MRK Universal Full Employment Shared Neg

8/2/2019 MRK Universal Full Employment Shared Neg

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mrk-universal-full-employment-shared-neg 1/51

SDI 09 – MRK LAB SHARED NEG

U NIVERSAL FULL EMPLOYMENT NEG __/__

UNIVERSAL FULL EMPLOYMENT NEG

CASE

harms frontine................................................... 2-4solvency frontline.............................................. 5-8- ext #3 – full emplymt doesn’t collapse cap..... 9- ext #5 – coercion link ext................................ 10- ext #6 – authoritarianism link ext.................... 11

link turn frontline.......................................... 12-14- ext #2 – plan ≠ impossible act.........................15- ext #3 – increases business demand.................16- ext #5 – job creation.........................................17- ext #6 – doing nothing solves better................ 18

- ext #7 – Rozo externalization.......................... 19realism good frontline....................................... 20

UNIVERSAL BAD K

1NC.................................................................. 21-22link block.............................................................23impact block........................................................ 24alternative block.................................................. 25a2 perm................................................................ 26a2 Thomassen...................................................... 27

UTILITARIANISM DA

1NC................................................................. 28-29link block.............................................................30impact block........................................................ 31a2 utopian vision outweighs................................32a2 value to life................................................. 33-34survival first........................................................ 35a2 calculability bad............................................. 36Isaac.................................................................... 37

POLITICS

Obama Good 1NC...............................................382NC link wall................................................... 39-40disad turns and outweighs case........................... 41

COUNTERPLANS

Counterfeiting Currency 1NC ......................... 42counterfeiting jacks capitalism........................ 43-45a2 perm do both...................................................46

Strike Against the Self 1NC..............................472NC solvency...................................................... 48solves overidentification..................................... 49

“Persons Living in Poverty” PIC....................50

NOTES –

A viable strategy that is not a component of this file is impact turning the aff. The capitalism good cards can befound in the cap core. Remember not to read the link turn frontline (“plan sustains capitalism”) with the capgood turns. You can still read the solvency extension #3 that full employment doesn’t solve cap collapse asdefense.

1





Harms Frontline (1/3)

1. Their argument that capitalism extinction is flawed – it is predicated on the primitive period of

capitalism that doesn’t account for the squo

Ha 1997. (Le Hong, retired Deputy-Minister of Public Security and Head of the Vietnamese Communist Party'sInternal Security Office, “Thinking on Marxism”, http://www.fva.org/0899/story14.htm)

The fallacies or fundamentally wrong deductions of Marxism are (albeit other correct points): 1. [That] using the analysis of just one period, particularly the primitive period, of capitalism, generalizing it as the essence of capitalism, and then predicting the tendency to extinction of

capitalism based on that deduction is wrong.

2. Can’t blame market for all social ills – most are the faults of governments and local conflicts

Agnew and Corbridge 95. (John, prof of geography @ Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs @Syracuse and Stuart, Geography Lecturer @ U Cambridge, Mastering Space: Hegemony, territory and political

economy, pg. 222)

By the same token, it is not clear that all of the failures of the late 1980s were market-inspired failures. We certainly do not agree with Paul Kennedy

(1993) when he argues that the world is not well prepared for the twenty-first century mainly because of natural Malthusian-style population pressures. The clear-felling of forests in Amazonia has more to do with cattle ranching and property speculation than with population pressure, and most of the world’s pollution is generated in regions where

population growth rates are low. Market failures count for more than Kennedy allows. That said, at least some of the crises of the 1980s must be laid at the door of government failures and local wars. It simply will not do to blame market economics and the IMF for all of the travails of the 1980s inthe under-developed countries of the South, any more than it will do to proclaim the market as a panacea for the world’s ills.

3. Capitalism is shifting away from an exclusionary model, solving all your offense

WSJ 7-3. (“The Poor as Stakeholders: Can 'Inclusive Capitalism' Thrive in India?”, Wall Street Journal , 2009,http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124660913790691623.html)

Communism fell from grace with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, capitalism is under siege with the collapse of Wall Street. Is inclu-sive capitalism the new way? "Capitalism at its core is basically agnostic," says Abraham of ISB. "It does not try to be inclusive or exclusive. Capitalism is about optimal allocation of resources. The more it is allowed to thrive, the higher the number of people who will be impacted

positively by [its] growth. So, in that sense, being inclusive is perhaps a natural process. But for this to happen, what is really needed is more

liberalization and fundamental reforms. For instance, until 1995 the fruits of telecom were not available to 95% of the country. Because of the reforms in thissector, [they are] now available to 50% of the country.... In this sector, capitalism has become a force for good. We could have the samething happen over and over again in different sectors."

4. Can’t claim international impacts – the capitalist system described by the aff only exists in the US, and

will never regain enough momentum to be modeled

Conniff 7-9. (Ruth, national political reporter - regular guest on CNN’s Sunday Capital Gang, PBS’ To the

Contrary, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal and NPR, “American Economic Triumphalism Is Over”, The

Progressive, 2009, http://www.progressive.org/mag/rc070709.html)

This is more than a temporary setback for the old U.S.-led regime, though. In good times or bad, the Western European, humane approach to preserving culture and protecting jobs is making a comeback that challenges the whole religion of Washington-style global capitalism.

All the United States had going for it was the guarantee of ever-expanding markets and ever-growing prosperity. The virtual certainty that

quaint customs like the siesta, universal, high-quality preschool, and a strong labor movement would crumble in the face of the sheer volumeof wealth generated by unfettered capital has been permanently undone. Instead, as the current downturn makes clear, the harsher aspects of theglobal free trade--ingrained poverty, an exploited workforce, a race to the bottom as multinationals seek lower wages and looser environmental regulations, and the outright

corruption and meltdown in the casino economy that replaced an economy based on manufacturing real goods in the first world--don't add up to a very appealing pic-ture. Just as rightwing pundits and politicians used to sneer at any idea that sounded vaguely socialist, pointing to the collapse of the SovietUnion and the grand communist experiment, so the bromides of triumphant global capitalism now seem like a bad joke. It turns out that, in Europe and Asia, many countries never entirely climbed on the U.S. bandwagon--despite American hubris about being "Number One." As a result,in France, as in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere, ordinary citizens are not suffering the same stomach-dropping collapse that we are feeling here in

the United States. Not only have these countries declined to dismantle their welfare states and privatize public services, as the U.S.-led IMF and World

Bank urge Third World nations to do, they have retained some highly paid manufacturing jobs and state-supported industries, even in the era of out-sourcing.

2

http://www.progressive.org/mag/rc070709.html









Harms Frontline (3/3)

Biopower does not lead to genocide or violence

Ojakangas 2005 ((Mika, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Finland; “Impossible Dialogue on

Bio-power: Agamben and Foucault” Foucault Studies, No 2, May, pp. 5-28)For Foucault, the coexistence in political structures of large destructive mechanisms and institutions oriented toward the care of individual life wassomething puzzling: “It is one of the central antinomies of our political reason.” 110 However, it was an antinomy precisely because in principle

the sovereign power and bio‐ power are mutually exclusive. How is it possible that the care of individual life paves the wayfor mass slaughters? Although Foucault could never give a satisfactory answer to this question, he was convinced that mass slaughters arenot the effect or the logical conclusion of bio‐ political rationality. I am also convinced about that. To be sure, it can be argued that sovereign power and

bio‐ power are reconciled within the modern state, which legitimates killing by bio‐ political arguments. Especially, it can be argued that these powersare reconciled in the Third Reich in which they seemed to “coincide exactly”. 111 To my mind, however, neither the modern state nor the Third Reich – in which the monstrosity of the modern state is crystallized – are the syntheses of the sovereign power and bio‐ power, but, rather, the institutional

loci of their irreconcilable tension. This is, I believe, what Foucault meant when he wrote about their “demonic combination”. In fact, thehistory of modern Western societies would be quite incomprehensible without taking into accountthat there exists a form of power which refrains from killing but which nevertheless is capableof directing people’s lives. The effectiveness of bio‐power can be seen lying precisely in that it

refrains and withdraws before every demand of killing, even though these demands would derive from the demand of justice. In bio‐ political societies, according to Foucault, capital punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself thanthe monstrosity of the criminal: “One had the right to who represented a kind of biological danger to others.” 112 However, given that the “right tokill” is precisely a sovereign right, it can be argued that the bio‐ political societies analyzed by Foucault were not entirely bio‐ political. Perhaps,there neither has been nor can be a society that is entirely bio‐ political. Nevertheless, the fact is that present‐day European societies have abolishedcapital punishment. In them, there are no longer exceptions. It is the very “right to kill” that has been called into question. However, it is not calledinto question because of enlightened moral sentiments, but rather because of the deployment of bio‐ political thinking and practice.

4





Solvency Frontline (1/4)

1. Jameson does not offer a viable political strategy – utopian demands frustrate any possibility of true

action

Fitting 06. (Peter, Director of Cinema Studies and Associate Prof @ U Toronto, former chair of the Society of Utopian Studie s, “Fredric

Jameson and anti-anti-Utopianism.(Part I: Archaeologies of the Future)(Critical essay)”, Arena Journal , January 1,http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-34009148_ITM)

As can be seen by the number of quotations I have included, I am still in the process of understanding and assimilating 'The Desire Called Utopia'. LikeBorges' map ('a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it'), my attempt to adequately explainJameson's arguments risks becoming a restating of the argument in its entirety. From a literary perspective, 'The Desire Called Utopia' is a rich, complexaccount of the genre, particularly in conjunction with the readings of specific 20th-century texts. But it is clear from the very outset that this is also a politicaltext, as he asks in the Preface 'how [such] visions ... can energize and compel us to action?' (32) This is not simply an intervention in some ongoing literarydiscussions about the nature of science fiction or the role Utopia plays today--although the book will certainly make important contributions to thosediscussions. Jameson also intends this book as a continuing interrogation of marxism and its validity today . In those terms, the

political role of the utopian disruption may seem paradoxical, frustrating those readers looking for a solution or a particular strategy, who wonder how utopian disruption is meant to replace or supplement other more traditional forms of politicalactivity.

2. No international spillover –

a) the 1AC has literally no evidence that the US is key to a broader movement. Their burden

b) the claim is laughable – other countries will not be swayed away from capitalism

Mattick 05. (Paul, visiting professor @ University-Center of Roskilde in Denmark, “Serfdom in a Free Society”, Western Socialist ,Proofed and Corrected in August 05; originally published in September 1946, http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-

paul/1946/09/serfdom.htm)

If Beveridge’s proposals for England, in spite of their naïveté, could serve government officials in their struggle with the orga-nized will of private capital, his international proposals serve nobody and are merely ridiculous. They are based on the

empty promises of the Atlantic Charter and on the senseless hope for an international authority engaged in a “good neighbor policy.”

He envisions the possibility of a planned management of capitalistic international trade, benefiting every nation including the backward areas. It all depends on the good will of men. In Beveridge’s words capitalists, monopolists and governments are supposed to regard them-selves as the agents of a policy wider than that of their own interests. The control of movements of capital, of exchanges, of raw materials

and foodstuffs, imports and exports should be undertaken with a view to avoiding depressions and unemployment without plunging into war. Obviously,

however, the rulers of today are not concerned with the niceties of modern economic theory. They are preparing for new warsand further destruction through which the crisis of capitalism asserts itself.

3. Full employment doesn’t topple capitalism

Mattick 05. (Paul, visiting professor @ University-Center of Roskilde in Denmark, “Serfdom in a Free Society”, Western Socialist ,Proofed and Corrected in August 05; originally published in September 1946, http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-

paul/1946/09/serfdom.htm)

The direction of investment, however, is not a question of governmental choice between various alternatives. To a certain extent

it is influenced, no doubt, not by reasoning but by the struggle between different capitalistic interests and between capital and la - bor. Where the latter struggle is temporarily set aside by government action, the fight between capitalistic contenders

still continues. Books like Hayek’s and Beveridge’s describe this struggle. But their opposing points of view are only reflections of the fight between the

groups they represent — the fight for gaining or maintaining controlling positions in a system which defeats every control other

than that which will secure the existence of that system. The fact that in this struggle the Beveridges and not the Hayeks are winning should in-dicate that the developmental trend is still determined by the uncontrollable pressures of capital accumulation based on an

exploitative social relationship. Who is the government which so wisely stops and starts accumulation in accordance with the changing needs of so-ciety? Once it was the executive of Hayek’s “competitors.” Then it became a capitalist monopoly among other monopolies. Now it is, or is in the process of

becoming, the complete monopoly which determines national policy in its totality. It competes with similar monopolies and with monopolistic blocs for thelargest share of world exploitation. The competitive strength of a nation consists in its productive capacity which is largely based on the size of its productiveapparatus and labor force. The reality of the competitive struggles alone precludes investments to raise the “propensity to consume.” The uncompleted processof capital concentration enforces the continued planlessness of capital expansion. More than ever before accumulation makes no sense from a social point of view; it may serve the ruling groups quite well, but it does so only because it still us an accumulation for the sake of accumulation. This fact reduces Bev-eridge’s theory to an attempt to turn the necessities of today into tomorrow’s virtue and indicates the inability of capitalism to have an economic theory. Itseconomists merely give ideological support to changing capitalistic practices.

5

http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1946/09/serfdom.htm















4. INEQUALITY TURN/ Full employment would result in the state reinforcing other forms of inequality

– workers would be worse off than the status quo *

Mattick 05. (Paul, visiting professor @ University-Center of Roskilde in Denmark, “Serfdom in a Free Society”, Western Socialist ,

Proofed and Corrected in August 05; originally published in September 1946, http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick- paul/1946/09/serfdom.htm)

Both, nevertheless, approach the problem of full employment from the point of view of immediate needs and with regard to its long-run consequences. Asthe national income rises with capital accumulation, governmental policy must steadily be adjusted to maintain full employ-ment. The rate of investment outlay must be increased or rising production must be fully absorbed by rising consumption. “Ultimately,”

Kaldor states, “the government may have to raise the propensity to consume by more radical methods of income re-distribution — when it will no longer be possible to afford the degree of inequality of income that can be sustained during the period of relatively high investment.” Therealization of all the expectations based on Keynesian economics depends on an accelerated capital accumulation. The theory will work provided

the workers can be exploited sufficiently to make it work. Although Keynes has said, and Beveridge affirms him, that “there is roomfor both: to promote investment and, at the same time, to promote consumption,” they still hold that investment comes first and con-sumption second. And though it is true that man must work before he eats, greater production in capitalism does not imply greater consumption for the

workers. And it is the consumption of the workers, we presume, that Beveridge wants to raise. Up to now, a progressively increasing in-

vestment has been made possible by progressively decreasing that part of total production which serves the consumption needs of the workers. To be sure,

the rapid development of labor productivity allowed for an increase in real wages. But the rising living standard in termsof wages was possible only because the rate of exploitation rose still faster. In this sense, of course, a progressive capital accumulationmay still yield an increase in real wages despite the decrease of workers’ consumption relative to total production. But it makes no sense to refer to this

process as a “re-distribution of income.”

5. COERCION TURN/ The government transition to full employment forces coercive higher taxes

Nevile 98. (JW, Emeritus Professor of Economics at University of New South Wales, “Human Rights Issues inthe Welfare State”, Australian Journal of Human Rights, http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AJHR/1998/6.html)

To sum up this section: if we believe that the right to employment is very important we have to be advocates of higher taxation, at

least in the transition period while we move from where we are now to full employment. The biggest single issue arising out of human rights inthe welfare state is how much are we prepared to increase taxation in order to achieve full employment.

b) Wealth redistribution violates individual libertyFarmer 9. Brian Farmer, Staff at the New American, January 2009, The Welfare State Is Really Socialism in Disguise, The NewAmerican, Accessed April 13, 2009, http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/683

That raises the obvious question, in view of this discussion: where does the Welfare State fit into that scheme? To answer that, we first have to define what the

Welfare State is. Strictly speaking, a Welfare State is a government that completely provides for the welfare, or the well-being, of its citizens. Such a

government is involved in citizens’ lives at every level. It provides for physical, material, and social needs, rather than the people

providing for their own needs. The purpose of the Welfare State is to create economic equality or to assure equitable standards

of living for all. It redistributes wealth by heavily taxing the middle and upper classes, in order to provide goods and services for those seen as

underprivileged. The redistribution of wealth is a socialist concept: from each according to his ability; to each according to his need. But try

to imagine an involuntary transfer of income or wealth, from one person to another, which is not a violation of the right

to property, the right to keep the fruits of one’s labor! Hence, the Welfare State is the antithesis of personal liberty, which is why the U.S. Constitution grants no such power of wealth redistribution to the federal government.

c) No Value to Life in a Coercive StateRaz 87. Joseph Raz, Philosopher, 1987, The Morality of Freedom, pg. 387

One way to test the thesis of the primacy of action reasons is to think of a person who is entirely passive and is continuously led, cleaned, and pumpedfull with hash, so that he is perpetually content, and wants nothing but to stay in the same condition. It’s a familiar imaginary horror . How do werank the success of such a life? It is not the worst life one can have. It is simply not a life at all. It lacks activity, it lacks goals. To the extent thatone is tempted to judge it more harshly than that and to regard it as a ‘negative life’ this is because of the wasted potentiality. It is a lifewhich could have been and was not . We can isolate this feature by imagining that the human being concerned is mentally and physically effected in a way which rules

out the possibility of a life with any kind of meaningful pursuit in it. Now it is just not really a life at all. This does not preclude one from saying that it is better than human life. It is simply sufficiently unlike human life in the respects that matter that we regard it as only a degenerate case of human life. But clearly not being alive can be better than that life.

6




http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AJHR/1998/6.html










d) Expansion of government role in private sector allows US capitalism to co-opt new challenges to its

supremacy

Gjelten 09. (Tom, intelligence and security reporter for NPR, panelist for PBS program Washington Week and

formerly employed by the State Dept and Pentagon, “Economic Crisis Stirs Free-Market Debate”, National Pub-lic Radio, June 23, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105783108 )

This is where the debate is now. The U.S. government, last fall under President Bush and then under President Obama, has gone well beyond rescuing banks. The practice of American capitalism has fundamentally changed. "Remember those days in September when

we woke up and found that the U.S. taxpayer now owned two large mortgage companies and an insurance company, AIG?" DeLong

asks. "And now we're going for auto companies, and who knows what's going to go next? The U.S. government is taking over anawful lot of things and expanding its role in the economy quite strongly and quite aggressively." Obama says he does not wantthe U.S. government's majority ownership of General Motors to mean Washington runs the company, but his administration is demanding more fuel-efficient

vehicles. He says he's "a strong believer in the power of the free market," but that statement came even as he proposed regulatoryreforms that would bring the biggest government intrusion into the private sector in more than 70 years. And then there are the ad-

ministration's plans for energy and health care reform, both of which feature major new government roles. Our free-market capitalist system will

survive. But with each new economic crisis the guiding principles get revised.

6. TOTALITARIANISM TURN/ Full employment risks totalitarianism at best, slavery at worst

Mattick 05. (Paul, visiting professor @ University-Center of Roskilde in Denmark, “Serfdom in a FreeSociety”, Western Socialist , Proofed and Corrected in August 05; originally published in September 1946,http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1946/09/serfdom.htm)

The labor market in the past has always been a buyer’s market. Beveridge realizes that to alter this would change many existinginstitutions. Hayek fears that these changes would evolve into slave-labor. But Beveridge, although admitting the danger, believes in the

possibility of avoiding it. He thinks it possible “to make Britain again” (what it never was) “a land of opportunity for all.” He admits, of course, that “the problem of maintaining full employment is more complicated in a free society than it would be under a totalitarian regime.”But from his present point of view he still thinks it attainable. If it should be shown by experience, however, “that abolition of private property in the means of

production was necessary for full employment, this abolition would have to be undertaken.”

b) Authoritarianism is the root cause of domination and oppression

Henderson, Professor of Law at Indiana University School of Law, 1991 Lynne, Indiana Law Journal, Spring page lexisSubstantive authoritarianism means opposition to the "liberal" values of tolerance of ambiguity and difference, insistence on obedience to rules, insistence on conformity, and use

of coercion and punishment to ensure that obedience. Frequently associated with xenophobic nationalism or ethnocentrism, n18 authoritarianism in the substantivesense is premised on a suspicious and distrustful view of human nature and is frequently linked, both on a personal and

political level, to racism, anti-semitism and patriarchy. n19 Substantive authoritarianism oppresses in the name of order andcontrol. This form of authoritarianism may reach the extreme level it did in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia or appear inmilder forms, as it did during the McCarthy era in the United States, when, as a result of fear, hatred and extreme nationalism, the government, with

private and judicial support, used law to persecute and punish citizens for being "un-American." n20 Authoritarianism need not be based only in activecoercion and oppression of disfavored groups by government. The government may also allow authoritarianism to flourish

by omission -- by permitting other institutions or persons to coerce and oppress others in the interest of maintaining control. Thus, much of the history of slavery in the United States could be characterized as government authoritarianism by omission in the interests [*383] of maintaining order and national and party unity. n21 Other examples include the government largely ignoring oppression of and violence against African-American women, n22 and a long history of governmental tolerance of private oppression of women and children through violence. n23 Because law is a major tool of social and political power, and because it is the

primary instrument for a government to legitimate itself and accomplish its objectives, law is vulnerable to "capture" for substantively authoritarian purposes. Law may always be authoritarian in the formal sense, because a major premise of lawis that people will accept and obey it absent some extraordinary justification. n24 Yet, a jurisprudential preoccupation withthe duty to obey law and the authority of law n25 overlook law's tendency to validate and facilitate oppression and violence,whether by the state directly or by private actors with tacit state approval. Judges may participate in authoritarian uses of law by unquestioning obedience to rule and other authorities, by using stereotypical reasoning, by upholding the status quo and hypostatizing power relationships, and by taking a punishing attitude towards disobedience. n26 AsRobert Cover noted and David Luban recently argued, the Supreme Court, in the case of Walker v. City of Birmingham, n27 [*384] engaged in authoritariandecisionmaking by holding that civil rights marchers could be punished for disobeying an injunction the Court had declared unconstitutional. Professor Luban concluded that theCourt in Walker, "[f]acing a choice between the anti-authoritarian consequences of liberal constitutionalism and the overwhelming desire to maintain reverence for authority, . . . opted for the latter." n28

7

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2100536












7. MILITARISM TURN/ Full employment results in military buildup through army reserves

Mandel 68. (Ernest, PhD from and Professor @ Free University in Berlin, delivered the Alfred Marshall

Lectures at U of Cambridge and former leader of the Socialist Workers Party, “Workers Under Neo-capitalism”, International Socialist Review, November-December,http://www.angelfire.com/pr/red/mandel/workers_under_neocapitalism.htm)

On the economic plane, we can briefly sketch the trends which make long-term “stability in growth” impossible for neocapitalism. When the growth rate

increases, as it did in Western Europe for 15 years from 1950 to 1965, then conditions of near-full employment enable the workers to rapidlyincrease real wages which, together with the rapidly increasing organic composition of capital, tend to push down the rate of profit. Thesystem must react, and its reactions usually take two forms, or a combination of both. One is rationalisation, automation, that is,increased competition between men and machines through reconstitution of the reserve army of labor to keep down the rate of increase of real wages. The other is voluntary or compulsory wage restraints, income policies, anti-strike and anti-union legislation, that is, attempts to preventlabor from utilising relatively favorable conditions in the labor market in order to increase its share of the new value it creates.

b) Militarism is the greatest threat to the environment – it perpetuates ecocide based in larger structures

of oppression

Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy, 1996 Chris, Hypatia 11.4, proquestIn Scorched Earth: The Military's Assault on the Environment, William Thomas, a U.S. Navy veteran, illustrates the extent to which the peacetime practices of military institutions damage natural environments and communities. Thomas argues that even "peace" entails a dramatic and widespread war on nature, or as Joni Seager puts it, "The environmental costs of militarized peace bear suspicious resemblance to the costs of war" (Thomas 1995, xi). All

told, including peacetime activities as well as the immense destruction caused by combat, military institutions probably present the most dramatic threat to ecological well-being on the planet. The military is the largest generator of hazardous waste in the United States, creating

nearly a ton of toxic pollution every minute, and military analyst Jillian Skeel claims that, "Global military activity may be the largestworldwide polluter and consumer of precious resources" (quoted in Thomas 1995, 5). A conventionally powered aircraft carrier consumes150,000 gallons of fuel a day. In less than an hour's flight, a single jet launched from its flight deck consumes as much fuel as a North American motorist

bums in two years. One F-16 jet engine requires nearly four and a half tons of scarce titanium, nickel, chromium, cobalt, and energy-intensive aluminum(Thomas 1995, 5), and nine percent of all the iron and steel used by humans is consumed by the global military (Thomas 1995, 16). The United StatesDepartment of Defense generates 500,000 tons of toxins annually, more than the world's top five chemical companies combined. The military is the

biggest single source of environmental pollution in the United States. Of 338 citations issued by the United States Environmental Protection

Agency in 1989, three-quarters went to military installations (Thomas 1995, 17). The feminization, commodification, and devaluation of nature helps create a reality in which its destruction in warfare is easily justified. In imagining an ethic that addresses these realities,

feminists cannot neglect the extent to which military ecocide is connected, conceptually and practically, to transnational capitalismand other forms of human oppression and exploitation. Virtually all of the world's thirty-five nuclear bomb test sites, as well as mostradioactive dumps and uranium mines, occupy Native lands (Thomas 1995, 6). Six multinationals control one-quarter of all United States defense contracts(Thomas 1995, 10), and two million dollars per minute is spent on the global military (Thomas 1995, 7). One could go on for volumes about the effects of chemical and nuclear testing, military-industrial development and waste, and the disruption of wildlife, habitats, communities, and lifestyles that areinescapably linked to military practices.

c) Environmental destruction risks planetary extinction-evidence is gender-modified

MAJOR DAVID N. DINER , Judge Advocate General's Corps, United States Army, Military Law Review Winter 1994 143 Mil. L. Rev. 161Biologically diverse ecosystems are characterized by a large number of specialist species, filling narrow ecological

niches. These ecosystems inherently are more stable than less diverse systems. "The more complex the ecosystem, the

more successfully it can resist a stress. . . . [l]ike a net, in which each knot is connected to others by several strands, such afabric can resist collapse better than a simple, unbranched circle of threads -- which if cut anywhere breaks down as awhole." n79 By causing widespread extinctions, humans have artificially simplified many ecosystems. As biologicsimplicity increases, so does the risk of ecosystem failure. The spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowlconditions of the 1930s in the United States are relatively mild examples of what might be expected if this trend continues.Theoretically, each new animal or plant extinction, with all its dimly perceived and intertwined affects, could cause total

ecosystem collapse and human extinction. Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a mechanic removing,

one by one, the rivets from an aircraft's wings, [hu] mankind may be edging closer to the abyss. ([ ] = correction

8

http://www.angelfire.com/pr/red/mandel/workers_under_neocapitalism.htm

http://www.angelfire.com/pr/red/mandel/workers_under_neocapitalism.htm





Solvency Extension #3 – Full Employment Doesn’t Collapse Cap

Extend Mattick 05 -- plan can’t solve for the collapse of capitalism. If we win this, they cannot leverage

any of the impacts of the 1ac, which are all predicated off cap bad. They explicitly avoid claiming full em-

ployment good, means only a risk of our offense. And, 5 reasons the PLAN CAN’T TOPPLE CAP –

a) Our 1NC ev says elite fatcats still control the mechanisms of capital accumulation with full employment

b) other forms of capitalist control will still be intact, particularly true for the US


Apparently Beveridge knows that it is not the market but capitalist control over the means of production which forces the workers to accept their miserable conditions. Exploitation goes on regardless of the market-weather, though it goes on even better in the presence of unemployment. But even

the complete loss of the labor market leaves all essential control-measures intact . The forced-labor camps need not be installed at once, the rightideology, together with the right labor organizations, should still be workable in countries like America and England.

c) doesn’t change who owns the modes of production


In diagnosing unemployment, Beveridge found that “the relation of total demand to total supply is the most important single element in the

problem.” The war confirmed “the possibility of securing full employment by socialization of demand without socialization of production.”To avoid unemployment the state must set up “a long-term program of planned outlay directed by social priorities and designed to give stability and expansion to the economicsystem. Its main instrument is a new type of budget, instrumental not only for determining public outlay, but also for influencing private outlay.”

d) the state can sustain full employment conditions, proving there would never be a breaking point

Mattick 05. (Paul, visiting professor @ University-Center of Roskilde in Denmark, “Serfdom in a FreeSociety”, Western Socialist , Proofed and Corrected in August 05; originally published in September 1946,

http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1946/09/serfdom.htm)The economic problem, then, is finding a technique of manipulation which, directly and indirectly, will foster investments for capital expansion. Beveridge’s application of

Keynes’ principle is summed up in his suggestions to the Minister of National Finance. Each year the Minister must make one cardinal decision: “after es-timating how much, assuming full employment and under the taxation which he proposes, private citizens may be expected to lay out a year on consumption and private investment, he must propose that year public outlay sufficient, with this estimated private outlay, to employ the whole man-

power of the country . . . The state must spend more than it takes away from the citizens by taxation, in order to use the labor and other productive resources which would

otherwise be wasted in unemployment.” The state can do this, Beveridge points out, because it possess an unlimited command over the nation’s

credit. It can tax and borrow and borrow again and repay with interest what it has borrowed by taxing once more . In brief, it can continue do-ing what it is doing now. No one should become alarmed by the probability of a steadily rising national debt. The real national income remains unaffected thereby; all thatmay result from the debt is a transfer of income between different layers of society. And even this may not necessarily happen, for “if the annual interest charge is paid out of the proceeds of an income tax which is proportionate to income, there is no transfer at all in consequence of the debt.”

e) Err Neg. Economic consensus is on our side

Kalecki 02. (M., with the Institute of Business Cycles and Prices in Warsaw, “Political Aspects of FullEmployment”, Political Quarterly, Volume 4, Originally published in 1943, pg. 322-331, Republished in Joan

Robinson: Critical Assessments of Leading Economists, pg. 218)

9











Solvency Extension #5 – Coercion Link Ext

Full employment would require a significant tax hike


Thus, at the very least a strong case can be made that it is not high minimum wages that are preventing a movement towardsfull employment in Australia but something else. The most plausible candidate is that successful measures to reduceunemployment require raising the level of taxation. The Australian community appears to be very resistant to increases intaxes and certainly Australian politicians are unwilling to ask the community to pay higher taxes as part of a program toreduce unemployment. This may be because even a well-designed program to reduce unemployment will not have anynoticeable effect overnight, or even over the first year that it is introduced. Yet unemployment could be very substantiallyreduced over a five to ten year period if the community is prepared to pay the cost in higher taxes.

10








Solvency Extension #6 – Authoritarianism Link Ext

If full employment does challenge capitalists, they will turn to m to control workers

Pollin 08. (Robert, Prof @ Dept of Economics and Political Economy research Institute @ U Mass-Amherst,http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_101-150/WP141.pdf )

But despite the fact that businesses could benefit from full employment in this way, Kalecki reasoned that they still won’tsupport full employment as a goal because it would embolden workers excessively. Full employment could threaten thecapitalists control over the workplace, the pace and direction of economic activity, and even a society’s politicalinstitutions. These arguments led Kalecki to a striking conclusion: that full employment was sustainable under capitalism,

but only if the challenges to capitalists’ social and political hegemony could be contained. From this perspective, Kaleckiheld that m could be an effective framework for operating full employment capitalism, since the job of a tgovernment would also be to maintain the capitalists control over workers, no matter whether the workers had jobs or not.

11

http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_101-150/WP141.pdf






Link Turn Frontline (1/3)

Full employment SAVES capitalism – 7 reasons

1. Calls to action fail – the plan’s attempt to remedy desire politics will be co-opted by larger structures of

liberal capitalist hegemonyJohnston interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory 2004 Adrian, Psychoanalysis, Culture &

Society, December v9 i3 p259 page infotrac

The height of Zizek's philosophical traditionalism, his fidelity to certain lasting truths too precious to cast away in a postmodern frenzy, is his conviction thatno worthwhile praxis can emerge prior to the careful and deliberate formulation of a correct conceptual framework. His references to the Lacanian notion of the Act (qua agent-less occurrence not brought about by a subject) are especially strange in light of the fact that he seemingly endorses the view that theorymust precede practice, namely, that deliberative reflection is, in a way, primary. For Zizek, the foremost "practical" task to be accomplished today isn't some

kind of rebellious acting out, which would, in the end, amount to nothing more than a series of impotent, incoherent outbursts. Instead, given thecontemporary exhaustion of the socio-political imagination under the hegemony of liberal-democratic capitalism, he sees theliberation of thinking itself from its present constraints as the first crucial step that must be taken if anything is to be changed for the better. In a lecture given in Vienna in 2001, Zizek suggests that Marx's call to break out of the sterile closure of

abstract intellectual ruminations through direct, concrete action (thesis eleven on Feuerbach--"The philosophers have only interpreted theworld in various ways; the point is to change it") must be inverted given the new prevailing conditions of late-capitalism. Nowadays,one must resist succumbing to the temptation to short-circuit thinking in favor of acting, since all such rushes to action aredoomed; they either fail to disrupt capitalism or are ideologically co-opted by it.

2. Demand for full employment is not an Impossible Act that challenges the system, but rather one that

restores consumer confidence in capitalism

Schiller 08. (Robert J., econ and finance prof @ Yale and co-founder and chief economist of MacroMarketsLLC, “To Build Confidence, Aim for Full Employment”, New York Times, December 13,http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/business/economy/14view.html )

IN the current crisis, discussions of economic policy have often centered on uninspiring, short-term goals. To restoreconfidence in our economic future, we need appropriate, firm targets that will clearly put us where we want to be. For

example, President-elect Barack Obama has framed his economic stimulus package in terms of the number of jobs he will create. The goal is to add 2.5 million jobs, he says, by hiring people to improve our highways, fix up our schools and doother infrastructure work around the country. All of that is fine, but it does not represent a commitment to full

employment — providing a job for everyone who is willing to work . As a result, confidence remains abysmal. If the new

president had a target of full employment, and if Americans believed that he could reach it, the confidence problem could

be quickly solved.

3. Full employment causes capitalist economies to profit – high demand for business


The final major thinker on unemployment that I want to mention is Michal Kalecki, who was a contemporary of Keynes,and who tried to synthesize the perspectives of Marx along with Keynes. Kalecki reasoned as follows 6 : Due to Keynes,we now have a sufficient understanding of capitalist economies such that we candevise workable policies to sustain full

employment. Moreover, contrary to Marx, Kalecki held that full employment can be beneficial to profits, because theeconomy will be operating with buoyant markets at a high level of overall demand for products. Business profits could well

be squeezed by high wage demands in a full employment economy, but they could compensate through a higher volume of sales combined with smaller, but still positive, profit margins.

12

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/business/economy/14view.html

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per



http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/united_states_economy/economic_stimulus/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier



http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:WSJWx9LD1LoJ:www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_101-150/WP141.pdf+%22FULL+EMPLOYMENT%22+POSSIBLE&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us#7%237

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/business/economy/14view.html




http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:WSJWx9LD1LoJ:www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_101-150/WP141.pdf+%22FULL+EMPLOYMENT%22+POSSIBLE&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us#7%237






4. Full employment saves capitalism – increases productivity while preserving income disparities

Wray 09. (L. Randall, University of Missouri–Kansas City, “The Social and Economic Importance of Full

Employment”, The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, http://www.levy.org/pubs/wp_560.pdf )If jobs can be provided to the unemployed, inequality and poverty will be reduced— although such policy will not directly address the problem of excessive income at the top of the distribution. Most importantly, Keynes wanted to putunemployed labor to work— not digging holes, but in socially productive ways. This would help to ensure that theadditional effective demand created by government spending would not be exhausted in higher prices as it ran up against

bottlenecks or other supply constraints. Further, it would help maintain public support for the government’s programs by providing useful output. And it would generate respect for, and feelings of self-worth in, the workers employed in these projects (no worker would want to spend her days digging holes that serve no useful purpose). President Roosevelt’s NewDeal jobs programs (such as the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps) are good examples of such targeted job-creating programs. These provided income and employment for workers, actually helped increase thenation’s productivity, and left us with public buildings, dams, trails, and even music that we still enjoy today. As our nation(and the world) collapses into deep recession, or even depression, it is worthwhile to examine Hyman P. Minsky’scomprehensive approach to resolving the unemployment problem.

5. Full employment furthers the entrepreneurial capitalist sector

Schweickart 09. (David, PhD in math and philosophy, Prof of Philosophy @ Loyola U Chicago, May-June,http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/may_jun_09_schweickart)

Full Employment. We need the government to serve as the employer of last resort . Every person wanting to work shouldhave a job. No market economy, capitalist or socialist, can guarantee full employment. The government has to do that. Every citizen should enjoy a genuine"right to work." These jobs will not be high paying, but they should involve decent, socially useful work. Involuntary unemployment is a scourge, adeepening, terrifying global trend that must be addressed head on. (To be unable to find work is a terrible thing. It's as if society is saying, "There is nothing

you can do that we need. We may deign to keep you alive, but make no mistake: you are a parasite, living off the labor of others." Is it any wonder thatunemployment breeds social pathologies?) Capitalism within Socialism. Economic democracy does not require that every business be democratically run.Small businesses need not be. Nor larger businesses either, no matter what their size, so long as the entrepreneurial founders are still actively involved.Economic democracy values entrepreneurial ability. Society as a whole profits from the exercise of such talents. If capitalist incentives are useful in fosteringsuch abilities, they should be retained. Our economy will feature an entrepreneurial capitalist sector. Anyone who wants to can start a

business, hire as many workers as she wants, introduce as much or as little worker-participation and profit sharing as she sees fit. However, when theentrepreneur wants to retire or move on, and the business exceeds a certain size, she or he must sell the business to the state, which will then turn it over to its

workers to be run democratically. The entrepreneurial capitalist sector thus serves as an important source of democratic firms.Such capitalists play a valuable role in our socialist economy and are duly honored therein.

6. Doing nothing in the face of the Aff solves better

Zizek 2004 Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, page 71-71The stance of simply condemning the postmodern Left for its accommodation, however, is also false, since one should ask the obvious difficult question:what, in fact, was the alternative? If today’s ‘post-politics’ is opportunistic pragmatism with no principles, then the predominant leftist reaction to it can beaptly characterized as ‘principle opportunism’: one simply sticks to old formulae (defence of the welfare state, and so on) and calls them ‘principles’,

dispensing with the detailed analysis of how the situation has changed – and thus retaining one’s position of Beautiful Soul. The inherent stupidity of the ‘principled’ Left is clearly discernable in its standard criticism of any analysis which proposes a more complex pictureof the situation , renouncing any simple prescriptions on how to act: ‘there is no clear political stance involved in your theory’ – and this from people with

no stance but their ‘principled opportunism’. Against such a stance, one should have the courage to affirm that, in a situation like today’s, the onlyway really to remain open to a revolutionary opportunity is to renounce facile calls to direct action, which necessarilyinvolve us in an activity where things change so that the totality remains the same . Today’s predicament is that, if we succumb tothe urge of directly ‘doing something’ (engaging in the anti-globalist struggle, helping the poor…) we will certainly and undoubtedly

contribute to the reproduction of the existing order. The only way to lay the foundations for a true, radical change is towithdraw from the compulsion to act, to ‘do nothing’ – thus opening up the space for a different kind of activity.

13

http://www.levy.org/pubs/wp_560.pdf

http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/may_jun_09_schweickart


http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/may_jun_09_schweickart






7. The affirmative makes ethics impossible and violence inevitable –externalizing ethics onto institutions

is the worst form of violence because it exonerates individuals of responsibility for their relationship with

the other which allows institutional violence across the board - turns the aff

Rozo, MA in philosophy and Cultural Analysis, 2004

Diego, Forgiving the Unforgivable: On Violence, Power, and the Possibility of Justice p 19-21Within the legal order the relations between individuals will resemble this logic where suffering is exchanged for more, but ‘legal’ suffering, because these

relations are no longer regulated by the “culture of the heart” [ Kultur des Herzens]. (CV 245) As Benjamin describes it, the “legal system tries toerect, in all areas where individual ends could be usefully pursued by violence, legal ends that can berealized only by legal power.” (CV 238) The individual is not to take law in his own hands; no conflict should be susceptibleof being solved without the direct intervention of law, lest its authority will be undermined. Law has to present itself as indispensable for any kind of conflict to be solved. The consequence of this infiltration of law

throughout the whole of human life is paradoxical: the more inescapable the rule of law is, the less responsible the individual becomes. Legal and judicial institutions act as avengers in the name of the individual. Even the possibility of forgiveness is

monopolized by the state under the ‘right of mercy’. Hence the responsibility of the person toward the others is nowdelegated on the authority and justness of the law. The legal institutions, the very agents of (legal) vengeance

exonerate me from my essential responsibility towards the others, breaking the moral proximity that makes every ethics possible.20 Thus I am no longer obliged to an other that by his/her very presencewould demand me to be worthy of the occasion (of every occasion), because law, by seeking to regulate affairs between individuals, makes this other anonymous, virtual: his otherness is equaled to that of every possible other. TheOther becomes faceless, making it all too easy for me to ignore his demands of justice, and even to exerton him violence just for the sake of legality. The logic of evil, then, becomes not a means but an end in itself:21 state violence for the sake of the state’s survival. Hence, the ever-present possibility of the worst takes the form of my unconditional responsibility towards the other being delegated on the ideological and totalitarianinstitutions of a law gone astray in the (its) logic of self- preserving vengeance. The undecidability of the origin of law, and its consequent meddlingall across human affairs makes it possible that the worst could be exerted in the name of law. Even the very notion of crimes against humanity, which seeks to

protect the life of the population, can be overlooked by the state if it feels threatened by other states or by its own population.22 From now on, myresponsibility towards the Other is taken from me, at the price of my own existence being constantlythreatened by the imminent and fatal possibility of being signaled as guilty of an (for me) indeterminateoffence. In this picture, the modern state protects my existence while bringing on the terror of state violence – the law infiltrates into and seeks to ruleour most private conflicts.

14





Link Turn Extension #2 – Not Impossible Act (3/3)

Extend Schiller – full employment doesn’t serve as an Impossible Act. Consumer confidence under

Obama is dismal, but would be restored if the government announced a full employment policy – it would

restore the system rather than disrupt it.

And, the goal of full employment is what served to further capitalism from WWII till the 70’s. Proves it’s

not only possible, but sustains and propels capitalist thought


Keynes was convinced that the wise application of well-designed policiescould counteract this inherent tendency, and thereby create and sustain fullemployment capitalism. The Keynesian approach was centered aroundmacroeconomic policy—specifically the idea that central governments couldmanipulate their spending levels between fiscal deficits and surpluses (fiscal

policy) and could adjust interest rates and the availability of credit (monetary policy) to maintain a level of overall demand consistent with no involuntaryunemployment. Note that this Keynesian path to attaining zero involuntaryunemployment is dramatically at odds with the Friedman position that involuntaryunemployment can occur only because of obstacles in the labor markets such aslabor unions and minimum wage standards.It was largely due to Keynes’s arguments that, from the end of World War II until the early 1970s, economic policies in the capitalist societies were targetedto achieving full employment. To be sure, the level of commitment to this goalvaried substantially according to country and political party, as did the specific

policy approaches for maintaining a high level of overall demand. Butnevertheless, the idea of running economies at something approximating fullemployment, and utilizing macroeconomic policy tools to make this happen, wasalmost universally a front-and-center concern.

.

15







Link Turn Extension #3 – Increases Business Demand

1. Full employment allows for businesses to increase profits – buoyant markets mean that demand for

products increase – that’s Pollin 08.

2. Full employment would increase purchasing power under capitalist economies


In broader economic and social terms, when an economy operates at a high employment level—i.e. at somethingapproaching full employment—this creates as a matter of course a high level of overall purchasing power in the economy,since people will have more money in their pockets to spend. This means more buoyant markets, greater businessopportunities for both small and large firms, and strong incentives for private businesses to increase their level of investment. An economy with an abundance of decent jobs will also promote both individual opportunity and equality,

because this kind of economy offers everyone the chance to provide for themselves and their families.

.

16







Link Turn Extension #5 – Job Creation

1. Extend Schweickart. Full employment sustains entrepreneurial capitalism – allows government to

serve as employer of last resort.

2. Government guarantee of jobs increases economic growth – raises aggregate demand and income

Wray 09. (L. Randall, University of Missouri–Kansas City, “The Social and Economic Importance of FullEmployment”, The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, http://www.levy.org/pubs/wp_560.pdf )

During the Great Depression, Keynes famously remarked that if the government could find nothing better to do, it couldhire one group of workers to dig holes to bury money, and then hire another group to excavate the money that would beused to pay their wages. This might seem to be a rather silly policy proposal, and Keynes meant it to be just that. What hewas saying is that first, given the low levels of effective demand and the high levels of unemployment in the 1930s,virtually any paid work would be an improvement—it would provide jobs and incomes to the unemployed, raisingaggregate demand and stimulating the economy. Thus, even something as seemingly useless as digging holes would be

beneficial. Second, he was using such a ridiculous example to spur policy-makers to come up with more useful projects— surely even the dumbest politicians or economists could come up with something better than digging holes! Finally, whatis often overlooked is that Keynes’s comments were predicated on the conditions that existed in the Great Depression— massive unemployment and idled factories. Those workers burying or uncovering money would be able to increase their consumption and the factories would easily increase output to meet that extra demand.

3. ELR allows for economic and price stability

Wray 09. (L. Randall, University of Missouri–Kansas City, “The Social and Economic Importance of FullEmployment”, The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, http://www.levy.org/pubs/wp_560.pdf )

Finally, some supporters emphasize that an ELR (Employer of Last Restort) program with a uniform basic wage also helps

to promote economic and price stability. ELR will act as an automatic stabilizer as employment in the program grows inrecession and shrinks in economic expansion, counteracting private sector employment fluctuations. The federalgovernment budget will become more countercyclical because its spending on the ELR program will likewise grow inrecession and fall in expansion. Furthermore, the uniform basic wage will reduce both inflationary pressure in a boom anddeflationary pressure in a bust. In a boom, private employers can recruit from the ELR pool of workers, paying a mark-up

over the ELR wage. The ELR pool acts like a “reserve army” of the employed, dampening wage pressures as privateemployment grows. In recession, workers down-sized by private employers can work at the ELR wage, which puts a floor to how low wages and income can go. Critics argue that a job guarantee would be inflationary, using some version of aPhillips curve argument according to which lower unemployment necessarily means higher inflation (Sawyer 2003). Someargue that ELR would reduce the incentive to work, raising private sector costs because of increased shirking, since workerswould no longer fear job loss. Workers would also be emboldened to ask for greater wage increases. Some argue that anELR program would be so big that it would be impossible to manage it; some fear corruption; others argue that it would beimpossible to find useful things for ELR workers to do; still others argue that it would be difficult to discipline ELR workers. It has been argued that a national job guarantee would be too expensive, causing the budget deficit to grow on anunsustainable path (Aspromourgous 2000; King 2001). However, proponents have argued that these critics do notunderstand the proposal (see Mitchell and Wray 2005 for responses to these critiques). First, they do not see the difference

between general demand pumping (which can be inflationary even before full employment is reached) and targetedspending (hiring only the unemployed that the private sector does not want to hire). Second, they do not understand the

putting in place a wage floor (the ELR wage) only prevents wages from falling, but cannot cause private sector wages torise. Third, they do not recognize the countercyclical nature of the government’s spending on the program—automaticallystabilizing the economy as ELR spending rises in recession and falls in expansion. Finally, they do not understand that asovereign government can always financially afford to buy anything offered or sale—a topic we examine later in this paper.

.

17









Link Turn Extension #6 – Doing Nothing Solves

Extend our Zizek 04 evidence. Any call to action reproduces the existing capitalist order which produces

violence in the first place. Only withdrawing from action stands the possibility of success.

Doing nothing solves.

Zizek 1999 Slavoj, The Ticklish Subject, page 220The key point is to assert the complementarity of these two excesses, of too much and not enough: if the first attitude is unable to perceive the specificcultural jouissance which even a 'victim' can find in a practice of another culture that appears cruel and barbaric to us (victims of clitoridectomy often perceiveit as the way to regain the properly feminine dignity), the second attitude fails to perceive the fact that the Other is split in itself - that members of another culture, far from simply identifying with their customs, can acquire a distance towards them and revolt against them - in such cases, reference to the 'Western'notion of universal human rights can well serve as the catalyst which sets in motion an authentic protest against the constraints of one's own culture. In other

words, there is no happy medium between 'too much' and 'not enough'; so when a multiculturalist replies toour criticism with a desperate plea: 'Whatever I do is wrong - either I am too tolerant towards the injustice the Other

suffers, or I am imposing my own values on the Other - so what do you want me to do?' our answer should be:‘Nothing! As long as you remain stuck in false presuppositions, you can do nothing!' What the liberal multiculturalist fails to notice is thateach of the two cultures engaged in 'communication' is caught in its own antagonism which has prevented it from fully 'becoming itself' - and the onlyauthentic communication is that of 'solidarity in a common struggle', when I discover that the deadlock which hampers me is also the deadlock which hampersthe Other.

18





Link Turn Extension #7 – Rozo Externalization

EXTERNALIZATION – extend Rozo ‘4 – ceding our ethical politics to institutions exonerates

individuals from their responsibility for ethical action – the affirmative blames the USFG for

individuals desire to exploit the Other when in reality it is individuals who make the choice toaccept degrading the quality of life of other persons – externalizing ethics in this matter make

all violence inevitable because the state becomes not only the dictator of ethics –but also its

enforcement – the affirmative makes legal violence necessary which turns the 1AC

19





Realism Good Frontline

The aff abandons a realist understanding of international violence – that leads to m which turns case

Mearsheimer ’95 John J., professor of political science at the University of Chicago. “The False Promise of

International Institutions.” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 3., Winter 94/95. Nevertheless, critical theorists occasionally point to particular factors that might lead to changes in international relations discourse . In such

cases, however, they usually end up arguing that changes in the material world drive changes in discourse. For example, when Ashley makes surmises about the future of realism, he claims that "a crucial issue is whether or not changing historical conditions have disabled longstanding realist rituals of

power ." Specifically, he asks whether "developments in late capitalist society," like the "fiscal crisis of the state," and the "internationalization of capital," coupled with "the presence of vastly destructive and highly automated nuclear arsenals [has] deprived statesmen of the latitude for competent performance of realist rituals of power?" (157)Similarly, Cox argues that fundamental change occurs when there is a "disjuncture" between "the stock of ideas people have about the nature of the world and the practical problems that challenge them." He then writes, "So me of us think the erstwhile dominant mental construct of neorealism is inadequate to confront the challenges of global

politics today." (158) . It would be understandable if realists made such arguments, since they believe there is an objective reality that largelydetermines which discourse will be dominant. Critical theorists, however, emphasize that the world is socially constructed, and not shaped infundamental ways by objective factors. Anarchy, after all, is what we make of it. Yet when critical theorists attempt to explain why realism may be losing itshegemonic position, they too point to objective factors as the ultimate cause of change. Discourse, so it appears, turns out not to be determinative, but mainly a reflection of developments in the objective world. In short, it seems that when cr itical theorists who study international politics offer glimpses of their thinking about the causes of change in

the real world, they make arguments that directly contradict their own theory, but which appear to be compatible with the theory they are challenging. (159). There is another

problem with the application of cr itical theory to international relations. Although critical theorists hope to replace realism with a discourse that emphasizesharmony and peace, critical theory per se emphasizes that it is impossible to know the future. Critical theory according to its own logic, can be

used to undermine realism and produce change, but it cannot serve as the basis for predicting which discourse will replace realism, becausethe theory says little about the direction change takes. In fact, Cox argues that although "utopian expectations may be an element in stimulating

people to act...such expectations are almost never realized in practice." (160). Thus, in a sense, the communitarian discourse championed bycritical theorists is wishful thinking, not an outcome linked to the theory itself. Indeed, critical theory cannot guarantee that the new discoursewill not be more malignant than the discourse it replaces. Nothing in the theory guarantees , for example, that a t discourse far more violentthan realism will not emerge as the new hegemonic discourse.

Trying to infuse states with ethical norms is hopeless – the anarchic international system will prevent them

from going along

Mearsheimer ’95 John J., professor of political science at the University of Chicago. “The False Promise of International Institutions.” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 3., Winter 94/95.For critical theorists, the key to achieving a "postmodern international system" is to alter state identity radically, or more specifically, totransform how states think-about themselves and their relationship with other states. (139) In the jargon of the t heory, "intersubjective understandings

and expectations" matter greatly. (140) In practice, this means that states must stop thinking of themselves as solitary egoists, and instead develop a powerful communitarian ethos. (141) Critical theorists aim to create an international system characterized not by anarchy, but by community.States must stop thinking of themselves as separate and exclusive--i.e., sovereign--actors, and instead see themselves as mutuallyconditioned parts of a larger whole. (142) States, or more precisely, their inhabitants and leaders, should be made to care about concepts like"rectitude," "rights," and "obligations." In short, they should have a powerful sense of responsibility to the broader international community.

Only realism has empirical support – other theories are simply not supported in practice

Mearsheimer ’95 John J., professor of political science at the University of Chicago. “The False Promise of International Institutions.” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 3., Winter 94/95Three points are in order regarding the critical theorists' interpretation of history. First, one cannot help but be struck by the sheer continuity of realist behavior in the critical theorists' own account of the past. Seven centuries of security competition and war represents an impressive span of time,especially when you consider the tremendous political and economic changes that have taken place across the world during that lengthy

period. Realism is obviously a human software package with deep-seated appeal, although critical theorists do not explain its attraction. Second, a closelook at the international politics of the feudal era reveals scant support for the claims of critical theorists: Markus Fischer has done a detailed study of that period, and he finds "that feudal discourse was indeed distinct, prescribing unity, functional cooperation, sharing, and lawfulness." (166) More importantly, however, he alsofinds "that while feudal actors observed these norms for the most part on the level of form, they in essence behaved like modern states." Specifically, they"strove for exclusive territorial control, protected themselves by military means, subjugated each other, balanced against power, formedalliances and spheres of influence, and resolved their conflicts by the use and threat of force." (167) Realism, not critical theory, appears bestto explain international politics in the five centuries of the feudal era. Third, there are good reasons to doubt that the demise of the Cold War means that the millennium is here. It is true that the great powers have been rather tame in their behavior towards each other over the pastfive years. But that is usually the case after great-power wars. Moreover, although the Cold War ended in 1989, the Cold War order that itspawned is taking much longer to collapse, which makes it difficult to determine what kind of order or disorder will, replace it. For example,Russian troops remained in Germany until mid-1994, seriously impinging on German sovereignty, and the United States still maintains a substantialmilitary presence in Germany. Five years is much too short a period to determine whether international relations has been fundamentallytransformed by the end of the Cold War, especially given that the "old" order of realist discourse has been in place for at least twelvecenturies.

20





Universal Bad K– 1NC

Universal politics are the ultimate form of violence – exclusion of particular struggles assures literal

death for persons who do not join the affirmatives struggle

Butler Professor of Rhetoric at Berkeley 2000 Judith, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, page 21-22Although the individual works and lives under a regime which calls itself ‘universality’ and ‘absolute freedom’, theindividual cannot find [themselves] himself in the universal work of absolute freedom. Indeed, this failure of theindividual to find a place in this absolute system (a critique of the Terror that anticipates Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel himself)

exposes the limits to this notion of universality, and hence belies its claim to absoluteness. In Hegel’s view, to perform adeed one must become individuated; universal freedom, deindividuated, cannot perform a deed. All it can do is to vent its fury, the fury of destruction. Thus, within the condition of absolute terror, actual self-consciousness becomes the opposite to universalfreedom, and the universal is exposed as qualified, which is to say that the universal proves to be a false universal. Becausethere is no room for self-consciousness or the individual under these conditions, and because no deed can be performed that conforms withthe norm of mediated self-expression, any ‘deed’ that does appear is radically disfigured and disfiguring. For Hegel, the only deed thatcan appear is an anti-deed, destruction itself, a nothingness that comes of a nothingness. In his view, the sole work and deedof universal freedom is therefore death (para. 360). Not only is the individual nullified and, therefore, dead, butthis death has both literal and metaphorical meanings. That individuals were easily killed under the Reign of Terror for the sake of ‘absolute freedom’ is well-documented. Moreover, there were individuals who survived, butthey are not ‘individuals’ in any normative sense. Deprived of recognition and of the power to externalizethemselves through deeds, such individuals become nullities whose sole act is to nullify the world that hasnullified them. If we are to ask: What kind of freedom is this?, the answer Hegel offers is that it is ‘the empty point of absolutely free

self’, ‘the coldest and meanest of all deaths’, no more significant than ‘cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water’ (para. 590).**edited for gendered language **

The affirmative is the ultimate act of black mail because it engages in blatant militarism and

destruction of the other

Robinson, PhD, School of Politics, and Tormey, Prof Politics and Critical Theory at U of Nottingham, 2003(Andrew and Simon, What is Not to be Done! Everything you wanted to know about Lenin, and (sadly) weren’t afraid to ask Zizek,http://homepage.ntlworld.com/simon.tormey/articles/Zizeklenin.pdf )

Zizek’s Lenin takes his place amongst the various elements in Zizek’s theory which operate as a conservative pull on the possibility of a transformative politics. Basically,Zizek is telling left radicals to abandon the notion of the state - even an authoritarian or totalitarian state - as a source of unwanted violence and oppression. Instead, he urgeshis readers to see the state as part of the solution to, rather than the problem of, reorganising social life. The state is a useful ally because it is the instrument through which toimpose the Good Terror. Zizek denounces anti-statism as idealistic and hypocritical (RL 16, FA 171, DSST 271), and he attacks the anti-capitalist movement for its lack of

political centralisation (RL 20). He does not offer any alternative to the violence of the existing state, or rather, the alternative he offers is (in his own phrase) a replacement of Bad with Worse. In Zizek’s world, to misquote an anarchist slogan,

‘whoever you fight for, the state always wins’. Opponents of imperialist war and the arms trade, of police racism andrepression against demonstrators, will find no alternative in Zizek; while he may oppose the acts of existing states, his own

preferred institutions look remarkably similar. He offers no alternative to statist violence, only a new militarism, a Good Terror andyet another Cheka. In this, he goes further even than Lenin, who in The State and Revolution committed himself, at least on paper, to the eventual elimination of the state. Here isone absolute Zizek never suspends, the universal which remains operative at the very heart of his own theory. In a memorable cartoon, Wildcat insists: ‘I don’t just want freedom

from the capitalists. I also want freedom from people fit to take over’ (ABC 24). This sums up what is wrong with Zizek’s position: for all his radical posturing, he restoresthe same kind of oppressive logic which operates in the present social system. Granted, he wishes it to operate under the banner of anew master-signifier, and to achieve such a displacement there needs to be a revolution. However, his entire project is geared towards the creation of people ‘fit to take over’, prepared to do what is necessary to restore order and make sure that the core dogmas of the Lacanian schema are not threatened by revolutionary energies which exceed ‘order’.

In this way, Zizek acts as a representative of the strand of psychoanalysis which operates as a normalising practice, entrapping desire and existence within the Oedipal cage. This places him firmly within the ‘party of order’, not within the ‘party of anarchy’, the proletariat (see Marx, 18th

Brumaire p. 19). He may not be a ‘liberal’, but he still has little to offer politically, besides a politics of domination. Perhaps, then, there is a

need to take up against Zizek the clarion-call he sounds against other theorists. He expects his reader to respond to his blackmail: stopshirking the Act, or you are not a committed revolutionary! He counterposes this to the rightist blackmail: stop supporting revolution,

or you are a totalitarian! In this context, one should remember his call, during the Balkans wars, to reject the ‘double blackmail’ (****). The path to a committed radicalism, Zizek rightly observes, does not lead through the ‘moderation’ and ‘reasonableness’ of quasi-liberal politics. Atthe same time, however, it does not lead through the Zizekian Act either. It lies in the flows of desire and activity which exceed Zizek just as much as they exceed his opponentsin their rejection of the traps of state, Party and master-signifier. It lies with a demand for the ‘impossible’ which is not a demand for Nothingness, but for new openings, greater possibilities and a freedom which is lived actively and without the hierarchy and subordination we would argue is implicit to any Zizekian schema.

21

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/simon.tormey/articles/Zizeklenin.pdf

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/simon.tormey/articles/Zizeklenin.pdf





Universal Bad K – 1NC

Our alternative is to reject the affirmative in favor of an embrace of political contingencies – this

political strategy is willing to say “I don’t know” to answer questions about the world that

escape our symbolic schema

Robbinson, PhD, School of Politics U of Nottingham, 2005 Andrew, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique, Theory & Event - V8, I1, project museThe difference between contingency and "constitutive lack" becomes clear if one imagines other ways inwhich the former could be expressed. One important expression of an awareness of contingency is a preparedness to say "I don't know". This phrase - sadly anathematized in contemporary western societies which identify

"knowledge" with quick-fire answers, but expressing a noble tradition stretching back to Socrates - expresses a "contingent"awareness that a particular aspect of the world has escaped one's own symbolic schema, and that (inLacanian terms) the Symbolic itself is incomplete. As Postman and Weingartner put it, 'good learners donot need to have an absolute, final, irrevocable resolution to every problem. The sentence "I don't know",does not depress them, and they certainly prefer it to the various forms of semantic nonsense that pass for answers to questions that do not as yet have any solution - or may never have one' 100 . They even advocate that

teachers use "I don't know" as a pedagogical tactic to inspire investigation101. Trevor Pateman adds that '[i]t is significant when people give an answer when really they don't know, because they create an illusion of knowledge, whichat the collective level may function as a real obstacle to understanding' 102. Pointing to a gap in one's knowledge bythe metacommunicative statement "I don't know" is far more direct than the more immediately communicative and apparently affirmative

use of phrases involving words such as "the" and "is". Is the idea of a "constitutive lack" equivalent to the gesture of saying "I don't know"? Although (as noted above) it is an explanation which means "I don't know", it nevertheless poses as anexplanation, and so is part of the problem Pateman outlines. One could, of course, refer to the instance where one says "I don't know" as a"gap in one's knowledge", and subsequently refer to this as "the gap", generating a use of language superficially similar to Lacanian theory.This is possible due to what Korzybski terms the multiordinality of language: although one cannot make a statement about what one does notknow, one can nevertheless make a statement about one's incapacity to make a statement, because it is always possible to make a statementabout a statement (or its absence)103. A "second-order" nominalization of this kind could indeed express an impossibility without

attempting to symbolize it (i.e. without asserting one way or another the nature of that which one does not know). However, one could

not incorporate such a "second-order" concept in some of the phrases which arise in Lacanian theory. There is a particular problem as regards phrases involving words such as "constitutive", "primordial" and"irreducible". The idea of a constitutive "I-don't-know" is virtually meaningless. If it could be renderedmeaningful, it would seem to mean something along the lines of the idea that inquiry and creation are motivated by gaps in knowledge. Itwould not preclude (for instance) learning something one does not know, and therefore, it does not have the reductive and limiting effects of

the idea of "constitutive lack" (for instance, that all social organization is reducible to antagonism). This suggests that, in Lacaniantheory, the "I-don't-know" gesture is reified into something else: it has a silent "-ity" on the end, andrelates to instances of "I don't know" in much the same way that "Germanness" relates to individualGermans.

22

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/8.1robinson.html



http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/8.1robinson.html#_edn100




















Universal Bad K – Link Block

VIOLENT EXCLUSION - The pursuit of universal politics necessitates violence – extend the Butler

evidence from the 1NC – those persons excluded from their struggle become prime targets for

extermination of mind and body

A BETTER WORLD - Their revolution cannot produce utopia because it replaces one system of violence

for another – this makes it difficult for them to produce a reason to risk the violence they endorse

Robbinson, PhD, School of Politics U of Nottingham, 2004 Andrew, ‘The Politics of Lack’, British Journal of Politics and InternationalRelations, MayThe centrality of the idea of betrayal and of the revolution which 'commits suicide' reveals another crucial problem with thenihilistic variety of Lacanianism. Since the basic structure of existence is unchangeable and the purpose of an Act is toaccept (not to change) it, Lacanian revolutionism must stop short of the claim that a better world can be constructed. To be sure,

an existing master-signifier can be replaced with a new one, but the basic structure of existence—including, crucially, the central role of violence,antagonism and exclusion—is beyond question. Žižek's failure to supplement his radical existential claims and his radical

posturing with a substantive radical politics is not, therefore, an accident, as is often assumed. It reflects an underlying conservatismapparent in even the most radical-seeming versions of Lacanianism. For such theories, the crucial point is the celebration of lack, and specific

political issues are subordinate to this goal. Even the specific policies of existing regimes are acceptable if they can be reformulated in a manner compatible with a belief in the primacy of lack. To take a recent example, Žižek denounced the American invasion of Afghanistan, but his demand for an alternative stops at the limits

of the emotional investments of t he participants: 'the punishment of those responsible' for September 11th should be done in a spirit of 'sad duty', not 'exhilarating retaliation' (2002, 244). Politics does notchange, only its symbolic and libidinal inscription. The scathing denouncements Žižek makes of other theorists are therefore much like Mouffe's remarks on Rawls: because of Lacanians' tendency to

establish themselves as a sect out side the mainstream, the remarks can involve a radical challenge t o established categories, but the political issues at stake are rarely very substantial. Since ,furthermore, the Act or Event cannot establish a better world, the case for performing it becomes extremely weak. The point of the Russian and French

revolutions for their participants and advocates was to build a new world which would overcome the exclusions and blockages of older systems. If, however, the new world cannot be better than the old, and if all the problems of the present must either return or be replaced by structurally similar problems,there seems little reason to risk revolution — especially the highly violent and dangerous kind preached by Žižek— rather than to tolerate the status quo.The case for the Act becomes almost religious: it is performed because it has a cleansing, freeing effect on the subject whoundergoes it. This hardly seems, however, a solid basis for a political project . The problem is intensified when one takes into account the slippery manoeuvresrequired in order for the likes of Žižek and Badiou to keep their categories of a true Act/Event in line with their political preferences (for instance, to keep Lenin in and Hitler out).

STOP GAP - The concept of constitutive lack creates a stop gap in thinking – the aff is willing to ignore all

of the consequences of their actions because it confuses a lack of rational sense with a politics of the

voidRobbinson, PhD, School of Politics U of Nottingham, 2005 Andrew, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique, Theory &Event - V8, I1, project museThe myth of constitutive lack, like all myths, has a closing role: it limits what can be said through an "order not to think". On the other hand, the idea that creativity is motivated by a stance that "I-don't-know" has an opening effect. As Callinicos puts it, 'whatBadiou and Žižek calls the "void" in a situation is rather the set of determinate possibilities it contains, including that of transformation' 122. If there is no irreducible "Real" beneath each blockage or lack, these can be overcome by creative action, as with the creative role of anomalies in paradigm-change in the

sciences, and the creative role of "psychotic" philosophies such as those of Deleuze and Nietzsche. The imperative in Lacanian theory is to "accept" lack, whereasthe logic of a non-mythical idea of contingency is to use opportunities for openness as a basis for creativity.

YES THEIR ZIZEK - Their theory is based on constitutive lack – they cannot avoid our link argument

Robbinson, PhD, School of Politics U of Nottingham, 2004 Andrew, ‘The Politics of Lack’, British Journal of Politics and InternationalRelations, MayThe guiding theme in the work of Žižek, Badiou, Laclau, Mouffe and Stavrakakis is the idea of 'constitutive lack'. This basic idea refersto a first principle or zero-point of 'the human condition' or (in the case of the Essex School) of social life which is asserted at a high level of generality,

as ontology or 'social ontology'. Rather than being treated as a contingent phenomenon, lack is turned into something akin to anessence, which can be used to explain social phenomena. The authors have different names for the basic element of lack and there are subtle differencesin their uses of the concept, but they all take approaches traceable to Lacan's thesis that existence is constructed around the repression of a fundamental, unrepresentable and

impossible negativity. In Lacan's vocabulary, reproduced most explicitly by Žižek, this impossible element, the 'Lacanian Real',renders any kind of social fullness or completeness a pipe dream; the Real necessarily returns to haunt every symbolic order.The social order, or the Symbolic, constructs an illusion of completeness, but it is able to do so only on the basis of thesymbolic exclusion and psychological repression of the always-returning Real. This exclusion is carried out through the device of a master-signifier, a particular symbolic element which 'quilts the field' of discourse and reality by positing a particular element in discourse as universal. It thereby identifies some other discursive element with the Real, and the exclusion of this element sustains the possibility of a stable symbolic edifice. As Badiou expresses it, '[a]t least one real element must

23













exist ... that the truth cannot force' (2001, 85), and, as Stavrakakis adds, the Real is 'inherent in human experience' (1999, 87).

24





Universal Bad K – Impact Block

NEW MILITARISM – extend the Robbinson evidence – their reliance on the exclusions of

democracy to establish a utopian vision only opens the periphery to a new wave to state

militarism and violence – turns and outweighs the case

EXTERMINATION - The particularities that are excluded by their notion of the universal become

less then human and open to annihilation

Butler Professor of Rhetoric at Berkeley 2000 Judith, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, page 23Although universality at first denoted that which is self-identical to all human beings, it loses thatidentification as a consequence of its refusal to accommodate all humans within its purview. It becomes notonly split between an official and spectral universality, but it becomes dismembered into an estate system which reflects the divided

character of the will and the discontinuities inherent in this version of universality. Those who are dispossessed or remainradically unrepresented by the general will or the universal do not rise to the level of the recognizablyhuman within its terms. The ‘human’ who is outside that general will is subject to annihilation by it, but

this is not an annihilation from which meaning can be derived: its annihilation is nihilism.In Hegel’s terms:

“its negation is the death that is without meaning, the sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive…’ (para. 594).

25





Universal Bad K – Alternative Block

EMBRACING POLITICAL CONTINGENCY SOLVES – extend Robbinson from the 1NC – it is

not necessary to proclaim a false prophet in the struggle against capitalism instead we should

radically embrace a politics of “I don’t know” and instead of exclusion include a multiplicityof struggles against capitalism and violence

ANTAGONISM – the affirmatives political act cannot resolve the basic questions of violence – only

the alternative’s more positive ideology can solve

Robbinson, PhD, School of Politics U of Nottingham, 2004 Andrew, ‘The Politics of Lack’, BritishJournal of Politics and International Relations, MayFor Lacanians, the return of the Real is always a disruptive, almost revolutionary event which shatters the entire social totality constructed around itsexclusion. Every social order, therefore, has a single touchy 'nodal point' which it must maintain, or else it will collapse. Since the exclusion of a Real element

is supposed to be necessary, Lacanians urge that one reconcile oneself to the inevitability of lack . Lacanian politicsis therefore about coming to terms with violence, exclusion and antagonism, not about resolving or removing these. The acceptance of lack takes the form of an Act or Event, in which the myth of

subjective completeness is rejected and the incompleteness of the self is embraced.The primary ethical imperative in Lacanian politics is to 'accept' the primacy of antagonism, i.e. the centralontological claim of the Lacanian edifice itself. Mouffe, for instance, demands that one accept 'an element of hostility among human beings' as something akinto a fact of human nature (2000, 130–132). She attacks deconstructive and dialogical approaches to ethics for being 'unable to come to terms with "the

political" in its antagonistic dimension'. Such approaches lack 'a proper reflection on the moment of "decision" which characterises the field of politics' andwhich necessarily 'entail[s] an element of force and violence' (ibid., 129–130). Mouffe's alternative involves a politics which 'acknowledges the real nature of [the] frontiers [of the social] and the forms of exclusion that they entail instead of trying to disguise them under the veil of rationality or morality' (ibid., 105).She celebrates democracy, but her version of democracy depends on 'the possibility of drawing a frontier between "us" and "them" ' and 'always entailsrelations of inclusion–exclusion' (ibid., 43). The derivation of such views is unclear from the text, but seems to be that, since everyone needs a master-signifier

as an element in their psyche, and since such a signifier arises through the machinations of 'the political', therefore the exclusionary and violentoperations of coercive state apparatuses must be accepted as an absolute necessity for any kind of sociallife. This is Hobbesian statism updated for a post-modern era.

26





Universal Bad K – AT: Perm

One should renounce strategies of synthesis – instead radical criticism must assert that

contradictions are irreducible – we should celebrate the gap between thesis and anti-thesis

not try to fill it with constructed synthesisZizek in 2006 Slavoj, The Parallax View, The Symptom Volume 7, spring, http://www.lacan.com/zizparallax.htm In his formidable Transcritique, 7 Kojin Karatani endeavors to assert the critical potential of such a "parallax view": when confronted with an antinomic

stance in the precise Kantian sense of the term, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other (or, evenmore, to enact a kind of "dialectical synthesis" of the opposites); one should, on the contrary, assert antinomy asirreducible, and conceive the point of radical critique not a certain determinate position as opposed to another position, but the irreducible gap between the positions itself, the purely structural interstice between them. Kant's stance is thus "tosee things neither from his own viewpoint, nor from the viewpoint of others, but to face the reality that is exposed through difference (parallax)." 8 (Is this not

Karatani's way to assert the Lacanian Real as a pure antagonism, as an impossible difference which precedes itsterms?) This is how Karatani reads the Kantian notion of the Ding an sich (the Thing-in-itself, beyond phenomena): this Thing is not simply a

transcendental entity beyond our grasp, but something discernible only via the irreducibly antinomic character of our experienceof reality. 9Let us take Kant's confrontation with the epistemological antinomy which characterized his epoch: empiricism versus rationalism. Kant'ssolution is neither to chose one of the terms, nor to enact a kind of higher "synthesis" which would "sublate" the two as unilateral, as partial moments of a

global truth (and, of course, nor does he withdraw to pure scepticism); the stake of his "transcendental turn" is precisely to avoid the need to formulate one'sown "positive" solution. What Kant does is to change the very terms of the debate; his solution - the transcendental turn - is unique in that it,first, rejects the ontological closure: it recognizes a certain fundamental and irreducible limitation ("finitude") of the human condition, which is why the two poles, rational and sensual, active and passive, cannot ever be fully mediated-reconciled - the

"synthesis" of the two dimensions (i.e., the fact that our Reason seems to fit the structure of external reality that affects us) always relies ona certain salto mortale or "leap of faith." Far from designating a "synthesis" of the two dimensions, the Kantian"transcendental" rather stands for their irreducible gap "as such": the "transcendental" points at something in thisgap, a new dimension which cannot be reduced to any of the two positive terms between which the gap isgaping. And Kant does the same with regard to the antinomy between the Cartesian cogito as res cogitans, the "thinking substance," a self-identical

positive entity, and Hume's dissolution of the subject in the multitude of fleeting impressions: against both positions, he asserts the subject of transcendentalapperception which, while displaying a self-reflective unity irreducible to the empirical multitude, nonetheless lacks any substantial positive being, i.e., it is inno way a res cogitans. Here, however, one should be more precise than Karatani who directly identifies the transcendental subject with transcendental illusion:

The permutation severs the universal nature of the affirmative and the theory of the lack – thisseverance makes negative strategy impossible and is a voting issue

Permutation is stuck in the logic of scientific hegemony – ignores the unchangable nature of social

conditions

McMillan doctoral student at Massey University Albany New Zealand 2008 Chris In Defence of theHungry November 12 http://sewersociety.blogspot.com/Sach’s blindness is part of a larger trend, the scientific hegemony of global problem solving. Science itself has a roleto play in both the reduction of poverty and in managing environment change, but it does not consider thestructuration of its own understanding. This has led to a situation where the status of global politics is considered

as either moral or scientific, never human. Both social theory and politics are foreclosed from the debate – withthe result that not only do we not look outside of current understanding for solutions, but human behaviour isimplicitly considered to be fundamentally malleable. However, as Terry Eagleton has asserted, mountains has proved mucheasier to move that the structures of social life.

27

http://www.lacan.com/zizparallax.htm


http://www.lacan.com/zizparallax.htm#7x
















Universal Bad K – AT: Thomassen

Even Thomassen votes neg. He generally defends Lacan, but DISLIKES Zizek. Their approach to

psychoanalysis is incoherent and contradictory

Thomassen 2001 (Lasse, Department of Government, U of Essex, Review of The Ticklish Subject, Postmodern Culture, 11:3,http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v011/11.3thomassen.html )

More importantly, there is the problem of bridging the gap between Zizek's formal Lacanian argument and hisethico-political arguments. This is not a critique of Zizek's ethico-political position, but of the way he argues for it. Zizek uses large

parts of the book to stress the constitutive gap between the ontological and the ontic. However, when he engages with ethico-political

arguments, an ambiguity appears. It is not clear what his Lacanian ethics and politics imply, since Zizek appearsto argue for three different and mutually exclusive positions in The Ticklish Subject. The first position isthat it is not possible to derive an ethics and a politics from the Lacanian argument about subjectivity. This

follows from his insistence on the gap between the ontological and the ontic. The second position is that there is a certain Lacanian

ethics, namely an ethics of disruption and suspension. This is an ethics that does not attempt to erect a new comprehensivesystem telling us how to live the Good Life, but rather attempts to open up possibilities for disrupting any existing system. In relation to this

position, the problem is whether this is not already a particular positivization of a formal argument about subjectivity, a positivization thatdoes not acknowledge the irreducible gap between the ontological and the ontic. Finally, Zizek seems to argue not only for concrete ethical and political positions, but also that these positions are the correct expression of the ontology of the subject.

This, of course, runs counter to the argument he makes about the irreducibility of the gap between the ontological and the

ontic. Zizek's Lacanian argument is precisely that it is not possible to bridge the gap between a formal argument anda concrete position. In short, Zizek tries to do things with Lacanian theory that--according to his ownarguments--it cannot do.

28

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v011/11.3thomassen.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v011/11.3thomassen.html





Utilitarianism DA - 1NC

Their totalizing view of violence makes utilitarianism impossible – the provide no method to

evaluate the magnitude of consequences

Grayling professor of philosophy at London University 2008 A.C. The Australian 6/28http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23915460-16947,00.htmlOne disconcerting consequence of Zizek's take on violence is that this kind of moral imagination, which seesvalue in trying to rescue individuals from the danger and effects of violence, has to be seen not merely as beside the point or only a distraction from the real task, which is to "learn, learn and learn" about the true nature of violence, but as

somehow complicit in its causes. That is why we must do nothing about it. The world may be in the midst of agonies, but we must be brave and not yield to the temptation to let any practicality sully the crucial task of theorising.Zizek's main argument is that "subjective violence" -- demonstrators throwing stones at police, for example -- gets put into perspective when we switchviewpoint and see its background is not a neutral state of peaceful order but a far greater violence: the "objective violence" of the system, in particular the

capitalist system, which is a monster feeding its gross appetites in blithe unconcern for people or the environment . This is the "fundamental systemicviolence" that the fat cats of the World Economic Forum, meeting annually at Davos, try to persuade themselves and us is in our interests. The leading figuresamong capitalists -- Bill Gates, George Soros -- go further and commit themselves to vast acts of philanthropy to prove the point, but the humanitarian mask

conceals the face of exploitation that brought the surplus wealth into these philanthropic hands in the first place. For Zizek, the philanthropists, whom he bizarrely calls "liberal communists", are "the enemy of every progressive struggle today". Terrorists, religious fundamentalists and corrupt bureaucrats aremerely local figures in contingent circumstances, minor in comparison to these true enemies of progressive endeavour, who are the embodiment of the system

that is itself the true violence in the world. Zizek has much else to say, not least in analyses of media coverage of crime and unrest, and the role of fear inmotivating attitudes in societies that think of themselves as liberal without being so. This is therefore and emphatically a topical book, whose approach to

present preoccupations with terrorist attacks, Danish cartoons, the clash of civilisations and Islam is unconventional.But the plausibility of its approach turns on the idea just described: that the main violence to which contingent acts of violence are a response is the globalisedcapitalist system itself and the apologetics that work on its behalf. The problem is not the rather wearisome invocation of views owed to Karl Marx, JacquesLacan, Walter Benjamin, Alain Badiou and the other usual suspects who shape a certain (arguably implausible and certainly tendentious) way of thinking but

the key logical fallacy in Zizek's premise, namely, the equivocation on the word violence.You can, and should, complain vociferously about the harms and wrongs perpetrated by capitalism, but todescribe them all as violence makes it impossible to distinguish between what happens when anmultinational oil company raises its prices and when it pays to have people bullied off land above an oildeposit. Being paid a low wage and being shot in the head are two different things. If you use the same wordfor both you are muddling, weakening and misdirecting your argument.This underlies the discussion in Zizek's book and it is why the discussion is not about the difference between the relatively infrequent situation in which, say, asmall number of religious fanatics carry out mass murder and the standard situation in a Western liberal democracy in which security forces, existing at the

implicit and occasionally explicit desire of its citizens, are maintained to enforce laws arrived at, and changeable by, non-violent political processes .So there is no discussion here of the psychology of violence, or of the tensions and contradictions in non-totalitarian polities that occasionally express themselves violently, or of the forms of non-politicalviolence (evidently this phrase has to be a contradiction for Zizek) that take place at football matches, with much greater frequency than politically motivated violence.Can football violence be blamed on capitalism? Might Zizek think it is not really violence, despite broken heads and black eyes? On the evidence of this book,

the answer to both would seem to be affirmative.The least plausible idea is that the response to the systematic objective violence of the dominant ideology

and its institutions, namely global capitalism, is to do nothing: "The first gesture to provoke a change in the system is towithdraw activity, to do nothing: the threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to 'be active', to 'participate'."This is not consistent with the remark quoted earlier, that to oppose racism, sexism and religious obscurantism one has to compromise with the system, for todo any of these things is to be active and to participate; revealingly, the system's efforts to oppose these things have to be compromised with because they are

tainted: presumably they are bad opposition to racism and so on, whereas non-capitalist anti-racism is ostensibly good anti-racism .But such a view is altogether too self-serving, too precious. We have to fight on many fronts at once:against the system, with the individual, for the good whatever its shape and local name. The idea of thedisengaged intellectual is an unappealing one, and lends weight to the distrust and suspicion that transfersto the intellectual's stock in trade, which is ideas. Moreover, ideas themselves are empty vessels unlessapplied, tested, connected with practice.

29





Utilitarianism DA - 1NC

Evaluation of consequences is the utmost ethical act – their ethic allows infinite violence

Williams 2005 (Michael, Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales—Aberystwyth,

The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations, p. 174-176)A commitment to an ethic of consequences reflects a deeper ethic of criticism, of ‘self-clarification’, and thus of reflection upon thevalues adopted by an individual or a collectivity. It is part of an attempt to make critical evaluation an intrinsic element of responsibility. Responsibility to thismore fundamental ethic gives the ethic of consequences meaning. Consequentialism and responsibility are here drawn into what Schluchter, in terms that will

be familiar to anyone conversant with constructivism in International Relations, has called a ‘reflexive principle’. In the wilful Realist vision, scepticismand consequentialism are linked in an attempt to construct not just a more substantial vision of political responsibility, but alsothe kinds of actors who might adopt it, and the kinds of social structures that might support it. A consequentialist ethic is notsimply a choice adopted by actors: it is a means of trying to foster particular kinds of self-critical individuals and societies, and in so doing to encourage a

means by which one can justify and foster a politics of responsibility. The ethic of responsibility in wilful Realism thus involves a commitment to both autonomy and limitation, to freedom and restraint, to an acceptance of limits and the criticism of limits. Responsibilityclearly involves prudence and an accounting for current structures and their historical evolution; but it is not limited to this, for it seeks ultimately the creationof responsible subjects within a philosophy of limits. Seen in this light, the Realist commitment to objectivity appears quite differently. Objectivity in terms of consequentialist analysis does not simply take the actor or action as given, it is a political practice — an attempt to foster a responsible self, undertaken by an

analyst with a commitment to objectivity which is itself based in a desire to foster a politics of responsibility. Objectivity in the sense of coming toterms with the ‘reality’ of contextual conditions and likely outcomes of action is not only necessary for success, it isvital for self-reflection, for sustained engagement with the practical and ethical adequacy of one’s views . The blithe, self-

serving, and uncritical stances of abstract moralism or rationalist objectivism avoid self-criticism by refusing to engage with theintractability of the world ‘as it is’. Reducing the world to an expression of their theoretical models, political platforms, or

ideological programmes, they fail to engage with this reality, and thus avoid the process of self-reflection at the heart of responsibility. By contrast, Realist objectivity takes an engagement with this intractable ‘object’ that is not reducible to one’s wishes or will as a necessarycondition of ethical engagement, self-reflection, and self-creation.7 Objectivity is not a naïve naturalism in the sense of scientific laws or rationalist

calculation; it is a necessary engagement with a world that eludes one’s will. A recognition of the limits imposed by ‘reality’ is a conditionfor a recognition of one’s own limits — that the world is not simply an extension of one’s own will . But it is also achallenge to use that intractability as a source of possibility, as providing a set of openings within which a suitably chastened andyet paradoxically energised will to action can responsibly be pursued. In the wilful Realist tradition, the essential opacity of both the self and the world are

taken as limiting principles. Limits upon understanding provide chastening parameters for claims about the world and actions within it. But they also

provide challenging and creative openings within which diverse forms of life can be developed: the limited unity of theself and the political order is the precondition for freedom. The ultimate opacity of the world is not to be despaired of: itis a condition of possibility for the wilful, creative construction of selves and social orders which embrace the diversehuman potentialities which this lack of essential or intrinsic order makes possible.8 But it is also to be aware of the less salutary possibilities thisinvolves. Indeterminacy is not synonymous with absolute freedom — it is both a condition of, and imperative toward, responsibility.

30





Utilitarianism DA – Link Block

Extend the Grayling evidence from the 1NC – multiple arguments

ESSENTIALISM – their inability to distinguish between magnitudes of violence makes it impossi-ble to make rational, calculated decisions about the evaluation of consequences – this makes

utilitarianism impossible

INACTION – the affirmatives argument that the remedy to subjective violence is to do nothing

makes it impossible to solve the root causes of violence – only compassionate utilitarianism

can solve for violent acts

AND - Consequences can be assessed--their argument wrongly assumes zero knowledge of the

future

Cowen 2004 (Tyler, Department of Economics at George Mason University, "The Epistemic Problem Does Not Refute

Consequentialism," November 2, http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/Tyler/Epistemic2.pdf, p. 14-15)The epistemic critique relies heavily on a complete lack of information about initial circumstances. Thisis not a plausible general assumption, although it may sometimes be true. The critique may give the impression of relying moreheavily on a more plausible assumption, namely a high variance for the probability distribution of our estimates concerning the future. Butsimply increasing the level of variance or uncertainty does not add much force to the epistemic argument. To see this more clearly, consider

another case of a high upfront benefit. Assume that the United States has been hit with a bioterror attack and onemillion children have contracted smallpox. We also have two new experimental remedies, both of which offer some chance of curing smallpox and restoring the children to perfect health. If we know for sure which remedy works, obviously we should

apply that remedy. But imagine now that we are uncertain as to which remedy works. The uncertainty is so extreme that eachremedy may cure somewhere between three hundred thousand and six hundred thousand children. Nonetheless we have a slight idea that one remedy is better than the other. That is, one remedy is slightly more likely to

cure more children, with no other apparent offsetting negative effects or considerations. Despite the greater uncertainty, we still

have the intuition that we should try to save as many children as possible. We should apply the remedy that is morelikely to cure more children. We do not say: “We are now so uncertain about what will happen. We should pursue somegoal other than trying to cure as many children as possible.” Nor would we cite greater uncertainty about longer-runevents as an argument against curing the children. We have a definite good in the present (more cured children), balancedagainst a radical remixing of the future on both sides of the equation. The definite upfront good still stands firm. Alternatively, let us assumethat our broader future suddenly became less predictable (perhaps genetic engineering is invented, which creates new and difficult-to-forecast possibilities). That still would not diminish the force of our reason for saving more children. The variance of forecast becomes

larger on both sides of the equation – whether we save the children or not – and the value of the upfront lives remains. A higher variance of forecast might increase the required size of the upfront benefit (to overcome the Principle of Roughness), but it wouldnot refute the relevance of consequences more generally. We could increase the uncertainty more, but consequentialism stillwill not appear counterintuitive. The remedies, rather than curing somewhere in the range of three to six hundred thousand children, mightcure in the broader range of zero to all one million of the children. By all classical statistical standards, this new cure scenario involves moreuncertainty than the previous case, such as by having a higher variance of possible outcomes. Yet this higher uncertainty lends little support

for the view that curing the children becomes less important. We still have an imperative to apply the remedy that appears best, and isexpected the cure the greater number of children. This example may appear excessively simple, but it points our attention to the non-

generality of the epistemic critique. The critique appears strongest only when we have absolutely no idea aboutthe future; this is a special rather than a general case. Simply boosting the degree of background generic uncertainty should not stop usfrom pursuing large upfront benefits of obvious importance.

31





Utilitarianism DA – Impact Block

An ethic of utilitarianism outweighs the aff – extend the 1NC Williams evidence – multiple

arguments

INFRASTRUCTURE – an ethic of consequences creates the necessary conditions for a political, so-

cial and individual embrace of a deeply self-critical ideology which solves all of their quality

of life arguments

NECESSARY COMPLEXITY – their ideological stance is too reductionist – the world does not

conform to their criticism – only an ethic of consequences can evaluate a more complicated

set of impacts

Williams 2005 (Michael, Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales—Aberystwyth,The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations, p. 178-179)

This commitment to the construction of an ethic of responsibility in a world without foundations is also illustrated in the very idea of objective enquiry. Why, for example, shouldanalysts be committed to objectivity given wilful Realism’s scepticism toward a science of international politics? Why, as Morgenthau so pointedly asked, should it be a ‘calling’to seek ‘truth’ and not just ‘power’, when it is so often and so clearly advantageous to speak the truth which power wants to hear? Would not a Realist appreciation of power leadits most astute practitioners to tell power whatever it wanted to hear in order to gain power themselves? Within the wilful Realist tradition, this is again a question of

responsibility and, importantly, of will. It is a responsible choice, itself beyond ultimate ground of objectivity. The capacity to recognise the lack of anaïvely ‘objective’ standpoint is necessary for an objective (realistic) understanding of the social world and,vitally, is a condition of the construction of an ethic of responsibility within it. Responsibility in wilful Realismdoes not entail a simple support for , and acquiescence to, dominant political realities and a consequential analysis of their

implications. On the contrary, it is a condition of responsible scepticism toward dominant political claims. Power, in

this vision, wants continually to claim that there is no gap between its understandings and actions and truth. Thecommitment to objectivity in wilful Realism is to demonstrate the inevitably partial nature of these claims, to uncover the ethical and practical limitations and forms of domination that they seek to disguise, and to subject these toruthless and ongoing criticism. If political success is a matter of continually ensuring that truth bends to the needs of power, responsibility entailsconsistently challenging this dynamic. The commitment to truth does not emerge from an external reality: it is a responsible element and expression of self-mastery, autonomy, and freedom. Rather than being the outcome of some naïve, disembodied, positivist ideal, or of the uncritical pursuit of some Modernist

utopia, it is an expression of will, of creative self-assertion and moral commitment fully conscious of the limits of knowledge. To give oneself over fully to the demands of prevailing structures of power — in the form of either a servile ascription to dominant forms of knowledge or

political obligation — or retreat wholly from such commitments in the name of the inescapability of some soporific ‘relativism’, is precisely to forfeit one’s autonomy and to abdicate one’s responsibility

AND - Their ethical purity is not an excuse for indifference to human suffering – only our ethic

creates a responsibility towards the other

Chomsky 2004 (Noam, Professor of Linguistics at MIT, “Advocacy and Realism: A reply to Noah Cohen,” ZNet, August 26,http://www.chomsky.info/letters/20040826.htm)

Right now, there are several possible stands that might be taken by those concerned with the people of the region, justice for Palestinians in particular.

Evidently, such stands are of only academic interest unless they are accompanied by programs of action that takeinto account the real world. If not, they are not advocacy in any serious sense of the term. Perhaps another word of clarification is in order.

Attention to feasible programs of action is sometimes dismissed as “realism” or “pragmatism,” and is placed inopposition to “acting on principle.” That is a serious delusion. There is nothing “principled” about refusal to payattention to the real world and the options that exist within it – including, of course, the option of making changes, if a feasible course of action can

be developed, as was clearly and explicitly the case with regard to Vietnam, discussed in the comments that Cohen brings up and completely misunderstands.

Those who ignore or deride such “realism” and “ pragmatism,” however well-intentioned they may be, are simplychoosing to ignore the consequences of their actions. The delusion is not only a serious intellectual error, but alsoa harmful one, with severe human consequences. That should be clear without further elaboration. I will keep here to advocacy in the

serious sense: accompanied by some kind of feasible program of action, free from delusions about “acting on principle” withoutregard to “realism” -- that is, without regard for the fate of suffering people.

32





Utilitarianism DA – AT: Utopian Vision Outweighs

The intent of the affirmative is irrelevant – they are responsible for the plans consequences

Porter ’96 (Jean, U of Notre Dame, “’Direct’ and ‘indirect’ in Grisez's moral theory,” Theological Studies, Dec., 57(4),ProQuest)

Nonetheless, Grisez's reformulation is more than a clarification. The relationship between the agent's intention and the causal structure of the act did play acrucial role in traditional moral theology, because it provided an objective basis for assessing the intention of the agent. Without some such basis, the agent's

intention could be described in terms of whatever could be said to be the agent's purpose or motive in acting. In that case, it would be difficult tosee how the doctrine of double effect would rule anything out , since any act can be said to be directed tosome good or other , in terms of which the agent's intention could be described. As Elizabeth Anscombe remarks: For after all we can formintentions; now if intention is an interior movement, it would appear that we can choose to have a certain intention and not another, just by e.g. saying within

ourselves: "What I mean to be doing is earning my living, and not poisoning the household"; or "What I mean to bedoing is helping those good men into power; I withdraw my intention from the act of poisoning the household, which I prefer to think goes on without my

intention being in it." The idea that one can determine one's intentions by making such a little speech to oneself is bosh.(45) The question that arises is: Does Grisez's interpretation of the direct/indirect distinction similarly provide an objective criterion for determining what the agent's intention is? Or does it leave open the possibility of describing the agent's intention in terms of whatever good purposes motivatethe act in question? If the latter is the case, then Grisez cannot really distinguish between those acts which attack an instance of a basic good, and other, similar acts which merely allow damage to some instance of a basic good, simply on the basis of an analysis of the structure of the act. In that case, we must suspect

that his distinction between direct and indirect harms actually reflects prior moral evaluations, which rest on other considerations. In order to address thesequestions, it will be helpful to take each of the two considerations which Grisez puts forward in turn. Hence, we will first examine the criterion of goodness of intention, and then the criterion of indivisibility of performance. GOODNESS OF INTENTION AND THE DESCRIPTION OF AN ACT What does it meanto say that an act may be morally justified, if the agent's intention is morally good, and the bad effect is not necessarily included in the attainment of theintended good? As we have already indicated, Grisez does not hold that the necessity in question is causal. Rather, in these cases, the bad effect is notnecessary to the attainment of the good end because it is not necessarily included in the very idea of the good end. In such cases, the good and bad effects may

be said to flow indivisibly from the agent's action, and the moral character of the action is determined by the good outcome at which he aims rather than by the bad outcome which he permits. And so, for example, a woman who shoots her would-be rapist in self-defense does not intend his death; she intends to stop hisattack, and only accepts his death as a side effect (in the moral, not the causal sense) of her act. (This assumes, of course, that it is really necessary to kill theassailant, and also that the woman's purpose is good, in the sense that she is not using the necessity for self-defense as a pretext to kill out of hatred or a desirefor revenge.) On the other hand, if the proposal which the agent chooses, and which therefore determines his will, necessarily includes bringing about a death,then the act is ipso facto ruled out: On this analysis, choosing to kill is adopting a proposal precisely to kill or to do something understood in such a way thatits meaning includes bringing about death. For example, people who choose to shoot someone in the heart or to administer a lethal dose of opiates ordinarilyunderstand what they choose as ways of ending life, and when a proposal is so understood, its very meaning includes bringing about death.(46) What is thedistinction between a proposal for action which necessarily includes the intention to kill, and a proposal which does not? Grisez rules out the traditionalanswer, that the distinction lies in the causal relation between the victim's death and the good sought by the agent, and he does not offer any alternativecriterion in the physical order, Thus, when Grisez says that an action with both good and bad effects is not defined by the bad effect unless it is necessarily

included in the agent's intention, the kind of necessity in question would appear to be logical necessity. In support of this interpretation, consider thefollowing: If an action's description, however limited, makes plain that such an action involves a choice to destroy, damage, or impede some instance of a

basic human good, the wrongness of any action which meets the description is settled. Additional factors may affect the degree of wrongness, but further descriptions of the act cannot reverse its basic moral quality. So, moral norms derived from this mode of responsibility can be called "moral absolutes."(47) If this interpretation is correct, then Grisez would be relying on a familiar feature of the logic of action descriptions, namely, the fact that any action may bedescribed correctly in an indefinitely large number of ways. Thus, the action of the woman who stops her assailant by cutting his throat can be described asstopping an attack, or as stopping an attack by killing one's attacker, or as killing an attacker, or as killing a person, or as cutting a person's throat, or as makingslashing motions with a knife. Clearly, each of these descriptions conveys something different about the action; but it is equally clear that none of them isincorrect as a description of the act and, correlatively, none is logically necessitated by the facts of the case. Thus nothing prevents Grisez from fixing on thefirst of these descriptions as the agent's "proposal," that is to say, the description under which her will is determined. Nothing prevents this, but nothingrequires it either. Herein lies the difficulty in Grisez's analysis. Supposedly, the fact that an act's description clearly indicates that it involves a choice to"destroy, damage, or impede" some instance of a basic good serves to distinguish it from an act which indirectly brings about the same effect. But as we notedabove, an act which involves indirect killing in Grisez's terms can also be described in terms of the killing which it brings about. To continue with his ownexample, the action of a woman who stops her attacker by cutting his throat can be described as an act of self-defense by killing, or even just as an act of killing. By the same token, an act which is a direct act of killing in Grisez's terms could be redescribed in terms of the good sought, in such a way as to omitany mention of the killing itself. How, then, can Grisez distinguish between forbidden acts of killing and permissible acts which have deadly side effects on

the basis of the description of the act alone? Perhaps the key to Grisez's response can be found in a remark immediately preceding the passage quoted above:"Descriptions of actions adequate for moral evaluation must say or imply how the agent's will bears on relevant goods."(48) Following this line of analysis,Grisez could admit that there are indefinitely many correct descriptions for every act, and yet still hold that only one of these is morally relevant, namely, thatwhich describes the act in terms of what the agent does in fact intend. Yet this argument does not resolve the difficulty. If one accepts the Thomistic principle

that every action is directed knowingly towards the attainment of some good (as Grisez does), then it follows that every action can be describedin terms of some good which the agent is voluntarily seeking . Why should the agent not describe his

intention in terms of that good, relegating the harms which he [or she] brings about to foreseen but notchosen aspects of the act? This brings us to the position which Anscombe described as "bosh," namely, that the agent can determine his intentionsimply by focusing on the good at which he aims.

33





Utilitarianism DA – AT: Value to Life

Saving the most lives is not calculative. They deny human dignity by failing to maximize life

Cummiskey ’96 (David, Associate Philosophy Professor at Bates College, Kantian Consequentialism, p. 129-131)

It does, however, support the consequentialist interpretation. Since the moral demand to respect other persons is based on the equal moral status of all persons,Kant’s argument presupposes the equal value, or dignity, of all persons. Such beings are comparable, and the comparison demonstrates the equal objective value of

all. The equal value of all rational being provides a clear basis for a requirement to maximally promotethe flourishing of rational agency (chapter 5). Nonetheless, while the extreme interpretation must be rejected, the dignity- price distinction stillaccurately signifies the priority of rationality. If we refuse to sacrifice a person for the sake of the maximization of happiness or any other market value, then we

have shown a “reverence” for such beings. But as we shall see more fully in chapter 9, this reverence is compatible with thesacrifice of some for the sake of other persons with dignity. It is mere dogmatic intuitionism or groundless deontology to insist that all such sacrifices are inconsistent with the equal dignity of all. At timesthe dignity principle seems to function like an inkblot where each sees whatever conclusions he or she is predisposed to accept. If one believes that a particular wayof treating people is morally unacceptable, then such treatment is inconsistent with respect for the dignity of persons. Too often, when a deontologist uses the dignity principle as a normative principle, the cart is put before the horse: This reasoning presupposes that we have a standard of unacceptable conduct that is prior to thedignity principle. The dignity principle cannot then provide the reason why the conduct is unacceptable. The goal of the Kantian deontologist is to (directly)vindicate ordinary commonsense morality; but it is not at all clear how the dignity principle can even support the intuitive view that the negative duty not to kill ismore stringent than the positive duty to save lives. How is the common view that we have only slight, if any, duties to aid those in desperate need consistent with thelexical priority of the dignity of persons over the price of the inclinations? Of course, on the one hand, it is commonly maintained that killing some persons to savemany others fails to give due regard to the incomparable and absolute dignity of persons. On the other hand, it is maintained that respect for the dignity of personsdoes not require that one spend one’s discretionary income on saving lives rather than on one’s own personal projects. As long as one has done some minimum andindeterminate amount to help others, then one need not do any more. So the Kantian deontologist wants to use the dignity-price distinction to resolve conflictinggrounds of obligation in an intuitively acceptable way, but it is far from obvious why allowing a loss of dignity for the sake of something with price is consistentwith the dignity principle. In short, ordinary morality permits one to place the satisfaction of one’s inclinations above a concern for the dignity of all.Consequentialists have produced indirect justifications for many of these common intuitive judgments; it would seem that those appealing to the dignity principle

must rely on similar arguments. Finally,even if one grants that saving two persons with dignity cannot outweigh and

compensate for killing one —because dignity cannot be added and summed in this way— this point still does not justify deontologicalconstraints. On the extreme interpretation, why would not killing one person be a stronger obligation than saving two persons? If I am concerned with the priceless dignity of each, it would seem that I may still save two; it is just that my reason cannot be that the two compensate for the loss of the one. Consider Hill’sexample of a priceless object: If I can save two of three priceless statutes only by destroying one, then I cannot claim that saving two makes up for the loss of theone. But similarly, the loss of the two is not outweighed by the one that was not destroyed. Indeed, even if dignity cannot be simply summed up, how is the extreme

interpretation inconsistent with the idea that I should save as many priceless objects as possible? Even if two do not simply outweigh and thus

compensate for the loss of the one, each is priceless; thus, I have good reason to save as many as I can . In short, it is

not clear how the.extreme interpretation justifies the ordinary killing/letting-die distinction or even how it conflicts with the conclusion that the more persons with dignity who are saved, the better.

34





Utilitarianism DA – AT: Value to Life

Turn—maximizing all lives is the only way to affirm equal and unconditional human dignity

Cummiskey ’96 (David, Associate Philosophy Professor at Bates College, Kantian Consequentialism, p. 145-146)We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some

persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for thesake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is

a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? Byemphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of themany other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, whatwould a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basisof all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself” (GMM 429). Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all

conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such adilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible (chapter 5). In order toavoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantiandeontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on anunconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would preventother more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for

prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use

them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an

unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value (GMM 436), but persons also have a fundamentalequality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of theend-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefitothers. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one mayhave to sacrifice some to save many.

Consequentialism affirms the equal, unconditional value of everyone

Cummiskey ’96 (David, Associate Philosophy Professor at Bates College, Kantian Consequentialism, p. 150-151)Consequentialism thus provides an indirect justification for our intuitive conviction that we should not demand that the innocent sacrifice themselves, and alsothat we should not sacrifice the innocent. Kant’s moral theory, however, simply does not provide a more direct and indefeasible justification for deontological

constraints. In principle, a conscientious Kantian moral agent may be required to kill one in order to save two. Nonetheless, if someone is unable to do so, thismay well not be grounds for reproach. Similarly, if I cannot amputate a leg to save a life—either my own or that of another—I may not be blameworthy for my failure, although it is true that I should have done the nasty deed. Still, in such a situation I must try to force my attention on the good I am doing andthereby enable myself to act. Similarly, in the highly unusual case where it would truly be best to kill some to save others, a good person should also try tofocus on the lives to be saved rather than becoming fixated exclusively on those who will be killed. Nonetheless, even though sacrificing some to save othersis sometimes the right thing to do, one should still feel regret and mourn the people who are lost. After all, the goal is to save each and every person; thus, one

should indeed feel the loss of even one. According to Kant, the objective end of moral action is the existence of rational beings. Respect for rational beings requires that in deciding what to do, one must give appropriate practical considerationto the unconditional value of rational beings and to the conditional value of happiness. Since agent-centered constraints

require a non-value-based rationale, the most natural interpretation of the demand that one give equal respect to allrational beings leads to a consequentialist normative theory. We have seen that there is no sound Kantian reason for

abandoning this natural consequentialist interpretation. In particular, a consequentialist interpretation does not requiresacrifices that a Kantian ought to consider unreasonable, and it does not involve doing evil so that good may come of it. It

simply requires an uncompromising commitment to the equal value and equal claims of all rational beings and a recognition that in the moral consideration of conduct, one’s own subjective concerns do not have overriding importance.

35





Utilitarianism DA – Survival 1st

Even their focus on quality of life must put questions of survival before consideration of the aff

Fried 2002 Charles Fried, professor of law @ Harvard, “Right and Wrong as Absolute.” P. 76-77, in Absolutism and its Consequentialist

Critics, edited by Jorem Graf Haber.

Even within such boundaries we can imagine extreme cases where killing an innocent person may save a whole nation. Insuch cases it seems fanatical to maintain the absoluteness of the judgment, to do right even if the heavens will in fact fall. Andso the catastrophic may cause the absoluteness of right and wrong to yield, but even then it would be a non sequitur to argue (asconsequentialists are fond of doing) that this proves that judgments of right and wrong are always a matter of degree, depending on the relative goods to beattained and harms to be avoided. 1 believe, on the contrary, that the concept of the catastrophic is a distinct concept just because itidentifies the extreme situations in which the usual categories of judgment (including the category of right and wrong) nolonger apply. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the concept of the trivial, the de minimis where the absolute categories do not yet apply. And thetrivial also does not prove that right and wrong are really only a matter of degree. It is because of these complexities and because the term absolute is really

only suggestive of a more complex structure, that I also refer to the norms of right and wrong not as absolute but as categorical.*) When we say that onemust not grievously harm an innocent person, that one must not lie, these are categorical prohibitions in the sense that (within

limits) no amount of good can justify them. But they are not absolute in the sense that we may never be justified in doing actswhich have these very results—the death of an innocent person, the propagation of false beliefs—as a consequence. They are

absolute in the sense that they point out certain acts we must not perform. They are not absolute in the consequentialist's sense; they do not

state that a certain state of the world is of such supreme importance that the value of everything else must be judged byits tendency to produce that state . So here we see a complex relation between deontological judgments on what we do andevaluative (axiological) judgments on states of the world—with which we are also concerned. We must indeed beconcerned with producing good in the world, but without violating the absolute norms of right and wrong ).

Extinction comes first

Kateb 1992 George, professor of politics @ Princeton University. "The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture."What does a theory of rights leave undecided? Many issues of public policy do not affect individual rights, despite frequent ingenious efforts to claim that they do.

Such issues pertain to the promotion of a better life, whether for the disadvantaged or for everyone, or involve the clash of interests. So long as rightsare not in play, advocates of rights can rightly allow a loose utilitarianism as the proper guide to public policy, though theyshould be always eager to keep the state's energy under suspicion. One can even think, against utilitarianism, that any substantive outcome achieved by morally

proper procedure is morally right and hence acceptable (so long as rights are not in play). The main point, however, is that utilitarianism has a necessary place in any democratic country's normal political deliberations . But its advocates must know its place, which ordinarily is only to help to decide

what the theory of rights leaves alone. When may rights be overridden by government? I have two sorts of cases in mind: overriding a particular right of some persons for the sake of preserving the same rjght of others, and overriding the same right of everyone for the sake of what I will clumsily call"civilization values." An advocate of rights could countenance, perhaps must countenance, the state's overriding of rights for these two reasons. The subject is

painful and liable to dispute every step of the way. For the state to override—that is, sacrifice—a right of some so that others may keepit, the situation must be desperate. I have in mind, say, circumstances in which the choice is between sacrificing a right of some and letting a right of all be lost. The state (or some other agent) may kill some (or allow them to be killed), if the onlyalternative is letting every one die .7 It is the right to life which most prominently figures in thinking about desperatesituations. I cannot see any resolution but to heed the precept that "numbers count." Just as one may prefer saving one's own life tosaving that of another when both cannot be saved, so a third party—let us say, the state—can (perhaps must) choose to save the greater number of lives andat the cost of the lesser number, when there is otherwise no hope for either group. That choice does not mean that those to be sacrificed are immoral if they resist being

sacrificed. It follows, of course, that if a third party is right to risk or sacrifice the lives of the lesser for the lives of the greater number when the lesser would otherwise live, the lesser are also not wrong if they resist being sacrificed. I suppose that permitting

numbers to count in desperate situations is to accept utilitarianism (in some loose sense) as a necessary supplement It thusshould function when rights arc not at stake and when they are most cruelly at stake; it should function innocently, or when all hope of innocence is gone. I emphasize, above all, however, that every care must be taken to ensure that the precept that numbers of lives count does not become alicense for vaguely conjectural decisions about inflicting death and saving l ife and that desperation be as strictly and narrowly understood as possible. (Buttotal numbers killed do not count if members of one group have to kill members of another group to save themselves from threatened massacre or enslavement or utter degradation or misery; they may kill their attackers in the attempt to end the threat.)

36





Utilitarianism DA – AT: Calculability Bad

Calculability is a prerequisite to care for the other – without it, the other’s suffering is inaccessible

Santilli 2003 Paul C., Siena College. “Radical Evil, Subjection, and Alain Badiou’s Ethic of the Truth” Event World Congress of TheInternational Society for Universal Dialogue, Pyrgos, Greece May 18-22, 2003.From the standpoint of an ethics of subjection there is even something unnecessary or superfluous about the void of suffering in the subject bearers of evil. For Levinas, the return to being from the ethical encounter with the face and its infinite depths is fraught with the danger the subject will reduce the other to a"like-me," totalizing and violating the space of absolute alterity. As Chalier puts it, "Levinas conceives of the moral subject's awakening, or the emergence of

the human in being, as a response to that pre-originary subjection which is not a happenstance of being."28 But if there really is somethinginaccessible about suffering itself, about the 'other' side of what is manifestly finite, subjected, and damaged, then to acertain extent it is irrelevant to ethics, as irrelevant as the judgment of moral progress in the subject-agent. Let me take the

parent-child relation again as an example. Suppose the child to exhibit the symptoms of an illness. Are not the proper "ethical"questions for the parent to ask questions of measure and mathematical multiples: How high is the fever? How long has itlasted? How far is the hospital? Can she get out of bed? Has this happened before? These are the questions of the doctor, the rescue squads and the

police. They are questions about being , about detail, causes and effects. Ethically our response to the needs of must be reduced to a positivity simply because we have access to nothing but the symptoms, which are like mine. Our primary moralresponsibility is to treat the symptoms that show up in being, not the radically other with whom I cannot identify. Say weobserve someone whose hands have been chopped off with a machete. How would we characterize this? Would it not be slightly absurd to say, "He had hislimbs severed and he suffered," as though the cruel amputation were not horror enough. Think of the idiocy in the common platitude: "She died of cancer, but

thank God, she did not suffer", as though the devastating annihilation of the human by a tumor were not evil itself. For ethics, then, the onlysuffering that matters are the visible effects of the onslaught of the world. All other suffering is excessive and inaccessible.Therefore, it is in being , indeed in the midst of the most elemental facts about ourselves and other people, that we ethicallyencounter others by responding to their needs and helping them as best we can. It is precisely by identifying being and not

pretending that we know any thing about suffering, other than it is a hollow in the midst of being, that we can actresponsibly. What worries me about Levinas is that by going beyond being to what he regards as the ethics of absolute alterity, he risks allowing the sheer,almost banal facticity of suffering to be swallowed in the infinite depths of transcendence. Indeed, it seems to me that Levinas too often over emphasizes theimportance of the emergence of the subject and the inner good in the ethical encounter, as though the point of meeting the suffering human being was to cometo an awareness of the good within oneself and not to heal and repair. I agree with Chalier's observation that Levinas's "analyses adopt the point of view of themoral subject, not that of a person who might be the object of its solicitude."29 Ethics has limits; there are situations like the Holocaust where to speak of amoral responsibility to heal and repair seems pathetic. But an ethics that would be oriented to the vulnerabilities of the subjected (whichare others, of course, but also myself) needs to address the mutilation, dismemberment, the chronology of torture, thenumbers incarcerated, the look of the bodies, the narratives, the blood counts, the mines, knives, machetes, and poisons.Evil really is all that . When the mind does its work, it plunges into being, into mathematical multiples and starts counting

the cells, the graveyards, and bullet wounds. Rational practical deliberation is always about the facts that encircle the voidinaccessible to deliberation and practical reason.30

Calculability is key to resistance against the worst forms of violence

Campbell ’99 David, professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle. “The Deterritorialization of Responsibility: Levinas,Derrida, and Ethics after the End of Philosophy,” published in Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics, edited by David Campbelland Michael J. Shapiro.The finite nature of the decision may be a "madness" in the way it renders possible the impossible, the infinite character of

justice, but Der rida argues for the necessity of this madness. Most importantly, although Derrida's argument concerning the decision has, to this point, been concerned with an account of the procedure by which a decision is possible, it is with respect to the necessity of the decision that Derrida begins toformulate an account of the decision that bears upon the content of the d ecision. In so doing, Derrida 's argument addres ses more directly—more directly, I wouldargue, than is acknowledged by Critchley— the concern that for politics (at least for a progressive politics) one must provide an account of the decision to combat

domination. That undecidability resides within the decision, Derrida argues, "that justice exceeds law and calculation, that theunpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles,within an institution or a state, or between institutions or states and others."" Indeed, "incalculable justice requires us tocalculate." From where does this insistence come? What is behind, what is animating, these imperatives? It is both thecharacter of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the other, a relationship that because of its undecidabililymultiplies responsibility, and the fact that "left to itself, the incalculable and giving {donatrice) idea of justice is always veryclose to the bad, even to the worst, for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation."'2 The necessity of calculating the incalculable thus responds to a duty, a duty that inhabits the instant of madness and compels the decision toavoid "the bad," the "perverse calculation," even "the worst." This is the duty that also dwells with deconstruction andmakes it the starting point, the "at least necessary condition," for the organization of resistance to totalitarianism in all itsforms. And it is a duty that responds to practical political concerns when we recognize that Derrida names the bad, the

perverse, and the worst as those violences "we recognize all too well without yet having thought them through, the crimes of

37





xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism."93

Utilitarianism DA - Isaac

Political responsibility requires a consideration of consequences

Jeffrey Isaac, James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University, Bloomington, Spring 2002, Dissent, vol. 49, no. 2As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern

with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of

personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not

ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally

compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving

any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of

real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of

complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially

immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it

fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is theeffects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with "good" may

engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth

century: it is not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask aboutthe effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualizedways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotesarrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness. WHAT WOULD IT mean for the American left right now to take seriously thecentrality of means in politics? First, it would mean taking seriously the specific means employed by the September 11 attackers--terrorism. There is a tendency in some quartersof the left to assimilate the death and destruction of September 11 to more ordinary (and still deplorable) injustices of the world system--the starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. But this assimilation is only possible by ignoring the specific modalitiesof September 11. It is true that in Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, too many innocent people suffer, and that is wrong. It may even be true that the experience of suffering isequally terrible in each case. But neither the Mexican nor the Israeli government has ever hijacked civilian airliners and deliberately flown them into crowded office buildings inthe middle of cities where innocent civilians work and live, with the intention of killing thousands of people. Al-Qaeda did precisely this. That does not make the other injusticesunimportant. It simply makes them different. It makes the September 11 hijackings distinctive, in their defining and malevolent purpose--to kill people and to create terror andhavoc. This was not an ordinary injustice. It was an extraordinary injustice. The premise of terrorism is the sheer superfluousness of human life. This premise is inconsistent with

civilized living anywhere. It threatens people of every race and class, every ethnicity and religion. Because it threatens everyone, and threatens values central to any decentconception of a good society, it must be fought. And it must be fought in a way commensurate with its malevolence. Ordinary injustice can be remedied. Terrorism can only bestopped. Second, it would mean frankly acknowledging something well understood, often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century Marxist left--that it is often politicallynecessary to employ morally troubling means in the name of morally valid ends. A just or even a better society can only be realized in and through political practice; in our complex and bloody world, it will sometimes be necessary to respond to barbarous tyrants or criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work. In such situations our choice is not between the wrong that confronts us and our ideal vision of a world beyond wrong. It is between the wrong that confronts us and the means--perhaps the dangerous means--wehave to employ in order to oppose it. In such situations there is a danger that "realism" can become a rationale for the Machiavellian worship of power. But equally great is thedanger of a righteousness that translates, in effect, into a refusal to act in the face of wrong. What is one to do? Proceed with caution. Avoid casting oneself as the incarnation of pure goodness locked in a Manichean struggle with evil. Be wary of violence. Look for alternative means when they are available, and support the development of such meanswhen they are not. And never sacrifice democratic freedoms and open debate. Above all, ask the hard questions about the situation at hand, the means available, and the likelyeffectiveness of different strategies. Most striking about the campus left's response to September 11 was its refusal to ask these questions. Its appeals to "international law" werenaive. It exaggerated the likely negative consequences of a military response, but failed to consider the consequences of failing to act decisively against terrorism. In the best of all imaginable worlds, it might be possible to defeat al-Qaeda without using force and without dealing with corrupt regimes and political forces like the Northern Alliance. But in

this world it is not possible. And this, alas, is the only world that exists. To be politically responsible is to engage this world and toconsider the choices that it presents. To refuse to do this is to evade responsibility. Such a stance may indicate asincere refusal of unsavory choices. But it should never be mistaken for a serious political commitment.

38





Obama Good 1NC Link

Universal full employment guarantees don’t have government support

Tcherneva 05. (Pavlina, Associate Director for Economic Analysis at the Center for Full Employment and Price

Stability @ University of Missouri-Kansas City, “The Economic Viability of Universal Guarantees in SovereignCurrency Nations”, www.cfeps.org/pubs/wp-pdf/WP49-Tcherneva.pdf)

False notions of public finance are perhaps the single most important obstacle to implementing important government policies. Similarly,universal job or income guarantees are not likely to yield the necessary support, unless we dispelmisconceptions about the effects of modern government spending.

.

39





Obama Good PTX 2NC Link Wall (1/2)

1. Extend Tcherneva from the 1NC – she claims because of misconceptions about financing, any proposal

for universal full employment would not garner government support

2. BIG BUSINESS/a) Business is key to Obama’s health care agenda – they’re in favor now but would reverse support

MARCUS 6-24-09. [Ruth, financial editorial writer and columnist, “Déjà vu on Health Care?” Washington Post-- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/23/AR2009062303116.html]

So the whole effort could well fall apart once again. But my money is on the side of a significant legislativeaccomplishment -- something short of immediate universal coverage but more than cosmetic change. In conversations with veterans of the Clinton effort, all said

the turbulence was expected, inevitable and almost certainly not the last buckle-your-seatbelt moment. But most were cautiously optimistic about thefinal outcome. Their reasoning was threefold: This administration has learned from the multiple mistakes of the Clinton years. Congressional Democrats are

more committed to getting something passed than they were 15 years ago. The interest groups -- insurers, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, hospitals -- are no less self-interested, but some have concluded that their self-interest may be better served by forging change to their liking than sticking with an unsustainable status quo. The Clinton administration's errors on health care were, literally, start to finish. At this point in the Clintonadministration, the plan was being written in secret; the stone tablets weren't handed down until September. Obama smartly let lawmakers work through the complicateddetails from the start. At the same time, he has not locked himself into an unwinnable endgame as Clinton did, waving his pen and vowing to veto anything short of

universal coverage. By contrast, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has decreed that "the only non-negotiable principle here is success." Even RobertReischauer, CBO director during the Clinton years and the most pessimistic of the bunch, gave the Obama administration high marks. "The way they've been goingabout doing this has raised the probability, in my mind, from zero to about 33, 40 percent," he said. In Congress, key lawmakers have been preparing for this momentand are determined not to squander it. Montana Democrat Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is no Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but that may be agood thing in this circumstance: Moynihan as chairman was openly skeptical of comprehensive reform, while Baucus has doggedly been working through the detailsalongside the ranking Republican, Iowan Chuck Grassley. Getting more than a few Republicans on board will be difficult but not impossible: The proof is in the

bipartisan bill crafted by Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden and Utah Republican Bob Bennett. Without being ghoulish, the Ted Kennedy factor is also at play. Although theeffort has suffered to some extent because of the Massachusetts senator's absence from the negotiating scene, his illness provides powerful emotional leverage for

passage. "I know some people are trying to turn this into '93-94, and people on the right wing and people on the left wing are practically starting the recrimination hour already," said Wyden, optimistic Tigger to Reischauer's gloomy Eeyore. "There is much more to work with today than there was in '93. Republicans have moved

dramatically and Democrats have said that we want to meet them halfway." Meantime, the coalition of interest groups that coalesced to killhealth-care reform last time is in a more accommodating frame of mind. Insurers are willing to subject themselves to strictrules if they don't face crippling competition from a public plan and if individuals are required to purchase coverage.Pharmaceutical companies are running ads in support of health reform; Monday's announcement that the industry will ante up $80 billion insavings was short on details but still suggests how far the calculus in favor of cooperation has changed.

b) Full employment really grinds big business’ gears – they’ll use their significant Congressional clout tooppose

Kalecki 02. (M., with the Institute of Business Cycles and Prices in Warsaw, “Political Aspects of FullEmployment”, Political Quarterly, Volume 4, Originally published in 1943, pg. 322-331, Republished in Joan

Robinson: Critical Assessments of Leading Economists, pg. 217)

40

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/23/AR2009062303116.html









Obama Good PTX 2NC Link Wall (2/2)

3. TAXES LINK/

a) Full employment would require a significant tax hike

Nevile 98. (JW, Emeritus Professor of Economics at University of New South Wales, “Human Rights Issues inthe Welfare State”, Australian Journal of Human Rights,http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AJHR/1998/6.html)

Thus, at the very least a strong case can be made that it is not high minimum wages that are preventing a movement towardsfull employment in Australia but something else. The most plausible candidate is that successful measures to reduceunemployment require raising the level of taxation. The Australian community appears to be very resistant to increases intaxes and certainly Australian politicians are unwilling to ask the community to pay higher taxes as part of a program toreduce unemployment. This may be because even a well-designed program to reduce unemployment will not have anynoticeable effect overnight, or even over the first year that it is introduced. Yet unemployment could be very substantiallyreduced over a five to ten year period if the community is prepared to pay the cost in higher taxes.

b) Taxes derail the health care scheme – GOP are only on board if tax hikes on the wealthy are avoided

CNN 7-12. (“Raising taxes at center of health care reform debate”, 2009,http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/12/health.care/index.html?eref=rss_mostpopular)

Republicans oppose the high cost of health care reform, as well as key components of Democratic proposals includinghigher taxes on the wealthy. However, some Republicans expressed support for taxing employer-provided benefits of themost expensive health insurance plans.

41







Disad Turns and Outweighs Case

Disad outweighs biopower – physical violence is worse than disciplinary power

Mark Bevir, Reader in Political Theory @ U. Newcastle, Feb. 1999, Political TheoryPerhaps we might say, therefore, that power or pastoral-power recognises the value of the subject as an agent, whereas violence or

discipline attempts to extinguish the capacity of the subject for agency. Although Foucault, of course, never describes things in quite these

terms, he does come remarkably close to doing so. In particular, he defines violence, in contrast to power, as aiming at domination or as a physical constraint that denies the ability of the other to act: “where the determining factors saturate the whole there is no relationship of power,” rather “it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint.”27 Similarly, he defines power, in contrast to violence, as able to come into play onlywhere people have a capacity to act, perhaps even a capacity to act freely: “power is exercised over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free,” by which“we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diversecomportments may be realized.”28 If we thus accept that power always treats the subject as an agent, whereas violence always attempts to extinguish thecapacity of the subject for agency, we can see why Foucault’s later work on power emphasises that power, unlike violence, necessarily entails acapacity for resistance. To treat someone as an agent, one has to recognise that they can do other than one wishes—they canresist. Power can exist only where people have a capacity to act freely, and so only where they can resist that power. Perhaps, therefore, we should define asviolent any relationship—whether overtly violent or not—in which an individual has his action determined for him. Violence manifests itself in anyrelationship between individuals, groups, or societies in which one denies the agency of the others by seeking to define for them actions they must perform.Power, in contrast, appears in any relationship—although no overtly violent relationship could meet the following requirement—in which an individual doesnot have his action determined for him. Power manifests itself whenever individuals, groups, or societies act as influences on the agency of the subject without

attempting to determine the particular actions the subject performs. Here a rejection of autonomy implies that power is ineliminable, while adefence of agency implies that power need not degenerate into violence. Foucault’s final work on the nature of governmentality suggests,therefore, that society need not consist solely of the forms of discipline he had analysed earlier. Society might include an arena in which free individualsattempt only to influence one another. I hope my discussion of Foucault’s theory of governmentality has pointed to the way in which a distinction

between violence and power might provide us with normative resources for social criticism absent from his earlier work.Provided we are willing to grant that the capacity for agency has ethical value — and this seems reasonable enough— we will denounceviolent social relations and champion instead a society based on a more benign power .29 We will favour forms of power thatrecognise the other as an agent, and so provide openings for resistance. As Foucault suggested, we will judge societies against anideal of “a minimum of domination.”30A good society must recognise people as agents: it must encourage forms of resistance. What is more, of course, if we are to recognise people as agents and encourage forms of resistance, we must tolerate, perhaps even promote,difference. Most discussions of the sort of ethics poststructuralism might sustain, especially in relation to feminism, highlight the ideas of a recognition of theother and a tolerance of difference.31 What I hope I have added to these discussions is the suggestion that one way of generating these values is to treatFoucault’s concept of governmentality as implying a recognition of the subject as an agent but not an autonomous agent. No doubt important questions remainto be answered. Questions such as, can we devise criteria by which to determine the extent of violence within a society? how should we promote resistance?and can we make further relevant distinctions between forms of violence or even between forms of power? It seems clear already, however, that Foucault

provides us with a point of departure from which to address these questions. His concept of governmentality encourages us to look at social formations to seehow they provide possibilities for agency and resistance understood as key forms of human freedom. As he himself said, “the notion of governmentalityallows one, I believe, to set off the freedom of the subject and the relationship to others, i.e., that which constitutes the very matter of ethics.”32

And, disad turns the case – war fuels systemic and objective violence – not the other way around

Goldstein, War and Gender, Prof. @ American Univ., 01, p 412First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace. Many peace scholars and activists support the

approach, “if you want peace, work for justice.” Then, if one believes that sexism contributes to war, one can work for gender justicespecifically (perhaps among others) in order to pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but

rests on the assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this book suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of theseinfluence wars’ outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices.So, “if you want peace, work for peace.” indeed, if you want justice (gender and others), work for peace. Causality does not run just up— ward through the levels of analysis,from types of individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the military may be the most

important way to “reverse women’s oppression.” The dilemma is that peace work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, inlight of this book’s evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate.

.

42





Crash Capitalism CP 1NC

TEXT –

The United States federal government should legalize the counterfeiting of currency.

SOLVES –

1. Legalizing counterfeiting jacks currency stability and undermines the international economic system as a

whole

Cummings 99. (Nathan K., Associate @ Howrey & Simon Law Firm, Southern California Interdisciplinary Law

Journal , 8 S. Cal. Interdis. L.J. 539, Spring, lexis)

Counterfeiting is also recognized by the international community of nations as one of approximately twenty internationalcrimes. 189 It is recognized as an international crime because it strains relations between nations and threatens mutualinterests, namely the stability of national and international economic systems and the value of the currencies which operatein those systems. 190 For instance, members of the International Monetary Fund ("IMF") could be severely impacted by adevaluation of the dollar due to counterfeiting, both because the United States has made large deposits with the IMF and

because the health of the world economy is so linked to the health of the U.S. economy. To prevent such harm, there is aninternational prohibition on the making, buying, selling, passing, or transporting of counterfeit currencies. 191

2. This is the most effective way to destroy global capitalism***

New Straits Times 98. (April 17, lexis)

But all our efforts can come to naught if deficiencies in the international architecture of capital and trade are not redressed.The growing volatility of short-term capital flows, coupled with the systemic fragility of the international monetary

system, threatens the very foundations of the global economy. So is the lack of transparency in currency trading. It wasLenin who asserted that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to undermine the value of money . Thisassertion found support from an unlikely quarter. John Maynard Keynes himself agreed when he wrote that "there is no subtler nor surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency . The process engages allthe hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one [hu]man in a million is

able to diagnose".** This evidence has been edited for gendered language**

3. Your author agrees – Jameson thinks abolishing the value of money would serve as the ideal Utopian

break, allowing political action to follow

Fitting 06. (Peter, Director of Cinema Studies and Associate Prof @ U Toronto, former chair of the Society of Utopian Studies, “Fredric Jameson and anti-anti-Utopianism.(Part I: Archaeologies of the Future)(Criticalessay)”, Arena Journal , January 1, http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-34009148_ITM)

In returning to More's starting point--the abolition of money--Jameson has found an example of what he calls a 'dramaticrupture' with the present; and 'The Desire Called Utopia' ends with a call for more such 'utopian disruptions':

This is indeed how Utopia recovers its vocation at the very moment where the undesirability of change is everywheredogmatically affirmed ... Disruption is then the name for a new discursive strategy, and Utopia is the form such disruption necessarily takes. And this

is now the temporal situation in which the Utopian form proper ... has its political role to play, and in fact becomes a new kind of content in its own right. For it is the very principle of the radical break as such, its possibility, which is reinforced by the paradoxicality of the Utopian form,which insists that its radical difference is possible and that a break is necessary. The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological convictionthat no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a moretraditional picture of what things would be like after the break (30) ... Utopia thus now better expresses our relationship to a genuinely political future than anycurrent program of action, where we are for the moment only at the stage of massive protests and demonstrations, without any conception of how a globalized

transformation might then proceed. But at this same time, Utopia also serves a vital political function today which goes well beyondmere ideological expression or replication. The formal flaw--how to articulate the Utopian break in such a way that it istransformed into a practical-political transition--now becomes a rhetorical and political strength--in that it forces us

precisely to concentrate on the break itself: a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right. This is very far from aliberal capitulation to the necessity of capitalism, however; it is quite the opposite, a rattling of the bars and an intense spiritual concentrationand preparation for another stage which has not yet arrived. (31)

43





2NC CP Solvency – Counterfeiting Jacks Capitalism (1/3)

Counterfeit money is the Achilles’ heel of capitalism

Buland 06. (Alton, Program Assistant with the Program on Science, Technology, America and the Global

Economy @ the Wilson Center, “Book Launch -- Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renewthe Free-Market System”, March 2, http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=events.event_summary&event_id=171594)

Raymond Baker , Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy, presented his

new book Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System at a STAGE-hosted seminar. Baker , a graduate

of Harvard Business School and longtime international businessman, argued that the capitalist system was threatened by the lopsideddistribution of income between the top 20% of the world’s population (who control 70-90% of global income) and the bottom percentiles. Directly

contributing to this economic disparity was “dirty money,” defined as capital whose origin, movement, or use violates the law, and of which there are three kinds: corrupt (bribes), criminal (drugs, racketeering, etc.), and commercial (tax evading). Baker traced the global infrastructure for moving dirty money (including the world’s 70 tax havens, its 1 to 3 million disguised corporations, fake foundations, flee clauses, shell banks, and anonymoustrusts) as a Western development of the 1960s to handle the flight capital of the fleeing political and economic elite of newly independent former colonies andas a by-product of the great proliferation of international corporations in that era. In the 1980s and 1990s, syndicated crime inherited the system and was

joined in more recently by international terrorist networks. Falsified pricing, noted Baker, was the most oft used tool for shifting funds. Difficult to trace, it

involves verbal or informal agreements between businesspeople to enrich themselves quietly by invoicing sales at higher prices, hiding overloads. In doing so,export and import values are misstated, and capital flows go unrecorded, leading to ineffective tax collection, as well inaccurate GDP figures and other

important economic indicators. Unfortunately, current U.S. law and policy is ineffective in fighting the movement of dirty money. Thescope of the laws against money laundering is so narrow, targeting money from drugs, terror, and governmental corruption, that funds raised overseas through

non-bank fraud, racketeering, stock and bond swindles, counterfeiting and counterfeit goods, slave trading, alien smuggling, trafficking in women, etc. all

can legally enter the United States. Baker argues that it is folly to fight such a narrow subset of illicit funds, while welcoming with openarms and few questions dirty money raised through all other means. He noted even bin Laden recognized in a 2001 tape that “these are the

very flaws in the Western financial system that are becoming a noose for it.”

Counterfeiting is a symbol by which to challenge American economy primacy and the culture of

capitalism

Mihm 04. (Stephen, assistant prof of history at University of Georgia, “Accept No Imitations”, Common Place,

Vol. 4, No. 4, July, http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-04/mihm/)While it is tempting to ascribe our money’s makeover to American envy about the new Euro notes, the threat of counterfeiting was the realimpetus for the change. After some seventy years in which the look of the greenback changed very little if at all, the country is adopting a novellook for its currency in the hopes it will deter a new and technologically savvy generation of criminals. But if history is any guide, theTreasury Department has an uphill fight ahead of it; counterfeiters have a knack for circumventing almost any obstacle put in

their way. That said, the challenges the government now faces pale in comparison to the monetary misery of an earlier epoch,when counterfeiting assumed epidemic proportions, eventually becoming symbolic of a crisis of confidence in the nation’s

currency, and perhaps in its emerging economic culture as well.

Sound currency the heart of functioning capitalism

Fisher 05. (Richard, “Contemplating the Nature of Money and the Capillaries of Capitalism”, Remarks Before

Downtown Waco Inc., October 6, http://www.dallasfed.org/news/speeches/fisher/fs051006.html)Money flows are an economy’s lifeblood, and the Federal Reserve’s great responsibility lies in maintaining thecardiovascular system of American capitalism. The Federal Reserve’s factory operations—from payments processing to bank regulation to the New York desk’s trading activities— keep open the arteries, veins and even the capillaries of capitalism. We cannot letthe equivalent of sclerosis block the arteries and disrupt the workings of the circulatory system.

44

http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-04/mihm/








Laws over the production of money uphold capitalism – without which, counterfeiting would flourish and

communism would reign

Thibadeau 94. (Robert, PhD, “Deciding Where Technology Ends and the Law Begins”, School of Computer Science with Carnegie Mellon U, August, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rht/leaps/tecend.rtf )Where, in law, should we look for guidance? Take a look at the 'wild west' of capitalism. At a recent Progress and Freedom Foundation conference, it wasobserved that foreigners commonly suspect that capitalism is controlled by a master conspiracy. No, the speaker countered; it is driven in a chaos of opportunity, by incentive, but not by a ruling conspiracy. I would argue this opinion is mistaken. Capitalism flourishes when there is a heavy

hand of the law: the old fashioned, steadfast, protection of property . Capitalism is indeed constructed by a conspiracy: a

conspiracy among those few people who write and judge property laws. In the world of cyberspace, we should carefully construct our notions of "property," and we should carefully construct our notions of "the form of the property protection laws." I submit that this is stuff for the most human,common sense and ages old, kind of consideration. It is not the stuff for confusion. The rule that creates order is property law. Theft, the violation of individual ownership, is a very basic and old legal notion. But don't confuse theft in the world of symbols with a violation of copyright law! Copyright law,and other, more esoteric forms of law, including all "intellectual property," and "regulation," evolve from basic property law. The wild west of cyberspacelacks consensus on basic property, so it is no wonder that people, including this author, are confused about "intellectual property," and people find "regulation"inappropriate. Sit back through the last millennium, and recognize how complicated but simple, and pervasive but specific, this thing of property is. Isuppose the land of cyberspace is lawless precisely because most people are prematurely worried about "copyright," "regulation," or "technical means for insuring ownership." Such things assume a consensus exists about what can be owned in cyberspace, and how it can be owned. But where is this consensus?

Discussion that provides a recipe for consensus should precede a lot of what is popularly discussed today. In the lawless Internet today, about the onlyactivity one can prudently justify is giving stuff away free. This is an ancient act of a peasantry in a lawless land -- the abrogation of rights in order tosurvive. With property laws for protection, value is created by the limitation to access. In the creation of value, the cost of property law pays for itself. Without a clear notion of property, and the law designed to protect it, we can only rely on technical means. You will have to pay the technology lords,the IBM, EDS, Microsoft, RSA, or Netscape, Inc., to protect your rights. But we know, a priori, that technical means for protection, unaccompanied by law,are at best "renegade," and "fiefdom" laws, and, at worst, invitations for hackers and theft. The mafias of cyberspace are, at this moment, being created bywell-intentioned people as well as ill-intentioned ones. No IBM, EDS, Microsoft, RSA, or Netscape wants consciously to be a mafia or a petty lord, butabsolute power corrupts. Human rights need the protection of law. On this note, let us turn to the oldest symbolic property, money, and then to thenext oldest, stamps. Money and stamps are not "copyrighted," they are owned! Money has been a common human artifact for thousands of years. The wordis "stuff" like "water," but it is really composed of a large collection of symbols. A coin or bill is a symbol for wealth. Even when a coin is gold or a bill is

backed by gold, the amount of gold is still a symbol for wealth. It is abstract, like any good symbol, because it can substitute for many differentthings in physical reality. Money could exist in cyberspace. Cyberspace is a region of countless symbols, in countless variety, all moving about,interacting with one another, and cheaply accessed with a personal computer and modem. But, again we are premature. Before we discuss money incyberspace, we need to discuss property: the symbols of cyberspace as things that money buys. Consider money as a prototype for how law is historicallywritten for things as non-substantive as symbols. The government guarantees, with law, two attributes of money, your right to possess

it and a universal quantitative measure of it. One dollar can be yours. The government, through theft laws, secures this right.Furthermore, law authorizes the denominations of money: one dollar is one dollar, while five is the sum of five ones. However, this authorization does notdefine value: the law allows you to exchange a five for six ones. As a service, the government protects the value of the money. Nowadays,

the government skips the gold standard (an older symbology), and controls, by law, the printing and minting of money. There is

only one authorized source of money. The law that protects production is counterfeiting law. It is a felony to print your own money. A popular misconception is that they make it hard to counterfeit bills, but, as a member of the Technical Association for

Graphics Arts, I will tell you that most people in the printing industry know it is not that hard. It is simply illegal. There are laws of theftand counterfeiting, but no governmental laws that say you have to trade a five for five ones. We presume, here, laws made by men and natural laws that mendo not have to state. But notice, we have natural law, here, applied by men to a symbol made entirely by men. Hurray! People, for centuries, have alreadyfigured out a system of laws coupled to a system of common sense that governs the abstract interactions of abstract symbols! Now, consider another place

where the law is curiously absent, or largely absent. The government does not, by law, guarantee a right to trade the property of a dollar with the property of a good or service. The trade laws that do exist are fairness laws that say, mainly, that if you already trade goods for money, you cannotunreasonably withhold further trade. The government does not enforce specific trade value by law. While there are arguable exceptions, in the case of governmental interactions with other sovereign states, or banks working with the central bank, the value of money, inside the country's economy, is largely leftfree. People recognize that freedom to set trade value is good, and that price regulation is not good. In fact, price regulation tends to correlate with distortions

of property ownership. Witness communism.

45

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rht/leaps/tecend.rtf

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rht/leaps/tecend.rtf






Promoting a substitute to the US dollar would break the empire

Canova 99. (Timothy A., Assistant Prof of Law @ University of New Mexico, American University International Law Review, 14 Am. U. Int'l L. Rev. 1571, lexis)Back in 1994, before the Mexican peso meltdown and the start of the global currency contagion, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund,Michel Camdessus, proposed increasing "Special Drawing Rights," by $ 52 billion. 259 The Special Drawing Right ("SDR "), also

known as "paper gold," is a global currency that was created by the IMF, first issued in 1970, and used as a reserve asset. 260 Supporters of the Camdessus proposal recognized that the formerly communist and other poor countries never received any initialallocation of SDRs. 261 It should be no surprise that many of those [*1634] countries now lack the reserves with which to fend off speculative attacks

against their currencies. Unfortunately, the Camdessus proposal was rejected, and Camdessus was reportedly "roundly criticized by the United

States, Germany and Britain, which accused him of empire-building." 262 It may, however, be more accurate to describe the Camdessus proposal as afailed attempt at empire-breaking, or at least to undermine the dominance of the United States dollar and several other major currencies. There is reason to conclude that the global monetary system favors First World surplus and creditor countries, as well as the United States, achronic deficit country 263 that does not operate under the same constraints as most other deficit countries since its own currency, 264 the United Statesdollar, is the major reserve currency in the world.

46





2NC Counterfeiting CP – a2 Perm Do Both

1. Perm still links to the net benefits – they don’t avoid our full employment specific links

2. No such thing as double solvency. If we win our New Straits Times ev that currency counterfeiting

collapses the system, there’s no need for another Impossible Act.

3. Perm fails – combining full employment with the CP would cause currencies' values to readjust,

sustaining cap

Patnaik 06. (Prabhat, prof at Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in the School of Social Sciences @Jawaharlal Nehru U, Vice-Chair of the Planning Board of the Indian state of Kerala, Economic and Political

Weekly, May 6, http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/ope/archive/0605/att-0105/01-Diffusion_Of_Development.pdf )

The theoretical argument advanced for demanding such a revaluation of Asian currencies is that they are “undervalued”.

This argument, however, is logically flawed for at least two reasons: first, to claim that a currency is “undervalued”

presupposes that it has a “true value”. Hence it invokes the notion of an equilibrium exchange rate. This is never explicitly

defined, but let us (without any loss of generality) take it as that rate at which the current balance would be zero. Now, since

the current balance depends also on the level of activity, it follows that we have a separate equilibrium exchange rate in this

sense for every level of activity. To talk of the equilibrium exchange rate therefore is to presume a particular level of activity ,

which can only be the full employment level. This whole argument in short presupposes the spon- taneous prevalence of

universal full employment, which is erroneous. Second, even if a currency was “undervalued” in a world of universal

full employment vis-à-vis some other currency, the onus of adjustment surely is not exclusively on itself, as the American

argument suggests.

47

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/ope/archive/0605/att-0105/01-Diffusion_Of_Development.pdf









Strike Against the Self CP 1NC

The United States federal government should end diplomatic and economic relations with China.

The Counterplan solves - Non-interference in the Chinese economy maintains the Logic of Capitalism –

only the counterplan can destroy the symbiosis between the United States and China

Zizek 2003 Slavoj, Liberation Hurts – an interview with Zizek, 9/29, http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/rasmussen.htmBut you see my point, what these “post”-theories don’t take into account radically enough is that this split is structural. In order for the United States to function theway it functions today, you need China as the ultimate communist-capitalist country. What do I mean by this? Everything hinges on thissymbiosis between the United States and China. China is an ingenious solution. It’s a country where, yes, you have political control by thecommunists, but everyone in the West focuses their attention on those persecuted religious sects or dissidents. Screw them - not that I don’t careabout them. For me, the true news about China is that there are now desperate attempts by millions of jobless workers to organize themselves into trade unions. There lies the

true repression. So, China, as long as you don’t mess with politics, is the ultimate capitalist country, because capitalists can do whatever theywant in the economy, and the state guarantees them total control over the working class - no interference by trade unions or whatever. That guaranteeof noninterference , I maintain, is absolutely crucial. One way it is done is by this famous outsourcing.

This radical politicization of trade and the economy is essential to solve the aff

Zizek 1999 Slavoj, The Ticklish Subject, page 352-355The big news of today’s post-political age of the ‘end of ideology’ is thus the radical depoliticization of the sphere of the economy: the waythe economy functions (the need to cut social welfare, etc.) is accepted as a simple insight into the objective state of things. However, as long as thisfundamental depoliticization of the economic sphere is accepted, all the talk about active citizenship, about public discussion leading to responsible

collective decisions, and so on, will remain limited to the ‘cultural’ issues of religious, sexual, ethnic and other way-of-life differences, without actually encroachingupon the level at which long-term decisions that affect us all are mad. In short, the only way effectively to bring about a society in which risky long-termdecisions would ensue from public debate involving all concerned is some kind of radical limitation of Capital’s freedom, the subordinated of the process of production to social

control – the radical repoliticization of the economy. That is to say: if the problem with today’s post-politics (‘administration of social affairs’) is that itincreasingly undermines the possibility of a proper political act, this undermining is directly due to the depoliticization of economics, to thecommon acceptance of Capital and market mechanisms as neutral tools/ procedures to be exploited.

The counterplan makes the seemingly irrational choice to strike against the self – this ruptures the entire

system of capital

Zizek 2000 Slavoj, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, page 122-124

What these three gestures have in common is that, in a situation of the forced choice, the subject makes the 'crazy', impossible choice of, in a way, striking at [ them] him self, at what is most precious to [them] him self. This act, far from amounting to a case of impotent aggressivity turned on oneself, rather changes the co-ordinates of the situation in which the subject finds [them] him self: by cutting [them] him self loose from the

precious object through whose possession the enemy kept [them] him in check, the subject gains the space of free action. Is not such a radicalgesture of 'striking at oneself’ constitutive of subjectivity as such? Did not Lacan himself accomplish a similar act of 'shooting at himself' when, in 1979, he

dissolved the Ecolejreudienne de Paris, his agalma, his own organization, the very space of his collective life? Yet he was well aware that only such a 'self-destructive' actcould clear the terrain for a new beginning. In the domain of politics proper, most of today's Left succumbs to ideological blackmail by the Right in accepting its basic premisses ('the era of the welfare state, with its unlimited spending, is over', etc.) - ultimately, this is what the celebrated 'Third Way' of today's social democracy is about.

In such conditions, an authentic act would be to counter the Rightist agitation apropos of some 'radical' measure ('You want the impossible; this will lead

to catastrophe, to more state intervention . . .') not by defending ourselves by saying that this is not what we mean, that we are no longer the old Socialists, that

the proposed measures will not increase the state budget, that they will even render state expenditure more 'effective' and give a boost to investment, and so on and so forth, but by a resounding 'Yes, that is precisely what we want!’.52 Although Clinton's presidency epitomizes the Third Way of today's (ex-) Left succumbing to Rightistideological blackmail, his healthcare reform programme would none the less amount to a kind of act, at least in today's conditions, since it would be based on the rejection of thehegemonic notions of the need to curtail Big State expenditure and administration - in a way, it would 'do the impossible'. No wonder, then, that it failed: its failure - perhaps theonly significant, albeit negative, event of Clinton's presidency - bears witness to the material force of the ideological notion of 'free choice'. That is to say: although the greatmajority of so-called 'ordinary people' were not properly acquainted with the reform programme, the medical lobby (twice as strong as the infamous defence lobby!) succeeded in

imposing on the public the fundamental idea that with universal healthcare, free choice (in matters concerning medicine) would be somehow threatened - against this purelyfictional reference to 'free choice', any enumeration of 'hard facts' (in Canada, healthcare is less expensive and more effective, with no less free choice, etc.) proved ineffectual.

As for the subject's (agent's) identity: in an authentic act, I do not simply express/actualize my inner nature - rather, I redefine myself, the very coreof my identity. To evoke Butler's often-repeated example of a subject who has a deep homosexual 'passionate attachment', yet is unable openly to acknowledge it, to make it part of his symbolic identity:53 in an authentic sexual act, the subject would have to change the way he relates to his homosexual 'passionate attachment' - not only in the sense of

'coming out', of fully identifying himself as gay. An act does not only shift the limit that divides our identity into the acknowledged and the disavowed part more in the direction of the disavowed part, it does not only make us to accept as 'possible' our innermost disavowed 'impossible'fantasies: it transforms the very coordinates of the dis avowed phantasmic foundation of our being. An act does not merely redraw thecontours of our public symbolic identity, it also transforms the spectral dimension that sustains this identity, the undead ghosts that haunt theliving subject, the secret history of traumatic fantasies trans mitted 'between the lines', through the lacks and distortions of the explicitsymbolic texture of his or her identity. ** this evidence was paraphrased for gendered language

48





Strike Against the Self CP – Solvency 2NC

The counterplan solves capitalism better then the aff – extend our 3 pieces of Zizek evidence from

the 1NC – multiple arguments

INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIES - non-inference with the Chinese economy creates the condi-

tions necessary for capitalism to flourish – only the counterplan solves capitalism on a global

scale

POLITICIZATION OF THE ECONOMY – the counterplan radically politicizes the economy by

exposing its lack of neutrality – our actions towards China exposes the dangers of an assumed

neutrality within the economy

STRIKE AGAINST THE SELF - denying ourselves the surplus of our interactions with China rup-

tures the system – this seemingly irrational act exposes our desire for surplus enjoyment –

more evidenceZizek 1999 Slavoj, The Ticklish Subject, page 377One should reread Lacan's matrix of the four discourses as the three modes of coming to terms with the trauma of the (analyst’s) act; 63 to these three

strategies of disavowal of the act, on should add the fourth, properly psychotic one: since an authentic act involves the choice of theWorse, since it is by definition catastrophic and the act will somehow occur … (therein lies the desperate ‘terrorist’ act of trying

to ‘sober’ the masses lulled into ideological sleep, from the RAF in the Germany of the early 1970s to the Unabomber). While this temptationmust, of course, be resisted, one should no less firmly resist the opposite temptation of the different modalities of dissociating the act from its inherent ‘catastrophic’ consequences. In so far as the political act par excellence is a revolution, twoopposing strategies arise here; one can endeavour to separate the noble Idea of the Revolution from its abominable reality (recall Kant’s celebration of thesublime feeling the French Revolution evoked in the enlightened public all over Europe, which goes hand in hand with utter disdain for the reality of therevolutionary act itself, and bemoans its regrettable but unavoidable later betrayal (recall the nostalgia for Trotskyite and other radical Leftists for the earlydays of the Revolution, with workers’ councils popping up ‘spontaneously’ everywhere, against the Thermidor, that is, the later ossification of the Revolution

into a new hierarchical state structure). Against all these temptations, one should insist on the unconditional need to endorse the act

fully in all its consequences. Fidelity is not fidelity to the principles betrayed by the contingent facticity of their actualization, but fidelity to the consequence entailed by the full actualization of the (revolutionary) principles. Within the horizon of what precedes the act, the act always and by definition appears as a change ‘from Bad toWorse’ (the usual criticism of conservatives against revolutionaries: yes, the situation is bad, but your solution is even worse … ). The proper heroism of the act is fully to assume this Worse.

Self destruction is the only mechanism of authentic politics – only our reinvention of subjectivity

can break the viscous cycle of passive nihilism

Zizek 2001 Slavoj, an interview on spiked-online, November 15, http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000002D2C4.htmThis post-political world still seems to retain the tension between what we usually refer to as tolerant liberalism versus multiculturalism. But for me - though I

never liked Friedrich Nietzsche - if there is a definition that really fits, it is Nietzsche's old opposition between active and passive nihilism. Activenihilism, in the sense of wanting nothing itself, is this active self-destruction which would be precisely the passion of thereal - the idea that, in order to live fully and authentically, you must engage in self-destruction. On the other hand, there is passive

nihilism, what Nietzsche called 'The last man' - just living a stupid, self-satisfied life without great passions. The problem with a post-politicaluniverse is that we have these two sides which are engaged in kind of mortal dialectics. My idea is that, to break out of thisvicious cycle, subjectivity must be reinvented.

49





Strike Against the Self CP – Over-ID

The Counterplans confrontation with the violence of isolationist policy is an act of over-

identification – this is key to rupture the system

Zizek 1997 Slavoj, Repeating Lenin, http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htmThis repression of the regime's own excess was strictly correlative to something homologous to theinvention of the liberal psychological individual not take place in the Soviet Union in the late 20s andearly 30s. The Russian avant-garde art of the early 20s (futurism, constructivism) not only zealouslyendorsed industrialization, it even endeavored to reinvent a new industrial man - no longer the old man of sentimental passions and roots in traditions, but the new man who gladly accepts his role as a bolt or screw in the gigantic coordinated industrial Machine. As such, it was subversive in its very "ultra-orthodoxy," i.e. in its over-identification with the core of the official ideology: the image of man that weget in Eisenstein, Meyerhold, constructivist paintings, etc., emphasizes the beauty of his/her mechanicalmovements, his/her thorough depsychologization. What was perceived in the West as the ultimatenightmare of liberal individualism, as the ideological counterpoint to the "Taylorization," to the Fordist

ribbon-work, was in Russia hailed as the utopian prospect of liberation: recall how Meyerhold violentlyasserted the "behaviorist" approach to acting - no longer emphatic familiarization with the person theactor is playing, but the ruthless bodily training aimed at the cold bodily discipline, at the ability of theactor to perform the series of mechanized movements...59 THIS is what was unbearable to AND IN theofficial Stalinist ideology, so that the Stalinist "socialist realism" effectively WAS an attempt to reassert a"Socialism with a human face," i.e. to reinscribe the process of industrialization into the constraints of thetraditional psychological individual: in the Socialist Realist texts, paintings and films, individuals are nolonger rendered as parts of the global Machine, but as warm passionate persons.

50

http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm#59

http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm#59





“Persons Living in Poverty” PIC

TEXT –

The United States federal government should guarantee universal full employment in the United States.

We can clarify

COMPETES –

“Persons living in poverty” is in their plan text – the permutation severs this qualifier. Severance is a

voter -- makes the Aff a moving target that can shift out of any link and means the Neg proved the plan is

a bad idea or the CP is mutually exclusive.

And, textual competition is best

a) predictable. the plan is the most predictable focus because it’s the only stable advocacy and proves

aff should be prepared. “persons living in poverty” is obviously heart of the topic, they should be

able to defend it.

b) fairness - functional competition is arbitrary, it can be derived from intent creating an unpre-

dictable moving targetc) aff ground – our interp limits out CPs like delay and consult which are way worse for making the

aff debate themselves

d) forces better plan writing – smarter affs and allows neg strats to be better developed

SOLVES –

Read their evidence – they literally have no defense of why the poor should be targeted for the plan.

Jameson specifically calls for everyone who wants a job to be guaranteed one

NET BENEFIT –

1. All our poverty specific links (politics, etc) are net benefits because they target the poor.

2. The plan isn’t really universal – targeting towards “persons living in poverty” increases social stigmaand invasions of privacy, which cause people to opt out


Australia traditionally has had a social welfare system that is both targeted on the basis of need (ie, income and means test-ed) and targeted to categories of people (ie, to have the right to cash social welfare payments you have to belong to this or that category). The major argument for targeting is the problem of economic and budget constraints. (These are not twowords for the same thing, as budget constraints may be political as well as economic) Indeed some in favour of targeting ar-gue that universal systems will not be viable in the long run. Other arguments for targeting include the fact that transfershave transaction costs, giving money to people and then getting it back through the tax system does involve real costs. Alsothe characteristics of those targeted on a needs basis may reveal information that is very helpful in designing programs tocombat the causes of poverty.

The major arguments against targeting revolve around what Mitchell et al call "intrusion, stigma and social cohesion". Tar -geting involves inquiring into people's lives, often even their very intimate lives such as who is sleeping with whom. Tar-

geting may stigmatise people; in Australia this seems often to be the case with unemployment benefits but not with old age pensions. On the other hand, universal systems are claimed to promote social cohesion and widespread support for the wel-fare system making it more generous and less vulnerable to cost-cutting politicians. Other universalists' arguments includethe problem of high effective marginal tax rates and poverty traps Since benefits are withdrawn as income rises in an in-




Date post:	06-Apr-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	tommy-snider
View:	217 times
Download:	0 times

MRK Universal Full Employment Shared Neg

Documents