Perm
Negotiation DA: neoliberalism splinters alter-political resistance by
accepting small demands while leaving the structure of the economy
itself unquestioned – culminates in extinction
Parr ’13 (Adrian, Assoc. Prof. of Philosophy and Environmental Studies @ U. of
Cincinnati, THE WRATH OF CAPITAL: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, pp.
5-6)
The contradiction of capitalism is that it is
an uncompromising structure of negotiation. It ruthlessly
absorbs sociohistorical limits and the challenges these limits pose to capital, placing them in the
service of further capital accumulation. Neoliberalism is an exclusive system premised upon the logic of
property rights and the expansion of these rights, all the while maintaining that the free market is self-regulating,
sufficiently and efficiently working to establish individual and collective well-being. In reality, however, socioeconomic
disparities have become more acute the world over, and the world's "common wealth,” as David Bollier and later Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri note, has been increasingly privatized.12 In 2010, the financial wealth of the world's high-networth individuals (with investable assets of $1 to $50 million or more [all money amounts are in U.S. dollars] ) surpassed
the 2007 pre-financial crisis peak, growing 9.7 percent and reaching $42.7 trillion. Also in 2010 the global population of
high-net- worth individuals grew 8.3 percent to 10.9 million.13 In 2010, the global population was 6.9 billion, of whom
there were 1,000 billionaires; 80,000 ultra-high-net-worth individuals with average wealth exceeding $50 mil- lion; 3 billion
with an average wealth of $10,000, of which 1.1 billion owned less than $1,000; and 2.5 billion who were reportedly
"unbanked'' (without a bank account and thus living on the margins of the formal financial system) .14 In a world where
financial advantage brings with it political benefits, these figures attest to the weak position the majority of the world
Neoliberal capitalism ameliorates the
change by taking control of the collective call it issues forth,
splintering the collective into a disparate and confusing array of individual choices competing
with one another over how best to solve the crisis. Through this process of competition, the collective
nature of the crisis is restructured and privatized, then put to work for the production and circulation of
occupies in the arena of environmental and climate change politics.
threat posed by environmental
capital as the average wealth of the world's high-net-worth individuals grows at the expense of the majority of the world
living in abject poverty. Advocating
that the free market can solve debilitating environmental changes and
not a political response to these problems; it is merely a political ghost emptied of
its collective aspirations. In the following pages, I mine the political and pragmatic implications of this dance of
the climate crisis is
death between neoliberal capitalism and environmental change. I prefer to use the term environmental change rather than
climate change except when directly dealing with the issue of C02 buildup in the atmosphere. When I use the term climate
change, I am specifically referring to the long-term warming of the earth as a result of GHGs entering the atmosphere
because of human activities. The “changes” that the term environmental change refers to are both the changes that are
the result of human activities' thickening the earth's C02
blanket and the broader environmental changes
wrought by modernity and the free market, such as the privatization of the commons, landfills, freshwater
scarcity, floods, desertification, landslides, coastal and soil erosion, drought, crop failures,
extreme storm activity, land degradation and conversion for agriculture and livestock farming,
urban heat-island effect, polluted waterways, ocean acidification, and many other problems on a
growing list.
AT – Wohlforth
Wohlforth’s wrong---unipolarity contains several avenues for conflict--prefer our ev which takes theirs into account
Nuno P. Monteiro 12, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University,
“Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity is Not Peaceful,” International Security, Winter 2012,
Vol. 36, No. 3, p. 9-40
This article has laid out a theory of unipolarity that accounts for how a unipolar
structure of the international system provides significant incentives for conflict.
In doing so, my argument corrects an important problem with extant research
on unipolarity—the absence of scholarship questioning William Wohlforth’s
view that a unipolar world is peaceful. In this respect, Wohlforth’s words ring as true
of extant scholarship today as they did in 1999: “When balance-of-power theorists argue that the post–
Cold War world is headed toward conflict, they are not claiming that unipolarity causes conflict. Rather, they are
claiming that unipolarity leads quickly to bi- or multipolarity. It is not unipolarity’s peace but its durability
that is in dispute.”112 Not anymore . It is not that the core of Wohlforth’s widely shared argument is wrong,
however: great power conflict is impossible in a unipolar world. Rather, his claim that unipolarity is peaceful
has two important limitations. First, it focuses on great powers. But because unipolarity prevents the
aggregation of conflicts involving major and minor powers into conflict between great powers, scholars must look
beyond great power interactions when analyzing the structural incentives for war. Second,
Wohlforth assumes that the unipole’s only reasonable strategic option is defensive dominance.
But given that unipolarity provides the unipole with ample room for defining its foreign policy,
offensive dominance and disengagement are equally plausible strategies. This requires a look at
how these two additional strategies facilitate conflict. After correcting for these two limitations, it becomes clear
that unipolarity possesses much potential for conflict . Contrary to what
Wohlforth argued, unipolarity is not a system in which the unipole is spared from any
conflicts and major powers become involved only in peripheral wars . Instead, a unipolar system
is one that provides incentives for recurrent wars between the sole great power and
recalcitrant minor powers, as well as occasional wars among major and minor powers. That is the
central prediction of my theory.
AT – Friedman
Friedman relies on terrible data from hedge fund managers and
Ehron and fails to break free from capitalist coordinates.
Cerni 12 (Paula, October 8th, 12, “Thomas Friedman's Paean to Globalization 'The
Lexus and the Olive Tree' Is Back, but We've Moved On”,
http://www.popmatters.com/review/163932-the-lexus-and-the-olive-tree-by-thomas-l.friedman/RJ)
When Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree was first published in
April 1999, globalization was in, the Cold War was out, the NASDAQ was up, and
our computers were about to be eaten by the Y2K cookie monster. A dozen years later,
Friedman’s paean to globalization—and forerunner to his even more successful The World is
Flat—is being republished; but history has moved on. Since then, 9/11, disastrous wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, economic crisis on a scale not seen since the Great Depression,
Wikileaks, and mounting geopolitical rivalries in the Middle East and Asia have
made the world a far less rosy place than Friedman , for all his bet-hedging caveats, had
hoped it would be . His anonymous techie friend was wrong to forecast that by 2010 ‘about 100 million toasters
should be online’ (356); the European Monetary Union wasn’t a ‘godsend’ (178) after all; and that ‘flourishing junk bond
market’ turned out to be, not a symptom of the ‘democratization of finance’ (55), but of a speculative bubble that ruined
many people’s lives. Oh, dear. Of course, hindsight is easy; but the hazards of predicting the future aren’t the main reason
Although Friedman is an accomplished writer—and threetimes Pulitzer winner—his grasp of big issues is shaky. Partly, this is because he’s too
this book fails the test of time.
attached to the current social system to perceive its colossal failures ; and partly, it’s
because he tries to explain the world ‘through simple stories, not grand theory’
(19). Hence such pseudo-concepts as ‘globalution’, the ‘Electronic Herd’, and ‘Microchip Immune Deficiency Syndrome’—
not to speak of his ‘Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention’. Alas, social and economic phenomena are much too
complex and important for this kind of treatment.
Friedman’s poor method (hedge-fund managers
are some of his ‘best intellectual sources’, p26) and annoying-cheer-leader style
quickly fall down . Take his assertion that ‘every inch’ of road in central Hanoi is ‘occupied by people who have
traded their sandals for a bicycle, their bicycle for a motor scooter, their motor scooter for a Honda Civic, their Honda Civic
for a Toyota Camry and, yes, even their Toyota Camry for the occasional Lexus’ (349). Or his argument that bankrupt
European businessmen would be ‘welcomed with open arms in Palo Alto’ (370). Sorry, this isn’t just bogus, it’s cruel .
Hedge-fund managers aren’t actually the worst of Friedman’s sources. ‘Consider Enron’,
he urges us on page 387. Well, yes, consider Enron, but don’t listen to a word its former
CEO, Kenneth Lay, says in this book. Lay went on to die in 2006, after defrauding
his shareholders, sinking his company, and leaving thousands of employees
without jobs . (Watch Enron, the Smartest Guys in the Room, if you really want to know the truth about this story).
Named ‘America’s Most Innovative Company’ by Fortune magazine every single year from 1995 to 2000, Enron had been
innovative alright; but only at fleecing its customers and cooking the books. As for the once-fashionable notion of
globalization, Friedman
mostly uses it to paint a facile and overstated contrast with the
Cold War. The Cold War built walls, he says, today’s globalization knocks them
down; the Cold War was slow, globalization is fast; the Cold War was about topdown control, globalization is about democracy; and so on. All this ignores the
fact that the end of the Cold War left the world’s wider problems and conflicts
virtually intact. Look at Russia today, for example, or at any other country for that matter, and it’s still some
combination of economic corruption, political repression, and self-interested attempts to either build walls against
foreigners, or bulldoze down other people’s walls. It would be more sensible to think of globalization, technological
change, and democratization—interwoven trends Friedman rightly favors—as unfinished processes that began not only
before the Cold War, but even before capitalism. When our ancestors spilled out of Africa into the rest of the world, when
they invented the plough, when Genghis Khan marched across Asia, the French wielded the guillotine, and the Beatles
got bigger than Jesus – those were all steps in a journey towards a more advanced, humane, and, yes, more global
society. Yet
they were only partial and halting steps, taken in harsh social conditions
and often themselves brutal. Friedman is probably correct that the pace is
quickening, but even so it’s the same journey, still taking us through rough and
contradictory terrain. Friedman pretends that globalization and the free market are one and the same thing,
when they aren’t, and in the process conveniently forgets that today’s markets aren’t really
free anyway. He poses as a champion of innovation, but isn’t innovative enough
to imagine life without capitalism . (Most people in the Dark Ages couldn’t imagine life without feudalism
either, but feudalism came to an end all the same). He’s not even a true globalizer, since his flag isn’t the planet’s, but the
stars and stripes (globalization is mostly made in the USA, he argues; and also tells of his ‘covering Secretary of State
Baker when he went out on his fund-raising trip for the first Gulf War. All the reporters on the plane pitched in and bought
him a tin cup’, p 240). Globalization wasn’t made in any one country; it’s (gradually) doing away with countries. It’s the
work-in-progress of humanity, carried out by people who, in the past, rarely understood the significance of their own
actions. Today, we have the chance of making history in a wiser and more civilized manner—but only if we learn to be
critical of the powers that be, and respectful of the need for sound thinking. Too bad this book isn’t any of that.
Too
bad the cookie monster didn’t eat Friedman’s computer back in the year 2000.