Tournament: Vanderbilt | Round: 3 | Opponent: WFU TM | Judge: Fredrick, Katie
1AC treats “war powers” as a legal limit, but legislative or judicial check on militarism will be ineffective without an engaged public. Only this anti-imperialist mass movement can create political pressure necessary to push back against the executive.
Stone '73 I.F. American investigative journalist and author, New York Review of Books, May 17
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1973/apr/19/can-congress-stop-the-president/?pagination=false  

As the means, the secret commitments, and the occasions for intervention have grown, the power of Congress to make the final decisions of war and peace have dwindled. Until the problem is attacked as a function of imperialism and militarism, constitutional and statutory tinkerings with war powers are likely to prove ineffective. Here and there, in the voluminous hearings, reports, and debates on the pending legislation, this truth occasionally surfaces. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee said some of this when it reported out the Javits-Stennis-Eagleton war powers bill last year.4 If the United States, the committee report said, “is to be continually at war, or in crisis, or on the verge of war, or in small-scale, partial or surrogate war, the force of events must lead inevitably toward Executive domination despite any legislative roadblocks that may be placed in the Executive’s way.” Senator Javits also touched on the more fundamental factors when Senate debate on the measure began last year.5 The Founding Fathers were deeply distrustful of “standing armies.” At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, the United States Army consisted of a total of 719 officers and men. On the eve of the Civil War it was only 28,000 and in 1890 it was only 38,000. Even in 1915, the Army numbered less than 175,000. However, since 1951 the Korean War the size of our “standing” armed forces rarely has dipped below 3,000,000 men. These forces under the President’s command are equipped with nuclear weapons…and they are deployed all over the world…. It is the convergence of the President’s role of conducting foreign policy with his role as Commander-in-Chief of the most potent “standing army” the world has ever seen that has tilted the relationship between the President and Congress so far out of balance…. The imbalance will be tilted even further by the completion of the new all-volunteer army, which puts all the armed forces on a professional basis and relieves the President and the Pentagon from the need to rely on the draft except in the case of a major war. The army will no longer be a citizens’ army but a professional force largely enlisted from among the poor and desperate. As Joseph A. Califano, Jr., who was President Johnson’s assistant for domestic affairs, has pointed out,6 An all-volunteer force that subjects only the ones at the bottom to military service will effectively reduce the need for future rulers to be concerned about the more affluent majority in America and its judgments about foreign adventures, at least until those adventures are so far along that they will be virtually impossible to stop. II The character and course of the war powers legislation in Congress show the same weaknesses that have allowed presidential power to grow so strong in the past. One difficulty is that of foreseeing the contingencies under which war may arise. When the Constitution was being written, Congress was first given the power to “make” war, but this was changed to “declare.” The purpose of this change was twofold: to allow the President to repel sudden attacks and to free him as commander in chief from interference by Congress in the day-to-day operations of the armed forces once war had been declared. Too specific a spelling out of presidential powers would either restrict his powers too greatly or give him a blank check in advance for actions that might go far beyond legitimate limits. Last year both houses of Congress passed war powers bills but they died with the session when the differences between them could not be reconciled. Each passed with majorities big enough to override a veto. The Javits-Stennis-Eagleton bill passed the Senate by a vote of 68 to 16 on April 13, 1972. The Zablocki bill passed the House 344 to 13 last August 14. The lopsided vote testifies to the wide discontent in Congress. It is not often that Democrats as different as Stennis and Eagleton can agree with a Republican like Javits to merge their respective bills. In the House there are more than a dozen bills to limit the President’s war-making powers. Their sponsors range from Ronald Dellums, the black militant Democrat from California, to John Rarick of Louisiana, who has been described as a Birchite with a Southern accent. But the coming legislative battle will be between revised versions of the Javits-Stennis-Eagleton bill in the Senate and the new Zablocki bill in the House, as they emerge from committee shortly. The contest will be over which bill will prevail in a showdown or fare best in a compromise. Both bills were extremely cautious in their draftsmanship, though in quite different ways. The House bill7 in its original form won such wide support because it sought to do so little. It merely required the President promptly to inform Congress whenever he committed US military forces to armed conflict abroad “without specific prior authorization by Congress.” A salutary provision of the bill is that it applied not only to the commitment of troops to actual hostilities but also to their deployment abroad, though with a loophole: “except…for humanitarian or other peaceful purposes.” Our purposes are always peaceful. As we shall see, this House bill has now been strengthened. The Senate bill sought to disarm White House opposition by exempting the Indochina war; it does not apply to “hostilities in which the Armed Forces of the United States are involved on the effective date of this Act.” Whether it would apply after a Vietnam cease-fire and troop withdrawal remains a cloudy question. The bill contains enough loopholes to allow a wide range of future “undeclared” presidential wars. The President is allowed to use troops abroad without a declaration of war in order to repel an attack upon the United States and its possessions, or on its armed forces outside the United States, or “to forestall the direct and imminent threat of such an attack,” or to evacuate citizens from an area in which they are endangered. The last was the excuse for the invasion of the Dominican Republic by Lyndon Johnson. Such “undeclared” presidential wars are limited to thirty days unless authorized by Congress and may be terminated sooner by act or joint resolution (the latter is not subject to veto) unless the President certifies in writing that “unavoidable military necessity respecting the safety” of these armed forces requires their continued use “in the course of bringing about a prompt disengagement.” Nixon’s disengagement from Indochina is still incomplete after four years. These loopholes could make the situation worse by giving advance congressional authority to presidential actions of dubious constitutional validity or even patent usurpations. When the bill was reported by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Fulbright noted in his “Additional Views” that the provisions authorizing the President “to forestall the direct and imminent threat” of an attack could have been used to justify the Cambodian invasion of 1970 and the Laotian invasion of 1971, “both of which were explained as necessary to forestall attacks on American forces.” Fulbright feared that under these provisions a future President might cite secret or classified data “to justify almost any conceivable military initiative.” He warned that this authority could be construed “as sanctioning a pre-emptive, or first, attack solely on the President’s own judgment.” Since such a first strike might be nuclear, Fulbright suggested that the bill be amended (in accordance with a proposal advocated by the Federation of American Scientists) to forbid a nuclear first strike under any circumstances “without the prior explicit authorization of Congress.”8 But this was not accepted by the Senate.9 Another weakness in the Javits-Stennis-Eagleton bill is that it does not automatically provide for calling Congress into session once an “undeclared” war begins. The bill says that such “undeclared” wars shall not continue for more than thirty days without specific authorization by Congress. This could prove quite a loophole. Twenty-nine days of sustained bombing would be enough to cripple many a small country which had provoked the chief executive’s ire. Congress could terminate hostilities sooner than thirty days by bill or joint resolution (the latter not subject to presidential veto) unless the President had certified that “military safety for prompt disengagement” made continued fighting necessary. That is another big loophole. Senator John Sherman Cooper would have substituted for all these elaborate thirty-day procedures a simple joint resolution requiring the President to notify Congress whenever he uses the armed forces abroad in an undeclared war or “believes” that such use is “imminent.” Congress, if not already in session, would convene itself within twenty-four hours and proceed immediately to decide whether to authorize such use of the armed forces “and the expenditure of funds for purposes relating to these hostilities or imminent hostilities.” This would avoid the labyrinthine booby-traps and loopholes of the Javits-Stennis-Eagleton bill and confront Congress immediately with the question of whether it concurred or disapproved. Cooper said there was doubt whether Congress could constitutionally limit hostilities to thirty days “or any period of time, except by the denial of funds.” But he said there was no question that “a prompt meeting and consideration by the Congress of any involvement in hostilities is the power and the duty of the Congress.”10 The Cooper approach would avoid many constitutional problems and also the danger of providing new loopholes for undeclared presidential wars. Cooper’s suggestions are not in the Senate bill, but roughly the same approach is taken in the newly revised version of the Zablocki bill, the main bill in the House.11 This is a far stronger bill than last year’s version and may be preferable to the complicated Rube Goldberg contraptions of the Javits-Stennis-Eagleton bill. It reaffirms the congressional right to declare war, recognizes that the President has “in certain extraordinary and emergency circumstances” “authority to defend” the country and its citizens, but limits the exercise of this authority to two kinds of cases. One is to “respond to any act or situation that endangers” the United States or its citizens (but not their property) abroad when the necessity to respond does not allow time for advance congressional authorization; the word “endangers” may be far too broad. The other class of cases is pursuant to specific prior authorization by Congress. “But at the same time,” the Zablocki bill says, “nothing in this resolution should be construed to represent Congressional acceptance of the proposition that executive action alone can satisfy the constitutional process requirement contained in the provisions of mutual security treaties to which the United States is a party.” Since these treaties cover some forty-three separate nations it is important to make clear—it is dangerously vague now—that they cannot be used to authorize war without specific congressional authorization. Otherwise they become blank checks for undeclared presidential wars. A similar provision (Sec. 34) of the Senate bill would in effect recall the many blank checks outstanding in existing treaties by requiring specific congressional authorization for the use of troops under them. But both bills leave untouched the special blank checks for war in the Formosa, Middle East, and Cuba resolutions, leftovers from the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations. The new Zablocki bill requires the President to report to Congress and ask its approval not only when he commits armed forces to conflict but when he “commits military forces equipped for combat to the territory, airspace or waters of a foreign nation” or “substantially enlarges military forces already located in a foreign nation.” These contingencies are not covered by the Javits-Stennis-Eagleton bill. If Congress is not in session, the President under the Zablocki bill must convene it. This differs from the Cooper proposal in that the latter would have the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House reconvene Congress if it were not in session.12 A President in a time of undeclared war might refuse to reconvene Congress, on the claim that this provision was unconstitutional or on some other pretext. Lest this be thought far-fetched we call attention to the war powers testimony of Charles N. Brower, acting legal adviser of the Department of State, before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 13. He objected to any legislation that would require the President to reconvene Congress in the event of undeclared war. “A decision to convene Congress,” Mr. Brower told the House committee, “constitutionally lies within the discretion of the President, and should depend on the circumstances prevailing at the time.” The Framers would have been startled to hear it argued that the President has a constitutional right not to reconvene Congress under circumstances nullifying its constitutional power to declare war. III The reconvening of Congress to deal with an undeclared war would merely be the beginning of the battle. No legislation restricting “undeclared wars” can be any better than the will of Congress to stop them. It is the will that has been lacking in the past. Generally speaking Congress has been alert in preventing the last war and slack in dealing with the next one. None of these war powers bills, if enacted, will make much difference if Congress is as supine as it has been in the past. Senator Cooper, in his “individual views” appended to last year’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, recalled that as early as 1954, when the Korean Defense Treaty was under consideration, Senator Stennis, former Senator Watkins, and himself warned that the Senate should make clear in all these so-called mutual defense treaties that the term “constitutional processes” used in them should not be used to send troops into combat without a declaration of war by Congress. These misgivings were brushed aside by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate. Later as the blank check war resolutions came up on Formosa, the Middle East, Berlin, Cuba, and Tonkin Gulf, reservations to the same effect were offered in committee and on the Senate floor and rejected. The record showed that Congress had consistently voted away its own constitutional war powers.13 The record was put into longer perspective and in a cynical but more searching light by Secretary of State Rogers during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the war powers bills in 1971. Rogers recounted with smug satisfaction the “undeclared” presidential actions as far back as the Mexican war, which triggered American imperial expansion at the expense of our Latin neighbors. He paused especially to savor the undeclared war in which the US Marines occupied and governed Nicaragua from 1926 to 1933. This history, Rogers said, shows an increasing use of presidential powers, “and yet,” he observed, “there was remarkably little complaint from the Congress.” “It is interesting to speculate,” the secretary went on, “why this is so. It seems to me there may have been several possible factors. In the first place, I suppose that Presidents were acting in the context of a generally popular consensus in the country that the United States should assume a posture consistent with its emerging power, particularly in the Western Hemisphere.” Indeed “big stick” tactics toward our weaker neighbors have been generally popular in our history, and attacks upon this attitude have been a lonely exercise as far back as Lincoln’s opposition, while a congressman, to the Mexican war. “Secondly,” Rogers said, “a large majority of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century presidential actions occurred in the Caribbean, where this country’s power was so predominant that there was little or no chance of forcible response to our actions.”14 Tough tactics were applauded, so long as we dealt with nations too weak to hit back. A third element, on which the secretary did not touch, is that almost all of these actions in the Caribbean and Central America were designed to collect debts for American banks and enforce the will of American sugar, fruit, and other interests to which Congress is sensitive (and beholden) both at home and abroad. In every generation there have been Americans to protest imperialism but they have been in a minority. Henry Steele Commager at the same hearings showed that presidential “undeclared wars” have almost always been used against “small, backward and distraught” peoples. He asked, “Does it really comport with the honor and dignity of a great nation to indulge its chief executive in one standard of conduct for the strong and another for the weak?”15 The answer seems to be that the country rather enjoys it, unless—as in Korea and Indochina—the victim shows an unexpected capacity to resist. There is no reason to believe that under any of the pending war powers bills—had they then been on the statute books—Truman could not have obtained congressional authorization for the Korean War or Johnson for the Vietnam war. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., told the House Foreign Affairs Committee the other day, “All wars are popular the first thirty days.” Javits, the principal sponsor of the Senate war powers bill, still accepts conventional clichés about the Vietnam war and only turned against it when it became too expensive. As recently as last May 1, in a speech in Chicago, he said, It is not in the interest of the United States to allow the ARVN to be overrun, and the Thieu government to be overthrown by this current North Vietnamese offensive. But we have already done in Vietnam all that any nation could ever do for an ally in terms of our own casualties and treasure spent…. If the South Vietnamese people want a country, they can have it, because we have equipped them for the purpose. But…we cannot continue for the indefinite future to underwrite the survival and security of South Vietnam. This embodies the conventional and propagandistic view which identifies the Thieu dictatorship with the people of South Vietnam, and paints our purpose there as one of benevolent concern for their self-determination. It is only the cost that separates Javits from Nixon. In fact, the more one studies the record the more one feels that it is neither lack of power nor lack of information that has led Congress to acquiesce in the war powers of the President but the fact that it usually shares much the same outlook. Senator Eagleton provided another example of this before the House Foreign Affairs Committee March 7. He said that while the Senate war powers bill would allow presidential military action to rescue endangered citizens, it was tightly worded to prevent a President from using this excuse “to pursue a policy objective over and above their safe evacuation.” Eagleton cited the Dominican affair when President Johnson expanded a rescue operation “into an invasion” of the Dominican Republic in 1965. “It should be emphasized,” Senator Eagleton said, “that the policy considerations that motivated President Johnson may italics in original have been correct. They were, however, legally questionable since Congress was excluded from the decision-making process.” It must make Latin Americans wince to read such stuff from a liberal US senator. We helped to overthrow a constitutional and democratic government, on the pretext that it was in danger of a communist takeover, and thus to replace the liberal regime of Bosch with the repressive regime of Trujillo’s long-time aide, Balaguer. It is hard to arouse Congress over legally or constitutionally questionable acts by the Executive when it agrees with the policy considerations. The biggest obstacle of all to congressional restraint on the Executive is the instinctive reaction that once war begins, the patriotic duty is to rally behind the war, however disastrous or wrong one may believe it to be. Thus Senator Stennis voiced misgivings about the Indochinese intervention very early in the Sixties but swallowed his doubts once combat operations began. 

Resisting executive power through the formal legislative process is a strategy for cooption and endless trivial battles. This trades-off with the radical opposition necessary to stop the system of global ecological destruction—only effective social action strategies solve
Ford '13 Matt, history teacher "The Left Had No Choice But To Die" 5/31
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/31/the-left-had-no-choice-but-to-die/

Mussolini himself gained his political stripes by roughing up striking workers. Later, a plank of his National Fascist Party’s political platform was hyper-industrialization. In Spain, Franco’s coup was supported by his Fascist allies in Italy and Germany. The Spanish Republic, the Socialist and Anarchist worker organizations, and hope for a life of dignity for the Spanish working class was killed with the victory of Franco. However, it was obvious that throughout Europe, the workers had the power to determine the destiny of the country. Not only did they have the power to shape the economy, but the ability to fight wars depended on their obedience as workers and soldiers. Enough with history. I hope the point has been made and accepted that in industrial economies the workers that manufacture goods or mine raw materials are the most important social group for any type of progress- left or right. In an industrial economy, workers are listened to because economies depend on their labor. In the US today, these circumstances no longer exist. Manufacturing has been outsourced and most of the working class is employed in the service sector. Wars are no longer fought by the working class, and their continuance does not depend on the obedience of the workers. Modern technology has made human power less important in warfare and production. Furthermore, industrial society has given us the poison of environmental destruction. Therefore, we would be naïve to ignore these realities and continue to use outdated tactics to achieve a bigger piece of the industrial society’s pie. We find ourselves lost and directionless. In a position without precedent. In the US, the left has not adapted to these new situations. With these new conditions, the working class simply has little or no power using the same tactics that were used in the past. Strikes in the service sector typically result in nothing due to the ability of technology to supplant human labor or because of the low-skill nature of service sector jobs. Marches or rallies without the threat of affecting profits are without potency. To a great extent, the demands of the working class have been funneled into the political process where, as always, they are watered down and co-opted. The political process is controlled by the rich who no longer have to answer to the demands of the workers that create their wealth, because those workers are either outside of our borders or are Wall Street gamblers. Other demands of the working class are channeled into social movements that adopt the same tactics of the bygone era. Numbers of people in the streets are no longer a threat because profits still roll into the bank accounts of the rich. Picket signs and organized marches with police escorts do not have the power to make change. The Occupy movement serves as the most glaring example. Another factor that must be taken into account in examining our new situation is the growth of the non-profit industrial complex. Social movements are frequently co-opted by the paid community organizers of non-profit organizations. Non-profit organizations cannot be expected to make meaningful change due to their very structure. The budgets of the organizations and the paychecks of the organizers depend on grants from government agencies and endowments. These funds exist -in theory- to combat social problems. So, if these social problems disappear, the funding will disappear. The existence of these organizations and the jobs of the organizers, depend on the existence of social problems. Non-profit organizations do not want to put themselves out of business, therefore they can not be expected to make change. An analogy may be useful: An industrial capitalists exists to make profit. He will not share his profits because doing this threatens his existence. A non-profit organization will not eliminate social problems because doing so threatens their existence. Certainly there are non-profit organizations that are funded by donations from rich people, but this shouldn’t require an explanation of why these will not alleviate the plight of the working class. Not every sector of the working class has been stripped of their labor power. The massive population of farm workers have an immense about of labor power. The profits of the agriculture industry depend on their labor. However the plight of the farm workers has also been co-opted by the political pimps of the unions and the non-profits. Since most of these workers are immigrants, and a sizeable portion is undocumented, the labor power of this group has been diluted into demands for new immigration legislation. Unfortunately, the American elite doesn’t care about the horrendous stories of inhumane treatment of migrant workers, deportations and separation of families, and deaths on the border. They care about their profits. But “immigration reform” movement continues trying to tap into the non-existent consciousness of political elites by begging for crumbs in the immigration debate. If the labor power of this group was not ignored and the crops went unpicked, the elite would be forced to listen. Instead, the watered-down “immigration reform” movement remains as a movement of annual marches and lobby days organized by non-profit community organizers. Further complicating the issue is the impending environmental disaster. Industrial economies, whether their workforce is outsourced or not, will result in the destruction of the planet. It should be noted that industrial agriculture is equally part of this problem. We must recognize this. Clinging to old traditional leftist ideologies of proletarian organization in industrial economies will almost certainly result in the extinction of species. The old tactics of the traditional Left are obsolete. We live in a new world. If the modern working class adopts the tactics of the past, we cannot expect any meaningful change. A new working class must adopt new tactics. A working class facing ecological disaster must address the cause of that disaster (ie: industrial civilization). Technology has isolated us and controls us through distraction and surveillance. Outsourcing has made us powerless and our demands fall on deaf ears because we no longer pose a threat to those who pull the levers of power. History shows us that “progress” has limits and the evidence shows us that the planet has reached its limit. As Jeffrey St. Clair has noted, the Left is dead. It had no choice but to die. It grew from a world that no longer exists.

The alternative is civil disobedience, which enacts a utopian seizing of collective agency against the logic, which grants executive war powers in the first place—opening space for broader opposition. This is empirically successful.
Vrasti '12 Wanda, Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humboldt University in Berlin "This Courage Called Utopia" The Disorder of Things http://thedisorderofthings.com/2012/11/09/this-courage-called-utopia-2/

The concrete utopia enacted in the Occupy camps was, of course, never as detailed and complex as those represented in science fiction literature. The encampments were fairly short-lived social experiments, far messier and short-lived. They managed, however, to take the anti-authoritarian sensibility seen in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time out into the streets and give it a concrete social and spatial dimension. Instead of placing specific demands on the state, as is usually expected from social movements, Occupy rejected everything and demanded nothing. Occupy was a scream of outrage against capitalist society, as John Holloway (2002) would call it or in the words of the inexhaustibly eloquent Matt Taibbi (2011), a “visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become.” Of course, pundits complained the movement lacked a coherent political vision or a clear strategy for moving from means to ends, and this was partly true but only because Occupy intentionally replaced strategy for process and instrumental rationality for collective ritual. Their tactic was to capture as much public space as possible and transform it in accordance with a distinct utopian program from the ground up. This program, which was evident both in the political content of the movement and the aesthetic from of the encampments, was an eclectic mélange of New Left currents and principles from autonomist Marxism to anarchism, ecofeminism, anti-racism, indigenous struggles, and other social justice movements against the dispossessions of global neoliberal capital. Let’s take, for instance, the camp at Liberty Plaza in New York. It was a kind of “living installation or social sculpture” (Schwendener 2011) made of assembly and lecture spaces, information booths and media centers, cooking tents, day care corners, barter tables, a library space, drum circles and an endless array of banners and posters separating it from the curious eyes of tourists, press and police officers. Inside the camp magical things took place: people made their first contact with direct democracy, homeless people found food and shelter, work was cooperative, art and music were made, social cohesion emerged in the place of isolation and depression. In the words of a participant in the May ’68 events in Paris, people were “living beyond their intellectual, emotional and sensorial limits: each person existed above and beyond himself” (cited in Haiven 2011:71). The Occupy camps were, first of all, a great meeting ground for people who usually only communicate online, as it was a great antechamber of politicization for people not previously involved in activism. Political theorist Jodi Dean (2011), who covered the New York occupation relentlessly, recalls she was spending three hours a day in face-to-face meetings, a rarity for an academic whose work consists mostly of sitting alone at the desk or being part of some surrogate community on social networking sites. Against the segregation and isolation of everyday life Occupy offered participatory structures and open communication. It invited people to experience first-hand what an inclusive and egalitarian society might look like and how far we were from it. The general assemblies and working groups, while famously grueling and time-consuming, allowed an entire generation of otherwise voiceless and apathetic people to come into contact with direct democracy. Learning how to plan an agenda, speak up, listen to others, work towards consensus, and take collective action will have an enduring impact on these people’s lives and actions, if it is only to doubt the mantra that There Is No Alternative. Also important, the camps allowed people to live in public, to do things usually reserved for the private sphere – cooking, cleaning, and caring, or things deemed suspicious when they occur in public without state supervision or corporate endorsement – assembling, camping (loitering), and celebrating. If one of the greatest forces behind the political apathy of our generation is that “we have lost the pleasure of being together” (Bifo and Lovink 2011), cooking together in the camps, sharing free goods, building a people’s library, and so on was the simplest and yet most efficacious way of counteracting the isolation, consumerism and competition responsible for our powerlessness. Renown Marxist feminist writer, Silvia Federici, has long been making the case for “putting an end to the separation between the personal and the political, and political activism and the reproduction of everyday life” (cited in Caffentzis 2012). Where many of our strategies on the Left focus on one-off spectacular events, such as demonstrations and strikes, greater concern for the social reproduction of resistance would help the struggle extend to all moments of our lives, throughout the entire fabric of our communities until it became a self-reproducing “round-the-clock bodily presence” like the Occupy camps (ibid., Federici 2005). The experience of Occupy confirmed Marge Piercy and so many other feminists’ intuition: utopia is in the quotidian details, it is in the way we organize the mundane activities that reproduce our collective existence. Utopia starts at home. Living in public was also the surest way to demonstrate just how militarized and corporatized public space has become in recent years and how distant this was from people’s real needs and from real democracy. Taking public squares and filling them with networks of mutual aid and voluntary cooperation, free food and education, spontaneous creativity and participatory structures, especially in countries like Greece, Spain and the United States where people have to bear the brunt of austerity politics, was less an act of occupation than a liberation of space from the hands of corporate interests and riot police. Even more upsetting than living in public was perhaps the public display of collective enjoyment. Protest and art, politics and festival were integrated in a “carnival of resistance” many bystanders found ineffectual, if not outright offensive. Carnival, street theatre, drumming circles, surrealist and situationist artistic practices have been staples of the alter-globalization movement since the 90s, to the exasperation of police and public officials who never know how to respond to this “non-violent warfare” other than by using violence and demagogy, which only further delegitimize their rule (for a quick summary of carnivalesque tactics see Graeber 2002). For protesters, however, these rituals of collective enjoyment forge a sense of solidarity and social cohesion, crucial at a time when the moralization of debt and the humiliation of precarious work, not to mention police repression are working to obscure the chains that oppress us along with the bonds that could empower us. Rebecca Solnit (2012) captures the spirit well: There was a tremendous emotion around it the camps – the joy of finding you were not alone, the shame that was shed as the prisoners of debt stepped out of the shadows, the ferocity of solidarity when so many of us were attacked by the police, the dizzying hope that everything could be different, and the exhilaration in those moments when it was. Finally, there were the esoteric looks of the camps, the most dubious element of them all. New Age rituals, drum circles, free hugs, incense and all sorts of cliché “hippie” paraphernalia were a constant presence in Occupy encampments. Conservative pundits treated these as a threat to public “health and safety” or an obstacle to rational discourse, but here is more to the spiritual element in Occupy, which can range from ecofeminism to New Age mysticism. Used to an instrumentalist conception of politics that separates rulers and ruled, private and public, and reason from emotion, we sometimes rush to dismiss all collective displays of ecstasy and spirituality as indications of “savagery.” In the ecofeminist tradition, however, spirituality comes from the rediscovery of the sacredness of life, human and non-human, and is essential for liberating women, nature and subaltern people from patriarchal and technocratic rule. Metaphors like “reweaving the world”, “healing the wound”, and re-connecting and interconnecting the “web” are not always New Age affectations. Sometimes they are serious attempts to imbue reality with a spiritual dimension explicitly shunned in all modern traditions of thought, liberal or socialist, that equate the highest human potential with the expansion of material wealth. A spiritual orientation that is mindful of the material relations underlying the estrangement and isolation it is supposed to heal can go a long way in repairing the destruction of traditional knowledge and self-sufficient life forms stretching back to the “witch hunts” and the early days of colonialism (Mies and Shiva 1993). Without a doubt, the Occupy movement has allowed millions of people to participate in (or at least witness) a post-capitalist anti-authoritarian utopia never before seen outside science fiction literature. It created a utopianism for the here and now. Concrete representations of utopia such as these are powerful weapons of struggle in so far as they affectively invest us in the promise of an alternative future and stir our collective desire for it. But how exactly do representations of utopia embolden transformative action? Is there not a danger for the utopian feeling to start eclipsing the strategic kind of action needed to generalize and normalize utopia? This has certainly been the greatest concern with the Occupy camps, which echoes earlier misgivings about intentional communities and direct-action campaigns of the ‘60s and 70s. In the concluding section, I discuss this problem only with reference to concrete utopia of the Occupy movement because it is a more recent example I am far more familiar with than the events and debates Marge Piercy and Ursula Le Guin were writing against in the 70s. Utopia Don’t Be Shy Despite pundits declaring Occupy Wall Street dead on the one-year anniversary of the occupation at Zucotti Park in New York, Occupy has accomplished more in a year than any other leftist social movement or organization over the past few decades. Of course, if one equates Occupy with the encampments in Zucotti Park and other squares across the globe, the conclusion must be that the movement is already history. But this is an incredibly narrow and outright ignorant understanding of what Occupy stood for. Occupy was, from the very beginning, about creating alternative pathways for political organization and communication to prefigure the real democracy to come. Within only one year, Occupy introduced millions of people to the experience of direct democracy; it radicalized an entire generation of previously discouraged and apathetic youth; it built test zones for imagining and living out a post-capitalist utopia organized outside profit or competition; it created a global network of activists that remain active in neighborhood assemblies, guerilla gardens, soup kitchens, direct action campaigns and independent media forms; and it radically shifted the terms of the debate from the morality of austerity to a collective resistance movement against the dictate of public and private debt (Roos 2012). The success of Occupy cannot be measured by or reduced to the longevity of the encampments, but neither would Occupy have had such resonance had there not been the concrete utopias of the camps to give people a sensorial taste and participatory stake in its oppositional vision. For change to be effective it must be affective. It cannot just offer a critique of the present, no matter how correct or convincing, it must also substantiate this narrative with an experience people can relate to and have a part in. This is the principal task of the radical event. Writing about May ’68, Max Haiven describes the radical event as follows: Radical events of collective action are animated by and refract a “flash” of a utopia of unalienated labor. … Here collectivities, to the extent that they are able to create temporary (even partial and problematic) conditions of autonomy, create their own form of life and collaborate “biopolitically” on their own accord. These events are, at least in one valence, radical experiments with organizing social cooperation another way. As such, they (often inadvertently) open themselves to the raw ‘magma’ of human cooperation or the “social flow of doing.” It is precisely this openness that marks the event as “radical,” as fundamentally at odds with a form of capitalist biopolitics that tyrannically seeks monopoly over the possibilities of social cooperation. (2011:70) Radical events are moments when politics explodes from its “representational” casket, erasing the lag between speech and behavior, theory and action, public and private. Divisions of labor, hierarchies and socially assigned roles, official channels of communication and the very category of “the public” as an entity that needs representation by either political or media vehicles dissipate. Radical events release individuals and collectivities from the “done” of their being into an unalienated social flow of “doing.” The normal order of things dissolves, however briefly, to reveal vulnerable cracks and surprising possibilities. In such days of intense social activity, like the three months that passed before most American Occupy camps were removed in a coordinated “shock and awe” operation, time moves faster, events seems more real, experiences arrive unmediated, and people become makers of their own history (Haiven 2011:72). Politics assumes a sensuous quality like in this famous Paris ‘68 slogan: “The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution. The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.” This is “a utopia in which the production and reproduction of reality is totally unalienated and monstrously democratic” (Haiven 2011:75). None of this is to paper over the many political and organizational problems that plagued the Occupy movement and especially the camps: power differentials, exclusions, activist snobbery, and so on. Often the strong social cohesion and aesthetic dimension of the camps came at the expense of an institutional structure or strategy that could have helped make the social relations built in the camps durable and generalizable. But such is the nature of radical events: their obstreperous temporality can rarely accommodate questions of strategy and organization (Haiven 2011:70, 73). In return they leave an enduring affective trace on their participants. Radical experiments in social cooperation like the Occupy camps will shape an entire generation’s sense of what is politically possible and desirable. This might not mean much in terms of concrete strategies for winning either the “war of position” or the “war of maneuver,” but it is certainly more than any previous social movement since the radical events of ’68 can boast. The critique of banks, big business and the collusion with state power prompted by the movement would have never been as widely shared and deeply felt had there not been the encampments to demonstrate a positive, life-affirmative corollary to this critical impulse. No matter how fleeting or foolish it might have seemed, without the prefigurative utopia of the camps it would have been nearly impossible for this movement to prove that life after capitalism might be worth fighting for. The next step, already on the minds of many Occupy activists today, should be how to translate the affective content of the radical event into a strategy of self-sustainable radical politics, how to turn counter-culture into counter-institutions. After all, it is only by enabling mass participation in transformative action that representations of utopia can remain politically useful in the long run. However, this cannot happen by erasing or denying the contribution of the Occupy camps, with all their aesthetic dramatizations, carnivalesque tactics, and time-consuming decision-making structures. When the forces of reaction are engaged in a campaign of erasing any collective memory of success, it is our task to remember that other forms of living and cooperating are possible. When the capitalist economy is being presented as unassailable truth, it is up to us to keep our dissident history alive, and recognize its power over the present and over who we are today (Haiven 2011:84).

Tournament: Vanderbilt | Round: 3 | Opponent: WFU TM | Judge: Fredrick, Katie
1AC treats “war powers” as a legal limit, but legislative or judicial check on militarism will be ineffective without an engaged public. Only this anti-imperialist mass movement can create political pressure necessary to push back against the executive.
Stone '73 I.F. American investigative journalist and author, New York Review of Books, May 17
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1973/apr/19/can-congress-stop-the-president/?pagination=false  

As the means, the secret commitments, and the occasions for intervention have grown, the power of Congress to make the final decisions of war and peace have dwindled. Until the problem is attacked as a function of imperialism and militarism, constitutional and statutory tinkerings with war powers are likely to prove ineffective. Here and there, in the voluminous hearings, reports, and debates on the pending legislation, this truth occasionally surfaces. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee said some of this when it reported out the Javits-Stennis-Eagleton war powers bill last year.4 If the United States, the committee report said, “is to be continually at war, or in crisis, or on the verge of war, or in small-scale, partial or surrogate war, the force of events must lead inevitably toward Executive domination despite any legislative roadblocks that may be placed in the Executive’s way.” Senator Javits also touched on the more fundamental factors when Senate debate on the measure began last year.5 The Founding Fathers were deeply distrustful of “standing armies.” At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, the United States Army consisted of a total of 719 officers and men. On the eve of the Civil War it was only 28,000 and in 1890 it was only 38,000. Even in 1915, the Army numbered less than 175,000. However, since 1951 the Korean War the size of our “standing” armed forces rarely has dipped below 3,000,000 men. These forces under the President’s command are equipped with nuclear weapons…and they are deployed all over the world…. It is the convergence of the President’s role of conducting foreign policy with his role as Commander-in-Chief of the most potent “standing army” the world has ever seen that has tilted the relationship between the President and Congress so far out of balance…. The imbalance will be tilted even further by the completion of the new all-volunteer army, which puts all the armed forces on a professional basis and relieves the President and the Pentagon from the need to rely on the draft except in the case of a major war. The army will no longer be a citizens’ army but a professional force largely enlisted from among the poor and desperate. As Joseph A. Califano, Jr., who was President Johnson’s assistant for domestic affairs, has pointed out,6 An all-volunteer force that subjects only the ones at the bottom to military service will effectively reduce the need for future rulers to be concerned about the more affluent majority in America and its judgments about foreign adventures, at least until those adventures are so far along that they will be virtually impossible to stop. II The character and course of the war powers legislation in Congress show the same weaknesses that have allowed presidential power to grow so strong in the past. One difficulty is that of foreseeing the contingencies under which war may arise. When the Constitution was being written, Congress was first given the power to “make” war, but this was changed to “declare.” The purpose of this change was twofold: to allow the President to repel sudden attacks and to free him as commander in chief from interference by Congress in the day-to-day operations of the armed forces once war had been declared. Too specific a spelling out of presidential powers would either restrict his powers too greatly or give him a blank check in advance for actions that might go far beyond legitimate limits. Last year both houses of Congress passed war powers bills but they died with the session when the differences between them could not be reconciled. Each passed with majorities big enough to override a veto. The Javits-Stennis-Eagleton bill passed the Senate by a vote of 68 to 16 on April 13, 1972. The Zablocki bill passed the House 344 to 13 last August 14. The lopsided vote testifies to the wide discontent in Congress. It is not often that Democrats as different as Stennis and Eagleton can agree with a Republican like Javits to merge their respective bills. In the House there are more than a dozen bills to limit the President’s war-making powers. Their sponsors range from Ronald Dellums, the black militant Democrat from California, to John Rarick of Louisiana, who has been described as a Birchite with a Southern accent. But the coming legislative battle will be between revised versions of the Javits-Stennis-Eagleton bill in the Senate and the new Zablocki bill in the House, as they emerge from committee shortly. The contest will be over which bill will prevail in a showdown or fare best in a compromise. Both bills were extremely cautious in their draftsmanship, though in quite different ways. The House bill7 in its original form won such wide support because it sought to do so little. It merely required the President promptly to inform Congress whenever he committed US military forces to armed conflict abroad “without specific prior authorization by Congress.” A salutary provision of the bill is that it applied not only to the commitment of troops to actual hostilities but also to their deployment abroad, though with a loophole: “except…for humanitarian or other peaceful purposes.” Our purposes are always peaceful. As we shall see, this House bill has now been strengthened. The Senate bill sought to disarm White House opposition by exempting the Indochina war; it does not apply to “hostilities in which the Armed Forces of the United States are involved on the effective date of this Act.” Whether it would apply after a Vietnam cease-fire and troop withdrawal remains a cloudy question. The bill contains enough loopholes to allow a wide range of future “undeclared” presidential wars. The President is allowed to use troops abroad without a declaration of war in order to repel an attack upon the United States and its possessions, or on its armed forces outside the United States, or “to forestall the direct and imminent threat of such an attack,” or to evacuate citizens from an area in which they are endangered. The last was the excuse for the invasion of the Dominican Republic by Lyndon Johnson. Such “undeclared” presidential wars are limited to thirty days unless authorized by Congress and may be terminated sooner by act or joint resolution (the latter is not subject to veto) unless the President certifies in writing that “unavoidable military necessity respecting the safety” of these armed forces requires their continued use “in the course of bringing about a prompt disengagement.” Nixon’s disengagement from Indochina is still incomplete after four years. These loopholes could make the situation worse by giving advance congressional authority to presidential actions of dubious constitutional validity or even patent usurpations. When the bill was reported by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Fulbright noted in his “Additional Views” that the provisions authorizing the President “to forestall the direct and imminent threat” of an attack could have been used to justify the Cambodian invasion of 1970 and the Laotian invasion of 1971, “both of which were explained as necessary to forestall attacks on American forces.” Fulbright feared that under these provisions a future President might cite secret or classified data “to justify almost any conceivable military initiative.” He warned that this authority could be construed “as sanctioning a pre-emptive, or first, attack solely on the President’s own judgment.” Since such a first strike might be nuclear, Fulbright suggested that the bill be amended (in accordance with a proposal advocated by the Federation of American Scientists) to forbid a nuclear first strike under any circumstances “without the prior explicit authorization of Congress.”8 But this was not accepted by the Senate.9 Another weakness in the Javits-Stennis-Eagleton bill is that it does not automatically provide for calling Congress into session once an “undeclared” war begins. The bill says that such “undeclared” wars shall not continue for more than thirty days without specific authorization by Congress. This could prove quite a loophole. Twenty-nine days of sustained bombing would be enough to cripple many a small country which had provoked the chief executive’s ire. Congress could terminate hostilities sooner than thirty days by bill or joint resolution (the latter not subject to presidential veto) unless the President had certified that “military safety for prompt disengagement” made continued fighting necessary. That is another big loophole. Senator John Sherman Cooper would have substituted for all these elaborate thirty-day procedures a simple joint resolution requiring the President to notify Congress whenever he uses the armed forces abroad in an undeclared war or “believes” that such use is “imminent.” Congress, if not already in session, would convene itself within twenty-four hours and proceed immediately to decide whether to authorize such use of the armed forces “and the expenditure of funds for purposes relating to these hostilities or imminent hostilities.” This would avoid the labyrinthine booby-traps and loopholes of the Javits-Stennis-Eagleton bill and confront Congress immediately with the question of whether it concurred or disapproved. Cooper said there was doubt whether Congress could constitutionally limit hostilities to thirty days “or any period of time, except by the denial of funds.” But he said there was no question that “a prompt meeting and consideration by the Congress of any involvement in hostilities is the power and the duty of the Congress.”10 The Cooper approach would avoid many constitutional problems and also the danger of providing new loopholes for undeclared presidential wars. Cooper’s suggestions are not in the Senate bill, but roughly the same approach is taken in the newly revised version of the Zablocki bill, the main bill in the House.11 This is a far stronger bill than last year’s version and may be preferable to the complicated Rube Goldberg contraptions of the Javits-Stennis-Eagleton bill. It reaffirms the congressional right to declare war, recognizes that the President has “in certain extraordinary and emergency circumstances” “authority to defend” the country and its citizens, but limits the exercise of this authority to two kinds of cases. One is to “respond to any act or situation that endangers” the United States or its citizens (but not their property) abroad when the necessity to respond does not allow time for advance congressional authorization; the word “endangers” may be far too broad. The other class of cases is pursuant to specific prior authorization by Congress. “But at the same time,” the Zablocki bill says, “nothing in this resolution should be construed to represent Congressional acceptance of the proposition that executive action alone can satisfy the constitutional process requirement contained in the provisions of mutual security treaties to which the United States is a party.” Since these treaties cover some forty-three separate nations it is important to make clear—it is dangerously vague now—that they cannot be used to authorize war without specific congressional authorization. Otherwise they become blank checks for undeclared presidential wars. A similar provision (Sec. 34) of the Senate bill would in effect recall the many blank checks outstanding in existing treaties by requiring specific congressional authorization for the use of troops under them. But both bills leave untouched the special blank checks for war in the Formosa, Middle East, and Cuba resolutions, leftovers from the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations. The new Zablocki bill requires the President to report to Congress and ask its approval not only when he commits armed forces to conflict but when he “commits military forces equipped for combat to the territory, airspace or waters of a foreign nation” or “substantially enlarges military forces already located in a foreign nation.” These contingencies are not covered by the Javits-Stennis-Eagleton bill. If Congress is not in session, the President under the Zablocki bill must convene it. This differs from the Cooper proposal in that the latter would have the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House reconvene Congress if it were not in session.12 A President in a time of undeclared war might refuse to reconvene Congress, on the claim that this provision was unconstitutional or on some other pretext. Lest this be thought far-fetched we call attention to the war powers testimony of Charles N. Brower, acting legal adviser of the Department of State, before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 13. He objected to any legislation that would require the President to reconvene Congress in the event of undeclared war. “A decision to convene Congress,” Mr. Brower told the House committee, “constitutionally lies within the discretion of the President, and should depend on the circumstances prevailing at the time.” The Framers would have been startled to hear it argued that the President has a constitutional right not to reconvene Congress under circumstances nullifying its constitutional power to declare war. III The reconvening of Congress to deal with an undeclared war would merely be the beginning of the battle. No legislation restricting “undeclared wars” can be any better than the will of Congress to stop them. It is the will that has been lacking in the past. Generally speaking Congress has been alert in preventing the last war and slack in dealing with the next one. None of these war powers bills, if enacted, will make much difference if Congress is as supine as it has been in the past. Senator Cooper, in his “individual views” appended to last year’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, recalled that as early as 1954, when the Korean Defense Treaty was under consideration, Senator Stennis, former Senator Watkins, and himself warned that the Senate should make clear in all these so-called mutual defense treaties that the term “constitutional processes” used in them should not be used to send troops into combat without a declaration of war by Congress. These misgivings were brushed aside by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate. Later as the blank check war resolutions came up on Formosa, the Middle East, Berlin, Cuba, and Tonkin Gulf, reservations to the same effect were offered in committee and on the Senate floor and rejected. The record showed that Congress had consistently voted away its own constitutional war powers.13 The record was put into longer perspective and in a cynical but more searching light by Secretary of State Rogers during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the war powers bills in 1971. Rogers recounted with smug satisfaction the “undeclared” presidential actions as far back as the Mexican war, which triggered American imperial expansion at the expense of our Latin neighbors. He paused especially to savor the undeclared war in which the US Marines occupied and governed Nicaragua from 1926 to 1933. This history, Rogers said, shows an increasing use of presidential powers, “and yet,” he observed, “there was remarkably little complaint from the Congress.” “It is interesting to speculate,” the secretary went on, “why this is so. It seems to me there may have been several possible factors. In the first place, I suppose that Presidents were acting in the context of a generally popular consensus in the country that the United States should assume a posture consistent with its emerging power, particularly in the Western Hemisphere.” Indeed “big stick” tactics toward our weaker neighbors have been generally popular in our history, and attacks upon this attitude have been a lonely exercise as far back as Lincoln’s opposition, while a congressman, to the Mexican war. “Secondly,” Rogers said, “a large majority of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century presidential actions occurred in the Caribbean, where this country’s power was so predominant that there was little or no chance of forcible response to our actions.”14 Tough tactics were applauded, so long as we dealt with nations too weak to hit back. A third element, on which the secretary did not touch, is that almost all of these actions in the Caribbean and Central America were designed to collect debts for American banks and enforce the will of American sugar, fruit, and other interests to which Congress is sensitive (and beholden) both at home and abroad. In every generation there have been Americans to protest imperialism but they have been in a minority. Henry Steele Commager at the same hearings showed that presidential “undeclared wars” have almost always been used against “small, backward and distraught” peoples. He asked, “Does it really comport with the honor and dignity of a great nation to indulge its chief executive in one standard of conduct for the strong and another for the weak?”15 The answer seems to be that the country rather enjoys it, unless—as in Korea and Indochina—the victim shows an unexpected capacity to resist. There is no reason to believe that under any of the pending war powers bills—had they then been on the statute books—Truman could not have obtained congressional authorization for the Korean War or Johnson for the Vietnam war. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., told the House Foreign Affairs Committee the other day, “All wars are popular the first thirty days.” Javits, the principal sponsor of the Senate war powers bill, still accepts conventional clichés about the Vietnam war and only turned against it when it became too expensive. As recently as last May 1, in a speech in Chicago, he said, It is not in the interest of the United States to allow the ARVN to be overrun, and the Thieu government to be overthrown by this current North Vietnamese offensive. But we have already done in Vietnam all that any nation could ever do for an ally in terms of our own casualties and treasure spent…. If the South Vietnamese people want a country, they can have it, because we have equipped them for the purpose. But…we cannot continue for the indefinite future to underwrite the survival and security of South Vietnam. This embodies the conventional and propagandistic view which identifies the Thieu dictatorship with the people of South Vietnam, and paints our purpose there as one of benevolent concern for their self-determination. It is only the cost that separates Javits from Nixon. In fact, the more one studies the record the more one feels that it is neither lack of power nor lack of information that has led Congress to acquiesce in the war powers of the President but the fact that it usually shares much the same outlook. Senator Eagleton provided another example of this before the House Foreign Affairs Committee March 7. He said that while the Senate war powers bill would allow presidential military action to rescue endangered citizens, it was tightly worded to prevent a President from using this excuse “to pursue a policy objective over and above their safe evacuation.” Eagleton cited the Dominican affair when President Johnson expanded a rescue operation “into an invasion” of the Dominican Republic in 1965. “It should be emphasized,” Senator Eagleton said, “that the policy considerations that motivated President Johnson may italics in original have been correct. They were, however, legally questionable since Congress was excluded from the decision-making process.” It must make Latin Americans wince to read such stuff from a liberal US senator. We helped to overthrow a constitutional and democratic government, on the pretext that it was in danger of a communist takeover, and thus to replace the liberal regime of Bosch with the repressive regime of Trujillo’s long-time aide, Balaguer. It is hard to arouse Congress over legally or constitutionally questionable acts by the Executive when it agrees with the policy considerations. The biggest obstacle of all to congressional restraint on the Executive is the instinctive reaction that once war begins, the patriotic duty is to rally behind the war, however disastrous or wrong one may believe it to be. Thus Senator Stennis voiced misgivings about the Indochinese intervention very early in the Sixties but swallowed his doubts once combat operations began. 

Resisting executive power through the formal legislative process is a strategy for cooption and endless trivial battles. This trades-off with the radical opposition necessary to stop the system of global ecological destruction—only effective social action strategies solve
Ford '13 Matt, history teacher "The Left Had No Choice But To Die" 5/31
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/31/the-left-had-no-choice-but-to-die/

Mussolini himself gained his political stripes by roughing up striking workers. Later, a plank of his National Fascist Party’s political platform was hyper-industrialization. In Spain, Franco’s coup was supported by his Fascist allies in Italy and Germany. The Spanish Republic, the Socialist and Anarchist worker organizations, and hope for a life of dignity for the Spanish working class was killed with the victory of Franco. However, it was obvious that throughout Europe, the workers had the power to determine the destiny of the country. Not only did they have the power to shape the economy, but the ability to fight wars depended on their obedience as workers and soldiers. Enough with history. I hope the point has been made and accepted that in industrial economies the workers that manufacture goods or mine raw materials are the most important social group for any type of progress- left or right. In an industrial economy, workers are listened to because economies depend on their labor. In the US today, these circumstances no longer exist. Manufacturing has been outsourced and most of the working class is employed in the service sector. Wars are no longer fought by the working class, and their continuance does not depend on the obedience of the workers. Modern technology has made human power less important in warfare and production. Furthermore, industrial society has given us the poison of environmental destruction. Therefore, we would be naïve to ignore these realities and continue to use outdated tactics to achieve a bigger piece of the industrial society’s pie. We find ourselves lost and directionless. In a position without precedent. In the US, the left has not adapted to these new situations. With these new conditions, the working class simply has little or no power using the same tactics that were used in the past. Strikes in the service sector typically result in nothing due to the ability of technology to supplant human labor or because of the low-skill nature of service sector jobs. Marches or rallies without the threat of affecting profits are without potency. To a great extent, the demands of the working class have been funneled into the political process where, as always, they are watered down and co-opted. The political process is controlled by the rich who no longer have to answer to the demands of the workers that create their wealth, because those workers are either outside of our borders or are Wall Street gamblers. Other demands of the working class are channeled into social movements that adopt the same tactics of the bygone era. Numbers of people in the streets are no longer a threat because profits still roll into the bank accounts of the rich. Picket signs and organized marches with police escorts do not have the power to make change. The Occupy movement serves as the most glaring example. Another factor that must be taken into account in examining our new situation is the growth of the non-profit industrial complex. Social movements are frequently co-opted by the paid community organizers of non-profit organizations. Non-profit organizations cannot be expected to make meaningful change due to their very structure. The budgets of the organizations and the paychecks of the organizers depend on grants from government agencies and endowments. These funds exist -in theory- to combat social problems. So, if these social problems disappear, the funding will disappear. The existence of these organizations and the jobs of the organizers, depend on the existence of social problems. Non-profit organizations do not want to put themselves out of business, therefore they can not be expected to make change. An analogy may be useful: An industrial capitalists exists to make profit. He will not share his profits because doing this threatens his existence. A non-profit organization will not eliminate social problems because doing so threatens their existence. Certainly there are non-profit organizations that are funded by donations from rich people, but this shouldn’t require an explanation of why these will not alleviate the plight of the working class. Not every sector of the working class has been stripped of their labor power. The massive population of farm workers have an immense about of labor power. The profits of the agriculture industry depend on their labor. However the plight of the farm workers has also been co-opted by the political pimps of the unions and the non-profits. Since most of these workers are immigrants, and a sizeable portion is undocumented, the labor power of this group has been diluted into demands for new immigration legislation. Unfortunately, the American elite doesn’t care about the horrendous stories of inhumane treatment of migrant workers, deportations and separation of families, and deaths on the border. They care about their profits. But “immigration reform” movement continues trying to tap into the non-existent consciousness of political elites by begging for crumbs in the immigration debate. If the labor power of this group was not ignored and the crops went unpicked, the elite would be forced to listen. Instead, the watered-down “immigration reform” movement remains as a movement of annual marches and lobby days organized by non-profit community organizers. Further complicating the issue is the impending environmental disaster. Industrial economies, whether their workforce is outsourced or not, will result in the destruction of the planet. It should be noted that industrial agriculture is equally part of this problem. We must recognize this. Clinging to old traditional leftist ideologies of proletarian organization in industrial economies will almost certainly result in the extinction of species. The old tactics of the traditional Left are obsolete. We live in a new world. If the modern working class adopts the tactics of the past, we cannot expect any meaningful change. A new working class must adopt new tactics. A working class facing ecological disaster must address the cause of that disaster (ie: industrial civilization). Technology has isolated us and controls us through distraction and surveillance. Outsourcing has made us powerless and our demands fall on deaf ears because we no longer pose a threat to those who pull the levers of power. History shows us that “progress” has limits and the evidence shows us that the planet has reached its limit. As Jeffrey St. Clair has noted, the Left is dead. It had no choice but to die. It grew from a world that no longer exists.

The alternative is civil disobedience, which enacts a utopian seizing of collective agency against the logic, which grants executive war powers in the first place—opening space for broader opposition. This is empirically successful.
Vrasti '12 Wanda, Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humboldt University in Berlin "This Courage Called Utopia" The Disorder of Things http://thedisorderofthings.com/2012/11/09/this-courage-called-utopia-2/

The concrete utopia enacted in the Occupy camps was, of course, never as detailed and complex as those represented in science fiction literature. The encampments were fairly short-lived social experiments, far messier and short-lived. They managed, however, to take the anti-authoritarian sensibility seen in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time out into the streets and give it a concrete social and spatial dimension. Instead of placing specific demands on the state, as is usually expected from social movements, Occupy rejected everything and demanded nothing. Occupy was a scream of outrage against capitalist society, as John Holloway (2002) would call it or in the words of the inexhaustibly eloquent Matt Taibbi (2011), a “visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become.” Of course, pundits complained the movement lacked a coherent political vision or a clear strategy for moving from means to ends, and this was partly true but only because Occupy intentionally replaced strategy for process and instrumental rationality for collective ritual. Their tactic was to capture as much public space as possible and transform it in accordance with a distinct utopian program from the ground up. This program, which was evident both in the political content of the movement and the aesthetic from of the encampments, was an eclectic mélange of New Left currents and principles from autonomist Marxism to anarchism, ecofeminism, anti-racism, indigenous struggles, and other social justice movements against the dispossessions of global neoliberal capital. Let’s take, for instance, the camp at Liberty Plaza in New York. It was a kind of “living installation or social sculpture” (Schwendener 2011) made of assembly and lecture spaces, information booths and media centers, cooking tents, day care corners, barter tables, a library space, drum circles and an endless array of banners and posters separating it from the curious eyes of tourists, press and police officers. Inside the camp magical things took place: people made their first contact with direct democracy, homeless people found food and shelter, work was cooperative, art and music were made, social cohesion emerged in the place of isolation and depression. In the words of a participant in the May ’68 events in Paris, people were “living beyond their intellectual, emotional and sensorial limits: each person existed above and beyond himself” (cited in Haiven 2011:71). The Occupy camps were, first of all, a great meeting ground for people who usually only communicate online, as it was a great antechamber of politicization for people not previously involved in activism. Political theorist Jodi Dean (2011), who covered the New York occupation relentlessly, recalls she was spending three hours a day in face-to-face meetings, a rarity for an academic whose work consists mostly of sitting alone at the desk or being part of some surrogate community on social networking sites. Against the segregation and isolation of everyday life Occupy offered participatory structures and open communication. It invited people to experience first-hand what an inclusive and egalitarian society might look like and how far we were from it. The general assemblies and working groups, while famously grueling and time-consuming, allowed an entire generation of otherwise voiceless and apathetic people to come into contact with direct democracy. Learning how to plan an agenda, speak up, listen to others, work towards consensus, and take collective action will have an enduring impact on these people’s lives and actions, if it is only to doubt the mantra that There Is No Alternative. Also important, the camps allowed people to live in public, to do things usually reserved for the private sphere – cooking, cleaning, and caring, or things deemed suspicious when they occur in public without state supervision or corporate endorsement – assembling, camping (loitering), and celebrating. If one of the greatest forces behind the political apathy of our generation is that “we have lost the pleasure of being together” (Bifo and Lovink 2011), cooking together in the camps, sharing free goods, building a people’s library, and so on was the simplest and yet most efficacious way of counteracting the isolation, consumerism and competition responsible for our powerlessness. Renown Marxist feminist writer, Silvia Federici, has long been making the case for “putting an end to the separation between the personal and the political, and political activism and the reproduction of everyday life” (cited in Caffentzis 2012). Where many of our strategies on the Left focus on one-off spectacular events, such as demonstrations and strikes, greater concern for the social reproduction of resistance would help the struggle extend to all moments of our lives, throughout the entire fabric of our communities until it became a self-reproducing “round-the-clock bodily presence” like the Occupy camps (ibid., Federici 2005). The experience of Occupy confirmed Marge Piercy and so many other feminists’ intuition: utopia is in the quotidian details, it is in the way we organize the mundane activities that reproduce our collective existence. Utopia starts at home. Living in public was also the surest way to demonstrate just how militarized and corporatized public space has become in recent years and how distant this was from people’s real needs and from real democracy. Taking public squares and filling them with networks of mutual aid and voluntary cooperation, free food and education, spontaneous creativity and participatory structures, especially in countries like Greece, Spain and the United States where people have to bear the brunt of austerity politics, was less an act of occupation than a liberation of space from the hands of corporate interests and riot police. Even more upsetting than living in public was perhaps the public display of collective enjoyment. Protest and art, politics and festival were integrated in a “carnival of resistance” many bystanders found ineffectual, if not outright offensive. Carnival, street theatre, drumming circles, surrealist and situationist artistic practices have been staples of the alter-globalization movement since the 90s, to the exasperation of police and public officials who never know how to respond to this “non-violent warfare” other than by using violence and demagogy, which only further delegitimize their rule (for a quick summary of carnivalesque tactics see Graeber 2002). For protesters, however, these rituals of collective enjoyment forge a sense of solidarity and social cohesion, crucial at a time when the moralization of debt and the humiliation of precarious work, not to mention police repression are working to obscure the chains that oppress us along with the bonds that could empower us. Rebecca Solnit (2012) captures the spirit well: There was a tremendous emotion around it the camps – the joy of finding you were not alone, the shame that was shed as the prisoners of debt stepped out of the shadows, the ferocity of solidarity when so many of us were attacked by the police, the dizzying hope that everything could be different, and the exhilaration in those moments when it was. Finally, there were the esoteric looks of the camps, the most dubious element of them all. New Age rituals, drum circles, free hugs, incense and all sorts of cliché “hippie” paraphernalia were a constant presence in Occupy encampments. Conservative pundits treated these as a threat to public “health and safety” or an obstacle to rational discourse, but here is more to the spiritual element in Occupy, which can range from ecofeminism to New Age mysticism. Used to an instrumentalist conception of politics that separates rulers and ruled, private and public, and reason from emotion, we sometimes rush to dismiss all collective displays of ecstasy and spirituality as indications of “savagery.” In the ecofeminist tradition, however, spirituality comes from the rediscovery of the sacredness of life, human and non-human, and is essential for liberating women, nature and subaltern people from patriarchal and technocratic rule. Metaphors like “reweaving the world”, “healing the wound”, and re-connecting and interconnecting the “web” are not always New Age affectations. Sometimes they are serious attempts to imbue reality with a spiritual dimension explicitly shunned in all modern traditions of thought, liberal or socialist, that equate the highest human potential with the expansion of material wealth. A spiritual orientation that is mindful of the material relations underlying the estrangement and isolation it is supposed to heal can go a long way in repairing the destruction of traditional knowledge and self-sufficient life forms stretching back to the “witch hunts” and the early days of colonialism (Mies and Shiva 1993). Without a doubt, the Occupy movement has allowed millions of people to participate in (or at least witness) a post-capitalist anti-authoritarian utopia never before seen outside science fiction literature. It created a utopianism for the here and now. Concrete representations of utopia such as these are powerful weapons of struggle in so far as they affectively invest us in the promise of an alternative future and stir our collective desire for it. But how exactly do representations of utopia embolden transformative action? Is there not a danger for the utopian feeling to start eclipsing the strategic kind of action needed to generalize and normalize utopia? This has certainly been the greatest concern with the Occupy camps, which echoes earlier misgivings about intentional communities and direct-action campaigns of the ‘60s and 70s. In the concluding section, I discuss this problem only with reference to concrete utopia of the Occupy movement because it is a more recent example I am far more familiar with than the events and debates Marge Piercy and Ursula Le Guin were writing against in the 70s. Utopia Don’t Be Shy Despite pundits declaring Occupy Wall Street dead on the one-year anniversary of the occupation at Zucotti Park in New York, Occupy has accomplished more in a year than any other leftist social movement or organization over the past few decades. Of course, if one equates Occupy with the encampments in Zucotti Park and other squares across the globe, the conclusion must be that the movement is already history. But this is an incredibly narrow and outright ignorant understanding of what Occupy stood for. Occupy was, from the very beginning, about creating alternative pathways for political organization and communication to prefigure the real democracy to come. Within only one year, Occupy introduced millions of people to the experience of direct democracy; it radicalized an entire generation of previously discouraged and apathetic youth; it built test zones for imagining and living out a post-capitalist utopia organized outside profit or competition; it created a global network of activists that remain active in neighborhood assemblies, guerilla gardens, soup kitchens, direct action campaigns and independent media forms; and it radically shifted the terms of the debate from the morality of austerity to a collective resistance movement against the dictate of public and private debt (Roos 2012). The success of Occupy cannot be measured by or reduced to the longevity of the encampments, but neither would Occupy have had such resonance had there not been the concrete utopias of the camps to give people a sensorial taste and participatory stake in its oppositional vision. For change to be effective it must be affective. It cannot just offer a critique of the present, no matter how correct or convincing, it must also substantiate this narrative with an experience people can relate to and have a part in. This is the principal task of the radical event. Writing about May ’68, Max Haiven describes the radical event as follows: Radical events of collective action are animated by and refract a “flash” of a utopia of unalienated labor. … Here collectivities, to the extent that they are able to create temporary (even partial and problematic) conditions of autonomy, create their own form of life and collaborate “biopolitically” on their own accord. These events are, at least in one valence, radical experiments with organizing social cooperation another way. As such, they (often inadvertently) open themselves to the raw ‘magma’ of human cooperation or the “social flow of doing.” It is precisely this openness that marks the event as “radical,” as fundamentally at odds with a form of capitalist biopolitics that tyrannically seeks monopoly over the possibilities of social cooperation. (2011:70) Radical events are moments when politics explodes from its “representational” casket, erasing the lag between speech and behavior, theory and action, public and private. Divisions of labor, hierarchies and socially assigned roles, official channels of communication and the very category of “the public” as an entity that needs representation by either political or media vehicles dissipate. Radical events release individuals and collectivities from the “done” of their being into an unalienated social flow of “doing.” The normal order of things dissolves, however briefly, to reveal vulnerable cracks and surprising possibilities. In such days of intense social activity, like the three months that passed before most American Occupy camps were removed in a coordinated “shock and awe” operation, time moves faster, events seems more real, experiences arrive unmediated, and people become makers of their own history (Haiven 2011:72). Politics assumes a sensuous quality like in this famous Paris ‘68 slogan: “The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution. The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.” This is “a utopia in which the production and reproduction of reality is totally unalienated and monstrously democratic” (Haiven 2011:75). None of this is to paper over the many political and organizational problems that plagued the Occupy movement and especially the camps: power differentials, exclusions, activist snobbery, and so on. Often the strong social cohesion and aesthetic dimension of the camps came at the expense of an institutional structure or strategy that could have helped make the social relations built in the camps durable and generalizable. But such is the nature of radical events: their obstreperous temporality can rarely accommodate questions of strategy and organization (Haiven 2011:70, 73). In return they leave an enduring affective trace on their participants. Radical experiments in social cooperation like the Occupy camps will shape an entire generation’s sense of what is politically possible and desirable. This might not mean much in terms of concrete strategies for winning either the “war of position” or the “war of maneuver,” but it is certainly more than any previous social movement since the radical events of ’68 can boast. The critique of banks, big business and the collusion with state power prompted by the movement would have never been as widely shared and deeply felt had there not been the encampments to demonstrate a positive, life-affirmative corollary to this critical impulse. No matter how fleeting or foolish it might have seemed, without the prefigurative utopia of the camps it would have been nearly impossible for this movement to prove that life after capitalism might be worth fighting for. The next step, already on the minds of many Occupy activists today, should be how to translate the affective content of the radical event into a strategy of self-sustainable radical politics, how to turn counter-culture into counter-institutions. After all, it is only by enabling mass participation in transformative action that representations of utopia can remain politically useful in the long run. However, this cannot happen by erasing or denying the contribution of the Occupy camps, with all their aesthetic dramatizations, carnivalesque tactics, and time-consuming decision-making structures. When the forces of reaction are engaged in a campaign of erasing any collective memory of success, it is our task to remember that other forms of living and cooperating are possible. When the capitalist economy is being presented as unassailable truth, it is up to us to keep our dissident history alive, and recognize its power over the present and over who we are today (Haiven 2011:84).

Tournament: Vandy | Round: 1 | Opponent: Indian FH | Judge: Sciullo, Nick
ERROR

Tournament: Vanderbilt | Round: 3 | Opponent: WFU TM | Judge: Fredrick, Katie
The United States federal judiciary should apply a clear statement principle to the indefinite detention war power authority of President of the United States on the grounds that executive indefinite detention violates international law.

Appeal to constitutional interpretation fails – furthers policies of colonial assimilation
SAITO ’02 (Natsu Taylor; Professor of Law – Georgia State University, “Asserting Plenary Power Over the “Other”: Indians, Immigrants, Colonial Subjects, and Why U.S. Jurisprudence Needs to Incorporate International Law,” 20 Yale L. and Pol’y rev. 427, l/n)

In a powerful critique of the plenary power doctrine in immigration law, Hiroshi Motomura argues that courts have used "phantom" constitutional norms in "subconstitutional," i.e., statutory and regulatory, decisions to gradually introduce constitutional constraints into immigration decisions which formally fall under the plenary power doctrine. Such cases illustrate, he says, that decisionmakers realize the inadequacy of the plenary power doctrine and are moving toward the full constitutionalization of immigration law. 195 While constitutionalization would lead to better results in many cases, 196 this solution raises two fundamental questions. First, is assimilation actually the best solution? And second, is the constitutional order actually capable of incorporating the Other within U.S. law? While the answers will be different in each field of law, there are common limitations to the intraconstitutional option that should be considered. First, an intraconstitutional approach presumes away the rights of those who are subject to plenary authority to decide for themselves the nature of their affiliation with the United States, a right firmly rooted in international law. This is illustrated by the Supreme Court's recent decision in Rice v. Cayetano, where the Court used a race-based equal protection analysis to strike down a rule that only those of native Hawaiian descent were eligible to vote for the trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (thereby opening the vote to white settlers). 197 Chris Iijima notes that although the "colonization of native people is wrapped and justified in the rhetoric and the ideology of white supremacy," 198 the Supreme Court's application of a standard equal protection analysis was inappropriate: The inquiry should not be whether Native Hawaiians constitute a "race" ... but whether they have been specifically harmed as a people by the loss of their nationhood. It is not acceptable to confuse the remedy for loss of nationhood with the remedy for the denial of equal access to political, social, and economic power demanded by other subordinated groups within America... . There can be no "cure" without proper diagnosis. 199 Similarly, equal protection within the polity is not a remedy for the United States's disregard of American Indian sovereignty. Indian nations have consistently rejected the U.S. government's attempts to force them into the polity and *460 have fought instead for independence and the enforcement of treaties. Under international law, the United States's claims to incorporate Indian lands and peoples have no more legitimacy than Germany's claims to Luxembourg or the Netherlands in the early 1940s. 200 This debate is directly tied to the well-being of the people involved. The disastrous consequences of assimilationist policies can be seen throughout the history of colonial rule and in contemporary Indian communities, from the genocidal impact of European diseases and attempts to "Christianize" Indians, to the loss of land and community following the Allotment Act, 201 to the multi-generational trauma inflicted by boarding schools whose stated purpose was to "kill the Indian and save the man," to the urban resettlement programs of the 1950s and 1960s, which left large numbers of people homeless and unemployed. 202 The devastation faced by indigenous communities is presumably a "worst case" scenario for assimilationist policies. However, it is commonly assumed that the problems of indigenous peoples, or those living in U.S. territories or subject to harsh immigration policies, are best solved by their full incorporation into the constitutional framework and, indeed, many are willing to give up claims to sovereignty or self-determination in exchange for equal protection. 203 The inadequacies of this option may be better assessed by considering what should be the "best case" scenario, the extension of full constitutional protection to African Americans. While the plenary power doctrine as articulated in the 1890s was never formally applied to Africans in America, they were subject to the plenary authority of European individuals and their various governments beginning in 1619. 204 Without using the words "slave" or "slavery" the Constitution ensured that the slave trade could not be banned before 1808, that even jurisdictions that forbade slavery would use their police powers to return fugitive slaves, and *461 that the militia would be available to suppress slave uprisings. 205 These provisions, without which the Union would not have been formed, prompted William Lloyd Garrison to call the Constitution "a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell." 206 The law of slavery that evolved in America treated slaves as property, classified persons with any discernible African ancestry as "black," presumed black persons to be slaves, and used the power of the federal government to protect this "property" everywhere under its jurisdiction. 207 Justice Taney articulated this plenary authority most clearly in 1857 in Dred Scott v. Sanford. 208 Dred Scott sued his nominal owner in federal court arguing, among other things, that the time he had spent in territory where slavery was forbidden by the Missouri Compromise rendered him a free man. Taney held that the federal court had no diversity jurisdiction because Scott was not a citizen of Missouri, asserting that black people were not citizens of the United States or, therefore, of any particular state, nor even "persons" under the law. 209 He then described all those of African descent as "regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." 210 Taney concluded by declaring the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional on the ground that Congress could not pass a law barring citizens from taking property into U.S. territories. 211 Thus, until the end of the Civil War, the legal system supported the exercise by white persons generally, and state governments particularly, of complete plenary authority over black people. 212 The legal framework changed dramatically with enactment of the Thirteenth, *462 Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished legalized slavery except as punishment for those convicted of crimes. Many southern legislatures responded by passing laws which criminalized idleness or vagrancy, and many emancipated, but destitute, African Americans found themselves convicts leased to their former "masters," doing the same work on the same land for no pay. 213 The legal system was used to enforce their subordination in numerous ways, leading Justice Miller to comment in the Slaughter-House Cases that the "black codes" passed by southern states after abolition "imposed upon the colored race onerous disabilities and burdens, and curtailed their rights in the pursuit of life, liberty, and property to such an extent that their freedom was of little value." 214 These developments were paralleled in the history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which declared all persons of African descent born in the U.S. to be citizens of both the United States and the state in which they lived, and forbade state governments from discriminating against them. Euroamerican lawmakers and policymakers, even avid abolitionists, had not expected that persons of African descent would become full U.S. citizens, 215 and in response to the amendment they reformulated the legal apparatus in ways that resulted in the social, political, and economic subordination of African Americans. 216 This set the stage for a two-track process in which a stated commitment to formal legal equality ran parallel to legally-sanctioned, race-based subordination, beginning with a series of cases in which the Supreme Court refused to apply the Fourteenth Amendment or the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to non-governmental conduct and "left the African American segment of American society virtually unprotected against state actions." 217 *463 The Fifteenth Amendment, which forbade states from interfering with the right to vote, was similarly undermined. In many disfranchisement cases the Court refused to reach the merits; in others, the Court interpreted the Fifteenth Amendment narrowly, allowing facially neutral legislation adopted for a racially discriminatory purpose, extensive discretion for voter registrars, and race-based interventions by private individuals. 218 In one case, Giles v. Harris, the Court "candidly conceded that even if southern disfranchisement devices were unconstitutional, it was powerless to provide adequate remedies." 219 By 1896 most of the gains African Americans had made during Reconstruction had been rolled back and Jim Crow legislation was becoming commonplace. 220 The Supreme Court cemented this reversion in Plessy v. Ferguson, 221 in an opinion written by Justice Brown, soon to be the author of Downes v. Bidwell. 222 Brown wrote that consigning Homer Plessy, admittedly "seven eighths Caucasian," to a "colored" railroad car was not a "badge of servitude" violating the Thirteenth Amendment, nor a violation of Fourteenth Amendment equal protection. 223 Plessy was not about the segregation of public accommodations so much as the "broader question of constitutive rhetoric and collective identity: who belongs to the American polity and on what conditions?" 224 Even Justice Harlan's dissent, well-known for its assertion that the Constitution is "color-blind," argued that compliance with the Constitution was the best way to maintain white supremacy: The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. 225 Plessy spawned a rash of segregationist legislation which eventually extended ""to every type of transportation, education, and amusement; to public housing, restaurants, hotels, libraries, public parks and recreational facilities, *464 fraternal associations, marriage, employment, and public welfare institutions." 226 Judge Higginbotham wrote: In the post-Reconstruction era, legislatures and courts disingenuously affixed labels to their enactments and pronouncements that suggested compliance with the Fourteenth Amendment's requirements: labels such as "equal protection," "due process," and "privileges and immunities." Nevertheless, their conduct, rulings, and declarations were most often associated with black inferiority and powerlessness. 227 This highlights the real significance of Jim Crow laws, which was not the furtherance of segregation per se but the perpetuation of white supremacy: Jim Crow was enacted in the midst of efforts to disenfranchise black voters and in an era when an average of two African Americans were "lynched by mobs - burned, hanged, mutilated" every week. 228 Judge Higginbotham's "Ten Precepts of American Slavery Jurisprudence" begins with the precept "Inferiority: Presume, preserve, protect, and defend the ideal of the superiority of whites and the inferiority of blacks" and ends with "By Any Means Possible: Support all measures, including the use of violence, that maximize the profitability of slavery and that legitimize racism. Oppose, by the use of violence if necessary, all measures that advocate the abolition of slavery or the diminution of white supremacy." 229 As he said, "it would be a mistake of the highest order to perceive these ten precepts as concepts that perished at the end of the Civil War or upon the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments." 230 Similarly, these precepts did not perish when the Supreme Court overturned Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education 231 or when Congress passed the civil rights acts of the 1960s. 232 Brown introduced an era of equal protection jurisprudence that recognized the inherently subordinating nature of legally segregated public accommodations and institutions, but it did little to address the social, economic, or political realities of a people who had been stripped of their national identities but still suffered from a form of internal colonialism. 233 Although it has been nearly fifty years since the Brown decision, for the most part public schools remain segregated. 234 Nearly thirty percent of African Americans have incomes below *465 the official poverty line, with forty percent in actual poverty. Median black household income is about two-thirds of that of white households and the disparity is much greater when wealth, rather than income, is compared. 235 Two-thirds of all "non-white" men are arrested and jailed before they turn thirty, and they are three-and-one-half times more likely than their white counterparts to be convicted of felonies. 236 The Brown decision is often portrayed as diametrically opposed to Plessy, but they have both served the same end - incorporating persons of African descent into the American polity without fundamentally changing economic or political structures. 237 Brown eschewed separatism as inherently unequal. However, by emphasizing the need to assimilate black children into white society it reinforced a primary tenet of white supremacy: "white" is the norm to which others must assimilate and by which they will be measured. As Jerome Culp says, Brown assumed that "assimilation and cultural degradation were the only two courses available." 238 He summarizes the inadequacies of the equal protection framework: Brown's failures stem from three common misconceptions ... . The most important misconception was that if we changed the law of the land, "good" people would comply with it. However, preventing those "good" people from using ruses to achieve their cherished ends served by racial segregation has proven difficult ... . The second misconception is that there is a race neutral policy that we can all *466 agree on that will achieve racial justice ... . The final misconception at the heart of the Brown decision is that a single standard of assimilation can be articulated for American society, and that black people will be willing to adhere to that standard. This requirement of black assimilation is akin to a requirement that black people put on white face and is ultimately unacceptable as a goal for a decolonized African American community. 239 The experience of African Americans illustrates that equal protection under law is necessary for the protection of human rights, but is not sufficient. The limits to an intraconstitutional solution to problems created by the U.S. government's exercise of plenary power are summarized by the statements of two great African American leaders, quoted by Judge Higginbotham in Shades of Freedom. In 1852 Frederick Douglass said, This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice I must mourn ... . The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. 240 And 140 years later, on July 4, 1992, Justice Thurgood Marshall said, I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories ... and that liberty and equality were just around the bend ... . But as I look around, I see not a nation of unity but of division - Afro and white, indigenous and immigrant, rich and poor, educated and illiterate ... . There is a price to be paid for division and isolation. 241 The African American experience, paralleled in many respects by other "minorities" in the United States, and the terrible price paid by indigenous peoples for attempts to assimilate them 242 illustrate the limitations of an intraconstitutional solution to problems caused by the government's exercise of plenary power. 243 The following section considers a "metaconstitutional" option which *467 incorporates international law, an alternative that has much to offer people of African descent in the U.S. as well as those formally subjected to the plenary power doctrine. 

Coloniality normalizes a hellish existence and defines life through slavery or domination, inaugurating a permanent state of existential condemnation and massive bloodshed

Nelson Maldonado-Torres, associate professor of comparative literature at Rutgers, ‘8 Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, p. 217-21 DDI13

Dussel, Quijano, and Wynter lead us to the understanding that what happened in the Americas was a transformation and naturalization of the non-ethics of war—which represented a sort of exception to the ethics that regulate normal conduct in Christian countries—into a more stable and long-standing reality of damnation, and that this epistemic and material shift occurred in the colony. Damnation, life in hell, is colonialism: a reality characterized by the naturalization of war by means of the naturalization of slavery, now justified in relation to the very constitution of people and no longer solely or principally to their faith or belief. That human beings become slaves when they are vanquished in a war translates in the Americas into the suspicion that the conq uered people, and then non-European peoples in general, are constitutively inferior and that therefore they should assume a position of slavery and serfdom. Later on, this idea would be solidified with respect to the slavery of African peoples, achieving stability up to the present with the tragic reality of different forms of racism. Through this process, what looked like a "state of exception" in the colonies became the rule in the modern world. However, deviating from Giorgio Agarnben's diagnosis, one must say that the colony--long before the concentration camp and the Nazi politics of extermination--served as the testing ground for the limits and possibilities of modernity, thereby revealing its darkest secrets." It is race, the coloniality of power, and its concomitant Eurocentrism (and not only national socialisms or forms of fascism) that allow the "state of exception" to continue to define ordinary relations in this, our so-called postmodern world.
Race emerges within a permanent state of exception where forms of behavior that are legitimate in war become a natural part of the ordinary way of life. In that world, an otherwise extraordinary affair becomes the norm and living in it requires extraordinary effort." In the racial/ colonial world, the "hell" of war becomes a condition that defines the reality of racialized selves, which Fanon referred to as the damnes de la terre (condemned of the earth). The damne (condemned) is a subject who exists in a permanent "hell," and as such, this figure serves as the main referent or liminal other that guarantees the continued affirmation of modernity as a paradigm of war. The hell of the condemned is not defined by the alienation of colonized productive forces, but rather signals the dispensability of racialized subjects, that is, the idea that the world would be fundamentally better without them. The racialized subject is ultimately a dispensable source of value, and exploitation is conceived in this context as due torture, and not solely as the extraction of surplus value. Moreover, it is this very same conception that gives rise to the particular erotic dynamics that characterize the relation between the master and its slaves or racialized workers. The condemned, in short, inhabit a context in which the confrontation with death and murder is ordinary. Their "hell" is not simply "other people," as Sartre would have put it-at least at one point - but rather racist perceptions that are responsible for the suspension of ethical behavior toward peoples at the bottom of the color line. Through racial conceptions that became central to the modern self, modernity and coloniality produced a permanent state of war that racialized and colonized subjects cannot evade or escape.
The modern function of race and the coloniality of power, I am suggesting here, can be understood as a radicalization and naturalization of the non-ethics of war in colonialism." This non-ethics included the practices of eliminating and enslaving certain subjects-for example, indigenous and black-as part of the enterprise of colonization. From here one could as well refer to them as the death ethics of war. War, however, is not only about killing or enslaving; it also includes a particular treatment of sexuality and femininity: rape. Coloniality is an order of things that places people of color within the murderous and rapist view of a vigilant ego, and the primary targets of this rape are women. But men of color are also seen through these lenses and feminized, to become fundamentally penetrable subjects for the ego conquiro. Racial- ization functions through gender and sex, and the ego conquiro is thereby constitutively a phallic ego as well." Dussel. who presents this thesis of the phallic character of the ego cogito, also makes links, albeit indirectly, with the reality of war.
And thus, in the beginning of modernity, before Descartes discovered ... a terrifying anthropological dualism in Europe, the Spanish conquistadors arrived in America. The phallic conception of the European-medieval world is now added to the forms of submission of the vanquished Indians. "Males," Bartolome de las Casas writes, are reduced through "the hardest, most horrible, and harshest serfdom"; but this only occurs with those who have remained alive, because many of them have died; however, "in war typically they only leave alive young men (mozos) and women.""5 The indigenous people who survive the massacre or are left alive have to contend with a world that considers them to be dispensable. And since their bodies have been conceived of as inherently inferior or violent, they must be constantly subdued or civilized, which requires renewed acts of conquest and colonization. The survivors continue to live in a world defined by war, and this situation is peculiar in the case of women. AsT. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T, White put it in the preface to their anthology Spoils oJ War: Women oJ Color, Cultures, and Revolutions: A sexist and/or racist patriarchal culture and order posts and attempts to maintain, through violent acts of force if necessary, the subjugation and inferiority of women of color. As Joy James notes, "its explicit, general premise constructs a conceptual framework of male and/or white as normative in order to enforce a politicaljracial, economic, cultural. sexual and intellectual mandate of male and/or white as superior." The warfront has always been a "feminized" and "colored" space for women of color. Their experiences and perceptions of war, conA ict, resistance, and struggle emerge from their specific racial-ethnic and gendered locations ... Inter arma silent leges: in time of war the law is silent," Walzer notes. Thus, this volume operates from the premise that war has been and is presently in our midst.” The links between war, conquest, and the exploitation of women's bodies are hardly accidental. In his study of war and gender, Joshua Goldstein argues that conquest usually proceeds through an extension of the rape and exploitation of women in wartime." He argues that to understand conquest, one needs to examine: I) male sexuality as a cause of aggression; 2) the feminization of enemies as symbolic domination; and 3) dependence on the exploitation of women's labor-including reproduction." My argument is, first, that these three elements came together in a powerful way in the idea of race that began to emerge in the conquest and colonization of the Americas. My second point is that through the idea of race, these elements exceed the activity of conquest and come to define what from that point on passes as the idea of a "normal" world. As a result, the phenomenology of a racial context resembles, if it is not fundamentally identical to, the phenomenology of war and conquest. Racism posits its targets as racialized and sexualized subjects that, once vanquished, are said to be inherently servile and whose bodies come to form part of an economy of sexual abuse, exploitation, and control. The coloniality of power cannot be fully understood without reference to the transformation and naturalization of war and conquest in modern times.
Hellish existence in the colonial world carries with it both the racial and the gendered aspects of the naturalization of the non-ethics of war. "Killability" and "rapeability" are inscribed into the images of colonial bodies and deeply mark their ordinary existence. Lacking real authority, colonized men are permanently feminized and simultaneously represent a constant threat for whom any amount of authority, any visible trace of the phallus is multiplied in a symbolic hysteria that knows no lirnits.?" Mythical depiction of the black man's penis is a case in point: the black man is depicted as an aggressive sexual beast who desires to rape women, particularly white women. The black woman, in turn, is seen as always already sexually available to the rapist gaze of the white, and as fundamentally promiscuous. In short, the black woman is seen as a highly erotic being whose primary function is fulfilling sexual desire and reproduction. To be sure, any amount of "penis" in either one represents a threat, but in his most familiar and typical forms the black man represents the act of rape- "raping" -while the black woman is seen as the most legitimate victim of rape- "being raped." In an antiblack world black women appear as subjects who deserve to be raped and to suffer the consequences-in terms of a lack of protection from the legal system, sexual abuse, and lack of financial assistance to sustain themselves and their families-just as black men deserve to be penalized for raping, even without having committed the act. Both "raping" and "being raped" are attached to blackness as if they form part of the essence of black folk, who are seen as a dispensable population. Black bodies are seen as excessively violent and erotic, as well as being the legitimate recipients of excessive violence, erotic and otherwise." "Killability" and "rapeability" are part of their essence, understood in a phenomenological way. The "essence" of blackness in a colonial anti-black world is part of a larger context of meaning in which the death ethics of war gradually becomes a constitutive part of an allegedly normal world. In its modern racial and colonial connotations and uses, blackness is the invention and the projection of a social body oriented by the death ethics of war." This murderous and raping social body projects the features that define it onto sub-Others in order to be able to legitimate the same behavior that is allegedly descriptive of them. The same ideas that inspire perverted acts in war--particularly slavery, murder, and rape--are legitimized in modernity through the idea of race and gradually come to be seen as more or less normal thanks to the alleged obviousness and non-problematic character of black slavery and anti-black racism. To be sure, those who suffer the consequences of such a system are primarily blacks and indigenous peoples, but it also deeply affects all of those who appear as colored or close to darkness. In short, this system of symbolic representations, the material conditions that in part produce and continue to legitimate it, and the existential dynamics that occur therein (which are also at the same time derivative and constitutive of such a context) are part of a process that naturalizes the non-ethics or death ethics of war. Sub-ontological difference is the result of such naturalization and is legitimized through the idea of race. In such a world, ontology collapses into a Manicheanism, as Fanon suggested."

Tournament: NDT | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harvard HX | Judge:
The US Executive branch should
--establish ex ante transparency of targeted killing standards and procedures and restrict targeted killings to clear and convincing instances of threat determined using a quantum of information framework.
The executive branch should end targeted killings by the Central Intelligence Agency using remotely piloted aircraft systems and only claim authority for targeted killing under Title 50 authority.
The United States Congress should create an intelligence appropriation mechanism distinct from defense appropriations. Through this mechanism, the United States Congress should substantially increase funding for CIA intelligence operations.
Ex ante transparency and procedures solves accountability and overuse.
Daskal 6/1/2012 (Jennifer, American University College of Law, "The Geography of the Battlefield: A Framework for Detention and Targeting Outside the 'Hot' Conflict Zone" papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2049532)

4. Procedural Requirements Currently, officials in the executive branch carry out all such ex ante review of out-of-battlefield targeting and detention decisions, reportedly with the involvement of the President, but without any binding and publicly articulated standards governing the exercise of these authorities. n163 All ex post review of targeting is also done internally within the executive branch. There is no public accounting, or even acknowledgment, of most strikes, their success and error rates, or the extent of any collateral damage. Whereas the Department of Defense provides solatia or condolence payments to Afghan civilians who are killed or injured as a result of military actions in Afghanistan (and formerly did so in Iraq), there is no equivalent effort in areas outside the active conflict zone. n164 Meanwhile, the degree of ex post review of detention decisions depends on the location of detention as opposed to the location of capture. Thus, *1219 Guantanamo detainees are entitled to habeas review, but detainees held in Afghanistan are not, even if they were captured far away and brought to Afghanistan to be detained. n165 Enhanced ex ante and ex post procedural protections for both detention and targeting, coupled with transparency as to the standards and processes employed, serve several important functions: they can minimize error and abuse by creating time for advance reflection, correct erroneous deprivations of liberty, create endogenous incentives to avoid mistake or abuse, and increase the legitimacy of state action. a. Ex Ante Procedures Three key considerations should guide the development of ex ante procedures. First, any procedural requirements must reasonably respond to the need for secrecy in certain operations. Secrecy concerns cannot, for example, justify the lack of transparency as to the substantive targeting standards being employed. There is, however, a legitimate need for the state to protect its sources and methods and to maintain an element of surprise in an attack or capture operation. Second, contrary to oft-repeated rhetoric about the ticking time bomb, few, if any, capture or kill operations outside a zone of active conflict occur in situations of true exigency. n166 Rather, there is often the time and need for advance planning. In fact, advance planning is often necessary to minimize damage to one's own troops and nearby civilians. n167 Third, the procedures and standards employed must be transparent and sufficiently credible to achieve the desired legitimacy gains. These considerations suggest the value of an independent, formalized, ex ante review system. Possible models include the Foreign Intelligence *1220 Surveillance Court (FISC), n168 or a FISC-like entity composed of military and intelligence officials and military lawyers, in the mode of an executive branch review board. n169 Created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, n170 the FISC grants ex parte orders for electronic surveillance and physical searches, among other actions, based on a finding that a "significant purpose" of the surveilla

Tournament: NDT | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harvard HX | Judge:
Obama’s PC stops Dems from pushing Iran sanctions now – that’s prevents war.
Jacob Glass 3/25/14, Truman-Albright Fellow, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-glass/as-iran-nuclear-negotiati_b_5024604.html

Last week Iran and the so-called P5+1 countries -- Russia, China, Britain, France, the U.S., plus Germany -- began a new round of negotiations in the Austrian capital of Vienna. While perhaps overshadowed by tensions on the Crimean Peninsula and missing Malaysian Flight 370, the talks mark a significant step towards resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis. Yet misguided calls by Congress to increase sanctions on Iran threaten to scuttle progress, and underscore the fragility of the negotiating process. Over the past three decades, Iran has faced crippling sanctions imposed by America and the international community. Trade restrictions have steadily increased to block Iran's lucrative petroleum export market as well as the country's participation in the global banking system. All told, international sanctions have cost Iran over $100 billion in lost oil profits alone. So called "carrot and stick" policies have long been fundamental to international diplomacy. The "stick" has been a sharp one, and has finally brought the Iranians to the negotiating table. During his September visit to the UN General Assembly in New York, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani spoke with President Obama over the phone, marking the first direct communication between an American and Iranian president since 1979. On November 24, an interim "first-step" deal was reached to freeze Iran's nuclear development program and pave the way for a comprehensive agreement. The deal halts uranium enrichment above 3.5 percent and puts international observers on the ground in Iran, all but ensuring that negotiations cannot be used as a delay tactic. Yet amid these positive signs that diplomacy is working, members of Congress have advocated for even more sanctions to be levied against Iran, specifically in the form of Senate Bill 1881, sponsored by Illinois Republican Mark Kirk and New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez. New sanctions would torpedo the Vienna talks and reverse the diplomatic progress that has been made. Iranian officials have already promised to abandon negotiations if new sanctions are passed. Even our own allies, along with Russia and China, have opposed the move. Passing unilateral sanctions will splinter the fragile international coalition, needlessly antagonize Iranian negotiators, and make a violent conflict with Iran more likely. Diplomatic victory will only be achieved if the international community stands united before Iran. To this point, the Obama administration has avoided a vote on SB 1881 by threatening a veto of the bill, and the administration's full court press to prevent Senate Democrats from supporting new sanctions has bought international negotiators time. Several influential Democrats, including Senator Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut, have agreed to postpone a vote on the bill, contingent on productive negotiations. Although legislation imposing new sanctions has been avoided thus far, the pressure on Congressional Democrats to act will intensify as talks in Vienna move forward. This round of negotiations is widely projected to be more difficult than the November deal, and inflammatory rhetoric from Tehran is likely. Nevertheless, sanctions are not the answer. Instead, we must continue to let diplomacy run its course. Sanctions have done their job by bringing Iran to the table. In return, Iran expects to be rewarded with sanctions relief. The passage of new trade restrictions would effectively withdraw the carrot, and hit Iran with another stick. Consider the negotiations over. The risks of delaying new sanctions is slight. The sanctions relief Iran is receiving is valued between $6 and $7 billion, and represents only a small fraction of the remaining restrictions blocking Iran from using the international banking system and selling oil. Should Iran prove to be a dishonest negotiating partner, sanctions can be renewed and

Tournament: NDT | Round: 5 | Opponent: Harvard HX | Judge:
The United States federal government should enact legislation restricting Title 50 authority for targeted killing by the Central Intelligence Agency using remotely piloted aircraft systems.
Observation One—the counterplan competes—it eliminates presidential focus from the plan text—any elimination of presidential focus severs the plan’s focus on the presidency
And this distinction is meaningful—rhetoric matters—when Congress debates the plan the rhetoric they will use frames expectations and scope of policy
Bjork, prof. of Communication @ University of Utah, 1992 p. 120
(Rebecca, The Strategic Defense Initiative)
I argued in chapter 3 that one factor leading to the rising support for the nuclear freeze movement was the Reagan administration’s “loose talk” concerning nuclear warfighting strategies, civil defense, and limited nuclear war scenarios. Although Regan’s policy concerning warfighting options was not substantially different from Carter’s, official statements from the Reagan Whitee House used language that was less euphemistic than previous statements. What Carter’s advisers referred to as escalatory “options,” Caspar Weinberg called “nuclear warfighting”. Assuming for the moment that foreign policy discourse somehow is separate from “reality” the substance of Reagan’s policy was the same as Carter’s: only the language used to describe it publicly had changed. Betts agreed with this assessment, when he argued that the freeze campaign was energized in part by Rewagan’s belligerent rhetoric, and that “his loose talk about limited nuclear war simply thrust into wider concsciousness the reality of what official doctrine has been for over two decades.” In other words, talk about policy is what matters, not some extra-symbolic “reality” of policy itself.
Best interpretation of fiat: imagine the representations associated with the plan are what are used in Congressional debates over the policy—this allows for a combination of real world policy analysis with scholarly insight—it maintains a focus on policies and institutions while at the same time acknowledging the complexities that language offer for our politics
The counterplan competes on discourse alone but even if they win functional competition there are meaningful functional differences between the plan and counterplan
Observation Two—Net benefit—hegemonic presidentialism
Framing the policy as presidential regulation triggers a media firestorm that undercuts legitimacy of the plan
Nelson 8 (Dana D. Nelson is a professor of English at Vanderbilt university and prominent author/activist. She received her MA and PhD from Michigan State University. “Bad for Democracy: How The Presidency Undermines the Power of the People”, University of Minnesota Press 2008, PRINT, mjb) The first part of my argument is simple enough: it's not particular presi­ dents who are a problem for l\S. democracy, it's presidentialism. Prcsi- dentialism characterizes the unconscious power that the presidency works on citizens, and it describes the gravitational symbolic and insti­tutional place that the presidency assumes within U.S. government. We understand the president's strength to be the strength of U.S. democracy Although the hallmark of constitutional democracy is the separated and balanced powers of the three governmental branches, executive, legisla­tive, and judicial, the fact is, when we think democracy, wrc think of the president, Legislatures and judges alike are factually more likely to assist than to impede the president. On the rare occasions that they set up a roadblock, they are often depicted by media and understood by citizens to be interferingwrith the president's power and the democratic process. Presidentialism has trained us for this conclusion, and insofar as it suc­ceeds, it works to undermine our democratic proclivities and skill build­ing. Baldly put, presidentialism has been bad for democracy. Despite the particular virtues and leadership skills of some presidents, presidential­ism works against peoples' civic cultivation of democratic skills. It trains us to want t

Tournament: NDT | Round: 1 | Opponent: Oklahoma CL | Judge: Eyzaguirre, Phillips, M Moore
1NC
Realism K
 “Invisible Man”
Ralph Ellison  (Vintage International Edition, 1995)

“Well, I wasn’t always lame, and I’m not really now ‘cause
AND
know who is he or where he’s going. (576-577)

1NC- Corporatism (Long)

Our alternative is a paradigm shift in social relations towards a more equitable distribution of resources. This recognizes material foundations for autonomy as a pre-requisite for communication
Briscoe '12 Felicia, Professor of Education at UTSA, "Anarchist, Neoliberal, and Democratic Decision-Making: Deepening the Joy in Learning and Teaching" Education Studies, Vol. 48, Issue 1
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00131946.2011.637257#preview

A More Equal Distribution of Resources Emma Goldman describes anarchism as “an order that
AND
, there is little autonomy; without autonomy, authentic communication becomes impossible.

The role of the ballot is to resist performances complicit with corporatist ideology of self-creation and the vocabulary of radical choice that constructs them. Insofar as the aff solves, they assert the privilege to call into question the current order from a position that is dominant
Mueller '13 Sebastian, "NEWSPEAK RULES. HOW NEOLIBERALISM EXPLAINS THE WORLD"
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/02/05/18731399.php

How is the socio-economic change of the last decades expressed in political language
AND
policy since Agenda 2010 under Gerhard Schroeder should be viewed on this background.

Only a decision-making calculus that privileges working class LIFE over corporatist valorization can de-link growth from environmental destruction. Failure ensures destruction.  
Harvey '5 David, David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" http://messhall.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/A-Brief-History-of-Neoliberalism.pdf

The imposition of short-term contractual logic on environmental uses has disastrous consequences.
AND
warning. 30 Less dramatic but equally insidious is the case of forestry.

The 1AC appeals to the power of agential language to give the ballot itself political force-this buys into a mode of thinking that over-invests in self-liberating discourse. Their notion the ballot can do anything to alter material relations entrenches their resistance
Cloud and Gunn '10 Joshua Gunn and Dana L. Cloud, Department of Communication, University of Texas at Austin, "Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism" Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

Over a decade ago anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff (1999) advanced
AND
magical voluntarism leads to narcissistic complacency, regressive infantilism, and elitist arrogance.

heir scholarship is a Horatio Alger narrative that buys into the neoliberal fantasy of upward mobility that the system permits success even against the odds. Our criticism is a prior question to their role of the ballot and indicts the way they justify methodological resistance.
Reed '13 Adolph Reed, Jr., University of Pennsylvania http://nonsite.org/editorial/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why 2-25-13

So why is a tale about a manumitted slave/homicidal black gunslinger more palatable
AND
, genders, and sexual orientations, narrates its understandings of the world. 

Exclusion is bad, but inclusion via the ballot enact symbolic violence that outweighs the aff and trades off with the creation of  a collectivist community
Page ’99 Helan Enoch Page is an Associate Professor and race theorist in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Transforming Anthropology, Volume 8, Numbers 1and2 1999, Page pp. 111-128

African Americans expecting benefits from racial integration are most apt to patronize products sold through
AND
, but neither should it any longer cater to phobic reactions to blackness. 

The idea that a judge’s decision can “change the world” is the capitalist ideology of sanitizing class inequality by highlighting individual success. Only with a starting focus on structure can we develop pedagogies that make material improvements
Cane and Zorn ’08 -- Don Cane  and Jacob Zorn are of the Spartacist League Central Committee speaks and write on Race, Class and Socialist Revolution ( Communist Organizing in the Jim Crow South: What's Not in The Great Debaters”, “ Workers Vanguard No. 92521 November 2008)

The Great Debaters represents a take on the old theme of “racial uplift”—
AND
party necessary to sweep away the capitalist system of exploitation and racial oppression. 

Advancing their speech act in a competitive venue is self-containing—commodifies their speech within the political economy of the ballot which submits to the very mode of control they’re resisting
James ‘3 Joy, Professor of Africana Studies @ Brown “Academia, activism, and imprisoned intellectuals.” http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Academia,+activism,+and+imprisoned+intellectuals.-a0133368005

Activism is as multidimensional in its appearances as the academy; as academia's alter ego
AND
communicate with political prisoners, as openly as possible given the structural disparities.

Reliance on performativity figures the social order as responsive to speech acts—this confuses performance and agency. The idea we can talk or think our way out lets perpetrators off the hook and re-creates exploitation
Cloud and Gunn '10 Joshua Gunn and Dana L. Cloud, Department of Communication, University of Texas at Austin, "Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism" Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

Constructivism and the Malleable World Presumably drawing on the work of Judith Butler (1993
AND
, urging millions to think positively in the face of their immiseration.9

Narrative challenges to privilege are scripted around static understandings of power, obscuring particularity. This enacts new hierarchies and makes resistance cooptable
Ewick and Silbey '95 Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey, "Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Toward a Sociology of Narrative" Law and Society Review, 00239216, 1995, Vol. 29, Issue 2 http://web.mit.edu/ssilbey/www/pdf/subversive.pdf

In the previous section, we discussed how narratives, like the lives and experiences
AND
without the requirement to produce an individually crafted narrative of right and liability.

2NC
And the idea that they can appropriate things like the N-word from their cultural position takes for granted the individual’s position to break with the violent history of slavery – this is an independent reason to reject the speech act of the 1nc and a net-benefit to a negative ballot that affirms their speech act without this word – our argument is not that black folks should never use the word or that it isn’t theirs to use but rather that their use empowers a form of individualistic politics that does more harm than good
Patrice R. Ferguson 6, http://www.csun.edu/csbs/departments/pan_african_studies/programs/hip_hop_think_tank/articles.html

At what point does a word take on a life of its own? When
AND
-image dilemmas of African Americans. (Cole et al, 205) 

Link- Radical Individualism
Belief in radical individualism proves the link—
Belief in the power of the will against material reality engages in victim blaming and opens the door for further neoliberal domination
Cloud and Gunn '10 Joshua Gunn and Dana L. Cloud, Department of Communication, University of Texas at Austin, "Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism" Communication Theory 20 (2010) 50–78 © 2010 International Communication Association

Radical Individualism Finally, both The Secret and Foss, Waters, and Armada’s versions
AND
of their debt (see Bond, 2001; Geier, 2000).12

Turns the aff—the corporatist ideology of individualism will be appropriated as a mask for racism and economic violence
Perelman ‘5  Michael, Professor of Economics at CSU-Chico, “Manufacturing Discontent: The Trap of Individualism in Corporate Society” Pluto Press, p. 139

Of course, no society can completely abolish risk, but the government can help
AND
it would be toward a young, immigrant, single mother of color. 

1NR
Reading the story of the Invisible Man serves as a chrono-political afro-futurist intervention into dominant and oppressive histories of the past and future that gets outside of the historical and cultural understanding of the aff. This is key.
Yaszek 2007 (Lisa, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, "An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man" www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642520500149202#.UyY8mK1dUag)

Not surprisingly, Ellison's sense of a uniquely modern American sociopolitical identity is closely related
AND
first step towards the creation of a new and more egalitarian multiracial futurity.

We should start the process of re-thinking ‘politics as usual’ by reclaiming the critical power of writing—must be open to the unpredictability of multiple meanings.
Hemer 2006 (Oscar, Professor at Malmo University, "Fiction's truth and social change. Preliminary outlines for an investigation of fiction as a research method and a means of communication for social change" dspace.mah.se/handle/2043/7465)

Literature played a key-role in the formation of nation-states and the
AND
content, exploring the tension between what is documented and what is imagined.

Scott Link
One of the spits of the 2AC discusses the affs ability to come to the debate community and speak the truth but this assumes that there is a “truth” to be experienced rather than a million different experiences. That his experience is the same with UDLs as all is a form of individual politics. He says we don’t link to your corporatism kritik because we are “talking overacrchingly about what all experience.” It is a mimicry of the liberal politics of the powerful that demand minority groups submit a single entity to speak on their behalf in order to foreclose a discussion of broader edifices of power. This turns politics into policing
Scott, 92 – professor of sociology at Princeton (Joan, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity,” The Identity in Question (Summer, 1992), pp. 12-19, JSTOR)
There is nothing wrong, on the face of it, with teaching individuals about
AND
facts the prerequisites for inclusion in any group.

A2- Perm
Adding other forms to fiction destroys the imaginative potential—recreates dominant political practices
Hemer 2013 (Oscar, professor at Malmö University and co-director of Ørecomm, “Global Histories through the Lens of Fiction” Lecture given as part of the seminar “What Time is Global History? http://195.178.227.4/bitstream/handle/2043/16520/Global_Histories_RUC.pdf?sequence=3)

That could have been my concluding remark. But I’ll give you one final example
AND
a just as serious interrogation of the present past as the academic dissertation.

Only through a discussion of particular characters can we make the 1ac discussion accessible
Carroll, '2 The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature, and Moral Knowledge Author(s): Noël Carroll Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 60, No. 1, 60th Anniversary Issue (Winter, 2002), pp. 3-26

Perhaps some evidence for this hypothesis can be found in the typical response of plain
AND
the same person schemas they use to understand each other in everyday life.