Neoliberalism Kritik
Samford Debate Institute ‘13
***1NC*** ............................................................................................................................................... 3
1NC Shell .............................................................................................................................................. 4
***Neg Block*** ......................................................................................................................................... 7
2NC/1NR Overview.............................................................................................................................. 8
***Links*** ........................................................................................................................................... 10
Cuba .................................................................................................................................................... 11
Mexico ................................................................................................................................................ 12
Venezuela............................................................................................................................................ 14
Generic Link – Energy ........................................................................................................................ 16
***Impacts*** ........................................................................................................................................ 18
EXT – Impact ...................................................................................................................................... 19
EXT – Unsustainable .......................................................................................................................... 20
***Alternative***................................................................................................................................... 23
Alt Solves – Generic ........................................................................................................................... 24
***Framework*** .................................................................................................................................. 27
Framework .......................................................................................................................................... 28
***2NC Answers To***......................................................................................................................... 33
AT: Perm............................................................................................................................................. 34
AT: Transition Wars ........................................................................................................................... 37
AT: Neoliberalism is Good ................................................................................................................. 38
AT: Inevitable ..................................................................................................................................... 39
AT: Alt Fails ....................................................................................................................................... 41
***Affirmative Answers*** ....................................................................................................................... 42
2AC Frontline ..................................................................................................................................... 43
EXT – Sustainable .............................................................................................................................. 47
EXT – Alt Fails ................................................................................................................................... 49
EXT – Key to Peace ............................................................................................................................ 51
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Neoliberalism Kritik
Samford Debate Institute ‘13
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Samford Debate Institute ‘13
Neoliberalism Kritik
***1NC***
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1NC Shell
A) Link: The plan is justification for U.S. neoliberal domination of Latin America – U.S. security
interests will always come before the needs of the people. Economic engagement is a mask
for U.S. hegemony and exploitation of 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
directly linked to
the hegemonic power of the United States. Gary Prevost and Carlos Oliva Campos have assembled a collection of articles that
strongest critics as part of the continuing expression of Western power through the mechanisms of globalization, often
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 War—among them an altered balance of power, shifting U.S. strategy, and evolving
interamerican relations—they 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 Consensus—diminishing 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 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]
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B) Impact: Neoliberalism makes extinction inevitable – it is try or die for the
alternative
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 Kahn’s Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement with a
poem. The direct and succinct message of The Great Mother Wails cuts through our theorizing and opens us up to the very heart of the book’s
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
message—to ignite a fire that speaks to the
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
Everywhere we look there are glaring signs of
political systems and social structures that propel us toward unsustainability and extinction . In this historical
ourselves, each other, and all living beings with whom we reside on the earth.
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 planet’s 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 species—whether 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” 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 planet’s 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 beings—assumptions 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
camouflages wretched neoliberal policies and practices that left unchecked hasten the
annihilation of the globe’s ecosystem. True to its promise, the book cautions that any anti-hegemonic resistance movement that
mainstream environmentalism actually
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.
5
Neoliberalism Kritik
Samford Debate Institute ‘13
C) Alternative: the judge should reject U.S. led initiatives in Latin America – this allows
a bottom-up model of Latin American self-determination. Any perm will derail
productive resistance of neoliberal exploitation.
Kaltwasser ‘11 (Cristóbal Rovira, Foundation postdoctoral research fellow at the Social Science Research Center Berlin, "Toward PostNeoliberalism 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 Neoliberalism—which offers an overview in
three chapters, followed by a series of single-case studies—Grugel 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, Cortés 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 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
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
class. However, these episodes
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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Samford Debate Institute ‘13
Neoliberalism Kritik
***Neg Block***
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Neoliberalism Kritik
2NC/1NR Overview
Economic engagement is a mask for neoliberal exploitation of Latin America – the plan
cements a system that makes extinction inevitable as ruthless capitalist profits off the
backs of millions of oppressed workers.
4 INDEPENDENT Reasons to vote negative
a) Serial policy failure – economic engagement guarantees endless wars and military
interventions into Latin America that will destabilize countries and turn the case
b) Extinction inevitable – Profit-driven ideologies destroy the environment and make
the earth unlivable for future generations – even claims to protect the environment
are masks for exploitation of resources
c) Ethics – the system of neoliberalism propagated by the affirmative shapes unethical
policies and directs how we understand politics in the first place
Meszaros ‘95 (Istavan, Prof. Emeritus @ U of Sussex, Beyond Capital: 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 Lukácss ‘Tactics and Ethics’ that ‘Hegel’s 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
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 capital’s
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 rearticulation of socialist moral discourse and political strategy, taking fully on board the painful lessons of the recent past.
which produces the wisdom of ‘there is no alternative’. For, evidently,
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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Samford Debate Institute ‘13
d) Their knowledge production is inherently flawed – oppression is inevitable without
a radical change in the way we approach policies toward Latin America
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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***Links***
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Cuba
Private corporations will fill-in for State control in Cuba – causes neoliberal
exploitation
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.
The U.S. would dominate Cuba’s market
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 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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Mexico
US-Mexico relations act as a springboard for neoliberal exploitation and domination of
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)
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
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
independence than the latter, in the authors' view. Jaime Preciado
the international division of labor.
The Mexican oil industry represents the worst forms of neoliberal exploitation of
natural resources and structural violence
de Regil ‘4 (Álvaro J, The Jus Semper Global Alliance, "The Neo-Capitalist Assault in Mexico: Democracy vis-à-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 world’s 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 South’s 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 world’s capitalist
exploitative system. Besides the advantageous conditions for the North in the terms of trade in the exchange of goods and services, the North
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 South’s natural resources
represents far greater benefits. Often enough, with the direct support of the South’s 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
also
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 South’s 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 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
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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 Mexico’s
development.
Economic engagement to Mexico is a guise for American Imperialism
de Regil ‘4 (Álvaro J, The Jus Semper Global Alliance, "The Neo-Capitalist Assault in Mexico: Democracy vis-à-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 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
oligarchy, continues to be the same: to make themselves suitable to Washington’s new
geopolitical interests, banking to benefit its very private interests on maintaining a centre-periphery partnership where they can continue
twin, the business
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 neocapitalist 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 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
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Neoliberalism Kritik
Venezuela
Economic engagement over Venezuelan oil is a mask for U.S. hegemony and
exploitation in the region
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 1990’s 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 1960’s mass movements, guerilla
organizations and sectors of the trade unions formed part of a nationalist and socialist counter-hegemonic bloc. Venezuelan-US relations were not
uniform despite substantial continuities over time. Despite close relations and economic dependence especially during the 1960’s counterinsurgency 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 1980’s and 1990’s reflected a period of maximum US hegemony, a phenomena that took place throughout Latin
America in the 1990’s. 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 President’s Bush’s 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 can’t fight terror with terror”). These events triggered far reaching consequences in USVenezuelan 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 1990’s 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 America’s 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 the1990’s. The
repeated
failure by both the Bush and Obama regime to recognize regime changes, ideological shifts and the new development
lead to mindless threats and diplomatic incapacity to develop any new bridges to the
14
models and trade patterns has
Neoliberalism Kritik
Samford Debate Institute ‘13
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 Venezuela’s 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, "Chávez 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 Chávez 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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Samford Debate Institute ‘13
Neoliberalism Kritik
Generic Link – Energy
U.S. energy policy in Latin America furthers exploitation and manifests in the worst
forms of neoliberalism
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 govern- ments profoundly restructured their economies, including the oil, gas, and
mining sectors. The economic circumstances at this time worked against the policies of state ownership. Busting world market prices for
minerals, the global economic crisis, and the region’s 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 capital’s 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 (Fernández 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 sec- tor, 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 ele- ment of the neoliberal policies implemented by the
second government of President Carlos Andrés Pérez (1989–1993) and the government of President Rafael Caldera (1993–1998). The stateowned oil company PDVSA was not privatized, but private companies (mostly multination- als) 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 Sánchez de Lozada government (1993–1997) imple- mented 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 oper- ations 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 America’s poorest country, especially when large new gas reserves
were discovered. Consequently, in October 2003, after Sánchez de Lozada (during his second presidency in 2002–2003) had announced that 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 Sánchez 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 pri- vate investors at a time when many people were suffering from
poverty and economic crisis, caused citizens’ anger and protests. According to Eric Holz-Giménez (2008, pp. 29–30), “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 for- eign 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 trea- ties. 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 nation’s “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
privatization primarily
caused economic concentration, increasingly rich elites, and greater inequality . This popular perception of
corrupt, and that everyone would be better off with modern and competitive private companies, in reality
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 world’s largest mining companies. This plebiscite was organized by two of Brazil’s largest social organizations – the movement of landless peasants, MST, and the central union confederation, CUT – together with 200 other organizations. Ten years
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after Vale’s privatization, 94 percent of the 3.7 million respondents said they preferred a renationalization of the company. However, President
Lula (2003–2010) 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 Vale’s status ( Americas Program Report , November 26, 2007).
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Samford Debate Institute ‘13
Neoliberalism Kritik
***Impacts***
18
Samford Debate Institute ‘13
Neoliberalism Kritik
EXT – Impact
Every impact is inevitable – neoliberalism generates endless cycles of violence, war,
and disease
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
weakness—the 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
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
International Monetary Fund.
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
force—to 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 aspirations—the longing for a better life
which comes from their very souls—they 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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Samford Debate Institute ‘13
Neoliberalism Kritik
EXT – Unsustainable
Neoliberal systems are unsustainable as environmental collapse and war make
extinction inevitable
Shearman ‘7, (David , 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)
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
This
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 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 earth’s capacity to maintain life and that humanity’s
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 world’s 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 earth—
such as fresh water, fisheries, and the regulation of air, water, and climate—are 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.
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The best studies prove the system is unsustainable – only the alternative can save us
Rockstrom et al ‘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 Rockström, 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, Åsa 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. Björn Nykvist is a Research Fellow at Stockholm Environment Institute at Stockholm
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 Sörlin 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 Arctic’s new Institute of Circumpolar
Reindeer Husbandry and a Professor II at the University of Tromso. He is a Partner of the Sustainability Institute and it’s 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 global warming to shift as a result, because it is not only greenhouse gas emissions that threaten our planet's
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
equilibrium. There
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 Rockström, 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
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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, Rockström 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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Neoliberalism Kritik
***Alternative***
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Neoliberalism Kritik
Alt Solves – Generic
Our alternative can oust neoliberalism in Latin America
Buono 10 [Professor of Sociology, Author 10 books regarding Latin America “Latin America and the Collapsing Ideological Supports of
Neoliberalism”, 9-20, http://crs.sagepub.com/content/37/1/9]
The explosion of blogs and other websites created dynamic new virtual spaces for anti-neoliberal entities all
across the region. These spaces accompany the day to day communications of people who are socially networking
with an agenda for social transformation. This is something particularly important in the construction of
transnational social movements. Just one example is www.rebelion.org, a radical website in Spanish that is hosted by leftists in Spain
and updated on a daily basis with editorials, analytical essays and other materials submitted from intellectuals, social movements and leftist
political parties. With social movement media in ascendance, it is only logical that anti-neoliberal governments would take
the struggle to a higher level. In Latin America, the most ambitious example of this is the TeleSUR project. Initially financed as a
joint venture between Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, TeleSUR is a region-wide network of independent news and
cultural programming, with broadcasting over cable networks, public television systems and its own website where news and internet
broadcasting is available around the world. It was there that various issues were discussed including the need for greater media
exchanges in Latin America.
Our alternative allows for ethical globalization – that’s key to more sustainable form
of capitalism/neoliberalism –nullifies their offense
Veltmeyer & Petras ‘9 (Prof. James Petras Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University and Prof. Henry Veltmeyer
professor of Sociology and International Development Studies at Saint Mary's University Global Research, November 19, 2009 Neoliberalism
and the Dynamics of Capitalist Development in Latin America http://www.globalresearch.ca/neoliberalism-and-the-dynamics-of-capitalistdevelopment-in-latin-america/16167)
In Latin America the World Social Forum process, is the basic form taken by the “anti-globalization movement” in the search for “another
world” (the latest event in this process was hosted by Lula, taking place in Bélem towards the end of January 2009). Apart from the absence of an
internal division between the advocates of moderate reform (ethical globalization) and more radical change the anti-globalization process
is designed to define and maintain the outer limits of permitted change; that is, controlled dissent from the
prevailing model of global capitalist development. Not anti-globalization but a more ethical form. Not
anti-capitalism but a more humane form of capitalism, a more sustainable human form of development.
Not anti-imperialism because imperialism is not at issue.
Individual intellectual rejection has emancipatory potential triggering a rapid cascade
of change
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 Nader’s 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.
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Our alternative is a necessary first step to fix the system
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
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
its most basic, calls
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 we’re doing and know
how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social
patterns and theirs. But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new
lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t 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. It’s quite clear then
how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or
buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves
instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another clarification is needed. This strategy does not call for reforming
capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing capitalism, totally, with a new civilization. This is an important
distinction, because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms, as a system. We can sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it
(usually only temporary ones) and win some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it
piecemeal, as a system. Thus our strategy of gutting and eventually destroying capitalism requires at a
minimum a totalizing image, an awareness that we are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with
another, and not merely reforming one way of life into something else.
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Neoliberalism Kritik
***Framework***
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Neoliberalism Kritik
Framework
Our criticism is a prerequisite to effective policymaking – the K should come
before the AFF
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
direct concern to citizens (Latinobarómetro 2002), increases poverty, and is
income inequality is of
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 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 Sánchez-Páramo 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 StolperSamuelson 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 services—notably in basic education and health, electricity, and water—with 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 Prism—the 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. 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 fundamentals—incentives matter to both public sector workers and households, voice and accountability are important at some
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level—but a
Samford Debate Institute ‘13
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
America is characterized
both by weak institutional conditions and high levels of inequality in terms of asset ownership and political influence.
"neoliberalism"? We emphasize one set of issues of particular salience to the region. Latin
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 surveybased 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 twoway 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 kritik is key to productive education – the AFF will be co-opted by
neoliberal forces – turns solvency
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 delegitimizing of deep dissent, and the weakening of oppositional centers and practices and thought. In eras of declining
capital accumulation, an ultimately inevitable process, capital—and the governments and parties and generals and CEOs who act at
their behest—more 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 neoliberalneoconservative 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
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
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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 workers—such as librarians, teachers, lecturers, youth workers, have in capitalist states such as England
and Wales, or the United States? Don’t 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 struggle—sometimes (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 Labour’s, 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 ain’t 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 “don’t 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 attacking workers’ rights, in Italy and Australia and elsewhere)—all in the last two years—or 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 choice—to 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.
Our role of the ballot as individuals and students is necessary to confront the
worst forms neoliberal exploitation and preserve the democratic public sphere
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-studentsnew-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 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
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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,
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
and faculty as more than technicians or a subaltern army of casualized labor. At a time when
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 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
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
imperfect state,
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 wellbeing, 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.
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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 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.
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***2NC Answers To***
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Neoliberalism Kritik
AT: Perm
Only the alternative can resolve the crisis – including the plan allows
neoliberalism to regenerate
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.
Small improvements ignore the broader system that makes extinction
inevitable – the plan masks the worst forms of neoliberalism
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
them in the service of further
sociohistorical limits and the challenges these limits pose to capital, placing
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 mil­ lion; 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 and the broader environmental changes wrought by modernity and the free market, such as the
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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.
Absolute rejection is key – the plan allows the worst forms of neoliberalism to
go unchecked
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 media’s 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!” Today’s 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, Lenin’s 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 today’s 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). It’s 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, tolerant, ready to “listen” to all — even if one
insist on one’s 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”)
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The plan prevents complete abandonment of the system – makes it look
legitimate and continues to propel U.S. hegemony with a humanitarian mask
Zizek ‘2 (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 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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Neoliberalism Kritik
AT: Transition Wars
Non UQ – transition now – only the AFF allows state sanctioned violence and
inevitable crisis
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 order—i.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 unrest—from Cairo
to London, from Santiago to New York—resembles 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 tumult—a 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.
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Neoliberalism Kritik
AT: Neoliberalism is Good
Neoliberalism is only good for elites – it exacerbates inequality gaps and
destabilizes marginalized regions
Brien and Leichenko 2k (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 221–232)
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 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.
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AT: Inevitable
Neoliberalism is collapsing in Latin America
Buono 10 [Professor of Sociology, Author 10 books regarding Latin America, “Latin America and the Collapsing Ideological
Supports of Neoliberalism”, 9-20, http://crs.sagepub.com/content/37/1/9, 6-25-2013, JLLS]
Fast forwarding to 21st century sociological terminology, this involves doing ‘public sociology’ and in Latin
America it specifically means works dedicated to unmask ing neoliberal forms of social organization before
various publics. When successful, these efforts serve to identify and render visible the underlying power relations of
neoliberal capitalist practices and the larger architecture of imperial power . Its cumulative
effect is to attack the legitimacy of neoliberal capitalism and to undermine its ideological
supports. In so doing, the sense that the neoliberal order is somehow ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ begins
to collapse.
The discourse of inevitability perpetuates an invisible global class war
Veltmeyer & Petras ‘9 (Prof. James Petras Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University and Prof. Henry
Veltmeyer professor of Sociology and International Development Studies at Saint Mary's University Global Research, November 19,
2009 Neoliberalism and the Dynamics of Capitalist Development in Latin America http://www.globalresearch.ca/neoliberalism-andthe-dynamics-of-capitalist-development-in-latin-america/16167)
It is commonplace among many intellectuals, pundits and policy makers both in Latin America as elsewhere to discuss
“globalization” as of it were a process unfolding with an air of inevitability, the result of forces beyond anyone’s
control—at worst allowing policymakers to manage the process and at best to push it in a more ethical direction; that is, allow the
presumed benefits of globalization to be spread somewhat more equitably. This is, in fact, the project shared by the antiglobalization
movement in their search for “another world” and the pragmatic centre-left politicians currently in power in their search for “another
development”. ¶ In this discourse, globalization appears as a behemoth whose appetites must be satisfied
and whose thirst must be quenched at all costs—costs borne, as it happens but not fortuitously, by the working class.
In this context to write, as do so many on the Left today, of the “corporate agenda” and “national interests”, etc. is to
obfuscate the class realities of globalization—the existence and machinations of the global ruling
class (Petras, 2007) and what Jeffrey Faux (2006) terms a “global class war”.
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We must learn to think differently – “inevitability” arguments lock in the status
quo and prevent innovative human capacities
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 wellbeing. 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 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
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:
far more rapidly.
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. That’s what plenitude offers.
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AT: Alt Fails
Non-unique – capitalism makes authoritarianism inevitable
Meszaros ‘95 (Istavan, Prof. Emeritus @ U of Sussex, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, p 146)
In view of the fact that the most intractable of the global capital system’s 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 capital’s 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 capital’s
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 system’s
structural limits) will be successfully pursued, despite its obvious authoritarian character and destructiveness, will depend on the
working class’s 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 capital’s absolute limits, they cannot be conveniently bypassed, nor
their gravity wished out of existence. On the contrary, they remain the overriding requirement of allembracing remedial action in the reproductive practices of humankind for as long as the vicious
circle of capital’s 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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***Affirmative Answers***
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2AC Frontline
1. Perm: Do both – pass the plan and support Latin American bottom-up
resistance to neoliberalism.
2. No Impact -- Neoliberalism is environmentally sustainable
Zimmerer ‘11
(Karl S., PHD. Editor “CONSERVATION BOOMS" WITH AGRICULTURAL GROWTH?
http://ehis.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.samford.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=51afb46e-d9a0-4035-a43cff4417f57beb%40sessionmgr110&vid=2&hid=116, Assed today 6/27/13 M.D.)
The concept of nature-society hybridity, as used in geography and environmental¶ planning and management, considers
conservation and use of land and¶ other resources "coproduced" through governance and human-environment interactions,¶
rather than as strictly social outcomes (Swyngedouw 1999; Zimmerer¶ 2000, 2006). A second, albeit distinct, concept of
hybrid also is used here to refer¶ to variants of neoliberal governments that may foster, even conspicuously, certain¶
sustainability policies and environment protection (on protected-area conservation¶ and community-based resource
management of hybrid neoliberalism in¶ Latin America, see Zimmerer 2009). Coproduction of conservation relies also on¶ the
concept of territory making or territorialization, which is integral to national¶ policies and statecraft in environment and
resource management (Orlove 2002;¶ Scott 1998). Conservation territories have often arisen through multiscale interactions¶
with international and global organizations as well as local and regional¶ institutions. Taken together, these concepts are
associated with the approach of¶ Latin American political ecology (Campbell 2007).^ They enable an understanding¶ of
protected areas and PES as not merely gatekeepers and reinforcement of¶ wilderness relicts but as arising
through socioeconomic, political, environmental,¶ and spatial processes involved How did Latin American
governments interact with and respond to the environmental agendas and political pressures of conservation organizations,
social¶ groups, and private interests propelling protected-area expansion? More broadly,¶ how were national approaches to
protected areas shaped amid other state policies¶ toward land and resource use? Predominantly neoliberal governments
and¶ resource policies, which varied throughout Latin America, were characteristic¶ of the period from 1985 to 2008.
Governments in Mexico and Costa Rica pursued¶ chiefly neoliberal policies throughout this time, and shifts
to the center-left¶ and nationalist-populist political regimes have occurred in Brazil since 2002 and¶ in Bolivia since 2006.
Moreover, there has been a mixed political model in Peru¶ since 2003 (Petras 2006; Roberts 2009; Weyland 2004, 2009).
This study's principal¶ framing from 1985 to 2008 enables comparative analysis of state-sanctioned
environmental¶ conservation under shifting neoliberalism, with a secondary focus on¶ potential shifts
associated with country-specific movements at least partly away¶ from neoliberal policies. Finally, the 1985-2008 period
encompassed emphasis on¶ both protected-area expansion and the newer PES. Championed by the influential¶ Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment in the early 2000s, PES is globally concentrated¶ in Latin American countries.^This study's second goal
is to identify the persistent tension between the successful political activism of civil-society groups (e.g., social movements,
indigenous¶ organizations, conservation supporters) and the typically depoliticizing national¶ technocratic approaches
toward protected areas for environmental stability¶ and sustainability. The former has contributed to the notable, albeit
partial, shift¶ of protected-area governance in Latin American countries from the strict dictates¶ of the so-called
Yellowstone Park model to the broader compass of protected area related¶ social issues, including the territorial roles of
peasant, indigenous, and¶ resource-user groups. This shift in environmental conservation policy has been¶
incorporated into a wide spectrum of political perspectives on social welfare,¶ poverty alleviation,
development, demographic growth, and economic markets¶ (Adams et al. 2004; Brockington, Igoe, and
Schmidt-Soltau 2006; Naughton-Treves,¶ Buck Holland, and Brandon 2005).This study's focus is national-level institutions
and policies, especially the unfolding of territorial designations (i.e., territorializing), as both a condition and an¶ effect of
expanded environmental governance in Latin America. In addition to¶ nature protection per se, political and economic
functions of conservation areas¶ in these countries have ranged from legal, territorial, and business based (e.g.,¶ tourism) to
serving as important discursive foundations of national sustainability¶ efforts and as a way of thinking in popular media and
increasingly in the personal subjectivities of citizens (Zimmerer 2006a, 2006b; Zimmerer, Galt, and Buck 2004). Expanding
protected-area designations and environmental governance amid land-use change have also created political winners and losers in
these countries (on Brazil, for example, see Fearnside 2003). These trends raise the question of how conservation expansion, growth
of land and resource use, and environmental policy making more generally occurred between 1985 and 2008 in Latin America in the
context of mostly neoliberal national policies. Central to this question is the role of social movements, indigenous federations,
NGOs, citizen groups, and environmental activists and institutions that have
been highly effective in
conservation-related environmental politics and governance (e.g., Lemos and Agrawal 2006; Stevens and De
Lacy 1997). Influence of these civil-society groups was especially marked in the conservation boom in Brazil (Hecht and
Cockburn 1990; Keck 1995; Pieck 2006; Schmink and Wood 1992).Numerous Latin American countries have emerged as
global centers of environmental conservation and land-use modernization during recent decades(Brandon, Redford, and
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Sanderson 1998). Between 1985 and 2008, protected natural areas in Latin America, such as parks and reserves, grew
more than threefold in number and area to cover nearly 3,500 sites and more than 3 million square kilometers in Latin
America (UN Environmental Programme [UNEP] and World Conservation Monitoring Centre [WCMC] 2008). This
expansion consisted of conservation booms in each of the individual countries as well as a composite Latin Americawide trend (Zimmerer and Carter 2002, 207). Countries of Latin America now account for nearly 15 percent of global coverage
of protected areas. Governance of environmental conservation has included civil society groups, ranging from
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs, both international and national),indigenous groups and federations, communities, and
political networks(Brush and Orlove 1996; Keck 1995; Lemos and Agrawal 2006; Stocks 2005), as well as state agencies from
municipal to national levels, international organizations,and multilateral lenders. At the same time, increased scientific,
technological, andlegal capacities have been designed to support the protected areas and thereby
promote environmental conservation in Latin American countries.' The majorityof these conservation
areas, as elsewhere globally, have functioned reasonablywell, albeit incompletely and subject to continued evaluation and
debate (Bruneret al. 2001; Joppa, Loarie, and Pimm 2008). Expansion of protected-area conservation¶ runs counter to earlier
arguments of the political and economic infeasibility¶ of significant environmental advances in Latin America (on Mexico, see
Mumme,¶ Bath, and Assetto 1988).¶
3. Framework – Evaluate the implications of the plan versus a competitive
policy option or the status quo – key to fairness and education because there
are an infinite number of frameworks the negative could read to moot the 1AC
and the best AFF offense goes away.
4. The Alternative Doesn’t Solve
A) Can’t solve the aff – (insert specific analysis about your AFF, Ex: It
doesn’t lift the Cuban embargo so it can’t access our relations or economy
advantages)
B) Can’t solve the kritik
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-changenothing-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
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
follow the example set by the Occupy Wall Street protests, it's worth pondering what happened to the
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 cliché) 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
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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 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.
5. Turn – Markets are 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 post–WorldWar 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
capital markets creates a new
mechanism for competition and communication for states that might otherwise be forced to fight.
Separately, these processes influence patterns of warfare in the modern world. Together, they explain the absence of
war among states in the developed world and account for the dyadic observation of the democratic peace. The
persist in the next century is a question open to debate. Finally, the rise of global
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 welldocumented role of liberal politics.
6. Perm – Do the plan and reject neoliberalism in other instances.
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7. The status quo is improving – their impacts are hype
Goklany ‘10, Indur 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-emissionsand-human-well-being-in-the-age-of-industrialization-part-iii-have-higher-us-population-consumption-and-newer-technologiesreduced-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 30fold, 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, 1900–2006, 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, today’s U.S. population
not only lives longer, it is also healthier. The disability rate for seniors declined 28 percent between 1982 and 2004/2005 and, despite
quantum improvements in diagnostic tools, major diseases (e.g., cancer, and heart and respiratory diseases) now occur 8–11
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 healthrelated 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.
8. Perm – Do the plan and all non-competitive parts of the alternative.
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EXT – Sustainable
Neolib is sustainable
Zakaria ‘9 (Fareed, Former Editor of Newsweek International, Current Editor-at-Large of Time, “The Capitalism Manifesto:
Greed is Good,” June 13th, http://www.newsweek.com/2009/06/12/the-capitalist-manifesto-greed-is-good.html,)
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 crises—which were far more painful in those countries than
the current downturn has been in America—we 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 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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Newest studies prove we’re right – its sustainable
Sari and Soytas ‘9 (Ramazan and Ugur, Dept. of Business Administration, Middle East Technical University, “Are global
warming and economic growth compatible? Evidence from five 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 specific 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
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.
review) which relate environmental degradation to economic growth. The hypothesis states that
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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Neoliberalism Kritik
EXT – Alt Fails
Your author concludes that the Alt can’t solve
Kaltwasser ‘11 [Member of the Department of Politics and Contemporary European Studies, and member of the editorial board
of the journal "Government & Opposition, “Toward Post-Neoliberalism in Latin America?, 11-6, 6-25-13, JLLS]
Is Latin America seeing the rise of an alternative model of development that goes beyond the
Washington Consensus? According to the books reviewed here, the answer is a cautious “not yet.” Postneoliberalism is thus far an ill-defined category; we do not know how it will develop or whether it will endure. Nevertheless, in
examining the causes for the emergence of leftist regimes, their differences, and their
commonalities, the six books reviewed show that, although the prescriptions of the Washington
Consensus are losing ground in Latin America, there is no single explanation. In fact, the movement
beyond neoliberalism differs from country to Country.
No mindset shift and no alt solvency
Lockwood ‘11, Matthew 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 isn’t
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 Crompton’s) and policies to drive greater durability of products. A counterview
might be that all these changes are needed, and it doesn’t matter so much what happens first, that they all reinforce each other etc etc.
But I don’t think that’s 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 credible strategy for redistribution. That’s 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 hasn’t materialised so far, but nor have the policies for low carbon innovation we need to produce it – like Gandhi’s
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 can’t”. 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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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
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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Neoliberalism Kritik
EXT – Key to Peace
Best studies prove global economic growth is good
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 people’s 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 Pinker’s 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 book’s most
effective features. The book, spanning the whole human past as far back as our aboriginal condition, points to two major steps in 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 Hobbes’s
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 1–
5%. 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 book’s 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 USA’s 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
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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
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 20,000–25,000 soldiers. This was a very large army by the standards of the time. Yet the total
population of Egypt was about 2–3 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 Union’s 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 continent’s 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 Muchembled’s
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 state’s 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 Elias’s (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 state’s 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 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
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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: 536–537, 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, 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,
218–16 BCE, Rome lost some 50,000 citizens of the ages of 17–46, 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 Rome’s free peasantry during the Second Punic War, did not reduce
Rome’s propensity for war thereafter. During the Thirty Years War (1618–48) 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 noncombatants 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 industrial–commercial 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 state’s 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 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: 72–75) 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.
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Neoliberalism is 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]
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 planet’s 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
If
provide little help to policy analysts or political leaders.
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