist,
as we know only too well. Nevertheless, in principle and in conformity with its declared vocation, its professed essence, it should remain an ultimate place of critical
resistance and more than critical to all the power of dogmatic and unjust appropriation.[3] Chomsky and the late Zinn have spoken about and demonstrated for over 40
years what it means to think rigorously and act courageously in the face of human suffering and manufactured hardships. All of these theorists are concerned with
what it means for intellectuals both within and outside of higher education to embrace the university as a productive site of dialogue and contestation, to imagine it as
a site that offers students the promise of a democracy to come, to help them understand that there is no genuine democracy without genuine opposing critical power
and the social movements that can make it happen. But there is more at stake here than arguing for a more engaged public role for academics and students, for
demanding the urgent need to reconnect humanistic inquiry to important social issues, or for insisting on the necessity for academics to reclaim a notion of ethical
advocacy and connective relationships. There is also the challenge of connecting the university with visions that have some hold on the present,
defending education as more than an investment opportunity or job
credential, students as more than customers, and faculty as more than
technicians or a subaltern army of casualized labor. At a time when
higher education is increasingly being dominated by a reductive
corporate logic and technocratic rationality unable to differentiate
training from a critical education, we need a chorus of new voices to
emphasize that the humanities, in particular, and the university, in general, should play a central
role in keeping critical thought alive while fighting back all attempts to
foreclose and pre-empt the further unraveling of human possibilities,
prodding human society to go on questioning itself and prevent that
questioning from ever stalling or being declared finished. Corporations and the warfare state
should not dictate the needs of public and higher education, or, for that matter, any other democratic public sphere. As the Occupy
student protesters have pointed out over the last few months, one of the
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great dangers facing the 21st century is not the risk of illusory hopes, but
those undemocratic forces that promote and protect state terrorism,
massive inequality, render some populations utterly disposable, imagine the future
only in terms of immediate financial gains, and promote forms of self-serving historical reinvention in which power is measured by the degree to which it evades any
sense of actual truth and moral responsibility. Students, like their youthful counterparts in the 1960s, are once again arguing that higher
education, even in its imperfect state, still holds the promise, if not the reality, of being
able to offer them the complex knowledge and interdisciplinary related
skills that enable existing and future generations to break the continuity
of common sense, come to terms with their own power as critical agents,
be critical of the authority that speaks to them, translate private
considerations into public issues, and assume the responsibility of not
only being governed but learning how to govern. Inhabiting the role of
public intellectuals, students can take on the difficult but urgent task of
reclaiming the ideal and the practice of what it means to reclaim higher
education in general and the humanities, more specifically, as a site of possibility that embraces the idea of democracy not
merely as a mode of governance but, most importantlyas journalist Bill Moyers points out as a means of dignifying people so they can become fully free to claim their
moral and political agency. Students are starting to recognize that it is crucial to struggle for the university as a democratic public sphere and the need to use that
sphere to educate a generation of new students, faculty and others about the history of race, racism, politics, identity, power, the state and the struggle for justice. They
are increasingly willing to argue in theoretically insightful and profound ways about what it means to defend the university as a site that opens up and sustains public
connections through which people's fragmented, uncertain, incomplete narratives of agency are valued, preserved, and made available for exchange while being
related analytically to wider contexts of politics and power. They are moving to reclaim, once again, the humanities as a sphere that is crucial for grounding ethics,
justice and morality across existing disciplinary terrains, while raising both a sense of urgency and a set of relevant questions about what kind of education would be
suited to the 21st-century university and its global arrangements as part of a larger project of addressing the most urgent issues that face the social and political world.
The punishing state can use violence with impunity to eject young people from parks and other public sites, but it is far more difficult to eject them from sites that are
designed for their intellectual growth and well-being, make a claim to educate them, and register society's investment and commitment to their future. The police
violence that has taken place at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis does more than border on pure thuggery; it also reveals a display of force
that is as unnecessary as it is brutal, and it is impossible to justify. These young people are being beaten on their campuses for simply displaying the courage to protest
a system that has robbed them of both a quality education and a viable future. But there is more. It is also crucial not to allow
casino capitalism to transform higher education into another extension of
the corporate and warfare state. If higher education loses its civic
purpose and becomes simply an adjunct of corporate and military power, there will be practically no spaces
left for dissent, dialogue, civic courage, and a spirit of thoughtfulness and critical engagement. This is all the more
reason to occupy colleges and use them as a launching pad to both educate
and to expand the very meaning of the public sphere. Knowledge is
about more than the truth; it is also a weapon of change. The language of
a radical politics needs more than hope and outrage; it needs institutional spaces to produce
ideas, values, and social relations capable of fighting off those ideological and material
forces of casino capitalism that are intent in sabotaging any viable notion
of human interaction, community, solidarity, friendship, and justice. Space is
not the ultimate prize here.[4] Politics and ideology are the essence of what this
movement should be about. But space becomes invaluable when it its
democratic functions and uses are restored. In an age when the media have become a means of mass
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distraction and entertainment, the university offers a site of informed engagement, a place
where theory and action inform each other, and a space that refuses to
divorce intellectual activities from matters of politics, social responsibility and social justice.
As students and faculty increasingly use the space of the university as a
megaphone for a new kind of critical education and politics, it will
hopefully reclaim the democratic function of higher education and
demonstrate what it means for students, faculty, and others to assume the
role of public intellectuals dedicated to creating a formative culture that
can provide citizens and others with the knowledge and skills necessary for a
radical democracy. Rather than reducing learning to a measurable
quantity in the service of a narrow instrumental rationality, learning can
take on a new role, becoming central to developing and expanding the
capacity for critical modes of agency, new forms of solidarity, and an
education in the service of the public good, an expanded imagination,
democratic values, and social change. The student intellectual as a public figure merges rigor with civic courage,
meaning with the struggle for eliminating injustice wherever it occurs and hope with a realistic notion of social change.

This debate is key to education status quo curriculum has
been co-opted by conservative forces
Hill 10 (Dave Hill is professor of education policy at the University of
Northampton, England, and professor of education at Middlesex
University, London, England. 2010. Revolutionizing Pedagogy:
Education for Social Justice Within and Beyond Global Neo-Liberalism.
Eds. Sheila Macrine, Peter McLaren, and Dave Hill, pp. 135-138)
Impacts on Democracy and on Critical Thinking The neoconservative faces of
education reform, indeed, of the wider marketization and commodification of humanity and society,
come to play in the enforcement and policing of consent, the de-legitimizing of deep dissent, and the
weakening of oppositional centers and practices and thought. In eras of declining capital
accumulation, an ultimately inevitable process, capitaland the governments and parties and generals
and CEOs who act at their behestmore and more nakedly ratchet up the ideological and repressive state
apparatuses of control (see also Hill, 2001, 2003, 2004b, 2006b, and 2007). Thus, key working class
organizations such as trade unions and democratically elected municipal governments are marginalized,
and their organizations, and those of other radically oppositional organizations based on race, ethnicity,
religion, are attacked through laws, rhetoric, and, ultimately, sometimes by incarceration. In education,
the combined neoliberal-neoconservative educational reform has led to a radical change in what
governments and most school and college managements/leaderships themselves see as their mission. In
the 1960s and 1970s (and with long prior histories), liberal-humanist or social democratic or socialist
ends of education were common through the advanced capitalist (and parts of the anticolonialist
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developing) worlds. This has changed dramatically within the lifetimes of those over thirty. Now the
curriculum is conservative and it is controlled. Now the hidden curriculum of
pedagogy is performative processing and delivery or pre-digested points. Now the overwhelming and
nakedly overriding and exclusive focus is on the production of a differentially educated,
tiered (raced and gendered) social class workforce and compliant citizenry. Differentially skilled
and socially/politically/culturally neutered and compliant human capital is now the production focus of
neoliberalized education systems and institutions, hand in glove with and enforced by a Neoconservative
ideology and state. Resistance But there is resistance; there are spaces, disarticulations, and contradictions
(see for example, Jones, Cunchillos, Hatcher and Hirtt, 2007; and Hill, 2009b). There are people who
want to realize a different vision of education. There are people who want a more human and more equal
society, a society where students and citizens and workers are not sacrificed on the altar of profit before
all else. And there are always, sometimes minor, sometimes major, awakenings that the material
conditions of existence, for teacher educators, teacher, students, and workers and families more widely,
simply do not match or recognize the validity of neoliberal or neoconservative or other capitalist
discourse and policy. Cultural Workers as Critical Egalitarian Transformative Intellectuals and the
Politics of Cultural/Educational Transformation What influence can critical librarians,
information workers, cultural workers, teachers, pedagogues have in working toward a
democratic, egalitarian society/economy/polity? How much autonomy from state suppression and control
do/can state apparatuses and their workerssuch as librarians, teachers, lecturers, youth workers, have in
capitalist states such as England and Wales, or the United States? Dont they get slapped
down, brought into line, controlled, or sat upon when they start getting dangerous, when
they start getting a constituency/having an impact? When their activities are deemed by the capitalist class
and the client states and governments of/for capital to be injurious to the interests of (national or
international) capital? The repressive cards within the ideological state apparatuses are stacked against the
possibilities of transformative change through the state apparatuses and their agents. But historically and
internationally, this often has been the case. Spaces do exist for counter-hegemonic
strugglesometimes (as in the 1980s and 1990s) narrower, sometimes (as in the 1960s and 1970s and
currently) broader. By itself, divorced from other arenas of progressive struggle, its success, the success
of radical librarians, cultural workers, media workers, education workers will be limited. This
necessitates the development of proactive debate both by and within the
Radical Left. But it necessitates more than that; it calls for direct engagement with liberal, social
democratic, and Radical Right ideologies and programs, including New Labours, in all the areas of the
state and of civil society, in and through all the ideological and repressive state apparatuses, and in and
through organizations and movements seeking a democratic egalitarian economy, polity, and society. It
takes courage, what Gramsci called civic courage. It is often difficult. Some of our
colleagues/comrades/companeras/companeras/political and organizational coworkers aint exactly easy to
get along with. Neither are most managements; especially those infected with the curse of new public
managerialism, the authoritarian managerialist, brutalist style of management and (anti-) human
relations, where bosses know best and dont you dare step outa line, buddy! But I want here to
modify the phrase better to die on your feet than live on your knees. It is of course better to live on
your/our feet than live on your/our knees. And whether it is millions on the streets
defending democratic and workers rights (such as over pensions, in Britain and
elsewhere, or opposing state sell-offs of publicly owned services, in France and elsewhere, or laws
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attacking workers rights, in Italy and Australia and elsewhere)all in the last two yearsor in
defense of popular socialist policies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Honduras, Nepal, we
are able, in solidarity, and with political aims and organization, not only
to stand/live on our feet, but to march with them, to have not just an individual impact,
but a mass/massive impact. We have a three-way choiceto explicitly support the
neoliberalization and commodification and capitalization of society; to be complicit, through our silence
and inaction, in its rapacious and antihuman/antisocial development, or to explicitly oppose it. To live on
our feet and use them and our brains, words, and actions to work and move with others for a more human,
egalitarian, socially just, economically just, democratic, socialist society: in that way we maintain our
dignity and hope.
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***Answers To***
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2NC Overview

The kritik outweighs and turns the caseextend the piece of
Darder evidenceviolent neoliberal growth forces violent
business cycles which result in the inevitable collapse of the
ecological systemprecludes and internal link turns all of
their authors warrants since
1. Only during the upswing of the K do states have the
cash to develop military capacitiesmeans we control the
root expansionary cause of war
2. Permits unchecked ecological destruction whose
expansion rests upon new resources with unsearched
consequencesthings like dirty shale mining prove any new
sustainable resources only DELAY environmental
annihilation

Neoliberal governmentality ensures war, disease, and
environmental collapse- economic decision-making views
people as a disposable resource for producing capital, only
stepping outside this frame for politics can avert extinction
Giroux 6 (Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network
Chair Professorship at McMaster University in Canada. Dirty
Democracy and State Terrorism: The Politics of the New
Authoritarianism in the United States, Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26.2 (2006) 163-177.)
While it would be ludicrous to suggest that the United States either represents a mirror image of fascist ideology or mimics the systemic
racialized terror of Nazi Germany, it is not unreasonable, as Hannah Arendt urged in The Origins of Totalitarianism, to learn to recognize how
different elements of fascism crystallize in different historical periods into new forms of
authoritarianism. Such antidemocratic elements combine in often unpredictable ways, and I
believe they can be found currently in many of the political practices, values, and policies that
[End Page 164] characterize U.S. sovereignty under the Bush administration. Unchecked power at the top of the
political hierarchy is increasingly matched by an aggressive attack on dissent throughout the body politic and fuels both a war abroad and a war at
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home. The economic and militaristic powers of global capital spearheaded by U.S.
corporations and political interests appear uncurbed by traditional forms of national and international
sovereignty, the implications of which are captured in David Harvey's serviceable phrase "accumulation by dispossession."
Entire populations are now seen as disposable, marking a dangerous moment for the promise of a global
democracy.8 The discourse of liberty, equality, and freedom that emerged with modernity seems to have lost even its residual value as the central
project of democracy. State sovereignty is no longer organized around the struggle for
life but an insatiable quest for the accumulation of capital, leading to what Achille Mbembe
calls "necropolitics," or the destruction of human bodies.9 War, violence, and death have
become the principal elements shaping the biopolitics of the new authoritarianism that is emerging
in the United States and increasingly extending its reach into broader global spheres, from Iraq to a vast array of military outposts and prisons
around the world. As the state of emergency, in Giorgio Agamben's aptly chosen words, becomes the rule rather than the exception, a number
of powerful antidemocratic tendencies threaten the prospects for both American and global democracy.10 The first is a market
fundamentalism that not only trivializes democratic values and public concerns but also
enshrines a rabid individualism, an all-embracing quest for profits, and a social Darwinism in which misfortune is
seen as a weaknessthe current sum total being the Hobbesian rule of a "war of all against all" that replaces any vestige of shared responsibilities
or compassion for others. The values of the market and the ruthless workings of finance capital become the template for organizing the rest of
society. Everybody is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in
bottom-line, cost-effective terms as the neoliberal mantra "privatize or perish" is
repeated over and over again. Responsible citizens are replaced by an assemblage of
entrepreneurial subjects, each tempered in the virtue of self-reliance and forced to face the increasingly difficult
challenges of the social order alone. Freedom is no longer about securing equality, social justice, or the public welfare but about unhampered
trade in goods, financial capital, and commodities. As the logic of capital trumps democratic sovereignty, low-intensity warfare at home chips
away at democratic freedoms, and high-intensity warfare abroad delivers democracy with bombs, tanks, and chemical warfare. The
global cost of these neoliberal commitments is massive human suffering and death, delivered not only in the form
of bombs and the barbaric practices of occupying armies but also in structural adjustment policies in which the drive for land, resources, profits,
and goods are implemented by global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Global
lawlessness and armed violence accompany the imperative of free trade, the virtues of a
market without boundaries, and the promise of a Western-style democracy imposed through military solutions,
ushering in the age of rogue sovereignty on a global scale. Under such conditions, human suffering and hardship reach unprecedented levels of
intensity. In a rare moment of truth, Thomas Friedman, the columnist for the New York Times, precisely argued for the use of U.S. power
including military forceto support this antidemocratic world order. He claimed that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without the
hidden fist. . . . And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy
and Marine Corps."11 As Mark Rupert points out, "In Friedman's twisted world, if people are to realize their deepest aspirationsthe longing for
a better life which comes from their very soulsthey must stare down the barrel of [End Page 165] Uncle Sam's gun."12 As neoliberals in the
Bush administration implement policies at home to reduce taxation and regulation while spending billions on wars abroad, they slash funds that
benefit the sick, the elderly, the poor, and young people. But public resources are diverted not only from
crucial domestic problems ranging from poverty and unemployment to hunger; they are also diverted
from addressing the fate of some 45 million children in "the world's poor
countries [who] will die needlessly over the next decade," as reported by the British-based group Oxfam.13 The U.S. commitment to
market fundamentalism elevates profits over human needs and consequently offers few displays of compassion, aid, or relief for millions of poor
and abandoned children in the world who do not have adequate shelter, who are severely hungry, who have no access to health care or safe water,
and who succumb needlessly to the ravages of AIDS and other diseases.14 For instance, as Jim Lobe points out, "U.S. foreign aid in 2003 ranked
dead last among all wealthy nations. In fact, its entire development aid spending in 2003 came to only ten percent of what it spent on the Iraq war
that year. U.S. development assistance comes to less than one-fortieth of its annual defense budget."15 Carol Bellamy, the executive director of
UNICEF, outlines the consequences of the broken promises to children by advanced capitalist countries such as the United States. She writes,
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Today more than one billion children are suffering extreme deprivations
from poverty, war, and HIV/AIDS. The specifics are staggering: 640 million children without adequate
shelter, 400 million children without access to safe water, and 270 million children without access to basic health services. AIDS has orphaned 15
million children. During the 1990s alone, war forced 20 million children to leave their homes.16

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AT: Perm
Have a low link-threshold neoliberalism is an inertial
system residual links regenerate themselves like a many-
headed hydra
Kovel 2 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of
Nature, p 142-3)
The value-term that subsumes everything into the spell of capital sets
going a kind of wheel of accumulation, from production to consumption and back,
spinning ever more rapidly as the inertial mass of capital grows, and generating its force field as a
spinning magnet generates an electrical field. This phenomenon has important implications for the
reformability of the system. Because capital is so spectral, and succeeds so well
in ideologically mystifying its real nature, attention is constantly
deflected from the actual source of eco-destabilization to the instruments
by which that source acts. The real problem, however, is the whole mass of globally
accumulated capital, along with the speed of its circulation and the class structures sustaining
this. That is what generates the force field, in proportion to its own scale; and it is this
force field, acting across the numberless points of insertion that constitute the ecosphere, that creates ever
larger agglomerations of capital, sets the ecological crisis going, and keeps it from being resolved. For
one fact may be taken as certain that to resolve the ecological crisis as a whole, as against tidying
up one corner or another, is radically incompatible with the existence of
gigantic pools of capital, the force field these induce, the criminal underworld with which they
connect, and, by extension, the elites who comprise the transnational bourgeoisie. And by not
resolving the crisis as a whole, we open ourselves to the spectre of another
mythical creature, the many-headed hydra, that regenerated itself the more
its individual tentacles were chopped away. To realize this is to
recognize that there is no compromising with capital, no schema of
reformism that will clean up its act by making it act more greenly or
efficiently We shall explore the practical implications of this thesis in Part III, and here need simply
to restate the conclusion in blunt terms: green capital, or non-polluting capital, is preferable to the
immediately ecodestructive breed on its immediate terms. But this is the lesser point, and diminishes with
its very success. For green capital (or socially/ecologically responsible investing) exists, by its very
capital-nature, essentially to create more value, and this leaches away from the concretely green location
to join the great pool, and follows its force field into zones of greater concentration, expanded
profitability and greater ecodestruction.
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Negotiation DA neoliberalism splinters alter-political
resistance by accepting small demands while leaving the
structure of the economy itself unquestioned causing
extinction via multiple scenarios
Parr 13 (Adrian, Assoc. Prof. of Philosophy and Environmental
Studies @ U. of Cincinnati, THE WRATH OF CAPITAL: Neoliberalism
and Climate Change Politics, pp. 5-6)
The contradiction of capitalism is that it is an uncompromising structure of
negotiation. It ruthlessly absorbs sociohistorical limits and the challenges these limits
pose to capital, placing them in the service of further capital accumulation.
Neoliberalism is an exclusive system premised upon the logic of property rights and the expansion of
these rights, all the while maintaining that the free market is self-regulating, sufficiently and efficiently
working to establish individual and collective well-being. In reality, however, socioeconomic disparities
have become more acute the world over, and the world's "common wealth, as David Bollier and later
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note, has been increasingly privatized.12 In 2010, the financial wealth
of the world's high-net-worth individuals (with investable assets of $1 to $50 million or more [all money
amounts are in U.S. dollars] ) surpassed the 2007 pre-financial crisis peak, growing 9.7 percent and
reaching $42.7 trillion. Also in 2010 the global population of high-net- worth individuals grew 8.3
percent to 10.9 million.13 In 2010, the global population was 6.9 billion, of whom there were 1,000
billionaires; 80,000 ultra-high-net-worth individuals with average wealth exceeding $50 million; 3
billion with an average wealth of $10,000, of which 1.1 billion owned less than $1,000; and 2.5 billion
who were reportedly "unbanked'' (without a bank account and thus living on the margins of the formal
financial system) .14 In a world where financial advantage brings with it political benefits, these figures
attest to the weak position the majority of the world occupies in the arena of environmental and climate
change politics. Neoliberal capitalism ameliorates the threat posed by
environmental change by taking control of the collective call it issues
forth, splintering the collective into a disparate and confusing array of individual
choices competing with one another over how best to solve the crisis. Through this
process of competition, the collective nature of the crisis is restructured and
privatized, then put to work for the production and circulation of capital as the average wealth of the
world's high-net-worth individuals grows at the expense of the majority of the world living in abject
poverty. Advocating that the free market can solve debilitating environmental changes
and the climate crisis is not a political response to these problems; it is merely a
political ghost emptied of its collective aspirations. In the following pages, I mine
the political and pragmatic implications of this dance of death between neoliberal capitalism and
environmental change. I prefer to use the term environmental change rather than climate change except
when directly dealing with the issue of C02 buildup in the atmosphere. When I use the term climate
change, I am specifically referring to the long-term warming of the earth as a result of GHGs entering the
atmosphere because of human activities. The changes that the term environmental change refers to are
both the changes that are the result of human activities' thickening the earth's C02 blanket
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and the broader environmental changes wrought by modernity and the free market, such as the
privatization of the commons, landfills, freshwater scarcity, floods,
desertification, landslides, coastal and soil erosion, drought, crop failures,
extreme storm activity, land degradation and conversion for agriculture and
livestock farming, urban heat-island effect, polluted waterways, ocean
acidification, and many other problems on a growing list.

Reformism DA Their political project becomes a consumable
single issue movement that doesnt produce a universal demand on
the system it incorporates it into existing structures of domination
Zizek, 99 (Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Repeating Lenin
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm)
Today, we already can discern the signs of a kind of general unease recall the series of events usually
listed under the name of Seattle. The 10 years honeymoon of the triumphant global capitalism is over,
the long-overdue seven years itch is here witness the panicky reactions of the big media, which
from the Time magazine to CNN all of a sudden started to warn about the Marxists manipulating the
crowd of the honest protesters. The problem is now the strictly Leninist one how to
ACTUALIZE the medias accusations: how to invent the organizational structure
which will confer on this unrest the FORM of the universal political
demand. Otherwise, the momentum will be lost, and what will remain is the
marginal disturbance, perhaps organized as a new Greenpeace, with certain efficiency, but also strictly
limited goals, marketing strategy, etc. In other words, the key Leninist lesson today is: politics without
the organizational FORM of the party is politics without politics, so the answer to those who want just the
(quite adequately named) New SOCIAL Movements is the same as the answer of the Jacobins to the
Girondin compromisers: You want revolution without a revolution! Todays blockade is that there are
two ways open for the socio-political engagement: either play the game of the system, engage in the long
march through the institutions, or get active in new social movements, from feminism through ecology
to anti-racism. And, again, the limit of these movements is that they are not
POLITICAL in the sense of the Universal Singular: they are one issue
movements which lack the dimension of the universality, i.e. they do not
relate to the social TOTALITY. Here, Lenins reproach to liberals is crucial: they only
EXPLOIT the working classes discontent to strengthen their position vis-a-vis the conservatives, instead
of identifying with it to the end.52 Is this also not the case with todays Left liberals? They like to evoke
racism, ecology, workers grievances, etc., to score points over the conservatives WITHOUT
ENDANGERING THE SYSTEM. Recall how, in Seattle, Bill Clinton himself deftly referred to the
protesters on the streets outside, reminding the gathered leaders inside the guarded palaces that they
should listen to the message of the demonstrators (the message which, of course, Clinton interpreted,
depriving it of its subversive sting attributed to the dangerous extremists introducing chaos and violence
into the majority of peaceful protesters). Its the same with all New Social Movements, up to the
Zapatistas in Chiapas: the systemic politics is always ready to listen to their demands, depriving them
of their proper political sting. The system is by definition ecumenical, open,
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tolerant, ready to listen to all even if one insist on ones demands,
they are deprived of their universal political sting by the very form of
negotiation. The true Third Way we have to look for is this third way
between the institutionalized parliamentary politics and the new social
movements. The ultimate answer to the reproach that the radical Left
proposals are utopian should thus be that, today, the true utopia is the belief that the
present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely, without radical changes. We are
thus back at the old 68 motto Soyons realistes, demandons l'impossible!": in order to be truly a realist,
one must consider breaking out of the constraints of what appears possible (or, as we usually out it,
feasible)

Interpassivity DA the call for reform without complete
abandonment of capitalist coordinates leads to passive acceptance of
capitalism that coopts the alt
Zizek, 02 (Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the University of Ljubljana Revolution at the gates p.169-
171)
Indeed, since the "normal" functioning of capitalism involves some kind of
disavowal of the basic principle of its functioning (today's model
capitalist is someone who, after ruthlessly generating profit, then
generously shares parts of it, giving large donations to churches, victims of ethnic
or sexual abuse etc., posing as a humanitarian), the ultimate act of transgression is -to
assert this principle directly, depriving it of its humanitarian mask. I am
Therefore tempted to reverse Marx's Thesis 11: the first task today is Precisely not to succumb to the
temptation to act, to intervene directly and Change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul-de-sac of
debilitating impossibility: "What can we do against global capital? "), but to question he hegemonic
ideological coordinates. In short, our historical moment is ,till that of Adorno:To the question "What
should we do?" I can most often truly answer only with "I don't know." I can only try to analyse
rigorously what there is. Here people reproach me: When you practise criticism, you are also obliged to
say how one should make it better. To my mind, this is incontrovertibly a bourgeois prejudice. Many
times in history it so happened that the very works which pursued purely theoretical goals transformed
consciousness, and thereby also social reality. 5If, today, we follow a direct call to act, this
act will not be performed in an empty space - it will be an act within the
hegemonic ideological coordinates- those who "really want to do
something to help people" get -involved in (undoubtedly honourable) exploits like
Medecins sans frontieres -,Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which
are all not only tolerated but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly encroach an economic
territory (for example, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions,
or use child labour - they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get
too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect
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example of interpassivity: of doing things not in order to achieve
something, but to prevent something from really happening, really
changing. All this frenetic humanitarian, politically Correct, etc., activity fits the formula of "Let's go
on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!". If standard Cultural
Studies criticize capitalism, they do so in the coded way hat exemplifies Hollywood liberal paranoia: the
enemy is "the system", the hidden "organization", the anti-democratic "conspiracy", not simply capitalism
and state apparatuses. The problem with this critical stance is not only that it
replaces concrete social analysis with a struggle against abstract
paranoiac fantasies, but that - in a typical paranoiac gesture - it
unnecessarily redoubles social reality, as if there were a secret
Organization behind the "visible" capitalist and state organs. What we should
accept is that there is no need for a secret " organization-within- an- organization": the
"conspiracy" is already in the "visible" organization as such, in the
capital system, in the way the political space and state apparatuses work.

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AT: Transition Wars
The transition is now the alternative is conservatives filling
the void only the alt avoids war
Schreiner 11 (Ben, contributor to New Politics journal, freelance
writer, October 23, 2011, Occupy Wall Street in Context: Systemic
Crisis and Rebellion, http://newpol.org/node/540)
The main flaw of the Occupy Wall Street movement, according to the establishment media, has been that
the protesters themselves have only been able to articulate a "vague" sense of grievance. This, it is argued,
is evidenced in the protesters' disorganized and rather scattered complaints. What is it, the media
bemoans, that all those demonstrators occupying city parks across the nation in an apparent protest of
everything from the death penalty to corporate greed really want? Of course, the reason for the varied
grievances of the Occupy participants lies in the fact that the protests have spawned in
response to a systemic crisis afflicting the day's hegemonic economic orderi.e., neoliberal
capitalism, or neoliberalism. And as this crisis of neoliberalism has intensified, its internal
contradictions have become ever more pronounced. The crisis-stricken
system thus churns out: mass unemployment and swelling wealth inequality,
state sanctioned violence and repression, and a privatized and gridlocked political system. Is it
any wonder, then, that assorted grievances abound in the Occupy protests? The crisis of neoliberalism,
and the revolt it has now set off, is not without precedents, though. The current worldwide unrestfrom
Cairo to London, from Santiago to New Yorkresembles that of forty-years ago. In fact, it has been
since the late 1960s, particularly 1968, that such wide scale unrest has occurred. And, lest we forget, it
was in the wake of this latter revolt that the capitalist model was made anew, as neoliberalism began its
rise to dominance (about which more will be said below). Clearly then, we are in the midst of a
worldwide period of transition and tumulta world revolution. The neoliberal era is at its end,
and the formation of a new economic paradigm to take its place has begun. This,
needless to say, is not to imply that we are on the precipice of a more equitable and just society. The
experience of the 1960s, as that of 1848, demonstrates that crises and popular uprisings can be suppressed
or seized by the right. The parameters of the neoliberal successor, in other words, are
not preordained, but will be determined through the course of struggle.
Therefore, the question faced when assessing Occupy Wall Street is whether the
movement will be able to sustain itself, grow, and eventually summon the power to function as a
vehicle for resolving the current systemic crisis in a way that can lead to a more equitable
economic and political order. Or, conversely, whether the promise and hope epitomized in the Occupy
movement will be beaten back by a reactionary counteroffensive.

LeDuc NeoLib

Any war that happens doesnt outweigh massive ecological
destruction collapsing the internal environmentthey have
no warrants on why a war causes global extinction

LeDuc NeoLib

AT: Neolib good
The system is unsustainable the alt is try or die
David Shearman 7, Emeritus professor of medicine at Adelaide
University, Secretary of Doctors for the Environment Australia, and an
Independent Assessor on the IPCC; and Joseph Wayne Smith, lawyer
and philosopher with a research interest in environmentalism, 2007, The
Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, p. 4-6
This impending crisis is caused by the accelerating damage to the natural
environment on which humans depend for their survival. This is not to deny that there
are other means that may bring catastrophe upon the earth. John Gray for example5 argues that destructive war is inevitable as
nations become locked into the struggle for diminishing resources. Indeed, Gray believes that war is caused by the same
instinctual behavior that we discuss in relation to environmental destruction. Gray regards population increases, environmental
degradation, and misuse of technology as part of the inevitability of war. War may be inevitable but it is
unpredictable in time and place, whereas environmental degradation is
relentless and has progressively received increasing scientific evidence.
Humanity has a record of doomsayers, most invariably wrong, which
has brought a justifiable immunity to their utterances. Warnings were
present in The Tales of Ovid and in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and in more recent times some of the
predictions from Thomas Malthus and from the Club of Rome in 1972, together
with the population bomb of Paul Ehrlich, have not eventuated. The
frequent apocalyptic predictions from the environmental movement are
unpopular and have been vigorously attacked. So it must be asked, what is different
about the present warnings? As one example, when Sir David King, chief scientist of the UK government,
states that in my view, climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today, more serious than the threat of
terrorism,6 how is this and other recent statements different from previous discredited prognostications? Firstly, they are
based on the most detailed and compelling science produced with the
same scientific rigor that has seen humans travel to the moon and create
worldwide communication systems. Secondly, this science embraces a range
of disciplines of ecology, epidemiology, climatology, marine and fresh
water science, agricultural science, and many more, all of which agree on
the nature and severity of the problems. Thirdly, there is virtual unanimity of
thousands of scientists on the grave nature of these problems. Only a handful of
skeptics remain. During the past decade many distinguished scientists, including numerous Nobel Laureates, have warned that
humanity has perhaps one or two generations to act to avoid global ecological catastrophe. As but one example of this
multidimensional problem, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that global warming caused by
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fossil fuel consumption may be accelerating.7 Yet climate change is but one of a host of
interrelated environmental problems that threaten humanity. The authors have seen
the veils fall from the eyes of many scientists when they examine all the scientific literature. They become advocates for a
fundamental change in society. The frequent proud statements on economic growth by treasurers and chancellors of the
exchequer instill in many scientists an immediate sense of danger, for humanity has moved one step
closer to doom. Science underpins the success of our technological and comfortable society. Who are the thousands
of scientists who issue the warnings we choose to ignore? In 1992 the Royal Society of London and the U.S. National Academy
of Sciences issued a joint statement, Population Growth, Resource Consumption and a Sustainable World,8 pointing out that the
environmental changes affecting the planet may irreversibly damage the earths capacity to maintain life and that humanitys own
efforts to achieve satisfactory living conditions were threatened by environmental deterioration. Since 1992 many more
statements by world scientific organizations have been issued.9 These substantiated that most environmental
systems are suffering from critical stress and that the developed countries are the main culprits. It
was necessary to make a transition to economies that provide increased human welfare and less consumption of energy and
materials. It seems inconceivable that the consensus view of all these
scientists could be wrong. There have been numerous international conferences of governments, industry
groups, and environmental groups to discuss the problems and develop strategy, yet widespread deterioration of the environment
accelerates. What is the evidence? The Guide to World Resources, 2000 2001: People and Ecosystems, The Fraying Web of
Life10 was a joint report of the United Nations Development Program, the United Nations Environment Program, the World
Bank, and the World Resources Institute. The state of the worlds agricultural, coastal
forest, freshwater, and grassland ecosystems were analyzed using 23
criteria such as food production, water quantity, and biodiversity. Eighteen of the criteria were
decreasing, and one had increased (fiber production, because of the destruction of forests). The report card on the
remaining four criteria was mixed or there was insufficient data to make a judgment. In 2005, The Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment Synthesis Report by 1,360 scientific experts from 95 countries was released.11 It stated that approximately 60
percent of the ecosystem services that support life on earthsuch as fresh
water, fisheries, and the regulation of air, water, and climateare being
degraded or used unsustainably. As a result the Millennium Goals agreed to by the UN in 2000 for
addressing poverty and hunger will not be met and human well-being will be seriously affected.
The transition is now the alternative is conservatives filling
the void only the alt avoids war
Schreiner 11 (Ben, contributor to New Politics journal, freelance
writer, October 23, 2011, Occupy Wall Street in Context: Systemic
Crisis and Rebellion, http://newpol.org/node/540)
The main flaw of the Occupy Wall Street movement, according to the establishment media, has been that
the protesters themselves have only been able to articulate a "vague" sense of grievance. This, it is argued,
is evidenced in the protesters' disorganized and rather scattered complaints. What is it, the media
bemoans, that all those demonstrators occupying city parks across the nation in an apparent protest of
everything from the death penalty to corporate greed really want? Of course, the reason for the varied
grievances of the Occupy participants lies in the fact that the protests have spawned in
response to a systemic crisis afflicting the day's hegemonic economic orderi.e., neoliberal
LeDuc NeoLib

capitalism, or neoliberalism. And as this crisis of neoliberalism has intensified, its internal
contradictions have become ever more pronounced. The crisis-stricken
system thus churns out: mass unemployment and swelling wealth inequality,
state sanctioned violence and repression, and a privatized and gridlocked political system. Is it
any wonder, then, that assorted grievances abound in the Occupy protests? The crisis of neoliberalism,
and the revolt it has now set off, is not without precedents, though. The current worldwide unrestfrom
Cairo to London, from Santiago to New Yorkresembles that of forty-years ago. In fact, it has been
since the late 1960s, particularly 1968, that such wide scale unrest has occurred. And, lest we forget, it
was in the wake of this latter revolt that the capitalist model was made anew, as neoliberalism began its
rise to dominance (about which more will be said below). Clearly then, we are in the midst of a
worldwide period of transition and tumulta world revolution. The neoliberal era is at its end,
and the formation of a new economic paradigm to take its place has begun. This,
needless to say, is not to imply that we are on the precipice of a more equitable and just society. The
experience of the 1960s, as that of 1848, demonstrates that crises and popular uprisings can be suppressed
or seized by the right. The parameters of the neoliberal successor, in other words, are
not preordained, but will be determined through the course of struggle.
Therefore, the question faced when assessing Occupy Wall Street is whether the
movement will be able to sustain itself, grow, and eventually summon the power to function as a
vehicle for resolving the current systemic crisis in a way that can lead to a more equitable
economic and political order. Or, conversely, whether the promise and hope epitomized in the Occupy
movement will be beaten back by a reactionary counteroffensive.
The question is good for who globalization exacerbates
global inequality their indicators are cherry-picked and
situated within a western perceptive
Brien and Leichenko 0 (Karen - Center for International Climate
and Environmental Research At the U of Oslo, and Robin - Department
of Geography and Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers
University, "Double exposure: assessing the impacts of climate change
within the context of economic globalization," Global Environmental
Change Volume 10, Issue 3, October 2000, Pages 221232)
Despite a widespread perception that globalization is a unifying and
all-encompassing force, these processes have (heretofore) been highly
uneven across all geographic scales. In fact, it has been argued that globalization
accentuates, rather than erodes, national and regional differences
(Mittelman, 1994). Processes of globalization have been uneven among
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major regions of the world, characterized by an increasing proportion of trade and resource flows
taking place both within and between between three major economic regions, including North America
(US, Canada and Mexico), the European Union and East and Southeast Asia (led by Japan). These
three regions, often referred as the Triad, accounted for 76% of world output and 71% of
world trade in 1980 (Dicken, 1997). By 1994, the Triad accounted for 87% of world
merchandise output and 80% of world merchandise exports (Dicken, 1997).
Increased concentration of global economic activity among the Triad has
meant that large regions outside the Triad, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa and
South Asia, have become increasing marginalized vis a vis the global
economy (Castells, 1996; Mittelman, 1994). Examination of the global distribution of foreign direct
investment among low and middle income countries aptly illustrates these regional differences (Table 2).
More than 10% of the world population currently lives in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet this region receives
only 1% of total world foreign direct investment (World Bank, 1998). Similarly, South Asia contains 22%
of the world population, but receives only 1.1% of world foreign direct investment (World Bank, 1998).
Globalization processes are also uneven among regions within
countries (Hirst and Thompson, 1996). Within China, for example, coastal regions
have been increasingly integrated into the global economy, while
more remote areas of the country remain largely untouched by
globalization. As a result, globalization is exacerbating existing patterns of
uneven development within China. Even within an advanced country such as the
United States, the impacts of globalization have been highly uneven. Studies
of international trade involvement of US cities and regions by Markusen et al. (1991),Hayward and
Erickson (1995) and Noponen et al. (1997), for example, find substantial variability in the level of
involvement in international trade and in the relative contribution of international trade to regional
economic growth. As with climate change, the uneven nature of globalization leads
to the emergence of winners and losers. In addition to globalization's
frequently identified winners, which include large transnational corporations and advanced and newly
industrializing countries (Cook and Kirkpatrick, 1997; Fischer, 1990; Greider, 1997), winners may also
include subnational regions and social groups which benefit directly or indirectly from globalization
(Tardanico and Rosenberg, 2000). Frequently identified losers in the process of globalization include
countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, as noted above, as well as unionized labor and small, locally oriented
firms (Conroy and Glasmeier, 1993). Additional losers may include other regions and groups that are left
out of globalization processes or that experience direct negative impacts.

LeDuc NeoLib

AT: Human Nature/Inevitable
Human nature can be changed Its not set in advance and
pedagogical transformation in this debate can change
economic preference formation
Schor 10
(Julie, Prof. of Economics @ Boston College, Plenitude: The New
Economics of True Wealth, pgs. 11-12)
And we don't have to. What's odd about the narrowness of the national economic conversation
is that it leaves out theoretical advances in economics and related fields that have
begun to change our basic understandings of what motivates and enriches
people. The policy conversation hasn't caught up to what's
happening at the fore- front of the discipline. One of the hallmarks of the
standard economic model, which hails from the nineteenth century, is that people are considered
relatively unchanging. Basic preferences, likes and dislikes, are assumed to be
stable, and don't adjust as a result of the choices people make or the circumstances in which they find
themselves. People alter their behavior in response to changes in prices and
incomes, to be sure, and sometimes rapidly. But there are no feedback loops from today's
choices to tomorrow's desires. This accords with an old formulation of human nature as fixed, and this
view still dominates the policy conversation. However, there's a growing body of
research that attests to human adaptability. Newer thinking in
behavioral economics, cultural evolution, and social networking that has developed
as a result of interdisciplinary work in psychology, biology, and sociology yields a view of
humans as far more malleable. It's the economic analogue to recent findings
in neuroscience that the brain is more plastic than previously
understood, or in biology that human evolution is happening on a time scale more compressed
than scientists originally thought. As economic actors, we can change, too. This has
profound implications for our ability to shift from one way of living to
another, and to be better off in the process. It's an important part of why we can both reduce ecological
impact and improve well- being. As we transform our lifestyles, we transform
ourselves. Patterns of consuming, earning, or interacting that may seem
unrealistic or even negative before starting down this road become feasible and appealing.
Moreover, when big changes are on the table, the narrow trade-offs of the past
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can be superseded. If we can question consumerism, we're no longer forced to make a mandatory
choice between well-being and environment. If we can admit that full-time jobs need not require so many
hours, it'll be possible to slow down ecological degradation, address unemployment, and make time for
family and community. If we can think about knowledge differently, we can expand social wealth far
more rapidly. Stepping outside the "there is no alternative to business-
as-usual" thinking that has been a straitjacket for years puts creative options
into play. And it opens the doors to double and triple dividends: changes that yield benefits on more
than one front. Some of the most important economic research in recent years shows that a single
intervention-a community reclamation of a brownfield or planting on degraded agriculture land-can solve
three problems. It regenerates an ecosystem, provides income for the restorers, and empowers people as
civic actors. In dire straits on the economic and ecological fronts, we have little choice but to find a way
forward that addresses both. Thats what plenitude offers.

They need to win their epistemology is right before winning
this claim cap inev is class ideology and used as an alibi for
capital
Kovel 2 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy
of Nature, p 223)
The belief that there can be no alternative to capital is ubiquitous and no
wonder, given how wonderfully convenient the idea is to the ruling
ideology.2 That, however, does not keep it from being nonsense, and a failure of
vision and political will. Whether or not the vision of ecosocialism offered here has merit, the notion
that there is no other way of organizing an advanced society other than
capital does not follow. Nothing lasts for ever, and what is humanly made can
theoretically be unmade. Of course It could be the case that the job of changing it is too hard and capital is
as is as humanity can go, in which instance we must simply accept our fate stoically and try to palliate the
results. But we don't know this and cannot know this. There is no proving it one way or
the other, and only inertia, fear of change or opportunism can explain the
belief in so shabby an idea as that there can be no alternative to capital
for organizing society.

This is the link they conflates ideology with inevitability
Murphy 4 (John, Professor of Sociology at the University of
Miami, Caro Associate Professor of Sociology at Barry
University, and Choi, Professor of Sociology at San Diego State
Universty, Globalization With A Human Face, p2-3
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What is diabolical is that the market is touted to hold everyones future. Because persons no
longer direct history, but are simply products of this process, there
appears to be no alternative to the spread of markets and their worldwide
integration. And anyone who chooses another approach to conceptualizing
orderan alternative social or economic logicis simply obstinate and denying reality. The
logic of the market is deemed irrefutable. Furthermore, the image that is emanating from most political
leaders in Europe and North America is that utopian thought is pass. The days of what Marcuse called
the Great Refusal are long past.4 For many observers, history has delivered the best of possible
worldsan economic windfall to select groups that will eventually enhance everyone. What persons need
now are patience and perseverance, and the magic of the market will do the rest. But many groups are
becoming restless. In their opinion, the ideology of the market has become stale and
an impediment to achieving a better life. Stated simply, they have not abandoned their
utopian ideals of fairness and justice, and are looking for ways to realize these aims. In some cases,
revolutionary fervor persists. But in general, they have decided to challenge the inherent ability of history
to deliver a more propitious future. They are saying enough, and are searching for
alternative models of economic regulation and social order. As a result, large
numbers of persons have been protesting in most major cities over the spread and costs of neoliberalism.
Although most mainstream politicians have been deaf to these calls for a more responsible order, the
chants for a new direction continue. And contrary to the claims made by many pundits, these protesters
have not abandoned their utopian impulse and have decided to make a different history. In other words,
they have recognized that only ideology can bring history to an end, and that the recent picture created by
this political device is an illusion. They have understood, accordingly, that history ends only
when no more persons are left to decide their own fate. The invitation extended
to join the globalized world is thus considered by many to be a ruse to get persons to jettison their own
perspectives on the future. To prosper, all they have to do is assimilate to specific political mandates that
have been cloaked in historical necessity. But critics of globalization have decided to change the rules of
history and defy this view of progress. Their refusal, however, will not necessarily destroy civilization, as
some conservative critics claim, but merely expose how the newly globalized world has been rigged in
favor of the rich and ignores the needs and desires of most persons. The powerful and their supporters
scream that these challenges are irrational and doomed to fail. Without a doubt, if these
powerful forces continue to meddle in the social experiments of others,
defeats will likely occur. But these failures have nothing to do with
flaunting the laws of history or human nature. They occur most often
because the rich and powerful want to discredit alternatives to their
worldview and thus undermine any threats to their social or economic
privileges.

Capitalism is not inevitable proven through its
maintenance
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Kovel 2 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy
of Nature, p115-116)
This reasoning is, I believe, valid, and necessary for grasping how capital becomes the efficient cause of
the crisis. But it is incomplete, and fails to clear up the mystery of what capital is, and consequently what
is to be done about it. For example, it is a commonly held opinion that capitalism is
an innate and therefore inevitable outcome for the human species. If this is the case, then the necessary
path of human evolution travels from the Olduvai Gorge to the New York Stock Exchange, and to think
of a world beyond capital is mere baying at the moon. It only takes a brief reflection to demolish the
received understanding. Capital is certainly a potentiality for human nature, but,
despite all the efforts of ideologues to argue for its natural inevitability,
no more than this. For if capital were natural, why has it only occupied
the last 500 years of a record that goes back for hundreds of thousands?
More to the point, why did it have to be imposed through violence wherever it
set down its rule? And most importantly, why does it have to be continually
maintained through violence, and continuously re-imposed on each
generation through an enormous apparatus of indoctrination? Why not
just let children be the way they want to be and trust that they will turn
into capitalists and workers for capitalists - the way we let baby chicks be, knowing that they will
reliably grow into chickens if provided with food, water and shelter? Those who believe that capital is
innate should also be willing to do without police, or the industries of culture, and if they are not, then
their arguments are hypocritical.

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AT: Authoritarianism/No Alt Solve

Non-unique capitalism makes authoritarianism inevitable only
the risk the alt averts it
In view of the fact that the most intractable of the global capital systems contradictions is the one
between the internal unrestrainability of its economic constituents and the now inescapable necessity of
introducing major restraints, any hope for finding a way out of this vicious circle under the circumstances
marked by the activation of capitals absolute limits must be vested in the political dimension of the
system. Thus, in the light of recent legislative measures which already point in this direction, there
can be no doubt that the full power of the state will be activated to serve
the end of squaring capitals vicious circle, even if it means subjecting
all potential dissent to extreme authoritarian constraints. Equally there can be
no doubt that whether or not such a remedial action (in conformity to the global capital systems
structural limits) will be successfully pursued, despite its obvious authoritarian character and
destructiveness, will depend on the working classs ability or failure to radically rearticulate the socialist
movement as a truly international enterprise. In any event, what makes matters particularly
serious is the fact that the far-reaching issues themselves which confront
humankind at the present stage of historical development cannot be
avoided either by the ruling capital system or by any alternative to it.
Although, as a matter of historical contingency, they have arisen from the activation of
capitals absolute limits, they cannot be conveniently bypassed, nor their
gravity wished out of existence. On the contrary, they remain the overriding
requirement of all-embracing remedial action in the reproductive
practices of humankind for as long as the vicious circle of capitals
present-day historical contingency is not irretrievably consigned to the
past. Indeed, paradoxically, the ability to meet in a sustainable way the absolute historical challenge
that had arisen from the perverse historical contingencies and contradictions of the capital system
constitutes the measure of viability of any social metabolic alternative to the ruling order. Consequently,
the struggle to overcome the threatening absolute limits of the capital
system is bound to determine the historical agenda for the foreseeable
future.

LeDuc NeoLib

The failure of socialism in the past was reliance on the state and
competition this meant capitalism wasnt jettisoned completely
and coopted the Soviet experiment
The implosion of the Soviet type capital system had brought a seven decades long historical experience to
its conclusion, making all theorizations and political strategies conceived in the orbit of the Russian
revolution whether positively disposed towards it or representing various forms of negation
historically superseded. The collapse of this system was inseparable from the
structural crisis of capital which began to assert itself in the 1970s. It was
this crisis which clearly demonstrated the vacuity of the earlier strategies, from Stalins projection of
establishing the highest stage of socialism on the foundation of overtaking U.S. capitalism in per capita
pig iron production to the equally absurd post-Stalinist slogan of building a fully emancipated communist
society by defeating capitalism through peaceful competition. For under the capital system
there can be no such thing as peaceful competition; not even when one
of the competing parties continues to delude itself of being free from the
crippling structural constraints of capital in its historically specific form.
The disintegration of the Communist parties in the East took place parallel to the implosion of the Soviet
system. In the Western capitalist countries, however, we were witnessing a much more complicated
process. For the crisis of the Western Communist parties preceded the
collapse in Russia and elsewhere in the East by well over a decade, as the
fate of the once most powerful French and Italian Communist parties demonstrated. This circumstance,
again, underlined the fact that the crucial underlying cause was the
deepening structural crisis of the capital system in general, and not the
difficulties of political response to the baffling vicissitudes in Russia and
in Eastern Europe. To be sure, after the implosion of the Soviet system all of
the Western Communist parties tried to use the events in the East as the
belated rationalization and justification for their abandonment of all
socialist aspirations. Most of them even changed their name, as if that could alter anything for
the better. Indeed, the same kind of rationalization and reversal of actual historical chronology, in the
interest of justifying an obvious turn to the right, characterized also the Italian Socialists and the British
Labour Party. The real problem was that under the new circumstances of
capitals structural crisis the former working class parties, Communist
and non-Communist alike, had no strategy to offer as to how their
traditional constituency labour should confront capital which was
bound to impose on the working people growing hardship under the
worsening conditions. Instead, they resigned themselves to the meek called realistic
acceptance of what could be obtained from the shrinking margins of capitals troubled profitability.
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Understandably, in terms of political ideology this turn of events presented a much greater problem to the
Communist than to the non-Communist parties. The stillborn strategies of
Eurocommunism and great historic compromise were attempts to
come to terms with this difficulty, in the hope of finding a new
constituency in the middle ground while retaining some of the old
rhetorics. But it all came to nothing and ended in tears for many devoted
militants who once genuinely believed that their party was moving in the
direction of a future socialist transformation. The disintegration of the left in Italy,
among others, in the last few years bears witness to the gravity of these developments, underlying the
enormity of the challenge for the future.
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AT: Aberdeen No Root Cause

Aberdeen is wrong Greed cant monocausally explain war only
materialist criticism does
Jackson, 7 (Richard, Centre for International Politics, University of
Manchester, Toward an Understanding of Contemporary Intrastate
War, Government and Opposition, Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 121137, 2007,
Wiley Library)

Colliers approach has since gained real political and academic currency, despite the fact that he has
recently moderated his position to emphasize the interaction of greed and grievance in war initiation.9
The notion that the exploitation of natural resources for purposes of self-enrichment is the principal driver
of war has become a central element of United Nations and World Bank policies towards intrastate wars,
notably through efforts to reduce trades in conflict goods. The greed hypothesis has also generated a
vast body of scholarship, and is a central component of the new wars argument. Mary Kaldors
influential thesis suggests that contemporary warfare is new, in part because its
aims are greed-based, it exploits the global networks engendered by neo-liberal globalization
and it blurs the distinctions between war and organized crime.10 Although Colliers greed
hypothesis is a partial corrective to the view that intrastate war can be explained by
reference to its irrational and inexplicable primordial qualities, it remains a powerful
expression of the new barbarism approach, not least because it reduces
the actors in intrastate war to little more than thieves and bandits. As such,
the greed hypothesis functions to de-politicize and de-legitimize violent
forms of subaltern counter-hegemonic resistance, securitize aid and
development activities and legitimize the global liberal project.11 Like the
earlier IPA research project volumes, Rethinking the Economics of War finds no
case study evidence that greed can be considered the sole motivation or
cause of intrastate war, or even a significant initiating factor. As the studys
editors put it: It is notable that none of the conflicts explored in this book started as a greed-based
rebellion. Contrary to Colliers earlier predictions, neither greed nor the existence of lootable, resource-
based wealth was an important cause or trigger of the conflict (p. 11). Further, the evidence from
actual cases suggests that even though war always requires a resource
base for its continuation, greed is rarely an important variable in the
persistence of war; the pursuit of wealth is virtually always a means to a
political end rather than an end in itself. Instead, the editors conclude that
grievances and identities political factors are still central to understanding the
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roots and objectives of war (p. 12), and that wars result from a complex
interplay of failing state structures, a set of material grievances, hostile social
identities, and political entrepreneurs who are willing and able to mobilize groups (pp.
26270).

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AT: Innovation

Tech innovation cant sustain capitalism they cede long-term
planning to short-term profits and consumption
Liodakis, 10 (George, Professor of Political Economy at the Technical University of Crete, Greece,
Political Economy, Capitalism, and Sustainable Development, Sustainability, 8/18/10, proquest)
Coming now to a more detailed explanation of this increasing ecological rift, we might stress that, under
capitalism, an increase in labour productivity is essentially tantamount to a reduction in the amount of
abstract socially necessary labour required for the production of any particular commodity (including
labour power itself), which is a condition for an increased extraction and appropriation of surplus value
[19]. This, as I have noted, is the dominant goal of capitalism, and hence all increases in the productivity
of labour should serve this goal. Under this context, an increasing productivity of labour
does not imply a process economizing on labour or any other productive
resources. On the contrary, insofar as capital can proceed with a free appropriation of nature as a gift
to capital, there will be a permanent bias towards developing a labour-
saving technology, but this technology is conducive to a maximum
throughput of natural resources and energy, which further implies a
rapidly increasing depletion of natural resources and an increasing
pollution contributing to a systemic environmental degradation. A
labour-saving technology, therefore, and a rising productivity of labour do
not necessarily imply an increasing social and ecological efficiency, but
rather an increasing potential for material and energy throughput, with
an enhanced ecologically damaging impact. What is more, even a resource-
saving technological innovation cannot have, under capitalism, an
environmentally protective impact insofar as it will, most likely, imply
lower commodity prices and hence an increasing market demand, which
will result in an increased (rather than decreased) extraction of the natural
resource concerned. This implication is clearly related with the so-called Jevons Paradox
[10,14,18]. Economic efficiency, at a societal level, is not simply a technical issue (a matter of
input/output relation) and should not be understood, in general, as market (capitalist) efficiency. In fact it
is largely determined, not only by the dominant goals of production, but also by the prevailing social
relations and the scale of production, as well as relations of distribution and property regimes. Apart from
other reasons, it should be noted that, insofar as negative externalities (cost shifting) are not taken into
account and positive externalities are insufficiently utilized due to the fragmented and (individually)
antagonistic character of capitalist production, a maximum social efficiency goal cannot be achieved
under capitalism, and this has clear and significant ecological implications [14,16,18,23]. This would also
largely apply within a context of market socialism, but on this issue we will return below. It should
further be stressed that the expropriation and privatization of common property under contemporary
capitalism has increased class tensions, economic inequality and environmental degradation, while mal-
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distribution and inequality undermine economic efficiency and the sustainability of production [16,17,30-
32]. On the other hand, a large number of studies have recently questioned the assumed efficiency of
private property and pointed out a remarkably efficient allocation and utilization of resources in some
traditional or alternative property regimes, such as common property or open access regimes, which partly
explains the long run sustainability of these regimes [18,31-34]. Despite this evidence, the rapid
privatization and commodification of natural resources within the context of the current neoliberal and
rapidly globalizing capitalism, along with the commodification of scientific research and technological
innovation, tend to a detrimental and multifaceted ecological impact [35]. Among other forms of this
ecological degradation, one might stress the rapid loss of biological diversity
and the recent dramatic climate changes, as having far-reaching both
ecological and economic implications. While this ecological degradation
may imply an upward push of the regulating cost of production without
immediately putting absolute barrier to the reproduction of capital, this
process cannot continue without ultimately causing crucial and perhaps
insurmountable economic and environmental problems. Here, of course, we
need to take into account the possibility of extending nature, of producing a second nature or alternative
natures, which may have important implications for the sustainability of capitalism. There is an extensive
research concerning this production of a second nature or alternative natures and their socioeconomic
and ecological implications [29,36-38]. As E. Swyngedouw points out: While one sort of sustainability
seems to be predicated upon feverishly developing new natures ... forcing nature to act in a way we deem
sustainable or socially necessary, the other type is predicated upon limiting or redressing our intervention
in nature, returning it to a presumably more benign condition so that human and non-human sustainability
in the medium and long term can be assured. Despite the apparent contradictions of these two ways of
becoming sustainable (one predicated upon preserving natures status quo, the other predicated upon
producing new natures), they share the same basic vision that technonatural and sociometabolic
interactions are urgently needed if we wish to secure the survival of the planet and much of what it
contains [39]. Although the possibility of producing new nature may extent the potential terrain of
capitalist accumulation, and this may have important implication for an epoch characterized by a
tendency towards a universal subsumption of nature under capital, it must be stressed that it does not
imply that capitalism could ever escape all natural constraints. It is a rather limited and consequential
potential [40]. Distinct from this potential of producing new nature, Neo-Malthusian approaches to the
environmental problem, by assuming a finite availability of natural resources, have tended to overstress
natural limits, presenting them usually in a naturalistic and absolute manner, while blaming
overpopulation as the main source of environmental degradation and crisis [4,6]. On the other hand, Marx
and contemporary Marxists, without ignoring natural and biological limits, conceive that
social (organizational) or technological factors may, occasionally, relax or defer
such limits. Reflecting on Marxs view, P. Burkett points out that, with its exploitative
scientific development of productive forces, its in-built tendency to
reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale, and the attendant
extension of productions natural limits to the global, biospheric level,
capitalism is the first society capable of a truly planetary environmental
catastrophe, one that could ultimately threaten even capitals own
material requirements [23]. As I have argued, referring to a particular example, The
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increasing water scarcity, the declining quality of water, and the
inequitable pattern of its use across countries and in each particular
country, along with a green-house warming that increasingly dries up
mother earth, are not of course the result of some natural evolution, nor
mainly the result of overpopulation, but rather an outcome of a few
centuries of capitalist development and a particularly rapid economic
growth during the last half of the twentieth century [14]. In this case, as also in
the case of energy, neo-Malthusian approaches are misleading insofar as they naturalize external limits
(emphasizing natural scarcity), while largely ignoring the potentially important impact of drastic
technological and organizational changes on both the supply and the demand side. On the latter side,
quantitative and qualitative developments in social needs may be more the result of changes in technology
and social organization, than the result of any population growth. But more importantly, neo-Malthusian
approaches are misleading because they erroneously divorce the allocation of resources from the scale of
production and, taking at face value the presumable allocative efficiency of the market mechanism, end
up stressing a fixed scale of production and hence a steady-state model as a necessary condition for the
sustainability of capitalism [41]. As R. Smith has plausibly argued, however, economic growth (and
growthmania) is an inherent tendency of the market system and capitalism, and therefore a sustainability
of capitalism through a steady-state adjustment is impossible [42]. It becomes rather clear from the
preceding analysis and an increasing number of studies that capitalism, as a specific mode of production,
tends to undermine the most basic conditions of ecological sustainability, jeopardizing thus the survival of
human beings and of the capitalist system itself [14,15,43,44]. It would be rather misleading,
however, to consider ecological sustainability separately from the
conditions of economic and social sustainability of capitalism. Although this
is not the place to expand on the deeper causes of the currently evolving and aggravated economic crisis,
which tends to directly and indirectly undermine the conditions of economic and social sustainability of
capitalism, we should briefly take into account the fundamental role of the law of the tendency of the rate
of profit to fall [28], lying behind the overaccumulation crisis of the early 1970s which continues, with
some fluctuations, until the currently aggravated worldwide recession. This crisis, through a variety of
processes and mechanisms, has fuelled the exacerbation of ecological crisis in various forms. Among
these processes, we might consider the intensification of capitalist competition, the increasing
externalities (cost-shifting), and the over-exhaustive exploitation of both labour power and natural
resources. At the same time, there is an equally important dialectical feedback of the exacerbated
ecological crisis on the further aggravation of economic and social crisis. At this point it may be pertinent
to briefly address the dematerialization hypothesis as it might possibly have significant implications for
both ecological crisis (reduction of materials and energy use) and the economic crisis caused by a rising
organic composition of capital, namely the relation between constant to variable capital (C/V), and falling
profits rates (as noted above). According to this hypothesis, the increasing information and knowledge
content of production in modern capitalism, along with a relative expansion of the sector of services and a
more energy-efficient technology imply a significant reduction in the material requirements of
production. There are good reasons however, to argue that this dematerialization has not any significant
real dimensions [45,46]. More importantly, I would further argue that this presumable dematerialization
trend cannot have a significant impact on the material requirements of production, negating the tendency
towards a rising composition of capital. The capitalist imperatives behind this rising organic composition
of capital relate to three interrelated processes. In the first place, any process of production in capitalism
encompasses a use-value production and a valorization process, and labour has necessarily to be
materialized through the use and transformation of energy and natural resources. Secondly, competition
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implies the need of an incessant mechanization and automation drive aiming at an increased labour
productivity. Thirdly, the capitalist need to discipline and exploit labour in production can again be met
by an increasing mechanization. This increasing mechanization requires increased energy and resource
use and implies further a potentially maximum throughput of material resources with a minimum labour
power. It follows, therefore, that these necessities cannot be significantly changed by any
dematerialization trend, and hence it cannot have any significant ameliorating impact of economic and
ecological crisis. Capital, of course, deploys all sorts of strategies and methods to
stave off or ameliorate crisis, and popular pressure may also have some
effect in limiting the implications of economic and ecological crisis.
Despite this pressure and all attempts or policies aiming at an ecological
adjustment, however, it is rather impossible to adequately tackle the
ecological problem within the context of the currently prevailing
capitalist relations of production [10,14,18,21]. As the evidence available indicates, most
of these attempts, aiming at a green redevelopment, dematerialization and a decoupling of capitalist
economic growth from its negative ecological impact, have rather poor effects and cannot over all ensure
the conditions for the sustainability of capitalism [46]. And as M. Singer notes, although
capitalism has produced an impressive array of technological
innovations, as a global system it is characterized by inherent features
that make it unsustainable and, further, that current efforts to implement
green modifications to increase sustainability do not really address the
central environment-society contradictions of this socioeconomic
system [44]. It becomes increasingly clear that the growing metabolic rift between society and
nature, the exacerbated economic and ecological crisis, the expanding commodification of environmental
goods and the rapid shrinkage of the public goods provision lead to an increasing degradation in the
quality of life and undermine the required conditions for a sustainable human development [17,18,27].
While sustainable human development should be considered as being a major concern by itself and a
crucial condition for the overall sustainability of society, mainstream theorizing and policy
implementation regarding sustainable development are essentially concerned only with the sustainability
of capitalist profitability (and growth), and not with the sustainability of the ecosystem or the conditions
required for a sustainable human development. According to Burketts interpretation of Marx, the
intensification of the contradiction between production for profit and production for the satisfaction of
human needs is a condition for capitalisms historical crisis, [which] represents a generalized crisis of
capitalist relations as a form of human-need satisfaction and human development, and this cannot be
reduced to long-run profitability problems [23]. It is such a crisis that we face today, which clearly
manifests the economic, ecological and social un-sustainability of the capitalist mode of production. The
preceding analysis confirms our argument that a specific treatment of the social organization of
production, which is essentially ignored by mainstream economics, is crucial for exploring the conditions
of social and ecological sustainability. In light of the barriers to capitalist sustainability associated with
the immanent features of the CMP, several researchers clearly point to the need for a historical
transcendence of this particular mode of production [14,23,44,47]. The crucial question is, therefore, to
envisage the appropriate social forces and transitional processes, as well as the specific organizational
restructuring of society ensuring both social equity and sustainability, and ecological sustainability.

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Turn Organizing the economy around innovation creates
economics of speed- leads to rapid investment shifting and product
development- thats unsustainable and makes financial collapse
inevitable
Goldman et al. 6
(Robert Goldman, Stephen Papson, Noah Kersey, Landscapes of the
Social Relations of Production in a Networked Society, Fast Capitalism
2.1,
http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_1/SocialRelations.html
)
The formula for success is knowledge, power, mobility, and determination.
Situated in positions of power, the corporate elite imagistically embody
these attributes -- they are active, informed, determined, focused, surrounded by
technology. Even when the body is not moving, information continues to flow via cell phones and
electronic information tools integrated into the scenes. Embodied in pinstripes, wingtips, and the other
accoutrements of power, these scenes suggest that markets may be volatile but capital is composed and
disciplined in its pursuit of opportunities. Nowhere is this scenario more graphically played out than in
the 1999 ad campaign for Salomon Smith Barney that reveals a world moving at warp speed while the
elite investment bankers calmly survey it as they spot the opportunities that will pay off. These
representations resemble what Thomas Friedman (1999) dubs the Electronic Herd in The Lexus and the
Olive Tree. His metaphor embraces the volatility of markets in conjunction with the diffusion of capital
across the electronic circuits of finance. According to Friedman, no corporation or nation-
state can risk losing the favor of the Herd. In the global economy this can
be catastrophic to market values. Those who comprise the Herd
compete to maximize the rate of return on investments, which translates
into manically scouring the planet for opportunities or cutting
losses as quickly as possible when it is time to sell. The manic need
to invest is matched by panic selling. Combined with the ability to transfer
funds and monies electronically, a stock can be cut in half in hours, or a countrys currency thrown into
crisis with a rapidity hitherto unknown. Friedmans metaphor of the electronic herd pictures an economic
elite dashing about in a global free market economy fueled by technological innovation and the liquidity
of capital forms (currency, stocks, commodities). The figures who compose this grouping are constructed
as dynamic, mobile, and technologically sophisticated. They fluidly traverse the world of nonplaces and
occupy office suites in corporate towers surrounded by personal communication technologies. And yet,
even in these idealized abstractions, uncertainties and anxieties seep through. Narratives of
success are sprinkled with hints of impending crisis, or stories of those who
made the wrong choices - the wrong office equipment, the wrong software, the wrong package
delivery service. The exhilaration associated with accelerated social,
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economic, and technological change mixes with an undercurrent of
apprehension. Speed may mean winning, but it can also lead to
crashing. There are more losers than winners in casino capitalism. The
landscape of risk is omnipresent.

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AT: Gibson-Graham

Totalizing Rejection is necessary creates fissures within
capitalist ideology that makes emancipation possible the ballots
endorsement is key
Holloway 5 (John, 8-16, Ph.D Political Science-University of Edinburgh ,
Can We Change The World Without Taking Power?,
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/5616)
On the question of fissures. We often feel helpless because capitalism weighs so
heavily on us. But when we say No we start off with an appreciation of
our own strength. When we rebel we are in fact tearing a little hole in
capitalism. It is very contradictory. By rebelling we are already saying no to the command of capital.
We are creating temporary spaces. Within that crack, that fissure, it is
important that we fight for other social relations that don't point towards the state,
but that they point towards the sort of society we want to create. At the core of
these fissures is the drive to self-determination. And then it is a question of working out what does this
mean, and how to be organised for self-determination. It means being against and beyond the society that
exists. Of expanding the fissures, how to push these fissures forward structurally. The people who say we
should take control of the state are also talking about cracks. There is no choice but to start with
interstices. The question is how we think of them, because the state is not the whole world. There are 200
states. If you seize control of one, it is still only a crack in capitalism. It is a question of how
we think about those cracks, those fissures. And if we start off from
ourselves, why on earth should we adopt capitalist, bourgeois forms for
developing our struggle? Why should we accept the template of the
concept of the state?

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AT: No Impact

1. The card literally just says neolib good but doesnt provide
specific instances or warrantsstatus quo abuses of the
environment are because of the neoliberal system ignoring
the implications of short-term resource hungry actiona
disad to your arguents
2. Doesnt take into account environmental or political
implications of the affirmative
3. If we win sustainability this is moot--the preservation of an
unsustainable capitalism makes authoritarianism inevitable
only the risk the alt averts it
In view of the fact that the most intractable of the global capital systems contradictions is the one
between the internal unrestrainability of its economic constituents and the now inescapable necessity of
introducing major restraints, any hope for finding a way out of this vicious circle under the circumstances
marked by the activation of capitals absolute limits must be vested in the political dimension of the
system. Thus, in the light of recent legislative measures which already point in this direction, there
can be no doubt that the full power of the state will be activated to serve
the end of squaring capitals vicious circle, even if it means subjecting
all potential dissent to extreme authoritarian constraints. Equally there can be
no doubt that whether or not such a remedial action (in conformity to the global capital systems
structural limits) will be successfully pursued, despite its obvious authoritarian character and
destructiveness, will depend on the working classs ability or failure to radically rearticulate the socialist
movement as a truly international enterprise. In any event, what makes matters particularly
serious is the fact that the far-reaching issues themselves which confront
humankind at the present stage of historical development cannot be
avoided either by the ruling capital system or by any alternative to it.
Although, as a matter of historical contingency, they have arisen from the activation of
capitals absolute limits, they cannot be conveniently bypassed, nor their
gravity wished out of existence. On the contrary, they remain the overriding
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requirement of all-embracing remedial action in the reproductive
practices of humankind for as long as the vicious circle of capitals
present-day historical contingency is not irretrievably consigned to the
past. Indeed, paradoxically, the ability to meet in a sustainable way the absolute historical challenge
that had arisen from the perverse historical contingencies and contradictions of the capital system
constitutes the measure of viability of any social metabolic alternative to the ruling order. Consequently,
the struggle to overcome the threatening absolute limits of the capital
system is bound to determine the historical agenda for the foreseeable
future.
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AT: System Improving
1. Unsustainability means this doesnt matterthe only
reason why this is happening is because of technological
developments delaying the inevitablepopulation growth
and increased consumption trump all your cool stuff
2. Not in the context of environmental policy means we still
keep impacts relevant to the collapse of the entire ecological
structure
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***Aff
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2AC Sustainable
Neolib still sustainable
Zakaria 9 (Fareed, Former Editor of Newsweek International, Current
Editor-at-Large of Time, The Capitalism Manifesto: Greed is Good,
June 13
th
, http://www.newsweek.com/2009/06/12/the-capitalist-
manifesto-greed-is-good.html, EMM)

A few years from now, strange as it may sound, we might all find that we are
hungry for more capitalism, not less. An economic crisis slows growth, and when
countries need growth, they turn to markets. After the Mexican and East
Asian currency criseswhich were far more painful in those countries than the current downturn
has been in Americawe saw the pace of market-oriented reform speed up. If, in
the years ahead, the American consumer remains reluctant to spend, if federal and state governments
groan under their debt loads, if government-owned companies remain expensive burdens, then private-
sector activity will become the only path to create jobs. The simple truth is that with all
its flaws, capitalism remains the most productive economic engine we
have yet invented. Like Churchill's line about democracy, it is the worst of all economic
systems, except for the others. Its chief vindication today has come halfway across the world, in
countries like China and India, which have been able to grow and pull hundreds of millions of people
out of poverty by supporting markets and free trade. Last month India held elections during the worst
of this crisis. Its powerful left-wing parties campaigned against liberalization and got their worst
drubbing at the polls in 40 years.

Market forces are sustainable and good
Matthews 11
[Richard Matthews, eco-entrepreneur, eco-investor, sustainable writer,
Is Capitalism Sustainable?, The Green Market, 5-12-2011,
http://thegreenmarket.blogspot.com/2011/05/is-capitalism-
sustainable.html]
Business has created the environmental crisis and now the same
capitalist system that was behind the industrial revolution, is beginning
to play a vital role in solving the problems it created. Despite the link between
environmental practices and profitable, long-term business sustainability, many believe that
capitalism itself is unsustainable. The Earth has finite resources, so their
argument goes, but capitalism depends on ever expanding consumption.
The truth is that dating back to the origins of our species, we have seen our use of
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resources evolve, from stone, to bronze and then iron. More recently we
entered the information age which may prove to be the gateway to a
more sustainable use of resources. Although we should do everything we can to preserve
finite resources, human ingenuity is infinite. In this way we are slowly
moving away from finite fossil fuels to infinitely renewable fuels such as
wind, wave and solar. Market driven solutions can be incredibly
powerful as they have the power to extend, promote and invest in
sustainable innovation. Although new market based mechanisms like regulation, incentives and
tradable permits are still a few years off, it is inevitable that the true cost of carbon
will be made absolutely clear. As a tenant of the free market business should pay for the
costs they incur. Sustainability will continue because it is an unstoppable
mega-trend that is destined to keep growing at even faster rates. With the rise
of the green consumer, businesses want to cash-in on the steady and growing
demand for green goods and services. Various partnerships are emerging to help in the
development of sustainable best practices. One such arrangement involves the new partnerships between
corporations and environmental organizations.

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2AC Sustainable Kuznets
Newest studies prove Kuznets curve is right
Sari and Soytas 9 (Ramazan and Ugur, Dept. of Business Administration, Middle East
Technical University, Are global warming and economic growth compatible? Evidence from ve OPEC
countries?, Applied Energy, Volume 86, pg. 1887-1893, ScienceDirect)

The recent studies on the other hand improved our understanding in at least two
ways. Firstly, the empirical studies may be suffering from omitted variables
bias that may yield spurious causality test results. Hence, a multivariate approach should be preferred
over bi-variate approaches. Secondly, the temporal relationship between energy use and income may be
depending on country specic factors. Furthermore, depending on the nature of the link in concern,
alternative policy options may be available to policy makers in different countries. Therefore, studying
countries individually may be necessary. There is an abundance of studies that test the
environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis (see [6,45] for a review) which relate
environmental degradation to economic growth. The hypothesis states that as economies grow
pollution also grows, but after an income level is reached economic growth
is associated with a decline in pollution. As Rothman and de Bruyn [35] suggest if the
hypothesis holds economic growth can gradually become a solution to
environmental problems and no policy action is necessary.

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Neoliberal globalization is sustainable
Park 12
[Mi Park, PhD at Dalhousie University, Imagining a Just and
Sustainable Society: a Critique of Alternative Economic Models in the
Global Justice Movement, Critical Sociology, published online 2-13-
2012 at SAGE Journals]
Many critics of globalization believe that economic expansion,
regardless of resource regimes, is ecologically unsustainable. They
presuppose a mutually exclusive, destructive relationship between
economic growth and the use of natural resources. But as an
environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) demonstrates, environmental
quality improves with the use of better production technology. Some
environmentalists argue that with technological developments, we need
fewer primary resources to produce goods and services while expanding
the range of recyclable goods (Field and Olewiler, 2005). If so,
economic growth can be de-linked from the use of non-renewable
energy and waste. Indeed, the eco-capitalist globalization model is
premised on the notion of decoupling economic growth from ecological
degradation.

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2AC No Impact

Globalized liberal capitalism turns your oppression claims
Bhagvati 4 (University Professor at Columbia University and Senior
Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations
[JagdishBhagwati, In Defense of Globalization. 2004. Overview,
http://www.cfr.org/publication/6769/in_defense_of_globalization.html]
JagdishBhagwati takes conventional wisdomthat globalization is the cause of several social illsand
turns it on its head. Properly regulated, globalization, he says, is the most
powerful force for social good in the world. Drawing on his unparalleled knowledge
of international economics, Bhagwati dismantles the antiglobalization case. He persuasively argues that
globalization often leads to greater general prosperity in an
underdeveloped nation: it can reduce child labor, increase literacy, and
enhance the economic and social standing of women.And to counter charges that
globalization leads to cultural hegemony, to a bland McWorld, Bhagwati points to several examples,
from literature to movies, in which globalization has led to a spicy hybrid of cultures.
Often controversial and always compelling, Bhagwati cuts through the noise on this most contentious
issue, showing that globalization is part of the solution, not part of the problem. Anyone who wants to
understand whats at stake in the globalization wars will want to read In Defense of Globalization. The
first edition of In Defense of Globalization addressed the critiques that concerned the social implications
of economic globalization.Thus, it addressed questions such as the impact on
womens rights and equality, child labor, poverty in the poor countries,
democracy, mainstream and indigenous culture, and the environment.
Professor Bhagwati concluded that globalization was, on balance, a force for
advancing these agendas as well.Thus, whereas the critics assumed
thatglobalizationlacked a human face, itactually had a human face. He also examined in
depth the ways in which policy and institutional design could further advance
these social agendas, adding more glow to the human face.
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2AC Alt Fails
No mindset shift and no alt solvency
Matthew Lockwood 11, previously Associate Director for Climate,
Transport and Energy at the Institute for Public Policy Research, The
Limits to Environmentalism, March 25,
http://politicalclimate.net/2011/03/25/the-limits-to-environmentalism-4/

This brings us neatly finally to the third problem with PWG: politics. Jackson does have some discussion
of the need for our old favourite political will towards the end of the book, and there are some examples
of concrete ideas (e.g. shorter working week, ban advertising aimed at children), but there is
basically no political strategy. Indeed, the argument is framed in terms of
the need for social and economic change and governance, but not
politics at all. The key question is how we are supposed to get from
where we are to where he wants us to be. Jackson acknowledges that at the
moment, many people want growth (or more precisely, economic
stability) and so demand it of politicians, who then have a political
incentive to deliver it. The quandary (not really acknowledged) is which strategy to adopt in
this situation. Do you first reshape the economy to deliver economic stability without growth (e.g. by a
shorter working week), which then demonstrates to people socially and politically that growth isnt
necessary for a good life, or do you first have to bring about major social change, moving people away
from consumerism, as a precondition for transforming the economy and making the end of growth
politically feasible? The discussion in chapter 11 of the book sort of implies that Jackson is thinking in
terms of the latter route, but it actually has no strategy. He lays out (some quite conventional, even dare I
say it, already proposed by economists) policies like carbon taxation and the aforementioned shorter
working week but there is nothing on political narrative. The closest we get to a strategy for social
transformation is banning advertising aimed at children (also a theme of Tom Cromptons) and policies to
drive greater durability of products. A counterview might be that all these changes are needed, and it
doesnt matter so much what happens first, that they all reinforce each other etc etc. But I dont think
thats enough. The political party in the UK that comes closest to offering the
Jackson vision is the Green Party. They got 1% of the popular vote in the
2010 general election, and one MP. What stronger evidence can there
be that the vision on its own is not enough? A final point takes us back to equity
(see previous post), but this time within rich countries. Certainly within the US and the UK,
a large group of people in the low-to-middle part of the income
distribution have seen their real incomes stagnate or fall over the last
decade, as the rich have got richer. Telling this squeezed middle that
economic growth is to end is not going to go down well unless there is a
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credible strategy for redistribution. Thats why a good initial step for a more sustainable
economy might be a set of good old-fashioned social democratic policies on tax and spend. Prosperity
without Growth raises some very important questions, and Tim Jackson shows how tight a squeeze we are
in. But the book leaves some even more crucial questions hanging. Of course ending economic
growth in rich countries would make a solution to ecological limits a bit
easier, but this would play only a small role. In the absence of radical technological
change, only serious de-growth, what Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows call planned economic
recession would be sufficient to bring about the cut in emissions needed. With rapid growth in poor
countries this conclusion is even stronger. So what we should be focusing on is
achieving that technological change. Yes, it hasnt materialised so far, but
nor have the policies for low carbon innovation we need to produce it like Gandhis Western
civilisation, the low carbon revolution would be a good idea. And yes, getting those policies
in place will require political effort. But that effort will be as nothing
compared with the political challenge of replacing capitalism with a
new steady state system either lacking innovation or with a disappearing working week.
Perhaps the most fundamental, indeed philosophical issue here is that, despite the fact that Jackson has
made a good effort to make an argument about limits into an argument about quality of life, his
underlying message is (pace Obama): No, we cant. But beyond the
environmentalist camp, this message will not work. In the face of the biggest
collective challenge that humanity has faced, we need a narrative that has the human potential to solve
problems, and overcome apparently unbeatable odds, at its heart.
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Neolib inevitable and the alt fails
Jones 11 (Owen, Masters at Oxford, named one of the Daily Telegraph's 'Top 100 Most
Influential People on the Left' for 2011, author of "Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class",
The Independent, UK, "Owen Jones: Protest without politics will change nothing", 2011,
www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-protest-without-politics-will-change-
nothing-2373612.html

My first experience of police kettling was aged 16. It was May Day 2001, and the anti-globalisation
movement was at its peak. The turn-of-the-century anti-capitalist movement feels largely forgotten
today, but it was a big deal at the time. To a left-wing teenager growing up in an age of unchallenged
neo-liberal triumphalism, just to have "anti-capitalism" flash up in the headlines was thrilling.
Thousands of apparently unstoppable protesters chased the world's rulers from IMF to World Bank
summits from Seattle to Prague to Genoa and the authorities were rattled. Today, as
protesters in nearly a thousand cities across the world follow the
example set by the Occupy Wall Street protests, it's worth pondering what
happened to the anti-globalisation movement. Its activists did not lack
passion or determination. But they did lack a coherent alternative to
the neo-liberal project. With no clear political direction, the
movement was easily swept away by the jingoism and turmoil that
followed 9/11, just two months after Genoa. Don't get me wrong: the Occupy movement is a
glimmer of sanity amid today's economic madness. By descending on the West's financial epicentres,
it reminds us of how a crisis caused by the banks (a sentence that needs to be repeated until it becomes
a clich) has been cynically transformed into a crisis of public spending. The founding statement of
Occupy London puts it succinctly: "We refuse to pay for the banks' crisis." The Occupiers direct their
fire at the top 1 per cent, and rightly so as US billionaire Warren Buffett confessed: "There's class
warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." The Occupy
movement has provoked fury from senior US Republicans such as Presidential contender Herman
Cain who predictably labelled it "anti-American". They're right to be worried: those camping
outside banks threaten to refocus attention on the real villains, and to act as a catalyst for wider
dissent. But a coherent alternative to the tottering global economic order
remains, it seems, as distant as ever. Neo-liberalism crashes around,
half-dead, with no-one to administer the killer blow. There's always a
presumption that a crisis of capitalism is good news for the left. Yet in the Great Depression, fascism
consumed much of Europe. The economic crisis of the 1970s did lead to a resurgence of radicalism on
both left and right. But, spearheaded by Thatcherism and Reaganism, the New Right definitively
crushed its opposition in the 1980s.This time round, there doesn't even seem to
be an alternative for the right to defeat. That's not the fault of the protesters. In
truth, the left has never recovered from being virtually smothered out
of existence. It was the victim of a perfect storm: the rise of the New Right; neo-liberal
globalisation; and the repeated defeats suffered by the trade union movement. But, above all, it was
the aftermath of the collapse of Communism that did for the left. As US neo-conservative Midge
Decter triumphantly put it: "It's time to say: We've won. Goodbye." From the British Labour Party to
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the African National Congress, left-wing movements across the world hurtled to the right in an almost
synchronised fashion. It was as though the left wing of the global political spectrum had been sliced
off. That's why, although we live in an age of revolt, there remains no left to give it direction and
purpose.

The alt fails, causes transition conflicts, requires totalitarianism, and
flips their impacts
Aligica 3 (fellow at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University, and Adjunct Fellow at the
Hudson Institute (Paul, 4/21. The Great Transition and the Social Limits to Growth: Herman Kahn on
Social Change and Global Economic Development, April 21,
http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=2827)

Stopping things would mean if not to engage in an experiment to change the human nature, at least in an
equally difficult experiment in altering powerful cultural forces: "We firmly believe that despite the
arguments put forward by people who would like to 'stop the earth and
get off,' it is simply impractical to do so. Propensity to change may not be
inherent in human nature, but it is firmly embedded in most contemporary
cultures. People have almost everywhere become curious, future oriented, and dissatisfied
with their conditions. They want more material goods and covet higher status and
greater control of nature. Despite much propaganda to the contrary, they believe in progress
and future" (Kahn, 1976, 164). As regarding the critics of growth that stressed the issue of the gap
between rich and poor countries and the issue of redistribution, Kahn noted that what most people
everywhere want was visible, rapid improvement in their economic
status and living standards, and not a closing of the gap (Kahn, 1976, 165).
The people from poor countries have as a basic goal the transition from
poor to middle class. The other implications of social change are
secondary for them. Thus a crucial factor to be taken into account is that while the zero-
growth advocates and their followers may be satisfied to stop at the
present point, most others are not. Any serious attempt to frustrate these
expectations or desires of that majority is likely to fail and/or create
disastrous counter reactions. Kahn was convinced that "any concerted attempt
to stop or even slow 'progress' appreciably (that is, to be satisfied with the moment)
is catastrophe-prone". At the minimum, "it would probably require the
creation of extraordinarily repressive governments or movements-
and probably a repressive international system" (Kahn, 1976, 165; 1979, 140-153).
The pressures of overpopulation, national security challenges and poverty as
well as the revolution of rising expectations could be solved only in a
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continuing growth environment. Kahn rejected the idea that continuous
growth would generate political repression and absolute poverty. On the contrary, it is the limits-
to-growth position "which creates low morale, destroys assurance,
undermines the legitimacy of governments everywhere, erodes
personal and group commitment to constructive activities and
encourages obstructiveness to reasonable policies and hopes". Hence this
position "increases enormously the costs of creating the resources
needed for expansion, makes more likely misleading debate and
misformulation of the issues, and make less likely constructive and
creative lives". Ultimately "it is precisely this position the one that
increases the potential for the kinds of disasters which most at its
advocates are trying to avoid" (Kahn, 1976, 210; 1984).

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2AC Markets Good

Markets key to peace
Gartzke 9 (The Capitalist Peace Erik Gartzke Columbia University 2009 Erik Gartzke is an
associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace
Studies at Columbia University

The discovery that democracies seldom fight each other has led, quite reasonably, to the conclusion that
democracy causes peace, at leastwithin 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 capitalism and common interstate interests. Economic development,
capital market integration, and the compatibility of foreignpolicy preferences
supplant the effect of democracy 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.1 If war is a product of incompatible
interests and failed or abortive bargaining, peace ensues when states lack differences 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 postWorldWar 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
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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 others saw in market forces the power to end war. Unfortunately, war
continued, leading many to view as overly optimistic 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
contemporary 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.Mostdemocraticpeace researchexamines trade in goods and services but ignores capital markets
and offers only a cursory assessment of economic development (Maoz and Russett 1992). Several studies
explore the impact 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 politics.

Cap key to solve resource scarcity- their ev is biased
Taylor 2 (Jerry Taylor, Cato Natural Resource Studies Director, 02 [Sustainable Development: A
Dubious Solution in Search of a Problem, August 26, http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa449.pdf]

If resources are growing more abundant while the concentration of
pollutants in air sheds and watersheds continues to decline, how can we explain
the proliferation of various stylized sustainability indices that point to a
deterioration of the planets resource base? There are five common weaknesses with such
reports. First, they are almost always built upon a selective but
fundamentally arbitrary or irrelevant set of indicators. Second, they are
often built not upon actual resource data but upon hypotheses or theories
about resource health that do not comport with the data or that rest upon highly suspect data
fundamentally inconsistent with the larger data sets available to analysts. Third, they ignore the
well-documented propensity of capitalist societies to create and invent
new resources when old resources become relatively more scarce (that is, they assume that
resources are fixed and finite when they are not). Fourth, they are highly aggregated
and often subjective calculations of data sets that lack common
denominators. Finally, they are frequently heavily biased by
ideological assumptions about politics and government action. Accordingly, they provide
little help to policy analysts or political leaders.
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2AC World Improving
Violence has massively decreased because of econ
growth/modernization/interdependence- best data proves
Gat 13 (AZAR GAT, DPhil in History (University of Oxford, 1986);
Ezer Weitzman Professor of National Security, Political Science
Department, Tel Aviv University; recent books: War in Human
Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2006); Victorious and
Vulnerable: Why Democracy Won in the 20th Century and How It Is
Still Imperiled (Hoover Institution, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010);
Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and
Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Is war declining and
why? Azar Gat Department of Political Science, University of Tel
Aviv azargat@post.tau.ac.il , March 19
th
2013)

When quite a number of scholars simultaneously and independently
of one another arrive at very similar conclusions on an issue of
cardinal theoretical and practical significance, their thesis deserves,
and has received, great attention. The thesis is that war and violence in
general have progressively decreased in recent times, during the
modern era, and even throughout history. Of course, despite their unanimity, all
these scholars could still be wrong. Indeed, each of them tells a similar story of
peoples disbelief at their findings, most notably that we live in the most
peaceful period in human history. Some of them even explain the
general incredulity by the findings of evolutionary psychology according
to which we tend to be overly optimistic about ourselves but overly
pessimistic about the world at large. Having myself written about the
marked decrease in deadly human violence (Gat, 2006), I agree with the
authors general thesis. However, their unanimity falters over, and they are less clear about, the
historical trajectory of and the reasons for the decline in violence and war, questions that are as important
as the general thesis itself. Previous Section Next Section Hobbes was right, and Rousseau wrong, about
the state of nature Steven Pinkers The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) towers above all the other
books surveyed here in size, scope, boldness, and scholarly excellence. It has deservedly attracted great
public attention and has become a best-seller. Massively documented, this 800-page volume is lavishly
furnished with statistics, charts, and diagrams, which are one of the books most effective features. The
book, spanning the whole human past as far back as our aboriginal condition, points to two major steps in
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the decline of violence. The first is the sharp decline in violent mortality which resulted from the rise of
the state-Leviathan from around 5,000 years ago. This conclusion is based on the most comprehensive
studies of the subject published over the past 15 years (Keeley, 1996; LeBlanc, 2003; Gat, 2006), which
demonstrate on the basis of anthropological and archaeological evidence that Hobbess picture of the
anarchic state of nature as a very violent one was fundamentally true. Pinker rightly summarizes that
violent mortality with the rise of states dropped from a staggering estimated 15% of the population, 25%
of the men, in pre-state societies, to about 15%. The main reason for this drop is the enforcement of
internal peace by the Leviathan, but also, less noted by Pinker, lower mobilization rates and a smaller
exposure of the civilian population to war than with tribal groups, as will be explained shortly. This
conclusion regarding the dramatic drop in violent mortality with the transition to the state is at odds with
the claim made by Jack Levy & William Thompson in their book, The Arc of War (2011). As the books
title implies, Levy & Thompson posit a great increase in warfare during history, before a decrease during
the past two centuries. Thus, the book claims that mortality in fighting greatly increased, accelerated in
the authors language, with the transition to the state. They reach this conclusion by making several
mistaken assumptions. First, although professing ignorance about the distant past because of the lack of
evidence on the behavior of hunter-gatherer societies before the adoption of agriculture some 10,000
years ago, they cite and are heavily influenced by the old Rousseauite anthropology of the generation
after the 1960s, which recent studies have refuted. Obviously, one does not have to accept the above
findings regarding the pervasiveness and great lethality of prehistoric warfare. But Levy & Thompson
simply do not engage with them. They accept as true the Rousseauite premise that sparse human
population could not possibly have had that much to fight about. However, recently extant hunter-gatherer
societies prove the opposite. Australia is our best laboratory of hunter-gatherer societies, because that vast
continent was entirely populated by them and unpolluted by agriculturalists, pastoralists or states until
the arrival of the Europeans in 1788. And the evidence shows that the Australian tribes fought incessantly
with one another. Even in the Central Australian Desert, whose population density was as low as one
person per 35 square miles, among the lowest there is, conflict and deadly fighting were the rule. Much of
that fighting centered on the water-holes vital for survival in this area, with the violent death rate there
reckoned to have been several times higher than in any state society. In most other places, hunting
territories were monopolized and fiercely defended by hunter-gatherers because they were quickly
depleted. Even among the Inuit of Arctic Canada, who were so sparse as to experience no resource
competition, fighting to kidnap women was pervasive, resulting in a violent death rate 10 times higher
than the USAs peak rate of 1990, itself the highest in the developed world. In more hospitable and
densely populated environments casualties averaged, as already mentioned, 15% of the population and
25% of the men, and the surviving men were covered with scars (Gat, 2006: chs 2, 6). We are not dealing
here with a piece of exotic curiosity. Ninety-five percent of the history of our species Homo sapiens
sapiens people who are like us was spent as hunter-gatherers. The transition to agriculture and the
state is very recent, the tip of the iceberg, in human history. Furthermore, the human state of nature turns
out to be no different than the state of nature in general. Here too, science has made a complete turnabout.
During the 1960s people believed that animals did not kill each other within the same species, which
made humans appear like a murderous exception and fed speculations that warfare emerged only with
civilization. Since then, however, it has been found that animals kill each other extensively within
species, a point pressed on every viewer of television nature documentaries. There is nothing special
about humans in this regard. Thus, lethal human fighting did not emerge at some point in history, as
Levy & Thompson posit. Previous Section Next Section Violent death sharply decreased with the rise of
the Leviathan As mentioned earlier and as Pinker well realizes, violent mortality actually dropped steeply
with the emergence of the state-Leviathan. Here is where Levy & Thompson make a second mistake. For
measuring the lethality of warfare they use evidence of battle mortality, but this is highly misleading for
various reasons. First, pre-state tribes main fighting modes were not the battle but the raid and the
ambush capturing the enemy by surprise and often annihilating entire sleeping camps: men, women, and
children. Second, the size of battles merely indicates the size of the states and their armies, which are
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obviously larger than tribal groups in absolute terms. Yet the main question is relative
casualties, what percentage of the population died violently. And here the fact is that while states
and their armies grew by a factor of tens, hundreds, and thousands, giving a spectacular impression of
large-scale fighting, relative casualties actually decreased under the state,
and not only because of internal peace. Indeed, casualties decreased precisely because
states grew large. Take Egypt, for example, part of the acceleration of war with the emergence of states
in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and China, according to Levy & Thompson. The size of the Egyptian
army with which Pharaoh Ramses II fought the Hittite empire at the Battle of Kadesh (commonly dated
1274 BCE) was 20,00025,000 soldiers. This was a very large army by the standards of the time. Yet the
total population of Egypt was about 23 million, so the army constituted 1% of the population at most.
This was very much the standard in large states and empires throughout history because of the great
financial and logistical problems of maintaining large armies for long periods at great distances from
home. Thus, in comparison to the high military participation rates of small-scale tribal societies,
participation rates, and hence war casualties, in large states armies were much lower. Moreover, in
contrast to the great vulnerability of women and children in small-scale tribal warfare, the civilian
population of Egypt was sheltered by distance from the theaters of military operations and not often
exposed to the horrors of war. Such relative security, interrupted only by large-scale invasions, is one of
the main reasons why societies experienced great demographic growth after the emergence of the state. It
is also the reason why civil war, when the war rages within the country, tends to be the most lethal form
of war, as Hobbes very well realized. Warfare and feuds in the pre- and early-modern eras Levy &
Thompson further posit that between the 14th and early 19th centuries, Europe was the scene of a second
acceleration in the historical trajectory of violence. This is very much in line with the prevailing
perceptions regarding early modern European history, but these perceptions are most probably wrong, and
for the same reason as before: Levy & Thompson count absolute battle casualties, and obviously states
became more centralized during this period and armies grew in number, so battles also grew in size. Yet it
was the anarchy and feudal fragmentation in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and 1200 that
were responsible for the pervasive insecurity and endemic violence that characterized the Dark Ages and
resulted in, among other things, a sharp demographic decline. Again, small-scale usually meant more, not
less, violent mortality. The focus on early modern Europe is misleading also in another way: in the late
Middle Ages the Mongol conquests inflicted on the societies of China, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe
casualties and destruction that were among the highest ever suffered during historical times. Estimates of
the sharp decline experienced by the populations of China and Russia, for example, vary widely. Still,
even by the lowest estimates they were at least as great, and in China almost definitely much greater, than
the Soviet Unions horrific rate in World War II of about 15%. The receding of medieval anarchy in the
face of the growing European state-Leviathans was the first step towards a steep decline in the continents
violent mortality rate beginning in early modernity and continuing to the present day. The studies and
data cited by Pinker with respect to the domestic aspect of this trend are strikingly paralleled by those of
Robert Muchembleds History of Violence (2012). The work of a historian, the book meticulously
documents, on the basis of French legal records, a 20-fold decrease in homicide rates between the 13th
and 20th centuries. Earlier studies of other parts of Europe, starting with Gurr (1981), have come up with
similar findings. Like Pinker, Muchembled attributes the steep decline to the states growing authority, as
its justice system effectively replaced and deterred private justice, vendetta, and pervasive violence, all
of them endemic in unruly societies. Correspondingly, again like Pinker, Muchembled invokes Norbert
Eliass (2000) civilizing process, whereby the defense of honor by sword and knife, a social norm and
imperative in most traditional societies, is gradually given up among both the nobility and the general
populace. The civilizing process is partly a function of the growing authority of the states rule and justice
system. But there were other factors involved, which Pinker excels in identifying and weaving together.
Although he is not a historian, his historical synthesis is exemplarily rich and nuanced. He specifies the
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growing humanitarian sensibilities in Europe of the Enlightenment, which he traces to, among other
things, the gradual improvement in living conditions, growing commercial spirit and, above all, the print
revolution with the attendant values and habits of reasoning, introspection, and empathy that it inculcated
among the reading elites. As Pinker points out, not only did homicide rates decline but also other
previously common forms of violence, such as judicial disembowelment and torture, were becoming
unacceptable by the 18th century. This was the beginning of a continuous process which during the
following centuries would bring about, among other things, the abolition of slavery and the decline of
capital punishment, tyranny, and political violence in the developed world most notably in the areas
where the values of Enlightenment humanitarianism triumphed. Both Pinker and Muchembled identify a
change in the trend towards increased violence and homicide rates in the United States and Europe from
the 1960s on. They attribute this change (Pinker is particularly elaborative here) to the erosion of public
authority and some reversal of the civilizing process with the cults of youth culture, defiance of
authority, radical ideologies of violence by the oppressed, and the fragmentation of the stable family
structure. Pinker identifies a return to a downward trend in violence from about 1990 on, which he
attributes to an ebbing of much of the above through reasserted state action and changes in the public
mood. A last point worth mentioning in this context: Muchembled reveals that throughout the steep
decline in homicide rates, from medieval times to the present, 90% or more of all cases have been
perpetrated by men, especially between the ages of 20 and 30 years old. As Daly & Wilson (1988: 145
149) have shown, this ratio is found in each and every society studied around the globe, from hunter-
gatherers to agricultural and industrial societies, irrespective of the vastly different homicide rates among
them. Previous Section Next Section The decline of war and the three `Long Peaces' after 1815 We
now move to the decline of war, which is our main concern here. Most
people are surprised to learn that the occurrence of war and overall
mortality in war sharply decreased after 1815, most notably in the developed world.
The Long Peace among the great powers after 1945 is more recognized
and is widely attributed to the nuclear factor, a decisive factor to be sure,
which concentrated the minds of all the protagonists wonderfully. The
(inter-)democratic peace has been equally recognized. But in actuality,
the decrease in war had been very marked before the nuclear era
and encompassed both democracies and non-democracies. In the
century after 1815, wars among economically advanced countries
declined in their frequency to about one-third of what they had been
in the previous centuries, an unprecedented change. Indeed, the Long Peace
after 1945 was preceded by the second longest peace among the great powers, between 1871 and 1914,
and by the third longest peace, between 1815 and 1854 (Gat, 2006: 536537, 608). Thus, the three longest
periods of peace by far in the modern great powers system all occurred after 1815. Clearly, one needs to
explain the entire trend, while also accounting for the glaring divergence from it: the two World Wars.
Previous Section Next Section Is modern war more lethal and destructive than before? In his earlier
works, Levy (1983) was among the first to document the much-reduced frequency of war after 1815. But
what brought about this change? Levy & Thompson assume this is perhaps the most natural hypothesis
that wars declined in frequency because they became too lethal, destructive, and expensive. Supposedly,
a trade-off of sorts was created between the intensity and frequency of warfare: fewer, larger wars
supplanting many smaller ones. This hypothesis barely holds, however, because, again, relative to
population and wealth wars have not become more lethal and costly than earlier in history. Furthermore,
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as Levy & Thompson rightly document, the wars of the 19th century the most peaceful century in
European history were particularly light, in comparative terms, so there is no trade-off here. True, the
World Wars, especially World War II, were certainly on the upper scale of the range in terms of
casualties. Yet, as already noted, they were far from being exceptional in history. Once more, we need to
look at relative casualties, general human mortality in any number of wars that happen to rage around the
world, rather than at the aggregate created by the fact that many states participated in the World Wars. I
have already mentioned the Mongol invasions, but other examples abound. In the first three years of the
Second Punic War, 21816 BCE, Rome lost some 50,000 citizens of the ages of 1746, out of a total of
about 200,000 in that age demographic (Brunt, 1971). This was roughly 25% of the military-age cohorts
in only three years, the same range as the Russian and higher than the German rates in World War II.
This, and the devastation of Romes free peasantry during the Second Punic War, did not reduce Romes
propensity for war thereafter. During the Thirty Years War (161848) population loss in Germany is
estimated at between one-fifth and one-third either way higher than the German casualties in World
War I and World War II combined. People often assume that more developed military technology during
modernity means greater lethality and destruction, but in fact it also means greater protective power, as
with mechanized armor, mechanized speed and agility, and defensive electronic measures. Offensive and
defensive advances generally rise in tandem. In addition, it is all too often forgotten that the vast majority
of the many millions of non-combatants killed by Germany during World War II Jews, Soviet prisoners
of war, Soviet civilians fell victim to intentional starvation, exposure to the elements, and mass
executions rather than to any sophisticated military technology. Instances of genocide in general during
the 20th century, much as earlier in history, were carried out with the simplest of technologies, as the
Rwanda genocide horrifically reminded us. Nor have wars during the past two centuries been
economically more costly than they were earlier in history, again relative to overall wealth. War has
always involved massive economic exertion and has been the single most expensive item of state
spending (e.g. massively documented, Bonney, 1999). Examples are countless, and it will suffice to
mention that both 16th- and 17th-century Spain and 18th-century France were economically ruined by
war and staggering war debts, which in the French case brought about the Revolution. Furthermore, death
by starvation in premodern wars was widespread. Previous Section Next Section Is it peace that has
become more profitable? So if wars have not become more costly and destructive during the past two
centuries then why have they receded, particularly in the developed world?
The answer is the advent of the industrialcommercial revolution after
1815, the most profound transformation of human society since the Neolithic adoption of agriculture. The
correlation between the decline of war in the developed world and the process of modernization, both
unfolding since 1815, is surely not accidental, and the causation is not difficult to locate. In the first place,
given explosive growth in per capita wealth, about 30- to 50-fold thus far, the Malthusian trap has been
broken. Wealth no longer constitutes a fundamentally finite quantity, and
wealth acquisition progressively shifted away from a zero-sum game.
Secondly, economies are no longer overwhelmingly autarkic, instead
having become increasingly interconnected by specialization, scale, and exchange.
Consequently, foreign devastation potentially depressed the entire system
and was thus detrimental to a states own wellbeing. This reality, already noted
by Mill (1848/1961: 582), starkly manifested itself after World War I, as Keynes (1920) had anticipated
in his criticism of the reparations imposed on Germany. Thirdly, greater economic openness
has decreased the likelihood of war by disassociating economic
access from the confines of political borders and sovereignty. It is no
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longer necessary to politically possess a territory in order benefit
from it. Of the above three factors, the second one commercial
interdependence has attracted most of the attention in the literature.
But the other two factors have been no less significant. Thus, the greater
the yield of competitive economic cooperation, the more
counterproductive and less attractive conflict becomes. Rather than
war becoming more costly, as is widely believed, it is in fact peace that
has been growing more profitable. Referring to my argument in this regard, Levy &
Thompson (2011: 7275) excused themselves from deciding on the issue on the grounds of insufficient
information regarding the cost of premodern war. But as already noted, the information on the subject is
quite clear.

The status quo is structurally improving
Indur Goklany 10, policy analyst for the Department of the Interior phd from MSU, Population,
Consumption, Carbon Emissions, and Human Well-Being in the Age of Industrialization (Part III
Have Higher US Population, Consumption, and Newer Technologies Reduced Well-Being?), April 24,
http://www.masterresource.org/2010/04/population-consumption-carbon-emissions-and-human-well-
being-in-the-age-of-industrialization-part-iii-have-higher-us-population-consumption-and-newer-
technologies-reduced-well-being/#more-9194

In my previous post I showed that, notwithstanding the Neo-Malthusian worldview,
human well-being has advanced globally since the start of
industrialization more than two centuries ago, despite massive increases in
population, consumption, affluence, and carbon dioxide emissions. In
this post, I will focus on long-term trends in the U.S. for these and other indicators. Figure 1 shows that
despite several-fold increases in the use of metals and synthetic organic chemicals, and emissions of CO2
stoked by increasing populations and affluence, life expectancy, the single best measure
of human well-being, increased from 1900 to 2006 for the US. Figure 1 reiterates this point
with respect to materials use. These figures indicate that since 1900, U.S. population has quadrupled,
affluence has septupled, their product (GDP) has increased 30-fold, synthetic organic chemical use has
increased 85-fold, metals use 14-fold, material use 25-fold, and CO2 emissions 8-fold. Yet life
expectancy advanced from 47 to 78 years. Figure 2 shows that during the same period, 19002006,
emissions of air pollution, represented by sulfur dioxide, waxed and waned. Food and water got
safer, as indicated by the virtual elimination of deaths from gastrointestinal (GI) diseases between 1900
and 1970. Cropland, a measure of habitat converted to human uses the single most important
pressure on species, ecosystems, and biodiversity was more or less unchanged from 1910
onward despite the increase in food demand. For the most part, life expectancy grew
more or less steadily for the U.S., except for a brief plunge at the end of the First World War accentuated
by the 1918-20 Spanish flu epidemic. As in the rest of the world, todays U.S. population not only lives
longer, it is also healthier. The disability rate for seniors declined 28 percent between 1982 and 2004/2005
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and, despite quantum improvements in diagnostic tools, major diseases (e.g., cancer, and heart and
respiratory diseases) now occur 811 years later than a century ago. Consistent with
this, data for New York City indicate that despite a population increase from 80,000 in 1800 to 3.4
million in 1900 and 8.0 million in 2000 and any associated increases in economic product, and chemical,
fossil fuel and material use that, no doubt, occurred crude mortality rates have declined more or less
steadily since the 1860s (again except for the flu epidemic). Figures 3 and 4 show, once again, that
whatever health-related problems accompanied economic development, technological change, material,
chemical and fossil fuel consumption, and population growth, they were overwhelmed by the health-
related benefits associated with industrialization and modern economic growth. This does not mean that
fossil fuel, chemical and material consumption have zero impact, but it means that overall benefits
have markedly outweighed costs. The reductions in rates of deaths and
diseases since at least 1900 in the US, despite increased population,
energy, and material and chemical use, belie the Neo-Malthusian
worldview. The improvements in the human condition can be ascribed to
broad dissemination (through education, public health systems, trade and commerce) of
numerous new and improved technologies in agriculture, health and
medicine supplemented through various ingenious advances in
communications, information technology and other energy powered
technologies (see here for additional details). The continual increase in life expectancy accompanied
by the decline in disease during this period (as shown by Figure 2) indicates that the new
technologies reduced risks by a greater amount than any risks that they
may have created or exacerbated due to pollutants associated with greater consumption of
materials, chemicals and energy, And this is one reason why the Neo-Malthusian vision comes up short. It
dwells on the increases in risk that new technologies may create or aggravate but overlooks the larger
and usually more certain risks that they would also eliminate or reduce. In other words, it focuses on
the pixels, but misses the larger picture, despite pretensions to a holistic worldview.

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