1NC
Broad sweeping change of marijuana markets caters to major multinational
corporations and expands capitalist political dominance – marijuana will use tobacco’s
playbook for exploitation and prop up the big weed business to further capitalist
dominance of the poor.
Sabet 10/8 (Kevin Sabet, director of the Drug Policy Institute at the University of Florida, is the co-founder of Smart Approaches to
Marijuana and served as senior adviser at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy from 2009 to 2011. Dallas Morning News, “If
you think Big Tobacco was bad, wait till you get a whiff of Big Marijuana” http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/sunday-commentary/20140911if-you-think-big-tobacco-was-bad-wait-till-you-get-a-whiff-of-big-marijuana.ece , Published: 11 September 2014 12:19 PM , Updated: 08
October 2014 04:38 PM)
Proponents of legalization and other drug policy reforms make some important points. It is true that most people who try drugs do not get
addicted — they stop after using a few times. It is also true — and regrettable — that America’s incarceration rate is embarrassingly high and
that blacks and Latinos bear the brunt of harsh arrest policies. And, finally, despite our best efforts, fully eradicating drug use and its
consequences remains a distant dream. But placing faith that legalization will help any of these issues is misguided. In fact, legalization
threatens to further contribute to disproportionate health outcomes among minorities, all the while
creating a massive new industry — Big Tobacco 2.0 — intent on addicting the most vulnerable in society.
For example, with much fanfare, and alongside the ex-president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, former head of Microsoft corporate strategy James
Shivley announced this year that he was creating “the Starbucks of marijuana.” His plan? To buy up marijuana
stores in Colorado and Washington state, “mint[ing] more millionaires than Microsoft in this business.” And so, in the midst of America’s
great debate about marijuana legalization, Big Marijuana is born. Pot legalization is no longer about a few friends calmly sharing a
joint on the weekend in their own living room. Inevitably — and ever so swiftly — it has become about big business and big
bucks. Shivley isn’t the only one preparing to cash in. At least three marijuana vending machine companies, already earning millions of dollars
in revenue from medical marijuana “patients,” have announced giant expansion plans. “It is like a gold rush,” remarked one vending
executive. A couple of Yale MBAs recently created a multimillion-dollar private equity firm dedicated solely to financing the marijuana business.
As one of them explains, the
firm has become inundated with pitches from businesses who plan to become the “WalMart of marijuana.” To a student of history, none of this should come as a surprise, of course. Tobacco executives in the 1900s
wrote the playbook on the reckless and deceitful marketing of an addictive — and therefore hugely
profitable — substance. Indeed, Big Marijuana creates unique problems that neither the status quo (with all its deficiencies), nor a
grow-your-own approach to legal marijuana presents. Like Big Tobacco, the large-scale commercialization of marijuana
will require consistently high use rates and increasing addiction rates to keep shareholders and investors
happy. We’ve seen this horror movie before. First, we know that addictive industries generate the lion’s share of
their profits from addicts, not casual users. In the tobacco industry, 80 percent of the industry’s profits come from 20 percent
of smokers. So while most marijuana users try the drug and stop, or use very occasionally, and the brunt of the profits — and
problems — come from the minority of users, that minority causes enormous problems to our roadways, educational system,
workplace and health care system. This means that creating addicts is the central goal. And — as every good tobacco executive
knows (but won’t tell you) — this, in turn, means targeting the young. People who start tobacco or marijuana in their youth, when
their brains are still developing, have far greater chances of becoming addicted. Internal company memos released as a result of
the great tobacco settlement tell us as much: “Less than one-third of smokers start after age 18,” says one, and “if our
company is to survive and prosper, we must get our share of the youth market. … [That] will require new
brands tailored to the youth market.” Such memos were circulated even as the tobacco industry was publicly rejecting youth
cigarette use. The poor and otherwise vulnerable are also prime targets. They suffer the highest addiction rates
of any group. It’s no wonder that peer-reviewed research has concluded that tobacco and liquor outlets are several times as
likely to be in poorer communities of color, and that the tobacco industry has cozied up with homeless
shelters and advocacy groups as part of its downscale marketing strategy. David Goerlitz, a former Winston Man
model who now suffers from smoking-related illnesses, testified before Congress in 1989: “Of course, children aren’t the only targets. …
Once, when I asked an R.J. Reynolds executive why he didn’t smoke, he responded point-blank that ‘We
don’t smoke this [expletive]; we just sell it. We reserve that right for the young, the poor, the black and
the stupid.’” That doesn’t mean we have to be content with the status quo. We need much better science-based prevention, early
intervention and treatment. We need to make sure our laws are equitable and fair. Specifically, even as marijuana remains illegal, low-level
marijuana offenses should not saddle people with a criminal record that hurts their chances at education, housing or other assistance. Drug
treatment courts and smart probation programs must also be taken to scale. But under
legalization, big business and big
lobbies peddle pseudoscience and stop at nothing to protect their profits. Before it was ordered to disband due to
deceitful practices, Tobacco Institute Inc. was the industry’s lobby group, challenging studies linking smoking with cancer and rebutting surgeon
general reports on cigarettes before they were even published. Today, tobacco still has
a powerful presence in Washington.
It fights any safety measures that might curb cigarette use and ensures that federal cigarette taxes remain low. (To bring
federal cigarette taxes back to their inflation-adjusted level in 1960, we’d have to see a 17 percent increase in tobacco taxes today.) We can
fully expect marijuana profiteers to recycle the tactics that have earned Big Tobacco billions and billions of
dollars. Already, the claims made by Big Tobacco only a few decades ago are being revived by the new marijuana moguls: “Moderate marijuana
use can be healthy.” “Marijuana-laced candy is meant only for adults.” “Smoked marijuana is medicine.” It is true that marijuana is not as
addictive as tobacco (in fact, tobacco is more addictive than even heroin). And marijuana and tobacco differ among other dimensions of harm.
Tobacco, though deadly, is not psychoactive. And unlike marijuana, one can drive impairment-free while smoking tobacco. That means that
when someone is high, their ability to learn, work and become an active member of society is threatened. That is the last thing young people
need today as they try to get a quality job or education. Indeed, education and public health professionals, including groups like the American
Medical Association, National School Nurses Association, American Society of Addiction Medicine, American Psychiatric Association, American
Pediatrics Association and American Lung Association, regard today’s high-potency marijuana as harmful. The best science tells us that learning
and IQ are directly affected by regular marijuana use among kids and that marijuana use is associated with a host of other problems such as
mental illness, car crashes and increased health care costs. Can
we afford decades of deceit from an industry that
depends on addiction and heavy use for profits all over again? Some say that it doesn’t have to be this
way. We could establish a safer form of legalization by setting up measures that prevent the emergence
of another Big Tobacco. History and experience show, however, that even the best of intentions are easily
mowed over in the name of big profits. This will be American-style legalization. Unless we repeal the First
Amendment — which declares commercial speech as free speech — and unless we quickly do away with our long-standing Madison
Avenue culture of hypercommercialization, legal marijuana will lead down an all-too-familiar path. We are seeing
this play out in Colorado with abandon. It will be the Yale MBAs, the established addictive industries and the new Mad
Men of marijuana who will benefit most from legalization. “Let’s go big or go home,” was Shivley’s final remark to the press
after his announcement about creating the Starbucks of marijuana. In order to avoid another public health disaster and give our young people a
chance to succeed, let’s hope that he and others like him do go home. But we shouldn’t count on it.
Statistical and empirical models prove resource use and inequality make eco-collapse
inevitable regardless of tech efficiency gains.
Ahmed 14 (Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, The
Guardian, “Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?”, 3/14/14,
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversiblecollapse-study-scientists)
A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global
industrial civilisation could
collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal
wealth distribution.¶ Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to
make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a
recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous
collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."¶ The research project is based on a new cross-
disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri of the US National Science
Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study
based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.¶ It finds
that
according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse,
raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:¶ "The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not
more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that
advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent."¶ By
investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated
factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today:
namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.¶ These factors can lead to collapse when
they converge to generate two crucial social features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain
placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the economic stratification of society into Elites
[rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" These social phenomena have played "a central role in the
character or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five thousand years."¶ Currently,
high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with "Elites"
based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:¶ "... accumulated surplus is not evenly
distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population,
while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above
subsistence levels."¶ The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges
by increasing efficiency:¶ "Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends
to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy
effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use."¶
Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from "increased
(rather than decreased) resource throughput," despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period.¶
Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharri and his colleagues conclude that under conditions
"closely reflecting the reality of the world today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid." In the first of
these scenarios, civilisation:¶ ".... appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an
optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too
much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important
to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature."¶
Another scenario
focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that "with a larger
depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but
eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites."¶ In both scenarios, Elite wealth
monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most "detrimental effects of the environmental
collapse until much later than the Commoners", allowing them to "continue 'business as usual' despite
the impending catastrophe." The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how "historical collapses were allowed to occur by
elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases)."¶
Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that:¶ "While some members of
society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore
advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed
making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing
nothing."
Vote negative to endorse the centrality of anti-capitalism to bottom-up social
movements --- capitalism’s crisis opens a unique opportunity for university spaces to
challenge it but clarity of vision and focus on capitalism are necessary for success –
otherwise systemic violence and extinction are inevitable.
Katz-Fishman 14, W. Katz-Fishman -- Howard University, J. Scott -- Founder and Former Director,
Project South K. Haltinner (ed.), Editor of Teaching Race and Anti-Racism in Contemporary America
Adding Context to Colorblindness, Race, Class and Transformation: Confronting Our History to Move
Forward, http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/934/chp%253A10.1007%252F978-94-007-71017_26.pdf?auth66=1390670850_4076387ffba6f17ddf3a828859827d80&ext=.pdf
26.1 The Current Crisis, Developing Motion, and Openings for Education and Consciousness-Raising
This examination of race and class in America takes place in the context of today’s crisis and developing social motion. We
are
experiencing a crisis of the entire global capitalist system and, thus, for all of its components and institutions. Systemic
crisis exacerbates and exposes the ever starker contradictions of society – of great abundance on a
global scale of all the things people require, but of great want, deprivation, exploitation, oppression,
and dispossession. Vanishing jobs, plummeting wages, soaring poverty, a broken social contract and
neoliberal policies, growing militarism and police repression, and ecological collapse are a daily reality
for U.S. workers and the vast majority of the world’s peoples (Amin 2011; Berberoglu 2009). Because of the
historic reality of white supremacy, Blacks, Indigenous peoples, Latinos and immigrant communities are
disproportionately affected by these mul- tiple crises. In addition, patriarchy results in working class women
and children being among the most impoverished and oppressed. At the same time wealth and power are being
concentrated among an ever smaller class of global capitalists, who are using global institutions and their national
governments to bailout capital’s global financial institutions and corporations and to wage war to advance their class interests (Harvey
2010;Katz-FishmanandScott 2011). The
question is how to secure the necessities of life for all humanity,
eliminate white supremacy and national and gender oppression, protect the planet, and win the
peace. Social movements and revolutionaries are in motion. Twenty-first century global capitalism
requires a coordinated global movement from the bottom-up with diverse working class leadership,
including workers of color and Indigenous as part of collective leadership (Peery 2002;Pleyers 2010;Santos
2006).The struggle is growing in the United States and around the world – from uprisings in Tunisia, in Egypt’s Tahrir Square and throughout the
Middle East, to the Indignados in Spain, to Greece, Britain and across Europe, to Wisconsin and, most recently, to Occupy Wall Street and
Occupy Together, including cities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Associated Press 2011). These realities present
new openings
for movement organizing, analyzing, visioning, and strategizing (Gonzales and Katz-Fishman 2010;Harvey 2010).The
growing popular response to the deepening crisis is the beginning of a rupture in consciousness of the
past period and is a strategic opportunity for creating critical learning spaces – in K-12 and higher
education and in the movement struggle. Today’s emerging counter-hegemonic movement requires that we
undertake a mass education project to raise consciousness and to develop the collective leadership
from below that embodies a political clarity of vision and strategy to keep the movement on its path
to the real resolution to the problems before us – the path to an egalitarian and cooperative society in
which all human needs are met and the earth is renewed and protected. In the United States, this means
confronting our history of division based on race, class, and capitalism within social movements and in the larger society to move forward in
unity (Katz-Fishman and Scott 2008, 2011).
1NC
The United States should legalize cannabis and remove it from the Controlled
Substances Act.
The affirmative’s use of the term “marijuana” cannot be separated from its 1930s
origin as a form of racist propaganda against black and brown bodies. Reject their
racially politicized discourse as a starting point for policy change.
Romanelli 2013 Carl, 2006 Green Party Candidate for U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania, founding
member of Luzerne County Green Coalition, It’s Cannabis, not Marijuana, Wilkes
http://wilkesbarrescrantonig.com/2013/04/02/its-cannabis-not-marijuana/
For thousands of years humankind has interacted with cannabis and hemp. Its amazing applications have been known, and experienced, from
the days of ancient Egypt to the present time. It is used as medicine, is employed in the manufacture of thousands of industrial products, and
functions, too as a social and religious enhancement. However, there are quite
a few Americans who are unable to
recognize the term “cannabis.” It is not because this is a rare plant, exotic and originating from faraway places. To the contrary,
this particular plant is still enjoyed and exploited worldwide on a regular basis. It grows wild all over the planet. So, why the lack of recognition?
Because, in the US we rarely call the plant by its actual name. Here, it’s known as marijuana and
our dangerously uninformed American public sees it as a threat and a scourge. Such misinformation can be traced back to
the 1930s when the American public was much more knowledgeable on cannabis and hemp, so
a new word had to be invented, or borrowed, in order to sell prohibition. That word had to be
tied to an already engrained dark energy in America, that of racism. So a word that sounded like
something unique to Black, Latino, or Native Americans had to be conjured to effectively scare
the public with the purported dangers of the leaf. Of course, holding federal hearings in secret also helped the cause, as it kept scientists
and farmers from exposing the radical and sinister plans of prohibition. the economy is denied the benefits, and individuals and businesses are
denied the opportunities that would be available through legal cannabis The
word “marijuana,” coined by the Director
of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger of southern Pennsylvania, marks a now 75year-old campaign of lies and the persecution of anyone favoring this popular and helpful plant.
Anslinger spent most of his career in the shadow of his rival, J. Edgar Hoover. They were both power-crazed bigots amassing files on many high
profile entertainers. Just as Hoover kept secret information on celebrities like John Lennon and Elvis, Anslinger created files on performers like
Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Also like Hoover, Anslinger’s paranoia left few free of his bullying, as even beloved icons in the
prime of their career—Louis Armstrong, Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason, to name a few—made “the list” by the 1950s. Just as Hoover viewed
Rock and Roll musicians as a threat to American heritage, so, too did Anslinger see Jazz musicians as posing the same danger. Of course, the
behavior of poison-hearted individuals like Anslinger and Hoover yielded substantial economic rewards for the special interests of their day.
Just as powerful government officials today serve corporate monsters like Monsanto, in the early days of cannabis prohibition powerful
corporations such as DuPont and Kimberly-Clark (a pulp-based timber and paper company) benefited greatly. However, it was racism that
pushed prohibition over the tipping point to the new absurd reality of the misinformation campaign which still persists today. Sadly, the
government no longer needs to be secretive, as its abuses are blatant and right in front of our eyes in the form of the prison state our so-called
free country has become. The
trail of lies and garbage science that follows the word “marijuana”
extends beyond the horrors of incarceration. As Americans, we have lost our right to privacy, lost property through
forfeiture and seizure, have become victims of entrapment by police and blackmail by informants (because the mere presence of cannabis
immediately brands a person as a criminal), are subjected to unwarranted searches (including urine testing for employment), to say nothing of
prohibition’s contribution to law enforcement and judicial system corruption. As a result, the economy is denied the benefits, and individuals
and businesses are denied the opportunities that would be available through legal cannabis. Further, what would obviously be a profitable
trade in recreational and medical cannabis for legitimate business instead is driven into the realm of organized crime and cartels. We end up
with a situation—just as we saw with alcohol prohibition—in which the insane laws prove far more harmful than any of the banned substances.
So let’s take a deep breath, stop using the M-word and dragging along all the lies that have been
bound to it, and instead fall in step with history and the rest of the world by calling the plant by
one of its true names: cannabis or hemp. With that as a starting point we may also understand the truth about the
non-addictive, non-toxic cannabis plant. The very notion that we need to arrest otherwise law-abiding citizens for smoking cannabis is cruelly
immoral and inhumane The truth concerning cannabis is that it is incredibly effective as medicine. Oils made from highly potent strains have
been effective in curing many forms of cancer. Inhaled cannabis has proven a great appetite enhancer and has demonstrated other benefits.
Ointments and salves derived from cannabis have numerous therapeutic properties for healing of wounds, and can even protect us from the
radiation of the sun. So-called “industrial hemp” is a cannabis variant containing extremely low levels of the psychoactive component, THC. This
variant can be used to fashion tens of thousands of products, among them clothes, paper, building materials, soap, rope and many other
valuable goods. Finally, the herb will not, and never has, killed anyone. The very notion that we need to arrest otherwise law-abiding citizens for
smoking cannabis is cruelly immoral and inhumane, not to mention hypocritical. It is impossible to overdose on cannabis, but plenty are killed
by criminals profiteering on its underground trade, and by policing agencies engaged in the war on cannabis. After all, death is a primary
component of warfare, is it not? It
is time for truth and justice. Demand it. Learn the reality about cannabis and stop the
injustice of punishing folks for choosing nature over chemicals. The first place to start is to shed the racist
propaganda of the past 75 years, and to get used to reminding all: IT’S CANNABIS, NOT
MARIJUANA. Let the propagandists and drug warriors know we will not live in fear of our neighbors and that we demand our natural
right to interact with a plant, will medicate as we see fit with natural substances, and will assert our right to have options for our own economic
future beyond corporate subservience.
---Counterplan Solves --- Shifting the frame of the discussion from “marijuana” to
“cannabis” enables a linguistic transformation that overcomes racist propaganda.
HHC 2013 Harborside Health Center, Medical Cannabis Support and Dispensary, The
“M” Word, http://www.harborsidehealthcenter.com/the-M-word.html
We prefer to use the
word cannabis, because it is a respectful, scientific term that encompasses all the
many different uses of the plant. The word "marijuana" is an emotional, pejorative term that
has played a key role in creating the negative stigma that still tragically clings to cannabis. Most cannabis
users recognize the "M word" as offensive, once they learn its history. The term started off life as a Mexican folk name for cannabis, but
was first popularized in the US by the notorious yellow press publisher, William Randolph Hearst. Hearst was a
racist, as well as being committed to the prohibition of cannabis, which threatened his timber investments. He used his control of hundreds
of newspapers to orchestrate a vicious propaganda campaign against cannabis, which featured lurid (and
false) stories about black and brown men committing outrageous acts of murder and mayhem. That
campaign played on then-predominantly racist public opinion to make cannabis illegal at the federal level in 1937. Since then, the M
word has come to be associated with the idea that cannabis is a dangerous and addictive
intoxicant-- and thereby helped continue the prohibition of cannabis. Language is important
because it defines our ideas. Words have a power that transcends their formal meaning. When
we change words, we can also change the thoughts that underlie them. By changing the
words we use to describe cannabis, we can help our fellow citizens understand the truth about it, and
see through the decades of propaganda. That understanding will convert cannabis opponents
into supporters, and bring closer the day when all our prisoners go free, and nobody else is ever
again arrested for cannabis.
1NC
Legalization may decrease the number of arrests for possession, but people of color
are still targeted for distribution. Because of the prison industrial complex,
antiblackness will be perpetuated with or without the criminalization of marihuana.
The ignorance of legalization conditions us to ignore broader trends of criminalization
that condition us toward progressivism doomed to fail.
Kunichoff 13, Yana Kunichoff, senior reporter for the Chicago Now, and contributor to the Huffington
Post, “Do new marijuana legalization laws only benefit white people?” June 7, 2013,
http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-muckrakers/2013/06/do-new-marijuana-legalization-laws-onlybenefit-white-people/
David Simon, the creator of HBO series “The Wire,” raised some eyebrows last month when he declared that the widely applauded marijuana
legalization measures in states like Colorado and Washington were only going to help “white, middle-class” youth avoid going to jail for drug
use. Simon’s award-winning series
focused at times on the illegal drug trade and its effect on inner city
communities, making him a de facto expert on how the war on drugs and the economic downfall shape
urban life. What happened in Washington and Colorado was essentially a political move to stall
broader reforms of the criminal justice system, said Simon at a debate hosted by the Observer, the weekend edition of the
British-based Guardian newspaper. "I want the [drug war] to fall as one complete edifice. If they manage to let a
few white middle-class people off the hook, that's very dangerous,” he said. “If they can find a way for
white kids in middle-class suburbia to get high without them going to jail, and getting them to think
that what they do is a million miles away from black kids taking crack, that is what politicians would
do.” Is he right? It’s no secret that marijuana arrests are the most common of all drug arrests. More than
half of those arrested for drug possession in the Midwest in 2011, were caught with marijuana,
according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s arrest data. This includes people in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio
and Wisconsin, among others. Most people behind bars for sale and manufacturing of drugs were also accused
of distributing marijuana. We also know that drug arrests fall more heavily on communities of color.
Nationwide African Americans are almost four times more likely to be arrested for possession of
marijuana, according to a June 2013 report by the American Civil Liberties Union. This is despite the fact that white communities used
marijuana at similar rates. We spoke to experts on drug policy from around the country, including in a state that recently passed marijuana
legalization, to find out what communities of color might expect from the change in penalties for possession. Fewer arrests for smoking Art
Way, senior drug policy manager with the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization that promotes alternatives to incarceration, lives in Colorado.
That state legislature just passed two bills that would allow marijuana for recreational use and create a taxing system to regulate it. He expects
that, contrary to Simon’s assumption, the
bills will have a positive effect on people arrested for possession. “There
will be a disproportionate benefit for people of color,” Way said. Fewer people will be arrested, he said,
because “they have been disproportionately impacted by prohibition. In Colorado, people of color are twoand-a-half times more likely to be arrested for possession.” In June 2012, the Chicago City Council also took a step
toward leniency by decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana. Chicago police can now ticket someone caught with 15 grams
or less but not arrest them. WBEZ looked at the effects of the ordinance earlier this year and found that, while few tickets were issued, there
were also fewer marijuana arrests. The Illinois General Assembly passed a medical marijuana bill on May 17 that would allow physicians to
prescribe marijuana to treat pain. It is unclear whether Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn will sign the bill. Gov. Quinn’s office said he remains neutral on
the legislation. But possibly more arrests for distribution Possession of
marijuana is not the only drug-related crime that
lands people behind bars. Distribution charges account for a large portion of drug arrests and will likely
continue, according to Marc Mauer, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Sentencing Project, an advocacy group that
advocates for reforms in sentencing policy. “Legalizing marijuana is not likely to have much effect on the prison
population,” Mauer said. “It would probably help at least some people of color who might otherwise get
picked up for marijuana possession, but in terms of the dynamics of incarceration, it doesn’t change
much.” Way, of Colorado, said some people in Washington and his state are concerned that legalizing some distribution could actually mean
an increase in arrests for illegal distribution. “Law enforcement usually find a way to circumvent reforms,” he said,
noting that a drop in arrests could hurt police departments’ budgets. In particular, states that receive federal
funding to fight the war on drugs could see a drop in their overall budget if arrests drop, Way said. The Colorado and Washington legislation
look to regulate the distribution of marijuana--either through licenses for growing or only allowing growing within designated spaces.
Legalization doesn’t challenge the prison industrial complex Mauer
and Way do agree with Simon’s argument that the
marijuana legalization movement fails to take up broader issues of criminalization. “The marijuana
movement has traditionally been a white movement,” Way said, “and [people in the movement] have not
incorporated racial justice into their politics. The racial disparities seen throughout the drug war will
not end through the marijuana prohibition ending.”Mauer agreed: “The marijuana legalization movement … doesn’t really
address the problem of mass incarceration in any kind of direct way.” For Simon, a former reporter who also served as head writer for “The
Wire,” drug policy can’t be separated from the larger socioeconomic issues affecting communities that grapple with high incarceration and
unemployment rates. “Drugs are the only industry left in places such as Baltimore and East St. Louis, [Ill.]"--an industry that employs "children,
old people, people who've been shooting drugs for 20 years, it doesn't matter,” he said at the Observer event. “It's the only factory that's still
open.
This is a central question. Certain bodies as disposable psychologically conditions us to
make genocide and mass violence possible. Historical analysis is critical demask the
way that systems of power mark specific bodies for extermination and exploitation.
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 04, (Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @
UPenn) (Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg.
19-22)
This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal
violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in
Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory
disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow
the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois,
Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence
also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and
adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical
suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and
distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to the “little” violences
produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to
pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that
risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of
human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” (see also
Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes,
courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The
violence continuum also refers to the ease
with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and
assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide
continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect
to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to
the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the
title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there
is a moral risk in overextending the concept of
“genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and
there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal
practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens.
Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the
evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute
the “small wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore,
Washington DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As
Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s
By including the
normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the
architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links
between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion
partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task.
of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war
crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematic- ally and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of
rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens”
versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence
make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of
professionally applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify
peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or
structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based
opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the
rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more
secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e.,
over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it
is essential that we recognize the existence of a
genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive
hypervigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that
render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps
more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of
radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonalization, pseudospeciation, and reification which
normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant
hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to
recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century
radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental
hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the
willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish
people. There
is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in
the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of
the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik
Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide
and one that is carefully honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective
denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical
technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful
tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense
free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular
social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for
something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public
secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and
violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of
culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan
identifies “meconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the
structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; FavretSaada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence
as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic
domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are
presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as
encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize
these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative
experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and
genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by
perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in
social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They
harbor the early “warning signs”
(Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social
consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social
support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare
queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (supermaximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security,
including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization).
Cartels
Representations of savage terrorists as extremists who only want to get the bomb
cannot be separated from historical racism—critiquing faulty assumptions is key to
eliminate racist mythologies that justify atrocities.
Sharp 07, 2007, Patrick B. Sharp, Chair, Department of Liberal Studies California State University, Los
Angeles, Ph. D. in English University of California, Santa Barbara, M.A. in English University of California,
Santa Barbara, B.A. in English (High Honors) University of California, Santa Barbara, American
Association of Colleges and Universities Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success,
University of Vermont, University of Oklahoma Press : Norman, “Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and
Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture” pdf
On 29 January 2002, President George W. Bush gave the first post- 9/11 State of the Union address. The
United States had invaded Afghanistan and struck at the bases of Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization
responsible for the attacks. However, Bush saw a much bigger threat to “the civilized world”: he
asserted that an “axis of evil” was “seeking weapons of mass destruction” and urged that the “war on
terror” be expanded beyond the borders of Afghanistan.1 The “axis of evil” consisted of Iraq, Iran, North
Korea “and their terrorist allies.”2 In the days, months, and years that followed, Bush committed the
United States to a wide-ranging series of military operations under the banner of the “war on terror,” a
war that eventually led to the controversial invasion and occupation of Iraq. At the heart of Bush’s
rhetoric was a basic opposition, a “fight between civilization and terror” that threatened to undermine
the “existence of free nations.”3 Time after time, Bush attempted to invoke fear in his audience by
warning that technologically backward “terrorists” were close to getting their hands on advanced
modern weapons, including that most feared weapon of all, the atomic bomb. Bush’s representation of
terrorism bore a striking resemblance to the notion of savagery that once dominated American national
discourse. By representing terrorists as the opposite of the “civilized world,” Bush tapped into a rich vein
of racism that extended back to the dawn of the United States, when the idea of civilization was
intimately connected to the idea of race. Beginning in the 1750s, these two ideas were developed by
scientists and intellectuals in Europe and America who were attempting to account for the supposed
cultural and biological inferiority of people who were not of European descent.4 The distinction
between white civilization and nonwhite savagery became deeply entwined in American colonial
discourse and served as a rallying point for white Americans as they pushed the frontier across the
continent. By the 1850s, scientists in the United States had developed a theory of human difference
known as polygenesis. This theory asserted that different races originated from separate creations and
thus constituted separate species. Polygenesis was a product of a society deeply invested in the
connection between white superiority and American national identity. The enslavement of African
Americans, the war against Mexico, and the repeated atrocities against Native Americans were all
justified in part by appealing to the belief in an ongoing racial war between civilization and savagery. If
the polygenists were correct, then the nonwhite races were not fully human and did not have a claim to
the rights spelled out in the founding documents of the United States. Long after the scientific ideas of
the polygenists were rejected, their formulation of race still held currency in the United States. The
reason was simple: polygenism was merely one expression of a deeply racist society that was built on
the notion of civilized progress replacing savagery.
No Mexican failed state—reject media hype
by Martín Paredes ·El Paso News February 28, 2014 “George Friedman: Mexico is not a Failed State”
http://elpasonews.org/2014/02/george-friedman-mexico-failed-state/ ac 8-27
A failed state read the headlines. Doom
and gloom, Mexico was about to implode led the news cycles starting
around 2008. A revolution as about to start south of the US border, it was just a matter of days. Fast forward to today and the
notion that Mexico is on the verge of becoming a failed state is as idiotic today as it was then. The
news reporters happily interviewed the dubious characters predicting Mexico’s failures because to lead
with Mexico’s imminent demise was an easy sell for the US appetite for sensational headlines.¶ I
understand that the news media has to attract eyeballs in order to stay in business. Eyeballs sell
advertising and the more eyeballs the more financially stable the news outlet is. Most of the time when I am
discussing the state of the news media with a reporter and news outlet executive the topic of tabloids leads to heated discussions about ethics
in journalism. That discussion invariably leads to how blogging
has destroyed the profession of the professional news
outlet. I always counter that the demise of the newspapers and news outlets to Internet delivered news is a direct result of the failure of the
traditional news outlets adhering to the basics of fair and ethical news reporting.¶ The demise of the traditional news media
came about when sensationalism became the accepted practice rather than the exception. I don’t blame
the so-called experts on everything drug cartel related because they are nothing more than individuals
looking to make a quick buck by proclaiming themselves experts on the drug traffickers in Mexico.¶ The
notion of the imminent failure of Mexico was started by information peddler George Friedman in May of
2008 with his self-serving, make-another-dollar opinion that was nothing more than another charlatan
peddling his goods to those willing to buy. The problem with people like Friedman is that the news
media is too happy to label them “experts” in order to ply their sensational headlines to their audience.¶
George Friedman’s company and raison d’ete is his company Stratfor. Stratfor peddles “strategic
analysis” about geopolitics. In essence, the company has self-proclaimed itself as an expert in global
security in order to sell its publications to individuals and governments. It peddles self-proclaimed
expertise in security. The problem though is that their security “expertise” apparently doesn’t include
their own operations because in 2011, the hacker group Anonymous broke into their systems. In February
2012, Wikileaks began publishing the stolen emails.¶ Friedman’s Stratfor has taken the position that you can’t trust the released emails because
they will not confirm which ones are authenticate and which ones may be doctored after they were stolen. To me, this position is nothing more
than a desperate attempt to discount the theft of their emails. Regardless, for a so-called expert on “security” the theft of their emails shows a
distinct failure in their ability to protect themselves and thus the security of their clients.¶ For his part, George Friedman, born in Budapest
Hungary is a former professor and now an author and owner of Stratfor. He peddles information to those willing to buy it. I am sure you are all
aware of the famous phrase; “those who can’t, teach”. Most appropriate for Friedman.¶ A
Failed State is generally defined as a
country that has lost some or all control over its sovereignty. The fact is that Mexico, even at the height
of the Mexican Drug War never relinquished control over its sovereignty. I am sure some of you will argue that there
were and are pockets of criminality in Mexico that seem to surpass the government’s ability to maintain control. However, all of that
rhetoric ignores a fundamental reality; a failed state has a failed economy and an ineffective
government. So, let’s take a look at those two functions.¶ Has the Mexican economy faltered?¶ The World Bank
ranks Mexico’s economy as the second largest economy south of the Rio Bravo (Rio Grande), behind
Brazil. This month Moody’s rated Mexico as A3, the first time the country has received an “A” rating in its entire history. Keep in mind that
the rating is derived from actions taken by two administrations under two different political parties.¶ I
wish George Friedman would
explain to everyone how it is that a country on the verge of collapse is able to attain an A rating for its
economy. Somehow, I don’t expect he will, as it isn’t something he can sell to the news outlets and his subscribers looking for doom-andgloom coming from Mexico.¶ Somehow, a country on the verge of collapse, according to George Friedman is on
the road to becoming the United States’ number one automobile exporter this year. Again, how is it that a
country on the verge of collapse continues to build enough automobiles to outpace Canada and Japan?¶
Clearly, the Mexican economy is not on the verge of collapse and therefore the country’s government is in
full control. So, let’s a take a look at the transition of power.¶ On December 1, 2012, President Enrique Peña Nieto
took office. Mexico had effectively transitioned power from one government to another. Former
President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa, who initiated the Mexican Drug War, democratically relinquished
power in a transition from one party to another. Both US president Barack Obama and leftist president Hugo Chavez both
agreed that the transfer of power was properly completed.¶ In other words, two opposing political ideologies both agreed
that Mexico’s electoral process was completed properly under the law. In fact, Mexico has now
transitioned power from one party, to another and back to the original party making Mexico a two-party
country.¶ So much for the notion that Mexico was on the verge of collapse.¶ The problem of the drug
cartels is a significant problem for Mexico but it is a geopolitical problem with many facets at work at
the same time. For the most part Mexico has risen to the occasion and has demonstrated that far from being
a failed state, it is in fact an economically growing country in full control of its sovereignty. As much as
the naysayers want it to be, the facts are that Mexico is not some backwards country on the border
holding the US back. Rather it is a country that the US should be proud to call a friend.¶ Unfortunately,
for people like George Friedman and those who subscribe to his voodoo research the facts are just
inconvenient things that should be ignored.
Alternative production can’t be distributed in-theater—it’s just as vulnerable to
disruptions as oil
Bartis, PhD chemical physics – MIT, senior policy researcher – RAND, and van Bibber, researcher –
RAND, ‘11
(James T. and Lawrence, “Alternative Fuels for Military Applications,” RAND Corporation)
Examples of forward-based concepts that require a feedstock include the following:¶ • An alternative fuel
plant could be built on a barge that could be towed to a location¶ within or near the theater of operations and
where natural gas is available.¶ Each floating plant could produce 10,000 to 20,000 bpd of fuel. If the floating¶ plant is sufficiently close to
forward operating units, the produced fuel could be¶ transferred by helicopter; otherwise, it could be offloaded onto a Navy oiler.¶ • A
small
biomass-to-liquids plant could be built within or near a forward operating¶ base. The fuel plant could produce between a
few hundred and as much as¶ 1,000 bpd using biomass delivered by local farmers.¶ While there are many variations of the above two cases and
many in between, all
of¶ the local-feedstock-based production concepts examined in this study present serious¶
operational, institutional, or logistical problems that significantly limit their military ¶ utility, as
compared to producing fuel outside of the theater of operations and shipping¶ that fuel to the theater of
operations.¶ Floating Production¶ Large floating production facilities are vulnerable to attack and have limited
application,¶ since appropriate feedstocks may not be available. There is no evidence that a floating
production¶ facility would be less expensive than delivering finished military fuels produced¶ outside the zone of
conflict.¶ For production levels of over 10,000 bpd, floating production plant concepts require¶ a barge that is roughly
the size of an aircraft carrier. Putting a barge of this size in the¶ vicinity of or within a conflict zone would
likely require protection by dedicated naval¶ assets. Most importantly, the concept has limited application. The
concept for floating¶ production that has been most extensively examined involves jet and diesel fuel¶ production from natural gas via FischerTropsch synthesis.1 Short-duration
conflicts¶ would not support the time and expense necessary to bring the
barge to theater, secure¶ a natural gas supply, and conduct equipment shakedown. There is also the question of¶ whether
permission to access the needed natural gas feedstock at reasonable prices and¶ within a reasonable time would be
granted by the nation (or nations) claiming ownership¶ of the natural resource. Such permission might be delayed due
to political reasons,¶ but there are also valid economic and technical reasons. If the natural gas is already¶ being extracted, diversion to
alternative liquids production would leave other applications¶ and customers without supplies. If the natural gas is in an undeveloped
reservoir,¶ the
owner nation may be concerned that a rush to production may preclude the reservoir¶
characterization and engineering necessary for sustainable production.¶ Finally, there is no evidence that a floating
production plant would be less expensive¶ than using Navy oilers or commercial oil tankers to bring JP-8, JP-5, and diesel¶ fuel directly to
forward-based oil depots. Production
economics further suffer from the¶ need to produce a fairly narrow
product slate, namely, middle distillates, which will¶ require extensive upgrading or flaring of light hydrocarbon liquids and
gases. Also, a¶ production facility capable of producing roughly 10,000 bpd of fuel cannot sit idle¶ in storage and then be expected to operate
when needed. When
not deployed, such a¶ plant will need to be operated, and such operations could incur net annual
losses.¶ Variations of this floating-barge production concept include using nuclear power¶ to provide hydrogen
from water, using coal rather than natural gas, and using coproduced¶ water to meet the water needs of forward-based forces. So
long as natural gas¶ is the feedstock, there would be no shortage of hydrogen, and therefore no benefit from¶ a nuclear source of
hydrogen.¶ There would be no logistical advantages of using coal as the feedstock, even if¶ the coal were to
come from a local source. We are aware of no credible analysis that¶ suggests that the costs of loading, unloading, storing, and
processing coal in a mobile¶ facility would be less than the costs of transporting finished fuels produced outside the¶ zone of conflict.¶ While it
is true that water can be a co-product of an FT gas-to-liquids plant, a¶ search of the literature reveals that there is no experience, globally
speaking, in using¶ industrial wastewater for human consumption and very little experience in using industrial¶ wastewater for irrigation of
food crops. Even if research revealed that such use would¶ be appropriate, significant water treatment and monitoring resources would be
required¶ to ensure that appropriate water quality standards were continuously met.¶ Small-Scale Production¶ It
is difficult to identify
a credible operational scenario in which having forward-based¶ units carry and operate a smallfootprint, modular alternative fuel plant would be an¶ asset. The logistics and operational burden of having
forward-based units secure a carbon containing¶ feedstock is greater than that of delivering finished fuels to those
units.¶
Motivating interest in small-scale alternative fuel production concepts is the potential¶ to co-locate military fuel production with tactical units.
Ongoing advances in chemical¶ microprocessing offer the possibility of designing small-footprint, modular alternative¶ fuel plants that can be
delivered to or carried by a forward operating unit. Presumably, a tactical unit supported by such a plant would require less logistics support.
In¶ situations in which logistics lines are at risk of attack, fewer fuel-delivery trucks means¶ fewer drivers at risk and fewer military assets
dedicated to convoy security.¶ In
our analysis of small-scale, forward-based military fuel production concepts,¶
we considered both technical viability and military utility. From a strictly technical¶ perspective, a number of the concepts
being supported by DoD funds might be viable.2¶ From a military utility perspective, all of these concepts appear to
place a logistical and¶ operational burden on forward-based tactical units that is well beyond that
associated¶ with the delivery of finished military fuels, either synthetic or conventional, produced¶ outside the
theater of operations. Specifically, all of these concepts require delivery of a¶ carbon-containing feedstock.
For all known fuel conversion processes, the weight and¶ volume of the required feedstock deliveries would far exceed
the weight and volume of¶ the fuel deliveries that would be displaced. Considering fuel-delivery issues, the diversion¶
of combat strength involved in protecting local extraction and delivery of feedstocks,¶ and the additional personnel required to deliver, set up,
operate, and maintain a¶ forward-based military fuel production facility, we
have difficulty identifying credible¶ operational
scenarios in which such a facility would be a military asset.
Their brooks evidence labels military, economic factors as key to preponderance, no reason lack of
energy reform changes our overall military preponderance – that was CX.
Data disproves hegemony impacts
Fettweis, 11
Christopher J. Fettweis, Department of Political Science, Tulane University, 9/26/11, Free Riding or
Restraint? Examining European Grand Strategy, Comparative Strategy, 30:316–332, EBSCO
It is perhaps worth noting that there
is no evidence to support a direct relationship between the relative level of U.S.
activism and international stability. In fact, the limited data we do have suggest the opposite may be true.
During the 1990s, the United States cut back on its defense spending fairly substantially. By 1998, the United States was
spending $100 billion less on defense in real terms than it had in 1990.51 To internationalists, defense hawks and
believers in hegemonic stability, this irresponsible “peace dividend” endangered both national and global security. “No serious analyst of
American military capabilities,” argued Kristol and Kagan, “doubts that the defense budget has been cut much too far to meet America’s
responsibilities to itself and to world peace.”52 On the other hand, if the pacific trends
were not based upon U.S. hegemony
but a strengthening norm against interstate war, one would not have expected an increase in global
instability and violence. The verdict from the past two decades is fairly plain: The world grew more peaceful while the
United States cut its forces. No state seemed to believe that its security was endangered by a less-capable
United States military, or at least none took any action that would suggest such a belief. No militaries were
enhanced to address power vacuums, no security dilemmas drove insecurity or arms races, and no
regional balancing occurred once the stabilizing presence of the U.S. military was diminished. The rest of the
world acted as if the threat of international war was not a pressing concern, despite the reduction in U.S. capabilities. Most of all, the United
States and its allies were no less safe. The incidence and magnitude of global conflict declined while the United States cut its military spending
under President Clinton, and kept declining as the Bush Administration ramped the spending back up. No complex statistical analysis should be
necessary to reach the conclusion that the two are unrelated. Military spending figures by themselves are insufficient to disprove a connection
between overall U.S. actions and international stability. Once again, one could presumably argue that spending is not the only or even the best
indication of hegemony, and that it is instead U.S. foreign political and security commitments that maintain stability. Since neither was
significantly altered during this period, instability should not have been expected. Alternately, advocates of hegemonic stability could believe
that relative rather than absolute spending is decisive in bringing peace. Although the United States cut back on its spending during the 1990s,
its relative advantage never wavered. However, even
if it is true that either U.S. commitments or relative spending account
for global pacific trends, then at the very least stability can evidently be maintained at drastically lower levels of both. In other words,
even if one can be allowed to argue in the alternative for a moment and suppose that there is in fact a level of engagement
below which the United States cannot drop without increasing international disorder, a rational grand
strategist would still recommend cutting back on engagement and spending until that level is
determined. Grand strategic decisions are never final; continual adjustments can and must be made as time goes
on. Basic logic suggests that the United States ought to spend the minimum amount of its blood and treasure while seeking the maximum
return on its investment. And if the current era of stability is as stable as many believe it to be, no increase in conflict would ever occur
irrespective of U.S. spending, which would save untold trillions for an increasingly debt-ridden nation. It is also perhaps worth noting that if
opposite trends had unfolded, if other states had reacted to news of cuts in U.S. defense spending with more aggressive or insecure behavior,
then internationalists would surely argue that their expectations had been fulfilled.
If increases in conflict would have been
interpreted as proof of the wisdom of internationalist strategies, then logical consistency demands that
the lack thereof should at least pose a problem. As it stands, the only evidence we have regarding the likely
systemic reaction to a more restrained United States suggests that the current peaceful trends are
unrelated to U.S. military spending. Evidently the rest of the world can operate quite effectively without the
presence of a global policeman. Those who think otherwise base their view on faith alone.
FBI
Advantage is ridiculous – they have no evidence that says that pot smoking hackers wont just cheat their
drug test OR not smoke before the exam
They also have to win that EVERYBODY who wants to work for the FBI will smoke weed – their evidence
only says many like to
The 1ac’s description of impending Cyber attacks on US soil serves as a political cover
for 21st century Big Brother and it justifies OFFENSIVE CYBER OPERATIONS in the first
place – it allows US military aggression to go unquestioned and the military to
infiltrate local resistance groups.
Greenwald 13 (Glenn, 1/28, “The Pentagon’s Massive Security Unit is All about offense”
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-pentagons-massive-expansion-of-its-cyber-security-unit-is-allabout-offense-2013-1”)
As the US government depicts the Defense Department as shrinking due to budgetary constraints, the Washington Post this morning
announces "a major expansion of [the Pentagon's] cybersecurity force over the next several years, increasing its size more than fivefold."
Specifically, says the New York Times this morning, "the expansion would increase the Defense Department's Cyber Command by more than
4,000 people, up from the current 900." The Post describes this expansion as "part of an effort to turn an organization that has focused largely
on defensive measures into the equivalent of an Internet-era fighting force." This
Cyber Command Unit operates under the
command of Gen. Keith Alexander, who also happens to be the head of the National Security Agency, the
highly secretive government network that spies on the communications of foreign nationals - and American citizens.¶ The Pentagon's rhetorical
justification for this expansion is deeply misleading. Beyond that, these
activities pose a wide array of serious threats to internet freedom,
privacy, and international law that, as usual, will be conducted with full-scale secrecy and with little to no oversight
and accountability. And, as always, there is a small army of private-sector corporations who will benefit most from this expansion.¶
Disguising aggression as "defense"¶ Let's begin with the way this so-called "cyber-security" expansion has been
marketed. It is part of a sustained campaign which, quite typically, relies on blatant fear-mongering.¶ In March, 2010,
the Washington Post published an amazing Op-Ed by Adm. Michael McConnell, Bush's former Director of National Intelligence and a past and
current executive with Booz Allen, a firm representing numerous corporate contractors which profit enormously each time the government
expands its "cyber-security" activities. McConnell's career over the last two decades - both at Booz, Allen and inside the government - has been
devoted to accelerating the merger between the government and private sector in all intelligence, surveillance and national security matters (it
was he who led the successful campaign to retroactively immunize the telecom giants for their participation in the illegal NSA domestic spying
program). Privatizing government cyber-spying and cyber-warfare is his primary focus now.¶ McConnell's Op-Ed was as alarmist and hysterical
as possible. Claiming
that "the United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing", it warned that "chaos would result"
from an enemy cyber-attack on US financial systems and that "our power grids, air and ground
transportation, telecommunications, and water-filtration systems are in jeopardy as well." Based on these
threats, McConnell advocated that "we" - meaning "the government and the private sector" - "need to develop an early-warning system to
monitor cyberspace" and that "we need to reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact
assessment - who did it, from where, why and what was the result - more manageable." As Wired's Ryan Singel wrote: "He's talking about
changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users
and their computers for retaliation."¶ The same week the Post published McConnell's extraordinary Op-Ed, the Obama White House issued its
own fear-mongering decree on cyber-threats, depicting the US as a vulnerable victim to cyber-aggression. It began with this sentence:
"President Obama has identified cybersecurity as one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation, but
one that we as a government or as a country are not adequately prepared to counter." It announced that "the Executive Branch was directed to
work closely with all key players in US cybersecurity, including state and local governments and the private sector" and to "strengthen
public/private partnerships", and specifically announced Obama's intent to "to implement the recommendations of the Cyberspace Policy
Review built on the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) launched by President George W. Bush."¶ Since then, the
fearmongering rhetoric from government officials has relentlessly intensified, all devoted to scaring citizens
into believing that the US is at serious risk of cataclysmic cyber-attacks from "aggressors". This all culminated
when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, last October, warned of what he called a "cyber-Pearl Harbor". This "would cause physical
destruction and the loss of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation and create a profound new sense of vulnerability."
Identifying China, Iran, and terrorist groups, he outlined a parade of horribles scarier than anything since Condoleezza Rice's 2002 Iraqi
"mushroom cloud":¶ "An aggressor nation or extremist group could use these kinds of cyber tools to gain control of critical switches. They could
derail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals. They could contaminate the water supply
in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country."¶ As usual, though, reality is exactly the opposite. This
massive new expenditure of money is not primarily devoted to defending against cyber-aggressors. The
US itself is the world's leading cyber-aggressor. A major purpose of this expansion is to strengthen the
US's ability to destroy other nations with cyber-attacks. Indeed, even the Post report notes that a major component of this
new expansion is to "conduct offensive computer operations against foreign adversaries".¶ It is the US - not Iran, Russia or "terror" groups which already is the first nation (in partnership with Israel) to aggressively deploy a highly sophisticated and
extremely dangerous cyber-attack. Last June, the New York Times' David Sanger reported what most of the world had already
suspected: "From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that
run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons." In fact, Obama "decided to
accelerate the attacks . . . even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming
error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet." According to the Sanger's report, Obama
himself understood the significance of the US decision to be the first to use serious and aggressive cyber-warfare:¶ "Mr. Obama, according to
participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United
States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the
1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons
- even under the most careful and limited circumstances - could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks."¶
The US isn't the vulnerable victim of cyber-attacks. It's the leading perpetrator of those attacks. As Columbia
Professor and cyber expert Misha Glenny wrote in the NYT last June: Obama's cyber-attack on Iran "marked a significant and dangerous turning
point in the gradual militarization of the Internet."¶ Indeed, exactly as Obama knew would happen, revelations that it was the US which became
the first country to use cyber-warfare against a sovereign country - just as it was the first to use the atomic bomb and then drones - would
make it impossible for it to claim with any credibility (except among its own media and foreign policy community) that it was in a defensive
posture when it came to cyber-warfare. As Professor Glenny wrote: "by introducing such pernicious viruses as Stuxnet and Flame, America has
severely undermined its moral and political credibility." That's why, as the Post reported yesterday, the DOJ is engaged in such a frantic and
invasive effort to root out Sanger's source: because it reveals the obvious truth that the US is the leading aggressor in the world when it comes
to cyber-weapons.¶ This
significant expansion under the Orwellian rubric of "cyber-security" is thus a perfect
microcosm of US military spending generally. It's all justified under by the claim that the US must defend
itself from threats from Bad, Aggressive Actors, when the reality is the exact opposite: the new program is devoted
to ensuring that the US remains the primary offensive threat to the rest of the world. It's the same way
the US develops offensive biological weapons under the guise of developing defenses against such weapons
(such as the 2001 anthrax that the US government itself says came from a US Army lab). It's how the US government generally
convinces its citizens that it is a peaceful victim of aggression by others when the reality is that the US builds more
weapons, sells more arms and bombs more countries than virtually the rest of the world combined.¶ Threats to privacy and internet freedom¶
Beyond the aggressive threat to other nations posed by the Pentagon's "cyber-security" programs, there is the profound threat to privacy,
internet freedom, and the ability to communicate freely for US citizens and foreign nationals alike. The
US government has long
viewed these "cyber-security" programs as a means of monitoring and controlling the internet and
disseminating propaganda. The fact that this is all being done under the auspices of the NSA and the Pentagon means, by definition,
that there will be no transparency and no meaningful oversight.¶ Back in 2003, the Rumsfeld Pentagon prepared a secret report entitled
"Information Operations (IO) Roadmap", which laid the foundation for this new cyber-warfare expansion. The Pentagon's self-described
objective was "transforming IO into a core military competency on par with air, ground, maritime and special operations". In other words, its
key objective was to ensure military control over internet-based communications:¶ It further identified
superiority in cyber-attack capabilities as a vital military goal in PSYOPs (Psychological Operations) and
"information-centric fights":¶ And it set forth the urgency of dominating the "IO battlespace" not only during wartime but also in
peacetime:¶ As a 2006 BBC report on this Pentagon document noted: "Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its
acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops,
is finding its way onto the
computer and television screens of ordinary Americans." And while the report paid lip service to the need to create
"boundaries" for these new IO military activities, "they don't seem to explain how." Regarding the report's plan to "provide maximum control of
the entire electromagnetic spectrum", the BBC noted: "Consider that for a moment. The US military
seeks the capability to
knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet."¶ Since then, there
have been countless reports of the exploitation by the US national security state to destroy privacy and undermine internet freedom. In
November, the LA Times described programs that "teach students how to spy in cyberspace, the latest frontier in espionage." They "also are
taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and
flash drives." The program, needless to say, "has funneled most of its graduates to the CIA and the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which
conducts America's digital spying. Other graduates have taken positions with the FBI, NASA and the Department of Homeland Security."¶ In
2010, Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, gave a speech explicitly announcing that
the US intends to abandon its policy of "leaving the Internet alone". Noting that this "has been the nation's Internet policy since the Internet
was first commercialized in the mid-1990s", he decreed: "This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and
the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now."¶ The documented power of the US government to
monitor and surveil internet communications is already unfathomably massive. Recall that the Washington Post's 2010 "Top Secret America"
series noted that: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other
types of communications." And the Obama
administration has formally demanded that it have access to any and
all forms of internet communication.
¶ It is hard
to overstate the danger to privacy and internet freedom from a massive expansion of the National Security State's efforts to exploit
and control the internet. As Wired's Singel wrote back in 2010:¶ "Make no mistake,
the military industrial complex now has its
eye on the internet. Generals want to train crack squads of hackers and have wet dreams of cyberwarfare. Never shy of extending its
power, the military industrial complex wants to turn the internet into yet another venue for an arms race".¶ Wildly exaggerated
cyber-threats are the pretext for this control, the "mushroom cloud" and the Tonkin Gulf fiction of cyber-warfare. As Singel
aptly put it: "the only war going on is one for the soul of the internet." That's the vital context for understanding this massive expansion of
Pentagon and NSA consolidated control over cyber programs.
2NC
*****Debating specifics of policy is useless. Their arguments are based in blinkered
intelligence- capitalist enclosures nurture war and disinformation, distorting their
picture of the world and nullifying the truth-value of their claims. The aff isn’t true and
their pessimism of the alt is unfounded
Shor, 10 - Wayne State history professor
[Francis, Dying Empire: US Imperialism and Global Resistance, p32-34, net library, accessed 1-31-10]
In order to excavate and explode the mental landscapes created by imperial enclosures, we will need to confront and transcend the blinkered intelligence, impeded
wills, and hectored hearts that are integral to the imperial and civic enclosures that surround
us in the United States. These
enclosures are enerated by ideological mechanisms, media constructions, and daily social practices that
are deeply embedded in the political culture of an imperial U.S. From uncritical patriotism, induced by
ruling elites and ritualized by the corporate media, to cultural provincialism, U.S. citizens are ensconced in an
imperial matrix that distorts reality and nurtures "aggressive militarism" and 'escalating
authoritarianism." "As the militarization of American society proceeds," contends Carl Boggs, "the confluence of the domestic
war economy and global Empire generates popular attitudes inconsistent with a vibrant, democratic
public sphere: fear hatred, jingoism, racism, and aggression. We have arrived at a bizarre mixture of
imperial arrogance and collective paranoia, violent impulses and a retreat from the norms of civic
engagement and obligation that patriotic energies furnish only falsely and ephemerally." Recognizing how falsely
and ephemerally patriotism attempts to assuage the assaults of militarism and imperialism, a number of feminist dissenters have promoted "matriotism" as a key
component of critical opposition. Among the more prominent proponents of matriotism was Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war advocate who became a lightning rod for
opponents of the Iraq War after her son, Casey, was killed in Iraq. Writing in January 2006, Sheehan argued that a "true Matriot would never drop an atomic bomb
or bombs filled with white phosphorous, carpet bomb cities, and villages, or control drones from thousands of miles away to kill innocent men, women and
children." Beyond this critique of war-making, Sheehan urged those among her readers who would join other matriots "to stand up and say: "No, I’m not giving my
child to the fake patriotism of the war machine which chews up my flesh and blood to spit out obscene profits." While flag-wavering
patriotism may
provide ideological cover for the mendacity of ruling elites and compensatory status for the powerless, it also reinforces the self-enclosure of
imperialism. The desperate need to display the flag, from the phalanxes of those that now accompany the public appearances of U.S.
presidents to the periodic fluttering outside the homes of average citizens, provides a symbolic ritual for imperial legitimacy. In effect,
the more uncritical the kind of patriotism that rules popular imagination and public discourse, the more alone, insulated,
special and different the American ethos makes people feel. The more it holds up a distorting mirror to itself and the rest of
the world, the more incomprehensible the rest of the world becomes, full of inarticulate, hostile
elements. That distorting mirror is not only part of the imperial narrative that represents the United States as the repository of good in the world, but is also a
function of the role of corporate media's presentation of the world. Through the use of framing and filtering devices, U.S.
corporate media, especially television, manage to narrow and exclude critical perspectives, leading to
significant misperceptions. In fact, according to a University of Massachusetts study of television viewers during Operation Desert Storm in 1991:
"the more TV people watched, the less they knew....Despite months of coverage, most people do not know basic facts about the political situation in the Middle
East, or about the recent history of U.S. policy towards Iraq" Added to media distortions, misrepresentations, and complicity, the Bush Administration's deliberate
policy of disinformation in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003 further eroded the public's critical understanding of the situation in the Middle East and Iraq.
Erroneously insisting on ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush Administration and
complicit corporate media helped to frame the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Such misperceptions persisted into 2006 when a Harris Poll found that 64 percent
still believed that Hussein had strong links to al Qaeda and 50 percent were convinced that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded. The
kind of disinformation spread by politicians and pundits and reinforced by the media follows from our
national and imperial myths which, in turn, bother literally and figuratively separate us from the rest of
the world. While not a new phenomenon, such imperial self-enclosure does seem even more striking in the globalized and interconnected world we now
inhabit. "As the American media has acquired a global reach," argue cultural critics Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, "it has simultaneously, and
paradoxically, become even more parochial and banal." According to Sardar and Davies, the
media reinforce what they call "knowledgeable
ignorance" by acting as "the gatekeeper of what is relevant and necessary to know about Third World
civilizations." Often, most evident in those mediage images are ones of random violence or poverty and disease unrelated to U.S. policies. However, it is not
just those countries caught up in conflict, whether initiated by the United States or endemic to a particular region, that suffer from media frames that diminish or
denigrate the reality of others' lives. "As
a function of American narcissism," notes another critic, "American media tend to
problematize all countries except the United States....The absence of self-reflexivity or a sense of humor and irony in viewing America's place
in the world seems to be part of the collective habitus." Even when U.S. citizens are aware of some vague relationship
between their government and conditions elsewhere, there remains a kind of phenomenological
disconnection, inherent in life in an imperial culture, which impedes understanding of the causal
connections. Commenting on the violations perpetrated against peasants in central America by U.S. sponsored militaries and para-militaries and the
resultant gross violations of human rights, Christian Smith observes: "Most Americans probably were, in fact, concerned about these problems. But for most
U.S. citizens, these injustices and atrocities remained essentially abstract and remote, detached from the
immediate affairs that shaped their lives. It is not that most Americans were necessarily callous. They simply lacked the
cultural and social positioning that would have infused these violations with a sense of personal
immediacy and urgency. The lack of a cultural and social positioning is evident in the way some U.S. citizens continue to see the
world through the same blinkered filters that inform the dynamics of knowledgeable ignorance. A good
example of the misperception of the U.S. role in the world is how the vast majority of U.S. citizens continue to overestimate the largesse of their government's
foreign aid. Although most citizens believe the U.S. gives close to 10 percent of its GDP for foreign aid, the U.S. actually gives closer to 0.1 percent. Moreover, much
of that aid is military material sent to Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. A fictional example, albeit representative, of such knowledgeable ignorance or imperial
arrogance while abroad is the evangelical Baptist father in Barbara Kingsolver's 1998 novel, The Poisonwood Bible. Nathan Price stubbornly insists that every last bit
of U.S. culture and horticulture can be easily transplanted in the Congo in the midst of the Cold War. With such imperial blinders and blinkered intelligence he
manages to endanger his whole family, resulting in the death of one child and his own demise.
Reject their capitalist pedagogy - reading the 1AC as a chain of disaster events without
structural causes erases the class antagonisms and empowers the corporate elite
through “new” laissez-faire policies
TRC, 12 (the RED COLLECTIVE is an international cadre of revolutionary Marxists committed to class
struggle, “Disaster Theory”, Spring 2012, http://redcritique.org/WinterSpring2012/disastertheory.html )
Bourgeois theory, to use Marx and Engels' words, has always been "instructions in the art of ghost-seeing." It has been, in other words, the
metaphysics of capitalism. It has conjured up concepts, tropes, interpretive strategies and a rhetoric to
go with them, by which capital, often in the rhetoric of an anarcho-left, replaces property with the power (of the State), inverts class
difference into cultural difference, obscures the collective in irruptive singularities, and legitimates its
own class interest as the universal interest. Faced with an intensification of the historical situation—whose stubborn materialist
complexities overflow the interpretive cunning of its textual ethics and threaten to make it irrelevant to capital and deprive it of its institutional rewards—
bourgeois theory is now altering and adapting its strategies in order to translate the class interests of capital
into new topoi ("extinction events," "despoilment," "mutation events") through which it distracts
analytical attention away from material causes and instead focuses on cultural effects. Bourgeois theory
is the assemblage of reading practices that bury causes in effects and construct the social as
singularities of events, as causeless arrivals. In a Nietzschean move, it suspends the very idea of "cause." The "new" topoi of
bourgeois theory hover over the tropics of disaster. In a newly adopted apocalyptic tone, bourgeois
theory deploys disasters—ecological, social, political disasters, which it takes to be allomorphs of
nature—to displace history (the outcome of class struggles). Disasters are seen as aleatory and unrepresentable
"mutations of systems," as they are called by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook in the manifesto of their new book series on disaster theory (Open
Humanities Press, published by the University of Michigan Library) [1], that they title "Critical Climate Change" (a mimetic residue of Cary Wolfe's Critical
Environments). However, its "climate"
has nothing to do with the current "climate," which is an effect of (the exploitation of)
human labor, and what it calls "change" is merely a reprocessing of the exhausted concepts of recent cultural theory by using
marketing techniques that sensationalize the "new"-ness of a present and manufacture the "old"-ness
of the past. In contrast to this troping of the new, change is always the outcome of remaking the social relations of production. "Climate change" is
part of a tradition in bourgeois theory that questions the naturalness of the natural (in order to represent it according to the needs
of capital) while grounding itself as nature, as the uncanny and the unrepresentable with a singularity of its own. For instance, it
"deconstructs" politics (which it represents as naturalized beliefs) displacing it into "the political" (as the "endlessness of politics" which includes all life practices,
the politics of means without end). "The political" is de-naturalized (de-programmed), but like its textuality, it has the organic unplannedness and unrepresentability
of difference—as nature. Nature
is the horizon of concept-tropes in "climate change" because it is assumed to be omni-historical and
cross-class, and thus the condition for an environmentalism without class. The appeal of ecology for bourgeois theory is that
nature involves all the people (regardless of class), and therefore through ecology, the bourgeois theorists can
express concern for the planet and its inhabitants without having to account for the social relations of
production which actually shape the ecological. "Climate change" is the vulgar, apocalyptic, and loudly sentimental version of such other
"terrestrial" theories as "risk society theory." Since hazards, like all environmental events, are represented as affecting all people
alike—the poor and the rich—the division of the social into owners and workers is no longer relevant to the risk society. Of course, this
does not mean that risk theory does not recognize that poor neighborhoods are more likely to suffer from pollution, contaminated water and proximity to the toxic
waste of the affluent. It
knows the politics of hazard, but treats it as a local matter that does not substantively
influence the terrestrial reach of the theory. Having erased class from the social, risk theory invokes a messianic voice
(which is also the tone of "climate change") to claim that old social models of analysis concerned with equality are
outdated, modernist political thought and residues of industrial class society. In the new risk society,
"safety" not "class" is the norm of social justice. The erasure of class, the dismissal of social analysis and a fusional ecstasy over the limits
of political thought are the desires that underlie Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller's other disaster text—Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de
Man, On Benjamin. Here, Paul de Man (whose writings are expressions in literary theory of what Milton Friedman argues for in his economic theories) emerges as
the promised "new" model for understanding the "mutations of systems beyond 20th century." De Man's reading of Benjamin, is the example for "critical climate
change" and for reading the remains of the apocalypse: the "current sense of depletion, decay, mutation and exhaustion." He is the prophet who is "oriented," to
use words from Cohen and Colebrook's manifesto, "toward the epistemo-political mutations that correspond to the temporalities of terrestrial mutations." De Man
on Benjamin, to put it more clearly, is the bearer of "the critical languages and conceptual templates, political premises and definitions of 'life'" that are called for in
the disaster "era of climate change" which "involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models." De Man provides models for grasping
all that "until recently" stood "outside representation." His 20th century writings are, to say it again, the model for the model-less. The simplistic historiography of
"climate change"—its cartoonish views of the 20th and 21st centuries—comes out of the white papers of capital's think tanks and the talking points in board rooms.
After all the climate hype, its 21st century turns out to be a refurbished (return of the) 20st century—"the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." In the affective
cadences of care, ethics and justice but in
a paramilitary language of shock and awe, "climate change" produces an interpretive "climate" in
which cultural meanings—which are effects of the social relations of production—mutate into orphan signifiers that resignify class relations
as links of affinity and invert the economic so it "counts with the aneconomic." The social in disaster theory is the
assemblage of "events" whose understanding, as Tom Cohen announces in the manifesto to his edited collection of essays, Telemorphosis
(the disaster mimesis of teletechnologies), "exceed any political, economic, or conceptual models." The social, in other words,
is made, not by human labor but by disasters—the irruptive chain of singularities of shock and awe.
Telemorphosis is a book of the "impasse of an emerging era of climate change and ecocatastrophic acceleration," the tale, as he writes in his hagiography of de
Man, of a "disappearing future." The companion volume to Cohen's disasterographies (Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, ed. By
Henry Sussman) chases after megadisasters not just in the global but also in the "post-global" scene of "ecological, demographic, socio-political, economic, and
informational disasters." It is the narrative of an "open-ended chain of current insults and injuries to the ecological, socio-political, and cultural surrounds." The two
books are echographies of disaster as "wholly other." The theoretical hollowness of "critical climate change" is on display here in its treatment of disaster as an
"event." In recent bourgeois theory, "event" has become the trope of the post-historical. It "implies surprise, exposure, the unanticipatable," and its "eventfulness
depends" on the "experience of the impossible" which is the "unique, exceptional, and unpredictable arrival of the other." But, and here is the event's political twist,
"there is iterability and return in absolute uniqueness and utter singularity, [this] means that the arrival of the arrivant—or the coming of the inaugural event—can
only be greeted as a return, a coming back, a spectral revenance." "Event," in cultural theory, in other words, is the causeless, reversible history, utter alea; its
arrival is always a re-arrival outside the regulative structure of specific historical social relations. The deploying of "event" as the analytics of "climate change" is a
symptom of the poverty of its historical understanding masquerading as a freedom from connected meanings (history). "Event"
is valorized because
it is the paralogic of singularities—disconnections. Cause is the logic of connections, of effect. "Climate change"
is administrative disconnection. Through the singular, it produces subjectivities out-of-joint for desire shopping in the niche markets of capital. "Climate change" is
the pedagogy of a post-disaster longing. It teaches shoppers the trauma of the rationalities of modernity and re-educates them into spontaneity so that they can
shop (beyond reason) to slow capital's falling rate of profit (as reason). Disaster theory is the cultural arm of what Naomi Klein in her The Shock Doctrine called
"disaster
capitalism." It is an ideological crusade to invert cultural meanings, which are the outcome of specific historical
social relations of productions, into the spectral wavering of mutational signs, in order to make it
impossible to form any ground for class struggles. Klein argues that capitalism uses disasters to heighten
cultural crises and produce a "climate change" within which it pushes through laissez-faire, procorporation policies as "new" ideas. Like shock doctrine, disaster theory uses the "current sense of depletion, decay, mutation and exhaustion"
to orchestrate raids on public meanings. Texts of culture produce public meanings through which social collectivities are formed and general class experiences (class
Cultural texts, in short, have "use-value." Disaster theory
undoes their use-values and reconstitutes them as exchange-value. The public meaning of texts (the collective signified) is
no longer a means for analyzing and understanding the social in order to change it. "Critical climate change," changes
it into spontaneous reflection on the signifier, which is now "value" in itself—a semiotic fetish. The shift from meaning as use-value to meaning as
exchange-value is the shift from the signified to the signifier, from conceptual analysis to the linguistic body, from the social to the natural, from
class to climate. Reading, consequently, is no longer aimed at understanding the outside of the text but is a
purely immanent activity directed toward the anarchograms that put the signified in ruins. Reading is
the disaster of meaning, a semiotic catastrophe, a mutation of the letteral. Disaster theory produces a crisis—"climate change"—in
which meaning as social relations is represented as limited and unable to engage the higher levels of
"extinction events." This is another way of saying that through disaster, cultural signs are re-signified so as to produce
meanings that, instead of unconcealing social relations and laying bare their class logic, become linguistic
disasters to the body politics and put its class interpretations of signs in ruins. The bigger the disaster,
the more radical is the re-signification. The ideal disaster is a mega-disaster with a "post global"
magnitude moving in the rhythm of "terrestrial temporalities." Disaster theory is the trauma of the public signified. It softens it
in itself) is transformed into class consciousness and class solidarity (class for itself).
up for lines of private connotations that ultimately subject class to the "repression of the archive." In "critical climate change" there is, of course, "no political power
without control of the archive." Disaster theory is the control of the archive: the exclusion of class and reassertion, with "climate change," of the rights to private
ownership of public surplus labor. But all
archives are historical—they are the scene of class struggles—their control will
collapse not because they are archiviolithic—the lapse of memory and forgetting—but because of activating the class contradictions
that they attempt to contain.
Prioritize the impacts of capitalism
1. Capitalism makes violence invisible. It is impossible to calculate the deaths that
resulted from capitalism because capitalists use methods like online gambling to
obscure violence. We have an ethical obligation to reject this violence
Daly 4 (Glyn, Senior lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences @ University College
Northampton, “Risking the Impossible,” http://www.lacan.com/zizek-daly.htm)
For Zizek it
is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that
our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today's global capitalism and
its obscene naturalization/anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world.
Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture - with all its pieties concerning "multiculturalist" 6 etiquette - Zizek is arguing for a politics
that might be called "radically incorrect" in the sense that it breaks with these types of positions 7 and
focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today's social reality: the principles of global liberal
capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been bedeviled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards
political morbidity With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and move recently Laclau and Mouffe, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the
transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish.
That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of implicitly
accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian- Lacanian twist, the
few of economism can end up reinforcing a
de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it
fears). This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizek's point is rather that in rejecting
economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the fives and destinies
of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx's central
insight that in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the
politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is
persistently denied by neo-liberals; such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification
of global liberal capitalism is one whose "universalism" fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a
disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world's population. In this way, neo-liberal ideology
attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply
a matter of chance and sound judgement in a neutral marketplace. Capitalism does indeed create a
space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal
and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent
global poverty and degraded "life-chances" cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale
and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the "developing
world"). And Zizek's point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalism's profound capacity to ingest its
own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a
culture of differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sustained by
postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. Against this Zizek argues for a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is
to confront the fact that our forms of social existence are founded on exclusion on a global scale. While
it is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-particular embodiment in
order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizek's universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this
fact or to reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a "glitch" in an otherwise sound matrix.
framing drugs as a national security threat is a false characterization of the issue of
drugs. The security threat is minimal at best. Their securitizing rhetoric has historically
justified the increase military force, policing, surveillance
O’Manique 14 (Sophie O’Manique From Prohibition to Decriminalization: Interrogating the Emerging
International Paradigm Shift in the War on Drugs Discourse, 2014, A thesis submitted to the Faculty of
Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of
Arts in Political Economy Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario)
Emily Crick applies the Copenhagen School’s securitization framework to the global drug prohibition regime in order to explore the
internationalization of what she calls the ‘drugs as threat discourse.’ Crick
posits that the United States has been central to
the internationalization of the ‘drugs as threat discourse,’ given their prominent position in the
formulation of international drug policy. For Crick, the process of securitization began with the
ratification of the 1961 Convention in that, as previously touched on, the language of the Convention
was markedly different from that of previous international agreements. Crick writes, The developing
discourses surrounding drugs consistently rely on the construction of drugs, drug users, drug producers
and drug traffickers as ‘the antagonistic drug other.’…This regime articulated the idea that the fulfillment of the global
‘self’ was being hindered by the ‘antagonistic drug Other’ by creating the idea of ‘mankind’ (Single Convention, 1961) as the global ‘Self’
carrying out the humanitarian endeavor to rid the world of the drugs threat, the hegemonic discourse was strengthened and, therefore, the
institutionalization of policies to negate these threats… became strengthened... Such language has created the space for policies that
themselves threaten human rights and human security in the name of fighting evil. (2012: 408) Crick
understands the fact that
96% of countries are signatories to the 1961 Single Convention as being exemplary of the universality of
this discourse (2012: 408). While upon ratification in 1961, the discourse was characterized by religious undertones, as exemplified by the
use of the word evil, Crick highlights a shift in discourse towards analogies of ‘war,’ beginning with Nixon and consolidated under Reagan (2012:
411). While we
can argue that the ‘drugs as threat’ discourse emerged with the ratification of the 1961
Convention, this discourse became especially prevalent under the Reagan administration, whereby
Reagan would often repeatedly refer to the problem of drug trafficking as a “national security threat”
(Galen Carpenter, 2003: 29). Under the Reagan administration strong links were drawn between drug
trafficking and terrorist activity (Crick, 2012: 411). Terms like “narco-terrorist” and “narco-communist”
became fixtures of the American neo-conservative popular lexicon (Galen Carpenter, 2003: 49). Further,
Reagan, and the leaders that preceded him, often made reference to the threat that drug trafficking posed to democratic governance in the
Latin American region should a given state’s government and institutions be infiltrated by drug traffickers. Of course, there is truth to the
notion that drug cartels in, for example, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico have been and have become very powerful in relation to the state.
The physical security threat posed by drug trafficking to the United States however is minimal at best.
Violence associated with the drug cartels in Northern Mexico has been largely contained within
Mexican borders. Further, one would be hard pressed to find a terrorist attack on US soil emanating
from groups that are funded by Latin American drug money. Nevertheless, under successive US
presidents, drugs became constructed as a threat to national security. The ‘drugs as threat’ discourse is very much
evident in the National Security Decision Directive #221 (NSDD 221), which came into effect in 1986. The document makes direct links between
drug trafficking and terrorist groups, discusses the “inevitable rise in violence” associated with drug trafficking and the threat it poses to “the
integrity” of democratic governance (1986: 2). About the directive, Galen Carpenter writes “although portions of the directive remain classified,
it is clear that the military and intelligence portions of the document were deemed most important” (2003: 29). This
is evident on the
last page of the directive, where actions that are outlined to be taken by the president include,
military forces in supporting counter-narcotics efforts
security issue in discussions with other nations. Greater participation by the U.S. intelligence
community in supporting efforts to counter drug trafficking (1986: 6) Galen Carpenter argues that the issuance of the
NSDD 221 provided supporters of the War on Drugs with new ground to stand on in their calls for increased military action in the face of the
drug threat (2003: 31). Many have drawn links between the language used in the NSDD 221 and the subsequent 1988 UN Convention Against
the Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. Crick highlights that the notion propagated in the NSDD 221, that drug
trafficking constitutes an existential threat to the state, was articulated at the international level with the ratification of the 1988 UN
Convention, representing the internationalization of this discourse (2012: 411). The link between drugs and security is made quite clear in the
preamble to the 1988 convention: … Recognizing the links between illicit traffic and other related organized criminal activities which undermine
the legitimate economies and threaten the stability, security and sovereignty of states, Aware that illicit traffic generates large financial profits
and wealth enabling transnational criminal organizations to penetrate, contaminate and corrupt the structures of government, legitimate
commercial and financial business and society at all its levels… (1988: 1) The similarity in language between the NSDD 221 and the 1988
Convention, are exemplary of the process outlined by liberal theorists by which domestic norms evolve into international norms, often through
channels like the UN. By securitizing the issue of drug trafficking, the issue was moved outside the realm of domestic politics and as a 44
consequence, beyond the grasp of voters (Crick, 2012: 413). Further, it placed the issue higher on both domestic and international agendas.
Finally, by constructing the threat posed by drugs in such dramatic terms, it allowed for responses to a
“humanitarian issue,” that in fact worked to violate facets of international human rights law and
fostered violence in the name of fighting this ‘evil’ (Crick, 2012: 408). Painting the problem in such terms
strengthened the hegemonic power of the discourse.
THE AFFIRMATIVE’S DEPICTION OF MEXICO AS A PLACE OF NARCO-CHAOS AND
UNREST CONTRIBUTES TO THE DOMINANT NARRATIVES OF THE DRUG WAR,
LEGITIMATING IMPERIALIST INTERVENTION AND OBSCURING THAT THE ROOT CAUSE
OF ALL THEIR IMPACTS IS US POLICY
CARLOS 14 (Alfredo, Q.A. Shaw McKean Jr. Fellow @ Rutgers U School of Management and
Labor Relations and Doctoral Candidate in Political Science @ U California – Irvine, Mexico “Under
Siege”: Drug Cartels or U.S. Imperialism?, Latin American Perspectives, Issue 195, Vol. 41 No. 2,
March 2014, p. 43-59)
The dominant
discourse about Mexico in the United States has a long history and has affected the way
Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Chicanos are viewed and treated. While much has changed since the 1800s, the current
discourse about Mexico serves the same basic purpose. The United States legitimizes its expansionist
economic foreign policy in terms of the burden of civilizing, uplifting, and promoting development in less
developed countries, beginning with its neighbor to the south (Gonzalez, 2004: 185). It employs a foreign
policy that advances its imperialist interests. U.S. government and media agencies generate a
representation of Mexico that has provided avenues for very specific courses of action. Promoting a
discourse of a “chaotic,” “unruly,” “failing state” has provided justification for direct U.S. military
intervention, especially along the border, now potentially with armed drones (O’Reilly, 2013), and legitimized the penetration
of U.S. capital interests in Mexico at the expense of Mexico’s own economy and, more important, its
people. Even at its most basic level, we can only call this imperialism. While Mexico has an ineffective justice system, government corruption,
and crime and drug-related violence, these are problems that most modern nationstates also face. In fact, the United States is itself heavily
implicated in the drug trade, holding by far the largest stocks of cocaine in the world and being Mexico’s primary market (INCB, 2008). It is also
the largest supplier of arms not just to Mexico but to all of Latin America (Chomsky, 2012). Latin American countries are working together
toward the decriminalization of drugs, which has produced very promising results in Portugal, while, in stark contrast, ”the coercive procedures
of the 40-year U.S. drug war have had virtually no effect . . . while creating havoc through the continent” (Chomsky, 2012). But the conversation
doesn’t revolve around what the United States can do to clean up its own act; it
is about “othering” Mexico. The United
States has had a tremendous impact on Mexico’s internal dynamics regarding migration,
unemployment, poverty, and crime. Its economic imperialism has contributed to the weakness of Mexico’s economy and as a
result its internal politics. NAFTA has stunted Mexican economic growth and led to the mass displacement of
workers, forcing them into job markets that they would not have considered had they had access to jobs
with dignity. For many it has led to migration to the United States, while for others it has meant lives of crime and violence. But
no one discusses this, and it gets no media coverage because the focus is not on the failed U.S.-imposed neoliberal
economy but on drug-related violence. This is done purposefully, since the story does specific work and is
perpetuated because it benefits U.S. economic interests and works as a mechanism of justification for
continued U.S. imperialism. For the most part, the concerns that the vast majority of people experience the vast majority of the time
on a daily basis are not about these drug-violence outrages. Instead they are economic—how they will pay their bills and clothe, shelter, and
feed their families. Even in the conversation about immigration reform, no one discusses the fundamental right that people have to live and
grow in the place they consider home. No one discusses that people choose to migrate only when they have no other options. U.S. imperialism
has led to people’s having no other option.
Representing Mexico as a “failing state” allows the United States to
evade responsibility for creating many of these problems in Mexico while also providing a powerful story
to convince American citizens and Mexican politicians that U.S. economic intervention in Mexico is
necessary. The irony of it all is that NAFTA continues to be justified through a narrative of a chaotic and violent
Mexico needing economic programs of development to solve its social problems, when in fact it is the
penetration of U.S. capital that has caused many of those problems. The meta-narrative helps to perpetuate an
asymmetrical power relationship between Mexico and the United States. The dominant discourse provides the veil for this “imperial
encounter” to become a mission of salvation rather than of economic conquest. In the end, the way Mexico is represented in the United States
has little to do with its actual internal political or social dynamics, instead it is a means to expand and maintain U.S. imperialism in Mexico.
Over the past 150 years, one thing that has stayed the same is Mexico’s position as an economic colony
of the United States, a place to go for cheap labor, raw materials, and cheap manufactures for
consumption at home. Focusing on drugs and violence obscures this. While Mexico does have serious
issues of drug-related crime, this crime is not the most severe of Mexico’s problems. Those problems are
poverty and unemployment and the country’s inability, for the first time in its history, to feed its own
people. Mexico is indeed “under siege”—not by drug lords but by U.S. economic interests— and this has
had disastrous social costs for the Mexican people. This is not, however, the discourse we engage in.
That discourse is purposefully absent
Societies change—feudalism, tribal communities, and Soviet communism all evolved
and died away by consciousness shift—the alt is a catalyst for a consciousness shift
that rejects capitalism. And history goes neg.
Kovel 2 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, The Enemy of Nature, p. 115-16)
For example, it is a commonly held opinion that capitalism is an innate and therefore inevitable outcome
for the human species. If this is the case, then the necessary path of human evolution travels from the Olduvai Gorge to the New York Stock Exchange, and to think of a
world beyond capital is mere baying at the moon. It only takes a brief reflection to demolish the received understanding. Capital is certainly a potentiality for
human nature, but, despite all the efforts of ideologues to argue for its natural inevitability, no more
than this. For if capital were natural, why has it only occupied the last 500 years of a record that goes
back for hundreds of thousands? More to the point, why did it have to be imposed through violence
wherever it set down its rule? And most importantly, why does it have to be continually maintained
through violence, and continuously re-imposed on each generation through an enormous apparatus of
indoctrination? Why not just let children be the way they want to be and trust that they will turn into capitalists and workers for capitalists — the way we let baby chicks be,
knowing that they will reliably grow into chickens if provided with food, water and shelter? Those who believe that capital is innate should also be willing to do without police, or the industries
of culture, and if they are not, then their arguments are hypocritical. But this only sharpens the questions of what capital is, why the path to it was chosen, and why people would submit to an
economy and think so much of wealth in the first place? These are highly practical concerns. It is widely recognized, for example, that habits of consumption in the industrial societies will have
to be drastically altered if a sustainable world is to be achieved. This means, however that the very pattern of human needs will have to be changed, which means in turn that the basic way in
which we inhabit nature will have to be changed. We know that capital forcibly indoctrinates people to resist these changes, but only a poor and superficial analysis would stop here and say
nothing further about how this works and how it came about. Capital’s efficient causation of the ecological crisis establishes it as the enemy of nature. But the roots of the enmity still await
exploration.
1NR
---Independently outweighs the affirmative. Challenging the structural basis for
exclusion within the term “marijuana” undermines the logic that makes the worst
forms of violence possible.
Miller 2012 Hugh T., Governing Narratives: Symbolic Politics and Policy Change, pg. 2832
Curiously, the
term marijuana is not well known before the 1930s. The physician Horatio Wood
(1869) described his experiments with cannabis grown in Lexington, Kentucky, without using the word
marijuana. He concluded, "There can be no doubt that under certain circumstances cannabis indica supplies a medical mood, which no
other drug will so exactly meet" (231). The New York Times (1926b) named the drug "cigarettes made of the leaves of the cannabis indica,"
"canjac," and "hashish," even though at another point in the story hashish was identified as an incorrect reference. The headline contained the
words marijuana, hemp, and the weed. "The weed" is "really Indian hemp." the article later noted; or maybe "ganja." But it also might be
"cannabis indica or sativa." The
association of marijuana with Mexicans had strategically expanded by
1935, with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (LBN) claiming that "fifty percent of the violent crimes
in districts occupied by Mexicans, Spaniards, Latin-Americans, Creeks, or Negroes may be
traced to this evil" (Bonnie and Whitcbrcad 1974.100). Musto (2002) tracked down LBN reports on marijuana from 1931, 1933, and
1937, all titled "Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs." The first report, from 1931, merely contrasts Indian
hemp and Chinese hemp and when it does mention "marihuana," the word is placed within
quotation marks and linked to the Mexican population in the Southwest (423). The 1933 report
uses the terms Indian hemp, cannabis sativa, and marijuana interchangeably and notes that Mexican
laborers clandestinely plant it among beet plants (424). The 1937 report is dramatically different. It tells of local eradication
programs; it uses the term marihuana exclusively and it names villainous minority ethnic status . For
example: "Pete Lopez, alias Mexican Pete, was growing and selling marijuana. . . . [Officers purchased seven ounces from him and from a
colored woman, Lucy Vaughn" (427). In another passage. "Wong Kop cafe operator and prominent member of Memphis's Chinese colony" was
sentenced (429). Marijuana
was first criminalized in the same year as the 1937 report. The Spanishlanguage term enabled easy ideographic association between Mexican immigrants and the
recreational drug marijuana. The PBN under Harry Anslinger, as well as Hearst newspaper reporters known for their "yellow
journalism" style of sensationalism, constructed marijuana users as rapists and killers, as well as Mexican immigrants, immediately before and
after the enactment of the Marihuana Tax Act of 19 37. In an in- terview, Anslinger told David F. Musto that his appointment as commissioner
of FBN was helped by the crucial support of William Randolph Hearst (Musto 1999, 209). Hearst newspapers were not the only source for
screechy marijuana headlines, however. One New York Times (1926a) headline read: "Kills Six in a Hospital: Mexican, Crazed by Marijuana. Runs
Amuck with Butcher Knife." The ideograph)' of drug use became conspicuously connocarivc when cocaine psychosis was linked to black males.
Media images of bullet-resisianc, cocaine- crazed black men possessed of extraordinary marksman skills accompanied the first regulation of
cocaine. In the public debate leading up to the passage of the Harrison Act in 1914. which regulated and taxed narcotics, an M.O. by the name
of Edward Huntington Williams wrote a piece for the New York Times StmtLty Mtigiizineabout a new southern menace causing murder and
insanity: Negro co- caine fiends. The problem, according to Williams (1914.12), was that Georgia. Norih Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee,
and West Virginia "passed laws in- tended to keep whiskey and the negro separated. These laws do not. and were not intended to, prevent the
white man or the well-to-do negro getting his ac- customed beverages through legitimate channels." The laws also did away with saloons, "but
a large proportion or the intelligent whites were ready to make this sacrifice if by doing so they could eliminate the drunken negro" (12). This
astonishing story purports to explain why these southern states have incarcer- ated so many more insane drug users—the consequent fact
seems to be that, after the new laws were passed, lower-class blacks had access to cocaine, but not whiskey, thus creating a criminal race
menace fueled by cocaine, in Williams's view. Cocaine fiends arc particularly dangerous because, according to Williams, normal bullets don't
knock them down as they would a sane man. The chief of police of Asheville, North Carolina, had to increase the caliber of his weapon after the
"negro drug fiend" he was trying to kill did not even stagger when hit by a normal bullet. Police officers all over the south "have made a similar
ex- change for guns of greater shocking power for the express purpose of combat- ing the 'fiend' when he runs amuck." On the other hand, the
story continues.cocaine use near Asheville increased the accuracy of (he "cocaine nigger [who] dropped five men dead in their rracks, using
only one cartridge for each" (Wil- liams 1914.11). Chinese immigrants were the target group of the West Coast's early opium laws, as reported
in appendix I. In 1875, San Francisco outlawed the smoking of opium—the first time drugs had been banned in the United States. The association of opium smoking with Chinese immigration "was one of the earliest ex- amples of a powerful theme in the American perception of drugs,
that is. link- age between a drug and a reared or rejected group within our society" (Musto 2002,184-185). The specific content of the
marginalized target group has varied over the years, but TraditionalValues.org (2009) carries on the tradition in an article titled "Barney Frank
Wants America to Be Woodstock Nation."Accord- ing to the article, "Massachusetts gay activist Barney Frank (D) not only wants to force all
Americans to affirm the lifestyles of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, drag queens, and transsexuals, but he also wants us to get high on marijuana,
too." I Lush c.vv.m p.'.u v is .111 opportunity to express disdain for deviance; it connotes a willingness to confront the difficult-to-control
elements of society who have already demonstrated, by nonconventional drug choices, a willingness to eschew mainstream orthodoxy. An
efficient mechanism for pressuring recalcitrant indi- viduals, drug policy also functions to stabilize the status quo by exorcising from the political
community counterculture threats. As drug policy became a war on drugs, the culture war against "the other" intensified. The
causal
associations of marijuana with rape, murder, and suicide were not credible in the long run.
Demonization of drug users was perhaps an effective strategy in articulating the dominant drug
policy narrative, nonetheless. Endemic to the narrative was the theme of otherization, wherein
drug users were framed as different, and not just in terms of their choice of recreational drug .
They were presented as if from a different nationality or subculture. Their values were not wholesome, patriotic American values. Such
ethnic associations were effective in connoting other. Opium connoted Chinese immigrants; cocaine connoted
murderous black men; marijuana connoted evil Mexicans and, later, the war-protesting Woodstock nation. The connotations often elicited
emotions of disgust or fear among the general population. At its nastiest, this
nativist narrative generates and reinforces
racial and ethnic stereotypes and warrants extreme incarceration. At its best, the nativist narrative functions to
assist culture in determining who is us and who is them. What do we stand for? What should our practices consist of? What are our common
values? Social cohesion depends, to some extent, on a common answer to these sorts of questions. But the nativist
narrative also
carries with it the possibility of an unjust stigmatizing. It may signal societal irresolution that needs serious
attention, as when a normalized mainstream privileges itself against deviant others. The
exteriorization that results from these practices has consequences that go deep into cultural
identities. Exclusions, such as occurred during the witch craze (Oplinger 1990), the Palmer Raids, and
the Holocaust, function to reinforce the identity of the normal people . I.aclau (lOOf. 70) offers the
general template for this thesis: "So ... the only possibility or having a true outside would be that the outside is not simply one more
neutral element but an excluded one, something that the totality expels from itself in order to constitute itself (to give a political example: it is
through the demonization of a section of the population that a society reaches a sense of its own cohesion)." When drug policy functions as an
otherizing technique, the politics can be seen as a clash between status quo normalcy seeking to preserve its orthodoxy and a not-yet
mainstream cultural tendency that poses a heretical challenge. Orthodoxy's fulsome whole IS affirmed when the excluded elements function to
reinforce the identity of the whole population. For example, illegal immigrants, through their exclusion, provide the whole of the native
population its identity. But if the exclusion harms the fulsome whole of society, which now might have to reconcile itself to its own bigotry and
prejudice, the exclusion functions quite differently. The fulsome whole is undermined when groups that should be part of "us" are turned away
as "them"—are otherivzed. Otherization undermines the fulsome whole when subparts of the population are wrongly exteriorized. For those
opposed to locking up recreational drug users, their exclusion signifies a compelling and shared absence, a wound to the fulsome whole. Othermotion would in this sense function as a signifier of loss and ache, directing attention toward the immanent injustice of exclusion through
incarceration and other forms of sanction and humiliation. Meanwhile, drug users and illegal immigrants (to take but two groups who, at this
writing, arc stigmatized) arc dealt with according to the rules or dispatch— prison and/or deportation. There is no harmonizing their struggle
with other struggles of ostracized people, as happened in the civil rights movement. A sympathetic moment came in 2009 when the sentencing
disparities between crack cocaine and powder cocaine were acknowledged as racist in the United States. Mostly, however, for both drug users
and illegal immigrants, there is no discursive traction for joining the struggle of "the people," no access to the fulsome whole-little opportunity
to have their exclusion politicized. Instead, exteriorizing keeps illegal immigrants and drug users alike out of decent society's self- definition, as
exemplars of riaf-tis. Drug
policy discourse constructed target populations to fit the narratives, but
rationality, and especially science, were not integral to the discourse. In the drug policy debate, scientific findings were
typically subordinated to an ob-vious policy agenda. Regarding die official annual Statistical report. National Drug Control Strategy, published by
the U.S. Office or National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), Robinson and Schcrlcn (2007, xiv-xv) surmise that cither: "(1) ONDCP knowingly uses
statistics to mislead about the drug war: or (2) the authors of its annual Strategy need some basic instruction about the nature of basic statistics
(including how to use them, how not to use them, and how to visually depict them in graphs and figures)." Official research can be problem-
atic in other ways as well. The study group Richard Nixon commissioned re- ported back to him that marijuana smoking was not nearly as
harmful as had been previously believed, nor did it cause violent or aggressive behavior (Scha- feret al. 1972). Nixon disdained the report.
Instead of using the information in the report to shape public policy- he launched a war on drugs upon its release (Markham 1972). Public
policy design produces symbolic meaning; Schneider and Ingram's social constructivist approach
shows how perceptual categories inform the policy process, and also how the policy process in
turn produces its own cultural effects. "Policy designs thus structure the subsequent opportunities
for participation, allocate material resources, and send messages that shape the political
orientations and participation patterns of the target group as well as other members of the
public. In sum, these policy designs usually reproduce the prevailing institutional culture, power relationships, and social constructions, but
at times depart from this partem and introduce change" (Ingram, Schneider, and dcLcon 2007, 97).
---The terms are mutually exclusive --- Including the term marijuana ensures it's
dominance due to its favored positioning in the national narrative. Chorus' of
“Marijuana” will overwhelm “Cannabis” in the institutional order.
Klein & Rottner 2013 Kenji, School of Economics and Business Administration @ Saint
Mary’s College of California, Renee, Stern School of Business @ New York University,
Weeding Out the Competition: How Alternatives are Eliminated During
Institutionalization, The Inaugural Paul R. Lawrence Conference: Connecting Rigor and
Relevance in Institutional Analysis, http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2013paulrlawrence/Documents/WeedingOut_KleinRottner_HBSconf.pdf
What the institutionalization of cannabis prohibition suggests is that new institutional orders do not simply become taken-for-granted because
repetition and routinization of actions consistent with that order make the order appear natural, but also because barriers to seeing it that way
have been removed, intentionally or not. Actions
aimed at practical outcomes have cognitive consequences.
As the designation and understanding of the cannabis plant as “marijuana” came to dominate,
earlier understandings of the plant were forgotten. Under the new order of cannabis
prohibition, older understandings grew less relevant and were erased by those hoping to
stabilize and defend this new order, who actively worked to eliminate threatening traces of the past order. The words
cannabis and hemp still existed, but the communities for which these words had specific meanings
were essentially gone, their practices, markets, and technologies eliminated by an emerging
institutional order in which all forms of the cannabis plant were treated as the dangerous drug
marijuana (Bonnie & Whitebread, 1974).
Legalizing marihuana by rescheduling, regulating and taxing solves.
CMA 11 (California Medical Association, Cannabis and the Regulatory Void: Background Paper and Recommendations, 2011,
http://www.cmanet.org/files/pdf/news/cma-cannabis-tac-white-paper-101411.pdf, da 7-31-14) PC
Reschedule cannabis: The federal Controlled Substances Act classifies cannabis as a ¶ Schedule I
controlled substance, therefore preventing prescriptions from being written ¶ for the substance and
subjecting it to production quotas by the Drug Enforcement¶ Agency (DEA). These production quotas make it extremely
difficult to acquire cannabis ¶ for clinical research purposes, thus contributing to the lack of data currently
available ¶ about cannabis. As of 2010, CMA supports the rescheduling of cannabis to facilitate ¶ further clinical research (HOD 102a10). This clinical research should be targeted at ¶ determining the safety and efficacy of cannabis and its constituent active chemicals.¶ Three
options exist for rescheduling cannabis and supporting further research:¶ 1. Move cannabis to an appropriate
scientific schedule within the current DEA ¶ scheduling structure;¶ 2. Place cannabis on its own schedule
with parameters unique from other ¶ enumerated schedules;¶ 3. Support the development of local
cannabis regulations as an interim ¶ alternative pending federal action.¶ The route to challenging cannabis‟s status as
a Schedule I controlled substance is by ¶ filing a rule-making petition with the DEA Administrator. The Administrator has the ¶ authority to
reschedule substances by considering the “scientific evidence of [the ¶ substance‟s] pharmacological effect, if known” and “the state of current
scientific ¶ knowledge regarding the [substance].”33¶ Because the DEA has historically denied petitions to reschedule cannabis, CMA should¶
encourage the formation of a national coalition between state medical societies, medical ¶ specialty societies, and other relevant groups for the
purpose of building support for ¶ cannabis rescheduling. The national movement whereby 16 states and the District of ¶ Columbia have
decriminalized the use of medical cannabis should serve as a model for ¶ building this coalition. With strength in numbers and the power to
place the necessary ¶ political pressure on the DEA, this coalition should consider jointly petitioning the DEA ¶ to reschedule cannabis.¶
Regulate medical cannabis: Rescheduling medical cannabis to allow for further clinical ¶ research is the
acceptable avenue for providing an opportunity to formulate a workable, ¶ evidence-based federal and
state regulatory structure that protects public health and ¶ safety.
By allowing adequate research to determine the utility, safety and efficacy of ¶ cannabis as well as the
necessary controls for the substance‟s production, distribution, ¶ taxation, etc., cannabis regulation is able
to mirror that of other prescribed medications. ¶ The appropriate regulatory bodies can use funds collected through a
cannabis tax to ¶ enforce violation of the implemented standards. The regulation of cannabis should ¶ address several broad areas, including:¶
Research: As with any drug or pharmaceutical product, the properties of ¶ cannabis should be thoroughly studied through clinical research to
determine ¶ utility, safety, and efficacy for potential medicinal uses. The outcome of this ¶ ¶ 33 21 U.S.C. §811(c)(2), (3), 1994.annabis and the
Regulatory Void¶ 13¶ clinical research should be used to determine an appropriate regulatory ¶ framework for cannabis control.¶