Neg vs. Greenhill BH---St.

Mark’s----Round
4
1NC
OFF
 OFF
POLITICS DA.
Ukraine aid passes now, but it’s close and PC is key.
Naomi Lim 10/13, reporter for the Washington examiner, 10/13/2023, "Slew of vexing international
crises confront Biden a year out from Election Day,"
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/biden-foreign-policy-president
Biden, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman during his 36 years in the chamber as a Delaware Democrat, also had a
considerable foreign policy portfolio as vice president for eight years under President Barack Obama. And since
Russia's February 2022
invasion of Ukraine , Biden and his administration have steered U.S. foreign policy toward the beleaguered
Eastern European nation.
To be sure, these international crises have strong domestic components. With the Israel situation, there's a direct U.S. tie, with American
citizens among those being held hostage. And up to 25 Hamas attack casualties are dual Israeli-American citizens.

Convincing the American public of a direct interest in the U.S. to support Ukraine amid its defensive war
against Russia is a tougher sell . Though military aid to Ukraine commands majority support in
Congress , a deep isolationist streak runs through Hill Republicans. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Rep. M arjorie T aylor
G reene (R-GA), and a vocal minority of their GOP colleagues , fervent Trump supporters, contend Ukraine aid saps
financial resources needed for domestic concerns .

The Biden administration may try a workaround by including in its Israel military aid funding request materials for
Ukraine as well as Taiwan, which is facing a military threat from China. Funding to strengthen security of the U.S.-Mexico border could also
be included.

Border funding was a casualty of wrangling between the Republican majority House, Democratic Senate, and Biden White House during the
final days of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's (R-CA) nine-month tenure in his chamber's top job. McCarthy brought to the House floor a
"clean" funding bill, minus aid for Ukraine and the border. The measure passed but enraged some of the most conservative House Republicans,
who wanted much broader budget cuts. McCarthy soon was ousted, likely to be succeeded by House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), who
is a big Israel supporter but has been coy on Ukraine aid.

Biden , in a Tuesday speech, promised to ask Congress "to take urgent action to fund the national security
requirements of our critical partners."
Biden noted the cause's bipartisan support.

"This is not about party or politics," he said. "This is about the security of our world, the security of the United States of America."

Israel's Counteroffensive

It's an open question how these foreign policy crises confronting Biden come together. But it has the potential to be bad news for Biden, just
over a year out from Election Day.

Israel's war with Iran-backed Hamas, coupled with the slow progress of Ukraine's counteroffensive against Russia and uncertainty regarding
future Ukraine support, "paints a picture of an administration taking backwards steps in foreign and security policy," said retired Army Col. Rich
Outzen, an Atlantic Council senior fellow.

"Our friends remain under threat, Iran and Russia have not been deterred or adequately punished for their aggressive behaviors, and there is
little consistent vision or leadership coming from the White House," Outzen, a former State Department adviser, told the Washington Examiner.
"Instead, there are a lot of mixed messages."

Alexander Hamilton Society Executive Director Gabriel Scheinmann said Biden's foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, is in "shambles"
after he distanced himself from Israel and Saudi Arabia while he "sought to legitimize or acquiesce Iranian power."
"From the desire to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, from the amount of sanctions relief that the administration basically gave the Iranians, not
just the hostage money recently, but the oil revenues are really the big one, over the course of two years," Scheinmann told the Washington
Examiner.

Ukraine's Fight for Survival

While there's somewhat less overt support for backing Ukraine , tying the two foreign crises together may
help achieve financial support for both .

Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the Israel-Hamas war will " complicate
matters more for those who are opposing funds for Ukraine ."
Goldberg added, "We now have two democracies under assault by anti-American forces, both in need of sustained U.S. military support, both
willing to do all the fighting without a single American soldier being put in harm's way."

Goldberg, who in the Trump administration was the director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction for the White House National
Security Council, said of the Biden administration funding strategy, "If the White House requests a
supplemental that combines emergency assistance for Israel with emergency assistance for Ukraine , the pro-
Putin caucus in the House will have a difficult time maneuvering."

A JG requires massive PC.

Annie Lowrey 18, journalist for The Atlantic, 5/11/2018, “A Promise So Big, Democrats Aren’t Sure
How to Keep It,” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/05/the-democratic-party-wants-to-
end-unemployment/560153/

There is also the cost. “It would take a level of funding for which we would have to very much alter our fiscal
outlook ,” Jared Bernstein, who was former Vice President Joe Biden’s chief economist and is now at CBPP, told me. Small pilot programs
aimed at stopping recidivism might pay for themselves. But a true jobs guarantee would cost something like $400 to $700 billion a year now,
and vastly more during a downturn. There are other sticky questions. How much should these jobs pay , and what
kind of benefits should they provide? Would a jobs guarantee foment inflation ? What would a jobs
guarantee do to our understanding of the interplay between inflation , employment , and growth
anyway? Would the government get rid of unemployment insurance ? Would the jobs be permanent? If not, is that
really a guarantee that ends joblessness, once and for all? If so, would that sap the country of some of the ingenuity of its private workforce?
What share of the economy would be involved in care work? How much would that represent a
movement from uncompensated, kitchen-table care work to compensated , workplace care work? For
some Democratic policy wonks, the trade-offs in both economic and political capital seem the most
salient. What do you give up by implementing a jobs guarantee ? What comes first: a public option for
health insurance , or a major jobs plan , or an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, or a universal child
allowance, or a major educational debt-relief plan , or postal banking —all of which are ideas being pushed by
Democratic presidential aspirants right now? “How much in life do you spend money on the last mile?” Gene Sperling, who was the director of
the National Economic Council under Obama, asked me. “There are big, long-term unemployment problems, right? That’s complicated. Those
are people who need a lot of help. They need a lot of support. Is that really the issue, or is the issue that the working poor are not making
enough money to support their families? If you’re going to spend a trillion dollars on something huge …There’s an element here of people not
thinking about what they’re actually trying to do.” In a technocratic sense, perhaps. But the technocratic problems that a jobs guarantee poses
are not impossible to solve. There are good models. RecycleForce, for instance, cuts the recidivism rate of recently incarcerated individuals to
26 percent, versus a national rate of 64 percent, Keesling told me. And it saves the taxpayer $1.20 for every dollar invested. Surveys show that
similar jobs programs have raised both earnings and employment rates for their participants, and also “decreased family public benefit receipt,
raised school outcomes among the children of workers, boosted workers’ school completion, lowered criminal-justice system involvement
among both workers and their children, improved psychological well-being, and reduced longer-term poverty,” a survey by the Georgetown
Law Center on Poverty and Inequality found. “There may be additional positive effects, such as increased child-support payments and improved
health.” Scaling up transitional jobs initiatives would be a good start, then. “There’s nothing resembling an entitlement that supports a person
coming home from prison right now,” Sam Schaeffer, the executive director of the Center for Employment Opportunities, a New York-based
nonprofit that provides jobs and training to the formerly incarcerated in 20 cities, told me. “To really tackle this challenge, there should be
some unifying mechanism, with a mix of workforce programs, anti-poverty programs, nutrition assistance, housing, and more. We’ll pay $82
billion a year to incarcerate people. We don’t make anything like a similar investment on reentry.” There are also models stemming from TANF-
EF. JobsNOW! in San Francisco offers a tiered program to help workers with different levels of readiness for a paid job. One tier pays
participants while they enroll in job-readiness or vocational training, or a high-school diploma program. It also pays participants to do relatively
low-skill work at a nonprofit. Finally, there is a wage-subsidy program, aimed at individuals with work experience. On top of that, the program
provides case management and wraparound services, helping ensure that participants have Medicaid and food stamps. All in all, it has
increased its 20,000 participants’ earnings by an average of 55 percent, and three in four no longer need cash assistance two-and-a-half years
after exiting the program. The evidence for what works is out there, and the need especially great in certain communities and with certain
individuals. Starting with pilots and scaling them up, as Booker wants to do, makes sense. So does Khanna’s model of directing state and local
governments to figure out what works for them, as TANF-EF did. So does Sanders’s idea of having “hundreds” of public-works initiatives. For all
the blue-sky thinking and talk of a national, public-jobs guarantee, Democratic policymakers do seem to be taking the idea
seriously, but not literally , to borrow a phrase. The idea is to indicate to the country that they want to tackle the biggest
challenges with the biggest solutions—not to figure out every detail, pay for every dollar, appeal to every voter, and pass a policy bar their
colleagues on the other side of the aisle have shown no interest in. That gives Democrats room to experiment. “This is not a panacea to solve
the jobs problem. It has to be attacked in multiple ways,” Khanna told me. “I would argue that this is a first, serious proposal that by my own
admission I would say is not intended to be perfect.” It avoids putting them in the position of negotiating themselves down. “I see it as really
opening the Overton Window in a way that is a quite useful for this debate,” Bernstein said. “I’m not in the business of negotiating with myself
at this point. Let’s let all the good ideas blossom.” It
vaults over the need to figure out the most difficult parts of the
legislation, like how much or how to pay for such a proposal. “I’m not gonna presume how we pay for it,” Tanden said. “I
do think the Republican tax plan indicates how little Republicans care about deficits when it comes to taxes. I’m not saying that we won’t care
about this. But obviously it makes that an easier conversation.” It also acknowledges that Republicans
are unlikely to get on
board with big Democratic ideas, freeing liberals to think bigger. “We live in the era of tribalism,” Tanden told me. “It’s
hard to think through a proposal if Republicans feel like doing any deal with Democrats is noxious. Ipso
facto, when a Democrat proposes something, they cannot support it because it’s the Democrats have
creating it. That does not allow for compromise.”

Funding Ukraine prevents US-Russia war.

Alan Yu 10/12, Senior Vice President, National Security and International Policy, 10/12/2023, "5
Reasons Why Congress Must Approve Aid to Ukraine Right Away,"
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/5-reasons-why-congress-must-approve-aid-to-ukraine-right-
away/
The failure of then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to include aid to Ukraine in a stopgap spending bill has sent an ominous signal, not
only to Kyiv but also to our European allies, calling into question our commitment to defend Ukraine “for as long as it takes.”

The Ukrainian people, beleaguered and under relentless and unjustified attack, have demonstrated remarkable resilience in a fight with
implications for America’s core values and interests. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his December 2022 address to a joint session of
Congress, declared:

The battle is not only for life, freedom and security of Ukrainians or any other nation which Russia attempts to conquer. This struggle
will define in what world our children and grandchildren will live.

Now, decisions made in Washington will shape the trajectory of U.S. interests in Ukraine and in the world for years—if not
decades —to come. But not everyone in Washington is as clear-sighted. A small core of far-right extremists seeks to vacate the
U.S. commitment to Ukraine. This short-sighted push is oblivious to the long-term strategic benefits that a free
Ukraine provides to the United States and the world. Immediate assistance to Ukraine is a critical part of addressing core
American equities.

1.Immediate assistance is required to stand up to Russian aggression and prevent an escalation of U.S.
involvement in an overseas conflict
Continuing robust aid to Ukraine is a powerful deterrent to future Russian aggression . A Russian victory in
Ukraine could encourage President Vladimir Putin’s territorial ambitions , possibly leading him to target a
member of NATO . That could lead to a direct U.S.-Russia conflict that would put American lives at risk and
increase the possibility of a broader war . Funding Ukraine now is a strategic investment to prevent
greater costs later .

2. Immediate assistance would help meet Ukrainian security needs at an acute moment

The resilience and bravery of the Ukrainian people is buttressed in large part by the steady support of the
United States and its allies. But Ukraine’s military is under operational strain . Ammunition is depleting
rapidly , as troops fire 2,000 to 3,000 artillery shells daily. The United States has supplied more than 2 million 155mm artillery rounds,
but the demand persists . Russia’s extensive land mines have slowed the counteroffensive, pushing Ukraine to rely
even more on distant artillery targeting. Senior U.S. military officials warn that gaps in funding could delay essential military
supplies as Russia prepares for a winter offensive . A funding impasse now sends the wrong signal to the
Ukrainians amid brutal fighting.

3. Immediate assistance to Ukraine strengthens European resolve

Putin is taking a long-game approach to the war in Ukraine, hoping he can outlast the will of the United States
and other allies to continue help to Ukraine. The current dysfunction in House leadership and certain developments in Europe
may be validating the Kremlin’s bet.

Shifts in European politics underscore the urgency . Slovakia, for instance, recently saw the election of Robert Fico,
who campaigned on a pledge to end Slovak military assistance to Ukraine. Poland, one of Kyiv’s closest and most vocal
allies, announced it would cease weapons transfers to Ukraine after a dispute over Ukrainian grain exports to the European
Union. It is imperative that the alliance remains unified , and all members continue to move military assistance to
Ukraine at this critical moment, including the United States, Slovakia, Poland, the rest of NATO, and other allies and partners. The
United States is the fulcrum for this effort; our continued assistance is critical for fulfilling this role too.
It was U.S. leadership on Ukraine that first solidified and then strengthened the NATO alliance, demonstrated most notably by Sweden’s and
Finland’s swift moves to seek NATO membership as well as steps by Germany and other NATO allies to bolster their own military capabilities.
U.S. leadership continues to be central to sustaining and directing NATO’s strategic approach to countering
Russia’s aggression.

4. Assistance to Ukraine is a strategic and affordable investment

Ukraine stands as a bulwark against Russian aggression and absorbs most of the associated costs. As some critics lament a $76.8 billion tab in
total U.S. assistance to Ukraine, including $46.7 billion in military aid, it is essential to put this figure into perspective. The amount represents a
mere 0.65 percent of total federal spending over the past two years.

The U.S. approach to the Ukraine conflict is, in fact, smart strategically and fiscally . The United States provides
material and financial support to a partner as it counters and weakens a dangerous adversary. U.S. troops are not pulled into the conflict,
driving to zero the risk of American battlefield casualties as well as the financial burden required by U.S. military deployments. This is critically
important, as conflict escalates in the Middle East and as the Department of Defense faces China’s increasing military strength.

5. Sustained assistance to Ukraine influences China’s strategic calculus

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has pointed out that China is keenly watching the world’s response to Russia’s
aggression in Ukraine. Any perceived inconsistency in U.S. support for Ukraine risks emboldening China
for its far-reaching territorial ambitions, notably in Taiwan . Taiwan’s representative in Washington, Bi-khim Hsiao, contends that if
the West abandons Ukraine, that would signal to the Taiwanese people that they are alone, which plays
into Beijing’s propaganda .

Blinken has further highlighted the evolving China-Russia relationship, raising concern over how this authoritarian
axis is
threatening the rules-based international order. In this context, steadfast support for Ukraine is not just about a
single nation’s sovereignty; it is a strategic stance to reinforce global norms .

Conclusion

In moments of crisis, as seen in Ukraine—and now in Israel and Palestine—the world looks first to the United
States for leadership and help. In each case, there are core U.S. interests at stake as our partners seek support for their critical
security needs. Just as Congress has shown staunch historical support for America’s ally in Israel, now is the time for Congress to

demonstrate its support to our partner Ukraine in its time of greatest crisis .

NATO-Russia war is the only extinction scenario.

Dr. Owen Cotton-Barratt 17, Research Associate at the Future of Humanity Institute, 2/3/2017,
“Existential Risk,” Global Priorities Project, https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Existential-
Risks-2017-01-23.pdf
1.1.1 Nuclear war

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated the unprecedented destructive power of nuclear weapons.
However, even in an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia, despite horrific casualties, neither country’s
population is likely to be completely destroyed by the direct effects of the blast, fire, and radiation.8 The aftermath could be much worse:
the burning of flammable materials could send massive amounts of smoke into the atmosphere , which would
absorb sunlight and cause sustained global cooling , severe ozone loss , and agricultural disruption – a
nuclear winter .

According to one model 9, an all-out exchange of 4,000 weapons 10 could lead to a drop in global temperatures of around
8°C, making it impossible to grow food for 4 to 5 years. This could leave some survivors in parts of Australia and New Zealand, but they
would be in a very precarious situation and the threat of extinction from other sources would be great.
An exchange on this scale is only possible between the US and Russia who have more than 90% of the
world’s nuclear weapons, with stockpiles of around 4,500 warheads each, although many are not operationally deployed.11
Some models suggest that even a small regional nuclear war involving 100 nuclear weapons would produce a nuclear winter serious enough to put two

billion people at risk of starvation,12 though this estimate might be pessimistic.13 Wars on this scale are unlikely to lead to outright human

extinction , but this does suggest that conflicts which are around an order of magnitude larger may be likely to threaten
civilisation . It should be emphasised that there is very large uncertainty about the effects of a large nuclear war on global climate. This remains an area
where increased academic research work, including more detailed climate modelling and a better understanding of how survivors might be able to cope and adapt,
would have high returns.

It is very difficult to precisely estimate the probability of existential risk from nuclear war over the next century, and existing attempts leave very large confidence
intervals. According to many experts, the most likely nuclear war at present is between India and Pakistan.14 However, given the relatively modest size of their

arsenals, the risk of human extinction is plausibly greater from a conflict between the U nited S tates and
Russia . Tensions between these countries have increased in recent years and it seems unreasonable to rule out
the possibility of them rising further in the future.
 OFF
ANARCHISM.

The 1AC invests its hope for resolution of our generalized social crisis in the sovereign
state---this failed model guarantees war, environmental destruction, climate change,
and extinction---vote neg for autonomous collective organizing and a politics of
questions that refuses the answers given by the state
John Holloway 21, professor of sociology in the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades,
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 5/1/21, “We have no answers; we have questions. Urgent
ones,” https://roarmag.org/essays/holloway-asking-questions/

We live in a failed system . It is becoming clearer every day that the present organization of society is a disaster, that capitalism is
unable to secure an acceptable way of living. The COVID-19 pandemic is not a natural phenomenon but the result of the social
destruction of biodiversity and other pandemics are likely to follow. The global warming that is a threat
to both human and many forms of non-human life is the result of the capitalist destruction of established
equilibria. The acceptance of money as the dominant measure of social value forces a large part of the world’s
population to live in miserable and precarious conditions.

The destruction caused by capitalism is accelerating. Growing

inequality, a rise in racist violence, the spread of fascism,
increasing tensions between states and the accumulation of power by police and military. Moreover, the
survival of capitalism is built on an ever-expanding debt that is doomed to collapse at some point.

The situation is urgent, we humans are now faced with the real possibility of our own extinction .

How do we get out of here? The traditional answer of those who are conscious of the scale of social
problems: through the state . Political thinkers and politicians from Hegel to Keynes and Roosevelt and now Biden have seen the
state as a counterweight to the destruction wreaked by the economic system. States will solve the problem of global warming;
states will end the destruction of biodiversity ; states will alleviate the enormous hardship and poverty

resulting from the present crisis . Just vote for the right leaders and everything will be all right. And if you are very worried about
what is happening, just vote for more radical leaders — Sanders or Corbyn or Die Linke or Podemos or Evo Morales or Maduro or López
Obrador — and things will be fine.

The problem with this argument is that experience

tells us that it does not work . Left-wing leaders have never
fulfilled their promises, have never brought about the changes that they said they would. In Latin America, the
left-wing politicians who came to power in the so-called Pink Wave at the start of this century, have been closely associated with extractivism
and other forms of destructive development. The Tren Maya which is Mexican president López Obrador’s favorite project in Mexico at the
moment is just the latest example of this. Left-wing parties and politicians may be able to bring about minor changes, but they have done
nothing at all to break the destructive dynamic of capital.

THE STATE IS NOT THE ANSWER

But it is not just experience that tells us that thestate is not the counterweight to capital that some make it out to
be. Theoretical reflection tells us the same thing. The state, which appears to be separate from capital, is actually
generated by capital and depends on capital for its existence . The state is not a capitalist and its workers do not on
the whole generate the income it needs for its existence. That income comes from the exploitation of workers by capital, so that the state
actually depends on that exploitation, that is, on the accumulation of capital, to reproduce its own existence.
The state is obliged , by its very form, to promote the accumulation of capital . Capital, too, depends on the
existence of an instance — the state — that does not act like a capitalist and that appears to be quite separate from capital, to secure its own
reproduction. The state appears to be the center of power, but in fact power lies with the owners of capital, that is, with those persons who
dedicate their existence to the expansion of capital. In other words, the state is not a counterweight to capital: it is part of the same
uncontrollable dynamic of destruction.

The fact that the state is bound to capital means that it excludes us. State
democracy is a process of exclusion that says:
“Come and vote every four or five years, then go home and accept what we decide.” The state is the
existence of a body of full-time officials who assume the responsibility of ensuring the welfare of society
— in a way compatible with the reproduction of capital, of course. By assuming that responsibility, they take it away from

us . But, whatever their intentions, they are unable to fulfill the responsibility , because they do not
have the countervailing power that they appear to have: what they do and how they do it is shaped by the need to ensure
the reproduction of capital.

Just now, for example, politicians are talking of the need for a radical change in political direction as the world emerges
from the pandemic, but at no point does any politician or government official suggest that part of that
change in direction must be the abolition of a system based on the pursuit of profit.
If the state is not the answer to ending capitalist destruction, then it follows that channeling our concerns into political parties cannot be the
answer either, since parties are organizations that aim to bring about change through the state. Attempts
to bring about radical
change through parties and the taking of state power have generally ended in the creation of
authoritarian regimes at least as bad as those they fought to change .
ASKING WE WALK

So, if the state is not the answer, where do we go? How do we get out of here? We come to a conference like this,
of course, to discuss anarchist answers. But there are at least three problems: firstly, there are not the millions of people here that we need for
a real change of direction; secondly, we have no answers; and thirdly, the label “anarchist” probably does not help.

Why are there not millions of people here? There is certainly a widespread growing feeling of anger,
desperation and an awareness that the system is not working. But why is this anger channeled either towards left-
reformist parties and candidates (Die Linke, Sanders, Corbyn, Tsipras) or to the far right, and not towards efforts that push against-and-beyond
the system? There are many explanations, but one that seems important to me is Leonidas Oikonomakis’ comment on the election of Syriza in
Greece in 2015 that, even
after years of very militant anti-statist protest against austerity, it still seemed to
people that the state was the “only game in town .”

When we think of global warming, of stopping violence against women, of controlling the pandemic, of
resolving our economic desperation in the present crisis, it is still hard not to think that the state is where the
answers lie , even when we know that it is not.

Perhaps we have to give up the idea of answers . We have no answers. It cannot be a question of opposing
anarchist answers to state answers . The state gives answers, wrong answers. We have questions,
urgent questions, new questions because this situation of impending extinction has never existed
before . How can we stop the destructive dynamic of capital? The only answer that we have is that we
do not know.

It is important to say that we do not know, for two reasons. Firstly because it happens to be true. We
do not know how we can
bring the present catastrophe to an end. We have ideas, but we really do not know . And secondly, because a
politics of questions is very different from a politics of answers . If we have the answers, it is our duty
to explain them to others. That is what the state does , that is what vanguardist parties do. If we have
questions but no answers , then we must discuss them together to try and find ways forward. “Preguntando
caminamos,” as the Zapatistas say: “Asking we walk.”

The process of asking and listening is not the way to a different society, it is already the creation of a
different society . The asking-listening is already a mutual recognizing of our distinct dignities. We ask-and-
listen to you because we recognize your dignity. This is the opposite of state politics. The state talks. It pretends to
ask-and-listen but it does not and cannot because its existence depends on reproducing a form of social
organization based on the command of money.

Our asking-listening is an anti-identitarian movement. We recognize your dignity not because you are an anarchist or a
communist, or German or Austrian or Mexican or Irish, or because you are a woman or Black or Indigenous. Labels are
very dangerous — even if they are “nice” labels — because they create identitarian distinctions. To say “we are anarchists” is self-
contradictory because it reproduces the identitarian logic of the state: we are anarchists, you are not; we are
German, you are not. If we are against the state, then we against its logic, against its grammar .

A MOVEMENT OF SELF-DETERMINATION

We have no answers, but our walking-asking does not start from zero. It is part of a long history of walking-asking.
Just in these days we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune and the centenary of the Kronstadt Uprising. In the present,
we have the experience of the Zapatistas to inspire us, just as they are preparing their journey across the Atlantic to
connect with the walkers-askers against capital in Europe this summer. And of course we look to the deeply ingrained practice
of councilism in the Kurdish movement in the terribly difficult conditions of their struggle. And beyond
that, the millions of cracks in which people are trying to organize on an anti-hierarchical, mutually
recognitive basis .

It is simply not true that the state is the only game in town . We must shout from the rooftops that
there is another, long-established game: the game of doing things ourselves, collectively .

Organization in the communal or council tradition is not on the basis of selection-and-exclusion but on the basis
of a coming-together of those who are there, whether in the village or the neighborhood or the factory, with all their
differences, their squabbles, their madnesses, their meannesses, their shared interests and common concerns.

The organization is not instrumental: it is not designed as the best way of reaching a goal , for it is itself its
own goal. It does not have a defined membership since its aim is to draw in, not to exclude. Its discussions are not aimed at defining the
correct line, but at articulating and accommodating differences, at constructing here and now the mutual recognition that is negated by
capitalism.

This does not mean a suppression of debate, but, on the contrary, a constant process of discussion and
critique aimed not at eliminating or denouncing or labeling the opponent but at maintaining the creative
tension that arises from holding together ideas that push in slightly different directions . An always difficult
mutual recognizing of dignities that pull in different directions.

The council or commune is a movement of self-determination: through asking-listening-thinking we shall decide how we
want the world to be , not by following the blind dictates of money and profit. And, perhaps more and more
important, it is an assumption of our responsibility for shaping the future of human life .
If we reach the point of extinction , it will be of no help to say on the last day: “It is all the fault of the
capitalists and their states.” No. It will be our fault if we do not break the power of money and take back
from the state our responsibility for the future of human life.
 OFF
STATES CP.
The fifty states and relevant territories should establish and implement an interstate
agreement to
- abolish balanced budget requirements;
- create Reserve Bank systems;
- adopt a jobs guarantee;
- and implement a financial transactions tax.

Interstate agreements solve economic inequality and avoid federal sabotage which
tubes the aff.
Jon Michaels and Emme M. Tyler 23 – Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law, and Attorney, "Just-
Right Government: Interstate Compacts and Multistate Governance in an Era of Political Polarization,
Policy Paralysis, and Bad-Faith Partisanship," Indiana Law Journal: Vol. 98: Iss. 3, Article 5. Available at:
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj/vol98/iss3/5

3. TheNeed (and Public Mandate) for Aggressive, Impactful Government Action Is Greater Now Than It
Was in 1925

Another difference is that the

need (and mandate) to legislate and regulate today is far more urgent . The costs of
health care and higher education continue to spiral out of control. We’ve been overdue for major immigration reform for
several decades. Economic inequality is greater now than at any time since the Census Bureau started

tracking such data more than five decades ago.160 We need a more durable infrastructure to address
health and energy crises. And the moral imperative to advance long-needed racial justice initiatives can no longer be ignored. There is, we hasten
to add, popular support for each of these measures;161 such support may well be a function of American society, despite the extant

efforts to disenfranchise various communities, being a more racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse (and inclusive)

polity than ever before162—and thus collectively far more attentive to the way in which legislators and regulators

need to play a role in countering, among other things, the vagaries and at times cruelties of the market economy ,
civil society, and the criminal justice system.

The same could not readily be said about life in 1925. This is not to say that there weren’t grave and acute challenges when it came such things as racial justice,
health care, education, and workers’ rights. It is just that those challenges were not nearly as politically pressing. Again, by no means are we trying to shortchange
the array of difficulties Americans faced in 1925, particularly people of color, women, wage laborers, and those with various disabilities. We are making a narrower,
but (we hope) still salient, point—namely, because there really was not the political will among then-enfranchised citizens to take such steps, the gap between what
the electorate demanded and what elected officials were willing and able to deliver was considerably smaller. Put slightly differently, the failure to address at least a
good percentage of the racial and socioeconomic ills back then could be explained for reasons other than the states being too small or to the federal courts striking
down national legislation. We’re not sure that the same is true today.

4. Compacts and Agreements Have Many More Permutations Today

Today’s interstate arrangements and compacts can bring together political communities in many more
combinations than were practicable before. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and surely throughout the 1920s when
Frankfurter and Landis were pressing their claims), regulatory compacts pretty much had to be between and among contiguous or otherwise proximate states. This
was a function of the limited mobility of labor, capital, and culture—and also the nature of the challenges we faced back then compared to today. In the 1920s,
California, Maryland, Minnesota, and Connecticut would have been an absurd regulatory community. But now bicoastal
compacts and other
non-contiguous configurations are eminently plausible and, indeed, potentially quite sensible
whenever those states share a common vision for such things as environmental justice, police reform, education
policy, or labor protections—and are more closely connected and interconnected through shared markets
for labor , capital, and culture.163
And, of course, the nature (and urgency) of environmental regulation has changed. Just a generation or so ago, officials were understandably focused on what we
now consider to be old-school pollutants, ones that were fairly geographically concentrated.164 Today our biggest threat comes from greenhouse gases and those
we know, circulate broadly and diffusely. That is to say, New Yorkers may not benefit greatly from California’s restrictions on particulate matter—and vice versa. But
those East Coasters are inescapably part of California’s ecosystem when it comes to the latter’s carbon emissions.

5. A Fresh Start

Beyond the far greater number of possible interstate spatial permutations, compacts and other agreements provide administrative lawyers and public
administration experts opportunities for a fresh start. In the 1920s, there was not any concern, or likely even a vague apprehension, about federal (or state)
administration being hopelessly saddled by outdated and ill-suited procedural requirements—let alone that agencies would be especially parsimonious when it
came to requirements to ensure robust democratic engagement. Yet that is the world we encounter today, with a federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA) that,
however transformative and however much celebrated,165 has very serious limitations. Meaningful public notice and participation are often sorely lacking, leaving
well-heeled special interests with ample room and opportunity to wield disproportionate influence.166 Longstanding and bipartisan focus on cost-benefit analysis
systematically overvalues certain interests and interest groups over others.167 Judicial challenges (increasingly the exclusive province of parties alleging economic
injuries168) wind their way through, up, and down the court system, posing tremendous costs on agencies and leaving many regulatory landscapes underregulated
or subject to rules and policies sorely in need of updating.169 And, now, litigants are persuading courts to revisit longstanding commitments to agency
deference,170 Congress’s authority to set the conditions for the appointment and removal of high-ranking agency officials,171 and Congress’s delegation power.172
For these reasons, many (across the political spectrum) label the federal administrative state as captured, sclerotic, ossified, and undemocratic173— not to mention
deeply imperiled.174

In addition, in spaces where we had long privileged expertise and a modicum of independence, political appointees, presidents, and, more recently, the courts
themselves have worked to shred the layers of insulation and undermine the central role of apolitical experts that many see as the backbone of a vibrant,
knowledgeable, and truth-seeking bureaucracy.175 Witness the decades-long efforts to contract out the work of federal bureaucrats176 and to reclassify career
civil servants as at-will employees (subject to politically motivated hiring and firing decisions);177 witness, too, recent political moves to force out some of the most
talented civil servants.178

Similarly, most states have created civil service workforces roughly in league with what exists at the federal level; 179 and they their own versions of the APA (and
draw upon a Model State Administrative Procedure Act).180 Not surprisingly, that means many states are experiencing the same political efforts—couched as
reforms—to outsource and politicize rank-and-file bureaucrats.181

Add to these longstanding efforts a new wave of populist attacks. These attacks have reached a fever pitch starting in 2020 with wholesale attacks on educators
(surrounding COVID-19 protocols, support for Black Lives Matter, and the implementation of antiracist curricula,182 and most recently, for recognizing and
supporting the equal dignity of trans children), public health officials,183 and election officials. If anything, states are in a lot worse shape than the federal
government. As the recent and trenchant work by Miriam Seifter illustrates, compared to the feds, most state agencies are less well funded, less expert, less legally
independent from elected officials and insulated populist hostility, and less closely monitored by interest groups and journalists.184

We are bringing this up for the sole but, we think, important reason that the extant federal and state administrative structures are hardly ideal instruments for
democratic or expert policymaking. While it should of course be a priority to bolster federal and state workforces, administrative structures, and processes,185 we
are, again, not optimistic that efforts in that direction will gain any traction.186 So, with all that in mind, consider
interstate governance an
opportunity to create administrative structures and procedures anew—stripped of the baggage of
good-faith attempts that haven’t worked out or that have been directly and sometimes shamelessly
sabotaged .187 (This is all in addition to the various requirements intentionally imposed to slow down
and disrupt the regulatory processes from the outset.188)

On this tabula rasa of interstate public administration, more expert , more democratic , and (perhaps in time) more
legitimate processes and policies can be crafted. 189 We won’t drill down on specifics other than to note that interstate
bodies need not follow the blueprint of other, mid-to-late twentieth century compacts that have been
subject to justifiable criticism190—and could, instead, adopt some of the reform proposals that are, for a variety of
reasons, too difficult or cumbersome for legacy agencies at the federal and state levels to adopt. Today’s agreements
can incorporate such things as proportional representation based on such metrics as member states’ relative populations and the relative allocation of

responsibilities, etc. Technocratic

responsibilities can be better insulated from political, partisan overseers.191
Experts can be recruited and retained through the assurances of competitive pay and, crucially,
protection from partisan arm-twisting. Meaningful public participation can be secured through any number
of measures more contemporary and comprehensive than simply posting dense notice of meetings and opportunities for comment
on websites monitored only by white-shoe lobbyists. Compacting entities may even call for groups of empaneled

administrative jurors— ensuring virtual public representation—something leading scholars and government reformers have
hoped would take root at the federal level.192

What’s more, the development of interstate bodies with substantial responsibilities right now would have the
incidental, but arguably highly salutary, effect of deemphasizing and decentering the federal courts .193
Interstate regulatory bodies would, as we see it, take some pressure off agencies and Congress to do
as much heavy lifting—allowing them time to prioritize challenges of a truly national or international
character while still regrouping and rebuilding administrative capacity after decades of disparagement
and what David Noll calls sabotage .194 One byproduct of this shift away from centralized federal regulation is that disputes arising
out of regulation and enforcement by interstate compacting entities can be handled by newly
constituted adjudicatory bodies (thus circumventing the whole “pack the courts/strip the courts of power” political campaigns that seem
increasingly futile).195

Surely, it
is conceivable that disputes arising out of interstate compacting would find their way into federal
courts under diversity jurisdiction. But the substance of those challenges would then turn principally on the new
laws of interstate administrative agreements—perhaps more akin to contract law or the law of
corporations. And, of course, we’re aware of the challenges associated with circumventing federal law and federal courts; we certainly don’t think anything
akin to mandatory commercial arbitration should be the default for interstate bodies. Nor do we think that what, for instance, Facebook has set up in the form of its
private oversight board, is necessary or appropriate.196 But we
are, again, open to thinking about the bypassing of an
increasingly unrepresentative and out-of-touch federal bench as a fortuitous consequence of interstate
governance.197 Indeed, we can imagine rotations of judges from the benches of member states or (if the agreement is capacious enough to so warrant) a
new court—chosen in ways that prioritize expertise and democratic equity—to take on the solemn duties of judging.

We recognize these are abrupt and incredibly costly departures from the status quo. Goldilocks didn’t have to build a just-right bed or prepare just-right porridge

the cost of inaction , of otherwise continuing to countenance

from scratch. And that’s precisely what we’re calling for. But

huge amounts of corporate welfare to pass highly watered-down legislation, and of waiting and hoping
the federal courts don’t invalidate new laws and rules, are themselves already intolerably high . And, on
the substance of interstate governance laws and policies, we hesitate to label any of what we’ve just suggested as particularly
radical. Though such administrative features suggest a sharp break from much of federal and state administrative law, there is nothing—ideologically

speaking—radical about anything we just proposed.

B. Model Compacts: A Blue New Deal

Whether and how to enter into interstate agreements is a tricky question. When it comes to considering interstate agreements versus federal interventions, we
might be tempted to insist, as a threshold matter, that before opting for the former, it ought to be established that a national (that is, federal)
solution is
unlikely to be forthcoming any time soon. Though that might make sense as a presumption, we recognize that a preference for
superior public administration may, by itself, justify circumventing the extant federal and state
pathways . Indeed, it may well be the most salient longterm reason, assuming that those federal pathways do not remain permanently bottled up. What’s
more, it also may be the case that regional governance—not fully mediated or directed by federal agencies, as is currently the case198—stands as an independent
and completely valid reason for compacting.

Reasons for bypassing the states are even more numerous; they follow directly from the discussions as to why states are often the wrong loci for addressing

complex problems. Specifically, we understand four discrete but often overlapping bases for seeking interstate solutions: to internalize
spillover effects , to cancel or at least reduce races to the bottom , to increase economies of scale , and to
take advantage of cross-border efficiencies. Mindful of those four bases, we propose four corresponding sketches.199 These sketches—two
of which are ambitious and capacious and two of which are narrow and modest—are tentative; we intend them to be simple, rough, and open-ended templates.
1. Climate Change Agreement200

Participating states agree to act swiftly and decisively to combat climate change. Consistent with applicable federal laws, member states agree to:

•Set and enforce emission reduction goals (no less than the applicable federal standards) for firms and industries operating within any and all of the member states;

•Accord preferential contractor status (for all state, local, and interstate administrative contracts) for firms operating anywhere within the jurisdiction of interstate
agreement that exceed the agreement’s prescribed reductions by ten percent or more over a specified period of time;

•Provide state and local tax credits for firms that exceed the agreement’s prescribed reductions by fifteen percent or more over a specified period of time;

•Provide grants to colleges and graduate schools that develop or broaden their programs on climate change abatement and environmental justice;

•Subsidize student tuition for those enrolled in climate change or environmental justice programs;

•Plan multistate reforestation and wetlands preservation initiatives that take advantage of the best spaces for such initiatives anywhere within the agreement’s
boundaries;

•Establish a legal-aid-like program for lawyers, scientists, and public health experts committed to combating climate change or advancing environmental justice; and

•Increase opportunities and public funding for transporting people and goods across the member states in vehicles powered by renewable energy.

Among the interstate parties, we could imagine agreements of this sort along the West Coast and Hawaii (“Pacifica”), a Mid-Atlantic (“Amtrak Corridor Agreement”),
and perhaps even the Upper Midwest, with the possibility that, down the road, each of those groupings adds new members or two or more of the groupings merge
(or essentially adopt reciprocal standards).

Note that an agreement of this sort seeks to capture spillover effects, as emissions of traditional pollutants and also greenhouse gases disperse across state lines.
But internalizing externalities is hardly the only reason to prefer interstate governance of this sort. Like-minded states all agreeing to tighten environmental
standards are, most assuredly, preempting races to the bottom vis-à-vis recruiting and retaining businesses and high-wealth families. There are also cross-border
efficiencies built into this particular agreement. Not every state college needs to invest in the same environmental programming. The different flagship universities
can agree to divvy up the specialties, allowing students from anywhere within the agreement to receive the benefits of in-state tuition (and, perhaps, admissions
preferences).201 Likewise, if all states benefit from tree reforestation efforts or wetlands expansion, but not all states have climates or terrain conducive to either
forests or wetlands, those inconducive states can still do their part by helping to underwrite those out-of-state projects.

2. Workers, Working Families, and Economic Justice Agreement

Participating states agree to act swiftly and decisively to improve the economic and social conditions
of work. Consistent with applicable federal laws, member states agree to:
•Set and enforce payment of a minimum wage (no less than twenty percent above the federal minimum) for all employees;

•Set and enforce a guarantee of up to two months’ paid leave for all employees eligible under current federal law for an unpaid leave of absence;

•Provide child-care tuition assistance (on a sliding scale) to all working parents earning less than twice the federal poverty line;

•Provide a guarantee of two years of tuition-free community college (anywhere within the zone of agreement) for all high school graduates; and a guaranteed two
years of additional tuition-free university education at all state schools within the agreement for those who maintain a B or higher grade while earning an
Associate’s degree at any community college within the agreement;

•Create a no-minimum basic (deposit-and-checking) public banking option, administered through each agreeing state’s DMV or other such widely accessible facility;
and

•Provide a one-time housing relocation assistance for any individual or family moving anywhere within the boundaries of the party states.

Similar in many respects to the Climate Agreement, the Economic Justice Agreement mitigates races to the bottom (while
simultaneously reducing welfare magnets) and captures cross-border efficiencies . This Agreement also
enjoys economies of scale , specifically in terms of spreading the benefits and pooling the risk of
economic downturn across a larger, more diversified political economy.

Banks solve while independently boosting the economy and avoiding budget tradeoffs
Steven Attewell 9 – US Public Policy Professor at the University of California Santa Barbra, “Fifty-State
Keynesianism - Part Deux”, 7/31/09, http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/fifty-state-
keynesianism-part-deux
Background: Why is it the case that America's
state governments have become so strongly pro-cyclical? The basic
reason is that all but one state in the Union (Vermont being the exception) have some form of a
balanced budget or debt limitation requirement, which makes it impossible to deficit spend during
recessions.
Many of these requirements date back over a hundred years, following the Panic of 1837, which caused nine states to default on their "internal improvement" (i.e,
transportation infrastructure) related debts in 1842, which prompted a wave of anti-debt measures. The state of New York, for example, adopted a new constitution
in 1846, which required a 2/3rds vote for appropriations bills and a 3/5ths vote for any bill that would raise taxes or incur debts. Illinois' 1848 constitution required a
2/3 vote for appropriations, a balanced budget requirement, and a $50,000 cap on state debts. Similar waves of constitutional redrafting tended to follow other
major recessions in which states suddenly were unable to finance their debts, such as the Panics of 1857 and 1873 (triggered by the failure of banks that had over-
speculated on railroads).

The question is why we allow a "hobgoblin of little minds" over a hundred and seventy years old to continue to rule over us? Why, when even a total economics
amateur like myself can pick up Keynes and learn about the "paradox of thrift," do we continue to allow the political cliche that "well, families have to balance their
budgets, so the government should too" to be the conventional wisdom of the stump speech? (Incidentally, given the fact that most American families are horribly
in debt and are relying on their credit cards to make ends meet, this couldn't be less accurate).

A 50-State Solution:
One of the things that's often puzzled me about the progressive movement is our lack of willingness to use the initiative process to our advantage in both achieving
policy ends and mobilizing the electorate - consider the way in which the Republican Party used anti-gay marriage propositions in 2002 and 2004 to gin up their
right-wing base, change the political debate from economic issues to their wedge issues, and attack the civil rights and civil liberties of queer Americans. In 2006, we
saw a little bit of this strategy on the progressive side, using minimum wage initiatives to increase working class turnout in states like Ohio, but to the best of my
knowledge it hasn't become a standard part of the Democratic Party political toolkit.

Hence, the
first step in establishing "50-state Keynesianism" is to promote, state-by-state an "Anti-
Recession Budget Reform Initiative." (if anyone has a better name for it, I'm open to suggestions). This initiative should amend
the state constitution's balanced budget requirement to allow the state, when the economy is in
recession (i.e, two quarters of negative economic growth) to run a limited deficit (two years maximum) for the purposes
of funding counter-cyclical stimulus programs (limited to say, 5-10% of state GDP). We should begin our push in those
areas which are deep blue states and which tend to have weaker balanced budget requirements - New England would be a good starting place, especially with
Vermont as the lone non-balanced budget state sitting there as a model for how deficit spending won't destroy western civilization. The Rust Belt states that have
been especially hit hard, like Michigan or Ohio, would probably be receptive to a message that it's better to spend money to create jobs than to balance a budget by
throwing teachers and other state workers out of their jobs. As usual, the major prizes would be New York and California, given their size and political weight.

Second, in
order to build state capacity for Keynesian economic policy, we should also push for the creation
of State Reserve Banks. Here, I really have to credit Ellen Brown over at the Huffington Post for promoting this idea and bringing it to my attention. This
amazingly simple yet powerful idea takes its example from, of all places, the state of North Dakota, which has operated the Bank of North Dakota since 1919. It
works like this - the state charters a public bank, and instead of placing its reserves, tax revenues, deeds for public lands, and
so forth in a variety of state banks (as most states do), it puts all of them in the public bank to act as the bank's
capital base. (Note: as long as the bank only circulates U.S dollars, it's perfectly constitutional, avoiding the Article I,
Section 10 bar against states issuing coin or bills of credit) The bank then acts like a reserve bank, using the power of

" fractional reserve lending " (i.e, that a bank can generate much more money in loans than it keeps in
its vaults, thus multiplying many times over its actual reserves, as long as it keeps back a portion to
redeem deposits) to generate loans, act as a local "lender of last resort" (thus buttressing the work of
the Federal Reserve and FDIC during credit crises), and (this is the key bit) allowing the State to borrow
money in order to deficit spend in a recession without relying on the ideologically-biased bond
market and the credit agencies who've taken a hammer to state bond ratings while maintaining A ratings for AIG and
Lehman Brothers. The State could then use these loans (which would be much cheaper than ordinary bonds,

given that its essentially paying interest to itself ) to maintain public services and fund public works and
other stimulus measures in a recession.

Third, as I've suggested before, one of the best ways to fight a recession is to create jobs directly. Hence, with all this new
fiscal and monetary muscle, we should set up a WPA-like system of State "Job Insurance." While the Federal government is best suited to this task, in that it has
superior powers to deficit spend and print money, state governments could run their own permanent job insurance systems, establishing State J.I Funds,
contributions from workers and employers, and assistance from the general fund. The idea would be to create short-term jobs (say 6-month duration, with a right to
re-apply after a job search at the end of 6 months) at $10 an hour - the number of jobs directed at reducing unemployment by whatever proportion (say, 50% in the
example below) needed to keep unemployment at or below a specific level. As the economy turned around, these jobs could be gradually eliminated (at 1/2 the
rate of job growth, for example) in order to not damage the recovery as happened when the WPA was suddenly downsized in 1937-8. In return for a monthly
contribution, workers would have a right to one of these jobs, as allocated by some fair procedure (order of application, random lottery, etc.).
 OFF
ASPEC.
The plan text should specify the federal branch that carries out the plan---they didn’t.
That’s key to agent counterplans and stable links to tradeoff and politics DAs. Reject
the aff.
 OFF
COURT CURBING CP
The United States Congress should unanimously pass a resolution threatening the
judiciary if it does not require a federal jobs guarantee and a financial transactions tax.

Curbing threats ensure compliance and deter strike down of Biden’s agenda.
Daniel Block 20, editor for Washington Monthly, B.A. in Political Science and History from Swarthmore
College, 10/25/2020, “The Case for Threatening the Courts,”
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/10/25/the-case-for-threatening-the-courts/

Traditionally, F ranklin D elano R oosevelt’s attempt to expand the Supreme Court is viewed as a disaster. “Dear
Democrats: FDR’s court-packing scheme was a ‘humiliating’ defeat,” The Washington Post wrote in 2019. Citing “New Deal history,” two law professors argued in
The Atlantic that “a titanic contest over the Supreme Court hardly seems worth it.” In National Review, Charles Cooke dismissed talk of expansion as “silly” by citing
Roosevelt’s doomed efforts. “Back in 1937,” he wrote, “when the country was less divided than it is now, FDR was more popular than a President Biden would be,
and voters cared less about the Supreme Court, court-packing was met with a definitive ‘no.’ ” The message to Democrats is simple: Don’t even bother.

These assessments are correct in a literal sense. Faced with a Supreme Court that aggressively overturned significant portions of the New Deal, Roosevelt proposed
legislation to expand its size. The bill never received a vote. The number of justices remained at nine.

But shortly after Roosevelt introduced his proposal, the Court stopped overturning the administration’s
programs. The shift was widely seen as related to the president’s frontal attack on the judiciary —“the
switch in time that saved nine,” as one contemporary humorist put it. The most important swing justice, Owen Roberts, eventually suggested as

much. Speaking before Congress in 1954, Roberts said that FDR’s plan placed “ tremendous strain and threat to the existing

Court of which I was fully conscious .”

Throughout modern U.S. history, the Supreme Court has proved susceptible to outside pressure . FDR’s
proposal is just one of many successful institutional attacks . In the mid- 1950s , the liberal Warren Court backed away from
protecting victims of McCarthyism because a popular Senate bill threatened to strip the Court’s powers. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s , conservative
politicians flooded Congress with legislation to stop the Court from ruling on racial integration. The justices retreated from enforcing busing regulations.

For Democrats worried about being railroaded by a 6–3 conservative bench, these conflicts should be instructive. In
none of these instances did
Congress or the president truly enact laws that changed the Court. In each of them, the Court changed
anyway . These attacks can exact costs, as FDR discovered; his particularly aggressive push weakened his power within Congress. But they also have
clear payoffs . Threats to expand, strip, or otherwise limit the Court—done with credibility—can influence
judicial behavior .

“ Historically , I think we have found that the Court gets the message ,” Keith Whittington, a political scientist at Princeton
University who studies the politics of the judiciary, told me. “When conservatives are pressing these types of bills, the Court becomes a

little more conservative. When liberals are pressing these types of bills, the Court becomes a little more liberal.”

If Joe Biden takes office in January, he will confront a landscape not unlike the one FDR faced in 1937. Biden, like Roosevelt, will grapple with an economic downturn
of historic dimensions. He’ll have won promising to enact a variety of sizable spending and welfare programs. In interviews, Biden has explicitly cited the Roosevelt
presidency as a template.

But, much like FDR, Biden will have to contend with a Supreme Court stacked with six conservatives . For Roosevelt,
these six men were perhaps his most powerful enemies. With large majorities in both the House and Senate, the president moved transformative economic
legislation—from minimum wages to maximum hours—with remarkable ease, only to have it struck down by justices who didn’t abide by the bromide of not
“legislating from the bench.” These activist rulings infuriated Roosevelt, who in 1935 declared that the Court was creating a “ ‘no-man’s-land’ where no government
—state or federal—can function.” They also stirred up popular sentiment. Much like today, the Supreme Court hung over the 1936 presidential election.

FDR won that election with more than 60 percent of the vote. Emboldened, he decided to confront the Court. Within weeks of his inauguration, Roosevelt announced an initiative to add six justices to the body. The Supreme Court was furious. Privately, Chief Justice Charles Hughes
remarked that the bill would “destroy the Court as an institution.”

At first, the public was closely divided over Roosevelt’s plan, as was Congress. Republicans, southern conservatives, and some liberals came out against the idea. But Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson, who was promised a seat on the expanded bench, backed the president. After a
fireside chat on March 8, so did a large plurality of Americans. “We cannot yield our constitutional destiny to the personal judgment of a few men who, being fearful of the future, would deny us the necessary means of dealing with the present,” Roosevelt said.

As FDR spoke, the Court was preparing to rule on perhaps the biggest case of his tenure, National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. The decision would determine the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act, landmark New Deal legislation that made
it significantly easier to join and form a union. Legal observers widely expected that the act, like its predecessors, would fall. So did the president.

Instead, in mid-April, the Court upheld it in a 5–4 decision, with Hughes and Roberts in the majority. Almost immediately afterward, public support for adding justices dipped. Then, at the end of May, the Court upheld the creation of Social Security, again in a surprise 5–4 ruling. The plan
grew even more unpopular. In a May 25 cartoon in the Rochester Times-Union, Roosevelt’s “Supreme Court Packing Case” was depicted as a large crate, collapsing as the Court’s various liberal decisions, each representing an underlying plank, toppled beneath it. By the end of July, FDR’s
proposal was dead.

There’s a vigorous academic debate about the extent to which the Court’s pivot had to do with pressure from Roosevelt versus organic jurisprudential development. There’s no doubt that the Court’s constitutional doctrine was already evolving in ways that made siding with the president
easier. The Court that had struck down child labor laws and FDR’s National Recovery Act was evolving into a body more deferential to Congress. But it’s hard to see how the swing justices couldn’t have been touched by Roosevelt’s attacks and the resulting public discourse. As The New
Yorker sarcastically wrote in 1937, the only way the Supreme Court could not have been impacted was if its then-new building, completed in 1935, “has a soundproof room, to which the Justices retire to change their minds.”

Does that mean that if Democrats win in November, they could be equally effective by threatening to expand the size of the bench? There are reasons to be skeptical. If he wins, Biden will not enter the White House backed by more than 500 electoral votes. If Democrats control 52 Senate
seats come 2021, they will consider it a roaring success. In 1937, the party held more than 70. (It’s also unclear if the Roberts Court will aggressively strike down Biden legislation.)

But some of the differences between Roosevelt’s era and today’s could actually work to the advantage of
modern Democrats . In the 1930s, the Democratic Party was a sprawling entity, featuring both New Deal
liberals and the southern right. The latter were some of the most tenacious opponents of court expansion. They included, for example, former
Texas Congressman John Nance Garner—Roosevelt’s own vice president.

Today, the Democratic Party is far more unified . The southern conservative constituencies that once fought Roosevelt now almost all
vote Republican. Unlike FDR’s vice president, Kamala Harris won’t go AWOL. She expressed openness to expanding the size

of the Supreme Court during the Democratic primaries, well before the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg led Biden to soften his opposition.

FDR was not the first person to intimidate the Supreme Court. In the Progressive Era, major politicians put forth all kinds of
proposals to curb the power of a judiciary they viewed as in thrall to big businesses, from allowing voters to override Supreme Court decisions to
making it easier to recall justices. None passed , but scholars believe that the clamor may have kept the Court from

making it impossible for reformers to reshape economic power. They’re not alone in that assessment. “I may not know much
about law,” President Theodore Roosevelt remarked in 1905, “but I do know that one can put the fear of God in

judges .”

In the latter half of the 20th century, politicians toyed with more targeted attacks. According to Article III, Section 2 of the
Constitution, the Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction over all cases “with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.”
Conservative congressmen and senators seized on this language to propose bills that would “strip” the Court of its right to rule on racial integration. These

bills, for the most part, went nowhere . But, much like FDR’s court-expansion attempt, they still made a difference . During the
tenure of Chief Justice Warren Burger from 1969 to 1986, the justices kept careful track of “jurisdiction-stripping”
legislation , circulating them to one another whenever they came up. Burger himself kept a file of all these proposals as they moved through Congress. In
both the 1970s and 1980s, the Court retreated from many attempts to force integration, even as it gave a yellow light to affirmative action.

Part of that change, no doubt, stems from personnel; the Burger Court had more conservative membership than the Warren Court that preceded it. But academics

argue that congressional pressure also had a clear role . In a memo to eight of the Court’s justices, for example, one law clerk noted that a
major busing case had attracted great political and congressional controversy. He recommended that the judges deny a petition to hear it. They followed his advice.

“The clerk is writing for eight of the nine justices,” said Tom Clark, a political scientist at Emory University and the author of The Limits of Judicial Independence. “[It]
tells me that the clerk was aware the justices would want to know that.”

It’s unclear exactly why John Roberts decided in 2012 to uphold the A ffordable C are A ct, but it’s entirely possible that his vote
was one of institutional deference : He didn’t want to nullify a sitting president’s greatest accomplishment .
And so far, under Donald Trump, Roberts has sided with liberals on a number of surprising occasions, including an abortion
case. Perhaps that’s to keep the Court from being dragged into the country’s partisan slugfest. Perhaps, and relatedly, it’s because of Democrats’

heated rhetoric about the need to bend the judiciary .

“I think he takes those threats seriously ,” Princeton’s Whittington said.

Unrestrained conservative majority destroys the admin state.

John Coffee 22, Professor of Law and director of the Center on Corporate Governance at Columbia
University, 3/7/2022, "The Most Dangerous Branch: Is the Supreme Court Dismantling the
Administrative State?," https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2022/03/07/the-most-dangerous-branch-
is-the-supreme-court-dismantling-the-administrative-state/

The basic point of this brief column is that the Court’s newly ascendant conservative wing appears to be moving at a
rapid pace to dismantle much of the Admin istrative State . This process began in earnest in 2018 when the
Court decided Lucia v. SEC,[10] which found that ALJs appointed by the SEC staff flunked the constitutional standard that requires an
appointment be made by the president or a limited number of persons subject to the president’s removal power. In December, 2021, Cochran
seems to have expressed support for the flipside of this coin: Unless ALJs can be removed in a similar fashion, they will again be found in
violation of the president’s Article II authority. Between now and the end of June, we will likely see decisions in both West Virginia v.
EPA and Axon Enter ., Inc. v. FTC, which will tell us whether the Court’s hardcore conservatives can bring a majority
of the Court with them. Note, however, that just in the month of January, the Court has taken three significant steps towards
the effective dismantling of the admin istrative state ; that is a fast pace .
Once, Alexander Bickel defended the Supreme Court as the “least dangerous branch” and stressed its tendency to use the “passive virtues” to
avoid confrontations with the other branches of government. This January does not show the Court still relying on the passive virtues. Nor does
the Court’s skepticism of the Administrative State stand alone. As everyone is well aware, the Court may soon reverse or curtail Roe v. Wade
and could sharply constrain affirmative action. Much depends on the potentially swing-vote status of Chief Justice Roberts
and justices Kavanaugh and Barrett , but whether they are truly swing votes is still unresolved.

To sum up, the president is politically challenged and vulnerable ; Congress is dysfunctional; and administrative
agencies may soon have very confined discretion that does not allow them to address “major questions.” As
a result, the most significant issues of the day — climate change , the pandemic , and the economy — are likely
to remain unresolved, and a virtually paralyzed government may persist. Yes, things may not turn out this way, but even an optimist
should be apprehensive .

The admin state prevents extinction.

Dr. Stephen J. Collier 21, Professor of City & Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley,
PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, November 2021, “The Government of
Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security,” p. xi-19, Princeton University Press

The evidence is clear: we live in an increasingly vulnerable world. Maps with isometric lines indicating flood zones tell
us about the ever-growing likelihood that the places we live will be inundated in future hurricanes, torrential rains, or even high tides.
Emergency exercises reveal that governmental response systems are not prepared to deal with future disease outbreaks. Stress tests
isolate weak links in national and global financial systems that would be exposed in the event of a panic or an economic
downturn. Network analyses point to alarming vulnerabilities to accidents or attacks (whether cyber or
physical) on critical nodes of power systems . Models of climate change demonstrate the vulnerability of
cities and critical infrastructures to heat waves, drought, floods, and landslides. This mountain of evidence points to a
troubling contemporary reality: the vulnerability of the vital systems on which modern life depends to
a startling range of potentially catastrophic events .1
Discussions of vulnerability and preparedness are often, understandably, caught up in the urgency of recent disasters and future threats: a
looming hurricane; a critical system that is prone to failure; a virus that is a single mutation away from causing a deadly
pandemic . And experts, policymakers, and scholars often search out the sources of vulnerability in relatively recent changes in the
structure of our collective existence. Intensifying global flows of people, goods, and capital, they argue, make our world
increasingly interdependent and therefore subject to sudden disruptions that spread through financial systems,
electricity grids, information networks, or human bodies in rapid circulation and close proximity.2 But there is another way to think about our
vulnerable world. Rather than taking vulnerability for granted as a category of understanding—and investigating how our vulnerability became
so acute and pervasive—we can ask how it became possible to think about our world in this way in the first place. More specifically, we can ask
how we came to think of our world in terms of a particular kind of vulnerability. When did government first become concerned with the
disruption or breakdown of life-sustaining vital systems? For what purposes were the techniques that, today, generate such an
extraordinary profusion of evidence about our vulnerability originally invented? How did norms such as resilience and preparedness become
political obligations, to which policymakers and officials are held accountable?

The Government of Emergency addresses these questions by turning to a period of American history in which this distinctive and now mostly
taken-for- granted way of thinking about vulnerability was just taking shape. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, amid the Great
Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, an array of technical experts and government officials developed a new understanding of
the United States as a complex of vulnerable, vital systems. They also invented technical and administrative devices to mitigate

the nation’s vulnerability , as well as organizing a distinctive form of emergency government designed to prepare for
uncertain future events that might catastrophically disrupt these systems. In doing so, these experts and officials
did not, of course, solve the problem of vulnerability. Quite the contrary, they defined vulnerability as a particular kind of problem with which
today’s experts, officials, policymakers, and emergency managers are still grappling.
——

Our interest in these topics was initially sparked by the aftermath—at once troubling and disorienting—of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The most visible and controversial response by the federal government to
these attacks was a series of aggressive security policies identified with the “war on terror.” External security measures taken in the wake of the September 11 attacks included preemptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, drone
strikes on suspected terrorist cells, and extrajudicial detentions, most notoriously in the prison complex at Guantanamo Bay. Domestically, new security measures included heightened border controls, domestic surveillance, and
steps to protect large cities and transportation networks against attack. Many of these domestic measures were associated with a new federal agency, established soon after the attacks of 9/11, with an unfamiliar and Orwellian
name: the Department of Homeland Security.

At one level, these new security measures challenged familiar conceptions of security. Externally, the focus of military and intelligence organizations on terrorist groups and other nonstate actors seemed distinct from the
traditional framework of national security, related to struggles among sovereign states. Meanwhile, new domestic policies pointed to an ominous “securitization” of civilian life, with totalitarian overtones. In another sense,
however, these widely discussed elements of the “war on terror” fit relatively comfortably with familiar understandings of security. These measures sought to identify and interdict enemies of the United States, employing
traditional means of intelligence, surveillance, military force, border control, and policing.

But beneath the surface of these highly visible and contested measures, a different formation of contemporary security was consolidating. Its
contours could be glimpsed by perusing the plans and strategic statements on problems such as “national preparedness” and “critical
infrastructure protection” issued by the president, the D epartment of H omeland S ecurity, the Department of H ealth and H uman

S ervices, and other parts of the US government in the years after 2001. The key norm articulated in these statements was not
the deterrence, interdiction, capture, or defeat of an enemy. Rather, these statements laid out a strategy of preparedness for a
range of uncertain future events —from natural disasters to disease outbreaks, blackouts , and
terrorist attacks —that threatened to disrupt the vital systems that make contemporary life possible .
They drew on forms of specialized knowledge and expert assessment that were quite different from those of domestic
surveillance, foreign intelligence, and other approaches to understanding the plans and motivations of enemies. The evidence these documents
adduced to assess vulnerability was produced by tools such as simulations of catastrophic events; scenario-based exercises to pinpoint gaps in
preparedness plans; and evaluations of the “criticality” of particular facilities, such as ports, power plants, communication nodes, and
transportation hubs. Finally, these statements of strategy proposed a distinctive set of preparedness measures: stockpiling critical
supplies; securing vital facilities or creating redundant facilities; improving coordination among different
parts of the federal government, and among federal, state, and local governments; and, perhaps above all, conducting more exercises to test
readiness. The sudden consolidation of these norms, knowledge practices, and security measures was puzzling. Where had they developed and
been cultivated before coming together so rapidly in new plans and practices?
In 2005, two years after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, these questions were cast into starker relief, and inflected in new ways, by another domestic catastrophe: Hurricane Katrina, which inundated the city of New Orleans. Like the attacks of September 11, Katrina
was followed by rancorous debate and finger pointing. Much of the blame fell on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). FEMA had borne responsibility for disaster preparedness and response in the federal government for almost thirty years. But by 2005, it was
incorporated into the new Department of Homeland Security, whose emphasis on counterterrorism, some observers charged, had left the agency unprepared for a massive natural disaster.3 FEMA’s failure to organize a competent response to Katrina raised doubts about the federal
government’s ability to prepare for a range of other disasters, such as the outbreak of a novel and dangerous infectious disease, a particularly acute concern for public health officials in 2005 given the reemergence of avian flu in Asia, one year earlier. 4 The failed response to Katrina also
focused attention on the “distributed” structure of preparedness in the United States, which required complex coordination among local, state, and federal governments. This structure, too, had failed in spectacular fashion. Local governments proved poorly organized and ill equipped.
State governments were unable to provide timely assistance.

But amid the arguments about where the failure lay, and who was to blame, a basic diagnosis was universally accepted: the government had been unprepared to deal with an event like Katrina and was obliged, in the future, to bolster preparedness, not only for natural disasters but also
for a range of other future catastrophes. Thus, more questions: Where did this peculiar American structure of distributed preparedness come from? Why would an agency charged with anticipating terrorism also be responsible for natural disaster preparedness? And how had this
unquestioned political responsibility—to prepare for events like Katrina—initially been established and entrusted to such a peculiar and apparently precarious governmental arrangement?

In a first stage of our research, we sought to address these questions by looking back to civil defense planning of the early Cold War.5 Cold War civil defense was in one sense quite different from contemporary emergency management. Its primary concern was not preparedness for
natural disasters, pandemic disease, or terrorist attacks. Rather, civil defense focused on strengthening the preparedness of local governments, communities, and households for a nuclear attack on the United States.6 In another sense, however, the way civil defense planners identified
problems and sought to address them was familiar: preparing to respond in the wake of a catastrophic event. Moreover, Cold War civil defense, particularly the Federal Civil Defense Administration (1950–1958), was a recognized part of the landscape of postwar history for scholars of
American emergency management, who have identified it as the source of our current way of thinking about and organizing for emergencies.7

But as our research proceeded, our attention was increasingly drawn to another history—adjacent to but distinct from the history of civil defense—that turned out to be more germane to our concerns. Initially, we encountered a forgotten federal government office, the Office of
Emergency Preparedness, that in the 1960s was charged with addressing many of the problems that have become so urgent and visible at the beginning of the twenty-first century. 8 The central concern of this office was the vulnerability of vital systems, such as oil pipeline networks,
electricity and communication grids, and systems of economic circulation. And it sought to develop methods for anticipating the effects of various kinds of events—terrorist attacks, economic shocks, industrial strikes—that might disrupt these systems, as well as techniques for planning
and testing a governmental structure capable of rapid, coordinated response. Digging into the history of this office and its predecessors, we found ourselves on a track that ran parallel to the story of civil defense (see figure 0.1). It led us to the National Security Resources Board and the
Office of Defense Mobilization, which were established not to carry out the now-familiar functions of emergency management but to prepare for military-industrial mobilization. In contrast to the well-studied history of civil defense, the activities of these organizations have been largely
neglected in the scholarship on the history of emergency management and, indeed, in the broader scholarship on American political development in the middle of the twentieth century. And yet, from 1947 (when the National Security Resources Board was created by the National
Security Act) to 1958 (when the Office of Defense Mobilization was combined with the Federal Civil Defense Administration), these were the organizations working on the central problem of emergency government: preparedness for a nuclear attack on the United States. As we show in
the chapters that follow, experts and officials working in these now obscure offices shaped current understandings and practices related to the vulnerability of vital systems, preparedness for future catastrophes, and the organization of emergency government.

Our research into the work of these mobilization planning offices opened up, in turn, a deeper history, which connected the history of
emergency management in the United States to very different kinds of emergencies: the Great Depression and World War II. During these
earlier episodes, we found, experts and officials working in domains such as mobilization planning, target selection for air war, and national
economic planning developed new kinds of knowledge about flows of resources through the nation’s vital systems and their vulnerability to
catastrophic disruption. These were also the circumstances in which government reformers assembled the distinctive
administrative and political mechanisms of American emergency government, with its small, centralized planning
offices (the ancestors of FEMA), its complex arrangements for distributed preparedness across agencies and governmental
units, and its often-fraught accommodations between democratic norms, expert control, and strong executive authority to address crisis
situations. Thus, in the unexpected settings of depression and world war, we encountered the now-familiar norms and forms of US emergency
government taking shape.
When we set out to write this book, we imagined that it would begin in the 1950s and move into the present, tracing how Cold War civil defense evolved into contemporary emergency management in its various guises of homeland security, pandemic preparedness, and natural disaster policy. But as this parallel history unfolded, the scope of our book shifted. What we had
previously imagined would be the beginning of the story—nuclear pathways of American emergency government. Many of the practices and institutions of contemporary American emergency government emerged from little-studied offices such as the National Security Resources Board and the Office of Defense Mobilization. The history of these organizations points to largely
unexplored genealogical connections between emergency government as we know it today and major midcentury episodes in the development of American political institutions. Credit: Janice Yamanaka-Lew. preparedness in the 1950s—became its endpoint. Our question changed as well. The book’s central concern was no longer the process through which nuclear preparedness
expanded into preparedness for a range of other emergencies in the decades after the 1950s—a history that largely remains to be written. Instead, we traced how the knowledge practices, administrative devices, and governmental mechanisms originally invented to manage the emergencies of economic depression and world war were redirected to preparedness for uncertain
future events that threaten vital systems.

This shift in empirical focus went hand in hand with a shift in, and significant expansion of, the conceptual and historical problems with which we were grappling. In the United States and elsewhere, the problem of the vulnerability of vital systems to catastrophic disruption is coeval with—and is indeed a crucial element in—the history of industrial and urban modernity itself. Thus,
the process through which system vulnerability became such a prevalent governmental concern, and such a dominant feature of our politics, can only be described as one dimension of the broader emergence of a mass industrial and metropolitan society in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. It is also linked to a significant mutation in political institutions.
In contending with the “emergencies” of the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War—all of which were understood as existential crises that demanded exceptional government measures—political reformers created new mechanisms of expert rule and expanded executive power. Thus, in investigating the genealogy of system vulnerability, we also address the
process through which, as political scientist Clinton Rossiter put it in 1949, US government was “adjusted in all its ramifications to the mounting stresses of a protean, outward-looking, industrial society.”9

As we completed this book, governments around the world were struggling to respond to a global crisis. In early 2020, the coronavirus outbreak that began in China was spreading rapidly. As the first wave of the pandemic arrived in the United States, officials faced a daunting prospect: the onset of a deadly disease with no effective biomedical countermeasures at hand, and an
immunologically naïve population. Experts rushed to identify bottlenecks in health systems, such as shortages of masks, testing reagents, and medical personnel, that would limit the number of patients that could be treated. Policymakers argued about how to procure scarce materials and establish priorities for the allocation of limited resources. Local officials sought to identify
essential functions—medical services, critical infrastructure, and the production and distribution of food, for example—whose operation would need to be secured as stay-at- home orders were imposed across the country. Epidemiologists updated pandemic models to anticipate surges in cases in particular areas and to estimate the demand that such surges would make on health
resources. Debates flared up about the distribution of responsibility between federal agencies and the president, and between the federal government and the states.

As authorities sought to address multiplying breakdowns and bottlenecks in health systems, a distant episode of American history came to public attention. In spring 2020, Democratic lawmakers and a range of experts and interest groups urged then-president Donald Trump to draw on the emergency powers of the Defense Production Act to organize a forceful federal response to
the pandemic. This Act, passed in 1950, gave the president authority to manage national economic resources in order to mobilize the industrial economy, initially for the Korean War.10 By the late 1950s, mobilization planners had laid plans to use Defense Production Act powers to manage an array of other problems— including massive nationwide medical response—that would
arise in the aftermath of a large-scale nuclear attack on the United States. These plans addressed many of the issues that health officials and policymakers would face, over half a century later, in spring 2020: ensuring adequate production capacity of essential medical supplies through government loans and production agreements; securing vital inputs to such production through
priorities ratings and allocation controls; and managing the distribution of scarce medical resources, including personnel, to meet a medical emergency unfolding across the country.

The Trump administration made limited use of the Defense Production Act to procure items such as test kits and protective gear but was widely criticized for its unwillingness to employ it more expansively. “We’re at war,” proclaimed the former director of the Defense Production Act program division at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “and the enemy is called Covid.
The question is do we have the guts that our grandfathers had to mobilize the economy of the United States against the enemy.” 11 Upon taking office in January 2021, President Joseph Biden issued an executive order that outlined a broad use of the Defense Production Act’s emergency authorities. Priorities ratings would bolster vaccine manufacturers’ access to equipment such as
filling pumps and filtration units required to ramp up production. Loans and purchase agreements would spur investment in domestic plants to manufacture surgical gloves, whose production in other countries had been constrained by shortages of a vital input: nitrile butadiene rubber. Officials contemplated similar actions, such as issuing loans and purchase agreements, to expand
the production of at-home coronavirus tests, N95 masks, and other critical supplies.12

As we show in this book, the powers of priorities ratings, allocation control, emergency loans, and purchase agreements are not the only elements of the government response to the Covid-19 pandemic that have roots in the emergencies of the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, many dimensions of the response can be traced back to attempts to manage national resources and to
ensure the operation of vital systems during these prior emergencies. Perhaps like no other event in the last seventy years, the Covid-19 pandemic has thrust these problems to the center of attention. But a range of current issues—most notably the intensifying disasters that will result from climate change—ensure that this largely neglected dimension of emergency government will
be increasingly central to contemporary politics.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the intellectual engagement and support of innumerable friends, colleagues, collaborators, and family members. We are particularly grateful to Ben Anderson, Carlo Caduff, Craig Calhoun, David Collier, Ruth Berins Collier, Deborah Cowen, Savannah Cox, Tyler Curley, Myriam Dunn, Lyle Fearnley, Andreas Folkers, Nils Gilman, Kevin
Grove, Anke Gruendel, Frédéric Keck, Chris Kelty, Clay Kerchoff, Eric Klinenberg, George Lakoff, Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Sandy Lakoff, Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, Brian Lindseth, Sven Opitz, Onur Özgöde, Paul Rabinow, Peter Redfield, Janet Roitman, Antina von Schnitzler, and Antti Silvast.

We are also grateful for support from the National Science Foundation under Grant no. 1058882, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Julien J. Studley Research Fund at The New School, and the Dean’s Office of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences.

INTRODUCTION

The New Normalcy

During the past twenty years we have substituted for the normalcy of the halcyon 1920s an almost unbroken series of emergencies: depression, defense, war, inflation, cold war. Indeed, emergency appears to have become the new kind of normalcy. National emergencies tend to favor improvisation by government. Yet with all our improvising, our
“putting out of fires,” our apparent activation by events instead of deliberate activation of events, we have emerged with a discernible pattern of domestic and foreign policy and, most important, with an acceptance of the idea that government should consciously plan a strategy for anticipating and meeting domestic and foreign emergencies at the
operational level.

— JAMES FESLER, SPEECH TO THE INDUSTRIAL COLL EGE OF THE ARMED FORCES, SEPTEMBER 4, 1952

In 1954, the United States’ Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF) published a massive multivolume tome, Emergency Management of the National Economy.1 The ICAF volumes collected a series of lectures that had been delivered to military officers at the college, as well as a range of government documents that addressed ICAF’s main concern: managing industrial
mobilization for war. The fourth volume, dedicated to Principles of Administration, reproduced a lecture by political scientist James Fesler, a veteran of government reform during the New Deal and of mobilization planning during World War II.2 Looking back on the previous two tumultuous decades, Fesler observed that the United States had emerged from an “unbroken series of
emergencies”—“ depression, defense, war, inflation, cold war”—with a “discernible pattern” of emergency government. Its hallmark was a new norm: “government should consciously plan a strategy for anticipating and meeting domestic and foreign emergencies at the operational level.” In the “new kind of normalcy” Fesler described, emergency government was no longer
confined to exceptional situations. Rather, ongoing emergency preparedness had become a part of governmental routine.

More than six decades later, it is taken for granted that government bears responsibility for continuously anticipating and preparing for emergencies. This assumption has been evident in efforts to assign blame and bolster readiness following disasters such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and, most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. It is
noteworthy, then, that in 1952, when Fesler gave his lecture, this governmental norm was neither established nor taken for granted. Rather, it was new and required explicit statement and elaboration.

It is also noteworthy that Fesler’s discussion addressed a set of problems and institutional contexts that seem distant from our contemporary understandings of emergency management. Today, government offices tasked with managing emergencies are concerned with preparedness for events such as natural disasters, disease outbreaks, and terrorist attacks, as well as with
response and recovery in the aftermath of such events. But in 1952, the object of emergency management was the national economy, and its central aim was military-industrial mobilization—marshaling raw materials, industrial facilities, and manpower to build the tanks, planes, munitions, and other supplies necessary for total war. In this sense, Fesler’s speech points us to the
specificity of the historical conjuncture during which new norms for managing emergencies were first articulated in the United States and were connected to forms of expert knowledge, administrative practices, and legal mechanisms. The topics addressed in Emergency Management of the National Economy suggest some of the issues that, in this now unfamiliar landscape, were
initially clustered around emergency government: resource planning, economic controls, internal security, economic intelligence, air targeting, government reorganization, domestic vulnerability, and nonmilitary defense. And the government offices, commissions, and agencies whose work was either collected or discussed in the ICAF volumes—most long-since dissolved, and many
virtually forgotten—provide a map of the institutional settings in which emergency government was addressed at this time. Among these were committees working on government reform and resource management during the New Deal; wartime and postwar mobilization planning offices; air-targeting and strategic intelligence units in the military; and offices of civil defense and
domestic preparedness of the early Cold War.3

If Emergency Management of the National Economy situates the history of American emergency government in relation to economic management and military-industrial mobilization during the Great Depression and World War II, it also marks a point of inflection. In the early 1950s, emergency government was already in the process of becoming something different and, from our
contemporary perspective, more familiar. In the foreword to the ICAF tome, another veteran of wartime mobilization planning, Arthur Flemming, described this new horizon of emergency government. At the time, Flemming was serving as director of the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM). Created in 1950 to lead civilian mobilization planning for the Korean War, ODM had by
1953 become the most important domestic preparedness agency in the federal government. Surveying the landscape of the early Cold War, Flemming offered a grim assessment of the current world situation. The United States, he wrote, was in an “age of peril.” The advent of long-range bombers and atomic weapons confronted national security strategists with the specter of a
sudden “devastating attack on the continental United States.” In the event of such a sudden attack, the United States would not have time to mobilize its “material and human resources” over the course of months or years, as it had in the prior two world wars. Rather, Flemming argued, the country would have to shift immediately to war footing and would be faced with managing
the consequences of a crippling initial blow. Adequately preparing the nation for this eventuality could “save an untold number of human lives” and ensure that the United States could “continue a substantial portion of our war production and production essential for the holding together of our civilian economy.” 4

In light of these concerns about a devastating enemy attack, during the 1950s the civilian mobilization planning agencies turned their attention to a novel task. If earlier these agencies were concerned primarily with military-industrial production during a long war fought overseas, then increasingly their focus shifted to preparedness planning to ensure the survival of the national
population and recovery of the economy in the aftermath of a domestic catastrophe. It is indicative of this shift that, by the early 1960s, the Office of Defense Mobilization had evolved into the Office of Emergency Planning, which was in turn renamed the Office of Emergency Preparedness. In 1962, the director of this office, Edward McDermott, outlined the aims and means of
emergency government as they had come to be understood by this time. Citing a draft executive order issued by President John F. Kennedy, McDermott reported that he had been charged with coordinating the “national preparedness program,” whose goal was to maintain a “state of readiness with respect to all conditions of national emergency.” This meant, first and foremost,
maintaining an “emergency management organization” that would be prepared to “handle the myriad of resource and economic problems necessary to save lives and sustain survival and expedite recovery.” Reviewing these “resource and economic problems”— related to electric power, transportation, communications, food, and medical care—McDermott pointed to the vast
scope of his office’s concern. “We are really talking about the fundamentals of life on this earth,” he intoned, “the elemental problems of safeguarding the food we eat, the fuel we consume, the transportation to maintain a steady flow of commerce, an intricate telecommunications system which will continue to function under all conditions, and perhaps most important, the
foundation of constitutional government which underpins our way of life.”5 In sum, the Office of Emergency Planning was charged with sustaining the very biological and associational life of the American population during a future emergency.
In the decades since McDermott’s speech, practices for anticipating and managing emergencies have continued to evolve, and the organization of emergency government has been frequently reshuffled. But McDermott’s 1962 description of the task of governmental preparedness for emergency is strikingly similar to contemporary understandings. Emergency preparedness continues
to focus on reducing the vulnerability of vital systems in anticipation of a range of potentially catastrophic future events, and on preparing for life-saving response and recovery in their aftermath. Thus, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s 2015 National Preparedness Goal—which currently guides governmental preparedness for events ranging from terrorist attacks to
hurricanes and pandemics—refers to a “secure and resilient Nation with the capabilities required across the whole community to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and recover from the threats and hazards that pose the greatest risk.” 6 The emphasis now, as in 1962, is on what the Department of Homeland Security’s 2017 guidance on critical infrastructure protection
refers to as “the essential services that underpin American society and serve as the backbone of our nation’s economy, security, and health”; “the power we use in our homes, the water we drink, the transportation that moves us . . . and the communication systems we rely on.”7 Today, as in the early 1960s, emergency preparedness aims to ensure governmental functions relating
to “health and safety,” “infrastructure systems,” “hydration, feeding, and sheltering,” that, in the wake of a future disaster, will be essential to “rapidly meeting basic human needs,” “restoring basic services,” “establishing a safe and secure environment,” and “supporting the transition to recovery.”8 And as has been true since the beginning of the postwar period, emergency
government today is not an exception to the normal operation of the state. Rather, it encompasses the management of unfolding emergencies and ongoing preparedness for future emergency situations as permanent functions of normal government.

A Genealogy of Emergency Government

This book examines the formation of American emergency government in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It follows the process through which a governmental apparatus initially assembled to manage economic depression and industrial mobilization for war mutated into an apparatus of emergency preparedness for domestic catastrophe. The account presented in this
book is a genealogy of emergency government that traces how now-familiar forms of knowledge, practices, and norms first came into being.9 It is only relatively recently, we suggest, that we have come to understand and organize emergency government as a matter of reducing the vulnerability of vital systems, and it is only recently that preparedness for events that might disrupt
these systems has become a basic obligation of government.

This genealogical approach to the study of emergency government can be usefully distinguished from histories of the field of disaster preparedness and emergency management, which follow the changing forms of knowledge and governance that have been applied to a certain class of phenomena—disasters. For example, in Acts of God, historian Ted Steinberg traces how the US
government has understood and managed (or failed to manage) natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and storms, from the early days of the American republic to the present. 10 Scott Knowles, in The Disaster Experts, constructs what he calls a “disaster chronology” over roughly the same period, tracking how experts have made “the knowledge and control of disasters their
special concern.”11 In contrast to such historical studies of disaster and disaster management, a genealogical approach asks how a range of seemingly disparate phenomena, from nuclear attacks and economic shocks to hurricanes and disease outbreaks, have been constituted as common types of events that present similar kinds of problems. Thus, the title of this book—The
Government of Emergency—does not refer to the way that a pregiven class of events or situations has been governed. Rather, it refers to a form of political rationality, which we understand, following sociologist Nikolas Rose, as an “intellectual machinery or apparatus for rendering reality thinkable in such a way that it is amenable to political programming.”12

As Rose suggests, political rationalities have both normative and epistemological dimensions. On the one hand, a given political rationality entails specific assumptions about the “proper distribution of tasks between different authorities” and the “ideals or principles to which government should be addressed.” Thus, it implies certain presumptions (however contested and unstable)
about what government is, what it should do, and what its limits should be. On the other hand, a political rationality involves a distinct “style of reasoning,” that is, a body of “intellectual techniques for rendering reality thinkable and practicable, and constituting domains that are amenable—or not amenable—to reformatory intervention.” Importantly, a style of reasoning entails
specific “conceptions of the objects to be governed,” whether the national economy, the population, or the vulnerable, vital systems on which the economy and the population depend.13

One strategy of genealogical research is to paint a “before and after” picture that aims, as Ian Hacking has put it, “to permanently fix in the mind of the reader the fact that some upheaval has occurred”—a momentous shift in ways of thinking and governing.14 Our account is framed by such a conceptual and political “upheaval,” in which new objects, aims, and practices of
government came into being over a relatively brief period. But we also present a detailed account of how this momentous shift unfolded. We focus on specific organizations and on historically situated actors as they took up existing ways of knowing and intervening, or invented new ones, to address novel problems. 15 Through these often-mundane practices, a new political
rationality—and indeed, we suggest, a new dimension of political modernity—took shape over the period spanning roughly from the Great Depression through the early Cold War.

The first part of the book examines the period from the 1930s to the early 1940s, in which the federal government faced two conditions of “national emergency”: the Great Depression and World War II. During this period, emergency government largely involved economic interventions to ameliorate the Depression and to manage industrial production for total war. Chapter 1
follows the work of experts in a succession of domains—from city and regional planning to economic management, wartime mobilization, and air targeting—as they constituted vital systems as objects of systematic knowledge and as targets of intervention. Chapter 2 describes a parallel process through which government reformers invented administrative devices and
organizational forms to address the economic emergencies of depression and war. It focuses in particular on how these reformers addressed the tensions between liberal constitutionalism and crisis government by assembling what they called an “administrative machinery” to organize and prepare for emergency situations.

The book’s second part is situated in the years immediately after World War II, a period of heightening concern about the prospect of an enemy attack on the continental United States that would cripple military-industrial production systems. Chapter 3 shows how civilian experts and military officers developed systematic knowledge about American economic and infrastructural
vulnerability and devised practices and understandings that would constitute a new kind of expertise—and a new kind of expert, the “vulnerability specialist.”16 Chapter 4 turns to the first efforts to develop techniques for reducing this vulnerability and preparing to manage the consequences of a massive attack. It examines postwar mobilization planning agencies, where experts and
officials reoriented the existing institutions and practices of emergency government. If previously these institutions had focused on economic management of the unfolding emergencies of depression and war, their objective now shifted to preparing for a future war. Emergency government was thus becoming a matter of ongoing peacetime preparedness.

Part III traces a further shift in American emergency government that took place during the 1950s. As nuclear weapons and delivery systems
grew increasingly powerful, mobilization planners deemphasized readiness to ramp up industrial production for a long war. Instead, they
turned to the task of ensuring the continuous functioning of vital systems that would be required to sustain human
life , economic activity, and governmental operations in the unprecedented conditions that would result from a thermo nuclear attack.
“administrative readiness” developed by mobilization planners to prepare for government
Chapter 5 examines the practices of
operations in a future emergency, culminating with a description of Mobilization Plan D-Minus (1957)—the first plan for national
emergency preparedness in the United States. Chapter 6 focuses on one dimension of such national preparedness planning: the management
of resources such as food, medical supplies, and services that would be essential to the population’s postattack survival. The chapter traces how
mobilization planners used the new tool of computer simulation to envision and prepare for an unprecedented future event—a catastrophic
nuclear attack.
By the late 1950s, emergency government, which had previously focused on alleviating economic depression and mobilizing for war, had mutated into emergency preparedness for a future domestic catastrophe. A coherent set of understandings, practices, and organizational forms had consolidated into an apparatus that continues to structure emergency government—in the
United States and beyond—to the present day. In the next two sections, we outline the broader conceptual and theoretical significance of this mutation in governmental rationality. First, we introduce the concept of vital systems security as a form of “reflexive biopolitics,” oriented to the management of uncertain and potentially catastrophic future events. We argue that, beginning
with the midcentury episodes we examine, securing the nation’s vital systems has become a central norm of modern government. Second, we describe how American emergency government took shape as a response to the challenge that increasingly common use of emergency powers during war and economic crisis posed to democratic government. In these contexts, reformers
assembled a political technology for governing emergencies that, they thought, would make it possible to avoid recourse to exceptional measures that would undermine constitutional democracy.

Vital Systems Security

In 1984, applied mathematician and security expert Robert Kupperman published Technological Advances and Consequent Dangers, a working paper for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, DC.17 Kupperman’s essay was a far-reaching reflection on the vulnerability of vital systems as a central problem of national security. For our
purposes, Kupperman’s paper indicates how system vulnerability was linked to a broader problematization of risk and security in modern societies.

For millennia, Kupperman argued, human beings had faced relatively localized and “self-extinguishing” threats that were “dissipated by the distribution of cultural assets, by the existence of physical and psychological ‘hinterlands,’ and by the cushioning function of institutional diversity and independence.” Even the cataclysm of World War I was a contained event. “Diversities,
distances, and differences, systematic inefficiencies of civilization in themselves,” he argued, “provided the recuperative forces necessary to maintain continuity.” But in the intervening years, the “extension of technology in the service of civilization” had enabled human beings to move “into every suitable niche, and even into some not so suitable.” The increasingly “efficient,
economical infrastructure” required to sustain this process carried with it an unacknowledged price. “Modern technological efficiency in the provision of food, water, energy, medicine, transport and communication,” he wrote, has been “oriented toward economic affordability without much attention to complex network fragility.” Pointing to the “interlocking technologies” that
underpin the “fragile dynamic cycle of production, transportation, and consumption” in contemporary societies, Kupperman argued that the “greater a society’s dependence for survival on its technological infrastructure, the greater its vulnerability to a collapse triggered naturally or artificially at a key point.” Like biological organisms, contemporary human societies could not
manage “fundamental system failures multiplying at a biological rate.” “A critical point is reached,” Kupperman warned. “A cascade of organ-system failures ensues, and death comes quickly.” Modern civilization, in developing technologies oriented to furthering the “ends of human life,” had created a system whose “success and importance to social survival make it, ironically, one
of society’s greatest weaknesses.”18

In the 1970s and 1980s, the kinds of hazards that Kupperman identified—what sociologist Ulrich Beck describes as “modernization risks”19—were taking on a new kind of public and political life. Economic and energy shocks, environmental crisis, and terrorism garnered increasing attention alongside the paradigmatic specter of catastrophic risk, thermonuclear war, which raised the
prospect, for the first time, of self-inflicted human extinction. 20 Kupperman’s reflections are especially significant for our story given his career trajectory, which passed through some of the mostly forgotten technical domains in which, we show in this book, the vulnerability of vital systems was identified and addressed as a matter of governmental concern. In 1980, Kupperman
served the incoming Ronald Reagan administration as the head of the transition for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which President Jimmy Carter had created by executive order in 1979. Prior to that, during the 1960s and early 1970s, Kupperman had worked in one of FEMA’s predecessors, the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP). As director of the
Systems Evaluation Division within OEP, Kupperman oversaw studies on “the impact on the Nation’s security and economy created by emergency contingencies of both military and nonmilitary nature,” examining issues such as natural disaster assistance, the continuity of government, damage assessment, resource management, and the “survivability of networks related to national
preparedness.”21

The arc of Kupperman’s career points us to a broader question: How did it become possible to understand collective existence in the United States as dependent on a complex of vital and vulnerable systems, and how did the protection of such systems come to be a taken-for- granted obligation of contemporary government? In the chapters that follow we show that, for nearly a
century, a persistent discourse has examined collective life from a particular point of view: the vulnerability of modern society and economy to disruption of the vital systems on which they depend. And since at least the early Cold War, the federal government has been concerned with ensuring the continuous functioning of such systems in the face of catastrophic threats. Today,
this problem of “vital systems security” is a central object and aim of government, defined in legislation, executive orders, and broad statements of security strategy.

REFLEXIVE BIOPOLITICS

We analyze the emergence of vital systems security as the product of a mutation in the government of modern life. Specifically, it marks a reflexive moment in the history of “biopolitics”—that is, the government of human beings in relation to their biological and social existence. Michel Foucault famously coined the term “biopolitics” to mark a shift, dating roughly to the late
eighteenth century, in the aims and objects of government in European countries: from the “classical sovereignty” of the European territorial monarchies to a new governmental concern with ensuring the health and well-being of national populations.22 Classical sovereignty, Foucault argued, ruled “from the standpoint of the juridical-political notion” of the legal subject. Diplomatic,
military, and police apparatuses—elements of what might be called “sovereign state security”—aimed to ensure the security of the state itself in the face of foreign and domestic threats. By contrast, biopolitical government is exercised over the population—a collection of living beings understood as a “technical-political object of management.” Foucault traced the “birth of
biopolitics” to late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Europe, when government authorities sought to manage the health and welfare of populations in growing urban centers. The rapid growth of towns, the expansion of industry, the intensification of trade, and increasingly crowded living conditions posed “new and specific economic and political problems of governmental
technique.” In response, officials, planners, and experts in the nascent human sciences invented new forms of knowledge about—and devices for governing—the “fine materiality of human existence and coexistence, of exchange and circulation.”23 As Foucault emphasized, the point is not that the birth of biopolitics displaced prior mechanisms of sovereignty; indeed, particularly
with the advent of total war, threats to sovereignty were a key catalyst for the development of biopolitics. Rather, the theme of biopolitics designates the interplay between the exercise of juridical power over legal subjects and the technical management of living beings.

Building on Foucault’s analysis, scholars have traced the development of biopolitical government in a range of domains from the early nineteenth century. In efforts to reduce the toll of epidemics, organize conscription for war, or manage economic fluctuations, government bureaucracies generated vast amounts of data about phenomena such as birth, illness, and death; suicide and
crime; and levels of production and employment.24 This “avalanche of numbers,” as Hacking puts it, made possible a new, statistical understanding of collective life.25 The technical and political category of risk played a central role in this development, enabling experts and government officials to quantitatively analyze how phenomena such as crime, illness, accident, and poverty
were distributed over a given population, and to assess the costs and benefits of measures to minimize these risks.26 New governmental apparatuses in areas such as economic regulation, urban planning, and public health specified and managed these problems. As Foucault describes this complex process, a “constant interplay between techniques of power and their object” served
to “carve out” the population and its specific phenomena (birth and death rates, disease processes, etc.) as a “field of reality.” 27

We take up this story of biopolitical modernity at a later conjuncture and in a different locale. Beginning in the early twentieth century, American planners and policymakers in various domains argued that with the development of mass industrial and metropolitan societies, the interdependencies that made modern collective life possible also rendered it vulnerable to catastrophic
disruption from events such as economic shocks, industrial accidents, or wars. Over the following decades, experts and officials addressed this vulnerability by devising new ways to anticipate and mitigate the effects of such events, to reduce the vulnerability of vital systems, and to make society resilient to shocks.28

The first governmental apparatus for securing vital systems was assembled in the 1950s. In the early Cold War, planners and officials working on nuclear preparedness brought together a set of elements— knowledge forms, techniques of intervention, and organizational arrangements—that constituted system vulnerability as a target of governmental intervention. Like the
demographers, public health experts, and urbanists of the nineteenth century, mobilization planners produced an “avalanche of numbers” about collective existence, not through statistical analysis of populations but by using scenarios, catastrophe models, and vulnerability assessments. Through this process, society became vulnerable in a novel way. Like the figure of population a
century earlier, a new figure of collective life—the vulnerable, vital system—was “carved out” as an object of expert knowledge, technical intervention, and political concern.

By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this apparatus of vital systems security had been extended into new domains, including natural disaster response, pandemic preparedness, the management of economic crises, and homeland security.29 This is not to say that vital systems security displaced prior forms of security or became the dominant form of collective
security. As we will show, vital systems security emerged and consolidated in complex relation to sovereign state security and population security. Thus, the officials and planners in the 1950s-era Office of Defense Mobilization viewed the task of ensuring the functioning of vital systems in the wake of a nuclear attack as a matter of sovereign state security—prevailing in a future
war.30 Meanwhile, vital systems security has become central to many domains of biopolitical government, including the provision of population security in areas such as public health, urban planning, and economic governance. Indeed, we suggest that vital systems security should be understood as a form of “reflexive biopolitics.” It shares the aim of population security: ensuring
the health and welfare of populations. But these two forms of biopolitical security differ in their objects of concern, knowledge practices, and norms (see table 1). Whereas population security addresses regularly occurring events that can be managed through the distribution of risk, vital systems security deals with events whose probability cannot be precisely calculated, but whose
consequences are potentially catastrophic. Vital systems security does not rely on statistical analysis of past events, but rather employs techniques of enactment such as catastrophe models and scenario-based exercises to simulate potential future events and thereby generate knowledge about present vulnerabilities.31 Its interventions seek to increase the resilience of critical
systems and to bolster preparedness for future emergencies.

A NEW POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Our claim is not that governmental concern with vital systems is itself novel. Governments have long been concerned with vital systems like roads, communication networks, and large systems of water management. The construction and control of transportation, energy, and communication systems—what has only recently come to be called “infrastructure”—is found in all large-
scale complex societies. 32 Territorial empires have for centuries recognized what were referred to as “communications” as essential to prosperity and security. And military strategists have long been concerned with the importance of transportation and communication for military lines of supply; the military tactic of blockade goes back millennia.33 But from the late nineteenth
century to the mid-twentieth century, we observe a significant intensification and modulation of these concerns. In particular, three features distinguish vital systems security as a political rationality and delimit the conceptual and empirical scope of this book: first, its relationship to biopolitics; second, the emergence of specialized expertise about vital systems; and third, the
consolidation of a new political norm—that governments must ensure the ongoing functioning of vital systems in the face of catastrophic threats.

Vital systems and modern biopolitics. First, we can refer to vital systems security in the sense we use the term here only with the emergence of modern biopolitics. Electricity networks, railroads, and complex chains of production became “vital systems” when they were linked to newly constituted problem domains such as the national economy or social welfare.34 Although this
development can be traced to the late nineteenth century, particularly in European contexts,35 our narrative begins in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. We focus on two apparently disparate fields: regional planning and strategic bombing theory.36 Experts in these fields initially used biological metaphors to illustrate the dependence of collective
existence on what Muir Fairchild, an instructor at the US Army’s Air Corps Tactical School in the 1930s, called “life-sustaining vital systems.”37 Fairchild’s term suggested that, like the failure of vital organs or the breakdown of circulatory systems in a biological organism, the disruption of such systems would be catastrophic to the social body. As another Air Corps instructor put it in
1938, as the United States had “grown and prospered in proportion to the excellence of its industrial system,” it had become “more vulnerable . . . to wartime collapse caused by the cutting of one or more of its essential arteries.”38 The use of such biological metaphors would fade over time (though never disappear, as Kupperman’s 1984 report demonstrates). But from the case
studies of the Air Corps Tactical School and the quantitative analyses of “criticality” and “essentiality” in wartime and postwar facilities ratings to contemporary assessments of critical infrastructure vulnerability or resilience, experts have defined the “vitality” of vital systems, and the threat posed by their disruption, in terms of these systems’ role in the health and well-being of
populations—the central concerns of biopolitical government.

System vulnerability expertise. Second, vital systems security is distinguished by the development of specialized knowledge that constitutes vital systems and their vulnerability as objects of expert analysis and rational-technical intervention. By the mid-twentieth century, technical specialists and officials working in mobilization and air-targeting agencies had devised new practices
for assessing vulnerability and preparing for future events that might disrupt the nation’s vital systems. This new form of expertise rested on the accumulation of a vast amount of information about American natural resources, productive facilities, and public works—what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt referred to in 1935 as an “inventory of our national assets.”39 Such
expertise also drew on techniques for analyzing the interrelationships among the elements that this “inventory” comprised. Although specialists from many fields were involved in constituting vital systems—and the vulnerability of these systems—as objects of systematic knowledge, economists played a particularly prominent role. Economists first appear in our account during the
New Deal, inventing a “science of flows” to analyze how shocks would propagate through the economic system, whether these shocks resulted from a plunge in demand during economic downturns or from a surge in demand caused by government stimulus policies or wartime mobilization. A number of these New Deal economists then migrated to air intelligence offices during
World War II, where they developed an “economics of strategic target selection” to assess the vulnerability of enemy production systems and to recommend bombing targets.40 A decade prior to the development of “systems analysis” at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s, these mobilization planners and air intelligence specialists established methods for the quantitative analysis
of military-industrial complexes as ensembles of interlocking vital systems.41

In the closing years of World War II and the early Cold War, technical experts coupled the analysis of vital systems with new methods for modeling how a catastrophic event—such as an incendiary bombing attack on a city (during World War II) or an atomic detonation (after the war)—would unfold in space. As we show in chapter 3, these experts produced a new kind of knowledge
about vital and vulnerable systems. Initially, military analysts in air intelligence units used graphical techniques such as maps and transparent overlays to generate assessments of urban and industrial vulnerability. By the mid-1950s, vulnerability experts had replaced maps and physical overlays with digital computers and geographically tagged data sets—a precursor of geographic
information systems (GIS). The advent of computer simulation added another dimension to vulnerability analysis. By incorporating randomization procedures and multiple simulated runs in their models, vulnerability specialists could account for uncertainties about how a future attack would unfold. These simulation techniques—initially used as speculative “experiments” or “war
games” 42 as part of nuclear preparedness planning (see chapter 6)—have come to be accepted in various domains as authoritative tools for generating knowledge about uncertain future events.43

Vital systems security as political obligation and norm. Third, and finally, vital systems security refers to an increasingly taken-for- granted norm of politics. After World War II, the task of ensuring the continuous operation of vital systems and managing the risk of catastrophic disruption came to be accepted as a basic obligation of sovereign government. This was not the first time
that the US government was expected to deal with the consequences of domestic catastrophes. As Michele Landis Dauber has documented, there is a long American tradition of federal relief following disasters.44 But prior to the middle of the twentieth century, these governmental responses were ad hoc, organized in the wake of what were understood to be unforeseeable “acts of
god.” 45 Only in the last several decades has government been held responsible for preparing in advance of future catastrophes that can be anticipated if not precisely predicted. And only in the last several decades has this obligation been addressed, at least in part, by technical measures that aim to ensure the functioning of vital systems.

The first statutory mention of this new governmental obligation (discussed in chapter 4) was in the 1947 National Security Act. The Act created a new peacetime mobilization agency—the National Security Resources Board (NSRB)—and charged it with undertaking measures to protect “industries, services, Government and economic activities” whose “continuous operation” Congress
deemed “essential to the Nation’s security.” 46 The NSRB was a defense mobilization agency, in which the norm of “preparedness” still referred to military-industrial readiness for war. But planners working in government agencies charged with preparedness gradually adapted these techniques to address other kinds of potentially catastrophic events, such as hurricanes, floods, and
infectious disease outbreaks. By the 1960s, the norm of preparedness could refer to any event that might catastrophically disrupt the nation’s vital systems. The organization of responsibility for emergency preparedness has shifted almost constantly over the subsequent decades, and attention to this problem has ebbed and flowed. But the task of ensuring the continuous operation
of vital systems is now a virtually unquestioned—if not always successfully met—obligation of contemporary government.

An “Administrative Machinery” for Governing Emergencies

The prior section described how experts and officials constituted system vulnerability as an object of specialized knowledge and a target of governmental intervention during the Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War. But on its own, this description of expert knowledge and technical interventions is too serene. It is too serene, in part, because these “interventions” into
vital systems were closely linked to projects— whether war mobilization, strategic air targeting, or nuclear preparedness—that involved the mass slaughter of civilians, the annihilation of cities, and, after World War II, the prospect of nuclear holocaust.47 It is also too serene because the developments we have described corresponded to an upheaval in American government.
Technical experts and government officials often instituted the mechanisms of vital systems security through “emergency” measures that challenged American political traditions, such as deference to legislative prerogative and judicial precedent, as well as a diffuse and decentralized pattern of sovereignty. An account of the emergence and consolidation of vital systems security
must, therefore, address the fraught relationship between emergency powers and constitutional democracy.

As a point of entry into these questions, we turn to the writings of a prominent midcentury American commentator on crisis government, political scientist Clinton Rossiter. Rossiter began his seminal study Constitutional Dictatorship, published in 1948, with a question that President Abraham Lincoln had posed at the outset of the American Civil War. “Is there in all republics,”
Lincoln asked, “this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a government be too strong for the liberties of its people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” Had Lincoln been alive on the eve of World War II, Rossiter observed, he could have “framed his question in more modern terms.” Was it possible for a democracy to “fight a successful total war and still be a democracy when
the war is over?” For Rossiter, writing just after the end of World War II, the “incontestable facts of history” had provided an answer. “We have fought a successful total war,” Rossiter declared, “and we are still a democracy.” In this “severe national emergency,” the US government had employed “devices and techniques” that made it “strong enough to maintain its own existence
without at the same time being so strong as to subvert the liberties of the people it has been instituted to defend.” 48

In what follows, we show that the “devices and techniques” Rossiter referred to were the product of efforts by governmental reformers who, during the New Deal and World War II, sought to meet the challenge that, they thought, emergency situations posed to constitutional democracy. These reformers assembled what Rossiter called an “administrative machinery” that would
enable the US federal government, especially its executive branch, to manage emergency situations through expert rule without recourse to an extra-constitutional state of exception. They believed, like Rossiter, that in an era of pervasive doubt about the prospects for democracy, they had successfully responded to the “taunt of the dictators” that “democracies cannot meet the
demands of the modern world and still remain democratic,” as the reformer Luther Gulick put it in 1941.49 Our aim in describing these reformers’ efforts is not to assess the validity of such claims. Rather, it is to reconstruct how they formulated and sought to address the problem that emergencies posed to democratic constitutionalism. Their responses shaped a distinctive political
technology for governing emergency situations.

DEMOCRACY, EMERGENCY, AND THE MODERN AMERICAN STATE

Our account begins in the early twentieth century. At this time, Progressive reformers argued that, as Charles Merriam put it in 1933,
governments had “to undertake new activities” to address intensifying processes of urbanization and industrialization.
Among these new activities were the management of “public welfare, including education, recreation, health, social relief, and
welfare planning”; the construction of public works, such as “highways and aid to communications”; and the “central
control over social and economic forces.”50 The challenge, Merriam and other reformers held, was that American governmental
institutions, which were set up when the United States was a largely rural and sparsely populated country, were ill suited to the functions
required of what they referred to as a “positive state” that was involved in managing the health, well-being, and conditions of existence of a
rapidly growing and an increasingly urban population. Merriam described this mismatch as “social lag” and argued for governmental
“adjustment.”51 On the one hand, technical experts would have to play an expanded role in political administration. On the other hand, such
an “adjustment” would require a significant shift in the locus of political authority: centralization to address issues that crossed local
jurisdictional boundaries and decisive executive leadership to manage urgent social and economic problems.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, administrative reformers succeeded in instituting significant changes
along the lines Merriam and other Progressives prescribed. Initially, their efforts focused on state and local governments, as they sought to deal
with the growing pressures of urban growth and industrial expansion. By the 1930s, in the context of the New Deal, these reformers turned
their attention to the national level and the federal government, where they confronted the “emergency” situations of the Great Depression
and World War II. Between 1933 and 1945, federal agencies took on a vast range of new functions relating to the
provision of social welfare , economic management , and industrial mobilization .52 To better equip the federal
government—particularly the executive branch—to meet these new demands, Progressive reformers working in and around the Roosevelt
administration pushed through a series of laws and administrative changes. Partly as a result of their efforts, the American presidency, which
began the 1930s as a solitary office with a small staff, emerged from the war as a powerful office that oversaw an array of agencies ,
wield ing formidable discretionary powers.53 [FOOTNOTE] 53. Waldo (Administrative State) referred to the federal
government that emerged from World War II as the “administrative state.” On the expansion of the Executive Office of the
President (EOP) in particular, see Relyea, Executive Office. As one indicator of the growth of this apparatus of executive rule, President Hoover’s
staff consisted of thirty-three people; today, more than two thousand people are on the EOP’s staff. [END FOOTNOTE] New expert bodies were
scattered throughout the executive branch, and new mechanisms of rational-technical administration were woven into laws and regulations.
 OFF
CARBON CP:
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission should establish regulations
requiring:
---extractive energy corporations to disclose carbon-content estimates of their assets
and holdings, and assessments of their financial risk exposure under a variety of
potential greenhouse gas emissions restriction policies including policies necessary to
limit climate change to 2 degrees Celsius
---financial institutions to measure their risk exposure under the same variety of
emissions restriction policies
---incorporation of environmental sustainability into the legal duties of market
participants
The United States federal government should propose a Finance and Sustainability
Risk Forum to promulgate and share best practices regarding these regulations.

The counterplan establishes disclosure requirements and carbon stress-tests which

transition towards clean energy and deflate the bubble.
Dirk Schoenmaker 16, Senior Fellow at Bruegel and Professor of Banking and Finance at Rotterdam
School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam; and Rens van Tilburg, senior researcher at
SOMO (Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, 4/22/16, “Financial risks and opportunities in
the time of climate change,” http://bruegel.org/2016/04/financial-risks-and-opportunities-in-the-time-
of-climate-change/jpb

1. Increase transparency of exposure to environmental imbalances

Much has been done to develop accounting methodologies for natural capital, specifically in the field of carbon6. Figure 2 shows greenhouse-
gas emissions by sector. The financial sector generates very low emissions, largely from use of buildings and office equipment. The financial
sector’s real carbon exposure comes from indirect emissions through its investments and lending, looking at the full value chain (the so-called
scope 3 emissions).

The challenge for the financial sector is to have the data available on natural capital (including carbon) of its
clients and investments and to attribute these to the specific financial institutions or portfolios7. Corporate disclosure of greenhouse-
gas emissions is now mandatory in a number of EU member states, including Denmark, France and the UK. All EU member states must
transpose by the end of 2016 the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (2014/95/EU), which requires large companies to disclose material
information on environmental matters.

Even though the methodology is still developing, carbon accounting by financial institutions is already widespread.
More than 120 investors with $10 trillion in assets under management have committed to annually measure and publically disclose their carbon
footprints (the Montreal Pledge; PRI, 2014). Reporting
by financial institutions is increasingly being made
mandatory. Pension funds in seven EU member states are required to report on environmental, social
and governance factors. In France, financial institutions are now obliged to disclose “their exposure to climate-related risks, including
the greenhouse-gas emissions associated with assets owned”8. The IORP II Directive draft (Institutions for Occupational Retirement Provision)
published by the European Commission in January 2016 requires pension funds to assess new emerging risks related to climate change, use of
natural resources and the environment, and to disclose this information to beneficiaries.
Supervisors are using the data thus generated in their supervisory work. Examples are the Climate Change Adaptation Report by the UK
Prudential Regulation Authority (2015), the Chinese Green database9, and the announcement of the Netherlands Bank (Elderson, 2015) that
sustainability will be an explicit theme in its supervision of the pension sector.

The international Financial Stability Board has established an industry-led Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (FSB, 2015) that
will consider the physical, liability and transition risks associated with climate change and what constitutes effective financial disclosures in this
area.

Despite the progress, major challenges remain. Bloomberg Data shows that of 25,000 companies surveyed, 75
percent do not produce even one data point on sustainability (Aviva, 2014). We recommend that the European
Commission further develops the methodology, standard setting and reporting requirements for all financial and non-
financial institutions building on recent steps taken in this field for companies and investors10.
2. Methodologies for risk analysis and reduction

To make data on carbon exposure strategically meaningful, the financial risks that originate from these
exposures need to be mapped . The main risk is basically a policy risk that governments will
suddenly take drastic actions (ie the scenario of intensified environmental policies ). There is also a scenario
of crossing the ecologic boundaries leading to floods and droughts due to climate change.

The vulnerability of financial institutions to these risks can be analysed through a stress test . Some financial
institutions already have experience of such stress testing, using different scenarios mostly focused on oil, gas and coal. More granular
studies that include all carbon-intensive sectors are needed to enhance the analysis of carbon-related
exposures. Also, on the supervisory front, the capacity to develop new methodologies for carbon stress tests is uneven across the EU, with
some supervisors overstretched.

A new Finance and Sustainability Risk Forum , which has also been proposed by the United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP, 2016), could share best practices on environmental disclosures and carbon stress testing between the
EU’s various financial supervisors. Because of its financial system-wide mandate, the European Systemic Risk Board could host this Finance and
Sustainability Risk Forum. This forum would also increase the EU’s ability to shape the G20’s agenda on green finance, as international
coordination is crucial .
Next, credit rating agencies play an important role in analysing corporate risk. We suggest embedding sustainability in credit ratings by
requiring credit rating agencies to consider long-term environmental, social and governance matters over the full duration of a bond on a
‘comply or explain’ basis.

Risk reduction

Recent reductions in energy consumption can be mostly attributed to the slowdown in economic activity, rather than structural shifts in energy
consumption (Eurostat, 2015). Although worldwide emissions seem to be levelling off, we are not heading towards a soft landing with deep cuts
(see Figure 1). Also, current low energy prices are not helpful in terms of embarking on energy savings. The most efficient way of bending the
trend towards a more benign scenario would be through pricing for greenhouse-gas emissions. To this end, the EU has introduced the
Emissions Trading System (ETS). However, the current ETS carbon price fluctuates around €5 per tonne11, which is too low to have a
meaningful impact on operational and investment decisions within industry. A full analysis of a major reform of the ETS or the implementation
of a carbon tax is beyond the scope of this paper12.

On the supervisory front, if

supervisors find through the carbon stress tests that financial risks from ecological
risks are material, they can activate their supervisory instruments. Supervisors are typically worried about
large imbalances building up, because these imbalances can wipe out the equity capital of financial
institutions . If the carbon stress test results show that multiple financial institutions are at risk , we can
speak of a common risk factor leading to systemic imbalances. The most appropriate supervisory
instrument would be to impose large exposure limits for material exposures related to climate change
(Schoenmaker et al, 2015). That would mean that financial institutions would be obliged to sell off carbon-
intensive assets and/or to reduce lending to carbon-intensive sectors .

We do not propose higher risk weights, because environmental policies are the domain of the government (as we have discussed). Finally, the
outcome of carbon stress tests can also highlight opportunities for financing the transition to a low-
carbon economy .
3. Seize the green finance opportunity

Financial firms are increasingly adopting environmental, social and governance criteria , in addition to financial
and economic criteria, in their investment strategies. These criteria can be used to avoid over-exposure to ecological risks. A
more ambitious strategy is to not only reduce carbon-intensive investments, but also to seize the
opportunity of green finance .
Some financial institutions are also setting targets to reduce financing of carbon emissions. Through the Portfolio Decarbonisation Coalition, 25
investors with a total of $600 billion in assets under management have pledged to gradually reduce their carbon exposures (UNEPFI, 2015).
Individual financial institutions are setting themselves even more ambitious targets. The two largest Dutch pension funds, PFZW and ABP, set
themselves reduction targets of 50 percent and 25 percent respectively before 2020 (PFZW, 2015). Allianz and Aviva, major European insurers,
are another example of institutional investors with explicit climate objectives in their long-term investment strategies (Allianz, 2015). Finally,
Dutch SNS Bank pledged to become climate neutral across its investment portfolio in 203013.

The policy challenge is to overcome the short-term incentives in the investment chain by making
investors active owners , engaging with their companies to reduce transition risks and grasp the opportunities. There are
several initiatives to shift the focus to long-term value creation, stimulating investors to manage and
reduce environmental risks with a pay-off in the medium to long term14.

We propose to adopt a co-ordinated strategy and action plan on sustainable capital markets for Europe. In its
Action Plan on a Capital Markets Union (CMU)15, the European Commission should in partnership with industry and the wider financial
community develop a Green Capital Markets Plan16.

A first tenet of this Green Capital Markets Plan would be to tackle inefficiencies in the structure of capital markets.
A key element for the Commission is the creation of comparative benchmarks for environmental, social and governance performance in
partnership with the private sector and other stakeholders. As capital markets operate internationally, the International Organisation of
Securities Commissions should be encouraged to develop a standard for non-financial data to be incorporated in stock exchanges’ listing rules.
Next, the Commission could provide greater stability through an EU-wide definition of fiduciary duty and join investors in their call to the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development to consider a Convention on Fiduciary Duty and Long-Term Investing. It
is
important that long-term sustainable development be incorporated into the legal duties of market
participants including, in particular, the fiduciary duty of asset owners and the duty of care of asset
managers and investment consultants (Aviva, 2014). Also templates for long-term investment mandates and
remuneration structures need to be developed in order to get the incentive structure oriented to the long term ,
including stewardship, throughout the investment chain.

A second tenet is to secure green investment in infrastructure , as part of the Juncker Investment Plan. The CMU Action
Plan refers already to the possible creation of green bond standards. The Commission and the European Investment Bank (EIB) should take this
forward as soon as possible at EU level to encourage wider market understanding and transparency. Next, the Commission and EU countries
should look to develop national capital raising plans informing the Commission how they intend to finance the
delivery of a zero-carbon economy and meet the Paris Agreement and its Intended Nationally Determined
Contributions (INDCs). This could be done ahead of the next United Nations climate conference (COP22) in November 2016, and should outline
capital needs and how the private sector will be involved.

International coordination
Reducing carbon emissions is a global challenge . The UNEP Inquiry (2015) found that globally a “silent revolution” has taken
place in which policymakers, regulators and private financial institutions are bringing sustainability to the
core of the financial decision-making process. The EU should engage pro-actively in these international organisations, such as
the FSB and the G20 Green Finance Study Group.

Finally, the IMF and World Bank can employ their environmental expertise in their surveillance work, for example in their Financial Sector
Assessment Programme (FSAP)17. With
ecological risks as an integral part of the financial stability assessment, a
common standard can be set and policed. The carbon stress test can thus become an integral
component of the FSAP, because it is important to judge the vulnerability of the financial sector in an international setting.
 OFF
COERCION.
Taxation violates moral side-constraints, which justify the evisceration of all morality.
Vote neg to reject coercion.
Aeon Skoble 20 – Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute and professor of philosophy at Bridgewater
State University in Massachusetts. “The Essential Robert Nozick”, Fraser Institute,
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/essential-robert-nozick.pdf

Nozick begins Anarchy, State, and Utopia with the claim “Individuals
have rights, and there are things no person or
group may do to them (without violating their rights)” (p. ix). Incautious critics sometimes take this to mean that Nozick
simply assumes rights and then proceeds from there, but he does have an argument for rights. For better or worse, this doesn’t appear until the
third chapter of the book, but it is there. He understands rights as “ moral side constraints upon what we may do” (p.
33). If there were no other beings, we would be free to do whatever we wanted to do, constrained only by the laws of physics. Morality comes
into play when we are considering our interactions with others. Hence, the reality of other people creates limits on our actions. These limits are
not the same as the limits imposed by physics. Whether there are other people or not, I am not free to defy the laws of gravity or inertia, or to
be in two places at once. Those, too, are constraints on my action. Moral constraints are things I could do but that it would
be wrong to do. Saying “I can’t be in two places at once” and “I can’t murder Bob” are grammatically similar, but have very different
meanings: I physically could commit murder, but it would be bad if I did. So rights are a moral concept that establish the
boundary conditions of justified action (as opposed to the boundary conditions of physically possible action). Smith’s rights are
thus the boundary conditions on Jones’ actions.

Nozick understands this model of side-constraints as rooted in the “fact of our separate existences” (p. 33). As
distinct individuals with our own lives, no one could naturally have a claim over the life of another.
Individuals are not to be regarded as means to others’ ends; they are ends in themselves. A hammer, for
example, is a tool that exists in order to help people do things, it doesn’t have its own independent
reason for existing apart from this. It doesn’t exist for its own sake. But people do exist—they are ends in
themselves , not the means to another’s ends. “ Individuals are inviolable ” because each is a person
with his or her own life to live. So it is the fact that “there are different individuals with separate lives”
that produces the side constraint that no one is entitled to use another as a tool. Using a person as a
means to another’s ends “does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate
person and that his is the only life he has” (p. 33). So a person’s rights just are the flip side of the others’
constraints: That Jones is morally constrained to respect the separate personhood of Smith, and thus
can’t act upon Smith nonconsensually, implies that Smith has the right not to be used in this way . Since
Nozick sees rights as boundary conditions on the permissible treatment of others, he argues that to reject this conception of

rights would entail either a rejection of all morality entirely —no one has any constraints at all on how
they may treat others—or else a rejection of the idea of the reality of the uniqueness of each person.

One school of thought that might be inclined to reject this conception of rights is utilitarianism , a view on
which what is morally significant is total aggregate utility (understood as pleasure or happiness). For utilitarians, there aren’t constraints on the
permissible treatment of others per se, it’s just that the total goodness achieved must outweigh the bad. With such a theory, it would not make
sense to talk about the inviolability of persons, since we can easily imagine situations in which sacrificing one would benefit several others.
Nozick therefore explicitly addresses utilitarianism , arguing that it implies wildly counterintuitive results . Since
utilitarianism calculates utility subjectively, we can imagine a “utility monster ” who “gets enormously
greater gains in utility from any sacrifice of others than these others lose” (p. 41). This would make it
morally required to sacrifice everyone to the monster in order to maximize total utility . In addition to
running afoul of our intuitions about the equal dignity of all persons, this makes the theory self-
undermining ; implausible at least, if not internally inconsistent.

It won’t even do, Nozick adds, to think in terms of aggregating amounts of respect for persons, such that
we respect the rights of some large group at a cost of failing to treat some other group of persons as
inviolable. Rather, each individual person is to be regarded as an end and not a means , and no person
should be used as a tool for others’ purposes. He gives the example of violating the rights of an innocent
person to prevent a mob rampage which would itself yield many rights violations . He argues that this is to
misunderstand the point of side constraints. It’s not that we figure in the rights of others while
evaluating end states in which the rights of some are traded off for the rights of others; rather the rights
of others determine how you may treat them. Otherwise, they are not actual moral side constraints .
Ultimately, Nozick argues that we can ground the inviolability of persons in the human capacity for self-directedness. “A person’s shaping his
life in accordance with some overall plan is his way of giving meaning to his life; only a being with the capacity to so shape his life can have or
strive for a meaningful life” (p. 50). So it is our capacity for formulating life plans and acting on them that the moral side constraints protect.
This is why recognizing the reality of other persons implies the impermissibility of using them as means to others’ ends. Minimally, we would
each see this as implying our own inviolability, and it takes only a little maturity to see why this must extend to others.

So, the claim advanced on the first page of Anarchy, State, and Utopia’s preface is not without foundation after all: people have rights
as a matter of their status as distinct individual human beings with the capacity for self-directedness,
and that means that some things that one might do to another will be in violation of those rights, which,
while physically possible, are morally impermissible . The connection between “rights” as a moral concept and “rights” as a
political concept is found in Nozick’s observation that groups of persons cannot be morally justified in doing something that the individuals that
comprise the group are not justified in doing. That is, if Smith is not morally justified in violating Jones’ rights, then a large group of which Smith
is a member (or leader) will also be not morally justified in violating Jones’ rights. Although it is true that an individual may sacrifice something
for the sake of her own greater good (say, skipping a party to study for an important exam), “there is no social entity with a good that
undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using
one of these people for the benefit of others uses him and benefits the others” (pp. 32-33). Individuals acting jointly can’t be
justified in doing something they couldn’t morally do on their own . So the rights that people have as
moral side constraints against the predation of other individuals will turn out to be the rights that
delineate the proper scope of government as well.
Chapter 2

The Minimal State

A robust theory of rights such as the one Nozick outlined poses a significant challenge to political philosophy. If people’s rights cannot be
overridden, then most forms of government we’re familiar with lack moral legitimacy. This might imply the moral necessity of
anarchism. While for some people, that sounds like a conclusion so obviously wrong it requires no answer, Nozick thinks it worth taking
seriously. “The state” seems like it necessarily violates rights: rulers of various stripes lay down the law and force people to comply on
pain of fine, imprisonment, or death. Some laws might map onto some people’s predispositions anyway, but the coercion is there nonetheless.
For example, maybe I think it is prudent to wear a seat belt when driving and would do it even if there were no laws compelling it, but as it
happens, there are laws compelling it, which means coercion is being deployed even if my choices are not in this instance coerced. I could not
change my mind, and others who think differently are coerced already. And the state’s operations are financed coercively, via
taxation . Since this, too, is coercive, individualist anarchists have a point which we cannot simply ignore: the state is coercive in its very
nature, and this is morally problematic for anyone who takes rights seriously. So Nozick sees it as incumbent on himself to explain how some
sort of state could be possible without violating people’s rights.
Adv---Inequality
 Adv---Inequality---1NC
1. Inequality doesn’t cause societal decay---zero statistical correlation.
Ariely ’15 [Gal; 2015; Politics and Government Professor at Ben–Gurion University; Globalizations,
“Does National Identification Always Lead to Chauvinism? A Cross-national Analysis of Contextual
Explanations,” vol. 13]

With respect to internal explanations, the effects of income inequality and ethnic diversity are presented in Table 3. Models 3.1 and
3.2 indicate that neither directly affects chauvinism. H4 is therefore not supported . The results suggest, however, that both have a

negative effect on the national-identification slopes. Contrary to our expectations, countries with higher levels of economic and
ethnic division appear to exhibit a weaker relation between national identification and chauvinism. While these findings might
seem to contradict H5, the pattern was caused by outliers. After excluding South Africa—the most unequal and ethnic diverse country in our
sample—the effect of ethnic diversity is not even of borderline significance . After excluding Chile—the most unequal country in
our sample—the interaction effects for economic inequality were also far from significant . The results, therefore,
do not support H5.21

<<TABLE 3 OMITTED>>

Conclusions

During the historic phone call between President Obama and Iranian President Sheikh Hasan Rouhani in September 2013, the latter stated that
his country's nuclear program ‘represents Iran's national dignity’.22 This declaration reflects the common perception that Iran's nuclear
program mobilizes Iranians in support of resisting further national humiliation at the hands of foreigners (Moshirzadeh, 2007). This reflects the
important role national feelings play in the contemporary international arena. Evidence from other examples—such as the Israeli-Palestine
conflict—indicates that national identity serves as a key factor in conflict resolution. The prominence of national feelings is not limited to the
Middle East, their effect on public attitudes towards international issues, and conflicts also being manifest in the West (Billig, 1995; Kinder &
Kam, 2010).

It is thus hardly surprising that scholars seeking to develop a better understanding of conflicts adopt a social-psychology perspective, replacing
the deterministic view that identification with one's in-group necessarily leads to antagonism towards out-groups with an examination of the
broader social context. In line with this approach, the present paper focuses on the way in which political and social contexts encourage
chauvinistic views towards the international arena and how they affect the relation between national identification and chauvinism.

Integrating various social and psychological theories, we investigated two external contextual explanations (globalization and conflict) and an
internal explanation (social division). Employing cross-national survey data, we examined the relation between national identification and
chauvinism across 33 countries. The findings indicate that a positive relationship exists between national identification and chauvinism across
most of the countries, although the level differs from country to country. Using a multilevel regression analysis , we tested
to see whether globalization, conflict, and social division correlate with this variation. The results indicate that social and
political contexts are related to chauvinism and the ways national identification and chauvinism are linked. Although a closer relation exists
between national identification and chauvinism in more globalized countries, globalization failed to explain the variation in chauvinism itself.
These findings support the notion that globalization highlights the importance of national identity (Calhoun, 2007; Castells, 2011). While those
sections of globalized societies that are attached to their country also tend to resist international cooperation and endorse hostile views, the
complexity of the phenomenon—as evinced by the divergent findings of previous studies (e.g. Jung, 2008; Norris & Inglehart, 2009)—calls for
further research of this interpretation. The fact that the current study is cross-sectional must also be taken into account, the findings adducing
the relation but not the causal relations between the variables. In contrast to experimental studies, the present design is similarly limited in its
ability to offer a robust control for alternative explanations.

Another external factor found to be relevant—to a certain degree—was conflict. Countries that suffered large numbers of deaths in conflicts
and mobilized resources and personnel exhibited higher levels of chauvinism. When other indices for conflict were used, however, these results
were not replicated. A possible explanation for this finding lies in the inherent limitation in the way in which conflicts are measured across
various countries. Measuring international conflicts is a challenging task (Anderton & Carter, 2011). While the ways of measuring conflict were
chosen because they reflect different dimensions of conflict in order to be representative of a wide range of countries, the problem of
comparability cannot be ignored. An alternative explanation may derive from the fact that only deaths from conflict and resources/personnel
mobilization are sufficiently significant to contribute to chauvinism. The limitations of our measurements of conflict and research design mean
that this idea must remain speculative, however. In addition, it is important to emphasize that the sample of countries is also limited as many
countries are not involved in conflict and there is also limited variation in the types of conflicts.
Contrary to what the divisionary theory of national mobilization would lead us to expect, neither economic
inequality nor ethnic diversity were related to chauvinism or affected the relation between national identification and
chauvinism. This finding might also be explained by the limitation of the current research design. The number of countries included in the ISSP
2003 National Identity Module being relatively small and the sample only covering countries with available survey data, the results relate solely
to this specific sample of countries. Across another set of countries, social division might play a far more significant role. Another explanation
might be the meaning given to national identification and chauvinism across the countries. While evidence exists for the comparability of the
scales across most of the countries, the divergent meaning probably attributed to them in Germany, the United States, and Israel might form an
additional limitation.

2. Aff can’t solve---Schmidt is about elite capture which still exists post plan---some
people will always be richer.
1AC Schmidt and Juijn
First, there is some direct evidence that, whatever the causal pathway, inequality reduces institutional quality (which in turn
typically leads to more inequality) (Chong and Gradstein 2007; Savoia, Easaw, and McKay 2010).

Second, high inequality can lead to elite capture . Empirical work on studying political and de facto legal power is difficult, yet
there is a growing consensus that high levels of inequality can lead to elite capture and thereby reduce
the long-term quality of
legal and political institutions (Acemoglu and Robinson 2008; 2013; Bartels 2018; Bavel 2016; Chong and Gradstein 2007; Cummins
and Rodriguez 2010; Savoia, Easaw, and McKay 2010). Further, if institutions are disproportionately geared towards elite
interests, then they might be less likely to be geared towards positive longterm trajectories. We might see
more rent-seeking and less investment in public goods . Moreover, if elite capture is strong enough, such
capture, and the potential inequality that comes with it, can intensify going forward (Chong and Gradstein 2007).
 Adv---Inequality---Democracy---1NC
3. Democracy is thumped by January 6th and voting rights restrictions.

4. Democracies are not more cooperative.

Renske Doorenspleet 19, Political Science and International Studies Professor at Warwick University,
“Democracy and Interstate War,” Chapter 3 of Rethinking the Value of Democracy: A Comparative
Perspective, Stras
This finding or ‘law’ has not only been recognized by scholars of international relations, but also found its way outside academia and has
influenced foreign policies to promote peace and democracy, most prominently since the 1990s. However, my book will not draw
conclusions based on ‘ cherry-pick ing’ of specific studies showing how peaceful democracies are, but on a systematic overview of studies in

this field. Therefore, this book relies on my own database with hundreds of different studies , which are relevant
for each chapter; the articles had to engage directly with the chapter’s main research question. The next section will provide more detailed
information around the selection criteria. This overview includes both highly cited and recent articles which were selected in a systematic way.

Based on analyses of statistical studies around this topic of democracy and war, it will become clear that the overall statistical support for the
democratic peace hypothesis is not strong at all. In the rest of the chapter, I will spell out four reasons why democracy does not
cause peace , and why the empirical support for the popular idea of democratic peace is quite weak : (1) most
studies do not find a strong correlation between democracy and interstate war at the dyadic level , and they show
that there are other—more powerful—explanations for war and peace, or even that the impact of
democracy is a spurious one , (2) the theoretical foundation of the democratic peace hypothesis is
weak , and the causal mechanisms are unclear , (3) democracies are not necessarily more peaceful in
general, and the evidence for the democratic peace hypothesis at the monadic level is inconclusive, and (4)
the process of democratization is dangerous and living in a democratizing country means living in a less peaceful country.

In my view, it is difficult—if not impossible —to support the democratic peace hypothesis without any reservations. The
key caveats should not be ignored and certainly deserve more attention before we can confidently argue that democracies are more peaceful
than other types of political systems. Please notice that I can already reveal that the assumed link between democracy and intrastate war is
problematic as well, but this topic will be at the core of the next chapter (Chapter 4).

Selection of Articles: Democracy and War

The instrumental value of democracy cannot convincingly be found in democracy’s expected bond with peace. I have come to this conclusion
on the basis of an analysis of statistical studies, which will be discussed in the rest of this chapter. So how did I select the articles for my
database?4

For this chapter and Chapter 4, I selected the articles that focused on war and democracy. Using the online database Web of Science (formerly
known as Web of Knowledge), I identified a total of almost 8000 articles published in the sampled journals until the end of 2015. I
identifed them by entering ‘democr*’ in the basic search field; this asterisk (*)-based ‘wildcard’ allows searching for terms including
‘democratic’, ‘democracy’, and ‘democratization’ (in both British and American spellings) simultaneously, in the title, abstract and/or the
keywords. As a next step, I excluded articles in which ‘democracy’ is used as synonym for state (e.g. analysis of the relationship between
immigration policies and unemployment in European democracies) or a specific political party or movement (e.g. the ‘Democrats’ in the USA, or
Uganda’s People’s Democratic Army) or a specifc country (e.g. the Democratic Republic of Congo). In addition, I identified them by entering
‘war*’ in the basic search feld. The words democracy (democr*) and war (war*) need to be mentioned in title and/or abstract—and I also
checked for equivalents of ‘war’ like ‘conflict’ and ‘dispute’ and ‘no peace’.5

As it is not feasible to analyse thousands of articles, it is necessary to take a next step in the selection process. I decided to select these articles,
which will be part of the database for the third and fourth chapter, in three different ways. The first method is to choose the articles with the
most citations. So, for example, in Chapter 3, the articles which are cited more than a hundred times are included in this first list. The article by
Beck et al. (1998) has been cited more than 951 times, and as a consequence, this article is part of the database. But also articles with a much
lower number of citations (such as Barbieri 1996, with 179 citations) are included in my analyses.
The second method is simply to include the most recent articles published in the past five years, so since beginning 2011 until end 2015. The
most recent articles can easily be overlooked by applying the first method of most quoted articles. In my view, however, they still need to be
included as they present the most recent findings and engage with the recent and innovative debates, which cannot be ignored in this book. For
example, recent studies on democracy and interstate war (Chapter 3) have paid more attention to the mechanisms (see, e.g., Zeigler et al.
2014), and there is a growing attention for the impact of political institutions in recent studies on democracy and intrastate war (Chapter 4; see,
e.g., Walter 2015). Those recent findings cannot be ignored in any systematic analysis of statistical studies on this theme.

The third method is the most subjective approach of selecting articles, as it is based on the ‘snowballing method’. So it includes articles which
have not been selected by the first and second methods, but which have been quoted extensively and regularly by the previously selected
articles. For example, the article by Bethany Lacina (2006) cannot be selected based on having high citations (the first method) and it cannot be
included based on being a recent publication (the second method), but it has been mentioned by key studies and hence surfaces via the
snowballing method (a third method). This article is important as it clearly distinguish es the determinants of conflict severity
from those for conflict onset , and those determinants seem to be quite different , which is crucial information for
Chapter 4.

In this way, my study presents and assesses the findings based on a big pool of statistical studies in the published literature. Based on this
assessment, I will be able to draw clearer conclusions concerning the significance of the effects of democracy on interstate war (this chapter)
and intrastate war (the next chapter). The Appendix shows more detailed information of the selected articles.

The Democratic Peace Hypothesis, Its Roots and Supporters

The democratic peace hypothesis6 states that democracies never or seldom go to war with one another. Where is this powerful idea of
‘democratic peace’ coming from? Before discussing the main findings of the statistical articles and before describing the four caveats of the
‘democratic peace paradigm’, we need to know a bit more around the background and the roots of this idea.

Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay Perpetual Peace has often been mentioned as the foundation for this hypothesis. Kant believed peace was difficult
to achieve, since ‘the natural state is one of war’ (Kant 1795: 10). A state of peace must therefore be established for—in his view—it is certain
that hostilities will be committed and people need to be protected from each other. In such a world, each may treat his neighbour, from whom
he demands security, as an enemy. In a dictatorship where ‘the subjects are not citizens, a declaration of war is the easiest thing in the world to
decide upon, because war does not require of the ruler, who is the proprietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures
of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like. He may, therefore, resolve on war as on a pleasure party for the
most trivial reasons, and with perfect indifference leave the justification which decency requires to the diplomatic corps who are ever ready to
provide it’ (Kant 1795: 13).

In contrast, the situation is different in constitutional republics, according to Kant. He argued that the majority of the people in republics would
never vote to go to war, except for pure self-defence. Therefore, a world with only republics would be peaceful, since there would be no
aggressors. The republican constitution, which requires the consent of the citizens to start a war, gives the positive prospect of perpetual peace.

It is important to note that the ideas of Kant on the one hand and the modern democratic peace scholars on the other hand are not completely
similar. For example, Kant talked about republics instead of democratic states as the ideal states to achieve peace. He defined republican states
as states with representative governments, in which the legislature is separated from the executive. Not surprisingly—considering the epoch in
which he lived—Kant did not include universal suffrage in his definition, which is now seen as an essential dimension of democracy, even of the
most minimalist types of democracy (Dahl 1971; see also Chapter 2). Moreover, Kant argued that republics will be at peace in general, which
means that such political systems are expected to be not only in peace with each other, but also with other non-republican systems. Nowadays,
only few scholars would support this approach of a ‘ monadic democratic peace ’. As will become clear at the end of
this chapter, there is not much evidence for the idea that democracies are more peaceful in general .
Since the 1960s, most statistical studies have not focused on the ‘monadic democratic peace hypothesis’ but on testing the ‘dyadic democratic peace hypothesis’. This dyadic hypothesis states that it is less likely that democracies fight with each other, compared to other ‘dyads’ or other
pairs of different types of political systems. The sociologist Dean Babst was the first scholar who started to build on Kant’s old idea in the ‘dyadic’ way, and decided to test it in statistical studies (Babst 1964, 1972). He concluded that ‘no wars have been fought between independent
nations with elective governments between 1789 and 1941’ (Babst 1972: 55). His study was not published in one of the journals in the field of international relations, but in a sociological journal and later in Industrial Research. Therefore, it was not read by international relations scholars,
and initially, it did not get the attention it deserved in the field of international politics.

Babst’s work was, for example, not cited by Melvin Small and J. David Singer (1976), and their fndings seemed to contradict Babst’s study. However, Small and Singer did not compare the rates of war proneness for democracies and dictatorships, but instead they focused on the question
whether wars involving democratic states have historically been significantly different in length or in degree of violence compared to wars involving only dictatorships. For length and degree of violence during the wars, they did not find a difference between democracies and
dictatorships, so they concluded that types of political systems did not matter.7 A few years later, Rudolph J. Rummel did cite Babst’s work and replicated Babst’s idea in statistical tests, which were described in the fourth book of his five-volume Understanding Confict and War (1975–
1981). He found clear support for his eleventh (of the 33) propositions about causes and conditions of conflict, which stated that ‘Libertarian systems mutually preclude violence’ (Rummel 1979: 279).

Eventually, those innovative studies from the 1970s helped to evoke the interest in the democratic peace proposition, and in the expected peaceful nature of relationships among democratic states. Since the 1980s, the number of quantitative studies has increased considerably,
accumulating into an impressive field of research in international relations with its own ‘empirical law’ of democratic peace (Levy 1989: 270; see also Ray 1998).

This democratic peace hypothesis has not only received support from political scientists, but also from politicians and policy makers. Particularly since 1993, the idea of a democratic peace has inspired American foreign policies aimed at the promotion of peace and democracy. As the
42nd president of the USA (1993–2001), Bill Clinton was the first politician who explicitly bridged the gap between these findings in international relations on the one hand, and his foreign policy strategy on the other hand, at least rhetorically. Anthony Lake, who was Clinton’s National
Security Adviser, stated in 1993 that in order to cope with America’s foreign policy challenges, the expansion of democratic states around the world would be essential because ‘it protects our [U.S.] interests and security’ (see Henderson 2002: 20). In his 1994 State of the Union, Clinton
declared that ‘Ultimately, the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere. Democracies don’t attack each other’.8 Findings from research in the field of international relations seemed to have a direct impact on policy
making, and this move of the Clinton administration can be seen as ‘a textbook case of arbitrage between the ivory tower and the real world’ (Gowa 1999: 109).

Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, went one big step further in his faith that democratic peace holds. He argued that efforts to turn Iraq into a democratic country would have positive effects on Iraqi’s neighbours. The authoritarian regimes in the region would fall as domino stones and
follow the Iraqi example. They would start democratizing as soon as they could, which would then result in achieving a peaceful and stable the Middle East. The real motives for attacking Iraq may have been different, but ‘regime change’ was at the heart of Washington’s rhetoric when
the USA started to bomb Baghdad in March 2003. The rhetoric of the Bush administration focused on toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime, and replacing the entire underlying dictatorial system with a democracy.
Moreover, George W. Bush used the democratic peace idea to justify the war in Iraq, declaring, ‘The reason why I’m so strong on democracy is democracies don’t go to war with each other…I’ve got great faith in democracies to promote peace. And that’s why I’m such a strong believer
that the way forward in the Middle East, the broader Middle East, is to promote democracy’.9 In 2004, the 43rd President of the USA said: ‘If you think you can have peace without democracy – again - I think you’ll find that - I can only speak for myself, that I will be extremely doubtful
that it will ever happen’.10 In his second inaugural address, he stated that ‘the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world’.

Again, these are just words from speeches and can hence be seen as rhetoric to defend military intervention (cf. Jervis 2003; Kaufmann 2004; Daalder and Lindsay 2005; Owen 2005; Lieberfeld 2005; Schmidt and Williams 2008). Still, in the end, politicians have rationalized their political
decisions based on one of the most powerful ideas taken from studies in the field of international relations, clearly showing the influence of this academic idea in political practice.

Hence, the field of international relations seems to have its own law: democracies rarely fight with each other. It cannot be denied that the evidence supporting the democratic peace proposition is quite diverse in character (see Ray 1998): the evidence has been epistemological (Rummel
1975), philosophical (Doyle 1986), formal (Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman 1992), historical (Weart 1994; Ray 1995; Owen 1994), experimental (Mintz and Geva 1993), anthropological (Ember et al. 1992; Crawford 1994), psychological (Kegley and Hermann 1995), economic (Brawley 1993;
Weede 1996) and political (Gaubatz 1991). Still, there have been numerous critical studies (see, i.e., Hayes 2011), and the general picture is unclear. We do not yet know much about the overall findings from statistical studies.

So far, it seems as if some quantitative studies—mainly within the field of international relations—have found strong and robust evidence which supports the ‘democratic peace hypothesis’. Those studies show that democracy has had a positive influence on international peace (see, i.e.,
Rummel 1979; Ray and Russett 1996). In this sense, the idea of a democratic peace seems to be confirmed. Political scientists such as James Lee Ray are passionate supporters: ‘No scientific evidence is entirely definitive’ but ‘based on all the empirical evidence so far’ the more defensible
of the two possible definitive answers to the question “Does democracy cause peace?” is “Yes” (Ray 1998: 43). However, based on my own analyses of the empirical studies with statistical evidence, I cannot be as enthusiastic as those scholars; to the contrary, I whole-heartily disagree
with them, as a more systematic analysis of the articles shows that there are four important weaknesses, which seriously undermines the idea that peace is one of democracy’s instrumental values.

Caveat 1: It’s Not (Just) Democracy

While analysing the selected articles, the first remarkable finding is that only a relatively small number of studies have actually tested the
democratic peace hypothesis. Most of the studies have focused on the mechanisms (see next section, caveat 2), and hence seem to assume
that there is a correlation between democracy and war. In this way, the majority of the studies—often unintentionally—reinforce the idea that
democratic peace actually exists without testing this proposition. However, no ne of the studies that directly test the
democratic peace hypothesis found strong evidence that democracy is the most important factor when
explaining interstate war. All democratic peace studies have controlled for many possible alternative causes of the peace, such as
economic development and growth, geographic distance and contiguity, power status, alliance ties,
militarization and political stability. The findings show that it is not just democracy which explains war, not at all. Within this group
of studies, which explicitly test the democratic peace hypothesis, four different types of findings can be detected. I will discuss those results
more in-depth in the rest of this section.

First Result: There Is Correlation, but Other Explanations Are Significant Too

The first subgroup consists of scholars who stress the importance of democratic peace, despite the fact their own analyses have shown that
other factors are statistically significant as well (Maoz and Russett 1993; Rousseau et al. 1996; Gleditsch and Hegre 1997; Beck et al. 1998; Ray
2013). For example, some studies (e.g. Rousseau et al. 1996) included alternative independent variables in order to test realist arguments. They
tested whether the distribution of power determines decisions to use force, and measures each state’s military capabilities relative to its
opponent. A state’s military capability is the average of three elements: number of troops, military expenditures and military expenditures per
soldier. They found that this realist variable was strong, positive and statistically significant at the 0.001 level in their analyses (see, e.g.,
Rousseau et al. 1996: 522, Table 2). However, not only a state’s military capabilities appeared to be an important explanation for peace. In
addition, wealth, growth, alliances and contiguity played a crucial role when explaining interstate war (see, e.g., Maoz and Russett 1993: 632,
Table 1).11 Moreover, when other factors are included, the impact of democracy on the likelihood of
international crises is even spurious (Maoz and Russett 1993: 632; Henderson 2002: 141, see also p. 3).12 Still, scholars in this
group keep defending the democratic peace idea, despite the fact that their own analyses showed the significance of alternative explanations.

Second Result: Initially There Is Correlation, but the Impact of Democracy Is Spurious When Other Explanatory Factors Are Included in the
Models

The second subgroup of scholars is far more radical. Based on their own analyses, this group concludes that the democratic peace link is a
spurious one (Weede 1984, 1996; Barbieri 1996; Mousseau 2013; Gartzke and Weisiger 2014).13 Typically, efforts to demonstrate the
spuriousness of the statistical democratic peace pointed to other
factors that, when accounted for ‘ properly’ , eliminated
or dramatically reduced the statistical significance of shared democracy. Hence, the studies in this second group did not find
strong evidence for the democratic peace hypothesis anymore, once other explanatory factors were included in the models.14

One of the most convincing alternative explanations of peace between countries is that there is no democratic peace , but a
capitalist peace instead . The settlement in Germany and Japan succeeded because of the establishment of capitalist peace. Because
of economic support by the Americans, who encouraged free trade and offered trade opportunities in practice as well, the poorer economies in
Europe and Japan would gain economically, resulting in ‘economic growth, prosperity, and, ultimately, free trade among most of the more
technologically advanced economies’ (Rasler and Thompson 2005: 232). By establishing and expanding free trade, the incentives for war would
quickly decrease among trading states, according to this approach. To prevent new interstate wars after World War II, the capitalist peace was
a far more important factor than the American promotion of democracy and its political institutions.

The capitalist peace, or capitalist peace theory, also states that economic development accounts for both democracy and the peace among
democratic nations. Economic development is a key factor to explain democracy (Lipset 1959; see also Hegre 2003; Weede 2004).15 Moreover,
economic development also plays a role when explaining peace, and the presence of market-oriented economies in countries have a positive
impact on both democracy in those countries and peace between them (Mousseau 2000, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2013; see also Hegre 2014).
Democratic peace only exists when both democracies have high levels of economic development , when
economic development is well above the global median.

In fact, the poorest 21% of the democracies studied, and the poorest 4–5% of current democracies , are significantly more
likely than other kinds of political systems to fight each other (see, e.g., Mousseau 2005). Moreover, if at least one of
the democracies involved has a very low level of economic development, then democracy cannot prevent war.16 Still, there is a pacifying effect
of free trade and economic interdependence, which is more important than the effect of democracy,
because the former affects peace both directly and indirectly, by producing economic development and ultimately, democracy (see Weede
2004).17

Capitalist peace is not the only alternative explanation. Shared interests in general, and political similarities in specific, can also be seen as an
important second alternative explanation for war and peace between countries (Farber and Gowa 1995, 1997; Gartzke 2007; Gowa 1999;
Henderson 2002). Democracies are not peaceful to each other because they are democratic , but rather
because they are similar . So the difference of the scores of both countries also contributes to the conflict proneness of the dyad. If
the difference in levels of democracy is big, then the chance of conflict is higher (cf. Oneal and Russett 1997: 281–282).

Many researchers have conflated both the conflict-dampening impact of joined democracy and the confict-exacerbating impact of political
distance in the variables focusing on political systems, but as Errol A. Henderson (2002: 32) convincingly argued: ‘Fusing these two contrasting
attributes in a single variable makes it difficult to distinguish between the competing processes’. Therefore, it is better to include an additional
variable of ‘political dissimilarity’ in the model. Henderson (2002) was one of the first scholars who included this variable and measured it by
taking the absolute value of the difference between the two states’ scores. His main variables were not only political similarity, but also
geographic distance and economic interdependence, and he concluded that democratic peace is a statistical artefact which disappears when
those other variables are taken into account. Political similarity clearly has a pacifying effect18 (see Werner 2000; Henderson 2002; Beck et al.
2004), and it is not democracy per se which is the decisive factor.19

Hence, the benefits of trade and trade interdependence are essential explanations, while democracy is spurious or at least subordinate (see
also Rosecrance 1986; Weede 1984, 1996; Hegre 2000, 2014; Jervis 2002; Souva 2003; Rasler and Thompson 2005: 235; Mousseau 2000, 2002,
2003, 2005). Based on those studies, it is safe to conclude that democracy, on its own, is an unlikely cause of the democratic peace.

Third Result: There Is Correlation, but Other Explanations Are Much Stronger

This same point that democracy is just one of the explanations for peace (and not even a very important one) is also at the core of studies in the
third subgroup. Scholars of this group keep arguing that there is support for the democratic peace hypothesis, and that the link is not spurious.
In this sense, they are less radical than the second group of scholars, as they do not completely reject the value of democracy for peace. On the
other hand, their own analyses have clearly shown that alternative factors—hence other factors than democracy or type of political system—
are not only statistically significant but also more important when trying to explain interstate war (Bremer 1992; Gelpi 1997; Oneal and Russett
1999a, b; Reiter and Stam 2002; Peterson 2013; Caselli et al. 2015).

Theoretical arguments and empirical evidence suggest that democracy is not the most important factor , while war is more
likely to occur between states that are geographically proximate, approximately equal in power, major powers, allied, economically advanced
and highly militarized than between those that are not. Bivariate analyses of these factors in relation to the onset of interstate war over all pairs
of states in the period from 1816 to 1965 have generally supported these associations. However, multivariate
analyses revealed
some differences. Stuart Bremer (1992), for example, showed that some factors are far more important than others. The existence
of a dangerous, war-prone dyad can be best explained by the presence of contiguity , the absence of
an alliance and the absence of more advanced economy . The absence of democratic polity and other factors (absence of
overwhelming preponderance, and presence of major power) are less powerful. Overall, these findings suggest that our research priorities may
be seriously distorted and that we should not focus too much on the perceived positive impact of democracy, but on other factors (such as
alliances and economic factors) instead.
Fourth Result: There Is Correlation, but Only Under Certain Specific Conditions

The final subgroup of scholars argues that we cannot unconditionally accept the idea that democratic peace exists in general, so always and everywhere. Their statistical studies clearly showed that support for this hypothesis heavily depends on other factors. The chance of democratic
peace depends not just on the specific historical period (Cold War or not; Gibler and Sarkees 2004; Siverson and Emmons 1991; Weede 1984), but also the stage of the conflict (beginning, duration or severity; see Bremer 1993; Bennett and Stam 1996; Reed 2000), and on the
neighbourhood instability (extent of confict in the region; see Gibler and Braithwaite 2013; Gibler and Miller 2013). Despite the differences between the studies, there is one common finding in all studies: when explaining interstate war, we cannot just rely on the impact of democracy, as
it is too much dependent on other factors.

Several scholars found strong evidence for the idea that democratic peace exists, but only during some specific historical periods. Based on this evidence, they concluded that democratic peace is simply a statistical artefact of the Cold War. For example, Henry Farber and Joanne Gowa
(1995) found statistical support for the idea that peace between democracies is an artefact of the Cold War, when the threat from the communist states forced democracies to ally with one another (see also Mearsheimer 1990). Sebastian Rosato (2003) also argued that most of the
significant evidence for democratic peace has been observed after World War II; and that it has happened within a broad alliance, which can be identified with NATO and its satellite nations, imposed and maintained by American dominance.

Since the Second World War, war has become a very costly affair. Scholars discovered that only a handful of states are ‘capable of engaging in major power warfare. That process of elimination has not yet extinguished the possibility of major power warfare, but it has lowered its
probability immensely’ (Rasler and Thompson 2005: 219). The chance to achieve something in a war is low in general, and even lower in a bipolar world with two big power players risking high nuclear war costs (Jervis 2002). While war became more costly, trade became less costly; as a
consequence, the war/trade costs increased during the Cold War (Rosecrance 1986; see also Jervis 2002). In such a world, war and conflict have become less attractive, while trade and cooperation have become more appealing (Rasler and Thompson 2005: 219). Hence, more states
decided to adopt trading strategies in order to prevent confict and war as much as possible. In the end, democracy was part of the story, but only a very small part with a subordinated role next to the power dynamics during the Cold War, the costs of warfare and the benefits of trade.
Some scholars found evidence that the democratic peace still exists in the post-Cold War period (Park 2013) which weakens this argument. However, most analyses showed that dyadic dispute rates have converged after the Cold War (see, e.g., Gowa 2011). Moreover, jointly democratic
dyads are likely to be allied only after 1945 (see Gibler and Sarkees 2004); during the 1816–1944 time period, there is even a negative relationship between democratic dyads and alliance formation.20 These findings cast serious doubts on the idea of a general existence of democratic
peace.

Not only the historical period, but also the stage of the conflict is crucial. Some scholars in this group provided evidence that
democratic peace is not universal , but that it depends on the stage and whether we focus on the beginning, duration or severity
of the conflict. Although joint democracy has some pacifying effects on the onset of conflict, the results suggest that they are unrelated to the
escalation of disputes to war (see Reed 2000). Moreover, democratic peace is dependent on the neighbourhood instability. Democracies often
have few territorial issues over which to contend, as they tend to be part of a stable region. Democracies only seldom have territorial disputes
with their neighbours, and therefore they can more easily choose favourable conflicts to escalate. The type of political system does not predict
conflict selection or victory once controls are added for issue salience (Gibler and Miller 2013; see also Park and James 2015). There is an
interaction between joint democracy and regional instability, which confirms the idea that the effects of type of political system on continued
conflict apply mostly to dyads in peaceful regions (Gibler and Braithwaite 2013; see also Park and James 2015). Very democratic
countries might even become more aggressive and faster than other political systems, once the region
becomes more hostile (see, e.g., Baliga et al. 2011).
The General Lesson from the Results in a Nutshell (Caveat 1)

In short, regardless of the differences between the statistical studies on democratic peace, all findings have indicated that other explanations
are important as well. It is clear that democracy is just one of the explanations, and certainly not the most important one,21 sometimes even
spurious and often heavily dependent on other factors. It is not (just) democracy to be preoccupied with, when trying to prevent war between
countries (Table 3.1).

Caveat 2: What Are the Causal Mechanisms?

Most of the statistical studies on democratic peace seem to assume that there is a correlation between democracy and war; based on this
assumption, they then decide to focus on the mechanisms. This is problematic as none of the democratic peace studies found strong evidence
that democracy is the most important factor when explaining interstate war (see the previous section). As a consequence, the next step of
looking for mechanisms is quite irrelevant and not necessary in my view, but most studies nevertheless argue that the field lacks strong
theoretical foundations and robust empirical evidence that can reveal convincing causal mechanisms.22 Those studies seem to accept the
correlation between dyadic democracy and peace, and then start questioning whether democracy really causes peace before investigating
potential mechanisms.

Table 3.1 Statistical studies on democracy and interstate war (dyadic level)

Caveat 1: It’s Not (Just) Democracy Studies

‘It’s just democracy ; democracy is most important No studies found
explanation for peace between countries’
‘There is correlation, but other explanations are significant too’ Beck et al. (1998), Gleditsch and Hegre (1997), Maoz and Russett
(1993), Ray (2013), and Rousseau et al. (1996)
‘Initially there is correlation, but the
impact of democracy Barbieri (1996), Beck et al. (2004), Farber and
is spurious when other explanatory factors are Gowa (1997), Gartzke (2007), Gartzke and
included in the models’ Weisiger (2014), Gowa (1999), Hegre (2000,
2003, 2014, Jervis (2002), Mousseau (2000, 2002,
2003, 2005, 2013), Oneal and Russett (1997),
Rasler and Thompson (2005), Rosecrance (1986),
Souva (2003), Weede (1984, 2004), and Werner
(2000)
‘Thereis correlation, but other explanations are Bremer (1992), Caselli et al. (2015), Gelpi (1997),
much stronger ’ Oneal and Russett (1999a, b), and Peterson
(2013)
‘There is correlation, but only under certain specific conditions’ Baliga et al. (2011), Bremer (1993), Bennett and Stam (1996), Farber
and Gowa (1995), Gibler and Braithwaite (2013), Gibler and Miller
(2013), Gibler and Sarkees (2004), Gowa (2011), Jervis (2002),
Mearsheimer (1990), Park (2013), Park and James (2015), Rasler and
Thompson (2005), Reed (2000), Rosato (2003), Rosecrance (1986),
Gibler and Sarkees (2004), Siverson and Emmons (1991), and Weede
(1984)
 Adv---Inequality---Food---1NC
5. Statistics disprove food wars.
Cliffe ’16 [Sarah; April 3; Director of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation,
International Relations and International Economic Policy MA at Columbia University; Center on
International Cooperation, “Food Security, Nutrition, and Peace,”
https://cic.nyu.edu/news_commentary/food-security-nutrition-and-peace]

However, current research does not yet indicate a clear link between climate change, food insecurity and
conflict, except perhaps where rapidly deteriorating water availability cuts across existing tensions and weak institutions. But a series of
interlinked problems – changing global patterns of consumption of energy and scarce resources, increasing demands for food imports (which
draw on land, water, and energy inputs) can create pressure on fragile situations. Food security – and food prices – are a highly political issue,
being a very immediate and visible source of popular welfare or popular uncertainty. But their link
to conflict (and the wider links between
climate change and conflict) is indirect rather than direct . What makes some countries more resilient than others? Many

countries face food price or natural resource shocks without falling into conflict . Essentially, the two
important factors in determining their resilience are: First, whether food insecurity is combined with other
stresses – issues such as unemployment, but most fundamentally issues such as political exclusion or human rights abuses. We sometimes
read nowadays that the 2006-2009 drought was a factor in the Syrian conflict, by driving rural-urban migration that caused societal stresses. It
may of course have been one factor amongst many but it would be too simplistic to suggest that it was the primary
driver of the Syrian conflict. Second, whether countries have strong enough institutions to fulfill a social compact
with their citizens, providing help quickly to citizens affected by food insecurity, with or without international
assistance. During the 2007-2008 food crisis, developing countries with low institutional strength experienced more food price protests
than those with higher institutional strengths, and more than half these protests turned violent. This for example, is the difference in the events
in Haiti versus those in Mexico or the Philippines where far greater institutional strength existed to deal with the food price shocks and protests
did not spur deteriorating national security or widespread violence.

6. America is insufficient because of export locations.

Anne Weir Schechinger 16, M.S. in Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics at Michigan State
University, Senior Economics Analyst at EWG; Craig Cox, M.S., in Agricultural Economics at University of
Minnesota, October 2016, “Feeding the World: Think U.S. Agriculture Will End World Hunger? Think
Again,” https://static.ewg.org/reports/2016/feeding_the_world/EWG_FeedingTheWorld.pdf, Stras

These same voices often claim that doubling American production is a moral imperative , not simply a market
opportunity. They say people will go hungry if U.S. farmers don’t respond (see sidebar). In some cases, they imply or
even say outright that the collateral damage to natural resources, the environment, human health and ecosystems that would result from
meeting this moral imperative would be regrettable but unavoidable. Finally, they argue that “modern” farming systems that rely heavily on
biotechnology, fertilizers and chemicals are the only way U.S. farmers can meet this challenge, and that hewing to more agro-ecological
methods of producing agricultural bounty will put countless people at risk of hunger and malnutrition.

Many farmers sincerely believe this. Others use this scenario more cynically to pursue political or business
objectives . In either case, the “moral imperative” to feed the world has become an important rationale for maintaining the status quo in
U.S. farm policy. It has also been deployed to deflect attention from the damage that “modern” agriculture does to the environment and
human health, and to discredit calls for reform.

This self-serving narrative is being challenged , however. José Graziano da Silva, director-general of the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the U.N., has argued compellingly that the persistence of hunger in the world, and the growing damage that “modern”
agriculture does to soil and biodiversity demonstrate that this model of food production “is no longer acceptable.”4 Graziano and a host of
other experts say the true solution to ending world hunger, while protecting environmental resources, is to improve the productivity and
income of small farmers in the developing world, while promoting sustainable agriculture and “agro-ecology” everywhere.
EWG dug into agribusiness’ oft-repeated mantra to assess whether it reflects reality. It is true, of course, that many people across the globe do
suffer from hunger and malnutrition, and improving their diets while ensuring that millions more don’t suffer the same fate is indeed a moral
imperative. It is critical, therefore, that U.S. policies contribute effectively to ending hunger and malnutrition, but right now, these policies verge
far from the truth.

Global demand for more diversified diets is expanding as millions of people in developing nations become affluent enough to afford a better, or
at least different, diet. This is a welcome development and U.S. farmers have an important opportunity to serve this market through world
trade. But meeting this demand—largely for meat, meat products and animal feed—does not carry the same moral imperative as lifting people
out of poverty and hunger. The argument that we should accept the collateral damage from doubling U.S. production of grain and meat to
satisfy a demand of this type hardly holds water.

As a first step toward improving understanding of America’s role in combating hunger, EWG examined current agricultural export data in detail
to determine who gets fed by U.S. agriculture, and with what products. We analyzed agricultural trade and production data from the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the FAO of the U.N.. Export
demand is driven by consumption, so export patterns provide key information about which agricultural products are consumed worldwide.

SPECIFICALLY, WE INVESTIGATED:

1. The top 25 agricultural products the U.S. exports.

2. The primary countries that receive U.S. agricultural products.
3. The amount of U.S. exports that go to countries considered to have high or very high rates of undernourishment.
4. The share of undernourished countries’ food supply that comes from U.S. exports and food aid.

This report summarizes our findings.

TOP 25 U.S. AGRICULTURAL EXPORTS

In 2015, just 25 products accounted for 73 percent ($97.7 billion) of all U.S. agricultural exports ($133.05 billion), according to the most recent
data5 (see Table 1 below). Besides the 26th product, all other agricultural products contributed less than 1 percent each. Over 100 of them
contributed less than 0.5 percent each.

Ten years of data, from 2006 through 2015, show similar results, as do the five years of data from 2011 through 2015. However, the second
smallest product in 2015’s top 25—walnuts—dropped out of the top 25 over several years, overtaken by soybean oil or bovine hides. Grain
sorghum was also more prominent in 2015 than in many of the previous years.

EWG classified the 25 top export products in five categories: (1) animal feed, (2) meat and dairy, (3) food grains, (4) fruits, vegetables and nuts,
and (5) other—based on how the products are primarily used. Soybeans, for example, can be used as food for either animals or humans, but
were assigned to the animal feed grouping because the vast majority of soybeans are fed to animals. Globally, about 85 percent of soybeans
are “crushed” and turned into meal for animal feed and oil for human food.6 The meal-to-oil ratio of soybean exports varies by country, but in
the U.S., about 80 percent of crushed soybeans become animal feed.7 Uncrushed soybeans, which comprise a relatively small amount of the
total, have food, feed, seed and industrial uses.

Corn is also in the animal feed category. Much more corn is used as animal feed than as human food—about 44 percent is used for feed in the
U.S., compared to only 12 percent for food.8 Soybean meal and “other feeds and fodder” are also in the animal feed category.

Although wheat is used as animal feed in the European Union and some other parts of the world, EWG classified it in the food grains category
because globally, the majority of the wheat supply is used for food. Other products in the food grains category include rice and “other grain
products” such as millet, quinoa and pasta.

Table 1 omitted.

The meat and dairy category includes beef, chicken and pork, and dairy products like cheese and milk. The fruits, vegetables and nuts category
is also self-explanatory and includes fruits, vegetables, nuts and “miscellaneous horticulture products” such as spices and vegetable byproducts.
The “other” category consists mostly of cotton, beverages, sugar products, waxes and oils.

In 2015, animal feed contributed 40 percent ($39.3 billion) of the total value of the top 25 U.S. agricultural exports; meat and dairy contributed
16 percent ($15.2 billion); “other” 16 percent ($15.6 billion); food grains 14 percent ($13.7 billion); and fruits, vegetables and nuts 14 percent
($14.0 billion) (see Figure 1 below). Throughout the 2006-2015 decade, the breakdown of the top 25 exports was fairly consistent. On average,
41 percent of total value came from animal feed; 15 percent from meat and dairy; 18 percent from “other;” 15 percent from food grains; and
10 percent from fruits, vegetables and nuts.

Figure 1 omitted.
Together, animal feed, meat and dairy products yielded 56 percent ($54.5 billion) of the value of the top 25 U.S. exports in 2015 and a striking
41 percent of the value of all U.S. agricultural exports. In all, over half of the value of the top 25 exports and almost half the value of all
agricultural exports was from meat, meat products and animal feed.

EWG used the same five categories to analyze all U.S. agricultural exports—not just the top 25 products—in 2015 to the top 20 importers, and
found that animal feed made up 31 percent of their total value. Meat and dairy accounted for 19 percent; fruits, vegetables and nuts 22
percent; food grains 10 percent and “other” made up 18 percent (see Figure 2 below).

Animal feed exports to the top 20 destinations were highly concentrated— just seven products accounted for $35.6 billion of total agricultural
export value in 2015. Soybeans and soybean meal alone made up 18 percent ($21.1 billion) of total exports. Other categories were much less
concentrated: meat and dairy had 34 products for a combined $21.3 billion value; food grains had 14 products for $11.3 billion; fruits,
vegetables and nuts had 57 products for $25.4 billion; and “other” had 48 products for $20.9 billion.

Together, meat, dairy and animal feed accounted for 50 percent ($57 billion) of the value of all exports to the top 20 destinations, meaning that
half the total export value was earned by products that help people in wealthier countries eat more meat.

For the 2006-2015 decade as a whole, 33 percent of the value going to the top 20 export destinations came from animal feed; 18 percent from
meat and dairy; 11 percent from food grains; 18 percent from fruits, vegetables and nuts; and 20 percent from “other.” The combined export
value of meat, dairy and animal feed was very close to the 2015 figure— averaging 51 percent.

DEVELOPED COUNTRIES ARE THE MAIN EXPORT DESTINATIONS

The U.S. only provides a small portion of total world agricultural production . According to the U.N. FAO, in 2013
(the most recent year available) the value of U.S. agricultural production made up only 9.5 percent of the global
total .9
The U.N. Development Program uses a system of development indicators to rank each country’s development status as low, medium, high or
very high based on measures of life expectancy, income and level of education.10

In 2015, the top 20 importers of U.S. agricultural products—19 individual countries and the European Union—accounted for 86 percent ($114.4
billion) of the total value of U.S. agricultural exports. Only 14 percent went to the other 100-plus destinations. On average, the top 20 importers
accounted for 85 percent of all U.S. agricultural exports throughout the 2006-2015 decade. Most of the 20 importers were similar every year,
with the exceptions of Russia dropping out in 2014 and 2015, and Guatemala and India being added in 2015. In 2015, most of the top value
went to countries with very high or high development scores, and none went to countries with high rates of hunger.

In 2015, 50 percent of the value of America’s agricultural exports to the top destinations went to the European Union and seven countries the
U.N. rates very high for development; 39 percent went to six countries rated high; and just 8 percent went to five countries rated medium.
Taiwan, which did not have a human development rating due to a lack of data, accounted for 3 percent of the exports’ value (see Table 2
below). (The United States is rated very high for development.)

Between 2014 and 2016, nine of the 20 top importers of U.S. agricultural products enjoyed very low rates of hunger, according to the FAO.11
Nine countries had moderately low rates of hunger and only two had moderately high hunger. FAO ranks a country as suffering a very high
hunger rate if 35 percent or more of the population is undernourished; high at 25 to 35 percent undernourished; moderately high at 15 to 25
percent; moderately low at 5 to 15 percent; and very low at less than 5 percent. None of the top 20 importers had high or very high rates of
undernourishment, so U.S. agricultural exports mainly went to countries where less than 25 percent of the population is going hungry. (The
United States is rated very low for hunger.)

Despite their overall low rates of undernourishment, some countries among the top export destinations do struggle with malnutrition, resulting
from a combination of undernourishment and obesity. Millions of people suffer from malnutrition in four countries—China, Indonesia, India
and Mexico—that were main U.S. agricultural export destinations in 2015, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute’s 2014-
2015 Global Food Policy Report.12 The Institute considers 11 percent (150.8 million) of China’s population, 15 percent (190.7 million) of India’s
population and 9 percent (21.6 million) of Indonesia’s population to be undernourished. But in China and Indonesia, the number of overweight
or obese people is more than double the number who are undernourished, and 11 percent of India’s population is overweight or obese.

Likewise, being overweight or obese are the main reasons people in Mexico are malnourished. The Institute reports that undernourishment
affects a negligible percentage of Mexico’s residents, but 69 percent (82.6 million) are overweight or obese. The Institute cites three main
reasons why malnutrition is a problem in these countries despite their impressive rates of economic growth:

growing inequality in wealth and education;

a surge in urbanization, and associated dietary shifts from cereals toward sugary, salty and fatty foods; and

domestic food security programs that do not target the neediest or focus on nutrition.
Table 2 omitted.

U.S. agricultural exports to China, Indonesia and Mexico do nothing to alleviate these problems and may actually contribute to a rise in the
overweight and obese populations. In 2015, most of the value of America’s agricultural exports to these three countries came from meat, dairy
and animal feed products: 70 percent of the value to China, 65 percent of the value to Indonesia and 60 percent of the value to Mexico. India,
at 6 percent, was the only country in which meat, dairy and feed accounted for a low share of import value, mainly because 45 percent of its
total imported value was from almonds alone.

A TINY AMOUNT OF U.S. EXPORTS GO TO THE HUNGRIEST COUNTRIES

According to the U.N. FAO, from 2014 to 2016 four countries were experiencing very high undernourishment and 15 had high
undernourishment.13 All had low or medium human development scores, which are correlated with undernourishment.

U.S. agricultural exports to these 19 hungry countries were valued at only $719.3 million—a tiny 0.5 percent of total U.S. agricultural exports in
2015. Exports to the top 20 destinations were 158 times greater than those to the 19 undernourished countries (see Figure 3 below). The 10-
year average data is not directly comparable because the list of undernourished countries has changed since 2006. However, the value of U.S.
agricultural exports to the countries with very high or high undernourishment over the decade averaged only 0.7 percent of the value of total
agricultural exports.

Many of these nations have small populations, and having fewer people corresponds to lower agricultural imports. However, some of the top
20 importers have smaller populations than the 19 hungriest countries but still import considerably more agricultural products from the U.S. In
2013, for example, a number of the 19 hungriest countries had larger populations than Hong Kong, but the value of Hong Kong’s agricultural
imports in 2015 was much greater.

Among the 19 hungriest countries, Haiti and Yemen together accounted for 63 percent of all U.S. agricultural exports to the group (see Table 3
below). Agricultural exports to the other undernourished countries were small and unevenly distributed.

The breakdown of products in the five export categories was very different for the 19 undernourished countries compared to the top 20
destinations. Hardly any of the agricultural export value going to the 19 hungriest countries was in animal feed in 2015, and over half of the
value was in food grains (see Figure 4 below). In the hungriest countries, animal feed made up just 2 percent of the export value ($16.8 million).
Food grains were at 59 percent ($426.4 million); fruits, vegetables and nuts were at 9 percent ($67.5 million); meat and dairy were at 22
percent ($156.9 million); and “other” was at 8 percent ($56.5 million).

Figure 3 omitted.

Combined, meat, dairy and animal feed accounted for a much lower percentage of export value to the 19 undernourished countries than to the
top 20 export destinations. Those two categories accounted for 50 percent of the top importers’ values but only 24 percent of the hungry
countries’ values. Overall, U.S. exports delivered little meat to the hungry countries.

Table 3 omitted.

On average for the 2006-2015 decade, 3 percent of the undernourished countries’ imported values came from animal feed; 18 percent from
meat and dairy; 59 percent from food grains; 8 percent from fruits, vegetables and nuts; and 13 percent from “other.” The average value of the
meat, dairy and animal feed breakdown for the decade was 21 percent—a little less than in 2015.

U.S. EXPORTS AND AID PROVIDE LITTLE OF HUNGRY COUNTRIES’ FOOD

U.S. food exports and food aid made up a tiny portion of the total food supplies of the 19 hungriest
countries. EWG calculated the value of each country’s total food supply by adding net domestic food production and net food import values
reported by the U.N. FAO14 to total food aid reported by the OECD, in accordance with FAO methodology.15 The Organization’s food aid data
encompassed official development assistance in the form of food aid, food security assistance and emergency food aid.16 Due to the
combination of different data sources, the food supply calculations are estimates and may not represent exact values.

Figure 4 omitted.

On average, in 2013 (the most recent year with data), gross food imports from all exporting countries contributed 22 .9
percent of the undernourished countries’ food supplies. U.S. food exports made up just 1.2 percent of
the total .

Although the U.S. provided almost half of all food aid to the hungriest countries, total food aid made up a diminutive fraction
of these countries’ food supplies. In 2013, the share of the total food supply from food aid provided by OECD countries averaged
only 2.2 percent. The United States provided 48.9 percent of that food aid, but U.S. aid accounted for only 1.1 percent of the
total food supplies in the 19 hungriest countries .

Together, food exports and food aid from the U.S. constituted an inconsequential amount of the 19
undernourished countries’ total food supplies—averaging 2.3 percent . The U.S. contribution to food supplies ranged
from a high of 17 percent in Haiti to a low of almost zero in TimorLeste (see Table 4 below). Overall, food aid and gross food imports to the 19
undernourished countries accounted for 25.1 percent of their total food supplies, dwarfing the 2.3 percent U.S. contribution.
Adv---Economy
 Adv---Econ---Turn---1NC
1. TURN. No recession now but growth is fragile.
PRN 10/5, PR Newswire, citing the UCLA Anderson Forecast, “No Recession, but the UCLA Anderson
Forecast Foresees a Weak U.S. Economy in 2024,” https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/no-
recession-but-the-ucla-anderson-forecast-foresees-a-weak-us-economy-in-2024-301946521.html
The national forecast

The current forecast for the nation is nearly identical to the "no-recession" forecast presented last quarter. The debt ceiling crises
turned out to be short-lived , the United Auto Workers' current labor action and the potential government shutdown are
incorporated into the forecast. Based on historical impacts of these types of events, they shaved only a few tenths of one
percent off of the GDP growth forecast.

By contrast, retail sales continue to have robust growth , the backlog of durable goods orders has grown and factory
construction is soaring. As core inflation continues to come down slowly, we expect the Fed to increase the federal
funds rate by 25 basis points in fall 2023, and to hold the rate there until the sufficient weakness in the economy (forecast for 2024) results in some
moderate rate reductions. With a return to trend growth rates in 2025, lower inflation and an unemployment rate hovering in the 3.9
range, the Anderson Forecast economists do not expect any 2025 movement in the federal funds rate after the first quarter of 2025.

But why did the recession that so many economists called for not occur?

Usually "this time is different" turns out to be incorrect. But this time was different . First, monetary policy
tightened at the same time as fiscal policy eased. The combination of the CHIPS Act, the Infrastructure Act and the
I nflation R eduction A ct added significant demand to the economy and increased investment . In addition, the interest-
sensitive sectors of housing and autos were not overbuilt . Instead, they were still recovering from unmet demand during the
pandemic. Homeowners with 2%–3% mortgages were not opting to upsize or downsize into 7% mortgages, pushing post-pandemic demand

for housing, particularly among the next generation, into newly built homes. Autos and light truck manufacturing has been increasing , as chips
used in manufacturing became increasingly available. High gas prices also increased the demand for EVs and shifted auto manufacturers into large investments to
meet that demand.

The oft-predicted but never seen "recession next quarter" has now faded in the face of expansionary fiscal
policy, new national industrial policy and a consumer who is happy to continue spending . Nevertheless, the impact of higher interest
rates will be felt in restraining growth in 2024. As the Fed turns its attention away from aggressive interest rate increases and inflation slowly works its way back to
under 3% annually, the forecast calls for Fed policy to take a neutral stance and economic growth to rebound to trend rates.

Nevertheless, there are risks to the forecast. Will there be a protracted shutdown of government? Will geopolitical events upset the current growth pattern? Will

the election result in different national economic policy in 2025? These risks are substantial and bear watching as they could well drive the
economy off its current growth path .

The plan implodes the economy.

Ryan Bourne 18, Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at the Cato Institute, "A Jobs
Guaranteed Economic Disaster," https://www.cato.org/blog/jobs-guaranteed-economic-disaster
Crowd‐out
In reality, the fiscal costs are likely to be much, much higher, and the economic welfare losses even more significant, because in the
broader economy , a public jobs guarantee program would significantly crowd out productive
labor market and

private sector activity. This type of policy will radically alter behavior of both workers and businesses, and so the supply and demand for labor.

The Census shows that, among those who worked in 2016, 70+ million Americans earned under $32,500 (the full‐time job
guarantee salary would be $31,200). Yes, not all of these would seek out positions on the jobs guarantee program. But a large proportion would,
especially those employed in uncertain roles with low levels of job security.

In fact, some even paid more than $31,200 might consider leaving their jobs to pursue guaranteed roles if they
perceive better working conditions or an easier worklife (asked under what conditions someone would be fired from such a role,
the Levy Institute paper suggests that you would be sacked for failing to go to work, but that your performance would not be
judged by “private sector ‘ efficiency criteria ’”, for example.) It’s not inconceivable then that over 25 percent of the labor force could find
itself part of the scheme.

This crowd‐out is likely to be particularly acute in low productivity regions, and (ironically) after
economic downturns . A nationwide jobs guarantee program paying $15 an hour will be particularly attractive to workers in low wage regions, and by
setting a de facto wage floor the program will prevent private investment in regions on the basis of cheap
labor .

Though no doubt there would be some demand spillovers from well‐paid jobs, the net consequence is highly likely to be weaker
private sector job creation in poor regions, which has been the experience of countries such as Britain with a
nationwide minimum wages and public sector national pay bargaining . Proponents of the scheme see “higher labor standards” as a good
thing, but absent productivity improvements , policies which raise labor costs significantly will reduce the
quantity of workers demanded .

There’s good reason to expect the policy will reduce the efficiency and productive potential of the economy too.
Taxes will eventually need to be raised to cover the net cost of the program. In infrastructure and care giving
provision, costs will rise – because nobody would now work in these directly substitutable sectors for less
than the wage and conditions offered in the job guarantee program. This will waste resources , and there’s highly
likely to be overinvestment in lots of relatively low value ventures and programs to ensure workers are
employed, especially given the explicit aim is to provide employment rather than deliver projects at low cost.

Throwing resources at regions with higher levels of unemployment and after recessions too will work directly
against market signals and deter the mobility of labor (in geographic and industrial terms) and capital to its most
productive uses given prevailing market conditions. This is important: yes, employment is highly likely to have
some positive externalities; but the real driver of better living standards over time are productivity
improvements, discovered by market‐based activity .
Proponents of this policy seem to put an enormous weight on the idea that time out of the labor market has huge scarring consequences which could be

ameliorated by any type of temporary employment. But the literature on this shows that temporary jobs do not provide the workers
with skills to improve longer‐term labor market outcomes .
 Adv---Econ---Solvency---1NC
2. Private-sector backlash decimates the program.
Pavlina Tcherneva 18, Associate Professor at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, 4/2018,
“The Job Guarantee: Design, Jobs, and Implementation,” Levy Economics Institute Working Paper
Collection, Working Paper No. 902, https://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_902.pdf
Therefore, the challenge these programs face is not that there aren’t enough useful things to do, or that they will create make-work projects.
The challenge is that, because of their effectiveness, they tend to run against private interests , which then
mobilize and exert considerable outside pressure to underfund and privatize them —a challenge that
is serious , though not insurmountable (see question 47).

3. States resist it.

Daniel Carpenter 20, professor of government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the director of
social sciences at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; and Darrick Hamilton,
associate professor of economics and urban policy at the Milano School of International Affairs,
Management and Urban Policy and the Department of Economics, New School for Social Research,
2020, “A Federal Job Guarantee: Anti-Poverty and Infrastructure Policy for a Better Future,”
scholars.org/contribution/federal-job-guarantee

2. Jobs to support federal agencies. Direct government hiring by federal agencies would be essential for many reasons. First, in a polarized
political environment , it is quite possible that some states may obstruct cooperation with federal
government employment . Having a robust program of federal hiring, including directly in uncooperative states, would broaden the
distribution of benefits and mechanize the mandate for guaranteed employment. The federal government has a well-established personnel
system that has expanded before: witness the mobilization of government employment after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks,
including the creation of a new Cabinet-level department and the launching of new agencies such as the Transportation Security Agency (TSA).
 Adv---Econ---Defense---1NC
4. Economic decline doesn’t cause war.
Walt 20 – Stephen Walt, International Relations Professor at Harvard University. [Will a Global
Depression Trigger Another World War? 5-13-20, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/13/coronavirus-
pandemic-depression-economy-world-war/]

On balance, however, I
do not think that even the extraordinary economic conditions we are witnessing today are going to
have much impact on the likelihood of war . Why? First of all, if depressions were a powerful cause of war, there

would be a lot more of the latter . To take one example, the United States has suffered 40 or more recessions since
the country was founded, yet it has fought perhaps 20 interstate wars , most of them unrelated to the state of the
economy. To paraphrase the economist Paul Samuelson’s famous quip about the stock market, if recessions were a powerful cause of war,
they would have predicted “nine out of the last five (or fewer).”

Second, states do not start wars unless they believe they will win a quick and relatively cheap victory . As
John Mearsheimer showed in his classic book Conventional Deterrence, national leaders avoid war when they are convinced it

will be long , bloody , costly , and uncertain . To choose war, political leaders have to convince themselves they can either win a
quick, cheap, and decisive victory or achieve some limited objective at low cost. Europe went to war in 1914 with each side believing it would
win a rapid and easy victory, and Nazi Germany developed the strategy of blitzkrieg in order to subdue its foes as quickly and cheaply as
possible. Iraq attacked Iran in 1980 because Saddam believed the Islamic Republic was in disarray and would be easy to defeat, and George W.
Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 convinced the war would be short, successful, and pay for itself.

The fact that each of these leaders miscalculated badly does not alter the main point: No matter what a country’s
economic condition might be, its leaders will not go to war unless they think they can do so quickly , cheaply ,
and with a reasonable probability of success .

Third, and most important, the primary motivation for most wars is the desire for security, not economic gain . For this
reason, the odds of war increase when states believe the long-term balance of power may be shifting against them, when they are convinced
that adversaries are unalterably hostile and cannot be accommodated, and when they are confident they can reverse the unfavorable trends
and establish a secure position if they act now. The historian A.J.P. Taylor once observed that “every
war between Great Powers
[between 1848 and 1918] … started as a preventive war , not as a war of conquest ,” and that remains true of
most wars fought since then.

The bottom line: Economic conditions (i.e., a depression) may affect the broader political environment in which decisions for war or
peace are made, but they are only one factor among many and rarely the most significant . Even if the COVID-19

pandemic has large, lasting, and negative effects on the world economy—as seems quite likely—it is not likely to affect the
probability of war very much , especially in the short term.

5. The FTT fails for a litany of reasons.

Anna Tyger 20, Research Assistant at the Tax Foundation; Colin Miller, Programmer and Analyst at the
Tax Foundation, “The Impact of a Financial Transactions Tax,” 1/3/2020,
https://files.taxfoundation.org/20200122152248/The-Impact-of-a-Financial-Transactions-Tax.pdf

• An FTT would raise both explicit and implicit transaction costs, decreasing trading volume and lowering asset prices .
The decrease in trading volume would reduce the revenue raised by the tax. It is difficult to predict the magnitude of this
reduction. As a result, many existing FTTs have missed revenue targets .
• Depending on the design of the tax, derivatives could potentially be substituted for their underlying securities to
avoid the tax , reducing the revenue the tax raises.

• An FTT would fail to meet its goal of discouraging risky financial activity . Due to the higher
transaction costs , investors and institutions would be incentivized to avoid rebalancing their portfolios
and leave risk unhedged . Furthermore, investors and institutions moving to derivatives to avoid the tax
would face additional risks associated with trading those instruments.
• The existing literature is inconclusive as to whether an FTT would increase or decrease volatility. Higher volatility leads to lower compound
returns and increased risk for investors.

• An FTT would substantially reduce high-frequency trading (HFT). HFT has contributed to declining transaction costs. It can increase volatility
and some high-frequency traders have engaged in predatory activity; however, it is unlikely that these concerns have significant implications for
investors or that an FTT is the best way to address them.

• An FTT would increase the cost of capital , reducing both owners’ returns to capital and workers’ returns
to labor. As a result, the level of GDP would be reduced under an FTT.
The burden of an FTT would primarily fall on the wealthy, as the wealthy hold and trade financial assets the most frequently. However, the
portfolio values of all investors would be decreased by the reduction in asset prices . An FTT would
increase the cost of consumer goods , meaning that all taxpayers would be subject to the tax indirectly.

• Many FTTs have been enacted and subsequently repealed. If the U.S. enacts an FTT and it drives current market
participants out of the market entirely, the tax could cause lasting damage to the U.S. financial system even if it
is later repealed.
 Adv---Econ---Climate---1NC
6. The 1AC would BURST the carbon bubble. The scenario is a sudden loss of
confidence in carbon assets, which a steep tax would certainly cause
7. No climate solvency---emissions from China and India thump.
8. No climate impact.
Mark Bucknam 23, professor and the Director of Research and Writing at the National War College,
Ph.D. from King’s College London, 3/10/2023, “Climate Change and National Security,” Comparative
Strategy, Vol. 42, Issue 2, pp. 187-226, https://doi.org/10.1080/01495933.2023.2182108
Evidence of a Non-crisis

One of the main reasons the science remains unsettled and that more and more scientists appear comfortable bucking the prevailing
narrative isthe failure of the observed climate to conform to so many dire projections . For more than three decades, a
chorus of environmentalists, geologists, and climate scientists have warned that mounting levels of greenhouse gases in
Earth’s atmosphere were leading to extreme weather events, including more numerous and more severe hurricanes, more numerous and
extreme tornadoes, more frequent and intense heatwaves, more continuous and ferocious wildfires, more widespread droughts and floods, and more rapidly

melting glaciers and rising sea levels. Fortunately, the reality of all these weather-related events is far from alarming ,
notwithstanding what one might hear on the nightly news or read in newspapers. As Dr. Koonin explains in Unsettled, “ record high temperatures in
the US— they’re no more common today than they were in 1900 ,” nearly a century’s worth of observations
shows “human influences haven’t caused any observable changes in hurricanes,” “the global area burned by fires
each year has declined by 25 percent since observations began in 1998,” and while “sea levels…have been rising over the past many millennia…
the current rate of rise (about one foot per century )…explain[s] why it’s very hard to believe that surging seas will
drown the coast any time soon.”26 When discussing these claims, Koonin is careful to note: “Those statements are not my science.
They’re not my spin on the science. They’re what’s there in the [ IPCC and US government ] reports, although sometimes buried and

you’ve got to read them carefully.”27 And, citing the work of Yale’s Nobel Prize winning climate economist William Nordhaus, even if global
temperatures were to go up 6 degrees Centigrade by the year 2100—four times the target limit sought under the Paris Climate Accord and an
added fivefold increase above the 1 degree Centigrade increase since the mid-1800s—the impact on US and global GDP would be on the order of a few

percent— hardly a catastrophe .28

While Koonin may be the latest, most prestigious, and impeccably credentialed scientist to point to the gaping discrepancies between terrifying claims and the
unalarming physical record, he is far from being the only respected scientist or expert to call out these inaccuracies.29 Other
researchers and
commentators such as Bjorn Lomborg, and Alex Epstein point to the stunning worldwide drop in deaths caused by
severe weather —99 percent over the past century.30 The more detached from reality the claims of climate crisis have become, the more that contrarian
experts are speaking up, even though their well-founded skepticism risks their being branded as “deniers.”31 Predictions of climate catastrophe due to human

greenhouse gas emissions have been made for nearly 35 years, and yet Earth’s climate stubbornly refuses to lend evidence of a
“climate crisis” or the “ existential risk ” claimed in the Biden administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance and 2022 National
Security Strategy. 32 The scary projections are always based on models , not observed trends in the climate, and
those models have proven unreliable .33

Contrary to the prevailing narrative of climate doom , Earth’s warming is mild and largely beneficial —mostly
moderating cold temperatures in northernmost latitudes and at night; there are no climate-caused dangerous trends
in global weather such as hurricanes, droughts, floods, or wildfires; human deaths attributed to extreme weather events
have declined over 99 percent over the past century; increasing levels of CO2 are a net positive—enabling photosynthesis using less water and
greening the planet; coral reefs are not threatened by warming or increased CO2; polar bear populations are
increasing ; the Antarctic ice sheet is growing; the IPCC says the Greenland ice sheet under all scenarios would take centuries if not millennia to
melt; the Arctic will remain decidedly frozen in winter even if it becomes ice-free in summer—a phenomenon that would have almost no impact on sea levels as

Arctic ice is already floating on the ocean; with some natural variation, sea levels continue to rise at the same slow rate as they
have for 5,000 years —less than a foot per century; the oceans are and will remain markedly alkaline — burning all of
the coal, oil, and natural gas on Earth would not change that—and studies show marine life adapts well to changes in pH; and, finally, there is
no ev idence of mass species die-offs or a coming great extinction . These claims are so starkly counter to what everyone “knows”
that it would take a book or several books to explain and document their veracity. Fortunately, such books have been written by scientists and researchers who
understand that Earth’s climate is constantly changing and who acknowledge the planet has warmed just over 1 degree Centigrade over the past 170 years and that
CO2 and other human produced greenhouse gases contributed something to that warming. These are serious, intelligent people who have studied the evidence and

cannot be dismissed as "deniers.” The enormous gap between the unscary reality of climate change and the dire
statements and radical , multi-trillion-dollar policies of those pushing to “ fix ” the climate has led critics of the climate
hype to brand it as dishonest , unscientific , and immoral .34
2NC
States
 Delay Perm
‘Should’ requires immediate legal effect.
Justice Summers 94, Oklahoma Supreme Court, “Kelsey v. Dollarsaver Food Warehouse of Durant”,
1994 OK 123, 11-8, http://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/DeliverDocument.asp?
CiteID=20287#marker3fn13

The legal question to be resolved by the court is whether the word "should" 13 in the May 18 order connotes
futurity or may be deemed a ruling in praesenti .14 The answer to this query is not to be divined from rules of grammar;15 it
must be governed by the age-old practice culture of legal professionals and its immemorial language usage. To determine if the omission (from
the critical May 18 entry) of the turgid phrase, "and the same hereby is", (1) makes it an in futuro ruling - i.e., an expression of what the judge
will or would do at a later stage - or (2) constitutes an in in praesenti resolution of a disputed law issue, the trial judge's intent must be garnered
from the four corners of the entire record.16

[CONTINUES – TO FOOTNOTE]

13 "Should" not only is used as a "present indicative" synonymous with ought but also is the past tense of "shall" with various shades of
meaning not always easy to analyze. See 57 C.J. Shall § 9, Judgments § 121 (1932). O. JESPERSEN, GROWTH AND STRUCTURE OF THE ENGLISH
LANGUAGE (1984); St. Louis & S.F.R. Co. v. Brown, 45 Okl. 143, 144 P. 1075, 1080-81 (1914). For a more detailed explanation, see the Partridge
quotation infra note 15. Certain contexts mandate a construction of the term "should" as more than merely
indicating preference or desirability . Brown, supra at 1080-81 (jury instructions stating that jurors "should" reduce the amount of
damages in proportion to the amount of contributory negligence of the plaintiff was held to imply an obligation and to be more than advisory);
Carrigan v. California Horse Racing Board, 60 Wash. App. 79, 802 P.2d 813 (1990) (one of the Rules of Appellate Procedure requiring that a
party "should devote a section of the brief to the request for the fee or expenses" was interpreted to mean that a party is under an obligation
to include the requested segment); State v. Rack, 318 S.W.2d 211, 215 (Mo. 1958) ("should" would mean the same as "shall" or
"must" when used in an instruction to the jury which tells the triers they "should disregard false testimony"). 14 In praesenti means
literally "at the present time." BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 792 (6th Ed. 1990). In legal parlance the phrase denotes that which
in law is presently or immediately effective , as opposed to something that will or would become effective in

the future [in futurol]. See Van Wyck v. Knevals, 106 U.S. 360, 365, 1 S.Ct. 336, 337, 27 L.Ed. 201 (1882).

A ‘substantial’ increase is immediate.

Shepard ’98 [Justice Shepard on the Appellate Court of Illinois, First District; March 1, 1898; Westlaw,
“Bass v. Pease,” 79 Ill. App. 308]

“Outward,” “open,” “actual,” “visible,” “substantial” and “exclusive” mean, in the connection that they are employed in the cases referred
to, substantially the same thing. They mean “not concealed,” “not hidden, exposed to view,” “free from concealment, dissimulation, reserve
or disguise;” “in full existence ; denoting that which not merely can be, but is, opposed to potential , apparent,
constructive and imaginary;” “veritable, genuine, certain , absolute ;” “ real, at present time , as a matter of fact;” “not
merely nominal, opposed to form,” ““ actually existing , true;” “not including, admitting or pertaining to any others; undivided, sole;”
“opposed to inclusive.” Anderson's Law Dictionary and The Century Dictionary, under appropriate headings.
 Uniform 50SF Good---2NC
5. States is uniquely good on this topic.
Sarah K. Bruch et al 23, associate professor at the Joseph R. Biden, Jr., School of Public Policy and
Administration and the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware.
Joseph van der Naald is a doctoral candidate in the sociology program at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York. Janet Gornick is a professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York. She also serves as director of the James M. and Cathleen D.
Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, which includes the US office of LIS (the cross-national data
archive in Luxembourg). Social Service Review. “ Poverty Reduction through Federal and State Policy
Mechanisms: Variation over Time and across the United States” May 2.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/724556#d21216324e4057 //pipk

The efficacy of the US anti poverty policy is shaped both by its reliance on categorical sorting and by its decentralized
structure . To examine the implications of these features, this study introduces a novel disaggregation of
poverty reduction instruments into four mechanisms : federal taxes and federal transfers ( centralized )
and state taxes and state transfers (decentralized ). Using the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic
Supplement data and a sequence-independent decomposition, this analysis assesses the relative effectiveness of the
mechanisms at the national level between 1996 and 2016 and across the states in 2016. The study finds that
absolute and relative poverty reduction is greater and has increased over time for working-age
households with children compared with those without children . We also find cross-state variation in
market- and disposable-income poverty and in the poverty reduction attributable to each of the redistributive

mechanisms , highlighting the importance of examining poverty and antipoverty policy subnationally .
 AT: Preemption---Bentsen
The commerce clause doesn’t apply to interstate compacts.
Wiseman and Osofsky, 16 --- Hannah J. Wiseman** and Hari M. Osofsky* ** Attorneys' Title
Professor, Florida State University College of Law. J.D., Yale Law School, A.B., Dartmouth College. *
Professor, University of Minnesota Law School; Faculty Director, Energy Transition Lab; Director, Joint
Degree Program in Law, Science & Technology; Faculty Member, Conservation Biology Graduate
Program; Adjunct Professor, Department of Geography, Environment and Society; and Fellow, Institute
on the Environment Ecology Law Quarterly, “Regional Energy Governance and U.S. Carbon Emissions”,
lexis

In light of the embedded nature of states' powers in these areas and the Supreme Court's approach
thus far, it seems unlikely that the courts will hold that nondiscriminatory action to meet CPP goals that
impacts other states' electricity generators and markets is unconstitutional, even if Minnesota's
particular provision is still found to be problematic on appeal. The Colorado district court's and Tenth
Circuit's approach in Energy and Environmental Legal Institute, on which the Supreme Court declined
to grant certiorari , seems to comport better with longstanding dormant Commerce Clause [*184]

jurisprudence . n171 Further, states can avoid certain dormant Commerce Clause challenges by entering
into formal agreements with each other , although in these cases, the Compact Clause might apply in minor ways, as discussed in Part III.B.
 A2: Stone 14---2NC
BBAs cause fiscal volatility.
Christopher Biolsi and H. Youn Kim 21 – Department of Economics, Western Kentucky University,
“Analyzing state government spending: balanced budget rules or forward-looking decisions?”
International Tax and Public Finance (2021) 28:1035–1079 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10797-020-09634-1

This paper has presented an intertemporal model of government spending that accounts for habit
formation and the precautionary nature of saving by state governments with a treatment of asymmetry
in balanced budget rules, estimated on panel data for US states. In general, we find that balanced budget rules are a
significant constraint on state governments, as we cannot reject that expenditures on current operations rise significantly with
revenue growth.

This is in line with some previous results in the literature, such as Holtz-Eakin et al. (1994) and Borge and
Tovmo (2009). While this finding holds in the overall sample, we do find some very modest evidence for a slightly different pattern in
states, depending on the relative strictness of their balanced budget rules. Specifically, we find some evidence for the hypothesis that states
with very tight fiscal rules exhibit asymmetric responses to changes in revenue. They do not appear to change spending significantly when
revenue falls, but they increase spending when revenue rises. That said, in general, we cannot statistically reject that the responses to revenue
increases and decreases are equal in most of our specifications, and we generally do not reject the null of equal coefficients across our various
splits in the sample. In addition, we find that habit formation may be a significant influence on spending in all states, but especially in those with
relatively tight balanced budget rules in the most recent years of our data. There is not much evidence for precautionary saving as an important
driver of state governments’ spending decisions.

Our analysis is more in line with the findings of Canova and Pappa (2005), who conclude that balanced budget rules make little macroeconomic
difference for states, whether they are loose or tight. Our findings help to expand upon the work of Fatás and Mihov (2006), who conclude that
states with tighter balanced budget rules have more procyclical fiscal policies but also less volatile state economies. We find that the greater
procyclicality of policy in these states is driven by increases in spending when the state economy is
entering an expansionary period. This raises the possibility that, conditional on an expansion, states with tighter rules
might amplify (not mitigate) local economic volatility.
It may be noted that our main finding that balanced budget rules are a significant constraint on state governments does not mean that a
forward-looking model is not appropriate in the analysis of state government spending. This finding applies to the typical state government, but
we still find that precautionary saving and habit formation are relevant concepts for state government behavior. Even for those states for which
the model fails, there is value in establishing exactly how this canonical framework falls short in describing state government spending
behavior.
Coercion
 Overview---2NC
Outweighs extinction.
Shue, 89 – Henry Shue, Professor of Ethics and Public Life at Princeton University, Nuclear Deterrence
and Moral Restraint, p. 64-65, continued at 141-142

The issue raises interesting problems about obligations among generations. What obligations do we owe
to future generations whose very existence will be affected by our risks? A crude utilitarian calculation
would suggest that since the pleasures of future generations may last infinitely (or until the sun burns
out), no risk that we take to assure certain values for our generation can compare with almost infinite
value in the future. Thus we have no right to take such risks. In effect, such an approach would establish
a dictatorship of future generations over the present one. The only permissible role for our generation
would be biological procreation. If we care about other values in addition to survival, this crude
utilitarian approach produces intolerable consequences for the current generation. Moreover, utility is
too crude a concept to support such a calculation. We have little idea of what utility will mean to
generations very distant from ours. We think we know something about our children, and perhaps our
grandchildren, but what will people value 8,000 years from now? If we do not know, then there is the
ironic prospect that something we deny ourselves now for the sake of a future generation may be of
little value to them. A more defensible approach to the issue of justice among generations is the
principle of equal access. Each generation should have roughly equal access to important values. We
must admit that we shall not be certain of the detailed preferences of increasingly distant generations,
but we can assume that they will wish equal chances of survival. On the other hand, there is no reason
to assume that they would want survival as a sole value any more than the current generation does.
On the contrary, if they would wish equal access to other values that give meaning to life, we could infer
that they might wish us to take some risks of species extinction in order to provide them equal access
to those values. If we have benefited from "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," why should we as -
sume that the next generation would want only life?
 A2: N/U
2. CONSEQUENCES are UKNOWABLE. You might accidentally save the next Hitler or
condemn alien races to extinction caused by humanity.
Lenman 2k – James Lenman, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield,
BA (Oxford), MPhil, PHD (St Andrews), “Consequentialism and Cluelessness”, Philosophy and Public
Affairs, 29(4), Fall, ProQuest

Shelly Kagan in Normative Ethics said:

Perhaps the most common objection to consequentialism is this: it is impossible to know the future. This means that you will never be
absolutely certain as to what all the consequences of your act will be. An act that looks like it will lead to
the best results overall may turn out badly, since things often don't turn out the way you think they will: something extremely unlikely may
happen, and an act that was overwhelmingly likely to lead to good results might-for reasons beyond your control-produce disaster. Or there may be long

term bad effects from your act, side effects that were unforeseen and indeed unforeseeable . In fact lacking a
crystal ball, how could you possibly tell what all the effects of your act will be? So how can we tell which act will lead to the best results overall-counting all the

results? This
seems to mean that consequentialism will be unusable as a moral guide to action. All the
evidence available at the time of acting may have pointed to the conclusion that a given act was the
right act to perform-and yet it may still turn out that what you did had horrible results, and so in fact
was morally wrong. Indeed, it will never be possible to say for sure that any given act was right or wrong,
since any event can continue to have further unseen effects down through history . Yet if it is impossible
to tell whether any act is morally right or wrong, how can consequentialism possibly be a correct moral
theory?,
We may call this the Epistemic Argument against consequentialism. It is often briefly aired and discussed but generally not taken very seriously and has received relatively little by way of sustained attention.2 My aim in this essay is
to contribute to putting this right. For if the arguments that follow are sound, the Epistemic Argument goes very deep and needs to be taken very seriously indeed.

By 'consequentialism' I mean the view that the rightness of an action or, more generally, let us say, a policy, is a matter-entirely a matter-of the goodness of its consequences. The sort of consequentialism with which I am
concerned says of each person that that person should adopt policies with a view to the goodness of overall consequences. By `consequences' I mean all the consequences: what we ought to do is maximally promote the overall
good. 'Policies' here can refer to the performance (or omission) of actions, the adoption of rules, decision procedures (possibly not themselves consequentialist) or plans of life and the cultivation of traits of character. We might call
this pure consequentialism. Thus, pure consequentialist theories include theories that recommend the adoption of some decision procedure that is not consequentialist at all, as well as those that recommend some subjectivized
consequentialist deliberative strategy stressing the expected rather than the actual value of consequences, provided any such recommendation is made on, ultimately, pure consequentialist grounds. In what follows, in particular in
section V, I will argue that such variant forms of pure consequentialism do not successfully sidestep the Epistemic Argument.

Understand impure consequentialism, by contrast, to say such things as this: that each person should adopt policies whose general adoption by everyperson (or almost every person) would maximally promote the good. Such
impure consequentialism is consequentialism with a Kantian twist.3 Impure consequentialism may have resources to deal with the Epistemic Argument that pure consequentialism does not. In particular, `every person' includes
future persons, so that, in the ideal circumstances that play a key theoretical role, we can rule out, ex hypothesi, the sort of cases I will describe below, in which the remote consequences of my prima facie good actions include bad
actions by future others. Perhaps this is a little too convenient for the impure consequentialist, and it is debatable whether an impure consequentialist can really side-step the problem in a convincing way. If he or she can, the
Epistemic Argument may offer grist to the impure consequentialist's mill. There is certainly a lot to be said about the Epistemic Argument in the context of impure consequentialism.4 But, because this is already a long essay and an
adequate treatment of this would make it much longer, I shall not attempt to say it here. So in what follows, when I speak of 'consequentialism' I should be understood to mean pure consequentialism.

II. MASSIVE CAUSAL RAMIFICATION

Imagine we are in what is now southern Germany a hundred years before the birth of Jesus. A certain
bandit, Richard, quite lost to history, has raided a village and killed all its inhabitants bar one. This final survivor, a
pregnant woman named Angie, he finds hiding in a house about to be burned. On a whim of
compassion, he orders that her life be spared. But perhaps, by consequentialist standards, he should not
have done so. For let us suppose Angie was a great great great great great great great great great great
great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great
great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great
great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great
great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great
great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great
grandmother of Adolf Hitler . The millions of Hitler's victims were thus also victims of Richard's sparing
of Angie.
It must be stressed that there is nothing unlikely about this story. Let us bear in mind that in Hitler's family tree there are 2100 slots for
grandparents of this order. Because that is a number astronomically larger than the then available population of the world, there must be many people occupying
more than one such slot. Nonetheless, it is very likely that there were back then large areas, of Europe at least, where a high percentage of the population were
ancestors of Hitler (very possibly all those whose bloodlines endured into the twentieth century). Anyone who saved the lives of any of these people or any of their
intermediate descendants or who missed some opportunity to kill them before they fathered or mothered the relevant child shares in Richard's wrongdoing.

Do Hitler's crimes mean that Richard acted wrongly, in consequentialist terms? They do not. For Hitler's
crimes may not be the most significant consequence of Richard's action. Perhaps, had Richard killed
Angie, her son Peter would have avenged her , thus causing Richard's widowed wife Samantha to get
married again to Francis. And perhaps had all this happened Francis and Samantha would have had a
descendant 115 generations on, Malcolm the Truly Appalling , who would have conquered the world
and in doing so committed crimes vastly more extensive and terrible than those of Hitler.
Even if the crimes of Hitler were the most dramatic single consequence of Richard's action, there will also have been countless millions of smaller consequences, many of them nonetheless very dramatic. Assuming the survival of
Angie's bloodline, there will have been a huge impact on the identities of future people, especially when we think that most or all members of that bloodline will have had all manner of morally significant (for the consequentialist)
effects large and small, including effects on who lived, who died, and who reproduced. And these effects in turn will often have massive causal ramifications of their own.

Richard changed history in incalculable ways. So did the man who introduced his parents to each other. So did the incompetent giver of directions who caused his mother to miss a meeting, forcing her to linger longer than planned
in his father's village, long enough for the betrothal to take shape. So did the friends who did not invite Richard's father out hunting the afternoon of Richard's conception because one of them was offended by something that
Richard's father said in an argument. So did the man who made the casual remark that started the argument. So did his parents. And so on. Of course we know this already. For want of a nail...

The decision to spare Angie is an event with massive causal ramifications. It is highly plausible that almost all killings and engenderings and refrainings from these have similarly massive causal ramifications. These actions ramify in
massive ways most obviously because they are, let us say, `identity-affecting'. These are actions that make a difference to the identities of future persons and these differences are apt to amplify exponentially down the
generations. A very high proportion of identity-- affecting actions are, it is enormously plausible, reliably subject to such massive causal ramification. These will include all engenderings-reproductively efficacious sex acts as well as
causally more unorthodox engenderings-and at least a very high proportion of killings, including abortions. It is reflection on identity-affecting actions that, above all, brings out the depth of the Epistemic Argument. There are two
reasons for this. The first is that common-sense reasoning demonstrates most clearly that identity-affecting actions are reliably subject to massive causal ramification. Such massive causal ramification is perhaps, as I will go on to
suggest, pervasive elsewhere, but in the case of identity-affecting actions, there is no "perhaps" about it. The second reason is that killings and engenderings are among the most intrinsically morally significant things we do, the
kinds of action at which a large amount of our most serious moral thinking and theorizing is directed, and, as the same common sense reasoning shows, these are the actions about whose overall consequences the agents are most
apt to know, relatively speaking, as good as nothing. So the Epistemic Argument bites hardest in the case of just those actions respecting which we are most likely to want to put any ethical theory to work.

To drive the problem home, consider another, homelier, example. Suppose I decide to have a child and have a daughter, Andrea. When she grows up, she marries Duncan and has a son, George. So my identity-- affecting action of
having sex with Andrea's mother ramifies into the next generation. But this is just the start of it. For perhaps if Andrea did not come along, Duncan would marry Sandra. Duncan being snapped up by Andrea, however, Sandra will
marry Howard, who would otherwise have married Patricia, who will feel so let down by losing out on Howard she will marry nobody. So Andrea's existence has considerable identity-affecting effects far beyond the existence of
George. Even if she stays childless, she will have such effects by simply taking Duncan off the matrimonial market. Even if she stays single, she will have similar knock-on effects from any dating in which she participates. Even if she
stays celibate, she will almost certainly make identity-affecting differences through the parties she hosts, the introductions she perpetrates, and in a host of less scrutable, indirect ways. Ten generations hence it is highly likely that
the consequences of my engendering of Andrea in terms of the identities of the people alive will be vast. Some of these people will do terrible-or wonderful-things, and it is my seemingly innocent act of procreation that brings all
this about.

Identity-affecting actions include most acts of killing or engendering people. They will also include, as we have already seen in developing these examples, many apparently less momentous actions. For some actions that seem
insignificant have massive causal ramifications by virtue of being indirectly identity-affecting in unpredictable ways. Tony and Geraldine would have had sex and conceived a child that wet Tuesday night if Gary had not called and
invited them out for a drink. We can scarcely conclude that all our actions are indirectly identity-affecting in this way, but it is certain that many of them are. Equally certainly, it is often quite impossible to know which actions these
are. Given this, we can rely on continuing massive causal ramification for the vast majority of identity-affecting actions even when the bloodlines of those immediately affected are-as with the celibate Andrea-far shorter-lived than
Angie's. All our lives are certain to contain a great many indirectly identity-affecting actions even when we ourselves, like her, perform no directly identity-affecting actions.

Indeed, it is arguably a very real possibility that very many actions that seem very insignificant are subject to massive causal ramification. For some causal systems are known to be extremely sensitive to very small and localized
variations or changes in their initial conditions.5 Such sensitivity will make still more trouble for consequentialism if it is true in even a small number of domains that have a significant influence on the human world. One such
domain is perhaps the weather: differences in the weather make extremely widespread differences to the behavior of huge numbers of people. Such differences affect, for example, people's moods, the plans they make for any
given day, and the way these plans evolve as the day goes on. For any significant difference in weather over a large populated area, some of these effects are certain to be identity-- affecting. Now if small differences in initial
conditions could make great differences here, these might include my cooking my dinner, visiting the gym, or smoking a cigarette. Another example of a kind of system widely believed to behave like this is furnished by financial
markets, and once again these are influenced by countless, often quite intrinsically insignificant, human actions, and probably-directly or indirectly-by a very high percentage of intrinsically more significant ones. And the effect of
market movements on human life is again enormous and certainly often identity-affecting. And, of course, we do not need scientific theory but just common sense to tell us that any action that is, however indirectly, identity-
affecting is liable to massive causal ramification. So while the Epistemic Argument is strengthened if such systems are pervasively instantiated in nature, it does not depend on this.

We may conclude that massive and inscrutable causal ramification is plausibly the norm for identity-affecting actions. And many of the most morally significant actions are patently identity-affecting. Such ramification will also infect
actions that feature in the causal ancestry of identity-affecting actions, including a very large number of actions that seem relatively insignificant. And to the extent that the human world affects and is influenced by causal processes
that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, the range of actions that are subject to massive and inscrutable causal ramification may be very large indeed. The question of the extent of pervasive extreme sensitivity to initial
conditions quite generally is one I gratefully leave to scientists and philosophers of science. We can afford to be-and perhaps we ought to be-cautious here. For in the case of identity-affecting actions-the actions that often interest
moral philosophers the most-the fact of massive causal ramification is inescapable. And this by itself makes serious trouble for consequentialism.

The seriousness of the trouble we can easily make clear. Massive

causal ramification is inescapably the norm for identity-
affecting actions. By the same reasoning, even more astronomical causal ramification must reliably
attach to actions that are identity-affecting on a large scale: actions such as mass murder. Hitler, for example,
was responsible for the deaths of millions of people. But just how terrible-by consequentialist standards-
were Hitler's crimes? The full consequences of each death are plausibly no less vast and impenetrable
than the consequences of the sparing of Angie . How many Malcolm the Truly Appallings might have
been among the descendants of his victims? Not that it would help us to know this. For the causal
ramifications of what Malcolm the Truly Appalling himself does are so astronomically great that its
moral value isby consequentialist standards- utterly inscrutable . So we have only the feeblest of
grounds, from an objective consequentialist perspective, to suppose that the crimes of Hitler were
wrong . Here, if anywhere, surely, there is a considered moral judgment at stake that is well-enough entrenched not to be up for grabs in the cut and thrust of
reflective equilibrium, a judgment far enough from the periphery of the web of our moral beliefs to furnish a compelling reductio of any theory that might
undermine it.

We can now see how Kagan seriously understates the objection. The problem is, he says, that "you can never be absolutely certain as to
what all the consequences of your act will be" and that you can never "say for sure that any given act was right or wrong" (emphases mine). This suggests

that the problem is merely an absence of certainty about consequences, an absence consistent with our having a prettygood idea
what the consequences will be. And this is just what he claims in dismissing the Epistemic Argument:

Although we may lack crystal balls, we are not utterly in the dark as to what the effects of our actions are likely to be; we are able to make reasonable educated
guesses.6

However, that does not begin to do justice to the worry. The worry is not that our certainty is
imperfect, but that we do not have a clue about the overall consequences of many of our actions. Or
rather-for let us be precise-a clue is precisely what we do have, but it is a clue of bewildering
insignificance bordering on uselessness -like a detective's discovery of a fragment of evidence pointing
inconclusively to the murderer's having been under seven feet tall. We may not be strictly without a
clue, but we are virtually without a clue .

The trouble for consequentialism then is that the foreseeable consequences of an action are so often a drop in the
ocean of its actual consequences . All Richard knows about his action is that it makes the difference
between life and death for Angie. That is, of course, tremendously important for Angie. But this
contribution to the good is only a tiny detail in the overall consequences of Richard's actions. So it
gives only the weakest of reasons for him to think his action, by consequentialist standards, right or
wrong.
Inequality Adv
 Democracy
Monadic analysis is more uncertain.
Renske Doorenspleet 19, Political Science and International Studies Professor at Warwick University,
“Democracy and Interstate War,” Chapter 3 of Rethinking the Value of Democracy: A Comparative
Perspective, Stras

Caveat 3: And, Are Democracies More Peaceful? No , Probably Not …

Almost all studies which try to explain war between countries have included the factor of democracy as one of the possible explanations.
However, those studies do not simply include a country’s level of democracy in their analyses, but instead
tend to focus on ‘democratic dyads’. Hence, they look at explaining peace among democracies. They do not study the
involvement of democracies in war in general , or whether democracies are more peaceful in general. They study the ‘dyadic
democratic peace hypothesis’, which states that it is less likely that democracies fight with each other, compared to other ‘dyads’ or other pairs
of different types of political systems. The ‘monadic democratic peace hypothesis’ has hardly been tested in
research.
Table 3.2 Statistical studies on mechanisms of democratic peace

Caveat 2: What are the causal mechanisms? Studies

‘Democracies are less likely to fight with each other because they Dixon (1993, 1994), Inman et al. (2014), and Maoz and Russett
share specific norms with each other, but the measures of (1993)
democratic norms are weak’
‘It has regularly been argued that democracies are less likely to fight Braumoeller (1997), Fair et al. (2014), Gates et al. (1996), Inman et
with each other because they share specific norms with each other, al. (2014), Mousseau (2000), and Stein (2015)
but there is no evidence for this idea’
‘It has regularly been argued that democracies are less likely to fight Arena and Nicoletti (2014), Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman (1992),
with each other because they have specific institutional constraints, Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson (1995), Bueno de Mesquita et al.
but the evidence is mixed and inconclusive’ (1999), Chiozza and Goemans (2004), Conconi et al. (2014), Fearon
(1994), Finel and Lord (2000), Gaubatz (1996), Gelpi and Grieco
(2000), Gelpi and Griesdorf (2001), Gibler and Hutchison (2013),
Gowa (1999), Kinne and Marinov (2012), Kydd (1997), Levy and
Razin (2004), Mansfeld et al. (2002), Morgan and Schwebach (1992),
Oneal and Russett (1997, 1999a, b), Ray (1998), Russett and Oneal
(2001), Siverson and Emmons (1991), Smith (1996), Schultz (1999),
Weeks (2008), and Zeigler et al. (2014)
This lack of attention is not surprising, given the historical background of the democratic peace Feld (cf. Geis et al. 2006: 4). This field has
evolved in the subfield of international relations and started as an alternative to the dominant realist assumptions about war as a regular
feature of politics in an anarchical system. This alternative research programme was built around topics of international cooperation and
regime building, and the main focus was on how to explain cooperation and peace at the international level. So, the emphasis was, for example,
on the question whether democracies would fight less with each other. However, in this way, scholars have missed some other crucial
questions. For example, how to explain war in general? Are some types of political systems less war-prone than others? Or, formulated slightly
differently, are democracies more peaceful than other types of political systems? As a consequence, statistical studies focusing on such
questions are rare , and the results are confusing .
Some statistical studies have found that democracies are more peaceful overall (e.g. Haas 1965; Rummel 1983, 1995; East and Gregg 1967;
Benoit 1996), but that this effect is very weak (see Müller and Wolff 2004). In 1965, for example, Michael Haas analysed conflict data from the
end of the 1950s and found ‘a slight but consistent tendency for democratic countries to have less foreign conflict than undemocratic political
systems’ (1965: 319). After this study, some other studies followed (Small and Singer 1976; Doyle 1983a, b) but only Rudolph Rummel’s studies
(1983, 33 1995; cf Benoit 1996) found clear evidence that democracies participate in wars less frequently than other types of political systems.

Most of the statistical studies found no real difference in the war proneness of democracies relative to
nondemocracies (e.g. Chan 1984; Weede 1984; Rousseau et al. 1996; see also Banks and Gregg 1965; Russett and Monsen 1975; Small
and Singer 1976). Steve Chan (1984), for example, found that relatively free countries participated in war just as much as
the less free countries (−6.7% versus 6.1%, respectively) of all country years between 1816 and 1980, and the frequency of
participation in war or militarized interstate disputes (whether measured by incidence or onset) is not very different between democracies and
nondemocracies. Even fervent followers of the d emocratic p eace t heory found the evidence for the
democratic peace hypothesis at the national monadic level to be ‘ actually quite thin ’ (Rousseau et al. 1996:
526).34 Some studies showed that there is a link, but that the direction goes the other way around, so democracies are actually less
peaceful (see Henderson 2002: 69–70; see also Chan 1984; Weede 1984, during specific periods).
There seems to be statistical support for the idea that democracies initiate wars and militarized disputes less frequently, and tend to seek
negotiated conflict resolution more frequently (cf. Benoit 1996; Rousseau et al. 1996: 512–513; Gleditsch and Hegre 1997: 295; Rioux 1998:
282; Schultz 2001; Russett and Oneal 2001: 95–96, 116, 122). In an analysis dividing the war data by time periods, scholars also found that
during the Cold War, democracies participated significantly less frequently in war than nondemocracies, that democracies were less likely than
nondemocracies to initiate crises against all states, and they have fewer battle fatalities. However, those findings are difficult to
interpret , and as Nils Petter Gleditsch and Håvard Hegre (1997) already pointed out, it is not clear what this means for the
overall peacefulness of democracies .
The General Lesson from the Results in a Nutshell (Caveat 3)

It is remarkable that the majority of the articles on democratic peace have focused on ‘democratic dyads’ and hence investigate whether
democracies do not fight with each other (see caveats 1 and 2 above). However, not many studies have paid attention to the question whether
peace is more likely in democracies in general.35 Some studies do not explicitly test the monadic democratic peace hypothesis, but still argue
that there is evidence; based on the results of the dyadic tests, they state that there is sufficient support for the monadic idea as well (Oneal
and Russett 1997; see also Henderson 2002: 57).36

The first problem is that there is a lack of studies which explicitly focus on this monadic link, so it is difficult
to know whether democracies are more peaceful or not. The second problem is that the existing statistical
evidence for the monadic peace has been contradictory so far , and therefore we cannot draw one clear
conclusion . The third problem is that we need more studies with the monadic question at its core , because answers to this
question are far more relevant for people than examining the dyadic question. It is not surprising that scholars
have been fascinated by the dyadic question, as the democratic peace scholars have predominantly been working in the feld of international
relations; as a consequence, they are first and foremost interested in relationships and cooperation between states. However, why would
people be interested in such questions? Why
would people want to know whether democracies do not fight with
each other? In the end, people simply want to know whether it is safer for them to live in a democracy, or not. Whether war
is less likely in their country, or not. Whether it matters that they live in a democracy, or not. Instead, scholars have stayed fixated
on studying the likelihood of war between democracies, which is quite a narrow question and less relevant to
people. In other words, in my view, it would be more pertinent to investigate whether democracies are more peaceful in general or not, and
more research is needed to test such hypotheses. So far, however, we cannot unequivocally state there is a significant link between democracy
and peace in general (Table 3.3).

Table 3.3 Statistical studies on democracy and interstate war (monadic level)

Caveat 3: Democracies do fight with other Studies

countries, just as much as dictatorships
‘Democracies are more peaceful overall;
there is less interstate war in democracies
compared to less democratic political
systems’
‘There is a negative link between democracy
and interstate war at the monadic level, but
it is very weak’
‘There is no link between
democracy and interstate war
at the monadic level ’
Haas (1965), East and Gregg (1967), and
Rummel (1983, 1995)
Benoit (1996), Doyle (1983a, b), and Müller
and Wolff (2004)
Chan (1984), Greggs and Banks (1965),
Rousseau et al. (1996), Russett and Monsen
(1975), Small and Singer (1976), and Weede
(1984)
‘There is a positive link Henderson 2002

between democracy and

interstate war at the monadic
level , which means that
interstate war is more likely in
democracies compared to less
democratic political systems’
‘Democracies initiate wars and militarized Benoit (1996), Gleditsch and Hegre (1997),
disputes less frequently, and tend to seek Rioux (1998), Rousseau et al. (1996), and
negotiated confict resolution more Schultz (2001)
frequently, but it is unclear what these
fndings mean for the overall peacefulness of
democracies’
 Food

If you’re hungry, how are you fighting?

Idean Salehyan 14, Political Science at the University of North Texas, “Climate change and conflict:
Making sense of disparate findings,” Political Geography 43, Stras
The third dimension on which research differs has to do with the social scale that is being studied. By social scale, I mean the degree of
coordination among individuals and organizational resources needed to undertake collective action. Environmental variables may affect an
individual's propensity to resort to violence and crime (Rotton & Cohn, 2003); relatively unorganized protests and riots (Hendrix & Salehyan,
2012); rebellion by organized, armed actors (Burke et al., 2009); and international conflict between states (Tir & Stinnett, 2012). Results for one
type of social phenomenon may not be commensurable with other types of behavior. Moreover, causal relationships are likely to differ; the
causal chain leading from water scarcity to communal conflict between farmers and pastoralists may look very different when examining
conflict between nation-states over water resources. The same variables that influence conflict between states, which are highly organized
entities, may not apply to conflict between individuals and vice-versa. To illustrate how social scale matters, take for example a pair of studies
by Hendrix and Salehyan (see Hendrix and Salehyan, 2012, Salehyan and Hendrix, 2014). In the first study (Hendrix & Salehyan, 2012), we show
that abnormally high and abnormally low levels of rainfall, which can both disrupt normal agricultural practices, predict social conflict events
such as sporadic protests and riots. These types of unrest are usually short-lived, require relatively little sustained commitment, and have
limited degrees of organization. By contrast, armed conflict —which requires a long-term commitment by ‘professional’ militant
organizations—declines during periods of low rainfall and resource scarcity (Salehyan & Hendrix, 2014). Such groups need
food and supplies in order to maintain a rebel army , and find it more difficult to sustain their operations
under conditions of environmental distress . Thus, in looking at different scales of social organization, the effect of a similar set
of independent variables may differ.

Their own ev says it’s for “developing countries”---they won’t go nuclear.

Gilchrist ’21 [Jock; March; M.S. in Environmental Science and Policy, Johns Hopkins University, 2020
E2 1Hotels Fellow, and a researcher with The Climate Center and Natural Capitalism Solutions; “The
Promise of Regenerative Agriculture,” https://e2.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Jock-Final-Report-
The-Promise-of-Regenerative-Agriculture.pdf]

A 100-year analysis of a continuously cropped field in the U.S. Midwest found that, even with fertility
management, degraded soils had 60% lower corn yields than at the start of the 100-year period (Gantzer, Anderson,
Thompson, & Brown, 1990). The worsening of soil quality threatens global food security and livelihoods in
developing nations and exacerbates climate change (Sulaeman & Westoff, 2020).
Economy Adv
 Defense
3. Solar cycle 25 caps warming to .4°---spotless sun and more clouds!
Prof. Valentina Zharkova 20, PhD in astrophysics and physics professor at Northumbria University,
“Modern Grand Solar Minimum will lead to terrestrial cooling,” Temperature, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 217-222,
doi: 10.1080/23328940.2020.1796243

In this editorial I will demonstrate with newly discovered solar activity proxy- magnetic field that the Sun has entered
into the modern Grand Solar Minimum (2020–2053) that will lead to a significant reduction of solar magnetic

field and activity like during Maunder minimum leading to noticeable reduction of terrestrial temperature .

Sun is the main source of energy for all planets of the solar system. This energy is delivered to Earth in a form of solar radiation in
different wavelengths, called total solar irradiance. Variations of solar irradiance lead to heating of upper planetary atmosphere and
complex processes of solar energy transport toward a planetary surface.

The signs of solar activity are seen in cyclic 11-year variations of a number of sunspots on the solar surface using averaged monthly sunspot numbers as a proxy of
solar activity for the past 150 years. Solar cycles were described by the action of solar dynamo mechanism in the solar interior generating magnetic ropes at the
bottom of solar convective zone.

These magnetic ropes travel through the solar interior appearing on the solar surface, or photosphere, as sunspots indicating the footpoints where these magnetic
ropes are embedded into the photosphere.

Magnetic field of sunspots forms toroidal field while solar background magnetic field forms poloidal field. Solar dynamo cyclically converts poloidal field into toroidal
one reaching its maximum at a solar cycle maximum and then the toroidal field back to the poloidal one toward a solar minimum. It is evident that for the same
leading polarity of the magnetic field in sunspots in the same hemisphere the solar cycle length should be extended to 22 years.

Despite understanding the general picture of a solar cycle, it was rather difficult to match the observed sunspot numbers with the modeled ones unless the cycle is
well progressed. This difficulty is a clear indication of some missing points in the definition of solar activity by sunspot numbers that turned our attention to the
research of solar (poloidal) background magnetic field (SBMF) [1].

By applying Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to the low-resolution full disk magnetograms captured in cycles 21–23 by the Wilcox Solar Observatory, we
discovered not one but two principal components of this solar background magnetic field (see Figure 1, top plot) associated with two magnetic waves marked by
red and blue lines. The authors derived mathematical formulae for these two waves fitting principal components from the data of cycles 21–23 with the series of
periodic functions and used these formulae to predict these waves for cycles 24–26. These two waves are found generated in different layers of the solar interior
gaining close but not equal frequencies [1]. The summary curve of these two magnetic waves (Figure 1, bottom plot) reveals the interference of these waves
forming maxima and minima of solar cycles.

[figure 1 omitted]

The summary curve of two magnetic waves explains many features of 11-year cycles, like double maxima in some cycles, or asymmetry of the solar activity in the
opposite hemispheres during different cycles. Zharkova et al. [1] linked the modulus summary curve to the averaged sunspot numbers for cycles 21–23 as shown in
Figure 2 (top plot) and extended this curve to cycles 24–26 as shown in Figure 2 (bottom plot). It appears that the amplitude of the summary solar magnetic field
shown in the summary curve is reducing toward cycles 24–25 becoming nearly zero in cycle 26.

[figure 2 omitted]

Zharkova et al. [1] suggested to use the summary curve as a new proxy of solar activity, which utilizes not only amplitude of a solar cycle but also its leading
magnetic polarity of solar magnetic field.

Figure 3 presents the summary curve calculated with the derived mathematical formulae forwards for 1200 years and backwards 800 years. This curve reveals
appearance of Grand Solar Cycles of 350–400 years caused by the interference of two magnetic waves. These grand cycles are separated by the grand solar minima,
or the periods of very low solar activity [1]. The previous grand solar minimum was Maunder minimum (1645–1710), and the other one before named Wolf
minimum (1270–1350). As seen in Figure 3 from prediction by Zharkova et al. [1], in the next 500 years there are two modern grand solar minima approaching in the
Sun: the modern one in the 21st century (2020–2053) and the second one in the 24th century (2370–2415).

[figure 3 omitted]

The observational properties of the two magnetic waves and their summary curve were closely fit by double dynamo waves generated by dipole magnetic sources
in two layers of the solar interior: inner and outer layers [1], while other three pairs of magnetic waves can be produced by quadruple, sextuple, and octuple
magnetic sources altogether with dipole source defining the visible appearance of solar activity on the surface.

Currently, the
Sun has completed solar cycle 24 – the weakest cycle of the past 100+ years – and in 2020, has
started cycle 25. During the periods of low solar activity, such as the modern grand solar minimum, the Sun will often be
devoid of sunspots . This is what is observed now at the start of this minimum, because in 2020 the Sun has seen, in total, 115 spotless days (or 78%),
meaning 2020 is on track to surpass the space-age record of 281 spotless days (or 77%) observed in 2019. However, the cycle 25 start is still slow in firing active

regions and flares, so with every extra day/week/month that passes, the null in solar activity is extended marking a start of
grand solar minimum . What are the consequences for Earth of this decrease of solar activity?
Total solar irradiance (TSI) reduction during Maunder Minimum

Let us explore what has happened with the solar irradiance during the previous grand solar minimum – Maunder Minimum. During this
period, very few sunspots appeared on the surface of the Sun, and the overall brightness of the Sun was slightly decreased.

The reconstruction of the cycle-averaged solar total irradiance back to 1610 (Figure 4, top plot) suggests a decrease of the solar irradiance during Maunder
minimum by a value of about 3 W/m2 [2], or about 0.22% of the total solar irradiance in 1710, after the Maunder minimum was over.

[figure 4 omitted]

Temperature decrease during Maunder minimum

From 1645 to 1710, the temperatures across much of the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth plunged when the Sun entered a
quiet phase now called the Maunder Minimum . This likely occurred because the total solar irradiance was reduced by
0.22%, shown in Figure 4 (top plot) [2], that led to a decrease of the average terrestrial temperature measured mainly in the
Northern hemisphere in Europe by 1.0–1.5°C as shown in Figure 4 (bottom plot) [3]. This seemingly small decrease of the average temperature in the Northern
hemisphere led to frozen rivers, cold long winters, and cold summers.

The surface temperature of the Earth was reduced all over the Globe (see Figure 1 in [4]), especially, in the countries of
Northern hemisphere. Europe and North America went into a deep freeze : alpine glaciers extended over valley farmland;

sea ice crept south from the Arctic ; Dunab and Thames rivers froze regularly during these years as well as the famous canals in the
Netherlands.

Shindell et al. [4] have shown that the drop in the temperature was related to dropped abundances of ozone created by solar ultra-violate light in the stratosphere,
the layer of the atmosphere located between 10 and 50 kilometers from the Earth’s surface. Since during the Maunder Minimum the Sun emitted less radiation, in
total, including strong ultraviolet emission, less ozone was formed affecting planetary atmosphere waves, the giant wiggles in the jet stream.

Shindell et al. [4] in p. 2150 suggest that “a change to the planetary waves during the Maunder Minimum kicked the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) – the balance
between a permanent low-pressure system near Greenland and a permanent high-pressure system to its south – into a negative phase, that led to Europe to remain
unusually cold during the MM.”

Role of magnetic field in terrestrial cooling in Grand Solar Minima

However, not only solar radiation was changed during Maunder minimum. There is another contributor to the reduction of terrestrial temperature during Maunder

minimum – this is the solar background magnetic field, whose role has been overlooked so far. After the discovery [1] of a significant reduction of
magnetic field in the upcoming modern grand solar minimum and during Maunder minimum, the solar magnetic field was
recognized to control the level of cosmic rays reaching planetary atmospheres of the solar system, including
the Earth. A significant reduction of the solar magnetic field during grand solar minima will undoubtedly
lead to the increase of intensity of galactic and extra-galactic cosmic rays, which, in turn, lead to a formation of high
clouds in the terrestrial atmospheres and assist to atmospheric cooling as shown by Svensmark et al. [5].
In the previous solar minimum between cycles 23 and 24, the cosmic ray intensity increased by 19%. Currently, solar magnetic field predicted in Figure 1 by
Zharkova et al. [1] is radically dropping in the sun that, in turn, leads to a sharp decline in the sun’s interplanetary magnetic field down to only 4 nanoTesla (nT) from
typical values of 6 to 8 nT. This decrease of interplanetary magnetic field naturally leads to a significant increase of the intensity of cosmic rays passing to the
planet’s atmospheres as reported by the recent space missions [6]. Hence, this process of solar magnetic field reduction is progressing as predicted by Zharkova et

al. [1], and its contribution will be absorbed by the planetary atmospheres including Earth. This can decrease the terrestrial
temperature during the modern grand solar minimum that has already started in 2020.
Expected reduction of terrestrial temperature in modern Grand Solar Minima
This summary curve also indicated the upcoming modern grand solar minimum 1 in cycles 25–27 (2020–2053) and modern grand solar
minimum 2 (2370–2415). This will bring to the modern times the unique low activity conditions of the Sun , which

occurred during Maunder minimum. It is expected that during the modern grand solar minimum, the solar activity will be reduced

significantly as this happened during Maunder minimum (Figure 4, bottom plot). Similarly to Maunder Minimum, as discussed above, the reduction of solar
magnetic field will cause a decrease of solar irradiance by about 0.22% for a duration of three solar cycles (25–27) for the first modern grand minimum (2020–2053)
and four solar cycles from the second modern grand minimum (2370–2415).

This, in turn, can lead to a drop of the terrestrial temperature by up to 1.0°C from the current temperature during the next
three cycles (25–27) of grand minimum 1. The largest temperature drops will be approaching during the local minima between cycles 25 − 26 and cycles 26–27
when the lowest solar activity level is achieved using the estimations in Figure 2 (bottom plot) and Figure 3. Therefore, the average temperature in the Northern
hemisphere can be reduced by up to 1.0°C from the current temperature, which was increased by 1.4°C since Maunder minimum. This will result in the
average temperature to become lower than the current one to be only 0.4°C higher than the temperature
measured in 1710. Then, after the modern grand solar minimum 1 is over, the solar activity in cycle 28 will be restored to normal in the rather short but powerful
grand solar cycle lasting between 2053 and 2370, as shown in Figure 3, before it approaches the next grand solar minimum 2 in 2370.

Conclusions

In this editorial, I have demonstrated that the recent progress with understanding a role of the solar background magnetic field in defining solar activity and with
quantifying the observed magnitudes of magnetic field at different times allowed us to enable reliable long-term prediction of solar activity on a millennium
timescale. This approach revealed a presence of not only 11-year solar cycles but also of grand solar cycles with duration of 350–400 years. We demonstrated that
these grand cycles are formed by the interferences of two magnetic waves with close but not equal frequencies produced by the double solar dynamo action at
different depths of the solar interior. These grand cycles are always separated by grand solar minima of Maunder minimum type, which regularly occurred in the
past forming well-known Maunder, Wolf, Oort, Homeric, and other grand minima.

During these grand solar minima, there is a significant reduction of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance, which impose the reduction of terrestrial temperatures
derived for these periods from the analysis of terrestrial biomass during the past 12,000 or more years. The most recent grand solar minimum occurred during
Maunder Minimum (1645–1710), which led to reduction of solar irradiance by 0.22% from the modern one and a decrease of the average terrestrial temperature by
1.0–1.5°C.

This discovery of double dynamo action in the Sun brought us a timely warning about the upcoming grand solar minimum 1, when solar magnetic field and its
magnetic activity will be reduced by 70%. This period has started in the Sun in 2020 and will last until 2053. During this modern grand minimum, one would expect
to see a reduction of the average terrestrial temperature by up to 1.0°C, especially, during the periods of solar minima between the cycles 25–26 and 26–27, e.g. in
the decade 2031–2043.

The reduction of a terrestrial temperature during the next 30 years can have important implications for different parts of the planet on growing vegetation,

agriculture, food supplies, and heating needs in both Northern and Southern hemispheres. This global cooling during the upcoming grand solar
minimum 1 (2020–2053) can offset for three decades any signs of global warming and would require inter-government
efforts to tackle problems with heat and food supplies for the whole population of the Earth.
1NR
DA---Ukraine
 AT: Case Outweighs---2NC
That causes extinction.
Michael Klare 22, professor emeritus of peace and world-security studies at Hampshire College, senior
visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association, 10/13/2022, "Could the Fight Over Taiwan Trigger
Nuclear War?," https://www.thenation.com/article/world/china-taiwan-nuclear-war/
NO BARRIERS TO ESCALATION?

If it weren’t for the seemingly never-ending war in Ukraine, the dangers of all of this might be far more apparent and deemed far more newsworthy. Unfortunately,

at this point, there are no indications that either Beijing or Washington is prepared to scale back its provocative
military maneuvers around Taiwan. That means an accidental or unintended clash could occur at any time,
possibly triggering a full-scale conflict .
Imagine, then, what a decision by Taiwan to declare full independence or by the Biden administration to abandon the One China policy could mean. China would
undoubtedly respond aggressively, perhaps with a naval blockade of the island or even a full-scale invasion. Given the increasingly evident lack of interest among
the key parties in compromise, a violent outcome appears ever more likely.

However such a conflict erupts , it may prove difficult to contain the fighting at a “conventional” level .
After all, both sides are wary of another war of attrition like the one unfolding in Ukraine and have instead
shaped their military forces for rapid , firepower-intensive combat aimed at securing a decisive victory quickly. For
Beijing , this could mean firing hundreds of ballistic missiles at US ships and air bases in the region with the aim of
eliminating any American capacity to attack its territory. For Washington , it might mean launching missiles at
China’s key ports, air bases, radar stations, and command centers. In either case, the results could prove
catastrophic . For the United States, the loss of its carriers and other warships; for China, the loss of its very capacity to make war. Would leaders of the
losing side accept such a situation without resorting to nuclear weapons? No one can say for sure, but the temptation to escalate would
undoubtedly be great.

Unfortunately, at the moment, there are no US-China negotiations under way to resolve the Taiwan question, to prevent
unintended clashes in the Taiwan Strait, or to reduce the risk of nuclear escalation . In fact, China quite publicly cut off all
discussion of bilateral issues , ranging from military affairs to climate change, in the wake of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. So, it’s
essential , despite the present focus on escalation risks in Ukraine, to recognize that avoiding a war over Taiwan is no less
important —especially given the danger that such a conflict could prove of even greater destructiveness . That’s
why it’s so critical that Washington and Beijing put aside their differences long enough to initiate talks focused on preventing such a catastrophe.

a) Additional Ukraine escalation crushes global food security

Mercy Corps 9-23, international humanitarian NGO, 9/23/23, “The Potential Impact of Black Sea
Escalations on Food Security in the Middle East and North Africa (September 2023),”
https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/potential-impact-black-sea-escalations-food-security-
middle-east-and-north-africa-september-2023 /jpb

Countries in the Middle East and North Africa have contended with food insecurity for decades as their
populations grow alongside increased demand for imported foodstuffs. This has left many countries
across the region heavily or partially dependent on imported grains , in particular those exported
through the Black Sea .
This dependency came to the forefront in 2022 when grain shipments from Ukraine were at risk of being
completely halted prior to the Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI) being struck. This paper examines the
risks facing certain Middle Eastern countries considering a series of conflict escalations affecting Black
Sea grain exports following Russia’s withdrawal from the BSGI in July, with a focus on immediate and
longer-term consequences.

Should a major conflict escalation affecting Black Sea export infrastructure take place, it is likely that
significant international grain shortages or price increases could threaten and/or exacerbate food
security across the region.

Broader global system dynamics could, in concert with an escalation of conflict in the Black Sea,
exacerbate or sustain severe price shocks across a range of essential food commodities .

Flinching on aid now shreds the LIO and triggers short-term nuclear cascades.
Daniel Michaels et al. 10/1 - Brussels Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal; Lindsay Wise,
Laurence Norman, “In U.S. Fights Over Ukraine Aid, Allies Fear Deeper Global Harm”, 2023,
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/in-u-s-fights-over-ukraine-aid-allies-fear-deeper-global-harm-
d54ea330

Uncertainty about Washington’s commitment to Ukraine is rising despite Congress having approved more
than $100 billion in military, economic and humanitarian assistance since Russia’s large-scale invasion.
In recent days, American M1 Abrams tanks—among the world’s most advanced—have started arriving in Ukraine. President Biden has
promised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to deliver a small number of long-range ATACMS missiles, which he had requested
repeatedly.

military assistance has helped Kyiv stave off and beat back a Russian invasion that many initially
U.S.
thought would quickly succeed. Western assistance has helped significantly degrade Russia’s military, the world’s
second-largest, which boasted a formidable reputation before the war.

current U.S. military assistance isn’t sufficient for Ukraine to defeat and eject Russian
Still, allies worry that
forces occupying roughly 20% of its country.
European allies of the U.S. and Ukraine also have provided extensive military and financial support to Kyiv, at times offering more advanced
weapons than those from the U.S. But Europe’s armories are far smaller than the Pentagon’s and couldn’t fill
the gap if Washington retreats from its current support levels, say European and U.S. officials.
Other Republicans, particularly in the Senate, strongly support Ukraine and warn against U.S. wavering. Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the top
Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Ukraine’s allies in the U.S. need to make a better case to the American people,
starting by reminding them that America gave Ukraine security assurances in 1994 in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arsenal.

“ If indeed
we breached that agreement with Ukraine , what do you think every one of our enemies—and more
importantly, our allies—are going to say about America? ‘We can’t count on America,’” Risch said. “That has
a domino effect . It is greatly debilitating to the national security of the United States, not the least of which it’s
going to set off a view by many countries that, ‘We can’t count on the United States. We need nuclear
weapons .’”
Biden administration officials acknowledge political opposition to funding Ukraine but expect Americans broadly to continue supporting Kyiv.
“In Congress, yes, there are some loud voices that are taking a different tack,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday. “We of course
have to continuously try to focus our fellow citizens on the stakes.”
With fights over support for Ukraine becoming part of the U.S. funding battles and election-year politics, Kyiv’s
supporters fear that
Biden and others who have so far vocally backed Ukraine’s fight will temper or reduce their support out of
concern that combatting Russia isn’t a winning campaign strategy.

Some Ukraine boosters had hoped that Biden would stake his political ground in contrast to Republicans by adamantly committing to support
Kyiv and actively portraying the clash to voters as a war for all democracies and free countries against authoritarian regimes and repression. So
far, he hasn’t done that.

Among the gloomier scenarios that diplomats are extrapolating from recent trends is a world where Washington struggles to
cajole or compel other countries to back it. Some see signs of that already.

“Unfortunately, the current wave of instability spreading around the globe shows that our actions might not be seen as sufficiently persuasive,”
said Lithuania’s Landsbergis, citing conflicts in the Sahel region of Africa, the South Caucasus and the Western Balkans.

America’s traditional allies in the Middle East—such as Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia—have over recent years grown
wary of Washington’s willingness to protect their interests. That doubt has prompted them to pivot to seeking stronger relations with Russia
and China alongside their Washington ties.

A further erosion of U.S. global sway would ultimately undermine the rules-based international order ,
which Washington spent years and vast political capital building after the Second World War.

Prolif causes extinction.

Joe Cirincione 20, President of Ploughshares Fund, Former Vice President for National Security at the
Center for American Progress, and Zack Brown, Policy Associate and Special Assistant to the President at
Ploughshares Fund, “Why Letting Our Allies Get Nuclear Weapons Is A Bad Idea”, Responsible Statecraft,
5/20/2020, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2020/05/20/why-letting-our-allies-get-nuclear-weapons-is-
a-bad-idea/

There is nothing automatic about the nuclear domino theory , and it has been successfully countered in
some regions, but the theory is generally correct . The Soviet Union got the bomb because, as Stalin told
his scientists after Hiroshima, “The balance has been broken. Build the bomb. It will remove the great
danger from us.” Britain and France got the bomb because the Soviets (and the U.S.) had it. China did
the same, then India got the bomb because China did; Pakistan because India did.

Nuclear competition in Asia would not end if South Korea decided to build a nuclear arsenal. Others in
the region would likely follow suit . Japan, Taiwan, perhaps Vietnam. Similarly, a Saudi bomb would
likely beget an Iranian bomb, a Turkish bomb and even an Egyptian bomb. Far from making the region —
and the United States — safer, these arms races would blanket the globe with nuclear tripwires , each
primed to unleash unprecedented destruction at the slightest twitch.

Where you stand determines what you see. Kennedy and the other presidents stood atop the chain of
command, and their own experiences with that awful responsibility (particularly with the near-miss of
the Cuban Missile Crisis) colored how they saw nuclear politics. They recognized the limitations of
theory in a world characterized by imperfect information and the frictions of human interaction . They
understood what the nuclear theorists could not — that more countries having nuclear weapons would
only increase the risk of their use, not lessen it.

Three months before the Cuban Crisis, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, gave a
speech in Ann Arbor, Michigan where he laid out this danger. “The mere fact that no nation could
rationally take steps leading to nuclear war does not guarantee that a nuclear war cannot take place,”
he said. “Not only do nations sometimes act in ways that are hard to explain on a rational basis, but
even when acting in a ‘rational’ way they sometimes, indeed disturbingly often, act on the basis of
misunderstandings of the true facts of a situation. They misjudge the way others will react, and the way
others will interpret what they are doing.”

Any attempt to rationalize nuclear relationships — treating adversaries like two sides of a balanced
equation — removes the human factor : the tendency towards irrationality and error. In a world with
just a handful of nuclear states, that factor has already nearly led to apocalypse. In a world with a
dozen more , those risks would go up exponentially .

It does not have to be this way. For over 50 years, since the signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, successful
diplomacy, security assurances , and global norms have largely kept nuclear proliferation at bay . The
nightmare scenario of dozens of nuclear states has so far been averted , in no small part through the
conscious and continual effort of America n presidential administrations of both parties. Yes, there will always be those who advocate for
more nuclear weapons in more hands. But the forces of restraint, and with it, survival , have prevailed and can continue to prevail if U.S. policy
leads the way .
 Will Pass---2NC
ISRAEL. ensures passage now---PC is key.
Todd Prince 10/11, reporter, 10/11/2023, “Israel Conflagration Opens A Possible New Path For U.S.
Aid To Ukraine. There Are Pitfalls,”
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-israel-gaza-war-us-military-aid/32633143.html

But in Washington, the conflagration in Israel has opened a potential new path to securing additional support for
Ukraine . The White House is reportedly work ing with pro-Ukrainian members of Congress to link military aid to
Israel with funding for Ukraine and for Taiwan, which faces the potential threat of military action by China.

Israel enjoys wide bipartisan support in Congress, so a package that included aid to both Israel and Ukraine
would be almost certain to pass, experts say.

“It makes sense for the administration to pair aid for Ukraine with aid for Israel ,” Mark Cancian, an analyst at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told RFE/RL. “ Israel has a lot more bipartisan support right now, so it
might help push the Ukrainian aid along .”

PUBLIC SUPPORT and RESILIENT MAJORITIES. It passes, but it’s close.

Ivo Daalder 10/13, reporter for Politico, 10-13-2023, "Despite Washington chaos, Americans still want
to support Ukraine," https://www.politico.eu/article/despite-washington-chaos-americans-still-want-to-
support-ukraine/

The chaos in Washington is real. But as Britain’s late wartime leader Winston Churchill once said, there is good reason to believe
that Americans will once again do the right thing — after they have tried everything else. And that’s
particularly true when it comes to military support for Ukraine .

There is currently overwhelming bipartisan support for Ukraine in the U.S. Congress . Virtually every
Democrat — from the most progressive side of the House to the most conservative in the Senate — favors military support for
Ukraine. And the vast majority of Senate Republicans — over 40 of them — has consistently voted in favor of
spending more on Ukraine than President Joe Biden’s administration asked for. The same holds true for most House
Republicans , although their numbers have declined with each vote.
Just as important is the fact that contrary to the widespread belief that the American public is suffering from Ukraine fatigue and increasingly
turning its back on the war, support has remained steadfast.

two-thirds of those polled (63 percent)

A new survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs shows that nearly
support sending additional arms and military supplies to Ukraine, and 61 percent support providing economic
assistance.

That’s hardly an erosion in public support. In fact, support for military assistance has dropped by just two percentage points
since last November (within the margin of error), and backing for economic aid has dropped a mere five points.

Americans also remain clear as to the goal of this support. By a three-to-two margin, respondents favor providing arms and military supplies to
Ukraine until it reclaims all its territory over encouraging the country to negotiate with Russia to end the conflict — even if that means allowing
Russia to keep territory it has captured.
Nor are Americans under any illusion as to how long this war is likely to last. According to the survey, only 14 percent believe it will be over
within a year, with the remainder thinking it will continue for over a year (34 percent), between two to five years (34 percent), or five years or
more (15 percent).

This isn’t a picture of an exhausted public, or of eroding political support. So, why then the perception, among politicians and commentators,
that Ukraine fatigue has set in?

One reason is stark partisan differences. While support for military aid among Democrats has gone up since last November and remained
remarkably stable since the very first days of the war, support among Republicans has gone down precipitously. Though a majority (50 percent)
of GOP voters continue to favor sending military aid to Ukraine today, this number is down 30 points from March 2022 and 18 points from July
2022. And only a minority of Republicans (47 percent) still support providing economic aid to Ukraine.

Similarly, while a large majority of Democrats (71 percent) favor supporting Ukraine until it has recaptured all its territory that is held by Russia,
a narrow majority of Republicans (50 percent) support encouraging Ukraine to negotiate an end to the war instead.

Finally, whereas seven in 10 Democrats believe U.S. military support has been worth the cost, six in 10 Republicans do not.

These partisan differences are bound to intensify in the months ahead, as the U.S. gears up for a rematch between Biden and Trump. Ukraine is
one of the many issues that divide the two likely nominees, with Biden having demonstrated an unwavering commitment to supporting the
country for as long as it takes, and Trump suggesting he has a plan to end the war “in one day.”

Given these circumstances, what can Ukraine, and its European allies, expect when it comes to new military aid for the war? Existing funds for
U.S. assistance are rapidly running out — with just over $5 billion left from earlier appropriations — which means a vote on more funding is
necessary in the next few weeks.

And while Republican machinations in the U.S. House will likely continue for some time, there is another
looming deadline : Congress only voted to fund the government till mid-November . This means a deal
on overall government spending will need to be reached between now and then, and though
Democrats and Senate Republicans were willing to drop Ukraine funding to avoid a government
shutdown last week , they’re unlikely to do so again .
The best hope now is for a significant funding package — Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has suggested $60 billion — that would cover
military aid through the 2024 elections, and the public is supportive of this.

The big question is whether the People’s House will listen.

It’ll pass---CR sets the stage for a clean vote on Ukraine aid and it has the votes
Kurt Volker 10-7, Distinguished Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, 10/7/23, “Ignore
the Noise — Congress Can Still Pass Ukraine Aid,” https://cepa.org/article/ignore-the-noise-congress-
can-still-pass-ukraine-aid/ /jpb

Several pieces
of good news have been buried amid the overall doomsday coverage about the future of US
support for Ukraine.

First, the C ontinuing R esolution approved on September 30 separated the issue of general government funding from the issue of Ukraine
aid.

That’s a positive. Regardless of Ukraine aid, Congress needs to find a sustainable path forward on the overall US budget deficit (which is huge at
about $1.5 trillion), and on congressional leadership now that the Republican House Speaker has been removed. Once Congress does so,
however, it sets
the conditions for a clean vote on Ukraine aid as a standalone issue, without being
conflated with wider concerns over the budget.

Second, the October 5 ousting of Speaker Kevin McCarthy was not about Ukraine aid , but about a handful of House members
objecting to his cross-party Republican-Democrat deal to approve the general budgetary continuing resolution.
One of his leading Republican critics, Representative Matt Gaetz, exercised his right to introduce a Motion to Vacate under House rules that
were approved when McCarthy was first elected. McCarthy did not have the votes to stop the motion, and the Democrats did not come to his
rescue.

Looking forward, there is no chance of a Democratic Speaker being elected, meaning the next Speaker will also be a Republican. Any new
Republican Speaker, however, may well link his or her assumption of the gavel to a change in this destabilizing house rule — probably by
modestly increasing the number of members required to file a Motion to Vacate.

Third, Ukraine aid is very clearly in the US national interest (see below) and enjoys the support of the vast
majorities of both parties , in both the House and the Senate; a September 27 House vote showed 126 Republicans
votes are there , if a supplemental appropriation can be brought to the
backing Ukraine aid and 93 opposed. The
floor in both chambers. And with a rule change, the risk of another Motion to Vacate a new Speaker is
considerably smaller.

Republican House members should be confident that Republican voters can be convinced to support aid
to Ukraine ; it is clearly framed as an American national interest: when GOP Presidential candidate Nikki Haley
witheringly deconstructed fellow candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s calls to abandon Ukraine, she was greeted with spontaneous applause from a
Republican audience. Moreover, the outrage
over the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel should be a reminder
that no acts of indiscriminate killing of civilians, whether by Palestinians or by Russians, will ever find favor with the
American people.

ONE-AND-DONE PASSAGE gets hardliners on board.

Charter97 10/8, News agency 10/8/2023, "Biden Plans To Ask Congress For $100 Billion Ukraine Aid
Package," https://charter97.org/en/news/2023/10/8/566827/

US President Joe Biden is going to request from Congress the largest-ever package of funding for weapons and
humanitarian assistance to Ukraine , which should be enough until the beginning of 2025.

UNIAN reports with reference to The Telegraph (translation - UNIAN) that Biden Joe Biden
is considering a “ one-and-done ”
spending bill to fund the war in Ukraine until the next presidential election in an attempt to overcome an impasse with
Republicans, according to some sources.

"Some officials believe passing a single package , which could be as large as $100 billion, may give the Biden administration the
best chance of securing funding for the war until after next November’s election," the article reads.

As a source familiar with the discussion noted, the ‘big package’ idea is supported by many throughout the administration.
At the same time, a US administration official told The Telegraph that the White House is “not making any decisions about whether to do one
big package or about how much it would be” until after the election to replace Mr McCarthy, which is expected to begin on Wednesday.

But they said a large package to fund the war until November 2024 was “one option” under consideration.

If the vote reaches the House , it would likely pass with the support of nearly all Democrats and about
half of Republicans . Funding for Ukraine also enjoys the support of a large majority of senators .
Since the war began in February 2022, Congress has approved four war packages of around $113 billion in total. The largest package of $45
billion was passed in December 2022 but is close to running out.
 Will Pass---AT: House Speaker---2NC
Dems voting for a Republican speaker on the condition of bringing Ukraine aid to a
vote solves.
-post-Scalise withdrawal

Russell Berman 10/12, staff writer at the Atlantic, 10/12/2023, "Steve Scalise Bows Out,"
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/10/steve-scalise-withdraws-house-speaker/675630/

Democrats feared the election of either Scalise or Jordan could effectively end American aid to Ukraine. If
Republicans are unable to secure enough votes on their own to elect a speaker, Democrats might agree to support a more
moderate candidate on the condition that the House vote on an aid package , among other concessions. “I do
think that a
majority of House members want to continue to help Ukraine ,” said Frankel, who sits on the
subcommittee that oversees the foreign aid budget. “The challenge is having a speaker who would bring up a bill to
allow us to do that . That’s the danger of a Republican candidate for speaker making a deal with extremists who say, ‘hell no.’”

Expanding McHenry’s power creates another avenue for the bill.

Jeremy Herb 10/12, reporter for CNN, 10/12/2023, "Steve Scalise drops out of speaker's race as House
GOP faces leadership crisis," https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/12/politics/steve-scalise-speaker-fight/
index.html

Before Scalise withdrew, Republicans were already considering whether they should try to expand the
powers of interim Speaker Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, so the House can pass legislation , like a
resolution for Israel , multiple lawmakers told CNN.
“That is an option that we could pursue,” GOP Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas told reporters.

A group of more centrist Republicans are circulating a letter asserting that McHenry should have more
temporary power , sources told CNN – a sign of desperation as the GOP scrambles to coalesce around a speaker.

It doesn’t matter who the speaker is

Brian Bennett 10/5, reporter for TIME, 10/5/2023, “Amid House Chaos, Biden Faces Shrunken
Legislative Agenda: Avoid Shutdowns, Fund Ukraine”, https://time.com/6320700/joe-biden-house-
speaker-shutdowns-ukraine/
The Biden administration believes the security of the European continent is at stake if Russia isn’t stopped from overrunning Ukraine. “If there’s
one thing that all Americans, no matter who you vote for, can get behind it’s the idea of independence,” John Kirby, a spokesman for the
National Security Council, said on Tuesday. “That’s what Ukraine is fighting for: their right to be an independent state. It’s what we fought for
in 1776.” Kirby likened the US helping Ukraine to American revolutionary forces winning the country’s independence with help from the French
military and naval forces.

Some Republicans in Congress believe that despite concerns from a vocal minority, funding for Ukraine’s defense isn’t in jeopardy. Rep. Mike
McCaul, a Texas Republican, is the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and a vocal advocate for Ukraine aid. He says that
Republicans won’t know next steps on Ukraine funding until the House elects a new speaker , but he
remains optimistic that Congress will be able to get it done .
Similarly, Rep. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican who sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee, says he isn’t worried
about the next Speaker’s position on Ukraine because “the vast majority of the House shows that it is
supportive of it.”
 Will Pass---AT: House Republicans---2NC
It’ll pass---CR sets the stage for a clean vote on Ukraine aid and it has the votes
Kurt Volker 10-7, Distinguished Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, 10/7/23, “Ignore
the Noise — Congress Can Still Pass Ukraine Aid,” https://cepa.org/article/ignore-the-noise-congress-
can-still-pass-ukraine-aid/ /jpb

Several pieces
of good news have been buried amid the overall doomsday coverage about the future of US
support for Ukraine.

First, the C ontinuing R esolution approved on September 30 separated the issue of general government funding from the issue of Ukraine
aid.

That’s a positive. Regardless of Ukraine aid, Congress needs to find a sustainable path forward on the overall US budget deficit (which is huge at
about $1.5 trillion), and on congressional leadership now that the Republican House Speaker has been removed. Once Congress does so,
however, it sets
the conditions for a clean vote on Ukraine aid as a standalone issue, without being
conflated with wider concerns over the budget.

Second, the October 5 ousting of Speaker Kevin McCarthy was not about Ukraine aid , but about a handful of House members
objecting to his cross-party Republican-Democrat deal to approve the general budgetary continuing resolution.

One of his leading Republican critics, Representative Matt Gaetz, exercised his right to introduce a Motion to Vacate under House rules that
were approved when McCarthy was first elected. McCarthy did not have the votes to stop the motion, and the Democrats did not come to his
rescue.

Looking forward, there is no chance of a Democratic Speaker being elected, meaning the next Speaker will also be a Republican. Any new
Republican Speaker, however, may well link his or her assumption of the gavel to a change in this destabilizing house rule — probably by
modestly increasing the number of members required to file a Motion to Vacate.

Third, Ukraine aid is very clearly in the US national interest (see below) and enjoys the support of the vast
majorities of both parties , in both the House and the Senate; a September 27 House vote showed 126 Republicans
votes are there , if a supplemental appropriation can be brought to the
backing Ukraine aid and 93 opposed. The
floor in both chambers. And with a rule change, the risk of another Motion to Vacate a new Speaker is
considerably smaller.

Republican House members should be confident that Republican voters can be convinced to support aid
to Ukraine ; it is clearly framed as an American national interest: when GOP Presidential candidate Nikki Haley
witheringly deconstructed fellow candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s calls to abandon Ukraine, she was greeted with spontaneous applause from a
Republican audience. Moreover, the outrage
over the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel should be a reminder
that no acts of indiscriminate killing of civilians, whether by Palestinians or by Russians, will ever find favor with the
American people.

Israel-Ukraine package makes passage likely, but there’s still opposition.

Russell Berman 10/12, staff writer at the Atlantic, 10/12/2023, "Steve Scalise Bows Out,"
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/10/steve-scalise-withdraws-house-speaker/675630/

Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel could reopen a path for Ukraine funding . Despite pockets of
opposition on the far left and right, the Jewish state retains overwhelming bipartisan support in
Congress; when Scalise left Wednesday’s party meeting, he was wearing both an American and Israeli
flag pin on his suit jacket. Biden officials and congressional Democrats are already discussing a package
that would combine funding for both Israel and Ukraine, in the hope that yoking the two together
would help the Ukraine aid win approval .
 AT: PC Fails---2NC
Political capital true, limited, and key to push legislation---Biden’s is high now.
Greg Valliere 22, Chief U.S. Policy Strategist AGF Investments, 11/29/2022, “What Will Joe Biden Do
With His Political Capital?,” https://perspectives.agf.com/what-will-joe-biden-do-with-his-political-
capital/

P OLITICAL C APITAL is crucial for any president. With it, he can win legislative victories ; without it,
opponents circle like sharks. For Joe Biden — after a solid second half — the issue is how he will spend his new p olitical
c apital after the Democrats’ decent showing in the Nov. 8 elections. WITH P OLITICAL C APITAL, Biden can afford to alienate his allies in
organize d labor; yesterday he essentially told Congress to intervene and end the railroad strike threat. WITH P OLITICAL C APITAL, Biden
can afford to anger human rights advocates by staying relatively quiet on the protests that are sweeping through China. Biden does not want to jeopardize
chances of better relations with Xi Jinping. AND WITH P OLITICAL C APITAL, Biden can push for a spending package
in December that may resurrect the child tax credit, raise the debt ceiling and provide $40 billion or more in new aid to Ukraine. THERE ARE SOME ISSUES —
banning assault weapons, for example — that are unattainable. But Biden can demand action on guns. with public support. He also can speak out forcefully against

the murderous ayatollahs in Iran, but that’s another issue where Biden’s capital is limited . BIDEN’S BIGGEST ASSET may be the
looming GOP chaos in the House of Representatives, where Republicans will have a tiny majority. And the GOP is now consumed with a controversy

over Donald Trump’s dinner with a Holocaust denier. BIDEN’S LEGISLATIVE SUCCESSES this year reportedly have made him more inclined to run
for a second term. He’s known for extensive deliberations before making a decision, so it could be late winter before Biden decides on whether to
run again. IF HE DECLARES THAT HE’S RUNNING, Biden probably won’t have to worry about a serious challenge from any Democrat, most of whom have declared

that they won’t run if he does. This includes California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said over the past weekend that he will not challenge Biden. WITH A SOLID
RECORD of legislative wins and a Democratic Senate, Biden may be tempted to overlook the elephant in the room — his age. If he won re-election,
Biden’s second term theoretically would end with him at 86 years old. An 86-year-old president is inconceivable to us; it’s a very stressful job, even with political
capital.

Biden’s PC is key to passage.

Dan De Luce 10/5, reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit, 10/5/2023, “Can Biden keep U.S. aid
flowing to Ukraine amid GOP chaos in House?” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/can-
biden-keep-us-aid-flowing-ukraine-gop-chaos-house-rcna118907

The Biden administration is scrambling to find a way to keep U.S. weapons flowing to Ukraine in its war with
Russia after the ouster of the Republican House speaker put future assistance to Kyiv in serious jeopardy.

The morning after the House ousted Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker, President Joe Biden
told aides he wanted to deliver a speech
about Ukraine to make the case for why it was in America’s interest to provide further aid to Ukraine, a
senior administration official said.

Biden later told reporters about his plans for a “major speech” about the importance of arming Ukraine and acknowledged he was concerned
about the effect of the political upheaval in the House on future U.S. support.

“It does worry me,” Biden said. “But I know there are a majority of members of the House and Senate and both
parties who have said that they support funding Ukraine.”
He also suggested there may be more options to ensure continued weapons deliveries to Ukraine, saying, “There is another means by which we
may be able to find funding for that,” but he did not elaborate, and it was not clear how much funding was available.

Lawmakers and administration officials are keenly aware that

the clock is ticking, and Ukraine could suffer setbacks on
the battlefield if the flow of U.S. arms and artillery and other ammunition is disrupted.
“Everything is completely uncertain right now, and it’s just impossible to predict how this will play out,” a Republican congressional
aide said.

As the administration examined how to shift other funds to Ukraine and to look to allies to possibly bridge any gap, top national security
officials, including the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown, were due to brief Biden about Ukraine in the
Oval Office on Thursday, the White House said.

Biden spoke to world leaders Tuesday to reassure them that Washington remained committed to
helping Ukraine defend itself, despite the power struggle unfolding in Congress.

Administration officials said that even

though a vocal minority in Congress was wary of more assistance for Ukraine, there
was still majority support in both chambers to keep weapons, ammunition and other aid moving to Kyiv.
Biden has argued that Ukraine is a key battleground in a global struggle between democracies and authoritarian regimes, like Russia’s.

“There is still strong bipartisan support for aid to Ukraine, but we don’t take it for granted ,” another senior
administration official said.

However, McCarthy’s short tenure as speaker demonstrated that a

minority of hard-line lawmakers can shape the
congressional agenda and undermine the legislative priorities of the majority.
 Link---2NC
2. Job guarantee uses all available political capital.
Jonathan Hasak 5-2-2018; Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs at Year Up; Before
Guaranteeing Jobs, Let's Guarantee Job Retraining; RealClear Policy;
https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2018/05/02/before_guaranteeing_jobs_lets_guarantee_job_r
etraining_110616.html; DL

Every administration since the Progressive Era has sought to create more jobs through the promise of
tax breaks to businesses; subsidizing job opportunities; infrastructure, tax, and housing incentives; and
leveraging resources from the private sector. But these incremental reforms have not fixed the broken
talent marketplace that now exists in our country, nor have they corrected the mismatches in the labor
market. While political constraints may prevent a large federal jobs guarantee program from becoming
law anytime soon, it behooves both Democrats and Republicans — whether already in or aspiring to
office — to create and champion local and state job-retraining initiatives that could be used as the
foundation for a more comprehensive jobs program in the future. Consider what a localized, guaranteed job-retraining program could look like. Modeled after the GI Bill, states could use a combination of
private-sector funding and a portion of workforce and training money to create a Dignity of Work Fund. These competitive grants would provide funding to regions and localities to offer free training to displaced Americans at community colleges that would prepare them for local in-demand middle-skills jobs. Employers would help design curriculum and collaborate with community
colleges and proven training providers like Year Up, a national job-training organization that works to catapult opportunity youth — young adults who are out of school and out of work — from minimum wage jobs to meaningful careers in a single year. Our country’s community colleges are often the easiest place for Americans seeking opportunity to find a training provider.
Guaranteeing job retraining at our community colleges — a postsecondary system with substantial investments in work-based learning — would be both smart policy and good politics, immediately improving career pathways for all community college students and appealing to the majority of Americans who support making college tuition free. A Dignity of Work Fund would also
influence training programs across the country to become more effective at preparing Americans for jobs. It would do so by demonstrating the need for public funding for market-based practices and programs aligned to employer demand. Just as President Obama’s Race to the Top program incentivized states to change their education policies when applying for funds, these
competitive grants would incentivize regional workforce development boards to become more accountable for producing market-based outcomes. This allows employment outcomes — not compliance provisions — to be used as the metric for negotiating training provider contracts and awarding any future public funding. States that implement a Dignity of Work Fund could also
launch hiring campaigns focused on mobilizing statewide employers to make changes to legacy hiring practices, such as removing four-year degree requirements as a proxy for hire. With over two-thirds of the job openings in this country created by 2020 expected not to require a bachelor’s degree, this campaign could expand the economy for Americans who have not finished

To be sure, competitive grant programs would not

college — a key constituency of President Trump’s base. It would also increase the likelihood of reaching the 5 million apprenticeships goal the Trump administration embraced last year.

serve every American looking for gainful employment; greater federal investment would eventually be
needed. For that, we would likely need a president and Congress willing to use all available political

capital to implement a federal guaranteed jobs program.

3. Job guarantees are empirically controversial---moderate democrats are lobbied by

corporations who hate the AFF.
Peter-Christian Aigner and Michael Brenes 18, historians of twentieth-century America; “The Long,
Tortured History of the Job Guarantee”, https://newrepublic.com/article/148388/long-tortured-history-
job-guarantee, eden

It took a half-century of growing inequality, a massive recession, a spoiler primary campaign by a self-proclaimed socialist, and
the election of a quasi-fascist, but big ideas are here again for Democrats. Medicare for All, paid family leave, tuition-free college
—not since the late 1960s and ’70s has the Democratic Party had such a bold, liberal agenda. Now, likely presidential candidates are

even talking about job guarantees and universal basic income. The future seems left indeed.

But before assuming that anything is possible, it is worth considering just how bad things had to get for these goals,
many of which were first proposed long ago, to be revived—and what destroyed these causes in the past, when the
progressive coalition was much stronger . Major reform of the kind now under consideration has only passed in times of extreme
crisis. (Think about how much of the liberal Democratic state was enacted in a mere six years, shared between the New Deal and Great Society.)
And while the party appears to have decided to “lurch left” to win back the blue-collar whites who voted
for Donald Trump after voting for Barack Obama, there is no shortage of research demonstrating that American
economic policy has long been well to the right of where voters actually want it.

The job guarantee is a great example . Over the last month, progressives have been celebrating the legislation
recently introduced by Senator Cory Booker, calling for a pilot job guarantee in 15 cities and regions, co-sponsored by Senators
Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand. But this bill preempts universal job guarantee legislation being drawn up by Bernie Sanders and rejects
even the limited job guarantee advocated by the Center for American Progress, suggesting that Democratic leaders still do not understand the
severity of the problem. Those excited by the idea ought to remember, too, that it was liberals, not
conservatives, who have killed job guarantee bills in the past.
Joblessness also fell dramatically, if we count public labor—to 9 percent in FDR’s first term, and to 6 percent in 1941 (and this was before the
war). No later Congress was more successful. The growth rates in that period were impressive, too, averaging between 8 and 10 percent, far
better than most recovering economies. Kiran Klaus Patel, in his 2016 book The New Deal: A Global History, notes that direct job-creation was
the most distinctly American feature of the New Deal, although many local governments have used the program in economic downturns
through history. Philip Harvey, Steven Attewell, Edwin Amenta, and others have argued that FDR’s Committee on Economic Security saw the
better-known insurance and welfare program as fallbacks, actually, to a primary, “forgotten leg” in the welfare state: public employment.

Recent pieces on the job guarantee sometimes note that FDR gave the right to work the top spot in his famous second Bill of Rights. And with
fear of depression returning after the war, farmers, unions, and liberals mobilized behind a Full Employment bill that ostensibly would have
created a permanent WPA. But while
a pair of racist southern Democrats and one northern Republican are often
blamed for defeating this social democratic legislation , the best new research finds that it was already
“one of the most conservative” proposals floating around Congress , before the House ever voted—
watered down by the New Deal Keynesian economists who drafted and reworked what became the
1946 Employment Act (which provided full employment in rhetoric only).
Happily, depression did not return. But in the fabled 1950s economy, unemployment steadily increased after three recessions, and then
“automation” entered the lexicon. By the late 1950s, Walter Reuther, the left-labor leader, was calling for a March on Washington and a
“Marshall Plan for the cities,” soon joined by civil rights leaders. John F. Kennedy responded with the first national job training program, but it
did little. Lyndon Johnson followed with the Keynesians’ solution: a tax cut, expected to “unleash” the market and (what else?) “create jobs.”
Unemployment fell, helped by the Vietnam War, but high rates of joblessness remained, particularly for the “unskilled” and discriminated
groups. Very soon after LBJ’s War on Poverty began, various government departments began pushing for direct job-creation and calling for the
government to become “employer of last resort,” ideas JFK and LBJ had many times rejected. But domestic welfare was subsumed by the war.

Hubert Humphrey carried the banner in 1968, promoting federal planning for jobs, housing, and community development. But when he lost to
Nixon, reformers in the party rejected this approach. “New Politics” Democrats turned to George McGovern, who implied that postwar
Keynesianism had failed, and instead offered a far less popular solution with voters (and the poor): a “demogrant,” or universal basic income
(UBI). Every American would receive an annual income of $1,000, instead of a job.

The debate between “guaranteed” jobs or income played out in the 1972 primary between Humphrey
and McGovern. Each candidate battled for the soul of the Democratic Party, with two competing
versions for resolving unemployment and poverty. In Humphrey’s corner were the NAACP and AFL-CIO.
Remnants of the anti-war movement and wealthy suburban liberals backed McGovern .

There were no winners. After

Humphrey’s primary attacks, McGovern quickly abandoned the demogrant, a
third as large as Nixon’s guaranteed income plan (a precursor to the Earned Income Tax Credit), which Eugene McCarthy led
the fight against. Then came the larger economic crisis of the 1970s: rising unemployment, high inflation, and stagnating wages. Democrats
made an unusual move, endorsing the Humphrey-Hawkins Act in the 1976 platform, the first real attempt to establish a job guarantee since the
late New Deal. House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill called it the “centerpiece.” Voters responded by electing a filibuster-proof majority in the
Senate, a 74-seat majority in the House, and Jimmy Carter, who officially committed to support the bill.

But the same veterans of the Great Society killed it. Carter blamed high energy prices for “stagflation,” as well as unions—the largest army in
the Democratic base. Despite support from civil rights and religious groups, Carter refused to provide an enforcement mechanism for the
legislation, which passed, but in a gutted, toothless form, just like the earlier Employment Act.

Ronald Reagan dismantled the job program Nixon had been forced to create just before his reelection. In response, Democratic Party elites
followed the advice of the so-called New Democrats, and steadily moved right on “bread and butter” issues. When the Cold War ended, Bill
Clinton, who cut his teeth on the 1972 McGovern campaign, reanimated the idea of converting the military—the longest-running, if
unacknowledged, jobs program in the U.S.—to more economically and socially productive industries (as McGovern had suggested a generation
earlier, taking off from the now-lonely work of Seymour Melman). But the idea never took. Even self-admitted socialists like Oakland’s Ron
Dellums refused to close military bases in his district, emblematic of Democratic politicians across the board who failed to recognize defense as
an endless source of patronage and pork.
Support for a government-imposed ceiling on unemployment, for socially useful, economically productive, and
individually satisfying work, has remained extraordinarily high into the Reagan era and present . But popular

support alone cannot enact legislation . Clear barriers , intellectual and institutional, stand in the way.
Wall Street is considerably stronger, and unions are on their knees . Under Trump, an exciting groundswell
of activism has appeared. But it is questionable whether the resistance is powerful enough to defeat the
donor class , which is violently opposed to a job guarantee. And many of the special interest groups that
have replaced the unions and civil rights groups of earlier decades remain “heads without bodies,”
unable to marshal constituents to the cause.

Grassroots organizations like Black Lives Matter or the National Women’s March, meanwhile, lack the deep
pockets of these liberal lobbies. Democratic policy goals have lurched left, but there is no major effort
underway to reform the electoral or legislative system, as the left in earlier periods believed necessary
to any major policy goal.

Even when the left had both the numbers and financing to rival the GOP, job
guarantees were rejected for weak temporary
programs because New Deal and Great Society liberals assumed, like their opponents, and most Democratic leaders
today, that capitalism would eventually (one day! soon!) provide for all. The jobs vs. income debate is somewhat a false
either/or, but it is not surprising that one-percenters in Silicon Valley and Democratic Party elites still favor
the UBI overwhelmingly against a public option in the labor market, despite persistently lopsided
support for one and not the other. A job guarantee threatens corporate power, while an income
guarantee subsidizes it.

If the latest job guarantee is not going to end like the rest, progressives will need to grapple with these
ideological and institutional barriers. Or fail once more .
 AT: Winners Win---2NC
It's empirically false for Biden.
Courtney Subramanian 21, reporter, interviewing William Howell, a political scientist at the
University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy; Joey Garrison, same, 3/7/2021, “‘Dinner table’
politics: Why Joe Biden ditched bipartisan dealmaking to pass his COVID-19 relief,”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/03/07/covid-19-bill-biden-chooses-dinner-table-
politics-over-bipartisanship/6892438002

Despite the relief plan's popularity outside the Beltway, it is unlikely that momentum from its passage will
hurtle Biden into future legislative wins, Howell said.

“The idea that a legislative win begets a subsequent legislative win in this environment is probably asking
for too much ,” he said, noting the prospect of passing COVID-19 relief was higher than more hot-button issues like immigration or
health care.

A legislative defeat would have raise d questions about Biden’s ability to pass any meaningful
legislation, but its passage won’t be a “springboard to the production of all kinds of landmark
legislation – far from it ," Howell said.

Wins fade from view, while defeats are forever.

Daniel Drezner 21, Professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at
Tufts University, 3/30/2021, “Biden’s brand of bipartisanship,”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/03/30/bidens-brand-bipartisanship/

The paradox for Biden is that the more successful he is at addressing the pandemic and the economy, the more
difficulty he could encounter in building bipartisan coalitions to address other problems.
Pol itical Sci ence 101 would suggest that if Biden gets credit for ending the pandemic and restoring a strong economy,
that popularity should translate into greater p olitical c apital for other problems in the queue.

Pol itical Sci ence 301 offers a cautionary warning : Solved problems fade from view . Biden is
appropriately addressing the issues voters care about. But if the pandemic and the economy evolve as expected, voters will quickly bank those
successes and focus on thornier problems — like immigration.