The new generation LGBTQ movement is working with community-based solutions, moving away from the flare of courts. Lazare ‘10/13 Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet, A former staff writer for Common Dreams. “Meet 5 Movement Leaders Across the U.S. Fighting for LGTBQ Issues on the Ground.” Alternet. October 13, 2016. http://www.alternet.org/lgbtq/meet-5-movement-leaders-across-us-fighting-lgtbq-issues-ground JJN "We've gotten dragged into a national conversation where same-sex marriage is held up as the pinnacle of the LGBTQ struggle, but there are so many other things our communities struggle around, issues that have to do with life and death,” Paulina Helm-Hernandez, the co-director of the queer liberation group Southerners on New Ground (SONG), told AlterNet. “We’re dealing with issues like criminalization, health care access and core safety. We’re thinking about ways our people know a lot about violence and how to survive." Helm-Hernandez is one of countless movement leaders in rural communities and urban centers across the country bringing a queer lens to racial, social and economic justice activism. LGBTQ organizers are at the helm of the Movement for Black Lives, calling for an end to extrajudicial police killings, and on the frontlines of native resistance at Standing Rock, where indigenous earth defenders have erected a "two-spirit camp," for gay and lesbian indigenous people. They are demanding an stop to deportations and mass incarceration and devising concrete, community-safety alternatives to calling the police. While fending off the racist incitement of the 2016 election cycle, LGBTQ organizers are also going on the offensive, preparing to mobilize for demilitarization at home and abroad no matter who wins in November. AlterNet spoke with five U.S.-based organizers whose political and cultural work shows that LGBTQ movements go far beyond marriage equality, and are shaping the social movements that define our times. 1. Kym Anthoni, New Orleans “Second lining is very big in New Orleans culture,” said Anthoni, an organizer with the youth-led LGBTQ organization BreakOUT. “After someone passes away, people will do a dance celebrating resilience. Every year around the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we do a second line for the people who died to celebrate resilience, strength and moving forward.” “When a transgender woman has been killed, or you’ve gone through a bunch of bullshit, we embody the culture of second line, recognizing that we have a lot of pain and embracing resilience, saying let’s let go of the harsh shit that you’ve been through and celebrate the fact that you made it,” Anthoni continued. “Last year for the Trans March of resilience, we had a whole second line. We were uplifting the voices that are normally not uplifted in our culture.” New Orleans has been hit hard in recent years by a wave of killings targeting transgender women of color. Among them was BreakOUT community member Penny Proud, a 21-year-old black transgender woman murdered in 2015. This summer, the organization released a statement reading, “It is with heavy hearts that we share the news that another young, black trans/gender non-conforming person, Devin Diamond, has been murdered in New Orleans, just a few weeks after 24-year-old Erica ‘E’ Davis was shot in the Treme neighborhood on her way to work.” Key to BreakOUT’s organizing is the principle that “we deserve to walk down the street and not be attacked, we deserve to not be criminalized,” said Anthoni. This demand is aimed at curbing vigilante violence as well as law enforcement brutality. The organization’s first campaign was called We Deserve Better and took on rampant abuse by the New Orleans Police Department. According to a report released in 2014 by BreakOUT, police abuse is widespread. The survey found that “75 percent of people of color respondents feel they have been targeted by police for their sexual orientation or gender identity or gender expression compared with 24 percent of white respondents.” In addition, the report states that “43 percent of people of color respondents have been asked for a sexual favor by police compared with 11 percent of white respondents.” Anthoni emphasized that it is important for the broader public to understand that police brutality is also an LGBTQ issue. “Police always target trans women of color just for being trans,” Anthoni said. “They over-eroticize transgender bodies. The queer and transgender youth of color are most targeted by law enforcement. It’s a huge issue because it takes your power away, it makes you feel vulnerable. Our vulnerability can sometimes cost us our lives.” In addition to organizing, political education and youth work in local high schools, Anthoni said, “The main core of what we do is heart healing justice work. We focus on finding ways to heal as a community.”
Court civil rights victories act as fly paper drawing other social movements into the court to focus on litigation strategies Rosenberg 8 (Gerald N., University of Chicago political science and law professor, Ph.D. from Yale University, member of the Washington, D.C. bar, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change?, p. 427) If this is the case, then there is another important way in which courts affect social change. It is, to put it simply, that courts act as “fly-paper” for social reformers who succumb to the “lure of litigation.” If the constraints of the Constrained Court view are correct, then courts can seldom produce significant social reform. Yet if groups advocating such reform continue to look to the courts for aid, and spend precious resources in litigation, then the courts also limit change by deflecting claims from substantive political battles, where success is possible, to harmless legal ones where it is not. Even when major cases are won, the achievement is often more symbolic that real. Thus, courts may serve an ideological function of luring movements for social reform to an institution that is structurally constrained from serving their needs, providing only an illusion of change.
Courts wreck movements Becker 93 (Mary, Prof of Law @ University of Chicago Law School; 64 U. Colo. L. Rev. 975 ln) Binding judicial review can impede political movements even when the Supreme Court does not actually block success. The relegation of high matters, such as sexual equality, to the courts saps political movements of their strength, particularly after ineffective victories. 76 At the same time, judicial review can mobilize the opposition, and the Court itself will be influenced by the resulting political climate, a climate it has helped create. When ineffective judicial victories weaken a movement, there may be less grass-roots pressure for change. Yet, real change in the relationship between the sexes is unlikely without change at the grass-roots level. Decisions from on high are unlikely to transform intimate relationships. Judicial victories protecting one or some outsider groups, but not all such groups, also interfere with the development of effective coalitions. This may be most harmful to the most vulnerable groups, such as lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. Real or perceived judicial protection of less marginal groups, such as straight women or racial minorities, may mean that these groups are less likely to form effective coalitions with the more marginal groups. Judicial review is, therefore, a "divide and conquer" strategy.
The court system destroys crucial parts of the LGBTQ movement and works to further marginalize people. Leachman ‘14 Gwendolyn M. Leachman - Gwendolyn M. Leachman. Sears Law Fellow, Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, UCLA School of Law; J.D.; Ph.D. Candidate, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, UC Berkeley. “From Protest to Perry: How Litigation Shaped the LGBT Movement’s Agenda.” University of California, Davis. 2014. http://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/47/5/Articles/47-5_Leachman.pdf JJN *bracketed for offensive language The primary contribution of this Article has been to expose a set of advantages that may be associated with social movement litigation — media visibility and organizational stability — and to illustrate how these advantages may work to elevate the issues being litigated to top priorities for protest-based activists operating outside the courtroom. In this Part, I dig deeper into the normative consequences that this work implicates for the LGBT movement and for current understandings of litigation as a tool for social change. I argue that the consequences of legalization of a social movement’s agenda depend on two factors: first, the extent to which movement litigation focuses on legal impact (winning favorable precedent), and second, the dominant framing and assumptions inherent in the law that movement actors deploy. In movements like the LGBTQ movement, where lawyers predominantly use impact litigation focused on antidiscrimination law, the legalization of movement goals has the potential to marginalize the movement’s more far-reaching visions for social change. The refocusing of a movement around litigation priorities has substantive consequences only if litigation strategies are divorced from the larger movement’s needs and goals. This is something that is particularly likely to occur in conventional impact litigation, which prioritizes formal legal outcomes. Focusing on gaining formal legal advances leaves little need for litigating groups to assess what other activists are doing or what change most constituents desire.347 Focusing on winning favorable precedent further pushes lawyers toward “juridically intelligible” issues and claims,348 which have the greatest likelihood of succeeding in court. Impact litigation groups tend to select priorities based on legal expertise rather than democratic concerns for community goals.349 My analysis in this Article, which corroborates findings from previous work,350 suggests that has been the dominant pattern in LGBT movement impact litigation. When lawfocused impact litigation groups operate in pluralistic movements with diverse political factions and demands — as they do in the LGBT movement351 — legalization will likely generate a substantive change in movement focus (and risk subordinating the priorities of protest groups).352 Does the legalization of a movement’s priorities harm that movement? It depends on whose perspective you take. Some might argue that legalizing a social movement’s agenda could be advantageous for a movement in that it would weed out the more radical movement subgroups, reducing movement infighting and concentrating movement efforts into common, perhaps more attainable, goals. Yet eliminating radical dissent in a movement is only beneficial to the extent one discounts radical politics as ineffective — a position which privileges a reformist view of movement success.353 Radical movement factions tend to envision their own contribution not in terms of attaining a checklist of political gains, but rather as cultivating an alternative vision of society that the current system is incapable of producing.354 By this definition, sacrificing movement segments that earnestly advocate and attempt to diffuse an alternative vision of change that cannot be addressed through legal reform would instead diminish a movement’s prospects for success. Instead of considering the harm that legalization might cause a social movement — a normative judgment that shifts depending on how one evaluates movement effectiveness — it is more useful to consider the effects of legalization in terms of its ability to redefine the scope of movement goals. Legalization of a movement’s agenda helps enshrine within the political culture of that movement the set of values that dominate the legal landscape — and history tells us that those values can be “left” or “right” values, depending on the context.355 For movements whose central purpose is to promote equality for a disadvantaged group, what is crucially important is the extent to which the law supports a vision of equality that would adequately address the plight of a movement’s constituents. Some commentators have held that U.S. law is inherently incapable of ameliorating, or even having an adequate language for conceptualizing, persistent social inequalities;356 this would suggest that the privileging of political goals that can be framed in law’s terms will necessarily constrain equality movements from pursuing more effective alternative strategies. I would not so resolutely discount the potential for law to support transformative politics. Social movements often cultivate their own interpretations of legal principles, which may fly in the face of official understandings,357 as an organizing tool in politics. The law is then, at the very least, capable of radical interpretation and expressing transformative visions of equality and social change. Yet though law contains the potential for radical interpretations promoting substantive equality, this potential often remains latent.358 Antidiscrimination law in particular — the typical target of equality movements — has become settled around quite limited understandings of equality. Judicial interpretation has crystallized around a definition of equality as formal access to equal opportunity359 and discrimination as isolated, intentional acts by prejudiced perpetrators, which cause harm to individual victims.360 This interpretation not only denies remedies for the structural factors most responsible for perpetuating inequality, it also places the focus on preventing individual wrongdoing rather than producing substantive outcomes and creating real change.361 Thus, when antidiscrimination litigation comes to define an equality movement’s priorities, the movement may find itself privileging issues with little hope of creating social transformation through substantive equality. The emphasis on single-axis identity categories in antidiscrimination law362 raises another potential harm in the legalization of movement goals: marginalizing intersectionality. Although those who have multiple subordinated identities experience discrimination differently than those who have a single subordinated identity, antidiscrimination law provides few opportunities for claims based on the combination of more than one protected identity category.363 Very few courts have acknowledged intersectional discrimination364 and instead typically address intersectional claims in the alternative.365 Courts’ requirement of a comparator group in discrimination claims further complicates effective intersectional claims-making.366 It is unsurprising, then, that civil rights advocacy tends to reflect the law’s single-axis paradigm.367 The legalization of movement goals around antidiscrimination litigation may accordingly facilitate the marginalization of movement goals focused on intersectional subordination and crosscutting, multi-issue goals.368 In the LGBTQ movement’s case, this might help explain why issues like “support for working families, ending violence against women, prison reform, poverty, and redistribution — all once critical parts of our LGBTQ liberation movement’s agenda have disappeared in the national LGBT movement discourse.”369 In summary, the elevation of litigation priorities on a movement’s agenda may circumscribe the movement’s goals, but the potential for litigation to do so depends on the approach movement lawyers take — what doctrine they target, and how instrumentally focused they are on law reform goals. In movements that use impact litigation focused on antidiscrimination law, there lies the danger that legalizing the agenda could marginalize a movement’s structural demands and attempts to address multiple dimensions of subordination. These goals are arguably more transformative than goals that resonate with the existing antidiscrimination paradigm, in that they target particularly intractable inequalities, which are given scant public attention and often go undetected and unchallenged. Because there is no surer way to diminish the possibilities for far-reaching reform than to undercut efforts to achieve it, the reorientation of movement activists around a more conservative set of legal priorities can work to undermine a movement’s potential to produce transformative change. CONCLUSION The original empirical research presented in this Article suggests that litigation strategies in the LGBT movement have become the most visible and stable forms of LGBT activism and that the organizations that use litigation have become independent, agenda-setting movement leaders. With the media as its megaphone, and the stable organizational support behind it, litigation appears to have been privileged vis-à-vis other tactics for social change, drawing protest groups away from more radical priorities for cultural transformation and toward the legal reform goals articulated through movement litigation. In short, the substantive issues being litigated become the default agenda of the whole LGBT movement, radical and stateoriented factions alike. The primary contribution of this Article has been to introduce a set of systemic, unintentional mechanisms, outside the strategic choices made by lawyers in the attorney-client relationship, which may privilege legal frameworks for imagining inequality and advancing social change in a social movement’s political agenda. In the case of the LGBTQ movement (and perhaps other contemporary equality movements that target antidiscrimination law), this privileging of legal frameworks for change may have diminished the more expansive visions of social change espoused by the movement’s more radical factions. The LGBTQ movement has come to be defined by legal reform goals based on sexual and gender identity, marginalizing many of the broader priorities espoused by queer activists (e.g., sexual liberation, challenging the patriarchal nuclear family, support for working families, poverty, redistribution).370 The marginalization of those queer movement priorities appears to have occurred through institutional mechanisms similar to those identified by previous antidiscrimination scholarship;371 instead of being intentionally cut out from the broader movement agenda, queer priorities may have instead been diminished by a set of unintentional, systemic processes — arising from factors like journalistic practices, interactions among movement organizations, and protest planning routines — which may elevate social movement litigation and the dominant, legalized views of inequality that it typically promotes.
LGBTQ Rights are crucial to avoid extinction Tatchell ’89 Peter Tatchell - is a British human rights campaignerbest known for his work with LGBT social movements, was selected as Labour Party Parliamentary candidate for Bermondsey. “Gay Liberation is Central to Human Emancipation.” Peter Tatchell.net. However, note at the bottom: “An edited version of this article was published in "Labour Briefing", 1989. See also "Beyond lesbian and gay rights", Interlink. May /June 1989.” http://www.petertatchell.net/masculinity/gay_liberation.htm JJN *bracketed for offensive language Lesbian and gay LGTBQ liberation is of critical importance to the broader project of human emancipation. It is not merely a minority issue, nor purely a question of civil rights and sexual freedom. The ultimate aim is a cultural revolution to end heterosexual supremacism and the concomitant cult of heterosexual masculinity which underpins all relations of oppression and exploitation. This was the revolutionary agenda of the lesbian and gay liberation movement which emerged 20 years ago following the Stonewall Riots in New York in June 1969. In contrast to earlier liberal-oriented movements for homosexual equality, the lesbian and gay liberation movement did not seek to ape heterosexual values or secure the acceptance of homosexuals within the existing sexual conventions. Indeed, it repudiated the prevailing sexual morality and institutions - rejecting not only heterosexism but also heterosexual masculinity with its oppressive predisposition to rivalry, toughness and aggression (most potently symbolised by the rapist and the queer-basher). In contrast the "radical drag" and''gender-bender" politics of the Gay Liberation Front glorified male gentleness. It was a conscious, if sometimes exaggerated, attempt to renounce the oppressiveness of masculinity and subvert the way masculinity functions to buttress the subordination of women and gay men. Lesbian and gay liberation is therefore truly revolutionary because it specifically rejects the male heterosexual cult of masculine competitiveness, domination and violence. Instead, it affirms the worthwhileness of male sensitivity and affection between men and, in the case of lesbians, the intrinsic value of an eroticism and love independent of heterosexual men. By challenging heterosexual masculinity, the politics of lesbian and gay liberation has profound radical implications for oppressed peoples everywhere: it actively subverts the male heterosexual machismo' values which lie at the heart of all systems of domination, exploitation and oppression. Lesbian and gay liberation is therefore not an issue which is peripheral. It is, indeed absolutely central to revolutionary change and human liberation in general. Without the successful construction of a cult of heterosexual masculinity and a mass of aggressive male egos, neither sexual, class, racial, species, nor imperialist oppression are possible. All these different forms of oppression depend on two factors for their continued maintenance. First, on specific economic and political structures. And second, on a significant proportion of the population, mainly heterosexual men, being socialised into the acceptance of harsh masculine values which involve the legitimisation of aggression and the suppression of gentleness and emotion. The embracing of these culturally-conditioned macho values, whether consciously or unconsciously, is what makes so many millions of people able to participate in repressive regimes. (This interaction between social structures, ideology and individual psychology was a thesis which the communist psychologist, Wilhelm Reich, was attempting to articulate nearly 60 years ago in his book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism). In the case of German fascism, what Nazism did was merely awake and excite the latent brutality which is intrinsic to heterosexual masculinity in class societies. It then systematically manipulated and organised this unleashed masculine violence into a fascist regime of terror and torture which culminated in the holocaust. Since it is the internalisation of the masculine cult of toughness and domination which makes people psychologically suited and willing to be part of oppressive relations of exploitation and subjection, repressive states invariably glorify masculine "warrior" ideals and legally and ideologically suppress those men - mainly homosexuals - who fail to conform to them. Given that this internalisation of masculine aggression within the male population is a prerequisite for injustice and tyranny, love and tenderness between men ceases to be a purely private matter or simply a question of personal lifestyle. Instead, it objectively becomes an act of subversion which undermines the very foundations of oppression. Hence the Nazis' vilification of gay men as "sexual subversives" and "sexual saboteurs" who, in the words of Heinrich Himmler, had to be "exterminated- root and branch." In conclusion: the goal of eradicating injustice and exploitation requires us to change both the social structure and the individual personality to create people who, liberated from masculinity, no longer psychologically crave the power to dominate and exploit others and who are therefore unwilling to be the agents of oppressive regimes (whether as soldiers, police, gaolers and censors or as routine civil servants and state administrators who act as the passive agents of repression by keeping the day-to-day machinery of unjust government ticking over). By challenging the cult of heterosexual masculinity, lesbian and gay liberation politics is about much more than the limited agenda of human rights. It offers a unique and revolutionary contribution to the emancipation of the whole of humanity from all forms of oppression and subjugation.
11/5/16
NOV-DEC - DA - Hollow Hope
Tournament: Damus | Round: 1 | Opponent: Loyola AB | Judge: Smith, Calen The new generation LGBTQ movement is working with community-based solutions, moving away from the flare of courts. Lazare ‘10/13 Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet, A former staff writer for Common Dreams. “Meet 5 Movement Leaders Across the U.S. Fighting for LGTBQ Issues on the Ground.” Alternet. October 13, 2016. http://www.alternet.org/lgbtq/meet-5-movement-leaders-across-us-fighting-lgtbq-issues-ground JJN "We've gotten dragged into a national conversation where same-sex marriage is held up as the pinnacle of the LGBTQ struggle, but there are so many other things our communities struggle around, issues that have to do with life and death,” Paulina Helm-Hernandez, the co-director of the queer liberation group Southerners on New Ground (SONG), told AlterNet. “We’re dealing with issues like criminalization, health care access and core safety. We’re thinking about ways our people know a lot about violence and how to survive." Helm-Hernandez is one of countless movement leaders in rural communities and urban centers across the country bringing a queer lens to racial, social and economic justice activism. LGBTQ organizers are at the helm of the Movement for Black Lives, calling for an end to extrajudicial police killings, and on the frontlines of native resistance at Standing Rock, where indigenous earth defenders have erected a "two-spirit camp," for gay and lesbian indigenous people. They are demanding an stop to deportations and mass incarceration and devising concrete, community-safety alternatives to calling the police. While fending off the racist incitement of the 2016 election cycle, LGBTQ organizers are also going on the offensive, preparing to mobilize for demilitarization at home and abroad no matter who wins in November. AlterNet spoke with five U.S.-based organizers whose political and cultural work shows that LGBTQ movements go far beyond marriage equality, and are shaping the social movements that define our times. 1. Kym Anthoni, New Orleans “Second lining is very big in New Orleans culture,” said Anthoni, an organizer with the youth-led LGBTQ organization BreakOUT. “After someone passes away, people will do a dance celebrating resilience. Every year around the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we do a second line for the people who died to celebrate resilience, strength and moving forward.” “When a transgender woman has been killed, or you’ve gone through a bunch of bullshit, we embody the culture of second line, recognizing that we have a lot of pain and embracing resilience, saying let’s let go of the harsh shit that you’ve been through and celebrate the fact that you made it,” Anthoni continued. “Last year for the Trans March of resilience, we had a whole second line. We were uplifting the voices that are normally not uplifted in our culture.” New Orleans has been hit hard in recent years by a wave of killings targeting transgender women of color. Among them was BreakOUT community member Penny Proud, a 21-year-old black transgender woman murdered in 2015. This summer, the organization released a statement reading, “It is with heavy hearts that we share the news that another young, black trans/gender non-conforming person, Devin Diamond, has been murdered in New Orleans, just a few weeks after 24-year-old Erica ‘E’ Davis was shot in the Treme neighborhood on her way to work.” Key to BreakOUT’s organizing is the principle that “we deserve to walk down the street and not be attacked, we deserve to not be criminalized,” said Anthoni. This demand is aimed at curbing vigilante violence as well as law enforcement brutality. The organization’s first campaign was called We Deserve Better and took on rampant abuse by the New Orleans Police Department. According to a report released in 2014 by BreakOUT, police abuse is widespread. The survey found that “75 percent of people of color respondents feel they have been targeted by police for their sexual orientation or gender identity or gender expression compared with 24 percent of white respondents.” In addition, the report states that “43 percent of people of color respondents have been asked for a sexual favor by police compared with 11 percent of white respondents.” Anthoni emphasized that it is important for the broader public to understand that police brutality is also an LGBTQ issue. “Police always target trans women of color just for being trans,” Anthoni said. “They over-eroticize transgender bodies. The queer and transgender youth of color are most targeted by law enforcement. It’s a huge issue because it takes your power away, it makes you feel vulnerable. Our vulnerability can sometimes cost us our lives.” In addition to organizing, political education and youth work in local high schools, Anthoni said, “The main core of what we do is heart healing justice work. We focus on finding ways to heal as a community.”
Court civil rights victories act as fly paper drawing other social movements into the court to focus on litigation strategies Rosenberg 8 (Gerald N., University of Chicago political science and law professor, Ph.D. from Yale University, member of the Washington, D.C. bar, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change?, p. 427) If this is the case, then there is another important way in which courts affect social change. It is, to put it simply, that courts act as “fly-paper” for social reformers who succumb to the “lure of litigation.” If the constraints of the Constrained Court view are correct, then courts can seldom produce significant social reform. Yet if groups advocating such reform continue to look to the courts for aid, and spend precious resources in litigation, then the courts also limit change by deflecting claims from substantive political battles, where success is possible, to harmless legal ones where it is not. Even when major cases are won, the achievement is often more symbolic that real. Thus, courts may serve an ideological function of luring movements for social reform to an institution that is structurally constrained from serving their needs, providing only an illusion of change.
Courts wreck movements Becker 93 (Mary, Prof of Law @ University of Chicago Law School; 64 U. Colo. L. Rev. 975 ln) Binding judicial review can impede political movements even when the Supreme Court does not actually block success. The relegation of high matters, such as sexual equality, to the courts saps political movements of their strength, particularly after ineffective victories. 76 At the same time, judicial review can mobilize the opposition, and the Court itself will be influenced by the resulting political climate, a climate it has helped create. When ineffective judicial victories weaken a movement, there may be less grass-roots pressure for change. Yet, real change in the relationship between the sexes is unlikely without change at the grass-roots level. Decisions from on high are unlikely to transform intimate relationships. Judicial victories protecting one or some outsider groups, but not all such groups, also interfere with the development of effective coalitions. This may be most harmful to the most vulnerable groups, such as lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. Real or perceived judicial protection of less marginal groups, such as straight women or racial minorities, may mean that these groups are less likely to form effective coalitions with the more marginal groups. Judicial review is, therefore, a "divide and conquer" strategy.
The court system destroys crucial parts of the LGBTQ movement and works to further marginalize people. Leachman ‘14 Gwendolyn M. Leachman - Gwendolyn M. Leachman. Sears Law Fellow, Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, UCLA School of Law; J.D.; Ph.D. Candidate, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, UC Berkeley. “From Protest to Perry: How Litigation Shaped the LGBT Movement’s Agenda.” University of California, Davis. 2014. http://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/47/5/Articles/47-5_Leachman.pdf JJN *bracketed for offensive language The primary contribution of this Article has been to expose a set of advantages that may be associated with social movement litigation — media visibility and organizational stability — and to illustrate how these advantages may work to elevate the issues being litigated to top priorities for protest-based activists operating outside the courtroom. In this Part, I dig deeper into the normative consequences that this work implicates for the LGBT movement and for current understandings of litigation as a tool for social change. I argue that the consequences of legalization of a social movement’s agenda depend on two factors: first, the extent to which movement litigation focuses on legal impact (winning favorable precedent), and second, the dominant framing and assumptions inherent in the law that movement actors deploy. In movements like the LGBTQ movement, where lawyers predominantly use impact litigation focused on antidiscrimination law, the legalization of movement goals has the potential to marginalize the movement’s more far-reaching visions for social change. The refocusing of a movement around litigation priorities has substantive consequences only if litigation strategies are divorced from the larger movement’s needs and goals. This is something that is particularly likely to occur in conventional impact litigation, which prioritizes formal legal outcomes. Focusing on gaining formal legal advances leaves little need for litigating groups to assess what other activists are doing or what change most constituents desire.347 Focusing on winning favorable precedent further pushes lawyers toward “juridically intelligible” issues and claims,348 which have the greatest likelihood of succeeding in court. Impact litigation groups tend to select priorities based on legal expertise rather than democratic concerns for community goals.349 My analysis in this Article, which corroborates findings from previous work,350 suggests that has been the dominant pattern in LGBT movement impact litigation. When lawfocused impact litigation groups operate in pluralistic movements with diverse political factions and demands — as they do in the LGBT movement351 — legalization will likely generate a substantive change in movement focus (and risk subordinating the priorities of protest groups).352 Does the legalization of a movement’s priorities harm that movement? It depends on whose perspective you take. Some might argue that legalizing a social movement’s agenda could be advantageous for a movement in that it would weed out the more radical movement subgroups, reducing movement infighting and concentrating movement efforts into common, perhaps more attainable, goals. Yet eliminating radical dissent in a movement is only beneficial to the extent one discounts radical politics as ineffective — a position which privileges a reformist view of movement success.353 Radical movement factions tend to envision their own contribution not in terms of attaining a checklist of political gains, but rather as cultivating an alternative vision of society that the current system is incapable of producing.354 By this definition, sacrificing movement segments that earnestly advocate and attempt to diffuse an alternative vision of change that cannot be addressed through legal reform would instead diminish a movement’s prospects for success. Instead of considering the harm that legalization might cause a social movement — a normative judgment that shifts depending on how one evaluates movement effectiveness — it is more useful to consider the effects of legalization in terms of its ability to redefine the scope of movement goals. Legalization of a movement’s agenda helps enshrine within the political culture of that movement the set of values that dominate the legal landscape — and history tells us that those values can be “left” or “right” values, depending on the context.355 For movements whose central purpose is to promote equality for a disadvantaged group, what is crucially important is the extent to which the law supports a vision of equality that would adequately address the plight of a movement’s constituents. Some commentators have held that U.S. law is inherently incapable of ameliorating, or even having an adequate language for conceptualizing, persistent social inequalities;356 this would suggest that the privileging of political goals that can be framed in law’s terms will necessarily constrain equality movements from pursuing more effective alternative strategies. I would not so resolutely discount the potential for law to support transformative politics. Social movements often cultivate their own interpretations of legal principles, which may fly in the face of official understandings,357 as an organizing tool in politics. The law is then, at the very least, capable of radical interpretation and expressing transformative visions of equality and social change. Yet though law contains the potential for radical interpretations promoting substantive equality, this potential often remains latent.358 Antidiscrimination law in particular — the typical target of equality movements — has become settled around quite limited understandings of equality. Judicial interpretation has crystallized around a definition of equality as formal access to equal opportunity359 and discrimination as isolated, intentional acts by prejudiced perpetrators, which cause harm to individual victims.360 This interpretation not only denies remedies for the structural factors most responsible for perpetuating inequality, it also places the focus on preventing individual wrongdoing rather than producing substantive outcomes and creating real change.361 Thus, when antidiscrimination litigation comes to define an equality movement’s priorities, the movement may find itself privileging issues with little hope of creating social transformation through substantive equality. The emphasis on single-axis identity categories in antidiscrimination law362 raises another potential harm in the legalization of movement goals: marginalizing intersectionality. Although those who have multiple subordinated identities experience discrimination differently than those who have a single subordinated identity, antidiscrimination law provides few opportunities for claims based on the combination of more than one protected identity category.363 Very few courts have acknowledged intersectional discrimination364 and instead typically address intersectional claims in the alternative.365 Courts’ requirement of a comparator group in discrimination claims further complicates effective intersectional claims-making.366 It is unsurprising, then, that civil rights advocacy tends to reflect the law’s single-axis paradigm.367 The legalization of movement goals around antidiscrimination litigation may accordingly facilitate the marginalization of movement goals focused on intersectional subordination and crosscutting, multi-issue goals.368 In the LGBTQ movement’s case, this might help explain why issues like “support for working families, ending violence against women, prison reform, poverty, and redistribution — all once critical parts of our LGBTQ liberation movement’s agenda have disappeared in the national LGBT movement discourse.”369 In summary, the elevation of litigation priorities on a movement’s agenda may circumscribe the movement’s goals, but the potential for litigation to do so depends on the approach movement lawyers take — what doctrine they target, and how instrumentally focused they are on law reform goals. In movements that use impact litigation focused on antidiscrimination law, there lies the danger that legalizing the agenda could marginalize a movement’s structural demands and attempts to address multiple dimensions of subordination. These goals are arguably more transformative than goals that resonate with the existing antidiscrimination paradigm, in that they target particularly intractable inequalities, which are given scant public attention and often go undetected and unchallenged. Because there is no surer way to diminish the possibilities for far-reaching reform than to undercut efforts to achieve it, the reorientation of movement activists around a more conservative set of legal priorities can work to undermine a movement’s potential to produce transformative change. CONCLUSION The original empirical research presented in this Article suggests that litigation strategies in the LGBT movement have become the most visible and stable forms of LGBT activism and that the organizations that use litigation have become independent, agenda-setting movement leaders. With the media as its megaphone, and the stable organizational support behind it, litigation appears to have been privileged vis-à-vis other tactics for social change, drawing protest groups away from more radical priorities for cultural transformation and toward the legal reform goals articulated through movement litigation. In short, the substantive issues being litigated become the default agenda of the whole LGBT movement, radical and stateoriented factions alike. The primary contribution of this Article has been to introduce a set of systemic, unintentional mechanisms, outside the strategic choices made by lawyers in the attorney-client relationship, which may privilege legal frameworks for imagining inequality and advancing social change in a social movement’s political agenda. In the case of the LGBTQ movement (and perhaps other contemporary equality movements that target antidiscrimination law), this privileging of legal frameworks for change may have diminished the more expansive visions of social change espoused by the movement’s more radical factions. The LGBTQ movement has come to be defined by legal reform goals based on sexual and gender identity, marginalizing many of the broader priorities espoused by queer activists (e.g., sexual liberation, challenging the patriarchal nuclear family, support for working families, poverty, redistribution).370 The marginalization of those queer movement priorities appears to have occurred through institutional mechanisms similar to those identified by previous antidiscrimination scholarship;371 instead of being intentionally cut out from the broader movement agenda, queer priorities may have instead been diminished by a set of unintentional, systemic processes — arising from factors like journalistic practices, interactions among movement organizations, and protest planning routines — which may elevate social movement litigation and the dominant, legalized views of inequality that it typically promotes.
LGBTQ Rights are crucial to avoid extinction Tatchell ’89 Peter Tatchell - is a British human rights campaignerbest known for his work with LGBT social movements, was selected as Labour Party Parliamentary candidate for Bermondsey. “Gay Liberation is Central to Human Emancipation.” Peter Tatchell.net. However, note at the bottom: “An edited version of this article was published in "Labour Briefing", 1989. See also "Beyond lesbian and gay rights", Interlink. May /June 1989.” http://www.petertatchell.net/masculinity/gay_liberation.htm JJN *bracketed for offensive language Lesbian and gay LGTBQ liberation is of critical importance to the broader project of human emancipation. It is not merely a minority issue, nor purely a question of civil rights and sexual freedom. The ultimate aim is a cultural revolution to end heterosexual supremacism and the concomitant cult of heterosexual masculinity which underpins all relations of oppression and exploitation. This was the revolutionary agenda of the lesbian and gay liberation movement which emerged 20 years ago following the Stonewall Riots in New York in June 1969. In contrast to earlier liberal-oriented movements for homosexual equality, the lesbian and gay liberation movement did not seek to ape heterosexual values or secure the acceptance of homosexuals within the existing sexual conventions. Indeed, it repudiated the prevailing sexual morality and institutions - rejecting not only heterosexism but also heterosexual masculinity with its oppressive predisposition to rivalry, toughness and aggression (most potently symbolised by the rapist and the queer-basher). In contrast the "radical drag" and''gender-bender" politics of the Gay Liberation Front glorified male gentleness. It was a conscious, if sometimes exaggerated, attempt to renounce the oppressiveness of masculinity and subvert the way masculinity functions to buttress the subordination of women and gay men. Lesbian and gay liberation is therefore truly revolutionary because it specifically rejects the male heterosexual cult of masculine competitiveness, domination and violence. Instead, it affirms the worthwhileness of male sensitivity and affection between men and, in the case of lesbians, the intrinsic value of an eroticism and love independent of heterosexual men. By challenging heterosexual masculinity, the politics of lesbian and gay liberation has profound radical implications for oppressed peoples everywhere: it actively subverts the male heterosexual machismo' values which lie at the heart of all systems of domination, exploitation and oppression. Lesbian and gay liberation is therefore not an issue which is peripheral. It is, indeed absolutely central to revolutionary change and human liberation in general. Without the successful construction of a cult of heterosexual masculinity and a mass of aggressive male egos, neither sexual, class, racial, species, nor imperialist oppression are possible. All these different forms of oppression depend on two factors for their continued maintenance. First, on specific economic and political structures. And second, on a significant proportion of the population, mainly heterosexual men, being socialised into the acceptance of harsh masculine values which involve the legitimisation of aggression and the suppression of gentleness and emotion. The embracing of these culturally-conditioned macho values, whether consciously or unconsciously, is what makes so many millions of people able to participate in repressive regimes. (This interaction between social structures, ideology and individual psychology was a thesis which the communist psychologist, Wilhelm Reich, was attempting to articulate nearly 60 years ago in his book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism). In the case of German fascism, what Nazism did was merely awake and excite the latent brutality which is intrinsic to heterosexual masculinity in class societies. It then systematically manipulated and organised this unleashed masculine violence into a fascist regime of terror and torture which culminated in the holocaust. Since it is the internalisation of the masculine cult of toughness and domination which makes people psychologically suited and willing to be part of oppressive relations of exploitation and subjection, repressive states invariably glorify masculine "warrior" ideals and legally and ideologically suppress those men - mainly homosexuals - who fail to conform to them. Given that this internalisation of masculine aggression within the male population is a prerequisite for injustice and tyranny, love and tenderness between men ceases to be a purely private matter or simply a question of personal lifestyle. Instead, it objectively becomes an act of subversion which undermines the very foundations of oppression. Hence the Nazis' vilification of gay men as "sexual subversives" and "sexual saboteurs" who, in the words of Heinrich Himmler, had to be "exterminated- root and branch." In conclusion: the goal of eradicating injustice and exploitation requires us to change both the social structure and the individual personality to create people who, liberated from masculinity, no longer psychologically crave the power to dominate and exploit others and who are therefore unwilling to be the agents of oppressive regimes (whether as soldiers, police, gaolers and censors or as routine civil servants and state administrators who act as the passive agents of repression by keeping the day-to-day machinery of unjust government ticking over). By challenging the cult of heterosexual masculinity, lesbian and gay liberation politics is about much more than the limited agenda of human rights. It offers a unique and revolutionary contribution to the emancipation of the whole of humanity from all forms of oppression and subjugation.
11/5/16
NOV-DEC - DA - TPP
Tournament: Damus | Round: 4 | Opponent: Marlborough SD | Judge: Scott Wheeler 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.” 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
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.
11/6/16
SEPT-OCT - Holy Cross NC r3 - Cold Fusion, ITER DA, Warming DA
Tournament: Holy Cross | Round: 3 | Opponent: Newark Science BA | Judge: Open Source
