1NC
GOP will win—multiple factors
Tobin 9-17-14 (Jonathan, Senior Online Editor of Commentary magazine, "Dem
Senate Comeback May Be Fool’s Gold" Commentary Magazine)
www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/09/17/dem-senate-comeback-may-be-foolsgold-midterms/
But even
if we concede that the last week has provided a great deal of comfort
for Democrats, they shouldn’t get too cocky. As the party in charge of the
White House, they are still laboring under tremendous disadvantages this
fall that provide their GOP opponents with a safety net that could cushion
the impact of any surge in Democrat fundraising as a result of these new
more favorable predictions. National surveys, such as the latest New York Times/CBS Poll,
show President Obama’s job approval ratings still heading south. Just as
important, Republicans are gaining crucial advantages with the public on
the economy, foreign policy, terrorism, and immigration. While those who would
extrapolate from these numbers the seeds of a genuine Republican wave are probably exaggerating the impact of national
polls on local races, the
Democrats are still dealing with some very unfavorable
electoral math. In order to hold the Senate, they need to take one or two
Republican seats (Kansas and Georgia representing their best chances),
preserve the seats of one or two of their endangered red-state incumbents
(North Carolina’s Hagan being their best chance of that), win some of the
tossup states like Iowa, while also avoiding losing any of the seats that they
thought were not endangered like that of New Hampshire’s Jean Shaheen. Is
that doable? Yes. Is it likely? The answer here is still no. As much as the outlook has brightened for
Democrats, Stuart Rothenberg’s prediction last week that Republicans will win at
least 7 seats and possible more is still the more reasonable conclusion about
an electoral map and a national political atmosphere that is heavily slanted
toward the GOP. Democrats may be able to stop the bleeding and stay competitive by constantly reminding
voters that their name isn’t Barack Obama. But doing so also reminds the electorate why midterms trend
against the party in power. Even more to the point, unlike in the past when
Republicans came up short in efforts to win back the Senate, this time they
don’t appear to be burdened with a roster of terrible candidates. Weak incumbents
like Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Mark Begich in Alaska, and Mark Prior in Arkansas might have survived against equally
weak challengers but they didn’t get that lucky. And strong GOP candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire have put seats in
play that many thought to be safe for the Democrats. So while the pundits should forget about waves, the notion of
a big Democrat comeback may be more a case of them finding fool’s gold
than a real path to victory in November.
Plan spurs youth voter turnout—ensures Democrats sweep the
election
Appelbaum 14 (Josh Appelbaum earned an English degree from the University of
Vermont in 2009, “Let’s Weed Out Republicans in 2014,” March 4,
http://suffolkresolves.com/2014/03/04/lets-weed-out-republicans-in-2014/)
By running on pot legalization, Democrats can spur voter turnout and
sweep the 2014 Midterms. In many ways, the legacy of Barack Obama will be determined by how the final
two years of his presidency play out. He will either be remembered as a transformational president who achieved great
legislative victories despite unprecedented obstruction, or a president who underestimated the partisanship of the political
landscape and failed to deliver on his grandiose message of hope and change. At the moment, you could make the case for
either. His accomplishments are impressive: digging us out of the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression,
passing the Affordable Care Act, getting us out of Iraq and (by the end of this year) Afghanistan, forty-six straight months
of job growth, killing Osama Bin Laden. But his first five years in office have also been marred by dysfunction and
disappointment, stagnation and inaction. Nothing can get passed in Congress because the Republicans refuse to work with
him. No jobs bills. No background checks on gun sales. No extension of unemployment insurance. No Immigration
Reform or minimum wage increase. If Obama is to be remembered as one of the great Presidents in history, the rest of his
term must be marked by action, not gridlock. He needs a congress that will work with him to pass big, legislative
initiatives that improve our country. To accomplish this goal, the Democrats must win back the
House and defend the Senate in the 2014 Midterm Elections. If they fail to do so, Obama’s final two
years will be spent as a lame duck whose only remaining power lies in his veto pen. So how can Democrats
win big in 2014? It’s simple: run on pot. IT’S ALL ABOUT TURNOUT A recent CNN poll
showed that a majority of Americans (55%) support legalizing marijuana,
which is a staggering number when you consider that just 34% supported it in 2002. However, when you look deeper into
the numbers, it tells a different story. Just 39% of people age 65+ support legalization, and among people age 50-64 the
approval rises only slightly to 50%. However, among
18-34 year olds, it’s wildly popular: over
66% support full legalization. This is great news for the Democratic Party,
which has struggled in recent years to turn out voters during Midterm
Elections, and continued this trend in 2010. In 2008, voters age 18-29 made up 18% of the electorate. In the 2010
midterms, young people accounted for a paltry 11% of the vote. In 2014, much of the debate will be centered on
Obamacare. Unfortunately for Democrats, this isn’t a motivating factor for young people
to head to the polls. It doesn’t excite them. They feel invincible and don’t
think they need health insurance. It’s too abstract. Marijuana is different.
It’s beloved by young people: a symbol of equal parts independence and rebellion. Unlike health care,
which can feel overwhelming and complicated, marijuana is a tangible issue that young people
can relate to. It’s simple and straightforward. By pushing legalized
marijuana nationally, Democrats can provide much-needed motivation for
young people to turn out and vote for them. Simply put, paying $100 per month for Health Care
that you may not even need doesn’t excite young voters, but being able to walk down the street to a pot shop and pay $40
for an 8th of legal marijuana does. Best of all, this isn’t just a theory — the numbers back it up. Election data from the promarijuana group Just Say Now showed that in 2008 the youth vote (18-29) stood at 14% in the state of Colorado. In 2012,
when a marijuana initiative was on the ballot, that number rose to 20%. In the state of Washington the increase was even
more pronounced. In 2008, the youth vote was 10%. With pot on the ballot in 2012 it soared to 22%. If you put it on the
ballot, young people will vote for it. THE PATH TO VICTORY Heading into the 2014 Midterm Elections, Democrats
control the Senate 55-45. There are 36 open seats, 21 of which are held by Democrats, 15 by Republicans. Democrats can
afford to lose up to four seats and still remain in control. It’s a different story in the House, where Democrats are in the
minority 201-234. With every seat open — since Representatives are elected every two years — Democrats must flip 17
seats in order to regain the majority. According to a recent Reason.com article, thirteen states could be voting to legalize
marijuana in 2014, while sixteen others could be voting to allow medical marijuana. Three of the most likely states to have
recreational pot on the ballot just so happen to have incumbent Democrat Senators up for re-election. This includes
Alaska (Begich), Oregon (Merkley) and New Mexico (Udall). A fourth Senator up for re-election, Mark Udall of Colorado,
will be running on the backdrop of his state’s wildly successful legal marijuana launch. A recent report from the state’s
Joint Budget Committee showed that in the first 18 months Colorado expects to generate $610 million in marijuana retail
sales and take in $184 million in tax revenue. Aside from full out legalization, the medical marijuana push may be more
important to Democrats because many of the states that could have ballot initiatives are traditionally Republican. This
presents a golden opportunity to flip House seats in states like Florida,
Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas and Wyoming, all
of whom may have medical marijuana on the ballot in 2014. THE TIME IS NOW When engaging in a fiscal debate, our
two political parties get hung up on pledges. Republicans refuse to increase taxes while Democrats refuse to make cuts to
entitlements. As a result, methods of addressing our debt and improving our economy are almost impossible to find in
Washington. Legalizing marijuana is the perfect bipartisan solution: it doesn’t raise taxes or cut Social Security. It allows
us to bring in much-needed revenue that we can use to invest in education and infrastructure without violating either
party’s economic pledge. It’s time for the Democrats to step up and make pot legalization a central issue in the Midterm
Elections. They can look to Colorado and tout its success, and in doing so they’ll motivate young people
to reject apathy and turn out at the polls for them. As crazy as it sounds, pot
legalization just might be the issue that propels the Democrats to victory in
2014 , ensuring that the final two years of Obama’s presidency will be marked by action and achievements, not gridlock.
GOP Senate reinvigorates the Asia pivot
Kieck 14 (Zachary, Associate Editor of The Diplomat, “The Midterm Elections and
the Asia Pivot,” April 22, http://thediplomat.com/2014/04/the-midterm-elections-andthe-asia-pivot/)
But it needn’t be all doom and gloom for U.S. foreign policy, including in the Asia-Pacific. In fact, the Republicans
wrestling control of the Senate from the Democrats this November could be
a boon for the U.S. Asia pivot. This is true for at least three reasons. First, with little prospect
of getting any of his domestic agenda through Congress, President Barack Obama will
naturally focus his attention on foreign affairs. Presidents in general have a tendency to focus more
attention on foreign policy during their second term, and this effect is magnified if the other party controls the legislature.
And for good reason: U.S. presidents have far more latitude to take unilateral action in the realm of foreign affairs than in
domestic policy. Additionally, the 2016 presidential election will consume much of the country’s media’s attention on
domestic matters. It’s only when acting on the world stage that the president will still be able to stand taller in the media’s
eyes than the candidates running to for legislative office. Second, should the Democrats get pummeled
in the midterm elections this year, President Obama
is likely to make some personnel changes in
the Republican Party incurred losses in the
2006 midterms, then-President George W. Bush quickly moved to replace Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld with the less partisan (at least in that era) Robert Gates. Obama followed suit
by making key personnel changes after the Democrats “shellacking” in the
2010 midterm elections. Should the Democrats face a similar fate in the 2014 midterm
elections, Obama is also likely to make notable personnel changes. Other aides, particular
former Clinton aides, are likely to leave the administration early in order to start vying
the White House and cabinet. For instance, after
for spots on Hillary Clinton’s presumed presidential campaign. Many of these changes are likely to be with domestic
advisors given that domestic issues are certain to decide this year’s elections. Even so, many nominally domestic
positions—such as Treasury and Commerce Secretary—have important implications for U.S.
policy in Asia. Moreover, some of the post-election changes are likely be foreign
policy and defense positions, which bodes well for Asia given the appalling
lack of Asia expertise among Obama’s current senior advisors. But the most
important way a Republican victory in November will help the Asia Pivot is that the GOP in Congress are
actually more favorable to the pivot than are members of Obama’s own party.
For example, Congressional opposition to granting President T rade P romotional A uthority —
which is key to getting the T rans- P acific P artnership ratified — is largely from Democratic
legislators. Similarly, it is the Democrats who are largely in favor of the defense
budget cuts that threaten to undermine America’s military posture in Asia. If
Republicans do prevail in November, President Obama will naturally want to find ways to
bridge the very wide partisan gap between them. Asia offers the perfect
issue area to begin reaching across the aisle. The Republicans would have
every incentive to reciprocate the President’s outreach. After all, by giving them control
of the entire Legislative Branch, American voters will be expecting some results from the GOP before they would be
ostensibly be ready to elect them to the White House in 2016. A Republican failure to achieve anything between 2014 and
2016 would risk putting the GOP in the same dilemma they faced in the 1996 and 2012 presidential elections.
Working with the president to pass the TPP and strengthen America’s
military’s posture in Asia would be ideal ways for the GOP to deliver results without
violating their principles.
That’s key to prevent nuclear war
Colby 11 – Elbridge Colby, research analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses, served as
policy advisor to the Secretary of Defense’s Representative to the New START talks,
expert advisor to the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, August 10, 2011,
“Why the U.S. Needs its Liberal Empire,” The Diplomat, online: http://thediplomat.com/2011/08/10/why-us-needs-its-liberal-empire/2/?print=yes
But the pendulum shouldn’t be allowed to swing too far toward an incautious retrenchment. For our problem hasn’t been
overseas commitments and interventions as such, but the kinds of interventions. The
US alliance and partnership
structure, what the late William Odom called the United States’ ‘liberal empire’ that includes a substantial military
presence and a willingness to use it in the defence of US and allied interests, remains a vital component
of US security and global stability and prosperity. This system of voluntary and consensual cooperation
under US leadership, particularly in the security realm, constitutes a formidable bloc defending the liberal international
order. But, in part due to poor decision-making in Washington, this system is
under strain , particularly in East
Asia, where the security situation has become tense r even as the region continues to become the
centre of the global economy. A nuclear North Korea’s violent behaviour threatens South
Korea and Japan, as well as US forces on the peninsula; Pyongyang’s development of a road mobile
Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, moreover, brings into sight the day when North Korea could threaten the
United States itself with nuclear attack, a prospect that will further imperil stability in
the region. More broadly, the rise of China – and especially its rapid and opaque
military build-up – combined with its increasing assertiveness in regional
disputes is troubling to the United States and its allies and partners across the region. Particularly
relevant to the US military presence in the western Pacific is the development of Beijing’s anti-access and area denial
capabilities, including the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile, more capable anti-ship cruise missiles, attack submarines,
attack aircraft, smart mines, torpedoes, and other assets. While Beijing remains a constructive contributor on a range of
matters, these capabilities will give China the growing power to deny the United States the ability to operate effectively in
the western Pacific, and thus the potential to undermine the US-guaranteed security substructure that has defined littoral
East Asia since World War II. Even if China says today it won’t exploit this growing capability, who can tell what tomorrow
or the next day will bring? Naturally, US efforts to build up forces in the western Pacific in response to future Chinese
force improvements must be coupled with efforts to engage Beijing as a responsible stakeholder; indeed, a strengthened
but appropriately restrained military posture will enable rather than detract from such engagement. In short, the
United
States must increase its involvement in East Asia rather than decrease it. Simply maintaining the military
balance in the western Pacific will, however, involve substantial investments to improve US capabilities. It will also require
augmented contributions to the common defence by US allies that have long enjoyed low defence budgets under the US
security umbrella. This won’t be cheap, for these requirements can’t be met simply by incremental additions to the existing
posture, but will have to include advances in air, naval, space, cyber, and other expensive high-tech capabilities. Yet such
efforts are vital, for East Asia represents the economic future, and its strategic developments will determine which country
or countries set the international rules that shape that economic future. Conversely, US interventions in the Middle East
and, to a lesser degree, in south-eastern Europe have been driven by far more ambitious and aspirational conceptions of
the national interest, encompassing the proposition that failing or illiberally governed peripheral states can contribute to
an instability that nurtures terrorism and impedes economic growth. Regardless of whether this proposition is true, the
effort is rightly seen by the new political tide not to be worth the benefits gained. Moreover, the United States can scale
(and has scaled) back nation-building plans in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans without undermining its vital interests
in ensuring the free flow of oil and in preventing terrorism. The lesson to be drawn from recent years is not, then, that the
United States should scale back or shun overseas commitments as such, but rather that we must be more discriminating in
making and acting upon them. A total US unwillingness to intervene would pull the rug out from under the US-led
structure, leaving the international system prey to disorder at the least, and at worst to chaos or dominance by others who
could not be counted on to look out for US interests. We need to focus on making the right interventions, not forswearing
them completely. In practice, this means a more substantial focus on East Asia and the serious
security challenges there, and less emphasis on the Middle East. This isn’t to say that the United States should be
unwilling to intervene in the Middle East. Rather, it is to say that our interventions there should be more tightly connected
to concrete objectives such as protecting the free flow of oil from the region, preventing terrorist attacks against the United
States and its allies, and forestalling or, if necessary, containing nuclear proliferation as opposed to the more idealistic
aspirations to transform the region’s societies. These more concrete objectives can be better met by the more judicious and
economical use of our military power. More broadly, however, it means a shift in US emphasis away from the greater
Middle East toward the Asia-Pacific region, which dwarfs the former in economic and military potential and in the
dynamism of its societies. The
Asia-Pacific region, with its hard-charging economies and growing presence on
of the international security and economic system will be
set, and it is there that Washington needs to focus its attention, especially in light of rising
the global stage, is where the future
regional security challenges.
1NC
DoJ lawyers are pressuring states that legalized marijuana now,
but federal legalization violates US obligations to UN treaties
Posel 13.
Susanne Posel (Investigative Journalist; Chief Editor @ OccupyCorporatism.com).
“Marijuana Legalization Violates US Gov Obligation to International Treaties,” Occupy
Corporatism, 3 May 2013, http://www.occupycorporatism.com/marijuana-legalizationviolates-us-gov-obligation-to-international-treaties //dtac
The US government, in conjunction with Department of Justice (DoJ) lawyers, are
considering suing states that have passed marijuana legalization laws. For now, the federal
government is observing how recreational laws will affect punitive measures and how the federal laws in place are
applicable. Illegal drugs from Mexico will be directly impacted by the legalization of marijuana in the US. Attorney
General Eric Holder explains: “ We
have treaty obligations with nations outside of the
US. There are a whole variety of things that have to go into the determination that we are in the process of making.”
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports research on drug
trafficking in the World Drug Report. The UN is monitoring the world heroin market and opium trade from the Lao
People’s Democratic Republic to Afghanistan and tracing the flow of drugs through markets in the Russian Federation
along its way to Easter Europe. Opium and heroin markets are estimated at $33 billion annually. Global cocaine market
that travels through the Near and Middle East, on to South-West Asia and Western and Central Europe is worth about
$88 billion. This cocaine is shipped from areas in the European Union to Colombia, Mexico or Central America. The
shipments then make their way into the US. In November of 2012, Raymond Yans, president of
the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) asserted that the US
government has treaty obligations that preclude the legalization of
marijuana in Colorado and Washington State. In fact, Yans points out that “these developments are
in violation of the international drug control treaties.” Stated in the 1961 UN
Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (SCND), the new legalization of marijuana laws in Colorado
and Washington must be overridden by the federal government because there was a limit “of the use of
cannabis to medical and scientific purposes”, according to the SCND. Therefore narcotic drugs
must be made available for medical purposes to all the States who signed the treaty. This fact would be reflected in
Treaty
obligations would also ensure that nations would comply with the SCND. The
SCND is a combination of many international drug trade treaties which
outlines the limitations of the “production, manufacture, export, import,
distribution of, trade in, use and possession of” opiates, marijuana and cocaine to
“medicinal and scientific purposes.” In Schedule 1, heroin, cocaine and cannibus are the most
restricted narcotics. The INCB was established to monitor nations and maintain compliance with the SCND. The
legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington State, according to Yans and the SCND, is a
contradiction to the international law set forth in the treaty. Yans made it clear that his
organization was seeking to have the US government come back into
compliance with the SCND with regard to the legalization of marijuana
which is a violation of international drug control treaties for the sake of “protect[ing]
national laws within each sovereign nations and be fully in-line with international mandates.
the health and well-being” of American citizens. The Global Initiative for Drug Policy Reform states that: “Although the
objectives of the 1961 Convention made it clear that its aims were the improvement of the health and welfare of mankind,
the measures of success which have been used in the ‘war on drugs’ approach have been the number of arrests, size of the
seizures or severity of prison sentences . . . these indicators may tell us how tough we are being, but they don’t tell us how
successful we are in improving the health and welfare of mankind.” In essence, the Obama administration
is facing the choice of knowingly violating the SCND or finding a legal
remedy against Colorado and Washington for allowing marijuana for
recreational use within state limits.
Spillsover to the whole regime.
David R. Bewley-Taylor 3, Department of American Studies, University of Wales,
The International Journal of Drug Policy, “Challenging the UN drug control conventions:
problems and possibilities”
Increasing numbers of sovereign states are beginning to review their stance on the prohibition based UN drug control
conventions. Recent years have seen nations implement, or seriously discuss, tolerant drug policies that exploit the
latitude existing within the legal framework of the global drug control regime. With efforts to implement
pragmatic approaches to drug use at the national level, however, comes the
growing recognition that the flexibility of the conventions is not unlimited. It
seems that the time is not too distant when further movement within states away
from the prohibitive paradigm will only be possible through some sort of change in or
defection from the regime. This article suggests that efforts to implement treaty
revision are fraught with difficulties. It will be shown how the UN procedures permitting revision of
the conventions allow nations supporting the current prohibition based system, particularly the United States of America,
to easily block change. The article argues that such systemic obstacles may lead parties wishing
to appreciably expand policy space at a national level to consider a form of
treaty withdrawal. It is suggested that such action by a group of like-minded revision oriented states
may be sufficient to trigger a weakening of the regime . The article contends, however,
that total withdrawal would be a problematic option, not least because it
would have serious consequences for the entire international treaty system .
Treaties breaking hampers cooperation on every issue – climate,
debt, trafficking, trade, terrorism, and proliferation
Koh and Smith 2006 (Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of
International Law, Yale Law School; Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human
Rights and Labor, 1998-2001, May, 2003, “FOREWORD: On American Exceptionalism,”
55 Stan. L. Rev. [Ben]
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=MJtQqpPM7QgZQHCm1hjSyn01
k0Mh2nhnVWLTYgfGp19rl3LDnGcR!-150223949!333767387?docId=5001997668)
Similarly, the oxymoronic concept of "imposed democracy" authorizes top-down regime change in the name of democracy.
Yet the United States has always argued that genuine democracy must flow from the will of the people, not from military
occupation. 67 Finally, a policy of strategic unilateralism seems unsustainable in an
interdependent world. For over the past two centuries, the United States has become
party not just to a few treaties, but to a global network of closely interconnected
treaties enmeshed in multiple frameworks of international institutions.
Unilateral administration decisions to break or bend one treaty
commitment thus rarely end the matter, but more usually trigger vicious cycles of treaty
violation. In an interdependent world, [*1501] the United States simply
cannot afford to ignore its treaty obligations while at the same time
expecting its treaty partners to help it solve the myriad global problems that
extend far beyond any one nation's control: the global AIDS and SARS crises, climate
change, international debt, drug smuggling, trade imbalances, currency
coordination, and trafficking in human beings, to name just a few. Repeated
incidents of American treaty-breaking create the damaging impression of a
United States contemptuous of both its treaty obligations and treaty partners.
That impression undermines American soft power at the exact moment that
the United States is trying to use that soft power to mobilize those same
partners to help it solve problems it simply cannot solve alone: most obviously, the
war against global terrorism, but also the postwar construction of Iraq, the Middle
East crisis, or the renewed nuclear militarization of North Korea.
1NC
Legalizing marijuana ignores that drug cartels are HIGHLY
adaptable and resilient and will move into HIGHER-PROFILE
criminal activities.
Astorga & Shirk 10 - *Doctor in Sociology from the University of Paris I
Panthéon-Sorbonne, member of the Institute for Social Research at the UNAM and the
National System of Researchers, and coordinator of the UNESCO Chair "Social and
economic transformations related to international drug problem, **Associate professor
in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of
San Diego, a Global Fellow at the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars, and a visiting professor at the UCSD School of International
Relations and Pacific Studies. (Luis & David A., Drug Trafficking Organizations and
Counter-Drug Strategies in the U.S.-Mexican Context, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies
UC San Diego, 01-01-2010) NAR
Generally speaking, however, there has been little serious attempt to gauge the possible
consequences of legalization for the United States, Mexico, or other drugproducing countries.74 Many pro-legalization activists assume that it will be
a simple cure-all for drug-related crime and violence. Yet organized crime is
highly adaptable and would no doubt venture into other high-profile
criminal activities (such as kidnapping or pirated materials). Legalization is
therefore unlikely to be a magic bullet in the fight against organized crime.
Moreover, as with other controlled substances, like tobacco and alcohol (whose costs to society arguably outweigh any tax
revenue they generate), legal recreational drug use represents a potentially serious harm, including traffic fatalities,
overdoses, addiction, and other impacts (such as second-hand effects on unborn children). In the end, any effort to
evaluate the merits of current policy versus legalization must conduct a careful accounting of the likely costs and benefits
of either approach. Also, whether permitted or prohibited, more resources must to be directed to reducing drug
consumption. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) estimates that in 2006 only 2.5 million U.S. citizens received
treatment for drug and alcohol addiction, out of an estimated 23.6 million U.S. citizens in need. NIDA estimates
conservatively that illicit drug consumption costs the United States more than $181 billion annually, and that the effects of
addiction can be considerably reduced by a greater concentration on treatment.75 Hence, moving toward a policy regime
that treats drug use as a public health problem could yield significant dividends, at significantly lower cost than both
countries are currently paying in the war on drugs. Over the last two decades, there have been
three successive generations of Mexican drug trafficking organizations.
With each generation there has been a shift in the balance of power , and the
emergence of different poles of dominance in Mexico’s drug trafficking underworld. First, there was a
relatively uni-polar arrangement under Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo in the mid-1980s. Next,
there came a fractioning of trafficking networks, and a brief bipolar
moment as the Arellano Félix organization faced competition from Amado Carrillo Fuentes and his allies in the
1990s. Finally, there has developed an increasingly multi-polar constellation
of trafficking organizations with varying specializations and capacities in the late 1990s and 2000s. In
the process, like other global supply chains, organized crime groups operating via Mexico
have become increasingly decentralized, diversified, and complex. Smaller
affiliated criminal organizations play varying roles as franchisees, precursor and retail suppliers, local and wholesale
distributors, cross-border smugglers and logistical facilitators, and enforcers, among other activities.76
Cartels will be re-vamped for nuclear terrorism.
Watkins 11 - MA @ Naval Postgraduate School (Lance J., SELF-PROPELLED SEMISUBMERSIBLES: THE NEXT GREAT THREAT TO REGIONAL SECURITY AND
STABILITY, NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA, June
2011, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a547788.pdf) NAR *notes: (SPSS) = SelfPropelled Semi-Submersible, (SPFS) = Self-Propelled Fully-Submersible
This demonstrates that DTOs
are advancing in overseas trafficking, setting up labs with possible
WMDs will soon follow . It is also common knowledge that once a relatively wealthy
country such as South Africa becomes a major transit route, it is not long before it becomes a
major drug consuming country‖ 143 An opportunity will always remain for DTOs to
conspire with terrorists and use SPSSs for WMDs. It can be chemical or nuclear in nature,
causing an international disaster in the Western Hemisphere. The USG and GOC
construction of SPSSs;
have to take into account the worst-case scenario when dealing with such innovative technology of DTOs. For example,
President Barrack Obama believes The greatest threat to U.S. and global security is no
longer a nuclear exchange between nations, but nuclear terrorism by violent
extremists and nuclear proliferation to an increasing number of states.144 This same idea applies to DTOs
that may be coercing with terrorists, planning a WMD destruction attack
using nuclear or biological weapons via SPSS. According to James Carafano of the Heritage
Foundation, The threat is pretty much global, Sri Lanka saw a lot of this and we have seen some from Hamas as well, so
It is not a far-fetched situation . DTOs
are motivated by profits, and if these extremists were to offer a huge amount
of money for the technology and development of SPSSs, a coastal or harbor
attack can easily be carried out within a few years in the U.S. The creativity and
we know groups are borrowing tactics from one another.145
expansion of these vessels will ignite drug cartels to improve the technology of another transiting tool for cocaine—
underground tunnels. In 2007, congress passed legislation providing a 20-year maximum sentence for the developing or
financing of subterranean passages between the U.S. and another country.146 The threat of tunnels being used to
transports human cargo and drugs concerned congress, because ―these passages were directly on U.S. soil and could be
used by terrorists‘ organizations to smuggle in dangerous weapons.‖ 147 The proceeding in passing laws against SPSSs,
were based on the same philosophy and guidelines. Drug smugglers operating and transiting SPSSs would be given a
―maximum 15-20 years sentence, since, theoretically, it can carry more dangerous cargo and present a threat to the
security of the United States.‖ 148
They'll switch after they diversify – analysts agree.
Morris ’13 (12/10; Evelyn Krache is an International Security Program fellow at the
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of
Government, Harvard University.) “Rethink Mexico’s cartels — they’re not just about
drugs” http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/12/10/3810031/rethink-mexicos-cartelstheyre.html#storylink=cpy (xo1)
A look at conventional assumptions about Mexican drug cartels:¶ “Drugs Aren’t a Foreign Policy Problem.”¶ You might
think so for all the attention they get. As U.S. officials and commentators focus on events in Syria, Egypt and Iran, another
violent struggle is taking place much closer to home. The rise of drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs) in
Mexico has fueled crime on both sides of the border and has undermined
the economy of an important trading partner of the U nited S tates.¶ Since 2006, more
than 60,000 people have been killed in DTO-related violence, and more than 26,000 have gone missing. The
violence has spread from rural Mexico to major cities like Guadalajara and
Mexico City, where, this May, armed men kidnapped 12 young people from a nightclub. The bodies of 10 of the
abductees were later found in a mass grave outside the city; officials think they were killed as part of an ongoing war
between rival drug gangs in the capital.¶ Despite enormous casualties, including members of U.S. law enforcement, the
turmoil in Mexico does not receive nearly the level of scrutiny or attention
from the U.S. government that conflicts in other countries do. During six hours of
presidential debate in the 2012 campaign, for example, there was not a single direct mention of Mexico.¶ This is
particularly puzzling given the close geographic, economic and cultural ties
between Mexico and the U nited S tates. The two countries share a 1,933-mile
border that 350 million people cross legally each year, making it the world’s busiest.
Mexico is the U nited S tates’ second-biggest export market and its third-largest
import supplier. And a 2011 Gallup poll found that 84 percent of Americans think that
what happens in Mexico is either “vitally important” or “important but not vital”
to the U nited S tates — more than said the same about Afghanistan, Iran or
Pakistan.¶ The official U.S. neglect of the Mexican cartels is partly a function of the complex challenges they present.
Violence connected with DTOs is no longer limited to northern Mexico but
now reaches throughout the country. This expansion not only poses a foreign-policy
problem for Washington, but it also exacerbates several of the most intractable domestic
issues facing the U nited S tates, including immigration reform and gun control.¶ A first step toward
controlling the cartels would be to better understand how they function. The Mexican drug-trafficking organizations are a
collection of criminal enterprises. Some, such as the Gulf cartel, have existed for decades; others, such as Los Gueros, are
relative newcomers. Because of shifting alliances and breakaway cells, it is almost impossible to state definitively which
cartels are in operation at any one time, and the extent of the crime, corruption, and instability associated with them has
been difficult to quantify precisely. Without a clearer idea of what the DTOs are doing, the violence will only continue. ¶
“The Cartels Are Focused on Drugs.”¶ Drugs are just the tip of the iceberg. In the popular U.S. television series Breaking
Bad, about a high school teacher turned methamphetamine kingpin, there was an instructive exchange. When the show’s
antihero, Walter White, was asked whether he “was in the meth business or the money business,” he replied, “I’m in the
empire business.”¶ The same can be said of the DTOs, which are independent and competing entities — not an association
like OPEC. The sale of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and meth remains extremely profitable. The U.S. Justice Department
has put the cartels’ U.S. drug trade at $39 billion annually. But the DTOs have diversified their business considerably, both
to increase their profits and to exclude rivals from new sources of revenue. For example, they are dealing increasingly in
pirated intellectual property, like counterfeit software, CDs and DVDs. The most destructive new “product,” however, is
people. The cartels have built a multibillion-dollar business in human trafficking, including the shipment of both illegal
immigrants and sex workers.¶ What the DTOs are really selling is logistics, much like Wal-Mart and Amazon.com.
Walmart was one of the first retailers to run its own fleet of trucks, providing tailored shipping at a lower cost that in turn
gave the company an edge over its competitors. Similarly, Amazon may have started as a bookseller, but its dominance, as
Fast Company put it, is “now less about what it sells than how it sells,” providing a distribution hub for all sorts of
products. Drug-trafficking organizations are using the same philosophy to cut costs, better control distribution, and
develop new sources of revenue.¶ The one element of the U.S.-Mexico relationship that has received no shortage of
attention is the border, yet the technology and money dedicated to enhancing security there have not been enough to
thwart creative DTOs. The Sinaloa cartel, for example, has an extensive network of expertly constructed tunnels under the
border, some featuring air-conditioning. (The workers who build the tunnels are frequently executed after the work is
completed.) At the other extreme, traffickers have used catapults to launch deliveries from Mexico into the United States.¶
Logistics, then, are the DTOs’ main source of revenue, and illegal drugs are but one of the
products they offer. As
the cartels’ revenue streams become increasingly
diversified, the drug trade will become less and less important. In fact, the
prospect of the DTOs’ selling their services to terrorists, say by transporting
w eapons of m ass d estruction across the U.S.-Mexico border, has begun to frighten
analysts both inside and outside government.¶
Collapses the global economy, escalates into global war.
Daley 10. Tad Daley (J.D., Ph.D, heads the Abolishing War program of the Center for
War/Peace Studies and former RAND Corporation member of the International Policy
department). Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World.
Kindle Book. cville
In a large urban area of the United States, a single nuclear detonation would
pose an existential threat both to our nation and to the world. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet
premier from 1953 to 1964, famously observed that, after a nuclear exchange, "the survivors will envy the dead." The Los
Angeles office of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), the American affiliate of the Nobel peace laureate
organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), projected the results of an atomic
warhead the size of the Hiroshima bomb (about 13 kilotons) detonating at noon on a weekday in downtown Los Angeles. It
concluded that more than 117,000 people would perish instantly, more than 15,000 others would die from intense
radiation exposure within a few hours, and more than 96,000 survivors would slowly wither away as victims of deadly
radioactive fallout.43 Similarly, the RAND Corporation released a study in August 2006 calculating the effects of a tenkiloton device exploding shortly after unloading onto a pier at Los Angeles-Long Beach Harbor, the busiest port in the
United States. It concluded that 60,000 people would die at once, 150,000 would be directly exposed to hazardous
radiation, and 2 to 3 million would have to relocate immediately because their homes would be hopelessly
contaminated.44 Another 2006 study came to even more disturbing conclusions (and also illuminated the large measure
of uncertainty regarding such assessments). A highly technical analysis in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
Discussions estimated the number of immediate deaths from a fifteen-kiloton nuclear detonation in various major cities
around the world: Los Angeles, 700,000; New York, 2 million; Tehran, 2.5 million; Cairo, 3.5 million; Moscow, 3.7
million. 45 Many of the city-busting hydrogen bombs produced during the protracted cold war,
however, are
still in service today, and they are far more potent than ten or fifteen
kilotons. Consider, for instance, the 550-kiloton warhead still common in the Russian
arsenal or the B-83, America's largest warhead, which weighs in at 1,200 kilotons (1.2 megatons-nearly
one hundred times the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima). Now raise those estimates from PSR, RAND,
and Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions accordingly. The RAND study also suggested that the economic
losses resulting from such an attack would quickly soar into the trillions of dollars and would resonate throughout the
global economy for years thereafter. The World Bank concluded that the 9/11 attacks cost the world economy 80 billion
dollars and cast 10 million people into poverty.4' The Royal Institute of International Affairs, defining cost more broadly,
found that the burden of 9/11 on the United States alone was at least 500 billion dollars.47 In a November 2004 video
(perhaps after reading that study), Osama Bin Laden pointed out the cost-effectiveness of his operation, which inflicted
half a trillion dollars' worth of damage on us yet cost him only half a million dollars to carry out.48 The Dow Jones
Industrial Average fell more than 7 percent on the first day of stock trading after the 9/11 attacks. How much would it fall
on the day after a nuclear terror attack? The broad and cascading economic costs could
plunge the world into deep depression and perhaps cause large segments of
the global economy to collapse into chaos. In addition, as our government endeavored to track
down the perpetrators and prevent future incidents, we might well see the rapid and remorseless
imposition of martial law and military rule into virtually every sphere of American life. General
Tommy Franks, commander of the American military force that toppled the government of Saddam Hussein, speculated
on the second anniversary of 9/11 about the possible domestic consequences of another "massive, casualty-producing
event" in the United States, "this time employing the potential of a weapon of mass destruction." According to Franks, it
might well cause "our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country ... [and] to
unravel the fabric of our Constitution."49 In the wake of a nuclear terror attack, would any American politicians muster
the temerity to object? If it happened in the weeks or days before a presidential election, would the election be canceled?
For those who worry about the degradation of American civil liberties in the wake of Guantanamo, the Patriot Act,
extrajudicial detentions, warrantless National Security Agency spying, ghost prisons, the September 2006 Military
Commissions Act, and the disturbing Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel memos issued within weeks of 9/11
but revealed to the public only after President Bush left office, only one thing can be said about the nuclear terror scenario:
you ain't seen nothing yet. Moreover, how might an incensed United States react in the international sphere? Even if
virtually no
evidence emerged to indicate who was behind the deed, enraged
citizens and demagogic politicians would bay for retaliation-perhaps on
Tehran , perhaps on Pyongyang , perhaps on Mecca and Medina . It is difficult to imagine any
American president resisting such pressures indefinitely. It is hard to envisage such reprisals being undertaken with
anything other than our substantially more powerful nuclear weapons . And it is hard to fathom the magnitude
of conflagration toward which such responses might ultimately lead. "And what then?" asks Pervez Hoodbhoy. "The
world shall plunge headlong into a bottomless abyss of reaction and
counter reaction whose horror the human mind cannot comprehend. -50
1NC
CP Text: The United States should enter into prior binding
consultation with the United Mexican States over the
legalization of marihuana.
Unilateral policy decisions backfire—binding consultation
cements US-Mexico strategic partnership
Woodrow Wilson Center 9 (“The United States and Mexico,” Mexico Institute,
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/The%20U.S.%20and%20Mexico.%20T
owards%20a%20Strategic%20Partnership.pdf) CMR
! The Obama administration and the incoming Congress
have the opportunity to raise the
level of attention given to Mexico and to pursue a strategic partnership
based on consultation and cooperation around issues of shared national interest. Too often
in the past, the U.S. government has pursued unilateral solutions to
problems that require binational cooperation. There is no lack of policies towards Mexico in
the U.S. government. Since the issues in the relationship with Mexico almost always have domestic as well as foreign
policy aspects, every department and almost every agency of the U.S. government has some dealings with Mexico or the
U.S.-Mexico border, as do a range of state and local government agencies. The challenge is, therefore, to find
strategic ways of building synergies among these multiple, disjointed, and
often competing efforts that tie into a broad agenda for collaboration with
Mexico around clearly defined objectives that are in the national security
interests of both countries. A strategic partnership between the two countries will
require both high-level foreign policy attention in Washington and Mexico City and efforts
to engage all government actors at the federal, state, and local level involved in key policy decisions. It will be
important to strengthen existing structures for consultation but also to
develop new ones that can promote and sustain effective dialogue and
problem-solving . ! There are at least four areas that call out for priority attention in the relationship and will
require sustained dialogue and engagement: security cooperation, economic integration, immigration, and border
management.
Growing a strong US-Mexican relationship is a prerequisite to
continued US power projection and supremacy.
Pastor 12
Robert A. Pastor is professor and director of the Center for North American Studies at
American University. Pastor served as National Security Advisor on Latin America
during the Carter Administration. “Beyond the Continental Divide” From the
July/August 2012 issue of The American Interest http://www.the-americaninterest.com/article.cfm?piece=1269
Most Americans think that the largest markets for U.S. exports are China
and Japan, and that may explain the Obama Administration’s Asian
initiative. But the truth is that Canada and Mexico are the top two markets
for U.S. exports. Most Americans also think that Saudi Arabia and Venezuela are the largest sources of our
energy imports, but again, Canada and Mexico are more important. And again, we think that most tourists who come and
spend money here are European and Asian, but more than half are Canadians and Mexicans. A similar percentage of
Americans who travel abroad go to our two neighbors. All in all, no two nations are more important
for the U.S. economy than our two closest neighbors. From the perspective
of U.S. national security, too, recall for a moment that Mexico and Canada made an
historic gamble in signing NAFTA. Already dependent on the behemoth next
door and wary of the imbalance of power, both countries feared that NAFTA could make them
more vulnerable. Still, they hoped that the United States would be obligated to treat
them on an equal and reciprocal basis and that they would prosper from the
agreement. Canadians and Mexicans have begun to question whether they made
the right choice. There are, of course, a wealth of ways to measure the direct and indirect impact of NAFTA, but
political attention, not without justification, tends to focus on violations of the agreement. The U.S.
government violated NAFTA by denying Mexican trucks the right to enter
the United States for 16 years, relenting in the most timid way, and only after Mexico was permitted by
the World Trade Organization to retaliate in October 2011. And for more than a decade, Washington failed to comply with
decisions made by a dispute-settlement mechanism regarding imports of soft-wood lumber from Canada. More recently,
the United States decided to build a huge wall to keep out Mexicans, and after a
three-year process of reviewing the environmental impact of the Keystone XL pipeline from western Canada to the Gulf of
Mexico, this past December 2011 President Obama decided to postpone the decision for another year. This is the
sort of treatment likely to drive both Canada and Mexico to conclude that
depending on the United States was the wrong decision. Imagine for a
moment what might happen if Canada and Mexico came to such a conclusion.
Canada might divert its energy exports to China, especially if China guaranteed a long-term relationship at a good price.
Mexico would diversify with South America and China and might be less
inclined to keep America’s rivals, like Iran, at arm’s length. Is there anyone who thinks
these developments would not set off national security alarms? A very old truth would quickly
reassert itself: The United States can project its power into Asia, Europe and
the Middle East in part because it need not worry about its neighbors. A new
corollary of that truth would not be far behind: Canada and Mexico are far more important to the national security of the
United States than Iraq and Afghanistan. Beyond the economy and national security, our two neighbors have societal ties
to the United States that make all other ethnic connections seem lean in comparison. By 2015, there will be
about 35 million people in the United States who were either born in Mexico
or whose parents were born in Mexico; that number exceeds the total population of Canada.
Canadians in the United States don’t stand out as much as do Mexicans, but nearly a million Canadians live in the United
States. And more Americans live in Mexico than in any other foreign country. In sum, the economy, national security and
society of the United States, Mexico and Canada are far more intertwined than most U.S., Canadian and Mexican citizens
realize. Most Americans haven’t worried about Mexico in strategic terms since
the days of Pancho Villa, or about Canada since the 1814 Battle of Plattsburgh. That’s unwise.
Bad relations with either country, let alone both, would be disastrous. On
the other hand, deeper relations could be vastly beneficial. We don’t seem ready to
recognize that truth either.
Loss of American power projection capacity causes global war.
Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth ’13 (Stephen, Associate Professor of
Government at Dartmouth College, John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of
Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, William C. Wohlforth is the
Daniel Webster Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College
“Don’t Come Home America: The Case Against Retrenchment,” International Security,
Vol. 37, No. 3 (Winter 2012/13), pp. 7–51)
A core premise of deep engagement is that it prevents the emergence of a far more
dangerous global security environment. For one thing, as noted above, the
United States’ overseas presence gives it the leverage to restrain partners
from taking provocative action. Perhaps more important, its core alliance
commitments also deter states with aspirations to regional hegemony from
contemplating expansion and make its partners more secure, reducing their incentive to adopt solutions to their security problems
that threaten others and thus stoke security dilemmas. The contention that engaged U.S. power dampens the baleful
effects of anarchy is consistent with influential variants of realist theory. Indeed, arguably the scariest portrayal of the war-prone world that would
emerge absent the “American Pacifier” is provided in the works of John Mearsheimer, who forecasts dangerous
multipolar regions replete with security competition, arms races, nuclear
proliferation and associated preventive war temptations, regional rivalries,
and even runs at regional hegemony and full-scale great power war. 72 How do
retrenchment advocates, the bulk of whom are realists, discount this benefit? Their arguments are complicated, but two capture most of the variation: (1) U.S.
security guarantees are not necessary to prevent dangerous rivalries and conflict in Eurasia; or (2) prevention of rivalry and conflict in Eurasia is not a U.S.
interest. Each response is connected to a different theory or set of theories, which makes sense given that the whole debate hinges on a complex future
counterfactual (what would happen to Eurasia’s security setting if the United States truly disengaged?). Although a certain answer is impossible, each of these
responses is nonetheless a weaker argument for retrenchment than advocates acknowledge. The first response flows from defensive realism as well as other
international relations theories that discount the conflict-generating potential of anarchy under contemporary conditions. 73 Defensive realists maintain that the
high expected costs of territorial conquest, defense dominance, and an array of policies and practices that can be used credibly to signal benign intent, mean that
Eurasia’s major states could manage regional multipolarity peacefully without the American pacifier. Retrenchment would be a bet on this scholarship, particularly
in regions where the kinds of stabilizers that nonrealist theories point to—such as democratic governance or dense institutional linkages—are either absent or
weakly present. There are three other major bodies of scholarship, however, that might give decisionmakers pause before making this bet. First is regional
expertise. Needless to say, there is no consensus on the net security effects of U.S. withdrawal. Regarding each region, there are optimists and pessimists. Few
experts expect a return of intense great power competition in a post-American Europe, but many doubt European governments will pay the political costs of
increased EU defense cooperation and the budgetary costs of increasing military outlays. 74 The result might be a Europe that is incapable of securing itself from
various threats that could be destabilizing within the region and beyond (e.g., a regional conflict akin to the 1990s Balkan wars), lacks capacity for global security
missions in which U.S. leaders might want European participation, and is vulnerable to the influence of outside rising powers. What about the other parts of
Eurasia where the United States has a substantial military presence? Regarding the Middle East, the balance begins to swing toward pessimists concerned that
states currently backed by Washington— notably Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—might take actions upon U.S. retrenchment that would intensify security
dilemmas. And concerning East Asia, pessimism regarding the region’s prospects without the American pacifier is pronounced. Arguably the principal concern
expressed by area experts is that Japan and South Korea are likely to obtain a nuclear capacity and increase their military commitments, which could stoke a
destabilizing reaction from China. It is notable that during the Cold War, both South Korea and Taiwan moved to obtain a nuclear weapons capacity and were only
constrained from doing so by a still-engaged United States. 75 The second body of scholarship casting doubt on the bet on defensive realism’s sanguine portrayal is
all of the research that undermines its conception of state preferences. Defensive realism’s optimism about what would happen if the United States retrenched is
very much dependent on its particular—and highly restrictive—assumption about state preferences; once we relax this assumption, then much of its basis for
optimism vanishes. Specifically, the prediction of post-American tranquility throughout Eurasia rests on the assumption that security is the only relevant state
preference, with security defined narrowly in terms of protection from violent external attacks on the homeland. Under that assumption, the security problem is
Burgeoning
research across the social and other sciences, however, undermines that core assumption:
states have preferences not only for security but also for prestige, status, and other aims, and
largely solved as soon as offense and defense are clearly distinguishable, and offense is extremely expensive relative to defense.
they engage in trade-offs among the various objectives. 76 In addition, they define security not just in terms of territorial protection but in view of many and varied
milieu goals. It follows that even states that are relatively secure may nevertheless engage in highly competitive behavior. Empirical studies show that this is indeed
sometimes the case. 77 In sum, a bet on a benign postretrenchment Eurasia is a bet that leaders of major countries will never allow these nonsecurity preferences to
influence their strategic choices. To the degree that these bodies of scholarly knowledge have predictive leverage, U.S. retrenchment would result in a significant
deterioration in the security environment in at least some of the world’s key regions. We have already mentioned the third, even more alarming body of
that the withdrawal of the American pacifier will yield
either a competitive regional multipolarity complete with associated
insecurity, arms racing, crisis instability, nuclear proliferation, and the like, or bids
scholarship. Offensive realism predicts
for regional hegemony, which may be beyond the capacity of local great powers to contain (and which in any case would generate intensely competitive behavior,
great power war).
possibly including regional
Hence it is unsurprising that retrenchment advocates are prone to focus on the second argument
noted above: that avoiding wars and security dilemmas in the world’s core regions is not a U.S. national interest. Few doubt that the United States could survive the
return of insecurity and conflict among Eurasian powers, but at what cost? Much of the work in this area has focused on the economic externalities of a renewed
threat of insecurity and war, which we discuss below. Focusing on the pure security ramifications, there are two main reasons why decisionmakers may be
rationally reluctant to run the retrenchment experiment. First, overall higher levels of conflict make the world a more dangerous place. Were Eurasia to return to
one would see overall higher levels of military spending and innovation and a higher likelihood of
proxy wars and arming of client states
higher levels of interstate military competition,
competitive regional
—all of which would be concerning, in part because it would
promote a faster diffusion of military power away from the United States. Greater regional insecurity could well feed proliferation cascades, as states such as Egypt,
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia all might choose to create nuclear forces. 78 It is unlikely that proliferation decisions by any of these actors would be
the end of the game: they would likely generate pressure locally for more proliferation. Following Kenneth Waltz, many retrenchment advocates are proliferation
optimists, assuming that nuclear deterrence solves the security problem. 79 Usually carried out in dyadic terms, the debate over the stability of proliferation
changes as the numbers go up. Proliferation optimism rests on assumptions of rationality and narrow security preferences. In social science, however, such
assumptions are inevitably probabilistic. Optimists assume that most states are led by rational leaders, most will overcome organizational problems and resist the
temptation to preempt before feared neighbors nuclearize, and most pursue only security and are risk averse. Confidence in such probabilistic assumptions
declines if the world were to move from nine to twenty, thirty, or forty nuclear states. In addition, many of the other dangers noted by analysts who are concerned
about the destabilizing effects of nuclear proliferation—including the risk of accidents and the prospects that some new nuclear powers will not have truly
crisis dynamics” that
could spin out of control is also higher as the number of nuclear powers increases. Finally, add to these concerns the enhanced danger
survivable forces—seem prone to go up as the number of nuclear powers grows. 80 Moreover, the risk of “unforeseen
of nuclear leakage, and a world with overall higher levels of security competition becomes yet more worrisome. The argument that maintaining Eurasian peace is
not a U.S. interest faces a second problem. On widely accepted realist assumptions, acknowledging that U.S. engagement preserves peace dramatically narrows the
difference between retrenchment and deep engagement. For many supporters of retrenchment, the optimal strategy for a power such as the United States, which
has attained regional hegemony and is separated from other great powers by oceans, is offshore balancing: stay over the horizon and “pass the buck” to local
powers to do the dangerous work of counterbalancing any local rising power. The United States should commit to onshore balancing only when local balancing is
likely to fail and a great power appears to be a credible contender for regional hegemony, as in the cases of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the
midtwentieth century. The problem is that China’s rise puts the possibility of its attaining regional hegemony on the table, at least in the medium to long term. As
Mearsheimer notes, “The United States will have to play a key role in countering China, because its Asian neighbors are not strong enough to do it by themselves.”
81 Therefore, unless China’s rise stalls, “the United States is likely to act toward China similar to the way it behaved toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.”
82 It follows that the United States should take no action that would compromise its capacity to move to onshore balancing in the future. It will need to maintain
key alliance relationships in Asia as well as the formidably expensive military capacity to intervene there. The implication is to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan,
the argument that U.S.
security commitments are unnecessary for peace is countered by a lot of
scholarship, including highly influential realist scholarship. In addition, the argument that Eurasian peace is unnecessary for U.S. security is
reduce the presence in Europe, and pivot to Asia— just what the United States is doing. 83 In sum,
weakened by the potential for a large number of nasty security consequences as well as the need to retain a latent onshore balancing capacity that dramatically
reduces the savings retrenchment might bring. Moreover, switching between offshore and onshore balancing could well be difªcult. Bringing together the thrust of
the case for retrenchment misses the
underlying logic of the deep engagement strategy. By supplying reassurance, deterrence, and active
management, the United States lowers security competition in the world’s key regions, thereby preventing the
emergence of a hothouse atmosphere for growing new military capabilities. Alliance ties dissuade
many of the arguments discussed so far underlines the degree to which
partners from ramping up and also provide leverage to prevent military transfers to potential rivals. On top of all this, the United States’ formidable military
machine may deter entry by potential rivals. Current great power military expenditures as a percentage of GDP are at historical lows, and thus far other major
powers have shied away from seeking to match top-end U.S. military capabilities. In addition, they have so far been careful to avoid attracting the “focused enmity”
of the United States. 84 All of the world’s most modern militaries are U.S. allies (America’s alliance system of more than sixty countries now accounts for some 80
percent of global military spending), and the gap between the U.S. military capability and that of potential rivals is by many measures growing rather than
shrinking. 85
1NC DEA
Sinola Cartel winning the War – no violence escalation.
Global Post 13 (“How the Sinaloa cartel won Mexico’s drug war”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/mexico/130227/sinaloacartel-mexico-drug-war-US-global-economy-conflict-zones) RJT
BADIRAGUATO, Mexico — Neat, freshly painted buildings and a renovated church
line the central square. Shiny SUVs rest curbside. Some lack license plates, as if the law
doesn’t apply. Mansions crown the surrounding hills.¶ Badiraguato, a town of 7,000 in Sinaloa state, shouldn’t have such
wealth. It’s among the poorest municipalities in Mexico. But you’re better off not asking questions here.¶ This is a secretive
place, hot and quiet in the Sierra Madre foothills. There’s an army barracks, but soldiers
mostly stay inside.¶ It’s the heart of drug country, home to Mexico's most
powerful criminal syndicate: the Sinaloa cartel, led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.¶ For well over a
century, local farmers have the harvested marijuana and opium in the rugged
mountains surrounding Badiraguato. Since the 1980s, Sinaloa cartel has acted as their Wal-Mart,
transporting the mind-bending cargo north with quasi-corporate efficiency, and distributing it
to a narcotics-craving United States market.¶ Ever since former President Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of soldiers
and federal police to combat organized crime in 2006, the country has been ravaged by violence. An estimated 70,000
people have been killed in often brutal territorial warfare.¶ Yes, there have been victories for the government: In March
2009 the attorney general’s office published a most-wanted list of 37 high profile drug lords. As of February 2013, twothirds of them are either dead or in custody. By now, the majority of the seven major drug
trafficking cartels battling for dominance have been crippled. Most have partially or completely fractured
into smaller groups. Even the infamous Los Zetas, whose leader Heriberto Lazcano was killed
last fall, have recently suffered severe blows.¶ Only the Sinaloa cartel seems to
have survived the onslaught relatively intact.¶ In fact, some critics of the government even claim Sinaloa has
“won” the drug war.¶ El Chapo is still at large, after his spectacular escape from prison in . In mid-February Guatemalan
authorities investigated rumors that he had been gunned down, but the president’s spokesman later told GlobalPost they
found no evidence of this. His inner circle cronies Juan Jose Esparragoza and Ismael Zambada also still operate freely.¶
And while they succesfully evade capture, the cartel has made substantial territorial
advances, and has amassed extravagant wealth.¶ “El Chapo is going to get stronger if he is not
arrested in the next year and a half,” a senior official of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) told Forbes in a June
2011 interview.¶ Since then, the Sinaloa cartel ousted its rivals in the lucrative smuggling corridors of
Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. El Chapo himself is now the most wanted man on the globe, with US authorities offering a $5
million reward for any information leading to his capture.¶ In a business as opaque as the drug trade, it’s hard to get
reliable figures on the size of a crime group’s territory, the breadth of its wealth or the extent of its market share. Court
documents, arrests and drug seizures, however, paint a picture of the Sinaloa cartel as a multinational, highly flexible
organization, quick to adapt to new circumstances and showing a resilience unlike any of its rivals.¶ Compared to its
humble beginnings in the 1980s, when it controlled only a single Pacific trafficking route into Arizona, the cartel’s
territorial expansion has been staggering. Key areas it now controls include most of Mexico’s Pacific coast states and parts
of central Mexico.¶ Even more impressive is its global reach. Sinaloa operatives have been arrested from Egypt to
Argentina and from Europe to Malaysia. Properties attributed to El Chapo Guzman have been seized in Europe and South
America. US law enforcement reports that the group is now present in all major American cities. Recent US court
documents involving the case of Vicente Zambada-Niebla, Mayo Zambada's son, even suggest the Sinaloa cartel now
controls the cocaine trade in Australia.¶ Earlier this month, Chicago named El Chapo Guzman public enemy No. 1, the first
to receive that title since the city’s legendary crime boss, Al Capone.¶ Sinaloa's share in the drug market is titanic. Even by
the most sober estimates, Mexican drug trafficking amounts to over $6 billion per year, with El Chapo's Sinaloa cartel
controlling an estimated half of that market, raking in billions each year.¶ No wonder Forbes has listed El Chapo Guzman
on its annual list of billionaires since 2009.¶ “The Sinaloa cartel certainly has the upper hand now,” says Javier Valdez, cofounder of Rio Doce, a Sinaloa-based weekly magazine covering the drug war. “It’s the only cartel that has grown over the
years, extending its reach into Europe, Africa and South America, while all others have lost.Ӧ Some have
accused the Calderon administration of collusion with El Chapo, claiming
the government struck a deal by taking out its rivals. And last October,
leaked emails from security analysis firm STRATFOR suggested that even
the US government facilitated them.¶ Accusations of government collusion, however, are rejected by
Malcolm Beith, a British-American journalist and author of "The Last Narco," a book about El Chapo Guzman. “Since
2009, the Sinaloa cartel has been hit very hard too, completely obliterating those criticisms,” he contends.¶ Beith points
out that Sinaloa's survival and recalcitrant power should instead be attributed to the way it operates.¶ “ There
is a
level-headedness about the leadership that the other groups lack ,” he says. “To the
authorities, first priority always has to be quelling violence. When other groups throw grenades into a crowd of innocents
or behead[s] people, it's obvious what needs to be done. Sinaloa has perpetrated its share of violence, but by
and
large it did not cause disruption to the general well-being of the population."¶
The Sinaloa cartel’s relatively low profile in terms of violence is partly due to its relatively long history — it’s been around
for 25 years. In Sinaloa itself the goup is deeply rooted in society. Not only do its senior leaders hail from the region, but
the cartel reputedly funds hospitals and schools, thus winning support from
locals who aid the "capos" in their never-ending struggle to escape arrest.¶ El
Chapo and his cronies have also perfected the strategy of “bribe over bullet,” preferring
to corrupt authorities rather than fighting them into submission. Government officials on all
levels in Mexico have been accused of being on Sinaloa’s take, as have some of their US counterparts.¶ “El Chapo has an
apparent ability to [allegedly] corrupt and infiltrate elements of law enforcement on both sides of the border and
seemingly play the authorities' every move to his advantage,” Beith says. “When the Mexican army moved into Juarez, so
did El Chapo, seizing an opportunity. When the authorities took down the Arellano-Felix cartel, El Chapo was already
poised to take Tijuana.Ӧ All things considered, El Chapo Guzman and his Sinaloa cartel seem to have been profiting rather
than suffering from the drug war, Javier Valdez argues. “The drug war has helped them stay on
top. While they continue to keep the heat away from their home turf, their rivals have been
weakened.Ӧ The most recent National Drug Threat Assessment of the Justice Department (2011) suggests the same,
by stating that overall drug availability in the US is increasing, as are production of marijuana, heroin and synthetic drugs
such as methamphetamine. Those are all businesses in which El Chapo Guzman and his Sinaloa cartel have a large stake.¶
“The organization is particularly dominant because it is one of the few that can obtain multi-ton quantities of cocaine from
South America, as well as produce large quantities of heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine,” the report claims.¶
Felipe Calderen left office in December. His succesor Enrique Peña Nieto promises to cut the murder rate in half in the
next six years, but most Mexicans doubt he is able to; during his first two months in office at least 1,500 people are
estimated to have died in gangland violence.¶ All the while El Chapo Guzman continues to make a mockery of the drug war
with every day he remains at large. His Sinaloa cartel has been around longer than any
other crime group in Mexico, and it may just outlast everybody else.
Latin America impacts are empirically denied
Hartzell 2000 (Caroline A., 4/1/2000, Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies Latin American
Essays, “Latin America's civil wars: conflict resolution and institutional change.”
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-28765765_ITM)
Latin America has been the site of fourteen civil wars during the post-World War II era,
thirteen of which now have ended. Although not as civil war-prone as some other areas of the world, Latin America
has endured some extremely violent and destabilizing intrastate conflicts. (2) The region's
experiences with civil wars and their resolution thus may prove instructive for other parts of the
world in which such conflicts continue to rage. By examining Latin America's civil wars in some depth
not only might we better understand the circumstances under which such conflicts are ended but also the institutional
outcomes to which they give rise. More specifically, this paper focuses on the following central questions regarding Latin
America's civil wars: Has the resolution of these conflicts produced significant institutional change in the countries in
which they were fought? What is the nature of the institutional change that has taken place in the wake of these civil wars?
What are the factors that are responsible for shaping post-war institutional change?
No Latin America impact
World Economic Forum 8 – is an independent international organization committed to
improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to
shape global, regional and industry agendas. (“Uncertain political landscape ahead for Latin America,” News
Release, April 15, 2008, http://www.weforum.org/news/uncertain-political-landscape-ahead-latinamerica)//SS
The political future of Latin America seems uncertain agreed panelists in a
session on the political state of the region, especially given the recent spat
between Ecuador and Colombia, rumblings in Venezuela, and the
presidential elections and economic downturn in the United States.¶ Moisés
Naím, Editor-in-Chief, Foreign Policy Magazine, USA, expressed surprise at how good the economy has been in Latin
America, even though there had been political instability. “The last four years have been the best economically since 1492,”
he said.¶ Latin America nears the end of the first decade of the 21st century in the midst of an unprecedented run of
economic growth, peace and political stability, participants in the World Economic Forum on Latin America 2008 agreed.¶
Yet the geopolitical landscape seems uncertain given the recent spat between Ecuador and Colombia, rumblings in
Venezuela, and the presidential elections and economic downturn in the United States.¶ Mr Naím offered what he called
two surprises and one prediction. Surprise number one: “how good the economy has
been in Latin America and how bad the politics have been,” he said. “The last four years
have been the best [economically] since 1492.Ӧ Hyperbole
aside, economic performance is
indeed about as good as ever since the dawn of systematic statistical
analysis. Yet political unrest, involving sometimes violent street protests, is
growing in many countries.¶ “If the politics have been bad when the economy
has been good, it is interesting to imagine – if you think there will be a
slowdown – what the politics will be like when the economy is bad.”
1NC Ag
Industrial model is good and sustainable – AFF causes widespread
environmental damage and crushes GMO’s
-lower yields: 20-50%
-land use
-acidification
-soil erosion/tillage
-rotenone x fish
-zero-sum: aff model T/O
Miller 14 (Dr. Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, was the founding
director of the FDA's Office of Biotechnology and is a research fellow at Stanford
University's Hoover Institution, “Organic Farming Is Not Sustainable,” May 15,
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB100014240527023044311045795500028884344
32, Groot)
You may have noticed that the organic section of your local supermarket is growing.
Advocates tout organic-food production—in everything from milk and coffee to meat and
vegetables—as a "sustainable" way to feed the planet's expanding population. The
Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental group, goes so far as to
say organic farming "has the potential to contribute to sustainable food security by
improving nutrition intake and sustaining livelihoods in rural areas, while simultaneously
reducing vulnerability to climate change and enhancing biodiversity." The evidence
argues otherwise. A study by the Institute for Water Research at Ben-Gurion University in
Israel, published last year in the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, found that
"intensive organic agriculture relying on solid organic matter, such as composted manure
that is implemented in the soil prior to planting as the sole fertilizer, resulted in
significant down-leaching of nitrate" into groundwater. With many of the world's most
fertile farming regions in the throes of drought, increased nitrate in groundwater is hardly a
hallmark of sustainability. Moreover, as agricultural scientist Steve Savage has documented
on the Sustainablog website, wide-scale composting generates significant amounts of
greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. Compost may also deposit pathogenic
bacteria on or in food crops, which has led to more frequent occurrences of food poisoning
in the U.S. and elsewhere. Organic farming might work well for certain local
environments on a small scale, but its farms produce far less food per unit of land
and water than conventional ones. The low yields of organic agriculture—typically
20%-50% less than conventional agriculture—impose various stresses on farmland and
especially on water consumption. A British meta-analysis published in the Journal of
Environmental Management (2012) found that "ammonia emissions, nitrogen leaching
and nitrous oxide emissions per product unit were higher from organic systems"
than conventional farming systems, as were "land use, eutrophication potential and
acidification potential per product unit." Lower crop yields are inevitable given organic
farming's systematic rejection of many advanced methods and technologies. If the
scale of organic production were significantly increased, the lower yields would
increase the pressure for the conversion of more land to farming and more water for
irrigation, both of which are serious environmental issues. Another limitation of
organic production is that it disfavors the best approach to enhancing soil quality—
namely, the minimization of soil disturbances such as tilling, combined with the use of
cover crops. Both approaches help to limit soil erosion and the runoff of fertilizers
and pesticides. Organic growers do frequently plant cover crops, but in the absence of
effective herbicides, often they rely on tillage (or even labor-intensive hand weeding) for
weed control. One prevalent myth is that organic agriculture does not employ
pesticides. Organic farming does use insecticides and fungicides to prevent predation
of its crops. More than 20 chemicals (mostly containing copper and sulfur) are
commonly used in the growing and processing of organic crops and are acceptable
under U.S. organic rules. They include nicotine sulfate, which is extremely toxic to
warm-blooded animals, and rotenone, which is moderately toxic to most mammals but so
toxic to fish that it's widely used for the mass poisoning of unwanted fish populations
during restocking projects. Perhaps the most illogical and least sustainable aspect of
organic farming in the long term is the exclusion of "genetically modified organisms,"
but only those that were modified with the most precise and predictable techniques
such as gene splicing. Except for wild berries and wild mushrooms, virtually all the fruits,
vegetables and grains in our diet have been genetically improved by one technique or
another, often through what are called wide crosses, which move genes from one species or
genus to another in ways that do not occur in nature. Therefore, the exclusion from
organic agriculture of organisms simply because they were crafted with modern, superior
techniques makes no sense. It also denies consumers of organic goods nutritionally
improved foods, such as oils with enhanced levels of omega-3 fatty acids. In recent
decades, we have seen advances in agriculture that have been more environmentally
friendly and sustainable than ever before. But they have resulted from science-based
research and technological ingenuity by farmers, plant breeders and agribusiness
companies, not from social elites opposed to modern insecticides, herbicides, genetic
engineering and "industrial agriculture."
GMO’s key to avert extinction
Trewavas 2K [Anthony, Professor at the Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology at the
University of Edinburgh, “GM IS the Best Option We Have”,
http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech-info/articles/biotech-art/best_option.html]
In 535A.D. a volcano near the present Krakatoa exploded with the force of 200 million
Hiroshima A bombs. The dense cloud of dust so reduced the intensity of the sun that for at
least two years thereafter, summer turned to winter and crops here and elsewhere in the
Northern hemisphere failed completely. The population survived by hunting a rapidly
vanishing population of edible animals. The after-effects continued for a decade and human
history was changed irreversibly. But the planet recovered. Such examples of benign
nature's wisdom, in full flood as it were, dwarf and make miniscule the tiny modifications
we make upon our environment. There are apparently 100 such volcanoes round the
world that could at any time unleash forces as great. And even smaller volcanic
explosions change our climate and can easily threaten the security of our food supply.
Our hold on this planet is tenuous. In the present day an equivalent 535A.D. explosion
would destroy much of our civilisation. Only those with agricultural technology
sufficiently advanced would have a chance at survival. Colliding asteroids are another
problem that requires us to be forward-looking accepting that technological advance may
be the only buffer between us and annihilation.
Turn – High yield agriculture is critical to preventing soil erosion – The
impact is extinction
Avery, Director of & Senior Fellow at Center for Global Food Issues, former agriculture
analyst for the State Department, and former staff member of the President's National
Advisory Commission on Food and Fiber, 95 (Dennis, “SAVING THE PLANET WITH NOTILL, HIGH-YIELD FARMING,” before the Manitoba/North Dakota Zero Tillage Farmer's
Association, January 24,
http://www.mandakzerotill.org/books/proceedings/Proceedings%2019
95/highyield.html)
The true long-term threat to human existence is soil erosion. Doubling the yields
on the best and safest farmland cuts soil erosion by more than half. And
now herbicides and conservation tillage are letting us cut those low rates of
soil erosion by 65 to 98 percent . It should now be possible to build topsoil and soil tilth on much of the world's best farmland -- while carrying on intensive highyield farming. For 10,000 years, man has accepted soil erosion as the long-term price for having a dependable food supply in the short run. In the U.S. alone, the Conservation 'Technology
Information Center reports roughly 100 million acres using conservation tillage systems. The systems are continuing their rapid spread through such widely-differing agricultures as Western
Herbicides are the first alternative mankind has ever
developed to "bare-earth" farming. These herbicide-based farming systems are the most sustainable farming Systems ever devised.
They save more soil, even as they encourage more earthworms, more soil
microbes and more soil tilth than plowing. Nor do the herbicides present
any significant threat to wildlife or people from runoff or residues. (Atrazine, the most
Europe, Brazil, Australia and Kenya. We are doing this with chemicals.
widely-used "suspicious" herbicide in the world has just had its safety rating raised seven-fold by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.) In addition, high-yield farmers are in the midst of
developing "no-leach" farming. Tractors and applicator trucks for farm chemicals now can be guided by global positioning satellites and radar within inches of their true positions across the
field, while microprocessors vary the application rates of chemicals and seed seven times a second based on intensive soil sampling, soil hydrology, slope, plant population and nearness to
High-yield farming must now
claim environmental credit for both the acres not plowed. and for the soil
erosion not suffered.
waterways. It is now practical to manage our farms by the square yard, rather than in chunks of 10 or 100 hectares.
Warming inevitable even if we cut emissions to zero—multiple
studies confirm
Gillett et al 10—director @ the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis Nathan, “Ongoing climate
change following a complete cessation of carbon dioxide emissions”. Nature Geoscience
Several recent studies have demonstrated that CO2-induced 17 global mean temperature
change is irreversible on human 18 timescales1_5. We find that not only is this climate
change 19 irreversible, but that for some climate variables, such as Antarctic 20
temperature and North African rainfall, CO2-induced climate 21 changes are simulated to
continue to worsen for many centuries 22 even after a complete cessation of emissions.
Although it is 23 also well known that a large committed thermosteric sea level 24 rise is expected
even after a cessation of emissions in 2100, 25 our finding of a strong delayed high-latitude Southern
Ocean 26 warming at intermediate depths suggests that this effect may be 27 compounded by ice shelf
collapse, grounding line retreat, and ensuing accelerated ice discharge in marine-based
sectors of the 28 Antarctic ice sheet, precipitating a sea level rise of several metres. 29
Quantitative results presented here are subject to uncertainties 30 associated with the climate sensitivity, the
rate of ocean heat 31 uptake and the rate of carbon uptake in CanESM1, but our 32 findings of
Northern
Hemisphere cooling, Southern Hemisphere 33 warming, a southward shift of the
intertropical convergence zone, 34 and delayed and ongoing ocean warming at
intermediate depths 35 following a cessation of emissions are likely to be robust. Geo- 36
engineering by stratospheric aerosol injection has been proposed 37 as a response measure in the event of a
rapid melting of the 38 West Antarctic ice sheet24. Our results indicate that if such a 39 melting were driven by
ocean warming at intermediate depths, as 40 is thought likely, a geoengineering response would be ineffective 41
for several centuries owing to the long delay associated with 42 subsurface ocean warming.
Rainforests A. Compensating for lower yields will lead to the razing of
rainforest.
Avery, ‘98
[Dennis, Sr. Researcher the Hudson Institute & Director of the Center for Global Food security,
“Saving People and Wild Lands with Global Modern Agriculture ” Agricultural Institute of Canada
Conference, July 5, 1998, http://www.highyieldconservation.org/articles/savingpeople.html]
Agriculture dominates the world's land use. Cities take only 1.4 percent of the earth's land area, and will occupy less than 4
percent in 2030.4 Agriculture (with pastures) takes about one-third of the land area, and its
high yields have kept another third for forests-on the land left over we have
"enough" food. We must remember that land is the scarcest natural resource of all, and high-yield farming is how
we conserve it. The world's population today is 80 percent bigger than in 1960. The environmental wonder of the 20th
Century is that today's farmers are feeding better diets to almost twice as many people from virtually the same cropland
base. We used 1,394 million hectares of land for crops in 1960-and only 1,441 million hectares in 1992 to get twice the
grain and oilseeds.5-6 In addition, the average Third World citizen is getting 28 percent more calories, including 59
percent more vegetable oil (twice the resource cost of cereal calories) and 50 percent more animal calories (three times the
resource cost of cereals).7 The world's population is likely to re-stabilize at roughly 9 billion
people, about the year 2040.8 Most of these people will be affluent, demanding much more meat and milk,
along with more fruits, vegetables and cotton. Thus, the world's agricultural output must increase
by at least 250 percent, and may need to triple.9 Moral concerns aside, famine is not an option for
saving the environment. Poor people in the newly emerging countries are clearly willing to chop down
forests and kill wildlife to get adequate calories-or even to get high-quality protein.
India is trying to produce its own milk, even though it has to steal one-third of its dairy fodder from the forests and
another third in the form of its crop residues from its soil tilth. Indonesia is clearing tropical forest to grow low-yielding
soybeans for chicken feed. If the world shifted to organic farming tomorrow, it would almost
immediately have to clear 5 to 6 million square miles of forest for green manure
crops and organic nitrogen. Then, since the evidence is strong that organic yields are substantially lower,
we would have to plow additional wildlands to make up for the low yields.
B. This leads to the destruction of the Amazon – ending life on Earth.
Hurtak, ‘5
[JJ, PhD, founder and President of the Academy for Future Sciences and consultant in the field of
philosophy and its application to technical futures” “Crisis of the Amazon” The Academy for
Future Science, http://www.affs.org/html/crisis_of_the_amazon.html]
What will happen if the Brasilian rainforest disappears? The forest makes its own climate and is
the result of that unique climate. What if devastation continues at the present rate? Most everything could be
gone by the year 2025 AD. A hundred thousand square kilometers of primeval forest are cleared every year the
results of destruction grow exponentially. Land the size of Portugal is slashed and burned every year. And the end
will inevitably be: (1) a change in weather, (2) an increase of drought and desert, and
(3) massive starvation for many peoples, regardless of background and world economics. With large land
parcels being given away for exploitation, there is absolutely no way, even with Radam surveys, to oversee clearance. At
the present time, 100 tons of topsoil are lost per hectare each year. The forests that are destroyed will take a
thousand years to regenerate. With their destruction goes the refugia of a species diversity entirely preserved
from the early periods of evolution—the Pleistocene era in our "present" time: with color morphs, strange and beautiful
speciations, butterfly wings of color. All of this is being steadily destroyed, and there is human tragedy as well. At least
87 Indian tribes have become extinct this century. Anthropologists have seen an overall Amazonian
aborigine population decrease over the past 500 years from an estimated 6.8 million to the present 125,000.
Anthropologist Emilio Moran cites disturbing research indicating the decline of the Parakana and Nambiquara indigenous
groups within very short periods of time due to the influences of outside companies, ranchers, and road workers whom the
Indians call the "termite people." As highways and small
farmers who are simply trying to create a livelihood
intensify their own slash-and -burn techniques throughout the Amazon basin—and more and more
ruropoli (frontier family villages) of some 48-1000 people spring up in various locations throughout the Amazon—the
forests are razed, the inroads flooded, the Malaria vector is strengthened, intense soil
erosion occurs, and the river fish species die out. The tragedy is that most of these small
family plots created by hundreds of thousands of new inhabitants are only able to sustain crops for a
limited number of years because of the rainforest terrain. Therefore, these farmers must move
on and find new land to utilize. So what happens to their old plots of land? They become wastelands
with small brush, because the original trees cannot grow back due to their root structures and because the soil has been
destroyed and removed. In the wake of vast devastation throughout the Amazon, only now has the revelation of global
atmospherics impressed biologists. The Amazon is the critical link in the Earth's carbon
dioxide clearing house. Furthermore, Amazonian Indians and forest species possess the richest repository of
native wisdom and potential medical, and technological plant products of any other region of the planet. But the metaphor
of human disruption—since the sixteenth century—is fully at work in Brasil. The country is the vortex of ecological
imperialism and new deforestation. A generation of embattled conscience has arisen in Central and South American
writers who have responded to the political and moral crises with an anguished outpouring due to the mismanagement of
such critical factors as: population growth, political agendas, and regional economics. Nobel Prize winner Garcia Marquez
(The Autumn of the Patriarch) and Vargas Llosa (The War of the End of the World) are but a few of the many testimonies
of this anguish.
Our time has now come to work for new cooperation in this and other critical environmental regions. Our species is the
only one to lay claims to being able to influence the make up of the natural world. We long ago drew up the battle lines.
Today, that struggle is most dangerously pronounced in the tropics, where soil is in
short supply and human food is at a premium. The Amazon contains some 550 million hectares of
rain forest, 3.5 million square kilometers, nearly half of the Earth's water moisture, easily a million plant and animal
species. In but 2 hectares of Amazon forest, 173 floral species have been discovered on a base of 900 metric tons of living
biomass. In short, for several thousand years, life has been fashioned according to its evolutionary laws and in the Amazon
basin archaeological relics suggest an early habitation at the mouth of the Amazon dating back as far as 5000 years. As a
part of Eden on earth, its destruction may also signify the end of life as we know it. It is our time
to make the change to work together to expand the lifetime of the Amazon Basin in Brasil—so that there would be no end
of real civilization, but a wise and practical preparation for the opening of the high frontier in meeting with other cultures
and cosmic civilization in the 21st century.