China DA

US Gambling precedent is key to Chinas censorship

apparatus---the aff erases the loophole
Qin 11 (Julia Ya Qin, Professor of Law, Wayne State University Law School,

Chinese Journal of International Law, 2011, 10(2), 271, Pushing the Limits of
Global Governance: Trading Rights, Censorship and WTO JurisprudenceA
Commentary on the ChinaPublications Case,
http://chinesejil.oxfordjournals.org/content/10/2/271.full)
49. Prior to this case, China had kept a perfect record of complying with adverse WTO decisions. In the first
two cases in which its measures were found to be WTO-inconsistent,79 China fully implemented DSB
rulings, including making amendment to major national legislation.80 And it had every incentive to keep

China relies on the WTO system to

maintain an open global trading environment. Non-compliance with DSB
rulings would cost dearly in political capital as China fights against
protectionist trends in the post-financial crisis era. Domestically, however, the political climate has
not been conducive to making the type of systemic changes required by the WTO ruling. Threatened
by rising social unrest in recent years, the government has been tightening
its grip on the media, the Internet and the censorship machine.81 If there was
that record. Being the top exporter in the world,

previously some hope that the Party reformists might be able to embrace the WTO decision and leverage it
to advance their political reform agenda,82 any such hope has been dashed after anonymous online calls

In
response to China's failure to meet the deadline for implementation,
the U nited S tates may initiate additional WTO proceedings to compel
compliance.84 Under the current political climate, however, the prospects for full
compliance remain poor. 52. A lack of full compliance can lead to an eventual request by the
United States for WTO-sanctioned trade retaliations. In this regard, China may take to heart the
for a revolution in China prompted the government to react with harsh crackdowns.83 51.

U nited S tates' practice in USGambling ,85 a case that bears a certain

resemblance to ChinaPublications. In that case, Antigua challenged the US
regulations prohibiting Internet gambling as a breach of the US
commitment to liberalize recreational services under the GATS. The United States contended

that its services commitments did not include Internet gambling. To justify its measures, the United States
also invoked the public morals exception of GATS Article XIV(a), which contains similar language as GATT
XX(a). Siding with Antigua, the WTO judiciary found that the United States had committed to liberalize
Internet gambling, and that while its measures were designed to protect public morals, the United States
had failed to demonstrate that the measures met the non-discrimination requirements under the chapeau

After losing the case, the U nited S tates claimed it had

committed an oversight in drafting its services schedule .87 Instead of
of Article XIV.86

removing the restrictions, the United States has since renegotiated its schedule with other Members to
exclude gambling from its GATS commitments.88 With respect to Antigua, the United States has accepted
WTO-sanctioned trade retaliation of $21 million per year.89

Gambling, China could

also

claim an oversight

Similar to the U nited S tates in US

in drafting the coverage of its trading rights

commitments. Unlike the United States, however, China might not be able to renegotiate its commitments
due to the legal uncertainty surrounding possible amendment to the Accession Protocol.90 Nonetheless,

China may follow the US example in accepting WTO-sanctioned retaliation ,91

especially if the amount is manageable.92 [Footnote 91 begins here] 91 See Wu, above n.9, fn.55
(indicating that

a proposal was made for China to follow suit with US's non-compliance in

USGambling ). [Footnote 91 ends here]

Key to Chinese and CCP Stability

MacKinnon 9 (REBECCA MacKINNON, FELLOW, OPEN SOCIETY INSTITUTE,

AND ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, JOURNALISM AND MEDIA STUDIES CENTRE, THE

UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON
CHINA, February 27, 2009, "DOES CHINA HAVE A STABILITY PROBLEM?",
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-111hhrg48223/html/CHRG111hhrg48223.htm)
As with everything in China, positives and negatives tend to exist simultaneously, which makes studying
China particularly interesting. That is certainly the case with the Internet and sociopolitical change in

in the West we tend to focus on the relationship between the

Internet and China as sort of more as the negative side, that it's a challenge to the regime,
China. I think

that it enables a platform--a very new platform--for the airing of grievances, for exposing official abuse and

But the Chinese Government has so far managed, through censorship

and manipulation, to stop localized incidents from metastasizing into
protest.

national movements . This is in part due to the Chinese Government's

success--while technically censorship is not perfect, it works well enough
when combined with surveillance and law enforcement that dissent that is
expressed on the Internet and is expressed every day does not get turned into
nationwide political movements , for the most part, or they are nipped in the bud before they
can turn into specific action . Another point is that, although the economic crisis, as Charlotte
mentioned, poses a particular challenge to China this year, and we have this anniversary year with the
20th anniversary of the 1989 crackdown, and many other anniversaries coming up,

the C hinese

C ommunist P arty has really displayed an ability to learn and adapt to the Internet
age and has been experimenting with innovative new approaches to using
the Internet as a tool for maintaining legitimacy.
Extinction
Yee and Storey 2 (Herbert Yee, Professor of Politics and IR, Hong Kong
Baptist University --AND-- Ian Storey, Lecturer in Defence Studies at Deakin,
02
The China Threat: Perceptions, Myths and Reality, p5)
The fourth factor contributing to the perception of a China threat is the fear of political
and economic collapse in the PRC, resulting in territorial fragmentation,
civil war and waves of refugees pouring into neighbouring countries.
Naturally, any or all of these scenarios would have a profoundly negative impact on
regional stability. Today the Chinese leadership faces a raft of internal
problems, including the increasing political demands of its
citizens, a growing population, a shortage of natural resources and a deterioration in the natural environment caused by rapid
industrialisation and pollution. These problems are putting a strain on the central
government's ability to govern effectively. Political disintegration or a
Chinese civil war might result in millions of Chinese refugees seeking
asylum in neighbouring countries. Such an unprecedented exodus of refugees from a
collapsed PRC would no doubt put a severe strain on the limited resources of
China's neighbours. A fragmented China could also result in another nightmare
- nuclear weapons falling into the hands of irresponsible local provincial
leaders or warlords.2 From this perspective, a disintegrating China would also pose a
scenario

threat to

its neighbours and

the world.

Spec
-- Aff must specify which branch passes the plan they
dont
-- Vote Neg
1. Ground robs courts, congress, executive
counterplans, agent specific disads and case arguments
2. Conditionality resolved means a firm course of
action not specifying allows them to shift and clarify in
the 2AC
3. No solvency theres no actor as the United States,
only specific branches

CP
The United States federal government should:
- Clarify that the UIGEA applies to horseracing
- Amend the Interstate Horseracing Act of 1978 so that
it prohibits remote internet gambling
- Adjust the UIGEA to fit within GATS article XIVs
public morals exception.
CP solves the WTO advantage but only affects horse-race
betting
Bloom 8

(Heather, South Carolina Journal of International Law and Business, "Upping

the Ante: The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act's Noncompliance
with World Trade Organization Law")
Armed with a public morals rationale, the United States has taken significant
steps in the past decade to prohibit offshore internet gambling . In
2003, the small country of Antigua and Barbuda ("Antigua") brought a claim at
the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the United States.' Antigua argued
that the U.S. prohibition of offshore internet gambling violated
commitments the U.S. had made under the General Agreement on Trade in Services
(GATS). 2 The Panel agreed with Antigua that U.S. federal laws
governing internet gambling are inconsistent with U.S. commitments
and are not justified by public morals. 3 The WTO panel's decision was a victory for
Antigua, the smallest nation ever to bring a WTO complaint against the U.S.4 The WTO Appellate
Body, however, significantly reversed the Panel's findings, holding
that the U.S. could justify the prohibition under public policy,
except with regard to horseracing . 5 Despite the WTO's decision that
the U.S. modify its interstate horseracing laws, 6 the U.S. failed to
comply with the recommendation in 2006. 7 Instead, President George W. Bush
signed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006
(UIGEA), which prohibits remote internet gambling , except on horseracing, by
requiring (1) financial institutions to identify and block illegal internet gambling transactions; and (2)

The
recently enacted UIGEA violates WTO law, in particular as analyzed
against the backdrop of the WTO Appellate Body's decision in United
States-Measures Affecting the Cross-border Supply of Gambling and
Betting Services (the Antigua case). To comply with WTO law, the U.S.
gambling businesses to stop payments through credit card, "electronic fund transfer," or check. 8

should (1) clarify that the UIGEA applies to horseracing ; (2) amend the
Interstate Horseracing Act of 1978 so that it prohibits remote
internet gambling; and (3) adjust the UIGEA to fit within GATS article
XIV's "public morals" exception.

K
Gambling is meaningless consumption creates access to
global capital markets
Reith 13 (Gerda, Professor at U. of Georgia, Techno economic systems and excessive consumption:
a political economy of pathological gambling)

gambling is a paradigmatic form of consumption that

captures the intensified logic at the heart of late modern capitalist
societies. As well as a site of intensified consumption, it claims that gambling has also become the location of what has been
This article argues that

described as a new form of social pathology related to excess play. Drawing on Castells (1996) notion of techno-economic systems, it

intersections between technology, capital and states

have generated the conditions for this situation, and critiques the unequal distribution of
explores the ways that

gambling environments that result. It argues that, while the products of these systems are consumed on a global scale, the risks associated
with them tend to be articulated in bio-psychological discourses of pathology which are typical of certain types of knowledge that have
salience in neo-liberal societies, and which work to conceal wider structural relationships. We argue that a deeper understanding of the
political and cultural economy of gambling environments is necessary, and provide a synoptic overview of the conditions upon which gambling
expansion is based. This perspective highlights parallels with the wider global economy of finance capital, as well as the significance of
intensified consumption, of which gambling is an exemplary instance. It also reveals the existence of a geo-political dispersal of harms,
conceived as deteriorations of financial, temporal and social relationships, which disproportionately affect vulner able social groups. From this,
we urge an understanding of commercial gambling based on a critique of the wider social body of gambling environments within techno

No society has ever been quite

so addictive as . . . [America], which did not invent gambling, to be sure, but which did invent compulsive
consumption Fredric Jameson 2004: 52 As Jameson has noted in his essay on The Politics of Utopia (2004). gambling is a
type of consumption that is aligned with compulsion. It is also a
phenom- enon which is illustrative of wider trends in capitalist
modernity: he goes on. late capitalism has at least brought the
epistemological benefit of revealing the ultimate structure of the
commodity to be addiction itself (or. if you prefer. has produced the very concept of addiction in all its
economic systems, rather than the (flawed) individual bodies within them.

metaphysical richness)` (2()04: 52). However. despite its centrality as a key form of cultural and economic production, gambling has been
under-theorized in the sociological literature. We hope to go some way to addressing this lacunae in an argument that explores the cultural.
political and economic conditions upon which its expan- sion is based. To begin. we note the recency and intensity of the development of
commercial gambling itself, which was transformed between the 1980s and 2000s when the governments of North America, Australasia and
Europe liberalised previously strict regulatory regimes. At the same time, they pursued a set of policies that deregulated financial markets and
allowed an expansion of cheap credit, creating the conditions for the growth of a massive global industry. formational capitalism: a period of
capitalist restructuring in which deregulation, privatization and the dismantling of the social contract between labour and capital worked to

The technological innovations of

micro-electronics, computers and telecommunications that were
crucial to these developments ultimately created a new techno
economic system which was informational, global and networked (1996: 77).
The emergence of a modern gambling industry can be seen as a microcosm of these developments. Within it, capitalist
restructuring and technological innovations particularly with respect to information and
communication technologies revolutionized the ways that games of chance could
be played and marketed, and, by extension, the ways that they could be
experienced by millions of consumers around the globe . As a consequence,
commercial gam- bling has today become a site of intensified
consumption. Alongside this, however, it has also become the site of what has been described as a new social pathology. New
maximize profits and globalize production, circulation and markets

forms of knowledge based on biomedicine and the psy sciences (Rose 1999) have brought into being new types of subject and, along with
other twentyfirst century forms of excess consumption, such as binge drinking (Nicholls 2006) and obesity (Campos 2004), we now have a
population (or, more accurately, segments of populations) classified as pathological or compulsive gamblers.

Neoliberalism is epistemologically bankrupt wrecks

equality and the environment
Holleman 12 assistant professor of sociology at Amherst, PhD in
sociology from the University of Oregon (Hannah, June, sociology dissertation,
University of Oregon, Energy justice and foundations for a sustainable
sociology of energy,

https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/12419/Hollem
an_oregon_0171A_10410.pdf?sequence=1)
under this system, when there is an
environmental catastrophe, like the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, or the current BP oil spill in the Gulf,
companies make an enormous profit cleaning up, or at least professing to do so. GDP
goes up. If someone is sick, if they die a long, drawn-out death from cancer, there is profit to be made. There is no
money to be made in human and ecological health and well-being . If
As Marilyn Waring noted twenty years ago,

communities grow their own food, the global food market significantly decreases; if people walk rather than drive, the oil and car companies
dont make money. If education is free, who benefits? Maybe most people, and the society at large, maybe even the environment, but not

it is much more economically efficient to let the

market shape education. Today students take out larger and larger loans to buy more expensive books, to get less
necessarily the shareholders. Therefore,

education engendered by fewer teachers. This is capitalist efficiency. The surplus is efficiently transferred from one segment of the population

The same goes for letting the market shape energy

policy. Those arguing today for market intervention in the climate crisis often
fail to mention that it is absolutely already the market shaping
energy policy. This is precisely the problem. It is very efficient for the
market to extract oil at bargain prices from countries without
militaries to stop them. It is very efficient, in terms of profit, to have the most
vulnerable in society pay the costs of energy production, and to keep polluting, all
the while terrifying people that new energy developments might be their
only chance of economic survival. Nevermind where the real money goes and what
happens with the boom goes bust. The current version of capitalist
ideology, which absorbs energy scholars (and even environmental socialists) often
unwittingly, was consciously shaped to co-opt the language of social
movements seeking freedom from the yolk of capitalism and imperialism. It is no surprise that the
market would co-opt green rhetoric today. Economists having the greatest ideological influence
on political debates and social science today, the architects of neoliberal ideology, have
sought to re-write the history of capitalist development as the
constitution of liberty, and the basis of free society (Hayek 1960; Friedman 1962; Van Horn, Mirowski, and Stapleford,
eds. 2011). There can be no acknowledgement of slavery, racism, sexism,
or ecological destruction among other issues, because all of these undermine the basic
thesis neoliberal writers actively promote as political ideology. To make their argument, these writers must
to another, those at the top.

present capitalism as raising all boats, color-blind, gender-neutral, and free of class coercion, the globalization of which results in a flat,

these ideas dominate the political

sphere, and contemporary notions of organizational, community, and national development. In academia, many
theorists celebrate the alleged leveling of social differences owing to
globalization (Pellow 2007, 41). The blinders imposed by this view continue to infect
energy studies despite the work of critical energy scholars.
Spreading capitalism thus becomes the solution for poverty associated with
inequalities caused by oppression based on race, class, gender, and position in the world system, as well as the solution to
environmental and energy crises. This is the basic modernization thesis. The Ecological Modernization
happy world, even if it is hot (Friedman 2005, 2008). Unfortunately,

Reader (Mol, Sonnenfeld, and Spaargaren 2009) presents these systematized views regarding the environmental crisis, which are increasingly

Foster (2012) have pointed out the

empirical, theoretical, and philosophical roots of, and problems
associated with this perspective as a basis for understanding
ecological and social crises and solutions. But, we can expect this view to
persist as long as social relations remain intact because the logic of modernization is
influential in environmental sociology. York and Rosa (2003) and

seductive precisely because it is the logic of capitalism (Foster 1999b, 2002, 2009, 2012). The processes of capitalism, including its ideological
developments, are the background conditions in which those integrated into the market economy live, as fish swim in water, they are the
social gravity we might naturally feel is right, but dont necessarily see, as much a part of our lives as the air we breathe (York and Clark

critical theorists and

activists have sought to expose the mythological basis of
neoliberalism and transcend the system. The work of environmental justice scholars, feminist
2006). In contrast to the modernization thesis, environmental justice scholars, among other

represent powerful critiques of

the modernization thesis. Taken together with the insights in existing critical work on energy, they
ecologists, and ecological rift theorists, marshaling the empirical evidence,

provide an alternative approach to energy that belies the notion

that there is no alternative. They share a common commitment, as
social scientists and activists, to reality. Part of this reality is that actual class and racial
inequalities around the global and between North and South have only worsened in the
past half-centurythe same period during which the late modern state of
capitalism took hold (Pellow 2007, 41). Despite views that we live in a post-racial society, (or one where men are
finished and women are taking over [Sohn 2011]), in fact economic globalization has seriously
undermined the gains of the civil rights and labor movement and the
general antiracist struggle in the United States and undercut the global
benefits of the anticolonial struggles occurring throughout the global
South (Pellow 2007, 43). Moreover, economic globalization and the intensified spread of
ecological destruction are intimately linked because the TNCs
[transnational corporations] themselves were the ones creating and pushing both
globalization and toxins on the world markets, facilitating greater
control over nations, communities, human bodies, and the natural world itself(43). Today,
neoliberal mythology has severely hindered the development of a
wider environmental justice consciousness in the broader public, and amongst
activists and academics. In energy studies this view is especially pronounced
in the focus on technology, carbon markets, voluntary certification schemes, and
alternative energies that basically allow business to continue as
usual

(Foster 2002, 9-25; Rogers 2010; Holleman 2012). The

critical literature emerging from what I call an energy

justice perspective in ecological rift theory, systems ecology, feminist and critical human ecology, and environmental justice scholarship

has drawn out the social and ecological crises of the current energy
regime. This is in contrast to too many well-intentioned scholars and activists who buy into the main tenets of the modernization thesis,
and thus are reluctant to break with capitalism as a system, or worse, they promote it, ignoring or ignorant of the enormous costs. This has led
to the view that our task as environmentalists is getting economics to internalize the externalities, to bring under the pricing system the

For energy this means carbon markets and

trade in other forms of pollution and raising energy prices . While it is clear that
work of natural systems and human services (labor).

as long as we have this system, goals should include wealth redistribution and businesses shouldering the costs of their polluting practices,

The logic of the market is

clear. An energy justice movement, with the intention of healing the
ecological rift and transcending social injustice, on the other hand has as its
base the goal of externalizing the internalities . This is an
long-term, internalizing more of the world in the market system is a total death strategy.

ecological and social imperative.

Understanding the nature of the current system, Daniel Yergins worse-

If the
point is accumulation, sources of profit must be found at every turn
and crises represent especially ripe opportunities (Klein 2007). The problem
today is not capitalisms lack of response to the climate crisis, capital was never developed as a system geared toward ecological
reproduction or meeting human needs. It is a system geared toward profit at all cost and
can have no rational response. The problem is that capitalism organizes so
many of our productive activities in the first place. The sooner this is
than-nothing approach to energy is the logical response of capital. Carbon markets and the new biotech boom also make sense.

recognized, the sooner we can start thinking of real alternatives,

and understand ourselves as subjects, not merely objects of the
system, as protagonists of our own future . We can move beyond
playing the passive consumers of the next product capitalism has on
offer, green or otherwise, packaged as a solution to energy crises . Examples like the carbon market

theres no way we can

just subcontract our environmental conscience to the new breed of
green marketers (McKibben 2010). Energy and social inequality, the challenges of our generation The social
and ecological costs of our energy regime today are clear, though the
ways these are both the result of and exacerbate social inequality and
oppression are often misunderstood or ignored. While the future is unwritten, projections, if
business continues as usual, indicate environmental and social
catastrophe with much of the damage irreversible . Without
significant social change, we should prepare for, among other depredations,
increased warfare to secure energy resources to meet increased
schemes, or Daniel Yergins view of what constitutes energy revolution, make clear that

demand . The most recent British Ministry of Defence Strategic Trends report suggests that nations will
increasingly use energy security to challenge conventional
interpretations on the legality of the use of force (108).
Environmentally and socially destructive energy sectors are
projected to grow the next thirty years, such as nuclear energy and biofuel, while expected fossil fuel
demand also goes only one way, up: Global Energy use has approximately doubled over the last 30 years and, by 2040, demand is likely to

demand is likely to remain

positively correlated to economic growth with fossil fuels, meeting more than 80% of this increase.
grow by more than half again. Despite concerns over climate change,

Urban areas will be responsible for over 75% of total demand. (Strategic Trends, 106) Even a U.S. government official has recognized publicly

our patterns of energy use create geopolitical instability . The

ways we use energy are disrupting the climate system and threaten
terrifying disruptions in decades to come (Sandalow 2009). These realities only partially illustrate
that

energys extensive contribution to what K. William Kapp (1950) referred to as capitalisms systemic unpaid costs. As Anderson (1976) put it:

the growth society operates as if it had tunnel vision and

nearsightedness; the accumulation of capital is pursued without
regard for the side-effects or for longrange consequences , leaving to

nature and the larger community these uncalculated costs (140). Prefiguring
contemporary discussions and movement framing, Anderson referred to these accumulated
unpaid costs, or externalities as the ecological debt, the result of the exploitation of
both nature and humans for the sake of economic growth at all costs
(142-43), undermining the natural and social conditions of production. As
indicated previously, with energy demand expected only to increase as the
economy expands, the unpaid costs associated with its extraction
and use will continue to accumulate, but on a scale heretofore unseen .
The science is clear that if we do not severely curtail energy use, we
will cross critical thresholds in the biospheres ability to recycle
waste and regulate the earths temperature. The consequences of
crossing such planetary boundaries will be irreversible (Hansen 2009; Solomon, et
al. 2009; Cullen 2010; Foster 2011). This is a new juncture in humanitys relation to the rest of nature. However, the costs of
climate change, among other environmental crises generated by energy production and
use, which is driven largely by economic growth , already are visited upon communities and other social
groups in a dramatically unequal waythis we may understand as a defining feature of
energy injustice. This social inequality, indeed, is a necessary feature of
capitalism, making human exploitation and the assault on the
environment possible, and energy injustice inevitable in the current system:
Environmental deterioration will continue so long as there is a class
system, since the profits of environmental neglect accrue primarily to one class whereas the costs are borne primarily by another
(Anderson 1976, 139). Scholars studying the ecological and social rift of capitalism, including
those working on environmental racism and feminist ecology, have expanded the understanding of

how these processes are gendered and racialized. Work on unequal ecological exchange
amply has demonstrated that inequality between nations and regions also increases
the burdens of environmental injustice. Studies from all of these perspectives have
drawn out inequalities embedded in our current patterns of energy
decision-making, extraction, use, and waste disposal, documenting energy injustice through various theoretical lenses.

Alternative reject the affs neoliberal policy proposal

establishing pedagogies in this debate space is the only
way to reclaim critical education.
Giroux 12 (Henry A. Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English and

Cultural Studies at McMaster University, 19 June 2012, Beyond the Politics of

the Big Lie: The Education Deficit and the New Authoritarianism, http://truthout.org/opinion/item/9865-beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-educationdeficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism)
The democratic deficit is not, as many commentators have argued, reducible to the growing (and unparalleled) inequality gap in the United States, the pervasiveness of
lending fraud, favorable tax treatment for the wealthy, or the lack of adequate regulation of the financial sector. These are important issues, but they are more

The democratic deficit is

closely related, however, to an unprecedented deficit in critical education .
The power of finance capital in recent years has not only targeted
the realm of official politics, but also directed its attention toward a
range of educational apparatuses - really, a vast and complex ideological
ecosystem that reproduces itself through nuance, distraction, innuendo, myths, lies and
misrepresentations. This media ecosystem not only changes our sense of time, space and information; it also redefines
the very meaning of the social and this is far from a democratic
process, especially as the architecture of the Internet and other media platforms are largely in the hands of private interests.(13) The educational pipelines for
symptomatic than causal in relation to the democratic decline and rise of an uncivil culture in America.

corporate messages and ideology are everywhere and have for the last twenty-five years successfully drowned out any serious criticism and challenge to market

The current corrupt and dysfunctional state of American

politics is about a growing authoritarianism tied to economic, political and cultural formations that
have hijacked democracy and put structural and ideological forces in place that
constitute a new regime of politics , not simply a series of bad policies. The solution in this case
does not lie in promoting piecemeal reforms, such as a greater redistribution of wealth and income, but in
dismantling all the institutional, ideological and social formations
that make gratuitous inequality and other antidemocratic forces
possible at all. Even the concept of reform has been stripped of its
democratic possibilities and has become a euphemism to "cover up the
harsh realities of draconian cutbacks in wages, salaries, pensions and public welfare and the sharp increases in regressive taxes."(14) Instead of
reversing progressive changes made by workers, women, young people, and others, the American public needs a new
understanding of what it would mean to advance the ideological and
material relations of a real democracy, while removing American society from the grip of "an authoritarian political
culture."(15) This will require new conceptions of politics , social responsibility, power, civic courage, civil
society and democracy itself. If we do not safeguard the remaining public spaces that
provide individuals and social movements with new ways to think about
and participate in politics, then authoritarianism will solidify its hold on the
fundamentalism.

American public. In doing so, it will create a culture that criminalizes dissent, and those who suffer under antidemocratic ideologies and policies will be both blamed for the
current economic crisis and punished by ruling elites. What is crucial to grasp at the current historical moment is that the fate of democracy is inextricably linked to a
profound crisis of contemporary knowledge, characterized by its increasing commodification, fragmentation, privatization and a turn toward racist and jingoistic conceits.

As knowledge becomes abstracted from the rigors of civic culture and is reduced to
questions of style, ritual and image, it undermines the political, ethical
and governing conditions for individuals to construct those viable public
spheres necessary for debate , collective action and solving urgent

social problems. As public spheres are privatized, commodified and turned

over to the crushing forces of turbo capitalism, the opportunities for
openness, inclusiveness and dialogue that nurture the very idea and
possibility of a discourse about democracy cease to exist. The lesson to be learned in
this instance is that political agency involves learning how to deliberate, make judgments and exercise choices, particularly as the latter are brought to bear on critical
activities that offer the possibility of change. Civic education as it is experienced and produced throughout an ever-diminishing number of institutions provides individuals

it is
critical education that has been under

with opportunities to see themselves as capable of doing more than the existing configurations of power of any given society would wish to admit. And

precisely this notion of civic agency and

aggressive assault within the new and harsh corporate order of casino capitalism. Anti-Public Intellectuals and the Conservative Re-Education
Machine The conservative takeover of public pedagogy with its elite
codifiers of neoliberal ideology has a long history extending from the work of the "Chicago Boys" at the University of Chicago
to the various conservative think tanks that emerged after the publication of the Powell memo in the early seventies.(16) The Republican Party will more than likely
win the next election and take full control over all aspects of policymaking in the
U nited S tates. This is especially dangerous given that the Republican Party is now controlled by extremists. If they win the 2012 election, they will not only extend the
Bush/Obama legacy of militarism abroad, but likely intensify the war at home as well. Political scientist Frances Fox Piven rightly argues that, "We've been at war for
decades now - not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it's been a war [a]gainst the poor [and as] devastating as it has been, the war against

the war at home now includes more than

attacks on the poor, as campaigns are increasingly waged against the
rights of women, students, workers, people of color and immigrants ,
the poor has gone largely unnoticed until now."(17) And

especially Latino Americans. As the social state collapses, the punishing state expands its power and targets larger portions of the population. The war in Afghanistan is
now mimicked in the war waged on peaceful student protesters at home. It is evident in the environmental racism that produces massive health problems for AfricanAmericans. The domestic war is even waged on elementary school children, who now live in fear of the police handcuffing them in their classrooms and incarcerating them
as if they were adult criminals.(18) It is waged on workers by taking away their pensions, bargaining rights and dignity. The spirit of militarism is also evident in the war
waged on the welfare state and any form of social protection that benefits the poor, disabled, sick, elderly, and other groups now considered disposable, including children.
The soft side of authoritarianism in the United States does not need to put soldiers in the streets, though it certainly follows that script. As it expands its control over the
commanding institutions of government, the armed forces and civil society in general, it hires anti-public intellectuals and academics to provide ideological support for its
gated communities, institutions and modes of education. As Yasha Levine points out, it puts thousands of dollars in the hands of corporate shills such as Malcolm Gladwell,
who has become a "one man branding and distribution pipeline for valuable corporate messages, constructed on the public's gullibility in trusting his probity and
intellectual honesty."(19) Gladwell (who is certainly not alone) functions as a bought-and-paid mouthpiece for "Big Tobacco Pharma and defend[s] Enron-style financial
fraud ... earning hundreds of thousands of dollars as a corporate speaker, sometimes from the same companies and industries that he covers as a journalist."(20)
Corporate power uses these "pay to play" academics, anti-public intellectuals, the mainstream media, and other educational apparatuses to discredit the very people that
it simultaneously oppresses, while waging an overarching war on all things public. As Charles Ferguson has noted, an entire industry has been created that enables the
"sale of academic expertise for the purpose of influencing government policy, the courts and public opinion [and] is now a multibillion-dollar business."(21) It gets worse, in
that "Academic, legal, regulatory and policy consulting in economics, finance and regulation is dominated by a half dozen consulting firms, several speakers' bureaus and
various industry lobbying groups that maintain large networks of academics for hire specifically for the purpose of advocating industry interests in policy and regulatory
debates."(22) Such anti-public intellectuals create what William Black has called a "criminogenic environment" that spreads disease and fraud in the interest of bolstering
the interests, profits and values of the super wealthy.(23) There is more at work here than carpet bombing the culture with lies, deceptions and euphemisms. Language in
this case does more than obfuscate or promote propaganda. It creates framing mechanisms, cultural ecosystems and cultures of cruelty, while closing down the spaces for
dialogue, critique and thoughtfulness. At its worst, it engages in the dual processes of demonization and distraction. The rhetoric of demonization takes many forms: for
example, calling firefighters, teachers, and other public servants greedy because they want to hold onto their paltry benefits. It labels students as irresponsible because of
the large debts they are forced to incur as states cut back funding to higher education (this, too, is part of a broader effort by conservatives to hollow out the social state).
Poor people are insulted and humiliated because they are forced to live on food stamps, lack decent health care and collect unemployment benefits because there are no
decent jobs available. Poor minorities are now subject to overt racism in the right-wing media and outright violence in the larger society. Anti-public intellectuals rail
against public goods and public values; they undermine collective bonds and view social responsibility as a pathology, while touting the virtues of a survival-of-the-fittest
notion of individual responsibility. Fox News and its embarrassingly blowhard pundits tell the American people that Gov. Scott Walker's victory over Tom Barrett in the
Wisconsin recall election was a fatal blow against unions, while in reality "his win signals less a loss for the unions than a loss for our democracy in this post-Citizens United
era, when elections can be bought with the help of a few billionaires."(24) How else to explain that Tea Party favorite Walker raised over $30.5 million during the election more than seven times Barrett's reported $3.9 million - largely from 13 out-of-state billionaires?(25) This was corporate money enlisted for use in a pedagogical blitz
designed to carpet bomb voters with the rhetoric of distraction and incivility. The same pundits who rail against the country's economic deficit fail to connect it to the
generous tax cuts they espouse for corporations and the financial institutions and services that take financial risks, which sometimes generate capital, but more often
produce debts and instability that only serve to deepen the national economic crisis. Nor do they connect the US recession and global economic crisis to the criminal
activities enabled by an unregulated financial system marked by massive lending fraud, high risk speculation, a corrupt credit system and pervasive moral and economic
dishonesty. The spokespersons for the ultrarich publish books arguing that we need even more inequality because it benefits not only the wealthy, but everyone else.(26)
This is a form of authoritarian delusion that appears to meet the clinical threshold for being labeled psychopathic given its proponents' extreme investment in being
"indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests."(27) Nothing is said in this pro-market narrative about the massive human suffering
caused by a growing inequality in which society's resources are squandered at the top, while salaries for the middle and working classes stagnate, consumption dries up,
social costs are ignored, young people are locked out of jobs and any possibility of social mobility and the state reconfigures its power to punish rather than protect the
vast majority of its citizens. The moral coma that appears characteristic of the elite who inhabit the new corporate ethic of casino capitalism has attracted the attention of
scientists, whose studies recently reported that "members of the upper class are more likely to behave unethically, to lie during negotiations, to drive illegally and to cheat
when competing for a prize."(28) But there is more at stake here than the psychological state of those who inhabit the boardrooms of Wall Street. We must also consider
the catastrophic effects produced by their values and policies. In fact, Stiglitz has argued that, "Most Americans today are worse off than they were fifteen years ago. A fulltime worker in the US is worse off today then he or she was 44 years ago. That is astounding - half a century of stagnation. The economic system is not delivering. It does
not matter whether a few people at the top benefitted tremendously - when the majority of citizens are not better off, the economic system is not working."(29) The
economic system may not be working, but the ideological rationales used to justify its current course appear immensely successful, managing as they do to portray a
casino capitalism that transforms democracy into its opposite - a form of authoritarianism with a soft edge - as utterly benign, if not also beneficial, to society at large.
Democratic Decline and the Politics of Distraction Democracy withers, public spheres disappear and the forces of authoritarianism grow when a family, such as the Waltons
of Walmart fame, is allowed "to amass a combined wealth of some $90 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of US society."(30) Such
enormous amounts of wealth translate into equally vast amounts of power, as is evident in the current attempts of a few billionaires to literally buy local, state and federal
elections. Moreover, a concentration of wealth deepens the economic divide among classes, rendering more and more individuals incapable of the most basic opportunities
to move out of poverty and despair. This is especially true in light of a recent survey indicating that, "Nearly half of all Americans lack economic security, meaning they live
above the federal poverty threshold but still do hot have enough money to cover housing, food, healthcare and other basic expenses.... 45 percent of US residents live in
households that struggle to make ends meet. That breaks down to 39 percent of all adults and 55 percent of all children."(31) The consequential impacts on civic
engagement are more difficult to enumerate, but it does not require much imagination to think about how democracy might flourish if access to health care, education,
employment, and other public benefits was ensured equally throughout a society and not restricted to the rich and wealthy alone. And yet, as power and wealth accrue to
the upper 1 percent, the American public is constantly told that the poor, the unions, feminists, critical intellectuals and public servants are waging class warfare to the
detriment of civility and democracy. The late Tony Judt stated that he was less concerned about the slide of American democracy into something like authoritarianism than
American society moving toward something he viewed as even more corrosive: "a loss of conviction, a loss of faith in the culture of democracy, a sense of skepticism and
withdrawal" that diminishes the capacity of a democratic formative culture to resist and transform those antidemocratic ideologies that benefit only the mega corporations,
the ultrawealthy and ideological fundamentalists.(32) Governance has turned into a legitimation for enriching the already wealthy elite, bankers, hedge fund managers,
mega corporations and executive members of the financial service industries. Americans now live in a society in which only the thinnest conception of democracy frames
what it means to be a citizen - one which equates the obligations of citizenship with consumerism and democratic rights with alleged consumer freedoms. Antidemocratic
forms of power do not stand alone as a mode of force or the force of acting on others; they are also deeply aligned with cultural apparatuses of persuasion, extending their
reach through social and digital media, sophisticated technologies, the rise of corporate intellectuals and a university system that now produces and sanctions intellectuals
aligned with private interests - all of which, as Randy Martin points out, can be identified with a form of casino capitalism that is about "permanent vigilance, activity and
intervention."(33) Indeed, many institutions that provide formal education in the United States have become co-conspirators with a savage casino capitalism, whose
strength lies in producing, circulating and legitimating market values that promote the narrow world of commodity worship, celebrity culture, bare-knuckle competition, a
retreat from social responsibility and a war-of-all-against-all mentality that destroys any viable notion of community, the common good and the interrelated notions of
political, social and economic rights. University presidents now make huge salaries sitting on corporate boards, while faculty sell their knowledge to the highest corporate
bidder and, in doing so, turn universities into legitimation centers for casino capitalism.(34) Of course, such academics also move from the boardrooms of major
corporations to talk shows and op-ed pages of major newspapers, offering commentary in journals and other modes of print and screen culture. They are the new traveling
intellectuals of casino capitalism, doing everything they can to make the ruthless workings of power invisible, to shift the blame for society's failures onto the very people
who are its victims and to expand the institutions and culture of anti-intellectualism and distraction into every aspect of American life. Across all levels, politics in the

United States now suffers from an education deficit that enables a pedagogy of distraction to dictate with little accountability how crucial social problems and issues are
named, discussed and acted upon. The conservative re-education machine appears shameless in its production of lies that include insane assertions such as: Obama's
health care legislation would create death panels; liberals are waging a war on Christmas; Obama is a socialist trying to nationalize industries; the founding fathers tried to
end slavery; and Obama is a Muslim sympathizer and not a US citizen. Other misrepresentations and distortions include: the denial of global warming; the government
cannot create jobs; cuts in wages and benefits create jobs; Obama has created massive deficits; Obama wants to raise the taxes of working- and middle-class people;
Obama is constantly "apologizing" for America; and the assertion that Darwinian evolution is a myth.(35) Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney continues
spinning this spider web of lies unapologetically, even when members of his own party point out the inconsistencies in his claims. For instance, he has claimed that,
"Obamacare increases the deficit,"(36) argued that Obama has "increased the national debt more than all other presidents combined" and insisted that Obama has lied
about "his record on gay rights." He has falsely claimed that, "Obama promised unemployment below eight percent,"(37) dodged the truth regarding "his position on
climate change" and blatantly misrepresented the truth in stating that, "he pays a 50% tax rate."(38) Diane Ravitch has recently pointed out that in making a case for
vouchers, Romney has made false claims about the success of the DC voucher program.(39) The politics of distraction should not be reduced merely to a rhetorical ploy
used by the wealthy and influential to promote their own interests and power. It is a form of market-driven politics in which educational force of the broader culture is used
to create ideologies, policies, individuals and social agents who lack the knowledge, critical skills and discriminatory judgments to question the rule of casino capitalism

Politics and education have always

mutually informed each other as pedagogical sites proliferate and
circulate throughout the cultural landscape.(40) But today, distraction is the primary element being used
and the values, social practices and power formations it legitimates.

to suppress democratically purposeful education by pushing critical thought to the margins of society. As a register of power, distraction becomes central to a pedagogical
landscape inhabited by rich conservative foundations, an army of well-funded anti-public intellectuals from both major parties, a growing number of amply funded
conservative campus organizations, increasing numbers of academics who hock their services to corporations and the military-industrial complex, and others who promote
the ideology of casino capitalism and the corporate right's agenda. Academics who make a claim to producing knowledge and truth in the public interest are increasingly
being replaced by academics for hire who move effortlessly among industry, government and academia. Extreme power is now showcased through the mechanisms of
ever-proliferating cultural/educational apparatuses and the anti-public intellectuals who support them and are in turn rewarded by the elites who finance such apparatuses.
The war at home is made visible in the show of force aimed at civilian populations, including students, workers, and others considered disposable or a threat to the new
authoritarianism. Its most powerful allies appear to be the intellectuals, institutions, cultural apparatuses and new media technologies that constitute the sites of public

While a change in consciousness

does not guarantee a change in either one's politics or society , it is
pedagogy, which produce the formative culture necessary for authoritarianism to thrive.

a crucial precondition for connecting what it means to think

otherwise to conditions that make it possible to act otherwise . The
education deficit must be seen as intertwined with a political deficit , serving to make
many oppressed individuals complicit with oppressive ideologies. As the late Cornelius Castoriadis made clear, democracy requires
"critical thinkers capable of putting existing institutions into
question.... while simultaneously creating the conditions for individual and social autonomy."(41) Nothing will change
politically or economically until new and emerging social movements take
seriously the need to develop a language of radical reform and create new public spheres that
support the knowledge, skills and critical thought that are necessary features of a democratic formative culture. Getting beyond the big lie as a precondition for critical
thought, civic engagement and a more realized democracy will mean more than correcting distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods produced by politicians, media

It will also require addressing how new sites of

pedagogy have become central to any viable notion of agency , politics and
talking heads and anti-public intellectuals.

democracy itself. This is not a matter of elevating cultural politics over material relations of power as much as it is a rethinking of how power deploys culture and how
culture as a mode of education positions power. James Baldwin, the legendary African-American writer and civil rights activist, argued that the big lie points to a crisis of
American identity and politics and is symptomatic of "a backward society" that has descended into madness, "especially when one is forced to lie about one's aspect of
anybody's history, [because you then] must lie about it all."(42) He goes on to argue "that one of the paradoxes of education [is] that precisely at the point when you begin
to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person."(43)
What Baldwin recognizes is that learning has the possibility to trigger a critical engagement with oneself, others and the larger society - education becomes in this instance
more than a method or tool for domination but a politics, a fulcrum for democratic social change. Tragically, in our current climate "learning" merely contributes to a vast
reserve of manipulation and self-inflicted ignorance. Our education deficit is neither reducible to the failure of particular types of teaching nor the decent into madness by

it is about how matters of knowledge, values

and ideology can be struggled over as issues of power and politics .
Surviving the current education deficit will depend on progressives
using history, memory and knowledge not only to reconnect intellectuals to the everyday needs of ordinary people,
but also to jumpstart social movements by making education central to
organized politics and the quest for a radical democracy.
the spokespersons for the new authoritarianism. Rather,

Internet
Growth is unsustainable complexity theory and law of
diminishing returns means growth has reached maximum
efficiency and will inevitably collapse
MacKenzie 8 (Debora, science journalist New Scientist, Why the
demise of civilisation may be inevitable, New Scientist, Vol. 197 Issue 2650,
p32-35, 4-2, http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?
linkid=97741)

DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which
ravage the planet, leaving a few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every
civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different? Doomsday scenarios
typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic (see
"Will a pandemic bring down civilisation?"). Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature
of civilisation means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later? A few
researchers have been making such claims for years. Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as

once a society develops

beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile .
Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor
disturbance can bring everything crashing down . Some say we have already
reached this point , and that it is time to start thinking about how we
might manage collapse. Others insist it is not yet too late, and that we can - we must - act
complexity theory suggest that they are right. It appears that

now to keep disaster at bay. Environmental mismanagement History is not on our side. Think of Sumeria,
of ancient Egypt and of the Maya. In his 2005 best-seller Collapse, Jared Diamond of the University of
California, Los Angeles, blamed environmental mismanagement for the fall of the Mayan civilisation and
others, and warned that we might be heading the same way unless we choose to stop destroying our
environmental support systems. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC agrees. He
has long argued that governments must pay more attention to vital environmental resources. "It's not
about saving the planet. It's about saving civilisation," he says. Others think our problems run deeper.
>From the moment our ancestors started to settle down and build cities, we have had to find solutions to
the problems that success brings. "For the past 10,000 years, problem solving has produced increasing
complexity in human societies," says Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist at Utah State University, Logan, and
author of the 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies. If crops fail because rain is patchy, build
irrigation canals. When they silt up, organise dredging crews. When the bigger crop yields lead to a bigger
population, build more canals. When there are too many for ad hoc repairs, install a management
bureaucracy, and tax people to pay for it. When they complain, invent tax inspectors and a system to
record the sums paid. That much the Sumerians knew. Diminishing returns There is, however, a price to

Every extra layer of organisation imposes a cost in terms of

energy, the common currency of all human efforts, from building canals to educating scribes. And
increasing complexity, Tainter realised, produces diminishing returns . The
be paid.

extra food produced by each extra hour of labour - or joule of energy invested per farmed hectare -

We see the same thing today in a declining

number of patents per dollar invested in research as that research investment
mounts. This law of diminishing returns appears everywhere, Tainter says. To keep growing,
societies must keep solving problems as they arise. Yet each problem
solved means more complexity. Success generates a larger
population, more kinds of specialists, more resources to manage,
more information to juggle - and, ultimately, less bang for your buck.
Eventually, says Tainter, the point is reached when all the energy and resources
available to a society are required just to maintain its existing level
of complexity. Then when the climate changes or barbarians invade, overstretched institutions
diminishes as that investment mounts.

break down and civil order collapses. What emerges is a less complex society, which is organised on a
smaller scale or has been taken over by another group.

Tainter sees diminishing returns

as the underlying reason for the collapse of all ancient civilisations,

from the early Chinese dynasties to the Greek city state of Mycenae .
These civilisations relied on the solar energy that could be harvested from food, fodder and wood, and
from wind. When this had been stretched to its limit, things fell apart. An ineluctable process Western
industrial civilisation has become bigger and more complex than any before it by exploiting new sources of

There are increasing signs of

diminishing returns: the energy required to get each new joule of oil
is mounting and although global food production is still increasing, constant innovation
is needed to cope with environmental degradation and evolving pests and
energy, notably coal and oil, but these are limited.

diseases - the yield boosts per unit of investment in innovation are shrinking. "Since problems are
inevitable," Tainter warns, "this process is in part ineluctable." Is Tainter right? An analysis of complex
systems has led Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, to the same conclusion that Tainter reached from studying history. Social organisations
become steadily more complex as they are required to deal both with environmental problems and with
challenges from neighbouring societies that are also becoming more complex, Bar-Yam says. This
eventually leads to a fundamental shift in the way the society is organised. "To run a hierarchy, managers
cannot be less complex than the system they are managing," Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases,
societies add ever more layers of management but, ultimately in a hierarchy, one individual has to try and
get their head around the whole thing, and this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies give
way to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are at this point. This shift to decentralised
networks has led to a widespread belief that modern society is more resilient than the old hierarchical
systems. "I don't foresee a collapse in society because of increased complexity," says futurologist and
industry consultant Ray Hammond. "Our strength is in our highly distributed decision making." This, he
says, makes modern western societies more resilient than those like the old Soviet Union, in which decision
making was centralised. Increasing connectedness Things are not that simple, says Thomas Homer-Dixon,
a political scientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and author of the 2006 book The Upside of Down.
"Initially, increasing connectedness and diversity helps: if one village has a crop failure, it can get food
from another village that didn't." As connections increase, though, networked systems become
increasingly tightly coupled. This means the impacts of failures can propagate: the more closely those two
villages come to depend on each other, the more both will suffer if either has a problem.

"Complexity leads to higher vulnerability in some ways," says Bar-Yam. "This is not
widely understood." The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they
start to transmit shocks rather than absorb them. "The intricate
networks that tightly connect us together - and move people, materials,
information, money and energy - amplify and transmit any shock," says Homer-Dixon.
"A financial crisis, a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak has almost instant destabilising effects, from one
side of the world to the other." For instance, in 2003 large areas of North America and Europe suffered
blackouts when apparently insignificant nodes of their respective electricity grids failed. And this year
China suffered a similar blackout after heavy snow hit power lines. Tightly coupled networks like these
create the potential for propagating failure across many critical industries, says Charles Perrow of Yale
University, a leading authority on industrial accidents and disasters. Credit crunch Perrow says

interconnectedness in the global production system has now

reached the point where "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means
a breakdown everywhere". This is especially true of the world's financial systems, where the
coupling is very tight. "Now we have a debt crisis with the biggest player, the US. The consequences could
be enormous." "A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism," says Bar-Yam, "random
damage is like lopping a chunk off a sheep." Whether or not the sheep survives depends on which chunk is
lost. And while we are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn't clear - it may not even be
predictable - which chunks of our densely networked civilisation are critical, until it's too late. "When we
do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it," says Bar-Yam. "Now that we can ask
questions of such systems in more sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can be very
vulnerable. That means civilisation is very vulnerable." So what can we do? "The key issue is really
whether we respond successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have," Bar-Yam says. That means
making sure our "global sheep" does not get injured in the first place - something that may be hard to
guarantee as the climate shifts and the world's fuel and mineral resources dwindle. Tightly coupled
system Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are prone to collapse. Similar
ideas have emerged from the study of natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz
Holling, now at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Some ecosystems become steadily more complex
over time: as a patch of new forest grows and matures, specialist species may replace more generalist
species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever more
tightly coupled system. "It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in the face of
the normal range of conditions," says Homer-Dixon. But unusual conditions - an insect outbreak, fire or
drought - can trigger dramatic changes as the impact cascades through the system. The end result may be
the collapse of the old ecosystem and its replacement by a newer, simpler one. Globalisation is resulting

in the same tight coupling and fine-tuning of our systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says.
Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as companies maximise profits. Some products are
produced by only one factory worldwide. Financially, it makes sense, as mass production maximises
efficiency. Unfortunately, it also minimises resilience. "We need to be more selective about increasing the
connectivity and speed of our critical systems," says Homer-Dixon. "Sometimes the costs outweigh the
benefits." Is there an alternative? Could we heed these warnings and start carefully climbing back down
the complexity ladder? Tainter knows of only one civilisation that managed to decline but not fall. "After
the Byzantine empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they simplified their entire society. Cities
mostly disappeared, literacy and numeracy declined, their economy became less monetised, and they
switched from professional army to peasant militia." Staving off collapse Pulling off the same trick will be
harder for our more advanced society. Nevertheless, Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action now.
"First, we need to encourage distributed and decentralised production of vital goods like energy and food,"
he says. "Second, we need to remember that slack isn't always waste. A manufacturing company with a
large inventory may lose some money on warehousing, but it can keep running even if its suppliers are
temporarily out of action." The electricity industry in the US has already started identifying hubs in the
grid with no redundancy available and is putting some back in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments
could encourage other sectors to follow suit. The trouble is that in a world of fierce competition, private
companies will always increase efficiency unless governments subsidise inefficiency in the public interest.
Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely. He points to what he calls "tectonic" stresses
that will shove our rigid, tightly coupled system outside the range of conditions it is becoming ever more
finely tuned to. These include population growth, the growing divide between the world's rich and poor,

In
imposing new complex solutions we will run into the problem of
diminishing returns - just as we are running out of cheap and
plentiful energy. "This is the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to
allow for the healthy breakdown in natural function in our societies
in a way that doesn't produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to
healthy renewal," Homer-Dixon says. This is what happens in forests, which are a patchy mix of
financial instability, weapons proliferation, disappearing forests and fisheries, and climate change.

old growth and newer areas created by disease or fire. If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is
recolonised and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow partial breakdown here and there,
followed by renewal, he says, rather than trying so hard to avert breakdown by increasing complexity that

we are fast running

out of time. "The world can no longer afford to waste a day . We need a
any resulting crisis is actually worse. Tipping points Lester Brown thinks

Great Mobilisation, as we had in wartime," he says. "There has been tremendous progress in just the past

But it's
now a race between tipping points - which will come first, a switch to
sustainable technology, or collapse?" Tainter is not convinced that even new
technology will save civilisation in the long run. "I sometimes think of this as a 'faith-based' approach
to the future," he says. Even a society reinvigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually
face the problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be
subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits. Studies of the way cities grow by Luis
few years. For the first time, I am starting to see how an alternative economy might emerge.

Bettencourt of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, support this idea. His team's work
suggests that an ever-faster rate of innovation is required to keep cities growing and prevent stagnation or
collapse, and in the long run this cannot be sustainable.

Transition away from growth is key any delay makes the

inevitable collapse more devastating
Barry 10 (Glen, President and Founder Ecological Internet. Ph.D. in Land
Resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Resisting Global
Ecological Change, 1-5,
http://www.ecoearth.info/blog/2010/01/earth_meanders_resisting_globa.asp)
Shared survival requires powering down, going back to the land, and ecological
resistance. The human family faces imminent and (Copenhagen would suggest) inevitable
collapse of the biosphere the thin layer of life upon an otherwise lifeless planet that

makes Earth habitable. Marshes and rivers and forests and fish are far more than resources they and all
natural ecosystems are a necessity for humanitys existence upon Earth. A few centuries of historically

unprecedented explosion in human numbers and surging, albeit inequitable,

consumption and resultant resource use, ecosystem destruction and

pollution; is needlessly destroying being for all living things. Revolutionary
action such as ending coal use, reforming industrial agriculture and protecting and restoring old forests
and other natural ecosystems, is a requirement for the continuation of shared human being. Earth is
threatened by far more than a changing atmosphere causing climate change. Cumulative ecosystem
destruction not only in climate, but also water, forests, oceans, farmland, soils and toxics -- in the name
of progress and development -- threatens each of us, our families and communities, as well as the
Earth System in total and all her creatures. Any chance of achieving global ecological sustainability
depends urgently upon shifting concerns regarding climate change to more sufficiently transform ourselves

ecological, social and

economic collapse may be inevitable, but its severity , duration and
and society to more broadly resist global ecological change. Global

likelihood of recovery are being determined

by us

now . It does not look good

as the environmental movement has been lacking in its overall vision, ambition and implementation. The
growing numbers of ecologically literate global citizens must come forward to together start considering
ecologically sufficient emergency measures to protect and restore global ecosystems.

We need a

plan that allows humans and as many other species as possible to survive the
coming great ecological collapse, even as we work to soften the
collapse, and to restore to the extent practicable the Earths ecosystems. This

mandates full protection for all remaining large natural ecosystems and working to reconnect and enlarge

It is time for a hard radical turn back

to a fully functioning and restored natural Earth which will require again
biologically rich smaller remnants that still exist.

regaining our bond with land (and air, water and oceans), powering down our energy profligacy, and taking
whatever measures are necessary to once again bring society into balance with ecosystems. This may
mean taking all measures necessary to stop those known to be destroying ecosystems for profit. As
governments dither and the elite profit, it has become dreadfully apparent that the political, economic and
social structures necessary to stop human ecocide of our and all lifes habitats does not yet exist .

The
hyper-capitalistic and nationalistic growth machine eating
ecosystems is not going to willingly stop growing . But unless it does,
human and most or all other life will suffer a slow and excruciating
apocalyptic death. Actions can be taken now to soften ecological
three hundred year old

collapse

while maximizing the likelihood that a humane and ecologically whole Earth remains to be

renewed.

Growth causes warming and extinction

Barry 8 (Dr. Glen, President and Founder Ecological Internet, Economic

Collapse and Global Ecology, 1-14,
http://www.countercurrents.org/barry140108.htm)
Given widespread failure to pursue policies sufficient to reverse deterioration of the biosphere and avoid ecological

the best we can hope for may be that the growth-based

economic system crashes sooner rather than later Humanity and the Earth are
collapse,

faced with an enormous conundrum -- sufficient climate policies enjoy political support only in times of rapid economic
growth. Yet this

growth is the primary factor driving

greenhouse gas

emissions and other environmental ills. The growth machine has

pushed the planet well beyond its ecological carrying capacity, and
unless constrained, can only lead to

human

extinction

and an end to

complex life. With every economic downturn, like the one now looming in the United States, it becomes more difficult and
less likely that policy sufficient to ensure global ecological sustainability will be embraced. This essay explores the
possibility that from a biocentric viewpoint of needs for long-term global ecological, economic and social sustainability; it
would be better for the economic collapse to come now rather than later. Economic growth is a deadly disease upon the
Earth, with capitalism as its most virulent strain. Throw-away consumption and explosive population growth are made
possible by using up fossil fuels and destroying ecosystems. Holiday shopping numbers are covered by media in the same
breath as Arctic ice melt, ignoring their deep connection. Exponential economic growth destroys ecosystems and pushes
the biosphere closer to failure. Humanity has proven itself unwilling and unable to address climate change and other
environmental threats with necessary haste and ambition. Action on coal, forests, population, renewable energy and

emission reductions could be taken now at net benefit to the economy. Yet, the losers -- primarily fossil fuel industries and
their bought oligarchy -- successfully resist futures not dependent upon their deadly products. Perpetual economic
growth, and necessary climate and other ecological policies, are fundamentally incompatible. Global ecological
sustainability depends critically upon establishing a steady state economy, whereby production is right-sized to not
diminish natural capital. Whole industries like coal and natural forest logging will be eliminated even as new opportunities
emerge in solar energy and environmental restoration. This critical transition to both economic and ecological
sustainability is simply not happening on any scale. The challenge is how to carry out necessary environmental policies
even as economic growth ends and consumption plunges. The natural response is going to be liquidation of even more
life-giving ecosystems, and jettisoning of climate policies, to vainly try to maintain high growth and personal consumption.
We know that humanity must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% over coming decades. How will this and
other necessary climate mitigation strategies be maintained during years of economic downturns, resource wars,
reasonable demands for equitable consumption, and frankly, the weather being more pleasant in some places? If efforts
to reduce emissions and move to a steady state economy fail; the collapse of ecological, economic and social systems is
assured. Bright greens take the continued existence of a habitable Earth with viable, sustainable populations of all
species including humans as the ultimate truth and the meaning of life. Whether this is possible in a time of economic
collapse is crucially dependent upon whether enough ecosystems and resources remain post collapse to allow humanity

It may be better for the Earth

and humanity's future that economic collapse comes sooner rather
than later, while more ecosystems and opportunities to return to
nature's fold exist. Economic collapse will be deeply wrenching -- part Great Depression, part African
to recover and reconstitute sustainable, relocalized societies.

famine. There will be starvation and civil strife, and a long period of suffering and turmoil. Many will be killed as balance
returns to the Earth. Most people have forgotten how to grow food and that their identity is more than what they own. Yet
there is some justice, in that those who have lived most lightly upon the land will have an easier time of it, even as those
super-consumers living in massive cities finally learn where their food comes from and that ecology is the meaning of life.

Economic collapse now means humanity and the Earth ultimately

survive to prosper again. Human suffering -- already the norm for many, but hitting the currently

materially affluent -- is inevitable given the degree to which the planet's carrying capacity has been exceeded. We are a
couple decades at most away from societal strife of a much greater magnitude as the Earth's biosphere fails.

Humanity can take the bitter medicine now, and recover

emerging better for it;

while

or our total collapse can be a final,

fatal death swoon. A successful revolutionary response to imminent

global ecosystem collapse would focus upon bringing down the
Earth's industrial economy now . As society continues to fail
miserably to implement necessary changes to allow creation to continue,
maybe the best strategy to achieve global ecological sustainability is
economic sabotage to hasten the day. It is more fragile than it looks. Humanity is a
marvelous creation. Yet her current dilemma is unprecedented. It is not yet known whether she is able to adapt, at some
expense to her comfort and short-term well-being, to ensure survival. If she can, all futures of economic, social and

it is better from a long-term biocentric

viewpoint that the economic growth machine collapse now, bringing
forth the necessary change, and offering hope for a planetary and
human revival. I wish no harm to anyone, and want desperately to avoid these prophesies foretold by
ecological collapse can be avoided. If not

ecological science. I speak for the Earth, for despite being the giver of life, her natural voice remains largely unheard over
the tumult of the end of being.

Economic decline doesnt cause war

Ferguson 6 (Niall, Professor of History Harvard University, Foreign

Affairs, 85(5), September / October, Lexis)

Nor can economic crises explain the bloodshed. What may be the most familiar causal
chain in modern historiography links the Great Depression to the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World

Germany started the war in Europe only

after its economy had recovered. Not all the countries affected by the Great
Depression were taken over by fascist regimes, nor did all such regimes start
wars of aggression. In fact, no general relationship between economics and
conflict is discernible for the century as a whole. Some wars came after
periods of growth, others were the causes rather than the consequences of
economic catastrophe, and some severe economic crises were not
followed by wars.
War II. But that simple story leaves too much out. Nazi

Growth causes war

--Resource wars
--Struggle for expansion --World Wars --Full war
chests
Trainer 2 (Ted, Senior Lecturer of School of Social Work University of New
South Wales, If You Want Affluence, Prepare for War, Democracy & Nature,
Vol. 8, No. 2, EBSCO)
If this limits-to-growth analysis is at all valid, the implications for the problem of global peace and conflict

If we all remain determined to increase our living

standards, our level of production and consumption, in a world where resources are already scarce,
and security are clear and savage.

where only a few have affluent living standards but another 8 billion will be wanting them too, and which
we, the rich, are determined to get richer without any limit, then

nothing is more guaranteed

than

that there will be increasing levels of conflict and violence. To put it another way, if we insist
on remaining affluent we will need to remain heavily armed. Increased conflict in at least the following
categories can be expected. First, the present

conflict over resources between the rich elites and

the poor majority in the Third World must increase, for example, as development under globalisation
takes more land, water and forests into export markets. Second, there are conflicts between the Third
World and the rich world, the major recent examples being the war between the US and Iraq over control
of oil. Iraq invaded Kuwait and the US intervened, accompanied by much high-sounding rhetoric (having
found nothing unacceptable about Israels invasions of Lebanon or the Indonesian invasion of East Timor).
As has often been noted, had Kuwait been one of the worlds leading exporters of broccoli, rather than oil,
it is doubtful whether the US would have been so eager to come to its defence. At the time of writing, the
US is at war in Central Asia over terrorism. Few would doubt that a collateral outcome will be the
establishment of regimes that will give the West access to the oil wealth of Central Asia. Following are
some references to the connection many have recognised between rich world affluence and conflict.
General M.D. Taylor, US Army retired argued ... US military priorities just be shifted towards insuring a
steady flow of resources from the Third World. Taylor referred to fierce competition among industrial
powers for the same raw materials markets sought by the United States and growing hostility
displayed by have-not nations towards their affluent counterparts.62 Struggles are taking place, or are in
the offing, between rich and poor nations over their share of the world product; within the industrial world
over their share of industrial resources and markets.63 That

more than half of the people on

are poorly nourished while a small percentage live in historically unparalleled luxury is
a sure recipe for continued and even escalating international conflict.64 The oil embargo
this planet

placed on the US by OPEC in the early 1970s prompted the US to make it clear that it was prepared to go
to war in order to secure supplies. President Carter last week issued a clear warning that any attempt to
gain control of the Persian Gulf would lead to war. It would be regarded as an assault on the vital
interests of the United States.65 The US is ready to take military action if Russia threatens vital American
interests in the Persian Gulf, the US Secretary of Defence, Mr Brown, said yesterday.66 Klares recent book
Resource Wars discusses this theme in detail, stressing the coming significance of water as a source of

demand for many key materials is growing at an unsustainable

rate. the incidence of conflict over vital materials is sure to grow. The wars of
the future will largely be fought over the possession and control of vital economic goods.
international conflict. Global

resource wars will become, in the years ahead, the most distinctive feature of the global security
environment.67 Much of the rich worlds participation in the conflicts taking place throughout the world is
driven by the determination to back a faction that will then look favourably on Western interests. In a
report entitled, The rich prize that is Shaba, Breeze begins, Increasing rivalry over a share-out between
France and Belgium of the mineral riches of Shaba Province lies behind the joint Franco Belgian paratroop
airlift to Zaire. These mineral riches make the province a valuable prize and help explain the Wests
extended diplomatic courtship 68 Then there is potential conflict between the rich nations who are after
all the ones most dependent on securing large quantities of resources. The resource and energy intensive
modes of production employed in nearly all industries necessitate continuing armed coercion and
competition to secure raw materials.69 Struggles are taking place, or are in the offing, between rich and
poor nations over their share of the world product, within the industrial world over their share of industrial
resources and markets 70 Growth, competition, expansion and war Finally, at the most abstract level,

warfare
appears as a normal and periodic form of competition within the capitalist world economy.
world wars regularly occur during a period of economic expansion. 71 War is
an inevitable result of the struggle between economies for expansion.72 Choucri and
North say their most important finding is that domestic growth is a strong determinant of
national expansion and that this results in competition between nations and war.73 The First and
the struggle for greater wealth and power is central in the literature on the causes of war.

Second World Wars can be seen as being largely about imperial grabbing. Germany,
Italy and Japan sought to expand their territory and resource access. Britain already held much of the
world within its empire which it had previously fought 72 wars to take! Finite
of expanding populations and increasing per capita demands

resources in a world
create a situation ripe for

international violence.74 Ashley focuses on the significance of the quest for economic growth.
War is mainly explicable in terms of differential growth in a world of scarce and unevenly distributed

So long as the dynamics of differential growth

remain unmanaged, it is probable that these long term processes will sooner or later
carry major powers into war.75 Security The point being made can be put in terms of
resources expansion is a prime source of conflict.

security. One way to seek security is to develop greater capacity to repel attack. In the case of nations this
means large expenditure of money, resources and effort on military preparedness. However there is a
much better strategy; i.e. to live in ways that do not oblige you to take more than your fair share and
therefore that do not give anyone any motive to attack you. Tut! This is not possible unless there is global
economic justice. If a few insist on levels of affluence, industrialisation and economic growth that are
totally impossible for all to achieve, and which could not be possible if they were taking only their fair
share of global resources, then they must remain heavily armed and their security will require readiness to

if we want affluence we must

prepare for war. If we insist on continuing to take most of the oil and other resources while many
use their arms to defend their unjust privileges. In other words,

suffer intense deprivation because they cannot get access to them then we must be prepared to maintain
the aircraft carriers and rapid deployment forces, and the despotic regimes, without which we cannot
secure the oil fields and plantations. Global peace is not possible
and that is not possible unless rich countries move to The Simpler Way.

without global justice ,

WTO
-- No extinction diseases favor limited lethality and
medicine will check
Posner 4 (Richard, Judge US Court of Appeals, Catastrophe: Risk and
Response, p. 22-24)

Yet the fact that Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease to
assail it in the 200,000 years or so of its existence is a source of genuine
comfort, at least if the focus is on extinction events. There have been
enormously destructive plagues, such as the Black Death, smallpox, and now
AIDS, but none has come close to destroying the entire human race. There
is a biological reason. Natural selection favors germs of limited lethality;
they are fitter in an evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to
be spread if the germs do not kill their hosts too quickly. The AIDS virus is an
example of a lethal virus, wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious
in its host for years maximizes its spread. Yet there is no danger that AIDS will
destroy the entire human race. The likelihood of a natural pandemic that
would cause the extinction of the human race is probably even less today
than in the past (except in prehistoric times, when people lived in small,
scattered bands, which would have limited the spread of disease), despite
wider human contacts that make it more difficult to localize an infectious
disease. The reason is improvements in medical science. But the comfort is a
small one. Pandemics can still impose enormous losses and resist prevention
and cure: the lesson of the AIDS pandemic. And there is always a lust time.

-- Burn out stops disease

Lederberg 99 (Joshua, Professor of Genetics Stanford University School
of Medicine, Epidemic The World of Infectious Disease, p. 13)

The toll of the fourteenth-century plague, the "Black Death," was closer to
one third. If the bugs' potential to develop adaptations that could kill us off
were the whole story, we would not be here. However, with very rare
exceptions, our microbial adversaries have a shared interest in our survival.
Almost any pathogen comes to a dead end when we die; it first has to
communicate itself to another host in order to survive. So historically, the really
severe host- pathogen interactions have resulted in a wipeout of both host and
pathogen. We humans are still here because, so far, the pathogens that have
attacked us have willy-nilly had an interest in our survival. This is a very delicate

balance, and it is easily disturbed, often in the wake of large-scale ecological

upsets.

Regionalism is better than multilateralism - most military

conflicts are local, so regionalism solves wars better by
strengthening local ties. Thats key to counterbalance
globalization.
WTO fails to uphold trade because it tried to go global too
quick Regional agreements are needed as building
blocks to create effective multilateralism
Brkic 13, Economics Prof at U of Sarajevo (Snjeana, 3/25, Regional Trading

Arrangements Stumbling Blocks or Building Blocks in the Process of Global

Trade Liberalization?, papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=2239275)
There are over 180 independent states in the modern world, most of which
differ enormously in economic development and power. World economy is
therefore a battlefield of varied interests expressed in the action of different national economic policies. In
such conditions, attempts to integrate world economy by global
liberalization of international trade cannot yield significant results
overnight. Global free trade is considered the first best solution, but is not feasible
immediately and at once, since too many people believe that they
would lose with global liberalization. According to the view believed to be optimistic,
creation of international economic integrations could be a distinctive
inter-step in the process of free world market creation. Lester Thurow points
out: "In the long run, regionalism development could be favorable for the world. Free trade within
regions and regulated trade between regions could be the proper road to free
world trade in a long term. The shift from national to world economy
at once would be too big a jump. One should first make a few smaller
inter-steps, and pseudo-trading blocs coupled with regulated trade could be such
a necessary inter-step." The essential rationale of this view is
actually the speed of reforms - the gradual versus big bang
approach. Many contemporary economists, in their analyses of world economy
trends, conclude that political forces behind regional integration show
signs of consistency with those acting towards global world trade.
According to the optimistic view, the multilateralization process is slowed down
by different standpoints on the free trade usefulness, by economic
nationalisms, even by varying political interests, and therefore another
way had to be found in order to achieve the world market integration
a slower one, but more effective in the existing constellation of
international economic relations. This view denies the opposition between regionalism
and multilateralism, and explains it as follows: Since integration improves economic relations between
members through removing trading and other barriers, and since all these integrated regions are part of

advancement of economic relations within regions

can be understood as the advancement of global economic relations.
the world territory, the

Regional trading, i.e. economic blocs would in this case be only a bypass towards the creation of unified

What could not be achieved in global relations was

achieved within regions, through multilateralization of the European economic area. These
world market. "...

achievements were later followed by many countries in other world regions, in their mutual relations
practice. Practically, we thus got regional multilateralisms." Regionalism advocates also point out that the
formation of economic integrations could facilitate the pending WTO negotiation rounds. Actually, the
Uruguay round was partly protracted due to a great number of participants and the "free riders" issue.

regionalism contributes to overall

globalization as well, since these are processes motivated from the same source.
Viewed in broader context, one could say that

driven by big capital interests, and that these

phenomena are actually ways to make the centuries-long
capitalism aspiration unified world market - come true. According to this
Both regionalism and globalization are
two

view, the globalization process as a process of world economy functional integration under the
circumstances of imperfect market and hegemony weakening early in the 20th century has to be
supported by the institutional component, either on a multilateral basis through international organizations
and institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO, or on regional scale

through regional

trading arrangements.

---Non-compliance is routine and inevitable with no impact

to overall trade assumes online gambling
Tallberg and Smith 14 (Jonas, Professor of Political
Science at Stockholm University, & James McCall, Attorney
at Covington & Burling, LLP, former Assistant Professor of
Political Science and International Affairs at George
Washington University, "Dispute settlement in world
politics: States, supranational prosecutors, and
compliance," European Journal of International Relations
2014, Vol 20 (1), 118-144)
In terms of post-ruling settlements, powerful defendants are more
likely to delay or avoid making concessions than developing countries.
The post-ruling phase of WTO dispute settlement does not always
produce timely and effective implementation for three reasons. First,
compliance reviews under the DSU and ad hoc procedural
agreements between disputants routinely extend the deadline for
implementation and delay the imposition of any sanctions. Appeals
are routinely among disputes that produce panel rulings (71%), and
requests for additional compliance panels, after the reasonable time
period for implementation has expired, are far from rare (16%) (Horn
and Mavroidis, 2008a). Among 30 disputes that reach the Appellate Body in
its first seven years, there were only four cases of protracted non-compliance
(Garrett and Smith, 2003). But in another seven cases, compliance did
not occur within the reasonable time period agreed upon by the
disputants or determined by an arbitrator. The average delay in those
seven cases (more than 10 months) was significant, especially when
added to the already generous implementation period of up to 15 months.
Not surprisingly, the majority of these 11 failed or delayed cases were
against the US or EU. And this count does not include cases in which
complainants voluntarily agreed to extend the time period for
implementation or to delay the onset of sanctions - an accommodation often
extended to powerful defendants such as the US or EU. Second, despite
occasional requests for authority to retaliate, sanctions remain a limited and
rarely utilized tool for inducing compliance. Stark imbalances in the capacity
to impose and withstand retaliation imply basic asymmetries in the capacity
of WTO member states to enforce their rights after obtaining a favorable legal

result. In 15% of disputes with adopted ruling (19 of 130), complainants at

least formally requested the authority to 'suspend benefits' (Horn and
Mavroidis 2008a). Only very rarely, however, were sanctions imposed - and in
certain cases, such as US sanctions against EU restrictions on hormonetreated beef, settlements proved no easier to achieve. Finally, disputing
governments are free in practice to reach settlements contrary to
WTO rules even after a binding ruling has been adopted. Among
Appellate Body cases, multiple settlements delayed or denied full
implementation of DSB recommendations (Garrett and Smith, 2003).
The most significant example is EC - Bananas, in which the US and
then Ecuador agreed to a deal in which the EU increased access for their
producers or traders during its gradual transition toward a WTO-compliant
regime. The tariff-only scheme that was to constitute full compliance
was not in place until 2006, more than eight years after the ruling or
violation entered into force - and Latin banana producers challenged
it, too, for failing to preserve their market access (Smith, 2006). The
cases of Turkey - Textiles and Thailand - Iron & Steel constitute
additional examples of settlements being resolved and removed from the
DSB agenda without disclosure of terms and apparently short of full
compliance (WTO, 2001, 2002). In yet other cases, US - Sec. 110(5) of the
Copyright Act and US - Gambling, the United States - rather than
complying - has offered compensation to the complainant or affected
third parties (WTO, 2003; Lester, 2008).

---Compliance doesnt solve WTO effectiveness changes

in law cant compensate years of non-compliance
Skyes 14 (Alan O., Robert A. Kindler Professor of Law at New York
University School of Law, "An Economic Perspective on As
Such/Facial versus As Applied Challenges in the WTO and U.S.
Constitutional Systems," Journal of Legal Analysis, March 5,
Winter 2013 5 (2))
Suppose that in the event of (at least any inefficient) harm to a
potential claimant, the claimant will have an as applied challenge and a
remedy that is fully and accurately compensatory, in the sense that
it restores the welfare of the claimant to its level before the occurrence
of the harm. Assume further that no third parties are affected by the potential
respondents conduct. Under these assumptions, as such challenges are
simply unnecessary and can easily prove counterproductive. The
potential complainant by assumption is insulated from harm, the respondent
will internalize costs of inefficient harm to the complainant, and the
respondent will be induced to act efficiently.48 If a claimant can bring an as
such challenge nevertheless, it will simply impose unnecessary costs on the
respondent, and a claimant may even pursue a challenge strategically to try
and extract surplus. Putting aside third party externalities, these observations
suggest that as such challenges are undesirable if claimants can bring
successful as applied challenges following inefficient harm and receive full
compensation (ignoring litigation cost complications for the moment).
Conversely, inadequacy of the ex post remedy is a necessary condition for as

such challenges to become desirable from an economic standpoint although,

as shall be seen, it is by no means sufficient. An injured partys remedies
may prove inadequate for three types of reasons. First, the
substantive law at issue may afford no remedy for inefficient harms.
For example, imagine a system of tort law under which no injury is
compensable unless it is intentionally inflicted. Under these circumstances,
the incentive for injurers to take economically worthwhile
precautions against accidental harm will be lost, even if the remedy
for intentionally inflicted harms is fully compensatory. Although
inefficiencies in the substantive law represent an important class of problems
in many fields, they afford little basis for choosing between as such and as
applied challenges. If the underlying substantive law fails to condemn
inefficient behavior (or prevents efficient behavior), it seems unlikely that
either type of challenge can promote efficiency. Accordingly, I will assume
that the underlying substantive law is efficient, in the sense that it at least
allows a claim for relief whenever the complainant suffers inefficient harm. A
second possible reason for inadequate remedies is legal error in ex
postadjudication. The complainant with a meritorious as applied challenge
may be denied relief by mistake. I will not dwell on this possibility either,
however, because it seems unlikely to afford a compelling case for as such
challenges. Indeed, for reasons that are developed later, a pre-enforcement
as such challenge may be more likely to result in error than a postenforcement as applied challenge. The third reason why remedies may
prove inadequate is simply that they may fail to afford full and
accurate compensation for harm suffered. With particular reference
to the WTO and the U.S. Constitutional systems, serious concerns arise
in this regard. Under WTO law, a violator incurs no formal sanction
until a complaining member has brought a case, received a favorable
adjudication, and the violator has exhausted a reasonable period of
time to bring its behavior into compliance.49 The practical result is that
a violator can break the rules for a period of years before any formal
sanction is triggered, and indeed can avoid any formal sanction
completely by curing the violation within the reasonable period.
Commentators sometimes refer to this system as the three-year free
pass. In addition, it may be doubted that the formal remedy for WTO
violations after the expiration of the reasonable periodtrade
sanctions imposed by the complainantcan compensate complainants
even for the prospective harm suffered due to the ongoing
violation.50 Small countries, for example, cannot use trade sanctions
to improve their terms of trade, and often complain that retaliatory
measures amount to shooting themselves in the foot. Larger
countries with the ability to improve their terms of trade through sanctions
may also be undercompensated for prospective harm because of the principle
that trade sanctions must be equivalent to the harm caused by the
violation, a vague standard administered in somewhat unclear fashion by
WTO arbitrators. If the arbitrators allow only the level of retaliation that
restores the complainants terms of trade, for example, then the complainant
is undercompensated because of the decline in trade volume due to the
violation.51 In the U.S. Constitutional system, remedies are also
limited in many cases. Depending on the particular constitutional violation

in question, damages for past harm suffered may not be available at

all, and the remedy may be limited to an order directing the
government to desist from the conduct in question going forward
(such as an order declaring that the enforcement of a statute against the
plaintiff was unconstitutional). Likewise, some violations may involve conduct
that irreparably alters the future course of affairs, such as restrictions on
speech or voting that affect the outcome of an election. Measures to
restore the status quo ante may as a practical matter prove
infeasible.

---Lack of action on the Bali deal is tanking credibility

Zhong 14 (Raymond, "WTO Fails to Ratify Trade
Agreement," July 31, Wall Street Journal,
http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-pressures-india-on-wto-tradeagreement-1406820288)
The World Trade Organization failed Thursday to ratify an agreement
designed to streamline the global trade system, frustrating a late
push by U.S. officials to convince India to reach a compromise that
would have secured a deal. "I do not have the necessary elements that
would lead to me to conclude that a breakthrough is possible," WTO Director
General Roberto Azevedo said. "We got closersignificantly closerbut not
quite there." The WTO reached an agreement in December on the
Indonesian resort island of Bali to streamline customs procedures. The
deadline to ratify that agreement was Thursday, but India declined to do
so without a parallel agreement allowing developing countries more
freedom to subsidize and stockpile food. Some economists have
estimated that the Bali agreement, which seeks to standardize customs
practices and remove red tape, could save WTO members more than $1
trillion eventually. Failure to achieve a consensus before the WTO's
own deadline deals a severe blow to the Geneva-based body's
credibility, already tenuous after years of stalled talks on tariff
reductions. The trade-easing deal was viewed as a way to create some
momentum. As a raft of regional trade deals moves ahead, the WTO's
ability to act as a catalyst for global trade liberalization is in doubt .
India had insisted for weeks that it wouldn't sign off on the Bali pact
unless the group comes to a faster accord on exempting foodsubsidy and stockpiling programs like India's from current WTO rules that
limit them. The Bali meeting had produced a truce: WTO members agreed not
to file complaints against India's food subsidies for the time being and said a
permanent solution would be found by 2017. India wanted speedier progress
on meeting its demands. "The bottom line is that we are very sensitive to,
and we care about, and we will work with India," U.S. Secretary of State John
Kerry told NDTV, an Indian news channel earlier in the day. "The key is, don't
lose the opportunity." To maintain government reserves and provide
subsidized food to needy households, India buys rice and wheat from farmers
in enormous quantities at above-market prices. That has put it at risk of
violating WTO rules capping subsidies that influence agricultural prices and
production. For developing countries, the yearly ceiling for "trade-distorting"

subsidies is 10% of the value of agricultural production. Economists have

estimated that India has exceeded its cap in the last few years as the size of
its grain stockpilesand hence the prices it must pay to growershas grown
rapidly. But the WTO doesn't have current data on the size and nature of
India's agricultural subsidies. India hasn't submitted the requisite
documentation since 2011, when it reported the assistance it provided to
farmers between 1998 and 2004. An Indian trade official confirmed that New
Delhi hadn't submitted its documents for more-recent years but said it would
do so soon. There are "tens of nations" that are behind on their WTO
reporting, said the official, who didn't want to be named. "What's the big
deal?" This isn't the first time WTO members have been at
loggerheads over agricultural policy and government protections for
poor farmers. The Doha Round of trade negotiations broke down in
Geneva in 2008 because the U.S. and India couldn't agree on developing
countries' rights to ramp up tariffs in the event of a surge in agricultural
imports. The collapse in Geneva proved traumatic. WTO talks on
major issues were on hold for years. The Bali talks in December also
came close to falling apart. Then as now, Indian negotiators portrayed the
food-security standoff as one between developing countries seeking to
provide for their poor and developed ones privileging freer trade over the
lives of millions of vulnerable people. A coalition of developing countries
initially backed India's proposal to uncap farm subsidies provided as part of
food-security programs. But in this month's showdown, India was supported
only by Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela. Meanwhile, China, Thailand and
Mexico, among other large emerging markets, have publicly
criticized India's intransigence . Pakistanpoorer per capita than India but
also a major rice-growerhas quizzed India about its rice subsidies at WTO
meetings.

---The WTO and U.S. legal systems inevitably dont mix

plan cant prevent vague exceptions

Skyes 14 (Alan O., Robert A. Kindler Professor of Law at New York University
School of Law, "An Economic Perspective on As Such/Facial versus As Applied
Challenges in the WTO and U.S. Constitutional Systems," Journal of Legal
Analysis, March 5, Winter 2013 5 (2))
The WTO legal system (along with its predecessor under the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade [GATT]) and U.S. Constitutional law each
have a substantial body of decisional law regarding the
circumstances under which adjudicators will entertain as such or facial
challenges. The U.S. Constitutional system has additional layers of
jurisprudence concerning pre-enforcement and post-enforcement
challenges, remedies, and overbreadth challenges. As shall be seen, the
general principles are often subject to important and imprecise
exceptions, with the result that the law in both systems is actually
rather muddled.

---Dispute settlement body is clogged with Russia

sanctions

DW 14 (Deutsche Welle, "Russia and Europe will engage WTO in sanctions

dispute," http://www.dw.de/russia-and-europe-will-engage-wto-in-sanctionsdispute/a-17847288)
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev announced a ban on EU food
imports It's the panel's job to examine the contested facts and prepare a
report on whether the disputed measure violates WTO rules. If the
complaining country objects to the report's findings, it can appeal to
the WTO's Appellate Body, a permanent seven-member group that can
uphold, modify or reject the DSB panel's report. The Appellate Body
then sends its own report back to the DSB. "The DSB has the opportunity
to accept or reject the Appellate Body's report," Pickett said. "This is
according to the principle of 'negative consensus' - which means that a report
will be accepted if there is no objection to it." Other WTO members would
likely offer support. The EU has also been hit by the Russian sanctions.
Agricultural products - especially fruit, cheese and pork - are the bloc's
fourth-largest source of trade income with Russia, behind
machinery, chemicals and medicines. Last year, sales amounted to 12
billion euro. Poland, whose mainstay in trade with Russia is apples, is the EU's
second-biggest exporter to Russia, behind Lithuania and ahead of Germany.
"Warlike situations" in Moscow? Poland exports large numbers of apples to
Russia But nothing has yet been decided. "The biggest legal question is
whether a panel will decide that a major security concern exists for
Russia - and whether the sanctions are necessary to meet its
security needs." Here, there is very little case law. Pickett said the last
comparable cases were in the 1940s: "In the pre-WTO era - which would fall
under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade of 1947 - there are a few
examples of such panels, but they are not particularly meaningful." Russia is
also arguing on the basis of article 51 of the UN Charter: "That gives each
state the right to self-defense," Pickett said. "I think, however, that Russia will
have great difficulty making that legal case." Russia must establish either
that the sanctions constitute a necessary measure in times of war, he said, or
that a "special crisis in international relations" exists. Greece also hard-hit
Although about 70 percent of the Russian population approve of its sanctions,
Pickett said the odds are good that the complex WTO mechanism will
uphold Poland's complaint. "In my view, war-like conditions must either
prevail or be imminent. Russia argues that this is a matter of food safety. I
doubt that will be legally sufficient." Lithuania, Germany and Greece also
benefit from trade with Russia: Last year, Germany exported agricultural
products worth almost 600 million euros, while Lithuania sold more than 900
million euros of food to Russia. Greek farmers export large quantities of
peaches and fish, especially during the summer months. According to the
"Sddeutsche Zeitung" daily, if the WTO mechanisms do not work, or do not
take effect quickly enough, this could mean a loss of 178 million euros for
Greek vegetable and fruit farmers. Athens has therefore already begun to
hold bilateral negotiations with Moscow.

---NAFTA meat-trading disputes are a bigger threat to

WTOs global signal
Menon 14 (Nirmala, "WTO Panel Decides Against U.S. in Meat-Labeling
Dispute," Aug 21, WSJ, http://online.wsj.com/articles/wto-panel-decidesagainst-u-s-in-meat-labeling-dispute-1408645566)

OTTAWAThe U.S. has lost a key round at the World Trade

Organization in a trade dispute with Canada and Mexico over meat
labeling, according to people familiar with the WTO's findings. Canada and
Mexico opposed a new U.S. rule that requires more information on
labels about the origins of beef, pork and other meats, which went into
effect in November. They took their case to the WTO, saying the rule hurts
their competitiveness. The WTO panel that heard oral arguments in the
dispute over the so-called country-of-origin labeling rule earlier this year has
decided in favor of Canada and Mexico, according to sources familiar with the
panel's confidential report. The report, which the three governments have
received, is expected to be made public in late September or early October,
these sources said. "We all know what the report says. The U.S. lost,"
according to one person with knowledge of the report. "We do for a fact know
that the ruling, when it is made public, will be in favor of Canada and
Mexico," another source said. The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued the
new rule after a WTO finding in 2012 that an earlier version was
discriminatory. But Canada and Mexico said the amended rule was even more
onerous, and limited exports of cattle and hogs into the U.S from their
countries. The animals end up being sold at a discount to those from the U.S.,
they said. According to WTO rules, the U.S. will have 60 days to appeal from
the time the report is made public. Ottawa has to wait until the appeal
process is exhausted to get the WTO's approval to retaliate, which isn't
expected until late next year. The developments could push the three
partners of the North American Free Trade Agreement closer to a
potential trade war. Canada, which estimates its cattle and hog industries
suffer annual losses of over one billion Canadian dollars ($911.5 million) from
the U.S. labeling rule, has threatened to retaliate with punitive tariffs
on a range of U.S. imports including chocolate, cornflakes, fruit and
potatoes. Canadian officials have said they would wait for WTO approval
before taking any action. U.S. lawmakers who want the labeling rule
changed have warned about the economic toll of retaliation. A brief
section in the spending bill passed by Congress earlier this year said the U.S.
economy could suffer a $2 billion hit if Canada and Mexico made good on
their threats to retaliate. Several government and industry officials in Canada
and the U.S. said they have been briefed on the WTO panel's report, but
declined to discuss the findings. Representatives for Canadian Trade Minister
Ed Fast and Canadian Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said Canada would
comply with WTO rules and only comment once the report is made public.
But both renewed Canada's threats of retaliation. "The [Canadian]
government remains steadfast in taking whatever steps may be
necessary, including retaliation, to achieve a fair resolution," Mr.
Ritz's spokesman, Jeffrey English, said in an email. A spokesman for the U.S.
Trade Representative said the report will be circulated to WTO members and
will be made public when it is completed and translated, expected later this
year. Big U.S. meatpackers also oppose the meat-labeling rules, saying they
drive up costs for the industry. Proponents of the meat-labeling rules say they
provide more information for consumers wary of products from countries with
less-stringent safety rules. Toronto-based Canadian international trade lawyer
Lawrence Herman said it would be "unfortunate" if the three countries cannot
settle the issue and end up in a trade war. "It would be a bad signal to

the rest of the world that the Nafta countries could not resolve an
issue among themselves," Mr. Herman said.

---Dispute settlement isnt key to trade

Shapiro 7 (Hal, Miller & Chevalier, WTO Dispute Settlement, Part III,

Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, Winter, 24 Ariz. J. Int'l

& Comp. Law 53, Lexis)
The importance of dispute settlement is greatly exaggerated. The WTO
agreements are primarily self-executing. The institutions of the WTO work
most days with almost no enforcement. Each day, trade between the United
States and Canada, and between the United States and Europe, is more than
$ 1 billion. The largest trade disputes are enormous for the particular industry
affected, but typically are dwarfed by the total amount of trade between the
countries involved. For example, the $ 4 billion involved in the Softwood
Lumber dispute is the equivalent of four days of U.S. trade with Canada or
the EU. So, why is the dispute settlement system important? The dispute
settlement system gives parties the ability to have their day in court and
allows grievances to be addressed. The trading system would not work as
well as it does if there were no mechanism to deal with disputes when they
arise. The existing system is generally sensible and necessary.

---Dispute settlement isnt key to trade

Shapiro 7 (Hal, Miller & Chevalier, WTO Dispute Settlement, Part III,

Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, Winter, 24 Ariz. J. Int'l

& Comp. Law 53, Lexis)
The importance of dispute settlement is greatly exaggerated. The WTO
agreements are primarily self-executing. The institutions of the WTO work most
days with almost no enforcement. Each day, trade between the United States and
Canada, and between the United States and Europe, is more than $ 1 billion. The
largest trade disputes are enormous for the particular industry affected, but typically are
dwarfed by the total amount of trade between the countries involved. For
example, the $ 4 billion involved in the Softwood Lumber dispute is the equivalent of four days of U.S.
trade with Canada or the EU. So, why is the dispute settlement system important? The dispute settlement
system gives parties the ability to have their day in court and allows grievances to be addressed. The
trading system would not work as well as it does if there were no mechanism to deal with disputes when
they arise. The existing system is generally sensible and necessary.

Noncomplianceinev
Ikenson13(DanielJ.,directorofCatosHerbertA.StiefelCenterforTradePolicyStudies,

MAineconomicsfromGeorgeWashingtonUniversity,ProtectionistAntidumpingRegimeIsa
PoxonAmericasGlassHouse,www.cato.org/publications/commentary/protectionist
antidumpingregimepoxamericasglasshouse)
Othercandidatescometomindwhencontemplatingtheworldsworstinternationaltrade
scofflaw,buttheUnitedStatesmakesastrongcaseforitself.ArecentCommerceDepartment
determinationthatforeigncompanieslikeSamsung,LG,andElectroluxengagedintargeted
dumpingbyreducingpricesontheirwashingmachinesforBlackFridaysalesconfirmsthatthe
UnitedStatesisactivelyseekingthatignominiousdistinction.U.S.policieshavebeen

thesubjectofmoreWorldTradeOrganizationdisputes( 119 ,followedbytheEUwith73,thenChina

with30)
andhavebeenfoundto

violateWTOrulesmore

frequently
thananyothergovernmentspolicies.Nogovernmentismore
likelytobeoutofcompliancewithafinalWTODisputeSettlementBody(DSB)
rulingorforalongerperiodthantheU.S.government.Tothisday,theUnitedStatesremainsoutof
complianceincasesinvolvingU.S.

subsidiestocottonfarmers,
restrictionsonAntiguasprovisionofgamblingservices,countryof
originlabelingrequirementsonmeatproducts,thesocalled
ByrdAmendment,avarietyof

antidumpingmeasures,and
severalotherissues ,someofwhichwereadjudicatedmorethana
decadeago.Insomeofthesecases,U.S.tradepartnershave eitherretaliated ,
orbeenauthorizedtoretaliate,againstU.S.exportersorassetholders,yetthenon
compliancecontinuesasthoughtheUnitedStatesconsidersitselfabovetherules.
Cottonsubsidiespoundtheadvantage
Langevin14(Mark,associateresearcherattheCentroUniversitriodeBraslia(UniCEUB),
andadjunctassociateprofessorofgovernmentandpoliticsattheUniversityofMaryland
UniversityCollege,U.S.Brazil:TheBattleOverCottonSubsidies,www.theglobalist.com/us
brazilbattlecottonsubsidies/

TheU.S.governmentisdeadsetagainstIndiaandother
governmentsaroundtheworldprovidingfinancial

supportto
theirpoorfarmers. Atthesametime,theUnitedStatesisonceagain
squaringoffwithBrazil,inanotherroundofthelongrunningcotton
disputebetweenthetwonationsoverU.S.subsidies. TheU.S.

governmentsstrategyofnoncompliance withWTOrulesagainst
thosesubsidieshasa

clear

goal
.Insoccerterms,itseekstocompelBraziltoaccepttheconsolation
matchratherthanraisethechampionstrophybywinningU.S.compliance. Alittlebitofhistoryisinorder.In2005,ina
decisionhailedwidelyatthetime,theWTOsDisputeSettlementBody(DSB)orderedtheU.S.
governmenttoeliminateitscottonproductionsubsidiesaswellasits
agriculturalcommodityexportguaranteeprograms. TheUnitedStatesappealed,buteventuallylost
thecasealtogetherin2009whentheWTOarbitratorapproved
the largesttradesanctionsinhistory . AstingtotheUnitedStates Moreimportantly,the

arbitratorruledthatBrazilcouldimpose

socalled

cross
retaliationmeasures.ThatallowedBraziltoimpose
countermeasuresinothersectors,notlimitedtoagriculture.
ThisrulingcameacrossasatruestingtotheUnitedStates.The
WTOs

decisionmarkedthe
firsttimethatamajoremergingmarket

countrywasentitled
toimplement

suchaninternationaltraderemedytosecureeffectiveleverageagainsttheUnitedStates.