MM Condemnation of Jurispudence
Case Neg
1NC Shell
Framework
Our interpretation is that an affirmative should defend curtailing federal
government surveillance as the endpoint of their advocacy. This does not
mandate roleplaying, immediate fiat or any particular means of impact
calculus.
Surveillance can only be understood in relation to the agent doing the
surveying – understanding federal government surveillance as unique is key
or the topic becomes abstract and unlimited
Cetina 14
(DANIEL K. CETINA, BALANCING SECURITY AND PRIVACY IN 21ST CENTURYAMERICA: A FRAMEWORK FOR FISA
COURT REFORM, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1453 2013-2014, Hein)
Any legitimate attempt to discuss and critique United States surveillance tactics necessarily
demands defining exactly what surveillance is and what it entails. Although discourse surrounding
governments' intelligence and law enforcement techniques transcends any specific epoch or
state,11 modern communication technologies "have revolutionized our daily lives [and] have also created minutely detailed
recordings of those lives," 12 thereby making governmental surveillance simple, potentially ubiquitous, and susceptible to abuse.13
Of course, recent surveillance programs were implemented for the noble purpose of conducting the War on Terrorism; 14 but the
danger is that pursuing this purpose unchecked can undermine the central principles that both provide the Republic's foundation
and differentiate it from the very enemies it combats. 15¶ While the prospect of governmental surveillance seems to implicitly
suggest a quasi-Orwellian dystopia,16 fantastical science fiction mythologies, 17 abstruse philosophical concepts, 18 or documented
repressive regimes,19 the reality is both less foreboding and more nuanced. Although American society, ostensibly, is looking
increasingly akin to such fiction, theory, and totalitarianism, surveillance as applied is not so disturbing. Surveillance involves and
encompasses many topics and practices, both abstract and practical,20 but it primarily involves power relationships. 2 1 Specifically,
surveillance is "the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection
or direction."22 Surveillance can target a modern society's numerous communications networks, 28 which exist to send and receive
information. 24 The communications include both envelope information and content information, distinct categories that draw
varying degrees of interest from the surveillance authority. 25¶ But surveillance is not strictly the province of the federal
government. 26 Indeed, state and local governments have their own surveillance practices, as do private corporations, which
routinely use surveillance data to determine purchasing trends and calibrate advertising, especially through such social media sites
as Facebook.28 Surveillance, therefore, transcends the boundary between the private sector and the public sector. 29¶ The
focus here, however, is on federal governmental surveillance. It is therefore critical to
understand from where the federal government derives its authority to monitor and analyze
communications networks.
The Aff undermines the ability to have a limited and stable number of
Affirmatives to prepare against. The link magnitude is high. Their affirmative
prevents arguments about ____.
This is a reason to vote negative.
Our first standard is competition – every affirmative argument needs to be
filtered through the question of “how does this function in a competitive
venue of debate where there must be a win or a loss assigned to each team. All
their evidence will assume non-competitive academic environment rather
than one where a forced choice will inevitably take place with every ballot.
Second is substantive side bias
Not defending the clear actor and mechanism of the resolution produces a
substantive side bias.
They have the ability to recontextualize link arguments, shift focus to different
proscriptive claims of the 1AC while using traditional competition standards
like perms to make non-absolutist disagreements irrelevant.
The first impact to Aff sides bias is absolutism – their interp creates bad
debates where negatives are forced into the absolutist positions like cap and
Baudrillard to ensure links and have generic positions that can apply to
everything. This is bad for education -- forcing us to the academic margins,
makes us less effective scholars and less literate in current events. Trains us
only for leftist infighting, rather than social change.
Second, it undermines research – Aff has an incentive to constantly break new
affs at every tournament making any real attempt at engagement irrelevant
and decreasing the quality of all debates. They don’t spur engagement and
exploration cause there are so many teams reading so many Affs, the only way
to respond it with generics. The Aff is conversely incentivized to pick a body of
literature with very little negative literature and a prolif of aff advocacies
based on single articles or created phrases. There is no incentive to produce
detailed strategies because academic disagreements in the literature are
minute and easily wished away by perms or Aff changes.
And we have an external impact – Sufficient research-based preparation and
debates focused on detailed points of disagreement are key to political
effectiveness
Gutting 13
(professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame)
(Gary, Feb 19, A Great Debate, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/a-great-debate/?emc=eta1)
This is the year of what should be a decisive debate on our country’s spending and debt. But our political
“debates”
seldom deserve the name. For the most part representatives of the rival parties exchange one-liners: “The rich can afford
to pay more” is met by “Tax increases kill jobs.” Slightly more sophisticated discussions may cite historical precedents: “There were
higher tax rates during the post-war boom” versus “Reagan’s tax cuts increased revenues.”¶ Such volleys still don’t even amount to
arguments: they don’t put forward generally accepted premises that support a conclusion. Full-scale
speeches by
politicians are seldom much more than collections of such slogans and factoids, hung on a
string of platitudes. Despite the name, candidates’ pre-election debates are exercises in looking authoritative, imposing their
talking points on the questions, avoiding gaffes, and embarrassing their opponents with “zingers” (the historic paradigm: “There you
go again.”).¶ There is a high level of political discussion in the editorials and op-eds of national newspapers and magazines as well as
on a number of blogs, with positions often carefully formulated and supported with argument and evidence. But even here we
seldom see a direct and sustained confrontation of rival positions through the dialectic of
assertion, critique, response and counter-critique. Such exchanges occur frequently in our law courts (for
example, oral arguments before the Supreme Court) and in discussions of scientific papers. But they are not a significant part of our
deliberations about public policy. As a result, partisans typically remain safe in their ideological worlds, convincing themselves that
they hold to obvious truths, while their opponents must be either knaves or fools — with no need to think through the strengths of
their rivals’ positions or the weaknesses of their own.¶ Is there any way to make genuine debates — sustained back-and-forth
exchanges, meeting high intellectual standards but still widely accessible — part of our political culture? (I leave to historians the
question of whether there are historical precedents— like the Webster-Hayne or Lincoln-Douglas debates.) Can we put our
politicians in a situation where they cannot ignore challenges, where they must genuinely engage with one another in responsible
discussion and not just repeat talking points?¶ A first condition is that the debates be focused on specific points of major
disagreement. Not, “How can we improve our economy?” but “Will tax cuts for the wealthy or stimulus spending on infrastructure
do more to improve our economy?” This will prevent vague statements of principle that don’t address the real issues at stake.¶
Another issue is the medium of the debate. Written discussions, in print or online could be easily arranged, but personal encounters
are more vivid and will better engage public attention. They
should not, however, be merely extemporaneous
events, where too much will depend on quick-thinking and an engaging manner. We want
remarks to be carefully prepared and open to considered responses.
This guts any educational potential of the aff – failure to engage with the legal
detail of surveillance policy prevents translating their argument into action.
Cohen 15 (professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center)
(Julie, 2015, Studying Law Studying Surveillance, Studying Law Studying Surveillance. Surveillance &
Society 13(1): 91-101)
Relative to legal scholarship, work in Surveillance
Studies is more likely to build from a solid foundation in contemporary
social theory. Even so, such work often reflects both an insufficient grasp of the complexity of the legal
system in action and lack of interest in the ways that legal and regulatory actors understand,
conduct, and contest surveillance. By this I don’t mean to suggest that Surveillance Studies scholars need law degrees, but only to
point out what ought to be obvious but often isn’t: legal processes are social processes, too, and in overlooking these processes,
Surveillance Studies scholars also engage
in a form of black-boxing that treats law as monolithic and
surveillance and government as interchangeable. Legal actors engage in a variety of discursive
and normative strategies by which institutions and resources are mobilized around
surveillance, and understanding those strategies is essential to the development of an archaeology of surveillance practices.
Work in Surveillance Studies also favors a type of theoretical jargon that can seem impenetrable and, more importantly,
unrewarding to those in law and policy communities. As I’ve written elsewhere (Cohen 2012a: 29), “[t]oo many such works find
power everywhere and hope nowhere, and seem to offer well-meaning policy makers little more than a prescription for despair.”
Returning to the topics already discussed, let us consider some ways in which Surveillance Studies might benefit from dialogue with
law.¶ Let us return first to the problem of digitally-enhanced surveillance by law enforcement—the problem of the high-resolution
mosaic. As discussed in the section above, works by Surveillance Studies scholars exploring issues of mobility and control offer
profound insights into the ways in which continual observation shapes spaces and subjectivities—the precise questions about which,
as we have already seen, judges and legal scholars alike are skeptical. Such
works reveal the extent to which
pervasive surveillance of public spaces is emerging as a new and powerful mode of ordering
the public and social life of civil society. They offer rich food for thought—but not for action. Networked surveillance
is increasingly a fact of contemporary public life, and totalizing theories about its power don’t take us very far toward gaining
regulatory traction on it. That enterprise is, moreover, essential even if it entails an inevitable quantum of self-delusion.
Acknowledgment of pervasive social shaping by networked surveillance need not preclude
legal protection for socially-shaped subjects, but that project requires attention to detail. To put the
point a different way, the networked democratic society and the totalitarian state may be points on a continuum rather than binary
opposites, but the fact that the continuum exists is still worth something. If so, one needs tools for assessment and differentiation
that Surveillance Studies does not seem to provide.¶ As an example of this sort of approach within legal scholarship, consider a
recent article by legal scholars Danielle Citron and David Gray (2013), which proposes that courts and legislators undertake what
they term a technology-centered approach to regulating surveillance. They would have courts and legislators ask whether particular
technologies facilitate total surveillance and, if so, act to put in place comprehensive procedures for approving and overseeing their
use. From a Surveillance Studies perspective, this approach lacks theoretical purity because its technology-specific focus appears to
ignore the fact that total surveillance also can emerge via the fusion of data streams originating from various sources. But the
proposal is pragmatic; it does not so much ignore that risk as bracket it while pursuing the narrower goal of gaining a regulatory
foothold within the data streams. And because it focuses on the data streams themselves, it is administrable in a way that schemes
based on linear timelines and artificial distinctions between different types of surveillance are not. One can envision both courts and
legislatures implementing the Citron and Gray proposal in a way that enables far better oversight of what law enforcement is doing.¶
Turning next to the linked practices of commercial profiling and social media surveillance, we have already seen that work in
Surveillance Studies again steps in where legal scholarship badly needs supplementation: on the question of how pervasive
surveillance by private market actors shapes the production of culture and the patterns of emergent subjectivity. Such work typically
does not, however, consider or explore the ways that the legal construct of consent mobilizes legal and policy discourses to sanction
ongoing expansions of private-sector surveillance and insulate them from regulatory oversight. Work in Surveillance Studies also has
not seemed to pay particularly careful attention to the roles that rhetorics of innovation and competition play in regulatory debates
about information privacy. For a discipline that seeks to develop comprehensive and rigorous accounts of surveillance as social
ordering and as cultural practice, these are large omissions. As we have seen, the notice-and-choice paradigm has deep roots within
liberal theory, and legal and policy discourses about notice and choice reflect legal culture in action. By the same token,
understanding surveillance simply as a means to effective administration, or as a means for pursuing and performing security, misses
the extent to which a narrative about the inevitable nature of innovation and knowledge production positions surveillance as a
modality of technical and social progress (Cohen 2015). The “surveillance-industrial complex” does not simply parallel the militaryindustrial complex; it is also deeply rooted in Silicon Valley’s technoculture and (albeit paradoxically) in the tropes of romantic
individualism and cultural iconoclasm with which its participants self-identify. These themes have been especially salient for privacy
regulators.¶
Engagement with legal scholarship on information privacy would inform the project
of understanding surveillance as social ordering and as culture in a number of complementary
ways. First and most basically, many legal writings on information privacy are important as primary sources that reveal the noticeand-choice paradigm and the narrative of inevitable innovation at work. But there is also a rich vein of legal scholarship interrogating
the assumptions and the politics that underlie privacy and data protection regulation (e.g., Cohen 2012a, 2012c, 2013, 2015; Kerr
2013; Ohm 2010; Solove 2013). In addition, legal scholars have produced richly detailed and revealing investigations of regulatory
and compliance processes; for example, scholars concerned
with the operation of “surveillant
assemblages” and “digital enclosures” ought to read and consider the important work by Kenneth
Bamberger and Deirdre Mulligan on corporate privacy compliance cultures (2011a, 2011b).¶ If Surveillance Studies is to inform the
content of laws and the nature of regulatory practice in the domain of commercial profiling and social media, however, surveillance
theorists will need to do more than simply read legal sources. Work in Surveillance Studies so far has not been particularly welladapted to helping policymakers figure out what, if anything, to do about evolving practices of commercial surveillance. Once again,
if it is to be useful to policymakers, the view from Surveillance Studies requires translation into a form that might furnish a
framework for action. Here I want to identify three important sets of questions on which Surveillance Studies scholars who want
their work to make a difference might take their cues from legal scholarship.¶ An initial set of questions concerns how to redefine
privacy and data protection in functional terms that do not presuppose the stable, liberal self, and that instead offer real benefit to
the situated subjects who might claim their protection. David Lyon (2001) has argued that the organizing concepts of “privacy” and
“data protection” are inadequate to comprehend surveillance as a mode of social ordering. From a sociological perspective that is
undoubtedly right, but privacy and data protection still might be made effective as legal constructs if articulated differently, in ways
that correspond more closely to the ways that surveillance shapes experience. That project calls for the sort of theoretical
cannibalization that makes Ph.D. committees in Real Disciplines nervous, but at which legal scholars excel. With some trepidation, I
offer my own work on privacy as boundary management for the postliberal self (Cohen 2012a, 2013), as well as Valerie Steeves’
(2009) work on relational subjectivity, as examples of the sort of exercise that is necessary to reframe the effects of surveillance
as social ordering in ways to which legal systems can respond. For law to develop a sustainable
and effective approach to regulating data protection and protecting privacy, the ways of theorizing
about the subject represented by these projects must become second nature, not only for scholars but also and more importantly
for legislatures, regulators, and courts. That in turn requires second process of translation, from the language of academia into a
vernacular that can supply inputs into policy processes.¶ A second set of questions concerns how to understand what constitutes
privacy harm in an era in which some surveillance is a constant. To the Surveillance Studies reader this may seem to be a variation
on the first question, but it is different: in law, harm is what makes violation of an interest actionable,
and the potential for harm is what creates the predicate for comprehensive regulation of particular domains of activity. Harm need
not be individualized or monetizable; environmental regulations and financial market regulations address systemic and often
nonmonetizable risk. But it must be reasonably definite; talk of power, power everywhere is plainly insufficient and it should come
as no surprise that policymakers find it risible. Work on this problem is still preliminary, but here legal
scholarship has a
leg up because it deals in practicalities. Surveillance Studies scholars might profitably read works by Danielle Citron
(2007) and Paul Ohm (2010) that identify and name the systemic risks associated with leaky and largely unregulated data reservoirs,
and that draw on resources ranging from the history of tort law to computational science to craft recommendations for more
effective regulatory strategies.¶ A final set of questions concerns the design of governance mechanisms. As we have already seen,
the flows of surveillance within social media create novel institutional design challenges. In the domain of commercial profiling,
many activities on the business-facing side of personal information markets, removed from consumer-facing processes that purport
to ensure notice and choice, have eluded regulatory scrutiny entirely. Some of the classic works on privacy governance originate
within the Surveillance Studies tradition; these include Priscilla Regan’s (1995) study of the way privacy legislation emerges within
the U.S. political system and Colin Bennett and Charles Raab’s (2006) work
on privacy governance and the
emergence of data protection as a regulatory paradigm. But the question of governance badly needs to be
revisited; in particular, Surveillance Studies scholars have not yet engaged with the “new privacy governance” now emerging as
official policy in the U.S. (and as de facto policy in the European Union) in a sustained and meaningful way. Works by legal scholars
on the political, epistemological, and normative dimensions of the new governance (e.g., Bamberger 2010; Cohen 2012b, 2013;
Freeman 2000; Lobel 2004) offer starting points for an inquiry that moves beyond “doing Surveillance Studies” to consider the more
pressing challenge of doing surveillance regulation wisely and effectively.¶ Conclusion: Doing Law-and-Surveillance-Studies
Differently¶ The prospects for fruitful interchange and collaboration between legal scholars and Surveillance Studies scholars are
likely to remain complicated by pronounced differences in underlying theoretical orientation. But since Surveillance Studies is itself
an interdiscipline (Garber 2001), and since legal scholarship has thrived on interdisciplinary exploration, the prospects for effective
communication also seem reasonably good. Bridging the gaps requires, first and foremost, efforts by emissaries from both traditions
to foster a more tolerant and curious dialogue directed toward improved understanding and, ultimately, toward methodological
hybridization. Within one’s own academic community, it can become too easy to mistake consensus on methodological conventions
for epistemological rigor, and to forget that methodological strength also derives from refusal to be hemmed in by disciplinary
boundaries.¶ From the standpoint of theory, a more sustained dialogue between law and Surveillance Studies would count as a
success if it produced a mode of inquiry about surveillance that melded the theoretical sophistication of Surveillance Studies with
lawyerly attention to the details, mechanisms, and interests that constitute surveillance practices as legal practices, and to the kinds
of framing that mobilize legal and policy communities. To do Surveillance Studies better, legal scholars need to challenge their own
preference for putting problems in categories that fit neatly within the liberal model of human nature and behavior, and Surveillance
Studies scholars can help by calling attention to the social and cultural processes within which surveillance practices are embedded.
Surveillance Studies scholars need to do more to resist their own penchant for totalizing dystopian narratives, and should delve
more deeply into the legal and regulatory realpolitik that surrounds the administration of surveillance systems; legal scholars can
help by demystifying legal and regulatory processes.¶ From a legal scholar’s perspective, however, theory achieves its highest value
when it becomes a tool for forcing productive confrontations about how to respond to real problems. And so I think it would count
as an even bigger success if dialogue between law and Surveillance Studies generated not only a hybridized theoretical discourse of
law-and-Surveillance-Studies but also the beginnings of a more accessible policy discourse about surveillance and privacy, along with
reform proposals designed to put the animating concepts behind such a discourse into practice. Here the goal would be a
hybridization between law’s ingrained pragmatism and Surveillance Studies’ attentiveness to the social and cultural processes
through which surveillance is experienced and assimilated. Working together, legal scholars and Surveillance Studies scholars might
advance the project of formulating working definitions of privacy interests and harms, and might develop more sophisticated
projections of the likely effects of different policy levers that could be brought to bear on systems of surveillance.
Next is Mechanism Education
The Aff’s failure to identify an agent and mechanism makes cost-benefits
analysis impossible, meaning debates take place in an academic vacuum
where tradeoffs are irrelevant. It makes link comparisons vacuous and means
that detailed PICs about substance are all but impossible.
And this turns the Aff – debates over mechanisms for change are crucial to
solve material violence on a large scale
Capulong 9 (Assistant Professor of Law, University of Montana)
(Eduardo R.C., CLIENT ACTIVISM IN PROGRESSIVE LAWYERING THEORY, CLINICAL LAW
REVIEW, 16 Clinical L. Rev. 109, Fall, 2009)
Motivating client activism under dynamic social conditions requires the development and constant assessment and reassessment of
a political perspective that measures that resistance and its possibilities. That
task in turn requires the
development of specific activist goals within the context of such analyses, and perhaps
broader, national and international strategy--what some call the political "next step." This is particularly true
today, when the economic crisis plaguing capitalism, the "war on terror" and climate change undeniably have world-wide
dimensions. Instances
of failure, too, need to be part of that analysis, because they teach us much about why
otherwise promising activist efforts do not become sustained mass movements of the sort to
which we all aspire.¶ Thus, the theoretical need is two-fold: to construct a broader organizing perspective from a political
standpoint, and to consider activism writ large. Without reading the pulse of prevailing social conditions, it is easy to miscalculate
what that next step ought to be. We will not build a mass movement though sheer perseverance--a linear, idealist conception of
change at odds with dynamic social conditions. By the same token, we may underestimate the potential of such mass activism if we
focus simply on the local dimensions of our work.¶ The dialectic between a dynamic social context and political consciousness and
action requires
a constant organizational and political calibration and modulation often missing
from theoretical scholarship. Without such a working perspective, we are apt to be either ultra-left or overly
conservative. As Jim Pope put it recently in the context of new forms of labor organizing: "If we limit our vision of the future to
include only approaches that work within the prevailing legal regime and balance of forces, then we are likely to be irrelevant when
and if the opportunity for a paradigm shift arises." n449 The cyclical nature of labor organizing, he argues, mirrors politics generally:¶
American political life as a whole has likewise alternated between periods characterized by public action, idealism, and reform on
the [*189] one hand, and periods of private interest, materialism, and retrenchment on the other. A prolonged private period
spawns orgies of corruption and extremes of wealth and poverty that, sooner or later, ignite passionate movements for reform.
n450¶ C. 'Activism': Towards a Broader, Deeper, Systematic Framework¶ In
progressive lawyering theory,
grassroots activism is frequently equated with "community organizing" and "movement" or
"mobilization" politics. n451 Indeed, these methods have come to predominate activist lawyering in much the same way as
"public interest law" has come for many to encompass all forms of progressive practice. "Activism" is, of course, broader still. Even
on its own terms, the history of community organizing and social movements in the United States includes two vitally important
traditions frequently given short shrift in this realm: industrial union organizing and alternative political party-building. n452 In this
section, my aim is not to catalogue the myriad ways in which lawyers and clients can and do become active (methodically or
institutionally)--which, given human creativity and progress, in any event may be impossible to do--but rather to
problematize three assumptions: first, the tendency to define grassroots activity narrowly; second, the notion that certain groups-for example "the poor" or the "subordinated"--are the definitive agents of social change; and finally, the conviction that mass
mobilization or movement-building, by itself, is key to social transformation.¶ 1. Grassroots Activism¶ There are countless ways in
which people become socially or politically active. Yet even the more expansive and sophisticated considerations of activism in
progressive lawyering theory tend to unnecessarily circumscribe activism. For example, Cummings and Eagly argue that we need to
"unpack" the term "organizing." n453 Contrasting two strategies of the welfare rights movement in the 1960s, these authors
distinguish between "mobilization as short-term community action and organizing as an effort to build long-term institutional
power." n454 In the same breath, however, they define organizing "as shorthand for a range of community-based practices," n455
even though at least some activism, for example union organizing or, say, [*190] fasting, might not be best characterized as
"community-based."¶ What is required is a larger framework that takes into account the sum total of activist initiatives. Lucie White
argues that we need to "map out the internal microdynamics of progressive grassroots initiatives ... observe the multiple impacts of
different kinds of initiatives on wide spheres of social and political life ... and devise typologies, or models, or theories that map out a
range of opportunities for collaboration." n456 This map would be inadequate--and therefore inaccurate--if we include certain
activist initiatives and not others. But that is precisely what the progressive lawyering literature has done by failing to regularly
consider, for example, union organizing or alternative political party-building.¶ 2. Agents of Social Change: Identity, Class and
Political Ideology As with our definition of activism, here, too, the problem is a lack of clarity, breadth or scope, which leads to
misorientation. Have we defined, with theoretical precision, the social-change agents to whom we are orienting--e.g., the "people,"
the "poor," the "subordinated," "low-income communities" or "communities of color?" And if so, are these groupings, so defined,
the primary agents of social change? By attempting to harmonize three interrelated (yet divergent) approaches to client activism-organizing on the bases of geography and identity, class and the workplace, and political ideology--modern community organizing
simultaneously blurs and balkanizes the social-change agents to whom we need to orient. What, after all, is "community?" In
geographic terms, local efforts alone cannot address social problems with global dimensions. n457 As Pope observed of workers'
centers: "the tension between the local and particularistic focus of community unionism and the global scope of trendsetting
corporations like Wal-Mart makes it highly unlikely that community unionism will displace industrial unionism as 'the' next paradigm
of worker organization." n458 On the other hand, members of cross-class, identity-based "communities" may not necessarily share
the same interests. In the "Asian American community," Ancheta explains: using the word "community" in its singular form is often a
misnomer, because Asian Pacific Americans comprise many communities, each with its own history, culture and language: Filipino,
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Lao, Lao-Mien, [*191] Hmong, Indian, Indonesian, Malaysian, Samoan,
Tongan, Guamanian, Native Hawaiian, and more. The legal problems facing individuals from different communities defy simple
categorization. The problems of a fourth-generation Japanese American victim of job discrimination, a monolingual refugee from
Laos seeking shelter from domestic violence, an elderly immigrant from the Philippines trying to keep a job, and a newcomer from
Western Samoa trying to reunite with relatives living abroad all present unique challenges. Add in factors such as gender, sexual
orientation, age, and disability, and the problems become even more complex. n45 Angela Harris echoes this observation by
pointing out how some feminist legal theory assumes "a unitary, 'essential' women's experience [that] can be isolated and described
independently of race, class, sexual orientation, and other realities of experience." n460 The same might be said of the "people,"
which, like the "working class," may be too broad. Other categorizations--such as "low-income workers," "immigrants", and the
"poor", for example--may be too narrow to have the social weight to fundamentally transform society. In practice, progressive
lawyers orient to the politically advanced among these various "communities." In so doing, then, we need to acknowledge that we
are organizing on the basis of political ideology, and not simply geography, identity or class. Building the strongest possible mass
movement, therefore, requires an orientation not only towards certain "subordinated" communities, but to the politically advanced
generally. Otherwise, we may be undermining activism writ large. This is not to denigrate autonomous community efforts. As I have
mentioned, subordinated communities of course have the right to self-determination, i.e. to organize separately. But the point is not
simply to organize groups of people who experience a particular oppression, but rather to identify those who have the social power
to transform society. Arguing that these agents are the collective, multi-racial working class, Smith explains: The Marxist definition of
the working class has little in common with those of sociologists. Neither income level nor self-definition are [sic] what determine
social class. Although income levels obviously bear some relationship to class, some workers earn the same or higher salaries than
some people who fall into the category of middle class. And many people who consider themselves "middle [*192] class" are in fact
workers. Nor is class defined by categories such as white and blue collar. For Marx the working class is defined by its relationship to
the means of production. Broadly speaking, those who do not control the means of production and are forced to sell their labor
power to capitalists are workers. n461 The practical consequence of this very well may be that we redefine who we represent as
clients and consider activism or potential activism outside subordinated communities, for example union activity and alternative
political-party building, as part of our work.¶ 3. From Movementism to Political Organization¶ Dogged as our work is in the activist
realm, any effort at fundamental social transformation is
doomed without effective political leadership. Such
leadership, in turn, requires work not often associated with "activism," such as, for example, theoretical
study. n462 "Movementism," n463 by which I mean the conviction that building a mass movement is the answer to oppression and
exploitation, has its limitations. Even though activism itself is perhaps the best school for political education, we have an enormous
amount to learn from our predecessors. In the final analysis, fundamental social transformation will only come about if there are
political organizations clear enough, motivated enough, experienced enough, large enough, embedded enough and agile enough to
respond to the twists and turns endemic in any struggle for power. "The problem," as Bellow astutely observed, "is not our analytic
weaknesses, but the opportunistic, strategic, and political character of our subject." n464 Such
opportunities typically
occur when there is a confluence of three factors: a social crisis; a socio-economic elite that
finds itself divided over how to overcome it; and a powerful mass movement from below. As I understand the
nature of social change, successful social transformations occur when there is a fourth element: political organization.¶ Conclusion¶
Client activism is not a monolithic, mechanical object. Most of the time, it is neither the gathering mass movement many of us wish
for, nor the inert, atomized few in need of external, professional motivation. Rather, activism is a phenomenon in constant ebb and
flow, a [*193] mercurial, fluid complex shaped by an unremitting diversity of factors. The key through the maze of lawyering advice
and precaution is therefore to take a hard, sober look at the overarching state of activism. Are our clients in fact active or are they
not? How many are and who are they? What is the nature of this period? Economically? Politically? Culturally? What are the
defining issues? What political and organizing trends can be discerned? With which organizations are our clients active, if any? What
demands are they articulating, and how are they articulating them?¶ This is a complex evaluation, one requiring the formulation,
development and constant assessment and reassessment of an overarching political perspective. My aim in this Article is to begin to
theorize the various approaches to this evaluation. In essence, I am arguing for the elaboration of a systematic macropolitical
analysis in progressive lawyering theory. Here, my purpose is not to present a comprehensive set of political considerations, but
rather to develop a framework for, and to investigate the limitations of, present considerations in three areas: strategic aims;
prevailing social conditions; and methods of activism. Consciously or not, admittedly or not, informed and systematic or not,
progressive lawyers undertake their work with certain assumptions, perspectives and biases. Progressive lawyering theory would be
a much more effective and concrete guide to action--to defining the lawyer's role in fostering activism--if it would elaborate on these
considerations and transform implicit and perhaps delimited assumptions and approaches into explicit and hopefully broader
choices.¶ Over the past four decades, there has been remarkable continuity and consistency in progressive lawyers' use of litigation,
legislation, direct services, education and organizing to stimulate and support client activism. The theoretical "breaks" to which
Buchanan has referred n465 have not been so much about the practice of lawyering itself, but rather about unarticulated shifts in
ultimate goals, societal analyses, and activist priorities, each necessitated by changes in the social, economic, and political context.
That simply is another way of stating the obvious: that progressive lawyers change their practices to adapt to changing
circumstances. The recurrent problem in progressive lawyering theory is that many commentators have tended to generalize these
practice changes to apply across social circumstances. In so doing, they displace and often replace more fundamental differences
over strategic goals, interpretation of social contexts, and organizing priorities with debates over the mechanics of lawyering
practice.¶ The argument is turned on its head: we often assume or tend to [*194] assume agreement over the meanings and
underlying conceptual frameworks relating to "fundamental social change," current political analysis, and "community organizing,"
and debate lawyering strategy and tactics; but instead we should be elaborating and clarifying these threshold
political
considerations as a prerequisite to using what we ultimately agree to be a broad and flexible
set of lawyering tools. In effect, the various approaches to lawyering have become the currency by which scholars have
debated politics and activism. The irony is that our disagreements are less about lawyering approaches per se, I believe, than they
are about our ultimate political objectives, our analyses of contemporary opportunities, and our views of the optimal paths from the
latter to the former. The myriad lawyering descriptions and prescriptions progressive lawyering theory offers are of limited use
unless they are anchored in these primary considerations. How do we decide if we should subscribe to "rebellious" and not
traditional "public interest" lawyering, for example, or "collaborative" over "critical" lawyering, if we do not interrogate these
questions and instead rush too quickly into practical questions? The differences among these approaches matter precisely because
they have different political goals, are based on different political analyses, and employ different political activist strategies.¶ Activist
lawyers already engage in these analyses--necessarily so. To foster client activism, they must read prevailing social conditions and
strategize with their clients about the political next step, often with an eye toward a long-term goal. But I don't think we necessarily
engage in these analyses as consciously, or with as full a picture of the history and dynamics involved or options available, as we
could. Often this is because there simply isn't time to engage these questions. Or perhaps not wanting to dominate our clients, we
squelch our own political analysis and agenda to allow for organic, indigenous leadership from below. But if we are truly
collaborative--and when we feel strongly enough about certain political issues--we engage on issues and argue them out. In either
event, we undertake an unsystematic engagement of these fundamental issues at our peril.¶ If we adhere to the belief that only
organized, politicized masses of people can alter or replace exploitative and oppressive institutions and bring about lasting
fundamental social change, then, as progressive lawyers, we need to be clear about which legal tactics can bring about such a
sustained effort in each historical moment. Without concrete and comprehensive diagnoses of ultimate political goals, social and
economic contexts, and organizing priorities, progressive legal practice will fail to live up to its potential.¶
Now the State debate
We do not need to win that the state is good, rather just that the value of the
state is something that should be debated about. This is the screen you should
adopt for the Aff’s ev – it can’t just say that the state is bad or ineffective, their
ev has to say that the state should not even be discussed. General indictments
of the state can be done on the neg, while still preserving limited and effective
debate and research.
First, engaging with the law is inevitable and can be effective
Capulong 9 (Assistant Professor of Law, University of Montana)
(Eduardo R.C., CLIENT ACTIVISM IN PROGRESSIVE LAWYERING THEORY, CLINICAL LAW
REVIEW, 16 Clinical L. Rev. 109, Fall, 2009)
Nevertheless, in contrast to what Steve Bachmann has called the [*116] "a-legal" or "crude Marxist" approach, n19 progressive
activists recognize that the legal arena remains a forum for social struggle. n20 This is so for three
reasons: First, activists often do not have a choice but to work within the legal system, as when they
are arrested or otherwise prevented from engaging in activism by state authorities. Second, because law is relatively autonomous
from economic and political interests, n21 campaigns for legal reform can win substantial gains and are frequently the only vehicles
through which more far-reaching change takes shape; struggles for reform, in other words, beget more radical possibilities and
aspirations. n22 And third, law
is constitutive of the social order. Law--or, more accurately, the
concept of it--is not (again as some crude analysts would argue) simply a tool of one ruling
class or other, but rather an essential component of a just society. n23¶ Commentators observe that lawyers who base their
practice on these three premises are "hungry for theory," n24 for theory checks the "occupational hazards [of] reformism or
cynicism." n25 The theoretical project is thus a dialectic: while law reform alone cannot "disturb the basic political and economic
organization of modern American society," n26 [*117]
law and lawyering are "a complex, contradictory, and
open-textured setting that provides opportunities to challenge the status quo."¶
Second, debate about arcane legal details are crucial to the short-term
survival of oppressed populations. Outside of the law being good or bad, legal
education is crucial to empower even the most revolutionary of movements.
Arkles et al 10
(Gabriel Arkles, Pooja Gehi and Elana Redfield, The Role of Lawyers in Trans Liberation: Building a
Transformative Movement for Social Change, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, 8 Seattle J. Soc. Just. 579,
Spring / Summer, 2010, LN)
While agenda-setting by lawyers can lead to the replication of patterns of elitism and the reinforcement of systems of oppression,
we do believe that legal work is a necessary and critical way to support movements for social
justice. We must recognize the limitations of the legal system and learn to use that to the
advantage of the oppressed. If lawyers are going to support work that dismantles oppressive structures, we must
radically rethink the roles we can play in building and supporting these movements and
acknowledge that our own individual interests or even livelihood may conflict with doing radical and
transformative work. n162 A. Community Organizing for Social Justice When we use the term community organizing or organizing,
we refer to the activities of organizations engaging in base-building and leadership development of communities directly impacted
by one or more social [*612] problems and conducting direct action issue campaigns intended to make positive change related to
the problem(s). In this article, we discuss community organizing in the context of progressive social change, but communityorganizing strategies can also be used for conservative ends. Community organizing is a powerful means to make social change. A
basic premise of organizing is that inappropriate imbalances of power in society are a central component of social injustice. In order
to have social justice, power relationships must shift. In Organizing for Social Change: Midwest Academy Manual for Activists
(hereinafter, "the Manual"), n163 the authors list three principles of community organizing: n164 (1) winning real, immediate,
concrete improvements in people's lives; (2) giving people a sense of their own power; and (3) altering the relations of power. n165
Before any of these principles can be achieved it is necessary to have leadership by the people impacted by social problems. n166 As
Rinku Sen points out: [E]ven allies working in solidarity with affected groups cannot rival the clarity and power of the people who
have the most to gain and the least to lose . . . organizations composed of people whose lives will change when a new policy is
instituted tend to set goals that are harder to reach, to compromise less, and to stick out a fight longer. n167 She also notes that,
"[I]f we
are to make policy proposals that are grounded in reality and would make a difference
either in peoples' lives or in the debate, then we have to be in touch with the people who are
at the center of such policies. n168 We believe community organizing has the potential to make fundamental social
change that law reform strategies or "movements" led by lawyers cannot achieve on their own. However, community organizing is
not always just and effective. Community-organizing groups are not immune to any number of problems that can impact other
organizations, including internal oppressive dynamics. In fact, some strains of white, male-dominated [*613] community organizing
have been widely criticized as perpetuating racism and sexism. n169 Nonetheless, models of community organizing, particularly as
revised by women of color and other leaders from marginalized groups, have much greater potential to address fundamental
imbalances of power than law reform strategies. They also have a remarkable record of successes. Tools from community organizers
can help show where other strategies can fit into a framework for social change. The authors of the Manual, for example, describe
various strategies for addressing social issues and illustrate how each of them may, at least to some extent, be effective. n170 They
then plot out various forms of making social change on a continuum in terms of their positioning with regard to existing social power
relationships. n171 They place direct services at the end of the spectrum that is most accepting of existing power relationships and
community organizing at the end of the spectrum that most challenges existing power relationships. n172 Advocacy organizations
are listed in the middle, closer to community organizing than direct services. n173 The Four Pillars of Social Justice Infrastructure
model, a tool of the Miami Workers Center, is somewhat more nuanced than the Manual. n174 According to this model, four
"pillars" are the key to transformative social justice. n175 They are (1) the pillar of service, which addresses community needs and
stabilizes community members' lives; (2) the pillar of policy, which changes policies and institutions and achieves concrete gains with
benchmarks for progress; (3) the pillar of consciousness, which alters public opinion and shifts political parameters through media
advocacy and popular education; and (4) the pillar of power, which achieves autonomous community power through base-building
and leadership development. n176 According to the Miami Workers Center, all of these pillars are essential in making social change,
but the pillar of power is most crucial in the struggle to win true liberation for all oppressed communities. n177 [*614] In their
estimation, our movements suffer when the pillar of power is forgotten and/or not supported by the other pillars, or when the
pillars are seen as separate and independent, rather than as interconnected, indispensable aspects of the whole infrastructure that
is necessary to build a just society. n178 Organizations with whom we work are generally dedicated solely to providing services,
changing policies, or providing public education. Unfortunately, each of these endeavors exists separate from one another and
perhaps most notably, separate from community organizing. In SRLP's vision of change, this separation is part of maintaining
structural capitalism that seeks to maintain imbalances of power in our society. Without incorporating the pillar of power, service
provision, policy change, and public education can never move towards real social justice. n179 B. Lawyering for Empowerment In
the past few decades, a number of alternative theories have emerged that help lawyers find a place in social movements that do not
replicate oppression. n180 Some of the most well-known iterations of this theme are "empowerment lawyering," "rebellious
lawyering," and "community lawyering." n181 These perspectives share skepticism of the efficacy of impact litigation and traditional
direct services for improving the conditions faced by poor clients and communities of color, because they do not and cannot
effectively address the roots of these forms of oppression. n182 Rather, these alternative visions of lawyering center on the
empowerment of community members and organizations, the elimination of the potential for dependency on lawyers and the legal
system, and the collaboration between lawyers and directly impacted communities in priority setting. n183 Of the many models of
alternative lawyering with the goal of social justice, we will focus on the idea of "lawyering for empowerment," generally. The goal
of empowerment lawyering is to enable a group of people to gain control of the forces that affect their lives. n184 Therefore, the
goal of empowerment lawyering for low-income transgender people of [*615] color is to support these communities in confronting
the economic and social policies that limit their life chances.¶ Rather than merely representing poor people in court and increasing
access to services, the role of the community or empowerment lawyer involves:¶ organizing, community education, media outreach,
petition drives, public demonstrations, lobbying, and shaming campaigns . . . [I]ndividuals and members of community-based
organizations actively work alongside organizers and lawyers in the day-to-day strategic planning of their case or campaign.
Proposed solutions--litigation or non-litigation based--are informed by the clients' knowledge and experience of the issue. n185¶ A
classic example of the complex role of empowerment within the legal agenda setting is the question of whether to take cases that
have low chances of success. The traditional approach would suggest not taking the case, or settling for limited outcomes that may
not meet the client's expectations. However, when our goals shift to empowerment, our strategies change as well. If we understand
that the legal system is incapable of providing a truly favorable outcome for low-income transgender clients and transgender clients
of color, then winning and losing cases takes on different meanings.¶ For example, a transgender client may choose to bring a
lawsuit against prison staff who sexually assaulted her, despite limited chance of success because of the "blue wall of silence," her
perceived limited credibility as a prisoner, barriers to recovery from the Prison Litigation Reform Act, and restrictions on supervisory
liability in § 1983 cases. Even realizing the litigation outcome will probably be unfavorable to her, she may still develop leadership
skills by rallying a broader community of people impacted by similar issues. Additionally, she may use the knowledge and energy
gained through the lawsuit to change policy. If our goal is to familiarize our client with the law, to provide an opportunity for the
client [*616] and/or community organizers to educate the public about the issues, to help our client assess the limitations of the
legal system on their own, or to play a role in a larger organizing strategy, then taking cases with little chance of achieving a legal
remedy can be a useful strategy.¶ Lawyering
for empowerment means not relying solely on legal
expertise for decisionmaking. It means recognizing the limitations of the legal system, and using
our knowledge and expertise to help disenfranchised communities take leadership. If community
organizing is the path to social justice and "organizing is about people taking a role in determining their own future and improving
the quality of life not only for themselves but for everyone," then "the primary goal [of empowerment lawyering] is building up the
community." n186¶ C. Sharing Information and Building Leadership¶ A key to meaningful participation in social justice movements is
access to information. Lawyers are in an especially good position to help transfer knowledge, skills, and information to
disenfranchised communities--the
legal system is maintained by and predicated on arcane knowledge
that lacks relevance in most contexts but takes on supreme significance in courts, politics, and
regulatory agencies. It is a system intentionally obscure to the uninitiated; therefore the lawyer has the opportunity to
expose the workings of the system to those who seek to destroy it, dismantle it, reconfigure it, and re-envision it.¶ As Quigley points
out, the ignorance of the client enriches the lawyer's power position, and thus the transfer of the power from the lawyer to the
client necessitates a sharing of information. n187 Rather than simply performing the tasks that laws require, a lawyer has the option
to teach and to collaborate with clients so that they can bring power and voice back to their communities and perhaps fight against
the system, become politicized, and take leadership. "This demands that the lawyer undo the secret wrappings of the legal system
and share the essence of legal advocacy--doing so lessens the mystical power of the lawyer, and, in practice, enriches the advocate
in the sharing and developing of rightful power." n188¶ Lawyers have many opportunities to share knowledge and skills as a form of
leadership development. This sharing can be accomplished, for example, through highly collaborative legal representation, through
community clinics, through skill-shares, or through policy or campaign meetings where the lawyer explains what they know about
the existing structures and fills in gaps and questions raised by activists about the workings of legal systems.¶ D. Helping to Meet
Survival Needs¶ SRLP sees our work as building legal services and policy change that directly supports the pillar of power. n189
Maintaining an awareness of the limitations and pitfalls of traditional legal services, we strive to provide services in a larger context
and with an approach that can help support libratory work. n190 For this reason we provide direct legal services but also work
toward leadership development in our communities and a deep level of support for our community-organizing allies.¶ Our approach
in this regard is to make sure our community members access and obtain all of the benefits to which they are entitled under the law,
and to protect our community members as much as possible from the criminalization, discrimination, and harassment they face
when attempting to live their lives. While we do not believe that the root causes keeping our clients in poverty and poor health can
be addressed in this way, we also believe that our clients experience the most severe impact from state policies and practices and
need and that they deserve support to survive them. n191 Until our communities are truly empowered and our systems are
fundamentally changed to increase life chances and health for transgender people who are low-income and people of color, our
communities are going to continue to have to navigate government agencies and organizations to survive.¶
Monolithic rejections of the law are wrong – cooption is more likely in nonstate activism and fails to compare to alternative mechanisms for change.
Concrete mechanisms for success should be your metric for evaluation.
Lobel 7 (Assistant Professor of Law, University of San Diego)
(Orly, THE PARADOX OF EXTRALEGAL ACTIVISM: CRITICAL LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND
TRANSFORMATIVE POLITICS, 120 Harv. L. Rev. 937, February, 2007, LN)
In the following sections, I argue that the extralegal model has suffered from the same drawbacks associated with legal cooptation. I
show that as an effort to avoid the risk of legal cooptation, the current wave of suggested alternatives has effects that ironically
mirror those of cooptation itself. Three central types of difficulties exist with contemporary extralegal scholarship. First, in the
contexts of the labor and civil rights movements, arguments
about legal cooptation often developed in
response to a perceived gap between the conceptual ideal toward which a social reform group
struggled and its actual accomplishments. But, ironically, the contemporary message of opting out of traditional legal
reform avenues may only accentuate this problem. As the rise of informalization (moving to nonlegal strategies), civil society
(moving to extralegal spheres), and pluralism (the proliferation of norm-generating actors) has been effected and appropriated by
supporters from a wide range of political commitments, these concepts have had unintended implications that conflict with the very
social reform ideals from which they stem. Second, the
idea of opting out of the legal arena becomes selfdefeating as it discounts the ongoing importance of law and the possibilities of legal reform in seemingly
unregulated spheres. A model encompassing exit and rigid sphere distinctions further fails to recognize a reality of increasing
interpenetration and the blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres, profit and nonprofit sectors, and formal and
informal institutions. It therefore loses the critical insight that law operates in the background of seemingly unregulated
relationships. Again paradoxically, the
extralegal view of decentralized activism and the division of
society into different spheres in fact have worked to subvert rather than support the
progressive agenda. Finally, since extralegal actors view their actions with romantic idealism, they fail to develop tools for
evaluating their success. If the critique of legal cooptation has involved the argument that legal reform, even when viewed as a
victory, is never radically transformative, we must ask: what are the criteria for assessing the achievements of the suggested
alternatives? As I illustrate in the following sections, much of the current scholarship obscures the
lines between the
descriptive and the prescriptive in its formulation of social activism. If current suggestions present
themselves as alternatives to formal legal struggles, we must question whether the new extralegal politics that are proposed and
celebrated are capable of producing a constructive theory and meaningful channels for reform, rather than passive status quo
politics.¶ A. Practical Failures: When Extralegal Alternatives Are Vehicles for Conservative Agendas¶ We don't want the 1950s back.
What we want is to edit them. We want to keep the safe streets, the friendly grocers, and the milk and cookies, while blotting out
the political bosses, the tyrannical headmasters, the inflexible rules, and the lectures on 100 percent Americanism and the sinfulness
of dissent. n163¶ A basic structure of cooptation arguments as developed in relation to the labor and civil rights movements has
been to show how, in
the move from theory to practice, the ideal that was promoted by a social
group takes on unintended content, and the group thus fails to realize the original vision. This
risk is particularly high when ideals are framed in broad terms that are open to multiple interpretations. Moreover, the pitfalls of the
potential risks presented under the umbrella of cooptation are in fact accentuated in current proposals. Paradoxically, as the
extralegal movement is framed by way of opposition to formal legal reform paths, without sufficiently defining its goals, it runs the
very risks it sought to avoid by working outside the legal system.¶ Extralegal paths are depicted mostly in negative terms and as
resorting to new alternative forms of action rather than established models. Accordingly, because the ideas of social organizing, civil
society, and legal pluralism are framed in open-ended contrarian terms, they do not translate into specific visions of social justice
reform. The idea of civil society, which has been embraced by people from a broad array of often conflicting ideological
commitments, is particularly demonstrative. Critics argue that "some ideas fail because they never make the light of day. The idea of
civil society ... failed because it [*972] became too popular." n164 Such a broadly conceived ideal as civil society sows the seeds of its
own destruction.¶ In former eras, the claims about the legal cooptation of the transformative visions of workplace justice and racial
equality suggested that through legal strategies the visions became stripped of their initial depth and fragmented and framed in
ways that were narrow and often merely symbolic. This observation seems accurate in the contemporary political arena; the idea of
civil society revivalism evoked by progressive activists has been reduced to symbolic acts with very little substance. On the
left,
progressive advocates envision decentralized activism in a third, nongovernmental sphere as a
way of reviving democratic participation and rebuilding the state from the bottom up. By
contrast, the idea of civil society has been embraced by conservative politicians as a means for replacing government-funded
programs and steering away from state intervention. As a result, recent political uses of civil society have subverted the ideals of
progressive social reform and replaced them with conservative agendas that reject egalitarian views of social provision.¶ In
particular, recent calls to strengthen civil society have been advanced by politicians interested in dismantling the modern welfare
system. Conservative civil society revivalism often equates the idea of self-help through extralegal means with traditional family
structures, and blames the breakdown of those structures (for example, the rise of the single parent family) for the increase in
reliance and dependency on government aid. n165 This recent depiction of the third sphere of civic life works against legal reform
precisely because state intervention may support newer, nontraditional social structures. For conservative thinkers, legal reform
also risks increasing dependency on social services by groups who have traditionally been marginalized, including disproportionate
reliance on public funds by people of color and single mothers. Indeed, the end of welfare as we knew it, n166 as well as the [*973]
transformation of work as we knew it, n167 is closely related to the quest of thinkers from all sides of the political spectrum for a
third space that could replace the traditional functions of work and welfare. Strikingly, a range of liberal and conservative visions
have thus converged into the same agenda, such as the recent welfare-to-work reforms, which rely on myriad non-governmental
institutions and activities to support them. n168¶ When analyzed from the perspective of the unbundled cooptation critique, it
becomes evident that there are multiple limits to the contemporary extralegal current. First, there have been significant problems
with resources and zero-sum energies in the recent campaigns promoting community development and welfare. For example, the
initial vision of welfare-to-work supported by liberal reformers was a multifaceted, dynamic system that would reshape the roles
and responsibilities of the welfare bureaucracy. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 n169
(PRWORA), supported by President Clinton, was designed to convert various welfare programs, including Aid to Families with
Dependent Children, into a single block grant program. The aim was to transform passive cash assistance into a more active welfare
system, in which individuals would be better assisted, by both the government and the community, to return to the labor force and
find opportunities to support themselves. Yet from the broad vision to actual implementation, the program quickly became limited
in focus and in resources. Indeed, PRWORA placed new limits on welfare provision by eliminating eligibility categories and by placing
rigid time limits on the provision of benefits. n170¶ Moreover, the need to frame questions relating to work, welfare, and poverty in
institutional arrangements and professional jargon and to comply with various funding block grants has made some issues, such as
the statistical reduction of welfare recipients, more salient, whereas other issues, such as the quality of jobs offered, have been
largely eliminated from policymakers' consideration. Despite aspects of the reform that were hailed as empowering for those groups
they were designed to help, such as individual private training vouchers, serious questions have been raised about the adequacy of
the particular [*974] policy design because resources and institutional support have been found lacking. n171 The reforms require
individual choices and rely on the ability of private recipients to mine through a vast range of information. As in the areas of child
care, health care, and educational vouchers, critics worry that the most disadvantaged workers in the new market will not be able to
take advantage of the reforms. n172 Under such conditions, the goal of eliminating poverty may be eroded and replaced by other
goals, such as reducing public expenses. Thus, recalling the earlier cooptation critique, once reforms are envisioned, even when they
need not be framed in legalistic terms, they in some ways become reduced to a handful of issues, while fragmenting, neglecting, and
ultimately neutralizing other possibilities.¶ At this point, the paradox of extralegal activism unfolds. While public interest thinkers
increasingly embrace an axiomatic rejection of law as the primary form of progress, their preferred form of activism presents the
very risks they seek to avoid. The rejected "myth of the law" is replaced by a "myth of activism" or a "myth of exit," romanticizing a
distinct sphere that can better solve social conflict. Yet these myths, like other myths, come complete with their own perpetual
perils. The myth of exit exemplifies the myriad concerns of cooptation. For feminist agendas, for example, the separation of the
world into distinct spheres of action has been a continuous impediment to meaningful reform. Efforts to create better possibilities
for women to balance work and family responsibilities, including relaxing home work rules and supporting stay-at-home parents
through federal child care legislation, have been couched in terms of support for individual choice and private decisionmaking. n173
Indeed, recent initiatives in federal child care legislation to support stay-at-home parents have been clouded by preconceptions of
the separation of spheres and the need to make one-or-the-other life choices. Most importantly, the emergence of a sphereoriented discourse abandons a critical perspective that distinguishes between valuing traditional gender-based characteristics and
celebrating feminine difference in a universalist and essentialist manner. n174 [*975] Not surprisingly then, some feminist writers
have responded to civil society revivalism with great skepticism, arguing that efforts to align feminine values and agendas with
classic republican theory of civil society activism should be understood, at least in part, as a way of legitimizing historical social
structures that subordinated women.¶ The feminist lesson on the law/exit pendulum reveals a broader pattern. In a classic example
of cooptation, activists should be concerned about the infusion (or indeed confusion) of nonlegal strategies with conservative
privatization agendas. Indeed, in significant social policy contexts, legal scholarship oriented toward the exploration of extralegal
paths reinforces the exact narrative that it originally resisted - that the state cannot and should not be accountable for sustaining
and improving the lifeworld of individuals in the twenty-first-century economy and that we must seek alternative ways to bring
about social reform. Whether using the terminology of a path-dependent process, an inevitable downward spiral, a transnational
prisoner's dilemma, or a global race to the bottom, current analyses often suggest a lack of control over the forces of new economic
realities. Rather than countering the story of lack of control, pointing to the ongoing role of government and showing the
contradictions between that which is being kept regulated and that which is privatized, alternative extralegal scholarship accepts
these developments as natural and inevitable. Similar to the arguments developed in relation to the labor movement - in which
focusing on a limited right to collective bargaining demobilized workers and stripped them of their voice, participation, and
decisionmaking power - contemporary extralegal agendas are limited to very narrow and patterned sets of reforms.¶ A striking
example has been the focus on welfare reform as the single frontier of economic redistribution without a connection being made
between these reforms and social services in which the middle class has a strong interest, such as Social Security and Medicare.
Similarly, on the legal pluralism frontier, when activists call for more corporate social responsibility, the initial expressions are those
of broad demands for sustainable development and overall industry obligations for the social and environmental consequences of
their activities. n176 The discourse, however, quickly becomes coopted by a shift to a narrow focus on charitable donations and
corporate philanthropy or [*976] private reporting absent an institutionalized compliance structure. n177 Moreover, because of
institutional limitations and crowding out effects possible in any type of reform agenda, the focus shifts to the benefits of corporate
social responsibility to businesses, as marketing, recruit-ment, public relations, and "greenwashing" strategies. n178 Critics therefore
become deeply cynical about the industry's real commitments to ethical conduct.¶ A similar process can be described with regard to
the literature on globalization. Globalization scholarship often attempts to produce a unifying narrative and an image of unitary
struggle when in fact such unity does not exist. Embodied in the aforementioned irony of a "global anti-globalization" movement,
social reform activism that resides under the umbrella of global movements is greatly diverse, some of it highly conservative. An
"anti-globalization" movement can be a defensive nationalist movement infused with xenophobia and protective ideologies. n179 In
fact, during central instances of collective action, such as those in Seattle, Quebec, Puerto Alegre, and Genoa, competing and
conflicting claims were frequently encompassed in the same protest. n180 Nevertheless, there is a tendency to celebrate and
idealize these protests as united and world-altering.¶ Similarly, at the local level, grassroots politics often lack a clear agenda and are
particularly ripe for cooptation resulting in far lesser achievements than what may have been expected by the groups involved. In a
critical introduction to the law and organizing model, Professor Scott Cummings and Ingrid Eagly describe the ways in which new
community-based approaches to progressive lawyering privilege grassroots activism over legal reform efforts and the facilitation of
community mobilization over conventional lawyering. n181 After carefully unpacking the ways in which community lawyers embrace
[*977] law and organizing, Professor Cummings and Eagly rightfully warn against "exaggerating the ineffectiveness of traditional
legal interventions" and "closing off potential avenues for redress." n182 Significantly, the strategies embraced by new public
interest lawyers have not been shown to produce effective change in communities, and certainly there has been no assurance that
these strategies fare comparatively better than legal reform. Moreover, what are meant to be progressive projects of community
action and community economic development frequently can have a hidden effect of excluding worse-off groups, such as migrant
workers, because of the geographical scope and zoning restrictions of the project. n183 In the same way that the labor and
corporate social responsibility movements have failed because of their embrace of a legal framework, the community economic
development movement - so diverse in its ideological appeal yet so prominent since the early 1990s as a major approach to poverty
relief - may bring about its own destruction by fracture and diffusion. n184¶ In all of these cases, it is the act of engagement, not law,
that holds the risks of cooptation and the politics of compromise. It is not the particularities of lawyers as a professional group that
create dependency. Rather, it is the dynamics between skilled, networked, and resourced components and those who need them
that may submerge goals and create reliance. It is not the particularities of the structural limitations of the judiciary that threaten to
limit the progressive vision of social movements. Rather, it is the essential difficulties of implementing theory into practice. Life is
simply messier than abstract ideals. Cooptation analysis exposes the broad, general risk of assuming ownership over a rhetorical and
conceptual framework of a movement for change. Subsequently, when, in practice, other factions in the political debate embrace
the language and frame their projects in similar terms, groups experience a sense of loss of control or possession of "their" vision. In
sum, in the contemporary context, in the absence of a more programmatic and concrete vision of what alternative models of social
reform activism need to achieve, the conclusions and rhetoric of the contemporary critical legal consciousness are appropriated by
advocates representing a wide range of political commitments. Understood [*978] from this perspective, cooptation is not the result
of the turn to a particular reform strategy. Rather, cooptation occurs when imagined ideals are left unchecked and seemingly
progressive rhetoric is reproduced by a conservative agenda. Dominant interpretations such as privatization and market
competitiveness come out ahead, whereas other values, such as group empowerment and redistributive justice, receive only
symbolic recognition, and in turn serve to facilitate and stabilize the process. n185¶
Neoliberalism K
The AFF’s paranoia of excessive government induces neoliberalism’s control of
society
Anderson 12
Ben Anderson, Reader in the Department of Geography at Durham University, “Affect and
biopower: towards a politics of life,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 37,
No. 1, p. 37-8, fwang
By ‘affective condition’ I mean an affective atmosphere that predetermines how something – in this case the state – is habitually encountered, disclosed and can be related to.
Bearing a family resemblance to concepts such as ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1977) or ‘emotional situation’ (Virno 2004), an ‘affective condition’ involves the same doubled
and seemingly contradictory sense of the ephemeral or transitory alongside the structured or durable. As such, it does not slavishly determine action. An ‘affective condition’
shapes and influences as atmospheres are taken up and reworked in lived experience, becoming part of the emotions that will infuse policies or programmes, and may be
transmitted through assemblages of people, information and things that attempt to organise life in terms of the market.
State-phobia obviously exists
in complex coexistence with other affective conditions. To give but two examples, note how Connolly (2008) shows how
existential bellicosity and ressentiments infuse the networks of think tanks, media and
companies that promote neoliberal policies . Or consider how Berlant (2008) shows how ‘nearly utopian’ affects of belonging to a world
of work are vital to the promise of neoliberal policies in the context of precariousness. In addition state-phobia has and will vary as it is
articulated with distinct political movements. For example, the USA ‘Tea Party’ phenomenon is
arguably animated by an intensified state-phobia named in the spectre of ‘Big Government’
and linked to a reactivation of Cold War anxieties about the threat of ‘Socialism’. But the ‘Tea Party’ also
involves a heady combination of white entitlement and racism, affective-ideational feelings of freedom, and the pervasive economic insecurity that follows from economic crisis.
How, then, do we get from state-phobia to a logic of governing that purports to govern ‘as little
as possible’ but actually intervenes ‘all the way down’ through ‘ permanent activity, vigilance
and intervention ’ (Foucault 2008, 246)? State-phobia traverses quite different apparatuses, and
changes across those apparatuses. As Foucault puts it, it has many ‘agents and promoters’ (2008, 76), meaning that it can no longer be localised.
It circulates alongside the concern with excessive government, reappears in different sites and therefore overflows any one neoliberalising apparatus (2008, 187). Hinting to a
Foucault differentiates it from a similarly ‘ambiguous’ phobia at the end of the 18th century
about despotism, as linked to tyranny and arbitrariness (2008, 76). State-phobia is different . It gives a push to the
question of whether government is excessive, and as such animates policies and programmes
that are based on extending the market form to all of society . State-phobia is, on this account, both
cause and effect of the neoliberal identification of an ‘economic-political invariant’ (2008, 111)
across disparate forms of economic intervention (including the New Deal, Keynesianism and Nazism). Developing Foucault’s brief
comments on its ‘inflationary’ logic (2008, 187), we can think of state-phobia as being bound up with the
anticipatory hyper-vigilance of paranoia (Sedgwick 2003). It is based on an ‘elision of actuality’ that passes over what the state is actually
doing to always find the ‘great fantasy of the paranoiac and devouring state’ (Foucault 2008, 188). In short,
neoliberalism is imbued with a suspicion of any state economic action that is not wholly in the
service of organising life around the market form.
genealogy of state-affects,
The idea of racism is swabbed through the neoliberal ideology- failure to take
into account reinforces racist pedagogy
Davis, 08
(Angela Y. Davis is a Professor of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies University of California, Santa Cruz. “Recognizing
Racism in the Era of Neoliberalism.”
http://www.omi.wa.gov.au/resources/clearinghouse/Recognizing_Racism_in_the_Era_of_Neoliberalism_davis.pdf. Date Accessed07/22/15.//Anshul)
To recapitulate, neoliberalism sees the market as the very paradigm of freedom and democracy emerges¶ as a synonym for
capitalism, which has reemerged as the telos of history. In the official narratives of U.S.¶ history, the historical victories of Civil Rights
are dealt with as the final consolidation of democracy in¶ the U.S., having relegating racism to the dustbin of history. The
path
toward the complete elimination¶ of racism is represented in the neoliberalist discourse of
colorblindness. Equality can only be achieved¶ when the law, as well as individual subjects,
become blind to race and fail to apprehend the material and¶ ideological work that race
continues to do.¶ When obvious examples of racism appear to the public, they are considered to be
isolated aberrations,¶ to be addressed as anachronistic attributes of individual behavior. There have been a number of
such¶ cases in recent months in the U.S. I mention the noose that was hung on a tree branch by white students¶ 1 What is
Neoliberalism? A Brief Definition for Activists by Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia¶
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=376¶ Vice Chancellor’s Oration 2008¶ at a school in Jena, Louisiana as a sign that black
students were prohibited from gathering under that¶ tree. I can also allude to the public use of racist expletives by a well-known
white comedian, the racist¶ and misogynist language employed by a well-known radio host in referring to black women on a college¶
basketball team, and finally, the recent comments regarding the golfer Tiger Woods.¶ Perhaps I should elaborate on this final
example: two sports journalists were recently involved in a¶ conversation regarding the seemingly unstoppable Tiger Woods in
relation to the new generation of¶ golfers, who are having great difficulty catching up with him. One journalist noted that the
younger¶ golfers would probably have to get together and gang up on Woods. The other responded by saying that¶ they would have
to catch him and “lynch him in a back alley,” thus conjuring, with a single casual phrase,¶ a vast repressed history of ruthless racist
violence.¶ These comments were, of course, readily identified as racist, familiar – exceedingly familiar – expressions¶ of
attitudinal racism that are now treated as anachronistic expressions of racism that were once
articulated¶ with state-sponsored racisms but are now relegated to the private sphere and only
become public when¶ they are literally publicized. Whereas, during an earlier period in our history, such comments would have¶
been clearly understood as linked to state policy and to the material practices of social institutions, they¶ are now treated
as
individual and private irregularities, to be solved by punishing and reeducating the¶ individual
by teaching them colorblindness, by teaching them not to notice the phenomenon of race.¶ But
if we see these individual eruptions of racism as connected to the persistence and further entrenchment¶ of institutional and
structural racism that hides behind the curtain of neoliberalism, their meanings¶ cannot be understood as individual aberrations. In
the cases we have discussed, the racism is explicit¶ and blatant. There is no denying that these are racist utterances. What happens,
however, when racism¶ is expressed, not through the words of individuals, but rather through institutional practices that are¶
“mute” – to borrow the term Dana-Ain Davis uses – with respect to racism?2¶ The inability to recognize the contemporary
persistence of racisms within institutions and other social¶ structures results in the attribution of responsibility for the effects of
racisms to the individuals who¶ are its casualties, thus
further exacerbating the problem of failing to identify
the economic, social, and¶ ideological work of racism. There is a similar logic undergirding the criminalization
of those communities,¶ which are vastly overrepresented in jails and prisons. By failing to recognize the material
forces of racism¶ that are responsible for offering up such large numbers of black and Latino
youth to the carceral state,¶ the process of criminalization imputes responsibility to the individuals who are its casualties,
thus¶ reproducing the very conditions that produce racist patterns in incarceration and its seemingly infinite¶ capacity to expand.
The misreading of these racist patterns replicates and reinforces the privatization¶ that is at
the core of neoliberalism, whereby social activity is individualized and the enormous profits¶
generated by the punishment industry are legitimized.¶ O
The impact is extinction – neoliberal social organization ensures extinction from
resource wars, climate change, and structural violence – only accelerating
beyond neoliberalism can resolve its impacts
Williams & Srnicek 13
(Alex, PhD student at the University of East London, presently at work on a thesis entitled
'Hegemony and Complexity', Nick, PhD candidate in International Relations at the London
School of Economics, Co-authors of the forthcoming Folk Politics, 14 May 2013,
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationistpolitics/)
At the begin-ning of the second dec-ade of the Twenty-First Cen-tury, global civilization faces a
new breed of cataclysm. These com-ing apo-ca-lypses ridicule the norms and organ-isa-tional
struc-tures of the polit-ics which were forged in the birth of the nation-state, the rise of
cap-it-al-ism, and a Twen-ti-eth Cen-tury of unpre-ced-en-ted wars. 2. Most significant is the
break-down of the planetary climatic system. In time, this threatens the continued existence
of the present global human population. Though this is the most crit-ical of the threats which
face human-ity, a series of lesser but potentially equally destabilising problems exist along-side
and inter-sect with it. Terminal resource depletion, especially in water and energy reserves,
offers the prospect of mass starvation, collapsing economic paradigms, and new hot and cold
wars. Continued financial crisis has led governments to embrace the para-lyz-ing death spiral
policies of austerity, privatisation of social welfare services, mass unemployment, and
stagnating wages. Increasing automation in production processes includ­ing ‘intel­lec­tual
labour’ is evidence of the secular crisis of capitalism, soon to render it incapable of
maintaining current standards of living for even the former middle classes of the global north.
3. In con-trast to these ever-accelerating cata-strophes, today’s politics is beset by an inability
to generate the new ideas and modes of organisation necessary to transform our societies to
confront and resolve the coming annihilations . While crisis gath-ers force and speed, polit-ics
with-ers and retreats. In this para-lysis of the polit-ical ima-gin-ary, the future has been
cancelled. 4. Since 1979, the hegemonic global political ideology has been neoliberalism, found
in some vari-ant through-out the lead-ing eco-nomic powers. In spite of the deep struc-tural
chal-lenges the new global prob-lems present to it, most imme-di-ately the credit, fin-an-cial,
and fiscal crises since 2007 – 8, neoliberal programmes have only evolved in the sense of
deep-en-ing. This continuation of the neo-lib-eral pro-ject, or neo-lib-er-al-ism 2.0, has begun to
apply another round of structural adjustments, most sig-ni-fic-antly in the form of encour-aging
new and aggress-ive incur-sions by the private sec-tor into what remains of social demo-cratic
insti-tu-tions and ser-vices. This is in spite of the immediately negative eco-nomic and social
effects of such policies, and the longer term fun-da-mental bar-ri-ers posed by the new global
crises.
The alternative articulates a “counter-conduct” – voting neg pushes towards a
cooperative conduct that organizes individuals around a collectively shared
commons – affirming this conduct creates a new heuristic that de-couples
government from the demand for competition and production
Dardot & Laval 13
(Pierre Dardot, philosopher and specialist in Hegel and Marx, Christian Laval, professor of
sociology at the Universite Paris Ouest Nanterre La Defense, The New Way of the World: On
Neoliberal Society, pgs. 318-321)
This indicates to what extent we must take on board in our own way the main lesson of neoliberalism: the subject is always to be constructed . The whole question is then how to
articulate subjectivation with resistance to power. Now, precisely this issue is at the heart of all of Foucault’s thought. However, as
Jeffrey T. Nealon has recently shown, part of the North American secondary literature has, on the contrary, stressed the alleged break between Foucault’s research on power
and that of his last period on the history of subjectivity.55 According to the ‘Foucault consensus’, as Nealon aptly dubs it, the successive impasses of the initial neo-structuralism,
and then of the totalizing analysis of panoptical power, led the ‘last Foucault’ to set aside the issue of power and concern himself exclusively with the aesthetic invention of a
style of existence bereft of any political dimension. Furthermore, if we follow this de-politicizing reading of Foucault, the aestheticization of ethics anticipated the neo-liberal
mutation precisely by making self-invention a new norm. In reality, far from being oblivious of one another, the issues of power and the subject were always closely articulated,
even in the last work on modes of subjectivation. If one concept played a decisive role in this respect, it was ‘counter-conduct’, as developed in the lecture of 1 March 1978.56
‘forms of resistance of conduct’
that are the correlate of the pastoral mode of power. If such forms of resistance are said to be
‘of conduct’, it is because they are forms of resistance to power as conduct and, as such, are
themselves forms of conduct opposed to this ‘power-conduct’ . The term ‘conduct’ in fact
This lecture was largely focused on the crisis of the pastorate. It involved identifying the specificity of the ‘revolts’ or
admits of two meanings: an activity that consists in conducting others, or ‘conduction’ ; and
the way one conducts oneself under the influence of this activity of conduction.57 The idea
of ‘counter-conduct’ therefore has the advantage of directly signifying a ‘struggle against the
procedures implemented for conducting others’, unlike the term ‘misconduct’, which only
refers to the passive sense of the word.58 Through ‘counter-conduct’, people seek both to
escape conduction by others and to define a way of conducting themselves towards others .¶
What relevance might this observation have for a reflection on resistance to neo-liberal
governmentality? It will be said that the concept is introduced in the context of an analysis of
the pastorate, not government. Governmentality, at least in its specifically neo-liberal form,
precisely makes conducting others through their conduct towards themselves its real goal. The
peculiarity of this conduct towards oneself, conducting oneself as a personal enterprise, is that
it immediately and directly induces a certain conduct towards others: competition with
others , regarded as so many personal enterprises. Consequently, counter-conduct as a form of resistance to this governmentality must correspond to a conduct that is
indivisibly a conduct towards oneself and a conduct towards others. One cannot struggle against such an indirect mode of conduction by appealing for rebellion against an
authority that supposedly operates through compulsion external to individuals. If ‘politics is nothing more and nothing less than that which is born with resistance to
governmentality, the first revolt, the first confrontation’,59 it means that ethics and politics are absolutely inseparable.¶ To the subjectivation-subjection represented by ultra-
To neo-liberal governmentality as a specific way of
conducting the conduct of others, we must therefore oppose a no less specific double refusal:
a refusal to conduct oneself towards oneself as a personal enterprise and a refusal to
subjectivation, we must oppose a subjectivation by forms of counter-conduct.
conduct oneself towards others in accordance with the norm of competition . As such, the
double refusal is not ‘passive disobedience’.60 For, if it is true that the personal enterprise’s
relationship to the self immediately and directly determines a certain kind of relationship to
others – generalized competition – conversely, the refusal to function as a personal
enterprise, which is self-distance and a refusal to line up in the race for performance, can only
practically occur on condition of establishing cooperative relations with others , sharing and
pooling . In fact, where would be the sense in a self-distance severed from any cooperative
practice? At worst, a cynicism tinged with contempt for those who are dupes. At best, simulation or double dealing, possibly dictated by a wholly justified concern for
self-preservation, but ultimately exhausting for the subject. Certainly not a counter-conduct. All the more so in that such a game could lead the
subject, for want of anything better, to take refuge in a compensatory identity , which at least
has the advantage of some stability by contrast with the imperative of indefinite selftranscendence. Far from threatening the neo-liberal order, fixation with identity , whatever its
nature, looks like a fall-back position for subjects weary of themselves, for all those who have
abandoned the race or been excluded from it from the outset. Worse, it recreates the logic of
competition at the level of relations between ‘little communities’. Far from being valuable in
itself, independently of any articulation with politics, individual subjectivation is bound up at its
very core with collective subjectivation. In this sense, sheer aestheticization of ethics is a pure
and simple abandonment of a genuinely ethical attitude. The invention of new forms of
existence can only be a collective act , attributable to the multiplication and intensification of
cooperative counter-conduct . A collective refusal to ‘work more’, if only local, is a good example of an attitude that can pave the way for such forms
of counter-conduct. In effect, it breaks what André Gorz quite rightly called the ‘structural complicity’ that binds the worker to capital, in as much as ‘earning money’, ever more
The genealogy of
neo-liberalism attempted in this book teaches us that the new global rationality is in no wise
an inevitable fate shackling humanity. Unlike Hegelian Reason, it is not the reason of human
history. It is itself wholly historical – that is, relative to strictly singular conditions that cannot
money, is the decisive goal for both. It makes an initial breach in the ‘immanent constraint of the “ever more”, “ever more rapidly”‘.61¶
legitimately be regarded as untranscendable. The main thing is to understand that nothing can release us from the task of promoting a
different rationality. That is why the belief that the financial crisis by itself sounds the death-knell of neo-liberal capitalism is the worst of beliefs. It is possibly a source of
pleasure to those who think they are witnessing reality running ahead of their desires, without them having to move their little finger. It certainly comforts those for whom it is
an opportunity to celebrate their own past ‘clairvoyance’. At bottom, it is the least acceptable form of intellectual and political abdication. Neo-liberalism is not falling like a ‘ripe
fruit’ on account of its internal contradictions; and traders will not be its undreamed-of ‘gravediggers’ despite themselves. Marx had already made the point powerfully: ‘History
There are only human beings who act in given conditions and seek through their
action to open up a future for themselves . It is up to us to enable a new sense of possibility to
blaze a trail. The government of human beings can be aligned with horizons other than those
of maximizing performance, unlimited production and generalized control. It can sustain
does nothing’.62
itself with self-government that opens onto different relations with others than that of
competition between ‘self-enterprising actors’ . The practices of ‘communization’ of
knowledge, mutual aid and cooperative work can delineate the features of a different world
reason. Such an alternative reason cannot be better designated than by the term reason of
the commons .
Policing the Color Line
The aff does nothing to solve local surveillance rooted in racism
APUZZO 15 (Matt Apuzzo is a reporter for the NYT, and Professor at Georgetown University,
and reported for Associated Press and the Standard-Times, “Ferguson Police Routinely Violate
Rights of Blacks, Justice Dept. Finds”, MARCH 3, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/justice-department-finds-pattern-of-police-bias-andexcessive-force-in-ferguson.html?_r=0)
WASHINGTON — Ferguson,
Mo., is a third white, but the crime statistics compiled in the city over
the past two years seemed to suggest that only black people were breaking the law. They
accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of tickets and 93 percent of arrests. In cases like jaywalking, which often hinge
on police discretion, blacks accounted for 95 percent of all arrests.¶ The
racial disparity in those statistics was so
stark that the Justice Department has concluded in a report scheduled for release on Wednesday that
there was only one explanation: The Ferguson Police Department was routinely violating the
constitutional rights of its black residents.¶ The report, based on a six-month investigation, provides a
glimpse into the roots of the racial tensions that boiled over in Ferguson last summer after a
black teenager, Michael Brown, was fatally shot by a white police officer, making it a worldwide flash
point in the debate over race and policing in America. It describes a city where the police used force almost
exclusively on blacks and regularly stopped people without probable cause. Racial bias is so ingrained,
the report said, that Ferguson officials circulated racist jokes on their government email accounts.¶ In a November 2008 email, a city
official said Barack Obama would not be president long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years?” Another email
included a cartoon depicting African-Americans as monkeys. A third described black women having abortions as a way to curb
crime.¶ “There
are serious problems here that cannot be explained away,” said a law
enforcement official who has seen the report and spoke on the condition of anonymity because it had not been released
yet.¶ Those findings reinforce what the city’s black residents have been saying publicly since the shooting in August, that the criminal
justice system in Ferguson works differently for blacks and whites. A black motorist who is pulled over is twice as likely to be
searched as a white motorist, even though searches of white drivers are more likely to turn up drugs or other contraband, the report
found.¶ Minor, largely discretionary offenses such as disturbing the peace and jaywalking were brought almost exclusively against
blacks. When whites were charged with these crimes, they were 68 percent more likely to have their cases dismissed, the Justice
Department found.¶ “I’ve known it all my life about living out here,” Angel Goree, 39, who lives in the apartment complex where Mr.
Brown was killed, said Tuesday by phone.¶ Many such statistics surfaced in the aftermath of Mr. Brown’s shooting, but the Justice
Department report offers a more complete look at the data than ever before. Federal investigators conducted hundreds of
interviews, reviewed 35,000 pages of police records and analyzed race data compiled for every police stop.¶ The report will most
likely force Ferguson officials to either negotiate a settlement with the Justice Department or face being sued by it on charges of
violating the Constitution. Under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., the Justice Department has opened more than 20 such
investigations into local police departments and issued tough findings against cities including Newark; Albuquerque, N.M.; and
Cleveland.¶ But the Ferguson case has the highest profile of Mr. Holder’s tenure and is among the most closely watched since the
Justice Department began such investigations in 1994, spurred by the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles and the riots that
followed.¶ While much of the attention in Ferguson has been on Mr. Brown’s death, federal officials quickly concluded that the
shooting was simply the spark that ignited years of pent-up tension and animosity in the area. The Justice Department is expected to
issue a separate report Wednesday clearing the police officer, Darren Wilson, of civil rights violations in the shooting.¶ It
is not
clear what changes Ferguson could make that would head off a lawsuit.¶ The report calls for
city officials to acknowledge that the police department’s tactics have caused widespread
mistrust and violated civil rights. Ferguson officials have so far been reluctant to do so ,
particularly as relations between the city and Washington have grown strained.¶ Mr. Holder was openly critical of the way local
officials handled the protests and the investigation into Mr. Brown’s death, and declared a need for “wholesale change” in the police
department. Ferguson officials criticized Mr. Holder for a rush to judgment and saw federal officials as outsiders who did not
understand their city.¶
Local Police police surveillance easily turns into violence – the Aff
cannot solve this
FRIEDERSDORF 15 (Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on
politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best
of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction, “Few Conservatives Take Police
Abuses Seriously”, MAY 1, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/fewconservatives-take-police-abuses-seriously/391886/)
¶ Nearly a quarter
century ago, the libertarian magazine Reason published an essay on civil unrest suffused with an insight that
movement conservatism still hasn't grasped. Then-editor Virginia Postrel was writing in the wake of the Los Angeles riots of 1992.
"What caused the riots?" she asked. "How do we prevent them from recurring?" She agreed with law-and-order voices of that era
that a dearth of conscience and empathy were factors. "Only
people without empathy could drag people out
of their cars and beat them within an inch of their lives," she wrote. "Only people without
empathy could burn and loot the lives and dreams of their neighbors." But she went on to
observe that a small criminal element preys on South Los Angeles every day whereas riots
occur once in a generation. Rottenness may have been necessary to explain the beating of Reginald Denny or the terror
inflicted on small business owners, but it wasn't sufficient to explain such mayhem.¶ To turn rottenness into riots, she
argued, another necessary condition was widespread rage. "Black Angelenos, black Americans,
are very, very angry. Most did not riot; many saw their stores burn, their dreams explode,
their lives suddenly get harder," she wrote. "Nor were all the rioters either black or angry: a
plurality of looters arrested were Latino; many in Hollywood and downtown were white ... But
rage did fuel these riots, at least at the beginning. To violent people, the not-guilty verdicts—and the rage they engendered among
the general public—provided a signal to riot, to converge at once on shops and passersby. Rage supplied cover for more venal
motivations. And it spurred the political apologies for the rioters."¶ As well, the attention paid to the riots gave the non-violent
majority a chance to peacefully voice their rage. "If you listen to what those people are actually saying—often in loud and angry
voic¶ es—you will not hear the cliches of pundits and politicians," she wrote. "The Great Society, pro or con, will not come up.
Instead you will hear this: The
criminal justice system does not protect black Americans. It does not
make their streets safe from violence. It does not rally to the side of black crime victims. It sees
black people only as criminals, never as citizens. It does not give them respect." The LAPD was not the only
contributing factor, but anyone hoping to understand the L.A. riots had to contend with the
city's policing.
Fusion centers will still continue racial profiling
Cyril ’15 Staff writer for The Progressive (April 2015, Malkia Amala Cyril, The Progressive,
“Black America's State of Surveillance”,
http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance)
They will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase interagency collaboration for
the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the intelligence
community. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on
record. They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used “suspicious activity reports”—
described as “official documentation of observed behavior reasonably indicative of preoperational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity.” These reports and other
collected data are often stored in massive databases like e-Verify and Prism. As anybody who’s
ever dealt with gang databases knows, it’s almost impossible to get off a federal or state
database, even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true.
Predictive policing doesn’t just lead to racial and religious profiling— it relies on it . Just as stop
and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of color, almost
90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime, suspicious activities reporting and
the dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities of color. One review of such
reports collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color.
This is the future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies me.
Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of white
Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of
power.
One of the most terrifying aspects of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of those it
disproportionately impacts
Miseducation
Self Serving Role of the Ballots bad because it justifies giving the ballot for
other reasons besides to whoever did the better debating
Surveillance based on race is sometimes good because it prevents
ethnographic segregation and database restriction <Multiple uses for this
card> <Can use this to talk about how the state is key in challenging racist
practices; this helps for FW>
Sperry, 15
(Paul Sperry is an analyst for the New York Post. “Obama collecting data for a secret race database.”
http://nypost.com/2015/07/18/obama-has-been-collecting-personal-data-for-a-secret-race-database/. Date Accessed- 07/21/15.
//Anshul)
A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The
government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic
justice.”¶ Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s
racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their
health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to
document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.¶ This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a
vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to
make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to
minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other lowincome housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.¶
Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.¶ So
civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,”
even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.¶ OBAMA IS PRESIDING OVER THE LARGEST CONSOLIDATION OF PERSONAL DATA
IN US HISTORY.¶ Housing database¶ The granddaddy of them all is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the
Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It
will map
every US neighborhood by four racial groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and
publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances.¶ The agency
proposes using nonwhite populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying
segregated areas.¶ Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow
Hispanic/Latino — and
construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate inner-city minorities to those predominantly
white areas. HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be used to select
affordable-housing sites.¶ HUD plans to drill down to an even more granular level, detailing
the proximity of black
residents to transportation sites, good schools, parks and even supermarkets. If the agency’s
social engineers rule the distance between blacks and these suburban “amenities” is too far,
municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal grant money and face possible
lawsuits for housing discrimination.¶ Civil-rights groups will have access to the agency’s sophisticated mapping
software, and will participate in city plans to re-engineer neighborhoods under new community outreach requirements.¶ “By
opening this data to everybody, everyone in a community can weigh in,” Obama said. “If you want affordable housing nearby, now
you’ll have the data you need to make your case.”¶ Mortgage database¶ Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, headed
by former Congressional Black Caucus leader Mel Watt, is building its own database for racially balancing home loans. The so-called
National Mortgage Database Project will compile 16 years of lending data, broken down by race, and hold everything from individual
credit scores and employment records.¶ Mortgage contracts won’t be the only financial records vacuumed up by the database.
According to federal documents, the repository will include “all credit lines,” from credit cards to student loans to car loans —
anything reported to credit bureaus. This is even more information than the IRS collects.¶ The FHFA will also pry into your personal
assets and debts and whether you have any bankruptcies. The agency even wants to know the square footage and lot size of your
home, as well as your interest rate.¶ FHFA will share the info with Obama’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
which acts more like a civil-rights agency, aggressively investigating lenders for racial bias.¶ The FHFA has offered no clear
explanation as to why the government wants to sweep up so much sensitive information on Americans, other than stating it’s for
“research” and “policymaking.”¶ However, CFPB Director Richard Cordray was more forthcoming, explaining in a recent talk to the
radical California-based Greenlining Institute: “We
will be better able to identify possible discriminatory
lending patterns.”¶ Credit database¶ CFPB is separately amassing a database to monitor ordinary citizens’ credit-card
transactions. It hopes to vacuum up some 900 million credit-card accounts — all sorted by race — representing roughly 85% of the
US credit-card market. Why? To
sniff out “disparities” in interest rates, charge-offs and collections.¶
all regulated banks to report data on minority
Employment database¶ CFPB also just finalized a rule requiring
hiring to an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. It will collect reams of employment data, broken down by race, to police
diversity on Wall Street as part of yet another fishing expedition.¶ School database¶ Through its mandatory Civil Rights Data
Collection project, the Education
Department is gathering information on student suspensions and
expulsions, by race, from every public school district in the country. Districts that show
disparities in discipline will be targeted for reform.¶ Those that don’t comply will be punished. Several already
have been forced to revise their discipline policies, which has led to violent disruptions in classrooms.¶ Obama’s educrats want to
know how many blacks versus whites are enrolled in gifted-and-talented and advanced placement classes.¶ Schools that show blacks
and Latinos under-enrolled in such curricula, to an undefined “statistically significant degree,” could open themselves up to
investigation and lawsuits by the department’s Civil Rights Office.¶ Count on a flood of private lawsuits to piggyback federal
discrimination claims, as civil-rights
lawyers use the new federal discipline data in their legal
strategies against the supposedly racist US school system.¶ Even if no one has complained about
discrimination, even if there is no other evidence of racism, the numbers themselves will “prove” that things are unfair.¶ Such
databases have never before existed. Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history. He is creating
a diversity police state where government race cops and civil-rights lawyers will micromanage demographic outcomes in virtually
every aspect of society.¶ The first black president, quite brilliantly, has built a quasi-reparations infrastructure perpetually fed by
racial data that will outlast his administration.
Bell’s ideas of Racial Realism provide a smokescreen for the realities of racial
domination
Powell 1991
(John A. Powell is a Berkley Law Graduate. “Racial Realism or Racial Despair.”
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1537&context=facpubs. Date Accessed- 7/21/15. //Anshul)
The core message of Racial Realism is that the racial domination and subjugation of blacks in America is immutable. Bell contends:¶
Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more
than temporary "peaks of progress," short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain
white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it and move on to adopt policies based
on what I call: "Racial
Realism." This mind-set or philosophy requires us to acknowledge the
perma- nence of our subordinate status. That acknowledgement en- ables us to avoid despair, and frees us to
imagine and imple-¶ *National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, New York; J.D. 1973. Uni-¶ versity of California at
Berkeley School of Law, B.A. 1969. Stanford University. I would like to thank Professor Martha Minow, Adam Cohen and Victor
Bolden for their helpful suggestions, and Topaz Lennard for her editorial and secretarial assistance.¶ 1. Derrick Bell, Racial Realism,
24 CONN. L REv. 363 (1992).¶ HeinOnline -- 24 Conn. L. Rev. 533 1991-1992¶ CONNECTICUT LAW REVIEW [Vol. 24:533 ment racial
strategies that can bring fulfillment and even¶ triumph.2¶ Bell's aim
is to free blacks from the psychological
burden of de- spair. The goal of "Racial Realism" is therefore limited. The despair, according to
Bell, is not caused by actual racial domination that blacks experience, but by the false belief
that things can get better and that eventually equality will be achieved. He asserts that it is the
rhetoricof equality that keeps these false hopes alive in black America and pre- vents us from
acknowledging the reality of racial domination. Accord- ing to Racial Realism, therefore, it is the false
hope for equality, and not racism, that must be vanquished.3¶ Racial Realism is a provocative
and thoughtful piece, written in an elegant style that adds to its power. It draws on a number of areas,
from philosophy, politics, law, and history. Using broad strokes, Profes- sor Bell both describes and explains the conditions of African
Ameri- cans in society today. This all comes together as he takes what he de- scribes as a "hard-eyed" view of this reality-Racial
Realism concludes that racial subordination of blacks in this country is a per- manent fixture of our society.
Bell tries to
support these troubling claims by attacking equality logically and pragmatically. He looks to
history for proof that there has been no real change in racial domina- tion in our society. He
would have blacks continue to struggle, not for equality or to transform racial domination, but in
order to "harass white folks."" Despite the power of his message-seemingly plausible, given the current state of race
relations-I will argue that he fails on all fronts to support his claim and that his message must be rejected.¶ In Part I, I will
examine Professor Bell's logical critique of equal- ity; in Part II, I will focus on his pragmatic critique; and in Part III, I will examine
Bell's treatment of hope and power.¶ I. THE LOGICAL CRITIQUE OF EQUALITY¶ Bell begins his attack by setting his sights on formal
equality, us- ing what I call his logical critique." He argues that formal equal- ity-the idea that rights protection can be grounded on
an objective foundation of principles-is merely an abstract concept that is not only incoherent and indeterminate, but also a tool of
domination
The 1AC maintains the racial domination of the status squo
Powell 1991
(John A. Powell is a Berkley Law Graduate. “Racial Realism or Racial Despair.”
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1537&context=facpubs. Date Accessed- 7/21/15. //Anshul)
Professor Bell shifts to his pragmatic analysis as he moves into a discussion of legal cases. 20 From this perspective, he is no longer
con- cerned with the logical foundation of the value or rhetoric of equality, but with how it affects the lives of subordinated blacks.¶
The pragmatic analysis is much more significant in determining whether there is merit to Bell's
claim that the goal of
"equality" should be abandoned. Most people will not and should not abandon their val- ues
or goals simply because these aims do not rest on an objective, logical foundation. Bell claims
that, aside from the issue of formal equality, the true condition of subjugation and subordination of blacks
has never really improved, and never will. This claim is much more devastating and far-reaching
than the earlier claim that formal equal- ity is unattainable. It is the heart of the foundation for
Racial Realism: If the goal of equality does not bring even some progress for the black situation, there is no reason to rely on it.
Upon examination, though, it becomes clear that this claim is simply wrong, robbing Racial Realism of most
of its value.¶ Even if equality is unobtainable, as long as we can make substan- tial and real improvements in the status quo,
equality as a regulative ideal would maintain much of its force.2' If the ideal goal of equality could help us move from slavery to nonslavery, with or without Jim Crow laws in place, this would be progress. This would justify using equality as an ideal, even if it would
never be a reality-especiallyifthe alternative were to maintain the condition of slavery. The issue of whether equality can be
achieved or not is irrelevant from a pragmatic view. This pragmatic reason for accepting equality as an ideal would fail only if it could
not help improve the status quo.¶ The pragmatic attack on equality has force only if it can be shown that equality has no positive
transformative value for addressing black subjugation, or that equality rhetoric makes things worse. Bell cites Re- gents of the
University of Californiav. Bakke22 as the ultimate exam- ple of how "equality" in fact has been used to hurt blacks.¶ As every civil
rights lawyer has reason to know ... abstract principles lead to legal results that harm blacks and perpetu- ate their inferior status.
Racism provides a basis for a judge to select one available premise rather than another when incom- patible claims arise. A paradigm
example presents itself in the case of Regents of the University of Californiav. Bakke.23¶
Bell goes on to add that "cases
the role of equality jurisprudence in its
potential to improve the lives of black Americans. 21 4¶ Bell is critical of the civil rights community for relying
on these abstract legal principles. Not only is such reliance ill-founded, goes his critique, but the
such as Bakke should inspire many civil rights lawyers to reexamine
reliance worsens the condition of the black community.¶
Although it seems clear that Bakke was wrongly
decided for the reasons Bell suggests, it does not support his position that equality can- not have a transformative role in addressing
the needs of black Ameri- cans. What Bakke demonstrates is that a conservative Court was able to ignore the present and historical
conditions of blacks in using formal equality to limit the claims of blacks. Justice Powell wrote the majority opinion that accepted an
abstract notion of equality of which Bell is critical. However, four members of the Court, as well as the civil rights community,
rejected "formal equality" as the correct standard to apply in this case and argued for a standard that Bell seems to accept.20When
Bell cites with approval the "flexible reasoning" used by the¶ 26¶ Court in Griggs, he seems to have in mind something close to the¶
substantive equality standard argued by Brennan and Marshall-and much of the civil rights community-in Bakke.2"¶ But if the civil
rights community was not attached to the false value of formal equality, the real injury in Bakke was not despair at the hand of the
community's own false consciousness, but an injury at the hand of a conservative Court intent on maintaining the status quo. Racial
Realism does not address this. Instead, Bell wrongly
paints the civil rights community as ideological dupes,
unaware of how abstract principles are used to visit damage on the black community.28¶ Bell
suggests that what is wrong with the reliance on the rule of law in Bakke is that it allowed a conservative Court
the discretion to choose to adhere to "neutral principles," thereby hurting the goal of racial
equality . But choice is not the problem. There is no method that can eliminate choice, whether one calls it flexible reasoning,
substantive equality, or Racial Realism. There are two serious problems with how formalism in general, and formal equality in
particular, is used by the Court. The first problem is that the Court obscures what it is doing by denying that it is making choices in
deciding cases. The second more serious problem is that the choices the Court makes under formalism often maintain racial
domination. I believe it is better to make explicit that choices are being made-in fact, must be made-and then de- mand justification
to support their selection. By accepting this ap- proach, I would
argue that a choice that maintains the status
quo of racial domination cannot be justified and must be refuted.¶ Professor Bell, in broad strokes,
collapses the nonformal aspects of equality into the suspect use of formal equality. He therefore
concludes that all aspects of equality fail the black community. However, Bell's approach does not help us to determine if the value
of equality plays either a role of transformation or a role of maintaining the status quo.
The state is key to monitor and address prejudice and discrimination inside their
organizations
Devey et. al., 09
(Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Patricia Warren are analysts for the magazine Contexts which includes feature articles, culture and
book reviews, and photography, as well as analysis of the latest social science research. “explaining and eliminating racial profiling.”
http://contexts.org/articles/explaining-and-eliminating-racial-profiling/. Date Accessed- 07/23/15. //Anshul)
Unconscious biases are particularly difficult for an organization to address because offending individuals are typically unaware of
them, and when confronted they may deny any racist intent.¶ There is increasing evidence that even deep-seated stereotypes and
unconscious biases can be eroded through both education and exposure to minorities who don’t fit common stereotypes, and that
they can be contained when people are held accountable for their decisions. Indeed,
it appears that acts of racial
discrimination (as opposed to just prejudicial attitudes or beliefs) can be stopped through managerial
authority, and prejudice itself seems to be reduced through both education and exposure to minorities.¶ Unconscious biases can
be eroded through education and exposure to minorities who don’t fit common stereotypes. Biases can also be contained when
people are held accountable for their decisions.¶ For example, a 2006 study by sociologists Alexandra Kalev, Frank Dobbin, and Erin
Kelly of race and gender employment bias in the private sector found that holding management accountable for equal employment
opportunities is particularly efficient for reducing race and gender biases. Thus, the active monitoring and managing of police
officers based on racial composition of their stops and searches holds much promise for mitigating this “invisible” prejudice.¶ Citizen
and police review boards can play proactive and reactive roles in monitoring both individual police behavior as well as problematic
organizational practices. Local police forces can use data they collect on racial disparity in police stops to identify problematic
organizational behaviors such as intensively policing minority neighborhoods, targeting minorities in white neighborhoods, and racial
profiling in searches.¶ Aggressive enforcement
of civil rights laws will also play a key role in
encouraging local police chiefs and employers to continue to monitor and address prejudice
and discrimination inside their organizations. This is an area where the federal government has a clear role to
play. Filing lawsuits against cities and states with persistent patterns of racially biased policing—whether based on the defense of
segregated white neighborhoods or the routine patrolling of crime “hot spots”—would send a message to all police forces that the
routine harassment of minority citizens is unacceptable in the United States.¶ justice in the obama era¶ Given the
crucial
role the federal justice department has played in both creating and confronting racial profiling,
one may wonder whether the election of President Barack Obama will have any consequences for racially biased policing.¶
Obama certainly has personal reasons to challenge racist practices. And given the success of his
presidential campaign, it would seem he has the political capital to address racial issues in a way and to
an extent unlike any of his predecessors.¶ At the same time, the new president has vowed to continue to fight a war
on terrorism, a war often understood and explicitly defined in religious and ethnic terms. In some ways, the threat of terrorism has
replaced the threat of African Americans in the U.S. political lexicon. There’s evidence as well that politicians, both Democrat and
Republican, have increased their verbal attacks on illegal immigrants and in doing so may be providing a fertile ground for new
rounds of profiling against Hispanics in this country. So, while the racial profiling of African Americans as explicit national policy is
unlikely in the Obama Administration, other groups may not be so lucky.¶
Americans committed to racial justice
and equality will likely take this as a cautionary tale. They will also likely hope the Obama
Administration decides to take a national leadership role in ending racial profiling. But if it does, as sociologists we hope the
administration won’t make the all too common mistake of assuming racial profiling is primarily the result of racial prejudice or even
the more widespread psychology of unconscious bias.
2NC Framework
Topical Version of the Aff
T-Version of the Aff: The USFG should ban the use of unwarranted stop & frisk,
policing and criminalization based on skin color by revitalizing the End Racial
Profiling Act
Brooks et. al., 14
(Cornell Williams Brooks is the president of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People. “Stop-and-Frisk Abuses
& the Continued Fight to End Racial Profiling in America” http://action.naacp.org/page//Criminal%20Justice/Born_Suspect_Report_final_web.pdf. Date Accessed- 07/23/15. //Anshul.)
Sponsored by Julius Volker, a member of the New York State Assembly, New York’s stop-and-frisk law was¶ first passed in 1964, with
the goal of making it easier for evidence that came from stops based on less than¶ “probable cause” to be considered in court. The
law would also allow police officers to prevent crimes and¶ increase public safety in New York City.50
African American
communities have since challenged the law as a¶ form of racial profiling that allows officers to
more easily target and harass communities of color.¶ The US Supreme Court has also addressed the question of
stop-and-frisk. In 1968, in Terry v. Ohio, the Court¶ ruled that stopping and frisking are constitutional if done under certain
conditions. Specifically, the Court said¶ that in order for a police officer to stop an individual, the officer only needs “reasonable
suspicion” that an¶ individual is committing or about to commit an illicit activity. However,
for a police officer to then
lawfully frisk¶ an individual, somewhere between the “reasonable suspicion” standard and the
“probable cause” standard¶ required for search warrants is necessary—where a police officer either
witnessed or was informed that a¶ suspect is armed and poses an immediate threat to the officer.51¶ However, in 2013 a federal
court found that the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk reflected a widespread pattern¶ and practice of stops that did not meet the legal
standard of “reasonable suspicion” put forth by Terry. In¶ fact, data indicated that many of the stops by the NYPD over the last
decade failed to meet even this lower ¶ 11¶ standard. For example, in 2009, officers failed to cite an acceptable “suspected crime”
for the stop 36% of the¶ time.52 And in 2011, over half of the stops conducted were for “furtive movements”—an abstract,
relatively¶ subjective, and meaningless basis for a stop—although one that the courts have not yet taken a firm stance¶ against.53
The court also found a widespread pattern and practice of racially discriminatory stops and frisks, in¶ violation of the 14th
Amendment.¶ A closer look at the statistics for stop-and-frisk throughout the last decade can shed further light on the NYPD’s¶
abuse of this tactic, the negative impact it has had on communities, and ultimately serve as further evidence of¶ the futility of racial
profiling as a tool for effective law enforcement.
<Over 24 paragraphs later>
at the height
of the movement to improve law enforcement accountability and end racial¶
profiling, the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA) was introduced in both houses of Congress.82 The
bill had¶ bipartisan support and aimed to ban racial profiling at all levels of government, provide
provisions for data¶ collection and monitoring, include training, and offer sanctions and
remedies for violations of the law. The¶ NAACP, along with a broad range of coalition partners, supported the bill,
which at that point seemed likely to¶ pass. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the bill lost
momentum and with it the chance of passage¶ for more than a decade. ERPA has been repeatedly introduced in Congress;
without the level of support it¶ enjoyed in 2001, its passage remains challenging. One roadblock is the false claim often used by
political¶ leaders that racial profiling is a necessary tool for enhancing national security.¶ However, during this same period, leaders
from the top ranks of several administrations have also verbally¶ committed to ending racial profiling. In February of 2001, President
George W. Bush promised to end racial¶ profiling in America in an address to Congress:¶ Earlier today I asked John Ashcroft, the
Attorney General to develop specific recommendations¶ to end racial profiling. It’s wrong and we will end it in America.83¶ Two
years later, in June 2003, the Department of Justice issued the Guidance Regarding the Use of Race¶ by Federal Law Enforcement
Agencies.84 Although the guidance was a good first step in meeting the Bush¶ Administration’s promise, it fell short in many ways
that have not been addressed to date and the policy still¶ stands as is almost 6 years into the Obama Administration.85 Specifically,
the Guidance:¶ • Does not apply to local or state agencies¶ • Does not protect people from being profiled on the basis of religion or
national origin¶ • Does not include a private right of action, fiscal sanctions or any other enforcement mechanisms¶ • Does not offer
penalties for officers found in violation of the provisions¶ • Has a blanket exception for “enforcing laws protecting the integrity of
the Nation’s borders,” and¶ “threats to national security and other catastrophic events.”86¶ More recently, during an address at the
2013 NAACP National Convention, following the verdict in the case¶ of George Zimmerman for the shooting death of Trayvon
Martin, Attorney General Eric Holder touched upon¶ the problem of racial profiling. In his address, Holder shared personal stories of
being profiled as a young¶ adult, including being stopped and searched by police on the New Jersey Turnpike. Holder also
recounted¶ conversations his father had with him about how to properly conduct himself as an African American man with¶ law
enforcement—conversations he finds himself having with his son.87 Holder reiterated:¶ [W]e
must confront the
underlying attitudes, mistaken beliefs, and unfortunate stereotypes that¶ serve too often as
the basis for police action, and private judgment.88¶ In addition to advocating for the passage
of ERPA, over the last decade advocates have also waged a campaign¶ to update the Federal Guidance and to eliminate its
shortcomings. In 2012, more than 225 groups, including¶ the NAACP, signed a letter urging the Attorney General to update the
Guidance to:¶ • Ban profiling based on religion or national origin.¶ • Close the “national security” and “border integrity” loophole.¶
19¶ • Apply
profiling ban to data collection assessments and investigations carried out by law¶
enforcement and to include the mapping of communities as demonstrated by the NYPD’s¶
Demographics Unit.¶ • Create enforceable standards to be met by law enforcement agencies.¶ • Prevent federal agencies from
working with state and local departments that do not have racial¶ profiling policies meeting the standard of the renewed Guidance.¶
89¶ An updated Guidance is expected in the near future, and it is expected that it will expand the prohibited ¶ profiling categories to
include national origin, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. Initial reports indicate,¶ however, that it will not ban the use of
nationality to map communities stereotypically thought more likely to¶ commit certain kinds of crime.¶ Despite the existence of
constitutional protections, a partial federal guidance, and numerous promises by¶ officials over several presidential administrations,
the country continues to grapple with solving the problem of¶ racial profiling and preventing
abuses of power by law enforcement
Neoliberalism K
2NC Links
Market organization of society is at least as coercive as state action – its
interventions into society are simply cloaked as “protecting property rights”
and “encouraging competition”
Noys 10
Benjamin Noys, Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester, “The Grammar of
Neoliberalism,” September 2010, talk given at the Accelerationism workshop at Goldsmiths,
fwang
It was the extinction of the Nazi state that made post-war Germany the ideal site to re-found the state in terms of the economic, in
which legitimation was achieved through economic growth rather than in political terms. At the same time
neo-liberalism
solidifies a ‘state-phobia’ , by arguing that the tendency of any intervention to a statecontrolled economy, planning, and economic interventionism will lead to Nazism or
totalitarianism. In a provocative series of formulations Foucault argues that this ‘state phobia’ permeates
modern thought, aligning the critique of the spectacle (Debord) and ‘one-dimensionality’ (Marcuse) with Werner Sombart’s
proto-Nazi critiques of capitalism (113-4). Here we might say we can see the emergence of the ‘grammar’
argument, in the sense of a common phobia of the state that leaves us vulnerable to historical
re-inscription under the terms of neo-liberalism, or, as Foucault puts it: ‘All those who share in the great state
phobia should know that they are following the direction of the wind and that in fact, for years and years,
an effective reduction of the state has been on the way, a reduction of both the growth of
state control and of a “statifying” and “statified” governmentality.’ (191-2)
What is the precise nature, then, of neo-liberalism? Of course, the obvious objection to the ‘anti-state’ vision of neo-liberalism is
that neo-liberalism itself is a continual
form of state intervention, usually summarised in the phrase
for the rich, capitalism for the poor’. Foucault notes that neo-liberalism concedes this: ‘neo-liberal
government intervention is no less dense, frequent, active, and continuous than in any other
system.’ (145) The difference , however, is the point of application . It intervenes on society ‘so
that competitive mechanisms can play a regulatory role at every moment and every point in
society and by intervening in this way its objective will become possible, that is to say, a general
‘socialism
regulation of society by the market.’ (145) Therefore, we miss the point if we simply leave a critique of neo-liberalism at the point of
saying ‘neo-liberalism is as statist as other governmental forms’. Instead, the
necessity if to analyse how neoliberalism creates a new form of governmentality in which the state performs a different
function: permeating society to subject it to the economic .
2NC Impact Framing
The “white gaze” survives through the guise of neoliberalism
Davis,08
(Angela Y. Davis is a Professor of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies University of California, Santa Cruz. “Recognizing
Racism in the Era of Neoliberalism.”
http://www.omi.wa.gov.au/resources/clearinghouse/Recognizing_Racism_in_the_Era_of_Neoliberalism_davis.pdf. Date Accessed07/22/15.//Anshul)
Parenthetically, when I recently mentioned these new figures to a group in London, including Members¶ of Parliament, almost
everyone thought that either I had misspoken myself or that they had misheard¶ me. As it turns out, they were familiar with the
figures regarding the incarceration of young black men¶ and were not so surprised that immense numbers of people of color were in
jail. But it was difficult for¶ them to grasp the idea that, given a majority white population, one in every one hundred adults in the ¶
U.S. is behind bars.¶ In 1985, there were fewer than 800,000 people behind bars. Today there are almost three times as many¶
imprisoned people and the vast increase has been driven almost entirely by the practices of incarcerating¶ young people of color.
Although the figures are not comparable, one can argue that a similar dynamic¶ drives imprisonment here in Australia, with
imprisoned aboriginal people accounting for ten times their¶ proportion in the general population.¶ Why,
then, is it so
difficult to name these practices as racist? Why does the word “racist” have such¶ an archaic
ring to it – as if we were caught in a time warp? Why is it so difficult to name the crisis in¶ imprisonment
as a crisis of racism?¶ According to the Pew Report, the United States incarcerates more people than any country in¶ the
world, including the far more populous nation of China. At the start of the new year, the¶ American penal system held more than 2.3
million adults. China was second, with 1.5 million¶ people behind bars, and Russia was a distant third with 890,000 inmates,
according to the latest¶ available figures. Beyond the sheer number of inmates, America also is the global leader in the rate¶ at
which it incarcerates its citizenry, outpacing nations like South Africa and Iran. In Germany,¶ 93 people are in prison for every
100,000 adults and children. In the U.S, the rate is roughly eight¶ times that, or 750 per 100,000.¶ These figures have been produced
by the vastly disproportionate numbers of youth of color, especially¶ young black men who are currently behind bars. For example,
if one out of every sixty white men between¶ the ages of twenty and twenty-four is behind bars, then one of out every nine black
men of the same age¶ is incarcerated. According
to neoliberalist explanations, the fact that these young
black men are behind¶ bars has little to do with race or racism and everything to do with their
own private family upbringing¶ and their inability to take moral responsibility for their actions.
Such explanations remain “mute” – to¶ use Dana-Ain Davis’s term again – about the social, economic, and historical power of
racism. They¶ remain “mute” about the dangerous contemporary work that race continues to do.¶ The incarceration of youth of
color – and of increasing numbers of young women of color (women have¶ constituted the fastest growing sector of the
incarcerated population for some time now) – is not
viewed¶ as connected to the vast structural changes
produced by deregulation, privatization, by the devaluation¶ of the public good, and by the
deterioration of community. Because there is no public vocabulary which¶ allows us to place these developments within a historical
context, individual deviancy is the overarching¶ explanation for the grotesque rise in the numbers of people who are relegated to
the country’s and the¶ world’s prisons. According
to Henry Giroux, “racism survives through the guise of
neoliberalism, a kind¶ of repartee that imagines human agency as simply a matter of
individualized choices, the only obstacle to¶ effective citizenship and agency being the lack of principled self-help and moral
responsibility.”4¶ Because racism is viewed as an anachronistic vestige of the past, we fail to grasp
the extent to which¶ the long memory of institutions – especially those that constitute the intimately
connected circuit of¶ education and incarceration – continue to permit race to determine who has access to education and who¶ has
access to incarceration. While laws have had the effect of privatizing racist attitudes and eliminating¶ the explicitly racist practices of
institutions, these
laws are unable to apprehend the deep structural life of¶ racism and therefore
allow it to continue to thrive.¶ 4 Giroux, Henry A. (2003) ‘Spectacles of Race and Pedagogies of Denial: Anti-Black Racist
Pedagogy¶ Under the Reign of Neoliberalism’, Communication Education, 52:3, 191 - 211¶ Vice Chancellor’s Oration 2008¶ This
invisible work of racism not only influences the life chances of millions of people, it helps to
nourish¶ a psychic reservoir of racism that often erupts through the utterances and actions of
individuals, as in¶ the cases previously mentioned. The frequent retort made by such individuals who are caught in the¶ act is:
“I’m not a racist. I don’t even know where that came from” can only be answered if we are able to¶ recognize this deep structural
life of racism.¶ The deep structural racism of the criminal justice system affects our lives in complicated ways. What¶ we
acknowledged more than a decade ago as the U.S. prison industrial complex through which racism¶ generates enormous profits for
private corporations can now be recognized as a global prison industrial¶ complex that profits the world over from postcolonial
forms of racism and xenophobia. With the¶ dismantling of the welfare state and the structural adjustment in the southern region
required by global¶ financial institutions, the institution of the prison – which is itself an important product marketed¶ through
global capitalism – becomes the privileged site into which surplus impoverished populations are¶ deposited. Thus new forms of
global structural racism are emerging. The deep
structural life of racism¶ bleeds out from the U.S. criminal
justice system and is having a devastating effect on the political life of¶ the nation and the world.¶ Since
the era of slavery, racism has been associated with death. Geographer Ruth Gilmore has defined¶ racism as “the state-sanctioned
and/or legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated¶ vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely
interconnected political geographies”5¶ The¶ death to which Gilmore refers is multi-dimensional, embracing corporeal death, social
death, and civil¶ death. From its advent, the institution of the prison has been organically liked to the political order of¶ democracy
in that it negatively demonstrates the centrality of individual rights and liberties. Civil life¶ is negated and the prisoner is relegated to
the status of Civil Death. Following Claude Meillasoux and¶ Orlando Patterson, Colin ( Joan) Dayan and other scholars have
compared the social death of slavery¶ to the civil death of imprisonment, particularly given the landmark legal case Ruffin v.
Commonwealth,¶ which in 1871 declared the prisoner to be “the slave of the state.”¶ Although prisoners’ state of civil death has
now mutated so that
Neoliberalism is producing accelerating inequality, environmental destruction,
and conflict in the squo – statistics showing the world is getting better only
illustrate the positive impact of Latin American and Chinese resistance to the
neoliberal model
Milne 15
(Seumus Milne, Guardian columnist and associate editor, “The Davos oligarchs are right to fear
the world they’ve made,” 22 January 2015,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/22/davos-oligarchs-fear-inequalityglobal-elite-resist)
The scale of the crisis has been laid out for them by the charity Oxfam. Just 80 individuals now
have the same net wealth as 3.5 billion people – half the entire global population. Last year,
the best-off 1% owned 48% of the world’s wealth, up from 44% five years ago. On current
trends, the richest 1% will have pocketed more than the other 99% put together next year.
The 0.1% have been doing even better, quadrupling their share of US income since the 1980s.¶
This is a wealth grab on a grotesque scale. For 30 years, under the rule of what Mark Carney,
the Bank of England governor, calls “market fundamentalism” , inequality in income and
wealth has ballooned, both between and within the large majority of countries. In Africa, the
absolute number living on less than $2 a day has doubled since 1981 as the rollcall of
billionaires has swelled.¶ In most of the world, labour’s share of national income has fallen
continuously and wages have stagnated under this regime of privatisation, deregulation and
low taxes on the rich . At the same time finance has sucked wealth from the public realm into
the hands of a small minority, even as it has laid waste the rest of the economy. Now the
evidence has piled up that not only is such appropriation of wealth a moral and social outrage,
but it is fuelling social and climate conflict , wars , mass migration and political corruption ,
stunting health and life chances , increasing poverty , and widening gender and ethnic
divides .¶ Escalating inequality has also been a crucial factor in the economic crisis of the past
seven years, squeezing demand and fuelling the credit boom. We don’t just know that from the
research of the French economist Thomas Piketty or the British authors of the social study The
Spirit Level. After years of promoting Washington orthodoxy, even the western-dominated
OECD and IMF argue that the widening income and wealth gap has been key to the slow
growth of the past two neoliberal decades. The British economy would have been almost 10%
larger if inequality hadn’t mushroomed. Now the richest are using austerity to help
themselves to an even larger share of the cake.¶ The big exception to the tide of inequality in
recent years has been Latin America . Progressive governments across the region turned their
back on a disastrous economic model, took back resources from corporate control and slashed
inequality. The numbers living on less than $2 a day have fallen from 108 million to 53 million
in little over a decade. China, which also rejected much of the neoliberal catechism, has seen
sharply rising inequality at home but also lifted more people out of poverty than the rest of
the world combined, offsetting the growing global income gap.¶ These two cases underline
that increasing inequality and poverty are very far from inevitable . They’re the result of
political and economic decisions. The thinking person’s Davos oligarch realises that allowing
things to carry on as they are is dangerous. So some want a more “inclusive capitalism” –
including more progressive taxes – to save the system from itself.¶ But it certainly won’t come
about as a result of Swiss mountain musings or anxious Guildhall lunches. Whatever the feelings
of some corporate barons, vested corporate and elite interests – including the organisations
they run and the political structures they have colonised – have shown they will fight even
modest reforms tooth and nail. To get the idea, you only have to listen to the squeals of
protest, including from some in his own party, at Ed Miliband’s plans to tax homes worth over
£2m to fund the health service, or the demand from the one-time reformist Fabian Society that
the Labour leader be more pro-business (for which read pro-corporate), or the wall of
congressional resistance to Barack Obama’s mild redistributive taxation proposals.¶ Perhaps a
section of the worried elite might be prepared to pay a bit more tax. What they won’t accept
is any change in the balance of social power – which is why, in one country after another, they
resist any attempt to strengthen trade unions, even though weaker unions have been a crucial
factor in the rise of inequality in the industrialised world.¶ It’s only through a challenge to the
entrenched interests that have dined off a dysfunctional economic order that the tide of
inequality will be reversed. The anti-austerity Syriza party, favourite to win the Greek elections
this weekend, is attempting to do just that – as the Latin American left has succeeded in doing
over the past decade and a half. Even to get to that point demands stronger social and
political movements to break down or bypass the blockage in a colonised political
mainstream . Crocodile tears about inequality are a symptom of a fearful elite. But change will
only come from unrelenting social pressure and political challenge .
Social inequality causes extinction – produces background of structural
violence that makes conflict and environmental collapse inevitable
Szentes ‘8
Tamás Szentes, a Professor Emeritus at the Corvinus University of Budapest. “Globalisation and
prospects of the world society” 4/22/08
http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/Documents/Events/exco/Glob.___prospects_-_jav..pdf
It’ s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace.
Without peace countries cannot develop. Although since 1945 there has been no world war, but
--numerous local wars took place, --terrorism has spread all over the world, undermining
security even in the most developed and powerful countries, --arms race and militarisation have
not ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but escalated and continued, extending also to
weapons of mass destruction and misusing enormous resources badly needed for development,
--many “invisible wars” are suffered by the poor and oppressed people, manifested in mass
misery, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, starvation and malnutrition, epidemics and
poor health conditions, exploitation and oppression, racial and other discrimination, physical
terror, organised injustice, disguised forms of violence, the denial or regular infringement of the
democratic rights of citizens, women, youth, ethnic or religious minorities, etc., and last but not
least, in the degradation of human environment, which means that --the “war against Nature”,
i.e. the disturbance of ecological balance, wasteful management of natural resources, and largescale pollution of our environment, is still going on, causing also losses and fatal dangers for
human life. Behind global terrorism and “invisible wars” we find striking international and
intrasociety inequities and distorted development patterns , which tend to generate social
as well as international tensions , thus paving the way for unrest and “visible” wars. It is a
commonplace now that peace is not merely the absence of war. The prerequisites of a lasting
peace between and within societies involve not only - though, of course, necessarily demilitarisation, but also a systematic and gradual elimination of the roots of violence, of the
causes of “invisible wars”, of the structural and institutional bases of large-scale international
and intra-society inequalities, exploitation and oppression. Peace requires a process of social
and national emancipation, a progressive, democratic transformation of societies and the world
bringing about equal rights and opportunities for all people, sovereign participation and
mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a pluralistic democracy
on global level with an appropriate system of proportional representation of the world society,
articulation of diverse interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-violent conflict
management, and thus also a global governance with a really global institutional system. Under
the contemporary conditions of accelerating globalisation and deepening global
interdependencies in our world, peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if
reduced to a period only after or before war, and cannot be safeguarded in one part of the
world when some others suffer visible or invisible wars. Thus, peace requires, indeed, a new,
demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide equal opportunities for
sustainable development. “Sustainability of development” (both on national and world level) is
often interpreted as an issue of environmental protection only and reduced to the need for
preserving the ecological balance and delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature
with overexhausted resources and polluted environment. However, no ecological balance can
be ensured, unless the deep international development gap and intra-society inequalities are
substantially reduced. Owing to global interdependencies there may exist hardly any “zerosum-games”, in which one can gain at the expense of others, but, instead, the “negative-sumgames” tend to predominate, in which everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or
indirectly, losses. Therefore, the actual question is not about “sustainability of development”
but rather about the “sustainability of human life”, i.e. survival of mankind – because of
ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism. When Professor Louk de la Rive Box was the
president of EADI, one day we had an exchange of views on the state and future of development
studies. We agreed that development studies are not any more restricted to the case of
underdeveloped countries, as the developed ones (as well as the former “socialist” countries)
are also facing development problems, such as those of structural and institutional (and even
system-) transformation, requirements of changes in development patterns, and concerns about
natural environment. While all these are true, today I would dare say that besides (or even
instead of) “development studies” we must speak about and make “survival studies”. While the
monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical, we live in an almost permanent crisis of the
world society, which is multidimensional in nature, involving not only economic but also sociopsychological, behavioural, cultural and political aspects. The narrow-minded, election-
oriented, selfish behaviour motivated by thirst for power and wealth, which still characterise
the political leadership almost all over the world, paves the way for the final, last catastrophe .
One cannot doubt, of course, that great many positive historical changes have also taken place
in the world in the last century. Such as decolonisation, transformation of socio-economic
systems, democratisation of political life in some former fascist or authoritarian states,
institutionalisation of welfare policies in several countries, rise of international organisations
and new forums for negotiations, conflict management and cooperation, institutionalisation of
international assistance programmes by multilateral agencies, codification of human rights, and
rights of sovereignty and democracy also on international level, collapse of the militarised Soviet
bloc and system-change3 in the countries concerned, the end of cold war, etc., to mention only
a few. Nevertheless, the crisis of the world society has extended and deepened, approaching to
a point of bifurcation that necessarily puts an end to the present tendencies, either by the final
catastrophe or a common solution. Under the circumstances provided by rapidly progressing
science and technological revolutions, human society cannot survive unless such profound
intra-society and international inequalities prevailing today are soon eliminated. Like a single
spacecraft, the Earth can no longer afford to have a 'crew' divided into two parts: the rich,
privileged, wellfed, well-educated, on the one hand, and the poor, deprived, starving, sick and
uneducated, on the other. Dangerous 'zero-sum-games' (which mostly prove to be “negativesum-games”) can hardly be played any more by visible or invisible wars in the world society.
Because of global interdependencies, the apparent winner becomes also a loser. The real choice
for the world society is between negative- and positive-sum-games: i.e. between, on the one
hand, continuation of visible and “invisible wars”, as long as this is possible at all, and, on the
other, transformation of the world order by demilitarisation and democratization. No ideological
or terminological camouflage can conceal this real dilemma any more, which is to be faced not
in the distant future, by the next generations, but in the coming years, because of global
terrorism soon having nuclear and other mass destructive weapons, and also due to irreversible
changes in natural environment.
Case
2NC Miseducation
Bell’s views are flawed because he is narrow-sighted with the ideologies of
giving values
Powell 1991
(John A. Powell is a Berkley Law Graduate. “Racial Realism or Racial Despair.”
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1537&context=facpubs. Date Accessed- 7/21/15. //Anshul)
¶ e reason
why Professor Bell believes that the lack of an objec- tive foundation means that we have to drop formal equality may be
that he accepts what Bernstein has called the "Cartesian Anxiety": ei- ther there is some transcendent grounding for our principles
or we are doomed to relativism, where everything is a matter of power and per- sonal preference.9 But as Bernstein and others
cogently demonstrate, there
are other ways to give values and principles legitimacy. Principles and
values need not be objective or relative.' 0 Although Bell is right to argue that the values and
rhetoric we use do leave choices to be made, he fails to see that despite real choice, we are
nonetheless constrained by the values we embrace and the conversations in which we
engage."¶ Bell's logical critique does not help us to choose between compet- ing principles or
theories and assessing the application of a value. Yet unless one embraces relativism, there must be some way
of judging and choosing among these different theories and principles. 2 Although Bell flirts with relativism, he
rejects it. He accepts that there are ways of legitimately deciding moral issues and criticizing others.la For example, he cites
Griggs v. Duke Power Co." as an example of the Court's use of "flexible reasoning"'15 to arrive at the correct result.10 Bell also sug-¶
gests that Racial Realism would aid in delivering a more correct 17¶ result.¶ Bell's logical critique is correct to suggest that moral
issues cannot¶ be mechanically compelled by objective principles. Moral judgment and moral choices will have to be made and
defended on some other basis.
If the goal is to end racial domination, substantive equality may
provide a more legitimate choice than formal equality.' 8 Ultimately, the struggle over which language we use,
though it does not resolve all the issues, is also a struggle over the kind of world in which we want to live.¶ At this time in our legal
and racial history, it seems clear that formal equality must be rejected as an adequate way of transforming racial domination; but
not for the logical reasons that Bell sets forth. Formal equality should be rejected because it has become a better tool for
maintaining-rather than ending-the status quo of racial domina- tion. However, this pro-status quo use was not always the case. For
example, during the Jim Crow period, formal equality served a trans- formative value for lessening racial domination.19 This is a
pragmatic assessment of the role of "equality," however, not a logical one. I will¶ now turn to Bell's pragmatic critique.
2NC Policing the Color
The affirmative’s criticism doesn’t solve for how local law enforcement
treats black lives matter like a terrorist threat
Johnson ’15 associate editor at AlterNet (4/29/15, Adam, Popular Resistance, “Government
Treating #BlackLivesMatter Like A Terrorist Group”,
https://www.popularresistance.org/government-treating-blacklivesmatter-like-a-terroristgroup/)
We learned in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement that the government’s use of its anti-terror
apparatus at a local and federal level was both routine and pervasive. Thus far, the means with which
similar practices have been used on #BlackLivesMatter have been subtly emerging — thanks in large part to some truly intrepid
journalism — from across the country. Here is a recap of the five of the worst examples:¶ 1. NYPD and FBI
uses counterterror apparatus on #BlackLivesMatter New York.¶ Though it was mostly taken for granted by those paying
attention within the activists community, official recognition that the NYPD and its FBI Joint Terror Task Force were using their
counter terror units on #BlackLivesMatter didn’t really come until a casual admission by the NYPD in the New York Post the
day before the announcement of the Eric Garner verdict in December of last year:¶ “They wore me out, ” said one counterterror
expert who monitored the protests. “Their ability to strategize on the fly is something we haven’t dealt with before to this degree.”¶
A few weeks later, the New York Post would again be the forum with which the NYPD would casually assert counter terror
units were used on #BlackLivesMatter, this time in connection to an alleged assault on an NYPD officer: “Linsker was nabbed by
members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force around 3:45 a.m., sources said.”¶ Alex Kane reported for Vice:¶ How
the NYPD’s
Counterterrorism Apparatus Is Being Turned on Protesters¶ The police wearing the
counterterrorism jackets at protests are perhaps the most palpable sign of the agency’s
transformation since 2001. Before 9/11 the NYPD had no counterterrorism bureau and the Intelligence Division focused
its resources on gang activity. After the September 11 attacks, however, billions of dollars were poured into the department to
counter the threat of terrorism, as a 2011 60 Minutes report showed. Critics of the NYPD’s post-9/11 turn have been arguing that
practices devoted to fighting terrorism have violated the Constitution.¶ Now, they say, the NYPD is unleashing its counterterrorism
tools on activists against police brutality, conflating legitimate protest with the threat of terrorism.¶ 2. California Highway Patrol
used counterterror units to monitor #BlackLivesMatter in Bay Area.¶ A cache of emails revealed
by Darwin BondGraham
of the East Bay Expresstwo weeks ago revealed the California Highway Patrol were using its antiterrorism apparatus, including fusion centers like Northern California Regional Intelligence
Center to monitor #BlackLivesMatter activists on social media. As BondGraham would lay out:¶ An email
sent on December 12 illustrates how counter-terrorism officials working out of fusion centers helped CHP monitor protesters. At
12:12 p.m. that day, Elijah Owen, a senior intelligence advisor with the California State Threat Assessment Center (Cal STAC) sent
CHP officer Michael Berndl a copy of a protest fliercalling for a speak-out and march against the CHP the next day. “Just so
it’s on your folks’ radar,” wrote Owen. Cal STAC officers appear in other CHP emails as sources of information, or recipients of intel
gathered by the Oakland Police Department, Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, and other agencies.¶ Earlier this year, the
California Highway Patrol would also casually drop in the LA Times how they used fake twitter
profiles to monitor protesters:¶ Despite Wednesday’s incident, Browne said he will continue to deploy plainclothes
officers to gather intelligence from protesters. Officers have also been creating Twitter accounts, on which they don’t identify
themselves as police, in order to monitor planned demonstrations.¶ It’s unclear to what extent these two approaches – using antiterror apparatus to monitor #BlackLivesMatter social media and the use of fake online profiles to monitor #BlackLivesMatteroverlapped.¶ 3. Massachusetts Counterterror fusion
centers were used to monitor #BlackLivesMatter
protesters in Boston.¶ Similarly, fusion centers were used to monitor #BlacklivesMatter protests in Massachusetts. As the ACLU’s
Kade Crockford noted last November:¶ Law enforcement officials at the Department of Homeland Security-funded
“Commonwealth Fusion Center” spied on the Twitter and Facebook accounts of Black Lives Matter protesters in Boston earlier this
week, the Boston Herald reports.¶ The reference to the so-called ‘fusion’ spy center comes at the very end of a news story
quoting Boston protesters injured by police in Tuesday night’s demonstrations, which was possibly the largest Ferguson related
protest in the country the day after the non-indictment of Darren Wilson was announced.¶ The state police Commonwealth Fusion
Center monitored social media, which provided “critical intelligence about protesters’ plans to try to disrupt traffic on state
highways,” state police said.¶ Though it was buried at the end of the Boston Herald story, the
use of fusion centers –
deliberately set up for the purposes of stopping terrorism – are, once again, being used to
monitor peaceful domestic dissent.¶ 4. FBI Joint Terror Task Force was used to track #BlackLivesMatter Minnesota.¶
Just as with the California Highway Patrol, internal emails between local police departments and federal authorities revealed the
extent to which the counter-terror apparatus was casually – and entirely turn-key – used on #BlackLivesMatter. The Intercept’s Lee
Fang revealed in March:¶ Why
Was an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force Tracking a BlackLives Matter
protest?¶ Members of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force tracked the time and location of a Black Lives Matter protest last
December at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, email obtained by The Intercept shows¶ The email from David S.
Langfellow, a St. Paul police officer and member of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, informs a fellow task force member from the
Bloomington police that “CHS just confirmed the MOA protest I was talking to you about today, for the 20th of DEC @ 1400 hours.”
CHS is a law enforcement acronym for “confidential human source.”¶ In other words, these emails revealed that not only was the FBI
using its Joint Terror Task Force – an entity that exploded post-9/11 in the name of fighting terrorism – but also using paid
informants who were undercover posing as protestors. Once again, tactics and legal allowances created in the name of “stopping
terrorism” are being used, without any oversight or public debate, on entirely peaceful domestic activism.¶ 5. Emails reveal Missouri
National Guard viewed Ferguson protestors as “enemy forces.”¶ The most haunting revelation may just be the latest, from CNN:¶
Missouri National Guard’s term for Ferguson protesters: ‘Enemy forces’¶ As the Missouri National
Guard prepared to deploy to help quell riots in Ferguson, Missouri, that raged sporadically last year, the guard used highly
militarized words such as “enemy forces” and “adversaries” to refer to protesters, according
to documents obtained by CNN.¶ CNN’s use of military speak aside (“quell riots”), the report clearly shows those in
charge viewed both rioter and protester alike as enemy combatants and Ferguson as a war zone.¶ What makes this, and the other
above examples, so pernicious isn’t just the use of anti-terror language, legal authority, and apparatuses on peaceful domestic
activism, it’s the entirely casual nature with which it’s done. Beyond a few PR tweaks, there doesn’t seem to be, in any of these
internal documents, an ounce of doubt or hesitation as to whether or not using systems set up ostensibly to combat al-Qaeda
should be so quickly turned on domestic activism. If all you have is a hammer, as the cliche goes, everything looks like a nail. We’ve
given our hyper-militarized police and the FBI the hammer of coordinated mass surveillance, infiltration, and monitoring in the name
of fighting a phenomenon that kills fewer people a year than bee stings, It was only a matter of time, therefore, that mass
protests would begin to look like a nail in the eyes of our paranoid, over-equipped security officials.
General Local surveillance can break the law without consequence – they can
they can cover it up with non disclosure agreements
Fenton 15 (Justin Fenton, who joined The Sun in 2005, has covered the Baltimore Police Department since 2008.
His work includes an investigation into Cal Ripken Jr.'s minor league baseball stadium deal with his hometown of
Aberdeen and a three-part series chronicling a ruthless con woman, “Baltimore Police used secret technology to track
cellphones in thousands of cases”, April 9, 2015, http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bsmd-ci-stingray-case-20150408-story.html#page=1 -JD)
The Baltimore Police Department has used an invasive and controversial cellphone tracking
device thousands of times in recent years while following instructions from the FBI to
withhold information about it from prosecutors and judges, a detective revealed in court
testimony Wednesday.¶ The testimony shows for the first time how frequently city police are
using a cell site simulator, more commonly known as a "stingray," a technology that authorities
have gone to great lengths to avoid disclosing.¶ The device mimics a cellphone tower to force
phones within its range to connect. Police use it to track down stolen phones or find people.¶
Until recently, the technology was largely unknown to the public. Privacy advocates nationwide
have raised questions whether there has been proper oversight of its use.¶ Baltimore has
emerged in recent months as a battleground for the debate. In one case last fall, a city
detective said a nondisclosure agreement with federal authorities prevented him from
answering questions about the device. The judge threatened to hold him in contempt if he
didn't provide information, and prosecutors withdrew the evidence.¶ The nondisclosure
agreement, presented for the first time in court Wednesday, explicitly instructs prosecutors to
drop cases if pressed on the technology, and tells them to contact the FBI if legislators or
judges are asking questions.¶ Detective Emmanuel Cabreja, a member of the Police
Department's Advanced Technical Team, testified that police own a Hailstorm cell site
simulator — the latest version of the stingray — and have used the technology 4,300 times
since 2007.¶ Cabreja said he had used it 600 to 800 times in less than two years as a member of
the unit.¶ Nate Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said 4,300 uses is
"huge number." He noted that most agencies have not released data.¶ The Florida Department
of Law Enforcement says its officers have used the device about 1,800 times. Police in
Tallahassee say they have used it more than 250 times; police in Tacoma, Wash., 170 times.¶
Former U.S. Judge Brian L. Owsley, a law professor at Indiana Tech, said he was "blown away" by
the Baltimore figure and the terms of the nondisclosure agreement. "That's a significant amount
of control," he said.¶ Agencies have invoked the nondisclosure agreement to keep information
secret. At a hearing last year, a Maryland State Police commander told state lawmakers that
"Homeland Security" prevented him from discussing the technology.¶ Wessler said the secrecy
is upending the system of checks and balances built into the criminal justice system. ¶ "In
Baltimore, they've been using this since 2007, and it's only been in the last several months that
defense attorneys have learned enough to start asking questions," he said. "Our entire judicial
system and constitution is set up to avoid a 'just trust us' system where the use of invasive
surveillance gear is secret."¶