1AC
Cartels Adv: 1AC
Drug violence is causing massive instability in Mexico
Carlos Rodriguez 11-9 Opinion editor at The Brownsville Herald “Don’t fail” Posted on Nov 9, 2014
http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/opinion/editorials/article_67ab01ec-695a-11e4-a9d7-13a648a3f589.html
if Mexico can’t find some way to control the scourge of drugrelated crime and violence, it risks deteriorating into a failed state .¶ Based on recent events, that failure
might seem closer than ever .¶ People on both sides of the border are still demanding answers after the
mid-October kidnapping and murder of a young Progreso woman, her brothers and boyfriend in the town of Control,
Tamaulipas, between Matamoros and Reynosa.¶ Witness say the siblings, who had gone to Mexico to visit their father, were
kidnapped by members of a special police force created by Matamoros Mayor Leticia Salazar.¶ That crime came on the
heels of a similar action in which 43 students at a teaching college in Iguala, in Guerrero state, were
rounded up shortly after a some city buses were commandeered during a student protest. Apparently, they were
kidnapped by local police and military personnel.¶ Searches for the students, who are presumed dead, have been futile.
Observers in recent years have warned that
Searchers found a mass grave, but the bodies aren’t the students’. ¶ Iguala’s former mayor and his wife, who had gone into hiding
shortly after the students’ sequester, have been arrested in connection to the disappearance. ¶ This is the kind of stuff
we’ve heard mostly in despotic African dictatorships. To hear it could be happening right across
the Rio Grande, in a country that has all the natural resources to be a global economic power, is
both alarming and disappointing.¶ Granted, cartels often scare witnesses , and the news media , into
silence. So the fact that so many people are saying they saw the recent massacres, and point the finger at police units, is
suspect. However, the fact that such accusations are widely believed, and believable, speaks volumes
about the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto, who was elected largely on a promise to put an end to the violence that
has virtually destroyed the country.¶ Peña Nieto now has to endure widespread heckling and shouts of “Assassin!” at his public
appearances. Unless things change, the president, who’s barely completing the first trimester of his term, could be in for a long four
crime under control is crucial for Mexico’s future, as it surely would increase
foreign investment and improve the economy, which would give the country’s workers options
that are better than becoming mules for the cartels.
years.¶ Bringing
Widespread state-led legalization disrupts Mexican cartels and solves violence
Bender 13 {Steven W., Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development and Professor of Law (Seattle University),
former Professor of Law at Oregon too, elected member of the American Law Institute, co-president of the Society of American Law
Teachers, J.D. (Oregon Law) and B.S. in Political Science (Oregon), “Joint Reform?: The Interplay of State, Federal and
Hemispheric Regulation of Recreational Marijuana and the Failed War on Drugs,” Seattle University School of Law Digital
Commons, 6 ALB. GOV'T L. REV. 359, http://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1116&context=faculty}
In 2012, Washington and Colorado voters surprised the nation by authorizing the recreational use of
marijuana.' The outcome sent state regulators scrambling to implement the directive and supply a
product source, while the federal government faced its own dilemma of whether to tolerate or squelch these state initiatives
contradicting longstanding federal law. Surely the Mexican drug cartels (and other illicit growers and suppliers
from Canada and within the United States) weighed the prospect for wider reform and its consequences for
their multi-billion dollar industry. Although few of these uncertainties have been resolved with any clarity at the time of
this writing, below I aim to situate these just-enacted allowances of recreational use within the broader
history of U.S. and hemispheric drug regulation, suggesting a framework for additional reform. Having
advocated elsewhere for selective legalization of illicit drugs, starting with marijuana, here I address the process of that reform. I
suggest the natural order is that states, having first vilified and criminalized marijuana, should
lead the way toward rational drug policy. Additionally, informed by that history, I address the appropriate responsive
role of the federal government that is busily conducting the failed War on Drugs. Given the interconnectedness of
Mexico and the Mexican cartels in the illicit drug trade, and, for Mexico , in the racialized origins of U.S.
marijuana prohibition in the first instance, I also situate both Mexican drug policy and the Mexican cartels within U.S. reform
that steers us away from the present course of a bloody war on Mexican streets and mass incarceration
of communities of color in the United States. Although dismissed by some as intended to launch a stoner jubilee,
legalizing recreational use carries the potential to reverse these seemingly intractable trajectories
of national and hemispheric violence and oppression. When the smoke clears, we may look back
years from now on the moral courage and vision of voters that helped point the nation on a
different path from its last 100 years' failed journey.
Most comprehensive studies prove violence will be significantly reduced in the
long-run, and short-term lashout will be limited
Beau Kilmer et al 10, Jonathan P. Caulkins, Brittany M. Bond, Peter H. Reuter (Kilmer--Codirector, RAND Drug Policy
Research Center; Senior Policy Researcher, RAND; Professor, Pardee RAND Graduate School, Ph.D. in public policy, Harvard
University; M.P.P., University of California, Berkeley; B.A. in international relations, Michigan State University, Caulkins--Stever
Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, Bond--research economist in the Office of the
Chief Economist of the US Department of Commerce's Economics and Statistics Administration, Reuter--Professor in the School of
Public Policy and the Department of Criminology at the University of Maryland. “Reducing Drug Trafficking Revenues and Violence
in Mexico Would Legalizing Marijuana in California Help?” RAND occasional paper (peer reviewed),
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/2010/RAND_OP325.pdf
However, there
is at least one countervailing factor that might reduce violence in the short run. Given
that the signal of market decline will be strong and unambiguous, experienced participants might
accept the fact that their earnings and the market as a whole are in decline. This could lead to a
reduced effort on their part to fight for control of routes or officials, since those areas of control
are now less valuable. Of course, that does presume strategic thinking in a population that appears to have a propensity for
expressive and instrumental violence. The natural projection in the long run is more optimistic . Fewer young
males will enter the drug trade, and the incentives for violence will decline as the economic
returns to leader- ship of a DTO fall. 10 However, the long run is indeterminably measured: probably years, and
perhaps many years.
Alternative activities can’t make up for profits—post-prohibition effect on the
mafia proves
Robelo 13 -- Drug Policy Alliance research coordinator
[Daniel, "Demand Reduction or Redirection? Channeling Illicit Drug Demand towards a Regulated Supply to Diminish Violence in
Latin America," Oregon Law Review, 91 Or. L. Rev. 1227, 2013, l/n]
It is also impossible to foresee how regulation would affect levels of violence. Some analysts believe a short-term increase in
violence is possible (as competition over a smaller market could intensify), but that violence in the longer term will decline. n106
Some analysts point out that organized crime may further diversify into other activities, such as extortion and
kidnapping, though these have been shown to be considerably less profitable than drug trafficking.
As one scholar [*1249] notes, given the profitability of the drug trade, "it would take roughly 50,000 kidnappings to equal 10% of
cocaine revenues from the U.S. n107 While the American mafia certainly diversified into other criminal endeavors
after the Repeal of alcohol Prohibition, homicide rates nevertheless declined dramatically. n108
Combining marijuana regulation with medical regulatory models for heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine could strike a major blow
to the corrosive economic power of violent trafficking organizations, diminishing their ability to perpetrate murder, hire recruits,
purchase weapons, corrupt officials, operate with impunity, and terrorize societies. Moreover, these approaches promise concrete
results - potentially significant reductions in DTO revenues - unlike all other strategies that Mexico or the United States have tried to
date. n109 Criminal organizations would still rely on other activities for their income, but they would
be left weaker and less of a threat to security. Furthermore, the U nited S tates and Latin American governments
would save resources currently wasted on prohibition enforcement and generate new revenues in
taxes - resources which could be applied more effectively towards confronting violence and other
crimes that directly threaten public safety. n110
Even modest losses means cartels can’t corrupt the police and judiciary
Usborne 14 [David, "How Central Is Marijuana In The Drug War? Ctd," The Dish, quoted by Andrew Sullivan, 1-11-14,
dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/01/11/how-central-is-marijuana-in-the-drug-war-ctd/, accessed 6-9-14]
A 2012 research paper by the Mexican Competitiveness Institute in Mexico called ‘If Our Neighbours Legalise’, said that the
legalisation of marijuana in Colorado, Washington and California would depress cartel profits by as much as 30 per cent. A 2010
Rand Corp study of what would happen if just California legalised suggests a more modest fall-out. Using consumption in the US as
the most useful measure, its authors posit that marijuana accounts for perhaps 25 per cent of the cartels’
revenues. The cartels would survive losing that, but still. “ That’s enough to hurt , enough to cause massive
unemployment in the illicit drugs sector,” says [fellow at the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center
David] Shirk. Less money for cartels means weaker cartels and less capacity to corrupt the judiciary
and the police in Mexico with crumpled bills in brown envelopes. Crimes like extortion and kidnappings are
also more easily tackled.
Plan creates a reverse gateway effect that reduces demand for harder drugs
Herrington, 12 Luke, Editor-At-Large for E-IR and Assistant Reviews Editor for Special Operations Journal. He is a
graduate student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Kansas where he previously earned an MA in Global and
International Studies, “Marijuana Legalization: Panacea in the War on Drugs or Stoners Blowing Smoke?,” http://www.eir.info/2012/08/24/marijuana-lagalization-panacea-in-the-war-on-drugs-or-stoners-blowing-smoke/, Vitz
Legalization Will Hurt the Cartels A chorus of Latin American leaders think legalization will undermine the cartels, and they advocate
it as a new strategy in the war on drugs. In March, Otto Perez Molina, the president of Guatemala, announced his interest in
legalizing drugs in an effort to fight the cartels, including the Zetas, who were allegedly behind a May 2011 attack that left 27
dismembered workers on a farm in northern Guatemala. Molina, however, is not the only leader to suggest that drug legalization
could help stem the rising tide of drug-related violence in Latin America. In fact, former Mexican President Vicente Fox also supports
the legalization of marijuana, [7] as do César Gaviria, Ernesto Zedillo, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Ricardo Lagos, former
presidents of Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Chile respectively. [8] The government of Uruguay is also agitating for legalization.
marijuana legalization and regulation may be used to help fight cocaine
use and abuse . The government also says it would sell the drug directly, tracking buyers in the process
There, officials announced that
and limiting the black market’s ability to usurp this new supply. [9] Grillo agrees. He suggests that mass-burnings of marijuana in
Mexico, for instance, a hallmark in source control, do more to illustrate exactly how hulking the narco-economic edifice of the cartel’s
drug industry really is, than it does to elucidate how Mexico constantly hammers their organizations. It also demonstrates that U.S.
demand for product will continue to encourage the flow of marijuana and, by extension, other drugs over the border. Citing a
narrowly defeated attempt by California voters to legalize marijuana, and petitioners in Colorado promoting a referendum to do the
same, Grillo highlights the fact that campaigns for legalization view the Mexican Drug War “as a reason to change U.S. drug laws.”
Moreover, these campaigners argue that “American ganja smokers are giving billions of dollars to psychotic Mexican drug cartels,
[…] and legalization is the only way to stop the war.” [10] Grillo concedes that the cartels have morphed into diversified, 21st century
firms with entrenched profit sources well beyond the scope of the marijuana industry. Nevertheless, he concludes, legalization as a
strategy in the war on drugs could still do more in the effort to undermine cartel profits than the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency
(DEA) and the Mexican army ever have. Legalization “might not kill the Mexican cartels,” he says, however it certainly could inflict a
deep wound upon their organizations. Armstrong accuses the U.S. of failure in its war on drugs, and asserts that the violence in
Mexico is only one consequence. Despite the tightening of post-9/11 border regulations, tons of cocaine and marijuana continue to
pass into the U.S. and billions of dollars in illicit money and weapons are passing into Mexico. Traditional policies hardly curb this
two-way flow of illicit traffic, in essence, because secondary and tertiary criminal lieutenants are prepared to fill the void when their
leaders are arrested or killed. Indeed, General Charles H. Jacoby, Jr., the leader of U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM),
testified before the U.S. Senate, stating that the “decapitation strategy” may succeed in killing key drug figures, but “it ‘has not had
an appreciable effect’ in thwarting the drug trade.” [11] The Mexican government has even started rethinking its approach. Instead of
focusing on the interdiction of drugs bound for U.S. markets, Mexican authorities are starting to focus more on their citizens’ safety.
Obama Administration officials, for their part, have chastised Latin American leaders for debating the legalization strategy, whilst
also stressing the importance of shared responsibility to the Mexican government. In spite of this, the U.S. has done little on its end
to stem the actual demand for illicit drugs. Armstrong believes U.S. policymakers must launch a serious dialogue here [in America]
on legalizing, or at least decriminalizing, the drugs. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s better than no solution at all. […] The United
States needs a strategy to win the war or to settle it. [12] Indeed, if shared responsibility means anything, it means that the U.S.
must do its part not to enable the continuation of the drug wars. That means that in addition to the possible legalization or
decriminalization of marijuana (and other drugs for that matter), the U.S. must slow the flood of weapons and cash, the cartels’
raison d’etre. [13] Most importantly, legalization could undermine Latin American cartels by removing from marijuana, the so-called
“gateway effect.” As has happened in other countries, such as Portugal, where decriminalization has been experimented with on a
large scale, isolating marijuana from the black market makes it more difficult for drug dealers to push
“ harder” narcotics on individuals using marijuana. More will be said on this subject below, but for now, suffice it
to say that this has the potential to undermine the cartels—perhaps the foundations of the black market itself—across the board,
from the ground up. [14]
They won’t compete in the legal market
Carpenter 11 – Ted Galen Carpenter, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, “Undermining Mexico’s Dangerous Drug Cartels”,
Cato Policy Analysis, 11-15, http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/PA688.pdf
Legalizing pot would strike a blow against Mexican traffickers. It
would be difficult for them to compete with American
producers in the American market, given the difference in transportation distances and other
factors . There would be little incentive for consumers to buy their product from unsavory
Mexican criminal syndicates when legitimate domestic firms could offer the drug at a competitive
price—and advertise how they are honest enterprises. Indeed, for many Americans, they could
just grow their own supply—a cost advantage that the cartels could not hope to match.
Mexico instability undermines U.S. leadership and risks global arms races
Robert Haddick, contractor at U.S. Special Operations Command, managing editor of Small Wars Journal, "This Week at War: If
Mexico Is at War, Does America Have to Win It?" FOREIGN POLICY, 9--10--10,
www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/09/10/this_week_at_war_if_mexico_is_at_war_does_america_have_to_win_it, accessed 5-213.
Most significantly, a
strengthening Mexican insurgency would very likely affect America's role in the rest
of the world . An increasingly chaotic American side of the border, marked by bloody cartel wars,
corrupted government and media, and a breakdown in security, would likely cause many in the U nited
S tates to question the importance of military and foreign policy ventures elsewhere in the world.
Should the southern border become a U.S. president's primary national security concern, nervous
allies and opportunistic adversaries elsewhere in the world would no doubt adjust to a distracted
and inward-looking America, with potentially disruptive arms races the result. Secretary Clinton has
looked south and now sees an insurgency. Let's hope that the United States can apply what it has recently learned about
insurgencies to stop this one from getting out of control.
Arms races go nuclear
Metz 13 – Dr. Steven Metz, Director of Research at the Strategic Studies Institute, Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University,
and an MA and BA from the University of South Carolina, “A Receding Presence: The Military Implications of American
Retrenchment”, World Politics Review, 10-22, http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/13312/a-receding-presence-the-militaryimplications-of-american-retrenchment
So much for the regions of modest concern. The
M iddle E ast/ N orth A frica region, by contrast, is a part of the world where
American retrenchment or narrowing U.S. military capabilities could have extensive adverse effects . While the
region has a number of nations with significant military capability, it does not have a functioning method for preserving order without outside
As U.S. power recedes, it could turn out that American involvement was in fact a deterrent
against Iran taking a more adventurous regional posture, for instance. With the United States gone, Tehran could
become more aggressive, propelling the Middle East toward division into hostile Shiite and Sunni blocs and
encouraging the spread of nuclear weapons . With fewer ties between regional armed forces and the United States, there
also could be a new round of military coups. States of the region could increase pressure on Israel, possibly
leading to pre-emptive military strikes by the Israelis, with a risk of another major war . One of the al-Qaida affiliates
involvement.
might seize control of a state or exercise outright control of at least part of a collapsed state. Or China might see American withdrawal as an
opportunity to play a greater role in the region, particularly in the Persian Gulf. The United States has a number of security objectives in the Middle East
and North Africa: protecting world access to the region's petroleum, limiting humanitarian disasters, preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, limiting the operating space for al-Qaida and its affiliates, sustaining America's commitment to long-standing partners and assuring Israel's
security. Arguments that the U.S. can disengage from the region and recoup savings in defense expenditures assume that petroleum exports would
continue even in the event of domination of the region by a hostile power like Iran or a competitor like China, state collapse or even the seizure of
power by extremists. Whoever exercises power in the region would need to sell oil. And the United States is moving toward petroleum self-sufficiency
or, at least, away from dependence on Middle Eastern oil. But even if the United States could get along with diminished petroleum exports from the
disengagement
from the Middle East and North Africa would entail significant risks for the U nited S tates. It would be a roll
Middle East, many other nations couldn't. The economic damage would cascade, inevitably affecting the United States. Clearly
of the strategic dice. South and Central Asia are a bit different, since large-scale U.S. involvement there is a relatively recent phenomenon. This means
South and Central Asia
two vibrant, competitive and nuclear-armed powers—India and China—as well as one of
the world's most fragile nuclear states, Pakistan. Writers like Robert Kaplan argue that South Asia's importance will continue
that the regional security architecture there is less dependent on the United States than that of some other regions.
also includes
to grow, its future shaped by the competition between China and India. This makes America's security partnership with India crucial. The key issue is
whether India can continue to modernize its military to balance China while addressing its immense domestic problems with infrastructure, education,
income inequality and ethnic and religious tensions. If it cannot, the United States might have to decide between ceding domination of the region to
China or spending what it takes to sustain an American military presence in the region. Central
Asia is different. After a decade of U.S. military
a cauldron of extremism and terrorism. America's future role there is in doubt, as it looks like
the United States will not be able to sustain a working security partnership with Afghanistan and Pakistan in the future. At some point one
or both of these states could collapse, with extremist movements gaining control . There is little chance of another
large-scale U.S. military intervention to forestall state collapse, but Washington might feel compelled to act to secure
Pakistan's nuclear weapons if Islamabad loses control of them . The key decision for Washington might someday be
operations, the region remains
whether to tolerate extremist-dominated areas or states as long as they do not enable transnational terrorism. Could the United States allow a Taliban
state in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance, if it did not provide training areas and other support to al-Qaida? Most likely, the U.S. approach
would be to launch raids and long-distance attacks on discernible al-Qaida targets and hope that such a method best balanced costs and risks. The
Asia-Pacific region will remain the most important one to the United States even in a time of receding American power. The United States retains deep
economic interests in and massive trade with Asia, and has been a central player in the region's security system for more than a century. While
instability or conflict there is less likely than in the Middle East and North Africa, if it happened it would be much more dangerous because of the
economic and military power of the states likely to be involved. U.S. strategy in the Asia-Pacific has been described as a hub-and-spokes strategy "with
the United States as the hub, bilateral alliances as the spokes and multilateral institutions largely at the margins." In particular, the bilateral "spokes"
are U.S. security ties with key allies Australia, Japan and South Korea and, in a way, Taiwan. The United States also has many other beneficial
America's major security
objectives in the Asia-Pacific in recent years have been to discourage Chinese provocation or destabilization as China
rises in political, economic and military power, and to prevent the world's most bizarre and unpredictable nuclear power—North
Korea—from unleashing Armageddon through some sort of miscalculation . Because the U.S. plays a
more central role in the Asia-Pacific security framework than in any other regional security
arrangement, this is the region where disengagement or a recession of American power would have the most farreaching effect. Without an American counterweight, China might become increasingly
aggressive and provocative . This could lead the other leading powers of the region close to China—particularly Japan,
South Korea and Taiwan—to abandon their historical antagonism toward one another and move toward some sort of de
facto or even formal alliance. If China pushed them too hard, all three have the technological capability to develop
and deploy nuclear weapons quickly. The middle powers of the region, particularly those embroiled in disputes with China over the
security relationships in the region, including with Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines.
resources of the South China Sea, would have to decide between acceding to Beijing's demands or aligning themselves with the Japan-South KoreaTaiwan bloc. Clearly North Korea will remain the most incendiary element of the Asia-Pacific system even if the United States opts to downgrade its
involvement in regional security. The parasitic Kim dynasty cannot survive forever. The question is whether it lashes out in its death throes, potentially
with nuclear weapons, or implodes into internal conflict. Either action would require a significant multinational effort, whether to invade then reconstruct
and stabilize the nation, or for humanitarian relief and peacekeeping following a civil war. Even if the United States were less involved in the region, it
security threats are plausible
and dangerous: protracted internal conflicts that cause humanitarian disasters and provide operating space for extremists (the
Syria model); the further proliferation of nuclear weapons; the seizure of a state or part of a state by extremists that then use the
territory they control to support transnational terrorism; and the old specter of major war between nations. U.S. political
leaders and security experts once believed that maintaining a full range of military capabilities, including the ability to
undertake large-scale, protracted land operations, was an important deterrent to potential opponents.
would probably participate in such an effort, but might not lead it. Across all these regions, four types of
But the problem with deterrence is that it's impossible to prove. Did the U.S. military deter the Soviet seizure of Western Europe, or did Moscow never
intend to do that irrespective of what the United States did? Unfortunately, the only way to definitively demonstrate the value of deterrence is to allow
U.S. power to recede and see if bad things happen. Until recently, the United States was not inclined to take such a risk. But now there is increasing
political support for accepting greater risk by moving toward a cheaper military without a full range of capabilities. Many Americans are willing to throw
the strategic dice. The
recession of American power will influence the evolution of the various regional
security systems, of which history suggests there are three types: hegemonic security systems in which a dominant state assures stability;
balance of power systems where rivals compete but do not dominate; and cooperative systems in which multiple states inside and sometimes outside
a region maintain security and limit or contain conflict. Sub-Saharan Africa is a weak cooperative system organized around the African Union. Even if
there is diminished U.S. involvement, the sub-Saharan African security system is likely to remain as it is. Latin America might have once been a
hegemonic system, at least in the Caribbean Basin, but today it is moving toward becoming a cooperative system with a diminished U.S. role. The
M iddle E ast/ N orth A frica region, South and Central Asia and the Asia-Pacific will probably
move toward becoming balance of power systems with less U.S. involvement. Balances of power can prevent major wars with
adept diplomacy and when the costs of conflict are high, as in Europe during the Cold War, for instance. But catastrophic conflicts can
happen if the balance collapses, as in Europe in the summer of 1914. Power balances work best when one key
same is true of Europe. The
state is able to shift sides to preserve the balance, but there is no candidate to play this role in the emerging power balances in these three regions.
Hence the
balances in these regions will be dangerously unstable .
2
State governments remain strapped for cash and revenue shortages are set to
increase in the future—best studies prove
GAO 12/19/14 (Government Accountability Office, “STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS’ FISCAL OUTLOOK 2014 Update,”
12/19/14, http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/667623.pdf, CJC)
The state and local government sector continues to face fiscal challenges which contribute to the
overall fiscal challenges of the nation as a whole. As shown in figure 1, GAO’s simulations suggest that
the sector could continue to face a gap between revenue and spending during the next 50 years , and
that state and local governments would need to make substantial policy changes to avoid these fiscal
imbalances in the future.1 In recent years, the state and local government sector has seen an increase in tax receipts
following declines during 2008 and into 2009. Specifically, from the second quarter of 2009 to the second quarter of 2014, total tax
receipts increased 9 percent in real dollars. Income and sales taxes accounted for most of the growth, increasing 20 percent and 15
percent respectively, in real dollar terms during the same period. Property tax receipts continued to lag and decreased 5 percent in
real dollars from the second quarter of 2009 to the second quarter of 2014, as real estate values remained suppressed. However,
during the last year, from the second quarter of 2013 to the second quarter of 2014, total tax receipts declined 1 percent
and income tax receipts declined 8 percent in real dollars. In the long term, as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), our
model suggests that at current rates total tax revenues for the sector would not return to the 2007
historical high until 2058, near the end of our simulation period. A primary driver of the decline in the sector’s
operating balance in the long term is the rising health-related costs of state and local expenditures on Medicaid and
the cost of health care compensation for state and local government employees and retirees. Since most state and local
governments are required to balance their operating budgets, the declining fiscal conditions indicated by our simulations continue to
suggest that the sector would need to make substantial policy changes to avoid fiscal imbalances that would likely grow in the
future. That is, absent any intervention or policy changes, state and local governments are facing, and will
continue to face, an increasing gap between receipts and expenditures in the coming years.
Disregard the negative’s evidence—optimistic assessments ignore the massive
cuts that led to balanced budgets
Oliff et al 12 (Phil Oliff, Chris Mai, and Vincent Palacios, 6-27-12, "States Continue to Feel Recession’s Impact" Center for
Budget and Policy Priorities) www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=711
Consequently, even
though the revenue outlook is trending upward, states have addressed large
budget shortfalls by historical standards as they considered budgets for 2013. The vast majority of these
shortfalls have been closed through spending cuts and other measures in order to meet balancedbudget requirements. As of publication all but five states have enacted their budgets, and those five will do so soon. To the
extent these shortfalls are being closed with spending cuts, they are occurring on top of past
years’ deep cuts in critical public services like education, health care, and human services. The
additional cuts mean that state budgets will continue to be a drag on the national economy ,
threatening hundreds of thousands of private- and public-sector jobs, reducing the job creation
that otherwise would be expected to occur. Potential strategies for lessening the impact of deep
spending cuts include more use of state reserve funds in states that have reserves, more revenue through tax-law
changes, and a greater role for the federal government. Our survey of state fiscal conditions shows that: States continue to
face a major fiscal challenge. Thirty-one states projected (and in most cases now have closed) budget gaps totaling $55
billion for fiscal year 2013. (See Figure 1.) These shortfalls were all the more daunting because states’ options
for addressing them were fewer and more difficult than in recent years. Temporary aid to states
enacted in early 2009 as part of the federal Recovery Act was enormously helpful in allowing states to avert some of the
most harmful potential budget cuts in the 2009, 2010 and 2011 fiscal years. But the federal government allowed that
aid to largely expire at the end of fiscal year 2011, leading to some of the deepest cuts to state services since the
start of the recession. Far from providing additional assistance to states, the federal government is now
moving ahead with spending cuts that will very likely make states’ fiscal situation even worse.
Specifically, state budget cuts to schools remain in place, which prevents growth
and destroys competitiveness—new revenue sources are needed
Leachman and Mai 14 (Michael, Director of State Fiscal Research with the State Fiscal Policy division of the Center, Ph.D.
in sociology from Loyola University Chicago, and Chris, Research Assistant with the State Fiscal Project, Master of Public Policy
from the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School, 5-20-14, "Most States Funding Schools Less Than Before the Recession"
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=4011
States’ new budgets are providing less per-pupil funding for kindergarten through 12th grade than
they did six years ago — often far less. The reduced levels reflect not only the lingering effects of the 2007-09
recession but also continued austerity in many states ; indeed, despite some improvements in overall state revenues,
schools in around a third of states are entering the new school year with less state funding than they had last year. At a time
when states and the nation are trying to produce workers with the skills to master new
technologies and adapt to the complexities of a global economy, this decline in state educational
investment is cause for concern . Our review of state budget documents finds that: At least 35 states are
providing less funding per student for the 2013-14 school year than they did before the recession
hit. Fourteen of these states have cut per-student funding by more than 10 percent. (These figures, like
all the comparisons in this paper, are in inflation-adjusted dollars and focus on the primary form of state aid to local schools.) At
least 15 states are providing less funding per student to local school districts in the new school year than they provided a year ago.
This is despite the fact that most states are experiencing modest increases in tax revenues. Where funding has increased,
it has generally not increased enough to make up for cuts in past years. For example, New Mexico is
increasing school funding by $72 per pupil this year. But that is too small to offset the state’s $946 per-pupil cut over the previous
five years. Restoring
school funding should be an urgent priority . The steep state-level K-12
spending cuts of the last several years have serious consequences for the nation. State-level K12 cuts have large consequences for local school districts. Some 44 percent of total education
spending in the United States comes from state funds (the share varies by state).[2] Cuts at the state level
mean that local school districts have to either scale back the educational services they provide ,
raise more local tax revenue to cover the gap, or both. Local school districts typically have little ability to
replace lost state aid on their own. Given the still-weak state of many of the nation’s real estate markets, many school
districts struggle to raise more money from the property tax without raising rates, and rate increases are often politically very difficult.
Localities collected 2.1 percent less in property tax revenue in the 12-month period ending in March 2013 than in the previous year,
after adjusting for inflation.[3] The cuts deepened the recession and have slowed the economy’s recovery.
Federal employment data show that school districts began reducing the overall number of
teachers and other employees in July 2008, when the first round of budget cuts began taking
effect. As of August 2013, local school districts had cut a total of 324,000 jobs since 2008.[4] These job losses have
reduced the purchasing power of workers’ families, in turn reducing overall economic
consumption, and thus deepened the recession and slowed the pace of recovery . The cuts
undermine education reform and hinder school districts’ ability to deliver high-quality education,
with long-term negative consequences for the nation’s economic competitiveness. Many states
and school districts have undertaken important school reform initiatives to prepare children better
for the future, but deep funding cuts hamper their ability to implement many of these reforms. At a
time when producing workers with high-level technical and analytical skills is increasingly
important to a country’s prosperity, large cuts in funding for basic education threaten to
undermine the nation’s economic future.
US growth is the engine of the global economy
Caploe ‘9 (David Caploe is CEO of the Singapore-incorporated American Centre for Applied Liberal Arts and Humanities in
Asia., “Focus still on America to lead global recovery”, April 7, The Strait Times, lexis)
IN THE aftermath of the G-20 summit, most observers seem to have missed perhaps the most crucial statement of the entire event,
made by United States President Barack Obama at his pre-conference meeting with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown: 'The
world has become accustomed to the US being a voracious consumer market, the engine that drives a lot of economic growth
worldwide,' he said. 'If there is going to be renewed growth, it just can't be the US as the engine.' While superficially sensible, this
view is deeply problematic. To begin with, it ignores the fact that the
global economy has in fact been 'Americacentred' for more than 60 years . Countries - China, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Korea, Mexico and so on - either sell to the
US or they sell to countries that sell to the US. This system has generally been advantageous for all concerned. America gained
certain historically unprecedented benefits, but the system also enabled participating countries - first in Western Europe and Japan,
and later, many in the Third World - to achieve undreamt-of prosperity. At the same time, this deep inter-connection between the
US and the rest of the world also explains how the collapse of a relatively small sector of the US economy - 'subprime' housing, logarithmically exponentialised by Wall Street's ingenious chicanery - has cascaded into the worst
global economic crisis
since the Great Depression. To put it simply, Mr Obama doesn't seem to understand that there
is no other engine for the world economy - and hasn't been for the last six decades. If the US does not drive
global economic growth, growth is not going to happen. Thus, US policies to deal with the current crisis
are critical not just domestically, but also to the entire world. Consequently, it is a matter of global concern that the
Obama administration seems to be following Japan's 'model' from the 1990s: allowing major banks to avoid declaring massive
losses openly and transparently, and so perpetuating 'zombie' banks - technically alive but in reality dead. As analysts like Nobel
laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman have pointed out, the administration's unwillingness to confront US banks is the main
reason why they are continuing their increasingly inexplicable credit freeze, thus ravaging the American and global economies.
Economic stagnation causes global WMD conflict
Hutchinson 14 (Martin, Business and Economics Editor at United Press International, MBA from Harvard Business School,
former international merchant banker, 1-3-14, “The chilling echoes of 1914, a century on” Wall Street Journal)
http://online.wsj.com/articles/william-galston-secular-stagnation-may-be-for-real-1409095263,
The years before 1914 saw the formation of trade blocs separated by high tariff barriers. Back then,
the world was dominated by several roughly equivalent powers, albeit with different strengths and weaknesses. Today, the world is
similarly multi-polar. The United States is in a position of clear leadership, but China is coming up fast. Europe is weaker than it was,
but is still a force to be reckoned with. Japan, Russia, Brazil, India are also too powerful to ignore. A hundred years ago, big
international infrastructure projects such as the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, and before it the Suez Canal, were built to protect favored
trading. Today’s equivalent may be the bilateral mining partnerships forged between, for instance, China and mineral-rich African
protectionism could be become
entrenched if prolonged economic stagnation leads countries to pursue their own narrow
interests. Germany, Austria, Russia and France lost between 20 and 35 percent of national output between 1913 and 1918,
states. Today, the World Trade Organization offers some defence against tariffs. But
according to Angus Maddison’s data used in Stephen Broadberry’s “The Economics of World War One: A Comparative Analysis”.
British GDP declined in 1914 and 1915, but grew 15 percent over the four years, as did the U.S. economy. The 37 million military
and civilian casualties may tell a more accurate story but if history were to repeat itself, the global conflict could
be both more universal and more destructive. Nuclear weapons proliferate. Warped diplomatic
anger could lead to the deployment of chemical and biological devices. Electromagnetic pulses
could wipe out our fragile electronic networks. Like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that sparked World
War One, the catalyst for cataclysm might be something quite surprising. A global run on bank and other investment assets or an
outbreak of hyperinflation, maybe? These threats get more serious the more policymakers pump up equity, bond, property and
banking bubbles. If global wealth evaporates, or is proven to be an illusion, today’s largely cordial global
entente could be smashed with precipitous speed.
Budget cuts have devastated state public health departments—this leaves the
nation woefully unprepared against a pandemic or bioterror attack—new revenue
streams are key
IOM 11 (Institute of Medicine, American non-profit, non-governmental organization founded in 1970, 6-13-11, "The Impact of
State and Local Budget Cuts on Public Health Preparedness" Institute of Medicine)
www.iom.edu/~/media/Files/Activity%20Files/PublicHealth/MedPrep/Impact%20of%20state%20and%20local%20budget%20cuts%2
0on%20PHP.pdf
This study analyzed the impact of budget cuts on state and local public health preparedness
capabilities. The assessment encompassed seven resource and capabilities elements of public health preparedness: capacity
in these areas was generally in decline, with a few elements staying relatively stable. As for the eighth element, the H1N1 response,
were a pandemic to occur in the near future, funding cuts would prevent
a repeat of what health officials and subject matter experts felt was a robust 2009 response. 159 Several predominant
themes emerged from the interviews and document review: 1) Robust all-hazards public health preparedness
capabilities require a sustained level of sufficiently high funding
strong and steady public
health budget enables adequate funding of the public health infrastructure, from biosurveillance
activity to medical surge capacity. This ideal situation contrasts sharply with the reality at state and
local health departments: significant fluctuations in public health funding marked by large infusions (ARRA and H1N1
there is widespread concern that
funding) and followed by rapid decreases. In this volatile cycle, we see public health laboratory funding climb from $20 million in
FY2001 to almost $200 million in FY2003, before steadily declining to $70 million in FY2008. The case studies provide tangible
examples of the consequences at the state and local level: cutbacks in staff and decreased funding for public health infrastructure.
2) The average state and local health workforce is rapidly aging, and the next generation of skilled staff and leaders is not being
capabilities is yet to be seen. Roughly one-third of US public health workers will be eligible to retire in the next five years.160 If the
currently widespread practice of eliminating vacated positions persists, then workforce shortages will increase in severity. In addition
to the shortage in manpower, valuable institutional knowledge and experience is likely to be lost, resulting in potentially underfunded
and understaffed public health departments. 3) As state and local health departments fail to invest adequately
in biosurveillance infrastructure and lose their epidemiological expertise, the resulting decrease
in capabilities makes the nation significantly less secure against intentional and naturally
occurring health threats.
is arguably the most severely impacted by
budget cuts. State and local health departments play a key role in the data collection and early-stage
analysis for biosurveillance; the supporting infrastructure is not receiving adequate financial
support. State and local health departments are losing a great number of epidemiologists to layoffs and attrition; capacity in this
field appears to be declining even more rapidly than the general trend for public health workers.161 State and local health
departments often have the first opportunity to detect health threats , from a pandemic to a
bioterrorist attack. While there has been a proliferation of new tools for biosurveillance, adequate
funding is necessary to purchase these tools and pay the associated workforce. If capabilities
continue to decline in this area, it could seriously impact our nation’s health security. 4) Rural health
departments, which rely almost exclusively on federal funding for health security and preparedness efforts, are particularly
tudies illustrate that rural health
departments rely overwhelmingly on federal grants to fund their preparedness programs. With a smaller tax base to support the
fixed costs associated with their health security programs, rural health departments simply have less state and local funding at their
disposal. Although the recent decreases in federal health security funding have not yet had severe effects, a continued decline could
cause a significantly negative impact. Due to their smaller size, rural health departments can be severely impacted by even a
handful of staff departures due to declines in federal health security funding. 162 Some state and local health departments have had
moderate success in mitigating the effects of budget cuts on preparedness programs. Health departments are now placing a greater
emphasis on cross-training exercises for staff in emergency preparedness offices; this helps staff to become capable of handling a
wide range of responsibilities. This activity will also diminish the loss of institutional knowledge and strengthen the general expertise.
Finally, in an effort to cut costs, departments are conducting their own workshops rather funding employee travel to off-site, inperson training. Collaboration between the public health sector and private health care industry is another approach that can
alleviate the impact of reduced funding. Pharmacies, emergency medical services, and hospitals are critical components in
emergency response efforts; creating partnerships between these organizations and public health departments is significantly
beneficial to emergency preparedness capabilities. For example, improved coordination between hospitals and a local health
department can augment medical surge capacity. Furthermore, relying on community organizations and faith-based organizations
has improved many elements of preparedness, such as information sharing with the public during a health emergency. However,
there is concern that the utility of mitigation strategies may soon expire, and that the leveraging of
partnerships and other such strategies are ―nearing the end of their rope.‖163 Reductions in all-hazard
public health preparedness funding since 2003, and particularly in the last two years, have resulted in the loss of experienced and
cable personnel, along with underinvestment in the requisite supporting infrastructure. Recent budgetary cutbacks have
exacerbated a situation where preparedness programs were already ―chronically underfunded.‖164 All-hazards preparedness
focuses on health emergencies that have the potential to overwhelm routine capabilities. If preparedness capabilities
continue to degrade, this may go largely unnoticed by the public for some time. However, if funding trends persist,
the next pandemic, natural disaster, or bioterrorist attack may provide a vivid illustration of the
effects of budget cuts on public health preparedness at the state, local, and national level.
Unchecked pandemics destroy humanity
Keating 9 -- Foreign Policy web editor (Joshua, "The End of the World," Foreign Policy, 11-13-9,
www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/13/the_end_of_the_world?page=full, accessed 9-7-12, mss)
How it could happen: Throughout history,
Death killed more off more than half of
plagues have brought civilizations to their knees. The Black
Europe's population in the Middle Ages. In 1918, a flu pandemic killed
an estimated 50 million people, nearly 3 percent of the world's population, a far greater impact than the just-concluded
World War I. Because of globalization, diseases today spread even faster - witness the rapid worldwide spread
of H1N1 currently unfolding. A global outbreak of a disease such as ebola virus -- which has had a 90 percent fatality
rate during its flare-ups in rural Africa -- or a mutated drug-resistant form of the flu virus on a global scale could have
a devastating, even civilization-ending impact . How likely is it? Treatment of deadly diseases has improved since 1918,
but so have the diseases. Modern industrial farming techniques have been blamed for the outbreak of diseases, such as swine flu,
and as the world’s population grows and humans move into previously unoccupied areas, the risk
of exposure to previously unknown pathogens increases. More than 40 new viruses have emerged since the
1970s, including ebola and HIV. Biological weapons experimentation has added a new and just as troubling complication.
Bioterror attack causes extinction
Anders Sandberg et al., James Martin Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University, "How Can We Reduce
the Risk of Human Extinction?" BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, 9-9-08, http://www.thebulletin.org/webedition/features/how-can-we-reduce-the-risk-of-human-extinction, accessed 5-2-10.
The risks from anthropogenic hazards appear at present larger than those from natural ones. Although great progress has been
made in reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world, humanity is still threatened by the possibility of a global
thermonuclear war and a resulting nuclear winter. We may face even greater risks from emerging technologies. Advances in
synthetic biology might make it possible to engineer pathogens capable of extinction-level
pandemics. The knowledge, equipment, and materials needed to engineer pathogens are more
accessible than those needed to build nuclear weapons. And unlike other weapons, pathogens
are self-replicating , allowing a small arsenal to become exponentially destructive . Pathogens
have been implicated in the extinctions of many wild species. Although most pandemics "fade out" by reducing
the density of susceptible populations, pathogens with wide host ranges in multiple species can reach even isolated individuals.
The intentional or unintentional release of engineered pathogens with high transmissibility,
latency, and lethality might be capable of causing human extinction. While such an event seems unlikely
today, the likelihood may increase as biotechnologies continue to improve at a rate rivaling Moore's Law.
Synthetic biology takes out their D—makes bioterror inevitable—creates
means and motive
Rose, 14 -- PhD, recognized international biodefense expert [Patrick, Center for Health & Homeland Security senior policy
analyst & biosecurity expert, National Defense University lecturer, and Adam Bernier, expert in counter-terrorism, "DIY Bioterrorism
Part II: The proliferation of bioterrorism through synthetic biology," CBRNePortal, 2-24-14, www.cbrneportal.com/diy-bioterrorismpart-ii-the-proliferation-of-bioterrorism-through-synthetic-biology/, accessed 8-16-14]
synthetic biology has made bio-engineering
accessible to the mainstream biological community. Non-state actors who wish to employ biological agents
for ill intent are sure to be aware of how tangible bio-weapons are becoming as applications of
synthetic biology become more affordable and the probability of success increases with each scientific breakthrough.
In Part I of this series, we examined how the advancement of
The willingness of non-state actors to engage in biological attacks is not a new concept; however, the past biological threat
environment has been subdued compared to that of conventional or even chemical terrorism. The frequency and deadliness of
biological attacks has, thankfully, been limited; much of which can be attributed to the technical complexity or apparent ineptitude of
the perpetrators developing biological weapons. Despite the infrequency and ineffectiveness of biological attacks in
the last four decades, the threat may be changing with the continued advancement of synthetic
biology applications. Coupled with the ease of info rmation sharing and a rapidly growing d o- i ty ourself -bio logy ( DIYbio) movement (discussed in Part I), the chances of not only , more attacks , but
potentially more deadly ones will inevitably increase .¶ During the last half century terrorist organizations have
consistently had an interest in using biological weapons as a means of attacking their targets, but only few have
actually made a weapon and used it. The attraction is that terrorist activities with biological weapons are difficult to detect and even
more difficult to attribute without a specific perpetrator claiming responsibility. Since 1971 there have been more than 113,113
terrorist attacks globally and 33 of them have been biological. The majority of bio-terrorism incidents recorded occurred during the
year 2001 (17 of the 33); before 2001 there were 10 incidents and since 2001 there were 6 (not counting the most recent Ricin
attacks). The lack of a discernable trend in use of bio-terrorism does not negate the clear intent of extremist organizations to use
biological weapons. In fact, the capacity to harness biological weapons more effectively today only increases the risk that they will
successfully be employed.
Legalization generates up to $100 billion in new revenue
Easton 09 (Stephen, professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University and an adjunct scholar at The Fraser Institute. He
received his A.B. from Oberlin College and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, "PRO: FUND CRIME—OR TAXES?"
Businessweek) www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2010/03/legalize_mariju.html
As California readies for its November referendum, the first public test of the marijuana-legalization issue, it makes sense for
Americans to have a look in the rearview mirror. The current prohibition on marijuana consumption exactly
parallels the 1920s alcohol prohibition. Every year, a widely consumed illegal substance makes potential criminals of
millions and actual criminals of hundreds of thousands. And like booze during Prohibition, this substance, marijuana,
is the easy revenue of organized crime, contributing tens of billions of dollars to growers, who
commit a variety of bad acts both at home and abroad. How much money is made from this single
illegal substance? In fairness, nobody knows for sure. "Illegal" means hard data are difficult to come by. We do know,
however, that according to recent figures, U.S. consumers number anywhere from 25 million to 60
million (depending on how likely survey respondents are to tell the whole truth), and at an average cost of $5 per
cigarette (and factoring in one per day for each user), total spending on marijuana may add up to $45 billion
to $110 billion a year. What about possible tax revenue? From Canada we’ve learned that the
production cost of (government-sponsored) marijuana is roughly 33¢ a gram. Currently, U.S.
marijuana consumers pay at least $10 per gram retail for illegal marijuana. If the cost of retailing and
distribution is the same as for legal tobacco cigarettes, about 10¢ a gram, then selling the (legal) product at exactly the
same price as on the street today ($10 per gram) could raise $40 billion to $100 billion in new revenue. Not
chump change. Government would simply be transferring revenue from organized crime to the public
purse.
Colorado proves significant revenue can be generated—taxes don’t deter people
from buying within the legal market
Walker 14 (Jon, author of “After Legalization”, 2-25-14, "These 5 Numbers Show Marijuana Legalization Is Going Well in
Colorado" Just Say Now) justsaynow.firedoglake.com/2014/02/25/these-5-numbers-show-marijua
Limited marijuana possession has been legal for over a year in Colorado and retail shops have
been open for almost two months. This means there is now real data showing that legalization is
going well and mostly as its backers intended. These five numbers tell the story: 1) 77 percent decrease in
state court marijuana cases - Legalization has caused marijuana arrest to plummet saving the
state money . This drop is remarkable given that Colorado already had fairly liberal marijuana laws before Amendment 64 was
approved. The Denver Post found, “the number of cases filed in state court alleging at least one marijuana offense plunged 77
percent between 2012 and 2013. The decline is most notable for charges of petty marijuana possession, which dropped from an
average of 714 per month during the first nine months of 2012 to 133 per month during the same period in 2013 — a decline of 81
$184 Million in new tax revenue – Legal marijuana sales are now projected to bring in
$184 million in new tax revenue for the state during the first 18 months. This is higher than initial
projections . Much of this money will go to education and drug treatment. This number isn’t just important because it will help
the state balance its budget. Significant tax revenue also proves that people are choosing to move from
the black market to the new legal system even though there are high excise taxes. 3) 58 percent
support for legalization – Now the that people of Colorado have gotten a chance to directly experience legalization they are
percent.” 2)
increasingly supportive. Currently 58 percent of voters in Colorado support the new legalization law while only 39 percent oppose it.
By comparison, in 2012 the ballot measure only won by 55.3 percent yes to 44.7 percent no. 4) 10 percent last month
usage rate – In the first month after retail stores opened only 10 percent of Colorado voters said they actually used marijuana.
This is right in line with use rates before legalization, showing it has not turned the state into a
“land of potheads.” 5) 6.3 percent increase in airline flight searches – Early indications are that
legalization will also be a modest boost for tourism. According to Hopper, “Flight search demand for Denver has
been 6.3% above the national search average since December 1st.” During the first week of January flight searches were up 14
percent. Since marijuana was legalized in Colorado marijuana arrests are way down, tax revenue is up and support for reform
continues to grow.
This is what success looks like.
Marijuana use has a minimal economic impact—decades worth of studies debunk
productivity claims
Dighe 14 (Ranjit, Professor of Economics, The State University of New York at Oswego, 1-30-14, "Legalize It -- The Economic
Argument" The Huffington Post, accessed 7-27-14) www.huffingtonpost.com/ranjit-dighe/legalize-marijuana-economicargument_b_4695023.html
As for the effect of marijuana on worker productivity, the first thing to note is that nobody is
advocating smoking marijuana or being high on the job, any more than anyone advocates
drinking or being drunk on the job. People are expected to show up for work sober, and
employers have always had the right to fire people who fail to meet that basic requirement. The
issue, then, is whether smoking marijuana in one's free time impairs one's job performance. Long-
term memory loss and "amotivational syndrome" have been alleged, but decades' worth of
studies have debunked both of those claims.
3
Marijuana is a test case for the federal-state relationship and is a valuable
opportunity for states to assert themselves within the partnership—sets a
precedent for other areas of disagreement
Rauch 13 (Jonathan, guest scholar in Governance Studies at Brookings, contributing editor of the National Journal and The
Atlantic, March 2013, "Washington Versus Washington (and Colorado): Why the States Should Lead on Marijuana Policy"
Brookings Institution)
www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2013/3/26%20marijuana%20legalization%20localism%20rauch/Washington%2
0Versus%20Washington%20and%20Colorado_Rauch_v17.pdf
Unlike the cases of immigration and Obamacare and the D efense o f M arriage A ct, marijuana
involves not merely friction between state and federal policy but something closer to outright
defiance. Even in a context of growing agitation in federal-state relations, this was putting a cat
among the pigeons. Avoiding conflict or even chaos is not going to be easy, and the outcome will affect not only
drug policy but the way in which the country handles other federal-state conflicts sure to emerge. In
short, there is no escaping, or delegating to lawyers and drug-policy experts, the inherently political question the
country now confronts: How should we handle the cannabis conflict? The question is not primarily, “What is the lawful
approach?” It is, “What is the wise approach?” To answer that question, it is helpful to look at a recent success story. III. The Example of Same-Sex Marriage Gay marriage
came on the scene in American public debate in the early 1990s. In at least two very important respects, it is different from the marijuana issue: it involves civil rather than
criminal law and it is a policy area which has traditionally been left to the states. Moreover, nothing in the following discussion implies any close substantive tie between gay
marriage and marijuana legalization. Where their political structures are concerned, however, gay marriage and marijuana legalization bear a number of important, indeed
striking, similarities. First, both are controversial social issues, on which, for many people, fundamental questions about morality and rights trump policy tradeoffs and costbenefit balancing. Over time, attitudes toward gay marriage closely track attitudes toward the morality of homosexuality. Similarly, the views on the legalization of marijuana are
closely bound up with views of the morality of using drugs. In both cases, compromise is difficult among those who believe that fundamental values are at stake. Second, both
are areas where a formerly strong national consensus has broken down, leaving public opinion closely divided but possibly at the point where the lines cross and the former
minority becomes the majority. The almost eerie parallel between the two speaks for itself. Third, both issues are marked by pronounced regional, partisan, and religious
differences. Conservatives and Republicans are less supportive of both marijuana legalization and gay marriage than are liberals and Democrats, with moderates and
independents leaning more toward Democrats. Southerners are less supportive than easterners. In other words, the country is not homogeneous on either issue. Although the
country as a whole is closely divided, many states and regions remain firmly opposed to legalization of both same-sex marriage and marijuana. Fourth, and of potentially great
significance: levels of support for both marijuana legalization and gay marriage are closely tied to age cohort. The younger you are, the more likely you are to favor liberalization;
the youngest and oldest cohorts stand firmly on opposite sides of the issue, separated by a 20- to 30-point gap, with intermediate cohorts arrayed in between. Although some
young people grow more conservative with age and parenthood, it seems a very safe bet that overall support for both legal marijuana and same-sex marriage will grow over
time as older cohorts die off. We can assume, then, that public opinion will continue to change. Whatever the country’s final destination on both issues, it has not yet arrived
there. Fifth, both were, at time of first enactment, untested policies. No modern country allowed same-sex marriage until 2000, when the Netherlands legalized it—only four
years before Massachusetts legalized it. No modern jurisdiction legalized marijuana production, distribution, possession, and recreational use until Colorado and Washington did
it last year. The result, among electorates and politicians, is caution—an especially appropriate attitude toward marijuana liberalization, which can be implemented in all kinds of
ways. (There are not a whole lot of ways to legalize gay marriage.) In short: here we have two social issues where a prior consensus has broken down, where a new consensus
has not yet emerged, where different regions and demographic groups take quite different views, where public opinion is likely to shift toward legalization, and where much
remains to be learned about the effects of reform and how best to implement it. The country's handling of another divisive social issue offers a cautionary tale. In 1973, as states
began to deregulate abortion, the Supreme Court stepped in and declared abortion to be a constitutional right. The result was to impose upon the whole country a policy on
which nothing like a consensus had emerged, generating backlash and polarization which remain politically vexing to this day. The country handled gay marriage very
differently, by leaving it to the states. This was, in some ways, a striking departure from the general trend in recent years to push social policy issues and disputes up to the
federal level (as with, for example, abortion, education, immigration, crime)-a trend which contributed to the state rebelliousness we see today. Congress twice considered and
rejected a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage nationally, instead settling for the Defense of Marriage Act, which affirmed that states and the federal government
could all go their separate ways. The implicit principle was that neither the federal government nor any one state (by exporting its policy to the rest of the country) would be
allowed to set a single policy for the entire nation. Diversity would be the rule, at least while the country was making up its mind. Two groups disliked the decentralized,
incremental approach to same-sex marriage. The first were social conservatives who want gay marriage banned on every square inch of U.S. soil. The second were gay-rights
advocates who want marriage equality recognized immediately everywhere. Both sides argued, albeit from opposite perspectives, that a decentralized approach would be
incoherent and confusing. As, indeed, to some extent it has turned out to be: many gay couples are now in the demeaning and inconvenient position of being married in some
states but not others.7 Nonetheless, I think tomorrow's historians will join today's political moderates in judging the state-by-state marriage strategy to have been a success.
Despite its imperfections, it has done a remarkable job of containing conflict and smoothing a difficult social transition. In particular, delegating marriage to the states has had
five important advantages: First: It has educed information. Over the course of the last nine years, since Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in 2004, states provided a
testing ground. The country has gone from having zero knowledge about the possible effects of gay marriage, and believing that the results might be catastrophic, to having
some sense of what actually happens: not very much. The absence of visible harm does not prove that bad things (or good things) will not happen in the future, but it allows
much more peace of mind than if the country had jumped into the policy change wholesale. Second, relatedly: it has managed risk. No policy change is without risk. But that is
not an argument for never changing policies, because standing pat in a changing world entails risks of its own. The state-by-state strategy obviated any need to bet the entire
country on one policy or the other, immensely reducing the cost of mistakes-very important in a world where trial-and-error is indispensable for learning what works and what
doesn't. Third: it has facilitated adaptation. Locking the whole country into a fixed policy, as with a national constitutional ban on gay marriage, is particularly hazardous when
public opinion is in flux. Even if the policy is workable or acceptable today, it may be obsolete and reviled tomorrow. By letting each state set its own tempo, the decentralized
approach allowed gradual policy adaptation at a rate that neither lagged nor led public opinion. Fourth: it has contained conflict. Moving the gay marriage debate to the national
stage, with policy for the entire country at stake, would have created a conflict of nearly apocalyptic importance to the stakeholders. Instead, the state-by-state approach left
room for regional variation and agreement to disagree. The result is that, although the gay marriage debate has certainly had its hysterical episodes, the national debate as a
whole has been remarkably calm and deliberate. Fifth: it has fostered public deliberation. This may be the most important advantage of all. By stepping in and nationalizing
abortion policy, the Supreme Court truncated a process in which the states, acting through their legislatures, were debating the morality of abortion, adapting to changing public
opinion, and discovering and developing consensus. The Supreme Court settled the argument before it could properly begin. As both sides subsequently dug in-pro-choicers to
defend Roe v. Wade at any cost, pro-lifers to undermine it in every way possible-the country lost an opportunity to have an orderly public debate about the morality of abortion
and the status of unborn children. That debate might have built a clearer moral consensus one way or the other. With gay marriage, by contrast, the consensus-building process
has gone ahead unimpeded, to impressive persuasive effect. IV. Lessons for Marijuana Legalization What, then, does the example of gay marriage suggest about marijuana
the body
politic will be healthier if the argument is pushed down toward the state level, and if the country
moves away from the one-size-fits-all approach that has dominated drug policy until now. It implies that the legalization experiments in
legalization? It argues for distinguishing between what the policy should be and how the policy should be decided-two very different questions. It suggests that
Colorado and Washington may be bad ideas or good ideas, but that the federal government would be wise to view them and other state experiments not as threats but as
opportunities-opportunities, specifically, to: • Avoid a premature national decision. As with gay marriage, a trend toward legalization is plainly under way, but the country is far
from a consensus. Allowing some states, when they feel ready and able, to attempt orderly change is a good way to adapt policy to changing public opinion without betting the
whole country on a single policy prematurely. The result is likely to be better risk management and a less bumpy ride. * Educe knowledge about drug regimes. Because
legalizing marijuana is a very complicated policy change, understanding the consequences and costs of different regulatory approaches is especially important. What happens
to consumption? To crime? To prices? How high should taxes be, and structured in what way? Can states prevent leakage of marijuana across state lines? Cliche" though it
may be, the phrase "laboratories of democracy" nicely describes the function states can perform in finding out what works and what doesn't. * Launch an overdue public
deliberation. Public opinion on marijuana has been changing since 1995, almost 20 years, but the federal government's rigid drug laws and ostensible (if often unenforceable)
zero-tolerance policies have left little room for political deliberation on other options. A result is that the drug war and public opinion have drifted apart. That disconnect cannot
be sustainable, at least not in a democracy as responsive to public opinion as ours. State-level deliberation provides a comparatively safe, incremental way to bring policy and
opinion into closer alignment. * Contain conflict and reduce hysteria. The attempt to impose a one-size-fits-all policy from Washington, D.C., even if it were sustainable, would
come at the cost of setting up a bitterly polarizing winner-takes-all political dynamic. Pushing the question to states allows advocates to win in some places despite losing in
others, reducing the fear of a catastrophic or permanent defeat. It forces them to adapt their arguments to local tastes and conditions, reducing the fear that one area's
preferences will be foisted on the whole country. It keeps minds open longer and prevents premature commitment, allowing politicians and voters to hang back and see how
state skirmishes and experiments work out before choosing sides and taking entrenched positions. Now, the two caveats mentioned above deserve another moment in the sun.
Both suggest that for the federal government to cede leadership to the states on drug policy will be harder-probably much harder-than for it to cede leadership on marriage.
First, gay couples didn't go to jail for trying to marry; they just couldn't get married. The matter was civil in nature, and no sprawling structure of criminal law and law enforcement
entered the picture. By contrast, when one level of government is issuing licenses to the same people whom another wants to arrest, the two sides are very far apart indeed.
Second, marriage and family policy have been within states' purview ever since colonial times. Federal interventions were rare, indeed extraordinary. To let states lead on gay
marriage, the federal government needed to do little more than hang back (or deadlock) and let nature take its course. In vivid contrast, drug policy has been an area where
federal law has been active, often dominant, since the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914. Tolerating state leadership on marijuana policy will require creative and
proactive legal and political thinking from all concerned, especially the federal government. That said, the payoffs for accommodation are substantial, and are not limited to drug
Marijuana legalization is not the first state-federal conflict to have bubbled up, but it
certainly won't be the last. How the Obama Administration, the states, Congress, the courts, and the public choose
to cope with it will influence the handling of other conflicts yet to emerge. The path around
confrontation on marijuana is a trail which others can follow in the future . The opportunity to
blaze it, if foreclosed, may be hard to recover. V. The Madisonian Way James Madison understood exactly what he was doing when he
policy per se.
designed the U.S. Constitution as a mechanism to force compromise. He and his colleagues in Philadelphia faced a seemingly intractable dilemma, one which no prior form of
government had ever solved. They were writing a constitution for a regime they hoped would be durable for generations, even centuries. Yet they could not begin to foresee the
kinds of problems and conflicts which would arise 50,100, 200 years in the future. How could they design a system that would be both adaptive and stable? Madison's solution
was as counterintuitive as it was brilliant. Force competing factions, branches of government, and-not least-/eve/s of government into continuous but orderly conflict, requiring
them, in order to meet their own goals, to accommodate the goals of others. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition," he famously wrote in Federalist 51 Not only would
factions restrain each other and thereby constrain each other's depredations (the cure for political excess is even more politics), their competitive jostling would force the system
to adjust dynamically to real-world change. The result, if it worked, would be a continuously recalibrated equilibrium. Building a political regime not on authority but on conflict,
and betting that the result would be not chaos but adaptation, was the most visionary political gamble ever taken-especially at a time when Adam Smith was a contemporary
figure and Charles Darwin was decades in the future. Today, though the resulting system isn't pretty to watch, even Madison might be surprised by how well it has worked-when
it is allowed to. Where illegal drugs and especially marijuana are concerned, however, Madison's mechanism has been largely disabled for decades by the federal government's
effective near-monopoly on policy. The result, I would argue, has been a shining example of counter-productivity and excess-but that is a topic for another day. The point for
today is that marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington offers an opportunity not just to improve policy; it also offers an opportunity to give the constitutional order a
tune-up, putting play back in the joints of drug policy and channeling conflict toward constructive change-and thereby, if you will, bringing James Madison back into the game .
Although no particular outcome is inevitable, the question before the country, given the change in
public opinion, is not whether to adjust marijuana policy but how. Allowing for state leadership and
regional diversity would leave many people unhappy, and it is certain to be messy and imperfect. It also, however,
offers the best prospect of containing conflict, preventing disruptive change, avoiding policy mistakes, and
correcting the mistakes that do happen before there is no turning back.
State resistance over marijuana can be characterized as a form of uncooperative
federalism which offers numerous theoretical benefits—increases innovation and
deliberation
Bulman-Pozen and Gerken 09 (Jessica, Yale Law School, JD 2007, and Heather, Professor of Law, yale Law School
"Uncooperative Federalism" Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository)
digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1344&context=fss_papers
Other examples of uncooperative federalism may be harder to spot because they do not fit neatly into the model sketched above.
For example, state decriminalization of medical marijuana, while concededly at the edges of our definition, might
nonetheless be thought of as uncooperative federalism. Against a backdrop of strict federal criminalization,94
thirteen states have eliminated state-level criminal penalties on the use, possession, and cultivation
of marijuana by patients who have a physician’s recommendation.95 These state laws flout, with aspirations to change,
federal drug law96 and have prompted a range of reactions from the federal government. While Congress seems to have
declared a detente,97 the executive branch has been actively working to undermine the decriminalization efforts underway in
California, the state with the most nationally visible decriminalization policy.98 As with the examples above, states decriminalizing
medical marijuana exercise power within the microspheres of an integrated regulatory scheme. But here two primary foundations of
the servant's power—dependence and integration—come from different sources than is the case with our other three examples.
Federal dependence on the states stems from an act of omission, a failure to occupy the field, rather than an affirmative grant of
power." While marijuana regulation might initially look like dual sovereignty, the enforcement of federal law actually depends on
state agents: due to limited resources, the federal government prosecutes only a small percentage of high-profile drug offenders,
with roughly 99% of all marijuana arrests made by state and local officials.100 So, too, federal-state integration in this instance
comes not from an explicit statutory plan, as with the examples above, but from de facto, often ad hoc cooperative schemes and
multijurisdictional taskforces.'01 Thus, as one commentator has put it, though "some have referred to a federal 'monopoly;' over
drug policy .... national drug policy is more suggestive of a ubiquitous mode of ordering federal-state relations: cooperative
federalism."102 And this "cooperative" structure facilitates uncooperative state action. In die remainder of this Essay, we turn from
the descriptive to the normative, as we begin to outline the case in favor of uncooperative federalism and suggest how current
doctrine could be changed to accommodate and foster state dissent within the cooperative federalism framework. II. IS
UNCOOPERATIVE FEDERALISM VALUABLE? In light of the substantial amount of ink devoted to
defending the idea that it is useful for states to serve as rivals or challengers to the federal
government, we begin with the assumption, common to much federalism scholarship, that it is desirable to
have some level of friction, some amount of state contestation, some deliberation-generating froth
in our democratic system. The question, then, is whether those who share this vision of statefederal relations should think harder about the ways in which it can be promoted outside the
realm of state sovereignty. Should we invite states to play a dissenting role only in those areas
where they exercise the power of the sovereign, or should we welcome state efforts to contest
federal policies in the regulator)' space where they wield the power of the servant? In other words, is
uncooperative federalism a valuable form of state dissent? Uncooperative federalism fosters state challenges to
federal policy in a manner distinct from both the autonomy model and its main competitor,
commonly denominated as the "political safeguards of federalism." While there is a good deal more empirical and
analytic work to be done before a proper assessment of the costs and benefits of uncooperative federalism can be made. in this
Part we sketch some preliminary lines of analysis, our own best guess as to where the empirical answers will lie, and our initial take
on the normative questions. We leave a full development of these questions for future work. As we noted in the Introduction, the
costs of uncooperative federalism are familiar to scholars. Most have to do with the price of variation, agency slack, and petty
parochialism. For this reason, we focus on its underappreciated benefits, in effect making the case that die phenomenon long
dismissed as "agency slack" may offer a distinct set of normative benefits. A. Uncooperative Federalism Versus the Autonomy
Model l. The Administrative Safeguards of Federalism Perhaps the strongest reason to value the power of the
servant is that it ensures that state contestation occurs in the vast regulator)' swaths where states
are not autonomous policymakers but instead carry out federal law. Call it the "administrative safeguards of
federalism."101 Joint regulation embeds within the Fourth Branch a set of bureaucrats who are at least
partially beholden to the states. These would-be dissenters wield influence over their federal
bosses because the federal government depends on them to carry out its programs, and ties between
federal and state officials develop over time. State bureaucrats are not the only ones who support these administrative safeguards—
the state legislators and executives who consider how to respond to federal mandates are also important. Because states respond
to federal policy through varied channels, including their own laws and executive orders, the integration of state and federal
regulation introduces politicians as well as bureaucrats into the realm of administration.104 The bureaucrats who shaped
Wisconsin's welfare policy and determined California's Clean Air Act emissions standards were engaged in dissent, but so too were
Governor Thompson and the California legislature. Some acts of rebellion sound largely in politics, as with state challenges to the
Patriot Act. Others take a far more technocratic form, as with state resistance to the inspection and monitoring mandates of the
Clean Air Act. Uncooperative federalism does not just complement the autonomy model of state
contestation in terms of coverage. It also reveals an additional set of leverage points that state
officials can use to push their agenda . Federal dependence on state administrators should matter
not only when state and federal officials are bargaining over how to fill in the gaps of statutory
mandates, but also when federal policy is made in the first place.105 After all, bureaucrats are a
critical part of the policymaking process. Administrators often help set policy at the statutory level through their
interaction with members of the executive and legislative branches. Because federal bureaucrats depend on state
actors, uncooperative federalism ensures that state interests are pursued through not only
political channels, but also administrative ones. Uncooperative federalism , in short, ensures that the
political safeguards of federalism are buttressed by the administrative safeguards of
federalism.106 We should note that uncooperative federalism might also be thought of as part of the federalist safeguards of
administration. Integrating state officials into federal administration reproduces some of the dynamics of federalism within the Fourth
Branch, including its uncooperative elements. In this sense, uncooperative federalism may complement recent
efforts in administrative law to create channels for debate and dissent within federal agencies.107
Indeed, because state bureaucrats possess their own resources and political bases from which to
launch criticisms, we suspect that they will often have more leverage than the typical dissenter
enjoys in a fully centralized federal agency. 2. Agenda Setting Another advantage associated with the
power of the servant is that it enables state officials to set the agenda. The great challenge for
most dissenters is to get those in power to address their concerns. Ignoring dissent is often the
most effective way to undermine it. When states challenge federal policies in areas where they are
autonomous sovereigns, they are in roughly the same position as individual dissenters —outside
the system—thus making it easy for federal officials to pursue a strategy of avoidance.'"8 A state may enact policies that
exemplify its dissenting views, but the less the effects of those policies are felt elsewhere, the easier it is for federal officials simply
to ignore the challenge. That means that the more rigid the bounds between state and federal policymaking, the less effective a
state's resistance is likely to be. Avoidance is more difficult when states are engaged in uncooperative
federalism because states are administering federal law. The absence of uniformity, coupled with
the risk that other states will demand similar exemptions, is likely to put pressure on the federal
government to react. Variation, after all, can be administratively costly. Moreover, federal officials
may find it irksome to see federal funds being used to thwart a statutory mandate rather than to
serve it. Modus vivendi is less palatable when funded out of your own pocket. We thus would expect the federal government to
respond in some way to a state's challenge. It might override the state, tolerate its position, or adopt the state's preferred policy. The
key is that the federal government will be pressured to engage the state's position. And engagement
is at least a partial victory for any dissenter. 3- Dissent as an Act of Affiliation Another reason to value
uncooperative federalism is that it involves an unusual type of state challenge that harnesses the
power of insider status in the service of outsider interests. Here again, uncooperative federalism serves as a
useful complement to the autonomy model. When a state uses its sovereign power to contest federal policy,
it does so as an outsider to the system.100 There are many advantages to dissenting as an outsider. State officials
are not bound by federal program requirements, they are free to say whatever they want, and they are untainted by any association
with the policies they are criticizing. There are also disadvantages associated with an outsider's status, however. State officials
may be considered less knowledgeable than those who administer the program, and they may be
unfamiliar to federal officials. They may be able to speak more forcefully than partial insiders, but
they may also be less likely to get heard. Uncooperative federalism, in contrast, takes place in
areas where states can take advantage of the connective ties that bind them to federal officials.
While those ties may lead state officials to dissent in less forceful or radical terms, they should also yield knowledge
of the system and personal relations with the people best positioned to change the policy. If
effective dissent requires one to know both what to say and to whom to say it, uncooperative
federalism ought to be fairly effective. Integration may also lend an expressive dimension to state
officials' contestation. One of the most common rhetorical devices used by dissenters is to invoke
a shared commitment or community, to offer some proof of affiliation even as they challenge the prevailing view. The
reason for doing so is simple: as scholars studying the dissent tradition have recognized, individuals speaking out against social
policy have a greater claim to our attention if they are part of our community. An effective critic must place herself "[a] litde to the
side, but not outside," argues Michael Walzer."° Those who insist on separation and detachment may, by so doing, undermine their
ability to dissent effectively. But "the connected critic," who retains ties to the community even as she speaks out against it, makes a
powerful bid for our attention."' State officials who implement federal law are the rough equivalent of
Walzer's connected critics. They speak as both insiders and outsiders — part of the federal
machinery with ties to those outside it. That means that even as they articulate a dissenting view,
they are still understood to be part of the national system. This connectedness may lend states
"standing," in the colloquial sense, to criticize federal policy." 1 Consider how much less compelling state
resolutions responding to the Patriot Act would be if they invoked only state constitutions. These resolutions have force because the
states are integral parts of the apparatus that administers the Act, and they appeal to the nation's shared laws and traditions. Yet the
resolutions confirm that states have enough distance from the federal government to disobey aspects of its current policy. 4.
Accountability It might seem surprising that we list accountability as one of the benefits associated
with uncooperative federalism. After all, one of the more serious worries about cooperative
federalism is that it blurs the lines of accountability, preventing citizens from knowing whom to
blame for an unpopular policy. Accountability is considered a particularly powerful argument against commandeering
(something we diink a strong commitment to uncooperative federalism would favor"'). On this account, when the state-federal
relationship is "cooperative" — when the state and federal government are in agreement about the regulatory question —it may be
fair to censure both state and federal officials for any problems that arise. When state officials disagree with their federal
counterparts, however, the accountability problem is worrisome. The Supreme Court in New York v. United States, for instance,
maintained that having states carry out federal policies with which they disagree—precisely what uncooperative federalism involves
—would result in state officials wrongly "bear[ing] the brunt of public disapproval" of federal policy."4 Given how little most voters
know about discrete policy issues,"5 we are skeptical that accountability arguments deserve as much weight as they have been
given. Political accountability depends almost entirely on voters' reliance on broadly defined partisan heuristics, not fine-grained
policy judgments."6 Indeed, the extant research has prompted Neil Siegel to conclude that while high-information voters should be
able to identify the right culprits, low-information voters "may be largely beyond judicial or political help on the accountability front.""7
We thus think diat accountability in this context is mostly an elite affair, depending largely on what Jerry Mashaw calls "soft law" —
bureaucrats policing themselves based on shared professional norms, with nudges from outside advocacy groups and
policymakers."8 Uncooperative federalism, of course, offers significant advantages in promoting this sort of
bureaucratic accountability because it takes place in the regulatory arenas where state
administrators are integrated with federal ones. Professional peer pressure depends on the ties
that bind bureaucrats to one another. When state bureaucrats are embedded within the federal
system, they are able to develop those professional ties while still being able to rely on a separate
power base. State administrators may therefore be less inhibited than their federal counterparts in challenging existing practices.
But they should still be better situated to push those challenges than bureaucrats outside the system."0 Even when we can look to
voters to hold officials accountable for their missteps, it is still not clear that uncooperative federalism (or, more accurately, joint
regulation) falls short on the accountability measure. To the contrary, when state and federal officials disagree, joint
regulation offers at least three accountability-promoting devices: information, access, and allies.
First, disagreement within a joint regulatory regime can provide a useful information-enforcing
device. Accountability, of course, requires accurate information. In a complex regulatory world, it is often difficult to discern who is
responsible for a problem even when the states and federal government regulate independently. When state and federal officials are
at loggerheads, joint regulation imposes the rough equivalent of "joint and several liability" upon them. The advantage to this
strategy, at least in theory, is that it creates an incentive for defendants to play the blame game among themselves, using their
resources to get the goods on each odier. When state and federal officials disagree, dual regulation is the political cognate to joint
and several liability; it should create an incentive for state and federal officials to disseminate information about who is to blame for a
problem. This means that the people with the most information about who is responsible—and the greatest ability to get that
information out —will be hard at work educating voters.120 Second, accountability is not simply about knowing
who is responsible, but also being able to appeal to them. And interposing the state between the
people and the federal government may bolster this aspect of accountability by offering more
access points for individuals who oppose federal policy —they can petition not only the federal government, but
also state officials. Having more access points may not matter as much if both the states and federal government are committed to
the same project. But where, as with uncooperative federalism, state and federal officials disagree, citizens and public interest
groups ought to be able to find someone to help them push their cause. This brings us to a third, related point —one
that we explain in greater detail in Part III. Forcing state officials to participate in a federal scheme
they oppose may generate more allies for the citizens who oppose the scheme. If states can
simply opt out of a program with which they disagree, they may not have much incentive to
devote the resources needed to mount an effective challenge to federal policy.111 When state officials
fear that they will suffer the political consequences of carrying out a policy that runs contrary to their constituents' interests, they
have a greater incentive to play the contrarian's role. Those who favor the autonomy model of state dissent are absolutely correct
that "sometimes it takes a government to check a government."1" But it may be that federal-state integration, rather than autonomy,
creates more incentives for state governments to check the federal government. When a state finds itself entangled with unpopular
federal policies, citizens demanding federal accountability may suddenly find themselves with a rather powerful allv.
Uncooperative federalism is key to clean tech development
Carols Romo, environmental and natural resources attorney in the Austin office of Baker Botts L.L.P. He has a J.D. from the
University of Texas School of Law and a B.A. in Public Policy from Stanford University, Winter 2014, Hydraulic Fracturing,
Uncooperative Federalism, and Technological Innovation, http://gwujeel.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/romo_article_jeel_0114.pdf
“The
effect of environmental policies on the development and spread of new technologies may, in
the long run, be among the most important determinants of success or failure in environmental
protection.”229 The important role that technological innovation plays in environmental protection
highlights why it is necessary to more closely examine the influence of federalism on
technological innovation. The technological development and regulation of recycling produced water is an important
example of this phenomenon.230 Emerging technologies to recycle and reuse oil and gas wastewaters
have prompted states to review relevant regulations to encourage these promising new methods
that reduce water consumption and oilfield wastes.231 Proposed EPA regulation of wastewater treatment
from CBM and shale gas extraction under the CWA is premised in part under a theory of federalism, focusing
on the lack of consistency and accountability in state regulatory frameworks for the management of produced
water.232 This Article suggests, however, that diverse state policies may have one
underappreciated environmental advantage: encouragement of technological innovation . The
continued exploration of this unconventional method of wastewater management highlights the
potential environmental benefits of uncooperative federalism.
Secures US leadership
Klarevas ‘9 Louis, Ph.D. in International Relations from the School of International Service at American University, NYU
coordinator of graduate Transnational Security studies, former Defense Analysis Research Fellow at the London School of
Economics, former research associate at the United States Institute of Peace, "Securing American Primacy While Tackling Climate
Change: Toward a National Strategy of Greengemony," www.huffingtonpost.com/louis-klarevas/securing-americanprimacy_b_393223.html, AM*modified for gender, denoted by brackets
As national leaders from around the world are gathering in Copenhagen, Denmark, to attend the United
Nations Climate Change Conference, the time is ripe to re-assess America's current energy policies - but
within the larger framework of how a new approach on the environment will stave off global
warming and shore up American primacy. By not addressing climate change more aggressively
and creatively, the United States is squandering an opportunity to secure its global primacy for the
next few generations to come. To do this, though, the U.S. must rely on innovation to help the world
escape the coming environmental meltdown. Developing the key technologies that will save the
planet from global warming will allow the U.S. to outmaneuver potential great power rivals seeking to
replace it as the international system's hegemon. But the greening of American strategy must
occur soon. The U.S., however, seems to be stuck in time, unable to move beyond oil-centric geo-politics in any meaningful
way. Often, the gridlock is portrayed as a partisan difference, with Republicans resisting action and Democrats pleading for action.
This, though, is an unfair characterization as there are numerous proactive Republicans and quite a few reticent Democrats. The
real divide is instead one between realists and liberals. Students of realpolitik, which still heavily guides American foreign
policy, largely discount environmental issues as they are not seen as advancing national interests
in a way that generates relative power advantages vis-à-vis the other major powers in the system: Russia, China,
Japan, India, and the European Union. Liberals, on the other hand, have recognized that global warming might
very well become the greatest challenge ever faced by [hu]mankind. As such, their thinking often eschews
narrowly defined national interests for the greater global good. This, though, ruffles elected officials whose sworn obligation is,
above all, to protect and promote American national interests. What both sides need to understand is that by
becoming a lean, mean, green fighting machine, the U.S. can actually bring together liberals and
realists to advance a collective interest which benefits every nation, while at the same time,
securing America's global primacy well into the future. To do so, the U.S. must re-invent itself as not
just your traditional hegemon, but as history's first ever green hegemon . Hegemons are countries that
dominate the international system - bailing out other countries in times of global crisis, establishing and maintaining the most
important international institutions, and covering the costs that result from free-riding and cheating global obligations. Since 1945,
that role has been the purview of the United States. Immediately after World War II, Europe and Asia laid in ruin, the global
economy required resuscitation, the countries of the free world needed security guarantees, and the entire system longed for a
multilateral forum where global concerns could be addressed. The U.S., emerging the least scathed by the systemic crisis of
fascism's rise, stepped up to the challenge and established the postwar (and current) liberal order. But don't let the world "liberal"
fool you. While many nations benefited from America's new-found hegemony, the U.S. was driven largely by "realist"
selfish national interests. The liberal order first and foremost benefited the U.S. With the U.S.
becoming bogged down in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, running a record national debt, and
failing to shore up the dollar, the future of American hegemony now seems to be facing a serious
contest: potential rivals - acting like sharks smelling blood in the water - wish to challenge the U.S. on a variety of fronts. This
has led numerous commentators to forecast the U.S.'s imminent fall from grace. Not all hope is
lost however. With the impending systemic crisis of global warming on the horizon, the U.S. again finds
itself in a position to address a transnational problem in a way that will benefit both the
international community collectively and the U.S. selfishly. The current problem is two-fold. First, the
competition for oil is fueling animosities between the major powers. The geopolitics of oil has
already emboldened Russia in its 'near abroad' and China in far-off places like Africa and Latin
America. As oil is a limited natural resource, a nasty zero-sum contest could be looming on the horizon for
the U.S. and its major power rivals - a contest which threatens American primacy and global
stability. Second, converting fossil fuels like oil to run national economies is producing irreversible harm in the form of carbon dioxide
emissions. So long as the global economy remains oil-dependent, greenhouse gases will continue to
rise. Experts are predicting as much as a 60% increase in carbon dioxide emissions in the next twenty-five years. That likely
means more devastating water shortages, droughts, forest fires, floods, and storms. In other words, if global competition
for access to energy resources does not undermine international security, global warming will. And
in either case, oil will be a culprit for the instability. Oil arguably has been the most precious energy resource of the last
half-century. But "black gold" is so 20th century. The key resource for this century will be green gold - clean,
environmentally-friendly energy like wind, solar, and hydrogen power. Climate change leaves no alternative. And the
sooner we realize this, the better off we will be. What Washington must do in order to avoid the traps of
petropolitics is to convert the U.S. into the world's first-ever green hegemon. For starters, the federal
government must drastically increase investment in energy and environmental research and development (E&E R&D). This will
require a serious sacrifice, committing upwards of $40 billion annually to E&E R&D - a far cry from the few billion dollars currently
being spent. By promoting a new national project, the U.S. could develop new technologies that will assure it does not drown in a
pool of oil. Some solutions are already well known, such as raising fuel standards for automobiles; improving public transportation
networks; and expanding nuclear and wind power sources. Others, however, have not progressed much beyond the drawing board:
batteries that can store massive amounts of solar (and possibly even wind) power; efficient and cost-effective photovoltaic cells,
crop-fuels, and hydrogen-based fuels; and even fusion. Such innovations will not only provide alternatives to oil, they will also give
the U.S. an edge in the global competition for hegemony. If the U.S. is able to produce technologies that allow modern, globalized
And this will give
the U.S. a tremendous economic boom , while simultaneously providing it with means of leverage
that can be employed to keep potential foes in check.
societies to escape the oil trap, those nations will eventually have no choice but to adopt such technologies.
US leadership solves great power wars
Yuhan Zhang, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Lin Shi, Columbia University,
“America’s Decline: A Harbinger of Conflcit and Rivalry,” EAST ASIA FORUM, 1—22—11,
http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2011/01/22/americas-decline-a-harbinger-of-conflict-and-rivalry/
This does not necessarily mean that the US is in systemic decline, but it encompasses a trend that appears to be negative and
perhaps alarming. Although the US still possesses incomparable military prowess and its economy remains the world’s largest, the
once seemingly indomitable chasm that separated America from anyone else is narrowing. Thus, the global distribution of power is
shifting, and the inevitable result will be a world that is less peaceful, liberal and prosperous, burdened by a dearth of effective
conflict regulation. Over the past two decades, no other state has had the ability to seriously challenge the US military. Under these
circumstances, motivated by both opportunity and fear, many actors have bandwagoned with US hegemony and
accepted a subordinate role. Canada, most of Western Europe, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore and the Philippines
have all joined the US, creating
a status quo that has tended to mute great power conflicts . However, as
the hegemony that drew these powers together withers, so will the pulling power behind the US alliance. The result will
be an international order where power is more diffuse, American interests and influence can be more readily
challenged, and conflicts or wars may be harder to avoid. As history attests, power decline and
redistribution result in military confrontation. For example, in the late 19th century America’s emergence as a
regional power saw it launch its first overseas war of conquest towards Spain. By the turn of the 20th century, accompanying the
increase in US power and waning of British power, the American Navy had begun to challenge the notion that Britain ‘rules the
waves.’ Such a notion would eventually see the US attain the status of sole guardians of the Western Hemisphere’s security to
become the order-creating Leviathan shaping the international system with democracy and rule of law. Defining this US-centred
system are three key characteristics: enforcement of property rights, constraints on the actions of powerful individuals and groups
and some degree of equal opportunities for broad segments of society. As a result of such political stability, free markets, liberal
trade and flexible financial mechanisms have appeared. And, with this, many countries have sought opportunities to enter this
system, proliferating stable and cooperative relations. However, what will happen to these advances as America’s influence
declines? Given that America’s authority, although sullied at times, has benefited people across much of Latin America, Central and
Eastern Europe, the Balkans, as well as parts of Africa and, quite extensively, Asia, the answer to this question could affect global
society in a profoundly detrimental way. Public imagination and academia have anticipated that a post-hegemonic world
would return to the problems of the 1930s: regional blocs, trade conflicts and strategic rivalry. Furthermore,
multilateral institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank or the WTO might give way to regional organisations. For example, Europe
and East Asia would each step forward to fill the vacuum left by Washington’s withering leadership to pursue their own visions of
regional political and economic orders. Free markets would become more politicised — and, well, less free
— and major powers would compete for supremacy. Additionally, such power plays have historically possessed a
zero-sum element. In the late 1960s and 1970s, US economic power declined relative to the rise of the Japanese and Western
European economies, with the US dollar also becoming less attractive. And, as American power eroded, so did international
regimes (such as the Bretton Woods System in 1973).
A world without American hegemony is one where great
power wars re-emerge, the liberal international system is supplanted by an authoritarian one, and trade protectionism
devolves into restrictive, anti-globalisation barriers. This, at least, is one possibility we can forecast in a future that will inevitably be
devoid of unrivalled US primacy.
State-led innovation spills up internationally and solves warming
Snyder and Binder 09 (Jared, Assistant Commissioner for Air Resources, Climate Change and Energy, and Jonathan,
Office of General Counsel, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation,"The Changing Climate of Cooperative
Federalism: The Dynamic Role of the States in a National Strategy to Combat Climate Change" UCLA Journal of Environmental
Law and Policy, 27 UCLA J. Envtl. L. & Pol'y 231, accessed 8-26-14, Lexis)
The Case for Federalism: Application to Global Climate Change The inactivity of the Bush Administration in the area of
climate change over the past eight years has led to a flowering of state actions, like those described above in
New York State, from
state r enewable p erformance s tandards and energy efficiency programs to the
development of RGGI and other emerging state cap-and-trade programs. These programs have had,
and will continue to have, tremendous value as they reduce GHG emissions , build a thriving
green energy economy , and serve as the laboratory for further efforts at the federal, international
or multi-state level. Once the federal government finally begins meaningful action - whether in the form
of federal cap-and-trade legislation, administrative regulation of GHG emissions, or otherwise - the role for continued state
and local efforts will be equally critical, or even more essential. A federal program should take advantage of the
progress that has been demonstrated at the state level. The recent history of climate regulation demonstrates that
many of the traditional economic incentives that have led to a so-called "race to the bottom" in
some areas of environmental policy are reversed in the case of climate change , as it is often in a
state's self-interest economically and otherwise to work towards additional GHG emission
reductions. Furthermore, there are collective benefits that will accrue to the nation as a whole from
allowing states to continue to operate unfettered in the climate change context , even after the federal
government finally establishes its climate change policy. Finally, there is no legitimate federal policy reason for
preventing a state or region from implementing additional climate change policies that impose
additional costs only on its own sources. Indeed, a state's interest in positioning its sources to compete effectively in
an interstate marketplace provides a sufficient constraint on state exuberance. When determining the appropriate roles for the
different levels of government in climate change policy, the question is not simply whether or not federal climate change legislation
should preempt state and local laws. Instead, the question is whether the federal government can enact policies that fully address
climate [*247] change in the most effective manner possible. Undoubtedly, the most efficient and effective method of addressing
climate change includes state and local governments continuing to operate in a manner that is long-accepted under our system of
federalism, wherein they are collaborative partners with the federal government in working to address a complex and wide-ranging
problem. Without this kind of cooperative federalism, solving the climate change crisis may be further delayed or even become
impossible, and powers traditionally left to the states will be precluded by the federal government without any resulting collective
benefit. A. Climate Change and the Dynamics of Cooperative Federalism While the climate change crisis may differ from other
environmental problems in many ways, it is similar in that the best approach to mitigate and adapt to the problem requires a
comprehensive approach involving multiple levels of government. Over the past several decades, many of the major success stories
in environmental law contain some type of cooperative federalism approach; restraining one or both levels of government in the
overall equation often has negative results. n24 Recognizing the value of state action, Congress has rarely enacted laws that
preempt state and local action completely, especially when that state and local action supplements the protection of public health
and the environment provided by the federal statute. n25 In the rare instances that Congress has preempted state action, its policy
choice has been dictated by the interstate and international nature of commerce at issue. n26 [*248] The fairly short history of
environmental regulation in the United States has been characterized by an ebb-and-flow of action at the state and federal levels.
Prior to the enactment of the major federal environmental laws starting in the 1960s, the states were the primary forces in protecting
environmental quality, relying on nascent state laws as well as the common law of public nuisance. After Congress passed a
multitude of federal laws and created the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1960s and 1970s, the space for states to act
seemed less important. But times change, and as Washington became gridlocked on environmental policy in the 1990s and
continuing into this decade, the initiative returned to the states, especially in the realm of climate policy. n27 Although it appears that
we are moving into another period of federal action, the pendulum will undoubtedly swing back again in the future. The recent
history of climate change regulation has defied the conventional wisdom that states , left to their
own devices, will engage in a so-called "race to the bottom," in which some states eschew environmental
requirements in order to gain a competitive advantage economically over the other states. Federal environmental laws have been
seen as necessary to counter the "race to the bottom" by the states. Under this scenario, a federal response to the environmental
problem is often necessary to set a uniform regulatory "floor" that requires each state to at least meet a minimum level of
environmental protection. In fact, it is largely because of this dynamic that the major federal environmental laws of the early 1970s,
including the Clean Air Act, came to fruition. n28 Instead of a "race to the bottom," climate change has
engendered what may be called a "race to the top. " n29 In many ways, the reasons for the "race to the
top" are similar to the reasons for the "race to the bottom," in that states are trying to gain an
economic [*249] advantage. n30 In fact, states have seen many policies that address climate change
not as a burden on commerce, but as an economic opportunity. Research, manufacturing and
deployment of "green" technologies can generate well-paying jobs in the short term and create
new anchor industries in the long term. These technologies can then be sold to the rest of the
country and the world, providing additional economic and environmental benefits. Part of the reason for
a particular state to act even in the absence of federal action is to be a leader in new and emerging markets. In the event Congress
finally enacts some form of comprehensive climate change legislation, states will still have many of the same motivations to engage
in a "race to the top," with potential changes only in terms of degree. With a properly designed piece of legislation, the continuing
"race to the top" can have numerous positive effects, in terms of national and state economic benefits, as well as national and state
GHG emission reductions. B. Collective Benefits of State and Local Government Action to Combat Climate Change State and
local efforts to reduce GHG emissions have already played a valuable role in reducing GHG
emissions in the United States. Such efforts have also helped in developing strategies for
reducing GHG emissions that can serve as a model for federal and international action, and in
positioning the U nited S tates to join in and lead international efforts to reduce GHG emissions . Even if
the federal government finally implements real measures to address climate change, state and local action will continue to have
substantial benefits. 1. States as "Laboratories" and the Need for Ongoing Innovation One of the primary benefits of
state environmental action is that it enables states to develop new and more effective or efficient
models of environmental regulation. As Justice Brandeis observed, while a state may incur additional
expenses or decide to impose extra risk on itself, "it is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a
single courageous State may, if its citizens [*250] choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel
social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country. " n31 In this sense, allowing
states the ability to develop their own strategies to further reduce GHG emissions operates as a
sort of insurance policy for the national economy. This is because an innovation that fails at the state
level will, of course, have less of an impact on the national economy than a federal attempt at
innovation that fails. State efforts to date are influencing the development of a federal program profoundly. In particular,
RGGI has provided an important template for action by the federal government and other states in
several ways. It is demonstrating the mechanics of developing a cap-and-trade program for
carbon dioxide. This is especially true in areas such as offsets and the auctioning of CO(2) allowances. Prior to the
development of RGGI, there was little discussion in Washington about auctioning CO(2) allowances. Now, given RGGI's example of
auctioning nearly 100 percent ofCO(2) allowances, the only debate seems to be how quickly to move to 100 percent auctioning of
allowances. n32 In fact, President Obama's recent budget proposal makes clear the administration's intent for the forthcoming
federal cap-and-trade program to include 100 percent auctioning of allowances. n33 The actual process for conducting RGGI
auctions will also serve as a detailed model for federal legislation or regulation, particularly given the success of the RGGI auctions
to date. Once comprehensive federal climate change legislation is finally enacted, the need for
ongoing innovation and additional development of policy mechanisms will not just disappear.
Continued improvements in policy will likely be necessary to develop new means of further
reducing GHG emissions. State and local level action is often the most effective way to
accomplish this continual policy enhancement. Even if a particular state innovation does not
result in net reductions within a federal cap, it [*251] could provide a policy model for reducing
emissions further into the future. 2. State and Local Programs Can Reduce the Cost of Meeting a Federal Cap State
and local programs can facilitate compliance with a federal program by reducing the overall cost
of a given level of nationwide emissions reduction. Even advocates of preemption recognize the value of
complementary policies at the sub-national level, including in areas such as "appliance efficiency standards, building
codes, land use decisions, performance standards, public transit, and incentives to increase
efficiency." n34 These policies address market imperfections and barriers such as lack of consumer
information about the financial benefits of efficient products, disconnect between the buyers and
users of equipment (e.g., rental housing), entrenched energy systems, research and development spillover effects, and other
related issues. By reducing the demand for carbon-intensive energy, these state programs and
policies reduce the pressure on achieving a given federal GHG goal. Ignoring these barriers could
potentially result in the federal program accruing higher costs and higher allowance prices than
necessary. State programs that reduce the demand for carbon-containing energy through
measures such as state efficiency programs and standards, improved land use and transportation
planning, renewables deployment and cap-and-trade n35 will reduce the cost of federal
allowances by lowering the demand for such allowances. n36 Reduced federal allowance prices will result in
reduced consumer price impacts and reduced costs for other [*252] covered entities outside of the state. Because costs of
compliance and consumer price impacts are both significant political variables in policy design, these effects could create the
political opportunity for the federal government to further ratchet down the federal cap over time. In other words, aggressive state
action, even if it is more expensive for the state, can lead to additional benefits by facilitating more stringent federal action.
Certain redundancies that result from an overlapping cooperative federalism approach are
actually desirable. Many federal laws contain some form of redundancy in authority among the
different levels of government. Although such redundancy may not be perfectly efficient, it is
sometimes more effective than a less redundant approach. n37 Other approaches - including those that are
more purely federal, exclusively state-controlled or more precisely divided between the two levels - have certain benefits, but also
notable flaws. A cooperative and sometimes redundant approach still realizes these benefits - including a reduced overall cost of a
given level of national GHG emission reductions - while also avoiding most of the costs. n38 3. Enabling Further Action in the Future
Allowing for the possibility of continued state innovation also gives states the ability to
encourage and affect further federal action. With climate change, this has happened over the past
several years in an environment of federal inaction. Even if Congress finally does pass some form
of comprehensive GHG emission reduction legislation, additional efforts may become necessary
in the future. New technologies will likely be needed on an ongoing basis. Just as the auction of
allowances was a new [*253] policy innovation, so too might a new policy mechanism be developed by state or local governments
once a federal cap-and-trade program is in place. But if Congress decides to preclude ongoing progress by the
state and local governments, such necessary future innovation may be impossible. As explained
above, the history of environmental regulation has been characterized by an ebb-and-flow of action
between the federal and state governments. We appear to be entering an era of federal action on
climate change after a lengthy period in which states filled the vacuum left by federal inaction. But
the pendulum is sure to swing back in the future, and the possibility - even likelihood - of the
return of a period of federal gridlock a decade or two in the future dictates the need to keep all the
tools in the toolbox, including the ability to act at the state level. Furthermore, states are able to
respond more quickly than the federal government to new information and scientific and
technological developments. New information is always being developed in the climate change
area, including information regarding the scope and timing of the response needed, the technological options available for
mitigating climate change, and the economics of responding to climate change. In areas of environmental protection,
states are often able to act more quickly to adapt to new circumstances. n39 We must be mindful of
the possibility - indeed the likelihood - that a federal response will be inadequate from the outset. It is
virtually certain that any federal legislation will not be completely comprehensive; it will probably
not apply to 100 percent of the nation's GHG emissions. Additionally, a federal bill might not be
sufficiently stringent to avoid the most damaging effects of climate change in its first incarnation.
This could be due to a variety of factors including political compromise, poor policy design
choices, or lack of information. This is particularly relevant to the changing nature of climate
science. As we learn more about the earth's climate system and our impact upon it, it is possible
we will have to accelerate reductions beyond what is deemed to be "necessary" today. [*254] In this
regard, the reduction targets in all the major federal bills are based on the scientific consensus on the need to keep atmospheric
CO(2) concentrations below 450 parts per million, which requires emission reductions in the developed world of 80 percent by
midcentury. However, there is a growing minority view - led by Dr. James Hansen and the writer Bill McKibben - that contends that
we have already exceeded the safe level of 350 ppm, meaning that much more dramatic action is needed. n40 Five to ten years
from now, this minority view may become the majority view, sparking recognition of the need for more action. By then, however,
power in Washington may have returned to less progressive leadership, requiring states to fill the void once again. It is difficult
to predict exactly what further action, if any, may be necessary in the future. But this is precisely
the reason for allowing the states to take further action if it does become necessary. The dynamic
of the last eight years - in which states act in an environment of federal inaction - could very well
happen again. Ignoring this history will make it even more likely that this history will be repeated,
to the detriment of the nationwide environment and economy.
Warming is real, human caused, and causes extinction—acting now is key to
avoid catastrophic collapse
Dr. David McCoy et al., MD, Centre for International Health and Development, University College London, “Climate Change and
Human Survival,” BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL v. 348, 4—2—14, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g2510, accessed 8-31-14.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just published its report on the impacts of global warming. Building on
its recent update of the physical science of global warming [1], the
IPCC’s new report should leave the world in no
doubt about the scale and immediacy of the threat to human survival , health, and well-being. The IPCC
has already concluded that it is “ virtually certain that human influence has warmed the global climate
system” and that it is “ extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average
surface temperature from 1951 to 2010” is anthropogenic [1]. Its new report outlines the future threats of
further global warming: increased scarcity of food and fresh water; extreme weather events; rise in sea
level; loss of biodiversity; areas becoming uninhabitable; and mass human migration, conflict and
violence. Leaked drafts talk of hundreds of millions displaced in a little over 80 years. This month, the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (AAAS) added its voice: “the well being of people of all nations [is] at risk.” [2] Such
comments reaffirm the conclusions of the Lancet/UCL Commission: that climate change is “the greatest threat to
human health of the 21st century.” [3] The changes seen so far—massive arctic ice loss and extreme weather events, for
example—have resulted from an estimated average temperature rise of 0.89°C since 1901. Further changes will depend
on how much we continue to heat the planet. The release of just another 275 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide would
probably commit us to a temperature rise of at least 2°C—an amount that could be emitted in less than eight years. [4]
“ Business as usual ” will increase carbon dioxide concentrations from the current level of 400 parts per
million (ppm), which is a 40% increase from 280 ppm 150 years ago, to 936 ppm by 2100, with a 50:50 chance that this will deliver
global mean temperature rises of more than 4°C. It is now widely understood that such a rise is “incompatible with an organised
global community.” [5]. The
IPCC warns of “ tipping points ” in the Earth’s system, which, if crossed, could lead
to a catastrophic collapse of interlinked human and natural systems. The AAAS concludes that there is
now a “real chance of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes with highly
damaging impacts on people around the globe.” [2] And this week a report from the World Meteorological Office (WMO)
confirmed that extreme weather events are accelerating. WMO secretary general Michel Jarraud said, “There is no standstill in
global warming . . . The laws of physics are non-negotiable.” [6]
Plan: The United States state governments should legalize nearly all marihuana in
the United States.
Solvency: 1AC
States can successfully legalize marijuana despite the federal ban—the plan
cannot be preempted and federal sanctions are not viewed as credible
Mikos 09 (Robert, Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University Law School, October 2009, “On the Limits of Supremacy: Medical
Marijuana and the States' Overlooked Power to Legalize Federal Crime” Vanderbilt Law Review, 62 Vand. L. Rev. 1421, Lexis)
When Congress bans some activity that has been legalized n2 by the states, however, both the legal
status and practical import of state law are far less obvious. Contrary to conventional wisdom,
state laws legalizing conduct banned by Congress remain in force and, in many instances, may
even constitute the de facto governing law of the land . The survival and success of these state
laws are the result of previously overlooked constraints on Congress's preemption authority
under the Supremacy Clause as well as practical constraints on its enforcement power. Using
medical marijuana as a case study, this Article closely examines the states' underappreciated
power to legalize activity that Congress bans. Congress has banned marijuana outright , recognizing
no permissible medical use for the drug. Violation of the ban carries a variety of modest-to-severe sanctions, both criminal and civil.
In [*1423] Gonzales v. Raich, n3 the Supreme Court affirmed Congress's power to enact the ban. In
fact, it suggested that Congress's power to regulate, and hence to proscribe, medical marijuana
(among other things) was almost unlimited. n4 The decision caused some commentators to declare that the war over
medical marijuana was over, and that the states had clearly lost. n5 As long as Congress wanted to eradicate marijuana, the states
seemingly could do nothing to stop it. But Raich did not stop (or even slow) state legalization campaigns. At
the time Raich was decided, when Congress's authority was still (somewhat) doubtful, ten states had
legalized medical marijuana. n6 Since that time, however, three more states have passed legislation
legalizing the use of medical marijuana, n7 and several more states 51may soon join the fray. n8
The flurry of legislative activity is puzzling: If the war on medical marijuana is truly over, why are
the states still fighting? I argue that states retain both de jure and de facto power to exempt medical
marijuana from criminal sanctions, in spite of Congress's uncompromising - and clearly
constitutional - ban on the drug. States may continue to legalize marijuana because Congress has
not preempted - and more importantly, may not preempt - state laws that merely permit (i.e., refuse to
punish) private conduct the federal [*1424] government deems objectionable. To be sure, the
objectives of the state and federal governments clearly conflict : states want some residents to be able to use
marijuana, while Congress wants total abstention. But to say that Congress may thereby preempt state inaction
(which is what legalization amounts to, after all) would, in effect, permit Congress to command the states to
take some action - namely, to proscribe medical marijuana. The Court's anti-commandeering rule,
however, clearly prohibits Congress from doing this . n9 I develop a new framework for analyzing the boundary
between permissible preemption and prohibited commandeering - the state-of-nature benchmark. The state-of-nature benchmark
eliminates much of the confusion that has clouded disputes over state medical marijuana laws. It suggests that as long as
states go no further - and do not actively assist marijuana users, growers, and so on - they may
continue to look the other way when their citizens defy federal law. On a more practical level, the fact
that state exemptions remain enforceable is consequential; these states laws, in other words, are not
merely symbolic gestures. The main reason is that the federal government lacks the resources
needed to enforce its own ban vigorously: although it commands a $ 2 trillion dollar (plus) budget,
the federal government is only a two-bit player when it comes to marijuana enforcement. Only 1
percent of the roughly 800,000 marijuana cases generated every year are handled by federal
authorities. n10 The states, by virtue of their greater law enforcement resources (among other things),
hold the upper hand. The federal ban may be strict - and its penalties severe - but without the
wholehearted cooperation of state law enforcement authorities, its impact on private behavior will
remain limited. Most medical marijuana users and suppliers can feel confident they will never be
caught by the federal government. Even more interestingly, analysis of the medical marijuana
conflict reveals that states also have comparatively strong sway over the private (i.e., non-legal)
forces that shape our actions, such as our personal beliefs about behavior and our social norms.
Simply by allowing their residents to use marijuana for medical purposes, the states have
arguably fostered more tolerant attitudes toward the practice, making it seem more compassionate, less
thereby removing or softening the personal and societal [*1425] reproach that
once suppressed medical use of the drug. The expressive power of permissive state legislation largely ignored by the academy - cannot easily be undone or countered by Congress. As a result, the
states may possess even more de facto power vis-a-vis Congress than is commonly perceived. At
dangerous, and less wicked,
a minimum, this Article provides a definitive study of one of the most important federalism disputes in a generation. n11 It shows that
states have wielded far more power and influence over medical marijuana than previously
recognized. The states have not only kept the patient breathing, so to speak, in anticipation of a day
when federal policy might change; they have, for all practical purposes, already made medical marijuana
de facto legal within their jurisdictions . In other words, the war on medical marijuana may have ended
long before the Obama Administration began to suggest that a partial truce should be called, n12
but it may have been the states - not the federal government - that emerged as the victors. More
importantly, however, by shedding new light on the struggle over medical marijuana, this Article also
has much broader relevance to our understandings of federalism and state resistance to federal
authority. Although this Article focuses on medical marijuana, the insights generated here could be applied
across a wide range of issues pitting restrictive federal legislation against more permissive state
laws. Over the past decade, states have legalized a variety of controversial practices that
Congress has sought to proscribe or restrict. For example, states now recognize same-sex
marriages, legalize certain abortion procedures, and allow possession of firearms that Congress
proscribes (or has sought to curtail), and several states are proposing to allow sports gambling - an
activity banned under federal statute. n13 As the case study of medical marijuana [*1426]
demonstrates, states (generally) possess legal authority to enact permissive legislation governing
such issues, in spite of contrary congressional policy: states are merely restoring the state of nature. And as with
medical marijuana, the ultimate outcome on such issues may hinge more on Congress's capacity to enforce its own laws and its
ability to manage the non-legal forces that shape our behavior than on the Supreme Court's proclamations demarcating Congress's
substantive powers vis-a-vis the states. The Article thereby highlights the need for courts, commentators, and lawmakers to
distinguish between (1) federal laws authorizing conduct banned by the states (under which state power is significantly constrained),
and (2) federal laws banning conduct authorized by the states (under which states wield considerably more power).
Banks are willing to work with marijuana businesses
Givens 14 – Paula, founder of Industry Assurance and Oversight LLC, which offers financial services to cannabis companies
and banks, 8/25/14, http://mmjbusinessdaily.com/guest-column-banking-relief-is-on-the-way-heres-how-you-can-prepare/
Banking Relief is on the Way – Here’s How You Can Prepare Most cannabis-related businesses do not have a transparent
and ongoing relationship with a financial institution, reflecting the fact that banks are wary of servicing the marijuana industry. In
recent months, though, a small number of financial institutions have quietly begun to work with
cannabis companies. And more will likely do so in the near future . The reason: Solutions are
starting to arise through private services that allow banks to perform the intensive due diligence
required under federal guidelines issued in February by the Departments of Justice and Treasury.
Under the guidance, banks interested in opening an account for a marijuana-related business
must ensure the company’s operations do not conflict with any of the eight priorities outlined in the
so-called Cole Memo released by the Justice Department a year ago, and that a long list of “red flags” do not exist. If
the company passes muster initially and the account is opened, the banks must aggressively monitor these accounts as the
relationship continues. The effort required to simply open a single account for a marijuana-related business is too much
for the risk management personnel of most banks, so the guidance had little impact at first. But the new
services are helping banks streamline the process and ensuring they stay within the federal
guidelines. The program I created, for instance, involves the examination of every aspect of a
marijuana-related business, from the source of capitalization to accounts payable and withdrawals of owner equity. This
helps banks determine the source of funds that started the business, where the income is going
and whether the distribution of equity are all compliant with the anti-money laundering provisions
of the Bank Secrecy Act. Banks in several states – including Oregon and Colorado – are starting to use
these services or are creating their own internal systems of risk analysis. As more financial
institutions move in this direction, they will encourage others to do so as well. If front-door
banking for marijuana businesses has not reached your state yet, it is coming. There are several steps a
marijuana related business should take now to prepare for the application process when banking does become available: #1. Create
and follow written cash-handling procedures that account for all cash received and all cash payments, i.e., create a paper trail to
record all transactions; #2. Cease taking credit cards. Visa and MasterCard do not do business with dispensaries or cultivation
centers. If you accept credit cards, as opposed to cash advances on a credit card, then your business has been falsely represented
to Visa/MasterCard by your merchant service provider. The willingness of a business to misrepresent itself to other financial
institutions will negatively impact your ability to demonstrate global compliance to a prospective bank; #3. Make certain that you
have current financial statements and that they reconcile internally and with your sales and income tax returns; #4. Ensure that you
are in compliance with all local, state and federal laws; and #5. Ensure that the source of all contributions of capital into the business
and/or withdrawals of equity from the business are thoroughly documented. Marijuana-related businesses also might want to
consider utilizing a closed-loop payment system (think of Pay Pal for cannabis) like the one being launched by Portland’s MBank,
which is called Pay With Change. It should be noted that the typical application process for getting an account with a bank operating
under the recent federal guidelines will be quite long and detailed – more detailed, in fact, than the application for a dispensary
permit in many states. While this information requirement has been off-putting to a few business
owners, most understand that it’s simply a necessity for banks to protect themselves and comply
with federal guidance.
New federal memos encourage banks to engage the marijuana industry
Altman 14 [Alex, “Feds To Let Pot Shops Use Banks”, 2-14-14, TIME, http://swampland.time.com/2014/02/14/marijuanalegalization-banking-pot-colorado-washington/, RSR]
The federal government took a significant step Friday toward addressing the marijuana’s
industry’s banking problems, issuing guidance designed to help pot shops gain access to the
financial system. Joint memos from the Department of the Justice and the Treasury Department’s
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network gave individual banks the discretion to transact with legal
marijuana companies, which have been denied access to basic services like checking accounts
and credit cards because of federal money-laundering statutes. The documents outline the steps financial
institutions must take if they wish to transact with legal cannabis companies, while reaffirming their obligations to report illicit activity.
Taken together, they offer a long-sought roadmap for both the banking and marijuana industries,
which have been trying to resolve the problems created by forcing pot shops to hoard huge sums
of cash. The lack of access to basic banking has been the biggest early obstacle for the marijuana industry since Colorado and
Washington state legalized marijuana for recreational uses. Managing stockpiles of cash is a complex task that makes it harder for
the state to track and tax legal marijuana purchases, and presents serious safety hazards for employees of legal businesses. The
guidance “clarifies how financial institutions can provide services to marijuana-related
businesses,” the Treasury Department wrote. “In general, the decision to open, close or refuse
any particular account or relationship should be made by each financial institution .” Justice
Department spokeswoman Allison Price told TIME that the department “shares the concerns of public officials and law enforcement
about the public safety risks associated with businesses that handle significant amounts of cash. These guidelines,
together with the Treasury Department’s guidance to financial institutions, are intended to
increase the availability of financial services for marijuana businesses—that are licensed and
regulated—while at the same time preserving and enhancing important law enforcement tools .”
Cannabis groups hailed the documents as a major milestone for the industry. “This is a huge
victory for our members, our communities, and the banks that take this opportunity to serve a
thriving new market,” said Aaron Smith, executive director of the National Cannabis Industry
Association.
2AC
T-Legalize: 2AC
1. We meet—the plan removes the threat of legal sanctions over marijuana in the
United States—1AC Mikos indicates that the states can make marijuana
affirmatively legal
“Nearly all” marijuana arrests occur at the state level
Hume 10 (Kevin, staff writer, 10-15-10, "U.S. attorney general says marijuana prosecutions will continue if Prop. 19 passes" SF
Public Press) sfpublicpress.org/news-notes/2010-10/us-attorney-general-says-marijuana-prosecutions-will-continue-if-prop-19passes
If Prop 19 passes in November, California would be the first state to legalize and regulate recreational marijuana use. Enforcement
of federal marijuana laws may be difficult with its passage because
nearly all marijuana arrests are made at the
state level.
2. Counter-interpretation:
Legalization is a process of eliminating prohibitions
OAS 13, Scenario Team appointed by the Organization of American States, composed of drug policy experts and officials from
throughout the OAS, “SCENARIOS FOR THE DRUG PROBLEM IN THE AMERICAS: 2013 – 2025,”
http://reospartners.com/sites/default/files/Scenarios_Report.pdf
• Legalization
¶ The process of eliminating legal prohibitions on the production, distribution, and
use of a controlled substance for other than medi- cal or scientific purposes, generally through
replacement with a regulated market. The term has often been associated with ‘liber- alization’ or regimes in which the prohibition for certain drugs is ended without
necessarily imposing strict state controls. It also sometimes refers to regimes of regulation to control commercial- ized production and distribution. The term ‘legalization’ is therefore usefully qualified for the sake
of clarity – for example, ‘legalization and regulation’ or ‘free-market legalization’.
“Legalization” is removing a legal prohibition
Rolles 9 – Stephen Rolles, Company Director of Transform Drugs Campaign Limited, “A Comparison of the Cost-effectiveness
of Prohibition and Regulation of Drugs”, April, http://www.tdpf.org.uk/sites/default/files/Cost-Effectiveness.pdf
‘Prohibition’ is used in this paper to refer to the set of policies that formally prohibit—through the application of
legal sanctions —all production, distribution and possession of specific psychoactive drugs for non-medical use, as defined
under the UN drug conventions and the Misuse of Drugs Act 197137. Reduction in use, specifically the aim of a ‘drug free’ society,
is often given as the primary goal.
‘Decriminalisation’, which is often confused with legalisation/regulation, is the reduction or abolition (actual or de facto) of criminal
penalties in relation to certain acts. While decriminalised acts are no longer crimes, they may still be the subject of regulation; for
example, a civil or administrative penalty (commonly a fine) in place of a criminal charge for the possession of a decriminalised drug
for personal use.
‘Legalisation’, in contrast to decriminalisation, is the process of removing a legal prohibition against
something which is currently illegal. ‘Legalisation’ describes a process or shift in legal status , rather than
describing a policy position or form of legal regulation.
US means the several states- in the context of pot
Dyer, 70 -- Circuit Judge
[David, UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Christopher Garard MATTHEWS, Defendant-Appellant, UNITED
STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT, 427 F.2d 992; 1970 U.S. App. LEXIS 8705, 6-15-1970, l/n, accessed 725-14]
HN1Go to the description of this Headnote.
21 U.S.C.S. § 176(a) provides in part that whoever knowingly imports or brings
into the United States marijuana contrary to law is guilty of a crime which carries a minimum five year sentence. Criminal Law &
Procedure > Criminal Offenses > Controlled Substances > Delivery, Distribution & Sale > General Overview HN2Go to the
description of this Headnote. For purposes of the Narcotic Drugs chapter in which 21 U.S.C.S. § 176(a) appears, "United States" is
defined to include the several States and Territories, and the District of Columbia. 21 U.S.C.S. § 171(b).
3. Standards:
A. Over-limiting—they destroy aff innovation on an incredibly stale topic—
experimenting with mechanism is necessary to generate new arguments which is
key to topic education and student engagement. Requiring the aff to remove
every single penalty means we’d always lose to PICs.
B. Legal education—their interpretation misplaces focus—the federal role in
shaping drug laws is minimal
Kreit 10 (Alex, Associate Professor and Director, Center for Law and Social Justice, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, Spring
2010, “Beyond the Prohibition Debate: Thoughts on Federal Drug Laws in an Age of State Reforms” Chapman Law Review, 13
Chap. L. Rev. 555, Lexis)
In an important sense, however, the debate about legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana truly is
misplaced in the context of federal drug laws. Indeed, to ask if the federal government should
legalize marijuana is to ask an essentially irrelevant question - irrelevant not because it is
unimportant or on the political fringe (certainly, if the polling is to be believed, it is not), but because it
misunderstands the role of the federal law in shaping drug policy . Whether or not legalizing or
decriminal-izing marijuana is a good idea, the federal government simply does not have the
power to effect such a change.
4. Functional limits and literature checks
5. Default to reasonability—competing interpretations incentivize a race to the
bottom—they’ll always find a way to limit out the aff
6. Potential abuse is not a voter
Tribal Weed DA: 2AC
Indian pot won’t happen on a large scale—tribes are wary, there’s little demand,
and legal hurdles remain
Barnard 12-12-14 (Jeff, AP staff writer, Tribes Wary of Selling Pot, Even if DOJ says OK" King5)
www.king5.com/story/news/local/2014/12/12/marijuana-selling-growing-tribal-lands/20313011/
GRANTS PASS, Ore. -
Many in Indian Country are wary of the idea of growing and selling marijuana
on tribal lands, even if it could present an economic windfall and the U.S. Department of Justice
says it's OK. "I would really doubt tribes would be wanting to do something like that," said Don
Gentry, chairman of the Klamath Tribes in Oregon, where voters this year approved a measure to legalize
recreational pot. "We have an alcohol- and drug-free policy at work. It would just not be something we
would be looking for into the future." The U.S. Justice Department announced on Thursday that it has adopted a new
policy saying Indian tribes, which are considered sovereign nations, can grow and sell marijuana on tribal lands as long as they
follow the same federal conditions laid out for states that have legalized the drug. Oregon U.S. Attorney Amanda Marshall said the
policy addresses questions raised by tribes about how legalization of pot in states like Oregon, Washington and Colorado would
apply to Indian lands. "That's been the primary message tribes are getting to us as U.S. attorneys," Marshall said from Portland.
"What will the U.S. as federal partners do to assist tribes in protecting our children and families, our tribal businesses, our tribal
housing? How will you help us combat marijuana abuse in Indian Country when states are no longer there to partner with us?"
Marshall said only three tribes
- one each in California, Washington state and the Midwest - have voiced any interest. She did not identify them. Seattle
Whether tribal pot could become a major bonanza rivaling tribal casinos is a big question.
attorney Anthony Broadman, whose firm represents tribal governments throughout the West, said the economic potential is vast. "If
tribes can balance all the potential social issues, it could be a really huge opportunity," Broadman said. Many in Indian Country are
wary. The Yakama Nation in Washington state recently banned marijuana on the reservation and is
trying to halt state regulated pot sales and grows on lands off the reservation where it holds
hunting and fishing rights. The Hoopa Valley Tribe in Northern California has battled illegal pot
plantations on its reservation that have damaged the environment. In South Dakota, the Oglala
Sioux Tribal Council this year rejected a proposal to allow marijuana on the Pine Ridge
Reservation. "For me, it's a drug," said Ellen Fills the Pipe, chairwoman of the council's Law and
Order Committee. "My gut feeling is we're most likely going to shoot it down." Marshall warned
that problems could arise for tribes with lands in states that outlaw marijuana due to the
likelihood that pot would be transported or sold outside tribal boundaries. Broadman said tribes would
enjoy a huge advantage selling pot, as they do with tobacco, because they would not have to charge taxes. Alison Holcomb,
a primary drafter of Washington state's legalization measure, said most people in larger states
won't want to drive to far-flung reservations to buy pot.
Big weed takes over—can’t solve
Klas 12-12-14 (Mary, staff writer, "Indian tribes may legalize marijuana, feds say" Miami Herald)
www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article4451249.html
“My worry is you
will now have corporate investors flocking to tribes and enticing them to sell
marijuana in order to make a lot of money,’’ Sabet said. “The legalization is about massive
corporations — the beginning of a new Tobacco 2.0, and it is now going to be infiltrating the
tribe.”
labeling indigenous peoples as connected to the environment is dehumanizing and fails
to acknowledge Native ontologies—also proves no internal link to the impact
Shepard Krech III, PhD and Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Brown University,
1999, “The Ecological Indian: Myth and History”, W. W. Norton & Company, New York: London, acc.
2/15/13, p. 15-27
Even though an invention of Madison Avenue, the Crying Indian is an effective image and advocate because its
assumptions are not new. From the moment they encountered the native people of North America
and represented them in texts, prints, paintings, sculptures, performances—in all conceivable media—Europeans
classified them in order to make them sensible. They made unfamiliar American Indians
familiar by using customary taxonomic categories, but in the process often reduced them
simplistically to one of two stereotypes or images, one noble and the other not. For a long time,
the first has been known as the Noble Savage and the second as the Ignoble Savage. The Noble
Savage, the first of the two stereotypes or images, has drawn persistently on benign and increasingly
romantic associations; the Ignoble Savage, the second, on a menacing malignancy The first has emphasized
the rationality, vigor, and morality of the nature-dwelling native; the second, the cannibalistic,
bloodthirsty, inhuman aspects of savage life. Often elements from the two stereotypes have been
combined in a single portrait.2 The label savage, which English-speaking people used for
North American Indians (and their imagery) for centuries, presents problems today. With its derivation
from silvaticus (Latin), cognates sauvage (French), salvage (Spanish), selvaggio (Italian), and the related forms silva,
selva, and sylvan—which have woodland, wooded, forest, and wild among principal meanings—savage connoted
originally a state of nature.5 But in their theories of social evolution, nineteenth-century anthropologists
and sociologists positioned savages on the earliest and lowest rungs of human society.
Overwhelmingly derogatory connotations effaced the original woodland meanings of savage
and even survived the now-discredited evolutionary schemes. Today. North American Indians
frequently say that they are members of a particular tribal group or nation, or that they are
Native Americans, American Indians, or (in particular) just Indians. They also refer to themselves
as native or indigenous people, and sometimes as aboriginal people. For these reasons, the term Noble Indian
(one manifestation of which is the Ecological Indian) is used here for the stereotype or image that others have called
Noble Savage, and Indian, native, indigenous, and other terms are used for the people.4 There can be no doubt about
the depth of ideas implicit in the image of the Noble Indian. Always present for more than five hundred years
(even if overwhelmed by ignoble imagery). Noble Indians have, however, changed in attributes.6 In their earliest
embodiment they were peaceful, carefree, unshackled, eloquent, wise people living innocent,
naked lives in a golden world of nature. The origins of nature-dwelling nobles are deep in the
ancient world. When Columbus speculated that he found the Islands of the Blessed and their natural residents, his
readers were not surprised. They commonly linked several mythic places originating in pagan or
Christian thought—-notably the Islands of the Blessed, Arcadia, Elysium, the Earthly Paradise, the Garden of
Eden, and the Golden Age (collectively ideas of earthly paradise, eternal spring, and innocent life
removed in space or time). Allegorical for some but literal for others who located them in geographical space,
these places were objects of fancy and search in the New World and elsewhere. The potency of
this imagery as a source of ennobling sentiment over two and one-half centuries simply cannot be overstated, as
Europeans drew liberally on it to represent the New World and its inhabitants, in the context of a nostalgic longing for
the past and a simpler life. Among many affected by Columbus was Peter Martyr, who compiled accounts of discovery
and wrote of an American Indian golden world, and Martyr influenced in turn Amerigo Vespucci's famous depictions of
New World lives. For centuries, they and others invoked Tacitus and other ancients, and classical analogs like
Scythians (stamped by many as simple, frugal, honest, natural folk) in order to make the indigenous people of the New
World comprehensible to themselves and their audiences. In Virginia, they depicted Indians leading "gentle, loving, and
faithful" lives "void of all guile and treason," exactly "after the manner of the Golden Age." Elsewhere they associated
primitiveness with virtue in similar scenes.6 The French, seizing on liberty and equal access to basic resources as
characteristic of "savage" life and important virtues to emulate, were without peer over two centuries in developing an
imagery of noble indigenousness. Michel de Montaigne. Baron de Lahontan, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were
especially influential in this process. Montaigne drew widely upon Tacitus, missionaries to the New World, and
Tupinambas at the French court both to laud the naturalness of Brazilians and to condemn the French as corrupt,
greedy, and vain. He used the New World, one historian remarked, "as a stick for beating the Old."7 Lahontan invented
a natural, noble "Intelligent Savage" named Adario as a literary device to critique the European scene (including those
who left him without property). Others copied Lahontan widely, and in the second half of the eighteenth century the
Noble Indian ruled, especially in Rousseau's major works presenting "savage" lite as simple, communal, happy, free,
equal, and pure— as inherently good, and exemplified by America's indigenous people. Like other synthesizers with
perfect timing, Rousseau was a lightning rod for charged feelings opposed to his, and a touchstone for many who
subsequently portrayed Indians as gentle, egalitarian, free people living in pure nature—and in sharp contrast to life in
the city and in civilization. One train of influence runs toward and converges with the nature poetry of William
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and others, which located the Noble Indian's day in the past, and a nearly
uninterrupted path runs from Wordsworth to James Fenimore Cooper, best-selling author from the early 1820s through
the 1840s and arguably the most important nineteenth-century figure for development of the Noble Indian imagery.
Cooper's heroes are all in and of nature. Nature herself, a heroine of unsurpassed dimensions, shares the stage with
Leatherstocking, the protagonist of heroic proportions in Cooper's most famous novels. Every manner of Indian can be
found in Cooper's novels, Noble and Ignoble, each taking on and reproducing the character of their tribes, and Cooper's
must famous Indian heroes are dignified, firm, faultless, wise, graceful, sympathetic, intelligent, and of beautiful bodily
pro portions reminiscent of classical sculpture. By 1900. skill in nature, an important attribute of Coopers Noble Indians,
encapsulated noble indigenousness. It fit neatly with the day's effort to reform policy in natural resources (water, forests,
wildlife, and lauds and parks, from which came managed use in the progressive conservation movement), American
Indian affairs, and America's youth. The most important writers for Noble Indiana from roughly 1875 through 1940 were
Ernest Thompson Seton and—tor the first time— an Indian: Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa), a Dakota or Sioux. Their
influence was pervasive. With Captain Seth Eastman, the famous soldier artist, as his maternal grandfather, Eastman
took the white man's road to Dartmouth College and Boston University Medical School. After marriage—his wife was a
self-described Yankee nonconformist, avowed romantic, and vivid and accomplished writer—Eastman wrote more than
ten best-selling books that ennobled Indians both by resurrecting romantic visions of lives long past and by emphasizing
skills in nature, or woodcraft. Eastman sometimes pointedly apposed an idyllic past with a demoralizing present (even if
the present was a way station to a positive civilized future), and contrasted Indians who kill animals because they need
them with whites who kill them wantonly. In perhaps his most famous work. The Soul of the Indian, Eastman first paid
homage to Coleridge, and then painted his boyhood with his relatives as natural, altruistic, and reverent, and his current
life as artificial, selfish, and materialistic.8 Both Cooper and Eastman influenced Ernest Thompson Seton, first Chief
Scout of the Boy Scouts and charismatic naturalist, artist, author, public speaker, conservationist, and youth-movement
activist who reached millions through his writings and activities. One of Seton's major goals was to instill manhood in
boys through woodcraft >r outdoor life exemplified by Cooper's "Ideal Indian." Eastman's talk of the need to form
character through fishing, signaling, making ire. constructing canoes, forecasting weather, and other skills—what he
called the "School of Savagery" or the "natural way"—dovetailed with Seton's aims. And Seton's Ideal Indian was like
Eastman's: He was kind, hospitable, cheerful, obedient, reverent, clean, chaste, brave, courteous, honest, sober, thrifty,
and provident; he condemned accumulation, waste, and wanton slaughter; and he held land, animals, and all property
in common, thereby curbing greed and closing the gulf between rich and poor. The imagerv of Noble Indians shifted
again during the extraordinary-era of 1965-75, known primarily for violent antiwar and civil rights movements,
assassination, and societal upheaval, when bitter battles were also waged over pesticides, oil spills, flammable rivers,
industrial and human waste, and related environmental issues. It was during this period that the Crying Indian came to
the fore, reinforcing both practical and ideological slants present in the work of Seton, Eastman, and other
predecessors. New Ecological Indians exploded onto the scene. As critics linked many current global predicaments to
industrial society, spoke openly of earlier less complex times as being more environmentally friendly, and castigated
Christianity for anthropocentrism, they marshaled Ecological Indians (as deployment of the Crying Indian makes clear)
to the support of environmental and antitechnocratic causes.1" Ecological Indians constituted fertile soil for those
seeking alternative "counterculture!* lives. In the back to-nature movement, many sought communal life shot through
with American Indian tribal metaphors and material culture, as well as native religion-—or any religious tradition, in fact,
perceived as more in tune with ecology and in harmony with nature. Greenpeace marked the convergence of ecology,
environmentalism, critique of the social order, and images of American Indians as ecological prophets. More widely,
environmentalists joined American Indians in their vision quests and struggles, and thought of themselves as "tribalists."
In their conscious antitechnocratic critique of Western society, Rousseau was reborn. American Indians embraced the
new shift in perception and actively helped construct the new image of themselves. At occupied Alcatraz Island, they
argued for social and political rights and advocated forming an Indian center of ecology. A new canon emerged: bestselling native texts in which nature and the environment figured significantly, and that critiqued, implicitly or explicitly,
white civilization. Several crossed over notably with the environmental movement, and the new canon's expressions of
an animistic world have affected many. By far most influential was Black Elk Speaks, the nineteenth-century
biographical, historical, and visionary reminiscences of a Lakota holy man as told to John G. Neihardt, a poet who
believed that literature existed to show people how to "live together decently on this planet." Published in 1932 to no stir,
this work was rediscovered in the late 1960s and propelled by events into a widely reprinted and translated instant
classic." Since those tumultuous days. Noble Indians have saturated public culture. They grace the covers of fiction and
non fiction best-sellers, and pervade children's literature. They leap from movies and television screens, fill canvases,
take shape in sculptures, find expression in museum and gallery exhibitions, animate dance and other performances,
and appear on T-shirts. Time and again the dominant image is of the Indian in nature who
understands the systemic consequences of his actions, feels deep sympathy with all living
forms, and takes steps to conserve so that earth's harmonies are never unbalanced and resources never in
doubt. This is the Ecological Indian. Exemplifying him, the Crying Indian brims over with ecological prescience
and wisdom. On matters involving the environment, he is pure and white people are polluting. He
cries because he feels a sense of loss, as (he silently proclaims) other American Indians do also. And if he could cry
because he and others lived in nature without disturbing its harmonies (or throwing trash upon it), then he possessed
authority to speak out against pollution. The immediate forces that brought the Crying Indian into existence, as well as
the long history of images of nobility preceding this one, have borne considerable fruit. The Ecological Indian has
influenced hiimanitarians concerned about the global environment and health, so-called deep and spiritual ecologists,
metaphysicians and new biologists interested in the Gaia hypothesis of an organic earth, ecofeminists, the Rainbow
Family and other alternative groups, and self-help advocates.12 Historians and other scholars have called Indians "the
first" American environmentalists or ecologists to "respect" environmental limits and the "need to restrain human
impact,"' to possess "the secret of how to live in harmony with Mother Earth, to use what she offers without hurting her,"
and to "[preserve] a wilderness ecological balance wheel."15 Finally (and not least), in Hollywood, the Ecological Indian
has become today's orthodoxy to reach millions, as the creators of the Lakotas in Dances with Wolves or of the
animated Pocahontas, who talks to Grandmother Willow, the tree, and sings about herons and otters who "are my
friends" and the "hoop that never ends," play on their presumed closeness to nature, nobility, and ecological sainthood.
Few visual or textual representations of the Native North American have been as persistent over
time as this one has, in one form or another, and few others are as embedded in native
identity today. The Ecological Indian has embraced conservation, ecology, arid
environmentalism; has been premised on a spiritual, sacred attitude toward land and animals,
not a practical utilitarian one; and has been applied in North America to all indigenous people.
Explicit at several notable moments in the history of Noble Indians (as in the eighteenth century and today), and in the
gaze of the Crying Indian, is the fact that the image usually stands against, not alone. Habitually coupled
with its opposite, the Nonecological White Man, tile Ecological Indian proclaims both that the American
Indian is a nonpolluting ecologist, conservationist, and environmentalist, and that the white
man is not. "The Indian," Vine Deloria, Jr., a Lakota author and lawyer, has remarked, '"lived
with his land/' In contrast, " The white destroyed his land. He destroyed the planet earth.™1*
But what does it mean to say that Indians are ecologists or conservationists? Because they
are the most consistent attributes of the image of the Ecological Indian, the concepts should
be defined with care. Embedded in them are certain cultural premises about the meanings of
humanity, nature, animate, inanimate, system, balance, and harmony, and their suitability for
indigenous American Indian thought or behavior should not be taken as a given . Ecology, to start
with, which is concerned mainly with interactions or interrelations between organisms and the animate and inanimate
environments m winch tlicv live, has a distinct disciplinary history in which systemic balance, stability, and harmony
have been central to ecological metaphors and premises. The idea of a well-regulated nature or of a balance in nature
derives from antiquity, and through the centuries has been linked with different divine plans. In the seventeenth century,
the balance was connected to God's harmony, and from that time until the late twentieth century, balance and harmony
have remained central despite a major paradigmatic change from religion to science in comprehending the natural
world. When George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action,
one of the most critical early works for the development of both conservation and ecology, in 1864, the title initially
contemplated was Man the Disturber of Nature s Harmonies. For Marsh and many others, nature in the absence of man
was self-regulating, in balance, or in equilibrium; and man if he were "imprudent" could "[disturb] harmonies," producing
"exhausted regions."*'5 Over the last twenty-five years, ecology has been in ferment. For those who favor rigorous,
quantitative methodologies and replicable results,j>roof that balance, stability, or harmony exists has been elusive.
Ecologists have abandoned these and other long-held assumptions in favor oi chaotic dynamics in systems, and longterm disequilibrium and flux. The ferment is due to the recognition that organisms are as likely to behave unpredictably
as predictably; that in the absence of human interference (if that is possible), natural systems are not inherently
balanced or harmonious; and that left alone, biological communities do not automatically undergo predictable
succession toward some steady-state climax community, which is an illusion. Natural systems, today's ecologists
emphasize, are open systems on which random external events like fire or tempest have unpredictable impacts. As the
biologist Daniel Botkin emphasized, "Change now appears to be intrinsic and natural at many scales of time and place
in the biosphere."16 The implications of this fundamental shift in thought for assumptions about the very people
perceived as part of nature, the indigenous people of North America and elsewhere, are profound. In a balanced,
harmonious, steady-state nature, indigenous people reproduced balance and harmony. In an open nature in which
balance and climax are questionable, they become,, like all people, dynamic forces whose impact, subtle or not, cannot
be assumed. Some who write about environmentalism use the term ecology where they mean "environmental"—as in
ecology movement. This unfortunate confusion unnecessarily conflates a scientific discipline with a moral and political
cause, and muddies the definition of ecology. In this book the two terms are kept separate. Environmentalism has
distinct meanings ranging from the belief that the environment and its components have basic rights to remain
unmolested, to the idea that technological change and sustainable growth are compatible with proper care for the
environment. One of the most inclusive— and, because of its breadth, useful—definitions of environmentalism is
"ideologies and practices which inform and flow from a concern for the environment."17 When speaking of Native
Americans as ecologists, we do not necessarily mean that they used mathematical or hypothetico-deductive techniques,
but we should mean that they have understood and thought about the environment and its interrelating components in
systemic ways (even if the system, all increasingly agree, is more metaphor than hard and bounded reality). When we
speak of them as environmentalists, we presumably mean showing concern for the state of the environment and
perhaps acting on that concern.18 Conservation, the second major attribute of the Ecological Indian, has also acquired
different meanings through time, some of which (like the very general idea of "prudent husbanding") have ancient roots.
Moreover, as w;ith ecology and environmentalisin, conservation has often been conflated with preservation—as in
conservation as "preservation from destructive influences, natural decay or waste."19 Yet it makes sense to differentiate
conservation from preservation. At the turn of the twentieth century, at least two separate camps debated conservation
and preservation issues (the debates continue today). The most famous pitted Gifford Pinchot; widely regarded as the
founder of contemporary conservationist policy in America, against John Muir, the preservationist. The two fought over
the fate of Hetch Hetchy, a canyon in Yosemite National Park that thirsty urbanites wanted to make useful by a dam and
lake. Pinchot and Muir battled heatedly, Muir's preservation assuming the sacral pristineness of nature and Pinchot s
conservation privileging rational planning and efficient use: two very different approaches to environmental relations.
Pinchot, who was Theodore Roosevelt's forestry chief, won the day even though Roosevelt had left office by the time
Congress legislated damming Hetch Hetchy.20 In 1910, Pinchot wrote that conservation's "first principle" was
"development, the use of the natural resources now existing on this continent for the benefit of the people who live here
now." The second was "the prevention of waste,1' and the third that "natural resources must be developed and
preserved for the benefit of the many, and not merely for the profit of a few."21 Conservationists, as one observer noted
in 1970, were "fairly united in attacking instances of apparent waste or unwise use." Waste or unwise use included
obtaining products in a manner that proved destructive to the environment when a nondestructive method would do,
obtaining less than the maximum sustained yield from resources, ignoring useful by-products of extractive processes,
and using energy resources inefficiently.22 Today, conservation is defined in different ways. Some regard it as
management "of human use” of the biosphere so that it may yield the greatest sustainable benefit to present
generations while maintaining its potential to meet the needs and aspirations of future generations." Others emphasize
that it means "all that man thinks and does to soften his impact upon his natural environment and to satisfy all his own
true needs while enabling that environment to continue in healthy working order."25 Narrower definitions—by Bryan
Norton and John Passmore, respectively, both philosophers—focus on conservation as* using a resource "wisely, with
the goal of maintaining its future availability or productivity." or as/Jiving;"natural resources for later consumption." The
conservationist promotes careful husbandry and sustainable development; if he opposes anything, it is waste. The
emphasis in preservation is quite different, "a saving^/rom rather than a saving for" as in conservation, according to
Passmore; specifically "the saving of species and wilderness from damage or destruction." For Norton, preservation is
protecting^ "an ecosystem or a species, to the extent possible, from the disruptions attendant upon it from human use."
The preservationist, in other words, seeks to keep habitats from further deterioration or use even for purposes of
conservation.24 If we describe a Native American as a conservationist, we do not mean that he calculates sustainable
yield into the distant future or, in a preservationist-like manner, leaves the environment in an undisturbed, pristine state,
but rather that he does not waste or "despoil, exhaust, or extinguish," and that he does, with deliberation, leave the
environment and resources like animal populations in a usable state for succeeding generations.25 People everywhere
creatively construct meaningful frameworks for understanding their past; they everywhere actively invent tradition.
"History," as Greg Dening, a historian, reminded us, "is both a metaphor of the past and metonym of the present." No
matter who their authors may be, narratives about the Native American past must be read in this light. As Edward
Bruner, an anthropologist, underscored, narratives about Native North Americans are contingent on the times in which
they were created. They mirror relations between Native Americans and people of European descent. They reflect not
just changing national governmental policies toward indigenous people, but understandings of native people that vary
from one moment to the next. Given that traditions are often fashioned creatively, it seems unwise to assume uncritically
that the image of the Ecological Indian faithfully reflects North American Indian behavior at any time in the past.26 Quite
the reverse: For while this image may occasionally serve or have served useful polemical or political ends, images of
noble and ignoble indigenousness, including the Ecological Indian, are ultimately
dehumanizing . They deny both variation within human groups and commonalities between
them. As the historian Richard White remarked, the idea that Indians left no traces of themselves on
the land "demeans Indians. It makes them seem simply like an animal species, and thus
deprives them of culture."27 In a related vein, Henry M. Brackenridge, a lawyer with archaeology as his
avocation, remarked some 180 years ago on a voyage on the Missouri River how "mistaken" are those "who look for
primitive innocence and simplicity in what they call the state of nature." As he traveled along the Missouri, Brackenridge
mused on the "moral character" of Indians he encountered: "They have amongst them their poor, their envious, their
slanderers, their mean and crouching, their haughty and overbearing, their unfeeling and cruel, their weak and vulgar,
their dissipated and wicked; and they have also, their brave and wise, their generous and magnanimous, their rich and
hospitable, their pious and virtuous, their frank, kind, and affectionate, and in fact, all the diversity of characters that
exists amongst the most refined people." One need not believe that moral or emotional or psychological traits are
universal (like most anthropologists today, I would assert that to be human is fundamentally to be a cultural being) to
appreciate that no simple stereotype satisfied Brackenridge, who refused to reduce Indians to silhouetted nobility or
ignobility.28 Yet as its simplistic, seductive appeal works its charm, the Noble Indian persists long beyond
memory of when or how it entered currency. At first a projection of Europeans and European-Americans, it
eventually became a self-image. American Indians have taken on the Noble Indian/Ecological Indian stereotype,
embedding it in their self-fashioning, just as other indigenous people around the world have done with similar primordial
ecological and conservationist stereotypes.29 Yet its relationship to native cultures and behavior is deeply problematic.
The Noble Indian/Ecological Indian distorts culture. It masks cultural diversity. It occludes its actual connection to the
behavior it purports to explain. Moreover, because it has entered the realm of common sense and as received wisdom
is perceived as a fundamental truth, it serves to deflect any desire to fathom or confront the evidence for
relationships between Indians and the environment.50
No modeling
Industrial Ag
Industrial ag is self-correcting
Haspel 9-2-14 (Tamar, “Small vs. large: Which size farm is better for the planet?,”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/small-vs-large-which-size-farm-is-better-for-the-planet/2014/08/29/ac2a3dc8-2e2d11e4-994d-202962a9150c_story.html,)
The idea that we should replace the large, polluting farms with the small, diversified farms ignores
what might be the best solution: Get the large farms to stop polluting . There are some hopeful signs that
it’s already happening . Cover cropping and no-till farming, which help improve soil health and
reduce runoff, are on the rise . Recent droughts have underscored the importance of building up
organic matter, which retains water, in soil.
It’s key to yields and global stabilty – small farms are unsustainable and kill the
environment
- Turns Econ
- UQ – production & access both increasing – hunger @ all-time low
- Existing problems are due to LACK of ag tech
- Small farm proponents ignore costs – slash & burn – soil erosion/water pollution
- Shifts from conventional ag too risky*
Motes 10 (Dr. William C, chief economist at Informa Economics, reviously had assignments at USDA and the U.S. Senate
Agriculture Committee, “Modern Agriculture and Its Benefits,” http://www.globalharvestinitiative.org/Documents/Motes%20%20Modern%20Agriculture%20and%20Its%20Benefits.pdf,)
Modern Agriculture is Important There is really little mystery about why agriculture is important — it is the physical foundation of
human energy, health, and physical well being — all key components of every important human activity. To the degree these components
are missing, the human e istence is defined primarily by the effort necessary to provide them. Making them more widely available at lower
costs increases the capacity of any population to invest in more productive work , education, economic
development and cultural activities. The basic facts are clear: More people the world over eat more and better because
of modern agriculture. Increased production continues to enable steadily improving diets,
reflecting increased availability of all foods, dietary diversity and access to high - protein food
products ; The additional food modern systems provide has enabled hundreds of millions of people to realize more of their potential and better lives — thus enhancing
the achievements of all, from student s to retirees. It increases workforce productivity and generally supports human development and growth ; The current hunger and
malnutrition that extends to some one billion people reflects poor policies, low productivity and low
incomes. Failure to continue to apply new tech nologies to advance productivity on the farm and
across the food system simply worsens every aspect of these problems , especially those forced on individuals and
Why
families who live in poverty. To a very large extent, c u rrent food insecurity problems r eflect bad policies, poor infrastructure and low economic productivity in the nations where
hunger and malnutrition that persist in many parts of
would have been far worse had agricultural systems not grown and developed as they did;
The physical pressures on the environment that have become increasingly prominent public concerns have been greatly
ameliorated by modern agriculture, which has reduced: o The need to expand land area, and thereby
reduced pressure to cultivate fragile lands and forested areas. Modern agriculture includes successful
new technologies, including biotechnology to enable both higher yields and reduced environmental impacts.
These reduce the land, fertilizer and pesticide use per unit of outpu t ; o Pressure on grassland,
forestland and cropland thus increasing wildlife habitat as a result; While the unintended negative environmental consequences
of modern agriculture are freque ntly noted, little mention is ever made of the negative environmental impacts that
frequently arise from small holder farming , especially from ― slash and burn ‖ primitive systems in wide
use in developing countries where vertical rows are often planted up st eep hillsides , resulting in some of the world’s heaviest soil
erosion, badly polluted watercourses and many other problems of both efficiency and
sustainability. The lack of sustainability of these practices can be seen in the fact that they typically
lead to abandonment of successive plots y
these conditions occur, rather than a physical lack of food or food production capacity The s ignificant
the world
ear after year; Processing technology and handling advancements contribute enormously to improved food safety through pathogen reductions and large reductions
in post - harvest losses that further increas e food suppl ies . Pasteurization of milk, canning, freezing, and other processing technologies significantly reduce health risks
associated with food. Threats from bacteria and other contaminants are still important, but the risks of illness and death are far less than in the past, a fact that is widely
underappreciated; Modern agriculture brings enormous economic and social benefits to consumers including: o Improved quality of life and living standards as food costs
decline. This effectively raises consumer incomes si nce it leaves greater purchasing power for other consumer goods, for education, health care, leisure, etc. , a trend that has
been a major driver of economic growth in developed countries, and in some developing countries, as well. Today, consumers in the United States spend less than 10% of their
disposable income for food while many in the developing world spend from half or more of their income on food , a huge drag on quality of life. It is now widely recognized that
the development of modern food system has been a major factor in improving the standard of
living enjoyed in much of the world today ; When consumers spend the major share of their
income and virtually all of their daily efforts simply to find food, little money or time is left for
human investments. This ―survival treadmill‖ characterizes the lives of most small holder farmers , especially in
developing countries ; Modern ag riculture increases global political stability by making more food
available, improving its quality and making it access ible to more people. o Without the advances
that characterize modern agriculture, the world arguably would be a much more dangerous and
volatile place
because more people would be food insecure — as the food price spike s of mid - 2008 clearly illustrated. o D evelopment of a robust, rules
- based trading system has been extremely important in improving food distribution and increasing accessibility in food - deficit areas . The major threat to
modern agricultural development comes not from lack of interest and willingness to invest by farmers, but from increasingly vocal
opposition from a constellation of activists who have succeeded in shifting agricultural policies in several areas. This threat is
discussed in detail in the following sections.
Cal Politics DA: 2AC
Won’t pass – huge opposition
Todd Woody, 1-6-15, “What California Gov. Jerry Brown's Ambitious Green Energy Plan Means for You,”
http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/01/06/what-california-gov-jerry-browns-ambitious-green-energy-plan-means-you
Translating those words into action will not be easy , and Brown is sure to face resistance from big
utilities, the oil industry, and Republicans over new regulations to implement his green energy targets. The expansion
of solar power plants and wind farms also depends on continued subsidies from the federal government . But
renewable energy and transportation experts say Brown is not California dreaming.
Multiple issues thump—marijuana, tuition hikes, taxes, tech, immigration
White and Rosenhall 1-4-15 (Jeremy and Laurel, staff writers, "Key issues for returning California Legislature"
Sacramento Bee) www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/article5417739.html
Another massive freshman class was already inaugurated in December amid speeches and glittering special interest-sponsored
receptions. Those state government neophytes will join a substantial class of second-term lawmakers elected in 2012. Elected
under new term limit rules, the two waves of relatively inexperienced legislators could together shape California
policy for a decade. Related Gov. Jerry Brown pressed to increase safety-net spending California ready to cope with rainy-day
budget fund Bills, oaths and receptions mark California Legislature’s first day There
will be no shortage of issues to
occupy them. Some of the debates likely to arise this year, such as how California funds public
universities and handles medical marijuana, have smoldered for years . Others, such as questions about
the new “sharing economy,” reflect the rise of new industries and increasingly influential interest groups. This list is not
comprehensive. Likely pushes to tackle California’s public pension liabilities or hold police officers
accountable with body cameras, for example, will also occupy the Capitol . But these are five prominent
issues likely to consume the Legislature’s attention and political capital. MEDICAL MARIJUANA
Two decades after California legalized medical marijuana, Sacramento has proved consistently unwilling to enact state-level
regulation of the cultivation, transportation and sale of the quasi-legal plant. A key difference this year: with other states having
sanctioned recreational pot, advocates are determined to put full legalization on the 2016 ballot in California. Those who favor broad
regulation hope the looming ballot initiative will motivate lawmakers to rein in the medical market before voters potentially launch a
new green rush. There are already two bills in the pipeline that would create a statewide cannabis
system: one by Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Alameda, and one by Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, D-Los Angeles. Key
players: California Police Chiefs Association/California Narcotics Officers Association, the League of California Cities, cannabis
UC TUITION November elections had scarcely ended when University of California President Janet Napolitano
initiated the first major budget battle of 2015, floating a plan to raise UC tuition annually for five
years. She immediately drew a backlash from lawmakers and Gov. Jerry Brown, who believed the university was
advocates
reneging on a deal to freeze tuition in exchange for Proposition 30 dollars. Leaders in the Senate and the Assembly have since
announced alternative plans to avert tuition bumps, and Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, has proposed hauling UC
officials in to have them justify their budgets line by line. With California’s coffers flush again, this could be the
main pressure point for lawmakers imploring Brown to loosen the purse strings. Key players: Brown,
TAXES With his first bill
as a state senator, former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg has proposed a massive shift in California tax
policy, one he says better reflects a 21st century economy where information and services make up a huge portion of economic
Napolitano, Atkins, Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, budget committee chairs
activity. The Los Angeles Democrat proposes extending the state’s sales tax to many services and devoting the money to education
and local governments. As a tax hike, the bill requires two-thirds approval – a heavy lift in a Legislature where Democrats have lost
their supermajority. But Hertzberg chairs the committee that oversees tax bills and is widely seen as an ambitious politician. Taxes
will also figure big this year as political operatives prepare ballot measures for the 2016 election.
Education advocates are calling for an extension of the temporary tax increases v oters approved with
Proposition 30 in 2012, and liberal activists want to change 1978’s Proposition 13 to increase taxes on commercial property. Public
health advocates have said they will pursue a new tax on cigarettes this year, through either legislation or the ballot box. Key
TECHNOLOGY Expect
debates about consumer data, Internet privacy and regulation of some Web-based businesses to
loom large this session. The tech lobby beefed up its presence in Sacramento last year, with the Internet
players: Hertzberg, anti-tax advocate Jon Coupal, union-backed advocate Lenny Goldberg
Association opening an office here – its first office outside Washington, D.C. The group was instrumental in rallying ride-sharing
services like Uber and Lyft to oppose legislation increasing their insurance requirements. A similar effort to regulate home-sharing
services is likely to emerge in the Legislature this year; one such company, Airbnb, recently retained a Sacramento lobbyist for the
first time. The Assembly has established a new committee devoted to privacy and consumer protection, chaired by Assemblyman
Mike Gatto. He is carrying a bill that would change the way Californians can use the Internet – it would permit playing poker online.
IMMIGRATION After
legislation stalled last year to provide undocumented immigrants subsidized health care, Sen.
Ricardo Lara is making another go of it. SB 4 would give immigrants who are in the country illegally – a group that is
Key players: Gatto, Internet Association lobbyist Robert Callahan and the growing tech lobbying corps
not covered by the federal Affordable Care Act – access to health insurance in California. Lara, a Bell Gardens Democrat, has also
proposed creating a new state office to help immigrants acclimate to life in California. He’s been given a powerful position as
chairman of the Senate’s appropriations committee, and will play a big role in deciding which spending bills live or die. The
Legislature’s Latino caucus has been instrumental in backing legislation to expand the freedoms
undocumented immigrants can enjoy in California. The caucus gets a new chairman this year: Assemblyman Luis
Alejo, D-Watsonville, who in 2013 carried a bill offering driver’s licenses to immigrants who are in the country illegally. He has
already introduced legislation for this session that could allow undocumented immigrants to work legally.
Brown would never push the aff
Bassett 14 (Laura, 3-2-14, "Jerry Brown Opposes Legal Pot Because We Need to Stay Alert" Huffington Post)
www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/02/jerry-brown-marijuana_n_4885455.html
California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) said Sunday that he
is not convinced legalizing marijuana is a good idea
because the population needs to "stay alert." "The problem with anything, a certain amount is okay," Brown said on
NBC's Meet the Press. "But there is a tendency to go to extremes. And all of a sudden, if there's advertising and legitimacy, how
many people can get stoned and still have a great state or a great nation? The world's pretty dangerous, very competitive. I think we
need to stay alert, if not 24 hours a day, more than some of the potheads might be able to put together." A recent poll found that for
the first time ever, a majority of Californians support legalizing marijuana. More than half of U.S. states are also considering
decriminalizing or legalizing marijuana since Colorado and Washington did so a little over a year ago. Brown noted that California
already allows medical marijuana, but said he is not completely sold on legalizing the drug for recreational use.
XO solves
Cart 1-7-15 (Julie, reporter, "Gov. Brown's renewable energy plan could boost solar, wind industries" LA Times)
www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-renewable-goals-20150108-story.html
And Brown
could make the 50% standard happen simply by issuing an executive order . The
California Public Utilities Commission has the authority to compel the state's three big utilities —
Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric — to procure 50%
of their energy through renewables. But such an edict would not apply to large municipal companies like the Los
Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Brown’s support for fracking CRUSHES climate leadership
Gaworecki 1-7 (Mike, “California Governor Proposes Most Ambitious Renewable Energy Target In US,”
http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/07/california-governor-proposes-ambitious-renewable-energy-target-us/)
reacted to Governor Brown’s proposal with heavily qualified optimism. Linda Capato of
even the most ambitious R enewable P ortfolio S tandard
mandate in the country would not erase the harm done by Brown’s support of fracking in California .
“While this is a real step in the right direction, it still doesn’t address the reality that thousands of wells across our
state are pouring hundreds of thousands of gallons of freshwater down a hole to release oil that
worsens our collective addiction to fossil fuels,” Capato said. “The bottom line is simply this: California can’t
claim to be a national leader in the fight against climate change while also unabashedly participating
in extreme energy extraction methods that worsens it and endangers the health of our communities.”
Some environmentalists
350.org pointed out in a statement that, in the balance,
Modeling fails and empirically denied
Bennett 1-14 (Lisa, “Author and Communications Strategist,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-bennett/will-cas-new-energypropo_b_6470184.html)
so what ? Even if California succeeds in meeting this most ambitious
renewable energy goal in the nation, but the rest of the world does not follow suit , the Golden State's
efforts will make no dent in global warming for
One, critics may say, as some have,
our children and our children's children. So bully for California for trying, but we could still be cooked. Two, with California
having been in the lead on the fight against climate change for decades , one could say there is
something " been there, done that " about this development. (See "Rays of Hope in California.")
Not an opportunity cost – you can do the plan and pass the 50% standard – most
logical and key to good decision-making
50 percent target fails – rebound effect and intermittency
Nikolewski 1-16 (Rob, National Energy Correspondent for Watchdog.org, “Can California really hit a 50 percent renewables
goal?,” http://watchdog.org/193024/california-50-percent/)
RENEWABLE WRANGLING: Backers of renewable energy, such as solar, say a 50 percent target in California is doable. But
others have concerns about reliability and pricing. Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, said the
goals are “in the realm of possibility.” Brown said the 50 percent mark could prove to be “a very tall order.” Count Robert
Michaels, professor of economics at Cal State Fullerton University, as skeptical. “I think it’s going to be a
lot more costly than anyone’s making it out to be,” Michaels told Watchdog.org, citing what energy economists call
the “rebound effect.” That occurs when something — such as electricity — becomes more available,
efficient and less expensive, people use more , rather than less. “Renewables are going to have to be
somehow reliably backed up with conventional power sources, and that means we’re back in the fossil
fuel-burning
business,” Michaels said in a telephone interview. According to the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, the
state’s business owners already pay 84 percent more than the national average for industrial
electricity. “It’s very difficult for manufacturers in California to compete, between the increasing renewable standards and the
state’s cap-and-trade program,” said Gino DiCaro, vice president of communications at CMTA. Since 2010, DiCaro said,
manufacturing jobs in California have grown less than 1 percent but have increased 6.2 percent in the rest of the country. “We’re
already at 150 percent of electrical rates of our neighboring states, meaning we’re paying 50 percent more,” Huff said. “So, as we
continue to amp up this feel good environmental policy, we price ourselves out of job growth that will help the middle class.”
Another concern is that reaching 50 percent would likely require more reliance on solar and wind energy.
But their intermittent nature adds uncertainty as well as economic and logistical challenges,
Michaels said. “The
more renewables you have the bigger the problems of interruptions to the power
that you have,” Michaels said in a telephone interview. “You’ve got to have reserves to potentially cover more contingencies.”
Treaties DA: 2AC
State and legalization now and doesn’t violate
Kleiman 12—Mark, is Professor of Public Policy in the UCLA School of Public Affairs,
“Marijuana policy and international law,”
http://www.samefacts.com/2012/07/drug-policy/marijuana-policy-and-international-law/
the treaties don’t bind the fifty states. The treaties explicitly recognize that the obligations
they impose on the signatories are limited by those signatories’ own domestic constitutional
arrangements , and it’s settled constitutional law that the federal government may not require a
state to criminalize something, or force a state to help carry out federal law.
First,
Other US violations of I-law thump
Newman 12/3/14 (Alex, "UN Torture Committee Slams U.S. Police and Military." The New American. 12/3/14.
www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/19645-un-torture-committee-slams-u-s-police-and-military, TD)
After a spectacle featuring senior Obama administration officials prostrating themselves before the United Nations “Committee
Against Torture,” the controversial UN body released a scathing report last week accusing U.S.
authorities of widespread violations of what it calls “ international law.” Among other concerns, the global
panel cited everything from “police brutality” by state and local officials domestically to the
actions of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies abroad. Other criticism directed at the United
States focused on immigration policies, deportations , prison conditions, Guantanamo Bay, the
terror war , and more. In response to the UN committee’s findings, the panel called on federal officials to alter
U.S. laws to comply with its demands — including abolishing the death penalty, reforming deportation
procedures, and more. The report also called on the U.S. government to pass new federal laws defining torture in accordance with
the UN Convention. In the same section, it lashed out at the U.S. government’s “interpretation” of the global “torture” regime, saying
that “under international law, reservations that are contrary to the object and purpose of a treaty are impermissible.” In other words,
the dictator-dominated UN, rather than the U.S. Constitution, purports to be the arbiter of what is or is not “permissible.”
advertisement The UN bureaucrats on the committee — one comes from Morocco, another from Communist China, and one more
from Communist Nepal — also called on U.S. authorities to amend “laws and regulations” to be in compliance with the global
agreement. In addition, the UN committee said it “encourages” the U.S. government to ratify other global agreements purporting to
bind the American people and their elected officials to globalist demands rather than the U.S. Constitution. Finally, the document is
packed with calls for the federal government to go beyond its constitutional limitations in commandeering state and local
governments. All across the report, the UN also offered instructions to the Obama administration on everything from indefinite
detention without charges or trial to releasing information on post-9/11 atrocities allegedly perpetrated by various agencies within the
U.S. government. Among other demands, the UN experts called on the Obama administration to “cease the use of indefinite
detention without charge or trial” — something that constitutes a serious crime against the U.S. Constitution, regardless of what the
UN and its oftentimes brutal member governments claim regarding their planetary torture regime. Moreover, the White House
should release information on numerous instances of CIA “human rights violations, including torture, ill-treatment and enforced
disappearance of persons suspected of involvement in terrorism-related crimes.” In addition to the CIA, the U.S. military and its
policies — ranging from the treatment of detainees to its policy manuals — came under severe criticism in the document. Of course,
virtually all of the UN’s complaints should be considered moot, because the U.S. Constitution, which established the federal
government in the first place and granted it a few limited powers, already prohibits such schemes. Separately, in an open letter to
Obama, a UN group of self-styled “human rights experts” with bombastic titles also called on the administration to release a U.S.
Senate report on CIA “interrogation” practices. “As a nation that has publicly affirmed its belief that respect for truth advances
respect for the rule of law, and as a nation that frequently calls for transparency and accountability in other countries, the United
States must rise to meet the standards it has set both for itself and for others,” the UN “experts” declared. According to the UN
“human-rights” operatives, victims of torture and human-rights defenders around the world would be “emboldened” if the Obama
administration — widely described as the most secrecy-obsessed, least transparent in U.S. history — would support transparency.
“On the contrary, if you yield to the CIA's demands for continued secrecy on this issue, those resisting accountability will surely
misuse this decision to bolster their own agenda in their countries,” the open letter continued. As The New American has reported
on multiple occasions, in addition to the draconian secrecy, the Obama administration has also improperly worked to protect George
W. Bush administration officials from prosecution for the myriad alleged crimes they perpetrated under color of law. “The Committee
expresses concern over the ongoing failure to fully investigate allegations of torture and ill-treatment of suspects held in U.S.
custody abroad, evidenced by the limited number of criminal prosecutions and convictions,” the UN torture committee said in its
report about the United States, the first such “periodic review” since 2006. In light of the overseas torture (such as water
boarding) carried out by U.S. officials, the UN called for “prompt, impartial and effective investigations” to
“ensure that alleged perpetrators and accomplices are duly prosecuted, including persons in positions of command and those who
provided legal cover to torture.” If found guilty of the charges, the criminals in government should be punished with serious penalties
“commensurate with the grave nature of their acts,” the UN said. Victims of U.S. government torture should also be compensated
and rehabilitated, the panel said. On law enforcement, which is a power generally reserved for state and local government by the
U.S. Constitution, the UN also expressed a wide array of concerns. “The Committee is concerned about numerous
reports of police brutality and excessive use of force by law enforcement officials, in particular
against persons belonging to certain racial and ethnic groups, immigrants and LGBTI individuals,
racial profiling by police and immigration offices and growing militarization of policing activities,”
the report said, citing Chicago’s police department as particularly alarming.
Treaty breaches are compartmentalized
Brewster 9—Rachel, Assistant Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, “Unpacking the State’s Reputation,” Harvard
International Law Journal, 50(2): http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3353696/unpackingstatesrep.pdf?...
The second question addresses the informational content of specific violations of international
law for predicting future violations. Say that the U.S. administration violates an arms control
agreement. The reputational costs to the United States will depend on the inferences the international
audience draws from that violation about whether the United States will comply with other international obligations.
This turns out to be difficult to predict. For one thing, the arms control violation may not provide very
much information about how the United States will behave with respect to international
obligations in other areas, such as human rights, trade, or environment, where the domestic
political considerations may be very different. It may not even provide much information about
future compliance with other arms control agreements, because, again, the domestic political
considerations in a future period may be different . Much depends on how the state s reputation is
bundled, both topically and temporally . For another, legal compliance with an agreement may not be
particularly predictive of how cooperative the state will be in future interactions. States can be
poor treaty partners while maintaining strict legal compliance with an agreement by attaching
reservations or withdrawing from their commitments, as the U nited S tates did with the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty (“ABM Treaty”). Other variables, such as the alignment of interests in domestic or
international politics, are likely to be better predictors. For instance, the likelihood that the U nited
S tates will comply with future arms control agreements depends far more on the strategic situation of
the moment (for example, the present threat from international terrorist groups) than whether it complied with the
ABM Treaty in very different political contexts in the past (for example, during the Cold War). Recognizing
that reputational costs are limited to the political conditions of the time ,
governments are probably not overly concerned about the reputational costs of discrete
violations of international rules . For better or worse, bad actions that are not predictive of future
behavior, because the regime has changed or because the strategic situation is different, do not
lead to reputational costs.
No impact – states will either cooperate inevitably or won’t because it’s not in
their interest
Eric A. Posner 9, Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law
School. The Perils of Global Legalism, 34-6
34 ¶ Most global legalists acknowledge that international law is created and enforced by states. They believe that states are willing to expand
international law along legalistic lines because states’ long-term interests lie in solving global collective
action problems. In the absence of a world govern- ment or other forms of integration, international law seems like the only way for states to solve these problems. The great
difficulty for the global legalist is explaining why, if states create and maintain international law, they
will also not break it when they prefer to free ride. In the absence of an enforcement
mechanism, what ensures that states that create law and legal institutions that are
supposed to solve global collective action prob- lems will not ignore them? ¶ For the rational choice theorist, the
answer is plain: states cannot solve global collective action problems by creating institutions that themselves depend on global collective action. This is not to say that international law is not possible at all. Certainly, states can
But if states (or the individuals who
cannot create a global government or q uasi-g overnment institutions, then it seems unlikely that they can
cooperate by threatening to retaliate against cheaters, and where international problems are matters of coordination rather than confl ict, international law can go far, indeed.7
control states)
solve, in spontaneous fashion, the types of problems that, at the national level, require the action of
governments. ¶ Global legalists are not enthusiasts for rational choice theory and have ¶ 35¶ grappled with this problem in other ways.8 I will criticize their attempts in chapter 3. Here I want to focus on one
approach, which is to insist that just as individuals can be loyal to government, so too can individuals (and
their governments) be loyal to international law and be willing to defer to its requirements even when self-i nterest does not strictly demand that they do so.
International law has force because (or to the extent that) it is legitimate.9 ¶ What makes governance or law legitimate?
This is a complicated ques- tion best left to philosophers, but a simple and adequate point for present purposes is that no system of law will be perceived as
legitimate unless those governed by that law believe that the law does good — serves their
interests or respects and enforces their values. Perhaps more is required than this — such as political participation, for example — but we can treat the fi rst condition as necessary if not suffi cient. If
individuals believe that a system of law does not advance their interests and respect their values, that instead it
advances the interests of others or is dysfunctional and helps no one at all, they will not
believe that the law is legitimate and will not voluntarily submit to its authority . ¶ Unfortunately,
international law does not satisfy this condition, mainly because of its institutional weaknesses;
but of course, its institutional weaknesses stem from the state system — states are not
willing to tolerate powerful international agencies. In classic international law, states enjoy
sovereign equality, which means that international law cannot be created unless all agree, and that international law binds all states equally. What this means is that if nearly everyone in the world agrees
that some global legal instrument would be benefi cial (a climate treaty, the UN charter), it can be blocked by a tiny country like Iceland (population 300,000) or a dictatorship like North Korea. What is the attraction of a system that
puts a tiny country like Iceland on equal footing with China? When then at- torney general Robert Jackson tried to justify American aid for Britain at the onset of World War II on the grounds that the Nazi Germany was the aggressor,
international lawyers complained that the United States could not claim neutrality while providing aid to a belligerent — there was no such thing as an aggressor in international law.10 Nazi Germany had not agreed to such a rule of
international law; therefore, such a rule could not exist. Only through the destruction of Nazi Germany could international law be changed; East and West Germany could reenter international so-¶ 36¶ ciety only on other people’s
Because no world government can
compel states to comply with inter- national law, states will comply with international law
only when doing so is in their interest. In this way, international law always depends on state consent. So international law must take states as they are, which means that
terms. How could such a system be perceived to be legitimate? ¶ There is, of course, a reason why international law works in this fash- ion.
little states, big states, good states, and bad states, all exist on a plane of equality. ¶
Prior legalization is vital to jumpstarting reform of the drug conventions at
UNGASS
Collins, 10-28 [John Collins is the International Drug Policy Project Coordinator at LSE IDEAS at the London School of
Economics 2014 (John, “Surprising source offers signs the global ‘war on drugs’ may be ending” Reuters,
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/10/28/surprising-source-offers-signs-the-global-war-on-drugs-may-be-ending/]
William R. Brownfield,
assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs
summed up the key idea underpinning the shift at the United Nations on Oct. 9: Things have changed since 1961. We
must have enough flexibility to allow us to incorporate those changes into our policies … to tolerate different national
drug policies, to accept the fact that some countries will have very strict drug approaches; other countries will
legalize entire categories of drugs. The statement is hugely significant as it represents a new diplomatic doctrine and a potential tipping point in
efforts to end the disastrous “war on drugs” that has lasted six decades. It recognizes that immediate reform of the UN drug
control conventions (the core of which is the 1961 Single Convention), while necessary, is not yet feasible. But it
acknowledges that UN conventions should never serve as a barrier to improving global drug
policies and that different policies will work for different regions and nations. Lastly, it accepts that member states can reinterpret the conventions
in response to new scientific evidence and with careful regard to other international human rights norms and obligations — as Uruguay has done in the
case of cannabis regulation. The United States was a key architect of the international control system, begun in 1909, and has traditionally served as
chief proselytizer for a repressive prohibitionist model globally. Although it initially rejected the 1961 Single Convention as too weak relative to its
predecessor treaties, the United States soon embraced it as a useful mechanism to rally nations towards the global war on drugs, formally launched in
the 1970s. The United States soon worked to strengthen the convention through successor treaties, funding initiatives and aggressive bilateral drug
diplomacy. Now that the United States has openly rejected the role of key bilateral enforcer the United Nations will likely cease to be a forum where
states are pressured to pursue the war on drugs orthodoxy. Instead, it can become a forum that facilitates cooperation and discussion on a new range
of policy approaches. The main obstacle to this change will likely remain Russia and a coalition of conservative states that are reticent to move away
from a militarized and repressive police response. Nonetheless, Russia, despite a strong grip on the UN drug control apparatus, will struggle to enforce
its vision due to the post-Ukraine diplomatic freeze and a general recognition that Russia’s domestic drug policies have fuelled incarceration, human
As states approach the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs,
Brownfield’s framework provides a practical way forward. It allows states to push ahead with
various national regulatory reforms, including regulated markets around the recreational use of certain drugs. It
focuses diplomatic effort on preserving the ‘core’ of the conventions — nothing to do with
national cannabis or coca leaf prohibitions, and everything to do with regulating licit markets for pain
medicines. And it focuses enforcement efforts on minimizing the impact of illicit markets through effective targeting of criminal gangs, rather than
rights abuses and a HIV epidemic.
blanket enforcement of impossible global prohibitions. Finally, it allows regions to move ahead with case-specific policies that reflect their local needs,
rather than acting as agents of a self-destructive global ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy. The United Nations and member states are moving toward a more
nuanced understanding that places the drug conventions within broader contexts of human rights, indigenous rights and other frameworks of health
and human empowerment. As Brownfield points out, part of this shift is driven by the need to make rational determinations of resource allocation and
interpret implementation of the conventions accordingly. The United States federal government does not believe making U.S. states comply with drug
Legal reform of the
international drug conventions is certainly required but only prior national reforms will make that
process seem necessary and inevitable to member states. The course outlined in the Brownfield doctrine appears the
conventions on cannabis is a good use of resources. Other nations should make similar, case specific, determinations.
best strategy to ensure the survival and modernization of the global drug control framework for the immediate future.
1AR
T- Not States
T-Legalize: We Meet 1AR
They are factually incorrect about the Supremacy clause—the federal government
cannot preempt state marijuana legislation – fitton wrong
Mikos 09 (Robert, Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University Law School, October 2009, “On the Limits of Supremacy: Medical
Marijuana and the States' Overlooked Power to Legalize Federal Crime” Vanderbilt Law Review, 62 Vand. L. Rev. 1421, Lexis)
Though Congress has banned marijuana outright through legislation that has survived
constitutional scrutiny, state laws legalizing medical use of marijuana not only remain in effect,
they now constitute the de facto governing law in thirteen states. These state laws and most
related regulations have not been - and, more [*1482] interestingly, cannot be - preempted by
Congress, given constraints imposed on Congress's preemption power by the anticommandeering rule, properly understood. Just as importantly, these state laws matter; state
legalization of medical marijuana has not only eliminated the most relevant legal barrier to using
the drug, it has arguably fostered more tolerant personal and social attitudes toward the drug. In
sum, medical marijuana use has survived and indeed thrived in the shadow of the federal ban. The
war over medical marijuana may be largely over, though skirmishes will undoubtedly continue,
but contrary to conventional wisdom, it is the states, and not the federal government, that have
emerged the victors in this struggle. Supremacy , in short, has its limits.
they bypass the modern debate over legalization, which is centered on changes
at the state level- tute is wrong
Kreit 10 (Alex, Associate Professor and Director, Center for Law and Social Justice, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, Spring
2010, “Beyond the Prohibition Debate: Thoughts on Federal Drug Laws in an Age of State Reforms” Chapman Law Review, 13
Chap. L. Rev. 555, Lexis)
recognizing that a proposal to
remove simple drug possession from federal authority is only tangentially related to the idea of
"drug decriminalization" is critical if we want to achieve a more rational and constructive dialogue
about federal drug laws. So long as every structural change in federal drug laws is viewed within
the framework of the debate about prohibition or legalization , there will be little room for
agreement and compromise. Likewise, questions that are much more relevant in the context of
today's drug policy landscape - in which states are enacting and considering a diverse range of
different reforms - like how to most effectively use state and federal law enforcement resources,
or which policy decisions should be left to state discretion and which require uniformity across
the country, will continue to be pushed to the background .
Whatever one's view about the appropriate role of federal law in drug enforcement,
“United States” refers to the 50 state governments
US Code 14 [7 USC 2116: Definitions Text contains those laws in effect on July 24, 2014 From Title 7-AGRICULTURE
CHAPTER 53-COTTON RESEARCH AND PROMOTION,
uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req="united+states+means"&f=treesort&fq=true&num=13&hl=true&edition=prelim&granuleId=USCprelim-title7-section2116, accesssed 7-25-14]
The term "United States" means the 50 States of the United States of America.
T-Legalize: A2 “Taylor”
Taylor concludes aff
Taylor 13 – Nonresident Senior Fellow in Governance Studies @ Brookings Institution [Stuart Taylor, Jr. (Contributing Editor at
Newsweek and JD from Harvard University), “Marijuana Policy and Presidential Leadership: How to Avoid a Federal-State Train
Wreck,” Governance Studies at Brookings, (April 2013)
The Constitution provides that it and “the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made,
or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land . . . any thing in the
Constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.”21 This “Supremacy Clause” makes clear that state marijuana
laws are void if they conflict with or are otherwise preempted by any federal laws that are themselves constitutional. But federal
supremacy has its limits, and what constitutes a conflict or preemption is not always self-evident. An important qualification is the
Supreme Court’s rulings that the Tenth Amendment bars the federal government from coercing states either to enforce federal laws
or to keep (or adopt) state laws that they don’t want, on marijuana or anything else.22 Of course, federal laws can penalize conduct
for which there are no state penalties only if so intended by Congress and authorized by the Constitution. The CSA’s provisions
passed those tests in Supreme Court decisions on medical marijuana in 2001 and 2005, both from California. The first, United
States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative, held that Congress intended to criminalize even the state-approved,
noncommercial, purely intrastate growing and possession of marijuana for personal medical use.23 The second, Gonzales v.
Raich—a landmark decision broadly construing federal powers—held that Congress had the constitutional authority to criminalize
such local, noncommercial activity by two women.24 Once that much was established, the Supremacy Clause made it clear that the
two women’s compliance with California’s 1996 medical marijuana law was no obstacle to federal seizure of their marijuana
plants. [EMORY EVIDENCE ENDS]
But, as noted above, federal law cannot go so far as to “commandeer” —a fancy word for coercing—states.
Indeed, the states’ independence on marijuana is evident from the fact that many of them
criminalized the substance before the federal government did; that all or most have in recent
decades imposed much less severe penalties than the CSA for marijuana and other drug offenses; and
that sixteen (including Colorado and Washington) have decriminalized marijuana use. These sixteen states’
departures from federal marijuana laws differ only in degree from partially legalizing medical use, as
eighteen states (including many of the sixteen) have done, or recreational use, as Colorado and Washington have
now done. Federal efforts to coerce states—as distinguished from providing them with financial or other inducements to
do the feds’ bidding— violate the Tenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has ruled , in decisions that were
originally characterized as “conservative” but that have acquired a more liberal constituency in the marijuana context.25 This
it seems undisputed that the CSA could not preempt state law in the sense of coercing
states to maintain criminal penalties or otherwise act against medical (or other) use of marijuana,
even though a state’s partial withdrawal from the war against marijuana sends a message
contrary to the CSA’s effort to stigmatize it as an outlaw drug. Because of the anti-commandeering
rule, “Congress may not preempt the exemptions at the core of state medical marijuana laws,” as
Robert Mikos has written.26 Nor did Raich either purport to preempt any state law or have the
effect of much slowing down the medical marijuana movement, as dissenting justices and others had predicted it
would.27 Eight of the eighteen state laws (and the District of Columbia law) that have legalized medical
marijuana have been adopted since Raich.
explains why
T-Legalize: A2 “Kleiman”
The hemperer has no clothes! Legal scholars disagree with Kleiman
Leibman-Dershowitz 10 (Hanna, attorney in Los Angeles and member of the Proposition 19 legal subcommittee7-2810, "A federal-state law inconsistency shouldn't stop Californians from legalizing marijuana" LA Times)
articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/28/opinion/la-oew-dershowitz-20100728
The law is the law. If we unquestioningly accepted that maxim, imagine where we would be today. Jim Crow would be alive and
well, rivers and skies would be polluted, and women wouldn't be allowed to vote. Yet such is the mindset of many of those who
criticize Proposition 19, the marijuana regulation and taxation initiative on the November ballot. In his July 18 Times Op-Ed article,
UCLA public policy professor Mark A.R. Kleiman declares that state legalization "can't be done." He points out,
correctly, that if the initiative is successful, the federal marijuana prohibition laws will remain in place. What he assumes,
incorrectly, is that federal agents will swarm into California, busting farmers and arresting distributors
and shopkeepers, to say nothing of the garden stores that sell them equipment and supplies, the accountants who do their
books and the municipal tax officials who delight in assessing and collecting the new tax revenues. Kleiman might well have uttered,
the law is neither absolute nor infallible, and that's why Californians can — and
should — legalize, regulate and tax marijuana -related commerce. The federal-state dynamic concerning marijuana is not
complicated. Under our system of federalism, both the states and the feds may prohibit commerce in
marijuana, but neither is required to do so. Similarly, during alcohol prohibition (1920-33), commerce in alcoholic
"The law is the law." But
beverages was prohibited not only by federal law (the Volstead Act) but by the laws of most states. In 1923, New York repealed its
state prohibition laws, leaving enforcement, for the remaining 10 years, entirely to the feds. California voters overwhelmingly did the
same thing in 1932, one year before national prohibition was repealed. Let's think this through. If Proposition 19 passes,
two important balls roll into the feds' court. The first is that the sole responsibility and expense of enforcing marijuana prohibition will
be shifted to them. After Nov. 2, marijuana "offenders" could be arrested only by federal agents,
prosecuted only under federal law, and sentenced only to federal detention. If the feds undertook this,
cases involving simple possession cases and small-time marijuana businesspeople, usually relegated to state courts, would flood
federal courthouses. But even with a drastic increase in funding for federal enforcement, such activity
would barely put a dent in California's marijuana trade, and would fail to stifle California's policy
change, as the federal government has failed to do since the first medical marijuana laws were
passed 14 years ago. Moreover, justifying the invasion into a state's province to undermine the will of the voters at such great
expense to taxpayers would be highly questionable, especially in the current economic climate, not to mention a political climate that
is at best lukewarm on prohibitionist policies. The second ball is even more significant. Voter approval of Proposition 19 would shift
to the feds the responsibility and burden of justifying marijuana prohibition in the first place. Now, the Washingtonians who have
never questioned decades of anti-pot propaganda can explain to the people of California why we cannot be trusted to determine our
state's marijuana policies. Let them endorse the prohibition laws' usefulness as a tool of oppressing minorities. Let them celebrate
how minor marijuana violations cost people their jobs, their housing, custody of their kids, and entrap them permanently in vast
criminal justice databases. Let them justify the utter hypocrisy of the legal treatment of alcohol and tobacco, as compared with the
illegal treatment of marijuana. Let them tell us how many more people will have to be prosecuted and punished before marijuana is
eradicated, how much that will cost, and where the money will come from. Proposition 19's success in November would put the feds
in a quandary, yes, but it is a quandary of their own making. Unlike alcohol prohibition, which required a constitutional amendment,
Congress could fix this easily with a simple amendment to the Controlled Substances Act allowing conduct legal under state law and
respecting the right of states to regulate and tax the cannabis industry. After all, determining what is a crime is traditionally handled
at the state level; indeed, federal prosecutions of drug possession make up a miniscule portion of overall drug arrests. Instead of
hewing to a misguided and unworkable federal hegemony in this area, encouraging innovation at the state level would be a more
legal scholars have long disagreed with Kleiman's conclusion that the
feds must and will intervene to try to quell state action in this area. States need not shrink from countering federal
policy on marijuana. California can show leadership in driving needed reforms, as it has before. In other words, the law need
rational federal policy. And to be clear,
not be the law if you're willing to stick your neck out. Cautious academics and politicized public employees will always embrace the
status quo, joined by risk-averse politicians who misconstrue a lack of constituent "noise" on this issue as satisfaction with current
law, not fear. But voters know better. Not only can Californians regulate and tax marijuana, we should.
Kleiman changed his mind
Elliot 13 (Steve, 4-10-13, "CAN'T BE DONE," SAYS STATE'S NEW LEGAL POT CZAR" The North West Leaf)
www.thenorthwestleaf.com/pages/articles/post/cant-be-done-says-washingtons-new-legal-pot-czar
So, let's
recap, shall we? Kleiman and the Botec thinktank are taking over a state-level marijuana
legalization program (which he said just three years ago "can't be done,") and the reality of what ours will
look like is one that Kleiman, three years ago, said was undesirable.
T-Legalize: A2 “Valente”
The Partnership constantly makes things up
Males 13 (Mike, American sociologist who is senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 10-17-13,
"Partnership for a Drug-Wrecked America" Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice) www.cjcj.org/news/6789
The Partnership at Drugfree.org has always felt free to lie— blatantly, openly , stupidly—about drugs.
In fact, lying to obscure the realities of drug abuse in order to protect powerful interests and constituencies is the reason the
Partnership exists. Called the Partnership for a Drug-Free America when it formed in 1985, it was funded by
alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical and big-advertising interests worried that escalating War on Drugs
fervor might impact its profits. Big funders then included American Brands (Jim Beam whiskey), Philip Morris (Marlboro
and Virginia Slims cigarettes, Miller beer), Anheuser Busch (Budweiser, Michelob, Busch beer), R.J. Reynolds (Camel, Salem,
Winston cigarettes), and Big Pharma firms like Bristol Meyers-Squibb, Merck & Company and Proctor & Gamble. In 1997, the
Partnership abstained from legal-drug funding and now gets its bucks from the drug-war cabal, which is hardly more honest .
Lying about critical issues in gigantic advertising campaigns has been the Partnership’s motif. In
a 1989 ad, the Partnership mispresented the electroencephalograph of a comatose patient as “the
brain waves of a marijuana smoker.” Another Partnership ad declared that 10 million of the 15
million Americans who used cocaine had died from the drug and the remaining 5 million required medical help,
wildly excessive figures exposed as fabricated in an inquiry from Scientific American. And of course, there was the
Partnership’s famous egg-frying “this is your brain on drugs” idiocy. The Partnership is the latest in America’s long
history of phony lobbies—the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) is the White House branch—that revel
in misinformation and misdirected policies that perpetuate the social crises they claim to be attacking because they tacitly
profit from making them worse.
case
Decreasing federal grants will lead to nationwide state budget collapse, even if
some have recovered they will tank – Budget Control Act
Clark 12/5/14 (Timothy B., editor-at-large at Government Executive and fellow and former board member of the National
Academy of Public Administration, 12/5/14, http://www.govexec.com/state-local/2014/12/intergovernmental-states-cities-fiscaldecline/100566/, CJC)
In a detailed presentation from a forthcoming book, Posner sounded the alarm at the NAPA meeting, saying that under current
policies, “domestic spending would be cut to the bone.” If the Budget Control Act and its sequester
policy remain in effect, non-defense domestic discretionary spending will drop below the lowest level in
the modern era in the current fiscal year. As a percentage of GDP, it will decline from 4.4 percent in the 2011 stimulus year to
2.6 percent by the end of this decade. That’s alarming because
federal grants comprised the largest share of
state and local government revenue during the stimulus era. In 2010, stimulus-boosted federal grant programs
amounted to $624 billion, easily exceeding other large sources of state and local funding : property taxes
($442 billion), sales and gross receipts taxes ($431 billion), general sales taxes ($285 billion) and
individual income taxes ($260 billion). If the Budget Control Act is not amended, domestic discretionary
spending will quickly slump below the 3.2 percent of GDP that’s the lowest level of the modern
era, Posner’s data show. States can ill-afford such a decline. While state budgets have recovered along
with the economy, spending in 2014 for all 50 states combined is still less than the fiscal 2008 peak after
accounting for inflation, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. And “many states will continue
to face difficult budgetary choices in fiscal 2015 and beyond,” according to a recent NASBO paper. The
situation is no better in major U.S. cities, reports a Pew Charitable Trusts study released in mid-November. A significant problem in
the 30 cities studied by Pew was a decline in intergovernmental aid. Some 22 of the cities suffered such declines in the 2011-2012
period the report covered. Phoenix alone saw its intergovernmental subventions drop by $200 million. Falling property tax receipts
were the other major factor in cities’ budget woes. The recession and its aftermath cost some 700,000 state and
local workers their jobs. Some are coming back, but still, the future is bleak. “State and local budgets
are on an unsustainable course,” Posner and co-author Tim Conlan write in their paper. Government Accountability
Office projections, they note, indicate that subnational levels of government face long-term structural deficits that will exceed 3
percent of GDP by 2050. That would be the equivalent of $526 billion today, when GDP amounts to $17.6 trillion. As at the federal
level, old-age pensions and health care costs are principally to blame. To achieve operating balances will require the state and local
sector to cut costs or raise revenues by more than 14 percent per year through 2060, according to GAO projections.
DA
No federal follow-on—Republican Congress
Freking 12/16, KEVIN FREKING, “Congress blocks DC marijuana legalization initiative but has less leverage with the states”,
Associated Press, US News and World Report, Dec. 16, 2014, http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2014/12/16/marijuanafight-riskier-for-congress-in-states
Meanwhile, proponents of marijuana legalization know exactly where they want to go next. The itinerary includes pushes into
California, Arizona, Nevada, Maine and Massachusetts. There's money to be raised for campaign ads, ballot initiatives to write and
petition campaigns to organize. Four states so far -Washington and Colorado were the first, followed by Oregon and Alaska - have
voted to legalize marijuana. The groups are confident that momentum is on their side and that most members of Congress know
they can't do anything about it. "I think everyone knows it's inevitable. Republican Senate or not, we're going to keep moving
forward," said Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates an overhaul
of drug policy. The group points to another section of the just-passed spending bill as evidence that most lawmakers don't want
Congress to interfere with state decisions regarding marijuana. That provision prevents the Justice Department from using funds to
arrest and prosecute medical marijuana patients or distributors who are in compliance with their state's laws. Twenty-three states
have laws allowing medical marijuana, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The GOP's most consistent
backer of the legalization movement, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, said he's simply unsure where a Republican-controlled
Congress will take the marijuana issue. "I can't read my fellow Republicans on this. Behind the scenes, they will tell
you, 'Oh, yeah, (prohibition) is stupid, but I'm not going to risk my political career,'" Rohrabacher said.
Republican Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, an anesthesiologist who has led the congressional effort to halt the District of Columbia's
marijuana initiative through September 2015, said prohibiting recreational marijuana use is the right thing to do. He's not worried
about the politics. "If we can educate the public about the hazards, especially given the high unemployment rate among D.C. youth,
the problems they have in the educational systems, I think we can convince people the last thing they need in the District of
Columbia is legalization," said Harris, who represents Maryland's Eastern Shore. The effort to legalize marijuana in the district was
spurred by concerns about racial disparities in marijuana arrests with black people making up about 90 percent of marijuana arrests,
though they make up about half the city's residents. When asked whether Republican leaders were ready to
take on the legalization trend elsewhere, Harris said he would agree the issue is not a top priority for
them. "The plate of leadership is so full with foreign affairs and economic matters in this country,
this is just not on their radar screen and appropriately not on their radar screen," Harris said.
compart
Compartmentalized- finishing- no sense- why spillover?
governments are probably not overly concerned about the reputational costs of discrete
violations of international rules . For better or worse, bad actions that are not predictive of future
behavior, because the regime has changed or because the strategic situation is different, do not
lead to reputational costs.
Treaty Torture Thumps 1AR
US violates UN torture treaties –
-Police brutality, detention, interrogations, lack of prosecution
Jurist 12-1 [2014 http://jurist.org/paperchase/2014/12/un-report-criticizes-us-compliance-with-anti-torture-treaty.php]
[JURIST] The
UN Committee Against Torture [official website] released a report [text, PDF] on Friday that found the
US has fallen short of full compliance with the Convention Against Torture international treaty [text]. Police
brutality [JURIST report], detention facilities , military interrogations and the criminalization of torture itself
were several of the top concerns. The committee raised particular concern regarding the
Guantanamo Bay [JURIST backgrounder] detention facility, urging the US to cease the indefinite holding of
suspects of terrorism-related activities without official charge or trial, to "appropriately prosecute those responsible" for detainee mistreatment and
to "ensure effective redress for victims." The panel called on the US to abolish unreasonable sleep deprivation during
military interrogations as well as the practice of sensory deprivation, as scientific studies have shown that it induces psychosis. The
committee also urged the US to federally criminalize torture: Notwithstanding the State party's statement that under
U.S. law, acts of torture are prohibited by various statutes and may be prosecuted in a variety of ways, the Committee regrets that a specific offence of
torture has not been introduced yet at the federal level. The Committee is of the view that the introduction of such offence, in full conformity with Article
1 of the Convention, would strengthen the human rights protection framework in the State party. The panel recommended the re-introduction of the
Law Enforcement Torture Prevention Act [text, PDF], a bill previously proposed to Congress in 2012 that defines torture and criminalizes acts of torture
by law enforcement officers and others acting under the color of law.
-It is explicit US noncompliance according to newest reports
**Prisons, taser weapons, interrogations, illegal migrants, solitary confinement, and detainees
The Independent, 11-29 [2014 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/america-falling-short-on-complyingwith-antitorture-treaty-un-report-finds-9892779.html]
The U nited S tates is falling short of complying with an international anti-torture treaty , a United Nations
report has found. Police brutality, military interrogations and prisons were among the UN Committee
Against Torture’s top concerns when they released their report on Friday. It is the first review of the US record since 2006. The panel looked the
nation’s compliance with the UN Convention Against Torture, which took effect in 1987 and was ratified in the US in 1994. “There are
numerous areas in which certain things should be changed for the United States to comply fully with the
convention,” said Alessio Bruni of Italy, one of the panel's chief investigators. The report expresses concerns about allegations of police brutality
and excessive use of force by officers, particularly the Chicago Police Department’s treatments of blacks and Latinos. It also calls for the
use of taser weapons by police to be restricted only to life-threatening situations. However, it had no
specific recommendation or reaction to a grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot dead unarmed black
teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in early August. The
panel criticised the US record on military interrogations,
maximum security prisons, illegal migrants and solitary confinement while calling for tougher
federal laws to define and outlaw torture, including with detainees at Guantanamo Bay and in Yemen. It
also called for a ban on interrogation techniques that rely on sleep or sensory deprivation that is
“aimed at prolonging the sense of capture”.
I-Law 2NC
Multilateralism is in unstoppable decline
Young et al 13
Kevin Young is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, David Held is
Master of University College, and Professor of Politics and International Relations, at the University of Durham. He is also Director
of Polity Press and General Editor of Global Policy, Thomas Hale is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Blavatnik School of
Government, Oxford University, Open Democracy, May 24, 2013, "Gridlock: the growing breakdown of global cooperation",
http://www.opendemocracy.net/thomas-hale-david-held-kevin-young/gridlock-growing-breakdown-of-global-cooperation ableist
edited
The Doha round of trade negotiations is
deadlocked, despite eight successful multilateral trade rounds
before it . Climate negotiators have met for two decades without finding a way to stem global
emissions. The UN is [frozen] paralyzed in the face of growing insecurities across the world, the latest dramatic
example being Syria. Each of these phenomena could be treated as if it was independent, and an explanation sought for the
peculiarities of its causes. Yet, such a perspective would fail to show what they, along with numerous other instances of breakdown
in international negotiations, have in common.
Global cooperation is gridlocked across a range of issue areas . The reasons for this are not the
result of any single underlying causal structure , but rather of several underlying dynamics that
work together. Global cooperation today is failing not simply because it is very difficult to solve
many global problems – indeed it is – but because previous phases of global cooperation have been
incredibly successful, producing unintended consequences that have overwhelmed the problem-solving
capacities of the very institutions that created them. It is hard to see how this situation can be unravelled, given
failures of contemporary global leadership, the weaknesses of NGOs in converting popular campaigns into institutional change and
reform, and the domestic political landscapes of the most powerful countries.
A golden era of governed globalization
In order to understand why gridlock has come about it is important to understand how it was that the post-Second World War era facilitated, in many respects, a successful form
of ‘governed globalization’ that contributed to relative peace and prosperity across the world over several decades. This period was marked by peace between the great
powers, although there were many proxy wars fought out in the global South. This relative stability created the conditions for what now can be regarded as an unprecedented
period of prosperity that characterized the 1950s onward. Although it is by no means the sole cause, the UN is central to this story, helping to create conditions under which
decolonization and successive waves of democratization could take root, profoundly altering world politics.
While the economic record of the postwar years varies by country, many experienced significant economic growth and living standards rose rapidly across significant parts of
the world. By the late 1980s a variety of East Asian countries were beginning to grow at an unprecedented speed, and by the late 1990s countries such as China, India and
Brazil had gained significant economic momentum, a process that continues to this day.
Meanwhile, the institutionalization of international cooperation proceeded at an equally impressive pace. In 1909, 37 intergovernmental organizations existed; in 2011, the
number of institutions and their various off-shoots had grown to 7608 (Union of International Associations 2011). There was substantial growth in the number of international
treaties in force, as well as the number of international regimes, formal and informal. At the same time, new kinds of institutional arrangements have emerged alongside formal
intergovernmental bodies, including a variety of types of transnational governance arrangements such as networks of government officials, public-private partnerships, as well
as exclusively private/corporate bodies.
Postwar institutions created the conditions under which a multitude of actors could benefit from forming multinational companies, investing abroad, developing global production
chains, and engaging with a plethora of other social and economic processes associated with globalization. These conditions, combined with the expansionary logic of
capitalism and basic technological innovation, changed the nature of the world economy, radically increasing dependence on people and countries from every corner of the
world. This interdependence, in turn, created demand for further institutionalization, which states seeking the benefits of cooperation provided, beginning the cycle anew.
This is not to say that international institutions were the only cause of the dynamic form of globalization experienced over the last few decades. Changes in the nature of global
capitalism, including breakthroughs in transportation and information technology, are obviously critical drivers of interdependence. However, all of these changes were allowed
to thrive and develop because they took place in a relatively open, peaceful, liberal, institutionalized world order. By preventing World War Three and another Great Depression,
the multilateral order arguably did just as much for interdependence as microprocessors or email (see Mueller 1990; O’Neal and Russett 1997).
Beyond the special privileges of the great powers
Self-reinforcing interdependence has now progressed to the point where it has altered our ability
to engage in further global cooperation. That is, economic and political shifts in large part
attributable to the successes of the post-war multilateral order are now amongst the factors
grinding that system into gridlock. Because of the remarkable success of global cooperation in the postwar order,
human interconnectedness weighs much more heavily on politics than it did in 1945. The need for international
cooperation has never been higher. Yet the “supply” side of the equation, institutionalized
multilateral cooperation, has stalled. In areas such as nuclear proliferation, the explosion of small arms
sales, terrorism, failed states, global economic imbalances, financial market instability, global poverty and
inequality, biodiversity losses, water deficits and climate change, multilateral and transnational
cooperation is now increasingly ineffective or threadbare. Gridlock is not unique to one issue domain, but
appears to be becoming a general feature of global governance: cooperation seems to be increasingly difficult and
deficient at precisely the time when it is needed most .
four reasons for this blockage , four pathways to gridlock: rising multipolarity,
institutional inertia, harder problems, and institutional fragmentation . Each pathway can be thought of as
a growing trend that embodies a specific mix of causal mechanisms . Each of these are explained briefly
It is possible to identify
below.
Growing multipolarity . The absolute number of states has increased by 300 percent
in the last 70 years, meaning that the most basic transaction costs of global governance have grown.
More importantly, the number of states that “matter” on a given issue—that is, the states without whose
cooperation a global problem cannot be adequately addressed—has expanded by similar proportions. At Bretton
Woods in 1945, the rules of the world economy could essentially be written by the United States with some consultation with the UK
and other European allies. In the aftermath of the 2008-2009 crisis, the G-20 has become the principal forum for global economic
management, not because the established powers desired to be more inclusive, but because they could not solve the problem on
now that many more countries, representing a diverse
range of interests, must agree in order for global cooperation to occur.
Institutional inertia . The postwar order succeeded, in part, because it incentivized great power involvement in key
their own. However, a consequence of this progress is
institutions. From the UN Security Council, to the Bretton Woods institutions, to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, key pillars of the global
order explicitly grant special privileges to the countries that were wealthy and powerful at the time of their creation. This hierarchy
was necessary to secure the participation of the most important countries in global governance. Today, the gain from this trade-off
has shrunk while the costs have grown. As power shifts from West to East, North to South, a broader range
of participation is needed on nearly all global issues if they are to be dealt with effectively. At the same time, following
decolonization, the end of the Cold War and economic development, the idea that some countries should hold more
rights and privileges than others is increasingly (and rightly) regarded as morally bankrupt. And yet,
the architects of the postwar order did not , in most cases, design institutions that would organically
adjust to fluctuations in national power .
Harder problems . As independence has deepened, the types and scope of problems around which
countries must cooperate has evolved. Problems are both now more extensive , implicating a broader
range of countries and individuals within countries, and intensive , penetrating deep into the domestic policy space and daily
life. Consider the example of trade. For much of the postwar era, trade negotiations focused on reducing tariff levels on
manufactured products traded between industrialized countries. Now, however, negotiating a trade agreement requires also
discussing a host of social, environmental, and cultural subjects - GMOs, intellectual property, health and environmental standards,
biodiversity, labour standards—about which countries often disagree sharply. In the area of environmental change a similar set of
considerations applies. To clean up industrial smog or address ozone depletion required fairly discrete actions from a small number
of top polluters. By contrast, the threat of climate change and the efforts to mitigate it involve nearly all
countries of the globe. Yet, the divergence of voice and interest within both the developed and
developing worlds, along with the sheer complexity of the incentives needed to achieve a low carbon
economy, have made a global deal, thus far, impossible (
Falkner et al. 2011; Victor 2011).
Fragmentation . The institution-builders of the 1940s began with, essentially, a blank slate. But efforts to cooperate
internationally today occur in a dense institutional ecosystem shaped by path dependency . The
exponential rise in both multilateral and transnational organizations has created a more complex
multilevel and multi-actor system of global governance. Within this dense web of institutions mandates can
conflict, interventions are frequently uncoordinated, and all too typically scarce resources are subject to
intense competition. In this context, the proliferation of institutions tends to lead to dysfunctional fragmentation, reducing the
ability of multilateral institutions to provide public goods. When funding and political will are scarce, countries need focal points to
guide policy (Keohane and Martin 1995), which can help define the nature and form of cooperation. Yet, when international regimes
Fragmented institutions , in turn, disaggregate resources and
political will, while increasing transaction costs.
overlap, these positive effects are weakened.
In stressing four pathways to gridlock we emphasize the manner in which contemporary global governance problems build up on
challenges now
faced by the multilateral order are substantially different from those faced by the 1945 victors in the
each other, although different pathways can carry more significance in some domains than in others. The
postwar settlement . They are second-order cooperation problems arising from previous phases of success in global
coordination. Together, they now block and inhibit problem solving and reform at the global level.