Professional Documents
Culture Documents
X State Key...................................................................................................................................................................22
Obama Winning - Colorado..........................................................................................................................................23
Obama Winning – Florida.............................................................................................................................................24
Obama Winning............................................................................................................................................................26
Russia and Saudi Oil DA Updates................................................................................................................................27
COERCION CRITIQUE...............................................................................................................................................37
LINKS...........................................................................................................................................................................37
Link – Economic Incentive...........................................................................................................................................37
Link – Economic Intervention......................................................................................................................................38
Link – Incentives...........................................................................................................................................................39
Link - Incentives...........................................................................................................................................................40
Link - Incentives...........................................................................................................................................................41
......................................................................................................................................................................................41
Link - Incentive.............................................................................................................................................................42
Link - Incentives...........................................................................................................................................................43
......................................................................................................................................................................................46
IMPACTS......................................................................................................................................................................47
Coercion Bad.................................................................................................................................................................47
Coercion Bad.................................................................................................................................................................48
Coercion Bad.................................................................................................................................................................49
Rights Outweigh...........................................................................................................................................................50
Rights Outweigh...........................................................................................................................................................51
Value to life...................................................................................................................................................................52
MO Impacts...................................................................................................................................................................55
SDI 08 2
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Alternatives...................................................................................................................................................................65
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DO NOTHING K ALTERNATIVE
Our Alternative is to do nothing in response to the Aff harms. You have to refuse every
instance of liberal reformism.
The 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 be aptly
characterized as 'principled 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 discernible in its standard criticism of any analysis which proposes a more complex picture of 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 only way really to remain open to
a revolutionary opportunity is to renounce facile calls to direct action, which necessarily involve us in
an activity where things change so that the totality remains the same. Today's predicament is that, if we
succumb to the 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 to withdraw from the compulsion to act, to
'do nothing' – thus opening up the space for a different kind of activity.
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THEIR CLAIM THAT THE CASE OUTWEIGHS IS A LINK. Their tactics for convincing the judge to "do what
has to be done because the bomb is ticking" mirror Heinrich Himmler's tactics for mechanizing the SS to liquidate
the Jews.
Žižek 2006
[Slavoj Zizek, philosopher and psychoanalyst, senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in the
Humanities, in Essen, Germany, professor at the European Graduate School. "How expendable is human
life, spirit", February 12, 2006]
This brings up a crucial question: What does this all-pervasive sense of urgency mean ethically? The pressure of events is so
overbearing, the stakes are so high, that they necessitate a suspension of ordinary ethical concerns. After all, displaying moral
qualms when the lives of millions are at stake plays into the hands of the enemy. CTU agents act in a shadowy space outside the
law, doing things that "simply have to be done" to save society from the terrorist threat. This includes not only torturing terrorists when
they are caught, but torturing CTU members or their closest relatives when they are suspected of terrorist links. In the fourth season,
among those tortured were the secretary of defense's son-in-law and son (both with the secretary's full knowledge and support), as well
as a female member of CTU, wrongly suspected of passing information to the terrorists. (After the torture, when new data confirms her
innocence, she is asked to return to work. And since this is an emergency and every person is needed, she does.) The CTU agents not
only treat terrorist suspects in this way -- after all, they are dealing with the "ticking bomb" situation evoked by Alan Dershowitz to
justify torture in his book, "Why Terrorism Works" -- they also treat themselves as expendable, ready to lay down their colleagues' or
their own lives if this will help prevent the terrorist act. Special Agent Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, embodies this attitude at
its purest. Without qualms, he tortures others and allows his superiors to put his life on the line. At the end of the fourth season, he
agrees to be turned over to the People's Republic of China as a scapegoat for a CTU covert operation that killed a Chinese diplomat.
Although he knows he will be tortured and imprisoned for life, he promises not to say anything that would hurt U.S. interests. That
leaves Jack in a paradigmatic situation: When he is informed by the ex-president of the United States, his close ally, that someone in the
government ordered his death (delivering him to the wily Chinese torturers is considered too much of a security risk), his two closest
friends in CTU organize his fake death. He then disappears into nowhere, anonymous, officially non-existent. In the war on terror, it is
not only the terrorists but the CTU agents who become what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls homini sacer -- those who can
be killed with impunity because, in the eyes of the law, their lives no longer count. While the agents continue to act on behalf of a
legal power, their acts are no longer covered and constrained by the law. They operate in an empty space within the domain of the
law. It is here that we encounter the series' fundamental ideological lie: In spite of this thoroughly ruthless attitude of self-
instrumentalization, the CTU agents, especially Jack, remain warm human beings, caught in the usual emotional dilemmas of normal
people. They love their wives and children, they suffer jealousy -- but at a moment's notice they are ready to sacrifice their loved ones
for their mission. They are something like the psychological equivalent of decaffeinated coffee, doing all the horrible things the
situation necessitates, without paying the subjective price for it. Consequently, "24" cannot be simply dismissed as a pop cultural
justification for the problematic methods of the United States in its war on terror. More is at stake. Recall the lesson of Francis Ford
Coppola's "Apocalypse Now." The figure of Kurtz is not a reminder of some barbaric past but the necessary outcome of modern Western
power. Kurtz was a perfect soldier. As such, through his over-identification with the military power system, he turned into the excess that
the system had to eliminate in an operation that imitated the ruthlessness of Kurtz, which it was ostensibly fighting against. This is the
dilemma for those in power: How to obtain Kurtz without Kurtz's pathology? How to get people to do the necessary dirty job
without turning them into monsters? SS chief Heinrich Himmler faced the same dilemma. When confronted with the task of
liquidating the Jews of Europe, Himmler adopted the heroic attitude of "Somebody has to do the dirty job, so let's do it!" It is easy to do
a noble thing for one's country, up to sacrificing one's life for it. It is much more difficult to commit a crime for one's country. In the
book "Eichmann in Jerusalem," Hannah Arendt provided a precise description of how the Nazi executioners endured the horrible acts
they performed. Most of them were not simply evil; they were well aware that their actions brought humiliation, suffering and death to
their victims. Their way out of this predicament was that "instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would
be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!" In
this way, they were able to turn around the logic of resisting temptation: Their "ethical" effort was directed toward the task of resisting
the temptation not to murder, torture and humiliate. Thus, the very violation of spontaneous ethical instincts of pity and compassion
was turned into the proof of ethical grandeur: Doing one's duty meant assuming the heavy burden of inflicting pain on others.
There was a further ethical problem here for Himmler: How to make sure that the SS executioners who performed these terrible
acts could remain human and retain their dignity? His answer was found in the Bhagavad-Gita, a special leather-bound edition
of which he always kept in his pocket. There, Krishna tells Arjuna that he should carry out his acts with an inner distance and
never get fully involved in them. Therein also resides the lie of "24": The presumption that it is not only possible to retain human
dignity in accomplishing acts of terror, but that when an honest person accomplishes such acts as a heavy duty, this confers on
him an additional tragic-ethic grandeur. But what if such a distance is possible? What if we do have people who commit terrible acts
as part of their job while they remain loving husbands, good parents and caring friends? As Arendt knew, far from redeeming them, the
very fact that they are able to retain their normality while committing such acts is the ultimate confirmation of their moral
catastrophe.
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YUCCA SOVERIGNTY
Yucca mountain takes sovereignty away from indigenous people
Think and Ask October 2003
http://www.thinkandask.com/news/shoshone.html
Mary and Carrie Dann sued the United States government for violating their rights. The Nevada sisters say
the United States used illegal means to gain control of Native American ancestral lands slowly encroached
upon by industry and private landowners. The U.S. government says it paid the Western Shoshone Nation for
its use of their land in 1979, and has since privatized millions of additional acreage. The Western Shoshone
Distribution Bill, HR 884, sets to relax territorial rules held by Shoshones for 150 years.
Approximately 26 million acres will transition to the U.S. Government if the Senate passes HR Bill 884. This
Shoshone acreage is marked by the Bureau of Land Management for mining minerals, storing nuclear waste,
and for geothermal energy production. Yucca Mountain, a historical and spiritual area for Shoshones, will
expand its current nuclear storage facilities during the next 5-7 years.
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found the U.S. government violated the Dann sisters' rights,
although did not state that the Dann sisters owned land. The Commission suggested an "effective remedy"
should ensure respect for the Danns' claim to their ranch of 70 years. The Organization of American States
(OAS) human-rights commission reaffirmed land-rights use of the Western Shoshone Indian tribe, rejecting
the U.S. government's claim the Danns live on public land. It was the first time both councils charged the
U.S. government with violating human rights, and the case will be heard by the United Nations Commission
on Human Rights.
May 19, 2005 – The Shoshone tribe is considering whether to appeal a federal judge's decision that rejected
their attempt to stop plans for a national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The Western Shoshone National Council had challenged the US Department of Energy's proposed use of the
land, which is within ancient Shoshone territory, as violating the 1863 Ruby Valley Treaty
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The Western Shoshone Nation has been struggling since 1863 for sovereignty over their treaty-granted land
throughout Nevada. Unlike many native nations, the Shoshone NEVER gave, ceded, or sold their land to the
United States government, by treaty or otherwise. The United States government and multinational mining
corporations have recognized the value of the land for the gold underneath and for the usage potential of the
land above ground. The government continues to break the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley signed with the
Western Shoshone Nation, and is without any doubt, committing cultural and spiritual murder throughout
Nevada. For the last ten years, an organization called the Western Shoshone Defense Project has worked
ceaselesly in nonviolent resistance to the mining companies and to the United States Government. Current
struggles center around preventing the government from distributing money it has held in trust for the
Shoshones, ostensibly as "payment" for lands taken in violation of the treaty of Ruby Valley. Distribution of
this money has polarized the Shoshones, between most, who recognize the move for what it is: an attempted
buyout and a relinquishing of traditional claims to the land (the government recognizes that it has no case
without the payout being voted through), and others who want to cash in, even if it means exhausting their
claims to their birthright. SEE RECENT UPDATES FOR NEWS ON THE DISTRIBUTION BILL.
“We have rights to protect our homelands and stop the destruction of our land, water, and air by the abuses of
the United States government and the multinational corporations. The situation is outrageous and we’re glad
the United Nations Committee agrees with us. Our people have suffered more nuclear testing than anywhere
else in the world and they’re continuing underground testing despite our protests. Yucca Mountain is being
hollowed out in order to store nuclear waste. We cannot stand for it – this earth, the air, the water are sacred.
People of all races must stop this insanity now in order to secure a safe future for all.” - Joe Kennedy,
Western Shoshone.
“The Western Shoshone Nation is very thankful to the Committee members for their decision affirming U.S.
discrimination and destructive policies do not go on unaccounted for. Truth is what it is – that can never
change. We pray for the healing of our peoples, the land and the harassment and destruction to stop. While
others are allowed the freedom of religion, we are kept from the very same right. The Newe (people) use this
ancestral land for sacred ceremonies. The federal agencies prevent our access to some of these important
areas. Our ancestors’ burials are being dug up and placed into local museums’ basement storage areas
because of surge of gold mines and nuclear developments. This is an outrage to our people!” - Judy Rojo,
Western Shoshone.
“This battle has been going on for quite some time, but we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the federal
government and the companies’ rush to finalize what they consider a settlement in order to get a hold of our
lands for activities that are contaminating our water and our air. Again, we are very pleased that our rights are
finally being taken seriously and we look forward to positive actions being taken by the U.S.” - Steven
Brady, Western Shoshone.
“We are Shoshone delegates speaking for a Nation threatened by extinction. The mines are polluting our
waters, destroying hot springs and exploding sacred mountains—our burials along with them--attempting to
erase our signature on the land. We are coerced and threatened by mining and Federal agencies when we seek
to continue spiritual prayers for traditional food or medicine on Shoshone land. We have endured murder of
our Newe people for centuries, as chronicled in military records, but now we are asked to endure a more
painful death from the U.S. governmental agencies —a separation from land and spiritual renewal. We thank
our past leaders for their persistence and courage and the CERD for this monumental step.” - Bernice Lalo,
Western Shoshone.
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A contingent of Western Shoshones played what Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project opponents consider
their ace in the hole Friday: a lawsuit based on an 1863 treaty that the tribes say doesn't allow building a
repository on their native land.
It is the first time the Ruby Valley Treaty, authorized by Civil War Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, has been used
in a case that targets Yucca Mountain, said Reno attorney Robert Hager, who represents the Western
Shoshone tribes.
"I have always felt the Western Shoshone have the best claim to stop Yucca Mountain," Hager said, flanked
by tribal leaders outside Lloyd George U.S. Courthouse in Las Vegas where the case was filed.
There's a new legal challenge Friday against Yucca Mountain. The Western Shoshone Nation is suing the
Department of Energy in federal court, claiming the proposed nuclear dump violates a land use treaty dating
back to the 1800s.
The chief of the Western Shoshone Nation has had just about enough. "We had hoped to, instead of doing
this, enter into negotiations with the United States government." Raymond Yowell asked, begged, pleaded to
discuss Yucca Mountain with the Department of Energy and has been turned down every time.
"There's been nothing from the government." Shoshone council member John Wells says the tribe has history
on its side. His ancestors lived on Yucca Mountain. It was their home, their land. The federal government
acknowledged that 139 years ago.
In 1866, Congress ratified a peace treaty with the Western Shoshone and under that treaty the federal
government could use Shoshone land for agriculture, ranching, the construction of roads and railroads. The
treaty said nothing about the storage of radioactive waste.
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US is willing to store nuclear waste in Russia, and it would help the Russian economy
Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at George Mason University, Space War July 17
2006
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/US_And_Russia_Building_A_Friendship_Based_On_Nuclear_Waste_999.html
In early July, however, the Bush administration changed course and signaled its willingness to allow spent
nuclear fuel under American jurisdiction to be stored in Russia even though Moscow has not stopped
providing assistance to the Iranian atomic energy reactor program. But it has been widely reported that since
Washington allowed it to store spent fuel that might be worth up to $20 billion to Moscow, the Bush
administration hopes the Kremlin will become more amenable to cooperation with Washington on both Iran
and North
Krasnoyarsk-26 solves nuclear waste, Russian economy, loose WMD’s and is not prone to
Earthquakes or terrorist attacks
Living on Earth, April 2 1999
http://www.loe.org/series/three/international.htm
GROSSMAN: At Krasnoyarsk-26, a city in the heart of Siberia, technicians board a train bound for a huge underground plutonium
factory. Scientist Yevgeniy Velikhov says Russia could rent out space here for storing used fuel for other countries, until they come up
with a permanent disposal plan. Dr. Velikhov is president of the Kurchatov Institute, Russia's leading nuclear research center. He says
Krasnoyarsk-26 is not prone to earthquakes and already has secure storage carved from a mountain.
VELIKHOV: It is no access to terrorism, no access to any accident like airplane crash or bombing, because this storage already designed
and built to withstand a direct nuclear weapons hit.
(Doors shut; motors hum)
GROSSMAN: Dr. Velikhov's is only one of a number of competing proposals for a Russian fuel storage site. All of them would generate
hundreds of millions of dollars for the cash-starved country, which could fund the clean-up of Russia's decrepit nuclear weapons industry
and keep underpaid nuclear technicians at Krasnoyarsk-26, like those servicing this reactor, from taking their skills, and possibly some
stolen plutonium, abroad.
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The ministry issued the statement in a reaction to media reports that quoted a certain group, Ekozashchita
(Ecology Defence), as saying that work had been underway since 1998 to build a nuclear waste burial site
some 25 to 30 km away from the Krasnoyarsk-26 nuclear centre.
The ministry press-service confirmed that research had started on a granitoid geological platform, close to
Krasnoyarsk-26, in 1992 to find areas for building reliable burials of radioactive waste.
But the project envisioned that solidified radioactive products resulting from nuclear waste recycling would
be buried there upon arrival from a new waste utilization facility in Siberia.
The ministry stressed that the project had nothing to do with irradiated nuclear fuel.
"It fully meets international standards for the use of stable geological formations for long-term storage of
hazardous waste," the ministry said.
Mikheyev, captioned There are plans to modernize the existing liquid storage facility at the Mining and
Chemical Integrated Works from 6,000 to 9,000 tonnes.
Correspondent There are plans to accept spent nuclear fuel from all over the world, mainly from the USA.
Even the so-called third world countries, which do not wish to keep spent nuclear fuel, have already found
the necessary money to transport and store the fuel in Russia. They are just waiting until magnanimous
Russia opens its depths to accept their nuclear rubbish. There is no need to say how dangerous it would be to
have such a facility just at arm's length.
Krasnoyarsk-26 is safe to store nuclear waste and can withstand a nuclear attack
Wall Street Journal, may 5 2005
http://www.mre.gov.br/portugues/noticiario/internacional/selecao_detalhe3.asp?ID_RESENHA=136707
Yongbyon is often described as North Korea's Los Alamos, but North Koreans who have lived there say that it
actually more closely resembles Soviet underground complexes like Krasnoyarsk-26. This is a small city in Siberia
built 600 feet below the surface on Stalin's orders, by Gulag prisoners later replaced by 100,000 troops. It has 3,500
rooms and halls, and a system of tunnels as big and extensive as the Moscow Metro. Inside Krasnoyarsk-26, safe
even from a nuclear attack, the Soviets built three plutonium reactors plus a radiochemical facility to separate the
plutonium from spent fuel rods, storage tanks and ballistic missile plants. The entrances could be sealed off and a
ventilation system with air filters was intended to protect the workforce from outside radiation.
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Opening Krasnoyarsk-26 increases the russian economy, but perm would shift storage to
the US
New York Times November 18 1998
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C00E3D91630F93BA25752C1A96E958260&sec=&spon=&page
wanted=all
The complex is so desperate it would like to make money storing nuclear waste. But Russian law forbids it
from accepting nuclear waste from abroad.
These days Krasnoyarsk-26 is counting on the construction of a $200 million factory to produce silicon for
computer chips. The Defense Enterprise Fund, a Pentagon-financed group that is trying to help Russia
convert its military industry to civilian production, has paid for some of the planning. The Russian
Government has already spent several million dollars to grow silicon crystals.
Krasnoyarsk-26, however, still needs to line up major Western investors. With Asia in a recession and the
United States and Europe possibly on the brink of a slowdown, persuading foreign companies to sink
hundreds of millions of dollars in a Siberian nuclear city is extremely difficult.
US is willing to store nuclear waste in Russia, and it would help the Russian economy and
US Russian relations
Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at George Mason University, Space War July 17
2006
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/US_And_Russia_Building_A_Friendship_Based_On_Nuclear_Waste_999.html
In Washington, the reversal of American opposition to Russia storing spent fuel under U.S. jurisdiction is
seen as providing a financial windfall to Moscow which the Kremlin will value and be grateful for.
Washington, then, should be able to use both the prospect of signing this agreement as well as the possibility
of terminating it after it is signed as leverage for aligning Russia's policies toward Iran and North Korea with
its own.
In Moscow, however, this agreement is likely to be seen very differently. The Kremlin knows storing nuclear
waste in their own countries is unpopular with the public in the United States and other countries. The Putin
administration's willingness to store it in Russia, is therefore seen in Moscow as providing a significant
benefit for which Russia deserves to be well paid. Furthermore, because America and the West benefit so
much from Russia storing their nuclear waste, Moscow can hardly be expected to alter its policies toward
Iran and North Korea. Given its past behavior, Moscow will undoubtedly see no reason why it cannot make
money from the West for storing its spent fuel as well as from Iran for aiding its atomic energy program.
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A nuclear war between just two countries using less than 1% of the
world’s nuclear arsenal results in rapid and long -lasting cooling
Robock Et. Al. 2007 (Alan Robock, Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers
University, Brian Toon and Charles Bardeen, University of Colorado, Richard Turco, UCLA, Georgiy Stenchikov,
Rutgers University, and Luke Oman, Johns Hopkins University, “Climate Effects of a Regional Nuclear Conflict”,
IPRC Climate, 2007. <http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/iprc_climate_NW.pdf.>)
With support from the National Science Foundation, we studied the following scenario: A nuclear war between two
countries in which each country is using 50 Hiroshima -size (15 kilotons) weapons to attack the other’s most
populated urban areas with populations that could exceed 10 million. These 100 bombs represent less than 0.03% of
the explosive power of the current nuclear arsenal worldwide. In our 100 - weapon scenario, we estimate that five megatons of
smoke would result from urban firestorms rising into the upper troposphere due to pyro -convection. Direct fatalities due to fire and smoke would
be comparable to those worldwide in World War II. Furthermore, the megacities exposed to atmospheric fallout of long -lived radionuclides
would likely have to be abandoned indefinitely, with severe national and international implications. We also anticipate substantial
perturbations of global ozone. To investigate the climate response to this massive smoke injection, we conducted
simulations with a state -of -the -art general circulation model, ModelE from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space
Studies, which includes a module to calculate the transport and removal of aerosol particles. Our experience with
this model shows it simulates realistically the climate response to large volcanic eruptions. Article continues. In the
model, the black carbon particles in the aerosol layer are heated by absorption of shortwave radiation. This heating
induces vertical motions and the aerosols are lofted close to the top of the stratosphere, much higher than is typical
of weakly absorbing volcanic sulfate aerosols. As a result, the carbon aerosols have a very long residence time and
continue to affect surface climate for more than a decade. The mass e -folding time for the smoke is six years; for typical volcanic
eruptions, one year; and for tropospheric aerosols, one week. The global -average surface shortwave radiation in response to the aerosols
decreases by up to 15 W/m2 (Figure 1). Five years after the initial smoke injection, the global -average perturbation is still at –7 W/m2. This
exceeds the maximum global -average surface cooling of –4 W/m2 following the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo volcanic eruption, the largest of the 20th
century. The cooling is also greater than the global average increase of 1.5 W/m2 at the surface or 4 W/m2 at the tropopause for a doubling of
atmospheric CO2. The smoke cloud lowers surface temperature significantly (Figure 1). (Stratospheric temperatures are
also severely perturbed.) A global average surface cooling of –1.25°C persists for years. After a decade, the cooling
is still –0.5°C (Figure 1). The temperature changes are largest over land. …article continues…Precipitation recovers faster than
temperature, but both lag the forcing. For comparison, the global average net surface -shortwave forcing from a model simulation of the 1991 Mt.
Pinatubo eruption is shown. 18 IPRC Climate, vol. 7, no. 1, 2007 most of the grain -growing regions, are several degrees cooler. As in the
case with the earlier nuclear winter calculations, large climatic effects are felt in regions far removed from the
countries involved in the conflict. As a result of Earth’s surface cooling, evapotranspiration slows and the global
hydrological cycle is weakened, with global precipitation reduced by about 10% (Figure 1). Although rainfall decreases
mostly in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, as observed after the 1991 Pinatubo eruption, large areas on the continents are also affected,
including the Asian summer monsoon. The temperature, precipitation, and insolation changes would affect agriculture
greatly. For example, the growing season in some regions of North America and Europe are shortened by 10 to 20
days. Such a reduction in growing season may completely eliminate crops that have insufficient time to reach
maturity. And these reductions continue for several years. To put the results in a larger historical context, the greatest volcanic
eruption of the past 500 years, the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia, resulted in a “Year Without a Summer” in 1816 in the Northern
Hemisphere. Killing frosts disrupted agriculture throughout the summer in New England and led to significant emigration. In Europe,
the
wet cold summer caused a widespread harvest failure, resulting in famines and economic collapse. That climatic
disruption only lasted one year. Because the black carbon aerosols in the current nuclear simulation are lofted into
the upper stratosphere where their residence time is close to a decade, the climatic effects of the fivemegaton case
are significantly greater and more persistent than those following the Tambora eruption.
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A regional nuclear war between Third World nations could trigger planetwide cooling that would likely ravage
agriculture and kill millions of people, scientists reported Monday. For many years, Western military scientists and
strategists have assumed that the damage from small -scale regional nuclear wars would be limited to continents on
which they occurred. Now, in a revamping of the "nuclear winter" debate of the 1980s, new and far more
sophisticated computer models show that even these little nuclear wars could create global devastation. Scientists,
reporting their findings at the American Geophysical Conference in San Francisco, said vast urban firestorms ignited
by war would send thick, dark clouds into the upper atmosphere, blocking the sun's rays and cooling much of the
planet, with severe climatic and agricultural results. The soot might remain in the upper atmosphere for up to a
decade. "All hell would break loose," said Prof. Richard Turco of UCLA's department of atmospheric and ocean
sciences. In some places, the planet could cool more than it did during the so -called Little Ice Age of the 17th
century, when glaciers advanced over much of northern Europe, said Alan Robock of Rutgers University, speaking
Monday at a news conference at the Moscone Center, where the conference is being held this week. "It would be very
difficult for agriculture," he said. The scientists' research is a new twist on the nuclear winter hypothesis, which attracted attention in the early
1980s. Back then, planetary scientist Carl Sagan and others warned that a much larger nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union
would lead to extensive atmospheric cooling and agricultural failure on a much greater scale and kill far more people. The hypothesis sparked
widespread scientific and political controversy. It faded from public attention toward the end of the Cold War, after which
many U.S. strategists concluded that major nuclear wars that threatened all civilization were improbable. But that
judgment was premature, because of the recent emergence of small - and medium -sized nations that either have or
are trying to develop nuclear weapons, the scientists warned. They said that worldwide, a regional nuclear war could
kill tens of millions of people, partly because even a small number of nuclear blasts could generate enough smoke to
trigger a global climate change. The nuclear explosions and smoke could also damage the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, they
said. That layer shields Earth's surface from cancer -causing radiation from the sun. Initially, about 20 percent of the soot would be washed out of
the atmosphere by rainfall, said Turco, who was one of the pioneers of the original nuclear winter hypothesis. However, much of the rest of the
soot would rise skyward and warm as it was baked by the sun. That warming would make the soot more buoyant and force it even higher into the
sky until it penetrated the stratosphere - - just above the tops of thunderclouds - - where high -speed winds would quickly spread the soot
throughout the atmosphere, Turco and his colleagues said. The climatic effects of the regional nuclear wars were computer -modeled by Turco
and colleagues including another veteran nuclear winter theorist, Owen Brian Toon, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado; his
student colleague, Charles Bardeen; Robock; scientist Georgi Stenchikov, also of Rutgers; and Luke Oman of Johns Hopkins University.
Alluding to the spread of nuclear weapons to medium -sized nations such as North Korea, Turco said: "The only way to solve this problem is
through diplomacy. Force won't do it. We need to be looking forward to complete disarmament of nuclear weapons."
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Even a minor terrorist attack with nuclear weapons could plunge the
planet into an unprecedented nuclear winter
CNN News 06 (CNN News citing a report by the Geophusical Union in San Francisco, 12 Dec. 2006. <
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id -2720173&page -1>)
The decline of the Soviet Union may have left many Americans feeling safer from nuclear war, but a disturbing new
study argues that an attack by terrorists sponsored by a small nuclear state could be just as lethal. Nuclear wasteland
Scientists say that even a small nuclear war, between small countries or carried out by terrorists could have global
repercussions. Such an attack "could generate casualties comparable to those once predicted for a full -scale nuclear
exchange in a superpower conflict," says the report, presented Monday during the fall meeting of the American
Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Furthermore, Americans should not think of themselves as isolated from
potential small -scale, regional nuclear conflicts in such distant areas as the Middle East or Asia. The impact of such
an encounter would be global, probably plunging the planet into a "nuclear winter" and blanketing wide areas of the
world with radioactive fallout. The report, which cautions that there are many uncertainties in its own conclusions,
was produced by a team of scientists who have been long active in studying the consequences of nuclear war. The
study assumes that weapons used by terrorists, or smaller states, would be much smaller than those available to the
superpowers, probably on the scale of those dropped on Japan during World War II. But the results would be
catastrophic because the weapons would most likely be targeted at major cities. "The current combination of
nuclear proliferation, political instability, and urban demographics forms perhaps the greatest danger to the stability
of society since the dawn of humanity," Brian Toon of the University of Colorado in Boulder told a press conference
prior to the presentation. The number of countries known to have nuclear weapons has grown to eight, but as many as 40 have some
fissionable material and could produce bombs fairly quickly, the scientists said, basing their conclusions partly on studies by the National
Academy of Sciences, the Department of Defense, and their own years -long research. Toon said Japan, for example, has enough nuclear material
on hand to produce 20,000 weapons, and "most think they could do it in weeks." Many of the conclusions are based on the consequences of two
nations, each with 50 bombs, delivering their full complement of weapons on each other. That's not a hypothetical figure, they suggested, because
both India and Pakistan are believed to have at least that many weapons. So what would happen if they had at it? About 20 million
persons in that area would die, the scientists concluded. But the weapons would send up such a plume of smoke that
the upper atmosphere would become opaque, blocking out so much solar radiation that temperatures around the
world would plummet. "You would have a global climate change unprecedented in human history," said Alan
Robock, associated director of the Center for Environmental Prediction at Rutgers Cook College and a member of
the research team. "It would instantaneously be colder than the little ice age." There would be shorter growing
seasons, less rain, less sun, and starvation around the world.
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Small nuclear skirmishes cause rapid global cooling and famine for
billions
Oman Et. Al. 07 (G. Oman, 1Department of Environmental Sciences Rutgers University, A. Robock1, 1Department of Environmental
Sciences Rutgers University, L. Stenchikov1, 1Department of Environmental Sciences Rutgers University, O. B. Toon2, 2Department of
Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics University of Colorado, C. Bardeen2, 2Department of
Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics University of Colorado and R. P. Turco3, 3Department of
Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences University of California, “Climatic consequences of regional nuclear conflicts” Atmospheric Chemistry and
Physics. Published: 19 April 2007. < http://www.atmos -chem -phys.net/7/2003/2007/acp -7 -2003 -2007.pdf.>)
We use a modern climate model and new estimates of smoke generated by fires in contemporary cities to calculate
the response of the climate system to a regional nuclear war between emerging third world nuclear powers using 100
Hiroshima -size bombs (less than 0.03% of the explosive yield of the current global nuclear arsenal) on cities in the
subtropics. We find significant cooling and reductions of precipitation lasting years, which would impact the global
food supply. The climate changes are large and longlasting because the fuel loadings in modern cities are quite high
and the subtropical solar insolation heats the resulting smoke cloud and lofts it into the high stratosphere, where
removal mechanisms are slow. While the climate changes are less dramatic than found in previous “nuclear winter”
simulations of a massive nuclear exchange between the superpowers, because less smoke is emitted, the changes are
more long -lasting because the older models did not adequately represent the stratospheric plume rise.
Introduction The casualties from the direct effects of blast, radioactivity, and fires resulting from the massive use of
nuclear weapons by the superpowers would be so catastrophic that we avoided such a tragedy for the first four
decades after the invention of nuclear weapons. The realization, based on research conducted jointly by Western and
Soviet scientists (Crutzen and Birks, 1982; Aleksandrov and Stenchikov, 1983; Turco et al., 1983, 1990; Robock,
1984; Pittock et al., 1986; Harwell and Hutchinson, 1986; Sagan and Turco, 1990), that the climatic consequences,
and indirect effects of the collapse of society, would be so severe that the ensuing nuclear winter would produce
famine for billions of people far from the tar - Correspondence to: A. Robock (robock@envsci.rutgers.edu) get
zones, may have been an important factor in the end of the arms race between the United States and the Soviet
Union (Robock, 1989). …article continues…A global average surface cooling of −1.25 C persists for years, and
after a decade the cooling is still −0.5 C (Fig. 3). The temperature changes are largest over land. A map of the
temperature change for the Northern Hemisphere summer one year after the smoke injection is shown in Fig. 5. A
cooling of several degrees occurs over large areas of North America and Eurasia, including most of the grain
-growing regions. As in the case with nuclear winter calculations, large climatic effects would occur in regions far
removed from the target areas or the countries involved in the conflict. Northern Hemisphere winter temperature
changes are also large (Fig. 6). Snow feedbacks enhance and prolong the climate response, as seen in areas of snow
and sea ice changes - 22 - 486 487 Figure 4. …article continues… As a result of the cooling of the Earth’s surface,
evapotranspiration is reduced and the global hydrological cycle is weakened. The resulting global precipitation is
reduced by about 10% (Fig. 3). Figure 8 shows maps of precipitation change for the Northern Hemisphere summer
one year after the smoke injection.
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Twenty years ago, the results of climate model simulations of the response to smoke and dust from a massive
nuclear exchange between the superpowers could be summarized as “nuclear winter,” with rapid temperature,
precipitation, and insolation drops at the surface that would threaten global agriculture for at least a year. The global
nuclear arsenal has fallen by a factor of three since then, but there has been an expansion of the number of nuclear
weapons states, with additional states trying to develop nuclear arsenals. We use a modern climate model to re
-examine the climate response to a range of nuclear wars, producing 50 and 150 Tg of smoke, using moderate, and
large portions of the current global arsenal, and find that there would be significant climatic responses to all the
scenarios….article continues…The effects of the smoke cloud on surface temperature are extremely large (Fig. 2).
Stratospheric temperatures are also severely perturbed (Fig. 3). A global average surface cooling of –7°C to –8°C
persists for years, and after a decade the cooling is still –4°C (Fig. 2). Considering that the global average cooling at
the depth of the last ice age 18,000 yr ago was about –5°C, this would be a climate change unprecedented in speed
and amplitude in the history of the human race. The temperature changes are largest over land. Maps of the
temperature changes for the Northern Hemisphere summers for the year of smoke injection (Year 0) and the next
year (Year 1) are shown in Fig. 4. Cooling of more than –20°C occurs over large areas of North America and of
more than –30°C over much of Eurasia, including all agricultural regions. There are also large temperature changes
in the tropics and over Southern Hemisphere continents. Large climatic effects would occur in regions far removed
from the target areas or the countries involved in the conflict. As examples of the actual temperature changes in
important grain -growing regions, we have plotted the time series of daily minimum air temperature for grid points
in Iowa, United States, at 42°N, 95°W, and in Ukraine at 50°N, 30°E (Fig. 5). For both locations (shown in Fig.
4), minimum temperatures rapidly plummet below freezing and stay there for more than a year. In Ukraine,
they stay below freezing for more than two years. Clearly, this would have agricultural implications. As a
result of the cooling of the Earth’s surface, evapotranspiration is reduced and the global hydrological cycle is
weakened. In addition, Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon circulations collapse, because the driving continent
-ocean temperature gradient does not develop. The resulting global precipitation is reduced by about 45%.
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Subfreezing temperatures, low light levels, and high doses of ionizing and ultraviolet radiation extending for many
months after a large -scale nuclear war could destroy the biological support systems of civilization, at least in the
Northern Hemisphere. Productivity in natural and agricultural ecosystems could be severely restricted for a year or
more. Postwar survivors would face starvation as well as freezing conditions in the dark and be exposed to near
-lethal doses of radiation. If, as now seems possible, the Southern Hemisphere were affected also, global disruption
of the biosphere could ensue. In any event, there would be severe consequences, even in the areas not affected
directly, because of the interdependence of the world economy. In either case the extinction of a large fraction of the
Earth's animals, plants, and microorganisms seems possible. The population size of Homo sapiens conceivably could
be reduced to prehistoric levels or below, and extinction of the human species itself cannot be excluded.
SDI 08 18
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The amplitude of the climate changes from the 5 Tg, 50 Tg and 150 Tg cases are compared to those from global
warming of the past century in Fig. 8 and climate change of the past 1000 yr in Fig. 9. In both cases it is clear that
all cases would produce unprecedented long lasting climate change. The 50 Tg and 150 Tg cases produce cooling as
large or larger than that experienced 18,000 yr ago during the coldest period of the last Ice Age. Harwell and
Hutchinson [1986] clearly described the impacts of nuclear winter. They assumed that there would be no food
production around the world for one year and concluded that most of the people on the planet would run out of food
and starve to death by then. Our results show that this period of no food production needs to be extended by many
years, making the impacts of nuclear winter even worse than previously thought. Agriculture would be affected by
many factors, including temperature changes, precipitation changes, and changes in insolation [e.g., Robock et al.,
1993; Maytín et al., 1995]. As an example, Fig. 10 shows changes in the length of the freeze-free growing season
for the third full growing seasons in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Such large reductions in growing
season would completely eliminate crops that have insufficient time to reach maturity. Also, global ozone loss is
likely [Toon et al., 2006], with effects on downward ultraviolet radiation [Vogelmann et al., 1992] and atmospheric
circulation. Further analysis of these and other effects, which is beyond the scope of this paper, is needed.
SDI 08 19
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POLITICS UPDATES
McCain Winning - Colorado
McCain Winning
X State Key
Obama Winning
Russia DA Uniqueness
Russia’s economy is surging because of high oil prices but inflation has also risen making
the economy vulnerable to any sudden change
Emirates Business 24/7 July 11, 2008 (“Russian Economy flourishes like UAE’s”,
http://www.business24-
7.ae/Articles/2008/7/Pages/RussianeconomyflourisheslikeUAE%E2%80%99s.aspx)
With oil prices remaining high, Russia is enjoying a similar economic boom to the Emirates, and has
amassed $500 billion (Dh1.83trn) in foreign currency reserves. GDP has been rising sharply at around
seven per cent per annum for the past seven years. And as emerging stock markets like China and
India have sold down rapidly since last October, 48 and 35 per cent respectively, the Russian
bourse hovers near an all-time high. Last week came the news that Dubai World and OAO Roskommunenergo are to bid $5.3bn for
Russia’s biggest wholesale power producer before price caps end in 2011. This will be the first Russian Energy investment by a GCC oil state, and part of a
$34bn sale of electricity generation and distribution assets since 2006. Dubai-based entities have a mixed record for buying foreign assets in recent years.
Property giant Emaar bought UK estate agency Hamptons just in time for the market to slump, and acquiring the second-largest US housebuilder John
Laing was arguably even worse on timing. But then Madame Tussauds in London proved an excellent buy and was sold on for double the sale price. Then
again last August Dubai World agreed to invest $5.1bn in Kirk Kerkorian’s MGM Mirage company in Las Vegas as part of Dubai’s diversification plans.
Since then Las Vegas has gone into an unprecedented slump with tourism falling in a city once thought recession proof. OGK-1 has four plants in European
Russia and two in Siberia, and supplies electricity to Moscow and the oil-rich Tyumen region. Only time will tell if this is the right time to buy. It is only
too easy for foreign investors to become the latecomers to any investment party. But the omens are very fortuitous in post-Putin Russia. The economic
transformation runs deep and is being overlooked by the Cold War mentality of some observers in the West. Arriving back in Russia after a year’s absence
, the
last week there is an immediate sense of economic prosperity in the air, and none of the near panic seen in the UK, US and parts of Europe. Indeed
most apparent change is that inflation has surged in Russia, usually a sign of economic strength or possibly
overheating. The cost of the train ticket from Moscow to St Petersburg has doubled in a year, similarly ballet prices have shot up and even the price
of art on the streets is double what it was two years ago. Even gas at the pumps sells for US prices these days.
Istock analysis July 10, 2008 (“Russian Economy could grow 8% in 2008”,
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews+articleid_2387619&title=Russian_Econo
my_Could.html)
Russian GDP could grow about 8% in 2008, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov said at a meeting
with members of the Association of European Business in Moscow on Thursday. “Based on my appraisals and the appraisals of the Economic Development
Ministry, GDP growth could close in on 8% in 2008,” he said . Industrial production could grow by more than 6%, he said.
The government’s official forecast for GDP growth in 2008 currently stands at 7.6%, while the forecast for industrial production is 5.7%. The Economic
According to the Economic
Development Ministry will present an updated forecast for 2008 to the government at the end of July.
Development Ministry, Russian GDP grew 8.3% in the first half of 2008, while industrial
production increased 6.6%. Zhukov noted that Russia has maintained a rather high level of
economic growth “despite the continuing financial crisis throughout the world,” although there have nevertheless been
some negative consequences. As an example, he cited inflation, which was already up to 9% for the year on July 7, or three
percentage points higher than in the same period of last year.
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Russia DA Uniqueness
The Russian economy is strong and getting stronger, although some problems plague it
Zoellick was generous with his praise for the Russian economy. He congratulated President
Dmitry Medvedev and his colleagues on Russia's strong economic growth, and said that this is a
very interesting time for Russia and its relations with the World Bank. Zoellick was much more diplomatic than
the authors of the World Bank's early June report on the Russian economy. They too commended Russia for its economic growth rates: 8.1 percent in 2007,
and 8.7 percent in the first quarter of this year. But they again criticized the Russian government for persistent inflation (which reached 7.7 percent from
. Importantly, for the first time World Bank experts
January to May of this year, and was up to 8.1 percent by June 9)
spoke about the overheating of the Russian economy, which they define as a situation where
consumer demand outstrips the supply of goods and services. Graphic evidence of this is the faster growth of wages
and salaries than labor productivity. This situation threatens even higher inflation, which could eventually slow down
economic growth rates. Nevertheless, the experts have concluded that all macroeconomic indicators, except for inflation, point to the strength of the
Russian economy.
The Russian economy is strong now solely because of oil prices it’s the only thing
masking the underlying problems
McClatchy Newspapers July 17, 2008 (“Russia worries about its high inflation”,
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/100/story/44620.html)
Dmitry Sorokin, a prominent economist in Moscow, said Russia's inflation generally was thought to be fueled by the
infusion of cash into the economy as well as the higher prices of oil and gas. But lurking beneath
everything, he said, is the fundamental problem that the country's infrastructure was never fully
rebuilt after chronic underinvestment by the Soviets, followed by the collapse of the Soviet
Union and then the 1998 economic crisis. For instance, the total volume of agricultural production in Russia in 2007 was roughly
25 percent less than in 1989, said Sorokin, the deputy director of the economics institute at Russia's academy of sciences in Moscow. Why, then, is
Russia's gross domestic product — about $1.29 trillion last year — so high? "The answer is
obvious. It's because of high oil prices, which have given us money, but not products," Sorokin said. "I call it
a GDP made of air; it's not true growth."
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A. Currently High oil prices are giving money to help Islamic banks who will invest that in
helping Africa because there are people who will only take sharia products- plan takes
away the income
The Guardian July 23, 2008 (“Centres fight for Islamic finance as oil booms”,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/7672824)
From Africa to Paris to Britain's former industrial heartland, Islamic law-compliant investment
products are springing into existence as financial centres try to compete for a slice of the Middle
East's colossal new oil revenues. With conventional sources of cash depleted by the credit crunch
and fears of recession around the developed world -- and with high oil and food prices limiting
growth -- oil-rich Gulf markets are one of the few reliable sources of finance. With dollar crude
prices soaring to almost double their level of a year ago -- and Western financial woes seen deepening -- a new
intensity has gripped Islamic finance growth. Estimates of the total size of assets held under Islamic finance rules vary, but the
Asian Development Bank estimates it at around $1 trillion, with growth of 10 to 15 percent a year. It is no surprise then that cities with substantial Muslim
populations and connections as diverse as Singapore and Hong Kong, London and Birmingham and even Paris are vying to act as key centres of expertise
in the new boom. "The French have lagged the British...but recently the French government signalled a change in attitude," ratings agency Standard &
Poor's said this week. "By preparing the ground for Islamic finance, France can help financial innovation and benefit from the deep pockets of Middle
Eastern investors as liquidity has dried up elsewhere in the global financial markets." It is unclear to what extent, if at all, the vast sovereign wealth funds
being built up by Gulf oil produces might be managed under the strictest principles of Islamic law, which prohibits the use of interest -- and therefore
more and more takers have been coming
investment in conventional banks, alcohol or pornography producers. But
forward with products to target those who demand sharia products. In June, investment
bank Investec announced a partnership with a Saudi investment provider to produce the first
sharia-compliant fund targeting Africa. Other funds are following. For now, two thirds of the worldwide Islamic sukuk bond
market -- an estimated $100 billion -- is based in Malaysia where the industry first took off.
B. There is a huge population of Muslims in Africa and their numbers are only increasing
Hunwick 96 (John, Dr. Hunwick holds a joint position as professor of religion and professor of
African history. His research has concerned aspects of the intellectual and social history of
Muslims in West Africa, especially in Mali and Nigeria, “Africa and Islamic Revival: Historical
and Contemporary Perspectives”, http://www.uga.edu/islam/hunwick.html)
One thousand, three hundred and fifty-five years ago, in A.D. 641, the Arab commander 'Amr ibn al-'As led his army across what we would now call the
Gaza Strip and into Egypt.The move constituted Islam's first footsteps in the African continent, and
opened up an era of continuous expansion for the faith, both as a spiritual enterprise and a
political kingdom. Today approximately one quarter of the world's one billion Muslims live in
Africa-that is about 250 million. In the countries of the northern one third of the continent they are a majority-up to 99% of the
population in some cases. This includes all the countries we would nowadays recognize as "Arab"
countries in Africa (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania and, to some extent the Sudan), as well as a second tier
of countries where Islam is either the majority religion, such as Somalia, Chad, Niger, Mali,
Senegal and Guinea, or is the religion of approximately half of the population, such as Nigeria,
Eritrea and Ethiopia. Most other African countries have minority Muslim populations, i.e. less than 50% of the inhabitants, and these include
some with sizeable minorities such as Ghana, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Kenya and Tanzania; others have smaller numbers.
SDI 08 30
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C. Muslims in Africa are at a Unique risk of contracting AIDS without assistance, they
don’t believe it affects them when it does
One of the difficulties Positive Muslims faces is convincing the Muslim community that AIDS is
something that also affects them. Many Muslims believe that AIDS is a homosexual disease or a
disease that affects black people only. This attitude stems from the belief that the Islamic way of
life protects people from contracting HIV and, second, that most Muslims believe they have not
seen or touched a fellow Muslim living with HIV/AIDS. Islam, like many other religious
traditions, advocates abstinence from any sexual activity before marriage. The reality is that
many Muslims have sex before marriage and engage in extra-marital affairs. The belief that the Islamic
way of life protects Muslims is therefore unrealistic and leads to a false sense of security in the Muslim
community. Being able to see and touch something often makes it more real for people. Since most Muslims believe that they have not touched or
seen a fellow Muslim who is HIV-positive, they conclude that AIDS does not affect them. The reality is that one cannot see who is HIV-positive or
negative, and so many Muslims have come across someone who is HIV-positive. Due to the secrecy surrounding HIV/AIDS, Muslims are unwilling to
reveal their status while alive and families are afraid to say how their loved ones died. The denial and taboos surrounding HIV/AIDS result in people
questioning Positive Muslims' leadership in this field. People challenge our legitimacy and purpose as an organisation, questioning the type of leadership
we provide and asking whether Muslim leadership on HIV/AIDS is required in the first place. Probably, one of our greatest challenges has been to establish
ourselves and our ability to lead in a community that believes it does not require leadership in the face of the AIDS pandemic. We continue to grapple with
through our awareness and education campaigns, Muslims will realise the importance
this, hoping that
of HIV prevention, before they are able to see and touch fellow Muslims whom they know are
HIV-positive.
Muchiri 2k [Michael Kibaara Staff Member at Ministry of Education in Nairobi, “Will Annan
finally put out Africa’s fires?” Jakarta Post, March 6, LN]
The executive director of UNAIDS, Peter Piot, estimated that Africa would annually need between $ 1 billion to $ 3 billion to combat the disease,
but currently receives only $ 160 million a year in official assistance. World Bank President James Wolfensohn lamented that Africa was losing
teachers faster than they could be replaced, and that AIDS was now more effective than war in destabilizing African countries. Statistics show
that AIDS is the leading killer in sub-Saharan Africa, surpassing people killed in warfare. In 1998, 200,000 people died from armed
conflicts compared to 2.2 million from AIDS. Some 33.6 million people have HIV around the world, 70 percent of
them in Africa, thereby robbing countries of their most productive members and decimating entire villages. About 13
million of the 16 million people who have died of AIDS are in Africa, according to the UN. What barometer is used to proclaim a holocaust if this
number is not a sure measure? There is no doubt that AIDS is the most serious threat to humankind, more serious than hurricanes,
earthquakes, economic crises, capital crashes or floods. It has no cure yet. We are watching a whole continent degenerate into ghostly skeletons
that finally succumb to a most excruciating, dehumanizing death. Gore said that his new initiative, if approved by the U.S.
Congress, would bring U.S. contributions to fighting AIDS and other infectious diseases to $ 325 million. Does this
mean that the UN Security Council and the U.S. in particular have at last decided to remember Africa? Suddenly,
AIDS was seen as threat to world peace, and Gore would ask the congress to set up millions of dollars on this case.
The hope is that Gore does not intend to make political capital out of this by painting the usually disagreeable
Republican-controlled Congress as the bad guy and hope the buck stops on the whole of current and future U.S.
governments' conscience. Maybe there is nothing left to salvage in Africa after all and this talk is about the African-
American vote in November's U.S. presidential vote. Although the UN and the Security Council cannot solve all
African problems, the AIDS challenge is a fundamental one in that it threatens to wipe out man. The challenge is not one of a single continent
alone because Africa cannot be quarantined. The trouble is that AIDS has no cure -- and thus even the West has stakes in the AIDS challenge.
Once sub-Saharan Africa is wiped out, it shall not be long before another continent is on the brink of extinction. Sure as death, Africa's time has
run out, signaling the beginning of the end of the black race and maybe the human race.
Russia will still be able to increase production by 2010- Their evidence doesn’t assume new
findings
The Guardian UK July 23, 2008 (“Russia oil output seen up at 10.3 mbpd in 2010”,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/7672661)
Russia expects its oil output will rise by 4.6 percent in 2010 compared to 2007, an energy
ministry document showed on Wednesday, stopping short of making predictions for 2008-09. A government source
quoted the report, issued by Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, as saying that oil output in
Russia will reach 514 million tonnes (10.3 million barrels per day) in 2010, up from 491.5 million tonnes
last year. The report did not include the ministry's forecasts of oil production for this year and 2009. Oil production in Russia, the
world's second largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia, fell by 0.3 percent in the first half of this
year, prompting some analysts to say the fall might become a trend until the country launches
production at new deposits in East Siberia and the Far East. Shmatko said earlier this month that Russian oil
output will be at least flat this year despite a drop in the first half and will certainly rise next year.
Last year, Russian production rose by 2.3 percent, a notch up from 2.2 percent in 2006, but much lower than huge spikes in previous years -- including a
The government made maintaining output and exploring for more oil top
record 11 percent in 2003.
priorities for the strategic oil sector and approved a number of tax breaks for the oil industry
from 2009 to allow firms to fund new projects.
Istock analysis July 10, 2008 (“Russian Economy could grow 8% in 2008”,
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews+articleid_2387619&title=Russian_Econo
my_Could.html)
Zhukov noted that Russia has maintained a rather high level of economic growth "despite the
continuing financial crisis throughout the world," although there have nevertheless been some negative consequences. As an
example, he cited inflation, which was already up to 9% for the year on July 7, or three percentage points higher than in the same period of last year. He
also said the government has set the goal of "using the favorable situation on the global energy
market to switch the Russian economy to an innovative development model, raise the
competitiveness of Russian business, retain a high level of investment, carry out several large
infrastructural projects, steadily develop the banking system and increase its contribution to
economic growth." The innovative development model will make it possible to maintain average
GDP growth rates at 6.5% per year for the period until 2020 even if oil prices fall, he said.
SDI 08 32
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Non-Unique Oil Prices are falling and the Russian economy is just getting stronger
RussiaToday July 17, 2008 (“Oil Prices Wont Affect Russian Economy”,
http://www.russiatoday.ru/business/news/27632)
Fears of an economic slowdown in the US keep kept oil markets volatile on wednesday - with a
sharp downward movement of 6 dollars a barrel for the second day running. At around 135 dollars, it’s a
sign the markets are not sure strong levels of demand can persist. However, Ron Smith of Alfa Bank says long-term,
fundamental demand for oil remains strong. If this trend continues in the next ten days or two weeks we should see another run at higher prices. At the
same time there is reason to believe this might be a bubble, and if this trade ever turns, if the hedge funds and everyone else who’s piled into suddenly start
. Russia, the world’s
to think that prices are going to go down then that will become a self fulfilling prophecy and they will go down
second-biggest oil exporter, remains little affected for now. With petro-dollars flowing into the country, any hope that
lower prices will slow inflation are also vague. Inflation has topped 9 per cent so far this year. But
the falls in the oil price of this week wont have an immediate impact on inflationary pressure
according to Roland Nash of Renaissance Capital. Its to small a move to have a big impact on the inflation rate in the short term. You need to see
the oil price fall for a considerable period of time. While the clouds continue to gather for the
leading developed economies, investors are increasingly looking to Russia as a safe haven. So the
decision by ratings agency Moody’s to lift its investment rating of Russian government debt is a timely signal to investors.
Arguments that the Russia Economy is too dependant on energy exports are wrong- 2
reasons
Business Week July 18, 2008 (“A rougher road for emerging market stocks”,
http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/jul2008/pi20080718_363030.htm?chan=search)
While the Russian economy is arguably too dependent on energy exports, we believe two factors
mitigate this risk. First, rising incomes and credit growth have led to strong Russian
household consumption, which is supporting service and manufacturing growth, and is helping
to diversify the economy. Second, although increasing speculation has made a short-term
correction in raw material prices likely, in our view, we believe a secular increase in emerging market
demand, combined with tight global capacity, will keep the long-term commodity uptrend intact.
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Iran News July 22, 2008 (“Oil prices fell again after iran deadlock, Gulf storm”,
http://www.iranmania.com/News/ArticleView/Default.asp?NewsCode=60171&NewsKind=Curr
ent%20Affairs)
Oil prices fell again after Iran and world powers announced resumption of talks to put an end to
the nuclear standoff; Traders said that prices also slipped on prospects that slowing economic growth
would cut demand for crude, Iran Daily reported. Talk might be cheap, but in the case of Iran, talk might
lead to cheaper gas at the pump. Traders were watching developments in the Middle East after what appeared to be a shift in US policy
toward Iran announced last Tuesday, which left much more impact on the oil market. Talk might be cheap, but in Iran’s case, talk might lead to cheaper gas
at the pump. While certainly not the only reason for sky-high oil, unnecessary tensions over Iran’s civilian nuclear program have helped fuel the surge in
The cost of a barrel of oil shot up nearly 8 percent in a single day in
gas prices that is altering American lifestyles.
June after a senior Israeli official raised the specter of an attack on Iran, CHN reported. But the
price has dropped to $131 from a record $147, not only because Americans are driving less but because
the Bush administration has finally come to its senses to talk to the Islamic Republic of Iran over its civilian nuclear program instead of demanding that the
country suspend its nuclear enrichment before any face-to-face negotiations.
Non- Unique- Steepest four day decline of oil prices in history and nothing to do with
supply and demand
The Huffington Post July 23, 2008 (“Oil Prices in steep decline: be afraid be very afraid”,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/oil-prices-in-steep-decli_b_113994.html)
Here we go again. Oil prices tumbling "in the steepest four day decline in history." The sense of relief
throughout the land is palpable. For a moment the fact that we are still at levels over 160% above prices of only a year and a half ago -- prices unheard of
And silenced for the moment is the inane commentary of President
before -- seems lost in the ebullient moment.
Bush, of our stalwart Secretary of Energy Sam Bodman, not to speak of our Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, of myriad oil company
poobahs, and of course our ex-Wall Streeter, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson who understands that when his cronies on Wall Street are bleeding
All
it's because of the manipulation of the "short sellers", but when it's you and I paying through the nose at the pump "it's all about supply and demand".
this while our regulatory commission, the CFTC, has become more of a casino huckster than
vigilant overseer, forever whitewashing the commodity exchanges, proclaiming "We see no
evidence of manipulation or undue speculation" -- as if an eighteen dollar plunge in four
trading days had everything to do with "supply and demand" -- thereby shamelessly
providing this administration, especially our Energy Secretary, talking points to rationalize doing
nothing.
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Istock Analyst July 22, 2008 (“Russian economy still growing, but could be slowed by high
infation”,
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews+articleid_2423563~title_Russian-
Economy-Still.html)
The Russian economy continues to grow, however high inflation will certainly lead to a
slowdown in economic growth, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said. "It can't be said
for now that economic growth rates are declining," he told journalists on Tuesday in comments
on the low growth levels in fixed capital investment and a reduction in retail growth rates in June. Economic
trends cannot be based on a single month, he said. At the same time, he said that "a slowdown in economic growth always
occurs when inflation is high." Inflation in Russia stood at 9.1% as of July 14. The problems facing the Russian economy are not
connected with the global financial crisis, he said. "Russia's problem is inflation," he said. Inflation is the main factor behind the decline
in retail turnover, rising interest rates and lower investment levels, he said. At the same time, he noted that investment has yet to decline but could do so.
"In the end, inflation leads to a decline in economic growth rates. There is a basic impression in Russia that high economic growth rates
can be achieved when inflation is up," he said. In recent years, when inflation was on the decline, economic growth was high and investment increased, he
said . Now, investment is not coming into the economy when inflation is high, he added.
Russia’s is growing so fast its overheating boom will turn into bust, the Status Quo leads
to nuke war inevitably, its try or die for the aff
The International Herald Tribune July 22, 2008 (“Some fear Russia's boom could turn to bust as
economy growing too fast”, http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/07/22/business/EU-Russia-
Overheating-Economy.php)
Fears are growing that Russia's oil and gas fueled economy is running too hot — and about to
boil over in the kind of mess that has scalded smaller East European neighbors. Some of the most vehement
warnings have been coming from the normally bland Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who says gross domestic product is growing
too fast and any ill-conceived stimulus measures such proposed tax cuts will lead to intolerable
inflation and a sudden stall in growth. Kudrin startled audience at a recent tax conference when
he compared the issue to nuclear war. Cut taxes, Kudrin warned, and Russia won't maintain its thousands of
atomic warheads. "The 33 percent share of the budget spent on defense and security is our
guarantee that there won't be a nuclear war," the minister said. His opponents, including Economic Development Minister Elvira
Nabiullina, are clamoring for the sharp tax cut to wean Russia off its addiction to imports, which are growing at an annual rate of over 40 percent. The
government is walking a tightrope. With all the government and private sector spending,
inflation is reeling out of control — food prices are soaring at an annual rate of 25 percent — and
threatens to submerge hundreds of thousands of people below the poverty line.
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Russia’s economy wont decline their evidence is old and doesn’t assume Russian
measures to prevent a crisis
The International Herald Tribune July 22, 2008 (“Some fear Russia's boom could turn to bust as
economy growing too fast”, http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/07/22/business/EU-Russia-
Overheating-Economy.php)
Concerns over Russia's economy coincide with the approaching 10th anniversary of the 1998
financial crisis, when the country defaulted on domestic debt and devalued the currency, causing
a shock wave on international markets. Millions of Russians lost their savings. Economists stress
there is no chance of a repeat crisis. Russia has wisely used the oil windfall to tuck away
hundreds of billions of dollars in strategic reserves and sovereign wealth funds — "rainy day"
funds that it can use as a buffer against any short-term shock such as a precipitous drop in oil prices.
Currently the Saudi Economy Relies completely on oil revolving around weak governance
and private sector
Reuters News July 24, 2008 (“Trouble looms for oil producers –report”,
http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL24200465.html )
Oil producing countries need to fix the rest of their economies to prepare for inevitable falls in
exports, a report by a British think tank said on Wednesday. The survey of the economic
prospects of 12 oil-producing countries by Britain's Royal Institute for International Affairs --
entitled "Ending Dependence, Hard Choices for Oil-Exporting States" -- described its own
conclusions as "rather depressing". Only three of the 12 countries -- Indonesia, Malaysia and
Norway -- were "well on the road to moving towards a non-hydrocarbon-dependent economy."
The others -- Algeria, Nigeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Timor Leste (East Timor), Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait and Iran -- "face serious barriers and constraints. "These revolve around weak
governance, poorly performing private sectors and an inadequate programme of economic and
political reform." Although many of them will be able to sell oil for decades, they face a plateau
period long before oil runs out, when the rate of production stops increasing while growing
domestic demand means exports slow and revenues shrink. "Time, not oil, is running out," it
said.
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A2: Saudi DA: Impact inevitable (If you have oil adv.)
The Economic Times July 3, 2008 (“World oil market in fear of terror attack in Saudi
Arabia”,http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/Economy/Indicators/World_oil_market_in_f
ear_of_terror_attack_in_Saudi_Arabia/articleshow/3190779.cms)
An attack -- or even an attempted attack -- by Islamic extremists on Saudi Arabia's oil sector
would have disastrous consequences on the world market and the price per barrel, analysts warn.
Of more than 700 people arrested in the course of the last six months in Saudi Arabia, dozens
had been part of cells charged with preparing attacks against oil sites, according to authorities in Riyadh. With
the price per barrel rising constantly and the capacity to increase global production almost non-existent, apart from in Saudi Arabia, the
world market has never been so vulnerable to an offensive by Jihadists in the kingdom, they said.
Michael Klare, head of the University of Massachusetts's peace and world security programme and author of the book "Resource Wars", said that even
if an attack caused little damage, the impact would still be enormous. "There would be a
tremendous psychological effect because the market is already prepared to expect terrorist events
like this. It would have an immediate effect on prices," he said.
Non Unique demand is falling in the Status Quo causing prices to go down
Emirates Business 24/7 July 25, 2008 (“Demand for oil falling due to high prices”,
http://www.business24-
7.ae/articles/2008/7/pages/07252008_d150dc86aab547d6961a1c7e51988274.aspx)
A surge in oil prices above $100 over the past few months has started to destroy strong demand
and this was evident in the recent price collapse, said a report. With the exception of the world's oil giant Saudi Arabia, the
Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) as a whole has remained reluctant to increase production because it wants to drive prices even
the London-based Centre for Global Energy Studies (CGES), which is run by former Saudi oil
higher, said the report by
rebuffed OPEC claims that
minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Al Yamani. In its monthly report for August, sent to Emirates Business, CGES
the sharp rise in crude prices has been a result of speculation and the weak US dollar, saying
supply shortage is the main reason for the surge. "The world has been short of oil since the
middle of 2006 and remains short now, although demand destruction is gathering pace and prices
have fallen by more than $17 a barrel in the past three days," CGES said. "Producers argue that they are supplying
every barrel that their customers want to lift, but demand is a function of price also and, in the case of crude oil, it is a function of price differentials as well
as absolute prices."
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COERCION CRITIQUE
LINKS
Link – Incentives
Market incentives mask coercive forces
Grant, April 2002
(Ruth, Professor of Political Science and Philosophy @ Duke University, “The Ethics of
Incentives: Historical Origins and Contemporary Understandings,” from Economics and
Philosophy,http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FEAP%2FEAP18_01%2FS026
6267102001104a.pdf&code=648c0775ce861befb810d4d41529542f access July 23, 2008)
Today the situation is altogether different. The term `incentive' has become abstracted from the
ethical and political issues in which it was once embedded. Particularly when the term appears
within economic discourse, the ethical and political issues are concealed, and incentives take on
the positive ethical patina associated with the free market. In the market, we have only equal,
individual rational actors whose choices are constrained by impersonal forces, which, like the
force of gravity, operate equally upon us all. A trade will occur only if both parties act voluntarily
for their own benefit. To the extent that the operations of incentives have become assimilated to
our thinking about market forces and we do speak of `market incentives' today, they appear to be
implicitly ethical or, at least, benign. By analogy, the voluntary and egalitarian characteristics
inherent in market relations are assumed too readily and uncritically to characterize all sorts of
incentive structures as well. We do not examine too closely what sorts of choices are truly
voluntary; the threat of force, for example, is sometimes treated simply as one kind of
disincentive. Moreover, the power relations involved with incentives are often rendered invisible.
We speak of incentives in the passive voice `What are the incentives in this situation?' even when
incentives are offered by someone to someone with a clear and deliberate design. And generally,
the one doing the offering has less to lose if his offer is rejected than the one doing the choosing
has to lose by refusing the offer. The equality of the parties involved ought not to be assumed.
When the sense of incentives is broadly understood within the framework of the market, the
political character of relationships where incentives are employed deliberately to alter what
would otherwise be automatic outcomes is entirely lost to view.
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Link - Incentives
The tool of incentives is a form of manipulation
Grant,April 2002
(Ruth, Professor of Political Science and Philosophy @ Duke University, “The Ethics of
Incentives: Historical Origins and Contemporary Understandings,” from Economics and
Philosophy,http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FEAP%2FEAP18_01%2FS026
6267102001104a.pdf&code=648c0775ce861befb810d4d41529542f access July 23, 2008)
We are now in a position to identify a core understanding or a distinctive meaning of the concept
of incentives; what we might call incentives `strictly speaking'. Incentives are employed in a
particular form of negotiation. An offer is made which is an extrinsic benefit or a bonus, neither
the natural or automatic consequence of an action nor a deserved reward or compensation. The
offer is usually made in the context of an authority relationship ± for example, adult/child,
employer/employee, government/citizen or government/organization. The offer is a discrete
prompt expected to elicit a particular response. Finally and most importantly, the offer is
intentionally designed to alter the status quo by motivating a person to choose differently than he
or she would in its absence. If the desired action would result naturally or automatically, no
incentive would be necessary. An incentive is the added element without which the desired
action would not occur. For this reason, it makes sense to speak of `institutional incentives' when
referring to arrangements designed to encourage certain sorts of responses. `Perverse incentives'
is also an expression that implies that incentives are meant to direct people's behavior in
particular ways. Central to the core meaning of incentives is that they are an instrument of
government in the most general sense. The emergence of the term historically within discourses
of social control is illustrative of this point.
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Link - Incentives
Incentives are a form of control and should not be masked in a positive market ideology
Grant, April 2002
(Ruth, Professor of Political Science and Philosophy @ Duke University, “The Ethics of
Incentives: Historical Origins and Contemporary Understandings,” from Economics and
Philosophy,http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FEAP%2FEAP18_01%2FS026
6267102001104a.pdf&code=648c0775ce861befb810d4d41529542f access July 23, 2008)
Incentives are one of the various ways in which people can get other people to do what they want
them to do. They involve relations of power; power which is exercised in a manner
distinguishable from persuasion as well as from coercion. In some situations, of course,
incentives are the preferred alternative to coercion. But in others, where persuasion might be an
effective alternative, it is an insult to be offered an incentive: it implies either that you are crass ±
that is, that there is no good reason to do the thing you are being asked to do, but that your
compliance can be bought; or that you are stupid and would not be able to appreciate the good
reasons for doing what you are being asked to do so that an appeal to your selfish interests must
take the place of argument; or that you are not well-intentioned and must be induced to do the
right thing by extrinsic benefits.59 I am suggesting that incentives be considered, along with
persuasion and coercion in their various forms, as a member of the set of ways in which power
and influence are exercised ± that is, as a form of control, rather than simply as an alternative to
it. There is an abundant store of highly developed argumentation on the problem of
distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate uses of power and influence. For those interested in
ethics and economics, this is the place to turn in considering the ethics of incentives. In the case
of incentives, it is more fruitful to use the tools of political and philosophical analysis to
understand economic phenomena than vice versa. When incentives are understood within the
horizon of market economics, first, the concept becomes so broad as to lose its distinctive
character and analytic utility, and second, the ethical problematic involved in the use of
incentives becomes obscured. By uncovering the history of the term `incentives', I hope to have
placed the use of incentives in both a clearer and a different light.
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Link - Incentive
Economic incentives coerce individuals and mold their values and re-entrenches market
capitalism
Carvalho and Rodrigues, September 2006
(Luis and Joao, Department of Economics and DINAMIA, ISCTE Lisbon, “On Markets and
Morality: Revisiting Fred Hirsch” from Review of Social Economy,
http://www.informaworld.com/index/758256824.pdf, accessed July 24, 2008)
In fact, this hegemony of the ‘‘market model’’ was fuelled by neoliberal economic theory, which,
according to Chang (2003), emerged as an alliance between neoclassical economics and the
Austrian-libertarian tradition, based on a more or less clear division of labour: the former
provided the analytical tools with a universalistic ambition, encompassing in its analysis all kinds
of human behaviours and social interactions; the latter supplied a robust moral and political
philosophy able to create a ‘‘common sense’’ discourse about the desirability of a ‘‘new free-
market capitalism’’. One can therefore conceive neoliberalism as a renewed theoretical effort to
justify and argue for the universalization of market-based social relations, with the corresponding
penetration in almost every single aspect of our lives of the discourse and/ or practice of
commodification, capital accumulation and profit making (Wood 1997). Furthermore, in line
with Le Grand (2003), one can argue that this project was successful inasmuch as it was capable
of inducing a change in the views and beliefs of policy-makers and other institutional designers
about human nature and the dominant motivations of human behaviour. By this we mean that
public choice theorists and other neoliberal intellectuals were capable of turning a particular
view of individuals into the hegemonic understanding what it means to ‘‘take men as they really
are’’. Thus, it is not surprising that an agenda emphasizing markets and monetary incentives has
become the dominant policy menu of our epoch, contributing, in a kind of perverse selffulfilling
prophecy, to mould individual values to dangerously fit the abovementioned dismal portrait. The
contemporary political success of this project allows us to speak, in line with Polanyi (1957), of
the unfolding of a second great transformation, in the sense of a new utopian and ultimately
unsustainable effort of turning the market and self-interest into the only foundations for social
order. Fred Hirsch, writing precisely in the midst of the transitional phase that would lead to the
dominance of neoliberalism, was able to foresee some of its key features and troublesome
implications. It should be noted that Hirsch, although sceptical about the survival possibilities of
post-war Keynesianism, probably had in mind a quite different historical outcome—he even
considered a ‘‘reversion’’ to the liberal-conservative approach (of, say, Hayek) as ‘‘morally and
politically unthinkable’’ (Hirsch 1976: 189). Nevertheless, by identifying the tendency to market
expansion and the corresponding commodification of increasing spheres of social life, while
simultaneously acknowledging its potential adverse consequences on the motivational appeal of
social and moral norms, Hirsch unintentionally offered a work which resonates in the
contemporary debates and which may give valuable contributions to them.
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Link - Incentives
New “green” practices transform conventional forms of sovereignty to be able to control the
environment, populations, and other systems.
Goldman 2001
The World Bank represents its recent interventions in the Mekong Region, and Laos in particular, as
reflecting its new modus operandi: "environmentally sustainable development." Over the next two
decades, the multilateral banks and the Lao government plan to build more than a dozen hydroelectric
dams on the Mekong river, converting Laos into the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) of Southeast
Asia.' Unlike the TVA, however, these plans are being implemented through new ideas and tools of
conservation, preservation, and sustainability. When a whole range of actors, from World Bank
lawyers to international conservation scien- tists, are commissioned to rewrite national property rights
laws, redesign state agencies, and redefine localized production practices based on new global norms,
they transform conven- tional forms of state power, agency, and sovereignty. I argue below that these
new "green" practices are impacting the production of, first, national and global truth regimes on
nature; second, rights regimes to more effectively control (and increase the market value of)
environments, natural resources, and resource-dependent populations; and third, new state authorities
within national boundaries and in the world sys- tem. Hence, the World Bank's practices are facilitating
the birth of environmental states in the Global South, but not in the way that ecological modernization
theorists suggest, i.e., that states are unified, rational actors and eventually graduate into eco-rational
modernity (Frank, et al. 2000; Mol and Sonnenfeld 2000; Schofer, et al. 2000; Spaargaren and Mol 1992).2
Instead, the environmental states that are emerging around the world today are marked by new global
forms of legality and eco-rationality that have fragmented, stratified, and unevenly transnationalized
Southern states, state actors, and state power.3 These changes affect what Foucault called the "art of
government" (Dean 1994; Foucault 1991), a concept he deployed to decenter the traditional notion of
the state as the main site of modern societal power ("the transcendent singularity of Machiavelli's
prince"). He preferred to emphasize the multiplicity and widely dispersed "forms of government and
their imma- nence to the state" (Foucault 1991:91) that had been left undertheorized in political theory.
Foucault argued there were three basic types of government and each was connected to a par- ticular
science or discipline: self-government or morality/ethics, the proper way to govern the family from which
emerges the modern science of economy, and the science of state rule or politics. For our purposes, the art
of government also includes, on the one hand, the making of the modern rational subject4 and the
efficient state that s/he would help build, and, on the other hand, the intensified regulation of the relation
of these subjects to their natural terri- tory. I call these productive relations of government-with their
emphasis on "knowing" and "clarifying" one's relationship to nature and the environment as mediated
through new insti- tutions-eco-governmentality. That is, in the process of analyzing this new type of
global green governmentality, I engage Foucault's question: "What rules of right are implemented by the
relations of power in the production of discourses of truth?" (Foucault 1994). We can learn a lot about
relations of power through an inquiry into the co-production of regimes of territorial rights and
discourses of environmental truth.
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Goldman 2001
The World Bank's influence in Laos is not limited to the visible means of restructuring and
environmentalizing the state described in the preceding sections; indeed, the very same
analytical and methodological tools that the World Bank and its partners invent and use, and
the classificatory systems they establish in pursuit of environmentally sustainable develop-
ment, represent an exercise of power. These tools, methodologies, and classification systems
serve to create a new cognitive mapping of Lao nature and society, state and citizen, through
new forms of knowledge production and institutional collaborations. They are a powerful set
of discourses of norms, rights, and truths of global eco-rationality that seeks to build upon and
replace prior formations that have dealt with the "subjects" of these new policies: hill tribes,
forest dwellers, scientists, and development officials.31
Any positive benefit that the affirmative claims is only as a result of the state’s violent oppression.
Campbell 2005
David, Professor of Cultural & Political Geography at Durham U, The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire,
and the Sports Utility Vehicle, projectmuse
As an imagined community, the state can be seen as the effect of formalized practices and ritualized acts that
operate in its name or in the service of its ideals. This understanding, which is enabled by shifting our theoretical
commitments from a belief in pregiven subjects to a concern with the problematic of subjectivity, renders foreign
policy as a boundary-producing political performance in which the spatial domains of inside/outside, self/other,
and domestic/ foreign are constituted through the writing of threats as externalized dangers. The narratives of
primary and stable identities that continue to govern much of the social sciences obscure such an understanding.
In international relations these concepts of identity limit analysis to a concern with the domestic influences on foreign
policy; this perspective allows for a consideration of the influence of the internal forces on state identity, but it
assumes that the external is a fixed reality that presents itself to the pregiven state and its agents. In contrast, by
assuming that the identity of the state is performatively constituted, we can argue that there are no foundations of
state identity that exist prior to the problematic of identity/difference that situates the state within the framework
of inside/outside and self/other. Identity is constituted in relation to difference, and difference is constituted in
relation to identity, which means that the “state,” the “international system,” and the “dangers” to each are coeval
in their construction. Over time, of course, ambiguity is disciplined, contingency is fixed, and dominant meanings
are established. In the history of U.S. foreign policy— regardless of the radically different contexts in which it has
operated—the formalized practices and ritualized acts of security discourse have worked to produce a conception
of the United States in which freedom, liberty, law, democracy, individualism, faith, order, prosperity, and
civilization are claimed to exist because of the constant struggle with and often violent suppression of opponents
said to embody tyranny, oppression, anarchy, totalitarianism, collectivism, atheism, and barbarism.
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Incentives control
Alan, Professor of political science at Queens College of the City University of New York, Alan, Assistant
professor of philosophy at Queens College of the City University of New York, (2002) 'Marxism and
Governmentality Studies: Toward a Critical Encounter', Rethinking Marxism, 14:1,132 — 142
Rose designates this political problem space “etho-politics.” Within this regime of practices of
government, he finds an economic dimension: “Human capital and social capital, then, introduce etho-
politics into economics through the capitalization of morality in the service of national economic
advantage . . . Economic health is to be governed indirectly . . . through fostering an ethos of human
enterprise and moral responsibility . . . Each individual is to see it as their moral duty to invest in their
own capacities, to subscribe to the commitments of waged labour” (1999b, 484– 85). The capitalization of
the subject through community and morality thus becomes a leitmotif of this political rationality and its
attendant governmental programs and technologies. Among these technologies are those that Rose
designates “control technologies,” technologies for the control of others and oneself on the basis of
which those who were once dependent on the welfare state, “through the rational reconstruction of the
will, and of the habits of independence, life planning, self-improvement, autonomous life conduct . . .
can be re-inserted into family, work and consumption, and hence into the continuous circuits and
flows of control society” 1992a (270). For those individuals who cannot be so inscribed or re-inscribed,
“control will take the form of more or less permanent sequestration” (270).4
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IMPACTS
Coercion Bad
Coercion Bad
Coercion Bad
Individual rights should never be violated – regardless of the benefits that government
action might produce
Machan 2003
(Tibor R., Professor Emeritus Of Philosophy at Auburn and research fellow at the Hoover
Institution, The Passion for Liberty, p.96-97)
All in all, then, I support the principled or rights-based approach. In normal contexts, honesty is
the best policy, even if at times it does not achieve the desired good results; so is respect for
every individual's rights to life, liberty, and property. All in all, this is what will ensure the best
consequences—in the long run and as a rule.
Therefore, one need not be very concerned about the most recent estimate of the consequences of
banning or not banning guns, breaking up or not breaking up Microsoft, or any other public
policy, for that matter. It is enough to know that violating the rights of individuals to bear arms is
a bad idea, and that history and analysis support our understanding of principle. To violate rights
has always produced greater damage than good, so let's not do it, even when we are terribly
tempted to do so. Let's not do it precisely because to do so would violate the fundamental
requirements of human nature. It is those requirements that should be our guide, not some recent
empirical data that have no staying power (according to their very own theoretical terms).
Finally, you will ask, isn't this being dogmatic? Haven't we learned not to bank too much on what
we've learned so far, when we also know that learning can always be improved, modified, even
revised? Isn't progress in the sciences and technology proof that past knowledge always gets
overthrown a bit later? As in science and engineering, so in morality and politics: We must go
with what we know but be open to change— provided that the change is warranted. Simply
because some additional gun controls or regulations might save lives (some lives, perhaps at the
expense of other lives) and simply because breaking up Microsoft might improve the satisfaction
of consumers (some consumers, perhaps at the expense of the satisfaction of other consumers)
are no reasons to violate basic-rights. Only if and when there are solid, demonstrable reasons to
do so should we throw out the old principles and bring on the new principles. Any such reasons
would have to speak to the same level of fundamentality and relevance as that incorporated by
the theory of individual rights itself.
Those defending consequentialism, like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, have argued the
opposite thesis: Unless one can prove, beyond a doubt, that violating rights in a particular
instance is necessarily wrong in the eyes of a "rational and fair man," the state may go ahead and
"accept the natural outcome of dominant opinion" and violate those rights.1
Such is now the leading jurisprudence of the United States, a country that inaugurated its
political life by declaring to the world that each of us possesses unalienable rights, ones that may
never be violated no matter what!
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Rights Outweigh
Individual rights are key to human dignity- this is the biggest impact in the round
Kateb – Professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Political Philosophy at Princeton –
1992 (George, The Inner Ocean p.4-5)
Why make so much of individual personal and political rights? The answer, as I have said, is that
respect for rights is the best way of honoring human dignity. Why make so much of human
dignity? I do not find much to say. I am not even sure that much should be said. Suppose we
carry on at length about why governments should treat people in certain ways (by actions and
abstentions), and in these ways unconditionally and as a matter of course, and should do so
because people deserve and are entitled to such treatment, rather than because governments may
find it prudent to treat people in these ways in the spirit of extending revocable privileges. I am
afraid that we may jeopardize human dignity by laboring to defend it. What sort of attack would
merit an answer? Is a long and elaborate theory needed to establish the point that people should
not be treated by the state as if they were masses, or obstacles or instruments to higher purposes,
or subjects for experiments, or pieces in a game, or wayward children in need of protection
against themselves, or patients in need of perpetual care, or beasts in need of the stick? With
what right does anyone maintain that people may be regarded or used in these nonhuman or
subhuman ways? With what truth? Unabused and undegraded, people have always shown that
they deserve better. They deserve guaranteed rights. When their rights are respected, all that their
dignity, their human status, requires is achieved. People are enabled to lead lives that are free,
modest, and decent—provided, of course, socioeconomic circumstances are not hopeless. To tie
dignity to rights is therefore to say that governments have the absolute duty to treat people (by
actions and abstentions) in certain ways, and in certain ways only. The state's characteristic
domination and insolence are to be curbed for the sake of rights. Public and formal respect for
rights registers and strengthens awareness of three constitutive facts of being human: every
person is a creature capable of feeling pain, and is a free agent capable of having a free being, of
living a life that is one's own and not somebody else's idea of how a life should be lived, and is a
moral agent capable of acknowledging that what one claims for oneself as a right one can claim
only as an equal to everyone else (and relatedly that what one wants done to oneself one should
do to others). Respect for rights recognizes these capacities and thus honors human dignity.
Rights Outweigh
Public policymakers have a moral obligation to protect individual rights and respect
sovereignty
Kateb – Professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Political Philosophy at Princeton –
1992 (George, The Inner Ocean p.2)
The background assumption is that most people in a society of rights are disposed to be law-
abiding and that government's mere existence sustains their disposition. But because some
persons inevitably transgress against their fellow citizens, government can never lose the status
of protector; in particular, protector of life and property, the usual objects of transgression. If,
then, rights are rights against the state, the theory of rights does not ignore the obvious fact that
the state exists to prevent, deter, or punish crime or mayhem. (I prefer to see crime not as a
denial of the victim's rights but, instead, as legally culpable immorality; neverthe¬less, it is
sometimes sensible to speak of individuals violating one an¬other's rights.) Government exists to
preserve individuals. The point is that it must do this work, and its other work, in a way that does
not violate rights, including the rights of transgressors and those accused of transgression.
If the Bill of Rights is the core, its silences and deliberate omissions required that it be
supplemented over time. Freedom of speech, press, religion, and association; due-process rights
for suspects, defendants, and the legally guilty; and respect for a person's freedom from arbitrary
invasions of security and privacy—all go far in protecting the dignity (or integrity) of
individuals. But their dignity needs more—above all, three further rights: first, the right to vote
and take part in politics; second, the right to be spared from utter degradation or to be saved from
material misery; and third, the right to equal protection of the laws (in the language of the
Fourteenth Amendment). The two last-named rights do not call for mere governmental
abstention, as do the rights of speech, press, religion, association, security, and privacy. Nor do
they call for only procedural justice, as do some other main rights in the Bill of Rights. Rather,
the right to be free of degradation and misery answers to a minimal samaritanism as morally
obligatory on society and looks to government to carry it out. It is a right to be given something,
to be enabled to begin to live a life. Samaritanism is obligatory on society, and obligatory
samaritanism would be the foundation of a right to life which was expanded beyond its present
constitutional interpretation in the United States. I believe that this right, more than any other,
stands in need of expansion through positive governmental action, despite all the serious risks
involved in charging governments with the task of fostering life. And the equal protection of the
laws may necessitate governmental action against, say, official or social racial discrimination.
Naturally, in saying that the state, which must always be kept under suspicion, must also be
entrusted not only with the fundamental task of preserving individuals against transgressors but
also with the positive function of promoting some of the rights that are indispensable to human
dignity, one admits that there will be an inevitable ambivalence toward the state. It is an enemy,
the worst enemy, but it is not the only enemy and it is not only an enemy. My emphasis,
however, is on the antagonism that government shows to rights by its initiatives rather than by its
neglect. Throughout this book I rarely refer to rights that need government's positive
contribution. The latter rights, no matter how fundamental, cannot be the norm in a society
devoted to individual rights.
Different individuals may use or need the several rights variably, but when government refuses to
respect rights, it not only makes people suffer, it injures everyone's human dignity.
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Value to life
Marc, Frederic, “Voyages Across the Web of Time; Angkarn, Nietzsche and Temporal Colonization,
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, September 1st, 1999
It becomes particularly significant when we realize that the fear of death (thanatophobia), though it
pushes death into the margins of cultural consciousness, is absolutely critical in determining the
prodigious hyperactivity of postmodemity. As Norman O. Brown suggested some four decades ago in the
United States in a book entitled Life Against Death, the exaggerated and apparently limitless desire for
more material wealth, more noise and more activity is an unconscious phobic overreaction to the absence,
silence and passivity of death which lurks within the uniquely temporal human psyche. [33] Appearances
to the contrary, it is Thanatos, not Eros, which primarily drives the hyperactive consumer culture. So
when Angkarn's "The Eye of Time" alludes to the seduction of humans by precious objects towards which
they "rush to their deaths", we should remember that, ironically, it may be the individualized person's
knowledge and fear of death, and the vain desire to defeat mortality through material self-aggrandis
ement (or through mindnumbing, time-destroying freneticism), that actually render the human so
vulnerable to that seduction. There is an important sense, then, in which Angkarn's aesthetic temporal
philosophy, though not immune to nostalgia, presents a more profound alterity to the increasingly
pervasive market and productivity-centred global culture than does Nietzsche. The German writer is
clearly at odds with the culture of unlimited consumption that was gestating in Europe in the latter part
of the nineteenth century. His philosophy of the will represents, among other things, a response to the
will-less, unrestrained desire of a human conceived principally as producer-consumer. Yet Nietzsche's
promotion of the superhuman individual who relentlessly pursues the mastery of time, the domination of
death, epitomizes that culture in which the individual is at war with time, with mortality. As we have
attempted to demonstrate here, that same psychological war plays a significant role in driving the
irrational and exponential growth of a globalizing free market.
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The focus of calculative analysis leads to a world devoid of meaning. The greatest impact is the
attempt to avoid nuclear war to fall into ontological damnation.
Zimmerman 1994
Michael E. Professor of Philosophy at Tulane, Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity,
Heidegger asserted that human self-assertion, combined with the eclipse of being, threatens the relation
between being and human Dasein. Loss of this relation would be even more dangerous than a nuclear
war that might “bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth.”
This controversial claim is comparable to the Christian teaching that it is better to forfeit the world than to
lose one’s soul by losing one’s relation to God. Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it is
possible that after a nuclear war, life might once again emerge, but it is far less likely that there will ever
again occur an ontological clearing through which such life could manifest itself. Further, since
modernity’s one-dimensional disclosure of entities virtually denies them any “being” at all, the loss of
humanity’s openness for being is already occurring. Modernity’s background mood is horror in the face
of nihilism, which is consistent with the aim of providing material “happiness” for everyone by reducing
nature to pure energy. The unleashing of vast quantities of energy in nuclear war would be equivalent to
modernity’s slow-motion destruction of nature: unbounded destruction would equal limitless
consumption. If humanity avoided nuclear war only to survive as contented clever animals, Heidegger
believed we would exist in a state of ontological damnation: hell on earth, masquerading as material
paradise.
The affirmative’s call to act against the harms of the case diverts attention from the evils of the
capitalist framework
Slovoj, “The Spectre of Ideology,” from Mapping ideology, Ed. Slavoj Zizek, London ; New York: Verso, p.
1
By way of a simple reflection on how the horizon of historical imagination is subjected to change,
we find ourselves in medias res, compelled to accept the unrelenting pertinence of the notion of
ideology. Up to a decade or two ago, the system production-nature (man's productive-
exploitative relationship with nature and its resources) was perceived as a constant, whereas
everybody was busy imagining different forms of the social organization of production and
commerce (Fascism or Communism as alternatives to liberal capitalism); today, as Fredric
Jameson perspicaciously remarked, nobody seriously considers possible alternatives to
capitalism any longer, whereas popular imagination is persecuted by the visions of the
forthcoming 'breakdown of nature', of the stoppage of all life on earth — it seems easier to
imagine the 'end of the world' than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if
liberal capitalism is the 'real' that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global
ecological catastrophe . . . . One can thus categorically assert the existence of ideology qua
generative matrix that regulates the relationship between visible and non-visible, between
imaginable and nonimaginable, as well as the changes in this relationship.
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Dillon 2005
Michael, Lancaster U, “Cared to death: The Biopoliticised Time of Your Life” http://www.foucaultstudies.
com/no2/dillon.pdf.
In posing an intrinsic and unique threat to life through the very ways in which it promotes, protects
and invests life, ‘care for all living’ threatens life in its own distinctive ways. Massacres have become
vital. The threshold of modernity is reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own (bio)
political strategies. Biopolitics must and does recuperate the death function. It does teach us how to
punish and who to kill. Power over life must adjudicate punishment and death as it distributes live
across terrains of value that the life sciences constantly revise in the cause of life’s very promotion. It
has to. That is also why we now have a biopolitics gone geopolitically global in humanitarian wars of
intervention and martial doctrines of virtuous war.Here, also, is the reason why the modernising
developmental politics of biopolitics go racist: “So you can understand the importance – I almost said the
vital importance – of racism to such an exercise of power.” In racism, Foucault insists: “We are dealing
with a mechanism that allows biopower to work.” But: “The specificity of modern racism, or what gives
it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies or the lies of power. It is bound up with
the techniques of power, with the technology of power.” In thus threatening life, biopolitics prompts a
revision of the question of life and especially of the life of a politics that is not exhaustively
biologised; comprehensively subject to biopolitical governance in such a way that life shows up as
nothing but the material required for biopolitical governance, whether in terms posed by Foucault or
Agamben. Emphasising care for all living - the promotion, protection and investment of the life of
individuals and populations – elides the issue of being cared to death. Being cared to death poses the
issue of the life that is presupposed, nomologically for Agamben and biologically for Foucault, in
biopolitics. Each foregrounds the self-immolating logic that ineluctably applies in a politics of life that
understands life biologically, in the way that Foucault documents for us, or nomologically, in the way that
Agamben’s bare life contends. When recalling the significance of the Christian pastorate to biopolitics,
Ojakangas seems to emphasize a line of succession rather than of radical dissociation. One, moreover,
which threatens to elide the intrinsic violence of biopolitics and its essential relation with correction
and death.
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MO Impacts
Clough 2004,
Patricia, professor of sociology, coordinator of the women's studies certificate program, and director of the Center for Research on Women
and Society at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Future Matters: Technoscience, Global Politics, and Cultural Criticism,
proquest
Gilles Deleuze referred to societies of control in order to mark the diversification and diffusion of
forces of state power throughout social space, including the reappropriation of these forces for and by
the state. Control therefore is an intensification and transformation of what Michel Foucault had
referred to as the "governmentalization of the state" in disciplinary societies.29 As Foucault argued, in
disciplinary societies, the "governmentalization of the state" enabled the state to extend its disciplinary
practices through institutions such as the church, the school, the prison, the family, [End Page 13] and
the union, "the enclosures of civil society."30 The state is thereby able to move deep into the lives of
individual subjects through disciplining, but it does so through complex strategies of socialization that
the institutions of civil society deploy in managing sociality and the moral order. Although aimed at the
production of "docile bodies," disciplining is a deployment of biopower that nonetheless engages
bodily matters through a politics of representation, by which familial and national ideological
apparatuses function to constitute subject identities, and where resistance to these identities, and the
transgression of the institutional norms that support them, is possible, even enabled, by the instability of
the strategies of disciplining. The institutions of civil society have constituted the space for a whole
range of oppositional identity politics focused on gender, sexual, ethnoracial, class, and national
differences. The shift from disciplining to biopolitical control refers to the transformation of governance
and a politics of representation occurring under the conditions of the reconfiguration of the relations of
power across international organizations, the nation and civil society, the state and the economy, and the
public and the private spheres. Such a reconfiguration is due in part to the disorganization of nationally
organized capital, effected since the 1970s by globalization and structural adjustment and the increased
complexity added with flexible accumulation of capital and flexible employment of labor power, and the
globalization of information technologies, as well as to the ongoing social and political responses to these
changes locally and globally. Control addresses the added complexity, as the turbulence arising with
the reconfiguration of governance across community, national, regional, and international
organizations is being turned over to risk management, militarism, and policing.31
Ingersoll 1992
Richard, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, Formerly Associate Professor at Rice University, The
Ecology Question, Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 45, No. 2, (Feb., 1992), pp. 125-127,
jstor.
Most designers today probably do not feel comfortable with a term like "social responsibility" in
reference to the built environ- ment-especially after the last decade of history, one would have to
suspect it to be inherently contradictory. Looking at the roster of sup- porters for this New York chapter,
the identity seems to be located somewhere between "socialite responsibility" and "socialist responsi-
bility"-between the patronizing liberal and the grassroots radical. The happy median is that those who
identify with the term "social re- sponsibility" are essentially people of conscience, who believe in the
possibility of justice for all people. The crisis of the welfare state during the last twenty-five years,
however, has brought ever more doubt to the matter of how to follow one's conscience. Michel
Foucault, and other social philosophers of our times, have opened our eyes to the fact that most social
institu- tions become tools of systematized repression, and thus what previ- ously might have been
justified as social responsibility eventually reveals itself to be social control. As much as I admire
Foucault's cri- tique, I am also disconcerted that the atmosphere of relativism that has followed it has
often turned out to be less humane than what was being criticized. There were scattered instances of
alternatives based on Foucault's theories that are excellent models of social reintegration: the
Democratic Psychiatry movement in Italy in the 1970s, which shut down asylums and opened publicly
funded centers for mental hygiene in the central cities, or the German Green Party, which prac- tices a
non-hierarchic organization, rotating its leaders, might serve as examples. But these are small tokens of
resistance compared to the re- venge that free enterprise has taken on public welfare.
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Ingersoll 1992
Richard, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, Formerly Associate Professor at Rice University, The
Ecology Question, Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 45, No. 2, (Feb., 1992), pp. 125-127,
jstor.
There are others, however, who see the attempt to restore the ecological balance of the biosphere as
having profound social rel- evance. In effect, the very means for exploiting and controlling the natural
environment are no different than those that have exploited and controlled the social one. By calling it
the "Ecology Question," I mean to make direct allusion to Engels's "The Housing Question." This latter
served as one of the most powerful critiques of late nine- teenth-century capitalism and was instrumental
in mobilizing a con- sciousness of social responsibility among designers, predicated on fair and healthy
housing for all. supercede The famous social failures of public hous- ing in our own times, which have
alerted us to functionalist fallacies, should not blind us to the fact that the demand is still there. We
can anticipate, however, that the ever-worsening environmental crisis will probably matters such as
housing, and in the near future the housing question will be absorbed into a greater ecology question.
This will occur with the awareness that the costs of high entropy have become greater than the
benefits from exploiting nonrenewable re- sources. The "Ecology Question" has the potential of
generating one of the most effective critiques of late twentieth-century capitalism, es- pecially since
the demise of official Marxism in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
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Campbell 2005
David, Professor of Cultural & Political Geography at Durham U, The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle,
projectmuse
Michel Foucault argues that biopolitics arrives with the historical transformation in waging war from
the defense of the sovereign to securing the existence of a population. In Foucault’s argument, this
historical shift means that decisions to fight are made in terms of collective survival, and killing is
justified by the necessity of preserving life.16 It is this centering of the life of the population rather than
the safety of the sovereign or the security of territory that is the hallmark of biopolitical power that
distinguishes it from sovereign power. Giorgio Agamben has extended the notion through the concept
of the administration of life and argues that the defense of life often takes place in a zone of
indistinction between violence and the law such that sovereignty can be violated in the name of life.17
Indeed, the biopolitical privileging of life has provided the rationale for some of the worst cases of
mass death, with geno- cide deemed “understandable” as one group’s life is violently secured through
the demise of another group.18 However, the role of biopolitical power in the administration of life is
equally obvious and ubiquitous in domains other than the extreme cases of violence or war. The
difference between the sovereign and the biopolitical can be understood in terms of the contrast between
Foucault’s notion of “disciplinary society” and Gilles Deleuze’s conception of “the society of control,” a
distinction that plays an important role in Hardt and Negri’s Empire. According to Hardt and Negri, in
the disciplinary society, “social command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or
apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive practices.” In the society of
control, “mechanisms of command become ever more democratic, ever more immanent to the social field,
distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens.” This means that the society of control is
“characterized by an intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of
disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline, this
control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating
networks.”19 Network is, therefore, the prevailing metaphor for social organization in the era of
biopolitical power, and it is a conception that permits us to understand how the effects of our actions,
choices, and life are propagated beyond the boundaries of our time-space location.20 It is also a
conception that allows us to appreciate how war has come to have a special prominence in producing the
political order of liberal societies. Networks, through their extensive connectivity, function in terms of
their strategic interactions. This means that “social relations become suffused with considerations of
power, calculation, security and threat.”21 As a result, “global biopolitics operates as a strategic game in
which the principle of war is assimilated into the very weft and warp of the socio-economic and
cultural networks of biopolitical relations.”
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Clifford 1
Michael, Professor of American Studies and the English Language Political Genealogy after Foucault: Savage Identities , Routledge, pg. 43-
45
The private autonomous individual serves, or can serve, a very important political function in the
modern state, a function tied to the state's new (i.e., beginning roughly with the Treaty of Westphalia) historical
status as a nation in competition with other nations. The competition between nations takes many
forms, not the least of which is war. Thus, the state has need of soldiers, to protect its interests, to serve
as the instruments of its preservation and the index of its strength. The state has recourse to
disciplinary mechanisms required to turn individuals into good soldiers, at least from a technical
point of view. Yet is this enough to ensure that these individuals will “lay their life on the line” for the
sake of the state? The soldier is not to be understood as simply a body trained in the tactics of warfare, but rather as someone who
“fights for his country.” Through discourses of patriotism and nationalism, which are disseminated through institutional channels to
individuals from at least the time they are able to “pledge allegiance, ” disciplinary
power binds the individual to the
nation, and in so doing helps to preserve the integrity of the nation itself. 23 One instrument for this
integration, but by no means the only one, is the linking of the nation conceptually with the
preservation of the individual's rights and freedoms. Through the notion of the private autonomous
individual the state is able to mobilize the masses in the service of its own protection and
preservation. 24 Here is precisely where the discourse of rights and freedoms is brought into play and the nation becomes an
enunciative modality for the emergence of political subjects. In fact, as we shall see in the next section, much of modern political identity is
informed by reference to a national identity, either positively or negatively. 25 Moreover, this identity is structured and animated by the
discourse of threat that we saw take shape in Enlightenment political philosophy.
The attempts to control, manage, and ensure safety of the population is based on the power of death
and its underside, the power to warn and strike fear. This form of control is the root of all 20th century
atrocities as the sovereign sword has diminished in favor of the violence of the population.
Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never
before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death – and this is
perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits – now
presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a power that exerts a positive influence on life, subjecting it to
precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be
defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of
wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival,
of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many to be killed.
And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-
out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by
the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a
whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence. The
principle underlying the tactics of battle – that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living – has become
the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of
sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers,
this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the
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level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.
Agemben in 2
Giorgio Agamben, prof of philosophy, “Security & terror,” Theory & Event, vol 5:4)
Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments of this paradigm of security. In the
course of a gradual neutralisation of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the
state, security imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several
decisive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the
sole criterion of political legitimation. Security reasoning entails an essential risk. A state which has
security as its only task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by
terrorism to turn itself terroristic. We should not forget that the first major organisation of terror after the
war, the Organisation de l'Armée Secrète (OAS) was established by a French General who thought of
himself as patriotic and who was convinced that terrorism was the only answer to the guerilla
phenomenon in Algeria and Indochina. When politics, the way it was understood by theorists of the
"Polizeiwissenschaft" in the eighteenth century, reduces itself to police, the difference between state and
terrorism threatens to disappear. In the end it may lead to security and terrorism forming a single
deadly system in which they mutually justify and legitimate each others' actions. The risk is not
merely the development of a clandestine complicity of opponents but that the hunt for security leads
to a worldwide civil war which destroys all civil coexistence. In the new situation -- created by the end
of the classical form of war between sovereign states -- security finds its end in globalisation: it implies
the idea of a new planetary order which is, in fact, the worst of all disorders. But there is yet another
danger. Because they require constant reference to a state of exception, measures of security work
towards a growing depoliticization of society. In the long run, they are irreconcilable with democracy.
Nothing is therefore more important than a revision of the concept of security as the basic principle of
state politics. European and American politicians finally have to consider the catastrophic consequences
of uncritical use of this figure of thought. It is not that democracies should cease to defend themselves,
but the defense of democracy demands today a change of political paradigms and not a world civil war
which is just the institutionalization of terror. Maybe the time has come to work towards the prevention
of disorder and catastrophe, and not merely towards their control. Today, there are plans for all kinds of
emergencies (ecological, medical, military), but there is no politics to prevent them. On the contrary, we
can say that politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies. It is the task of democratic
politics to prevent the development of conditions which lead to hatred, terror, and destruction -- and
not to reduce itself to attempts to control them once they occur.
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Duffield 2004
Mark Duffield, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Lancaster, 2004 , Carry
on Killing: Global Governance, Humanitarianism and Terror
Bio-politics emerged with modernity to form the basis of state power. It is concerned with validating, supporting
and promoting the life of the nation (Foucault 1998). For the purposes of this paper, bio-politics is the regulation of life at the aggregate level of population. Bio-politics exists in
the governmental technologies that both discover and act upon the varied biological, demographic, health, social and economic factors and mechanisms that constitute life as
Global governance, however, is a specific form of bio-power. It is a power over the life
aggregated species-life.
of populations conceived as existing globally rather than nationally or territorially. More specifically, it is a power
over populations experienced as territorial or local illustrations of a particular global species-type. This is how we know, for example, ‘refugees’, ‘economic migrants’, ‘internally
displaced’ the ‘chronically poor’, and so on. In relation to global governance, those technologies and strategies that constitute ‘development’ are an essential expression of
Biopolitics, however, contains an intrinsic and fateful duality. As well as fostering and
international bio-power.
promoting life it also has the power to “…disallow it to the point of death” (Ibid: 138 orig. emph.). In making
this bio-political distinction, racism plays a formative role (Foucault 2003; Stoler 1995).” This not only includes
its nineteenth and early twentieth century biological forms, it also involves its contemporary cultural,
value and civilisational re-inscriptions (Duffield 1984). Race and its modern codings underpin the division between valid and invalid life
and legitimates the measures deemed necessary to secure the former against the later. In this sense, bio-politics is intrinsically connected with the security populations,
including global ones. This duality moreover underlies the paradox of bio-politics: as states have assumed responsibility for maintaining and developing life, wars have become
increasingly more encompassing, devastating and genocidal for the populations concerned. The awesome power to unleash limitless death presents itself as a cynical
counterpart, …of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to all precise controls and comprehensive
. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged
regulations
on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilised for the purpose of wholesale
slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital (Ibid: 136). As the managers of
species-life, since the end of the nineteenth century states have been able to wage total wars that have pitched
entire populations against each other in cataclysmic struggles to the death. What is at stake in modern war is the existence
of society itself. Genocide consequently emerges as a strategy “…because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena
of population” (Ibid: 137). Although the ending of the Cold War raised hopes of a ‘peace dividend’, the diagrammatic form of bio-power was to be re-inscribed in the ‘new wars’
of the 1990s and confirmed with the declaration of war on terrorism. This re-inscription has taken in its stride the shift in the locus of threat from the Soviet Union, one of the
world’s largest and most centralized war economy, to its very opposite, that is, the new security cartography of failed states, shadow economies and terrorist networks.
However, as the Guardian columnist quoted above has grasped, despite this radical re-ordering the bio-political principle of state power has remained the same: in order to
carry on living one has to carry on killing (Ibid). As well as departing from a realist conception of power, the idea of global governance as a design of bio-power also breaks with
the conventional view of what global governance is. That is, as an essentially benign undertaking involving state and non-state actors in a collective pursuit of global security, an
open and inclusive economic system, effective legal and political instutions, global welfare and development, and a shared commitment to conflict resolution (Biscop 2004).
It becomes an
From this perspective, security threats are usually seen as emerging independently of global governance and, indeed, despite its best intentions.
Biopower lends itself to racism – allowing the state to inflict violence on the other.
Foucault in'76
[Michel, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, p. 254-257
What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under
power's control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the
biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the
fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this
is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the
groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological type caesura
within a population that appears to be a biological domain. This will allow power to treat that population
as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into
the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to fragment, to create
caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower. Racism also has a second function.
Its role is, if you like, to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: "The more you kill, the
more deaths you will cause" or "The very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more." I
would say that this relation ("If you want to live, you must take lives, you must be able to kill") was
not invented by either racism or the modern State. It is the relationship of war: "In order to live, you
must destroy your enemies." But racism does make the relationship of war-"If you want to live, the
other must die" - function in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise
of biopower. On the one hand, racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and
the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-
type relationship: "The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the
fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more Ias species rather than individual-
can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate." The fact that the
other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of
the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is
something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer. This is not, then, a military,
warlike, or political relationship, but a biological relationship. And the reason this mechanism can come
into play is that the enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of
the term; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population. In the
biopower system, in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a
victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of
the species or race. There is a direct connection between the two. In a normalizing society, race or
racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable. When you have a normalizing society, you
have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance, or in the first line a biopower, and
racism is the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be
killed. Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of
the State. So you can understand the importance-I almost said the vital importance-of racism to the
exercise of such a power: it is the precondition for exercising the right to kill. If the power of
normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if,
conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words, a power that has the right of life and death,
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wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must
become racist. When I say "killing," I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form
of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people,
or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on. I think that we are now in a position to
understand a number of things. We can understand, first of all, the link that was quickly-I almost said
immediately-established between nineteenth-century biological theory and the discourse of power.
Basically, evolutionism, understood in the broad sense-or in other words, not so much Darwin's theory
itself as a set, a bundle, of notions (such as: the hierarchy of species that grow from a common
evolutionary tree, the struggle for existence among species, the selection that eliminates the less fit)
naturally became within a few years during the nineteenth century not simply a way of transcribing a
political discourse into biological terms, and not simply a way of dressing up a political discourse in
scientific clothing, but a real way of thinking about the relations between colonization, the necessity for
wars, criminality, the phenomena of madness and mental illness, the history of societies with their
different classes, and so on. Whenever, in other words, there was a confrontation, a killing or the risk of
death, the nineteenth century was quite literally obliged to think about them in the form of evolutionism.
And we can also understand why racism should have developed in modern societies that function in the
biopower mode; we can understand why racism broke out at a number of .privileged moments, and why
they were precisely the moments when the right to take life was imperative. Racism first develops with
colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide. If you are functioning in the biopower
mode, how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill populations, and to kill civilizations? By
using the themes of evolutionism, by appealing to a racism. War. How can one not only wage war on
one's adversaries but also expose one's own citizens to war, and let them be killed by the million (and this
is precisely what has been going on since the nineteenth century, or since the second half of the
nineteenth century), except by activating the theme of racism? From this point onward, war is about two
things: it is not simply a matter of destroying a political adversary, but of destroying the enemy race,
of destroying that [sort] of biological threat that those people over there represent to our race. In one
sense, this is of course no more than a biological extrapolation from the theme of the political enemy.
But there is more to it than that. In the nineteenth century-and this is completely new-war will be seen not
only as a way of improving one's own race by eliminating the enemy race (in accordance with the themes
of natural selection and the struggle for existence), but also as a way of regenerating one's own race. As
more and more of our number die, the race to which we belong will become all the purer.
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Zuss 98
Mark, Ph.D., City Univ. of New York, 1/1, Reading Culture Hybridly', Review of Education, Pedagogy,
and Cultural Studies, 20:4, 353 — 364
The cultivation of a distinctive individual character, in Norbert Elias's terms, homo clausus, an identity
fashioned and marked by interiority, and emblematic of the ascendant European bourgeois subject, was
realized through an accelerated pedagogical scrutiny and regulations of sexuality through enculturating
practices. These practices made manifest first in the European theater what was latent and dangerous to
its own developing cohesion and class interests. As Stoler's readings of Foucault's College de France
lectures on race indicate, racial discourses that came to be developed within colonial enterprises
emerged from the nature of Europe's developing cohesion along lines of class interests, alliances, and
rivalries. The formation of what Fichte identified as 'internal frontiers' crystallized gradually through
processes which Stoler and Gilroy consider a racial grammar developed in the colonial laboratory. These
grammars, racial codifications, and disciplinary knowledges were pronounced through new policies,
prohibitions, and incentives that were intended to naturalize the unstable category of European
identity. These practices, which Foucault would call 'technologies of the self or forms of biopower,
were devised under the perceived threat of hybridization, creolization and a metissage that
represented nothing less than the specter of contamination, miscegenation and, hence, the attendant
degeneration of European racial purity in its variously developing imperial largesse.
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Alternatives
Bernauer in 90
James Bernauer, Professor of Philosophy Boston University, Flight of Foucault, 1990 p. 140-143
It is within the field created by the functioning of this bio-power that the issues that
cluster around the quality-of-life theme arise, and that medical discourse assumes
political standing. Bio-politics permits us to understand how movements could appear that make
sexual repression the object of a critique that is advanced as political. Sex as a political issue was made
possible because it is located at the pivot of the two dimensions along which this power of life developed;
it is involved both with the disciplining of the body and with considerations relating
to the control of populations. For the modern period, sex "was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of
the species."74 The notion of a political-sexual critique is consistent with the system of power within which it operates, and such a critique
cooperates in blocking a comprehension of the actual mechanisms of power in our society. To take repression, specifically sexual repression,
as the fundamental form in which power acts creates the illusion that in merely speaking about it, in violating taboo, one is challenging
power. The very concept of sex as naturally given serves this illusion; an object is defined in such a manner that constituted along with it is
both the possibility of its repression and the chance to win freedom by rising against this force of prohibition. The "irony" of modernity's
discourses on sex and its repression consists in "having us believe that our 'liberation' is in the balance."75 Here Foucault finds the beginning
of an answer to his question of how it was possible for generations to tolerate the formation of a disciplinary society. Power is
acceptable only when the most substantial part of it is hidden. For it to function throughout a
society, power must hide its pervasiveness beneath a web of identifiable repressions. For those caught within its grasp, would such pervasive
power be acceptable "if they did not see it as a mere limit placed on their desire, leaving a measure of freedom-however slight-intact? Power
as a pure limit set on freedom is, at least in our society, the general form of its acceptability."76 This capacity of power to conceal itself cannot
cloak the tragedy of the implications contained in Foucault's examination of its functioning. While liberals have fought to extend rights and
Marxists have denounced the injustice of capitalism, a political technology, acting in the interests of a better administration of life, has
produced a politics that places man's "existence as a living being in question.'77 The very period that proclaimed pride in having overthrown
the tyranny of monarchy, that engaged in an endless clamor for reform, that is confident in the virtues of its humanistic faith-this period's
politics created a landscape dominated by history's bloodiest wars. What comparison is possible between a sovereign's authority to take a life
and a power that, in the interest of protecting a society's quality of life, can plan, as well as develop the means for its implementation, a
Such a policy is neither an aberration of the fundamental
policy of mutually assured destruction?
light of SP and VS, man-that invention of recent date--continued to gain sharper focus. By means of that web of techniques of discipline and
methods of knowing that exists in modern society, by those minute steps of training through which the body was made into a fit instrument,
The same humanism
and by those stages of examining the mind's growth, the "man of modern humanism was born."80
that has invested such energy in developing a science of man has foisted upon us the
illusion that power is essentially repressive; in doing so, it has led us into the dead
end of regarding the pursuit and exercise of power as blinding the faculty of
thought.81
From the moment life became accessible as an object of political power, its role has been ambiguous:
conducive to freedom and oppression, security and danger. No one has shown the ambiguities of a
power focused on life better than Foucault, who went so far as to describe the dream of modernity as
genocide (Foucault 1978: 137).1 The paradoxes of a modern power at once devoted to and contemptuous of life provides one
explanation for the twentieth century's attention to human rights. Emerging from fear rather than hope, the enunciation of rights which
would once, as Arendt remarks, have been seen as an inviolable part of the human condition, results from the ways the most minimal
conditions of being human are endangered by politics (Ignatieff 1997: 18; Arendt 1973: 297). 1. Since World War II, human rights have
undergone an extraordinary expansion. We can now recognize an international rights regime formed by international rights declarations;
regional and international courts; NGOs and other groups who monitor rights; and new norms of state behavior giving human rights greater
weight. The proliferation of references to human rights in and of itself implies the presence of the bearer of such rights -- the human being, or
'man,' (Douzinas 1996: 122). That referent, however, has become more than a discursive object. At least since the end of the Cold War,
humanity has emerged as a material political group in the same manner that the "people" became a
concrete group with the rise of the representative nation-state.2 2. What political power represents
humanity is less apparent. The United Nations, as the closest thing to an international political organization, appears such a power.
But the decisions of the U.N., as well as its capacity to act, remain wholly circumscribed by the nation-states composing the U.N. Global or
world civil society is also often treated as the political voice of the human. Such groups do indeed wield political influence on the actions of
states. But they lack the power to enforce human rights. That task falls ultimately to the existent sovereign powers. As those powers become
increasingly involved with humanity, they can no longer be fully captured by the concept of a nation-state sovereignty committed to
Given the novelty of this emerging form of sovereignty and of humanity, we have few
particular peoples.
tools for understanding the meaning of each term, or the relations between them. 3. Indeed, that such
a relationship could exist between humanity and political power has long been doubted. Since the French
Revolution, the sheer breadth and presumed anonymity of humanity has resulted in skepticism about its political effectiveness. Arendt, who
had a profound investment in the possibility of universal rights, found herself compelled to acknowledge that whether or not humanity
could guarantee the rights of individuals belonging to it "is by no means certain" (p. 298). Such hesitations have been less evident since the
end of the Cold War. Nearly by default, the main explorers of the emerging international rights regimes have been Kantian inspired
cosmpolitanists. Those scholars have been readily inclined to treat international human rights as a globalization of the rights and dignities
accorded by liberal democracies and as a limitation of sovereign power. Yet how the globalization of rights which emerged out of the
modern sovereign state should limit the very power they owe their existence to is far from obvious. 4. Standing against Kantian visions of a
cosmopolitan humanity is the profound skepticism of Carl Schmitt. Expanding his scathing critique of liberalism to the international field,
Schmitt insisted any political formation of humanity would prove impossible (1996: 55). For Schmitt, the characteristics of humanity would
undermine the features defining politics: the role of the sovereign exception and the friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt was clearly wrong to
insist humanity could constitute no political group. At the same time, he astutely foresaw such a world would risk turning life
into an indifferent value.