Imperialism Links

The US is at the forefront of the ISPS

Chalk 8Writer for RAND (Peter, The Maritime Dimension of International Security Terrorism, Piracy, and Challenges for the United
States http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG697.pdf)//RT
The United States has been at the forefront of several moves to upgrade global maritime security
over the last ve years, including the Container Security Initiative the International Ship and Port
Facility Security (ISPS) Code the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) the Customs-Trade Partnership
Against Terrorism. In addition to these measures, the United States has been instrumental in instituting
regional maritime security initiatives and capacity building in areas recognized as vital to U.S.
counterterrorism strategy.
Venezuela is one of the few countries that has rejected US influence
Petras 8Professor at Global Research (James Venezuela : Democracy, Socialism and Imperialism, April 17, 2008,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/venezuela-democracy-socialism-and-imperialism/8711)//RT

Venezuela s President Hugo Chavez remains the worlds leading secular, democratically elected
political leader who has consistently and publicly opposed imperialist wars in the Middle East ,
attacked extra-territorial intervention and US and European Union complicity in kidnapping and
torture. Venezuela plays the major role in sharply reducing the price of oil for the poorest countries in
the Caribbean region and Central America, thus substantially aiding them in their balance of payments,
without attaching any strings to this vital assistance. Venezuela has been in the forefront in
supporting free elections and opposing human right abuses in the Middle East, Latin America and
South Asia by pro-US client regimes in Iraq , Afghanistan and Colombia . No other country in the
Americas has done more to break down the racial barriers to social mobility and the acquisition of
land for Afro-Latin and Indio Americans. President Chavez has been on the cutting edge of efforts
toward greater Latin American integration despite opposition from the United States and several
regional regimes, who have opted for bilateral free trade agreements with the US .

Without US involvement Venezuela has done great
Petras 8Professor at Global Research (James Venezuela : Democracy, Socialism and Imperialism, April 17, 2008,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/venezuela-democracy-socialism-and-imperialism/8711)//RT

GDP has grown by more than 87% with only a small part of the growth being in oil. The poverty rate has been cut in
half (from 54% in 2003 at the height of the bosses lockout to 27% in 2007; and extreme poverty has been reduced from 43% in 1996 to 9% in
2007), and unemployment by more than half (from 17% in 1998 to 7% in 2007). The economy has created jobs at
a rate nearly three times that of the United States during its most recent economic expansion.
Accessible health care for the poor has been successfully expanded with the number of primary care
physicians in the public sector increasing from 1,628 in 1998 to 19,571 by early 2007. About 40% of the
population now has access to subsidized food. Access to education, especially higher education, has
also been greatly expanded for poor families. Real (inflation adjusted) social spending per person has increased by more than
300%.

US involvement would wreck Venezuelas growth
Petras 8Professor at Global Research (James Venezuela : Democracy, Socialism and Imperialism, April 17, 2008,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/venezuela-democracy-socialism-and-imperialism/8711)//RT

The large-scale, long-term practical accomplishments of the Chavez government, however have been overlooked by
liberal and social democratic academics in Venezuela and their colleagues in the US and Europe, who prefer to
criticize secondary institutional and policy weaknesses, failing to take into account the world-historic significance of the
changes taking place in the context of a hostile, aggressively militarist-driven empire.4 No reasonable and rigorous
contemporary analysis can seriously provide an accurate assessment of Venezuela while glossing over
the tremendous accomplishments achieved during the Hugo Chavez presidency. It is within the framework of
Chavez innovative and courageous political-social breakthroughs that we should proceed to an analysis of the advances, contradictions and
negative aspects of specific political, economic, social and cultural policies, practices and institutions. The Advances and
Limitations of Economic Policy Venezuela has made tremendous advances in the economy since the
failed coup of April 11, 2002 and the employers lockout of December 2002-February 2003, which led
to a 24% decline in the GDP.5 Under President Chavez leadership and with favorable terms of trade,
Venezuela grew by over 10% during the past 5 years, decreasing poverty levels from over 50% to less
than 28%, surpassing any country in the world in terms of the rate of poverty-reduction. The economy
has, in contrast to the past, accumulated over $35 billion dollars in foreign exchange reserves despite a vast increase
in social spending and has totally freed itself of dependence on the onerous terms imposed by the self-styled international banks (IMF, World
Bank and Inter-American Development Bank) by paying off its debt.

The aff is constructing maritime threats to gain access to Venezuela
Chalk 8Writer for RAND (Peter, The Maritime Dimension of International Security Terrorism, Piracy, and Challenges for the United
States http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG697.pdf)//RT

Historically, the worlds oceans have not been a major locus of terrorist activity. Indeed, according to the RAND
Terrorism Database, strikes on maritime targets and assets have constituted only two percent of all
international incidents over the last 30 years. To be sure, part of the reason for this relative paucity has
to do with the fact that many terrorist organizations have neither been located near coastal regions
nor possessed the means to extend their physical reach beyond purely local theaters. There are also
several problems associated with carrying out waterborne strikes which have, at least historically,
helped to oset some of the tactical advantages associated with esoteric maritime environments
outlined in Chapter Two. Most intrinsically, operating at sea requires terrorists to have mariner skills, access to
appropriate assault and transport vehicles, the ability to mount and sustain operations from a non-
landbased environment, and certain specialist capabilities (for example, surface and underwater
demolition techniques).1 Limited resources have traditionally prevented groups from accessing
these options.


Neolib Links
An increase in port security just perpetuates capitalism
Isenberg 12Staff Writer at the CATO institute (David The Rise of Private Maritime Security Companies, May 26, 2012,
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/rise-private-maritime-security-companies)//RT

Why do companies pursue this market? Because there is good money to be made. Hiring licensed
private security guards costs up to $60,000 for the voyage through the Gulf of Aden. Ships pay roughly
$5,000 a day for a four-man armed team, on duty for four to 20 days. Contracts can be bare bones with
only three men with binoculars, radios and a single hunting rifle or ramp up to over a dozen armed
men, elaborate ship hardening, drill training or if policy forbids on board security, move to an
emerging trend of hardened, armed escort cutters operating as mini gunboats. According to the
private intelligence company Stratfor, the cost for a typical four-man team on a normal 40-day rotation
would be $56,000-64,000 plus whatever the security company needs to make a profit from the trip.
Bypassing the Gulf of Aden, adding three thousand miles and from two to three weeks to voyages,
incurring additional fuel costs of $3.5 million per year for tankers and $74.4 million per year for the liner
trades Pay higher insurance premiums, which have increased from only $500 in 2007 to
approximately $20,000 per ship per voyage, excluding injury, liability, and ransom coverage Paying
ransoms, totaling between $30 million and $150 million in 2008. Ransoms paid to pirates operating off
the coast of Somalia have increased from 2004 to 2009from about $500,000 per vessel to upwards
of $5.5 million Sustaining a multinational naval presence in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean, at a
cost of between $250 million and $400 million per year Why the demand? The answer is simple. To
date, no ship with armed security has been successfully hijacked. Dollars and Sense The emerging
economic paradigm indicates that use of maritime armed guards will only increase. That means the
private security companies, many based in Britain or elsewhere in northern Europe, that combat the
pirates were earning much more than the pirates themselves. Thus piracy is good for at least some
businesses. Maritime private security companies now pull in $52.2m a month from an estimated
1,500 escorted journeys. Newcastle upon Tyne-based, Convoy Escort Programme Ltd. intends to deploy
seven armored former naval patrol boats, each with an eight-man security team. Convoy Escort
reportedly will charge about $30,000 for a boat traveling in a convoy of about four commercial vessels
for three to four days According to the Independent Maritime Security Association the use of a private
armed security team general costs about $50,000 per transit. If only 25% of vessels employed guards,
that would work out to 10,612 transits At the 25% figure that works out to $530.6 million for private
armed security. At 50% it would be a billion dollar dollar a year industry just in the Gulf of Aden. And,
given that some underwriters give discounts to ships that hire armed guards, they are likely to pull in
more business in the future. Although Somalia is the current epicenter for acts of piracy, it is a global
problem with some disturbing forecasts. According to Peter Cook, the head of the Security
Association for the Maritime Industry (SAMI), which represents 120 armed security outfits, more than
half of which are British, over the next 20 years maritime traffic will increase 50% but navies will
shrink by 30%. In addition to commercial traffic, there are 4,500 super yachts afloat and over half a
million tourists aboard cruises ships every day of the year. Coming up with a clear agreed upon
standard for the provision of armed security will not be easy. There are more than 8,000 ports
covered by the ISPS (International Port and Ship Security Code with no clear regulation on armed
security. This does not include the potential problems posed at thousands of ports around the world,
the threat to offshore oil and gas industry or even how the use of armed security affects something
like the undersea cable laying sector. Currently many major maritime entities insist on armed escorts
which keep armed men off their corporate vessels as well as the liability.

Race Links
Increasing port security increases discrimination racial profiling and anti-labor
policies.
Cowen, 6 - Postdoctoral Fellow, Division of Social Sciences at York University (Struggling with 'Security':
National Security and Labour in the Ports by Deborah Cowen SSHRC
http://www.justlabour.yorku.ca/volume10/pdfs/03CowenPress.pdf)//RT

Over the past five years, governments around the world have been busy crafting new policies,
institutions, and rationales for national securitization. Largely at the behest of the United States, they
have been compelled to define a wide range of new security measures. The war on terror has
focused heavily on securing the movement of people and goods across national borders, and the
profiling of suspected terrorists on the basis of nationality, religion and ethnicity. This is the case,
despite the fact that perhaps the only common thread to the various agents of non-state terror in the
US, from Timothy McVeigh to Osama bin Laden, is some form of training by the US military. This
incredible disjuncture between perceived risks and response continues to inform dominant
conceptions of security, as well as the practices they organize. While the control of human migration
has intensified alongside the globalization of production over the past few decades, border control
has nevertheless been rapidly reworked since 2001. Mobility has been newly constrained for many
people, largely through racial profiling and its impacts on no-fly lists, security certificates, and
international information sharing. On the other hand, the movement of goods across national borders
has been liberalized in recent decades to facilitate the massive volume of cargo movement that
constitutes global trade. However, since 9/11, politicians and security officials have become increasingly
concerned about the incredible volume of unchecked cargo crossing borders. They are particularly
anxious about the mysterious contents of shipping containers. The competing demands of economy
and security have placed international ports at the centre of national security debates. In fact, key
security initiatives target transport workers, who at once play a pivotal role in policing the territorial
borders of the nation and are central to the global movement of goods. Security clearance programs
are under development for port workers that will severely compromise employment security by
making workers subject to extensive screenings that violate privacy, allow for job suspension based
on reasonable suspicion of terrorist affiliation, and offer no independent appeals process. New
security regulations threaten to institutionalize racial profiling and directly undermine collective
agreements and civil rights. Moreover, there are plans to generalize these programs across the transport
sector a large part of the labour force that includes trucking, mass transit, airport, and rail. In this
paper, I look at struggles over port security regulations in Canada. I discuss the creative political
response, particularly by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Canada, which
represents west coast port workers, in their coalition work to reform federal initiatives. I suggest that
national security policy, as backdoor labour policy, works to institutionalize anti-social forms of
security. For port workers, security is already a dominant concern, but as these precedents are
generalized beyond port workers, security policy will become an increasingly critical issue for the
labour movement more broadly.

Port security policies set the precedent for racial profiling
Cowen, 6 - Postdoctoral Fellow, Division of Social Sciences at York University (Struggling with 'Security':
National Security and Labour in the Ports by Deborah Cowen SSHRC
http://www.justlabour.yorku.ca/volume10/pdfs/03CowenPress.pdf)//RT

The implications for employment security were severe; proposed regulations would make workers
vulnerable to indiscriminate suspension, thus directly undermining collective agreements, as well as
creating potential for employers to exploit the regulations in order to deliberately circumvent
collective agreements. The ILWU emphasized how uneven the impact of the proposed regulations
could be in terms of creating insecurity for particular groups of workers. They outlined how the
regulations would institutionalize racial profiling and systemic discrimination based on national origin,
and could be used to target union activists and other dissident political voices. The MFRAACP was a
carefully veiled employment discrimination policy through the application of various types of
stereotyping racial, political, union activist, etc. they argued (ILWU 2004, emphasis in original). A
documented history of racial profiling within Canadian Security and Intelligence institutions, alongside
the significant pressure to expedite large numbers of security clearances by an already overburdened
security bureaucracy, would create all the conditions to rationalize racial profiling. The RCMP and CSIS,
who are responsible for security checks, are widely known to be engaging in racial profiling of just this
sort (Clark 2005, ONeil 2004, Teotonio 2006). In the wake of the Maher Arar inquiry, countless groups
and individuals, including even Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, recommended better
oversight of the operations of CSIS, the RCMP and Transport Canada. Transport Canadas recent
information package on the security clearances, in fact, directly outlines how travel history is
collected to see if an applicant has traveled to a country where there may be security concerns (TC
2006). This clearly is a direct invitation for the profiling of risky workers based on simplistic
assumptions about risky regions. Importantly, the ILWU also suggested that the MFRAACP could be
used to target workers for crime as easily as for suspected terrorist affiliation. They questioned how
national security would be served by this blurring of categories, and how any form of security could be
instituted by undermining the privacy, security and civil rights of citizens. This concern is a serious one.
It has become common sense among security experts that the boundary between terror and crime is
an outdated one and simply slows them down in their hunt. Crime and risk consultant and author
Chris Mathers recently explained in an interview in Canadian Security Magazine, organized crime and
terrorism are two horns of the same goat. He repeated American mythologies that these are
particular problems for Canada because of its relaxed approaches to immigration and criminal
prosecution and because it is adjacent to both one of the largest markets and the largest target in the
world the United States. The blurring of terror and crime is furthermore the foundation for a spate
of new security and defense policy in the US. As H. Allen Holmes, the former Assistant Secretary of
Defense has said, special operations forces are increasingly working at the seam between war and
crime (Goss 2006). Indeed, countless security and anti-terrorism strategies redefine military and
civilian authority through programs like Military Assistance to Civil Authorities [MACA], Defense Support
to Civil Authorities [DSCA] and emergency preparedness (NYT 2006). In all this, the ILWU focused their
lobby for reform on the three most pernicious elements of the plan for labour: the lack of meaningful
appeals process, the scope of information collected for the security clearance, and the range of
workers who would be subject to the screening. None of these elements of the proposed regulations
had the potential to enhance security of any kind.

Security Links
The aff is just a securitization of the world for the US
Chalk 8Writer for RAND (Peter, The Maritime Dimension of International Security Terrorism, Piracy, and Challenges for the United
States http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG697.pdf)//RT

In terms of specic maritime threats, piracy and terrorist contingencies involving containerized
freight, passenger ferries, and cruise liners are most relevant to U.S. security considerations. Piracy
already costs U.S. businesses several millions of dollars a year in lost cargo, delayed trips,
damaged vessels, and fraudulent trade, and there is little indication of the situation improving any
time soon. In terms of national assets, U.S.-agged vessels have been frequently targeted, with
more than 30 incidents taking place between 2003 and 2005.3 The gure for 2005 represented a 36
percent rise over 2003s total and was more than double the number of attacks recorded for 2004.4
Just as problematic are high and ongoing rates of global pirate activity, the eects of which continue
to fall disproportionately on the United States simply by virtue of the extensive seaborne trade that
the country engages in with industrialized maritime nations.