1NCThe liberalization of gambling relies on the self-regulating subject – this neoliberal ideal upholds the deregulation of all life.Reith 7, Gerda, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow, “Gambling and the Contradictions of Consumption: A Genealogy of the “Pathological” Subject, http://abs.sagepub.com/content/51/1/33.full.pdf, Accessed 8/4/14

The proliferation of gambling and problem gambling in the late 20th and 21st centuries is in part a result of the commercial expansion of the industry itself. But equally important is the growth of new discursive formations that develop in conjunction with changes in the structure of Western economies and reflect

wider contradictions within them. Since the 1970s in particular, the gambling industry has undergone a period of dramatic liberalization and deregulation, with a loosening of legal restrictions on promotion and expansion resulting in

the massive proliferation of commercial gambling as a global enterprise, with a central place in Western economies. Governments around the world have legalized lotteries, casinos, and sports betting as well as machine-

based gambling, such as slots and video lottery terminals (VLTs), as sources of vast profit for both state and commercial enterprise.

At the same time, new technologies such as the Internet have launched gambling into cyberspace, breaking down national boundaries and posing complex regulatory challenges. In the United States alone, expenditure on gambling (i.e., amount wagered minus payouts for winnings) increased from $10 billion to $50 billion between 1982 and 1997 as the size of the industry increased tenfold (National Research Council [NRC], 1999). Similar expansion can be found elsewhere, with annual expenditures in Australia and the United Kingdom now exceeding AU$11 billion and £7 billion, respectively (Department of Culture, Media, and Sport [DCMS],

2001; Productivity Commission, 1999). At the same time, shifts in the fabric of social life, including increasing

secularization, the declining influence of arguments concerning the “immorality” of gambling, and the spread of consumerism, have created a climate that is conducive to the proliferation of gambling as a mainstream leisure activity. The development of the commercial strategies of market research, advertising, and branding has

been used to develop a variety of products and opportunities to gamble: From “convenience” to “resort” gambling—from the purchase of lottery tickets and scratch cards at corner stores to the development of destinations such as Las Vegas—

games of chance have been commodified as heterogeneous products , offering a diverse range of choices for ever-

increasing numbers of consumers (Reith, 1999). Participation has not only increased but also widened to include , for the first time, the middle class —the group traditionally most hostile to all forms of gambling—in a move that has finally “normalized” the activity. Such legitimation is reflected in shifting nomenclature, at least on the part of the industry, whose use of the euphemistic term gaming, with its connotations of play and leisure, dissociates games of chance from their older, “harder” connotations of betting, wagering, and inevitably, financial loss. Lotteries represent the apogee of this trend: With their links to public services and “good causes,” they attract language the rest of the industry can only dream of, with patrons described as “playing,” “participating,” or enjoying a

“flutter”—but never actually “gambling” proper. These trends of liberalization and proliferation can be located within

wider changes in Western economies, most notably, the move toward political and fiscal policies of

neoliberalism and the rejection of broadly Keynesian principles of market regulation. These are characterized by the state’s reduced intervention in social and economic life, its decreasing responsibility for the provision of public services, and its promotion of competitive enterprise. In particular, this “minimal state” is characterized by

increasing unwillingness to levy unpopular taxation on voting populations. In the revenue vacuum created by such policies, the economic utility of gambling as a voluntary, albeit regressive, form of taxation to state and federal coffers is obvious. Through direct involvement in lotteries and extensive taxation of commercial operations, states extract vital revenue from games of chance with which to fund public services (Abt, Smith, & Christiansen, 1985; Goodman, 1995). For example, in

2003, lotteries contributed $14.1 billion to U.S. state governments (North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, 2003); the U.K. gambling industry provided some £1530 million to the government in 2000 (DCMS, 2001) and the Australian industry AU$4.4 billion in the same year, an almost fourfold increase in real terms since the 1970s (Della Sala, 2004). Such profits are either added to general tax revenue or else

designated for particular services, with education, health care, and housing projects being popular beneficiaries. And so, as the presence of the state in the regulation of public life is scaled back, so its involvement in the business of gambling increases. It is this symbiotic relation between commercial profit and state revenue that has provided much of the impetus for the liberalization and promotion of gambling toward the end of the 20th century and into

the 21st. In this convergence of commerce with chance, the state-sponsored fantasy of the big win turns the ethos of production and accumulation on its head, advocating the benefits of massive, unearned wealth over the satisfaction of modest gains in a shift that reflects not only the transcendence of the work ethic but

also the promotion and celebration of a new kind of “consumption ethic.” The values of risk taking , hedonism, and instant gratification are promoted in lottery advertisements that urge consumers to live for the present (“Forget it all for an instant”; U.K. scratch card), reject work (“Work is nothing but heart attack-inducing drudgery”; Massachusetts lottery), embrace risk (“Lotto—the biggest risk of becoming a millionaire”; Netherlands lottery), and dream of a life of leisure (“The freedom to do what you want to do, year

after year”; Queensland Golden Casket), all for a simple purchase (“All you need is a dollar and a dream”; New York lottery). Appeals to the democracy of chance continue and are now associated with the aspirations of the American Dream—anyone can be lucky, bountiful state lotteries do not discriminate, and the downtrodden McWorker has as much chance of winning as the Ivy League lawyer. As the U.K. lottery slogan puts it, “It could be YOU!” Quantifying the Problematic Subject: The Construction of the “Pathological

Gambler” It was into this climate that the “pathological gambler” as a quantifiable entity was born, when it was introduced into the reference manual of mental disorders used by the American Psychiatric Association (1980), the Diagnostic and

Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed.; DSM-III). What is perhaps most immediately striking about its appearance is the fact that although steeped in a climate of commercial proliferation and economic deregulation, explanations of gambling problems were seldom couched in terms of consumer behavior but were rather discussed within a reductive, materialistic epistemology of sickness and disease. The syndrome was first described as an impulse control disorder: a compulsion characterized by an inability to resist overwhelming and irrational drives. Focus soon shifted to its addictive characteristics, however, and it was reclassified in terms similar to those for psychoactive substance dependency in DSM III-R in 1987 and then refined again in DSM-IV in 1994, with the term pathological gambling consistently used to

reflect its chronic, progressive character (American Psychiatric Association, 1987, 1994; Lesieur & Rosenthal, 1991). The DSM-IV screen contrasts pathological with social and professional gambling on the basis of the presence or absence of the values of reason and discipline: Social gambling is defined by its “predetermined acceptable losses” and professional gambling

where “risks are limited and discipline is central” (American Psychological Association, 1994, p. 283). Underlying its checklist of symptoms is a focus on loss of control as the organizing principle for pathology, reflected in criteria such as repeated unsuccessful attempts to stop gambling and irritability when attempting to stop as well as others such as preoccupation and tolerance, which reflect the assumption of the physiological basis of the disorder. (See appendix.) Meanwhile, another screen—the South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS; Lesieur & Blume, 1987)—was developed for the clinical diagnosis of gambling problems, again with loss of control as a guiding principle of categorization, and became widely used for the measurement of gambling problems throughout the population. In general, behavior is viewed as existing on a continuum, with “problem,” as opposed to “pathological,” gambling regarded as a less severe condition, defined in terms of its harmful effects to the individual and its disruptive effects on economic productivity, familial breakdown, and crime. It has been estimated that up to 2% of the population in the United States experience gambling- related problems, with 0.8% considered pathological (NRC, 1999). Around 1.1% of Australians experience moderate, and a further 1% severe, problems with their playing (Productivity Commission, 1999), and around 0.8% of Britons are regarded as problem gamblers (Sproston,

Erens, & Orford, 2000). With the development of a system of classification and nomenclature, a distinct type of individual, with a checklist of symptoms that could be measured and compared against a norm, came into existence. For the first time, the problem of gambling was given a name, quantified, separated from normal gambling, and legitimated within the domain of medicine. This is part of a process described by

Foucault (1976) as the “constitution of subjects,” whereby the observation and classification of various types of

behavior provides the conceptual tools for conceiving—thinking of—subjects in new ways, creating a language with which to describe and discuss them, so rendering them increasingly visible to social inquiry and

also increasingly “real” (see also Collins, 1996, on this process). With the recognition of pathological gambling as a psychiatric disorder

came a proliferation of interest in the subject, with the establishment of a range of medical, legal, academic, and treatment professionals as well as lay groups and formal organizations, all with their own conception of and interest in the problem (Volberg, 2001). A range of explanations for the syndrome were proposed, many of which tended to simply “explain” it in terms of a description of the features that characterized it. Whereas psychological research focused on what appeared to be the fundamental impulsivity and irrationality of gamblers, medical research attempted to locate biochemical and neurological bases for the disorder, and public health perspectives used a variety of approaches to estimate the prevalence of problems and calculate patterns of risk across populations. All of this resulted in a somewhat messy overlapping of discourses that configured problem and pathological gambling in a range of different ways: as a mental disorder, a physiological syndrome, or sometimes a (calculable) combination of all of these things, expressed as factors of risk. Despite widespread interest in what appears a significant social phenomenon, social theorists have, on the whole, paid relatively little attention to problem gambling, with the result that it remains an inadequately understood entity and an under-theorized area of human behavior. Some accounts that are pertinent here, however, have noted the wider discursive processes within which the problem has been located (Castellani, 2000) and have argued that the medicalization of gambling is part of the more general medicalization of marginal or deviant behavior that has historically been applied to phenomena such as drug taking and mental illness and is often associated with middle-class participation in an activity (Conrad & Schneider, 1992; Rosecrance, 1985). Recently, Collins (1996) has incorporated such arguments into a genealogical account of the emergence of the pathological gambler in the 1980s, drawing on both Foucault’s idea of the constitution of subjects as well as Ian Hacking’s (1986) notion of “making up people” to describe the process by which new social categories are constructed out of new forms of knowledge. To an extent, the (medicalized) creation of the pathological gambler can be seen as an instance of such a “made-up” or socially constituted individual. However, it can also be said that all behavior defined as problematic is socially constituted in some way—“made up” through a process of comparison, separation, and exclusion on the basis of dominant values and beliefs. Furthermore, the problematization of gambling occurred not when it was

considered marginal or deviant but at precisely the point when it became a mainstream leisure activity. Given this, what is perhaps more interesting here is the conditions under which gambling came to be constituted as problematic at all and, moreover, what the nature of its configuration tells us about broader social conditions. With this in mind, the article now turns to examine the broader climate in which medicalized discourses of problem gambling are located before moving on to investigate their convergence with

wider socioeconomic structures. The Consumption Ethic The recent shift in the status of commercial gambling has to be seen in the context of the general transformation of Western societies from industrial, production- based

economies toward those organized around consumption and the provision of services. This trend, often described as “post-“

or “late” modern, is characterized by the elevation of consumption as an organizing feature of social life, with an elective affinity to neoliberal ideologies of freedom, choice, and consumer sovereignty . As Zygmut Bauman (1998) puts it, we have moved from a “production ethic” to a “consumption ethic,” characterized by the values of self-fulfilment, hedonism, and desire. Here,

consumption has a crucial role in the creation and realization of both individual and social identity, with consumers using the acquisition and display of commodities to mediate social relationships and to construct a coherent “narrative of the self” (Giddens, 1991). This formulation is based on a very specific view of consumption as a regulatory force as well as a means of self-expression, which is located in the economic and political structures of affluent Western neoliberal societies . Here, the reduction in external sources of governance—

the economic deregulation of markets and the withdrawal of the state from interference (or perhaps more accurately, funding)

in ever more areas of public and private life—is accompanied by an increasing emphasis on forms of individual self-control. The demand is for consumers to govern themselves through their consumption habits, with the ideal of consumer sovereignty based on autonomous individuals shaping their own trajectories through their actions in the marketplace. Crucially, these self-determining agents are responsible for their own welfare, security, and future happiness independent of wider systems of social support: aims that are realized through prudent decision making and rational and controlled

consumption (O’Malley, 1996; Nikolas Rose, 1999). As such, the ideologies of free choice and consumer sovereignty actually become the regulatory principles of modern life. Ironically then, the very freedom of consumers is

also the means of their regulation and is based on the subjugation of irrational urges and desires to rational

forethought and prudence. As Mitchell Dean (1999) put it, to be free at all, the subject must first demonstrate that it is “capable of responsibly exercising that freedom through systems of domination” (p. 165). In this way, “appropriate” consumption contributes to both individual and social health—to the self-realization of the sovereign consumer as well as to the maintenance of productive social relations.

The impact is extinction—short term reforms aimed at stabilizing the system only cause harder landingRobinson 14 (William, professor of sociology, global and international studies, and Latin American studies, at the University of California-Santa Barbara, “Global Capitalism: Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism”, The World Financial Review, May-June 2014)

This crisis of humanity shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises but there are also several features unique to the present:

1. The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction. Global capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a way as to threaten to bring about what would be the sixth mass extinction in the

known history of life on earth.3 This mass extinction would be caused not by a natural catastrophe such as a meteor impact or by evolutionary changes such as the end of an ice age but by purposive human activity.

According to leading environmental scientists there are nine “planetary boundaries” crucial to maintaining an earth system environment in which humans can exist, four of which are experiencing at this time the onset of irreversible environmental degradation and three of which (climate change, the

nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss) are at “tipping points,” meaning that these processes have already crossed their planetary boundaries.

2. The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented, as is the concentration of the means of global communication and symbolic production and circulation in the hands of a very few powerful groups. Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth, have changed

the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. At the same time we have arrived at the panoptical surveillance society and the age of thought control by those who control global flows of communication, images and symbolic

production. The world of Edward Snowden is the world of George Orwell; 1984 has arrived;

3. Capitalism is reaching apparent limits to its extensive expansion. There are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism, de-ruralisation is now well advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of preand non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that

is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths

never before seen. Cap italism must continually expand or collapse . How or where will it now expand?

4. There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a “planet of slums ,”4 alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to

destruction to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This includes prison-industrial and immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent policing, militarised gentrification, and so on;

5. There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based system of political

authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists refer to as a “hegemon,” or a leading nation-state that has enough power and

authority to organise and stabilise the system. The spread of w eapons of m ass d estruction and the unprecedented militarisation of social life and conflict across the globe makes it hard to imagine that the system can come under any stable political authority that assures its reproduction.

Global Police State

How have social and political forces worldwide responded to crisis? The crisis has resulted in a rapid political polarisation in global society. Both right and left-wing forces are ascendant. Three responses seem to be in dispute.

One is what we could call “reformism from above.” This elite reformism is aimed at stabilising the system, at

saving the system from itself and from more radical responses from below . Nonetheless, in the years following

the 2008 collapse of the global financial system it seems these reformers are unable (or unwilling) to prevail over the power of transnational financial capital. A second response is popular, grassroots and leftist resistance from below. As social and political conflict escalates around the world there appears to be a mounting global revolt. While such resistance appears insurgent in the wake of 2008 it is spread very unevenly across countries and regions and facing many problems and challenges.

Yet another response is that I term 21st century fascism.5 The ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In

broad strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global working class – such as white

workers in the North and middle layers in the South – that are now experiencing heightened insecurity and the specter of downward mobility. It involves militarism, extreme masculinisation, homophobia, racism and racist mobilisations, including the search for scapegoats, such as immigrant workers and, in the West, Muslims. Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy and xenophobia, embracing an idealised and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture normalises and glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with domination that is portrayed even as heroic.

The need for dominant groups around the world to secure widespread, organised mass social control of the world’s

surplus population and rebellious forces from below gives a powerful impulse to projects of 21st century fascism . Simply put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy cannot easily be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control . We have been witnessing transitions from social welfare

to social control states around the world. We have entered a period of great upheavals, momentous changes and

uncertainties. The only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity along the lines of a 21st century democratic socialism, in which humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature.

Vote neg to reject their fear-centric, corporatist politics—critical analysis of neoliberalism and resultant militarism gives us a new political vocabulary to articulate a truly democratic politics—activating your role as an ethical educator is the only way to avert permanent war. Henry Giroux 13, Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Violence, USA, monthlyreview.org/2013/05/01/violence-usa

In addition, as the state is hijacked by the financial-military-industrial complex, the “most crucial decisions regarding national policy are not made by representatives, but by the financial and military elites.”53 Such massive

inequality and the suffering and political corruption it produces point to the need for critical analysis in which the separation of power and politics can be understood. This means developing terms that clarify how power becomes global

even as politics continues to function largely at the national level, with the effect of reducing the state primarily to custodial, policing, and punishing functions—at least for those populations considered disposable.

The state exercises its slavish role in the form of lowering taxes for the rich, deregulating corporations, funding wars for the benefit of the defense industries, and devising other welfare services for the ultra-rich. There is no escaping the global politics of finance capital and the

global network of violence it has produced. Resistance must be mobilized globally and politics restored to a level where it can make a difference in fulfilling the promises of a global democracy. But such a challenge can only take place if the political is made more pedagogical and matters of education take center stage in

the struggle for desires, subjectivities, and social relations that refuse the normalizing of violence as a source of

gratification, entertainment, identity, and honor.

War in its expanded incarnation works in tandem with a state organized around the production of widespread violence. Such a state is necessarily divorced from public values and the formative cultures that make a democracy possible. The result is a weakened civic culture that allows violence and punishment to circulate as part of a culture of commodification, entertainment, distraction, and exclusion. In opposing the emergence of the United States as both a warfare and a punishing state, I am not appealing to a form of left moralism meant simply to mobilize outrage and condemnation. These are not unimportant registers, but they do not constitute an adequate form of resistance.

What is needed are modes of analysis that do the hard work of uncovering the effects of the merging

of institutions of capital , wealth, and power , and how this merger has extended the reach of a military-industrial -carceral and academic complex , especially since the 1980s. This complex of ideological and institutional elements designed for the production of violence must be addressed by making visible its vast national and global interests and militarized networks, as indicated by the fact that the United States has over 1,000 military bases abroad.54 Equally important is the need to highlight how this military-industrial-carceral and academic complex uses punishment as a structuring force to shape national policy and everyday life.

Challenging the warfare state also has an important educational component. C. Wright Mills was right in arguing that it is impossible to separate the violence of an authoritarian social order from the cultural apparatuses that nourish it. As Mills put it, the major cultural apparatuses not only “guide experience, they also expropriate the very chance to have an experience rightly called ‘our own.’”55 This narrowing of experience shorn of public values locks people into private interests and the hyper-individualized orbits in which they live. Experience itself is now privatized, instrumentalized, commodified, and increasingly militarized. Social responsibility gives way to organized infantilization and a flight from responsibility.

Crucial here is the need to develop new cultural and political vocabularies that can foster an engaged mode of citizenship capable of naming the corporate and academic interests that support the warfare state and its apparatuses of violence, while simultaneously mobilizing social movements to challenge and dismantle its vast networks of power . One central pedagogical and political task in dismantling the

warfare state is , therefore, the challenge of creating the cultural conditions and public spheres that would enable the U.S. public to move from being spectators of war and everyday violence to being informed and engaged citizens .

Unfortunately, major cultural apparatuses like public and higher education , which have been historically

responsible for educating the public, are becoming little more than market-driven and militarized knowledge factories. In this particularly insidious role, educational institutions deprive students of the capacities that would enable them not only to

assume public responsibilities, but also to actively participate in the process of governing. Without the public spheres for creating a formative culture equipped to challenge the educational, military, market, and religious fundamentalisms that dominate U.S. society, it will be virtually impossible to resist the normalization of war as a matter of domestic and foreign policy.

Any viable notion of resistance to the current authoritarian order must also address the issue of what it means pedagogically to imagine a more democratically oriented notion of knowledge, subjectivity, and agency and what it might mean to bring such notions into the public sphere. This is more than what Bernard Harcourt calls “a new grammar of political disobedience.”56 It is a reconfiguring of the nature and substance of the

political so that matters of pedagogy become central to the very definition of what constitutes the political

and the practices that make it meaningful. Critical understanding motivates transformative action, and

the affective investments it demands can only be brought about by breaking into the hardwired forms

of common sense that give war and state-supported violence their legitimacy. War does not have to

be a permanent social relation , nor the primary organizing principle of everyday life, society, and foreign policy.

The war of all-against-all and the social Darwinian imperative to respond positively only to one’s own self-interest represent the death of

politics, civic responsibility, and ethics, and set the stage for a dysfunctional democracy, if not an emergent authoritarianism. The existing neoliberal social order produces individuals who have no commitment , except to profit , disdain social responsibility, and loosen all ties to any viable notion of the public good. This regime of punishment and privatization is organized around the structuring forces of violence and militarization, which produce a surplus of fear, insecurity, and a weakened culture of civic engagement—one in which there is little room for reasoned debate, critical dialogue, and informed intellectual exchange. Patricia Clough and Craig Willse are right in arguing that we live in a society “in which the production and circulation of death functions as political and economic recovery.”57

The United States understood as a warfare state prompts a new urgency for a collective politics and a social movement capable of negating the current regimes of political and economic power, while imagining a different and more democratic social order. Until the ideological and structural foundations of violence that are pushing U.S. society over the abyss are addressed, the current warfare state will be transformed into a full-blown authoritarian state that will shut down any vestige of democratic values, social relations, and public spheres. At the very least, the U.S. public owes it to its children and future generations, if not the future of democracy itself, to make visible and dismantle this machinery of violence while also reclaiming the spirit of a future that works for life rather than death—the future of the current authoritarianism, however dressed up they appear in the spectacles of consumerism and

celebrity culture. It is time for educators , unions, young people, liberals, religious organizations, and other groups to connect the dots, educate themselves, and develop powerful social movements that can restructure the fundamental values and social relations of democracy while establishing the institutions and formative cultures that make it possible. Stanley Aronowitz is right in arguing that:

the system survives on the eclipse of the radical imagination, the absence of a viable political opposition with roots in the general population, and the conformity of its intellectuals who, to a large extent, are subjugated by their secure berths in the academy [and though] we can take some solace in 2011, the year of the protester…it would be premature to predict that decades of retreat, defeat and silence can be reversed overnight without a commitment to what may be termed “a long march” through the institutions, the workplaces and the streets of the capitalist metropoles.58

The current protests among young people, workers, the unemployed, students, and others are making clear that this is not—indeed, cannot be—only a short-term project for reform, but must constitute a political and social movement of sustained growth, accompanied by the reclaiming of public spaces, the progressive use of digital technologies, the development of democratic public spheres, new modes of education, and the safeguarding of places where democratic expression, new identities, and collective hope can be nurtured and mobilized. Without broad political and social movements standing behind and uniting the call on the part of young people for democratic transformations, any attempt at radical change will more than likely be cosmetic.

Any viable challenge to the new authoritarianism and its theater of cruelty and violence must include developing a variety of cultural discourses and sites where new modes of agency can be imagined and enacted, particularly as they work to reconfigure a new collective subject, modes of sociality, and “alternative conceptualizations of the self and its relationship to others.”59 Clearly, if the United States is to make a claim to democracy, it must develop a politics that views violence as a moral monstrosity and war as virulent pathology. How such a claim to politics unfolds remains to be seen. In the meantime, resistance proceeds, especially among the young people who now carry the banner of struggle against an encroaching authoritarianism that is working hard to snuff out all vestiges of democratic life.

2NC

AT: Environment UnsustainableNow is key – ecological phase shifts are coming, A recent study by 22 scientists improves on previous models and concludes that we can cause rapid and irreversible critical transitions Barnosky et al 12—Professor of Integrative Biology @ UC Berkeley [Dr. Anthony D. Barnosky (Professor of Paleontology @ UC Berkeley), Dr. Elizabeth A. Hadly (Professor of Biology @ Stanford University, Jordi Bascompte (Integrative Ecology Group @ Estación Biológica de Doñana) Eric L. Berlow (TRU NORTH Labs), James H. Brown (Professor of Biology @ The University of New Mexico), Mikael Fortelius (Professor of Geosciences and Geography @ University of Helsinki), Wayne M. Getz (Professor of Environmental Science@ UC Berkeley), John Harte (Professor of Environmental Science@ UC Berkeley) Alan Hastings (Professor of Environmental Science@ UC Davis) Pablo A. Marquet (Departamento de Ecología, Facultad de Ciencias Biológicas, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) Neo D. Martinez (Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab) Arne Mooers (Professor of Biological Sciences @ Simon Fraser University, Peter Roopnarine (California Academy of Sciences), Geerat Vermeij (Professor of Geology @ UC Davis) John W. Williams (Professor of Geography @ University of Wisconsin), Rosemary Gillespie (Professor of Environmental Science@ UC Berkeley) Justin Kitzes (Professor of Environmental Science@ UC Berkeley), Charles Marshall (Department of Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley), Nicholas Matzke(Department of Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley), David P. Mindell (Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry @ UC San Francisco), Eloy Revilla (Department of Conservation Biology, Estación Biológica de Doñana) & Adam B. Smith (Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development, Missouri Botanical Garden) “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere,” Nature 486, (07 June 2012) pg. 52–58

Humans now dominate Earth, changing it in ways that threaten its ability to sustain us and other species1, 2, 3. This realization has led to a growing interest in forecasting biological responses on all scales from local to global4, 5, 6, 7.

However, most biological forecasting now depends on projecting recent trends into the future assuming

various environmental pressures5, or on using species distribution models to predict how climatic changes may alter presently

observed geographic ranges8, 9. Present work recognizes that relying solely on such approaches will be

insufficient to characterize fully the range of likely biological changes in the future, especially because complex interactions, feedbacks and their hard-to-predict effects are not taken into account 6, 8, 9, 10, 11.

Particularly important are recent demonstrations that ‘critical transitions’ caused by threshold effects are likely12.

Critical transitions lead to state shifts, which abruptly override trends and produce unanticipated biotic effects. Although most previous work on threshold-induced state shifts has been theoretical or concerned with critical transitions in localized ecological systems over short time spans12, 13, 14, planetary-scale critical transitions that operate over centuries or millennia have

also been postulated3, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18. Here we summarize evidence that such planetary-scale critical transitions have occurred previously in the biosphere, albeit rarely, and that humans are now forcing a nother such

transition, with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience.

Two conclusions emerge. First, to minimize biological surprises that would adversely impact humanity, it is essential to improve biological forecasting by anticipating critical transitions that can emerge on a planetary scale and understanding how such global forcings cause local

changes. Second, as was also concluded in previous work, to prevent a global-scale state shift, or at least to guide it as best we

can, it will be necessary to address the root causes of human-driven global change and to improve our management of biodiversity and ecosystem services3, 15, 16, 17, 19.

It is now well documented that biological systems on many scales can shift rapidly from an existing state to a

radically different state12. Biological ‘states’ are neither steady nor in equilibrium; rather, they are characterized by a defined range of deviations from a mean condition over a prescribed period of time. The shift from one state to another can be caused by either a ‘threshold’ or ‘sledgehammer’ effect. State shifts resulting from threshold effects can be difficult to anticipate, because the critical threshold is reached as

incremental changes accumulate and the threshold value generally is not known in advance. By contrast, a state shift caused by a sledgehammer effect—for example the clearing of a forest using a bulldozer—comes as no surprise. In both cases, the state shift is relatively abrupt and leads to new mean conditions outside the range of fluctuation evident in the previous state.

Threshold-induced state shifts, or critical transitions, can result from ‘fold bifurcations’ and can show hysteresis12. The net effect is that once a critical transition occurs, it is extremely difficult or even impossible for the system to return to its previous state. Critical transitions can also result from more complex bifurcations, which have a different character from fold bifurcations but which also lead to irreversible changes20.

Recent theoretical work suggests that state shifts due to fold bifurcations are probably preceded by general phenomena that can be characterized mathematically: a deceleration in recovery from perturbations (‘critical slowing down’), an increase in variance in the pattern of within-state fluctuations, an increase in autocorrelation between fluctuations, an increase in asymmetry of fluctuations and rapid back-and-forth shifts (‘flickering’) between states12, 14, 18. These phenomena can theoretically be assessed within any temporally and spatially bounded system. Although such assessment is not yet straightforward12, 18, 20, critical transitions and in some cases their warning signs have become evident in diverse biological investigations21, for example in assessing the dynamics of disease outbreaks22, 23, populations14 and lake ecosystems12, 13. Impending state shifts can also sometimes be determined by parameterizing relatively simple models20, 21.

In the context of forecasting biological change, the realization that critical transitions and state shifts can occur on the global scale3, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, as well as on smaller scales, is of great importance. One key question is how to recognize a global-scale state shift. Another is whether global-scale state shifts are the cumulative result of many smaller-scale events that originate in local systems or instead require global-level forcings that emerge on the planetary scale and then percolate downwards to cause changes in local systems. Examining past global-scale state shifts provides useful insights into both of these issues.

Earth’s biosphere has undergone state shifts in the past, over various (usually very long) timescales, and therefore can do so in the future (Box 1). One of the fastest planetary state shifts, and the most recent, was the transition from the last glacial into the present interglacial condition12, 18, which occurred over millennia24. Glacial conditions had prevailed for ~100,000 yr. Then, within ~3,300 yr, punctuated by episodes of abrupt, decadal-scale climatic oscillations, full interglacial conditions were attained. Most of the biotic change—which included extinctions, altered diversity patterns and new community compositions—occurred within a period of 1,600 yr beginning ~12,900 yr ago. The ensuing interglacial state that we live in now has prevailed for the past ~11,000 yr.

Occurring on longer timescales are events such as at least four of the ‘Big Five’ mass extinctions25, each of which represents a critical transition that spanned several tens of thousands to 2,000,000 yr and changed the course of life’s evolution with respect to what had been normal for the previous tens of millions of years. Planetary state shifts can also substantially increase biodiversity, as occurred for example at the ‘Cambrian explosion’26, but such transitions require tens of millions of years, timescales that are not meaningful for forecasting biological changes that may occur over the next few human generations (Box 1).

Despite their different timescales, past critical transitions occur very quickly relative to their bracketing states: for the

examples discussed here, the transitions took less than ~5% of the time the previous state had lasted (Box 1). The biotic hallmark for each state change was, during the critical transition, pronounced change in global, regional and local assemblages of species.

Previously dominant species diminished or went extinct , new consumers became important both locally and globally,

formerly rare organisms proliferated, food webs were modified, geographic ranges reconfigured and resulted in new

biological communities, and evolution was initiated in new directions. For example, at the Cambrian explosion large, mobile predators became part of the food chain for the first time. Following the K/T extinction, mammalian herbivores replaced large archosaur herbivores. And at the last glacial–interglacial transition, megafaunal biomass switched from being dominated by many species to being dominated by Homo sapiens and our domesticated species27.

All of the global-scale state shifts noted above coincided with global-scale forcings that modified the atmosphere, oceans and climate (Box 1). These examples suggest that past global-scale state shifts required global-scale forcings, which in turn initiated lower-level state changes that local controls do not override. Thus, critical aspects of biological forecasting are to understand whether present global forcings are of a magnitude sufficient to trigger a global-scale critical transition, and to ascertain the extent of lower-level state changes that these global forcings have already caused or are likely to cause.

Global-scale forcing mechanisms today are human population growth with attendant resource consumption3, habitat transformation and fragmentation3, energy production and consumption28, 29, and climate

change3, 18. All of these far exceed, in both rate and magnitude, the forcings evident at the most

recent global-scale state shift , the last glacial–interglacial transition (Box 1), which is a particularly relevant benchmark for

comparison given that the two global-scale forcings at that time—climate change and human population growth27, 30—are also primary forcings today. During the last glacial–interglacial transition, however, these were probably separate, yet coincidental, forcings. Today conditions are very different because global-scale forcings including (but not limited to) climate change have emerged as a direct result of human activities.

AT: alt failsWho cares if it failsSnoek, Macquarie philosophy PhD, 2012

(Anke, Agamben's Joyful Kafka: Finding Freedom Beyond Subordination, google books, ldg)

Given the preceding sketch Agamben gives of power and possibilities (the law’s being in force without significance, the subtle reverse found in Kafka’s work of this

situation, Agamben’s praise of creatures without work), the questions arise: what ought we to do now? What form of resistance is possible for us? How should we act? What can we do? This is actually one of the major criticisms on Agamben’s work, that in it, at least when read superficially, Agamben nowhere seems to formulate any explicit answer to the question of resistance. The Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri, also one of Agamben’s close friends, points out that Agamben was never directly involved in political struggles and he sees this as a great lack in his philosophy. 2 Agamben’s work is often described as a radical passivity. 3 This passivity can be seen both as a strength and a weakness of his work. Agamben’s

passivity is not a regular powerlessness, but seems to come close to (Mahayana) Buddhism, an exercise in doing nothing. 4 This passivity also shows evidence of a radical paradigm shift in thinking about power and resistance, a movement that is often attributed to

Foucault and whose traces can be found in Kafka avant la lettre. As is evident from the above, Agamben is fundamentally opposed to the tendency of metaphysical politics to attribute an identity to the human being, to allocate to him a work of his own. If the human being has no identity of his own and no activity of his own, then this also

has consequences for our traditional view of actions as being fundamentally embedded within end-means relationships, as goal-oriented in essence. Our views of activities and activism must therefore be thoroughly revised in line with our revision of the possibility of a transcendent work of man . Kafka’s opera

singing executioners or questioners Deleuze once defined power as the act in which the human being is cut off from its potentiality. But, Agamben states, ‘There is, nevertheless, another and more insidious operation of power that does not immediately affect what humans can do – their potentiality – but rather their “impotentiality”, that is, what they cannot do, or better,

can not do ’ (N, 43). Given that flexibility is the primary quality the market requires from us, the

contemporary human, yielding to every demand by society, is cut off from his impotentiality , from his

ability to do nothing. Just as we saw previously, politics is a politics of the act, of the human individual being at work. The irresponsible motto of the contemporary individual, ‘No problem, I can do it’, comes precisely at the moment ‘when he should instead realize that he has been consigned in unheard of measure to forces and processes over which he has lost all control’ (N, 44). This flexibility also leads to a confusion of professions and callings, of professional identities and social roles, because people are no longer in touch with their inability. Agamben sees an example of this in Kafka’s The Trial. In the last chapter, just before his death, two men enter through Joseph K.’ s door. They are his questioners/ executioners,

but Joseph K. does not recognize them as such and thinks that they are ‘[o]ld second-rate actors or opera singers?’ 5 Agamben argues that, in Kafka’s world, evil is presented as an inadequate reaction to impotentiality (CC, 31). Instead of making use of our possibility of ‘not being’, we fail it, we flee from our lack of power, ‘ our fearful retreat from it in order

to exercise … some power of being’ (CC, 32). But this power we try to exercise turns into a malevolent power

that oppresses the persons who show us their weakness. In Kafka’s world, evil does not have the form of the demonic but that of being separated from our lack of power. Nothing makes us more impoverished and less free than this estrangement from impotentiality. Those who are separated from what they can

do, can, however, still resist; they can still not do. Those who are separated from their own impotentiality lose , on the other

hand, first of all the capacity to resist . (N, 45) And it is evident, according to Agamben, from the example of Eichmann how right Kafka was in

this (CC, 32). Eichmann was not so much separated from his power as from his lack of power, tempted to evil precisely by the powers of right and law (CC, 32). What should one do? A clash with activists At the end of 2009, Agamben gave a lecture in honour of the presentation of a collection of texts written by the Tiqqun collective. This French collective has written several political manifestoes and in 2008 their compound was raided by the anti-terrorist brigades. The charges were quite vague: belonging to an ultra-left and the anarcho-autonomous milieu; using a radical discourse; having links with foreign groups; participating regularly in political demonstrations. The evidence that was found was not weapons, but documents, for example a train schedule. Although Agamben calls these charges a tragicomedy and accuses French politics of barbarism6, in his lecture he

emphasizes another important political value of the Tiqqun collective. This collective embodies Foucault’s idea of the non-subject. One of the latter’s greatest merits is that he thought of power no longer as an attribute that a certain group had over another, but as a relation that was constantly shifting. A second merit of Foucault’s thinking was the idea of non-authorship. The subject itself, its identity, is always formed within a power relation, a process that Foucault termed

‘subjectivization techniques’. In Foucault, the state attempts to form the subject via disciplinary techniques and the subject responds via subjectivization techniques: it internalizes the expectations of the state in the formation of its own identity. That is why Foucault rejects the idea of a subject and the idea of actorship, of attributing an act to a subject. Hence,

as long as we continue to think in terms of a subject resisting oppressive power via deliberate action, we cannot liberate ourselves from power relations. The gesture Tiqqun instead is making , according to

Agamben, not one of looking for a subject that can assume the role of saviour or revolutionary. Rather, they begin with investigating the force fields that are operative in our society (instead of focusing on the subject). In describing these fields of force and the moment they become diffuse, new possibilities can arise that

are not dependent on a subject. The discussion that followed this lecture provides a very clear picture of Agamben’s position. Many

activists

/// MARKED ////

present at the lecture asked what his theory entailed concretely with respect to the direction in

which they should go. Agamben’s constant reply was that anyone who poses this question has not

understood the problem at all. I always find it out of place to go and ask someone what to do, what is there to be done? … If someone asks me

what action, it shows they missed the point because they still want me to say: go out in the streets and do this? It has nothing to do with that. (OT) Inactivity

as active resistance to the state was hardly conceivable for many of the left wing activists present at

Agamben’s lecture at Tiqqun. Although the state acknowledges the anti-law tendencies in the writings of the Tiqqun collective, the activists present at Agamben’s

lecture failed to recognize this specific form of resistance. What Agamben attempted to show was that the power of the

Tiqqun collective lay precisely in the fact that they did not prescribe any concrete actions but sought unexpected possibilities in ‘being-thus’ . In that same sense, Agamben’s analysis of Kafka’s work should not be seen as a manual for activist freedom but as a description of small opportunities, of

examples in which the power relation is diffuse and that we must attempt to recognize, create and use. Agamben shows us different possibilities and means for resistance, but these are not regular acts with a goal; rather, they are means without end. As Kishik pointed out, Agamben’s work is an attempt to ‘“ make means meet” (not with their ends, but with each other)’. 7 One way to achieve this is through gestures. The gestures of the people in the Oklahoma theatre and elsewhere in Kafka’s work, the shame of Joseph K. and the ‘as not’ in Kafka’s ‘On Parables’ show us that there are other strategies, aside from active resistance, to reverse political situations.

YudkowskiPrefer our disjunctive scenarios to their short-term conjunctive scenarios.Eliezer Yudkowsky, 8/31/2006. Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Palo Alto, CA. “Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks,” Forthcoming in Global Catastrophic Risks, eds. Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic, singinst.org/upload/cognitive-biases.pdf.

The conjunction fallacy similarly applies to futurological forecasts. Two independent sets of professional analysts at the Second International Congress on Forecasting were asked to rate, respectively, the probability of "A complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the USA and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983" or "A Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the USA and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983". The second set of analysts responded with significantly higher probabilities. (Tversky and Kahneman 1983.) In Johnson et. al. (1993), MBA students at Wharton were scheduled to travel to Bangkok as part of their degree program. Several groups of students were asked how much they - 6 - were willing to pay for terrorism insurance. One group of subjects was asked how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance covering the flight from Thailand to the US. A second group of subjects was asked how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance covering the round-trip flight. A third group was asked how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance that covered the complete trip to Thailand. These three groups responded with average

willingness to pay of $17.19, $13.90, and $7.44 respectively. According to probability theory, adding additional detail onto a story must render the story less probable. It is less probable that Linda is a feminist bank teller than that she is a

bank teller, since all feminist bank tellers are necessarily bank tellers. Yet human psychology seems to follow the rule that adding an additional detail can make the story more plausible . People might pay more for international diplomacy intended to prevent nanotechnological warfare by China, than for an engineering project to defend against nanotechnological attack from any source. The second threat scenario is less vivid and alarming, but the defense is more useful because it is more vague. More valuable still would be strategies which make humanity harder to extinguish without being specific to nanotechnologic threats - such as colonizing space, or see Yudkowsky (this volume) on AI. Security expert Bruce Schneier observed (both before and after the 2005 hurricane in New Orleans) that the U.S. government was guarding specific domestic targets against "movie-plot scenarios" of terrorism, at the cost of taking away resources from emergency-response capabilities that could respond to any disaster. (Schneier 2005.) Overly detailed reassurances can also create false perceptions of safety: "X is not an existential risk and you don't need to worry about it, because A, B, C, D, and E"; where the failure of any one of propositions A, B, C, D, or E potentially extinguishes the human species. "We don't need to worry about nanotechnologic war, because a UN commission will initially develop the technology and prevent its proliferation until such time as an active shield is developed, capable of defending against all accidental and malicious outbreaks that contemporary nanotechnology is capable of producing, and this condition will

persist indefinitely." Vivid, specific scenarios can inflate our probability estimates of security , as well as misdirecting defensive investments into needlessly narrow or implausibly detailed risk scenarios . More generally, people tend to overestimate conjunctive probabilities and underestimate disjunctive probabilities. (Tversky and Kahneman 1974.) That is, people tend to overestimate the probability that, e.g., seven events of 90% probability will all occur. Conversely, people tend to underestimate the probability that at least one of seven events of 10% probability will occur. Someone judging whether to, e.g., incorporate a new startup, must evaluate the probability that many individual events will all go right (there will be sufficient funding, competent employees, customers will want the product) while also considering the likelihood that at least one critical failure will occur (the bank refuses - 7 - a loan, the biggest project fails, the lead scientist dies). This may help explain why only 44% of entrepreneurial ventures3 survive after 4 years. (Knaup 2005.) Dawes (1988) observes: 'In their summations lawyers avoid arguing from disjunctions ("either this or that or the other could have occurred, all

of which would lead to the same conclusion") in favor of conjunctions. Rationally, of course, disjunctions are much more probable than are conjunctions.' The scenario of humanity going extinct in the next century is a disjunctive event. It could happen as a result of any of the existential risks discussed in this book - or some other cause which none of us foresaw. Yet for a futurist, disjunctions make for an awkward and unpoetic-sounding prophecy.

Econ UnsustainableThe neoliberal system guarantees inevitable economic collapse – system theory provesHudgins 12 – cites *Joseph Tainter; Global Institute of Sustainability and School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, cites **Jim Rickards, an American lawyer, economist, and investment banker with 35 years of experience working in capital markets on Wall Street (Coley Hudgins, March 22nd, 2012, ‘Resilient Family,’ “Complexity Theory and System Collapse,” http://www.theresilientfamily.com/2012/03/complexity-theory-and-system-collapse/ >:)

Jim Rickards is probably the world’s baddest of the bad-asses in understanding and explaining modern monetary theory. I’m about three-quarters of the way

through his outstanding book Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis and can’t recommend it highly enough. If you

really want a comprehensive understanding of how our global economic system works (or doesn’t [work]), Rickards’ insights will give you a graduate level understanding. I’m going to be writing more about Currency Wars in the future, but wanted to start off today by writing about his insights on

Complexity Theory. The concept of Complexity Theory is really pretty simple: It’s the idea that as systems become more

complex, they become inherently unstable . One of the deepest thinkers on Complexity Theory is Joseph A. Tainter, the author of The

Collapse of Complex Societies . Rickards devotes a considerable amount of space in Currency Wars explaining Tainter’s work, which is crucial to understanding why it seems modern society continues to face ever-more frequent financial crises, wars, currency collapses and societal breakdowns. Tainter, who studied societal collapses throughout history

— from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the disappearance of Mayan and Chacoan civilizations — argues

persuasively that in all cases, societal breakdown follows a fairly consistent trajectory : The exponential increase in

complexity , which eventually reaches a point of diminishing marginal returns followed by collapse. In other

words, a society’s inputs increase with the scale of civilization, but its outputs – when measured in terms of

public good – eventually decline per unit of input until the whole shebang implodes and the societal growth process starts over. Take the case of government bureaucracy. In America’s early beginnings, our government was highly efficient and generated substantial “public goods”. We had a straightforward and simple blueprint that enumerated citizens’ rights and responsibilities (the Constitution and Bill of Rights), and the rules of the road for how society would be governed. Over the course of the next couple of hundred years, complexity inexorably worked its way into the bureaucratic system. To understand the perils of complexity, one need only look at the nation’s tax code. In 1913, when the 16th amendment was ratified allowing the Feds to tax individual income, the tax code was 400 pages. One hundred years later, our tax code is over 72,000 pages. Today, the marginal returns of taxpayer (ahem) “investments” in government bureaucratic functions – education, financial regulation,

agriculture, labor, and others — are diminishing at a faster and faster clip, the downslope of the marginal utility curve. There are more and more inputs (rules, regulations, laws, etc.), but the outputs — or the public goods

from those inputs — are fewer and fewer. The Dodd-Frank financial overhaul legislation is another great example of diminishing marginal returns in action. The 849-page Dodd-Frank bill (compare that to the 37-page Glass-Steagall Act that regulated Wall Street until 1999) provides absolutely no clarity whatsoever in how the financial sector should be regulated. It’s a mish-mash of confusing gobbledygook, ill-defined, and vague government overreach that only a Wall Street banker could love. Why? Because only they have the size and scope to pay astronomically high-priced lawyers to comb through the legislation and find the myriad

loopholes and exemptions that will render future enforcement of Wall Street scumbaggery toothless. The consequence of Dodd-Frank then is more, not less,

complexity, which creates more instability in the financial system as the next financial weapon of mass destruction lurks right around the corner. Rickards uses Tainter’s example of the collapse of the Roman Empire to explain just what happens when complex societal systems go kaboom: “When the barbarians finally

overran the Roman Empire, they did not encounter resistance from the farmers; instead they were met with open arms. The farmers had suffered for centuries from Roman policies of debased currency and heavy taxation [to fund an increasingly complex bureaucracy] with little in return. In fact, because the barbarians were operating at a

considerably less complex level than the Roman Empire, they were able to offer farmers basic protections at a very low cost.”

In Tainter’s and Rickards’ view, increasing complexity also creates hugely inefficient obstacles to improvements that

would benefit all of society, and instead benefits only those parasitical government and financial elites who use complexity to perpetuate their own privileged class through rent-seeking — the

accumulation of wealth through non-productive means. Think about it this way; the financialization of the global economy, and the explosion of government on a global scale are really all about harnessing complexity for the benefit of privileged classes. It’s why supranational, quasi-government organizations like the IMF, World Bank, G-20, and European Union

have become so influential and self-perpetuating. It’s why increasing complexity in finance leads to the extraction of financial resources from society at large and directs them towards financial and government elites in the form of taxes, bailouts, usurious consumer fees, deceptive derivatives and bonuses. And it’s why, for instance, the IMF can get away with proposing even more complex global monetary instruments like SDR’s (Special Drawing Rights) through what they argue is a process that “may be relatively fast and need not involve significant public support.” (Us hoi polloi needn’t worry our heads about such things I guess… It’s too

complex after all, and in any case the IMF will decide for us.) In the end, it’s this complexity that crushes citizens under the weight of rent extraction from a parasitical class. The end-result is an exponential increase in instability and an increasing possibility of collapse. Summarizing Tainter, Rickards says we now have three choices: simplification – descaling society and returning the input-output ratio to a more sustainable level by, for instance, devolving political and economic power away from the self-

perpetuating, parasitical elites in government and finance to more local and decentralized systems; continued conquest – the effort to take resources from neighbors by force in order to provide new inputs (U.S. foreign policy); or collapse – a sudden, involuntary and chaotic form of simplification. It’s wishful thinking to believe that the highly complex global systems we have today will descale and simplify to more sustainable levels on their own. But you can take individual action by simplifying your own life and decoupling to the extent possible from the complex and unstable systems on which most of us now depend. At its core, resiliency is really about the stability that simplicity makes possible. It’s indeed possible for individuals to weather instability and collapse, but it starts with individual action. Self-reliance, stability and simplicity are the best hedges in an increasingly complex and unstable world.

This is the American way of life framed around “enjoy!” and don’t worry about the consequences – this has led to credit based economy that leads to over-accumulation of a few resources at the top instead of addressing underlying problemsArthur 95 Morrison Professor of Economics and Population Studies – Stanford University, W. Brian, “Complexity in Economic and Financial Markets,” Complexity, vol 1, no. 1,

April)

One way to look at the economy, the standard way in fact, is to view it in physical terms as a collection of activities, technologies, and needs, all interacting though a market system peopled by decision-making agents such as firms, banks, consumers, and investors. A very different way—the one I want to explore here—would be to view the economy in psychological terms: as a collection of beliefs, anticipations, expectations, and interpretations; with decision-making and strategizing and action-taking predicated upon these beliefs and

expectations. Of course, the two views are related. Activities follow from beliefs and expectations. And beliefs and expectations

are mediated and sculpted by the physical economy they find themselves in. Why might a psychological or cognitive view of the

economy be useful? Economic agents make their choices based upon their current beliefs or hypotheses (I will

use these terms along with the jargon terms expectations or predictions) about future prices, or future interest rates, or competitors’

future moves, or the future character of their world. And these choices, when aggregated, in turn shape the prices,

interest rates, market strategies, or world these agents face. The beliefs or hypotheses that agents form in the real economy are largely

individual and subjective. They are often private. And they are constantly tested in a world that forms from their and others’ actions—a world that is ultimately formed from their and other agents’ subjective beliefs . Thus at a sub-level, we can think of the economy ultimately as a vast collection of beliefs or hypotheses, constantly being formulated, acted upon, changed and discarded; all interacting and competing and evolving and coevolving; forming an ocean of ever-changing, predictive models-of-the-world. This view is useful, I believe, because it forces us to think about how beliefs create economic

behavior—and how economic outcomes create beliefs. And it leads to different insights. Beyond the simplest problems in economics, this

ecological view of the economy becomes inevitable; and it leads to a world of complexity . The standard way to handle predictive beliefs in economic analysis is to assume identical agents who possess perfect rationality and arrive at shared, logical conclusions or expectations about the situation they face. When these expectations induce actions that aggregatively create a world that validates them as predictions, they are in equilibrium and are

called rational expectations. Rational expectations are useful in demonstrating logical equilibrium outcomes and analyzing their

consequences. But in the real world they break down easily. If some agents lack the computing power to deduce the

posited outcome; or if some arrive logically at different conclusions from the same data (as they might in a pattern recognition

problem); or if there is more than one rational expectations equilibrium with no means to coordinate which is chosen;

then some agents may deviate in their expectations. And if some deviate , the world that is created may change ,

so that others should logically predict something different and deviate too. And so rational expectations can unravel easily .

Unless there are special circumstances, they are not robust. There is a game in economics that illustrates this unraveling of rational expectations beautifully. It is the Guessing Game, where N players choose a number between 0 and 100, and the winner is the one closest to 2/3 of the average guess (see Nagel [16]). Obviously here, beliefs of what constitutes a good guess depend on one’s view of others’ beliefs of what constitutes a good guess. Now, uniform predictions of zero would constitute rational expectations; they would be self-validating in that if agents expected other agents to choose zero they should also choose zero. Therefore expectations that everyone will choose zero would be in equilibrium. And no other real number, if chosen by all, would constitute an expectational equilibrium. But does that mean that zero will necessarily be chosen? If I, as a reference player, suspect that some players—or even one player—may choose non-zero, then logically I ought to choose non-zero. And if I believe that others believe that someone may choose non-zero, I will deduce that they too will choose non-zero. Thus beliefs that some may choose non-zero lead others to expect non-zero and choose non-zero. The game leads to a self-referential sequence of “If they choose x, I and others should choose y. But if I and others choose y, they will have to choose z.” There is no closure here,

and ultimately beliefs or expectations in this game are deductively indeterminate, no matter how logical or rational the agents are.1 Consider as a second example my Bar Problem (Arthur [2]). One hundred people must decide independently each week whether to show up at their favorite bar (El Farol in Santa Fe, say). The rule is that if a

person predicts that more that 60 (say) will attend, he will avoid the crowds and stay home; if he predicts fewer than 60 he will

go. This seems innocuous; but it destroys the possibility of long-run shared expectations. If all believe few will go, than all will go, thus invalidating these expectations. And if all believe many will no, no one will go, invalidating those expectations.

Predictions of how many will attend depend on others’ predictions, and others’ predictions of others’ predictions. Once again there is no rational means to arrive at deduced a-priori predictions . These two problems

are of course toy problems, concocted like the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma to make a point. But they illustrate a foundational difficulty in economics. Where forming expectations means predicting an aggregate outcome that is formed in part from others’

expectations, expectation formation can become self-referential. The problem of logically forming expectations then becomes ill-defined, and rational deduction finds itself with no bottom ground to stand

upon. This indeterminacy of expectation-formation is by no means a rarity or anomaly within the real economy. On the contrary, it

pervades all of economics and game theory.

AT: HartwichPolicy fixes cannot resolve structural problems in the capitalist system—their framework and solvency claims actively exclude anti-capitalist discourses—ensures serial policy failure and turns caseWolff 08 (Rick Wolff, Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2008 “Policies to "Avoid" Economic Crises,” MR Zine—a publication of The Monthly Review, November 6th, Available Online at http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/wolff061108.html)

The whole idea of policy is bizarre . The "right policy" represents an absurd claim that this or that law or regulation can somehow undo the many different factors that cumulatively produced this

crisis. Policies are " magic potions " offered to populations urgently demanding solutions to real problems. Whether cynically advocated for ulterior motives or actually believed by the politicians,

promoters, and professors themselves, policy is the secular cousin of religion . These days, the

conservative policy amounts, as usual, to "let the private economy solve the problems" and "minimize state intervention because it only makes matters worse." Conservatives protect the freedoms of private enterprise, market transactions, and the wealthy from state regulations and controls and from taxes. The liberals' policy, also as usual, wants the state to limit corporate behavior, control and shape market transactions, and tilt the tax system more toward benefiting middle and lower income groups. Both policies can no more overcome this economic crisis than they overcame past crises. Historically, both conservative and liberal policies fail at least as often as they succeed. Which outcome happens depends on all the factors

shaping them and not on the policy a government pursues . Yet, both sides endlessly claim otherwise in desperate efforts at self-justification. Each side trots out its basic philosophy – dressed up as "a policy to achieve solutions." Conservatives and liberals keep debating. Today's crisis simply provides an urgent sort of context for the old debate to continue. Each side hopes to win converts by suggesting that its approach will "solve the economic crisis" while the other's approach will make it worse. Thus the liberals displaced the conservatives in the depths of the Great Depression, the reverse happened in the recession of the 1970s, and the liberals may now regain dominance. In no instance were adopted policies successful in solving the crises in any enduring way. The unevenness and instability of capitalism as a system soon brought another crisis crashing down on our economy and society. The basic conservative message holds that the current economic crisis is NOT connected to the underlying economic system. The crisis does NOT emerge from the structure of the corporate system of production. It is NOT connected to the fact that corporate boards of directors, responsible to the minority that owns most of their shares, make all the key economic decisions while the enterprise's employees and the vast majority of the citizenry have to live with the consequences. The very undemocratic nature of the capitalist system of production is NOT related to crisis in the conservative view. The basic liberal message likewise disconnects today's crisis from the capitalist production system. Rather, each side insists that all crises would have been and would now be "avoidable" if only the right policy were in place. Conservatives and liberals share more than a careful avoidance of

connecting the crisis to the underlying capitalist system. They are also complicit in blocking those

who do argue for that connection from making their case in politics, the media, or the schools . While conservative and liberal policies do little to solve crises, the debate between them has

largely succeeded in excluding anti-capitalist analyses of economic crises from public discussion .

Perhaps that exclusion – rather than solving crises – is the function of those endlessly rehashed policy debates between liberals and conservatives.

FrameworkThe role of the ballot is to reclaim public spheres for student dialogue from neoliberal corruption – this allows us to imagine a new form of democracy and discover new forms of education.Giroux 14, Henry, cultural studies professor at McMaster University, 3/19/14, “Henry Giroux | Beyond Neoliberal Miseducation,” http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/22548-henry-giroux-beyond-neoliberal-miseducation, Accessed 8/5/14

As universities turn toward corporate management models, they increasingly use and exploit cheap faculty labor while expanding the ranks of their managerial class. Modeled after a savage neoliberal value system in which wealth

and power are redistributed upward, a market-oriented class of managers largely has taken over the governing structures of most institutions of higher education in the United States. As Debra Leigh Scott points out, " administrators now

outnumber faculty on every campus across the country."1 There is more at stake here than metrics. Benjamin Ginsberg views this shift in governance as the rise of what he calls ominously the "the all administrative university," noting that it does not bode well for any notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere.2 A number of colleges and universities are drawing more and more upon adjunct and nontenured faculty - whose ranks now constitute 1 million out of 1.5 million faculty - many of whom occupy the status of indentured servants who are overworked, lack benefits, receive little or no administrative support and are paid salaries that increasingly qualify them for food

stamps.3 Many students increasingly fare no better in sharing the status of a subaltern class beholden to neoliberal policies and values, and largely treated as consumers for whom education has become little

more than a service. Too many students are buried under huge debts that have become a major source of celebration by the

collection industry because it allows them to cash in on the misfortune and hardships of an army of indebted students. Under the regime of neoliberal education , misery breeds a combination of contempt and source of profits for the banks and other financial industries. Jerry Aston, a member of that industry, wrote in a column after witnessing a protest rally by students criticizing their mounting debt that he "couldn't believe the accumulated wealth they represent - for our industry."4 And, of course, this type of economic injustice is taking place in an economy in which rich plutocrats such as the infamous union-busting Koch brothers each saw "their investments grow by $6 billion in one year, which amounts to three million dollars per hour based on a 40-hour 'work' week."5 One astounding figure of greed and concentrated power is revealed in the fact that in 2012, the Koch brothers "made enough money in one second to feed one

homeless woman for an entire year."6 Workers, students, youths and the poor are all considered expendable this neoliberal global economy . Yet the one institution, education, that offers the opportunities for students to challenge these anti-democratic tendencies is under attack in ways that are unparalleled, at least in

terms of the scope and intensity of the assault by the corporate elite and other economic fundamentalists. Casino capitalism

does more than infuse market values into every aspect of higher education; it also wages a full-fledged assault on public goods,

democratic public spheres, and the role of education in creating an informed and enlightened citizenry . When former presidential candidate Sen. Rick Santorum argued that intellectuals were not wanted in the Republican Party, he was articulating what has become common sense in a society wedded to narrow instrumentalist values, ignorance as a political tool, and a deep-seated fear of civic

literacy and a broad-based endorsement of the commons. Critical thinking and a literate public have become dangerous to

those who want to celebrate orthodoxy over dialogue , emotion over reason and ideological

certainty over thoughtfulness . 7 Hannah Arendt's warning that "it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to

think"8 at the heart of authoritarian regimes is now embraced as a fundamental tenet of right-wing politicians and pundits and increasingly has become a matter of common sense for the entertainment industry and the dominant media, all primary modes of an education industry that produces consumers, smothers the country in the empty fog of celebrity culture and denounces democracy as tantamount to the enemy of free-market fundamentalism. How else to explain the willingness of so many people today to give up every vestige of privacy to the social media, the government and anyone else interested in collecting data for the most despicable and anti-democratic purposes. Self-interest does

more than embrace a new culture of narcissism; it empties out any viable notion of the social, compassion, and the

ethical imagination . Right-wing appeals to austerity provide the rationale for slash-and-burn policies intended to deprive government-

financed social and educational programs of the funds needed to enable them to work, if not survive. Along with health care, public

transportation, Medicare, food stamp programs for low-income children, and a host of other social protections, higher education is being defunded as part of a larger scheme to dismantle and privatize all public services, goods and spheres. The

passion for public values has given way to the ruthless quest for profits and the elevation of self-interests over the common good. The educational goal of expanding the capacity for critical thought and the outer limits of the imagination have given way to the instrumental desert of a mind-deadening audit culture. But there is more at work here than the march toward privatization and the never-ending search for profits at any cost; there is also the issue of wasteful spending on a bloated war machine, the refusal to tax fairly the rich and corporations, the draining of public funds for the US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ongoing consolidation of class power in the hands of the 1 percent. The deficit argument and the austerity policies advocated in its name is a form of class warfare designed largely for the state to be able to redirect revenue in support of the commanding institutions of the corporate- military-industrial complex and away from funding higher education and other crucial public services. The extent of the budget reduction assault is such that in 2012 "states reduced their education budgets by $12.7 billion."9 Liberals and conservatives justify such cuts by pointing to declining revenues brought in by the state but what is missing from this argument is that one major reason for the decline is because of right-wing policies and legislation that lowers the taxes of the rich and major corporations. Of course, the burden of such reductions falls upon poor minority and other low-income students, who will not be able to afford the tuition increases that will

compensate for the loss of state funding. As the political state is replaced by the corporate state, tuition rises, the ranks of the poor expand, more social problems are criminalized and the punishing state blooms as a default register for potential dissent. Leftover weapons from the battle fields of Iraq and Afghanistan have found a home on

many college campuses that increasingly look as if they have become potential war zones. What has become clear in light

of such assaults is that many universities and colleges have become unapologetic accomplices to corporate, interests,

values and power, and in doing so increasingly regard social problems as either irrelevant or make them invisible.10 The transformation of higher education in the United States and abroad is evident in a number of registers. These include decreased support for programs of study that are not business-oriented; reduced funds for research that does not increase profit; the replacement of shared forms of governance with rigid business management models; the lessening of financial support for academic fields that promote critical thinking rather than an entrepreneurial culture; the ongoing exploitation of faculty labor; and the use of purchasing power as the vital measure of a student's

identity, worth and access to higher education.11 In addition, many universities are now occupied by security forces whose central message is that dissent and protest, however peaceful, will be squelched through violence. Leftover weapons from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have found a home on many college campuses that increasingly look as if they

have become potential war zones. These weapons stand as a grim reminder that they could be used against all those

students who question authority, imagine a more democratic role for the university, and connect learning to social change. Universities are increasingly becoming dead zones of the imagination, managed by a class of swelling bureaucrats, inhabited by faculty who constitute a new class of indentured, if not sometime willing, technicians, and students who are demeaned as customers and saddled with crippling debts. Not all faculty and students fit into this description. Some raise their voices in protests, others enjoy the benefits of being accomplices to power, and others get lost in the orbits of privatized interests or academic specialization. The university is a site of struggle and beset by many contradictions, but I don't believe it is an exaggeration to say that higher education since the late 1970s has been hijacked by a mix of political and economic fundamentalist forces that have worked hard to empty it of what it means to truly educate young people to be knowledgeable, critical, thoughtful and sensitive to the plight of others and the larger

society. Most importantly, higher education too often informs a deadening dystopian vision of corporate America and old-style authoritarian regimes that impose pedagogies of repression and disciplined conformity associated with societies that have lost any sense of

ethical responsibility and respect for equality, public values and justice. The democratic imagination has been

transformed into a data machine that marshals its inhabitants into the neoliberal dream world of babbling consumers and armies of exploitative labor whose ultimate goal is to accumulate capital and initiate faculty and students into the brave new surveillance/punishing state that merges Orwell's Big Brother with Huxley's

mind-altering soma. One consequence of this ongoing disinvestment in higher education is the expansion of a punishing state that increasingly criminalizes a range of social behaviors, wages war on the poor instead of

poverty, militarizes local police forces, harasses poor minority youths and spends more on prisons than

on higher education. The punishing state produces fear and sustains itself on moral panics. Dissent gives way to widespread insecurity

and uncertainty and an obsession with personal safety.12 Precarity has become an organizing principle of a social order so as to legitimate and expand the ranks of those considered disposable while destroying those public sites that give voice to the narratives of those marginalized by race, class, gender, sexuality and

ideology. Public places are now militarized , and those spaces once designed for dialogue, critique, informed exchange and dissent are occupied by the police and other security forces who have become the most visible

register of the surveillance-security state. Political, moral and social indifference is the result, in part, of a public that is increasingly constituted within an educational landscape that reduces thinking to a burden and celebrates civic illiteracy as foundational for negotiating a society in which moral disengagement and political corruption go hand in hand.13 The assault on the university is symptomatic of the deep educational, economic and political crisis facing the United States. It is but one lens through which to recognize that the future of democracy depends on achieving the educational and ethical standards of the society we inhabit.14 What liberals refuse to entertain is that the Left is correct in attacking Obama for his cowardly retreat from a number of progressive issues and his dastardly undermining of civil liberties. This lapse of the US public into a political and moral coma is also induced, in part, by an ever-expanding, mass-mediated celebrity culture that trades in hype and sensation. It is also accentuated by a governmental apparatus that sanctions modes of training that undermine any viable notion of critical schooling and public pedagogy. While there is much being written about how unfair the left is to the Obama administration, what is often forgotten by these liberal critics is that Obama has aligned himself with educational practices and policies as instrumentalist and anti-intellectual as they are politically reactionary, and therein lies one viable reason for not supporting his initiatives and administration.15 What liberals refuse to entertain is that the left is correct in attacking Obama for his cowardly retreat from a number of progressive issues and his dastardly undermining of civil liberties. In fact, they do not go far enough in their criticisms. Often even progressives miss that Obama's views on what type of formative educational culture that is necessary to create critically engaged and socially responsible citizens are utterly reactionary and provide no space for the nurturance of a radically democratic imagination. Hence, while liberals point to some of Obama's progressive policies - often in a New Age discourse that betrays their own supine moralism - they fail to acknowledge that Obama's educational policies do nothing to contest, and are in fact aligned with, his weak-willed compromises and authoritarian policies. In other words, Obama's educational commitments undermine the creation of a formative culture capable of questioning authoritarian ideas, modes of governance and reactionary policies. The question is not whether Obama's policies are slightly less repugnant than his right-wing detractors. On the contrary, it is about how educators and others should engage politics in a more robust and democratic way by imagining what it would mean to work collectively and with "slow impatience" for a new political order outside of the current moderate and extreme right-wing politics and the debased, uncritical educational apparatus that supports it.16 The transformation of higher education into a an adjunct of corporate control conjures up the image of a sorcerer's apprentice, of an institution that has become delusional in its infatuation with neoliberal ideology, values and modes of instrumental pedagogy. Universities now claim that they are providing a service and in doing so not only demean any substantive notion of governance, research and teaching, but also abstract education from any sense of civic responsibility. Higher education reneged on enlightenment ideals and lost its sense of democratic mission, but it also increasingly offers no defense to the "totalitarianism that haunts the modern ideal of political emancipation."17 Driven by an audit culture and increasingly oblivious to the demands of a democracy for an informed and critical citizenry, it now devours its children, disregards its faculty, and resembles an institution governed by myopic accountants who

should be ashamed of what they are proud of. The university needs to be reclaimed as a crucial public sphere where administrators, faculty and students can imagine what a free and substantive democracy might look like and what it means to make education relevant to such a crucial pedagogical and political task. This could be a first step in taking back higher education as a precondition for developing a broad-based social movement for the defense of public goods, one capable of both challenging the regime of casino capitalism and re-imagining a society in which democracy lives up to its promises and ideals .

Turns ChinaChina conflict is a product of the capitalist system. While a nuclear war with China is highly unlikely, their nationalistic representations cause geo-economic skirmishes and violenceSmith March 2013 (Ashley, Writer for Counterpunch and the Monthly Review, “US imperialism's pivot to Asia”, http://isreview.org/issue/88/us-imperialisms-pivot-asia)

Contrary to neoliberal fantasies , globalization has not brought an end to conflic t s between nation- states . While the United States remains the world’s preeminent power, it is in relative decline against its rising and potential peer

competitor, China. Thus, capitalism continues to stoke interimperial rivalries over dominance in the world system. But this growing rivalry is unlikely to produce any large-scale war for two key reasons. First, the extreme degree of economic integration among the United States, China, and the entire Asia-Pacific tends to pull the powers back from confrontation. Second, because many of the powers involved in the scramble for Asia have nuclear weapons it deters conflicts from degenerating into

shooting wars. Nuclear warfare threatens the respective countries in war with annihilation. This nuclear

deterrent will tend to lead states to avoid military confrontation and instead engage in geo-economic

struggle . They will punish each other through political and economic means, thereby pulling apart

the economic integration globalization has wrought . Despite these two countervailing forces, it is easy to imagine the sharp tensions exacerbated by Obama’s pivot producing at least small-scale clashes. The extreme nationalism being fostered b y ruling classes from one end of the region to the other, including the United State s ,

where China-bashing has become de rigueur in the political establishment, will exacerbate the drift toward such increasing conflict. The hope amidst this horror is the potential for the working classes and peasantry already in struggle across the region to develop the organization and consciousness to build international solidarity in the fight against imperialism and the capitalist system that breeds it.

Images of China as a threat are crafted by the military industrial complex and create a self-fulfilling prophecyPan 12—Chengxin Pan, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Deakin University, Australia [Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics, pg. 85-86]

With his known enemy, the lucky Inman is in good company. In many ways, the military-industrial complex finds itself in a similar

situation, but its lucky star is the perceived certain threat of China. Without knowing this threat , the high-level military spending would be difficult to justify , and without that military spending, the political economy of fear could not function properly, nor could military Keynesianism continue to flourish. This is why Richard N. Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations and former Director of Policy Planning in the US State Department, observes that having

survived decades of the Soviet challenge, containment might not be able to survive its own success.4 To the military-industrial

complex, the absence of a threat/ enemy constitutes an ultimate threat . While the lack of an enemy—real or imagined—appears costly indeed for the discursive identity and institutional ‘survival’ of the

m ilitary i ndustrial c omplex, I contend that having an enemy, even an imagined one, is by no means cost-free. In

fact, in the case of China, it could be very costly in that the construction and treatment of China as a threat could result in China becoming one in reality . In other words, the cost lies in the fact that the ‘China

threat’ paradigm could become self-fulfilling in practice . A self-fulfilling prophecy, according to American

sociologist Robert Merton, means that ‘a false definition of the situation which makes the originally false conception come true’.5 What is ‘false’ in hindsight or in the eyes of a bystander is frequently defined as real by the actor in question;

and ‘if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’.6 In international relations, fear, often based on ‘false’ images, can have precisely such self-fulfilling consequences. Thucydides, the author of a realist ‘great text’ History of the Peloponnesian War, noted a self-fulfilling prophecy of fear in interstate politics. In his account for the war’s outbreak, Thucydides suggested that ‘What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta’.7 More than two millennia later, another realist scholar-practitioner, George Kennan ascribed the origin of the Cold War to the paranoid ideology of the Soviet Union.8 If so,

the fear manifested in the ‘China threat’ paradigm could also become confirmed in reality. Two interrelated processes are at play here. First, the ‘China threat’ paradigm , taken as objective truth,

would imply the need for containing China in practice. Second, such practice , given the logic of mutual

responsiveness, is more likely than not to be mirrored back by China in either symmetric or asymmetric ways. As the latter’s hardline mimicry apparently ‘confirms’ the initial fear of the China threat, what

we are witnessing is a classic case of self-fulfilling prophecy .

Bond Markets LinkCrisis Politics – Captialism uses the threat of disaster to re-create its power – reject the aff to embrace the catastopheKlein 07 (Naoimi, Klein contributes to The Nation, In These Times, The Globe and Mail, This Magazine, Harper's Magazine, and The Guardian. She once lectured as a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics as an award-winning journalist, writer on the anti-globalisation movement She ranked 11th in an internet poll of the top global intellectuals of 2005, a list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals compiled by the Prospect magazine in conjunction with Foreign Policy magazine She was involved in a protest condemning police action during the G20 summit in Toronto, ON. She spoke to a rally seeking the release of protesters in front of police headquarters on June 28, 2010. In May 2011, Klein received an honorary degree from Saint Thomas University., “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”, Book -- http://infoshop.org/amp/NaomiKlein-TheShockDoctrine.pdf)

Most people who survive a devastating disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to

salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed; they want to reaffirm their

relatedness to the places that formed them. "When I rebuild the city I feel like I'm rebuilding myself,"

said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans' heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. 1 9 But

disaster capital ists have no interest in repairing what was . In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Or leans, the

process deceptively called " reconstruction " began with finishing the job of the original disaster by

erasing what was left of the public sphere and rooted communities , then quickly moving to replace

them with a kind of corporate New Jerusalem —all before the victims of war or natural disaster were

able to regroup and stake their claims to what was theirs. Mike Battles puts it best: " For us, the fear and

disorder offered real prom ise." 2 0 The thirty-four-year-old ex-CIA operative was talking about how the chaos in postinvasion

Iraq had helped his unknown and inexperienced pri vate security firm, Custer Battles, to shake roughly $100 million in contracts out of the

federal government. 21 His words could serve just as well as the slo gan for contemporary capitalism —fear and disorder are the catalysts for each new leap forward . When I began this research into the intersection between superprofits and megadisasters, I thought I was witnessing a fundamental change in the way the drive to "liberate" markets was advancing around the world. Having been part of the movement against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I was accustomed to seeing similar business friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at World Trade Organization summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the International Mon etary Fund. The three trademark demands—privatization, government deregulation and deep cuts to social spending—tended to be extremely unpopular with citizens, but when the agreements were signed there was still at least the pretext of mutual consent between the governments doing the

negotiating, as well as a consensus among the supposed experts. Now the same ideological program was being imposed

via the most baldly coercive means possible : under foreign military occupation after an invasion, or

im mediately following a cataclysmic natural disaster . September 11 appeared to have provided Washington with the green light to stop asking countries if they wanted the U.S. version of "free trade and democracy"

and to start im posing it with Shock and Awe military force. As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model

had swept the globe, however, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus

operandi of Milton Friedman's movement from the very beginning— this fundamentalist form of capitalism has

always needed disas ters to advance . It was certainly the case that the facilitating disasters were getting bigger and more

shocking, but what was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a new , post-September 11 invention .

Rather , these bold ex periments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of

strict adherence to the shock doctrine . Seen through the lens of this doctrine, the past thirty-five years look very different. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as

sadistic acts carried out by antidemo cratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-

market "reforms . " In Argentina in the seventies , the junta's "disappearance" of thirty thousand people, most of them leftist activists, was integral to the imposition of the country's Chicago School poli cies ,

just as terror had been a partner for the same kind of economic meta morphosis in Chile. In China in 1989 , it was the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the subsequent arrests of tens of thousands that freed the hand of the Communist Party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zon e, staffed with workers

too terrified to demand their rights. In Russia in 1993 , it was Boris Yeltsin's decision to send in tanks to set fire to the parliament building and lock up the opposition leaders that cleared the way for the fire-sale

privatization that created the country's noto rious oligarchs. The Falklands War in 1982 served a similar

purpose for Margaret Thatcher in the U.K.: the disorder and nationalist excitement resulting from the war al lowed her to use tremendous force to crush the striking coal miners and to launch the first privatization frenzy in a Western democracy. The NATO at tack on Belgrade in 1999 created the conditions for rapid

privatizations in the former Yugoslavia—a goal that predated the war. Economics was by no means the sole motivator for

these wars , but in each case a major collective shock was exploited to prepare the ground for

economic shock therapy. The traumatic episodes that have served this "softening-up" purpose have not always been overtly

violent. In Latin America and Africa in the eighties, it was a debt crisis that forced countries to be "privatized or die," as one for mer IMF official put it. 2 2 Coming unraveled by hyperinflation and too in debted to say no to demands that came bundled with foreign loans, governments accepted "shock treatment" on the promise that it would save them from deeper disaster. In Asia, it was the financial crisis of 1997-98— almost as devastating as the Great Depression—that humbled the so-called Asian Tigers, cracking open their markets to what The New York Times de scribed as "the world's biggest going-out-of-business sale." 2 3 Many of these countries were democracies, but the radical free-

market transformations were not imposed democratically. Quite the opposite: as Friedman under stood, the atmosphere of large-

scale crisis provided the necessary pretext to overrule the expressed wishes of voters and to hand

the country over to eco nomic "technocrats." There have , of course, been cases in which the adoption of free-market policies has taken place democratically —politicians have run on hard-line platforms and won elections, the

U.S. under Ronald Reagan being the best example, France's election of Nicolas Sarkozy a more recent one. In these cases, however,

free-market crusaders came up against public pressure and were invariably forced to temper and

modify their radical plans , accepting piecemeal changes rather than a total conversion. The bottom line is

that while Friedman's economic model is capable of being partially imposed un der democracy , authoritarian conditions are required for the implementa tion of its true vision. For economic shock therapy to be applied without restraint —as it was in Chile in the seventies, China in the late eighties, Rus sia in the nineties and the U.S. after September 11,

2001—some sort of ad ditional major collective trauma has always been required, one that either temporarily suspended democratic practices or blocked them entirely. This ideological crusade was born in the

authoritarian regimes of South America, and in its largest newly conquered territories —Russia and China —it coex ists most

comfortably, and most profitably, with an iron-fisted leadership to this day.

This is the American way of life framed around “enjoy!” and don’t worry about the consequences – this has led to credit based economy that leads to over-accumulation of a few resources at the top instead of addressing underlying problemsArthur 95 Morrison Professor of Economics and Population Studies – Stanford University, W. Brian, “Complexity in Economic and Financial Markets,” Complexity, vol 1, no. 1,

April)

One way to look at the economy, the standard way in fact, is to view it in physical terms as a collection of activities, technologies, and needs, all interacting though a market system peopled by decision-making agents such as firms, banks, consumers, and investors. A very different way—the one I want to explore here—would be to view the economy in psychological terms: as a collection of beliefs, anticipations, expectations, and interpretations; with decision-making and strategizing and action-taking predicated upon these beliefs and

expectations. Of course, the two views are related. Activities follow from beliefs and expectations. And beliefs and expectations

are mediated and sculpted by the physical economy they find themselves in. Why might a psychological or cognitive view of the

economy be useful? Economic agents make their choices based upon their current beliefs or hypotheses (I will

use these terms along with the jargon terms expectations or predictions) about future prices, or future interest rates, or competitors’

future moves, or the future character of their world. And these choices, when aggregated, in turn shape the prices,

interest rates, market strategies, or world these agents face. The beliefs or hypotheses that agents form in the real economy are largely

individual and subjective. They are often private. And they are constantly tested in a world that forms from their and others’ actions—a world that is ultimately formed from their and other agents’ subjective beliefs . Thus at a sub-level, we can think of the economy ultimately as a vast collection of beliefs or hypotheses, constantly being formulated, acted upon, changed and discarded; all interacting and competing and evolving and coevolving; forming an ocean of ever-changing, predictive models-of-the-world. This view is useful, I believe, because it forces us to think about how beliefs create economic

behavior—and how economic outcomes create beliefs. And it leads to different insights. Beyond the simplest problems in economics, this

ecological view of the economy becomes inevitable; and it leads to a world of complexity . The standard way to handle predictive beliefs in economic analysis is to assume identical agents who possess perfect rationality and arrive at shared, logical conclusions or expectations about the situation they face. When these expectations induce actions that aggregatively create a world that validates them as predictions, they are in equilibrium and are

called rational expectations. Rational expectations are useful in demonstrating logical equilibrium outcomes and analyzing their

consequences. But in the real world they break down easily. If some agents lack the computing power to deduce the

posited outcome; or if some arrive logically at different conclusions from the same data (as they might in a pattern recognition

problem); or if there is more than one rational expectations equilibrium with no means to coordinate which is chosen;

then some agents may deviate in their expectations. And if some deviate , the world that is created may change ,

so that others should logically predict something different and deviate too. And so rational expectations can unravel easily .

Unless there are special circumstances, they are not robust. There is a game in economics that illustrates this unraveling of rational expectations beautifully. It is the Guessing Game, where N players choose a number between 0 and 100, and the winner is the one closest to 2/3 of the average guess (see Nagel [16]). Obviously here, beliefs of what constitutes a good guess depend on one’s view of others’ beliefs of what constitutes a good guess. Now, uniform predictions of zero would constitute rational expectations; they would be self-validating in that if agents expected other agents to choose zero they should also choose zero. Therefore expectations that everyone will choose zero would be in equilibrium. And no other real number, if chosen by all, would constitute an expectational equilibrium. But does that mean that zero will necessarily be chosen? If I, as a reference player, suspect that some players—or even one player—may choose non-zero, then logically I ought to choose non-zero. And if I believe that others believe that someone may choose non-zero, I will deduce that they too will choose non-zero. Thus beliefs that some may choose non-zero lead others to expect non-zero and choose non-zero. The game leads to a self-referential sequence of “If they choose x, I and others should choose y. But if I and others choose y, they will have to choose z.” There is no closure here,

and ultimately beliefs or expectations in this game are deductively indeterminate, no matter how logical or rational the agents are.1 Consider as a second example my Bar Problem (Arthur [2]). One hundred people must decide independently each week whether to show up at their favorite bar (El Farol in Santa Fe, say). The rule is that if a

person predicts that more that 60 (say) will attend, he will avoid the crowds and stay home; if he predicts fewer than 60 he will

go. This seems innocuous; but it destroys the possibility of long-run shared expectations. If all believe few will go, than all will go, thus invalidating these expectations. And if all believe many will no, no one will go, invalidating those expectations.

Predictions of how many will attend depend on others’ predictions, and others’ predictions of others’ predictions. Once again there is no rational means to arrive at deduced a-priori predictions . These two problems

are of course toy problems, concocted like the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma to make a point. But they illustrate a foundational difficulty in economics. Where forming expectations means predicting an aggregate outcome that is formed in part from others’

expectations, expectation formation can become self-referential. The problem of logically forming expectations then becomes ill-defined, and rational deduction finds itself with no bottom ground to stand

upon. This indeterminacy of expectation-formation is by no means a rarity or anomaly within the real economy. On the contrary, it

pervades all of economics and game theory.

1NR

1NR WTOWTO useless - Bali package is false optimism, super powers will always trump, regionalism train is rollingPALO 1 – 2 – 15 The Dollar Business [Bidhu Bhushan Palo, WTO GRAPPLES WITH GROWING CHALLENGES AS IT TURNS 20, https://www.thedollarbusiness.com/wto-grapples-with-growing-challenges-as-it-turns-20/]

He also added that, “Moreover, at our 9th Ministerial Conference in Bali in 2013, we took our first major step forward in updating multilateral

trade rules. The measures agreed in Bali were a real breakthrough for the WTO, and they will provide a significant economic boost. In December 2014 WTO Members came together to recommit to implementing all aspects of the Bali package.”

And that’s where the disappointment lies .

The fact that the WTO arrived at a consensus on the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), hailed as the biggest

breakthrough since its inception by the WTO, after a delay of around six months from the July 31, 2014 deadline, and over a year

after members agreed to adopt it, shows that frustration is something the WTO has to get accustomed to in coming years.

Azevêdo also claimed that the WTO has played a crucial role in strengthening world trade and resolve trade disputes. However, why has it failed to take notice that Pakistan has not granted the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status to India for 20 years now? And why could it not resolve India’s concerns over food security programmes when the matter was resolved miraculously between India and USA in late 2014?

Azevêdo said that WTO has provided a bulwark against protectionism , but why was it mum when several countries and major economies such as USA, Russia, and EU used trade restrictions as a weapon in 2014 . Why is it quiet over the decline in oil and commodity prices and its impact on global trade?

The truth is that 2014 was a mirror that showed a not so flattering picture of the organisation which boasts of

“all or none” as its hallmark. In 2014, the WTO was , at best, an organisation that could do nothing but hope

and be held hostage to decisions of the superpowers .

There are more challenges for the WTO this year. So far, we have seen that politics wins over trade . And

there is a real concern that politics may become more powerful in 2015 . Regional agreements such APEC, BRICS,

ASEAN, SAARC and TPP have all been in focus for members in 2014 and are expected to knock multilateralism off the table in 2015.

In Azevêdo’s own words, 2015 is set to be an eventful year for the WTO. He plans to hold the 10th Ministerial Conference in Nairobi in December 2015. The 5th Global Review of Aid for Trade will be held in June-July this year. However, what’s interesting is that the WTO plans to

implement all aspects of the Bali package and address other issues of the Doha Development Agenda by July 2015. Six months from now will be a good time to evaluate the status of the WTO, its promise to developing and least developed countries, and its place in a world that is witnessing an economic and political reset.

AT: WTO Good

GATT/WTO decline key to development of regionalism which is a better check on protectionism and war.Brkic 13, Economics Prof at U of Sarajevo (Snježana, 3/25, Regional Trading Arrangements – Stumbling Blocks or Building Blocks in the Process of Global Trade Liberalization?, papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2239275)

. Since early 1990s, the value of intra-regional imports registered the average annual growth of 18%. In the same time, the extra-regional exports were also growing, although at a lower rate of 9% average a year; its share in the total Latin America exports at the end of decade amounted to 18% as compared to 12% in 1990. In the 1990-1996 period, the intraregional imports grew by some 18% a year. The extra-regional imports were also growing very fast, reaching the 14% rate. These data reflect a great unbalance in the trade with extra-regional markets, since

the imports from countries outside the region grew much faster the exports.30 Since the described trends point to the continued growth of extra-regional imports and exports, they also show that regional integration in Latin America has had the open regionalism character. Besides, the pending establishment of FTAA – Free

Trade Area of Americas will gather, in the same group, the so-called "natural" trade partners – countries that have had an

extremely extensive mutual exchange for years already, and the outsiders are therefore unlikely to be affected by

strengthening of regionalism in this part of the world. Contemporary research shows that intra-regional

trade is growing , however, same as interdependence between North America and East Asia and between the EU and East Asia. It can also be seen that the biggest and the most powerful countries, i.e. blocs, are extremely dependent on the rest of the world in terms of trade . For the EU, besides the intra- European trade, which is ranked first, foreign trade has the vital importance since it accounts for 10% of European GDP. In early 1990s, EU exchanged 40% of its foreign trade with non-members, 16% out of which with North America and East

Asia together. EU therefore must keep in mind the rest of the world as well. The growing EU interest in outsiders is confirmed by establishing "The Euro-Med Partnership", which proclaimed a new form of cooperation between the EU and the countries at its

South periphery32. Besides, the past few years witnessed a series of inter-regional agreements between the EU on the one hand, and certain groups from other regions on the other (MERCOSUR, CARICOM, ASEAN and GCC). In

case of North America the ratio between intra-regional and inter-regional trade is 40:60, and in East Asia, it is 45:55. Any attempt to

move towards significantly closed blocs ("fortresses") would require overcoming the significant

inter-dependence between major trading blocs . Besides the analysis of contemporary trends in extra-

and intra-regional trade, other research was conducted that was supposed to point to the reasons why the new

regionalism has mainly a non-negative impact on outsiders and global liberalization . The distinctive features of new regionalism were also affected to characteristics of international economic and political environment it sprouted in. In the 1980s, economic nationalisms were not so expressed as in the interventionism years following the Second World War; however, the neo-liberalism represented by GATT activities did

not find the "fertile ground” in all parts of the world. Regionalism growth in the circumstances of multilateral system

existence is , among other things, the consequence of distrust in multilateralism . „The revival of the forces of regionalism stemmed from frustration with the slow pace of multilateral trade liberalization... If the world trade regime could not be moved ahead, then perhaps it was time for deeper liberalization within more limited groups of like-minded nations ... Such efforts would at least liberalize some trade... and might even prod the other nations to go along with multilateral liberalization.“33 Kennedy's round and Tokyo round of trade negotiations under GATT auspices

brought a certain progress in the global trade liberalization. However, the 1980s witnessed significant changes in the

world economy that the GATT trade system was not up to. Besides. GATT had not yet managed to cover the entire trade in goods, since there were still exceptions in the trade in agricultural and textile products that particularly affected the USA and developing

countries. GATT system of conflict resolutions, and its organizational and administrative mechanism in general also required revision. In this

vacuum that was created in promoting trade and investment multilateralism from the point when GATT inadequacy became obvious until the start of the Uruguay round and the establishment of World Trade Organization, the wave of regionalism started spreading across the world again. Prodded by the Single European Act and the success of European

integration, many countries turned to an alternative solution – establishment of new or expansion and deepening of the existing economic integrations. Even the USA, the multilateralism bastion until then, made a radical turn in their foreign-trade policy and started working on designing a North American integration.

1NR AT: China

Zhang.7 For the remaining 31 cases, compliance either came much delayed or the complainant was not satisfied with the implementation.8 In six cases, the United States even failed to fully implement the panel or Appellate

Body rulings despite trade retaliations having been authorized by the WTO.9 Following the lead of the United States on the list of noncompliance or incomplete compliance is the European Union. As China grew to be the second largest economy in the world, it is fair to wonder if China will follow the lead of the United States and become another frequent defaulter. The answer to this question is important to all of China's trading partners, as well as for the future of the WTO DSS.

What are the factors influencing China's decisions facing adverse panel/Appellate Body rulings? Why did China fail to comply with panel/Appellate Body recommendations in a timely manner in China—Publications and Audiovisual Products? This article attempts to answer these questions through investigating the politics behind China's compliance decisions in WTO disputes.

Drawing from scholarship on states' compliance with their international commitments and features of policy making under authoritarian regimes, this paper argues that China's compliance in WTO disputes

is largely determined by a small group of leaders at the center of the policy-making structure while relevant bureaucracies compete to influence their perception of the costs and benefits of compliance.

Determined to establish and maintain an image of a responsible player in the international community, China is highly committed to the legitimacy of the WTO DSS, hence strongly motivated to comply with adverse WTO dispute settlement rulings in a timely manner. Nevertheless, successful implementation can be impeded by certain interest groups, in particular, monopolistic state-owned enterprises (SOEs) involved in the trade of politically sensitive products.

Finishing Barfieldwill, over time, create major questions of democratic legitimacy. In retrospect, it was relatively easy to rebut charges of

democratic illegitimacy against the delegates to Seattle in 1999: they were appointed officials of (mostly) democratic governments. It will be another thing, however, to defend the actions of WTO judicial bodies when it is alleged

that they are "legislating" new rights and obligations through judicial interpretation. Substantively, there are two problems. First, even with the best of wills, panels and the Appellate Body face a daunting task in interpreting the underlying text and rules because, as even defenders of the new system admit, they contain numerous gaps and ambiguities,

lacunae, and contradictory language that papers over basic policy differences among negotiators. More fundamentally, there is no consensus in a number of instances on the complex regulatory issues posed in such areas as services regulation, health and food safety, and national intellectual property regimes. The Beef Hormones Case For the purposes of this essay, two major WTO judicial confrontations between the US and the EU illustrate the political and the substantive conundrums engendered by the new system. The first is the wellknown Beef Hormones Case, which remains a standoff with Europe continuing to pay over $100 million in compensation for refusing to abide by a WTO ruling. There could be no better example of the folly of a promise of a legally "correct" decision in a program area than this case. Underlying the complicated facts of the dispute is a fundamental disagreement about how societies should handle risk. The EU is moving inexorably toward an expansive interpretation of the "cautionary principle," whereby nations can ban the import of goods with minimal (or no) scientific evidence. The US (and some other nations) are moving in the other direction - toward mandating credible scientific data before allowing trade restrictions. WTO rules seem to point to at least minimal scientific justification, and assume that

invocation of the "precautionary principle" will be temporary, pending additional data. When confronted with such dissonances, the Appellate Body produced a decision laced with a hodgepodge of creative, yet unintegrated rationales. It upheld the need for scientific evidence, while undercutting that mandate by allowing socioeconomic arguments (including public opinion) to

rank with science in determining import policy. It denied the EU's contention that the "precautionary principle" had reached the status of customary international law at this time - a truly radical assertion - but held out the possibility that in the future the situation might change. (Subsequently, the EU compounded the problem by flouting the clear statement in WTO rules that the "precautionary principle" can only be utilized "provisionally" and temporarily; in effect, it defended an invocation virtually in perpetuity.) Whatever the specific outcome in each of these questions, the debate centered on issues that potentially altered the rights and obligations of WTO members - and thus should not have been confined to the single discretion of WTO judicial bodies. The FSC Cases The equally famous FSC cases concerning alleged WTO-illegal tax subsidies for US exporters is another illustration of both the incapacity of the Dispute Settlement Understanding to deal with a complex international economic issue (international taxation) and the dangerous consequences of pronouncing on highly charged political issues. (It should be noted that the author is a strong opponent of any subsidies for exporters and would abolish as corporate welfare such US programs as those administered by the US Export-import Bank and OPIC. The issue here, however, relates to WTO rules and adjudication - and not the wrongheadedness of export subsidies.) Fundamentally, the issues in these cases stem from differing national approaches in taxing foreign source income of corporations. The United States generally uses a so-called worldwide system of taxation - that is, it taxes income of a person or corporation regardless of where the income is earned. European nations in general utilize the so-called territorial system under which countries tax all income within their border but do not tax income earned abroad. Conflicts have arisen for three decades as the United States has attempted to level the playing-field and replicate some part of the European foreign source income exemption. Suits and countersuits were launched in the 1970s under the old GATT. A standoff ensued when both the European (at least for several countries) and the US international tax system were found in violation of existing trade rules. In 1981, a political "Understanding," ratified by the GATT General Council, was reached that agreed that with respect to these cases "and in general, " economic processes, including transaction involving exported goods, need not be taxed by the exporting country. Fifteen years later, in a fit of pique and after much negotiating water had flowed over the dam, the EU challenged the then existing US export credit regime. Brushing past ample legal authority to uphold the validity of the 1981 Agreement, a WTO panel and the Appellate Body upheld the EU challenge. The US Congress then revised the export tax regime, only to have a panel and the Appellate Body once again find for the Europeans. In this last case, the Appellate Body put forward a standard that assumed the possibility of a "bright line" between foreign and domestic income - and struck down the US law for establishing formulas that partially mixed the two. As the US trade and tax expert, Gary Hufbauer, has stated, this interpretation could only have been advanced by a "firstyear law student ... with only limited knowledge of tax law." To conclude this section, these cases (and others that could be cited) illustrate the twin dangers inherent in the mindset of the panels and the Appellate Body that is, incautious incursions into highly volatile political areas such as food safety and international taxation, combined with a determination to provide a legally "correct" answer to all questions, even when it means - as with the FSC decisions - that they will be forced to venture into complex substantive areas beyond their competence. What is to be Done? The aim of the following recommendations for change in the WTO's dispute settlement system is: (1) to reintroduce some elements of the older GATT diplomatic approach, with an emphasis on mediation and conciliation rather than legal fiats; and (2) to rein in the judicial bodies and thereby lessen both sovereignty and legitimacy concerns. The recommendations are complementary but independent - that is, the WTO could adopt them singly or in some combination. 1. A Safety Valve: Mediation, Conciliation and Arbitration: Under this proposal, the WTO Director General or, alternatively a Committee of the WTO Dispute Settlement Body, would be empowered to step in and direct the contending WTO members to settle their differences through bilateral negotiations, mediation or arbitration by an outside party. Such action would be taken in situations where, in the judgment of the Director General or the Committee, the highly divisive political nature of the contest would permanently damage the WTO, or where clearly the underlying text masked deep substantive divisions between WTO members. 2. A Blocking Mechanism: The goal of this proposal is to redress the current imbalance between the highly efficient dispute settlement system and the inefficient, ineffective consensus-plagued rulemaking process. At any time, at least one third of the members of the WTO Dispute Settlement Body, constituting at least one quarter of trade among WTO members, disagreed with a judicial decision, that decision would be set aside until the issue could be negotiated out in the WTO General Council, or as part of an overall round of trade negotiations. In addition, two less radical changes should be considered. They

would constitute new guidelines for future panels and the Appellate Body. 1. Non liquet Doctrine: This legal term literally means " it is not clear ." Given the widespread agreement that WTO texts are replete with lacunae and contradictory provisions, and given that questions concerning the legitimacy of judicial decisions are magnified at the international level, the panels and the Appellate Body should be instructed to utilize this doctrine much more frequently - and throw the decision back to the WTO General Council or to trade round negotiations. Critics of non liquet have argued that it is prohibited because international law is

necessarily "complete," or that it is the duty of judges to step in and fill gaps, particularly in contentious areas. WTO rules, by common consent, are certainly not "complete" and arguments for "gap-- filling" by judges reflect a

dangerous - even antidemocratic - myopia. 2. Political Question Doctrine: Alternatively, the WTO could adopt a variation of the so-called "political issue doctrine," developed by the US Supreme Court. The doctrine is meant to provide a means for the judiciary to avoid decisions

that have deeply divisive political ramifications and thus, in the opinion of the court, should be settled through more traditional democratic processes, involving both the legislature and the executive. Once again, if such a doctrine is deemed important for preserving checks and balances at the national level, an even more cogent argument can be advanced for its introduction in international law - where the sources of legitimacy of judicial bodies are much

weaker than within democratically constructed nation states. In summary, the proposition advanced here is that heading off corrosive conflicts between the US and the EU in the future will necessitate reform of the international trading rules that have enmeshed - and indeed entrapped - both trading superpowers.

AT: BownBown 09 – (2009, Chad, Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and International Business School at Brandeis University and a Non-Resident Fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution, “U.S.–China Trade Conflicts and the Future of the WTO,” the fletcher forum of world affairs, vol.33:1 winter/spring 2009)

There were many events that did nothing but add fuel to the political fire . In 2005, for example, the Chinese firm CNOOC attempted to acquire the U.S. oil firm Unocal and was rebuffed on the grounds of national security by Congress. The 2007 year was beset by an epidemic of product recalls and U.S. import bans related to China’s exporters—due to claims of chemicals such as melamine and diethylene glycol discovered in pet food and toothpaste, lead paint found in children’s toys, defective radial tires, and banned antibiotics applied to farmed seafood.3 The first half of 2008 saw new topics seep into U.S.–China trade tensions—including the growing financial clout of sovereign wealth funds, the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves, and the threat that the United States would impose new border taxes to address failures to negotiate multilateral commitments to reduce carbon emissions and combat global climate change.4

The scary item to note from this laundry list of U.S.–China tensions is that they all took place despite relatively good times for the U.S. economy and certainly well before the severe deepening of the financial crisis in the second half of 2008. Many expect U.S.–China trade frictions to only get worse in the face of an ongoing U.S. recession and worsening unemployment figures.5 History provides many examples of how a bad domestic economy creates just the right conditions for politicians to shut off imports in a misguided and desperate attempt to save jobs.

Despite the fragility of the global economy and the risks it poses to the liberal international trading system, Beijing and Washington are unlikely to settle all of these (as well as any imminent) newly initiated U.S.–China WTO disputes without going through the formal WTO process . 6 For one, there is a tremendous amount at stake in terms of market access, legal precedent, and politics. Second, each dispute requires many years of legal challenges and appeals that can be used to provide beneficial political cover to both sides . For the Obama administration, even simply continuing with the ongoing disputes that the Bush administration initiated will help diffuse some of the protectionist threat emanating from a Congress that is politically hostile toward China. Such a strategy could lead to tangible signs of Chinese reform “progress ” that may be more difficult to negotiate in other settings . Third, it is not clear that the two indicators of greatest political concern to the Congress—the size of the bilateral trade deficit (still close to $250 billion for 2008) and the extent of renminbi currency revaluation vis-à-vis the dollar (appreciating since July 2005, but neither sufficiently quickly nor with sign of increasing marketoriented flexibility)—will see marked improvements anytime soon. Thus, Beijing also recognizes that if it were to settle the full complement of WTO disputes early, it would likely find itself the political target of new WTO disputes, if not something worse.

Given the current economic insecurities as well as the state of bilateral trade relations , are China, the U nited S tates, and the WTO ready for their frictions over auto parts, film, media, and intellectual property to be at the center of formal dispute settlement ? In these WTO disputes, what starts as seemingly harmless legal maneuvering and argumentation often turns into political battles, threats, and legally-sanctioned implementation of actual retaliation, and media-fed worries of an all-out trade war. Successful use of the WTO’s multilateral dispute settlement process to diffuse Washington-Beijing bilateral tensions is far from a foregone certainty . In order for the WTO dispute process to “work,” both the U nited S tates and China need to act and react with political savvy and have an underlying, long-term commitment to the process and WTO system. Is China in particular sufficiently vested in the system? Is the system itself too vulnerable to hold up in such a politically sensitive and weak economic environment? As the history of formal dispute settlement reveals, a fully successful resolution to these and future disputes that the United States and China file against each other will involve dealing with some foreseeable, as well as many unforeseeable, pitfalls.7

China prioritizes a good reputation and economy—won’t escalate a trade disputeXiaowen Zhang and Xiaoling Li, 2014. Assistant professor of political science at Augustana College, PhD in International Relations @ University of Southern California; and associated professor of law at the China Youth University for Political Sciences in Beijing, China,Ph.D. in Law from the East China University of Political Science and Law. “The Politics of Compliance with Adverse WTO Dispute Settlement Rulings in China,” Journal of Contemporary China, 23:85, 143-160.

Although much has been written about the factors affecting compliance with international commitments in general, little systemic attention has been paid to compliance with WTO dispute settlement rulings. A few observers have examined the record of compliance in WTO disputes and identified some features of the pattern of compliance. For

instance, Bruce Wilson finds that compliance has been more rapid where the WTO violations can be corrected through administrative action as opposed to legislative action, indicating that the procedural arrangement of implementation in respondent states influences the prospect of compliance.24 Regrettably, these studies are mainly descriptive, without offering in-depth explanations for why respondent states sometimes fail to implement the panel/Appellate Body recommendations in

due time.25 Consistent with the political economy of compliance in general, compliance in WTO disputes

is an act generating uneven political and economic payoffs for various special interests in a respondent state. Anticipating increasing competition as a result of compliance, the producer group that has been benefiting from the status quo has strong incentives to block the implementation of panel/Appellate Body recommendations.

Under this circumstance, the prospect of successful implementation is subjected to the political influence

of the affected producer group in the respondent state . However, there is no systematic study yet examining

how special interests within a respondent state may influence the prospect of compliance in WTO disputes.

Even less is known about how domestic politics in authoritarian countries like China may influence the prospect of compliance in WTO disputes, as the vast majority of respondent states that have been found violating WTO obligations are democracies.26

Theoretically, decision makers in authoritarian countries face less domestic constraints when it comes to complying with international commitments than democracies. While in democracies, re-election-minded governments may drag their feet as long as possible before they change WTO-inconsistent trade policies just to please politically influential special interests, decision makers in authoritarian regimes are largely autonomous, facing fewer

constraints from special interests. The choice of compliance is largely shaped by the perception of a small group of individuals of the material and reputational costs of noncompliance, which in turn is influenced by the relative power of the state and its degree of reliance on the good will of the international community. Nonetheless, China's record of compliance in WTO disputes indicates that

there must be more going on concerning the politics of compliance in authoritarian China . Of the

disputes against China that went through WTO litigation, the U nited S tates was either the sole complainant or the leading co-complainant, indicating a similar level of material costs if China chose noncompliance and sanctions were authorized. Besides, these disputes were initiated when the same group of Chinese leaders was in power (between 2006 and 2009). Despite these similarities, China made a different policy choice in China—Publications and Audiovisual Productsthan for others. To explain this puzzle, an in-depth analysis of the compliance decision-making process in China is needed.

WTO compliance decision making in China

Generally speaking, policy making in China is characterized by a ‘fragmented authoritarian’ model.27 Compared with democracies, policies in China are made by a much more concentrated group of individuals in a top-down manner. Although it is fragmented in the sense that various actors at different levels of the power hierarchy are charged with the enforcement of policies, the framework places emphasis on achieving consensus and narrowing the divergent policy goals of different ministries and agencies. At the central government level, the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) is the primary bureaucratic unit responsible for matters related to foreign economic relations. Within MOFCOM, there is a WTO Division in the Department of Treaty and Law that handles WTO disputes. However, according to the mandate of MOFCOM, the Minister of MOFCOM officially decides whether to bring a complaint to the WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB). Meanwhile, input from the Premier or the Vice Premier in charge of foreign trade has a decisive influence on any final decisions. Since the measures at dispute are often issued by various bureaucracies, the amendment of which often requires coordination, when facing coordination difficulties as a result of conflicting bureaucratic interests, the Vice Premier in charge of MOFCOM will usually intervene.28

Unlike democracies, China's legislature, the National People's Congress (NPC) and its Standing Committee, puts few constraints on the ability of the executives to comply with international commitments . There is no special procedural law regarding the implementation of WTO panel /Appellate Body recommendations. If the measures at dispute are administrative regulations enacted by the State Council, the State Council

is entitled to revise or abolish them. Likewise, ministries or commissions under the State Council, the People's Bank of China, the State Audit Administration, or other organs endowed with administrative functions, are responsible for the revision of departmental rules they enact respectively. If the measure at dispute is a national statute, normal legislative procedures apply. Panel/Appellate Body rulings are first studied by relevant government agencies, which then send their comments to the State Council. The State Council drafts the legislative proposals to be submitted to the NPC or its Standing Committee for deliberations and vote. Theoretically, NPC and its Standing Committee can block or delay implementation by voting down the proposals. In practice, however, once a proposed legislation is submitted to be voted on at the NPC or its Standing Committee, it almost always gets approved, especially when the bill is introduced by the State Council. For example, in the ten-year period of the 8th and 9th NPC between 1993 and 2003, all 44 legislative proposals introduced by the State Council were passed with high affirmative votes.29

The fact that the Premier or the Vice Premier in charge of foreign trade makes the ultimate decisions regarding WTO dispute settlement indicates the broad, complex and sometimes sensitive ramifications of panel/Appellate Boding rulings. Although respondent states are expected to implement panel/Appellate Body recommendations, a tactical matter in theory, they do choose noncompliance or incomplete compliance for a variety of strategic reasons. Not only does the decision of compliance impact the interests of affected industries, but also it often affects a country's long-term development objectives and its relationship with key trading partners. For vital decisions like this, a high degree of centralization is often observed during the

policy-making process in China.30 According to Liyu Han and Henry Gao, under most circumstances , top leaders in China are under no or little pressure from individual industries or businesses when it comes to compliance with adverse WTO dispute settlement rulings .31 Their top concern is the material and

reputational costs of noncompliance to the country as a whole . Although as China's economy grows, the material costs of noncompliance decline relatively, China still has great concern about the reputational costs of noncompliance, which explains its largely satisfactory performance as a respondent in the WTO DSS.

A peacefully rising China

As a rising economic power that takes continuous economic growth as its top priority, China is very concerned about the reputational costs of noncompliance in the WTO DSS. Noncompliance will hurt China's image as a credible power in the international community, upset China's trading partners and undermine the legitimacy of the WTO, all of which are indispensible to China's economic development.

The concern over the reputational costs of noncompliance is well aligned with China's national objective of ‘peaceful rising’. Since early 2003, China's leaders have started to talk about the concept of ‘peaceful rising’ in various international settings.32 As explained by Bijian Zheng, a key advisor to the top Chinese leaders, ‘peaceful rising’ is a unique development strategy that China chose, different than that of any other emerging powers in modern history. Instead of

rising through ‘invasion, colonization, expansion or even large-scale wars of aggression’, China's rise has been driven by ‘capital, technology, and resources acquired through peaceful means’ . The key to rising in a peaceful manner is to embrace economic globalization. According to China's current strategic plan, it will take another 40 years—until 2050—before China can be called a modernized, medium-level developed

country. To rise peacefully, China needs an open and orderly world market so that China can continue

to take advantage of globalization .33 Being the central driving force behind economic globalization, the wellbeing of

WTO is therefore imperative to China's long-term objective. Acknowledging that, China strived for WTO membership. After becoming a member, upholding the legitimacy of the WTO and maintaining amicable relations with trading partners became imperative. However, both could be compromised by noncompliance in the WTO DSS.

In particular, noncompliance can mean two types of reputational costs to China. Firstly, noncompliance will hurt China's reputation as a credible rule player in the international community, which in turn will alienate its trading partners. Since joining the WTO, China has grown to be the largest exporter of manufactured goods

in the world. On the one hand, China has gained considerably from WTO membership, as the rapid growth of the Chinese economy is, to a large extent, driven by international trade. On the other hand, China's huge trade surpluses have brought considerable pressure to its trading partners. Their import-competing industries have been harmed by the inflow of Chinese products and they keep a close eye on China and would take every opportunity to lobby the governments to take protectionist measures against China. It has been argued that one of the purposes of China joining the WTO is to send a reassuring signal to the world that China is a credible player in the international economic system.34 Noncompliance, openly reneging on China's commitments to the international free trade community, will no doubt hurt China's reputation as a trustworthy rule player and provide those who are already upset by a rising China with support when they lobby their governments. Since the future

goodwill and cooperation of others are essential to China's continuous growth, such reputational costs are serious. Secondly, noncompliance will hurt China's reputation as a system builder. Because the WTO DSS is the central

pillar of the WTO, its effectiveness is crucial to the legitimacy of the WTO as a whole . As the second largest member in the WTO and the largest developing country in the WTO, China's performance in the WTO DSS attracts wide attention , especially among developing countries , who look up to China and

expect China to be a leader in the WTO. Noncompliance will not only undermine the legitimacy and effectiveness of the WTO DSS and, in turn, the WTO as a whole, but will also hurt the image of China as a system builder, affecting its future ability to lead.

China's relatively good performance as a respondent in the DSS has well demonstrated its high concern over reputational costs. For the cases that China settled through mutually agreed solutions, China could have waited until the adoption of panel reports and then further extended the litigation process by filing an appeal before the Appellate Body. Since there are no retroactive remedies in the current DSS, the material costs of noncompliance will only be lower in this case, as the affected producer will benefit from the status quo for longer. In fact, many respondent states have chosen to take advantage of this loophole, escalating the disputes all the way to the end of the litigation process despite almost 90% of the adopted panel and/or the Appellate Body reports finding WTO violations.35 In contrast, China has settled nine of the 19 resolved cases out of court, showing great caution over the risk of reputational damage as a result of adverse panel/Appellate Body rulings.

When the chance of winning is perceived to be small, China has chosen to settle in order to avoid the reputational costs, despite the material benefits of escalation.

The unusual rush during the implementation stage of China—Intellectual Property Rights provides another good example. On 10 April 2007, the United States filed a dispute before the WTO targeting three specific sets of Chinese measures related to the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights in China. The panel reported mixed findings in March 2009 and neither party appealed before the Appellate Body. The two parties then agreed to set the deadline of the reasonable period of time for China to implement the rulings as 20 March 2010, a year after the adoption of the panel report. As the panel upheld US claims against Article 4 of the Chinese Copyright Law, legislative action was taken on the part of China. That is, the State Council needed to propose amendments to the disputed measure and submit the amendments to the

NPC or its Standing Committee for approval. Interestingly, the State Council waited until 10 February 2010 to pass and submit the proposed amendments, leaving the NPC Standing Committee only 16 days before its next, also the last, session prior to the implementation deadline. Despite that, the Standing Committee rushed to pass the amendments on 26 February 2010, skipping steps such as releasing the proposed revisions to the public for opinions before the vote. Such unusual practice revealed the limited

power of the legislature. Nevertheless, it also showed that it had become a consensus in China that compliance with WTO dispute settlement was extremely important.

Bonds

CaesarsAlt causes—can’t make upLewitt 12/17 – (2014, Michael, JD, LLM in Taxation, Money Morning, joined Cumberland Advisors in January 2012 as a Vice President and the Portfolio Manager for the Opportunistic Debt Strategy, co-founded Harch Capital Management, LLC in 1991, where he was the co-lead portfolio manager (1991-2001) and lead manager (2001-2011) for all of the firm’s client assets including separate accounts, hedge funds (long and short), collateralized debt obligations and mutual funds focused on the less-than-investment grade debt markets for U.S. and non-U.S. institutional clients as well as high net worth individuals, family office and foundations and endowments, “A Surprising Profit Play from Troubled Caesars Stock (Nasdaq: CZR),” http://moneymorning.com/2014/12/17/a-surprising-profit-play-from-troubled-caesars-stock-nasdaq-czr/)

In an unstable economy, bond payment failures take on added import as bellwethers of

ailing markets .¶ Especially when they involve large, well-known corporations .¶ On December 15, Caesars Entertainment Operating Co. Inc. (Nasdaq: CZR) failed to make a $225

million interest payment on its 10% Second Lien Notes due 2018.¶ CZR has a 30-day grace

period to make the payment or be declared in default .¶ On Friday, December 12, it was reported that negotiations with senior creditors regarding a debt restructuring had broken

down.¶ This comes as no surprise to those of us who have been watching one of the ugliest

situations in the debt markets unfold over the past couple of years .¶ But it does reveal a

surprising buying opportunity…¶ Meet the Private Equity "Sponsors" Stripping Caesars

Clean ¶ Indeed, the entire situation and the players involved deserve particular scorn as this sham transaction has unfolded.¶ Asset stripping, equity dilution, and $4 billion in corporate value that's disappeared are just small parts of the story.¶ What's happening now is the start of an endgame that will leave you shaking your head, and thankful if you were not one of the investors who stands to lose money…¶ On November 25, UMB Bank, the Trustee for Caesars Entertainment Operating Co. Inc.'s 8.5% Senior Secured Notes due 2020, filed a devastating lawsuit against Caesars Entertainment Corporation, affiliated companies, and the companies' directors and officers.¶ The lawsuit is an attempt to salvage one of the most ill-begotten leveraged buyouts in history, and at the same time a comprehensive and powerful indictment of a scheme perpetrated by Caesar's private equity owners, Apollo Global Management LLC (NYSE: APO) and the "Sponsors," Texas Pacific Group (TPG).¶ It catalogues over $4 billion of value that has been shifted away from Caesars Entertainment Operating Company to two other entities under the control of the Sponsors, Caesars Growth Partners, LLC, and Caesar

Acquisition Company.¶ By all accounts, this effort has been led by Apollo , which has managed to build a formidable investment firm after almost collapsing during the financial crisis and then managing to recover despite a history of mistreating creditors in its private

equity deals and being widely distrusted on Wall Street.¶ The lawsuit was masterfully drafted by a skilled team of lawyers led by the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP, a firm I have some experience with and know to be extremely formidable litigators. Apollo is conducting itself as though this lawsuit does not pose a threat to its business and reputation, but it is sorely mistaken.¶ The thoroughness with which the Sponsors have looted Caesars over the past couple of years can only be described as deliberate, pathological, and potentially criminal ; a vulture could not have done a better job picking the corpse of CEOC clean.¶ The Sponsors' behavior includes all of the hallmarks of a desperate borrower, including transparent attempts to avoid both the plain language and clear spirit of indentures as well as transactions approved by conflicted directors and blessed by hired gun lawyers and investment bankers issuing phony fairness opinions.

Bond market inev collapseCondon 14 – (10/5, Bernard, MA in International Affairs, Business Writer AP, former Associate Editor at Forbes, citing tons of investment experts, “Bond market may be more fragile than you think,” http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2014/10/05/bond-market-bubble/16613571/)

A bottleneck is building in the global market for bonds.¶ Main Street investors have poured a trillion dollars into bonds since the financial crisis, and helped send prices soaring . As fund managers and regulators fret about an inevitable sell-off, the bigger fear is that when people

go to unload, there won't be anyone to buy .¶ Too many funds own the same bonds, making them difficult to sell in a sudden downturn. On top of that, the banks that used to bring bond buyers and sellers together have pulled back from the role. Investors looking to sell would be

slow to find buyers, spreading fear through the $100 trillion global bond market and

sending prices tumbling .¶ It's a situation known as "liquidity risk" and some bond pros are scrambling to prepare for it.¶ Portfolio managers are hoarding cash. BlackRock, the world's largest fund manager, is suggesting regulators consider new fees for investors pulling out of funds. Apollo Management, famous for profiting from a bond collapse 25 years ago, is launching a fund to bet against bonds.¶ Mohamed El-Erian, former CEO of bond fund giant

Pimco, thinks ordinary investors are too blasé about the flaws in the trading system. Investors today are like homeowners who only discover there's a clog under the sink when it's too late and they're staring at a mess .¶ "It's only when you try to put a lot of things

through the pipes that you realize" you've got a problem, says El-Erian , now chief economic

adviser to global insurer Allianz . "You get an enormous backup."¶ What's at risk is more than

money in retirement accounts . Big investors often borrow when buying bonds and so losses

can be magnified . Trillions of dollars of bets using derivatives ride on bonds , too. A small fall

in prices could lead to losses that reverberate throughout the financial system .¶ "The market is so tightly wound," says JPMorgan's William Eigen, head of its Strategic Income Opportunities

fund, who has put 63% of his portfolio in cash. " There's no place to hide ."¶ In such a fragile

situation, even news with no bearing on bond fundamentals can trigger losses .

EconThere’s no statistical basis for your claims—our study analyzes 670 different downturnsCharles BOEHMER, professor of political science at Pennsylvania State University, ‘2 [March 24, 2002, “Domestic Crisis and Interstate Conflict: The Impact of Economic Crisis, Domestic Discord, and State Efficacy on the Decision to Initiate Interstate Conflict,” paper presented to the International Studies Association, http://isanet.ccit.arizona.edu/noarchive/boehmer.html]

I have argued in this study that economic growth should be positively related to militarized interstate conflicts while at the same time reducing the risk of domestic regime transitions. I also expected that domestic conflict would reduce the risk of

interstate conflict. The research design used here specifically allows for a comparison of the relative probabilities of

both interstate conflict and regime transitions. I do not find support for the conclusions often made in

studies of diversionary conflict claiming that lower rates of economic growth should lead to interstate

conflict . With the exception of MID initiations (where it had little effect), economic growth increases state involvement in militarized

foreign conflicts. However, the results also show that higher levels of domestic protest and rebellion both increase international conflict as well as the risk of regime transitions. These results are in part consistent with the predictions of diversionary conflict theory, although it is

important to note that involvement in foreign conflicts in the face of high levels of domestic protest or rebellion is very risky. Of the 670

observations where country-years where a militarized interstate conflict was initiated, 117 of these foreign conflicts (17%) were

related somehow to regime transitions. This means that some attempts to divert failed , while others following

MID transitions may be completely unrelated to diversionary behavior. Moreover, these conflict initiations likely include many conflicts which most would agree were not diversionary, such as US

interventions into Bosnia or Afghanistan. This means that the risk of regime transition during is even probably higher when leaders would most prefer to divert. To gain higher confidence that domestic conflict leads to diversionary behavior, we should require a more detailed analysis of other causes, controlling for such factors as interventions into civil wars.

Theories of diversionary conflict need to further specify the linkages between domestic conflict, state efficacy, and regime type. Attention has been focused on each of these elements, but more work could be done. For example, the results here show that domestic conflict is partly a source of both international conflict and domestic instability, although whether states will most likely experience high levels of protest or rebellion would seem to depend on the structure and efficacy of their governments. While most

existing studies provide a discussion of why diversionary conflict could be beneficial to leaders, more attention must be paid to

the potential costs of diversion. The results here suggest that some leaders will be removed from power before they can take advantage of an opportunity to use foreign conflict to induce a rally effect , while others

that attempt this gambit fail in the process. Can leaders really fool all the people all the time ? The answer

would appear to be no . This should not be surprising. However, an implication of this study is that the rally-around-the-flag effect identified in the American case may not be applicable to other countries or necessarily work as successfully.

AT: Diversionary WarNo evidence backs diversionary theory.Reiter 9—Dan Reiter is professor and chair of political science at Emory University [Aug 17, 2009, How Wars End, ch. 2, “Bargaining, Information, and Ending Wars,” pg. 9-10, Princeton University Press]

Irnportantly, the assumption that Wars are always on balance costly for each side is not uncontroversial. Some feminist approaches contend

that states may fight for the sake of lighting, as wars serve patriarchy by reinforcing gender identity.3 A more mainstream critique is that leaders go to war for domestic political reasons, such that a war-avoiding bargain might not be reachable even when both sides knew who would win, as lighting itself provides domestic political benefits from a war to

both win- ner and loser.4 Under some conditions, especially if a state is undergoing democratization or if a national leader is experiencing domestic political problems such as unrest or economic downturn, a state may see war as a way to rally the public around the leader and stave off domestic political challenges.5 The proposition that leaders go to war when facing domestic difficulties is often called the "diversionary" hypothesis.

However, the evidence that leaders choose war to solve internal political problems is thin . The underlying assumption is that going to war en- genders a rally round the flag effect that boosts the popularity of leaders, but leaders reap this benefit only under very narrow conditions (which often cannot be controlled by the attacking state),

and even the biggest rallies are short-lived . 6 Importantly, there is almost no smoking gun historical evidence of a leader launching a war primarily as a means of solving domestic political problems . At most, politicians have occasionally speculated about diversionary action, such as Secretary of State William Seward's (ignored) April 1861 suggestion to President Abraham Lincoln that the United States provoke crises with European powers as a means of staving off civil war between the Union and the seceding southern states.7 A Russian minister is famously thought to have declared just after the outbreak ofthe 1904-O5 Russo-japanese War that, "We need a little, victorious war to stem the tide of revolution," but the story is likely too good to be true.8 Leaders sometimes see indirect relationships between starting war and reaping domestic political benefits, such as the possibility that Lyndon

Johnson escalated the Vietnam War in 1965 to protect his Great Society program from domestic political attack.9 Some quantitative studies have found that the presence of internal problems like declining economic growth, rising inflation, partial democratization, or declining leader popularity are correlated with an (often slightly)

increased likelihood in the use of force. However, these relationships are often limited in scope, occurring only under certain economic or political conditions.10 Any possible diversionary effects might in turn be moderated by the tendency of states to avoid provoking other states that might have diversionary incentives.11

1NR—EUEU market is screwed – shadow banksJones 11/27 – (2014, Claire, Financial Times, Frankfurt, “ECB vice-president warns of bond-buying risks,” http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a25f2e7c-7651-11e4-a704-00144feabdc0.html)

A top European Central Bank official has insisted policy makers must do all they can to boost weak eurozone inflation, in spite of warnings that any extension to the ECB’s bond-buying spree could increase risks for the bloc’s financial system.¶ The ECB governing council is set to decide in the first quarter of 2015 whether to broaden its asset purchases to include government debt. The hope is that aggressive monetary easing will counter the threat of a Japanese-style lost decade of economic stagnation. However, the central bank’s financial stability report, which was presented on Thursday, illustrated policy makers’ actions are not without side-effects.¶ The ECB warned that riskier corporate bonds and some forms of bank debt are already looking overpriced as investors search for yield in an environment of ultra-low interest rates. The central bank identified an abrupt reversal of this search for yield as the main danger to financial stability in the region.¶ That threat would be exacerbated if, as expected, the ECB extends its purchases of asset-backed securities and covered bonds to include mass government bond buying, a policy which works in part by boosting the prices of riskier assets.¶ Vítor Constâncio, the ECB’s vice-president, acknowledged the risks, but said the primary responsibility of the central bank was to ensure inflation, at 0.4 per cent in October, stayed close to the target of just under 2 per cent.¶

“Monetary policy is our responsibility and the primary objective of monetary policy that overrides everything else is price stability,” Mr Constâncio said. “Now we’re in a situation of very low inflation that is very far away from our objective.”¶ While there were signs of “excessive froth” in the market for high-yield corporate bonds and some Cocos – a form of bank debt which behaves like equity should a bank fail – the ECB’s report found that “normal” corporate bonds and equities did not show any indications of overvaluation.¶ The problem highlights a challenge facing central banks across the world. Many monetary authorities have taken on more responsibility for safeguarding the health of the financial system, while at the same time pursuing an aggressive monetary policy that some believe has done more to spur asset prices than revive growth.¶ Mr Constâncio said it was a problem best solved by the use of so-called macroprudential measures, which work by limiting the supply of credit to particular financial markets. He added that macroprudential measures were a better tool to tackle the build-up of problems over financial cycles.¶ But the ECB vice-president warned that his central bank needed more tools to counter risks in the financial system.

Unlike the Bank of England, the ECB does not have the power to ban mortgages with high loan-to-deposit or loan to income ratios.¶ The

ECB also warned of the threat posed by the rapid expansion of the region’s shadow banking sector,

with the central bank adding that it wanted to enhance its oversight of non-banks .¶ “[ The rise of the

shadow banks] is a structural phenomenon and it’s bound to continue . Risks are starting to emerge

that are not very well covered and are not very well monitored , “ Mr Constâncio said.¶ He later added: “We need to

be vigilant about the border [between banks and non-banks]. We have to monitor better the exposures between the regulated and unregulated parts of the system.”

Austerity inevitable—quant easing won’t solve now or with the planLachman 14 – (1/2, Desmond, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303370904579294163997059846)

Undaunted, both European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi and European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs Ohli Rehn are now once again declaring that Europe has finally turned a corner and that a sustained economic recovery is underway. They are also asserting that there is absolutely no risk that any of the euro zone's 17 member countries might exit the monetary union. Sadly, there are all too many reasons to think that their confidence will prove to be as misplaced in 2014 as it has been in the past.¶ A principle reason for this pessimism is that Europe's macroeconomic policy setting is not conducive to a sustained economic recovery. Europe's longest economic recession in the postwar period only ended in the middle of 2013, having brought unemployment to a record 12.3%. Underlying all this was the pursuit of budget austerity and the onset of a severe credit crunch, which led the ECB to a more restrictive monetary stance. To compound

matters, these policies were being pursued within the euro-zone straitjacket, which precluded currency depreciation. Yet in 2014, budget

austerity—albeit of a lesser degree—will continue to be applied by most euro countries. This will be

done in pursuit of the longer term goal of attaining structural budget balance . At the same time, there is every

reason to fear that Europe's credit crunch , which has already resulted in the fastest pace of credit contraction in the euro zone's

15-year history, will intensify in the year ahead, since little is being done to recapitalize European banks ahead

of the ECB's asset-quality review exercise. That exercise, which will be completed by the end of 2014, will induce

European banks to de-leverage at an even faster pace than in 2013. Absent a meaningful economic recovery, Europe's unemployment rate will continue to hover at close to today's record level. Even the ECB and the European

Commission are projecting that EU unemployment will remain stuck at close to 12% by the end of 2015 . The

persistence of high unemployment would heighten the risk that the debt crisis will erupt again in the

year ahead. Persistently high unemployment risks driving the countries on the European periphery into a

deflationary trap. Deflation would make it all but impossible for countries such as Greece, Italy,

Portugal and Spain to work down their debt-to-GDP ratios in the both the public and private sectors .

Persistently high unemployment is also likely to exacerbate the marked deterioration in the political climate that has already occurred in Europe. Signs of austerity fatigue are all too evident in France, Greece, Italy, and Portugal, where there has been a sharp erosion of public support for centrist parties and a corresponding surge in the polls for populist extremists on both the left and the right. This does not bode well for forthcoming European parliamentary elections in May 2014, which could register strong anti-European sentiment at the ballot box. It would be comforting to believe European policy makers' soothing reassurances about the economic and political outlook. However, if their past forecasting record is a prologue to the future, one would be mistaken to take them too seriously.

AT: U.S.-Russian WarUS will never go to war with Russia—self-preservation, war-fatigue, empirics Michael PECK, contributing editor for Foreign Policy Magazine and contributor at Forbes, 14 [“7 Reasons Why America Will Never Go to War over Ukraine,” Forbes, March 5, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpeck/2014/03/05/7-reasons-why-america-will-never-go-to-war-over-ukraine/)

America is the mightiest military power in the world. And that fact means absolutely nothing for the Ukraine crisis.

Regardless of whether Russia continues to occupy the Crimea region of Ukraine, or decides to occupy all of Ukraine, the U.S. is not going to get into a shooting war with Russia .

This has nothing to do with whether Obama is strong or weak . Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan would face the same

constraints. The U.S. may threaten to impose economic sanctions, but here is why America will never smack Russia with a

big stick :

Russia is a nuclear superpower. Russia has an estimated 4,500 active nuclear warheads , according to

the Federation of American Scientists. Unlike North Korea or perhaps Iran, whose nuclear arsenals couldn’t inflict substantial damage,

Russia could totally devastate the U.S. as well as the rest of the planet . U.S. missile defenses, assuming they even work, are not designed to stop a massive Russian strike.

For the 46 years of the Cold War , America and Russia were deadly rivals . But they never fought . Their

proxies fought: Koreans, Vietnamese, Central Americans, Israelis and Arabs. The one time that U.S. and Soviet forces almost

went to war was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Neither Obama nor Putin is crazy enough to want to

repeat that .

Russia has a powerful army. While the Russian military is a shadow of its Soviet glory days, it is still a formidable force. The Russian army has about 300,000 men and 2,500 tanks (with another 18,000 tanks in storage), according to the “Military Balance 2014″ from the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Its air force has almost 1,400 aircraft, and its navy 171 ships, including 25 in the Black Sea Fleet off Ukraine’s coast.

U.S. forces are more capable than Russian forces, which did not perform impressively during the 2008 Russo-Georgia War. American troops would enjoy better training, communications, drones, sensors and possibly better weapons (though the latest Russian

fighter jets, such as the T-50, could be trouble for U.S. pilots). However, better is not good enough. The Russian military is not composed of lightly armed insurgents like the Taliban, or a hapless army like the Iraqis in 2003. With advanced

weapons like T-80 tanks, supersonic AT-15 Springer anti-tank missiles, BM-30 Smerch multiple rocket launchers and S-400 Growler anti-

aircraft missiles, Russian forces pack enough firepower to inflict significant American losses.

Ukraine is closer to Russia. The distance between Kiev and Moscow is 500 miles. The distance between Kiev and New York is 5,000 miles. It’s much easier for Russia to send troops and supplies by land than for the U.S. to send them by sea or air.

The U.S. military is tired. After nearly 13 years of war , America’s armed forces need a breather . Equipment is worn out from long service in Iraq and Afghanistan, personnel are worn out from repeated deployments overseas, and there are still about 40,000 troops still fighting in Afghanistan .

The U.S. doesn’t have many troops to send. The U.S. could easily dispatch air power to Ukraine if its NATO

allies allow use of their airbases, and the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush and its hundred aircraft are patrolling the Mediterranean. But for a ground war to liberate Crimea or defend Ukraine, there is just the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Italy, the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit sailing off Spain, the 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment in Germany and the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

While the paratroopers could drop into the combat zone, the Marines would have sail past Russian defenses in the Black Sea, and the Stryker brigade would probably have to travel overland through Poland into Ukraine. Otherwise, bringing in mechanized combat brigades from the U.S. would be logistically difficult, and more important, could take months to organize.

The American people are tired. Pity the poor politician who tries to sell the American public on yet

another war , especially some complex conflict in a distant Eastern Europe nation . Neville Chamberlain’s

words during the 1938 Czechoslovakia crisis come to mind: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

America’s allies are tired . NATO sent troops to support the American campaign in Afghanistan, and has little to show for it. Britain sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, and has little to show for it. It is almost inconceivable to imagine the Western European public marching in the streets to demand the liberation of Crimea, especially considering the region’s sputtering economy, which might be snuffed out should Russia stop exporting natural

gas. As for military capabilities, the Europeans couldn’t evict Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi without American help. And Germans fighting Russians again? Let’s not even go there.