About MSDI & Missouri State U..For twenty years, the Missouri State Debate Institute has offered an excellent educational experience in the middle of the high school topic. MSDI is distinct from other camps in six ways. First, our skills focus assures that a typical 2-week debater gets nearly 80 speeches, including over 20 debates. Second, we emphasize the largest cases on topic, with students getting both aff and neg rounds on each. Third, our senior faculty are comparable with top lab leaders in any camp. Fourth, MSDI students can earn highly transferable college credit in public speaking for a minimal cost. Fifth, we respect variance in home debate circuits – our goal is to improve line by line debating in ways that will help students no matter who judges in their home circuit. Finally, our price is below any comparable camp and far below most camps. Our 2016 information will be available shortly at: http://debate.missouristate.edu/camp.htm.

Missouri State University is a large comprehensive university (enrollment over 24k), with nearly any major you might want. The university has excellent academic scholarship support – most debaters combine academic “entitlement” scholarships (guaranteed based on GPA/test scores) with debate scholarships. The Spicer Debate Forum competes in two year-long policy debate formats: NDT and NFA-LD. We’ve national semis or finals in both in the last decade. Our debaters have an average GPA over 3.5, a 97% graduation rate, and 70% complete law/grad school afterward. Our program is a high-impact academic experience with an exceptional alumni network. Please contact Dr. Eric Morris for more information (EricMorris@MissouriState.edu).

http://debate.missouristate.edu/

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A2 Economy Adv

Economic decline nowUS Economy already in decline; many other factorsSamantha Sharf 5/29/15, Writer for Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2015/05/29/u-s-economy-contracted-0-7-in-first-quarter-2015-down-from-first-estimate/, “US economy contracted 0.7% in First quarter 2015”

The economy shrank last quarter thanks to a decline in some inputs and barely there growth in

others. The questions now are if winter weather is blame and what it all means for the Federal Reserve. On Friday, the Bureau of Economic

Analysis released its second estimate of real gross domestic product for the first quarter of this year — covering January, February and March.

The release showed output in the United States decreasing at a rate of 0.7%. This is substantial

deceleration from the fourth quarter of 2014 when real GDP grew 2.2%. Economists on average were

anticipating a 0.9% contraction Friday. The figure, which measure the value of goods and services produced in the U.S., is down from BEA’s advance Q1 estimate which last month said that the economy grew 0.2%. The 0.9% shift into negative territory, said BEA in the release, was due

to weaker than previously thought private inventory investment and a larger than expected import figure. Imports are subtracted

in the calculation of GDP. “In short, GDP looks even weaker than before, but we remain skeptical

about the sudden-deterioration signal,” wrote Jim O’Sullivan, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in a note.

“The pattern is somewhat reminiscent of early 2014, when a 2.1% rate of decline in Q1 was followed by a +4.6% pace in Q2.” Last year many economists, including those at the Fed, ultimately said colder than usual temperatures explained away most of the decline. Temporary factors

may be at play again this year. Parts of the country were hit by more snow than usual. Others factors some say held back

growth this year include the strong dollar making imports less expensive and exports more so;

pressure on the energy sector from lower oil prices; consumers saving rather than spending money

saved on oil; and dock worker strikes on the West Coast that disrupted that flow of trade. PNC Chief

Economist Stuart Hoffman pointed out, “There is evidence that the BEA’s seasonal adjustment process is not fully correcting for quarterly variation in GDP; over the past 20 years GDP growth in the first quarter has been well below that in the other three quarters of the year.”

The overall downturn compared to the fourth quarter reflects slowing exports, nonresidential fixed

income investment and local government spending. Personal consumption expenditures, private inventory investment,

resident fixed income and federal government spending, on the other hand, were up. PCE, however, decelerated compared to the prior quarter. The 0.1% boost in federal spending comes on the heels of a 7.3% decreased in the fourth quarter BEA now judges that the price index for gross domestic purchases — which measures prices paid by U.S. residents — decreased 1.6%. Excluding the price of food and energy the price index increased 0.2%. Real personal consumption expenditures increased 1.8% slow from 4.4% in gains in the fourth quarter. Gross domestic income increased 1.4%.

Global economies are experiencing slowdown that is expected to remainThomas Hirst 4/7/15, Author for Business Insider, http://www.businessinsider.com/imf-world-economic-outlook-slow-growth-2015-4, “The era of strong economic growth is over- and we should be worried”

The International Monetary Fund has got some bad news for us — the slower rate of economic growth could be here to stay. In its latest

World Economic Outlook update , the IMF says a combination of slower catch-up growth by

emerging economies and ageing societies in the developed world are set to hold back global growth

despite signs of a recovery setting in. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, potential growth in

advanced economies has slowed from an average of over 2% per year to around 1.6%. Here's what that looks like:

As you can see from the chart, most of the fall in potential growth is coming from the squeezing of that middle brown section — employment growth. That represents the potential growth in the number of employees in an economy and it is falling as Western societies get older. This process, according to the IMF, is likely to hold back growth in future. As the Fund puts it: Working-age population growth is likely to decline significantly in most advanced economies, particularly Germany and Japan, where it will reach about –0.2 percent a year by 2020. At the same time, rapid aging is expected to further decrease average trend labor force participation rates, offsetting the positive effect of continued

population increases on overall labor supply. Meanwhile emerging economies have also seen growth rates slipping

since the crisis, albeit from higher starting points. This is largely due to slower catch-up growth as the

technological improvements and increases in educational achievement over the past few decades

that have helped to narrow the gap with their advanced peers are unlikely to be repeated. What does

this all mean? Well, firstly it means that living standards are going to struggle to rise in future at the same pace as they have done. Workers experiencing sluggish wage growth since the crisis may find that it becomes the norm rather than the exception in future. Unfortunately, slower potential growth also has worrying implications for public finances. Governments can lower the burden of public debt in two ways, either by

cutting spending to reduce borrowing or through the economy growing faster than debt costs. Slower growth means that

cutting debt is likely to rely more heavily on spending cuts than simply allowing growth to erode the

problem. Yet the very factor holding back growth — ageing societies — is also likely to make such

cuts harder to achieve as older people use state services such as healthcare more intensively than

their younger peers. As it says in the WEO (emphasis added): Reduced prospects for potential growth in the medium term have

important implications for policy. In advanced economies, lower potential growth makes it more difficult to reduce still-high public and private

debt... In emerging market economies, lower potential growth makes it more challenging to rebuild

fiscal buffers. Despite the gloom, there are ways in which countries can act to ameliorate some of the consequences of this growth

squeeze. In particular, the IMF suggests state support for innovation and further education should be policy goals as well as providing an environment that promotes increased labour force participation by those of working age, especially for women. More controversially, perhaps, the IMF also says providing support for demand through accommodative central bank policies and also, where possible, government spending may also be needed to boost investment. One subject that the Fund elects not to discuss in any detail is the potential growth benefits of higher immigration. For example, Britain's Office for Budget Responsibility, the government's budget watchdog, recently noted that higher than forecast immigration over the past few years had "raised potential output growth by 0.5 per cent over the forecast period via 16+ population growth".

US retains economic/tech edge Multiple other factors ensure tech lead – assumes cloud computing Donilon 14, Tom, distinguished fellow at the council on foreign relations, senior partner at the international law firm O’Melveny and Myers, “We're No. 1 (and We're Going to Stay That Way)” July 3rd, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/07/03/we_re_no_1_and_we_re_going_to_stay_that_way_american_decline

First, the U nited States has an innovation edge over the rest of the world. Apple, Google, Facebook , Twitter -- all are synonymous with American economic vitality today, but only one of these companies existed 15 years ago. The eight largest technology companies in the world by market capitalization are based in the United States. And when it comes to the next frontiers in extraordinary breakout technology, like 3-D manufacturing, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology,

cloud computing, robotics, big data, and advanced material science, American entrepreneurs and companies are leading the way. The United States also leads the world in r esearch and development, with a projected $465 billion in spending this year --

that's over 30 percent of all global R&D. Like so many of our strengths, our innovation advantage didn't happen by accident. It

stems from the combination of a risk-taking culture , significant investment by the American government in research, the best universities in the world churning out good ideas, and the kind of regulations and access to liquid and deep capital markets that make it possible to turn those ideas into businesses. And all

these strengths come together in Silicon Valley, which represents to the world our spirit of creativity and innovation.

Tech companies not key to economyTech Industry is dependent on a strong economy, not the other way aroundHeidi Richardson, 4-12, 2015, Heidi Richardson is a Global Investment Strategist for BlackRock. She is responsible for relating the Investment Strategy Team’s research and investment views to a wide variety of investors. She joined the firm in 2010 with twenty three years of active investment experience across both equities and fixed income. She writes about how to implement BlackRock’s best investment ideas, "Tech Companies Likely To Benefit From An Improving Economy," The Realist, http://marketrealist.com/2015/03/tech-companies-benefit-improving-economy/

Tech is also poised to reap the benefits of continued economic improvement. Capital expenditures (or capex), which is the investment in property and equipment by companies, is expected to increase for U.S. companies across the board. We anticipate that much of this investment will be used to upgrade corporate hardware, software and networking systems. On the consumer side, improving purchasing power, partly due to lower oil prices, may be a boon to companies like Apple (AAPL). Market Realist – Tech companies could benefit from an improving economy. Usually, capital expenditure is the amount spent to acquire or improve long-term assets such as machinery or buildings. In the case of tech companies, it’s a little different. The main assets of a tech company are human resources. So, capital expenditure for a tech company could involve money spent on innovation and R&D (research and development). It also includes funds spent on expanding the business, like with any other industry. The graph above shows the total capex spent by Apple, Google (GOOG)(GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), and IBM (IBM). Google’s capex in 4Q14 was highest at $3.5 billion. Apple’s capex was $3.2 billion, a little less than that of Google. Microsoft and IBM invested $1.5 billion and $970 million in capex, respectively. Capex in the tech sector has galloped along over the years, which is a good sign. An indicator of business sentiment, capex has otherwise been low across much of the economy in recent years, despite very low interest rates. Tech companies (QQQ) have used their excess cash well. Given their financial strength, these companies can afford more capex. Lower oil (USO) prices mean consumers are saving at the pump and have more money to spend on other items. Consumer-oriented tech companies are certainly well positioned to benefit from this.

Corporatization of Tech companies has transitioned them out of central importance to the economyTim Fernholz, 3-24-2015, Tim Fernholz covers state, business and society for Quartz. What does that mean? Whenever business competition spills into the halls of government, economic conflict puts protesters in the street, companies disrupt the way we live or public policy shapes the market, he will be there, "Wall Street’s infiltration of Silicon Valley is a bad sign for the US economy," Quartz, http://qz.com/369233/wall-streets-infiltration-of-silicon-valley-is-a-bad-sign-for-the-us-economy/

The New York Times’ Neil Irwin makes the positive case: Porat’s migration—like that of her industry colleague Anthony Noto, who made the leap from Goldman Sachs to Twitter CFO, and the armies of MBAs from Harvard heading west—is good news because the best and brightest want to make their fortunes at firms that actually produce goods and services to people, rather than at financial institutions that innovate mainly by gambling with other people’s money. But if a too-large financial sector is bad news for the economy, the financialization of its most dynamic and innovative industry isn’t a necessarily a step forward either. Financiers won’t be pitching in on the software engineering team or

the marketing department. They’ll be using financial engineering to make these companies more profitable: better managing the piles of offshore cash that tech companies garner with geographically-boundless intellectual property, and supporting the acqui-hire cycle of larger companies bringing on start-ups for their talent and new ideas. That will make tech giants more efficient companies, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they will be better at their primary mission. Instead, it’s a sign that the tech industry is maturing, with the largest companies no longer capable of generating new products. Instead, they are becoming glorified private equity firms, competing to buy the best start-ups and manage them to success—not unlike what’s happening in the pharmaceutical industry, with its similar patent-driven culture. Twitter, which has yet to see a profit, today announced the first investment (paywall) of its own venture capital investment fund. Of course, this argument is somewhat overstated: Vox’s Timothy B. Lee points out that Apple has been the major large-company innovator in the last fifteen years, but while the jury is still out on its new watch (color me unimpressed) the endless parade of slightly-larger iPhones haven’t been as ground-shaking as its $30 billion stock buyback-cum-tax dodge. Android’s products have certainly improved since it was bought by Google, but that still started as an acquisition, not a skunk-works project. Part of this trend is the natural evolution of new firms and industries toward maturity; there’s no shame in running a company that does its job well and gives its earnings back to its stockholders. But remember, the two most popular ideas in Silicon Valley are that its start-ups can create brand-new products and grow at unimaginable multiples to create massive, multibillion-dollar companies; and that massive multibillion-dollar companies aren’t nimble enough to really innovate. In other words, news that more Americans are studying technical fields or starting new firms would be positive signs when it comes to the tech sector. News that bankers are moving in for the profit-taking doesn’t seem like a leading indicator of innovation.

Alt causes to tech offshoringTech companies are moving because of cheaper labor – not surveillanceSam Zuckerman, Chronicle Economics Writer Published 4:00 am, Sunday, June 1, 2003 Overseas tech jobs proliferate / More Silicon Valley companies find cheaper labor in other countries http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Overseas-tech-jobs-proliferate-More-Silicon-2613599.php

It's no mystery what's driving the migration. Companies that move technology functions overseas stand to save a bundle. In Silicon Valley, salary and benefits for a programmer with a few years' experience run about $75 to $80 per hour. A third-party provider in the United States charges about $125 per hour for the same service, according to

Karamouzis. Leading Indian firms, such as Wipro, ask only $20 to $25 per hour, she said. And second-tier Indian companies can be found that will do the work for as little as $15.

NSA coopts reform effortsNSA coopts legislative reform – USA Freedom Act proves Solomon 6/5 Norman Solomon, Author, 'War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death', “The USA Freedom Act Is a Virtual Scam”, Huffington Post, June 5 th, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-solomon/the-usa-freedom-act-is-a_b_7519046.htmlCR

Some foes of mass surveillance have been celebrating the final passage of the USA Freedom Act , but Thomas Drake sounds decidedly

glum. The new law, he tells me, is "a new spy program." It restarts some of the worst aspects of the Patriot Act and further codifies systematic violations of Fourth Amendment rights. In Oslo as part of a "Stand Up For Truth" tour, Drake warned at a public forum on Wednesday that "national security" has become "the new state religion." Meanwhile, his Twitter messages were calling the USA Freedom Act an "itty-bitty step" -- and a "stop/restart kabuki shell game" that "starts with restarting bulk collection of phone records." That downbeat

appraisal of the USA Freedom Act should give pause to its celebrants. Drake is a former senior executive of the N ational S ecurity A gency -- and a whistleblower who endured prosecution and faced decades in prison for daring to speak truthfully about NSA activities. He ran afoul of vindictive authorities because he refused to go along with the NSA's massive surveillance program after 9/11. Drake

understands how the NSA operates from the highest strategic levels. He notes a telling fact that has gone virtually unacknowledged by anti-surveillance boosters of the USA Freedom Act: "NSA approved." So, of course, did the top purveyor of mendacious claims about the U.S. government's surveillance programs -- President Obama -- who eagerly signed the "USA Freedom" bill into law just hours after the Senate passed it. A comparable guardian of our rights, House Speaker John Boehner, crowed: "This legislation is critical to keeping Americans safe from terrorism and protecting their civil liberties." While some organizations with civil-liberties credentials have responded to the USA Freedom Act by popping open champagne bottles at various decibels, more sober assessments have also been heard. Just after senators approved the bill and sent it to the president, Demand Progress issued a statement pointing out: "The Senate just voted to reinstitute certain lapsed surveillance authorities -- and that means that USA Freedom actually made Americans less free." Another astute assessment came from CREDO, saying that Congress had just

created "sweeping new authorities for the government to conduct unconstitutional mass surveillance of Americans." As it happened, the president signed the USA Freedom Act into law while four U.S. "national security" whistleblowers -- Drake as well

as Coleen Rowley (FBI), Jesselyn Radack (Justice Department) and Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers) -- were partway through a "Stand Up For Truth" speaking tour from London to Oslo to Stockholm to Berlin. Traveling as part of the tour, I've been struck by the intensity of interest from audiences in the countries we've already visited -- Great Britain, Norway and Sweden -- where governments have moved to worsen repressive policies for mass surveillance. Right now, many people in Europe and elsewhere who care about civil liberties and want true press freedom are looking at the United States: to understand what an aroused citizenry might be able to accomplish, seeking to roll

back a dangerous accumulation of power by an ostensibly democratic government. Let's not unwittingly deceive them -- or

ourselves -- about how much ground the U.S. surveillance state has lost so far.

US not key to global US not key to global economyNYT (New York Times) July 2009 “In Asia, a Derided Theory Returns” http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CEFDE163EF932A35754C0A96F9C8B63&pagewanted=1

For a while, when the global economic crisis was at its worst, it was a dirty word that only the most provocative of analysts dared to use. Now,

the D-word -- decoupling -- is making a comeback, and nowhere more so than in Asia. Put simply, the term refers to the theory that emerging countries -- whether China or Chile -- will become more independent of the ups and downs in the United States as their economies become stronger and more sophisticated . For much of last year, the theory held up. Many emerging economies had steered clear of investments that dragged down a string of banking behemoths in the West, and saw nothing like the turmoil that began to engulf the United States and Europe in 2007. But then, last autumn, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers caused the global financial system to convulse and consumer demand to shrivel, emerging economies around the world got caught in

the downdraft, and the D-word became mud. Now, the tables are turning again, especially in Asia, where many emerging economies are showing signs of a stronger recovery than in the West . And economists here have begun to use the D-

word in public once again. ''Decoupling is happening for real,'' the chief Asia-Pacific economist at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong, Michael Buchanan, said in a recent interview. Or as the senior Asia economist at HSBC, Frederic Neumann, said, ''Decoupling is not a dirty word.'' To be sure, the once sizzling pace of Asian economic growth has slowed sharply as exports to and investments from outside the region slumped. Across Asia, millions of people have lost their jobs as business drops off and companies cut costs and output. Asia is heavily dependent upon selling its products to consumers in the United States and Europe, and many executives still say a strong U.S. economy is a prerequisite for a return to the boom of years past. Nevertheless, the theory of decoupling is back on the table. For the past couple of months,

data from around the world have revealed a growing divergence between Western economies and those in much of Asia, notably China and India. The World Bank last week forecast that the economies of the euro zone and the United States would contract 4.5 percent and 3 percent, respectively, this year -- in sharp contrast to the 7.2 percent and 5.1 percent economic growth it forecasts for China and India. Forecasts from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that were also published last week backed up this general trend. Major statistics for June, due Wednesday, are expected to show manufacturing activity in China and India are on the mend. By contrast, purchasing managers' indexes for Europe and the United States are forecast to be merely less grim than before but still show contractions. Why this diverging picture? The crisis hit Asia much later. While the U.S. economy began languishing in 2007, Asian economies were still doing well right up until the collapse of Lehman Brothers last September. What followed was a rush of stimulus measures -- rate cuts and government spending programs. In Asia's case, these came soon after things soured for the region; in

the United States, they came much later in the country's crisis. Moreover, developing Asian economies were in pretty good shape when the crisis struck. The last major crisis to hit the region -- the financial turmoil of 1997-98 -- forced governments in Asia to introduce overhauls that ultimately left them with lower debt levels, more resilient banking and regulatory systems and often large foreign exchange reserves . Another crucial difference is that Asia, unlike the United States and Europe, has not had a banking crisis. Bank profits in Asia have plunged and some have had to raise extra capital but there have been no major collapses and no bailouts. ''The single most important thing to have happened in Asia is that there has not been a banking crisis,'' said Andrew Freris, a regional strategist at BNP Paribas in Hong Kong. ''Asia is coming though this crisis with its banking system intact. Yes, some banks may not be making profits -- but it is cyclical and not systemic.''

Economy resilient Econ resilientFareed Zakaria (editor of Newsweek International) December 2009 “The Secrets of Stability,” http://www.newsweek.com/id/226425/page/2]

One year ago, the world seemed as if it might be coming apart. The global financial system, which had fueled

a great expansion of capitalism and trade across the world, was crumbling. All the certainties of the age of globalization—about the virtues of free markets, trade, and technology—were being called into question. Faith in the American model had collapsed. The financial industry had crumbled. Once-roaring emerging markets like China, India, and Brazil were sinking. Worldwide trade was shrinking to a degree

not seen since the 1930s. Pundits whose bearishness had been vindicated predict ed we were doomed to a long, painful bust, with cascading failures in sector after sector, country after country . In a widely cited essay that appeared in

The Atlantic n this May, Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, wrote: "The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump 'cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.' This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse

than the Great Depression." Others predicted that these economic shocks would lead to political instability and violence in the worst-hit countries. At his confirmation hearing in February, the new U.S. director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, cautioned the Senate that "the financial crisis and global recession are likely to produce a wave of economic crises in emerging-market nations over the next year." Hillary Clinton endorsed this grim view. And she was hardly alone. Foreign Policy ran a cover story predicting serious unrest in several emerging markets. Of one thing everyone was sure: nothing would ever be the same again. Not the financial industry, not capitalism,

not globalization. One year later, how much has the world really changed? Well, Wall Street is home to two fewer investment banks (three, if you count Merrill Lynch). Some regional banks have gone bust. There was some turmoil in Moldova and (entirely unrelated to the financial crisis) in Iran. Severe problems remain, like high unemployment in the West, and we face new problems caused by

responses to the crisis—soaring debt and fears of inflation. But overall, things look nothing like they did in the 1930s. The predictions of economic and political collapse have not materialized at all . A key measure of fear and fragility is the ability of poor and unstable countries to borrow money on the debt markets. So consider this: the sovereign bonds of tottering Pakistan have returned 168 percent so far this year. All this doesn't add up to a recovery yet, but it does reflect a return to some level of normalcy. And that rebound has been so rapid that even the shrewdest observers remain puzzled. "The question I have at the back of my head is 'Is that it?' " says Charles Kaye, the co-head of Warburg Pincus. "We had this huge crisis, and now we're back to business as usual?"This revival did not happen

because markets managed to stabilize themselves on their own. Rather, governments, having learned the lessons of the

Great Depression, were determined not to repeat the same mistakes once this crisis hit. By massively expanding state support for the economy—through central banks and national treasuries—they buffered the worst of the damage. (Whether they made new mistakes in the process remains to be seen.) The extensive social safety nets that have been established across the industrialized world also cushioned the pain felt by many. Times are still tough, but things are nowhere near as bad as in the 1930s, when governments played a tiny role in national economies. It's true that the massive state interventions of the past year may be fueling some new bubbles: the cheap cash and government guarantees provided to banks, companies, and consumers have fueled some irrational exuberance in stock and bond markets. Yet these rallies also demonstrate the return of confidence, and confidence is a very powerful economic force. When John Maynard Keynes described his own prescriptions for economic growth, he believed government action could provide only a temporary fix until the real motor of the economy started cranking again—the animal spirits of investors, consumers, and companies seeking risk and profit.

Beyond all this, though, I believe there's a fundamental reason why we have not faced global collapse in the last year.

It is the same reason that we weathered the stock-market crash of 1987, the recession of 1992, the Asian crisis of 1997, the Russian default of 1998, and the tech-bubble collapse of 2000. The current global economic system is inherently more resilient than we think . The world today is characterized by three major forces for stability, each reinforcing the other and each historical in nature.

Econ resilientDaniel W. Drezner 12, Professor, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, October 2012, “The Irony of Global Economic Governance: The System Worked,” http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/IR-Colloquium-MT12-Week-5_The-Irony-of-Global-Economic-Governance.pdf

It is equally possible, however, that a renewed crisis would trigger a renewed surge in policy

coordination . As John Ikenberry has observed, “the complex interdependence that is unleashed in an

open and loosely rule-based order generates some expanding realms of exchange and investment that result in a growing array of firms, interest groups and other sorts of political stakeholders who seek to

preserve the stability and openness of the system.” 103 The post-2008 economic order has remained

open , entrenching these interests even more across the globe . Despite uncertain times, the open

economic system that has been in operation since 1945 does not appear to be closing anytime soon.

It’s resilientGlobe and Mail ‘10

(5/31/10, BRIAN MILNER, "While gloom says bear, TIGER points to bull", lexis, WEA)

Even at the height of the remarkable rebound of 2009 that brought stocks back from the dead zone, the bears never retreated to their lairs. Negative sentiment among investors remained stubbornly high, no matter how promising the economic indicators looked. And then along came the Greeks and their little sovereign debt problem, the Chinese and their public hand-wringing over a sset bubbles and the North Koreans and their latest idiotic sabre-ratting to remind nervous markets just how fragile the nascent global recovery could turn out to be. The latest survey of American investors last week showed bearish sentiment hovering close to 30 per cent, with plenty of room for an uptick in the months ahead, as the optimists come to realize that a V-shaped recovery was never in the cards after the worst global financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression. The world's most overexposed permabear, Nouriel Roubini, is still grabbing headlines with his dire Greece-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg warnings. (Well, he does have a new book to sell.) And such high-profile Canadian bruins as gold-loving money manager Eric Sprott and eminent strategist and data miner David Rosenberg have never veered from their sombre outlooks. The fact that May turned into a particularly brutal month for just about everything but U.S. Treasuries - even after last week's modest rebound, the Dow posted its worst performance for the month in 70 years - only added fuel to arguments that worse, much worse, is yet to come. I mention all this to Eswar Prasad, when I reach the Cornell University economics professor at his hotel in Beijing. Prof. Prasad is a noted China watcher who once headed the IMF's China division and still keeps in close touch with top

government finance officials. But on this call, I'm more interested in one of his other hats as a shrewd analyst of global economic and market trends. "My

inclination also is to be a bear," the affable academic says. "But the data don't support my bearishness as much as I

would like. One has to be a little cautious, because these are based on a variety of indicators. Some of them certainly show more strength than I had realized." The data he's talking about come out of his work on a new composite index derived from a broad set of economic, market and confidence measures in the G20 countries and designed to provide a quarterly snapshot of the global recovery. "All signs are that the recovery has some momentum," says Prof. Prasad, who developed the index at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank where he is also a senior fellow. "But I wouldn't call

it solid enough momentum that we can consider it 'in the bag.'" The new index, cutely named TIGER (Tracking Indices for the Global Economic Recovery), is

a joint effort by Brookings and the Financial Times. And TIGER shows that since the world began climbing out of the deep trough about the middle of last year, big emerging economies have roared ahead , while the developed world has experienced much

more uneven results. Industrial production and trade have bounced back handsomely - total exports from the big emerging

countries now exceed pre-crisis levels - but the employment picture remains cloudy and consumption has yet to develop a new head of steam. "It's much easier at this stage to list all the things that could derail the recovery ," Prof. Prasad says. "But all of those things are still conjectural.

The reality, and the data, is that things are looking better ."

Fungibility guarantees economic flexibility – no collapse

Eugene Gholz (an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin) Daryl G. Press (an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College) Harvey M. Sapolsky (a professor of public policy and organization at MIT) and Benjamin H. Friedman (research fellow in defense and homeland security studies at Cato Institute) Fall 2009 “Restraining Order: For Strategic Modesty” http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/articles/2009-Fall/full-Sapolsky-etal-Fall-2009.html

Under a policy of restraint, the United States would remain deeply enmeshed in the global economy. U.S. firms will continue to sell their products abroad as eagerly as they do now, and consumers around the world will still buy American products. Nor would the adoption of restraint affect the movement of global capital. American investors will still seek high returns abroad , and foreigners will still invest in the United States. Some policy analysts suggest that political instability abroad would disrupt the global economy, interfering with trade and investment. They presume that growing economic interdependence means that the United States has an economic interest in policing the globe. Although globalization heightens economic ties between countries, those ties mitigate U.S. vulnerability to overseas shocks. Globalization has multiplied the alternatives for almost every economic relationship. There are now alternative suppliers for the goods we consume, alternative consumers for the products we manufacture, alternative locations in which we can invest, and alternative sources of capital for our firms. A common metaphor for the global economy—a complex web—is on the mark. The structure of that web can survive even if a few strands are severed. Profit-seeking actors respond quickly to disruptions by searching for the next-best alternative. If there is trouble in the Strait of Malacca, ships will quickly reroute through the nearly-as-convenient Straits of Lombok or Makassar. If disruptions abroad make it harder to sell U.S. bicycles in Korea, manufacturers will sell them in Portugal. Because of globalization, the United States depends more on access to the global economy as a whole but depends less on any specific economic relationship. The oil market seems to stand out as an exception. Disruptions to oil supply routinely cause huge price spikes and painful adjustments. But the danger of oil disruptions does not require that Washington police the Middle East; rather, the United States ought to retain large stockpiles of oil and other critical materials. The U.S. government has already amassed approximately 700 million barrels of oil. If you add the stockpiles in the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and China, the total for the industrialized world is approximately 1.5 billion barrels of oil. And those are only government-controlled stocks; most analysts believe private holdings exceed official stockpiles. When one compares these massive reserves against plausible disruptions, government-controlled stockpiles alone count as more than sufficient to maintain global supply. The extreme flexibility of the global economy adds to restraint’s appeal as a strategy for the United States. The global economy is not a rigid chain with links that must be protected. It is a flexible, constantly changing web that needs no global policeman to direct its traffic

Economy – no war Econ collapse doesn’t cause war – prefer our studiesSamuel Bazzi (Department of Economics at University of California San Diego) and Christopher Blattman (assistant professor of political science and economics at Yale University) November 2011 “Economic Shocks and Conflict: The (Absence of?) Evidence from Commodity Prices” http://www.chrisblattman.com/documents/research/2011.EconomicShocksAndConflict.pdf?9d7bd4

VI. Discussion and conclusions A. Implications for our theories of political instability and conflict The state is not a prize?—Warlord politics and the state prize logic lie at the center of the most influential models of conflict, state development, and political transitions in economics and political science. Yet we see no evidence for this idea in economic shocks, even when looking at the friendliest cases : fragile and unconstrained states dominated by extractive commodity revenues. Indeed, we see the opposite correlation: if anything, higher rents from commodity prices weakly 22 lower the risk and length of conflict . Perhaps shocks are the wrong test. Stocks of resources could matter more than price shocks (especially if shocks are transitory). But combined with emerging evidence that war onset is no more likely even with rapid increases in known oil reserves (Humphreys 2005; Cotet and Tsui 2010) we regard the state prize logic of war with skepticism.17 Our main political economy models may need a new engine. Naturally, an absence of evidence cannot be taken for evidence of absence. Many of our conflict onset and ending results include sizeable positive and negative effects.18 Even so, commodity price shocks are highly influential in income and should provide a rich source of identifiable variation in instability. It is difficult to find a better-measured, more abundant, and plausibly exogenous independent variable than price volatility. Moreover, other time-varying variables, like rainfall and foreign aid, exhibit robust correlations with conflict in spite of suffering similar empirical drawbacks and generally smaller sample sizes (Miguel et al. 2004; Nielsen et al. 2011). Thus we take the absence of evidence seriously. Do resource revenues drive state capacity?—State prize models assume that rising revenues raise the value of the capturing the state, but have ignored or downplayed the effect of revenues on self-defense. We saw that a growing empirical political science literature takes just such a revenue-centered approach, illustrating that resource boom times permit both payoffs and repression, and that stocks of lootable or extractive resources can bring political order and stability. This countervailing effect is most likely with transitory shocks, as current revenues are affected while long term value is not. Our findings are partly consistent with this state capacity effect. For example, conflict intensity is most sensitive to changes in the extractive commodities rather than the annual agricultural crops that affect household incomes more directly. The relationship only holds for conflict intensity, however, and is somewhat fragile. We do not see a large, consistent or robust decline in conflict or coup risk when prices fall. A reasonable interpretation is that the state prize and state capacity effects are either small or tend to cancel one another out. Opportunity cost: Victory by default?—Finally, the inverse relationship between prices and war intensity is consistent with opportunity cost accounts, but not exclusively so. As we noted above, the relationship between intensity and extractive commodity prices is more consistent with the state capacity view. Moreover, we shouldn’t mistake an inverse relation between individual aggression and incomes as evidence for the opportunity cost mechanism. The same correlation is consistent with psychological theories of stress and aggression (Berkowitz 1993) and sociological and political theories of relative deprivation and anomie (Merton 1938; Gurr 1971). Microempirical work will be needed to distinguish between these mechanisms. Other reasons for a null result.—Ultimately, however, the fact

that commodity price shocks have no discernible effect on new conflict onsets, but some effect on ongoing conflict, suggests that political stability might be less sensitive to income or temporary shocks than generally believed. One possibility is that successfully mounting an insurgency is no easy task. It comes with considerable risk, costs, and coordination challenges. Another possibility is that the counterfactual is still conflict onset. In poor and fragile nations, income shocks of one type or another are ubiquitous. If a nation is so fragile that a change in prices could lead to war , then other shocks may trigger war even in the absence of a price shock. The same argument has been made in debunking the myth that price shocks led to fiscal collapse and low growth in developing nations in the 1980s.19 B. A general problem of publication bias? More generally, these findings should heighten our concern with publication bias in the conflict literature. Our results run against a number of published results on commodity shocks and conflict, mainly because of select samples, misspecification, and sensitivity to model assumptions, and , most importantly, alternative measures of instability . Across the social and hard sciences, there is a concern that the majority of published research findings are false (e.g. Gerber et al. 2001). Ioannidis (2005) demonstrates that a published finding is less likely to be true when there is a greater number and lesser pre-selection of tested relationships; there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and models; and when more teams are involved in the chase of statistical significance. The cross-national study of conflict is an extreme case of all these. Most worryingly, almost no paper looks at alternative dependent variables or publishes systematic robustness checks. Hegre and Sambanis (2006) have shown that the majority of published conflict results are fragile, though they focus on timeinvariant regressors and not the time-varying shocks that have grown in popularity. We are also concerned there is a “file drawer problem” (Rosenthal 1979). Consider this decision rule: scholars that discover robust results that fit a theoretical intuition pursue the results; but if results are not robust the scholar (or referees) worry about problems with the data or empirical strategy, and identify additional work to be done. If further analysis produces a robust result, it is published. If not, back to the file drawer. In the aggregate, the consequences are dire: a lower threshold of evidence for initially significant results than ambiguous ones.20

Economy – no war Economic collapse doesn’t cause war – no causal connectionThomas P.M. Barnett (senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC and a contributing editor/online

columnist for Esquire magazine) August 2009 “The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis” http://www.aprodex.com/the-new-rules--security-remains-stable-amid-financial-crisis-398-bl.aspx

When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all sorts of scary predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression leading to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize how globalization's first truly worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the international security landscape. None of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly attributed to the global recession. Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine) predates the economic crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the 15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia (where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly, the Russia-Georgia conflict last August was specifically timed, but by most accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most important external trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in an almost two-decade long struggle between Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then, we see a most familiar picture: the usual mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist movements. Besides the recent Russia-Georgia dust-up, the only two potential state-on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to one side acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to global economic trends. And with the United States effectively tied down by its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistan-bleeding-into-Pakistan), our involvement elsewhere around the planet has been quite modest, both leading up to and following the onset of the economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts in Latin America, the usual military exercises with allies across Asia, mixing it up with pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere else we find serious instability we pretty much let it burn, occasionally pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa Command, for example, hasn't led us to anything beyond advising and training local forces. So, to sum up: * No significant uptick in mass violence or unrest (remember the smattering of urban riots last year in places like Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); * The usual frequency maintained in civil conflicts (in all the usual places); * Not a single state-on-state war directly caused (and no great-power-on-great-power crises even triggered); * No great improvement or disruption in great-power cooperation regarding the emergence of new nuclear powers (despite all that diplomacy); * A modest scaling back of international policing efforts by the system's acknowledged Leviathan power (inevitable given the strain); and * No serious efforts by any rising great power to challenge that Leviathan or supplant its role. (The worst things we can cite are Moscow's occasional deployments of strategic assets to the Western hemisphere and its weak efforts to outbid the United States on basing rights in Kyrgyzstan; but the best include China and India stepping up their aid and investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Sure, we've finally seen global defense spending surpass the previous world record set in the late 1980s, but even that's likely to wane given the stress on public budgets created by all this unprecedented "stimulus" spending. If anything, the friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging was the most notable great-power dynamic caused by the crisis. Can we say that the world has suffered a distinct shift to political

radicalism as a result of the economic crisis? Indeed, no. The world's major economies remain governed by center-left or center-right political factions that remain decidedly friendly to both markets and trade. In the short run, there were attempts across the board to insulate economies from immediate damage (in effect, as much protectionism as allowed under current trade rules), but there was no great slide into "trade wars." Instead, the World Trade Organization is functioning as it was designed to function, and regional efforts toward free-trade agreements have not slowed. Can we say Islamic radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis? If it was, that shift was clearly overwhelmed by the Islamic world's growing disenchantment with the brutality displayed by violent extremist groups such as al-Qaida. And looking forward, austere economic times are just as likely to breed connecting evangelicalism as disconnecting fundamentalism. At the end of the day, the economic crisis did not prove to be sufficiently frightening to provoke major economies into establishing global regulatory schemes, even as it has sparked a spirited -- and much needed, as I argued last week -- discussion of the continuing viability of the U.S. dollar as the world's primary reserve currency. Naturally, plenty of experts and pundits have attached great significance to this debate, seeing in it the beginning of "economic warfare" and the like between "fading" America and "rising" China. And yet, in a world of globally integrated production chains and interconnected financial markets, such "diverging interests" hardly constitute signposts for wars up ahead. Frankly, I don't welcome a world in which America's fiscal profligacy goes undisciplined, so bring it on -- please! Add it all up and it's fair to say that this global financial crisis has proven the great resilience of America's post-World War II international liberal trade order. Do I expect to read any analyses along those lines in the blogosphere any time soon? Absolutely not. I expect the fantastic fear-mongering to proceed apace. That's what the Internet is for.

Economic collapse doesn’t cause warJervis, professor of political science – Columbia University, ‘11

(Robert, Force in Our Times,” Survival, Vol. 25, No. 4, p. 403-425)

Even if war is still seen as evil, the security community could be dissolved if severe conflicts of interest were to arise. Could the more peaceful world generate new interests that would bring the members of the community into sharp disputes? 45 A zero-sum sense of status would be one example, perhaps linked to a steep rise in nationalism. More likely would be a worsening of the current economic difficulties , which could itself produce greater nationalism , undermine democracy and bring back old-fashioned beggar-my-neighbor economic policies .

While these dangers are real , it is hard to believe that the conflicts could be great enough to lead the members of the community to

contemplate fight ing each other . It is not so much that economic interdependence has proceeded to the point where it could not be reversed –

states that were more internally interdependent than anything seen internationally have fought bloody civil wars. Rather it is that even if

the more extreme versions of free trade and economic liberalism become discredited , it is hard to see how without building on a

preexisting high level of political conflict leaders and mass opinion would come to believe that their countries could prosper by impoverishing or even attacking others. Is it possible that problems will not only become severe, but that people will entertain the thought that they have to be solved by war? While a pessimist could note that this argument does not appear as outlandish as it did before the

financial crisis, an optimist could reply (correctly, in my view) that the very fact that we have seen such a sharp economic down-turn

without anyone suggesting that force of arms is the solution shows that even if bad times bring about greater economic conflict , it

will not make war thinkable .

No impact to economic decline – empirically provenFerguson, 2006 (Niall, MA, D.Phil., is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is a resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He is also a Senior Reseach Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct)

Nor can economic crises explain the bloodshed. What may be the most familiar causal chain in modern historiography links the Great Depression to the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II. But that simple story leaves too much out. Nazi Germany started the war in Europe only after its economy had recovered . Not all the countries affected by the Great Depression were taken over by fascist regimes, nor did all such regimes start wars of aggression. In fact, no general relationship between economics and conflict is discernible for the century as a whole. Some wars came after periods of growth, others were the causes rather than the consequences of economic catastrophe, and some severe economic crises were not followed by wars.

Protectionism defenseNo impact to protectionism – backlash will not escalate into an all out trade war.Kati Suominen (transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and trade economist at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington) 2009 “A New Age Of Protectionism? the Economic Crisis And Transatlantic Trade Policy”, the German Marshall Fund Of The United States, http://www.gmfus.org//doc/Suominen%20final.pdf

This paper makes three arguments First, fears of an all-out trade war and spiraling protectionist backlash are exaggerated. There are a great many insurance policies in place to pre-empt anything akin to the beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the 1930s, including a solid multilateral system with bound tariffs and a credible dispute settlement mechanism, dozens of bilateral free trade deals with often deep tariff commitments, solid intellectual backing for free trade, well-organized export lobbies, and the unprecedentedly large stake that countries around the world have in the policies of their trading partners and the fortunes of the global trading system.

Protectionism concerns are overblown; its inevitable and overall has had very little effect on the continuing function of free tradeDani Rodrik, Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. “The Myth of Rising Protectionism”. 2009. http://relooney.fatcow.com/0_New_5973.pdf

The reality is that the international trade regime has passed its greatest test since the Great Depression with flying colors. Trade economists who complain about minor instances of protectionism sound like a child whining about a damaged toy in the wake of an earthquake that killed thousands. Three things explain this remarkable resilience : ideas, politics , and institutions . Economists have been extraordinarily successful in conveying their message to policymakers – even if ordinary people still regard imports with considerable suspicion. Nothing reflects this better than how “protection” and “protectionists” have become terms of derision. After all, governments are generally expected to provide protection to its citizens. But if you say that you favor protection from imports , you are painted into a corner with Reed Smoot and Willis C. Hawley, authors of the infamous 1930 US tariff bill. But economists’ ideas would not have gone very far without significant changes in the underlying configuration of political interests in favor of open trade. For every worker and firm affected adversely by import competition, there is one or more worker and firm expecting to reap the benefits of access to markets abroad. The latter have become increasingly vocal and powerful, often represented by large multinational corporations. In his latest book, Paul Blustein recounts how a former Indian trade minister once asked his American counterpart to bring him a picture of an American farmer: “I have never actually seen one,” the minister quipped. “I have only seen US conglomerates masquerading as farmers.” But the relative docility of rank-and-file workers on trade issues must ultimately be attributed to something else altogether: the safety nets erected by the welfare state. Modern industrial societies now have a wide array of social protections – unemployment compensation, adjustment assistance, and other labor-market tools, as well as health insurance and family support – that mitigate demand for cruder forms of protection. The welfare state is the flip side of the open economy. If the world has not

fallen off the protectionist precipice during the crisis, as it did during the 1930’s, much of the credit must go the social programs that conservatives and market fundamentalists would like to see scrapped. The battle against trade protection has been won – so far. But, before we relax, let’s remember that we still have not addressed the central challenge the world economy will face as the crisis eases: the inevitable clash between China’s need to produce an ever-growing quantity of manufactured goods and America’s need to maintain a smaller current-account deficit. Unfortunately, there is little to suggest that policymakers are yet ready to confront this genuine threat.

Even if protectionism occurs it is short-lived and has marginal effects on tradeDaniel Ikenson (director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies) 2009 “A protectionism fling”, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10651

Conclusion Despite the global economic contraction and the occasional protectionist indulgence, there is reason to be hopeful that retrogressive policies will be marginal, short-lived, and ultimately rejected. The absence of trade rules in the 1930s meant that there were no proffered courses of action, no sources of adjudication or remediation, and no generally accepted limits to the actions governments could take in response to external economic policies. And there were far fewer domestic constituencies of any political consequence advocating against protectionism in the '30s. Consequently, there were no proven stopgaps to prevent the pandemic of spiraling protectionism that erupted and exacerbated the global recession.

Today we have the benefit of understanding the consequences of the actions taken in the 1930s. Although that understanding does not guarantee avoidance of past mistakes, we also have solid institutions and incentives to help steer policymakers away from the abyss. The rules governing more than 60 years of trade liberalization have fostered greater certainty and stability, and thus more investment, trade, and economic growth. And today, the commercial and political appeal of protectionism is considerably diminished because most countries have established domestic constituencies that depend on a trade and investment environment that is open in both directions

Protectionism doesn’t cause conflicts – Comprehensive studiesMartin, Mayer and Thoenig 2008 (Phillipe, University of Paris 1 Pantheon—Sorbonne, Paris School of Economics, and Centre for Economic Policy Research; Thierry MAYER, University of Paris 1 Pantheon—Sorbonne, Paris School of Economics, CEPII, and Centre for Economic Policy Research, Mathias THOENIG, University of Geneva and Paris School of Economics, The Review of Economic Studies 75)

Does globalization pacify international relations? The “liberal” view in political science argues that increasing trade flows and the spread of free markets and democracy should limit the incentive to use military force in interstate relations. This vision, which can partly be traced back to Kant’s Essay on Perpetual Peace (1795), has been very influential: The main objective of the European trade integration process was to prevent the killing and destruction of the two World Wars from ever happening again.1 Figure 1 suggests2 however, that d uring the 1870–2001 period, the correlation between trade openness and military conflicts is not a clear cut one. The first era of globalization , at the end of the 19th century, was a period of rising trade openness and multiple military conflicts, culminating with

World War I. Then, the interwar period was characterized by a simultaneous collapse of world trade and conflicts. After World War II, world trade increased rapidly , while the number of conflicts decreased (although the risk of a global conflict was obviously high). There is no clear evidence that the 1990s, during which trade flows increased dramatically, was a period of lower prevalence of military conflicts, even taking into account the increase in the number of sovereign states.

A2 Internet Freedom Adv

Internet freedom sustainableInternet freedom sustainable – self-correcting – its hypeFinnie 14 {Matthew, Chief Technology Officer for Interoute, degrees in electrical and electronic engineering, regular advisor to the European Commission on ICT research and innovation and a member of the CONNECT Advisory Forum, “Is the Internet Really Going to Collapse -- Again?,” Wired, 6/2, http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/is-the-internet-really-going-to-collapse-again#axzz3EeAfWS5k# }

Every couple of months a major report is released that foretells the demise of the things we hold dear in the digital

world. These are usually produced in an effort to shock people into reading the report and then promote the author’s solution to the

problem. A recent example of this comes from storage behemoth EMC which cited that by 2019 the internet would collapse under the weight of content being

relentlessly generated. The general theme of EMC’s report is that our desire to consume and share is ever present. In fact, the accepted assumption now is that if you’re an organisation, you want the content you create to spread globally. By doing that, combined with all you can eat storage offers from the likes of

Dropbox and Microsoft, we are all heading for a technological apocalypse as our data centre infrastructure crumbles under the pressure of

our storage needs. But actually, that’s just not the case . Technology has a knack of relentlessly improving its

capacity to support our insatiable demand. Gordon Moore could be the father of the modern global economy when in

1965 he analysed the density with which you can put transistors onto a silicon wafer. The paper he wrote, called,

‘Cramming more components onto integrated circuits’, Electronics Magazine 19 April 1965, noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965. The paper concluded

saying that that there was no reason this consistent ‘ upgrade’ would ever stop . . What is striking is that the

paper was right . The hard disk you bought 10 years ago cost the same, but the volume is 1000 times more. The networks we use are 100 times cheaper and

bigger in both direction. The shift to cloud computing is as much about efficiently using silicon as convenience for the customer. Whether it’s to make financial trading faster, take photos with millions of pixels or watch TV on the train, we simply

want to do everything everywhere all the time, faster. Tech nology simply looks at what’s hindering us and removes it . Making

technology the ultimate convenience enabler . So will technology just keeping on improving, enabling us to keep

up with demand? It might , but there’s a second powerful factor to consider, and that’s our fickle nature as human beings. Our love of convenience

feeds our impatience. So if, a great social media site gets overly exploited by people trying to sell to you, or your inbox gets rammed full of promotions we simply switch off and move on to the new thing. Despite all the choice available to us in the big wide digital world, we end up selecting what works for us and leaving what

doesn’t to fade away on the digital scrap heap. In essence, we are self correcting our consumption. So will the party carry on forever? Most

likely , through a combination of technology-enabling convenience to keep up with demand and humans simply discarding what’s not needed.

Internet won’t collapse – ignore their empirically denied doomsaying Dvorak 7 {John C., syndicated technology and computing analyst, Bachelors in History (California-Berkley), “Will the Internet Collapse?” PC Mag, 5/1, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0%2c2817%2c2124376%2c00.asp#THUR}

When is the Internet going to collapse? The answer is NEVER . The Internet is amazing for no other

reason than that it hasn't simply collapsed, never to be rebooted. Over a decade ago, many pundits were predicting an all-out catastrophic failure, and back then the load was nothing compared with what it is today. So how much more can this network take? Let's look at the basic changes that have occurred since the Net became chat-worthy around 1990. First of all, only a few people were on the Net back in 1990, since it was essentially a carrier for e-mail (spam free!), newsgroups, gopher, and FTP. These capabilities remain. But the e-mail load has grown to phenomenal proportions and become burdened

with megatons of spam. In one year, the amount of spam can exceed a decade's worth, say 1990 to 2000, of all Internet traffic. It's actually the astonishing overall growth of the Internet that is amazing. In 1990, the total U.S. backbone throughput of the Internet was 1 terabyte, and in 1991 it doubled to 2TB. Throughput continued to double until 1996, when it jumped to 1,500TB. After that huge jump, it returned to doubling, reaching 80,000 to 140,000TB in 2002. This ridiculous growth rate has continued as more and more services are added to the burden. The jump in 1996 is attributable to the one-two punch of the universal popularization of the Web and the introduction of the MP3 standard and subsequent music file sharing. More recently, the emergence of inane video clips (YouTube and the rest) as universal entertainment has continued to slam the Net with overhead, as has large video file sharing via BitTorrent and other systems. Then VoIP came along, and IPTV is next. All the while, e-mail numbers are in the trillions of messages, and spam has never been more plentiful and bloated. Add blogging, vlogging, and twittering and it just gets worse. According to some expensive studies, the growth rate has begun to slow down to something like 50 percent per year. But that's growth on top of huge numbers. Petabytes. So when does this thing just grind to a halt or blow up? To date, we have to admit that the structure of the Net is robust, to say the least. This is impressive, considering the fact that experts were predicting a collapse in the 1990s. Robust or not, this Internet is a transportation system. It transports data. All transportation systems eventually need upgrading, repair, basic changes, or reinvention. But what needs to be done here? This, to me, has come to be the big question. Does anything at all need to be done, or do we run it into the ground and then fix it later? Is this like a jalopy leaking oil and water about to blow, or an organic perpetual-motion machine that

fixes itself somehow? Many believe that the Net has never collapsed because it does tend to fix itself . A decade ago we were going to run out of IP addresses—remember? It righted itself, with rotating addresses and subnets. Many of the Net's improvements are self-improvements. Only spam, viruses, and spyware represent incurable diseases that could kill the organism. I have to conclude that the worst-case scenario for the Net is an outage here or there, if anywhere. After all, the phone system, a more machine-intensive system, never really imploded after years and years of growth, did it? While it has outages, it's actually more reliable than the power grid it sits on. Why should the Internet be any different now that it is essentially run by phone companies who know how to keep networks up? And let's be real here. The Net is being improved daily, with newer routers and better gear being constantly hot-swapped all over the world. This is not the same Internet we had in 1990, nor is it what we had in 2000.

Internet is safe—open, secure, resilientNegroponte, 13 (John Negroponte – research fellow and lecturer in international affairs at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, 8/16, The Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/ Global-Viewpoint/2013/0816/The-Internet-will-not-survive-unless-we-defend-it)

The Internet as we know it is open, secure, and resilient. This is no mistake. It was designed and has evolved this way. Due to its open nature, the Internet has gained traction at a fantastic pace and transformed the world by fostering communication and innovation while generating tremendous economic growth. Roughly 2.5 billion people, more than one-third of the world’s population, currently use the Internet, and another 2.5 billion individuals are expected to go online by the end of this decade.

No balkanization – it’s posturingTim Maurer and Robert Morgus 2-19-2014; Tim Maurer focuses on international affairs and Internet policy at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute. Robert Morgus is a researcher at New America's Open Technology Institute.Stop Calling Decentralization of the Internet “Balkanization” http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/02/19/stop_calling_decentralization_of_the_internet_balkanization.html

It’s the end of the Internet. That was the headline of the prominent Swiss newspaper NZZ on Feb. 9. And Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, recently called for a re-decentralization, declaring, “I want a Web that’s open, works internationally, works as well as

possible, and is not nation-based.” These are the latest voices in the growing chorus over the “balkanization” of the Internet and the emergence of “splinternets”—networks that are walled off from the rest of the Web. This is an important debate, one that will affect the future of the Internet. And with a major global conference on this topic taking place in Brazil in April and the

World Summit on the Information Society +10 scheduled for 2015, it is high time to bring more clarity and nuance to it. Unfortunately, the term balkanization itself creates problems. Depending on whom you ask, balkanization can be a positive or negative process. For some, the term represents a move toward freedom from oppression. For others, it is a reminder of centuries of bloody struggle to hold together a region that ultimately ended in violent fragmentation, which makes use of the word offensive to some. Fragmentation of the Internet is the term we’ll use, but maybe a creative mind somewhere will find a better, more evocative way to describe it. The question is: What does fragmentation mean, exactly? Is it the end of the Internet if domain names can no longer only be written using the Roman alphabet? If so, the Internet ended in 2009, when ICANN approved alternative alphabet domain names. Is it fragmentation if people around the world using Weibo and Yandex in lieu of Google and Twitter? Or is it data localization and national routing – subjecting data transfers to national boundaries? This debate is a lot more complex than most headlines suggest. The Internet is more than Facebook and it is more than the Web itself—more than the content people access every day. However,

popular discussion tends to lump these various dimensions together. It obscures the fragmentation efforts that truly undermine the openness and interoperability of the network .

No modelingNo global modeling—regardless of our position on surveillance. And there are alt causes or exceptions to even our commitment to open communication.Bambauer, 12 -- Derek E. Bambauer, Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School, Chicago LR, 12, “ORWELL’S ARMCHAIR”, Lexis

Ordinarily, the term “censorship” carries a pejorative connotation. It is particularly loaded in American scholarly and political discourse, where censorship is seen as anathema to deeply-held beliefs about the importance of unfettered discourse and free expression. Yet America’s normative commitment to open communication contains exceptions. Even the Supreme Court has permitted a state government to censor by seizing material in advance of a judicial determination as to whether it was unlawful. The Court emphasized, rightly, the procedural safeguards included in the scheme rather than treating seizures as per se impermissible. America, like every other country, views some material as sufficiently harmful to warrant blocking. And like most countries, America prefers not to describe such blocking as censorship. Each state balances freedom of expression against other values differently, leading to incommensurable definitions of what constitutes censorship. For Americans, filtering file sharing sites does not qualify as censorship , but filtering politically-oriented or pornographic sites does. For South Korean citizens, though, filtering pornographic sites or politically-oriented material that praises North Korea does not count as censorship , but blocking file sharing sites does . Norms vary. Every country assumes its own views on content restrictions are not only defensible, but natural.

Internet freedom not key to econ

Not key to the economy

Lowrey 2011 (Annie; Freaks, geeks, and the GDP; Mar 8; www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/03/freaks_geeks_and_gdp.html; kdf)

If you have attended any economists' cocktail parties in the past month or so—lucky you!—then you have probably heard chatter about Tyler Cowen's e-book, The Great Stagnation. The book seeks to explain why in the United States median wages have grown only slowly since the 1970s and have actually declined in the past decade. Cowen points to an innovation problem: Through the 1970s, the country had plenty of "low-hanging fruit" to juice GDP growth. In the past 40 years, coming up with whiz-bang, life-changing innovations—penicillin, free universal kindergarten, toilets, planes, cars—has proved harder, pulling down growth rates across the industrialized world. But wait! you might say. In the 1970s, American businesses started pumping out amazing, life-changing computing technologies. We got

graphing calculators, data-processing systems, modern finance, GPS, silicon chips, ATMs, cell phones, and a host of other innovations. Has the Internet, the

most revolutionary communications technology advance since Gutenberg rolled out the printing press, done nothing for GDP growth? The answer, economists broadly agree, is: Sorry, but no — at least, not nearly as much as you would expect. A quarter century ago, with new technologies starting to saturate American homes and businesses, economists looked around and expected to find computer-fueled

growth everywhere. But signs of increased productivity or bolstered growth were few and far between. Sure, computers and the Web transformed thousands of businesses and hundreds of industries. But overall, things looked much the same. The GDP growth rate did not tick up significantly, nor did productivity.

As economist Robert Solow put it in 1987: "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." An overlapping set of theories emerged to explain the phenomenon, often termed the "productivity paradox." Perhaps the new technologies advantaged some firms and industries and disadvantaged others, leaving little net gain. Perhaps computer systems were not yet easy enough to use to reduce the amount of effort workers need to exert to perform a given task. Economists also wondered whether it might just take some time—perhaps a lot of time—for the gains to show up. In the past, information technologies tended to need to incubate before they produced gains in economic growth. Consider the case of Gutenberg's printing press. Though the technology radically transformed how people recorded and transmitted news and information, economists have failed to find evidence it sped up per-capita income or GDP growth in the 15th and 16th centuries. At one point, some economists thought that an Internet-driven golden age might have finally arrived in the late 1990s. Between 1995 and 1999, productivity growth rates actually exceeded those during the boom from 1913 to 1972—perhaps meaning the Web and computing had finally brought about a "New Economy." But that high-growth period faded quickly. And some studies found the gains during those years were not as impressive or widespread as initially thought. Robert Gordon, a professor of economics at Northwestern, for instance, has found that computers and the Internet mostly helped boost productivity in durable goods manufacturing—that is, the production of things like computers and semiconductors. "Our central theme is that computers and the Internet do not measure up to the Great Inventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and in this do not merit the label of Industrial Revolution," he wrote. Gordon's work leads to another theory, one espoused by Cowen himself. Perhaps the Internet is just not as revolutionary as we think it is. Sure, people might derive endless pleasure from it—its tendency to improve people's quality of life is undeniable. And sure, it might have revolutionized how we find, buy, and sell goods and

services. But that still does not necessarily mean it is as transformative of an economy as, say, railroads were. That is in part because the Internet and computers tend to push costs toward zero, and have the capacity to reduce the need for labor . You are, of course,

currently reading this article for free on a Web site supported not by subscriptions, but by advertising. You probably read a lot of news articles online, every day, and you probably pay nothing for them. Because of the decline in subscriptions, increased competition for advertising dollars, and other Web-driven dynamics, journalism profits and employment have dwindled in the past decade. (That Cowen writes a freely distributed blog and published his ideas in a $4 e-book rather than a $25 glossy airport hardcover should not go unnoted here.) Moreover, the Web- and computer-dependent technology sector itself does not employ that many people. And it does not look set to add workers: The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that employment in information technology, for instance, will be lower in 2018 than it was in 1998. That the Internet has not produced an economic boom might be hard to believe, Cowen admits. "We have a collective historical memory that technological progress brings a big and predictable stream of revenue growth across most of the economy," he writes. "When it comes to the web, those assumptions are turning out to be wrong or misleading. The revenue-intensive sectors of our economy have been slowing down and the big technological gains are coming in revenue-deficient sectors." But revenue is not always the end-all, be-all—even in economics. That brings us to a final explanation: Maybe it is not the growth that is deficient. Maybe it is the yardstick that is deficient. MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson * explains

the idea using the example of the music industry. "Because you and I stopped buying CDs, the music industry has shrunk, according to revenues and GDP. But we're not listening to less music. There's more music consumed than before." The improved choice and variety and availability of music must be worth something to us—even if it is not easy to put into numbers. "On paper, the way GDP is calculated, the music industry is disappearing, but in reality

it's not disappearing. It is disappearing in revenue. It is not disappearing in terms of what you should care about, which is music." As more of our lives are lived online, he wonders whether this might become a bigger problem. "If everybody focuses on the part of the economy that produces dollars, they would be increasingly missing what people actually consume and enjoy. The disconnect becomes bigger and bigger." But providing an alternative measure of what we produce or consume based on the value people derive from Wikipedia or Pandora proves an extraordinary challenge—indeed, no economist has ever really done it. Brynjolfsson says it is possible, perhaps, by adding up various "consumer surpluses," measures of how much consumers would be willing to pay for a given good or service, versus how much they do pay. (You might pony up $10 for a CD, but why would you if it is free?) That might give a rough sense of the dollar value of what the Internet tends to provide for nothing—and give us an alternative sense of the value of our technologies to us, if not their ability to produce growth or revenue for us. Of course, if our most radical and life-altering technologies are not improving incomes or productivity or growth, then we still have problems. Quality-of-life

improvements do not put dinner on the table or pay for Social Security benefits. Still, even Cowen does not see all doom and gloom ahead, with incomes stagnating endlessly as we do more and more online and bleed more and more jobs and money . Who knows what awesome technologies might be just around the bend?

Internet freedom doesn’t help growth.Charles Kenny, 6/17/2013. senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. “Think the Internet Leads to Growth? Think Again,” Bloomberg Business Week, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-17/think-the-internet-leads-to-growth-think-again.

Remember the year 2000 in the months after the Y2K bug had been crushed, when all appeared smooth sailing in the global economy? When the miracle of finding information online was so novel that The Onion ran an article, “Area Man Consults Internet Whenever Possible?” It was a time of confident predictions of an ongoing economic and political renaissance powered by information technology. Jack Welch—then the lauded chief executive officer of General Electric (GE)—had suggested the Internet was “the single most important event in the U.S. economy since the Industrial Revolution.” The Group of Eight highly industrialized nations—at that point still relevant—met in Okinawa in 2000 and declared, “IT is fast becoming a vital engine of growth for the world economy. … Enormous opportunities are there to be seized by us all.” In a 2000 report, then-President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers suggested (PDF), “Many economists now posit that we are entering a new, digital economy that could inaugurate an unprecedented period of sustainable, rapid growth.”

It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Indeed, if the last 10 years have demonstrated anything, it’s that for all the impact of a technology like the Internet, thinking that any new innovation will set us on a course of high growth is almost certainly wrong .

That’s in part because many of the studies purporting to show a relationship between the Internet and economic growth relied on shoddy data and dubious assumptions . In 1999 the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland released a study that concluded (PDF), “… the fraction of a country’s population that has access to the Internet is, at least, correlated with factors that help to explain average growth performance .” It did so by demonstrating a positive relationship between the number of Internet users in a country in 1999 with g ross d omestic p roduct growth from 1974 to 1992. Usually we expect the thing being caused (growth in the 1980s) to happen after the things causing it (1999 Internet users).

In defense of the Fed, researchers at the World Bank recently tried to repeat the same trick. They estimated that a 10 percent increase in broadband penetration in a country was associated with a 1.4 percentage point increase in growth rate. This was based on growth rates and broadband penetration from 1980 to 2006. Given that most deployment of broadband occurred well after the turn of the millennium, the only plausible interpretation of the results is that countries that grew faster from 1980 to 2006 could afford more rapid rollouts of broadband . Yet the study is widely cited by broadband boosters. Many are in denial about the failure of the IT revolution to spark considerable growth.

Innovation in information technology has hardly dried up since 2000. YouTube(GOOG) was founded in 2005, and Facebook (FB) is only a year older. Customer-relations manager Salesforce.com (CRM), the first cloud-based solution for business, only just predates the turn of the millennium. And there are now 130 million smartphones in the U.S., each with about the same computing power as a 2005 vintage desktop. Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce

(PDF), retail e-commerce as a percentage of total retail sales has continued to climb—e-commerce sales were more than 6 percent of the total by the fourth quarter of 2012, up from less than 2 percent in 2003.

Yet despite continuing IT innovation, we’ve seen few signs that predictions of “an unprecedented period of sustainable, rapid growth ” are coming true . U.S. GDP expansion in the 1990s was a little faster than the 1980s—it climbed from an annual average of 3 percent to 3.2 percent. But GDP growth collapsed to 1.7 percent from 2000 to 2009. Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon notes that U.S. labor productivity growth spiked briefly—rising from 1.38 percent from 1972 to 1996 to 2.46 percent from 1996 to 2004—but fell to 1.33 percent from 2004 and 2012.

Part of the labor productivity spike around the turn of the century was because of the rapidly increasing efficiency of IT production (you get a lot more computer for the same cost nowadays). Another part was because of considerable investments in computers and networks across the economy —what economists call “capital deepening.” But even during the boom years it was near-impossible to see an economywide impact of IT on “total factor productivity”—or the amount of output we were getting for a given input of capital and labor combined.

Within the U.S., investment in the uses of the Internet for business applications had an impact on wage and employment growth in only 6 percent of counties—those that already had high incomes, large populations, high skills, and concentrated IT use before 1995, according to a recent analysis (PDF) by Chris Forman and colleagues in the American Economic Review . Investments in computers and software did yield a return for most companies—but the return wasn’t anything special .

So what happened to the promised Internet miracle? While the technology has had a dramatic impact on our lives, it hasn’t had a huge impact on traditional economic measures. Perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

To understand why, think about television in the 1970s. Broadcast to the home for free, and all we had to pay for was the set and the electricity to run it. Despite that small expenditure, we spent hours a day watching TV.

Fast-forward four decades: 209 million Americans spent an average 29 hours online in January , according toNielsen; 145 million U.S. Facebook visitors spent an average six hours in January on that site alone. And each month, YouTube users spend 6 billion hours watching videos—or 684,000 times as long as it took to paint the Sistine Chapel. They pay for the PC and Internet connection, but per hour, surfing the Web is a cheap form of entertainment .

And all that time online has knock-on effects. Andirana Bellou at the University of Montreal suggests that broadband adoption has led to increasing marriage rates among 21- to 30-year-olds as they meet online in chatrooms and dating sites, but has “significantly reduced the time young people spend on socializing and physically communicating.” This may be why the link between Internet usage and measures of contentment are pretty weak. According to the World Database of Happiness, answers to a poll that asked if you were not happy (a score of 1), somewhat happy (2), or very happy (3) averaged 2.28 in the U.S. in 1990. That fell to 2.11 in 2010. Studies of Internet use tend to suggest that people who spend more time online are less happy (PDF) than the rest of us—although it may be that less happy people are surfing more rather than surfing being the cause of their misery. Regardless, the Internet has been behind a massive shift in our use of time during the past two decades, and not necessarily one that has generated a huge amount of positive feelings .

Of course, we also use the Internet to sell stuff on e-Bay and look for jobs. While Betsy Stevenson has suggested (PDF) in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper that the widespread use of the Internet in job searches may be one factor behind employed people switching jobs more often, she concludes there’s little evidence that the Web helps the unemployed find jobs faster.

Perhaps one reason we haven’t seen a huge impact on productivity because of access to the Internet is because, once we find a job, we spend quite a lot of time surfing the Web at the office . (Some of that time is

used to look for a different job, apparently.) Ninety percent of workers with a PC also say they surf recreational sites at work. Almost the same number say they send personal e-mails, and more than half report they

cybershop. The reality may be worse: Tracking software suggests that 70 percent of employees visit retail sites, and more than one-third check out X-rated sites. Perhaps we’re using the Internet to do more in less time at work. Yet we’re using the extra hours to check out pictures of Kate Upton or cats playing the piano rather than producing more widgets for the boss.

Alt Causesalt causes – online gambling policies also restrict internet freedomGelb, 2010 (Professor of Business & Economics @ University of Houston, Foreign Affairs, 7/28/10, “Getting Digital Statecraft Right” http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66502/betsy-gelb-and-emmanuel-yujuico/getting-digital-statecraft-right)

All these cases share the same fallacy -- that U.S.-directed methods can spur development in other nations. But U.S. policies seeking to extend freedom through technology can be successful -- if the

U nited S tates refrains from acting in ways that seem less than sincere , and if it adopts a gradual,

rather than transformative, approach. U.S. protests against censorship would seem more convincing if it were not for its own policies restricting Internet freedom. Consider, for example, the United States' questionable prohibition of cross-border trade in Internet gambling . In 2004, the World Trade Organization ruled in favor of Antigua and Barbuda against the United States when the United States banned online gambling services emanating from the twin-island nation. The United States appealed the case and lost, but in the meantime, Antigua's online gambling industry was virtually destroyed. The

U nited S tates still has not yet satisfactorily resolved this ruling and should do so by conform ing to it.

Internet nationalization inevitableFree internet doesn’t exist – nationalization and regulation are good Mansell 11 (Robin, Department of Media and Communications , London School of Economics and Political Science , London, UK. New visions, old practices: Policy and regulation in the Internet era, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 25:01, 19-32)I

Champions of an open Internet , not subject to regulation , have so far managed to convince policy makers that direct intervention under conventional telecommunication or broadcasting regulatory mechanisms is not needed and would suppress innovative activity (Benkler 2000; Johnson and Post 1996). Internet

Service Providers (ISPs)4 have been classed in the U nited S tates as information service providers, not subject

to traditional common carriage regulations by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC 2005). In Europe, the

Internet is unregulated , at least in so far as it is not understood to involve carriage, and it is not classed

as a mass media audio-visual service (EC 2009b, 2010b). It is important to recall, however, that the Internet ‘sits’

on top of a network infrastructure. There are corporate interests in the sale of routers , network

cables , microware towers , terminals and handsets and in software applications and content . Many

of these market segments are subject to regulation in the public interest which has been affected by the

neoliberal agenda. Thus, claims that the Internet has escaped this agenda entirely are misguided . 5

Scarcity and corporate interest in the Internet

Political economy analyses of the content and telecommunication industries have revealed the market

power of the large companies (Bettig and Hall 2003; McChesney 2004; Mosco 2004), but there has been remarkably

little research on the specific interests of companies that are dominating many aspects of the Internet.

Even if the distributed nature of the Internet enables many actors to participate in content production

and communicative processes, empirical analysis indicates that emerging strategies are similar to the

monopolizing tendencies of the earlier media and communication industries .

Exploiting labour power

Cohen (2008, 7), for example, analyses corporate interests in social interactions among users of Facebook. She

considers whether audiences are ‘empowered’ when they serve as co-producers of content ,6 suggesting

that users are providing their unpaid labour in support of the profit-seeking motives of large

companies . The Web 2.0 applications are being put into the service of capital , ‘reorganizing production

and distribution in order to increase wealth and extend control over the labour force ’ (7). The unpaid

work of users enables the owners of Facebook and other similar sites to build revenue models around users

who ‘self-service’ themselves .7

Her analysis of the political economy of the new online social media recalls Smythe’s earlier discussion of the ‘audience commodity’ in the age of the mass media (Smythe 1977).8 If today’s ‘audience’ comprises globally networked

users who seem to derive pleasure through social networking , producing a ‘productive composition of

bodies as aggregates of networked ICTs’ (Cote´ and Pybus 2007, 97), then ‘ immaterial labour 2.0 ’ on Facebook

or MySpace offers companies a basis for targeting their marketing of goods and services . As Cote´ and Pybus

(103) argue, these networked relations of affinity ‘ are an emergent form of contestation of neoliberal

globalization’ but they also serve capitalist interests increasingly well, offering new sites for co-

optation .

The dialectic of co-optation and resistance is evident in the proliferation of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing of copyright-infringing content (David 2010) and in the use of social networking to mount social movements of many different kinds. The Internet is being used to support political opposition, but these activities

remain subject to co-optatio n either by mainstream media or they are subject to surveillance and other

online counter-insurgency activities of the state (Bennett 2003; Cammaerts 2008; Latham and Sassen 2005; McCurdy 2009;

Rogers 2004). The existence of involuntary, or even voluntary co-optation, creates a prima facie case for

public oversight, if not a case for regulatory intervention. In this paper, the focus is on the strategies of the corporate

world rather than on those of the state . In the next sub-sections I discuss whether the open Internet is being managed to

create scarcity conditions that are necessary for the exercise of discriminatory corporate power.

Impact defenseInternet doesn't solve extinction; answers their authorSeth Mnookin teaches science writing at MIT March 23, 2012, "The Frozen Future of Nonfiction", http://www.downloadtheuniverse.com/dtu/2012/03/why-the-net-matters-how-the-internet-will-save-civilization-by-david-eagleman-canongate-books-2010-for-ipad-by-set.html

Or maybe you’re like me, and you can no longer remember when you first became aware of Eagleman and his work--you just know you’re curious about whatever it is he decides to tackle next because it will inevitably be interesting and erudite and thought-provoking and, in all likelihood, fun.

At least, that’s what I assumed before I read Why The Net Matters, Eagleman’s frustrating 2010 e-book about how and why the Internet will save civilization. (I reviewed the $7.99 iPad version, which is the platform it was designed for; a stripped-down, text-based version is available on the Kindle for the portentous price of $6.66.) The problems start with Eagleman’s premise, which is so vague and broad as to be practically meaningless. There are, he writes, just “a handful of reasons” that civilizations collapse: “disease, poor information flow, natural disasters, political corruption, resource depletion and economic meltdown.” Lucky for us (and Eagleman does offer readers “[c]ongratulations on living in a fortuitous moment in history”), the technology that created the web “obviates many of the threats faced by our ancestors. In other words...[t]he advent of the internet represents a watershed moment in history that just might rescue our future.”

On the other hand, it just might not: In order to make his point, Eagleman either ignores or doesn’t bother to look for any evidence that might undercut it. The first of six “random access” chapters that make up the bulk of Why The Net Matters is devoted to “Sidestepping Epidemics,” like the smallpox outbreak that helped bring down the Aztec Empire. In the future, Eagleman writes, the “protective net ,” in the form of telemedicine, telepresence (“the ability to work remotely via computer”), and sophisticated information tracking, will save us from these outbreaks. That all sounds lovely, but what of the fact that we’re currently experiencing a resurgence in vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles...a resurgence which is fueled in no small part by misinformation spread over that very same “protective net”?

A few chapters later, in a section celebrating the benefits of the hive mind, Eagleman invokes Soviet pseudoscientist Trofim Lysenko, a famed quack who took over the U.S.S.R.’s wheat production under Stalin. Because the Soviet Union spanned 13 time zones, Eagleman writes, “central rule-setting was disastrous for wheat production. … Part of the downfall of the USSR can be traced to this centralization of agricultural decisions.” That sounds nice, and might even be true—but it’s not a point that’s supported by Lysenko, whose main shortcoming was not that he believed in a one-size-fits-all approach; it was that he was a fraud .

Moving to the present day, Eagleman addresses wildfires that swept through Southern Californi a in 2007, which, he writes, “brought into relief the relationship between natural disasters and the internet.”

At the beginning of the outbreak in October, Californians were glued to their television screens, hoping to determine if their own homes were in danger. But at some point they stopped watching the televisions and turned to other sources. A common suspicion arose that the news stations were most concerned with the fate of celebrity homes in Malibu and Hollywood; mansions that were consumed by

the flames took up airtime in proportion to their square footage, which made for gripping video but a poor information source about which areas were in danger next. So people began to post on Twitter, upload geotagged cell phone photos to Flickr, and update Facebook.

I had been fairly obsessed with the wildfires, and since I didn’t remember this “common suspicion,” I decided to check the article Eagleman cites as the source of this info, which was a Wired blog post titled “Firsthand Reports from California Wildfires Pour Through Twitter.” It contained no references to a celebrity-obsessed news media; instead, the piece described how “the local media [was] overwhelmed .” It also talked about a San Diego resident who was “[a]cting as an ad hoc news aggregator of sorts” by “watching broadcast television news, listening to local radio reports and monitoring streaming video on the web” and then posting information, along with info gleaned from IMs, text messages, and e-mails, to his Twitter account.

Internet doesn’t solve conflict/global problems.Phillip Elias, board member of the New Media Foundation, 20 January 2012, “Will humanity perish without the internet?,” http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/will_humanity_perish_without_the_internet

The new Encyclopaedists make the opposite mistake about the future. Inherent in their worldview is the idea that setting up a system where information can be shared quickly, widely, and freely will somehow eliminate corruption, greed and violence from the world. It is almost as though human foibles were glitches in the software of society. But human vices can never be reduced to social viruses. They come from deep within us and can find their way into the most scientific settings .

Do Wikipedians think themselves immune from the temptation to wield their power towards their own ends?

Free access to information for everyone could be said to be the Wikipedian creed. It encapsulates the Enlightenment values of liberty and equality. But, like the French terror of the 1790s, it neglects that other ideal needed to give them gumption -- a genuine concern for other human beings.

But fraternité is not achieved by giving everyone more information, more freedom and more equality. And it is what is so often lacking on the internet, on blogs, and in other forms of web communication. Online interaction is so often vitriolic it is unreadable, and it is at its worst when the tech-savvy confront each other. I have seen very few geeks who try to love their enemies.

Fraternité comes from empathising with others. This is difficult to learn online. But without it, how can we understand the point of view of those who have different concepts of freedom or equality, or of troglodytes who don’t blog, or of nematodes who don’t have access to the internet. Believe it or not, there is a life offline and wisdom is wider than the web.

China soft power defense – can’t build

China can’t effectively build soft power regardless of the plan

Shaun Breslin , 2011, Professor Shaun Breslin is an Associate Fellow of the Asia Programme at Chatham House and Director of the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on the political economy of contemporary China and comparative regional integration, “The Soft Notion of China’s ‘Soft Power’ ,” Chatham House Asia Programme Paper: ASP PP 2011/03 , https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&sqi=2&ved=0CB4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chathamhouse.org%2Fsites%2Ffiles%2Fchathamhouse%2Fpublic%2FResearch%2FAsia%2F0211pp_breslin.pdf&ei=NmGVVc6uM8vYsAXisa9o&usg=AFQjCNGWm2rhajN9K1Kw-VTZqkjiu86BBg&sig2=8XnF0-eLoz47tpO4eIeTBA&bvm=bv.96952980,d.b2w

As already noted, in Chinese debates over soft power the emphasis is often on how to ensure that Chinese voices are heard more clearly overseas in an attempt to impose a preferred national image on debates over China’s global role and future projection of power. Of course, this is not a unique Chinese project. Many countries use state funding and state agencies to promote an image and idea of that country overseas, and some have been doing it for much longer than China. The point here is not to criticize China, but to point out that the concerted effort by a powerful state to create a national image to influence others is not the same as soft power defined as passive, inherent attraction. So in keeping with the idea of unpacking different dimensions of non-hard power, it is considered here to be a second and different dimension of power. Indeed, it is not just that this state project is different from the passive attraction of soft power, but that it was in part at least inspired by China’s lack of soft-power attraction. It was built on a realization that the current system and Chinese values (as understood overseas at least) were a potential source of weakness that might turn others away from China and/or lead them to fear its intentions and the consequences of its rise. Convincing everybody that China’s rise should be supported might not be possible, but assuaging concerns, reducing opposition and winning over new friends was a realistic ambition. If China’s values and system were not to attract, then at least perhaps they might not repel. This project has entailed looking backwards to what China once was and the creation of a somewhat idealized historical Golden Age. This is most visibly associated with Confucius, through the establishment of Confucius Institutes and Classrooms overseas, and with the unveiling of a nearly 10-metre-high statue of the Great Teacher in Beijing in January 2011. In reality, the virtues and values that are at the heart of this Golden Age have a much wider base, incorporating elements of Daoism and Sun Zi’s ‘The Art of War’. But as ‘Confucianism’ itself owes at least as much to the later interpretations of Confucius by Mencius and other scholars as it does to the verifiable writings of Confucius himself, it is appropriate that he has become a symbol for a diverse body of thinking. So the past is being constructed to serve the present. This seems to be partly because it builds on existing interests in Chinese history and traditions in many parts of the world; it plays to the attraction of China as what it was rather than what it is. But it is also because it can be used to build a basis for understanding the way China is today: why it acts in the way that it does and how it will act in the future. It is a means of explaining ‘difference’ – a different understanding of the relationship between the individual and the state, a different understanding of how society is ordered and functions, and a

different understanding of the nature and purpose of government – different from the dominant Anglo-European model of individualism and liberalism.

Plan doesn’t affect the soft power of China – their leadership and values are much more important it its developmentHölkemeyer 12-6-13 [Patricia Rodríguez Hölkemeyer, research professor and deputy director of the School of Political Science at the University of Costa Rica, Honorary Member of the Academy Research Center of Central Private, “China's forthcoming soft power as a natural result of international events,” http://www.china.org.cn/china/Chinese_dream_dialogue/2013-12/06/content_30822607.htm]

On the other side, Deng'saphorism that China should never strive to attain global hegemony has been widely respected by its leaders and reformers. Nevertheless, today circumstances have changed. China's ancient thinkers rejected the idea of searching for hegemony through stratagems, and favored instead the accomplishment of what Mencius and Xuzi called humane authority. Nevertheless, at the present moment China does not need to strive for the attainment of a leading role because the present world circumstances are catapulting her to become a world superpower. What are the present world circumstances that have put China in the position to have a say in international affairs without having to strive for hegemony? Why is the Western 'presumptive paradigm' (Rodrik)for development failing contrastingly to the pragmatic and experimental learning paradigm of the Chinese reformers that Joshua Cooper Ramo dubbed the Beijing Consensus? The ex-ante presumption of knowledge, a characteristic of the Western countries and global institutions, very probably will be ceding its place to a Deweyian pragmatic change of paradigm, according to which, even the mere conception of what is the best form of democracy is fallible and contextual. ¶ Very probably, the paradigm of 'arrogance' will be giving place to a paradigm based on what the political scientist, Karl Deutsch, once called 'humility'. Deutsch defined its opposite "arrogance" as the posture of permitting oneself the luxury of not to learn (because it is supposed that one has already learned everything), while he defines 'humility' as the attitude of the political leader who is always open to learning from

others. The West has forgotten that the concept of feedback (learning form the other) is the biggest bite to the tree of knowledge that humanity has undertaken in the last two thousand years (Bateson). A new concept of democracy has

to take into consideration this advancement as the Chinese reform process has done. Western countries' presumptive frame of mind has been slowly losing momentum . The present circumstances provide a clear indication that one of the most cared institutions, the Western multiparty democracy system, has been losing its ability to learn, and thus, its capacity to offer creative solutions to its own and the world's problems. As a former US Ambassador to China said two years ago, the willingness of Chinese leaders to learn from their errors and adapt to new circumstances "differs sharply from what one encounters in Washington, where there's such concern over our inability

to correct the problems that are making our political system — in the eyes of many Americans — increasingly dysfunctional."¶ The US has to enhance its learning capac ity if it wants to lead in world affairs in cooperation with the newly emerging superpower. The West has to acknowledge that the so called American values are not universal, that harmony implies unity in

diversity, that the concept of democracy is fallible and mutable, and that hegemony has to cede to a well gained

humane authority, not only abroad but domestically.¶ Since W. W. II, the US attained the soft power that China lacked.

Nevertheless, the US insistence in the maintenance of an hegemonic international order a pplying the smart power

(a new concept of Joseph Nye) stratagems, has culminated in the observed failure of the misnamed Arab Spring, even if the application of smart power (instigation through political activism, and the posterior use of military power if necessary) was partially successful

in the so called Color Revolutions (Rodríguez-Hölkemeyer, 2013).¶ Given the present circumstances (as the effects of 9/11 , the global

financial crisis, the formation of the G20, the global rejection of US espionage stratagems, the failure of the Pivot to the East policy due to the attention the US had to devote to the failed Arab Spring, to an ailing Europe, and to its own domestic financial and political problems) China's possibilities to acquire soft power and to exert its positive influence way the international governing institutions and in international relations, are now real. The world needs a new international relations paradigm, other than the Western style democracy promotion policy through political activism (see the book of the present US Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, Advancing Democracy Abroad)orchestrated by organized minorities (NGOs) who want to impose the so called 'American values' in countries with different historical paths, culture and aspirations. The new paradigm will have to be founded in ethics, wisdom, cooperation, confidence-building, and on the recognition that knowledge is fallible and hypothetical, and that with globalization world circumstances and interactions are prone to change. This new paradigm has already been successfully tested in the 35 years of China's own economic and institutional reform process and

diplomatic practice. This adaptive and learning-prone attitude of the Chinese leaders , even to the point of adapting (not

adopting) western suggestions and institutions when necessary, is the underlying cause of the success of the admirable and

unique Chinese development path. As Mencius and Xuzi's observations suggest that a country cannot exert international influence if its own house is not in order.¶ In sum, the present article states that now China possesses a substantive experiential wisdom to start a very productive dialogue with the World. Especially in a moment when it is beginning to be clear to many in the World, that to strive for maintaining a hegemonic world order (Mearsheimer) by means of dubious stratagemsis --according to Lao Tzu thought—the kind of response when intentions are going against the natural course of events.

China soft power defense – alt causeAlt Cause – Chinese Soft Power will be secured with Massive Foreign InvestmentDavid Shambaugh, 7-1-2015, Policy Writer for Foreign Policy Magazine, "China’s Soft-Power Push," Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2015-06-16/china-s-soft-power-push

China is fleshing out these rhetorical salvos in proposed institutions, such as the New Development Bank (a project organized by China together with Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific. All of these would supplement a host of regional bodies that China has already created in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and central and eastern Europe. Through these institutions, China is meticulously constructing an alternative architecture to the postwar Western order. And it is backing up its soft-power ventures with serious money: $50 billion for the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, $41 billion for the New Development Bank, $40 billion for the Silk Road Economic Belt, and $25 billion for the Maritime Silk Road. Beijing has also pledged to invest $1.25 trillion worldwide by 2025. This scale of investment is unprecedented: even during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union did not spend anywhere near as much as China is spending today. Together, these recent pledges by Beijing add up to $1.41 trillion; in contrast, the Marshall Plan cost the equivalent of $103 billion in today’s dollars. China’s diplomatic and development schemes form just one part of a much broader agenda aimed at enhancing its soft power in media, publishing, education, the arts, sports, and other domains. Nobody knows for sure how much China spends on these activities, but analysts estimate that the annual budget for “external propaganda” runs in the neighborhood of $10 billion annually . By contrast, the U.S. Department of State spent $666 million on public diplomacy in fiscal year 2014. Clearly, Beijing is using the strongest instrument in its soft-power toolbox: money . Wherever Chinese leaders travel these days —and between them, Xi and Premier Li Keqiang visited more than 50 countries in 2014—they sign huge trade and investment deals, extend generous loans, and dole out hefty aid packages. Major powers always try to use their financial assets to buy influence and shape the actions of others; in this regard, China is no different. But what is striking about China’s investments is how low a return they appear to be yielding. Actions speak louder than words, and in many parts of the world, China’s behavior on the ground contradicts its benign rhetoric.

China soft power defense – fails

Chinese soft power fails

Boot 10—Snr Fellow, CFR. Master’s in diplomatic history, Yale (Max, The Rising Dragon and “Smart” Diplomacy, 27 September 2010, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/category/contentions?author_name=boot)

For years we have been hearing about how effective Chinese diplomacy is — a supposed contrast with a ham-handed, distracted Uncle Sam who was letting the rising dragon take over East Asia while we weren’t paying attention. No one should underestimate the rising military challenge posed by China. As Robert Kaplan notes in this Washington Post op-ed: China has the world’s second-largest naval service, after only the United States. Rather than purchase warships across the board, it is developing niche capacities in sub-surface warfare and missile technology designed to hit moving targets at sea. At some point, the U.S. Navy is likely to be denied unimpeded access to

the waters off East Asia. China’s 66 submarines constitute roughly twice as many warships as the entire British Royal Navy. But a funny thing happened on the way to Chinese hegemony : its rise has alarmed pretty much all its neighbors , ranging from India and Australia to Japan and

South Korea. The latest sign of how Chinese hectoring and bullying is souring other countries is the flap over a Chinese fishing trawler that collided with Japanese coast-guard vessels near a disputed island in the East China Sea that is claimed by both countries. The Japanese agreed to release the fishing captain on Friday after what the New York Times described as “a furious diplomatic assault from China ,” which included the cut-off of “ministerial-level talks on issues like joint energy development, and curtailed visits to Japan by Chinese tourists.” In the short term, this is a victory for China. But for the long

term, it leaves hard feelings behind and convinces many more Japanese — and other Asians — that China’s rise poses a threat to them. Keep in mind that the Democrats, the current Japanese ruling party, came to power talking about weakening the U.S.-Japanese alliance and strengthening

ties with China. If China were better behaved, that might have come to pass. But Chinese assertiveness is rubbing the Japanese the wrong way. The same is true with South Koreans, Australians, and other key Chinese trade partners. In those countries, too, hopes of a closer relationship with China have been frustrated; instead, they are drawing

closer to the U.S. The fundamental problem is that China’s ruling oligarchy has no Marxist legitimacy left; its only claim to power is to foster an aggressive Chinese nationalism . That may do wonders for support on the home front, but it is doomed to antagonize its neighbors and possibly bring into being a de facto coalition to contain Beijing. That, at least, should be the goal of American policy. Even as we continue to trade with China, we should make sure to curb its geo-political ambitions. That is a goal in which we should be able to get the cooperation of many of China’s neighbors — if we actually practice the sort of “smart power” diplomacy that the Obama-ites came into office promising.

China soft power defense - environmentChina’s soft power is ineffective at solving problems, including environment.Beina Xu, 4-25-2014, Beina Xu received a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature at New York University. She has worked as a Writer, Editor and Producer for the Council on Foreign Relations in New York; as a Reporter and a Photographer for the Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones, New York and Elan Magazine, New York. She is the Co-Founder of Brownstone Magazine at New York University and a News Assistant for the Financial Times in Beijing, China, "China's Environmental Crisis," Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/china/chinas-environmental-crisis/p12608

The legacy of decentralization characterized by Deng's reforms remains at the heart of China's environmental struggles today. The reforms diffused authority to the provinces, creating a proliferation of township and village enterprises (TVEs) to encourage development in rural industries. In 1997, TVEs generated almost a third of the national GDP. But local governments were difficult to monitor and therefore seldom upheld environmental standards. Today, environmental policies remain difficult to enforce at a local level, where officials often retain economic incentives to ignore them. China's modernization has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and created a booming middle class. In some ways, the country's trajectory of industrialization is not unlike those of other modernizing nations, such as Great Britain in the early nineteenth century. But experts point to the nation's staggering size and pace of its growth, noting that its environmental effect on the world is far greater than that of any other single country. "It's on a scale and speed the world has never known," says Jennifer Turner, director of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson Center. How Bad Is It? China's energy consumption has ballooned, spiking 130 percent from 2000 to 2010. In January 2013, Beijing experienced a prolonged bout of smog so severe that citizens dubbed it "airpocalypse"; the concentration of hazardous particles was forty times the level deemed safe by the World Health Organization. Later that year, pollution in the northern city of Harbin shrank visibility to less than 50 meters. China Daily reported that December was the worst month in 2013 for air quality, with more than 80 percent of the seventy-four cities with air-monitoring devices failing to meet national standards for at least half the month. Based on a 2012 Asian Development Bank report, less than 1 percent of China's 500 largest cities meet the WHO's air quality standards.

China’s environmental problems short circuit its soft power – it alienates would-be partnersBeina Xu, 4-25-2014, Beina Xu received a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature at New York University. She has worked as a Writer, Editor and Producer for the Council on Foreign Relations in New York; as a Reporter and a Photographer for the Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones, New York and Elan Magazine, New York. She is the Co-Founder of Brownstone Magazine at New York University and a News Assistant for the Financial Times in Beijing, China, "China's Environmental Crisis," Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/china/chinas-environmental-crisis/p12608

China's neighbors, including Japan and South Korea, have also expressed concern over acid rain and smog affecting their native populations. In May 2013, government officials of the three countries added air pollution and climate change to a list of diplomatic issues for the region to solve. Moreover, a recent study reported that emissions from China's export industries are worsening air pollution as far as the western United States. The damage has also affected China's economic prospects as it continues to

pursue resources and pump investment into other countries. Its close economic partners, particularly in the developing world, face costly environmental burdens attached with doing business with China, note CFR's Economy and Michael Levi in their book on China's quest for resources, By All Means Necessary.

China soft power defense – territorial claimsNo chance of escalation of territorial conflicts in South China SeaXue Li and Xu Yanzhuo, The Diplomat, June 19, 2015, "The US and China Won't See Military Conflict Over the South China Sea," Diplomat, http://thediplomat.com/2015/06/the-us-and-china-wont-see-military-conflict-over-the-south-china-sea/

However, this does not necessary mean the South China Sea will spark a U.S.-China military conflict. As a global hegemon, the United States’ main interest lies in maintaining the current international order as well as peace and stability. Regarding the South China Sea, U.S. interests include ensuring peace and stability, freedom of commercial navigation, and military activities in exclusive economic zones. Maintaining the current balance of power is considered to be a key condition for securing these interests—and a rising China determined to strengthen its hold on South China Sea territory is viewed as a threat to the current balance of power. In response, the U.S. launched its “rebalance to Asia” strategy. In practice, the U.S. has on the one hand strengthened its military presence in Asia-Pacific, while on the other hand supporting ASEAN countries, particularly ASEAN claimants to South China Sea territories. This position has included high-profile rhetoric by U.S. officials. In 2010, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton spoke at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi about the South China Sea, remarks that aligned the U.S. with Southeast Asia’s approach to the disputes. At the 2012 Shangri-La

Dialogue, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta explained how the United States will rebalance its force posture as part of playing a “deeper and more enduring partnership role” in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2014, then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel called out China’s “destabilizing, unilateral activities asserting its claims in the South China Sea.” His remarks also came at the Shangri-La dialogue, while China’s HY-981 oil rig was deployed in the waters around the Paracel Islands. In 2015, U.S. officials have openly pressured China to scale back its construction work in the Spratly islands and have sent aircraft to patrol over islands in the Spratly that are controlled by China. These measures have brought global attention to the South China Sea.

No war over territorial claimsCarlson 2013 [Allen Carlson Associate Professor in the Government Department of Cornell University 2-21-2013 Foreign Affairs “China Keeps the Peace at Sea” http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139024/allen-carlson/china-keeps-the-peace-at-sea]

The nuclear test, though, is a red herring in terms of the conflict over the disputed islands. In truth, the roots of the conflict -- and the reasons it

has not yet exploded -- are much deeper. Put simply, China cannot afford military conflict with any of its Asian neighbors. ¶ It is not that China believes it would lose such a spat; the country increasingly enjoys strategic superiority over the entire region, and it is difficult to imagine that its forces would be beaten in a direct engagement over the islands, in the South China Sea or in the

disputed regions along the Sino-Indian border. However, Chinese officials see that even the most pronounced victory would be outweighed by the collateral damage that such a use of force would cause to Beijing's two most fundamental national interests -- economic growth and preventing the escalation of radical nationalist sentiment at home. These constraints , rather than any external deterrent, will keep Xi Jinping , China's new leader, from authorizing the use of deadly force in the Diaoyu Islands theater. ¶ For over three decades,

Beijing has promoted peace and stability in Asia to facilitate conditions amenable to China's economic development. The origins of the policy can be traced back to the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping repeatedly contended that to move beyond the economically debilitating Maoist period, China would have to seek a common ground with its neighbors. Promoting cooperation in the region would allow China to spend less on military preparedness, focus on making the country a more welcoming destination for foreign investment, and foster better trade relations. All of this would strengthen the Chinese economy. Deng was right. Today, China's economy is

second only to that of the United States. ¶ The fundamentals of Deng's grand economic strategy are still revered in Beijing. But any war in the region would erode the hard-won , and precariously held, political capital that China has gained in the last several decades . It would also disrupt trade relations, complicate efforts to promote the yuan as an international currency, and send shock waves through the country's economic system at a time when it can

ill afford them. There is thus little reason to think that China is readying for war with Japan. ¶ At the same time, the specter of rising Chinese nationalism, although often seen as a promoter of conflict, further limits the prospects for armed engagement. This is because Beijing will try to discourage nationalism if it fears it may lose control or be forced by popular sentiment to take an action it deems unwise. Ever since the Tiananmen Square massacre put

questions about the Chinese Communist Party's right to govern before the population, successive generations of Chinese leaders have carefully negotiated a balance between promoting nationalist sentiment and preventing it from boiling over. In the process, they cemented the legitimacy of their rule . A war with Japan could easily upset that balance by inflaming nationalism that could blow back against China's leaders. Consider a hypothetical scenario in which a uniformed Chinese military member is killed during a firefight with Japanese soldiers. Regardless of the specific circumstances, the casualty would create a new

martyr in China and, almost as quickly, catalyze popular protests against Japan. ¶ Demonstrators would call for blood, and if the government (fearing economic instability) did not extract enough, citizens would agitate against Beijing itself . Those in Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leadership compound in Beijing, would find themselves between a rock and a hard place. ¶

It is possible that Xi lost track of these basic facts during the fanfare of his rise to power and in the face of renewed Japanese assertiveness. It is also possible that the Chinese state is more rotten at the core than is understood. That is, party elites believe that a diversionary war is the only

way to hold on to power -- damn the economic and social consequences. ¶ But Xi does not seem blind to the principles that have served Beijing so well over the last few decades. Indeed, although he recently warned unnamed others about

infringing upon China's "national core interests" during a foreign policy speech to members of the Politburo, he also underscored China's commitment to "never pursue development at the cost of sacrificing other country's interests " and to never "benefit ourselves at others' expense or do harm to any neighbor." ¶ Of course, wars do happen -- and still could in the East China Sea. Should either side draw first blood through accident or an unexpected move, Sino-Japanese relations would be pushed into terrain that has

not been charted since the middle of the last century. ¶ However, understanding that war would be a no-win situation, China has avoided rushing over the brink. This relative restraint seems to have surprised everyone. But it shouldn't. Beijing will continue to disagree with Tokyo over the sovereign status of the islands, and will not budge in its negotiating position over disputed territory. However, it cannot take the risk of going to war over a few rocks in the sea . On the contrary, in the coming months it will quietly seek a way to shelve the dispute in return for securing regional stability, facilitating economic development, and keeping a lid on the Pandora's box of rising nationalist sentiment. The ensuing peace, while unlikely to be deep , or especially conducive to improving

Sino-Japanese relations, will be enduring.

No war- conflicts over territory invite negotiationGupta 2011 [Rukmani Gupta is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi October 23, 2011 The Diplomat “South China Sea Conflict? No Way” http://thediplomat.com/2011/10/23/south-china-sea-conflict-no-way/?all=true]

These suggestions to recalibrate Indian policy towards the South China Sea and its relationship with Vietnam are premature at best. Despite the rhetoric, conflict in the South China Sea may well not be inevitable . If the history of dialogue between the parties is any indication, then current tensions are likely to result in forward movement . In the aftermath of statements by the United States, and skirmishes over fishing vessels, ASEAN and China agreed upon the Guidelines on the

Implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea at the Bali Summit in July 2010. And recent tensions may well prod the parties towards a more binding code of conduct. This isn’t to suggest that territorial claims and sovereignty issues will be resolved, but certainly they can become more manageable to prevent military conflict .

Asia's shared values prevent war and escalation.

Barry Desker, dean of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, NTU, The Straits Times (Singapore), "Why war is unlikely in Asia" June 25, 2008 lexis

Although the United States has been the hegemon in the Asia-Pacific since the end of World War II, it will probably not remain the dominant presence in the region over the next 25 years. A rising China will pose a critical challenge to the US, probably more difficult than the challenge posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This will lead to a profound change in the region's strategic environment. But the rise of China

does not automatically mean that conflict is likely. First, a more assertive China does not mean a more aggressive China. Beijing appears content to press its claims peacefully (if forcefully) through existing avenues and institutions. Second, when we examine the Chinese military buildup, we find that there may be less there than some might have us believe. The Chinese war machine is not quite as threatening - although still worrisome - as some fear. Instead of Washington's perspectives shaping Asia-Pacific affairs coercively, the rise of China is likely to see a new paradigm in international affairs. The nascent 'Beijing Consensus', for want of a better term, would consist of the following attributes: The leadership role of the authoritarian state, a technocratic approach to governance, an emphasis on social rights and obligations over individual rights, a reassertion of the principles of national sovereignty and non-interference, support for freer markets and stronger regional and international institutions. The argument that there is an emerging 'Beijing Consensus' is not premised on the rise of the 'East' and decline of the 'West', as sometimes seemed to be the sub-text of the earlier 1990s 'Asian values' debate. But like the previous debate,

this new debate will reflect alternative philosophical traditions. At issue is the appropriate balance between the rights of the individual and those of the state. This debate will highlight the values China and other states in the region share. By contrast, one conventional American view is that Sino-American competition will result in 'intense security competition

with considerable potential for war' in which most of China's neighbours 'will join with the United States to contain China's power'. Asia's shared values are likely to reduce the risk of such conflict and result in regional pressure for an accommodation of and engagement with China, rather than a confrontation with it . In its interactions with the region, China itself is beginning to be interested in issues of proper governance, the development of domestic institutions and the strengthening of regional institutions. Nor is Chinese policy unchanging, even on the issue of sovereignty. For example, there has been an evolution in Chinese thinking on the question of freedom of passage through the straits of Malacca and Singapore. China supported the claims of the littoral states to sovereign control over the straits when the Law of the Sea Convention was concluded in 1982. But its increasing dependence on imported oil shipped through the straits has led to a shift in favour of burden-sharing, the recognition of the rights of user states and the need for cooperation between littoral states and user states. China has also revised its earlier advocacy of strict non-intervention and non-interference. Its support for global initiatives such as peacekeeping and nuclear non-proliferation - as well as its restrained use of its veto in the UN Security Council and its active role in the World Trade Organisation - indicates it is aware that responsible participation in global institutions can shape perceptions of a rising China. Beijing has also greatly lowered the tone and rhetoric of its strategic competition with the US. This is significant as most South-east Asian states prefer not to have to choose between the US and China, and have adopted 'hedging' strategies in their relationships with the two powers. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) is certainly in the midst of the most ambitious upgrading of its combat capabilities since the early 1960s. Its current defence doctrine is centred on the ability to fight 'Limited Local Wars'. The emphasis is on pre-emption, surprise and shock value, given that the earliest stages of conflict may be crucial to the outcome of a war. Thus the PLA has pursued the acquisition of weapons for asymmetric warfare. It mimics the US military in terms of the ambition and scope of its transformational efforts - and therefore challenges the US military at its own game. Nevertheless, China is still at least two decades behind the US in terms of its defence capabilities. It is certainly acquiring new and better equipment, but its current military buildup is indicative of an

evolutionary, steady-state and sustaining - rather than disruptive or revolutionary - innovation and change. War in the Asia-Pacific is unlikely. But the emergence of East Asia, especially China, will require adjustments by the West, just as Asian societies had to adjust to Western norms and values during the American century.

No South China Sea conflict Rosenberg 9 David, Professor of Political Science – Middlebury College and Research Fellow at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies – Australian National University, “Dire Straits: Competing Security Priorities in the South China Sea”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, 3-20, http://japanfocus.org/-David-Rosenberg/1773

From the Taiwan Strait to the Strait of Malacca, security concerns are growing around the South China Sea. While the Bush Administration sees a resurgent Chinese military threat across the Taiwan Strait and a terrorist threat in the Strait of Malacca, many countries between the Straits are more concerned about security for their maritime resources from the threats of competitors, traffickers, poachers, and pirates. Security Concerns in the South China Sea Several recent statements and appointments highlight the current Bush administration view of China's threat to Taiwan. Porter Goss, director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, warned that improved Chinese capabilities not only threaten Taiwan but also U.S. forces in the (western Pacific) region. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld worried that the Chinese navy was building some amphibious landing ships for possible use across the Taiwan Strait. The appointment of combative neoconservative John Bolton as

U.S. ambassador to the United Nations sends a clear and ominous signal: formerly a paid consultant to the Taiwanese government, Bolton has advocated Taiwan's independence and its full U.N. membership. Then, in February 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and their Japanese counterparts announced a significant alteration in the U.S.-Japan Security Alliance by identifying security in the Taiwan Strait as a "common strategic objective." Has

there been any big shift in the balance of power around the Taiwan Strait that warrants this U.S. response? The Chinese defense budget has grown by double-digit increases for the past fourteen years. This year it's up by 12 percent. But that is not significantly faster than the Chinese economy as a whole is growing. China is modernizing its defenses -- adding anti-ship missiles to aircraft, acquiring AWACS-airborne early warning and control systems, guided missile destroyers and

frigates. However, its power projection capabilities are limited . It lacks any long-range amphibious capability or support infrastructure to supply forces over long distances for a protracted period. It also lacks heavy cargo-carrying aircraft, comprehensive air defenses, seaworthy ships, and aircraft carriers . Given the current state of Chinese equipment and training, the Chinese have no capability to pursue an expansionist maritime policy in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea. [1] By contrast, the U.S. has overwhelming military superiority and an expansive network of military bases across the Asia-Pacific. The U.S. Pacific Fleet is the world's largest naval command, including approximately 190 ships, about 1,400 Navy and Marine Corps aircraft and 35 shore installations. Over 300,000 Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Special Operations, and Intelligence military personnel are integrated under the unified command of PACOM, the U.S.

Pacific Command. What are China's strategic goals between the Straits? China's Defense White Paper of 2002 emphasizes the importance of pursuing peaceful external relations initiatives through multilateral, cooperative approaches to promote domestic development. The most recent Defense White Paper, published in December of 2004, reiterates this priority. More important than statements of

good intentions, however, China has taken significant steps to implement this goal. It was evident in the Framework Agreement on ASEAN-China Comprehensive Economic Cooperation, negotiated in November 2002. That led to the agreement signed in November 2004 to implement an ASEAN-China Free Trade Area (FTA) by 2010. Following the 10th Summit Meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), in Vientiane, Laos in November 2004, Beijing held its own summit with ASEAN leaders (ASEAN Plus One) and then joined Japan and the Republic of Korea in discussions with ASEAN leaders (ASEAN Plus Three, or APT). Beijing had earlier in November hosted the first Security Policy Conference of the ASEAN Regional Forum. It featured an anti-piracy drill and a workshop on countering terrorism. Regional Economic and Financial Agreements Regional economic agreements were the main achievements of these meetings. However, the ASEAN Plus Three sessions identified other areas for cooperation, including deeper cooperation in investment and finance, expanded security dialogue and cooperation, expanded cultural exchanges, and periodic progress reviews. Perhaps the most dramatic developments have occurred in regional financial cooperation. Finance ministers of the ASEAN+3 countries have launched an Asian Bond Markets Initiative and the regional central bankers group set up two Asian Bond Funds in early 2005. These are key steps in addressing one of the major weaknesses in the region's development as indicated by the currency and financial crisis that struck large parts of the region in 1997: the heavy reliance by firms on short-term bank loans for financing. As Jennifer Amyx notes, many countries in East Asia maintain high savings rates but, because of the absence of stable long-term debt markets, the savings deposited into local banks tended to be funneled out to international financial centers and then back into the region as short-term foreign currency loans. This situation creates a problem referred to as a "double mismatch" -- that is, a mismatch between debt maturities (short-term borrowing for long-term investments) and the denomination of this debt (in foreign rather than local currencies). [2] The ASEAN+3 finance ministers had earlier set up a network of bilateral currency swaps to permit a country beset by a speculative attack to draw on reserves of other nations. The program -- the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) -- went into effect at the end of 2003. Japan, with the largest reserves in the region, led negotiations over swap arrangements and will play the role of arbitrator for currency loans. China, another potential lender with substantial reserves in excess of potential needs, also lent its support to the CMI. Widespread participation by ASEAN Plus Three members in these initiatives encourages smooth financial liberalization processes and thereby bolsters regional stability. It also reinforces the efforts of various working groups to improve transparency and

information dissemination and to strengthen settlement systems and regulatory reforms. China's shift to a more proactive position on regional financial cooperation has greatly facilitated these recent financial developments. As a result, interdependence between the Chinese economy and other economies in the region has deepened significantly in recent years. Today, trade by ASEAN member nations with China far exceeds trade conducted within the ASEAN grouping, while China is predicted to soon overtake the

United States as Japan's top trading partner. Levels of investment in China by countries in the region are also extremely high. The worst case scenario

is not Chinese domination but a Chinese meltdown , as many regional monetary authorities are quick to note.

Disadvantage links

Politics links – Plan is controversialAdditional restrictions controversial – strong Republican oppositionBurgess Everett and Seung Min Kim, 5-18-2015, Burgess Everett is a congressional reporter for POLITICO. Seung Min Kim is an assistant editor who covers Congress for POLITICO, "House, Senate Republicans square off over PATRIOT Act," POLITICO, http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/mitch-mcconnell-congress-work-memorial-day-weekend-patriot-act-trade-bill-118058.html

House and Senate Republican leaders are locked in a standoff over one of the nation’s most controversial national security programs — with each chamber refusing to budge, the clock ticking and patience running low. With key portions of the PATRIOT Act set to expire at the end of the month, House Republicans are signaling they won’t accept anything other than their USA Freedom Act, which would end the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection program and passed the chamber by an overwhelming majority last week. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has repeatedly panned that proposal, and his leadership team is indicating the only thing that can clear the chamber is a temporary extension of current law, which would extend the NSA program revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden. On Monday, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) maintained the Senate had only one option: pass the House bill. “I think when you get 338 votes, we’re meeting somebody in the middle,” McCarthy told reporters. “When you can get the Republicans and Democrats beyond veto-proof, when you can get a [Jim] Sensenbrenner and Devin Nunes and [Bob] Goodlatte and [John] Conyers and everybody, I think that’s a great bill for the Senate to take.” But in interviews, senior Republican senators and aides expressed doubted that the proposal can pass the Senate, particularly given that McConnell is so staunchly opposed. He engineered a stunning filibuster of an earlier version of the House bill late last year when Democrats were in control, and he could do the same this time around. In fact, some Senate Republicans aren’t even guaranteeing that they will hold a vote on the USA Freedom Act, with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) weighing a filibuster and myriad procedural hoops to jump through before a surveillance bill of any kind can come to the Senate floor. They say the only solution is a short-term extension of surveillance law that allows the Senate time to hold a longer debate about intelligence tactics and national security. “The problem is we don’t have time,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in an interview. “Time is not our friend.” For House and Senate Republicans who spent a frigid January retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania, trying to coordinate their agenda, the two wings of the GOP are so out of sync that they can’t even agree on a schedule. Sen. Bill Nelson is shown. ALSO ON POLITICO Sen. Nelson introduces bill to raise Amtrak liability cap RACHAEL BADE The House is set to leave on Thursday for the Memorial Day recess, but it may take the Senate until Friday or later to vote on the bulk collection program. And McCarthy wouldn’t commit to keeping the House in session into the weekend to respond to whatever eventually passes the Senate. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 Senate Republican who’s worked closely with McCarthy to try to align Senate and House Republicans, said the uncertainty on the PATRIOT Act revolves around a math problem. “The House is just in a very different place,” Thune said. “The key’s going to be whether that gets 60 over here. I don’t know that today, but if I were a betting man, I’d say it doesn’t.” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who’s sponsored the Senate version of the House-passed surveillance bill, said the only choice left for the Senate is the USA Freedom Act — or letting the programs end altogether. “I can’t quite figure it out,” Leahy said of McConnell’s strategy on the expiring PATRIOT Act provisions. “Because right now, we’re down to a point: We either have the House bill, or we have nothing at all. Interesting choices, aren’t they?”

Plan provisions have been empirically controversial in previous Congressional debates.Warren Mass, 11-20-2014, Writer for New American Magazine "Forty-two Senators Block USA Freedom Act to Limit NSA Surveillance," No Publication, http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/19572-forty-two-senators-block-usa-freedom-act-to-limit-nsa-surveillance

A November 18 vote to allow the USA Freedom Act to proceed to the floor of the Senate for debate fell two votes short of the 60 required to end a Republican-led filibuster and failed by a margin of 58-42. Only four Republicans — Ted Cruz of Texas, Dean Heller of Nevada, Mike Lee of Utah, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — voted “Yea” with 52 Democrats and two independents. One Democrat, Bill Nelson of Florida, voted “Nay.” The official summary of the legislation, S. 2685, sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) read: “To strengthen privacy protections, accountability, and oversight related to domestic surveillance conducted pursuant to the USA PATRIOT Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.” In contrast to the firm GOP opposition to the bill in the Senate, a related version of the bill, (H.R. 3361) sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), passed the Republican-controlled House on May 22 by a 303-121 vote. Cosponsors of the House bill included steadfast constitutionalists Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and Paul Broun (R-Ga.). Sensenbrenner was the principal author of the Patriot Act but in recent years has had severe reservations about how that legislation has been applied. He expressed his concerns about it in a June 6, 2013, letter he sent to Attorney General Eric Holder, which was prompted by the FBI’s “application for a top secret court order to collect the phone records of essentially every call made by millions of Verizon customers.” “As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation," wrote Sensenbrenner. He continued: “The Bureau’s broad application for phone records was made under the so-called business records provision of the Act. I do not believe the broadly drafted FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act. Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.” Sensenbrenner introduced The USA PATRIOT Act in the House on October 23, 2001, and it was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001. The authors of the act attempted to justify its limitations of Americans’ privacy rights by asserting that it was a necessary response to the terrorist attacks of September 11 that year. In a summary of the USA Freedom Act posted on his website, Sensenbrenner stated that it would end the bulk collection of Americans’ communications records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act; that it would strengthen the prohibition on “reverse targeting” of American (that is, targeting a foreigner with the goal of obtaining communications involving an American); and would require the government to more aggressively filter and discard information about Americans accidentally collected through PRISM and related programs. PRISM is a clandestine, mass electronic surveillance data-mining program launched in 2007 by the National Security Agency (NSA) for the stated purpose of combating terrorism. In a statement posted on his website about the Republican filibuster that blocked the USA FREEDOM Act from coming to a vote in the Senate, Leahy noted that the act was, “strongly supported by privacy advocates, technology leaders, and reformers from across the political spectrum, [and] would usher in the most significant surveillance reforms since the USA PATRIOT Act was enacted in 2001.” “Tonight, Senate Republicans have failed to answer the call of the American people who elected them, and all of us, to stand up and to work across the aisle. Once again, they reverted to scare tactics rather than to working productively to protect Americans’ basic privacy rights and our national security,”said Leahy.

(Emphasis in original.) As noted, four Republicans — Ted Cruz, Dean Heller, Mike Lee, and Lisa Murkowski — voted to end the filibuster and vote on the bill. That Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was not among them is somewhat surprising, given that his father, former Representative Ron Paul, has expressed strident opposition to the type of government spying the bill would have curtailed. However, Paul opposed the Leahy bill for different reasons than most other Republicans who denied it a vote on the floor. Paul said that he voted against further consideration of the USA Freedom Act because it currently extends key provisions of the Patriot Act until 2017. He posted the following statement of explanation on his Senate website: In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Americans were eager to catch and punish the terrorists who attacked us. I, like most Americans, demanded justice. But one common misconception is that the Patriot Act applies only to foreigners — when in reality, the Patriot Act was instituted precisely to widen the surveillance laws to include U.S. citizens…. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “those who trade their liberty for security may wind up with neither.” Today’s vote to oppose further consideration of the Patriot Act extension proves that we are one step closer to restoring civil liberties in America. Paul’s explanation, therefore, was that he was not against the parts of the USA Freedom Act that would have limited NSA surveillance, but against those parts that would have extended parts of the Patriot Act until to 2017. In that, he is correct. Section 701 of the act, entitled “Sunsets” states: (a) USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005- Section 102(b)(1) of the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 (50 U.S.C. 1805 note) is amended by striking ‘June 1, 2015’ and inserting ‘December 31, 2017’. Cruz had a different take on the USA Freedom Act and said, last July, when the bill was introduced: Republicans and Democrats are showing America that the government can respect the privacy rights of law-abiding citizens, while at the same time, giving law enforcement the tools needed to target terrorists…. The USA FREEDOM Act of 2014 ends the government’s bulk record collection program and implements other necessary surveillance reforms. In his statement, Cruz acknowledged that “the bill isn’t perfect.” The contrasting viewpoints of Paul and Cruz illustrate the problem even constitutionalists may have in trying to correct the limitations on our freedom, once imposed. Should they take the piecemeal approach favored by Cruz that chips away at bad programs, or hold out for something better, as Paul obviously seeks to do? Another approach to accomplish what both senators seek to do, in their own ways, is the course that Representative Justin Amash (R-Mich.) took last year when he proposed an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill for 2014 that sought to remove funding in the bill for some of the NSA programs. Paul’s father, former Representative Ron Paul, commented on Amash’s attempt: Had Amash’s amendment passed, it would have been a significant symbolic victory over the administration’s massive violations of our Fourth Amendment protections. But we should be careful about believing that even if it had somehow miraculously survived the Senate vote and the President’s veto, it would have resulted in any significant change in how the Intelligence Community would behave toward Americans. The US government has built the largest and most sophisticated spying apparatus in the history of the world. Constitutionalists and libertarians worried about the NSA’s spying on Americans clearly have a difficult road ahead of them if they want to safeguard our right to privacy as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. We can only hope that those of a similar mindset, such as senators Cruz and Paul, can put together legislation that will satisfy the concerns of all Americans concerned about government spying.

Strong Congressional opposition to additional restrictions on selection identifiers and data collection.Kim Zetter, 5-23-2015,Kim Zetter is an award-winning, senior staff reporter at Wired covering cybercrime, privacy, and security, "The Senate Fails to Reform NSA Spying, Votes Against USA Freedom Act," WIRED, http://www.wired.com/2015/05/senate-fails-end-nsa-bulk-spying-votes-usa-freedom-act/

A LAST-MINUTE BID to reform NSA spying before lawmakers break for a week-long recess failed early Saturday morning after hours of debate and filibuster overnight when Senate lawmakers voted 57-42 against the USA Freedom Act. Senator Mitch McConnell then tried to lead an effort to extend the key provision in the Patriot Act that has been used to justify NSA spying, which is set to expire on June 1. But that vote also failed. Temporarily, that means the government’s bulk collection of phone records from U.S. telecoms is on hold. USA Freedom Act aimed to put an end to that program, first uncovered by USA Today in 2006 and re-exposed in 2013 by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The bill called for records to be retained by telecoms and would have forced the NSA to obtain court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to gain access to them. It also would have required the agency to use specific search terms to narrow its access to only relevant records. A companion bill passed in the House earlier this month by a landslide vote of 338 to 88 but encountered trouble in the Senate where opponents said it would handicap the fight against terrorism and harm national security. Proponents of the bill were pushing to get it passed before lawmakers could vote on whether or not to re-authorize sections of the US Patriot Act. Section 215, which the government has long said legally justifies its collection of phone records, is set to expire at midnight June 1. Even after this failure, Lawmakers remain under pressure to re-authorize it before then. They plan to reconvene on May 31 after their break to try again. Supporters of the USA Freedom Act hoped to get this bill passed to counter Section 215 and reform the collection program that Section 215 purportedly legalizes. But the Second Circuit Court of Appeals introduced a ripple when it ruled earlier this month that Section 215 cannot be used to justify the bulk records collection program. The three-judge panel said that such collection was never intended by lawmakers when they drafted the Patriot Act, and that the government could not use it to legally justify the mass collection of US phone records. This left lawmakers with the choice of either revising Section 215 so that it is written in a way that does authorize bulk collection, or re-authorize it as written, leaving the government with no legal coverage for the NSA’s phone records collection program. The USA Freedom Act was intended as a compromise—a bill that would authorize the NSA to still obtain access to phone records that are relevant to an investigation but without allowing the spy agency to collect massive records to do so. Civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation were divided in their support of the USA Freedom Act. EFF had supported the legislation until the appeals court ruling about Section 215. EFF hoped the ruling would embolden the Senate to revise the bill to provide even stronger reforms of the phone records program. Most importantly, EFF wanted lawmakers to include language that would provide a strict interpretation of key terms in the statute such as “relevant” and “investigation,” to prevent the NSA from using loose interpretations to keep collecting massive amounts of data. “This easy task will make sure that the law is not read as rejecting the Second Circuit’s reading and will help ensure that the USA Freedom Act actually accomplishes its goal of ending bulk collection,” EFF wrote in the post last week. The bill had the support of the White House, which had said it balanced the need for surveillance with the preservation of constitutional protections for Americans. Attorney General Eric Holder and even the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had both expressed support for it. Lawmakers who opposed it, however, said it would handicap the NSA

and allow terrorist groups to prosper. In a Wall Street journal op-ed, former NSA and CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden and former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey called it the kind of “NSA Reform That Only ISIS Could Love,” referring to the militant group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria that is terrorizing parts of the Middle East.

Stronger mass data collection restrictions are empirically controversialAdi Robertson and Russell Brandom, 5-23-2015,Adi is a culture and tech policy correspondent for the verge, Russell is an assistant editor at the verge, "Senate votes down USA Freedom Act, putting bulk surveillance powers in jeopardy," Verge, http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/23/8637413/usa-freedom-act-2015

In a midnight session, the Senate has voted down the USA Freedom Act, putting one of the legal bedrocks of the NSA's bulk surveillance programs into jeopardy. The Patriot Act is set to expire at the end of the month, and the USA Freedom Act would have extended large portions of the act in modified form. Tonight's failure to arrive at a vote makes it likely that many of those powers will automatically expire, although Senate Majority Leader McConnell (R-KY) scheduled a last-minute session on May 31st for one last shot at passing the bill. In particular, the USA Freedom Act would have modified the Section 215 of the Patriot Act, a clause that allows the FBI to secretly order the collection of "tangible things" that could help in a national security investigation. Since its passage, Section 215 has been interpreted loosely — and likely illegally — by intelligence agencies. As whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013, the definition of both "tangible things" and "investigation" was broad enough to let NSA build a large database of American phone records for an ongoing, expansive national security effort. After the program was discovered, President Obama ordered the NSA to get approval before searching the database, but the phone metadata orders have still been renewed every three months. Government reports have said that there's little evidence the phone records program foiled any terrorist plots, however, and a recent court decision found that it wasn't legal at all by the standards of Section 215. The provision has also been used for tracking more than phone records. This week, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General released a review of Section 215. While it's partially redacted, the document describes FBI requests for records that "range from reproductions of hard copy reproductions of business ledgers and receipts to gigabytes of metadata and other electronic information," including email records. This might not necessarily be problematic in itself, but the report notes that requests could cover "groups composed of unknown members" and people who weren't actually associated with investigations, with the justification that they were still relevant to the investigation. Originally, the USA Freedom Act was a relatively broad reform bill, tightening the language of national security rules and adding more transparency requirements. Since its introduction, though, it had been revised several times — a watered-down version passed the House last year, and a stronger version died in the Senate. The House brought a new version of bill back and passed it earlier this month, but the bill faced significant opposition in the Senate. Most notably, Rand Paul has staged a series of non-procedural filibusters in symbolic opposition to the bill, including a speech today that pushed the Senate vote past midnight.

Terrorism linksMetadata k2 prevent terrorism – foiled over 50 terror attacks Dozier 13 – (Kimberly Dozier, AP’s intelligence writer, Bradley Chair at the U.S. Army War College,“NSA: Surveillance Programs Foiled Some 50 Terrorist Plots Worldwide”, AP, June 18, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/nsa-surveillance_n_3460106.html) Wang

The director of the N ational S ecurity A gency insisted on Tuesday that the government's sweeping surveillance programs have foiled some 50 terrorist plots worldwide in a forceful defense echoed by the leaders of the House Intelligence

Committee.¶ Army Gen. Keith Alexander said the two recently disclosed programs – one that gather s U . S. phone records and a nother that is designed to track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible

links to terrorism – are critical in the terrorism fight .¶ Intelligence officials have disclosed some details on two thwarted attacks,

and Alexander promised additional information to the panel on thwarted attacks that the programs helped stop. He provided few additional

details.¶ The programs "assist the intelligence community to connect the dots ," Alexander told the committee in a rare, open Capitol Hill hearing.¶ Alexander got no disagreement from the leaders of the panel, who have been outspoken in backing the programs since Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton, disclosed information to The Washington Post and the Guardian newspapers.¶ Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the committee, and Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the

panel's top Democrat, said the programs were vital to the intelligence community and assailed Snowden's actions as

criminal.¶ "It is at times like these where our enemies within become almost as damaging as our enemies on the outside," Rogers said.

NSA solves terrorism – threats increasingEdelman 14 – (Adam Edelman, Founder, Co-Chairman & CEO at IMM, former Managing Director at SES Americom, “‘A lot more terror attacks coming our way:’ former NSA chief”, New York Daily News, May 18, 2014, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/lot-terror-attacks-coming-nsa-chief-article-1.1797130) Wang

A former top U.S. security official fears the nation could be attacked again by terrorists. ¶ Gen. Keith Alexander,

who retired in March as director of the National Security Agency after eight years on the job, said the probability of another

terrorist attack on U.S. soil is increasing. ¶ “The number of attacks that are coming, the probability, it’s growing,” Alexander

said in a New Yorker magazine interview published over the weekend. “What I saw at N.S.A. is that there is a lot more coming our way.”¶

“We’re at greater risk,” Alexander said. “Look at the way Al Qaeda networks. From Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al Qaeda in

the Islamic Magreb, and now in Syria, the al-Nusra front.”¶ “Look at the number of jihadists going into Syria and what they want to

do. When put all that together, you can say those are distant countries, but a lot of these groups are looking to attack the United States. I take that threat very seriously”, Alexander added , stressing the need to use controversial spying tactics to help combat terrorism.¶ Alexander claimed that such tactics — including the agency’s bulk-metadata collection program (which many lawmakers have claimed is unconstitutional) — have contributed to the disruption to at least 54 terrorist plots . ¶ The program, along with another NSA strategy called “reasonable articulable suspicion,” may have even prevented the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks , Alexander said.¶ “We know we didn’t

stop 9/11. People were trying, but they didn’t have the tools,” he said. “This tool, we believed, would help them.”

*This is also a section of the original Terror DA file