R8 NEG V. GEORGE MASON KL
2NR
UNIQUENESS/PC KEY
End of article agrees that having an actual deal changes the calcualus
Crowley, Politico Foreign Affairs Correspondent, and Everett, Politico
Congressional Reporter, 11-11, 2014,
(Michael and Burgess, "Republicans seek to thwart deal," Politico, PAS)
www.politico.com/story/2014/11/how-republicans-plan-to-thwart-obamas-iran-talks112805.html 11-14-14
[AFF CARD ENDS]
The friction also spiked after The New York Times reported in mid-October that Obama officials
were designing an Iran deal that would rely heavily on executive authority to suspend many of
the U.S.-imposed sanctions that have stunted Iran’s economy. Administration officials say the
president has that power, although only Congress can permanently lift sanctions it has passed.
A State Department spokeswoman called the premise of the Times story “wrong.” But a
Democratic staffer who has been briefed by senior officials called the idea “very real.” And senior
Republicans already concerned that Obama would cut a soft deal with Iran are determined not
to be sidelined.
A senior administration official argued that Secretary of State John Kerry would not cut a
deal with Iran that couldn’t be defended against critics, noting that any comprehensive
agreement would also require the approval of America’s negotiating partners.
As the administration has in the past, the official also again raised the idea that
opponents of a deal with Iran were in effect choosing a path of dangerous confrontation.
“You’re going to vote no — what’s that a vote for? So you think we should go to
war?”
[ARTICLE ENDS]
Obama can fight off a veto override of new Iran sanctions now – but it’s going to be
a major political fight
Khan, 11/5/14 (Taimur, The National, “New US Congress a risk to Iran nuclear deal,”
http://www.thenational.ae/world/iran/new-us-congress-a-risk-to-iran-nuclear-deal)
With Republicans now in full control of Congress for the first time in Barack Obama’s presidency, a final deal
with Iran over its nuclear programme could be at risk.
There is a renewed threat of additional sanctions on Tehran and a risk that Congress might refuse to lift current sanctions if an
accord is struck that politicians see as a bad deal or if the talks are extended beyond the November 24 deadline.
“What we ought to do, if we can’t get an acceptable agreement with the Iranians, is tighten the sanctions,” the leader of Senate
Republicans, Mitch McConnell, said on Sunday. “In fact, we had a bill in the Senate to do that which the current majority leader
wouldn’t allow a vote on. ... That’s the kind of thing a new Senate would be voting on.”
On Tuesday, Republicans seized the Senate in midterm elections, giving the party a majority in both chambers of Congress for the
first time in eight years.
The current Democratic Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, blocked a bipartisan bill earlier this year that would
have imposed even more stringent sanctions on Iran than are currently in effect.
Now under Republican control, the Senate is likely to revive the bill. Even if it is vetoed by the US president,
the newly emboldened Congress could signal to Iran that Mr Obama cannot uphold the US side of any agreement.
“The main concern is that with a Republican Senate the Iranians will worry about the ability of the US government to implement the
long-term deal in terms of ultimately lifting sanctions,” said Barbara Slavin, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank in
Washington who closely follows the negotiations.
If a deal is reached, Mr Obama will likely bypass Congress on a vote to lift the sanctions by using executive power to temporarily
suspend a majority of the crippling sanctions. The sanctions currently prohibit foreign companies from doing business with Iran and
deny access to the global financial system.
Administration officials have said that a permanent lifting of sanctions requiring congressional authority would only be necessary
after the IAEA is able to verify that Tehran is abiding by the terms of a deal over an extended period of time.
The rationale officials have given is that the threat of reimposing the current sanctions would maintain leverage on Iran to honour
the accord.
But a Republican-majority Senate is likely to see such a move by the Obama administration as intended to sideline Congress and
may demand a vote on the temporary suspension of sanctions, or even propose new sanctions.
“The question is to what extent Congress will try to screw up the implementation of a nuclear deal if there is one,” Ms Slavin said.
Members of Congress from both parties have said they fear the White House is seeking a bad deal with Iran, one that would allow it
to enrich uranium and remain on the threshold of being able to build a nuclear bomb. They see even stronger sanctions as the best
way to constrain Iran.
The Republican senator Mark Kirk, who co-authored the recent sanctions legislation that was blocked, said last month that
“Congress will not permit the president to unilaterally unravel Iran sanctions”.
But some analysts say they expect Republicans in the Senate, once they are no longer in the opposition, to act more cautiously.
“When they’re in charge maybe some realise this is serious business and they would look more carefully at it,” said George
Perkovich, an expert on nuclear strategy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They wouldn’t necessarily support a
deal, but you can protest without sabotaging.”
Mr Obama would be able to veto any new sanctions. The Republican majority is also slim,
making a vote to override Mr Obama’s veto unlikely, Mr Perkovich said. Many Democrats, however, have
criticised the White House’s handling of negotiations and could potentially vote with Republicans.
He said Republican congressional staffers have told him that they do not expect any new sanctions
authorised by Congress to be implemented because of the veto power, suggesting the outcome would
likely be a protracted political battle for Mr Obama, not the scuttling of a final deal.
“They’re doing politics,” Mr Perkovich added.
Iran knows they can’t get full relief now—not a dealbreaker as long as we prevent
new sanctions
Drezner, 10/21/14 --professor of international politics at Tufts University (Daniel W., “How a
polarized America negotiates with the world,”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/10/21/how-a-polarized-americanegotiates-with-the-world/, JMP)
As the Washington Times’s Victor Morton noted in his cut-and-paste-job report on Sanger’s
story, this is “another example of the White House bypassing Congress to avoid a vote it would
lose.” And needless to say, such a gambit is agitating members of Congress, colorful
conservative pundits, and the state of Israel.
The short-term question — as with the climate change negotiations — is whether the “bypass
Congress” strategy will affect Iran’s willingness to negotiate. A White House that can’t get
Congress to permanently remove sanctions would not appear to have much in the way of
negotiating credibility. And as I wrote last week, you can’t just yadda yadda yadda your way out
of the domestic politics of these negotiations.
On the other hand, as Sanger notes, it’s not like the Iranian negotiators have that much
freedom to maneuver either:
[F]or a deal to be struck with Iran, Mr. Obama must navigate not one negotiation, but three.
The first is between Mr. Obama’s negotiators and the team led by Mohammad Javad Zarif, the
savvy Iranian foreign minister. The second is between Mr. Zarif and forces in Tehran that see no
advantage in striking a deal, led by many in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and many of
the mullahs. The critical player in that effort is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has reissued
specific benchmarks for an accord, including Iran’s eventual expansion of its uranium
enrichment program by nearly tenfold. And the third is between Mr. Obama and Congress.
There are two other reasons to be moderately more optimistic about the “bypass Congress”
option on Iran than climate change. The first is that Iran appears to recognize that it won’t
be able to get all of the sanctions lifted in this round of negotiations. This means that
there’s less bypassing of Congress anyway.
More importantly, it seems increasingly clear that the negotiation process itself is less than half
the game when it comes to this particular interaction. Any deal between Iran and the United
States will also require a long, drawn-out process of trust-building on both sides. Even if it
appears that Iran is complying with the interim nuclear deal, members of Congress will need to
be persuaded that this represents a genuine shift in Iranian policy. So it’s premature for
Congress to permanently revoke sanctions anyway. My hunch is that it would take a less
hawkish Prime Minister of Israel years of observed and verified Iranian compliance before
Congress could be persuaded to authorize a permanent lifting of sanctions.
So this might be a case where political polarization does not get in the way of international
negotiations.
That said, if we step back a bit, this is not an encouraging trend for the United States. One of the
strengths of the U.S. system of government is that it can offer credible commitments to the rest
of the world. Requiring congressional ratification of treaties and other significant international
agreements is hard political work — but once ratified, these agreements become the law of the
land and difficult to reverse.
As the White House finds ways to cut deals without Congress, it lowers the transaction costs of
negotiation in the present. But the credibility of the executive branch’s commitments also get
lowered. That’s not a good thing for the future — but short of single-party control of all branches
of government, it appears to be the new normal in international negotiations.
AT: IMMIGRATION THUMPER
Doesn’t answer the thesis of our disad --immigration move would upset the most
conservative Republicans who are already aggressively supporting sanctions. Our
disad is about Obama using PC to sway more moderate congress people. That’s
Beauchamp.
Obama likely to delay immigration
Sink, 11/14/14 (Justin, “Defiant Obama says immigration action ‘going to happen’”
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/224157-obama-defiant-says-immigration-actiongoing-to-happen, JMP)
An administration official traveling with the president in Burma told CBS News Obama had
received frequent updates on the range of options under consideration, although the official
cautioned that no final decisions had been made.
"This isn't like the Academy Awards, where the president gets an envelope and doesn't know
what's inside," the official said. "He's been involved throughout."
The official said the White House knew Republicans would be unhappy with the action when it
was announced but was gauging when would be best to unveil the plans.
There is concern within the administration about rolling out the action before Congress agrees
to a spending bill. Lawmakers have until Dec. 11 to strike an agreement to prevent a government
shutdown, and Democratic leaders have encouraged the White House to wait until after then to
make their announcement.
Obama is pricing the immigration move into his political calculations
Sink, 11/13/14 (Justin, “Obama going big on immigration?”
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/224045-obama-nears-crucial-immigrationdecision, JMP)
While Obama could make his decision as soon as next week, the White House is also
considering how the announcement could affect work in the lame-duck session of
Congress.
GOP lawmakers have indicated they might look to link legislation funding the government to
blocking any executive action the president might take, and the announcement could cause headaches in the
confirmation proceedings for Loretta Lynch, Obama’s nominee to become the next attorney general.
“Congress can stop it and must stop it,” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said in an interview Wednesday with Fox News, calling the
reported proposals “really a threat to the constitutional order.”
The White House did say the president would not necessarily wait until the conclusion of the lame-duck session before he announces
his decision.
But Earnest said that lawmakers interested in preventing the president from acting unilaterally should take up reform efforts
themselves.
“If the House does pass the bipartisan Senate bill that's already passed, the president would happily sign that into law,” Earnest said.
“And if he has already made a decision and moved forward on his own executive actions, he would happily retract those executive
actions so that we could implement the bipartisan Senate bill.”
Earlier this week, the White House downplayed concerns, expressed by congressional leaders, that
executive action would prevent cooperation on other legislative issues.
Obama won’t actually act on immigration
Yglesias, 11/5/14 – staff for Vox (Matthew, “The midterms may have killed bold executive
action on immigration” Vox, http://www.vox.com/2014/10/8/6925967/obama-immigrationexecutive-action/in/6914992)
Throughout the fall, President Obama has said that after the midterm election he would use his
executive authority to create a fairly broad program to immunize many otherwise law-abiding
undocumented immigrants from deportation. On Election Day itself, spokesman Josh Earnest
reiterated that this is happening between now and the New Year.
I'm just not sure I believe him.
Not that I doubt the president's sincerity. I haven't gazed into his soul on the subject, but the
best read I have on White House officials is that they genuinely believe that they are going to do
this. Chief of Staff Denis McDonough has explicitly reassured Congressional Hispanic Caucus
members that there will be no flip-flop, and other administration officials have said the same to
a variety of relevant players on and off Capitol Hill. I just think they may be mistaken about their
own likely behavior.
Given the GOP takeover of the Senate, I just think it's likely that Democrats will survey the postelection landscape and have a change of heart. That probably won't mean a complete betrayal of
the promise. But instead of the kind of broad action advocates are hoping for, it's likely that we'll
end up with something cosmetic like yet another reboot of the secure communities initiative or
another effort to better explain and clarify its existing memos about priorities.
To see why, just think about the speech that the president would have given had he announced
this initiative back in June. He would have said that immigration reform was a pressing
problem. He would have praised the Senate for passing a bipartisan reform bill with an
overwhelming majority behind it. He would have noted that the House of Representatives had
refused to bring any kind of immigration legislation to the floor. He would have argued that the
public was behind him, and made the humanitarian case for action, and flagged the business
community's desire for reform. He would have bemoaned Republican obstructionism. And he
would have plowed ahead with a controversial expansion of executive authority.
His argument, in other words, would have been that House Republicans were obstructing
something the public, the business community, and even a bipartisan majority of the Senate
wanted. But can you really cry obstruction right after losing an election? Republicans are now
able to claim not just that Obama was stretching his authority in a novel way, but doing so
specifically to overturn an adverse result in the midterms.
"When I take executive action, I want to make sure that it's sustainable," Obama told NBC's
Chuck Todd in September, explaining his deliberate pace. Does action really look more
sustainable today than it did back then?
Even with control of the Senate, the GOP can't stop Obama from following through on his
promise. But as Brian Beutler has written, with the Senate in Republican hands come the New
Year, they'll be positioned "to place 'executive amnesty' at the center of proximate fights over
funding the government and increasing the debt limit."
The basic dynamic from the summertime where Democratic Senators from states with low
Latino populations aren't eager to have a huge throwdown over the issue remains in place. Can
Obama really count on Democratic Senators from West Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, North
Dakota, and Montana to stick with him on the issue? And if they start to break, won't Angus
King, Debbie Stabenow, and Sherrod Brown also have some doubts?
Of course the administration won't say that broad executive relief is dead, just as they didn't say
it the last time they delayed it. They'll simply say what they said the last two times, namely that
the time isn't right. The problem is that there's never a perfect time to take a controversial
unilateral action on immigration. So far, with every passing month, the circumstances have
gotten less ideal, not more. A sweeping electoral win in 2016 — a by no means unlikely outcome
— would change that. But nothing else will.
PC NOW
Obama still has PC on Iran and he will win a sanctions fight
Shalev, 11/5/14 (Chemi, Haaretz, “Obama has been humiliated, but he is no lame duck”
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.624784)
Nonetheless, while there is no denying that Obama
has been humiliated in the eyes of Americans and of the world, it
would be premature, perhaps even foolhardy, to diagnose him, as many Israelis undoubtedly will, as a lame
duck of no further consequence. The American constitution bestows significant powers on the president, even one who has
suffered such a stinging electoral loss, especially in the conduct of foreign affairs.
In fact, it is an open question whether the bellicose and contrarian Congress that some decision makers in Israel are dreaming of
now would have more or less influence on the president’s moves as opposed to one that would seek constructive ways of
collaborating with him.
In any case, the impact of the new Republican-controlled Congress, whose leaders are naturally inclined to
support Israel and to admire Benjamin Netanyahu, would
be most dramatically felt if and when the
administration reaches a nuclear agreement with Iran. Such a development would most likely
lead to a sharp clash over the president’s authority, or lack thereof, to gradually suspend sanctions
against Tehran without the Senate’s approval.
If the White House decided to tackle Congress head on an issue on which, Tuesday’s outcome
notwithstanding, it enjoys significant public support, the result could be an ugly political
and constitutional confrontation, with Israel stuck in the middle. If anyone thinks this would be “good for the Jews,” he's
got another thing coming.
Congress would have even less sway over the administration’s positions vis a vis the Palestinians, though it could huff and puff and
persuade some Israelis that it might blow the house down. Though it seems that Israeli officials and politicians have been
prematurely pressing the panic buttons in recent days with nightmare scenarios of an administration abandonment of Israel, it is
true that Obama could decide to do so with relative impunity, especially if he loses any hope of collaborating with the new Congress.
Finally, it is always worthwhile to remember that there is an ebb and flow in both domestic and international affairs that is often
unpredictable. It is hard to tell what lessons Obama will draw from these difficult days, whether he will withdraw from his political
rivals and from public opinion, as he has before, or rather reengage with both in order to change the debilitating dynamics of the
past few years and start anew.
Congress, for its part, may soon find out that it was not elected in order to prolong the paralysis that has plagued Washington but to
try and find ways of breaking it and of getting the capital to start working again. Needless clashes with the president,
therefore, may
not stay on the Congressional cards for very long.
FBI TAKEOUT
An immense body of case law proves this applies to marijuana
Berg, 14 [ Drug-Free Workplaces In The Era Of Medical And/or Legal Marijuana Use By
Alexander P. Berg on August 4, 2014 in Employment Discrimination, Legislative Developments,
Medical/Legal Marijuana, http://kollmanlaw.com/employment-discrimination/drug-freeworkplaces-era-medical-andor-legal-marijuana-use/]
What can an employer do under these circumstances? This post is designed to provide a basic snapshot of the current state of the law, and the prominent issues that employers face.
below, employers
As detailed
are generally blanketed by the protections of the atwill employment doctrine,
as the vast majority of state marijuana laws alter only the criminal sanctions facing those who legitimately use and possess
medical marijuana. Marijuana Legislation
In recent years, there has been a considerable trend in favor of the
legalization of marijuana. Twenty-three states (plus the District of Columbia) now permit medical marijuana, and Washington and Colorado additionally allow the recreational use of marijuana. In
addition, sixteen other states have marijuana legislation pending. Within the federal system, drugs subject to regulation are grouped into one of five lists (labeled as Schedules I through V) under the Controlled
Substances Act (CSA), 21 U.S.C. §§ 801 et seq. The Attorney General retains authority over whether, and where, to list a particular substance. Currently, both marijuana and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the
primary mind-altering ingredient found naturally in marijuana, are classified as Schedule I drugs. As the Supreme Court has explained, “Schedule I drugs are categorized as such because of their high potential for
abuse, lack of any acceptable medical use, and absence of any accepted safety for use in medically supervised treatment.” Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1, 14 (2005). There has been a recent movement to consider
downgrading marijuana from Schedule I and, at the behest of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Food and Drug Administration is presently conducting an analysis on the subject. There is not,
however, any indication that marijuana or THC will be removed from the CSA schedules altogether. Therefore, marijuana is and will in all likelihood remain illegal under federal law, independent of state laws to
the contrary. Maryland and the District of Columbia, among others, have recently passed legislation that decriminalizes—but does not legalize—marijuana. Significantly, the efforts in the District of Columbia affect
only the local enforcement, without reaching federal law in any way. In these jurisdictions, a “qualifying patient” who has been diagnosed with certain medical conditions may legally receive marijuana from a
licensed dispensary for medical use in his or her home. The use and possession of marijuana in public remains illegal, although a person who can prove that he is a “qualifying patient” faces only civil penalties (i.e.,
There are well-documented workplace safety concerns related to
marijuana. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), employees who abuse drugs are more likely than those who do not to “change jobs frequently; be late to or absent from work; be
fines) rather than incarceration. Drug Use And The Workplace
less productive employees; be involved in a workplace accident; [and] file a workers’ compensation claim.” Marijuana, specifically, may cause safety concerns such as “include impairment of short-term memory;
altered judgment and decisionmaking; and mood effects, including severe anxiety (paranoia) or even psychosis (loss of touch with reality), especially following high-dose exposures.” NIDA, DrugFacts: Is
Marijuana Medicine?. “Marijuana also significantly reduces motor coordination and slows reaction time, which makes it very dangerous to use before driving a car.” Id. Studies have also shown that roughly 9% of
Employers may protect workplace safety by
prohibiting drug use in the workplace and require that employees “not be…engaging in the
illegal use of drugs in the workplace.” 42 U.S.C. §§ 12114(c)(1), (2); see 29 C.F.R. § 1630.3(c). In
marijuana users will become addicted, and THC can remain in a user’s body for up to three months.
addition, according to NIDA, successful drug-free workplace programs may lead to “improvements in morale and productivity, and decreases in absenteeism, accidents, downtime, turnover, and theft.” Medical
Marijuana Use Is Not Covered By The ADA Although the Americans with Disabilities Act
(ADA) generally requires employers to reasonably accommodate an employee whose medical
conditions require prescription drugs to take them while at work (if prescribed to do so), at least one federal court has
concluded that “medical marijuana use is not protected by the ADA.” An employee who is
“currently engaging in the illegal use of drugs” is not considered a “qualified individual with a
disability” under the ADA. 42 U.S.C. § 12114(a); see 29 C.F.R. § 1630.3(a). The ADA and its implementing regulations define “illegal use of drugs” as the use of drugs the possession
or distribution of which is unlawful under the [CSA]. Such term does not include the use of a drug taken under the supervision of a licensed health care professional, or other uses authorized by the [CSA] or other
provisions of Federal law. 42 U.S.C. § 12111(6); see 29 C.F.R. § 1630.3(a)(2). Because neither the CSA nor other federal law authorize it, on-site medical marijuana use is not covered under the “supervision of a
There is no requirement that employers accommodate off-site medical
marijuana use, either. Merely being licensed to use medical marijuana is an insufficient basis for employers to take disciplinary action, because the medication relates to the employee’s
disability (e.g. cancer, osteoarthritis, or severe pain). Where the employee tests positive for marijuana, however, even if
licensed to use it for medical purposes, employers have discretion to take such action as a
neutral enforcement of policies against employee misconduct. Employee Discipline Relating To Medical Marijuana State “compassionate
licensed health care professional” exception.
use” laws that prohibit certain criminal penalties and adverse government licensing decisions for medical marijuana do not affect the presumption of at-will employment or otherwise create a new right to sue for
Courts interpreting these state
laws in the context of employees who challenge employers’ decisions not to hire, to discipline, or
to terminate them have consistently ruled in the employer’s favor. These include courts
in Colorado (Curry v. MillerCoors, Inc., 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 118730 (D. Colo. Aug. 21, 2013); Coats v. Dish Network, LLC, 303 P.3d 147 (Colo. App. 2013)) and Washington (Roe
v. TeleTech Customer Care Mgmt., 216 P. 3d 1055 (Wash. 2009)), as well as courts in California (Ross v. Ragingwire Telecommuns., Inc., 174 P.3d 200 (Cal. 2008)); Maine
(Savage v. Maine Pretrial Servs., 58 A.3d 1138 (Me. 2013)); Michigan (Casias v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 764 F. Supp. 2d 914 (W.D. Mich. 2011), aff’d, 695 F.3d 428 (6th Cir. 2012)); Montana
(Johnson v. Columbia Falls Aluminum Co., LLC, 350 Mont. 562, 2009 Mont. LEXIS 120, at *5 (Mont. Mar. 31, 2009)); and Oregon (Emerald Steel Fabricators, Inc. v. Bureau of Labor & Indus., 348
employees who face adverse employment actions stemming from their medical marijuana use (such as failing an employer’s drug test).
Ore. 159, 169 n.7 (2010)). An employee who uses medical marijuana will also likely not be able to recover employment benefits. For example, an employee who brought in marijuana-laced candy (colloquially
known as an “edible”) into her workplace was denied unemployment benefits on the ground that she committed gross misconduct by violating the company’s stated drug-free policy. Canning v. Emp. Sec’y Dep’t.,
2014 Wash. App. LEXIS 877 (Wash. Ct. App. Apr. 14, 2014). But see Vialpando v. Ben’s Auto. Servs., 2014 N.M. App. LEXIS 50 (N.M. Ct. App. May 19, 2014) (requiring employer to provide workers’ compensation
benefits for employee who was certified for state’s medical marijuana program). Conclusion An employer wishing to ensure that medical marijuana does not negatively affect the health and safety of its workplace
should maintain and update its drug-free policies accordingly. Specifically, employers should insert language clarifying that, unlike other prescription medications, there is a zero-tolerance policy toward medical
If the employer chooses to utilize drug testing of its
employees, any such testing policy should similarly make clear that positive tests for marijuana
may result in discipline, up to and including termination. An employee who complies with state law in using and possessing medical marijuana
cannot be disciplined for that fact alone; if, however, he or she violates neutral company policy by using in the workplace or
marijuana, in order to alleviate confusion and provide clear advance notice to employees.
failing a drug test, the employer may legitimately take action without facing the risk
of future liability. Please let us know if you have questions about such policies, relevant state laws or other questions on this unique and evolving issue.
1NC
POLITICS
Obama’s PC checks moves to sanction Iran—deal coming now but obstruction
causes war
Slavin, 11/6/14 --senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center and a correspondent
for Al-Monitor.com (Barbara, “Column: Will US Election Results Undermine Iran Nuclear
Talks?” http://www.voanews.com/content/will-us-election-results-undermine-iran-nucleartalks/2510432.html, JMP)
Foreign policy – apart from scaremongering about Ebola and terrorism – was not a major issue in U.S. midterm elections. But the
imminent Republican
takeover of the Senate could impact whether the international community and
Iran agree to a landmark deal in talks that are nearing a November 24 deadline.
Iran is being asked to put long-term limitations on its nuclear activities in return for relief of nuclear-related sanctions. While
President Barack Obama can provide that relief on a short-term basis through the use of executive orders
and presidential waivers, ultimately Congress would be asked to repeal some sanctions and to
allow a key piece of legislation – the Iran Sanctions Act – to expire at the end of 2016.
At this juncture, it isn’t clear what priority incoming majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), will give to the Iran issue. Two years
ago, he expressed support for authorizing the use of force against Iran if it developed nuclear weapons.
Other senators, especially Mark Kirk (R-Ill) and Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), have sponsored
legislation that would impose new sanctions on Iran if no nuclear deal is reached by an unspecified date. On Sunday, McConnell was
quoted as saying that "what we ought to do, if we can’t get an acceptable agreement with the Iranians, is tighten the sanctions.”
In the past, Democratic leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), and the Democratic chairmen of other key
committees, were able to fend off new Iran sanctions bills that would have disrupted nuclear
negotiations. Menendez, in the end, followed party discipline but may feel freer to oppose the
White House more aggressively with the Republicans in charge.
Iran monitors election
Iranian officials, who follow U.S. politics much more closely than most Americans follow
Iranian internal deliberations, have probably already factored in a GOP victory, which had
been widely predicted.
An Iranian negotiator, who communicated with VOA on condition that he not be named, said that in the event of a deal, “we expect
the government of the U.S. to deliver, and we do not interfere in the internal politics of the U.S.” However, the negotiator added that
“personally, as an observer of U.S. politics, I have my concerns about the ability of the U.S. team to negotiate seriously now. I am not
as concerned about implementation once an agreement is reached.”
Iranians will be monitoring Congressional statements carefully in the weeks ahead
for clues about how a Republican-led Senate would react to a possible deal. Much will depend on the
nature of any agreement reached in the talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus
Germany (P5+1).
To keep Congress on board, the Obama administration has been consulting extensively
with key members. It is arguing that a deal that closes off all likely pathways to a nuclear weapon
is better than an alternative that permits Iran to resume enriching uranium to levels close to
weapons grade – a scenario that could lead to pre-emptive U.S. military action in a region
already in flames.
Many members of Congress – indeed administration officials, too -- would prefer a deal that eliminates Iran’s enrichment program
altogether and forces it to dismantle centrifuges and other infrastructure. Iran rejects this but apparently is willing to accept
a combination of restrictions that would reduce the output of its operating centrifuges and send
any stockpile of low-enriched uranium produced to Russia for conversion into fuel for civilian
reactors.
Negotiators optimistic
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, President Obama said that the
negotiations so far had been “constructive”
and that the P5+1 had presented a framework that would allow the Iranians “to meet their
peaceful energy needs.” Obama said he wasn’t sure “whether they can manage to say yes,” noting that Iran – like the U.S. –
has its own politics, a reference to hard-line opposition in Tehran to nuclear concessions and improved relations with the U.S.
A high-level U.S. team, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, will be meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and European
Union negotiator Catherine Ashton in Oman this weekend to try to try to finalize key elements of an agreement.
Optimism about the talks had risen in recent days, with officials on all sides reporting progress
on some of the most contentious issues. Some U.S. experts, such as Robert Einhorn, a former negotiator who is now
at the Brookings Institution, have said that they doubt an agreement will be completed by November 24 but suggest that it is
possible that Iran and the P5+1 can “reach agreement on the key parameters of a deal and … take several more months to flesh out
the parameters.”
With the Republicans due to take control of the Senate in January, negotiators
may be further incentivized to conclude an agreement before the end of the year. At
the same time, the Iranians are likely to stiffen demands for a rapid removal of U.N. sanctions, which provided the basis for many
other countries’ economic penalties, and for other U.S. measures permitting Iran to return to the international financial system.
Administration officials have stressed that they have sufficient authority to proceed and that
Congress will not get an up-or-down vote on any deal. Obama also retains veto power and the
Republicans did not win enough seats to override a veto of any new sanctions.
On Wednesday, he said that if “we do have a deal that I have confidence will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon… I think
that we’ll be able to make a strong argument to Congress that this is the best way for us to avoid a nuclear Iran, that it will be more
effective than any other alternatives we might take, including military action.”
With polls showing that the American electorate is unhappy with both Obama and the Congress,
each side has pledged to try to work with the other where possible to achieve consensus on
issues of importance to the nation.
A long-term deal that keeps Iran from developing nuclear weapons would be profoundly in U.S.
national interests. Hopefully, McConnell will focus his obstructive energies on other areas and allow the president to carry out
his constitutional responsibility to chart U.S. foreign policy.
Plan wrecks PC
Daw, 12 --- J.D. from Harvard Law (12/15/2012, Jeremy, “Marijuana Not A Priority For
Obama,” http://cannabisnowmagazine.com/current-events/politics/marijuana-not-a-priorityfor-obama)
Some hope for even more radical change. With the most recent polls suggesting that a majority
of Americans favor reform of pot laws, why not seize the moment and end federal prohibition
entirely? Obama could order the DEA to reschedule cannabis out of Schedule I to a less
restrictive classification, which would effectively end the conflict with the federal government in
medical marijuana states. Such a move could harness political will for change and put the
president on the winning side of public opinion.
But such moves would have serious downsides. The politics of pot, rife with cultural and
political divisions since the tumultuous 1960s, remain bitterly divisive; any politician who
proposes liberalization of cannabis laws risks becoming saddled with labels borne out of a long
history of ingroup/outgroup dynamics and which can rapidly drain a leader’s store of
political capital. Given Obama’s susceptibility to an even older tradition of racial stereotyping
which associates cannabis use with African Americans, any kind of green light to relaxed
marijuana laws will cost the president dearly.
It’s top priority but they trade off with PC necessary to prevent override and
sustain talks, causing prolif and war
Beauchamp, 11/6/14 --B.A.s in Philosophy and Political Science from Brown University and
an M.Sc in International Relations from the London School of Economics, former editor of TP
Ideas and a reporter for ThinkProgress.org. He previously contributed to Andrew Sullivan’s The
Dish at Newsweek/Daily Beast, and has also written for Foreign Policy and Tablet magazines,
now writes for Vox (Zack, “How the new GOP majority could destroy Obama's nuclear deal with
Iran,” http://www.vox.com/2014/11/6/7164283/iran-nuclear-deal-congress, JMP)
There is one foreign policy issue on which the GOP's takeover of the Senate could have huge ramifications, and beyond just the US:
Republicans are likely to try to torpedo President Obama's ongoing efforts to reach a nuclear deal
with Iran. And they just might pull it off.
November 24 is the latest deadline for a final agreement between the United States and Iran over the latter's nuclear program.
That'll likely be extended, but it's a reminder that the negotiations could soon come to a head. Throughout his presidency,
Obama has prioritized these negotiations; he likely doesn't want to leave office without having made a deal.
But if Congress doesn't like the deal, or just wants to see Obama lose, it has the power to torpedo
it by imposing new sanctions on Iran. Previously, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used procedural powers to stop
this from happening and save the nuclear talks. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may not be so kind, and he may
have the votes to destroy an Iran deal. If he tries, we could see one of the most important
legislative fights of Obama's presidency.
Why Congress can bully Obama on Iran sanctions
At their most basic level, the international negotiations over Iran's nuclear program (they include several other nations, but the US is
the biggest player) are a tit-for-tat deal. If Iran agrees to place a series of verifiable limits on its nuclear development, then the
United States and the world will relax their painful economic and diplomatic sanctions on Tehran.
"The regime of economic sanctions against Iran is arguably the most complex the United States and the international community
have ever imposed on a rogue state," the Congressional Research Service's Dianne Rennack writes. To underscore the point,
Rennack's four-page report is accompanied by a list of every US sanction on Iran that goes on for 23 full pages.
The US's sanctions are a joint Congressional-executive production. Congress puts strict limits on Iran's ability to export oil and do
business with American companies, but it gives the president the power to waive sanctions if he thinks it's in the American national
interest. "In the collection of laws that are the statutory basis for the U.S. economic sanctions regime on Iran," Rennack writes, "the
President retains, in varying degrees, the authority to tighten and relax restrictions."
The key point here is that Congress gave Obama that power — which means they can take it
back. "You could see a bill in place that makes it harder for the administration to suspend
sanctions," Ken Sofer, the Associate Director for National Security and International Policy at
the Center for American Progress (where I worked for a little under two years, though not with Sofer directly), says.
"You could also see a bill that says the president can't agree to a deal unless it includes the following things or [a bill] forcing a
congressional vote on any deal."
Imposing new sanctions on Iran wouldn't just stifle Obama's ability to remove existing
sanctions, it would undermine Obama's authority to negotiate with Iran at all, sending the
message to Tehran that Obama is not worth dealing with because he can't control his own
foreign policy.
So if Obama wants to make a deal with Iran, he needs Congress to play ball. But it's not
clear that Mitch McConnell's Senate wants to.
Congress could easily use its authority to kill an Iran deal
To understand why the new Senate is such a big deal for congressional action on sanctions, we have to jump back a year.
In November 2013, the Obama administration struck an interim deal with Iran called the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA). As part of the
JPOA, the US agreed to limited, temporary sanctions relief in exchange for Iran limiting nuclear program components like uranium
production.
Congressional Republicans, by and large, hate the JPOA deal. Arguing that the deal didn't place sufficiently serious limits on Iran's
nuclear growth, the House passed new sanctions on Iran in December. (There is also a line of argument, though often less explicit,
that the Iranian government cannot be trusted with any deal at all, and that US policy should focus on coercing Iran into submission
or unseating the Iranian government entirely.) Senate Republicans, joined by more hawkish Democrats, had the votes to pass a
similar bill. But in February, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid killed new Iran sanctions, using the Majority Leader's power to
block consideration of the sanctions legislation to prevent a vote.
McConnell blasted Reid's move. "There is no excuse for muzzling the Congress on an issue of this importance to our own national
security," he said. So now that McConnell holds the majority leader's gavel, it will remove that procedural roadblock that stood
between Obama and new Iran sanctions.
To be clear, it's far from guaranteed that Obama will be able to reach a deal with Iran at all; negotiations could fall apart long before
they reach the point of congressional involvement. But if he does reach a deal, and Congress doesn't like the terms, then they'll be
able to kill it by passing new sanctions legislation, or preventing Obama from temporarily waiving the ones on the books.
And make no mistake — imposing new sanctions or limiting Obama's authority to waive the
current ones would kill any deal. If Iran can't expect Obama to follow through on his promises to
relax sanctions, it has zero incentive to limit its nuclear program. "If Congress adopts sanctions," Iranian
Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told Time last December, "the entire deal is dead."
Moreover, it could fracture the international movement
to sanction Iran. The United
States is far from Iran's biggest trading partner, so it depends on international cooperation in
order to ensure the sanctions bite. If it looks like the US won't abide by the terms of a deal, the
broad-based international sanctions regime could collapse. Europe, particularly, might decide
that going along with the sanctions is no longer worthwhile.
"Our ability to coerce Iran is largely based on whether or not the international community thinks that we are the ones that are being
constructive and [Iranians] are the ones that being obstructive," Sofer says. "If they don't believe that, then the international
sanctions regime falls apart."
This could be one of the biggest fights of Obama's last term
It's true that Obama could veto any Congressional efforts to blow up an Iran deal with sanctions.
But a two-thirds vote could override any veto — and, according to Sofer, an override is entirely within
the realm of possibility.
"There are plenty of Democrats that will probably side with Republicans if they try to push a harder line on Iran," Sofer says. For a
variety of reasons, including deep skepticism of Iran's intentions and strong Democratic support for Israel, whose government
opposes the negotiations, Congressional
Democrats are not as open to making a deal with Iran as
Obama is. Many will likely defect to the GOP side out of principle.
The real fight, Sofer says, will be among the Democrats — those who are willing to take the
administration's side in theory, but don't necessarily think a deal with Iran is legislative priority
number one, and maybe don't want to open themselves up to the political risk. These Democrats
"can make it harder: you can filibuster, if you're Obama you can veto — you can make it impossible for a
full bill to be passed out of Congress on Iran," Sofer says. But it'd be a really tough battle, one that would
consume a lot of energy and lobbying effort that Democrats might prefer to spend
pushing on other issues.
"I'm not really sure they're going to be willing to take on a fight about an Iran sanctions bill," Sofer concludes. "I'm not really sure
that the Democrats who support [a deal] are really fully behind it enough that they'll be willing to give up leverage on, you know,
unemployment insurance or immigration status — these bigger issues for most Democrats."
So if the new Republican Senate prioritizes destroying an Iran deal, Obama will have to fight
very hard to keep it — without necessarily being able to count on his own party for support.
And the stakes are enormous: if Iran's nuclear program isn't stopped peacefully, then
the most likely outcomes are either Iran going nuclear, or war with Iran.
The administration believes a deal with Iran is their only way to avoid this horrible choice.
That's why it's been one of the administration's top priorities since day one. It's also why this could
become one of the biggest legislative fights of Obama's last two years.
Negotiation collapse causes nuclear war
Philip Stevens 13, associate editor and chief political commentator for the Financial Times,
Nov 14 2013, “The four big truths that are shaping the Iran talks,”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af170df6-4d1c-11e3-bf32-00144feabdc0.html
The who-said-what game about last weekend’s talks in Geneva has become a distraction. The six-power
negotiations with
Tehran to curb Iran’s nuclear programme may yet succeed or fail. But wrangling between the US and France
on the terms of an acceptable deal should not allow the trees to obscure the forest. The organising facts shaping the negotiations
have not changed.¶ The first of these is that Tehran’s acquisition of a bomb would be more than dangerous for the
Middle East and for wider international
security. It would most likely set off a nuclear arms race that
would see Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt signing up to the nuclear club. The nuclear nonproliferation treaty would be shattered. A future regional conflict could draw Israel into
launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike. This is not a region obviously susceptible to cold
war disciplines of deterrence.¶ The second ineluctable reality is that Iran has mastered the
nuclear cycle. How far it is from building a bomb remains a subject of debate. Different intelligence agencies give different
answers. These depend in part on what the spooks actually know and in part on what their political masters want others to hear. The
progress of an Iranian warhead programme is one of the known unknowns that have often wreaked havoc in this part of the world. ¶
Israel points to an imminent threat. European agencies are more relaxed, suggesting Tehran is still two years or so away from a
weapon. Western diplomats broadly agree that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not taken a definitive decision to step over the line. What
Iran has been seeking is what diplomats call a breakout capability – the capacity to dash to a bomb before the international
community could effectively mobilise against it.¶ The third fact – and this one is hard for many to swallow – is that neither a
negotiated settlement nor the air strikes long favoured by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, can offer the rest of the
world a watertight insurance policy.¶ It should be possible to construct a deal that acts as a plausible
restraint – and extends the timeframe for any breakout – but no amount of restrictions or
intrusive monitoring can offer a certain guarantee against Tehran’s future intentions.¶ By the same
token, bombing Iran’s nuclear sites could certainly delay the programme, perhaps for a couple of years. But,
assuming that even the hawkish Mr Netanyahu is not proposing permanent war against Iran, air strikes would not
end it.¶ You cannot bomb knowledge and technical expertise. To try would be to empower those
in Tehran who say the regime will be safe only when, like North Korea, it has a weapon. So when Barack
Obama says the US will never allow Iran to get the bomb he is indulging in, albeit understandable, wishful thinking.¶ The best
the international community can hope for is that, in return for a relaxation of sanctions, Iran
will make a judgment that it is better off sticking with a threshold capability. To put this another way, if
Tehran does step back from the nuclear brink it will be because of its own calculation of the
balance of advantage.¶ The fourth element in this dynamic is that Iran now has a leadership that, faced
with the severe and growing pain inflicted by sanctions, is prepared to talk. There is nothing to say that
Hassan Rouhani, the president, is any less hard-headed than previous Iranian leaders, but he does seem ready to weigh the options.
TREATIES
Obama’s “wait and see” approach lays groundwork for treaty reform, but
legalizing now wrecks the system
Bennett and Walsh, 10/14 - *Wells C. Bennett is a Fellow in National Security Law at the
Brookings Institution and Managing Editor of Lawfare AND **John Walsh is a Senior Associate
at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), focused on drug policy reforms that protect
human rights, public health and public safety. His work has contributed to the recent opening of
the hemispheric debate on drug policy (“Marijuana Legalization is an Opportunity to Modernize
International Drug Treaties” October,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2014/10/15-marijuanalegalization-modernize-drug-treaties-bennett-walsh/cepmmjlegalizationv4.pdf)
United States’ enforcement discretion under the drug treaties might be drawn precisely, we
cannot be an across-the-board, categorical affair, when the issue is federal tolerance of
regulated, comprehensive marijuana markets established by state law. And that’s just it: if more states
take a legalize-and-regulate approach, a federal-level decision not to prosecute similarly situated persons
could start to look like blanket non-enforcement of implementing legislation—something that, in
our view, the drug treaties do not contemplate.
Wherever the limits of the
know that such discretion by definition
The prospect of future marijuana regulation raises a second, more fundamental reason to rethink things: the nation’s experiment with legalizing and
regulating marijuana might actually go well. Suppose Colorado and Washington both operate their regulated marijuana markets smartly, without
offending federal enforcement prerogatives, and—most importantly— without compromising public health and safety. We don’t think this is a fanciful
or improbable scenario. Our Brookings colleague John Hudak was the first to examine Colorado’s implementation effort up close. And he tentatively
concluded that so far, the state’s initial rollout has been imperfect but quite effective.39 If this path continues or even bends towards improvement,
then other states may soon elect to follow Washington and Colorado’s lead. And that, in turn, stands to exacerbate an already visible tension between
obligations imposed by the drug treaties, and the federal government’s enforcement posture towards legalizing states.
To put the point another way, if
Colorado and Washington augur a real trend, then the costs to the United
States of treaty breach could be swiftly ratcheted upwards. The INCB could raise the volume
and severity of its criticisms; we wouldn’t be surprised to hear protests from more prohibitionist
countries about the United States’ treaty compliance, or to see other nations start pushing the limits of other
no less important treaties to which the United States is party. When some or all of this happens, the United States
won’t get very far in emphasizing the CSA’s theoretical application nationwide, subject to enforcement priorities enunciated in the Cole Memo; or in
appealing to larger objectives woven throughout the drug treaties, and their conferral of policy flexibility. What if twenty or thirty states successfully
establish, and police, regulated markets for marijuana production and sale?
Having that scenario in mind, we lastly emphasize the United States’ unique relationship both to the drug treaties and to the wider international
community. The
United States was a—if not the—key protagonist in developing the 1961, 1971, and 1988
Conventions, as well as the 1972 protocol amending the 1961 Convention; the United States has for decades been widely
and correctly viewed as the treaties’ chief champion and defender.40 That fact feeds back onto this one: The
United States also occupies a singular place in international relations. It can summon powers no other
nation can summon, but it also confronts risks no other nation confronts.41 For that oft-cited reason, the
United States has a profound interest in ensuring that counterparties perform their treaty
obligations. Reciprocity is always a big deal for any nation that trades promises with other
ones—but it is perhaps uniquely so for ours.
These factors mean that caution is in order regarding international law and the viability of the Cole Memo in the longer run. If the United States can
“flexibly interpret” the drug treaties with regard to marijuana, then Mexico is entitled to no less—though it might view the limits of its flexibility
differently, or apply it to another controlled substance within the treaties’ purview. Or imagine that a foreign nation’s controversial policy butts up
against seemingly contrary language, in a treaty covering an extremely important global issue other than drug control. Likely the United States will
have a tougher time objecting when, rather than conceding the problem or changing course, that nation’s foreign ministry invokes the need to
“tolera[te] different national approaches;” or recasts the relevant treaty as a “living document” subject to periodic, unilateral reinterpretation.
This is not to suggest that compliance challenges or complexity should always trigger a call to reshape the United States’ treaty commitments. Practice
and prudence both support a more nuanced, case-specific approach than that. Sometimes the United States has sought to make significant adjustments
to multilateral frameworks or even quit them; other times, the United States has weighed costs and benefits, and pressed on within the treaty despite
consequential breaches—in situations much more obvious (and less open to reasonable contention) than that regarding marijuana.
But in those instances, the United States’ compliance failures often have come despite some hard striving by the federal government. The State
Department, to name one well known example, tries mightily to make state law enforcement officers aware of the United States’ obligations under the
Vienna Convention on Consular Relations—notwithstanding some repeated and well-known violations of that treaty by the likes of Texas, Virginia, and
Arizona.42 In this case, though, no external factors—federalism, say, or a contrary ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court—have frustrated a strong push
by the executive branch to vindicate the drug treaties; the decision not to assert federal supremacy was in fact taken unilaterally by the Obama
administration. Given the circumstances, we believe it was the correct decision. The
Cole Memo nevertheless establishes at least
some friction with a treaty obligation, by holding back on CSA enforcement, so as to
accommodate state-level regulation of marijuana. Again, the reasons why are entirely understandable: given the incipient
nature of the changes to which the Cole Memo was reacting, the United States essentially opted to take a wait-and-see
approach as to how problematic the treaty questions might become.
So far as we are aware, this strategy is without precedent in U.S. treaty practice. The United States
should approach it carefully and deliberatively, given the country’s outsized interest in reciprocal
performance of treaty obligations. That depends in part on being able to credibly call out other
nations for treaty failings—something which in turn depends on strictly performing our
own obligations, or at least making a good show of trying hard to do so before coming up short.
Again, we think the United States can sustain the status quo in the short term. But today’s
model likely won’t hold up year in and year out, for the reasons we describe above. The government therefore ought
to start thinking about some of the fundamental treaty reforms that its public statements seemingly have
downplayed. Better to have weighed such options early on, should existing policy’s downsides start to overtake its upsides—as we predict they could.
Sequencing key—legalizing before gradual amendment cracks the global treaty
regime
Bennett and Walsh, 10/14 - *Wells C. Bennett is a Fellow in National Security Law at the
Brookings Institution and Managing Editor of Lawfare AND **John Walsh is a Senior Associate
at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), focused on drug policy reforms that protect
human rights, public health and public safety. His work has contributed to the recent opening of
the hemispheric debate on drug policy (“Marijuana Legalization is an Opportunity to Modernize
International Drug Treaties” October,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2014/10/15-marijuanalegalization-modernize-drug-treaties-bennett-walsh/cepmmjlegalizationv4.pdf)
VI. A Stress Test We Can Pass
In making the case for the United States to proactively open the door to future change in the drug treaties, we have emphasized, so
far, the negative value of avoiding conflict and instability. We would be remiss not to end on an equally important positive note. The
political changes and incentives in play in the marijuana-policy debate open a real opportunity to
demonstrate and improve the adaptability of the international legal system—a system on which the
United States relies more and more.
No treaty can survive the collapse of a political consensus supporting it. And no
treaty system can endure if it cannot
cope with changing political conditions. Sustainability in international law depends not only on
commitment but also on resilience and adaptability.
At this writing, one or two more U.S. states may be about to adopt a version of marijuana legalization. If
states continue to legalize, and if the federal government continues to allow their reforms to
proceed, the short run for treaty reform may come quite soon. This is why we refer to the
challenge of marijuana legalization as a “stress test” for the adaptability of international
law. Should legalization prove politically popular or socially successful, it will spread to more states and nations; should it
spread, then one way or another both domestic and international politics will find ways to
accommodate it—either by adapting formal legal commitments or by cutting new, informal
channels around those commitments. The latter would weaken international law; the
former would strengthen it.
Marijuana-related reform to the drug treaties offers, in several respects, good odds of achieving constructive adaptation. Reform
need not entail any wholesale reconsideration of international drug policy, nor need any brand new treaty be negotiated. Modest
incrementalism can do the job. In the United States, moreover, a growing political constituency, embracing members of both
political parties, favors reform, so the issue is less partisan than many. Persuading the Senate to make more room for U.S.
experimentation by revising an existing treaty is a lighter lift than persuading it to undertake entirely new treaty obligations. And, if
the United States plays its cards right (with, as we have suggested, suitably narrow and hedged legal
changes), we believe a consensus abroad for modest change could become within reach. In any case,
broaching the subject relatively early on—by ruling treaty change in, now, as a possibility, instead
of ruling it out as a non-starter—may itself open the door to a new international conversation about
modernizing and adapting drug treaties. In other words, marijuana offers as good a chance as we are
likely to see of setting a precedent for creative, consensual, and gradual adaptation of a wellestablished international treaty structure.
The international legal system, however suspicious of it many Americans may be, has always mattered and has never
mattered more than now. For example, the campaign against ISIS and the Ukraine crisis
underscore all too dramatically the continuing importance of multilateral security commitments.
If anything, international law’s remit is growing as environmental, social, economic, and security
problems transcend national borders. From global warming to sanctions on Iran and
Russia to the campaign against terrorism and military intervention in a host of theaters,
the United States and its allies increasingly rely on international agreements and commitments to
legitimize and amplify joint action against common threats.
Of course, marijuana and the international narcotics treaties are only one small piece of that
puzzle. But they are a highly visible piece, and they offer a real opportunity to demonstrate
adaptation through international legal channels, rather than around them. Laying
groundwork for manageably incremental changes—by beginning conversations with treaty
partners and other constituencies about where flexibility might lie—would reaffirm American
commitment to constructive adaptation, and to building consensus. Conversely,
pushing the outer boundaries of the drug treaties’ flexibility could weaken the international
order and damage American interests.
To put the point another way: Marijuana policy reform is a stress test that the United States and the international order should, and
realistically can, pass.
Key to i-law, multilat, and prevents great power war
Harald Müller 2K, Director of the Peace Research Institute-Frankfurt and Professor of
International Relations at Goethe University, Summer 2000, “Compliance Politics: A Critical
Analysis of Multilateral Arms Control Treaty Enforcement,” The Nonproliferation Review,
http://cns.miis.edu/npr/pdfs/72muell.pdf
A third very crucial condition is a sufficient commonality of interest and commitment among the
major powers with regard to both the treaty in general and the compliance issue in question in particular. The great
powers act on the basis of a multiplicity of interests, commitments, and orientations. If the major powers' broader political,
economic, and security concerns turn out to be contradictory or even antagonistic, a non-multilateral compliance action by one or
more of them becomes more likely. Such action outside the multilateral context will affect the great power
relationship and, in turn, the prospects for continued institutionalized cooperation.
In short, power relations do not develop in an ahistorical and context-free way, following quasi-natural laws. They depend
rather on habits, conventions, and perceptions that are shaped by experience. The constraints and
relations in the international system are thus not immutable, but rather malleable.12 When a treaty regime creates
expectations of multilateral compliance policies, unilateralist behavior can thus cause one of two
difficulties:
• It may push other powers (and possibly their followers, proxies, allies, and partners) to rally around the accused party. This may
occur either because the accused party is a close ally, or to deter the power(s) acting unilaterally from further unilateral actions out
of fear that such actions may lead to an adverse change in the balance of power. Such a course of events would seriously diminish
the chances for pursuing further the road towards a world order based on cooperative security,13
rather than balance of power principles. Moreover, such confrontations include a risk of escalation ,
which could lead to another confrontation like the Cuban missile crisis, by far the most dangerous
event so far in the nuclear age .
• Alternatively, the aggrieved powers may abstain from a direct confrontation out of concern for these risks, but freeze their
cooperation in the arms control field as a sort of reprisal. Such a development, while less dangerous on the surface, would risk the
erosion of multilateral arms control and nonproliferation in the long run. Would-be rule-breakers could be tempted to play off great
powers against each other, making it possible for them to pursue their rule-breaking activities with less risk and a greater likelihood
of getting away unscathed with their deviant course of action.
In either mode, arms agreements suffer, the prospects of cooperative security policy as an ordering
principle of world politics decline, and the risk of a major confrontation among great powers
increases . This trajectory is a reflection of the pivotal role of treaty community cohesion . Because of
the particular importance of major powers within that community—the presumption of legal equality
notwithstanding—antagonisms among them are particularly likely to sunder that community and
prevent it from maintaining and strengthening the treaty when it is challenged by deviant behavior.
Extinction
Sachs 14—Jeffrey, D. is a Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and
Management, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is also Special Adviser
to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals “Ukraine and
the Crisis of International Law,” http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/jeffrey-d-sachs-sees-in-russia-s-annexation-of-crimea-the-return--with-us-complicity--of-great-powerpolitics
International law itself is at a crossroads. The US, Russia, the EU, and NATO cite it when it
is to their advantage and disregard it when they deem it a nuisance. Again, this is not to justify Russia’s
unacceptable actions; rather, it is to add them to the sequence of actions contrary to international law.
The same problems may soon spill over into Asia. Until recently, China, Japan, and
others in Asia
have staunchly defended the requirement that the Security Council approve any outside military
intervention in sovereign states. Recently, however, several countries in East Asia have become locked in
a spiral of claims and counterclaims regarding borders, shipping lanes, and territorial rights. So far, these
disputes have remained basically peaceful, but tensions are rising. We must hope that the countries of the
region continue to see the great value of international law as a bulwark of sovereignty, and act
accordingly.
There have long been skeptics of international law – those who believe that it can never prevail
over the national interests of major powers, and that maintaining a balance of power among
competitors is all that really can be done to keep the peace. From this perspective, Russia’s actions in the
Crimea are simply the actions of a great power asserting its prerogatives.
Yet such a world is profoundly and unnecessarily dangerous. We have learned time and again
that there is no such thing as a true “balance of power.” There are always imbalances and
destabilizing power shifts. Without some scaffolding of law, open conflict is all too likely.
This is especially true today, as countries jostle for oil and other vital resources. It is no coincidence
that most of the deadly wars of recent years have taken place in regions rich in valuable and
contested natural resources.
As we look back in this centennial year toward the outbreak of WWI, we see again and again that the only possible
route to safety is international law, upheld by the United Nations and respected on all sides. Yes, it sounds
naive, but no one has to look back to see the naiveté of the belief that great-power politics will
preserve peace and ensure humanity’s survival.
CP
The United States should:
--decriminalize marijuana through the establishment of civil drug courts centered
upon harm reduction, and freeze additional moves towards legalization, pending
the outcome of international treaty reform
--propose amendments to the international drug control treaties to authorize
signatories to legalize marijuana
--eliminate marijuana testing policies for federal employees, including the FBI
--legalize medical marijuana and instruct the FDA to allow medical marijuana
research and pharmaceutical applications
--increase funding and cooperation with Mexico to implement an anti-cartel
strategy based upon a hybrid model from Colombia, and enlist Colombian
cooperation
Decrim solves cartels—we use the Portugal model
Duke, 9 – professor of law at Yale (Steven, “Drugs: To Legalize or Not” Wall Street Journal,
4/25, http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB124061360462654683)
Even with popular support, legalizing and regulating the distribution of marijuana in the U.S.
would be neither easy nor quick. While imposing its prohibitionist will on the rest of the world
for nearly a century, the U.S. has created a network of treaties and international agreements
requiring drug prohibition. Those agreements would have to be revised. A sensible
intermediate step would be to decriminalize the possession and use of marijuana and to
exercise benign neglect of American marijuana growers. Doing both would puncture the
market for imports from Mexico and elsewhere and would eliminate much of the profit
that fuels the internecine warfare in Mexico.
After we reap the rewards from decriminalizing marijuana, we should move on to hard drugs.
This will encounter strong resistance. Marijuana is a relatively safe drug. No one has ever died
from a marijuana overdose nor has anyone gone on a violent rampage as a result of a marijuana
high. Cocaine, heroin and amphetamines, on the other hand, can be highly addictive and
harmful, both physically and psychologically. But prohibition makes those dangers worse,
unleashing on vulnerable users chemicals of unknown content and potency, and deterring
addicts from seeking help with their dependency. There is burgeoning recognition, in the U.S.
and elsewhere, that the health benefits and the myriad social and economic advantages of
substituting regulation of hard drugs for their prohibition deserves serious consideration.
A most impressive experiment has been underway in Portugal since 2001, when that country
decriminalized the possession and personal use of all psychotropic drugs. According to a study
just published by the Cato Institute, "judged by virtually every metric," the Portuguese
decriminalization "has been a resounding success." Contrary to the prognostications of
prohibitionists, the numbers of Portuguese drug users has not increased since decriminalization.
Indeed, the percentage of the population who has ever used these drugs is lower in Portugal
than virtually anywhere else in the European Union and is far below the percentage of users in
the U.S.. One explanation for this startling fact is that decriminalization has both freed up funds
for drug treatment and, by lifting the threat of criminal charges, encouraged drug abusers to
seek that treatment.
We can try to deal with the Mexican murderers as we first dealt with Al Capone and his minions,
or we can apply the lessons we learned from alcohol prohibition and finish dismantling the
destructive prohibition experiment. We should begin by decriminalizing marijuana now.
The CP causes treaty reform and allows legalization down the road
Don, 14 - University of Minnesota Law School, J.D. candidate 2015 (Allison, “Lighten Up:
Amending the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs” 23 Minn. J. Int'l L. 213, Hein Online) The
Board = The International Narcotics Control Board
3. Amending the Single Convention is the Best Option
In light of the newly passed legislation within the United States concerning recreational
marijuana and proposed legislation in the international community, the best means of aligning
the Single Convention with evolving norms is to amend the treaty.153 Amendments allow for
formal changes to be made to a treaty while maintaining the treaty's existence. 154 This allows
for adjustment as "parties' understanding of the issue"' change or circumstances surrounding
the issue change without requiring the drafting of a new treaty or termination of an existing one.
By amending the Single Convention to allow for the recreational use of marijuana, the United
States and other countries considering such legislation would be able to continue the legislative
process without any international obligations impeding the progression towards marijuana
legalization.
Article 47 within the Single Convention provides instructions for amending the treaty, stating
that "[any [p]arty may propose an amendment to this Convention.156 In order to make such a
proposal, the amendment itself and the reasons behind the amendment must be transferred to
the Secretary- General of the United Nations in writing who will then disseminate the proposed
amendment to the other parties of the treaty and the Commission. At this point, the
Commission has the power to decide if a conference should be held to discuss the proposal or if
the parties should simply be asked if they are willing to accept.157 If there is no objection within
18 months, the amendment becomes fully adopted; if there is an objection, the Commission
may then choose to hold a conference to review the proposal.158
With 153 current parties to the Single Convention, arriving at a consensus may prove difficult.
This does not preclude the option to amend as "amendments require agreement between
treaty parties, but not necessarily between all parties." Once an amendment has been proposed
and adopted, parties are free to decide if they will become a party to the amendment.159 Those
who opt not to join the amendment remain bound by the treaty's original obligations.160 By
proposing an amendment that would permit the use of marijuana for recreational purposes,
those countries who wish to pursue such legislation would be permitted to do so and those
countries who remain in opposition would be able to remain parties to the original treaty
preventing the use of recreational marijuana.161
The last plank solves cartels
Loconsolo, 14 - Major, United States Army, Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE IN DEFENSE ANALYSIS from the
NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL (Michael, “EXPORTING THE COLOMBIAN “MODEL”:
COMPARING LAW ENFORCEMENT STRATEGIES TOWARDS SECURITY AND STABILITY
OPERATIONS IN COLOMBIA AND MÉXICO” June http://www.dtic.mil/cgibin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA606980)
Nonetheless, the
Mexican cartel system retains a number of attributes that were essential to
Colombian organized crime. Centralized control, the use of violence, intimidation, and bribery, and the pursuit of
information remain constant in contemporary organized crime. These attributes are important in understanding the applicability of
Colombia’s law enforcement model to México’s current problem.
The Colombian law enforcement model targeted virtually all conversion mechanisms of the
cartel system, including the personnel structure (kingpin strategy), financing, logistics, intelligence,
and communication. It developed a specialized federal police unit, relatively absent of corruption, and dedicated to the defeat
of the Medellín and Cali cartels. The Colombian government maintained a flexible extradition policy that allowed law enforcement
leadership to leverage such policy in negotiations with numerous cartel leaders. Additionally, it incorporated unique
capabilities from SOCOM and the DEA to professionalize the force and gather information
regarding cartel structure and operations. Finally, Colombian law enforcement covertly cooperated with an illegal
vigilante force (Los Pepes) to reduce the cartels’ information advantage.
Colombia’s federal police defeated the cartels’ ability to exist as large and overt organizations,
influence authority at the highest levels, and conduct acts of mass violence with impunity. Law
enforcement efforts did very little to defeat drug production, trafficking, and distribution. The result was the creation of
numerous cartelitos, or small cartels, covert in their drug trafficking operations and limited in capacity
for large-scale violence.
Can the Colombian law enforcement model apply to the existing struggle against powerful organized crime in México? Currently, the
majority of Mexican citizens prefer that law enforcement target the cartels’ ability to intimidate and extort the local populace over
efforts to disrupt illicit narcotics operations.259 If the goal is the elimination of drug trafficking operations, Colombia’s model has
little application. If the Mexican government seeks to reduce the power, influence, and violence of
organized crime, a modified version of the Colombian law enforcement model provides a
relevant framework. The creation of a Gendarmería is similar to Colombia’s Search Bloc in that
it represents a reorganization of the federal police to address organized crime, however it should differ
in its core mission to combat the cartels. While the Search Bloc focused on raids and other kinetic strikes to target cartel leadership,
the Gendarmería should focus on a long term reinvention of the federal police and enduring
strategy to establish a strong relationship with the local populace. As Colombia permitted direct support
from U.S. Special Operations, México should consider developing a similar approach that still ensures compliance with
constitutionally mandated non-intervention policies. Finally, where Colombia benefited from cooperation with an illegal vigilante
force, Mexican forces can develop a legitimate relationship with rural defenses who may have
access to invaluable information on cartel structure and activities. A strategy that nests in
national policy, focuses on reform, and targets information contributions of the cartel system
can set the conditions to effectively reduce cartel size, power, and influence, restore security in
all regions, and allow for the pursuit of growth and prosperity in a stable Mexican environment .
PHARMA
Emerging markets mean pharma can withstand the patent cliff
Ward, 10/16/14 (Andrew, Financial Times, “Pharma giants face developing market ambitions”
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e1b39b2c-2f97-11e4-83e400144feabdc0.html#axzz3JHJQf9rR)
As the pharmaceuticals industry careered towards the edge of its notorious patent cliff over the
past decade, there was one main hope for a soft landing.
Emerging markets were supposed to be big pharma’s salvation, as many of its most important
products lost market exclusivity without enough new drugs to replace them.
Growth in China, India, Brazil and other developing economies would revive the industry, as
rising living standards, ageing populations and increased incidence of diseases such as cancer
and diabetes fuelled higher healthcare spending.
To some extent, this new world has begun to materialise. Take Sanofi, France’s biggest
drugmaker, which has increased revenues from emerging markets by a fifth since 2010, even as
those from the developed world have stalled.
Emerging markets accounted for a third of sales last year – comfortably ahead of the US and
Europe as Sanofi’s biggest geographic division. Others, including Bayer of Germany and
GlaxoSmithKline of the UK, have been making similar strides in Asia, the Middle East, Africa
and Latin America.
Yet the general upwards trend masks pockets of volatility, as drugmakers grapple with local
healthcare and regulatory systems that vary widely in their structure and maturity.
GSK’s £300m fine from Chinese authorities in September for “massive and systemic” bribery of
doctors to boost sales highlighted the potential pitfalls in chasing rapid growth in unfamiliar and
often opaque markets.
In India, meanwhile, big pharma has been waging a running battle over intellectual property, as
regulators have opened some patent-protected medicines to low-cost generic production by local
manufacturers such as Cipla and Sun Pharma.
Novartis, for example, saw its best-selling drug, Glivec for leukaemia, denied patent protection
by the Indian Supreme Court last year. Health activists have welcomed such rulings as a step
towards more affordable access to medicines.
Some industry leaders, however, accuse India of using public health as a pretext for giving
domestic drugmakers a free ride on western innovation. Should other emerging markets take a
similar stance, the intellectual property framework underpinning the industry could be
threatened, they fear.
A deal struck last month by Gilead Sciences of the US to license its blockbuster hepatitis C
medicine, Sovaldi, to several big Indian manufacturers showed that some companies are willing
to find middle ground.
Gilead has been among the pioneers of tiered pricing models that offer drugs more cheaply in
poor countries. However, finding a fair level can be difficult in places such as India where wealth
coexists with extreme poverty.
Pricing looks set to remain tough and contentious across the developing world, as governments
seek to widen access to healthcare while containing costs. But Chris Viehbacher, Sanofi chief
executive, says the twin trends of urbanisation and an expanding middle class will support a
steady rise in spending.
“Some 80 per cent of the world’s population live in emerging markets. Many of those people are
not treated today. Many of those people are gaining greater incomes . . .[and] that’s going
to be a strong growth driver.”
Pharma profits are sky high
Anderson, 11/6/14 (Richard, BBC News, “Pharmaceutical industry gets high on fat profits”
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223)
Pharmaceutical companies have developed the vast majority of medicines known to humankind,
but they have profited handsomely from doing so, and not always by legitimate means.
Last year, US giant Pfizer, the world's largest drug company by pharmaceutical revenue, made
an eye-watering 42% profit margin. As one industry veteran understandably says: "I wouldn't be
able to justify [those kinds of margins]."
Stripping out the one-off $10bn (£6.2bn) the company made from spinning off its animal health
business leaves a margin of 24%, still pretty spectacular by any standard.
In the UK, for example, there was widespread anger when the industry regulator predicted
energy companies' profit margins would grow from 4% to 8% this year.
Last year, five pharmaceutical companies made a profit margin of 20% or more - Pfizer,
Hoffmann-La Roche, AbbVie, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Eli Lilly.
'Profiteering'
With some drugs costing upwards of $100,000 for a full course, and with the cost of
manufacturing just a tiny fraction of this, it's not hard to see why.
Last year, 100 leading oncologists from around the world wrote an open letter in the journal
Blood calling for a reduction in the price of cancer drugs.
Dr Brian Druker, director of the Knight Cancer Institute and one of the signatories, has asked:
"If you are making $3bn a year on [cancer drug] Gleevec, could you get by with $2bn? When do
you cross the line from essential profits to profiteering?"
And it's not just cancer drugs - between April and June this year, drug company Gilead clocked
sales of $3.5bn for its latest blockbuster hepatitis C drug Sovaldi.
Drug companies justify the high prices they charge by arguing that their research and
development (R&D) costs are huge. On average, only three in 10 drugs launched are profitable,
with one of those going on to be a blockbuster with $1bn-plus revenues a year. Many more do
not even make it to market.
But as the table below shows, drug companies spend far more on marketing drugs - in some
cases twice as much - than on developing them. And besides, profit margins take into
account R&D costs.
Plan destroys it
Jackson ‘12
Lee Jackson, staffwriter for Daily Finance News and 24/7 Wall St. News, 12/11/12, “Will
National Legalized Marijuana Help or Hurt Big Pharma, Tobacco and Alcohol?”
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/12/11/will-national-legalized-marijuana-help-or-hurt-bigpharma-tobacco-and-alcohol/
One other big and powerful industry might have something to lose: Big Pharma. It is estimated
that the global pharmaceutical market will be worth more than $1 trillion by 2014. Industry
giants Merck & Co. (NYSE: MRK), Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE)
and Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT) have warded off patent cliffs for years using their large
cash reserves to acquire smaller companies with robust product pipelines. The last thing these
companies want see is current product lines that are producing dependable revenue flow to be
dented by legal marijuana. The big pharmaceutical firms have a lot of money to spread around,
so when it comes to lobbying efforts, very few have this group’s clout. One thing it wants is for
marijuana to remain illegal.
There are countless maladies where the ingestion of marijuana has been believed to help
alleviate or control the symptoms. These include glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, AIDS-related
complications, Crohn’s disease, fibromyalgia, chemotherapy complications and others. Big
pharma has tried to come up with their own pot pill. There are more than 400 chemicals in
marijuana, 80 of which are called “cannabinoids.” Drug companies have tried reducing it to one
chemical and results have been poor. Researchers find that when you reduce cannabis to just
tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), you lose efficacy and gain side effects.
In a book critical of the pharmaceutical industry called “Our Daily Meds,” author Melody
Petersen offers a statistic showing more than 100,000 people die each year from prescription
drugs. This includes death from abuse and overdose, side effects, misdiagnosis and interaction
error. Many physicians may currently be reluctant to prescribe legalized marijuana. A national
mandate would provide many physicians with the moral and ethical cover they need to be more
aggressive if they feel medical marijuana may help their patients. Then it is very possible that
medical marijuana prescriptions will put a dent in many currently prescribed drugs. This is not
an outcome that big pharma is likely to tolerate well, unless they get in on the action themselves.
Can’t patent marijuana
Berkman Center ‘10
Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard University, 2010, “HEALTH CONFLICTS:
WHAT ARE THE ECONOMIC INCENTIVES OF DRUG COMPANIES?”
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/evidence99/marijuana/Economic_2.html
Drug companies may be in favor of legalizing marijuana in its traditional smokable form only if
they have control over its production. Again, though, that would put marijuana within the ambit
of the FDA. Additionally, drug companies would be less enthusiastic about such a proposal since
part of the advantage of developing new drugs is the patent. Since marijuana is a plant, it
cannot be patented. Therefore, drug companies lose some of the value inherent in developing
other new drugs.
Reject their evidence - most of it lacks qualls, for all we know they are in high
school
Pharma doesn’t solve disease
Young 10/2—health care reporter for the Huffington Post
(Jeffrey, “Why We Won't Have An Ebola Cure Or Vaccine For Years”, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/02/ebolacure_n_5915892.html, dml)
That doesn't mean it's easy, even with all possible support from governments, pharmaceutical companies or anyone else.
Inventing medicines and vaccines and diagnostic tests is difficult, takes time and is more likely
to fail than succeed, Ross said.
"It really takes almost a decade from concept to finally put the drug into a vial that you're ready to hand to a
physician or a nurse," Ross said. "Very few drugs ever make it to market."
Scientists must follow a basic set of procedures throughout that can take an unknown amount of time and
pose challenges all along, any one of which could scuttle the entire enterprise, Ross said.
It starts out with the basic, fundamental research of understanding what the disease is, how it works and how it might be
counteracted. If those stages are successful and researchers have an idea of a way to attack the disease, they have to test it on
animals to see whether it works at all, and whether it's safe.
Before a treatment or vaccine can be tested on living humans, scientists must conduct two rounds of research on human cells and
tissue, first for safety and then for effectiveness. If all of that is successful, a drug company then has to get approval
from the Food and Drug Administration and regulators in other countries to sell the product,
which can take years.
During those painstaking steps, researchers and drugmakers always have to think about money. "It costs
millions of dollars to do human trials," Ross said.
"Even if you have a drug that is effective,
it really sometimes comes down to the economics of it. If it's
going to cost you way more than what a person can afford, they're not going to be able to
manufacture it," Ross said. "There won't be a market for it."
No abr impact
Jesse Pines, Associate Professor, Emergency Medicine and Health Policy, George Washington
University, “Should We Be Afraid of the Superbug?” FOREIGN POLICY, 9—3—10,
www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/09/03/should_we_be_afraid_of_the_superbug,
accessed 9-14-14.
For a few days this August, much of the news media in the West became convinced that we were
headed back to the 1800s, medically speaking. A study in the September 2010 issue of British
medical journal the Lancet argued that bacteria carrying genes for NDM-1, a gene that imparts
resistance to a key family of antibiotics, had made their way through India and Pakistan into
Britain and were now threatening to derail medical treatment across the developed world.
Linked with the always shady-sounding concept of "medical tourism" -- the practice of traveling
to other countries for budget surgery -- the so-called "superbug," able to breed vicious and
deadly infections, became an instant media panic during a slow news month. The Drudge
Report and Andrew Breitbart's news website both featured it. A Guardian science columnist
wrote, "Now, the post-antibiotic apocalypse is in sight."
Er, not so much. As with most August stories, the reality of superbugs is a bit more complex
than the media has portrayed it. Yes, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a threat, as this week's
news of an outbreak among premature infants in London reminds us. But no one yet knows how
bad NDM-1-related infections could be. Not only is it far too early to say we're headed for
apocalypse, we've also got a lot to learn from superbugs -- namely, how our own over-use of
antibiotics is making it more likely that a superbug of the future could live up to this summer's
hype.
Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic by accident in 1928, when he left out a
bacterial culture for a month while on vacation and came back to find that some of the bacteria
had been killed by a fungus named Penicillium. By the early 1940s, a commercial product,
penicillin, was mass-produced to cure bacterial infections in humans, and medical practice
hasn't been the same since.
These days, antibiotics are a major weapon in medicine's war on disease, used to treat
everything from life-threatening infections like meningitis to more run-of-the-mill ear
infections. For more advanced medical technologies, like chemotherapy or organ
transplantation, antibiotics are needed to prevent and treat infections while patients heal.
Neither treatment would be possible without antibiotics.
At this point, in fact, antibiotics are suffering from their own success. They are so engrained in
the medical and social culture that over-prescription is a major problem. Recent surveys have
found that 70 to 80 percent of doctors' visits for sinus infections result in an antibiotic
prescription. But most sinus infections are caused by viruses, and antibiotics don't cure viral
infections.
The medical sin of antibiotic overuse goes beyond mere ineffectiveness -- it actually can be
harmful. Here's how it works: Bacteria are everywhere on our bodies, even when we are not sick.
When we take antibiotics for a bacterial infection, they only kill certain bacteria (usually the
ones making us sick). Then, as the body gets better, the surviving bacteria multiply and take
over. Now and then a few remaining bacteria carry special resistance to antibiotics -- which is
what kept them alive in the first place. With the other bacteria out of the way, the resistant
bacteria (i.e., the superbug) can multiply and sometimes cause problems. For example, if one of
those superbugs causes an infection, some antibiotics won't work anymore, and then you have
an infection that is more difficult to treat.
One of the prototypical superbugs caused by antibiotic use (and overuse) is MethicillinResistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). MRSA is resistant to many antibiotics, including
penicillin, and causes a variety of problems in humans: mostly skin infections, but also more
invasive diseases like pneumonia and bloodstream infections.
Another superbug that's been around for a while but has also taken a recent media tour is
Clostridium difficile (C. diff), which can be spread when antibiotics wipe out normal intestinal
bacteria that keep C. diff in check. A recent study found C. diff infection occurred in 13 out of
every 1,000 hospitalizations. C. diff causes diarrhea, and in some cases a particularly severe and
sometimes lethal infection of the colon.
Looking at bacteria carrying the NDM-1 gene, C. diff, and MRSA, it's not surprising that people
would panic over the possibility of these or other, even more resistant, bugs of the future making
our advances in antibiotics worthless. And it's a legitimate fear. Although there are antibiotics
and other treatments that work against all known superbugs, bacteria will continue to evolve,
developing stronger antibiotic resistance in the future. It is conceivable that bacteria will
someday outsmart our best medical technologies.
But it is unlikely that it will happen any time soon. One reason is that there are many different
classes of antibiotics, so while some don't work against superbugs, there are usually others that
do. Antibiotics that have been shelved for years might even be re-introduced to fight superbugs,
though obviously this would be less than ideal because of higher risk of side effects. A better and
more likely solution is for drug companies and other scientists to discover new classes of
antibiotics. The financial incentives for heading off a true superbug-led medical catastrophe
would be huge -- something that always drives medical innovation quite nicely, as it did with
treatments for HIV in the 1990s.
Econ resilient
Olive 2009 (3/15, David, The Chronicle Herald, “Depression? Not a chance Sure, times are
tough, but don’t be scared into believing we’re in for a modern-day version of the Great
Depression”, http://thechronicleherald.ca/NovaScotian/1111419.html)
SHOULD WE brace for another Great Depression? No. The notion is ludicrous. Conditions
will forever be such that the economic disaster that helped define the previous century will never
happen again. So why raise the question? Because it has suited the purposes of prominent folks to raise the spectre of a second Great Depression. Stephen Harper
has speculated it could happen. Barack Obama resorted to apocalyptic talk in selling his economic stimulus package to the U.S. Congress. And British author Niall
Ferguson, promoting his book on the history of money, asserts "there will be blood in the streets" from the ravages dealt by this
downturn. Cue the famished masses’ assault on a latter-day Bastille or Winter Palace. As it happens,
the current economic emergency Obama has described as having no equal since the Great Depression has not yet reached the
severity of the recession of 1980-82, when U.S. unemployment reached 11 per cent. The negativism has become so thick that Robert Shiller was prompted to
warn against it in a recent New York Times essay. Shiller, recall, is the Yale economist and author of Irrational Exuberance who predicted both the dot-com collapse of the late 1990s and the
likely grim outcome of a collapse in the U.S. housing bubble. Shiller worries that the Dirty Thirties spectre "is a cause of the current situation — because the Great Depression serves as a model
for our expectations, damping what John Maynard Keynes called our ‘animal spirits,’ reducing consumers’ willingness to spend and businesses’ willingness to hire and expand. The Depression
Even the prospects of a small-d
depression — defined by most economists as a 10 per drop in GDP for several years — are
slim. In a recent Wall Street Journal essay, Robert J. Barro, a Harvard economist, described his study of 251 stockmarket crashes and 97 depressions in 34 nations dating back to the mid-19th century. He notes
that only mild recessions followed the U.S. stock-market collapses of 2000-02 (a 42 per cent plunge) and 1973-74 (49 per
narrative could easily end up as a self-fulfilling prophecy." Some relevant points, I think: LOOK AT STOCKS
cent). The current market’s peak-to-trough collapse has been 51 per cent. Barro concludes the probability today of a minor depression is just 20 per cent, and of a major
depression, only two per cent.
LOOK AT JOBS NUMBERS
In the Great Depression, GDP collapsed by 33 per cent, the jobless rate was 25 per cent, 8,000
U.S. banks failed, and today’s elaborate social safety net of state welfare provisions did not exist.
In the current downturn, GDP in Canada shrank by 3.4 per cent in the last quarter of 2008, and in the
U.S. by 6.2 per cent. A terrible performance, to be sure. But it would take another 10 consecutive quarters of
that rate of decline to lose even the 10 per cent of GDP that qualifies for a small-d depression.
Allowing that 1,000 economists laid end to end still wouldn’t reach a conclusion, their consensus view is economic recovery
will kick in next year, if not the second half of this year. The jobless rate in Canada and the U.S. is 7.7 per cent and 8.1 per
cent, respectively. Again, the consensus among experts is that a worst-case scenario for U.S. joblessness is a peak of 11 per cent. There have been no bank failures in
Canada. To the contrary, the stability of Canadian banks has lately been acclaimed worldwide. Two of America’s largest banks, Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America
Corp., are on government life support. But otherwise the rate of collapse of U.S. lenders outside of the big "money centre" banks at the heart of the housing-related
financial crisis has been only modestly higher than is usual in recessionary times. LOOK AT INTERVENTIONS
In the Great Depression, Herbert
Hoover and R.B. Bennett, just prior to the appearance of the Keynesian pump-priming theories that would soon dominate modern economic
management, obsessed with balanced budgets, seizing upon precisely the wrong cure. They also moved very slowly to confront a crisis
with no precedent. (So did Japan’s economic administrators during its so-called "lost decade" of the 1990s.) Most earlier U.S. "panics" were directly
tied to abrupt collapses in stock or commodity values not accompanied by the consumer-spending excesses of the Roaring Twenties and greatly
exacerbated by a 1930s global trade war. Today,
only right-wing dead-enders advance balanced budgets as a
balm in this hour of economic emergency. In this downturn, governments from Washington to
Ottawa to Beijing have been swift in crafting Keynesian stimulus packages. Given their recent legislative passage
— indeed, Harper’s stimulus package awaits passage — the beneficial impact of these significant jolts is only beginning to be felt. And, if one believes, as I long
have, that this is a financial crisis — the withholding of life-sustaining credit from the economy by a crippled global banking system — and not a crisis with origins on
Main Street, then the resolution to that banking failure may trigger a much faster and stronger economic recovery than anyone now imagines. TUNE OUT THE
STATIC It’s instructive that there
was much talk of another Great Depression during the most painful recession since the
alarm-ist talk about global systemic collapses has accompanied
just about every abrupt unpleasantness, including the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the Mexican default in 1995, the
Second World War, that of 1980-82. Indeed,
Asian currency crisis of the late 1990s, financial havoc in Argentina early this decade, and even the failure of U.S. hedge fund Long-Term Capital
Management in the late 1990s. Modern economic recoveries tend to be swift and unexpected. The
nadir of the 1980-82 downturn,
in August 1982, kicked off the greatest stock-market and economic boom in history. And no sooner had
the dot-com and telecom wreckage been cleared away, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average bottoming out at 7,286 in October 2002, than the next stock boom was
in high gear. It reached its peak of 14,164 — 2,442 points higher than the previous high, it’s worth noting — just five years later.
LOOK AT THE BIG PICTURE
Finally, the
case for a sustained economic miasma is difficult to make. You’d have to believe that
the emerging economic superpowers of China and India will remain for years in the doldrums to
which they’ve recently succumbed; that oil, steel, nickel, wheat and other commodities that only last year skyrocketed in price will similarly
fail to recover, despite continued global population growth, including developing world economies seeking to emulate the Industrial Revolutions in China and South
Asia. "While today people are anxious and feel insecure," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told a joint session of the U.S. Congress earlier this month, "over
the next two decades billions of people in other continents will move from being simply
producers of their goods to being consumers of our goods, and in this way our world economy
will double in size." You’d have to believe that one of the chief lessons of the Great Depression
will be set aside, and the world will engage in another round of mutually destructive trade wars.
That there will be no salutary impact from the $7.6 trillion (U.S.) that the U.S. Fed and the U.S.
Treasury have spent in the past few months to revive the economy; the additional up to $2 trillion the current U.S. administration has
committed to rescuing the financial system; and Obama’s outsized $787-billion economic revival package recently passed by Congress. These
represent a stunning five per cent of U.S. GDP, compared with the two per cent accounted for by
Franklin Roosevelt’s first-year New Deal stimulus spending. Anticipating the worst assumes
that similar efforts in Europe and Asia will also fail. Confidence plays a role in most human activity, from vocational pursuits to
the selection of a life partner. Economic decision-making is no different. When it gets to the point where a CEO opts to lay off workers, as it has, because he or she
surmises that we’re heading into a Great Depression in which the CEO’s firm won’t find a market for its widgets, it’s not asking too much that the rationale for the
Depression talk be justified by facts based on experience and sound projections. Today’s widespread fear is instead largely informed by fear. And fear mongers.
FBI
The shortage is already causing federal hiring revisions
Walker, 14 (Hunter, “The FBI Can’t Hire Cyber Security Recruits Because They All Smoke
Weed” Slate, 5/21,
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/05/21/fbi_director_james_comey_has_tr
ouble_recruiting_it_savvy_workers_because.html)
FBI Director James Comey is starting to think the law enforcement agency's zero tolerance
policy on marijuana might be, like, a total bummer.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Comey discussed how the bureau's pot prohibition was
making it harder to find tech savvy recruits when he spoke to the annual White Collar Crime
Institute conference Monday.
"I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cyber criminals and some of those kids
want to smoke weed on the way to the interview," Comey said.
As a result of this, Comey said the FBI is "grappling with the question right now" of whether or
not to change its marijuana policy. Currently, the agency will not accept job applicants who have
smoked pot at any point within the past three years.
In fact, Comey indicated the bureau is already relaxing its restrictions on marijuana.
When one attendee at the conference said one of their friends was discouraged from trying to
work at the FBI due to the pot policy, Comey said they "should go ahead and apply" in spite of
their marijuana smoking.
Sternstein concludes it’s not a big deal
Aliya Sternstein 14, Next Gov Senior Correspondent, FEDERAL CYBER HIRING COULD
TAKE A HIT UNDER MARIJUANA MANDATE, March 14,
http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2014/03/federal-cyber-hiring-could-take-hit-undermarijuana-mandate/80527/) Smith = Kathleen Smith, chief management officer at
ClearedJobs.Net
Federal employers might be able to entice nonconventional computer whizzes with stimulants
instead of hallucinogens, Smith said.
"What I found with people who like doing cleared work and working for the government is they
like to work on the really cool stuff," said Smith, whose clients include security cleared
professionals in the federal government and private sector. "The price to work on the really cool
stuff might be: Some of the recreational drug use I can't do any longer."
Cleared personnel already inside the government likely will not protest the administration’s
stance, said Kathy Lavinder, executive director of Security and Investigative Placement
Consultants, who helps professionals with military and government experience.
"The jobs pay very well and they want to keep that clearance," she said. "If you are inside that
tent, you are already emotionally tied in."
Jeff Snyder, president of Colorado-based SecurityRecruiter.com, said the antimarijuana
mandate for government employees "has not been an issue for me or anyone I have heard
about."
Maybe it's not a topic that comes up in job interviews?
"They can be a little confessional at times -- but they won't tell me what they are doing in their
off hours," Lavinder said.
Overwhelming alt causes are worse
Summers, 10/3/14 (DJ, “For Uncle Sam, trouble raising a cyber army” Fortune,
http://fortune.com/2014/10/03/government-cyber-security-shortage/)
In Washington, the feeling is acute. More than 30,000 open positions in the federal government
wait to be filled by the next influx of white-knight hackers. One problem: government work
doesn’t quite ooze the sex appeal of private-sector jobs, where there is already a shortage.
Industry professionals interviewed by Fortune said government cyber security jobs have lower
pay, less flexible hours, and extensive background checks, making them less tempting than the
$116,000 per year on average that a salaried information security professional makes in the
private sector.
“Education and government are not rewarding their information security professionals,” reads a
2013 Frost & Sullivan report on the industry. “Forty-four percent and six percent of education
respondents reported no change or reduction in salary, respectively, in 2012. For respondents in
government, the results are similar: 45 percent reported no change and five percent reported a
salary reduction.”
In May, Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs committee, introduced a bill requesting more competitive hiring practices on par with
their counterparts in the the National Security Agency and the private sector. (It passed on
September 18.) Higher salaries, faster hiring, and competitive retention bonuses top the priority
list.
“Unfortunately, the demand for cyber security experts in the government greatly outpaces the
supply and many agencies have had difficulty attracting the best and brightest and retaining
those already in service,” Carper said. “It’s critical that Congress gives the Secretary of
Homeland Security the personnel authorities the Department needs to improve their ability to
compete with the private sector and other agencies to hire and retain the most skilled cyber
workforce.”
“The tradeoff of working for the government is making less than you can in the private sector,”
added Jennie Westbrook, a spokesperson for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and
Government Affairs. “That’s definitely one of the challenges we face.”
Still, NSA wages don’t match those in Silicon Valley. Without the free-flowing revenues that
private technology firms enjoy, government recruiters say they rely on other tried-and-true
tactics: get ‘em while they’re young and get their red, white, and blue blood flowing.
Paul Judge, chief research officer and vice president of Barracuda Networks CUDA -1.17% , a
Campbell, Calif.-based cyber security firm, argues that heroism can be a big hook. Not everyone
can be a Green Beret, the term for the U.S. Army Special Forces; that air of exclusivity must
apply to NSA hackers, too.
“There are no shortage of individuals who care about protecting the country,” Judge says. “You
grew up playing Cops and Robbers. You might not have grown up the biggest kid on the block
but you can fight with your brain.”
The effort is already underway. The Department of Homeland Security and Department of
Defense woo university and high school students to prime those interested in computer science
for government hacking. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management offers Scholarship for
Service, a sort of digital National Guard, through which the National Science Foundation
bankrolls undergraduate and graduate students in exchange for a stint in local, state, or federal
cyber security service. Some states sponsor “cyber camps” for high school and university
students to learn security fundamentals. Other states even push to make programming
languages like Java qualify for high school foreign language credit.
As in many youth recruitment programs, patriotism can be a mixed bag for younger generations.
Nicolas Peterson, a graduate student in the Master of Cybersecurity and Leadership program at
University of Washington-Tacoma, says his peers often eye the federal hand that seeks to feed
them with suspicion.
“I’m definitely not an experienced professional when it comes to cyber security, but I can say
that a lack of trust seems to be especially apparent between cyber security students and
government,” he says. Peterson served as an intern for Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-Wash), where he
researched the challenges of Washington’s cyber security industry.
Recent revelations of the NSA’s hardware bugging and domestic surveillance have left intergenerational relationships chilly.
“[Edward] Snowden was kind of the final straw,” Peterson says. “It’s really kind of fracturing the
community of professionals and creating these two camps where all the sudden private business
are saying, ‘Well okay, now we need to protect ourselves against the government, too.’”
No impact
Gartzke, 13 - Erik Gartzke is Professor of Government at the University of Essex and Associate
Professor of Political Science at the University of California San Diego (“The Foreign Policy
Essay: Erik Gartzke on “Fear and War in Cyberspace”” 12/1,
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/12/foreign-policy-essay-erik-gartzke-on-fear-and-war-incyberspace/)
Should we fear cyberspace? The internet is said to be a revolutionary leveler, reducing the hard
won military advantages of western powers, even as the dependence of developed nations on
computer networks leaves them vulnerable to attack. Incidents like the Stuxnet worm and cyber
attacks against U.S. government computers, apparently launched from servers in China, seem to
testify to the need for concern. Yet, even if these details are correct—and some are not—there is
no reason to believe that the internet constitutes an Achilles heel for the existing world order.
To the contrary, cyberwar promises major advantages for status quo powers like the United
States.
Contrasting a Logic of Possibilities with a Logic of Consequences
The ability to harm is ubiquitous. Anyone passing on the street could just punch you in the face.
Still, violence is relatively rare in large part because little is typically gained from most potential
uses of force. Perpetrators must ask not just “what harm can I inflict?” but “how can I benefit by
inflicting harm?” In short, cyberwar requires a logic of consequences. Just as a morbid fear of
being sucker punched at random may be misplaced, concern about cyberwar can be exaggerated
if there is little to suggest how internet aggression can be of benefit to potential perpetrators.
Efficacy separates the widespread potential for harm from actual aggression. Nations, groups
and persons threaten force to influence, compelling others to cooperate or deterring aggression.
Violence is also exercised to alter the balance of power. If the damage inflicted is temporary,
however, then aggression must be followed up with other actions, or an attack serves no
purpose. Creating “a window of opportunity” cannot matter unless one intends to exercise the
opportunity.
Fighting on the Internet
In isolation, the internet is an inferior venue for achieving objectives traditionally associated
with military violence, particularly coercion. Traditional military capabilities are observable.
Armies can be seen standing near city gates. Missiles can be observed in firing positions ready
to launch. Capability coerces precisely because the effects of a contest can be anticipated. A city
does not need to be stormed for inhabitants to imagine the consequences of an attack. Cyber
coercion is problematic because capabilities are difficult to communicate without harming
military potency. Targets cannot assess credibility unless they are given access to details of a
planned cyber attack, but attackers cannot share this information with defenders without
undermining their own attack. If instead a defender accedes to unverified threats, then it will
invite a multitude of false claims.
Harm threatened can compel if it is credible and does not weaken the exercise of force. Harm
inflicted can be used to threaten future harm, but only if the act of harming is a good indicator of
future effectiveness. This works pretty well with war elephants, infantry brigades or high speed
penetrating bombers, where capability is not determined by whether the enemy knows they
exist. But again the success of cyber aggression is unusually reliant on conditions of surprise
and even an internet attacker that has succeeded before can be tempted to bluff if bluffing will
be believed.
The bigger issue, however, is that the effects of internet attacks are temporary. Unlike a
rocket strike on an oil refinery or demolition of critical elements of the transportation grid, cyber
attacks generally achieve “soft kills,” temporary incapacitation that can be reversed relatively
quickly at moderate cost. Unless it has a lasting effect on the balance of power, internet
aggression serves either as an irritant, or as an adjunct to other, more traditional, forms of
coercion or force.
Imagine that some unspecified cyber attack disables communication or transportation nodes in
a target country. What then? While inconvenienced, the target will eventually get the lights
back on and vehicles running. The target will then attempt to retaliate. Permanent harm
inflicted over the internet can weaken an opponent and serve as a motive for aggression. Yet,
harm inflicted over the internet, or at Pearl Harbor for that matter, only benefits the attacker if
it can extract concessions from the target, or if the attack can be made to permanently weaken
an opponent.
Considerable damage was done to the U.S. Pacific Fleet in the Pearl Harbor attack, but it failed
to force the United States to be bargaining table, a critical component of Japan’s grand strategy.
Though Japan’s leadership knew that total war with the United States would result in their
defeat, they hoped for a limited contest. Cyberwar with no follow-on strategy is much more
foolish than the Japanese plan in 1941 to the degree that the effects of an attack can be repaired
more quickly. Any attack over the internet must either convert short-term advantages into longterm effects, or wager that the enemy will accept defeat in cyberspace lying down. A cyber Pearl
Harbor has no purpose unless it is accompanied by a terrestrial attack precisely because the
target is capable and is destined to respond to any serious attack with a vigorous reprisal. If the
target is unlikely to succumb to traditional forms of aggression, then cyber attack makes very
little sense, either.
Cyberwar Benefits the Strong
While many can imagine a cyber attack on the United States, few find it practical to speculate
about physical invasion of U.S. territory. Yet, short of invasion, all that can be achieved by cyber
attack are the kinds of pin pricks that anger and mobilize an enemy, rather than leading to
concessions or defeat. It is far less difficult to imagine powerful nations invading weaker states.
It is thus as an adjunct to existing capabilities that cyberwar is destined to prove most useful.
CARTELS
Latin America won’t escalate
Mauricio Cárdenas 11, senior fellow and director of the Latin America Initiative at the
Brookings Institution, 3-17, “Think Again Latin America,” Foreign Policy,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/17/think_again_latin_america?page=full
"Latin America is violent and dangerous." Yes, but not unstable. Latin American countries have among the world's
highest rates of crime, murder, and kidnapping. Pockets of abnormal levels of violence have emerged in countries such as Colombia - and more recently, in Mexico, Central America, and some large cities such as Caracas. With 140,000 homicides in 2010, it is
understandable how Latin America got this reputation. Each of the countries in Central America's "Northern Triangle" (Guatemala,
Honduras, and El Salvador) had more murders in 2010 than the entire European Union combined. Violence in Latin America is
strongly related to poverty and inequality. When combined with the insatiable international appetite for the illegal drugs produced
in the region, it's a noxious brew. As strongly argued by a number of prominent regional leaders -- including Brazil's former
president, Fernando H. Cardoso, and Colombia's former president, Cesar Gaviria -- a strategy based on demand reduction, rather
than supply, is the only way to reduce crime in Latin America. Although some fear the Mexican drug violence
could spill over into the southern United States, Latin America poses little to no threat to
international peace or stability. The major global security concerns today are the
proliferation of nuclear weapons and terrorism. No country in the region is in possession of
nuclear weapons -- nor has expressed an interest in having them. Latin American countries, on the
whole, do not have much history of engaging in cross-border wars. Despite the recent tensions on
the Venezuela-Colombia border, it should be pointed out that Venezuela has never taken part in
an international armed conflict. Ethnic and religious conflicts are very uncommon in Latin America.
Although the region has not been immune to radical jihadist attacks -- the 1994 attack on a Jewish Community Center in Buenos
Aires, for instance -- they have been rare. Terrorist attacks on the civilian population have been limited to a
large extent to the FARC organization in Colombia, a tactic which contributed in large part to the organization's loss of popular
support.
No impact to heg
Benjamin H. Friedman et al 13, research fellow in defense and homeland security studies;
Brendan Rittenhouse Green, the Stanley Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science and
Leadership Studies at Williams College; Justin Logan, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the
Cato Institute Fall 2013, “Correspondence: Debating American Engagement: The Future of U.S.
Grand Strategy,” International Security, Vol. 38, No. 2, p. 181-199
Brooks et al. argue that the specter of U.S. power eliminates some of the most baleful consequences of anarchy, producing a
more peaceful world. U.S. security guarantees deter aggressors, reassure allies, and dampen security dilemmas (p. 34). “By supplying
reassurance, deterrence, and active management,” Brooks et al. write, primacy “reduces security competition and does so in a way that slows the
diffusion of power away from the United States” (pp. 39–40). There
are three reasons to reject this logic : security
competition is declining anyway; if competition increases, primacy will have difficulty stopping
it; and even if competition occurred, it would pose little threat to the United States.¶ an increasingly peaceful
world. An array of research , some of which Brooks et al. cite, indicates that factors other than U.S. power are
diminishing interstate war and security competition .2 These factors combine to make the costs of military aggression
very high, and its benefits low.3¶ A major reason for peace is that conquest has grown more costly. Nuclear weapons
make it nearly suicidal in some cases.4 Asia, the region where future great power competition is most likely, has a “geography
of peace”: its maritime and mountainous regions are formidable barriers to conflict.5¶ Conquest also yields lower economic
returns than in the past. Post-industrial economies that rely heavily on human capital and information are more difficult to exploit.6
Communications and transport technologies aid nationalism and other identity politics that make foreigners harder to manage. The lowering
of trade barriers limits the returns from their forcible opening.7¶ Although states are slow learners, they
increasingly appreciate these trends . That should not surprise structural realists. Through two world wars, the
international system "selected against" hyperaggressive states and demonstrated even to victors
the costs of major war. Others adapt to the changed calculus of military aggression through
socialization.8¶ managing revisionist states. Brooks et al. caution against betting on these positive trends. They worry that if states
behave the way offensive realism predicts, then security competition will be fierce even if its costs are high . Or, if
nonsecurity preferences such as prestige, status, or glory motivate states, even secure states may become aggressive (pp. 36-37).9¶ These
scenarios, however, are a bigger problem for primacy than for restraint . Offensive realist security
paranoia stems from states' uncertainty about intentions; such states see alliances as temporary expedients of last
resort, and U.S. military commitments are unlikely to comfort or deter them .10 Nonsecurity
preferences are, by definition, resistant to the security blandishments that the United States can offer
under primacy Brooks et al.'s revisionist actors are unlikely to find additional costs sufficient reason to hold back, or the threat of those costs to
be particularly credible.¶ The literature that Brooks et al. cite in arguing that the United States restrains allies actually suggests that
offensive realist and prestige-oriented states will be the most resistant to the restraining effects
of U.S. power. These studies suggest that it is most difficult for strong states to prevent conflict between weaker allies and their rivals when the
restraining state is defending nonvital interests; when potential adversaries and allies have other alignment options;11 when the stronger state struggles
to mobilize power domestically12; when the stronger state perceives reputational costs for non-involvement;13 and when allies have hawkish interests
and the stronger state has only moderately dovish interests.14 ¶ In other words, the
cases where it would be most important to
restrain U.S. allies are those in which Washington's efforts at restraint would be least effective.
Highly motivated actors, by definition, have strong hawkish interests. Primacy puts limits on U.S. dovishness, lest its commitments lack the credibility
to deter or reassure. Such credibility concerns create perceived reputational costs for restraining or not bailing out allies. The United States will be
defending secondary interests, which will create domestic obstacles to mobilizing power. U.S. allies have other alliance options, especially in Asia. In
short, if
states are insensitive to the factors incentivizing peace, then the United States' ability to
manage global security will be doubtful. Third-party security competition will likely ensue
anyway. ¶ costs for whom? Fortunately, foreign security competition poses little risk to the United States. Its wealth
and geography create natural security. Historically, the only threats to U.S. sovereignty, territorial integrity, safety, or power position have been
potential regional hegemons that could mobilize their resources to project political and military power into the Western Hemisphere. Nazi Germany
and the Soviet Union arguably posed such threats. None exist today. ¶ Brooks
et al. argue that "China's rise puts the
possibility of its attaining regional hegemony on the table, at least in the medium to long term" (p. 38). That
possibility is remote , even assuming that China sustains its rapid wealth creation. Regional hegemony requires China
to develop the capacity to conquer Asia's other regional powers. India lies across the Himalayas and has
nuclear weapons. Japan is across a sea and has the wealth to quickly build up its military and develop nuclear
weapons. A disengaged United States would have ample warning and time to form alliances or regenerate
forces before China realizes such vast ambitions.
Violence down now
Zabludovsky 7/23/14 (Karla Zabludovsky covers Latin America for Newsweek. “Murders in
Mexico Down From Height of the Drug War, But Violence Persists” Filed: 7/23/14 at 6:42 PM
http://www.newsweek.com/murders-mexico-down-height-drug-war-violence-persists-260990
Some of the Mexican states where drug war–related violence has been most intense, like
Coahuila, Guerrero and Tamaulipas, showed a decreased homicide rate. In Durango, part of
the Mexican “golden triangle,” an area notorious for drug trafficking, homicides decreased by
nearly half in 2013 as compared to the previous year.¶ ADVERTISEMENT¶ It is unclear what percentage of recorded
homicides are related to organized crime since the government modified the classification in October, doing away with a separate category for drug
war–related deaths, instead lumping them all together.¶ Aware
of the war weariness felt among many in Mexico,
Pena Nieto ran on the promise that, if elected, his government would shift the focus from
capturing drug kingpins, like Calderon had, to making daily life for ordinary Mexicans safer.¶
"With this new strategy, I commit myself to significantly lowering the homicide rate, the number of kidnappings in the country, the extortions and the
human trafficking," wrote Pena Nieto in a newspaper editorial during his presidential campaign.¶ Since
taking office in December 2012,
has largely eliminated talk of security from his agenda except when large outbreaks
of violence have forced him otherwise, focusing instead on the economy and his legislative
reforms, including sweeping overhauls to education and energy. And while the country appears to be less violent now than during Calderon’s
Pena Nieto
war on drugs, the climate of press freedom, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, remains “perilous.”
The AFF increases violence
Pavlik 14 (Jim, "Legal Pot Means More Violence in Mexico–Not Less," High Technocracy, FEbruary 5,
hightechnocracy.com/2014/02/05/legalpot-means-more-violence-in-mexico-not-less/)
So I think legalizing marijuana can actually have a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts effect on Mexican state capacity. Why I eventually come to the
same conclusion as Hope is because of the nature of the violence in Mexico. Most
of the violence in Mexico is not between
state actors and the ICOs; it’s between ICOs.¶ If it’s hard to determine how much money is made in the marijuana biz, it’s
even harder to determine which ICOs are profiting the most from this sector (relative to the other sectors they are in). And that’s an important point.
Whichever cartels are most affected by the loss of the additional revenues are going to become
weaker relative to those cartels which aren’t as affected.¶ These relative power
shifts are the primary driver of inter-ICO violence. In other words, legalized marijuana—at least for a while—
should increase violence in Mexico. The plazas that abut the US border will be important
geographical areas to control so long as there remain any black or grey market goods to smuggle
across them. Disrupting the ICOs relative positions as they battle for equilibrium is exactly the
kind of thing that will make violence worse.
Cartels also profit off legal marijuana.
Sabet ‘13
Kevin, Director, University of Florida Drug Policy Institute, Department of Psychiatry, Division
of Addiction Medicine Director, Project SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana), “Written
Testimony “Conflict Between State and Federal Laws”,”
http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/9-10-13SabetTestimony.pdf
Department of Justice officials have publicly said that the sales of marijuana for supposedly “medical”
purposes are in some cases going to criminal enterprises and foreign drug trafficking
groups.8 “It's very clear to me that there's outside sources,” said Jeff Sweetin, Special Agent In Charge of the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency in Colorado, in a news article. “From my investigations, I can tell you what the foreign sources are; they're
foreign cartel sources.” The news story reported that “Sweetin says a large percentage of the pot consumed by
medical marijuana patients ‘absolutely’ comes from Mexico.” Sweetin continued, “These are real organized
crime groups. There's a faction that wants you to believe that these are just guys that are listening to their music, they're driving their
van, they're peaceful guys and they're moving a couple of ounces a week to people that are not doing any problems. That's not what's
happening.” This is also the case in other states, like California, where the U.S. Secret Service and the
DEA were involved in “what has amounted to a four-year investigation ... ... into an organized
criminal enterprise involving large-scale marijuana distribution, not only in the Los Angeles area, but
throughout the United States. This criminal enterprise hired known gang members as enforcers. This organization was
involved in the operation of multiple retail marijuana dispensaries generating massive profits, repeatedly showing their willingness
to use violence and intimidation to expand their operations and dissuade competition. To date, there have been 26 documented
crimes…” 9 As a Los Angeles newspaper mentioned in a story about dispensaries and criminal gangs, “Many of the
dispensaries and grow houses have ties to organized crime and sell to street dealers as
well, detectives said.” The story quoted L.A. County Sheriff's Detective David Mertens who said, “Most of the
dispensaries are getting pot from these indoor grows,” said L, who specializes in narcotics investigations. “It's
not just the dispensaries they're growing for. They're also selling to street dealers.”10
high taxes mean people go back to illicit markets.
Caulkins and Lee ‘12
Jonathan P. Caulkins is the Stever Professor of Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon
University's Heinz College and a consultant with RAND's Drug Policy Research Center. Michael
A. C. Lee has served as a drug-policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College,
“The Drug-Policy Roulette,” http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-drugpolicy-roulette
THE TAX DELUSION
Some legalization advocates suggest that the likely price collapses could be counteracted, and the
subsequent increases in drug use avoided, by the imposition of excise taxes. (The prospect of revenues from
such taxes is also a deal-sweetener used to attract political support for legalization.) What these
advocates neglect, however, is the fact that taxes capable of achieving these aims would be
exceedingly difficult to collect. The reasons why are straightforward. The first is a matter of amount: As we have
seen, the price collapse that would be induced by legalization is enormous. Any tax that aimed to
offset it, even in part, would therefore have to be staggeringly high. Consider the case of marijuana,
which is the drug most conducive to taxation. This is partly because marijuana is the bulkiest of the major illegal
drugs: A bulky product is more difficult to produce, ship, and sell without being detected, thus making tax evasion more difficult.
Moreover, the legalization-induced
price decline for marijuana would be the least dramatic among
the major drugs, meaning that it would require the lowest offsetting taxes. Nevertheless, despite these
favorable circumstances, even the numbers for marijuana are discouraging. In California, for instance, Democratic assemblyman
Tom Ammiano proposed legalizing marijuana and imposing an excise tax of $50 per ounce. That is a steep levy, to be sure. And yet it
would offset only about one-fifth of the price decline that Altered State? suggests would come from marijuana legalization in
California (and less than one-fifth of the decline that would be caused by legalization nationwide). Cocaine, heroin, and
methamphetamine present cases that are even more challenging: These drugs are much more
compact, and their prices would fall further in percentage terms as a result of legalization. To
understand how difficult it would be to collect excise taxes on these drugs, it is useful to compare them to tobacco, the excise tax on
which is the highest per unit weight among consumer goods in the United States. Were tobacco to be taxed at a per-
weight rate comparable to Ammiano's proposal for marijuana, it would amount to a $35 levy on
each standard (20-gram) pack of cigarettes — more than five times the highest state tobacco tax in the
United States today. For cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine, offsetting the legalization-induced price
declines could require taxes 500 to 1,000 times current tobacco taxes in terms of value per
unit weight. These tax-per-unit-weight (or volume) figures are crucial, because they govern the incentive
to sell untaxed products in a tax-evading "gray market." To see why, consider the amount of profit a person could
earn by evading taxes on a good that fits in the trunk of a car — a trunk capable of holding, say, 250 pounds of material without
making the car sag visibly (thereby drawing the attention of law enforcement). This would correspond to about 40 gallons of
gasoline, which, in the U.S. , carries an average excise tax of about $0.40 per gallon. The potential windfall from using
the car trunk to smuggle gray-market gasoline is thus only about $15. By contrast, the windfall from
evading a $3-per-pack excise tax on the same weight of cigarettes would be more than $17,000.
The corresponding windfall for evading Ammiano's $50-per-ounce marijuana tax would be
$200,000. The figures for cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine would be truly
astronomical — as would the incentives to reap such profits by smuggling gray-market drugs. The
case of tobacco also illustrates the effects of those incentives. There is abundant empirical evidence that taxevading contraband cigarettes capture a substantial portion of the market in many countries. In
2008, the Center for Public Integrity released a report titled Made to be Smuggled, which
examined an underground Russian cigarette brand called "Jin Ling." As the report says, "the brand is never
advertised and cannot be bought in shops. It is only sold illegally — smuggled by gangs who hope to pocket immense profits by
selling unlicensed, untaxed cigarettes on black markets across Europe." Jin Ling became so successful that it rivaled
Marlboro as the most smuggled cigarette brand in Europe. Canada, too, has been engaged in a well-
documented struggle with the gray market for untaxed cigarettes. Canada was forced to repeal excise-tax hikes enacted in the early
1990s after consumption of contraband cigarettes increased quickly, in some areas accounting for the majority of the market.
Lawmakers tried again in the early 2000s, this time raising tobacco excise taxes more modestly. According to Nachum Gabler and
Diane Katz of the Fraser Institute (a Canadian think tank), contraband cigarettes satisfied 27% of Canadian demand after the
measure passed. The U.S. is hardly immune to gray-market tax evasion. In their report Cigarette Taxes and
Smuggling, Michael LaFaive, Patrick Fleenor, and Todd Nesbit collected data for smuggling rates and excise taxes in 47 states.
They found a positive relationship between a state's excise tax and the market share of smuggled
cigarettes: The higher the excise tax, the more the market is taken over by contraband tobacco. If
we use this relationship to project the effects of Ammiano's $50-per-ounce excise tax on Californian marijuana, while
conservatively accepting the low rates of current tax evasion claimed in public-health studies,
the expected tax-evasion rate on marijuana would still be 50%. If we use the same
considerations but assume tax-evasion rates closer to those reported in public-finance
studies, the numbers suggest that contraband marijuana would meet essentially all marijuana
demand in the United States. To be sure, using the tax-evasion data from tobacco to try to determine the
implications for marijuana has limitations. Even so, the numbers are sobering — and indicate fairly clearly that marijuana-tax
evasion, or evasion of taxes on any legalized drug, could be a serious problem. This suggests that collecting taxes
capable of offsetting price declines, even partially, would be very difficult. Some have argued that
tax evasion could be deterred with sanctions, but this claim is very likely naïve. With a $50-per-ounce tax on
marijuana, tax evaders could reap profits of as much as $800 per pound. That is roughly double
the reward traffickers now earn for transporting fully illegal marijuana across the Mexico-U.S.
border. Inasmuch as Mexico now supplies the majority of marijuana consumed in the United States, the implication is clear:
Deterring evasion of a $50-per-ounce tax would require imposing sanction risks greater than
those now applied to international drug trafficking. The public is unlikely to support such
tough sentencing of people who are merely evading taxes on a fully legal
commodity; moreover, replacing drug arrests with tax-evasion arrests would defeat a
primary purpose of legalization.
Mexican energy reform fails – corruption
Pena, Cornell English professor, 14
(Daniel, 3/4/14, “Pemex Blues: The Downside to Mexican Energy Reform,” accessed 11/11/14,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-pena/pemex-blues-the-downside-to-mexican-energyreform_b_4522216.html, kns)
It's easy to tell that 2013 has been an impasse year for Mexico, capped off by Mexico's
historic energy reform this month that will
open the doors of the state-controlled energy industry to foreign investment , making North America one of
the world's largest suppliers of oil and natural gas. Reading the news coverage of the reform, I couldn't help but think of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's
talk on the danger of a single story. The American
coverage has, of course, been a single story reminiscent of
the same talking points surrounding NAFTA almost 20 years ago, focusing on the (hopeful)
benefits of such a drastic change to Mexico's economy: a more robust private sector injected with fresh capital, a stable
means toward growth and a short-term fix to hedge the fluctuating Mexican Peso against other world currencies. Many of these talking points echo
those of President Enrique Peña-Nieto, who touts the plan as Mexico's silver bullet to its current economic woes. In its current form, Mexico's
energy reform is based on Norway's model, which allows for profit-sharing, but not productionsharing with international companies in oil and natural gas production. One problem though: Mexico is not Norway and stateowned Pemex is hardly a shining example of efficiency. Trickle-down economics and all of its bunk theories aside,
corruption is the other problem everyone is thinking about but nobody is really talking about with concern to
this plan. Currently, Pemex supplies Mexico with one third of all its revenue, paying nearly $70 billion
in taxes on a 99.7% tax rate. To the casual observer, one third of all revenue from a single source should seem a little odd given the
diversity of other economies with similar GDP's to Mexico. And indeed it should be a red flag to the average Mexican citizen given that Pemex
Executives and Mexican politicians have reportedly embezzled billions of dollars from the
nationalized corporation. Peña-Nieto's plan fails to address such corruption. And it can only be assumed
that Pemex executives and the politicians benefiting from the decisions of those executives-many in the ranks of Peña-Nieto's own party--will remain safely intact after Mexico's energy
reform is enacted. Though Peña-Nieto has been grilled on questions concerning the way corruption might manifest given a new injection of
capital into Pemex, he's been reluctant to give answers so as to minimize wave-making within the ranks of his own party, the PRI.
2NC
IMPACT
Outweighs on magnitude
Avery, 13 --Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen (11/6/2013, John Scales Avery, “An Attack On Iran Could Escalate
Into Global Nuclear War,” http://www.countercurrents.org/avery061113.htm)
Despite the willingness of Iran's new President, Hassan Rouhani to make all reasonable concessions to US demands, Israeli pressure
groups in Washington continue to demand an attack on Iran. But such an attack might escalate into a global
nuclear war, with catastrophic consequences. As we approach the 100th anniversary World War I, we should remember
that this colossal disaster escalated uncontrollably from what was intended to be a minor conflict.
There is a danger that an attack on Iran would escalate into a large-scale war in the
Middle East, entirely destabilizing a region that is already deep in problems. The unstable
government of Pakistan might be overthrown, and the revolutionary Pakistani government
might enter the war on the side of Iran, thus introducing nuclear weapons into the
conflict. Russia and China, firm allies of Iran, might also be drawn into a general war in the Middle East.
Since much of the world's oil comes from the region, such a war would certainly cause the price
of oil to reach unheard-of heights, with catastrophic effects on the global economy. In the
dangerous situation that could potentially result from an attack on Iran, there is a risk that nuclear weapons would
be used, either intentionally, or by accident or miscalculation. Recent research has shown that
besides making large areas of the world uninhabitable through long-lasting radioactive
contamination, a nuclear war would damage global agriculture to such a extent that a
global famine of previously unknown proportions would result. Thus, nuclear war is the ultimate
ecological catastrophe. It could destroy human civilization and much of the biosphere.
To risk such a war would be an unforgivable offense against the lives and future of all the
peoples of the world, US citizens included.
Even if the deal is flawed, keeping it alive prevents immediate military escalation
Terry Atlas 10-23-2014; Bloomberg, “ Escalation Likely If Iran Talks Fail, U.S. Official Says “
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-24/escalation-likely-if-iran-talks-fail-u-s-officialsays.html
The alternatives to an international accord preventing Iran from producing nuclear weapons are
“quite terrible,” the chief U.S. negotiator in talks with Iran said. Even so, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy
Sherman said yesterday, the U.S. won’t accept “a bad deal or even a half-bad deal” to avoid failure. Sherman said in Washington that
she can’t predict the outcome of the negotiations as they head toward a Nov. 24 deadline with six nations and Iran still jockeying
over constraints on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities and the terms for lifting economic sanctions. U.S. lawmakers on key
committees are
preparing legislation to impose tougher economic sanctions on Iran if there’s no deal by that date,
an
agreement to extend the talks for a second time, the stage would be set for events that could
lead to military attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities by the U.S. or Israel. “There’s no question
that, if everything goes away, escalation will be the name of the game on all sides, and none of
and Iran’s interim commitment to curtail uranium-enrichment would expire with the end of the negotiations. Barring
that is good,” Sherman said at a conference on Iran held in Washington by Syracuse University’s Moynihan Institute of Global
Affairs and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. “It’s why I say the stakes are high.”
Only scenario for cartels
Trumpet 13—official website of the Philadelphia Trumpet news magazine (“Sanctions on Iran Bringing
Terror Closer to the U.S.”, http://www.thetrumpet.com/article/10246.19.0.0/sanctions-on-iran-bringing-terror-closer-to-the-us,
dml)
Curtailed funding from embargoed Iran to its terrorist proxies may be causing Hezbollah to partner
with Mexican drug cartels to raise funds for potential attacks in the United States.
The economic sanctions that have been slapped on Iran for its nuclear weapons program have caused Tehran to cut
back its funding to Hezbollah, according to the Israeli military. U.S. officials say Hezbollah operatives in
Mexico are enhancing their cooperation with murderous drug cartels, like Los Zetas, in the northern
districts bordering the U.S. in order to minimize dependency on Iranian funding.
In an article titled “Hezbollah’s Cocaine Jihad,” Ynetnews writes:
Western intelligence agencies have been able to gather
ample evidence suggesting that the drug
cartels in Mexico—which are the de facto rulers of the northern districts bordering the U.S.—are in cahoots with Islamic
terror organizations, which are eager to execute attacks against American, Israeli, Jewish and western targets; but most of
all, the Islamic terror groups are eager to make money, so they can fund their nefarious aspirations.
Hezbollah is helping the cartels in weapons and explosives production. The terror entity is also
training drug lords to build elaborate tunnels under the U.S.-Mexico border, much akin to the maze of tunnels running
under the Gaza-Egypt border. These tunnels would be mutually beneficial to both syndicates. The cartels
would use them to smuggle humans, drugs and weapons, and Hezbollah would use them for its
own terrorist activities in the United States. In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security caught wind of an al
Qaeda recruiter’s boasts of the ease with which these tunnels could be used to bring terror to the U.S. on a scale that
would “make 9/11 look like peanuts.”
And heg
Leverett, 11/10/13 - senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. and a
professor at the Pennsylvania State University School of International Affairs (Flynt, “Nuclear
Negotiations and America’s Moment of Truth About Iran”
http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/?q=node/13358)
America’s Iran policy is at a crossroads. Washington can abandon its counterproductive
insistence on Middle Eastern hegemony, negotiate a nuclear deal grounded in the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT), and get serious about working with Tehran to broker a settlement to
the Syrian conflict. In the process, the United States would greatly improve its ability to shape
important outcomes there. Alternatively, America can continue on its present path, leading
ultimately to strategic irrelevance in one of the world’s most vital regions—with negative
implications for its standing in Asia as well.
U.S. policy is at this juncture because the costs of Washington’s post-Cold War drive to
dominate the Middle East have risen perilously high. President Obama’s self-inflicted debacle
over his plan to attack Syria after chemical weapons were used there in August showed that
America can no longer credibly threaten the effective use of force to impose its preferences in
the region. While Obama still insists “all options are on the table” for Iran, the reality is that, if
Washington is to deal efficaciously with the nuclear issue, it will be through diplomacy.
In this context, last month’s Geneva meeting between Iran and the P5+1 brought America’s
political class to a strategic and political moment of truth. Can American elites turn away from a
self-damaging quest for Middle Eastern hegemony by coming to terms with an independent
regional power? Or are they so enthralled with an increasingly surreal notion of America as
hegemon that, to preserve U.S. “leadership,” they will pursue a course further eviscerating its
strategic position?
The proposal for resolving the nuclear issue that Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, presented
in Geneva seeks answers to these questions. It operationalizes the approach advocated by
Hassan Rohani and other Iranian leaders for over a decade: greater transparency on Iran’s
nuclear activities in return for recognizing its rights as a sovereign NPT signatory—especially to
enrich uranium under international safeguards—and removal of sanctions. For years, the Bush
and Obama administrations rejected this approach. Now Obama must at least consider it.
The Iranian package provides greater transparency on Tehran’s nuclear activities in two crucial
respects. First, it gives greater visibility on the conduct of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran has
reportedly offered to comply voluntarily for some months with the Additional Protocol (AP) to
the NPT—which it has signed but not yet ratified and which authorizes more proactive and
intrusive inspections—to encourage diplomatic progress. Tehran would ratify the AP—thereby
committing to its permanent implementation—as part of a final deal.
Second, the package aims to validate Iran’s declarations that its enrichment infrastructure is not
meant to produce weapons-grade fissile material. Iran would stop enriching at the near-20
percent level of fissile-isotope purity needed to fuel the Tehran Research Reactor and cap
enrichment at levels suitable for fueling power reactors. Similarly, Iran is open to capping the
number of centrifuges it would install—at least for some years—at its enrichment sites in Natanz
and Fordo.
Based on conversations with Iranian officials and political figures in New York in September
(during Rohani and Zarif’s visit to the UN General Assembly) and in Tehran last month, it is also
possible to identify items that the Iranian proposal almost certainly does not include. Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei has reportedly given President Rohani and his diplomats
flexibility in negotiating a settlement—but he has also directed that they not compromise Iran’s
sovereignty. Thus, the Islamic Republic will not acquiesce to American (and Israeli) demands to
suspend enrichment, shut its enrichment site at Fordo, stop a heavy-water reactor under
construction at Arak, and ship its current enriched uranium stockpile abroad.
On one level, the Iranian package is crafted to resolve the nuclear issue based on the NPT,
within a year. Iran’s nuclear rights would be respected; transparency measures would reduce the
proliferation risks of its enrichment activities below what Washington tolerates elsewhere. On
another level, though, the package means to test America’s willingness and capability to resolve
the issue on this basis. It tests this not just for Tehran’s edification, but also for that of other
P5+1 states, especially China and Russia, and of rising powers like India and South Korea.
America can fail the Iranian test in two ways. First, the Obama administration—reflecting
America’s political class more broadly—may prove unwilling to acknowledge Iran’s nuclear
rights in a straightforward way, insisting on terms for a deal that effectively suborn these rights
and violate Iranian sovereignty.
There are powerful constituencies—e.g., the Israel lobby, neoconservative Republicans, their
Democratic “fellow travelers,” and U.S.-based Iran “experts”—that oppose any deal recognizing
Iran’s nuclear rights. They understand that acknowledging these rights would also mean
accepting the Islamic Republic as an enduring entity representing legitimate national interests;
to do so, America would have to abandon its post-Cold War pretensions to Middle Eastern
hegemony.
Those pretensions have proven dangerously corrosive of America’s ability to accomplish
important objectives in the Middle East, and of its global standing. Just witness the profoundly
self-damaging consequences of America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, and how badly the
“global war on terror” has eviscerated the perceived legitimacy of American purposes in the
Muslim world.
But, as the drama over Obama’s call for military action against Syria indicates, America’s
political class remains deeply attached to imperial pretense—even as the American public turns
away from it. If Washington could accept the Islamic Republic as a legitimate regional power, it
could work with Tehran and others on a political solution to the Syrian conflict. Instead,
Washington reiterates hubristic demands that President Bashar al-Assad step down before a
political process starts, and relies on a Saudi-funded “Syrian opposition” increasingly dominated
by al-Qa’ida-like extremists.
If Obama does not conclude a deal recognizing Iran’s nuclear rights, it will confirm suspicions
already held by many Iranian elites—including Ayatollah Khamenei—and in Beijing and Moscow
about America’s real agenda vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic. It will become undeniably clear that
U.S. opposition to indigenous Iranian enrichment is not motivated by proliferation concerns,
but by determination to preserve American hegemony—and Israeli military dominance—in the
Middle East. If this is so, why should China, Russia, or rising Asian powers continue trying to
help Washington—e.g., by accommodating U.S. demands to limit their own commercial
interactions with Iran—obtain an outcome it does not actually want?
Iranian prolif causes nuclear war
Edelman, 11 - Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments; he was U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
in 2005-9 (Eric, “The Dangers of a Nuclear Iran,” Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb, proquest)
The reports of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States and the Commission on the Prevention ofWeapons of Mass
Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, as well as other analyses, have highlighted the risk that a nuclear-armed
Iran could trigger
additional nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, even if Israel does not declare its own nuclear arsenal. Notably,
Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates- all signatories to the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (npt)-have recently announced or initiated nuclear energy programs. Although some of these
states have legitimate economic rationales for pursuing nuclear power and although the low-enriched fuel used for power reactors cannot be used in
nuclear weapons, these moves have been widely interpreted as hedges against a nuclear-armed Iran. The
npt does not bar states from developing the sensitive technology required to produce nuclear fuel on their own, that is, the capability to enrich natural
uranium and separate plutonium from spent nuclear fuel.Yet enrichment and reprocessing can also be used to accumulate weapons-grade enriched
uranium and plutonium-the very loophole that Iran has apparently exploited in pursuing a nuclear weapons capability. Developing nuclear weapons
remains a slow, expensive, and difficult process, even for states with considerable economic resources, and especially if other nations try to constrain
aspiring nuclear states' access to critical materials and technology. Without external support, it is unlikely that any of these aspirants could develop a
nuclear weapons capability within a decade. There is, however, at least one state that could receive significant outside support: Saudi Arabia. And if it
did, proliferation could accelerate throughout the region. Iran and Saudi Arabia have long been geopolitical and ideological rivals. Riyadh would face
tremendous pressure to respond in some form to a nuclear-armed Iran, not only to deter Iranian coercion and subversion but also to preserve its sense
that Saudi Arabia is the leading nation in the Muslim world. The
Saudi government is already pursuing a nuclear power capability, which
its
progress by exploiting its close ties to Pakistan. During the 1980s, in response to the use of missiles during the Iran-Iraq War
could be the first step along a slow road to nuclear weapons development. And concerns persist that it might be able to accelerate
and their growing proliferation throughout the region, Saudi Arabia acquired several dozen css-2 intermediate-range ballistic missiles from China. The
Pakistani government reportedly brokered the deal, and it may have also offered to sell Saudi Arabia nuclear warheads for the css-2s, which are not
accurate enough to deliver conventional warheads effectively. There are still rumors that Riyadh and Islamabad have had discussions involving nuclear
weapons, nuclear technology, or security guarantees. This "Islamabad option" could develop in one of several different ways. Pakistan could sell
operational nuclear weapons and delivery systems to Saudi Arabia, or it could provide the Saudis with the infrastructure, material, and technical
support they need to produce nuclear weapons themselves within a matter of years, as opposed to a decade or longer.Not only has Pakistan provided
such support in the past, but it is currently building two more heavy-water reactors for plutonium production and a second chemical reprocessing
facility to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. In other words, it might accumulate more fissile material than it needs to maintain even a
substantially expanded arsenal of its own. Alternatively, Pakistan might offer an extended deterrent guarantee to Saudi Arabia and deploy nuclear
weapons, delivery systems, and troops on Saudi territory, a practice that the United States has employed for decades with its allies. This arrangement
could be particularly appealing to both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It would allow the Saudis to argue that they are not violating the npt since they
would not be acquiring their own nuclear weapons. And an extended deterrent from Pakistan might be preferable to one from the United States
because stationing foreign Muslim forces on Saudi territory would not trigger the kind of popular opposition that would accompany the deployment of
U.S. troops. Pakistan, for its part, would gain financial benefits and international clout by deploying nuclear weapons in Saudi Arabia, as well as
strategic depth against its chief rival, India. The Islamabad option raises a host of difficult issues, perhaps the most worrisome being how India
would respond. Would it target Pakistan's weapons in Saudi Arabia with its own conventional or nuclear
weapons? How would this expanded nuclear competition influence stability during a crisis in either the Middle East or South Asia? Regardless of
India's reaction, any decision by the Saudi government to seek out nuclear weapons, by whatever means, would be
highly destabilizing. It would increase the incentives of other nations in the Middle East to pursue nuclear weapons of their own. And it
could increase their ability to do so by eroding the remaining barriers to nuclear proliferation: each additional state that acquires nuclear weapons
weakens the nonproliferation regime, even if its particular method of acquisition only circumvents, rather than violates, the npt. N-PLAYER
COMPETITION Were Saudi Arabia to acquire nuclear weapons, the Middle East would count three nuclear-armed states, and perhaps more before
long. It is unclear how such an n-player competition would unfold because most analyses
of nuclear deterrence are based on
the U.S.- Soviet rivalry during the Cold War. It seems likely, however, that the interaction among three or more
nuclear-armed powers would be more prone to miscalculation and escalation than a bipolar
competition. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union only needed to concern themselves with an attack from the other.
Multipolar systems are generally considered to be less stable than bipolar systems because coalitions can shift quickly,
upsetting the balance of power and creating incentives for an attack.
More important, emerging nuclear powers in the Middle East might not take the costly steps necessary to preserve regional stability and avoid a nuclear
exchange. For nuclear-armed states, the bedrock of deterrence is the knowledge that each side has a secure second-strike capability, so that no state can
launch an attack with the expectation that it can wipe out its opponents' forces and avoid a devastating retaliation. However, emerging nuclear powers
might not invest in expensive but survivable capabilities such as hardened missile silos or submarinebased nuclear forces. Given this likely
vulnerability, the close
proximity of states in the Middle East, and the very short flight times of ballistic missiles in the region, any
new nuclear powers might be compelled to "launch on warning" of an attack or even, during a crisis, to use their
nuclear forces preemptively. Their governments might also delegate launch authority to lower-level
commanders, heightening the possibility of miscalculation and escalation. Moreover, if early warning systems
were not integrated into robust command-and-control systems, the risk of an unauthorized or accidental launch would increase further still. And
without sophisticated early warning systems, a nuclear attack might be unattributable or
attributed incorrectly. That is, assuming that the leadership of a targeted state survived a first strike, it might not be able to accurately
determine which nation was responsible. And this uncertainty, when combined with the pressure to respond
quickly, would create a significant risk that it would retaliate against the wrong party, potentially
triggering a regional nuclear war.
UNIQUENESS
Extend Slavin—Obama’s consulting Congress extensively and holding off new
sanctions so talks can progress—he will veto anny spoilers but PC is key to prevent
override or a breakdown of talks. Current pressure is sufficient but reversible—
Beauchamp explicitly says the effort will require capital from other issues. If his
efforts falter from getting bogged down in new battles, he won’t be able to prevent
sabotage.
Short term deal coming because of Obama pressure
Blair & Foster, 11/15/14 (David & Peter, “Final effort in US-Iran nuclear talks could settle 35
years of enmity and help defuse Middle East; Diplomats meet on Tuesday seeking a
comprehensive agreement to ensure Iran never produces the ultimate weapon – though Barack
Obama could still expect a fierce battle over the issue with both houses of Congress,”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/11233120/Final-effort-in-USIran-nuclear-talks-could-settle-35-years-of-enmity-and-help-defuse-Middle-East.html, JMP)
Even if America succeeds in reaching a viable deal, President Barack Obama
could still expect a fierce battle over
the issue with both houses of Congress, which fell to Republican control earlier this month.
Any agreement would require the US to lift sanctions in return for Iran dismantling much of its nuclear programme. But some
Republicans have promised to block a deal that leaves Iran with any centrifuges at all – even the
2,000 to 4,000 that experts believe are consistent with a one-year "breakout" to the essential material for a nuclear weapon.
Senators Robert Menendez, a Democrat, and Mark Kirk, a Republican, issued a joint statement saying that a good agreement "will
dismantle, not just stall" Iran's nuclear capabilities.
"This will require stringent limits on nuclear-related research, development and procurement, coming clean on all possible military
dimensions issues and a robust inspection and verification regime for decades to prevent Iran from breaking-out," they said.
Faced with this opposition, Mr Obama may opt to lift sanctions on Iran unilaterally, using his presidential waiver, rather than risk a
vote in Congress.
In a leaked tape recording, Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, said the White House was assessing how to "structure a
deal so we don't necessarily require legislative action right away".
Mr Rhodes reportedly added that he was confident there "were ways to do that".
But a senior Congressional aide told the Telegraph that Congressmen were already planning how to thwart this scheme by altering
Mr Obama's waiver powers.
Republicans will also fight any attempt by Mr Obama to proceed with an Iran deal without
Congressional consent. Senator Bob Corker, the presumed next chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, promised
new legislation to ensure that any nuclear agreement with Iran is ratified in some way by Congress.
"There will be a desire very quickly after the first of the year for Congress to weigh in on the
topic," said Senator Corker. "Whether it's ensuring, you know, that Congress has a vote in final outcome or some other
way, my sense is that there'll be a move pretty quickly to speak to that legislatively."
But senior Republican Congressional aides expect the White House to move swiftly
to sell any Iran deal before the new Congress assembles in January. This will increase
the pressure on Mr Obama's negotiators to reach an agreement in Vienna this week.
"The mid-term elections have created a new dynamic for the administration, increasing the
urgency for a deal for the White House to keep the high ground," said one senior
Republican aide closely involved in the Iran issue. "Then they can use the bully pulpit and
try to claim that the Republican Congress wants to take us to war when they have just achieved
'peace in our time'."
Sufficient PC now but margin is narrowing—Corker still cooperating
Collinson, 11/12/14 (Stephen, “Will Congress kill an Iran nuclear deal?”
http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/12/politics/iran-congress/, JMP)
Washington (CNN) -- Republicans poised to take control of Congress are already threatening
to kill what could turn out
to be President Barack Obama's most significant second-term achievement: a nuclear deal with Iran.
U.S. and Iranian negotiators are quickly approaching a Nov. 24 deadline to reach an agreement that would freeze Iran's nuclear
program in return for lifting international sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Hopes for a deal have been rising, though Obama
cautioned this weekend a "big gap" remains between the two sides and there are powerful constituencies in each country angling
against an agreement.
In the U.S., Republicans -- long skeptical of the talks -- are increasingly furious that Obama might
sideline Congress to finalize an accord. They're especially angry that the administration might make such a move after
last week's midterm elections gave the GOP -- dominated by foreign policy hard-liners -- firm control of the House and Senate.
"Like North Korea in the 1990s, Iran will use a weak deal as cover to get nuclear weapons," said Illinois Republican Sen. Mark Kirk, a
prominent skeptic of the negotiations.
Given the opposition, the Obama administration is believed to favor a framework agreement that, at
least initially, would not require Congress to lift sanctions. Instead, the President would
temporarily "suspend" them.
The personal stakes for Obama are immense as he seeks to restore his footing following last week's election drubbing. A deal would
elevate his legacy, which lacks a defining foreign policy triumph, and validate his vow to talk to leaders of U.S. enemies first made in
a CNN campaign debate seven years ago.
It would also mark a stunning diplomatic breakthrough after 35 years of estrangement between Washington and Tehran and
represent a major advance on one of the world's thorniest non-proliferation problems.
Some of the president's critics doubtless sense a chance to deny Obama a diplomatic win.
Concerns about deal
But others, including some Democrats, worry that Obama is being hoodwinked by Iran. They fear the mullahs will pocket sanctions
relief and then cheat their way to a nuclear bomb.
Republicans could respond to what they see as a "bad" deal by seeking to impose new sanctions
or drawing up punitive oversight benchmarks for Iranian compliance.
That could so sour already tenuous confidence between Washington and Tehran that the deal
could crumble.
South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham said this weekend that he would back a "good" Iran deal but would "kill" any agreement
that he found problematic.
On Thursday, Graham will try to bring up a bill in the Senate that would require Obama to submit any agreement to Congress within
three days for review. If he refuses, or if lawmakers vote to show their disapproval of the deal, funding for its implementation would
be cutoff.
And Kirk has already pledged to mobilize the new Senate behind legislation he wrote with Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez which
would target Iran's oil industry with sanctions and provide a "diplomatic insurance policy" he says would result in a "strong deal" to
reverse Tehran's nuclear program.
Some Obama opponents on Capitol Hill reject the idea they are opposed to any deal and say an agreement is possible that would
address their concerns. But they complain the White House has not worked with lawmakers to arrive at the best combination of
carrots and sticks in the talks. They contend that a bad deal is now more likely because the administration has been too eager to
make concessions to Iran.
The White House declined to discuss its tactics. But the administration has long warned that new sanctions would upend its
diplomacy and it denies
Veto
accusations that Obama plans to go around Congress.
Obama would be sure veto any legislation that could threaten the agreement.
But Republicans could draw on skeptical Democrats to get closer to a veto proof majority of 67
Senate votes.
An official with a prominent pro-Israel policy group in Washington added: "It is not a question of doing the math. The precise
change is in the leader's office. That now enables sanctions legislation to move forward."
But other sources doubt that if it really came to it, there would be enough Democrats to
challenge the president's veto and risk being accused of trashing a deal the rest of the world has
embraced. But they admit the numbers are tightening.
Jim Walsh, a research associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who is an expert on
Iranian nuclear diplomacy, predicted a fierce political battle.
"There will definitely be a fight. It will be a hard fight, but I think it will be a fight that the
president can win because the consequences of failure are high," he said.
The White House has already won one skirmish over Iran.
Last year, critics sought to derail an interim nuclear deal, but failed largely because Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid
blocked sanctions bills.
Republican Senate
Obama will not have that safety net in the new Republican Senate which convenes in January and backers of an agreement fear even
the threat of tougher action.
Dylan Williams, director of Government Affairs for J Street, a left-leaning pro-Israel group said new
sanctions would "guarantee" a fracturing of the international coalition against Iran.
Even if opponents fail to overcome a veto, Congress could still stir up the kind of trouble that could embolden hardline opponents of
President Hassan Rouhani who argue Washington can never be trusted to stick to its commitments.
And a deal could not survive as "temporary" forever -- eventually Congress would have to act.
"It is clear there is a significant problem," said Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council, which advocates
dialogue between Washington and Tehran. "At the end of the day, the president needs to lift sanctions through Congress in order to
make a deal possible."
The politics on Iran are getting trickier for Obama by the day.
Republicans are outraged at reports last week that he wrote to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, days before the Ayatollah
issued a barrage of tweets slamming the "barbaric, wolflike and infanticidal regime" in Israel.
Meanwhile, a report by the UN's nuclear watchdog body last week suggested Tehran may have violated an interim nuclear deal by
feeding natural uranium gas into one of its centrifuges. Iran was also accused of blocking existing inspections to its nuclear plants.
Political hardball
The White House has already shown it is ready to play political hardball over Iran,
warning last year that anyone who opposes the deal is effectively backing a march to war with
Iran.
Obama is also at odds over Iran with Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who views the prospect of an Iranian bomb as an
existential threat to the Jewish state. Netanyahu warned in a video address to Jewish Federations leaders on Tuesday that it was
obvious Iran wanted to remove sanctions and it should be "equally obvious" that it is not prepared to dismantle its nuclear program
in return.
The White House argues Israel's demand for a complete dismantling of Iran's nuclear infrastructure is impractical. Instead, it wants
the deal between the permanent five members of the UN Security Council, Germany and Iran to lengthen the period of time it would
take Tehran to dash towards a bomb.
"We will not let Iran get a nuclear weapon. Period. We mean it," Vice President Joe Biden said in Washington Monday as negotiators
from Iran, the US and Europe toiled in Oman to bridge gaps on a deal ahead of a final round of talks in Vienna next week.
Several key players could determine how the row over an Iran deal plays out on Capitol Hill.
Incoming Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, has voiced
skepticism about Obama's Iran diplomacy but has been more pragmatic than other critics on
sanctions.
He hates the plan
Belville, producer of The NORML Network, quoting an email from Senator Corker, 09
(1/30/2009, “Radical” Russ Belville, “Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) on Marijuana Law Reform,”
http://stash.norml.org/sen-bob-corker-r-tn-on-marijuana-law-reform,”
By "Radical" Russ Belville on January 30, 2009
Thank you for taking the time to contact my office about H.R. 5842, the Medical Marijuana
Patient Protection Act. Your input is important to me, and I appreciate the time you took to
share your thoughts.
I appreciate you bringing this situation to my attention, and I agree with you that a person
should not be denied access to needed medical care for legally following their doctor’s advice.
The Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act and Hinchey-Rohrabacher amendment are
currently in the House of Representatives and have not been introduced in the Senate; however,
I do not support the legalization of marijuana or any legislation that declassifies it
as a Schedule I drug.
Thank you again for your letter. I hope you will continue to share your thoughts with me.
Sincerely,
Bob Corker
United States Senator
So, let me get this straight, senator. You agree that a person should not be denied marijuana
recommended by a doctor for medicinal use, but you wouldn’t change the federal scheduling
that says marijuana has no medicinal use and doctors can’t recommend it.
Lawmakers are adopting a wait-and-see approach for now, but a deteriorating
balance causes veto override
Pecquet, 11/13/14 --Al-Monitor's Congressional Correspondent, he previously led The Hill's
Global Affairs blog (Julian, “Returning Congress gives Iran a pass — for now,” http://www.almonitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/11/congress-iran-pass.html, JMP)
Key US lawmakers are adopting a wait-and-see approach to new sanctions on Iran, buoying
nuclear deal advocates' hopes that the nuclear talks may yet survive the Republicans'
midterm victory.
In a joint Nov. 12 statement, the bipartisan architects of pending sanctions legislation indicated
that they would wait to see what a "potential deal" looks like before acting. In addition, the
chairman-in-waiting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., appears
open to a further extension of the talks past the Nov. 24 deadline, as seems increasingly likely.
"Why don't we wait until the 24th to start talking about alternatives," Corker told Al-Monitor and a handful of other reporters Nov.
12. "Let's see what actually occurs over the course of the next couple weeks."
"If there's no extension and no deal, absolutely you would want to add sanctions. [But] I would find it difficult to believe at this
moment that there will just be a walkaway from the table on the 24th. My sense is that there will be either an
extension or a deal, and if that's the case, we can weigh what that extension says," Corker stated.
"Always, I want to see what a document says [before acting]."
Corker's comments followed similar signals from current committee chairman Robert Menendez,
D-N.J., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., whose sanctions bill has garnered 60 co-sponsors but has been blocked from
coming to the floor all year by outgoing Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
"As co-authors of bipartisan sanctions laws that compelled Iran to the negotiating table, we believe that a good deal will dismantle,
not just stall, Iran’s illicit nuclear program and prevent Iran from ever becoming a threshold nuclear weapons state," they wrote.
"This will require stringent limits on nuclear-related research, development and procurement, coming clean on all possible military
dimensions (PMD) issues and a robust inspection and verification regime for decades to prevent Iran from breaking-out or covertly
sneaking-out. Gradual sanctions relaxation would only occur if Iran strictly complied with all parts of the agreement. If a potential
deal does not achieve these goals, we will work with our colleagues in Congress to act decisively, as we have in the past.”
Despite the statement's hawkish tone, deal advocates took solace from its commitment to let the
current round of talks run its course.
"This statement is bad news for those pushing for pre-Nov 24 deadline movement on Iran bills," tweeted Dylan Williams, director of
government affairs for the liberal, pro-Israel group J-Street. Williams later told Al-Monitor via e-mail that he thought the statement,
which makes no mention of zero enrichment, "left the door open pretty wide to domestic enrichment."
Others thought, or hoped, they saw a hint of daylight between Menendez and Kirk.
"The statement is somewhat vague, but the [insistence] on dismantlement continues to put Kirk and Menendez in the camp of those
pushing for unrealistic demands that can scuttle the deal," wrote Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council in an email to
Al-Monitor. "But the statement is at times contradictory, calling for dismantlement on the one hand and then a new emphasis on
inspections and verification on the other. If anything, it seems to indicate that Kirk and Menendez have a harder time putting
themselves on the same page."
Still, Republicans, and many Democrats, remain adamant that they won't hesitate to slap new
sanctions on Iran if diplomats negotiate what they consider a "bad deal." President Barack Obama
has vowed to veto such legislation while talks continue, which would require a two-thirds
majority in the House and Senate to overrule, but passed up a chance to further normalize relations with Iran and
renewed a decades-old "national emergency" on Nov. 12.
THUMPERS
Two framing issues –
First – if they don’t involve Obama’s direct lobbying they aren’t relevant – they
have no ev that says Obama is spending capital on them
Second – the thumpers are already priced in to Obama’s political planning – only
the plan is a bolt from the blue that forces him to reorganize his priorities
Punting Lynch confirmation proves Obama and Dems are trying to reset with GOP
--plan uniquely drives a wedge
Raju, 11/11/14 (Manu, “Loretta Lynch hearings likely to wait,”
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/loretta-lynch-hearing-wait-112779.html?hp=rc1_4,
JMP)
Senate Democrats appear increasingly likely to punt confirmation proceedings for attorney
general nominee Loretta Lynch into next year, a move that would appease Republicans
who want the fight to wait until they hold the majority.
Senior Senate Democratic and White House aides say they are reluctant to provoke a
process fight with the newly empowered Republicans. No final decision has been made, but
several Democrats privately believe that there might not be enough time to confirm Lynch in the
lame-duck session, anyway.
While Lynch has yet to be thoroughly vetted for the job, her nomination has not provoked a
major outcry from Republicans, a sign she still stands a strong shot at being approved even in a
GOP-led Senate — unless she trips up during her confirmation hearings.
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee that
will consider the nomination, is not making Lynch’s confirmation his top priority in the
remainder of the year. Instead, Leahy is pushing hard to enact the USA Freedom Act, a sweeping
overhaul of domestic surveillance programs that proponents fear would die next year if it
doesn’t pass while Democrats control the Senate.
Added to the hurdles: The White House has yet to formally send over the papers associated with
the Lynch nomination, meaning the bureaucratic work of considering the nomination has yet to
begin in earnest, let alone the nominee’s own one-on-one meetings with senators.
With limited time to act this Congress, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) appears
more eager to enact a must-pass omnibus spending bill, a defense policy measure and scores of
President Barack Obama’s executive and judicial nominations that have long been awaiting
action.
One Democratic leadership aide said Reid’s approach will be “pretty deferential” to
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who will be able to dictate the chamber’s agenda
starting in January. In addition to potentially holding off on Lynch, the aide said, Reid also will
open up the amendment process on the defense policy bill and avoid blocking GOP votes by
“filling the tree,”a tactic Republicans have long complained about. (Reid wants Leahy to try to
attach his surveillance bill to the defense measure on the Senate floor.)
The White House has said it’s up to the Senate leadership to decide when to process the
nomination — so the decision on when to vote would be Reid’s and Leahy’s alone. If Senate
Democrats were to move on the nomination in the lame-duck session, they would be blamed by
the GOP — and potentially the White House — for single-handedly invoking a partisan fight.
Right now, there doesn’t seem to be “the stomach” for a partisan fight over Lynch after
Democrats were shellacked at the polls last week, one aide said. Administration officials are
eager for Lynch to be confirmed by a strong bipartisan majority, and some Democrats believe
those prospects, ironically, improve in a GOP Senate.
And, the GOP has an incentive to avoid near term fights – current lame duck
drama will be contained
Sherman, 11/5/14 (Jake, Politico, “Senate flips, Republicans ready to rule”
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/2014-elections-senate-republicans-112545.html?hp=f1)
Before the election, top-level Republican aides and lawmakers described the strategy they hoped
would let them notch some early victories before the presidential election season is in full swing
in the second half of 2015 — a play by Boehner and other leaders to quickly shift away from
crisis governing and toward a positive agenda.
Legislating won’t begin until after Thanksgiving. Both parties intend to spend the weeks
immediately after election organizing for the new partisan makeup of Washington. Capitol Hill
will burst back into action by Dec. 1, and that’s when serious lawmaking could break out.
Republicans are desperate to avoid fiscal fights in the first half of 2015, which is why they will
try to use the first few weeks in December to pass a long-term spending bill to keep the
government open through most of the next year. Funding runs dry Dec. 11, as does the authority
for President Barack Obama’s administration to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels in their
fight against the Islamic State. That provision could complicate the calculus for lawmakers’
hopes for a drama-free spending bill.
Congress will also try to clear a host of lapsed tailored business tax provisions and renew a
government-backed program that helps insurance companies protect against terrorist attacks.
And depending on the result of the Senate, Democrats may push to confirm a new attorney
general in the waning months of 2014 with Eric Holder’s impending retirement.
The hope is that this spate of legislating will clear the calendar for the first half of 2015, so
Congress can pass a long-term highway and infrastructure bill, lift the debt limit and pass a
budget. With two chambers of Congress under GOP control, the budget process could give the
party its best chance to alter Obamacare, particularly if Senate Republicans try to use budget
reconciliation, which requires just 51 votes. Congress will also try to fix the Sustainable Growth
Rate, a pricey formula by which the government reimburses doctors who treat Medicare
patients.
One wild card is GOP Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, who have together vowed
to stymie any legislation considered non-essential during the lame duck period.
Senior aides caution that anything – or everything – can change. But it’s certain that this lameduck session will not include action on big items like immigration reform, tax reform or a largescale fiscal deal.
LINK—MARIJUANA
Federal legalization is suicide
Nagourney, 14 (4/5/2014, Adam, “Despite Support in Party, Democratic Governors Resist
Legalizing Marijuana,” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/us/politics/despite-support-inparty-democratic-governors-resist-legalizing-marijuana.html?_r=0, JMP)
Even with Democrats and younger voters leading the wave of the pro-legalization shift, these
governors are standing back, supporting much more limited medical-marijuana proposals or
invoking the kind of law-and-order and public-health arguments more commonly heard from
Republicans. While 17 more states — most of them leaning Democratic — have seen bills introduced this
year to follow Colorado and Washington in approving recreational marijuana, no sitting
governor or member of the Senate has offered a full-out endorsement of legalization. Only Gov. Peter
Shumlin, a Democrat in Vermont, which is struggling with a heroin problem, said he was open to the idea.
“Quite frankly, I don’t think we are ready, or want to go down that road,” Dannel P. Malloy, the Democratic governor of Connecticut,
which has legalized medical marijuana and decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana, said in an interview. “Perhaps
the best way to handle this is to watch those experiments that are underway. I don’t think it’s necessary, and I don’t think it’s
appropriate.”
The hesitance expressed by these governors reflects not only governing concerns but also, several analysts said, a
historically rooted political wariness of being portrayed as soft on crime by Republicans. In
particular, Mr. Brown, who is 75, lived through the culture wars of the 1960s, when Democrats suffered from being seen as
permissive on issues like this.
“Either they don’t care about it as passionately or they feel embarrassed or vulnerable. They fear the judgment,” said
Ethan Nadelmann,
the founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization that favors decriminalization of
fear of being soft on drugs, soft on marijuana, soft on crime is woven into the DNA
of American politicians, especially Democrats.”
He described that sentiment as, “Do not let yourself be outflanked by Republicans when it
comes to being tough on crime and tough on drugs. You will lose.”
marijuana. “The
The plan’s a political landmine and a waste of political capital
Sullivan, 12—Andrew, one of the most widely syndicated columnists in the USA, “The Silent
Stoner President, Ctd,” The Dish, http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2012/11/27/the-silentstoner-president-ctd/ -- BR
That old footage you showed of Obama speaking in favor of decriminalization in 2004 reminded me of one of the
weirdest Obama videos I've ever seen. It's from the summer of 2007 when he was running for president and
in it someone on a rope line in New Hampshire asked what his stance was regarding medical marijuana. You
can tell right away from Obama's body language that he really doesn't want to answer this
question, presumably because he thinks it's a political landmine. Then the oddest thing
happens, and I had to watch it a few times to make sure that I was seeing what I thought I was
seeing. You can see Reggie Love in the background apparently listening to an earpiece, which
I'm assuming must be radioed directly to somebody like Gibbs or Axelrod or some other adviser.
Reggie hears something in the earpiece and suddenly has to get Obama's attention in the middle
of this guy's question and not-so-smoothly transfers the ear piece to Obama, who then pauses,
and after a few beats apparently parrots back the stock answer coming to him in his ear. Obama's
response was that the Feds cracking down on state medical marijuana operations wouldn't be a worthwhile use of federal resources.
But never mind the answer, which didn't seem like his own. To me, it was one of those rare times where you see the
politically calculated side rather than the casual authenticity that usually comes across in him,
and the sense I got was that whatever Obama's actual position on marijuana is, he's not about to
let that be the issue that he wastes political capital on. That's not going to be the issue that prevents him from
becoming president and fixing everything else that he cares more about. As a big Obama supporter back in the summer of '07, I
wouldn't have dared point out this video before Obama won the Democratic primaries, the election in 2008, or the recent reelection,
but now that we're on the other side of all three, I couldn't help but pass along the footage. Above is some footage closer to the real
Obama.
Legalization wrecks Obama’s capital --- undermines rest of agenda
Raffin, 9 --- Editor in Chief at The Stanford Progressive (May 2009, Ross, “Legalizing
Marijuana the Federalist Way,” http://progressive.stanford.edu/cgibin/article.php?article_id=339)
Many advocates of legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana feel Obama has abandoned them.
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is a consistent warrior against decriminalization.
Attorney General Eric Holder has a history of opposing drug policy reforms and considers the
adult use of marijuana equivalent to public nuisance. Even Joe Biden, when asked about pain
management and medical cannabis, responded that “there's got to be a better answer than
marijuana.” But the reality is that the Obama administration has turned the tides in favor of
legalization and decriminalization in a much stronger and subtler way than open rhetorical
endorsements.
Optimism for drug reform began when Obama ended federal raids on cannabis dispensaries in
states which allow medical marijuana. What marijuana advocates fail to realize is that with this
the Obama administration initiated a small but extremely important step towards legalization.
More importantly, it has done so in a way to insulate itself from Republican attacks and
attempts to distract the public.
At the heart of the marijuana debate is federalism, the separation of state and national
governmental power. For most of America's history, marijuana was treated as a crop subject to
state regulation. However, the national government justified regulating marijuana through a
variety of means, mainly the Commerce Clause of the Constitution which gives Congress power
to regulate inter-state trade. This line of reasoning was forcefully used by the John Ashcroft in
2001 to enforce federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries.
When a state legalizes marijuana, medical or otherwise, state law is in contradiction with federal
law. This grey area leads to very confusing legal proceedings. For instance, if a state patrolman
finds a medical marijuana patient in possession of marijuana, nothing happens. However, if a
federal officer found a medical marijuana patient in possession of the same amount of
marijuana, the federal officer can and usually will arrest the patient and prosecute under federal
law. This hypocrisy is at the base of the current trials going on against elderly medical marijuana
patients.
The Obama administration drastically changed this dynamic with just a slight alteration of
criteria for federal intervention with marijuana dispensaries. Eric Holder announced that the
federal government will no longer pursue medical marijuana dispensaries or patients unless
they violate both federal and state laws. In the case of California, because medical marijuana is
legal, federal intervention is no longer allowed in cases where California's medical marijuana
laws are not broken. Thus, if California were to fully legalize marijuana, under current policy the
federal government would not intervene.
This leaves Republicans in a very tough spot. Small government is the bedrock foundation of the
party. However, if a “liberal” state legalizes marijuana, the only tool left to combat the
legalization of marijuana is for the federal government to extend power over state government.
Obama's actions cannot be criticized as an attempt to “deregulate” marijuana. Instead, it is a
triumph of state rights over federal intervention.
More importantly, any attempt to fight state legalization of marijuana through suit
automatically goes to the Supreme Court. This creates an opportunity to strike down previous
legislation criminalizing marijuana as opposed to having the Democrats introduce a bill on the
Senate floor to legalize pot
Consider the alternative strategy of legalizing marijuana on a national level first through Obama.
In the current political environment, the leading accusations against the president range from
terrorist to Marxist to illegal alien. Imagine the campaigns that could be waged if
Obama so much as hinted that he wants to legalize marijuana. Not only would there
be insinuations that Obama wants drugs for personal use, but inevitably racial dynamics and
stereotypes would enter discourse. It would be the ultimate redirect from the economy.
Instead of focusing on regulations and expenditures, emphasis would be on the president who is
destroying traditional American values with reefer.
If Obama or the Democrats proposed legalization, all the Republicans have to do is have several
governors or senators who refuse to implement the federal law. This would frame the argument
as Obama trying to extend the government's power to regulate what some consider the moral
fabric of society. With just a few rhetorical shuffles, Obama's proposal could be linked to general
monetary and budget extensions of power. This would be like the Republican's in the 30s
arguing against the New Deal as a whole by linking it with a government proposal to force states
to legalize prostitution.
The Obama administration's public hesitation towards marijuana legalization is not only
understandable but, considering the impact of the current economic legislation and programs
the administration is endorsing, the most pragmatic and efficient route for the moment.
Legalization and decriminalization advocates should focus efforts on state-wide legalization, not
nation-wide. If states are challenged in lawsuits, than the Supreme Court will be forced to rule
on whether legislation criminalizing marijuana should be struck down. This is preferable to the
executive putting forward a proposal to legalize marijuana from the top down. When Obama
tells the country that marijuana legalization is not the path he chooses for America, he means to
say that the path must first be drawn by us.
PC KEY
Our 1nc Beauchamp evidence slays their arg – lobbying Congress on Iran will
require all of Obama’s political capital and directly trades-off with other legislative
priorities.
It requires political capital to stave off Congress – otherwise the deal collapses
Winsor, 10/2/14 (Ben, “A Coalition Is Working Furiously Behind The Scenes To Support
Obama's Iran Talks,” http://www.businessinsider.com/rag-tag-iran-coalition-backingdiplomacy-2014-10, JMP)
Since November 2013, the Obama administration has engaged with Iran in tense, drawn-out
nuclear negotiations which optimists hope could bring an end to decades of hostility and
mistrust.
Throughout it all, Congress has threatened to play the spoiler, with a tough sanctions bill
passing the House and looming in the Senate which would almost certainly scuttle the fragile
talks over the Iranian nuclear program.
Now, as the deadline for the end of the talks approaches, a coalition of legislators, advocacy
groups, and White House officials are working to hold Congress back from the brink of
thwarting what they see as a historic window of opportunity. They're fighting against
legislators and conservative groups like The Heritage Foundation and The Free Enterprise
Institute who are pushing for the US to take a hawkish stance.
Legislators, led by Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, have been maneuvering quietly
behind the scenes in Congress to keep the talks alive. At the same time, officials from the
White House have been leaning heavily on Senate Democrats to refrain from
bringing a sanctions bill to the floor.
On the outside, a diverse range of pro-diplomacy groups, led by organisations like the National
Iranian American Council (NIAC) and the liberal Jewish organization J Street, have found a
common cause and rallied together to lobby for restraint. Even the Quakers are energized.
“This is a do-or-die moment, either we succeed, or we go in a much more negative direction,”
said NIAC co-founder Trita Parsi at the group’s annual conference last weekend.
Parsi sees the negotiations as a historic moment during a narrow window of opportunity.
Presidents on both sides have sunk significant time and energy into the talks and
Parsi believes the current leadership in both countries is more likely to make a deal than those
who came before — or might come after.
“The next president, whatever political party they’re in, is not going to spend precious political
capital battling Congress… [Obama] is the guy,” Parsi said.
Supporters fear that failure of the talks could trigger increased sanctions, the rise of hardliners
in Iran, and relations spiraling toward military confrontation.
Nuclear deal with Iran is a top priority --progress is being made but Obama must
sell Congress on the deal to prevent it from being undercut
Solomon & Lee, 10/23/14 (Jay Solomon And Carol E. Lee, The Wall Street Journal Online, “White House Seeks Support from
Allies, Congress for Potential Iran Deal; Late November Is the Deadline for Agreement,” Factiva, JMP)
WASHINGTON—The Obama administration is promoting a possible nuclear agreement with
Iran to allies, Congress and U.S. policy makers in an effort to win support ahead of a late
November deadline.
Significant divisions remain between Tehran and global powers in negotiations that seek to
constrain Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for an easing of Western sanctions, senior officials
stressed in interviews this week. But these officials also said important progress has been
made in recent talks in Vienna and New York.
The White House has subsequently decided to begin more aggressively outlining to various
partners the contours of a prospective deal with Tehran, and its potential merits, they said.
“This is a period of heightened activity. And it’s a chance to level-set people on where we are,”
said a senior U.S. official working on Iran. “There’s a stepped-up effort to show people what this
deal might look like.”
Among the administration’s point people in this effort is Undersecretary of State Wendy
Sherman, the U.S. chief nuclear negotiator with Iran. On Thursday, Ms. Sherman gave her most
expansive address on the status of the negotiations since taking her post and stressed the need
for Iran to seize on the diplomacy to end its international isolation.
“We have made impressive progress on issues that originally seemed intractable,” she told a
gathering at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “We
have cleared up misunderstandings and held exhaustive discussions on every element of a
possible text. However, like any complicated and technically complex diplomatic initiative, this
is a puzzle with many interlocking pieces.”
U.S., Iranian and European officials have said in recent weeks that the main barriers to a deal
remain focused on the future size of Tehran’s nuclear-fuel production capacity and the pace of
the potential lifting of Western sanctions in the case of an agreement.
The Obama administration initially demanded a complete dismantling of the nearly 20,000
centrifuges Iran has amassed to enrich uranium for the production of nuclear fuel. Tehran said
it would ultimately need up to at least five times that number to have enough fuel to power the
country’s reactors.
Iran denies it is seeking nuclear weapons and says its activities are for peaceful purposes only,
such as the production of energy.
Signs of a potential compromise have emerged in recent days with Iranian state media
reporting that Tehran and its negotiating partners, the five permanent members of the United
Nations Security Council along with Germany—a diplomatic bloc known as the P5-+1—focused
on a number of 4,000 centrifuges.
U.S. officials have neither confirmed nor denied the numbers. Outside experts said the
number could be acceptable to the P5+1 and to Congress because it would place
constraints on Iran’s ability to produce weapons-usable fuel.
“It’s not as simple as saying X-number of centrifuges, because it has to be taken as a whole
package,” said another senior U.S. official. “We’re looking at all of the ways that we can basically
block off any potential combination that they could think of how to get to a weapon.”
The White House’s outreach to Congress will be critical to sealing an agreement
with Iran. The issue of Congress’s role is a contentious one.
The White House is arguing that an agreement wouldn’t be a formal treaty, and, therefore,
wouldn’t require congressional approval. Leading U.S. lawmakers are threatening to
impose new sanctions if a deal isn’t seen as doing enough to roll back Tehran’s nuclear
capabilities.
Pro-Israel lawmakers have voiced concern and are demanding the White House seek
congressional approval to forge an agreement with Tehran.
“It’s tough to see a solid agreement when Congress—which was critical to putting in the strong
sanctions that got negotiators to this point—is so clearly sidelined,” said Rep. Ed Royce (R.,
Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Administration officials expect consultations to ramp up significantly in coming
weeks, as President Barack Obama tries to head off a confrontation over the easing of
sanctions—an issue that not only draws criticism from Republicans but also divides his own
Democratic Party.
The White House is looking at a deal that would have a probation period of sorts for Iran, where
sanctions would be in abeyance until Tehran has demonstrated its adherence to the terms of the
agreement over a set amount of time.
Only after that would sanctions be lifted. One senior administration official said that time period
is likely to be more than two years.
“There are going to be conditions on moving forward with this,” the second official said. “As part
of an overall comprehensive agreement, there will be a mix of legislative and executive actions,
but at what point those different actions come in we’re not in position to say because there’s no
deal.”
The U.S. is only looking at lifting nuclear-related sanctions, not others such as those related to
human rights concerns. But officials acknowledged that many of those sanctions are entwined,
making it difficult to separate out the nuclear-related ones.
Mr. Obama, for whom a nuclear deal with Iran is a top priority, is regularly briefed on the
talks, the senior administration official said. He is expected to become even more closely
involved as the deadline nears.
“We will need every single minute of the time through Nov. 24. The goal is to have an
agreement by then but it’s unclear whether that will come to pass,” a senior administration
official said.
AT: CROWDOUT TURN
Cassata’s over a year old – it’s about the last fight which means it doesn’t describe
the current docket
Doesn’t take out our link – fiat means the plan gets through so they still have time
to discuss sanctions. Also deosn’t assume the REACTION to the plan in which no
trust means Obama can’t get extension because they’ll sabotage immediately
Actually helps our link – they conceded they cause massive delays, probably a bad
thing
Economist, 11/1/14 (“We shall overcome, maybe; The chances of a deal with the West,”
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21628603-chances-deal-west-we-shallovercome-maybe, JMP)
Seen in this light, the nuclear negotiators have taken courageous steps. To get the talks going,
America conceded that in principle Iran could enrich nuclear fuel for civilian use. In return, Iran
froze its programme for the duration of the talks. Both sides appear committed to
reaching a deal. They recognise that this is a rare moment. For the first time since 1979 the
governments in Tehran and Washington both want to improve relations at the same time.
Previously, one or the other was always on the warpath.
Many observers believe that a deal will either be done in the next few months or not at all. Both
presidents have a narrow window to sell it at home. Mr Obama is likely to face an even
more hostile Congress from next January and will soon become a lame duck. Mr Rohani is
struggling to hold off hardliners and cannot afford to use all his political capital on this venture.
If the November 24th deadline is missed by much, the naysayers on both sides will claim that no
deal can be had, making a future agreement even harder.
Others think it is possible or even likely that the two sides will formally extend the talks. They
see little sign of Iranian hardliners accepting the sort of deal that is available. Yet neither they
nor the Americans want to see the talks fail conclusively. Negotiations may yet drag on into next
year.
The prizes to be had
If the negotiators do succeed, it will be because the potential benefits would be substantial,
especially for Iran. In its foreign relations, it could breathe easier and come a step closer to
fulfilling its ambition of leading other nations in the region. The partial withdrawal of American
troops from the Gulf would be a strategic victory. The economy would be likely to pick up.
Foreign investors are ready to return to Iran. Many have visited in recent months in anticipation
of an opening. Rolling back sanctions would take a long time, and difficult economic reforms
will still be needed. But there would be some quick results. Car production could soon double,
and so might oil exports.
The impact on Iranian domestic politics is harder to gauge. Mr Rohani could expect a boost from
the lifting of sanctions and improve his longer-term chances of succeeding Mr Khamenei as
supreme leader. However, if he is seen as garnering too much acclaim too quickly, hardliners
may decide to take him down a peg, say, by blocking economic reforms or boosting sponsorship
of foreign extremists. People close to Mr Rohani suggest that he has a longer-term plan to use
the momentum he would gain from lifting sanctions into reshaping the political system. The
next step would be to win more seats in parliament. But how much more sway he could gain is
uncertain. Hardliners retain control of many levers of power. The totems of their ideology, from
denouncing Israel to insisting on the veil for women, are unlikely to disappear. Progress will be
slow.
If no nuclear deal is signed, the domestic pendulum is likely to swing in the opposite direction.
Conservatives will reassert themselves. They have already talked of running a “resistance
economy”, meaning one less reliant on trade. Hostility towards the West would increase. State
media would resume their mantra that America is only interested in destroying Iran.
The likely American response would be to impose more sanctions. In the absence of a deal,
Congress will conclude that Iran is not serious about finding a solution and tighten its grip still
further. The question is whether other countries will go along with it. China may no longer be
willing to curtail trade with Iran. Russia is already in talks about a $20 billion barter deal. Some
of Iran’s old trading partners in Europe could peel away too, especially if they feel that America
is to blame for the failure of the talks. Even so, as long as American banking sanctions remain in
place, trade will continue to suffer.
And if Iran still refuses to budge? Pressure to bomb its nuclear installations would increase, but
until hope of a deal has completely evaporated America seems unlikely to attack Iran when it is
also fighting Islamic militants in Iraq and Syria, protecting Europe from Russia and guarding
Asian allies against an increasingly aggressive China. By comparison, doing a deal with Iran may
seem easy.
Delay doesn’t solve our link
Hammond, 11/3/14 - Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School
of Economics and was formerly US Editor at Oxford Analytica (Andrew, The Independent, “US
Midterms: Even if the Republicans gain control of the Senate, Obama still has a lot to play for”
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/us-midterms-even-if-the-republicans-gaincontrol-of-the-senate-obama-still-has-a-lot-to-play-for-9835795.html)
However, if Republicans do win the Senate, it won’t leave Obama as a complete "lame-duck" as
some contend. After all, a common response for politically weakened second term presidents is
to focus increasingly on foreign policy, where the executive has wider constitutional discretion.
Even here, however, Obama will not have complete latitude for action. His ambition to conclude
a comprehensive, nuclear agreement with Iran is one example. The Republican-controlled
House has passed legislation that would levy additional sanctions against Iran which could
torpedo US rapprochement with the country. However, the currently Democrat-controlled
Senate has not yet introduced these measures to the floor of the chamber for consideration.
This may change with any incoming Republican Senate majority from January. From Obama’s
perspective, current US-Iran negotiations might therefore need to be concluded in coming
weeks (the current round of talks is scheduled to finish by November 24) to avoid the prospect
of any such congressional interference.
While odds are narrowing of the president reaching a final agreement with Iran before the
November deadline, Secretary of State John Kerry is engaging in further intensive diplomacy
this month. If a deal is ultimately reached, it would consolidate Obama’s broader desire to
enhance global nuclear security as part of his presidential legacy.
PC THEORY/WINNERS WIN
Insiders believe political capital is true --should be treated as such
Schier, 11 --Professor of Political Science at Carleton College (December 2011, Steven E.,
Presidential Studies Quarterly, “The Contemporary Presidency: The Presidential Authority
Problem and the Political Power Trap,” vol. 41, no. 4, Wiley Online Library)
The concept of political capital captures many of the aspects of a president's political authority.
Paul Light defines several components of political capital: party support of the president in
Congress, public approval of the president's conduct of his job, the president's electoral margin,
and patronage appointments (Light 1999, 15). Light derived this list from the observations of
126 White House staff members he interviewed (1999, 14). His indicators have two central uses.
First, Light's research reveals that they are central to the “players' perspective” in
Washington. That is, those “in the game” view these items as crucial for presidential
effectiveness. Second, they relate to many central aspects of political authority as defined by
Skowronek. So on both theoretical and practical levels, the components of political capital are
central to the fate of presidencies. The data here will reveal that presidents over the last 70 years
have suffered from a trend of declining levels of political capital, a trend that is at the heart of
their political authority problem.
Obama can swing outcomes by leading from behind
Dickerson, 13 --Slate's chief political correspondent (5/2/2013, John, “Keeping His Distance;
Critics who want Obama to twist arms in Congress don’t understand how presidential leadership
works,”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/05/obama_and_congress_sh
ould_the_president_be_twisting_more_arms.html, JMP)
You wouldn't stick a medical thermometer in a pork roast to test if it was done, and this simple
kitchen rule should apply to presidential evaluations: Use the right thermometer. In a recent
interview, Sen. Pat Toomey, the Republican who failed to convince his colleagues to expand
background checks on gun sales, said some of those Republicans wouldn't vote for the measure
because they didn't want to give Barack Obama a political win. "There were some on my side
who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just
because the president wanted to do it," he said. The comment adds context to the ongoing
discussion about whether President Obama is showing "leadership." Leadership is an imprecise
word as it is commonly applied (as I've argued here, here, and here) and Toomey’s remarks
highlight one reason why: Leadership is not just about what a leader does; it's also about who he
is trying to lead. At various times, the president’s supporters and detractors alike have called on
him to schmooze Republicans, or, if that fails, twist their arms. But can a president flatter
Republican senators with dinners at swish hotels if they know they’re going to get a pasting
when they return home to their constituents? Can he twist arms effectively when Republican
lawmakers are more scared of voters than they are of him? No harm in trying, perhaps, but to
properly evaluate the gambit we’ve got to understand the outcomes that are even possible. And
sometimes there is harm in trying. While active, public engagement from the president is crucial
in some situations, in others it's the exact wrong thing to do. If a president's association with
legislation makes those he's trying to convince less likely to vote for it, then a smart president
shouldn't twist arms to get votes, he should fold his own and stand by. Adjusting the way we
measure presidents matters because it affects policy now, will affect a president's legacy after
he’s left office, and will also influence how we choose his successor. Our understanding of how
Obama fared in office will shape the attributes we’re looking for in the next set of applicants. If a
president is dunned for not leading, he gets some or all of the blame when policies get stuck.
This relieves public pressure from Congress: It’s not their fault for dithering, it’s the president’s
for not prodding them into action. In the current context, the more Obama's weakness is the
story , the less coverage there is of the dysfunction in the House of Representatives.
Occasionally, both sides will get a share of the blame in the coverage, but the result is the same:
Everyone throws up their hands and nothing gets done. In hindsight, a president’s legacy tends
to take into account the hurdles he faced. Presidents are praised if they try hard even when they
fail. We saw a recent example of this with President Bush, whose efforts in Iraq and to reform
Social Security are seen as failures. Nevertheless, he received wide praise from Presidents
Carter, Clinton, and Obama for his resolve and determination at his library ceremony. So we
need to try to think about the current situation the way we tend to do in hindsight—in order to
more accurately understand where Obama has failed and succeeded. Did he achieve a lot under
the circumstances or did he blow his opportunities? So what do Senator Toomey's remarks tell
us? Presidents have long complained about the opposition blocking their agendas just because
they are associated with the sitting president—Toomey’s observing an old phenomenon. That
said, things have gotten worse. Washington is more partisan and as Frances Lee has
demonstrated, presidential leadership inherently polarizes legislators because the opposition
can shape public opinion of the president by how they handle his agenda. They can make him
look weak by refusing to pass his signature legislation. So the more a president meddles in
Congress, the more a bill comes to be seen as his baby, and the greater chance for polarization.
This view argues against the kind of muscular, public leadership many people are calling for
from president Obama and the superficial LBJ comparisons. Toomey's remarks ratify the idea
that it might actually behoove the president to keep his distance. Given the current landscape, a
president who increases his level of meddling, schmoozing, and arm twisting in the wrong
circumstances could be, and should be, judged batty. He would be proving that he is incapable
of reading the moment. What this dirty window needs is another whack with the hammer.
Obama has tried to adapt. For several years, in interviews with his staff as they craft the State of
the Union speeches, this has been a running theme. How much can the president make a big
deal about policy without fear of sinking it? That's partially why the president didn't publicly
embrace Simpson-Bowles (there were other reasons) and it's what's governing his immigration
work now. The president has tried to be more hands-off while the Gang of Eight does its work in
order to show he understands the mess he could make of things if he meddled. This isn’t to say a
president should do nothing on some issues; just that he should know which ones require
him to work in the background. "Leading from behind" is a necessary form of
presidential leadership, but now it's mostly become an epithet. No one would make a film
about Lincoln's passivity, though that was an essential part of his nature, and political genius.
(In Lincoln we saw an attempt to convey this attribute in the brusque basement conversation
between the deliberate Lincoln and the hot-headed Thaddeus Stevens, whose impatience for a
reckoning with Democrats might have cost Republicans the 13th Amendment.) Whether Obama
has chosen the right way to exercise this type of leadership is open to debate, but he at least has
a working theory about how to apply different tactics to different situations. The problem is that
we don't really have a good thermometer to measure what a president isn’t doing. Rather than
reading the dials on the wrong instrument, we should consider what Obama might be
accomplishing by sitting on his hands.
False for Obama
Klein, 10/10/14 (Ezra, “Obama ditched a key campaign promise. And it saved his presidency,”
http://www.vox.com/2014/10/10/6953889/paul-krugman-obama-historic-success, JMP)
Hate Obama or love him, on this, Krugman is clearly correct. Obama has passed more major
legislation than perhaps any president since Lyndon Johnson — and, at least as of yet, there's no
Vietnam War to mar his legacy. The history of the Obama administration will be hard to write,
as so many of its chapters will demand their own books (indeed, some, like the stimulus, have
already gotten them). Most crucially, Obamacare itself looks headed for success — and that, plus
preventing the financial crisis from turning into another Great Depression, is a legacy in itself.
That said, Obama's greatest successes — and his most serious failures — lie in the dense mass of
his first two years. This is the time, in Krugman's telling, before Obama grokked the nature of
the Republican opposition and "began dealing with it realistically." I think the story there is
more complicated — and more interesting.
From 2009 to 2010, Obama, while seeking the post-partisan presidency he wanted, established
the brutally partisan presidency he got. Virtually every achievement Krugman recounts — the
health-care law, the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, the financial rescue, the stimulus bill —
passed in these first two years when Democrats held huge majorities in congress. And every item
on the list passed over screaming Republican opposition. The first two years of the Obama
administration are the story of Obama being haunted by his promises of a postpartisan
presidency, and choosing, again and again, to pass bills at the cost of worsening partisanship.
The irony of Obama's presidency
As Reid Cherlin, a former Obama administration staffer, put it, "[T]hey have managed over six
years to accomplish much of what Obama promised to do, even if accomplishing it helped speed
the process of partisan breakdown." The engine of Obama's political rise, going all the way back
to his 2004 keynote at the Democratic National Convention, was that the conflictual nature of
politics was the product of the people who knew no politics other than conflict. The central irony
of Obama's presidency is he proved himself wrong.
Obama promised to reform the health-care system and regulate the financial sector by fixing
American politics. Instead, he did it by breaking American politics further. The candidate who
ran for office promising to heal Washington's divisions became the most divisive president since
the advent of polling:
[graph omitted]
It's not just partisanship. Obama ran as the scourge of special interests. "We can't keep playing
the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expect a different result," he
said. "Because it's a game that ordinary Americans are losing. It's a game where lobbyists write
check after check and Exxon turns record profits, while you pay the price at the pump, and our
planet is put at risk."
Lobbyists still write their checks in Obama's Washington. The health-reform bill got done by
cutting side deals with pharmaceutical companies and insurers. Dodd-Frank got done by cutting
side deals with auto dealers and mutual funds. The Obama administration has put no political
capital behind major campaign-finance reforms or, really, any other ideas that would
fundamentally change how Washington works. It's the same old Washington game with the
same old Washington players — but Obama, when he had his big congressional majorities,
managed to secure a different result.
Obama spent his first two years keeping many of his policy promises by sacrificing his central
political promise. That wasn't how it felt to the administration at the time. They thought that
success would build momentum; that change would beget change. Obama talked of the "muscle
memory" Congress would rediscover as it passed big bills; he hoped that achievements
would replenish his political capital rather than drain it.
In this, the Obama administration was wrong, and perhaps naive. They overestimated their
ability to convert the raw exercise of political power into more political power. It was a mistake,
but not a very postpartisan one. And, as a theory, it was the one they needed to build their legacy
— a legacy, at this point, that even their early critics admire.
The midterm elections offer an opportunity for a political reset – trying to ram
something through Congress will poison the well on every other issue
Parnes, 10/15/14 (Amie, “Where did it go wrong for Obama?”
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/220775-where-did-it-go-wrong-for-obama)
Fewer than two years ago, President Obama was elected handily to his second term, becoming
the first Democrat since FDR to twice win an outright majority of the popular vote.
Now, Democrats in competitive Senate races hope he stays as far away as possible, previous
heartlands of support such as Iowa have turned against him and his approval ratings are
languishing in the low 40s — sometimes lower.
Political observers, from former Obama aides to staffers who served in previous
administrations, say something is going to have to change if the president is to achieve anything
at all in his last two years in office.
“It is a near metaphysical certainty that in his last two years, he’ll confront the same House he
has in the last four years,” said William Galston, a senior fellow of governance studies at the
Brookings Institution who served as an adviser to former President Clinton during his White
House years.
“So the question is, how are they going to deal with that? If they deal with the same House in the
same way, they’ll get the same results.”
Galston advised a different approach. Obama would be “well-advised” to reach out to the
Republican congressional leadership immediately after the midterm elections, he said, and
should resist the temptation to dig deeper into a partisan trench.
“He should say ‘Look, all three of us now face the same choice. ... Do we want to spend the next
two years messaging and preparing for 2016 or would we like to spend a few months
legislating?’ ”
To be sure, the decline in Obama’s political fortunes cannot be blamed on the kind of major
scandal that has marred other modern second terms, such as Watergate, Iran-Contra or the
Monica Lewinsky affair.
That leaves observers who are sympathetic to Obama putting forth all kinds of explanations,
even as Republicans suggest the dwindling support for the president was both inevitable and
overdue.
Tony Fratto, who served as deputy press secretary to former President George W. Bush, believes
Obama’s second term was over before it even started. He pinpoints the start of the problem as
the “fiscal cliff” negotiations in December 2012, the month before Obama would take the oath of
office for the second time.
Obama won the tit-for-tat fight. But Fratto argued that the president pushed Republicans so far
into a corner on that occasion that there was no possibility of them working with him
on any other issue.
“He got what he wanted and that was clearly a victory for him,” Fratto said. “But what I really
don’t understand is why he thought the relationship would improve after that. It could only get
worse, and it got worse.”
1NR
FBI
At will employment is IRON CLAD
NPR 10 ("Can Bosses Do That? As It Turns Out, Yes They Can". 1/29/10.
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123024596, TD)
Did you know you could be fired for not removing a political sticker from your car — or even having
a beer after work? Lewis Maltby says it's more than possible — it's happened. His new book, Can They Do That? explores
rights in the workplace.¶ As he tells NPR's Ari Shapiro, "Freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment — but only where
the government is concerned.¶ "What most Americans generally don't know is that the Constitution doesn't apply to
private corporations at all." In terms of monitoring its employees, the list of things a corporation
can't do is a short one — it's basically confined to eavesdropping on a personal oral conversation, Maltby said. "Anything else
is open season."¶ And outside the workplace, personal blogs or social media pages on services like Twitter or Facebook offer no
refuge.¶ Asked if workers can be fired for things they write on those sites, Maltby said, "Absolutely. Happens every day." ¶ But not all
snooping is meant to be malicious, Maltby said. For instance, a boss who suspects an employee might be about to quit, or is perhaps
moonlighting for a competitor, might seek out the worker's personal blog.¶ The worker might not have been doing any of the things
the boss had feared — instead, "your boss sees you blowing off steam about him, takes offense — and you get fired."¶ And
workers have very little legal protection against being fired, said Maltby, who is also the
president and founder of the National Workrights Institute.¶
New workforce incentives solve
Sternstein, 14 – Aliya Sternstein reports on cybersecurity and homeland security systems.
Aliya, “JUSTICE IS FAST-TRACKING CYBER HIRES” 5/15,
http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2014/05/justice-fast-tracking-cyber-hires/84511/)
The Justice Department is recruiting cyber professionals under special rules to fill vacancies
more quickly now that funding constraints have eased somewhat, the department's top network
security official said. While the severity of hacks is increasing, civilian agencies still struggle to
bring capable computer programmers on staff.
Justice is moving beyond "the sequestration, the budget concerns from the last couple of years,"
Justice Chief Information Security Officer Melinda Rogers told Nextgov. She was referring to
governmentwide spending cuts that took effect March 2013. "Our hiring freeze has lifted, and
we're moving forward."
To lure cyber sleuths, Justice promotes career opportunities to computer whizzes who have
collaborated with the department, she said.
"We are also proactively networking within the community, as we come across individuals that
we work with on a day-to-day basis that we find to be talented, Rogers said.
She added that the department has been granted the ability to fast-track offers through a "direct
hire authority." But all positions are listed publicly on the official government website,
USAJOBS.gov. "It's an open and fair competition process,” Rogers said.
She had just finished speaking at a cyber human capital conference hosted by the Association for
Federal Information Resources Management and the U.S. Cyber Challenge, an organization
working to build the nation’s cybersecurity workforce.
An FBI supervisory special agent recently said, at a separate event, that his agency’s cyber
division plans to hire 1,000 agents and 1,000 analysts in the coming year, according to
Bloomberg.
Within Rogers' wing, there are "a handful" of openings, “but we're actually filling up
quickly," she said.
PHARMA
Their 2ac arg about the patent cliff is wrong
Yates 13 (Jonathan, stock analyst, "Drug Companies Have Rebounded From The Patent Cliff
With Acquisitions Now On The Mind" seekingalpha.com/article/1298241-drug-companieshave-rebounded-from-the-patent-cliff-with-acquisitions-now-on-the-mind)
With the "Patent Cliff" proving to be every bit as overblown a threat to drug companies as the
"Fiscal Cliff" was to the country, investors have returned back to the pharmaceutical sector in
full force. It was not that long ago that the patent cliff, the period when a slew of lucrative drug
patents would expire, such as Lipitor for Pfizer (NYSE: PFE), led to Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS)
downgrading multinational pharmaceutical companies such as AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN),
Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK), Novartis AG (NYSE: NVS), Novo Nordisk and Roche. In
the report, "An Avalanche of Risk? Downgrading to Cautious," it was warned that "the operating
environment for pharma is worsening rapidly." But Big Pharma has recovered very nicely,
despite the concerns of Morgan Stanley. Year to date, Pfizer is up more than 13%. Novatris AG is
higher by 15.84% for 2013. Over the same period, GlaxoSmithKline has risen by 7.47% with
AstraZeneca increasing 5.66%.
Pharma is invincible
Bloomberg 2013 (“At record cash levels, pharmaceutical companies eye acquisitions”,
http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2013/01/pharmaceutical_companies_with.html)
“We’re through many cost-cutting programs, restructurings and portfolio arrangements,” said
Henry Gosebruch, managing director of health-care mergers and acquisitions at JPMorgan
Chase & Co. “When you put that together with record levels of cash available and improving, but
still moderate R&D productivity, we think there will be more big pharma M&A activity in 2013.”
Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Laboratories, Sanofi, Pfizer and Merck have already shown interest
in one purchase that may top $10 billion: Bausch & Lomb Inc., the eye-care company, is for sale
by Warburg Pincus LLC. The private equity firm is seeking at least $10 billion for the business
and those companies may be bidders, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
This week will set the year’s dealmaking agenda at JPMorgan’s annual health-care conference in
San Francisco. Almost 8,000 attendees and more than 400 companies will gather to make
public presentations, have one-on-one meetings and get a sense of available and competing
assets.
‘Circus Bazaar’
“It’s like a circus bazaar for business development,” said Geoff Meacham, JPMorgan’s
biotechnology analyst, in a telephone interview. “It’s at the beginning of the year, the time when
everyone sets the stage; there are crowded hallways, lots of buzz. And there’s probably a million
10-minute cups of coffee between companies.”
Big drugmakers will probably be on the hunt for assets to fill revenue holes left by expired
patents.
Pfizer’s Lipitor, which drew more than $12 billion in annual revenue at its peak, lost marketing
exclusivity in November 2011. Eli Lilly & Co. lost patent protection on its top-seller, the
antipsychotic Zyprexa, in October 2011. The drug had drawn more than $5 billion in peak sales.
New York-based Bristol-Myers faced generic competition last year to Plavix, its best-seller with
more than $7 billion in revenue.
Cash
Reserves
At the same time, they’ve got deep pockets. Pfizer ended the third quarter with $23 billion
in cash, near cash and short- term investments. Lilly had $6.9 billion, while Merck had $18.1
billion, and J&J, $19.8 billion.
“Many large cap pharma companies still face a patent cliff and have the financial capability and
strategic willingness to partner and acquire their way to continued innovation,” Leerink Swann
analysts including Seamus Fernandez wrote in a Jan. 3 report. They cited Bristol-Myers, Lilly
and London-based AstraZeneca Plc as potentially the most active acquirers.
Legalized marijuana replaces painkillers and hurts the multibillion dollar pharma
industry
Fang ‘14
Lee Fang, Investigative journalist and contributor to The Nation and Salon and others and is a
reporting fellow with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and has had his work result
in multiple calls for hearings in Congress and the Federal Election Commission, 9/7/14,
“Leading Anti-Marijuana Academics Are Paid By Painkiller Drug Companies”
https://news.vice.com/article/leading-anti-marijuana-academics-are-paid-by-painkiller-drugcompanies
VICE has found that many of the researchers who have advocated against legalizing pot have also been on the payroll of leading
pharmaceutical firms with products that could be easily replaced by using marijuana. When these
individuals have been quoted in the media, their drug-industry ties have not been revealed. Take, for example, Dr. Herbert Kleber of
Columbia University. Kleber has impeccable academic credentials, and has been quoted in the press and in academic
publicationswarning against the use of marijuana, which he stresses may cause wide-ranging addiction and public health issues. But
when he's writing anti-pot opinion pieces for CBS News, or being quoted by NPR and CNBC, what's left unsaid is that Kleber has
served as a paid consultant to leading prescription drug companies, including Purdue Pharma (the maker of OxyContin), Reckitt
Benckiser (the producer of a painkiller called Nurofen), and Alkermes (the producer of a powerful new opioid called Zohydro).
Kleber, who did not respond to a request for comment, maintains important influence over the pot debate. For instance, his writing
has been cited by the New York State Association of Chiefs of Police in its opposition to marijuana legalization, and has been
published by the American Psychiatric Association in the organization's statement warning against marijuana for medicinal uses.
Could Kleber's long-term financial relationship with drug firms be viewed as a conflict of interest? Studies have found that
pot can be used for pain relief as a substitute for major prescription painkillers. The opioid
painkiller industry is a multibillion business that has faced rising criticism from experts because
painkillers now cause about 16,000 deaths a year, more than heroin and cocaine combined. Researchers view marijuana
as a safe alternative to opioid products like OxyContin, and there are no known overdose deaths from pot. Other
leading academic opponents of pot have ties to the painkiller industry. Dr. A. Eden Evins, an associate professor of psychiatry at
Harvard Medical School, is a frequent critic of efforts to legalize marijuana. She is on the board of an anti-marijuana advocacy group,
Project SAM, and has been quoted by leading media outlets criticizing the wave of new pot-related reforms. "When people can
go to a 'clinic' or 'cafe' and buy pot, that creates the perception that it's safe," she told the Times last year.
These academic revelations add fodder to the argument that drug firms maintain quiet ties to the marijuana prohibition lobby.
Notably, when Evins participated in a commentary on marijuana legalization for the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, the publication
found that her financial relationships required a disclosure statement, which noted that as of November 2012, she was a "consultant
for Pfizer and DLA Piper and has received grant/research support from Envivo, GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer." Pfizer has moved
aggressively into the $7.3 billion painkiller market. In 2011, the company acquired King Pharmaceuticals (the makers of several
opioid products) and is currently working to introduce Remoxy, an OxyContin competitor. Dr. Mark L. Kraus, who runs a private
practice and is a board member to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, submitted testimony in 2012 in opposition to a
medical marijuana law in Connecticut. According to financial disclosures, Kraus served on the scientific advisory panel for painkiller
companies such as Pfizer and Reckitt Benckiser in the year prior to his activism against the medical pot bill. Neither Kraus or Evins
responded to a request for comment. These academic revelations add fodder to the argument that drug firms maintain quiet ties to
the marijuana prohibition lobby. In July, I reported for the Nation that many of the largest anti-pot advocacy groups, including the
Community Anti-Drug Coalitions for America, which has organized opposition to reform through its network of activists and
through handing out advocacy material (sample op-eds against medical pot along with Reefer Madness-style videos, for example),
has relied on significant funding from painkiller companies, including Purdue Pharma and Alkermes. Pharmaceutical-funded antidrug groups like the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and CADCA use their budget to obsess over weed while paying lip-service to the
much bigger drug problem in America of over-prescribed opioids. As ProPublica reported, painkiller-funded researchers helped fuel
America's deadly addiction to opioids such as OxyContin and Vicodin. These academics, with quiet funding from major pain pill
firms, encouraged doctors to over-prescribe these drugs for a range of pain relief issues, leading to
where we stand today as the world's biggest consumer of painkillers and the overdose capital of the planet.
What does it say about medical academia today that many of that painkiller-funded researchers are now standing in the way of a
safer alternative: smoking a joint.
It won’t be worse than 2008
Daniel W. Drezner 12, Professor, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University,
October 2012, “The Irony of Global Economic Governance: The System Worked,”
http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/IR-Colloquium-MT12-Week5_The-Irony-of-Global-Economic-Governance.pdf
It is equally possible, however, that a renewed crisis would trigger a renewed surge in policy
coordination. As John Ikenberry has observed, “the complex interdependence that is unleashed in an open and
loosely rule-based order generates some expanding realms of exchange and investment that result
in a growing array of firms, interest groups and other sorts of political stakeholders who seek to preserve the
stability and openness of the system.”103 The post-2008 economic order has remained open,
entrenching these interests even more across the globe. Despite uncertain times, the open economic
system that has been in operation since 1945 does not appear to be closing anytime soon.
HEG
No underlying triggers of interstate conflict in Latin America
Hofmeister '08
Wilhem, PhD, "International Security: A European-South American Dialogue" Conference
Report, 11/20/08, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, www.kas.de/bruessel/en/publications/15122/,
AD 5/22/1
“Security” is one main concern of Latin-America’s citizens. For them, it is not only a question of
carefreeness with regard to general risks, but a question of protection against violence and
crime. Compared to international standards, most Latin-American countries show a relativly
elevated degree of intra-state violence. In Brazil, for example, more than 40.000 people fall
victim of criminal violence each year. This extent of intra-state violence seems to contrast with
another phenomenom: In an international comparison, Latin-America is considered the region
with less inter-state conflicts and the one, who in proportion to its gross national product
(GNP), spends less in military expenses. The subcontinent lacks any major territorial dispute, as
well as religious or ethnical conflicts. Besides, Latin-America is the only region in the world
where all countries pronounce openly against the aquisition and posession of nuclear weapons.
Therefore, central topics on the agenda of international security, as the fight against terrorism or
the issue of non-proliferation, don’t have an immediate impact on Latin-American countries and
thus, within the continent, the interest and comprehension of these topics remain rather
limited. Accordingly, the disposition of politicians, media and a broader part of civil society to
support the fight against terrorism and the constriction of the proliferation of nuclear weapons,
is situated on a low level. This tendency is strengthened by the widely spread critique against the
Bush-Administration and the presence of the armed forces of the USA in Colombia. On the other
hand, the countries of Latin-America by no means have a cohesive position with regard to
matters of international security. They neither have a common view of security problems nor
does there exist a coordinated collective strategy in international forums. These countries are
more or less „free riders“ with regard to questions on security. Many times, the proximity to the
United States is not seen as protection against threat; on the contrary many countries feel
threatened by the hegemon.
Their laundry list of vague impacts is academic junk – conflicts can’t just emerge
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
Assertions that without the combination of U.S. capabilities, presence and commitments
instability would return to Europe and the Pacific Rim are usually rendered in rather vague language. If the
United States were to decrease its commitments abroad, argued Robert Art, “the world will become a more dangerous
place and, sooner or later, that will redound to America’s detriment.”53 From where would this danger arise? Who
precisely would do the fighting, and over what issues? Without the United States, would Europe really descend
into Hobbesian anarchy? Would the Japanese attack mainland China again, to see if they could fare better this time around? Would
the Germans and French have another go at it? In other words, where exactly is hegemony is keeping the peace?
With one exception, these questions are rarely addressed. That exception is in the Pacific Rim. Some analysts fear that a de facto
surrender of U.S. hegemony would lead to a rise of Chinese influence. Bradley Thayer worries that Chinese would become “the
language of diplomacy, trade and commerce, transportation and navigation, the internet, world sport, and global culture,” and that
Beijing would come to “dominate science and technology, in all its forms” to the extent that soon the world would witness a Chinese
astronaut who not only travels to the Moon, but “plants the communist flag on Mars, and perhaps other planets in the future.”54
Indeed China is the only other major power that has increased its military spending since the end of the Cold War, even if it still is
only about 2 percent of its GDP. Such levels of effort do not suggest a desire to compete with, much less supplant, the United States.
The much-ballyhooed, decade-long military buildup has brought Chinese spending up to
somewhere between one-tenth and one-fifth of the U.S. level. It is hardly clear that a restrained United
States would invite Chinese regional, must less global, political expansion. Fortunately one need not
ponder for too long the horrible specter of a red flag on Venus, since on the planet Earth, where war is no longer the dominant form
of conflict resolution, the threats posed by even a rising China would not be terribly dire. The dangers
contained in the terrestrial security environment are less severe than ever before. Believers in the pacifying power of hegemony
ought to keep in mind a rather basic tenet: When it comes to policymaking, specific threats are more significant than
vague, unnamed dangers. Without specific risks, it is just as plausible to interpret U.S. presence
as redundant, as overseeing a peace that has already arrived. Strategy should not be based upon
vague images emerging from the dark reaches of the neoconservative imagination. Overestimating
Our Importance One of the most basic insights of cognitive psychology provides the final reason to doubt the
power of hegemonic stability: Rarely are our actions as consequential upon their behavior as we perceive
them to be. A great deal of experimental evidence exists to support the notion that people (and therefore states) tend to
overrate the degree to which their behavior is responsible for the actions of others. Robert Jervis has
argued that two processes account for this overestimation, both of which would seem to be especially relevant in the U.S. case.55
First, believing that we are responsible for their actions gratifies our national ego (which is not small to begin with; the United States
is exceptional in its exceptionalism). The hubris of the United States, long appreciated and noted, has only grown with the collapse of
the Soviet Union.56 U.S. policymakers famously have comparatively little knowledge of—or interest in—events that occur outside of
their own borders. If there is any state vulnerable to the overestimation of its importance due to the
fundamental misunderstanding of the motivation of others, it would have to be the United States.
Second, policymakers in the United States are far more familiar with our actions than they are with the decisionmaking processes of our allies. Try as we might, it is not possible to fully understand the threats, challenges,
and opportunities that our allies see from their perspective. The European great powers have domestic politics
as complex as ours, and they also have competent, capable strategists to chart their way forward. They react to many international
forces, of which U.S. behavior is only one. Therefore, for any actor trying to make sense of the action of others, Jervis notes, “in
the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, the
most obvious and parsimonious explanation is that he was
responsible.”57 It is natural, therefore, for U.S. policymakers and strategists to believe that the behavior
of our allies (and rivals) is shaped largely by what Washington does. Presumably Americans are at least as susceptible
to the overestimation of their ability as any other people, and perhaps more so. At the very least, political psychologists tell us, we
are probably not as important to them as we think. The importance of U.S. hegemony in
contributing to international stability is therefore almost certainly overrated. In the end, one can never be sure
why our major allies have not gone to, and do not even plan for, war. Like deterrence, the hegemonic stability theory
rests on faith; it can only be falsified, never proven. It does not seem likely, however, that hegemony could fully
account for twenty years of strategic decisions made in allied capitals if the international system were not already a remarkably
peaceful place. Perhaps these states have no intention of fighting one another to begin with, and our commitments are redundant.
European great powers may well have chosen strategic restraint because they feel that their security is all but assured, with or
without the United States.
Sequester
Jeremy Herb 14, staff writer – The Hill, 2-142014, “Pentagon: Sequester risks longer wars,”
http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-strategy/199838-pentagon-sequester-threatensmilitary-strategy
The Pentagon on Tuesday warned that looming sequestration cuts would lead to a hollow
military that risks longer wars and more U.S. casualties. The 2014 Quadrennial Defense
Review (QDR), which was released alongside the Pentagon’s 2015 budget, concluded that sequestration
threatens the long-term U.S. military strategy. “Ultimately, continued resourcing at
sequestration level would likely embolden our adversaries and undermine the confidence
of our allies and partners, which in turn could lead to an even more challenging security
environment than we already face,” the document stated. The QDR mounts a defense of the Pentagon’s 2015 budget proposal,
which shrinks the size of the Army and proposes cuts to aircraft and troop benefits. The Pentagon argues the cuts and benefit
changes are necessary in order to carry out its strategy of creating a smaller and more modern military. The document does not,
however, propose any major shifts from its previous defense guidance released in 2012. House Armed Services Chairman Buck
McKeon (R-Calif.) blasted the Pentagon’s strategy document for focusing on the budget constraints, rather than strategy. He said in
a statement that it defied the law that mandates a QDR every four years, and that he would introduce legislation requiring the
Pentagon to re-write the document. “In defiance of the law, this QDR provides no insight into what a moderate-to-low risk strategy
would be, is clearly budget driven, and is shortsighted,” McKeon said. “It allows the president to duck the consequences of the deep
defense cuts he has advocated and leaves us all wondering what the true future costs of those cuts will be.” The Pentagon’s
$495.6 billion 2015 budget request is under the spending caps that were set under sequestration
and the December 2013 budget agreement. But beginning in 2016, the Pentagon included an
additional $115 billion above the spending caps over the next five years, funding the department says is necessary
to keep the military in balance. Pentagon officials warned that the military would have to get even
smaller and major weapons systems would be retired if sequester was not
reversed. Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale said that the Army’s end strength would be reduced to
420,000 from the 440,000 to 450,000 currently planned, while the Marine Corps would be cut to 175,000
from 182,000. The Navy would have to go forward with the retirement of the USS George
Washington aircraft carrier and a carrier air wing, and the Air Force would retire the KC-10 fleet
and have fewer Predator and Reaper drones. “The risks would grow significantly if sequesterlevel cuts return in FY2016, if proposed reforms are not accepted, or if uncertainty over budget levels
continues,” the QDR says.
VIOLENCE
Violence down now
Zabludovsky 7/23/14 (Karla Zabludovsky covers Latin America for Newsweek. “Murders in
Mexico Down From Height of the Drug War, But Violence Persists” Filed: 7/23/14 at 6:42 PM
http://www.newsweek.com/murders-mexico-down-height-drug-war-violence-persists-260990
Some of the Mexican states where drug war–related violence has been most intense, like
Coahuila, Guerrero and Tamaulipas, showed a decreased homicide rate. In Durango, part of
the Mexican “golden triangle,” an area notorious for drug trafficking, homicides decreased by
nearly half in 2013 as compared to the previous year.¶ ADVERTISEMENT¶ It is unclear what percentage of recorded
homicides are related to organized crime since the government modified the classification in October, doing away with a separate category for drug
war–related deaths, instead lumping them all together.¶ Aware
of the war weariness felt among many in Mexico,
Pena Nieto ran on the promise that, if elected, his government would shift the focus from
capturing drug kingpins, like Calderon had, to making daily life for ordinary Mexicans safer.¶
"With this new strategy, I commit myself to significantly lowering the homicide rate, the number of kidnappings in the country, the extortions and the
human trafficking," wrote Pena Nieto in a newspaper editorial during his presidential campaign.¶ Since
taking office in December 2012,
has largely eliminated talk of security from his agenda except when large outbreaks
of violence have forced him otherwise, focusing instead on the economy and his legislative
reforms, including sweeping overhauls to education and energy. And while the country appears to be less violent now than during Calderon’s
Pena Nieto
war on drugs, the climate of press freedom, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, remains “perilous.”
No Mexican state failure
Couch 12—Brigadier, British Army
(Neil, “‘Mexico in Danger of Rapid Collapse’. Reality or Exaggeration?”, Royal College of Defence Studies Seaford House Paper,
2012, dml)
A ‘collapsed’ state, however, as postulated in the Pentagon JOE paper, suggests ‘a total vacuum of authority’, the
state having become a ‘mere geographical expression’.16 Such an extreme hypothesis of Mexico disappearing like
those earlier European states seems implausible for a country that currently has the world’s 14th
largest economy and higher predicted growth than either the UK, Germany or the USA;
that has no external threat from aggressive neighbours, which was the ‘one constant’ in the European
experience according to Tilly; and does not suffer the ‘disharmony between communities’ that
Rotberg says is a feature common amongst failed states.17,18
A review of the literature does not reveal why the JOE paper might have suggested criminal gangs and drug
cartels as direct causes leading to state collapse. Crime and corruption tend to be described not
as causes but as symptoms demonstrating failure. For example, a study for Defense Research and
Development Canada attempting to build a predictive model for proximates of state failure barely
mentions either.19 One of the principal scholars on the subject, Rotberg, says that in failed states,
‘corruption flourishes’ and ‘gangs and criminal syndicates assume control of the streets’, but
again as effect rather than trigger.20 The Fund for Peace Failed States Index, does not use either
of them as a ‘headline’ indicator, though both are used as contributory factors.
This absence may reflect an assessment that numerous states suffer high levels of organised crime and
corruption and nevertheless do not fail. Mandel describes the corruption and extreme violence
of the Chinese Triads, Italian Mafia, Japanese Yakuza and the Russian Mob that, in some cases, has
continued for centuries.21 Yet none of these countries were singled out as potential
collapsed or failed states in the Pentagon’s paper. Indeed, thousands of Americans were killed in gang warfare during
Prohibition and many people ‘knew or at least suspected that politicians, judges, lawyers, bankers and business concerns
collected many millions of dollars from frauds, bribes and various forms of extortion’.22 Organised crime and
corruption were the norm in the political, business, and judicial systems and police forces ran their own ‘rackets’ rather
than enforcing the law.23 Neither the violence nor the corruption led to state failure.
TURNS
The AFF increases violence
Pavlik 14 (Jim, "Legal Pot Means More Violence in Mexico–Not Less," High Technocracy, FEbruary 5,
hightechnocracy.com/2014/02/05/legalpot-means-more-violence-in-mexico-not-less/)
So I think legalizing marijuana can actually have a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts effect on Mexican state capacity. Why I eventually come to the
same conclusion as Hope is because of the nature of the violence in Mexico. Most
of the violence in Mexico is not between
state actors and the ICOs; it’s between ICOs.¶ If it’s hard to determine how much money is made in the marijuana biz, it’s
even harder to determine which ICOs are profiting the most from this sector (relative to the other sectors they are in). And that’s an important point.
Whichever cartels are most affected by the loss of the additional revenues are going to become
weaker relative to those cartels which aren’t as affected.¶ These relative power
shifts are the primary driver of inter-ICO violence. In other words, legalized marijuana—at least for a while—
should increase violence in Mexico. The plazas that abut the US border will be important
geographical areas to control so long as there remain any black or grey market goods to smuggle
across them. Disrupting the ICOs relative positions as they battle for equilibrium is exactly the
kind of thing that will make violence worse.
No risk of energy reform
Kilisek, Breaking Energy Reform Editor, 14
((Roman, 01/08/14, “Mexico’s Energy Reforms: Can Mexico Emerge as a Prime Global Oil and
Gas Industry Expansion Prospect”, date accessed: 10/15/14,
http://breakingenergy.com/2014/01/08/mexicos-energy-reforms-can-mexico-emerge-as-aprime-global-oil-gas-industry-expansion-prospect/, LMM)
At the same time,
Mexican domestic crude oil production has been falling for nearly 10 years, to about 2.5
million barrels per day from 3.4 million barrels per day in 2004. One reason Mexican crude production has fallen so fast is
the precipitous decline of the Cantarell field in the Gulf of Mexico, where output has fallen 75% from its 2004 peak to just
500,000 barrels per day in 2011, according to U.S. EIA data. This
is a great challenge for Mexico because not only did this
field provide such a large share of Mexico’s total oil output but there are no other fields capable of replacing
it in the short term. Reforms that will give international oil companies new access to Mexican oil fields are supposed to change this overall trend. The
government says it will increase oil production to as much as 4 million barrels per day by 2025. However, it
is one thing to allow
private international oil companies to develop unexplored oil and gas fields. It is quite another to
increase nationwide production significantly as a result. Even in Mexico the era of ‘easy oil’ is over .
Technical assistance and foreign investment is sought from private international oil companies to exploit difficult-toaccess reserves such as deep-water deposits in the Gulf of Mexico. This has to be differentiated from offshore energy production in shallow water
where PEMEX has a proven track record. In addition, PEMEX is reeling under large financial losses while still funding about one third of the
government’s budget through taxes. Source: Energy Information System, Petroleos Mexicanos; from Atlantic Council report “Mexico Rising:
Comprehensive Energy Reform at Last?” by David Goldwyn. New infrastructure costs, availability of alternative projects – e.g.
opportunities all over the U.S. – for interested companies on a worldwide basis, the prevailing oil market price at the time of negotiations and, above
all, the terms of the development process such as standards for booking proven reserves and royalty as well as tax structures will
eventually
determine the pace of any increase in Mexican oil production. Currently, Mexico has an estimated 10.26 billion
barrels of proven oil reserves, as well as one of the world’s largest shale gas resource bases according to the CIA World Factbook. PEMEX itself
estimates that with adequate investment and technology exploring deep-water reserves could add as much as 27 billion barrels of oil to Mexico’s proven
reserves. This may be the big prize alongside substantial technically-recoverable shale gas and shale oil reserves. However, note that deep-water and
shale production are costly as well as risky endeavors and medium- to longer-term prospects. According
to Diana Villiers Negroponte
of the Brookings Institution, the Mexican Department of Energy (SENER) “may not grant licenses or
production sharing contracts for the exploration and extraction of oil and gas. Those [upstream] activities may
only be awarded on a contract for profit basis. The Mexican state thus preserves its ownership of the subsoil and its contents (…).”
From a commercial point of view, this contractual structure resembles the fee-for-service contracts that are the basis for the profitable business models
of companies like Halliburton. However, given
that it stops short of owning oil beneath the ground, it will make
it more difficult for conservative, privately-owned oil companies like ExxonMobil to take on the often
required greater risk. The business models of major international oil companies, as Steve Coll points out in his book “Private Empire –
ExxonMobil and American Power”, depend in part on “booked reserves” that they legally control under contract similar to property rights and which
they can exploit for sale in future years. Note, the distinct feature of the oil and gas industry is its depleting asset base and need for replacement
through drilling and acquisition. The
Mexican government will eventually have to sweeten the deal a bit to
compensate properly for greater risk and needed expertise foreign international oil companies
have to offer.