PSM+Kelly+and+Sichao

=Aff= toc **__Plan Text __** **__Contention 1: Sugar Ethanol Shift __** **Cuban sugarcane-based ethanol market is superior to American corn-based ethanol. It will slow the rate of climate change, pesticide use, and dead zones. ** [Jonathan-J.D. Wash. U St. Louis, Legal Advisor, “Raising Cane: Cuban Sugarcane Ethanol’s Economic and Environmental Effects on the United States,” Environmental Law & Policy Journal, Univ. of California Davis, Vol. 36:2, [] ] IV. Environmental Effects of Ethanol ¶ ¶ **__Assuming __** that **__Cuba is able to meet __** **__Contention 2: Advantages __** **__Scenario 1: Monoculture __** **Domestic corn-ethanol production is the root of massive species loss and ecosystem destruction in the Great Plains ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;">[Jonathan-J.D. Wash. U St. Louis, Legal Advisor, “Raising Cane: Cuban Sugarcane Ethanol’s Economic and Environmental Effects on the United States,” Environmental Law & Policy Journal, Univ. of California Davis, Vol. 36:2, [] ] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">Incentivizing farmers to grow consecutive corn crops instead of alternating with soybean crops is only <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">AND **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Monoculture model independently causes extinction ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;">[Stephen- international environmental journalist, “Biodiversity: Farming Will Make or Break the Food Chain”, Inter Press Service, 5-3-07,http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/03/945/] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">" **__<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">If __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> all **__<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">agricultural lands adopt __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> the industrial, **__<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">monocultural model, there will be __** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">AND <span style="display: block; margin-top: 10pt; page-break-after: avoid; page-break-before: always; text-align: center;">**__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16pt;">Scenario 2: Climate Change __** **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Global Warming is happening – most recent and best evidence concludes that it is human induced ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">AND **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">CO2 is the primary driver of climate change – outweighs all alt causes ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">Carbon dioxide (CO2 __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;">) __**__<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">emissions account for __****__<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';"> about 60% of the effect from __** **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Global warming makes global agricultural production impossible – resulting in mass starvation ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">AND <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">differently and food security is further challenged by a multitude of nonclimatic factors. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">4 degrees of warming make sustaining biodiversity impossible – the impact is extinction ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">(Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics, “Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must be Avoided”, A report for the World Bank, November, http://climatechange.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/Turn_Down_the_heat_Why_a_4_degree_centrigrade_warmer_world_must_be_avoided.pdf) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">Ecosystems and their species provide a range of important goods and services for human society <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">AND **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">4 degree warming is inevitable with current carbon usage trends – deceasing carbon emissions solve ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">to see a monthly summer temperature rise of more than 6°C. <span style="display: block; margin-top: 24pt; page-break-after: avoid; page-break-before: always; text-align: center;"> **__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 22pt;">Contention 3: Solvency __** **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Cuban sugar based ethanol is essential to replace oil based fuel—it’s the best solution for a transition away from oil-based fuel dependence—allowing access to the U.S. market is key ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;">[Jonathan-J.D. Wash. U St. Louis, Legal Advisor, “Raising Cane: Cuban Sugarcane Ethanol’s Economic and Environmental Effects on the United States,” Environmental Law & Policy Journal, Univ. of California Davis, Vol. 36:2, [] ] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">"The United States of America cannot afford to bet our long-term prosperity <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">AND <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">, deserves much greater consideration and evaluation than it has thus far received. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">And, joint ventures jumpstart the Cuban ethanol energy industry ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">[Walfrido Alonso-Pippo- former Vice-President of the Solar Energy Department at the University of Havana and a former member of the Cuban National Renewable Energies Front, where he was a specialist in biomass energy use <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">, Carlos A. Luengo, John Koehlinger, Pierto Garzone, Giacinto Cornacchia, “Sugarcane energy use: The Cuban case,” __Energy Policy__, Vol. 36, Issue 6, June 2008, <span style="color: windowtext; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 8pt; text-decoration: none;">[] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">]
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 10pt;">The United States federal government should authorize the licensing of American companies to participate in the development of Cuba’s sugar ethanol industry and allow Cuban sugar ethanol imports. **
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Specht 13 **
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">AND __**
 * __<span style="border: 2.25pt solid windowtext; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; padding: 0in;">to corn production __****__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';"> and, thus, to the domestic ethanol industry __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">. n68
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Specht 13 **
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">to clean __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> as the grasslands and wetlands that once filtered contaminants disappear. n100
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Leahy 7 **
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">what the key cards are or how many lost species is too many. __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">Muller **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;">7-28- <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">20 **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">12 **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> [Richard, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former MacArthur Foundation fellow, “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic”, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html?pagewanted=all]
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">(CO2), __****__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice. __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">Vertessy and Clark ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">3-13 **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 10pt;">- ****<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">2012 ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">[Rob, Acting Director of Australian Bureau of Meteorology, and Megan, Chief Executive Officer at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, “State of the Climate 2012”, <span style="color: windowtext; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 8pt; text-decoration: none;">[] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">]
 * __<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">AND __**
 * __<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">dominant cause of __****__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">the __****__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">observed __****__<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';"> CO2 increase is __****__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">the combustion of __****__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';"> fossil fuels . __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Potsdam Institute, 2012 ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">(Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics, “Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must be Avoided”, A report for the World Bank, November, http://climatechange.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/Turn_Down_the_heat_Why_a_4_degree_centrigrade_warmer_world_must_be_avoided.pdf)
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">The overall conclusions __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> of IPCC AR4 **__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">concerning __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> food production and **__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">agriculture included __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> the following:
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">ecosystems into a state unknown in human experience __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> (Barnosky et al., 2012
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Potsdam Institute, 2012 ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">(Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics, “Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must be Avoided”, A report for the World Bank, November, http://climatechange.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/Turn_Down_the_heat_Why_a_4_degree_centrigrade_warmer_world_must_be_avoided.pdf)
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">The emission pledges made at __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> the **__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">climate conventions __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> in Copenhagen and Cancun, **__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">if fully __**
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">AND __**
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Specht 13 **
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Alonso-Pippo et al. 8 **

**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Sugar ethanol importation from Cuba is superior to alternatives and solves impacts from domestic corn ethanol production—no environmental damage ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;">[Jonathan-J.D. Wash. U St. Louis, Legal Advisor, “Raising Cane: Cuban Sugarcane Ethanol’s Economic and Environmental Effects on the United States,” Environmental Law & Policy Journal, Univ. of California Davis, Vol. 36:2, [] ] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">B. Environmental Effects of Sugarcane-Based Ethanol <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ **__<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">If __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> future legislation does not <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">AND
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">The rise of the price of oil __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">above 80 USD/bbl .  **__<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">provides an __**
 * __<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">AND __**
 * __<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">movement toward the development of sugarcane as a viable alternative source of energy __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Specht 13 **
 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">to promote the importation of Cuban sugarcane-based ethanol should be encouraged __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">.

<span style="display: block; margin-top: 24pt; page-break-after: avoid; page-break-before: always; text-align: center;"> **__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 22pt;">Contention 4: Impact Debate __** **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">No great power war – interdependence, democracy, deterrence ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">[Doug, US Navy Lieutenant, “Now Hear This – Why the Age of Great-Power War Is Over”, May, 5/2012 [Lieutenant, US Navy, “”, US Naval Institute, <span style="color: windowtext; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 7pt; text-decoration: none;">[] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">In addition to geopolitical and diplomacy issues, globalization continues to transform the world. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">AND <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">a war is equal parts costly, counterproductive, archaic, and improbable. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Miscalc is impossible ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">[Sir Michael, visiting professor at King's College London, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Defence and former senior fellow at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, “Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects,” Oxford University Press] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">One special form of **__<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">miscalculation __** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">appeared sporadically in the speculations of academic commentators, though <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">AND <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">if necessary—that there was no misinterpretation of its conventionally armed launch. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Intervening actions check escalation ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">(Prof of History, Pennsylvania (Marc, The "Accidental War" Question, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/cv/inadv(1).pdf) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">The second point has to do with how much risk there really is in situations <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">AND __<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;">the system to keep relatively minor provocations from leading __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">directly __<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;"> to __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">general __<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt;"> war. __ **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Nuclear war doesn’t cause extinction ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">Yehoshua (Ph.D.), an inter-disciplinary physicist, is an expert in electro-optics, high-energy physics and applications, and material science and Moshe Yanovskiy, Jan 2, “Nuclear Proliferation and Democracy”, http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/01/nuclear_proliferation_and_demo.html, CMR <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">Nuclear proliferation should no longer be treated as an unthinkable nightmare; it is likely <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">AND <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">reality will most probably contain fewer nuclear-possessing states than the former. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Taboo is too strong – all of their scenarios are wrong ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">George Perkovich, International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, May 2009, “Extended Deterrence On The Way To A Nuclear Free World,” International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">The reality today is that **__<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">the taboo __** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">against using nuclear weapons **__<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">has become __** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">so **__<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; border: 2.25pt solid windowtext; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; padding: 0in;">strong __** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">AND
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Robb 2012 **
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Quinlan 2009 **
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Trachtenberg 2000 **
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 10pt;">Socol 2011 **
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Perkovich 2009 **
 * __<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% lime; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">obligation to fight for Taiwan __**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">ese independence if China has not committed aggression against Taiwan

=Neg Round 5=

Removing the embargo is a political battle that would use up Obama’s capital
<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 13pt;">Williams 5-3-13 (Carol J. Williams, LA Times foreign correspondent for 25 years, Carol J. Williams traveled to and reported from more than 80 countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America., “Political Calculus Keeps Cuba on US Terror List”, http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-cuba-us-terror-list-20130502,0,2494970.story) There was talk early in Obama’s first term of easing the 51-year-old embargo, and Kerry, though still in the Senate then, wrote a [|commentary] for the Tampa Bay Tribune in 2009 in which he deemed the security threat from Cuba “a faint shadow .” He called then for freer travel between the two countries and an end to the U.S. policy of isolating Cuba “that has manifestly failed for nearly 50 years.” The political clout of the Cuban American community in South Florida and more recently Havana’s refusal to release Gross have kept any warming between the Cold War adversaries at bay. It’s a matter of political priorities and trade-offs, Aramesh said. He noted that former Secretary of State [|Hillary Rodham Clinton] last year exercised her discretion to get the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen Khalq, or MEK, removed from the government’s list of designated terrorist organizations. That move was motivated by the hopes of some in Congress that the group could be aided and encouraged to eventually challenge the Tehran regime. “It’s a question of how much political cost you want to incur or how much political capital you want to spend,” Aramesh said. “President Obama has decided not to reach out to Cuba, that he has more important foreign policy battles elsewhere.” ====CIR key to the economy and competitiveness<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-weight: normal;">Green 7/2 - founder and president of FWD.us, an advocacy group created by technology leaders that promotes policies to keep the United States and its citizens competitive in a global economy (Joe, “House, knowledge economy needs immigrants”, [|__http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/02/opinion/green-immigration-reform/index.html__]) Our country has changed a lot during those 27 years, but not -- so far -- our immigration policy. Suffice it to say, __if we can pass__ our generation's __immigration reform, it will be a really big deal__.¶__America's greatest asset has always been its people__, drawn here from all over the world. In the 21st century, __our economic future depends on immigrants more than ever__. __The fastest-growing sector of our economy is the knowledge economy, where the main competitive difference is people__.¶ In a globalized world where people and businesses have their choice of countries to locate in, __continuing to have the best trained, hardest-working and most productive people in the world will keep the U__nited __S__tates __at the forefront of global competitiveness__. We have some huge advantages: the top universities in the world, the top scientific researchers, and -- right alongside these -- our identity as a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants.¶ At FWD.us, a nonprofit advocacy group, we are entrepreneurs, and we believe that one of the main reasons America is the leading entrepreneurial nation is that we are a nation of immigrants. Leaving behind your home country and everything you know to create a better life for your family is the essence of the risk-taking that characterizes the entrepreneurial ethos.¶ I think back to my ancestors in the shtetls of Eastern Europe in the 19th century. They had probably never been more than two miles from their village, and got on a steamship to go to a country they had never even seen in a picture, knowing they would never return home.¶ That is truly putting it all on the line to make a better life. It is not random, who chooses to emigrate, and the work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit of these immigrants have shaped the character of our country. Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley do not just identify with the experience of computer programmers coming to America to work at tech companies, but with everyone who comes here to make a better life. It's why we are working for comprehensive immigration reform.¶ There are talented young people in America who were brought here by their parents who now cannot go to college or work because they are undocumented. These DREAMers are just waiting to contribute, and their parents, with the right accountability measures, should be able to join them by coming out of the shadows and contributing fully to their communities.¶ In addition, we know that __the best and the brightest come here to study, start companies and create jobs that grow our economy__; millions more are caught in limbo navigating a complex and broken system that is totally outdated for a modern economy and modern American families. __We need to passc__omprehensive __i__mmigration __r__eform __to unlock those contributions and__ by doing so __change millions of lives.__Collapse of US global leadership causes great power war and extinction==== Events in Libya are a further reminder for **__Americans__** that we **__stand at a crossroads in our continuing evolution as the world's sole full-service superpower.__** Unfortunately, we are increasingly seeking change without cost, and shirking from risk because we are tired of the responsibility. We don't know who we are anymore, and our president is a big part of that problem. Instead of leading us, he explains to us. Barack Obama would have us believe that he is practicing strategic patience. But many experts and ordinary citizens alike have concluded that he is actually beset by strategic incoherence -- in effect, a man overmatched by the job. It is worth first examining the larger picture: We live in a time of arguably the greatest structural change in the global order yet endured, with this historical moment's most amazing feature being its relative and absolute lack of mass violence. That is something to consider when Americans contemplate military intervention in Libya, because if we do take the step to prevent larger-scale killing by engaging in some killing of our own, we will not be adding to some fantastically imagined global death count stemming from the ongoing "megalomania" and "evil" of American "empire." We'll be engaging in the same sort of system-administering activity that has marked our stunningly successful stewardship of global order since World War II. Let me be more blunt: **__As the guardian of globalization__**, **__the U.S. military has been the__** **__ greatest force for peace the world has ever known __**. **__Had America been removed from the global dynamics that governed the 20th century__**, the **__mass murder never would have ended__**. Indeed, it's entirely conceivable **__there would now be__** **__ no identifiable human civilization left __****__, once__** **__ nuclear weapons __** **__entered the killing equation.__** But **__the world did not keep sliding down that path of perpetual war__**. **__Instead, America stepped up and changed everything by ushering in our now-__****__ perpetual great-power peace __**. **__We introduced the international liberal trade order known as__** **__ globalization __** and played loyal Leviathan over its spread. **__What resulted was the collapse of empires,__** **__ an explosion of democracy __**, the **__ persistent spread of human rights __** , the liberation of women, **__ the doubling of life expectancy __** , a roughly **__ 10-fold increase in adjusted global GDP __** **__and a profound and persistent reduction in battle deaths from__** **__ state-based conflicts. __** That is what American "hubris" actually delivered. Please remember that the next time some TV pundit sells you the image of "unbridled" American military power as the cause of global disorder instead of its cure. With self-deprecation bordering on self-loathing, we now imagine a post-American world that is anything but. Just watch who scatters and who steps up as the Facebook revolutions erupt across the Arab world. While we might imagine ourselves the status quo power, we remain the world's most vigorously revisionist force. As for the sheer "evil" that is our military-industrial complex, again, let's examine what the world looked like before that establishment reared its ugly head. The last great period of global structural change was the first half of the 20th century, a period that saw a death toll of about 100 million across two world wars. That comes to an average of 2 million deaths a year in a world of approximately 2 billion souls. Today, with far more comprehensive worldwide reporting, researchers report an average of less than 100,000 battle deaths annually in a world fast approaching 7 billion people. Though admittedly crude, these **__calculations suggest a 90 percent absolute drop and a__** **__ 99 percent __****__relative__** **__ drop in deaths due to war. __** We are clearly headed for a world order characterized by multipolarity, something the American-birthed system was designed to both encourage and accommodate. But given how things turned out the last time we collectively faced such a fluid structure, **__we would do well to keep U.S. power, in all of its forms__**, deeply embedded in the geometry to come. To continue the historical survey, after salvaging Western Europe from its half-century of civil war, the U.S. emerged as the progenitor of a new, far more just form of globalization -- one based on actual free trade rather than colonialism. America then successfully replicated globalization further in East Asia over the second half of the 20th century, setting the stage for the Pacific Century now unfolding.
 * Barnett 11 ** (Thomas P.M., Former Senior Strategic Researcher and Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College American military geostrategist and Chief Analyst at Wikistrat., worked as the Assistant for Strategic Futures in the Office of Force Transformation in the Department of Defense, “The New Rules: Leadership Fatigue Puts U.S., and Globalization, at Crossroads,” March 7, CMR)

Sanctions are marked as failure of hardliners – removing it provides clout for the totalitarian model
<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 16pt;">Bandow 2012 (Doug Bandow, Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of several books, including Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire, 12-11-12, “Time to End Cuba Embargo”, nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-pointless-cuba-embargo-7834 Cuban human rights activists also gen erally oppose sanctions . A decade ago I (legally) visited Havana, where I met Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz, who suffered in communist prisons for eight years. He told me that //the "sanctions policy gives the government a good alibi to justify the failure of the totalitarian model in Cuba."// Indeed, it is only by posing as an opponent of Yanqui Imperialism that Fidel Castro has achieved an international reputation //. If he had been ignored by Washington, he never would have been anything other than an obscure authoritarian windbag//. Unfortunately, embargo supporters never let reality get in the way of their arguments. In 1994, John Sweeney of the Heritage Foundation declared that “ the embargo remains the only effective instrument available to the U.S. government in trying to force the economic and democratic concessions it has been demanding of Castro for over three decades. Maintaining the embargo will help end the Castro regime more quickly .” The latter’s collapse, he wrote, is more likely in the near term than ever before. Almost two decades later, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, retains faith in the embargo: “ The sanctions on the regime must remain in place and, in fact, should be strengthened, and not be altered. ” One of the best definitions of insanity is continuing to do the same thing while expecting to achieve different results. The embargo survives largely because of Florida’s political importance. Every presidential candidate wants to win the Sunshine State’s electoral votes, and the Cuban American community is a significant voting bloc.

Turns the aff - democracy improves lives of citizens: (1) decreases corruption; (2) fosters human rights; (3) boosts economy
Minxin Pei , Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Implementing the Institutions of Democracy,” INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON WORLD PEACE v. 19 n. 4, December ** 20 **  02  , p. 3+. The establishment of democratic institutions may also produce practical benefits for the countries that adopt them. Such benefits may come in various forms, such as less corruption in government, better protection of human rights, and greater economic prosperity. The work by Amartya Sen has made a powerful case that political rights protected under democratic institutions can drastically improve the well-being of average citizens. (19) The argument that democratic governance, which fosters political competition and public participation in the political process, should help contain corruption seems quite persuasive. The world's most corrupt regimes in recent years, which include Marcos in the Philippines, the Duvaliers in Haiti, Mobutu regime in the former Zaire, and Suharto in Indonesia, were all dictatorships that had degenerated into kleptocracies. Theory and evidence both support the view that democracies, which have by definition real opposition forces, organized civil society groups, and a watchful press, are unlikely to allow such predatory regimes to survive for so long and plunder their countries so thoroughly. Researchers who have used extensive data to analyze various factors that may contribute to or curb corruption conclude that civil liberties and their institutional manifestations (such as a free press and vigorous civil society) play an important role in explaining the variations in the degree of corruption across nations: countries with higher degrees of civil liberties are found to have less corrupt government. (20) Of course, there are significant variations in the level of good governance achieved by democracies across countries. Generally speaking, however, established democratic regimes are perceived to be less corrupt than newly democratized ones. (21) <span style="display: block; margin-top: 10pt; page-break-after: avoid; page-break-before: always; text-align: center;"> **__ Brazil 1nc Shell – Sphere of Influence __** ** Uniqueness - US absence in region provides Brazil opportunity to assert its regional power ** (Susanne Gratius and Miriam Gomes Saraiva “Continental Regionalism: Brazil’s prominent role in the Americas” No. 374 /February 2013 [|__http://www.ceps.eu/book/continental-regionalism-brazil%E2%80%99s-prominent-role-americas__] accessed tm 7-15) ¶ <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">There was no agreement with the United States over how regional issues should be dealt <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> with, but __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">the absence of a US policy for the region prevented any stand-off between the two __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">countries. The Brazilian government has operated autonomously whenever issues relating to __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">the continent have arisen. Washington’s low-profile in Latin America and the concentration __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">of a few countries of strategic interest __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> (Colombia, Central America and Mexico) __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">facilitated __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">Brazil’s proactive Latin American policy. __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">The Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> project was the last attempt to design a hemispheric project. Its failure at the Summit in Mar <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> del Plata in 2005 proved the limits of Washington’s traditional hegemony in the Americas <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> and contributed to a stronger regional profile of its rival in the South. Without a hemispheric <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> project, the Organization of American States (OAS) “lacks a guiding vision”23 and lost appeal <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> in Latin America. Although the OAS is still the most consolidated collective institution in the <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> Americas, it lacks both leadership and followers. Moreover, a serious financial crisis is <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;"> further weakening the traditional organisation __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">. Brazil is promoting regional concertation __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">outside the traditional framework instead of increasing its weight in the inter-American __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">environment, which reflects a US hegemony. __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';"> Against that background, __Brazil perceives regional integration not only as a goal in itself but__ __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ ____<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">also as an instrument for autonomy and ‘soft-balancing’ the United States. ____<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">24 __ <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">Thus, its attitude <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">towards integration is not free of self-interest. __Apart from common regional goals, the__ __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ ____<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">country also seeks to implement a neighbourhood policy that serves Brazil’s power ____<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ ____<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">aspirations ____<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 7pt;">25 ____<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">in South America and the Americas. __ ** B. Economic ties with neighbors help Brazil achieve regional leadership ** (Hal “DILEMMAS OF BRAZILIAN GRAND STRATEGY“ __Strategic Studies Institute Monograph__ August 2010 http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1017.pdf As this diplomacy indicates, __Brazil is aiming for what one scholar calls “consensual hegemony__ .”62 Brazilian officials seek to portray their country’s diplomacy as a benign, unthreatening project so as to avoid reviving traditional fears of a hegemonic Brazil and thereby driving South American countries toward Caracas or Washington. (How successful they have been in doing so is open to dispute.) __Accordingly, for Brazil to achieve effective regional leadership, it will have to forge consensual arrangements that provide its neighbors with economic and political benefits while drawing them deeper into the Brazilian orbit.__ ** C – Democracy ** ** 1. Brazil regional hegemony means expanded push for democratization ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">Brazil **<span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 10pt;"> - 2013 ** <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 10pt;">Oliver “Rising Powers and the Future of Democracy <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 10pt;">Promotion: the case of Brazil and India”, __Third World Quarterly__, 34:2, 339-355 Taylor and Francis accessed tm 7/15 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">This brief analysis shows that __Brazil is increasingly assertive in its region,__ __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ ____<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">and willing to intervene if political crises threaten democracy. Brazil is most ____<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ ____<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">likely to intervene during constitutional crises and political ruptures __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">, and less so <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">when procedural issues during elections may affect the outcome**—**as was the <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">case during Hugo Chavez**’** re-election in 2012, when several commentators criticised <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">Brazil**’**s decision not to pressure the Venezuelan government to ensure fair elections.74 Yet, __despite this distinction, it seems clear that the consolidation of__ __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ ____<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">democracy in the region has turned into one of Brazil’s fundamental foreign ____<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">¶ ____<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">policy goals __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';">. ** 2. Democratic decision-making is best for the environment, spreads risks proportionately and includes more voices into the equation ** [|__Akash__][|**Goreeba**] [writing for E-International Relations, an online resource and news outlet for global affairs] [|__Environmental Democracy? Does Anyone Really Care?__] October 26, ** 2012 ** [|__http://www.e-ir.info/2012/10/26/environmental-democracy-does-anyone-really-care/__] It is not surprising that EU policy has placed emphasis on just sustainability a year after and EU governance white paper was produced (2001). In this White Paper, ‘’the modernization of European governance is seen as a necessary precondition for European integration **__ through a process of decentralization __**, combating the impact of globalization, and **__ a restoration of faith in democracy through wider involvement in decision making’ __** ’ (Agyeman & Evans 2004, p.162). ¶ We have seen from the above the problematic of environmental justice. It is arguably particularly difficult when considered in the global context. It is not surprising that attempts to safeguard and provide environmental justice have now taken a small scale dimension. An example of a more small scale attempt at addressing the effects on environmental justice/injustice is the Environmental Justice Showcase Community by the EPA (environmental protection agency). Recently it was announced that the State of Jacksonville USA had been selected for the pilot scheme which would see a cash injection of over $100,000 by the EPA which would go towards addressing the environmental issues suffered by low income and minority communities. ¶ ‘’EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that, under the initiative, Jacksonville will be one of the national models for EPA’s commitment to EJ efforts. EJ refers to the disproportionate environmental burdens placed on low-income and minority communities’’ (EPA News Release, 04/2010). The project aims at working with the likes of schools, community organisations, local residents, as well as federal agencies. Greg Strong, Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Northeast District Director stated that ‘’we can achieve much more collectively, when we combine and leverage our resources, than as stand-alone organizations working independently… This kick-off event is an excellent way for us to find new opportunities to work collaboratively with our partners in order to benefit the local community and further improve human health and the environment’’(EPA News Release, 04/2010). ¶ Those such as the EJF (Environmental Justice Foundation) have already done well to illustrate the usefulness of small scale local and community projects aimed at addressing environmental injustices, the EJF essentially operates via providing film and advocacy training and empowering ‘’local’’ communities. Some notable examples where this has been successful include the Cambodian Fisheries Action Coalition Team, or (FACT). The Team aimed to resolve conflicts over freshwater fisheries, in short the EJC ‘’ trained and equipped FACT with essential cameras, computer equipment, internet access and GPS systems. And thereby helped FACT gather essential information and testimonies and co-produced ‘Feast or Famine’, which was launched at a meeting hosted by the UK Ambassador to Cambodia and attended by World Bank, IMF and other representatives of the donor community, helping to put the issues firmly on the political agenda’’ (EJF 2010). ¶ Other examples include the EJF’s ‘’educating on nature in Vietnam’’, ‘’CEDAC’’ aimed at reducing the use of deadly pesticides in Cambodia, and ‘’JALA’’ aimed at combating illegal fishing and helping poor fisherman in Sumatra. All the examples above have in common that they operated in the ‘’local’’ communities. Perhaps it is the case that both democracy and justice are best implemented at a local level. ¶ We have looked at the importance as well as the problematic nature of environmental democracy and justice. As problematic as the two are, their importance are undeniable. There are numerous organisations and NGO’s that are dedicated to ensuring environmental democracy and justice, some of which have been discussed above. In a world where we are witnessing environmental degradation and problems globally, effective democracy and justice is a necessity. ¶ **__ Good environmental governance equates to good environmental democracy/justice __**. We have seen how **__ minorities have suffered disproportionate environmental dis-benefits. In a supposed free world it is only fair that everyone should be allowed to experience both the risks and benefits associated with the environment, as well as future generations to come __**. And whilst from the above it is clear that **__ environmental democracy __** /justice has a long way to go, it **__ has done well so far to deal with many environmental issues globally, __** usually small scale and local. But it is undoubtedly the case that small scale localised efforts are most effective. It remains to be seen whether implementation of small scale localised agendas ‘’globally’’ will prove fruitful. And whilst the likes of Agyeman above, have argued that the majority of environmental issues ‘’fail to register a signal’, this is undeniably changing. Thanks to the efforts of the many who go out of their way to make consideration for the environment a key part of modern life. <span style="border: none; display: block; margin-top: 24pt; padding: 0in; page-break-after: avoid; page-break-before: always; text-align: center;">** Cuba Oil 1NC On ** <span style="display: block; margin-top: 24pt; page-break-after: avoid; page-break-before: always; text-align: center;"> **__ Solvency __** ** <If you can find where the cards against the Solvency contention are, you are a greater man (or womyn) than I> ** <span style="display: block; margin-top: 24pt; page-break-after: avoid; page-break-before: always; text-align: center;"> **__ China __**
 * Gratius and Saraia, 2013**
 * Brands** Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Duke University and former de­fense analyst **2010**
 * <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 10pt;">Stuenkel **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 8pt;">School of Social Science (CPDOC) of Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) in São Paulo,

A) Political views
Hanson and Lee 13 (Stephanie and Brianna – Council on Foreign Relations, “U.S.-Cuba Relations”, 1/31, http://www.cfr.org/cuba/us-cuba-relations/p11113) What is the //main obstacle// in U.S.-Cuban relations ? A fundamental //incompatibility// of //political views// stands in the way of improving U.S.-Cuban relations, experts say. While experts say the //U// nited //S// tates wants regime change, "the most important objective of the Cuban government is to //remain in power// at all costs ," says Felix Martin, an assistant professor at Florida International University's Cuban Research Institute. Fidel Castro has been an inspiration for Latin American leftists such a s Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Bolivian President Evo Morales, who have challenged U.S. policy in the region.

B) Human Rights, Guantanamo, and Cuban exiles
Hanson and Lee 13 (Stephanie and Brianna – Council on Foreign Relations, “U.S.-Cuba Relations”, 1/31, http://www.cfr.org/cuba/us-cuba-relations/p11113) What are the issues //preventing normalization// of U.S.-Cuba relations ? Experts say these issues include : //Human rights violations//. In March 2003, the Cuban government arrested seventy-five dissidents and journalists, sentencing them to prison terms of up to twenty-eight years on charges of conspiring with the United States to overthrow the state. The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, a Havana-based nongovernmental group, reports that the government has in recent years resorted to other tactics besides prison --such as firings from state jobs and intimidation on the street-- to silence opposition figures. A 2005 UN Human Rights Commission vote condemned Cuba's human rights record, but the country was elected to the new UN Human Rights Council in 2006. //Guantanamo Bay//. Cuba indicated after 9/11 that it would not object if the United States brought prisoners to Guantanamo Bay. However, experts such as Sweig say Cuban officials have since seized on the U.S. prison camp --where hundreds of terror suspects have been detained-- as a " //symbol of solidarity// " with the rest of the world against the //U// nited //S// tates. Although Obama ordered Guantanamo to be closed by January 22, 2010, the facility remains open as of January 2013, and many analysts say it is likely to stay in operation for an extended period. //Cuban exile community//. The Cuban-American community in southern Florida traditionally has heavily influenced U.S. policy with Cuba. Both political parties //fear alienating a strong voting bloc// in an important swing state in presidential elections.

C) The rest of the Embargo – the plan is only a fraction
Hanson 13 (Daniel – economics researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, “It's Time For The U.S. To End Its Senseless Embargo Of Cuba”, 1/16, http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/01/16/its-time-for-the-u-s-to-end-its-senseless-embargo-of-cuba/) While the embargo has been through several legal iterations in the intervening years, the general tenor of the U.S. position toward Cuba is a //hardline// not-in-my-backyard approach to communism a la the Monroe Doctrine. The official position is outdated, hypocritical, and //counterproductive//. The Cuban embargo was inaugurated by a Kennedy administration executive order in 1960 as a response to the confiscation of American property in Cuba under the newly installed Castro regime. The current incarnation of the embargo – codified primarily in the Helms-Burton Act – aims at producing free markets and representative democracy in Cuba through //economic sanctions//, //travel restrictions// , and //international legal penalties//.

Taiwan-China relations are high
Cole 12 -- Taipei-based journalist who focuses on military issues in Northeast Asia and in the Taiwan Strait (J. Michael, 9/3, "Taiwan Hedges its Bets on China," http://thediplomat.com/flashpoints-blog/2012/09/03/taiwan-hedges-its-bets-against-china/) //By a number of yardsticks//, relations in the Taiwan Strait today are the best they’ve been in years //, if not ever //. But if a report released by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) on Friday is any indication, Taiwanese government officials don’t appear to be convinced that such détente will last for very long. Without doubt, the pace of normalization in relations between Taiwan and China, especially at the economic level, has  // accelerated dramatically // since Ma Ying-jeou of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was elected in 2008, a process that is expected to continue with Ma securing a second four-year term in January. In addition to the landmark Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed in June 2010, the governments on both sides have inked at least 16 agreements touching on various aspects of cross-strait relations, including an agreement reached on Friday that will allow banks in Taiwan to clear renminbi transactions, a move that obviates the need for converting the currency into U.S. dollars before a transaction can be made. Beyond trade, visits to Taiwan by Chinese officials have become almost routine , a limited  number of Chinese can now study at Taiwan’s universities  ,  Chinese tourism to the island has boomed  , and  joint exercises by the countries’ respective coast guards are now held every other year  since 2010, mostly for the purpose of sea-rescue operations in the waters off Taiwan’s Kinmen and China’s Xiamen.

No US-China war – economics
Shor 12 (Francis, Professor of History – Wayne State, “Declining US Hegemony and Rising Chinese Power: A Formula for Conflict?”, Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 11(1), pp. 157-167) While the U nited S tates no longer dominates the global economy as it did during the first two decades after WWII, it still is the leading economic power in the world. However, over the last few decades China , with all its internal contradictions, has made enormous leaps until it now occupies the number two spot. In fact, the IMF recently projected that the Chinese economy would become the world's largest in 2016. In manufacturing China has displaced the US in so many areas, including becoming the number one producer of steel and exporter of four-fifths of all of the textile products in the world and two-thirds of the world's copy machines, DVD players, and microwaves ovens. Yet, a significant portion of this manufacturing is still owned by foreign companies, including U.S. firms like General Motors. [5] On the other hand, China is also the  // largest holder of U.S. foreign reserves //, //e.g. treasury bonds//. This may be one of the reasons // mitigating full-blown conflict //  with the U.S. now, since China has such a large stake in the U.S. economy, both as a holder of bonds and as the leading exporter of goods to the U.S. Nonetheless, "the U.S. has blocked several large scale Chinese investments and buyouts of oil companies, technology firms, and other enterprises." [6] In effect, there are still clear nation-centric responses to China's rising economic power, especially as an expression of the U.S. governing elite's ideological commitment to national security. <span style="display: block; margin-top: 24pt; page-break-after: avoid; page-break-before: always; text-align: center;"> **__ Econ __** ** 1. No commercially viable oil in Cuba – companies are backing out ** ** 2. Gorrell evidence is from 05 since then Cuba has been involved in joint ventures with the US to work against terrorist organizations ** ** 3. Bryan is from 01, relations haven’t improved then and there has not yet been a bioterror attack ** ** 4. Cuba is not a terrorist threat – engaging in peace talks ** Once a key supplier of arms and training to leftist rebels in Latin America, the Castro regime long ago disentangled itself from the Cold War-era confrontations. **__ Havana now hosts peace talks __** between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia that it once supported and the U.S.-allied government the insurgents battled for years. **__Havana still gives refuge to a few fugitive radicals__** from the Black Panthers and Basque insurgents, and two years ago a Cuban court convicted 64-year-old development specialist Alan Gross on spying charges for attempting to install satellite equipment without government permission. **__But nothing that Cuba has done suggests its government is plotting harm against Americans, national security experts say. And they criticize as counterproductive the__** [|**__State Department__**]**__’s decision, disclosed this week, to keep Cuba on its list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” “We ought to reserve that term for nations that actually use the apparatus of statehood to support the targeting of U.S. interests and civilians,”__** said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the [|Department of Homeland Security] and now writing and lecturing on national security in the Boston area. “ **__Yes, Cuba does a lot of bad things that we don’t like, but it doesn’t rise to anything on the level of a terrorist threat.”__** On Wednesday, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said the administration “has no current plans to remove Cuba” from the list to be released later this month. The island nation that has been under a U.S. trade and travel embargo since shortly after revolutionary leader Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 is in the company of only Iran, Syria and Sudan in being branded with the “state sponsor” label. **__Kayyem laments the “diluting” of the terrorist designation based on political or ideological disputes. “We work with a lot of countries we don’t like, but the imprimatur of ‘terrorism’ has a ring to it in a way that can be harmful to us,”__** she said. **__ Collaboration between the United States and Cuba __** on emergency planning **__ to respond to the mutual threats __** posed by hurricanes, oil spills and refugee crises **__ are complicated by the set of trade and financial restrictions that comes along with the “state sponsor” censure __****__, Kayyem__** said. “There are some real operational impediments when we have a system that begins with ‘no’ rather than ‘why not?’ ” she said of the legally encumbered contacts between Havana and Washington **__. Politicians who have pushed for a continued hard line against Cuba cheered their victory in getting the Obama administration to keep Cuba on the list.__** U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a South Florida Republican whose **__efforts to isolate and punish the Castro regime have been a central plank of her election strategy throughout her 24 years in Congress,__** hailed the State Department decision as “reaffirming the threat that the Castro regime represents.” **__Arash Aramesh, a national security analyst at Stanford Law School, blamed the continued branding of Cuba as a terrorism sponsor on politicians “pandering for a certain political base.” He also said President Obama and secretary of State John F. Kerry have failed to make a priority of removing the impediment to better relations with Cuba. “ As much as I’d like to see the Castro regime gone and an open and free Cuba, it takes away from the State Department’s credibility when they include countries on the list that aren’t even close” to threatening Americans __**//<span style="color: #404040; font-family: 'Cambria','serif';">, // Aramesh said. ** 5. Sandberg evidence says this has been a threat since 08, be skeptical on the probability. Stock isn’t even specific to Latin America, it’s about the coast guard ** ** 6. Data disproves hegemony impacts ** It is perhaps worth noting that **__ there is no evidence to support a __** **__direct relationship between __** the relative level of **__ U.S. activism and international stability __**. In fact, **__the limited data we do have suggest the opposite may be true__**. During the 1990s, the United States cut back on its defense spending fairly substantially **__. By 1998, the United States was spending $100 billion less on defense in real terms than it had in 1990__** .51 To internationalists, defense hawks and believers in hegemonic stability, this irresponsible “peace dividend” endangered both national and global security. “No serious analyst of American military capabilities,” argued Kristol and Kagan, “doubts that the defense budget has been cut much too far to meet America’s responsibilities to itself and to world peace.”52 On the other hand, **__if__** the pacific **__trends were not based upon U.S. hegemony but__** **__a strengthening norm against interstate war, one would not have expected an increase in global instability and violence.__** ¶ The verdict from the past two decades is fairly plain: **__ The world grew more peaceful while the U __** nited **__ S __** tates **__ cut its forces. No state __** **__seemed to believe that its security was endangered by a less-capable U__** nited **__S__** tates **__military__**, or at least **__none took any action that would suggest__** **__such a belief__**. **__ No militaries __** **__were enhanced to address power vacuums, no security dilemmas drove insecurity or arms races, and no regional balancing occurred once the stabilizing presence of the U.S. military was diminished__**. The rest of the world acted as if the threat of international war was not a pressing concern, despite the reduction in U.S. capabilities. Most of all, the United States and its allies were no less safe. The incidence and magnitude of global conflict declined while the United States cut its military spending under President Clinton, and kept declining as the Bush Administration ramped the spending back up. No complex statistical analysis should be necessary to reach the conclusion that the two are unrelated. ¶ Military spending figures by themselves are insufficient to disprove a connection between overall U.S. actions and international stability. Once again, one could presumably argue that spending is not the only or even the best indication of hegemony, and that it is instead U.S. foreign political and security commitments that maintain stability. Since neither was significantly altered during this period, instability should not have been expected. Alternately, advocates of hegemonic stability could believe that relative rather than absolute spending is decisive in bringing peace. Although the United States cut back on its spending during the 1990s, its relative advantage never wavered. ¶ However, **__even if it is true that either U.S. commitments__** or relative spending **__account for global__** pacific **__trends__**, then at the very least stability can evidently be maintained at drastically lower levels of both. In other words, even if one can be allowed to argue in the alternative for a moment and suppose that **__there is in fact a level of engagement below which the U__** nited **__S__** tates **__cannot drop without increasing international disorder, a rational grand strategist would still recommend cutting back on engagement and spending until that level is determined__**. **__Grand strategic decisions are never final__** ; continual **__adjustments can__** and must **__be made__** as time goes on. Basic logic suggests that the United States ought to spend the minimum amount of its blood and treasure while seeking the maximum return on its investment. And if the current era of stability is as stable as many believe it to be, no increase in conflict would ever occur irrespective of U.S. spending, which would save untold trillions for an increasingly debt-ridden nation. ¶ It is also perhaps worth noting that if opposite trends had unfolded, if other states had reacted to news of cuts in U.S. defense spending with more aggressive or insecure behavior, then internationalists would surely argue that their expectations had been fulfilled **__. If increases in conflict would have been interpreted as proof of the wisdom of internationalist strategies, then logical consistency demands that the lack thereof should__** at least **__pose a problem__**. As it stands, **__ the only evidence __** **__we have regarding the likely systemic reaction to a more restrained U nited S tates suggests that the current peaceful trends are unrelated to U.S. military spending__**. Evidently **__the rest of the world can operate__** quite **__effectively without the presence of a global policeman. Those who think otherwise base their view on faith alone.__**
 * Gibson 4/14 ** (William – Washington Bureau, “Companies abandon search for oil in Cuba's deep waters”, 2013, http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2013-04-14/news/fl-cuban-oil-drilling-retreat-20130414_1_jorge-pi-north-coast-cuban-officials)
 * __ After spending nearly $700 million during a decade, energy companies from __****__ around the world __****__ have all but __****__ abandoned their search __****__ for oil in __** **__deep waters off the north coast of Cuba __** near Florida, a blow to the Castro regime but a relief to environmentalists worried about a major oil spill. **__ Decisions by __** Spain-based **__Repsol and other companies to drill elsewher e__** greatly **__ reduce the chances that a giant slick __** **__along the Cuban coast would ride ocean currents to South Florida__**, threatening its beaches, inlets, mangroves, reefs and multibillion-dollar tourism industry. The Coast Guard remains prepared to contain, skim, burn or disperse a potential slick. And Cuban officials still yearn for a lucrative strike that would prop up its economy. A Russian company, Zarubezhneft, is drilling an exploratory well in shallower waters hugging the Cuban shoreline south of the Bahamas. **__But though some oil has been found offshore, exploratory drilling in deep waters __** near currents that rush toward Florida has **__ failed __****__ to reveal __****__ big deposits __****__ that would be __****__ commercially viable __****__ to extract __** , **__discouraging companies from pouring more money into the search.__** " **__Those companies are saying,__** **__'We cannot spend any more capital on this high-risk exploration__** . We'd rather go to Brazil; we'd rather go to Angola; we'd rather go to other places in the world where the technological and geological challenges are less,'" **__said Jorge Piñon, an oil-industry analyst__** at the University of Texas who consults with U.S. and Cuban officials as well as energy companies. " **__ I don't foresee any time in the future exploration in Cuba's deep-water north coast. __****__ It is, for all practical purposes, over." __**
 * Williams 5-3-13 ** (Carol J. Williams, LA Times foreign correspondent for 25 years, Carol J. Williams traveled to and reported from more than 80 countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America., “Political Calculus Keeps Cuba on US Terror List”, http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-cuba-us-terror-list-20130502,0,2494970.story)
 * Fettweis, 11 **Christopher J. Fettweis, Department of Political Science, Tulane University, 9/26/11, Free Riding or Restraint? Examining European Grand Strategy, Comparative Strategy, 30:316–332, EBSCO

Drilling profits will be slow – not solve dependence or cutoff fears
Emily A. Peterson  ¶ Daniel J.  Whittle , J.D. ¶  and  Douglas N.  Rader  , Ph.D ¶ December  2012  “Bridging the Gulf ¶ Finding Common Ground on Environmental and ¶ Safety Preparedness for Offshore Oil and Gas in Cuba”, http://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/EDF-Bridging_the_Gulf-2012.pdf Energy experts also note that examples from deep water exploratory drilling around the ¶ world demonstrate that it is not atypical to drill numerous dry or commercially unviable ¶ holes in new fields before a profitable discovery is found.24 Jorge Piñón, the former president ¶ of Amoco Oil Latin America and now an energy specialist at the University of Texas at Austin, ¶  explained that economic discoveries often play out  // over a longer time horizon //. “A lot of people  ¶  have been very naïve in thinking that an oil-rich Cuba was going to materialize overnight , and ¶ // that is not the case // ,” Piñón said. “ You don’t just turn the faucet on overnight .”25

No supply cutoff – new Venezuelan president is an ally
Peter Orsi 4/5  “Cuba avoids oil cutoff for now as Chavez ally narrowly wins Venezuela presidential election”, http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Cuba+avoids+cutoff+Chavez+ally+narrowly+wins+Venezuela+presidential+election/8244434/story.html Cuba ns were //relieved// Monday by the announcement that the late leader Hugo Chavez's hand-picked successor had been elected Venezuela's new president, apparently allowing their country to // dodge a threatened cutoff // of  billions of dollars in subsidized  oil. Cuban President Raul Castro sent a congratulatory message to Nicolas Maduro, who is seen as an  //ideological ally //  who will want to continue the  countries' // special relationship // as he serves out the remainder of Chavez's six-year term. " The main thing from Cuba's point of view is that //he's won//, if it's ratified," said Paul Webster Hare, a lecturer in international relations at Boston University and former British diplomatic envoy to both Venezuela and Cuba. "They will probably be thinking that they now have perhaps a maximum of five years of Venezuelan subsidies left," Hare said, "because if the trend continues moving against him, as I think is likely, this will be the last term even if they are able to continue all the subsidies for that period. ... The clock's ticking for that relationship." <span style="display: block; margin-top: 24pt; page-break-after: avoid; page-break-before: always; text-align: center;"> **__ Environment __** ** No drilling in the squo – all companies have bailed. ** Mary ** O'Grady ** (is a member of the editorial board at The Wall Street Journa) WSJ – April 24, ** 2013 ** http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324474004578442511561458392.html ** Cuban drilling is safe – access to technology and safety standards prove ** ** Status quo solves – US inspections of rigs ** On Christmas Eve, **__ a __** **__massive,__** **__ Chinese-made __****__ maritime oil rig, the Scarabeo 9, arrived __** at Trinidad and Tobago for inspection. The **__Spanish oil company Repsol __** YPF, which keeps regional headquarters in Trinidad, **__ ferried it to the Caribbean to perform __****__ deep-ocean drilling off Cuba __** — whose communist government believes as much as 20 billion barrels of crude may lie near the island's northwest coast. But **__ it wasn't Cuban authorities who __** **__came aboard the Scarabeo 9__** **__to give it the __****__ once-over __** : **__ officials from the U.S. Coast Guard __** **__and Interior Department did __**, **__even though the rig won't be operating in U.S. waters__**. On any other occasion that might have raised the ire of the Cubans, who consider Washington their imperialista enemy. But the U **__.S. examination of the Scarabeo 9__**, which Repsol agreed to and Cuba abided, **__was part of an unusual choreography of cooperation between the two countries__**. Their otherwise bitter cold-war feud (they haven't had diplomatic relations since 1961) is best known for a 50-year-long trade embargo and history's scariest nuclear standoff. Now, Cuba's commitment to offshore oil exploration — drilling may start this weekend — raises a specter that haunts both nations: an oil spill in the Florida Straits like the BP calamity that tarred the nearby Gulf of Mexico two years ago and left $40 billion in U.S. damages. The Straits, an equally vital body of water that's home to some of the world's most precious coral reefs, separates Havana and Key West, Florida, by a mere 90 miles. As a result, the U.S. has tacitly loosened its embargo against Cuba to give firms like Repsol easier access to the U.S. equipment they need to help avoid or contain possible spills. "Preventing drilling off Cuba better protects our interests than preparing for [a disaster] does," U.S. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida tells TIME, noting the U.S. would prefer to stop the Cuban drilling — but can't. "But the two are not mutually exclusive, and that's why we should aim to do both ." **__ Cuba meanwhile has tacitly __****__ agreed to ensure __****__ that its safety measures meet __****__ U.S. standards __** (not that U.S. standards proved all that golden during the 2010 BP disaster) **__ and is letting unofficial U.S. delegations in to discuss the precautions being taken by Havana __** and the international oil companies it is contracting. No Cuban official would discuss the matter, but Dan Whittle, senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund in New York, who was part of one recent delegation, says the Cubans "seem very motivated to do the right thing." =1NC July 13 practice debate=
 * __ Then came promises of an oil boom and __** last week **__ the predictable bust. __** The **__ Brazil __** ian state-owned Petrobras PETR4.BR +1.01% **__ had given up on deep-sea drilling in Cuba __** n waters in 2011. **__ Repsol __** REP.MC -2.46% **__ gave up in __** May **__ 2012 __** . The deep water platform it was using was then passed to **__ Malaysia __** 's state-owned Petronas, which also **__ came up empty __** . **__ Venezuela __** 's PdVSA **__ had no luck either __** . In November **__ Cuba announced that the rig that had been in use would be heading to Asia __** . **__ Last week __****__ came the end of shallow-water drilling. __**
 * Sadowksi 12 ** (Richard – Managing Editor of Production of the Journal of International Business and Law Vol. X, J.D Candidate at Hofstra University, “Cuban Offshore Drilling: Preparation and Prevention within the Framework of the United States’ Embargo”, 2012, http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1497&context=sdlp)
 * __Fears that Cuban offshore drilling poses serious__** **__ environmental threats __** **__because of the proximity to the__** **__ U __** nited **__ S __** tates **__and the prohibition on U.S. technology transfer__** **__ are overblown __** . **__ Cuba has at least as much incentive to ensure __****__ safe-drilling practices __****__ as does the __** **__ U __** nited **__ S __** tates, and **__reports indicate that Cuba is __****__ taking safety seriously __****__.__** 64 Lee Hunt, President of the Houston-based International Association of Drilling Contractors, said, “[t] **__he Cuban oil industry has put a lot of research, study and thought into what will be required to safely drill __**, ” and that “ **__they are very knowledgeable of international industry practices__** **__and have incorporated many of these principles__** into their **__ s afety __** **__ and __****__ regulatory __****__ planning and requirements __** . ” 65 Thus, while the economic embargo of Cuba restricts American technology from being uti - lized ,  **__ foreign sources have provided __****__ supplemental alternatives __** . 66
 * Padgett 12 **(Tim, “The Oil Off Cuba: Washington and Havana Dance at Arms Length Over Spill Prevention”, 1/27, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2105598,00.html)

Commercial Engagement Topicality
a. Interpretation - Economic Engagement must create economic agreements and cooperation between states - Facilitating trade through investment makes the plan “commercial” Woolcock 13 – Stephen Woolcock, Lecturer in International Relations at The London School of Economics, and Sir Nicholas Bayne, Fellow at the International Trade Policy Unit of the London School of Economics, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy, p. 387

Before suggesting some ways in which economic diplomacy could be seen as a distinct branch of diplomacy it is helpful to limit the scope of the term by saying what it is not. Our definition of economic diplomacy does not include the use of economic leverage, either in the form of sanctions or inducement, in the pursuit of specific political or strategic goals. This we would define as sanctions or perhaps economic statecraft. 2 Economic diplomacy is about the creation and distribution of the economic benefits from international economic relations. Clearly political and strategic interests will be a factor in economic negotiations, whether in terms of promoting a liberal, capitalist world order or in choosing negotiating partners tor trade agreements. 'I he conclusion of a trade or economic agreement can be seen as a means of promoting economic stability, growth, and employment and thus political stability in a country, such as in the countries of North Africa that have undergone reform since the spring of 2011. But the means remain the economic agreement, the substance of which will be shaped by a range of domestic sectoral and other interests. In other words, political objectives will not infrequently be a factor in decisions to initiate negotiations, but the concrete agenda, content, and conduct of the negotiations will be largely determined by economic factors and interests. We include international environment negotiations in our definition of economic diplomacy because of the close interdependence between economic and environmental objectives. By extension we also see economic diplomacy as an integrated part of a grand strategy combining political, military, and economic relations. Nor does our definition of economic diplomacy __ include the promotion of exports or investment __, whether outward or inward. While governments have always intervened to promote their national industries, there has been a trend towards more active involve­ment of foreign services or even diplomatic services in seeking markets for national companies in recent decades.* This differs from more traditional industrial policy or mercantilist trade policies. As traditional forms of intervention such as tariffs, subsidies, and other instruments that used to promote national champions have been disciplined by WTO and other trade regimes, governments have used diplomatic links, trade fairs, or visits of heads of state to promote commercial interests. Such activities are better cap­tured by the term commercial diplomacy, which contrasts with economic diplomacy; the latter facilitates trade and investment by establishing the framework of rules and disciplines within which markets and such commercial diplomacy function .4
 * b. Violation - the affirmative simply promotes investment and trade, which is commercial engagement.**
 * c. That’s a voting issue–**
 * 1. Predictable Limits – Commercial engagement means that affs that develop exports, foreign Investment, tech sharing, and tourism are all topical – makes it impossible to research gutting fairness**
 * 2. Predictable Ground – Core negative disad ground is based on economic engagement – allowing commercial engagement means the negative never has a core DA to read – makes educational debate impossible**

Immigration Politics Disadvantage

 * CIR will pass – bipartisanship is key**
 * AP 7/8 ** /13 (“Congress Is Back: Here's What's on the Bickering Agenda”, [] )

In the GOP-controlled House, courteous behavior, even within the majority ranks, has barely been perceptible with the ignominious failure of the farm bill. Some __ collaboration will ____ be necessary if the House is to move ahead on immigration __ legislation __ this month __. ¶ Conservatives from safe, gerrymandered House districts have rebuffed appeals from some national Republicans who argue that embracing immigration overhaul will boost the party's political standing with an increasingly diverse electorate, especially in the 2016 presidential election. Those conservatives strongly oppose any legislation offering citizenship to immigrants living here illegally. ¶ Reflecting the will of the rank and file, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and other Republicans have said the comprehensive Senate immigration bill that couples the promise of citizenship for those living here unlawfully with increased border security is a nonstarter in the House. ¶ Opening the Senate session on Monday, Reid urged the House to consider the Senate bill—a highly unlikely step. ¶ "Now it's our duty to convince our colleagues in the House, yes, they should vote with us," he said. " __ Bipartisan __ immigration __ reform __ that includes a pathway to citizenship __ makes __ economic and political __ sense __ ." ¶ House Republicans were assessing the views of their constituents during the weeklong July 4th break and planned to discuss their next steps at a private meeting Wednesday. ¶ Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said __ Republicans would be hashing out __ "two __ key hot spots __ " in the meeting: the pathway to citizenship and health care. ¶ "We need to be the party of solutions and not always obstructing, and so I think there's an effort here that we ... need to fix this immigration system," __ McCaul __ said Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation." He __ predicted __ that __ the full House could take up immigration as early as this month ____, __ and that __ rep ____ resentatives from both chambers could be working to resolve differences __ in their versions late this year or early next. ¶ The House Judiciary Committee has adopted a piecemeal approach, approving a series of bills, none with a path to citizenship that Obama and Democrats are seeking. __ Democrats hope the single- ____ issue bills get them to a conference with the Senate, where the prospects for a far-reaching overhaul improve ____. __ ¶ "I think what you're finding is that __ there will be a compromise __, a smart compromise," Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., said Sunday, also on CBS. "You have to be smart. You have to be tough. But you have to be fair. And if you can do that, you'll have a full fix."


 * Plan cause partisan battles**
 * Whitehead and Nolte 12 ** (Laurence Whitehead, senior research fellow in politics at Nuffield College, Oxford, and Detlef Nolte, acting president of the GIGA, director of the GIGA Institute of Latin American Studies, professor of political science at the University of Hamburg, Number 6, 2012, [] )

__ US–Latin America relations are __ routinely __ managed by __ multiple __ bureaucratic agencies ____, which __ can act quite autonomously and __ are __ often __ not coordinated __ via a common ¶ strategy. __ Obama’s Latin America policy has __ frequently __ been hampered by political __ ¶ __ polarization and partisan divisions __ in Congress. „ The intermestic dimension of US–Latin American relations has complicated foreign ¶ policy, because a more self-confident and autonomous majority in Latin America ¶ has sometimes sought a policy shift with regard to highly sensitive topics, such as ¶ drugs, immigration and Cuba. ¶ „ One issue area where some would criticize the Obama administration is its slowness ¶ in improving relations with Brazil or placing Brazil on par with, for example, India. ¶ __ „ ____ It is unlikely __ that __ Latin America’s modest ranking in US foreign policy will increase __ ¶ __ or __ that __ Washington’s priorities will shift __ much after the November 2012 elections.


 * CIR key to the economy and competitiveness**
 * Green 7/2 ** - founder and president of FWD.us, an advocacy group created by technology leaders that promotes policies to keep the United States and its citizens competitive in a global economy (Joe, “House, knowledge economy needs immigrants”, [] )

Our country has changed a lot during those 27 years, but not -- so far -- our immigration policy. Suffice it to say, __ if we can pass __ our generation's __ immigration reform, it will be a really big deal __. ¶ __ America's greatest asset has always been its people __, drawn here from all over the world. In the 21st century, __ our economic future depends on immigrants ____ more than ever __. __ The fastest-growing sector of our economy is the knowledge economy ____, where the main competitive difference is people __. ¶ In a globalized world where people and businesses have their choice of countries to locate in, __ continuing to have the best ____ trained, hardest-working and most productive people in the world will keep the U __ nited __ S __ tates __ at ____ the forefront of global competitiveness __. We have some huge advantages: the top universities in the world, the top scientific researchers, and -- right alongside these -- our identity as a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants. ¶ At FWD.us, a nonprofit advocacy group, we are entrepreneurs, and we believe that one of the main reasons America is the leading entrepreneurial nation is that we are a nation of immigrants. Leaving behind your home country and everything you know to create a better life for your family is the essence of the risk-taking that characterizes the entrepreneurial ethos. ¶ I think back to my ancestors in the shtetls of Eastern Europe in the 19th century. They had probably never been more than two miles from their village, and got on a steamship to go to a country they had never even seen in a picture, knowing they would never return home. ¶ That is truly putting it all on the line to make a better life. It is not random, who chooses to emigrate, and the work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit of these immigrants have shaped the character of our country. Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley do not just identify with the experience of computer programmers coming to America to work at tech companies, but with everyone who comes here to make a better life. It's why we are working for comprehensive immigration reform. ¶ There are talented young people in America who were brought here by their parents who now cannot go to college or work because they are undocumented. These DREAMers are just waiting to contribute, and their parents, with the right accountability measures, should be able to join them by coming out of the shadows and contributing fully to their communities. ¶ In addition, we know that __ the best ____ and the brightest come here to study, start companies and create jobs that grow our economy __ ; millions more are caught in limbo navigating a complex and broken system that is totally outdated for a modern economy and modern American families. __ We need to pass ____ c __ omprehensive __ i __ mmigration __ r __ eform __ to unlock those contributions and __ by doing so __ change millions of lives. __ Collapse of the US economic power causes nuclear war
 * Khalilzad 11 ** Zalmay was the United States ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations during the presidency of George W. Bush and the director of policy planning at the Defense Department from 1990 to 1992, “ The Economy and National Security”, 2-8-11, []

Today, __ economic __ and fiscal __ trends pose ____ the most severe __ long-term __ threat to ____ the U __ nited __ S __ tates’ __ position as global leader __. While the United States suffers from fiscal imbalances and low economic growth, the economies of rival powers are developing rapidly. The __ continuation of __ these two __ trends could lead to a shift from American primacy toward a multi-polar global system, leading in turn to increased ____ geopolitical rivalry ____ and __ even __ war ____ among __ the __ great powers __. The current recession is the result of a deep financial crisis, not a mere fluctuation in the business cycle. Recovery is likely to be protracted. The crisis was preceded by the buildup over two decades of enormous amounts of debt throughout the U.S. economy — ultimately totaling almost 350 percent of GDP — and the development of credit-fueled asset bubbles, particularly in the housing sector. When the bubbles burst, huge amounts of wealth were destroyed, and unemployment rose to over 10 percent. The decline of tax revenues and massive countercyclical spending put the U.S. government on an unsustainable fiscal path. Publicly held national debt rose from 38 to over 60 percent of GDP in three years. Without faster economic growth and actions to reduce deficits, publicly held national debt is projected to reach dangerous proportions. If interest rates were to rise significantly, annual interest payments — which already are larger than the defense budget — would crowd out other spending or require substantial tax increases that would undercut economic growth. Even worse, if unanticipated events trigger what economists call a “sudden stop” in credit markets for U.S. debt, __ the U __ nited __ S __ tates __ would be unable to roll over its outstanding obligations, precipitating a sovereign-debt crisis that would ____ almost certainly ____ compel a ____ radical retrenchment ____ of the U __ nited __ S __ tates __ internationally __. __ Such scenarios would ____ reshape the international order __. It was the __ economic devastation __ of Britain and France __ during World War II __, as well as the rise of other powers, that __ led __ both __ countries to relinquish their empires __. In the late 1960s, British leaders concluded that they lacked the economic capacity to maintain a presence “east of Suez.” Soviet economic weakness, which crystallized under Gorbachev, contributed to their decisions to withdraw from Afghanistan, abandon Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and allow the Soviet Union to fragment. If the U.S. debt problem goes critical, __ the U __ nited __ S __ tates __ would ____ be compelled to retrench, reducing its military spending and shed __ ding __ international commitments __. We face this domestic challenge while other major powers are experiencing rapid economic growth. Even though __ countries __ such as China, India, and Brazil have profound political, social, demographic, and economic problems, their __ economies are growing faster than ours, and this could alter the global distribution of power. ____ These trends could __ in the long term __ produce a multi-polar world __. __ If U.S. policymakers fail to act __ and other powers continue to grow, __ it is not a question of whether but when ____ a new international order will emerge __. __ The closing of the gap __ between the United States and its rivals __ could intensify ____ geopolitical ____ competition among major powers ____, increase incentives for local powers to play major powers against one another, and undercut our will ____ to preclude or respond to international crises because ____ of the ____ higher risk of escalation ____. ____ The stakes are high __. In modern history, __ the longest period of peace ____ among the great powers has been the era of U.S. leadership __. By contrast __, multi-polar systems have been unstable, with their competitive dynamics resulting in frequent crises and major wars among the great powers __. __ Failures of multi-polar international systems produced ____ both world wars __. __ American retrenchment could have ____ devastating consequences ____. ____ Without an American security blanket, regional powers could ____ rearm ____ in an attempt to balance against emerging threats __. Under this scenario, __ there would be ____ a heightened possibility of ____ arms races, miscalc __ ulation, __ or ____ other crises ____ spiraling into all-out conflict ____. __ Alternatively, __ in seeking to accommodate the stronger powers, weaker powers may shift their geopolitical posture away from the U __ nited __ S __ tates. Either way, __ hostile states would ____ be emboldened to ____ make aggressive moves ____ in their regions __. U.S.-Brazil Relations Good Disadvantage U.S. Brazil Relations high – now key “Global Brazil and U.S.-Brazil Relations” Independent Task Force Report No. 66 CAIO, 7/9)
 * Bodman and Wolfensohn 11 ** (Samuel W. Bodman and James D. Wolfensohn, Chairs Independent Task Force CFR; Julia E. Sweig, Project Director

__ Brazil and the U ____ nited States are now entering a period that has __ ¶ __ great potential to solidify a mature friendship, one that entails everdeepening __ ¶ __ trust in order to secure mutual benefits. This kind of relationship __ ¶ __ requires the two countries to move beyond their historic __ ¶ __ oscillation __ between misinterpretation, public praise, and rebuke, and ¶ __ instead approach both cooperation and inevitable disagreement with __ ¶ __ mutual respect and tolerance. __ Interference destroys relations
 * Rothkopf 09 ** (David, “The Perils of Rivarly”, Center for American Progress, March, [], accessed on 7/10/13)

__ There are other areas in which tension could enter the relationship. How the United States interacts with the Americas writ large under President Obama will shape relations and create potential pitfalls __, and so will domestic political considerations both in the United States and Brazil. __ Any real or perceived interference in the region by the U ____ nited States would greatly upset Brazil. If the United States decided that heavy-handed political pressure or intervention were required in regard, for example, to Venezuela __, Bolivia, or Ecuador, __ this could put Brazil in an uncomfortable position where it has to choose between the U ____ nited States and its neighbors __. __ Since Brazil has spent years arguing for South American unity, it would likely choose its neighbors or— __ even more likely— __ choose to interject itself as a third party with a third point of view __ Brazil is key in securing US agreements with developing countries

Brown, Director of Operations for the Office of the Defense, 2013 , Lawrence, “RESTORING THE "UNWRITTEN ALLIANCE: Brazil-U.S. Relations”, National Defense University Press, [], 2nd Quarter 2013, 7/9/13, JG

The last area of convergence and ¶ cooperationis not American, but Brazilian. ¶ Brasilia is as interested as Washington in a ¶ stronger relationship. Former foreign minister ¶ Celso Amorin, who is now the defense ¶ minister, recognized that there is enormous ¶ potential for structured cooperation between ¶ Brazil and the United States in areas of the ¶ world such as Africa, where there is great ¶ need for development and stability.''* Minister ¶ Amorin has cited the trilateral cooperation ¶ agreement among Brazil, Guinea- ¶ Bissau, and the United States as an example ¶ of productive cooperation. This was a first of ¶ its kind agreement for the United States and ¶ Brazil in Africa. These trilateral agreements make ¶ strategic sense because bilateral agreements ¶ between the United States and ¶ relatively poor countries usually elicit ¶ criticism that the world's only superpower ¶ is engaging in exploitive neocolonialism. ¶ Having itself been a Portuguese colony, ¶ Brazil is viewed as a moderating influence ¶ on perceived expansive U.S. foreign ¶ policy. It is also considered a friendly ¶ observer to the Non-Aligned Movement ¶ of 120 countries that are distrustful of ¶ superpower diplomacy. *" Plainly spoken, //if//// ¶ Brazil is part of a U.S. agreement with an//// ¶ impoverished country, that country feels//// ¶ more comfortable// making an agreement ¶ with the United States because Brazil, a ¶ guarantor of U.S. intentions, is part of ¶ it . Brazil welcomes this role because it ¶ enhances its position as a regional and ¶ world leader, establishes a singularly ¶ special diplomatic relationship with ¶ the United States, and fulfills two of its ¶ foreign policy action areas.^° And its role ¶ as a third-party broker does not end with ¶ Africa or other poor regions . Brazil sees ¶ itself as a viable broker for peace as evidenced ¶ by its last-ditch diplomatic effort ¶ with Iran, which attempted to resolve the ¶ uranium-processing crisis.

Free trade creates relations that foster peace and resolve conflict Foulkes 2012 (“The Magic of Free Trade,” 10-22-12, [|http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-magic-of-free-trade#axzz2YCcbjJVp], SP)

What’s more, f ree trade among nations is a way to promote peaceful international relations. Whenindividuals are free to trade across political boundaries, they are more likely to view “foreigners” positively. The mutual benefits of trade, in other words, can promote peace. Ricardo, one of the most influential economists of all time, was among the first to understand the great value of free trade. In his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) he summed up the benefits of free international trade nicely: Under a system of perfectly free commerce, each country naturally devotes its capital and labor to such employments as are most beneficial to each. This pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the universal good of the whole. . . . [It] distributes labor most effectively and most economically; while, by increasing the general mass of productions, it diffuses general benefit, and binds together, by one common tie of interest and intercourse, the universal society of nations throughout the civilized world. Free trade gets a bad rap from domestic producers and protectionists of all sorts. But nothing is more important to a growing, dynamic economy than allowing the basic human right to freely and peacefully exchange with others. Carbon Tax Counterplan

Text: The United States federal government should implement a phased carbon tax. Solves the aff and avoids politics July 12, 2011, [] )
 * Houser 11 ** - Peterson Institute for International Economics (Trevor, American Eyes on Australia's Carbon Tax, PIIE, Op-ed in the Australian Financial Review

__ A carbon tax has ____ long been the favorite tool among economists for reducing greenhouse gas emission __ s. Imposing a tax on something that reduces welfare (like pollution) can allow policymakers to reduce taxes on things that increase welfare (like employment, investment or innovation). And __ it’s not just liberal economists that find a carbon tax attractive __. Gregory Mankiw, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, senior economic advisor to Senator John McCain during the 2008 Presidential Campaign, have both argued the merits of taxing carbon and using the revenue to cut economically distorting corporate and payroll taxes. It’s the deficit reduction potential of a carbon tax that could give US climate policy a new lease on life. __ This economic logic has elicited support from some leading Republican politicians as well. Most notable i __ s Senator Lisa __ Murkowski __ of Alaska ( __ the highest ranking Senate Republican on energy policy issues) who, while opposing efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, has publically supported a carbon tax __. She is joined by ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, who argues the economic certainty that comes with a carbon tax is more important than the environmental certainty you get with cap-and-trade. And for Americans increasingly concerned with the security of the country’s energy supply, a carbon tax could yield some unexpected benefits. A colleague and I recently analyzed all leading energy security proposals currently bouncing around Washington—from vehicle efficiency standards to expanded offshore oil drilling. And we threw a carbon tax in just for fun. To our surprise __ the carbon tax did more to reduce US dependence on foreign oil than almost any other proposal because it __ both reduced oil __ demand __ and increased domestic supply. The latter occurs thanks to a) an increase in natural gas liquids production, an oil substitute pumped alongside the natural gas used to replace coal-fired power plants, and b) CO2 captured from remaining coal-fired power plants used to coax more oil out of older domestic wells. Brazil Counterplan Text: The government of Brazil should invest in the development of Brazil sugar ethanol and guarantee U.S. access to it. Brazilian sugar based ethanol solves - allowing access to the U.S. market key
 * Specht, their solvency advocate, 13 ** [Jonathan-J.D. Wash. U St. Louis, Legal Advisor, “Raising Cane: Cuban Sugarcane Ethanol’s Economic and Environmental Effects on the United States,” Environmental Law & Policy Journal, Univ. of California Davis, Vol. 36:2, [] ]

"The United States of America cannot afford to bet our long-term prosperity and security on a resource that will eventually run out." n1 This dramatic quote from President Obama opens the White House's forty-four page Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future. n2 The resource referred to, __ oil, is indeed finite __. " __ The output of conventional oil will peak in 2020 __ ," a __ ccording to estimates from the chief economist for the International Energy Agency __. n3 __ The transportation sector has increased its oil consumption __ over the past thirty years in the United States while residential, commercial, and electric utilities have decreased consumption. n4 Simply put, __ America's oil problem is an automobile problem ____. __ [*173] __ There are a number of ways the U.S. transportation sector could reduce the amount of oil it consumes __ : raising vehicle fuel efficiency standards further; increasing and improving light rail and other public transportation options; building more walkable communities so daily errands could be made without using an automobile; encouraging people to live closer to where they work; and increasing the availability of electric cars. n5 ¶ __ Yet, even using all of these strategies comprehensively will not change a fundamental fact of our oil-based transportation system __ - __ in certain areas __ (like rural communities and outer suburbs) __ the automobile is essential for transportation, and liquid fuel is extremely convenient __ for automobiles. With a liquid fuel engine, a driver can "re-charge" his or her car in a few minutes with a substance that is widely available from Boston to Boise and everywhere in between. With the conveniences of oil, however, come costs. __ Oil __ is a finite resource, and its __ consumption pollutes the air and contributes to climate change ____. __ Furthermore, __ it is expensive __ n6 __ and will only get more expensive in the future __. n7 However, __ any realistic plan for dealing with a future of reduced oil use must include liquid fuels ____ that are similar in convenience and availability to gasoline __, given the geography of the United States, the state of the current domestic transportation system, n8 and the ease of using liquid fuel for the personal automobile. ¶ __ This does not mean __, however, __ that corn-based ethanol __ , thus far the major liquid-fuel petroleum alternative pursued by the United States, __ is the best answer __. While __ it has __ benefitted the Midwest economically, the domestic ethanol industry has also __ contributed to a number of ____ negative environmental effects ____. There ____ is, __ however, __ another liquid fuel option other than fossil-fuel based __ [*174] __ gasoline and corn-based ethanol __. __ The Obama Administration's energy plan includes a wide range of strategies to reduce U.S. fossil fuel consumption, yet ____ one strategy is notably absent from the Blueprint: replacing a percentage of U.S. gasoline with ethanol imported from outside the United States. __ n9 A __ number of influential commentators, such as __ Thomas __ Friedman __ n10 __ and The Economist __, n11 have called for the __ U ____ nited States to encourage the importation of sugarcane-based ethanol __ from countries like Brazil. But __ the possibility of ____ importing ethanol from Cuba has been largely ignored b ____ y influential opinion-makers as well as the United States government. __ n12 While by no means a silver bullet for solving the United States' energy problems, __ importing ethanol made from sugarcane grown in Cuba would bring a number of environmental and economic benefits __ - partially offset by regionalized economic harms - to the United States. This possibility, at the very least, deserves much greater consideration and evaluation than it has thus far received. Case Debate -- Solvency Sugarcane could lead to herbicide resistant weeds – turns dead zones
 * Lehtonen 09 ** Author Dr Markku Lehtonen, Sussex Energy Group University of Sussex, UK - PhD in environmental economics University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France, 19 December 2009, Ethical-sugar (An organization that monitors the ethical use of pesticides in the sugar cane industry), “Status report on sugar cane agrochemicals management”, [] , DA: 7/3/2013

However, the public opinion in Brazil remains divided on the issue of GMOs. __ The development of herbicide resistant cane varieties is feared to increase the domination of sugarcane sector by large, vertically integrated conglomerates, thereby excluding small, independent farmers. A concern more specifically related to the theme of this paper is that herbicide-resistant sugarcane grown in large plantations may incite farmers to overuse herbicides __, as seems to have happened with the ¶ introduction of herbicide-resistant soy varieties (Joensen 2007). __ Finally, the high amounts of herbicide applied may lead to the development of herbicide-resistant __ ¶ __ weeds. __ Such weeds have not yet been found in sugarcane cultivation, but the rapid increase of ¶ herbicide resistance in crops such as soybeans, cotton and corn suggests that this situation may ¶ change (FoE & CFS 2008; Smeets et al. 2008, 785; Center for Food Safety 2008). __ The industry’s suggestion to combating herbicide-resistant weeds – to genetically engineer a new generation of plants to resist even more toxic and persistent weed killers such as 2,4-D and dicamba __ (Robinson, E. 2008) __ – might lead to a never-ending ‘arms race’ between cane breeders who develop evermore herbicide-resistant varieties, and the weeds that respond by developing their own herbicide resistance. __ No War Interdependence doesn’t solve At the Nuclear Precipice, p.24
 * Krieger 08 ** – Dr. Dave, Founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

10. There have been trends in recent years for international law to be disregarded as and when it suits those who feel they are in a position to disregard it. An instance is the invasion mounted on Iraq by two of the Permanent Members of the Security Council in disregard of the several rules that have grown up in international law forbidding such action. The rule against unilateral action by individual states without Security Council authorization and the principle that architectural and historical objects and sites are to be preserved are just two, which illustrate the wide range of matters covered by these principles. These are all well-established rules of i nternational law and some of them are enshrined in the UN Charter itself. They were built upon the sacrifice of millions of lives and need to be respected. When i nternational law is disregarded, especially by powerful states, itremoves restraints that would otherwise operate on others who desire to use force illegally and flout the rules of i nternational law. Prefer specific scenarios - democracy doesn’t check
 * Forsyth 07 ** James Wood, Professor, National Security Studies and Thomas E. Griffith Jr., Dean of Faculty and Academic Programs, National War College, "Through the Glass Darkly: The Unlikely Demise of Great-Power War," STRATEGIC STUDIES QUARTERLY, Fall 2007, []

The United States cannot prepare to put down any and all potential rivals. The costs of such an undertaking would quickly prove to be enormous, especially when domestic spending on programs like social security and Medicare are factored into the security equation. Over the long haul rivals will emerge, and there is little the U nited S tates can do __ except balance against them __, as they will prepare to balance against us. In such a world, where states compete for power, one must be concerned with survival. That being the case, it is worth remembering that the most serious threats to the great powers have historically stemmed from other great powers. In the years ahead, as strong challengers emerge , conflicts will arise, __ making war among ____ the great powers more, not less, likely __. 49 __ Contrary to popular belief, we are not living in a whole new world __. The events of September 11 and the wars that have followed have had a pronounced effect on US foreign and defense policy, but they have not done away with the state system. The world is still made up of states that must look out for themselves. To pretend otherwise is __ to neglect history or to fall prey to presentism __ —something common among pundits but dangerous for statesmen and men and women of the armed forces. Historically, the most efficient and effective way to ensure state security is through military means. Thus, the importance of the balance of power, which exists to prevent one great power from dominating the rest, has not diminished. Instead, it __ has been reinvigorated ____ as states are reminded of the need to defend themselves __. The implications of acknowledging the possibility of a great-power war are easier to grasp than to implement. Despite the urgency of the war in Iraq, we need to think seriously about what a great-power war would look like, how it could occur and be prevented, and how it would be fought so that we can gain some understanding about the equipment and forces needed to fight and win. The groundwork for the technologies needed for such a contest needs to be laid today. The difficulties in putting armor on vehicles for Iraq pale in comparison to creating the lead time and resources needed to fight a great-power war. Failing to do so risks lives and jeopardizes US security goals. This does not mean that we should ignore current threats or overlook the need to relieve misery and suffering around the world, what one strategist terms “minding the gap.” 50 As citizens, we should be concerned with the political and human consequences of poverty, ecological degradation, and population growth. We must also fully address the problem of terrorism. But as real as the consequences of poverty, ecological degradation, population growth, and terrorism might be, it is hard to come up with a realistic scenario involving these tragedies that would alter the balance of power. 51 Put simply, in an age of transformation, we cannot neglect the basics. Should the U nited S tates find itself in another great-power war, things that are taken for granted today , like air superiority or control of sea lanes, might come up short tomorrow. That technology, economics, democracy, and __ norms play a role in preventing great-power war is not the issue __. __ The issue is whether they make it unthinkable __. Regrettably, __ they do not __, and because they do not, __ great-power war has a bright future __ , however tragic that might seem. Deterrence fails At the Nuclear Precipice, p.5
 * Krieger 08 ** – Dr. Dave, Founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

During the Cold War the possession and development of nuclear weapons were justified in public by their official and nonofficial advocates primarily as instruments of deterrence to be used in restraining others from nuclear use and thus "necessary" for keeping the peace. Deterrence was never more than a label for a policy, actually a very unstable and misrepresented one, logically analyzed to death, but rarely subjected to experiential tests by reference to changing military balances, real-time accidents and misperceptions, and the recklessness of sociopaths or paranoid leaders. For deterrence to work there must be rational decision makers operating on the basis of near perfect informationabout the intentions and behavior of an adversary, a fanciful proposition in times of relative stability, and absurdly unrealistic in times of acute crisis. Communications must always be clear and reliable for deterrence to work, and the more countries with nuclear weapons the harder it will be to assure effective communications. The fabric of deterrence has been shredded in the most recent period of world politics where the main potential attacker is projected as, a nonstate terrorist network without a homeland and led by willing martyrs who cannot be deterred. Miscalc is possible - nuclear taboo is eroding
 * Potter 10 ** [Dr. William Potter is Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar Professor of Nonproliferation Studies and Director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS). “In Search of the Nuclear Taboo: Past, Present, and Future” Proliferation Papers, No. 31, Winter 2010, Chetan]

Less positive indicators of the vitality and durability of any non-use norm, however, also are in evidence. A short list of bad news items includes: the rise in the threat of high consequence nuclear terrorism involving both improvised nuclear devices and intact nuclear weapons, the failure of the CTBT to enter into force, the growing reliance on nuclear weapons by some nuclear weapons possessors tocompensate for shortcomings in manpower and/or conventional weapons (e.g., the Russian Federation and Pakistan), the disavowal by the United States during the Bush administration and, more recently by the Russian Federation, of a number of the “13 Practical Steps on Disarmament” adopted at the 2000 NPT Review Conference,12 stalled negotiations between the United States and the Russian Federation over the extension of several key nuclear arms control treaties that will soon expire, the barren results of the 2005 NPT Review Conference and less than encouraging indications for the next Review Conference in 2010, and the erosion of the perceived benefits of non-nuclear weapon status accentuated by the U.S.-India deal and the associated exemption granted to India by the Nuclear Suppliers Group in 2008. Perhaps most troubling is the potential for rapid escalation from conventional to nuclear weapons use in several regions, especially in South Asia. Space does not allow a discussion of all of the aforementioned positive and negative indicators, their impact on the probability that past restraint with respect to nuclear weapons use will either persist or lapse, or the likelihood of occurrence of specific breach scenarios. An examination of several trends, however, may provide some clues as to the durability of non-use and the conditions that might trigger at least a departure fromthe current norm/tradition/taboo. Intervening actions don’t check
 * Friedman 11 ** (Jonah, Research Intern for the Project on Nuclear Issues, “Countervalue vs. Counterforce”, June 2, [] )

__ The argument __ by GOP House members __ that countervalue targeting is immoral may be true, but it is __ also __ irrelevant __. __ There are few plausible scenarios ____ in which a nuclear exchange could remain limited __, despite discussions about nuclear warfighting strategies during the Cold War. As Robert McNamara wrote in a fall 1983 Foreign Affairs article: “ __ Is it realistic to expect __ that __ a nuclear war could be __ limited to __ the detonation of tens or even hundreds of nuclear weapons __, even though each side would have tens of thousands of weapons remaining available for use? __ The answer is clearly no __. __ Such an expectation requires the assumption that even though the initial strikes would have inflicted large-scale casualties and damage to both sides, one or the other __ —feeling disadvantaged— __ would give in __. __ But under such circumstances, leaders on both sides would be under unimaginable pressure to avenge their losses and secure the interests being challenged __. And __ each would fear ____ that the opponent might launch a larger attack at any moment…Under such conditions, it is highly likely that rather than surrender, each side would launch a larger attack __, hoping that this step would bring the action to a halt by causing the opponent to capitulate.” Thus, __ a nuclear exchange would __ almost __ certainly entail a massive attack __ , and the deaths of perhaps tens of millions of people. Seeking to mitigate this scenario by killing “only” several million people is to miss the point entirely. __ Any nuclear war would be devastating, regardless of any attempt to avoid directly targeting cities, __ and by declaring cities as targets the stability induced by MAD is increased. However, U.S. nuclear strategy employs a mix of counterforce and countervalue targeting, and some would argue that the inclusion of enemy military targets is useful. They might point to the ability of nuclear weapons to destroy deeply buried targets, for instance. The counterargument was made by Glaser and Steve Fetter in a 2005 International Security article, “Counterforce Revisited.” They point out that nuclear weapons would not be significantly more effective than conventional weapons at hitting such targets. __ It is difficult to imagine ____ a scenario which would require the use of nuclear weapons to hit military targets, since to do so is to suppose __ one of two things: either __ that one plans to attack these targets in a pre-emptive strike, or that they would be useful to the enemy even after a nuclear exchange __. The development of plans and capabilities for a first strike would serve to undermine stability. Concern for an enemy’s military assets would seem to be fruitless except in the case of a nuclear warfighting strategy, since these assets can be hit by conventional weapons. __ Given __ that __ the U.S. is highly unlikely to launch a nuclear first-strike on any nation, and that waging limited nuclear war is probably impossible, the greater emphasis placed on countervalue targeting __ (rather than counterforce), __ the better __. In addition, __ relying solely on a countervalue strategy may become more attractive as the U __ nited __ S __ tates __ reduces its nuclear arsenal __. __ Fewer warheads would be available ____ to strike a variety of targets, __ from enemy weapons and command and control sites to population centers. The imperative to hit military targets would necessarily detract from our ability to threaten the enemy’s cities. Likewise, a commitment to a countervalue-only strategy would have the added benefit of allowing for substantial reductions in our nuclear arsenal, since the need to hit additional targets is eliminated. Nuclear war causes extinction Wickersham 10 (University of Missouri adjunct professor of Peace Studies and a member of The Missouri University Nuclear Disarmament Education Team, author book about nuclear disarmament education (Bill, 4/11/10, “Threat of ‘nuclear winter’ remains New START treaty is step in right direction.” [] )

In addressing the environmental consequences of nuclear war, Columbian Steve Starr has written a summary of studies published by the Bulletin of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation, which __ concludes: “U.S. researchers have confirmed the scientific validity of the concept of ‘nuclear winter’a nd have demonstrated that any conflict which targets even a tiny fraction of the global arsenal will cause catastrophic disruptions of the global climate.” __ In another statement on his Web site, Starr says: “ If 1% of the nuclear weapons now ready for war were detonated in large cities, they would utterly devastate the environment, climate, ecosystems and inhabitants of Earth. A war fought with thousands of strategic nuclear weapons __ would leave the Earth uninhabitable __ .” Dead Zones No impact – forests check
 * Swanson 09 ** (Kent, Master’s in Community @ Regional Planning, http://www.practicalenvironmentalist.com/gardening/10-steps-to-a-healthy-ocean-protecting-our-oceans-from-pollution.htm, )

[|Biosystems are nature’s utilities] __ – they desalinate water, absorb carbon, liberate nutrients from the ground, and provide other services __ free of charge. The plants and animals that make up these systems are often treated as commodities, but killing the goose that lays golden eggs will only put food on the table for a day. __ Protecting biosystems can pay dividends for years to come. Forests are an essential buffer for the oceans. Old growth trees neutralize the pH of rain and absorb harmful chemicals before they reach the ocean __. Trees that grow in estuaries and along riverways are especially important, but those areas also face increased development pressure and they are easy for loggers to access. Shoreline habitat is being destroyed to build [|giant shrimp farms] and resort hotels. Luckily __, there are now sustainable forestry and aquaculture options available __. [|Sustainable logging] __ allows limited harvesting of resources without destroying the natural processes that we benefit from __. The next time you buy lumber or land, do some research and check for [|certifications of sustainability]. Marine life is resilient
 * ITOPF 10 ** (The International Tanker Owners Federation Limited, February 10, [] ,)

__ Marine organisms have ____ varying degrees of natural resilienceto changes in their habitats __. The __ natural adaptations __ of populations of animals and plants to cope with environmental stress, __ combined with __ their __ breeding strategies, provide important mechanisms for coping with ____ the daily and seasonal fluctuations in their habitats and for recovering from predation and other stochastic events __. Some natural phenomena can be highly destructive. The short-term power of hurricanes and tsunamis can easily be appreciated, as can the damage they cause. The cyclical El Niño phenomenon has major long-term consequences for marine organisms, seabirds and marine mammals throughout the entire Pacific Ocean. Organisms suffer under such onslaughts, but __ after what is often severe disruption and widespread mortality, the marine populations re-establish themselves over a period of time and this process constitutes natural recovery __. __ An important reproductive strategy for many marine organisms is the production of vast numbers of eggs and larvae which are released into the plankton and are widely distributed by currents. This mechanism has evolved to take maximum advantage of available space and resources __ in marine habitats and to deal with e.g. predation. In some cases, only one or two individuals in a million actually survive through to adulthood. A less common reproductive strategy that is generally restricted to long-lived species that do not reach sexual maturity for many years is to produce relatively few, well-developed, offspring. These species are better adapted to stable habitats and environments and as a result, their populations are likely to take much longer to recover from the pressures of localised mortality e.g. the effects of an oil spill. Whilst there may be considerable debate over what constitutes recovery, there is a widespread acceptance that natural variability in systems makes getting back to the exact pre-spill condition unlikely, and most current definitions of recovery focus on the re-establishment of a community of plants and animals which are characteristic of the habitat and are functioning normally in terms of biodiversity and productivity. Oceans can easily survive acidification
 * Ridley 10 ** (Matt, Doctor of Philosophy in Zoology, June 15, [] ,)

Lest my critics still accuse me of cherry-picking studies, let me refer them also to the results of Hendrikset al. (2010, Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science 86:157). Far from being a cherry-picked study, this is __ a massive meta-analysis __. The authors __ observed that `warnings that ocean acidification is a major threat to marine biodiversity are largely based on the analysis of predicted changes in ocean chemical fields’ rather than empirical data __. So they constructed a database of 372 studies in which the responses of 44 different marine species to ocean acidification induced by equilibrating seawater with CO2-enriched air had been actually measured. They found that __ only a minority of studies demonstrated `significant responses to acidification’ and there was no significant mean effect even in these studies. __ They concluded that __ the world's marine biota are `more resistant to ocean acidification than suggested by pessimistic predictions identifying ocean acidification as a major threat to marine biodiversity __ ’ and that __ ocean acidification `may not be the widespread problem conjured into the 21st century __ …Biological processes can provide homeostasis against changes in pH in bulk waters of the range predicted during the 21st century.’ This important paper alone contradicts Hoegh-Gudlberg’s assertion that `the vast bulk of scientific evidence shows that calcifiers… are being heavily impacted already’. In conclusion, I rest my case. My five critics have not only failed to contradict, but have explicitly confirmed the truth of every single one of my factual statements. We differ only in how we interpret the facts. It is hardly surprising that my opinion is not shared by five scientists whose research grants depend on funding agencies being persuaded that there will be a severe and rapid impact of carbon dioxide emissions on coral reefs in coming decades. __ I merely report accurately that the latest empirical and theoretical research suggests that the likely impact has been exaggerated __. Warming Sugarcane burning emits CO2
 * NCGA 11 ** (NCGA, National Corn Growers Association, “Sugarcane as a Feedstock for Biofuels: An Analytical White Paper”, National Corn Growers Association, an association that represents the interests of corn growers, 7/15/11, [] )

Burning of sugarcane is a major issue (Fig. 7). Burning is an effective method to remove the excess crop biomass that arises from the leaves, small tillers, and stalk tips (called trash). This fraction makes up about 14 percent of the sugarcane crop weight in the field. Trash is a restriction at harvest (for both hand-harvesting and mechanical), results in more costly transport, and can absorb the sugar juice during crushing with a negative effect on recoverable sugar. ¶ __ Burning a sugarcane field releases a considerable amount of CO2 with estimates varying from 2,600 – 4,500 Kg CO2/Ha. __ In some models, such as GREET as used by CARB, __ a small amount of carbon release ____ from burning is included in the sugarcane ethanol assessment __, and the Brazilian Sugarcane Association wants that to be reduced (UNICA2, 2009). The questions remain as to what is the exact amount of CO2 emissions used by the EPA, and what is the appropriate realistic number to include. ¶ __ Burning sugarcane also results in NOx emissions and, again, the exact amount is somewhat unclear although some reports indicate measured NOx emissions in the order of 25 Kg (N)/Ha (22 lb (N)/acre) __ : this is reported to be about 30 percent of the N fertilizer applied to sugarcane (Oppenheimer et al, 2004). ¶ In addition to the CO2 and NOx emissions per unit area, there is a large area of cane that is burnt. The Sao Paulo area, in the Central South region, produces about 60 percent of the sugarcane, has higher yields and more modern technologies, yet cane burning covers 8,000 sq. miles or equivalent to ~5 MM acres in this area alone. UNICA makes the point that a considerable number of mills have moved to mechanical harvesting, instead of manual sugarcane cutting, and that this will remove the emissions from burning (UNICA2). However, while the more advanced Sao Paulo area now has ~49 percent mechanical harvesting, there is still 69 percent of the harvested cane area being burnt each year: while mechanical harvesting overcomes the necessity for burning, it is still more efficient to harvest mechanically after burning-off the trash. With no burning in the field, the trash will have to be harvested -- at a higher cost, using more energy, with additional transport, just to be combusted into CO2 at the mill in any case. Warming is natural
 * Bell 10 ** (Larry, Prof at U Houston, 11/3/2010, [] )

Yes, there is no doubt about it __. The planet is experiencing a siege of abnormally high temperatures. This has now been going on for 15,000 to 18,000 years, a life-friendly period known as an interglacial cycle __. During glacial ages that exist about 90% of the time, our Northern Hemisphere is mostly covered with ice up to several miles thick. __ Records of these alternating glacial and interglacial fluctuations reveal the near regularity of an electrocardiogram over many hundreds of thousands of years … beginning long before __ the man-made inventions of agriculture, smokestacks, SUVs and __ carbon offset trading scams __. And just how abnormally warm is it now? Let's consider some "recent" comparisons. __ Temperatures are ____ probably about the same today as during a "Roman Warm Period __ " slightly more than __ 2,000 years ago __, and much warmer than the "Dark Ages" that followed. __ They are cooler than the "Medieval Warm Period" __ about 1,000 years ago when Eric the Red and his Icelandic Viking tribe settled on grasslands of Greenland's southwestern coast, and much warmer than about 400 years ago when the Northern Hemisphere plunged into depths of a "Little Ice Age" (not a true Ice Age). Near the end of that period Washington's army suffered brutal cold at Valley Forge (1777), and Napoleon's, a frigid retreat from Russia (1812). Warming is due to solar variations
 * Wojick 05 ** (David, President of Climatechange.org, Electricity Daily, January 10)

__ U.S. climate change research __ policy __ is seriously out of whack. There is growing evidence that solar variability is responsible for most of the global warming __ in the last century ( ED, Dec 15,2004). Coal fired power plants are being blamed for much of this warming, but if it is actually the sun at work then we are wasting time and a lot of money trying to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Clearly the Bush administration should be looking into this solar angle. But it is not, even though its $2 billion a year Climate Change Science Program just underwent a massive review. The CCSP is doing outdated, entrenched science, that assumes humans are to blame for what may well be a natural phenomenon. The problem is that __ the federal science program was defined 15 years ago __. It was assumed then that the climate is naturally unchanging, so humans must be the cause of the observed warming. Since then we have learned that climate, like weather, is never constant, but __ the research program has not changed __ accordingly. __ In the last 6-8 years the sun has emerged as a big driver of Earth s climate change __. For example, consider the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which conducts massive periodic reviews of climate science. __ In 1995 the IPCC said that the sun was not a factor in the warming over the last century. In 2001 it concluded that more than half of that warming was solar induced __, not human induced. __ Given that the IPCC tends to be biased toward the theory of human induced warming, this was a huge admission __. The scientific trend marked by the IPCC s flip flop has continued. The research problem is that the known __ variations in solar energy are not strong enough to account for all of the observed global warming. But in the last five years a number of indirect, amplifying mechanisms have been identified __. The result is that we now know how __ the sun might account for all of the warming __, and there is growing evidence that it does. Research problems do not get any better, or more important, than this. The policy problem is that the CCSP has no plans to do solar-climate research. Because carbon dioxide was assumed to be the culprit, the annual CCSP budget has a $110 million carbon cycle component. But CO2 is a trace gas and the CO2 increase to date cannot explain the observed warming, without assuming a water vapor feedback, so the CCSP also includes a $150 million water-cycle component. There is no corresponding solar-cycle research, what little is done on solar is round-off error. The word solar barely occurs in the new CCSP Strategic Plan, and occurs not at all in the plan s milestones. In short, __ the climate research program has assumed an old, speculative answer to the warming question ( __ humans are doing it) __ and is throwing vast quantities of money at that answer __. Billions of dollars over the last 15 years. Now that a new answer is emerging (it s the Sun, after all) the CCSP has failed to notice. Clearly its time to put some of these big science bucks into solar climate research. U.S. energy policy hangs in the balance. Warming inevitable
 * Husler and Sornette 11 ** (A.D., and D. Department of Management, Technology and Economics, ETH Zurich, “Evidence for super-exponentially accelerating atmospheric carbon dioxide growth,” 3/17/11)

We have analyzed the growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide and of what constitutes arguably its most important underlying driving variable, namely human population. Our empirical calibrations suggest that __ human population has decelerated from its previous super-exponential growth ____ until 1960 to __ \just" __ an exponential growth. ____ As for atmospheric CO ____ 2 ____ content ____, we find that it is at least exponentially increasing and more probably exhibiting an accelerating growth rate __ , consistent with a FTS (_nite-time singular) power law regime. We have proposed a simple framework to think about these dynamics, based on endogenous economic growth theory. We showed that the positive feedback loops between several variables, such as population, technology and capital can give rise to the observed FTS behavior, notwithstanding the fact that the dynamics of each variable would be stable or at most exponential, conditional on the stationarity of the other variables. It is the joint growth of the coupled variables that may give rise to the enormous acceleration characterized by the FTS behavior, both in the equation and, we present suggestive evidence, in the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere. Overall, the evidence presented here does not augur well for the future. _ __ The human population is still growing at a non-sustainable rate and there is no sign the population will stabilize anytime soon. ____ Many argue that economic developments and education of women will lead to a decrease growth rate and an eventual stabilization of human population. This is not yet observed in the population dynamics __, when integrated worldwide. Let us hope that the stabilization of the human population will occur endogenously by self-regulation, rather than by more stringent finite carrying capacity constraints that can be expected to lead to severe strains on a significant fraction of the population. No extinction
 * INPCC 11 ** Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. Surviving the unprecedented climate change of the IPCC. 8 March 2011. http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2011/mar/8mar2011a5.html

In a paper published in //Systematics and Biodiversity//, Willis //et al//. (2010) consider the IPCC (2007) "predicted climatic changes for the next century" -- i.e., their contentions that "global temperatures will increase by 2-4°C and possibly beyond, sea levels will rise (~1 m ± 0.5 m), and atmospheric CO2will increase by up to 1000 ppm" -- noting that it is "widely suggested that the magnitude and rate of these changes will result in many plants and animals going extinct," citing studies that suggest that "within the next century, over 35% of some biota will have gone extinct (Thomas //et al//., 2004; Solomon //et al//., 2007) and there will be extensive die-back of the tropical rainforest due to climate change (e.g. Huntingford //et al//., 2008)." On the other hand, they indicate that some __ biologists and climatologists have pointed out that "many of the predicted increases in climate have happened before, in terms of both magnitude and rate of change __ (e.g. Royer, 2008; Zachos //et al//., 2008), __ and yet biotic communities have remained remarkably resilient __ (Mayle and Power, 2008) __ and in some cases thrived __ (Svenning and Condit, 2008)." But they report that those who mention these things are often "placed in the 'climate-change denier' category," although the purpose for pointing out these facts is simply to present "a sound scientific basis for understanding biotic responses to the magnitudes and rates of climate change predicted for the future through using the vast data resource that we can exploit in fossil records." Going on to do just that, __ Willis //et al//. focus on "intervals in time in the fossil record when atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased up to 1200 ppm, temperatures in mid- to high-latitudes increased by greater than 4°C within 60 years, and sea levels rose by up to 3 m higher than present," ____ describing studies of past biotic responses that indicate "the scale and impact of the magnitude and rate of such climate changes on biodiversity __ ." And what emerges from those studies, as they describe it, "is ev __ idence for rapid community turnover, migrations, development of novel ecosystems and thresholds from one stable ecosystem state to anoth __ er." And, most importantly in this regard, they report " __ there is very little evidence for broad-scale extinctions due to a warming world ____ . __ " In concluding, the Norwegian, Swedish and UK researchers say that "based on such evidence __ we urge some caution in assuming broad-scale extinctions of species will occur due solely to climate changes of the magnitude and rate predicted for the next centur __ y," reiterating that " __ the fossil record indicates ____ remarkable biotic resilience to wide amplitude fluctuations in climate." __ CO2 isn’t key
 * Bell 10 ** (Larry, Prof at U Houston, 11/3/2010, [] )

More recent temperature variations have been relatively much more stable and moderate. __ The past century witnessed two distinct warming periods, one occurred from 1900-1945, and another from 1975-1998. About half of that total warming occurred before the mid-1940s. And while CO2 levels have continued to rise, there hasn't been statistically significant warming since 1998 __ (the end of a strong El Nino season). Those who pay honest attention to long-term climate patterns will note that __ atmospheric CO2 concentration fluctuations do not lead, but typically follow, temperature changes. That's because oceans are huge CO2 sinks, absorbing CO2 as they cool, and releasing CO2 as they warm up __. (When you open a carbonated beverage you experience the same phenomenon. If the beverage is cold, it retains CO2. If it is warm, it releases CO2 and sprays all over.) __ These temperature shifts are heavily influenced by entirely natural ocean cycle fluctuations that affect heat transfer patterns from the tropics __. In the Arctic these oscillations occur about every 60 to 70 years. They cause faster warming – large emission reductions remove sulfate aerosols, which cool the Earth
 * Lovelock 09 **, Consultant of NASA, former president of the Marine Biological Association, and Honorary Visiting Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford (James, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning: Enjoy it While You Can, 55-56

In 2004, two IPCC contributors, Peter Cox and Meinrat Andreae, raised the question: __ What happens to global warming if this pollution haze suddenly disappears __ ? Their paper in Nature warned that if the haze disappeared __, global heating would intensify, and dangerous change could be the consequence __. In 2008, a group led by Peter Scott, from the Hadley Centre (part of the Meterological Office), examined this phenomenon in a careful and wall-drawn paper in the journal Tellus: __ "global dimming __ ," they revealed, is complex, even as a purely geophysical problem. According to their calculations the sudden removal of haze __ could lead to __ either a modest or __ a severe increase of heating __. I know begin to see why my wise friend Robert Charlson is so loath to commit himself on pollution aerosols and climate change. Even so, there was little doubt among any of these distinguished climate scientists that the present pollution haze reduces global heating, or that its sudden removal could have serious consequences. I suspect that we worry less about global heating than about a global economic crash, and forget that we could make both events happen together if we implemented __ an immediate, global 60 percent reduction of emissions. __ This __ would cause a rapid fall in ____ fossil fuel consumption __, and __ most of the particles that make the atmospheric aerosol ____ would within weeks fall from the air __. This would greatly simplify prediction and we could at last be fairly sure that global temperature would __ rise; the removal of the pollution aerosol would leave the gaseous greenhouse unobstructed and free at last to devastate what was left of the comfortable interglacial Earth. __ Yes, if we implemented in full the recommendations made at Bali within a year, far from stabilizing the climate, __ it could grow hotter not cooler __. This is why I said in The Revenge of Gaia, "We live in a fool's climate and are damned whatever we do." Sulfur offsets carbon dioxide solves warming
 * Walsh 11 ** [Bryan-staffwriter, “Has China Sky Helped Slow Global Warming,” July 5, 2011, http://science.time.com/2011/07/05/has-china-sky-helped-slow-global-warming/]

As it turns out, however, __ China sky may __ actually __ have another, surprising impact on global warming __. For a while now scientists have been somewhat perplexed that the rise in the Earth's temperatures paused for a time during the 2000s. It's not that the Earth cooled—the last decade was the hottest on record—but __ global surface temperatures stopped showing a continuing rising trend even as carbon emissions grew year by year __. Something had to be acting to offset the warming that should otherwise have been caused by increasing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. According to a study published this week in the //Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences//, __ we can __ blame—or __ thank—China and its coal industry __. The authors of the study—led by Robert Kaufmann of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University—noted that during the time period __ there was an 11-year decline in solar input ____, as well as a cyclical shift from an El Nino to a La Nina climate pattern __ , which is associated with cooling. But __ the ____ larger effect might have come from the rapid growth in Chinese coal combustion, __ which doubled between 2003 and 2007—, __ leading to an increase in sulfur emissions __ and that white China sky. Sulfate particles can have a cooling effect on global temperatures because they can reflect sunlight back into space—something seen most recently in 1991, when the volcano Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, spewing up to 30 million tons of sulfur dioxide high into the atmosphere. That led global temperatures to fall about 0.5 C in 1992 and 1993, before the sulfur eventually fell from the atmosphere. __ The sudden spike in sulfur ____ from Chinese coal combustion over the past decade could have had a similar cooling effect that would have offset at least some of the expected warming from rising greenhouse gas emissions __. It wouldn't even be the first time that had happened—there was a similar slowdown in warming during the 30 years following World War II as the global economy boomed on the back of fossil fuels, only to see warming pick up as pollution controls kicked in and companies installed scrubbers in coal-fired power plants. = = = = = 1NC round 1 v GSQ POE Aff =

Comprehensive Immigration Reform Politics Disadvantage
[]
 * Immigration reform will pass - political capital key**
 * Latin American Herald Tribune 7/16 ** “Obama Ready to Spend Political Capital on Immigration”,

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama told Hispanic Democratic legislators on Wednesday that he __ will invest __ his __ political capital in __ an immigration reform package whose principles will be revealed during a forum in the next two months. ¶ That is what members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus reported after their first meeting with Obama on the subject of immigration. ¶ In remarks to reporters, the lawmakers expressed confidence __ that, with the president’s support __, this year the dialogue on comprehensive __ immigration reform will be resumed __ , opening a path to legalization for the country’s estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants. ¶ The chairwoman of the Hispanic Caucus, New York Democratic Rep. Nydia Velazquez said that the president assured the group “he is a man of his word” and would fulfill his campaign promises to push for immigration reform. ¶ Meanwhile, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) said that during the meeting Obam a assured lawmakers that he will invest part of his __ political capital ____ in moving forward on immigration reform __ that includes strong measures for border security and a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants. ¶ Menendez said that the lawmakers will work with Obama on the “principles” of that reform package, which will be presented at a public forum in the next two months with the aim of starting the dialogue about how to fix the country’s problematic immigration system. ¶ “He understands that this is a matter of civil rights,” the senator said of Obama. ¶ Gaining approval of a reform plan, Menendez acknowledged, will be “a struggle ,” taking into account the opposition of many Republicans and other conservative groups.

Farnsworth 12 – VP of the Council of the Americas and Americas Society (Eric, “The United States and Mexico: The Path Forward”, Nov 30, [], CMR)
 * Engaging Mexico drains PC **

The election of Enrique Peña Nieto and the re-election of President Obama mean that the U.S.-Mexican relationship has a unique opportunity to grow closer and bring numerous benefits to both sides of the border. To fully appreciate this unique opportunity, both sides must invest // political capital // and be prepared to engage domestic public opinion when it comes to // explaining // why our countries are united by much more than a fence.


 * PC key and finite**
 * Nakamura 13 ** (David, “In interview, Obama says he has a year to get stuff done”, 2/20/2013, [] )

President __ Obama __ said Wednesday he’s __ eager to move quickly to enact his second-term agenda, acknowledging __ that __ he ____ has a severely limited time frame __ before the political world begins thinking about the next election cycle in 2014 and beyond. ¶ Obama told a San Francisco television station that __ he wants to “get as much ____ stuff ____ done as quickly as possible __ .” ¶ “Once we get through this year, then people start looking at the mid-terms and after that start thinking about the presidential election,” Obama said during a brief interview with KGO, an ABC affiliate. “The American people don’t want us thinking about elections, they want us to do some work. America is poised to grow in 2013 and add a lot of jobs as long as Washington doesn’t get in the way.” ¶ __ Obama’s remarks were an acknowledgement that ____ a second-term president’s ability to use his political capital ____ faces rapidly diminishing returns, highlighting the high stakes of his bids to strike deals with Congress on __ issues from tax reform, budget cuts, __ immigration ____ reform __ and gun control.

[] )
 * Obama political capital key passage**
 * Sink 7/15 ** (Justin, “Obama takes push for immigration reform to Spanish-language TV”,

President Obama will look to intensify pressure on House Republicans to act on immigration reform with four television interviews on local Spanish-language networks this week. ¶ " The president 's going to give some interviews to local Spanish-language television where he will talk about, again, the need to __ move forward on immigration reform __ ," White House press secretary Jay Carney said on Monday. ¶ "He'll talk about the enormous benefits of immigration reform; economic benefits which were made clear by the [Congressional Budget Office], as well as all the other benefits to our businesses, to the rule of law, to the capacity for our country to continue to generate innovative ideas and entrepreneurial advances," Carney added. ¶ The Associated Press reported that the interviews will be conducted at the White House on Tuesday with stations from Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles and New York. ¶ The White House has thus far kept a behind-the-scenes role in the battle over immigration reform amid worries that a heavy-handed campaign-style approach could spook Republicans crucial to the bill's success. ¶ __ There have been signs, however, that the president is looking to increase his role __ in recent weeks, __ as concern mounts that legislation could stall ____ in the __ GOP-controlled House. ¶ Over the weekend, senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer told the AP that "there might be a moment where the hammer comes out, but we're not there yet" on immigration. ¶ Carney reiterated that threat on Monday. ¶ “When that moment arrives, if that arrives,” he said. ¶ "What has been our approach all along has been to evaluate the progress that comprehensive immigration reform has been making in the Congress and against that progress to make judgments about how we can best, from the president on down, advance the cause," he added. ¶ Members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus who visited the White House last week said that Obama was weighing a barnstorming trip around the country. The White House, though, has refused to confirm those plans, saying merely that it is under consideration. ¶ On Thursday, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), two authors of the Senate’s bipartisan immigration bill, wouldn't comment directly on reports that the president was considering taking his immigration message across the country after meeting with him in the Oval Office. ¶ The senators said the __ president realized he needed to bring GOP members onboard __. ¶ “I believe the president, as a result of our meetings , will be respectful,” McCain said. “The __ challenge __ here is to get __ Republican members __ .” ¶ McCain added that he believed Obama “is willing to work with everybody and __ make compromises ____ that are necessary __ .” ¶ “To somehow say that he shouldn't be involved in that discussion is foolish,” McCain added.


 * CIR key to the economy and competitiveness**
 * Green 7/2 ** - founder and president of FWD.us, an advocacy group created by technology leaders that promotes policies to keep the United States and its citizens competitive in a global economy (Joe, “House, knowledge economy needs immigrants”, [] )

Our country has changed a lot during those 27 years, but not -- so far -- our immigration policy. Suffice it to say, __ if we can pass __ our generation's __ immigration reform, it will be a really big deal __. ¶ __ America's greatest asset has always been its people __, drawn here from all over the world. In the 21st century, __ our economic future depends on immigrants ____ more than ever __. __ The fastest-growing sector of our economy is the knowledge economy ____, where the main competitive difference is people __. ¶ In a globalized world where people and businesses have their choice of countries to locate in, __ continuing to have the best ____ trained, hardest-working and most productive people in the world will keep the U __ nited __ S __ tates __ at ____ the forefront of global competitiveness __. We have some huge advantages: the top universities in the world, the top scientific researchers, and -- right alongside these -- our identity as a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants. ¶ At FWD.us, a nonprofit advocacy group, we are entrepreneurs, and we believe that one of the main reasons America is the leading entrepreneurial nation is that we are a nation of immigrants. Leaving behind your home country and everything you know to create a better life for your family is the essence of the risk-taking that characterizes the entrepreneurial ethos. ¶ I think back to my ancestors in the shtetls of Eastern Europe in the 19th century. They had probably never been more than two miles from their village, and got on a steamship to go to a country they had never even seen in a picture, knowing they would never return home. ¶ That is truly putting it all on the line to make a better life. It is not random, who chooses to emigrate, and the work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit of these immigrants have shaped the character of our country. Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley do not just identify with the experience of computer programmers coming to America to work at tech companies, but with everyone who comes here to make a better life. It's why we are working for comprehensive immigration reform. ¶ There are talented young people in America who were brought here by their parents who now cannot go to college or work because they are undocumented. These DREAMers are just waiting to contribute, and their parents, with the right accountability measures, should be able to join them by coming out of the shadows and contributing fully to their communities. ¶ In addition, we know that __ the best ____ and the brightest come here to study, start companies and create jobs that grow our economy __ ; millions more are caught in limbo navigating a complex and broken system that is totally outdated for a modern economy and modern American families. __ We need to pass ____ c __ omprehensive __ i __ mmigration __ r __ eform __ to unlock those contributions and __ by doing so __ change millions of lives. __


 * Collapse of the US economic power causes nuclear war**
 * Khalilzad 11 ** Zalmay was the United States ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations during the presidency of George W. Bush and the director of policy planning at the Defense Department from 1990 to 1992, “ The Economy and National Security”, 2-8-11, []

Today, __ economic __ and fiscal __ trends pose ____ the most severe __ long-term __ threat to the U __ nited __ S __ tates’ __ position as global leader __. While the United States suffers from fiscal imbalances and low economic growth, the economies of rival powers are developing rapidly. The __ continuation of __ these two __ trends could lead to a shift from American primacy toward a multi-polar global system, leading in turn to increased ____ geopolitical rivalry ____ and __ even __ war ____ among __ the __ great powers __. The current recession is the result of a deep financial crisis, not a mere fluctuation in the business cycle. Recovery is likely to be protracted. The crisis was preceded by the buildup over two decades of enormous amounts of debt throughout the U.S. economy — ultimately totaling almost 350 percent of GDP — and the development of credit-fueled asset bubbles, particularly in the housing sector. When the bubbles burst, huge amounts of wealth were destroyed, and unemployment rose to over 10 percent. The decline of tax revenues and massive countercyclical spending put the U.S. government on an unsustainable fiscal path. Publicly held national debt rose from 38 to over 60 percent of GDP in three years. Without faster economic growth and actions to reduce deficits, publicly held national debt is projected to reach dangerous proportions. If interest rates were to rise significantly, annual interest payments — which already are larger than the defense budget — would crowd out other spending or require substantial tax increases that would undercut economic growth. Even worse, if unanticipated events trigger what economists call a “sudden stop” in credit markets for U.S. debt, __ the U __ nited __ S __ tates __ would be unable to roll over its outstanding obligations, precipitating a sovereign-debt crisis that would ____ almost certainly ____ compel a ____ radical retrenchment ____ of the U __ nited __ S __ tates __ internationally __. __ Such scenarios would ____ reshape the international order __. It was the __ economic devastation __ of Britain and France __ during World War II __, as well as the rise of other powers, that __ led __ both __ countries to relinquish their empires __. In the late 1960s, British leaders concluded that they lacked the economic capacity to maintain a presence “east of Suez.” Soviet economic weakness, which crystallized under Gorbachev, contributed to their decisions to withdraw from Afghanistan, abandon Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and allow the Soviet Union to fragment. If the U.S. debt problem goes critical, __ the U __ nited __ S __ tates __ would ____ be compelled to retrench, reducing its military spending and shed __ ding __ international commitments __. We face this domestic challenge while other major powers are experiencing rapid economic growth. Even though __ countries __ such as China, India, and Brazil have profound political, social, demographic, and economic problems, their __ economies are growing faster than ours, and this could alter the global distribution of power. ____ These trends could __ in the long term __ produce a multi-polar world __. __ If U.S. policymakers fail to act __ and other powers continue to grow, __ it is not a question of whether but when ____ a new international order will emerge __. __ The closing of the gap __ between the United States and its rivals __ could intensify ____ geopolitical ____ competition among major powers ____, increase incentives for local powers to play major powers against one another, and undercut our will ____ to preclude or respond to international crises because of the higher risk of escalation. ____ The stakes are high __. In modern history, __ the longest period of peace ____ among the great powers has been the era of U.S. leadership __. By contrast __, multi-polar systems have been unstable, with their competitive dynamics resulting in frequent crises and major wars among the great powers __. __ Failures of multi-polar international systems produced ____ both world wars __. __ American retrenchment could have ____ devastating consequences ____. ____ Without an American security blanket, regional powers could ____ rearm ____ in an attempt to balance against emerging threats __. Under this scenario, __ there would be ____ a heightened possibility of ____ arms races, miscalc __ ulation, __ or ____ other crises ____ spiraling into all-out conflict ____. __ Alternatively, __ in seeking to accommodate the stronger powers, weaker powers may shift their geopolitical posture away from the U __ nited __ S __ tates. Either way, __ hostile states would ____ be emboldened to ____ make aggressive moves ____ in their regions __.

Exclusively Economic Action Topicality
a. Interpretation – “economic engagement” means the aff must be an exclusively economic action – it cannot encompass broader forms of engagement
 * Jakstaite 10 ** - Doctoral Candidate Vytautas Magnus University Faculty of Political Sciences and Diplomacy (Lithuania) (Gerda, “CONTAINMENT AND ENGAGEMENT AS MIDDLE-RANGE THEORIES” BALTIC JOURNAL OF LAW & POLITICS VOLUME 3, NUMBER 2 (2010), DOI: 10.2478/v10076-010-0015-7)

The approach to engagement as economic __ engagement focuses exclusively on economic instruments of foreign pol icy __ with the main national interest being security. Economic engagement is a policy of the conscious development of economic relations with the adversary in order to change the target state‟s behaviour __ and to improve bilateral relations __ .94 Economic engagement is academically wielded in several respects. It recommends that the state engage the target country in the international community (with the there existing rules) and modify the target state‟s run foreign policy, thus preventing the emergence of a potential enemy.95 Thus, this strategy aims to ensure safety in particular, whereas economic benefit is not a priority objective. Objectives of economic engagement indicate that this form of engagement is designed for relations with problematic countries – those that pose a potential danger to national security of a state that implements economic engagement. Professor of the University of California Paul Papayoanou and University of Maryland professor Scott Kastner say that economic engagement should be used in relations with the emerging powers: countries which accumulate more and more power, and attempt a new division of power in the international system – i.e., pose a serious challenge for the status quo in the international system (the latter theorists have focused specifically on China-US relations). These theorists also claim that economic engagement is recommended in relations with emerging powers whose regimes are not democratic – that is, against such players in the international system with which it is difficult to agree on foreign policy by other means.96 Meanwhile, other supporters of economic engagement (for example, professor of the University of California Miles Kahler) are not as categorical and do not exclude the possibility to realize economic engagement in relations with democratic regimes.97 Proponents of economic engagement believe that the economy may be one factor which leads to closer relations and cooperation (a more peaceful foreign policy and the expected pledge to cooperate) between hostile countries – closer economic ties will develop the target state‟s dependence on economic engagement implementing state for which such relations will also be cost-effective (i.e., the mutual dependence). However, there are some important conditions for the economic factor in engagement to be effective and bring the desired results. P. Papayoanou and S. Kastner note that economic engagement gives the most positive results when initial economic relations with the target state is minimal and when the target state‟s political forces are interested in development of international economic relations. Whether economic relations will encourage the target state to develop more peaceful foreign policy and willingness to cooperate will depend on the extent to which the target state‟s forces with economic interests are influential in internal political structure. If the target country‟s dominant political coalition includes the leaders or groups interested in the development of international economic relations, economic ties between the development would bring the desired results. Academics note that in non-democratic countries in particular leaders often have an interest to pursue economic cooperation with the powerful economic partners because that would help them maintain a dominant position in their own country.98 Proponents of economic engagement do not provide a detailed description of the means of this form of engagement, but identify a number of possible variants of engagement: conditional economic engagement, using the restrictions caused by economic dependency and unconditional economic engagement by exploiting economic dependency caused by the flow. Conditional economic engagement, sometimes called linkage or economic carrots engagement, could be described as conflicting with economic sanctions. A state that implements this form of engagement instead of menacing to use sanctions for not changing policy course promises for a target state to provide more economic benefits in return for the desired political change. Thus, in this case economic ties are developed depending on changes in the target state‟s behaviour.99 Unconditional economic engagement is more moderate form of engagement. Engagement applying state while developing economic relations with an adversary hopes that the resulting economic dependence over time will change foreign policy course of the target state and reduce the likelihood of armed conflict. Theorists assume that economic dependence may act as a restriction of target state‟s foreign policy or as transforming factor that changes target state‟s foreign policy objectives.100 Thus, economic engagement focuses solely on economic measures (although theorists do not give a more detailed description), on strategically important actors of the international arena and includes other types of engagement, such as the conditional-unconditional economic engagement. b. Violation – the affirmative increases border infrastructure c. That’s a voting issue 1. Predictable Limits – allowing infrastructure opens up transportation infrastructure between the U.S. and Mexico to increase bilateral relations, which explodes the topic and increases the research burden, making it impossible for us to prepare. 2. Predictable Ground – all of the negative links are based on economic engagement, which means that we will never have any core generics to run against them – kills clash. 3. Topic education – transportation infrastructure was last year’s topic. This year we should be learning about economic engagement. 4. Effects Topicality – they increase the infrastructure, which then increases bilateral relations. At best, they do not solve for their affirmative. =States Counterplan=
 * The 50 states and territories of the United States should fund substantial infrastructure improvements at Points of Entry along the United States – Mexico border.**


 * Solves the case**
 * Gerber et al 10 ** (James, PhD California Davis San Diego State University Director of the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and a Professor of Economics;Francisco Lara-Valencia, PhD Umich, Arizona State University Associate Professor, Director, Research Network for Transborder Development and Governance; Carlos de la Parra, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, PhD Umich, professor Urban and Environmental Studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. “Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border: Policies toward a More Competitive and Sustainable Transborder Region” Global Economy Journal Volume 10, Issue 4 2010)

The trajectory toward crossborder integration and the increasing political maturity of the ten border states are the underpinnings of the term “transborder ,” as we use it here and as it being use by the Border Governors Conference. The Border Governors Conference launched in 2009 a set of Strategic Guidelines, or Plan Indicativo, in an attempt to define policies for the U.S.-Mexico border region as a whole as well as to have a greater voice in the future of overall U.S.- Mexico relations. We argue that this claim to an increased voice in national policies for border states will tend towards a greater partnership between national and regional interests, rather than promoting a tug-of-war between border states and national capitals. Regional-national partnership is essential, both for the social and economic development of the border region, and for the strengthening of U.S.-Mexico ties.

Free Trade Good Disadvantage
Strassel 2013 (2-14-13, Kimberley A. Strassel is a member of Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, “The Obama Free-Trade Agenda, [] )
 * Obama re-prioritizing free trade to appease republicans **

Mr. Obama's promise in his Tuesday speech t o make free trade a centerpiece of economic revival was one of the few moments that earned him Republican and business-community applause. Trade gurus were heartened by both the attention the president gave the subject, as well as the scope of his ambitions. Mr. Obama vowed to not only finish a long-lingering trade pact with trans-Pacific nations, but to kick off a far-reaching agreement with the European Union. This would be a remarkable turnaround for a White House that has up to now treated trade with thinly disguised disdain. The highlight of its trade agenda are three free-trade pacts—with South Korea, Panama and Colombia—that were signed in the Bush administration, and which the Obama White House took three years to get around to asking Congress to pass. Beyond that, Mr. Obama has shown little appetite for taking on his union and environmentalist base, which oppose free trade on principle.

Costa 2013 (Anthony Costa - Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, “Selective engagement with the global economy, prioritizing growth, spurs inequality”, [] )
 * Intervention and engagement results in selective economic action not global trade - leaders use nationalism to justify economic decisions **

National security arguments also prompt intervention, such as scrutiny by the US government of Chinese telecommunications firms, like Huawei and ZTE, to sell in the American market. Upset about the elimination of any French jobs, the French government threatened to nationalize ArcelorMittal units in France, owned by an Indian steel magnate, after he proposed closing two inactive blast furnaces. Not all states intervene, though, too often indifferent, even callous to the plight of their citizens. In fact, most states fail to govern their economies well in the face of challenges and opportunities emanating from the world economy. Only a few states have the capacity to intervene effectively. Today these include ambitious developing states such as Brazil, Russia, China and India, known as BRIC, and East Asian __economies. These countries have a history of state-led development with global and regional political and economic ambitions in the midst of other powerful states. The concept of economic nationalism is used for selective engagement with the world economy. __ Rather than the orthodox notion of economic nationalism, defensive in nature and nation-centered, I offer a more dynamic understanding – economic nationalism in motion. This version, first proposed in the Review of International Political Economy, 2009, suggests that the practice is influenced by pragmatic considerations rather than ideology – akin to Deng Xiaoping’s proverbial cat that catches mice irrespective of its color – especially under fluid circumstances of economic growth, emerging competitive industries and, most importantly, as national capitalists mature. Earlier economic nationalism meant protection; today it’s promotion, though the basic motive for both is ensuring national economic interests. This ability to navigate changing circumstances and priorities pragmatically contributes to the dynamic movement of the practice of economic nationalism.

Foulkes 2012 (“The Magic of Free Trade,” 10-22-12, [|http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-magic-of-free-trade#axzz2YCcbjJVp], SP)
 * Free trade creates relations that foster peace and resolve conflict **

What’s more, f ree trade among nations is a way to promote peaceful international relations. Whenindividuals are free to trade across political boundaries, they are more likely to view “foreigners” positively. The mutual benefits of trade, in other words, can promote peace. Ricardo, one of the most influential economists of all time, was among the first to understand the great value of free trade. In his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) he summed up the benefits of free international trade nicely: Under a system of perfectly free commerce, each country naturally devotes its capital and labor to such employments as are most beneficial to each. This pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the universal good of the whole. . . . [It] distributes labor most effectively and most economically; while, by increasing the general mass of productions, it diffuses general benefit, and binds together, by one common tie of interest and intercourse, the universal society of nations throughout the civilized world. Free trade gets a bad rap from domestic producers and protectionists of all sorts. But nothing is more important to a growing, dynamic economy than allowing the basic human right to freely and peacefully exchange with others. = = =U.S.-Brazil Relations Disadvantage=

“Global Brazil and U.S.-Brazil Relations” Independent Task Force Report No. 66 CAIO, 7/9)
 * U.S. Brazil Relations high – now key**
 * Bodman and Wolfensohn 11 ** (Samuel W. Bodman and James D. Wolfensohn, Chairs Independent Task Force CFR; Julia E. Sweig, Project Director

__ Brazil and the U ____ nited States are now entering a period that has __ ¶ __ great potential to solidify a mature friendship, one that entails everdeepening __ ¶ __ trust in order to secure mutual benefits. This kind of relationship __ ¶ __ requires the two countries to move beyond their historic __ ¶ __ oscillation __ between misinterpretation, public praise, and rebuke, and ¶ __ instead approach both cooperation and inevitable disagreement with __ ¶ __ mutual respect and tolerance. __


 * Interference destroys relations**
 * Rothkopf 09 ** (David, “The Perils of Rivarly”, Center for American Progress, March, [], accessed on 7/10/13)

__ There are other areas in which tension could enter the relationship. How the United States interacts with the Americas writ large under President Obama will shape relations and create potential pitfalls __, and so will domestic political considerations both in the United States and Brazil. __ Any real or perceived interference in the region by the U ____ nited States would greatly upset Brazil. If the United States decided that heavy-handed political pressure or intervention were required in regard, for example, to Venezuela __, Bolivia, or Ecuador, __ this could put Brazil in an uncomfortable position where it has to choose between the U ____ nited States and its neighbors __. __ Since Brazil has spent years arguing for South American unity, it would likely choose its neighbors or— __ even more likely— __ choose to interject itself as a third party with a third point of view __


 * Relations key to the environment**
 * Barbosa 11 ** (Ruben, former Brazil ambassador to US, National Interest, july CIAO accessed 7/8)

__ In the foreign policy area engagement between __ ¶ __ Brazil and the United States held outside __ ¶ __ of the Americas will likely allow for greater __ ¶ __ cooperation ____, __ especially in countries in regions ¶ such as Africa where Brazil enjoys comparative ¶ advantages and where we can foresee more trilateral ¶ cooperation on education, health, governance ¶ and economic development. Although ¶ our views on international organizations do ¶ not always converge, __ we can hope for greater __ ¶ __ cooperation on matters of peace and security, __ ¶ __ the environment and climate change, G-20 __ ¶ __ energy initiatives, and technical assistance and __ ¶ __ cooperation __

The human species during its brief time on Earth has exhibited a remarkable capacity to kill itself off. The Cro-Magnons dispatched the gentler Neanderthals. The conquistadors, with the help of smallpox, decimated the native populations in the Americas. Modern industrial warfare in the 20th century took at least 100 million lives, most of them civilians. And now we sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species. Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the “future-eaters.” In the past when civilizations went belly up through greed, mismanagement and the exhaustion of natural resources, human beings migrated somewhere else to pillage anew. But this time the game is over. There is nowhere else to go. The industrialized nations spent the last century seizing half the planet and dominating most of the other half. We giddily exhausted our natural capital, especially fossil fuel, to engage in an orgy of consumption and waste that poisoned the Earth and attacked the ecosystem on which human life depends. It was quite a party if you were a member of the industrialized elite. But it was pretty stupid. Collapse this time around will be global. We will disintegrate together. And there is no way out. The 10,000-year experiment of settled life is about to come to a crashing halt. And humankind, which thought it was given dominion over the Earth and all living things, will be taught a painful lesson in the necessity of balance, restraint and humility. There is no human monument or city ruin that is more than 5,000 years old. Civilization, Ronald Wright notes in “A Short History of Progress,” “occupies a mere 0.2 percent of the two and a half million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone.” Bye-bye, Paris. Bye-bye, New York. Bye-bye, Tokyo. Welcome to the new experience of human existence, in which rooting around for grubs on islands in northern latitudes is the prerequisite for survival. We view ourselves as rational creatures. But is it rational to wait like sheep in a pen as oil and natural gas companies, coal companies, chemical industries, plastics manufacturers, the automotive industry, arms manufacturers and the leaders of the industrial world, as they did in Copenhagen, take us to mass extinction? It is too late to prevent profound climate change. But why add fuel to the fire? Why allow our ruling elite, driven by the lust for profits, to accelerate the death spiral? Why continue to obey the laws and dictates of our executioners ? The news is grim. The accelerating disintegration of Arctic Sea ice means that summer ice will probably disappear within the next decade. The open water will absorb more solar radiation, significantly increasing the rate of global warming. The Siberian permafrost will disappear, sending up plumes of methane gas from underground. The Greenland ice sheet and the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers will melt. Jay Zwally, a NASA climate scientist, declared in December 2007: “The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now, as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.”
 * Extinction**
 * Hedges 10 ** [Chris, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002]7/19/2010 (American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and war correspondent specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies. ) "Calling All Future Eaters." http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/calling_all_future-eaters_20100719/

TPP
Ellis 6/6 /13 – associate professor with the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies (R Evan, “China's New Backyard”, [], CMR)
 * 1) No evidence in solvency that says altering the TPP will bring in China**
 * 2) Their Kissing cards says China is already talking with South Korea on trade agreements which US perceives as containment**
 * 3) Turns case – China will undermine US strategy**

The challenges arising from China's global engagement should not, however, be confused with the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union that characterized the Cold War, in which each side actively promoted different, competing concepts for a global order. China does not seek to impose a new ideology on the world, yet the mercantilist way in which it promotes its economic development, combined with its lack of commitment to international norm s that it didn't create, makes it //more difficult// for the U nited S tates to conduct business and pursue policy goals in Latin America and other parts of the world.


 * 4) Squo Solves- China already wants to join to TPP now**

Bremmer, 10 – president of Eurasia Group and author (Ian Bremmer, “China vs. America: Fight of the Century,” Prospect, March 22, 2010, [])
 * 5) China won’t go to war - no incentive**

China will not mount a military challenge to the US any time soon. Its economy and living standards have grown so quickly over the past two decades that it’s hard to imagine the kind of catastrophic event that could push its leadership to risk it all. Beijing knows that no US government will support Taiwanese independence, and China need not invade an island that it has largely co-opted already by offering Taiwan’s business elite privileged investment opportunities.


 * 6) No Link- Their Kissinger evidence says that Obama has already invited China to the TPP**

US Mexico Relations

 * 1) No Internal Link- the bonner and rozenthal card doesn’t talk about relations, just border cooperation, not about POE’s**
 * 2) No Internal Link- Olson and Lee only talks about border security, not POE’s**

Reuters 7/10/13 Mexican president says possible U.S. spying 'totally unacceptable ' July 10, 2013|Reuters http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-07-10/news/sns-rt-us-usa-security-snowden-mexico-20130710_1_mexico-city-media-report-foreign-ministry Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said on Wednesday that if allegations were proven that the United States had spied on its southern neighbor, it would be "totally unacceptable ." During a visit to northern Mexico, Pena Nieto was asked for his views on a media report that the U.S. National Agency had spied on countries including Mexico "We have asked quite clearly, via the foreign ministry ... for an explanation from the government ... about possible spying," he told reporters in the border state of Chihuahua. " And we want to know if this is the case, and if it so, it would obviously be totally unacceptable ," he added, noting that relations with Washington remained cordial. Claims that the NSA monitored internet traffic, especially in Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico, were made in a Brazilian newspaper citing documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a fugitive former NSA contractor. Earlier, Mexico's foreign ministry said it had asked Washington for an explanation about the report in the paper O Globo. Separately, the Mexican government responded to a media report alleging that the prior administration had signed a contract in 2007 allowing the United States to install a to monitor phone and internet communications in Mexico. "The General is reviewing the documentation regarding this apparent agreement. We are going to verify if it exists and under what conditions," said Eduardo Sanchez, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. Emilio Gamboa, the Senate leader of Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party, said the contract allegations needed to be thoroughly investigated. " Friendship is made by cooperation, not by spying on us ," Gamboa told reporters in Mexico City.
 * 3) Spying kills relations.**


 * 4) Can’t solve relations – counternarcotics disagreements have already destroyed the relationship**


 * Barry, 13** – Senior Policy Analyst and Americas Policy Program Fellow, Center for International Policy (Tom, “Changing Perspectives on U.S.-Mexico Relations,” North American Congress on Latin America, May 2, [|https://nacla.org/news/2013/5/2/changing-perspectives-us-mexico-relations)//SY]

While the shape of the strategy remains unclear, dramatically reducing the pervasive and proactive military presence throughout much of Mexico has been an appropriate first step. The Mexican president has narrowed the window of U.S. involvement in intelligence, counternarcotics operations, andMexica n military affairs —a clear rebuff to the U.S. government. The Obama administration may be justifiably concerned about the ability of the new government to diminish the power and reach of criminal organizations built largely on drug-trafficking, yet President Obama should, in a gesture of solidarity and shared responsibility, acknowledge the systemic flaws in U.S. counternarcotics and anti-organized crime strategies. Pervasive patterns of human rights violations, impunity, and police and judicial corruption/reform should be top among U.S. concerns at the presidential meeting. At the same time, however, President Obama should acknowledge that the United States’ four-decade strategy of attempting to reduce the flow of illicit drugs has not only failed, but also led to a raft of adverse consequences.

Solvency
Pastor 12 – prof and director of the Center for North American Studies @ American Robert A, Beyond the Continental Divide, July/August, [], CMR
 * 1) No chance the plan solves – only trilateral cooperation with Canada can ensure successful integration**

The problem is that our leaders do not think continentally. As long as they persist in focusing on bilateral or Asian relationships, they will be //blind// to the promise and the problems of North America. At base, today’s problems are the result of the three governments’ failure to govern the North American space for mutual benefit. Once they visualize “North America” and decide to approach their problems from a continental perspective, solutions will appear that were previously //invisible//. ¶ None of the many proposals that have been advanced for the region can be achieved without such a vision. Americans and Canadians will not contribute to a North American Investment Fund to narrow the development gap with Mexico without being convinced that Mexico’s growth will benefit their countries. There is little prospect of reaching an agreement on labor mobility, harmonizing environmental standards, forging a transportation plan, or most any proposal that would cost money or change the status quo unless there is a vision of a wider community that could attract the support of the people and their legislatures. The right vision can inspire the three nations to rethink North America and incorporate the idea into our consciousness and policies. We can be more than the sum of our three great countries, but only if we first see the possibility.

Walser 2013
 * 2) No Solvency: improving cross-border trade isn’t sufficient – problems related to the drug trade will undermine cooperation**

Ray Walser, Senior Policy Analyst specializing in Latin America at The Heritage Foundation “Obama in Mexico: Change the Reality, Not the Conversation” 5/1/13 []

Of course there is much value in an opportunities-oriented approach to U.S.–Mexico relations. The two countries have unique ties based on patterns of trade, investment, integrated manufacturing, and the movement of peoples. Both nations should continue to deepen this relationship by focusing on everything from trade, global competitiveness, and modernizing and securing our shared 2,000-mile border in ways that advance economic freedom and improve educational quality and energy development. Yet addressing hard, seemingly intractable issues related to the illicit traffic in drugs, people, guns, and money moving with relative ease across the U.S.–Mexico border remains a major challenge for both leaders. The Obama Administration has done little to reduce drug demand in the U.S. Consumption of marijuana is on the rise among teens. There is legal confusion in Washington following passage of legalization measures in Colorado and Washington. Resource reductions for drug interdiction and treatment are built into the fiscal crisis. Prior objectives for drug prevention and treatment established by the Obama Administration have not been met, according to the Government Accountability Office. Meanwhile, cash and guns flow south largely unchecked into Mexico. Cooperation with Mexico may be scaled back or waning as U.S. officials are excluded from intelligence fusion centers the U.S. helped to set up. A new emphasis on citizen security may take the law enforcement heat of trafficking kingpins, who will likely attempt to move drugs across Mexico with less violence and greater efficiency as Mexican law enforcement focuses on the most violent criminal elements.


 * 3) No Solvency- Their O’Neil card doesn’t say Mexico will say yes- it only says they SHOULD, no evidence that it will reciprocate it**


 * 4) No Solvency- Their O’Neil card doesn’t say anything about the plan will get Mexico will or needs to invest**


 * 5) Their Bonner and Rosenthal card says new technology, zones of operation, and facial restructure is key, nothing about the plan gets Mexico to restructure how it’s law enforcement works, their own evidence says that’s necessary for there to be any effects**


 * 6) Their Wilson card says the only way to Solve is the need for facial reconstructure tech, nothing about the plan allows for this new teach means they can’t solve for security**

O’Neil 4/29/13
 * 7) No Solvency – Mexico says no - the new Nieto administration in Mexico is less likely to cooperate with the US on security measures**

Shannon O'Neil is Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher. She holds a BA from Yale University, an MA in International Relations from Yale University, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University. “Obama Heads to Mexico” __Latin America’s Moment__ http://blogs.cfr.org/oneil/2013/04/29/obama-heads-to-mexico/

Yet no less important for the two neighbors is security. Under Felipe Calderón’s administration, more than 70,000 Mexicans were killed and many more disappeared in violence related to drugs and organized crime. Regular crime, too, has risen, with 40 percent of Mexicans in a recent survey reporting that they or a family member had been a victim of a crime in the past year. This growing crisis opened the door to greater bilateral efforts. After years of cautious circling, U.S.-Mexico security cooperation — through the Mérida Initiative and other efforts — blossomed, setting the two neighbors on a different and more collaborative path. On this policy front, the direction Peña Nieto’s government plans to take is less clear. While repeatedly promising to reduce violence, the details of his administration’s security plan remain vague — suggesting more spending on prevention and social programs. Even the concrete shifts announced — for instance, creating a new federal gendarmerie — have been clouded by contradictory explanations and timelin es. The efforts to recentralize the security apparatus by bringing the autonomous Federal Police back under the control of the Ministry of Interior still await the definition of basic reporting lines and the stamp of a finally confirmed executive secretary of the national public security system charged with coordinating security efforts (an area where the previous government struggled). Finally, the leaders of this side of Peña Nieto’s government — Osorio Chong, ex-governor of Hidalgo; Manuel Mondragón y Kalb, the deputy secretary of public safety and previously Mexico City’s top cop; and Jesús Murillo Karam, Mexico’s attorney general and also an ex-governor of Hidalgo — are less familiar to the U nited S tates, and some worry less open to working with their neighbor than their predecessors. To be fair, security is harder. After more than a decade of underperformance, most Mexicans agree on what needs to be done economically. In contrast, there is no ready security blueprint for the way forward, for what will work to make Mexico — and by extension the United States — safer. And the issues on which there is some consensus — cleaning up Mexico’s police forces and courts and expanding programs to help youths and communities at risk — were started under the Calderón administration, making it a tricky sell for a government trying to differentiate itself. For Obama, the challenge this week will be to push forward on both fronts , recognizing and embracing the economic ambitions while also ensuring that security cooperation doesn’t falter. What really matters is what happens after the visit and how the U.S. government works with all of these elements and directions in Peña Nieto’s Cabinet. Because the outcome matters — as no other country affects the United States on a day-to-day basis as much as Mexico. = 1NC VS SVEN AND SAM =

** Immigration reform will pass - political capital key **

 * Latin American Herald Tribune 7/16 ** “Obama Ready to Spend Political Capital on Immigration”,

[]

WASHINGTON – President Barack **__ Obama __** told Hispanic Democratic legislators on Wednesday that he __ will invest __ his __ political capital in __ **__ an immigration reform package __** whose principles will be revealed during a forum in the next two months. ¶ That is what members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus reported after their first meeting with Obama on the subject of immigration. ¶ In remarks to reporters, the **__ lawmakers expressed confidence __** __ that, with the president’s support __, this year the dialogue on comprehensive __ immigration reform will be resumed __ **__ , __** opening a path to legalization for the country’s estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants. ¶ The chairwoman of the Hispanic Caucus, New York Democratic Rep. Nydia Velazquez said that the president assured the group “he is a man of his word” and would fulfill his campaign promises to push for immigration reform. ¶ Meanwhile, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) said that during the meeting **__ Obam __****__ a __** assured lawmakers that he **__ will invest __** part of his __ political capital ____ in moving forward on immigration reform __ **__ that includes __** strong measures for **__ border security and a path to legalization __** for undocumented immigrants. ¶ Menendez said that the **__ lawmakers will work with Obama on the __** “principles” of that **__ reform package __**, which will be presented at a public forum in the next two months with the aim of starting the dialogue about how to fix the country’s problematic immigration system. ¶ “He understands that this is a matter of civil rights,” the senator said of Obama. ¶ **__ Gaining approval of __****__ a reform plan, __** Menendez acknowledged, **__ will be “a struggle __** ,” **__ taking into account the opposition of __** many Republicans and other **__ conservative groups __**.


 * Aff Drains capital – Backlash and hostage taking on unrelated priority legislation is empirically proven, likely in future and specifically true for Rubio – Cuba policy is totally unique – this is the best link card you will ever read **


 * LeoGrande, 12 **

William M. LeoGrande School of Public Affairs American University, Professor of Government and a specialist in Latin American politics and U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, Professor LeoGrande has been a frequent adviser to government and private sector agencies, 12/18/12, http://www.american.edu/clals/upload/LeoGrande-Fresh-Start.pdf

The Second Obama Administration Where in the executive branch will control over Cuba policy lie? **__Political considerations played a__** **__major role in Obama's Cuba policy during the first term__**, albeit not as preeminent a consideration as they were during the Clinton years. In 2009, **__Obama's__** new foreign policy **__team__** got off to a bad start when they **__promised Senator Menendez that they would consult him before changing Cuba policy. That was the__** **__price he extracted for providing Senate Democrats with the 60 votes needed to break a Republican filibuster on a must-pass omnibus appropriations bill to keep the government operating. For the next four years, administration officials worked more closely with Menendez, who opposed__** the sort of major **__redirection of policy__** Obama had promised, **__than they did with senators__** like John Kerry (D-Mass.), chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, **__whose views were more in line__** with the president's stated policy goals. **__At the Department of State__**, Assistant Secretary Arturo Valenzuela **__favored initiatives to improve relations with Cuba__** , but he **__was__** **__stymied by indifference or resistance elsewhere in the bureaucracy__**. Secretary Hillary Clinton, having staked out a tough position Cuba during the Democratic primary campaign, was **__not inclined to be the driver for a new policy__**. At the NSC, Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere Dan Restrepo, who advised **__Obama__** on **__Latin America policy__** during the 2008 campaign, **__did his best to__** **__avoid the Cuba issue because it was so fraught with political danger. When the president finally approved__** the resumption of people-to-people **__travel__** to Cuba, which Valenzuela had been pushing, **__the White House political team__** **__delayed the announcement for several months at the behest of__** Debbie Wasserman **__Schultz. Any easing of__** the travel **__regulations__**, she warned, **__would hurt Democrats' prospects in the__** upcoming **__mid-term__** elections.43 **__The White House shelved the new regulations__** until January 2011, and then announced them late Friday before a holiday weekend. **__Then, just a year later, the administration__** **__surrendered to__** Senator **__Rubio's demand__** that it limit the licensing of travel providers **__in exchange for him dropping his hold on the appointment__** of Valenzuela's replacement.44 With Obama in his final term and Vice-President Joe Biden unlikely to seek the Democratic nomination in 2016 (unlike the situation Clinton and Gore faced in their second term), politics will presumably play a less central role in deciding Cuba policy over the next four years. **__There will still be the temptation__**, however, **__to__** **__sacrifice Cuba policy to mollify congressional conservatives, both Democrat and Republican, who are willing to hold other Obama initiatives hostage to extract concessions on Cuba__**. **__And since Obama has given in to such hostage-taking previously, the hostage-takers have a__** **__strong incentive to try the same tactic again.__** The only way to break this cycle would be for the president to stand up to them and refuse to give in, as he did when they attempted to rollback his 2009 relaxation of restrictions on CubanAmerican travel and remittances. Much will depend on who makes up Obama's new foreign policy team, especially at the **__Department of State__**. John Kerry has been a strong advocate of a more open policy toward Cuba, and worked behind the scenes with the State Department **__and USAID__** to clean up the "democracy promotion" program targeting Cuba, as a way to win the release of Alan Gross. A new secretary is likely to bring new assistant secretaries, providing an opportunity to revitalize the **__Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs,__** which **__has been__** **__thoroughly cowed by congressional hardliners__**. But **__even with new players in place, does Cuba rise to the level of importance that would justify a major new initiative and the__** **__bruising battle with conservatives on the Hill?__** Major **__policy changes that__** **__require a significant expenditure of political capital rarely happen unless the urgency of the problem forces policymakers to take action.__**

** CIR key to the economy and competitiveness **

 * Green 7/2 ** - founder and president of FWD.us, an advocacy group created by technology leaders that promotes policies to keep the United States and its citizens competitive in a global economy (Joe, “House, knowledge economy needs immigrants”, [] )

Our country has changed a lot during those 27 years, but not -- so far -- our immigration policy. Suffice it to say, __ if we can pass __ our generation's __ immigration reform, it will be a really big deal __. ¶ __ America's greatest asset has always been its people __, drawn here from all over the world. In the 21st century, __ our economic future depends on immigrants ____ more than ever __. __ The fastest-growing sector of our economy is the knowledge economy ____, where the main competitive difference is people __. ¶ In a globalized world where people and businesses have their choice of countries to locate in, __ continuing to have the best ____ trained, hardest-working and most productive people in the world will keep the U __ nited __ S __ tates __ at ____ the forefront of global competitiveness __. We have some huge advantages: the top universities in the world, the top scientific researchers, and -- right alongside these -- our identity as a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants. ¶ At FWD.us, a nonprofit advocacy group, we are entrepreneurs, and we believe that one of the main reasons America is the leading entrepreneurial nation is that we are a nation of immigrants. Leaving behind your home country and everything you know to create a better life for your family is the essence of the risk-taking that characterizes the entrepreneurial ethos. ¶ I think back to my ancestors in the shtetls of Eastern Europe in the 19th century. They had probably never been more than two miles from their village, and got on a steamship to go to a country they had never even seen in a picture, knowing they would never return home. ¶ That is truly putting it all on the line to make a better life. It is not random, who chooses to emigrate, and the work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit of these immigrants have shaped the character of our country. Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley do not just identify with the experience of computer programmers coming to America to work at tech companies, but with everyone who comes here to make a better life. It's why we are working for comprehensive immigration reform. ¶ There are talented young people in America who were brought here by their parents who now cannot go to college or work because they are undocumented. These DREAMers are just waiting to contribute, and their parents, with the right accountability measures, should be able to join them by coming out of the shadows and contributing fully to their communities. ¶ In addition, we know that __ the best ____ and the brightest come here to study, start companies and create jobs that grow our economy __ ; millions more are caught in limbo navigating a complex and broken system that is totally outdated for a modern economy and modern American families. __ We need to pass ____ c __ omprehensive __ i __ mmigration __ r __ eform __ to unlock those contributions and __ by doing so __ change millions of lives. __

** Collapse of the US economic power causes nuclear war **

 * Khalilzad 11 ** Zalmay was the United States ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations during the presidency of George W. Bush and the director of policy planning at the Defense Department from 1990 to 1992, “ The Economy and National Security”, 2-8-11, []

Today, __ economic __ and fiscal __ trends pose ____ the most severe __ long-term __ threat to the U __ nited __ S __ tates’ __ position as global leader __. While the United States suffers from fiscal imbalances and low economic growth, the economies of rival powers are developing rapidly. The __ continuation of __ these two __ trends could lead to a shift from American primacy toward a multi-polar global system, leading in turn to increased ____ geopolitical rivalry ____ and __ even __ war ____ among __ the __ great powers __. The current recession is the result of a deep financial crisis, not a mere fluctuation in the business cycle. Recovery is likely to be protracted. The crisis was preceded by the buildup over two decades of enormous amounts of debt throughout the U.S. economy — ultimately totaling almost 350 percent of GDP — and the development of credit-fueled asset bubbles, particularly in the housing sector. When the bubbles burst, huge amounts of wealth were destroyed, and unemployment rose to over 10 percent. The decline of tax revenues and massive countercyclical spending put the U.S. government on an unsustainable fiscal path. Publicly held national debt rose from 38 to over 60 percent of GDP in three years. Without faster economic growth and actions to reduce deficits, publicly held national debt is projected to reach dangerous proportions. If interest rates were to rise significantly, annual interest payments — which already are larger than the defense budget — would crowd out other spending or require substantial tax increases that would undercut economic growth. Even worse, if unanticipated events trigger what economists call a “sudden stop” in credit markets for U.S. debt, __ the U __ nited __ S __ tates __ would be unable to roll over its outstanding obligations, precipitating a sovereign-debt crisis that would ____ almost certainly ____ compel a ____ radical retrenchment ____ of the U __ nited __ S __ tates __ internationally __. __ Such scenarios would ____ reshape the international order __. It was the __ economic devastation __ of Britain and France __ during World War II __, as well as the rise of other powers, that __ led __ both __ countries to relinquish their empires __. In the late 1960s, British leaders concluded that they lacked the economic capacity to maintain a presence “east of Suez.” Soviet economic weakness, which crystallized under Gorbachev, contributed to their decisions to withdraw from Afghanistan, abandon Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and allow the Soviet Union to fragment. If the U.S. debt problem goes critical, __ the U __ nited __ S __ tates __ would ____ be compelled to retrench, reducing its military spending and shed __ ding __ international commitments __. We face this domestic challenge while other major powers are experiencing rapid economic growth. Even though __ countries __ such as China, India, and Brazil have profound political, social, demographic, and economic problems, their __ economies are growing faster than ours, and this could alter the global distribution of power. ____ These trends could __ in the long term __ produce a multi-polar world __. __ If U.S. policymakers fail to act __ and other powers continue to grow, __ it is not a question of whether but when ____ a new international order will emerge __. __ The closing of the gap __ between the United States and its rivals __ could intensify ____ geopolitical ____ competition among major powers ____, increase incentives for local powers to play major powers against one another, and undercut our will ____ to preclude or respond to international crises because of the higher risk of escalation. ____ The stakes are high __. In modern history, __ the longest period of peace ____ among the great powers has been the era of U.S. leadership __. By contrast __, multi-polar systems have been unstable, with their competitive dynamics resulting in frequent crises and major wars among the great powers __. __ Failures of multi-polar international systems produced ____ both world wars __. __ American retrenchment could have ____ devastating consequences ____. ____ Without an American security blanket, regional powers could ____ rearm ____ in an attempt to balance against emerging threats __. Under this scenario, __ there would be ____ a heightened possibility of ____ arms races, miscalc __ ulation, __ or ____ other crises ____ spiraling into all-out conflict ____. __ Alternatively, __ in seeking to accommodate the stronger powers, weaker powers may shift their geopolitical posture away from the U __ nited __ S __ tates. Either way, __ hostile states would ____ be emboldened to ____ make aggressive moves ____ in their regions __.

** U.S. Brazil Relations high – now key **

 * Bodman and Wolfensohn 11 ** (Samuel W. Bodman and James D. Wolfensohn, Chairs Independent Task Force CFR; Julia E. Sweig, Project Director

“Global Brazil and U.S.-Brazil Relations” Independent Task Force Report No. 66 CAIO, 7/9)

Brazil and the U nited States are now entering a period that has ¶ great potential to solidify a mature friendship, one that entails everdeepening ¶ trust in order to secure mutual benefits. This kind of relationship ¶ requires the two countries to move beyond their historic ¶ oscillation between misinterpretation, public praise, and rebuke, and ¶ instead approach both cooperation and inevitable disagreement with ¶ mutual respect and tolerance.

** Interference destroys relations **

 * Rothkopf 09 ** (David, “The Perils of Rivarly”, Center for American Progress, March, [], accessed on 7/10/13)

__ There are other areas in which tension could enter the relationship. How the United States interacts with the Americas writ large under President Obama will shape relations and create potential pitfalls __, and so will domestic political considerations both in the United States and Brazil. __ Any real or perceived interference in the region by the U ____ nited States would greatly upset Brazil. If the United States decided that heavy-handed political pressure or intervention were required in regard, for example, to Venezuela __, Bolivia, or Ecuador, __ this could put Brazil in an uncomfortable position where it has to choose between the U ____ nited States and its neighbors __. __ Since Brazil has spent years arguing for South American unity, it would likely choose its neighbors or— __ even more likely— __ choose to interject itself as a third party with a third point of view __

** Relations key to the environment **

 * Barbosa 11 ** (Ruben, former Brazil ambassador to US, National Interest, july CIAO accessed 7/8)

__ In the foreign policy area engagement between __ ¶ __ Brazil and the United States held outside __ ¶ __ of the Americas will likely allow for greater __ ¶ __ cooperation ____, __ especially in countries in regions ¶ such as Africa where Brazil enjoys comparative ¶ advantages and where we can foresee more trilateral ¶ cooperation on education, health, governance ¶ and economic development. Although ¶ our views on international organizations do ¶ not always converge, __ we can hope for greater __ ¶ __ cooperation on matters of peace and security, __ ¶ __ the environment and climate change, G-20 __ ¶ __ energy initiatives, and technical assistance and __ ¶ __ cooperation __

** Extinction **

 * Hedges 10 ** [Chris, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002]7/19/2010 (American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and war correspondent specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies. ) "Calling All Future Eaters." http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/calling_all_future-eaters_20100719/


 * The human species during its brief time on Earth has exhibited a remarkable capacity to kill itself off. The Cro-Magnons dispatched the gentler Neanderthals. The conquistadors, with the help of smallpox, decimated the native populations in the Americas. Modern industrial warfare in the 20th century took at least 100 million lives, most of them civilians. And now ** **__ we sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species. Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the “future-eaters.” In the past when civilizations went belly up __** through greed, mismanagement and the exhaustion of natural resources, **__ human beings migrated somewhere else to pillage anew. But this time the game is over. There is nowhere else to go. The industrialized nations spent the last century seizing half the planet and dominating most of the other half. We giddily exhausted our natural capital, especially fossil fuel, to engage in an orgy of consumption and waste that poisoned the Earth and attacked the ecosystem on which human life depends __**** . ** It was quite a party if you were a member of the industrialized elite. But it was pretty stupid. **__ Collapse this time around will be global __**** . ** We will disintegrate together. And there is no way out. The 10,000-year experiment of settled life is about to come to a crashing halt. And humankind, which thought it was given dominion over the Earth and all living things, will be taught a painful lesson in the necessity of balance, restraint and humility. There is no human monument or city ruin that is more than 5,000 years old. Civilization, Ronald Wright notes in “A Short History of Progress,” “occupies a mere 0.2 percent of the two and a half million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone.”  **__ Bye-bye, Paris. Bye-bye, New York. Bye-bye, Tokyo. Welcome to the new experience of human existence, in which rooting around for grubs on islands in northern latitudes is the prerequisite for survival __**   ** . **  ** We view ourselves as rational creatures ** .  **__ But is it rational to wait like sheep in a pen as oil and natural gas companies, coal companies, chemical industries, plastics manufacturers, the automotive industry, arms manufacturers and the leaders of the industrial world, as they did in Copenhagen, take us to mass extinction? It is too late to prevent profound climate change. But why add fuel to the fire? Why allow our ruling elite, driven by the lust for profits, to accelerate the death spiral? Why continue to obey the laws and dictates of our executioners __**** ? **  The news is grim. The  **__ accelerating disintegration of Arctic Sea ice means that summer ice will __****__ probably disappear within the next decade. The open water will absorb more solar radiation, significantly increasing the rate of global warming. The Siberian permafrost will disappear, sending up plumes of methane gas from underground. The Greenland ice sheet and the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers will melt. Jay Zwally, a NASA climate scientist, declared in December 2007: “The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now, as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died __**   ** . ** It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.”

** China’s current economic strategy is allowing them to outpace US influence in Latin America – plan reverses that **
** Gallagher 6/18 ** /13 – associate professor of international relations at Boston University (Kevin P, “Time for a U.S. Pivot to Latin America”, [], CMR)

**__ Increasingly __**, **__ Latin American countries see China __** not as a rival but **__ as a __****__ valuable trading partner __**. In fact, explains Kevin Gallagher, **__ China has become a __** //**__ better partner __**// in many ways **__ than the U __** nited **__ S __** tates. **__ China is offering attractive deals __****__ to Latin American economies __**, **__ while the U __** nited **__ S __** tates **__ continues to __****__ lecture and dictate. It's time for a __** //**__ real reset __**// **__ in U.S.-Latin American trade relations __**. ¶ The Obama administration and U.S. media have made much ado about the U.S. "pivot" to Asia. ¶ What has largely escaped their attention, however, is that **__ China has been lining up economic allies in __****__ the __** erstwhile **__ "backyard" of the U __** nited **__ S __** tates. ¶ Well, just as serious competition ought to awaken one's creative juices in business, **__ it is time for the U __** nited **__ S __** tates **__ to __** //**__ step up __**// **__ a __** suitable //**__ economic policy __**// **__ for Latin America __** before it is too late. ¶ The difference in approaches by the United States and China in Latin America were squarely brought into focus just in recent weeks when U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping made tours of Latin America. ¶ The United States principal offer to its Latin American neighbors is the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP offers access to the U.S. market to Latin American and Asian nations on the basis of a triple form of conditionality. ¶ First, they must deregulate their financial markets; second, adopt intellectual property provisions that give preferences to U.S. firms; and third, allow private U.S. firms to directly sue governments of countries that sign up to the TPP for violating any of its conditions. ¶ Talk about a heavily conditioned offering. So what's the Chinese approach? ¶ On his visit to the region, **__ China's President __** Xi Jinping **__ offered more than $5.3 billion in financing, with few conditions attached, to __** China's newfound **__ Latin America __** n friends. ¶ These offers will need to be confirmed, but according to press reports the Chinese have signed deals on this trip for: ¶ $3 billion in commitments to eight Caribbean countries for infrastructure and energy; ¶ $1.3 billion to Costa Rica in loans and lines of credit, including a $900 million dollar loan from the Chinese Development Bank for upgrading a petroleum refinery and a $400 million dollar line of credit for road infrastructure from the Chinese Ex-Im Bank; and a ¶ $ **__ 1 billion credit line __** from the China Ex-Im bank **__ to Mexico __** for its state-owned oil company PEMEX. ¶ Making available this financing comes on top of the already $86 billion in financing provided by China to Latin American governments since 2003. ¶ **__ China offers Latin American countries what they want, while U.S. offers always come with strings attached. __****__ ¶ __** Granted, that amount — large as it sounds — seems just like another number in today's world. ¶ To put it into proper perspective, consider this: ¶ Since 2003, thus **__ over the past decade, China's policy banks have provided more finance to Latin America than their counterparts at the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the U.S. Ex __** port- **__ Im __** port **__ Bank __**. ¶ If anything ought to awaken the United States from its past slumber and taking Latin America essentially for granted, that comparison ought to do it. ¶ Simply put, **__ the U __** nited **__ S __** tates and the array of largely Western-dominated international financial institutions **__ have been __** //**__ outgunned __**// **__ by China __** 's financial muscle. Welcome to the brave new world! ¶ But it's not just a matter of sheer numbers. **__ Unlike U.S. trade treaties __** or the finance from the international financial institutions largely under U.S. control, **__ China __** offers up its **__ loans come with few strings attached. __**

** US-Sino competition risks open conflict **
** Ellis 6/6 ** /13 – associate professor with the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies (R Evan, “China's New Backyard”, [], CMR)

**__ The challenge to Washington from China's presence in the region __** also **__ extends beyond economics and policy objectives __**. The U.S. Defense Department's critical posture regarding Chinese cyberattacks is a reminder that //**__ hostilities __**// **__ between the U __** nited **__ S __** tates **__ and China __**, though highly improbable and undesirable, **__ are __** //**__ not unthinkable __**//. **__ In __** such a **__ conflict __**, **__ China __****__ -operated ports, airports, telecomm __** unications **__ infrastructure, and other parts of the Chinese commercial presence in Latin America would represent potential assets in a global __** //**__ asymmetric warfare campaign __**// **__ against the U __** nited **__ S __** tates.

** Global nuclear war **
** Hunkovic 9 ** (Lee J, American Military University, “The Chinese-Taiwanese Conflict: Possible Futures of a Confrontation between China, Taiwan and the United States of America”, [|http://www.lamp-method.org/eCommons/ Hunkovic.pdf])

**__ A war between China, Taiwan and the __** //**__ U __**// nited //**__ S __**// tates **__ has __****__ the potential to __** // escalate into a nuclear conflict // **__ and a __** // third //// world war //, therefore, **__ many countries __** other than the primary actors **__ could be affected __****__ by such a conflict, including Japan, both Koreas, Russia, Australia, India and Great __****__ Britain, if they were drawn in __** tothe war, as well as all other countries in the world that participate in the global economy, in which the United States and China are the two most dominant members. If China were able to successfully annex Taiwan, the possibility exists that they could then plan to attack Japan and begin a policy of aggressive expansionism in East and Southeast Asia, as well as the Pacific and even into India, which could in turn create an international standoff and deployment of military forces to contain the threat. In any case, if China and the United States engage in a full-scale conflict, there are few countries in the world that will not be economically and/or militarily affected by it. However, China, Taiwan and United States are the primary actors in this scenario, whose actions will determine its eventual outcome, therefore, other countries will not be considered in this study.

**__ Strengthen Embargo CP __**
====** Text: The United States federal government should substantially decrease its economic engagement toward Cuba by increasing all relevant economic and legal sanctions, penalties, and restrictions of the Cuban Embargo. **====

** CP competes and solves the aff, it is the opposite action of the plan but avoids political fights from the pro embargo lobby **
[|DAMIEN] [|**CAVE**] [foreign correspondent for The New York Times, he covers Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.¶ From 2008 to 2010 he served as the Times’ Miami bureau chief, writing on a range of topics] ¶ November 19, ** 2012 ** ¶ Easing of Restraints in Cuba Renews Debate on U.S. Embargo¶ []

And **__ Cuba has a long history of tossing ice on warming relations. The latest example is the jailing of __** Alan **__ Gross, a State Department contractor __** who has spent nearly three years behind bars for distributing satellite telephone equipment to Jewish groups in Havana. ¶ In Washington, Mr. **__ Gross is seen as the main impediment to an easing of the embargo __**, but there are also limits to what the president could do without Congressional action. The [|1992 Cuban Democracy Act] conditioned the waiving of sanctions on the introduction of democratic changes inside Cuba. The [|1996 Helms-Burton Act] also requires that the embargo remain until Cuba has a transitional or democratically elected government. Obama administration officials say they have not given up, and could move if the president decides to act on his own. Officials say that under the Treasury Department’s licensing and regulation-writing authority, there is room for significant modification. Following the legal logic of Mr. Obama’s changes in 2009, **__ further expansions in travel __** are possible along with **__ new allowances for investment or imports and exports __**, especially if narrowly applied to Cuban businesses. ¶ Even **__ these adjustments __** — which could also include **__ travel for all Americans and looser rules for ships engaged in trade with Cuba __**, according to [|a legal analysis] commissioned by the Cuba Study Group — **__ would __** probably //**__ mean a fierce political fight __**//. **__ The __** handful of **__ Cuban-Americans in Congress __** for whom //**__ the embargo is sacred __**// oppose looser rules. ¶ When asked about Cuban entrepreneurs who are seeking more American support, Representative Ileana **__ Ros-Lehtinen __**, the Florida Republican who is chairwoman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, //**__ proposed an even tighter embargo __**//. ¶ “ **__ The sanctions on the regime must remain in place and __**, in fact, **__ should be strengthened __** , and not be altered,” she wrote in an e-mail. “ **__ Responsible nations must not buy into the facade the dictatorship is trying to create by announcing ‘reforms’ while, in reality, it’s tightening its grip on its people __** .” ¶ Many Cubans agree that their government cares more about control than economic growth. Business owners complain that inspectors pounce when they see signs of success and demand receipts to prove that supplies were not stolen from the government, a common practice here. One restaurant owner in Havana said he received a large fine for failing to produce a receipt for plastic wrap.

** Sanctions are marked as failure of hardliners – removing it provides clout for the totalitarian model **

 * Bandow 12 ** (Doug Bandow, Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of several books, including Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire, 12-11-12, “Time to End Cuba Embargo”, nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-pointless-cuba-embargo-7834

**__ Cuban human rights activists __** also gen erally **__ oppose sanctions __**. A decade ago I (legally) visited Havana, where I met Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz, who suffered in communist prisons for eight years. He told me that __the "sanctions policy gives the government a good alibi to justify the failure of the totalitarian model in Cuba__ ." Indeed, **__ it is only by posing as an opponent of Yanqui Imperialism that Fidel Castro has achieved an international __** __reputation. If he had been ignored by Washington, he never would have been anything other than an obscure authoritarian windbag__ **__. __** Unfortunately, embargo supporters never let reality get in the way of their arguments. In 1994, John Sweeney of the Heritage Foundation declared that “ **__ the embargo remains the only effective instrument available to the U.S. government in trying to force the economic and democratic concessions it has been demanding of Castro __****__ for over three decades. Maintaining the embargo will help end the Castro regime more quickly __** .” The latter’s collapse, he wrote, is more likely in the near term than ever before. Almost two decades later, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, retains faith in the embargo: “ **__ The sanctions on the regime must remain in place __****__ and, in fact, should be strengthened, and not be altered. __** ” One of the best definitions of insanity is continuing to do the same thing while expecting to achieve different results. The embargo survives largely because of Florida’s political importance. Every presidential candidate wants to win the Sunshine State’s electoral votes, and the Cuban American community is a significant voting bloc.

** Turns the aff - democracy improves lives of citizens **

 * Pei 02 ** Minxin, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Implementing the Institutions of Democracy,” INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON WORLD PEACE v. 19 n. 4, December 2002, p. 3+.

**__ The establishment of democratic institutions may also produce practical benefits for the countries that adopt them. Such benefits may come in various forms, such as less corruption in government, better protection of human rights, and greater economic prosperity. The work by Amartya Sen has made a powerful case that political rights protected under democratic institutions can drastically improve the well-being of average citizens. (19) The argument that democratic governance, which fosters political competition and public participation in the political process, should help contain corruption seems quite persuasive __**. The world's most corrupt regimes in recent years, which include Marcos in the Philippines, the Duvaliers in Haiti, Mobutu regime in the former Zaire, and Suharto in Indonesia, were all dictatorships that had degenerated into kleptocracies. **__ Theory and evidence both support the view that democracies, which have by definition real opposition forces, organized civil society groups, and a watchful press, are unlikely to allow such predatory regimes to survive for so long and plunder their countries so thoroughly. Researchers who have used extensive data to analyze various factors that may contribute to or curb corruption conclude that civil liberties and their institutional manifestations __** (such as a free press and vigorous civil society) play an important role in explaining the variations in the degree of corruption across nations: countries with higher degrees of civil liberties are found to have less corrupt government. (20) Of course, there are significant variations in the level of good governance achieved by democracies across countries. **__ Generally speaking, however, established democratic regimes are perceived to be less corrupt than newly democratized ones. (21) __**

** 1. Inherent equality of all beings requires utilitarianism **
** Cummiskey 1996 [David, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bates College and Ph.D. from UM, “Kantian Consequentialism”, p. 145-146] **

In the next section, I will defend this interpretation of the duty of beneficence. For the sake of argument, however, let us first simply assume that beneficence does not require significant self-sacrifice and see what follows. Although Kant is unclear on this point, we will assume that significant self-sacrifices are supererogatory. [|11] Thus, if I must harm one in order to save many, the individual whom I will harm by my action is not morally required to affirm the action. On the other hand, I have a duty to do all that I can for those in need. As a consequence I am faced with a dilemma: If I act, I harm a person in a way that a rational being need not consent to; if I fail to act, then I do not do my duty to those in need and thereby fail to promote an objective end. Faced with such a choice, which horn of the dilemma is more consistent with the formula of the end-in-itself? We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract "social entity." __It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive "overall social good."__ Instead**,** __the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other perso____ns.__ Robert Nozick, for example, argues that "to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has." [|12] But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? __By emphasizing__ solely __the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to__ sufficiently __respect__ and take account of __the__ many __other__ separate __persons,__ each with only one life __, who will bear the cost of__ our __inaction.__ In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that "rational nature exists as an end in itself" (GMM 429). Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. __If__ one truly believes that __all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution__ to such a dilemma __involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many__ rational beings __as possible__ (chapter [|5] ). In order to avoid this conclusion**,** __the non-consequentialist__ Kantian __needs to justify agent-centered constraints__. As we saw in chapter [|1], however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non-value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant's normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I __sacrifice__ some __for the sake of others,__ ** I ** __do not use them arbitrarily, and__ ** I ** __do not deny the__ unconditional __value of rational beings.__ Persons may have "dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth" that transcends any market value (GMM 436), but __persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others__ (chapters [|5] and [|7] ). __The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others__. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that __one may have to sacrifice some to save many.__

** 2. Privileging ethics over political consequences dooms the affirmative to political irrelevance **

 * __ Isaac, 02 __** (Jeffrey, Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University, Dissent, “Ends, Means, and Politics”, Spring, ebsco)

__ Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. __ Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world. Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. __To ac- complish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about__. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond moral- ity. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, __an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility.__ The concern may be morally laudable, re- flecting a kind of personal integrity, but __it suf- fers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Ab- juring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean con- science of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of **complicity in injustice****.**__ This is why, from the standpoint of poli- tics—as opposed to religion—pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically re- pudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any ef- fect __; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant__. __Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pur- suit of “good” that generates evil__. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: __it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and histori- cally contextualized ways. Moral absolutism in- hibits this judgment. It **alienates those who are not true believers**. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness__.

====** 3. The aff turns itself – it claims that the spread of US influence is bad then seeks to remove the only thing that prevents its influence from reaching Cuba – lifting the embargo would be an endorsement for Cuba. **====

====** 4. The aff’s claims of economic imperialism are a way to shut off legitimate criticism of the Castro regime. Lifting the embargo wouldn’t lead to a better life to Cubans as the problem is their political and economic structures. Even if your criticism of the embargo as being imperialist is true removing it is net worse- even far Left socialists understand the Castro regime is a blanket failure and should be resisted **====

PAUL ** D’AMATO ** [Paul D’Amato is managing editor of the International Socialist Review journal]

Cuba: Image and Reality. ISR Issue 51, January–February ** 2007 ** []



In many instances, **__ the defense of Cuba’s right to independence and against the U.S. embargo is coupled with a political identification with Castro’s government. __****__ Any criticism of Cuba is seen as playing into the hands of imperialism and therefore off-limits. Evidence of problems __**, at least as the Left might identify them—if acknowledged at all— **__ are excused as necessary or unavoidable distortions resulting from the embargo __****__. __** “The more honest or open-eyed of the ‘friends,’ at least when speaking tête-à-tête,” wrote Trotsky of the apologists for Stalin’s Russia, “concede that there is a spot on the Soviet sun. But substituting a fatalistic for a dialectic analysis, they console themselves with the thought that ‘a certain’ bureaucratic degeneration in the given conditions was historically inevitable.”2 Defenders of Cuba, at least the less starry-eyed, make the same argument. But as **__ Trotsky wrote, “The stupidity and dishonesty of one’s enemies,” in this case U.S. imperialism, “is no justification for one’s own blindness __****__ .” __** 3 The blindness referred to by Trotsky was on full display in the July 2006 issue of the magazine Socialism and Liberation, the magazine of the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL, a 2004 break-away from the Workers World Party), which published an article by its editor, Andy McInerney, entitled “A litmus test for socialists: Defending Cuba’s socialist revolution.” In it, McInerney asks the following questions: Was the Cuban revolution a socialist revolution—that is, a revolution that brought the working class to state power? What is the role of the Cuban Communist Party and President Fidel Castro? Do they deserve the support of the progressive and working-class movement in the United States—not just against imperialist intervention but also against internal efforts to overthrow the government? Answering these questions is a test of the fitness of an organization to lead a revolutionary struggle in the United States. According to McInerney, organizations that “claim to be socialist,” such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO, the only group he mentions by name), fail his fitness test because, though they may oppose U.S. intervention in Cuba, they do not answer all of the above questions in the affirmative. For McInerney, this “fitness” (or lack of it) extends to any organization that fails to defend the former Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries, China (even today), and North Korea. Those who “refuse to stand with any of the parties and governments that have tried to build societies free of capitalist rule,” he argues, merely use “leftist-sounding criticisms” as “a cover for capitulation and cowardice in the face of anti-communist propaganda.” Cuba cannot be “state capitalist,” McInerney asserts, because there are no private capitalists, and therefore no competition, inside Cuba. As for the impact of the world market on Cuba, McInerney informs us that Cuba’s participation in the world market is—and this is his most absurd claim—“limited.” Cuba’s state bureaucracy cannot be a class that “owns the surplus value created by Cuban workers,” he argues, because it is not very rich by comparison to capitalists elsewhere. Selectively pointing to Cuba’s period of sustained growth—the first decade of the 1970s—McInerney argues that Cuba’s economic problems can be laid entirely on the doorstep of the U.S. embargo. Long live Stalin and…Saddam? How socialists answer the questions posed by McInerney is indeed important, for it determines whether one identifies socialism with a society of genuine human liberation under workers’ control or with one in which the needs and aspirations of the working class are sacrificed to the demands of state accumulation. As for “cowardice in the face of anti-communist propaganda,” Cold War propagandists did not invent the horrors of Stalin’s Russia—though they took full advantage of them to try and discredit genuine socialism for their own reasons. And just as cynically, the rulers of Russia pointed to the horrors of capitalist society in order to justify their rule. But there really was a gulag. Ante Ciliga, one-time leader of the Yugoslav Communist Party who joined the Trotskyist opposition and who spent several years in a Russian concentration camp, estimated that at the height of the 1930s purges there were ten million people in Russian prison camps.4 Millions died in these camps. Stalin was at this time imprisoning and shooting most of the revolutionaries who had played leading roles in the Russian Revolution—all in the name of socialism. “Nowhere else in the world,” Ciliga wrote bitterly in 1937, “exist such flagrant contradictions between official theory and real life, between hopes and their fulfillment, between word and deed.”5 We leave it to the reader to decide whether it was Ciliga or Stalin who employed “leftist sounding criticisms” as a cover. The Russian Revolution for a brief few years brought workers to power, but the revolution degenerated from within and was finally snuffed out by a state bureaucracy that was hoisted up on the ruins of workers’ power; a process caused by the revolution’s isolation and impoverishment in the face of imperialist encirclement. In short, imperialist invasion and civil war devastated Russia’s already weak economy and its working class. To build up Russia’s heavy industry, needed for Russia’s defenses, the new bureaucracy squeezed the working class and peasantry using coercive means. The theory of “state capitalism” was meant to capture the fact that the bureaucracy, in engaging in this “primitive accumulation,” acted as a kind of state surrogate for the expropriated bourgeoisie. Only the most hidebound sects that survived the fall of Stalinism persist in its defense. One of those sects was an organization that called itself the Workers World Party (WWP)—the political forerunner of the PSL, whose basic politics the PSL still shares. A 1959 splinter from the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, the WWP was led by Sam Marcy until his death in 1998. Though Trotskyist in origin, the hallmark of the WWP, perversely, was its uncritical support for all things Stalinist. The basis of Marcy’s split from the SWP was his support for the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956 to crush the workers’ councils. PSL still adheres proudly to this tradition. The November 2006 issue of PSL’s magazine Socialism and Liberation published an article by Jon Britton entitled “The real lessons of the 1956 uprising in Hungary,” in which he writes: “Using the same language Bush uses today, the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was cloaked under the veil of ‘freedom and democracy.’ Few of the demonstrators called openly for the restoration of capitalism and landlordism. But the imperialist politicians and press knew where it was heading.”6 Since its founding, the WWP and its offspring have been consistent apologists for bureaucratic regimes from the Soviet Union to North Korea and Cuba. They supported the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia (“The ‘democratic socialist revolution’ in Czechoslovakia is in reality counter-revolutionary, anti-socialist and not very democratic,” wrote Marcy7), and Polish General Jaruzelski’s military coup against the Solidarity trade union in 1981. “The workers of the world and the workers in the United States have nothing to gain and a great, great deal to lose by supporting, encouraging, or promoting the cause of this counter-revolutionary, fink outfit misnamed Solidarity,” wrote Marcy in 1981.8 He characterized the Chinese government’s violent suppression of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989 as “a victory for socialism.”9 McInerney defended the Chinese government in a 1996 article that credits the Tiananmen crackdown for preventing China from going the way of the former Soviet Union, where, “A tiny handful have become fabulously rich.”10 Yet China at this time was itself in the throes of a series of pro-market economic reforms that were producing a new “fabulously rich” class of Chinese multi-millionaires, many of them leading Communist Party bureaucrats, a fact that led Western economists to lavish China with effusive praise. The Workers World Party has found itself in the company of strange bedfellows for socialists; offering uncritical support, for example, to Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. During the first Gulf War, Marcy compared Saddam Hussein to the leader of a Roman slave rebellion, Spartacus, who, Marcy noted, “was as much demonized, hated and vilified in his time as Saddam Hussein is today.” Saddam Hussein was a former U.S. ally, a butcher too fearful of domestic revolt to mobilize an adequate defense of Iraq against the U.S. invasion in 2003. Spartacus, on the other hand, a real leader of the oppressed and himself a slave, destroyed seven different Roman armies sent to defeat him. None of this directly answers McInerney’s claims about Cuba, but the historical record of the WWP and its identical offspring is relevant. Cuba came to model its state-led development closely on the Soviet Union until the latter’s demise in the late 1980s. McInerney’s position, which at first seems consistent, is broken, however, by his insistence that China, which has moved substantially to dismantle its aging state sector, is also socialist. Traditionally, Stalinists and their supporters would point to nationalized property as evidence of a regime’s socialist credentials. Today, we can only conclude that for McInerney a regime is socialist merely because it is ruled by a one-party state that declares itself socialist. The ISR’s difference with McInerney is not mainly about Cuba or some random fitness test, but rather about the fundamentals of socialism. For us, socialism is about workers’ self-emancipation and democratic self-rule. For McInerney, it is its opposite. To be sure, Cuba’s national revolution, and its independence from the U.S., must be staunchly defended. Likewise, the gains of the revolution, in particular the establishment of a much-improved public education system and a health care system clearly superior to the private system in the United States, must be defended against any attempt (from without or within) to retract them. But such support does not require one to hold illusions as to the socialist character of the Cuban state, any more than the superiority of Canada’s national health system renders it any less capitalist in its social relations than the United States. A workers’ state? The basic facts surrounding the Cuban Revolution are not in dispute. Castro’s rebel army marched into power after the collapse of dictator Fulgencio Batista’s army in January 1959. Castro’s small band had initiated operations after landing in the boat Granma on the coast of Cuba from Mexican exile in December 1956, with only a few dozen fighters. At the time of Batista’s fall, the rebel army had a few thousand armed soldiers but it also depended on a substantial urban network.11 Though never large enough to pose a serious military threat, the rebel army was able to take advantage of the political vacuum left by the collapse of the Cuban army and state, as well as the disgust the mass of Cubans felt for the old corrupt political system. Castro’s July 26th Movement appealed to all sectors of Cuban society. “Victory was only possible,” Castro told a crowd in New York’s Central Park in April 1959, “because we united Cubans of all classes and all sectors around a single, shared aspiration.”12 The movement’s nationalist populism did not necessarily presage any move toward complete nationalization of the Cuban economy, though there was already a strong tradition of state intervention in the economy. Ernesto “Che” Guevara had embraced a Stalinized version of Marxism and Fidel’s brother, Raúl, also a leading rebel commander, was, if not a member of the Cuban Communist Party, at least a close sympathizer. The July 26th Movement was programmatically vague, but it was committed to a more diversified national economic development that would reduce or eliminate Cuba’s dependence on the United States and on sugar exports. There was mounting hostility from the Cuban bourgeoisie and U.S. investors, especially after the promulgation of a new land reform, and Castro turned toward nationalization and sought out Russian support. The flight of Cuban capital and a series of punitive actions by the U.S. against Cuba accelerated this process. After the April 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco—the abortive U.S.-sponsored invasion of Cuba by several hundred CIA-trained Cuban exiles—Castro retroactively declared the Cuban Revolution “socialist.”13 What was the class nature of the revolution? The July 26th Movement’s core around Castro consisted of men from different social classes, mostly from the cities, but even those from the working class had not been active in unions or other working-class organizations before joining Castro. Likewise, peasant guerrilla recruits, “typically had little or no history of previous organized peasant struggles,” notes Sam Farber. “This was very important in allowing Fidel Castro to mould these men into faithful followers of his caudillo leadership. In any case, an inner circle of ‘classless’ men unattached to the organizational life of any of the existing Cuban social classes became Fidel Castro’s political core.”14 The collapse of the old state and the discredited status of the old political parties gave Castro’s movement a great deal of room to maneuver. In the end Castro’s movement stood not only above the capitalists who looked to the U.S. to “save” them, but also above the working class and the peasantry. He carried out his measures in their name, but neither class exerted any control over the process. According to McInerney, Castro established a “workers’ state.” His justification for this claim is that the revolution was popular, and the existence of an urban movement against Batista gave it a mass character. “There was support and participation from the masses,” writes McInerney, “such as the selling of bonds to finance the guerrilla fighters.” But even by this account, the urban resistance played an auxiliary role, that of providing material assistance to the guerrillas. More importantly, “support and participation” is by no means the same as saying that it was a mass upheaval or that the masses were in control of the process. Every successful revolution involves mass support and participation—such as the American and French revolutions. Neither created societies run by workers, however. What is so striking is that these bourgeois revolutions involved far greater mass mobilizations than did the Cuban Revolution. A sympathetic observer, James O’Connor, writing in 1964, made a similar assessment of the Cuban Revolution: From the attack by Fidel on the Moncada Barracks in July 1953, throughout the guerrilla war of 1957–58, until late 1959, when the Castro group firmly consolidated political power, not a single peasant revolt ignited the Cuban countryside. Passive resistance, surreptitious aid to Castro’s forces, there were, to be sure; unlike dozens of other political revolutions, however, the peasant class failed to grasp the initiative at any point in the struggle.…. The labor movement, in which over one half of Cuba’s labor force was enrolled, figured even less prominently in the Rebellion. It was in January 1959, after the regular army had received Castro’s final blows, that the working classes shut down Havana’s industry and commerce. Earlier a general strike in April 1958 had been a total failure. In the social revolution of 1959–61, the liquidation of Cuba’s private property system was invariably initiated by the ruling group. The peasantry did not spontaneously seize and cultivate idle lands.15 Castro, in fact, threatened reprisals against “anarchic land distribution,” drafting a law stipulating that anyone seizing land “without waiting for the new agrarian law will lose their rights to benefits from the new agrarian reform.”16 Nor did the urban workers and sugar mill laborers independently occupy the factories (this was a sharp departure from the abortive social revolution of 1933); rebel army or militia units at the direction of the central government took possession of Cuba’s farm land and industry. …The social revolution was more or less orderly because the political revolution transferred power from one relatively small group of men to another, [while] the masses of Cubans…passively supported the social revolution.17 There is no doubt that the new regime was enormously popular—a popularity it quickly consolidated with a series of significant reforms such as wage increases, land redistribution, utility rate and rent reductions, and a mass literacy campaign in the countryside; but Cuba’s was not a workers’ revolution, and it did not lead to a government by and of the working class. Castro’s decision to turn to the Cuban Communist Party (CCP, known then as the Popular Socialist Party, or PSP) was not a turn to the working class. The CCP had long before become a thoroughly Stalinized party, discredited for its withdrawal of support for a general strike against the Machado dictatorship in 1933 and its collaboration with Batista from 1938 into the mid-1940s. The PSP had pledged its support for Batista in exchange for legalization, control of the Cuban Confederation of Workers (CTC) and two positions in Batista’s cabinet. Many activists in the July 26th Movement resented the PSP for its past collaboration with Batista, a resentment that Castro, always tactically flexible, waived aside when the time came. The CCP cadres, with their administrative abilities and ties to Russia, were useful now, especially given the exodus of thousands of technicians, administrators, and managers. “I needed them,” Castro remarked.18 Is there “direct democracy,” or any democracy, in Cuba? Castro supporters, and Castro and Guevara themselves, have argued that Cuba had abandoned “the commonplaces of bourgeois democracy”19 for a new kind of direct democracy. The nature of this democracy derived allegedly from Fidel’s connection with the masses established, for example, at the numerous mass rallies where he would deliver hours-long speeches. But these rallies allowed millions to applaud Castro’s decisions, not debate or guide them. “Fidel Castro will decide on the orientation of the future,” a university director told René Dumont in 1969, expressing a widespread sentiment at the time.20 In the early phases of the revolution, these rallies were genuinely spontaneous expressions of mass enthusiasm, but by the late sixties they had become, according to Dumont, “obligatory.”21 At best, the masses are expected to play a consultative role, at worst, as an echo chamber for decisions already made at the top. For Fidel, according to his 1960 May Day speech, democracy in Cuba was expressed not in elections, “so often prostituted to falsify the will and the interests of the people,” but in “the close union and identification of the government and the people.”22 It is one thing to expose the limits of bourgeois democracy, however, and another to claim that democracy can exist without voting and elections. As Nigel Harris writes, for Marxists, The critique of parliament…was not a rejection of democracy itself. Lenin wrote: “The way out of parliamentarianism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the electoral principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from mere ‘talking shops’ into working bodies.” For, Lenin continues: “We cannot imagine democracy, not even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, but we can and must think of democracy without parliamentarianism.”23 “Close union,” that is, in the sense of support or agreement with decisions taken at the top, is not democracy, unless the close union is a product of elected leaders answering to their constituents. For Castro, however, democracy was not about the power of the masses to make important decisions or to exercise control over their elected representatives. Nigel Harris, writing about Mao’s China, captures in his description a similar reality in Castro’s Cuba: The Chinese Communist party’s view of democracy was taken from the Russia of the 1930s. Democracy is a style of relationship between cadres and non-cadres, between party leaders and cadres, not the subordination of power to the majority. In this sense democracy is not directly about power at all.24 Real working-class democracy would have required the creation of formal institutions of working-class rule, such as existed in the Paris Commune or the Russian Revolution—real decision-making bodies directly elected and instantly recallable, making no more than an average worker’s wage. As Argentine socialist Francisco Sobrino notes, “There can be no substantive democracy (one with truly egalitarian features) without it also being a formal democracy.”25 The fact that the old “national institutions were in varying degrees of disrepute”26 meant that the mass of Cubans did not cry when Castro failed to revive bourgeois elections. Yet neither were new organs of popular democracy created from below to replace them. State power was in the hands of a small group around Fidel. A number of supporters of the Cuban regime point to the existence of mass organizations such as the neighborhood-based Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) and the Federation of Cuban Women, which, says McInerney, “involved the masses of Cuban workers and peasants in the revolutionary process,” as evidence of democracy in Cuba. But the CDRs are not decision-making organs; their day-to-day function is to act as the eyes and ears of the regime at the neighborhood level. As one author notes, “CDR militants have…hounded ‘nonintegrated’ individuals, denouncing and condemning all forms of parasitic and antisocial behavior, as well as collaborating with local authorities in policing neighborhoods. In 1980, according to eyewitness accounts from Mariel refugees, the CDR sponsored ‘repudiation meetings’ designed to chastise, browbeat, and humiliate citizens who wanted to leave Cuba. Often, these meetings turned into violent and vituperative mob action.”27 The Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), like all state-sponsored “mass organizations” in Cuba, is an instrument for the mobilization of women to fulfill tasks determined by the party rather than collective debate and decision-making. A study of women’s role in Cuba by Alfred Padula and Lois M. Smith found that the FMC “was an intensely hierarchical organization.” With its top-down lines of command and its use of military terminology, the FMC—like all mass organizations in Cuba—had a certain martial aura. Activities were perceived as battles, struggles, campaigns; members were organized in brigades and detachments. Uniformity was the watchword. In 1974 the FMC launched a campaign to encourage proper sleeping habits in children, which included a contest “to select a figure and a melody that will be used every day at a specific hour [on radio] to urge the children to go to sleep.”28 As with most important gatherings, Fidel Castro was always the last speaker at FMC congresses, and according to Vilma Espín, president of the FMC, “His words constitute a mandate.”29 Even the much-celebrated system of “poder popular” or people’s power, does not in fact confer any real power on ordinary people. Popular power was touted as a means to institutionalize the revolution after a period of years (it wasn’t formed until 1976!) in which the revolutionaries had lost contact with the masses. A system of municipal and regional assemblies, crowned by a National Assembly—popular power, in the words of Sam Farber, offered “the appearance of democracy without the substance.”30 This is true for a number of reasons. One, there is only one legal political party—the Cuban Communist Party. Barred from campaigning, candidates can only present their political biographies. The electoral law of 1992 allowed for the election of all the members of the National Assembly (previously only 55 percent were elected, the rest appointed from above). A “candidacy commission” consisting of leaders of the CCP and leaders of the mass organizations nominates the candidates, resulting in a situation in which the overwhelming majority of candidates are either members of the CCP or its organizations. What’s more, the number of candidates is restricted in such a way that the municipal electors can either vote for “all the candidates, some of the candidates, or none of them.”31 All of this, in any case, is moot because the National Assembly, which meets only twice a year for a few days, is a rubber-stamp body. As Marifeli Pérez-Stable writes, it is “not a permanent legislature and consequently did not have an actual role in governing Cuba.” Its role is to listen to various reports and approve various budgets, economic plans and laws and vote for them. “Debate could modify but never reject proposals. The assembly approved most matters unanimously, or nearly so.… Invariably…once President Castro spoke definitively on an issue, discussion stopped.”32 Scholar Carollee Bengelsdorf, who observed a meeting of the National Assembly in 1978, witnessed a discussion about Cuba’s housing shortage in which some delegates complained that they had lost voters’ confidence because none of the problems affecting people at the municipal level ever seemed to get solved. On the last day of the assembly, Fidel explained, We cannot simply do things because the electorate says it’s best, that it is good, really beautiful. There are many beautiful things in the world that have to wait to be realized. Unquestionably, there is a yearly plan of work, construction, and when this plan is made, the wishes of the electorate cannot be taken into account.33 Quite simply, the bureaucracy denies democracy because it has decisions it wants to make that it knows Cuban workers won’t accept. The top CCP leaders are also not accountable to their own party. It held its first congress in 1975—ten years after the party’s founding. Since then there have been only five congresses, the last one being held in 2002. In the party itself, as Maurice Zeitlin, a sympathetic observer, described in 1970, “The Central Committee of the Communist Party was not chosen by the rank and file of the party throughout the country, and there seems to be no inclination to carry out such elections with the Party itself.”34 One might expect that in a workers’ state the working class might have some degree of control over economic priorities, but such is not the case in Cuba. The technical advisory councils established in 1960, for example, were seen as a way to get workers to accept management decisions. “It is not a question of discussing all administrative decisions with the workers,” noted Politburo member Armando Hart, “but of obtaining their enthusiasm to support the principal measures of the administration.”35 Guevara and other leaders were of the same opinion. Writes Pérez-Stable, Collective decision-making was never their prerogative: the revolutionary government conferred exclusive power over enterprise matters to management. “Collective discussions, one-man decision-making and responsibility,” Guevara contended. Carlos Rafael Rodriguez seconded him: “We hear from many quarters the idea that workers should decide by majority vote…. Collective management is destructive. Administrators should have, have, and will have the last word.”36 The trade unions in Cuba are also adjuncts of management that promote productivity and labor discipline rather than defend workers’ rights. The justification for this new role for the unions was that the interests of the working class and the state were now identical. “One of the principal functions of the trade unions under socialism,” wrote Raúl Castro in 1971, is to serve as a vehicle for the orientation, directives, and goals which the revolutionary power must convey to the working masses…. The work of the trade unions helps and supports that of the administration…. The principal tasks [in which the unions should be involved] are productivity and work discipline; more efficient utilization of the workday…and most efficient and rational use of both material and human resources.37 Union organizations independent of party (state) control are prohibited, and there is no right to strike. Beginning in 1969, a new law required that “everyone in the labor force carry an identification card listing his occupational and employment record, and making the maintenance of such records on their employees mandatory.”38 This emphasis on the part of the Cuban leadership on the role of unions promoting greater productivity continues today. The September 20, 2006, edition of Granma, an official organ of the CCP, cited a speech by José A. Carrillo Gómez, chief political director of the Cuban armed forces, stating that, “The principal role of the labor unions is to promote productivity and labor discipline.”39 Political opposition to the regime is carefully monitored and frequently suppressed, either through intimidation or imprisonment. And it is not just Miami-funded dissidents who are harassed. Pro-Soviet communists and left-wing critics have also been repressed, as well as various artists. In the 1960s, “The tiny group of Cuban Trotskyists (Posadistas) was in prison for several years after their literature and printing press were seized by the government,” writes Farber. This was a group that supported the Cuban Revolution. “They were eventually released on condition that they cease independent political activity.”40 Ariel Hidalgo spent seven years in prison in Cuba, according to Amnesty International, on the charge of “hostile propaganda,” for writing a pamphlet in 1984 criticizing the “prerogatives” enjoyed by managers but “denied to nearly the whole rank-and-file working population.”41 Where critical opinions that contradict official policy are not permitted one cannot speak of real debate, let alone democracy. Raúl Castro once said that Cuba is “the most democratic state” in history, “even without representative institutions” because it “represents the interests of the working class, no matter what its form and structure.” It is surely a peculiar democracy whose superiority consists in the fact that the governing party rules in the name of the working class without having to answer to any “representative institutions.”42 The Cuban regime squared this circle by asserting that, “The working class considered as a whole…cannot exercise its own dictatorship.” Why? “Originating in bourgeois society,” the working class is “marred by flaws and vices from the past.”43 (Apparently, Raúl, Fidel, Che, and all the other revolutionaries who “originated in bourgeois society” were somehow unmarked by these vices). Ironically, when Raúl Castro made this statement, the head of the CTC was Lázaro Peña, the same Stalinist bureaucrat who was president of the union federation under Batista’s first dictatorship. Some socialists who have no problem seeing through the limitations of bourgeois democracy—the choice every four to six years of who will misrepresent the people—seem to wear blinders when it comes to the absence of any democracy at all in Cuba. The economics of dependency The Cuban economy has gone through a number of different phases since the revolution, each a response to problems created by the previous phase. In the early 1960s, Cuba attempted to introduce a Soviet-model, centrally planned command economy with the aim of rapidly diversifying the economy and abandoning Cuba’s dependence on sugar. This phase ended in crisis as Cuba found itself increasingly in debt to the Russians, yet with declining foreign exchange from its neglected sugar sector. Cuba found that it had moved from dependence on the U.S. to dependence on the Russians, forced to return to sugar exports as its main source of earnings. In the late 1960s, Cuba embarked on a “Guevarist” phase of hyper-centralized growth based on “moral incentives,” the demand for “selfless production,” and the use of military-style campaigns and production competitions (“socialist emulation”). The goal was rapid accumulation and industrialization based on an extremely high rate of investment. The period ended in disaster (practically zero growth), as the economy was thrown into dislocation by the attempt to mobilize the entire population to meet the goal of a ten million ton sugar harvest by 1970. At the end of the post-revolution regime’s first decade, per capita income was below what it had been in 1959.44 In the period of the 1970s, Cuba came back into the Russian fold and adopted a more modest development plan involving an emphasis on quotas and monetary incentives, as well as experiments with market mechanisms. Cuba retained its dependence on sugar throughout the 1970s and 1980s, however, receiving “something like a $5 billion annual subsidy from the Soviet Union—about $500 per capita annually—in the form of a relative price for Cuban sugar bartered for Soviet oil that far exceeded prevailing world market price.”45 This did not prevent Cuba from entering a period of economic crisis in the late 1970s, and again in the late 1980s, in which declining sugar prices reduced Cuba’s foreign exchange earnings and drove up its trade deficit and foreign debt. Cuba’s economic troubles, in other words, did not begin in the 1990s. To respond to the 1980s crisis, Castro initiated the “campaign to rectify errors and negative tendencies” in 1986 and revived a number of features of the late sixties—moral incentives, the expansion of the state’s role and the restricting of various market concession made earlier in the decade, and the reintroduction of work brigades. Castro’s rhetoric spoke of the need to curb “two-bit capitalists” who were “forgetting about the country.”46 But at the same time he began opening up the country to more foreign investment and expanding the tourist industry. The campaign was devised to increase the available surplus wealth to pay back Cuba’s mushrooming foreign debt. In addition to clamping down on private business transactions and corruption, the government “came out against employment security, wage guarantees, and unemployment and seniority rights,”47 and initiated cuts in the supply of important consumer products like milk and sugar. The government also doubled transportation fares, raised electricity rates by 30 percent, “stopped providing snacks at work centers, and… replaced the afternoon meal (until then offered at child care institutions) with a snack.”48 The rectification campaign was in part Castro’s response to perestroika in Russia and Solidarity in Poland. His attacks on bureaucratic privilege in this context were in large part ideological (though he was concerned to curtail theft at all levels)—to ease public opposition to austerity by presenting it as shared sacrifice. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to post-revolutionary Cuba’s worst economic crisis in its history. The crucial subsidy Russia had provided to Cuba suddenly disappeared. Below market-rate oil shipments, some of which Cuba had resold at a profit, dried up. The Eastern Bloc had accounted for 80 percent of Cuba’s imported machinery, and imported 63 percent of Cuba’s sugar (at higher than world market rates), as well as 73 percent of its nickel exports. The results were catastrophic. Imports fell 70 percent between 1990 and 1993. “Nearly half of all factories were shut down or forced to operate on a much reduced scale, for lack of imported raw materials, spare parts, and petroleum.”49 Cuba’s economy went into a tailspin, declining by 36 percent in the same period. Cuba was forced to import bicycles and use horse-drawn carts, and malnutrition was widespread.50 A UN observer who visited Cuba in 1996, Solon Barraclough, reported rural shortages of basic farm implements like machetes and hoes, clothing, paper, pencils, books, and medical supplies like aspirin and antibiotics.51 Yet the urban economy was even worse off, prompting the state to send urban refugees into the countryside.52 In response to the crisis, Cuba declared itself to be in a “Special Period in Peacetime” and initiated a series of reforms to cope with the crisis: opening up of foreign investment, in particular to joint (50-50) enterprises; decentralization of foreign trade activity; an increase in tourism; a restructuring of land ownership toward cooperatives and small farms (in an effort to increase domestic food production); authorization of licensed self-employment on a limited basis; creation of handicraft markets; greater autonomy and self-financing for state-owned enterprises; and legalization of dollar holdings. Cuba’s chief economic strategist, Carlos Lage, claims that Cuba’s special reforms are “not an opening toward capitalism, but rather a socialist opening toward a capitalist world.”53 The head of Cuba’s national bank explained that, “We have to think like capitalists but continue being socialists.” Castro defended “creeping privatization,” citing the need for a “practical attitude,” and the slogan became “capital yes, capitalism no.”54 This opening included allowing foreign investors in joint ventures (of which there were 340 in 2003, down from a peak of 540 in 2000)55 to repatriate all of their share of the profits. Whereas the Cuban managers of these concerns are paid salaries comparable to their foreign counterparts, the Cuban workers in these businesses are paid by an agency of the Cuban state, which receives $450 in hard currency per month, but only pays the equivalent of fifteen Cuban pesos per month in wages. In order to attract foreign investment, the Cuban government “exempted investors from compliance with labor laws, and it allowed for unlimited profit repatriation for up to ten years.”56 Not even Cuba’s state-run unions were permitted in the joint ventures. According to Jorge Pérez-López, the special labor regime of workers in joint ventures and the tourist industry allows employers more leeway to apply disciplinary action, requires longer probationary periods, longer hours, and allows more irregular work schedules. Workers also have less job security, as employees can be dismissed if they are not deemed “suitable.”57 In addition, the state began an economic program known as “perfeccionamiento empresarial” (enterprise optimization)—first adopted by enterprises run by Cuba’s armed forces in the late 1980s—allowing some enterprises to buy and sell directly on the world market and set their own labor policies. The aim was to “increase the maximum efficiency and competitiveness” of state enterprises.58 Low world market sugar prices and declining crop yields prompted the state to restructure the industry, shutting down half the sugar mills and diverting fields for cane production to other agricultural products. Tourism revenue grew from $243 million in 1991 to $1.8 billion in 2001, surpassing sugar as Cuba’s main industry and accounting in 2000 for 41 percent of Cuba’s foreign exchange.59 Dollar remittances (estimated at as much as $1 billion) became a crucial source of foreign exchange as well as a lifeline for many Cubans on the island. Cuba expanded its biotechnology industry, and sought foreign investors from Canada and China, to revive its nickel industry. Cuba now gets Venezuelan oil at below-market prices and has developed a series of joint economic ventures with Venezuela and China. Though there had been some recovery, the industrial sector is still far from its 1989 levels, there are shortages of consumer goods, chronic underemployment, and Cuba’s per capita income “is at best marginally better now than in 1957,” according to one left-wing economist.60 The promotion of tourism brought back features that were more redolent of pre-revolutionary Havana, which was not altogether discouraged by the Cuban government: In its drive to attract tourists the government played on the image of the “old Havana.” Three of the main Cuban organs that operate resorts—Cubatur, Cubanacán, and Cimex—hosted a Playboy trip around the time the Special Period was launched. The government allowed the magazine to feature an article on the “girls of Cuba,” contingent on coverage of the island’s tourist facilities. Even the Ministry of Tourism began to run travel advertisements abroad featuring string bikini-clad sexy Cuban girls. If that were not enough, in 1991 the government opened a Tropicana nightclub in Santiago de Cuba, a club capitalizing on the name of Havana’s most famous prerevolutionary nightspot. The government’s interest in hard currency led it to play on its prerevolutionary reputation and to reverse its earlier puritanical stance on such matters.61 Tourism introduced a sort of economic apartheid in Cuba, with a marked contrast between tourist wealth and extravagance and the austerity and low pay of most islanders. The legalization of the dollar in 1993 created a parallel economy that increased income inequality on the island. Those with access to dollars (about 60 percent) had access to services and goods that others did not. The economy has become so distorted that state-employed professionals like doctors and professors with no access to dollars have a lower income than taxi drivers in the tourist zone, prompting the former to moonlight as cabbies and small restaurant operators. For many young workers, pay is so low that many decide to become self-employed in order to improve their living standards. As in times past (for example, the 1980 Mariel exodus), the regime, though it regularly restricted travel abroad among ordinary Cubans, has allowed the exodus of thousands of poor Cubans, which acts as both an economic and political safety valve. In 2004, some of these economic reforms were curtailed—for example, small businesses were restricted again and Castro, in retaliation for Bush’s new restrictions on remittances and visits by Cuban Americans to the island—decreed that dollars had to be exchanged for convertible pesos for a 10 percent surcharge, and enterprises’ access to foreign exchange was recentralized through the state. But another motive seemed to be that the state would be able to concentrate more hard currency for imports and debt repayment. Cuba’s hard currency debt stands at almost $14 billion as of 2004, not counting the estimated $22 billion it still owes to the ex-Eastern Bloc countries, a fact that makes it difficult for Cuba to secure, when it can, other than short-term, high-interest loans. Even Cuba’s debt to Venezuela, in spite of paying cheaper than market prices for Venezuelan oil, is estimated at $2.5 billion. According to economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago, The scarcity of hard currency has been aggravated by several problems: continuous deterioration in the terms of trade; a merchandise trade deficit of about $3 billion from 2000 through 2004; a decline in foreign direct investment from 2001 through 2004; cash purchases of food and agricultural products from the United States that reached a cumulative total of $1 billion at the start of 2005; [and] extensive imports of equipment, spare parts, and goods in 2004 due to the electricity crisis and subsequent paralysis of great parts of the tourist sector.62 These zig-zags do not represent an alternation between capitalist and socialist measures, but rather an effort to overcome the problems that each economic shift creates. Each time the state opens up the economy it runs the risk also of opening things up beyond its control. It then lurches in the other direction, only to find that it creates other problems. The economic rationale for centralization of the economy and banning of private economic activity is that it allows the state to concentrate in its hands greater surplus and prevent “leakage” of wealth. However, the shortages of basic goods and the long lines for goods and services lead to high rates of absenteeism and resentment, lower productivity rates, and economic decline. In response, the state moves toward allowing private market mechanisms to operate more freely, including small service-related businesses, legalization of the black market, and so on. And the cycle begins again. State (and private) capitalism in Cuba Marx wrote in Capital that individual capitalists are driven by market competition to maximize profits: Competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist, as external coercive laws. It compels him to keep constantly extending his capital, in order to preserve it, but extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation.63 Defenders of Cuba’s socialist character claim that these laws don’t apply because there is no competition domestically between firms. This purely national view fails to take into account that Cuba is not a self-sufficient entity, but a small island nation that does not even produce all of its own food, let alone the energy, raw materials, machinery, spare parts, and investment funds that it needs to develop. The “external coercive laws” of capitalism impose themselves in the form of the world market, from which Cuba, a country dependent on imports and exports to survive, and which is deeply in debt to international creditors, was not able to escape at any point in its history. What has guided the investment and production priorities of the Cuban state? In Castro’s 1978 speech to the National Assembly previously referred to, he explained that the overarching need to invest Cuba’s resources in “economic and industrial development” was “an absolute,” and that therefore “the priority given to such investment was not open to discussion, or questioning.”64 Historian Louis Pérez, Jr., tells of how the regime’s drive to reduce Cuba’s sugar dependency led to an economic policy in the 1960s in which “consumption was curtailed to divert investment into industrialization and rapid economic growth.”65 As an economy dependent on exports, and until recently on sugar, the Cuban state has, just like an individual capitalist, been concerned not with what “use value” it produces, but with its value, i.e., what can be gotten in return for as little expenditure as possible. After the initial failures of the Guevarist phase, its entire development strategy rested in large part on the maximization of profit on a single export. The exigencies of the world market compel the state to engage in “progressive” accumulation—the expansion of surplus value—for the purposes of reinvestment and expansion of the Cuban economy. As with “private” capitalism, in Cuba “living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor.” Of course, as the provider of social services, the state has been responsible for the maintenance of certain minimum living standards for the Cuban working class, but the limits of improvement of this “social wage” are conditioned by the needs of accumulation. That is the meaning of the countless statements by Castro & Co. that workers must sacrifice today for a better tomorrow. “We should not speak of improving living conditions,” Castro said in his speech commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the revolution. “The most sacred duty of this generation is to devote their efforts to the development of the country…. This generation must make sacrifices…. Other generations will live better.”66 It is evident in the fact that the bureaucracy has never been able to solve Cuba’s housing crisis—there was a shortage of one million housing units at the end of the 1970s (and still more than 700,000 today),67 a result not simply of shortages, but reflects “the priority given to construction programs in other sectors.”68 Yet this sacrifice has never been a shared sacrifice. Like any ruling class, the Cuban nomenklatura also reserves special material privileges for itself, though the income disparities in Cuba (reported by Dumont to be about 9.4 to 1 in 196969) are not comparable to those, for example, in the United States. But money is not an adequate indication of the privilege of the ruling class in Cuba. In the Stalinist economies political access to goods and services has always been more important than access to money. As Louis Pérez, Jr., writes, whereas many durable consumer goods for workers and poor Cubans have been rationed—often goods like refrigerators and TV sets are awarded only to the most “productive” and “conscious” workers—“at a higher level…the government made available to high-level technicians, labor union leaders and ranking state functionaries valued goods and services, including automobiles, better housing, and access to vacations abroad.”70 There are also special shops and clinics for the elite. Though some Castro supporters may concede these inequalities of wealth, they deny that the Cuban bureaucracy is a ruling class, or that Cuba is capitalist, on the grounds that there are no private owners (although even this view has to be modified in light of the joint ventures). Classes are defined by their relationship to the means of production, and by who thereby controls the surplus. In Cuba, the state owns most of the economy, and the top echelons of the CCP control the state, and therefore the surplus; the working class, which is deprived of control, and therefore ownership, of the means of production, as well as the surplus it produces, is an exploited class. The Catholic Church was the largest feudal landowner in Europe. It exploited peasants even though no Vatican high officials privately owned Church land. The fact that individual bishops could not inherit or pass on landed wealth did not negate the fact that the church as an institution was an exploiter of the peasantry on the lands it collectively owned.71 The same holds true for Cuba. What makes Cuba capitalist is the pressure of the world market on the priorities and decisions of the Cuban ruling class. Socialism on one island is no more possible than socialism in one factory. The fact that work discipline must continually be reinforced is strong evidence that Cuban workers do not feel themselves to be owners of the means of production. In response to the wide gap between wages and the scant availability of consumer goods, workers often work only as much as is necessary to buy their rations. Forms of labor coercion are needed to supplement efforts to convince workers to work under conditions of austerity. Absenteeism and theft are recurrent themes in the speeches of state officials. Lacking other means of redress for their low standards of living (such as striking), Cuban workers engage in these more passive forms of resistance. Workers absent themselves from their official jobs to engage in various unofficial activities to supplement their wages. This behavior only accelerated in past years because of the introduction of the parallel dollar economy related to tourism and dollar remittances from the United States. Conclusion **__ No country can escape from the effects of the world market __****__, least of all a small island economy. While small nations can achieve political independence from imperialism—Cuba is living proof—the idea of “economic independence” was always a nationalist pipe dream __**. Cuba’s inescapable reliance on one or two key exports (sugar, then tourism) its dependence on foreign investment and imports for capital, raw materials, and even food—first from the Eastern Bloc, today from elsewhere—is proof of this truth. If Cuba is able to diversify its exports in biotechnology, nickel, oil, and services (i.e. doctors) it will not have thereby strengthened “socialism” in Cuba. It will have been accomplished by significant investment from Canadian, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, and Venezuelan capital. The use of state planning to develop the products that give Cuba a “comparative advantage” in the world market is a development strategy employed by dozens of once less developed capitalist countries, from South Korea to Singapore. It has no more to do with socialism than Mexico’s national oil company. **__ The class nature of Cuba must be separated from the question of the defense of Cuba against U.S. imperialism, for they are not identical questions. Too often liberals have historically sided with U.S. aims and failed to defend countries under U.S. assault—witness the failure of the Left to oppose U.S. intervention in Somalia and Panama—because they could not identify politically with the regimes of those states. The uncritical defense of Castro’s rule is the flip side of the same approach. All sincere anti-imperialists should condemn the cruel U.S. economic blockade of Cuba; but we should have no illusions as to what the lifting of that embargo would mean. __** The proximity of Cuba to the U.S. and the latter’s size and power will lead to the more or less rapid reintegration of Cuba with the U.S. economy. With special rules that allow it to circumvent restrictive laws against trade and investment with Cuba, U.S. agribusiness has exported $1.6 billion in products to Cuba between 2001 and 2005, making Cuba the third largest U.S. food importer in Latin America.72 The Bush administration has also authorized a San Diego company to market three anti-cancer vaccines developed by the Center for Molecular Immunology in Havana.73 **__ A lifting of the embargo would lead not to the flourishing of socialism __**, by whatever definition. **__ Cuba’s social services—its free health care and educational system especially—would come under threat. __**

** 5. The Aff is naïve- power always exists in the international arena. If the US doesn’t exercise imperial force others will and that is comparatively worse **
Niall ** Ferguson ** [MA, D.Phil., is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford] IN "IMPERIAL DENIAL." WITH NONNA GORILOVSKAYA. MAY/JUNE ** 2004 **. http ://www. globalpo I icy. org/empire/analvs is/2004/052 mperi al d en i al .htm)

Well, it could be for a very short-time indeed. One of the nightmare scenarios that I have been thinking about a lot recently is that there is simply a world without hegemony in which the United States goes: "Oh dear, this is too nasty and morally compromising, we are going home." The Europeans are entirely taken up with their own problems of demographic, aging, and immigration. Out in Asia, the big issue is essentially economic development for the hinterland of China. Nobody wants to play the role of empire in mid-twenty-first century history and that's a perfectly plausible scenario. and its not a very comforting one. **__ Those __** of my critics **__ who __****__ say "empire is always bad __**, we should never have empire **__ ," have not looked at the historical alternatives to empire __** Throughout most of recorded history there have been empires. **__ Empires __****__ essentially create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states __** full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's "Imagine." **__ What you end up with is civil war, __** anarchy. **__ You end up with __** -- say in the 9th century- **__ the Vikings who were quintessential beneficiaries of the collapse of empire __**. They were able simply rampage around Europe looting and pillaging cities. **__ But that scenario __** - what I would call .the "Dark Age" scenario -- **__ is __** a **__ much scarier __**. one **__ in the 21st century __** than in the 9th century. **__ Technology gives the Vikings of our time the possibility of dirty bombs __****__. In that sense, empire is to be preferred to the available alternatives. __** That's why I want the United States to keep its nerve, to go the distance, to **__ recognize that the alternatives to empire are worst __**, not better. And in that sense **__, my arguments for liberal empire __** or whatever you want to call it -- hegemony, primacy, you name it — are **__ really activated by a sense that the alternatives involve more violence, more repression, more hardship, especially for the people of the Middle East __** .>

** 6. The Cuban government skims money from foreign investment and tourism, the plan plays right into their hands **
[|Mitchell] [|**Bustillo**] [will be attending Columbia University in the fall where he will be majoring in Engineering with a minor in Economics on a Pre-Law track. He is a first-generation Cuban-American, a Hispanic Heritage Foundation Gold Medallion Winner, and a former United States Senate Page, appointed by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. He one day hopes to return to the Hill]¶ Time to Strengthen the Cuban Embargo¶ May 9, ** 2013 ** ¶ []

Still **__ there is the idea that __** further **__ increasing American tourism __** to this nearby Caribbean island **__ will at least aid their impoverished citizens __** in some manner, **__ but this is neither a straight-forward nor easy solution __**. From the annual throng of American visitors, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio [|declared] at a 2011 Western Hemisphere Subcommittee Hearing that an estimated, **__ “$4 billion a year flow directly to the Cuban government from remittances and travel by Cuban Americans, which is perhaps the single largest source of revenue to the most repressive government in the region __** .” ¶ These remittances are sent by Americans to help their Cuban families, not support the Cuban government. **__ It is also a common belief that the Cuban embargo is a leading cause of poverty among the Cuban citizens and that lifting the embargo would go a long way toward improving the Cuban standard of living. However, no amount of money can increase the living standards there as long as their current regime stands. “ __** After all, **__ the authorities were already skimming 20 percent of the remittances from Cuban-Americans and 90 percent of the salary paid to Cubans __****__ by non-American foreign investors,” __** [|states Alvaro Vargas Llosa], Senior Fellow of The Center on Global Prosperity at The Independent Institute. ¶ However unfortunate it may be, **__ Cuba, in its current state, is __****__ a nation consisting only of a wealthy and powerful few and an impoverished and oppressed proletariat, who possess little to no means to escape or even improve their fate. Lifting the trade embargo will not increase the general prosperity of the Cuban people, but it will increase the prosperity of the government __**. Ergo, the poverty and dire situation of the Cuban people cannot be blamed on the United States or the embargo.

====** 7. The aff is an act of moral irresponsibility actively rewarding a brutal and oppressive regime- the Embargo is the only way to pressure the regime into reform. The status quo is the most ethical act **====

Miguel ** Olivella ** [Florida based attorney and writer about Cuban-American issues]¶ May 24, ** 2011 ** ¶ Miguel Olivella: Morality, not votes, guides embargo¶ []

Carl Leubsdorf advances **__ the notion that the Cuban embargo should be abandoned __** since it is in place solely due to political considerations that trump "the national interest." If Leubsdorf had his way, we would lift the embargo to create an atmosphere of change in Cuba that would enable Cuba to join the global democratic revolution. Leubsdorf appears to suffer from an extreme case of naivete when it comes to the likes of Fidel and Raul Castro. But before presenting my humble opinion as to justifiable reasons for the embargo, let's dispel the premise for Leubsdorf's opinion piece, i.e. that the Cuban-American vote dictates policy positions by Florida politicians. Recently, Gov. Rick Scott expressed support for the embargo. It is no secret that the governor is pro-business. The business community at large favors a lifting of the embargo because of the obvious trade and financial opportunities. This constituency is much larger than the Cuban-American constituency, and thus Gov. Scott's position on the embargo is clearly a net vote count loss for him. Even an unabashed Florida liberal such as Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is vehemently opposed to relaxing U.S. policy toward Cuba. The Cuban-American community can hardly be considered Wasserman Schultz voters in light of fundamental disagreement with her overall political philosophy. Moreover, I would suspect that her support of the embargo has cost her votes with her Democratic base. History also teaches us that the Cuban-American vote does not translate into election victory in Florida. If Cuban-American votes could truly carry an election, President Obama — a vocal proponent of abandoning the embargo — would never have won Florida in 2008. So **__ why would our __** pro-business **__ governor __** and the liberal Wasserman Schultz **__ refuse to sanction a lifting of the embargo __****__ ? __** Because **__ they are __** both **__ guided by a moral compass that will not allow them to reward one of the most reprehensible, Machiavellian regimes of our time with more trade than currently is in place. __** And, unlike Leubsdorf, **__ they do not suffer from the rose-colored-glasses belief that trade with Cuba will engender democracy. For some 50 years, the Castro regime has prohibited all political dissent. My fellow __** countrymen and **__ relatives have been tortured, __****__ executed and imprisoned for daring to express any political view that differs from the regime's philosophy __**. There is no right to free expression, privacy, association, assembly, movement or due process of law. Enforcement of government policy is carried out through surveillance, detentions, house arrests, travel restrictions, criminal prosecutions and dismissals from employment. Rewarding this conduct with open trade is unconscionable. **__ As for democracy, Fidel and Raul Castro have perfected a tyrannical system that has made them and their friends inordinately rich. This power structure includes __****__ not only human right atrocities, but a complete dominance over the economy, which is in the exclusive hands of the Cuban military and the Castros' circle of friends. Any company seeking to engage in commerce with Cuba must go through the state, and since the Castros enjoy unfettered control over all aspects of the economy, __** the only beneficiaries of commerce would be the Castros. **__ No thinking person can possibly believe that the Castros would allow democracy to flourish, since it would jeopardize __****__ what they have been zealously protecting for 50 years — lives of privilege and wealth. __**

** 8. Allowing the avoidable death of people through nuclear war you deny that group of people the ability to affirm life the way they want to **
Lawrence **__Hateb__** (Professor & Chair Philosophy and Religious Studies, Old Dominion University) **__1995__** “A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy” p. 152-3

Nietzsche is willing to offer judgements against weak, life-denying perspectives and in favor of strong, life-affirming perspectives. Nevertheless, __Nietzsche also indicates that overall evaluations of life cannot be given any veridical status, since they stem from perspectival interests__. “Judgements __, judgements of value, concerning life,__ for it or against it, __can, in the end, never be true__ : they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms: in themselves such judgements are stupidities. One must by all means stretch out one’s fingers and attempt to grasp this amazing finesse, __that the value of life cannot be estimated. Evaluations of life, then are local estimations that serve the interest of a certain perspective but that cannot stand as a global measure to cancel out other estimations. This would not be inconsistent with Nietzsche’s texts__ although he vigorously opposes what he calls the perspectives of the weak, nevertheless these perspectives have their authenticity, according to Nietzsche. Life denying perspectives serve the interests of certain types of life, who have been able to cultivate their own forms of power that have had an enormous effect upon the world. In order to make headway here, we have to distinguish between life affirmation and life enhancement. According to Nietzsche, even life-denying perspectives are life-enhancing, since they further the interests of weak forms of life. Different forms of life are continually affirming their own perspective on life; their cultural productions, even if animated by other worldy projections, express their local affirmative posture. Even philosophical pessimism is affirmative in this sense. Schopenhaurer’s elaborate philosophical output on behalf of pessimism was in effect an affirmation of a pessimistic life, in part as a vigorous – and stimulating – condemnation of optimism __. Short of the practical nihilism of suicide, all forms of human life seek to will their meaning, even if that meaning is a conviction about the meaninglessness of life. As__ Nietzsche says, “man would rather will nothingness than no will”. __Nietzsche does have a “global” philosophical position__, namely perspectivism, __in the sense that the life-world is a field of perspectives__ , each willing their own life interests; as perspectives if a field of becoming, however, none can pose as the “truth”. Nothing here would forbid Nietzsche from making judgements about perspectives that he thinks are deficient estimations of life. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena – more precisely, misinterpretation (missdeutung). Moral judgements, like religious ones, belong to a stage of ignorance at which the very concept of the real and the distinction between what is real and imaginary, are still lacking. Since, as we have seen, overall estimations of life can have no veridical status, __Nietzsche’s critique cannot amount to a project of refutation or erasure, but rather a “plea by an interested party”__ The promotion of life-affirmation over life-denial should be taken as Nietzsche’s perspective, as a battle that he is willing to wage, as a commitment that involves an existential decision rather than a search for justification. In this way other perspectives can have their place, in their service to the interest of different types of life “This is my way: where is yours? – thus I answered those who asked me “the way”. For the way – that does not exist