FACTA Case NegText: The United States federal government should repeal the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.

Notes:This aff is about how FACTA is bad, and causes bad things to happen.Lots of the arguments about why FATCA is good, or why companies won’t leave the dollar are cross applicable to almost all of the advantages, because they all have the same internal link of countries leaving, or the US losing credibility.

The Matthews 14 card (first card) is applicable to all three advantages, and you should take advantage of that.

Relations:Dollar heg:FATCA leads to loss of dollar heg, which decreases trade, which leads to resource wars. Independently, loss of US Dollar Heg leads to Middle east war and goes nuclear.Cred:FACTA kills cred Without Cred, we lose multilateralism which is key to solve for disease like CREEcon:

Case

Relations

FATCA won’t cause countries to leave the dollar – it save the US billions of dollars, and encourages bilateral agreements, and has boosted multilateralismMatthews 14 (Chris Matthews is a writer at Fortune.com, “Defending wealthy tax cheats is all the rage these days”,JUNE 25, 2014, http://fortune.com/2014/06/25/foreign-tax-evasion-law/ -JD)As the IRS implements new rules to crack down on tax evaders, the finance industry is putting up a big fight.¶ There’s no shortage of doomsayers trolling the Internet today, warning of imminent financial collapse.¶ But there’s something about next week’s deadline for financial institutions to become compliant with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA)—which requires foreign banks to divulge information about their American clients—that have these Cassandras in a particular tizzy.¶ One firm, Stansberry Research, is using the deadline to whip up fear that the U.S. dollar will “collapse” on July 1, when the law goes into effect, because foreign financial institutions will no longer want to deal in dollars. That’s because, according to Stansberry’s logic, firms would rather refuse to own dollar-denominated assets than hand over information on their American account holders.¶ More mainstream outlets, like The Wall Street Journal, are also coming to the defense of wealthy American expats who see the law as too onerous. In a recent article, it listed the trials of several Americans living abroad who claim to be suffering from its effects:¶ No doubt, these anecdotes represent real burdens faced by Americans, as foreign financial institutions adjust to the law. But there is no logical reason foreign financial institutions should be discriminating against Americans, as the law applies to all foreign financial institutions regardless of whether they serve American customers. While there may be some growing pains as American expats and foreign financial institutions get used to the new law, there’s no reason why Americans abroad ultimately shouldn’t be able to get the financial services they need.¶ Furthermore, it’s laughable that large foreign firms would consider abandoning use of the dollar because of added compliance issues. Despite the weakness in the U.S. economy in the past decade, the dollar has become more, not less, important, to the global economy because there simply is no alternative reserve currency waiting in the wings to take over. ¶ It’s also worth remembering why this law was necessary in the first place. The Department of Homeland Security estimated in 2008 that the U.S. government loses $100

billion per year in revenue as a result of tax evasion aided by offshore bank accounts . To

put that in perspective, recovering that amount could pay for nearly all federal spending

on food assistance requested by President Obama in his 2015 budget. ¶ And this isn’t strictly an American problem, either. Economist Gabriel Zucman recently estimated that $ 7.6 trillion in wealth was stashed illegally in offshore tax havens , a figure that represents 8% of the world’s wealth. That’s a staggering amount of money that, if properly taxed, could go a long way in alleviating all sorts of social ills. ¶ According to law professors Joshua Blank and Ruth Mason, FATCA is leading the charge in encouraging wealthy governments to finally start cracking down on jurisdictions that encourage this type of tax evasion. Instead of being an instrument of U.S. imperialism, FATCA is actually encouraging countries

to come to bilateral agreements with the U.S. to share important tax information . They write, “While complaints about the unilateralism and extraterritoriality of FATCA are not without merit, FATCA has enhanced multilateral cooperation in combating tax evasion,

and it has spawned similar legislation and treaties in other jurisdictions.”¶ Blank and Mason point out that the U.S. has reached dozens of agreements with foreign countries to share tax information, and that the G-5 group of nations announced that they would launch a multilateral effort to fight tax evasion . Meanwhile, Britain and France have drafted legislation that would implement FATCA-like laws in those countries.¶ Financial institutions don’t like new rules, and the implementation of FATCA will inevitably lead to disruptions in some financial services for Americans living abroad. But in an increasingly globalized world, where the wealthy have more and more tools at their disposal to evade taxes, FATCA will increase government cooperation to catch tax cheats.¶ By helping the government to find the people who aren’t paying what they owe, the rest of us can either enjoy greater services or reduced taxes. And that’s something we should all get behind.¶

No Dollar Collapse – US still has credibilityFinancial Sense 13 (Financial This year, longtime bear and well-known economic forecaster, Gary Shilling, recently made a splash in the financial community by turning positive on the U.S. economy and dollar. Given the lingering amount of pessimism by many investors after two major stock market crashes and the fear of another repeat event, there’s at least one thing that Shilling makes clear that investors SHOULDN’T be worried about happening anytime soon: a collapse of the U.S. dollar. ¶ Given that a currency reflects the strength of the nation that issues it, it's important to consider the following six reasons why Gary believes the U.S. dollar will maintain its strength as the global reserve currency for many years to come. The following are taken from his exhaustive study of dominant world currencies going back to ancient Rome along with comments made in his recent interview with Financial Sense.¶ 1. Economic Productivity¶

Among developed nations the U.S. has had the strongest productivity over the last decade. For example, the U.S. averaged 2.2%, Japan 1.6%, U.K. 1.2%, Germany 0.9%, Canada 0.9%, France 0.8%, and Italy flat. When you consider the deflationary trends now at work in emerging markets and other developed nations, Gary believes that U.S. productivity will continue to outperform and help keep the dollar strong. ¶ 2. The World’s Largest Economy¶

The dominant currency is typically found in the world’s largest economy and the U.S. is head-and-shoulders above the rest. As Gary points out, in 2012 U.S. GDP was $15.7 trillion. The second closest, China, was nearly half the size at $8.2 trillion. If you think China is about to overtake the U.S. in terms of size, Gary says “China would have to grow 12% a year for 20 years to catch up…it’s now down at about 7.5% growth and as the Chinese economy shifts away from being driven by exports…away from infrastructure, away from heavy borrowing, and so on, their growth is going to grow even more slowly.”¶ 3. Deep and Broad Financial Markets¶ Here, Gary writes, “Internationally, money—especially today when it can be transferred anywhere in a split second—wants to be where the action is. That requires not only a powerful and large economy but also deep and broad markets in which to invest. Today, the U.S. Treasury market trumps all others in size and, in the eyes of investors…, in safety as witnessed by the mad rush into Treasury bonds in times of recent global trouble."¶ Similarly, he states, “American stock market capitalization is four times that of China, Japan or the U.K. and is over three times the Eurozone's…Almost 50% of Treasuries are held by foreigners but only 9.1% of Japan's government net debt is owned by non-Japanese. According to the IMF, 62% of the world's currency reserves are in dollars. The 24% in euros is down from 29% four years ago. Foreigners so love investing in the U.S. that at the end of 2012, it exceeded U.S. investment abroad by $4.4 trillion, up from $4 trillion a year earlier.”¶ 4. Free and Open Financial Markets and Economy¶ “Investors want to go where it’s free and open; they don’t like China. China periodically freezes their currency.

They did that for example during the Great Recession. They had let it float up but then they froze it when they got worried. They’re now letting it float a bit, but they turn it on, they turn it off. Other currencies are much less free to people moving out. They typically manipulate currencies in a lot of places. The Swiss, for example…froze their currency 1.2 to the Euro when everybody wanted to be in the Swiss Franc because they worried that a strong currency would kill their exports to the Eurozone, which is their major trading partner.”¶ 5. Lack of Substitutes¶ “Things can change over time but one statistic that I think is very important is global forex trading. Now, there’s two sides to this so the numbers add up to 200%, not 100%, because for every sale there’s a buy. But if you look at the trading, in 2001, the U.S. dollar accounted for 90% of all the daily trading in currencies. In 2013, it’s down from 90% to 87%. But if you think of all that’s happened in that time, the euro currency had come in, China has gotten stronger, etc. But it still has only declined 3 percentage points and it’s way ahead of anything else. The second one today is the euro at 33% versus [the USD at] 87%, the yen 23%, sterling 12%—in other words, this is the currency that people transact.”¶ 6. Credibility¶ “The sixth characteristic is credibility. And that’s the only one where you can say there’s been any questioning of the dollar. And it is true that last year that Standard & Poor’s did downgrade the U.S. from triple AAA to AA+, but that hasn’t really hurt. You might remember that when they did that, Treasuries actually rallied…and it has not changed the willingness of foreigners to put money into dollar denominated assets. So, the credibility issue is the only one that is not absolutely triple-A, but it hasn’t had any decided effects so far.”

No resource wars Tetrais 12—Senior Research Fellow at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratgique (FRS). Past positions include: Director, Civilian Affairs Committee, NATO Assembly (1990-1993); European affairs desk officer, Ministry of Defense (1993-1995); Visiting Fellow, the Rand Corporation (1995-1996); Special Assistant to the Director of Strategic Affairs, Ministry of Defense (1996-2001).(Bruno, The Demise of Ares, csis.org/files/publication/twq12SummerTertrais.pdf)

The Unconvincing Case for ‘‘New Wars’’ ¶ Is the demise of war reversible? In recent years, the metaphor of a new ‘‘Dark Age’’ or ‘‘Middle Ages’’ has flourished. 57 The rise of political Islam, Western policies in the Middle East, the fast development of emerging countries, population growth, and climate change have led to fears of ‘‘civilization,’’

‘‘resource,’’ and ‘‘environmental’’ wars. We have heard the New Middle Age theme before. In 1973, Italian

writer Roberto Vacca famously suggested that mankind was about to enter an era of famine, nuclear war, and civilizational collapse. U.S. economist Robert Heilbroner made the same suggestion one year

later. And in 1977, the great Australian political scientist Hedley Bull also heralded such an age. 58 But the case for ‘‘new wars’’ remains as flimsy as it was in the 1970s.¶ Admittedly, there is a stronger role of religion in civil conflicts. The proportion of internal wars with a religious dimension was about 25 percent between 1940 and 1960, but 43 percent in the first years of the 21st century. 59 This may be an effect of the demise of traditional territorial conflict, but as seen above, this has not increased the number or frequency of wars at the global level. Over the past decade, neither Western governments nor Arab/Muslim countries have fallen into the trap of the clash of civilizations into which Osama bin Laden wanted to plunge them. And ‘‘ancestral hatreds’’ are a reductionist and unsatisfactory approach to explaining collective violence. Professor Yahya Sadowski concluded his analysis of post-Cold War crises and wars, The Myth of Global Chaos, by stating, ‘‘most of the

conflicts around the world are not rooted in thousands of years of history they are new and can be concluded as quickly as they started.’’ 60¶ Future resource wars are unlikely. There are fewer and fewer conquest wars. Between the Westphalia peace and the end of World War II, nearly half of conflicts were fought over territory. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been less than 30 percent. 61 The invasion of Kuwaita nationwide bank robberymay go down in history as being the last great resource war. The U.S.-led intervention of 1991 was partly driven by the need to maintain the free flow of oil, but not by the temptation to capture it. (Nor was the 2003 war against Iraq motivated by oil.) As for the current tensions between the two Sudans over oil, they are the remnants of a civil war and an offshoot of a botched secession process, not a desire to control new resources.¶ China’s and India’s energy needs are sometimes seen with apprehension: in light of growing oil and gas scarcity, is there not a risk of military clashes over the

control of such resources? This seemingly consensual idea rests on two fallacies. One is that there is such a thing as

oil and gas scarcity, a notion challenged by many energy experts. 62 As prices rise, previously untapped reserves and non-conventional hydrocarbons become economically attractive.

The other is that spilling blood is a rational way to access resources. As shown by the work of historians and political

scientists such as Quincy Wright, the economic rationale for war has always been overstated. And

because of globalization, it has become cheaper to buy than to steal. We no longer live in the world

of 1941, when fear of lacking oil and raw materials was a key motivation for Japan’s decision to go to war. In an era of

liberalizing trade, many natural resources are fungible goods. (Here, Beijing behaves as any other actor: 90 percent of the oil its companies produce outside of China goes to the global market, not to the domestic one.) 63 There may be clashes or conflicts in regions in maritime resource-rich areas such as the South China and East China seas or the Mediterranean, but they will be driven by nationalist passions, not the desperate hunger for hydrocarbons.

No chance of Middle East War or WMD useMiller 13 (Judith, a Fox News contributor, is an award-winning writer and author. She spent 85 days in jail in the Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia in 2005 to protect confidential sources. She is the author of a forthcoming memoir, “Don't expect a new Middle East war between the states, says Israel's Shimon Peres,” Fox News, September 23, 2013, http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/09/23/dont-expect-new-middle-east-war-between-states-says-israel-shimon-peres/)With the nuclear stand-off with Iran and Syrian chemical weapons still threatening the strife-torn Middle East, Israeli President Shimon Peres said he did not foresee a war between states erupting in the region any time soon. ¶ Though he was speaking generally, and did not specifically mention either Israel or the United States, both of which have conducted military strikes against states seeking WMD and have threatened to carry out more strikes against Iran, Syria or others suspected of seeking unconventional weapons, Mr. Peres asserted that military action was both increasingly costly and unlikely to resolve the challenges posed by terrorists or aggressive, authoritarian states. ¶ “I don’t foresee a war. It’s too expensive,” he said, referring to the cost not only in dollars but in human lives.¶ President Peres, who turned 90 this year, made his remarks at the 10th annual “Yalta European Strategy” conference in the Ukraine, known as “YES,” a political star-studded, two-day event sponsored by Victor Pinchuk, one of the Ukraine’s wealthiest businessmen and philanthropists.¶ According to Peres, winners in an increasingly globalized world would not be those with the most land but the most creative, the best educated, and technologically productive. ¶ The two day meeting of more than 200 officials, former leaders, academics and analysts was held in Yalta this weekend as foreign officials and diplomats headed to New York for the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. ¶ Diplomats said that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu intended to warn the U.S. against signing accord with Teheran that would permit Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, or improve its atomic weapons infrastructure, as North Korea did in 2005.¶ Mr. Peres, approaching the end of his eventful life and waxing philosophically about the profound changes he has witnessed, said that war’s soaring costs and decreasing payoff made it less attractive to state leaders, and hence less likely. ¶ “There will not be another war,” he said, “because what can you win? Why spend hundreds of millions of dollars and cause thousands of deaths? For what?” Land, or “real estate,” as he called it, was becoming less important than science and “wisdom” in the competition among nations. ¶ The cost of such confrontations was escalating exponentially, with a single fighter jet, for instance, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, placing unsustainable burdens on national budgets. ¶ “I don’t foresee a war,” he said more than once. “It’s too expensive.”¶ Nor did he see the use of a nuclear or other WMD between states, he added. After the bombing of Hiroshima, he said, a consensus had developed that nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons were too powerful to use. This explained why “we were so shocked” when the Syrians used chemical weapons and violated a ban that has become what he called “an accepted norm.” ¶ He also questioned Iran’s assertion that its ambitious nuclear program was for purely peaceful purposes and that its state religion, Islam, forbade the development of nuclear weapons. If that were so, he said, “why build 6,000-kilometer, long-range missiles” capable of delivering them? He urged nations to monitor Iran’s atomic efforts carefully. ¶ The Iranians, he said, excelled at both making carpets, which requires attention to minute detail, and playing chess, which demands a firm grasp of strategy. But he declined to say the course he favored to persuade Teheran to comply with requirements of international inspectors and allay American and Western concerns about its nuclear intentions.¶ Exploring other developments in his troubled region, he said he doubted that the upheavals which swept through the Arab Middle East two years ago had met the expectations of the Arab youth who helped foment them. “There is no Arab Spring,” he said. ¶ Egypt, the first Arab state to make peace with Israel

over 30 years ago, faced particular national peril, he argued. The army had ousted Egypt’s elected Muslim Brotherhood government and its party’s president Mohammed Morsi, he said, because Egypt, whose land had never been divided, faced for the first time in its long history the potential loss of its Sinai Peninsula to terror.¶ “The army took over because Morsi would not defend the integrity of the land,” Peres said. Moreover, the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been a powerful party in opposition, “had no plan to provide food, jobs, and hope” after it narrowly won a heavily contested free election two years ago.¶ In the Midde East, young Arabs face world-wide competition for increasingly scarce jobs, so throughout the world, “young people are in revolt.” ¶ Fueled by a powerful mix of testosterone and technology, the Arab Spring protests were aimed at creating jobs, hope, and political space. Some 99 million of the Middle East’s 350 million Arabs were on line at their start, he said, a number that would grow to 200 million in the next few years, he added. More than 60 percent of the region’s inhabitants who are under 26 years old. “It may take them time to get organized, but the future is theirs.” ¶ The winners in an increasingly globalized world would not be those with the most land, said the president whose own land mass is among the smallest in the region, but the most creative, the best educated, and technologically productive. ¶ While terrorism remained a threat to the region’s stability and prosperity, he said, “I can see the beginnings of a revolt against the terror” that has endangered the leadership and integrity of most Arab states, he said.¶ Mr. Peres, who often prides himself on his knowledge

of and devotion to history, said that given the technological and scientific changes transforming the world, spending a lot of time teaching history was a “waste of time.” ¶ “The future will not be a repetition of the past,” he said. So “throw away Clausewitz.” War, he added, referring to a maxim of Carl von Clausewitz, a father of modern military strategy, was no longer “an extension of politics by other means.”

CredFATCA is not perceived as Unilateral Imposition – Countries are already on boardWood 14 (Robert Wood is a tax lawyer based in San Francisco (www.WoodLLP.com), but he handles tax matters everywhere. He enjoys untangling a tax mess from the past, disputing taxes with the government or planning taxes for the future. One of his specialties is advising about lawsuit payments, “FATCA, IRS Global Tax Law, Is Everywhere -- Even Russia & China”, JUL 1, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/07/01/fatca-is-finally-here-even-in-russia-china/ -JD)FATCA—the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act—is America’s global tax law. And it’s finally here after a four-year ramp up. It requires foreign banks to reveal American accounts holding over $50,000. Bank secrecy? Forget it. Non-compliant institutions could be frozen out of U.S. markets, so everyone is complying.¶ So far, 77,000 financial institutions have registered and 80 countries have too. Countries must throw

their agreement behind the law or face dire repercussions. Tax havens have joined up. Even China and Russia are getting on board. The IRS has a searchable list of financial institutions. See FFI List Search and Download Tool and a User

Guide. Countries on board are at FATCA – Archive.¶ FATCA grew out of a controversial rule. America taxes its citizens—and even permanent residents—on their worldwide income regardless of where they live. In 2009, the IRS struck a groundbreaking deal with UBS for $780 million in penalties and American names. Yet today, that huge deal seems only a drop in the bucket of what has happened since. Credit Suisse took a guilty plea and paid a record

$2.6 billion fine.¶ With over a hundred Swiss banks taking a DOJ deal and many other developments, banking is now more transparent than could ever have been imagined. But in 2010, when only some of those developments were unfolding, FATCA was enacted. The idea was to cut off companies from access to critical U.S. financial markets if they didn’t pass along American data.¶ Cleverly, FATCA’s tax would be so catastrophic to those affected that everyone has opted to comply. Foreign financial institutions must withhold a 30% tax if the recipient isn’t providing information about U.S. account holders. Now, it seems unlikely that virtually anyone will pay the 30%. They will provide the data instead.¶ The U.S. even announced an agreement in principle with China. And amazingly, Russia too has just come aboard, with President Vladimir Putin Signing Law in 11th Hour to Satisfy U.S. Treasury. The U.S. and Russia were negotiating a FATCA deal until March, 2014, but Russia’s annexation of Crimea caused the U.S. to walk. That meant Russian financial institutions faced being frozen out of U.S. markets. Fortunately for them, President Putin signed a law allowing Russian banks to send American taxpayer data to the U.S.¶ Foreign Financial Institutions (FFIs) must report account numbers, balances, names, addresses, and U.S. identification numbers. For U.S.-owned foreign entities, they must report the name, address, and U.S. TIN of each substantial U.S. owner. Of course, apart from taxes, U.S. persons with foreign bank accounts exceeding $10,000 must file an FBAR by each June 30.¶ These forms too are serious. FBAR failures can mean fines up to $500,000 and prison up to ten years. Even non-willful civil FBAR penalty can mean a $10,000 fine. Willful FBAR violations can draw the greater of $100,000 or 50% of the account for each violation (and each year is separate). The numbers can add up fast. Court Upholds Record FBAR Penalties, Exceeding Offshore Account Balance.¶ U.S. account holders who aren’t compliant have limited time to get to the IRS. The IRS recently changed its programs, making its Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program a little harsher. Yet for those not willing to pay the 27.5% penalty—which goes to 50% for some named banks August 4, 2014—the new IRS’s Streamlined Program may be a good option for those who qualify.¶ The latter applies now to both foreign and U.S.-based Americans. Some still want to amend their taxes and file FBARs in a “quiet disclosure” which could bring civil FBAR penalties or even prosecution. Thus, caution is clearly in order.¶ Indeed, FATCA is making banking transparent virtually worldwide. With Swiss bank deals, prosecutions, summonses, and now FATCA, the IRS has quicker, better and more complete information than ever.

CRE Bacteria is not a threat – UCLA Superbug ProvesMai-Duc and Therhune 15 (Christine Mai-DucChristine Mai-Duc is a Metro reporter covering Long Beach and the South Bay, including Carson, Torrance and the beach cities, Chad Terhune covers the business of healthcare and the biggest expansion of health insurance in half a century as part of the federal Affordable Care Act, “UCLA superbug: Outbreak 'not a threat to public health,' officials say”, February 20, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ucla-superbug-patient-fear-20150220-story.html -JD)Los Angeles County health officials are attempting to assuage the public’s fears surrounding a deadly outbreak of drug-resistant bacteria at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, saying the episode is “not a threat to public health.”¶ The hospital disclosed

Wednesday that a superbug tied to tainted medical scopes had infected seven people and exposed 179 others.¶ The infected patients became ill with fever, chills and severe sepsis soon after being treated with the scopes, said Dr. Zachary Rubin, medical director of

clinical epidemiology and infection prevention at the medical center. Two of those people later died, officials said.¶ The bacteria appear to have

spread through duodenoscopes, which are placed down a patient’s throat to examine cancer, gallstones and other digestive system issues.¶ Hospital officials apologized Thursday for “some of the anxiety” the outbreak is causing.¶ “We get up every morning and come to work to help heal humankind,” said Dr. David Feinberg, president of the UCLA Health System. “When something like this happens, it really just gets us in our gut.” Feinberg said the hospital has implemented new sterilization procedures that exceed Food and Drug Administration requirements. Since then, no new cases have been discovered.¶ “I think our procedures today would make us the safest place to have

one of these ... life-saving interventions,” Feinberg told reporters Thursday. The UCLA outbreak involves CRE, or carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae. It's extremely resistant to antibiotics and can kill up to 50% of patients who become infected, according to federal health authorities.¶ But it isn't

typically transmitted by casual contact outside hospitals and other medical facilities.¶

No impact to disease – they either burn out or don’t spreadPosner 05 (Richard A, Senior Lecturer at University of Chicago “Catastrophe: the dozen most significant catastrophic risks and what we can do about them.”, Winter, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmske/is_3_11/ai_n29167514/pg_2?tag=content;col1)

Yet the fact that Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease to assail it in the 200,000 years or so of its existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus is on extinction events. There have been enormously destructive plagues, such as the Black Death, smallpox, and now AIDS, but none has come close to destroying the entire human race. There is a biological reason. Natural selection favors germs of limited lethality; they are fitter in an evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread if the germs do not kill their hosts too quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus, wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious in its host for years maximizes its spread. Yet there is no danger that AIDS will destroy the entire human race. The likelihood of a natural pandemic that would cause the extinction of the human race is probably even less today than in the past (except in prehistoric times, when people lived

in small, scattered bands, which would have limited the spread of disease), despite wider human contacts that make it more difficult to localize an infectious disease. The reason is improvements in medical science. But the comfort is a small one. Pandemics can still impose enormous losses and resist prevention and cure: the lesson of the AIDS pandemic. And there is always a lust time.

Economy

The 1AC’s ACA evidence doesn’t mention FDI. They have no internal link to the economy. It is also based on the hypothetical possibility that countries will back out. Our evidence says they won’t and we postdate.

The World is embracing FATCA, it doesn’t hurt economic interactionsWilkins 15 (Rebecca Wilkins is a Tax Justice Network-USA and the FACT Coalition, and a professor at the University of Denver, “Endorsing tax evasion”, March 27, 2015, http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-budget/237110-endorsing-tax-evasion -JD)

A vote in favor of repealing FATCA sends a message: a message to foreign banks that they can get back to helping wealthy Americans hide their assets and use offshore accounts to evade tax.¶ In anticipation of yesterday’s Senate’s budget resolution “vote-o-rama,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) has introduced an amendment to repeal the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). Passed in 2010 and effective in July 2014, FATCA requires foreign financial institutions to file information returns with the IRS about their U.S. customers’ accounts.¶ Accounts like the ones exposed in last month’s “Swiss Leaks” which revealed how officers and employees of HSBC were helping customers from around the world evade taxes in their home countries. Accounts like the 52,000 U.S.-related ones at UBS that is the subject of a deferred prosecution agreement for facilitating tax evasion.¶ The U.S. loses an estimated $150 billion in tax revenue each year to tax haven abuse – a revenue shortfall

that honest taxpayers have to make up. About $ 40-70 billion of that revenue loss is from individual tax evasion. In light of those numbers, the virtues of FATCA become exceedingly clear.¶ At the very heart of the matter, FATCA is an enforcement tool. It exists to give the U.S. government the information it needs to determine ownership of assets in foreign accounts and make it harder for taxpayers to hide assets and evade tax. Voting to repeal FATCA is a vote in favor of allowing tax evasion to continue—and escalate.¶ While some members of Congress want to turn the clock back to the days when hiding assets offshore was easier, the rest of the world is embracing global cooperation against tax evasion. While FATCA was heavily criticized by foreign governments and financial institutions when it was first enacted, now it is being hailed as the catalyst for change and an example for

inter-governmental agreements around the world . More than 80 countries have signed on, including China and Russia. The G20, G8, and the OECD have used FATCA as a model for the development of automatic information exchange agreements.¶ To oppose FATCA is to oppose transparency and cooperation and take the United States out of its leadership role in combating tax evasion. The United States Congress is faced with a choice. It can stand for openness, transparency, and honesty – or for tax evasion, secret bank accounts, and subterfuge.¶ In the geeky tax world, we often refer to FATCA as FATCATS. It helps us remember the acronym. The FATCATS are the ones with those offshore bank accounts . Will members of Congress protect them? Or will they stand with American people?¶

Global Economy resilient- numbers look good and won’t falterPerry 13 (Dr. Mark J. Perry is a full professor of economics at the Flint campus of The University of Michigan, where he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in economics and finance since 1996. 12/24/13 “A testament to economic resilience: World trade and output both reached new all-time record highs in October” http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/12/a-testament-to-economic-resilience-world-trade-and-output-both-reached-new-all-time-record-highs-in-october/ -JD )

1. World merchandise trade volume (adjusted for price changes) increased by 1.4% in October from September, and by 4.1% from a year ago to reach a new all-time record high in October (see blue line in chart above). On a month-over-month basis, import growth in October was 1.3% for both the advanced economies and the emerging economies, while export growth was higher in the emerging economies (1.9%) than in the advanced economies (1.1%).¶ 2. On an annual basis through October, the volume of trade grew faster in the emerging economies than in the advanced economies for both exports (4.7% vs. 3.6%) and imports (5.4% vs. 2.9%).¶ 3. At a new record high of 134.6 for the world trade index in October, the volume of global trade is now more than 10% above its previous cyclical peak of 122.2 in early 2008, and 37.3% above the recessionary cyclical low of 98 in May 2009.¶ 4. World industrial production (adjusted for price changes) increased in October on a monthly basis by 0.2% to a new record high, led by monthly growth of 0.6% in the emerging economies which offset the -0.2% decline in the advanced economies in October (see red line in chart). On an annual basis, world industrial output increased 3.2% in October, with especially strong year-over-year output growth in the emerging economies of 4.2%, led by growth in the Emerging Asian economies of 7.1%. Factory output in the advanced economies grew by 3.2%, led by Japan with 5.1% growth, followed by the US with 3.4% growth. Manufacturing output in October was flat in the Euro area from a year ago (-0.1%) and declined by 3.5% in Africa and the Middle East.¶ 5. At an all-time high index level of 121.7 in October, world industrial output is now 7.2% above its previous recession-era peak in February 2008 of 113.5, and 23.7% above the recessionary low of 98.4 in February 2009.¶

Bottom Line: World industrial output and world merchandise trade both reached new record monthly highs in October. The volumes of world output and trade are now both solidly above their previous peaks during the early months of the global slowdown in 2008 (by 10.1% and 7.2% respectively), suggesting that the global economy has now made a complete recovery from the 2008-2009 economic slowdown. At the forefront of the global economic expansion this year are the emerging economies, which experienced especially strong growth over the last year through October in both trade volumes (4.7% export growth and 5.4% import growth) and industrial output (4.1%). The complete recovery over the last several years in the global economy to new record highs for both global trade and global industrial output demonstrates the incredible resiliency of economies around the world to recover and prosper, even following the worst financial crisis and global economic slowdown in generations.

No Econ collapse – Assumes collapse like the Great DepressionBloomberg 13 (Kevin Buckl and John Detrixhe reporting for Blomberg news, “U.S. Isn’t Broke, Dollar Won’t Fail, Capital Economics Says”, April 9, 2013, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-09/u-s-isn-t-broke-dollar-won-t-collapse-capital-economics-says -JD)

April 9 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. isn’t broke, and the dollar isn’t in danger of collapse even after unprecedented stimulus measures enacted following the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, according to Capital Economics Ltd.¶ Taking into account total domestic assets and liabilities, the

U.S. economy’s overall net worth is about 550 percent of gross domestic product in 2011, Paul Ashworth, the chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a research note. That compares with official figures showing U.S. GDP at close to $15 trillion, while national debt has ballooned to $16.8 trillion after nearly tripling since 2001.¶ The report adds to the global debate over deficits and fiscal austerity, which is being waged from the euro area, whose economy is forecast to contract for a second year, to the U.S., which has grown for three years even as it was downgraded by Standard & Poor’s in August 2011 for failing to rein in its growing debt burden.¶ “At first glance it does appear that America is caught in some sort of debt super cycle,” Toronto-based Ashworth wrote yesterday. After accounting for increases in domestic asset values “the rise in credit market debt and total financial liabilities does not look particularly egregious.” ¶ The best-known study of the ramifications of a country’s ratio to gross-domestic-product is by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, which found that nations with debt loads greater than 90 percent of their economies grow more slowly.¶ ‘Absolutely Nonsense’¶ “That tipping point of 90 percent is absolutely nonsense,” Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning Columbia University economist, said today on Bloomberg Television’s “Surveillance” with Tom Keene and Sara Eisen. “We had a much higher debt-to-GDP ratio at the end of World War II. After World War II ended, we had the fastest rate of economic growth, shared prosperity.”¶ Reinhart and Rogoff said in a 2010 paper that once debt rises beyond 90 percent of gross domestic product for advanced economies, median growth rates are 1 percentage point lower. The U.S. passed the 90 percent mark in early 2010, according to the International Monetary Fund.¶ The U.S. isn’t deeply in debt to other nations, according to Capital Economics’s Ashworth. Taking into account U.S. holdings of foreign bonds and cross-country holdings of other types of assets, net external liabilities are a “fairly modest” 30 percent of GDP, he said in the report.

2NC Extensions

Relations

No dollar collapse

No one will back out from the US dollar due to FATCAWood 15 (Robert Wood is a tax lawyer based in San Francisco (www.WoodLLP.com), but he handles tax matters everywhere. He enjoys untangling a tax mess from the past, disputing taxes with the government or planning taxes for the future. One of his specialties is advising about lawsuit payments, “FATCA Repeal Efforts Just Failed, But Is It A Good Law?”, MAR 30, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2015/03/30/fatca-repeal-efforts-just-failed-but-is-it-a-good-law/ -JD)

Budget amendment SA 621, to repeal FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, failed to reach the Senate floor. Efforts to repeal America’s massive global disclosure law may not be dead, but they are comatose. Besides, repeal efforts make unsavory soundbites. One line descriptions of large and complex tax laws may be inherently deceptive. In the case of FATCA, that seems especially so.¶ The one line description? FATCA combats U.S. tax evasion by requiring disclosure of non-U.S. bank accounts. Yet it does vastly more than this. Passed in 2010, it took four years of preparation for it to apply, and even now, it is not fully in operation. The repeal FATCA movement just went down to defeat, and anyone opposing FATCA has a thankless job. The Hill said opposing FATCA is endorsing tax evasion:¶ “To oppose FATCA is to oppose transparency and cooperation and take the United States out of its leadership role in combating tax evasion. The United States Congress is faced with a choice. It can stand for openness, transparency, and honesty – or for tax evasion, secret bank accounts, and subterfuge.”¶ FATCA requires foreign banks to reveal Americans with accounts over $50,000. Non-compliant institutions are frozen out of U.S. markets, so everyone is complying. FATCA grew out of a controversial rule. America taxes its citizens and permanent residents on their worldwide income regardless of where they live. In 2009, the IRS struck a groundbreaking deal with UBS for $780 million in penalties and American names. Later, Credit Suisse took a guilty plea and paid a record $2.6 billion fine.¶ Since then, with over a hundred Swiss banks taking a DOJ deal and many other developments, banking is now more transparent than could ever have been imagined. FATCA was enacted in 2010, when only some of those developments were unfolding. The idea was to cut off companies from access to critical U.S. financial markets if they didn’t pass along American data. And boy did that idea work.¶ The world has agreed, even tax havens, Russia and China. Financial institutions everywhere have signed on to avoid the dire repercussions. Institutions are on the FFI List Search and Download Tool and

nations are on the FATCA Archive. FATCA’s 30% tax and exclusion from U.S. markets would be so catastrophic that everyone complied. And in what is a kind of global witch hunt, American indicia means

reporting.¶ There is no question that FATCA has done some good, as have the other unimaginable successes the U.S. has had at global transparency. But at what cost? FATCA’s massive and systemic overkill is great and vastly expensive. It is an elephant gun aimed at mosquitoes. And it has damaged the lives of over 7 million Americans abroad. Many can no longer open or maintain bank accounts where they live, get mortgages, or run their local businesses or households without difficulty. Many institutions around the world simple will not–perhaps cannot–open and maintain accounts for Americans, financial pariahs.¶

The US Dollar won’t collapseCollins 15 (J Collins is a writer for Philosophy of Metrics is the methodology of understanding the world through patterns and processes. From the ancient philosophy of primitive man to the stock market today, there is a pattern in everything and anything. We but need to observe and recognize the macro and micro of it all, LEARN WHY THE US DOLLAR WILL NOT COLLAPSE, MAY 22, 2015, http://philosophyofmetrics.com/learn-why-the-us-dollar-will-not-collapse/ -JD)

Since 1944 the currency of the United States has been used as the primary reserve asset in the international monetary system. The use of a single domestic currency such as the USD as the global reserve currency has caused large systemic imbalances in the global financial framework. These imbalances have led many to believe that the dollar is faced with an imminent collapse and hyper-inflation. This first installment to The Economic Transition Papers posits that the dollar will not die, but will in fact be -re-engineered and integrated within a multilateral financial

architecture which has been in development since the financial crisis of 2008.¶ A broad understanding of this transition from a unipolar framework to a multilateral framework is essential for not just Americans, but all interested investors around the globe. The coming depreciation of the USD can be easily misunderstood. But there are also opportunities and benefits to a depreciating dollar, some of which are covered here.¶ All countries, including both the United States and China, recognize the need for a supra-sovereign (non-domestic) asset which can be used as the international reserve currency. The Special Drawing Right (SDR) of the International Monetary Fund is the chosen asset which the multilateral framework will be build around.¶ This series of publications, titled The Economic Transition Papers, will be segmented into 3 stages, being Multilateral Stage One, Multilateral Stage Two, and Multilateral Stage Three. Each segment will contain various publications dealing with specific aspects of the transition from a unipolar USD based financial system to a multipolar framework based on the Special Drawing Right (SDR) of the International Monetary Fund.¶ This first installment, E-Publication – 001, will deal specifically with the Reengineering of the Dollar and should bring a more fundamental understanding to the role which the USD will play in the coming years. It is important for factual information to be presented about aspects of the dollars relationship with the external multilateral mandates. Lack of knowledge and understanding will only spread fear and confusion.¶ The alternative media has been promoting a false ideology of dollar collapse, while the mainstream media have failed at informing the larger population of the actual mechanisms and machinations of the economic transition. These papers will attempt to bridge the knowledge gap between both.

No Resource Wars

Resource wars theory wrong and compromise on resource scarcityVerhoeven 12 (Harry, doctorate researcher at the Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University, 6/29/12, “Dambisa Moyo’s Resource War Argument is Flawed”, http://politicsinspires.org/dambisa-moyos-resource-war-argument-is-flawed/)Yet there is a strong and deep academic literature, that draws on extensive interdisciplinary evidence from economics, political science, anthropology and history, which shows how simplistic and misguided such arguments about “resource wars” are, both when approached theoretically and through Asian or African case studies. Both historically and contemporarirly, growing resource scarcity does not tend to lead to conflict but to cooperation, even (or perhaps especially) in regions like the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. Moreover, the idea that wars are caused by exogenous environmental triggers — as opposed to endogenous political-economic drivers — has always been very convenient for powerful groups who try to depolicitise asymmetries in power and wealth and argue that scarcity is not man-made but really an Act of God that we can’t or shouldn’t contest. Moyo is similarly simplistic about China, presenting the country as a largely monolithic actor that thinks with one mind and has one purpose. In her latest book, Winner Takes All, there is little discussion of the intense rivalry between different factions within the Chinese Communist Party and the impact this has on foreign and economic policy; there was also little discussion of other key faultlines — federal government vs. regional players, state-owned enteprises competing among themselves, as well as against purely private actors — that explain why it is unhelpful to generalise and see everything through a “One China” lens. Such broad brushstrokes overstate the degree of coherence in Chinese policy, particularly vis-à-vis Africa, and offer little in terms of opportunities for policy engagement with different Chinese actors.

No risk of resource wars---historical evidence all concludes cooperation is way more likely Jeremy Allouche 11 is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. "The sustainability and resilience of global water and food systems: Political analysis of the interplay between security, resource scarcity, political systems and global trade" Food PolicyVolume 36, Supplement 1, January 2011, Pages S3-S8 Accessed via: Science Direct SciverseWater/food resources, war and conflictThe question of resource scarcity has led to many debates on whether scarcity (whether of food or water) will lead to conflict and war. The underlining reasoning behind most of these discourses over food and water wars comes from the Malthusian belief that there is an imbalance between the economic availability of natural resources and population growth since while food production grows linearly, population increases exponentially. Following this reasoning, neo-Malthusians claim that finite natural resources place a strict limit on the growth of human population and aggregate consumption; if these limits are exceeded, social breakdown, conflict and wars result. Nonetheless, it seems that most empirical studies do not support any of these neo-Malthusian arguments. Technological change and greater inputs of capital have

dramatically increased labour productivity in agriculture. More generally, the neo-Malthusian view has suffered

because during the last two centuries humankind has breached many resource barriers that seemed unchallengeable.¶ Lessons from history: alarmist scenarios, resource wars and international relations¶ In a so-called age

of uncertainty, a number of alarmist scenarios have linked the increasing use of water resources and food

insecurity with wars. The idea of water wars (perhaps more than food wars) is a dominant discourse in the media (see for example Smith, 2009), NGOs (International Alert, 2007) and within international organizations (UNEP, 2007). In 2007, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared that ‘water scarcity threatens economic and social gains and is a potent fuel for wars and conflict’ (Lewis, 2007). Of course, this type of discourse has an instrumental purpose; security and conflict are here used for raising water/food as key policy priorities at the international level.¶ In the Middle East, presidents, prime

ministers and foreign ministers have also used this bellicose rhetoric. Boutrous Boutros-Gali said; ‘the next war in the Middle East will be over water, not politics’ (Boutros Boutros-Gali in Butts, 1997, p. 65). The question is not whether the sharing of transboundary water sparks political tension and alarmist declaration, but rather to what extent water has been a principal factor in international conflicts. The evidence seems quite weak. Whether by president Sadat in Egypt or

King Hussein in Jordan, none of these declarations have been followed up by military action.¶ The governance of transboundary water has gained increased attention these last decades. This has a direct impact on the global food system as water allocation agreements determine the amount of water that can used for irrigated agriculture. The likelihood of conflicts over water is an important parameter to consider in assessing the stability, sustainability and resilience of global food systems.¶ None of the various and extensive databases on the causes of war show water as a casus belli. Using the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) data set and supplementary data from the University of Alabama on water conflicts, Hewitt, Wolf and Hammer found only seven disputes where water seems to have been at least a partial cause for conflict (Wolf, 1998, p. 251). In fact, about 80% of the incidents relating to water were limited purely to governmental rhetoric intended for the electorate (Otchet, 2001, p. 18).¶ As shown in The Basins At Risk (BAR) water event database, more than two-thirds of over 1800 water-related ‘events’ fall on the ‘cooperative’ scale (Yoffe et al., 2003). Indeed, if one takes into account a much longer period, the following figures clearly demonstrate this argument. According to studies by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), organized political bodies signed between the

year 805 and 1984 more than 3600 water-related treaties, and approximately 300 treaties dealing with water management or allocations in international basins have been negotiated since 1945 ([FAO, 1978] and [FAO, 1984]).¶ The fear around water wars have been driven by a Malthusian outlook which equates scarcity with violence, conflict and war. There is however no direct correlation between water scarcity and transboundary conflict. Most specialists now tend to agree that the major issue is not scarcity per se but rather the allocation of water resources between the different riparian states (see for example [Allouche, 2005], [Allouche, 2007] and [Rouyer, 2000]). Water rich countries have been involved in a number of disputes with other relatively water rich countries (see for example India/Pakistan or Brazil/Argentina). The perception of each state’s estimated water needs really constitutes the core issue in transboundary water relations. Indeed, whether this scarcity exists or not in reality, perceptions of the amount of available water shapes people’s attitude towards the environment (Ohlsson, 1999). In fact, some water experts have argued that scarcity drives the process of co-operation among riparians ([Dinar and Dinar, 2005] and [Brochmann and Gleditsch, 2006]).¶ In terms of international relations, the threat of water wars due to increasing scarcity does not make much sense in the light of the recent

historical record. Overall, the water war rationale expects conflict to occur over water, and appears to suggest that violence is a viable means of securing national water supplies, an argument which is highly contestable.¶ The debates over the likely impacts of climate change have again popularised the idea of water wars. The argument runs that climate change will precipitate worsening ecological conditions contributing to resource scarcities, social breakdown, institutional failure, mass migrations and in turn cause greater political instability and conflict ([Brauch, 2002] and [Pervis and Busby, 2004]). In a report for the US Department of Defense, Schwartz and Randall (2003) speculate about the consequences of a worst-case climate change scenario arguing that water shortages will lead to aggressive wars (Schwartz and Randall, 2003, p. 15). Despite growing concern that climate change will lead to instability and violent conflict, the evidence base to substantiate the connections is thin ([Barnett and Adger, 2007] and [Kevane and Gray, 2008]).

No Middle East war

No global escalation – it’s not the Cold War anymoreDyer, 02 ( Ph.D. in Military and Middle Eastern History from the University of London and former professor at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and Oxford University (Gwynne, Queen’s Quarterly, “The coming war”, December, questia)

All of this indicates an extremely dangerous situation, with many variables that are impossible to assess fully. But there is one comforting reality here: this will not become World War III. Not long ago, wars in the Middle East always went to the brink very quickly, with the Americans and Soviets deeply involved on opposite sides, bristling their nuclear weapons at one another. And for quite some time we lived on

the brink of oblivion. But that is over. World War III has been cancelled, and I don't think we could pump it

up again no matter how hard we tried. The connections that once tied Middle Eastern confrontations to a global confrontation involving tens of thousands of nuclear weapons have all been undone. The East-West Cold War is finished. The truly dangerous powers in the world today are the industrialized countries in general. We are the ones with the resources and the technology to churn out weapons of mass destruction like sausages. But the good news is: we are out of the business.

Offcase

T- domesticDomestic surveillance deals with information transmitted within a countryHRC 14 Human Rights Council 2014 IMUNC2014 https://imunc.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/hrc-study-guide.pdf

Domestic surveillance: Involves the monitoring, interception, collection, analysis, use, preservation, retention of, interference with, or access to information that includes, reflects, or arises from or a person’s communications in the past, present or future with or without their consent or choice, existing or occurring inside a particular country.

Violation: The affirmative deals with foreign information transmitted to the U.S. Any foreign element means the plan is not domestic.US Department of Treasury 14 (The Department of the Treasury (DoT) is an executive department and the treasury of the United States federal government, “Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA)”,12/8/2014, http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/treaties/Pages/FATCA.aspx -JD)FATCA was enacted in 2010 by Congress to target non-compliance by U.S. taxpayers using foreign accounts. FATCA requires foreign financial institutions (FFIs) to report to the IRS

information about financial accounts held by U.S. taxpayers, or by foreign entities in which U.S. taxpayers hold a substantial ownership interest. Here you will find links to many documents related to FATCA and its implementation.

Voters:1. Limits- The aff’s interpretation allows them to have a surveillance policy that affects anyone in any country, which overstretches the neg’s research burden to include the whole world, because all surveillance becomes topical, no matter what the target country is.

K

Neolib

US relations via Dollar Hegemony and FDI are part of a drive to smooth the contradictions within global neoliberalism through sub-division of markets into “spheres of influence” – reproduces the central axis of neoliberalismNegri ‘2, (Antonio, former Prof. of Poli Sci @ U of Padua, “The Order of War”, http://www.generation-online.org/t/negriwar.htm)

Preventative war is not only a military doctrine; it is a constituent strategy of Empire. The American administration’s September 20th document explicitly states so: preventative war is a just and necessary means to defend liberty, justice, democracy and economic growth against terrorists and tyrants. It adds that preventative war should be considered immediately relevant concerning three “rogue states”: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. To certain sectors of public opinion as well as to diplomats of some countries it seemed as though the statement about the “Axis of Evil”, along with a succession of angry unilateralist declarations on the

part of White House representatives and their watchdogs indicated the suspension or definitive interruption of the nexus between military doctrine and the constituent strategy of Empire. In reality such

was not the case. On the contrary, these statements represented items on the agenda [ordine del

giorno] around which constituent discussions between the global powers emerged. No sensible person could have ever really thought that Iraq, Iran and North Korea posed substantial problems for a power like the USA, which could claim inordinate military power after its victory against international communism. Now American military power, which is absolutely asymmetric, must also become intransitive; it must remain an absolute superpower not so much with respect to the three ‘powers of Evil’ but rather in respect to the other world powers: the Axis of evil is a metaphor for the great problems the monarchic power of the United States of America faces in three strategic areas at the end of the cold war. Europe, Russia and China represent the problematic poles of the new global order. Now, Iraq is a further indication of the European problem (and subordinately, of the Japanese one) presented under the guise of energy supplies: without securing them the European economy cannot exist and whoever controls energy supplies has his

hands on the whole range of biopolitical functions of power in the old continent. On the other hand, Iran (the area

around the Caspian sea) represents the soft underbelly of Russian development. North Korea is in the middle of the China Sea. How is Empire organized in these three fundamental zones? What is its material constitution to become, today, in the presence of an American military superpower? How is the military supremacy of the monarchic power over the new imperial order to be preventatively secured? It is well known that in Empire the sole exercise of military power-or rather, of the monarchical function- is far from being sufficient to secure centrality and stability for the exercise of global power. Moreover, 911 has shown

(and with what dreadful evidence!) that the United States is in no respects an island. The ensuing economic crisis –not only at the level of production but also and especially at the financial and monetary level- has demonstrated that in Empire monarchy cannot survive unless it is in agreement with the global aristocracy. Therefore, the war that’s brewing contains within its core a discussion on the imperial constitution, and particularly, as far as Europe is concerned, the dimensions and roles of the European aristocracies in it. Chirac and Schroder are neither pacifists nor warmongers: they are debating with Bush on the place of European capitalism in the imperial constitution. The major decisions are not being made on the war on terrorism or on the conventional war against tyrants, but rather on the forms of hegemony and the relative degrees of power that American and/or European

capitalist elites will have in the organization of the new world order. Preventative decisions are not simply to do with war but more with market predominance in the sub regions of the imperial organization.

The impact is extinction – neoliberal social organization ensures extinction from resource wars, climate change, and structural violence – only accelerating beyond neoliberalism can resolve its impactsWilliams & Srnicek 13(Alex, PhD student at the University of East London, presently at work on a thesis entitled 'Hegemony and Complexity', Nick, PhD candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics, Co-authors of the forthcoming Folk Politics, 14 May 2013, http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/)

At the beginning of the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, global civilization faces a new breed of cataclysm. These coming apocalypses ridicule the norms and organisational structures of the politics which were forged in the birth of the nation-state, the rise of capit-alism, and a Twentieth Century of unprecedented wars. 2. Most significant is the break - down of the planetary climatic system. In time, this threatens the continued existence of the present global human population. Though this is the most critical of the threats which face humanity, a series of lesser but potentially equally destabilising problems exist along - side and intersect with it. Terminal resource depletion, especially in water and energy reserves, offers the prospect of mass starvation, collapsing economic paradigms, and new hot and cold wars. Continued financial crisis has led governments to embrace the paralyz-ing death spiral policies of austerity, privatisation of social welfare services, mass unemployment, and stagnating wages. Increasing automation in production processes including ‘intellectual labour’ is evidence of the secular crisis of capitalism, soon to render it incapable of maintaining current standards of living for even the former middle classes of the global north. 3. In contrast to these ever-accelerating catastrophes, today’s politics is

beset by an inability to generate the new ideas and modes of organisation necessary to

transform our societies to confront and resolve the coming annihilations . While crisis gathers force and speed, politics withers and retreats. In this paralysis of the political imagin-ary, the future has been cancelled. 4. Since 1979, the hegemonic global political ideology has been neoliberalism, found in some variant throughout the leading economic powers. In spite of the deep structural challenges the new global problems present to it, most immedi-ately the credit, financial, and fiscal crises since 2007 – 8, neoliberal programmes have only evolved in the sense of deepening. This continuation of the neoliberal project, or neoliberal-ism 2.0, has begun to apply another round of structural adjustments, most significantly in the form of encouraging new and aggressive incursions by the private sector into what remains of social democratic institutions and services. This is in spite of the immediately negative economic and social effects of such policies, and the longer term fundamental bar-riers posed by the new global crises.

The alternative articulates a “counter-conduct” – voting neg pushes towards a cooperative conduct that organizes individuals around a collectively shared commons – affirming this conduct creates a new heuristic that de-couples government from the demand for competition and productionDardot & Laval 13(Pierre Dardot, philosopher and specialist in Hegel and Marx, Christian Laval, professor of sociology at the Universite Paris Ouest Nanterre La Defense, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, pgs. 318-321)

This indicates to what extent we must take on board in our own way the main lesson of neo-liberalism: the subject is always to be constructed . The whole question is then how to articulate subjectivation with resistance to power. Now, precisely this issue is at the heart of all of Foucault’s thought. However, as Jeffrey T. Nealon has recently shown, part of the North American secondary literature has, on the contrary, stressed the alleged break between Foucault’s research on power and that of his last period on the history of subjectivity.55 According to the ‘Foucault consensus’, as Nealon aptly dubs it, the successive impasses of the initial neo-structuralism, and then of the totalizing analysis of panoptical power, led the ‘last Foucault’ to set aside the issue of power and concern himself exclusively with the aesthetic invention of a style of existence bereft of any political dimension. Furthermore, if we follow this de-politicizing reading of Foucault, the aestheticization of ethics anticipated the neo-liberal mutation precisely by making self-invention a new norm. In reality, far from being oblivious of one another, the issues of power and the subject were always closely articulated, even in the last work on modes of subjectivation. If one concept played a decisive role in this respect, it was ‘counter-conduct’, as developed in the lecture of 1 March 1978.56 This lecture was largely focused on the crisis of the pastorate. It involved identifying the specificity of the

‘revolts’ or ‘forms of resistance of conduct’ that are the correlate of the pastoral mode of power. If such forms of resistance are said to be ‘of conduct’, it is because they are forms of resistance to power as conduct and, as such, are themselves forms of conduct opposed to this ‘power-conduct’ . The term ‘conduct’ in fact admits of two meanings: an activity that

consists in conducting others, or ‘conduction’ ; and the way one conducts oneself under the influence of this activity of conduction.57 The idea of ‘counter-conduct’ therefore has the advantage of directly signifying a ‘struggle against the procedures implemented for conducting others’, unlike the term ‘misconduct’, which only refers to the passive sense of the word.58 Through ‘counter-conduct’, people seek both to escape conduction by others

and to define a way of conducting themselves towards others .¶ What relevance might this observation have for a reflection on resistance to neo-liberal governmentality? It will be said that the concept is introduced in the context of an analysis of the pastorate, not government. Governmentality, at least in its specifically neo-liberal form, precisely makes conducting others through their conduct towards themselves its real goal. The peculiarity of this conduct towards oneself, conducting oneself as a personal enterprise, is that it immediately and directly induces a certain conduct towards others: competition with

others , regarded as so many personal enterprises. Consequently, counter-conduct as a form of resistance to this governmentality must correspond to a conduct

that is indivisibly a conduct towards oneself and a conduct towards others. One cannot struggle against such an indirect mode of conduction by appealing for rebellion against an authority that supposedly operates through compulsion external to individuals. If ‘politics is nothing more and nothing less than that which is born with resistance to governmentality, the first revolt, the first confrontation’,59 it means that ethics and politics are absolutely inseparable.¶ To the subjectivation-subjection

represented by ultra-subjectivation, we must oppose a subjectivation by forms of counter-conduct. To neo-liberal governmentality as a specific way of conducting the conduct of others, we must therefore oppose a no less specific double refusal: a refusal to conduct oneself towards oneself as a personal

enterprise and a refusal to conduct oneself towards others in accordance with the norm

of competition . As such, the double refusal is not ‘passive disobedience’.60 For, if it is true that the personal enterprise’s relationship to the self immediately and directly determines a certain kind of relationship to others – generalized competition – conversely, the refusal to function as a personal enterprise, which is self-distance and a refusal to line up in the race for performance, can only practically occur on condition of establishing cooperative

relations with others , sharing and pooling . In fact, where would be the sense in a self-distance severed from any cooperative practice? At worst, a cynicism tinged with contempt for those who are dupes. At best, simulation or double dealing, possibly dictated by a wholly justified concern for self-preservation, but ultimately exhausting for the subject. Certainly not a counter-

conduct. All the more so in that such a game could lead the subject, for want of anything better, to take refuge in a compensatory identity , which at least has the advantage of some stability by contrast with the imperative of indefinite self-transcendence. Far from threatening the neo-liberal order, fixation with identity , whatever its nature, looks like a fall-back position for subjects weary of themselves, for all those who have abandoned the race or been excluded from it from the outset. Worse, it recreates the logic of competition at the level of relations between ‘little communities’. Far from being valuable in itself, independently of any articulation with politics, individual subjectivation is bound up at its very core with collective subjectivation. In this sense, sheer aestheticization of ethics is a pure and simple

abandonment of a genuinely ethical attitude. The invention of new forms of existence can only be a collective act , attributable to the multiplication and intensification of

cooperative counter-conduct . A collective refusal to ‘work more’, if only local, is a good example of an attitude that can pave the way for such

forms of counter-conduct. In effect, it breaks what André Gorz quite rightly called the ‘structural complicity’ that binds the worker to capital, in as much as ‘earning

money’, ever more money, is the decisive goal for both. It makes an initial breach in the ‘immanent constraint of the “ever more”, “ever more rapidly”‘.61¶ The genealogy of neo-liberalism attempted in this book teaches us that the new global rationality is in no wise an inevitable fate shackling humanity. Unlike Hegelian Reason, it is not the reason of human history. It is itself wholly historical – that is, relative to strictly singular conditions that cannot legitimately be regarded as untranscendable. The main thing is to understand that nothing can release us from the task of promoting a different rationality. That is why the belief that the financial crisis by itself sounds the death-knell of neo-liberal capitalism is the worst of beliefs. It is possibly a source of pleasure to those who think they are witnessing reality running ahead of their desires, without them having to move their little finger. It certainly comforts those for whom it is an opportunity to celebrate their own past ‘clairvoyance’. At bottom, it is the least acceptable form of intellectual and political abdication. Neo-liberalism is not falling like a ‘ripe fruit’ on account of its internal contradictions; and traders will not be its undreamed-of

‘gravediggers’ despite themselves. Marx had already made the point powerfully: ‘History does nothing’.62 There are only human beings who act in given conditions and seek through their action to open up a future for

themselves . It is up to us to enable a new sense of possibility to blaze a trail. The government of human beings can be aligned with horizons other than those of maximizing performance, unlimited production and generalized control. It can sustain itself with self-

government that opens onto different relations with others than that of competition

between ‘self-enterprising actors’ . The practices of ‘communization’ of knowledge, mutual aid and cooperative work can delineate the features of a different world reason. Such an alternative reason cannot be better designated than by the term reason of the

commons .

Nietzsche

This search for a transcendently ordered world opposes the world as it exists. This produces a violent will to order that attempts to eliminate chaos but will inevitably fail, breeding ressentiment. Saurette 1996 (Paul, Prof of Political Studies @ UOttawa, “I Mistrust All Systematizers and Avoid Them: Nietzsche, Arendt, and the Crisis of the Will to Order in International Relations Theory” Millenium 25.1)According to Nietzsche, the philosophical foundation of a society is the set of ideas which give meaning to the phenomenon of human existence within a given cultural framework. As one manifestation of the Will to Power, this will to meaning fundamentally influences the social and political organisation of a particular community.5 Anything less than a profound historical interrogation of the most basic philosophical foundations of our civilization, then, misconceives the origins of values which we take to be intrinsic and natural. Nietzsche suggests, therefore, that to understand the development of our modern conception of society and politics, we must reconsider the crucial influence of the Platonic formulation of Socratic thought. Nietzsche claims that pre-Socratic Greece based its philosophical justification of life on heroic myths which

honoured tragedy and competition. Life was understood as a contest in which both the joyful and ordered (Apollonian) and chaotic and suffering (Dionysian) aspects of life were accepted and affirmed as inescapable aspects of human existence.6 However, this incarnation of the will to power as tragedy weakened, and became unable to sustain meaning in Greek life. Greek myths no longer instilled the self-respect and self-control that had upheld the pre-Socratic social order. 'Everywhere the instincts were in anarchy; everywhere people were but five steps from excess: the monstrum in animo was a universal danger'.7 No longer willing to accept the tragic hardness and self-mastery of pre-Socratic myth, Greek thought yielded to decadence, a search for a ¶ new social foundation which would soften the tragedy of life, while still giving meaning to existence. In this context, Socrates' thought became paramount. In the words of Nietzsche, Socrates saw behind his aristocratic Athenians: he grasped that his case, the idiosyncrasy of his case, was no longer exceptional. The same kind of degeneration was everywhere silently preparing itself: the old Athens was coming to an end—And Socrates understood that the world had need of him —his expedient, his cure and his personal art of self-preservation.8 Socrates realised that his search for an ultimate and eternal intellectual standard paralleled the widespread yearning for assurance and stability within society. His expedient, his cure? An alternative will to power. An alternate foundation that promised mastery and control, not through acceptance of the tragic life, but through the disavowal of the instinctual, the contingent, the problematic. In response to the failing power of its foundational myths, Greece tried to renounce the very experience that had given rise to tragedy by retreating/escaping into the Apollonian world promised by Socratic reason. In Nietzsche's words, '[rationality was divined as a saviour.,,it was their last expedient. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself at rationality betrays a state of emergency: one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish, or be absurdly rational.,.,,9 Thus, Socrates codified the wider fear of instability into an intellectual framework. The Socratic Will to Truth is characterised by the attempt to understand and order life rationally by renouncing the Dionysian elements of existence and privileging an idealised Apollonian order. As life is inescapably comprised of both order and disorder, however, the promise of control through Socratic

reason is only possible by creating a 'Real World' of eternal and meaningful forms, in opposition to an 'Apparent World' of transitory physical existence. Suffering and contingency is contained within the Apparent World, disparaged, devalued, and ignored in relation to the ideal order of the Real World. Essential to the Socratic Will to Truth, then, is the fundamental contradiction between the experience of Dionysian suffering in the Apparent World and the idealised order of the Real World. According to Nietzsche, this dichotomised model led to the emergence of a uniquely 'modern understanding of life which could only view suffering as the result of the imperfection of the Apparent World. This outlook

created a modern notion of responsibility in which the Dionysian elements of life could be understood only as a phenomenon for which someone, or something, is to blame. Nietzsche terms this philosophically-induced

condition ressentiment and argues that it signalled a potential crisis of the Will to Truth by exposing the central contradiction of the Socratic resolution. This contradiction, however, was resolved historically through the aggressive universalisation of the Socratic ideal by Christianity. According to Nietzsche, ascetic Christianity exacerbated the Socratic dichotomisation by employing the Apparent World as the responsible agent against which the ressentiment of life could be turned. Blame for suffering fell on individuals within the Apparent World, precisely because they did not live up to God, the Truth, and the Real World. As Nietzsche wrote, '1 suffer: someone must be to blame for it' thinks every sickly sheep. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest tells him: 'Quite so my sheep! someone must be to blame for it: but you yourself are this someone, you alone are to blame for yourself,—you alone

are to blame for yourself '—This is brazen and false enough: but one thing is achieved by it, the direction of ressentiment is altered." Faced with the collapse of the Socratic resolution and the prospect of meaninglessness, once again, 'one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish, or be absurdly rational....'12 The genius of the ascetic ideal was that it preserved the meaning of the Socratic Will to Power as Will to Truth by extrapolating ad absurdium the Socratic division through the redirection of ressentiment against the Apparent World! Through this redirection, the Real World was transformed from a transcendental world of philosophical escape into a model towards which the Apparent World actively aspired, always blaming its contradictory experiences on its own imperfect knowledge and action. This subtle transformation of the relationship between the dichotomised

worlds creates the Will to Order as the defining characteristic of the modern Will to Truth. Unable to accept the Dionysian suffering inherent in the Apparent World, the ascetic ressentiment desperately searches for 'the hypnotic sense of nothingness, the repose of

deepest sleep, in short absence of suffering".n According to the ascetic model, however, this escape is possible only when the Apparent World perfectly duplicates the Real World. The Will to Order, then, is the aggressive need increasingly to order the Apparent World in line with the precepts of the moral Truth of the Real World. The ressentiment of the Will to Order, therefore, generates two interrelated

reactions. First, ressentiment engenders a need actively to mould the Apparent World in accordance with the dictates of the ideal, Apollonian Real World. In order to achieve this, however,

the ascetic ideal also asserts that a 'truer', more complete knowledge of the Real World must be established, creating an ever-increasing Will to Truth. This self-perpetuating movement creates an interpretative structure within which everything must be understood and ordered in relation to the ascetic Truth of the Real World. As Nietzsche suggests, [t]he ascetic ideal has a goal—this goal is so universal that all other interests of human existence seem, when compared with it, petty and narrow; it interprets epochs, nations, and men inexorably with a view to this one goal; it permits no other interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, affirms and sanctions solely from the point of view of its interpretation.14 The very structure of the Will to Truth ensures that theoretical investigation must be increasingly ordered, comprehensive, more True, and closer to the perfection of the ideal. At the same time, this understanding of intellectual theory ensures that it creates practices which attempt to impose increasing order in the Apparent World. With this critical transformation, the Will to Order becomes the fundamental philosophical principle of modernity.

Ressentiment is the primary cause of war and violence.Blin ‘1 9/11/01 Arnaud Blin ¶ Coordinateur Forum for a new World Governance a political scientist specializing in the study of conflict in particular terrorism .¶ He has studied:¶ political science at the University of Georgetown ;¶ international law and political philosophy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy ;¶ the history of religions and ethics at the Harvard University .¶ “WORLD GOVERNANCE OF RESSENTIMENT” https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.world-governance.org%2FIMG%2Fdoc_Blin_-_World_Governance_of_Ressentiment-2.doc&ei=-dErUebnIcnpygGc4YHQAQ&usg=AFQjCNFEH7xcCrtI-U2fiQn7qTRHCceO7A&sig2=W_hI2IgLswTAsXjPF21H_w&bvm=bv.42768644,d.aWcHistory offers us an infinite array of examples of major and minor conflicts born of ressentiment. Revolutions, the key periods marking a break from the past and generating major cycles of history, are often the result of a sudden explosion of old ressentiments. Following the great revolutions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and the eruption of major ideologies and virulent nationalist movements which have all, in some way, instrumentalized legitimate ressentiments, the 21st century offers us the spectacle of a worldwide political map consumed by every sort of ressentiment. To paraphrase René Descartes, we could almost say that ressentiment is the most widely shared thing in the world. It is indeed difficult to observe current affairs without perceiving the ressentiments that are the causes or consequences of the major events that make up our daily lives. Let us take a recent example. What can we make of the current financial crisis? That it will create a mountain of ressentiments, notably in Southern hemisphere countries which could be freed from poverty with just a fraction of the hundreds of billions of euros and dollars released with disconcerting speed by rich countries to save their banks. The events of 11 September 2001 provide another example. The causes behind it? For many observers, Islamic terrorism springs from the ressentiment felt by the Muslim world towards the West. The war in Iraq? How many long-standing ressentiments has it created or exacerbated in the Middle East?¶ There is an endless supply of examples. Most current conflicts are primarily

fed by ressentiment , such as the conflict in the Middle East, tensions between India and Pakistan, and inter-ethnic conflicts in Africa. The genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, the bloodiest conflict of the last fifty years, was essentially a war of ressentiment, as were the wars in the former Yugoslavia. And aside from these examples of open conflicts, how many countries and peoples are influenced by enduring animosity dating from the past, recent or distant, which the collective memory keeps alive just below the surface, ready to explode? China, for instance, has yet to forgive Japan the acts of violence it committed in the 1930s. Neither have the Armenians forgiven the Turks for the genocide of 1915, their bitterness only exacerbated by the Turks’ refusal to recognise the event. The Spanish continue to nurture bitter memories of Napoleon and, increasingly now that Civil War mass graves are being opened, Franco, as well as of the Muslim colonisation, despite several centuries having passed since it took place. The Greeks continue to hold a strong grudge against the Turks for the centuries of subjugation they inflicted upon them. The Africans and Indians have ambivalent relationships with their former colonial nations, France, England, Portugal and the Netherlands. Since the days of Monroe and, especially, Theodore Roosevelt, the US has given its southern neighbours plenty of grounds for ressentment, and still today does nothing to overturn the feelings of animosity. Peru and Bolivia have not yet forgiven the Chileans for having sequestered a vast territory and, for the Bolivians, access to the sea. Throughout the Americas, from Chile to Argentina and the great Canadian north, Amerindian peoples feel the consequences of European colonization in their daily lives, just like the Aborigines and Maoris, amongst others, in the Pacific region. Ressentiment gnaws at people’s minds and hearts and shuts the door on forgiveness.

Disorder and insecurity are inevitable, the drive to secure culminates in endless violence and ressianiamnet Der Derian 98 – Prof Political Science at University of Mass. [James, Political Science Professor, University of Massachusetts, 1998. On Security, ed: Lipschitz, The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard, Decentering Security.]The will to power, then, should not be confused with a Hobbesian perpetual desire for power. It can, in its negative form, produce a reactive and resentful longing for only power, leading, in

Nietzsche's view, to a triumph of nihilism. But Nietzsche refers to a positive will to power, an active and affective force of becoming, from which values and meanings—including self-preservation—are produced which affirm life. Conventions of security act to suppress rather than confront the fears endemic to life, for "... life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of ones own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation—but why should one always use those words in which slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages."35

Elsewhere Nietzsche establishes the pervasiveness of agonism in life: "life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war.” But the denial of this permanent condition, the effort to disguise it with a con-sensual rationality or to hide from it with a fictional sovereignty, are all effects of this suppression of fear. The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference—that which is not us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven desire for protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power, which produces an aesthetic affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a truncated life which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks of the reader "Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubi lation of those who obtain knowledge not the jubilation over the restora-tion of a sense of security?**37 The fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated life, in which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest protection against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative pro-duces, and is sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols-.

The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?*1 shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause—a cause (hat is comforting, liber-ating and relieving. . . . That which is new and strange and has not been

experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some kind of explanation, to serve as a cause, but for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation—that which most quickly and frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations.38 A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility—recycling the desire for security. The "influence of timidity," as Nietzsche puts

it, creates a people who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the "necessities" of security: "they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences."39

This naïve aversion to death is the ultimate form of nihilism, ensuring a valueless existence—rather than seeking to escape death, we should ask first what makes life worth livingOwen & Ridley 0 [David, Head of the Division of Politics & International Relations and Professor of Social & Political Philosophy at the University of Southampton in England, and Aaron, Head of Research in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Southampton,

“Dramatis Personae: Nietzsche, Culture, and Human Types,” Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture, and Politics, ed. Alan D. Schrift, p. 149-151]The modern condition offers both a threat and a promise. Nietzsche argues that the self-destruction of the ascetic ideal threatens to under-mine our capacities for “self-discipline,” “self-surveillance," and “self-overcoming” and our disposition to truthfulness precisely because we now lack an overarching goal in the service of which these capacities and this disposition are cultivated. But this undermining does not entail any diminution of our dissatisfaction with our this-worldly existence: the suffering endemic to life itself remains; all that has gone is the (ascetic) mode of valuing that rendered such suffering meaningful, and hence bearable. Thus Nietzsche discerns the outlines of a creature whose best capacities have atrophied and whose relationship to its own existence is one of perpetual dissatisfaction. The threat here is obvious: What is to be feared, what has a more calamitous effect than any other calamity, is that man should inspire not profound fear but profound nausea; also not great fear but great pity. Suppose these two were one day to unite, they would inevitably beget one of the uncanniest monsters: the “last will" of man, his will to nothingness, nihilism. And a great deal points to this union. (GM III:14) So

suicidal nihilism beckons . The one response to the situation that is absolutely ruled out is the one that has so far

proved most successful at addressing problems of this sort, namely, adoption of the ascetic ideal, because the present crisis is caused by the self-destruction of that ideal. But Nietzsche argues that two plausible responses to the crisis are nonetheless possible for modern man. Both of these involve the construction of immanent ideals or goals: one response is represented by the type the Last Man, the other by the type the Ubermensch. The first response recognizes the reality of suffering and our (post-ascetic) inability to accord transcendental significance to it and concludes that the latter provides an overwhelming reason for abolishing the former to whatever extent is possible. This has the effect of elevating the abolition of suffering into a quasi-transcendental goal and brings with it a new table of virtues, on which prudence figures largest. In other words, this response takes the form of a rapport a soi characterized by a style of calculative rationality directed toward the avoidance of suffering at any cost, for example, of utilitarianism and any other account of human subjectivity that accords preeminence to maximizing preference satisfaction. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche portrays this type as follows: "What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" thus asks the Last Man and blinks. The earth has become small, and upon it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His race is as inexterminable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest." We have discovered happiness," say the List Men and blink. They have left the places where living was hard: for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs oneself against him: for one needs warmth. Sickness and mistrust count as sins with them: one should go about warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or over men! A little poison now and then: that produces pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at last, for a pleasant death. They still work, for work is entertainment. But they take care the entertainment does not exhaust them. Nobody grows rich or poor any more: both are too much of a burden. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much of a burden. No herdsman and one herd. Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse "Formerly all the world was mad," say the most acute of them and blink. They are clever and know everything that has ever happened: so there is no end to their mockery. They still quarrel, but they soon make up—otherwise indigestion would result. They have their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night: but they respect health. "We have discovered happiness," say the Last Men and blink. (Z:1 "Prologue" 5) Nietzsche’s hostility to this first form of response is evident. His general objection to the Last Man is that the Last Man’s ideal, like the ascetic ideal, is committed to the denial of chance and necessity as integral features of human existence. Whereas the ascetic ideal denies chance and necessity per se so that, while suffering remains real, what is objection-able about it is abolished, the Last Man’s ideal is expressed as the practical imperative to abolish suffering, and hence, a fortiori, what is objectionable about it—that is, our exposure to chance and necessity. This general objection has two specific dimensions. The first is that the Last Man's ideal is unrealizable, insofar as human existence involves ineliminable sources of suffering—not least our consciousness that we come into being by chance and cease to be by necessity. Thus the Last Man's ideal is predicated on a neglect of truthfulness. The second dimension of Nietzsche's objection is that pursuit of the Last Man's ideal impoverishes and arbitrarily restricts our understanding of what we can be and, in doing so,

forecloses our future possibilities of becoming otherwise than we are. Thus the Last Man's ideal entails an atrophying of the capacities (for self-overcoming, etc.) bequeathed by the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche brings these two dimensions together in Beyond Good and Evil: "You want, if possible-and there is no more insane ‘if possible’—to abolish suffering. . . . Well-being as you understand it—that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible—that makes his destruction desirable" (BGE 225).

Their predictions and rush to secure the world produces bureaucratic bungling that creates error replication—the solutions we prescribe make the problems worse Der Derian 5 [James, Director of the Global Security Program and Research Professor of International Studies at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University,

“National Security: An Accident Waiting to Happen,” Harvard International Review 27.3 (Fall 2005): 82-83] It often takes a catastrophe to reveal the illusory beliefs we continue to harbor in national and homeland security. To keep us safe, we place our faith in national borders and guards, bureaucracies and experts,

technologies and armies. These and other instruments of national security are empowered and legitimated by the assumption that it falls upon the sovereign country to protect us from the turbulent state of nature and anarchy that permanently lies in wait offshore and over the horizon for the unprepared and inadequately defended. But this parochial fear, posing as a realistic worldview, has recently taken some very hard knocks. Prior to September 11, 2001, national borders were thought to be necessary and sufficient to keep our enemies at bay; upon entry to Baghdad, a virtuous triumphalism and a revolution in military affairs were touted as the best means to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East; and before Hurricane Katrina, emergency preparedness and an intricate system of levees were supposed to keep New Orleans safe and dry. The intractability of disaster, especially its unexpected, unplanned, unprecedented nature, erodes not only the very distinction of the local, national, and global, but, assisted and amplified by an unblinking global media, reveals the contingent and highly interconnected character of life in general. Yet when it comes to dealing with natural and unnatural disasters, we continue to expect (and, in the absence of a credible alternative, understandably so) if not certainty and total safety at

least a high level of probability and competence from our national and homeland security experts However, between the mixed metaphors and behind the metaphysical concepts given voice by US Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff early into the Katrina crisis, there lurks an uneasy recognition that this administration—and perhaps no national government—is up to the task of managing incidents that so rapidly cascade into global events. Indeed, they suggest that our national plans and preparations for the “big one”—a force-five

hurricane, terrorist attack, pandemic disease—have become part of the problem, not the solution. His use of hyberbolic terms like “ultracatastrophe” and “fall-out” is telling: such events exceed not only local and national capabilities, but the capacity of conventional language itself. An easy deflection would be to lay the blame on the neoconservative faithful of the first term of US President George W. Bush, who, viewing through an inverted Wilsonian prism the world as they would wish it to be, have now been forced by natural and unnatural disasters to face the world as it really is—and not even the most sophisticated public affairs machine of dissimulations, distortions, and lies can close this gap. However, the discourse of the second Bush term has increasingly returned to the dominant worldview of national security, realism. And if language is, as Nietzsche claimed, a prisonhouse, realism is its supermax penitentiary. Based on linear notions of causality, a correspondence theory of truth, and the materiality of

power, how can realism possibly account—let alone prepare or provide remedies—for complex catastrophes, like the toppling of the World Trade Center and attack on the Pentagon by a handful of jihadists armed with box-cutters and a few months of flight-training? A force-five hurricane that might well have begun with the flapping of a butterfly’s wings? A northeast electrical blackout that started with a falling tree limb in Ohio? A possible pandemic triggered by the mutation of an avian virus? How, for instance, are we to measure the immaterial power of the CNN-effect on the first Gulf War, the Al-Jazeera-effect on the Iraq War, or the Nokia-effect on the London terrorist bombings? For events of such complex, non-linear origins and with such tightly-coupled, quantum effects, the national security discourse of realism is simply not up to the task. Worse, what if the “failure of imagination” identified by the 9/11 Commission is built into our national and homeland security systems? What if the reliance on planning for the catastrophe that never came reduced our capability to flexibly respond and improvise for the “ultra-catastrophe” that did? What if worse-case scenarios,

simulation training, and disaster exercises—as well as border guards, concrete barriers and earthen levees—not only prove inadequate but might well act as force-multipliers—what organizational

theorists identify as “negative synergy” and “cascading effects” —that produce the automated bungling (think

Federal Emergency Management Agency) that transform isolated events and singular attacks into global disasters? Just as “normal accidents” are built into new technologies—from the Titanic sinking to the Chernobyl

meltdown to the Challenger explosion—we must ask whether “ultracatastrophes” are no longer the exception but now part and parcel of densely networked systems that defy national management; in other words, “planned disasters.”

The alternative is to do nothing. This acceptance that the world breaks the sword out of a heighted sense of feeling accepting the danger of being alive. Nietzsche ’80 (Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, #284)We do not endorse the gendered language in this card

The Means towards Genuine Peace. No government will nowadays admit that it maintains an army in order to satisfy occasionally its passion for conquest. The army is said to serve only defensive purposes. This morality, which justifies self defence, is called in as the government's advocate. This means, however, reserving morality for ourselves and immorality for our neighbour, because he must be thought eager for attack and conquest if our state is forced to consider means of self defence. At the same time, by our explanation of our need of an army (because he denies the lust of attack just as our state does, and

ostensibly also maintains his army for defensive reasons), we proclaim the neighbor [him] a hypocrite and cunning criminal, who would fain seize by surprise, without any fighting. a harmless and unwary

victim. In this attitude all states face each other today. They presuppose evil intentions on their neighbour's part and good intentions on their own. This hypothesis, however, is an

inhuman notion, as bad as and worse than war. Nay, at bottom it is a challenge and motive to war, foisting as it does upon the neighbouring state the charge of immorality, and thus provoking hostile intentions and acts. The doctrine of the army as a means of self defence must be abjured as completely as the lust of conquest. Perhaps a memorable day will come when a nation renowned in wars and victories, distinguished by the highest development of military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifice to these objects, will voluntarily exclaim, "We will break our swords” and will destroy its whole military system, lock, stock, and barrel. Making ourselves defenceless (after having been the most strongly defended) from a loftiness of sentiment — that is the means towards genuine peace, which must always rest upon a pacific disposition. The so called armed peace that prevails at present in all countries is a sign of a bellicose disposition, of a disposition that trusts neither itself nor its neighbour, and, partly from hate, partly from fear, refuses to lay down its weapons. Better to perish than to hate and fear, and twice as far better to perish than to make oneself hated and feared — this must someday become the supreme maxim of every political community! — Our liberal representatives of the people, as is well known, have not the time for reflection on the nature of humanity, or else they would know that they are working in vain when they work for "a gradual diminution of the military burdens”. On the contrary, when the distress of these burdens is greatest, the sort of God who alone can help here will be nearest. The tree of military glory can only be destroyed at one swoop, with one stroke of lightning. But, as you know, lightning comes from the cloud and from above.

DA

Terror DA

Terror risk is high- maintaining current surveillance is keyInserra, 6-8-2015David Inserra is a Research Associate for Homeland Security and Cyber Security in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign and National Security Policy of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, at The Heritage Foundation, 6-8-2015, "69th Islamist Terrorist Plot: Ongoing Spike in Terrorism Should Force Congress to Finally Confront the Terrorist Threat," Heritage Foundation, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/06/69th-islamist-terrorist-plot-ongoing-spike-in-terrorism-should-force-congress-to-finally-confront-the-terrorist-threat

On June 2 in Boston, Usaamah Abdullah Rahim drew a knife and attacked police officers and FBI agents, who then shot and killed him. Rahim was being watched by Boston’s Joint Terrorism Task Force as he had been plotting to behead police officers as part of violent jihad. A conspirator, David Wright or Dawud Sharif Abdul Khaliq, was arrested shortly thereafter for helping Rahim to plan this attack. This plot marks the 69th publicly known Islamist terrorist plot or attack against the U.S. homeland since 9/11, and is part of a recent spike in terrorist activity. The U.S. must redouble its efforts to stop terrorists before they strike, through the use of properly applied intelligence tools . The Plot According to the criminal complaint filed against Wright, Rahim had originally planned to behead an individual outside the state of Massachusetts,[1] which, according to news reports citing anonymous government officials, was Pamela Geller, the organizer of the “draw Mohammed” cartoon contest in Garland, Texas.[2] To this end, Rahim had purchased multiple knives, each over 1 foot long, from Amazon.com. The FBI was listening in on the calls between Rahim and Wright and recorded multiple conversations regarding how these weapons would be used to behead someone. Rahim then changed his plan early on the morning of June 2. He planned to go “on vacation right here in Massachusetts…. I’m just going to, ah, go after them, those boys in blue. Cause, ah, it’s the easiest target.”[3] Rahim and Wright had used the phrase “going on vacation” repeatedly in their conversations as a euphemism for violent jihad. During this conversation, Rahim told Wright that he planned to attack a police officer on June 2 or June 3. Wright then offered advice on preparing a will and destroying any incriminating evidence. Based on this threat, Boston police officers and FBI agents approached Rahim to question him, which prompted him to pull out one of his knives. After being told to drop his weapon, Rahim responded with “you drop yours” and moved toward the officers, who then shot and killed him. While Rahim’s brother, Ibrahim, initially claimed that Rahim was shot in the back, video surveillance was shown to community leaders and civil rights groups, who have confirmed that Rahim was not shot in the back.[4 ] Terrorism Not Going Away This 69th Islamist plot is also the seventh in this calendar year. Details on how exactly Rahim was radicalized are still forthcoming,

but according to anonymous officials, online propaganda from ISIS and other radical Islamist groups are the source.[5] That would make this attack the 58th homegrown terrorist plot and continue the recent trend of ISIS playing an important role in radicalizing individuals in the United States. It is also the sixth plot or attack targeting law enforcement in the U.S., with a recent uptick in plots aimed at police. While the debate over the PATRIOT Act and the USA FREEDOM Act is taking a break, the terrorists are not. The result of the debate has been the reduction of U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism capabilities, meaning that the U.S. has to do even more with less when it comes to connecting the dots on terrorist plots.[6] Other legitimate intelligence tools and capabilities must be leaned on now even more . Protecting the Homeland To keep the U.S. safe, Congress must take a hard look at the U.S. counterterrorism enterprise and determine other measures that are needed to improve it. Congress should: Emphasize community outreach. Federal grant funds should be used to create robust community-outreach capabilities in higher-risk urban areas. These funds must not be used for political pork, or so broadly that they no longer target those communities at greatest risk. Such capabilities are key to building trust within these communities, and if the United States is to thwart lone-wolf terrorist attacks, it must place effective community outreach operations at the tip of the spear. Prioritize local cyber capabilities. Building cyber-investigation capabilities in the higher-risk urban areas must become a primary focus of Department of Homeland Security grants. With so much terrorism-related activity occurring on the Internet, local law enforcement must have the constitutional ability to monitor and track violent extremist activity on the Web when reasonable suspicion exists to do so. Push the FBI toward being more effectively driven by intelligence. While the FBI has made high-level changes to its mission and organizational structure, the bureau is still working on integrating intelligence and law enforcement activities. Full integration will require overcoming inter-agency cultural barriers and providing FBI intelligence personnel with resources, opportunities, and the stature they need to become a more effective and integral part of the FBI. Maintain essential counterterrorism tools. Support for important investigative tools is

essential to maintaining the security of the U.S. and combating terrorist threats . Legitimate government surveillance programs are also a vital component of U.S. national security and should be allowed to continue. The need for effective counterterrorism operations does not relieve the government of its obligation to follow the law and respect individual privacy and liberty. In the American system, the government must do both equally well. Clear-Eyed Vigilance The recent spike in terrorist plots and attacks should finally awaken policymakers—all Americans, for that matter—to the seriousness of the terrorist threat. Neither fearmongering nor willful blindness serves the United States. Congress must recognize and acknowledge the nature and the scope of the Islamist terrorist threat, and take the appropriate action to confront it.

Financial surveillance is key to stopping terrorist organizationsAtlas 15 [Terry Atlas, 2-6-2015, Senior Writer in Foreign Policy/National Security Team for Bloomberg News, "Follow the money new game plan in thwarting terrorism," Seattle Times, http://www.seattletimes.com/news/follow-the-money-new-game-plan-in-thwarting-terrorism/]

Economic and financial intelligence is critical to targeting and enforcing sanctions against Iran, North Korea

and Russia; strangling the flow of money to terrorist organizations, drug cartels and weapons

traffickers; tracking nuclear proliferation; and assessing the strength of nations such as Russia and China that are now part of the global economy. Treasury personnel in Washington, D.C. — and in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf — have worked

with intelligence and military colleagues to attack the finances of the Taliban, al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. The department has provided expertise and actionable intelligence to civilian and military leaders through “threat finance cells” for Afghanistan and Iraq, and worked elsewhere with the U.S. Special Operations Command. How much the intelligence mission has changed is highlighted by the move this month by David Cohen, the Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence to become deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Cohen, 51, whose Treasury responsibilities included sanctions policy, replaces Avril Haines, a lawyer who’s now President Obama’s deputy national security adviser. It’s the first time a Treasury official has moved into such a senior CIA post. That has been noticed in the intelligence community, where the Treasury has become a recognized power, and among the specialized legal and financial community affected by the nation’s increasing use of

economic coercion against adversaries. “Financial intelligence is incredibly important, and it’s much more important than it used to be,” said attorney Christopher Swift, a former Treasury official who investigated

financing of terrorist groups and weapons proliferators. “Cohen’s move to CIA underscores that.” Financial intelligence has come into its own as the U.S. increasingly turns to sanctions, asset freezes and other financial actions to thwart adversaries from al-Qaida operatives to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It’s a tactic that Ian Bremmer, the president of New York-based Eurasia Group, recently called the “weaponization of finance.” The U.S. strategy is “premised on the simple reality that all of our adversaries, to one degree or another, need money to operate, and that by cutting off their financial lifelines, we can significantly impair their ability to function,” Cohen said at a conference in London in June.

Financial intelligence exposes vulnerabilities of adversaries — whether nations or individuals — who

need access to the global financial system. Concealing financial flows can be harder than avoiding surveillance of emails and phone calls, which terrorists have tried to do in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about U.S. communications intercepts. “When people think about intelligence, they think about James Bond and running operations against the Russians or the Chinese, and that still goes on and we shouldn’t diminish the importance of it,” said Swift, an adjunct professor of national security studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “But if you’re looking at the other types of organizations in the global community that are causing problems for the United States and its allies, a lot of them are non-state actors, they’re criminal syndicates, they’re narcotics

syndicates, they’re transnational terrorist syndicates, and the best way to figure out how those organizations work, who’s part of those organizations, and the best way to degrade those organizations is follow the money,” he said. The U.S. government has vastly expanded its collection and use of financial intelligence, bolstered by a series of post-9/11 laws and executive orders that have given the Treasury Department a leading role in financial intelligence and sanctions. The Treasury Department has more than 700 personnel dealing with terrorist and

financial intelligence. The Treasury’s Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, which has access to the Swift international

banking transaction network, participated in investigations into the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, threats to the 2012 London Summer Olympic Games and the 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador in D.C., which U.S. officials said originated with senior members of the Quds force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a part of the Treasury’s

intelligence operation that regulates the financial industry to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing, receives more than

a million reports a year on potentially suspect cash movements from financial institutions, Cohen said in a speech in January. FinCen’s information, combined with data from other sources, assists investigators in “connecting the dots” involving sometimes previously unknown individuals and businesses, according to the Treasury.

ISIS is on track to gaining nuclear capabilities—US recruits and financial resources increase probability of a nuclear attack, a dirty bomb or a chemical weaponJoseph Cirincione, 9-30-2014, "ISIS will get nukes if allowed to consolidate: expert," NY Daily News, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/isis-nukes-allowed-consolidate-expert-article-1.1958855The risk of a terrorist attack using nuclear or chemical weapons has just gone up. ISIS is willing to kill large numbers of innocents, and it has added three capabilities that catapult the threat beyond anything seen before: control of large, urban territories, huge amounts of cash, and a global network of recruits . British Home Secretary Theresa May warned that if ISIS consolidates its control over the land it occupies, “We will see the world’s first truly terrorist state” with “the space to plot attacks against us. ” Its seizure of banks and oil fields gave it more than $2 billion in assets. If ISIS could make the right connection to corrupt officials in Russia or Pakistan, the group might be able to buy enough highly enriched uranium (about 50 pounds) and the technical help to build a crude nuclear device . Militants recruited from Europe or America could help smuggle it into their home nations. Or ISIS could try to build a “dirty bomb,” conventional explosives like dynamite laced with highly radioactive materials. The blast would not kill many directly, but it would force the evacuation of tens of square blocks contaminated with radioactive particles. The terror and economic consequences of a bomb detonated in the financial districts of London or New York would be enormous . ISIS could also try to get chemical weapons, such as deadly nerve gases or mustard gas. Fortunately, the most likely source of these terror weapons was just eliminated.

Terrorist retaliation causes nuclear war – draws in Russia and ChinaRobert Ayson, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies:

New Zealand at the Victoria University of Wellington, 2010 (“After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 7, July, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via InformaWorld)A terrorist nuclear attack, and even the use of nuclear weapons in response by the country attacked in the first place, would not necessarily represent the worst of the nuclear worlds imaginable. Indeed, there are reasons to wonder whether nuclear terrorism should ever be regarded as belonging in the category of truly existential threats. A contrast can be drawn here with the global catastrophe that would come from a massive nuclear exchange between two or more of the sovereign states that possess these weapons in significant numbers. Even the worst terrorism that the twenty-first century might bring would fade into insignificance alongside considerations of

what a general nuclear war would have wrought in the Cold War period. And it must be admitted that as long as the major nuclear weapons states have hundreds and even thousands of nuclear weapons at their disposal, there is always the possibility of a truly awful nuclear exchange taking place precipitated entirely by state possessors

themselves. But these two nuclear worlds—a non-state actor nuclear attack and a catastrophic interstate nuclear exchange—are not necessarily separable. It is just possible that some sort of terrorist attack , and especially an act of nuclear terrorism, could precipitate a chain of events leading to a massive exchange of nuclear weapons between two or more of the states that possess them. In this context, today’s and tomorrow’s terrorist groups might assume the place allotted during the early Cold War years to new state possessors of small nuclear arsenals who were seen as raising the risks of a catalytic nuclear war between the superpowers started by third parties. These risks were considered in the late 1950s and early 1960s as concerns grew about nuclear proliferation, the so-called n+1 problem. t may require a considerable amount of imagination to depict an especially plausible situation where an act of nuclear terrorism could lead to such a massive inter-state nuclear war. For example, in the event of a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States, it might well be wondered just how Russia and/or China could plausibly be brought into the picture, not least because they seem unlikely to be fingered as the most obvious state sponsors or encouragers of terrorist groups. They would seem far too responsible to be involved in supporting that sort of terrorist behavior that

could just as easily threaten them as well. Some possibilities, however remote, do suggest themselves. For example, how might the United States react if it was thought or discovered that the fissile material used in the act of nuclear terrorism had come from Russian stocks,40 and if for some reason Moscow denied any responsibility for nuclear laxity? The correct attribution of that nuclear material to a particular country might not be a case of science fiction given the observation by Michael May et al. that while the debris resulting from a nuclear explosion would be “spread over a wide area in tiny fragments, its radioactivity makes it detectable, identifiable and collectable, and a wealth of information can be obtained from its analysis: the efficiency of the explosion, the materials used and, most important …

some indication of where the nuclear material came from.”41 Alternatively, if the act of nuclear terrorism came as a complete

surprise, and American officials refused to believe that a terrorist group was fully responsible (or responsible at all)

suspicion would shift immediately to state possessors. Ruling out Western ally countries like the United

Kingdom and France, and probably Israel and India as well, authorities in Washington would be left with a very short list consisting of North Korea, perhaps Iran if its program continues, and possibly Pakistan. But at what stage would Russia and China be definitely ruled out in this high stakes game of nuclear Cluedo? In particular, if the act of nuclear terrorism occurred against a backdrop of existing tension in Washington’s relations with Russia and/or China, and at a time when threats had already been traded between these major powers, would officials and political leaders not be tempted to assume the worst? Of course, the chances of this occurring would only seem to increase if the United States was already involved in some sort of limited armed conflict with Russia and/or China, or if they were confronting each other from a distance in a proxy war, as unlikely as these

developments may seem at the present time. The reverse might well apply too: should a nuclear terrorist attack occur in Russia or China during a period of heightened tension or even limited conflict with the

United States, could Moscow and Beijing resist the pressures that might rise domestically to consider the United States as a possible perpetrator or encourager of the attack? Washington’s early response to a terrorist nuclear attack on its own soil might also raise the possibility of an unwanted (and nuclear aided) confrontation with Russia and/or China. For example,

in the noise and confusion during the immediate aftermath of the terrorist nuclear attack, the U.S. president might be expected to place the country’s armed forces, including its nuclear arsenal, on a higher stage of

alert. In such a tense environment, when careful planning runs up against the friction of reality, it is just possible that Moscow and/or China might mistakenly read this as a sign of U.S. intentions to use force (and possibly nuclear force) against them. In that situation, the temptations to preempt such actions might grow, although it must be admitted that any preemption would probably still meet with a devastating response.

Iran Ptix

Obama can hold off a veto now – but his political capital is keyWalsh and Barrett 7/16 (Deirdre, Senior Congressional Producer for CNN, Ted, senior congressional producer for CNN Politics, “WH dispatches Joe Biden to lock down Iran deal on Capitol Hill,” CNN, 7/16/2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/15/politics/iran-deal-white-house-democrats-congress/)//duncanTwo days after the Iran deal was unveiled, the Obama administration's sales job is in full

swing. ¶ Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to convince House Democrats to support the deal , while a small group of senators were invited to the White House to get their questions answered directly from officials who sat across from the Iranians at the negotiating table. Biden meets with Senate Democrats of the Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday.¶ House lawmakers said Biden was candid about the strengths and weaknesses of the compromise deal. One described his behind closed doors pitch.¶ "I'm going to put aside my notes and talk to you from my heart because I've been in this business for 45 years," Biden said in his opening comments, according to Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-New Jersey, who attended the session.¶ "I'm not going to BS you. I'm going to tell you exactly what I think," the vice president reportedly said.¶ Obama got a boost from the leader of his party in the chamber when Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi formally announced Thursday that she was backing the deal . ¶ SInce Republicans in the House and Senate are firmly against the Iran nuclear deal -- announced by

President Barack Obama on Tuesday -- the administration is cranking up its campaign to sway

concerned Democrats to back the agreement. ¶ Under legislation that allows Congress to review the

agreement, the White House needs to secure enough votes from members of his own party to sustain the President's promised veto on an resolution of disapproval -- 145 in the House and 34 in the Senate.¶

After the session with Biden, several House Democrats stressed that while the process is just beginning, right now the administration likely has the votes to sustain the President's

veto on a resolution to block the deal. ¶ "I'm confident they will like it when they understand it all," the vice

president told reporters on his way into the session, beginning what will be a two month campaign culminating in a vote, expected in September.¶ Democrats , both for and against the deal, praised Biden's presentation . ¶ "Joe Biden was as good as I've seen him," Rep. John Larson, D-Connecticut, told CNN. "I thought he did an excellent job."¶ Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar said Biden is a "master of detail" and helped clarify some concerns he had

about the verification provisions in the deal, but he still planned to carefully study it and said he was undecided.¶ Pascrell also cited the verification issue as a potential sticking point but said he is leaning 'yes' on the agreement.¶ "On our side

of the aisle there is concern and skepticism shared by a number of members but an

openness to be persuaded if the facts take them that way," Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia said. "I

think (Biden) made some real progress on behalf of the administration today."¶ But Democratic Rep. Steve Israel of New York, a former member of Democratic leadership, told reporters he wasn't sold yet.¶ "For me, I still have some very significant questions with respect to lifting of the embargo on conventional arms. And missiles. The (International Atomic Energy Agency) verification process for me is not any time anywhere, I think there are some very significant delays built into that," Israel said.¶ Larson noted that both Biden's presentation, along with Hillary Clinton's a day earlier, who he said spoke favorably

about the deal, helped lay the groundwork for most Democrats to back the White House . ¶ At the same time on Wednesday that the President held a news conference trying to persuade the public he had brokered an strong and effective deal with Iran, Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, and a handful of other senators, were in a separate part of the White House meeting with some of the President's top negotiators, who had just returned from Vienna.¶ "I

was very satisfied with an awful lot of the answers we received," Manchin told CNN.¶ The intimate meeting for

senators was another example of the White House's effort to shore up support in the

Senate where leaders believe as many as 15 Democrats could oppose the deal . If they did, it could provide Senate Republicans the votes needed to override a veto of the disapproval resolution and scuttle the deal . ¶ But Manchin , a centrist who has close relations with senators on both sides of the aisle, said at this point he has not detected major blowback from Senate Democrats to the deal. ¶ "At caucus yesterday I didn't get a reading there is hard, hard opposition. I did not," he said.¶ In fact, Manchin said he thought Republicans actually might struggle getting the 60 votes they will need to pass the disapproval resolution, much less the dozen or so votes that might be needed to sustain a veto.¶ One key

senator whose position will be closely monitored by the White House and his colleagues from both parties

on the Hill, is Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrats who is poised to become the Democratic

leader in the next Congress. Schumer has many Jewish voters in his state who are wary of the impact of the Iran agreement on the security of Israel. Schumer said he is skeptical of the deal and won't decide whether to support it before doing his homework.¶ "I will sit down, I will read the agreement thoroughly and then I'm gonna speak with officials -- administration officials, people all over on all different sides," he said when asked about his decision-making process. "Look, this is a decision that shouldn't be made lightly and I am gonna just study this agreement and talk to people before I do anything else."¶ Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, a leading critic of the

agreement with Iran, said " the pressure will be enormous from the administration," as it tries to

keep Democrats from defecting . As chairman of the Armed Services Committee, McCain said he intends to hold

hearings to demonstrate what he calls the "fatal flaws" in the deal.¶ House conservatives speaking at a forum sponsored

by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, one after another ripped the Iran deal. But they conceded that

ultimately they may not be able to block it.¶ " The game is rigged in favor of getting this done" Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan said.

FATCA is Unpopular and would cost Political Capitol Har 15 (Sophia Har, Communications Director of Common Dreams News citing Eric LeCompte, executive director of the financial reform organization Jubilee USA Network, “Senate Budget Action Fails to Repeal Tax Transparency Law”, March 27, 2015, http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2015/03/27/senate-budget-action-fails-repeal-tax-transparency-law)WASHINGTON - Budget amendment SA 621, to repeal the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA),

failed to reach the the US Senate floor for a vote on Friday. FATCA was originally passed in 2010 to prevent corrupt activities and Americans from evading taxes abroad. The law requires foreign financial institutions to disclose financial information or face penalties.¶ "It's an unpopular idea to overturn existing tax transparency laws in the Senate," said Eric LeCompte, executive director of the financial reform organization Jubilee USA Network, which

generated thousands of phone calls into the Senate in support of FATCA. "The lack of support for repealing FATCA shows how important anti-corruption legislation is to Congress."¶ Countries and financial institutions that sign FATCA compliance agreements with the US government agree to automatically share certain tax information. To date, over 77,000 banks and 80 countries have signed such agreements. In 2013, G8 leaders pledged to crack down on tax avoidance and improve transparency by working toward a global version of FATCA. The G20 that year agreed to automatically exchange information by the end of 2015 and called such exchange "the new standard." In 2014, 47 countries agreed to a global standard of information exchange developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.¶ "FATCA is part of a global campaign for financial transparency," noted LeCompte

Failure will spur prolif and war with Iran – the plan tanks Obama’s ability to hold off CongressBeauchamp 14 (Zack – B.A.s in Philosophy and Political Science from Brown University and an M.Sc in International Relations from the London School of Economics, former editor of TP Ideas and a reporter for ThinkProgress.org. He previously contributed to Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish at Newsweek/Daily Beast, and has also written for Foreign Policy and Tablet magazines, now writes for Vox , “How the new GOP majority could destroy Obama's nuclear deal with Iran,” http://www.vox.com/2014/11/6/7164283/iran-nuclear-deal-congress,)There is one foreign policy issue on which the GOP's takeover of the Senate could have huge ramifications, and beyond just the US: Republicans are likely to try to torpedo President Obama's ongoing efforts to reach a nuclear deal with Iran. And they just might pull it off. November 24 is the latest deadline for a final agreement between the United States and Iran over the latter's nuclear program. That'll likely be extended, but it's a reminder that the

negotiations could soon come to a head. Throughout his presidency, Obama has prioritized these

negotiations ; he likely doesn't want to leave office without having made a deal. But if Congress doesn't like

the deal, or just wants to see Obama lose, it has the power to torpedo it by imposing new sanctions on Iran. Previously, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used procedural powers to stop this from happening

and save the nuclear talks. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may not be so kind, and he may have the votes to destroy an Iran deal. If he tries, we could see one of the most important

legislative fight s of Obama's presidency. Why Congress can bully Obama on Iran sanctions At their most basic level, the international negotiations over Iran's nuclear program (they include several other nations, but the US is the biggest player) are a tit-for-tat deal. If Iran agrees to place a series of verifiable limits on its nuclear development, then the United States and the world will relax their painful economic and diplomatic sanctions on Tehran. "The regime of economic sanctions against Iran is arguably the most complex the United States and the international community have ever imposed on a rogue state," the Congressional Research Service's Dianne Rennack writes. To underscore the point, Rennack's four-page report is accompanied by a list of every US sanction on Iran that goes on for 23 full pages. The US's sanctions are a joint Congressional-executive production. Congress puts strict limits on Iran's ability to export oil and do business with American companies, but it gives the president the power to waive sanctions if he thinks it's in the American national interest. "In the collection of laws that are the statutory basis for the U.S. economic sanctions regime on Iran," Rennack writes, "the President retains, in varying degrees, the authority to tighten and relax restrictions." The key point here is that Congress gave Obama that power — which means they can take it back. "You could see a bill in place that makes it harder for the administration to suspend sanctions," Ken Sofer, the Associate Director for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress (where I worked for a little under two years, though not with Sofer directly), says. "You could also see a bill that says the president can't agree to a deal unless it includes the following things or [a bill] forcing a congressional vote on any deal." Imposing new sanctions on Iran wouldn't just stifle Obama's ability to remove existing sanctions, it would undermine Obama's authority to negotiate with Iran at all, sending the message to Tehran that Obama is not worth dealing with because he can't control his own foreign policy. So if Obama wants to make a deal with Iran, he needs Congress to play ball . But it's not clear that

Mitch McConnell's Senate wants to. Congress could easily use its authority to kill an Iran deal To understand why the new Senate is such a big deal for congressional action on sanctions, we have to jump back a year. In November 2013, the Obama administration struck an interim deal with Iran called the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA). As part of the JPOA, the US agreed to limited, temporary sanctions relief in exchange for Iran limiting nuclear program components like uranium production. Congressional Republicans, by and large, hate the JPOA deal. Arguing that the deal didn't place sufficiently serious limits on Iran's nuclear growth, the House passed new sanctions on Iran in December. (There is also a line of argument, though often less explicit, that the Iranian government cannot be trusted with any deal at all, and that US policy should focus on coercing Iran into submission or unseating the Iranian government entirely.) Senate Republicans, joined by more hawkish Democrats, had the votes to pass a similar bill. But in February, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid killed new Iran sanctions, using the Majority Leader's power to block consideration of the sanctions legislation to prevent a vote. McConnell blasted Reid's move. "There is no excuse for muzzling the Congress on an issue of this importance to our own national security," he said. So now that McConnell holds the majority leader's gavel, it will remove that procedural roadblock that stood between Obama and new Iran sanctions. To be clear, it's far from guaranteed that Obama will be able to reach a deal with Iran at all; negotiations could fall apart long before they reach the point of congressional involvement. But if he does reach a deal, and Congress doesn't like the terms, then they'll be able to kill it by passing new sanctions legislation, or preventing Obama from temporarily waiving the ones on the books. And make no mistake — imposing new sanctions or limiting Obama's authority to waive the current ones would kill any deal. If Iran can't expect Obama to follow through on his promises to relax sanctions, it has zero incentive to limit its nuclear

program . "If Congress adopts sanctions," Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told Time last December, "the entire deal is

dead." Moreover, it could fracture the international movement to sanction Iran. The U nited

S tates is far from Iran's biggest trading partner, so it depends on international cooperation in order to ensure the sanctions bite . If it looks like the US won't abide by the terms of a deal, the broad-based international sanctions regime could collapse . Europe, particularly, might decide that going along with the sanctions is no longer worthwhile. "Our ability to coerce Iran is largely based on whether or not the international community thinks that we are the ones that are being constructive and [Iranians] are the ones that being obstructive," Sofer says. "If they don't believe that, then the international sanctions regime falls apart." This could be one of the biggest fights of Obama's last term It's true that Obama could veto any Congressional efforts to blow up an Iran deal with sanctions. But a two-thirds vote could override any veto — and, according to Sofer, an override is entirely within the realm of possibility. "There are

plenty of Democrats that will probably side with Republicans if they try to push a harder line on Iran," Sofer says. For a variety of reasons, including deep skepticism of Iran's intentions and strong Democratic support for Israel, whose

government opposes the negotiations, Congressional Democrats are not as open to making a deal

with Iran as Obama is. Many will likely defect to the GOP side out of principle. The real fight, Sofer says, will be among the Democrats — those who are willing to take the administration's side in theory, but don't necessarily think a deal with Iran is legislative priority number one, and maybe don't want to open themselves up to the political risk. These Democrats "can make it harder: you can filibuster, if you're Obama you can veto —

you can make it impossible for a full bill to be passed out of Congress on Iran," Sofer says. But it'd be a really tough

battle, one that would consume a lot of energy and lobbying effort that Democrats might

prefer to spend pushing on other issues. "I'm not really sure they're going to be willing to take on a fight

about an Iran sanctions bill," Sofer concludes. "I'm not really sure that the Democrats who support [a deal] are really fully behind it enough that they'll be willing to give up leverage on, you know, unemployment insurance or immigration status — these bigger issues for most Democrats." So if the new Republican Senate prioritizes destroying an Iran deal, Obama will have to fight very hard to keep it — without necessarily being able to

count on his own party for support. And the stakes are enormous: if Iran's nuclear

program isn't stopped peacefully, then the most likely outcomes are either Iran going

nuclear, or war with Iran . The administration believes a deal with Iran is their only way to

avoid this horrible choice . That's why it's been one of the administration's top priorities

since day one. It's also why this could become one of the biggest legislative fights of Obama's last two years.

Nuke warStevens 13 (Philip Stevens, associate editor and chief political commentator for the Financial Times, Nov 14 2013, “The four big truths that are shaping the Iran talks,” http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af170df6-4d1c-11e3-bf32-00144feabdc0.html)The who-said-what game about last weekend’s talks in Geneva has become a distraction. The six-power negotiations with Tehran to curb Iran’s nuclear programme may yet succeed or fail. But wrangling between the US and France on the terms of an acceptable deal should not allow the trees to obscure the forest. The organising facts shaping the negotiations have not changed.¶ The first of these is that

Tehran’s acquisition of a bomb would be more than dangerous for the Middle East and for wider international security. It would most likely set off a nuclear arms race that would see Saudi Arabia, Turkey

and Egypt signing up to the nuclear club . The nuclear n on- p roliferation t reaty would be

shattered . A future regional conflict could draw Israel into launching a pre-emptive nuclear

strike. This is not a region obviously susceptible to cold war disciplines of deterrence .¶ The second

ineluctable reality is that Iran has mastered the nuclear cycle. How far it is from building a bomb remains a subject

of debate. Different intelligence agencies give different answers. These depend in part on what the spooks actually know and in part on what their political masters want others to hear. The progress of an Iranian warhead programme is one of the known unknowns that have often wreaked havoc in this part of the world.¶ Israel points to an imminent threat. European agencies are more relaxed, suggesting Tehran is still two years or so away from a weapon. Western diplomats broadly agree that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not taken a definitive decision to step over the line. What Iran has been seeking is what diplomats call a breakout capability – the capacity to dash to a bomb before the international community could effectively mobilise against it.¶ The third fact – and this one is hard for many to swallow – is that neither a negotiated settlement nor the air strikes long favoured by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, can offer the rest of the world a watertight insurance policy.¶ It should be possible to construct a deal that acts as a plausible restraint – and extends the timeframe for any breakout – but no amount of restrictions or intrusive monitoring can

offer a certain guarantee against Tehran’s future intentions.¶ By the same token, bombing Iran’s nuclear sites could certainly delay the programme, perhaps for a couple of years. But, assuming that even the hawkish Mr Netanyahu is not proposing permanent war against Iran, air

strikes would not end it. ¶ You cannot bomb knowledge and technical expertise. To try would be to empower those in Tehran who say the regime will be safe only when, like North Korea, it has a weapon. So when Barack Obama says the US will never allow Iran to get the bomb he is indulging in, albeit understandable, wishful thinking.¶ The best the international community can hope for is that, in return for a relaxation of sanctions, Iran will make a judgment that it is better off sticking with a threshold capability. To put this another way, if Tehran does step back from the nuclear brink it will be because of its own calculation of the balance of advantage . ¶ The fourth element in this dynamic is that Iran now has a

leadership that , faced with the severe and growing pain inflicted by sanctions , is prepared to talk .

There is nothing to say that Hassan Rouhani, the president, is any less hard-headed than previous Iranian leaders, but he does seem ready to weigh the options.

.¶