Tournament: USC | Round: 1 | Opponent: NA | Judge: NA
By regulating appropriate "space and time," free speech zones make any student protest meaningless
Crocker 7 Thomas Crocker (Assistant Professor, University of South Carolina School of Law. J.D., Yale; Ph.D., Vanderbilt), "Displacing Dissent: The Role of "Place" in First Amendment Jurisprudence," Fordham Law Review, 2007 AZ
Because where we speak is often just as important as what we say, increased efforts by the government to restrict the location of speech threaten to undermine the guarantees of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court's current free speech doctrine permits the imposition of reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech without raising constitutional concerns. 7 Government officials have seized upon this doctrinal permissiveness to develop practices that suppress and control the content of speech by regulating the place of speech. Such suppression and control is most (in)visible in the case of political dissent. Dissent or political protest is expressed most effectively in public, especially at places where government officials-above all the President-appear. To convey a message of dissent is to convey no message at all if it is spoken where no other persons-much less the targeted government officials-can hear or see the message. It is precisely this aim-the elimination of dissenters' ability to appear as dissent to specific audiences-that has been the object of much recent regulation. Regulation of place has stifled political dissent by creating special "protest zones" at presidential appearances, 8 by deploying free speech cages at national party conventions, 9 and by designating large areas of urban centers as "restricted zones."10 More generally, officials control or displace speech by establishing university "free speech zones,"' I limiting mass protests such as those in New York against the Iraq War,12 and restricting use of sidewalks, 1 3 malls, 1 4 and airports. 15 The simple regulation of place has made dissent effectively invisible, practically pointless, and criminally dangerous. For example, when President George W. Bush visited Columbia, South Carolina, in 2002, Brett Bursey sought to welcome him with a sign that read "No War for Oil.' 16 Standing among others who were waiting to greet the President without messages of dissent, Bursey was ordered by officials to remove himself to a designated protest zone three quarters of a mile away and out of sight of the President. 17 When he refused, he was arrested, charged with violating 18 U.S.C. § 1752,18 and later convicted of violating Secret Service restrictions on a person's presence where the President is temporarily visiting. 19 Bursey was not singled out simply because he wished to convey a message of dissent, but because he wished to convey a message of dissent in a particular place and in the presence of other persons standing along a roadway to greet the President as he passed. By the simple regulation of place, government officials succeeded in suppressing dissent.20 Many commentators lament the decline of the public sphere brought about by the increased organization of modem life.21 Quite apart from rising concerns over security, modem life has diminished the role of traditional places where the public might gather and mingle, such as town greens, parks, sidewalks, and pedestrian streets.22 Justice Anthony Kennedy has noted this problem: "Minds are not changed in streets and parks as they once were. To an increasing degree, the more significant interchanges of ideas and shaping of public consciousness occur in mass and electronic media."'23 Although the Internet provides a vibrant new forum for discursive practices, there is a countervailing worry that the ability to select content to an ever more refined degree will lead to greater social fragmentation. 24 Moreover, the Internet does not provide for serendipitous occasions to encounter others face-to-face or to discover the new or the strange in both a social and public setting.25 Trends of modem life and government regulation of public fora have led to the disappearance of meaningful public discourse, dissent, and protest from the public sphere. Thus, the combination of the physical displacement of traditional public spheres with the strategic disruption of political protest provides ample reason to question whether the bland treatment of place in the Court's current First Amendment jurisprudence appropriately protects, let alone enables, the values of free speech.

Zoning is reminiscent of the McCarthy Era and the faults of COINTELPRO – repression cloaked in the law – and gives authorities the power to construe civil disobedience as domestic terrorism, especially in this post-9/11 era.
Mitchell 03 -  Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse’s Maxwell School: 2003 (“The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is Silenced” Stanford Agora Vol. 4 p.43-45 Available at agora.stanford.edu/agora/volume4/articles/mitchell/mitchell.pdf Accessed on 12/11/16)IG
As the preceding argument has indicated, the liberalization of free speech has not always been progressive. And it has not been progressive in both senses of the term. It has not marched steadily forward, uninterrupted, towards the shining light of freedom, to become ever more liberal, ever more just. Rather, to the degree it has been liberalized, this has occurred in fits and starts, with frequent steps backwards or to the side rather than forward. Like any social history, that is, the history of free speech is not a linear one of ever-expanding enlightenment; like any social history it is a history of ongoing struggle. Nor has it been progressive in the sense of necessarily more just, as a close focus on the geography of speech makes clear. Geographical analysis has shown that what sometimes appears as a progressive reinforcement of a right to speech and assembly is really (or is also) in fact a means towards its suppression.169
Nonetheless, whatever rights have been won, have been won through struggle and often not by following the law, but by breaking it. Civil disobedience, by labor activists and other picketers, by civil rights marchers, by anti-war protesters, and by Free Speech activists (as with the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the sixties), has forced often illiberal theories of speech and assembly to be reconsidered. But against these struggles has to be set a history of governmental recidivism: the Palmer raids and Red Scare of 1919-1920, the Smith Act of 1940, the McCarthy era, and the antics of COINTELPRO in the 1960s and 1970s, are just a few of the more well-known moments of repression, often cloaked in law and justified as urgent “legitimate state interests” at a time when serious challenges were being made to the “established order” or when other exigent factors induced panic within the government and the public at large. The history of speech and assembly, that is, can be told as an on-going struggle against recurring illiberalism.
We are, most likely, now reentering an illiberal phase, and if I am right that civil disobedience has always been necessary to winning and securing rights to assembly and speech, there is a great deal to be deeply concerned about. For the closing off of space to protest has made civil disobedience all the more necessary right at the moment when new laws make civil disobedience not just illegal, but potentially terroristic. The witch’s brew of Supreme Court spatial regulation of speech and assembly and new antiterrorism laws portends deep trouble for those of us who think we have a duty as well as a right to transform our government when we think it is in the wrong, a duty and a right for which street protest is sometimes the only resource.
Within six weeks of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress had passed, and the President signed into law, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (USA PATRIOT Act).170 Among its many provisions, the Act defines as domestic terrorism, and therefore covered under the Act, “acts dangerous to human life that are in violation of the criminal laws,” if they “appear to be intended … to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion” and if they “occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”171 As Nancy Chang argues:
Acts of civil disobedience that take place in the United States necessarily meet three of the five elements in the definition of domestic terrorism: they constitute a “violation of the criminal laws,” they are “intended … to influence the policy of a government,” and they “occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.” Many acts of civil disobedience, including the blocking of streets and points of egress by nonviolent means during a demonstration or sit-in, could be construed as “acts dangerous to human life” that appear to be intended to influence the policy of a government “by intimidation or coercion,” which case they would meet the crimes remaining elements…. As a result, protest activities that previously would most likely have ended with a charge of disorderly conduct under a local ordinance can now lead to federal prosecution and conviction for terrorism.172
As the space for protest has become more and more tightly zoned, the likelihood that laws will be broken in the course of a demonstration – a demonstration seeking to “influence a policy of government” – increases. And, of course, the very reason for engaging in a demonstration is to coerce, even if it is not to directly “intimidate.” One should not be sanguine about the “or” placed between intimidate and coerce. It means just what it says: coercion or intimidation will be enough for prosecution.173 Now even civil disobedience can be construed as an act of terrorism.
The intersection of the new repressive state apparatus being constructed in the wake of September 11 with nearly a century of speech and assembly “liberalization” portends a frightening new era in the history of speech and assembly in America. We may soon come to long for those days when protest in public space was only silenced through the strategic geography of the public forum doctrine.

This geography implies that speech becomes dangerous and thus illegal as it becomes effective – that necessarily means effective protest become illegal and what’s left is empty.
Mitchell 03 -  Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse’s Maxwell School: 2003 (“The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is Silenced” Stanford Agora Vol. 4 p.9-14 Available at agora.stanford.edu/agora/volume4/articles/mitchell/mitchell.pdf Accessed on 12/11/16)IG
The Gitlow decision, and after it the appeals court decision regarding William Epton,31 referenced Holmes’s words in Schenck, and tried to determine just what constituted a “clear and present danger.” But “the future embraced the Holmes of Abrams rather than the Holmes of Schenck.”32 In his dissent in Abrams, Holmes wrote this:
When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by the free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes can safely be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophesy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think therefore we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.33
As remarkable and stirring as that passage is, it is also deeply problematic. Its liberal foundation, for example, has no means to recognize differences in power – or even in access to the market, powers that, as we have come to know so well in the current era of media communication, can be absolutely determinant of who can speak and who can be heard.34
As importantly, and as I have explored in detail in other work,35 it is problematic because it puts into place – by implication in Holmes’s own words, but later made explicit in a whole series of cases36 – a distinction between speech and conduct. Even “First Amendment absolutists,” like Justice Hugo Black saw nothing wrong with the regulation of peaceful rallies if their conduct interfered with some other legitimate interest.37 This conduct could be widely interpreted.38 For most of the first half of the twentieth century, conduct that could be prohibited included the mere act of picketing. Courts upheld numerous injunctions against picketing on the basis that the conduct it entailed was necessarily either violent or harassing.39 Indeed, in one famous case in the 1920s, Chief Justice William Taft wrote of picketing, that its very “persistence, importunity, following and dogging” offended public morals and created a dangerous nuisance.40 The problem with picketing, Taft thought, was twofold. First, through its combination of action and speech, it tried to convince people not to enter some establishment; second, it tended to draw a crowd.41 To the degree it did both – that is, to the degree that is successfully communicated its message – it interrupted business and, in Taft’s eyes, undermined the business’s property rights, and therefore could be legitimately enjoined.42 Speech was worth protecting to the degree that is was not effective. Not until the 1940s did the Court begin to recognize that there might be an important speech right worth protecting in addition to the unprotected conduct.43
There is an additional result of Holmes’s declaration about the value of speech in Abrams. Whereas the First Amendment is silent on why speech is to be protected from Congressional interference,44 Holmes makes it clear that the protection of speech serves a particular purpose: improving the state.45 Indeed, he quickly admits that speech likely to harm the state can be outlawed.46 And neither he nor the Court ever moved away from the “clear and present danger” test of Schenck.47 Speech, Holmes argues, is a good insofar as it helps promote and protect the “truth” of the state.48 There is a large amount of room allowed here for criticism of the state, but it can still be quieted by anything that can reasonably construed as a “legitimate state interest” (like protecting the property rights of a company subject to a strike).49 According to the Gitlow Court (if not Holmes, who did not see in Gitlow’s pamphlet enough of a clear and present danger), any speech that “endangers the foundations of organized government and threatens its overthrow by unlawful means” can be banned.50 Note here that speech does not have to advocate the overthrow of government; rather, it can be banned if through its persuasiveness others might seek to overthrow the government.51 On such grounds all manner of manifestos, and many types of street speaking, may be banned. And more broadly, as evidenced in picketing cases like American Steel Foundries, a similar prohibition may be placed on speech that, again through its persuasiveness (e.g. as to the unjustness of some practice or event) rather than through direct exhortation, may incite people to violence. Of course, speech (and its sister right, assembly), must take place somewhere and it must implicate some set of spatial relations, some regime of control over access to places to speak and places to listen.52 Consequently, the limits to speech, or more accurately the means of limiting speech, become increasingly geographic beginning in utopian. 13
1939 in the case Hague v. CIO, when the Supreme Court finally recognized that public spaces like streets and parks were necessary not only to speech itself but to political organizing.53 The problem is not always exactly what is said, but where it is said. At issue in Hague was whether the rights to speech and assembly extends to the use of the streets and other public places for political purposes, and in what ways that use could be regulated. The Court based its decision in a language of common law, arguing that “wherever the title of the streets and parks may rest, they have immemorially been held in trust for use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions.”54 But whatever the roots for such a claim may be in common law, it hardly stands historical scrutiny in the United States, where the violent repression of street politics has always been as much a feature of urban life as its promotion.55 That makes Hague v. CIO a landmark decision: it states clearly for the first time that “the use of the streets and parks for the communication of views on national questions may be regulated in the interest of all … but it must not, in the guise of regulation, be abridged or denied.”56 At the same time, the Court made it clear that protected speech in public spaces was always to be “exercised in subordination to the general comfort and convenience, and in consonance with peace and good order….”57 The question, then, became one of finding the ways to regulate speech (and associated conduct) such that order – and even “general comfort” – was always maintained.
The answers to that question were spatial. They were based on a regulation of urban geography in the name of both “good order” and “general comfort” and of the rights to speech and assembly. Speech rights needed to be balanced against other interests and desires. But order and comfort, it ought to go without saying, suggest a much lower threshold than does “clear and present danger.” While recognizing in a new way a fundamental right to speech and assembly, that is, the Hague court in fact found a language to severely limit that right, and perhaps even to limit it more effectively than had heretofore been possible. To put this another way (and as I will argue more fully below), the new spatial order of speech and assembly that the Court began constructing in Hague allowed for the full flowering of a truly liberal speech regime: a regime for which we are all, in fact, the poorer.

Education is increasingly driven by neoliberal forces – student activism is key to retake the political sphere and democratize elite education against market-driven logic
Williams 15 Jo Williams (Lecturer, College of Education at Victoria University), "Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy," Australian Journal of Adult Learning, November 2015 AZ
More than ever the crisis of schooling represents, at large, the crisis of democracy itself and any attempt to understand the attack on public schooling and higher education cannot be separated from the wider assault on all forms of public life not driven by the logic of the market (Giroux, 2003:7) “Fin al lucro en educación, nuestros sueños no les pertenecen” (end profit making in education, nobody owns our dreams 1 ) (slogan of the Chilean student movement, inspired by the French student uprisings of May-June 1968) Over the past four decades, as the economic and ideological depravity of neoliberal policy and its market-driven logic (D. W. Hursh and Henderson, 2011) has been brought to bear on every aspect of education, the very concept of ‘public’ has been negated. Characteristics such as user-pays, competition, assaults on teachers, and mass standardised-testing and rankings, are among the features of a schooling, which is now very much seen as a private rather than public good (Giroux, 2003). The question of public education as a democratic force for the radical transformation of a violently unjust society seems rarely if ever asked, and a dangerous co-option and weakening of the language and practice of progressive pedagogy has occurred to the extent that notions of inclusion and success are increasingly limited to narrowly conceived individualist and competitive measures of market advantage. As Giroux notes “the forces of neo-liberalism dissolve public issues into utterly privatised and individualistic concerns (2004:62), and despite ongoing official rhetoric “the only form of citizenship increasingly being offered to young people is consumerism” (2003:7). Neoliberal education sees students and young people as passive consumers, the emphasis of schooling on learning how to be governed rather than how to govern (Giroux, 2003:7). In such a context the space for a public pedagogy, based on challenging the hegemony of neoliberal ideology and aligned with collective resistance, appears limited at best. And yet, every day people, teachers, students and communities do engage in political struggle, enacting pedagogies that seek to unveil rather than continue to mask the political structures and organisation that ensures power remains in the hands of the few, and at the service of the few, at the expense of the rest of us. Giroux characterises public pedagogies as defined by hope, struggle and a politicisation of the education process. He argues for …a politics of resistance that extends beyond the classroom as part of a broader struggle to challenge those forces of neo-liberalism that currently wage war against all collective structures capable of defending vital social institutions as a public good (Giroux, 2003:14). Central to Giroux’s argument is the need for critical educators to look to, value, and engage in and with social movements as they emerge and develop as sites of resistance. To …take sides, speak out, and engage in the hard work of debunking corporate culture’s assault on teaching and learning, orient their teaching for social change, connect learning to public life and link knowledge to the operations of power (Giroux, 2004:77). He argues that “progressive education in an age of rampant neoliberalism requires an expanded notion of the public, pedagogy, solidarity, and democratic struggle” (Giroux, 2003:13), and that moreover, educators need to work against a “politics of certainty” and instead develop and engage in pedagogical practice that problematises the world and fosters a sense of collective resistance and hope (2003:14). A neoliberal vision of the ‘good citizen’ and ‘good student’ presumes passivity, acceptance of the status quo and an individualistic disposition. Critical pedagogues must seek out and embrace opportunities to support and celebrate collective political action, not only because it develops a sense of social and political agency but also because it constitutes a powerful basis for authentic learning and active and critical citizenship in an unjust world (Freire, 1970). The Chilean student movement stands as one such example of challenging and inspiring counter-practice and a reclaiming of pedagogy as political and public. For ten years students have filled Chile’s streets, occupied their schools and universities, and organised conferences, public Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy 499 meetings, political stunts, creative actions and protests. Students and young people have been at the centre of the largest and most sustained political action seen in Chile since the democratic movement of the 80s, which eventually forced out the Pinochet dictatorship. Despite global trends in the opposite direction, the Chilean students have fundamentally influenced a nationwide education reform program constituting significant changes to the existing system which has been described as an extreme example of market-driven policy (Valenzuela, Bellei, and Ríos, 2014:220). Most importantly, they have forced and led a nationwide dialogue on the question of education and social justice in Chile and an interrogation of the current, grossly inequitable and elitist model (Falabella, 2008). This article begins by reviewing the experiences of the Chilean student movement to date and offering a brief explanation of the historical development of the education system it seeks to dismantle. It then considers the movement as an example of public pedagogies, concluding with a discussion of how it might inform notions of radical educational practice and a return of the student and pedagogue as authentic and critical subjects.
The Role of the Ballot is to assume the role of an academic fighting neoliberalism to reclaim the academy and higher education. Objectivity is a lie placing an absolute truth where there is none to find except for the statement that neoliberalism is violent and uses normativity as a shield to hide their lies of oppression. Refuse that ethical criteria and embrace higher education’s true calling.
Giroux 13 (Henry, American scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, “Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University,” 29 October 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19654-public-intellectuals-against-the-neoliberal-university)//ghs-VA
Increasingly, as universities are shaped by an audit culture, the call to be objective and impartial, whatever one's intentions, can easily echo what George Orwell called the official truth or the establishment point of view. Lacking a self-consciously democratic political focus, teachers are often reduced, or reduce themselves, to the role of a technician or functionary engaged in formalistic rituals, unconcerned with the disturbing and urgent problems that confront the larger society or the consequences of one's pedagogical practices and research undertakings. Hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity, too many scholars refuse to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. Teaching needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues. In opposition to the instrumental model of teaching, with its conceit of political neutrality and its fetishization of measurement, I argue that academics should combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This requires finding ways to connect the practice of classroom teaching with important social problems and the operation of power in the larger society while providing the conditions for students to view themselves as critical agents capable of making those who exercise authority and power answerable for their actions. Higher education cannot be decoupled from what Jacques Derrida calls a democracy to come, that is, a democracy that must always "be open to the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely improving itself."33 Within this project of possibility and impossibility, critical pedagogy must be understood as a deliberately informed and purposeful political and moral practice, as opposed to one that is either doctrinaire, instrumentalized or both. Moreover, a critical pedagogy should also gain part of its momentum in higher education among students who will go back to the schools, churches, synagogues and workplaces to produce new ideas, concepts and critical ways of understanding the world in which young people and adults live. This is a notion of intellectual practice and responsibility that refuses the professional neutrality and privileged isolation of the academy.  It also affirms a broader vision of learning that links knowledge to the power of self-definition and to the capacities of students to expand the scope of democratic freedoms, particularly those that address the crisis of education, politics, and the social as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy itself. In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue and thought to have real effects, they must advocate that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which they live. This is a commitment we heard articulated by the brave students who fought tuition hikes and the destruction of civil liberties and social provisions in Quebec and to a lesser degree in the Occupy Wall Street movement. If educators are to function as public intellectuals, they need to listen to young people who are producing a new language in order to talk about inequality and power relations, attempting to create alternative democratic public spaces, rethinking the very nature of politics, and asking serious questions about what democracy is and why it no longer exists in many neoliberal societies. These young people who are protesting the 1 recognize that they have been written out of the discourses of justice, equality and democracy and are not only resisting how neoliberalism has made them expendable, they are arguing for a collective future very different from the one that is on display in the current political and economic systems in which they feel trapped.  These brave youth are insisting that the relationship between knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and that what they say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn dominating privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and transform, when necessary, the world around them.

Neolib produces international conflicts and environmental collapse – extinction
Ehrenfeld ‘5 (David, Dept. of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources @ Rutgers University, “The Environmental Limits to Globalization”, Conservation Biology Vol. 19 No. 2 April 2005)
The known effects of globalization on the environment are numerous and highly significant. Many others are undoubtedly unknown. Given these circumstances, the first question that suggests itself is: Will globalization, as we see it now, remain a permanent state of affairs (Rees 2002; Ehrenfeld 2003a)? The principal environmental side effects of globalization—climate change, resource exhaustion (particularly cheap energy), damage to agroecosystems, and the spread of exotic species, including pathogens (plant, animal, and human)—are sufficient to make this economic system unstable and short-lived. The socioeconomic consequences of globalization are likely to do the same. In my book The Arrogance of Humanism (1981), I claimed that our ability to manage global systems, which depends on our being able to predict the results of the things we do, or even to understand the systems we have created, has been greatly exaggerated. Much of our alleged control is science fiction; it doesn’t work because of theoretical limits that we ignore at our peril. We live in a dream world in which reality testing is something we must never, never do, lest we awake. In 1984 Charles Perrow explored the reasons why we have trouble predicting what so many of our own created systems will do, and why they surprise us so unpleasantly while we think we are managing them. In his book Normal Accidents, which does not concern globalization, he listed the critical characteristics of some of today’s complex systems. They are highly interlinked, so a change in one part can affect many others, even those that seem quite distant. Results of some processes feed back on themselves in unexpected ways. The controls of the system often interact with each other unpredictably. We have only indirect ways of finding out what is happening inside the system. And we have an incomplete understanding of some of the system’s processes. His example of such a system is a nuclear power plant, and this, he explained, is why system-wide accidents in nuclear plants cannot be predicted or eliminated by system design. I would argue that globalization is a similar system, also subject to catastrophic accidents, many of them environmental—events that we cannot define until after they have occurred, and perhaps not even then. The comparatively few commentators who have predicted the collapse of globalization have generally given social reasons to support their arguments. These deserve some consideration here, if only because the environmental and social consequences of globalization interact so strongly with each other. In 1998, the British political economist John Gray, giving scant attention to environmental factors, nevertheless came to the conclusion that globalization is unstable and will be short-lived. He said, “There is nothing in today’s global market that buffers it against the social strains arising from highly uneven economic development within and between the world’s diverse societies.” The result, Gray states, is that “The combination of an unceasing stream of new technologies, unfettered market competition and weak or fractured social institutions” has weakened both sovereign states and multinational corporations in their ability to control important events. Note that Gray claims that not only nations but also multinational corporations, which are widely touted as controlling the world, are being weakened by globalization. This idea may come as a surprise, considering the growth of multinationals in the past few decades, but I believe it is true. Neither governments nor giant corporations are even remotely capable of controlling the environmental or social forces released by globalization, without first controlling globalization itself. Two of the social critics of globalization with the most dire predictions about its doom are themselves masters of the process. The late Sir James Goldsmith, billionaire financier, wrote in 1994, It must surely be a mistake to adopt an economic policy which makes you rich if you eliminate your national workforce and transfer production abroad, and which bankrupts you if you continue to employ your own people.... It is the poor in the rich countries who will subsidize the rich in the poor countries. This will have a serious impact on the social cohesion of nations. Another free-trade billionaire, George Soros, said much the same thing in 1995: “The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime.” How much more powerful these statements are if we factor in the environment! As globalization collapses, what will happen to people, biodiversity, and ecosystems? With respect to people, the gift of prophecy is not required to answer this question. What will happen depends on where you are and how you live. Many citizens of the Third World are still comparatively self-sufficient; an unknown number of these will survive the breakdown of globalization and its attendant chaos. In the developed world, there are also people with resources of self-sufficiency and a growing understanding of the nature of our social and environmental problems, which may help them bridge the years of crisis. Some species are adaptable; some are not. For the non- human residents of Earth, not all news will be bad. Who would have predicted that wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo), one of the wiliest and most evasive of woodland birds, extinct in New Jersey 50 years ago, would now be found in every county of this the most densely populated state, and even, occasionally, in adjacent Manhattan? Who would have predicted that black bears (Ursus americanus), also virtually extinct in the state in the mid-twentieth century, would now number in the thousands (Ehrenfeld 2001)? Of course these recoveries are unusual—rare bright spots in a darker landscape. Finally, a few ecological systems may survive in a comparatively undamaged state; most will be stressed to the breaking point, directly or indirectly, by many environmental and social factors interacting unpredictably. Lady Luck, as always, will have much to say. In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, the archaeologist Joseph Tainter (1988) notes that collapse, which has happened to all past empires, inevitably results in human systems of lower complexity and less specialization, less centralized control, lower economic activity, less information flow, lower population levels, less trade, and less redistribution of resources. All of these changes are inimical to globalization. This less-complex, less-globalized condition is probably what human societies will be like when the dust settles. I do not think, however, that we can make such specific predictions about the ultimate state of the environment after globalization, because we have never experienced anything like this exceptionally rapid, global environmental damage before. History and science have little to tell us in this situation. The end of the current economic system and the transition to a postglobalized state is and will be accompanied by a desperate last raid on resources and a chaotic flurry of environmental destruction whose results cannot possibly be told in advance. All one can say is that the surviving species, ecosystems, and resources will be greatly impoverished compared with what we have now, and our descendants will not thank us for having adopted, however briefly, an economic system that consumed their inheritance and damaged their planet so wantonly. Environment is a true bottom line—concern for its condition must trump all purely economic growth strategies if both the developed and developing nations are to survive and prosper. Awareness of the environmental limits that globalized industrial society denies or ignores should not, however, bring us to an extreme position of environmental determinism. Those whose preoccupations with modern civilization’s very real social problems cause them to reject or minimize the environmental constraints discussed here ( Hollander 2003) are guilty of seeing only half the picture. Environmental scientists sometimes fall into the same error. It is tempting to see the salvation of civilization and environment solely in terms of technological improvements in efficiency of energy extraction and use, control of pollution, conservation of water, and regulation of environmentally harmful activities. But such needed developments will not be sufficient—or may not even occur— without corresponding social change, including an end to human population growth and the glorification of consumption, along with the elimination of economic mechanisms that increase the gap between rich and poor. The environmental and social problems inherent in globalization are completely interrelated—any attempt to treat them as separate entities is unlikely to succeed in easing the transition to a postglobalized world. Integrated change that combines environmental awareness, technological innovation, and an altered world view is the only answer to the life-threatening problems exacerbated by globalization (Ehrenfeld 2003b). If such integrated change occurs in time, it will likely happen partly by our own design and partly as an unplanned response to the constraints imposed by social unrest, disease, and the economics of scarcity. With respect to the planned component of change, we are facing, as eloquently described by Rees (2002), “the ultimate challenge to human intelligence and self-awareness, those vital qualities we humans claim as uniquely our own. Homo sapiens will either. . .become fully human or wink out ignominiously, a guttering candle in a violent storm of our own making.” If change does not come quickly, our global civilization will join Tainter’s (1988) list as the latest and most dramatic example of collapsed complex societies. Is there anything that could slow globalization quickly, before it collapses disastrously of its own environmental and social weight? It is still not too late to curtail the use of energy, reinvigorate local and regional communities while restoring a culture of concern for each other, reduce nonessential global trade and especially global finance (Daly and Cobb 1989), do more to control introductions of exotic species (including pathogens), and accelerate the growth of sustainable agriculture. Many of the needed technologies are already in place. It is true that some of the damage to our environment—species extinctions, loss of crop and domestic animal varieties, many exotic species introductions, and some climatic change— will be beyond repair. Nevertheless, the opportunity to help our society move past globalization in an orderly way, while there is time, is worth our most creative and passionate efforts. The citizens of the United States and other nations have to understand that our global economic system has placed both our environment and our society in peril, a peril as great as that posed by any war of the twentieth century. This understanding, and the actions that follow, must come not only from enlightened leadership, but also from grassroots consciousness raising. It is still possible to reclaim the planet from a self-destructive economic system that is bringing us all down together, and this can be a task that bridges the divide between conservatives and liberals. The crisis is here, now. What we have to do has become obvious. Globalization can be scaled back to manageable proportions only in the context of an altered world view that rejects materialism even as it restores a sense of communal obligation. In this way, alone, can we achieve real homeland security, not just in the United States, but also in other nations, whose fates have become so thoroughly entwined with ours within the global environment we share.

Neoliberalism rips apart communal bonds to maintain the illusion that structural inequalities are individual problems – the impact is systemic victim-blaming, poverty, and violence.
Smith 12 (Candace, author for Societpages, cites Bruno Amable, Associate Professor of Economics at Paris School of Economics) “Neoliberalism and Individualism: Ego Leads to Interpersonal Violence?” Sociology Lens is the associated site for Sociology Compass, Wiley-Blackwell’s review journal on all fields sociological AT
There appears to be a link between neoliberalism, individualism, and violence. In reference to the association between neoliberalism and individualism, consider neoliberalism’s insistence that we do not need society since we are all solely responsible for our personal well-being (Peters 2001; Brown 2003). From a criminological standpoint, it is not hard to understand how this focus on the individual can lead to violence. According to Hirschi’s (1969) social control theory, for instance, broken or weak social bonds free a person to engage in deviancy. Since, according to this theory, individuals are naturally self-interested, they can use the opportunity of individualization to overcome the restraining powers of society. Bearing in mind neoliberalism’s tendency to value the individual over society, it could be argued that this ideology is hazardous as it acts to tear apart important social bonds and to thereby contribute to the occurrence of ego-driven crimes, including violent interpersonal crimes. Such a thought suggests that as neoliberalism becomes more prominent in a country, it can be expected that individualism and, as a result, interpersonal violence within that country will increase. When it comes to individualization, this idea is one of the fundamental aspects of neoliberalism. In fact, Bauman (2000:34) argues that in neoliberal states “individualization is a fate, not a choice.” As Amable (2011) explains, neoliberals have realized that in order for their ideology to be successful, a state’s populace must internalize the belief that individuals are only to be rewarded based on their personal effort. With such an ego-driven focus, Scharff (2011) explains that the process of individualization engenders a climate where structural inequalities are converted into individual problems.  
Empirics confirm – neolib results in permanent war.
Klassen 15 – Jerome, Associate Lecturer in International Relations; Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance; McCormack Graduate School, 2015 (“Hegemony in Question: US Primacy, Multi-Polarity and Global Resistance,” Polarising Development–Introducing Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis, Pluto Press)
In the neoliberal period, a new structure of production, accumulation, and class and state formation emerged. With the end of Bretton Woods, the United States was able to run systematic trade deficits with Europe and Asia, which were forced to recycle dollar payments into US Treasury bonds or Wall Street securities. In the process, the dollar was saved as world money, capital controls were weakened in rival states, and the United States was able to run trade and government deficits. At the same time, Wall Street became the centre of global finance, and US firms gained access to new investment funds. Through these new modes of financialisation, the world economy was reconstituted under US centrality. President Reagan’s defeat of the US labour movement also paved the way for a new regime of ‘flexible accumulation’ in the US economy – one based on low wage, deskilled, racialised, gendered and part-time labour markets.
Alongside these economic shifts, the United States pursued an aggressive military policy. In Latin America, it backed military coups in Chile (1973) and Argentina (1986), and financed the Contras against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. After the 1979 revolution in Iran, the United States established Rapid Deployment Forces in the Gulf, and supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran the following year. After the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the United States also financed the mujahideen resistance to the communist government in Kabul. At the same time, Reagan supported South Africa’s invasion of Angola and labelled the African National Congress a terrorist organisation. Through these international proxy wars, the United States tried to weaken or defeat the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist resistance of the 1970s and 1980s.
It is vital to recognise that, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the transition to capitalism in China, the last obstacles to US grand strategy fell by the wayside. Indeed, after 1990, the United States was able to achieve the fundamental goals of hegemonic liberalism: the globalisation of capital and preeminent power for the United States itself. As a sign of this project, the Defense Planning Guidance of the Bush I Administration called for a strategy to ‘preclude the emergence of any potential future global competitor’. To this end, the Quadrennial Defense Review of the Clinton Administration argued that the role of the US military is to ‘sustain American global leadership’, and to secure ‘uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources’. In line with this, the National Security Strategy of the Bush II Administration aimed to ‘dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equalling, the power of the United States’. Likewise, the National Security Strategy of the Obama Administration posits that the United States should ‘underwrite global security’ by ‘renewing American leadership’ and reviving the national economy as ‘the wellspring of American power’.
Across the governments of the post-Cold War period, then, a single strategy has been advanced – one of globalising capital and US primacy. To these ends, the United States has engaged in permanent war, intervening in countries such as Panama, Colombia, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Honduras, Venezuela and Syria. However, US strategy has been challenged, if not degraded, by new dynamics in the global political economy.
Student protests oppose neoliberalism in higher education, translating theory into praxis
Delgado and Ross 16 Sandra Delgado (doctoral student in curriculum studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada) and E. Wayne Ross (Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada), "Students in Revolt: The Pedagogical Potential of Student Collective Action in the Age of the Corporate University" 2016 (published on Academia.edu) AZ
As students’ collective actions keep gaining more political relevance, student and university movements also establish themselves as spaces of counter-hegemony (Sotiris, 2014). Students are constantly opening new possibilities to displace and resist the commodification of education offered by mainstream educational institutions. As Sotiris (2014) convincingly argues, movements within the university have not only the potential to subvert educational reforms, but in addition, they have become “strategic nodes” for the transformation of the processes and practices in higher education, and most importantly for the constant re-imagination and the recreation of “new forms of subaltern counter-hegemony” (p. 1). The strategic importance of university and college based moments lays precisely in the role that higher education plays in contemporary societies, namely their role in “the development of new technologies, new forms of production and for the articulation of discourses and theories on contemporary issues and their role in the reproduction of state and business personnel.” (p.8) Universities and colleges therefore, have a crucial contribution in “the development of class strategies (both dominant and subaltern), in the production of subjectivities, (and) in the transformation of collective practices” (p.8) The main objective of this paper is to examine how contemporary student movements are disrupting, opposing and displacing entrenched oppressive and dehumanizing reforms, practices and frames in today’s corporate academia. This work is divided in four sections. The first is an introduction to student movements and an overview of how student political action has been approached and researched. The second and third sections take a closer look at the repertoires of contention used by contemporary student movements and propose a framework based on radical praxis that allows us to better understand the pedagogical potential of student disruptive action. The last section contains a series of examples of students’ repertoires or tactics of contention that exemplifies the pedagogical potential of student social and political action. An Overview of Student Movements Generally speaking, students are well positioned as political actors. They have been actively involved in the politics of education since the beginnings of the university, but more broadly, students have played a significant role in defining social, cultural and political environments around the world (Altbach, 1966; Boren, 2001). The contributions and influences of students and student movements to revolutionary efforts and political movements beyond the university context are undeniable. One example is the role that students have played in the leadership and membership of the political left (e.g. students’ role in the Movimiento 26 de Julio - M-26-7 in Cuba during the 50’s and in the formation of The New Left in the United States, among others). Similarly, several political and social movements have either established alliances with student organizations or created their own chapters on campuses to recruit new members, mobilize their agendas in education and foster earlier student’s involvement in politics2 (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). Students are often considered to be “catalysts” of political and social action or “barometers” of the social unrest and political tension accumulated in society (Barker, 2008). Throughout history student movements have had a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of political commitments. Usually, student organizations and movements find grounding and inspiration in Anarchism and Marxism, however it is also common to see movements leaning towards liberal and conservative approaches. Hence, student political action has not always been aligned with social movements or organizations from the political left. In various moments in history students have joined or been linked to rightist movements, reactionary organizations and conservative parties (Altbach, 1966; Barker, 2008). Students, unlike workers, come from different social classes and seemly different cultural backgrounds. As a particularly diverse social group, students are distinguished for being heterogeneous and pluralists in their values, interests and commitments (Boren, 2001). Such diversity has been a constant challenge for maintaining unity, which has been particularly problematic in cases of national or transnational student organizations (Prusinowska, Kowzan, and Zielińska, 2012; Somma, 2012). To clarify, social classes are defined by the specific relationship that people have with the means of production. In the case of students, they are not a social class by themselves, but a social layer or social group that is identifiable by their common function in society (Stedman, 1969). The main or central aspect that unites student is the transitory social condition of being a student. In other words, students are a social group who have a common function, role in society or social objective, which is “to study” something (Lewis, 2013; Simons and Masschelein, 2009). Student movements can be understood as a form of social movement (LuesherMamashela, 2015). They have an internal organization that varies from traditionally hierarchical structures, organizational schemes based on representative democracy with charismatic leadership, to horizontal forms of decision-making (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). As many other movements, student movements have standing claims, organize different type of actions, tactics or repertoires of contention, 3 and they advocate for political, social or/and educational agendas, programs or pleas.
Student protest combats racial inequality by sparking national dialogue and movements
Curwen 15 Thomas Curwen, Jason Song and Larry Gordon (reporters), "What's different about the latest wave of college activism," LA Times, 11/18/2015 AZ
Although some of the strategies may seem familiar, it is the speed and the urgency of today's protests that are different. "What is unique about these issues is how social media has changed the way protests take place on college campuses," said Tyrone Howard, associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA. "A protest goes viral in no time flat. With Instagram and Twitter, you're in an immediate news cycle. This was not how it was 20 or 30 years ago." Howard also believes that the effectiveness of the actions at the University of Missouri has encouraged students on other campuses to raise their voices. "A president stepping down is a huge step," he said. "Students elsewhere have to wonder, 'Wow, if that can happen there, why can't we bring out our issues to the forefront as well?'" Shaun R. Harper, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, agrees. The resignation of two top Missouri administrators, Harper said, showed students and athletes around the country that they have power they may not have realized before. The protests show "we're all together and we have the power to make the change we deserve," said Lindsay Opoku-Acheampong, a senior studying biology at Occidental. "It's affirming," said Dalin Celamy, also a senior at the college. "It lets us know we're not crazy; it's happening to people who are just like you all over the country." Celamy, along with other students, not only watched the unfolding protests across the country, but also looked to earlier protests, including an occupation of an administrative building at Occidental in 1968. Echoes of the 1960s in today's actions are clear, said Robert Cohen, a history professor at New York University and author of "Freedom's Orator," a biography of Mario Savio, who led the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. "The tactical dynamism of these nonviolent protests and the public criticism of them are in important ways reminiscent of the 1960s," Cohen said. "Today's protests, like those in the '60s, are memorable because they have been effective in pushing for change and sparking dialogue as well as polarization." Although the targets of these protests are the blatant and subtle forms of racism and inequity that affect the students' lives, the message of the protests resonates with the recent incidents of intolerance and racial inequity on the streets of America. There is a reason for this, Howard said. Campuses are microcosms of society, he said, and are often comparable in terms of representation and opportunity. "So there is a similar fight for more representation, acceptance and inclusion." The dynamic can create a complicated and sensitive social order for students of color to negotiate. "Latino and African American students are often under the belief if they leave their community and go to colleges, that it will be better," Howard said. "They believe it will be an upgrade over the challenges that they saw in underserved and understaffed schools. But if the colleges and universities are the same as those schools, then there is disappointment and frustration." In addition, Howard said, when these students leave their community to go to a university, they often feel conflicted. "So when injustice comes up," he said, "they are quick to respond because it is what they saw in their community. On some level, it is their chance to let their parents and peers know that they have not forgotten the struggle in the community." On campuses and off, Harper, of the University of Pennsylvania center, finds a rising sense of impatience among African Americans about social change. "As a black person, I think black people are just fed up. It's time out for ignoring these issues," he said. While protests in the 1960s helped create specific safeguards for universities today, such as Title IX, guaranteeing equal access for all students to any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, a gap has widened over the years between students and administrators over perceptions of bias. Institutions often valued for their support of free speech find themselves wrestling with the prospect of limiting free speech, but to focus on what is or isn't politically correct avoids the more important issue, Cohen said: whether campuses are diverse enough or how to reduce racism. Occidental student Raihana Haynes-Venerable has heard criticism that modern students are too sensitive, but she argues that subtle forms of discrimination still have a profound effect. She pointed to women making less than men and fewer minorities getting jobs as examples. "This is the new form of racism," she said.
Thus the plan –
Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict constitutionally protected speech to free speech zones.
Free speech zones limit student discourse and should be prohibited
Hudson 16 (David L. Hudson Jr. is a First Amendment expert and law professor who serves as First Amendment Ombudsman for the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center. He contributes research and commentary, provides analysis and information to news media. He is an author, co-author or co-editor of more than 40 books, including Let The Students Speak: A History of the Fight for Free Expression in American Schools (Beacon Press, 2011), The Encyclopedia of the First Amendment (CQ Press, 2008) (one of three co-editors), The Rehnquist Court: Understanding Its Impact and Legacy (Praeger, 2006), and The Handy Supreme Court Answer Book (Visible Ink Press, 2008). He has written several books devoted to student-speech issues and others areas of student rights. He writes regularly for the ABA Journal and the American Bar Association’s Preview of United States Supreme Court Cases. He has served as a senior law clerk at the Tennessee Supreme Court, and teaches First Amendment and Professional Responsibility classes at Vanderbilt Law School and various classes at the Nashville School of Law), "How Campus Policies Limit Free Speech," Huffington Post, 6/1/2016 AZ
Restricting where students can have free speech
In addition, many colleges and universities have free speech zones. Under these policies, people can speak at places of higher learning in only certain, specific locations or zones. While there are remnants of these policies from the 1960s, they grew in number in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a way for administrators to deal with controversial expression. These policies may have a seductive appeal for administrators, as they claim to advance the cause of free speech. But, free speech zones often limit speech by relegating expression to just a few locations. For example, some colleges began by having only two or three free speech zones on campus. The idea of zoning speech is not unique to colleges and universities. Government officials have sought to diminish the impact of different types of expression by zoning adult-oriented expression, antiabortion protestors and political demonstrators outside political conventions. In a particularly egregious example, a student at Modesto Junior College in California named Robert Van Tuinen was prohibited from handing out copies of the United States Constitution on September 17, 2013 - the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. Van Tuinen was informed that he could get permission to distribute the Constitution if he preregistered for time in the “free speech zone.” But later, Van Tuinen was told by an administrator that he would have to wait, possibly until the next month. In the words of First Amendment expert Charles Haynes, “the entire campus should be a free speech zone.” In other words, the default position of school administrators should be to allow speech, not limit it. Zoning speech is troubling, particularly when it reduces the overall amount of speech on campus. And many free speech experts view the idea of a free speech zone as “moronic and oxymoronic.” College or university campuses should be a place where free speech not only survives but thrives.
The First Amendment protects only public discourse
Weinstein 11 – James Weinstein, Amelia D. Lewis Professor of Constitutional Law, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, Arizona State University: 2011(PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY AS THE CENTRAL VALUE OF AMERICAN FREE SPEECH DOCTRINE, Virginia Law Review Vol 97:3 p.3, Available at https://web.law.asu.edu/Portals/31/Weinstein_UVA_May_2011.pdf Accessed on 12/14/16)IG
As Professor Robert Post's pioneering work has demonstrated, this extremely rigorous protection applies primarily within the do- main of "public discourse." Public discourse consists of speech on matters of public concern, or, largely without respect to its subject matter, of expression in settings dedicated or essential to democratic self-governance, such as books, magazines, films, the internet, or in public forums such as the speaker's corner of the park. It is in this realm that the people-the ultimate governors in a democracy-can freely examine and discuss the rules, norms, and conditions that constitute society. Precisely because public discourse in the United States is so strongly protected, however, the realm dedicated to such expression cannot be conceived as covering the entire expanse of human expression. Just as it is imperative in a democracy to have a realm in which any idea, practice, or norm can be questioned as vituperatively as the speaker chooses, there must be other settings in which the government may efficiently carry out the results yielded by the democratic process. Accordingly, in set- tings dedicated to some purpose other than public discourse-such as those dedicated to effectuating government programs in the government workplace," to the administration of justice in the courtroom," or to instruction in public schools the government has far greater leeway to regulate the content of speech.
It is not just the content of the speech that determines whether the expression will be highly protected as public discourse, but also the setting or medium in which the expression occurs." In modern democratic societies, certain modes of communication form "a structural skeleton that is necessary, although not sufficient, for public discourse to serve the constitutional value of democracy”. For this reason, "it is assumed that if a medium is constitutionally protected by the First Amendment, each instance of the medium would also be protected." The importance of the medium in which a given instance of speech occurs to democratic self- governance is, in my view, the best explanation of why the Su- preme Court rigorously protects nudity in film and cable television-media that are in its view part of the "structural skeleton" of public discourse-but not in live performances by erotic dancers on the stage of a "strip club."
Free speech zones and no protest zones infringe on protected speech and shut down impromptu uprising which disarms the most effective form of resistance and forces reform efforts to bend to the will of the established system
Mitchell 03 -  Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse’s Maxwell School: 2003 (“The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is Silenced” Stanford Agora Vol. 4 p.36-37 Available at agora.stanford.edu/agora/volume4/articles/mitchell/mitchell.pdf Accessed on 12/11/16)IG
In the end, a federal judge upheld the city’s position, seeing no illegitimate abridgement of protesters’ rights in the City’s establishment of a no protest zone. The judge stated, plainly enough, that “free speech must sometimes bend to public safety.”150 In this case it had to bend for 50 blocks, and right out of downtown – even though in Madsen, the court had found a 36 foot exclusion zone to be reasonable but both a 300 foot zone in which approaching patrons and workers of clinics, and a 300 foot no-protest zone around residences of clinic workers to be too great a burden on free speech, ordering a much smaller no-protest bubble to be drawn.151 Given this sort of spatial specificity in the Supreme Court’s decision, it seems unlikely that such a large protest exclusion zone could withstand scrutiny.
But there is another issue at work too. The judge in Seattle supported the City’s contention that sanctioned protest was acceptable. The no-protest zone was necessary because of impromptu protests. But, of course, the very effectiveness of the Seattle protests was their (apparent) spontaneity.152 That is what caught the media’s – and the public’s – imagination; and that is what allowed for the massive upsurge of political debate, in the U.S. and around the world, that followed.
Perhaps, tactically, Seattle’s “mistake” was to not establish designated protest and no-protest zones in advance of the meetings. Such a move had been effective in the 1996 Democratic and Republican Conventions (and in earlier ones too). And in subsequent years and events it has become standard practice, as with the 2000 National Conventions, the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, and the World Economic Forum meeting in New York in February 2002, where protesters are kept out of certain areas by fences, barricades and a heavy police presence.153 In the case of the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, it was the protesters who were fenced off, with the City establishing an official “protest zone” in a fenced parking lot a considerable distance from the convention site.154 The rationale, of course, was “security,” a rationale backed by appeals to the authority of the Secret Service. The ACLU, among others, sued the city, eventually winning a decision that invalidated the city’s plans. The city was forced to establish a protest zone closer to the convention center, with the judge chiding the City of Los Angeles for failing to consider the First Amendment when it established the rules for protest and security around the event. “You can’t shut down the 1st Amendment about what might happen,” the judge said. “You can always theorize some awful scenario.”155 This victory should not be considered very large. Its effect, and the effect of other cases like it, has largely reduced the ACLU and other advocates of speech rights to arguing the fine points of geography, pouring over maps to determine just where protest may occur. Protesters are put entirely on the defensive, always seeking to justify why their voices should be heard and their actions seen, always having to make a claim that it is not unreasonable to assert that protest should be allowed in a place where those being protested against can actually hear it, and always having to “bend” their tactics – and their rights – to fit a legal regime that in every case sees protest subordinate to “the general order” (which, of course, really means the “established order”).