Tournament: Damus | Round: 2 | Opponent: Albany EK | Judge: Crucilla, Sarah
The 1AC perpetuates the exact abstraction that recreates anti-black violence by ignoring the underlying antagonism inherent to its structure – asking historically racist institutions to try and fix problems is blind optimism that dooms them to recreate anti-blackness. Curry 13
Dr. Tommy J. Curry 13, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Texas AandM, "In the Fiat of Dreams: The Delusional Allure of Hope, the Reality of Anti-Black Violence and the Demands of the Anti-Ethical", 2013. CC

Despite the rhetorical strategies adopted by both Black and white political theorists which urge Blacks and whites alike to demand Americans to continue their allegiance to the foundational de-racialized ethos of the post-Civil Rights era, the reality of the American racism—its sheer recurring violence against Black people—demands more than symbolic rhetorical allusion. To seriously grasp the reality of racist oppression and the sempiternal machinations of anti-Blackness throughout American society be it in its institutions like the prison industrial complex, its policies like Affirmative action, or its manipulation of Black social degradation and economic disadvantage to support pathological theses about disasters like Katrina or cultural deviance as in the death of Trayvon Martin, Darius Simmons, or Jordan Davis, the study of the matter itself—racism—must be a study of a conceptual disengagement with the myth of racial equality and the “automatic progressivism” of the American liberal project. This disengagement is not simply the refusal to accept the idealism of civil rights myth held beyond the realm of fact, but the disengagement with the illusions of democracy and equality that continue to ignore the role that violence has played and continues to play in the subjugation, incarceration, and vilification of Black life. As Dr. A.J. William Myers reveals in his work groundbreaking work entitled Destructive Impulses, Until at such time white America (and Black America) is openly willing to confront a historical legacy of its own violence (perpetrated against an American people of color), any venture into and/ or expository on race relations becomes an exercise in futility…As a result, therefore, white violence, confined to the subliminal recesses of the American psyche, continues to prevent the transition necessary for the country to move beyond the idea of race. In America, Blackness and the racism that continues to condemn those historical racialized peoples is violence—it is the forceful and coercion enclosing of human beings to an inferior social, political, and economic status of which their own humanity exceeds. This dehumanizing relegation of the raced citizen is not a gradual or incremental debasement, but rather the historically immediate condition of inferiority that presents progress to be attainable by the cyclical degrees of physical violence against the racialized population. For these racially oppressed peoples, violence is the permanent fixture of existence in America, since it is the vitiation of their humanity that rationalizes the varying techniques of their cultural erasure, birthing the emergent symbolic associations of degradation that replace their invisibility, and empowering the intentional enforcements of their societal exclusions. In fact, it is precisely this triumvirate that gauges what we take to be the negation of the necessity of revolutionary change--since the raced is taken to be present, as a result of a critical redefining of humanity, integrated into society.

Their framework arguments are another link – their ethics are colorblind and abstract from reality in a way in a way that is inaccessible to oppressed bodies – they serve as another hoop to jump through before we can engage in racism and are exactly what keeps that oppression prevalent. Curry 2
Dr. Tommy J. Curry 13, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Texas AandM, "In the Fiat of Dreams: The Delusional Allure of Hope, the Reality of Anti-Black Violence and the Demands of the Anti-Ethical", 2013. CC

 In the post-structuralist era, post-colonial thinking about racism specifically, and difference/otherness generally, has given a peculiar ameliorative function to discourse and the performance of “other-ed” identities. In this era, the dominant illusion is that discourse itself , an act that requires as its basis the recognition of the “other” as “similar,” is socially transformative—not only with regard to how the white subject assimilates the similitude of the “other-ed,” but as an actual activity gauged by the recognition by one white person or by a group of white people in any given scenario, is uncritically accepted and encouraged as anti-racist politics.. In actuality such discourse appeals, which necessitate—become dependent on—(white) recognition, function very much like the racial stereotype, in that the concept of the Black body being the expression and source of experience and phenomena (existential-phenomenological-theorization) is incarcerated by the conceptualization created the discursive catalyst yearning to be perceived by the white thing seeing the Black. Such appeals lend potentiality-hope-faith to the already present/demonstrated ignorance-racism-interest of the white individual, who in large part expresses the historical tone/epistemology of their racial group’s interest. When morality is defined, not by the empirical acts that demonstrate immorality, but the racial character of those in question, our ethics become nothing more than the apologetics of our tyrannical epoch. Ought implies a projected (futural) act. The word commands a deliberate action to reasonably expect the world to be able to sustain or support. For the Black thinker, the Black citizen-subject-slave-(in)human, ought is not rational but repressive. For the oppressed racialized thinker, the ethical provocation is an immediate confrontation with the impossibility of actually acting towards values like freedom, liberty, humanity, and life, since none of these values can be achieved concretely for the Black in a world controlled by and framed by the white. The options for ethical actions are not ethical in and of themselves, but merely the options the immorality of the racist world will allow, thus the oppressed is forced to idealize their ethical positions, eliminating the truth of their reality, and the peeling away the tyranny of white bodies, so that as the oppressed, the can ideally imagine an “if condition,” whereby they are allowed to ethical engage racism from the perspective of: “if whites were moral and respected the humanity of Blacks, then we can ethically engage in these behaviors. Unfortunately, this ought constraint only forces Blacks to consciously recognize the futility of ethical engagement, since it is in this ought deliberation that they recognize that their cognition of all values are dependent not on their moral aspirations for the world, but the determined by the will of white supremacy to maintain virtue throughout all ethical calculations. In short, Black ethical deliberation is censored so that it can only engage moral questions by asserting that whites are virtuous and hence capable of being ethically persuaded towards right action, hence all ethical question about racism, white supremacy and anti-Blackness is not about how Blacks think about the world, but what possibility the world allows Blacks to contemplate under the idea of ethics. These ethics, the ethics that result from this vitiated morality, are not arbiters of oppression at all. They are not a rational calculus that is capable of revealing a categorical imperative, rather they function as the Kantian constraints upon human experience; the synthetic apriori upon which the phenomena of whiteness is the landscape of thinking about Blackness under the Western anthropos. There is an implicit appeal to a hierarchy of being that is both empirical and universal—all man is superior to non-man. Hence, ethics emerges as the product of the overrepresentation of Western man thinking itself—projecting itself—into the future. These ethics, theorized away from the anti-Blackness not within it, only uphold an overdetermined virtue of whiteness. They hold within them no actual delineation between good or bad, only a Puritanical call to reason to turn its attention towards the other-ed created. This attention however relies on the perceptions and caricatures of Black torment that appeal to the whites’ self-assuring imagining of themselves, so that even when confronted with racism and their role as whites thinking about Black people incarcerated within a racist society and dying, these whites can claim that their conceptualization of racism itself, or (inter-sectionally) next to other injustices like poverty, sexism, homophobia, etc. makes them (whites) virtuous. It is the process of, the appeal to, “getting whites to recognize” (racist) oppression that allows the destruction of reality, Black death, to continue unabated, since it is the exact moment that whites are forced to engage racist problems in America, be it the anti-Black violence of American society, which animates the aversion of the justice system, the police state, the white citizenry, or the practice of American democracy itself—where the death of Black people/criminals/deviants/thugs remain normal and justified by whites—that they, the white(s) thinking about racism, get to impose upon Black reality, a racist moral maxim, namely that racism is not death and beyond –the end of--ethical calculus or moral evaluation, but ultimately contingent in America and of measurable consequence so much so that must be weighed next to the other democratic values that preserve this great white society: security, safety, individuality, property, profit, and freedom, the very values that when enacted by whites continue to perpetuate one ultimate end, the death of Blacks. 

The 1AC’s colorblindness is itself a form of racism – it acts to shut off conversations about oppression and only allows the voices of whites to be heard. Williams
Monica Williams, "Colorblind Ideology Is a Form of Racism," Psychology Today http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/colorblind/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism, December 27, 2011. 

Racial issues are often uncomfortable to discuss and rife with stress and controversy. Many ideas have been advanced to address this sore spot in the American psyche. Currently, the most pervasive approach is known as colorblindness. Colorblindness is the racial ideology that posits the best way to end discrimination is by treating individuals as equally as possible, without regard to race, culture, or ethnicity. At its face value, colorblindness seems like a good thing — really taking MLK seriously on his call to judge people on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. It focuses on commonalities between people, such as their shared humanity. However, colorblindness alone is not sufficient to heal racial wounds on a national or personal level. It is only a half-measure that in the end operates as a form of racism. Problems with the colorblind approach Racism? Strong words, yes, but let's look the issue straight in its partially unseeing eye. In a colorblind society, White people, who are unlikely to experience disadvantages due to race, can effectively ignore racism in American life, justify the current social order, and feel more comfortable with their relatively privileged standing in society (Fryberg, 2010). Most minorities, however, who regularly encounter difficulties due to race, experience colorblind ideologies quite differently. Colorblindness creates a society that denies their negative racial experiences, rejects their cultural heritage, and invalidates their unique perspectives. Let's break it down into simple terms: Color-Blind = "People of color — we don't see you (at least not that bad ‘colored' part)." As a person of color, I like who I am, and I don't want any aspect of that to be unseen or invisible. The need for colorblindness implies there is something shameful about the way God made me and the culture I was born into that we shouldn't talk about. Thus, colorblindness has helped make race into a taboo topic that polite people cannot openly discuss. And if you can't talk about it, you can't understand it, much less fix the racial problems that plague our society. Colorblindness is not the answer Many Americans view colorblindness as helpful to people of color by asserting that race does not matter (Tarca, 2005). But in America, most underrepresented minorities will explain that race does matter, as it affects opportunities, perceptions, income, and so much more. When race-related problems arise, colorblindness tends to individualize conflicts and shortcomings, rather than examining the larger picture with cultural differences, stereotypes, and values placed into context. Instead of resulting from an enlightened (albeit well-meaning) position, colorblindness comes from a lack of awareness of racial privilege conferred by Whiteness (Tarca, 2005). White people can guiltlessly subscribe to colorblindness because they are usually unaware of how race affects people of color and American society as a whole.

Thus the alternative is to embrace anti-ethics; we must refuse the notion that historically racist institutions can help minorities and stop exploitation—fiat is illusory, so we need to destroy and demystify the concept of the white man and white virtue.  Curry 3 

Dr. Tommy J. Curry 13, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Texas AandM, "In the Fiat of Dreams: The Delusional Allure of Hope, the Reality of Anti-Black Violence and the Demands of the Anti-Ethical", 2013. CC

The shift out of our present conception of Man, out of our present “World System”—the one that places people of African descent and the ever-expanding global, transracial category of the homeless, jobless, and criminalized damned as the zero-most factor of Other to Western Man’s Self—has to be first and foremost a cultural shift, not an economic one. Until such a rupture in our conception of being human is brought forth, such “sociological” concerns as that of the vast global and local economic inequalities, immigration, labor policies, struggles about race, gender, class, and ethnicity, and struggles over the environment, global warming, and distribution of world resources, will remain status quo. ¶ Anti-ethics; the call to demystify the present concept of man as illusion, as delusion, and as stratagem, is the axiomatic rupture of white existence and the multiple global oppressions like capitalism, militarism, genocide, and globalization, that formed the evaluative nexus which allows whites to claim they are the civilized guardians of the world’s darker races. It is the rejection of white virtue, the white’s axiomatic claim to humanity that allows the Black, the darker world to sow the seeds of consciousness towards liberation from oppression. When white (in)humanity is no longer an obstacle weighed against the means for liberation from racism, the oppressed are free to overthrow the principles that suggest their paths to liberation are immoral and hence not possible. To accept the oppressor as is, the white made manifest in empire, is to transform white western (hu)man from semi-deitous sovereign citizen to contingent, mortal, and un-otherable. Exposing the inhumanity of white humanity is the destruction/refusal of the disciplinary imperative for liberal reformism and dialogue as well as a rejection of the social conventions that dictate speaking as if this white person, the white person and her white people before you are in fact not racist white people, but tolerable—not like the racist white people abstracted from reality, but really spoken of in conversations about racism. The revelatory call, the coercively silenced but intuitive yearning to describe the actual reality set before Black people in an anti-Black society, is to simply say there is no negotiating the boundaries of anti-Blackness or the horizons of white supremacy. Racism, the debasement of melaninated bodies and nigger-souls, is totalizing. ¶ But such a reality can never be spoken or written about without fear. In order to preserve the possibility of being recognized by whites, be it as citizen-not-terrorist or as a scholar, colleague, human-not-angry-nigger, the Black philosopher, Blackened person must offer to whites vindication—acknowledgement that he recognizes and will speak of-write about whites as having the potentiality for virtue. The revolutionary activity, if that is how we understand the efforts to change the material-physical relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor, making one’s individual assertion of white inhumanity—the local act of critique—real and socially transformative beyond the dialogical (conversations between colleagues, within a discursive space, or disagreements between critics), is not convincing the white subject in dialogue with, the supposed rational ethical subject, that they-it can potentiality to be different, or better. This is a dead end appeal over-determined by trying to “win over,” “be recognized by,” the white subject. The revolutionary activity is to demonstrate as a matter of ontology (this is whiteness as is) that whiteness is irredeemable. In relativizing Western MAN, showing the ethnoclass limitation of Europe’s cultural invention, Black humanity is freed to begin thinking itself anew without the fear of falling into mimicry. In short, seeing whites as they are is the proof that Black consciousness has shifted our present conception of man and has found a new teleological/cultural orientation; an endarkening path towards a new humanity. 

The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that best deconstructs power relations – pedagogical contexts like debate are uniquely political and your ballot promotes a true opportunity for change. Trifonas

Trifonas, Peter. PEDAGOGIES OF DIFFERENCE: RETHINKING EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE. New York, London. 2003.

Domination and subordination, I imply that they are relations of power. In an educational context, the exercise of power is accomplished in interactions (i.e., in a social organization), manifesting itself as acts of exclusion, marginalization, silencing, and so forth. Thus, paying attention to how power operates along axes of gender, race, class, and ability (that is, recognizing that social differences are not given, but are accomplished in and through educational settings) is a step toward educational equity. What does the above discussion mean in the educational context? It means that in the interactions of teachers with students in the classroom, or in other contexts, attention needs to be directed toward how dominant and subordinate relations (be they based on race, gender, class, or ability) permeate these contexts and intersect in complicated ways to produce inequality and marginalization. The frequently used and well-meaning phrase, “I treat everyone the same, ” often used by teachers and administrators to indicate their lack of bias in a diverse educational setting, in fact masks unequal power relations. Similarly, educational policies that assume that people are the same or equal may serve to entrench existing inequality precisely because people enter into the educational process with different and unequal experiences. These attempts, well meaning though they may be, tend to render inequality invisible, and thus work against equity in education. In her exploration of white privilege in higher education in the United States, Frances Rains (1998), an aboriginal-Japanese American woman, states emphatically that these benign acts are disempowering for the minority person because they erase his or her racial identity. The denial of racism in this case is in fact a form of racism. Thus, in moving toward equity in education that allows us to address multiple and intersecting axes of difference and inequality, I recommend that we try to think and act “against the grain” in developing educational policies and handling various kinds of pedagogical situations. 5 To work against the grain is to recognize that education is not neutral; it is contested. Mohanty puts it as such: … Education represents both a struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations. It is a central terrain where power and politics operate out of the lived culture of individuals and groups situated in asymmetrical social and political positions. (Mohanty 1990:184) We need to develop a critical awareness of the power dynamics operative in institutional relations-and of the fact that people participate in institutions as unequal subjects. Working against the grain is to take a proactive approach to understanding and acting upon institutional relations, whether in the classroom, in other interactions with students, or in policy development. Rather than overlooking the embeddedness of gender, race, class, ability, and other forms of inequality that shape our interactions, working against the grain makes explicit the political nature of education and how power operates to privilege, silence, and marginalize individuals who are differently located in the educational process. In her exploration of feminist pedagogy, Linda Briskin (1990) makes a clear distinction between nonsexist and antisexist education critical to our understanding here. She asserts that nonsexism is an approach that attempts to neutralize sexual inequality by pretending that gender can be made irrelevant in the classroom. Thus, for instance, merely asserting that male and female students should have equal time to speak-and indeed giving them equal time-cannot adequately rectify the endemic problem of sexism in the classroom. One of Briskin's students reported that in her political science tutorials that when the male students spoke, everyone paid attention. When a female student spoke, however, the class acted as if no one was speaking (13). Neutrality is an attempt to conceal the unequal distribution of power. An against the grain approach would acknowledge explicitly that we are all gendered, racialized, and differently constructed subjects who do not participate in interactional relations as equals. This goes beyond formulating sexism, racism, abilism, and class privilege in individualist terms and treating them as if they were personal attitudes. Terry Wolverton (1983) discovered the difference between nonracism and antiracism in her consciousness-raising attempt: I had confused the act of trying to appear not to be racist with actively working to eliminate racism. Trying to appear not racist had made me deny my racism, and therefore exclude the possibility of change. (191) Being against the grain means seeing inequality as systemic and interpersonal (rather than individual), and combatting oppression as a collective responsibility, not just as a personal attribute (so that somehow a person can cleanse herself or himself of sexism, racism, abilism, or class bias). It is to pay attention to oppression as an interactional property that can be altered (see Manners 1998). Roger Simon (1993) suggests, in his development of a philosophical basis for teaching against the grain, which shares many commonalities in how I think about an integrative approach to equity in education, that teaching against the grain is fundamentally a moral practice. By this he does not mean that teachers simply fulfill the mandate and guidelines of school authorities. He believes that teachers must expose the partial and imperfect nature of existing knowledge, which is constructed on the basis of asymmetrical power relations (for instance, who has the power to speak and whose voices are suppressed?). It is the responsibility of the teacher or educator to show how dominant forms of knowledge and ways of knowing constrict human capacities. In exposing the power relations integral to the knowledge construction process, the educator, by extension, must treat teaching and learning as a mutual and collaborative act between teachers and students. What may this ideal look like in practice? Marilyn Cochran-Smith (1991) also explores the notion of teaching against the grain in her research on how teachers and students worked together in a preservice program in the Philadelphia area. Borrowing from Gramsci's formulation that action is everyone's responsibility, she asserts that teaching is fundamentally a political activity. In practical terms, she outlines what it may mean to teach against the grain in an actual teaching and learning situation. Her succinct articulation is worth quoting at length: To teach against the grain, teachers have to understand and work both within and around the culture of teaching and the politics of schooling at their particular schools and within their larger school system and communities. They cannot simply announce better ways of doing things, as outsiders are likely to do. They have to teach differently without judging the ways other teach or dismissing the ideas others espouse…. They are not at liberty to publicly announce brilliant but excoriating critiques of their colleagues and the bureaucracies in which they labor. Their ultimate commitment is to the school lives and futures of the children with whom they live and work. Without condescension or defensiveness, they have to work with parents and other teachers on different ways of seeing and measuring development, connecting and dividing knowledge, and knowing about teaching and schooling. They have to be astute observers of individual learners with the ability to pose and explore questions that transcend cultural attribution, institutional habit, and the alleged certainty of outside experts. They have to see beyond and through the conventional labels and practices that sustain the status quo by raising unanswerable and often uncomfortable questions. Perhaps most importantly, teachers who work against the grain must name and wrestle with their own doubts, must fend off the fatigue of reform and depend on the strength of their individual and collaborative convictions that their work ultimately makes a difference in the fabric of social responsibility. (Cochran-Smith 1991:284-85) For me, to be against the grain is therefore to recognize that the routinized courses of action and interactions in all educational contexts are imbued with unequal distribution of power that produce and reinforce various forms of marginalization and exclusion. Thus, a commitment to redress these power relations (i.e., equity in education) involves interventions and actions that may appear “counter-intuitive.” 6 Undoing inequality and achieving equity in education is a risky and uncomfortable act because we need to disrupt the ways things are “normally” done. This involves a serious (and frequently threatening) effort to interrogate our privilege as well as our powerlessness. It obliges us to examine our own privilege relative though it may be, to move out of our internalized positions as victims, to take control over our lives, and to take responsibilities for change. It requires us to question what we take for granted, and a commitment to a vision of society built on reflection, reform, mutuality, and respect in theory and in practice. Teaching and learning against the grain is not easy, comfortable, or safe. It is protracted, difficult, uncomfortable, painful, and risky. It involves struggles with our colleagues, our students, as well as struggles within ourselves against our internalized beliefs and normalized behaviors. In other words, it is a lifelong challenge. However, as Simon (1993) puts it, teaching against the grain is also a project of hope. We engage in it with the knowledge and conviction that we are in a long-term collaborative project with like-minded people whose goal is to make the world a better place for us and for our children.
The aff’s attempt to whitewash history by ignoring the racist foundations that underlie their theory allows for racial domination to remain invisible – you as a judge must reject the aff’s epistemology and acknowledge the reality of oppression. That’s a voting issue. Leonardo
Leonardo, Zeus. "The souls of white folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse." Race, ethnicity and education 5.1 (2002): 29-50. CC

The fragmenting effects of the global economy work in tandem with the fragmenting tendencies of whiteness. As a perspective, whiteness is historicaly fractured in its apprehension of racial formations. In order to ‘see’ the formation in full view, whites have to mobilize a perspective that begins with racial privilege as a central unit of analysis. Since starting from this point would mean whites engage in a thorough historical understanding of ‘how they came to be’ in a position of power, most whites resist such an undertaking and instead focus on individual merit, exception- alism, or hard work. The act of interpreting the totality of racial formations is an apostasy that white students and educators must undertake but one which does not come easy or without costs. The costs are real because it means whites would have to acknowledge their unearned privileges and disinvest in them. This is a different tack from saying that whites benefit from renouncing their whiteness because it would increase their humanity. Whites would lose many of their perks and privileges. So, the realistic appraisal is that whites do have a lot to lose by committing race treason, not just something to gain by forsaking whiteness. This is the challenge. In his discussion of gender and race, Terry Eagleton (1996) provokes a distinction between identity politics and class relations. He calls class position relational in a way that gender and race are not, because possessing a certain skin color or body configuration does not prevent another person from owning such traits. By contrast, a landless laborer occupies a material position because the gentleman farmer owns the land or property. Eagleton goes on to say that being black does not mean one is of a different species from a white person. Pigmentation is not definitive of a general human experience in the same way that freckle-faced people do not constitute an essentialy different human category. In this, Eagleton exposes the racist and patriarchal imagination by highlighting its contradictions and ilogics. However, his analysis leaves out a more powerful explanation of how racism actualy works. Like most oppressive systems, racism functions through an illogical rationalization process. For instance, the one-drop rule, or the Rule of Hypodescent, demarcates blacks from whites by drawing an artiŽ cial and arbitrary line between them in order both to create more slaves and limit people’s power to achieve whiteness. Thus, the power of whiteness comes precisely from its ability to usurp reason and rational thought, and a purely rationalistic analysis limits our understanding of the way it functions. Despite its contradictions, the contours of racism can be mapped out and analyzed and this is what Cheryl Harris (1995) attempts when she compares whiteness to owning property. First, whiteness becomes property through the objectiŽ cation of African slaves, a process which set the precondition for ‘propertizing’ human life (Harris, 1995, p. 279). Whiteness takes the form of ownership, the deŽ ning attribute of free individ- uals which Africans did not own. Second, through the reification and subsequent hegemony of white people, whiteness is transformed into the common sense that becomes law. As a given right of the individual white person, whiteness can be enjoyed, like any property, by exercising and taking advantage of privileges co-extensive with whiteness. Third, like a house, whiteness can be demarcated and fenced off as a territory of white people which keeps Others out. Thus, caling a white person ‘black’ was enough reason, as late as 1957, to sue for character defamation; the same could not be said of a black person being mistaken for ‘white.’ This was a certain violation of property rights much like breaking into someone’s house. In al, whites became the subjects of property, with Others as its objects. As Charles Mils (1997) explains, the Racial Contract is an agreement to misinter- pret the world as it is. It is the implicit consensus that whites frequently enter into, which accounts for their fragmented understanding of the world as it is racialy structured. When confronted with the reality of racial oppression, according to Hurtado, whites respond with: I wil listen to you, sometimes for the Ž rst time, and wil seem engaged. At critical points in your analysis I wil claim I do not know what you are talking about and wil ask you to elaborate ad nauseam. I wil consistently subvert your efforts at dialogue by claiming ‘we do not speak the same language’. (cited in McLaren et al., 2001, pp. 211–212; italics in original) The frequent detours, evasions, and detractions from the circuits of whiteness cripple our understanding of the racio-economic essence of schools and society. It is a distortion of perfect communication in Habermas’s (1984) sense of it which creates what I cal an altogether ‘ideological speech situation.’ That is, communi- cation is ideological to the extent that the ‘ideal speech situation’ is systematicaly distorted, which is different from saying that it is always a bit distorted. As Hurtado plainly describes, radical communication about the Contract meets apathy and indifference, perhaps a bit predictably. Admitting the reality of white racism would force a river of centuries of pain, denial, and guilt that many people cannot assuage. In several instances, both in coleagues’ courses as wel as mine, white students have expressed their emotions and frustrations through tears when white privilege is confronted. In fact, Rains (1997) has described the same event occurring in her courses. Although it might seem cynical or unfeeling to analyze criticaly such an occurrence, it is important to deploy such a critique in the name of political and pedagogical clarity. It is imperative to address the local moment and ‘be there’ for al students but in slicing through the pathos, one also beneŽ ts from re ection on the moment in its larger, global signiŽ cance. The times when I have confronted this scenario can be described as the honest interrogation of racial power engaged by both white and non-white students. At certain moments, some anger has been expressed, sometimes frustration. In general, the milieu is emotional and politicaly charged. How can it not be? In one particular case, I witnessed a situation where a black student interrogated the issue of racial privilege and questioned a white coleague’s comments for failing to do the same. By the end of the exchange, the white student left the room crying and the discussion halted. In another case, an earnest discussion took place about racism and ways to address it in schools. A white student cried because she felt frustrated and a little helpless about how she comes into the fold of becoming an anti-racist educator. After a minute of pause, students of color returned to the discussion at hand, not breaking their stride. In a third instance, in the midst of discussing the importance of building solidarity between teachers against racism, a white student cries and asks her coleagues to remember that they must stay cohesive and support each other as comrades in struggle. A coleague reports a fourth instance where, during a dialogue about the experiences of women of color, a white woman repeatedly insisted that the real issue was class, not race, because her experiences as a woman were similar to the women of color. When a faculty of color informed her that she was monopolizing the discussion and in the process invalidated the voices of women of color, the white woman cried and was unable to continue. In al these cases, we observed the guilt of whiteness prompting the women to cry in shame. Made to recognize their unearned privileges and confronted in public, they react with tears of admission. Discussing (anti)racism is never easy and is frequently suppressed in mainstream classroom conditions. The establishment of the right conditions is precious but often precarious. In the Ž rst case, we must keep in mind that it was the black student who felt dehumanized and subsequently felt enough courage to express her anger about comments she perceived to be problematic. The act of crying by the white student immediately positioned the black student as the perpetrator of a hurt and erased/deraced the power of her charge. A reversal of sorts had just occurred. The white student earned the other students’ sympathy and the professor folowed her to the halway to comfort her white the black student nursed her anger by herself. Likewise, I could not help but feel for the white student. Upon re ection, an important difference needs to be discussed. In the act of crying, the student attenuated the centuries of hurt and oppression that the black student was trying to relay. In the act of crying, the student transformed racism into a local problem between two people. I couldn’t help feeling that other students in the class thought the black person was both wrong and racist, erasing/deracing the institutional basis of what she had to say. The room’s energy suddenly felt funneled to the white student. Clearly, there are more ‘harmonious’ ways of teaching the topic of race and racism. However, they also often forsake radical critique for feelings. Feelings have to be respected and educators can establish the conditions for radical empathy. That said, anger is also a valid and legitimate feeling; when complemented by clear thought, anger is frighteningly lucid. Thus, a pedagogy of politeness only goes so far before it degrades into the paradox of liberal feel-good solidarity absent of dissent, without which any worthwhile pedagogy becomes a democracy of empty forms. White comfort zones are notorious for tolerating only smal, incremental dozes of racial confrontation (Hunter and Nettles, 1999). This does not suggest that educators procure a hostile environment, but a pedagogical situation that fails to address white racism is arguably already the conduit of hostility. It fragments students’ holistic understanding of their identity development through the ability of whiteness to deform our complete picture of the racial formation. It practices violence on the racialized Other in the name of civility and as long as this is the case, racial progress wil proceed at the snail pace of white racial consciousness. White race traitors and progressive Others shal piece together a whole from the fragmentary pieces that whiteness has created out of this world. The Contract challenges educators of the new millennium to explain the untruth of white perspectives on race, even a century after Du Bois’s initial chalenge. Obviously, this does not mean that whites cannot grasp the Contract; many do, but they cannot accomplish this from the white point of view, a world-view which, according to Gibson, projects a ‘delusional world,’ ‘a racial fantasyland,’ and ‘a consensual halucination’ (cited in Mils, 1997, p. 18). With the rise of globalization, education—which prides itself for inculcating into students knowledge about the real world—struggles to represent the world in the most real way possible. White epistemology can be characterized as fragmentary and fleeting because white liveli- hood depends on this double helix. It is fragmentary because in order for whiteness to maintain its invisibility, or its unmarked status, it must by necessity mistake the world as non-relational or partitioned (Dwyer and Jones, III, 2000). This allows the white psyche to speak of slavery as ‘long ago,’ rather than as a legacy which lives today; it minimizes racism toward non-white immigrants today through a convenient and problematic comparison with white immigrants, like the Irish or Jews. It is also fleeting because it must deny the history of its own genesis and the creation of the Other. It can only be concerned with ‘how things are and not how they got to be that way.’ As a socio-spatial epistemology, whiteness sees the world upside-down. Mils (1997) and I agree when he says: Thus on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologicaly and socialy functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites wil in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made. (p. 18; italics in original) According to Mils, whiteness concerns itself with racial details and misses the totality of the Racial Contract. Like the way it partitions the world according to its own image, whiteness constructs history as separate racial details without coherence. As a result, it fails to provide our students the language to link together California’s Proposition 187 (anti-immigrant), 209 (anti-afŽ rmative action), and 227 (anti-bilin- gualism) as related to white hegemony. With the exception of particular Asian ethnic groups (to which I wil return later), al three legislations limit the rights of students of color. Fortunately, white and non-white activists have countered such measures with unrelenting protests and public organizing because, as Hopson et al. (1998) remind us, ‘Recognizing and valuing language varieties and multiple ways of speaking among students is a precondition to understanding how to teach them’ (p. 5). As a racial epistemology, whiteness is necessarily idealist in order to construct the Other as abstract, rather than concrete. Enslavement, discrimination, and marginalization of the Other work most efficiently when they are constructed as an idea rather than a people. They can be more easily controled, aggregated as the same, or marked as unchanging and constant when textbooks idealize them as inconse- quential to the history and evolution of humankind. In effect, whiteness eggs us on to yoke together different peoples around the globe under the sign of sameness.

Debate is a speech act – debaters should be held accountable for their discourse in round.  Vincent
Chris Vincent, Re-Conceptualizing our Performances: Accountability in Lincoln Douglas Debate, Vbriefly, 2013.  NS

The question then becomes how does our discourse justify what we believe? For many debaters it is the gaming aspect of debate that allows us to assume that our speech can be disconnected from the speech act. The speech can be defined as the arguments that are placed on the flow, and is evaluated in the context of what is the most logical and rational argument to win the round. The critical distinction is the speech act, which is the performance of that discourse. It’s not what you say, but what you justify. Understanding the speech act requires critically assessing the ramifications of the debaters discourse. Debate is in and of itself a performance. To claim that it is not is to be divorced from the reality of what we do. We must evaluate what a debaters performance does and justifies.  For white debaters it is easy to view the discourse as detached from the body. For those with privilege in debate, they are never forced to have their performance attached to them but instead their arguments are viewed as words on paper. They are taught to separate themselves from any ideologies and beliefs, and feel that there is no consequence to what they say. It becomes the way in which they justify what is deemed as “rational” and “logical” thought. The argument sounds like it will be competitive so it is read but it is deemed as just an argument. Judges evaluate this as just a speech. This becomes what I deem as a performance by the body, rather than a performance of the body.  Performances by the body allow debaters to not be held accountable to the words they say. Words are seen as divorced from any meaning outside of the flow, versus the performance of the body where the words are attached to the body itself. Debaters often insert the performance by the body, when they make arguments that they claim that they do not believe, but think it is the best strategy for the round. This is a false assumption, since for black debaters meaning is always connected to their bodies. The best strategy should never be one that at the same time justifies acts of racism.

Tournament: Alta | Round: 3 | Opponent: San Marino VL | Judge: Inglet, Sierra
Our system of policing is no accident – it is a direct result of economic policies keep to put poor and disenfranchised people on the margins with no political power. . Potter 15 

Gary Potter 1/15/15 “Police Violence, Capital and Neoliberalism” http://uprootingcriminology.org/essays/police-violence-capital-neoliberalism/

Starting with the Reagan administration the federal government began to cease investment in urban renewal programs and urban development. Funds which had been made available to local city governments dried up and disappeared. The withdrawal of federal support had two main impacts. First, a wide range of positive social and development programs were terminated. Second, cities faced a problem of rapidly increasing debt. With the federal government’s retreat from governance to sovereignty urban governments increasingly looked to banks and financiers to cover their costs and obligations. The banks were only too happy to fill the void. They predicated their underwriting of municipal governance with three demands. First, social welfare programs had to be ravaged. Second, municipal services and space had to be privatized. Third, order maintenance through aggressive policing had to serve the interests of land developers, realtors, banks, corporations and private business. In other words, municipal government had to divest itself from its own populace and as a result the police no longer served the community they served finance capital alone.¶ So, municipal governments no longer governed. They became profit-producing, entrepreneurial, sovereign fiefdoms no longer serving their residents but totally focused on policies that made urban areas financially, socially and politically attractive to corporations, developers and banks. A combination of private and corporate financial investment and urban government policies created the conditions for a perfect storm of gentrification that deliberately displaced impoverished neighborhoods, massively widened wealth differentials, exacerbated class conflicts and required a militarized, violent army of occupation. Gentrification turned police departments into privately-owned, violent, security forces who no longer answered to the people they allegedly served.¶ New Crime and Actuarial Policing¶ The simple fact is that almost everyone’s contact with the criminal justice system starts with the police. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Americans will have interactions with the police as their only criminal justice system contact. These interactions rarely result in arrest, let alone prosecution conviction or incarceration. In fact, of all those people who have been subjected to “stop and frisk” police tactics, 90 are never found to be engaged in criminal activity. That fact alone demonstrates that the police are not fighting crime but are engaged in a pattern of discipline and regulation directed at those targeted by neoliberal policies. The police are not protecting communities and keeping them secure, the police are playing a key role in destabilizing and reshaping those communities for the benefit of financial entrepreneurs.¶ Beginning in the 1990s many police departments abandoned “crime-fighting” in favor of an “order maintenance” policing strategy. Rather than targeting serious crimes like assault, robbery, rape, burglary, theft and homicide police departments turned their attention to minor, low-level instance of “disorder.” So incivility and behavior which is somehow defined as annoying like homelessness, panhandling, public alcohol consumption and minor vandalism became the new “index crimes” targeted by police departments. The result was obvious. The police engaged in punitive, oppressive and often violent tactics directed primarily at poor, inner-city communities. The net impact was that policing was no longer directed at serious crime, it was the new social engineering policy of the state to attack poverty.¶ The neoliberal demand for order maintenance makes a mockery of arguments that policing strategies are designed to protect us from harm from violent and property crimes. In 2013 police made 11,302,102 arrests. Of those 480,360 (4) were for violent crimes and 1,559,284 (13.8) were for property crimes. In view of the simple fact that arrest is the starting point for most police violence against civilians the question becomes what exactly is the police doing that require so many other arrests? The answer is that they were engaged in policing disorder, rudeness and bothersome behavior not crime.¶ The most telling category of arrests is the amorphous category of “all other offenses, defining by the FBI as “all violations of state or local laws not specifically identified as Part I or Part II offenses, except traffic violations.” In other words all criminal acts not defined by the FBI as being “serious” crimes. In 2013 police made 3,282,651 (29) arrests for “all other” infractions, a number dwarfing arrests for both violent and property offenses. But, it’s worse than that. In addition to the “all other offenses” category police made 1,441,209 arrests (12.8 of all arrests) for vandalism, curfew violation and loitering, vagrancy, disorderly conduct, drunkenness and liquor law violations (excluding drunk driving), extremely minor offenses as well. So 42 of police arrests were for public order indiscretions. If we add to those numbers the victimless crimes of prostitution and drug abuse (1,549,663 arrests and 13.7 of all arrests) we end up with a total 56 of all arrests that posed no discernible threat to the public.¶ Punitive policing has nothing to do with crime. It is, in fact, a symbolic representation of state power, a form of public humiliation and public punishment. Order maintenance strategies were direct almost exclusively against the poor and people of color in the United States. Policing became the primary tool of neoliberalism to control, humiliate and regulate the poor.¶ New crimes and new policing strategies like those associated with Wilson and Kelling’s infamous “Broken Windows Theory” had very little to do with serious crime. Instead, a plethora of new laws and policing priorities were focused on one thing and one thing only, the protection of capital flows to protect and enhance private investment and development in urban settings. For example, one of the first campaigns launched by NYPD under its “broken windows” paradigm was to crack down on and arrest street vendors. It was, of course, just this type of policing strategy that led to the tragic police-killing of Eric Garner for selling cigarettes on the streets. The demand for new laws and aggressive policing of street life came directly from commercial interests who argued that street vending, street artists, and the like created congestion on sidewalks and competed with the products being peddled in their stores. Aggressive policing toward sidewalk vendors, singers, dancers and artists had nothing to do with serious crime. It had everything to with private profit.¶ Similarly, it was corporate real estate developers who pushed for aggressive policing and changes in police deployment strategies as a means to clear out neighborhoods for gentrification. Once again new laws and aggressive policing strategies were aimed at the homeless, the poor and the mentally ill. Corporate elites wielded their considerable political clout to reallocate police resources from “crime” to removing obstacles to their takeover of land and buildings and their subsequent profits from skyrocketing rents and sales of refurbished urban housing. Simply put, the police were used to displace entire populations and sanitize the streets not for the benefit of residents, but for the profits of corporations.¶ NYPD’s Compstat program is the prime example of how police resources are reallocated for private profit. New York’s police commissioner Bill Bratton was a primary architect of this new form of police accountability to corporate interests. Bratton reorganized the NYPD around “private-sector business practices and principles for management.” Compstat, in addition to heightening police accountability to financial capital also decreased police accountability to poor communities. No longer were the concerns of residents the primary motivation for police activity. Now the police were accountable only to actuarial statistical patterns and numbers which served to define “disorder” in a manner conducive to private business and development. Compstat in no way provided any meaningful community input to policing. It was and is a total rejection of community input and the full embrace of private business and financial section input.¶ The result of all of this was the criminalization of “disorder.” Suddenly police became more concerned about panhandling, public singing and dancing, loitering, public drinking, bicycle riders, boom boxes, prostitutes, graffiti and street vending than they were about serious criminal harms. Criminalizing previously noncriminal acts resulted in a strategy of order-maintenance policing that was both punitive and judgmental in vilifying those who might be marginally annoying but in no way dangerous. This was both a gift to corporate interests and a war on the poor. In concert with the severe cuts to social service programs and the new definition of “crime” as disorder, policing became a major policy initiative in dealing with structural poverty. Neoliberal policies including massive corporate tax cuts and even corporate tax forgiveness along with the gutting of the progressive income tax created levels of inequality in the United States unheard of since slavery and the rise of the robber barons. The redistribution of income alone was astonishing. In 1980 the top 10 of income earners controlled 35 of all income. Today they control more than 50. The Gini Ratio which measures income inequality soared to .46 making the United States the most unequal industrialized country in the world.¶ At the same the U.S. prison population soared from around 500,000 in 1980 to over 2.5 million today with another 5 million under the control of one or another correctional programs. Today the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world and one out of every 30 adults are under control of the correctional system. And all this occurred in the midst of a dramatic drop in criminal victimization. The violent crime rate in 1981 was 52.3 per 1,000 people. In 2013 it was 26.1 per 1,000 people. The rise in incarceration had nothing to with crime. It had everything to do with an orderly corporatized society.¶ Neoliberalism has adopted a policy of incarceration as a response to control of poor communities and a growing surplus population of the unemployed and underemployed. As neoliberal policies have abandoned the state’s function of governance and eviscerated welfare policies it has looked to the criminal justice system as its primary response to poverty. That response has included both punitive and aggressive policing and the vindictive use of incarceration. The disorderly among us are subjected to arrest, police violence, incarceration and displacement from their communities. Order maintenance policing (Broken Windows) targets the homeless, the mentally ill and the poor for arrest and prosecution. Police resources are disproportionately reassigned to poor communities. A massive 33 nationwide cut in spending on health care for the mentally ill, including funds for medication, has resulted in police intervention as a primary modality to deal with psychiatric problems. Once the concept of crime was replaced by quality-of-life violations of local ordinances it was easy for police to find “cause” to stop-and-frisk almost anyone. Despite the fact that stop-and-frisk policies rarely resulted in arrests or the discovery of actual “crime” nonwhites were subjected to the tactic six times more frequently than Caucasians even with crime rates held constant. In New York City 90 of the precincts with high frequencies of police stops were majority-minority precincts. Analyzes of stops found that the strongest predictive variable was the poverty rates of the neighborhoods in which the stops occurred.

The affirmative’s legalistic approach to police violence brings us further away from recognizing the economic forces at work that makes police violence inevitable. Lane 7/21. 

ALYCEE LANE JULY 21, 2016 “Violence, Death and Our Neoliberal Police”  http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/21/violence-death-and-our-neoliberal-police/

If what we are witnessing in these violent encounters with police is neoliberalism in action, then we have to come up with an entirely different set of solutions to change policing. This is not to dismiss body cameras and training, which will no doubt save some lives. But they are technical fixes that do not address at all the neoliberal character of our police departments, the transformation of peace officers into neoliberal police, the policies that align policing with corporate power, and the violence that neoliberalism produces.¶ In fact, these fixes amount to our use of the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. After all, through neoliberal policies governments regularly take “outside of the realm of the political” the myriad problems that communities face and then render these problems “technical and actionable,” as Lester Spence has observed. So when we offer solutions like body cameras, we make fixing the police a technical matter rather than a political matter, and in so doing we legitimize and further entrench neoliberal policies and practices that enact invisible, spectacular, and ultimately normalized violence on those who don’t fit the mold. The consequence is that we’ll continue to receive tweets and Facebook feeds of police killings.¶ But we’ll also see more retaliatory killings of police officers – like the killings that occurred recently in Dallas and Baton Rouge – as more people realize that neoliberal policing, and the violence it enacts, is exactly the kind of policing our governments intend. Such counter-violence, however, is extraordinarily ironic, for individuals who engage in retaliatory killings – individuals who are, and will likely continue to be, primarily men – ultimately express just how deeply they have internalized the ideals that constitute the Virtuous Neoliberal Citizen: self-reliance or rugged individualism, personal responsibility, distrust of government, efficiency, cruelty. With an Izhmash-Saiga 5.45 mm rifle or some other AK-style weapon in tow, they alone will fix the problem of police violence, and in so doing, they will precisely, and finally, fit the neoliberal mode.¶ Repairing the police and our system of policing, then, clearly demands that we end not only neoliberal policing, but also the transformation of men and women into neoliberal police. To do this, we must relentlessly break down these moments of violence between officers and the community in order to unearth the neoliberal politics they express and enact, and that our government officials (local, state, national) continue to impose upon us at our expense (and for the benefit of the wealthy), but most especially at the expense of our abandoned, disposed children, women and men.¶ It is through this kind of work, in fact, that we can begin to upend an order that neoliberal proponents present as the only alternative and that appears all-powerful and all-encompassing. By doing this work, we’ll discover just how much neoliberalism and the violence it produces is, as Oksala makes clear, a “specific, rationally reflected and coordinated way of governing” – including the hiring, oversight, and training of police – that we absolutely have the power to change.

Blaming violence on ‘bad individual’s through civil suits replicates neoliberalism – it deflects blame on to individuals whose actions are predetermined by neoliberalism. Smith 15

Robert C. Smith The author of several books and over 100 academic articles, Robert is a Teaching-Scholar at the Cooperative Institute of Transnational Studies. He is also the founder of Heathwood Institute and PressHeathwood Institute and Press¶ AN INSTITUTION OF OPPRESSION OR FOR PUBLIC WELL-BEING AND CIVIL RIGHTS? REFLECTIONS ON THE INSTITUTION OF POLICE AND A RADICAL ALTERNATIVE May 4, 2015¶  http://www.heathwoodpress.com/an-institution-of-oppression-or-for-public-well-being-and-civil-rights-reflections-on-the-institution-of-police-and-a-radical-alternative-r-c-smith/
My aim here, however, has less to do with critique than with a consideration of alternatives, particularly when it comes to police. Movements in response to recent events in the US have rightly put demands for police reform at the top of the agenda. But there is something of a myth around such belief in reform. To paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates, when tackling the problem of the institution of police and the issue of “police authority” (not to mention “power”), the real problem is one of restoring democratic authority.12 To put it another way: “a reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It’s avoidance. It’s a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.”13¶ One cannot meaningfully dismantle the racist and unjust institution of the police without, firstly, tackling the belief that all our social problems can be solved with force.14 Secondly, the question of modern political-economy and its principle mode of relations must also be brought into direct focus, especially considering the manner in which current social-economic conditions tend to foster deep alienation which, in turn, establishes a social world open to the reproduction of practical and institutional power, domination, and coercion.¶ To this point, the American preference – as with much of the west in general – for considering the actions of ‘bad individuals’, as opposed to the function of ‘(bad) social systems’, represents a position of convenience. It deflects from the necessary course of difficult questions that need to be asked – a course that fundamentally challenges the status quo (Adorno). Regarding police brutality, is there an element of individual agency that we must recognize? Of course. If the modern institution of police represents a form of structural violence, as in the case of the almost daily murders of young black men and women, we must also bring into question the individual officer. Somewhere, at some point, the officer has a choice to stand-down, to drop the baton and shield, rip off the badge and refuse to partake in the violent repression of a citizen’s movement. On the side of structure, however, this choice is also defined within the context of economic coercion; ideological pressures to preserve status and economic benefits for one’s family; and twisted narratives of tribalism and of the positive values of a less-than-emancipatory system of law and order (what Sartre might have called “facticity”).¶ In further considering this point, allow me to ask the following question. Can it be said that every police officer is racist or believes in the oppression of others? Is it possible that some believe in the role of policing as a community service, rather than as an oppressive institution? The question that each officer should ask themselves, as they stand together in their militarized lines, facing fellow citizens with their modern weaponry, is ‘what actually am I standing for?’ Does one stand for oppression? Does one stand for indifferent corporations? Or does one stand for community and the rights of each citizen? In case of the latter, the very institution, the validity or legitimacy of the very concept of modern policing, collapses under the weight of its own illegitimacy.¶ If, as Luis Fernandez once said, asking the question ‘what are the alternatives to policing?’ is really to ask ‘what are the alternatives to capitalism?’, then the argument for or against the police boils down to either civil liberty or its opposite. And this is precisely the point or line of thought I would like to strike when reflecting on an alternative to police. In another way: it is along this line of thought that I think we might best formulate a structural critique of modern policing and an alternative, one that is for community, for the promotion of the “mediating subject”15 and mutual recognition16, and the protection of minority groups, civil rights and actual democracy.¶ If modern policing is based on the regulation and control of a community, the alternative, which could no longer be called “policing”, would be largely non-hierarchical, in line, perhaps, with a progressive notion of restorative justice inclined toward defending civil rights and principles of actual democracy as opposed to undermining them.¶ While this alternative would represent unarmed mediation, dialogue, and reconciliation in practice,17 it would also coincide with and mutually reinforce significant transformations across all norms of society: from the economic and political to health, education, food and so on. To be clear, what I am indicating is an alternative to police in the context of broader, holistic structural and systemic change across all social spheres or domains.¶ Rather than superficial reforms that maintain the status quo (Adorno), which the 1 would surely lobby for, the transformation of law, of justice, of policing in line with a progressive notion of restorative justice would need to coincide with a greater transformative vision and social philosophy. This transformative vision and social philosophy would not only support decriminalization. Or disarmament. Or the community development of a supportive social apparatus (as opposed to police) comprised of support-workers, case-workers, teachers, mental-health professionals and therapists, drug counselors, guidance counselors – all working on the basis of a person-centred and humanistic approach. It would also represent the reorganisation of political-economy and the establishing of social-economic conditions that would foster and support direct and participatory democratic models, which are particularly vital to any notion of restorative justice, and therefore also a complete transformation of society – of a post-police, post-capitalist society.

This turns the aff – police violence is a direct result of neoliberalism. A failure to recognize that makes violence inevitable. Lane 7/21

ALYCEE LANE JULY 21, 2016 “Violence, Death and Our Neoliberal Police”  http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/21/violence-death-and-our-neoliberal-police/

If we examine through the prism of neoliberalism the killing of Philando Castile – that is, if we think of the killing as a “moment when violence and neoliberalism coalesced” – then we are immediately confronted with the fact that, to a great extent, the current problem of policing is a problem of neoliberal policing. It is a problem of the production of police as officers whose enforcement of the law is guided by neoliberal policies and procedures, the violence of which no amount of body cameras or use of force training or diversity training can adequately address. Indeed, the fact of neoliberal policing requires from all of us a radically different response to policing and police killings, a response by which we directly confront policing, and our governments’ constitution of law enforcement, as neoliberal practice.¶ So let’s talk about this moment when neoliberalism and violence converged:¶ Over the course of fourteen years, Minnesota police initiated at least 52 encounters (a staggering number) with Philando Castile, citing him for minor offenses like driving without wearing a seat belt, speeding, and driving without a muffler. These encounters resulted in Philando being assessed a total of $6,588 in fines and fees.¶ Given these circumstances, let’s assume (indeed, it is probably safe to assume) that St. Anthony Police Department – the police department that employs Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Philando – operates under a scheme similar to the one that was in place in Ferguson, Missouri when Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown.¶ Under that scheme (as the U.S. Department of Justice found), City of Ferguson officials “routinely” urged its Chief of Police “to generate more revenue” for the City “through enforcement” and to meet specific revenue goals. In response, the Chief pressured his officers and created a culture in which officers competed with one another in generating revenue; created opportunities to issue citations in order to meet revenue goals; engaged primarily African American citizens as objects from which they could profit as well as subjected them to the department’s and City’s market discipline; and, measured their own value and success as police officers in market terms (the department looked favorably upon and rewarded officers who met their revenue demands).¶ Through this scheme, the City in essence transformed the police into neoliberal police officers, into men and women who would enforce the law in ways that folded penal discipline into the “market-driven disciplinary logic” of neoliberalism, and whose policing became the expression of what Simon Springer calls neoliberalism’s “fundamental virtues”: “individualism, competitiveness and economic self-sufficiency.”¶ As they sought out opportunities to generate revenue, officers also engaged in the kind of ‘Othering’ upon which neoliberalism depends. As Springer writes, neoliberalism not only “treats as enemies” those “who don’t fit the mold of a proper neoliberal subject” (e.g., possessive individualism, economic self-sufficiency); it also “actively facilitates the abandonment of ‘Others’ who fall outside of ‘neoliberal normativity’, a conceptual category that cuts across multiple categories of discrimination including class, race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexuality, age and ability.”¶ Ferguson’s neoliberal police officers (and city officials) regarded African Americans and poor people as those who don’t fit the mold. The latter were not the victims of neoliberal policies that had been embraced on a local, national and global scale. Instead, they were failures, people who were unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and remake themselves in the ways that the market demanded. Consequently, it was right to treat both as objects by which to profit and “as enemies” who needed to be disciplined and controlled.¶ That the City’s scheme and the neoliberal logic behind it would create the circumstances that led to Michael Brown’s death is clear. Indeed, through that scheme Ferguson officials and the police department produced a “‘state of exception,’ wherein…exceptional violence” – i.e.., violence that shocks, that “elicits a deep emotional response” – was “transformed into exemplary violence,” into violence that “forms the rule,” and particularly for those excluded and abandoned. Without social media, Brown’s death would have merely been a part of the everyday violence that police directed at Ferguson’s African American community and poor people generally, violence made increasingly likely by the market driven imperative of the Ferguson police force. And of course Brown’s death took place against the backdrop of the invisible violence of the City’s neoliberal policies (creation of unequal and increasingly privatized schools, attraction of business that paid little taxes and employed workers at low wages, privatization of public services, etc.).¶ If Officer Yanez worked under a governmental scheme similar to the one in Ferguson, then in that moment when he pulled the trigger (four or five times) he embodied, expressed and enacted the neoliberal principles and logic by which his department and his city operate.¶ But let’s suppose that the St. Anthony Police Department is not a business enterprise disguised as a police department, made so at the behest of city officials. Does that change the conclusion?¶ Hardly.¶ We live in the context of a global neoliberal order. And to a frightening degree, “we have become entrepreneurs of our lives,” as Johanna Oksala writes, “competing in the free market called society.” Indeed, we “compete in an ever-expanding range of fields, and invest in ourselves by enhancing our abilities and appearance, by improving our strategies of life coaching and time management. Our life has become an enterprise that we must lead to success.”¶ In other words, we are all neoliberals now, and as Springer argues, all of us are “implicated in the perpetuation of neoliberalised violence.”¶ A few months ago, I complained to my partner that the preschool our three-year old attends had not yet taught her the alphabet and numbers – at least not in any way that in my mind reflected academic rigor. “How is she going to succeed?” I asked. “When she gets to kindergarten, all the other kids will be way ahead.” I was ready to pull her out and send her to a school with a more disciplined, focused program, one that would lead to her academic success and, eventually, her career success. Lurking in the back of my mind was the fate of black girls, who have very little the market recognizes as valuable.¶ Let me repeat: my daughter is three. She attends a school in which learning happens outdoors – in a forest – where the kids discover things like rabbits and tadpoles and swarms of ladybugs and dead birds and, from those things, learn about habitats and camouflage and metamorphosis and death.¶ Against a neoliberal, market-driven idea of education – one that permeates the public sphere and that has redefined the purpose of school and education – I measured this wide-open, wonderful way of learning and found it wanting. Without even thinking about it, I was ready to subject my three-year old to the disciplinary logic of a neoliberal education and thus to perform an act, the violence of which (to creativity, to learning) I could not see.¶ Even if Officer Yanez had not performed his duty in accordance with the kind of policies that guided Ferguson’s police department, he nevertheless killed Philando within the context of a broader neoliberal framework that marked men like Philando as always already outside of neoliberal normativity (black male + broke ass car = enemy) and denied them any claim to the neoliberal virtues of economic self-sufficiency and possessive individualism. As to the latter, black people throughout United States history have been cast as anything but a collection of individuals. Instead, we are a monolith that can be used and disposed of at will (hence, Dallas police killer Micah Xavier Johnson is not Micah Xavier Johnson as such; instead, he is Black Lives Matter).¶ Moreover, that broader neoliberal framework, which defines (in the words of Lester Spence) “freedom in market terms rather than political terms,” is a racial capitalist framework that defines African Americans as unfree Others in order to naturalize class hierarchies. Thus, when Officer Yanez encountered Philando, he encountered an unfree Other who – in spite of that mark – had the audacity to claim the status of a free person by openly carrying a gun. Officer Yanez encountered the enemy.¶ My point in all of this is that Officer Yanez – like all of us, like me – was (is) immersed in neoliberalism and inevitably internalized as well as reproduced it in his employment life (and probably in his personal life as well). He was armed with it, so to speak, when he encountered and then killed Philando Castile, and I suspect this was true as well for Officer Darren Wilson of Ferguson, Missouri.

Our critique independently outweighs the case -  neoliberalism causes extinction and massive social inequalities – the affs single issue legalistic solution is the exact kind of politics neolib wants us to engage in so the root cause to go unquestioned. Farbod 15
 ( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)

Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return. 

The alternative is an embrace of class-consciousness as a method of critiquing neoliberalism’s grip on policing. LaVenia 15

Peter A. LaVenia PhD in Political Science from the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the Secretary of the NY State Green Party and manages Matt Funiciello’s campaign for Congress. JANUARY 16, 2015 “Police Behavior and Neoliberalism” http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/16/police-behavior-and-neoliberalism/

The cause of impotence on the part of elected officials even in the face of public intransigence by their own police forces lies rather within the socio-political landscape of declining US hegemony in the world-system and its byproduct, neoliberalism. The latter is too often a catch all explanation for Marxists and leftists trying to explain the current era, but here it makes sense. Policing in post-1980 America, roughly the beginnings of neoliberalism, are predicated on the “broken windows” theory first put into practice by NYC Police Commissioner Bill Bratton: crack down on working class behaviors now designated as unwanted or illegal, use the fines and fees from enforcing the criminalization of working class life to prop up municipal budgets gutted by tax cuts, offshoring, and underconsumption caused by wage stagnation. Interestingly the NYC police have essentially admitted as such during their slowdown and refusal to issue quality-of-life tickets over the past few weeks.¶ In conjunction with this politicians like de Blasio, assuming he actually would want to reform police behavior, find a distinct lack of allies in their own class (and parties) on this issue. Broken windows policing is popular with the financial elites and the ruling class because the money collected and produced by it means more progressive taxation that would otherwise fill the budget gaps of municipalities and states is avoided. It also has the consequence of splitting working people who might otherwise band together to demand – in a class conscious way – better living conditions, wages, and political power. Whites learn to be fearful of minority communities alternatively seen as both enemy and victim of circumstances, all the while needing the police and state to protect them. Of course maintaining this is crucial to legitimizing capitalism and preventing concerted resistance – that’s what the buildup of irrational attitudes of submission to authority do (to quote Chomsky) on the one hand, and on the other the racism inherent in the splitting of the US working class into white and minority groups.¶ There is, then, an implicit understanding by these mayors that their only allies in restraining the police would be working class Americans, and that to begin to do so would mean to put forward a broadly pro-worker agenda of higher wages, progressive taxation, restoring once-gutted social programs, and expanding the political power of the average worker. Quality-of-life problems will only be eliminated when their cause – ultimately capitalism – is, but by beginning to lift millions out of poverty and rebuilding communities the rationale for broken windows policing would begin to disappear. In another era, one with a faction of big business and finance capital willing to compromise on issues of wages and taxation, Mayor de Blasio and his peers would have found allies in the establishment. Now, the stark choice for the mayors and local pols on police behavior is to either acquiesce in one way or another or to throw in your lot with what would rapidly take on the characteristics of a working class political movement.¶ Nothing is likely to happen without protests and organization by labor and working Americans who demand not just an end to broken windows policing but the conditions that supposedly necessitated it in the first place. Crumbling infrastructure, decaying housing, bad schools, crappy jobs and low wages, lack of real health care, gutted social programs: these so-called broken windows that have been used to justify police militarization are the symptom of a rotten system. It is very hopeful indeed that protests against police brutality have sprung up across the United States, and could evolve into a movement to reject the neoliberal consensus. Until then we are likely to see nothing but equivocation by local officials and big city mayors.
Framework – Generic

The role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan. 

First, neoliberalism sustains itself by operating by propagating a narrow lens of what it means to be ‘political.’ We situate the judge as a critical educator who steps back to evaluate the frames through which we view policy first. Blalock, JD, 2015
(Corinne, “NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CRISIS OF LEGAL THEORY”, Duke University, LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS Vol. 77:71) MG from file
RECOVERING LEGAL THEORY’S RELEVANCE? The lens of neoliberalism not only allows one to see how these narratives fit together to reveal a larger rationality but also to understand why the solutions they propose fail to challenge or even escape that rationality. I address the three most prominent prescriptions being offered by critical legal scholars today: (1) a pragmatic turn to politics, (2) a return to more explicit normative and moral claims, and (3) acceptance in recognition that the decline is merely an ebb in the regular cycles of theory. A. Prescription: More Politics The most common prescription for recovering legal theory’s vibrancy is a greater participation in politics—scholars should eschew descriptive projects, especially those that might be used to bolster the conservative argument on an issue or in a case, as well as those critiques that appear purely academic, in favor of projects intended to influence the courts in progressive ways.134 One can certainly understand why this is a tempting prescription in light of the success of explicitly conservative legal theory and methods135 and concern that left-leaning legal academics have not taken up this charge.136 However, this demand for political engagement has unintended consequences: It legitimizes the current frameworks. As the Roberts Court further embraces neoliberal principles, persuading the Court means functioning within neoliberal logic and is therefore counterproductive for the revitalization of critical legal theory. Moreover, this political prescription tends to produce a reified notion of what counts as politics, limiting the political as well as intellectual potential of theoretical projects. For example, in the wake of the of the Court’s incremental move toward recognition of same-sex marriage in United States v. Windsor, 137 many progressive legal scholars have written on the subject hoping to nudge the Court toward full recognition. But in light of Nancy Fraser’s work, one should ask just what kind of recognition that would be—whether it would displace materialist claims or reify forms of identity.138 Full recognition of same-sex marriage is a destination toward which the Court is already heading and an area where the public discourse has largely already arrived. Emphasizing this area also participates in the ideology of erasure, leading many to believe that the current Court is making progressive interventions because it is progressive on identity and cultural issues, even though Windsor was handed down in a term in which the Court retrenched on significant materialist issues and embodied a number of blatantly neoliberal positions.139 Even if not writing for the Court, a legal scholar’s attempt to be useful to those in the profession who share her political goals risks constraining the legal profession and its own professional and disciplinary norms.140 In this way, the focus on concrete political effects helps foster legal thought’s “considerable capacity for resisting self-reflection and analysis,”141 which has only become more pronounced in the face of the neoliberalization of the academy as instrumental knowledge is increasingly privileged. When attempting to counter hegemony, what one needs to do is disrupt the legible—to expand the contours of what is considered political—not to accept the narrowly circumscribed zone of politics neoliberalism demarcates. Therefore, it is crucial not to judge critical legal scholarship according to whether its political impact is immediate or even known, and thus a turn to politics is not the remedy for legal theory’s marginalization. B. Prescription: More Normativity Some scholars recognize the danger of embracing a reified notion of politics that unwittingly reaffirms the status quo, and instead champion assertions of substantive morality to counteract the cold logics of pragmatism and efficiency.142 This proposed solution advocates a return to more substantive ideals of justice and equality. Although it may be true that change will ultimately require wresting these liberal and democratic ideals from neoliberalism and refilling their hollowed-out forms, this approach entails a number of pitfalls. The first is simply the inevitable question regarding moral claims: Whose morality is to be asserted? This question has created crisis on the left before, even producing some of the schisms among the crits recounted above. Neoliberalism does not have to contend with this issue—it foregrounds its formal nature and holds itself out as not needing to create a universal morality or set of values. More importantly, it claims to provide a structure in which one can keep one’s own substantive morals. Therefore, neoliberalism’s logic cannot be countered by moral claims without first disrupting its illusion of amorality. The ineffectiveness of the progressive critique of law and economics, based in claims of distributive justice and moral imperative, provides a clear example of how the neoliberal discourse can capture normative claims. The work of Martha McCluskey, one of the few legal scholars writing about neoliberalism in the domestic context over the last ten years, highlights the extent to which the “distributive justice” critique, which argues against the privileging of efficiency over equality and redistribution, fails to challenge the underlying logic.143 McCluskey illustrates how critics of law and economics who critique the approach’s inattention to redistribution have already ceded the central point, by arguing within the conventional views that “efficiency is about expanding the societal pie and redistribution is about dividing it.”144 “Neoliberalism’s disadvantage is not, as most critics worry, its inattention to redistribution, but to the contrary, its very obsession with redistribution as a distinctly seductive yet treacherous policy separate from efficiency.”145 In order to challenge this rationality, she explains, one cannot “misconstrue neoliberalism as a project to promote individual freedom and value-neutral economics at the expense of social responsibility and community morality.”146 One must instead recognize that neoliberalism has redefined social responsibility and community morality. Therefore, one must refuse the false dichotomy between the economic and cultural spheres (a division that allows the neoliberal discourse to displace cultural concerns to a moment after the economic concerns have been dealt with). Merely asserting the falsity of this separation is not sufficient. Neoliberalism has real effects in the world that strengthen its ideological claims.147 Therefore, it is not a struggle that can take place solely on the terrain of discourse or ideology. Like neoliberalism generally, law and economics does not hold itself out as infallible or as an embodiment of social ideals, but instead as the best society can do. It functions precisely on the logic that there is no alternative. Like Hayek’s theory, “law and economics is full of stories about how liberal rights and regulation designed to advance equality victimize the all-powerful market, undermining its promised rewards.”148 In light of this, it is a mistake to see neoliberalism as disavowing moral principles in favor of economic ones; it instead folds them into one another: “The Law and Economics movement is rooted in the moral ideal of the market as the social realization of individual liberty and popular democracy.”149 Neoliberalism’s approach presents itself not only as efficient, but also as just. Legal scholars need to recognize neoliberalism’s focus on the market is not only a form of morality, but also a powerful one. They cannot assume that in a battle of moralities the substantive communitarian ideal will win.150 Furthermore, the neoliberal framework, through its reconfiguration of the subject as an entrepreneur, justifies material inequalities—in contrast to liberalism’s mere blindness to them. Consequently, merely asserting the existence of material inequalities does not immediately undermine neoliberalism’s claims. Far from the engaged citizen who actively produces the polis in liberal theory, the neoliberal subject is a rational, calculating, and independent entity “whose moral autonomy is measured by her capacity for ‘self-care’—the ability to provide for her own needs and service her own ambitions.”151 The subject’s morality is not in relation to principles or ideals, but is “a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences.”152 If efficiency is the morality of our time, the poor are cast not only as “undeserving” but also as morally bankrupt. Therefore, efficiency replaces not only political morality, but also all other forms of value. Therefore, critics are right that other forms of value have been crowded out; but the logic is deeper than they seem to realize. It goes beyond the scope of what is being done in the legal academy. It is a logic that organizes our time and therefore must be countered differently. More normativity is not the answer to legal theory’s marginalization because neoliberalism’s logic can accommodate even radically contradictory moralities under its claims of moral pluralism. Ethical claims of justice and community may need to be made, but one must first recognize that countering hegemony is harder than merely articulating an alternative; hegemony must be disrupted first. Disrupting neoliberalism’s logic thus entails not only recognizing that neoliberalism has a morality, but also taking that morality seriously. C. Prescription: Acceptance The final response of legal theorists to their field’s marginalization is to dismiss it as merely the regular ebb and flow of theory’s prominence.153 Putting it in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts, the contemporary moment is just the “normal science” of the paradigm brought about by the crits’ revolutionary moment in the 1970s and 1980s.154 The vitality, this narrative contends, will return when a competing paradigm emerges. There are several problems with this perspective on the decline. First, it entails an error in logic insofar as it takes an external perspective. Legal theory does not inevitably rise and fall but only according to the work being produced; or, to put it another way, this descriptive account of theory’s ebb can be a selffulfilling prophecy insofar as it decreases scholars’ motivation to pursue and receptivity toward theoretical projects. Second, legal scholars cannot be content with normal science when it has the kinds of consequences for democracy and economic inequality that neoliberal hegemony does. The Court is currently entrenching these principles at an unprecedented rate in areas of free speech, equal protection, and antitrust to name a few.155 At first, such acceptance appears to be what Janet Halley is advocating in “taking a break from feminism,”156 but upon closer inspection it is not. Halley is cautioning against the left’s nostalgia—concluding that operating under the banner of feminism and a preoccupation with “reviving” feminism looks backward instead of forward.157 Critical legal scholarship instead needs to be “self-critical” and to recognize that “how we make and apply legal theory arises out of the circumstances in which we recognize problems and articulate solutions.”158 Theory must arise from engagement with the current circumstances. Acceptance cannot be the solution; legal theory must produce the momentum to move forward. VII CONCLUSION: WHERE WE GO FROM HERE The way forward cannot entail a return to reified notions of theory any more than by a return to reified notions of politics. Critical legal scholars should not attempt to revitalize previous critical movements but, instead, reinvigorate the practice of critique within the legal academy. A. Why Critique Naming neoliberalism is necessary in order to counteract it. Without explicit identification, there can be no truly oppositional position. It also makes legible connections that would otherwise go unseen, as was the case with scholars writing about the decline. But there must also be a step beyond naming: critique. Critique means taking neoliberal rationality seriously. The approach must not be dismissive, merely pointing out neoliberalism’s inconsistencies, but instead must recognize that neoliberal rationality is inherently appealing. One cannot merely indict efficiency as contrary to more substantive values, but one also must recognize that efficiency is inextricably tied to beliefs about liberty, dignity, and individual choice, as well as corresponding beliefs about the capacities and limits of the state to effectuate change. No one is arguing that neoliberalism is the best of all possible worlds; in fact, its power comes precisely from abandoning such a claim. In recognizing its hegemonic status, legal scholars can understand the critical task as being more than just demystification. Neoliberal does not paper over inequalities after all; it justifies them. Ultimately, critique should function as a means of opening the conversation in ways that go beyond the picture of law painted by the Roberts Court—to refuse to allow the legal academy to be merely mimetic of a Court that is clearly embracing a neoliberal vision. Critique provides a means of thinking about law as not limited by what the markets can tolerate; it is the means through which one can discover a form of resistance that goes beyond nostalgia for the liberal welfare state. And finally, critique is simply a means of asserting that things can be different than they are in a world that constantly insists that there is no alternative. 

Second, the knowledge claims of the AC are the jumping off point for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their analysis is wrong, they haven’t. 

Third, serial policy failure – policing is about culture. A refusal to stop and recognize the cultural underpinnings of the AFF dooms repeating the same failed policies that created the problem. . Smith 15
Robert C. Smith The author of several books and over 100 academic articles, Robert is a Teaching-Scholar at the Cooperative Institute of Transnational Studies. He is also the founder of Heathwood Institute and PressHeathwood Institute and Press¶ AN INSTITUTION OF OPPRESSION OR FOR PUBLIC WELL-BEING AND CIVIL RIGHTS? REFLECTIONS ON THE INSTITUTION OF POLICE AND A RADICAL ALTERNATIVE May 4, 2015¶  http://www.heathwoodpress.com/an-institution-of-oppression-or-for-public-well-being-and-civil-rights-reflections-on-the-institution-of-police-and-a-radical-alternative-r-c-smith/

As others have already argued, it is important that we acknowledge the systemic relation between police as an oppressive force and their utilization and instrumentalism as an extension of the order of economic coercion and domination. “In spite of the prevalence of its brutality …/ in the end the institution of the police is but an extension of the more deeply rooted institution of property – which, in turn, is the manifestation of wealth and economic power (which, in a capitalist society, translates to political power as well). In light of this, in confronting racism it is insufficient (though nevertheless still crucial) to focus our efforts on the brutality of the police. The police is but the tip of the racist iceberg.”6¶ It is a mistake, in seeking police reform, to limit one’s campaign solely to the institution of police. Groups engaged in anti-oppression and racial struggle, like those engaged in anti-capitalist struggle, share in one way or another a common universal struggle against a system which runs against the well-being of all, against the prospect of actual democracy, equality and egalitarianism. This is not to take anything away from the particular suffering, conflict and fight experienced by black communities across the US. If Chris Hedges is right, moreover, in his observation that the “discontent in Ferguson, Athens, Cairo, Madrid and Ayotzinapa” and now Baltimore “is one discontent”, this is because the fundamental source of injustice that unites them all is an unjust social-political, economic system. Emerging revolts around the world by minority groups may ‘come in many colors, speak many languages and have many belief systems’, but the common antagonist is an economic system and political order which produces and reproduces the precise social coordinates of injustice, inequality, the legitimation of state violence, and fraudulent models of democracy.¶ Slavoj Žižek once observed, “the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken.”7 Perhaps this is true, if we consider the dominant narrative of democracy in terms of its capitalist conception. But I think it is more consistent with fact or reality to suggest that, instead of the link being broken between the two, democracy simply never was. The link was always, in reality, non-existent. That is to say underlying the recent evolution of the institutions and structures of western society is not a sudden broken link, as if there has unfolded some ultimate social betrayal of actual democratic content on a structural and systemic level. In spite of the ballot-box elections and right to vote, democratic capitalism has never been actually democratic. To put it differently: modern democracy, as a concept and as a thing, has always had less to do with the actual content of “democracy” as an egalitarian system of political-economic values than with the neglect of this content for its (mere) form. The concept of democracy today is really the leftover after the actual content (Equality, Egalitarianism, Justice, Rights, etc.) has been boiled away.8 This sentiment is expressed most clearly on the streets, where the chant ‘there can be no democracy in capitalism’ is frequently voiced. Even if only intuitively expressed at times, there is a profound truth underlining this statement, one which discloses the all too known yet incredibly cloudy reality of the fraudulent status of western democracy.¶ The sooner the fraudulent status of modern western democracy is comprehensively conceptualised as such, which includes challenging certain liberal resistances, might we begin to reframe the debate concerning the structural conflicts now prevalent under the rule of neoliberal policy. This point has particular relevance when it comes to understanding the recent uprisings in Baltimore as well as the conflicts in Ferguson and elsewhere. What we witnessed in the brutal killing of Freddie Gray and the mobilization of state violence in response to uprisings in Baltimore, “is symptomatic of the neoliberal, racist, punishing state emerging all over the world,” wherein one of the only modes “of control left by corporate-controlled societies is violence, but a violence that is waged against the most disposable such as immigrant children, protesting youth, the unemployed, the new precariat and black youth.”9

Tournament: Damus | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harker QC | Judge: Angus, Thomas
Governments responsible for police officers should implement the Coalition Against Police Abuse proposal for civilian review which includes-
-establish “Loyal Opposition Policy Review Boards” for civilian oversight of police conduct, policy, and hiring/firing decisions
-The boards should be: elected, paid, and independent of police agencies
-The boards should have special investigators with unrestricted access to crime scenes and the power to subpoena police department personnel and records
-The board should have authority over all claims of police misconduct including: assault, discrimination, infiltration of community groups, sexual harassment, false arrest, and misuse of force. The board should be able to mandate training or discipline for officers up to and including firing, protections for police whistleblowers, and mandate of municipal damages
-Special city prosecutors should be appointed independent of the city attorney’s office and the city council who handle all criminal cases against police officers and have full subpoena powers
-staff should be hired on the basis of affirmative action policies 

CRBs are a legitimate alternative to immunity reform- their decisions affect the ‘clearly established’ doctrine which solves the case without judicial change
Meltzer, JD, 14
(Ryan E., Texas LR 92: 1277 Qualified Immunity and Constitutional-Norm Generation in the Post-Saucier Era: “Clearly Establishing” the Law Through Civilian Oversight of Police)
In the course of investigating discrete incidents of alleged police misconduct, civilian external investigatory bodies engage in fact-finding and identification and application of governing legal standards in much the same way as a court assesses a motion to suppress evidence or a § 1983 claim alleging a deprivation of constitutional rights.31 More importantly, these bodies constantly encounter novel factual scenarios, particularly ones implicating the Fourth Amendment,32 such that their findings epitomize the sort of fact-specific guidance endorsed by the Court.33 Further, to the extent that they are empowered to make policy recommendations to the police departments they oversee, civilian external investigatory bodies also resemble compliance agencies like the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), whose advisory reports have helped to provide the sort of “notice” required to overcome an official’s qualified immunity.34 Consequently, the Court’s qualified immunity jurisprudence appears to permit the findings of such bodies to contribute to the clearly-established-law analysis. At present, however, the work of civilian external investigatory bodies—work that produces a wealth of valuable information and often confronts constitutional questions that might otherwise escape formal adjudication— is largely divorced from that of the courts.35 This state of affairs represents a costly missed opportunity, especially in the wake of Pearson. (1281-2)

The CP Solves the Case 

1. Only EXTERNAL, CIVILIAN oversight can alter police behavior- the AFF’s internal legal reform drives police misconduct underground- it’s a trap
   Akbar, 15 – Assistant Professor of Law at Michael E. Moritz College of Law, the Ohio State University (Amna, “National Security’s Broken Windows”, UCLA Law Review, Vol. 62, pg. 834, May 2015, Lexis)
   This Article has attempted to identify the problems with community engagement and counterradicalization in the national security context, drawing from the critiques of community policing and broken windows in the ordinary criminal context. The canvas for this critical engagement was limited insofar as  *906  Muslim communities' experiences in these programs have been largely sheltered from public view. Harvesting those experiences is no doubt essential to understanding the possibilities and limitations of these programs. This Article provided a sketch of the problems lurking near the surface - that is left to future work.
   Is community engagement salvageable? Moving community engagement toward its most democratic aspirations - toward a more genuine exercise in community consultation, contestation, and collaboration - would involve ridding the program of its pernicious baggage. For example, law enforcement could end community engagement's integration with community-wide intelligence gathering, or could decouple community engagement from CVE and counterradicalization.
   Certainly there are strong normative reasons, including those that motivate this Article, to expect and demand that law enforcement account for the realities of marginalized communities. But we cannot expect that dialogue will necessarily lead to accountability, meaningful contestation, or realignment of police approaches in marginalized communities. After all, law enforcement is itself a significant vehicle for marginalization and racialization in the United States. It is reasonable to question whether community policing - or policing at all - can be expected to be the vehicle for the change we are seeking. The problem and the solution may be entirely mismatched.
   The allure of community policing rests in part on a broader construct of dialogue as inherently valuable. While dialogue can certainly be valuable, its value will depend on the context and the point of view from which it is being evaluated. Dialogue often serves a different function for the more powerful in the conversation than the less powerful. The idea that dialogue is the cure-all for poor relationships between police and marginalized communities emerges from a failure to recognize the structures and histories of police impunity in these communities, as well as the material realities that keep inequality in place. When the dialogue in question is with the police, initiated by the police, and on the police's own terms, not only is the function of the dialogue necessarily limited, the entire initiative should raise red flags. How will the dialogue change the material reality of policing in the community? Does the dialogue further exacerbate inequality or simply validate preexisting policing practices through the performance of democratic legitimacy? Or is it really allowing for messy democratic contestation, and the possibility for change in the material conditions of the relationship between the police and the marginalized?
   For community policing to be an effective tool in changing the relationship between the marginalized and law enforcement, marginalized communities cannot simply be offered a seat at the table to participate in preconceived policing  *907  programs. They must have the political power to hold police accountable. For community policing mechanisms to offer potential for real change to marginalized communities, communities must build capacity and political power to demand accountability. So while we might advocate for law enforcement to engage marginalized communities, we cannot rely on law enforcement initiatives to recalibrate relationships long rife with deep inequality. The pressure for meaningful change must come from outside, from the communities themselves organizing for change. n325
   2. The AFF attempts to improve regulation of INDIVIDUAL OFFICERS. The CP changes police culture as a whole. This reduces police opposition and rights violations
   Seybold, 15 – JD Candidate (Steven D, “Somebody's Watching Me: Civilian Oversight of Data-Collection Technologies,” March 2015, Texas Law Review, Vol. 93, pg. 1029)
   First, even a highly effective LOPRB providing quality policy recommendations to a police department would likely encounter some department resistance to the civilian oversight. This resistance may be created because of police department views of a civilian entity "meddling" or just the potential perception of an adversarial relationship between the *1058 LOPRB and police department. n207 However, the structure of LOPRBs help overcome most of this resistance traditionally leveled against civilian oversight from police departments. The emphasis on policy review, rather than complaint review, means that LOPRBs will not directly regulate individual police officers but rather the department as a whole. This change in focus will likely reduce the intensity of any police department resistance because the potential adversarial relationship will be between the LOPRB and the police department instead of individual officers. n208 Furthermore, any resistance can be ameliorated by public pressure on police departments to enact the LOPRB's policy recommendations. The LOPRB's outreach will inform the local community of the use of data-collection technologies, potentially generating popular support behind LOPRB recommendations. LOPRBs can thus indirectly enforce their recommendations through utilizing that popular support and pressure on police departments. That indirect pressure on police departments will help reduce potential police department resistance because policy changes brought about through public pressure will be a reaction by the police department to the public at large, rather than directly reacting to the adversarial LOPRB. Thus, while police department resistance likely cannot be completely overcome, LOPRBs can ameliorate this traditional civilian oversight problem.

3. The CRB doesn’t have to work- it creates a deterrent effect
Seybold, 15 – JD Candidate (Steven D, “Somebody's Watching Me: Civilian Oversight of Data-Collection Technologies,” March 2015, Texas Law Review, Vol. 93, pg. 1029)
3. Individual Deterrence and Systemic Correction. - Finally, civilian oversight has some meaningful deterrence on individual actors while also providing a functioning mechanism to address local systemic issues. n163 Individual police officers are more likely to undertake regulation of their own behavior when the officer knows that they are being watched by an oversight body. n164 External civilian oversight can ensure greater accountability not only among rank-and-file officers, but also among command officers, and can also address systemic issues facing dys-functional departments. n165 Approximately two-thirds of civilian oversight entities undertake policy review in addition to complaint review, n166 allowing civilian oversight bodies to review general policies and advocate for systemic reform. n167 Samuel Walker, a scholar whose work focuses on police accountability, emphasized that successful civilian oversight bodies "take a proactive view of their role and actively seek out the underlying causes of police misconduct or problems in the complaint process." n168 If civilian oversight mechanisms continually provide policy recommendations to police departments, those recommendations as a whole can have a significant effect on police misconduct, while at the same time making the police department more "accustomed to input from outsiders." n169 Civilian oversight thus can have a transformative impact on entire police departments rather than only correcting the actions of a singular officer.

4. Civilian review is mutually exclusive and more efficient than court action
Weinbeck, 11 – JD Candidate William Mitchell College of Law (Michael P, “Watching the Watchmen: Lessons for Federal Law Enforcement from America's Cities,” William Mitchell Law Review, Vol. 36, pg. 1306)
A police department's internal affairs unit, operating on its own, lacks the credibility to conduct an independent investigation that is satisfactory to the community. n50 Minneapolis city council members, in an attempt to assuage community members and preserve their own political futures, established the city's review authority. n51 In theory, at least, a system of civilian oversight inserts into the police investigation process a watchman without allegiance to the police who will ensure that the investigation is conducted without bias. n52 This, in turn, generally supports a perception by the community that its police department is operating with a proper respect for individual rights. n53 As a result, a greater level of trust develops between the police and the *1315 community that ultimately greases the cogs of crime detection and prevention. n54 There are other benefits that municipalities enjoy when establishing a system of citizen oversight. Chief among them is the political coverage that the city's elected officials receive when establishing the agency. n55 For example, the Minneapolis Civilian Police Review Authority came into being in 1990 after police officers identified the wrong house in a drug raid. n56 During the course of the botched raid, the police killed an elderly couple who lived in the house. n57 In another episode not long after, the Minneapolis Police Department broke up a peaceful party of college-aged African Americans at a Minneapolis hotel. n58 In response to both incidents, outraged community members engaged in vehement and highly publicized demonstrations. n59 Besides providing a measure of political coverage, citizen oversight may also operate as a mechanism for saving cities money. n60 Wronged citizens, instead of bringing their grievances to court, enter the civilian oversight system where they may achieve redress that ends up costing the city nothing more than the administrative costs of the investigation. n61

The net benefit is Tech Shift
A. Absent established, oppositional civilian review, police harassment will shift to technology based surveillance which avoids rights protections
Seybold, 15 – JD Candidate (Steven D, “Somebody's Watching Me: Civilian Oversight of Data-Collection Technologies,” March 2015, Texas Law Review, Vol. 93, pg. 1029)
Technology has provided police departments with powerful tools to collect extensive data on private citizens. Those tools have captured images of every license plate passing through an intersection; n1 used facial-recognition technology to determine whether Super Bowl attendees had criminal records; n2 and implemented multi-technology systems that "aggregate and analyze information from approximately 3,000 surveil-lance cameras around the city ... ." n3 New technologies allow police departments to collect a range of data on the public space, including private citizens not under investigation, raising concerns regarding how that data may be used in the future. n4 And as storage and database capabilities have become cheaper and more efficient, the potential for expansive databases has become not only a science-fiction trope n5 but a reality. n6 *1030 But despite potential, these new tools fit poorly within the current regulatory framework. Police departments have embraced the information age with little guidance or oversight, raising significant privacy concerns regarding the effect of mass-data collection on the privacy rights the general public has enjoyed for centuries. n7 At the same time, current regulatory mechanisms have not adequately addressed how police departments should use cutting-edge surveillance technologies. n8 Such regulatory mechanisms often are inhibited by conflicting motivations n9 or poorly adapted to technological change. n10 Scholars have proposed a variety of solutions to address the privacy and criminal law concerns raised by these "data-collection technologies," but these approaches often provide inadequate flexibility to local jurisdictions to address their unique problems n11 or focus too narrowly on correcting a particular, novel iteration of the problem. n12 *1031 To overcome this regulatory deficit, civilian oversight can provide effective regulatory oversight of police departments' use of new and emerging technologies. Specifically, I argue that a specialized form of civilian oversight, the "Loyal Opposition" Policy Review Board (LOPRB), would function as a regulatory mechanism that not only provides proactive regulatory guidance on technology usage by police departments but would also allow for that guidance to be specifically tailored to the local community. n13 LOPRBs, composed of members who are informed on and invested in technology and civil rights, would undertake policy review of police department procedures for the use of new technologies and recommend "best practices" approaches to ensuring that individual privacy rights and police department investigative needs are effectively balanced. n14 Such a civilian oversight mechanism would ensure that the privacy concerns of the average citizen remain protected as new technologies are incorporated into the daily operations of police departments.
B. Civil rights focus fails- it takes a black and white approach to police conduct that ensures resistance
Schlanger, 15 – Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law, University of Michigan (Margo, “Intelligence Legalism and the National Security Agency's Civil Liberties Gap”, Harvard National Security Journal, Vol. 6, pg. 112, 2015, Lexis)
I have suggested that rights discourse tends to sweep under the rug the messiness of civil liberties protections--the policy issues that lie at the core of civil liberties interests. That messiness will be apparent in what follows; there are no magic bullets here. But a measure can be useful even if messy or compromised. It is possible that that none of the offices described below will accomplish very much. It seems to me, however, that soft administrative measures are useful tools in the civil liberties toolkit, well worth trying by a principal--whether that principal is the President or the Congress--who wants to give more priority to civil liberties but lacks the institutional capacity to do so directly and repeatedly over time. Each of these three offices might represent civil liberties interests more systematically than current arrangements, and might advocate for more liberty protective government protocols and programs. It is worth emphasizing, too, that measures such as these might have not just cumulative but also mutually reinforcing effects, creating a civil liberties cadre with security clearances, who might assist each other in a variety of ways. n360 In addition to promoting civil liberties/privacy interstitially, offices like these assist other more authoritative rulemakers to understand the civil liberties implications of their choices. For example, they can help Congress in its otherwise very difficult oversight task, flagging issues that need more congressional attention. n361 And in several different ways, they may increase public access to otherwise secret matters, which in turn increases pressure on those authoritative rulemakers: They generate reports--both public and private--which can be used by Congress and the public. n362 And they build relationships with non-governmental organizations that promote increased official disclosure. My argument is not that offices like these are a cure-all  *193  for achieving optimal policy, but that they may be a useful part of a complicated ecology.

Tournament: Damus | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harker QC | Judge: Angus, Thomas

1. Civil suits don’t help the perception of the law. Civil suits don’t encourage reform- prefer our evidence it’s a direct response to their AC.  Cheh evidence
   Harmon, Law @ Virginia, 09
   (Rachel A., PROMOTING CIVIL RIGHTS THROUGH PROACTIVE POLICING REFORM, 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University, from the Stanford Law Review at 62 STAN. L. REV. 1 (2009). For information visit http://lawreview.stanford.edu. )
   Federal law has played an important role in regulating police misconduct. In particular, federal criminal prosecutions, civil suits for damages under § 1983, and the exclusionary rule are all legal tools that attempt to reduce police misconduct by punishing specific incidents of it and by deterring it in the future. Unfortunately, each is inadequate to promote wholesale institutional change. Federal criminal civil rights prosecutions face significant legal and practical obstacles, including that federal law imposes an onerous intent requirement on civil rights crimes; that victims of police misconduct often make problematic witnesses; and that juries frequently believe and sympathize with defendant officers.16 As a result, prosecutions against police officers are too rare to deter misconduct. Even if criminal prosecutions were more common, however, it is not clear that charges against individual officers would encourage departmental change. Almost inevitably, when some officers in a department are prosecuted, others are not. Criminal prosecution may therefore enable cities to characterize egregious misconduct as resulting from individual pathology rather than systemic problems and to deny the need for departmental improvement.17 Successful § 1983 suits for damages encourage some departmental reform, but they too are limited. Suits against individual officers are difficult to win, both because they suffer some of the same trial challenges as criminal cases against officers, and because officers often have qualified immunity for their actions, even when the conduct is unconstitutional.18 Suing supervisors or chiefs often requires establishing deliberate indifference or reckless action rather than negligence, and suing a city requires a plaintiff to show that misconduct was not only unconstitutional, but reflected municipal “policy” or “custom.”19 Some civil actions succeed despite these obstacles, but many incidents of serious misconduct result in an unsuccessful § 1983 suit or an inexpensive settlement, and therefore provide little incentive for reform.20 Moreover, some scholars have argued that even when plaintiffs win civil suits, damages actions against government actors are an ineffectual—even perverse—means of encouraging local officials to reduce misconduct.21 Daryl Levinson, for example, contends that government officers, police chiefs, and mayors respond to political incentives, and may never be forced to internalize the economic costs of damages paid by municipalities.22 Although Levinson may overstate the case against civil suits,23 he persuasively argues that even when they are successful, civil suits are at best an inefficient and limited means of encouraging institutional reform.24
   2. Fosters more resentment towards the law and resentment. Rosen 05
   Michael M. Rosen, January 2005, " A Qualified Defense: In Support of the Doctrine of Qualified Immunity in Excessive Force Cases, With Some Suggestions for its Improvement" Golden Gate University Law Review, http://digitalcommons.law.ggu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1899andamp;context=ggulrev MG

It is hard to deny that the more time police officers spend at trial defending their conduct, the less time they spend patrolling the streets, the more money their departments expend in their defense, and the more frequently the officers will second-guess certain behaviors in the heat of the moment. These drawbacks may well be justified for the sake of society's prevention of tortious and unreasonable conduct on the part of law enforcement agents. Nevertheless, police agencies, Supreme Court justices, and some scholars highlight the important role that qualified immunity can play in reducing unnecessary costs and in improving deterrence of crime. In its amicus brief in support of the Saucier petitioner, NAPO addressed several concerns related to costs and deterrence.47 It began by asserting that officers currently face too many lawsuits related to their conduct, litigation that generally is resolved in their favor and therefore wastes taxpayer time and money! It pointed to an "ever increasing number of lawsuits against law enforcement officers" and the threat that increase poses to the general public interest.49 The increased threat of lawsuits, according to this argument, deters effective police performance, thereby diminishing public safety: NAPO referred to Justice Scalia's assertion in Anderson v. Creighton5l that permitting frivolous lawsuits against law enforcement to go to trial "entails substantial social costs, including the risk that fear of personal monetary liability and harassing litigation will unduly inhibit officials in the discharge of their duties."·2 Several scholars echo NAPO's concerns. Richard Fallon and Daniel Meltzer describe the fears of the Supreme Court in Harlow v. Fitzgerald,53 explaining that such litigation works its evils by deterring officers through the threat of personal liability. Barbara Armacost notes that such liability begets poor law enforcement, which in turn harms the very people the officers are sworn to protect. 54 The chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Academy's Legal Instruction Unit echoes these sentiments. 55 Thus, at least in theory, the proliferation of lawsuits appears to involve serious risks to agents as well as the public. Of course, this entire edifice hangs on the assumption that law enforcement agents regularly face personal liability for their conduct when acting under color of law. Fallon and Meltzer challenge this premise. 57 They contend that in most situations, the police department and/or the officers' union make use of a legal defense fund while the officer need not expend a penny of his or her own.58 Thus, Fallon and Meltzer contend that the entire policy argument rests on a false assumption. Nonetheless, despite the unlikelihood of an officer facing personal liability, frivolous litigation imposes serious secondary costs on his or her conduct. First, contributions or premiums paid to a legal defense insurance plan will likely increase with the amount of litigation the officer faces. Second, the officer's career may endure a stain or stigma despite a victory on the merits of an excessive force case. Third, the department, as the officer's employer, may impose discipline, whether formal or informal, on any officer's involvement in litigation, whether successful or unsuccessful. Suspensions or unpaid leave may accompany lawsuits faced even by officers who are ultimately victorious in court. Thus, litigation indeed affects officers' conduct, in the heat of the moment, whether reasonably or not.59 This effect dovetails with a growing tendency toward "depolicing" that has become prevalent in several of America's urban cores.60 According to many officers, recent years have seen an increase in lawsuits and informal complaints brought against law enforcement, a correlate tendency in departments to steer officers away from necessarily risky conduct in do-or-die situations, and a concomitant decline in officer morale. 61 In 1981 in the State of California,"2 residents placed 8,686 complaints against peace officers, of which 1,552 or 18 were ultimately sustained.63 In 2000, Californians recorded 23,395 complaints, of which 2,395 or 10 were sustained. 64 This ballooning of claims - in particular unsuccessful ones65 - is as troubling as it is dramatic. The Oakland, California, Citizens Police Review Board ("CPRB") embodies this deterrent effect.66 This board provides an independent forum in which aggrieved citizens can register their complaints about police conduct. 67 At the same time, Detective Jesse H. Grant, who has had personal experience appearing before the CPRB, notes that complaints, more than 80 of which were not sustained in 2002, impose a serious deterrent effect on police conduct. 68 Officers now more than ever think twice and act conservatively - although not necessarily safely - when engaged in violent altercations with or apprehensions of dangerous suspects. 69 Ironically, the presence of entities like the CPRB undermines the justification for excessive force lawsuits to begin with: by providing an avenue for voicing grievances over police conduct, such boards obviate some of the need for civil actions. Moreover, they reflect the deterrent effect that wide-open public access to disciplinary bodies can breed. Thus, there exist significant reasons for the courts to grant some kind of immunity to law enforcement officials in order to ensure the contin-ued quality of their work. By increasing the threat of litigation, frivolous lawsuits can serve to deter officers' reasonable conduct, thus imperiling public safety and upending the delicate balance society seeks between forcefully fighting crime and respectfully treating all citizens.

3. Controversial decision coming that will harm the Court’s image either way it’s decided. Compton Herald ‘10/31
Compton Herald serves as an important objective voice providing general coverage of important issues that impact the public to up-close-and-personal investigative stories of public officials. “Supreme Court to hear transgender bathroom case.” The Compton Herald. October 31, 2016. http://comptonherald.com/supreme-court-hear-transgender-bathroom-case/ JJN
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Supreme Court of the United States has agreed to hear a case involving transgender restroom use, the Compton Herald has learned. The decision was announced Oct. 31 and is the first case of this kind to reach the high court. Once heard, the high court’s decision on this widely debated and controversial nationwide issue may well set a major historical precedent. The case involves a Virginia high school student who was born female but views herself as a male. Originally, a lower level court ruled the student would be allowed to use the boys’ restroom, but the Supreme Court placed a temporary stay while an appeal was reviewed, which was filed by the Gloucester County School Board. The student brought the case after the school upheld ordinary restroom use restrictions on the student when community members came forward with concern over the privacy of other students. “Students with gender identity dysphoria, to no fault of their own, should be treated with love and respect. However, such treatment must also be respectful of children of the opposite sex who don’t want their dignity and privacy violated daily in a locker room,” said Brad Dacus, president and founder of Pacific Justice Institute. The case is also important because the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education have issued a letter asserting that Title IX, which requires equal treatment between the sexes in the provision of educational services, applies to transgendered pupils. When Title IX was passed in 1972 Congress understood sex to be based purely on biological status. “What is important is whether the executive branch can unilaterally change the terms of a statute,” Dacus noted. “So in addition to the issue of privacy and transgenderism, the case has profound implications for the rule of law.” The Supreme Court is set to hear the case as early as next year. “It is PJI’s hope the Supreme Court will rule to protect the privacy and decency of all children in their decision,” Dacus added.
Turns

1.  Qualified immunity establishes a good relationship between law and citizens. Kirby 2k
   John D. Kirby, May, 2000, "Qualified Immunity for Civil Rights Violations: Refining the Standard " Cornell Law Review, http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3450andamp;context=clr MG
   Some sacrifice of individual rights for the sake of effective government is the inevitable price of living in a society organized and run by fallible human beings. 70 The early common law recognized that the threat of personal liability might prevent officials from executing their duties with the necessary decisiveness. 71 The framers embodied this recognition in the Constitution. 72 Indecisiveness caused by fear of personal liability can lead to grave public harm. For example, a mayor may decide not to demolish a row of houses to provide a fire-break if he thinks he will subsequently be held liable for destroying the homes.7 3 This trade-off rationale implies that the protection that the qualified immunity doctrine supplies should be closely tailored to the needs of different levels of public officials. It should give no more protection than is necessary for the official to effectively fulfill his duties because each additional measure of protection divests victims of a greater range of remedies for violations of their constitutional rights. Providing more protection than is necessary to prevent officials from being unduly inhibited in the performance of their duties results in an unjustifiable sacrifice of individual constitutional rights.

Tournament: Alta | Round: 3 | Opponent: San Marino VL | Judge: Inglet, Sierra
A. Interpretation- the word limit means to “restrict” not to ban or eliminate 

1. Limit has a variety of definitions, but they all mean “bound” not eliminate
   COURT OF APPEALS OF MARYLAND 02
   (SY-LENE OF WASHINGTON, INC. v. STARWOOD URBAN RETAIL II, LLC No. 132, September Term, 2002 COURT OF APPEALS OF MARYLAND 376 Md. 157; 829 A.2d 540; 2003 Md. LEXIS 455 July 29, 2003, Filed)
   Definitions of the word "limit" include the following: (1) to assign within limits, to appoint, fix definitely, to specify; (2) to confine within limits, to set bounds to, to prohibit a person from something; (3) to border upon a country; (4) to beg within specified limits. Each of these definitions incorporates the concept of a boundary or restraint. To limit something is to define its extent, and in so doing, to quantify it. The suggestion that the concept of elimination is contained within the term limit conflicts with the idea that a limit defines an area or range.
   2. Legal consensus- limit does not mean eliminate
   COURT OF SPECIAL APPEALS OF MARYLAND 14
   (SIERRA CLUB, ET AL. v. DOMINION COVE POINT LNG, L.P. No. 2429, September Term, 2012 COURT OF SPECIAL APPEALS OF MARYLAND 216 Md. App. 322; 86 A.3d 82; 2014 Md. App. LEXIS 18; 44 ELR 20037 February 28, 2014, Filed)
   Before the Court of Appeals, the plaintiff argued that the lease was ambiguous and that parol evidence should be admitted to determine the parties' intent at the time the lease was signed. Id. at 165. The defendant countered, arguing that the plain language of the lease did not provide any upper or lower limit to the number of spaces that must be provided, and therefore, it could eliminate all the spaces. It also argued that because the language was clear, no parol evidence should be admitted. Id. at 166. The Court noted that HN11Go to this Headnote in the case.under the objective test of contract interpretation, if the written contract is clear the court will give effect to its plain meaning. It explained, however, that a contract is ambiguous if it could be "subject to more than one interpretation when read by a reasonably prudent person." Id. at 167. The Court then looked to the language of the contract, to answer the question  *18 of whether the term "limit" meant that the defendant could eliminate. Id. at 168. First, it reviewed the dictionary definition of the word "limit," and then addressed the parties' arguments regarding the various meanings of the term. After examining caselaw from other states, the Court concluded that the "limit" did not mean "eliminate" and ruled that the defendant could not deny plaintiff any parking spaces entirely. Id. at 169. The Court remanded the case back to the circuit court in order for it to consider parol evidence and determine the intended amount of spaces at the time of contracting. Id.
   3. This case law represents broad precedent
   COURT OF APPEALS OF ARIZONA 08
   (COURT OF APPEALS OF ARIZONA, DIVISION ONE, DEPARTMENT E 2008 Ariz. App. Unpub. LEXIS 1013 May 1, 2008, Amended by Order Filed )
   P34 We find support for our conclusion in Sy-Lene and Schuster. In Sy-Lene, the lease provided that the tenant would pay for each employee parking space as needed for its employees and provided that the "landlord reserves the right to limit the number of employee parking spaces to be provided Tenant". 829 A.2d at 543. After a dispute arose between the parties, the landlord told the retail tenant that it would provide no reduced-fee employee parking spaces. Id. The trial court dismissed the action and the special court of appeals affirmed, holding that the right to limit the number of spaces implicitly included the right to limit the number to zero. Id. at 543-45. The Maryland Court of Appeals granted a writ of certiorari and reversed. Id. at 544. The court of appeals held that the definition of the word "limit" did not incorporate the concept of elimination.  *23 Id. at 547. It then remanded the case to the trial court to determine the parties' intentions at the time of executing the lease as to what limit of spaces would be acceptable. Id. at 547-48.
   B. Violation- the affirmative does not mandate a quantitative or qualitative restriction on qualified immunity, they eliminate it entirely
   C. Reasons to prefer 
2. Ground- the topic is designed to force the affirmative to defend the process of legal reform. Predictable negative ground includes counterplans to regulate police conduct outside of immunity reform, court precedent disads, and critiques of the legal system like CLS. Allowing the aff to abolish immunity access a different literature base over whether or not policing is a legitimate government function which makes the topic bidirectional and turbocharges aff solvency
   2. The affirmative interpretation is unreasonable- no definition of limit includes eliminate, its only justified by semantic gymnastics.  The topic could have been written to prohibit immunity but was not. This places the affirmative outside your jurisdiction- they haven’t presented a topical advocacy, you can vote negative on presumption
   3. Legal precision – we cite an evolving case law from multiple courts proving a consensus that limit does not include eliminate. This makes our interpretation the most predictable- it’s a legal topic, we should focus on legal definitions over random dictionary cards or field contextual evidence with no intent to define
   D. Topicality is a voting issue- it sets the balance of ground for debate and tells the negative what they do and do not have to prepare for. It should be evaluated via competing interpretations- its not what they do it’s what they justify.

Tournament: Damus | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harker QC | Judge: Angus, Thomas
TPP is predicted to pass, but there’s no time to waste. Mitchell ‘11/2
Peter Mitchell - AAP US Correspondent, Australian Associated Press. “US: White House bullish on TPP passing.” News.com.au. November 2, 2016. http://www.news.com.au/world/breaking-news/us-white-house-bullish-on-tpp-passing/news-story/66aaccb30c94f3301f95fa652040190f JJN
US President Barack Obama's top Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiator has bullishly predicted the trade deal will be approved by Congress after next week's presidential election if congressional leaders bring it up for a vote. Michael Froman also warned if Congress does not ratify the 12-nation free trade proposal Australia, China and other nations will swoop in and steal markets from the US in the Asia-Pacific. "It's up to the congressional leadership to decide to bring it forward," Mr Froman told CNBC on Tuesday. "If they bring it forward I think we can get the votes there." Presidential frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both oppose the TPP and members of Congress, many who are also up for re-election next Tuesday, have been reluctant to show public support for the contentious trade pact. Mr Obama and Mr Froman are hoping the the anti-trade sentiment will recede after the election and members of Congress will be willing to ratify it before Mr Obama moves out of the White House in January. "I think the key thing is the rest of the world isn't standing by whether it is China negotiating its own trade agreements or the EU, Canada or Australia or others, they are going to move ahead and get access to these markets at our expense," Mr Froman said. "Our market share is actually in decline in some of these important, fast growing and large markets so it is awfully important we show leadership." The TPP signatories are: Australia, the US, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru.

TPP is top of Obama’s priorities, PC is key. Creighton ‘10/27
Adam Creighton – economics correspondent Washington. “Hope for TPP as Obama administration works the phones.” The Australian Business Review. October 27, 2016. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/economics/hope-for-tpp-as-obama-administration-works-the-phones/news-story/8ce5e112900eb06ca2bb0711d3aa16ce JJN
The world’s biggest free trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Australian officials have written off as a casualty of a fierce anti-trade backlash in the US, has an almost even chance of success in Congress, according to people familiar with the matter in Washington DC. The Obama administration has been hitting the phones and sending cabinet ministers to remote US towns in an unprecedented bid to persuade Congress to pass the controversial Asia-Pacific trade deal among 12 countries. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have repudiated the deal. The former top economics adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden, Jared Bernstein, said the chance the TPP would be passed after November 8 but before the new president took office was almost 50 per cent, offering hope for the deal signed by the Turnbull government and 11 other nations in February, which frees up trade and investment across 40 per cent of the world’s GDP. “I think the probability is a lot higher than conventional wisdom on the street; I’d give it a 45 per cent chance,” said Mr Bernstein. He said President Obama would certainly send the deal to Congress whoever won the election. “What’s interesting is just how (hard) the administration is working it … full-court press behind the scenes,” he said. “More than on healthcare, more than on stimulus, more than on financial reform: it’s remarkable,” added Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizens Global Trade Watch. She said cabinet ministers had been traipsing the country trying to convince wavering Congressmen. “They are working the phones to a degree that actually is really interesting; cabinet secretary folks are once or twice a week since April calling House members who they might have any kind of chance with,” she added. “The odds of stopping it are slightly better, but it’s close.” Ambassador Joe Hockey and visiting Turnbull government ministers have been strenuously promoting the TPP in Washington, but confidence that the deal — which is also being sold as a way to entrench US and Australian commercial norms in a region increasingly dominated by China — will pass has dwindled significantly. Consonant with the mix of confected and genuine dissatisfaction with the TPP that permeates Republican and Democrat ranks in Congress, Republican congressman Kevin Brady earlier told The Australian the deal wouldn’t pass without additional protections for intellectual property, which Australia has publicly ruled out. Ms Wallach and Mr Bernstein, now at the Centre for Budget Priorities, by contrast argued the TPP deal had been captured by US corporate interests, and should be renegotiated to pare back the extra patent and intellectual property protections demanded by the US on behalf of its pharmaceutical industry. They also want to see clauses outlawing currency manipulation and removing investor-state dispute clauses that potentially limit governments’ freedom to make policies that damage foreign commercial interests. The TPP would be the first trade agreement to be rejected by Congress. If it doesn’t pass in the “lame duck” session — before the new house, senate and president are in place — it will be very unlikely the US would begin new trade negotiations given the febrile environment. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has made rewriting or rescinding US trade agreements the centrepiece of his economic strategy. “One of the reasons it’s 45 per cent (chance of success) and not 25 per cent is because … the undecideds are getting much more pressure from the administration than from (labour groups),” said Mr Bernstein. “Democrat and Republican elites have literally for decades ignored the costs of trade.”

(IF ACTOR IS COURTS) Court decisions are politicized – spur debate in Congress and reflects on Obama. Zeleny ‘10
Jeffrey Dean Zeleny is the senior Washington correspondent for CNN. “Political Fallout From the Supreme Court Ruling.” The Caucus, The Politics and Government Blog of the NY Times. January 21, 2010. http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/political-fallout-from-the-supreme-court-ruling/ JJN
Today’s ruling upends the nation’s campaign finance laws, allowing corporations and labor unions to spend freely on behalf of political candidates. With less than 11 months before the fall elections, the floodgates for political contributions will open wide, adding another element of intrigue to the fight for control of Congress. At first blush, Republican candidates would seem to benefit from this change in how political campaigns are conducted in America. The political environment – an angry, frustrated electorate seeking change in Washington – was already favoring Republicans. Now corporations, labor unions and a host of other organizations can weigh in like never before. But the populist showdown that was already brewing – President Obama on Thursday sought to limit the size of the nation’s banks – will surely only intensify by the Supreme Court’s ruling. The development means that both sides will have even louder megaphones to make their voices and viewpoints heard. Mr. Obama issued a statement – a rare instance of a president immediately weighing in on a ruling from the high court – and said his administration would work with Congressional leaders “to develop a forceful response to this decision.” “With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics,” Mr. Obama said. “It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.” Republicans, of course, hailed the ruling as a victory for the First Amendment. “I am pleased that the Supreme Court has acted to protect the Constitution’s First Amendment rights of free speech and association,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “These are the bedrock principles that underpin our system of governance and strengthen our democracy.” Democrats, not surprisingly, said the ruling would be bad for democracy. “Giving corporate interests an outsized role in our process will only mean citizens get heard less,” said Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “We must look at legislative ways to make sure the ledger is not tipped so far for corporate interests that citizens voices are drowned out.”

The plan sparks congressional debate. Orenstein ‘16
WALKER ORENSTEIN. “Reform advocates upset over pushback over changing malice law.” The News Tribune. July 29, 2016. http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/politics-government/article92684372.html JJN
When an effort by state lawmakers to make prosecuting police for improper use of deadly force easier stalled last year, legislators compromised. They agreed to let a task force study the issue and recommend policy to next year’s Legislature on how to reduce violent interactions involving law enforcement. But some on the state-appointed committee, which had its second meeting Tuesday, say lawmakers overseeing the panel are filibustering even a dialogue about changing controversial state law regulating police use of deadly force. Amending state statute on the subject was a key component of reform-advocates’ demands that spurred the task force. It’s also the subject of a proposed initiative to the Legislature that would amend the law if enacted. Washington’s law is regarded as unique in the country. Convicting an officer for using deadly force requires proof the officer acted with “malice.” It’s a standard many, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have said is more or less impossible to meet, effectively giving police immunity when they use deadly force. Some committee members say changing the law would reduce police use of deadly force, a stated end-goal of the task force. Others on the panel have pushed back, saying changing the statute won’t help that cause. The split could derail what Karen Johnson, chairwoman of the Black Alliance of Thurston County, described as a “golden opportunity” to be a “national model” for discourse between law enforcement and police reform advocates. ‘SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY’ De’Sean Quinn, a member of the state’s African American Commission on the task force, said he wants the group to be “action oriented.” Real action for him might include recommending the state collect data on police use of force to easier analyze how to reduce it, he said. But the key aim, he said, is to reach consensus on how to change Washington’s malice law, particularly in light of the recent police killings of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana. “I feel a sense of responsibility for my kids that we really try and address this issue,” Quinn, who has two sons, said in an interview. Gerald Hankerson, a member of the committee and president of the NAACP of Alaska, Oregon and Washington, said lawmakers and some law enforcement officials on the panel have been hesitant to broach the topic in seriousness. Others on the task force agree. Tuesday’s meeting centered mostly on law enforcement training. Toshiko Hasegawa, appointed to the task force as a member of the state’s Asian American Commission, called out lawmakers during committee session, saying they were avoiding a deeper discussion on changing the law by “hiding behind procedure.” She added in a later phone interview that committee co-chairman Sen. Kirk Pearson, R-Monroe, was deliberately avoiding the topic. “Why is the police task force on deadly force not discussing deadly force?” Hasegawa asked. The task force is required to meet only four times. Johnson, Quinn, Hasegawa and others signed a letter sent to Pearson and co-chairman Rep. Roger Goodman, D-Kirkland, before Tuesday’s meeting, asking for clearer guidelines on discussing the malice statute and more input on meeting agendas. Quinn said he felt work on the statute was being ducked, and said the Legislature is not responding fast enough to outcries for police reform in the country. “It’s not OK to not deal with the difficult issues,” he said. Although the Legislature is not obligated to act on task force recommendations, “consensus with law enforcement” on legal changes “would be significant for the Legislature going forward,” said Sen. David Frockt, D-Seattle. Rather than building consensus, the meetings so far have “almost been like it’s a dog and pony show,” Hankerson said. ‘NOT THE FIRST THING ON MY MIND’ Rep. Dave Hayes, R-Camano Island, is a sergeant with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office and one of four legislators on the panel. He said the task force should look at all sorts of avenues to reduce violent interactions involving police, and said changing Washington’s malice standard is “definitely not the first thing on my mind.” Added Hayes: “I don’t believe that changing the statute is going to fix anything.” He said he expects the result of the task force to be “a couple bills regarding data collection and how we use that data to make our local law enforcement officers better.” He cautioned the Legislature would have to weigh the cost of those bills to not place a burden on local law enforcement departments. Pearson, who left before the conclusion of Tuesday’s meeting, did not return calls or messages from The News Tribune asking for comment. On Tuesday, he said reviewing past applications of the malice statute is “beyond” what the committee was designed to do. Goodman said at the meeting the task force needs to learn more about perspectives of law enforcement officers, their training, and about data collection, and not just work on the malice statute. “We can’t be sort of rushing to focus on one aspect — one very important aspect and that is perception of flaws in the law — but we need to sit back and continue to listen,” he said during the committee meeting. Sue Rahr, the executive director of the Criminal Justice Training Commission, said at the meeting that prosecuting officers for improper use of deadly force “isn’t enough” to reduce violent encounters with law enforcement. Police officers in Washington train at Rahr’s organization with the exception of the Washington State Patrol. Rahr is on the task force. “If the task force does change the law, that’s only going to solve one piece of the problem,” she said. “The problem is much bigger and much more complex than that.” GOING FORWARD Johnson and others have tried to soothe brewing discontent in the group. She reminded task force members there would be more meetings, and that they can schedule more than four if needed. Goodman promised a more collaborative approach to setting new meeting agendas. A minority report can be filed if task force members don’t agree with the final group report to the Legislature. Frockt said Monday that he was looking at the malice law “very seriously,” and feels “ a deep sense of obligation and gravity surrounding this given what’s happening around the country.” “There are people who are going to be clearly disappointed if we don’t make some changes in some Washington law,” he added. “I hope that this is not the situation where the task force goes through, does a lot of work and nothing really happens with it.” Quinn said he’s still optimistic that thorough work on the malice statute will come. But, he said, “there needs to be a demonstration that we need to address these issues.”

Solves multiple extinction scenarios. Morimoto ‘15
Andy Morimoto is a research associate at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “The Strategic Costs of TPP Failure.” The Diplomat. August 22, 2015. http://thediplomat.com/2015/08/the-strategic-costs-of-tpp-failure/ JJN
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is in trouble. Trade ministers failed last month to conclude the massive 12-nation trade deal by their hoped-for summer deadline, putting negotiations in danger of collapse. This is a problem. Trade advocates argue that letting the TPP die would be a significant lost opportunity for the global economy. But there’s a potentially bigger problem here – one that may have serious consequences for both U.S. national security and regional stability in the Asia-Pacific. Just consider the strategic backdrop against which last month’s negotiations occurred. Maritime disputes flaring across the South China Sea. Tensions rising between Beijing and Tokyo. Perennial friction between China and Taiwan and a growing nuclear stockpile in North Korea. If the TPP falls through, it could greatly hurt the America’s ability to stabilize the fraught geopolitics of Asia. Some have argued that a TPP failure would be a net positive for regional stability. The deal, they claim, would isolate and provoke China, and should therefore be abandoned. But this view is blinkered. Given the high trade volumes and trade arrangements across the Asia-pacific, China stands very little chance of being isolated. Moreover, Chinese officials have other ventures on their minds. According to He Weiwen, a former Chinese Commerce Ministry official, “the Chinese are more or less neutral because we have our own agenda, pushing forward ASEAN plus six and the Silk Road.” In fact, there are a number of reasons to believe that the opposite is true: that a TPP failure will cause a number of strategic problems for the U.S. in the Asia-Pacific. First, failure would mean stunting the growth of America’s Pacific partners. This is problematic for two reasons. Most importantly, fewer states would be devoting fewer resources to meet shared challenges like counterterrorism and climate change. In addition, as countries get richer and more interdependent, they become more invested in the well-being of their neighbors. And while free trade, interdependence, and prosperity do not guarantee stability and peace (see: World War I), they do create conditions that make conflict less appealing. Second, failure would create more potential for instability and crises. Consider a hypothetical scenario in which China and one of its neighbors along the South China Sea (say, Vietnam) get into a serious spat over territorial claims. With the TPP, this spat would be less likely to escalate into a full-blown crisis, as China understands that the U.S. is more inclined to intervene in situations that threaten its growing trade interests. Without the TPP, there is less clarity about U.S. resolve, so the potential for miscalculation and escalation increases. Third, failure would send a strong signal that the U.S. no longer has the political will to lead in the region. This would come at a time when allies are already uncertain of U.S. commitments. Earlier this week, for example, Japan’s trade minister expressed disappointment in last month’s trade meetings, saying “every TPP country wondered why the U.S. was quick to give up the conclusion without its usual relentless persistence.” If the U.S. allows negotiations to collapse, it would demonstrate the Obama administration’s declaration – that the U.S. is “all in, when it comes to the Asia-Pacific” – to be hollow. This has important geopolitical implications. If Asia’s great powers perceive the U.S. to be unserious about its role in the region, this will increase the incentive for the powerful regional states (i.e. China and Japan) to jockey with one another for regional hegemony. Finally, failure would be a missed opportunity for the U.S. economy – and America’s ability to project strength abroad rests on its economic foundation at home. According to an analysis from the Peterson Institute, U.S. income gains under the TPP would be significant, potentially adding $59 billion per year by 2020. Failing to conclude the TPP would forego these potential gains, and would make it more difficult for the U.S. to stem the defense cuts put in place by the sequester and invest in our military presence in the Asia-Pacific. The Nobel Prize winning economist Thomas Schelling noted that “trade is what most of international relations are about. For that reason trade policy is national security policy.” Today, U.S. trade policy – and indeed, its national security policy – are in danger of falling apart. Getting something as big and complicated as the TPP across the line won’t be easy. But given the smoldering flashpoints across Asia, the U.S. can hardly afford to squander any tools in its foreign policy toolkit. The stakes are too high.

Regional hegemony is key to stop nuke war.  Rudd 11

Rudd 11 – Kevin Rudd, Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, “The Case for American Engagement in Asia: The Australian Perspective”, 9-15, http://foreignminister.gov.au/speeches/Pages/2011/kr_sp_110915.aspx?ministerid=2

THE GEO-STRATEGIC RAMIFICATIONS  But as nations change, so too do relations between nations.  The emergence of new powers inevitably brings new strategic complexity, as the power relativities of the 20th century give way to the new ones.  Asia will be vulnerable to a host of strategic uncertainties, arising from the need for new powers to integrate into the global economic and political order, and for the established powers to accommodate them.  The potential for misunderstanding — and the consequences of miscalculation — is also vast.  Tensions like those we see in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Korean Peninsula and the Persian Gulf may become even more difficult to manage.  Make no mistake: these aren’t just regional problems.  Questions about the future of the South China Sea touch on every regional country’s future, given their global strategic and economic significance.  This theme isn't new, but what I can tell you about this strategic shift is that we — Australia and the United States — will face it as allies.  Sure, there is the possibility of instability in our region.  But we've faced the possibility of conflict — and actual conflict — together in the past.  Many different tests, circumstances and challenges have put the acid to our alliance since the ANZUS treaty was signed, 60 years ago.  We've been reminded again that the only time the ANZUS treaty has been formally invoked was ten years ago this week — in response to the attacks on September 11.  But military and intelligence cooperation with the US continues across a wide range of theatres within the framework of the Alliance.  Here in San Francisco — where the ANZUS treaty was signed, all those years ago — I'm reminded that Australian and American servicemen and women have fought, flown, sailed and — I'm reliably informed — surfed together since the Pacific War.  Today, that Alliance continues to grow in meaning and intensity.  We are fighting together in Afghanistan; working together against global threats like piracy; and responding together to natural disasters across the region.  For us, for our relationship, the end of the Cold War hasn’t meant a downgrading of the importance of our Alliance — if anything, it’s become more intense and more important.  So as we face the challenges of the 21st Century — the challenges of the shift of power to Asia — we will do so together.  We’re working together to ensure our forces are aligned in the right way to provide for the national security of our two countries, and to help us shape the emerging regional environment.  Our forces have to be able to respond to the range of contingencies that can arise in our region, including humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.  Increasingly, we aren’t just working with each other, but with other regional players.  I'm not just talking about the Pacific, or the Asia-Pacific.  The critical region for our future now extends to include the Indian Ocean as well.  The growing strategic importance of the Indian Ocean starts with India's rise.  India is the largest democracy in the world.  Forecast to be the third largest economy in the world in coming decades, it is in the interest of both the United States and Australia for India to play the role of a major international power.  For now, India’s focus remains South Asia.  But its strategic weight is increasing with its increasing economic size and strength.  India is increasingly looking east with interest, both for strategic and economic reasons, and because of long-standing cultural connections.  But the importance of the Indian Ocean also lies in its unique role in maritime security and sea lines of communication for a much larger group of economies, both in Europe and Asia.  Lying between the Middle East energy sources and the dynamic global engine room of Asia, its importance grows with each passing year.  The pressures on the Gulf and West Indian Ocean choke points will intensify, as India grows and East Asian centres of growth remain reliant on Gulf energy and African resources.  In the 21st Century, questions of resource, energy and food security are becoming more vital than ever.  As Robert Kaplan says, the Indian Ocean is once again at the heart of the world, as it was in ancient and medieval times.  THE ROLE OF THE UNITED STATES  The United States has been a guarantor of security and economic prosperity in the Asia-Pacific for decades.   But the 21st Century will demand more.  As the world changes, it's even more critical that the US builds its engagement with our region.  As the United States transitions back from tough and unforgiving wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it might seem tempting to resist the case for further international engagement.  President Obama has already rightly intensified US involvement with East Asia.  It remains the case, in one way or another, that the United States is vital in solving common problems collectively.  No other power is able or willing to support essential global public goods — like the free movement of trade, capital and people around the world.  Sea-lane security, regional security in critical regions like the Gulf, open markets, the reserve currency, deep and liquid capital markets — who else provides these global public goods?  America has faced these questions before.  On the eve of entry into World War II, Henry Luce's seminal editorial in Life magazine on the American Century was much more than a statement about relative power, as America assumed its position in the new order.  It was a call for American leadership in international affairs.  It is in America’s interest and the world’s interest to provide that leadership — because in its absence, the risks grow that we will see destabilisation that threatens us all.  The interdependence of our economies has been shown clearly by the financial crisis, and a collapse in the conditions for open trade would be an economic disaster for all trading nations.  I share President Obama's view that America can neither retreat from "responsibility as an anchor of global security" nor "confront... every evil that can be found abroad".  But President Obama talked of the need for a "more centered course" — and that lies in a deep US engagement in Asia.  I believe the vast majority of the countries of Asia welcome that continued and expanded American strategic role in our hemisphere.  As Indonesia’s President Yudhoyono said in November 2008, as the financial crisis was wreaking havoc upon us, “none of these global challenges can be addressed by the world community without having America onboard. And conversely, none of these issues can be resolved by the United States alone.”  And as Lee Kuan Yew said a year later, “the consensus in ASEAN is that the US remains irreplaceable in East Asia.”  In the 21st Century, the US needs substantial, sophisticated, nimble engagement in the region.